The Trigger Read online

  'No.'

  'Then what are we going to do?'

  'Work on the wish list,' said Brohier, gently placing the President's memo on his desk. 'But when Christmas Day comes, just to be fair, we give presents to everyone.'

  'Are you really prepared to do that?'

  Brohier smiled ruefully. 'I suppose I can forgive you a touch of skepticism. But I have a conscience, too, Jeffrey - even if it comes with a complex set of loyalties attached. I want to give my President and his people every chance to live up to my high opinion of them. But I'm not such a naif that I couldn't anticipate the possibility that they'll disappoint me. Yes - I'm prepared for that eventuality. I've been preparing right along.'

  Drawing a deep breath and releasing it slowly, Horton sat back in his chair. 'I think you should tell me more about that.'

  Disappointment crossed Brohier's eyes. 'I hadn't realized you looked on me with such deep suspicion, Jeffrey.'

  'Oh - no, that's not why I want to know,' said Horton. 'You see, I've wondered, now and again, if I wasn't stopping myself -not letting myself see the answers, because I can't control what others will do with them. And I've envied you your apparent self-assurance - without realizing that there was more to it than reckless optimism. If I know what you know -'

  'Then you can come to the problem with a clear conscience.'

  'A clearer one, at least,' Horton said, then grinned. 'Besides, if something should happen to you, there should be someone else who knows where you put the Santa Glaus suit.'

  'Catastrophic single-point failure mode,' Brohier said thoughtfully. 'Very well, Dr Horton - welcome to my little conspiracy.'

  * * *

  14: Opportunity

  Port Arthur, Tasmania - Gunshots fired from a passing truck scattered a crowd of more than a thousand gun control advocates rallying at the Port Arthur Victims' Memorial. Eleven people were injured, one seriously, and the memorial's ceramic frieze was struck by two bullets. Police are looking for three men in a tan 'road-worn' Range Rover. 'I guess they must have figured we wouldn't be shooting back,' said event organizer Chad MacKee, of Hobart. The 'Enforce The Laws' rally was one of many being held on the anniversary of the 1996 massacre of thirty-five people by gunman Martin Bryant, which led to Australia's universal gun registration law and the ban on self-loading firearms.

  Complete Story Mass Murder and Madness

  'I Remember' Flashback: Port Arthur Massacre

  US Still Leader in Guns, Homicide, Suicide

  The 641st Tactical Brigade, an independent unit of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), made its first appearance as the second phase of Trigger deployment began. In a small miracle of military efficiency, 641 Tac BG had been created from scratch in just four months, and for only one purpose - to protect the myriad of Mark I Triggers wherever they might be placed.

  The Mark Is which had previously been deployed in the Washington, D.C. area had gone to locations which were already among the most secure on the continent. What's more, only two of those ten sites were 'hot' sites, ones where the Trigger was active around the clock. Out of sight and protected by the existing security, each of those ten units had only been assigned an operations team from the 115 Sig BT.

  But the wider deployment which was planned brought with it a much higher risk of attracting the curiosity of people outside Brass Hat. Stepak had told the President that the secrecy of the project could not be guaranteed once Phase Two began - it was only a matter of time before someone 'not on our Christmas card list' would learn of the Trigger's nature and existence. And once that happened, it was inevitable that someone would try to steal a working example to study, copy, and turn against the American government, the military, or the public.

  'It would be the perfect terrorist weapon against an armed enemy,' Stepak had pointed out. .'And frankly, sir, we are the most heavily armed target in sight.'

  Then we'll just have to make damned sure that every one of these things is guarded well enough that no enemy can get to one,' had been Breland's answer.

  But Breland had been surprised to be told that what he asked was impossible. 'We can't put enough men around one of these to prevent a sufficiently determined enemy from getting his hands on it,' Stepak had said. 'Not unless you'd agree to have them all stored at one of our ICBM sites. What we can try to do is make certain that by the time they reach a Trigger, it's of no use whatsoever to them.'

  That conversation had been the genesis of 641 Tac BG. Its first members were one hundred and fifty Army Special Forces troops drawn from three veteran companies at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. To them fell the task of devising a training program for the seven-man squads that would soon be called the T-teams. In two weeks, a plan was in place. Two weeks later, the cadre -now tasked with implementing its own plan - started receiving its first class of trainees at Fort Sill, Kansas.

  The intent behind the T-teams was to put a two-man guard on a Trigger unit around the clock - four-hour watches, one on, two off. By and large, it promised to be dull and unglamorous, the kind of 'stationary post' assignment that many Special Operations troops not only dreaded, but silently considered beneath them. It took no special training to be a guard-post gargoyle, and the roving 'head-knockers' of the Military Police got little more respect.

  But if the boredom ever broke, the T-team would likely find itself having to use nontraditional weapons at close range to resist a numerically superior force - a job for the toughest, calmest, and most intensely focused troops available. Reflecting that, a majority of the first class of recruits came piecemeal from the elite Special Operations units of all four services - Green Berets, Seals, Army Rangers, Recon Marines.

  If it looked no further, 641 Tac BG would have cannibalized all those units by the time it reached its full strength of seven thousand troops. So the first class of two hundred and fifty, like the ones that would follow, reached beyond Special Operations and drew on regular infantry and Airborne units as well.

  The three-month training program took some of the traditional strengths of Special Operations troops and built on them. Physical training and hand-to-hand combat were part of the daily regimen, but no more so than fighting off monotony and maintaining mental alertness.

  A folding, quick-loading crossbow and a compressed-air short-barrel carbine that could fire fletchettes or gas ampoules were added to the weapons qualifications list. In the meantime, the cadre kept testing other exotics, including a pistol-like cyanosilicate 'glue gun', which was startlingly effective but too prone to clogging to rely on.

  Some of the 'packages' - as the Triggers were referred to on all documents and throughout training - would be mobile, and all of them had to be protected in transit from the factory. So the training command took over a twenty-mile stretch of the brand-new automated interstate being built west of Nashville, and put every recruit behind the wheel of both the transport and escort vehicles for anti-hijacking drills and high-speed driving practice. The 'road work' caused more washouts than any other element of the training.

  More than two dozen buildings and other facilities at Fort Sill, ranging from an ammunition bunker to a four-story office building, were converted into mock deployment sites, and each training unit was assigned regular watches at one of them. They were not told about the concealed cameras monitoring them, or the group of cadre members assigned to carry out sneak attacks against them - a role which quickly but somewhat mysteriously earned that group the nickname 'the Spanish Inquisition'.

  It was not until the third month, after most of those who would wash out were gone, that the 641 Tac BG recruits were shown a mock-up of a Mark I Trigger unit. Only then were they made aware of the second dimension of a T-team's responsibility - to destroy their Trigger if they could not protect it. They were introduced to the special thermite castings - one each for the controls and the emitter - which had been devised for the purpose, and schooled in the streamlined arming procedure.

  Finally, soberingly, the T-teams tr
ained with the interlocked jaw-clench and hand-grip dead-man switches which would both allow the team to keep fighting as long as possible, and assure that death would not prevent them from fulfilling their ultimate responsibility. By the time they received their new battalion patches and individual team assignments on graduation day, every member of 641 Tac BG understood the stakes in a very personal way - and why, for what was being asked of them, no mere gargoyle would do.

  Unannounced and unexpected, Karl Brohier poked his head around the corner of the door to Jeffrey Horton's office. The associate director was sitting with his back to the door, hunched over a digitizing easel two-thirds of the size of his desk.

  Brohier had never gotten comfortable with the easel, which was, ironically, a product of the Aleph Instruments Division of Aron Goldstein's little empire. He much preferred the tiny notepad he carried everywhere and the enormous whiteboard he'd insisted be installed in every Terabyte conference room. But the easel had two advantages that attracted many younger scientists - it could both record and erase itself.

  But Horton did not look comfortable, either - and there was not much on the board to either record or erase. Brohier cleared his throat. 'You have a little time?'

  Horton stole a glance back over his shoulder, then straightened and turned. 'Sure.'

  'Good. Go pack a bag.'

  'Pardon me?'

  'We need to go to Washington.'

  The prospect of escaping the Annex lit up Horton's face. 'I finally get to meet Santa Claus?'

  'No, you get to meet the Grinch. The corporate patent attorney just forwarded the PTO examiner's first action on our application covering the Trigger - rejected.'

  'On what basis?'

  Brohier chuckled. The same one they use to reject applications for perpetual motion machines and reactionless drives - fails the standard for usefulness on the grounds of operativeness. Fails the test of patentable subject matter on the grounds of unsubstantiated scientific foundation.'

  'They don't think it will work.'

  'Right. They want us to submit a working model.'

  'We can't do that - can we?'

  'No. We're going to file an amended application for reconsideration, but first you and I are going to go talk to the examiner.'

  'Can't we do it on the wire?'

  The Patent and Trademark Office doesn't have military-grade secure conferencing. Have a winter coat?'

  'In a box somewhere. Why?'

  'Find it. Ten inches of new snow on the Mall.'

  'Lovely. I'm looking forward to it.'

  Retreating toward the door, Brohier sniffed skeptically. 'Meet me at the helipad at three - with coat.'

  'And files?'

  'No. We sent them a small mountain already. Our problem is making them understand what they read.' The door started to close behind him.

  'Say - Karl,' Horton called after him. 'Are we allowed to travel together now?'

  A wry smile crossed Brohier's face. 'Oh, sure. We'll have an escort - but they're only worried about us being grabbed, not killed. As far as Brass Hat is concerned, we're expendable now. We even get to fly straight there - no cloak and dagger, no double switches, no side trips to Kalamazoo. And you can have my peanuts - I can't digest them anymore.'

  By then, Horton was standing. 'Don't let anyone ever tell you that you don't know how to plan a vacation, Doc. I'll see you at three.'

  Patent Examiner Michael Wayne was a year younger than Jeffrey Horton, but was already at the top of the Patent Office's internal hierarchy.

  A short man with a shock of wild red hair, Wayne had outspoken opinions about 'tabloid science' and 'crooks with degrees'. From the first, he had taken special pleasure in dissecting and rejecting applications from the 'under-educated egotists who either think that we're idiots or don't know that they are.' Though nominally the senior examiner in engineering physics, Wayne was, by his own choice, the primary review examiner for the applicants the office informally dubbed 'exotics', and Wayne called the 'fanatics'.

  'They don't have any idea how much they don't know,' he would expound on the slimmest provocation. They can quote Clarke's First Law, but they don't understand the First Law of Thermodynamics. They've heard somewhere that Edison flunked the third grade and Einstein needed help with his math homework, and they think that means the world's waiting impatiently - checkbook in hand, of course! - for their invention.'

  Wayne reserved special contempt for any applicant who dared use the word revolutionary on the forms or in an interview: 'They make mistakes any second-year science student would catch, and when you point them out, they cry conspiracy - General Motors, or Exxon, or IBM has the fix in, protecting their stockholders. True Believers think they're this close to being billionaire tycoons, but they have a union man's contempt for big corporations, and the hard work it takes to build one.'

  Though his formal authority was limited to training supervisor for his own section, Wayne's attitudes had influenced the entire Engineering division, and the collection of 'perpetual motion' machines on his credenza was a Third Floor landmark. The irony of that - apparent to others with longer tenure, but not to Wayne himself - was that he had risen so quickly through the grades in part because the Marchmont scandal had swept a small army of senior examiners out of their offices and onto the streets.

  In retrospect, it was easy to see how the Marchmont situa-tion had developed. None of the names on the application titled Enhanced Energy Devices had any face credibility - neither the individuals nor the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where they were all students or instructors. The subject of their application had even less credibility - the Office had rejected more than three hundred cold fusion devices and processes over a span of nearly two decades. The whole application had the smell of a college prank, a hoax brewed up from beer and chutzpah.

  The only problem was that the EED worked. By all rights. Peter Marchmont and his graduate practicum in chemical engineering should have received the world patent for the decoupling hydrothermoelectric generator.

  But Toyota received it instead, based on an application filed in Tokyo seven months after the Marchmont application was received in Washington. And as the first Toyota Waterfall electric commuter sedans - with their thousand-kilometer range and inexpensive quick-replace plug-in fuel cells -began rolling off assembly lines in Kyoto and Tennessee, heads rolled in Washington.

  The Director, all five Associate Directors, and all sixteen Technical Section Managers were fired in President Engler's 'Black Friday' purge. But that was only the overture. When the Supreme Court gave the green light to Marchmont vs. US Patent and Trademark Office, the Office quickly settled out of court - and then vigorously cleaned house. More than two hundred senior review examiners were fired over the rejection of a patent application only five of them had ever seen.

  'We are going to war against a deeply-entrenched culture of that's-not-how-I-learned-it skepticism,' said the new director of the Office, a business-school graduate and former Merck executive. The cutting edge of science and technology comes to our front door - we have to be ready to welcome it, and speak to it in its own language.'

  Wayne missed the irony of his position because his reading of those events was different than that of most of the survivors. 'It's not that the examiners were too skeptical,' he explained to his trainees. 'It's not that they were hidebound and behind the times. It's that they got it wrong.

  'Walking into this building in the morning is like walking into a room where the floor is covered with precious black pearls and poisonous black beetles. You're supposed to stomp on the beetles and pick up the pearls. And if some day you can't tell the difference, you'd better not do anything until you can. The Marchmont examiners stomped on a pearl - a big one, a beauty. I have no sympathy for them. When you say "No", don't be wrong. It's as simple as that.'

  'So, gentlemen - you intend to file an amended application on your Remote Pyrotechnic Detonation Field Device?'

  Something in the examine
r's tone of voice prompted Horton and Brohier to exchange glances. That's why we're here, Mr Wayne -'

  'Dr Wayne.'

  'My apologies,' Brohier said, following the examiner's lead and sitting down. 'As I was saying. Doctor, that's why we're here - to make sure you're aware of the special circumstances surrounding this application, and see if we can come to a meeting of the minds that will assure -'

  As Brohier was speaking, Wayne picked his card up from the desktop and squinted at it. 'Special circumstances, yes - excuse me, but in exactly what capacity are you here today?'

  Brohier blinked in surprise. 'I'm the Director of Terabyte Laboratories -'

  'But you are not a named inventor on this application, is that right? Or do you anticipate amending that part, too?'

  'I hardly see a reason -'

  'Good. So long as you understand that adding your name adds nothing to the application - the defects in it would be unaffected. As for your taking part in this review -' Wayne shrugged. 'It's a bit irregular, but I can overlook it. Dr Horton, where is your patent attorney?'

  Offended on behalf of his mentor and taken aback by Wayne's police-interrogation style of questioning, Horton stammered through his answer. 'I, uh - the corporation's patent attorney is based in Cincinnati. I understood that the issues, um - the issues were technical and scientific, not legal. We have the attorney's release -'

  'As you wish,' said Wayne. 'I'll just note that you declined to have your attorney present. Now, about that amended application - as I'm sure you saw in the notice, I'm requiring you to submit a working specimen with any amended app. I've also judged your technical disclosure to be inadequate. This time, you'll need to provide citations to published papers in refereed journals establishing the validity of your operating principles.'