SLINGSHOT, page 15
part #1 of The Starchild Saga Series
SEATTLE—SMITH TOWER
A
conference room occupied the north side of the building, twenty-one floors below Mabel’s ornate desk, just to the east of one of two open atriums that extended all the way down to the third floor and up to the twenty-first. It was one of seven interconnected office spaces comprising the north and east sides of the fourteenth floor of Smith Tower. Two of the offices were flanked by stairwells and faced a bank of eight highly polished ornate brass elevators. Like the other doors in Smith Tower, the office doors were steel, molded and hand-finished to look like highly grained mahogany. They were the original doors installed back in 1914, as fully functional now as they were then. The plate on the left door immediately facing the elevators read simply Environment, Inc. The hallway ceiling was ornately carved wood with inset modern lighting fixtures, and the walls were trimmed with Alaskan marble set in paneled wainscots.
The conference room by the open well contained a large round table. Equipped with a holoprojector and surrounded by plain chairs, the table occupied the center of the conference room. A utilitarian office connected to the conference room was sparsely furnished with a simple holoprojector-equipped desk and chair, a plain cabinet, and a couch with a low occasional table filling the space in front.
Quinton Radler sat with his back to the eastern window studying a holodisplay in the air over his plain desk. He was in his mid-to-late-thirties, slender, with brown hair and a short-cropped full beard, and was dressed casually in the current fashion for Seattle business people. The display he was studying would have greatly interested Mabel twenty-one floors above. Radler was reviewing the LLI timetable—not the one available to anyone with a Link, but the confidential timetable that only the top echelon of LLI could access. He seemed particularly interested in a waypoint identified as Ascension.
Radler spent the next half-hour calling up background material on Slingshot. Although it seemed clear to him that Ascension meant the commencement of operations to raise Slingshot’s rails to orbital height, Radler was the kind of person who checked his facts, obsessively at times, always making sure before he took action. From his first day with EI, Radler was surprised to discover that LLI operated almost entirely in the open. The concept of proprietary information, of keeping your hand close to your vest, seemed foreign to Mabel. Radler valued physical fitness, so much so that he rode a bike to work every day, even in the rain. He had little sympathy for people who did not pay the same attention to their physical appearance. He was contemptuous of Mabel because of her size, typically referring to her as that “fat broad.” It never occurred to him that his contempt for Mabel’s physical appearance might be coloring his assessment of her capabilities.
Once Radler was satisfied that Ascension meant the raising of Slingshot’s rails, in effect the commencement of actual ribbon movement, he called a meeting in the conference room. Radler was entirely comfortable running the show through his Link, but he frequently employed the Harvard Business School lesson that nothing beats a face-to-face meeting to get things accomplished.
EI was structured with three legs. Its general focus was to stop LLI by any possible means, so long as the connection back to the DPRK remained invisible. The point of their spear was the radical environmental group, Green Force. Darius Gotch headed up this effort. His office was immediately next to Radler’s with a connecting door and a door into an L-shaped hall. Gotch walked across the hall into the conference room. He was of medium height, slender, with very short-cropped dark hair, and looked every bit the eternal Yale “Preppie” that he was. His unofficial title was Head of Site Sabotage—Head of SS, something he was secretly proud of.
Katelynn Leete’s office connected to Gotch and opened into the hall. She managed manufacturing sabotage efforts, and seemed ideally suited to the task. A slender bookish woman standing 175 cm, Leete dressed with a masculine flair that diminished her bosom. She wore her brown hair shorter than current feminine fashion dictated, and her make-up was so minimal that her colleagues rarely noticed. Leete arrived in the conference room right after Gotch.
Dane Curvin was in charge of personnel—ensuring that EI people were in position throughout LLI, always available to carry out surreptitious tasks assigned by Gotch and Leete. Like his colleagues, Curvin had a window looking east, but his southern wall was graced with a window overlooking the larger twenty-one-story open well that formed the core of the lower part of Smith Tower. His office also opened into the L-shaped hall. Curvin was Gotch’s Preppie twin and fellow Yale graduate, but unlike Gotch, Curvin continued with Yale Law school. He stood 180 cm, was clean-shaven with sharp features and piercing blue eyes. He wore his brown hair cropped short like Gotch. Curvin followed Leete into the conference room, and all three took their places, awaiting Radler.
The ubiquitous Link had dramatically changed modern office environments. Offices still employed paper, but the effusive use of paper that characterized work environments of a quarter-century earlier had been almost entirely replaced by electronics. Virtually everyone in the modern world wore a Link about the size of a twentieth-century wristwatch—usually on the wrist, but it could be worn anywhere on the body or incorporated into any clothing or jewelry piece. The Link was a gateway to the Web—a vast, all-encompassing virtual reality that had evolved from the Internet and World Wide Web of the early twenty-first century. The Web contained every book ever published, and most written but not published, every piece of medical and personal data on everyone alive and most who ever lived—it was the repository for all data from every source throughout the world. The Web was controlled through massive molecular computers located in undisclosed locations on the Isle of Man, with backup facilities in America, Europe, and Asia. It was not a government operation, although Whitehall had its fingers in nearly every part of the system. The Web was run by a consortium of large firms, each of which held one seat on the board. In effect, it received its funding from the pre-tax profits of several of the world’s largest companies. Rumor held that as soon as it became practical, the Web would move off-planet, sufficiently close to avoid significant transmission delays, but entirely away from any government influence. Nevertheless, the Link formed the backdrop for virtually everything in modern life.
While the three department heads waited for Radler, they called up their individual Links and continued the tasks on which they were working when Radler called the meeting. As Radler stepped through his private door, the three holodisplays folded into themselves and vanished. Radler took the empty seat and activated the table’s holoprojector.
“This,” he said, “is the target.” He pointed to the holodisplay filling the table center. Despite his austere style, Radler was given to occasional hyperbole. “And this is our goal.” The three-dimensional holographic image shifted ever so slightly, and the four conspirators watched the elevated rail tear itself apart. The 5,000-kilometer ribbon parted near the Earhart Skyport. The bitter end of the launch rail continued on to Noonan Skyport, and then whipped off to the east, pulling the entire length of the ribbon from the western sheath. It carried on in a slightly parabolic path, into cislunar space, and then into an eccentric solar orbit, leaving a scattered trail of debris in its wake. The four sat quietly, in awe of what they had just witnessed.
Radler broke the spell. “We have freed Watson,” he told them. The three looked up with surprise and interest. “He’s an idiot, you know,” Radler continued. “And you know what they say—Stupid is forever.” He looked at Gotch. “Darius, I want you to arrange a meeting with Watson. Clown it up. Give him some Hollywood spy stuff—make him b-e-l-i-e-v-e that he’s playing a kingpin role to save the fucking Earth!” He turned to the holodisplay. “This thing will commence Ascension in about three months. Between now and then, I want you, Katelynn, to cause havoc with their manufacturing process. Delay Ascension from your end. Let them find your people; get them fired, and get them replaced with Dane’s recruits. Keep them guessing one hundred percent of the time.” He looked around the table. “You guys earn your pay now.”
Radler turned to Gotch again. “I want you to set up Slingshot for failure on Ascension—what you saw in that simulation. Do it smart. Give Watson whatever he needs by way of ships and submersibles. Just make sure that he thinks it’s his idea. Funnel the funds to him through the dummy support network we created the last six months.” He turned to Curvin. “Dane, send your recruiters to Berkley, Stanford, Boston College, Columbia, Harvard and Yale, Evergreen—Hell! You know the list—all the universities that are producing the illiterate idiots flooding our modern society. Recruit a gaggle of pious little environmentalist pricks to man Watson’s navy. Pump them full of ecobabble, give them to Watson, and point him in the right direction with specific instructions for what to do when he gets there—and make him think it’s his idea, of course.” He looked over at Gotch. “Yeah, I know—you and Dane coordinate the details between you.”
JERSEY CITY—NEW JERSEY
T
he helicopter carrying Lars Watson had whisked him away from in front of the New York State Supreme Court building on Foley Square, swept low across Duane and Rockefeller Parks, and across the Hudson barely above the waves, lifted up over the Hudson Exchange, and then flew low and fast over Hamilton Park, Jones Park, across Kennedy Boulevard to the Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City. As the helicopter landed, the pilot shoved an envelope into Watson’s hands and told him to park himself somewhere inconspicuous and read the contents. Watson had no time to examine the envelope’s contents before he was unceremoniously shoved from the aircraft.
He found a quiet bench on a triangle marking a meeting of three trails near the park’s center. He sat and gingerly opened the envelope. The first thing he saw was a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. A quick count came to at least $10,000. A short note was the only other thing in the envelope. The cryptic message said: Take Whitman Ave from the NE corner of the cemetery. Turn right on Sip Ave. Go five blocks to Garrison Ave. Go left for three long blocks to the Ramada Inn of Jersey City. Give the front desk your name, pay for your room in advance for one week, go to your room, and wait for further instructions. DO NOT LEAVE THE HOTEL!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JERSEY CITY—NEW JERSEY
L
ars Watson had been in his room for two days without hearing from anyone. He was bewildered by the turn of events. He was deeply bothered by his ignominious capture in the South Pacific, and simultaneously thankful that Alex had actually taken care of him following his bends hit. Sure he knew that Alex had caused it in the first place, but Alex could simply have left him there to die. Watson was distraught at his mistreatment from Montague, and he harbored a palpable lust for payback. At the same time, he felt no remorse for his sexual shenanigans with the females of his clan. In fact, he filled his hours of restless waiting with wistful reveries of his sporting activities with this or that girl. Of them all, Francesca most filled his thoughts. Her little perfect body, her guileless sex play, her uninhibited release—he couldn’t keep his mind off her.
During his fateful dive at Buoy 1528, Watson had left his Link topside. He never got it back. Without his Link, he felt cut off from the rest of the world, half his normal self. Things had happened so fast on Jarvis that he had not had any chance to request its return. When he asked Montague on the Gulfstream, all he got was a sneering laugh. During the days leading to his Habeas Corpus hearing, nobody would listen to him, and in the chopper ride to New Jersey, there was time for nothing at all. Without his Link, Watson was helpless to make anything happen.
Watson was also bewildered by the $12,000 (as it turned out) that someone with a chopper and obviously vast resources had given him. Watson had always been good at extracting money from widows, divorcees, and naïve kids. Because it was for a good cause—saving the Earth—he didn’t care that they often could not afford their gifts. Let the State take care of them; he needed their money to further his just cause. But he had lost the Green Avenger, his immediate crew was gone, and he was holed up in an out-of-the-way fleabag somewhere in New Jersey, with no contacts, no help, and no Link to summon them.
The weather had turned, and rain plummeted against Watson’s window. Dark rain clouds lay low overhead, blanketing the sky as far as he could see. The world was gray, not only because of the weather, but because everything was gray for Watson, all the time. He had been born totally colorblind. When Watson looked at the world, all he saw were shades of gray. It was a secret he had told no one, a secret he had learned to live with. He knew, for instance, that red lights were always at the top and green at the bottom, even though to him they appeared identical. Getting dressed could be a problem, since what looked coordinated to him sometimes turned out to be violently clashing colors. So he had learned to live with the handicap. Watson felt closed in; he missed the open air and the uncluttered ocean. But the cryptic note had been clear. DO NOT LEAVE THE HOTEL! Watson figured that whoever wrote that note had enough power to enforce it. He tried to diagram his situation on a sheet of hotel stationery, but he got no further than a circle representing himself, with links to Francesca, Tiffany, Carmina, and the other girls he remembered.
Watson heard a sound outside the room door. He turned to see a slip of paper that had been pushed under the door. Quickly, Watson opened the door and looked up and down the hall. Nobody, not even a cleaning person. Watson closed the door and picked up the slip. It read: Buy a bouquet of flowers at the flower shop in the lobby. Then return to Holy Name Cemetery at the point where you were dropped. Locate a grave to the west two rows in from the road with a large bouquet of purple and blue flowers. Present yourself at that grave and pay your respects for five minutes. Leave your flowers, and retrieve a Link attached to the back of the vase holding the purple and blue flowers. DO NOT ACTIVATE THE LINK THERE! Return to your room and secure your blinds. Then activate the link and follow your further instructions.
SEATTLE—SMITH TOWER
“W
here is he now?” Curvin asked his man in Jersey City.
The image in his Link grinned and answered, “He just entered the hotel. He picked up the Link and made his way back to the hotel just as you predicted. He doubled back several times, looked at the reflection in a couple of display windows, even walked through a grocery store for a few minutes.” The observer laughed. “Just like that old TV series, Get Smart.” The simulacrum started laughing. “This guy’s a piece of work!”
“Good job—thanks.” Curvin terminated the link and leaned back in his chair, waiting. A few minutes later, his holodisplay flashed, and the upper right corner formed its own independent holodisplay. Below the display, the words Watson Link appeared. Curvin punched an intercom button. “Hey Katelynn, come in here and look at this.”
The side door in his entryway opened, and Leete entered his office. “Whatcha got, Dane? Watcha got that’s so impressive?” She looked at his holodisplay as she approached. “What’s that?” She walked around the back of his desk to see the front of the display.
“Watson’s Link, Babe.” He grinned at her. “How about dinner?”
“You know better than that, Dane. You got the wrong plumbing,” she said playfully. Then becoming serious, she said, “That’s pretty slick.” Turning, she added, “The machinists at LLI are going on strike. I got to monitor their progress. Later.” As she walked through the door, she said over her shoulder, “Change your plumbing, and I’ll seriously consider it.”
“Dyke,” Curvin muttered under his breath. He adjusted his Link so Watson’s holodisplay and his own reversed places. Watson was searching out the current status of Slingshot. Curvin activated his intercom again. “Darius, pull up…,” and he gave him the crypto-coordinates to view Watson’s Link. “He has no idea,” Curvin added.
Gotch commenced actively monitoring Watson’s Link. His simple plan was to feed doctored information in response to Watson’s info search requests. He figured that Watson was so disconnected from the real world, and so completely reliant on the Web, that he would not even question what came over his Link. First, however, Gotch sent an encrypted message to Watson, telling him to stay in his room for another day, and then to check out and go about his normal business, but with the lowest possible profile. From time to time, Gotch told him, Watson would receive anonymous contributions that would give him the funds he would need to continue his important work to save the planet.
AMERICAN SAMOA—SOUTH PACIFIC
A
s Watson roamed the Web collecting information for his operation going forward, he began to build a mental image for how best to reach his goal of stopping Slingshot. Carefully guided by Gotch, Watson came to understand that his next move would be to set up a catastrophic failure of Slingshot during Ascension. As his understanding of Slingshot increased, he realized that if he could significantly weaken several of the tensioner cables that kept Slingshot from tipping over during Ascension and kept it vertical during normal operation, Slingshot would crash. Further research, unknowingly guided by Gotch, brought him to the realization that the best way to accomplish this surreptitiously was to use a deep submersible to cut partway through several tensioner cables right at the massive concrete anchors at the Western Complex. Further research convinced him that instead of cutting the cables, which was risky at best, he could attach explosive cutters that would be triggered by significant tension. Then, during Ascension, sudden tension on these cables would trigger the explosive cutters, causing the cables to part with the resultant crash of the entire rail.
Watson was highly pleased with his incipient plan, especially so when an anonymous donor gave the aging, but fully functional, working deep submersible Alvin to Green Force to be used in its ongoing deep ocean research related to deep-water pollutants that might be destroying the Earth’s oceans. Alvin was delivered by air to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where the Philippine-flagged ship Aku Aku, which had been especially modified to service Alvin, was waiting, tied up at Pago Pago Harbor on the north shore of the bay. Normally a mothership for a deep submersible carries the little sub on its deck, and is outfitted with special cranes that can lift the sub and lower it overboard into the water. The Aku Aku was different. She was outfitted with a mid-ships well decked over at the top flush with the main deck. The hold just aft of the well had hydraulic doors that opened into the well, and a gantry crane designed to carry Alvin from the hold into the well and launch it from there. Upon Alvin’s return, the gantry would pick up the sub and return it to the hold. With this capability, Aku Aku could launch Alvin just outside the Western Complex, if she could come up with a sufficient reason for being there in the first place.
