A Song Called Youth (133 page)

“I mean, this could hurt the enemy. Will hurt them. But didn’t you—or Pasolini, if she was acting alone—think that this might force their hand? They might decide to release the Racially Selective Virus ahead of time. Anyone think of that? Tell you the truth, hodey, I’m scared for my own ass now . . . That RS pathogen’s got my DNA written on it . . . ”

He gave the reply code, and his image rezzed out.

Roseland looked at Steinfeld. “
Did
you tell her to do it?”

Steinfeld, after a scary second of hesitation, said, “No. I didn’t tell her to do it. I had no idea she was going to do it.”

He just sat there, staring into the blank screen. Shoulders slumped.

Two hundred thousand dead.

Killed by an NR operative.

Mexico.

They were in the cool cinder-block rec room. Kessler and Bettina sat at the card table, Jerome on the ratty, legless sofa, Alouette on the floor. Kessler and Bettina were playing chess. Bettina was winning. She moved her rook, shifting her weight at the same time. Her folding metal chair groaned under her as she shifted; Kessler groaned at the same moment, seeing the chess move.

Jerome was drinking a San Miguel and watching console TV. Alouette was singing to herself, sitting Indian style on the floor, and drawing with colored pens in a sketchbook, complex geometrical designs executed with inhuman exactitude; she was using her chip for the straight-edged geometry, her right-brain for the design. The crow was perched on a high bookshelf, on a copy of Crandall’s bogus Bible, sleeping, its head tucked under a wing.

The satellite broadcast of Nicholas Roeg’s
Performance
ended. Jerome said, “What a fucking great flick. They don’t make ’em with that kind of detailed mastery this century, no way no mo’.”

And then a news special came on. With Smoke. With Barrabas and Jo Ann.

“Bettina—Kessler—!”

They were already looking up, riveted to the big screen.

Smoke was being interviewed on InterNet TV, the Biggest Grid station in the world. The interviewer was a smooth, composed black Creole in an understated Japanese Action Suit.

And with him were Barrabas and Jo Ann.

“Thank you, Gridfriend,”

“It’s about time,” Kessler said.

“Shhhhh!” Alouette told them.

Smoke was saying: “—the new Holocaust has been ongoing for months. The video that Norman Hand has just shown you is available for examination, to determine computer enhancement or animation—”

“Some of it could simply have been staged,” the interviewer pointed out.

Hand, sitting beside the interviewer, snorted. He didn’t have much of his TV journalist’s persona left. He seemed simply tired and scared and angry.
“Staged?”
he said, a little shrilly. “We staged a Jægernaut crushing a building? Crushing those people? What are you saying, we made miniatures and matted in the people? Look at it closer. Watch it again.”

Barrabas was squirming on his seat, eager to say something. Finally he put in, “You can check the video of the subhumans. That’s all quite authentic as well.”

“And quite sickening,” the interviewer said.

“You think that’s sickening?” The camera moved in close on Barrabas, the director sensing emerging emotional drama. “That’s nothing. What’s sickening is how they make you part of it. I mean—how they could do it to anyone?” He swallowed. “To me! They—you have buttons you don’t even know you have. And they push ’em and you find yourself hating anyone they want you to hate! I mean . . . I mean, some of it, right, was in me already. My parents and . . . But they . . . it’s like they inflated it, made me . . . ” There were tears in his eyes. “Took advantage of me.” Jo Ann took his hand. It was obvious he was fumbling along, trying to find his way out of the maze of guilt, trying to see himself as a victim. “The scary thing is—how easily they can do it to people . . . ” He slumped back in his seat, embarrassed.

Smoke said gently, “Patrick is right—we’re all of us too vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Media-cultivated racism. It makes any kind of atrocity thinkable—because they think it for you first, in the media. By dehumanizing other races, nationalities. And by laying down a foundation of rationales to build on . . . ”

“Now you have your own media reply,” the interviewer said. “The video of the Jægernaut destroying the apartment building does seem very . . . authentic.”

“We also have corroborating documentation,” Smoke said. “And when NATO does some investigating they will find they have hundreds of thousands of witnesses.”

“And we have this . . . ” He nodded to a technician. The screen’s image changed to show victims of the Berlin mass murder. Smoke said, “The canister had been set off near the ghettos—but not directly in it. Between NATO headquarters and the ghettos.” The unsteadily panning eye of the camera showed hundreds of people, many of them black and Arab, dead on a street, sprawled and splayed and in some places heaped, fallen in the midst of their workday. A small portion of the two hundred thousand dead. “This is actually NATO video,” Smoke added. “We obtained a copy . . . Here’s a shot of the pathogen canister on the street. You can see there’s a minidisk taped to it . . . ” The vid ended, the screen showed Smoke again. “On the disk is a recorded manifesto from a right-wing terrorist. She was probably—and this conclusion is in NATO’s report too—probably associated with the Second Alliance. A follower of Rick Crandall’s, in fact, who’d worked at a lab run by the Second Alliance International Security Corporation lab—the two hundred thousand dead in Berlin is the end result of one of the Second Alliance’s viral warfare experiments gone wrong. At the very least, the SA’s leadership, even if they didn’t plan this, are guilty of the negligent homicide of two hundred thousand people . . . ”

“There were white people as well as people of color, dead, in that film . . . ”

“All whites who are not allies are enemies, from the SA fanatic’s viewpoint,” Smoke said. “But when they deploy the Racially Selective Virus—if we let them—they believe they’ll be killing only people of color. Perhaps it’ll work . . . ”

“This Racially Selective Virus—that whole business is a bit hard to believe,” the interviewer said. “It’s something you’re going to have trouble backing up.”

“No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Smoke said. “Not after—” He looked at his watch. “After, say—another ten minutes.”

London.

Early evening on a dark, rain-wet South London street. The streetlights had been smashed out in a food riot the previous winter. The street was consigned to blank warehouses and abandoned buildings. And three identical vans, parked in a row, lights out.

Torrence sat in the driver’s seat of the front van, huddled into a brown leather flight jacket that was a size too big for him. He’d lost weight. He rarely ate.

His assault rifle was behind him, leaning up against the metal wall. On his lap was a canvas bag of noise grenades. Roseland and Steinfeld and two other guerillas were in the back of the van.

Torrence was both tired and wired. He hadn’t slept since before the action in Freezone. He’d met Musa and Roseland and Steinfeld at the airport. The airport had been unprotected, at least by Second Alliance people—because they’d lost two-thirds of their auxiliary staff after the bank-records action. No money to pay them. Only the ideological hard core were left.

Now Torrence and thirty others were poised a block away from the SAISC’s second London storage facility. It was night and it was drizzly, and imminence crackled in the air. Or maybe it was only in Torrence’s head.

A dark limosine turned the corner up ahead, cutting its headlights as it came. The limo pulled up, a car length away, facing the van. Two men got out, one a big white guy in a long brown mac, carrying a riot shotgun, looking sharply up and down the street. The other, in a long coat and shiny black shoes, was a tall black man with hair shaved close to his head, a suit and tie under the great coat. He walked confidently up to the van.

“That’s Bill Marshall,” Steinfeld said from the back. “Open the door for him.”

Torrence reached across and opened the passenger-side door. The tall black man climbed in, stooping, bringing the smell of wet streets with him. The bodyguard waited outside the door, standing in the drizzle, the auto shotgun resting in the crook of an arm. Marshall closed the door and said, in tones as modulated as his expression, “Good evening, gentlemen. A light rain, tonight, but it’s not at all cold. Rather a relief from last night, don’t you think?” With precise, delicate motions of his hands, he tugged off thin ocher calfskin gloves. It wasn’t cold enough for gloves, but the well-dressed man wore gloves these days in London. “I mean,” Marshall went on, “it was dreadfully humid last night,”

Eton and Oxford, probably, Torrence guessed. The guy was MI-6, according to Steinfeld, which was run by Lord Chalmsley: a closet liberal and New Resistance sympathizer. Chalmsley was the only major figure in British intelligence who wasn’t either a rampant conservative or a Second Alliance puppet. The fascists, Steinfeld had said, were walking a narrow tightrope, however, in British politics. They were losing more supporters every day, in light of the recent revelations; were already political poison to many. And there had always been those who’d regarded the SA and SPOES as a threat to British sovereignty.

Marshall was as black a man as Torrence had ever seen. He had an immaculate tie and diamond cuff links. Marshall had been sent to school in England after his parents had seized a diamond mine from its white owners in Zimbabwe.

Marshall looked at Torrence expectantly.

Torrence decided the guy was waiting for him to respond to the small talk. He said, “Yeah. It’s, like, humid.”

Marshall smiled. “An American. And one resonant with charming authenticity.” He put the tips of his fingers together, making a little cage with his hands and pressed his thumbnails against his lower lip. His diamond-crusted Rolex counted off the minutes and seconds. “The situation is somewhat precarious,” he began.

“Do we have the green light or not?” Steinfeld asked.

Marshall turned sideways in his chair so he could see Steinfeld. Or anyway, Steinfeld’s silhouette. Somehow even in the cramped space of the van’s front passenger seat Marshall managed to strike a modelesque pose.

“You have the green light if you turn up something that can be verified without question. If this is a red herring, the green light never existed. We’ll lie copiously and persistently, and the Ministry will believe us over you.”

“Clear enough,” Steinfeld said.

Torrence was thinking
: Yeah, clear as mud.
“You got people ready to take the stuff, make the ID and everything?”

“Yes. Quite nearby.”

“Why don’t you just get a warrant or some kind of surprise building inspection or something? Check it out yourself. Say it was the wrong address if it turns out bunk.”

“Political subtleties make it difficult. If we came up wrong, the SA’s supporters would put two and two together . . . A New Resistance sympathizer—yours truly—would be identified in MI6. And there’s no time to go through the courts.”

Steinfeld said, “Torrence, let’s go.”

Torrence nodded, took a headset from his jacket pocket, and put it on. He pressed the stud. “Let’s go, Blue Flag.”

He heard the reply in his headset as he reached back for his rifle and soundproof helmet.

Marshall was already on his way back to the limo. By the time that Torrence and the other guerrillas were moving down the street, Marshall’s limo was already gone from sight.

Torrence and Roseland went ahead of the main group. They kept in the lee of the seemingly broken-down, robot-driven semitruck which an NR operative had remote-stalled slantwise on the street an hour before. Orange lights blinked on the semi. The Second Alliance guards had long since looked it over and decided it was harmless. It was. Except it was crucial cover for the two guerrillas, enabling them to get within thirty feet of the side door without being seen.

There were enemy sentries on the roof, so there was no coming in on a helicopter. But this side door was remote enough from the others, they might not see what happened there if the truck did the rest of its bit.

The truck cab’s emergency lights strobed wobbly golden streaks on the rainy street. Torrence ran hunched over up to the semi’s cab; rifle tightly strapped across his back, noise grenades in one hand and ballistic knife in the other. Roseland close behind him. Torrence spoke into his headset, and the guerrilla on the roof of the building to his left responded, throwing a switch on a remote-control unit. The truck suddenly started itself up. The cameras on its robot snout swiveled as if it were coming back to consciousness and wondering just where it was.

Torrence was cheek by jowl with the truck cab when it began to roll toward the SA storage building. He ran along beside it in a crouch, the truck hiding him from the building as it drove past. Then he hung back when he was parallel to the corner of the building, let it go on, honking and revving, rolling past the SA guards—holding their attention, he hoped, distracting them as he sprinted to the side door. But the guard there saw him coming, raised a gun, and opened his mouth to shout.

The shout came out in a bubbling moan as the ballistic knife parted the man’s windpipe. The cry was lost in the roar of the truck vanishing down the street. Torrence finished the guard, then he and Roseland plunged through the unlocked door, Torrence hissing orders into his headset, blinking in the sudden light of the bright interior. He sealed the soundproof helmet, was now locked into silence, except for headset crackle—and he flung the first of the noise grenades at a group of guards at the end of the hall. They went down, thrashing, clutching at their heads. The noise grenades were designed to put them out for a while with a vicious sonic pulse. Couldn’t risk major explosions in here, where the virus was kept.

“Those things really work,” Roseland said over his headset. “I want some for next time I got to visit my relatives at Passover. Stun my Uncle Irving . . . ”