hurriedly.
“Your mom hates me.” Jane said.
“She doesn’t hate you, she doesn’t hate anybody. She’s an ex-nun, for god’s sake.”
“Greektown! This is the Greektown station,” the Cylon voice of the People Mover proclaimed.
The Kid tapped John’s arm and everybody filed out. It was a straight shot from where they stood to the seven skyscrapers of the Renaissance Center. The GM logo floated over Detroit like it was advertising a giant blue-light special. Down on the street, only the Bouzouki Gentleman’s Club and Patras’ Coney Island remained open. A few drunks, at loose ends after last call, were weighing their options. Jane understood their dilemma.
“Decisions, decisions. Tits-and-ass. Or hot dogs. I’m so conflicted,” Jane murmured, shuddering.
“I’m not,” Jen grinned, veering toward the strip club. The Kid caught her by the back of her coat.
“Our daily scan says the tits are bugged, but the hot dogs are not. We can neither confirm nor deny the nutritional value of either.” The women in the larger than life-size burlesque pictures fronting the strip joint looked hurt. In an objectified, stereotypical sort of way.
“Is really Balalaika Club,” Leo said.
“Let me guess,” John said. “Your uncle owns it.”
“A family friend,” Leo clarified. “I must pay my respects. Paka!” He crossed the street, passed beneath the red-hot neon awning, and disappeared inside.
“Who IS that?” John asked the Kid.
“One of ours,” Jen said. “Believes in standing up for the little guy.”
“Oh great. We’re mobbed up.” John did not look pleased.
“We’re connected,” the Kid stressed. “Remember, the mafia has Robin Hood roots. Also - let he who is without sin and so forth? We’re all refugees from the dark side. Who else knows this shit?” The Kid herded them toward the diner. It was steamy warm inside, so much so that the windows streamed with moisture. They got a booth in the middle of the small dining room. There was a fun moment when Jen and the Kid sat down and John and Jane hesitated. The Kid was puzzled.
“What?”
John leaned down. “We don’t usually sit with our backs to the door.” Jen made a rude noise.
“I’ll keep it brief,” the Kid promised.
“OK,” John said. But when Jane slid into position, she sat sideways, with one arm on the back of the bench. John kept one foot in the aisle, pointed toward the cash register.
“First off,” the Kid began, as the waitress was doling out menus and plunking down water glasses, “Let’s talk organizational structure. There isn’t any.”
“That explains a lot,” Jane said. Jen stood a packet of raw sugar on end and flicked it at her.
“We’re a loosely affiliated group of IT and intelligence types working under the umbrella of the Anonymous collective. No leaders, just a self-healing network that takes on projects as they arise. Because of our background, we’re kind of the Anon special forces. Waffles, everybody?” He paused to let the waitress do her job. When she walked off to clip the ticket to the order spindle, the Kid resumed. “Our code name is - yes, go ahead and laugh, we have a code name - Deus Ex.”
“Cocky much?” John wondered, watching the Greek proprietor take money from another couple of nighthawks.
“’Ghost in the machine’ is what we were after,” the Kid explained.
“That would be Spiritus Ex Machina,” John’s inner altar boy observed.
“Too long. Our job is to intervene when least expected, like the gods in Greek plays, so - “ the Kid shrugged.
“Wake up, Blondie,” Jane was nodding off. Jen kicked her under the table. “We’re getting to the important part.”
“Ah yes, the important part. Thanks to you two and Jen and the Pentagon job, we have been able to nail down almost the entire history and apparatus of the New World Order, including the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis. We have pieced all that together from your pirated files, and before too long, if what’s left of the independent press does its job, the stories are going to begin to dribble out. Deregulation and the debt bubble; the Lehman takedown; the secret Fed bailout; the trillions in tax havens; the rigging of derivatives, currencies, interest rates, and exchanges; endless war and the strategy of tension; the mass surveillance networks; the political blackmail; the international economic games being used to dismantle society as we know it - in short, the entire neo-con, neo-lib ball of wax.”
John was still watching the proprietor, a wizened fellow, near eighty if he was a day, who had just picked up the ringing telephone. The old man listened, scowling, then came out from behind his check-out desk, and made a quick visual survey of the room, taking a long hard look at John and company.
“So that’s that, right?” John guessed absently. The proprietor turned his back and began to talk in heated, spitting Greek.
“Not hardly,” Jen scoffed.
“The elites are this close to achieving total global domination.” The kid held his forefinger and thumb mere nanometers apart. “The information we have is going to shock people when it gets out; but nobody thinks our corporate overlords are going to relinquish power and privilege without a fight. They own everything - armies, media, pulpits, politicians, prisons, banks.”
“Newsflash. We are fucked,” John said. “But are these some bodacious waffles or what?” He smiled winningly at the buxom waitress, who blushed and dealt their plates, refilled their cups, set down butter and syrup, then whisked away with flaming cheeks to another table.
“We do - or did - have an inside track on a gambit that might even the odds. In their drive for efficiency and supremacy, they made something that could conversely break them.” He paused for effect. “A ring of power.”
Jane groaned. “Who’s writing this script?”
“Relax, Prom Queen, it’s a metaphor,” Jen said. “Anybody want my bacon?” John raised his hand.
“Yes. That is, no it’s not a ring you wear,” the Kid erased the air with the hand not holding his fork. “It’s a highly secure network. It sits on top of their global command and control system. They call it SPIRE.”
“And MPIRE and XPIRE - surveillance, remote management, and - uh - let’s just say that last one gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘killer ap’,” Jen elaborated. She gulped some coffee and said quickly to John, who had his hand in his jacket, “Wazzup, Kemo Sabe?”
“Speaking of untimely ends,” John breathed.
The elderly man at the cash register was yelling into the telephone in highly scatological Greek. He smashed the receiver back into its cradle and continued yelling at the top of his voice. Jane caught a few words.
“Forty… years? Something about ‘the last time’,” she looked at John.
“Now see, here is where you can’t send a machine to do a man’s work. Forty years ago, that guy,” John nodded toward the proprietor, “was working for the US in Greece. Under the junta. Or so he says.” He raised a forefinger at the waitress. “Check?” He needn’t have bothered.
“Out! Everybody out! We’re closed. You, in the kitchen - go home. Everybody go.” The old Greek started pushing people out the door. “Now, fast. Are you deaf?” A couple of hipsters began to object. John pointed his gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
“You heard the man,” he said, in a voice of pure reason. Instant ghost town. They were the last to leave and the old Greek clutched at John as he passed. His face contorted as John pulled away. He started backing up the block, looking warily at the sky.
“When they say I am evil,” he called, “Don’t forget - you are alive.”
Leo was waiting a few doors down, pacing beside a food truck. He jumped into the cab of the truck when he saw them coming. The engine was running.
“How long?” Jane asked, following Jen and the Kid into the r
ear of the truck, with all its stainless steel shelves and prep surfaces.
“Leo, remember when President Reagan said, “We start bombing in five minutes?” John asked. He barely got the words out. Leo stood on the gas and everybody else pitched to the floor as the truck went from 0 to 60 in under 5 seconds. They had the ultimate drag strip, a quarter mile straightaway to the RenCen. Behind them a teeny, tiny laser-guided incendiary drone ended its test flight by dotting the ‘I’ in ‘Patras’ Coney Island.’ Fireworks ensued.
Tomorrow it would be reported that a popular downtown dining institution had suffered an electrical fire and would be closed until further notice. Today the explosion created a ball of flame so intense that the rear of the food truck could be read as clear as day:
“Super Gyros - There When You Need Us.”
16 Reboot the Mission
“So here’s the deal. We have two projects we can’t pull off alone,” the Kid said, getting down to brass tacks.
After a short suspenseful drive, much of it with headlights off, the five had abandoned the food truck in a port authority parking lot and were stealthily mounting the gangway of a freighter bound for New York. Other ships basked in halos of smoky light as the noisy business of bulk cargo and container loading shredded the last hour before day. Their ship, as big as two football fields, stood in relative darkness, with a few red deck lights illuminating their path aft. The Kid tapped on the door of the pilot house in passing and