Still frowning, Breland sighed. 'Maybe it's time to come up with some sort of personal tracer you can put right in the body.'
'In inventory, Mr, President. But using 'em generally calls for the cooperation of the person being traced,' Thorn said without missing a beat. The ingestible version passes in a few hours. The injectable requires an incision and periodic induction recharges.'
'I guess I haven't been keeping up on spycraft.'
There's a way to do anything you can imagine,' said Thorn affably. 'What you need is a reason.'
For two days, Jeffrey Horton enjoyed what he thought of as a probationary membership in the People's Army of Righteous Justice.
While he was still obliged to wear the walking-target orange jumpsuit, he was given a bunk in the men's long house, the right to take first meal with the men, and the freedom to go back and forth to the bathhouse and latrine unescorted. He earned those privileges by spending the greater part of both days inside a stuffy, windowless metal shed, analyzing the command and control logic of a late-model Trigger from Sears and an early-model Jammer from ADT.
The output stages of both units had been replaced with simple status lights by Wilkins's chief technician, Frank Sender. Schrier also hovered at Horton's elbow the entire time he was in the shed. The combination of the tech's preemptive tinkering and his constant presence made Horton's faint hope of using the devices against his captors vanish.
That left the even fainter hope of emerging from the makeshift laboratory with the kind of incontrovertible proof that would change Wilkins's mind - or his own.
They had, at least, provided him with a table full of the best tools. The logic probe was a PM Technologies CodeBreaker, found in reverse engineering labs around the world. The diagnostic analyzer was Zoftwerkz Mastermind, favored by designers and code thieves working on both sides of the law. And the benchmark reference was familiar enough - it was Horton's own public domain release of the Trigger technical guide.
Even so, it was a job that either Gordie or Lee would have been better equipped to tackle. Both were more familiar with not only the original designs, but the process of reading another designer's firmware from the inside out - in this case, in search of anomalous code. Horton tried to use his inexperience to lower expectations, but Schrier warned him that Wilkins would not stand for footdragging.
'One of the reasons I'm here is to keep things moving forward,' Schrier said. 'The Colonel always has a timetable, and it's not a good idea to be the one who's holding him back.'
'Have you already gone through these systems? Do you know if what I'm supposed to be looking for is here?'
'If they'd been sloppy enough that it was something I could spot, we wouldn't need you, would we, now?'
Horton began to see signs of Wilkins's impatience by the end of the second day. After leaving them alone on the first day, he stopped by the shed three times in the course of the second to check on their progress. When he showed up for the last of those, Wilkins's mouth was pinched, and he spoke only to Schrier. He was not at all happy to hear that they had only begun work on the second unit, the ADT Jammer, at midafternoon.
'How much longer?' Wilkins demanded.
'At this pace, Colonel, it could be three more days. The Trigger was open and basically clean. The Jammer has logic traps and looks like it's full of junk.'
Wilkins held Morton in a coldly appraising gaze. 'Services are in twenty minutes. I expect to see you both there. Then you can return to your work and see if you've been blessed with the guidance you need to bring it to a speedier conclusion.'
Horton had heard the communal singing every night since he had been brought to the camp, though the preaching and praying interspersed between hymns did not quite carry to the depths of Shelter Six. But on his first night of 'freedom', he had gotten an earful, even though he had exercised that freedom and stayed behind in the men's long house when services began. The preaching was one of two reasons he shortly thereafter left the long house and struck out into the woods.
The other, more important reason was to see if the camp's perimeter security was more porous during services. If he had not come across any of Wilkins's men, Horton might have just kept walking. As it was, he had come close to getting himself shot by a two-man foot patrol for whom he had no good explanation for his wandering.
'At night, Dr Horton, you want to make sure you stay inside the green perimeter,' the militiaman had said from behind his bug-like night-vision goggles. 'Another ten steps, and you would have been in our free-fire zone.'
'I lost track of where I was,' Horton had said weakly.
'That's a mistake I'd try not to repeat, Doctor. We'll escort you back.'
Wilkins had not said anything to Horton about his perambulation, but his hard look and pointed invitation said enough. The next evening, the physicist made sure that he was among the early arrivals when the women's long house began to fill in response to the call to worship.
Horton had not been inside a church since forsaking his parents' low-key Lutheranism at age fourteen. He was surprised at how many of the melodies were still familiar - some because they were borrowed from German Romantics and English folk tunes he now knew better from a different context, but others awakened unexpected echoes of childhood Sunday mornings.
The words, however, were another story. No congregation Horton had ever been part of before had sung 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' with a verse about the 'martyrs of Waco' or 'the heroes of Tigerton Dells', or The Ballad of Gordon Kahl' to the tune of This Is My Father's World'. But almost as startling was how martial some of the unaltered lyrics were, straight from the well-worn reprint of the 1933 Hymnal someone helpfully gave Horton when they saw that he was not singing:
Soldiers of Christ arise, and put your armor on.
Leave no unguarded place, no weakness of the soul.
Tread all the powers of darkness down, and win the well-fought day -
Once, Horton would have read those as metaphors. But surrounded by the people of the Army of Righteous Justice, seeing not only the fervent and unquestioning commitment on their faces but the weapons cradled in their arms, he knew that that distinction did not apply. He mouthed the words, unwilling to give them voice.
The service went on for nearly two hours, with more than a dozen men and women rising to offer witness and lead the group in prayer. Horton wondered how much of it was for his benefit, or because of his absence the night before. It was almost as if they were testing him, expecting the power of their own faith to bring about a public conversion, hoping to see him suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit and recanting his scientific sins. And while he could not say that he felt like the center of attention, he could not shake the feeling that everyone in the room was aware of him - especially when Colonel Wilkins rose and led the final responsive reading.
The Lord My Strength,' he announced, looking directly at Horton.
The entire group answered with thunderous and unselfconscious vigor. 'The Lord is the strength of my life - of whom shall I be afraid?'
'When my enemies and my foes came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.'
'The Lord is the strength of our family - of whom shall we be afraid?'
'Though war should rise against me, my heart shall not fear.'
'The Lord is the strength of our church - of whom shall we be afraid?'
'My head shall be lifted up above my enemies round about me.'
The Lord is the strength of our tribe - of whom shall we be afraid?'
'The kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord, and against His anointed.'
'The Lord is the strength of our nation - of whom shall we be afraid?'
'We shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.'
'Blessed are they who serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.'
'Blessed are they who put their trust in Him, from whom nothing is hid, and whose judgements are altogether true and right
eous,' Wilkins proclaimed. 'Amen.'
The cry came back: 'Amen, and praise be to God.'
Horton shuddered involuntarily, his skin prickling with goose-flesh despite the heat in the long house. He was almost insensible to the words of fellowship being offered him as he stood and headed for the doorway. Outside, he sought out Schrier, seizing him by the arm and turning him away from the woman he was speaking to.
'I had a thought,' he said. The same code would have to be in both units. Can we just run a compare on the Jammer using the anomalies we found in the Trigger? That would save us from having to work through the Jammer's base code.'
'But the override command could be part of the base code.'
'It's not,' Horton said firmly. The base code is my lab's code. If this thing is there, it's something that was added later.'
'How sure of that are you?'
'As sure as I am of anything at this point,' said Horton. 'Come on, we have a couple of hours until lights-out.'
More than twenty years had passed since Roland Stepak had given up the cockpit for a desk, but he had retained one essential skill of the combat pilot - 'power napping' or 'sleeping fast', the knack of diving deep into sleep whenever and for however long the opportunity presented itself. His four-hour nap in one of the Japanese-style capsules attached to the Situation Room was .enough to sweep the weight from his eyelids, and a hot shower helped wash the vaguely sick ache of fatigue from his limbs.
He had left a lieutenant colonel from Army Intelligence in charge while he napped, so he was surprised to find Morton Denby of the CIA riding the hot seat instead.
'Caught a small break, General - we've identified your mole in Defense Communications,' Denby said, rising to surrender the chair,
'Is that where Lieutenant Colonel Briggs went?'
Denby nodded as he slid sideways into the next seat. 'The mole is one of theirs - a civilian technician attached to the Signal Corps, working the graveyard in the GLOCOMNET traffic management center. David Luke Wickstrom, age thirty-four. It looks like he managed to access secure addresses and verifiers for several Terabyte principals, and upload a routing filter to the satellite network.'
'You should have wakened me,' Stepak said. 'Where is the mole now?'
'That's the thing- there was no point in waking you. Wickstrom's scampered. He may have been tipped off when GLOCOMNET security spotted the virus and started taking the satellites offline to flush it out. He took a sick day yesterday, and last night his apartment building was gutted by an arson fire that started in his apartment.'
'Let me guess - military-grade magnesium flares on a timer.'
'Looks like,' said Denby. 'Army Intelligence is on the scene, going through what little is left. FBI is going into his background, trying to get the egg off its face for clearing him for the post.' He clucked and shook his head. 'Pretty cold business, General - the fire killed three kids, burned out half a dozen families.'
'Any sightings or traces on Wickstrom since?'
'Nothing. Personally, I wouldn't bet on him going anywhere near wherever Horton is being held.'
'No,' said Stepak, leaning back in his chair with a deep frown creasing his face. 'But he'll be in touch with them - which means that they now know that we know. And I don't think that's good news for Jeffrey Horton.'
* * *
32: Never a Bad Peace
'There never was a good war or a bad peace.'
- Benjamin Franklin
It was midmorning, and the light rain which had been falling since dawn had finally percolated down through the trees to land on the work shed's metal roof as fat, percussive drops. The sound was grating on Jeffrey Horton's nerves, already stretched taut by the cumulative stress of imprisonment.
'Nothing,' Horton said, pushing back from the table where the analyzer and the Jammer sat side by side. 'There's nothing there. Right? You didn't see anything, either, did you?'
'There were no matches -' Schrier began.
'I expect you to tell Wilkins that.'
'- But that doesn't mean there's nothing there. The code might be different for a Jammer. Or you might be wrong, and it could be hidden in the base code.'
'Or I could be lying.'
'Or you could be lying,' Schrier agreed. 'But I think you're too smart to lie about something when you might be caught at it. I think you're too smart to underestimate us.'
'I'm not the enemy,' Horton said, shaking his head. 'I just want to go back to my life. But if Wilkins makes me choose, he could turn me into one.'
Schrier pursed his lips and said nothing.
Horton sighed. 'What now?'
'Keep looking. Who knows how many add-ons there are in this system? From what we've seen so far, I have a feeling it's a junkpile.'
Easing his chair forward, Horton said tiredly, 'Eeny, meeny, miney, moe -'
They had only another hour to themselves before Colonel Robert Wilkins threw open the door to the work shed and filled the opening with his silhouette. 'Report,' he said curtly.
'Yes, sir, Colonel, sir,' Horton muttered under his breath.
'Nothing to report, Colonel,' Schrier said, standing. 'No matches between the two systems that aren't covered by standard control functions.'
'You have nothing to show for three days' work? You're letting this man stall you.'
'Oh, we can show you a lot,' Horton said, coming to his feet behind Schrier. 'We can show you a little picture of the project supervisor for ADT, complete with horns and a funny mustache. We can show you the scores of the last ten football games between Texas and Texas A&M, the phone numbers of three women of dubious virtue, and about five hundred words of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'
Horton stepped around the technician and stood face to face with Wilkins. 'Oh, no, we didn't miss anything - we found the places where people slipped in their kids' names, or their tribute to a sex star, or their favorite quote from Calvin & Hobbes or In Sanity. But what we didn't find is any goddamned secret backdoor boogeyman-conspiracy remote-control kill-switch gateway, because there isn't any. It only exists in your paranoid fantasies. No, not paranoia - wishful thinking. I'll be damned if I know why, but you love this - you actually want this war.'
'War is a moral necessity, Dr Horton, when you're faced with an immoral enemy. There's no pleasure to be taken in it.'
Horton's eyes poured out his contempt. 'You think you're fit to judge what's moral? You think you're sitting high enough to judge me? Have you looked in a mirror lately?'
'Have you, Doctor? Your march-of-progress pose doesn't wash with me. You scientists gave us Zyclon-B, AIDS, abortion on demand, evolution, and now this. You never count the cost. And you, Jeffrey Horton, personally betrayed seventy million law-abiding American families. You condemned ten thousand good people to death at the hands of thugs and thieves. Don't strike a noble pose with me, Doctor. You're as guilty as if you murdered them yourself.'
The militia leader's impenetrable self-assurance roused a terrible fury in Morton, and he struck out at Wilkins with a torrent of angry words. 'You need to be a hero so badly that you're making up enemies as you go. But if that's what you want me to be, all right. I'm sorry that what I discovered cost some good people like my father their hobbies. And it does bother me that there's other people out there who got hurt because they didn't have a working gun to protect themselves. But I'm damned proud to have gotten in the way of a terrorist like you. You're a selfish little man with a head full of delusions, and anything I can do to put a crimp in your plans is a public service. Your revolution would be a disaster -'
Something Horton said must have found a weakness and pierced through Wilkins's armor to his tender pride. The colonel slammed both his palms against Horton's chest, driving him backwards into Schrier. 'You think you've accomplished anything? You think you've disarmed us?' He turned away into the drizzle. 'Bring him!' he snarled to the guards.
Horton was seized by both arms and dragged bodily along in Wilkins's wake, scrambling to get his feet unde
r him and his emotions under control. Don't beg, he thought. Don't give him that-
Wilkins's long strides led them to the second metal shed, standing by itself a hundred and fifty meters from the main camp. 'Cuff him and control him,' he said as he bent to the lock.
In the next moment, Horton found himself dropped face-down in the grass, with a booted foot on the back of his neck to hold him there. His arms were twisted behind him and his wrists bound together by a thin plastic tie that cut deep into the skin. He heard the door squeak and then clang open.
'Bring him in,' Wilkins said.
Hauled upright once more, his shirt and the side of one face painted with mud and dead needles, Horton fought the impulse to resist. Unaccountably, a quatrain from Matthew Halverson came to mind:
Control is an illusion,
order our comforting lie.
From chaos, through chaos,
into chaos we fly -
As he was pushed through the doorway, the lights inside the shed came on. They revealed it to be an armory, with the four walls hung with assorted weaponry, all military grade, all heavier than the personal arms carried by the militia - SAWs, light machine guns, grenade launchers, a 40mm mortar, a pair of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The base of each wall was lined with ammunition boxes stacked two and three high.
The middle of the floor was empty except for four square panels of wood slats, each with a rope pull. Wilkins stood on one of those as he turned to face Horton. 'You say you've stopped us, and yet every weapon in this armory is fully functional. I'm sorely tempted to prove it to you using your own flabby body as the target, but that would keep you from appreciating the fine irony about to be revealed to you.' Then he called an armory guard in, and gestured toward one of the wood panels. 'Bring up a canister from Bunker Two.'
'Yes, Colonel.' The guard pulled up the panel, revealing a man-sized tunnel opening into the ground below. He dropped through the opening as though it were a practiced thing, and returned not long after carrying a cylinder as long as his forearm and the diameter of a tennis ball.