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PEGGY WOKE UP ON A CALIFORNIA KING, ENSCONCED
in silk sheets. The soothing sounds of the Cetacean voices
came on at 5:50 am, and lasted five minutes. The couple who
owned the house had welcomed the Ishpems in weeks ago, and
had moved into a friend’s house over in Raleigh hills, and no one
had disturbed anything in the house, including the music settings
on their sound system.
Mosley lay sleeping. Peggy opened her eyes, and an involun-
tary mental inventory quickly booted up in her head. Two days
ago (or was it decades ago?) 6 am bike into town, to the gym,
stretching and lifting, then biking across town. Teaching her 8
am psych 101 class at PSU, followed by coffee with a student
she was advising, an hour break reading in her tiny closet of an
office, lunch, seminar with five graduate students, then waiting
around for three hours before her “The Future of Psychology”
night class. Then arriving home to find an old lover,(actually, she
realized sadly, the only old lover) casually talking to her husband.
She hadn’t seen Nate in 20 years. Dinner, horrible news on TV.
Back on the bike yesterday, across town, and – oh, yeah – she
killed a man, shot him in the head when she panicked. That was
new. But her husband was in jail, not her, and not Nate either,
more riding, up the steep hill to Washington Park, meeting the
woman her husband was seeing on the side – no, she didn’t know
that. Then standing inches away, two cops shot dead. Into the
woods, to a murderous firefight that lasted all night, and now – in
a million-dollar bedroom overlooking the city with a hard, young
soldier. So hard. She stifled a giggle, and looked at the time on
her fone on the teak wood night table next to the bed. It was 6:10
am. About three hours in bed, with some sleeping. And what did
you do yesterday?
Well – she skipped one thing. About 2 am they had stormed
into Gordy Lobetts’ condo. It had strong doors and locks. Mose
had some C4 and boom, boom, they were in.
Peggy went up on the balcony where she had seen Alison’s
light. She had expected to find her body, but nothing, only the
residue of a hasty exit. A gum wrapper was on the floor. She
opened it up, hoping somehow it might have a message, but it
was blank. She looked through each room, looking under cups,
in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, everywhere. No clue,
no sign of anything other than a bunch of people had been there,
drinking coffee, eating pastry, and a deli plate filled with baby
carrots, empty bottles of scotch, food left out, already beginning
to smell, and they didn’t wipe their feet either.
Mose told her, carefully, hesitantly, that another team had
broken into the Justice Center and freed almost one hundred
people that (V)ICE had been holding. But no Spence, although
one of the prisoners remembered seeing them take him away.
Mose had seemed surprised at her reaction, but later she would
have no memory of how she felt when she heard the news.
She didn’t feel bad about where she had ended her day. She
didn’t believe it, but as she searched her brain and listened to
whatever popped up, and it was clear, she really didn’t feel bad.
Yesterday, it must have been because of yesterday, she thought.
She had developed a hardened fatalism about life in the last
12 or so hours. It was the most natural thing in the world to fall
into bed with Mose, after last night. They had wiped out most
of a squad of (V)ICE commandos, and left the prisoners zip-tied
together around a huge Douglas fir. Then were ordered to “hold”
the nearby section command post, and that was what they were
doing. It had nothing to do with Spence. Or Nate either, not in
the slightest. She had never experienced anything like last night.
She wondered, would Nate be proud of her? Why would she even
care? The thought disturbed her. He had left her in an incredibly
dangerous situation, but she had come through.
“You awake?” Mosley asked.
“Yeah.” Even with so little sleep she had never felt more awake.
“We gotta get going. Siena said we had to get down to the
SwiftPad HQ by 9 am and relieve the guard. I would rather do
that than clean up. Bodies, blasted trucks –”
“And fire, can you smell it?” Peggy sat up, revealing her
breasts. “How old are you, Mosley?”
Mose laughed. “Twenty-three.”
She pulled the blanket up, to cover herself. Not much older
than her daughter.
“You get up first,” she said. She waited for Mose to ask her
that question, but to her immense relief it never came.
“Have you ever read anything about the Six-Day War – Israel
back in the sixties?” Mosley got up out of bed from a flat sit, no
hands. His naked ass – she couldn’t believe it was so beautiful.
“No,” she said.
“Apparently it was an orgy in Israel after the war. At the time
they weren’t sure how it was going to go. The idea that Egyptians
and Syrians might end up occupying Tel Aviv was not out of the
realm of possibility. They were sure it would be a long war at best.
But when it was over, and they had taken the Golan Heights and
Sinai – well – everybody was fucking. It was like a patriotic duty.
Israeli women let it all hang out for a week. That closeness to
death is an incredible aphrodisiac.”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know. I’ll – get dressed out in the – out there. See if I
can find something quick to eat.”
They walked down the winding road along the ridge. People
were coming out of the houses and applauding them. They
were soon joined by other Ishpems, as the rebels were becoming
known. They walked with weapons at ready, on the shoulders of
the road, covering their side, trusting the colleagues had the other
side. Where had she learned that? Peggy had read books on war,
and on the psychology of combat. It had fascinated her, and some
instinct for battlefield survival had somehow emerged in her last
night. She stood her ground, even when the man next to her went
down. Didn’t faze her. Where did that come from, she wondered?
Their orders were confirmed by fone to make haste to the
SwiftPad HQ. They were on Cornell Road. As the crow would fly,
the industrial district was straight through the easternmost sec-
tion of the park, but it was burning. Luckily there was no wind.
It had been a late spring, and while it wasn’t very dry, the under-
growth was dense. She looked up and saw dark clouds moving up
from the south.
They hiked down and picked up a ride in front of the
Audubon Society Center. Mosley told them where, and they were
taken directly there.
The industrial district looked like a town hit by a rogue tor-
nado. Some buildings were untouched and some were shot up and
in a couple of cases burned. The SwiftPad HQ was in the former
category. There were two sentries posted on the front corners of
the perimeter, but they looked relaxed. Peggy jumped out of the
truck and went into the former mostly wooden warehouse.
She walked in, her AK slung over her shoulder, and was
greeted by two older men, who looked beat.
“Where have you been? We had to stay here all night,” one
of them said.
“Sorry,” said Peggy. She smiled and gave them a flimsy salute,
which caused the two guards to shake their heads in mild dis-
gust. She was followed in by Mose and a couple of others, who
took over debriefing the two guys who had been relieved. She
walked into the main “foyer,” if that was what it was. It didn’t
look anything like what she expected a tech HQ to look like.
The walls were raw, unfinished plywood. There were wires lying
on the floor, held down by gray duct tape. Old couches and big
pillows that looked right out of the 1970s were spread around the
vast space. It smelled a little mildewy. Surrounding and above
were conference rooms, again, cheap furniture and mismatched
chairs. In the back, up on the balcony that overlooked everything,
she saw the top of a man’s head, chin in his hands, listening to
someone whom she couldn’t see. He looked familiar.
She and Mose climbed up the raw wooden stairs to the bal-
cony and saw a man with a head covered with a two-day stubble,
and a goatee that was morphing into a full beard. He was talking
to a woman about thirty, white, hair bushed out, like it was recently released from imprisonment, sitting in front of him, with her legs askew.
“Hello, how goes the battle?”
“Not bad, but not quite over,” said Mose.
“Aren’t you – Kip Rehain?” Peggy was squinting, not exactly
sure she was right.
“That is what everybody keeps telling me.”
“My – uh – friend Nathan Schuette said he was going to go to
your place last night.”
“Who are you?”
“Peggy. Margaret Stromborn.”
“Holy shit. Maggie! We waited for you. Wasn’t there another
woman with you?”
“Alison, uh, she works with Spence, my husband.” Peggy
realized she had no idea what her last name was. All State in
basketball 10 years ago, she did remember that. “I think she was
kidnapped by the guys now running Reigny Deigh. They might
have been able to fly out.”
“What is the status of your company, Mr. Rehain?” asked
Moseley.
“Mr. Rehain? Shit, everybody calls me Chubby. This is Hadley.
She knows more about that than I do.”
Mosley didn’t see any chub in “Chubby,” but an almost
skinny, clear-eyed guy of about 45 or 50, with stubble on his
scalp, and a goatee gone to seed.
“Internationally, not bad,” said Hadley, who was filling out
a tight, black body suit in a most attractive fashion. “But we
lost connection to almost all of our US-based data centers last
night. The main link to BC Canada is still up, and that is giving
us pretty good international coverage. Otherwise our network
is ‘blinking’ 12:00 o’clock. But the interesting thing is – China
opened up their firewall to SwiftPad. We gained 180 million new
users in the last four hours. It is all relayed too – we have no data
centers there so it is piggybacking on Korea and Vietnam’s links,”
Hadley reported.
“Just got a message from our CTO, Arkie,” said Chubby. “He
is working from an ‘undisclosed location.’” Kip didn’t mention it
was the compound down in the Coast Range. “We expect there
will be a reaction from the Feds to all of this, and we need to
co-locate system management down there for redundancy.”
“The Ishpeming Committee is concerned about – the direction
your company might be taking in the wake of Ms. Oglethorpe’s –
kidnapping,” Mose said.
“I’ll be in touch with them soon. I am leaving for the Midwest
tonight. If they took Cynthia there, I need to go and find her. I
don’t give a shit about anything else right now. Arkie will run
things on the West Coast for now.”
“Don’t forget my husband. Or his colleague.”
“Alison Aykroyd and Spence Stromborn. We are doing every-
thing we can to track them,” said Mose.
Aykroyd, thought Peggy. Of course.
“No, I won’t forget,” said Kip. “I plan to make my way up
to Michigan, to see the Committee. I am going to go through
RedHat country, get the scoop on the situation. I think I can pass
as one of them. Any word on security in Ishpeming?”
“They are fine. Seven thousand new troops are training there.
A Great Lakes Coast Guard squad defected, so no one will sneak
up on them from the water. It’s battle stations all over the country,
especially after last night.”
“What’s in the backpack, Mr. – uh – Chubby?”
“Five million dollars in hundreds. Over a hundred pounds of
paper. “
Mose was the only one who laughed.
“Want a ride? Want to go see Nate, Peggy?” Kip asked.
“Can I go?” Peggy looked at Mose.
“Yeah. You are relieved.” Mose looked at Peggy, and smiled.
She stepped over and planted a kiss on his lips
came on at 5:50 am, and lasted five minutes. The couple who
owned the house had welcomed the Ishpems in weeks ago, and
had moved into a friend’s house over in Raleigh hills, and no one
had disturbed anything in the house, including the music settings
on their sound system.
Mosley lay sleeping. Peggy opened her eyes, and an involun-
tary mental inventory quickly booted up in her head. Two days
ago (or was it decades ago?) 6 am bike into town, to the gym,
stretching and lifting, then biking across town. Teaching her 8
am psych 101 class at PSU, followed by coffee with a student
she was advising, an hour break reading in her tiny closet of an
office, lunch, seminar with five graduate students, then waiting
around for three hours before her “The Future of Psychology”
night class. Then arriving home to find an old lover,(actually, she
realized sadly, the only old lover) casually talking to her husband.
She hadn’t seen Nate in 20 years. Dinner, horrible news on TV.
Back on the bike yesterday, across town, and – oh, yeah – she
killed a man, shot him in the head when she panicked. That was
new. But her husband was in jail, not her, and not Nate either,
more riding, up the steep hill to Washington Park, meeting the
woman her husband was seeing on the side – no, she didn’t know
that. Then standing inches away, two cops shot dead. Into the
woods, to a murderous firefight that lasted all night, and now – in
a million-dollar bedroom overlooking the city with a hard, young
soldier. So hard. She stifled a giggle, and looked at the time on
her fone on the teak wood night table next to the bed. It was 6:10
am. About three hours in bed, with some sleeping. And what did
you do yesterday?
Well – she skipped one thing. About 2 am they had stormed
into Gordy Lobetts’ condo. It had strong doors and locks. Mose
had some C4 and boom, boom, they were in.
Peggy went up on the balcony where she had seen Alison’s
light. She had expected to find her body, but nothing, only the
residue of a hasty exit. A gum wrapper was on the floor. She
opened it up, hoping somehow it might have a message, but it
was blank. She looked through each room, looking under cups,
in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, everywhere. No clue,
no sign of anything other than a bunch of people had been there,
drinking coffee, eating pastry, and a deli plate filled with baby
carrots, empty bottles of scotch, food left out, already beginning
to smell, and they didn’t wipe their feet either.
Mose told her, carefully, hesitantly, that another team had
broken into the Justice Center and freed almost one hundred
people that (V)ICE had been holding. But no Spence, although
one of the prisoners remembered seeing them take him away.
Mose had seemed surprised at her reaction, but later she would
have no memory of how she felt when she heard the news.
She didn’t feel bad about where she had ended her day. She
didn’t believe it, but as she searched her brain and listened to
whatever popped up, and it was clear, she really didn’t feel bad.
Yesterday, it must have been because of yesterday, she thought.
She had developed a hardened fatalism about life in the last
12 or so hours. It was the most natural thing in the world to fall
into bed with Mose, after last night. They had wiped out most
of a squad of (V)ICE commandos, and left the prisoners zip-tied
together around a huge Douglas fir. Then were ordered to “hold”
the nearby section command post, and that was what they were
doing. It had nothing to do with Spence. Or Nate either, not in
the slightest. She had never experienced anything like last night.
She wondered, would Nate be proud of her? Why would she even
care? The thought disturbed her. He had left her in an incredibly
dangerous situation, but she had come through.
“You awake?” Mosley asked.
“Yeah.” Even with so little sleep she had never felt more awake.
“We gotta get going. Siena said we had to get down to the
SwiftPad HQ by 9 am and relieve the guard. I would rather do
that than clean up. Bodies, blasted trucks –”
“And fire, can you smell it?” Peggy sat up, revealing her
breasts. “How old are you, Mosley?”
Mose laughed. “Twenty-three.”
She pulled the blanket up, to cover herself. Not much older
than her daughter.
“You get up first,” she said. She waited for Mose to ask her
that question, but to her immense relief it never came.
“Have you ever read anything about the Six-Day War – Israel
back in the sixties?” Mosley got up out of bed from a flat sit, no
hands. His naked ass – she couldn’t believe it was so beautiful.
“No,” she said.
“Apparently it was an orgy in Israel after the war. At the time
they weren’t sure how it was going to go. The idea that Egyptians
and Syrians might end up occupying Tel Aviv was not out of the
realm of possibility. They were sure it would be a long war at best.
But when it was over, and they had taken the Golan Heights and
Sinai – well – everybody was fucking. It was like a patriotic duty.
Israeli women let it all hang out for a week. That closeness to
death is an incredible aphrodisiac.”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know. I’ll – get dressed out in the – out there. See if I
can find something quick to eat.”
They walked down the winding road along the ridge. People
were coming out of the houses and applauding them. They
were soon joined by other Ishpems, as the rebels were becoming
known. They walked with weapons at ready, on the shoulders of
the road, covering their side, trusting the colleagues had the other
side. Where had she learned that? Peggy had read books on war,
and on the psychology of combat. It had fascinated her, and some
instinct for battlefield survival had somehow emerged in her last
night. She stood her ground, even when the man next to her went
down. Didn’t faze her. Where did that come from, she wondered?
Their orders were confirmed by fone to make haste to the
SwiftPad HQ. They were on Cornell Road. As the crow would fly,
the industrial district was straight through the easternmost sec-
tion of the park, but it was burning. Luckily there was no wind.
It had been a late spring, and while it wasn’t very dry, the under-
growth was dense. She looked up and saw dark clouds moving up
from the south.
They hiked down and picked up a ride in front of the
Audubon Society Center. Mosley told them where, and they were
taken directly there.
The industrial district looked like a town hit by a rogue tor-
nado. Some buildings were untouched and some were shot up and
in a couple of cases burned. The SwiftPad HQ was in the former
category. There were two sentries posted on the front corners of
the perimeter, but they looked relaxed. Peggy jumped out of the
truck and went into the former mostly wooden warehouse.
She walked in, her AK slung over her shoulder, and was
greeted by two older men, who looked beat.
“Where have you been? We had to stay here all night,” one
of them said.
“Sorry,” said Peggy. She smiled and gave them a flimsy salute,
which caused the two guards to shake their heads in mild dis-
gust. She was followed in by Mose and a couple of others, who
took over debriefing the two guys who had been relieved. She
walked into the main “foyer,” if that was what it was. It didn’t
look anything like what she expected a tech HQ to look like.
The walls were raw, unfinished plywood. There were wires lying
on the floor, held down by gray duct tape. Old couches and big
pillows that looked right out of the 1970s were spread around the
vast space. It smelled a little mildewy. Surrounding and above
were conference rooms, again, cheap furniture and mismatched
chairs. In the back, up on the balcony that overlooked everything,
she saw the top of a man’s head, chin in his hands, listening to
someone whom she couldn’t see. He looked familiar.
She and Mose climbed up the raw wooden stairs to the bal-
cony and saw a man with a head covered with a two-day stubble,
and a goatee that was morphing into a full beard. He was talking
to a woman about thirty, white, hair bushed out, like it was recently released from imprisonment, sitting in front of him, with her legs askew.
“Hello, how goes the battle?”
“Not bad, but not quite over,” said Mose.
“Aren’t you – Kip Rehain?” Peggy was squinting, not exactly
sure she was right.
“That is what everybody keeps telling me.”
“My – uh – friend Nathan Schuette said he was going to go to
your place last night.”
“Who are you?”
“Peggy. Margaret Stromborn.”
“Holy shit. Maggie! We waited for you. Wasn’t there another
woman with you?”
“Alison, uh, she works with Spence, my husband.” Peggy
realized she had no idea what her last name was. All State in
basketball 10 years ago, she did remember that. “I think she was
kidnapped by the guys now running Reigny Deigh. They might
have been able to fly out.”
“What is the status of your company, Mr. Rehain?” asked
Moseley.
“Mr. Rehain? Shit, everybody calls me Chubby. This is Hadley.
She knows more about that than I do.”
Mosley didn’t see any chub in “Chubby,” but an almost
skinny, clear-eyed guy of about 45 or 50, with stubble on his
scalp, and a goatee gone to seed.
“Internationally, not bad,” said Hadley, who was filling out
a tight, black body suit in a most attractive fashion. “But we
lost connection to almost all of our US-based data centers last
night. The main link to BC Canada is still up, and that is giving
us pretty good international coverage. Otherwise our network
is ‘blinking’ 12:00 o’clock. But the interesting thing is – China
opened up their firewall to SwiftPad. We gained 180 million new
users in the last four hours. It is all relayed too – we have no data
centers there so it is piggybacking on Korea and Vietnam’s links,”
Hadley reported.
“Just got a message from our CTO, Arkie,” said Chubby. “He
is working from an ‘undisclosed location.’” Kip didn’t mention it
was the compound down in the Coast Range. “We expect there
will be a reaction from the Feds to all of this, and we need to
co-locate system management down there for redundancy.”
“The Ishpeming Committee is concerned about – the direction
your company might be taking in the wake of Ms. Oglethorpe’s –
kidnapping,” Mose said.
“I’ll be in touch with them soon. I am leaving for the Midwest
tonight. If they took Cynthia there, I need to go and find her. I
don’t give a shit about anything else right now. Arkie will run
things on the West Coast for now.”
“Don’t forget my husband. Or his colleague.”
“Alison Aykroyd and Spence Stromborn. We are doing every-
thing we can to track them,” said Mose.
Aykroyd, thought Peggy. Of course.
“No, I won’t forget,” said Kip. “I plan to make my way up
to Michigan, to see the Committee. I am going to go through
RedHat country, get the scoop on the situation. I think I can pass
as one of them. Any word on security in Ishpeming?”
“They are fine. Seven thousand new troops are training there.
A Great Lakes Coast Guard squad defected, so no one will sneak
up on them from the water. It’s battle stations all over the country,
especially after last night.”
“What’s in the backpack, Mr. – uh – Chubby?”
“Five million dollars in hundreds. Over a hundred pounds of
paper. “
Mose was the only one who laughed.
“Want a ride? Want to go see Nate, Peggy?” Kip asked.
“Can I go?” Peggy looked at Mose.
“Yeah. You are relieved.” Mose looked at Peggy, and smiled.
She stepped over and planted a kiss on his lips
