The zenith angle (10 page)

“I saw a pic of him,” Van said. And of The Weevil’s den, or whatever one called that impossible, filthy hole where The Weevil lived. At the FCIC Reunion in Phoenix in ’96, they’d had a slide projector. They ran some slides of The Weevil’s raid photos during their beer bust. Van could still remember those computer cops howling.

“I met him once,” said Jeb, wincing at the memory. “In a halfway house in Tacoma. I just had to go see The Weevil. I mean, this was the bad guy who took control of over four thousand computers. Mostly federal. One by one. By hand. Even back then, he had carpal tunnel so incredibly bad . . .” Jeb paused thoughtfully. “I think they call that ‘degenerative osteoarthritis,’ really. Hands like two big hockey gloves.”

“No,” said Fawn.

“Yes, Fawn.” Jeb offered Fawn a gentle smile. That fatherly expression looked strange on Jeb’s big face, but Jeb had known Hyman Glickleister really well.

Fawn’s penny loafer scuffed the federal shag carpet in her doubt. “Really?”

“Yeah, Fawn, really. I’m not kidding.”

Fawn believed him. “So, uh, what do we do about a guy like that?”

“Well, he’s mentally ill. The FBI profiled him as extreme obsessive-compulsive, and . . .” A summary thought struggled to burst out of Jeb. “This is the face of our enemy,” he said at last. “I mean, he’s not al Qaeda, but he’s truly of that kind. There is just no reasoning with this guy. There’s no possible diplomacy we can use with him. There’s no compromise or common sense. We can’t scare him off, or buy him off, or give him anything that he wants. He’s got a value system so totally alien to ours that he’s like a
Star
Trek
Borg.”

Van tugged at his beard, hard enough to pluck a whisker. “How does The Weevil even know we’re here? The only feed upstream of us is the NSA!”

“Man, I sure don’t like
that,
” Jeb said.

Van watched the screen. The Weevil was an awful typist. Small children typed better than The Weevil. He was, Van realized, using two fingers. Maybe two stumps.

Van had had two hours’ sleep and three pots of coffee, getting the alpha rollout of the Grendel system in shape. The project was turning out better than Van had imagined. In fact, it was working out in a rather interesting fashion. It was elegant and he was proud of it. Working with Grendel was worthy of his talents. The work was consuming him.

Van was living alone. He was under great pressure to perform. He was sore all over from lifting weights every night, so as to collapse and get some sleep in his cold, lonely, lumpy bed. Then, as Grendel’s very first “guest,” way before any legitimate user ever logged on to admire Van’s handiwork, here he was already, instantly, this . . . creature. Of course The Weevil wasn’t getting anywhere against Van’s secure system. It was like watching a termite trying to chew through a concrete block. But, as long as it just kept chewing, chewing . . .

“We’ve got to get rid of this guy,” he realized.

“He’ll never get inside Grendel.” Jeb shrugged. “He’s a lunatic.”

Van lowered his voice. “We have got to get rid of him
just because he is him and we are us.
”

“Good people have already tried that,” said Jeb. “Any district attorney takes just one look at The Weevil. It’s like: you want me to put THAT in front a jury? It’s almost blind! It has no hands! It can’t even talk. It’s never held a job in its life. It has no life. I’m not even sure it can read.”

“How does he eat?” said Fawn.

“He’s got some kind of family in Canada. They send him cash, I think. They’re okay people, that’s what I always heard. They’re just really happy that The Weevil lives far away.”

Van pulled off his glasses. “The Weevil is
Canadian
? He’s a
foreign national
? I never knew that.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Oh, man! That’s it! Game over! Illegal combatant! Enemy of humanity! Into the razor wire!

Guantanamo Bay, Jeb. Into the steel cage.”

“Take it easy, Van.”

Van stabbed at the screen with a finger. “Jeb,
look
at this! He’s
attacking the National Security
Council
! You know,
us
!”

“Huh.” Jeb cleared his throat. “Well, you’ve definitely got a point there.”

“This is his last hacker ’sploit! He is
over
! We
own
him now!”

“Van, the NSC isn’t supposed to directly involve itself in operational activities in the field. And we’re just a board of the NSC. We’re a policy coordination group.”

Van boiled over. “This punk-ass chump is screwing with us, and you’re going to let him
walk
? He’s notorious! Everybody in our business knows who he is! Are we wimps in this outfit, are we the
victims
?

Give me his address! He lives in Oregon, right? I’ll drive over there right now! I’ll kick his door in and kick his ass myself . . .”

Van let his voice trail off. Fawn and Jeb were staring at him. They had both gone pale.

“I’m overdoing it,” he realized.

“Uh, yeah,” said Fawn.

Van touched the monitor gently. “But, Jeb, you know, this is my baby here.”

Jeb took a while to nod. “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. But I do get it, Van. You’ve got the right gut instinct about this issue. We need to take some steps. I’m gonna keep you in the loop here.”

“Okay.”

“We need you here with this new Grendel system, Van. We can’t have you leaving us to run any field assignments.”

Now it was Van’s turn to stare. Jeb really believed that he, Derek Vandeveer, would lock and load, drive across America, and physically raid some bad guy. Take him down. Maybe shoot him. Van watched more tortured letters wriggle across the screen. He would do it, too, Van thought, in a stunning leap of self-knowledge. He was aching to go shoot The Weevil. He would sleep better for doing it.

Where was Dottie, where was Ted? Where was his bed, his home? He was in a bad way.

“I’m thinking visa problems,” rumbled Jeb, thunder gathering in his face. “Emigration violation. I’m thinking ‘cyberterrorism.’ I’m thinking a personal call to John Ashcroft and a serious ton of bricks.”

“Did they even pass that statute yet?” said Fawn.

“Patriot Act? Honey, they’re gonna pass all kinds of stuff.”

Van’s apartment in Washington was grimy and dangerous. His NSC office in Washington was makeshift and dull. But Van’s second office, four hours away from Washington in a place they called the “Vault,”

was so awful that he almost liked it. It quickly became his favorite place of work. On CNN and MSNBC, the Vault was always known as the “Undisclosed Location.” Dick Cheney was supposedly in there a whole lot. In point of fact Van had never seen the Vice President wandering around the Vault, but the Vault had an interesting crowd.

Someone with a very odd checklist had tried to figure out what kind of people would be necessary to run the United States of America if Washington was destroyed in a terrorist nuclear attack. That was the big concept behind the Vault: the lively possibility that D.C. might turn, without any warning, into a weapon-of-mass-destruction field of black slag.

Washington would be instant rubble. Then five minutes, maybe six minutes later, the Vault would come online. The survivors stashed away in the Vault would become the American post-nuclear government. The community in the Vault kept bubbling, in constant turnaround. Nobody really wanted to stay in the eerie Vault. They all much preferred to lead real lives, even at the risk of getting killed by nukes, sarin, or anthrax. So the Vault was a very mix-and-match place. It was the Melting Stovepipes business all over again, only to a factor of ten.

The inhabitants of the Vault all slept in similar steel bunks. They had the same military card tables and folding steel chairs. You never knew, day to day, who your new neighbors would be. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Postal Service even . . . They’d show up with plastic-coated briefing books and bewildered expressions, to spend two weeks hiding underground. The Vault had been built in 1962, in a nation still queasy from the Cuban Missile Crisis. It stayed secret because it had been built quietly, in a big hurry, by a very small group of top-notch fallout-shelter contractors. The Vault was located in the Alleghenies, just over the border of West Virginia. It had a rather delightful and well-equipped hotel sitting on top of it, to camouflage it from the Russkies and the American press. The Vault had successfully stayed unknown to the world for forty solid years. The West Virginians who ran the hotel were a clannish lot. They had never breathed a word about the giant warren lurking beneath them.

The Vault had huge steel blast doors and its own coal-fired power plant. The coal plant doubled as the Vault’s crematorium, in case anyone died of A-bomb radiation injuries. All the telephones were red plastic with rotary dials, straight off the set of Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove.
The biggest open space in the Vault was a small gym, so the last men on earth wouldn’t go completely bats with jail fever. Van spent a lot of time in the Vault’s gym. He’d become a workout addict in the grim celibacy of Dottie’s absence. His neglected hacker’s body yelled out for attention: decent food, sex, sleep, a long vacation. None of those things were remotely available to Van. Ferocious exercise was pretty much it. That attitude fit the military tone inside the Vault, though. These guys brought heavy private burdens to their fifty-pound barbells and Nautilus racks. Every Vault rat had to be emotionally troubled. The whole point of being in the Vault was that everything you knew might be blasted to ashes overnight. There was even one big, doomed soul in the Vault’s gym who lifted his weights with a security briefcase permanently tethered to his wrist. This top-secret courier never said a word to anyone, but he was a hard guy to miss. Tall, dark, silent, chiseled-looking, very buff.

Van took an interest in this mysterious stranger. Day after day passed, but no one ever set the courier free of his burden. The chained briefcase was waterproof and apparently blastproof. The guy even showered with it. Van, of course, never asked him about the briefcase. There was something way too personal about that subject.

The Vault was a barracks, and had stark, simple, military routines. The cafeteria line fed everyone three times a day, on big community tables. All the federal foodstuffs had tough-guy military nicknames, like

“elephant scabs” for the veal parmigiana and “bug juice” for the orangeade. When the lights went out at night, nobody stayed up to party. The Vault went as black as a tomb.

Van and his CCIAB people became extremely popular in the Vault. Within two days, Van had installed securely encrypted broadband Wi-Fi. Thanks to Van and his fellow cyberwarriors, even the most bored, lonely Vaultie, stuck in a sealed cell with a cheap khaki blanket and a laptop, could securely surf news portals. Van expected someone in authority to complain about all this free Internet access from within a secure facility, but no one ever complained. They just accepted Internet access as a modern force of nature.

Van lived much better inside the Vault than he did in his Washington apartment. The Vault was cramped, stony, and smelly, but at least he was fed and watered regularly. Van felt safe from the outside world. Most other federal employees in the Vault sheepishly feared an apocalypse that would destroy everything they knew. Van, however, was getting one. Van’s world was literally being destroyed, in newspapers, magazines, and television, day after day.

It was hard to believe—Van would never have imagined it—but Mondiale, the mighty Mondiale, was dot-bombing. Mondiale was coming apart at the seams. This brave, heroic, visionary, cutting-edge company—the bear market was beating it to death like a cheap piñata.

This made no sense at all. Mondiale was not some flimsy e-commerce Web site with a make-believe business model. Mondiale was the necessary basis of modern civilization. Mondiale was a telecommunications giant that owned real property: cables, microwave relay towers, optical switching stations, long-distance voice franchises, big chunks of regional local loop, and even satellites. Mondiale was a highly profitable business that was laying fiber-optic pipe around the planet, uniting the world in efficient globalized prosperity. Mondiale was the future. It was insane to think that a society in an Information Age was not going to need Mondiale and its skills and capacities. But the world had stopped believing in that. The Bubble was the Terror, just like that. And the stock had cratered. Van’s own holdings, his fortune, his net worth, were nose-diving day by day, relentlessly. Van was helpless. There was nothing he could do to escape the collapse and save himself. As a federal employee, he had placed his holdings into a blind trust.

Doing this had never bothered him. He had never been the kind of guy with any time to dabble and meddle in stocks. Of course he knew people who lived that life—one of them, Tony Carew, was his best friend. Knowing Tony well, Van had always known better than to try to outhustle the IPO hustlers on Wall Street. Van didn’t mind putting his Mondiale holdings into a locked federal box. Van had confidently figured he would just leave his stock there, as a classic, sensible, long-term investor, until the big emergency was over, and Mondiale took him back.

But Mondiale was eaten by the Terror. Everything that the common wisdom had urged Mondiale to do had turned, overnight, into poison. Everything Van had discovered and assembled for them—golden vistas of research potential, a host of raw possibilities, shining ways forward . . . nothingness. Vaporware. The abyss.

It felt very good to work inside solid bombproof concrete, then.

Van was wiped out, but not quite totally. As the Deputy Director of Technical Services for an NSC

board, Van had a federal salary, paid promptly every month. Van was paid about as much as a senior FBI agent, which was to say, he was paid peanuts. FBI agents never made a dime until they quit the FBI. Former FBI agents could do pretty well, when they went to work as well-paid private security people. Former FBI guys commonly went to work for big, serious-minded, major commercial outfits. Like Mondiale.