Although the online topo maps were helpful, target selection was a problem that couldn’t really be solved until he went to the sites with a GPS. He’d purchased a Garmin watch for just that purpose. It had a built-in GPS system, so he could take readings unobtrusively.
He had a hierarchy of “small targets,” headed by Joe Sozio, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. But he didn’t want to start with them. That would be like eating dessert before the main course.
The Patent Office was an obvious candidate for his tests, but the impact of the exercise might not be widely reported. The Patent Office was a bit like a tree falling in the forest. If nobody saw it fall and nobody heard it, what was the point? The New York Stock Exchange was a better choice in terms of impact, but its location was problematical. The sightlines would be terrible. Ditto the chances of getting away in the traffic.
He considered knocking out a satellite, but rejected the idea. For one thing, he wasn’t sure he could do it. For another, the incident might not be publicly reported. Then, too, he didn’t want to interfere with airline traffic before Irina arrived.
Yet another target, and a tempting one, was the Church of Latter-Day Saints – the Mormon Temple. For one thing, it was close, a straight shot, maybe four hundred miles east on the loneliest road in the world. More to the point, he had a grudge with the Mormons: They’d all but run the Paiutes off their traditional lands. It would be wonderful and fitting to trash the genealogical archives that were the Church’s bedrock. But it wouldn’t have much of an impact. Mormon researchers would be inconvenienced, and forced to work with paper until the records were restored. That would lead to fewer baptisms in the short run, but if you weren’t a Mormon, why would you care? Wilson didn’t.
That left SWIFT.
This was the acronym by which the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was known. A nearly invisible enterprise of massive import, SWIFT linked about 8,000 financial institutions in 194 countries, processing messages among them involving transactions adding up to more than six trillion dollars per day. And it wasn’t in New York.
It was in Culpeper, Virginia, a sleepy town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even better, Culpeper would be a twofer, because another important financial institution was located there – the so-called Culpeper Switch, the central node in the U.S. Federal Reserve banking system. Why these two important institutions had chosen such an obscure place to call home was a mystery. But it was a bonus for him. More buck for the bang, you might say.
He was guessing that in Culpeper, sightlines would prove no problem, and what’s more, he’d be using the weapon in the same way he intended to use it on June 22.
It was fun to think about where to strike. The beam was flexible, and he hadn’t decided exactly what degree of damage to inflict. Certainly, he didn’t want to create a new Tunguska – not with these targets. That would draw too much attention, too soon. Ideally, the tests should be less than catastrophic, a little ambiguous, even a bit subtle. Let people wonder: Was this an accident? Some kind of natural occurrence – or what? How had it happened? Once he deployed the weapon in the tower, everything would come apart at the seams – and America would know that it was under attack. Or had been. Because, by then, the war would be over. And there would be nothing subtle about it. (Nor would there be anything subtle about what was going to happen to Robbie Maddox. But that was different. That was personal.)
All of the hard physical work had transformed Wilson’s body. After two months at the B-Lazy-B, he was ripped. A healthy diet, along with the lifting and climbing and hauling, had turned his body hard. He’d never been this fit, not when he was running track and playing ball – not even when he was lifting weights in Allenwood.
It was a good time. Moving from one thermal pool to another at the end of the day, it occurred to Wilson that in many ways he’d never been happier. Lying back in the water, he luxuriated in its heat, the air on his face crisp and cold, redolent of pine and sulfur. Looking up through a canopy of trees, he saw a jet sliding silently across the sky, heading west – and the future flashed before his eyes, like so much spatter. Because, of course, it was going to be an abattoir. There was no way around it. He was an instrument of the past. Nothing more, and nothing less – the fulfillment of a prophecy.
He had been named for the man who created the Ghost Dance. At least, that’s what he’d been told. He’d never lived on a reservation himself, though Mandy had taken him to a few, insisting that he should be proud of his heritage – but that was wishful thinking. Until he’d gone to prison, he’d more or less seen his Indian identity as something to overcome, a stigma.
Mandy had to drag him to the one ritual that truly made an impression on him – the reenactment of the Sun Dance. At the time he’d complained about it. Getting up at dawn? Watching a bunch of old men sing and dance? But to his surprise, something about waiting in the cold and dark, something about the solemn anticipation in the midst of so many others who looked like him, had been a powerful and exhilarating experience.
It seemed as if he’d been almost ready to claim his cultural inheritance – but a few weeks afterward his life came apart and the opportunity was lost. The State took him away from Mandy, and he got caught up in trying to survive at his new foster home, with its Godsquad parents and seven foster siblings. The closest he got to the Sun Dance again was to write a paper about it.
Until he’d gone to prison, “Jack Wilson” was just a name, a nod to history – like George Washington or Martin Luther King.
This changed once he found himself behind bars, stripped of his invention and his future. Then he realized there was a reason for the name: He was the reincarnation of Jack Wilson. He was the Ghost Dancer.
Suddenly, he understood that what happened to him wasn’t an aberration. It was a logical extension of the earlier genocide of Native Americans. Wilson’s imprisonment was inevitable. If anything, he thought, he was doubly doomed – once for his heritage, and again for his genius. Because, of course, the invasion had long since turned in upon itself, so that the whites were now devouring their best and brightest. Ayn Rand had taught him that.
Lying in the water with his eyes closed, wearing only the ghost shirt that was his skin, it occurred to Wilson that if revenge is a dish that’s best served cold, after ten years – a hundred years! two hundred years! – the temperature should be about perfect.
CHAPTER 31
Mike Burke stood by himself in a rainy breeze on the corner of South Audley Street and Grosvenor Square, watching a door at the side of the U.S. embassy. The day before, he’d seen a flood of workers pour out that door at the end of the day, avoiding the public entrance at the front. So he guessed this was the exit that Kovalenko would use.
It was almost five o’clock, and Burke had already been there for more than an hour. It would have been easier, of course, to wait outside the FBI agent’s apartment. It was probably somewhere around here, or over in Knightsbridge. But Kovalenko wasn’t listed in the telephone book or in any of the online directories Burke tried. To get an address, Burke would have to hire an investigator or sweet-talk someone who had access to the embassy’s internal directories. That would take a while, and he didn’t have the time.
So here he was, getting wet.
The line in front of the embassy snaked halfway around the block, organized by an airport-style rope-and-pole system. The queue was remarkably patient, almost docile, under a conga line of umbrellas. It was like a temporary village, linked to the outside world via dozens of cell phones. People were eating and playing cards, talking, reading, and changing diapers. Every so often, someone would dart around the block to use the facilities, then jog back to thank whoever it was that saved his place in line.