John Barnes - Directive 51

“I’ll get them for you, Lenny,” Telabanian said.

“Good.” Cameron stood back up and said, “You’ve got this room any time you need it, but I imagine you’ll want to work mostly from your desks in the main room. Any objections to anything I’ve just decided?”

Edwards said, “I’m very glad we’re finally giving Assistant Secretary O’Grainne what she needs to do the job right and quickly.”

Heather realized then that Cam had more or less forced a buy-in on everyone in the room, especially Edwards. Now they’re on record that whatever I did wrong about Daybreak before, it was because I didn’t have the resources. Now that I do have the resources, the price of keeping my job is that I really have to do it. The only way Cameron could throw me a line was to give me enough rope to hang myself. That’s the nature of friendship in this town.

It looked like a weather station. An anemometer on a waist-high tripod turned slowly around in the light breeze; a wire from its base went to a telephone-sized aluminum box, connected by a short wire to a black box the size of a matchbox—a cellular wireless server.

Inside the aluminum box, a computer continually compared the time and the windspeed. Decisions about time took priority, and up until recently had been very simple: The program said do nothing until 4:00 P.M. or later, so every second, right on cue, the computer woke up, saw it wasn’t 4:00 P.M. yet, set a timer to tick off another second, and went back to sleep, like a child on Christmas morning who checks every five minutes to see if it is time to get up yet, and then dutifully goes back to bed before checking in another five minutes. At the speeds at which computers operated, that was less than a billionth of its working time.

After 4:00 P.M., the computer began to consult its rolling record of the windspeed across the last twenty minutes. This was more complicated. On the plains close to the Rockies, a strong west wind tends to rise in late afternoon, almost every day, as the shadowed east faces of the mountains cool and pour a torrent of cold, dense air down to where air warmed by a whole day of sunshine is still rising off the ground. The wind blows strong and flows across hundreds of miles; it’s a perfect medium for dispersing anything in the air.

Zach had written the program to detect the point when the strong evening wind was well-established; it took windspeed readings every second and kept a back file of 1200 of them, twenty minutes’ worth. Each second after 4:00 P.M., it averaged the list; when the average windspeed across the last twenty minutes was more than thirty-five kilometers per hour, it reviewed the list to make sure that there had been no more than ten consecutive seconds below 25 kph, Zach’s test to make sure that this was the real, strong mountain breeze, not just a stray gust.

At 4:42 P.M., those conditions were all met. The computer sent 750 phone numbers to the server, which dialed the triggers in all 750 of the bottles filled with black powder. As each came online the computer told it to arm and check; all were armed and checked in less than four seconds. The computer sent a signal to fire; a hundredth of a second later, when the 750th call dropped, the computer fired a small charge to destroy itself. People on the street thought it was a gunshot, looked around, and concluded it was something else.

Davidson resented like hell the way he had to be out there on collection days from fucking three thirty till goddam well six fucking o’clock sometimes, because although he had a great team with Howard and Isaac, and a tolerable one with Dorothy and Juan, the team of Fred and Annie was just absolutely not to be trusted at all. Sure enough, they came in late because they’d stopped to check on their kid in the day care, and they gave him some routine about how it smelled so bad they had to take showers, because it would never’ve occurred to numbnuts Fred or his fat slobby wife that maybe they should wait till they were done to shower instead of just getting all stunk up again.

Now they were busy telling Davidson their whole fucking life story, which was something they often did on the clock. He could have told it for them: Fred used to drink and party, and Annie did too. They got Jesus after their firstborn baby died, and he must have been sent from heaven to straighten them out. I’m sure that comforted the shit out of the little fucker, drowning in the bathtub while you idiots got stoned . But Davidson didn’t say that; people who would at least show up weren’t all that easy to find.

So he let them ramble on about how bad it stunk, and take him to the bin to show him. It was about three-quarters full of plastic bottles, a good week, but son of a bitch , this was like putting your head up a constipated cheesemaker’s butthole, and the slimy look of the plastic was weird too. And—hadn’t it been in the middle of lunch? Erin had just been doing the red lingerie number—Howard had called him, something about—

Wham-boom.

The biggest boom since the IED in Iraq, when he’d gone there for Bush twenty years ago. This one knocked all three of them flat on their asses. Lying on his back, he was perfectly positioned to see the sky fill instantly with a great cloud of dirty blue smoke, which tumbled to the east almost before it fully formed. From the cloud fell a rain of plastic bottles, a few into his plant, most over the fence, and quite a lot of them, caught in the strong mountain breeze, tumbling and blowing off far to the east. Some of them were going to be in fucking South Dakota before they came down, he thought, and then he realized that one whole day of recycling had just blown off into the sky, with all the trucks and workers already paid for, and he screamed and beat the ground with his fists like a two-year-old having a tantrum, until he realized that Fred and Annie, with their bleeding ears, couldn’t hear it, his hands were getting sore, and his ears hurt horribly. He couldn’t hear anything, though bits of plastic bottles were crashing down all around him and on the steel roofs of his buildings, and it should have been a terrible din.

Howard was stroking Michiko’s breasts and hair, real soft and gentle the way she said she liked. She was handling Isaac, who was breathing like he was about to finish.

Something went off like a cannon. Isaac, sitting up, bumped heads with Michiko; they were both still apologizing when Lenya, the Russian lady that owned the place, knocked on the door and said, “Howard, Isaac, so so sorry, something happen to your truck, dress and come out, okay?”

A few minutes later, hastily stuffed into their clothes, barefoot on the sunny parking lot, they stood stupefied in awe by the burned and scarred truck bed and the shattered windows. One other car, nearby, had taken a big crack in the rear window, but Reverend Nickleson had already driven it off to the auto-glass place, saying he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.

The cop who came out, unfortunately, was Matt Storey, who had enough trouble figuring out how to fill out speeding tickets, so no matter how much they tried to tell him about the two mystery bottles they’d been carrying in the back, he just kept shaking his head and saying it was probably kids. It was dark before he left to write his report, which would say something blew up in the pickup truck bed and it was probably kids.

After they swept the glass off the seat, Howard tried starting the truck. It was drivable, though it stank like a firecracker, and most of the gauges weren’t working.

“Probably leaking everything everywhere, too,” Isaac said, shining his flashlight under it. “Got oil and radiator, at least, dripping, and a couple things I ain’t sure of. But if we top up the oil and drive it home slow and careful, we can probably get it there. Think we got gas leaking?”