A Song Called Youth (94 page)

“It would seem simpler just to project a holo onto the stage and animate that—”

“They just don’t look real enough. And he can’t always be appearing on television, not exclusively. There’s something about the physical presence of a man, maybe even something . . . ” Cooper broke off, frowning. Stopping short of suggesting a psychic connection. Crandall didn’t approve: psychic phenomena was the province of demonology.

But Watson knew what he meant. Hitler had been effective in newsreels and would have been effective on television. But for the core of their movement, they needed to get in touch with something animal, something tribal, atavistic, at the heart of the best fascism. And that required physical presence from time to time, however dressed up it might be. “And the cameras are filtered against telltale holo shifts?”

Cooper had had enough. He turned sharply to Watson, snapped, “Ask your man Klaus. He’s made quite sure of every bloody detail. If you’ll excuse me . . . ” And did his best to stride in manful outrage from the room.

Watson snorted as Klaus walked up, chuckling, looking after Cooper. Klaus was a bigger man than Watson, even massively muscled, his hair cut flattop, his short black beard clipped with equal geometric severity, his eyes onyx glittery. He wore the jet uniform of Security staff, and on his shoulder the chrome insignia of its chief: A Christian cross topped with an eye.

Klaus was effectively the second most powerful man in the European Second Alliance. Not that, at this point, there was any single publicly defined leader . . . except for Crandall. And Crandall, though he made daily appearances, was quite dead. His death was something few people knew about.

“I’m afraid Dr. Cooper feels I’ve been breathing down his neck,” Klaus said. “But there are so many ways this . . . this false presentation could go wrong. I feel the same way about it as—”

Watson raised a hand for silence, glancing at the techs at their control consoles, then turned to go into the conference room. Klaus followed. Watson shut the door behind them. The room was soundproofed and, except for a table and chairs and a blank comm stack, almost featureless.

They sat at the table facing the door, and Klaus went on, “I don’t like it either. It’s not—It seems so clumsy, so indirect, manipulating people this way.”

Watson nodded. “One would think the cleverer thing to do would be to find a natural charismatic, train him, and set him up. In a sense, he’d already have all the necessary software . . . ”

“The Committee is very high on Cooper. They want to plug this thing into the Grid eventually. And in a way, it works with Crandall. He’s a Larousse without the warm body beneath the image.”

“Larousse worries me. A holographic, computerized persona is just too fragile in a public place.”

“Mmm . . . Do you want to see this afternoon’s transmission? ‘Crandall’ was quite impressive.” Klaus opened the table controls and punched in the code. One of the screens blinked on showing Rick Crandall, midway through this afternoon’s “little talk with my friends and neighbors.”

Crandall smiled out at them, his gaunt, Lincolnesque features faintly numinous with some inner light, and said, “I’m convinced the Good Lord wanted us out of North America for a very sound reason. Same reason he wanted the Israelites out of Egypt. To escape the unclean, the persecutors. We’re going back to the roots of the Aryan race, to drink from the wellsprings of our genetic heritage. It’s an Exodus of renewal. We are the true Israelites—those cast out from Israel, falsely replaced by the vermin who occupies that land now, the Jew. The difference between the Jew and the True Israelite should be obvious to anyone not blinded by the Zionist conspiracy. As some of you know, my research indicates that the true Israelite in fact originated in the mountains of Austria . . . ”

Watson shook his head in quiet amazement. Crandall was, of course, quite dead. Assassinated. But only a handful of people knew it. They had re-created him as a holographic computer program—and since it said whatever Watson and Klaus wanted it to say, it was the ideal leader.

“The program’s wandering a bit in its logic,” Watson said with approval. “That’s uncannily like Crandall. His way of almost seeming to make sense, weaving that gloriously superficial illusion in logic . . . ”

Klaus glanced at him. “You do not believe the origin of the Great Race is Austrian? That the Jews are impostors?”

Watson suppressed a smile. “Oh, I have no doubt of it. I’m just very pleased we’ve re-created such a lifelike Crandall . . . The animation is flawless and the charisma is there, too. Perhaps that vindicates Cooper, goes to show just how very artificial charisma is . . . How did the staff react to this little presentation?”

“Warmly. It was like liquor for them.”

“Good.” Watson struck the table with the flat of his hand, a sign he’d made a decision. “Right. We’ll give Cooper’s latest project a bit of a chance, and if it doesn’t work out, ‘Crandall’ will have every excuse to can the program.” Watson sighed happily. “It’s such a relief to have the little bastard’s ghost working for me . . . ” He was aware of the pressure of Klaus’s gaze, and turned to him, adding quickly, “And for you, of course, Klaus.”

The crowd was like a hysterically happy dog greeting its long-lost master, as Larousse thundered into the climax of his speech. The enormous screen beside the stage flashed through fabricated images of a reconstructed France, intercut with .005-second subliminal flashes of Larousse himself holding in his arms a baby wrapped in a French flag, shots of Larousse offering the viewers food, money, love.

“The purification of the French race means the survival and the
triumph
of the French race!” Larousse boomed. Each syllable masterfully timed, masterfully intoned. Torrence again had to fight himself, feeling the mob immersion in the Fascist fantasy sweep over him like a drug-rush. The man had, literally, an aurora, a faint divine shimmer, almost unseeable . . . 

Everyone in the crowd reaching out to Larousse as if in invocation . . . 

Torrence looked away and put a hand into his left sleeve, pressed the activation stud strapped to his forearm. It sent a signal to Danco and Cordenne and Pasolini. Together, at four widely separate points in the crowd, they raised their arms as if joining in the adulation, reaching imploringly to the distant figure of Larousse, and the harnesses began to transmit.

“And how is our Anomalous Crowd Movement?” Watson asked as he stepped up behind Klaus, who was seated at the main security console.

Not taking his eyes from the screen, Klaus said, “They haven’t moved, Colonel. Four of them, almost symmetrical, rooted to the spot while the crowd shifts around them. They picked their positions and stayed in place. It’s as if someone painted the footprints for them to stand in. RSFM projects sixty-eight-percent probability of a planned disruption from those four. Smaller possibility of an assassination attempt. “

“Larousse is shielded against rocket launchers, grenades, hoverbirds, all that sort of thing, is he? As well as bullets?”

“He is. And the NR knows it . . . Ah, there we are. Our people are moving in.”

There was so far no effect on Larousse’s image. The harnesses would try a broad range of frequencies. To try to disrupt it, try to make it ripple and warp so the crowd would see him as a fake. An agitprop attack. So far the SA’s filters held. It could take time.

But the time was past. Torrence saw the men in white, the “sanitation workers,” moving toward him, elbowing expertly through the crowd, this time carrying RR sticks. And SA bulls in full armor moving in around the edges. Other figures in white moving toward Danco, Cordenne, Pasolini.

It was all over.
Blown.

Torrence reached into his sleeve, hit the stud, signaling the others:
Get out.

He didn’t wait around to see what became of them. As of this moment, they were on their own. He turned and plunged into the crowd, recklessly violent, trying to create a stumbling block of turmoil in his wake. He jabbed ribs and stomped insteps and tripped people; they shouted at him, cuffed him as he passed, but no one took their eyes from Larousse for long.

The men in white came steadily on, slowing but never getting entangled, like antibodies searching him out. Torrence pulled the slicker off over his head, stumbling once doing it, nearly falling, catching himself. He fumbled for the plastic suction grenades on his bandolier as he reached the edge of the crowd and plunged into the street, sprinting for the Metro station. It was boarded up, the Metro was defunct, but some of the tunnels had been selectively unblocked by the NR.

An SA bull loomed up, running ponderously to cut him off at the corner, his mirrored helmet flashing dull silver with the afternoon light, his amplified American voice booming and bouncing, “STOP
OR
YOU
’
RE
DEAD
MEAT!” The last word echoing:
MEAT
-
EAT
-
EAT.
Torrence sailed the flat disc of the suction grenade at the bull, like a miniature discus. It hit the Fascist soldier in the chest and sucked itself flat against his armored sternum, whirring as it drilled with its tiny iridium-tipped drills. The SA bull shrieked, “FUCK
NO
!” Echoing
NO-WOH-WOHHHHH
 . . . 

As the drills dug through and the grenade charge went off with a muted
whumpf,
driving its drill bits into skin and flesh and bones so that blood sprayed around the disc’s flat edges . . . 

Torrence heard another explosion, much louder than it should have been; he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Pasolini woman had tossed a couple of standard grenades into the crowd—
oh, god
—and people were screaming . . . 

Damn her damn her damn her damn her.

He saw Cordenne running along the fringe of the crowd, heard gunfire spurt, Cordenne’s gut erupting red as he went skidding into his own puddle, giving out a sort of sobbing laughter.

Torrence glimpsed a silvery whirring out of the corner of his eyes not far overhead: a bird’s eye, a small thing of featherlight metal and glass, flashing on plastech wings to follow him. He imagined the image of himself—a small, desperate, fugitive figure—transmitted to some Security Center TV monitor. The boarded-over Metro was just ahead (bullets spat chips of street asphalt at his ankles) and the bird wouldn’t follow him down into the metro station because it wouldn’t be able to transmit from underground.

Bullets whined past his ear as he reached the seemingly boarded-over Metro, felt the soft warmth of an aiming-laser kiss the back of his neck. And as he dove through the paper of the false-boards the NR had left here, submachine-gun rounds parted the air where he’d been a half second before.

He slipped in his rush, fell down the stairs of the subway station—striking heavily on his shoulder, cursing with the pain, somersaulting down the steps quite without control, nose bloodying, lip splitting on concrete edges.

Up, instantly, at the trash heap on the bottom of the stairs. Up and running into darkness. Because it was get up and move, or die.

Running into darkness, thinking:
That fool
Pasolini played right into their hands
 . . . 

“Did you get that clearly?” Watson said. “The NR operative—the woman—tossing a grenade into the crowd?”

“We got it,” Klaus said.

“Let them try to pretend they’re not terrorists when we get that about!”

“Here’s the fourth one . . . He looks familiar . . . ”

Klaus tapped the keyboard, the image on the screen zoomed: a compact man with dark hair; a Spaniard probably, though not dark enough to evoke notice in the crowd.

“That’s the Spanish fellow,” Watson said. “We haven’t got a name for him.”

His name was Danco.

They watched the monitor. On it, Danco struggled in the grip of four men in white jumpsuits, who were dragging him to the building. The New Resistance guerilla thrashed like a worm on hot stone, Watson thought.

The Spaniard bellowing something. Watson caught a few words, “ . . . Cowards if you don’t kill me . . . spineless cocksuckers!”

Danco was trying to provoke them into killing him, of course. Knowing the extractor would pick his brain; knowing there was simply no way to resist an extractor.

Klaus reached for a toggle, spoke into his headset, “San Simon, get down there and tell them to search him before they—” And then he swore in German.

Danco had wrenched an arm loose, found the explosives strapped under his slicker. Klaus shouted, “No, no, you idiots, get it away from him, don’t run—we need him—!”

But they’d instinctively flung themselves away as Danco thumbed the detonator on the plastique, a cylinder no bigger than a perfume bottle that exploded into a fireball, engulfing Danco and the SA bull running up to him and two of the unarmored security men . . . 

“Bloody hell!” Watson burst out.

Danco was reduced to pulp, the second one would be too long dead to extract, and two others had so far gotten away . . . 

“We need to wire those tunnels,” Klaus murmured.

“Yes, obviously, naturally, but there are miles of them. And it could cause whole streets to collapse if we blow them. Move over, please.”

Klaus stood, and Watson sat down at the console, feeling as if he’d drunk a gallon of espresso, his pulse racing with fury and frustration. He ran back the images of the two who’d gotten away. They had a clear shot of the woman. But the man was harder. Every angle was half blocked by someone, or he’d been turning the wrong way. There—when he looked back over his shoulder, after the grenade went off in the crowd—a grainy shot of his face. Rather too much range for the cameras . . . He seemed to be missing most of an ear . . . 

Watson punched for computer enhancement and magnification. The image rezzed onto the screen. A man’s face. A strong, simple, sharply chiseled face. Eyes with an almost psychotic intensity. Maybe that was just the fear, the danger. Still, Watson shivered with a faint sense of déjà vu. He’d looked at that face before . . . and not in a glossy CIA file photo. He’d seen it somewhere digitally, like this. Where?