He read for a long time, swearing occasionally at Miriam's spidery handwriting and her copious list of contacts—She's
a journalist, it's what she does—until
he hit paydirt a third of the way through:
Milan, Paulette. Business intelligence division, the Weatherman.
That was where Miriam had worked, last time he looked. "Bingo," Mike muttered. There was a cell number
and
a street address out in Somerville. He made a note of it; then, systematic to the end, he went back to the cassette tape.
The next message was a call from Steve Schroeder—his voice familiar—asking Miriam to get in touch. It was followed by an odd double beep: some kind of tape position marker, probably. Then the rest of the tape: a farrago of political polls, telesales contacts, and robocalls that took Mike almost an hour to skim. He took notes, hoping some sort of pattern would appear, but nothing jumped out at him. Probably the calls were exactly what they sounded like: junk. Which left him with a couple of names, one of which seemed promising, and a conundrum. Someone had threatened Miriam, right after she'd been fired for stumbling over something. Was it Clan-related? And was this Paulette woman involved? "There's only one way to find out," Mike told himself unhappily. His stomach rumbled. "Time to hit the road again."
The coded electrogram from Springfield followed a circuitous course to Erasmus Burgeson's desk.
Huw's bluff had worked; the cadre at the post office were inexperienced and undisciplined, excited volunteers barely out of the first flush of revolutionary fervor, more enthusiastic than efficient. There was no command structure as such, no uniforms and no identity papers, and as yet very little paranoia: The threats they expected to defend the post office against were the crude and obvious violence of counterrevolutionary elements, fists and guns rather than the sly subtlety of wreckers and saboteurs from within. This was not—yet—a revolution that had begun to eat its offspring.
When Huw claimed to be part of a small reconnaissance cell in the countryside and asked to send a message to the stratospheric heights of the party organization, he was met at first with gape-jawed incomprehension and then an eagerness to oblige that was almost comically servile. It was only when he and Yul prepared to slip away that anyone questioned the wisdom of allowing strangers to transmit electrograms to New London without clearance, and by the time old Johnny Miller, former deputy postmaster of the imperial mail (now wearing his union hat openly), expressed the doubtful opinion that perhaps somebody ought to have detained the strangers pending the establishment of their bona fides, Huw and Yul were half a mile down the road.
Despite deputy postmaster Miller's misgivings, the eighty-word electrogram Miriam had so carefully crafted arrived in the central monitoring and sorting hall at Breed's Hill, whereupon an eagle-eyed (and probably bored) clerk recognized the office of the recipient and, for no very good reason, stamped it with a PARTY PRIORITY flag and sent it on its way.
From Breed's Hill—where in Miriam's world one of the key battles of the American War of Independence had been fought—the message was encrypted in a standard party cypher and flashed down cables to the Imperial Postal Headquarters building on Manhattan Island, and thence to the Ministry of Propaganda, where the commissioner on duty in the message room saw its high priority and swore, vilely. Erasmus was not in town that day; indeed, was not due back for some time. But it was a PARTY PRIORITY cable. What to do?
In the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda were numerous broadcasting rooms; and no fewer than six of these were given over to the letter talkers, who endlessly recited strings of words sapped of all meaning, words chosen for their clarity over the airwaves. So barely two hours after Huw and Yul had shown the cadre in Springfield two clean pairs of heels, a letter talker keyed his microphone and began to intone: "Libra, Opal, Furlong, Opal, Whisky, Trident"—over the air on a shortwave frequency given over to the encrypted electrospeak broadcasts of the party's network, a frequency that would be echoed by transmitters all over both Western continents, flooding the airwaves until Burgeson's radio operator could not help but receive it.
Which event happened in the operator's room on board an armored war train fifty miles west of St. Anne, which stood not far from the site of Cincinatti in Miriam's world. The operator, his ears encased in bulky headphones, handed the coded message with his header to the encryption sergeant, who typed it into his clacking, buzzing machine, and then folded the tape and handed it off to a messenger boy, who dashed from the compartment into the train's main corridor and then along a treacherous, swaying armored tunnel to the command carriage where the commissioner of state propaganda sat slumped over a pile of newspapers, reading the day's dispatches as he planned the next step in his media blitz.
"What is it now?" Erasmus asked, glancing up.
The messenger boy straightened. "Sor, a cript for thee?" He presented the roll of tape with both hands. "Came in over the airwaves, like."
"I see." The train clanked across a badly maintained crossing, swaying from side to side. Erasmus, unrolling the tape, drew the electric lamp down from overhead to illuminate the mechanical scratchings as he tried to focus on it. It had been under at least three pairs of eyeballs since arriving here; over the electrograph, that meant . . . He blinked.
Miriam? She's
here?
And she wants to talk?
He wound back to the header at the start of the message that identified the sending station.
Springfield.
Burgeson chuckled humorlessly for a moment. HAVE INTERESTING PROPOSAL FOR YOU RE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND FAMILY BUSINESS. To put that much in an uncoded message was a giveaway: It reeked of near-panic. She'd said something about her relatives being caught up in a civil war, hadn't she?
Interesting.
Burgeson reached out with his left hand and yanked the bell rope, without taking his eyes off the message tape. A few seconds later Citizen Supervisor Philips stuck his head round the partition. "You called, citizen?"
"Yes." Burgeson shoved the newspaper stack to one side, so that they overflowed the desk and drifted down across the empty rifle rack beside it. "Something urgent has come up back East. I need to be in Boston as soon as possible."
"Boston?" Philips raised a thin eyebrow. "What about the campaign, citizen?"
"The campaign can continue without me for a couple of days." Burgeson stared at Philips. Dried-out and etiolated, the officer resembled a praying mantis in a black uniform: but he was an efficient organizer, indeed had pulled together the staff and crew for this campaign train at short notice. "We've hit New Brentford and Jensenville in the past two days, you've seen how I want things done: Occupy the local paper's offices, vet the correspondents, deal with any who are unreliable and promote our cadres in their place. Continue to monitor as you move on." The two-thousand-ton armored war train, bristling with machine guns and black-clad Freedom Riders, was probably unique in history in having its own offset press and typesetting carriage; but as Erasmus had argued the point with Sir Adam, this was a war of public perception—and despite the technowizardry of the videography engineers, public perceptions were still shaped by hot metal type. "Keep moving, look for royal blue newspapers and insure that you leave only red freedom-lovers in your wake."