Free Interest by Kevin Gaughen Page B

front desk. The kid with the anime hair handed him another envelope. Inside was a boarding pass for a flight back to the United States.

11
     
    On the other side of the globe, it was a Sunday night. People ate dinner with their families or slept or watched TV to take their minds off the fact that all the security they’d ever known was under siege. That invincible fortress, the mighty US government, was starting to feel like a brittle Popsicle stick house. The collective anxiety in America and around the world had become palpable. Neith’s war was largely psychological, and she was winning.
    Citizens tend to regard governments the way children regard their parents’ marriage. The stability and permanence of both situations are taken for granted, and neither beneficiary realizes how tenuous the institution they live under is, nor how easily small things, happening precisely in the correct order, can cause all the stability they’ve ever known to completely fall apart.
    In fact, several of those small things were about to happen.
    At 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time, when the entirety of North America was completely dark, a beautiful ballet of technology began simultaneously in thirteen separate locations: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. At each site, an army of small robotic flying machines was launched from the back of a semitrailer. Flying through the doors, they rose quietly into the moonless night sky. In each city, a highly tailored flight path was followed to avoid security cameras, radar, and human sight. The swarms of drones flew in stunningly perfect formation: through dark alleys, low over rooftops, down air ducts, and through dark offices.
    Each machine carried a deadly payload, a plastic explosive that could be remotely triggered. These little bombs were placed at the most structurally significant points in each edifice the drones entered: support columns, I-beams, foundations—locations mathematically determined to produce untold damage.
    Once the payloads had been delivered, the machines quickly and silently exited the buildings and returned to the trucks whence they came. With every single robot accounted for, the trucks drove off, leaving no trace.
    At exactly ten the next morning, Monday, when the offices were fully occupied with throngs of white collars, the explosives were detonated simultaneously. In a choreography of exquisitely controlled demolition, thirteen very important buildings across the continent imploded thoroughly, leaving nothing but fire, bodies, twisted steel, and utter panic.

12
     
    “Mr. Rivington, welcome back,” said one of Neith’s men at the airport.
    “Thanks. Look, fellas, I’m not riding in the trunk again.”
    The two men looked at each other blankly, as though it hadn’t occurred to them that riding in the trunk might be uncomfortable.
    “You got what I left for you, right?”
    The men nodded.
    “So I completed the assignment in Japan?” Len asked. “I think I’ve earned the right to sit shotgun without handcuffs or a bag on my head.”
    “I suppose we can make an exception.”
    Walking past a restaurant on the way out of the airport, Len did a double take at the headlines on the television: “Entire Federal Reserve System Bombed, Hundreds Dead.”
    “Wow. How the hell did you lunatics pull that one off?”
    “Mr. Rivington, we have no idea what you’re talking about,” the shorter man said through his teeth in annoyance, looking around to make sure no one had heard Len’s comment.
    Amazingly, they did let him sit in the front of the car on the way to Neith’s compound. Len tried to keep mental notes of the location. As he’d suspected, it was in fact in the mountains of West Virginia. Around three in the afternoon, in the middle of the woods, they pulled up to a barbed-wire gate, which opened after they’d sat there for a few seconds. The road