Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Shhh!” he hissed, and I dummied up as he looked sharply at me. “Whatever you do,” he said very softly, “don’t say that again … not even in the car with me.”

He tapped his left ear and pointed outside the car. It wasn’t hard to get the picture. We might be invited guests for a public reception, but as soon as we had driven through the gates, we were in injun territory. Any high-tech company involved with a defense project as sensitive as Sentinel was probably capable of hearing a sparrow fart within a mile of its offices.

John pulled into an empty slot. “Pick up your camera and make like a log,” he murmured. “It’s showtime.”

Showtime, indeed.

We walked into the main building through the front entrance, wading through a small crowd hanging around the lobby until we found the reception table. A nice young woman took our invitations, checked them against a printout, then smiled and welcomed us by name-Jah’s, in my case-as she clipped a pair of security badges to us, each of them reading PRESS in bright red letters, which either made us honored guests or social lepers. She handed a press kit to John and ignored the disheveled beatnik with the camera behind him, then a polite young man who could have been her chromosome-altered clone pointed us through the crowd to a high archway leading to an atrium in the center of the building.

I had to rethink my opinion of the architect’s style; whoever designed this place had more on the bean than just playing with antique calculators. The atrium was three stories tall, its ceiling an enclosed skylight from which hung a miniature rain forest of tropical ferns. Small potted trees were positioned across the black-tiled floor, and dominating the far end of the room was a videowall displaying a real-time image of a Cape Canaveral launch pad so large that it seemed as if the shuttle was just outside the building.

Yet that wasn’t what immediately captured my attention. Holographic projectors, cleverly concealed among the hanging plants, had suspended a monstrous machine about twenty feet above the floor: the Sentinel 1 satellite, its long, thin solar arrays thrust out from its cylindrical fuselage, gold Mylar-wrapped spherical fuel tanks nestling against its white segmented hull just short of the black maw of its gun. The image had been shrunk somewhat-the real Sentinel was nearly as long as a football field-but the overall effect was nonetheless impressive: a giant pistol in the sky, and God help whoever tried to stare it down.

Milling around the atrium was a large crowd of business types, clustered in conversation circles, standing in front of the bar or taking drinks from the robowaiters, idly watching the shuttle countdown on the videowall. There was a buffet table at one side of the room; the aroma of hors d’oeuvres was too tempting for someone who hadn’t eaten all day, so I excused myself from John to go get some free chow.

After wolfing down a plate of cocktail shrimp, fried mushrooms, and toasted ravioli, I was ready to start thinking like a professional journalist again. John was nowhere in sight; I eased myself into a vacant corner of the room and took a couple shots of the holograph, then began to scan the room through the Nikon’s telescopic lens under the pretense that I was grabbing a few candid shots. The nice thing about posing as a down-at-the-heels news photographer is that, under circumstances such as this, you fade right into the woodwork; no one pays much attention to the photog because no one wants to seem as if they’re posing for pictures.

At first sight, no one seemed particularly remarkable; you’ve seen one suit, you’ve seen ’em all. The only exception was another photographer across the room, a young lady in jeans and a sweater who looked just as seedy as I. She scowled at me before melting into the crowd. Professional rivalry; she was probably from the Post-Dispatch. I wondered if she could help me adjust my F-stops …

Enough of that. Like it or not, I was still married, even if Marianne had sent me to the darkroom. I continued to check out the atrium.

For a few moments I didn’t see anyone recognizable. Then I spotted Steve Estes. The most right-wing member of the City Council was standing in the center of the room, yukking it up with a couple of other guys who looked as if they were fellow alumni of Hitler Youth. The pompous prick was probably bragging about how he had managed to get ERA to roust a bunch of panhandlers out of the park the night before.

Estes was clearly maneuvering for a run against Elizabeth Boucher in next year’s mayoral election; every public statement he had made since the quake hinted that he was going to oppose “Liberal Lizzie” (to use his term) on a good ol’ Republican law-and-order platform. It would be an easy run; Liz had been caught off guard by the quake and everything that occurred afterward, and in the last few weeks she had been rarely seen or heard outside of City Hall. Rumor had it that she was suffering from a nervous breakdown, a drinking problem, or both, and her foes on the council, chief among them Big Steve, had been quick to capitalize on the rumors. If she ran for reelection, it would be as an unstable incumbent; if you believed Estes’ rants, you’d think Boucher had gone down to New Madrid and jumped up and down on the fault line to cause the quake herself.

Estes glanced in my direction; the grin on his face melted into a cold glare. I took the opportunity to snag his picture before he looked away again. If anything, the shot could be used for Bailey’s next editorial against Estes and his hard-line policies. Then I happened to notice a small group of people standing across the room.

Unlike nearly everyone else at the reception, they were inordinately quiet, seeming somewhat ill at ease even though all three wore the blue badges that I had already recognized as designating Tiptree employees. Their apparent nervousness caught my attention; they appeared to be in terse, quiet conversation, occasionally shutting up and glancing furtively over their shoulders when someone happened to pass by.

I zoomed in on one of them, a distinguished-looking guy in his mid-fifties, tall and rail-thin, with a trim gray Vandyke beard and a receding hairline. Although his back was turned toward me, it was apparent that the two other people were deferring to him. When he looked over his shoulder again, I snapped his picture, more out of impulse than anything else.

Then, in the next instant, he shuffled out of the way, for the first time clearly revealing the shorter person who had been standing opposite him …

A middle-aged black woman in a powder blue business suit and white blouse, not particularly distinguishable from anyone else in the crowd-except I recognized the shock of gray in her hair and the stern expression on her face.

No question about it. She was the very same lady I had encountered in the park last night.

Fumbling with the lens-control buttons, I zoomed in on the woman as much as the camera would allow. The Nikon’s varioptic lens did wonders; now it was as if I were standing three feet in front of her. I could clearly read what was printed on her name badge: BERYL HINCKLEY, Senior Research Associate.

As if she were telepathic, her eyes flitted in my direction when I snapped her picture. I lowered the camera and smiled at her.

She recognized me. Her face registered surprise, and for a moment I thought she was going to come over to speak to me.

“Ladies, gentlemen, if I could have your attention please … we’re about to get started here.”

The amplified voice came through hidden speakers near the ceiling. A young executive was standing at a podium below the videowall. The drone of conversation began to fade as everyone quieted down.