The soul of the American surveillance machine was just as drab and bureaucratic-gray as the East German system he’d grown up under. And it recorded everything. For example, every parcel and letter and postcard passing through the USPS network was photographed digitally, sniffed for drugs and explosives, pinged for illicit memory chips, and scanned for radio-frequency ID tags. Quite possibly they were also shotgun-sampled for matches against the National DNA Prime Suspects Database.
But there were blind spots on the panopticon’s retina. The Post Office, for example, still offered prompt, reliable delivery of data—and it was possible to defeat the NSA and DHS data mining if you understood how to use it. It wasn’t rocket science. All you had to do was leave your phone at home, dress in clothing from which all the RFID washing machine instruction tags had been stripped, and go for a walk. You had to make sure you passed two or more postal boxes while carrying a suitably sanitized letter—addressed to your recipient by name but showing the address of a neighbor the recipient was on speaking terms with. The panopticon couldn’t distinguish between mail pickup boxes, and a misplaced digit would disguise the destination. Network analysis—looking for friends-of-friends relationships—would eventually crack a postal ring, but first they had to know there was something to look for. And to muddy the waters, there was always geocaching: the old tradecraft practices of dead letter drops, cutouts, and codes, turned into a hobby for the masses.
Until the authorities got around to putting RFID chips in every stamp, or banning cash transactions completely, the loopholes would remain open. Cypherpunks and paranoid libertarians might loudly swear that they would never! never! surrender their encryption keys to The Man. But in Kurt’s view, there was a lot to be said for quietly archaic tradecraft.
It was mid-afternoon, and Franz was at work. It was Emily’s day off, but she was on a grocery run—she used shopping as an excuse to get out of the house—and River was in college. Kurt ambled to his front door, locked it behind him, and stepped out into the street. There was no sidewalk, but it wasn’t dangerous. Most everyone who lived here had upgraded their wheels to self-driving in recent years to avoid the insurance premium hike for manual. Shuffling slowly, he passed the dividing line between his lot and his son’s. It was almost invisible—they’d pulled out the white picket fence when they bought both houses—but the grass on his side was slightly greener even though he never watered it. It was astroturf, as artificial as this strange lifestyle he’d fallen into in his twilight years. He shook his head, then approached the driveway. The flag on the mailbox was up. He stopped to rummage, retrieved the contents, briefly finger-checked for magnetic travel bugs on the mailbox’s underside—there were none, as was usually the case since Rita had left—then walked up to the kids’ front door and let himself in.
He sorted the mail quickly and stacked it on the breakfast bar. There wasn’t a lot: random junk flyers from local businesses, a package from Amazon for River; bills and banking were mostly taken care of online these days, except by old-timers. But in among the gravel there was gold dust, in the shape of a letter with a handwritten address and an honest old-fashioned self-adhesive stamp. And it was addressed to K. Douglas. Kurt smiled, tucked it inside his shirt, and headed back to his house.
It was Kurt’s habit to regularly take an hour-long afternoon nap in his bedroom. Lights out, phone left downstairs. He climbed the steps patiently, with scissors, pencils, envelope, and a pad of paper in hand. An hour and a half later he came back down, a pensive frown on his face, carrying the envelope, its enclosed letter, and the page he had laboriously transcribed from its contents. A lidded saucepan, a few drops of cooking oil, and a match would erase their troubling contents. After a trip through the dishwasher this evening there would be nothing left save memories to trouble his sleep, and that of his circumspect correspondent.
“I am going to have to tell her the truth,” he told himself unhappily, as if trying on a prisoner’s orange uniform for size. “Sooner or later I will be compelled to tell her, eh?” He gave a sad-dog sigh. “Later rather than sooner.” He opened the fridge door and pulled out a beer. Drinking alone in the mid-afternoon, he made the picture of a sad old widower. Too bad, he thought, that Greta couldn’t live to see this day. The pang of loss was a pro forma emotion, barely registering any more than a phantom pain from the stump of a long-amputated limb. She’d have laughed herself sick. His long-dead wife had been glorious in irony, back in the day. She could see the funny side of everything.
“What a strange age we live in: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce…”
Switches
WESTERN NEW YORK, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020
They were out of the side door as soon as the rotodyne stopped bouncing on its shock absorbers. The rotor disk high overhead was still shrieking as a squad of Commonwealth Guards rushed them to a squat blockhouse, checked their IDs, and led them into an elevator. The door concertina’d shut just as the aircraft began to spool up again, vacating the pad to make way for the next aircraft to land under the barrels of the point-defense guns.
There was nothing terribly subtle about the Redoubt, where the First Man and half the cabinet would take shelter from the gathering nuclear storm. Thousands of tons of concrete and rebar had been poured into a hole in the ground, forming a cradle around a sunken bunker that sat atop a platform suspended on huge shock absorbers. Nearby hills supported a forest of antennae; radar dishes twirled continuously overhead, tracking everything in the sky and feeding constant updates to the guns and missile batteries emplaced around the headquarters.
But the Redoubt had one unique twist that placed it in a class of its own, unlike anything ever built in the United States by anyone … except the Clan. The entire four-story command complex sat atop an air cushion; and hollow doppelganger Redoubts, identical save for a hole in place of the command complex, had been built in three neighboring empty time lines. With a world-walker permanently on station, ready to move the entire core of the Redoubt to safety, there was no need to drill a cathedral-sized bunker under Cheyenne Mountain for protection from a hard nuclear rain. Only a first strike executed in parallel in multiple time lines would stand a hope of succeeding—or so the designers hoped.