Directive 51

^DAYBREAK

All the days of the modern world begin at the International Date Line, in the middle of the Pacific. When it is midnight on the Date Line, the midnight that ended yesterday touches the midnight that begins tomorrow, and the whole world is in a single day.

October 28th was a date that would be known everywhere, forever; bigger than July 4th or 14th or 20th, bigger than December 7th or even 25th. As 12:00 A.M., October 28th, entered at the Date Line, nothing had happened yet, though many thousands of people, millions of machines, and billions of messages and ideas were already moving. When 11:59 P.M., October 28th, exited through the other side of the Date Line, the world had just tipped and begun to fall over into its new shape.

The Earth turned, rotating lands and seas in and out of shadow. October 28th was already old in northern New Guinea as it was just being born in Washington.

^{SENTANI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NEAR JAYAPURA, PAPUA PROVINCE. INDONESIA. 6:20 P.M. LOCAL TIME. OCTOBER 28.}

Across the bay, darkness rushed into Jayapura. Vice President John Samuelson sighed and tried not to see that as a metaphor. From the window of the unmarked 787, where he had lived for more than a week, Jayapura was a tumble of white and gray below the craggy green mountains still lit by the setting sun. Lights were flickering on; he liked that metaphor better.

He hadn’t so much as dipped a toe in the bay, set a boot on the hills, or shaken a hand in the town. Not that it would have been better if he had. Jayapura was maybe the size of Akron, Ohio, but as a provincial capital in a Muslim country, it was never going to be known for its night life. He had been there, once, thirty years ago, when he was demonstrating his backpack-to-anywhere skills to Kim, during the wildly romantic couple of years when he worked his way up to proposing to her.

To be here today, he’d sacrificed twelve days of campaigning in the last month before the election. Might as well just have taken Kim to the Caribbean for swimming and sun.

No one even knew he was here.

“Mr. Vice President?” Carol Tattinger, his State Department minder, said, “The communications techs say that if you have a message for the President, we should record and send now; once we’re airborne, we’re under radio silence.”

The mission had been thrown together so suddenly that a replacement satellite uplink hadn’t been available for this plane; they were stuck with tight-beam microwave to the American consulate across the bay. Typical, Samuelson thought: The budget for peace was just never there.

Samuelson stood up, his head almost touching the ceiling, and said, “All right, let me wash my face and put on a jacket and tie. I guess we’ll have to do this.”

Tattinger nodded; as he had so many times in the last few days, Samuelson watched her for any trace of sympathy or understanding, and saw none. With her hair in a tight bun, and her slightly large, beaky nose, she reminded Samuelson of a cartoon witch.

A few minutes later, he took his seat in front of the camera. “Roger, you and I have been friends a long time and I’m going to be blunt. The mission is a failure. I think that’s ninety percent them, ten percent us. We’ve spent the past eight days in an impasse, and now we’re at the deadline you set. I’d ask for more time but it wouldn’t help.

“Per your orders, and monitored by your people from State, Defense, and Homeland Security, I have repeated our offer without modifications. They still have not responded.”

Specifically, he thought, they had said neither yes nor no, but talked endlessly of general principles, mixed with hints about what might be possible.

He did try to keep the reproach out of his voice. “In my opinion, if someone could hold a more open-ended conversation with them, a deal might be within reach; but per your orders, I was only able to repeat our basic offer, and thus I can do absolutely nothing. Sorry, Roger, but I just don’t have a deal for us. We’ll be taking off in less than an hour, and I’ll see you when we get in. Good night, Mr. President.”

That was awfully brusque. He decided against re-recording. Unlike most presidents and vice presidents, they were friends, and had been friends long before they took their present jobs. If this message pissed Pendano off, well, Samuelson had always been able to get Rog’s forgiveness. Hell, give me a little more time, and probably I’ll forgive Rog.

Martin Reeve, the Defense liaison, looked in. “Sir, I thought I’d let you know I’m sending a message concurring with you. I think we just didn’t have enough flex to have a dialog.”

Samuelson made a face. “Thanks for the support. I don’t suppose Tattinger agreed with you.”

Reeve lowered his voice. “Everyone at State frets about whether they’re firm enough. I wouldn’t read anything personal into it, any more than I would into your following Pendano’s orders, sir.”

“I suppose not. Well, anyway, this was a lot of time in the plane I’d rather not have spent.”

“I’ll be happy to get off the Batplane myself, sir.”

Samuelson felt childish pleasure in that nickname, which made him feel like one of the guys. The design of the 787, with so many curves, made it look sissy to military eyes, so it had a million nicknames like “the Batplane,” “the Deco-Wrecko,” and “the Melted Boomerang.” Men’s planes should look like darts or spears; grace was for girls.

Technically this Covert High Level Missions plane was Air Force Two, like any plane carrying the Vice President; the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that was usually Air Force Two was back in Washington, parked in plain sight. “You know,” Samuelson said, “I never heard our cover story for this plane’s being here at Sentani.”

Reeve had no expression. “There’s a rumor that this plane is carrying the mistress of the Sultan of Brunei, and those men who visit are setting up a deal to make her his heir.”

“Well, no wonder you couldn’t let me get off the plane. I’d look like shit in a wig and a dress.”

Reeve grinned. “I’m glad you understand the necessity, sir.”

“There’s something else I still don’t get.” Another full day before I can just talk to Kim—I wonder… “Once we’re in the air, we have long-range radio even though we don’t have satellite uplink; wouldn’t it still be encrypted?”

“Sure, but you don’t need to be able to read the messages to use a direction finder to track the plane. And because this mission is covert and they kept the allies out of it, we don’t have escort fighters till they can come out and meet us from Guam. Till then… well, till we have the escorts, shit could happen, sir, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Samuelson smiled. “I’m acutely aware that shit can happen, Mr. Reeve.”

Reeve grimaced. “Once we have escorts, chances are it’ll be okay to call home if you need to.”

“Understood.” Maybe I can talk to Kim in a couple hours. I’d sure feel better.

Reeve looked over Samuelson’s shoulder. “What’s that about? We’ve already refueled and resupplied.”

A panel van was pulling up alongside the plane; they could hear the pilot talking to the tower.

Over the intercom, the pilot said, “Sir, it’s representatives from the opposite organization. They’re requesting permission to come aboard; they say their principals are offering to give you much of what you’ve asked for.”

Carol Tattinger and DeGrante, the usually silent man from Homeland Security, came in.

Samuelson said, “All right, instant input?”

Tattinger folded her arms across her chest and nodded. “When you negotiate with Middle Easterners, oftentimes they won’t reach for what’s on the table until you go to take it off. And doing it in the way that causes maximum hassle and inconvenience is very much in character. So this very well could be legit.”

Reeve said, “It’s up to you, sir.”

Usually DeGrante would just nod or say “Concur,” but this time he said, “I don’t like it. When I was a bodyguard, anything that moved suddenly in my peripheral vision was bad. That’s what this feels like. Maybe it’s just what Ms. Tattinger says, negotiating the way they do in their culture. But I want to say ‘Don’t.’”

“Noted,” Samuelson said, “and thank you for your candor. I’ll count that as a two-to-one vote unless you want to exercise your veto?”

“Not on just a hunch, sir. But since we couldn’t do a pat-down at the gate, would you let me frisk them at the door?”

“Yeah. There should be some penalty for this dumb last-second stunt. Frisk them at the door, and be thorough, and not excessively gentle. If you piss them off, I’ll square it up. Just let me change pants, and we’ll get this thing going.”

“I’ll cue you when we’re ready,” Tattinger said. She and DeGrante went forward to talk to the pilot.

In his private compartment, Samuelson appreciated the last streaks of deep red sun over the rugged mountains to the west, then shuttered his windows; mustn’t have any maintenance workers catching a glimpse of the Second Most Important Boxer Shorts In The Free World. Red sky at night, supposed to be a good omen.

He sighed happily as he stripped from his sneakers and jeans and pulled out slacks and wingtips. He felt it—this would work out.

Just like old times. As a mayor, John Samuelson had walked into a Crips and Bloods summit, armed with nothing but his confidence, and worn them down with round-the-clock talking and listening. As a governor, he’d hung on for five nearly sleepless days for a peaceful end to a prison hostage situation; just this June, he’d brokered a deal between UFCW and hotels to save the DNC.

Give Samuelson space to improvise, and you got a deal. This time—

Bang.

Sharp, flat, loud.

Two more bangs. Shouting. A cascade of bangs, thumps, screams—

Not bangs. Shots.

Samuelson froze, his fresh pants draped over his hand.

The door broke inward at him.

Man with a sledgehammer.

Two men beside him. Not Samuelson’s people. Not the other side’s negotiators. They pointed guns at him. For a stupefied instant, he thought of asking them to let him finish dressing.

One of them lunged, throwing something over Samuelson’s head. They pinned his arms behind him, punched him, kicked him, and grabbed his genitals and twisted. He puked.

His screams made no difference. Even with his head in a vomit-soaked coffee sack, sobbing for breath, he still understood the implications when he felt the big jet begin to move.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JAYAPURA, INDONESIA. 6:30 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

Armand Cooper was reflecting that if people actually make their own luck, he would give himself about a B- for what he was making. That was something to taste with an icy rum and Coke from his personal fridge in his office; as the American consul in Jayapura, he was the highest ranking, as well as the only, State Department official stationed here. And anyway it was out of regular hours—Abang and the other Indonesian clerks were never in here.

In a smallish city in the backwoods of one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world, you really appreciate your liquor. And your ice.

He’d had the tight-beam microwave antenna up, synched in, and checked out for an hour; he liked to be ready early for everything. One of those areas where making your own luck gets you an A.

Pointing the soles of the feet toward anyone was disrespectful, even through a third-floor window, so when he dragged his office chair around to give him a view of the street, he carefully placed the hassock to hide his feet from view. Good thing they can’t see what’s in my glass, the old hands say it wasn’t always this way, but this country has gotten pretty tight about everything.

Pluses, he thought, and savored the rum on his tongue: one of the youngest consuls in the Foreign Service. Especially hard when the younger ranks are so dominated nowadays by Asian-Americans; an African-American male rising so fast, well, hell that it’s a cliché, I sure did give Moms some bragging material.

Minuses, boondocky town in a Muslim country, near the equator.

Pluses, nothing to do except try to keep American tourists and businessmen out of trouble, or rescue them from it, and this far into the back of beyond, most of the people who get here are pretty savvy.

Minuses, social life consists of the Australian consul (nice old guy who likes to play chess), French consul (middle-aged lesbian couple), and the aging drunk that runs the Amex office downstairs.

More minuses, ever since they expanded the consular corps so much, consulates aren’t the dignified old Gothic or Victorian fortresses they used to be—I’m in an office over a bank, and security is the bank guard downstairs.

Come to think of it, the crowd outside—streets in Jayapura were crowded except during prayer—looked kind of odd, like they were waiting for something; maybe a popular preacher or an outdoor concert in the park nearby? All right, bigger minus, as hard as I work at it, I never really feel like I know what’s going on.

Biggest minus, being in charge this early in the career meant being in charge of something so small he had to be here all by himself after hours. He tasted the sourness and bite of his drink before he laughed at himself.

Armand, you are going to whine yourself to death someday, his mother had said to him, more than once, and his father had called him Mr. Glass Half Empty. And now not only was he grumbling about being in a tropical paradise with virtually no supervision, he was also on the fast track for promotion, he’d been doing well here, and the simple, easy task he had to do was part of a vital mission at the highest security level; all he had to do was not screw up and there was a great big plum of cred on his resumé.

He swirled the rum and Coke to make sure the ice was doing its job, and swallowed the rest. Maybe his next post—

His cell buzzed in his pocket. “Cooper, US Consul.”

“Cooper, it’s Seagull. Routine op in ten seconds, are you ready?”

He glanced at the computer screen, which said his antenna was aligned. “Ready… send the test…”

“Sending.”

The screen said confirmed clear.

“Good here.”

“And good here. Sending one main message.”

The screen said msg rec’d 48 mgb, relaying.

“Just the one this time?” Cooper asked.

“Just the one.”

Successful realay, wiping msg.

“Relayed and erased,” he said.

“That’s it for tonight. Unofficially, thanks for everything and bye.”

“Bye.”

So they were leaving. He’d thought they would be, soon; he’d been fielding more and more odd requests from the big white plane that he could just see through binoculars, across the bay at Sentani airport.

Well, time to bag it and head home. He might give himself a few days off sometime soon, maybe hop over to Oz or Tahiti for some nightlife and just to feel like nobody was watching his ass all the time. He rinsed his glass thoroughly—wouldn’t do to have it smelling of liquor when the Indonesian help came in—and locked the fridge after making sure he had returned everything to it. He started the sequence that would do a secure memory wipe on the satellite uplink server’s disk, and did some straightening up and putting away while he waited for it to finish.

The crowd outside was shouting and chanting; his Bahasa wasn’t terribly good and rumbling AC and armored windows made it hard to hear, so he went to the window.

The first brick bounced off right in front of his face, and he ducked away and crouched as a dozen more thudded against the window. Thought I heard “America” in that chant. And the uplink will be down for another five while it finishes—

Slams and scraping noises overhead. Ropes passing by the windows, flying up or spiraling down. Then a groaning and creaking overhead, a loud bang as bolts gave, and he saw the satellite uplink antenna plunge past the window to the ground. Make that the uplink is down.

Cooper crawled to the opposite wall, where the light switch was, but before he quite reached it, the power went out. He made sure his door was locked, sat up behind his heavy desk, and dialed the emergency desks at the Embassy in Jakarta, the Consular Service in Washington, and the local police department, leaving voice mail each time. Probably the person on duty at State was in the bathroom, the one in Jakarta was napping, and as for the local police, they might be out there with the mob or gone fishing for the month.

He was glad he had a prerecorded native-speaker message on the phone, and gladder still he’d made Abang stop giggling and record it perfectly straight. Minuses, he thought, I’m in a place where a prepared guy like me has LOCAL POLICE FOR VIOLENT MOB in his prerecorded speed phone list. Double minuses, voice mail all around.

He called Seagull to let them know there was trouble in the city; no voice mail picked up while he let the phone ring fifty times after he started counting. The stones and bricks had stopped after that first flurry, but so far three shots had caromed off the armored glass and screamed off into the dark.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. 151°6’E 11°23’N: ABOUT 450 NAUTICAL MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF GUAM, IN THE PACIFIC. THE NEAREST LAND IS GUAM. 9:10 P.M. GUAM TIME (8:10 P.M. JAYAPURA, 6:10 A.M. EST). MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

Seagull Watchdog One, the flight of three F-35s, arrived on the dot—literally, because the rendezvous point, 151°6’E 11°23’N, was just a dot on the map of the Pacific. The nearest land was Guam, which they had left about forty-five minutes ago, taking off from Andersen AFB. As agreed, they fanned out in the Touch Hands formation, a slowly rotating equilateral triangle in which each plane was at its highest cruising altitude and just close enough to the others to put them three degrees above the horizon. In Touch Hands, they maximized their chances of detecting the white, unmarked Dreamliner that they had been told was designated Seagull; the mission itself was SCI, Sensitive Compartmented Information, a designation above Top Secret.

The F-35, after a rocky start, had been thoroughly shaken down and its bugs worked out once and for all during the Second Iranian War. Its electronics suite had been redesigned and refined by the ten years of anti-terror patrol since the suicide attack on the carrier Franklin Roosevelt. The same routine anti-terror, anti-drug, and border patrols had trained the Air Force pilots to execute Touch Hands flawlessly. If the Dreamliner named Seagull was coming to its rendezvous at 151°6’E 11°23’N, Seagull Watchdog One would find it; the dark was no barrier. A typhoon would have been no more than a nuisance, but the sea was calm tonight.

With their large drop tanks, Seagull Watchdog One could circle the rendezvous point in Touch Hands for more than an hour and still have plenty of fuel to complete the escort mission before turning the Dreamliner over to fresh escorts out of Hawaii.

They had been warned that the Dreamliner might be as much as twenty minutes late; unofficially, the flight leader had been told they were coming out of some bush-league Third World airport to the south and west, the kind of place where delays were routine and anything could happen. When they picked up a plane on radar, they were to hail it via secure transponder code; once they had positive ID, they would close in to fly a protective formation around the Dreamliner. Until contact, or unless there were problems, they were to minimize radio contact with the controllers back at Andersen.

At twenty minutes after arrival, the flight leader radioed in that there had been no trace, and called for a radar and satellite confirmation that they were in the right place. They were. Twenty minutes later he requested and received permission to try to raise the transponder buoy that Seagull would have released if it had gone down. There was nothing. At about 10:35 P.M., with safety margins for completing the mission running thin, they were relieved by another flight, Seagull Watchdog Two, and headed back to base.

They went in for immediate debriefing by more high-ranking officers than any of them had ever seen in the same room, but they had nothing to report except that they had flown out to the rendezvous point, waited, and encountered nothing.

“Was there anything that could have been a trace of Air Force Two?” a man in a civilian suit asked, and only then did they know what their mission had been and what was lost.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON, DC. 6:54 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

In Washington, DC, wherever great hordes of Federal workers pour in and out of big, blocky office buildings all day long, there are more small coffee shops, cafés, and grills per block than in any artists’ quarter or bohemian enclave anywhere. They are nearly as essential to government operations as the Pentagon, the White House, or the Executive Office Building.

People in private industry hold meetings to coordinate what people are doing, decide issues in which several people have a say, and gratify some boss’s ego, not necessarily in that order. Only the third purpose is the same in Washington.

Decades of sunshine laws and open-government policies guarantee that anything discussed at any official meeting is eventually going to be public, so the most important rule for any meeting is to have nothing said that might ever attract any attention. Rather than coordinating or deciding, official government meetings ratify pre-made decisions and avoid ever saying anything unexpected.

To achieve such perfect official meetings, there has to be a “meeting before the meeting,” where the people involved caucus about what is going to be said. Disclosure laws and media scrutiny force any bureaucrats who need to think freely to do it in a place and time that is not official in any way—and thus those coffee shops and hole-in-the-wall cafés are vital.

Heather O’Grainne knew all that as well as birds know breezes; as she rounded the corner, finishing her morning run around the Capitol area, it compressed to time for the meeting that can’t be a meeting. This year marked a milestone: At age thirty-nine, she had now been a desk bureaucrat for eight years, one more than she had been an active Fed cop in her younger days. It tasted sour that she knew these bureaucratic games better, now, than she knew current procedure for arresting a suspect or obtaining a warrant.

This was bound to be a big, messy, uncomfortable meeting-before-the-meeting. As Chief of Staff, Allison Sok Banh was one of the few people in the Department of the Future who could make Heather jump on command. She had “invited” Heather to an “early breakfast” to “talk things over” at the Angkor Coffee Shop, which happened to be owned by Allie’s Uncle Sam, and had a convenient back eating area that wasn’t open during the mornings. Translated from bureaucratese, Allie had summoned Heather to an urgent emergency meeting, and whatever was up, Allie really didn’t want it to leak.

Sam, in his seventies, stooped, face deeply lined, had to be a foot and a half shorter than Heather’s six feet. He greeted her with a bow and a grin. “You’re here to assess my cooking?”

“Only if it’s a threat.” It was their inside joke, ever since Allie had explained that Heather headed up the Office of Future Threat Assessment.

“Allison is already here, in back. Your usual order?”

“Yes, Sam, thanks.”

The food here is so good I even eat here when we’re not skulking around on some piece of intrigue and politics, Heather thought. I guess that enhances the cover for days like today. The thought seemed slightly paranoid, but Remember, paranoia is one of the leading signs of having secret, all-powerful enemies.

She found Allie at the sunny table by the window; the curtains were drawn. Arnie Yang was with her, and that was more bad news. First of all, Arnie was Heather’s senior analyst in OFTA’s communications-monitoring program, and Heather should have been the one to bring him if he were needed. But coincidentally, he was also Allie’s boyfriend, and maybe her spy. And worse yet, his area of investigation was the last thing Heather wanted to talk about.

Allie and Arnie were eating already. Heather had barely sat down when Sam served her a Cambodian Breakfast Number One—chili-flavored pork, rice, and pickles, plus a big mug of chicory coffee with condensed milk. He vanished, carefully closing the door before Heather quite finished saying “Thank you,” and in the outer, public room, the music was abruptly much louder.

Heather relished her first swallow of the sweet, thick coffee. “You’re gonna make me fat with these meetings here.”

Arnie smirked. “I know you’re mostly muscle, boss. Bet your dad had to buy a tractor when you left the potato farm.”

“Do they farm potatoes with tractors? I’m an LA city chickie.” She sipped again at the rich brown coffee and then dug into the pork and rice; once Allie started into business, Heather knew from past experience, there wouldn’t be much time to eat.

When they had all finished wolfing down the food, Allie put her iScribe on the table.

“You’re recording this?” Heather said, shocked.

“Thought I’d better. CYA for all of us.”

“So, as soon as I saw you here, Arnie, I knew it had to be about Daybreak.”

“Heather,” Arnie said, “I haven’t said one word to Allie about—”

“You don’t have a leak in your organization,” Allie said, smoothly, heading off accusations and arguments. “But we do need to do something, soon. This comes down from Secretary Weisbrod, Heather, he says we’ve got to crack this open and let everyone else into the playpen.”

“Damn,” Heather said. Hunh, Secretary Weisbrod, not “Graham,” like Allie and I always call him. A little reminder that he’s the boss. Better give up before I get stomped. “I just hadn’t wanted to share it around the department because it sounds so crazy—”

“Too crazy for DoF? That’s got to be crazy.”

Heather returned the lopsided smile. The Department of the Future had a rep for madness; it had come into existence because Roger Pendano, who was about to be re-elected president, had once been a student of Graham Weisbrod, and some people—Heather and Allie were two—just never recovered from that experience, remaining “Weisbrodites” for decades no matter what else they did. As America’s most public futurologist, Weisbrod had made his slogan, We can’t afford just any old future, the title of a best-selling book, and now national policy.

DoF was the smallest, newest, and least significant department, but with Weisbrod at the helm, the Department of the Future had bombarded the public, the media, the Congress, and every government department with an endless stream of reports, studies, and scenarios. When a columnist at NYTBlog described them as “useful, sometimes necessary, lunatics,” Weisbrod threatened to make that the Department motto.

“Yeah, I think it’s crazy even for us,” Heather said.

Allie said, “You’ve been stalling on reporting this out of your office for months, Heather. Are you just afraid you’ll sound like Chicken Little?”

“Kind of. Look, every time I’ve ever made the news, it was because something blew up or went south. Daybreak might be nothing, and then I’ll look like a fool. It’s sort of like an asteroid strike; so highly unlikely that it seems irresponsible to waste time talking about it, but… but it could be so serious that… has Arnie told you anything?”

“Nothing,” Arnie said, flatly, obviously annoyed. “I said that already. I don’t game you behind your back, boss.”

Heather looked into his eyes and nodded; his lips tensed, barely acknowledging that they understood each other.

Allie had been watching them as if she expected one of them to pull a knife. “It’s not a security breach, Heather,” she said. “As far as we can know, Daybreak is still dark, tight, and close in your office. It’s just that you’ve been watching this for months, it hasn’t gone away, it keeps getting scarier, and it’s time to involve the rest of the government, that’s all. I haven’t gotten a word out of Arnie on the subject.”

If there’s a subject you can’t get a word out of Arnie about, Heather thought, that would be a first. But she said, “Well, maybe he should give you some words. It’s been his research baby.”

Allie said, “However you want to do it. But the Secretary wants us to roll this out, first to the other branches of the Department of the Future, then immediately to other Federal agencies. He’s assuming full responsibility if it turns out we’re crying wolf. Now, lay it out. In two hours we’re meeting with Browder and Crittenden—”

“Christ, Allie, they’ll tear us apart!”

“Not with me sitting in the room and Graham nodding along with you—and especially not if you practice first. Now tell me about Daybreak, just as if I didn’t know anything at all. What it is and why it’s important. And then after we rehearse you, we rehearse Arnie, because when you bring him in, your two asshat colleagues will be ten times as hard on him.”

Heather drew a deep breath and began an impromptu revision of the speech she’d been making to her bathroom mirror three or four times a day for many weeks:

“Daybreak looks sort of like the formation of an international terrorist movement, sort of like a philosophic discussion, sort of like an artists’ movement, sort of like a college fad, and sort of like a shared-world online game. It’s a complex of closely related ideas that strongly attract maybe five million people worldwide, with a hard core of about a hundred thousand, of which maybe thirty thousand are in this country. Daybreak people identify with Daybreak the way communists identify with the Revolution, funjadelicals identify with the Rapture, or technogeeks identify with the Singularity. But Daybreak seems to involve many thousands of people doing widespread sabotage and wrecking all at once—it could change overnight to self-organizing, spontaneous, widespread terrorism, maybe.”

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.”

ChemEWalker echoed, “Amen.”

Zach pulled out his bolt cutters, took the lock neatly off the chain-link gate, opened it, and descended the short iron ladder into the bin. ChemEWalker began handing him down the two-liter bombs, and Zach placed them using an equilateral triangle of PVC pipe twenty centimeters on a side, to space them roughly an equal distance apart. When he had placed about twenty, the others returned, and after that, the swift, silent work, in all but total darkness except for the pinprick stars above the bin, went very swiftly.

It was still night-dark when Zach, GreenCop, and SirWalksALot climbed out of the concrete pit, whose bottom was now covered with evenly spaced bombs. DarwinsActor handed him the laptop, and Zach logged into his secret account, clicked a couple of buttons, and said, “The weather stations are all reporting; the bottles are all reporting; they’ve confirmed messages between each other. We’re good to go. Arming now.”

He realized all six men were holding their breath, and he wanted to grumble that he had trusted the biologists to make the organisms, ChemEWalker to make the black powder, and everyone else to carry the tubs and not drop them. But he supposed they were entitled to nervousness too.

The list scrolled by. “They’re all armed and talking to each other. Let’s go.”

He started the computer’s hard drive reformatting on the laptop as they walked back, and left it under the front tire of the RV; when they pulled out, the brief, grinding crushing sound under the tire meant that nobody, ever, could retrieve the codes to disarm the system. “The sweet crunch of commitment,” DarwinsActor said, and for once, Zach didn’t find him irritating at all. Thank you, Lord, he thought, and almost jumped at the coincidence when Bugs said, “Amen.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JAYAPURA, PAPUA PROVINCE, INDONESIA. 9:25 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

The local police called back in about two hours, and Armand Cooper thought that had to be a good sign; if they were in on the riot or had instigated it, they’d have pretended he’d never called them. “We would like you to stay down very low behind furniture,” the police captain said; his English was excellent, with a mild Delhi accent. “We are going to try to put a perimeter between your building and the crowd. We do not think they are serious because, you know, if they were, they would have broken down your door by now, but accidents can happen with such a crowd, you know, and we’d like to make sure it doesn’t.”

“I agree completely,” Cooper said.

The captain laughed. “Good, you are in good spirits. Have you been hurt?”

“No.”

“And you can reach food and water, without showing yourself through the window? We need to make sure you have no snipers before you stand up.”

“It’s dark in here, and shots have been bouncing off the windows,” he said. “I can chance it if there’s a reason, but I don’t think there’s much of one yet.”

“Well, the infrared scopes are cheap and standard now, and a shot upward from a handgun in the street might bounce off, but I would not want to bet the same thing would happen if it were to be a high-powered rifle coming straight through the glass.”

“I’ll trust your expertise.”

Another laugh. “Stay low. Wait for us. Don’t get hurt. We’ll be there soon. And sometime you and I will have lunch and talk about all this and laugh very much.”

“I’ll enjoy that.”

After they rang off, Cooper stretched and smiled. Police service this good could only mean one thing—the captain needed some favor an American consul could do. Maybe a visa to spend a year visiting a sister in LA, maybe a cousin in immigration trouble in New York, it didn’t matter much. Cooper’s father had been on the Board of Public Works in Terre Haute, and he’d often thought that was great preparation for the way things got done in Jayapura. Whatever he wants, he’s getting it.

Shortly, there were a few shots and some angry shouting, followed by some general uproar. Cooper crept over to the window and peeked through, looking down, and saw the cops with their helmets, batons, and shields shoving the crowd back. It was noisy but halfhearted somehow, the mark of a mostly-paid mob. Hunh. More projects for the next week. Find out who paid them and why. Yes indeed, that captain is getting whatever he wants.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. EAGLE, COLORADO. 5:30 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

Jason had slept well when he hadn’t expected to, and that made him hate Super 8 even more. Last night he had expected to be awake all night: too soft a bed, sheets that smelled totally chemical, no sound of wildlife, the couple in the next room watching TV and quarreling. No friendly snores from his buds. No Beth cuddled against him. But here he was, well-rested, seduced by comfort.

He opened the curtains on the big west-facing window, sat cross-legged on the bed, breathed, and meditated. Across the dark parking lot… why should there be so many cars? So many ripping-outs of the guts of the mother. So many people who didn’t need to go anywhere going everywhere. So many scars on the planet. His gaze rose steadily upward from the rows of shiny metal and plastic earth-trashers to the dark mountains against the just-lightening sky.

Dawn among the bones of the Earth, he thought, then tried:

Truth comes at dawn.

No, too Hemingway.

Creation begins in my inner unfogged eyes.

Oh, yeah, needed to remember that. Might be my first line. No! Whoa—prewriting the poem; monkey mind. He watched the slow forming of the light in the air and on the stone and pines, and let it be in his mind, without words.

You had it right there, the statement of everything:

the mountains and the parking lot.

Title, or first line? Let it be whichever it would be. Let it be like the Earth, let it be, just accept. He breathed it all in pairs,

No. Corny, personal, not dichotomous. Besides, Dad sometimes googled Jason, read his poetry, and wrote annoying little notes about how talented he thought Jason was and how happy he was that Jason was keeping up with his writing.

Like I need support from an asshole sales director.

Damn monkey mind.

Shut up, brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip. Not original, joking with himself. Congratulating himself on the jokes. Damn monkey. Damn monkey.

Supposedly you could eliminate monkey mind by paying it some extra attention, rewarding it even; ook ook ook, anybody want a banana with barbiturate?

His felt his mind dash about, demanding his attention, until once again, as lightly as a soap bubble, it rested in the V of indigo between the black mountains, balancing the seductive warmth of the hotel room and the humanity and spirit of the cold hillsides. The crystal of a first line—insistent, an elegant angel of truth, banishing the monkey—started to form in his mind.

Carefully, watching the stacked cardboard boxes in the corner as if they could leap out and attack, he pulled his laptop from his pack. It was in a double Ziploc with a scattering of Drano crystals in the bottom. He held the bag up to the light; the crystals were all still well formed, and the litmus paper was reassuringly blue.

He plugged his laptop in and set it on the little fakewood circular table facing the big window. He breathed reverently and slowly. The disk zummed to life. Software booted up, offered him menus, connected to the wi-fi, faithfully went about its work.

“I’m going to pull kind of a dirty trick on you,” he whispered to his laptop, “but it’s for a good cause and it has to be done. Just the same, I know I’ll miss you, little buddy.”

Silent mighty strength of the eternal mountains.

Little town of Eagle—little settlement, really, use a colonialist word for a colonialist thing, or pocket of people, nothing you could dignify with a grand word like village.

Pointless neon. Vulgar little fakey business fronts. People who ate too much and thought too little.

The blank document was ready. He spoke softly into the microphone, let himself flow into his words, his singing glorious words against the Big System, full of love for all the beautiful good in the world and rage for the fat bastards keeping all the good and gentle people away from it.

When he finished, he read through it twice, treasuring the way it fit so neatly into the sunlight now caressing the tips of the mountains. “Command, post document, anon poet channel,” he said. The screen glowed back with posted. Through Super 8’s wi-fi, words of magic and power found their way from him to the mighty stream of Daybreak.

He pulled on heavy-duty gloves, dampened a rag with Liquid-Plumr, and wiped all over the laptop and the table around it. Then he blasted through all the laptop’s ports with a can of compressed air and wiped its surfaces again. The rag went into a plastic bread bag, which he dropped in the wastebasket. Each glove went back into its own Ziploc; he’d be needing them all day, so he put them in his “dirty” bag—an old laptop case—with his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, pliers, screwdrivers, and tubes of glue.

He wiped his computer with distilled water, then propped up the laptop to dry. He dipped the ends of the power cord into some Liquid-Plumr in a cup, rinsed them in the sink, dried them with toilet paper, and stowed the power cord in a plastic bread bag with more Drano crystals. By then the laptop was dry enough to go into its special home among the Drano crystals in the Ziploc.

With everything he was keeping closed up tight in the pack, he took it down to set it into a closed plastic trash can in the passenger seat’s foot well. He pulled out his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, duct tape, and protective gloves, set them on the passenger seat, and sealed on the can’s lid with duct tape.

Wearing the gloves, he hauled down his boxes of egg cartons. His clothes from the day before, and the contents of all the wastebaskets, went into a garbage bag, which he discreetly emptied into the open bed of an old pickup in the parking lot, adding it to the heap of construction junk, rusty tools, and old pop cans. He turned the bag inside out and left it blowing around in the parking lot.

After checkout, he plunged right into the Big System’s comfort trap, just this once: the free Continental breakfast of plaztatic corporate bagels, probably-made-from-petroleum cream cheese, grease-and-sugar doughnuts, and the inexcusably transported, chilled, and probably-crawling-with-pesticides orange juice, and plenty of corporate coffee. What the hell, it came with the room.

All around him were loser biz guys: goopy bags of lard and fascism, empty heads poking out above neckties, men like his dad and brother, eyes dead and shoulders drooping, stuffing in plaztatic petroleum pastry, engrossed in little grunty conversations over their USA Todays, about Game Seven of the World Series, about the upcoming election, about ten billion reasons to rape the mountains and scar the land.

Daybreak begins today.

Wake-up call for all the fat bastards of the world.

He got on the road half an hour late, but what the hell, it was a freedom mission, and there might as well be a little freedom in it. The old truck had a stereo thing that Elton had set up, along with a special flash drive just for this trip, one to be left somewhere and picked up by some poor stupid fuck when Jason was done. The flash held hours of awesome coustajam and ambvo, to keep Jason feeling good all day, and if it died, that would warn him that the nanospawn was beginning to eat into the truck itself.

He had another poetic flash; that little flash drive was like the canary in the coal mine. You could enjoy the music, but its real purpose was to let him know what was really going on, by when it died. “Silicon Canary”—definitely a poem title. Maybe a band name—some of the coustajam bands were pretty aware, maybe one of them should call itself that.

The mountains in the early-morning light were glorious. The truck’s heater worked well enough to keep him warm in the crisp morning, Marty Beelman’s amazing “Mount Elbert Jam”—Aaron Copland beatjected onto acoustic guitar and spirit drums—boomed from the speakers, and the sky was that deep blue that he was sure they did not have anywhere else in the world anymore. But you will, he thought. You will.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER THE WESTERN PACIFIC, JUST NORTH OF THE EQUATOR, ABOUT 650 KILOMETERS SOUTH OF THE ISLAND OF KUSAIE. JUST PAST THE MIDNIGHT TERMINATOR, SO IT IS 12:40 A.M. LOCAL TIME. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29.}

They had taken the bag off Samuelson’s head and roughly scrubbed him with a wet towel, so he only stank slightly of vomit; he was in a T-shirt and a pair of underwear, tied by the ankles to his bed in the private cabin, sitting upright.

After an interminable time, the door opened. Two of the young men came in. They dragged in a man in a suit; Samuelson recognized Taylor, one of the Secret Service special agents, more by his build than by his bruised and battered face.

“This man can do you no harm,” Samuelson said. “Let me clean him up. We cannot escape, and—”

One of the men backhanded him across his face. Then they turned to Taylor; he was breathing but seemed unconscious. One of the men drew a box cutter and slit the Secret Service man’s throat, an arc of arterial blood spraying onto the walls of the compartment, staining the American flag and the pictures of past presidents.

Samuelson could do nothing but watch the man die, and at that, he’s probably lucky. Yet he had to ask. “Why? Why did you do this?”

He had not expected an answer, but in perfect, almost-accentless English, the leader of the group said, “Because we can, and because we want you to know we can.”

They left Samuelson with the corpse, propped up so that he seemed to be looking at Samuelson from the depths of sleep or stupor. The vice president thought about looking away, curling up, doing something not to see, but he would still smell the blood no matter what, he would still know the broken body was there; he preferred to know with his eyes open.

Silently, he thought to Taylor, I’m sorry you were here for this. I’ll try to find something I can do, however petty or invisible, for you and me and the country.

He remembered that Taylor’s wife was named Beth, that they had one child, a boy that Taylor thought the world of. Taylor’s first name had been Charles and he’d endured teasing from the other Secret Service special agents about being named after a shoe. He’d been a quiet type who spent his breaks reading, and had always preferred to go home late in the afternoon when he could enjoy his family.

I remember you. That’s about all I can do right now.

Now that he was used to Taylor’s shocking appearance, the corpse was almost company, someone to talk to, anyway, and what politician doesn’t always need that?

Taylor, he thought, I hiked and camped and visited the back country all over the planet when I was younger, and I was the most traveled vice president in history, and I had more than enough experience so that I should have been able to see what these assholes were up to, but I just didn’t, and look what it’s done to you, buddy. I sure as hell wish I could promise I’d avenge you, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.

I guess I’ll be making my apology in person pretty soon, anyway.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST WEST OF SANTA ROSA ISLAND, ABOUT FIFTY MILES FROM THE CALIFORNIA MAINLAND. A LITTLE BEFORE 6:00 A.M. PST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

Grady Barbour wasn’t used to being up this early, though he was sometimes up this late; and he wasn’t at all used to being sober when he was up this late. But here he was, three days without a drink because Daybreak mattered, and after a long, lingering morning twilight, the sun was finally looking like it might decide to come up. That would bring on the land breeze that would make the rest of the day’s sail down the California coast a lot easier; they’d had to use the engine to get out here early this morning, and somehow that seemed wrong, just as it seemed entirely appropriate that Mad Caprice was a wooden boat that he’d re-rigged with hemp.

It was cold, but he had a nice big lidded mug filled with coffee, and the wind was light but steady. He kept a hand on the wheel, drank the coffee, and thought about Daybreak and what life together with Tracy would be like after this.

Tracy was taking her turn at launching, working as clean as possible because their electronics needed to work for a couple more weeks.

Normally, just watching Tracy could get him horny; to Grady, she pretty much defined “trophy wife.” But in the baggy jacket, rubber gloves, hairnet, and rubber boots, she didn’t look like much just now. Also, he was feeling uncharacteristically clearheaded because they’d agreed not to drink until Daybreak was actually delivered.

Yet he didn’t feel grumpy, tired, or sad at all, as he usually would, cold sober and up too early. With just enough breeze to fill the sails, the day promised to be warm but not hot, and they were on their way to a new world.

Tracy scooped out a cup of the little gelatin capsules and dumped them into a flaccid black balloon, as big as her own torso. Really, the longest and hardest part of the job had been building the glove box that let them load the gelatin capsules without spreading any of the various nanoswarm and tailored biotes around, but Grady had always been good with his hands. Tracy was always saying that he looked like a sculptor, with his craggy, weather- and gin-beaten features.

Tracy poured a cup of seawater into the balloon, enough to get the biotes going once the sun warmed it. She squirted the sealant on the surface inside the mouth of the balloon, then fitted it over the special adapter built by a Daybreaker in Seattle, sort of a friendly hippie machinist who usually made stuff for drug labs. She cranked down the gasket, opened the valve to the cylinder of welding hydrogen, and filled the balloon to its full two-meter diameter, bigger across than she was tall, enough to lift the water and capsules plus itself. She tightened the tie around the neck and released the adapter, letting the balloon rise away from the bow, carried well downwind before it was at mast height. It climbed slowly but steadily.

Grady visualized the rest of the story; in an hour or so, the seawater would dissolve a capsule containing a biote that would begin to grow and eat the balloon; while that continued, the other capsules would dissolve, leaving a gray, active breeding sludge of mixed nanoswarm and biotes, floating above the Big System inland, invisible to radar, and drifting on the breeze.

Sometime between two and five hours later, depending on whether the sun was out and how well each particular strain of biotes did, the balloon would rupture. Probably it would happen at the bottom of the puddled seawater, where exposure had been greatest. Then the escaping hydrogen would spray the solution and nanospawn into the air as the balloon whipped madly around, and a rain of ending would fall gently on the Big System below, perhaps in drips and spots across several square miles. Two hours later, the balloon itself would be gooey sludge on the ground somewhere—and another source of infection.

“Yeee-hah!” he yelled, as the balloon rose higher and caught the bright morning sun.

“Thank you for your applause,” Tracy said. “That was sixty-seven seconds, but I bet I can get it under forty before the day is out. Which will leave me the world record holder since we’ll never need to do this again.”

“I’ll brag endlessly of your record,” he said. “Just one of many things to brag about.”

She came back and insisted on a kiss before getting back to work, and that was lovely too. Daybreak was honestly the best idea Grady had ever encountered. Even being up in the morning sober would be all right if he had to do more of it, which he might, because they had already discussed that until things settled down after Daybreak, they might have to do some fishing or cargo-hauling to conceal the existence of the half ton of gold beneath the false lowest deck.

Contemplating a world where he had nothing to complain about, he grinned, and shouted, “Yeee-hah!” again.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ALONG COLORADO STATE HIGHWAY 13. 7:10 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

The long, winding two-lane road that snaked up into and over the mountains into Wyoming was nearly empty and Jason drove through deep tunnels of evergreens, burst into sunny meadows, and descended around the edges of wide, sunny valleys.

This road would become a track for wagons, then just a trail with the occasional traveler with a leather or canvas (never nylon again!) pack. Elk would graze on whatever popped up between the old cracked asphalt. The neat metal buildings of the ranches would fall into rusty piles. Stupid ranch houses, made of bricks hauled up here from a thousand miles away, would be dens of bears and roosts of crows. Great idea, too late to be a poem, probably. Maybe after.

Jason had taken this job because someone had to lay down the Daybreak seeds in the far back country so that, if the Big System tried to retreat from its deadly, miserable cities and spread its ecocidal madness to the clean wilderness, the nanoswarm and biotes would be here already, dug in and ready to stop the Big System from doing anything other than what it needed to do—stay in place, and die.

It was an honor to be trusted with such a vital assignment, when so many others were just out throwing biotes and nanoswarm any old place in the cities and along the highways. Besides, Jason admitted to himself, he had always loved driving in the mountains, especially in the fall, and this would probably be his last chance ever to do that.

He made his first stop in a broad meadow, about two miles across, at one of those solar-powered signs that talked to the satellites or the distant cell towers and displayed messages from the Highway Patrol: DRY & CLR THRU RIO BLANCO. During the winter it probably had more important things to say.

Nobody coming in either direction, not even a distant rooster-tail of autumn dust. He pulled on his gloves, leaving the engine running despite the added pollution and waste of gas, taking no more chances than he had to with his starter.

Jason reached in among the egg-packing cardboard and pulled out an object about the size and shape of an egg, the color of polished obsidian with a thick coating of clear varnish, except for one flat side, where a ring of white plastic surrounded a silvery spot the size of his thumbprint. From the toolbox in the back, he pulled out a caulking gun loaded with Liquid Nails, and applied a neat ribbon of the brownish glue to the white plastic, careful not to lap over onto the metal. He didn’t need the stepladder; the sign wasn’t much taller than he was.

The sign was double-sided, and the other side said, OPN RNGE—CATTLE ON RD. The solar collector faced south, on an eight-foot pole, and its cable ran down to a black box that joined the two sign faces. Jason considered for a moment; put it on a south-facing surface to be able to collect the maximum heat? Put it on the black box to be less conspicuous and have the maximum immediate effect?

Compromise and do both, he decided, and slapped the black egg high up onto the face of the solar collector. He went back to the truck for another black egg, squirted that with Liquid Nails, and stuck it to the black box, low on the south surface, where he hoped the sun would touch it for at least a couple of hours every day.

He pushed the capping sixpenny nail into the nozzle of the caulking gun and tossed that into the toolbox. Then he sprinkled Liquid-Plumr on his gloves and wiped them over each other as if washing his hands, peeled them off inside the Ziplocs, and set the bags on the front seat. In seconds, he was rolling again, the coustajam playing loud enough to shake the inside of the truck, like an anthem of victory.

^{ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER. JAYAPURA, PAPUA PROVINCE, INDONESIA. 11:12 P.M. LOCAL TIME. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

“Armand,” Captain Tuti said, “I do apologize that we’ll probably have to wait until morning to turn your power back on. We could do it, but if your lights come on, it’s apt to draw more unfavorable attention.”

“I don’t much like unfavorable attention myself,” Cooper said, gesturing at the bullet hole in the window, which had been created by “the only sniper who knew his business,” as Tuti explained. “My men were right on him, saw his muzzle flash from the roof, but he was quicker than we were and gone by the time we got up there. I’m afraid I don’t quite have my A Team on this, you know; most of them are out trying to liberate the airport. Or rather dug in twenty kilometers from the airport, because someone shot at them, and they are afraid to go on in the dark.”

“I don’t much like being shot at, myself,” Cooper pointed out. “Another?”

“Gladly, Armand, gladly.” Tuti had found a way to gently hint that if there happened to be liquor around, he had no religious objection to it; considering how many favors he was in a position to do Cooper, Armand had figured that most of a bottle of Captain Morgan was a perfectly reasonable price.

An hour after Tuti had come up to tell Cooper he was reasonably safe but couldn’t leave until the mob did, Cooper had established that the captain had a son with some minor, high-spirited events in his police record, who had a full scholarship to Tufts and needed a student visa. They’d be taking care of that in a day or so.

With business taken care of, there was little to do except establish their mutual experience that being bureaucrats here was not easy but also not dull, and that they had a similar sense of humor. Cooper remembered what his father had told him—It’s always nice to have one of the friends you need turn into a friend you want.

The phone rang. “Cooper, US Consul, Jayapura.”

“Hi, this is Jasmine at State in Washington. I just came on shift and found your voice mails. I have no idea what the person who was supposed to have the desk was doing, but I’m here now. First thing, are you safe?”

He sketched out the situation: that he was holed up but secure, that Captain Tuti was there, that the airport was in the hands of rebels who had previously not shown enough competence to seize a city bus stop. “Definitely some ringers on the team,” he explained to Jasmine.

“All right, we appreciate the report. And just this minute Secret Service asked if Seagull got away before the airport was taken.”

Secret Service? Who the hell was on that plane? Half an instant later, Armand Cooper realized what prominent politician had been unexpectedly missing from public appearances. Oh, shit. Here I am in the middle of history. But he held his voice even. “The consulate was attacked while they were still on the ground, and the assault on the airport was half an hour after that. Maybe, maybe not. Let me get the binoculars and see if they’re still on the ground there. I’ll call you right back.”

The big white unmarked 787 Dreamliner was not anywhere he could see; he explained the problem, without saying why he was looking, to Tuti, who borrowed the binoculars. “I can tell you for certain it is not there.”

“How do you know—”

“Because there is just one large repair hangar at Sentani, the only place where a plane that size could be concealed, and it has room for only one plane at a time. And I see the rebels are towing a Lion Airlines 737 into it right now. So since there is nowhere for it to be, it isn’t there.” Tuti lowered the binoculars. “They teach us these clever tricks, you know, in police school.”

Bad as the situation was, Cooper laughed, but then he called Jasmine back and told her, and she transferred his call to an Air Force general who brought in an admiral and a Secret Service liaison in conference, and Cooper went over things with them a few times. By the end of that he figured there just wasn’t going to be much to laugh about for quite a while.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. 9:40 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

The Department of the Future contained three “Offices-of,” each headed by an assistant secretary. Besides Heather’s Office of Future Threat Assessment, Jim Browder’s Office of Technology Forecasting watched the science and technology possibilities from the perspective of an old grouch of an engineer-science writer who was quite certain that most things wouldn’t work most of the time, and that if they did, it would make things worse. In theory, Noel Crittenden’s Office of Political Futurology tried to understand developing situations around the world, focusing partly on what governments were doing but mainly on trends in the political class and nascent mass movements. In practice, Crittenden was a broad-but-not-deep historian who could easily call to mind six other times when something had happened but couldn’t seem to reach a conclusion if his life depended on it.

Normally, Heather ignored her two colleagues, with Graham and Allie’s tacit encouragement. Allie liked to say Browder was mad about a girl getting hold of the boy toys like guns and money, and Crittenden’s office was actually the Office of Whatever a Retired History Prof Remembers; she made it abundantly clear that in the battle for funds and attention, she thought Heather’s office was the department’s only real star.

More than once, Graham Weisbrod had given Allie and Heather a stern lecture about everyone’s being on the same team. Heather wondered if he’d ever said the same thing to the two men.

So far, the meeting had gone exactly as Heather had anticipated: Browder was vocally, and Crittenden was sullenly, impossible. Browder, with malicious sarcastic glee, had forced Heather to explain and defend each slide, turning aside all suggestions that he wait and ask Arnie in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, Crittenden looked every stuffy ounce of his Cambridge doctorate. His ancient three-piece suits and the slash of his gray mustache against his dark skin made him look like some old-time big-city mayor of 1990 or so. He sat with his arms folded, his good ear pointed toward Heather, watching each new slide with the same sour glare.

Crittenden’s the reserve force that’ll come in to loot the dead and shoot the wounded after Browder finishes his massacre. And where’s all the support Allie and Graham told me I’d have? They’re both sitting there like lumps. Allie isn’t even looking up from her laptop.

Heather drew a deep breath before tackling Browder’s latest hostile question. “That’s why Dr. Yang’s statistical semiotics research is housed in our office of our department. It’s not about intuition or recognizing patterns. It’s about the mathematics that finds things that would be recognizable or recurring patterns—if anyone had ever seen them before. And Daybreak’s signprint—”

“What’s a signprint?”

Heather suspected that Browder already knew. At least I know this one, and I won’t give him a forty-minute version like Arnie would. “In the noosphere—the overall total environment of all the communications going in all directions at any one time—”

“I know what a noosphere is, Yang wore the subject out for me once.”

“Oh, good. Well, in the noosphere, we only detect signs when they move—we only know a word exists when someone speaks or writes it into a message, we only know an image exists when someone includes it in a bigger image, we only know a mistake is there when it’s spotted and corrected, all that. The signprint is the pathway in the noosphere that a group of signs, uh, flying in formation, I guess you could call it, they’re separate, but they stick together—it’s the pattern they leave—”

“Like a wake in the sea of meaning,” Crittenden suggested.

Hunh. That was almost friendly.

“Good enough! Well, different kinds of organized populations of signs leave different kinds of signprints. In fact, from a historian’s perspective, a signprint and the thing it’s a signprint of are really just the same thing, one’s what you see and one’s the thing that’s there, is the way Arnie puts it.”

“That’s a very old idea,” Crittenden said, “with considerable merit.”

I feel so blessed, she thought sarcastically, and said, “Good, all right, then the thing that Arnie’s kind of math has going for it is that it doesn’t look for signprints by looking for structures that are like preexisting signprints. It just finds things that stick together and move together. Another way Arnie says it is that the pattern-recog guys sit and stare at the screen and look for clouds that look like a horse or a ship. Arnie’s stat methods just look for clouds—which is what you want if you want to know the weather. It means his way of doing things can see the ‘clouds’ in the noosphere that no one else can and then try to understand them. Because in the noosphere, unlike in the atmosphere, there are often storms of a kind no one has ever seen before, and being able to see them the second or third time they show up is not good enough if we’re trying to foresee what messes might hit us in the near future.

“So—the signprint of Daybreak. Clearly there. Jumps out of the numbers like a sore thumb, according to Arnie.” She clicked to the slide.

Browder, to her surprise, nodded. “If I read that right, the variances are tiny, and the connectedness is huge. That’s not a cloud, that’s a boulder.”

“That’s right,” she said. Both of them reasonable within a minute of each other. Who’d’ve thunk? “That graph measures basically how distinct Daybreak is from everything else in the noosphere, and you can see it’s very distinct. So since it’s definitely there, the next question is, what is it? And the answer is, to quote my favorite book when I was a kid, ‘Something very much like something no one has ever seen before.’ Daybreak has some of the aspects of a religious cult, an artistic movement, a blogweave, a terror network more like the old al-Qaeda or the Japanese Red Army than like the modern il’Alb il-Jihado network, and some unique features all its own.”

“But that’s just how they communicate, right?” Browder asked. “What are they?”

“What are they, like—”

“Engineers or Catholics, old people, women, I guess I’m asking who, what do they have in common other than Daybreak?”

“Well, it’s a bunch of people who only agree that they hate the Big System, but they literally spend two to four hours a day making and consuming messages of one kind or another to each other about that. You could think of it as a mutual-hypnosis hate-the-Big-System club, maybe. No central office keeps them on message, either, it sort of runs by local consensus. They seem to have no permanent organization any bigger than three-to-twenty-person AGs.”

“AGs?” Browder asked.

Crittenden said, “Affinity group. Anarchist idea, goes back to the mid 1970s, sort of like a self-organized exec committee; team of people who are doing something or other they all think is the most important thing to do.”

“Uh, yeah.” Jim’s resemblance to the Incredible Hulk, gone old and soft with drinking, was especially noticeable when he raised one side of his single, massive brow. “And the Big System is what, the Trilateral Commission? The Catholic Church? The Elders of Zion? The Man?”

“The totality of plastic and computers, advertising and pornography, pop music and space travel, nuclear power and celebrities, everything that makes money, attracts attention in the media, or just originated after the Civil War. To Daybreakers, the whole freakin’ modern world is all just an avatar of the Big System.”

Browder’s tone sprayed mockery over them all. “And a pack of romantic loons like that is a threat?”

Stand your ground, Heather, he’s just a big bully, and you could drop him with one punch. She made a point of sighing. “Future threat—maybe. That’s our territory; if they were trouble right now, we’d be handing them off to the NDI or the FBI.”

“Which is what I favor doing,” Allie put in, making Browder jump. He tends to forget where the real authority is in the room, Heather thought.

He was softer but just as sarcastic when he asked, “And—repeating my question—who are these scary-talking weird people?”

“Well, here in the States, it’s some of everything: greenie granola hippies with windmills on their goat sheds, wannabe mountain-man racist tax resisters, dope-farmer computer hackers, oddball fundamentalists who think bar codes are the Mark of the Beast, ex-Special Forces snake-eating back-to-Jefferson types.”

Noel Crittenden coughed and tented his hands. “That does not mean they aren’t dangerous, Browder. Who’d’ve thought the Nation of Islam could have worked with the Panthers and the SCLC? Or that de Gaulle could put together the French Resistance out of a dozen factions ranging from royalists to commies? Don’t underrate the power of a common enemy. If I may ask—what do they mean by Daybreak?”

Heather said, “The event that breaks the Big System, causes it to go down so it never comes up again. They almost always capitalize Daybreak, like the Revolution or the Rapture.”

Crittenden nodded seriously. “And it’s international?”

“Dr. Yang reports that over seventy percent of the messages with identifiable locations are outside the US. There’s one mostly Asian cult, geeky engineers in Tokyo and Seoul, who read a lot of Tolkien and think that once the iron all rusts, the elves will come back. They might be the scariest of all; those guys are burned-out, frustrated engineers and technicians—single men in their forties with great salaries whose lives have gone by with no prospect of starting a family, sitting in concrete boxes full of pricey toys in Osaka or Seoul, figuring out where the modern industrial system is vulnerable.

“And plenty of others—young Islamic fundamentalist men, stuck sitting on their asses in perpetual unemployment, who want the good stuff they’d have had in 1400. Hindu fundamentalists, ditto except they mean 1400 B.C.

“What scares me the most is that they’re not all loser-nuts; far from it, there are a lot more dissatisfied successes. People with serious tech skills who aren’t finding happiness in a big paycheck, who sit in comfortable apartments beating off to American porn on the web and insisting that life should have a meaning.”

Crittenden made a face. “ ‘Whenever some damn idiot starts wanting life to have meaning, he finishes by helping other people to meaningless deaths.’”

Graham grinned. “Source?”

“Me, of course. In my first textbook. Out of print now.” Crittenden’s smile stayed on when he turned from Graham’s not-at-all-subtle flattery back to Heather.

Thanks, Graham! This could be worse. She explained, “Meaning-of-life stuff accounts for the usual-suspects component of Daybreak, too. French poets who think any words that resonate must be true. German performance artists who want to overthrow the tyranny of words and live in a world of pure action. Popomos looking for something to replace the Revolution. Back-to-peasantry long-bearded Tolstoy wannabes.

“The really big innovation with the ‘Daybreak’ crowd is that they don’t talk about purpose, plan, or program anymore. It’s Daybreak for Daybreak’s sake. They often say, ‘The point is, there’s no point.’”

“Why do it if there’s no point?” Browder snarled, now more angry than amused.

“The Daybreakers would say, ‘Why do it if there is a point?’ The idea is that they’d all like to blow up all the Wal-Marts, so why worry about which reason—”

The door opened, and Arnie came in. “Heather,” he said, “something big.”

“Um, Arnie, I’ll call you when it’s time to—”

“Lenny Plekhanov had some extra time and people this morning and they got a breakthrough on the keys for Daybreak, so we caught up with one—”

“Arnie, we’re—”

Arnie stopped leaning forward, stopped gesticulating, and stood as still as if he were at attention; that stopped Heather when nothing else would have. In a perfectly normal conversational voice, not moving a muscle, he said, “Heather. Secretary Weisbrod. I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. Daybreak started today, at midnight, GMT. There are at least nine hundred AGs reporting they’ve started their actions, which means maybe seven thousand people doing some kind of sabotage or other for Daybreak just here in the States, right now. That’s just what I’ve been able to attach an ID to. I’m guessing there are maybe as many as twenty thousand. Probably three or four times that overseas. Up to a hundred thousand participants worldwide.”

They all sat, stunned, and it was Crittenden who broke the silence. He stared out the window at the trees, red and gold in the autumn morning sun, as if somewhere in the wild colors, there were a puzzle to be solved. “A group of saboteurs the size of a medium-sized national army—”

Browder snorted. “With no point and no plan. And many of them seem to be people who couldn’t get a job delivering Domino’s.”

Crittenden speared Browder with his over-the-reading-glasses stare. The heavy, rumpled man sat back, as if startled; Heather thought, I’m glad I never had a late paper with that guy.

The old professor’s mouth crooked sardonically. “You haven’t been listening. Engineers, technicians, applied scientists—dissatisfied successes, in Heather’s useful phrase. And if that’s ten percent of their movement, that’s all they need; a pizza-delivery boy can carry a bomb if someone builds it for him.” He glanced back at Heather. “You had me once you said they were leaderless and programless. Daybreak sounds far too much like nihilism or futurism, back around 1900.”

Browder shrugged ostentatiously. “The world lived through that.”

Crittenden shook his head as if Browder were trying to BS through an oral quiz and not convincing anyone. “Better a high card you know in another man’s hand than a joker loose in the deck. The nihilists’ thirty years of bombings and assassinations smoothed the road for Lenin and communism in a dozen different ways. The Futurists… well, Marinetti, their founder, was among the first intellectuals to support Mussolini. So before Dr. Yang entered, I was about to say, Heather was absolutely right to bring this to our attention.” He favored Heather with a sardonic smile. “But Dr. Yang’s news has convinced me that we should not be worried. We should be scared. Heather, if there’s anything my office can do to help you determine what we’re dealing with, please call me at once.”

“I know I can count on all of you,” Heather said.

Graham was beaming at her, leaning back against the wall just below the poster Heather had given him. She’d found an old magazine in the library with a perfect article title—and the facing page for the article had depicted a robot taking dictation on an old-fashioned steno pad, a typist in a space helmet, and a woman doing her nails in front of what appeared to be some sort of gigantic computer console—all those images surrounding the caption THE SECRETARY OF THE FUTURE!

She’d had it blown up to poster size as a gag gift; Graham had insisted on hanging it in the conference room to remind everyone how silly it was to spend your life trying to predict the unpredictable.

Her old teacher dropped her a wink; in that instant, it was like he’d seated her on the couch by his fireplace, handed her a drink, and heard her troubles out—something he’d done often enough in reality.

Browder was still sitting where Crittenden’s glare had frozen him; with a grudging nod, he said, “Let me see how many resources I can shift to cover the technical side of Daybreak.”

Allie looked up from her notes and grinned; Graham was already smiling at her; and it was left to Arnie to spoil the mood by saying, “Well, by the way, it’s nice that everyone agrees, but we probably are under attack.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WYOMING STATE HIGHWAY 789, NEAR BAGGS, WYOMING. 7:50 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.}

Jason had placed sixteen eggs; the most entertaining one was right on the crotch of the smiling cowgirl on a neon sign over the gate of a roadhouse. Wish I could’ve jumped higher, I could’ve put black-egg nipples on her neon-tube boobs.

The two-lane road had climbed up into the park-and-pass country, where whenever a car came the other way, both drivers would raise a hand off the wheel in salute, kind of an I know we are both here that always made him feel like he was finally out among the real people. Most of the other cars were SUVs, but after all, he was driving a big old F-150 himself, the only thing they’d been able to find that was cheap, untraceable, and old enough not to rely on as much electronics, so that it stood a chance of finishing the trip.

Anyway, up here, where you could be coping with ground blizzards, deer and cattle on the road, snowdrifts, washouts, all kinds of whatnot, Jason saw no problem with pickups or even the old SUVs.

Emily back at the commune said people used their SUVs for evil things like hunting and going to logging jobs. He’d had a lot of good arguments with Emily about that.

The coolest thing about Daybreak: Almost everyone thought something about the Big System was all right, even positive. But when you put everyone together, you could compromise and agree, hey, we’ll get rid of the thing you hate, if I can get rid of the thing that I hate, and when you were all done, there’d be no Big System left.

A solar sign in the middle of an old clear cut announced to the saplings and brush that there was NO MESSAGE—DRIVE SAFE. He needed the stepladder this time to leave two more little black eggs.

He rolled on, glorious coustajam cranked to rattle the windows, the F- 150 tracing the edges of gulches and crossing steep-sided creeks on high truss bridges—almost like flying, with the land coming up and falling away.

In the last low hills, the small, stunted trees thinned out. The park was all rich browns and grays, dried out and ready for winter, with just streaks of green, gold, and yellow where aspens and cottonwoods revealed creeks. About a dozen pronghorns ran away from the road as the old truck roared by. “Soon, guys,” Jason said. “Soon. Your grandchildren won’t have any idea what an engine means.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. SENTANI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, JAYAPURA, PAPUA, INDONESIA. MIDNIGHT, LOCAL TIME. OCTOBER 28 JUST BECOMING OCTOBER 29.}

The ground crew weren’t happy. Guns pointed at them made their unhappiness irrelevant. One or two of them had tried to explain that you couldn’t use auto body paint on an airplane and expect it to look like anything, but the small man with the big mustache and the rage in his eyes had caressed the pistol on his hip, and now they were working fast, painting out the Lion Airways insignia on the 737.

They worked from ladders and scissor lifts, using mops, long-handled brushes, even brooms. The drums of white paint stood open all over the hangar, emitting clouds of strong fumes, enough to make men sick. The mustached man said to vomit if they had to but keep working.

He walked over to look at the three captured Americans; the dark-skinned, short man was dead or unconscious, not surprising after the beating they’d given him. He flipped the motionless man over with his boot toe; the open eyes were dried and dull.

The tall white man and the skinny woman lay huddled against each other. In one of your stupid movies, he thought, you would fall in love, overpower all of us, and escape to save the world, but here in reality, you cling to each other like a refugee child clings to a stuffed animal. It is pleasant to see that expression in an American’s eyes instead of a refugee child’s.

He could see no gain in separating the man and the woman, so he returned to shouting at the impromptu paint crew. Already, the Lion Airways insignia was more than half covered; they were at least a half hour ahead of schedule.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. GILLETTE, WYOMING. JUST BEFORE 9:00 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.}

Zach coasted up to the next recycling cart on his mud-spattered single-speed pink girl’s bicycle. He still rode awkwardly with his large bags of plastic bottles; he hoped people would think it was because he was drunk. He threw the lid back and glanced around. The first ten seconds was the highest risk—it wouldn’t look like a real bum stealing plastic. One more look around; surely it looked realistic for a bum stealing recyclable plastic to be paranoid?

Zach didn’t know much about being homeless, and even less about being a drunk. The cheap whiskey he’d poured all over his clothes was all the liquor he’d ever bought in his life.

His heart was pounding. Oh, well… Step One, here we go. Zach dumped his front left bag into the recycling cart—whoever heard of a bum putting plastic bottles into the trash? He mixed them thoroughly with the bottles that were already there, stirring with the yardstick he carried. Wonder if this looks like I’m looking for something?

Step Two was less conspicuous. He scrounged in the recycling cart, looking like any other bum as he filled up his bag, not worrying about happening to take back a few of the bottles he had just deposited there.

He hoped Step Three would look weird enough. He pulled out a Dad’s Root Beer two-liter bottle with a wadded paper napkin inside and uncapped it, retching at the smell. No question, Bugs and DarwinsActor had known their stuff; the inside of the bottle smelled like a fart from a sick cat, and the clear surface was already spotted with cloudy slime. From his coat pocket, he drew a whiskey bottle filled with a mix of beef broth, molasses, and fine-chopped plastic bottles, swirled it, and splashed about a teaspoon into the plastic bottle, taking care to soak the infected napkin.

He carefully left the Dad’s bottle on the top of the heap in the recycling cart; holes would form within an hour, and the solution would drizzle down through the cart.

If anyone in authority asked about the care he took of that special Dad’s bottle, he would explain that it was demonic and he had to sacrifice his whiskey to it and send it away before it destroyed all his plastic.

That made him laugh to himself in a convincingly weird way. So close to the truth, no one would believe it.

“Hey, shithead!”

Zach turned around slowly. Scrawny, red-skinned old white man. Bad leg, visible cataract, about six flannel shirts. “This here block is mine,” the man said. “You don’t take no plastic from it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was your territory. In fact, let me give you a couple bottles from my bag.” Zach handed him two seed bottles; he had more than he would need and was supposed to improvise with some of them.

“That’s real nice a-you,” the man said, “ ’Preciate it.” As he went to tuck the bottle into the huge bag he carried, he caught a whiff, and said, “These smell awful, where’d you get them?”

“Some kids’ party house I think. Think they maybe pissed in ’em. They’re still money.”

“Yeah.” The old man reached out and tapped his shoulder in what was probably intended as a friendly gesture. “Got any money? Want to come in and drink or something?”

“Gotta get me to some more carts,” Zach said. “Any more of these blocks yours?”

“Naw. I ain’t got no block that’s mine. Just people shouldn’t fuck with me, you know?” The old man scratched and squirmed, as if he’d had about as much human contact as he was prepared for. “My name’s Peter. You come by anytime.”

“My name’s Paul,” Zach said. After all, he thought, we’re two guys spreading the stuff that’s going to make the whole world better.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER THE WESTERN PACIFIC. AROUND SUNRISE LOCALLY. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29.}

With his face against the window, Samuelson could just see the rising sun. The point of what they’d done to poor Taylor, and of leaving Samuelson with the corpse for so long, and the beating that followed, could only be to make him despair; since that was what they wanted, he’d have to hope.

But not hope to live. He knew in his bones that he wouldn’t live. Whether they killed him or not beforehand, they meant to die themselves. They’d left the door open while they beat him, and he’d seen the big gray metal box, with two of them fussing over it, and the array of fifty-five-gallon drums, in the lounge. He was quite sure that whatever the box and the barrels held, it wasn’t supplies or documents, and their destination—no, their target—was a big crowd, a famous building, or both.

The three strong young men who had beaten Samuelson had left bruises everywhere, and now his back and gut ached, and his whole face was sore and puffy.

They’ll demand that I make a statement for broadcast before we hit, he thought. Almost for sure. That’s got to be why they care about what I’m feeling. I wonder if I can say the whole phrase “Mohammed is sucking Satan’s dick in hell” before they kill me on camera? He was surprised at himself, but only a bit. “New situations call for new insights,” he thought, quoting some of his speechwriter’s best work. Maybe I’m just getting in touch with my inner hawk. Some things are hard not to take personally, you know.

He lay sideways on his bed, chained to a furniture bracket, with two guards always watching him.

He really missed Kim.

He wished he’d been more suspicious, more paranoid—maybe just more angry—back when it could do some good, but had to admit that the too-trusting, too-open way he had walked into this had always been his whole approach to life.

He could see now what Rog had been trying so hard to tell him. If your biggest worry was that the other side might stop talking to you… well, sooner or later, if there was one genuinely malicious force in the world, you’d meet it, and something like this would happen. Once I made myself into John Samuelson, The Man Who Can Always Get a Deal, I was doomed to come out and meet these guys, even though Rog and everybody who really knew anything told me that it smelled bad and they didn’t want to do it.

He hated feeling like a fool, but it was still no excuse for despair. I’ve done my best, even if I was wrong. Somebody had to take the chance that they were telling the truth when they said they wanted to talk, and they wanted to make peace. You don’t make peace with people who aren’t dangerous in the first place; that’s not peacemaking, that’s just negotiation.

And now that it turns out it didn’t work, I guess someone else will have to make the lying, treacherous fuckers pay for that. Wish I could be there to see that.

Wish I could help.

They had kicked him for looking too closely at his handcuffs, and for looking around the room, and for wiping his face with his sleeve, and for sitting up. Since those were the rules, he’d purposely made a couple of fiddling, fumbling gropes at his cuffs and at the brackets they were attached to, taken the kicks, and let himself subside on his bunk, against the wall, face resting on the window, and pretended to cry uncontrollably—it hadn’t taken much pretending.

With his face on the window, he tried to look like he was finally without hope, overwhelmed by the shock.

“Hang on to your advantage,” he’d been told, over and over, way back when he took the classes in negotiation. “Whatever they don’t know about you, that’s an advantage.” Right now his one advantage, and it wasn’t much of one, was that they didn’t know he was still looking for something he could do.

The water below was featureless. Time hunched, lurched, and hobbled, mocking him with its slowness; if any sort of chance came along, he didn’t want to have to jump into it with stiff and unmoving muscles. He did what he could to ease the muscles without visibly moving. He whimpered and blubbered whenever he had to move a larger muscle, hoping that would make him look broken.

He was hungry and thirsty and really needed to take a crap, but he was afraid that if he asked for anything, they’d decide he was conscious enough to worry about, and they would move him away from this little airliner window, the only real source of hope in his life. Actually, there’s not much life left; weird that I still want hope.

Christ, as long as I’m asking for the impossible, I’d like one more time to hold Kim. Thirty-one years together, and I won’t be able to say good-bye.

^{HALF AN HOUR LATER. CRESTON, WYOMING. ABOUT 10:00 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.}

Thinking the word eggs all morning made Jason remember that if there was one thing they did well here in the high country, it was breakfast.

The old F-150 roared over the rise; a few miles ahead, he could see a town. Obviously the powers in the universe were trying to help out.

At a truck stop with four semis in the parking lot, Jason backed the old pickup in against the building, putting the expired plate toward a blank wall where it was unlikely anyone would look, right in the shadow of a big Fruehauf trailer. He got out, stretched, yawned. Ugly little dump of a gravel parking lot and concrete-block building, a human zit on the face of the mountains—not a poem idea, he decided.

Inside: country music, Fox on the television, dead animals on the wall. But the eggs, fried potatoes, and French toast were as great as Jason had expected, and as in anyplace that does a busy morning trade, the coffee was this-minute fresh.

The truckers were all at a table together, and Jason figured out, listening to them casually, that two of them had regular routes through here, and the other two passed through now and then and preferred to convoy with friends who knew where the treacherous downgrades, blind curves, and intolerant deputies were.

It was weird, Jason thought. Out here, people worked outside in all weather, and you’d think that would put them in touch with the Earth. Yet they all lived at the end of a long line of trucks and roads, everything dependent on petroleum and metal from thousands of miles away, and their loyalty went to the trucks and the roads. The Big System had a hook into everything.

The Fox yakkers on the television made the point, over and over, that the World Series was the most exciting in a decade and the election was the dullest since ’96. Last time people were this bored at an election, Jason thought, my parents were barely old enough to vote.

The Pirates underdog miracle team was tied three games to three against the ever-loathsome Angels. The Bucs had come fighting back after being down three to one. Game Seven tonight in Anaheim was going to be a game. Jason smiled to himself. Also the last night baseball game, ever, and the last one televised.

The election was dull in comparison. The truckers were all agreeing with the talking heads on Fox that Roger Pendano was going to be re-elected, and Will Norcross didn’t have a prayer (or rather prayers were all he had).

Four years ago, Jason had taken a semester off to ring doorbells for Pendano, and later he’d met Beth at a Pendano for President rally. He still liked the corrupt old oily preppy, even though he was just as much a part of the Big System as that right-wing Jesus-boy Norcross.

Still, even with a landslide in the making, Roger Pendano had apparently not wanted to jeopardize his massive victory and had really fastened the muzzle on John Samuelson, his much-more-liberal vice president. Now, that was a shame; Samuelson sometimes said something that needed saying. But Samuelson hadn’t even been seen in public for almost two weeks—whoever heard of a disappearing vice president just before an election?

Maybe Daybreak would make enough difference so that Samuelson could be president next time—without all the Big-System media and technobullshit distortion, it might be worth electing a president again.

The right-wing hairdos were now working up a harrumphing rage because some people wouldn’t vote for Norcross because he was openly Pentecostal. Jason shook his head; since when was it unusual for anyone in Congress to gibber like a nut in public at the direction of unseen forces?

The waitress topped up Jason’s coffee, following his glance to the TV. “Politics. Gah.”

“Yeah,” Jason said.

Back in the parking lot, he opened his passenger-side door, pulled his gloves on, extracted a few eggs from a box in the back, and considered where he might plant a few before moving on. Truckers were protective and observant about their rigs, but maybe on that yellow illuminated—

“Hey, there, hippie-dude, what’ja got there?”

He looked up to see the truckers; the question came from a slim little man with protruding ears, a mop of black curly hair sticking out from around his strap cap, giant sideburns, and big brown eyes, who resembled a leprechaun going to a costume party as a trucker.

Jason gave Leprechaun the warm grin that had gotten him through a lot of college classes when he hadn’t done the reading. “Well, it’s pretty dumb, and I don’t really know how to explain it,” he temporized. Then his eye fell on the deer whistle on the hood of the nearest cab. Hah! “I was just going to go inside and ask you whether you wanted one of these,” he said, holding two eggs out so they could see. “Don’t touch them, they’ll give your fingers the itch the way fiberglass will. My stupid dad thinks he’s an inventor, and he’s created this wind-resistance cutter. Supposedly you put it on your hood and it sends, like, radio waves forward that harmonize the sound vibrations in the wind stream and make the air flow real smooth over the car, which reduces wind resistance so much, supposedly, you get some extra miles to the gallon. I think. I gotta admit, I don’t understand Dad three-quarters of the time even when he’s not talking about physics.”

He caressed one of the little eggs with a gloved finger and let himself sound as if he were trying to hide his pride. There’s the ticket. Good old Dad. Genius inventor. I’m his amiable dimwit hippie son. Got it. “It’s solar-powered, so it has to be somewhere the sun gets to, but that way it doesn’t draw any power from the rest of the vehicle. Dad says it’s an idea from Nikola Tesla, who was this scientist dude that, like, studied air and electricity. So he sent me out to give away a bunch of them ’cause he can’t get the big companies interested. The one on the hood of my truck doesn’t do much for my gas mileage, though.”

“On the hood of your truck?” another guy, a square-built older type, asked.

Jason looked at the hood, and said, “Dammit. Third one that’s fallen off. I told Dad they wouldn’t stay on with Liquid Nails.”

Leprechaun-trucker snorted. “D’you think your dad’s really a genius with no common sense? Or is he just a guy who’s got so little common sense he don’t realize he ain’t a genius?”

Jason let himself grin broadly. “Well, we lived on his patent money most of the time I was growing up, but the company that paid him didn’t make any of his gadgets; it was some oil company that said ‘the market wasn’t right yet’ for energy-saving gadgets.”

“Damn,” the big beefy older trucker said. “Of course they said that; why would an oil company want anyone to save energy?”

“Yeah, I guess. So the patents ran out, the money dried up, and we had to move out to the boondocks to find a place cheap enough for Dad to keep working on his gadgets. Nowadays, the little bit he makes just lets him buy more parts for the next gadget. Doesn’t sound like a lot of common sense, does it?”

Leprechaun said, “No, it don’t sound like common sense, but I been following Tesla stuff for twenty years on the web, and your dad might just be a genius. Even if he don’t know that Liquid Nails won’t stick a piece of slick glass to a rusty old truck hood.”

“Well,” Jason said, “I’m supposed to offer one to anyone with a vehicle, and Dad said the bigger the vehicle, the more fuel it would save. They’re solar-powered, they work anywhere on the front of the vehicle where the sun gets in enough to charge it. Maybe we could put one on your grille? I’d hate to screw up the paint job on your hood.”

Leprechaun-trucker was beaming. “Let’s give it a try. If it don’t work, it weighs what, a couple ounces? And you can’t beat free for a price. I’ll even spring for some of that Superstick High-Temp they sell inside; that keeps trim on a truck, oughta keep one of these on the grille.”

After he’d equipped all four trucks with an egg on each grille, Jason also gave an egg carton with six more in it for his new Tesla-freak buddy Leprechaun to give to other truckers. “Handle them with gloves only,” he said. “You can trust me that you don’t want to know how much you’re gonna itch—or how much it will spread to anything you touch with your hands—if you don’t. And remember, whether it works or not, we’d sure appreciate a note at three w’s dot tesla hyphen waveflow, dot org, about whatever you observe.”

“Will do,” the short trucker said, pulling out a ballpoint pen to write it on his hand. Jason spelled it out carefully; there was no such site as far as he knew, but well before Leprechaun might try it, there’d be no web.

To keep it convincing, Jason was visibly at work, scraping at the rust on the hood of the F-150 to better attach a black egg, as the truckers pulled out. The moment the last truck vanished over the rise, he tossed the egg up onto the flat roof of the little diner, figuring there’d be plenty of sun, and with things like the air-conditioning, satellite antenna, and gadgets inside, there ought to be enough stray electromagnetic fields around as well.

Then he sloshed Liquid-Plumr over the place on the hood where the black egg had briefly rested. The truck had to make another 250 miles, even a POS this old had an electronic distributor and fuel injection, and with so much ground to cover, Jason couldn’t afford excessive irony.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. JUST AFTER 1:00 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.}

Edwards, the liaison from FBI, looked around the DoF’s main meeting room, as if seeking support from his dozen other law-enforcement, security, and military colleagues, folded his arms, and asked, “And you didn’t have crypto resources to find out about this sooner?”

Arnie looked as embarrassed as Heather felt. She said, “The only thing we could get was assistance from the Amateur Crypto Section at NSA.”

Susan Adler from NSA nodded. “It’s as much our neglect as yours. OFTA asked for more help all the time, and Dr. Plekhanov several times told us that you needed it badly.”

Edwards, a tall, thin, bald man with a crooked nose, who tended to look like Popeye on a bad day, said, “Well, that’s probably enough recrimination right there. Just another case of you can’t watch everything. But… thousands of people doing minor sabotage?”

Arnie nodded. “Maybe not minor. The tech analysts from Dr. Browder’s office gave us a preliminary opinion that what we’re looking at is at least weaponized nanoreplicators, which the Daybreakers call nanospawn, and a mix of genetically modified organisms they call biotes. Coordinated release not just across the country but around the world.”

“We’ve had to run on borrowed resources,” Heather said. “I’ve had a request in for two full years for a cryptologist, longer than that for more science and engineering staff—”

Edwards made a sour face. “I said this is no time for recriminations. Now, when they weaponize a nanoreplicator, what do they make it do? I thought in the most sophisticated labs they’ve got, right now, they’re barely making nanotech do anything.”

Jim Browder rubbed his porcine jowls, shoving so much flesh up toward his ears it looked as if he were about to peel his face off like a bag. “Non-replicating nanotech works just fine in industry, everywhere, these days, and has since the late twenty-teens. Replicating nanotech is a stunt that hobbyists do. It’s not hard to make nanos that make copies of themselves, and it’s not hard to make nanos that do something useful, but so far it’s hard to get them to do both because for any useful, creative purpose, they’d have to communicate and work with each other, and that’s very hard. But if all you want a nanobot to do is make nitric acid whenever it senses that it’s near an electric circuit—that’s what our weapons guys were looking at. They thought it was too unreliable, it would attack our own gear, and you’d never get rid of it once you released it. But if all electric machines are the enemy, forever, I guess that’s an advantage.”

“Why nitric acid?”

“Just an example,” Browder said. “Because you could theoretically synthesize it from air and wouldn’t have to have any other material available. But depending on what they intend to attack, and what they can expect to find near it, there’s at least a hundred other possibilities: fluorine gas, or hydroxide or peroxide ions, or a bimetallic strip that works like a battery. For sabotage, you only need nanoreplicators to reproduce in clusters around something valuable, and excrete a substance that attacks it. Achieving that is down at the college sophomore lab level these days.”

Hannah Bledsoe, from DHS, tall, handsome, dignified, with a deep red dress and pearls that seemed as much a part of her as her soft curly gray hair, looked up from her laptop. “And what are the biotes? Disease organisms?”

Browder grunted. “Sort of, but not against people as much as against artificial materials. The Daybreakers’ genetic-modification stuff that we’ve decrypted so far is all devoted to modifying ordinary decay bacteria, molds, funguses, any bug that eats dead stuff, to make engineered enzymes to break down long chains of carbon.”

Edwards said, “Pretend that some of us skipped chemistry class.”

“A lot of artificial materials—most plastics, for example—and the common fuels like gasoline and kerosene—have molecules that are built around a long, branching string of carbon atoms, with various other atoms attached on the side. The reason they usually don’t decay is because the carbon-carbon bond is fairly strong, and where there’s a long string of them, there’s not much—at least not much that a living thing naturally makes—that will attack the chain and break it into pieces small enough to digest. Basically the biotes are molds or yeasts, bacteria or maybe viruses, that turn synthetic materials and liquid fuels into sugars, fats, proteins—food that rots and spoils.”

“My god,” Bledsoe said, “and that’s what’s loose out there? But how did they get the technical expertise?”

“They don’t have to be tech wizards,” Arnie Yang put in. “Nowadays a process is no sooner understood than it’s automated. The guys who wrote the first computer viruses back in the eighties were pretty smart, but they created scripts for them, and now any eleven-year-old script-kiddie with a bootleg kit can write a virus that will steal your password, e-mail him your credit-card numbers, and fill your hard drive with porn.

“Once they had computers big enough to do molecular simulations and cheap enough for the public—like about the time the ApplePi came out a few years ago—it was really more just a matter of who wanted to do genetic engineering. Sure, it seems like it’s big news, and true, even ten years ago, biohacking was still all guesswork. But that’s just because people don’t keep track. Last year a kid biohacked a completely synthetic RNA prion for his Science Talent Search project—and only got second place because there was something more innovative going on.”

“I know Agent Edwards said no recriminations,” Susan Adler said, stroking her forehead as if it hurt, “but how the hell did we let something like that get loose to the general public?”

Browder shrugged and looked at Heather; he was right, it was her department more than his. “By the time anyone paid attention, it was making too much money to get rid of. It’s the basic technology of biohacking,” she said. “All those booming industrial plants around Baton Rouge and Portland, where they create cows with human blood, and that erosion-control ivy they use in burned-over areas, and those gasoline-from-saltwater-algae farms that they’re just starting around San Diego. Biohacking was making too many people rich. No one wanted to squash it.”

Hannah Bledsoe sighed. “So you’re saying your umpty thousand saboteurs—or more—might be spraying this stuff around the country—”

“Definitely spraying it around the world,” Arnie said.

Edwards cocked his head to the side and squinted hard, as if trying to see. “Uh, right. So bottom line, what’s it going to do?”

Everyone looked at Heather, and she said, “Well, it looks like what they were trying to do with the biotes was make plastic rot like soft cheese on a hot day and gasoline spoil like milk.”

“Any reason to think it won’t work?” Edwards asked, softly, breaking the grim silence.

“I don’t think Daybreak would have initiated itself until they had it working,” Arnie said.

Edwards nodded. “I get it. So the nanoswarm must be working too. I understood what you said it did inside the machines, but what does it do to things as a whole?”

“As a whole, you mean—?”

“Well, Dr. Browder told me the biotes cut up molecules into little pieces, and I understood that, but it took me a moment to understand that that makes plastic rot. What does something that drips corrosive acid inside microchips do?”

“Hell if I know. Something big,” Arnie said.

Browder added, “Probably many things. None of them good.”

“Well,” Edwards said, “I’ve heard enough. Dr. Yang, do you have any kind of list of the leadership of Daybreak?”

Arnie sighed. “That’s why I said Daybreak initiated itself. It’s a concept and a process that some people devote themselves to; there’s no leadership except within tiny little affinity groups. Daybreak has no leaders, no theoreticians, nobody who runs it or made it up. In fact it probably had no creator, or no one creator. It’s more… improvisational, like that improv comedy stuff that was popular when I was a kid? But more so. Nobody said, Okay, we’re ready for Daybreak, roll it. Nobody gave an order, prepared a report, made a decision, voted, or took an assignment in committee. What happened was… more, um… more like a flock of geese taking off to fly south in the fall.”

“I thought the goose out front was the leader.”

Browder and Arnie were both looking nervously at Heather because she’d been pretty harsh with them in the meeting over coffee before this meeting. But she nodded at Arnie; it wouldn’t look good to evade the question.

He said, “No, there’s not really a leader as such. It’s what’s called flocking behavior. Some of them honk I’m leaving and take off, then more of them honk I’m coming too, and they circle and maneuver to line up in each other’s slipstreams, and that forms them up into Vs, and the goose that finds itself at the head of the V heads south. That goose out front is not the leader; it’s just the goose that happens to have a clear idea of south at the moment. Shoot or confuse the goose at the tip of the V, and a couple will peel off to take care of the damaged goose, and the rest will just form up behind some other goose. You can’t decapitate it because it doesn’t have a head.”

“But…” Edwards didn’t look at all happy. “But then how do they stay on the program?”

“The program is whatever they happen to stay on,” Crittenden said, from the back of the room. “Which is taking down the Big System.”

Heather wanted to hug him; she’d been afraid that Arnie would say the words that made everyone resist what he was saying—pure system artifact—and she wanted people committed by action before they heard that, because it was more frightening than what they’d already heard—and worse yet, probably true. “If there are no questions,” she said, “let’s take five minutes for bathroom and coffee, and start self-organizing, ourselves.” Much as she liked Lenny Plekhanov, she was glad he hadn’t been able to come on such short notice; he’d have suggested that they get all flocked up.

^{ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER. GILLETTE, WYOMING. 11:30 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.}

When Zach had loaded every recycling cart he was supposed to, he had a good twenty seed bottles left; he was supposed to improvise until late afternoon, when a guy he was giving a ride to would be calling him.

For the moment, he was just enjoying pedaling along a deserted residential street—nice houses, suburban styles from the eighties and nineties, back when they really built for the family that only went out as a unit to Chuck E. Cheese’s, church, and youth activities, the way Zach remembered when he was a kid, when they’d understood that a Christian dad needed a home that was a fortress. You can’t bake a good cake if other people can throw in any old ingredients they want, and you can’t raise a good kid if you don’t make sure that everything he hears and sees is good, Zach thought. This was the kind of street where, after Daybreak, there’d be big, healthy families, with lots of healthy, clean kids and dogs, and moms to stay home and raise them, and dads with time to play ball and go fishing and just plain hang out. Maybe Zach could move Tiff and the boys here, once Christian families had a fighting chance, and help fill the town back up.

For now, though, what to do with twenty seed bottles? Empty houses had empty yards and empty garages, which attracted bums, kids looking for party spots, and the remaining neighbors’ heavy trash. All of that meant a lot of stray plastic in piles sitting out in the open, exposed to the wind. Watch them try to put that toothpaste back in the tube. By the third empty house, he had seeding a back yard down to a science.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. LAMONT, WYOMING. 11:30 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.}

So far Jason had reveled in miles and miles of gorgeous scenery and great music, punctuated with the amusing challenge of putting a black egg somewhere vulnerable.

Lamont, Wyoming’s computer store had a going-out-of-business sign and a south-facing window. Jason walked in with faked-up questions to confuse the clerks; while they were in the back trying to figure out whether they could sell him anything, he slipped behind the counter. He left two black eggs on top of two old tower servers, right where they’d get a few hours of sunlight through the dusty front windows in the morning.

Judging by the dust on the servers, the clerks probably wouldn’t see the black eggs till it was far too late; meanwhile, probably people having computer troubles—there would be a lot of those by tomorrow—would bring them in here. Jason was happier than Typhoid Mary at an all-you-can-eat salad bar.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE, WYOMING. 11:30 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.}

Howard and Isaac liked to say that trash was their life, and vice versa. Twin brothers, they liked driving the city trash truck, happily taking turns driving or loading, just as they took turns buying rounds at Mary’s Retreat, buying breakfast at Perkins, doing the driving on fishing trips, and in pretty much everything else. Their joint motto was, “Me too, on everything.”

Coworkers who knew the twins well often said that was why they’d reached forty years old unmarried; they couldn’t find a girl who wanted them to take turns. Those friends would have been very upset to know how close to the truth they were.

This morning, they were discussing the smell of some recycling carts; Howard thought it was more like a backed-up sewer line, and Isaac thought maybe more like a diaper pail—just something to talk about as an alternative to Game Seven of the Series.

As usual, their truck was the first to the holding bin. Isaac found the lock cut off and lying on the ground; then they discovered the too-neat array of bottles in the bottom of the bin. Howard called Davidson.

“So you’re calling me,” Davidson said, his voice slurred from his usual four beers at lunch, “because someone put plastic bottles in the bin where we keep plastic bottles, and they cut off the lock to do it.”

“Well, yeah,” Howard said. “And they put them in like a pattern, like they’re kind of evenly spaced over the floor of the bin, and that’s pretty weird. And I climbed down and looked at one bottle—”

“I don’t pay you to look at the bottles,” Davidson said. “I pay you to bring ’em in and get us all paid. Dump your load and clock out, like you’re supposed to. Don’t bother me with petty weird crap. I’ll put on a new lock in a few days; it’s just there ’cause the Feds say I have to lock my holding bin.”

“Okay, Mr. Davidson, sorry to bother you.”

As they went back to the truck, Isaac said, “Should we maybe take one or two bottles to the police?”

Howard considered. “Couldn’t hurt to take one or two of them and hang on to them, maybe, as evidence, in the back of the truck. Just for a couple weeks, till we knew it wasn’t going to mean nothing.”

“Sounds good,” Isaac said. He dropped down the ladder and retrieved two bottles. “Full of some black crud. And these smell terrible.”

“Yeah, it’s weird all right,” Howard agreed, swinging up into the cab of the recycling truck. “Let’s get this fella dumped so we can get to the Tokyo Spa.”

Howard backed the truck in (this week was his turn), and Isaac worked the hopper-gadget to send the load of plastic into the holding bin.

A moment later, he vomited, and when Howard came out to see what the strange sound was, he did too. They backed away, eyes streaming, miserable with retching and the vile smell.

“Like somebody shit a pile of strong cheese,” Isaac said. “That’s what it’s like. It got a lot worse while it was in the truck.”

Howard lit cigarettes for both of them to clear the smell, and after bracing themselves, they moved the truck to the washing barn.

From the upwind side, the piled plastic in the holding bin looked strangely dingy, smeared with gray and brown slime. They climbed into their own pickup; Isaac put the two mystery bottles they had saved into the back, among a tangle of old rope, tools, and fishing gear.

“Whether they offer it free or not,” Howard said, “at that Tokyo Spa, I think I want that full wash. Might stop off at home and pick up some clean clothes to change into, for after, too.”

“Me too,” Isaac said, “On everything. Might even want to shower and change before we go to the Toke. No reason those ladies should have to deal with guys that smell like we do.”

Howard nodded. “Me too, on everything.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 2:50 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“So,” Heather said, “before you take all this back to your home agencies, do—”

Graham walked in, looking over the three knots of diligently chattering bureaucrats with a wry little smile of approval, and shoving his wayward glasses back up his nose as always. “Heather. Something vital. Step into the hall a second.”

“Sure.”

Outside, he lowered his voice and said, “A limo is going to take you straight to a special meeting at Homeland Security. It will pull up outside the building in five minutes. They said to have your laptop and your current files with you. They told me what it’s about but I’m not supposed to tell you—they said they’ll tell you when you get there.”

“Got it,” she said. “Pill drive’s in one pocket, cell phone’s in the other, I’ll snag my laptop.”

“Three quick other things, Heather. One, can you deal with it if they go past midnight? This is one of those things that might.”

“Bad?”

“The worst. Do you need emergency toiletries?”

“All the purse crap—and I don’t need much—is in the side pockets of my laptop case. I’m good. Two?”

“Two, I don’t know if there’s a connection to Daybreak, but there could be, so I’m going to take our DoF part of the Daybreak team and keep them together on standby; when they go home, they’ll all be on call, so if you need the Daybreak team for anything, you already have it. For that matter, if you need your boss, you know I don’t have a life anyway, but I’ll be extra available tonight.”

She felt her breath drawing in and her shoulders squaring, the way they had in her late twenties when she was kicking down doors and busting bad guys. Usually she didn’t notice how much she towered over Graham, who was only five-foot-seven, but at times like this it was hard to miss. “So something’s in the soup.”

“That brings me to number three. Cameron Nguyen-Peters is convening it. We both know what kinds of thing he deals with.”

“Uh-huh. Bound to be interesting. ’Kay, I’ll grab my stuff and tell the troops something; Nellie can handle the wrap.” Truth to tell, her administrative assistant always did handle things like this, and a good thing too.

She cleared her throat at the door; they all looked up. “Everyone, I’ve been called to an emergency meeting. They won’t tell me what it’s about until I’m in the secure room, but it may be something to do with Daybreak. Nellie?”

“Ready.” Her assistant’s fingers poised above her laptop keyboard.

“Contact list from this meeting, available for all of us ASAP. See about a tentative meeting two days from now; DoF folks, Graham wants to talk to you right after this meeting. Sorry to run but I have to.”

Everyone stared at her. She didn’t blame them; she’d have been staring too. She folded her laptop, dropped it into its case, and was out the door.

Cell, pill drive, laptop, survival stuff, good till next morning if I have to be. Ready to go, just the same as the old days. There’s a dance in the old dame yet, she thought smugly. Hey, if I’m not entitled to be arrogant, who is?

She had just time enough to notice what a beautiful fall day it was, with the leaves a wild uproar of bright colors in damp golden sunlight, before the limo shot up the main drive and braked in front of her.

Man, this is big and someone is worried, for real. The driver seemed military; as she climbed into the front seat and got a better look, she saw it was a Secret Service ERT in light-duty uniform, no external armor, but a telltale holster-buckle bump on his left shoulder. “You’ll want to buckle up.”

“Always do,” she said. As her belt clicked closed, he whipped the big car out into the mid-day traffic, letting tires squeal and horns honk as they would, and gunned it across three lanes of traffic.

“Isn’t Homeland Security in the Nebraska Complex?” Heather asked, since they were going the other way.

“Most of it still is. Secretary Ferein and some key offices have already moved to the new complex at St. Elizabeth’s.” He took another turn fast and tight. “Escort should pick us up next block, then we can go faster.”

A DC police cruiser with siren and lights going cut in front of them, and the driver gunned the engine, apparently trying to park the limo on the cop car’s bumper. They roared up an entrance ramp to the parkway, zagged across to the left lanes, and headed south at what the speedometer said was just over eighty miles an hour, the regular traffic fleeing to the right in front of them and re-merging behind them.

Heather had never realized that St. Elizabeth’s was this close; usually, she supposed, it wasn’t. The driver turned off with a wave to the cop, drove without touching the brake through four gates that opened inches in front of his grille, and followed a short driveway to a side door on a big, old mock castle of a building.

“Let me guess,” Heather said, as he pulled the car around the little circular drive. “They just said deliver Heather O’Grainne to this door, as fast as you can?”

“That’s all they told me.”

The limo halted and Heather opened her door. “Thanks for keeping it down to terrifying.”

He grinned at her in a not-quite-professional way and departed at a much more sedate pace.

A slim young woman, discreetly armed and overtly capable, led Heather to an elevator, which must have descended at least eight floors.

St. Elizabeth’s had originally been built as the first national insane asylum, before the Civil War, and over the decades had been used for many things that needed to be hidden from the public: advanced weapons, cryptology, off-the-record briefings on black ops, meetings with outlaw governments, meetings to make decisions no one wanted to own—like a toxic dump for unspeakable secrets, as if the madness and violence at its foundation had drawn every dirty, secret thing to the old fake-feudal brickpile.

The elevator door opened, and Cameron Nguyen-Peters was waiting for her. “Hey, there, buddy,” she said, grinning and throwing an arm over his shoulder, a half hug that she knew would simultaneously please him (he’d had a crush on her for fifteen years) and offend him (he’d grown steadily stuffier in his dignity with time, and he hadn’t exactly started off as an egalitarian hippie, anyway). “How the hell are you?”

“Life’s been better. We have one big mess on our hands.” He seemed to be looking at something through the wall, twenty miles away.

“Well, if you’re holding this meeting on the day of Game Seven, I know it’s nothing small.”

“Exactly.” He glanced around. “Gotta say the Pirates appear to be getting a very unfair level of divine intervention. Anyway, thanks again for coming right—”

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” a female voice said from a speaker somewhere, “the DoDDUSP”—she pronounced it daw-duss-pee—“and the liaison from Deep Black are here.”

Dude, Heather thought. This is big.

Deep Black was the satellite reconnaissance office. They didn’t show up for many meetings because the breach of security in talking to or about them was so often worse than any situation that might have come up.

But if “Deep Black” was a red flag, DoDDUSP was a shrieking siren—the painfully long abbreviation for Department of Defense Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, which could be roughly defined as the guy in charge of having at his fingertips all the plans for all the wars the United States seemed likely to get into, in case the President should say, “occupy Sudan,” or “seal the Mexican border,” or ask “How long would it take us, starting from right now, to seize Abu Dhabi?” For forty years and more, DoDDUSPs had planned Grenada, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Jordan, the Second Korean War, the Taiwan defense, both Iranian wars, and the Myanmar Relief in Force—and a few more things the public had never heard about.

If DoDDUSP was here, it was because Cam thought there might need to be a war.

Cameron was nodding slightly, his lips pressed together, signaling her, Yes, that’s right, it’s that bad. “I have to confer with—”

The voice over the speaker said, “Mr. Nguyen-Peters, the President is just now coming in through the ultrasecure entrance.”

“We should talk some time when there is time to talk. Meanwhile I have bigwigs to prep for the ops room. I know you can be ready on your own. Down that way, then left, someone’ll set you up.”

“Thanks.” She hurried down the hall. He did say the ops room, didn’t he? A real working space for things that were truly bad.

At the door, she was retina-scanned by an apologetic young man. Inside, no one looked up as she came in. A map of the West Coast and the Eastern Pacific dominated the big central screen, with tables and graphs scrolling by in adjoining windows. Grim-faced people in headsets, some military, some civilian, many that radiated “cop,” a handful of geeks, a few who had the spy’s trick of giving off nothing, were all staring into screens and tapping the keys on their desks.

Lights were low so everyone could read screens easily, and to keep voices low; it felt like two minutes to midnight. A hundred feet up it was a nice fall afternoon with the trees bursting with color, and the people didn’t know this place was here. For a fleeting moment, Heather envied them, and then she strode to the station where a slim, olive-skinned young woman was beckoning her.

God, she’s young—surely they’re not using interns in here? Damn. No, I’ve just reached an age where some real live adults look young to me.

A transparent screen wrapped the far edge of Heather’s desk like an armor plate, so that she could look through the screen to see everyone else, or opaque it to concentrate.

A small shelf with indentations for cups slid out of the desk to her left. The young woman set four containers into the nearest ones. “Water, Gatorade, and coffee; the last container has squeeze bottles of half and half, vanilla extract, and honey, is that right?”

“Perfect.” Oh, good, the end of the world will be comfortably to my taste.

“Just hit the space bar when you’re ready to read the briefing. Anything else I can do for you?”

“I’m good, I’ve been through these before.” Too many of these, Heather thought, fixing her coffee. She sipped, pressed the space bar and looked.

Her gaze froze onto the screen. So that was where Samuelson had been while the media were lathering about whether he’d been muzzled or had a breakdown. Jayapura was not exactly where you’d think to look—a place most Americans hadn’t thought about since MacArthur invaded there.

She scrolled down, and as she read more, her belly seemed to hold a ball of solid ice. What the hell had everyone been doing for all this time? How had they let the VP be in that isolated town halfway round the world in the first place without proper security? Dammit! Samuelson thinks agreeing is more important than what you agree about, and they strung him along forever, then rushed him, and because he didn’t want “small details”—like proper security!—to be in the way, all the normal security just got peeled off like a guy trying to finish a dogsled race and throwing off his camping stuff, then his spare food, then his water, then his coat—and now the blizzard hits.

So the whole time, as they sacrificed all his security, our brave good-hearted goddam fucking naïve Samuelson kept reassuring everyone that he wasn’t afraid, and nobody said, “But, sir, it’s not just the danger to you, and the reason you’re not afraid is that you’re a fool.”

Radio silence; going out without the direct-to-satellite transmitters, when it turned out they didn’t have one on short notice; not flying one out

ASAP because another plane landing at Sentani might have drawn attention; who the hell’s brilliant idea had that been?

Three real stupid temporary solutions. Or were they stupid? Did they all come from the same place?

Shit. All three from one Samuelson advisor, Atela Pawhan, formerly Mary Davis. Back when she was Davis, she’d been briefly married to a guy who was now identified as a sometime stringer on the edge of the il’Alb il-Jihado network. Pawhan had a cousin, Lorenzo Bell, who worked in the secured storage where they kept the encrypted direct-to-satellite boxes—

She had almost posted round those people up, now, before she saw the screen title: BELL GROUP, IDENTIFIED MEMBERS AND DISPOSITIONS.

Duh.

The reason it was all there on one screen for her to find was that the FBI had already tried to arrest Pawhan and Bell about an hour ago. They found Pawhan dead in her apartment, which had been trashed in a way that fit the script for “surprised an intruder.” Bell had extensive gambling debts, and a suicide note, to go with being found hanging from his showerhead. The feebs didn’t believe either, of course, and were searching their apartments to see if they could find some clue to their controllers.

An IM glowed in the corner of her screen: L. Plekhanov, NSA.

Lenny! Aside from being her source for cryptology, and the only reason Arnie Yang could read Daybreak’s messages, Leonardo Plekhanov was also responsible for the last three dates she’d had—each about a month apart. She looked around for his wheelchair, and then spotted the thick, wraparound glasses surrounding Lenny’s outsized square head above his tiny shoulders; she waved, and he raised his small, twisted left arm at her, smiling.

His message said, shitload more relevant stuff 2 read B4 strt. back 2 wrk, Beautiful. Bell Org prolly= no clues.

Okay, this is seriously weird. how U know?

clenched fists, rubbing back of neck, uncanny analyst ability, sherlock holmes-like attn 2 detail! He turned his wheelchair to give her the full effect of his big grin. also i can read the files backward on yr screen cuz not opaqued.

Addressing me as Beautiful is not exactly opaque either. She took the time to type that one all the way out. Hunh. Assuming the whole world didn’t blow apart, wonder if he’s got anywhere to watch the Series tonight, and if he likes brats baked with sauerkraut? And the Angels, of course.

She put her mind back on the briefing; sheesh, her old tai chi coach would be all over her for the bad case of monkey mind she was developing today. Center, breathe, be in the flow…

Heather felt a twinge of guilt for enjoying good coffee in a comfortable chair, reading about Our Man In Jayapura trapped in that office over a bank. The supplementary data noted that he was twenty-seven years old and on his third assignment with the Foreign Service. At least someone else somewhere had an early career experience that actually sucked worse than mine.

The report noted that he’d destroyed the confidential documents and erased all computer files, standard practice for a consul in his situation, and that his morale was assessed as “good to very good” in the circumstances. There’s a relief, Heather thought, some people might think being surrounded by an angry mob in a foreign country might excuse negative thinking. An attachment to the document said that overtime had been authorized since he couldn’t get back to his apartment. Not only is his morale good, he’s getting paid; can’t do better than that! He had been strongly advised to take all necessary measures for his personal safety. I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought of that on his own.

Indonesian authorities in Jayapura, after much polite demurral and reassurance, had finally admitted that Sentani International Airport had been seized just at twilight, when Islamist rebels had come out of the low hills above the airport and overwhelmed the small security force. A “reinforced national police battalion”—internal security troops with a few light machine guns—had gone out from Jayapura to try to retake the airport, but they had been ambushed and thrown back on the only road around the bay. Unequipped for night fighting, the Indonesian soldiers had dug in for the night and would wait for dawn, when, “if God wills it,” a raider battalion would arrive. There were two links to raider battalion, so she clicked on them; the first explained that raiders were what Indonesia called special forces, and the second that the military attaché at the Embassy in Jakarta thought that an Indonesian raider battalion, assuming one arrived, could probably succeed in retaking the airport, unless of course there were more rebels than he had been told or “other unforeseen circumstances.”

In other words, the government forces will win unless they don’t. Nobody said anything about how the raiders would be getting there, with the airport closed. “Naval units” (but the communiqué didn’t say which ones) were “on their way,” and “we expect a satisfactory resolution within a short time” according to an Indonesian defense spokesman, also in Jakarta—farther from Jayapura than DC is from LA.

Heather scanned the FAQ window (and just how can any question about this situation be asked “frequently” yet? Illiterates!). She found timetable.

Two hours before anyone knew that Air Force Two was missing.

Almost five hours before anyone American realized it was probably in hostile hands.

Modified Boeing 787 Dreamliner, cruised at Mach 0.9, fully fueled. Still seven hours flying time left at normal cruise; could reach the opposite side of the planet without refueling.

They had been unable to turn on the secure transponders via satellite, which probably meant Bell had told the other side how to find and destroy them.

Satellite and air reconnaissance revealed no trace of the big white plane on the ground or in the air anywhere near Jayapura. The “Air Force Two Possible Area” now extended nearly from pole to pole, and along the equator from the 135 West meridian (about two-thirds of the way from the mainland to Hawaii) all the way to the 55 East meridian (just short of Madagascar and running north through the Persian Gulf and Iran).

A light touch on her shoulder made her look up at Cameron. “I just wanted to say,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Big mess, eh?”

“Just wanted to say hi to a friendly face before I got into this.”

“Best of luck,” she said, “and I mean that.” At the FBI, she’d been the closest thing he’d had to a friend; that had always made her feel sorry for him.

President Roger Pendano entered, flanked by DoDDUSP Mark Garren. Both men looked tired, shocked, and old. “Here we go,” Cam said, and hurried to the rostrum by the big screen.

“By now you are all aware of the basic situation, but more bad news, just confirmed, will update your timelines on your screens in a couple of minutes. Here it is in brief:

“About forty-five minutes ago, three bodies fell into a large town square in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, apparently dropped from a large unmarked white plane, with twin engines, which was flying low over the town—no positive identification, so far, by anyone we can trust to definitely identify a 787. Local air traffic control confirms that they had a big plane that didn’t answer any radio hail and continued on its way to the northwest.

“The American Embassy has claimed the bodies for an autopsy, but they fell more than a mile and landed on pavement. A Navy doctor from the Franklin Roosevelt is still on her way to do the positive identification. Tentatively, we believe them to be Carol Tattinger, the State Department liaison for Vice President Samuelson’s mission; Martin Reeve, the Defense liaison; and William DeGrante, the Homeland Security liaison. A great circle route from Jayapura through Nakhon Ratchasima extends along a line that skirts the Burma-China border, and then across the very northern edge of India—which is to say one that more or less walks the line between Indian and Chinese airspace. Those are the two competent air forces in that region, and they don’t get along with each other, so if that is Air Force Two, the hijackers may be hoping to be able to dodge across the border if either side tries to intercept.

“That great circle line would take the plane up into wild country in Central Asia, where various Islamist warlords and criminal gangs hold actual power.

“We’ve lofted minis—short-term satellites—using the Raptor augmented system, out of Germany, and Global Hawks have already taken off from Bagram, so if it stays in the air, we should be able to find that white plane within the hour. India has been completely cooperative—they’ve offered us landing rights as needed and some of their own planes are out searching even as we speak. When you ask China for help, of course, you never know what the answer is going to be until they give it.”

That caused State and Defense reps to interrupt and argue; Heather had time to access the spreadsheets that had generated the graphics on the main board.

Cameron was going on. “—well be a diversion or a part of some larger plan, or there may be something we are not seeing. This is not a usual sort of—”

That’s it. Heather typed the numbers in frantically, saw the result, scrolled back, found what she wanted, and highlighted it. She tagged it Inconsistent data / possible ruse and hit SEND.

Cam was saying, “So if there are no more questions—wait. Ms. O’Grainne?”

Heather said, “Based on flight time since Air Force Two left Jayapura, and the time the bodies fell in Thailand, that great circle arc is only about half as long as it should be. On that course at cruising speed, they ought to actually be in the ’Stans by now. And why throw three bodies from a plane over a city, let alone fly low over inhabited areas, when you could have gotten rid of the bodies for literally hours over the sea, or just left them behind in the first place? Especially when their best hope of success has to be in going undetected?

“Look at the consul’s report. They towed a Lion Airways plane into the hangar early that night; I just Goo-22ed photos of Lion Airways planes. They’re mostly white already, and they fly some 737s, which is a twin-engine airliner even if it’s an old one. You’d just need a few hours to repaint the tail and the markings and refuel, then drop bodies somewhere very public. They couldn’t make the timing come out right, and someone who knew something might recognize it was an old 737 and not a new 787, but they probably thought it was worth gambling that we wouldn’t be thinking clearly because we’d be too angry about what they did to our people.”

Cameron froze, which was a good sign; his first instinct, when things didn’t make sense, was always to stop moving until they did.

“It still might have been Air Force Two; those things could be explained,” Mark Garren, the DoDDUSP, pointed out. “Why would they run a whole second operation just as a ruse?”

“Mr. Plekhanov of NSA has a comment,” Cameron said.

Lenny’s good hand trembled as he adjusted his headset. “Timing. There must be something we could do that would make a difference if we don’t waste any time. So the target is only partly the Vice President, since they already have him. They’re going to do something with him and that 787, and they want us to dither before we act. Meanwhile, Air Force Two is going somewhere to deliver the main blow. Look at the edge of the possible area.”

On the big board, slowly, just barely visibly, the curve of the places Air Force Two could have gotten to continued to widen.

“Not Hawaii. Not Australia or anywhere in Asia,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said softly. “They’d have hit them hours ago if it was a target there. Anchorage just came within reach, Juneau will soon—Marshall, can you do us a geometric, focus on the next areas to become vulnerable in say the next two hours—show us when each part of the West Coast comes in range?”

“Already working on it, sir, coming up—” a voice said over the speakers.

The screen popped and adjusted, revealing a severely distorted map of the west coast of North America. The familiar coastline had been bent and twisted till it looked like claws reaching into the Pacific. “Nearest targets south of Alaska,” Marshall said, his voice calm and dispassionate over the speakers, “on the great circle routes. First the area around Coos Bay, then Puget Sound, and then gradually down to south California, with a lot of hops and skips because the coast bows out a long way toward New Guinea around the California-Oregon line, and again down by LA.”

Garren drew a breath. “Mr. President, I recommend you activate Forward Sentry West.”

Pendano looked like he was going to throw up, but he turned to the quiet little man carrying the case beside him, and said, “Hand me the football. I certify that I am sane and there is a National Defense Emergency.”

“Authentication: Nineteen,” Garren said, and the football-carrier stepped forward and handed the little black case to the President.

Pendano opened it, placed his hand flat on a reader plate, brought a microphone to his mouth, and said, “Authenticate.”

“Authenticated,” the football said.

“Authorize Forward Sentry West. Not a drill. Mu Nu Brave Walker. Repeat not a drill. Mu Nu Brave Walker. Verify.”

“Authorize Forward Sentry West,” the football said. “Authorization begins in one minute unless intervention—”

“Accelerate. Gamma Omicron Dominant Eagle.”

“Forward Sentry West commenced.”

Pendano handed the football back to the carrier and sank into his chair, rubbing his eyes.

Garren looked around. “You should all know. Plan Forward Sentry West is a joint American-Canadian-Mexican total aerial blockade of the West Coast. All incoming flights will be diverted to quarantined landing fields, if they obey orders; if they don’t, they’ll be shot down.” He looked around and said, “Forward Sentry West will be run out of the Pentagon and NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain. So officially Secretary of Defense Kimura will be taking over. I’m going to request that they leave me here; it’s a mature plan and once a warplan is settled on, as DoDDUSP, I don’t have much to do; forgive my arrogance, Mr. Nguyen-Peters, but I think I’ll be more useful here, where we don’t know what we’re doing yet.”

“You’ll certainly be welcome.” Cam was normally all but expressionless, but even more so now; Heather wondered whether he was displeased to have a backseat driver or relieved that this wouldn’t be his affair much longer.

Garren nodded politely. “Given that this is the room where people will be cleaning up the domestic damage, it seems only reasonable for me to answer any questions you may have.”

“Hernandez, Agriculture.” The heavyset woman’s arms were folded on her chest, and she was glaring over her bifocals. “Are there any limits on the blockade? If it doesn’t comply, they shoot it down, no matter where or what or how?”

“Pilots are allowed some judgment,” Garren said. “If the legendary man in a lawn chair with balloons is out there, they’ll look at him before they shoot. But discretion cuts both ways. They don’t have to ask permission, just exercise judgment, to use tactical nuclear weapons in the interceptions.”

Cameron said, “Ms. Nakayara, FAA?”

The petite woman looked up from her desk. “Why would you use a nuke?”

“Gas, germs, or another nuke could be on that plane,” Garren said, quietly. “And airbursts of tactical nukes don’t produce much fallout. So the safest thing we can do in the circumstances is to, um, sterilize it thoroughly, if it’s someplace where collateral damage is tolerable. For example, if we’d been following Plan Forward Sentry back on September 11, 2001, we would have shot down but not nuked the planes once they were over DC and New York; but we’d have used a nuke on the one over rural Pennsylvania.”

“Good Christ,” Nakayara said, very quietly.

Heather thought she’d never heard anything put better.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST EAST OF BUFFALO.WYOMING. 2:20 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Jason’s parking spot at the truck stop at the junction with I-90 was a jack-pot. To one side of the F-150, he tossed a black egg through a rolled-down window into an open bag of electrician’s tools in the back of a rusty Subaru. El Slobbo Electrico would spread nanoswarm everywhere he went, and if Daybreak was working, he’d be going a lot of places soon.

On the other side of the F-150, there was an elderly Prius that looked like it had last been washed when Bush was president, with junk-food wrappers, parking tickets, unopened mail, eviction orders, and court notices scattered across the back seat, an ode in debris to a freshman year ending at fall midterms.

Hunh. Massachusetts plate, new U of Montana bumper sticker. Probably on her way home. No doubt Little Muffin Dropout was all liberal, going to vote for Pendano, always did her community service at school with a smile, all that shit, and thought all her spiritual talk was making a difference in the world. Muffy, you are about to make the biggest difference you are ever going to make.

“Hey, you like my ride?”

Jason turned. The plump girl with thick glasses and a dozen band buttons on her jacket held a giant mug of coffee and a big container of chicken nuggets.

“Just looking and thinking you were probably cool.”

“If you have some weed, we could chill.”

“We’re both out of luck,” he said, “but I was just thinking, this car needs some serious help, and like, I’d hate to have a cool person get all stranded and stuff.” Jesus, I hope I’m being inarticulate enough to sound trustworthy.

About cars, Jason only knew what he’d picked up from being a gofer and light-holder for Carrie, the girl who kept the commune’s three old beaters running, but he was sure Miss Little Lost Muffin knew even less.

“Oh, man, that would suck to get stuck someplace. Once I got stuck when I was out with this guy drinking at UM, up at Lolo Hot Springs? and it turned out I was just out of gas and the battery was dead? but I like had to call my dad so he could call Triple A to tow the car the next day? but I like didn’t know that like at the time? So we needed to stay warm for the night, and the guy—”

Jason turned and fished in the toolbox for a few wrenches and screwdrivers, and shuffled four black eggs into his hands under the tools. “Well, let’s make sure you don’t get stuck this time. Pop your hood.”

He poked around and hmmed until she became bored and asked if she could turn on the stereo. That took about three minutes.

While she sat in the driver seat, eating her chicken, on the other side of the raised hood, Jason planted two eggs down low on the rear surface of the main generator—ambient heat wasn’t as good as solar, but it would work as long as one side of the egg was about 25 C warmer than the other. It looked like the cooling fan motor would blow the nanoswarm backward and down so that it didn’t build up and stop the engine too soon; he wanted Muffin here to keep rolling for a good long way, because I-90 would take her all the way back to Massachusetts, with bright sun on the south side the whole way, and if he could make this old prehistoric hybrid car scatter nanoswarm all along that highway, he could infect tens of thousands of cars. She was a perfect Patient Zero, and he didn’t want to squander the opportunity.

If I wanted to spread the clap, I’d give it to a slut who was following a band for the summer, he thought. If I wanted to spread flu, I’d cough on a flight attendant with a compromised immune system. And to spread nanoswarm… bright sunlight, badly shielded electrical system with lots of old-fashioned strong electric fields, on a platform traveling along one of the busiest roads on the continent.

He loudly said, “Just want to see what’s up on one passenger-side motor, looks seriously weird,” and crouched down beside the car, cheerfully putting two black eggs above the rear passenger-side wheel, where they would have plenty of sun if she was driving the way he’d guessed, and whirling electromagnetic fields from the motors no matter what, and thus produce a snow of nanoswarm as it ate her fender from inside, not destroying her car, but dropping nanoswarm onto the highway for hundreds of miles.

Then he closed it up, told her to get it looked at in “B-town,” and declined again the offer to get wasted and listen to some tunes before he went. She insisted on giving him something in trade, which turned out to be a plastic sandwich bag of weed. He waved at her as she drove away.

Once she was gone, he added a black egg to the baggie and left it in the sun on top of a transformer box by a lamppost. I don’t really care who picks that up or why, as long as they put it in their car.

He checked his cheapo plaztatic Wal-Mart watch; it showed a series of upside-down u’s, and when he pushed the reset button, it died completely. He dropped it in the back of the nearest pickup.

Backing out, he thought:

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. YUMA. ARIZONA. ABOUT 3:00 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Ysabel Roth’s parents had been service-oriented pacifists, raising her in a dozen countries while they bounced all over the world working for justice and development. She’d just kind of naturally gravitated into taking care of the world, doing two years’ service in Mexico right after college. Last year waiting tables at The Green Mother had been less dramatic, but she’d still seen a lot of life.

She yawned, stretched, and rubbed her face. Not nearly as much life as I’m about to see; life never involved a Stinger missile before.

The TV-control thing, linked to the launcher on the roof, showed a big white blimp, which Aaron had said was technically not a blimp but an aerostat. He had nice eyes and such a comforting, technically competent manner that she listened to him explaining tech stuff just to enjoy the sound of his voice. Apparently a blimp had a motor and went somewhere, and an aerostat was just tied to the ground by a long rope. But this aerostat did have a motor, Aaron had made a point of that, and she had nodded and liked the way he pushed his hair back off his face, and the motor put out infrared radiation. It made her sick that people would put radiation into the sky like that, but it would allow the Stinger to home in on it.

It was kind of like a video game, right down to little red letters she couldn’t read because she’d never picked up much Farsi.

Aaron had driven off that morning in a beat-up old Ford Hybridstar, loaded with all her stuff. He’d promised to set it into her room so it was all there when she arrived at the commune in Mexico. To stay here for two days, Ysabel had picked up an air mattress, two cups, a tea ball, and an old teakettle at the Salvation Army, and liberated a few sandwiches and some tea from The Green Mother.

She felt ashamed; Miriam always had been nice to her, even advancing her her first month’s rent for this place.

Well, after Daybreak, things would be better for local businesses, anyway. Meanwhile, Ysabel really needed the tea.

Other than her tea, all she had left was her purse and the cell phone she’d bought at a convenience store three weeks ago, to allow time for them to overwrite the surveillance video.

The kettle whistled; she made her tea; while it steeped, she contemplated the screen. She put the crosshairs on the motor, which turned a generator, which powered a radar thing, which shot radiation into Mexico to keep Mexicans out of the United States.

The idea that someone would keep out peasants, especially with radiation, made her sick. Ysabel loved peasants; she had learned wisdom and truth from peasants everywhere. One supercilious snot-chick at school had said that Ysabel had never met a peasant who wasn’t a great person in wonderful harmony with the whole Earth.

The thing was, it was true. Che had loved peasants, and so had all the great Latin American poets and writers, and for that matter fucking Jesus had loved peasants. Peasants were just, you know, lovable.

Aaron had that Che-Jesus-Latin-American-poet look about him, big wet brown eyes, curly black beard and hair in a mad scraggle, soft sensitive lips and expressive eyebrows…

Ysabel wanted to just talk with Aaron about her love for peasants. She loved faces with real character shaped by troubles, and simple faith in simple stories, and everything about the peasants. She loved their work ethic. She loved their gentle way with children—even when they hit them, it was totally different from some dad in the suburbs mindlessly pouring out rage on a little kid; you could feel the love. She liked the blunt, open sense of humor and the earthiness of the peasant women.

Daybreak was, really, truly, just the beginning of an America with acoustic folk and no country, deep faith and no religion, peasants and no rednecks.

Surely, for that, one little Stinger fired at military property was okay. You had to be practical, ends and means, omelets and eggs, all that stuff she’d had in college.

She smiled. Dad had once told her that instead of playing violent video games, she should be learning something practical.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OFF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND. CALIFORNIA. ABOUT 2:00 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“Forty-eight seconds,” Tracy Barbour said, as the black balloon tumbled upward and away, rising quickly and disappearing into the bright blue afternoon sky. “Beat that.”

“If you’ll take the helm.”

“Just what I was hoping you’d say. And how ’bout a beer for each of us? We’re down to our last two tanks of hydrogen; only about a hundred balloons to go. We won’t be drunk before we finish launching.”

Grady made his way to the cooler, his mind already on the next few months of loafing from port to port while they saw what shape the new world would take.

They always had been very green, from their long vacations spent hiking, to the natural fibers they wore, to the family land they’d put in conservation trusts, and of course their wooden boat, so when Tracy had been IMing with a few interesting people some years ago, they had immediately understood the promise of Daybreak, and a world without industry, because of the stories they had heard as children: Tracy’s grandmother had told her about life in a really big, comfortable house with abundant servants; Grady’s great-grandfather had described, in loving detail, how it was to own the whole estuary of a small river and maintain it for waterfowl and fish.

Rich was always better than poor, of course, but after Daybreak, Tracy liked to say, there would just be more point to being rich. Today’s twenty-first-century squalid, poor industrial world, where even the best of family and school meant only that you could afford a nanny and a cleaning service, a world where there was plenty of stuff but the stuff was all crap, and every damn body that wanted it could go anywhere whether they properly appreciated it or not… faugh!

Daybreak would bring back the world where people had a place, and filled it well, and knew they belonged there.

Grady and Tracy had about half a ton of gold in the concealed second hold, but until there was a safe way and place to spend it, they planned to fish and do small trading; hard work, but climbing mountains and sailing long distances is hard work, so it would be nothing they couldn’t handle.

Grady handed her a beer. “Hard work is overrated.”

“Where did that come from?”

“The cooler.”

“No, silly boy, what you just said.”

“Oh, I was just thinking, the trouble with people who do hard work is that they think it entitles them to whatever they want. Every damn rice farmer in Asia wants to be able to buy all the cheap plastic crap his shack can hold—”

“Do they call them shacks?”

“They call them something in Chinese or some language, hon, it’s just an example.”

“I mean, is it something we’d call a shack or is it more like a hut?” That little smile he had loved madly since St. Albans quirked up the corner of her mouth.

He gulped some icy beer and said, “I did have sort of a point.”

“Okay.” She squirmed to sit up straighter and did her best to look very, very serious.

God, he thought, it’s good to be this in love with my wife after fifteen years. “Oh, just that Asian rice farmer—let’s call him Wong—”

“Fong.” The challenging twinkle in her eye meant You are so getting laid tonight.

“Fong it is. Anyway, Fong’s an example of someone who really overrates hard work. See, because he works like a sonofabitch farming rice, and his kids work hard and long making cheap plastic crap in the factory, he thinks he’s entitled to buy all the cheap plastic crap he can stuff into his shack. He doesn’t get that life is hard work, whether it’s picking rice or climbing Everest or managing a company. Hard work doesn’t have anything to do with it; you should work hard wherever you are and shut the fuck up. You see what I mean?”

“No,” she said. “Six minutes.”

“What?”

“Six minutes since you took over launching balloons, and you haven’t launched even one. You’re not even close to beating me.”

He laughed and said, “Now time me on this next one.”

“Go,” she barked.

He lunged for the next balloon and jar. One hundred four more tries, and he never beat her best time, but he was pretty bombed for the last thirty. “What a grand day,” he said, watching the last one sail off toward the California coast. “What a goddam well grand day, with a grand life to follow.”

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. ON I-90 EAST BETWEEN GILLETTE AND SHERIDAN. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Probably that nice hippie mechanic guy just didn’t realize that some younger girls like interesting older guys, Marshalene decided. He was a good mechanic, though, no question. According to the graphics on the dash, the gas engine had settled right on the peak of the power curve and was purring away in easy perfection, despite being an antique 2012 model, spinning power out to the wheel motors and filling up the batteries. Or maybe it always did that, but she preferred to think hippie mechanic guy did it. Especially if he was thinking about me while he did.

She had finished the chicken from the bucket and was well into the Doritos, her coustajam hookmix cranked up to the top, buzzing the two car windows that weren’t quite tight. Well, it was sad college hadn’t worked out, but right now she had food and tunes and open road ahead of her, and she was good at accepting what was good and not worrying much.

To her left, in the other lane, she saw a column of trucks drafting; the IBIS wireless system on the interstates, one of Prez Pendano’s big deals that her dad was always complaining about the cost of, let a whole big huge row of trucks work their brakes all together, so they could be almost on each other’s asses, taking turns breaking the wind for each other. It meant sometimes you’d have like five gazillion trucks passing you on the highway.

No worry about passing them because when they were drafting, they were doing like a hundred or better; that didn’t seem fair to Marshalene, but shit, life wasn’t fair. She’d just barely found her groove, living in Missoula, when they threw her out of her apartment and made her go home. The whole world was full of mean people, and like the sticker said, they sucked.

Behind the rear passenger-side motor, where Jason had planted them, the two black eggs were getting steady sunlight from the south, warmth from the motor, and a steady flux of alternating magnetic fields; as programmed, each of them kept resetting and streaming out slightly different versions of nanoswarm every hundred thousand copies or so, which was about every four seconds.

Almost all of the nanoswarm were caught in the slipstream as the air rushed around the spinning wheels, scattered into the wake in the air behind the Prius. The strong southwest wind off the mountains blew them in a thick cloud across the wide median; some landed in the dirt, many on the small, scrawny pine trees or in the brush, but millions of nanoswarm were sucked into the six-mile-long cyberlinked truck convoy, lighting in the engines and on grilles, finding energy sources and metal and beginning to feed and reproduce.

By the time Marshalene’s Prius had passed—only about two minutes, since they were going in opposite directions—all 562 trucks in the locked chain were infected, and for the next few hours, they covered Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho’s lifeline highway with tens of billions of nanoswarm, till a few peeled off the convoy; till their engines, electronics, and motors failed and stranded a few more; and till the rest piled at the foot of a cliff in Lookout Pass where IBIS had gone dead and so had the warning system.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Behind a boarded-up apartment building, Zach stripped off his coat, and with it the cheap whiskey smell; his dirty, ragged outer shirt; and his filthy dreadlocked wig and knit cap. He left the clothes on the old bicycle, to be stolen and carry the bug farther. The wig might look suspicious, so he threw it under the old, rotting deck—anyone who saw it would think it was a dead animal.

At the mall, Zach squatted in the stall till the men’s room was empty, then climbed at once onto the sink, pushed up the ceiling tile, and pulled down the white plastic bag. He jumped down and scrubbed the brownish blotchy makeup off his face, hands, and neck in the sink.

In the stall, he took clean shoes, shirt, pants, and a light jacket from the bag. He dug out the hotel keys and car keys from the pocket of his bum pants, and put his bum clothes into the bag. As he emerged from the stall, carrying the white bag discreetly by his side, a high-pitched voice declared, “I’m going to poop right in here,” and an indulgent adult male voice said, “That’s right, Malachai, that’s what we come here for.”

Zach nodded at the little boy and his harried father; the kid looked a lot like his firstborn, Noah, at that same age. Enjoy indoor pooping while you can, Malachai.

He emptied the bag while unobserved in a toy store (plenty of plastic there).

At the opposite end of the mall, he caught the shuttle bus to the Holiday Inn, where his car, regular-person clothes, razor, and tub were waiting for him. On the shuttle bus, he bowed his head to pray gratefully. His phone vibrated; he put it to his ear. “Hey.”

“Hi, I’m looking for Laura Haxson.”

“Nobody by that name at this phone.” Zach hung up.

In his hotel room, he hit the dialback.

The view from Jason’s picnic table at the roadside rest, just outside Gillette, was very Hollywood: water towers and steeples above the blaze of fall colors from the old trees. No doubt it would turn out to be seedy and run-down.

His cell phone vibrated; the call was from UNAVAILABLE. “Yeah?”

“Did you want to buy a snowmobile?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you have to trade?”

“Real old F-150.”

“Okay, meet me at a rental property I own, it’s real run-down and doesn’t look good, just bring the truck all the way up the driveway.”

Sounded like WalksWDLord had found a good concealed spot, just as they’d agreed. Jason scribbled directions in ballpoint on his hand. “Got it.”

“I’ve got a shower here.” WalksWDLord explained how to walk to the Holiday Inn. “I’m in Room 215. You can clean up here and then we’ll grab some dinner and be on the road.”

“Very cool.”

Jason prayed that the truck had one more start left in it. He didn’t think the nanospawn would be able to knock out the alternator quite this fast, but shorting out the battery or eating the electronic distributor was well within their reach, to judge by the way the music had gone dead half an hour ago.

He thought about peeking under the hood, but there’d be time enough for that once he got to his destination, and meanwhile it would be better not to let in light, or more nanospawn.

The house with the FOR RENT sign was right where it was supposed to be, and Jason followed the driveway around to the garage in the back.

Jason stripped off coat, hat, gloves, and sweater, and tossed them onto the back porch. Maybe some homeless dude would find them and spread the nanospawn. He erased the cell phone’s recent calls, turned it off, and tossed it over the alley into a toy-crowded back yard to spread more nanospawn.

Jason took out his second pair of clean chem-proof gloves (sprinkled with Drano crystals, inside tied-off condoms) and slipped them on, walked back to the truck, opened the passenger-side door, poured Liquid-Plumr over the top of his pack, rinsed with a bottle of distilled water. He shrugged the pack on.

He left both doors hanging open and the keys in the ignition. On a whim, he raised the hood too, and looked inside by the bright afternoon sunlight.

The battery top had been clean the night before, but now it was covered with fluffy white crystals. The ends of wires everywhere were clotted with colored metal salts, and corrosion mixed with too-bright spots to speckle the whole surface of the engine. Definitely working—good. I’d sure feel like a damn idiot if it wasn’t.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 5:54 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Heather was huddled with Working Group Jayapura Ground, going over how the supposedly secure TBMW signal had probably been tapped. “A guy in Jim Browder’s Tech Assessment Office, Paulton Shapiro, has cataloged the ways to steal tight-beam microwave signals. The one I think happened here is called phased-interference edge-diffracted scattering, PIEDS, because it’s best adapted to a situation where a beam has to go between very precisely known locations and pass through an aperture surrounded by a conductor, like say the aluminum frame of a window.”

“Is that off-the-shelf tech?” Khang from CIA asked.

“You can’t buy it in a store, but DARPA’s labs have been trying to build them since way back in the Obama administration. Probably fifty countries have experimented with it. Somebody was bound to make PIEDS work in field conditions, sooner or later. It’s not intrinsically expensive, just needs very fast processors and some work-arounds on a couple physics issues. And it makes sense. To take the plane by subterfuge, intact, they needed to go the instant the plane went into radio silence. They knew the right time because the Pawhan/Bell cell set them up so that they were vulnerable to PIEDS. So—”

Cameron tapped her shoulder. “I know I’ve taken you through three working groups in an hour, Heather, but I need you in another one. Please come with me.”

At first she thought she was going to be in Working Group Pawhan Bell because he led her to the conference room where they were, but he just stuck his head in and said, “Dr. Edwards.”

“Coming.”

It was Edwards from the FBI, the one who looked like Popeye and had been at the Daybreak presentation. He nodded politely, and said, “Here we are again.”

“Yeah.” Heather was trying to think of how to ask what was going on, but Cameron hurried on, and the two of them hurried to catch up; he gestured them into a conference room but didn’t go in himself. Lenny Plekhanov was the only person in there. “Hi, do you guys have any idea what Cam’s doing?”

“None at all,” Heather said. “Lenny Plekhanov, this is Agent Edwards—Dr. Edwards, I guess, from what Cam—”

“The doctorate’s in social psych,” Edwards said, “and Lenny and I know each other, we worked on—”

The door opened and an assistant brought in five more people; the four Heather recognized were Reynolds, who was another FBI agent; Robbins, the CIA analyst from the Daybreak meeting; Nancy Telabanian, a quiet woman in a dark suit, who was Lenny Plekhanov’s boss from NSA; and the guy from Deep Black. The one Heather didn’t know was an African-American woman in a colonel’s uniform with the Army’s Cyber Command patch. They had barely sat down and begun shaking hands and getting acquainted when Cam came in and closed the door.

He walked to the end of the table and stood resting his hands on it, as if he might need to lunge out the door at any moment. “Heather, I have to ask right away, bluntly. Hannah Bledsoe told me about your presentation regarding the Daybreak movement this morning, and that whatever Daybreak is, it is apparently already active. Can you assure me that it has nothing to do with this present situation? And whether it does or not, do you see an impact on what’s going on?”

Heather felt the implicit criticism—as Cam had doubtless known she would—in the pit of her stomach. She could feel herself being fitted with the tag that read FAMOUS UNKNOWN IDIOT, the tag that adhered to the officer at Pearl Harbor who saw planes on the new experimental radar and thought they must be a much smaller flight of American planes he was expecting, the intelligence officers who ignored aerial photos of all that Russian construction gear moving into Berlin in 1961, and the FBI administrator who didn’t see anything urgent in so many Saudi men with al-Qaeda links taking flying lessons; she could imagine headlines on a billion screens: DOF COP COULD HAVE PREVENTED DISASTER.

Edwards gazed at her like the eyepits of a skull. “Well, if—”

Cameron silenced him with a glare. At least he understands that I’m thinking.

If the seizure of the Vice President wasn’t connected to Daybreak, it had to be history’s most amazing accidental—

Timing.

The thing their unknown enemy was best at.

“I think,” she said, “that there has to be a connection, even though it’s so improbable that it didn’t even occur to me.” She looked around the room. “Those of you who weren’t at the briefing, how much do you know about Daybreak?”

“I only heard about it fifteen minutes ago,” Cameron said. He managed not to sound as if he should have heard about it sooner, one more thing Heather owed him for.

“I read through the liaison’s notes earlier this afternoon,” the colonel from Cyber Command said. She shrugged. “Not with the attention I should have; I thought it was interesting, not urgent for me.”

Heather sketched it out in a few brief sentences—a leaderless, directionless-on-purpose anti-movement, built around the idea that with enough small, self-replicating bio- and nano- sabotage carried out simultaneously, the Big System—the modern world, really—could be taken down so that it never arose again. She took full blame for not alerting people earlier. “Just this morning, Graham Weisbrod himself had to corner me and tell me that we needed to talk to the rest of DoF, and while we were doing that my chief researcher on the project discovered that Daybreak had started.”

Nancy Telabanian from NSA, said, “Lenny, I’m guessing you didn’t see how vital this was going to be.”

“I gave Heather as much support as I could out of the amateur section,” Lenny said. “But Daybreak uses continuously modulated one-time keys for their ciphers—the same basic tech that spy agencies and armies use nowadays all over the world—and what they were using was good enough to keep us weeks, sometimes months, behind Daybreak’s key changes. We usually read their traffic five to nine weeks behind, till just this week when we identified what they were using as their modulator key.” He pushed his big, soft flop of black hair off his forehead, distracting Heather for an instant. “I’m afraid I was every bit as blind as Heather—”

Edwards glanced around the room. “I am quite certain my office would have done no better with this, Mr. Nguyen-Peters. We all claim to expect the unexpected, but it’s a lie we tell to protect our budgets. We don’t need to analyze how we missed Daybreak. I don’t think that’s productive. I do think Ms. O’Grainne almost certainly has to be right—Daybreak and this attack on the Vice President are linked, or it is the greatest coincidence in history.”

“Does everyone agree?” Cameron asked.

Nods all around the room.

Cameron leaned forward, resting his hands on the table. “Unless someone dissents, Heather O’Grainne is now the head of Working Group Daybreak, and you’re all members. Your mission is to find the Daybreak link to the seizure of Air Force Two; no action plan just yet, we’ll decide what to do once we know what we’re looking at. Heather, bring over whoever you need from OFTA and DoF for the duration of the crisis; I’ll message Graham Weisbrod and square that. Are there any crypto resources that NSA can spare for getting caught up on Daybreak’s communications?”

“I’ll get them for you, Lenny,” Telabanian said.

“Good.” Cameron stood back up and said, “You’ve got this room any time you need it, but I imagine you’ll want to work mostly from your desks in the main room. Any objections to anything I’ve just decided?”

Edwards said, “I’m very glad we’re finally giving Assistant Secretary O’Grainne what she needs to do the job right and quickly.”

Heather realized then that Cam had more or less forced a buy-in on everyone in the room, especially Edwards. Now they’re on record that whatever I did wrong about Daybreak before, it was because I didn’t have the resources. Now that I do have the resources, the price of keeping my job is that I really have to do it. The only way Cameron could throw me a line was to give me enough rope to hang myself. That’s the nature of friendship in this town.

^{ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 4:38 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

It looked like a weather station. An anemometer on a waist-high tripod turned slowly around in the light breeze; a wire from its base went to a telephone-sized aluminum box, connected by a short wire to a black box the size of a matchbox—a cellular wireless server.

Inside the aluminum box, a computer continually compared the time and the windspeed. Decisions about time took priority, and up until recently had been very simple: The program said do nothing until 4:00 P.M. or later, so every second, right on cue, the computer woke up, saw it wasn’t 4:00 P.M. yet, set a timer to tick off another second, and went back to sleep, like a child on Christmas morning who checks every five minutes to see if it is time to get up yet, and then dutifully goes back to bed before checking in another five minutes. At the speeds at which computers operated, that was less than a billionth of its working time.

After 4:00 P.M., the computer began to consult its rolling record of the windspeed across the last twenty minutes. This was more complicated. On the plains close to the Rockies, a strong west wind tends to rise in late afternoon, almost every day, as the shadowed east faces of the mountains cool and pour a torrent of cold, dense air down to where air warmed by a whole day of sunshine is still rising off the ground. The wind blows strong and flows across hundreds of miles; it’s a perfect medium for dispersing anything in the air.

Zach had written the program to detect the point when the strong evening wind was well-established; it took windspeed readings every second and kept a back file of 1200 of them, twenty minutes’ worth. Each second after 4:00 P.M., it averaged the list; when the average windspeed across the last twenty minutes was more than thirty-five kilometers per hour, it reviewed the list to make sure that there had been no more than ten consecutive seconds below 25 kph, Zach’s test to make sure that this was the real, strong mountain breeze, not just a stray gust.

At 4:42 P.M., those conditions were all met. The computer sent 750 phone numbers to the server, which dialed the triggers in all 750 of the bottles filled with black powder. As each came online the computer told it to arm and check; all were armed and checked in less than four seconds. The computer sent a signal to fire; a hundredth of a second later, when the 750th call dropped, the computer fired a small charge to destroy itself. People on the street thought it was a gunshot, looked around, and concluded it was something else.

Davidson resented like hell the way he had to be out there on collection days from fucking three thirty till goddam well six fucking o’clock sometimes, because although he had a great team with Howard and Isaac, and a tolerable one with Dorothy and Juan, the team of Fred and Annie was just absolutely not to be trusted at all. Sure enough, they came in late because they’d stopped to check on their kid in the day care, and they gave him some routine about how it smelled so bad they had to take showers, because it would never’ve occurred to numbnuts Fred or his fat slobby wife that maybe they should wait till they were done to shower instead of just getting all stunk up again.

Now they were busy telling Davidson their whole fucking life story, which was something they often did on the clock. He could have told it for them: Fred used to drink and party, and Annie did too. They got Jesus after their firstborn baby died, and he must have been sent from heaven to straighten them out. I’m sure that comforted the shit out of the little fucker, drowning in the bathtub while you idiots got stoned. But Davidson didn’t say that; people who would at least show up weren’t all that easy to find.

So he let them ramble on about how bad it stunk, and take him to the bin to show him. It was about three-quarters full of plastic bottles, a good week, but son of a bitch, this was like putting your head up a constipated cheesemaker’s butthole, and the slimy look of the plastic was weird too. And—hadn’t it been in the middle of lunch? Erin had just been doing the red lingerie number—Howard had called him, something about—

Wham-boom.

The biggest boom since the IED in Iraq, when he’d gone there for Bush twenty years ago. This one knocked all three of them flat on their asses. Lying on his back, he was perfectly positioned to see the sky fill instantly with a great cloud of dirty blue smoke, which tumbled to the east almost before it fully formed. From the cloud fell a rain of plastic bottles, a few into his plant, most over the fence, and quite a lot of them, caught in the strong mountain breeze, tumbling and blowing off far to the east. Some of them were going to be in fucking South Dakota before they came down, he thought, and then he realized that one whole day of recycling had just blown off into the sky, with all the trucks and workers already paid for, and he screamed and beat the ground with his fists like a two-year-old having a tantrum, until he realized that Fred and Annie, with their bleeding ears, couldn’t hear it, his hands were getting sore, and his ears hurt horribly. He couldn’t hear anything, though bits of plastic bottles were crashing down all around him and on the steel roofs of his buildings, and it should have been a terrible din.

Howard was stroking Michiko’s breasts and hair, real soft and gentle the way she said she liked. She was handling Isaac, who was breathing like he was about to finish.

Something went off like a cannon. Isaac, sitting up, bumped heads with Michiko; they were both still apologizing when Lenya, the Russian lady that owned the place, knocked on the door and said, “Howard, Isaac, so so sorry, something happen to your truck, dress and come out, okay?”

A few minutes later, hastily stuffed into their clothes, barefoot on the sunny parking lot, they stood stupefied in awe by the burned and scarred truck bed and the shattered windows. One other car, nearby, had taken a big crack in the rear window, but Reverend Nickleson had already driven it off to the auto-glass place, saying he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.

The cop who came out, unfortunately, was Matt Storey, who had enough trouble figuring out how to fill out speeding tickets, so no matter how much they tried to tell him about the two mystery bottles they’d been carrying in the back, he just kept shaking his head and saying it was probably kids. It was dark before he left to write his report, which would say something blew up in the pickup truck bed and it was probably kids.

After they swept the glass off the seat, Howard tried starting the truck. It was drivable, though it stank like a firecracker, and most of the gauges weren’t working.

“Probably leaking everything everywhere, too,” Isaac said, shining his flashlight under it. “Got oil and radiator, at least, dripping, and a couple things I ain’t sure of. But if we top up the oil and drive it home slow and careful, we can probably get it there. Think we got gas leaking?”

Howard sniffed. “I don’t smell any—just the sulfur from those bombs.”

Lenya told them no charge, rain check, and she’d take care of paying Michiko. “Reminds me when I’m still one of the girls, back in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had me a real good customer, one day he goes out, turns on his car, boom, he’s not a good customer no more. I even gone to his funeral and cried, especially when I seen he had a pretty wife and a bunch of kids. Never did heard what that was all about. You boys ain’t have no enemies?”

“Just bums going after the recyclables,” Isaac said.

“There’s a bum in my recycling cart this afternoon. I chase him away. He tells me God loved me anyway.”

“I doubt it was him,” Howard said.

As they drove through town, keeping it to about fifteen miles per hour from fear of the gas tank and because of the shattered windshield, Isaac said, “You know, old Lenya will still be feeling generous about that rain check tonight, but she might not in a week. It’s only about three miles, we could walk back in an hour. I say we park this thing, walk on in, let Lenya spoil us, and maybe catch the last of Game Seven and have us a steak at Mary’s. Hitch a ride or take a cab after. It’s been a day.”

“Me too, on everything,” Howard said.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NEAR THE BOUNDARY OF JAMMU WITH AKSAI CHIN. DISPUTED TERRITORY CLAIMED BY CHINA. INDIA, PAKISTAN. AND KASHMIRI SEPARATISTS. JUST BEFORE DAWN. LOCALLY. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

“Green Leader, Green Flight is authorized to cross over into Aksai Chin. The American satellites have laid you an intercept course at 321 degrees 9 minutes; we’re relaying it to your computer now—”

The flight leader passed orders to the other three planes in his flight. “Looks like we’re cleared to go get them.”

“How was it authorized so quickly?” Green Two, the pilot of one of the two fighters in the flight, asked.

Normally the flight leader would have reprimanded the excess chatter, but he was excited and nervous himself. “They told me the Americans told—not asked—Beijing and Islamabad to let us do this.”

The four Sukhoi jets of Green Flight flew on, high above the spectacular, deadly wastelands: the Aksai Chin, a flat, featureless saline desert surrounded by the high Himalayas. It could be reached by road for less than half the year, was more than three miles high with almost no rainfall, and offered death by thirst, starvation, or exposure at all times of year; three nations and one liberation movement claimed it, but not one of them would have expended a single life to maintain the claim.

China patrolled there more often than the other nations, but today India was there first with the requested flight of two fighters and two fast reconnaissance planes to the target. Swift agreement by all parties that this was strictly a favor to the Americans and reflected nothing else had been enabled by their shared perception that the United States was about to go utterly berserk.

Dawn overtook Green Flight. The old silver Sukhois glinted with steely fire in the abrupt daylight, and the missile pods on two of them, camera package on the third, and radar/communications boom on the leader stood out like diagrams of themselves.

“I have it on radar,” the flight leader reported. “Confirming orders: We are to secure as many photographs as feasible, while repeatedly warning them; if we are defied, or not answered, we are to shoot them down at the last feasible prudent time.”

“Those orders are confirmed, Green Leader.”

Feasible prudent time. I suppose it wouldn’t be prudent if it weren’t feasible, and maybe vice versa. Green Leader shrugged the thought off; the phrase was obviously just cover for his superiors if anything went wrong.

The high peaks off to their east dazzled them like monster flashbulbs as the morning sun found angles from glaciers and snowfields into the pilots’ eyes. Long, deep shadows extended across the salt plain below, crawling visibly back toward the mountains in the first moment of dawn. In late October, the mountains were piled high and deep with snow; they would have been snowcapped even in July, but for practical purposes that inaccessible, high, far land below them had been in winter for more than a month.

Coordinating with an American satellite operator, two of their own radar operators, and what must be an American observer relaying information from a Chinese or Pakistani radar, they moved in on the target. “Green Leader, this is Green Three.” That was the camera plane. “I have him on visual, Green Leader, proceeding to close with him.”

They turned to follow Three and then they all saw it: a white 737 flying at what must be about its max cruising altitude, gleaming white in the morning sun. In moments they had closed with the white plane and were circling it in the air like American Indians around a covered wagon in one of their old Westerns. The 737 neither deviated from its course nor answered any radio hails, though there was a soft hiss in one distress channel.

“Green Three, do you have a clear photo of that tail?”

“Several. Yes, and in close, you can clearly see that it used to display a red Lion Airways logo, under that runny, patchy paint. I’m going in close to see if I can see anyone in the cockpit and perhaps photograph them.”

“I’ll follow you in for a look, myself.”

After two passes, and with just thirty kilometers left in authorized airspace, Green One and Three had seen no evidence of life; the 737 continued to fly on a constant heading and altitude. Nothing moved in any window. The recon planes backed off to observe.

“Green Two and Green Four, we’re clear now. You are authorized to close in and fire at will.”

Two and Four accelerated past them, taking up positions at an angle behind the white airliner. R-73s lashed out in long white streaks. Two’s rocket blew the port engine to fiery bits, and the wing fell away; as the airliner tipped, the second R-73 tailpiped the remaining engine, stripping off the starboard wing. The airliner’s fuselage tumbled wildly downward, end over end; the rest of Green Flight circled while Green Three descended for better pictures of the impact.

The fuselage slammed into the gray-white, stony ground and vanished in a great blob of white-hot flame. Green Three peeled away; a collision with wreckage thrown into the sky might have doomed him to crash into the nightmare void of the desert below.

“Did you get spectroscopy, Green Three?” Green Leader asked.

“The instruments say we’ve got everything we’re supposed to get. That was quite an explosion. I wonder what they had on board?”

“They’ll know when they analyze your recordings, but you know they’ll never tell us. All right, let’s head for home, we have a storm coming, and I don’t want to be here when it hits.” They wheeled and headed for home, four contrails tipped with silver spearheads; with nothing but itself to burn, the wreckage burned briefly, smoldered a little longer, and was as bitter cold as everything around it before noon.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 5:09 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

When Jason reached to knock on the door of Room 215, it opened. Suburban dad-type, knit polo shirt, cheapie chinos, penny-for-the-love-of-god loafers. “Hi, I’m Zach. I’d rather not be too close to what you have there, so I’m going to prop this door open”—he did—“and walk over to the Denny’s across the street. I’ll be having coffee at the counter. My stuff’s already in the car so here’s the key to the room.” He tossed the card onto the bed. “Are you carrying anything plastic you need to keep?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, my stuff ferments flexible plastic, loves beverage bottles but really any plastic, semiaerobic so you kill it with bleach or peroxide. There’s three gallon jugs of peroxide on the table—pour it over any surface you need to touch before you handle any of your plastic.”

“My stuff makes nitric acid wherever there’s a fluctuating electromagnetic field, and powers off a temperature gradient,” Jason said. “Strong alkali, like lye, shuts it down temporarily and neutralizes the acid.”

“Thanks! Why don’t you walk out, and then I’ll walk in?”

“It’s a deal.” Jason stepped back to let Zach walk past the door and out into the sunlight. He was obviously careful not to step anywhere near where Jason had stood.

Not worrying about the Holiday Inn’s carpets since they’d never have time to bill Zach before Daybreak took hold, Jason poured peroxide over a big patch of the carpet, and followed up by sprinkling Liquid-Plumr there. He set his pack in the center, disinfected it, and gave it some more Liquid-Plumr, splashed more of the nasty chemicals onto his gloved hands and onto the plastic bags that had held his laptop and change of clothes.

With water from the faucet in a glass he had just removed from the hotel paper wrapper (SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION), Jason rinsed his sealed plastic bags, including the one with the laptop. He stripped and threw his clothes and shoes on the bed, helping the maid to scatter more of his nanospawn and Zach’s biotes.

After the long day, he took longer in the hot shower than he’d meant to—might as well enjoy the Big System one last time.

When at last Jason walked across the parking lot to Denny’s, the air tasted sweet and clean. Still an hour of daylight left? He reached for his watch before he remembered it had already died. Good fucking riddance. He was whistling “Natural Mountain Man” as he sprinted across the street.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 7:00 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“So the Indian Air Force had good remote sensing?” Cameron asked.

The Air Force liaison said, “As good as ours—it’s the same gear, we sold it to them, and they know what to do with it. So yeah, we can count on this result. The spectroscope was consistent with light hydrocarbons—at a guess, that would be a largish tank of propane in the plane’s body, maybe juiced with a few cylinders of aviation oxygen. We think the pilot and crew probably parachuted somewhere over wild country not long after they dropped the bodies in Thailand; jumping into a jungle would be a lot better than riding the plane through the operation.”

“How did they know we’d get it together fast enough to shoot down the 737?”

“They didn’t have to. A big white airliner with two engines crashing anywhere in that part of the world would just have been one more good decoy.” Nancy Telabanian sat back, folding her arms around herself. “Because the Indian pilots are good and know their business, we can be pretty sure about three important facts: It’s almost certainly the Lion Airways plane stolen from Sentani, with its tail repainted; it’s consistent with being the plane that dropped the bodies of Samuelson’s three key liaisons into the market square in Thailand; and it was unmanned by the time we shot it down. And it couldn’t possibly have been a Dreamliner. So Air Force Two is still somewhere, and the blow is going to fall… somewhere.”

Marshall—whoever or whatever his official job and title were, he seemed to be the one in charge of getting useful graphics up in a short period of time—spoke over the loudspeaker. “Per your request, Mr. Nguyen-Peters, we’ve got a graph to show estimated arrival times on the West Coast and other locations. Shall I put it up on the main screen?”

“Yes,” Cam said, “I think you’d better.”

The map of the eastern Pacific, and western North America, could not have been clearer; it showed the ocean as black, areas where the 787 could already have hit as red, and areas still safe as aqua. Hawaii and coastal Alaska from the Bering Sea almost to the panhandle were red. So far the West Coast was aqua. But a tongue of red crept down toward Juneau, inexorably south, like a glacier of fire and blood, widening as it went.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RAPID CITY. SOUTH DAKOTA. 5:04 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Marshalene still had half a tank and a full charge, but she’d had way too much liquid, and besides, she was bored. She liked truck stops because they always had a lot of silly junk that she could buy, and show to people to show them how she was kind of above it all, but not like being all superior, just she knew this stuff was junk and some people bought it for real.

It was dinner time and the café smelled good with all the white-trash cookin’, and she decided she could stand country music for some good meatloaf and pie. Besides, the lot had been so crowded, she teased herself, that she’d had to walk all the way here from where she’d parked, almost back by the highway.

The booth felt good and there were three cheesy bobbleheads and a couple cool T-shirts to linger about buying, so it was almost an hour before she got back on the road. Meanwhile, the wind under the Prius shifted, and nanoswarm blew across the parking lot and on into Rapid City itself; more than a hundred more trucks, bound all over the northern United States, were infected, along with four big transporters hauling wind-generator blades to Fort Collins, a Gray Liner bound for Winnipeg, and seven diesel-electric locomotives, three headed into the DME system and four for the old Great Northern. Within twenty-four hours, nanoswarm from Marshalene’s Prius would spread from Manitoba to northern California and Vancouver to Little Rock. It so happened that Jason’s eggs were among the most efficient ones out there, producing some of the fastest-reproducing nanoswarm, and Jason had been right all along; Marshalene’s car was perfect for the job. In any evolutionary system, tiny advantages become gigantic population shifts; it was nothing more than that.

^{ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. ABOVE ANGEL STADIUM. ANAHEIM. CALIFORNIA. 4:20 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Well, I guess I’m seeing the World Series, after all, Greg Redmond thought, circling Anaheim at forty-three thousand feet, all the higher the old A-10 could go. What he’d been told back in Arizona, while the ground crews ran around madly, was enough to scare the shit out of any sensible man with a wife and three small kids—phrases like get there ASAP, you’re already late, vitally important to obey all orders at once, and the single scariest phrase in the military lexicon: This is not a drill.

The Navy had the front line. Somewhere far out over the horizon, F-18 Super Hornets out of North Island NAS and LeMoore were scouting up and down the coast, using the hastily-given tactical callsign “Noseguard.” They were highly capable planes, each carrying more-than-good radar and a full array of long-range and visual-range missiles, but there weren’t many of them. Still, if the enemy designated “Bad Dreamliner” happened to come in through any of the territory the Super Hornets were covering, they had the tools for the job.

That was the scariest part. The CO had told them that there was “Unlimited authorization to destroy that plane.”

Greg’s buddy Nate had said, “Sir, I’m not clear. Unlimited authorization means—”

“Unlimited authorization means unlimited. Nothing is off-limits as long as that 787 gets destroyed before it can get to where it’s going. Use the Sidewinders, use the big gun, hell, use the Mavericks or ram the sonofabitch if you have to.” Greg had swallowed hard; the Mavericks were used to take out tanks, and it did not sound like the CO was kidding about ramming, either. “Everybody who is out on this mission—and they have called out everybody—is carrying the full suite of weapons. They are there for you to use. Of course, avoid collateral damage if you can, but if you can’t—destroy Bad Dreamliner. There’s no such thing as exceeding this order. Clear?”

And all the Hog Drivers on the bench had nodded, and said, yes, yes, sir, clear.

Greg wondered if everyone remembered what he did. Not about his own plane, but about some of the others. Some Super Hornets, on a stop-at-all-cost mission, might be carrying nukes. Whatever was on that thing had to be a nightmare.

Behind the Noseguards, in the middle range, from just over the horizon to perhaps eighty miles out at sea, were the Tackles—the main interception force, still being gathered from a dozen air bases. Land-based Navy and Marine F-35s out of North Island, with their extra fuel and longer patrol times, were already flying search patterns up and down the coast; Air Force F-35s and F-22s out of Holloman AFB in New Mexico were arriving and joining them. The fence was getting thicker, but it still had holes.

Along the coast, where the public could see them, the Halfbacks were just getting organized. So far the Arizona Air National Guard had just come in, flying F-22s and even old F-16s that Redmond’s grandfather might have flown in one of Reagan’s little wars. Redmond laughed privately; most of the F-16s were younger than his own A-10, but “old” in a fighter was different from old in an attack bomber, kind of like a gymnast versus a golfer. The Halfback part of the defense would grow thicker as more ANG fighters arrived from New Mexico, and extend farther north as the California Air Guard’s fighters, up in Fresno, got into the air and spread out.

The colonel had said, unofficially, that the A-10s almost weren’t invited to the party. They were a close-air-support plane, intended to attack targets on the ground, and slower than the Dreamliner. But with the whole West Coast littered with potential good targets for attack, and minimal prep time, they needed Fullbacks, planes patrolling around any likely target—such as Game Seven of the World Series here in Anaheim—and the A-10 was meant to loiter: circle a battlefield slowly, waiting to be called into action.

It wasn’t yet dark down below, but they were turning the stadium lights on. He took another slow wide turn over Anaheim, nursing the fuel, and wished he’d hear that the Bad Dreamliner had been picked up and nailed. It would be nice to be headed home.

As he made a turn, he saw something out of the corner of his eye; in the setting sun, there was a black dot. He talked to his controller, got cleared to investigate, and came around, descending gently and dropping down almost to stall speed for a better look. The low late-afternoon sun made the black sphere much more visible; a stray radiosonde balloon, floating along at about twenty-two thousand feet, one of the two-meter ones that you could buy from any scientific supply house, but with no instrument package.

Redmond made a report; it gave him something to do. In return, the controller informed him that the Pirates had just finished batting without having gotten a man on base.

He banked around and saw that the stadium lights were clearly visible; potentially a great target for the terrorists.

Against the red glow of sunset, he spotted three more dots, and called it in. “I think we’ve got somebody out there launching balloons for fun,” he said. “Anybody in Japan who doesn’t know the war’s over?”

“I’ll kick it upstairs,” his controller said. “You never know what’s significant. Thanks for the word on the balloons, Fullback Fourteen.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Greg thought he might have seen a dot move abruptly, but when he looked it was gone. Probably just popped. Lord, let that be the most violent thing I see on this trip.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 7:55 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Visualized as a fan of great circle trajectories, the West Coast reached toward Jayapura like a vast splayed hand, with parts of the coast as much as forty minutes closer than others. But which extended finger would the viper strike?

Alaska continued to glow red; nothing happened there. A new red blob popped up in Coos Bay, Oregon, but no blow fell.

The red cancer had spread out from Coos Bay for a few minutes until Vancouver, BC, had become another possible center of attack; in a few minutes the two red blotches had joined and begun to sweep down the coast and inland. Nothing hit; probably the enemy was not aiming at Seattle or Portland. In the Northwest, the red area moved inland in a sharp curve. A long red finger from the northwest blob reached down the coast, nearing San Francisco.

No 787 appeared on any radar, on any ship, plane, or ground station. High-altitude satellites might have seen something, but if so, it had not yet emerged from the analysis; even the NSA’s quantum computers couldn’t instantly scan the imaging from so many millions of square miles for something that would fit into one city block. A couple of low-altitude satellites would pass over soon; maybe they’d have better luck.

No calls came in about explosions, planes crashing, planes where there should be no planes; nothing. Perhaps they were taking some longer way round, had found a hole in the defenses or were planning to make one?

The big red patch in the Northwest grew, and its finger slid down over the Bay Area and thickened into a wedge, and nothing happened.

In the safe aqua zone, Newport Beach, California, well down the south coast, blossomed red, another victim of geometry that made it stick out from a great circle perspective centered on Jayapura.

The new red blotch spread rapidly, engulfing Irvine, reaching toward San Diego, as the older, bigger malignancy crawled into the northern suburbs of LA. The whole American/Canadian coast would be solid red in another minute.

There were down spots in the Mexican radar fence, but the holes were temporary problem spots, not where anyone—

Check that assumption. Heather typed a quick note and posted it in general discussion: Some radars down in Mexico. NE1 chkd Y? &when?

About five seconds later she saw MISO from Cam—his personal abbreviation for “make it so.” Shortly after that, a note came in from someone at Homeland Security, saying DoD was getting an answer through their liaison with the ministerio del ejército in Ciudad de México.

Ejército, the Army? Why not Defense? Heather clicked up a footnote. Technically Mexico has no Defense Department: Army and Navy are separate, the Air Force is part of the Army, and so the Mexican official with the most defense radars under his control is the Minister for the Army. Pretty much the same setup as we had in the United States around 1940; but unlike us, the Mexicans haven’t had a lot of wars lately. Mostly because we’ve been behaving our asses, sorta, comparatively anyway.

Heather looked up. The West Coast was bright red from Bellingham to San Diego. Red was now spilling down Baja, spreading east over the deserts and mountains, and racing around the northern head of the Gulf of California. She was holding her breath, as if somehow she could hear a shot or an explosion from here.

A note popped up on her screen to say that the Mexican Army should soon have a complete report on the radars that were down. So far all reports were of people not getting the word to defer scheduled downtime; more pale green curves popped up along the west side of Baja.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NEAR GUERRERO NEGRO. OFF THE PACIFIC COAST OF BAJA CALIFORNIA. 5:15 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

At first, Samuelson hadn’t even been sure that the dark area coming over the horizon was land, but now below him, it was not just land, but a place he knew. From the air, the Bay of Sebastian Vizcaino has a distinct hooked-curve shape that is easy to pick out, and because buildable land is scarce along its shores, the town of Guerrero Negro sits in a distinct, unusual position north of and above the bay. Just south, the Baja Highway cuts away from the Pacific to the Sea of Cortez. Guerrero Negro is a major ecotourist jumping-off point for whale watching and for the Vizcaino Desert Biosphere Reserve. Samuelson had passed through a dozen times in his twenties and a few since then with Kim, especially during the early, traveling years of their marriage.

Now I know exactly where I am, Samuelson thought, and they don’t know I do. I just need to figure out how to use that.

The plane began a steep descent; the pilot said something over the loudspeaker, but Samuelson’s tourist-Arabic from thirty years ago wasn’t adequate to make out what.

They leveled off at low altitude, flying down a canyon toward the Gulf of California. They must be—

The hand on his shoulder made him jump. “Time to make your statement.”

“That is impossible,” he said. “I cannot betray—”

The man punched him, in the face, hard enough to numb it. He hit Samuelson again, drew back his fist and looked into his eyes, waited for the vice president to realize what was happening.

He hit him again, much harder. “You must make your statement now.”

“I will not,” Samuelson said, “and you can’t make me.”

Those are the rules, where they come from. When anyone offers you anything, or asks for anything, refuse twice, accept on the third. Basic negotiation principle: Behave in a way that the other side is at home with.

He thought about that while they held him up and beat his ribs sore, leaving him coughing and unable to wipe the tears and mucus from his face.

When Samuelson had caught his breath, the man said, again, “Now, your statement.”

“What must be in the statement?” Samuelson asked.

They dickered and haggled. Samuelson insisted that he did not want to read the official statement because it dishonored himself and his nation. He pleaded with them—couldn’t he make his last words his own, and speak the way he always did to American audiences, wouldn’t that be more believable? And could he please begin by saying farewell to his wife? Well, because a man can be in love, can’t he?

One of his best negotiations in a life of negotiations. He had nothing to offer, and everything to gain, and the other side did not realize that he got everything he wanted.

When they had agreed, he was permitted a quick trip to the bathroom. Two guards watched him while he took a dump; did they expect him to hang himself in the toilet paper or pull a concealed machine gun from the electric shaver?

Face freshly washed. Calm. Ready.

The little light glowed on their camera. Here goes. “My fellow Americans, by the time most of you see this, I will be dead, because the men sitting just a few feet from me are planning to kill me, along with themselves. They demanded that I make a statement, which they are sending out in some kind of live webcast via cellular broadband, I’m afraid I don’t understand the technical details, but apparently they fear that we may be fired on before they can transmit a recording. So, they tell me, I am speaking to you, right now, live, in streaming video, and this is going out over the web, and they’ve notified millions of media outlets and bloggers and so on to record it; I’m sure many of them will broadcast it.

“First let me just say, Kim—my wife, my one and only love ever—I love you as much as I did on our honeymoon in Guerrero Negro, when we hiked the canyons to the north and sailed up the Gulf of California, if—”

A rough hand grasped his hair. Someone shouted. He tried to jab his handcuffed hands upward into the crotch of the man holding him, but other hands pushed them down, so he tried to turn and bite the man’s leg, but his head was held too tight. A knife pressed against his throat. Well, I tried.

The pressure slackened. His head was released. He saw that they were pointing the camera at the one who had been pressing the knife to his neck.

The man seemed to shake off the murderous rage as if it had never been, and handed the knife to one of his friends. The cameraman counted down, three, two, one, and the active-light went on. The man said, “We had hoped to present an honest—”

Samuelson screamed, “Bullshit! What’s in those barrels? What’s in those barrels?” as they yanked him around, trying to reach his mouth while he bucked and curled away from them.

He screamed, Barrels on this plane! twice more, and Bullshit! just as he got an elbow into someone’s balls. One of them shoved a fist into his mouth.

He tried to bite the fist, hurting his jaw but getting no real grip, and then they forced something into his mouth; he was retching and couldn’t breathe. He badly wanted to drift down into the darkness and pain, but he wanted more to see how all this came out.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 5:20 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Ysabel jumped when her phone rang. She grabbed it and said, “Yeah?”

“It’s time. Do it.” The connection went dead.

She couldn’t quite place the accent but that was okay, too, she knew this was an international effort. It seemed strange that it wasn’t a Spanish accent, though.

Oh, well. She jumped up, peed quickly, put her purse by the door, looked around to make sure there was nothing else for her to forget. She reminded herself again to drop the cheapie convenience-store cell phone in some place where it was likely to be stolen.

Then she sat down and worked the Stinger gadget. Really, this wasn’t as hard as most video games. She tabbed over to the button that said, ARM ON LOCK, clicked on it, and typed the password—DAYBREAK, of course.

A red message flashed Missile will arm when target acquired.

She’d practiced acquiring the target all afternoon; she just slid the crosshairs across the television screen, using the little thumbwheel controls, till the red glow told her it had found the diesel exhaust (imagine the jackass nerve of those Border Patrol assholes, dumping diesel exhaust right out above a city, of all things!)

She pushed the key combination, and jumped at the roar of the Stinger’s exhaust against the roof, a couple of feet above her ceiling. On the screen, the thread of smoke ended in a ball of fire under the aerostat.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:30 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“That’s not where we had our honeymoon,” a soft voice said. Heather thought, That must be Kim Samuelson, when did they bring—

On the screen, John Samuelson’s head was grabbed and a knife went to his throat; after a burst of shouting and a wildly swinging camera, the screen went dark.

Lenny Plekhanov, reading NSA feed, said, “We’ve got the cell-phone towers they relayed through—east coast of Baja—”

A young Asian woman said, “Confirmed, we have that tower’s location, thanks, and an angle on them. North and east of Guerrero Negro, latitude—”

A message flashed up on Heather’s screen; she looked down and said, loud enough so people could hear, “E-bomb attack on the Mexican Navy’s Guerrero Negro station about forty minutes ago. Took out radio, cell phone, and the local landline station, along with the radars on the frigate and cutter in port, and at the airport. Several visual sightings of a big white plane.”

The young Asian woman added, “Alerts out to ICE, Air Force, Air Guard, Navy, all the—shit. Yuma aerostat radar is out, and—Air Force says hostile action.”

On the screen, one big green curve across the Gulf of California blanked out; the remaining green curves peeled back like the cross section of a bullet hole.

“Either that’s the way they’re coming, or that’s the diversion,” Garren said. “We’ll—”

“They’ve killed him, you know. Or they will any minute. Shoot that plane down.” Roger Pendano looked haggard and sad.

Did he even realize that he’d given the order for that almost an hour ago? Or that the operation isn’t being commanded here anymore? Heather was afraid she might find out.

The silence went well beyond awkward before Garren said, “We are working on that, sir.”

Pendano sank into his chair, hands on his head; he didn’t move as everything else went on around him.

^{ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. CLAY SPUR. WYOMING. 6:45 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Jason’s Goo-22 search had found an all-organic restaurant about an hour away, on a route that would take them back to I-25 eventually, so they headed east and south. “We’ll miss being able to find places like this so easily,” Jason said, as they pulled into the gravel parking lot, “but on the other hand, instead of having these little islands of spiritual meaning in an ocean of Big System, we’ll all make meaning where we are, till the whole world will have spiritual meaning.”

“Spiritual?”

Jason shrugged. “There’s more to spirit than just God.”

Once seated, with a big pot of coffee for the table to share, and a big meal ordered for each of them, Jason sighed. “It feels good not to be driving; thanks for giving me a ride clear back to Raton. The mountains are beautiful and the challenge is fun, but after a while, dude, it’s all ‘hand on the throttle, eye on the rail.’”

“Back to the spiritual already.”

“A bunch of us at the commune like to play traditional stuff, and traditional includes gospel. No offense, but when I’m singing ‘You Got to Walk with Your Lord Every Step,’ it doesn’t mean I believe what I’m singing.”

Zach grinned. “You look way too much like one of the original disciples to be a current one.”

Jason nearly shot the coffee through his nose, and said, “I thought Christian types were supposed to try to convert people and didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it.”

“That’s another outfit. They get all the…” Zach froze, staring.

When Jason turned, the television over the bar showed flat Gothic letters, blue on yellow: ATTACK IN THE DESERT. SPECIAL REPORT.

One of the waitresses, braids and big skirt flying, ran to the TV and turned the volume all the way up.

“—joining us, again, the plane carrying Vice President Samuelson on a confidential diplomatic mission was seized earlier today, and government sources confirm that the streaming video webcast that appeared about forty minutes ago was not a hoax. Here’s a clip of that webcast; we apologize for the poor quality of the video and remind you he was being held prisoner and threatened. You may want to take small children out of the room.”

Samuelson’s image appeared, too big, too grainy, and with the color uncorrected. They watched him speak the plane’s position, the terrorists wrestling him, the knife at his neck, Samuelson dragged off camera. The network helpfully supplied subtitles so that they knew someone had shouted in Arabic not to kill Samuelson on camera, and “read our statement, read it now, we may have no time,” over the sound of the vice president shouting Bullshit! and Barrels on the plane!, and that the thuds off camera must mean he was being beaten.

An announcer cut off Samuelson’s scream of Bullshit! “We’re taking you right away to live coverage from our San Diego affiliate where—excuse me, I’m not sure—” The man listened intently to his earpiece. “Should I?”

“That’s some last words,” Zach said.

Jason nodded. “How many vice presidents ever say anything that close to the truth?”

The announcer said, “We are going direct to live video from the traffic reporting plane from our network affiliate in San Diego. We have—”

A blink in the feed cut the anchor off; the picture stabilized into a military jet streaking across the blue sky, seen from beneath and behind.

“That’s an A-10,” Zach commented. “I built a model of that when I was a kid. Weird. It’s a ground-attack plane, basically a tank-buster, not a fighter. Maybe something is going on on the ground?”

The camera angle widened to show four streaking contrails around the A-10, then rotated down to include the empty, ridge-scarred desert below. Sound resumed: “—believe are US Air Force A-10 attack planes en route to intercept a terrorist attack aimed somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, which is apparently being delivered via the hijacked Air Force Two—the plane carrying Vice President John Samuelson. For those of you who just joined us—”

“Television is the medium for people who just got here,” Jason said.

Zach nodded. “That’s why children love it.” The planes flew on, parallel white streaks in the blue sky, two of them big enough to show as glints of metal. The voice-over commentator began to go through it all again. Very softly, he added, “And why we need Daybreak.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 5:42 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Ysabel plunged down the stairs just slow enough to be silent; above her, she could hear Neil’s high old voice, like an unhappy child, over and over, asking if anyone knew what that sound was, and didn’t they smell smoke?

She popped through the ground-floor fire exit and walked quickly across the street, making herself not look back.

Stunned, exhilarated, scared, she held her cell phone to her ear and walked along the busy street, saying “unh-hunh, unh-hunh, yeah you’re right.” At the corner pay phone, she let herself look up and see the people staring over her head and behind her. Just like acting class back at the community college, “acting is re-acting,” nothing hard here.

She turned and gawped like everyone else. The aerostat was sinking slowly, a tangle of junk hanging from it, but it didn’t look like the diesel fuel had caught fire; good, less chance that anyone would be hurt. The Stinger had torn some big holes in the lower, air-filled part (to judge by the flapping bits of fabric) and small holes in the upper, helium-filled part (to judge by the way it was sinking).

Aaron had explained about the upper and lower parts, and it had been one of the few things he said about the aerostat that she could follow. She liked the way he tried so hard to be non-condescending and non-technical for her. That and his Latin-poet eyes.

Ysabel pictured campesino families, desperate for work, over the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. They would see the big balloon that had always been like a Yankee fist in their face sinking like a bad dream. She imagined them packing their few treasures from the old village and heading north tonight. Her face was aching for a chance to grin, but she kept it slack as she slumped heavily against the pay phone’s metal hood and slid her phone onto the little metal shelf. Someone looking to make a pay-phone call would be happy to find a prepaid cell phone with no security on it.

The aerostat sank faster in the late-afternoon sun. More people stopped to stare, point, and yell. Time to go.

^{ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:50 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“How the fuck did a local TV station plane get that close without permission?” Garren demanded.

I think a man can be allowed an f-bomb under the circumstances, Heather thought.

The radar balloon shot down in Yuma had pulled a whole flock of Air Force and ANG fighters too far west, and they were now out of the chase. Nonetheless, now we’ve got him. A Global Hawk had picked up the 787 as it flew northward, hopping over ridges in the empty desert east of San Diego and just north of the border—an area slashed by ridges and draws with no more apparent pattern than the folds in a crumpled sheet of newspaper, striped and blobbed in green and brown brush. Smart choice of approach, she thought, but we got you anyway. In the last few minutes they’d been able to pull Fullbacks, the A-10 Warthogs, off point defenses south of LA and send them on interception courses.

The A-10s wouldn’t have been as fast as the Dreamliner at high altitude in a straight-line chase, but the airliner was flying low and slow and zigzagging among the ridges, and they’d be able to dive on it. One of the Warthogs might well be first to the kill.

If Bad Dreamliner somehow dodged through the closing arc of A-10s, there were other chances. CVN 76 Ronald Reagan, just off North Island, had already catapulted two Super Hornets, which could overtake the 787 in a stern chase before it reached LA. Three Marine F-35s that had been returning to North Island had enough fuel to divert to intercept as well, and a flight of Utah ANG F-22s would be able to intercept just south of Long Beach, if Air Force Two somehow got that far.

Someone was going to shoot down that plane. She hoped Samuelson wasn’t still alive.

“They’ve got an interception vector for an A-10,” one of the DoD people announced. “First shot in about four minutes. Less than a minute after that we’ll have a window for an F-18 to put an AMRAAM on his tail. If he’s headed for somewhere around LA—and it looks like he is—we get at least five good tries to bring him down, plus three long shots.”

Kim Samuelson was talking with President Pendano, their arms around each other as if they were already at the funeral.

Cam spoke beside her. “Do you have Jim Browder on the line, Heather? Urgent question for him.”

“I’ve got him standing by on secure IM.” She typed, Phn me, encrypt #.

Her phone rang; she docked it in her terminal, set it for Record, Transcribe, and Speakerphone, and said, “Jim. Mr. Nguyen-Peters of Homeland Security has a question for you. Cam, Jim is fully briefed per your instructions.”

“Good. Dr. Browder, the vice president yelled ‘barrels on the plane’ three times. We’re about to shoot it down over uninhabited desert, almost nothing human downwind for hundreds of miles. Is there anything that they could have put on it that will cause massive problems if we just blow the plane up? Anything that will be made worse if it burns?”

“Probably not in uninhabited desert,” Browder said. “Planes burn hot. Fire should kill any weaponized germs or toxins we know about. Most nerve gases are destroyed by flame and heat, except maybe Novichok-5, which hasn’t been seen since the 1990s and it’s possible the formula is lost. Depending on which ex-Soviet scientist was telling you which self-serving mixture of lies and truth, that stuff might or might not have been heat resistant, but its chemical cousins are not. So I don’t think you have to worry about anything chemical or biological.”

“Nuclear? Radiological?”

“Nukes require very complex moving parts to work exactly right very, very fast. They’re the last thing in the world that you could set off by just whacking them or burning them. So if it was gas, germs, or nukes, they were planning to pull the trigger or open the nozzle before crashing the plane, and shooting it down in the desert should take care of it.”

“That leaves radiological.”

“Yeah. If the drums contained flammable radiological material, of course, that doesn’t stop being radioactive when it burns, and burning it might spread it around more. Either something like tritinated hydrocarbons or something like radiosodium might be kept in barrels. But I don’t think it’s likely; the physics is all wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“The flight time is too long,” Browder explained. “The shorter the half-life, the stronger the radiation. If they used something with a short-enough half-life to be quickly, immediately deadly, that’s going to be a half-life of hours rather than weeks or years. They’ve been on that plane for close to fifteen hours with it, and short-half-life radioactives are too energetic for any shielding less than tons of lead to deal with. They’d all be dead of radiation poisoning.

“That rules out things like sodium-24, which I thought of at first because it’s the classic radiological weapon—real strong radioactivity and chemically super active, so it would burn its way right into the body and would catch fire easily and be hard to put out. That’s why they store sodium in barrels, immersed in oil so it doesn’t spontaneously combust from the air around it. But the reason sodium-24 has been talked about as a fallout enhancer is because you make it by putting ordinary sodium in a strong neutron flux, like around a hydrogen bomb or in a nuclear reactor. Even if they made it in a reactor the day before they seized Air Force Two, and loaded it right on, it would be mostly gone now—and would have killed them in the early hours of the flight.

“The other family of radiological weapons is long-half-life stuff that isn’t very strong radioactively, and it could be on that plane—say tritinated methanol, methanol with superheavy hydrogen substituted for the ordinary hydrogen. If that burned it would put radioactive water into the air—but because it’s comparatively feeble, it’s purely a scare weapon, years or more likely decades before people would get sick from it, and you’d treat inhalation with lots of water and diuretics, it could be flushed out fast before it hurt most people. And on top of that, a long half-life means a small cross section of neutron absorption—”

Cam held his hands up in self-defense. “Whoa. I only got through one year of college physics.”

Browder closed in for the kill. “The cross-section for neutron absorption is closely related to how easy it is to make something radioactive. The weak stuff, that would last a long time and wouldn’t kill them while they flew here, is much more difficult and expensive to make than the strong stuff, which wouldn’t last all the way here and would already have killed them. So, the only things they could deliver on a flight that long are pretty mild and expensive and difficult to make. If it was any of the really bad kill-you-right-now stuff, it would already have killed them. If they are using the weak stuff, it’s mostly just a scare tactic, not something you really have to worry about; you need a good PR campaign, is all.”

Heather rolled her eyes; leave it to the science guy to think that all you had to do was explain things calmly and rationally, and everything would be fine.

Browder added, “But in case there’s something I didn’t think of, definitely warn the pilots not to fly through any plume of smoke after the crash, and if you can bring it down without blowing it all over, that might be extra safe. You probably don’t want the hero who saved us all to die of radiation poisoning next week.”

Cameron nodded infinitesimally. “Excellent. We’ll do that. Thank you, Dr. Browder, that’s what I needed.”

“Talk to you again soon, Jim.” Heather undocked her phone. When Cameron finished relaying Browder’s advice, she asked, “Wasn’t that really more of a question for someone at the Department of Energy? I mean, they’re the ones that build atom bombs and have all the physicists.”

“I wish,” Cameron said. “But there was no time—I’d’ve had to ask twenty of them and each one would have told me about one small detail. Your guy Browder used to be a science reporter, so he—”

“Fullback Fourteen will be on the target in thirty seconds,” Marshall said. “Going to feed from the Pentagon’s war room.”

The big screen wavered a moment and then they were looking southward across the mountainous desert through the cameras on the A-10. A tiny white bird shape just showed in a corner of the screen. The room was so quiet that they could hear the static in the link.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. THE DESERT BETWEEN SAN DIEGO AND ENGINEER SPRINGS. 5:57 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Greg Redmond didn’t have spare time or attention to be surprised when he heard, “Fullback Fourteen, you’ve got first shot.” His hands and feet mechanically did the necessary tasks as he listened. “Begin your attack immediately on sight. We have confirmed there are no civilian or military airliners anywhere in the vicinity. Investigative personnel have requested you bring it down with gunfire to preserve more evidence. Make one pass with the cannon, and if it’s still flying afterward, send both Sidewinders after it.”

“Roger.”

“We have also been warned that any plume, smoke, or flame from the plane should be considered extremely dangerous, and you are not to fly into it.”

“Roger. I have visual contact,” Redmond said.

Far below, Bad Dreamliner was coasting between two red-brown ridges spattered with deep green; in his head, Redmond was already solving the problem of coming in on it in a steep dive, figuring his pathway, and the old Hog was as familiar as his own body.

He banked, waited for his angle, and pushed the yoke forward to dive.

John Samuelson knew something was happening from the excited gabble. He’d been playing possum again, or just possibly he was actually dying because they had kicked his kidneys hard, over and over, and he might be hemorrhaging. Didn’t matter. He was awake with a chance to see it play out.

He flung himself hard sideways, rolling onto his back, and opened his eyes. Two of his captors jumped at him. He screamed into his gag, and cocked his feet to kick at them.

A row of fist-sized holes appeared in the bulkhead above him.

We won. We did it. He had been so afraid this was the beginning of the dive onto the target.

But the home team had pulled this one out.

The two men approaching Samuelson fell backward, and he seemed to be weightless. The plane was flipping—perhaps it had lost a wing?

Samuelson looked down to see a gushing stump instead of his foot. No matter, he had no more walking to do, anyway. He left the deck and felt as if he were flying, still trying to shout, “We won!” through the gag.

When he hit the forward bulkhead, the pain in the back of his head was nauseating, and his neck felt all wrong. Maybe that was just disorientation from the spinning plane? He wasn’t sure where his tormentors had gone. He saw only carpet, a bolthead, and someone’s cell phone sliding around.

He shut his eyes and tried to take a deep breath. He couldn’t feel whether his lungs responded or not, so he just prayed. God, please take care of things from here on out. Please accept me, forgive all my foolishness and pride, and make sure Kim knows I loved her.

He gave up trying to breathe, and tried to smile, because he’d handed it off to higher authority, and it was all taken care of, but somehow his face wouldn’t—

Shock, heat, darkness.

^{ABOUT THREE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:02 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

The image on the big screen was live from a camera on an A-10 flying figure-8s upwind of the wreckage. Air Force Two had shed a wing and rolled when the Warthog’s big nose cannon, designed to pierce Russian tanks, had perforated a diagonal line across its body, down the wing root, and back across one engine. The 787 Dreamliner had corkscrewed against the mountainside like a missed football pass, breaking into a cloud of parts and flame as it bounced uphill. The long streak of blazing metal was now setting fire to the autumn-dry brush; ammunition and fuel cooking off made more bursts and explosions.

But there were also a half dozen hot yellow-white fires, as bright as flares, pouring dense white-gray smoke into the air. The heat of their burning punched wavery updrafts through the red flame and black smoke pouring out of the wreckage. As they watched, another one erupted, first with a burst of orange fire and black smoke, but almost instantly becoming another yellow-white flare pouring out the gray-white smoke.

“No need to repeat the order about staying out of the plume,” Lenny remarked, “if the pilots have half a brain.”

“We’ve got a specialty hazmat chopper from North Island on its way,” one of the controllers said, “and there’s a couple teams in trucks on their way as well. We’ve already started emergency evacuation of Engineer Springs—we were preparing that for the last twenty minutes, just in case. Not too much wind today, so they’ll have a half hour at least to clear people out of Engineer Springs, and they’re doing a reverse 911 to the few people that live out in the desert itself, and trying to backtrack everyone who’s used a cell phone in those areas in the last couple days in case of hikers or backpackers. We shouldn’t have too many people exposed to it.”

“But,” Cam said, “what the hell is it?”

A voice said, “Oh, no,” just as Heather looked back at the screen and saw a non-military plane pass right through the plume. It took her only a moment to realize that it had to be that traffic plane from the TV station; during that moment, the plane tumbled, then seemed to regain control. The little jet descended rapidly, lowering his landing flaps, as if trying to make an emergency landing—but there was nowhere good to land on a slope covered with desk-sized boulders and tangled brush. As it touched down, the plane flipped onto its back and burst into flames.

“Marshall, we need the last minute or so of that broadcast up,” Cam said.

“Got it.” The central screen flashed, scrambled, and re-congealed into a view of the burning remains of the 787 from much lower down. The audio feed came on with a feedback squeal—“try for a closer look at this amazing tragedy from—”

The camera angle began to wobble, and the voice screamed “Oh, god, oh, my eyes. My eyes!” Another voice screamed—the pilot, Heather thought. The screams became hideous, barking coughs, the camera wobbled wildly, the plane stabilized. He tried to land it, Heather realized, but he was blind and in horrible pain.

On the screen, a confusion of rocks, sand, and brush slammed up at the camera, the sky rolled through the screen, and the signal went out.

“Did that go out live?” Cam asked.

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

Heather had known him for fifteen years, and today was the first day she’d ever heard Cam use profanity. I guess he was saving it for when it really applied.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CLAY SPUR. WYOMING. 7:08 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Jason and Zach hurried across the dark, cold gravel of the parking lot like a couple of criminals. At least they weren’t conspicuous; half the people in the restaurant were fleeing to their warm safe cars, down the highway, back to the family or the lover.

Zach started the car and, with more obsessive care than ground crew checking out an Orion for liftoff, ran over the lights and controls. “Is your laptop IBIS-capable?”

“Yeah. I was getting broadband Internet just fine till we turned off 90.”

“Then let’s go 90 to 25 all the way to Raton. I’m scared. I want to know my family’s okay, because the country’s under attack and I don’t know what’s going on.” Zach sighed. “Now is that dumb, or what? I mean, we’re attacking the United States, aren’t we?”

“Well, the United States and the whole Big System,” Jason said. “But I know what you mean. I feel it myself—damn foreigners have no right to attack America; only us Americans should attack America.”

“Yeah.” He put the car in gear and turned out of the parking lot. “That—uh, that whole thing with Air Force Two, that couldn’t be—there was no way—”

“That can’t be Daybreak,” Jason said. “We all spent, like, forever talking collectively about what was in bounds and what wasn’t, and I saw a bunch of ideas shot down for being too—you know, terroristic.”

“Yeah, except, why did it happen right on the exact day of Daybreak? Did all of Daybreak get conned?”

Jason balanced a hand. “Maybe. Or maybe somebody infiltrated us and piggybacked onto Daybreak. I can’t imagine how it could all be coincidence.”

“Makes me sick.”

“Me too. God I hope it has nothing to do with Daybreak.”

On I-90, Jason unfolded his laptop and made the free connection to IBIS, the chain of wireless stations that ran down the median. “Good news,” Jason said. “About every fifth or sixth wireless transceiver is down.”

Zach raised a fist in ironic salute, and said, “What’s the news?”

“I’ll have it up in a sec. The first thing we need after starting Daybreak is Internet access. Seems like a great prank of God.”

“Not God,” Zach said, quietly. “Someone who is often mistaken for Him, I think.”

^{ABOUT FIVE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:15 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Something moved in Heather’s peripheral vision; a message from Browder had popped up:

Na: the chemical abbreviation for sodium. And Browder thought the mystery plume looked like smoke from burning sodium. She forwarded to Cameron right away, and a moment later her headset was live. “Heather, I’m patching through to Browder, and I’ve got four DoE guys and two hazmat people from EPA kibitzing in.”

“Right here and ready,” Heather said.

“All right, for the record, we have Browder and O’Grainne from Department of the Future; Caspar, Pellegrino, Murchison, and Oe from Department of Energy; and Smith and Svejk from EPA, and my iScribe is taking all this down. Very quick briefing: We’ve got air samples from the plumes, both the gray-white caustic one coming from the hot spots, and the black smoke from the main body of the burning fuselage. The gray-white caustic plume is almost pure disodium oxide dust, and the spectroscopic analysis on the bright yellow-white fires shows very bright lines for sodium and oxygen, so there’s no question that it’s burning sodium.

“However the disodium oxide is not at all radioactive—it’s sodium-23 with a trace of other isotopes, not radioactive sodium-24. This is consistent with Dr. Browder’s speculation that sodium was being carried on board as a radiological enhancer for a nuclear weapon, especially a fusion weapon, since they produce enough neutron flux to transmute several tons of sodium instantaneously. Any problems with my understanding of the science so far?”

“Oe, DoE.” It was an older man’s voice with that flat, clipped Californiamall accent that all the stars used to have. “We’ve always worried about sodium-24 more than any other enhancer because of its chemical activity and extreme radioactivity, and because with the short half-life, the more eco-conscious terrorists might feel better about using it, since the radioactive component goes down from pure to less than a part per million in about ten days.”

“Caspar, DoE. Concur. The only reason to be carrying that stuff was if they had a nuke on board they were planning to use; metallic sodium is hard to handle and dangerous to work with and there are much more effective ways to enhance a fire—powdered aluminum or magnesium would be way easier to handle and make ten times the mess, and besides, they were crashing an airliner, which is going to start a big fire anyway. So the only possible reason to go to all that expense, danger, and complexity was if they intended to convert it all to sodium-24 with a nuclear bomb.”

“Thank you,” Cam said. He sounded desperate. “And yet the other plume analysis shows no trace of any tritium or deuterium beyond ordinary background levels, no chemical traces of uranium or plutonium, and no unexpected radioactivity at all—the only radioactivity we’re getting is a very slight trace of americium, which is almost certainly from the on-board smoke detectors. Any further speculation in light of that? I confess I’m baffled, but I’m not a physicist or chemist.”

There was a long pause. “Browder, DoF. No uranium or plutonium means no fission trigger, as far as I know.”

“Oe, DoE, that’s correct.”

“Svejk, EPA. Any trace of lithium or beryllium? We might as well check all the commonly known fusible nuclei that we can.”

“A little bit, but the on-site assessor said that there’s enough in half a dozen modern laptops and the plane’s own computers to produce the quantity they are seeing.”

“Browder, DoF. All the fusible nuclei you can check? I assume that means you can’t check for helium?”

“Svejk, EPA. Not easily. But we can probably cross helium off the list because fusing helium-4 into carbon is so far beyond what can be done on Earth, and helium-3 is so scarce and hard to isolate.

“Caspar, DoE, concur. Also helium-3 is somewhat harder to work with than tritium or deuterium, to boot. If they were using helium-3, it would almost certainly be easier, cheaper, and more effective to use tritium.”

“Nonetheless,” Cam said, “I’m alerting the crews to watch out for a nuclear weapon in the wreckage. Anybody have anything they need to add before we end this call?”

On the screen, the burning sodium continued to light the site in eerie, dancing flames; network feed showed a swarm of talking heads, all trying to explain everything else to each other.

Heather messaged Browder: thx, good job, stay online, wl b long night.

He sent back: ^surest prediction DoF ever made.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 6:23 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Ysabel took the Yuma city bus to the mall and picked up the pack she’d left at the door of Sam’s Club that morning. The developmentally disabled guy at the service desk seemed to remember her, but maybe nobody would believe him, if anyone even thought to ask him anything.

She walked across the parking lot to the little tour company where she’d bought a pass for a cheapie three-day package that went down to a little bed-and-breakfast in Puerto Penasco. They promised you the fun of waking up “in a foreign country” the next morning.

She planned to set her clock and slip out of the bed-and-breakfast about an hour before dawn, when the third-class buses in the zocalo would be picking up hotel workers from the graveyard shift. She’d just get on whichever one was going the farthest south on Highway 2; from there, she could be lost among the peasants until Daybreak eliminated pursuit.

“Would you mind if I sit with you?”

Ysabel looked up to see the only other person under fifty on the bus. The girl had an awfully big backpack for a three-day trip; she wore baggy shorts and sandals with socks, and the super-retro WrapLens glasses that made you look like a giant insect, the early smart-lens glasses from back in the ’teens. She mumbled as she introduced herself, and Ysabel didn’t really catch her name. Oh, well, at least I remembered my alias is “Jane.”

The Bug-Faced Girl was off on her first vacation entirely on her own. “I’ve never crossed any border before, I’ve never gone anywhere by myself, and I’ve only really been to Kansas, Oklahoma, a ski resort in Colorado, and Urbana, Illinois, because my grandma lives there. So here I was with a real job, nobody I had to see or plan with, and I just decided I’d see some places I hadn’t seen before. So I got a two-week pass on Greyhound, and went out to see the beach in San Diego, and now I’m doing this side trip so I can see another beach and sort of have been in another country. I must seem like the biggest dork in the world to you.”

“Well, having seen more of the world, I know there are way bigger dorks.”

Bug-Eyed Nerdchick took a second to get it, then laughed. “My mother is so freaked; but I left San Diego yesterday, and I was nowhere near where Air Force Two crashed.”

“Where—?” Ysabel asked. “Where what? ”

Miss High Adventure explained. Ysabel was flabbergasted—so that was why everyone had been piled around the TV set in the waiting area before they boarded the bus. Ysabel had figured it must be the stupid World Series; now she realized that she was fleeing across a border after shooting down a piece of military hardware, during a major terrorist attack.

It might be wise to be obviously buddies with someone conventional. And Nerdette herself was just saying she was “scared to death, even though I know this is about as safe as foreign travel gets.”

So they chattered about everything in the world, with Ysabel changing just enough of her bio not to be too recognizable in case they were looking for her. She’d thought it was a pretty good joke to call herself Jane Llano—“plain Jane”—on her false passport—but now her head was filled with, must remember, must remember, my name is Jane, Spanish major at UT-Austin, please don’t let anyone ask about anything there because I’ve never been there—

The border guard got on, and said, “Folks, they’re asking me to scan all the passports and record them, because of what’s happened, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”

Ysabel thought she’d explode, but Nerd Chick actually put a hand on her back, and said, “Hey, relax, you’re the old hand here. You know it’s nothing to do with us.”

“Yeah. I guess I’m having flashbacks. You travel down south of Mexico at all, into Nicaragua or Honduras, and sometimes border checkpoints are scary.”

They scanned the fake passport without comment. The guard even smiled and said, “Have a good time, Jane.” It would have been even better if the guy had happened to use SuperAmericanGirl’s first name too.

As the bus rolled into Mexico, Miss Texas Nerdface of 2024 was telling an apparently endless story about some elaborate prank that her brother had played on her other brother, which involved hiding underwear. From there she progressed to talking about how exciting-but-scary the world was.

Honey, you’ve got no freakin’ idea, Ysabel thought, between trying to think of more synonyms for that’s interesting and oh really?

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JUST WEST OF AVOCA. IOWA. 8:30 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Del Quintano was known as “Leprechaun” to his friends because, despite being solid Mexican as far back as the family knew, his bushy sideburns made him look more like the Notre Dame mascot than anyone had any right to. He’d made a virtue of it, growing his sideburns out and hanging the cab of his semi-tractor with little plastic leprechauns and decals, and he had to admit, his luck did seem to be pretty good.

He was listening to a talk station on IBIS radio, all the news about Air Force Two, shaking his head. Man, you never knew what was going to happen, except that when it did, every idiot in the world would call up every station in the world, and they’d all talk about it.

He had a mandatory sleep-layover coming up in Des Moines. A shower, a bed, and not being allowed to drive any farther until he’d had some sleep looked pretty nice to Del. Some of the old truckers complained about CELT, Continuous Electronic Load Tracking, because they couldn’t skate around the rest-rules and take more work, but as far as Del was concerned, it meant nobody else could cut in on you while you followed the rules and worked a reasonable pace.

But even at a reasonable pace, that last hundred miles or so could get pretty tiring. Maybe he’d put on some music, something lively to stay awake to. “Radio, search, find coustajam,” he said. He liked that new stuff.

The computer answered, “Searching, interruptions very frequent in IBIS, some scrawk.” Then it fell dead quiet.

“Radio, acknowledge.”

No sound.

“Radio, reboot.”

“Rebooting and loading—” a harsh squeal, then silence.

“Computer, internal check.”

A brief, rumbling hiss—then nothing.

Shit, he’d spent a fortune on a good voice-actuated system.

He pulled over at the next roadside rest. When he popped the cover, crusty gray-white stuff that looked like dried toothpaste fell out into his hand from the fuse box. He stared at the mess. It stung and burned where it had touched his fingers.

Del shook the mess off his hand into his litter bag, grabbed a wipe from his box, and swabbed his hands, looking in consternation at the tiny red dots that peppered his palms and fingers.

That gray-white stuff looked like battery corrosion. He took his flashlight around to take a look.

There were drifts and piles of that white crud everywhere, clustering and spilling around every little electronic gadget, engulfing every electric motor and encrusting every cable. The battery sat in a ball of crusty white goo the size of a beach ball.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. He closed up the compartment, got in, prayed—not something he did often, and seldom this sincerely—and tried to start it again. There were clunks and thuds on the first try; fewer of them after he’d tried a few times and then nothing at all.

Furious, thinking about a late load and all that would cost him, and about the bed and shower waiting for him in Des Moines, he took out his cell phone to make the call to the dispatcher. The phone’s screen was an unrecognizable scrawl of light and dark. Fighting panic, Del tried turning it off and on; it came on, wavered, and turned itself off. After that, it wouldn’t come on at all.

On a hunch he didn’t quite understand, he turned his phone over, pulled the battery, and tapped the phone in his hand; little gray-white crumbles fell out, stinging his hand again. The light in his cab went out, and wouldn’t come back on.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-90 EAST OF GILLETTE. WYOMING. 7:40 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

It was warm without being stifling in Zach’s Dadmobile. He drives like my dad, too, Jason thought. Dad always said it was his “precious cargo habit”—all those years of never looking away from the road because he couldn’t stand to have one of his kids hurt. Cool, actually, once you understand it. “You must be dying to get home.”

“Oh, yeah. Wrap up tight, down into the burrow with the cubs.” Zach smiled. “I still want to take down the Big System—but not before the Big System gets me home and lets me find out that everything’s basically okay. Speaking of that, I wonder why we haven’t heard from the President yet?”

“That is weird, isn’t it?” Jason said. “All I can find is recaps of what’s already been in the news.” His connection was still up and clear, and still tracking IBISNuStream Samuelson. In a fresh window he called up Goo- 22. “We’re not the only ones worrying. ‘Pendano’ is one of the five most searched words. But there’s just one statement out of the White House—he won’t be appearing at a fund-raiser in West Virginia in the morning. That’s it.”

“What do you suppose he’s doing?”

Jason shrugged. “The media always made a big deal about what good buds Pendano and Samuelson were. Maybe he’s crying.”

“I never liked him, but I hope that’s not true.”

“Yeah. I liked him, but I know what you mean. Funny how it still matters even when we know it’s all going away.”

“What’s all going away?”

“Dude. The Big System. I mean, Daybreak’s here. Whoever grabbed Samuelson, why they did it, everything—it’s all old stuff with no meaning, just history. This is just like a hangover or something. Once the Big System is down, we’ll stop having all these emotional attachments to media figures.”

“I don’t know about that,” Zach said. “I read history a lot. After Lincoln was assassinated, a few hundred thousand people dropped everything and went to Washington.”

“I was kind of hoping Daybreak would mean going, you know, like all the way tribal, no government past the next hill.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think it will turn out people still want to build some steam trains and sailing ships, and maybe even a few dirigibles or some telegraphs if they, you know, keep them clean and wrapped in antiseptic cloth all the time…”

“You mean if they practice safe machinery?”

“Exactly.”

“I was kind of hoping to maybe get rid of the wheel.”

“Wheels let you raise clean water from depth, and clean water means healthy babies,” Zach said. “You can have my wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

Jason liked to argue, and he was about to, but he felt that familiar, comforting internal hug, the reminder that you didn’t quibble about Daybreak matters. Take down the Big System and then work out how it was supposed to be after. He felt a surge of warm friendship toward Zach, and it was a while before they talked again.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. KENNEBEC. SOUTH DAKOTA. 8:56 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Marshalene was loving the drive across South Dakota. She’d pumped up some nice loops in a random feed so that the whole drive had been her favorite high points from her favorite songs, maybe two minutes of music over and over in random scramble. She wouldn’t make it back to B-town tonight, but she’d keep going till she was sleepy, and if she was up till morning, that would be okay; someplace some hotel would take her money to let her sleep for a while.

She’d be over in fucking Iowa before she even had to think about refueling, pissing, and buying more munchies to keep her going till dawn or tired, whichever came first.

Then this unholy screaming, grinding noise scared the piss out of her, and the car tried, all by itself, to run off to the right. She pulled it back onto the road but it wasn’t easy; in her remaining headlight (when had that other one gone out?) she saw a sign for an exit to County Road 19 and Kennebec. Kennebec reminded her of an East Coast name; it seemed like maybe there’d be someone there that got her when she talked.

The passenger-side rear motor had to be what it was, she realized, just like that hippie mechanic dude said. Damn, he’d been good, just not good enough to save what was obviously a dying POS car. Better go into a town and get some help. She took the exit.

Half a mile more, as that grinding noise built up, she was wondering if she’d reach Kennebec; it sounded like the left rear motor was going out too. She’d get it towed, first thing in the morning, from the motel parking lot, if she made it to a motel.

She sort of did. The engine had turned itself off but tried to come back on as the battery snapped and banged, and the number on the screen went up and down too fast to read—a bad short, for sure. The starter cranked twice, a funny, screeching noise, and died, but here she was at the driveway of a boarded-up gas station next to the COUNTRYSIDE INN MOTEL VACANCY, so she coasted into it as far as she could, set the brake, and lugged her bag across the parking lot.

The mean old lady behind the counter had the TV turned way up, and clearly didn’t want to talk to Marshalene, because the president or somebody, maybe the other guy, had been shot or was going to talk or something, but she got a room eventually, and when she got into it, it turned out her portable player was dead and all blobbed up with white stuff, so there was no music, and no gift shop to buy another player or any food within walking distance.

Really, some days you could just fucking cry.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:15 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.}

Heather convened the first meeting of Working Group Daybreak about six hours later than she had been asked to head it up; things had simply been too much of a mess for anyone to have spare moments and mindspace during the pursuit and fiery death of Air Force Two, and none of the other working groups had been meeting either. But Arnie Yang had made the trip over and found his way through security, and to her pleasant surprise, Noel Crittenden, who was rarely willing to attend any meeting that might go after five, had dragged himself away from his town house in Silver Spring and made the long trip in as well. “I might as well see some history since I’ve spent my life just knowing things about it,” he explained.

Working Group Daybreak gathered around the conference table, almost everyone with coffee or tea because it seemed certain they’d be here all night.

Edwards and Reynolds sat next to each other, working up a list of questions they wanted to ask; Heather fought down her paranoia and reminded herself that when she’d been in the FBI, she’d been trained to go into everything with a long list of questions, and anyway, the questions could hardly be anything but useful in the circumstances. Lenny Plekhanov and Nancy Telabanian were huddled over the document Arnie had just sent over, checking and rechecking graphs for his presentation, and messaging the analyst teams back at NSA, to make sure that Arnie’s claims were fully supported by their data; no one at NSA would ever completely trust any analysis that didn’t come from NSA, and worse yet, this analysis was just different enough from the math, semiotics, and cryptography they did in-house for them to distrust it. Firmly, Heather reminded herself that everyone preparing for the meeting was helping her, not spying on her.

The man from Deep Black, who had said to just call him Steve, was quietly reading from his phone. Orders? Reports? Enertainment? It might be his Bible; he walked and stood in a military way but he wore a black suit that looked like a Mormon missionary’s or a small-town funeral director’s. Deep Black Steve contrasted with Colonel Green, who, despite her uniform, slumped like a college student in a dull lecture, rubbing her face with tiredness; military people, even very senior ones, often pulled strange schedules, and perhaps she’d been up too long even before the crisis broke.

Arnie hurried in, the portfolio, briefcase, and papers hugged under one arm all on the verge of spilling and his laptop trailing a cord behind it.

Heather fought down a smile; she often suspected that one thing Allie found attractive about Arnie was that she was a natural organizer and Arnie was work for more than one lifetime.

As if to follow the thought, Allie herself came in after him, grabbing up some papers; if it hadn’t been so comical, Heather would have been peeved, since Allie was distinctly not invited, but then Cam came in.

Allie said, “Heather, I’m taking the responsibility, Arnie found something vital, and we think Cam needs to hear about this right away. I’m sorry to rearrange your agenda when it’s been so tough—”

Heather shrugged; what can anyone do when the universe has its thumb on the MAX CHAOS switch? “At least something important must be going on. Why don’t we all sit and let Arnie spit it out? If you don’t all know Dr. Arnold Yang, he’s the resident genius at OFTA, and he’s a statistical semiotician, which you could describe as doing what the pattern-recognition charlatans would be pretending to do if they were smart enough to understand it, except Arnie does it with math that would fry Einstein’s brain, and he can not only find things he’s not looking for, his methods can find things no one has ever seen before.”

“That’s a gross oversimplification—”

“Later, Arnie. What’d you find?”

“We’ve got the intersection between Daybreak and the attack on Air Force Two. Clear as a bell—no pun intended, the connection doesn’t run through the Bell cell in Washington. Furthermore, we can be nearly sure it was deliberate right from the start, because on both the Daybreak side and il’Alb side, they did some pretty difficult, complex work to conceal the way they were coordinating with each other. That doesn’t happen by accident, so it’s no coincidence.”

Edwards and Reynolds were leaning forward like leashed dogs smelling blood. Small wonder, Arnie’s offering them a chance to bust some butts and not feel helpless.

“Here’s the link.” On the room’s screen, he brought up a Saw diagram, the circle-and-arrow graph with contours that let an experienced professional read message traffic within an organization at once. “Heavy relaying made it hard to see at first. Many Daybreak messages worked like chain letters or spam, re-encrypting without decrypting, just proliferating till the message reached the right person with the right keys, and launched its own killer to eliminate all its copies from the net. Wasteful, messy, ultimately it gave our side a lot to work with, but it was fast and easy for Daybreak to use, and all the extra crap it generated meant it took us a long time to weed through all of it to see what was going on.

“Once we disentangled all that, we found eleven sources in il’Alb il-Jihado that were all messaging one Daybreaker in Guerrero Negro, who went by ‘Aaron.’ In turn, he led a very weird AG that didn’t look like any other Daybreak AG—it was all individuals scattered physically within 200 miles of the flight path of Air Force Two over Baja and the Gulf. But they all seemed to believe he had a commune somewhere in the mountains above Guerrero Negro, and they were planning to flee there after carrying out missions.

“We’ve got five of Aaron’s eight AG members identified. The first one, here, is Ysabel Roth—”

“She shot down the airborne radar, or someone did from her apartment,” Reynolds interrupted. “Agents in Yuma got into there just about an hour ago. Can you give us—”

“She’ll be fleeing toward Guerrero Negro, by some indirect route. Probably into Mexico and making things up after she gets there, she’s fluent in Spanish and can pass for Mexican.”

Reynolds nodded, and said, “Excuse me,” then began ticking away on the keys of his laptop.

Arnie said, “Let me run through the rest of the identified and then we’ll hit the non-identified. Peter Rapoch”—he brought up a slide—“released nanoswarm upwind of North Island NAS, so all those planes that were refueling or coming in and out of there are spreading the infection, and some of them may infect their home carriers when they return.”

Colonel Green jumped to her computer to confirm that flights out of North Island were grounded.

It went that way for the rest of the list, and Reynolds was able to identify one of Arnie’s unknowns with a suspect who had destroyed a microbiology lab at UCSD under the pretense that she was an animal-rights activist liberating the research monkeys. “But along with letting the monkeys out,” Reynolds said, “she took a bat, wrench, and split cord to exactly the gear and computers needed to identify new bacteria and funguses in Southern California’s coastal waters; she’s delayed the lab work by weeks. Then on her way out, she ‘accidentally’ went through the political science department, and ‘accidentally’ ran into Professor Constantine Elwein-Gonzalez, who was there because he was on conference call for some of our anti-terror work, was ‘startled,’ and shot him. Elwein-Gonzalez happens to be the American who was probably most knowledgeable about il’Alb il-Jihado and had actually met and interviewed some of them; it was a classic setup of ‘surprised an intruder,’ and we know il’Alb likes that particular cover and uses it often—it’s what they used when they murdered Pawhan. And the girl we’re looking for—her name is Jasmine Chin—matches with everything you know about Aaron Group Suspect Seven.”

“Let me take a second and relay all files to Agent Reynolds’s computer,” Arnie said, typing.

“So,” Edwards said, “between Daybreak and il’Alb il-Jihado, we’ve got cooperation both ways. Daybreak operatives took down assets that we’d need for coping with the hijacking, and they were provided with information that let them carry out Daybreak-type sabotage because they knew our military would be highly active at certain bases.”

“That’s right,” Arnie said. “Most Daybreakers didn’t know that was going on, but then I suspect most il’Albis didn’t either. The great majority of messages from Daybreakers still online are screaming that the whole Air Force Two business was completely contrary to the principles of Daybreak.”

Edwards looked up. “Sorry that it’s a world full of interruptions, but it is. Mr. Reynolds, I’ve got an e-mail from the Director; she has just authorized you to create a task force to round up the Aaron Group.”

“Dr. Yang, will there be more about the Aaron Group?” Reynolds asked Arnie.

“You’ve got all I had. Good hunting, and let me know where to keep you posted.”

Reynolds was out the door in a blur. FBI Agent perspective: Nothing is really wrong as long as there’s someone specific out there for me to bring in, Heather thought.

She said, “Well, now that the people who needed to get moving are moving, Arnie, give it to us, short and sweet. I’ll even let you say the words ‘system artifact,’ and hardly twitch at all—or now that you’ve got such a clear command structure in the analysis, is ‘system artifact’ even relevant?”

“Well,” Arnie said, “the basic idea is that—”

Reynolds stuck his head in the door. “Here’s an update: Ysabel Roth has been captured.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUERTO PENASCO. MEXICO. 8:25 P.M. MDT. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

I am one shitty spy and an embarrassingly bad terrorist. Even if Ysabel allowed herself a couple points for having carried out the mission and getting out of Yuma before anyone really started looking for her, she was doing one shitty job now.

Because the bed-and-breakfast in Puerto Penasco was overbooked, they’d given her the “automatic overbook upgrade” and moved her into the Plaztatic Palace, as she mentally dubbed the Puerto Penasco Sheraton, and saddled her with a roommate—none other than Little Miss Scared Of Foreign Places.

At least they’d given her a coupon good for a meal, but she hadn’t even thought of using that as an excuse to escape her unwanted roomie; instead, somehow, the earth-and-peasant-loving terrorist, scourge of the Big System, was now sitting over some bland noodle-veggie dish, trapped under the fake chandeliers in a plaztatic hotel restaurant, making polite conversation with Miss North Texas Loser Geek Girl.

If Ysabel had just thought of a good excuse to bring her bag down here, just act like it wasn’t safe to leave my bag in the room, then fake one little interruption and scoot out the door with it, and I’d’ve been fine. So why didn’t I have this thought forty minutes ago?

Back in the room exactly like the one you’d find in Cleveland or Tulsa, Ysabel said, “I saw more dirt in a day when I was three than this place sees in a year. Not exactly roughing it.”

Nerd Chickie said, “I wish I had a tenth of your nerve, to just travel the way you do, and be right in there with the stuff. For me it’s—even when it’s just, like, Aspen, like, everywhere except home’s an exhibit, behind a glass wall.”

Oh, fuckin’ gag me with a donkey dick, right now. “You need to get out more.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” Completely unironically, Nerdette turned on the TV and voice-commanded it: “American news.” She asked, “Were you going to do any of those organized activities tomorrow?”

Inspiration! Ysabel said, “I’m planning to be up early and go out into town; more fun than ‘activities’ with a bunch of people I could have stayed home and found at the Senior Center.”

The girl laughed and shoved her horn-rimmed glasses up her freckly nose. “We do seem to be the youth in the crowd, don’t we?”

If she looked any more wholesome and innocent, Ysabel thought, I’d just sell her to a pimp for resale to a Japanese tourist with a rape-a-librarian fetish. Dammit, where’s a good pimp when you need one?

But she said, “Yeah. So I’m going to turn in now and get up at dawn. It won’t be scary or dangerous or anything if you’d like to come along.”

“That would be so awesome.”

“Okay, so,” Ysabel said, “why don’t you grab first showers?”

“Eahh, I kind of want to catch the news. You can.”

It would look too weird to insist, so Ysabel shrugged. Anyway, it might be her last shower ever with unlimited hot water. She’d dress and take off while Little Miss Forgettable was in the shower. Nothing easier.

Ysabel was just toweling off when she saw the doorknob start to turn slowly, soundlessly, most of the way around and then return to its normal position. She reached for the little lock button. The door slapped her arm back and the base of a lamp caught her under the jaw.

Room spinning. Skull screaming like a bad smoke detector. What? She was—

The girl jammed the lamp into Ysabel’s naked belly, knocking the wind out of her, and let it crash to the floor, slamming Ysabel’s foot. She grabbed Ysabel’s long hair, wrapped it in a fist that pressed against her neck, and forced her head back and down, dragging her backward by the hair into the main room.

Ysabel’s feet slid and wobbled till she lost her balance completely and fell sideways on her ass on the hotel-room carpet.

The girl punched her, hard, in the cheek. “Roll over.”

She did. As she realized that the girl was tying her hands behind her back, she caught phrases from the American TV news: “believed to be,” “wanted for questioning,” and “Yuma.”

Oh, crap, and because they were in this big American Plaztatic Tower of a hotel, there would be someone with good English at the front desk, who would take “I need the police right away” seriously.

The carpet ground against her face, everything hurt, and the girl said, “Hey, is this one of those adventures you’re so patronizing about having had? You’re right, they’re fun.”

^{ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:36 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

After all the excitement, Arnie was stuck, as ever, with giving his presentation at a time when it had to be an anticlimax. “Let’s start with what I usually do, okay? So you’ll see why it was I found what I found.

“Semiotics is the study of how signs mean—how one thing stands for another or how a message connects to its meaning. Like an oncoming car flashes its lights at you on the highway, what do you know? Something wrong ahead, cop or accident or animals on the road, so you slow down and pay attention. Statistical semiotics is about how populations of signs function as signs. Like it’s close to night, or you’re close to a tunnel, and in the other lane you see ten cars in a row with their lights on, so you know it’s dark ahead, and you turn your lights on—and if other people do that, it becomes a message to other oncoming drivers.”

“But they weren’t sending a message,” Heather said, playing the role to hurry Arnie to the point. “They just had their lights on, and you saw them.”

“Many messages aren’t sent by anyone,” Arnie said, “even though they’re perceived and received. A deer doesn’t leave tracks or scent because it’s trying to tell hunters or dogs where to find it. If there is an intention, that’s expressed through yet more signs, which might or might not be important. So it doesn’t matter that the other drivers weren’t trying to say anything to you. And it doesn’t matter that any one car had its lights on or off—one car could just be a forgetful person or one of those cars that doesn’t give you a choice. But a population of signs formed a message. One swallow does not a summer make, but five thousand swallows and a million green buds on the trees and forty Memorial Day sales in the stores does.

“Those messages that no one intends to send, that are sent by a lot of different sources collectively, are called system artifacts. Like people doing the wave in a stadium; the wave isn’t any one person, but it’s visible to everyone. Like one color of scrunchy being reserved for the popular girls in a school; nobody makes it up, everyone just knows. Surprising numbers of fads and fashions have no originator for any practical purpose.”

“So you guess at fads and trends like the pattern recognizers?” Colonel Green asked. “And you’re studying how Daybreak is a fad?”

“No.” Arnie had an expression that amused Heather every time she saw it; it was the same one she’d seen on an astronomer who had been asked to cast a horoscope. “The pattern recognizers and trendspotters just know a lot about fads in the past, and they watch the news and the social media and look for things that look like what happened before; it’s all about their feeling and intuition.”

“The sort of thing I do,” Crittenden put in. “Highly believable and I like to think insightful, but nothing the historian at Charlemagne’s court couldn’t have done.”

“At least it’s entertaining,” Arnie said, “but forgive my pointing out it’s not science, and it can’t tell you anything you don’t already know on some level. What I do is describe in numbers the whole huge network of communications—everyone and everything, be it person, bot, book, web site, accident, whatever creates signs, and the signs they send, and everything that interprets the signs and the secondary signs that they send to each other about them. There are numbers and geometry to express all the ways the messages and their sources and targets are similar, different, parallel, whatever. That results in huge data structures, many terabytes even for the most elementary problems, which is why no one did this before supercomputers. Then, with a very fast computer, we use wavelet shrinkage—that’s a statistical method for estimating fractals if you’re up on your math—to find patterns that are persisting.

“Or to oversimplify and use an analogy—which is what Dr. Crittenden does, and why he’s easier to understand than I am—the pattern recognizers look at the clouds, and say ‘That’s a horsie, I feel good about horsies, I guess it won’t rain for the picnic.’ I teach the computer to look at trillions of pictures of clouds and notice that puffy ones with flat bottoms are associated with lightning and hail—even if I’ve never seen a cloud before.”

“Or a horsie,” Green said, grinning. “I’ve got grandkids. I can relate to horsies.”

“Or a horsie,” Arnie said. “I don’t find horsies, I find the pattern by which people learn to look for horsies—and I also find some people talking to some other people are more likely to call them horsies, and under what circumstances, and maybe construct a relationship that associates with the prefix grand- in other relationships. And I can do that in languages I don’t speak. So statistical semiotic analysis shows me brand-new patterns, things that haven’t been perceived before relating in ways that people haven’t named before; from there we can work out the tests and methods for detecting following those patterns if they’re important and persistent.

“Usually these patterns that fall out of the math are just what we call an idea pump—a person or organization that just repeats a message and encourages interested people to repeat it—and those are intentional and single-minded. Like the pattern of beer commercials having pretty girls and occurring during football games in North America.

“Sometimes the math finds a complex system like Islam, ‘Go Angels!’, or model railroading, where there are central ideas that change little and repeat often, but generate a huge volume of secondary short-lived messages—like Catholicism, say, the pope says pretty much what every pope always said, but your Catholic mother says, ‘What would Father McCarthy say if he found out you did that?’, that’s a secondary message reproducing and altering part of the primary message.”

“You were going to explain system artifact, Arnie,” Heather prompted.

Edwards cleared his throat. “I think I see where this is going from what Arnie’s already said. So a system artifact is a pattern that carries a message and originates in the system, not from any one participant, but from everyone at once.”

“Exactly,” Arnie said.

“Like esprit de corps, or corporate culture?” Green said. “No one makes them up, and you can’t order people to have them, they just sort of grow between people, but anyone who’s been around them knows they’re real.”

Steve looked up, and said, “That’s what you think Daybreak is. A group of ideas that… what, fused? Found a way to… ?”

“Evolved,” Arnie said. “It started out as a huge, inchoate list of reasons people didn’t like the modern world. As the people talked to each other, Daybreak lost all the reasons and justifications over time—I can trace out about the last half of that process—and converged on a basic idea: Working together, we can take down civilization, and we should. Within a few years, because Daybreak had acquired the priority of finding ways to propagate and to move out of virtual and into real events, it acquired skilled people, and got better at persuading them to join, and at giving up the aspects of their own ideas that separated them from other possible Daybreakers, and so on.”

“How does it keep them in line?” Heather asked. Good, good, mostly they’re getting it, look at them nod. This is going better than I thought it would. Come on, Arnie, make it—

“Well, that’s something it copied from a lot of the New Thought and ‘spiritual’ parts of the web,” Arnie said. “Made more extreme, of course. Most serious Daybreakers spend two to four hours a day staring into the computer screen while they play Daybreak messages that tell them to relax and feel calm and happy—and think about what they can do to take down the Big System. The messages reinforce negative associations for the Big System, so that the person automatically blames every small thing that goes wrong on plastic and electronics and corporations. They tie self-esteem to being Daybreak-oriented. And listening to the messages makes Daybreakers calm and happy.

“Then too, it spreads and infects other systems of ideas. About eighteen months ago Daybreak penetrated the coustajam movement in music, and that helped prepare a lot more people to drift into Daybreak; it’s also invaded the Stewardship Christianity branch of fundamentalism, and the Japanese Middle Earth Liberation League, and the Sons of Boone and Applegate, and lots of other places. But no matter what door people come into Daybreak from, once they become self-aware that they’re attracted to Daybreak, Daybreak will teach them to spend a lot of time repeating Daybreak messages to themselves, or playing them over and over from recorded media, in a deep suggestible state.”

“Who writes the messages?”

“Lots of Daybreakers scattered all over. Then they send them to each other, and try them out to see how they work with prior Daybreak messages. And they all collectively select the ones to use in their meditation and the ones to discard. For people who have been in Daybreak for three years or so, Daybreak is as central as Jesus is for a serious Baptist or the Revolution is for a serious Communist, but much more systematic and internally consistent—optimized really. Daybreak doesn’t need an enforcement system—no Inquisition, no thought police, no awareness of a friend who deviated and was shunned or arrested, because Daybreak is always a welcoming path that leads you deeper and deeper and makes you feel better at every step.

“So I think what we are seeing is the evolution of a new, much more powerful and effective kind of system artifact, and we have to understand it as such if we’re going to—”

Cameron sighed, impatiently. “All that was interesting theory until you found the connection to il’Alb il-Jihado,” he said. “But now as I see it you’ve got two possibilities. Wherever Daybreak might have come from and however people might practice it, it comes down to this: Either Daybreak found an enemy of the United States and allied with it, or the enemy found Daybreak and duped it. That means Daybreak has a leadership somewhere—leaders to be fooled or leaders to make the decision to be an ally—”

Shouting in the main room outside.

They all froze.

Cam muttered “Excuse me,” and went through the door; by common consent, as they looked around, everyone seemed to agree to go see what the matter was. Funny, Heather thought, none of us individually decided to drop Arnie’s explanation and go out the door, but here we are, filing out. Have to ask him if that would be a system artifact.

“I just think I should go with Kim!” President Roger Pendano’s voice was wild, yelping, cracking with misery.

DoDDUSP Garren and half a dozen uniforms were all crowding around him, saying “Mr. President” in an urgent tone that meant Listen!

Cam headed for the little group by the door, trying to be there instantly while not looking like he was hurrying. Now Pendano’s voice was too low to hear words, but the passionate, desperate, throat-mashing whine in the tone was painfully audible.

Lenny said, softly, “The president wants his dinner and his bed; look at the shoulders and the expression. Shit, shit, shit. Maybe if Garren or Nguyen-Peters pulled a Patton on him, right now, and just slapped him?”

Heather shook her head. “I don’t think the Secret Service would let Garren do that, and Cam’s too gentle and has too much respect. Besides, it might just send Pendano right over the edge.”

“He wasn’t this way about the Federal Reserve bombing, or the attack on the Franklin Roosevelt.”

Heather sighed and shrugged. “But those were ‘routine terrorism’—nothing personal—it wasn’t the enemy torturing one of his best friends, then blowing him to bits, let alone something he has to blame himself for.”

Kim Samuelson departed like a lost little girl between three big Secret Service agents; Pendano slumped into a chair, face in his hands, with Garren squatting beside him and whispering, urgently.

“Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” Lenny said.

“Yeah.” A thought struck Heather. “Might be something I can do. Back in a second.” She walked directly over to Cameron, who held his hands up as if to fend off two generals and a Secret Service man. “Cameron, I have something urgent and relevant.” She purposely stopped about twenty feet from him.

He held up an index finger to the group and walked over to her, whispering, “Thanks for the rescue, and what do you have?”

“Graham Weisbrod is good with former students in trouble. He’s stuck me back together many times. Maybe if he can talk to the President—”

Cameron grunted as if he were deflating. “Anything that has the slightest chance of working, sure. Call Weisbrod. And thanks.”

Heather turned around and nearly collided with Allie. Startled, she didn’t speak until Allie said, “Sorry, I overheard. I was coming over to suggest the same thing.”

Cameron smiled faintly. “Apparently Graham Weisbrod has some kind of amazing calming power on the minds of his former students. I don’t mind telling you, if he can do that for you at a time like this, I wish he’d been my teacher too. Anyway, go get the guru and see if he can do anything for the president. If you’ve got a witch doctor on tap someplace, bring that one along too.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE. IOWA. 9:42 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Chris Manckiewicz awoke, as he often did, to the vibration and the insistent, “Wake up, Chris, it’s the phone,” in his own voice, which came from the cell phone buttoned into the pocket of his soft cotton pajamas. He sat up in bed, put the phone to his ear, punched the “prep and stand by” button on the traveler’s autocafé that he kept ready by his bed, and said, “Yeah?”

“Your guy Norcross is about to give a speech about the shootdown of Air Force Two,” Cletus said. “Have you been asleep?”

“Yeah. Needed to catch up, Norcross’s a baseball nut, I figured he wouldn’t do much during a big game in the Series, my chance for a night’s sleep.”

Cletus chuckled sympathetically. “Oh, man, the fates really are after you, Chris. Brace yourself. Vice President Samuelson was on a secret peace mission when il’Alb kidnapped him and stole his plane, loaded it with some nasty-shit weapon, probably tried to crash it into Angel Stadium during the World Series, and his old best buddy and pal Prez Rog had to order it shot down. Air Force Two is burning like a fucking match head in the California desert right now, and the smoke from it is so deadly it’s knocking planes out of the air. And Pendano hasn’t been on the air with even one word about it, zip. Now that asshole Will Norcross is going to horn in and give a speech before the President does.”

“Well,” Chris said, trying not to sound pissed off, “you know, he is running for president.”

“Yeah. That’s what I meant. Cheap political stunt. Norcross just announced he’ll be making a statement twelve minutes from now, in the front lobby of the Radisson Dubuque. You’re in that hotel, right?”

“Right.” Chris’s practiced hand switched the autocafé on, and it gurgled as it began filling his carafe. “I’m on it. Live feed as it comes, and I’ll pack you a wrapped-and-ready ASAP after that. Standard procedure.”

“Hey, make sure it is standard procedure this time. This asshole is piling on our president at a real bad time. So do him no favors, you got it? Absolutely no fancy camerawork, plug in one camera, focus it on the podium, and just record the speech.”

“I’ve got six remotes and the big one on the computer, Cletus. It doesn’t cost any extra for me to use ’em, and you never know when the main cam will go out or something will pop. Using all the cams is standard—”

“Oh, horse shit. What was that last time, you got him at that church with all the screaming, weeping Jesus bitches practically busting out of their blouses, and that one-armed cowboy dude with that Navy thing on his hat and that big old tear in his eye—”

“He was a real vet, really was on Roosevelt when the suicide glider hit it, and he lost an arm fighting the fire—I verified that. And the tear was real. And my fucking story was real, Cletus.”

“Oh, yeah, real. Real. So real we had to bring in two editors to fix it and grab all your unused feed so we could show just Norcross’s face, which is what I fucking told you to shoot, just that and the empty corners of the room—”

“There weren’t any empty corners. It was packed.”

“Fuck you. If it wasn’t for the fucking lawyers, I’d have trashed your whole file, but we have to keep that piece of shit on file now for twenty years in case we get sued. Asshole. Now, listen, I’m telling you. Don’t stick us with more stuff we can’t broadcast—you know that’s what I mean. Now, one goddam camera, on Norcross, get his speech, don’t get anything more.”

“Cletus, what do you have against good video, anyway? You cut things like that hot girl losing it at the Save Our Nation rally—”

“Yes, I did. And I’ll do it again, and I cut that damn stupid huge African-American family all waving and grinning, and the old lady doing the Pledge of Allegiance with her hand over her heart. We are not giving Norcross one more thing than the minimum. What do you want, an Emmy for covering some jackass who will destroy our industry? You think someone’s going to thank you for that?”

“You keep shitcanning my best work,” Chris said. He set his cell phone down, put it on speakerphone and full vid, then turned to dress so that as he swiftly whipped his pajamas down, the camera pickup would point straight at his anus. Of course, this may be too subtle for Cletus.

Chris snatched his working suit from the closet. With just one guy on the job, thanks to the wonders of tech, every so often he had to be the man talking in front of a building.

He listened while Cletus screamed at him; it was the same fight they had every other day. Chris only prayed that when the campaign ended, ten days from now, 247NN would reassign him as far away from Cletus as possible, so he made sure these fights got plenty nasty.

After all, nothing else was at stake. Anyone could see that Pendano was gliding to reelection as smooth as if he had glass wheels.

Word was, even from Norcross’s own people, that since the ’pubs knew it wasn’t their year, with a popular Democrat running for reelection, they’d thrown the nomination to Mr. Jesus Guy just to hang the failure on that wing of the party.

Chris Manckiewicz knew all about how large organizations shaft enthusiastic people. One thing he really hated about this beat was that everyone who worked for Norcross knew that that they had no support, and, no matter how hard they worked, they’d been positioned to fail. I hate having so much in common with them.

Okay, maybe it was weird, even scary, that more than a third of the population was jumping up and down and wetting its Wal-Mart panties for a guy who wanted to add ten amendments to the Constitution to “make Jesus the Supreme Law,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Chris wasn’t going to vote for Norcross—but he wasn’t going to hate him, either. All he really wanted to do was report him.

He hadn’t said anything, being busy getting his tie on straight and running a fast suite-check on his gear, so Cletus felt ignored, and was screaming, “Listen to me, Manckiewicz!”

“I’m listening,” Chris said. “That’s why I’m not talking.” If he could just show everything about the Norcross campaign, Norcross would be understood—and then for sure he wouldn’t be elected. Did Cletus think the viewers were stupid, or what? Just last week he’d had some blond-maned teenage psychobitch for Jesus raving about killing all the gays, standing right in front of some weather-faced old farmer type, looked like a stock illo for “Farm country shot to hell,” who was obviously checking out her butt. If they’d broadcast that—

“Manckiewicz, you just remember to do your job when I tell you what it is. I need to deliver one thing to 247NN every day: twenty seconds per day of Norcross moving his mouth, to make things balanced. That’s all I need to do.”

“Well, you need to do that, and stay away from the bottle you’re thinking about right now, and not think about your ex-wife with a mouthful of that football player’s dick.”

That drew a long scream, and Chris reached over and hung up the phone. Two true shots. Okay, I’m a mean bastard. What’s a guy got to do to get fired anyway? I’ve got all my clips for my good work, I can hustle a new job in zip flat, especially because that asshole won’t talk about the things I say to him.

Besides, one time recently, he’d provoked Cletus into falling off the wagon, and a story had gone out just the way Chris wanted. This might be the biggest story remaining in the campaign and Chris was all they had.

Bottoms up, Cletus, he thought. Come on, after I was so rude to you, you deserve a drink, bucko. And then drunk dial your ex and violate that restraining order.

He was down in the front lobby three minutes before official go time. The other six network guys weren’t there yet, so Chris had his choice of spots. Just this once, fuck Cletus, fuck 247NN, and do it right.

Norcross actually waved at him, and said, “Hey, Chris,” and he was alarmed at how much he enjoyed that. Jeez, I wish I could just send them the story the way I want to, use it or have nothing. It would be so—

Hunh. Only three reasons he didn’t send out live stories just the way he wanted them, with everything locked. One, it made him nervous because live mix in the field was hard. Two, it was rare that they carried anything Norcross did or said live, even when they had him give them live feed. And three, because if he did it, he’d definitely be fired.

Hunh.

He set up the last of his six wireless remotes, scattering them widely; he was set up for some real reaction shots of the press corps, and some nice side angles that would really show emotions from the hastily-assembled audience—a few supporters who had been holding a post-rally party, about fifty people who had been at the bars or doing some late shopping, maybe another thirty businesspeople and traveling families who had been told history was happening and to come downstairs to see it, and a great number of hastily-dragooned hotel workers.

Three reasons why I can’t do this right, the way I want to do it, Chris thought. One, I’m not sure I’m good enough; two, it doesn’t usually go out live; three, I don’t want to be fired.

Hunh. I’m good enough, it’s going live tonight, and I’ d enjoy getting fired.

He checked his remotes, checked his main camera, smiled when Norcross announced they’d have to start a few minutes late to accommodate the other networks. All the time I need to be ready. Here we go, lock the structure, send only one camera at a time, lock the audio over the video I send…

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:42 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Whack! Crash! “Uh, um, damn.” Thud, thud-thud. Heather smiled, visualizing Graham’s awkward, startled fumbling as the secured handset plunged to the end of its cord. “Heather. What’s up?”

“I think your old student”—I don’t dare say the name or the office, but if anyone’s listening in, they’ll know, they just won’t be able to prove it—“may need your, um, advice—like the unofficial advice I’ve gotten from you a few times—and he might need it very, very badly. He’s here at the, um, old hospital where I’ve been all afternoon. The guy I’m working with here is sending a car—”

“Yes, of course, of course, I’ll be down front in about three minutes.”

“You can go eight,” Heather said, looking at her screen. “That’s the earliest the limo will get there. Bring a spare shirt and a toothbrush. Oh, and the Arnie Show was less of a disaster than we expected—he deigned to speak English to the mere mortals. See you soon.”

“Food’s here!” Cameron’s voice cut through the dense fog of chatter around her. “I’ll have to ask you all to stay where you can see your screens and hear your alarms, and a few critical people including me will have to stay fully online, but otherwise I insist that you make this as much of a break as you can make it. We probably won’t have any more major information coming in for the next half hour or more, so eat, relax, rest as much as you can, and take care of yourselves like the valuable people you are.” Aides were wheeling in carts of food.

“Also,” Cameron announced, “for those of you who care, the Commissioner of Baseball has ruled that since Game Seven of the World Series was tied at the end of the sixth inning when the evacuation began, by the agreement of both the Angels and Pirates management, we have the first tied Series in history; both teams will share the championship. America’s bookies are in total despair. Now, eat, relax, and be ready.”

“He takes care of his people,” Lenny said, stirring wasabi into soy sauce.

“Yeah. One of many things he’s good at,” Heather said. She pried a piece of pizza loose and slipped it onto a napkin. “This is an embarrassing thing for anyone from the Department of the Future to say, but do you have any feeling for how this is going to come out?”

“For the country, no idea. For people like us, same as anything else, free food and overtime.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE. IOWA. 9:55 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Chris Manckiewicz ran through his cameras and mikes one more time. Clear tight view of the hastily-set-up rostrum. Nice wide angle of the area behind it, get Mrs. Norcross, the Secret Service, the local politicians, check. Clear view of the night cleaning staff and bellhops standing nervously in the back. Clear shot of the small group of press; camera preset to pan across a cluster of biz folks, a family with the dad and mom in sweats, young soldier in uniform with his arm around a dark-haired girl in a nice maroon dress. Hell of an interruption for your leave, guy. Sorry about all the history breaking in. Another camera preset to swing between the dignified black guy in a suit (the host for the coffee shop), the mixed-race-and-gender group of young people in scruffy clothes (bunch of art students from Loras, grabbed out of a bar), and the brown-skinned woman in a pale green uniform with a big ring of keys (the night building engineer). All remotes good, broadband to 247NN open and clear.

It didn’t hurt that the crowd was pretty Frank Capra to begin with, but Chris thought he’d really set things to look all-American. And Lexy, Cletus’s after-hours assistant and the only person who might hate Cletus even more than Chris did, had gleefully slipped the word to Chris: Cletus was drunk and passed out.

So here we go. Edited live and on the fly and direct to air. My personal masterpiece. The story I see, the way I see it, and fuck the network with a garden rake. Gonna be so worth it.

“So, Chris, here we are in another town for another speech.” Norcross’s raspy nasal tenor was instantly recognizable; Chris turned and smiled. The Republican candidate said, “I think you’ve listened to me more than my wife.”

“I’m sure he has,” Mrs. Norcross put in.

Chris smiled. “Break a leg, Senator. I’m ready when you are.”

Norcross clapped Chris’s shoulder and strode to the rostrum. He looks exactly like he knows what he’s doing. People said Pendano was the guy Hollywood would cast as the president; Chris figured Norcross would be cast as the president’s barber—the man usually looked like he had really expected to be out on the road selling vacuum cleaners today. Nonetheless, I almost like the Jesus-spouting batshit-crazy son of a bitch.

The room quieted instantly when Will Norcross said, “Soundcheck, one, two, three, soundcheck; are we good?”

Thumbs went up all along the media tables. Norcross drew a breath, glanced down—probably praying, Chris decided. In his place, I sure would.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:59 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“Media alert,” Marshall called over the speakers. “Will Norcross’s statement is going in less than one.”

“Main screen,” Cameron said. The whole room turned silently toward the larger-than-life view from the Dubuque Radisson.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-25, ABOUT FIFTY MILES NORTH OF BUFFALO. WYOMING. 9:01 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“Norcross?” Jason exclaimed. “We haven’t heard from the President yet, and they’re running Norcross’s speech?”

Zach shrugged. “Well, Norcross is running for president, even if almost everyone is ignoring that fact.”

“I don’t want any damn candidate. The world’s blowing up, and I want my president!”

“Funny remark for an anarchist.”

“Hey, no anarchists in foxholes, or something like—” An emblem appeared on Jason’s laptop screen. “Here we go.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE, IOWA. 10:03 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Norcross looked calm but worried; Chris zoomed to catch the firm-set jaw and little wrinkles around his eyes, like your favorite uncle about to break bad news. “Well, thank you all for coming out and listening to me when there’s so much else happening. Let me begin by saying that all our prayers should be with the family of the late Vice President, John Samuelson; I suppose it’s no secret that he and I disagreed about very nearly every possible subject almost all the time, but on the personal level, he was a man who could listen, and care, could hear your—”

Pull back wide to show the ragtag crowd, catch the feeling that everyone, Norcross included, was deciding what to think and feel as they went along.

“—ask all Americans to join me in praying for President Pendano and his team as well. Now, I have no desire to be a backseat driver—”

Apophasis, Chris thought; saying you’re not going to say something in order to say it. Nixon’s favorite device, and Newt Gingrich’s, and Karl Rove’s—fine old Republican tradition.

That’s a beautiful girl with red hair in a Pendano T-shirt, great boobs, and that big cross around her neck helps show them off—cut there for a reaction. Wish she’d jump up and down—not that kind of speech.

“—go beyond politics, because our country comes first. So I am speaking to urge all my friends and supporters, every one of you who rings doorbells and makes phone calls, every blessed one of you with a bumper sticker supporting me or Governor Milton or the Christian Bill of Rights—”

Wow, nice. Cut back to close in on Norcross, look at the firm way he’s laying it down. Okay, next reaction is… that slightly bewildered young family in robes and pajamas… catch them right when Norcross hits his authority voice—yes! look at Daddy nodding solemnly, and taking Mommy’s hand, perfect! Gotcha!

“—no backbiting, no second-guessing, no analysis of how this affects our chances—just get in there and help. There will be time enough for politics later. So this is my—”

Wow, he’s already winding up. That was fast. Okay, throw in all the reactions I can:

Maid in uniform leaning on a dust mop, next to the obvious Washington guy, face careworn and exhausted, in the pricey perfect-fit suit.

Young black father holding a small girl.

White hair, DAV cap, wheelchair, how come those guys always have a flag with them? Never mind, on to:

Desk clerk in uniform, slumped against a pillar but smiling radiantly, as if she had just heard exactly what she wanted to hear, bowing her head in prayer.

Back to select, close up, focus, hit it:

Norcross’s grin, like a boxer who is half a minute from going back into the ring; here was a guy who believed.

“—beyond liberal and conservative, beyond Christian and secular, beyond business as usual. It’s about our country. So if you support me— support the president. Support our officials, support the nation, and pray for them and for all of us. Thank you and good night.”

Stay on him… expression of a man sure he has just done the right thing.

Pull back to show the room. Pop cuts around to:

Stone-faced Secret Service.

Eager reporters clicking away at their computers.

The crowd: young, old, men, women, children, many races, uniforms, jeans, T-shirts, bathrobes, suits—all nodding, solemnly, seriously, as gazes caught, held, were acknowledged in one another’s reactions.

He caught, over and over, that instant when fearful grimaces and stunned slack jaws became weary, determined smiles, like Norcross’s, as they decided we are in it together, and we will get through it.

In the corner of his screen: lexy: strike&go if no qns. Norcross was already at the door, so Chris moved swiftly, automatically, shutting down remotes and slipping them into cases, locking the cases onto his cart.

Residual pride insisted that he avoid taking the phone call that fired him in front of other people. He zipped through shut down and pack up. No call.

Back in the hotel room, he set about the ritual mechanics of pretending to himself that he would relax—pouring a double of Myers’s Dark Rum and RC Cola over cracked ice; taking a fast shower while thinking, don’t-ring-don’t-ring-don’t-ring, I don’t want to be fired while I’m wet and naked at the phone on the sink; settling the thick, soft robe around his shoulders.

The phone didn’t ring.

He nerved himself and dared to look on BackChanL, the instant archive on demand; they had broadcast it just as he’d sent it. He watched right to the end. Yep, my best work. Ever. And it went out to the public and look at all those hits, twenty times the nearest competition, my work defined that event for history! Worth getting fired for.

Cletus still didn’t call. Now, that was interesting.

Chris took a slow, welcome, savored sip of the rum and cola. Till it rang, life would be good. It might even be okay after.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-25 SOUTH. ABOUT THIRTY MILES NORTH OF CASPER. WYOMING. 9:13 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

The headlights swept out a long path as they descended the hill, and for a moment a fox’s eyes shone back at them like tiny, starry mirrors from the pointed face; then the bushy tail flickered over the railing, and the fox was gone.

All the news feeds filled up with chattering commentators, and Jason said, “I think I can do better commentary than any of those guys. Sheesh. That’s a way I’ve never seen Norcross. Is that what everybody on your side talks about, that he’s real different in person than he is through the media filter?”

“Well, I didn’t see the screen, busy driving, but yeah, it sounded more like the two times I saw him in person and not like the usual chopped-up version on TV.”

“I guess I can see why people vote for him.”

After a little while, Zach said, “You know, I hope when everything settles out from Daybreak, and this, and all, we will still have a President. Having one is kind of comforting.”

“Like Pendano would be, if he’d just talk.”

“Yeah.”

After a while, because no more news was coming in, and it didn’t sound like the president would be making a statement soon, they put the laptop into news-warn mode and talked about family, and music, and how confusing and wonderful it was to deal with women. The lights reached out in the darkness, and Jason watched for more wildlife, but apparently that fox was going to be it for the night.

^{ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:25 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Graham Weisbrod arrived and went straight into a small conference room with Pendano. Though Weisbrod was twenty years his senior, the president hung on his arm. The silence in the ops room was even deeper and more awkward than it had been, until Cam said, “All right, everyone, break’s over, noses to the screens, let’s have some good options waiting when the President comes out.” People got back to work, but much too quietly.

Cameron coughed politely behind her. “Heather, I’d like to borrow Arnold Yang for a couple of minutes, because I need a public-opinion expert, and you, because I need a Weisbrod expert.”

“Better get Allison Sok Banh in on it too. She’s good at keeping Arnie focused, and she’s even more of a Weisbrod alum than I am.”

A minute later, the four of them huddled in a conference room. “Dr. Yang,” Cameron said, “I remember how useful you were with helping to prevent panic during Hurricane Gordon.”

Arnie nodded. “I had actual data and could monitor it in real time, then—I don’t know how useful I can be this time.”

“Noted. I know I will have to go on guesses, but it’s my guess that you will have a better guess than I will.” Cam adjusted his glasses as if he might need to read some complex, subtle message from Arnie’s face. “Here’s how I see it. Will Norcross just finished making a public statement, and we still haven’t heard from the President of the United States yet. And it’s bedtime on the East Coast. People will be staying up to see how the crisis comes out. Individually, they’re brave and reasonable. In small groups of neighbors, especially if they know each other well, and there’s something they can do right away, they are often downright heroic. But as an audience, powerless to do anything but watch, people spread their anxiety and sense of defeat around the Internet like a bad cold. So we don’t have a lot of time. Right?”

“That’s consistent with my experience and everything I know,” Arnie said. “And I have no idea what to do about it.”

They nodded, not sure where Cam was going. He turned his intense gaze on Heather and Allie. “Heather. Ms. Sok Banh. You’re both Weisbrod—um, whatever you call the former students who…”

“Disciples, if you want,” Allie offered.

“You won’t offend us,” Heather added.

“So Weisbrod is a good friend and a kind man and all that, but—what are the odds of having a reasonably confident, ready-to-make-hard-decisions, President of the United States come through that door in the next ten minutes?”

Heather sighed. “Pretty much zip.”

Allie nodded. “Graham can work miracles with some people, but not fast. Graham’s way is to get you to talk, then analyze, and wait for you to decide to buck up and do what needs to be done.”

“Exactly,” Heather said. “He saved my life after every divorce, but it takes days. And this is a lot bigger deal. And neither of us is Roger Pendano.”

“You can’t imagine how much I wish one of you were. So we have about twenty minutes to put the President on the air in a sane, coherent, grave-but-upbeat style. And probably we can’t. Dr. Yang, how bad is the panic going to be?”

Arnie waggled his hand, balancing the issues. “For a real answer, give me a week and a quarter million dollars. But my guess is free. I think it’s not going to be as bad as things got in Pensacola during Gordon. People won’t necessarily run outside and do anything at midnight on a cold fall night. And the Daybreak damage to the Internet and the phone system might work in our favor—people may be more scared individually, but it won’t be nearly so easy to spread fear and rumors. One-way open-access broadcast media like television, radio, and satellite radio are doing better because”—Heather and Allie both gave him a look—“of reasons too lengthy to explain right now. I’d make an announcement, right away, about Daybreak, and give people things they can do to help. Try to make everyone who won’t go to bed feel useful, have them buy into the recovery.”

Cameron nodded. “And what can people do?”

“I’ll call Jim Browder,” Allison said, “and extract three or four ideas.”

Heather nodded. “Get something from Edwards too. The FBI never misses a chance for favorable press. And it occurs to me that if citizens are watching for them, we could bust a lot of Daybreakers right now, while their behavior is still unusual and before people’s memories fade.”

“Good thoughts. All right, Ms. Sok Banh, get whatever Dr. Browder can give you. I’ll contact Edwards and Director Bly. Now I’ve got to run; based on what you tell me about our situation with Weisbrod and Pendano, I guess I have to think about a Twenty-fifth Amendment situation, and I’m the NCCC. Thanks for the quick answers.”

“Hope they were right,” Arnie said.

“Me too.” Cam was out the door like a flash of lightning.

Allie was already phoning Browder, so Arnie asked Heather, “Am I admitting to too much ignorance if I ask you, what’s the NCCC?”

“My god,” Heather said, “I didn’t realize what he’d said. Shit, it’s really that bad.”

“Now I’m really lost.”

“Being the NCCC is Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s other job, the one he never wants to think about, and nobody else does either. National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator. Which is defined as the person with the authority to give orders and run the government—briefly—in the event of a break in the national chain of command. ‘Break’ is the euphemism for ‘everyone in the line of succession is dead, disabled, captured, or crazy.’ So if things are that bad, Cam runs the government, as a temporary dictator, until the real government can be put back together. His job is to do whatever it takes to keep the country alive and free, and make the succession work out, or establish a new government if it can’t. He might have to locate the President’s successor, or direct the Army and Air Force to repel armed invaders, order the Coast Guard to search for survivors in DC, send the Marines to rescue the surviving cabinet from a hostage situation in the Capitol. So if everything goes totally, completely into the soup—Cam’s our emergency dictator. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to have to do that job—I know he thought about turning down being Chief of Staff at DHS exactly because that would put him in line to be the NCCC—so if he’s thinking about doing it, things really are that bad.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE. IOWA. 10:32 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Chris had just finished savoring the iced cola and the Myers’s Dark Rum, and was deciding between porn, sports, or an old movie, when the phone finally rang; a glance at caller ID showed it was Cletus (as expected), with Anne the producer (as sort of expected) and a bunch of “somewhere up the chain of command” names he vaguely recognized (hunh).

Considering just how far off his instructions he’d gone, maybe that wasn’t a big surprise either. Probably the corporate counsel had said they all needed to be in on firing him.

This was definitely the way to do it. One huge satisfying act of defiance, like every American journalist since John Peter Zenger dreamed of. Besides, if they fired you out in the field, they gave you some expense money to get home with. Chris could rent a car, spend a few pleasant days driving home and enjoying the fine fall in the plains, the Rockies, and the desert, and be in a good frame of mind to start looking for his next job.

He took his last sip of his rum and cola, then picked up the call a split second before it would have gone to voice mail. “Yes, Cletus.”

“Two things,” Cletus said. “First. I fucking hate your guts. Pendano still has not gone on the air, you made Norcross look like Winston fucking Churchill as filmed by Frank fucking Capra, and the lightning polls are saying that four states that were safe for Pendano are now up for grabs. That was one brilliant piece of propaganda, you fucking goddam evil Christ-y-boy Republican wingnut.”

“I was just trying to catch what it was like in the—”

“Fuck you. It’s not ‘like’ anything, anywhere, at any time, till we decide what it’s like, and you were the one who decided to turn Norcross into presidential material when he couldn’t have done it for himself with a blender and a saw. So fuck you, asshole.”

“Am I fired?” Maybe Chris would have another rum and cola, and just get up whenever he felt like it, before starting his cross-country drive. Blow a little severance on getting a convertible, go more southerly, enjoy some sun. Since Cletus had mentioned Frank Capra, perhaps he’d watch an old Capra film tonight, toasting the master and celebrating.

The other side of the line was strangely quiet. A choking sound? Cletus… crying? “No, you’re not fired. I’m fired. They made me call you up to apologize, but I’m not apologizing, and they can’t make me—”

The line was dead just long enough for Chris to check to see if anyone was still on it; it looked like only Cletus had dropped.

Anne said, “Well, thank God that’s over with, Chris. Do you have any idea how good your work was tonight? We don’t think it could have happened by accident.”

Hunh. Funny, me either.

“Till this happened to go out live, and Cletus threw a hissy fit, we hadn’t realized just how much of your superb work he’d been sitting on, but once we hit the archive files and saw it—well, my dear god, Chris, why didn’t you just murder Cletus, and figure any jury that saw your work would acquit? I mean oh my god. You know?

“We want you to stay out there and cover the Norcross campaign the way you want to cover it, and then, after that, we were thinking that if you’d like, after the election, we could do a documentary. Call it The Norcross Factor , just as a working title, and maybe you could take all your short pieces that Cletus spiked, and put them together with some longer interviews with key players, and it might make a nice ninety minutes, like serious journalism we could all be proud of. Serious stuff. You know?”

Chris took a deep breath. “This sounds like, um, you are asking me to make a network documentary. After giving me free rein with the coverage on the campaign. Is that right?”

“That’s right, and no, you are not hallucinating.” The smile in her voice was evident. Why hadn’t Chris ever noticed before what a pleasant person Anne could be? “Look,” she said, “this is only partly politics, all right? If you’d been doing routine, ordinary work, it wouldn’t have mattered. The thing is, oh my dear god, a lot of what you’ve been shooting is great, really great, video. You are so going places. Okay?”

“Totally okay.” Sounds like Anne just barely managed to throw Cletus under the bus fast enough. Well, it couldn’t possibly have happened to a more deserving little turd with feet. “I was always kind of hoping you’d take a more active hand.”

“Exactly. Oh my dear god, we’re going to do good work together, you know?”

“Yeah.” Mmm, Chris thought. Ass. I love ass. Kiss it when you’re in a good position, and you’ll never be in a bad one.

“Cool,” Anne said. “Well, then, this was productive, but it’s late; any questions before I let you go?”

“Just keep my paycheck coming, and we’re good.”

“You got it, Chris!” Brilliantly decisive. Completely committed to him. “Till I hire a new editor, just send direct to me. Stay on it, and good night!”

“Thanks, Anne. Looking forward to it—good night!” Click off. Hope I sounded like a brilliant guy giving his brilliant boss her props.

Chris stretched, considered another rum and cola to celebrate, and decided to just go straight to bed; no predicting what he’d have to do tomorrow or how soon it would start. Might as well be ready. In this weird world, you never knew what might be your lucky day.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:32 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

To Heather, Bambi Castro sounded nervous on the phone. “Arnie’s friend Reynolds at FBI just called. The FBI office in San Diego expects delivery of Ysabel Roth from AFI—”

“AFI?”

“Mexican Federal police, the federales you hear about in movies. Good outfit. They’ll hand her over at the border tomorrow by ten, sooner if they can, and the FBI will take her straight to their office in San Diego. Reynolds was calling because he thought we ought to have someone there, but I guess he’s not in a position to issue the invitation, but if we asked—”

“Ask. Right away.” Heather’s biggest problem with Bambi Castro—and it wasn’t much of one—was that her chief field investigator, who seemed to have no fear and complete control in the field, was afraid of every minor bureaucratic hassle.

“Well, I could go out, and I think it would be a good idea,” Bambi said, “I know the budget is tight but—”

“Ha. It’ll never be that tight. We need someone at the interrogation. Take that next flight, and I’ll make sure we pay, and they expect you. Be there when they interrogate Roth.”

“On my way, thanks.” Bambi hung up, and Heather let herself have a moment of pure envy; maybe when Bambi flew back, she’d have a couple good stories. I can listen to them over tea while I adjust my shawl. Heather turned back to her work.

“Do you always look so mournful when you have to spend emergency budget?” Lenny asked, from beside her.

“Mourning my lost youth,” she said. “Biggest crisis since I was born, and I’ve got an office job.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MARANA. ARIZONA. 9:35 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

Kai-Anne had wanted to live a long way from the base if she could, and Greg had been his usual agreeable self, even though all the extra driving fell on him. She’d sometimes worried that it was one more of her eccentricities that might mark him as a dead-ender for promotions, but he’d just laughed at her and said that compared to wanting to fly a Hog in the first place, living far from the base and marrying a tattooed lady was nothing.

Still, this was one night when she wished she’d thought about how long the drive was before locating the family; it hadn’t been easy to find an emergency sitter, when she found out he was coming home that night, and she’d owe Mrs. Grawirth a lot of favors. And it had been a long haul down to Davis-Monthan, and now it had been a long haul back.

She knew what he’d been referring to when, just out of the base, he’d said, “Hon, the A-10 that did the job was me. Maybe talk about it later?” So it had been no surprise that he’d slumped in the passenger seat beside her, not asleep but not really there, just resting his eyes on the distant hills.

Kai-Anne had known something about this; she’d seen residual bits of it when he’d come back from Pakistan, from Iran, from Eritrea. She’d just never seen it so fresh and raw before. After driving about three miles, she’d asked, as gently as she could, “Want to hear about the kids and my day and all that?”

“Yeah.”

So she’d told him, more or less as if dictating an e-mail into her iScribe, the way she did every day when he was overseas, so that he could have the news but not necessarily the catch in her throat or the tears in her eyes; she felt that dealing with her loneliness and missing him should be at his option.

Nearly always he’d call after he finished the letter, and they’d talk, and it would be company, but now and then after a bad day, or pulling extra duty, he’d drop her a note that said only, Sorry, can’t tonight.

She finished the kids’ adventures of the day as they approached the Marana city limit. “What would you like to do when we get home?” she asked. “The kids’ll be asleep.”

“Truth is, after something like this, I like to sit out and look at the stars. I was thinking I’d drag the chase lounge away from the pool and out into the back yard.”

“Would you like company? We’ve got another chaise.”

“Okay, you take the shezz and I’ll take the chase.” His favorite joke about the only thing she remembered from two years of French. “As long as you promise to try to sleep, young lady. I usually don’t till really late. Somewhere around dawn I’ll want to take a shower and go to bed.” He stretched, and said, “And thanks for going along with my weirdness. I don’t usually get to do this after combat missions.” He sighed. “Then again, I don’t shoot down and kill the vice president every day, either.”

They didn’t say anything else while they set up the chaise longues to sleep on; she left a window open in Chloe’s room, and the boys’, so she could hear if she was needed, and when she returned from making sure everything was all right inside, Greg was already focused on the stars, as if he might fall right into the sky. But he whispered, “I love you,” as she pulled the covers over herself, and she said it back.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:40 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.}

“All right,” Cameron said, looking around from the center of the room.

“Marshall, up on the screen please.”

The big screen displayed:

“Anyone have any ideas about what else needs to be in the announcement?”

“If they can’t put the fuel down the drain, how do they discard it?” a woman asked from the far corner.

“Working on that, but we may have no answer,” a man scribbling on a pad next to Cam said.

“Tell them to take the precautions they would if they were going to lose power or other utilities in the next few days,” Edwards suggested.

“Tell them to take special care if they have family members with electronic or plastic artificial parts,” Lenny said. “Keep plastic surfaces and electrical contacts clean, and don’t unnecessarily expose them to outside air.”

There were a half dozen more suggestions before Cam said, “All right, that’s it, that will go out on every channel as—”

From the hallway next to the big screen, Roger Pendano came in, standing tall, his eyes dry. He’d combed his hair and straightened his clothes. He still looks like hell, Heather thought.

Graham Weisbrod moved quietly into the room behind him, standing against the wall, with his hands behind his back.

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters, I have something for you,” Pendano said, “that may or may not be helpful, but I think is necessary.” His voice was flat, dull, and emotionless. He held out a piece of paper. “Here.”

Cameron reached out as if he were being handed a live cobra or electric wire. He read. “Mr. President, are you sure that this is what you want to do?”

“No, but I’m quite sure it’s the best thing for the country.” For the first time, Pendano seemed to see the hundred other people in the main ops room. “It’s very simple. I’ve invoked Section Three of Amendment Twenty-five; I’m declaring myself temporarily incapable. I need to get out of the way and let someone who can focus solve the problem. I’m going to go out the back way and return to the White House, and put myself in the care of a doctor. Then, I suppose, we shall see. Thank you all for your patience.”

He shook Cameron’s hand. “Just do your duty; don’t second-guess yourself too much.” To Graham he added, “Dr. Weisbrod, I’m sorry that I’m not quite up to the job you always thought I had the ability for. I thought so, too, but I guess we were both wrong.”

“Roger, please don’t—”

“We’ll talk, some day when there’s time.” He looked around at them as if memorizing their faces. “Everything else can wait. Get this country a President, and then… and then…”

To Heather’s horror, he began to cry, first just sobbing with tears trickling down his face, still standing upright, trying to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, but then bending forward and breaking down completely, great wracking howls and cries, like a tantruming child, or a wounded ape. Weisbrod and Cam rushed to his side. The Secret Service had him out the door in another moment, but not one of the hundred people in the room could un-see what they had just seen, no matter how much they might wish it.

^{FOR TWENTY MINUTES AFTER. AROUND THE UNITED STATES (11:45 P.M. EST THROUGH 6:45 P.M. HAWAIIAN STANDARD TIME, MONDAY. OCTOBER 28; IT IS ALREADY 4:45 A.M. GMT (LONDON) AND 1:35 P.M. IN JAYAPURA. OCTOBER 29.)}

Del had walked toward the lights of the distant town. With his flashlight also dead, he’d been unable to find his sneakers in the dark truck cab, and he’d had to walk there in his cowboy boots. He found a cop waiting by the main road, and before he’d gotten half his story out, the policeman had introduced him to a chemistry teacher from the local high school, and they were on their way back, in the police cruiser, to take samples from Del’s truck. At least I have one hell of a good excuse, he thought. Also, that hippie asshole that tricked me into taking that black egg? I don’t mind describing him three thousand times if it means they catch his stupid butt. I’m just sorry they can’t hang him.

One particular Daybreaker in Boston had hated noise and rude people and hurry, and so he’d taken the job at Logan International; he’d had a chance to brush biote solution on hundreds of airplane tires that day. The first one happened in Tucson; the tire sensors told the pilot he couldn’t very well land on all flat tires, so after some discussion with the ground, they brought the airliner in on Ford Lake in Lakeside Park; it was a mess, but everyone survived what had to be the shallowest water landing in airline history, and at least there were plenty of cabs and buses there to pick them up in the city.

The next one had also picked up nanoswarm, and had to ditch in the Mississippi near St. Louis, unable to radio to explain what he intended; it would have been all right if he hadn’t collided with a police rescue boat, but still, there were only six deaths.

Then at LAX, the tire sensors were gone and another flight tried to land on the landing gear, not knowing that the tires were rotted and the hydraulic fluid was leaking; there were over fifty deaths. From there on, it became worse; there was still enough television and Internet to make sure everyone heard about it and began to look suspiciously at their neighbors.

Almost half of the Lookout Pass truck train, which hit a patch of failed IBIS on a downgrade, went off a cliff, and that was the most spectacular loss of its kind. But the worst was actually in western Kansas, near Hays, when over four hundred trucks cyber-linked in a train, including seven gasoline trucks, a truckload of liquid ammonia, and a double trailer of liquid oxygen, had picked up enough biotes to weaken most of the tires. When deer wandered onto the highway in front of the lead truck, the four hundred trucks were moving at almost one hundred miles per hour, and the IBIS station nearest the front truck relayed correct braking instructions as the first driver hit his brakes. The third truck, however, lost eleven tires and rolled; forty trucks piled into it, and a failed IBIS station didn’t allow for quick-enough braking for the next hundred or so trucks. An oxygen-gasoline mixture in the tangled wreckage ignited, setting off an explosion from the ammonia-gasoline mix behind it, and the flame front swept down the line and caught the rest of the gasoline trucks. Two more failed IBIS stations and uncountable burst tires completed the process; all but the last nine trucks were caught up in the vast wreck before anyone had time to react.

Power had already begun to fail in the small towns in that area, so there was nothing to hide the brilliant flames towering up into the sky. The best guess was that about 350 truckers died, along with about twenty State Troopers, firefighters from Hays and Goodland, and citizen volunteers trying to rescue people from the wreckage. It was never really possible to determine an exact number; in some areas near the center of the wreck, steel and aluminum ran and puddled onto the pavement.

A local reporter with video of the event, unable to access the Internet, tried to drive to Wichita with his video; at four A.M., walking away from his no-longer-running car on his rapidly decaying tennis shoes, he was run over by a headlightless van that was trying to get home before anything else stopped working.

Across the United States, the first incidents were scattered and few, and local people took care of it. The fear and anger over the Samuelson hijacking/ murder found an outlet in bringing in motorists stranded as their engines stopped running or their tires exploded; in making up lists of canned goods to buy the next day; in putting together groups to go relieve the hard-hit towns. The last night in which nearly every broadcast station was up, and nearly everyone had a working receiver, was a time of hope and of heart-warming stories of people pulling together; many of those still awake at midnight only needed to hear that the people in charge were on the job and that everyone would be pulling together to sleep soundly.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. MIDNIGHT. EST. OCTOBER 28/29.}

As the head of Working Group Daybreak, Heather was on the list for a brief caucus with Peter Shaunsen, before or after the swearing in, so she and the others, plus Mark Garren, had to wait patiently in the small video studio in the St. Elizabeth’s complex. Everyone had assumed that when Pendano declared himself unfit, the Speaker of the House would become the Acting President, but Kowalski had firmly reminded them that his parents had not yet been U.S. citizens when he was born, and he’d been born in Gdansk. Kowalski was likeable, smart, knew his way around, and had been mayor of Knoxville and Tennessee Attorney General before running for the House; he’d have been fine. Instead, since the Succession Act of 1947 barred Acting Presidents who were not eligible to be President, and the Constitution barred naturalized foreign-born citizens from the presidency, there was nothing for it; the next one in line was Senate President Pro Tempore Shaunsen.

Because Vice President Samuelson had spent so much of his time managing the President’s agenda for his party in the Senate, it had not mattered that Peter Shaunsen was a querulous, almost-senile old party hack who had first arrived in Congress in the Ford Administration, entitled to his position by seniority but nothing else. Nobody wanted to quarrel with the mean old fool, so they let him stay in.

She knew it might be indiscreet, but Heather quietly asked, “You couldn’t do anything?”

Cam shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I did point out that he could decline and let Secretary of State Randolph take the job. He shook his finger at me and said I was very clever, but he wasn’t giving up the greatest opportunity of his career.”

“Couldn’t the Senate convene and elect another President Pro Tempore?”

“Already checked, and the 1947 Act specifically prohibits that. We’re not allowed to adjust the line of succession once it’s invoked—that’s to prevent a coup.” Cameron shook his head, sadly. “I admit I’m less than crazy about a guy who talks about opportunity—and not duty or responsibility—in the middle of a mess like this. But like it or not, he’s who we’ve got.”

“You’re the NCCC; aren’t you supposed to find us a good president? I mean, if he was eating imaginary bugs and insisted that he was actually Carmen Miranda—”

“Directive 51 says I’m to locate the qualified and competent person highest in the line of succession,” Cam said. “If Shaunsen were obviously mad, in a coma, or in jail in Beijing, or maybe even just hopelessly drunk all the time, it would be my job to pass over him and go to the first competent person in the line of succession. But the job of the NCCC is to hand over the White House to the correct President or Acting President, and then get out of the way, and ‘correct’ doesn’t mean ‘the one I’d prefer,’ as I understand it; it means ‘the first one in line who conceivably could do the job,’ and I think I have to define ‘conceivably’ in a pretty broad, liberal way. Anyway, the Cabinet will be here in a few minutes—I’ve got Secretary Weisbrod and Secretary Ferein up there to greet them and bring them down as they come in; the Chief Justice should be here any minute, she’s scaring the hell out of everyone by driving herself like she always does; and Shaunsen will be along as soon as the barber shaves him and he figures out what suit he’s wearing. It was harder to find a barber on such short notice than it was to get the Secretary of Defense or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by the way.”

“Must be a pretty fine shave. I didn’t even know that we swore in Acting Presidents. Isn’t the Vice President the Acting President whenever the President has surgery with anesthesia? Have they all been taking oaths all these years?”

“We’ve never done it before,” Cameron admitted. “But I had to promise it to Shaunsen so he’d come down here and go on the air.”

“Shit.”

“Unofficially, that’s my opinion too. But we’ve had an oath ready for decades, in case there was a need for swearing in. It’s the Presidential oath except that there’s a bit about handing the job back when he’s told to, and it has ‘temporary’ and ‘acting’ all through it. And it’s not all downside; sure, it’s stroking Shaunsen’s oversized ego, and that’s probably just going to make a bad situation worse, but the PR consultants do seem to think that it will help reassure Americans, now that they’ve been completely freaked by not hearing from their president all night.”

“I never thought I’d say this,” Heather said, “but this almost makes me wish Norcross was in office.”

Cam smirked, just a little. “After today, who knows? He might be. But this isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.”

“No—”

Chief Justice Lopez came in, her motorcycle helmet still under her arm, with her two “wingmen,” the Secret Service who rode with her. They discreetly steered her to Cam, who handed her a copy of the Acting President’s Oath of Office. She pulled out a pen and began marking changes.

“That was vetted by the Attorney General,” Cam said.

“Unhhunh. He knows the law. I decide if he’s right. There’s three spots in here that Shaunsen could use to stay in power when he ought to go, and I’m fixing those. Plus two misspellings and I guess they just don’t teach them how to use semicolons in law school anymore. We’ll have it ready before I have to swear in His Nibs, and you know as well as I do that he won’t look at it first—that would involve work.” She bent to her task, unzipping her leather jacket and shrugging it off. “And don’t sweat the clothes, I’ve got a spare robe from my saddlebag—one of your interns is pressing it right now. Another lost skill. Thank god you have some back-country girls working here.”

As they drifted away from Lopez, Heather said, “There’s never been any idea of putting the Chief Justice in the line of succession, has there?”

“No, not really. And it would have been a mixed bag. Taft had been president, Earl Warren or John Marshall would have been fine, Roger Taney would’ve been a disaster. Besides, it sort of violates the separation of powers.”

“Doesn’t bringing a president over from Congress do that?”

“Shh. One of a lot of problems with the ’47 Act. In a better situation, I might have asked Lopez for a ruling about it. But I think we’ve got to have a President, any president, inside the next hour, so… let’s hope he grows.”

Graham Weisbrod brought in Secretary of State Randolph, who looked very tired and old—he’d already been planning to go back to Oxford, Mississippi, as soon as Pendano was re-elected. Weisbrod got him coffee and squatted to chat with him in a friendly way.

“Your old teacher and boss is definitely a people person,” Cam observed.

“Yeah. Hey, am I keeping you from anything you should be doing?”

“Getting everyone to this room is what I should be doing as NCCC, and that’s obviously something I delegate. Other than that, there’s just not that much left of either of my jobs. Most of the emergency operations upstairs are closing down; the disaster relief for stuff like the truck pileups and plane crashes is over at FEMA, catching Daybreakers is up to the FBI domestically, and the military are gearing up to go get as much of il’Alb as they can find, which won’t be much—it never has been. The temp team upstairs has been great, but it’s time for most of them to go back to their regular jobs. I’m going to shut most of it down and send as many of you home as I can. I might even sleep some tonight if I’m lucky.”

Dwight Ferein, Cam’s boss (and a prize stuffed shirt if ever there was one, Heather thought), brought in the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, settling them into chairs next to Randolph.

Peter Shaunsen came in. Cameron hurried over to meet him. Shaunsen looked around, and said, “What do we need to do?”

“You’ll probably want a briefing on the emergency, and you might want a quick meeting with the Cabinet; we’d like you to go on the air with a stock speech we have to reassure the public; and of course we need to do your swearing-in.”

Shaunsen said, “I’ll meet the Cabinet right now, but just to say hello. I don’t need to know details about the emergency, time enough for that tomorrow. Then let’s look at the speech you want me to give. Then swear me in, and I’ll give the speech and go home. Let’s get it done.”

In the small conference room, Shaunsen’s voice quavered. “Only five Cabinet secretaries, and one of them is from Department of the Future?”

“The rest are on their way, sir,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said, his voice carefully neutral. “I’m sure more will arrive while we—”

“Let’s see that speech.” Silently, Cam handed him the text.

Shaunsen read. “Okay, after the third sentence, add, ‘And I can promise that there will be many opportunities for our many different American communities as the situation develops.’ And then… ‘I’ll be reporting on those in a public address, and submitting a proposal to Congress, just as soon as our experts work out the details.’ Then we need to find a way to tell them that if they vote for Pendano, since it’s too late to think about changing the ballots, we’ll get them a good Democrat to take the job by the time the Electoral College meets.”

Weisbrod glanced at the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, and at the Attorney General. None of them met his gaze, so he said, “Uh, Mr. Acting President—”

“It’s ‘Mr. President,’ according to the protocol,” Shaunsen said, firmly. “I looked up the protocol on my way over here.”

“Mr. President, then, sorry. Mr. President, I think in a national-security emergency like this—we’ve been attacked, massively, by at least two different enemies in coordination, and the country is in the grip of a disaster, and there’s no guarantee that more and worse isn’t coming… um, I think campaign rhetoric would be out of place.”

“Will Fucking Norcross didn’t think so, did that little Jesus-weasel? Telling everyone he was going to be above politics. Can’t get more election-hustling than that, can you?”

“You have a point, Mr. President,” Weisbrod said. “But you know much better than I do, when someone high-roads you, pre-emptively, that way, the only way to beat it is to go even higher road. If he campaigned above politics, all you can do is campaign even further above politics.”

Shaunsen peered at Weisbrod with a keen expression that gave Cam a feeling, for the first time since his arrival, that the man was all the way here. “I suggest that when you leave your department, you think pretty seriously about running for county commissioner or maybe state senator someplace. You’ve got the instinct. All right, just the changes I made then; put them in the TelePrompTer, and let’s go.”

The Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Peace arrived during set-up, and the Secretary of the Treasury rushed in just as Shaunsen was in final read-through. Shaunsen looked over his eight Cabinet secretaries with a sour expression that made Weisbrod think, When I was an assistant prof one year out of grad school, if a dean had looked me over like that, I’d’ve quit on the spot; good jobs make cowards of us all.

At last Shaunsen said, “I guess it’ll be okay if you bunch them close together and keep the camera in tight focus. Secretary Randolph, make sure you stand in close, and you too, Secretary Karathuri.”

Weisbrod took a moment to realize that wasn’t because State and Treasury were especially important; it was because those were the two visibly-minority people present. So it’s all a photo op. Well, at least that’ll leave me out of it.

Shaunsen looked around once more. “And you say it would be half an hour before we had everyone?”

“Yes, sir,” Cameron said.

“Just doesn’t seem as special as it should. Well, let’s get it over with, an old man like me should be home in bed.”

Moments later, the lights winked green on the cameras, the tech director gestured rolling, and Chief Justice Lopez held out the Bible. Shaunsen seemed to gain three inches of height and lose three decades in that instant, looking solemn and serious, and his delivery of the TelePrompTer speech was flawless as pure performance, though it annoyed the hell out of Cameron: When it came to the messages that Homeland Security had written, asking people to be understanding about the needs of defense and law enforcement, but not to wait for authority if there was something they could do right now, Shaunsen delivered it in a pro forma rush. But when it came to the words he had added, all those promises that the crisis will generate plenty of pork, he slowed down to put a grin and almost-wink into it. Shit, shit, shit I wish Kowalski had been eligible—or Shaunsen had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck getting here.

Afterward, Shaunsen extracted a handshake and congratulation from all the Cabinet officials, including the slightly-too-late Secretaries of Education and the Interior, and told Dwight Ferein, “I know your guy here”—he pointed at Cam—“wanted to give me some kind of briefing or something about the whole situation, but I’m not that kind of micromanager, everybody should just keep doing the good job they’re doing, and I’ll get caught up sometime this week on it. Meanwhile, I’m tired, and can you believe it, I’ve been in Washington all these years, and it’s my first time sleeping in the White House? I’ve got to go before I fall over. You just tell your people to take care of it, and I’ve got total faith in them.” Three minutes later, he had climbed into a White House limo and rolled away.

Ferein said, “Mr. Nguyen-Peters, I presume you heard the president.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I just want to apologize for him. Because someone should. I suppose I should see about turning the rest of the Cabinet around and sending them home with as many feathers smoothed down as I can, eh?”

“That would be very helpful,” Cam said.

“I can see myself out,” Weisbrod said, “and I’m relatively featherless.”

Ferein had been a CEO of two different companies, an Army Reserve major, a state attorney general, and a one-term senator. He said, “If the job had fallen on me, I would not have felt up to it. I know perfectly well that I achieved adequate performance in several well-paid soft jobs, and a couple of very well-paid hard ones. But unfortunately, I think our Acting President believes himself fully up to it. I am not sure how to disabuse him of this notion, but if you have any ideas, I’ll help in any way I can. Thanks for being my Chief of Staff, Cam, and my colleague, Graham. Now and then I need someone I can make an indiscreet remark in front of; it prevents my exploding.”

“Part of my job, sir,” Cam said. “I should go upstairs and send the team home. Graham, let’s walk together.”

In the elevator, Cam said, “I suppose the White House Chief of Staff will figure out a way to shuffle Pendano out, and Shaunsen in, gently and with proper care for everyone’s dignity.”

“Most chiefs of staff can do that sort of thing,” Weisbrod said, smiling slightly.

“Yeah,” Cameron said. “Speaking as a chief of staff myself, what I actually meant to say was, I don’t envy the poor woman her job—especially since for all we know Pendano will wake up tomorrow morning and say, ‘What the hell have I done?’”

“From your mouth to God’s ears.”

“No kidding.” He stuck his hand out and shook Weisbrod’s. “Just between you and me, Mr. Secretary, my whole job is really all human contact, all I really am is a big smart Rolodex that knows where to go for help. And thank you for adding yourself to my list of people I can count on, tonight.”

“Fair enough. Honestly, I was just hanging around because there’s not much for me at home other than too much reading and not enough company, and it felt nice to be at least a little useful.”

“You were more than a little useful,” Cameron said. “Especially thanks for talking him out of turning the emergency speech into the opener for Shaunsen for President.”

“I’m just sorry that I couldn’t figure out a way to keep him from putting in that silly pork-for-everyone stuff.”

“At least you tried, and you did something. Four other Cabinet secretaries, including my boss, stood there like lumps. And Dwight Ferein called it on the nose, even if he was right about being no more than adequate; we have too many people who are adequate administrators for ordinary times, and who have attended too many seminars telling them that they’re leaders with vision, and too many of them have believed it.” Cameron nodded at Graham. “All that’s my long way of saying, I will call on you again, I’m sure, because I think you can make it up as you go, and most of these guys can’t.”

“I’ll try to live up to your faith,” Weisbrod said. “And hope it’s never tested.”

“Was that phrase of yours, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears’?”

“Perfect on the first try. You sound just like my mother.”