Zero Hour

Avram almost didn’t notice when the train’s doors finally slid closed. He’d become captivated by the musician, who was now midway through a flawless rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Big Band standard, keeping rhythm with some kind of jangling percussive setup on his foot, beating out its extended drum solo on the body, pick guard, and edges of his guitar. As they started pulling from the station, the guitar player concluded his second piece with another radical shift in musical styles, chopping out the introductory chords to an up-tempo country-and- western tune with vocals. His singing clear and strong over the cacophonous noise of the train, he belted out lyrics about riding the rails, and having to get on out of town in a hurry without a dime for a cup of coffee.

Impressed, Avram was certain the kid had timed his set so the third song, with its loud strumming, would coincide with the train’s startup — a smart, practical touch, since the complicated single-note melody lines of his other numbers would have been buried under the loud racket of its wheels moving over the tracks.

He listened with pleasure for the rest of the short ride, wholly engaged by his skill and cleverness. Lathrop, their secretive rendezvous, all of its roundabout maneuverings faded from his mind. What pure talent, he thought. What marvelous, underappreciated talent.

A squeal of brakes now, and the train jolted into Times Square.

Before making his exit, Avram waited for the crowd of discharging passengers around him to thin out, eased his way over to the guitarist, and leaned down to slip a crisply folded ten-dollar bill into the can at his feet.

“Wow,” the kid said. “Appreciate it.”

Avram straightened, hesitated.

“That first song,” he said. “The one you played while people were getting on at Grand Central… what’s its name?”

“ ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ ” the kid answered with a smile. “By the Ventures, that sixties group. Figure it kind of goes with the action around here, you know?”

Avram looked at him in silence. A smile flashed across his own lips only to vanish after the briefest of moments.

Then he turned, stepped onto the platform, and reached for the ringing cell phone in his coat pocket.

* * *

When dealing with her peers and superiors at UpLink San Jose, Noriko Cousins had found that an inverse logic tended to prevail over their discussions, at least from where she sat… which was to say the stuff Noriko felt ought to be hardest to communicate generally turned out to be fairly easy, while the easy stuff was often a gargantuan pain in the ass for her to get across. Hard-easy, easy-hard, she wasn’t sure what made it so, but thought it might be some kind of East Coast — West Coast thing. People living and working out there on the edge of the lazy, hazy, crazy Pacific just seemed to have synapses that were routed along very different paths from her own.

At any rate, Noriko had decided to begin with hard-easy at this morning’s video-conference, and work her way toward easy-hard, which ran contrary to her policy of always getting the most onerous task of the day out of her hair before anything else. Yes, class, that’s correct, she thought, here again logic was coiled in on itself like the proverbial snake eating its own tail. But she figured that if you were going to start out that way, you might as well do it with total commitment. Also, she hadn’t yet decided how to make her easy-hard argument to her respected SanJo colleagues — namely persuading them to keep their oversized shoes from clomping all over her turf — and wanted to buy some time in the hope that some creative ideas would burst upon her as they rolled merrily along.

“The problem with our country’s export law is twofold, or maybe threefold,” she said now, more or less facing the Webcam above her desktop’s flat-screen display. Three thousand miles away in their SanJo conference room, their faces in perfect resolution, Pete Nimec, Rollie Thibodeau, and Megan Breen the Ice Queen waited. “First, regulatory controls change with the political and economic tides, and that makes them ambiguous to everyone except specialized lawyers,” Noriko went on. “Second, we have firms selling goods overseas that instruct those hired-gun trade attorneys to search for loopholes with magnifying glasses. Then there are companies that have been slow to put comprehensive export management systems in place, resulting in decent employees throughout the corporate hierarchy… top executives, members of the sales force, people at every level of every division and department… who want to comply with the rules but are utterly lost in the muddle. And then there are people in those same positions who know how to exploit the confusion for a crooked buck.”

“Tough shovin’ an oar through those waters,” Rollie Thibodeau said.

“Very.” Noriko motioned toward the coffee carafe beside her. “Anybody care for some of this?” she said, and held the pot up toward the camera’s eye. “It’s nice and hot.”

Smiles.

“Sure,” Nimec said. “Cream and a pinch of sugar.”

“Yuck. Don’t allow any on premises.”

“Then I’ll pass.”

Noriko sipped from her cup. There, class, was what we consider a prime instance of injecting a moderate dose of levity into a serious discussion, acceptable in most forums, and highly recommended for loosening up its participants.

“Dual-use items are a category that can really drive you crazy,” she said after a moment. “The government has to evaluate whether a product marketed for some harmless commercial purpose could be applied in some way that threatens our national security. If there’s a determination that it might, the question becomes what’s going where… or who’s okay to receive a certain product from us, and who needs to be stopped from getting hold of it. But another country with firms capable of manufacturing that same commodity, or something similar, might disagree with our assessment, or be moved by conflicting economic and political interests, and refuse to go along with a proposed international ban. There are predictable rounds of lobbying, negotiation, and compromise before any accord is reached. And say we leverage what we want. Or most of it. With the spread of existing technologies, and the arrival of new ones, any controls have practical limits… as we know from hard experience.”

She read immediate understanding on all the faces in her display.

“That lab in Canada, Earthglow,” Megan said, airing their shared recollection. “Its scientists imported the same equipment you’d find in a factory that makes powdered baby formula to create a freeze dried medium for dispersal of its gene bombs. Then they used the same microencapsulation tech that’s used for perfume samplers to stabilize the agent.”

Noriko nodded and drank some coffee.

“The application of export policies isn’t fixed in place — and it can’t be,” she said. “For a lot of reasons, usually involving shifts in political winds. Diplomatic relationships with countries change for the better or worse. Treaties are made and nullified. Restrictions are relaxed as incentives or goodwill gestures, tightened as safeguards or penalties. Sometimes licenses are issued for products shipped to our closest allies. Sometimes a product becomes so readily available outside our borders that whatever bans we put on it become irrelevant and hurt our companies competitively unless they’re modified…. It depends. Even when you go to the opposite extreme, embargo a country by classifying it as a denied party, it can find legal, borderline legal, or patently illegal ways to get around the prohibition.” Noriko paused, lifting her cup to her chin again. “You guys really should try this coffee, it’s my personal blend.”

“Another time, thanks,” Megan said. “I’ve already filled my morning quota.”

Noriko shrugged, sipped.

“Getting back on point, I want to give you an example of dual-use hardware in action… and then talk about its distribution,” she said. “My cute little Mini Cooper — chili red, christened Sue Marie by moi—has an adaptive cruise control system that automatically slows it down if I drive over a hump in the road and come up short on an overturned semi. It uses sensors that aren’t too different from the ones you’d find in a cruise-missile seeker. In fact, the semiconductors that regulate electrical current through the system are Gunn diodes, which are used in thyratron switches, which have a wide range of laser-based civilian and military applications.” She took a deep swallow of coffee, held a finger up in a just-a-minute gesture, freshened her cup. “As a couple of for-instances, you’ll find these kickers in surgical equipment and multichannel, or tunable, lasers used for optical communications networks. You’ll also find them in nuclear triggering units… and potentially hard-kill high energy beam weapons. UpLink makes high-capacity Gunn diodes and builds oscillators around them. Armbright manufactures its own versions… and loathe though I am to admit it, they’re not only competitive with