John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The change in Unger’s tone made Stoner regret not playing along. Hell, he could’ve played the game, pretended to, long enough… until he got safely out. Too late, he tried to snow Unger into thinking he hadn’t meant it the way he had. “I’m talking about repercussions, man! For God’s sake, some of these people are congressmen.”

“Those people are on their way out. They won’t be alone.” And then he’d walked out of Stoner’s office.

The next day, Stoner had found his clearance reduced. They made excuses about why it’d happened. Claimed it was because he wasn’t working on Blue-relevant cases now, hence they’d decided to limit access for the sake of efficiency. Just efficiency, Stoner, that’s all. Crap.

And now he was waiting patiently in Etta’s line, Franklin glancing at him with pursed lips. Etta finished with Springsdale, Springsdale turned, saw Stoner, winked at him, and walked past.

Hey. What had the wink meant?

Forget it. You’re getting the shakes. Springsdale gives that bogus wink to everyone.

“Hi, Etta.” Stoner said, stepping up to the counter. Fingering his chit. Hoping the cold sweat on his palms didn’t smear it.

“How you doing, Cowboy?” Etta didn’t smile, but there was a lightness in her manner that said she found Stoner a relief after Springsdale. “You still listen to that twangy stuff?”

“Sure. You listen to that Hank Williams album I gave you?”

“Once or twice. Wimpy stuff.” She cracked her arthritic knuckles. “You know me: give me rock ’n’ roll anytime. It’s maybe archaic, but not as archaic as that stuff you listen to. When I was in my thirties, I discovered Bruce Springsteen, and I’ll never forget…”

He let her ramble through her memories for a while. He glanced at Franklin, a few paces away. The Priss was frowning over someone’s access code on his monitor, had forgotten about Stoner. But he was close enough to hear, if he were paying attention…

There was nothing else for it. Lopez had insisted.

“What can I do you for?” Etta asked, smiling at her own ancient joke.

“Oh, uh—got it right here.” He passed her the chit. Leaned over the counter just a little, enough for the merest shade of confidentiality. “I’m not exactly on for that.” He didn’t whisper it. Franklin would notice a whisper. “The clearance. Blue. But it’s a lot of red-tape hassle, and I was hoping to seduce you into letting me slide so I can get what I need before they get around to changing my classification back to where it oughta be.” That was it. It was up to her. He hadn’t pushed for a favor from her before. If he was right about her…

He was. “Why, shore, cowboy. I’m headin’ out to pasture in a month, what I care.”

“You retiring, really?”

“Going to the elephant’s graveyard in Florida. The part that ain’t underwater from that global warming thing. I’m kinda skinny for an elephant. More like an ostrich.” All the time punching through his request using her own access code. “Is there an ostrich’s graveyard?”

“Stop thinking so morbidly. People are living to a hundred-forty-something now all the time.”

“People who can pay for the treatments. I pay for my son’s hospitalization half out of my own pocket. Maybe we should pull the plug, but I never could… Don’t think I want to live to a hundred anything, anyway. Here you are.” She went to the chute, which discharged a minidisk, and she brought it to him.

“Thanks. I owe you.”

“Careful where you ride your horse, cowboy,” she said, looking him in the eye.

She was on to him. She knew he wasn’t supposed to have this file, and not only for reasons of technicality. She was warning him.

His mouth dry, he said, “I will. Don’t take up surfing in Florida without lessons, okay?”

He walked numbly back to his office, feeling Franklin watching him go.

In his office he opened his desk, found the bottle, poured himself a shot of peat-cured Glenfiddich.

Then he got up and locked the door.

It took only about five minutes to attach the recording filter to the screen of his word processor. It was a transparent square that fitted neatly over the screen. It might’ve passed for an antiglare filter if not for the telltale wire trailing from a lower corner to the little gray metal box. The Second Alliance files were supposed to be noncopyable, but the filter read anything that was on the screen the way his eyes did and “drank” the light pattern.

He accessed the minidisk, began to read.

Same old stuff so far. The Second Alliance: World’s biggest international private-cop outfit, its own sizable army, antiterrorist action, CIA-affiliated interrogations, et cetera, scroll ahead, more et cetera, go on to the next batch of info. And the next. Fresh reports from SA’s European theater of action, cross-referencing with CIA on Socialist or partisan activists who’d oppose the SA’s policing authority. Three of these people liquidated in France, two in Belgium. Harassment from the NR, retaliation against them, et cetera again, ho-hum stuff. Next. CIA endorsement of the Self-Policing Organization of European States.

What? What the hell was that all about?

The next section was in deep code. Only three people had that code, and Stoner was one of them. Which meant Unger was a step behind him.

Stoner punched in the decoding sequence and waited.

The section decoded, and he felt like someone had slugged him in the gut.

SPOES was “the multination framework for a single centrally authorized European State.” It was to be a dictatorship operated by the Second Alliance, using nationalist leaders as puppets. Europe’s several social democratic governments would be dissolved, not allowed to rebuild after the war.

Stoner was a hidebound capitalist, not enthusiastic about Socialism even in the watered-down form of social democracy. But SPOES would eliminate all choice in the matter. And it would systematically eliminate anyone who militated for a choice.

And: “A realistic assessment of Western Europe’s racial situation leads us to conclude that minority races represent a threat to political and economic stability…” It went on to endorse a policy of rounding up blacks, Arabs, Indians, leftist Jews—it stopped short of endorsing the proscription of all Jews—and other “chronic problem races” for expulsion or something called “labor realignment.” Which Stoner read as slavery.

Identified security risks were to be liquidated.

He stared at the word. Liquidated.

The Second Alliance estimated that forty percent of each “subracial community” were Security Risks.

Forty percent? They’re going to liquidate forty percent of the non-Caucasians in Europe?

And why quit there?

He scrolled ahead, his hand shaking on the keyboard. He found what he was looking for. Progress reports.

Eighty percent success in stage one, all secured areas.

Stage one was the business of rounding up and isolating “risk groups” and the liquidation of priority troublemakers. Anyone they had confined whom they’d identified as an active, organized rebel had been killed.

Stage one was bad. Stage two would be worse. But it was stage three that left him scared.

Watson had made a resolution to get caught up on his reports that night. He was beginning to regret the resolution. But when he thought of shelving it, he remembered the look on Crandall’s face… the look that said: “You’re expendable now, Watson.”

Watson was sitting in the Comm Center of the SA’s Sicilian HQ, monitoring reports from around Western Europe, yawning, swilling coffee that didn’t seem to help, fighting the fatigue that had dropped onto him at ten p.m. like a guillotine.