Peacemaker

He walked toward her, pretending to look for a place to sit and covertly looking at her again. Really nice. He was going to walk right up to her and ask to sit at her table because everything else was full (although it wasn’t) when somebody called, “Hey, Suter!”

It was Han. Suter smiled. It paid to stay on Han’s good side, he had found. People liked Han, God knows why.

“Hey, Colonel.” Suter sat down where he could look at the woman.

Han grinned. “This is a side of you I didn’t anticipate,” he said.

“Sir?”

Han grinned some more. “If your tongue hangs out any farther, you’re going to wet your tie. She’s married.”

“Who?”

Han laughed. Suter, he said, was something else.

Suter glanced at the woman. Married. Oh, well—so what?

Sarajevo.

Mike Dukas was standing by a window in the newly painted office of Sarajevo’s Associate Deputy Chief of Police for NATO Liaison. New office, new title, new man. The guy was a Bosnian Muslim, a desk cop, doing what he did best—managing information. In this case, he was briefing Dukas.

Dukas had been in Sarajevo for twenty-two hours. He was still groggy from jet lag and he didn’t have an office of his own yet. He was looking down into the courtyard of a small apartment building next door and wondering what the long heaps of earth like graves were.

When the Associate Deputy Chief shut up to take a breath, Dukas said, “What are those?” He pointed down. “The things that look like graves?”

The Bosnian hesitated a moment, then suddenly became human. “Those are graves,” he said quietly.

Dukas looked at him—disbelief, questioning.

Entirely human now, the Bosnian cop gave him a sad smile. “We couldn’t get to the cemeteries because of the bombardments. The snipers. We buried the dead where we found room. I buried my mother in her rose bushes.”

Welcome to Sarajevo.

5

July

IVI.

Her name was Rose Siciliano, and she was a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. Suter was amused by that, because when he’d seen her Friday, she’d been wearing blue jeans and a Redskins T-shirt. The clothes had meant she probably worked on Upper Level 2, where the whiz-kids played and things had low security classifications. Suter had been surprised to learn that in fact she worked on S1, the first underground level, where security classifications were high and Peacemaker got a lot of its work done. But the S1 location meant she knew Peacemaker only as an intelligence satellite and was walled off from DAM.

He had been back a total of nine hours, four of those spent with a lot of boring crap about British real estate in the South Atlantic that might make potential test targets for Peacemaker, and more spent with the general and some with Han, and he’d still found time to ask about the woman he’d seen at the cafeteria window. He’d thought about her at home, thought about her on the drive in.

She was the just-designated Seaborne Launch Officer. Her arrival signaled Peacemaker’s move from mockup to launchable prototype.

He managed to catch her in the cafeteria by making three trips there his second morning back. He was supposed to be reading targeting pubs, getting up to speed on the flashiest way of using Peacemaker. He was a speed reader, very good and very smart, if he did say so himself; he could spare the time to chase this wonderful-looking woman. And, the third time was the charm: there she was, in the same chair by the window. This time she was wearing a dress and looking like a businesswoman. Even more terrific.

“Mind if I join you?” he said. “I’m Ray Suter.”

She sort of smiled, but also looked a little pained.

“I’m a little lost, and I could use some sympathy. I’m new here.”

“Sure, sit.”

She was not an easy piece of work. Her eyes were amused by him, not charmed. She also had an innate toughness that surprised him; it hadn’t been evident on Friday. Maybe it had been the T-shirt, the suggestion of somebody young and naive.

“I thought you were one of the computer kids,” he said, trying to sound like a man who was embarrassed by some small stupidity. “I noticed you Friday.”

“Friday’s Casual Day in my place,” she said. “Today we’re just regular people. I gotta go.” She was on her feet, tossing her Styrofoam cup into a plastic receptacle.

“I’ll see you again,” he said. He stood.

“Probably.” She looked him up and down, still not charmed. A very tough woman inside that softness. But she smiled. “It’s a small place,” she said.

That afternoon, he called up her personnel file on his computer. He could do that because of Shreed’s influence with Touhey. He had access to everything. Almost the first thing he saw on her file was that she was married to Alan Craik.

His first response was that it was a real kick in the ass. The second was that something might be made of it. After all, taking Craik’s wife to bed would be killing two birds with one stone.

But it would take time. Well, he had time. Launch was still five months away.

IVI.

Rose loved the work at IVI. She was surprised. Desk jobs were usually a pain in the ass, something to be got through because the detailer said it was good for your career, but this one was both exciting and demanding. Two or three days a week, she was on the road, either visiting the contractors or hitting offices in the Navy department. She was going to be launch officer on a ship, and she didn’t know zip about ships, except what you had to know to land a chopper on one. More visits, more reading. She set herself up for a week’s cruise on a survey ship of the kind they would be using.

Alan was living in a short-term rental house in Falls Church, with Mikey and the dog. He hadn’t sold the Norfolk house yet and fussed about it—somewhat childishly, she thought. She missed him, but when the chance came to go to Houston to watch a missile launch from Mission Control, she went and lost a weekend with him. And Mikey. And the dog. She was pregnant but made little of it yet. In a few months, she told herself. When, at an IVI planning meeting, Touhey had talked about moving the test launch date up, she had found herself regretting the pregnancy. What if she had to take childbirth leave and they brought in somebody else and that’s when the launch went? Then, guiltily, she scolded herself. Where are your priorities?

East Africa.

O’Neill was getting the hang of it pretty well. Prior had told him so. Prior was fairly generous with compliments, actually, applying some version of the pop psychology the Agency rented from its consultants—” Motivate Your Subordinates,” “Catch More Flies with Sugar,” “The Four Steps to Excellence.” Or was it five? Or three? Mostly, what he said was, “God, at least you’re better than MacPherson!”

MacPherson fucked every female agent he could get close to and some of the men, I really believe it, Prior had told him. He had no more idea of how to behave than my golden lab. And the files and the stories around the embassy showed that, indeed, MacPherson had been one of God’s great fuckups, a possibly unique creation. Worst of all, he had let sex come into everything, which was not morally wrong but was, in O’Neill’s view, a mistake because sex was too powerful to use; it ended up using you. He would never make that mistake, he was sure.

O’Neill had a tiny house on the mountain slope outside Arusha, but he was seldom there. He also had an office in Arusha, but he was seldom there, either. The office ran itself, thanks to three female in-country employees who were vetted yearly out of Dar. Mostly, O’Neill was on the road, touting the wonders of capitalism and making contacts, but really driving, driving the roads to work out surveillance routes and trying to apply the lessons of the Ranch. The lessons were a bad joke in Africa, having been designed for cities and developed countries, the Ranch’s idea of the terrain of espionage being the shopping center and the parking garage and the supermarket. Now, O’Neill drove hundreds of miles, trying to establish routes from here to—where? That tree? This village without a telephone? That abandoned cement factory? This overgrown sisal field?

Thus, the Rotary Clubs and the Chambers of Commerce and above all the colleges and schools became major waypoints. His excuse for going there was his canned pep talk on Africa and the Free Market Economy. He thought of it as the Flea Market Economy but didn’t say so. He was a good speaker, and educated Africans in particular took to him because he reminded them either of their own days on an American campus or their days in England. English education was still the ideal, and Cambridge O levels, although abandoned in England, were revered here, and O’Neill, with his good clothes and his manners and his cultured voice, was very like those African academics who were more British than the British. They wore dark suits and had morning and afternoon tea in the Common Room, brought round by tea ladies pushing metal tea carts. Like academics everywhere, these were suckers for flattery and money, and the two in combination got him a lot of likely recruits. The trouble was, would they know anything worth squat or would they just want to spout off?

Mostly, they were merely excuses for trying to lay out detailed routes.

He had a five-year-old Toyota LandCruiser. Most of his travel was in the north and east of the country, where the modern economic activity was, but he made reasons to go west to the shore of Lake Tanganyika and up to Bikuba, where there were signs of military presence, because he knew that Rwanda was going to be big, no matter how cautious Prior was. He was also going nuts from the frustration of doing nothing important. On weekends, he came back to Arusha and sat in his nearly empty house. He wrote letters to Alan Craik full of up-to-date, inside stuff and sent them in the diplomatic bag. He reviewed the old files left by his woeful predecessor and the far better man before him, Hammer, who had set up the networks that MacPherson trashed.

He knew that there should be survivors out there who could be wooed back. To get the files, he had to drive to Dar, sign the files out, drive them to Arusha, read them, and drive them back and sign them in before his workday started on Monday. When he pointed out that the files could be sent via e-mail because Tanzania had no means of monitoring transmission, Prior told him that the official Agency position was that e-mail is not secure.

O’Neill selected what he saw as Hammer’s best three agents in Rwanda.

When he next went west, he left a sign at three places, and then he waited.

One agent was dead. One was terrified, living under a new name in Zambia. The third would respond.

6

August

IVI.

Rose had stopped going to the cafeteria for morning coffee because there was too much to do. Or that was what she said—and believed. An outsider might have said she had found work to fill that time. An outsider might have said she liked to boast of never having a minute, even for the cafeteria.

Suter stopped by sometimes. Rose found she rather liked him. She knew he was coming on to her. Many men did. So?

“At it again,” he said, leaning in her office door. “Got a minute?” He always had some excuse for visiting her. She didn’t discourage him. She learned stuff from him. And was flattered by the attention. Suter was a good-looking guy. Unlike Alan, however, he was aware of it. Vain.

“Half a minute,” she said. “I’m swamped.”

He had learned to bring his own coffee. Hers was terrible, made by some Seaman Apprentice first thing in the morning and left to cook down to its acidic worst all day. He told her some bit of detail about adjustments in the launch angle and said, “So you want to be an astronaut.”

“Sure do.” She was writing notes to herself about the launch angles.

“Ride the Vomit Comet? Join the Team of Heroes?”

“You got it.”

“I might be able to help you there.” She looked up. Her face was expressionless and did not give him the encouragement he wanted. “I know some people in the program.”

“I like to make it on my own,” she said.

“That’s not how it works.”

“That why you left the Navy?”

He had never mentioned his Navy career to her. It irritated him that she knew something like that without his having told her. “How’d you know that?” he said.

“My husband.”

Of course! That shithead Craik had told her all about him. He could picture the letters Craik had written home from the boat, full of self-pity and bitterness. He felt better. “I can imagine what he said about me,” Suter said with a smile.

“Really?” She had been writing, finished, looked up. “Actually, he didn’t say anything. I was the one who mentioned your name, and he put two and two together and guessed you were his old boss.”

“And then what’d he say about me?”

“Nothing.” She seemed surprised that he’d ask.

Well, of course he couldn’t believe that. Craik must have given her an earful. That was okay; bad press was better than no press. Maybe she found her husband just a bit of a shithead, too? “At least you mentioned my name to him,” he said with a grin.

“Valdez!” she shouted. She had a hell of a voice when she needed it; Suter resisted jumping out of his chair at her sudden bellow. Somebody had passed behind him out in the corridor. What the hell? he thought. A male voice behind him said, “Yeah,” and Rose called over and through Suter, “Show me how to acquire the Orbit Adjustment file out of White Sands, will you? I keep getting some message saying I’m committing an illegal act and I get closed down. It hurts my feelings.”

“Yeah, ma’am, I told you twice already.” He came in, a compact, dark, near-teenager in blue jeans. “Hey, how ya doin’?” he said to Suter without looking at him. He went right to Rose’s computer.

“Valdez is my resident geek,” she said. The words had a final tone to them, as if she had said something like, Oh, look how late it’s getting, meaning it was time for Suter to go. She turned away from him and toward Valdez, who was leaning over her computer.

“Uh—” Suter was annoyed. He didn’t like being dismissed. He liked even less being dismissed in favor of a Latino kid who had barely finished high school. “Maybe I’ll stick around and learn something,” he said.

She gave him a dazzling smile. “Valdez is the smartest computer jock in LantFleet. He’s got Silicon Valley after him—don’t you, Billie?”

“They jus’ want me for my body,” the kid said. His head was close to hers over the keyboard. Suter saw that he had a tiny tattoo behind his ear. Suter hated him.

Late in the day, Rose and Valdez caught a flight out of BWI to Houston. She was starting to ride herd on the thousands of details that affected the ship and the launch hardware; from Houston, they would go to Newport News to pick up the civilian ship for her week’s orientation. Go and go and go.

It was not enough for Rose to be assured by somebody else that things were going well. She had to see it for herself. She had to see the drawings, the mockups, the prototype. That first launch was not going off without her understanding everything about it. Valdez went along because he was her personal computer whiz—requested by name from her old squadron, where she had learned almost everything she knew about computers from him.

“How come you know so much, anyway?” she said as they flew over West Virginia, for once not using the flight to press her nose against the screen of her laptop. This was not a sudden desire to relax; Valdez was showing signs of unhappiness, and if her computer geek was unhappy, she knew she was going to be unhappy somewhere down the line.

“I’m a genius.” He meant it as a joke, but it was literally true, if you went by IQ scores.

“You weren’t born a computer geek, Valdez.”

“No, ma’am, I was born a spic. I was goin’ to be a criminal mastermind, but Mister Carvarlho got to me first.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask—who was Mister Carvarlho?”

“We called him ‘Mister Horse,’ because caballo means horse. You say ‘Carvarlho’ fast, it sounds like caballo—horse, okay? I hated him. He was PR, half black, he always wore suits, he was a born-again Christian with an attitude.”

“Not your ideal.”

Valdez laughed. “My nightmare! That guy was the opposite of everything I was gonna be. I was a gangbanger at eleven; at twelve, I was carrying a gun. No kiddin’! I had this Rossi .38 special, nickel, real shiny—I thought I was cool. I shot it once—I’m runnin’ the street at two a.m., just for the hell of it I shot it. Blam! I only had five bullets, that’s what it held—like a Chief’s Special, right, only a Rossi?—it was light, nice, but a lotta recoil for a little kid. Anyway, I carried that; I had a place I put it outside the school, I’d leave it in the morning, pick it up as soon as I got out. I was bad.”

The Navy didn’t like people who had been ba-a-a-d, she thought. He must have got awfully good awfully quick. “You never got caught?”

Valdez hesitated. He was slumped down in his seat, his left knee and calf pressed against the back of the seat in front. He was frowning. “My dad caught me. Him and me didn’t get along then. My dad—” Valdez squirmed upright. “He was workin’ two jobs, sendin’ money home, didn’t speak English—I came in drunk one night, he was comin’ home from his night job—I’m twelve years old, remember—and the gun drops out on the floor. He just looks at it, and then he starts to cry. I thought he was a jerk. I di’n’t know, you know? I see it now—the guy was worn out, beat down. But Jeez, to be a hotshit gangbanger and see your old man cry—! I thought I was so cool, man.”

Valdez plucked at a little packet of salted peanuts that had been put in front of him. “You understand about bein’ Latino?” he said. “In Cleveland?”

“Probably not.”

Valdez sniffed, like a bull inhaling. “Couple days later, I’m walking down the hall in school—I’m in junior high, seventh grade through ten are all together—and this hand comes outa nowhere and grabs my shoulder. I was gonna deck the guy. Nobody touched me—tough guy, huh? That’s when I found Mister Horse was one strong born-again Christian. One hand, he held me, I couldn’t move. ‘Come in here, young man,’ he says. Whoosh! I’m in his room. He holds me like a frigging vise! When I’m quiet, he says, ‘You are the newest member of the Computer Club. Welcome to the Club.’ I think he’s loco—I think he’s lost something up under his hair. Later, I find him and my father are in a Bible-reading thing together. My father has told him about the gun. Mister Horse sits me down in front of my first computer and puts a joystick in my hand and he turns on a simulation game.

“I’m hooked.”

He chewed on his peanuts. He shrugged. “Couple months later, I was doing simple programming.”

“How’s your father now?” she said.

“He died.” Valdez chewed. “He took my gun, he threw it in the river. I hated him. Then he was dead, I understood him a little better. Too late. Sad story, huh?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Lotsa sad stories. World is full of sad stories. Let’s change the subject.” Valdez squirmed again, shot a glance at her. “I’m not real happy with this job,” he said.

That was a surprise. A shock, in fact. “It’s a great job!” she said.

“Great for you, maybe.” He shook his head. “They’re not giving me stuff.”

“Who?”

“Them. Whoever.” He waved a hand. “In computers, what difference is who? Difference is what, Commander. Lemme put it in Navy: ‘Insufficient data are being provided to Petty Officer Valdez.’ See? No who.”

“Insufficient data about what?”

“If I knew that, I’d have the data, woul’n’t I? What I mean is, there’s too much code for the stream I’m getting.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell. That’s like me asking you how you can tell a chopper is loaded wrong from the way it flies. I can tell.”

She was already protective of Peacemaker. “You don’t have a need to know,” she said primly.

“Bullshit I don’t have a need to know! You think I’m gonna trust my work on a system where I’m closed out of part of the data stream? I might as well ask for a transfer right now.”

“Valdez!” She sat upright, turned on him. “What’s this ‘transfer’ crap?”

“I might do it.” He looked like a stubborn child. “I believe in freedom of information.”

“This is the goddam US military, and information is classified, not free!”

He rolled his head toward her. He had large eyes the color of dark chocolate. “You know what MP3 is?” he said.

“Are you changing the subject on me, Valdez?”

He shook his head. “MP3 is the way you download music and play it through your computer so you listen to what you want, when you want—no CDs, no albums, no nothing decided for you by somebody else. That’s freedom of information. You know what open source code is? Same kinda thing. I believe in those things. I also believe in the US Navy, but if the Navy gonna put me in a position where I got to knuckle under to somebody else’s idea of what comes through my computer—” He made a horizontal chopping motion. “Finito, man.”

She was angry—she recognized that she was getting on top of the job because she was beginning to get angry about it more often, caring—but she controlled herself and said, almost but not quite flirting with him, “Valdez—you wouldn’t desert me, would you?”

But he wouldn’t look at her. The movie had come on and he was watching it without headphones. “You find out what’s bein’ kept from me,” he said.

Rose sat back, arms folded. Problems, problems.

On the flight to Newport News two days later, it was as if settling into the seats and snapping the seatbelts put them back where they had left off. Nothing had been said in the interim; in fact, they had hardly seen each other. But clearly, the earlier conversation had been somewhere on her mind, because the first thing she said after they took off was, “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure, why not?” He flashed her a grin, all teeth and big brown eyes. “Maybe I won’t answer, though.”

“What’s that tattoo behind your right ear?”

“Pachuco.”

“What’s that?”

He didn’t believe it. “You don’t know pachuco?” He laughed, made the face that means, This is fucking incredible! “You know Zoot Suit.” He said it as a fact, not a question.

She was laughing now—at herself, at both of them. “What’s Zoot Suit? I’m sorry, Billie—”

“You don’ know Zoot Suit? Edward James Olmos, man! Luis Valdez!” Now, he was pleading with her to know. Then it was too much; he threw himself back in his seat and gave up. “I’ll bring you the video.” He started to take out his earphones, then turned to her again. “I saw Zoot Suit when I was a little kid. Another kid put the pachuco mark behind my ear; most guys got it on their hand, here, between the fingers so it doesn’t show. Then I did him. We weren’t gangbangers yet; we were being cool, big-time, but—It meant something to us! Zoot suits!” He shook his head. “It was a Latino thing. I kind of gave it all up when I went to Jesus, but, you know, it’s part of me, man.”

“Are you a born-again now?”

He folded his arms and stared at the seatback. “Yeah, and yeah, and finally no. I been to Jesus so many times I get frequent-flyer miles. You not laughin’? That’s one of my best lines, Commander; guys always laugh, ’cause it’s cool.” He slouched lower. He was a small man and the seat fit him. “Jesus got me out of the gangs and He got me through high school and into computers, but I couldn’t take church. Jesus, si, His people, no way, Jose. So, Jesus and me got our own church.” He looked at her, his head now lower than hers. “Okay?”