Distraction

Fontenot emerged from the flowering brush and discovered him. To Oscar’s mild surprise, Fontenot was exactly on schedule. Apparently the roadblock situation was easing in Louisiana.

The security man was wearing a straw hat, vest, jeans, and black gum boots. Fontenot had been getting a lot of sun lately. He looked more pleased with himself than Oscar had ever seen him.

They shook hands, checked by habit for tails and eavesdroppers, and fell into pace together.

“You’re getting a lot of credit for this Air Force base debacle,” Fontenot told him. “Somehow, it’s staying news. If the pressure keeps building, something’s bound to crack.”

“Oh, giving me the credit for that is all Sosik’s idea. It’s a fallback position for the Senator. If the situation blows a valve, then the experienced chief of staff can always make a fall guy out of the rash young campaign adviser.”

Fontenot looked at him skeptically. “Well, I didn’t see ’em twist-ing your arm when you did those two major interviews… I don’t know how you found the time to get so fully briefed on power black-outs and Louisiana politics.”

“Power blackouts are a very interesting topic. The Boston media are important. I’m very sentimental about the Boston media.” Oscar laced his hands behind his back. “I admit, it wasn’t tactful to publicly call Louisiana ‘the Weird Sister of American States.’ But it’s a truism.”

Fontenot couldn’t be bothered to deny this. “Oscar, I’ve been pretty busy getting my new house set up properly. But proper security isn’t a part-time job. You’re still paying me a salary, but I’ve been letting you down.”

“If that bothers you, why not put in a little work on the hotel site for us? It’s a big hit locally. These Buna people love us for it.”

“No, listen. Since we’ll s — I thought I’d run some full-scale secu-rity scans for you, across the board. And I’ve got some results for you. You have a security problem.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve offended the Governor of Louisiana.”

Oscar shook his head rapidly. “Look, the hunger strike isn’t about Governor Huguelet. Huguelet has never been the issue. The issue is the starving air base and the federal Emergency committees. We’ve scarcely said a word in public about Green Huey.”

“The Senator hasn’t. But you sure have. Repeatedly.”

Oscar shrugged. “Okay, obviously we haven’t much use for the Governor. The guy’s a crooked demagogue. But we’re not pushing that. As far as the scandal goes, if anything, we’re Huey’s tactical allies at the moment.”

“Don’t be naive. Green Huey doesn’t think the way you guys think. He’s not some go-along get-along pol, who makes tactical deals with the opposition. Huey is always the center of Huey’s universe. So you’re for him, or you’re agin him.”

“Why would Huey make u

“Huey does make enemies. He enjoys it. It’s part of his game. It always has been. Huey’s a smart pol all right, but he can be a one-man goon squad. He learned that when he worked in Texas for Senator Dougal.”

Oscar frowned. “Look, Dougal’s out of the picture now. He’s finished, history. If Dougal wasn’t in the dry-out clinic, he’d probably be in jail.”

Fontenot glanced around them with reflexive suspicion. “You shouldn’t talk like an attack ad when you’re standing inside a place that Dougal built. This lab was always Dougal’s favorite project. And as for Huey, he used to work in here. You’re walking in Huey’s footsteps. When he was the Senator’s chief of staff, he twisted arms around here hard enough to break a few.”

“They built this place all right, but they built it crooked.”

“Other politicians are crooked too, and they don’t build a goddamn thing. East Texas and SouthLouisiana — they finally got their heads together and cut a big piece of the pie for themselves. But things have always run crooked in this part of the country, always. They wouldn’t know what to do with clean government. Old Dougal fell down pretty hard in the long run, but that’s just Texas. Texas is ornery, Texans like to chew their good old boys up a little bit before they bury them. But Huey learned plenty from Dougal, and he doesn’t make Dougal’s mistakes. Huey is the Governor of Louisiana now, he’s the big cheese, the boss, the kahuna. Huey’s got himself two handpicked federal Senators, just to shine his shoes. You’re bad mouthing Huey up in Boston — but Huey is sitting just over yonder in Baton Rouge. And you’re getting in Huey’s face.”

“All right. I take the point. Go on.”

“Oscar, I’ve seen you do some very clever things with nets, you’re a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven’t seen everything that I’ve seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful.”

They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. “Okay. Let’s imagine you’re a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etie

Oscar laughed. “That’s a new one. That’s really crazy.”

“Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets… In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some com-monalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activi-ties. ”

“Sure. User profiles. Demographic analysis. Stochastic indexing. Do it all the time.”

“We built those profile sniffers quite a while back, and they turned out pretty useful. But then the State Department made the mistake of kinda lending that software to some undependable al-lies…” Fontenot stopped short as a spotted jaguarundi emerged from under a bush, stretched, yawned, and ambled past them. “The problem came when our profile sniffers fell into the wrong hands … See, there’s a different application for that protective software. Bad people can use it to compile large mailing lists of dan-gerous lunatics. Finding the crazies with net analysis, that’s the easy part. Convincing them to take action, that part is a little harder. But if you’ve got ten or twelve thousand of them, you’ve got a lotta fish, and somebody’s bound to bite. If you can somehow put it into their heads that some particular guy deserves to be attacked, that guy might very well come to harm.”

“So you’re saying that Governor Huguelet has put me on an enemies list?”

“No, not Huey. Not personally. He ain’t that dumb. I’m saying that somebody, somewhere, built some software years ago that auto-matically puts Green Huey’s enemies onto hit lists.”

Oscar removed his hat and carefully adjusted his hair. “I’m rather surprised I haven’t heard about this practice.”

“We Secret Service people don’t like it publicized. We do what we can to fight back-we wiped out a whole nest of those evil things during Third Panama… but we can’t monitor every offshore netserver in the world. About the best we can do is to monitor our own informants. We always check ’em, to see if they’re getting email urging them to kill somebody. So have a look at this printout.”

They found a graceful wooden garden bench. A small child in a pinafore was sitting on it, patiently petting an exotic stoat, but she didn’t seem to mind adult company. Oscar silently read through the text, twice, carefully.