anything I can do to help out . . . ?”
“You goddamn bet there is!” There’s a heart-felt emphasis on the words. “Stupid dumb fucks are misusing the diplomatic channel for fucking stupid dumb-ass
“The”—
“Yeah, them. It’s a network attack, we know that much. We even know what tools they’re using. Anyway, I want you to go meet a man down at the university there in Edin-burg. A double-domed doctor of artificial intelligence. He knows about this stuff.”
“Target acquisition, son.
“But this academic”—you wince—“how’s he going to help m—us take down the adversaries?”
“He’s not. What he did was, he worked on the project that developed the tools our adversaries are using. Not deliberately—we don’t think he’s responsible; we’re kind of in bed with him on another deal. What you’re going to do is impress upon him the importance of sticking with his business partners. And just in case he doesn’t get the message, you’re going to persuade him to give you his source code, and you’re going to upload it for us to do a walk-through. Fingerprinting. Just in case.”
“Their source code? What, you’re saying we’re being attacked by some kind of
“Yep. Although the folks who designed it—along with Mac-Donald—may not even know what it’s doing: Best if you don’t know too much, either. We’ll get you an appointment with Dr. MacDonald: When you go in, just tell him we want ATHENA.”
“What about these dumb-shit identity packages?” you demand.
“We buy them from a reliable source, son.” There’s a pause. “I’ll look into it. We’ll get you a new face just as soon as we figure out what’s going on. Don’t you worry about that. In fact”—there’s a longer pause—“you’re a serial killer right now? I like that, son. Let’s see if we can find you a job to go with it . . .”
You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
Albert and Eileen and the three girls lived in a paint-peeling house beside a dry creek in the ass-end of nowhere, about eight miles outside Lovelock, Nevada. Or maybe it was a croft in the highlands, ten miles from the nearest wee free kirk. When you arrived, there were five books in the house: a Bible, a copy of
The Bible in question was not the King James edition; nor did it include testaments ancient or modern, commandments (other than “keep your gun clean and loaded and your ammunition dry”), or advice about not wearing mixed-fibre fabric and eating shell-fish. It was, nevertheless, adhered to as rigorously as any religious text, within the homeschooled homesteaded ranch of Albert and Eileen: And so you learned to live by the rules of
You remember your first night at the ranch vividly—lying on the lumpy mattress on your stomach and trying not to cry with pain, terrified that if you made a noise, he’d come back—lying in the darkness and the stifling heat, listening to the crickets through the rotten, dry slats of the shuttered window, your entire back a mass of welts and bruises from your first real beating. You remember the taste of tears and blood, the sound of Uncle Al’s rasping, tobacco-roughened breath as he raised the hose again—“Discipline, boy! Lack of discipline gets soldiers
Albert and Eileen lived in a bunker at the wrong end of a very strange reality tunnel, in a world dominated by the spectre of the CIAFUNDED Jew-banker spooks who faked crashing the airliners into the Pentagon and the WTC to cover up how they’d bankrupted the nation by stealing all the gold from the Federal Reserve and used it to fund their evil scheme for vaccinating the children of dissidents with an autism-causing virus. (Lyndon LaRouche, in their recondite eschatology, was a Communist Sleeper Agent from North Korea.) Weirdly, they didn’t seem to know about the lizards or the British royal family; an inexplicable omission in hindsight.
Less reclusive than some, Al and Eileen sent the kids to school, dealt with the devil under duress—Al did gun shows, trading and fixing partially deactivated weapons: He even filed tax returns now and then—meanwhile they hunkered down, waiting for the storm. There was no Internet and no television in the bunker. There was always plenty of work to fill idle hands, and a beating as final punctuation for insolent questions.
You learned what was expected of you very quickly after the first day. No back-chat, a “yessir” or “yes, ma’am” to Uncle Al or Aunt Eileen’s orders, and keep your thoughts to yourself. The beatings fell off, became a random threat, a necessary dominance ritual. Al and Eileen treated their girls no less harshly, and Sara for one was always in trouble, unable to keep her yap shut: You remember the time Al broke her arm, and went on whacking her while she hollered with pain until Eileen realized what was wrong and scolded him into splinting it. Elizabeth, older and sneakier, was the snitch: You learned
And then there was Kitty, the youngest, aged six. You figured out how to use little Kitty to get what you wanted: Al and Eileen seemed to approve of their girls helping you out, helping you fit in, never quite realizing that their training cut both ways—they’d taught the girls to obey, out of fear, anyone stronger than they were. Including you.
You learned other things. Learned how to darn socks, shoot and strip an AR-15, identify a helicopter, plant a trip-wire. After a year, they enrolled you in school, ferried you to the bus-stop daily with the girls. It was impressed upon you that book larnin’ was a privilege which could be withdrawn for any perceived deficiency: And what happened in the compound stayed in the compound, on pain of . . . pain.
Uncle Albert probably thought he was doing a good job, beating the devilish inheritance of his jail-bird brother out of you. He had no idea how close to death’s jagged edge he stood, how you’d memorized every step between your room and the kitchen, which floorboards squeaked when you stood on them: committed to memory exactly where the hurricane lantern and the kerosene were stored, the matches, the doorway, and the peg to lock their bedroom window shutters from the outside.
The rest is largely a blur: Even this much is reconstructed laboriously and painstakingly from the wreckage piled inside your skull.
What stopped you from doing the deed, even then, was a rudimentary cost/benefit analysis. You couldn’t drive, and even if you could, you’d have had nowhere obvious to go—not with Mom dead and Dad in the big house for the foreseeable future for cutting the brake pipes. (The significant absence of Grandma and Grandpa on your paternal side did not escape you: Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.) And so you decided to bide your time until a suitable exit strategy presented itself.
As it turned out, you didn’t have to wait all that long. Three years after you arrived, Uncle Al finally succumbed to The Lure of the Internet and traded an elderly shotgun and a gallon of white lightning for a hot (in more senses than one) laptop with a modem. He’d been hearing about these BBS things for years from his pals on the militia circuit, and figured he ought to take a look-see. You and the girls didn’t get anywhere near Al’s PC—for Internet access you were restricted to the school’s rickety roomful of 486s, forced to expend tedious amounts of energy circumventing the district’s brain-dead net nanny—but from afar you watched as Al made quite a stink, talking somewhat more freely than he should have. Scratch that: With online friends like Jim Bell and his assassination politics shtick, Al clearly didn’t realize that he was breaking cover in a big way. But he lost interest rapidly and gave up dialling into AOL after a few months. And he probably thought that was that.
You were in school the day the Men in Black finally descended on the fuhrerbunker with a search warrant and the county sheriff’s deputy in tow. (Surprise: The county wasn’t on Al’s side against the perfidious feds—
