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  As she climbed the warehouse’s exterior stairs, Chance’s thoughts turned to the progress being made on the construction of their new hideout downtown. They had secured the second floor of an office building right in the center of the city, and its “sterilization” would be finished within the week. Replacement of the wallpaper with material that blocked electromagnetic waves was still under way, but they could probably move in next week, though perhaps not start working there just yet. Chance raised her left hand, implanted with an RFID chip, to open the electronic lock beside the door. From inside the room, she heard Shiraishi’s fluent but strongly Russian-accented English. Chance opened the door a crack. In a room lit only by a single bare bulb, Shiraishi was seated on a bed facing a television, in the middle of a videoconference. Under the wavering light, she could see Shiraishi exhale white breath with every word he spoke. In this season, the unheated warehouse control room they used could drop below freezing. Thinking of Shiraishi holed up in these atrocious conditions for five long years, Chance felt renewed admiration for his devotion.

  “That is right, Jose,” said Shiraishi. “X-Man prefers them Syd Mead–style. I have no doubt that he will choose the illustration you made based on my sketch. So let us get that thousand dollars, yes.”

  “Thanks so much for your help, Kirilo,” said the man on the television screen. “But this satellite plan … Where did you get it? It’s uncannily realistic.”

  “My father drew up the plan himself. He used to design Soviet communication satellites. I just added a little touch of my own to make it more like the Rod from God.”

  Chance confirmed with some relief that Kirilo, the name Shiraishi was using, was from a zombie profile prepared by the Cyber Front. The real Kirilo Panchenko, a Ukrainian design drafter born in 1979, was already dead. It was no longer wise to use a made-up identity for illegal activities in the present age, when people could perform background checks online.

  Chance went behind the television so as not to enter the frame of the camera. Shiraishi continued his conversation with the man he had called Jose without even glancing at her. His lengthy time spent in hiding had taught him to dissemble flawlessly in this way. It amazed Chance that he had learned so much under the wing of such incompetent handlers.

  Shiraishi smiled brightly with his whole face as he spoke facing the camera. He had never smiled for Chance in that way. He seemed to be having a great time pretending to be someone else.

  “We have little time, Jose. Now is the time to get moving, is it not?”

  “You’re absolutely right. Speak to you soon then.”

  The television went dark, and the bare bulb overhead shaded Shiraishi’s face with thick shadows. “Thanks for the drawing, Chance,” he said. “I just took the liberty of using it. Well, aren’t you looking pissed? Is something wrong?”

  Chance came around to the front of the television and checked the videoconference log still displayed on the screen. Shiraishi had been talking with a man named Jose Juarez in East LA. His profile listed his job as “conceptual artist.” Probably working around Hollywood, she supposed.

  The source of the communication was listed as “University of Ukraine.” It was one of the many computers that had been seized by the Cyber Front, which were collectively referred to as “Sleeping Gun.” There was no shortage of computers in the world with laxly managed security. The Cyber Front’s particular target was devices in poor countries unable to update to the latest version of Windows. Shiraishi used these sitting ducks to route his conference calls.

  “You seem to have concealed the communication properly,” said Chance. “But exposing your face was a mistake.”

  “Relax. I took care of that.”

  “How exactly? Don’t underestimate the CIA and NSA. They can’t follow each and every transmission, but everything gets recorded.”

  Though nearly every communication over a network, including videoconferences, was encrypted, government organizations also held the encryption/decryption key for major services. Shiraishi’s connection to Ukraine would therefore remain encrypted (though even this could likely be cracked within eight hours or so), but the video signal received by the illustrator in Hollywood would be saved in CIA servers as nonencrypted video.

  “I know. That’s why I altered my face,” said Shiraishi, pointing to his eyes. He explained that he had used an intermediary program that randomly changed the angle and position of his mouth and eyes, which were used as recognition criteria by the facial-recognition engines of the software companies that supplied the CIA. He had also run his voice through a program that simulated the mouth and voice box to throw off voiceprint recognition as well. “The machines won’t even recognize it as a person’s face. The CIA’s continuously recording hundreds of terabytes every day. There’s no way they’d check videoconferences where no humans even appear.”

  “But that guy saw your face.”

  “True, I guess,” said Shiraishi with a shrug.

  “Never do that again. If you ever need to do another videoconference I can sit in for you.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask you next time.”

  Chance sighed. It wasn’t as if Shiraishi would ever keep such promises.

  Chance passed him two thermoses full of coffee. Shiraishi thanked her and poured some coffee into his cup.

  “So how’s the script for the Supreme Leader and the advertising account coming along?” asked Shiraishi.

  “I merged your account with the advertising sponsor. The cat food manufacturer Kitten Master. Payments come from the president’s Amex.”

  Chance forwarded information about Kitten Master from her smartphone to the television. It was a rapidly expanding manufacturer of cat food made from organic ingredients specifically for kittens. The Cyber Front had got their hands on the president’s lost smartphone and had stolen all the passwords for his accounts, including email, social networks, and advertising.

  “What’s the limit?” asked Shiraishi.

  “It doesn’t seem to have one. You could probably use it up to around $1 million.”

  Shiraishi whistled. “Poor guy. And all because of you, Chance.”

  “His fault for not looking after it,” she said, curtly ending their discussion of the advertisement before explaining that she’d already received permission to switch the Supreme Leader’s speech. The rehearsal and recording were to be conducted in Pyongyang at 9:00 p.m.

  “At 9:00 p.m. today?” Shiraishi said, half-closing his eyes and lowering his head slightly for a moment, as though thinking hard about something. “That means it’ll be starting soon.”

  “What?”

  “The rehearsal.”

  “Did you memorize all the time zones?”

  “You think I’d waste my time doing that? I just shine a light on a globe I imagine in my head and correct for economic blocs, that’s all. I’d never do something so stupid as memorize each and every one.” Shiraishi patted the sleeping bag he’d laid out on top of the bed. “Take a seat, why don’t you? Let’s have a gander at the princeling’s speech.”

  Fri, 11 Dec 2020, 12:15 -0700 (2020-12-11T19:15 GMT)

  Peterson Air Force Base

  “Come in.”

  Hearing the knock on his open door, Colonel Claude Lintz rolled up the mouth of the paper bag he’d had his nose in and put it behind his computer display. He’d never live it down if rumors spread that the reason he’d been late for work was that he’d gone to buy one of the organic wheat Danishes that Starbucks had started selling this year.

  Looking up at the door, he saw Staff Sergeant Daryl Freeman standing there holding a tablet.

  “Colonel Lintz. I’ve come to report on SAFIR 3,” said Freeman.

  “Ah yes. The incident from yesterday,” said Lintz. “Shouldn’t you be reporting that to Major Fernandez?”

  “I was told to report directly to you, sir. Let’s lea
ve the ‘space stuff,’ as they put it, up to the colonel.”

  “First I’ve heard of that. But he made the right call.” Lintz urged Freeman to take a seat. Someone like Sylvester who had started out as a pilot would be in over their head when it came to orbital objects. There was also something he wanted to ask Freeman. “I hate to do this when you’re the one who came to see me, but let me ask you something first. This story is about SAFIR 3, correct?”

  Lintz took a three-page document from his “undecided” tray and put it on the table. It was an article from Geeple with the headline “ROD from GOD attacks ISS!” The article had been contributed by X-Man, and the banner featured an illustration credited to Jose Juarez.

  “What do you think?” asked Lintz.

  Dragging his chair over, Freeman took one glance at the headline and frowned doubtfully with his thick eyebrows. “That’s the article from yesterday, isn’t it? I read it earlier, but this is my first time seeing the illustration. Do you mind?” he asked, picking up the printout and briefly looking it over. “This is very well done. There’s a swiveling solar array wing, and to prevent that from throwing off the center of gravity there’s a projectile serving as a counterweight. You can also tell that the containment truss has been duralumin welded. Every individual element is outdated, but it’s well thought out overall. Like a design from the nineties … no, I’d say late eighties.”

  “And what about the author of the article?”

  Freeman flipped through the papers and then put them back on the desk. “It’s just some geek’s wild speculation, sir. I’m pretty sure there was a B movie with the same title. He just stole that and put it together with some stuff he picked off Wikipedia. It’s amazing that someone could draw such a realistic rendering of the Rod from God with only an article like this as their guide. This Jose really knows his stuff. He might have gotten advice from someone in the industry.”

  In an age when private citizens were visiting the ISS on their own rockets, it wasn’t out of the question that a space-development professional might work on the illustration for a tabloid article.

  “I completely agree. Let’s report it just like that. Can I add your name to say you verified the report, Sergeant?”

  “That would be fine, but did you get a request for a report from somewhere?” Freeman crooked his neck quizzically.

  “Yup. And guess where from? Our friends next door at USNORTHCOM. From what I hear, the aeronautics people and political people are fretting like mad over this issue. They’re even asking if we can deploy the ASM-140, experimental stage or not. Space experts like us have got to keep our cool when we deal with this. So tell me about SAFIR 3.”

  Lintz wrote “checked by Sgt. Freeman” on a Post-it note and stuck it on the document before tossing it back into the tray.

  “Thank you, sir. I’m here to report the results of last night’s observations.” Freeman woke up his tablet and looked down at it. Lintz caught a sparkle of stubble on his chin that hadn’t been there yesterday.

  “You’re fast, Sergeant. Did you stay there overnight?”

  “Yes, sir. SAFIR 3 made an overhead pass just last night, so I watched it on the monitor at the Oregon site. I wanted to avoid the heavy daytime air traffic around there by going late and …”

  Stopping his words short, Freeman looked down at the tablet again, as though he was searching for some kind of error.

  “What’s the matter?”

  At Lintz’s question, Freeman straightened up and looked him in the eye. “The second stage of SAFIR 3 is accelerating,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Freeman swept the tablet to the side and put his hands together on top of the table. “There’s no mistake. I double-checked. With an optical telescope, I could even see the light that X-Man claims is the thruster.”

  Lintz took out the printout that he’d returned to the paper tray. He turned over the first page with the illustration on it and looked carefully at the sequential photographs with the caption “Moment of acceleration” for the Rod from God.

  Freeman slid the tablet across the table. “This is a high-resolution image from X-Man’s site.”

  On the screen was a photograph of a cylindrical object tilted diagonally. Its three-dimensional contours appeared in sharp relief against the blackish-blue sky.

  “Where was this taken?”

  “At 7.67 degrees south, 52.68 degrees east. That’s where X-Man runs his Seychelles Eye, an observatory located on the Indian Ocean.”

  “It’s been asleep for quite a while … It can’t actually still be rotating?” said Lintz, pointing at the photograph.

  The rocket had been launched December 1. The idea that the cylinder might still be angled on its side after ten days was crazy. A long, thin object with a heavy engine on one end should’ve been standing up by now under the influence of tidal-rising power.

  “That’s one problem,” said Freeman, “but the more important issue is its acceleration.”

  Lintz couldn’t have agreed more and urged Freeman to continue.

  “On its two accelerations, SAFIR 3 increased its orbital velocity by 2.4 and 3.2 meters per second respectively.”

  “So it still had some gas left?”

  Freeman shook his head. “The acceleration occurred within one hundredth of a second.”

  “What’s that?” Lintz’s gut told him this was impossible. In his head, he made a simple formula. For a four thousand–kilogram object to increase its velocity by 3.2 meters a second in one hundredth of a second would require 1,280,000 newtons of thrust. Only a few rockets had that kind of power, such as—

  “You’re telling me it’s on par with the Space Shuttle? The Energia?”

  “Well, we’ve only made two observations so far, sir, but …” Freeman nodded.

  As Lintz stared at him, he felt a certain heat deep in his sinuses that he hadn’t felt in ages—not since the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain. In a shelter four hundred meters below ground, through 1.6 kilometers of tunnel, protected by two twenty-five-ton explosive resistant doors, he’d sat wondering whether an unidentified blip floating in Russian airspace was a passenger plane or a bomber or maybe an ICBM, nervously watching for indications of all-out nuclear war.

  “Sergeant, that’s …” Lintz stopped himself. He wanted to work with Freeman to solve the mystery of this object. But, unfortunately, the job was outside his domain of authority. NORAD was no longer the main player in orbital monitoring. If SAFIR 3’s second stage was an orbital weapon as X-Man claimed, Lintz was supposed to report it to USNORTHCOM, and if it was debris, to the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee established in 1993. Both of these organizations were surely following the Rod from God story, which had even been taken up by the popular media site Geeple. They would probably be grateful for observational data from NORAD, but, Lintz realized, offering a hypothesis that was largely subjective would not be a wise move. “Sorry, but I’m going to handle this myself.”

  Freeman’s lips tensed ever so slightly. Lintz wondered if he’d crushed the young man’s hopes. A spent rocket was displaying obviously erratic behavior, and here was some incompetent commander trying to shelve the whole thing. If that was how he took it, well, too bad. Though it might be best to have Freeman continue his observations and—

  “Colonel! Your hotline isn’t connecting.” A deep voice overlapped with Lintz’s thoughts. Captain Jasmine Harrison was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Your BlackBerry’s out of batteries, isn’t it? Maybe you would have remembered if you hadn’t been fooling around at Starbucks!”

  Jasmine’s round black finger pointed below Lintz’s belly. Tucked somewhere down there was his BlackBerry, which he used for important official communications. The cell phone was ancient, having been issued to Lintz fifteen years ago, and its battery had to be replaced twice daily, as Jasmine had implie
d.

  “Sorry.” Noting his hefty flab, Lintz inserted his hand beneath his belly and withdrew his BlackBerry from his belt case. The battery still had 30 percent left, but as he watched, the signal indicator switched from out of service to searching.

  “I’ve heard that fat blocks reception, you know,” said Jasmine. “Since you refuse to diet, please strap it to your arm or somewhere more appropriate. Major Fernandez got in touch while he was on lunch.”

  “I’m really sorry. I’ll be more careful. So what was the major contacting us about?”

  “This is a matter for field officers and above. If you’ll excuse us, Sergeant Freeman.” Jasmine pointed to the doorway and gave Freeman a wink. At this polite dismissal, Freeman stood up.

  “Hold on there, Sergeant,” said Lintz. “You have my permission to continue with your observations. If you learn anything, report directly to me. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  After watching Freeman leave, Jasmine approached Lintz’s desk and pointed to a message that had been blinking in the corner of his display.

  “The major requested that you watch a video. It’s a speech from the Supreme Leader of North Korea set to be broadcast in twelve hours. Since it’s critical of American space development, the video has been passed on to us for verification. The CIA found it uploaded to a YouTube account and sent it here.”

  “Thank you for coming to let me know.”

  “You’re welcome. There’s anything you need, just let me know.” Promptly turning her plump body around, Jasmine was about to step out the doorway when she looked back over her shoulder. “What sort of mission are you going to say you were on when you went to Starbucks for that Danish? I’ll leave the pleasure of that little secret all to you. Your office just reeks of pastries.”