Distraction

1

For the fifty-first time (according to his laptop), Oscar studied the riot video from Worcester. This eight-minute chunk of jerky footage was Oscar’s current favorite object of professional meditation. It was a set of grainy photos, taken by a security camera in Massachu-setts.

The press called this event “the Worcester riot of May Day ’42.” This May Day event did not deserve the term “riot” in Oscar’s professional opinion, because al-though it was extremely destructive, there was nothing ri-otous about it.

The first security shots showed a typical Massachu-setts street crowd, people walking the street. Worcester was traditionally a rather tough and ugly town, but like many areas in the old industrial Northeast, Worcester had been rather picking up lately. Nobody in the crowd showed any signs of aggression or rage. Certainly nothing was going on that would provoke the attention of the authorities and their various forms of machine surveillance. Just normal people shopping, strolling. A line of bank customers doing business with a debit-card machine. A bus taking on and disgorging its passengers.

Then, bit by bit, the street crowd became denser. There were more people in motion. And, although it was by no means easy to notice, more and more of these people were carrying valises, or knapsacks, or big jumbo-sized purses.

Oscar knew very well that these very normal-looking people were linked in conspiracy. The thing that truly roused his admiration was the absolute brilliance of the way they were dressed, the utter dullness and nonchalance of their comportment. They were definitely not natives of Worcester, Massachusetts, but each and every one was a cunning distillation of the public image of Worcester. They were all deliberate plants and ringers, but they were uncannily brilliant forgeries, strangers bent on destruction who were almost impossible to no-tice.

They didn’t fit any known demographic profile of a trouble-maker, or a criminal, or a violent radical. Any security measure that would have excluded them would have excluded everyone in town.

Oscar assumed that they were all radical proles. Dissidents, autonomen, gypsies, leisure-union people. This was a reasonable assumption, since a quarter of the American population no longer had jobs. More than half of the people in modern America had given up on formal employment. The modern economy no longer generated many commercial roles that could occupy the time of people.

With millions of people structurally uprooted, there wasn’t any lack of recruiting material for cults, prole gangs, and street mobs. Big mobs were common enough nowadays, but this May Day organization was not a mob. They weren’t a standard street gang or militia either. Because they weren’t saluting one another. There were no visible or-ders given or taken, no colors or hand signs, no visible hierarchy. They showed no signs of mutual recognition at all.

In fact — Oscar had concluded this only after repeated close study of the tape — they weren’t even aware of one another’s existence as members of the same group. He further suspected that many of them — maybe most of them — didn’t know what they were about to do.

Then, they all exploded into action. It was startling, even at the fifty-first viewing.

Smoke bombs went off, veiling the street in mist. Purses and valises and backpacks yawned open, and their owners removed and deployed a previously invisible arsenal of drills, and bolt cutters, and pneumatic jacks. They marched through the puffing smoke and set to their work as if they demolished banks every day.

A brown van ambled by, a van that bore no license plates. As it drove down the street every other vehicle stopped dead. None of those vehicles would ever move again, because their circuits had just been stripped by a high-frequency magnetic pulse, which, not coinci-dentally, had ruined all the financial hardware within the bank.

The brown van departed, never to return. It was shortly replaced by a large, official-looking, hook-wielding tow truck. The tow truck bumped daintily over the pavement, hooked itself to the automatic teller machine, and yanked the entire armored machine from the wall in a cascade of broken bricks. Two random passersby deftly lashed the teller machine down with bungee cords. The tow truck then thoughtfully picked up a parked limousine belonging to a bank officer, and departed with that as well.

At this point, the arm of a young man appeared in close-up. A strong brown hand depressed a button, and a can sprayed the lens of the security camera with paint. That was the end of the recorded surveillance footage.

But it hadn’t been the end of the attack. The attackers hadn’t simply robbed the bank. They had carried off everything portable, including the security cameras, the carpets, the chairs, and the light and plumbing fixtures. The conspirators had deliberately punished the bank, for reasons best known to themselves, or to their unknown controllers. They had superglued doors and shattered windows, sev-ered power and communications cables, poured stinking toxins into the wallspaces, concreted all the sinks and drains. In eight minutes, sixty people had ruined the building so thoroughly that it had to be condemned and later demolished.

The ensuing criminal investigation had not managed to apprehend, convict, or even identify a single one of the “rioters.” Once fuller attention had been paid to the Worcester bank, a number of grave financial irregularities had surfaced. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of three Massachusetts state representatives and the jailing of four bank executives and the mayor of Worcester. The Worcester banking scandal had become a major issue in the ensuing U.S. Senate campaign.

This event was clearly significant. It had required organization, observation, decision, execution. It was a gesture of brutal authority from some very novel locus of power. Someone had done all this with meticulous purpose and intent, but how? How did they compel the loyalty of those agents? How did they recruit them, train them, dress them, pay them, transport them? And — most amazing of all — how did they compel their silence, afterward?

Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess game. His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers and strategies, ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying this tape had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon on the tape was not a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn’t a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda, and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society.

Oscar sighed, shut his laptop, and looked down the length of the bus. His campaign staffers had been living inside a bus for thirteen weeks, in a slowly rising tide of road garbage. They were victorious now, decompressing from the heroic campaign struggle. Alcott Bambakias, their former patron, was the new U.S. Senator-elect from Massachusetts. Oscar had won his victory. The Bambakias campaign had been folded up, and sent away.

And yet, twelve staffers still dwelled inside the Senator’s bus. They were snoring in their fold-down bunks, playing poker on the flip-out tables, trampling big promiscuous heaps of road laundry. On occasion, they numbly rifled the cabinets for snacks.

Oscar’s sleeve rang. He reached inside it, retrieved a fabric telephone, and absently flopped his phone back into shape. He spoke into the mouthpiece. “Okay, Fontenot.”

“You wanna make it to the science lab tonight?” said Fontenot.

“That would be good.”

“How much is it worth to you? We’ve got a roadblock problem.”

“They’re shaking us down, is that it?” said Oscar, his brow creasing beneath his immaculate hair. “They want a bribe, straight across? Is it really that simple?”

“Nothing is ever simple anymore,” said Fontenot. The campaign’s security man wasn’t attempting world-weary sarcasm. He was relating a modern fact of life. “This isn’t like our other little roadblock hassles. This is the United States Air Force.”

Oscar considered this novel piece of information. It didn’t sound at all promising. “Why, exactly, is the Air Force blockading a federal highway?”

“Folks have always done things differently here in Louisiana,” Fontenot offered. Through the phone’s flimsy earpiece, a distant background of car honks rose to a crescendo. “Oscar, I think you need to come see this. I know Louisiana, I was born and raised here, but I just don’t have the words to describe all this.”

“Very good,” Oscar said. “I’ll be right there.” He stuffed the phone in his sleeve. He’d known Fontenot for over a year, and had never heard such an invitation from him. Fontenot never invited other people out to share the professional risks he took; to do that countered every instinct in a bodyguard. Oscar didn’t have to be asked twice.

Oscar set his laptop aside and stood up to confront his entourage. “People, listen to me, here’s the deal! We have another little roadblock problem ahead.” Dismal groans. “Fontenot is on the situation for us. Jimmy, turn on the alarms.”

The driver pulled off the road and activated the bus’s inbuilt defenses. Oscar gazed briefly at the window. Actually, the campaign bus had no windows. Seen from outside, the bus was a solid shell. Its large internal “windows” were panel screen displays, hooked to external cameras that scoped out their surroundings with pitiless intensity. The Bambakias campaign bus habitually videotaped everything that it perceived. When pressed, the bus also recorded and cataloged everything that it saw, exporting the data by satellite relay to an archival safe house deep in the Rocky Mountains. Alcott Bambakias’s campaign bus had been designed and built to be that kind of vehicle.

At the moment, their bus was passively observing two tall green walls of murky pines, and a line of slumping fence posts with corroded barbed wire. They were parked on Interstate Highway 10, ten miles beyond the eldritch postindustrial settlement of Sulphur, Louisiana. Sulphur had attracted a lot of bemused attention from the krewe of staffers as their campaign bus flitted through town. In the curdled fog of winter, the Cajun town seemed to be one giant oil refinery, measled all over with tattered grass shacks and dented trailer homes.

Now the fog had lifted, and on the far side of Sulphur the passing traffic was light.

“I’m going out,” Oscar announced, “to assess the local situation.”

Donna, his image consultant, brought Oscar a dress shirt. Oscar accepted silk braces, his dress hat, and his Milanese trench coat.

As the stylist ministered to his shoes, Oscar gazed meditatively upon his krewe. Action and fresh air might improve their morale. “Who wants to do some face-time with the U.S. Air Force?”

Jimmy de Paulo leaped from the drivjJer’s seat. “Hey, man, I’ll go!”

“Jimmy,” Oscar said gently, “you can’t. We need you to drive this bus.”

“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy, collapsing crestfallen back into his seat. Moira Matarazzo sat up reluctantly in her bunk. “Is there some reason I should go?” This was Moira’s first extensive period off-camera, after months as the campaign’s media spokeswoman. The normally meticulous Moira now sported a ratted mess of hair, chapped lips, furry eyebrows, wrinkled cotton pajamas. The evil glitter under her champagne-puffed eyelids could have scared a water moccasin. “Because I will go if it’s required, but I don’t really see why I should,” Moira whined. “Roadblocks can be dangerous.”

“Then you should definitely go.” This was Bob Argow, the campaign’s systems administrator. Bob’s level tone made it icily clear that he was nearing the point of emotional detonation. Bob had been drinking steadily ever since the Boston victory celebration. He’d begun his drinking in joyous relief, and as the miles rolled on and the bottles methodically emptied, Bob had plunged into classic post-traumatic depression.

“I’ll go with you, Mr. Valparaiso,” Norman-the-Intern piped up. As usual, everyone ignored Norman.

The twelve staffers were still officially on salary, mopping up the last of Bambakias’s soft campaign money. Officially, they were all taking a richly deserved “vacation.” This was a typically generous gesture by Alcott Bambakias, but it was also a situation specifically arranged to gently part the campaign krewe from the vicinity of the new Senator-elect. Back in his ultramodern Cambridge HQ, the charismatic billionaire was busily assembling an entirely new krewe, the Washington staff that would help him to govern. After months of frenzied team labor and daunting personal sacrifice, the campaigners had been blown off with a check and a hearty handshake.

Oscar Valparaiso had been Bambakias’s chief political consultant. He had also been the campaign’s Executive Director. From the spoils of victory, Oscar had swiftly won himself a new assignment. Thanks to rapid backstage string-pulling, Oscar had become a brand-new policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Science Committee. Senator Bambakias would soon be serving on that committee.

Oscar possessed goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future. The other campaign staffers lacked all these things. Oscar knew this. He knew all of these people only too well. During the past eighteen months, Oscar had recruited them, assembled them, paid them, managed them, flattered and cajoled them, welded them into a working unit. He’d rented their office space, overlooked their expense accounts, given them job titles, managed their access to the candidate, even mediated over substance-abuse problems and romantic entanglements. Finally, he’d led them all to victory.

Oscar was still a locus of power, so his krewe was instinctively migrating in his wake. They were “on vacation,” professional political operatives hoping for something to turn up. But the esprit de corps in Oscar’s entourage had all the tensile strength of a fortune cookie.

Oscar fetched his oxblood-leather shoulder satchel and, after mature consideration, tucked in a small nonlethal spraygun. Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo and bagman, passed him a fat debit card. Pelicanos was visibly tired, and still somewhat hungover from the prolonged celebration, but he was up and alert. As Oscar’s official second-in-command, Pelicanos always made it a point to be publicly counted on.

“I’ll go with you,” Pelicanos muttered, hunting for his hat. “Let me get properly dressed.”

“You stay, Yosh,” Oscar told him quietly. “We’re a long way from home. You keep an eye peeled back here.”

“I’ll get a coffee.” Pelicanos yawned, and reflexively clicked on a satellite news feed, erasing a bus window in a gush of networked data. He began hunting for his shoes.

“I’ll go with you!” Norman insisted brightly. “C’mon, Oscar, let me go!” Norman-the-Intern was the campaign’s last remaining gofer. The busy Bambakias campaign had once boasted a full three dozen interns, but all of the campaign’s other unpaid volunteers had stayed behind in Boston. Norman-the-Intern, however, an MIT college lad, had stuck around like a burr, laboring fanatically and absorbing inhuman levels of abuse. The campaign krewe had brought Norman along with them “on vacation,” more through habit than through any conscious decision.

The door opened with a harsh pneumatic pop. Oscar and Norman stepped outside their bus for the first time in four states. After hundreds of hours inside their vehicle, stepping onto earth was like decamping onto another planet. Oscar noted with vague surprise that the highway’s patchy shoulders were paved with tons of crunchy oyster shells.

The tall roadside ditchweed was wind-flattened and brownish green. The wind came from the east, bearing the reek of distant Sulphur — a bioindustrial reek. A stink like a monster gene-spliced brewery: like rabid bread yeasts eating new-mowed grass. A white V of departing egrets stenciled the cloudy sky overhead. It was late November 2044, and southwest Louisiana was making halfhearted preparations for winter. Clearly this wasn’t the kind of winter that anyone from Massachusetts would recognize.

Norman alertly fetched a motorbike from the rack on the back of the bus. The bikes were designed and sold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and were covered with union labels, antilitigation safety warnings, and software cheatsheet stickers. It was very typical of Bambakias to buy motor bicycles with more onboard smarts than a transcontinental airliner.

Norman hooked up the sidecar, and checked the battery. “No hotdogging,” Oscar warned him, clambering into the sidecar and placing his hat in his lap. They tugged on dainty foam helmets, then pulled onto the highway behind a passing electric flatbed.

Norman, as always, drove like a maniac. Norman was young. He had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems. He rode the motorbike with intense lack of physical grace, as if trying to do algebra with his legs.

Dusk began to settle gently over the pines. Traffic was backed up for two kilometers on the east side of the Sabine River bridge. Oscar and Norman buzzed up along the road shoulder, the smart bike and sidecar scrunching over the oyster shells with oozy cybernetic ease. The people trapped within the stalled traffic looked stoic and resigned. The big road professionals — eerie-looking biochemical tankers and big, grimy, malodorous seafood trucks — were already turning and leaving. Roadblocks were a sadly common business these days.

The state of Louisiana’s office of tourism maintained a roadside hospitality depot, perched at the riverside just at the state border. The tourist HQ was a touchingly ugly structure of faux-antebellum brick and white columns.

The building had been surrounded with fresh, razor-edged concertina wire. The highway into Texas was thoroughly blockaded with sentry boxes, striped barriers, and nonlethal clusters of glue mines and foam mines.

A huge matte-black military helicopter perched on its skids at the side of the highway, mechanically attentive and deeply bizarre. The black copter lit the tarmac with searing bluish spotlights. The colossal machine was armed to the teeth with great skeletal masses of U.S. Air Force weaponry. The ancient air-to-ground weapons were so insanely complex and archaic that their function was a complete mystery to Oscar. Were they Gatling flechettes? Particle accelerators? Rayguns of some kind, maybe? They were like some nightmare mix of lamprey fangs and sewing machines.

Within the brilliant frame of helicopter glare, small squads of blue-uniformed Air Force personnel were stopping and confronting the cars attempting to leave Louisiana. The people within the cars, mostly Texan tourists, seemed suitably cowed.

The Air Force people were engaged in an elaborate roadblock shakedown. They were pulling white boxes out of refrigerated trishaws, and confronting travelers with their contents.

Norman-the-Intern was an engineering student. He tore his fascinated gaze from the copters’ appalling weaponry. “I thought this was gonna be a party roadblock, more like those cool gypsy bikers back in Tennessee,” Norman observed. “Maybe we’d better just get out of here.”

“There’s Fontenot,” Oscar parried.

Fontenot waved them over. His advance vehicle, a sturdy all-terrain electric hummer, was straddling the roadside ditch. The campaign security manager wore a long yellow slicker and muddy jeans.

It was always reassuring to see Fontenot. Fontenot was a former Secret Service agent, a security veteran of presidential caliber. Fontenot knew American Presidents personally. In fact, he had been serving as bodyguard to an ex-President when he had lost his left leg.

“The Air Force flew in around noon,” Fontenot informed them, leaning on the padded bumper of his hummer and lowering his binoculars. “Got their glue bombs down, and some crowd-foamers. Plus the sawhorses and the tanglewire.”

“So at least they didn’t destroy the roadbed?” Norman said. Fontenot cordially ignored Norman. “They’re letting the lane from Texas through with no problems, and they’re waving everybody with Louisiana plates right through. There’s been no resistance. They’re shaking down the out-of-staters as they leave.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Oscar said. He put his helmet aside, adjusted his hair with a pocket comb, and donned his hat. Then stepped carefully out of the bike’s sidecar, trying not to dirty his shoes. The Louisiana bank of the Sabine was essentially a gigantic marsh.

“Why are they doing this?” Norman said.

“They need the money,” Fontenot told him.

“What?” Norman said. “The Air Force?”

“Got no federal funding to pay their power bills at the local air base. Either they pony up, or the utility cuts ’em off.”

“The continuing Emergency,” Oscar concluded.

Fontenot nodded. “The feds have wanted to decommission that air base for years, but Louisiana’s real mulish about it. So Congress wrote ’em out of the Emergency resolutions last March. Kinda dropped a whole air base right through the cracks.”

“That’s bad. That’s really bad. That’s terrible!” Norman said. “Why can’t Congress just have a straight-up vote on the issue? I mean, how hard can it be to close down a military base?”

Fontenot and Oscar exchanged meaningful glances.

“Norman, you had better stay here and mind our vehicles,” Oscar said kindly. “Mr. Fontenot and I need a few words with these military gentlemen.”

Oscar joined Fontenot as the ex-Secret Service agent limped up the long line of traffic. They were soon out of Norman’s earshot. It felt pleasant to be strolling slowly in the open air, where technical eavesdropping was unlikely. Oscar always enjoyed his best conversations when outside of machine surveillance.

“We could just pay them off, y’know,” Fontenot said mildly. “It’s not the first time we’ve seen a roadblock.”

“I don’t suppose it’s remotely possible that these soldiers might shoot us?”

“Oh no, the Air Force won’t shoot us.” Fontenot shrugged. “It’s nonlethal deployment and all that. It’s all political.”

“There are circumstances where I would have paid them off,” Oscar said. “If we’d lost that campaign, for instance. But we didn’t lose. We won. The Senator’s in power now. So now, it’s the principle.”

Fontenot removed his hat, wiped the permanent hat-crease in his forehead, and put the hat back on. “There’s another option. I’ve mapped us an alternate route. We can back off, head north up Highway 109, and still make that lab in Buna by midnight. Save a lot of risk and trouble all around.”

“Good idea,” Oscar told him, “but let’s have a look anyway. I think I can smell an issue here. The Senator always likes issues.” People were glaring at the two of them from within the stalled cars. Fontenot was easily passing for a native, but Oscar was drawing resentful and curious stares. Very few people in southwest Louisiana dressed like Beltway political operatives.

“It’s a big stinkin’ issue all right,” Fontenot agreed.

“This local Governor is a real character, isn’t he? A stunt like this… There must be better ways for a state politician to provoke the feds.”

“Green Huey is crazy. But he’s the people’s kind of crazy, these days. The State of Emergency, the budget crisis — it’s no joke down here. People really resent it.”

They stopped near the searing glare of the copter lights. An Air Force lieutenant was addressing a pair of day tripping Texan civilians through the open window of the couple’s car. The lieutenant was a young woman: she wore a padded blue flight suit, a body-armor vest, and an elaborate flight helmet. The helmet’s screen-crowded interior was busily ticking and flashing as it hung from her webbing belt.

The Texan man looked up at her cautiously, through the driver’s window. “It’s what?” he said.

“An Air Force bake sale, sir. Louisiana bake sale. We got your corn bread, your muffuleta bread, croissants, beignets… Maybe some chicory coffee? Ted, we got any of that chicory coffee left?”

“Just made us a fresh carafe,” Ted announced loudly, opening the steaming lid of his rickshaw. Ted was heavily armed.

“What do you think?” said the driver to his wife.

“Beignets always get powdered sugar over everything,” the Texan woman said indistinctly.

“How much for, uhm, four croissants and two coffees? With cream?”

The lieutenant muttered a canned spiel about “voluntary contributions.” The driver retrieved his wallet and silently passed over a debit card. The lieutenant swiftly slotted the card through a cellular reader, relieving the couple of a hefty sum. Then she passed the food through their window. “Y’all take care now,” she said, waving them on.

The couple drove away, accelerating rapidly once their car had cleared the line of fire. The lieutenant consulted a handheld readout, and waved through the next three cars, which all bore Louisiana plates. Then she pounced on another tourist.

Fontenot and Oscar edged past the blazing glare of the chopper and made their way toward the commandeered hospitality post. Chest-high tanglewire surrounded the building in a mesh of bright feather-weight razors. Sheets of foil and duct tape blacked the building’s windows. Military satellite antennas the size of monster birdbaths had been punched through the roof An armed guard stood at the door.

The guard stopped them. The kid’s military-police uniform was oddly rumpled — apparendy dug from the bottom of a mildewed duffel bag. The kid looked them over: a well-dressed politico accompanied by his krewe bodyguard. Certainly nothing unusual there. The young soldier scanned them with a detector wand, failing to notice Oscar’s all-plastic spraygun, and then addressed himself to Oscar. “ID, Sir?”

Oscar passed over a gleaming dossier chip embossed with a federal Senate seal.

Four minutes later, they were ushered inside the building. There were two dozen armed men and women inside the hospitality suite. The intruders had shoved the furniture against the walls, and staked out the doors and windows. Muffled thuds, scrapes, and crunches emanated from the ceiling, as if the attic were infested with giant, armed raccoons.

The original staffers from the Louisiana tourist office were still inside the building. The hospitality krewe were well-dressed middle-aged Southern ladies, with done hair and ribbons, and nice skirts and fiats. The ladies had not been arrested or formally detained, but they had been crowded together into a dismal corner of their foil-darkened office, and they looked understandably distressed.

The commanding Air Force officer was dead drunk. Oscar and Fontenot were greeted by the public relations officer. The PR man was also plastered.

The central office was crammed with portable military command-post gear, an overjammed closet full of stencils, khaki, and flickering screens. The place reeked of spilled whiskey; the commanding officer, still in full dress uniform including his spit-polished shoes, was sprawled on a khaki cot. His visored and braided hat half concealed his face.

The PR officer, a chunky, uniformed veteran with graying hair and seamed cheeks, was busy at a set of consoles. The pegboard counters trailed fat tangles of military fiber-optic cable.

“How may I help you gentlemen?” the PR officer said.

“I need to move a bus through,” said Oscar. “A campaign bus.”

The officer blinked, his eyelids rising at two different instants. His voice was steady, but he was very drunk. “Can’t you fellas just buy a little something from our nice little Air Force bake sale?”

“I’d like to oblige you there, but under the circumstances, it would look…” Oscar mulled it over. “Insensitive.”

The PR officer lightly tapped Oscar’s gleaming dossier card on the edge of his console bench. “Well, maybe you should think that over, mister. It’s a long way back to Boston.”

Fontenot spoke up. Fontenot was good-copping it, being very sane and reasonable. “If you just suspended your operations for half an hour or so, the traffic backlog would clear right up. Our vehicle would slip right through.”

“I suppose that’s an option,” the officer said. One of his screens stopped churning, and uttered a little triumphant burst of martial brass. The PR man examined the results. “Whoa… You’re the son of Logan Valparaiso!”

Oscar nodded, restraining a sigh. A good netsearch program was guaranteed to puncture your privacy, but you could never predict its angle of attack beforehand.

“I knew your dad!” the PR officer declared. “I interviewed him when he starred in the remake of El Mariachi.”

“You don’t say.” The computer had spewed up a bit of common ground for them. It was a cheap stunt, a party trick, but like a lot of psychological operations techniques, it worked pretty well. The three of them were no longer strangers.

“How is your ol’ dad these days?”

“Unfortunately, Logan Valparaiso died back in ’42. A heart attack.”

“That’s a shame.” The officer snapped his pudgy fmgers in regret. “He sure made some great action films.”

“Dad took a lower profile in his later life,” Oscar said. “He went into real estate.” They were both lying. The films, though hugely popular, had been very bad. The later real-estate deals had been money-laundering cover for his father’s Hollywood backers: йmigrй Colombian mafiosi.

“Could you temporarily relocate those barricades for us?” Fontenot asked gently.

“I’ll let you fellas in on something,” the man said. His screens were still churning away, but the three of them were all cozy now. They were swapping net-gossip, trading little confidences. You didn’t shoot someone when you knew that his dad was a movie star. “We’re almost done with this deployment anyhow.”

Oscar lifted his brows. “Really. That’s good news.”

“I’m just running a few battlespace awareness scans… Y’know, the problem with infowar isn’t getting into the systems. It’s getting out of them without collateral damage. So if you’ll just be patient, we’ll be packing up and lifting off before you know it.”

The commander groaned in drunken nausea, and thrashed on his cot. The public relations officer hurried to his superior’s side, tenderly adjusting his rough blanket and inflatable pillow. He then returned, having snagged a bottle of the commander’s bourbon from beneath the cot. He absently decanted an inch or so into a paper cup, studying his nearest screen.

“You were saying?” Oscar prompted.

“Battlespace awareness. That’s the key to rapid deployment. We have surveillance drones over the highway, checking car licenses. We input the licenses into this database here, run credit scans and marketing profiles, pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss…” The officer looked up. “So you might call this an alternative, decentralized, tax-base scheme.”

Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”

“Sure, it’s doable,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Ser-vice. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues.

The PR man laughed bitterly. “That’s what the Governor likes to call it… Look, this is just a standard infowar operation, the stuff we used to do overseas all the time. Fly in, disrupt vital systems, low or zero casualties, achieve the mission objective. Then we just vanish, all gone, forget about it. Turn the page.”

“Right,” said Fontenot. “Just like Second Panama.”

“Hey,” the officer said proudly, “I was in Second Panama! That was classic netwar! We took down the local regime just by screwing with their bitstreams. No fatalities! Never a shot fired!”

“It’s really good when there are no fatalities.” Fontenot flexed his false leg with a squeak.

“Had to quit my TV news work after that, though. Blew my cover. Very long story really.” Their host slurped at his paper cup and looked extremely sad. “You guys need a bourbon?”

“You bet we do!” Oscar said. “Thanks a lot!” He accepted a paper cup brimming with yellow booze, and pretended to sip at it. Oscar never drank alcohol. He had seen it kill people in slow and terrible ways.

“When exactly do you plan to relocate?” Fontenot said, ac-cepting his cup with a ready Eisenhower grin.

“Oh, nineteen hundred hours. Maybe. That’s what the com-mander had in mind this morning.”

“Your commander looks a bit tired,” Oscar said.

That remark made the PR man angry. He put down his bour-bon and looked at Oscar with eyes like two shucked oysters. “Yeah. That’s right. My commander is tired. He broke his sworn oath of allegiance, and he’s robbing U.S. citizens, the people he swore to protect. That tends to tire you out.”

Oscar listened attentively.

“Y’know, the commander here was given no choice. No choice at all. It was pull this stunt, or watch his people starving in their barracks. There’s no funding now. There’s no fuel, no pay for the troops, no equipment, there is nothing. All because you silk-suit sons of bitches in Washington can’t get it together to pass a budget.”

“My man just got to Washington,” Oscar said. “We need a chance.”

“My man here is a decorated officer! He was in Panama Three, Iraq Two, he was in Rwanda! He’s no politician — he’s a goddamn national hero! Now the feds are cracking up, and the Governor’s gone crazy, but the commander, he’ll be the fall guy for this. When it’s all over, he’ll be the man who has to pay for everything. The committees will break him in half”

Oscar was calm. “That’s why I have to work in Washington.”

“What’s your party?”

“Senator Bambakias was elected with a thirty-eight percent plu-rality,” Oscar said. “He isn’t tied to any single party doctrine. He has multipartisan appeal.”

The PR man snorted. “What’s your party, I said.”

“Federal Democrat.”

“Aw Jesus.” The man ducked his head and waved one hand.

“Go home, Yankee. Go get a life.”

“We were just leaving,” Fontenot said, putting aside his un-touched bourbon. “You happen to know a good local restaurant? A Cajun place, I mean? It has to seat a dozen of us.”

The young guard at the door saluted politely as they left the hospital-ity building. Oscar carefully slipped his federal ID back into his eelskin wallet. He waited until they were well out of earshot before he spoke. “He may be dead drunk, but that guy sure knows the local restau-rants.”

“Journalists always remember these things,” Fontenot said wisely. “Y’know something? I know that guy. I met him once, at Battledore’s in Georgetown. He was doing lunch with the Vice President at the time. I can’t remember his name now for the life of me, but that’s his face all right. He was a big-name foreign correspondent once, a big wheel on the old TV cable nets. That was before they outed him as a U.S. infowar spook.”

Oscar considered this. As a political consultant, he had naturally come to know many journalists. He had also met a certain number of spooks. Journalists certainly had their uses in the power game, but spooks had always struck him as a malformed and not very bright subspecies of political consultant. “Did you happen to tape that little discussion we just had?”

“Yeah,” Fontenot admitted. “I generally do that. Especially when I’m dead sure that the other guy is also taping it.”

“Good man,” Oscar said. “I’ll be skimming the highlights of that conversation and passing them on to the Senator.”

Oscar and Fontenot’s relations during the campaign had always been formal and respectful. Fontenot was twice Oscar’s age, canny, and paranoid, always entirely and utterly serious about assuring the physical safety of the candidate. With the campaign safely behind them, though, Fontenot had clearly been loosening. Now he seemed inspired by a sudden attack of sincerity. “Would you like a little ad-vice? You don’t have to listen, if you don’t want to.”

“You know I always listen to your advice, Jules.”

Fontenot looked at him. “You want to be Barnbakias’s chief of staff in Washington.”

Oscar shrugged. “Well, I never denied that. Did I ever deny it?”

“Stick with your Senate committee job, instead. You’re a clever guy, and I think maybe you could accomplish something in Washing-ton. I’ve seen you run those hopeless goofballs in your krewe like they were a crack army, so I just know you could handle a Senate commit-tee. And something’s just gotta get done.” Fontenot looked at Oscar with genuine pain. “America has lost it. We can’t get a grip. Goddammit, just look at all this! Our country’s up on blocks.”

“I want to help Bambakias. He has ideas.”

“Bambakias can give a good speech, but he’s never lived a day inside the Beltway. He doesn’t even know what that means. The guy’s an architect.”

“He’s a very clever architect.”

Fontenot grunted. “He wouldn’t be the first guy who mistook intelligence for political smarts.”

“Well, I suppose the Senator’s ultimate success depends on his handlers. The Senate krewe, the entourage. His staff.” Oscar smiled. “Look, I didn’t hire you, you know. Bambakias hired you. The man can make good staff decisions. All he needs is a chance.”

Fontenot flipped up his yellow coat collar. It had begun to drizzle.

Oscar spread his manicured hands. “I’m only twenty-eight years old. I don’t have the necessary track record to become a Senator’s chief of staff. And besides, I’m about to have my hands full with this Texas science assignment.”

“And besides,” Fontenot mimicked, “there’s your little personal background problem.”

Oscar blinked. It always gave him an ugly moment of vertigo to hear that matter mentioned aloud. Naturally Fontenot knew all about the “personal background problem.” Fontenot made knowing such things his business. “You don’t hold that problem against me, I hope.”

“No.” Fontenot lowered his voice. “I might have. I’m an old man, I’m old-fashioned. But I’ve seen you at work, so I know you better now.” He thumped his artiftcialleg against the ground. “That’s not why I’m leaving you, Oscar. But I am leaving. The campaign’s over, you won. You won big. I’ve done a lot of campaigns in my day, and I really think yours may have been the prettiest I ever saw. But now I’m back home to the bayous, and it’s time for me to leave the business. Forever. I’m gonna see your convoy safely through to Buna, then I’m outta here.”

“I respect that decision, I truly do,” Oscar said. “But I’d prefer it if you stayed on with us — temporarily. The crew respects your profes-sional judgment. And the Buna situation might need your security skills.” Oscar drew a breath, then started talking with more focus and intensity. “I haven’t exactly broken this to our boys and girls on the bus, but I’ve been scoping out the Buna situation. And this delightful Texas vacation retreat that’s our destination tonight — basically, it looks to me like a major crisis waiting to happen.”

Fontenot shook his head. “I’m not in the market for a major crisis. I’ve been looking forward to retirement. I’m gonna fish, I’m gonna hunt a little. I’m gonna get myself a shack in the bayou that has a stove and a fryin’ pan, and no goddamn nets or telephones, ever, ever again.”

“I can make it worth your while,” Oscar coaxed. “Just a month, all right? Four weeks till the Christmas holidays. You’re still on salary, as long as you’re with us. I can double that if I have to. Another month’s pay.”

Fontenot wiped rain from his hat brim. “You can do that?”

“Well, not directly, not from the campaign funds, but Pelicanos can handle it for us. He’s a wizard at that sort of thing. Two months’ salary for one month’s work. And at Boston rates, too. That might swing the earnest money on your standard bayou shack.”

Fontenot was weakening. “Well, you’ll have to let me think that over.”

“You can have weekends.”

“Really?”

“Three-day weekends. Since you’re looking for a place to live.”

Fontenot sighed. “Well…”

“Audrey and Bob wouldn’t mind doing some real-estate scan-ning for you. They’re world-class oppo research people, and they’re just killing time out here. So why should you get taken in a house deal? They can scare you up a dream home, and even a decent real-estate agent.”

“Damn. I never thought of that angle. That’s true, though. That could be worth a lot to me. It’d save me a lot of trouble. All right, I’ll do it.”

They shook hands.

They had reached their vehicles. There was no sign of Norman-the-Intern, however. Fontenot stood up on the dented hood of his hummer, his prosthetic leg squeaking with the effort, and finally spot-ted Norman with his binoculars.

Norman was talking with some Air Force personnel. They were clustered together under the sloping roof of a concrete picnic table, next to a wooden walkway that led into the cypress-haunted depths of the Sabine River swamp. “Should I fetch him for you?” Fontenot said.

“I’ll get him,” Oscar said. “I brought him. You can call Pelicanos back at the bus, and brief the krewe on the situation.”

Young people were a distinct minority in contemporary Amer-ica. Like most minorities, they tended to fraternize. Norman was young enough to be of military age. He was leaning against a graffiti-etched picnic roof support and haranguing the soldiers insis-tently.

“… radar-transparent flying drones with X-ray lasers!” Nor-man concluded decisively.

“Well, maybe we have those, and maybe we don’t,” drawled a young man in blue.

“Look, it’s common knowledge you have them. It’s like those satellites that read license plates from orbit — they’re yesterday’s news, you’ve had ’em for a zillion years. So my point is: given that technical capacity, why don’t you just take care of this Governor of Louisiana? Spot his motorcade with drone telephotos, and follow him around. When you see him wander out of the car a little ways, you just zap him.”

A young woman spoke up. “ ‘Zap’ Governor Huguelet?”

“I don’t mean kill him. That would be too obvious. I mean vaporize him. Just evaporate the guy! Shoes, suit, the works! They’d think he’s like… you know… off in some hotel chewing the feet of some hooker.”

It took the Air Force people some time to evaluate this proposal. The concept was clearly irritating them. “You can’t evaporate a whole human body with an airborne X-ray laser.”

“You could if it was tunable.”

“Tunable free-electron lasers aren’t radar-transparent. Besides, their power demand is out the roof”

“Well, you could collate four or five separate aircraft into one overlapping fire zone. Besides, who needs clunky old free electrons when there are quantum-pitting bandgaps? Bandgaps are plenty tun-able. ”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Oscar said. “Norman, we’re needed back at the bus now.”

The Air Force girl stared at Oscar, slowly taking him in, from perfect hat to shiny shoes. “Who’s the suit?”

“He’s… well, he’s with the U.S. Senate.” Norman smiled cheerily. “Really good friend of mine.”

Oscar put a gentle hand on Norman’s shoulder. “We need to move along, Norman. We’ve just made a group reservation at a great Cajun restaurant.”

Norman tagged along obediently. “Will they let me drink there?”

“Laissez les bon temps rouler, ” Oscar said.

“Those were nice kids,” Norman announced. “I mean, road-blockers and all, but basically, they’re just really nice American kids.”

“They’re American military personnel who are engaging in highway robbery.”

“Yeah. That’s true. It’s bad. It’s really too bad. Y’know? They’re stuck in the military, so they just don’t think politically.”

They crossed the Texas border in the clammy thick of the night. The krewe was glutted with hot baked shrimp and batter-fried alligator tail, topped with seemingly endless rounds of blendered hurricanes and flaming brandied coffees. The food at the Cajun casinos was epic in scope. They even boasted a convenient special rate for tour buses.

It had been a very good idea to stop and eat. Oscar could sense that the mood of his miniature public had shifted radically. The krewe had really enjoyed themselves. They’d been repeatedly informed that they were in the state of Louisiana, but now they could feel that fact in their richly clotted bloodstreams.

This wasn’t Boston anymore. This was no longer the sordid tag end of the Massachusetts campaign. They were living in an interreg-num, and maybe, somehow, if you only believed, in the start of something better. Oscar could not feel bad about his life. It was not a normal life and it never had been, but it offered very interesting chal-lenges. He was rising to the next challenge. How bad could life be? At least they were all well fed.

Except for hardworking Jimmy the driver, who was paid specifi-cally not to drink himself senseless, Oscar was the last person awake inside the bus. Oscar was almost always the last to sleep, as well as the first to wake. Oscar rarely slept at all. Since the age of six, he had customarily slept for about three hours a night.

As a small child, he would simply lay silently in darkness during those long extra hours of consciousness, quietly plotting how to man-age the mad vagaries of his adoptive Hollywood parents. Surviving the Valparaiso household’s maelstrom of money, drugs, and celebrity had required a lot of concentrated foresight.

In his later life, Oscar had put his night-owl hours to further good use: first, the Harvard MBA. Then the biotechnology start-up, where he’d picked up his long-time accountant and finance man, Yosh Pelicanos, and also his faithful scheduler/receptionist, Lana Ramachandran. He’d kept the two of them on through the cash-out of his first company, and on through the thriving days of venture capital on Route 128. Business strongly suited Oscar’s talents and proclivities, but he had nevertheless moved on swiftly, into political party activism. A successful and innovative Boston city council campaign had brought him to the attention of Alcott Bambakias. The U.S. Senate campaign then followed. Politics had become the new career. The challenge. The cause.

So Oscar was awake in darkness, and working. He generally ended each day with a diary annotation, a summary of the options taken and important operational events. Tonight, he wrapped up his careful annotations of the audiotape with the Air Force highway ban-dits. He shipped the file to Alcott Bambakias, encrypted and denoted “personal and confidential.” There was no way to know if this snippet of the modern chaos in Louisiana would capture his patron’s mercurial attention. But it was necessary to keep up a steady flow of news and counsel across the net. To be out of the Senator’s sight might be very useful in some ways, but to drift out of his mind would be a profes-sional blunder.

Oscar composed and sent a friendly net-note to his girlfriend, Clare, who was living in his house in Boston. He studied and updated his personnel flies. He examined and totaled the day’s expenditures. He composed his daily diary entries. He took comfort in the strength of his routines.

He had met many passing setbacks, but he had yet to meet a challenge that could conclusively defeat him.

He shut his laptop with a sense of satisfaction, and prepared him-self for sleep. He twitched, he thrashed. Finally he sat up, and opened his laptop again.

He studied the Worcester riot video for the fifiy-second time.