Two weeks after the attack, Steve went to see his HMO and came away with a prescription for Seroxat. It helped, a bit; which was why, on his way home from a day shift one evening, he was alert enough to realize he was being followed.
Downtown Boston was no place to commute on wheels. Like most locals, Steve relied on the T to get him in and out, leaving his truck in a car park beside a station. He didn’t usually pay much attention to his fellow passengers—no more than enough to spot a seat and keep a weather eye open for rare-to-nonexistent muggers—but as he got off a Green Line streetcar at Kenmore to change lines something drew his attention to a man stepping off the carriage behind him. Something familiar about the figure, glimpsed briefly through the crowd of bodies, triggered a rush of unease. Steve shivered despite the muggy heat and hurried across the tracks behind the streetcar, heading for his own platform. It can’t be him, he told himself. He spooked and ran. He looked around behind him, but the half-recognized man wasn’t there anymore.
What to do? Steve shook his head and hunkered down, waiting for the C Line train to North Station.
He knew something was wrong about five seconds after his train began to squeal and shudder away from the platform; knew it from the hairs on the back of his neck and the slight dip of his seat as the man behind him leaned forward, putting his weight on the seat back. “Hello, Steve.”
He tensed. “What do you want?” It was hot in the streetcar, but the skin in the small of his back felt icy cold.
“I’m getting off at the next stop; don’t try to follow me. I think you might like to have a look at these files. There’s an email address; mail me when you want to talk again.” A cheap plastic folder bulging with papers thrust over the seat back beside him like an accusing affidavit. He caught it before it spilled to the floor.
“What if I don’t want to talk to you?” he asked thinly.
The man behind him laughed quietly. “Give it to your FBI handler. He’ll shit a brick.”
The streetcar slowed; Steve, too frightened to look round as the man behind him stood up, clutched the folio to his chest. Jesus, I can’t just let him get away—
Too late: The doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. Steve began to turn, caution chiding him—He might be armed—but he was too late. Mike Fleming, Beckstein’s friend, had disappeared again. Steve subsided with another shudder. Fleming knows too damn much, he thought. He’d known about 7/16 before it happened. What if he was telling the truth? What if it’s an inside job? The prospect was unutterably terrifying. The looking-glass world news nightmare that had engulfed everything around him a month ago was bad enough; the idea that there really was a conspiracy behind it, and his own government shared responsibility for it, left Steve feeling sick. This was a job for Woodward and Bernstein, not him. But Bob Woodward was dead—one of the casualties of 7/16—and as for the rest of it, there was no one else to do whatever needed doing. I could phone Agent Judt, he told himself. I could.
A week or two ago, before the latest wave of chaos, he’d probably have done so immediately. But the end-times chaos of the past month had unhinged his reflexive loyalty to authority just as surely as it had reinforced that of millions of others. He unzipped the folio and glanced inside quickly. There was a cover sheet, laser-printed; he began reading.
8/18
It is a little-known fact that, contrary to public mythology, the president of the United States of America lacks the authority to order a strategic nuclear attack. Ever since the dog days of the Nixon administration, when the drunken president periodically phoned his diminishing circle of friends at 3:00 A.M. to rail incoherently about the urgent need to nuke North Vietnam, the executive branch has made every effort to insure that any such decision can only be made stone-cold sober and after a lengthy period of soul-searching contemplation. An elaborate protocol exists: A series of cabinet meetings, consultations with the Joint Chiefs, discussions with the Senate Armed Services Committee, and quite possibly divine intervention, a UN Security Council Resolution, and the sacrifice of a black goat in the Oval Office at midnight are required before such a grave step can be placed on the table for discussion.
However …
Retaliation in the aftermath of an attack is much easier.
If WARBUCKS put the plan in motion, diverted superblack off-budget funds to the Family Trade Organization, jogged BOY WONDER’s elbow to sign the presidential orders setting in motion the research program to build machines around slivers of vivisected neural tissue extracted from the brains of captured Clan world-walkers, then perhaps the blame might be laid at his door. But it was his successor in the undisclosed location, former mentor and then vice president by appointment, who organized the details of the strike and bullied the Joint Chiefs into drafting new orders for USSTRATCOM tasking them with a mission enabled by the new ARMBAND technology. And it was the Office of the White House Counsel who drafted legal opinions approving the use of nuclear weapons in strict retaliation against an extradimensional threat, confirming that domestic law did not apply to parallel instances of North American geography, and that the two still-missing SADM demolition devices were necessary and sufficient justification: that such an operation constituted a due and proportionate response in accordance with international law, and that the Geneva conventions did not apply beyond the ends of the Earth.
Complicity spread like a brown, stinking cloud through the traumatized rump of a Congress and Senate who were themselves the survivors of a lethal attack on the Capitol. WARBUCKS had insured that the opposition would vote the way they were told; the PAPUA bill was as efficient an enabling act as had been seen anywhere in the world since 1933. A few dissenters—pacifists and peaceniks mostly—spoke out against the far-reaching surveillance and monitoring regime, but the press and the public were in no mood to put up with their rubbish about the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments; with the nation clearly under attack, who cared if a few whining hippie rejects talked themselves into a holiday in Club Fed? Better that than risk them giving aid and comfort to enemy infiltrators with stolen nukes. Rolling out the new identity-card system would take a couple of years, and until it was in place there’d always be the risk that the person walking past you in the street was a soldier of the invisible enemy. An eager Congress voted an ever-increasing laundry list of surveillance and control orders through with unanimous consent, each representative terrified of being seen to be weak on security.
And when the president went before the House Armed Services Committee in secret session to present certain legal opinions and request their imprimatur upon his war plans—the full House having already voted to declare war on whoever had attacked the capital city—nobody dared argue that they were excessive.
* * *
Midmorning in Gloucestershire, England. It was a bright day at Fairford, and behind the high barbed-wire–topped fence the air base was a seething hive of activity. Officially a British RAF base, Fairford had for decades now provided a secure forward operating base for USAF aircraft staging out to the Arabian Gulf. Newly upgraded to provide a jumping-off point for operations in Iraq, boasting recently upgraded fuel bunkers and a runway so long that it was designated as a Space Shuttle transatlantic abort landing strip, for three weeks Fairford had been playing host to the B52s of the Fifth Bomb Wing, USAF.
The Clan couldn’t reach them in England, ran the official thinking. Not without international travel on forged documents.