FIVE HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 8:45 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 25.
At first Captain Wallace, Army Counterintelligence, seemed pretty nice; he explained that he had once been a Seattle police detective, working fraud, ID theft, and cash-hacks, and he was still more used to civilian investigations. He hoped Chris would cooperate.
Chris told him exactly what had happened and described the man as well as he could remember; Wallace was oddly uninterested, as if he already knew who had done it (Perhaps the spy was already busted? Chris thought). He established that Chris had looked at the documents but had no intention of disclosing their contents.
“I hate the idea of a civil war,” Chris explained, “but if there is one, I’m on the side of this government, and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize victory.”
“Is that a matter of revenge? You were jailed by the Athens government before being sent here—”
“Well, it didn’t make me especially like them, of course, but my real problem is that the Southeast is turning into one big Army base, gearing up to attack some squatty little patch of dirt that had nothing to do with Daybreak. And while they’re getting ready, they’re wiping out most of the traditional liberties.”
“Such as freedom of the press?”
“Well, I’m pretty attached to that one. Look, I had just realized what I’d been given when the Rangers came and busted me. I hadn’t had time or opportunity to turn it in—jeez, I guess your office would have been the right place, I didn’t even know that.”
“Yes, actually, my office would have been the right place.”
“Off the record, did you catch the guy?”
“You might say that. Off the record entirely, though.” Wallace sat down, so close to Chris that their knees almost touched. “So let me make sure of a few things. No one else saw the documents but yourself. How would you describe what you saw?”
“It looked like the first stages of a military offensive against the Athens government—securing our communications through Montana and the Dakotas to the New State of Superior, and cleaning out Castles that might act as enemy bases in our rear.”
“I can see you’ve done some military reporting before.”
“Second Iranian War; I was embedded with Tenth Mountain for three months, and almost all that was at headquarters.”
“Ah. And your record there?”
“Flawless on security issues, Captain Wallace. Not that anyone can prove anything with all the computers down.”
“True, but good to know.” The captain sat down and gazed straight into his eyes. “And you would not have divulged or published because—?”
“Because I’m a loyal citizen of this government. I’d be interested as all hell of course and I might have written a book after the war—probably would have—but I wasn’t going to let anything I publish harm us in the struggle, if it comes down to a war between a military-intel-administrative dictatorship and the actual Constitutional government.”
“You wouldn’t let anything you publish harm our side?”
“No, I would not. No matter what they show in the movies, not every reporter—”
The captain grabbed Chris by the lapels and shouted into his face, a long wailing scream, hot breath pouring in through Chris’s gaping mouth and flooding his throat, spittle spraying into his staring eyes. With his nose almost on Chris’s, he bellowed, “And yet you go and publish, and sell it in the marketplace, a book jammed full of lies, that slanders our president and our entire leadership, explains in detail the illegal position of the junta in Athens, directly says the Constitution is at fault, and cannot be called anything but treasonous slander! You run that ridiculous speech that you invented for the president to have given in Pale Bluff, promising to hand over power to the junta! In your own words, this book is exactly intended to harm us in this struggle! What do you have to say for yourself, you lying sack of shit? How much did they pay you to do this, in Athens? ”
Captain Wallace shook Chris, yanking him back and forth, and repeated the accusations, over and over, screaming and scattering spit over Chris’s face. When he ran out of air he threw Chris back in the chair. “Now, if you really meant that about supporting the legitimate government, you’ll sign these documents!”
“What if I don’t sign?”
“What if you don’t sign?” The captain grabbed him by the hair, tilted his face back, and slapped him. “Didn’t you say you were supporting our side? Didn’t you say that?”
Chris knew he was going to be here for a long time.
FOUR DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COL UMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 9:11 A.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. JANUARY 29.
“So,” Arnie said, turning the page over on the old flip chart, “big windmill with generator here, supplies power to this rotary-quenched spark gap, the high tech of 1915 here today. It’s a big piece of equipment, with a huge capacitance and at high voltage, so we’ll want to keep people far from it. Then we hook it to this oval of old high-tension lines, which will be our antenna. And the result is that we’ve got the biggest, loudest radio transmitter on Earth, by far.
“Now, in a warehouse, we found four hundred toy telescopes, all metal and glass, which we set up in arrays of fifty, spaced and angled to be looking at space above the antenna. Dark construction paper over the eyepieces like so. We use old surveying transits, sextants, and the almanac to get them aimed perfectly—”
“Let me guess. It’s a religious ritual,” Graham Weisbrod said. Several Cabinet members chuckled, which made Heather add a few points to their Sycophancy Index, a statistic she’d been making up for some time; Allie, sitting at his elbow, laughed and rubbed Graham’s arm.
Arnie flushed, and Heather beamed a thought at him: Come on, don’t let the bitch fluster you, she’s trying to fluster you. You’ll have a bucket of beer, and the kid and I will have some milk, and we will joke around about the Sycophancy Index over dinner, and it won’t matter. Arnie seemed to gather himself as if he could hear her. “So this will attract one of the EMP gadgets—whatever they are. From a robot’s-ear view, it’ll be the biggest and most obvious target this side of Jupiter. The toy telescopes that happen to catch the flash will burn holes in their construction paper, so the array will tell us about where the bomb went off, and the recording windup clock here can be coordinated with it.”
“If you have the telescopes, why do you need the clock?” McIntyre asked.
“We coordinate them. The EMP will be a huge, unmistakable mark on the disk, but in the few seconds before it, we’ll also be recording the echoes of the radio waves off the object, and with ten accurate chronometers scattered over a few thousand miles, we’ll be able—using graph paper and a lot of hand calculations—to put together what amounts to one good radar image. We’ll have its trajectory, and we’ll be able to solve that trajectory backward and know where it came from.
“And here’s the kicker. The AM modulator will work off a mechanical-disk recording device—”
“A record player, Arnie,” Heather said. Even she couldn’t help grinning at that one.
“Well, yes, it works just like an old-fashioned phonograph, and we’ll be broadcasting that we are using this gadget to identify the source of the EMPs, over and over, and nothing else.”