The Cause (21 page)

Montgomery strolled over to the tinted window in the conference room and gazed across to the mirrored panes of the building facing him. On the bar next to him, he picked up the pair of binoculars sitting next to an open bottle of Blanton’s and its cap. Atop the cap, a rider rode a bronze gelding in mid-stride. The rider seemed to be leaning over awkwardly. Montgomery felt similar, light-headed, a bit out of the saddle, not quite footed in the stirrups. He gazed down at his bandaged hand, re-gauzed this morning. He hadn’t been in a gun battle since the war, and that was an eon ago. After the previous week, he found himself fighting wars on two fronts.

Emily had gone to her mother’s. “A timeout,” he had told the kids, mixing up the story she had told them when she had said her mother was ill. To throw the kids off the scent of a separation, he took the weekend off and flew them to Orlando. He spent the weekend in the Magic Kingdom, taking them on rides, casting a spell around them, pretending nothing was wrong.

He poured himself another drink, dropped another ice cube in the glass, and took a gulp. He opened his arms. Wobbling a bit, he turned in a circle, welcoming any sniper out there to take his best shot. Of course, this time there would be no sniper unless it was one of his own people. He had gone through them all and done some pruning. Still, how had they gotten in here? And how did they get out?

Through the binoculars, he focused on the building across the road. The windows had been replaced, the glass below cleaned, and he couldn’t spy a pockmark in the concrete side. As clean as
if it had never happened. None of it had made any sense. The theory from internal investigations told him Hassani was the target. But if this was the case, why risk breaching the tight Fort Meade security? Hassani could have been hit anywhere.

If he was the target, why hadn’t they shot him first? It seemed preposterous that he was alive. He focused on the mirrored windows and saw his image in the opposing building—jacket open, a drink in his hand. There he was, the iris on the other side, the retina dilating in the window. He looked at his mirrored self and thought of The Dupe waiting out in the cold each frosty morning. It was twisting the wings off a fly to watch it buzz around a table surface. It paralleled his situation perfectly. Someone very clever out there, indulging themselves, having a laugh. Some mistakes were not mistakes.

Montgomery turned the binoculars to the left of the parking lot arrayed with cars—blue, green, black, white—under the midday sunshine and shadows of the higher floors. Eventually, he saw a car, a turquoise Humvee with tinted windows. The driver pulled into the shadows, out to the edge of the building and let a man out of the passenger door. The man stepped out on the pavement wearing a black blazer, chinos, and a pair of black polished leather boots that spit back the sun. On his mobile, Montgomery called reception and told the woman to hold anyone else coming to see him. Then he called The Dupe and told him to trot his ass up to the eleventh floor. Next, he called The Skulleyes’ control room and spoke with a guy in facial recognition to make sure they were getting good feeds, told them he wanted verification ASAP and would be down there shortly. When The Dupe arrived, he told him to act like himself, like he was the God boss. He told him he wanted to make a deal with the man about to enter. Someone named Hassani set up the meet, the man’s name was Cyril Tetsu, and to just make the deal. He then proceeded to walk out. When The Dupe asked, “What am I supposed to be bargaining for?” Montgomery gave him a wink
and shut the door.

In the control room, Montgomery watched alongside a couple of Skulleye techies monitoring the three screens. One, a close up on The Dupe, another a side-angled shot, and the third, a shot towards the door from The Dupe’s back. Hassani had told him Tetsu was the leader of The Abattoir, but Montgomery wasn’t so sure. Perhaps Hassani was giving him an impersonator. It enraged Montgomery that the NSA’s Tailored Access Ops essentially drew a blank about this guy. Even a cover should have some data associated with him. He had asked Bernie Horton in HR to fire a couple of underperformers just to make a point. “Let them know why too,” he had told him.

Finally, he had called Ron Pelletier in the CIA. Pelletier was a fellow West Point graduate he would occasionally catch a drink with. Pelletier was about the only person Montgomery could count on in The Company, and it was with great humility that he called in a favor. But Pelletier told him that Tetsu wasn’t any agent or cover he knew about. He’d look into it. The leader of The Abattoir was a man named Grant Darenius. Pelletier told him he had never met the man, but Montgomery sniffed a lie. So who was this guy? This man with multiple names?

Montgomery watched on screen four as the man aliased as Cyril Tetsu was led down the hall by two security guards. The man kept his head down, apparently shy of the cameras. A thick stubble grew on the man’s face, almost a full beard. He had a short Marine crew cut. As he passed the camera, his head darted up for a glimpse. In the couple of frames before the picture was lost, Montgomery saw eyes flaming like a pyre, whites smoking from the burn.

Security showed the man into the room. The Dupe stood and offered his hand. A scowl swept over the man’s face that Montgomery found intriguing. A look composed of the same sort of distaste the President would show when the Vice President would speak out of turn. Cyril Tetsu took The Dupe’s hand. As if
night suddenly turned into day, the severe face bloomed into a smile. He grabbed The Dupe’s hand and gave it a rugged handshake.

“A pleasure meeting you, Mr. Tetsu,” The Dupe said.

“Likewise, General Montgomery.” The two sat down at the conference table. “I heard there was a bit of excitement here a few weeks ago.”

The Dupe wavered, smiling awkwardly. The man was a catastrophe. “Yes, a bit, but that’s being handled.”

“How so?”

“We’ve got it all under control.”

“It appears so now, but how will you avoid these situations in the future?”

“The bastard doesn’t know when he’s being led,” Montgomery said.

The Skulleye next to him said, “Not so smooth.”

Montgomery nodded. “Watch. He’s going to keep questioning him until the fucker catches on.”

“We’ve beefed up security,” The Dupe continued. “Lined the fences with guards. They won’t be getting in here so easily next time.”

“So they got in through the fences, did they?”

“I never said that, Mr. Tetsu.”

“You did, but it isn’t important. Did they escape that way too?”

“Mr. Tetsu, please,” said The Dupe. “Can we speak about business now?”

“Certainly.”

With the sprightly tone Tetsu had just given, Montgomery sensed something seriously wrong and suddenly questioned his own experiment. “I don’t like it,” he said out loud. “Get a man down there to interrupt them.”

A long pause followed while The Dupe thought of what to say next. All of the sound seemed to be sucked out of the room while
The Dupe stumbled for words. Tetsu smiled. In his seat, one leg crossed over the other, boot twitching with a manic jerky motion.

Finally The Dupe said, “So I assume we can come to an arrangement?”

“An arrangement for what?”

“An arrangement that would be mutually beneficial to both of us.”

“I guess that’s what a deal is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Tetsu. If you’ll be kind enough to extrapolate exactly what it is you require—”

“Tch-tch-tch, General Montgomery. Not so fast. Romance me a bit. Tell me what you can do for me.”

The Dupe forced a smile. “We can do a number of things. You know, everything within reason is within our power, so simply ask.”

One of the tech guys spoke to Montgomery over the video feed. “We’ve got a facial match, but the name says Drey Ahanu, a contractor for—get this—Academi.”

“Get me everything you can get on this guy,” Montgomery said. “And get me a fucking aide in there to pull him out of there. What is taking so long?”

Tetsu uncrossed his legs and inched toward The Dupe. “If you bend over so easily, people might call you a slut.” He paused for a moment, then leaned forward in his seat, planting both feet on the ground. “Okay, I have a better idea. Allow me to ask you a question?”

“Certainly,” The Dupe said, totally out of his element.

“Why don’t we start with you telling me how your hand healed so quickly?”

The Dupe didn’t have enough time to react. Montgomery watched a blank expression form on his face, and then Tetsu, as if purposefully waiting for the stupefied look, pounced on him, grabbing him by the hair and slamming his head into the side of the table. Once The Dupe had crumbled to the floor, Tetsu kicked
him repeatedly into unconsciousness. Then he stared into the camera, face flushed, and shot out, “I do not like to get played! If you want to talk to me, then come talk with me!”

By the time Montgomery reached the room, Tetsu had grounded the aide he’d sent into the room to interrupt. The man lay unconscious, his nose splattered across his face. The aide’s pistol sat on the table next to the conf-call phone, the muzzle pointing toward the door. Tetsu stood over the bar pouring whiskey into two glasses. The Dupe began to wake from his beating, groans sliding out of his throat while his fingers gingerly pawed the gash on his head.

Montgomery approached, stepping over The Dupe, the color drained from his face. A stream of blood ran down The Dupe’s cheeks and formed a small pool on the beige carpet.

“So,” Tetsu said turning, “you must be the real Montgomery.” The man was square-jawed and beady-eyed, carrying himself with a weightless air of confidence. He was shorter than Montgomery by a couple of inches, but confident to the point of extreme arrogance. The
I’m better than you
look of a man in the profession.

A Charge Squad man ran into the room, looked at what had happened, and began to draw his gun. Montgomery put his hand into the air and said, “Get these men out of here and shut the door behind you.”

Montgomery turned back to the man at the bar. “So you are the infamous Cyril Tetsu? Or should I call you Drey Ahanu?”

Tetsu looked down at his watch. “I was figuring you’d get me in another fifteen minutes.”

“They’ve given us a generous budget over the years.”

“Indeed they have.”

Montgomery raised his hand. “Where did you hear that I was shot?”

“You wouldn’t believe what you can find out on the Internet.”

“We’re quite aware what you can find out on the Internet,”
Montgomery said.

“You don’t believe you have the monopoly on information, do you?”

“You got it from Hassani,” Montgomery said.

Tetsu smiled and gave Montgomery the second glass from the bar. It was then that Montgomery made up his mind that this was his guy. “Mr. Hassani has kindly let you know why we wanted to speak with you.”

“Persuasion is a greater ally than compulsion, wouldn’t you agree?”

Montgomery ignored the question. He would not be led like The Dupe.

“Mr. Ahanu, we’ll find out who you really are soon enough, so why don’t you save everyone some time.”

“I’m a trainer. I’m authorized to speak for the camp.”

“What do you do out there at The Abattoir?”

“Teach boys how to be men.”

“They say you kill people out there.”

“Not everyone deserves to live.”

Montgomery laughed. “I’m in agreement with that. We’re looking to train some of our men. We want them to have certain skills, particular skills, skills that fall outside normal SERE training regimes.”

“What? Torture training? Shit like that?”

“I never said that.”

“But you meant it.”

“Let’s call it asymmetric training. We’re going to prepare a list of things that fall outside our scope.”

“I understand, General Montgomery. But are you asking me this, or telling me this by way of threat?”

“The NSA is asking as a courtesy.”

Tetsu lipped a smile. “I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement.”

“We won’t stop your operation.”

“If you must, you must, so be it.”

“You don’t seem to care too much about it.”

“Money is a trivial thing to us. You only need so much of it, don’t you? Then it becomes a worry about what to do with it. You have never had this problem?”

“We are the government.”

“Indeed you are. There are many resources at your disposal, yes?”

“Of course.”

“Then, shall we talk bluntly or maneuver more around moral gray areas?”

“By all means, let’s talk candidly,” Montgomery said.

“Then it will cost you something else besides your silence. You can obtain things at a cost much more favorable for the sort of merchandise we would like to acquire.”

“What sort of merchandise piques your interest?”

“Drones.”

“And what might be your need for those?”

“The natives are getting restless, so to speak. We would rather utilize our resources for turf wars instead of thinning our men for the simple cause of limiting supply.”

“So you mean to continue with your business? Not that we really care, because we don’t. It’s not our directive. But I do have an issue of whom you’re selling to. This is our youth we’re talking about.”

“We will move it off U.S. soil if it pleases you. We would need certain resources to push into Asia, and we have not yet tapped into European demand. The world is a very big place.”

“So your organization is concerned with money after all?”

“Money is the cousin of what we’re interested in. You know as well as I what we’re interested in. Why not speak of it directly?”

Montgomery smiled but said nothing.

“Should we talk details?” Tetsu asked, lifting his glass.

Outside in the clearing, Kumo and Merrill packed up horses to ride me out of The Abattoir. “The world will be different,” Kumo warned. Bipolar adjustment, he called it. “Your mind will demure for the old, associating your new environment as Heaven after having just been put through Hell.”

“Don’t let your mind trick you,” Merrill added.

“It’s simpler than that,” Kumo argued. “A man with no belief has no footing. Remember your training and that you are a new man the world is not ready for. If not, you’ll be more fucked than ever.”

Now, I was on a dopamine high cruising down San Francisco’s Market Street. The world buzzed with women flowing in and out of promenade shops dressed in knee-high skirts, legs garbed in mesh stockings. They trotted around in stylish high heels, swinging designer pocketbooks and loping in Rowland Dawl hoodies, the new in-vogue fashion, a veil-like piece of fabric that refracted light causing a blurred effect with one’s facial features and confused the cameras and drones from above. They wore Glasswear sunglasses—big, round insect-looking lenses covering parts of the cheek. The glasses came in different colors, swaths of tinted browns and stylish blues, guaranteed to dupe facial recognition software while not compromising a chic style. Out here were the people who had something to lose, that didn’t want to be tracked by CCTV cameras or battery-powered MAV drones posing as crows. Anti-surveillance apparel was taking off, and the retail marketing machines were latching on.

A large police presence wandered the blocks; officers on every
corner of the street, radioing to one another over CBs; cops shaking down street urchins, loading drifters into paddy wagons. I walked on toward the financial district absorbing the skyscrapers, trollies, and bustle of people as if they were fresh air to breathe.

I turned right on Howard Street to a circus of ice-blue and lion-yellow, the block draped in Datalion banners. Pinned to the sides of buildings, they were mounted high up on rafters, pitched up on flagpoles, even tagged to FiDi drones doing flybys. The city was alight in Datalion glow, a marketing blitzkrieg covering the whole block, billboards of
Rumble in the Data Jungle
all the way up to Market Street. Signs pointed to the 2023 conference at the Moscone Center. I walked around the festooned tented camp, the compounds freshly erected. The spill of humanity overflowed the streets, and I bumped shoulders into a squad of geeks with badges tied up in shoelaces dangling around their necks. Sounds of jackhammers pounded the air. The rollick of construction workers fought to be heard over buzz saws and cranes.

I slipped into the Moscone Center West building and down an escalator. Datalion tech-heads bustled around a massive Ziggurat rack plugging in network cables. The techies swarmed around it clad in DL colored T-shirts and tan chinos. I stood and gawked at the worker bees from the hive attaching the nest of cables.

There I saw myself six years ago—one amongst the Blue and Yellow in the same spot, mounting up cloud-based Y servers with a thousand glittering green lights. I had just graduated with an MS in computer science from UCLA, a Freshy from SoCal, the most unlikely of career paths for a black kid from Crenshaw, the sense of the outcast driving me to prove myself. I would endure the equal-op looks at Datalion’s orientation day. I would work harder than the rest. Sleep there. Wake up bleary-eyed and waffle-faced from using the keyboard as a pillow. I would push
forward through the dregs of other screenfaces working database security inside the cubicles of DL and prove who was the best amongst them all.

But let me go back a bit further, all the way back to early youth, to that kid in the library cutting up encyclopedias, palming planet Earth in soiled baggies with holes in his pockets, slipping through sliding glass doors with a wink in his eye and a wave from his hand toward Mrs. Gomez the librarian. The
outcast
was stuck to me like web from a spider. I was an air-breathing arachnid moving around a world no one thought I belonged in. Any sense of cool I had would somehow get entangled. Trapped in the ‘hood, I was an insect wiggling in my own silky spinnerets. I took the cracks for being an egghead. Spit upon for answering a teacher’s question. Took the worst beatdowns not from neighborhood kids, but my brother, who was jealous of my doting parents who would ask him,
Why can’t you be more like him?

The outsider followed me like a stink into freshman engineering classes at the U—glowering contempt, the verbal rubdowns, everyone asking if I was free-ride,
liberum scholaris
. None held faith my high-school work was meritorious enough to walk amongst the anointed without the African American application checkbox. But the charity case would show them up in class by answering the tough questions no one else could. Glares turned tenuous, looks of subtle intrigue overpowered by yet deeper internal reflection they weren’t as smart as they thought they were. The outcast’s insecurity turned the outward world in, birthed the hacker Cerberus, and led me to the inner echelons of the DL elite, where all that mattered was bug-free code and burying your head in the blue and yellow dogma pouring from the DL heart.

Caged in an isolated decompression chamber next to the Ziggurat was the QX Blake Thompson would surely tout. It was black and tall—my height—standing up like a two-ton refrigerator. The DL logo embossed in the dark covering. Blue and
Yellow orbs of light glowed like eyes on the front panel. Datalion hype, but still, an undeniable allure. Inside, current flowed clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously at absolute-zero temperatures. Qubits inside in superposition, new doors opening to the Underworld. It was the first quantum computer I’d seen, and I moved closer trying to peer into the little porthole window on the side. Inside, the elements of a machine lurked—ion traps, superconducting circuits, quantum dots aglow trapping ions inside, suspended in their own space-time blankets.

I was struck with a moment of dizziness—a flash of Burns floating down the river. I put my hand over my chest. The Earth photo, still there, beating with my heart. I gazed down at my palms, the tools that had choked the life out of Burns, slayed Conroy. The gash in one of my palms was barely visible now, the surface wound made by Kumo’s knife a fading cut. The Sons of Liberty had cut their own hands, mashed them together in a blood bond when I made the pledge—blood brothers bounded by a bushido chain, The Cause rising high above our bodies from the smoke of the Freedom Fire, the flame where we ceremoniously burned old beliefs and pledged the new. But I was in San Francisco now, about to attend one of the largest technology conferences in the world. I had just bought a new pair of trousers and a sports jacket, and the words of Kumo and Merrill seemed like a distant echo instead of a strong voice.

Tomorrow, in this room, the lyrics of machinery would sing. The gods of technology would gather at the auditorium altar, step before the podium and offer fresh vision and speak about new paradigms. It would be the Timothy Skies dinner all over again. I had come full circle, back at Datalion. I rotated on an arc around both sides of the world, and returned where I started.

Now, however, the context differed.

A stream of encoded bits were speeding through a wire, pushing through the fiber at light speed, shooting through the
Internet like a bug about to splatter a windshield. It would pass undetected through NSA algorithms, pattern recognizers, and filters—land innocuously in the mailbox of Theresa Ross, or Mary Heller, or another real person’s Gmail account recently hacked by The Anthill. It would be hidden away in a folder somewhere in a rabbit hole of cyberspace. And when read, it would hit the screen as a message from the Underworld, surfacing onto a monitor nebulously ordering its real-world allies to take action, and I, Cerberus, would do my duty.

I heard a voice calling from behind the Ziggurat. “Isse Corvus? Is that you?”

A square-shouldered man walked up to me, wearing the DL colors. He had a bushy mustache rumbling over the sides of his mouth. A paunchy belly pushed through the fabric of his shirt, a Techno Buddha, we used to call the type. He had one of those long, drawn-out corporate smiles you could emboss a logo on.

He saw my eyes squinting for recognition. “You remember Rose don’t you?”

“Mike?” I asked.

He held out his hand. “In the flesh. Perhaps a bit more than before.” This statement brought out a booming laugh from him. He closed his eyes like an old seal. “How are you, Isse?”

“Good, Mike,” I said, shaking his hand. “Now, you mentioned Rose. Which one were you talking about, the program or the woman?”

“Both were beautiful,” Mike said. “Whatever happened to Rose Rossetti?”

Rose Rossetti—a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. She had been the inspiration, the one I would run home to when I couldn’t take any more of the Rose in the office. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I said whimsically.

“Didn’t you move back to L.A. and become a cop or something? I heard some bizarre ass shit like that.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Did it for a while and then burned out. So
finally I found a firm Datalion didn’t have their claws into.”

“Hey, that’s cool, man. So you’re back in the game?”

“Technical consultant.”

“Nice,” Mike said. “Who with?”

“ND Aerospace.”

“Never heard of them.”

“It’s neural network stuff. Highly top secret. I’d have to kill you if I told you any of the type of shit we do.”

We laughed at that, and he said, “I’m dead anyways. I’m still in blue and yellow.”

I pointed up to a massive sign pinned to the wall below the vaulted ceilings where Datalion’s logo was wrapped in a swirl of blue and yellow, and asked the obvious, “So, you’re still working for these guys, then?”

“Yeah. You know how it is here, same-old same-old.”

“Seems like a lifetime ago we were working on Rose together.” I paused a moment, stared at him glassy-eyed. “Those were some of the best times for me here.” Another few seconds passed. I scratched my chin. The whimsical moment had sunk in.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Mike said, “but you’re back in the game, right? I’m glad for you.”

“I was a bit of a cowboy back then, Mike. I deserved what I got, but I’m better man for it today.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

“I’m curious what Blake Thompson will have to say. Now that the cloud is old news, it’s all the QX now, right?”

“Pushing the envelope,” Mike said, holding up two fingers, putting the words in quotes, smiling vaguely.

“Is that what they’ve got you on now?”

“No, I’m all about MegaData.”

“What’s that?”

“Bigger than BigData.”

I laughed and said, “You sound depressed.”

He upturned a lip into a semi-smile. “It’s a job. I’m tired of
being a coder.”

“Mike, you’re still a coder?” I asked him in a raised voice. “I thought you’d be a management man for sure by now.”

“No. That shit’s not for me. I’m looking for a change though. I’ve been with Datalion quite a long time.”

“I hear you.” I stared down at my wristwatch. “Look, I got to run, Mike.”

“Do you want to hook up later? During the conference sometime?”

“Would love to,” I said. “You got a card or something?”

Mike pulled out a wallet and thumbed through it. He yanked out a card and handed it to me. I took it, said goodbye, and left for Moscone East to pick up my conference packet and badge. There I stood in line with the herd until I was at the front. I was given the DL marketing bomb—the shoulder sack with brochures, lecture schedules, safari sessions, a free book
(Coding for the QX)
, and a ticket for the Saturday-night Jungle Party with special musical guest Audacious on Treasure Island. The badge had
Shane Carrier
written on it in the DL colors, and I would stuff it in my pocket and use it only when needed at the conference.

I walked a couple of blocks to 611 Folsom Street to the dull, silver-looking AT&T Building. At the bus stop on 2
^nd
, I stared up at the nine-story building jutting up into the sky. One of the hearts of the Internet beat in there, arteries of fiber all converging into massive routers and switches, connecting together the nation’s ISPs. The trolls of the NSA were locked up in a room with a wire going in, tapping into cyberspace like a bloodthirsty mosquito, syphoning off bits of our lives, offloading them to processing sites where supercomputers crunched through every byte of data and stored them in DL cloud servers.

Afterward, I hit the streets, wending my way through the throngs in the Tenderloin district. On Turk Street, the police presence had faded to one uniformed cop across the street pushing away a homeless man who had thrown over a bag-lady’s
cart. The two screamed at one another in a scatter-mouth slur, rivulets of spit popping out of their mouths, only the expletives comprehensible.

Small grocery stores had their prices jacked. Teenage Korean sons tattooed-up, wearing wife-beater Ts, were armed at their entrances, pistols out in the open in holsters by their hips. Several of the stores had been incinerated, charred interiors with melted counters, the pavement around them littered in glass. Looted cars rammed up on curbs had smashed-in windows, tires missing, the trunks popped open. One had a grimy navy-blue sleeping bag in it filled with a junkie taking a snooze.

A small bazaar in the middle of Turk Street where traffic was closed off milled with people. Smoke from BBQs rose in the air. Most burned wood or old rags, smoking out aerial drones. CCTV cameras had been ripped off street poles, but judging from the lack of police presence, the authorities had surrendered this part of town.

People crowded around different tables. I pulled up to one and pushed into a crowd of ragmen circled around an old bootlegger selling bathtub liquor. A drunken man, jaundiced and pocked, waved a bill up in the air. He had a burned-out cigar nub crunched in his yellow-gray teeth. Said something in a street tongue I didn’t quite catch.