He went back to waiting in his room. He didn't go out much. There were periods in his life where he would go days without even speaking, where his whole world would shrink to no more than the dimensions of the walls around him. Sometimes he withdrew so thoroughly, the only thing that would bring him out of it was the buzz of his pager.
He thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too. In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don't cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries from their birth stand astride the planet. The benevolent peace lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.
It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger but with Old Testament-style moral wrath. Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.
Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as long as they also feared it. Oderint dum metuant.
True, there were downsides to the fear. After the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein, every bush-league enemy of America out there realized he needed an insurance policy. Because if Saddam had had a few nukes and had demonstrated the insanity or even just the minimal resolve to use them if attacked-and who would bet against a guy who had gassed his own people?-the U.S. would have stood down for sure. The Iranians understood this. It was part of why they were trying so hard for a nuke of their own.
He smiled. Well, they'd suffered a bit of a setback recently, hadn't they?
But killing the scientists was mostly just buying time. America was the world's richest, most networked, most technologically advanced nation, with unparalleled military superiority. Nukes might be enough to check a power like that, but that didn't mean America 's enemies weren't also looking for a checkmate. The Chinese were experimenting with antisatellite technology, looking for a way to put out America 's eyes in space. For the Russians, it was all about cyberwarfare, with their massive denial-of-service attack on Estonia a trial run. The Iranians and other third-tier powers… who knew? In a thousand garages and bunkers and secret laboratories all around the world, motivated men probed for weakness. When they found it, they would exploit it.
Luckily, there were hundreds of guys in the bowels of the Pentagon whose job was to ruminate over all the possibilities, imagine, predict, monitor, counter. Of course, there had been people assigned to figure out how to protect America from asymmetrical threats pre-9/11, too. But there were more of them now, and they were better motivated. The Defense Department had even formalized some of it, turning the Eighth Air Force into something called a Cyber Command, tasked with training and equipping forces to conduct network defense, attack, and exploitation. Ben hoped they were doing their job.
Well, he was doing his. He was proud of that. If his folks were alive, maybe they would have been proud, too.
Maybe not, though. He'd always been the black sheep. There was a reserve about him, a stillness at his core his parents found vaguely discomfiting and other kids mistook as a kind of cool. The stillness had made him popular, and that unsought, effortless popularity, along with the friends and dates and parties that came with it, had acted to balance the stillness and to some extent conceal it.
His father had been an engineer with IBM, and the family had moved three times when Ben was a kid-first, Yorktown Heights in New York; then Austin, Texas; and then Portola Valley, in California 's Silicon Valley, a stone's throw from the San Andreas Fault. Ben had a knack for football and wrestling, and sports were always a good way to quickly get accepted in a new school. His younger sister, Katie, never had a problem, either. She was a beautiful girl with a radiant smile and nothing but goodwill in her heart, who had it in her just to naturally like everyone, and naturally enough, everyone seemed to like her in return.
Alex, the youngest of the three, was the problem. He was shy and awkward everywhere but in the classroom, where the little teacher's pet would have an answer to every question and never made a mistake. Alex's constant need to show everyone how smart he was would invariably attract the attention of a bully, and then it would fall to Ben to straighten the bully out. The bully would typically have an older brother, and the brother would always have friends. Usually it took three or four fistfights before Ben established that even if his younger brother was a dipshit, that didn't mean people could pick on him. During these periods, when Ben had to make things clear to people, he often found himself suspended from school. His parents were appalled. They demanded explanations, but what could Ben really tell them? Alex, with his instant aptitude for science and school, was his father's favorite, and the old man wouldn't have understood that it was precisely Alex's showing off all the time in class that was causing the problems. A few times, after Ben had violently interceded on his behalf, Alex thanked him, but Ben didn't want his thanks, he just wanted him to stop provoking people by acting like he was smarter than everyone else. Ben would tell him that, but Alex never listened. And so it went on, Ben angry at Alex, the parents angry at Ben, Ben even more angry at Alex as a result, and Alex, awed by his big brother, confused and resentful at his aloofness and ire. The only emollient was Katie. She would soothe Ben and comfort Alex and try to explain to their parents, and although Martin and Judith Treven could never accept Ben's ready embrace of violence as a solution, no one could stay angry long when Katie was advocating for peace.
He hadn't known it at the time, but family was a fragile thing. Like a house of cards. Some cards, no doubt, could be pulled out without much affecting the overall structure. Others, when they were removed, caused a shudder, and then another card popped out, then two more-and then the whole thing collapsed, just like that. All from a single mistake, from one little lost card.
But none of that mattered anymore. What happened had happened, and now, looking back, it all seemed unavoidable, not a collection of random events at all but rather the insidious and inevitable workings of destiny itself. He wondered sometimes whether that feeling of destiny was a trick, a narcotic the mind offered up to anesthetize remorse and regret. After all, if it didn't just happen, but had to happen, it couldn't have been your fault. Destiny was like a freight train, and who the hell could stop that? Trains just went wherever the tracks led them. So at the time it had looked like a car, sure. But it wasn't. Really, it was a train.
8 THE FLAVOR OF THE FOOD
Sarah had gone back to her office so Alex could call the VCs and cancel the meeting. The poor guy looked crushed. Well, who wouldn't? He never said anything about it, but she knew if the Obsidian technology turned out to be as good as it looked, Hilzoy would become a very important client of the firm. For a sixth-year like Alex, coming up for partnership, originating a client like that had to be a big deal.
She spent two hours analyzing some prior art for one of the senior litigation associates. There were no interruptions, and she was glad of it-she still wasn't used to managing her time in six-minute increments, and long periods devoted exclusively to a single matter made it easier to keep track. She made a note of the time and thought about getting some lunch.