'Maybe,' Clarke said, 'but there's no point worrying about things we don't understand or can't affect. Just make damn sure that place is as tight as you can get it. We lose that and we are in trouble.'
'Sir,' Barnside said, scribbling on a pad.
'This Vegas thing, Dan,' Clarke asked, 'is there anything in it?'
Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'Hard to tell, sir. A guy starts talking about the end of the world. Mentions the word "Sundog". Then kills himself. I mean: Why?'
'Maybe he was trying to run away?' Helen said, knowing it didn't make sense.
'Then why did he kill himself? Second thoughts?'
She caught Lieberman's eye through the video link. 'Michael. Can you remember if Charley had some links with Vegas? Anything at all.'
'She hated it,' he said. 'We went there once. For a Dylan concert at Caesar's, believe it or not. The concert was okay but the town — she loathed it. The tackiness. The venality. It's the last place on earth she'd choose to be.'
'We need to ID this man,' Fogerty said, 'and we're working on that one. Newspapers. TV. Everything, not that we're handing out the real story. If we can prove some link, we may have a start.'
'Assume there is a link, Dan,' Clarke said. 'What next?'
'Big area, sir.' Fogerty grimaced. 'We can focus the AWACs, do some aerial reconnaissance.'
'We can start doing that now, surely,' Helen said. 'I checked with our own imaging people. We have digital photography of every last square foot of this country. We can set them working on that straightaway.'
'Sure,' Fogerty said. 'But think of the scale of the task. Nevada, Utah, Arizona — it could be any of the three, and you're talking massive areas of bare rock there. Even if we knew what we're looking for, how long would it take to find it? Photo reconnaissance is a long-term exercise, not something you can pull up in an hour or two.'
'We do know what we're looking for,' Schulz said from the screen. 'A dome. You've got these photos in digital form, right? I assume you have some kind of reconnaissance software that can search images on the basis of recognizable shapes.'
'Sure,' Helen said. 'We developed it ourselves. Runways. Camouflaged buildings.'
'Then set it up to look for a geodesic. Even if it's camouflaged you're going to get an outline.' Helen scribbled some notes on her pad. This was straight up Larry Wolfit's street. The room was quiet. They were all waiting for Clarke.
'We're getting somewhere,' the President said. 'Maybe we can kill the satellite. Maybe we can take them. If we're in luck, we do both.'
'Sir,' Helen replied, and looked at the faces around the room. There was some hope there, she thought. They were moving in on Gaia at last.
CHAPTER 31
Capital
'Martin never came back? We never heard from him again?'
Joe Katayama shook his head. Charley Pascal smiled at him, the slow, strained smile he recognized as an expression of some real physical pain inside her. In the main room of the farmhouse, where the Children worked around the clock talking to the satellite, monitoring the wires, there was a slow buzz of excitement that was fast approaching anxiety.
'Everything moves in its sphere,' Charley said as they sat alone at the edge of the room, watching the work go on. 'Everything has its purpose. We need to start moving people out, Joe. It's killing everyone to be glued to these screens. We need to start dispersing.'
Katayama pulled out a sheet of paper. 'I'd been thinking much the same way. I got some pre-programmed routes they can follow, vehicles lined up, air tickets, train tickets for when the transportation gets back to normal. They know what to do. Spread the word.'
Charley almost laughed. 'They don't need to spread the word, Joe. We're not evangelists. You don't understand.'
Some small fire lit behind his eyes, and Charley thought: He has a temper; it just stays beneath the surface most of the time.
'No,' he replied, face hard and expressionless, 'I guess I don't. I thought that, when it was over, when we'd dispersed, that was what we did next. Pointed the way.'
She did laugh then, just to see if she could get a response, but the flat Oriental face stayed unmoved. 'Meet the new boss. Just like the old boss. I don't think so. We've done our teaching. We can help. People can advise, point the way if it's needed. That's not why we're here.'
'Why is that?'
'To cleanse,' she said softly. 'To purify. The way a farmer burns the stubble at the end of the harvest. The way an artist scrubs a canvas when a painting goes wrong. There's a god in all this, Joe, don't forget that. Not a god that lives in the sky with some long white beard and a list of commandments. The god inside us. All of us, every living creature. And when we purify, that god comes out. She doesn't need our help. It happens. Even though they'll get their TV stations back on the air before long. Even though their armies don't go away. The real revolution starts in the heart, when we start to see the world around us for what it is: chaotic and fragile, ruined by our own endeavours.'
'You put a lot of trust in people,' Katayama said.
'No,' Charley said swiftly. 'I put a lot of trust in my god. Let's get moving, Joe. Start to thin the ranks.' She pushed her chair across the room and touched the arm of someone punching away at a keyboard. He stopped, beamed at her. 'How goes it, Sam?'
'Like a dream,' he said in a monotone English accent. Heads turned, faces smiling. No need for concern, she thought. The Children were a family, would always remain a family, even when they'd dispersed. There was peace in the room, in spite of the heat that seeped in from the windows, rose from the humming terminals, enveloped them all. Peace and a resolve to see this through. 'Good,' she said.
Against her instincts, she had spent time learning the workings of the financial markets. It was necessary to understand what you sought to destroy. Sam Lambert had been pivotal in this. A former English stockbroker who had quit his job to work for a venture capital company in Palo Alto, he knew so much about the way this digital flow of capital worked, moving around the world in some obscene impersonation of the sun itself, twenty-four hours a day, never resting, never failing — until now.
The markets were like flowers, blooming for the sun. When the earth revolved and placed them in daylight, they opened their petals, let the life flood into them, raced and ran through the bright, waking hours. Then, eight hectic hours later, they felt the day start to grow darker and chill, wound down to sleep. And as one bloom closed, another one opened, following the daily circling of the sun's light upon the earth. It was a permanent, unchanging process, one that had been established decades before. What made it different now was the technology that threw an invisible electronic thread between each of those points on the globe, made it possible to trade in Tokyo from a desk in London.
This changed the nature of the exercise entirely, linked every part to the whole. To make a trade in London, however small, however local, was to throw a pebble into the gigantic pool of international capital that swilled around the world, taking little heed of governments and currency restrictions, circumventing them by some quicksilver body swerve that got you where you wanted by some other route. It might add a few milliseconds to the transaction, taking you through some cabling in Panama or Cayman instead of Berne or Bonn. But you got there. Everything got there, pretty much.
This digital nervous system was the financial world. And without it, Charley had come to realize, the complex fabric of modern money was merely a blank and empty page, a tabula rasa demanding something be written upon it, with precious little there to use as ink.