Chapter Fifteen

“I can’t believe this,” Smith said. “We’ve been searching the streets for a week, and we haven’t found a trace of Beech!”

Schiano shrugged. “New York’s a big city,” he said.

“Not that big,” Smith retorted. “You sure about what you told me?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Schiano said. “First choice in his situation is to link up with rebels; second choice is to go to ground among the poor and make connections with the organizations poor people deal with—charities and organized crime.”

“You’re sure?”

“I wrote it, didn’t I?”

“So they tell me. You don’t seem terribly eager to prove it by helping us stop this son of a bitch, though.”

“I’m not in any hurry,” Schiano said with a shrug. “Not so long as you’re paying me a thousand bucks an hour.”

“You might want to earn some of that!”

“I’ve tried.”

Smith glared at Schiano.

Schiano looked back calmly.

He wasn’t bothered by Smith’s anger; Smith was an asshole. Schiano kept telling him that first choice was to join with some group trying to do what Beech was programmed to do, that is, to overthrow the government, and Smith kept missing it.

He had, at one point, asked whether Beech would sell out to some foreign power, and Schiano had told him no, which was quite true—that option was specifically avoided in the Spartacus File because it would lead to too many potential complications if the optimized agent went looking for outside allies. Covert had wanted their Spartacus to run an entirely home-grown operation, so no one could complain about international meddling.

But Smith still hadn’t hit on the idea of terrorists or subversive organizations. It was really quite an amazing blind spot. To Smith, Schiano had long since realized, those weren’t rebels—those were nuts. Dangerous criminal nuts. Rebels were something else, something the U.S. didn’t have.

Schiano had to struggle sometimes to keep from giggling at Smith’s absurdity.

“Okay,” Smith said, “so we haven’t been able to find Beech directly; we’ve just wound up with a bunch of dead derelicts and complaints from human rights groups. You say he’ll try to link up with organized crime?”

Schiano considered that.

Technically, a lot of the subversive organizations qualified as organized crime; certainly, any that had ever used terrorism did, and plotting to overthrow the government was conspiracy to commit treason, wasn’t it?

“Yeah,” Schiano said. “He’s probably already contacted someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” Schiano said. “What do I know about organized crime? I’m just a computer jock.”

That was the closest to an outright lie that Schiano had come yet in his dealings with Smith, because while he didn’t actually know, for the last day or two he’d begun to suspect just who Beech had joined up with. There were messages on the net—messages asking readers if they were unhappy with the way the country was run.

That was hardly anything new, but the wording of these particular messages sounded eerily familiar to Schiano.

If Smith phrased his questions properly, Schiano would have to admit that he was pretty sure Casper Beech had linked up with a group of suspected terrorists called People For Change.

But so far, Smith hadn’t phrased his questions correctly.

And Schiano was unhappy with the way the country was run—especially the piece of it Smith was running.

Giving up a thousand dollars an hour to join a bunch of crazy revolutionaries was a bit more than he was ready to do—but he was thinking about it.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” the redheaded man—Colby, the other members of PFC usually called him, though he also seemed to answer to “Rob” or “Perkins”—said as he leaned over Casper’s shoulder and looked at the computer screen. He was tall enough that he had to stoop slightly to see the display.

“Several things,” Casper said, still tapping keys.

“Name one,” Colby said, straightening up.

“Well, first off,” Casper said, hitting ENTER and leaning back, “I’m trying to raise the general level of discontent. While it’s true that you don’t need to have the backing of the majority in order to win a revolution, you do have to know that the general population isn’t going to come out in support of the old regime. There are going to be hardships and displacements in any change of government, and you want to make sure that the people don’t consider them an intolerable price to pay, or you get a counter-revolution.”

Colby considered that.

“I thought you just wanted to stay alive,” he said.

“That’s right,” Casper said. “And the best way to do that is to make sure the government that’s trying to kill me hasn’t got the power to do so.”

“So you seriously plan to overthrow the Party?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“That woman you brought with you says she can keep you alive by making you a cause celebre.”

“Celia?” Casper blinked. “She’s probably right.”

“Then why bother with the rest of this?”

Casper suddenly looked blank.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked back at the computer screen in puzzlement.

“You said you had several reasons for this stuff.”

“Yeah,” Casper said, still puzzled. “I’m trying to gauge the depth of existing resentment, and to make indirect contacts with any organizations that can be recruited to help us.”

“All in service to the revolution?”

“I guess so.”

“I think you’re wasting your time.”

Casper looked up. “Oh?”

Colby nodded. “I’ve studied Mao and Lenin and the rest—maybe you think they were wrong about how to run a government once they’d succeeded, we don’t have to agree on that, I don’t necessarily agree with them myself, but you’ll admit they understood how to stage a revolution, won’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Casper said—not so much because he agreed, since he had not actually read Mao and Lenin, as to see where Colby was leading.

“Well, they agree, and anyone can see, that the peasants—the common people, they don’t need to literally be peasants—will obey whoever is in power; as Mao put it, the masses need not be educated in the new thought until after the revolution. If you seize the centers of power, the existing power structure will yield.”

“Uh huh. Sure. Seize the centers of power. And how are you planning to do that?”

Colby frowned. “We do need a solid cadre, ready to die for the cause, before we can take control of the communications and command centers. But you don’t recruit true revolutionaries by posting frivolous complaints about government abuse; everyone knows the government is corrupt.”

“Oh, I see—and you’ve been able to recruit these loyal troops we need? Like Ed, the guy the rest of you watch nervously because he blew up that cop four years ago? Or wasn’t I supposed to notice that?”

Colby stared angrily at him.

“Look,” Casper explained, “you’re right that I’m not going to suddenly convert anyone; I’m mostly just planting seeds that may or may not yield something later. But I’m also providing encouragement for anyone who’s already on our side to join us.”

Colby considered that, then changed the subject.

“And if you succeed,” he said, “you plan to replace the corrupt so-called Party with true representives of the people, and redistribute the stolen wealth of the capitalists to the workers?”

Casper stared up at him.

“Jesus,” he said, “what rock did you crawl out from under? No, I’m not going to do anything like that! I want a proper, democratically-elected government, and a free-market economy—I’m an American, for heaven’s sake!”

“Isn’t that what we have now?” Colby asked sardonically.

Casper blinked.

Colby waited for a reply, but Casper could not come up with anything to say, and at last Colby snorted in disgust and turned away.

Casper watched him go.

And finally, the words came to him, too late to be spoken aloud.

No, they didn’t have a democratically-elected government, they had a one-party state. Even in the primaries, when there were primaries, the only choices the voters were offered had been selected for them from the class of professional politicians by other professional politicians. And they didn’t have a free market economy because the Consortium and the other government-granted monopolies had, with the help of the Party politicians, taken over the marketplace and rearranged it to suit themselves.

But was that enough to justify a revolution? The politicians had been elected; even if people weren’t happy with them, they’d voted for them. The two old parties had been merged into the Party to deal with the Crisis, and the Party had done what it promised. The Crisis was over, but the people still voted for the Party; the Greens held a few West Coast seats in Congress, but not enough to matter, while the Libertarians and Socialist Workers and the rest couldn’t get more than one or two percent of the vote.

And that meant that those people were hardly likely to march in the streets in protest, let alone take up arms and assault the power stations and communications centers.

Casper frowned.

There was something wrong here. There was something in his thinking that didn’t match the real world.

If it was his thinking, at all.

He’d never really hated the Party before; he’d considered it a sort of necessary, or at least inevitable, evil. A divided, two-party government had been inefficient and wasteful, unsuited to the complex modern world, and had brought on the Crisis, when the American economy virtually collapsed—that’s what the propaganda always said, and most of the American people believed it. George Washington’s warning against political parties was a favorite theme in Party literature, and the countries of eastern Europe, with their dozens of parties and unstable coalition governments, were held up as bad examples—better by far, the Party said, to have one organization providing the candidates. And everyone agreed that the little parties, with their extremist views, were all just eccentrics and crazies, relics of an earlier era. No one wanted them in power. The Greens were useful as a prod, but nobody wanted a Green government.

Casper had always gone along without really thinking about it. He’d been too busy with his own problems to care about politics.

But now he was thinking about it. He thought about it constantly. He was obsessed with politics, with strategies and tactics, with theories of government and constitutional rights, all of it stuff that had never concerned him before.

This wasn’t anything a spy would need, let alone an assassin—but it wasn’t, Casper realized, his own thinking at all.

Just what had NeuroTalents put in his head?