Chapter Twenty-Two

“Tell them I want to surrender at the U.N., in front of the international community,” Casper said into the phone.

“Do you?” Cecelia asked.

Casper smiled. “It’s a possibility,” he said.

“The U.N. should be okay,” Cecelia said thoughtfully.

“See how it would work, then, and I’ll get back to you. I should have that speech ready for you soon, too.” He shut off the phone and stuck it in his pocket.

“I thought…” Mirim said.

“What?” He looked up at her, startled.

“Didn’t you just ask Rose to book you on the train to Kennedy Spaceport? I thought maybe you were heading out to somewhere on the Fringe.”

“Where I might get a more sympathetic hearing?” Casper shook his head. “It wouldn’t be the Fringers themselves who’d be listening to me out there, it would be the authorities, and they’re heavily into suppressing rebellion.”

“But then why did…isn’t that what you told Rose?”

“Don’t worry about what I told Rose,” Casper said. “You just be ready to go.”

“Casper, I don’t want to go out to the Fringe! Space travel scares me.”

He looked up at her with interest. “Have you ever done any space traveling?”

“No, and I’m not going to!”

He held up his hands. “Okay, okay, that’s no problem! You don’t have to. I promise.”

“You’re going without me?”

“Look, Mirim, just trust me, okay? It’ll all be fine, just wait and see.”

She looked down at him uncertainly.

“I promise,” he said.

She turned away.

He watched her go, then picked up his laptop and booted it up. He had things to do. There were a lot of arrangements to make.

It was a good thing that PFC had at least one or two serious terrorists as members; he was going to need some of Ed’s skills, and other specialists, as well. He’d need a bomb, and for some reason he hadn’t been getting much help from the Spartacus File with the specifications on that. Maybe part of the imprint hadn’t taken properly, or maybe one of Schiano’s programmers had been faking it.

He’d need some specialized equipment—equipment Ed probably couldn’t provide, but he might know someone who could. Fortunately, the equipment didn’t actually need to work.

And he wanted some way to remove a person without anyone knowing it; poison, perhaps, or an engineered bug of some sort…?

“Sir,” the aide said.

The Chief of Staff looked up. “Yes?”

“It’s about Casper Beech,” he said.

“What about him?”

“It seems we have conflicting reports about him, sir. That lawyer of his says Beech is going to turn himself in at the U.N., but the word on the net is that he intends to head out to the Fringe.”

The Chief of Staff sat up straight and looked the aide in the eye.

“The Fringe?”

“Yes, sir. Probably to the L5 colony.”

“And once he gets there, is he planning to surrender, or to join the rebels?” He had talked with Smith and Schiano; he remembered that Beech was supposed to join a rebel group. They’d assumed that PFC was that group, but maybe Beech had decided it was time to try starting over somewhere else.

“We don’t know, sir.” The aide hesitated. “He says he plans to surrender, but the people who worked on the Spartacus File say that he can’t. And if you like…well, before we took over the situation, Covert had issued orders to destroy any ship Beech boarded, rather than risk letting him loose off-planet. We haven’t actually countermanded those orders yet, and we can blame that on a bureaucratic foul-up if we have to.”

“Countermand them,” the chief said immediately. “We want him alive, if at all possible. If he gets off-planet…hell, it ought to be that much easier to spot him and corner him out there. Everything’s so much smaller. And if he does get killed, we can blame it on the radicals, we don’t have to take the heat ourselves.” He gazed thoughtfully at the wall. “I wonder…do you suppose he’ll surrender out there? Maybe he thinks the radicals will back him up, or that we won’t dare harm him for fear of open revolt.”

“The programmers say he can’t surrender, sir.”

The chief nodded.

“If he’s off-planet, he’s less of a threat to us, alive or dead—we can always destroy the whole damn colony and blame the radicals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure about this, Casper?” Ed asked again, holding up his ticket and freight receipt.

“Absolutely,” Casper replied. “We’ve got to hurt them, force them to negotiate.”

Ed nodded. “Damn straight. I’ve gotta give you credit, man—I didn’t think you had the balls for something like this. You talk a good line sometimes, but I wasn’t sure you had what it takes to be a real revolutionary, any more than the rest of these wusses. For four years they haven’t dared do squat, and then you show up with this super-imprint in your head, and I think we’ll finally get somewhere, then you start talking about peaceful change. If you’d stuck with that public surrender crap, I might’ve been tempted to put a knife in your back myself—the only thing the fat cats understand is violence, and that might have stirred some up. It’s good to see you understand that you can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs.”

Casper looked at Ed, the man who had deliberately waited until a cop was leaning over the planted bomb in the New York precinct before detonating it four years before, the man behind virtually every act of violence PFC had committed before Colby had taken charge and moved the group away from overt terrorism.

Ed was a loose cannon, someone who couldn’t be rehabilitated because he didn’t want to be rehabilitated, someone who would always be in the way of any attempt to turn PFC into an effective political force.

Casper clapped him on the back. “Whatever it costs, Ed. I know that now, same as you do.”

Ed winced; the slap had stung. But then, everyone at PFC knew that Casper had a tendency to misjudge his own strength. “I thought you were serious about all that ‘peaceful means’ and ‘win at the ballot box’ crap,” he said.

Casper just smiled. He twisted a ring on his finger; Ed noticed that. Casper was definitely changing, Ed thought; he hadn’t worn any jewelry before, so far as Ed could remember.

“You can’t go that way, man,” Ed said. “You have to compromise too much if you play by their rules. You can’t play politics that way and keep your ideals.”

“I know,” Casper said. “Listen, good luck, Ed—and thanks for doing this.”

“You, too,” Ed said. Then he turned and boarded the Florida train.

Casper watched him go.

He felt a surge of guilt over what he had just done—over both parts of it. He knew that before his optimization he would never have done such a thing, never even have considered it.

Now he couldn’t help it.

At least, he told himself, this should be the last of it, the end of the violence. He would never do it again.

And it was better than the guerrilla war that the Spartacus File kept urging him to lead.

Cecelia Grand looked at her watch. She frowned. She’d heard the rumors about a flight to the Fringe, and intended to give Casper a piece of her mind. The U.N. would be much better for a surrender, and he damn well better intend to surrender! If he couldn’t control that damned software in his head…?

Well, he had plenty of good ideas, and she liked the whole idea of getting into politics, but she wasn’t going to let some damn piece of spy fiction run her life.

Her phone beeped; she snatched it up and opened it.

“Grand,” she said.

“Celia?”

It was Mirim’s voice, not Casper’s.

“Yes? Where’s Casper?”

“He told me to apologize, said he couldn’t help it.”

“Couldn’t help what?”

“He’s heading for the Fringe.”

Word went out on the net before Freight 2105 was even off the ground—Casper Beech was aboard, tucked in a crate in the cargo hold with his own oxygen, water, and food supplies. The passenger flights were too closely watched, and he’d wanted to get to the Fringe, so he’d had himself smuggled aboard an unmanned supply ship.

All along Florida’s northern Atlantic coast, people looked out their windows at the line of flame that was Freight 2105’s launch from Kennedy and ascent toward space.

Most of them, thanks to the rumors on the net, knew that Casper Beech, already something of a folk hero, was supposed to be aboard.

And hundreds of eyes saw the sudden flash and knew instantly what it meant.

“The guy gave his name as Thomas Paine,” the security guard read from the screen. “It’s apparently phony—we aren’t getting a description match on any real Thomas Paine, so it set off the security check, a bit late. He’s already left the port. Whoever he really is, we think he might be connected with People For Change.”

The spaceport’s traffic manager asked, “People For Change—isn’t that the group Casper Beech runs?”

“Sure is,” the guard agreed. “Rumors on the net say Beech is being smuggled off-planet, and this guy checked some freight aboard 2105—a goddamn big crate, according to the shipping people. Big enough to hold a man and three days’ supplies. We thought you might want to hold the launch until we’ve searched it.”

“You’re a little late,” she said. “2105 took off for the L5 colony five minutes ago.”

That was when the alarms went off. The flash hadn’t been visible in the windowless office, but there were plenty of other reports of the explosion aboard Freight 2105.

“Goddamn it,” the White House Chief of Staff said, “I thought I told you to countermand those orders.”

“I did,” his aide said. “Someone must have gotten the word late.”

“Shit. This’ll mean another show trial; it makes us look really bad.” He sighed. “Well, at least Beech is out of the way.”

Cecelia appeared before the cameras with tears on her cheeks, her make-up smeared.

“Casper Beech was aboard that ship,” she said, “and the Covert Operations Group, a branch of the government of the United States, shot it down to make sure that he was not able to bring his message to the people of America. I demand that those responsible be brought to trial for murder!”

The White House spokesman was visibly ruffled, though nowhere near as distraught as Cecelia, when he said, “This was an unfortunate accident. The orders to destroy any ship Casper Beech boarded had been countermanded, but apparently word had not reached everyone. We’re still trying to locate whoever was responsible.”

Casper smiled as he watched. Even the feds thought they’d done it, and that he was a burnt corpse on the bottom of the Atlantic.

The wreckage ought to be so far down that no one could recover it and find out that there weren’t any corpses, or at least none that had Casper’s DNA.

If they ever did find it, of course, they’d guess the truth—that he was safe in a cabin in the Poconos, and Mirim would be joining him as soon as she could get away.

There were still other loose ends to be dealt with, as well. He had to make sure that Ed was out of the way, that the genetically-engineered virus he’d injected with that slap on the back had done its job and erased his memory—otherwise, the possibility that Ed might reveal the fraud would always be there. Ed and his terrorist past didn’t fit with the new People For Change, in any case.

He hoped the virus wasn’t fatal; the black market gene tailor hadn’t made any promises. The thing had originally been developed with the idea of erasing outdated or proprietary imprints, but had never been used—it ate out huge chunks of the user’s memory, along with the imprinted skills, and the developers hadn’t been able to find a way to target it more precisely.

Casper was trying to resist the Spartacus File’s ruthlessness. He hadn’t simply killed Ed, though that would have been the easiest way to cover his tracks and remove an embarrassment from PFC—but Ed was going to lose so much of his past life and personality that death might almost have been preferable. If the virus performed as advertised, the old-line revolutionary would never be able to tell anyone that Beech was still alive, or that the crate that had supposedly held Beech and his life support system had actually held the bomb that destroyed Freight 2105.

That would take care of most of the loose ends, but there were other things he still had to do. Casper knew he’d have to find some way, working by proxy, to convince Cecelia to let Mirim act as her speechwriter, so that he could supply Mirim with the words to keep PFC on the right track.

But all in all, everything was going just fine. The revolution would continue, without violence, and this time no one was going to crucify Spartacus.

He’d beaten them to it.