The zenith angle (2 page)

Dottie set her own plate down, with dabs of food on it that would scarcely feed a sparrow. She heaved the restless baby from his high chair and propped him on her slender thigh. Ted was a big kid and Dottie was a small woman. Ted flopped back and forth, flinging his solid head at her like a stray cannonball.

“How much does it cost?” she said practically.

“Six hundred. Plus shipping.”

“Six hundred dollars for one chair, Derek?”

“But it’s magnesium
and
polycarbonate!” Van argued. “They only weigh seven kilograms! You can stack them.”

Dottie examined the catalog page, fork halfway to her tender mouth. “But this chair doesn’t even have a real back.”

“It’s got a back!” Van protested. “That thing that grows out of its arms, that is its back, see? I bet it’s a lot more fun to sit in than it looks.”

Dottie poured Van fresh coffee as Ted yanked at her pageboy brown hair.

“You don’t like it,” Van realized mournfully.

“That’s a very interesting chair, honey, but it’s just not very normal.”

“We’ll be the first on the block to have one.”

Dottie only sighed.

Van stared at the awesome chair, trying not to be surly. Six hundred dollars meant nothing much to him. Obviously Mondiale’s stock wasn’t at the insanely stellar heights it had been when he had bought the mansion, but any guy who bought his wife emeralds for their anniversary wasn’t going to whine about a magnesium chair.

Van couldn’t bear to turn the catalog page. The astonishing chair was already part of his self-image. The chair gave him the same overwhelming feeling he had about computers: that they were
tools.
They were
serious work tools.
Only lamers ever flinched at buying work tools. If you were hard-core you just
went
out and got them.

“This is a Victorian house,” Dottie offered softly. “That chair just doesn’t fit in here. It’s . . . well, it’s just too far-out.”

Dottie took the catalog from him and carefully read all the fine print.

“That chair is not that weird,” Van muttered. “It’s the whole world that’s weird now. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” He picked up his wireless laptop. “I’m going to Google the guys who made it.”

“You really want this thing, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I want ten or twelve of them.”

“Derek, that’s seventy-two hundred dollars for chairs. That’s not good sense.” Dottie sighed. “Tony Carew keeps saying that we should diversify our investments. Because the market is so down this season.”

“Okay, fine, fine, we’re not stock freaks like Tony is, but folks still need wires and bits.” Van shrugged. Van owned Mondiale stock because he put his own money where he himself worked. His work was the one thing in the world that Van fully understood. Whenever it came to the future, Van would firmly bet on himself. That had certainly worked out for him so far.

Dottie smoothed the glossy magazine page. “Derek, my grant expires this semester. That’s not good. I’ve got everything publishable that I’m going to get out of that cluster survey. The peer review people are saying we need better instrumentation.” She wiped at Ted’s spit-shiny chin with Van’s spare paper towel.

Van struggled to pay attention to her words. Dottie’s lab work meant everything to her. She had been working for four solid years on her globular cluster study. Dottie had colleagues in Boston depending on her. Dottie had grad students to feed.

“Derek, it just didn’t break wide open the way I hoped it would. That happens sometimes in science, you know. You can have a great idea, and you can put a lot of work into the hypothesis, but maybe your results just don’t pan out.”

“People love your dark energy nucleation theory,” Van said supportively.

“I’ve been thinking of spending more time here at home.”

Van’s heart leapt. “Yeah?”

“Teddy’s going to walk soon. And he’s talking now, listen to him.” Dottie stroked the baby’s wispy hair as Ted’s jolting head banged at her shoulder. “A little boy needs a normal life in some kind of normal house.”

Van was shocked to realize how much this idea meant to him. Dottie, living with him and Ted, every single day. He felt stunned by the prospect. “Wow, being normal would be so fantastic.”

Dottie winced. “Well, Helga is never around here for us when we need her. I think maybe I made a mistake there.”

“We could put out an APB for her.” Van smiled. “Aw, don’t feel bad, honey. We can make do.”

“I should do better,” she muttered. “I just don’t look after you and Teddie the way that I should.”

Dottie was plunging into one of her guilty funks. The oncoming crisis was written all over her. Pretty soon she would start lamenting about her mother.

Dottie only allowed herself these painful fits of insecurity when she was really, really happy. It had taken Van ten years of marriage to figure that out, but now he understood it. She was spoiling their perfect day because she had to. It was her secret promise to an ugly, scary world that she would never enjoy her life too much.

Normally this behavior on her part upset Van, but today he felt so good that he found it comical. “Look, honey, so what if you got some bad news from your lab? What’s the worst thing that can come out of all that? Come on, we’re rich!”

“Honey bear,” Dottie said, looking shyly at the spotless tabletop, “you work too hard. Even when you’re not in your office, you let those computer cops push you around all the time.” She picked up the other catalog again. “This funny chair you like so much? It’s waterproof. And we do need some kind of porch chair. So get this one, and you can keep it outside. Okay?”

“Two?”

Her mouth twitched. “One, Derek.”

“Okay then!” One chair, just as a starter. One chair would be his proof-of-concept. Van beamed at her. The television grew more insistent. Dottie glanced over her shoulder at it. “Oh, my goodness! What a terrible accident.”

“Huh.” Van stared at the smoldering hole in the skyscraper. “Wow.”

“That’s New York, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Boy, you sure don’t see that all the time.” Van could have walked to the little TV in three strides, but on principle, he spent thirty seconds to locate its remote control. It was hiding in a heap of catalogs. Van turned up the TV’s volume. An announcer was filling dead air.

Some big jet had collided with the World Trade Center.

Van scowled. “Hey, that place has the worst luck in the world.”

Dottie looked puzzled and upset. Even Ted looked morose.

“I mean that crowd of bad guys with the big truck bomb,” Van explained. “They tried to blow that place up once.”

Dottie winced. It was not her kind of topic.

Van fetched up his ThinkPad from the floor. He figured he had better surf some Web news. These local TV guys had a lousy news budget.

Covertly, Van examined his e-mail. Thirty-four messages had arrived for him in the past two minutes. Van flicked through the titles. Security freaks from the cyberwar crowd. Discussion groups, Web updates. They were watching TV right at their computers, and instantly, they had gone nuts. Van was embarrassed to think that he knew so many of these people. It was even worse that so many of them had his e-mail address.

Van examined the television again. That television scene looked plenty bad. Van was no great expert on avionic systems, but he knew what any system-reliability expert would know about such things. He knew that it was very, very unlikely that FAA air traffic control at Kennedy and LaGuardia would ever let a jet aircraft just wander accidentally into a downtown New York skyscraper. New York City had a very heavy concentration of TRACONs and flow control units. So that couldn’t be a conventional safety failure.

However. An unconventional failure, that was another story. An ugly story. Van had once spent a long, itchy three-day weekend with FEMA in Washington, watching information-warfare people describing the truly awful things that might be done by “adversaries” who “owned” federal air traffic control systems. Since there really was no such thing in the world as “information warfare,” information-warfare people were the weirdest people Van knew. Their tactics and enemies were all imaginary. There was a definite dark-fantasy element to these cyberwar characters. They were like a black flock of the crows of doom, haunting an orc battlefield out of Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings.
Van was reluctant to pay them any serious attention, because he suffered enough real-world security problems from hacker kids and viruses. Van did recall one soundbite, however. A bespectacled infowar geek, all wound up and full of ghoulish relish, describing how every aircraft in the skies of America would “become a flying bomb.”

Air traffic control was a major federal computer system. It was one of the biggest and oldest. Repeated attempts to fix it had failed. The guys in the FAA used simple, old-fashioned computers dating to the 1970s. They used them because they were much more reliable than any of the modern ones. FAA guys had very dark jokes about computers crashing. For them, a computer crashing meant an aircraft crashing. It meant “a midair passenger exchange.” It meant “aluminum rain.”

Now, Van realized, he was watching “aluminum rain” on New York’s biggest skyscraper. There was no way this was going to do. Not at all.

Van drew a slow breath. There was a bad scene on the TV, but he was prepared for it. He had been here before, in his imagination. In 1999, Mondiale had spent over 130 million dollars chasing down Y2K

bugs, with many firm assurances from security experts that the planet would fall apart, otherwise. Van had believed it, too. He’d felt pretty bad about that belief, later. When computers hadn’t crashed worldwide and the world hadn’t transformed itself overnight into a dark
MadMax
wasteland, that had been a personal humiliation for Van.

At least the Y2K money had really helped a big crowd of old programmers who had never saved up for retirement.

Van’s New Year’s resolution for the year 2001 had been to never panic over vaporware again. So Van stilled his beating heart as the blasted skyscraper burned fantastically on his television. He was living way ahead of the curve here. He was already thinking in tenth gear. Calm down, he thought. Chill out. Be rational.

Nothing really important was going to happen unless his phone rang. Some flurry of e-mail from his most paranoid and suspicious acquaintances, that did not mean a thing. Internet lists were no more than water coolers, nothing more than a place for loudmouths to shoot off. His home phone number was extremely private. If that phone rang, then that would mean big trouble.

If the phone did not ring, then he was much better off not saying anything to Dottie. Let her be happy. Let Ted be happy. Please, God, let everyone just be happy. Look at that sun at the window, that oak tree out in the lawn. It was such a nice day.

Uh-oh. There went the other one.

TWO

NEW JERSEY–CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 11–14, 2001

A
ir traffic had shut down. Van was living in a world without airplanes. His Frequent Flyer cards were useless plastic.

Van finally understood why he had bought himself a Range Rover Sport Utility Vehicle. Van climbed into the Rover, parked at curbside as usual, for his Victorian mansion had no garage. He drove a few hundred yards from the village, parked in the colossal lot that had taken over a former horse farm, and walked through Mondiale’s brown Plexiglas entranceway. Then he raided his lab for equipment. His coworkers asked him no questions about why he wanted so much hardware, or where he was going with it. At Mondiale’s R&D lab, Van’s friendliness to federal agents had never gone unnoticed.

The mood at the lab was shattered and jittery. Mondiale had lost a branch office inside the World Trade Center. While most of the Mondiale staff had retreated from the burning building in good order, two fatalities had been entombed in the giant disaster site. To have dead colleagues horribly killed by terrorists, that was very bad news, but the physical damage to Mondiale’s telecom system was a stunning calamity. When Manhattan’s two tallest buildings collapsed, New York’s microwave capacity had been gutted.

Wrist-thick fiber-optic cables, safely buried deep in the WTC’s subway, had been snapped, burned, and drowned. Bursting debris from the falling towers had crushed a telephone switching station in another building a block away. With cell-phone relays buried in the rubble, only one call in twenty was connecting. The landline networks were overwhelmed, with call volumes off the scale. Cops, feds, journalists, even professional system administrators, were reduced to using Blackberry pagers. New York’s telecom companies were howling for hardware, manpower, and emergency permissions from the FCC. They were struggling with closed bridges and streets thick with ash and debris.

It was the worst emergency of Van’s career. It wasn’t just a question of his company taking it on the chin. Feds wanted his advice, by e-mail, fax, and phone. Lots of feds wanted him. Law enforcement, military, infrastructure protection. Feds were calling him from agencies he had never heard of, and Van had heard of plenty. Van’s future was swinging like a broken window in those smoking, ash-laden winds. Van was not panicking. He felt grim confidence that he could manage. Cops were dead, firemen were dead, but Van was not dead and he was in no mood to play dead, either. He understood that his life had been profoundly changed, and that from now on his services would be needed in new ways. Everything would be different, harder, uglier, tougher, and more dangerous. He just needed a few good, solid ideas about that situation, that was all. He needed some genuine wisdom, from someone that he trusted. He needed a point of view that was solid and simple, that would settle him down. So, for very powerful, very personal reasons, Van had to travel right away from Merwinster, New Jersey, to Burbank, California.

Dottie understood this need of his. She never asked for many words from him. As foul black clouds spread across the television screen, Dottie went into a trance of efficiency. Her bright eyes went keen and hard behind her little round glasses. She packed up the baby, and herself. She even managed to find Helga the au pair.