7. Reaction
The next chapter of The Reboot Project
The world impinged on writing this chapter more than I would care to admit. Originally, I stuck close to the notion of ‘write what you know,’ and a lot of events in the original book take place in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but these past couple of weeks it’s been… heavy. I think the major change here is that I’m adding some plot points to move forward in a hopefully more complete way when this is done. I know where this is going, and I’m hoping that when all is said and done, I’ll be able to stick the landing a little better. Either way, here’s the previous installment (6. Raid), and I’m very happy to present Reaction.
~~~
General John McMillan groaned as he rolled over on his couch. He could no longer ignore the painfully loud buzzing from his phone anymore. There was something about that ringtone. It wormed its way into the most pleasant of dreams, until he realized what it was and came to the conclusion that it was not going to stop, however much he would have liked it to.
He had gotten drunk last night. After leaving Doreen’s, his mood had turned black, and he had made his way to that ramshackle little bar a few blocks from his house. It had the best selection of scotch on the East Coast, and he had been firmly intending to drink himself into a stupor before his contact arrived- but-
He groaned, picked up the phone, and threw it across the room as hard as he could. McMillan had learned long ago to invest in cases that could withstand his frequent bouts of irritation. It bounced off the wall and fell onto the carpet in front of his television, leaving a sizeable dent in its wake. It kept ringing.
McMillan spat out a string of curses and staggered to his feet, his stomach a swirling cauldron of bad decisions, half-digested peanuts, and scotch. He made his way over to the television and, with some difficulty, picked up the phone and pressed it to his ear.
“What the fuck do you want?” There was a pause. “No, I don’t care. I specifically arranged my schedule so I didn’t have to come into work today, and now you’re calling me at some god-awful hour to tell me-” Another pause. “When?” One final pause. “Fuck. Give me twenty minutes.”
McMillan took a deep breath, gathered himself, and, pushing the pain in his head and swirling mess in his stomach to one side as best he could, staggered into his bathroom that was just through his kitchen and dining area. He noted in passing that at least he had remembered to hang his uniform jacket on the back of one of the chairs. Once in the bathroom, he splashed water on his face, brushed his teeth, and began to get dressed, the fragments of his memory from last night starting to come back.
He had been sitting alone at the end of the bar, halfway through a very nice eighteen-year-old scotch, his mood black, when his contact had arrived, looking discouraged.
“What’s our next move?”
“I don’t know,” McMillan said. “With General Casey dead, we’re nowhere.”
“Do you know how close we were?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Harrison brought us their counteroffer,” his contact replied.
“Anything worth considering?”
“An amnesty commission. Truth and Reconciliation.”
McMillan gave a long, low whistle of surprise. “That’s… a legitimate counteroffer.”
“You think General Casey would have taken it?”
“I would have,” McMillan replied. He took another sip of scotch. “But now we’re… fucked.”
“They’re leaving Harrison up there for now,” his contact replied.
“So you can contact them if we need to?”
“Yes,” his contact said. “So now what?”
“Now we wait,” McMillan replied. “And see what happens.”
After that, the scotch gave way to bourbon, and then some rye, and then things spiraled down into chaos and nothingness until just now, when his phone started to ring out in the living room.
Feeling human again, he strode back into the kitchen, grabbed his uniform jacket, and slipped it on. He grabbed his keys and his phone off the table and opened his front door, stepping out into the warmth of the late afternoon. He stopped. At the bottom of the stairs that led up to his modest brownstone was a black government limousine. McMillan frowned. He did not use the government-issued cars that were available to members of the Federal Council. Someone must want to have a word with him.
He turned and locked his front door, trying in his head to remember if he had annoyed anyone lately or missed a meeting with someone important. Try as he might, nothing came to him, so he turned back around and walked down the stairs toward the limo. He shrugged. Might as well see who wanted to give him a ride to work. Sure enough, before he covered half the distance between the front door and the limo, the front side door opened and a young man dressed in a bland suit and tie that screamed ‘intelligence agent’ stepped out and opened the passenger side door. “General McMillan.”
“Thank you,” he said and stepped inside. The young man closed the door behind him, and the limousine began to move. McMillan knew the man sitting on the other side of the limousine quite well. What he wanted with McMillan, however, was another matter, so McMillan composed himself and assumed his best poker face.
“Ah, General McMillan,” Admiral Owen Jones, Director of the National Security Agency, greeted him. Jones was a tall, thin man with a spiky crop of silver hair pointed at a small sidebar in the corner of the limousine. “I hear you’re a scotch man,” he said. “We just picked up an eighteen-year-old single malt last week.”
“Sun’s not past the yardarm yet,” McMillan replied. “I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself,” Jones said.
“What does the NSA want with me?”
“I see your reputation for getting straight to the point is well-earned,” Jones said. “So I won’t dance around it.” He opened a laptop that was on the seat between them and tapped on the trackpad. “About two weeks ago now, we lost track of a hacker known only as The Rabbit, who we had been keeping under surveillance in South Dakota,” Jones said. A picture of a striking young woman with long black hair appeared on the screen. “She worked for the American Indian Movement and managed to hack into a secure Homeland Security server somewhere in Northern California.”
“I take it they weren’t very happy.”
“Not once they figured out where the breach came from,” Jones said. He tapped the trackpad again, and McMillan grimaced at the ugly image before him. “From what we’ve been able to tell, she got cornered inside Falls Park in Sioux Falls and with no bullets left in her gun, decided to immolate herself.”
McMillan shook his head. “I’ve heard stories about the Fire Warriors in the AIM, but I thought they had been stamped out.”
“Apparently not.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“We believe she had possession of some kind of a data stick, either one of those new data chips or a flash drive or something that she uploaded to a site somewhere in the park,” Jones said. “We weren’t able to track where the data went, but we were able to recover a fragment.”
“Which said what?”
Jones shrugged, “Nothing but a reference to Prisoner 112.”
McMillan furrowed his brow for a moment. “I know that prisoners and detainees of high political value were assigned three-digit identification numbers,” he said. “And they usually didn’t want any visible bruises on them either.”
“That’s what we thought,” Jones said. “But there’s no record of a Prisoner 112 anywhere in our system.”
“Does Homeland Security know who they are?”
“We think so. But they’re keeping a tight lid on whoever it is, and they seem desperate to make sure no one else finds out either.”
McMillan leaned back in his seat and gave the Admiral an appraising look. The NSA had been Jones’s turf for nearly two decades now, and he had skillfully fended off the attempts from both the Army and the Federal Council to wrest control of the agency from his grasp. Jones was playing games with him, McMillan knew. So, he doesn’t want to show his hand. Well, two can play that game.
McMillan shrugged. “So Homeland Security is getting its underwear in a bunch over some flammable hacker,” he said. “I’ve got bigger fish to fry. The hardliners are on the march, and I honestly think they’re trying to drag us back into another war. Today’s incident in New Mexico is only going to add fuel to that fire.”
“This wasn’t your typical Homeland Security response,” Jones said. “They scrambled two tactical teams and had an airplane on standby at the Sioux Falls Airport.”
McMillan raised an eyebrow. “All over one hacker?”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you,” Jones said. “Our brethren over at Langley seem to think that they’ve lost control over someone in their agency.”
“A rogue agent?”
“Or agents,” Jones said.
“That’s a problem,” McMillan replied. “You want me to work this from the inside?”
“That’d be awfully nice of you,” Jones replied. “Put your ear to the ground, see what you can find out.”
He laughed. “I think you overestimate my influence on the Federal Council.”
“Not at all,” Jones said. “We know what you and General Casey were working on, and we’re well aware you’re careful to cultivate your image as a General who drinks more than he should and has a loud mouth.”
“That’s not an image thing,” McMillan said with a grin. “That’s true on both counts.”
“One more thing,” Jones added. He withdrew a beige file folder from the briefcase next to him and handed it to McMillan. “This is a transcript of a conversation that took place between the Governor of New Mexico and the head of the New Mexico National Guard about forty minutes after the attack.”
McMillan scanned it. “So they’ve got most of them back already?”
“Yes. The Council’s news flunkies over at the NNN are busy inflating the casualty numbers when really there were maybe a dozen or so.”
“Are you sure about these targets?”
“Yes, turn the page,” Jones said. McMillan did so. “That’s confirmation from one of our satellites. They crossed the border just west of Juarez.”
“You know Miller is going to use this info to push through his agenda, which is an agenda I don’t think anyone is going to like,” McMillan said.
“We agree,” Jones said.
“All of you?” McMillan said, catching the inflection on the first word.
“All of us,” Jones said. “I just got off a conference call with Newark and Pearl Harbor an hour ago.”
“So if push comes to shove...” McMillan left it hanging.
“We’ll see,” Jones replied as the limo slowed to a halt in front of the Federal Council building. “Have fun at work. We’ll be in touch.”
McMillan opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk at the foot of the steps that led up to the Council Building. He closed the door behind him, and without a word, the limousine pulled back out into traffic and drove away.
“Well, that was the weirdest damn thing,” McMillan muttered. He turned and started up the steps to the building, trying to digest it all. The Navy and the Marine Corps had refused to participate in the Federal Council for a decade now, preferring instead to hold themselves neutral except in matters of defending the Homeland until a Constitutional Chain of Command has been restored. They were annoyingly principled about it, but if they were contemplating re-engagement…
He started up the stairs toward the entrance, trying to figure out what it might mean. Why tell me about that incident in South Dakota? Why meet with me at all? McMillan ground his teeth in frustration. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was people playing games, and this felt like a meeting designed to throw him breadcrumbs he couldn’t ignore. Breadcrumbs, he would have to investigate. Breadcrumbs—
Reaching into his uniform jacket, he pulled the letter Doreen had given him the night before. Pausing by the statue at the top of the stairs, he ran his thumb under the lip of the envelope and ripped it open. Inside, there was a folded sheet of paper. He opened it up.
It was John’s handwriting; he saw that right away. But there was no greeting, none of John’s usual blunt words of advice. There were only two short sentences: Go to Alcatraz and talk to Williams. He knows.
“Oh, great,” McMillan growled. “More games.” He shoved the letter back into the envelope and slipped it back into his jacket pocket. Time to go to work…
By the time McMillan reached the Council Chamber, things had already deteriorated. He stepped through the long, wooden doors just as Miller was reaching the end of what sounded like a fairly lengthy speech.
“These terrorists must be punished swiftly and harshly. We have to demonstrate to the country that the Federal Council will never tolerate attacks on government facilities, which is why I am asking the Council for the authority to launch air strikes against suspected terrorist targets across the western United States. The attack on Holloman demands a response.”
“Point of order,” this came from General Hernandez, a few seats up from McMillan.
“General Hernandez,” Miller acknowledged him as Hernandez stood up. McMillan slipped into his chair and tried to look attentive.
“Not for the first time today,” Hernandez said, “I want to say that the Air Force cannot countenance air strikes in response to this. Yes, we were attacked. No one disputes that. But air strikes would be a staggering overreaction to today’s events, it would needlessly antagonize the governors and would do more harm than good. Especially given the reports we’re getting that most of the prisoners are being rounded up easily.”
“Weakness can no longer be tolerated,” Miller replied. “We have the AR-17s ready and waiting for launch-”
“Except that the AR-17s haven’t been cleared for use yet,” Allison replied. General Bergman looked irritated, not bothering to hide her dislike for Miller. “There’s a flaw in the guidance system that we can’t seem to get past.”
“What kind of flaw?”
“The kind that makes them vulnerable to computer viruses like the Coronado and can cause them to do other things.”
“What other things?” Miller looked suspicious.
“Miss their targets,” Allison said. That shut Miller up. McMillan chuckled.
“Is there something funny, General McMillan? Now that you’ve joined us, maybe you can enlighten us,” Miller said.
“You sound like a bitchy teenager, Miller,” McMillan said, noting with satisfaction the flash of anger in the other man’s eyes. He looked like he was about to say something, but McMillan cut him off. “Seems to me that this shouldn’t come as a galloping shock to any of us,” he said. “The AIM has had the capability to launch an attack like this for years, but they’ve never had a reason to. Do we know what their objectives were?”
“Homeland Security doesn’t know.”
“That’s interesting,” McMillan said. “Because my sources do know. The AIM was after two very specific targets, and they got what they were looking for. New Mexico National Guard has rounded up most of the escapees already.”
“Which sources would those be?” Miller asked.
“The Governor of New Mexico,” McMillan said, bending the truth somewhat. “She was pretty pissed when we spoke on the phone, but she confirmed that the AIM’s forces had crossed the border just west of Juarez with their targets. General Steven Corcoran of the Free Territories and the one they call The Coyote.” There was stunned silence at that. McMillan smiled. “This was no terrorist attack, Miller. This was a jail break.”
~
“Weakness can no longer be tolerated!” General Miller actually pounded his fist on the Council Table after every word, the vein in his forehead bulging, his face red. Allison tried not to roll her eyes: he was grandstanding to his hardline allies, and he looked ridiculous doing so. “If the Air Force will not release the assets needed to allow us to respond to this effectively-”
George shot to his feet. “A reckless response is not an effective response! You’re proposing massive air strikes on our own territory!”
“On terrorists’ camps!”
Allison stood up then. “Where? Which ones? The AIM doesn’t have fixed positions, and if you think the Governors are going to stand by while we launch airstrikes-”
“Weakness can no longer be tolerated!” Miller shouted back at her.
“By bombing what? Reservations?” George shot back. “The Governors will lose their minds. It will undermine-”
“If I may interject?” Cabot creaked to his feet.
Miller took a deep breath and visibly brought himself under control before nodding to Cabot to continue.
“I have to agree with General Hernandez and General Bergman,” Cabot said. “However-” he raised a hand as he saw Miller’s face turn red again. “I also agree with your assessment of the situation. Weakness can no longer be tolerated, but we also have to remember that there are other, more effective ways to respond to this.”
George grimaced but sat down. Allison sank to her seat as well.
“A crackdown?” Miller guessed.
Cabot nodded. “In the wake of both Revolts, targeted crackdowns have been effective tools for this Council to show its commitment to maintaining order, as well as make a salient point or two to dissident and rebellious elements out there.”
“Very well,” Miller said. “Do we have a second?”
A hand shot up amongst the hardliners.
“All those in favor?”
Hands shot up all around the table. Allison didn’t need to count to know that the vote had passed. Beside her, George slumped in his seat. Miller picked up the gavel and pounded it once on the table. “It is so ordered,” he said. “If we have no other business-” he paused for a moment to see if anyone was going to speak, but no one did. He slammed the gavel down again. “We’re adjourned.”
People began to get up and push back from the Council table. Miller left without a word. “We need to meet. We need to-”
“Do what?” Allison said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “We brought ourselves some time, nothing more.”
“But still-” George said. “We should do something.”
Allison pushed back from the table. “I’m going to go and get some coffee.”
~
The car was nicely nondescript. It had taken a couple of phone calls and more money than Jordan had wanted to spend to acquire it, but a white older model mid-sized SUV would blend in nicely, if push came to shove. Jordan hoped it wouldn’t.
He was parked on the top level of the Washington Avenue Ramp, not quite sure what exactly he was waiting for. He had a hunch, though, and he was pretty certain he was going to be proven right. They had to send someone. It would be surprising if they didn’t send someone and-
A buzzing noise began on the seat next to him, and Jordan smiled. Chelsea was nothing if not predictable, even after all these years. He reached over and picked up the small device, which looked for all the world like an old-school pager from the 1980s. A small tech company had launched the little peer-to-peer devices about two decades before, and as a product, they had seemed very niche, designed to appeal to doomsday preppers, technophiles, and the irretrievably paranoid. When everything changed, and actual organized resistance to the Federal Council had begun, they had proved worth their weight in gold. They didn’t use wi-fi or cellular networks. They were immune to cell phone jamming and internet outages and employed long-range, very low-fi radio networks, and they were a bastard to trace. But not impossible.
VQ. VQ. MSND 2.1, BACK ROW, USUAL.
Jordan reached up to the laptop he had perched on the dashboard and hit enter to begin the tracing program. The beauty of these little devices is that you could send anything in the blind, but the meaning of the message was only known to the sender and the recipient.
A moment later:
RQ. RQ. MSND 2.1 TIMBTL.
Jordan’s eyes narrowed, and he searched his memory. The coding was familiar, and a memory tickled the back of his brain for a moment before the laptop made a noise and the tracing program opened a map, and a blinking blue dot appeared.
“Voice command test.”
Beep.
“Diagnostic check on nanodrones.”
Beep.
Jordan rolled down the back passenger side window. “Deploy drones. Follow the target indicated and make sure surveillance mode, audio, and video feeds are active.”
Beep. The soft buzz of the microdrones in the back seat activated the first one, and then the other lifted off and flew out the window. Two windows popped up on the laptop showing the video feeds of the drones as they dropped over the edge of the ramp and sped across the campus, zeroing in on their target.
Jordan left them to their work and found an onion router to get onto the dark web. He checked his encryption protocols and set to work. The archive he was looking for was buried pretty deep in the dark web, and this was a long shot at best. The encrypted messages could mean absolutely anything, but Chelsea had always been a bookworm. It was a weakness of hers that the Federal Council had, ludicrously, never seemed to catch on, even after all these years. A simple matter of plugging the message into his encryption program and then…
“Just gotta wait,” Jordan muttered. His head began to throb, and his vision blurred again. “Damn it.” It was happening again… he couldn’t… he forced himself to calm down and breathe slowly… in through the nose, out through the mouth. He closed his eyes and kept breathing. Little by little, the throbbing began to ease and then-
Beep.
Jordan opened his eyes. “Target acquired, huh?” He reached up to the keyboard, vision still blurry in one eye, and began to type. “One of you,” he said. “Can stay mobile. The other one,” he continued. “Needs to hitch a ride.” A quick tap of the keys and one of the drones dropped down and latched onto the backpack, while the other one swung around to get a glimpse of the target’s face.
She looked a little different from the average college student, as her electric blue bob stood out like a sore thumb. So did the go-go boots. Jordan knew that was by design. The networks that he and Chelsea had helped develop in the run-up to the Great Revolt had evolved over the years but still relied heavily on various activist and dissident networks on major college campuses across the country. There was no better way to blend in by standing out.
The drone captured enough of an image to ensure he had enough for a facial scan, but Jordan knew that whatever it found would have to be a cover identity. Unless things were more dire than he realized, there was no way the Territories would get that sloppy. They weren’t about taking risks. The drone queried, asking for further instructions. “Come on now, little drone,” Jordan said. “Keep following her. Let’s see where this goes.”
She slipped into a large building just off the main quadrangle, following a stream of students heading for what turned out to be a lecture hall, and slipped into a seat in the very back row. Jordan guided the second drone to the ceiling and set it to scan for anyone else who might be listening, turned the microphones up on the first one, and began to listen.
~
Mara never paid attention in this lecture. The class was ridiculous; the Professor uploaded everything directly onto the Internet. The University of Minnesota had just deemed Cultural and Historical Foundations of Communications worthy of being included in its kaleidoscope of online offerings this year.
Instead, Mara was reading. Abby, who, as always, was two seats down from her (they always left a seat between them so they had somewhere to place their bags), was quietly snoring as she always did, laptop precariously balanced on the small fold-out desk in front of her. Mara glanced up to see if anyone had noticed her not paying attention, but the professor was rhapsodizing about Star Chambers and censorship laws. She and Abby sat in the very back of Nicholson Auditorium so they would not get noticed. She opened her grandmother’s diary once again and kept reading:
Stillwater fell early this morning. I should have blown that bridge when I had the chance, but I doubt it would have stopped them. We had to pull a division out of Hudson in a hurry and send them south toward Red Wing and Winona to hold open a route to Iowa in case we need it.
So, now a siege. They want me to evacuate. Bobby practically begged me to leave the Capitol. I just can’t do it, though. I can’t turn and run. If we’re going to lose, then we lose standing on our feet with our heads held high. I’ll be damned if I’ll let myself be hunted like some rat across the country.
“Where is the good Vietnamese food in this town?”
Mara snapped out of her reverie to discover that an Asian girl, who looked to be about the same age as they were, had joined her and Abby. Her hair was electric blue and cut short into a bob that ended just below her ears. She was wearing knee-high gogo boots, a form-fitting dress shirt that had a couple of buttons strategically undone. All in all, she looked like an anime character sprung to life.
“There are tons of Vietnamese food around here.”
“Where can you find good pho?”
Mara almost gaped in surprise as she recognized the code phrase she had been told to memorize long ago, before she recovered and stammered: “Pho Sure’s Deli over in St. Louis Park.”
The girl smiled and placed a finger on her lips as she withdrew a pen from her pocket and pressed the top down, then laid it on Mara’s small desk. “Good. Now we can talk.”
~
“Shit,” swore Jordan as feedback screeched through the microphone. “Shit, shit, shit…” he began typing furiously. “Go quiet. Stealth, quick, quick…” The drone acknowledged the command, and the screen went blank. Jordan activated the microphones on the second drone placed on the ceiling and zoomed in as close as he could before the audio feed kicked in again.
~
“Who are you?”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Mara said. “No names.”
“That’s better. Now tell me what’s going on. Your report last week caused quite a stir.”
“The Ind-” Mara paused. “They are reorganizing, and they approached me about running in the fall.”
“Who’s re-organizing them?”
“I don’t know,” Mara said. “They usually run as independent candidates or make endorsements. They’ve never openly challenged the ban like this before.”
“Can you find out?”
“Maybe,” Mara said. “I’ve only met with them a couple of times, and I’m pretty sure the people I met with weren’t the ones pulling the strings.”
“How do you know?”
“They were freshman poli-sci majors,” Mara shrugged. “Way too excited about it.”
“Find out,” the girl said. “We need them to sit tight for a bit.”
“Sit tight? But we’re about to launch-”
“That’s the problem,” the girl replied. “Something is about to happen. We don’t know what. Until we do, we need them to keep a lid on this.”
“Like not-”
“Like you need to knock it the fuck off,” the girl replied. “And if they have a problem with that, let me know, and we’ll have a chat. A fairly direct one if I have to get involved."
“What’s about to happen?” Abby asked. Mara turned and saw that Abby was awake and clicking away on her laptop, undoubtedly scanning news sites
“You’ll see. If the news hasn’t broken wide yet, it’s about to- and pay attention to your spam emails. Anything about deals on Vietnamese food will have further instructions for you,” the girl said. The professor had finished his lecture downstairs, and the students in the auditorium were gathering their things and heading toward the doors.
“Wow,” Abby said.
“What?” Mara asked.
“The AIM just raided an internment camp at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Looks like thirty casualties so far.”
“Is that what you were talking about?” Mara turned to ask the girl- but she was already gone.
~
As the first drone came back online, the girl moved away from the lecture hall. Jordan waited until she had made her way back out of the building before sending the command to detach and go airborne again. She slipped into the exodus of students heading out across Pillsbury Drive to the Knoll before heading toward the bridge that led into Dinkytown.
She was good, Jordan had to admit. The wig came off her head and was slipped into a garbage can so quickly that he almost missed it. A facial recognition capture, and he uploaded it, and let the facial recognition algorithm start its work. Then, he turned back to the second drone.
Still on the ceiling, it was still focused on the pair below. Jordan sat back for a moment and tried to think. His head was throbbing, but still… his instincts were proving correct. Something was brewing up here. Something was— there was a flash of static across the second drone’s feed, and then, suddenly, the screen went black.
Jordan bit off a curse and tried a diagnostic, but to no avail. The drone was dead. Pulling the footage back up, he began to wind it back frame by frame, trying to see what had happened. There was the flash and then- he paused. What was that?
He quickly went back a frame or two and then forward again. Back and then forward. Back and then- There.
“Damn,” Jordan whispered. He had been so concerned about working around the countermeasures the girl had put in place that he hadn’t checked to see if anyone else was listening, either, and it turns out, someone had been. “Another drone.”
The facial recognition algorithm flashed a red banner at him, and he clicked on it, bringing up the picture. The algorithm wasn’t the prettiest of hacks, but it was efficient. It had checked the FBI, Homeland Security, Interpol, half a dozen intelligence agencies, and-
“Hello, Angela,” Jordan said, looking down at the picture. So, Chelsea had sent someone after all. Angela Wu is believed to be an intelligence operative of the Free Territories. Jordan leaned back in the seat of the car. “So,” he said aloud, running his hands across his short-cropped hair. “Someone is organizing the Independence Party. The Territories are aware of that much at least, and now,” his eyes fixed on the image of the drone that he had found. “We have a new player in the game. The only question is… who?”
~
The bell above the entrance rang as Allison stepped through the front door into the bright, welcoming atmosphere beyond. The walls were the color of curry, and framed Bollywood movie posters adorned the walls. The entire place smelled of coffee with a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg thrown in for good measure. The barista behind the counter looked up and gave Allison a smile. “How can we help you today?”
“Is Indira around?”
“I can check,” the barista said. She turned and stepped through a beaded curtain that hung over the doorway that led to what Allison assumed was a back room of some kind. A moment later, the barista returned with Indira a step behind her, smiling.
“General, good afternoon! Not your usual time to stop in, we missed you this morning!”
“I found myself in need of an afternoon pick-me-up. Something Turkish, if you have it.”
There was an ever-so-slight pause as Indira acknowledged the code phrase.
“Do you want the regular or the special?” How urgent is this?
“The special.” We need to talk.
“You want a surprise?” Indira smiled. “Are you sure?”
“I trust you.”
“Fine, let’s head to my office, we can talk there. Do you want a regular subscription if we can get it for you?”
“Depends on how good the coffee is,” Allison replied.
“The Turkish Special, two of them,” Indira said to the barista. “And bring it back to my office when it’s done and make sure we’re not disturbed.”
Indira gestured for Allison to precede her. Allison smiled and stepped behind the counter and through the beaded curtain into the room beyond. Indira was a step behind her and quickly took the lead. Allison followed her through a warren of boxes and storage racks until they came to another door, which Indira opened. “My office,” she said as she walked in.
It was crammed under the stairs that led up to the apartments above the coffee shop and contained a simple wooden table, two chairs, and a laptop. Indira gestured for Allison to sit in one of the chairs as she closed the door, sat down, and turned on the laptop.
“There,” she said, all business. “Now we can talk. You took one hell of a risk contacting me so directly.”
“They’re launching a crackdown,” Allison said.
“On what?”
“In the wake of the attack on Holloman, they’re seeing plots by the Territories under every rock. Miller was on the verge of authorizing airstrikes on every AIM target he could find.”
“What happened?”
“We wouldn’t release the assets he needed,” Allison said. “They’re going to start with raiding suspected AIM targets and move on from there.”
“To what?”
“Censorship crackdowns, arrests of suspected dissidents and political opponents. They’re bringing the full court press on this.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” Allison said. “But soon.”
There was a gentle knock on the door. Indira nodded. “I’ll let them know,” she said. Then she reached out and opened the door. The barista from before was waiting with two tiny coffee cups delicately balanced on a pair of tiny saucers. “Two Turkish Specials,” she said.
“Excellent, excellent,” Indira said, reaching out and taking the two saucers from the barista. “Now this,” she said, handing one of them to Allison, “is going to knock your socks clean off.”
~
It was much later. General Nathan Miller was alone in the command bunker located far below the Federal Council Chambers. Television screens, full of news channels from across the world, flickered along one wall, and in front of the long semicircle of a table was a gigantic map of the United States of America.
He hated this table. It was long, the wood was immaculately polished, the high-backed chairs reserved for the members of the Federal Council were each pushed in until they were at almost the exact same position, equidistant from one another along the length of it. The thing hearkened back not even to the War on Terror that had consumed the military in the early decades of the twenty-first century. No, this table, this bunker, were relics of a conflict before even that.
The Cold War, his lips twisted with distaste, how he both longed for that conflict and despised it. It had been decades of appeasement with the enemies of freedom. Those who counseled no surrender then had been shouted down. When September 11th came, there were those who counseled no surrender then, and they were shouted down, too. War, the way war was meant to be fought- that just was not done in these days of weak-kneed women and spineless men.
“This country used to be great once,” he said aloud to the empty room. His eyes fixed as they always did, on the twin holes in the middle of the map. One in Iowa, one in Minnesota, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. “Why did he agree to the ceasefire? Why sign that odious Treaty? Why did he stick us with this mess, where these Territories are allowed to defy Federal authority?” He had been younger then, more rash, more open in his defiance. It hadn’t mattered back then: he and his allies, true patriots, all of them, had been shouted down. Shut up, they explained. The country was tired of conflict. There had been enough bloodshed. The Territories could be useful, they said, a release valve for those who will not obey the rules or toe the line.
Well, they dumped the undesirables, the dissidents, the terrorists, the criminals- dumped them all in there and look at what they had wrought.
“A cancer,” Miller said. “Two tumors, beating, throbbing, cancerous tumors in the heart of America.”
And if you had a tumor, there were no other options. You excised it, or you died.
There was a thunk of the heavy door to the command bunker opening and then footsteps. Miller did not bother to turn his head.
“You’re late.”
“Sorry, General, I uh-”
Miller turned and frowned. “You’re not who I was expecting. Who are you?”
“I’m the Deputy-”
“Needles’ deputy? So what does make you, Pliers?”
“I, uh, guess so?”
“What do you want, Pliers?”
“Upstairs, you said that weakness could not be tolerated and they wouldn’t release the assets you wanted to-”
“I’m aware,” Miller replied shortly. “What’s your point?”
“We have an operative on the ground in the Twin Cities. We’ve been quietly funding efforts to reorganize the Independence Party, and they seem to be ready to go public with their efforts.”
“And?”
“And if circumstances on the ground right now aren’t enough to persuade the rest of the Council, we could… create some.”
“Really?” Miller drawled.
“Really, General, we could-”
Miller held up a hand. “I don’t need to know. You seem to be an ambitious young man who is full of ideas. If you want to show some initiative, I would be interested in seeing the results. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think I do, sir.”
“Good, then understand this: if you screw this up, I’ll make sure you end up in a cell so deep and so dark they’ll never find you.”
Pliers went pale but nodded.
There was another thunk of the heavy door to the command bunker opening and then footsteps and-
“What are you doing here?” Needles sounded annoyed. There was an unpleasant cast to his face, and his grey eyes were as hard as stone.
“He was leaving,” Miller said. “Brought me some files I asked for.”
Pliers didn’t need any more urging to take the hint. “Thank you, General,” he said and then turned and made his way out of the bunker until Miller and Needles were alone in the cavernous room. Miller walked over to the conference table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
“Well?”
“We lost him. He surfaced in Mankato last week and killed an ex-asset of ours.”
“An ex-asset?”
“Former NSA. Did some time in California after the Revolt, got out, disappeared, and just resurfaced last week in time to get killed.”
“I thought you had him under control.”
“We did.”
“But you don’t know,” Miller noted. “Do you think he knows?”
“About Prisoner 112? He’s not an idiot. If anyone can figure it out, he can.”
“So move her.”
“Moving her risks exposing her. We can’t take a chance that her existence could be revealed.”
“It hasn’t been revealed yet,” Miller said. “Everyone is convinced she’s dead.”
“Until we know what his agenda is and get back under our control, that risk is real,” Needles replied. “This man was our first double agent. He’s been with us since the beginning. He knows everything.”
“What if everybody was looking the other way?”
“What do you mean?”
“We need a distraction,” Miller said. He picked up the red phone next to him and dialled a number. “This is General Miller,” he said. “How many AR-17s are there at Billings?” There was a long pause. “Good, get a transport train ready and don’t be shy about it. Start loading them up and get them ready to move.” Another pause. “To Williston, but only on my order.” Then he hung up.
“Williston is within the seven hundred-mile limit,” Needles observed. “A Treaty violation.”
“Treaties are subject to approval by the United States Senate,” Miller said with an unpleasant smile. “You know that.”
“The Senate was destroyed twenty years ago, General,” Needles replied. “Acrobatics with semantics won’t alter our obligations.”
“I didn’t sign the damn treaty,” Miller said, “General Casey did.”
“I doubt anyone will care about that distinction.”
“We need a distraction,” Miller said. “Besides, it’s not like I’ve moved any of the missiles yet, have I?”
“But if you do, it may start a war.”
“Maybe,” Miller pushed back from the table and stood up. “We’re done here. Find a place to move her.”
~