The Deluge, page 37
“Yes, well, they’re still human beings who had free lives and now they won’t. They didn’t accept the risk we assigned them.” Allen had opened champagne to celebrate the successful coal plant operations, only to take one sip and abandon the flute on the nicked surface of the table. Murdock huffed and rolled his eyes. Shane thought of the DNA they would leave everywhere.
“I agree with Kel,” said Shane. “Spilled milk. Clean it up as best we can, and let’s move on.”
“Agreed,” said Quinn.
“I more meant what message do we get to the lawyers?” said Kai. “Carrots and sticks to keep them quiet and doing their time.”
“Seems to me they don’t know enough to get to us. The guy with the closest link, according to you,” Murdock looked to Allen, “is Gerald in Ohio, and all he knows is some drug dealer sent him out to look at a fence? Lasso his ass with a decent threat and carrot him with the promise that his family will get taken care of while he’s away.” Murdock downed his beer and shrugged his shoulders. “Simple pie.”
“They have nothing on Gerald anyway,” said Quinn. “Not enough proof for material support of terrorism, so the FBI’s trying to make a case for felony trespassing, vandalism, attempted burglary—it’s a joke. He has no idea who Allen is, and he has no connection whatsoever to Clay.”
“That’s right,” added Shane. “According to my source, Gerald wouldn’t roll, and they know their charges are over the top. They’re puffing out their chest in the media, trying to shake people out of the trees by saying it’s all unraveling, but that’s bullshit. They’re nowhere near any midlevel operative, just running in circles chasing ghosts.”
“We need new recruits,” said Kai. “We’ve asked so much of Clay these last few years. He has kids.”
Shane thought about pointing out the obvious, but instead decided to familiarize herself with each knot in the wood of the rustic dining room table. She already knew the contours of the entire argument that would follow.
CLAY RO Was their man in Ohio, a plumber who ran his own business and had an econ degree from Ohio University. Kai had recruited him as an undergraduate, steering him into a humdrum cover. The driver and detonator of the bomb that took down Tuscarawas, Clay also had two pipelines and one gas pad under his belt. Kai feared for him, though, as they all feared for the people they’d brought in. Maybe Clay Ro’s brother had once sent his DNA into an ancestry company because he was curious about how much Scottish or Korean he had in him. All it would take, in the end, was spit from a soda can or a random hair found at the scene of a bombing, and Clay would be sweating it out in a hole. He was a heroic kid.
JOHN GERALD Instead of Clay’s, the FBI lifted the DNA of some hapless grocery store clerk from a Fritos bag, so they tried to threaten him with a terrorism enhancement. Kai scrambled to arrange a lawyer, who appeared out of the blue to work pro bono. Gerald weighed on Kai’s conscience more than the others. Gerald hadn’t sold them vans like Tabitha (who thought they’d be used to run heroin) or nitromethane from a construction site like Newman. Gerald was just a dupe who’d gotten roped in by circumstance more than anything.
“We’ve already expanded,” said Allen. “If you own a business, you know the death knell can be growing too fast.”
“Insurgencies have to keep growing,” Murdock replied. “They live and die on new recruits. For those of us who’ve fought real insurgents.”
Ever since the first meeting in this cabin, they’d disagreed on how many operatives they should be adding. Allen always argued against new recruits, especially after their profile began to rise. He worried about potential defectors or, even worse, infiltrators. He’d demanded a moratorium after they activated the Second Cell. Allen had done so much of the initial scut work of recruiting with the cover of his handcrafted furniture business, which he used as a front to travel the country. He delivered his rustic tables, built out of reclaimed wood, anywhere east of the Mississippi. Over the years the Benefactor had purchased a good deal of these tables, which ended up being dropped off at Goodwill stores wherever Allen went to recruit. Beneath their own cell, they had thirty-seven active, in-the-know operatives muling supplies, moving cars, buying and selling safe houses, and of course planting bombs, and that, in Shane’s opinion, was not nearly enough. Everything took too much time.
“Jansi had a few minor slipups, sure,” said Quinn, “but they took out the Kentucky plant. And now Second is building a third cell?” She looked to Shane, and Shane nodded. “We should do the same.”
Allen stretched his arms to place his chapped hands in the center of the table like he was setting down a Christmas ham. “The more people we bring in, the more complexity we add. Every new recruit—”
Murdock dropped his head back and snored loudly. “Boring! We’ve heard this before.”
It was so juvenile that Allen began to scold him, and Quinn tried to interrupt with her ideas about new propaganda, and the argument spilled in three different directions at once.
Finally, Kai muttered through his hand, “Vote?” They all looked to him.
They voted four to one to add five new recruits in 2031 and elevate five operatives into a new cell.
* * *
The next morning, Shane rose early to get Lali fed and situate her upstairs with her VR, leaving her with only the educational cartridge. Allen made a breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes, fresh fruit, and bacon. Murdock doused his whole dish with hot sauce, stewed it together, and practically licked a hole in the china. They talked for five hours about copycats. The energy from the night before repeated itself, as they quagmired into the same frustrating, circular murk.
“Question is,” said Murdock, “we took a few of the dirtiest power plants in the country off-line, maybe two thousand pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour—something like that—but what of it?”
“What do you mean, ‘What of it?’ ” asked Kai. “We blew a hole in OVP’s share price.”
“Yeah, but they’re moving a lot of that generation to natural gas,” said Quinn. “Not much better.”
When they’d bankrupted Envige two years ago, they’d met at this same cabin, popping champagne, Mission Accomplished and all that. But what happened, one finds out, is that after a meticulous campaign to destroy crucial infrastructure and topple a carbon producer, the big fish turns out to be a little fish, and some oil and gas multinational just comes along and buys up their reserves and keeps digging, drilling, and fracking that carbon straight into the overloaded atmosphere. They didn’t just need more operatives, they needed more followers. As Quinn was saying, “We need to get people off the message boards and into the game.”
Shane, for her part, was bored by this line of debate. They had only two days. With the amount of deception it took to bring the five of them together from distant corners of the country, the bevy of lies they’d deployed to their friends, families, bosses—all of it riding on the specious premise that they’d forgotten, lost, or had their cellular devices, laptops, tablets, watches, smart clothes, pens, rings, and other techno-fashion and trackable gear stolen—they couldn’t waste a moment. She only wanted to hear one word: escalation.
“It’s a careful calibration,” said Allen, “when we ask people to take things into their own hands. It’s not like Murdock can set up a ‘My First Claymore’ workshop. We don’t want people blowing themselves up with homemade pipe bombs.”
Quinn’s head ticked toward him, a spindly blond predator hearing a twig snap in the brush. “I thought the point of all this was to inspire people to resistance. Why else am I spending time encrypting and distributing these communiqués?”
Shane resisted rolling her eyes. Quinn’s absurd communiqués calling people “to war” were, in her opinion, cringe-inducing. It made them sound like every dorm room revolutionary, and Quinn betrayed her hacktivist background with dopey leftist juvenile rhetoric that made Anonymous sound mature. Shane didn’t want to acquiesce to her distaste for the only other woman among the Principals but every time they met in person, she could not help but bristle at Quinn’s every little habit, motion, or notion.
BUMPER STICKERS, T-SHIRTS, SLOGANS, TATTOOS Quinn had flown from SFO to O’Hare before picking up the burner car to drive north. On the plane, she’d spent her time engaged in a dangerous hobby: looking at the world’s reaction. A sign outside a barrister’s office in Brisbane: WE DIDN’T DO IT BUT WE DUG IT: THE OHIO RIVER MASSACRE 2030. A banner draped across Times Square for nearly an hour before authorities cut it down: 6DEGREES IS COMING. A quote from one of her first communiqués now on social media posts, T-shirts, bumper stickers: DON’T TELL ME ABOUT YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT UNLESS YOU’VE BLOWN UP A PIPELINE. Her words now sizzling in the ether. Inspiring others. It did give her a tingle in the belly, there was no denying it.
“I’m reading about this group in the Niger Delta, and they’ve got all our identical rhetoric with an anticolonial twist.” Allen burped uncomfortably, his face pinching as the gas rose through his throat and he tried to muffle it. “Excuse me. But it’s all the same: child soldiers drilling holes in people, torturing, executing. Same thing with the Maoist Naxalites in India’s Red Corridor assassinating coal workers. This is not something we want to emulate, obviously, or trigger. When we ask people to join a resistance, we have to give them the tools to do so in a way that threatens no human or animal life.”
DOMESTIC COPYCATS Crank calls and bomb threats to the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, and Chevron corporate headquarters was about the best they’d inspired. A group of college kids in Texas bought materials to build an IED to target a refinery and had been caught before they even downloaded the instructions. When Kai first began seriously discussing this with Shane, he had known it would be vital that they appear as a hydra of cunning, the Great and Terrible Oz. The problem was, one could claim the mantle of 6Degrees, but without any of the discipline, one could measure the time it took to get caught in hours. He too was frustrated with the lack of movement from copycats. He’d imagined hordes rising up and sabotaging operations with everything from computer viruses to wrenches. He’d expected sledgehammers, axes, and screwdrivers as rebels dismantled infrastructure. Instead, there was the San Antonio 9, who didn’t even bother to clear their search histories.
Kai tapped his foot. Murdock looked irritated. Everyone stared at their plate for a moment, scrambled egg crumbs and syrup-soaked pancake bits going cold.
“It’s hard,” Kai finally said. “We had eleven years to prepare and put safeguards in place. There’s no way to disseminate that information or that know-how without giving the FBI a manual to finding us.”
“Which is why we need to build more cells,” Quinn said for the fifth time that morning.
“We also don’t know the effects of PRIRA,” Allen added. “When we ask people to take matters into their own hands, they’re facing down this amorphous, unconstitutional bill that no one really understands—”
“PRIRA’s a paper-fucking-tiger,” grumbled Murdock. “We’ve got nothing to fear from it.”
“Except drastically enhanced prison sentences,” said Kai.
Murdock pfffted at this. “If we’re at that stage, it’s all for shit anyway. Point is, they’re already using every maximally extraconstitutional method on deck. What’s gonna happen is they’re gonna wrangle up a bunch of idiot trust fund kids like the San Antone 9, Mommy and Daddy will get lawyers, and these measures will get struck down. Meanwhile, they ain’t got no fucking way of finding us. Doesn’t help ’em there.”
Kai and Allen were both shaking their heads. Kai said, “No one understands this bill yet.”
“Tinkerbell understands it,” Shane interrupted.
“Right,” said Quinn. “Our fairy-fucking-godmother.”
“Tinkerbell is actually just your standard-fare fairy, I think,” said Murdock. Shane felt her blood beating fast because of Quinn.
“Why are you so pissed about her?” Shane demanded.
WHO WAS HUNTING THEM Quinn knew the list included the government’s heavy hitters and multiple private intelligence contractors. All assembled into the Joint Terrorism Task Force, where Shane supposedly had her mole. Shane claimed that according to her woman, the JTTF was targeting mainstream environmental groups. The problem with shadowy national security apparatuses was that there was no accountability for lazy thinking. It was a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line. Nevertheless, Quinn was convinced that the gravest danger within their group was Shane’s sole access to this mole. Meanwhile, Quinn, doing all the most dangerous hacking, was treated like a combination of the kid sister and the naggy aunt. She watched the girl, Lali, fret about her pissed pants, and the rest of them melt for Shane’s single-mom act.
“I’m not.”
“Tinkerbell is keeping us safe at great risk.”
Quinn snorted. “So you say.”
And then they were all talking over one another again, so that no one noticed Lali, who came down the stairs and stood at the edge of the room, wringing her hands at all the furious adults. She finally said, “Mama.”
They all stopped. Lali stood looking guilty, the stain, mortifying and obvious, on the legs and inseam of her gray cotton pajama pants.
“I couldn’t—I couldn’t—I couldn’t—I had to take a nap,” she began to explain, her words coming out punctuated by the short breaths she excitedly took to avoid crying, “because I don’t have my fiddle, and if I don’t have my fiddle, it makes—it makes—it makes—”
“Okay, okay, dígame, mi amor. Let’s get you changed.” She took her daughter by the hand and led her back up the stairs.
* * *
“Me and Professor Ford are gonna walk on down to the lake. Get some fresh air.” Murdock rattled a pack of Camels at Shane. “Care to join?”
Lali was playing a board game with Kai; they’d started with Clue but when that proved a bit complicated had moved a step backward to checkers. Quinn was in her room taking a nap. Kai nodded to Shane: “Go ahead. I got Lals.”
“He’s got Laaaals!” Lali brayed in her robot voice. She moved a black checker back and forth indecisively between two squares.
Shane bundled into her hat, boots, and gloves, yet when they stepped outside, the chill snaked into every slit. She, Allen, and Murdock stomped down the porch and into the woods, toward the bloodied lip of the sunset.
Allen led them onto a narrow trail that cut between the trees. They walked single file, with Shane bringing up the rear, as Allen pointed out the Upper Cambrian sandstone and the forests of jack pine, oak, and aspen. The air smelled of snow.
PRIRA The Zombie Climate Bill, Allen’s wife called it. Signed under duress during record-setting D.C. floods, a veneer of investment for renewable energy, worker retraining, and environmental justice initiatives coupled with a veritable deluge of money for national security to chase terrorist threats, including themselves. When Vic Love wasn’t charming housewives by sitting for interviews on Good Morning America with his alarmingly handsome husband, he’d been cutting backdoor deals to include gobs of cash for military contractors, including his former company, Xuritas. Now he was the hero for pushing through what everyone was calling “the Green New Deal,” even though it didn’t even glance at fulfilling that daffy Keynesian castle in the sky. The bill was stuffed with money for beach sand replenishment on the coasts and loopholes that deputized private military contractors. It included money to replace lead pipes in cities but also allowed private security forces to patrol the streets of those cities. It was so expansive, so stuffed with provisions, even legal experts couldn’t agree what to make of it yet. Allen had a few bets on that subject, though.
“Invigorating,” said Murdock, blowing smoke skyward. “Our benefactor’s got good taste.”
“She’s about seven steps removed from actually making our real estate choices, Murdock,” said Shane.
“Too bad—” Murdock stumbled over a hidden root, breathed a quick cuss, and sprang back up. “Speaking of! I’d be just delighted to know who she is.”
“Get in line,” said Allen.
They came to a fallen limb, and Murdock lifted one fat leg over it and then the other, gingerly, as if his kneecap might explode from the torque. He was huffing severely from just the short trip, his ruined body no secret to them.
“Whoever she is, she’s gotta be crazy,” he said.
“Why’s that?” asked Shane.
Murdock jerked a thumb back toward the cabin.
“You seen Kai, that handsome devil? How could anyone trust a bright, shiny smile like that?”
The path angled downward and the trees opened up further. The bed of red pine needles spread before them like a shag carpet. Greater volumes of white exhaust collected before Shane’s face as her breathing picked up. Used to be she had to hike a mountain to get this kind of winded. Age took all kinds of things from you. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a walk for pleasure. Once she was off her feet after work, it was all she could do not to lock her brain into garbage television and finish an entire bag of chips.
ALLEN’S SECRET The Benefactor made all this possible with what seemed like bottomless funds. Part hawala, part two-bit money laundering, her system utilized fake online businesses to create a slush fund for their operations. Yet it was Shane who’d really created this. Allen met her when he quit academia after failing to get tenure for the last time. They were living off his wife’s family’s money when he decided to find some use for himself by joining a social justice campaign during the BP crisis in the Gulf. As he and Shane got to know each other (usually while sharing some bad reefer), he’d been impressed, engaged, activated. She spun radical fantasies of resistance, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t had his own dreams along these lines back in his youth. Hell, it was why he’d made a career of studying those radical movements in the first place. Over the long years of crafting and executing their plans, she’d taken up space in his head like she was actually his oldest daughter. It pained him that they had to stay so far away, that their communication had to be so circumspect and infrequent. When he saw her face wrench in worry, over Lali or their cause, he wanted nothing more than to take her hand and tell her everything would be all right.
