The long view, p.1
The Long View, page 1
The Long View
Book 14 of the April series
Mackey Chandler
Cover by Sarah Hoyt
Title by Phil Stracchio
Chapter 1
The Executive Council met at the Hawaiian Prime Minister’s whim and invitation. Since Robert Hoku formed a government and replaced Tanaka, the meetings had been weekly and didn’t always include the full second tier of government. He just called those in need of briefing or from whom he needed a brief.
Nick Naito had been invited to a council meeting just once to discuss options about how to increase Hawaii’s trade. They needed more foreign exchange to maintain the infrastructure essential to the public’s expectations. There were so many things Hawaiians couldn’t produce themselves. The power and distribution systems were out of date and required repair supplies such as line and insulators, transformers, and switching mechanisms just to stay functional with no upgrades. The biggest help for the system was the drop in population the islands had suffered. They at least had excess baseline generating capacity due to that.
The phone and internet services were more up-to-date, but there was every expectation that they would need to be upgraded every few years. That had been the pattern in the past with a new generation of phones requiring different services every few years. The USNA providers walked away from their investments when North America set sanctions on Hawaii. There was no longer any legal way to maintain the system or transfer local payments to the parent company. A huge one-time write-off looked much simpler and attractive in comparison to attempting to keep them running. That was much more hazardous now that North America made evading their expanding list of sanctions a criminal felony and made examples of some of the executives who tried various workarounds.
Few wanted to nationalize utilities except a couple of diehard socialists, but there was little choice but to do so. They also had no other choice but to award their maintenance contract to a telecom from Australia who had already turned down buying the system outright. The company had experienced people with current skills running a similar system and owned a compatible parts inventory. No other interest materialized. Any promises to do more than run the current system, such as committing to future investment were conspicuously absent in the deal after the telecom nationalization.
Australia was also the only compatible source for lots of other goods, such as new ground cars and parts to service them. The same applied to restaurant equipment, medical supplies, and even such common household items as appliances. Construction and maintenance of buildings were captive to the sizes and standards of studding, wiring, and plumbing fixtures.
The cost of shipping from Australia added to the price of everything. That was bad enough, but the fact they were a captive market meant there was little reason to moderate prices. Australia had its own cyclic supply problems, and sometimes Hawaii would compete with Australia’s domestic market for things in short supply.
Surprisingly, there was little public complaint that rebelling from North America had imposed these hardships. Typically, someone voicing such a complaint would have others inquire if they were ready to go back to legally mandated long sleeves and long-pants for bathing costumes on Hawaii’s beaches.
When Nick was called to a second executive session, he expected there would be some further discussion of his proposals from the first meeting. Other third and fourth-rank officials had put forth other suggestions. Some of them Nick considered practical and had already voiced his support for them.
The head of Health and Welfare, for example, suggested making Hawaii a medical vacation destination. There was considerable hostility to restarting a tourist industry after the old pattern, but he proposed to attract a much smaller volume of visitors who individually would bring much more money to the islands. The only opposition to that was from the head of the Native Hawaiians Council, who termed all visitors invaders.
Most of the huge oceanfront hotels were already demolished, and public access to the beaches was written into law for any future use of the land. Three of the remaining structures were closed but owned by corporations not under North American sanctions and eager to unload their white elephants any way possible. They could be refurbished and several floors converted to medical use. They could be connected to new construction on the land side, which would house the medical facilities such as imaging and operating theaters too difficult to retrofit in the old buildings.
A key part of the proposal was to recruit top medical talent worldwide by exempting them from taxation until they retired. Who wouldn’t want to live in paradise tax free? Nick took the risk to speak up and endorsed that right after the other man spoke. He thought he had a firm ally from that action.
Naito’s proposals included making Hawaii a banking center with the sort of privacy laws that Switzerland used to enjoy but which had been slowly eroded by threats and strong-armed tactics from North America. Currently, only the Russian Republic and a few Caribbean islands offer any effective banking privacy.
Another suggestion Nick made was to make Hawaii a free port for trade with space. Not only as a pass-through for other Earth nations, but domestically. He realized that proposal was encroaching on the territory of Commerce somewhat, but he’d sent an abbreviated form of that proposal to the head of Commerce and never gotten a reply.
Nick was mentally reviewing all those proposals, how to defend them, and some other possible courses of action when Jeremy Boland, the head of the National police, waved for Prime Minister Kanoa’s attention. That was pretty gutsy to hijack the meeting before the PM had a chance to set the agenda, but perhaps he had some horrific criminal problem that was urgent. He listened with half an ear to him accuse a prominent official of being a foreign agent. He was waiting for him to finish up so they could get back to the business and trade side of things in which he was actively interested.
When Boland named Nick as the object of his accusations everything in his carefully crafted mental lineup was suddenly irrelevant. He struggled to make the switch mentally. Down the table, heads turned to him. Most expected him to object, perhaps even to leap to his feet and object vehemently. He knew his reaction would set the opinions of the majority and be very hard to overcome later but he was shocked dumbstruck. The wrong words would do more harm than silence. He did exactly the correct thing on pure political instinct. He allowed himself an amused smile. It was so unexpected Boland faltered in his presentation. It was an obvious invitation to go ahead – dig yourself deeper.
No pause could have been brief enough to go unnoticed by this group of revolutionaries and political operatives. If Boland had a longer accusation prepared, he ruined its presentation by naming Nick too early. He didn’t detail which foreign government, or the manner of his betrayal before his presentation was deflected. After the fatal pause, he stumbled awkwardly through an emotional statement of the seriousness of the charges without detailing them. The switch to a defensive tone would undo him.
Nick looked up-table at Kanoa and got a slow nod that he was free to reply. Nothing else would have served, as his intended agenda was destroyed until this was addressed.
“One hardly knows where to begin,” Nick admitted. But he already knew exactly the path forward to neutralize this.
“My office exists precisely to promote good trade relations with other countries to our mutual benefit. If I speak to how I’ve succeeded I may be indicting myself as acting on behalf of another country than the one you have in mind. Would Mr. Boland identify which of our trading partners I’ve benefited too well?”
“You know damn well which one,” Boland said. He was showing some temper which suited Nick just fine. “You conspired with the Spacers to actually bomb our island. Then you never came forward and admitted to it.”
“Oh, and how did that benefit them?” Nick asked. “Did it eliminate some competition to a Spacer business?”
Boland’s bewildered expression said the question didn’t make any sense to him.
“I mean, if I’m improperly an agent of the Spacers, I must have done something to their benefit and not ours. It must benefit me too somehow or I’ve risked my standing in our government for nothing. That would make me a sadly stupid, useless agent, wouldn’t it? So, what did I do that was not only to their benefit but also to our detriment?”
“You gave them the location of the Hopkins Tropical Disease Center to remove it. It was a vital service for our own people and one of the leading centers for fighting such diseases in the world. It was a jewel of cutting-edge technology we’ll never replace. We not only lost the irreplaceable data and samples but murdered somewhere around two dozen researchers and support personnel.”
“Were some of those support personnel your national police, Jeremy?” Nick asked in a much quieter voice.
“We were charged with guarding it. So yes, we know four of our officers were killed. The final count we’ll never know because they were vaporized. Other civilians were injured and property damaged although the site was deliberately remote and inaccessible,” Boland said.
“What about the ship, Jeremy? You’re not going to pretend the destruction of the lab is unrelated to the destruction of the cruise ship Crown Jewel, are you? Are you objecting to the destruction of the ship too?”
“The ship was not sovereign Hawaiian territory or Hawaiian officers doing their duty.”
“Oh, you do know what ship I’m talking about,” Nick said. “I’m going to play you a file off my pad of my video conversation with Jeffery Singh. I’m sure you r emember him. He was the fellow who signed the treaty with North America for the Moon Queen.” It took Nick a moment to find it but nobody interrupted him.
“Mr. Singh,” Naito said with obvious relief.
“What happened to Jeff?”
“This is official, not friendly, and formality seems appropriate,” Naito said. “I was asked to call because I know you and they were scared you might not answer their call. This is not a call I want to make.”
“Well, get it off your chest. Is this about the hemorrhagic fever on the cruise ship?”
Naito surprised him by showing his teeth in an angry grimace and pounding the counter in front of him twice with his fist. A display of anger that seemed entirely out of character for the Naito Jeff knew.
“They wouldn’t tell me what sort of disease it was,” Naito choked out. “Morton would only say it was bad, really bad. The idiots deployed it as a doomsday weapon to be released if the islands were devastated as thoroughly as the North Americans were threatening. Morton claims he was against it too, but of course, everybody is against something after it is a disaster. He wasn’t against it enough to resign and go to the press to stop this madness.”
“I’ll take that for a yes,” Jeff said.
Naito just nodded, too overcome with emotion to speak.
“Can you get yourself calm enough to tell me what you expect me to do about it?” Jeff asked. “Why are you calling me? We have nothing to do with either end of this. We can shut off Home and Central like we did for the flu and let you slaughter yourselves ‘til your heart’s content. We’re in a much better place to do that than before. We were just getting ready to buy a bunch of systems and materials from Earth but there will be much less need for that if your world is in chaos.”
Naito nodded, visibly composing himself taking deep breaths.
“We have no weapons systems that can reach the ship to correct our error. I can almost assure you the powers that can, like North America, are going to dither about and hesitate until it is too late or worse, try to put a rescue team aboard to see if anyone can be saved and to find out the exact nature of the disease. Just like my fools, they always think they can contain it. We need you to vaporize that ship beyond any possibility of the virus surviving on the wreckage and spreading.”
“Oh no. Hell no,” Jeff replied. “You want me to be your butcher boy when the Earthies already think I’m a monster.”
“Much more a monster not to stop it when you have the means,” Naito insisted. “Morton said this will kill a couple of billion people.”
“What’s the point of removing the ship when you still have a stock of the filthy thing there on your island?” Jeff asked. “Are you volunteering to be cleansed too?”
“I know that was sarcastic,” Naito said. “I don’t have the authority to ask it but I think that’s exactly what you should do and the sooner the better.” He looked utterly resigned and exhausted.
Jeff was shocked to the core that the man was calling fire down on his own position. They looked at each other for a moment in silence, thinking different thoughts.
“Do you know where they made this God-awful thing?” Jeff asked.
“The lab? Yes, it’s not a secret. They did do some good things they bragged on. You can easily find it online.
“Split your screen and show me on a map,” Jeff ordered.
Naito looked shocked and scared but complied.
“How soon?” Naito asked. There was only one reason for Jeff to ask.
“Who knows if your call is secure or if they have your place bugged? I’m setting it up now. I’m dialing my weapon yield down as far as I can. I’ve never done that but I’m guessing it might be as low as twenty-five megatons to fifty to the high end. Certainly, the blast radius will be sufficient that nobody is going to rush a sample of this virus to safety even if they are listening to us and rushing to remove it right now.”
He was typing away as he spoke. After he had it all entered, he lifted an index finger for the camera and hit enter dramatically.
“Six minutes,” Jeff said. “Damn you all, for putting this on me to do. I’ll go locate the ship and destroy it now.” He cut off the call with no more pleasantries.
“That’s how eager Singh was to bombard either the ship or the lab,” Nick said. “He cursed me and abruptly terminated the conversation. I’m not entirely sure I haven’t squandered what goodwill I had with him or his people asking them to dirty their hands to correct Hawaii’s crime against humanity. I haven’t tried to call him again to know if he’ll even take a call from me after dumping this on him.
“I’m sure some of you here knew the story because Singh admitted to destroying the ship to a South African news outlet and the story was picked up elsewhere. I certainly make no apologies for saving a few billion lives. I’ll remind you some of them were going to be our own citizens. We’re remote but nowhere escapes a viral pandemic. If that’s a state secret it shouldn’t be. No crime of that scale should be hidden. Tanaka admitted his error and is in a self-imposed exile. So far nobody has been eager to track down every official and officer who helped him create such a monstrous weapon. The worst of those monsters were probably killed in the destruction of the laboratory.
“I suspected it was somebody from our intelligence community who carried that hemorrhagic fever onto the cruise ship but maybe I was wrong. If your officers were guarding the source of that evil, was it one of yours delivering it?”
All their heads turned when Nick paused to see if Boland would answer him. He sat there with a deer-in-the-headlights stare and no answer, so Nick spoke again.
“If this means you approved of destroying a third of humanity you need to resign and self-exile like Tanaka did. At least he had the sense to see he’d made a huge moral blunder. If you had a hand in this crime, can you at least assure us there aren’t any samples of this weapon that survived the destruction of the lab?”
“It wasn’t one of my officers on the Crown Jewel,” Boland said.
“Yes, but my veracity software is just shouting that you are evading and do know who it was,” Prime Minister Kanoa said.
“That isn’t admissible,” Boland replied. It wasn’t the right thing to say.
“This isn’t a court,” Kanoa said in a dangerously soft voice.
It wasn’t a question but the pause challenged Boland to answer and he couldn’t.
“Then who. . .” Naito started to ask him but Director Morton of intelligence cut him off.
“Wait. You’ll corrupt his response without a neutral baseline response for the software,” Morton warned him, and spoke first, looking at Boland.
“Was it the cute girl at the deli you told me about that took it aboard the ship?”
“I’m surprised you remember that story,” Boland told Morton.
“Was it someone from the Queen’s Medical Center,” Morton asked again.
Boland didn’t answer but he didn’t have to. The software in Morton’s spex could pick up changes in Boland’s breathing, pupil dilation, and even the pattern of skin temperature across his face. Speaking would just enrich the analysis beyond a yes or no.
“We could do better with drugs, a full cap, and a keyword list but go ahead and ask him now,” Morton invited Naito. “I think it will be a slam dunk when you have a hit.”
“OK, was it someone who worked for Intelligence who carried the disease aboard the cruise ship?” Naito asked.
Morton raised his eyebrows at Naito naming his agency first after he volunteered to help but admitted: “That upset him but the response is ambiguous.”
“Let me refine it,” Naito said. “Was it someone from Morton’s agency?”
Morton still didn’t like being targeted first but the response was much less intense which tended to exonerate him. It didn’t take him long to realize it was really to his benefit to be exonerated first.
“You’re good at this. I should hire you for an interrogator,” Morton decided after it went favorably for him.
“I don’t have to sit here for this,” Boland decided and put his hands on the table like he intended to rise.
“On the contrary. You will continue this informal session or be removed under arrest to a much more intense version with a full cap,” the PM said.
