Distraction Read online

  “I’ll go with you,” Pelicanos muttered, hunting for his hat. “Let me get properly dressed.”

  “You stay, Yosh,” Oscar told him quietly. “We’re a long way from home. You keep an eye peeled back here.”

  “I’ll get a coffee.” Pelicanos yawned, and reflexively clicked on a satellite news feed, erasing a bus window in a gush of networked data. He began hunting for his shoes.

  “I’ll go with you!” Norman insisted brightly. “C’mon, Oscar, let me go!” Norman-the-Intern was the campaign’s last remaining gofer. The busy Bambakias campaign had once boasted a full three dozen interns, but all of the campaign’s other unpaid volunteers had stayed behind in Boston. Norman-the-Intern, however, an MIT college lad, had stuck around like a burr, laboring fanatically and absorbing inhuman levels of abuse. The campaign krewe had brought Norman along with them “on vacation,” more through habit than through any conscious decision.

  The door opened with a harsh pneumatic pop. Oscar and Norman stepped outside their bus for the first time in four states. After hundreds of hours inside their vehicle, stepping onto earth was like decamping onto another planet. Oscar noted with vague surprise that the highway’s patchy shoulders were paved with tons of crunchy oyster shells.

  The tall roadside ditchweed was wind-flattened and brownish green. The wind came from the east, bearing the reek of distant sulphur—a bioindustrial reek. A stink like a monster gene-spliced brewery: like rabid bread yeasts eating new-mowed grass. A white V of departing egrets stenciled the cloudy sky overhead. It was late November 2044, and southwest Louisiana was making halfhearted preparations for winter. Clearly this wasn’t the kind of winter that anyone from Massachusetts would recognize.

  Norman alertly fetched a motorbike from the rack on the back of the bus. The bikes were designed and sold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and were covered with union labels, antilitigation safety warnings, and software cheatsheet stickers. It was very typical of Bambakias to buy motor bicycles with more onboard smarts than a transcontinental airliner.

  Norman hooked up the sidecar, and checked the battery. “No hotdogging,” Oscar warned him, clambering into the sidecar and placing his hat in his lap. They tugged on dainty foam helmets, then pulled onto the highway behind a passing electric flatbed.

  Norman, as always, drove like a maniac. Norman was young. He had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems. He rode the motorbike with intense lack of physical grace, as if trying to do algebra with his legs.

  Dusk began to settle gently over the pines. Traffic was backed up for two kilometers on the east side of the Sabine River bridge. Oscar and Norman buzzed up along the road shoulder, the smart bike and sidecar scrunching over the oyster shells with oozy cybernetic ease. The people trapped within the stalled traffic looked stoic and resigned. The big road professionals—eerie-looking biochemical tankers and big, grimy, malodorous seafood trucks—were already turning and leaving. Roadblocks were a sadly common business these days.

  The state of Louisiana’s office of tourism maintained a roadside hospitality depot, perched at the riverside just at the state border. The tourist HQ was a touchingly ugly structure of faux-antebellum brick and white columns.

  The building had been surrounded with fresh, razor-edged concertina wire. The highway into Texas was thoroughly blockaded with sentry boxes, striped barriers, and nonlethal clusters of glue mines and foam mines.

  A huge matte-black military helicopter perched on its skids at the side of the highway, mechanically attentive and deeply bizarre. The black copter lit the tarmac with searing bluish spotlights. The colossal machine was armed to the teeth with great skeletal masses of U.S. Air Force weaponry. The ancient air-to-ground weapons were so insanely complex and archaic that their function was a complete mystery to Oscar. Were they Gatling fléchettes? Particle accelerators? Rayguns of some kind, maybe? They were like some nightmare mix of lamprey fangs and sewing machines.

  Within the brilliant frame of helicopter glare, small squads of blue-uniformed Air Force personnel were stopping and confronting the cars attempting to leave Louisiana. The people within the cars, mostly Texan tourists, seemed suitably cowed.

  The Air Force people were engaged in an elaborate roadblock shakedown. They were pulling white boxes out of refrigerated trishaws, and confronting travelers with their contents.

  Norman-the-Intern was an engineering student. He tore his fascinated gaze from the copters’ appalling weaponry. “I thought this was gonna be a party roadblock, more like those cool gypsy bikers back in Tennessee,” Norman observed. “Maybe we’d better just get out of here.”

  “There’s Fontenot,” Oscar parried.

  Fontenot waved them over. His advance vehicle, a sturdy all-terrain electric hummer, was straddling the roadside ditch. The campaign security manager wore a long yellow slicker and muddy jeans.

  It was always reassuring to see Fontenot. Fontenot was a former Secret Service agent, a security veteran of presidential caliber. Fontenot knew American Presidents personally. In fact, he had been serving as bodyguard to an ex-President when he had lost his left leg.

  “The Air Force flew in around noon,” Fontenot informed them, leaning on the padded bumper of his hummer and lowering his binoculars. “Got their glue bombs down, and some crowd-foamers. Plus the sawhorses and the tanglewire.”

  “So at least they didn’t destroy the roadbed?” Norman said.

  Fontenot cordially ignored Norman. “They’re letting the lane from Texas through with no problems, and they’re waving everybody with Louisiana plates right through. There’s been no resistance. They’re shaking down the out-of-staters as they leave.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Oscar said. He put his helmet aside, adjusted his hair with a pocket comb, and donned his hat. Then stepped carefully out of the bike’s sidecar, trying not to dirty his shoes. The Louisiana bank of the Sabine was essentially a gigantic marsh.

  “Why are they doing this?” Norman said.

  “They need the money,” Fontenot told him.

  “What?” Norman said. “The Air Force?”

  “Got no federal funding to pay their power bills at the local air base. Either they pony up, or the utility cuts ’em off.”

  “The continuing Emergency,” Oscar concluded.

  Fontenot nodded. “The feds have wanted to decommission that air base for years, but Louisiana’s real mulish about it. So Congress wrote ’em out of the Emergency resolutions last March. Kinda dropped a whole air base right through the cracks.”

  “That’s bad. That’s really bad. That’s terrible!” Norman said. “Why can’t Congress just have a straight-up vote on the issue? I mean, how hard can it be to close down a military base?”

  Fontenot and Oscar exchanged meaningful glances.

  “Norman, you had better stay here and mind our vehicles,” Oscar said kindly. “Mr. Fontenot and I need a few words with these military gentlemen.”

  Oscar joined Fontenot as the ex-Secret Service agent limped up the long line of traffic. They were soon out of Norman’s earshot. It felt pleasant to be strolling slowly in the open air, where technical eavesdropping was unlikely. Oscar always enjoyed his best conversations when outside of machine surveillance.

  “We could just pay them off, y’know,” Fontenot said mildly. “It’s not the first time we’ve seen a roadblock.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s remotely possible that these soldiers might shoot us?”

  “Oh no, the Air Force won’t shoot us.” Fontenot shrugged. “It’s nonlethal deployment and all that. It’s all political.”

  “There are circumstances where I would have paid them off,” Oscar said. “If we’d lost that campaign, for instance. But we didn’t lose. We won. The Senator’s in power now. So now, it’s the principle.”

  Fontenot removed his hat, wiped the permanent hat-crease in his forehead, and put the hat back on. “There’s another option. I’ve mapped us an alternate route. We can bac
k off, head north up Highway 109, and still make that lab in Buna by midnight. Save a lot of risk and trouble all around.”

  “Good idea,” Oscar told him, “but let’s have a look anyway. I think I can smell an issue here. The Senator always likes issues.” People were glaring at the two of them from within the stalled cars. Fontenot was easily passing for a native, but Oscar was drawing resentful and curious stares. Very few people in southwest Louisiana dressed like Beltway political operatives.

  “It’s a big stinkin’ issue all right,” Fontenot agreed.

  “This local Governor is a real character, isn’t he? A stunt like this…There must be better ways for a state politician to provoke the feds.”

  “Green Huey is crazy. But he’s the people’s kind of crazy, these days. The State of Emergency, the budget crisis—it’s no joke down here. People really resent it.”

  They stopped near the searing glare of the copter lights. An Air Force lieutenant was addressing a pair of daytripping Texan civilians through the open window of the couple’s car. The lieutenant was a young woman: she wore a padded blue flight suit, a body-armor vest, and an elaborate flight helmet. The helmet’s screen-crowded interior was busily ticking and flashing as it hung from her webbing belt.

  The Texan man looked up at her cautiously, through the driver’s window. “It’s what?” he said.

  “An Air Force bake sale, sir. Louisiana bake sale. We got your corn bread, your muffuleta bread, croissants, beignets…Maybe some chicory coffee? Ted, we got any of that chicory coffee left?”

  “Just made us a fresh carafe,” Ted announced loudly, opening the steaming lid of his rickshaw. Ted was heavily armed.

  “What do you think?” said the driver to his wife.

  “Beignets always get powdered sugar over everything,” the Texan woman said indistinctly.

  “How much for, uhm, four croissants and two coffees? With cream?”

  The lieutenant muttered a canned spiel about “voluntary contributions.” The driver retrieved his wallet and silently passed over a debit card. The lieutenant swiftly slotted the card through a cellular reader, relieving the couple of a hefty sum. Then she passed the food through their window. “Y’all take care now,” she said, waving them on.

  The couple drove away, accelerating rapidly once their car had cleared the line of fire. The lieutenant consulted a handheld readout, and waved through the next three cars, which all bore Louisiana plates. Then she pounced on another tourist.

  Fontenot and Oscar edged past the blazing glare of the chopper and made their way toward the commandeered hospitality post. Chest-high tanglewire surrounded the building in a mesh of bright featherweight razors. Sheets of foil and duct tape blacked the building’s windows. Military satellite antennas the size of monster birdbaths had been punched through the roof. An armed guard stood at the door.

  The guard stopped them. The kid’s military-police uniform was oddly rumpled—apparently dug from the bottom of a mildewed duffel bag. The kid looked them over: a well-dressed politico accompanied by his krewe bodyguard. Certainly nothing unusual there. The young soldier scanned them with a detector wand, failing to notice Oscar’s all-plastic spraygun, and then addressed himself to Oscar. “ID, sir?”

  Oscar passed over a gleaming dossier chip embossed with a federal Senate seal.

  Four minutes later, they were ushered inside the building. There were two dozen armed men and women inside the hospitality suite. The intruders had shoved the furniture against the walls, and staked out the doors and windows. Muffled thuds, scrapes, and crunches emanated from the ceiling, as if the attic were infested with giant, armed raccoons.

  The original staffers from the Louisiana tourist office were still inside the building. The hospitality krewe were well-dressed middle-aged Southern ladies, with done hair and ribbons, and nice skirts and flats. The ladies had not been arrested or formally detained, but they had been crowded together into a dismal corner of their foil-darkened office, and they looked understandably distressed.

  The commanding Air Force officer was dead drunk. Oscar and Fontenot were greeted by the public relations officer. The PR man was also plastered.

  The central office was crammed with portable military command-post gear, an overjammed closet full of stencils, khaki, and flickering screens. The place reeked of spilled whiskey; the commanding officer, still in full dress uniform including his spit-polished shoes, was sprawled on a khaki cot. His visored and braided hat half concealed his face.

  The PR officer, a chunky, uniformed veteran with graying hair and seamed cheeks, was busy at a set of consoles. The pegboard counters trailed fat tangles of military fiber-optic cable.

  “How may I help you gentlemen?” the PR officer said.

  “I need to move a bus through,” said Oscar. “A campaign bus.”

  The officer blinked, his eyelids rising at two different instants. His voice was steady, but he was very drunk. “Can’t you fellas just buy a little something from our nice little Air Force bake sale?”

  “I’d like to oblige you there, but under the circumstances, it would look…” Oscar mulled it over. “Insensitive.”

  The PR officer lightly tapped Oscar’s gleaming dossier card on the edge of his console bench. “Well, maybe you should think that over, mister. It’s a long way back to Boston.”

  Fontenot spoke up. Fontenot was good-copping it, being very sane and reasonable. “If you just suspended your operations for half an hour or so, the traffic backlog would clear right up. Our vehicle would slip right through.”

  “I suppose that’s an option,” the officer said. One of his screens stopped churning, and uttered a little triumphant burst of martial brass. The PR man examined the results. “Whoa…You’re the son of Logan Valparaiso!”

  Oscar nodded, restraining a sigh. A good netsearch program was guaranteed to puncture your privacy, but you could never predict its angle of attack beforehand.

  “I knew your dad!” the PR officer declared. “I interviewed him when he starred in the remake of El Mariachi.”

  “You don’t say.” The computer had spewed up a bit of common ground for them. It was a cheap stunt, a party trick, but like a lot of psychological operations techniques, it worked pretty well. The three of them were no longer strangers.

  “How is your ol’ dad these days?”

  “Unfortunately, Logan Valparaiso died back in ’42. A heart attack.”

  “That’s a shame.” The officer snapped his pudgy fingers in regret. “He sure made some great action films.”

  “Dad took a lower profile in his later life,” Oscar said. “He went into real estate.” They were both lying. The films, though hugely popular, had been very bad. The later real-estate deals had been money-laundering cover for his father’s Hollywood backers: émigré Colombian mafiosi.

  “Could you temporarily relocate those barricades for us?” Fontenot asked gently.

  “I’ll let you fellas in on something,” the man said. His screens were still churning away, but the three of them were all cozy now. They were swapping net-gossip, trading little confidences. You didn’t shoot someone when you knew that his dad was a movie star. “We’re almost done with this deployment anyhow.”

  Oscar lifted his brows. “Really. That’s good news.”

  “I’m just running a few battlespace awareness scans…Y’know, the problem with infowar isn’t getting into the systems. It’s getting out of them without collateral damage. So if you’ll just be patient, we’ll be packing up and lifting off before you know it.”

  The commander groaned in drunken nausea, and thrashed on his cot. The public relations officer hurried to his superior’s side, tenderly adjusting his rough blanket and inflatable pillow. He then returned, having snagged a bottle of the commander’s bourbon from beneath the cot. He absently decanted an inch or so into a paper cup, studying his nearest screen.

  “You were saying?” Oscar prompted.

  “Battlespace awareness. That’s the key to rapid de
ployment. We have surveillance drones over the highway, checking car licenses. We input the licenses into this database here, run credit scans and marketing profiles, pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss…” The officer looked up. “So you might call this an alternative, decentralized, tax-base scheme.”

  Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”

  “Sure, it’s doable,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Service. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues.

  The PR man laughed bitterly. “That’s what the Governor likes to call it…Look, this is just a standard infowar operation, the stuff we used to do overseas all the time. Fly in, disrupt vital systems, low or zero casualties, achieve the mission objective. Then we just vanish, all gone, forget about it. Turn the page.”

  “Right,” said Fontenot. “Just like Second Panama.”

  “Hey,” the officer said proudly, “I was in Second Panama! That was classic netwar! We took down the local regime just by screwing with their bitstreams. No fatalities! Never a shot fired!”

  “It’s really good when there are no fatalities.” Fontenot flexed his false leg with a squeak.

  “Had to quit my TV news work after that, though. Blew my cover. Very long story really.” Their host slurped at his paper cup and looked extremely sad. “You guys need a bourbon?”

  “You bet we do!” Oscar said. “Thanks a lot!” He accepted a paper cup brimming with yellow booze, and pretended to sip at it. Oscar never drank alcohol. He had seen it kill people in slow and terrible ways.

  “When exactly do you plan to relocate?” Fontenot said, accepting his cup with a ready Eisenhower grin.

  “Oh, nineteen hundred hours. Maybe. That’s what the commander had in mind this morning.”

  “Your commander looks a bit tired,” Oscar said.

  That remark made the PR man angry. He put down his bourbon and looked at Oscar with eyes like two shucked oysters. “Yeah. That’s right. My commander is tired. He broke his sworn oath of allegiance, and he’s robbing U.S. citizens, the people he swore to protect. That tends to tire you out.”