Systemic Shock Page 19

  He spilled a little, gulped a little. "I'm not sure."

  She uncoiled, kicked off her wedgies, a smile of bogus innocence transfixing him as she stepped nearer. Her free hand went under his arm, her cheek nuzzling his. “We could find out. Actually I have a little coke; they didn't search me for my stash—and guess where I keep mine," she giggled.

  Too kittenishly. He felt lithe muscle in her casual embrace; sensed a tension, a spring-loaded trigger, in her willingness.

  His erection died at birth, and he knew she was crowded near enough to notice. “Maybe later, "he murmured, patting her shoulder. Jeezus but she was tempting; and so was the free alcohol, and for that matter the offer of a free body-search to find forbidden drugs within other delights.

  Which made it all clearly a setup. He strode to the cabinet again, filled his glass with mixer. Some small imp made him sway his hips as he moved to the bed and sat down, kicking off his shoes in bald imitation of her, patting the rumpled coverlet. He was uncertain about the twitches on the lovely face, but she sat with him and sipped again. “Now," he said with as much nasal sensuality as he could muster, "tell me about T Section."

  Her smile was dazzling this time, her body shaking with repressed mirth. "Don't you like me?"

  He stared at her breasts, her high-arched insteps, her mouth. "You are without question a Nobel Prize pussy, Sanger, and I promise to think about you later tonight," he said in open insolence.

  Her smile faltered under his scrutiny. There was something of relief and of genuine wistfulness in her, “I 'll accept that, Quantrill. It's costing me, but I'll accept it."

  "Now about T Section," he prodded.

  It was a zero-sum world, she sighed. Every move you made in T Section was a step forward or backward for somebody. If you had minor weaknesses they would be found and expunged. Major weaknesses got you bounced. You were issued recorders, keyboard cassettes, anything within reason for the classes which were held in upper rooms of the big house, far from the tourist route. You could spend as little time as you liked studying. You were smart to study a lot, because Control was anxious to use only the very best candidates. T Section would give you every tool to succeed, every opportunity to fail—and cardinal sin number one was the failure of common sense.

  Quantrill stared at his drink. Common sense told him he'd gulped that first glass too quickly; anything that impaired your control had to be an error. “I can't read your mind," he said. "When do I get a list of do's and don'ts?"

  "Tomorrow's Saturday," she said as if she thought she were answering his question. "Your carrel will wake you early and someone will come for you. We'll be doing covert weapons work on the range—there's half a county for us to use here—so wear jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and sneakers." She took a deliberate sip of her drink, eyed him. "Are we going to let this nice big bed go to waste?"

  Instantly: "Is sex a failure of common sense?"

  "Sometimes yes, sometimes no," she shrugged, and used a finger to trace the seam on his pullover. “Mm; nice shoulders."

  He stared into her eyes, smiled sadly. "I think I'd like a rain check," he husked.

  "It'll be a long time before the rain stops," she said with nonchalance, slipping to the floor, scuffing into her shoes. "I live on the floor below, and I have some cramming to do. See you in class."

  He walked with her to the door, suffused with a mixture of relief, desire, and uncertainty. "I'll tell you something, Marbrye Sanger, this has been the damnedest welcome I ever got, I need to sort things out."

  "Don't worry about it," she said with the barest hint of pique. "You haven't flunked yet." Her departing footfalls were almost noiseless in the evening gloom.

  Quantrill was still standing in the doorway when the carrel chimed for attention. He found that his name was now an input code and the terminal would answer certain queries from typed input; no voice input accepted.

  When and where would he find supper? He wouldn't, that night.

  What was the status of Marbrie Sanger? Marbrye—the correction was underlined—Sanger was an advanced trainee in T Section; 'Q1 clearance, no on-site restriction.

  Why had Sanger visited Quantrill? A multiplex enticement-frustration test.

  "Shit," he muttered, and typed another question: had he passed? No comment.

  The terminal verified Sanger's instructions for the next day, adding that meals would be provided. As afterthought, he asked what courses he would take. He found the list daunting:

  COVER, Unofficial, and Control

  CRYPTANALYSIS

  INTELLIGENCE, Theory

  INVESTIGATION, Methods

  LINGUISTICS

  PSYCHOLOGY, Criminal

  PSYCHOLOGY, Social

  SCIENCE, Military, unconventional

  SCIENCE, Political, and Indoctrination

  SURVEILLANCE, Use and Nullification

  TERMINATIONS, Covert, and Pursuit

  WEAPONS, Covert and Overt

  The terminal would give no coursework details. Quantrill suspected that the Sanger hotsy had already reported the results of her welcome; dimly perceived that T Section might have monitored their brief meeting. It did not yet occur to him that San Simeon might be instrumented in such a way that Marbrye Sanger had no need to report; nor that Control, while testing his responses to uncertainty, had already begun the process of instilling in him a mild and necessary paranoia.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Within a few days Quantrill learned to accept the bizarre setting in which he might jog five klicks with a half-dozen other trainees to a refurbished barn for a class; or find a dubok, a message drop, while alone with memorized instructions. He saw the lissome Sanger only in cryptanalysis class; she ignored him. At no time did any class, either in the big house or outside it, contain more than eight members.

  Much of the training pitted trainees against each other; no one had to be cautioned against forming close friendships. He failed to locate the scalpel tip which little Barbara Zachary had cyanoacrylated to the back of her neck until the 'unconscious' Zachary pressed it to his throat—but he did not repeat that failure. He forgot that a one-time cipher could be generated from a telephone directory, and drew two extra cryptanalysis tasks that took him half a night to complete. The youngest of the trainees, Quantrill forgot a lot of things; but only once.

  He would never forget his instructors. Marty Cross was half Cheyenne and all whip leather, a wizened wisp of a man so adept at covert pursuit that he seemed to simply materialize behind the trainee he stalked. It was Cross who taught Quantrill to become utterly still; so inert that he could stand erect in a cluttered room and be unnoticed for vital seconds.

  Sean Lasser, whose middle-aged paunch danced when he laughed, always had something to laugh about after submitting to a search. Quantrill exulted the day he identified Lasser's signet ring as a garrotte complete with spring-wound wire.

  Seth Howell, heavy-bodied with spidery arms and legs, had a whispery tenor and a gift for phrasing the dullest indoctrination material as though analyzing an invisible cud of tobacco. Craggy of face, prematurely graying, Howell claimed a hitch in the quad-service Rapid Deployment Force—and another in the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Howell's adumbration of the current political mess might not be the whole truth, but it didn't put you to sleep either. He took, for example, the Starlinger-Ahbez hypothesis.

  Starlinger, a German, had long ago warned of China's expansive dreams, whatever denials she might make. With her southern borders already overpopulated, China would eventually find it necessary to expand into underpopulated Siberia.

  Ahbez, a NATO strategist from Turkey, had added an alternative. China might indeed be able to expand southward if her southern neighbors, for whatever reason, became underpopulated. Ahbez theorized that China might find ways to depopulate India, or the Vietnamese peninsula, without overtly declaring war on them. She might even maintain an outward alliance while draining that ally of people.

  "Now, Ahb
ez is a freak about germ warfare," Howell drawled, his Colorado twang lending him the air of an inspired hick; "and he figgered China might dump a few bugs down south. Well, she didn't; she gave the goddam Injuns the paranthrax they dumped on us. Makes sense. China had the technology, and thought she could hamstring us and let India take the heat.

  "That explains why China didn't dump paranthrax on the RUS. She wants to avoid retaliation in kind, and depletion of RUS livestock she intends to own later. But if the Allies start an epidemic in India,—well, China's natural borders to the south could protect her long enough to produce a defense. Meanwhile, India would go belly-up.

  "We think China's waiting for us to do just that. But guess what we've spotted from orbit." Howell snapped the holo projector on; the display was a map of the Sinolnd lands. He spread one big hand like a tarantula, placed fingertips on Cambodia, Laos, and the other Viet republics, and slid the tarantula to ward China's heartland, Szechuan. "Viets. More of 'em than you ever saw, swarming north like ants as far as the Yangtse River.

  "Some are doing winter harvests in Yunnan, feeding others who're training in little groups all over south China. And then a lot are disappearing along the Yangtse. Now, the Yangtse's a muddy bitch; even infrared doesn't tell us what's going on under its surface. Some Viets are going upriver, possibly through pressure locks under the dams that're left. One hell of a lot of Viets are popping up on the Kazakhstan front. You guess where all the rest are."

  "Spam?" Quantrill could not resist the awful jest.

  "That's been discussed," Howell said. "Cold storage, too. But we think they're going underground, trained as factory workers while they mass for a hundred-division offensive. Little factories, lots of 'em; a cottage-industry war. It'd be futile to impact-nuke every square meter of Szechuan. Just maybe, it's time we gave the Sinos a taste of their own medicine in Szechuan."

  Graeme Duff, the bull-necked trainee from Minneapolis: "How do we send germs down into filtered tunnels?"

  "Wouldn't the Sinos like to know?" Howell's smile was one-sided. "You can bet they have moles boring around every lab in this country, trying to dope that one out. And that," he said, snapping off the projector, "is where gunsels like you come in."

  "We're supposed to penetrate deep cover?" Zachary was always thinking two steps ahead, thought Quantrill enviously.

  "Other people are trained for that. They finger the mole; you take him—or her—out. Usually you just disappear him. That leaves the other side wondering if we've turned him.

  "Chances are, you'd get a different assignment against certain folks in media." He waited for the murmur of surprise to abate. "Do I have to tell you how important our media are in reassuring what's left of this country that we're winning—whether we are or not? Face it: we've lost half our population and the other half needs its daily holo fix! The Sinolnds would love to nuke NBN's world of make-believe, if they knew where our production centers are. Damn' few foreign stars or directors know; we can't be absolutely sure of their loyalties."

  "Rivas Paloma," said elegant young Goldhaber, with a surgeon's fingersnap. "Killed in a strafing on location in Mazatlan. Am I right?"

  "The Spanish film industry's loss," said Howell obliquely, "may have been NATO's gain."

  "But Paloma got an Oscar for directing an anti-Chinese movie," said Goldhaber, frowning. You could depend on the well-born Goldhaber for cultural snippets.

  "If he was an assignment—I say if—then he was a mole. Depend on it."

  "I guess we have to."

  The thin voice was almost a falsetto whisper: "Oh, yes. You literally bet your life you have to. Media star, bishop or bird colonel: if Control says he goes, he goes.

  "Which reminds me." Did Seth Howell betray faint cynicism? Quantrill could not be sure as the instructor continued, “Never doubt for a second that President Collier was a lucky break for this country. The Mormons, and nobody else in the US, were ready for this war. They're going to pull us through if we follow the right path. In a war of survival we can't afford the sedition of every Jew and Catholic who won't accept a moral imperative.

  "But the LDS has more splinter groups than a toothpick factory. Some of 'em are just wrong. Others are violently opposed to the administration—and they are dead wrong."

  Kent Ethridge, the gymnast from Iowa State, spoke as rarely as Quantrill. "In other words," he said slowly, "a war of religious extermination."

  "What d 'you think the AIR confederacy is doing," asked Howell.

  "Threatening Jews," said Goldhaber, not smiling.

  "What if Control identified someone in the Jewish Defense League who was trying to assassinate your President," Howell asked.

  "Ice him," Goldhaber replied. "No religion is more important than my country."

  Howell stared out the window for a long time, then glanced at each of his trainees. "Thanks to the no-hum outlook most Americans had before last August, one religion is your country. That's overstated a mite, but it's closer to the facts every day."

  "I'm not exactly wild," said Goldhaber, "about joining the LDS."

  "A gunsel," Howell snorted, "is not exactly eligible." The tone of his voice put an end to one unsettling topic, and led Howell to the unsettled problems between the Allies.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  The US, as Howell put it, had a neighbor problem. We needed Mexican oil and were still getting it; but the capitalist, Mormon Collier administration could not entirely satisfy socialist, Catholic Mexico of our continuing good will. One needed only study the bloody clashes between Mormon angles and Catholic latinos in the American southwest. Already the media were spiking rumors that White House Central might relocate again from its New Mexico warrens.

  Canada, too, had a strong gentile distaste for the new turn in our political path, but chose to treat it as a temporary aberration. Canada's gross national product and her technologies had swelled to the point where she no longer needed to feel defensive about her southern sister. Rather, said Howell, she began to feel all too protective. From the remnants of Maine to the desperate survivors freezing in Michigan, Canadian currency was now more readily acceptable than US greenbacks. Because Canada was our conduit to Asian battlefields and a potential source of fossil fuel, the Collier administration kept a discreet silence on the currency question. But—Seth Howell chose his words with great care in describing US/Canadian relations—White House Central had an obvious problem. Quantrill had to check the definition of the key word, 'hegemony'.

  Meanwhile, Canada worried about her RUS alliance. It was not just a question of competition for polar resources, but also of a big new semi-capitalist union adjacent to an enormous semi-Marxist union. Canadians never tired of warning that the Russians had learned nothing but caution in their 1985 debacle. After the RUS learned to modernize their own frozen northlands and to fully exploit their resources, she would doubtless covet Canada's.

  Doubtless. But all that could be dealt with later; the spectre of a Chinese Siberia frightened the Canadians even more than

  Russians did. Canada stretched out her hand to the RUS, and counted her fingers.

  If anyone expected the Russians to make a big display of thanks for Canadian aid, he courted disappointment. The official line from Tass maintained that the ice-crusted Kazakhstan front held the key to western survival. The RUS Supreme Council no longer blustered in blunt ideological jargon terms for foreign audiences. The old words could be dusted off again after the war. The RUS relied instead on a partly genuine, partly spurious identification with the west, and backed the claim with a few gestures such as the Frisbees they exported for US deployment. Without question, the Frisbees had been a major factor in limiting the Indian-supplied invasion of Florida. Just as surely, that invasion was doomed anyway by the vulnerability of its supply lines. Its Latin American supply sources evaporated with the 'Libyan' nuke strikes on Latin American ports, and excepting the few supply submersibles India had punched through the gauntlet of Allied hunter-killer teams, the invaders wer
e now on their own. Tampa Bay would hold.

  A few nations were still seeking ways to turn a global atrocity into local profit. Neutral Sweden remembered her windfalls in World War II and sought to employ her merchant fleet as a pipeline for refugees. She could rake in the krona by providing safe floating platforms for those who could pay the price. Brazil, whose neutrality leaned toward the Sinolnds, listened to the Swedes; thought she might slash her huge external debt by billions of cruzeiros; and magnanimously offered sanctuary to Sinolnd refugees—prepaid in precious metal which Indians had in quantity.

  But Argentina and Peru bordered Brazil, and had scarifying debts of their own. They promptly offered to accept Allied refugees for so many pesos and sols per head, whether they came by Swedish surface ships or waterwings. Brazil instantly reconsidered her offer. She needed high technology, not a prefabricated war. The Swedes sulked, and went on selling machine tools to both sides.

  Yet America's most sharply-felt boundary was internal: the paranthrax quarantine line which ran up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, extending to Lake Erie via the Ohio state line. Early in February of 1997, the long-awaited vaccine was ready for airdrop, packaged as pressure-fed intramuscular injection ampoules for the millions of Americans in our eastern states. The first drops were made in Tampa and Orlando; the health of our swamp guerrillas was more immediately important than that of miners in West Virginia.

  Americans knew, because the holo told them, that the quarantine would be lifted in time. But even the reassurances of Eve Simpson could not counter a suspicion that paranthrax spores might lie dormant for decades. Rumors among the well-informed suggested that the quarantine would stay in effect until every mammal in the US was vaccinated. Until then, it was said, quarantine-runners would be shot on sight. Even quintessential materiel like titanium from mines in New York and Virginia was refined and packaged hot, for hot shipment through Cincinnati. No one needed worry about any bug surviving a ride on that stuff.