Year Zero (34 page)

“So how’s life as a gazillionaire?” I asked Del, only half-jokingly.

He gave me a wry smile. When he’d had enough of committee life, Judy had personally arranged this new job for him at two and a half times his old salary.
³

Once the music executives gathered up their briefcases and left, Judy introduced me to the senator as a rising superstar in the firm (which made me briefly giddy, despite everything that was going on), and Manda as her Hungarian niece Mysti, who couldn’t speak a word of English, but still made a remarkably good living in Manhattan as a performer.

The senator fixed me with a serious and appraising look as he shook my hand. This made for a regal moment, as he’s the Hollywood ideal of the silver-haired statesman. At six-two, he towers, but doesn’t loom over most of his supplicants. He’s lean but not scrawny, wears impeccably tailored suits, and tops them off with colorful ties that are creative
but not excessively so. The only odd touch is these straitjacket-like shirts that he wears. They’re starched enough to retain their shape in a trash compactor, and have extralong collars that must put his neck into traction whenever he buttons one up. It’s whispered that he wears them because he got sick of media consultants and handlers always telling him to hold his head high (a constant refrain in Washington, where jowl minimization is a citywide obsession). And it works—but at the cost of giving him the air of a remarkably career-oriented turtle.

After the introductions, Judy got right down to business. “Believe it or not, Senator, I’m bringing you a matter today that’s more connected to your work on the Intelligence Committee than your role on Judiciary.”

“In that case, I’m all ears,” Fido said. And he wasn’t alone, as I had no idea what Judy was going to say now that our stereopticon was gone. But the Intelligence Committee reference made me worry that she was about to ad-lib some kind of tie between our licensing needs and an imaginary Third World terrorist threat. This wouldn’t be a bad idea in theory—except that Judy has this strange dyslexia when it comes to geography. She’s also militantly disinterested in (and therefore uninformed about) developing countries, what with their paltry markets for legal services.

“Sir,” Judy began, “are you familiar with Abdulistan? I’m talking about the breakaway province of Pashtun. Not the … emcee.”

I was quite certain that neither existed, but Fido nodded gravely.

“There’s a criminal gang out there that’s very well known to my firm. Ex-apparatchiks from the local Soviet party. We once sued them in Dubai for pirating CDs, and
won a huge judgment. But they slipped across the border into Pakistan before it could be enforced.”

Pakistan and Dubai don’t share a border any more than Brazil and Alabama do. And Fido knows the region well from his work with the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security. But he just nodded again—and I started to relax. Judy speaks with such charisma and authority that when she says something that everyone knows is factually wrong, her listeners just feel embarrassed for not understanding the world properly.

“Anyway,” Judy continued, “it seems that these guys have graduated from penny-ante music piracy to weapons of mass destruction. Happens all the time. In this case, an informant in the file-sharing world tells us that the Abdulistanis have snagged some dirty bionukes from Mongolia.”

“That’s alarming.” Fido’s obvious concern made it clear that Judy’s superpower was working its usual magic.

“Luckily, they’re crooks and not ideologues,” she continued. “So they’re willing to trade their weapons away. Cuba’s offered them a fortune in barter. But you have something that they want more than venison and cheap gin.”

Manda shot me a desperate look. As the daughter of an international relations professor, she knew Judy was claiming that an imaginary nuclear weapon had leaked from a nonnuclear nation into a breakaway region of Pashtun—which itself is a language, and not a country. She might have tried to nudge the conversation toward sanity, but having been cast as a Hungarian monoglot, she was in no position to do so.

I caught her eye and gave her a reassuring smile. I was no longer concerned in the least.

“So what do the terrorists want?” Fido asked.

“Freedom fighters, Senator. It turns my stomach, too, but we have to call them that to have any shot at a deal with them. What they want is the unilateral, retroactive, and unconditional suspension of the fines in the Copyright Damages Improvement Act. All fines ever accrued under the law revoked. In Abdulistan, and all points beyond. Infinitely beyond, in fact. That part’s important.”

“They want to suspend the Copyright Damages Improvement Act? But … why?”

“It’s their
generalissimo
,” Judy said, lowering her voice as if to foil Abdulistani bugs. “Macaca something. He’s some kind of techno anarchist. Lessig must have gotten to him.”
⁴

Fido looked at Judy with a combination of alarm and desperate confusion. “But we can’t negotiate with terrorists!”

“Freedom fighters, Senator. And it’s not a negotiation. It’s more like haggling. There’s a difference. And we’ve only got a few hours to show them that we’re serious about striking a deal.”

“But … how do you think our
friends
will react to this?” Fido was getting frantic. The media magnates who drip out the trickle of feigned artistic validation that he so craves would rabidly oppose any change to the Copyright Damages Improvement Act—even if it meant that a few cities
had to take it in the teeth from a “dirty bionuke.” Forced to choose, he’d probably do the right thing. But he’d desperately hate to enrage his patrons if he could possibly avoid it. It had been almost a year since two seconds of one of his songs had accompanied a scene transition in an Adam Sandler movie, and Fido was craving more Milk Bone.

“That’s the beauty, Senator—the labels will support this one hundred percent.” Judy looked slyly back and forth, as if verifying that we were alone. “It’s Bono. He’s the linchpin to the whole thing. He met Macaca at the TED Conference last year, and is negotiating with him right now. And he’s figured out a way to get the label people on board. The plan is to act like we’re giving the Abdulistanis exactly what they want. But then we’ll pull the deal at the eleventh hour—and placate them by putting on a huge festival to benefit their rain forest. It’ll be like Live Earth—only without Al Gore.” That last bit was a cunning jab at a raw nerve. Fido had been teed up to make a fleeting, but ego-stroking walk-on appearance at 2007’s Live Earth Festival. But Al Gore was Live Earth’s coproducer, and put the kibosh on this.

The whole performance was vintage Judy. And within twenty minutes, we walked out of there with the skeletal outline of a mock bill to eradicate the fines that were enacted by the Copyright Damages Improvement Act. It was even printed on Judiciary Committee stationery, because Fido’s assistant had set up a little office in one of the suite’s rooms. The odds of our draft actually becoming law were drastically lower than my odds of becoming the Shah of Peru. But it only needed to wow Paulie into giving us a couple of extra days.

Once we were back in the town car and heading toward our meeting with The Munk, Judy pulled the Guardian’s
Foiler key chain out of her suit pocket. “So what’s this?” she asked, pinching the tacky thing between a thumb and a forefinger and holding it far from her body, as if it were a rat carcass.

“A Refined device in disguise,” I said. “It’ll prevent Paulie’s people from Wrinkling you against your will.”

“Not that you don’t deserve it,” Manda said. “I mean, were you trying to make the senator think that I’m a Hungarian stripper, or something?”

“I figured Romanian would be a bit far-fetched,” Judy said absently, as she pulled the key chain up to her eyes and gazed at it in fascination. “So this little thing can seriously stop me from disappearing into a—”

Puff of smoke
.

No, she didn’t say those words—she disappeared into one. Strictly speaking, it was more of a puff of fog, I guess, because it didn’t smell like anything, and it left a moist residue on her seat. But whatever it was, Judy was gone, daddy, gone. And so was the draft outline of that law, which she had carefully stored in the attaché case that disappeared along with her.

Manda and I just stared
at the empty spot that Judy had occupied as the town car inched toward our meeting with The Munk. “So much for Guardian technology not sucking ass,” I finally said.

“Do you think she’s … okay?” Manda asked.

“I think so. Paulie could have sent my cousin to the ocean floor when he Dislocated him out of the cavern last night. Or to Pluto. But he sent him to a street corner. So he probably just put Judy someplace where she’ll be fine, but out of the way.” For the next few hours. Whereupon he’d basically sentence her and every other living person to death.

“That’s my sense, too.” Manda was silent for a moment. Then, “So now what?”

“We could … tell Fido that Judy’s been abducted? By an Abdulistani splinter cell? And that we need another copy of that document to spring her?”

Manda shook her head. “I’m sure Judy already stretched his gullibility to the breaking point. I can’t imagine he’d buy that.”

I nodded. “And I’m sure he’s in another meeting by now, and we’d never get access to him without Judy anyway.”

Manda considered this. “So what else?”

I thought hard. “I guess we could try to get something compelling from The Munk. He runs one of the world’s biggest music labels—so that could be almost as impressive as the document that we got out of Fido. The trouble is that he doesn’t know me. And we don’t have Judy with us. And we don’t have the stereopticon. And even if we could win the guy over, his label is just one of many, big as it is.”

“That doesn’t sound very promising,” Manda said. “Although if there’s any lever to pull in the entire music industry, he’ll know about it, right? So he might come up with a way to fix this mess that we haven’t thought of ourselves.”

“True. So should we go and tell him exactly what’s going on, and hope for the best?”

Manda shrugged. “Why not? If he doesn’t believe us, we’ll bail after five minutes, and try something else.”

I nodded slowly. This was better than nothing. Just. “Meanwhile, we should try to do something to derail Paulie down in Grand Central.”

“Like what?”

I thought for a moment, then it hit me. “Start a mutiny.”

Manda looked at me blankly.

“I’m serious. Everybody down there loves you. They also love humanity, and our music—and they don’t seem to like Paulie any more than we do. If you tell them what’s happening, I’ll bet they’ll rally to you.” I grabbed at my suit
jacket pocket and found it empty. “Dammit—where’s the map to the transmission facility?”

“Pugwash has it,” Manda reminded me. “You wanted him in position at the Waldorf, in case we need him to go down there.”

“Right. Let’s get him on the line.”

I called Pugwash and put him on speaker, and we quickly formed a multipronged plan. I would meet with The Munk, and try to come up with something as compelling as the memo that we briefly had from Fido. Manda would meanwhile head straight to the Waldorf, and connect with Pugwash. The two of them would then go down to the Decapus settlement, start a mutiny, and corner Paulie. If that didn’t work, Pugwash would try to persuade Paulie to give us a bit more time. This was a perfect role for my cousin, because he’s actually a decent negotiator—and he and Paulie are cut from a similar cloth.

“How much time do we need?” Pugwash asked.

“Whatever you can get from him,” I said. “A week, a day, a few hours. Hell—twenty minutes, if that’s all you can manage. Everything we’re doing right now is strictly meant to buy us more time. So do whatever it takes to get some.”

“Whatever it takes?”

“Absolutely. Whatever it takes.”

The car pulled up in front of the Peninsula Hotel just as we were finalizing all of this (the three-and-a-half-block drive having taken over ten minutes in midtown traffic). We were there because The Munk famously does business out of hotel penthouses when he’s in town from L.A. There’s no practical reason for this, because unlike Fido, he has extensive offices available to him in New York. In fact, the
headquarters
of the label he runs are in New York. He just never
shows up there, because slumming it under the same roof as his minions would subtract too much from the theater of being the boss. So instead, he has them navigate snarled traffic, oozing slush, or hellish humidity to reach his realm.