The Probability Broach, chapter 3
Win is sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the police department, waiting to catch a bus home. The story doesn’t linger on it, but I think this is meant to be another sign of how hellish his dystopian U.S. has gotten: things are so bad that city employees have to use mass transit!
Behind the counter a radio recited body counts from our latest victory in New Guinea. The Papuans should have run out of people three years ago.
Between energy shortages, government patent theft, and now this – it’s yet another fragment of the backstory that Smith never more than vaguely gestures towards.
The backstory of this world is never fleshed out, but from the hints we get, it seems like every bad thing is happening at once. There are energy shortages and rationing, oppressive secret police, organized crime running the government, and this chapter adds 1984-style war propaganda. What went so badly wrong here? Which of these evils was the root cause?
As I said before, I doubt if Smith sees this as inconsistent. In his view, government is purely a force for evil; what’s more, it’s the sole cause of evil. He doesn’t see any contradiction in blaming every possible bad thing on the state simultaneously. In his anarchist utopia, when all government is abolished, peace and prosperity burst into full flower seemingly overnight.
Now I was blackballed without so much as a memo—much to my superior’s relief—by vague pressure “from god knows how high.” Mac’s office was bugged, if you believed him, and his telephone tapped. An ex-security-cleared scientist who rated his own car and a government-issue handgun had been mortally afraid of the very agency he once worked for. The maraschino cherry on top was the fact that said professor had been gunned down with a .380 Ingram—a favorite item of hardware for covert SecPol operations.
So what was really going on? I’d probably never find out. Tomorrow morning I’d be back on ordinary Capitol Hill muggings.
Obviously, there’s no great mystery about what happened to Meiss. The only thing Win doesn’t know yet is the motive. But just when he’s resigned to ignorance, he sees his chief departing the office:
Through the window I watched Mac emerge from the City and County Building, briefcase in hand. He paused to straighten his tie and stepped into the street. Suddenly there was a screech as a parked car accelerated violently. Mac turned, annoyance, incomprehension, sudden terror racing each other across his face. He ran, trying to make the median. Too late. The front bumper hit him at knee level—a sickening whump of hollow metal on solid flesh. His body flopped like a rag doll, head and arms draped over the hood, legs disappearing underneath. The car never slowed. I heard the engine race as the pedal was floored. Mac whipped to the pavement, his head smashing into the asphalt as the car devoured him, his outflung hand still visible, gripping the briefcase.
The only thing missing is the famous line, “And he was just one day from retirement.”
After the body is carted away and all the paperwork is done, Win returns morosely to his apartment. But when he lets himself in, something is wrong. The bedroom door is ajar, and he’s sure he left it closed:
I stretched out on the floor, feeling silly in my own apartment, and slowly levered out the S & W. They should have hit me coming in. They were going to pay for that mistake. I planned to punch several soft, custom-loaded 240-grain slugs into whoever was behind that door. Crawling painfully on knees and elbows, I tried to remember to keep my butt down.
A damned good thing I didn’t pull the trigger. Creeping closer, I noticed a fine, shiny wire stretching from the doorknob. I’d always cursed that streetlight shining in my window; now it had saved my life. I laid the forty-one on the carpet and carefully traced the wire to a menacing shape attached to the frame inside. It looked vaguely like a striped whiskey bottle, but I knew those “stripes” were cut deeply into the casing to assure proper fragmentation. The wire led to a ring, one of four clustered at the top. An easy pull would raise and fire the striker.
A Belgian PRB-43: common in New Guinea, a favorite with domestic terrorists, too. I felt grateful they’d left something I was familiar with.
Win is able to cut the wire and disarm the booby trap, but he sits in shock for a long time, “cradling the harmless bomb” in his lap. It’s a small human moment in a chapter that has so much casual violence.
As dramatic as this is, it seems like superfluous villainy. They were doing as they were told! This should be Evil Overlord 101: you punish people for disobedience, not for obedience.
As this guy could have told you, the phrase “You have failed me for the last time!” exists for a reason.
If Chief MacDonald had refused the order to take Win off the case, or if Win had persisted in investigating without official sanction, then SecPol would have a reason to murder the two of them… but nothing like that happened. The chief bowed to pressure from above, and Win was off the case with no leads. He’d even given up his desire to investigate. The villains’ scheme would have come to fruition without any interference if they’d just left well enough alone.
It’s never adequately explained, either now or later, why the bad guys wanted Win and MacDonald dead. If you need secrecy to carry out your evil plans, this is the exact wrong way to go about it. It certainly seems like the death of two police officers on the same day – one of them a chief – should have drawn scrutiny from someone. Conversely, if the world is so corrupt and SecPol so powerful that they can murder local police with impunity, why even bother with the coverup?
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Other posts in this series:
i wonder if the toss-off about PNG was an homage to The King in Yellow’s toss-off about German Samoa.
Did Smith not know that most city-dwellers use mass transit? That is the last thing I’d expect him to use as a sign of a dystopian world.
Obviously, the state is not the sole cause of evil in the world, even if it is more bad than good on the balance. If it went away, things would not become perfect overnight. It would probably take a couple of years for things to get measurably better, and only if some other hierarchy does not replace it. Abolishing the state would be kind of useless if people do not already decide cooperation is better than competition and mutual aid is better than oppression.
But Smith isn’t thinking along those lines. His problem is not that government exists, it’s that it interferes with the free market. He never questions his proposition that only free markets can produce prosperity and liberty, nor does he see a contradiction between the maximization of personal profits and the general welfare of all people, even though corporations have always sought profits at the expense of everyone else and are actively hostile to avoiding harm. That itself disproves his belief that profit-seeking can produce freedom instead of corporate neofeudalism. Like Hitler and Stalin persecuting Christians because the Church was a competitor for loyalty and not because of any atheism on the dictator’s part, Smith hates the state because it’s an alternative authority to private corporations, not because of anything bad government does. He doesn’t really desire the abolition of government so much as corporations becoming the government, taking over all its functions and leaving Congress as a rubber-stamp to carry out the will of the corporate boardrooms.
The bedroom door is ajar, and he’s sure he left it closed…
Yeah, right — a professional hitman breaks into a guy’s house to carefully set a lethal booby-trap, but then forgets to leave the door shut like it was before, thus alerting his target that he’s being targeted. Just like all those TV shows where murderers always leave their victims’ doors unlocked or open when they’re done.
@ Raging Bee #3: In real life, most professional hitmen are just hired mercenary goons, not necessarily very bright or competent at much beyond killing, with their biggest defense against being caught is that they have no personal connection to their victims. People like that have been caught and their victims survived thanks to dumb errors likely due to over-reliance on anonymity making them sloppy. Since the story implied earlier that there was no longer a clear dividing line between the government and the mob, whoever hired them might not have had time to requisition a proper agent-assassin and went with the first mercenary-goon they could get on a short notice, because of some sort of unwarranted paranoia about whatever Win and/or MacDonald may or may not have known.
This part doesn’t strike me as particularly unrealistic, it’s the larger context in which this scene happens which is dumb.
In the R. Austin Freemen mystery novels I enjoy so much, one of the tropes is that criminals never know when to leave it alone. In many of the novels the criminals are caught because they keep trying to cover their tracks, and in doing so leave more clues for an investigator to follow.
There is a more common trope in fiction, whether it’s literature or other media, that the bad guys want to “clean up loose ends.” In other words, kill everyone besides themselves who has any knowledge of a McGuffin. I think the idea being that if a random Josephine has knowledge about what they are trying to conceal, that person will somehow put the pieces together, become a hero, and spoil their entire operation. In some really poorly written literature this extends to waitresses in seedy diners who might have heard a single word while serving coffee. This trope is occasionally spoofed by authors when one of the more dim-witted characters used for comic relief suggests it, and their equally dim-witted colleague says something to the tune of, “Then we have to kill all the people who knew that person. Then all the people who knew those. This didn’t work the last time we tried it!”
However, that would be the justification as to why MacDonald and Win needed to die. They “knew too much.” Of course, what they knew was that someone was killed with weapons typically used by a group everyone is afraid of. Being told to drop the case probably was a relief to them.
As a side note, I was doing some reading into the background of Will Cuppy, and came across the name of Isabel Paterson. Paterson was apparently Cuppy’s primary contact, goad, and friend. Paterson was also one of the founders of libertarianism, and a mentor of Ayn Rand. Wikipedia says that the self-educated Canadian taught Rand American history and government. While I’m all for self-education it does leave gaps. If Rand learned American history and government from Paterson, that might explain some of the more obvious miss-understandings which Rand had. Paterson, unlike Rand, apparently declined to take any social security payments, calling it a “government swindle.” I haven’t bothered yet, but it may be interesting to read Paterson’s libertarian opus, The God of the Machine. If you were unaware of it, I thought I would bring it to your attention. Of course, it would not surprise me that you were already aware of this book.
@Snowberry:
Yeah, in real life a number of criminals get caught because they’ve been successful for long enough that they start believing they never will get caught and get sloppy as a result. It isn’t even just ‘trying to cover their tracks leaves more clues’, it’s ‘doing more jobs and leaving more clues and increasing the number of data points for everybody else to track you with, while at the same time believing that you’ve outsmarted everybody’.
Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo is a classic example. The guy was so hopped up on his own cleverness that not only did he get caught, he ended up refusing to agree to a plea deal against his lawyer’s advice because he was sure he could win, despite his girlfriend having already turned Crown’s evidence. The lawyer eventually quit, citing being unable to work with his client anymore, and turned over all the evidence he had… which included some the police hadn’t found earlier.
@flex:
The webcomic Girl Genius did a bit like that early on, when a pair of Jaegers catch up with the main character, one of them threatens to kill her for sneaking around, then threatens to kill the prisoner she was talking to, his (slightly) smarter partner goes:
– “This is turning into one of those plans.”
– “Eh?”
– “You know, the ones where we kill everybody that notices we’re killing everybody?”
– “Uhhh…”
– “And how do those plans always end?”
– *sighs, and says as if reciting from memory* “Everybody dead, the dirigible in flames, and I’ve lost my hat.”
– “And any plan where you lose your hat is…?”
– “A bad plan.”
While reading this, I thought of a possible loose end that might explain why both the chief and Wim were targeted for elimination: The gold coin that Wim took from evidence, and MacDonald also knew about because it was on his permission that Wim had the coin.
The bad guys know about it because of course they have access to the paperwork. And they might well think that gold might be a reason for people to keep snooping even when they’ve been taken off the case, and even if the coin was returned to evidence, the Treasury dept (or whoever enforces the laws about gold possession) might take an interest, and keep investigating.
And Smith doesn’t mention this because there’s no way for Wim to know about this motivation specifically yet, and afterwards, the bad guys don’t just up and tell why they did everything.
Maybe.
Oops.
s/Wim/Win/g