“The United States started out as a revolutionary republic, just like our Commonwealth,” Sir Adam said, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his sunken eyes. “They may have succumbed to the twin corruptions of oligarchy for the elite and bread and circuses for the masses, but their Deep State still has sinews of steel. Moreover, their form of government is extremely resilient. They are no more capable of surrendering than we are. War is unthinkable. If it is unleashed, the conflagration will spread until all are consumed.”
He paused for a few seconds. “As you can see, I am indisposed.” He looked at them across the table, deliberately making eye contact. “So I delegate this task to you who are assembled here. You are to devise a strategy for engaging directly with the government of the United States. I want you to lock them into a dance of, ah, I believe the term they will understand is, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction.’” He smiled directly at Miriam: a fey, frightening expression. “It will give them the comfort and certainty of a well-thumbed rule book for avoiding the holocaust. And then”—he paused for a few more seconds, until Miriam was about to ask his nurse to intervene—“once the immediate situation is stabilized, you are to investigate ways and means of bringing democracy to the United States of America.”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Rita’s first foray to the switchyard had taken place at 3:15 a.m. on a Thursday. It had taken six minutes, and she’d spent the next six hours being debriefed no less than three times, first by Patrick and then over a secure video link by Colonel Smith and a tired-looking posse of senior agents, all of whom were presumably going to brief their various superiors over the following days. Then they stuck her in a box with a tablet while she wrote up everything she remembered. A transcript of this would be carefully embalmed with the telemetry dumps from the equipment she’d been wearing. It would then be buried so deep in the Office of Special Programs’ vaults that she herself wouldn’t be able to retrieve it.
One committee briefing would inevitably lead to another, and by the time the ripples had spread out into the organization it was Friday lunchtime. The head-scratching over when to schedule her next jaunt to the switchyard then commenced. If it had been up to Rita, she’d have gone back over in the small hours of Friday morning, but Patrick told her that the Colonel couldn’t authorize another trip without obtaining a consensus from his supervisors. “The BLACK RAIN discovery has rattled teeth all the way up to cabinet level. He wanted to send you out tonight, but he’s got the Homeland Security Council breathing down his neck. OSP doesn’t usually get this level of oversight, much less at his level—”
“He’s a colonel, isn’t he?” Rita frowned. “I thought that was pretty senior…” She trailed off.
“He’s not a colonel, he’s a retired colonel,” Patrick said. He paused to take a mouthful of coffee. He winced: too hot or too bitter. “A colonel would be a pretty junior officer to be running this sort of operation; colonels usually command a battalion or an Air Force squadron. Eric isn’t a colonel, he’s a spook, and it’s all alphabet soup. He may have started out in the Air Force, but he moved sideways into NSA, was assigned to the FTO in the early days, FTO became the OSP, OSP did a reverse-takeover of the DHS, and then he set up the Unit as his personal project. That’s us, the human intelligence arm within what used to be the OSP, which used to be the FTO, which is what happened when the federal government discovered parallel universes and went WTF. Colonel was his rank when he retired from the Air Force; these days he punches above Major General.”
“Um.” Rita shook her head. “So he’s called a Colonel but is actually a Major General?”
“Never mind.” Patrick grinned suddenly. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just say he’s extremely senior. This started out as his personal hobbyhorse, but it’s suddenly attracted the attention of a lot of even more senior people in the administration. He’s not going to risk giving anyone an excuse to take his toy away from him, so nothing is going to happen before Monday. Hurry up and wait, in other words. You might as well take the weekend off: I’ll clear it for you. You’ve earned some downtime.”
Rita yawned. “I’m in the wrong time zone,” she complained. “My family are in Phoenix, most everyone I know is in Cambridge, and I’m stuck in a motel in Allentown. What am I going to do?”
“Go get some beauty sleep, then pretend you’re a tourist visiting exotic Philadelphia.”
“I guess…”
Rita drove back to the motel, lost in thought. Back in her room she started by phoning her parents: her usual weekly sonar ping was rendered slightly stilted by the certainty that everything she said would be transcribed and forwarded to whoever the Colonel had assigned to monitor her. She’d been on the inside of DHS for only a matter of weeks, but that was enough to be certain that there was no way in hell an organization like the Unit would trust a newbie like her with a key technology like JAUNT BLUE without putting her under surveillance. It was probably Gomez, she guessed: Gomez was a hard-assed bitch and had been on her back since the beginning. If not Gomez, then Jack, the good cop to Sonia’s bad cop.
“Your grandfather’s here,” River told her when the idle big-sis/little-brother chat began to bore him. “Wanna talk to him?”
“Yeah. Hi, Gramps.”
“Hello, Rita. Are you well?” he asked gravely.
“I’m fine, work’s fine,” she said happily. “I can’t talk about it, though.” “Talk” was their prearranged code word: it meant everything was indeed fine. “Discuss,” in contrast, meant “Send help,” and “mention” was not to be mentioned save in extremis. “That book you lent me was weird. Are there any others like it?”
They chatted about trivia for another five minutes, until Kurt tired. “Why don’t you look up your old school friends, see if anyone lives nearby?” he asked. “I’m tired; I need my nap.”
“Yes, Gramps, I’ll do that,” she said, and hung up. Hearing Mom and Dad and River and Gramps’s voices had given her a brief boost, but the chill of isolation began to descend again. Rita could feel alone in the middle of a crowded party; being stuck in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere with a bugged phone and monitored Internet feed was beyond lonely.