could feel my rage balloon inflating up out of my chest and into my throat in an almost detached way.
She sold you out, I thought. She fucked you all the way up the colon with a Chunnel driller.
No, wait-I thought back-you don’t know how much she knew about it. She may not even know No Way’s dead.
Oh, yes, she does. She just doesn’t know it happened down there. Obviously Lindsay doesn’t tell her everything, but she knows good ’n’ plenty. If she’s curious about No Way, she’s just trying to cover her tight little ass.
Well, first of all, I’ve got to get hold of Grgur. Ask him. What’s Marena’s real deal?
What is this, Harnessing the Power of Wishful Thinking? You want to determine the exact degree of guilt on some scale between Quisling and Mussolini? She fucked you over and one’ll get you ten they’re going to waste you, too, sometime, and she knows about it and doesn’t care. If she didn’t come up with it herself, that is. It’s probably fun for her to fuck a soon-to-be-dead guy. Dead Man Fucking. It’s another PSDL power trip. Your whole life you’ve just been a tool, maybe a sharp tool but disposable, like a plastic razor.
Yeah, you’re right, I thought. Time to rock. I could already see myself boiling over, trashing the whole place, grabbing Marena to interrogate her, a little taste of her own shit Don’t do it, I said. Give in to rage and you’ll screw worse up. Chill. Chill. Get past furious, get to that cold point where you can just nurture that little green flame. Figure out how to record this stuff. Go public. Get them all put away. And then maybe get them killed in prison.
No, wait, better just kill them first. Even if I got them into court they’d hire Scheck, Spence, amp; Dershowitz and everything’ll stay the same and I’ll be hung out to dry. At best. At worst I’d disappear before I got myself into custody.
Okay. Okay.
Goal.
Payback.
Why the shit did Lindsay hang on to that video? I wondered. Maybe he wanted his killers bloody all over. Still Okay. Record. I started downloading the file onto a Zip Chip.
Okay, I thought. I watched the bar graph fill up with deadly data. It said it would take another 1.2 minutes.
You know, you still don’t know what’s going on, I thought. Find out. Do de right thing. Find out. Information isn’t power yet, but it’s on the right track. First you learn what Lindsay’s really doing. Then meticulous planning. Then horrible and merciless revenge. Then party.
I checked Marena’s GPS. She was eight miles west of here, but it looked like she was headed back.
Okay, think. Lindsay’s got a scheme.
Find out.
What’s his plan, what’s his plan, what’s his plan?
Not sure, Shitlock. I entered SEARCH COUNT CHOCULA. Why did the EGP want to check out this guy? If they did at all. For that matter, why were they that paranoid about that stupid-looking Stake place? It wasn’t like it was a secret or anything, it was just another really bad-taste Mormon summer camp. One of dozens. So far it looked like a vintage-1979 Ford trucks dealership in the middle of the rain forest. So, what’s the big deal? The answers to these questions and more are yours next week… in the heart-rending conclusion of Sixty-three files came up.
Hah.
(100)
Some of the security windows were as vapid as “Thank you for downloading DrudgePro 1.3.” But some were packed with simple powerful yet powerful statements, like “do not click on any items other than those specified or you may void your bowels.” Still, it all didn’t look too tough. These days you barely have to even hack, you just use reverse-engineering programs. You become a systems manager. No sweat.
I checked Marena’s phone’s GPS dot. She was on Chinikatook Street. On her way. Better hurry.
Looking, looking…
Most of it seemed to be military products, things like bowling-ball- and beachball-sized ground robots. Another division of Warren was developing much smaller “spider robots, which were partly guided by brains taken from pigeons.” Don’t stop to gawk, I thought. Eyes on the bling.
Okay. I found out that LEON was not an acronym for “Learning Engine/Orlando Network.” Rather, it was short for Leonid Bugaev, the Russian researcher who oversaw the Russian military’s time-travel research in the early 1970s, and who came up with the basic equations used in the missile-defense system-a name I heard mentioned during the Racetrack Table Conference.
I was still clue-free about what the Warren Corporation was really doing, though. Were they just contracting for the Pentagon? Or for some other country, maybe?
They weren’t telling me Shit One, that was for dang sure.
I was cold and shaky.
Chattering.
Obviously betrayed, even though I didn’t know quite what the deal was.
For a moment I felt that there was somebody in the room with me. But I looked and there was no one.
The Stake has a fleet of five F-22s, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is actually enough to do quite a bit of damage, and over forty unmanned support aircraft, over five hundred medium-range remote-piloted missiles, and over two hundred freight and troop transport aircraft-also eight attack helicopters and at least thirty noncombat helicopters.
How many troops? Twelve hundred regulars, fourteen thousand irregulars?
The Pentagon group had calculated that the country couldn’t withstand many more attacks in the mode of the Disney World Horror, and that they might happen even if the U.S. policy in the Middle East changed a lot-which it wouldn’t. And no conventional means could stop them. So they began to fund research on speculative systems that might be able to affect a situation without touching it, or redirect it once had started. Over the last ten years, they had funded nearly a hundred speculative research projects-disintegrator rays, antigravity, telekinesis, atmospheric shielding, weather control, and so on-and only a few of them, notably ASP, ever worked out.
They reasoned that they’d never be able to completely stop terrorists from getting into a jet and taking it over, but that once they’ve seen the jet is heading for a given target, they might be able to get into the terrorist pilot’s head and make him reroute it-even in the last couple of seconds.
Then, it became clear that there might not even be time to do that-but that it might be possible to send signals or even consciousnesses into that terrorist’s head at a moment in the recent past. This wouldn’t affect anything up until the time you sent the signal, of course-but it could give you enough leeway to change what that terrorist would do later on, beginning the moment after the signal was sent.
And, of course, the project grew from there. And grew, and grew.
Okay. Time for that call. I touched PIC. Marena’s head and shoulders came up.
(101)
“Hi, friend,” her head said. “I stopped for slushies. And I have to do a few things. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” I said great and managed to stay expressionless. She disappeared herself. The Windows status bar said it was already 5:11:23 P.M.
Okay. Let’s do the hustle.
Order something. I clicked up ParkShop and after a little thrashing around I picked out a few needful things from Lobel Brothers’ Prime Kosher Provisions and the New Prana Botanica and Balducci’s South and a few other places and prepaid them on Marena’s Mall number. Instead of using Marena’s delivery service I clicked up Pink Dot- it’s this really fast high-end driving-and-errand place we used to use a lot in the Kings-and sent them the list. You
