He just sat there, staring into the blank screen. Shoulders slumped.
Two hundred thousand dead.
Killed by an NR operative.
They were in the cool cinder-block rec room. Kessler and Bettina sat at the card table, Jerome on the ratty, legless sofa, Alouette on the floor. Kessler and Bettina were playing chess. Bettina was winning. She moved her rook, shifting her weight at the same time. Her folding metal chair groaned under her as she shifted; Kessler groaned at the same moment, seeing the chess move.
Jerome was drinking a San Miguel and watching console TV. Alouette was singing to herself, sitting Indian style on the floor, and drawing with colored pens in a sketchbook, complex geometrical designs executed with inhuman exactitude; she was using her chip for the straight-edged geometry, her right-brain for the design. The crow was perched on a high bookshelf, on a copy of Crandall’s bogus Bible, sleeping, its head tucked under a wing.
The satellite broadcast of Nicholas Roeg’s Performance ended. Jerome said, “What a fucking great flick. They don’t make ’em with that kind of detailed mastery this century, no way no mo’.”
And then a news special came on. With Smoke. With Barrabas and Jo Ann.
“Bettina—Kessler—!”
They were already looking up, riveted to the big screen.
Smoke was being interviewed on InterNet TV, the Biggest Grid station in the world. The interviewer was a smooth, composed black Creole in an understated Japanese Action Suit.
And with him were Barrabas and Jo Ann.
“Thank you, Gridfriend,”
“It’s about time,” Kessler said.
“Shhhhh!” Alouette told them.
Smoke was saying: “—the new Holocaust has been ongoing for months. The video that Norman Hand has just shown you is available for examination, to determine computer enhancement or animation—”
“Some of it could simply have been staged,” the interviewer pointed out.
Hand, sitting beside the interviewer, snorted. He didn’t have much of his TV journalist’s persona left. He seemed simply tired and scared and angry. “Staged?” he said, a little shrilly. “We staged a Jægernaut crushing a building? Crushing those people? What are you saying, we made miniatures and matted in the people? Look at it closer. Watch it again.”
Barrabas was squirming on his seat, eager to say something. Finally he put in, “You can check the video of the subhumans. That’s all quite authentic as well.”
“And quite sickening,” the interviewer said.
“You think that’s sickening?” The camera moved in close on Barrabas, the director sensing emerging emotional drama. “That’s nothing. What’s sickening is how they make you part of it. I mean—how they could do it to anyone?” He swallowed. “To me! They—you have buttons you don’t even know you have. And they push ’em and you find yourself hating anyone they want you to hate! I mean… I mean, some of it, right, was in me already. My parents and… But they… it’s like they inflated it, made me…” There were tears in his eyes. “Took advantage of me.” Jo Ann took his hand. It was obvious he was fumbling along, trying to find his way out of the maze of guilt, trying to see himself as a victim. “The scary thing is—how easily they can do it to people…” He slumped back in his seat, embarrassed.
Smoke said gently, “Patrick is right—we’re all of us too vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Media-cultivated racism. It makes any kind of atrocity thinkable—because they think it for you first, in the media. By dehumanizing other races, nationalities. And by laying down a foundation of rationales to build on…”
“Now you have your own media reply,” the interviewer said. “The video of the Jægernaut destroying the apartment building does seem very… authentic.”
“We also have corroborating documentation,” Smoke said. “And when NATO does some investigating they will find they have hundreds of thousands of witnesses.”
“And we have this…” He nodded to a technician. The screen’s image changed to show victims of the Berlin mass murder. Smoke said, “The canister had been set off near the ghettos—but not directly in it. Between NATO headquarters and the ghettos.” The unsteadily panning eye of the camera showed hundreds of people, many of them black and Arab, dead on a street, sprawled and splayed and in some places heaped, fallen in the midst of their workday. A small portion of the two hundred thousand dead. “This is actually NATO video,” Smoke added. “We obtained a copy… Here’s a shot of the pathogen canister on the street. You can see there’s a minidisk taped to it…” The vid ended, the screen showed Smoke again. “On the disk is a recorded manifesto from a right-wing terrorist. She was probably—and this conclusion is in NATO’s report too—probably associated with the Second Alliance. A follower of Rick Crandall’s, in fact, who’d worked at a lab run by the Second Alliance International Security Corporation lab—the two hundred thousand dead in Berlin is the end result of one of the Second Alliance’s viral warfare experiments gone wrong. At the very least, the SA’s leadership, even if they didn’t plan this, are guilty of the negligent homicide of two hundred thousand people…”
“There were white people as well as people of color, dead, in that film…”
“All whites who are not allies are enemies, from the SA fanatic’s viewpoint,” Smoke said. “But when they deploy the Racially Selective Virus—if we let them—they believe they’ll be killing only people of color. Perhaps it’ll work…”
“This Racially Selective Virus—that whole business is a bit hard to believe,” the interviewer said. “It’s something you’re going to have trouble backing up.”
“No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Smoke said. “Not after—” He looked at his watch. “After, say—another ten minutes.”
Early evening on a dark, rain-wet South London street. The streetlights had been smashed out in a food riot the previous winter. The street was consigned to blank warehouses and abandoned buildings. And three identical vans, parked in a row, lights out.
Torrence sat in the driver’s seat of the front van, huddled into a brown leather flight jacket that was a size too big for him. He’d lost weight. He rarely ate.
His assault rifle was behind him, leaning up against the metal wall. On his lap was a canvas bag of noise grenades. Roseland and Steinfeld and two other guerillas were in the back of the van.
Torrence was both tired and wired. He hadn’t slept since before the action in Freezone. He’d met Musa and Roseland and Steinfeld at the airport. The airport had been unprotected, at least by Second Alliance people—because they’d lost two-thirds of their auxiliary staff after the bank-records action. No money to pay them. Only the ideological hard core were left.
Now Torrence and thirty others were poised a block away from the SAISC’s second London storage facility. It was night and it was drizzly, and imminence crackled in the air. Or maybe it was only in Torrence’s head.
A dark limosine turned the corner up ahead, cutting its headlights as it came. The limo pulled up, a car length away, facing the van. Two men got out, one a big white guy in a long brown mac, carrying a riot shotgun, looking sharply up and down the street. The other, in a long coat and shiny black shoes, was a tall black man with hair shaved close to his head, a suit and tie under the great coat. He walked confidently up to the van.
“That’s Bill Marshall,” Steinfeld said from the back. “Open the door for him.”
Torrence reached across and opened the passenger-side door. The tall black man climbed in, stooping, bringing the smell of wet streets with him. The bodyguard waited outside the door, standing in the drizzle, the auto shotgun resting in the crook of an arm. Marshall closed the door and said, in tones as modulated as his expression, “Good evening, gentlemen. A light rain, tonight, but it’s not at all cold. Rather a relief from last night, don’t you think?” With precise, delicate motions of his hands, he tugged off thin ocher calfskin gloves. It wasn’t cold enough for gloves, but the well-dressed man wore gloves these days in London. “I mean,” Marshall went on, “it was dreadfully humid last night,”