Victor weaved a bit on his tired feet, looking through the Doc Savage magazines, and he remembered one particularly fantastic aspect of Doc’s world: the man believed in the ultimate goodness of humanity and thought that it was diseased minds that created criminals. Doc had a secret medical facility in upstate New York where criminals he had captured were operated upon, to correct the imbalance in their minds and thereby allow them to become useful, productive and law-abiding citizens.
Poor Doc. Victor went to another bin of magazines. Doc never realized — as Victor had, during his first residency at an ER in an inner-city hospital in Atlanta — that some men (and a few women, to be honest) liked hurting people, liked killing people, liked being evil, and there was no miracle operation in existence that could change that. He remembered a bull session with Monty Zane late one night, when Monty had said, ‘You know, when it’s all said and done, the best way to protect this nation is to locate a certain number of men out there who hate us, and dispatch them with a nine-millimeter round to the forehead. Problem is, of course, knowing who they are and where they are.’
How true. Victor rubbed his fingers across the clear plastic, remembered the joy in reading these pulps in those few hours available to him, early on in his medical career. He wished for the simplicity of that time, wished he had never heard of the CDC or weaponized anthrax or any other damnable thing. At the moment he thought it would have been a fine thing to enter the Public Health Service and end up as a small town MD in rural Arkansas or something, married to some local gal who’d worship him because of his education, and where he could haunt the used-magazine and book dealers on the Internet.
What a life that would have been, instead of the nightmare he was in now. A nightmare that was going to get worse, for Victor had no doubt that details of the Final Winter immunization program would most certainly become public, if not this year then next.
And he had already planned that as part of a plea agreement for quickly cooperating with the government, he’d be sent to a minimum-security facility, and be able to bring his collection of pulps with him.
It would only be fair.
Darren Coover sat in a comfortable easy chair in his apartment, the Bose Wave radio in the room set to a local classical station, as he worked on a New York Times crossword puzzle from 1950 while his laptop hummed away at his elbow on a portable desk. He looked over at the laptop, saw that the program he was running was doing its business, quietly surfing sex sites on the Internet — with an emphasis on busty women — and went back to his puzzle. He had long ago lost interest in doing contemporary crossword puzzles — he usually finished the Sunday New York Times one in under an hour -but he did love the challenge of solving posers and he found that doing old puzzles was a hell of a nice challenge.
For one thing, there was a whole universe of cultural phrases and words that were a half-century old that one had to ruminate over before completing a fifty-year-old puzzle, which was a delight. Darren subscribed to a special service that recovered old puzzles from the New York Times microfilm records and mailed them out to subscribers around the world. It was one thing to solve a puzzle involving a play on words; it was something else when you had to remember the name of a Broadway star from the late 1940s.
Remembering. Darren looked up at the laptop, merrily moving along the program that he had sent into its innards. The line from his Dell laptop was linked with a cable modem, and he spent a few moments just imagining the intricacy of sending those packets of information back and forth, back and forth, along the cable line. One cable here out to a utility pole to a switching station to… another memory, this time of a lecture being given back at the NSA campus — known as Crypto City — when a lecturer from MIT came in and stood in a secure conference room, yapping about something. Darren had sat at the rear, idly listening to the guy drone on, when the man had said something interesting. The lecturer asked, ‘How many computer networks are out there in the world today?’ There had been a low murmur and Darren knew it was a trick question, and he had kept his mouth shut until the lecturer had triumphantly said, ‘One. There is just one computer network in the world.’ Everything else was just a subset of this huge network. There had been a low titter of laughter, and the lecturer had just let it slide right over his pointy head.
Because the right answer wasn’t one. Darren wasn’t sure what the right answer was, exactly, but he knew that the numeral one wasn’t it. For there was another network out there, one that belonged to the NSA. It was called HARDWIRE, and it was a network with a 526-bit encryption technology, based on a new quantum mechanics computing system that existed only in Crypto City. HARDWIRE allowed NSA operatives — like himself — to chat with one another.
He looked down at the crossword puzzle, thinking yet again how the current puzzles were no longer much of a challenge. Ah, a challenge — now, getting a handle on Final Winter and what Adrianna had set in motion, that was one hell of a test, and he knew that he should have been satisfied with what was on his plate. But there was something there that he wanted to dig around, something that just didn’t quite make sense. If he dumped that porn program he was running and logged into HARDWIRE -which could take a while: the verification and password protection system made entering the White House look like buying a day pass at Disneyworld — he could chat with some of his co-workers and see what sniffings they had on Final Winter. Not that he didn’t trust what was going on with his Tiger Team. No, sir, not at all. It was just that -well, he liked things to work out right, to make sense. And right now something wasn’t quite making sense. He wasn’t sure what it was. There was just a tingling back there in his mind that bothered him.
Darren glanced up at the impressively built women flashing in and out of existence on his computer screen. Some women — every one of them, in fact — that he saw flash by were merely representatives of binary numerals, like 100101110100111010011100111, and the merest adjustment to that number stream, say, changing the second zero to a one, could make the photo out of focus. Or blur it completely. One switch of a digit could turn something originally designed to arouse men into a frustrating blend of colors and static.
He looked away from the screen. The unfilled puzzle was still in his lap. He remembered his boss’s orders. Take the day off. We need you fresh.
True enough.
Darren picked up his pen and went to work. Now. Who in hell had been the female lead in the Broadway premiere of South Pacific?
Brian Doyle spent part of his day off heading out to a small park near Greenbelt that looked like it hadn’t been maintained since it had originally been slapped together. The park memorialized some cavalry unit from Maryland that had fought for the Union during the Civil War and save for a few benches and a statue of a man on a horse there wasn’t much to the place. Late-night drinking and sex bouts by local high-school students were probably the main recreational activities. Brian pulled into the gravel parking lot, noting with satisfaction that the place seemed empty. Good. That suited him well.
He got out of the Lexus, went to the rear door and took out a heavy black box with a handle in the center. He walked past the statue, down to a grassy field that overlooked a stream. The grass was ankle high but that didn’t bother him. It seemed to be a good day. He put the box down on the grass, looked around. No picnickers, no witnesses. Brian remembered how, some years ago, in a similar park, the body of the White House counsel had been found, an apparent suicide. Now that had been a time, and an eight-year vacation from reality. All that spilled ink and recorded news tape about a pudgy intern and a lecherous president, leading to an impeachment and an incredible waste of media energy and resources.