Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

CybeServe’s public relations director was Paul Huygens. He had started off by affably refuting the accusations during a long phone interview. He also offered to have a unit installed in my house-free of charge, of course, for “research purposes.” When I didn’t wag my tail and roll over, he circulated an in-house memo to all key company personnel, tacitly threatening job termination to anyone who didn’t hang up as soon as I called.

It could be said in Huygens’s defense that he had only been doing his job. That’s fair; I was doing mine. After several weeks of hangups, I managed to find a disgruntled former CybeServe R amp;D scientist with a guilty conscience who told me, in a not-for-attribution interview, about the fatal flaws in the Dataroom 310. That, along with all the real and circumstantial evidence, allowed me to write an exposé about the company. It was published in the Clarion after nearly two months of grinding work, and within a couple of months after its publication, the Dataroom 310 was taken off the market and CybeServe was forced to deal with dozens of civil-court lawsuits regarding the product.

By then, I had lost my job. Almost as soon as the article was published, Huygens called Boston-area companies that had business with CybeServe, all of them electronics retailers that advertised in the Back Bay Clarion. These stores, in turn, swamped the Clarion’s publisher with threats that they would yank their ads from the paper unless an editorial retraction was published and I was fired.

Like most alternative weeklies, the Clarion was a free paper, its existence dependent solely upon ad revenues. Most publishers-like Pearl, bless his rancid heart-have an iron rod thrust down their backs, knowing all too well that advertisers need the papers just as much as the papers need the advertisers and that editorial wimp-outs only invite further intimidation. Earlier that year, though, the Clarion had been sold to a greedhead who was innocent of journalistic ethics and didn’t have the common sense not to let himself be cowed by hollow threats. This jellyfish, confronted with the notion that he might not be able to purchase a summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, knuckled under.

Two weeks after the publication of my CybeServe story, I was on my way to work when I stopped off at a Newbury Street deli to have coffee and read the Globe-Herald. This made me twenty minutes late for work. I had done it many times before with no previous complaints, but when I showed up at the office, my termination notice was already pinned to my door. The reason given was “chronic tardiness.”

I was cleaning out my desk and putting all my files in cartons when my printer began to hum. I looked around to see the handwritten fax as it dropped into the tray:

Never fuck with the gods.

The fax came unsigned, but when I double-checked the number at the top of the page against my Rolodex, I saw that it had originated from Huygens’s extension at CybeServe. His company was going down the tubes, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take me with him.

And now here I was, in another place and another time, fucking with the gods again.

“Huygens wanted to get me out of there,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something he doesn’t want me to know about. I screwed him up once … he doesn’t want that to happen again.”

John nodded his head. “Could be. Could be …”

“I spotted the woman I met last night,” I said as I cinched my seat upward again. John drove up the eastbound ramp to I-64, the car sliding into the dense midday traffic heading downtown. “Just before Huygens found me. She was across the room from us …”

“You did?” Tiernan looked mildly surprised; he passed a tandem-trailer rig that was chugging down the right lane and squeezed in behind a twenty-year-old BMW with Illinois tags and an expired gas-user decal. “What did she look like?”

“African-American, about five-six … um, sort of plump, about forty to forty-five. Some gray in her hair. It was her, all right.” I hesitated, then added, “I used the camera to zoom in on her badge.”

“Yeah?”

“Found out her position, too. Printed right on the badge.”

“No kidding …”

“No kidding.”

I fell silent. He waited for me to go on. “Well?”

I pointed at the shitbox ahead of us. Pale fumes billowed from its exhaust pipe. “Can you believe that they’re still allowing cars like that on the road? I mean, I thought they were supposed to be enforcing the phase-out laws, and here’s this clunker-”

“Gerry …”

“I think I’m going to do a column about this. I mean, I don’t mind much if someone like Chevy Dick’s got an antique in his garage and takes it out once every now and then, but when you see something like this in broad daylight … y’know, it’s just disgraceful …”

John sighed. “Okay, okay, knock it off. What do you want to know?”

I grinned. It was an old game between us dating back to our college journalism days: quid pro quo information trading. You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine, tit for tat. Sometimes the game had been played for higher stakes than this: when he wanted to know the name of the cute brunette in my Econ 101 class, I traded it to him for the home phone number of the university chancellor. It worked out pretty well; I was able to call the chancellor on a Sunday afternoon while he was watching a football game to ask him embarrassing questions about next semester’s tuition hikes, and for this John received the name of his future wife.

“Ruby fulcrum,” I said. “What’s it mean?”

John sighed. “It’s a code phrase of some sort. To be honest, I don’t know much about it myself, except that it has something to do with the Sentinel program. This lady keeps mentioning it, though, so it must be important somehow.”

He suddenly snapped his fingers, then reached above the windshield to pull down the car’s flatscreen. “Let’s see if CNN has anything on the launch.”

“‘Don’t know’ doesn’t count …”

“Okay, okay.” Keeping one eye on traffic and one hand on the wheel, John switched the CTV to bring us CNN. “Ask me another one.”

“Why are you talking to this woman?” I asked. “What’s this story all about?”

John didn’t say anything for a moment. On the screen, the CNN anchor was reading a story about the deployment of Army troops on the Oregon border. Footage of rifle-toting soldiers tramping down the ramp of an Air Force transport jet, APCs and tanks rolling down highways between coniferous forests, antiwar demonstrators attempting to barricade military convoys …

“It has to do with a murder,” he said, carefully picking his words. “My source-and yeah, I think it’s the same lady, though I’ve never seen her-says that a Tiptree scientist was killed recently. Even though the police are still calling it random homicide, she claims it’s part of a conspiracy and has something to do with this Ruby Fulcrum business.”

The footage on the screen changed back to the CNN newsroom; a window in the right corner displayed the NASA logo. “Here we go,” John said as he turned up the volume.

“… launched a half-hour ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida,” the anchorwoman intoned as the screen switched to a shot of the shuttle Endeavour lifting off from its pad. “In its cargo bay are the final components of the Sentinel 1 ABM satellite.”

Animated footage of the massive satellite, identical to the holographic image that had been displayed in the Tiptree atrium, replaced the live-action shot. “Linkup between the shuttle and the twenty-billion-dollar satellite is expected sometime tomorrow afternoon.”