PART TWO
Secrets Made Manifest
Chapter Twenty-One
Platt sat in the kitchen of his house, the house that had belonged to his mother before she died, his laptop computer on the wooden table next to the fridge. He took another big ole slug of the Southern Comfort and Coke over ice, and giggled. Four minutes it had taken the Net Force pukes to snag his posting. He'd have thought they coulda done it in less, given they knew exactly when it was coming and all, but okay, cut ‘em a little slack, they did have a lot of territory to cover. He'd stuck a squealer on the note and dropped it into a public chat room on the World OnLine commercial service, the WOL room marked 'Gay Texans.'
Served ‘em right for being fags.
He took another snort of the blended liquor and Coke, and laughed again. He was remembering little Jay Gridley hopping out of that VR truck, trying to figure out why the sucker had slewed to a stop in the middle of the freeway. Time he got it, it was too late. Haw!
Platt was on the wireless modem, had beamed a signal to a rebroadcaster, and then into a little throwaway stupecomp he'd set up in a rented room in San Diego, California. The stupecomp was set up for e-mail only, and rigged so it logged onto WOL and then sent the message and squeal at exactly 11:59: 59 Eastern Standard Time. When the squeal went off, it sent the signal back to the stupecomp, which routed it back through the rebroadcaster and to his laptop, to let him know. Then the stupecomp wiped its hard drive and RAM disk clean, then fried the modem's memory real good — a complete wipe that
He lifted his glass, rattled the ice cubes, and held it up in a toast. 'Yo, Net Force. Happy Fucking New Year!'
He drained the rest of the dark brown and slightly fizzy liquid in two big swallows, put the glass down on the table, then shut the laptop off. The info in the squirt wasn't much, a list of all the patients treated for STDs — sexually transmitted diseases — reported to the Atlanta CDC MedNet for the last six months. By law, certain things had to be reported to the states, and eventually some of these things wound up at the Centers for Disease Control. There were a few eyebrow-raisin' names on the list, politicians, actors and actresses, some high-profile big-money types, and even some visiting big shots, including a couple of sand nigrah princes. No real tactical value, the list, but it would be embarrassing as all hell trying to explain to your wife just how come you was treated for the clap. Mainly it was something to rattle Net Force's cage, to show that the little manifesto Hughes had cooked up was legit. A throwaway, that was all.
Outside, the sounds of firecrackers and gunshots still echoed through the cold Georgia night.
'Oh, yeah, yeah — we havin' fun now, ain't we, boys?'
Hughes sat in bed, reading a recent biography of the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling. Quisling, a career army office whose name later came to be synonymous with 'traitor,' had in the late 1930's, formed a national socialist party in his country, the Nasjonal Samling. The party hadn't done much, had never had any real power, but then the Germans had started a war and, in due course, had invaded Norway. Quisling tried to form his own government, which the Germans knocked down pretty quick, but since he was a home-grown national socialist who had once met with Hitler, the Nazis saw him as one of their own. Quisling became a collaborator who was ultimately deemed responsible for sending hundreds of Jews to the death camps, along with trying to convert the schools and churches into pro-German organizations.
One of the first things the Norwegians had done after their liberation was to round up and arrest scores of known collaborators. These were quickly tried, then quickly executed.
Quisling had been at the top of their list.
The biographer was convinced that Quisling's policies had cost Germany the war. Had he not tried so hard to 'Nazify' the country, the writer was convinced there would not have developed much of a Norwegian resistance movement. The Norwegians were from good Viking stock, not the least bit cowardly, as evidenced by the famous tale of their king and the Jewish symbol — when told that Jews must wear the Star of David sign in public to show who they were, supposedly King Haakon VII took up the symbol himself and urged all his people to do the same. Thai could be apocryphal, of course, but truth should never stand in the way of a good story. The Norwegians were also smart enough to figure out which way the winds of war were blowing. If things hadn't been bad at home, they would have hunkered down and allowed the storm to blow itself out. But Quisling's policies pissed them off.
The resistance movement was never more than a small thorn in the Nazis' side, but it did cause a fair amount of industrial sabotage. Foremost among the attacks was a major strike against the heavy-water production facilities in Rjukan. The writer postulated that if the Germans had been able to speed up their atomic experiments, they would have likely developed a working atomic bomb before the United Slates did, and that such a weapon would have turned the tide of war in their favor. A few of those in the noses of V2 rockets launched from ships off the U.S. mainland at American cities would have done the trick.
If you accepted the theory, that was a reasonable assumption. A mile-wide smoking crater in the middle of New York or Washington, D.C., would have given the Americans something to think about, all right.
Too bad for them, the Germans ran out of time. It was left for America to build fission bombs that finished off the Japanese; atomics hadn't even been needed to beat the Germans.
Hughes thought this Quisling-cost-the-war theory was something of a stretch, but the writer nonetheless echoed a valid point from all the vaults of history: For want of a nail, a war
A butterfly flapping its wings in Kansas today contributes to the tornado in Florida tomorrow. All things are interconnected, so the theory went.
Hughes grinned. He dog-eared the corner of the page and closed the biography. He turned off the light, settled down into his orthopedic biofoam pillow, and stared into the darkness.
Quisling had probably not been aware that he was a contributor to history. Certainly he hadn't wanted to be remembered as a traitor. But men who were less than adept did not control their own destinies, much less how they personally would be viewed years later. History, after all, was written by the victors.
History…
Hughes had always been fond of the story about the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Elected to the French National Assembly a few years before the Revolution, and being a man of medicine and of a kindly nature,
