The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling

far away.”
    Van pulled off his glasses. “The Weevil is Canadian ? He’s a foreign national ? I never knew that.”
    “Yeah. So?”
    “Oh, man! That’s it! Game over! Illegal combatant! Enemy of humanity! Into the razor wire!
    Guantanamo Bay, Jeb. Into the steel cage.”
    “Take it easy, Van.”
    Van stabbed at the screen with a finger. “Jeb, look at this! He’s attacking the National Security Council ! You know, us !”
    “Huh.” Jeb cleared his throat. “Well, you’ve definitely got a point there.”
    “This is his last hacker ’sploit! He is over ! We own him now!”
    “Van, the NSC isn’t supposed to directly involve itself in operational activities in the field. And we’re just a board of the NSC. We’re a policy coordination group.”
    Van boiled over. “This punk-ass chump is screwing with us, and you’re going to let him walk ? He’s notorious! Everybody in our business knows who he is! Are we wimps in this outfit, are we the victims ?
    Give me his address! He lives in Oregon, right? I’ll drive over there right now! I’ll kick his door in and kick his ass myself . . .”
    Van let his voice trail off. Fawn and Jeb were staring at him. They had both gone pale.
    “I’m overdoing it,” he realized.
    “Uh, yeah,” said Fawn.
    Van touched the monitor gently. “But, Jeb, you know, this is my baby here.”
    Jeb took a while to nod. “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. But I do get it, Van. You’ve got the right gut instinct about this issue. We need to take some steps. I’m gonna keep you in the loop here.”
    “Okay.”
    “We need you here with this new Grendel system, Van. We can’t have you leaving us to run any field assignments.”
    Now it was Van’s turn to stare. Jeb really believed that he, Derek Vandeveer, would lock and load, drive across America, and physically raid some bad guy. Take him down. Maybe shoot him. Van watched more tortured letters wriggle across the screen. He would do it, too, Van thought, in a stunning leap of self-knowledge. He was aching to go shoot The Weevil. He would sleep better for doing it.
    Where was Dottie, where was Ted? Where was his bed, his home? He was in a bad way.
    “I’m thinking visa problems,” rumbled Jeb, thunder gathering in his face. “Emigration violation. I’m thinking ‘cyberterrorism.’ I’m thinking a personal call to John Ashcroft and a serious ton of bricks.”
    “Did they even pass that statute yet?” said Fawn.
    “Patriot Act? Honey, they’re gonna pass all kinds of stuff.”
    Van’s apartment in Washington was grimy and dangerous. His NSC office in Washington was makeshift and dull. But Van’s second office, four hours away from Washington in a place they called the “Vault,”
    was so awful that he almost liked it. It quickly became his favorite place of work. On CNN and MSNBC, the Vault was always known as the “Undisclosed Location.” Dick Cheney was supposedly in there a whole lot. In point of fact Van had never seen the Vice President wandering around the Vault, but the Vault had an interesting crowd.
    Someone with a very odd checklist had tried to figure out what kind of people would be necessary to run the United States of America if Washington was destroyed in a terrorist nuclear attack. That was the big concept behind the Vault: the lively possibility that D.C. might turn, without any warning, into a weapon-of-mass-destruction field of black slag.
    Washington would be instant rubble. Then five minutes, maybe six minutes later, the Vault would come online. The survivors stashed away in the Vault would become the American post-nuclear government. The community in the Vault kept bubbling, in constant turnaround. Nobody really wanted to stay in the eerie Vault. They all much preferred to lead real lives, even at the risk of getting killed by nukes, sarin, or anthrax. So the Vault was a very mix-and-match place. It was the Melting Stovepipes business all over again, only to a factor of ten.
    The