“Well, we have the shipping records from a building that no longer exists,” corrected Bug. “That’s not going to be enough for declarations of war. We’re going to have to be careful how we break this.”
“I agree,” said Junie. “This news is like a nuclear bomb. Last thing we want is politicians overreacting and demanding that we put missiles in the air.”
“For the record, guys,” said Bug, “I’m not a fan of that whole mutually assured destruction thing. I’ve seen those movies. First bombs, then giant radioactive cockroaches and gorillas on horseback with carbines. No thanks.”
“He’s right,” said Junie. “As much as I’m usually for full disclosure, there is no way to spin this that wouldn’t result in a panic or a war. Or both.”
“Can’t let it go unanswered,” said Top.
“No,” agreed Church.
“Who do we tell?” asked Doc. “Last I heard everyone in Washington was hanging up on you.”
“First things first,” I said. “Valen is still out there. Bug, have you been able to decrypt the shipping records? How many God Machines were sent to America?”
“Well,” Bug said, “some of it is still rough guesses, and not all of the shipments went to the United States. But if you include Canada, to places where there’s a lot of interstate trucking heading down to the States, then it’s a lot of them. Possibly as few as eighty and as many as two hundred.”
“Two hundred?” cried Cole.
“Maybe more,” said Bug. “It breaks down like this. Fifty of them were sent to Baltimore via container ships. The dockyard records show them coming in from three different points of origin, none of which are Russia. The shipments were moved around a lot. Any customs computer whiz would have missed it, because the guys at Pushkin were very smart about it. But… y’know… MindReader and all. So that accounts for all of the D.C. machines, and maybe some others as backups, or defective. There are no records at all after they were picked up by local trucking companies and delivered to a warehouse in Baltimore. They were probably picked up from there by Valen and his crew. The warehouse has been swept and is clean.”
“Big question,” said Doc, “but where’d the rest of the gol-dang machines go?”
“Five different ports in Western Canada. Coming from all sorts of fake destinations, but I can prove they started at Pushkin. The cargo was picked up by truckers and came into the U.S. via the standard routes through Canada Route 99, to Route 5 in Washington, and then west along 90, and probably south on 15.”
“That means we can track them,” said Duffy. “Good. Let’s roadblock these sons of bitches.”
“Bug, tell them the complications.”
Bug sighed. “First thing is that most of the parts shipments were sent to their destinations months ago. Not sure how long it takes to assemble one of these God Machines, but from our experience with Gateway and Prospero Bell, it’s tricky. There are all sorts of alignment issues, and you really don’t want to get the math wrong.”
“Assuming they know how to build them,” said Top, “what’s the timetable?”
“I think the clock’s ticking down to boom,” I said. “Bug spotted Valen in Montana. I think he’s out there to oversee the next phase. But before we get to that, let’s backtrack and add the other big piece of the puzzle. The why.”
“About that,” said Cole, “what’s his beef with us? Unless I skipped that day in history class, we didn’t sabotage Chernobyl.” She glanced at Church. “Did we?”
“No,” said Church. “We did not sabotage Chernobyl.”
“Then why did he wreck Washington? And why’s he out there maybe setting up some other attack?”
“Why did the Soviet Union collapse?” asked Church.
Cole thought about it. “It was economics, wasn’t it? Trying to keep up with us, building up their military and all that. We have more natural resources and a stronger economy.”
“Top marks,” said Church. I’m sure if he’d actually been in the same room with us he’d have given her a cookie. “There were other elements, but as is often the case, it comes down to money. We have more of it, and we used it more effectively. There was tremendous economic turmoil, poverty, corruption, and internal strife in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. We prospered and even offered financial aid, which seemed like compassion and forgiveness, but wasn’t. It never is in such circumstances. The ideal outcome for America would have been to turn Russia into another postwar Japan or Germany. That nearly happened, too, but there was too much resentment and it lasted much longer than the tensions between America and its enemies during World War Two. The Cold War never truly ended, at least for key players in Russia.”
“There’s a conspiracy theory,” said Junie, “that the influx of Russian Mafiya to America was a deliberate tactic. After all, so many of them were former Soviet military.”
“There may be a great deal of truth in that, Miss Flynn,” conceded Church. “Which supports the view that the Cold War hasn’t ended. When the Wall fell, the Cold War went dark, but it is still being fought as a long-game special operation. There are hawks on both sides, and in times when those hawks were not in open political power, they worked tirelessly behind the scenes. It’s only been more recently that the hawkish views in Russia have become less well hidden. Maybe because they knew that they were going to finally win that war.”
“So, wrecking D.C. was what? Their opening move?” asked Duffy. “Are they going to hit New York next? If so, why aren’t we going there? That’s where the money is. That’s the heart of the economy, unless I’m reading Forbes magazine wrong.”
“Money passes through there,” said Church. “It’s the brains of the national economy, just as Washington is the center of the infrastructure. But it’s not the heart of the economy.”
“Then what is?”
I bent and tapped some keys on my laptop, and some pictures I’d preloaded popped onto the virtual walls of the ORB. Oceans of wheat blowing in the wind; thousands of acres of corn and barley and soy; groves of fruit trees. “This is America,” I said. “This is what Valen is going to destroy.”
Duffy shook his head. “How? He’d need a million God Machines to cause that many earthquakes.”
“No,” said Doc Holliday, her face draining of all color, “he won’t. He could do it with the machines they’ve already sent to America.”
“But… how?”
“Tell them, Cowboy,” said Doc.
I could see the precise moment when Junie got where I was going. She went pale as death. Doc, too. They looked like they wanted to flee. As if that was even possible.
I pushed another key and one more image came up. It was of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. “Beneath the park is the Yellowstone Caldera,” I said. “Church, you even listed it as a possible target when we were at the hospital. One of our own analysts put together a paper on this a few years ago when we were tracking that Apocalypse Cult in Montana, the ones we thought might have brought in some old Soviet nukes bought on the Chechnyan black market. Because Montana’s just north of there, the analyst put the caldera at the top of our worry list, and for a good goddamn reason.”