She could see Allie was trying not to make it a reprimand. “That’s supposed to be your office’s job—to look for long-range implausible threats and alert other Federal—”
“But DoF has been burned so often about—”
“OFTA’s job is to cry wolf,” Allie said, very firmly. “Whenever you think you might see one. It’s in the hands of others to see whether there’s a real wolf or not. So is that the wolf? Thirty thousand Americans might start wrecking stuff at random?”
Heather glanced at Arnie Yang and said, “Okay, giving you fair coverage, you’ve been saying for a month that it’s time to tell her how bad it could be.”
To her surprise, Arnie was nodding, not popping up with some version of Told you so or Well, duh. He said to Allie, “Maybe I just have contagious paranoia. That’s what Heather’s really worried about, that it sounds like such a scary wolf that everyone will go berserk about it. But the thing is, the bottleneck for being able to assess it accurately is cryptography. We’re reading their coded traffic, but we’re reading it three to five weeks late, because that’s as much as Lenny Plekhanov is able to do for us.”
“Who’s Lenny Plekhanov? Other than the nice guy in the wheelchair that Heather goes out with now and then, I mean?” Now that it was clear Allie was going to get everything she wanted, without a fight, she was back to her sweet, pleasant, teasing self.
Heather flushed slightly and said, “Well, that’s the main way you’ve met him, I know. But we met because over at No Such Agency, there’s an amateur crypto section—ever since secrecy collapsed, computers became so cheap, and the economy produced a mathematician surplus, it’s been pretty cheap and easy for anybody—drug gangs, animal liberators, little political outfits, computer-crime outfits, anybody—to create codes as hard to break as only governments used to be able to do. So any Fed agency with an amateur-crypto problem goes to Lenny, and he gets them whatever analysts he can. It’s not timely or efficient, but we don’t have the resources—”
“Then you are going to go into that meeting, say ‘thirty thousand saboteurs could attack any minute,’ and I’ll find you the resources, Heather.” Allie didn’t sound as happy. “Arnie, how fast could you be up to date with a dedicated crypto operation?”
“Almost overnight.”
Allie looked at both of them. “You know I adore you both, and there’s no one I value more around DoF, aside from the personal side of things. But this is dumb, guys. Now tell me how you’re going to flatten Browder and Crittenden.”
Heather hated these moments with Allie; never a second to think of what you were going to do. But before she could start to stammer and temporize, Arnie handed Heather a pill drive, and said, “She’s going to use this, and then I’ll come in and be the brilliant explainer if they still have questions.”
“What is it?” Heather asked.
“I’ve scripted a slideshow on the subject—suitable for presentation by you, and with some stuff that ought to shut Browder and Crittenden up—and it’s only a few minutes long. Plenty of time between now and the morning meeting to go over it and rehearse. And no, I didn’t show it to Allie first.”
“Thank you. Great idea.” Heather’s relief was tempered by her realization that Arnie was, “Managing your boss, Doctor Yang?”
“Somebody has to,” he pointed out.
Heather really didn’t like the way Allie nodded at that.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE, WYOMING. 5:12 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
DarwinsActor reminded Zach of the jackass science students back in college, but he still had to listen to the weird little turd of a man explain how they were going to break into the holding bin at the Gillette Municipal Plastics Recycling Facility.
They’d already been over it a few dozen times; this particular Daybreak AG should probably have called itself Team Obsessive Compulsive. Especially me, Zach added to himself. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me see the beam in my own eye, even if it makes me struggle with seeing the mote in his.
DarwinsActor had a hooked nose, one of those vague East Coast accents, a slim, too-hairy little body that made you think maybe he was evolved from a monkey, anyway, and a dab hand at genetically modifying bacteria. He wore an old military-style coat over a torn sweater, a paint-spattered black watch cap, and ripped jeans; all six men in the AG were in bum outfits, sitting in the dark interior of the RV in the freezing predawn of Wyoming October.
Bugs—the other biologist in the team—finally said, “Dar, it’s time, and we all know our parts. Let’s just do it.”
Zach disliked Bugs much less than he disliked DarwinsActor, even though both of them were always trying to put in all that unnecessary evolution crap about how their part of Daybreak would work. DarwinsActor himself had said that they had targeted this facility exactly because it was so badly run that it was practically designed for Daybreak; somehow that never made those bioweenies like DarwinsActor and Bugs realize there had to be an Operator for the universe, too—one Who had designed it for what needed to be done. It was funny how these science guys never thought of anything important; that would need fixing, some day.
But not right now, Zach reminded himself sternly. That’s the beauty of Daybreak. First Daybreak, then everything else.
Zach cleared his throat. “Bugs is right, let’s just get it done.”
ChemEWalker said, “I’m with Bugs and WalksWDLord. That’s a majority. No more talk. Let’s go now.”
Took me a moment to remember WalksWDLord is me, Zach thought. I’ve only seen it typed, mostly.
The six men slipped out of the RV. It made Zach nervous to carry his end of a big plastic tub filled with two-liter pop bottles of black powder. He and ChemEWalker were carrying the first tub; as a precaution, the others gave them a hundred-yard head start. Zach didn’t like thinking about what it was a precaution against. He had plenty of faith in the little microprocessor /RC detonators buried in the black powder in each bottle because he’d built them himself, but he was edgy about the stability of the black powder, even though ChemEWalker was a chemical engineer and a fellow Stewardship Christian.
Lord, help me trust my fellow workers in this great endeavor. Lord, also, steady our hands, and don’t let us trip.
Bugs had said black-powder explosions were cool enough and low pressure enough not to hurt the biotes on their way to their destiny. We all have to trust each other, Zach reminded himself. No AG works without that. No doubt they’re all worried about the radio detonators because WalksWDLord is a crazy Christian.
They stayed on the smooth concrete path; SirWalksALot had scouted it in daylight, and they knew there were no stairs and usually no obstructions. The operator here was too cheap to hire a guard, relying on the distance from town to keep the bums out of the recyclables.
At the holding bin, Zach and ChemEWalker gently set down their tubs in the deep shadow. Surrounded by a chest-high chain-link fence, the concrete tub, the size of a semi trailer, yawned empty; tomorrow it would receive a fresh load of plastic from the city, filling it almost to the top.
The two Christians bowed their heads and held hands. “Lord Jesus,” Zach prayed, “let this be the first step in cleansing Your Earth. Bring off Daybreak and bring us a world fit for our children to grow up in. Let what we do be done according to Your will. Amen.”