Chapter Twenty
No one gave any names, and while many Americans would have thought the tall man’s face was familiar they wouldn’t have been able to say who he was.
Smith knew, though. As part of his job he had to be able to instantly identify any high government official, just in case he happened to see one somewhere he shouldn’t, and he knew who he was facing. He straightened a little further.
This was the White House Chief of Staff—the current administration’s hatchet man.
The two men stared at each other, Smith stiff and nervous, the other relaxed but angry.
“So,” the tall man said at last, “you’re the asshole who started a riot in New York.”
“Sir,” Smith protested, “I don’t feel that’s a fair description.”
“You don’t.”
“No, sir.”
“You’re the one who ordered a bunch of hit men to shoot someone who was giving a speech in Washington Square, right? Right out there in front of the crowd, like something from a goddamned Hollywood movie?”
“I…” Smith caught himself. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“And you didn’t think that would start a riot?”
“I… Perhaps I hadn’t thought out the consequences,” Smith admitted.
“And why hadn’t you?”
“Sir, I considered it essential that we dispose of Casper Beech as soon as possible. I was too concerned with that to worry about collateral damage.”
“Collateral damage,” the other man said. “An anti-government riot in the middle of New York—you call that collateral damage?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I seem to recall that collateral damage is a euphemism for what we used to call ‘overkill.’”
“Ah, well… I don’t know, sir.”
“You ought to. If you’re going to use a term like that, you ought to know just what the hell you’re saying. And if you’re going to do something like shoot people in front of a crowd in the middle of New York, you ought to know what the hell you’re doing.”
“I was trying to prevent a catastrophe, sir!”
“By killing this Casper Beech.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you kill him?”
“No, sir.”
The chief of staff stared at Smith for a long moment, then asked, “Did you ever read Macchiavelli?”
Smith blinked. “No, sir.”
“You should. Anyone in government should. If you had, you might’ve remembered that he said, ‘if you strike at a king, you must kill him.’ Well, you’ve struck at this son of a bitch, and you haven’t killed him, and you’re in deep shit.”
Smith swallowed, then said, “I gathered that, sir.”
“That all you’ve got to say?”
“No, sir.” Smith swallowed again. This was his chance to present a defense, and he didn’t want to blow it; he hadn’t been sure he was even going to get one, and he was pretty damn sure he wouldn’t get another. “Sir,” he said, “Casper Beech has been programmed with the Spartacus File. That’s considered the most dangerous of all our imprint weapons; we put everything into it, everything we knew how to do. A man who’s been optimized with the Spartacus File is driven to overthrow the government of his homeland—it’s an irresistible compulsion, and nothing short of death will stop it.”
“There are probably thousands of people in this country who are obsessed with overthrowing the government, Mr. Smith,” the chief of staff said drily.
“Yes, but the Spartacus File also gives him the knowledge and skills necessary to do it. He had to be stopped, by any means available.”
The chief of staff sighed, and seated himself on the edge of the desk. “So you’ve been trying to kill him.”
“Yes, sir—of course. That’s the only way to stop him.”
“And you didn’t worry about who or what might get caught in the overkill.”
“No, sir. You can’t make an omelet, and all that.”
“Smith, you’re an idiot. You and your guns and bombs and computers…look, if we seriously had wanted to take out this Beech, if you’d brought this up to my level to begin with, we could have done it. We could have fucking nuked New York if we thought it was important enough. If you really don’t care about the overkill you can take out anybody, any time you want. If this Beech ever gets to be that much of a menace, we can goddamn well do that. But we haven’t. You know why?”
He waited for a reply, but Smith simply looked blank.
“Because we do care about the overkill, goddammit!” He slammed his fist on the desk. “A lot of good it does to take out one revolutionary if the political damage creates a hundred more! So this Beech is dangerous, he’s a goddamn Spartacus who’s going to turn the whole goddamn underclass into a slave army, he’s going to turn every city in the country into a war zone if we let him, until someday he and a bunch of ghetto punks come riding into Washington on a hijacked Greyhound and string us all up on the Mall and declare the People’s Libertarian Republic or some such crap—that’s what you’re worried about?”
“Ah…yes, sir.”
“Fine. Let’s say he gets every single American who’s living below the poverty line to sign up in his army and pick up a gun. You know what he’s got, then, out of three hundred million Americans?”
“No, sir.”
“He’s got a hundred million troops—most of ‘em women and children. They’ve probably got handguns and homemade explosives at most and they aren’t trained for shit. And you know what we’ve got?”
Smith didn’t bother to answer.
“We’ve got two hundred million loyal Americans, including the whole goddamn army, and against a bunch of kids with rifles we’ve got 3,000 nuclear warheads. We put one of those warheads on Beech’s headquarters, and his army falls apart overnight. They don’t come marching down the Mall. We don’t negotiate with them. We don’t need to. We just blow ‘em away.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t look convinced, Smith—and I think I know why. Because if it comes to dropping a nuke on Americans, we’re in rough shape. Damn right we are. But Smith, that’s worst case. That’s if we do nothing until this Beech has his whole army up and running. Best would have been if someone at NeuroTalents had been paying attention, and when Beech got that brain flash and was lying there out cold from the zap, this helpful person had quietly cut his throat. That didn’t happen, and you’ve been trying to make it happen ever since.”
“Yes, sir, that’s it exactly!” Smith said, perking up. “We need…”
“You need to shut up and listen. Smith, it’s too late for that. Timing is everything in politics, and this is politics. It was too late once Beech went underground and linked up with the PFC and started putting his propaganda out on the nets. You can’t just cut his throat now.”
Smith fought down the urge to demand, “Why not?” Instead he said, “Yes, sir.”
“You’ve been looking at this wrong. Our goal isn’t to kill Beech. That’s not a goal, it’s just a means to an end. You have to look at what we really want. It’s not that we want Beech dead; it’s that we don’t want him screwing up the country.”
“But…”
“But killing him would be one easy way to make sure he doesn’t screw up the country. Right. No argument. But you haven’t managed to kill him, have you?”
“No, sir.”
“And he’s on guard now, he’s got helpers, he’s got a whole goddamn organization, he’s got some public support.”
“Sir, if we could just shut down…”
“Shut down the media. Right. Do you know how long we’ve wanted to do that? Since Nixon, for God’s sake! This isn’t Serbia, Smith; we can’t do it. If we tried, we’d have pirate stations on the air in hours, we’d have illegal satellite uplinks bitching to every other country on Earth, we’d have the nets screaming bloody murder. Americans didn’t care when one by one we gutted all the Constitutional checks and balances that are supposed to keep the government in line, because they always knew they had an ace in the hole, the biggest goddamn brake in the whole system—the media, with its muckrakers and investigators. If we screw over someone too much he can go on one of the talk shows or rat to the tabloid news shows and make life hell for whoever’s responsible—or at least he thinks he can. So we live with it, we don’t go after the media, and we’ve got our deals, our unwritten laws, and we can pretty much do as we please when the media aren’t looking, but we can’t shut it down, or suppress anything that happens out in public. That riot of yours was in the middle of fucking New York—we can’t suppress that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, if you’d had any brains, or anyone in your department knew shit about PR, we wouldn’t have had any problem, because we could have said the snipers weren’t ours, and then we could have investigated and said that Beech staged the whole thing, and he’d look like an asshole and we could track him down at our leisure and blow him and his buddies to hell with an explosion we’d put down as them setting off a bomb they were building. But you didn’t do that. You didn’t deny anything. You didn’t tell the cops to keep their mouths shut, and they’d been told not to interfere with the feds on the rooftops.”
“That hasn’t been widely reported, sir. We could still deny it, say that was all rumors…”
The chief of staff shook his head. “No, we couldn’t, asshole. You don’t understand how PR works, do you? It’s all timing. I told you, all timing. If we deny it now, everyone will scream cover-up, and we’ll have another goddamn scandal dragging on for years even if Casper Beech walks in here in ten minutes and blows his own brains out. We should have had a spokesman there covering our ass on the scene—once the story’s out on CNN and Fox and all over the net it’s too late.”
Smith wanted to protest, but the other man was right—he didn’t know anything about PR. That wasn’t part of his job description. Covert was covert; they never admitted or denied anything.
“You beginning to see the situation, Smith?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, what we want is to make sure that this Beech doesn’t start a revolution. We want to dump the blame for the riot. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the direct approach hasn’t worked with Beech—and you can be proud of that, if you want, because that’s exactly what you programmed him for, asshole. He’s supposed to be able to handle any kind of direct attack, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So why the hell did you use them? Chrissake, man…”
Smith swallowed uneasily.
The chief of staff took a moment to collect himself. “So we need to find another approach,” he continued eventually.
“Like what?”
The chief of staff smiled. “Why, it’s obvious. You heard his speech, saw the vids?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He says he’s not a revolutionary,” the tall man pointed out. “He says he wants peaceful political reform.”
“That’s just propaganda, sir,” Smith said. “It’s in the Spartacus File. It’s all just talk, for public consumption. He’s still programmed for violent revolution.”
“Of course,” the other agreed, nodding. “But what if we take it literally? What if we invite him to Washington for talks?”
“What?”
“What if we apologize, say it was all a misunderstanding, and invite him down here to meet the president?”
“Sir, he’d assassinate the president!”
“Okay, then, to meet somebody, some geek from State maybe. It doesn’t matter who he talks to. The point is, we get him out of the underground, out where we can see him, keep an eye on him.”
Smith blinked. “And then we can get him with his defenses down and kill him?”
“Oh, God,” the chief of staff said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling in disgust. Then he leaned forward again and hammered the desk with his fist. “No, asshole! We don’t kill him. We co-opt him. How the hell is he going to recruit an army if he’s here talking to the Under-Secretary for Urban Affairs? Hell, we could even appoint him Under-Secretary for Urban Affairs if we have to! We make him think we’re taking his reform talk seriously, and tie him up in red tape until everyone just forgets him, until he’s just one more former radical giving speeches no one listens to!”
“But…he won’t do it. He’s compelled.”
“That’s fine, too. Then we can point and say, ‘Look, we tried,’ and we can send the SWAT teams after him and blow him away right out in public and people will cheer for us instead of starting riots! And we’ll take our time about it and do it right, with bombs or serious firepower, no more half-baked crap with snipers using armor-piercing shells… Jesus, Smith, where’d you come up with that, anyway?”
“It seemed…we wanted to be ready for everything, and we thought he might wear a vest…”
“Right.” He grimaced in disgust. “You thought.”
For a moment the two men were silent; then Smith asked, “So you’ll issue a pardon for him, then? And after that Covert’s out of it?”
The chief of staff shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “We need to dump the blame for the riot. We need a scapegoat if we’re going to pull this off and have the public on our side when we ask Beech to surface.”
Smith felt a sudden cold dread.
The chief of staff smiled.
“You got it, Smith. Seems there’s a small covert unit gone rogue, went after this Beech character without authorization, but of course we’ve caught them now. We’ll have a nice show trial, you and maybe three or four others will be convicted and given twenty years, and then we’ll quietly lose you on the way to prison, and next thing you know you’ll be in the Witness Protection Program somewhere.”
“But…my work…my career…”
“So you’ll have a two-year vacation. It’ll be about that long before this blows over. A sabbatical, Smith—you can do some studying, brush up on your practical politics. Maybe when you come back you’ll have a better handle on the way the real world works.”
Smith shuddered.