Free The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling Page B

silent ferocious impacts . . . But only one side in Chechnya was awash in cash. That was not his own side. His side was merely a national army, not a global conspiracy. His side was always broke. The thought didn’t bear contemplation. And yet, and yet, Natalya. Yes, if fate demanded it, he could do a thing like that for Natalya’s sake. Because love conquered all.
CHAPTER
    FIVE
    WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 2001
    T all yellow cranes were digging black wreckage from the Pentagon. American flags the size of basketball courts covered the walls of federal offices, Old Glory the Battle Flag as a kind of angry wallpaper. Truck bomb barriers, strangely disguised as concrete flower pots, bloomed right, left, and center. The streets around the White House had become empty asphalt malls, where jittery tourists lurked in ones and twos.
    The newly formed Coordination of Critical Information Assurance Board met in the Old Executive Building, under the sponsorship of the Vice President. The badly overcrowded conference room had leather club chairs, steel coffee urns, lots of dented mahogany, and an ancient oil painting of an elder statesman named John C. Calhoun. Mr. Calhoun didn’t look happy. Neither did the crowd. If Van didn’t know all the faces, he knew the institutions. Every major federal bureaucracy had some kind of stake in computer security work. The Justice Department with the FBI, the Treasury with their Secret Service. The Department of Defense had a Defense Information Systems Agency. The Air Force was high-flying and enthusiastic, while the Navy worked to keep up steam. The Commerce Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NASA was there. The Computer Emergency Response Team, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Even one lonely computer whiz from the Railroad Retirement Board.
    The National Security Council, Van’s new employer, had sent out the invitations. This was their first big dance. If this shindig worked out, then a lot of things might work out. If this didn’t work, then Van had just blown his career for a swift bureaucratic fiasco.
    With a thirty-year career in computer crimebusting, Jeb was a living dinosaur of computer security. Jeb had trained a lot of the people in this conference room, and most of them owed him favors. Van had a gold-star reputation as a coder, but was a personal stranger to most of these people. Most of them were strangers to one another.
    This was the cyber-version of a larger story happening all over the federal government, from Pennsylvania Avenue, to Quantico, to Fort Meade, to Pentagon City. Since 9/11, all federal security agencies had been suffering a scary process that they called “melting stovepipes.” People who had spent their whole lives inside narrow institutional channels were forced to network with other feds that they’d never met.
    Who were these strangers from distant, scary wings of the U.S. government? Were they rivals? Allies?
    Neutrals? No one even knew. The new Homeland Security empire was going to eat up any number of proud, independent agencies. Some said six, some said twelve, and some said twenty-two. This meant that no one’s turf was safe anymore.
    It also meant something more promising, though. It meant opportunity: the biggest federal re-org in forty years. It meant that the right bunch of computer-security geeks, in the right place with the right tools and attitude, might break out from obscurity. Bold nerds from some mainframe garage in the Commerce Department might end up giving marching orders to the Secret Service. Jeb was the kind of man that computer people naturally turned to in a crisis. Jeb rather resembled Jabba the Hutt, if Star Wars characters had been cops from Texas. Jeb’s mood, always dark and cynical, had ratcheted up several notches to grimly militant. Jeb had the rigid-eyed stare of a man who was summing up his life’s work and laying it right on the line. Jeb had shaved his cherished beard,