John Barnes - Directive 51

Now I know exactly where I am, Samuelson thought, and they don’t know I do. I just need to figure out how to use that.

The plane began a steep descent; the pilot said something over the loudspeaker, but Samuelson’s tourist-Arabic from thirty years ago wasn’t adequate to make out what.

They leveled off at low altitude, flying down a canyon toward the Gulf of California. They must be—

The hand on his shoulder made him jump. “Time to make your statement.”

“That is impossible,” he said. “I cannot betray—”

The man punched him, in the face, hard enough to numb it. He hit Samuelson again, drew back his fist and looked into his eyes, waited for the vice president to realize what was happening.

He hit him again, much harder. “You must make your statement now.”

“I will not,” Samuelson said, “and you can’t make me.”

Those are the rules, where they come from. When anyone offers you anything, or asks for anything, refuse twice, accept on the third. Basic negotiation principle: Behave in a way that the other side is at home with.

He thought about that while they held him up and beat his ribs sore, leaving him coughing and unable to wipe the tears and mucus from his face.

When Samuelson had caught his breath, the man said, again, “Now, your statement.”

“What must be in the statement?” Samuelson asked.

They dickered and haggled. Samuelson insisted that he did not want to read the official statement because it dishonored himself and his nation. He pleaded with them—couldn’t he make his last words his own, and speak the way he always did to American audiences, wouldn’t that be more believable? And could he please begin by saying farewell to his wife? Well, because a man can be in love, can’t he?

One of his best negotiations in a life of negotiations. He had nothing to offer, and everything to gain, and the other side did not realize that he got everything he wanted.

When they had agreed, he was permitted a quick trip to the bathroom. Two guards watched him while he took a dump; did they expect him to hang himself in the toilet paper or pull a concealed machine gun from the electric shaver?

Face freshly washed. Calm. Ready.

The little light glowed on their camera. Here goes. “My fellow Americans, by the time most of you see this, I will be dead, because the men sitting just a few feet from me are planning to kill me, along with themselves. They demanded that I make a statement, which they are sending out in some kind of live webcast via cellular broadband, I’m afraid I don’t understand the technical details, but apparently they fear that we may be fired on before they can transmit a recording. So, they tell me, I am speaking to you, right now, live, in streaming video, and this is going out over the web, and they’ve notified millions of media outlets and bloggers and so on to record it; I’m sure many of them will broadcast it.

“First let me just say, Kim—my wife, my one and only love ever—I love you as much as I did on our honeymoon in Guerrero Negro, when we hiked the canyons to the north and sailed up the Gulf of California, if—”

A rough hand grasped his hair. Someone shouted. He tried to jab his handcuffed hands upward into the crotch of the man holding him, but other hands pushed them down, so he tried to turn and bite the man’s leg, but his head was held too tight. A knife pressed against his throat. Well, I tried.

The pressure slackened. His head was released. He saw that they were pointing the camera at the one who had been pressing the knife to his neck.

The man seemed to shake off the murderous rage as if it had never been, and handed the knife to one of his friends. The cameraman counted down, three, two, one, and the active-light went on. The man said, “We had hoped to present an honest—”

Samuelson screamed, “Bullshit! What’s in those barrels? What’s in those barrels?” as they yanked him around, trying to reach his mouth while he bucked and curled away from them.

He screamed, Barrels on this plane! twice more, and Bullshit! just as he got an elbow into someone’s balls. One of them shoved a fist into his mouth.

He tried to bite the fist, hurting his jaw but getting no real grip, and then they forced something into his mouth; he was retching and couldn’t breathe. He badly wanted to drift down into the darkness and pain, but he wanted more to see how all this came out.

Ysabel jumped when her phone rang. She grabbed it and said, “Yeah?”

“It’s time. Do it.” The connection went dead.

She couldn’t quite place the accent but that was okay, too, she knew this was an international effort. It seemed strange that it wasn’t a Spanish accent, though.

Oh, well. She jumped up, peed quickly, put her purse by the door, looked around to make sure there was nothing else for her to forget. She reminded herself again to drop the cheapie convenience-store cell phone in some place where it was likely to be stolen.

Then she sat down and worked the Stinger gadget. Really, this wasn’t as hard as most video games. She tabbed over to the button that said, ARM ON LOCK, clicked on it, and typed the password—DAYBREAK, of course.

A red message flashed Missile will arm when target acquired.

She’d practiced acquiring the target all afternoon; she just slid the crosshairs across the television screen, using the little thumbwheel controls, till the red glow told her it had found the diesel exhaust (imagine the jackass nerve of those Border Patrol assholes, dumping diesel exhaust right out above a city, of all things!)

She pushed the key combination, and jumped at the roar of the Stinger’s exhaust against the roof, a couple of feet above her ceiling. On the screen, the thread of smoke ended in a ball of fire under the aerostat.

“That’s not where we had our honeymoon,” a soft voice said. Heather thought, That must be Kim Samuelson, when did they bring—

On the screen, John Samuelson’s head was grabbed and a knife went to his throat; after a burst of shouting and a wildly swinging camera, the screen went dark.

Lenny Plekhanov, reading NSA feed, said, “We’ve got the cell-phone towers they relayed through—east coast of Baja—”

A young Asian woman said, “Confirmed, we have that tower’s location, thanks, and an angle on them. North and east of Guerrero Negro, latitude—”

A message flashed up on Heather’s screen; she looked down and said, loud enough so people could hear, “E-bomb attack on the Mexican Navy’s Guerrero Negro station about forty minutes ago. Took out radio, cell phone, and the local landline station, along with the radars on the frigate and cutter in port, and at the airport. Several visual sightings of a big white plane.”

The young Asian woman added, “Alerts out to ICE, Air Force, Air Guard, Navy, all the—shit. Yuma aerostat radar is out, and—Air Force says hostile action.”

On the screen, one big green curve across the Gulf of California blanked out; the remaining green curves peeled back like the cross section of a bullet hole.

“Either that’s the way they’re coming, or that’s the diversion,” Garren said. “We’ll—”

“They’ve killed him, you know. Or they will any minute. Shoot that plane down.” Roger Pendano looked haggard and sad.

Did he even realize that he’d given the order for that almost an hour ago? Or that the operation isn’t being commanded here anymore? Heather was afraid she might find out.