Mercury Revolts (6 page)

“I don’t follow you, sir,” said Zion Johnson.

“Babcock assured me that if we were to cooperate and keep
any nosy congressmen from poking around, and that if we put enough money into it,
a bomb could be located. Do you follow me now, Zion?”

“You’re saying that the bomb that was lost…”

“…now is found,” finished Prowse. “Technically it’s not
exactly the same bomb, but there’s no way anyone could know that.”

“How the hell did you manage to build another bomb?” Zion
Johnson asked. “Wormwood was shut down. The facility was cleared out. There
were inspections and congressional hearings. It was all over the news for two
years!”

“We had some help,” said Prowse, glancing at Michelle. “We
have… allies who are very good at hiding things, and very good at convincing
people not to dig too deeply.”

Zion Johnson frowned. “But, Mr. President, if your concern
was loss of face with other countries, why haven’t you produced the bomb? Why
haven’t you gone public with it?”

Prowse sighed. “The problem is, even with help from our
friends, the Wormwood bomb took nearly three years to replicate. By that time,
the damage had been done. At this point, everybody just assumes the bomb is
hidden away in some top secret facility. After all, if it had been stolen by
terrorists, they would have used it by now. It would almost be more
embarrassing for us to come out and say, ‘Hey, look what we found!’”

Zion Johnson shook his head. “Just so I understand you
correctly, your response to your predecessor’s career-ending scandal was to
recreate the exact conditions that led to that scandal?”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” said Prowse. “The
difference is that we’re not going to get caught. And even if we do, how upset can
people really get at this point? If a Republican president can run a secret
nuclear weapons program behind Congress’ back, then it’s only fair that my
party gets a shot at it.”

Zion Johnson shrugged and nodded. It made sense in a
completely amoral, Machiavellian way—which is the way Zion Johnson tended to
look at things anyway. It was why he kept getting put in charge of illegal top
secret programs.

“So what is my involvement in all this?” Zion Johnson asked.
“What do you want me to do?”

“Well, as you know,” Prowse said. “There’s been a lot of
pushback lately regarding some of our more aggressive anti-terrorism policies.
A lot of bleeding heart types making noise about civil liberties and whatnot.
And I get it, I do. I mean, I campaigned on a lot of that stuff. Transparency,
civil liberties, it’s all good stuff in theory. But it’s getting to the point
where it’s getting difficult for me to do my job, which is to keep the American
people safe.”

“I understand,” said Zion Johnson.

“The problem is
,
people have
forgotten how great the threat to our way of life is. We prevent these
attacks—like that attempted poison gas attack in the New York subway last week,
but it doesn’t really penetrate. People don’t understand how close we are, all
the time, to the brink of chaos. I see the intelligence reports, and let me
tell you, it’s some scary shit. I mean, what if Wormwood had been stolen by
terrorists? Can you imagine?”

“I can,” said Zion Johnson, carefully.

“Do you know what the original purpose of Wormwood was? They
were trying to determine how small a nuclear bomb could be made, so that we’d
know what to look for. I guess it turned out that the simplest way to figure
that out was to actually build the bomb. Of course, nobody else has a hundred
billion dollars in secret funds to spend on building a miniature nuke, but
still, it’s scary to think how easy it would be to detonate something like that
in a medium-sized American city.”

Zion Johnson regarded the president coldly. “How easy would
it be?”

“For someone with your skills and contacts,” replied Prowse,
“it would be a cakewalk.”

Zion Johnson stared at the president, trying to parse his
words. “Sir, are you suggesting…?”

“Such a bomb must never be detonated in a heavily populated
area,” said Prowse. He turned to Michelle, who nodded slightly. “What I’m
envisioning is a scenario in which Homeland Security narrowly saves an entire
city from destruction, and the bomb detonates safely somewhere nearby. Far
enough away not to cause any serious
damage,
but close
enough to put the fear of God into the citizens.”

Ah, thought Zion Johnson. This was more like it. When he had
been mysteriously instructed to ‘step back’ his efforts to wipe out Chaos
Faction, he suspected something like this was in the works. It was about time
somebody in the Oval Office had the
balls to do what was
necessary to protect America from its enemies. He never expected that person to
be Danton Prowse, though—and as he glanced over at the young girl sitting
quietly to his left, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t.

“What city do you think the terrorists would pick?” he
asked. “Baltimore?”

“Too big.
Too close to Washington,
D.C.”

Zion Johnson nodded. Medium-sized city, far from Washington,
he thought. “Modesto, California?”

“Too obvious.
Travis
Babcock’s hometown.
And have you ever been there? A nuke would improve
the place.”

“Also, California’s not a swing state,” said Zion Johnson.

Prowse smiled. “I like the way you think,” he said. “I was
thinking Grand Rapids, Michigan.”

“A conservative stronghold in a Democrat-leaning state,”
said Zion Johnson.

“Exactly.”

Zion Johnson frowned, turning to look at Michelle. She met
his gaze impassively. It was clear he wasn’t going to get a straight answer about
who this little girl really was. Maybe he would never know. But Zion Johnson,
having worked with agents from Mossad and the Saudi Arabian intelligence
service, was used to dealing with shadowy figures. If the president didn’t want
to tell him who she was, he didn’t have to. Danton Prowse didn’t answer to Zion
Johnson. All Zion Johnson needed to know was that this mission served America’s
interests.

He turned back to Danton Prowse. “Mr. President,” he said,
“is this some sort of test?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you pretending to propose a false flag
terrorist attack just to see how I’ll react?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m not sure. Either you’re testing my conscience or my
loyalty.”

The president leaned forward and studied Zion Johnson’s
face. “Do you
have
a conscience, Zion?”

Zion Johnson thought for a moment. “A conscience is a
weakness of the will, sir.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“My will is strong, sir,” said Zion Johnson.

“Good,” said Prowse. He turned toward Michelle. “What do you
think?”

The girl eyed Zion Johnson for a moment,
then
said, “I think he will do.”

Prowse nodded and turned back to Zion Johnson. “So, Zion,
are you in?”

“I’m in.”

“Excellent,” replied Prowse. “Oh, one more question. “Aren’t
you a Republican?”

“I am,” said Zion Johnson. “But my country comes first.”

Chapter Five
    
 

Brimstone Research Facility,
Milpitas, California; August 2016

It was the coffee pot that finally
did Suzy Cilbrith in. Later she would claim it was simply an attack of
conscience, but in reality it was the abject refusal of any of the male
engineers to start a new pot of coffee that really made her lose her shit. It
was bad enough that
these
Lawrence Livermore rejects
couldn’t get the calculus right on a damage assessment for a medium-sized
American city, but it was simply unacceptable that they would take the last cup
from the pot and not make a new one. It was a matter of basic human decency.

In the back of her insufficiently caffeinated brain, various
moral and ethical qualms had been trying for some time to get some traction,
but it was the coffee issue that finally brought things to a head. Suzy began
to wonder what sort of monsters she was working with, who would deliberately
empty the coffee pot and not make a new one. Occasionally she would confront
one of the engineers, holding a pot that was empty save for a quarter inch of
foul brown liquid swirling about the bottom, like a prosecutor dangling a
revolver in front of a suspect, but the guilty party would just sit and stare
at her, like
she
was the crazy one.

After the third such unproductive confrontation, she started
to get philosophical about the problem. How was it possible for them to be so
completely unaware of their own crime, even when presented with
incontrovertible evidence? This line of thought led her to wonder whether she
possessed similar blind spots about her own foibles. She spent her lunch breaks
for several weeks cataloging her own day-to-day behavior, but was unable to
pinpoint any particular activity that could be considered a true offense
against her fellow engineers. She arrived on time, did what was expected of
her, was cordial and professional (if not particularly warm) in her exchanges
with co-workers, and respectful of her superiors. But then maybe her own biases
had skewed her selection of criteria for acceptable behavior. She considered
asking one of her co-workers to assess her criteria, but (for obvious reasons)
she didn’t trust their judgment. And perhaps such a request itself could be
considered a violation of some workplace norm. How could she know? It was an
ethical quandary.

Eventually she became so obsessed with this philosophical
conundrum that it began to affect her work. She started to make mistakes in her
calculations and miss deadlines. She justified these lapses by reasoning that
determining whether she was committing any horrible ethical breaches in her
interactions with her co-workers was at least as important as doing her actual
job. This line of reasoning led her to reflect on the value of her job, which
led her to the realization that she was working on an illegal program to
produce an insanely dangerous weapon whose only conceivable purpose was to kill
thousands of innocent civilians. Not only that, but the ultimate rationale for
building the bomb was old-fashioned political ass-covering: the government had
to produce a bomb so that it could claim that the bomb produced by the previous
illegal nuclear weapons program hadn’t been misplaced. The people she was
working for weren’t just evil; they were complete fucking assholes.

And that’s how Suzy Cilbrith found her ethical blind spot.

She wasn’t sure how her job had morphed from low-level
quality assurance engineer into accomplice to mass murder (or at least mass
deception). Her job had originally been to help assess the damage that would be
caused by a Wormwood-style bomb to an American city. Specifically, she ran
tests on the software that simulated a ten kiloton blast to make sure the
software was working properly. The data from the simulations would be given to
Homeland Security, who would theoretically use it to train first responders,
like firefighters, police and paramedics. The program—called Brimstone—was
created by Congress after the Wormwood scandal, to make sure first responders
were as prepared as possible in case the missing bomb were ever used in an
American city. Congress was so concerned about the possibility of the Wormwood
bomb being used on American soil that it approved a budget for Brimstone that
was ten times that of the Wormwood project. All the scientists and engineers
who had been fired from the Wormwood project were rehired for Brimstone, and
many more were added. Suzy had been in college during Wormwood, but she was
swept up in the Brimstone hiring spree, given top secret clearance, and put to
work testing software.

All of this was kept secret, of course. Congress never
explicitly authorized Brimstone; the funding was hidden in a vague bill aimed
at “nuclear non-proliferation.” It wouldn’t do to let the public know that the
government was terrified one of its own bombs would be used against it. The
truly ironic part of all this was that the senior personnel on the Brimstone
project (who were also the senior personnel on the Wormwood project) knew very
well that Brimstone was completely unnecessary, because the bomb hadn’t been
stolen; it had been commandeered by agents working for President Babcock. They
didn’t know what Babcock had done with the bomb, but they knew it was unlikely
to turn up anywhere in the United States. So these bomb-makers, who had been
given a pointless task by bureaucrats who were in no position to judge whether
the task were being properly carried out, went back to the President, who was
in hot water over a lost bomb, and asked him whether their efforts might be
better spent “finding” the missing bomb. Babcock met with the president-elect,
Danton Prowse, and they agreed (with some prodding from a certain angelic
advisor) that “finding” the bomb would indeed be
Good
for the Country. And just like that, the program designed to deal with the
fallout of the Wormwood bomb became a program to build another Wormwood bomb.

None of the lower-level engineers—like Suzy—knew about any
of this, of course. Suzy’s first hint came when she tried to explain to the Homeland
Security liaison how data in her simulation report could be of use to
paramedics, and was met with a blank stare. He tried to cover it up, but it was
clear to Suzy that the man had never actually talked to any first responders.
Which was absurd, unless her superiors were misleading her about
the whole purpose of Brimstone.
She tried dealing with the problem the
way she normally did: by getting a pedicure and changing her hair color—purple,
this time—but this cure-all failed to soothe her conscience. Three months and
twenty-eight empty coffee pots later, she finally snapped.