The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [99]
A nurse slid her face in Van’s field of view. “You’re Dr. Vandeveer? Yes?” She slid a blood-pressure cuff over his arm. “We’ve got to move you now. I think we’ve found you that ambulance.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
WASHINGTON, D.C., FEBRUARY 2002
Van was in a hospital bed, confronting his e-mail. His damaged face was hot and stretched. The flesh felt rubbery. An inflated tire, a Macy’s blimp. There was a very thin strip of surgical steel, securing the ruins of his left canine and bicuspid. His aching tongue could not stay away from that wire. It was like a steel I-beam installed in his head.
Dottie had written him such a brave letter. Dottie was apologizing to him for daring to be so lonely and unhappy. She was promising to do better. She said that she was proud of him.
As sedatives coursed through his flesh, Van read his wife’s electronic sentences over and over. For the first time in his life, he could literally hear Dottie’s spoken voice behind her blurry pixels. Van thumbed his way back to the top of the screen again. Some indescribable comfort was seeping into him. In real life, Dottie would not have repeated the same consoling words to him, over and over again, one hundred slow, blurry times. A man in a hospital needed that.
Of course, he hadn’t yet typed one word to Dottie about getting his face smashed in. What was he going to tell her? What if somebody else told her about it first?
He had just gone through a violent, crazy, amazingly painful ordeal, all for the sake of some wild notion . . . so useless, something utterly stupid . . . Van turned his aching face toward the black plastic case of spy tools.
Van’s burgled apartment was not a safe place to leave a top-secret infowar tool case. So, despite the surprised protests of doctors and nurses, the hardware was still with Van. The case was locked to Van’s iron hospital bed frame with a laptop security cable. Come and take it, if you dare.
Van had beaten the living daylights out of another American in order to control the tools. Van sank his swollen head into the small, sterile pillow. His face had been smashed in by a computer security policy war. Why not some kind of real shooting war, for heaven’s sake? He wouldn’t feel half so bad if he’d been mangled while fighting with al Qaeda.
Van slid his tongue along the luscious edge of that steel wire inside his head. He was never in his life ever going to fight al Qaeda. Van knew that perfectly well now. Cyber-security was all about computer policy. Infowar was a form of war for high-tech people sitting quietly at desks. Bin Laden didn’t surf the net. Al Qaeda were Third World fanatics on low-tech bicycles who talked only to their mullahs and their cousins. Al Qaeda guys got recruited in madrassas and sent to live in Pakistani slums and Afghan villages. They were bitter, freaked-out, culture-shocked men. They existed in such a frenzy of rage and wounded pride that suicide was a blessed relief to them. Being a martyr was so much, much better than being al Qaeda that they leapt at a chance to explode themselves in the midst of much happier people. “We long for death more than you long for life.” That was their bumper sticker.
Terrorists didn’t fight wars. The whole point of terrorism was to kick a government so hard, in so tender and precious a spot, that the government went nuts from rage and fear. Then the machinery of civilization would pour smoke from the exhaust. It would break down. Back to the tribes and the sermons, the blessed darkness of a world without questions.
Van looked at the chained black case. So it did matter. Cyberwar had always been about Americans and what Americans chose to do with their tools. Van knew that it mattered, because all he had to do was imagine himself losing the fight. Suppose that Wimberley broke into the hospital room and tried to take the case again. Would Van lie back with a ruined smile this time, let the hardware go? No. Not at all.