The Boost by Stephen Baker

Author:Stephen Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466810686
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

3/8/72 8:43 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

In her decade as a Democracy Movement activist, it’s one question Stella never considered, even as a hypothetical: What kind of coffee would John Vallinger like? Ever since the afternoon she walked out of the job interview with him on K Street, dismayed by the man’s vision of their country as an obscenely profitable networked subsidiary of China Inc., she had reclassified Vallinger as a reptile, albeit a diabolically intelligent one—not someone who would be sitting in her ancestral living room in Montclair awaiting a cup of coffee. She reaches for the worst ground beans she has, a house-blend decaf that’s been moldering on a shelf for a year or two, and drops a few tablespoons of it into the pot.

Childish behavior, she thinks. But who invited him? Stella decides to take her time. She puts a kettle on the flame—the old-fashioned way—sets it to low, and wipes the kitchen counters as she waits.

She wonders why Vallinger would assume that she was a source for The Tribune. She doesn’t receive the paper and wouldn’t even know how to buy it. She lives hiding—at least until today—in an electronically jammed refuge from which she can communicate only by a messenger on bicycle. Would she be sending reports by means of cyclists and pigeons to the editor of a newspaper she never sees? Unlikely.

Still, Vallinger thinks it’s her. She was aware, of course, that Ralf was preparing to hack the update, that he was nabbed, and that Bao-Zhi liberated him from a clinic in Alexandria. So it would be reasonable to consider her as a source on Ralf. And Simon lives in El Paso. In most families, when two brothers get together after years apart, the mother might be expected to be in the know. It isn’t normal for such news to come from a messenger who has unwound a piece of paper from a pigeon’s leg. How was John Vallinger to know that her family, if you could call it that, was different from most, that the Kellogg-Alvares, as Ralf liked to say, “took the fun out of dysfunctional”?

She wonders what Francisco would think if he could see what the family has come to. He was angry when he left Washington for Paraguay, all those years ago, sure of himself and certain that the boost would lead to tyranny. He was contemptuous of her, and her junior role in the negotiations. One night, after he’d been drinking, he called her a “lackey,” and Stella, already pregnant with Ralf, hurled a half full bottle of Bohemia beer at his face. It was a week or two later that he left, never to be seen again. Stella considers her work in the DM a silent tribute to Francisco, an admission on her part that he was right.

She hears steps in the living room and imagines that Vallinger, weary of waiting, has gotten to his feet to check out the artwork on the walls.

He seemed so smug in saying that her colleagues were out to destroy the world, as if he had an inside line on the DM.

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