Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

The trip downtown had been taken without any words spoken between us; only the morning news on NPR had broken the cold silence in her car. U.S. Army troops were still being airlifted to the Oregon border as Cascadia continued its Mexican standoff with the White House, and the crew of the Endeavour had succeeded in rendezvousing with Sentinel 1 and linking the final module to the antimissile satellite. And some lady in Atlanta was attracting massive crowds to her house after she claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in a pot roast.

Whoopee. I would rather have been in Birmingham, Seattle, outer space … anywhere, in fact, but St. Louis.

Everyone stared as I entered the newsroom, but no one said anything to me as I walked straight to Bailey’s office. Not surprisingly, he had already taken the cover off his IBM and was peering into its electronic guts with a penlight; Pearl was nothing if not paranoid.

“Close the door and sit down,” he said without glancing up from his work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

I shut the door and found a chair that wasn’t buried beneath galley proofs and contact sheets. He patiently continued to poke through the breadboards and chips until he was satisfied, then he slid the cover shut and turned around in his swivel chair to gaze at me.

“Look, Earl,” I began, “I’m really sorry about-”

“Y’know what this is?” He picked up a large, flat case that lay atop the usual paperwork heaped on his desk. It had a pair of headphones jacked into one end, and one side was covered with knobs and digital meters; a slender spiral cord led to a long, needle-tipped wand. “Of course you know what it is,” he went on, “because you must have known I had one when I called you.”

“It’s an electronic surveillance detector,” I said. “You showed it to me once. Remember?”

“That’s right,” he replied, nodding his head. “Mr. Orkin Man himself. It can scan everything we use in this office and locate virtually any RF or VLF signal imaginable. Infinity bugs, hook-switch bypasses, modem or fax machine taps … you name it, this sucker can sniff it out. Put me back three grand, but hey, I’ve always considered it to be worth the dough. A little extra insurance, if you want to think of it that way.”

He carefully placed the instrument back on his desk. “If you meant to scare the bejeezus out of me, you succeeded. As soon as I got off the phone with you, I had everyone drop whatever they were doing while Jah and I went through the place. We switched on every computer, every light, picked up each phone, and turned on all the faxes … not a goddamn thing here went untouched, and that includes your apartment and the lab downstairs. I even had Jah run antivirus tests through all the computers and PTs … at least, the ones the feds didn’t steal from your place last night. And you know what we found?”

He raised his right hand, circling his thumb and forefinger. “Nada. Nyet. Zippity-doo-dah. Not so much as a loose wire. Now, either the feds have managed to put some pretty godlike equipment in here, or you’re an anatomical wonder … someone who can talk on the phone with his head shoved straight up his butt.”

I remained silent throughout all this. He needed to have a good rant right now, and I was unlucky enough to be the target. When he was done, he stared at me from across the desk, his hands folded together over his stomach. He finally let out his breath and kneaded his eyelids with his fingertips.

“The only reason why I haven’t thrown your ass out into the street,” he said very calmly, “is because you must be onto something. Or at least John must have been onto something, because some bastard took the time and effort to kill him. And I think you must have stumbled into it, because your door got kicked down last night and the feds carted off everything that could be plugged in. So now I’m stuck with a smart reporter who’s dead and a dumb reporter who doesn’t know how to call his editor when the shit’s coming down-”

“Pearl,” I began, “look-”

All at once, Bailey surged to his feet, grabbed a pile of paper at random, and hurled it at me so fast I didn’t have time to duck the printouts and photostats as they slapped me in the face.

“Fuck you, Rosen!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “I wanna know what’s going on!”

The paper rain cascaded down around me, falling into my lap and onto the floor. It was dead quiet outside the cubicle-every person in the office must have heard the explosion-but that wasn’t what I noticed. For the first time, I saw that Pearl’s eyes were puffy and red-rimmed.

The son of a bitch had been hit hard by the news of John’s murder. He was taking it out on me, and maybe he was right to do so because, God help me, I hadn’t wept a single tear since the moment Farrentino had called to ask if I could come down to the bar and identify his body.

If Pearl felt like a jerk for going on a futile bug hunt, then I now felt much the same way for not giving myself the time to realize that my best friend was dead. Yet, by the same token, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of wallowing in my own grief. There was something happening out there, at this very moment, of which John’s death was only a small and incidental part.

I didn’t know what was happening either, but it was time to stop being a victim of circumstance.

“Sit down, Earl,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

And I told him all of it, except a couple of the juicy parts.

There was no reason for him to know everything that had occurred during my encounter with Colonel Barris at the stadium … in particular, my signed agreement against revealing the details of Ruby Fulcrum. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping facts from my editor; I was concerned about his safety. If things went bad, I didn’t want ERA troops to come knocking at his door. There was no reason why they wouldn’t anyway, but neither did it make any sense to have Pearl mixed up in this shit more than necessary.

And, although I related the story of the strange IM I had received through Joker just before the riot at the Muny, I didn’t tell him about the phone call I had received in my apartment just before the ERA raid. I didn’t want him to think I had gone around the bend, even if I could explain how I might have heard my own voice and Jamie’s over the phone. When Pearl asked me why I hadn’t returned to my apartment after I was released from ERA custody, I told him I was too frightened to go back to my place but had simply fled to my ex’s house in Webster instead.

Everything else came out, though, and when I was through he simply gazed at me, his fingers knitted together above his lap. After a few moments he picked up his phone and pushed a couple of buttons. “Craig? This is Dad … yeah, come up right away, I want you to do something for me.”

He put the phone back on its cradle and stood up. “When he gets here, I want to give him Joker so he can run some tests on it. The bastards might have messed with it somehow, and I don’t want you running around with a Trojan horse in your PT.”

The same thought had already occurred to me, so I pulled Joker out of my pocket. “I take it this means I’m not fired yet,” I said as I typed in the “chickenlegs” password.

“I don’t fire people, Gerry. I just make ’em quit.” Pearl walked around his desk and opened the door. “Now let’s go upstairs and see if that disk is still where you hid it.”

We met Jah outside Pearl’s office. He took Joker and went back downstairs to the photo lab, then Pearl and I climbed the stairs to the third floor.

My apartment was much as I had last seen it. The door was ajar; the desktop computer and the phone were still AWOL; along with the manuscript of my novel. I imagined some ERA officer at the stadium diligently reading the novel, trying to find hidden references within its pages. It would probably be the only audience the book would ever find; I hoped he liked the sex scenes, at least.