First Citizen (46 page)

The way to locate an informer is to color his data. We couldn’t very well tell everyone in the house where we would be sleeping—and mention a different room each time. But we could pour subtle scrambles in the harvesting instructions for the next week. If the Hajimeru agents took any action, it would finger their insider.

It was fun, helping Mandy that summer. We went up almost every morning to chase the dusters and, after a few weeks of straight losses, they stopped coming. We fought two pitched battles in the valley. After that, we went on the offensive. With my lady at my side, we went on a raid to the Oakland Inner Harbor to blow up a shipment of Japanese drugs. Two limpets placed at the waterline put the freighter on the bottom and blocked the channel. The cargo was in watertight containers, but we brought in the Stompers to strafe and bomb. Then we put a tap on the Hajimeru headquarters building in San Francisco and hit it a week later with another night raid.

Pet Gervaise and I were planned to go in with fake IDs making us for Midwestern clients. The cover story was that we wanted to wrap a deal with the Hajimeru right after the theater and before we went off for a late supper. Such a busy schedule …

We would indeed be dressed for the theater, but under the polysilks, strapped to our legs and torsos, we’d be carrying a full kit of nonmetallic weapons and unsniffable explosives. The idea was to get in, go for position, and disrupt everything in sight. Wong would come by in fifteen minutes with a backup team and comb the building. There was just a chance we might not hold out that long, and that’s what made the plan exciting.

Mandy nixed it.

“Why are you going with her?”

I was listening carefully for emphasis. Was it my taking part in the plan that she objected to? Or Pet’s? Couldn’t tell, so I picked my own interpretation.

“Why, I have to go, Mandy. I’m about the only one here old enough to be a believable buyer. The white hair does it.”

“No, you bear, I mean why
her.”

“Lieutenant Pet’s a good soldier,” I smiled.

“But I want to go with you.”

“Nonsense, you’d be recognized.”

“Not if I wore a wig …”

“With cheek pads and a funny nose?”

“You won’t know me.”

And I didn’t. Mandy looked sassy and brassy when she modeled the disguise for me at H minus three. A silver-blonde acrylic wig, ironed straight and with bangs to her eyebrows, put her two cycles out of fashion. Subtle crow’s feet painted next to her eyes and a little padding stuffed against her flat stomach added fifteen years to her age. She looked like a midtown jolly girl, nearing the end of her working life but just the thing for an old coot from the cornfields.

“You’re hired,” I told her. “Got your briefings?”

“Cab to the front door. Make the checkpoints on the strength of your appointment and a bunch of cards. Get to the elevators, and freestyle it from there. Where do we lodge, the executive suite?”

“Oh no! Going through with the appointment upstairs puts us on their terms and under their guns. If we get as far as the elevator, we punch for the second basement and head for the computer center.”

Mandy’s mouth tightened, cracking a layer of lip gloss. “We’re going below street level? Down in a hole. We could
die
there.”

“Shall I call Pet?”

“No, just an observation.”

No one tumbled to us at the first checkpoint, a magnetometer and sulfate sampler. At the second, a body patdown, the Japanese guard paused over the latex thigh pads that hid my spring gun. He probably thought I was in really good shape to have muscles like that.

At the third station, our hosts, the Okane brothers, met us themselves. With just a short-form bow and smile, they led us across the building’s green-marble lobby toward the elevator bank. Mandy, walking beside me, wobbled drunkenly on her high heels and put a hand to her new potbelly. She was unobtrusively working a penade up from the stuffing.

The brothers ushered us into the first open car, followed behind us, placed themselves against either sidewall, still smiling, and pressed “Close Door.” The car was a big one, about seven feet wide and six deep—an awkward space, with both their eyes on me, and their hands never far from the first button of their coats and the pistols that would be underneath.

Before the doors were fully closed and either of the men could punch for an upper floor, Mandy pressed her stomach again, moaned, and bent over. As the brothers moved forward, I swept up my hands in a crossed-uncrossed double strike that went to the limits of my extension and two centimeters more.

The first brother was caught square in the throat and put up his hands, after the fact, to do something with his larynx. The second brother took the edge of my hand just below the orbital ridge of his left eye. Whenever you double strike like that, you divide the force of your blow. I had enough behind that hand to split his eyebrow—the sort of wound that makes a lot of blood in the boxing ring but never stopped anyone. He actually got his gun unseated before I could bring my other fist around and bury it in his solar plexus. His gun hit the floor in the same second my knee came up to flatten his descending nose.

The sight of the gun must have reminded the other brother, who left his throat alone and fumbled for his own weapon. He fumbled long enough for me to turn that rising knee into the cock for a back-kick that broke his wrist across his stomach. Then I half-turned and smashed his temple with a two-knuckle back-fist. The Okane brothers slumped across each another.

What was Mandy doing all this time? When she doubled over with her sick act, she let it carry her under my first strike and up against the doors. There she slid around like a snake to keep out of my way and pushed the B2 button. Before I had finished them off—it took all of nine seconds—the doors were opening in the basement. Mandy launched herself out into the white-tiled corridor in a drunken stagger.

A security guard, of a different flavor from the ones running the entry stations upstairs, came out of his glass booth to help her. He found himself looking down the barrel of a plastic squirt gun. It took him two seconds to figure it out; it took Mandy one second to fill his snoot with double- strength Mickeyfinn. He dropped like a sack of gypsum.

Meanwhile, I was taking the brothers’ guns and tidying their sleeping posture in the open car. I was just about to send it up to “Penthouse” with their special keys, when Mandy stopped me with a hand. She bent over one, set a penade in his ear canal, set the timer for thirty seconds’ delay, and rammed it home with the sole of her shoe. She repeated the action with the other brother, setting his timer for fifteen seconds. Then she pushed the floor button and stepped out. We didn’t hear the charges go off but inferred it from the way the telltale lights froze up around the twenty-first floor.

We turned to the double doors of the computer center. Time was six minutes into the operation.

Two batches of operators, about a dozen people all told, let themselves be herded into the corner of the room. Mandy held them there with the guns while I set penades and plastique in among the reader spindles and under the cabinet holding the core memories. I strung garlands of touch paper in the disk vault and fused it with my last penade. Then we took the operators out into the corridor and prepared our stand with a hostage shield while waiting for, first, the center to go up and, second, Barney Wong to get in with his infiltrators.

Things happened in that order, and we had a hairy minute watching the flames come out of the double doors and block our retreat to the stairs. The room itself may have been fire retardant, but I tell you nine tons of polymer substrate and ferrous carbon burn like merry Hell. There was a lot of stinky smoke in the corridor. … Only later did I think what the intense heat might be doing to the gallium arsenide on the semiconductor chips.

We held our ground for the full fifteen minutes, enough time to make sure of destroying the Hajimeru records, accounts, and data bases. They sent three waves of guards against us, but they were too concerned with trying to dislodge us and fight the fire at the same time, thereby making a botch of both tasks. Wong came through from the lobby and took them in the rear. Hajimeru’s business limped so badly after our raid that I can only assume they didn’t have their data properly backed up. Pity.

Mandy and I returned to the house in the late hours of the night, washed the last bits of makeup and sticky soot off each other with wash cloths, then made love to the singing of birds just before sunrise.

The traitor? We found him that first week: Eduardo, the brother. His dependency was something other than pele and red wine. Mandy should have spotted it months ago.

That summer was just what I needed: a break, a respite from the national scene. A time to fill my lungs with the quiet, moist air of the redwood groves. A time to deal with problems on a personal scale, a “pocket war” if you will.

In August, Mandy told me with shining eyes that she was pregnant and happy about it. She was the first of my wives—and no wife, really—to have a child. It filled me with strange emotions. She began talking about all the things we would do with the pele business: new land to cultivate, new strains to experiment with, new markets to trade in. She wove her plans for us, our new life together, and I listened.

A certainty was growing within me, however, that this hilltop existence might be fine for a vacation but it was no life. I had other business to continue, national business. Playtime was just about over. Soon now. Any time. But it was soothing to listen to her song.

Chapter 21

Billy Birdsong: Speaker For Life

I had to go into California and get Corbin myself.

He left me with a mixed army of half a million men and women, keeping watch on the west bank of the Mississippi River and up the Ohio as far as Cincinnati. They were an uncongenial collection of State militias, my own TENMAC troops, volunteers, vigilantes, survivalists, reservists, freebooters, and carpetbaggers. A carnival show.

For every two of them who held a gun, a third was carrying papers and electronic ID that identified him or her as, variously, chairman of the fictitious board of Maybe Never Investments, Inc.; the newly elected governor of Erectorset County, looking for just the right kind of men to form a cabinet; the sole commercial representative for Nutra-Vita-Vim-Gro-Gen-Stuff, who just happened to have samples in the other pocket; a patent attorney with venture capital to offer the right young inventor who had just a tenner, or make it a hundred, to set the wheels in motion; the special agent-in-charge for the Canadian Bureau of Investigation, down here on official business seeking the beneficiaries of the Saska-Baska-Berta-Berry Case and a mere twenty would seal your claim; or just plain the heir to the throne of Roumania. These pitchmen were turning over a small geyser of currency every day on the flimsiest pretexts.

Why? Because we were an army with nothing to fight.

The station we were keeping, the line we were holding, was nominally against advances from the Old South and the East. But most of those States, while they had not yet declared for Corbin, had stopped fighting for Pollock when he disappeared after Boise River. They were content to growl at us across the frontier, occasionally, but they hoped to be left alone. After twenty-plus years of a Federal government that had served in, at best, an advisory capacity, they were quite happy to find their own level of provincialism, print their own paper money, and trade cows, corn, and not-too-bad moonshine whiskey with their neighbors.

The country was becoming balkanized. Most of the States kept their elected form of government, although I heard that Montana had promoted themselves a king. Most of them kept good relations within their region, although Florida was getting a bad name in the Old South by opening diplomatic ties with Cuba and Jamaica. There was a rumor that Russian troops were practicing wet landings in the Everglades, but rumor was all it amounted to. People were seeing Russian spies, Japanese trading cartels, and Ayatollian terrorists on every street corner. That kind of fear contributed to people closing the borders, cranking up the vigilance committees, piling up inventories, and stockpiling canned goods and dry wood on the storm porch.

The carny folks in my army prospered, also, because the air on our side of the river was glittery with prospects. “After this war is over” they told each other—and went on to spin a dream. They would aspire to public office. They would set up a business. They would get married. They would travel, and see this beautiful land from some perspective besides the backside of a gun. They would get pregnant. They would carve a frontier out of the semi-urban wilderness of any State that would not submit to General Corbin. They would be on the winning side, you see, with a chance to become powerful and wealthy and famous and happy … “after this war is over.”

I was nominal commander of a nominal army that was halfway demobilizing itself on the spot—and which had never been more than halfway mobilized to begin with—in the middle of a civil war that we were nominally winning but nobody knew. And Corbin was gone.

He had taken half a regiment down the road from Oregon and then disappeared. Yes, they had carried a satellite downlink with them. Yes, they had set it up and called in regularly. But they would not say where, exactly, they were bivouacked or what they were doing. There was a giggly note in the transmissions I was receiving. The lieutenant on the California end was smilingly evasive, yes-sir and no-sir, but he would
not
tell me where the General was. “He’s out on hmm-ha”—secret smile—”on
maneuvers,
Colonel, um-ha-ha.” Usually his link would drift off channel before I could get anything more out of him.

Sometimes, rarely, I even saw Gran on the link. “You just hold the fort there, Billy,” he would tell me, with that same God-damned smile. “We’re doing important military work here. Good liaison stuff.”

Now that was more than just erratic. More like crazy. With the country about to fall apart like an ice-cream pie in the hot sun, what was Corbin doing “liaisoning” with the California natives? They were already on our side, supposedly—if they were really on anyone’s side in this war.