by Neovictorian
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Page 67
The Two Orders
Something I touched on but briefly in Heights is how the reality of power manifests in centralized modern governments (and, for that matter, in centralized ancient governments). This already describes most of the world as of this writing, and the last holdouts will be gone soon enough. Centralized modern governments, whether pseudo -“Capitalist” -“Socialist” or -“Communist” have this in common: They mercilessly DeHumanize their subjects.
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Page 69
The Big Order and the Real Order
These are two more terms that I’ve coined, for accuracy’s sake. The “Real” Order are the men (and a few women) that decide. That is the definition of the Real Order. They decide who the Presidents, Prime Ministers and so on will be, they decide who the nation’s friends and enemies will be, they decide the monetary policies that produce prosperity or depression. They decide. There is no one world Real Order, there are interconnected Real Orders spread around the world, mostly cooperating but occasionally, briefly and non-fatally (for themselves, personally) fighting, like lions around an antelope carcass.
The “Big” Order is the structure of humans “meritocratically” selected to support and serve the Real Order. Each year the highest scorers on the college admissions tests and civil service tests and the law school entrance tests and so on are selected for possible entry in to the Big Order, given the places at the most prestigious schools and agencies, and observed as they progress through the increasingly narrow holes in the sieve that strain out the too-independent thinkers and those who come to the realization that they’re being used and opt out. Those with the ideal combination of high-IQ and high conformity become members of the Big Order. Generally they believe themselves to be happy and successful, though each and every one I have known had a huge Hole that they were suppressing, any way they could. A very few Big Order people are eventually invited into the Real Order, but mostly the Real Order is a series of family connections and dynastic marriages.
The Big Order includes many academics, foundation managers, journalists, upper-level bureaucrats, elected officials and “social scientists.” Social science is just a branch of the Order, and its purpose is to keep the mass fat, dumb and happy, so the Order can continue to be the Order.
A decent analogy would be the structure of the Roman Catholic Church. There are a billion or so just folks, Big Order bishops and cardinals, and the Papal Suite. To believe any real power lies outside the basilicas and cathedrals is the most basic of errors.
“Your martini, Sir,” she says with just the right amount of feigned obsequiousness and hint of payback is a bitch and the drink appears next to my right hand. I can see the print at the base where her thumb partially melted the layer of ice on the surface.
I close the Manifesto and watch as she sets her own drink on the table and eases back into her seat. I’m still a little bit high from the first one, and I weigh 220 to her probably 140, and she’s a woman, so she’s roughly 50 percent higher—one more, downed quickly, and her defenses will be compromised. So will mine, but that’s right for this moment, for what’s coming next.
I pick up the martini and raise it toward her an inch, an invitation to a toast and I can see her resisting, she’s got a conflict both consciously and subconsciously, she wants to be led but she’s been conditioned for years, for her whole damn life, to be a Strong Independent Woman Who Makes Her Own Decisions, her body gave her away a minute ago when I ordered her up, and now she wants to reestablish something, she probably couldn’t say what if you asked her right now—but she picks up the glass.
“To surprise,” I toast and she smiles at that and we touch glasses, the backs of our fingers make contact and there’s a spark, a pulse, even though the glasses and our fingers are freezing, and I lock in on her eyes as we raise them to our lips and take long sips, not blinking, the stuff is pure dynamite and when it hits I raise my eyebrows at her a little and nod, and set the glass down carefully.
“Just as good the second time, which is true of so little in life,” I say. “I’m feeling quite relaxed and I suppose you are too, so I think it’s time we really got down to business Lisa. It’s time we get to the truth.”
She nods, a centimeter—consciously or unconsciously?—and says, with confidence, “I completely agree, Cal. Tell you what, you ask me a question, then I’ll ask you one, and so on, until one of us stops because they’ve had all the truth they can handle.”
I laugh and pick up the glass, take another sip and raise my chin, staring her down and daring her to do the same. She makes an amused little “huff” through her nose, and does.
“In gino, veritas,” I chuckle. “All right, my first question is an easy, factual one. Do you know where your mother is?”
She looks puzzled, then shocked, then angry, then guilty, all in the space of half a second, then she seems to realize the purpose of the question and she’s none of those things and she smiles slightly.
“No,” she says. And the fact that she doesn’t elaborate tells me what I want to know.
“My turn,” she says, and picks up her martini, gives me a look that I recognize from the playground, I dare you, and takes another long sip and I do, too. When she sets the glass down I reach farther across the table and set mine next to hers; the lines of drink left are exactly the same, and there’s just one good sip left.
My face is getting warm again and there’s a faint buzzing in my ears, the sound you’d hear if you were shrunk down a thousand times, in one of those old movies, the sound humans hardly ever hear but that the ants and creatures smaller always do, the sound of the random movement of air molecules that never stops, the crackling noise of grass growing, the Energy constantly swirling around every square inch of the planet. You can hear it any time, if you but stop and listen. I was listening now.
“What’s ‘The Outfit’?” she says, except she’s already looking for any sign before she finishes saying it, and so I don’t give her any.
“There are a lot of ‘Outfits,’” the first one that comes to mind is the American Mafia,” I say.
“Do you know of any…”
“Oops,” I cut her off.
“My turn.”
“Was the person who briefed you yesterday on ‘The Network’ as you called it, Dale Anders?”
She can’t stop the slight widening of the eyes and tiny involuntary movement of the head, and I see it and she knows I see it, and she smiles a little secret smile of acceptance. The truth is the simplest option now, really the only one, making the situation much easier to handle.
“Yes,” she says, and I wait for something else and there isn’t any, and I chuckle at her. She’s making me wait for my next question. Fair. She smiles back, relaxing now, massaging her shoulders across the top of the chair. She doesn’t even look 22 anymore, maybe 19. She’s been liberated. That stonewall was bothering her more than she even knew.
Instead of asking the next question right away she closes her eyes and rubs her four fingertips down her temples twice, stroking her brain. She comes to a decision and opens her eyes, looks at the manuscript open in front of me.
“Is this really the first time you’ve read the Manifesto, or were you lying to me earlier?”
“No, and yes.” She’s not surprised when I don’t add anything else. She doesn’t seem surprised at my answer, either.
“My turn again, Lisa.” I pick up my glass in a silent invitation and she follows, we down the rest without any additional toasts or wasted words. She gasps a little and covers her mouth with her hand,
“Did you and your mother really just start studying and practicing ReHume a couple of months ago when she met Mason, or have you been in it for a long time and you were lying to me earlier?”
“No, yes and yes,” she says.
We study each other for a few seconds and then she sits up very straight, puts her hands on the table and slowly turns them over, palms
open and empty.
“I think I’m drunk,” she says. “What I really want, right now, is for you…” Her eyes flick toward the rear bulkhead door.
I’m a little drunk too, really the perfect amount of drunk, clear headed and calculating still, but my body is relaxed and buzzing, and when she says this it begins to vibrate, deep inside, and I can feel the Wolf rising, and I allow some of It to show in my face, to blaze out of my eyes, and her own eyes widen.
“Yeah, me too,” I say. “But not here, not now. First, we find Eve.”
It feels like flame, no just raw, radiant heat is coming out my eyes now, and her face and neck are turning pink.
“Do you ever get a feeling Lisa, maybe you have since you were 12, 13, maybe even younger a feeling that you were almost like an alien observing earth from a distance, that your friends and family were often strange and stupid that everyone’s just acting acting acting all the time?”
“It’s my tur…” she begins, but then the teeth of the question bite, and it hurts, and for all her training the answer shows in the water forming at the corners of her eyes, and she looks at me, wondering, the water trickles down until it stops at her jaw line and gathers, getting bigger and threatening to drip onto the table.
I reach out my hand and I’m interested to see if she’ll pull back but she doesn’t, she leans forward just a fraction and I brush the tear with my fingertips and touch the wetness to my forehead and I hear the silent words, “In the name of the Father…”
“Of course you do,” I say. “We’ll finish that part later Lisa. Then, we will figure out the right thing to do. In detail.”
49. 3 years ago, Fairfax County, Virginia May 13 10:07 pm
“Fifty,” I gasp out, gather my legs under me and stand up, breathing hard. Jack does too, smiling. He’s not breathing hard.
“Yeah, easy for you to smile, dammit. But we did them, I did them, but my shoulder is hurting again.”
“Sure it is, but how’s your range of motion? Put your arm straight out, sideways, and hold it there.”
I do, and the pain increases, but only a little. After a few seconds my arm is trembling but that’s as much fatigue from the pushups as the wound.
“Now straight out to the front.” I swing it around slowly, it’s not too hard, I’ve been stretching and working on the adhesions like crazy every day. Anything to get the hell out of this safe house.
“Now straight up, really point at the ceiling and stretch it out,” he says, and I try, but at the very top, before I can lock out vertically, the pain increases a lot, and the muscles just don’t do what I want them to. I groan as softly as I can and slowly lower my arm back down to my side. A trickle of sweat is running down my left temple. I ignore it.
“Not bad,” he says. You’re ready for what we’re going to do in two days.”
“What’s that, Jack?”
“We’re going to kill a terrorist for the Allah Alantiqam.”
I grin at him, raise my eyebrows. My breathing is almost normal now.
“Man, nothing you say really surprises me anymore, not even this. Of course, it doesn’t seem to make any sense, but I have a feeling it will.”
“Remember what I said about diplomacy? My boss, soon to be my ex-boss, talked to someone at the Agency who talked to someone in Jordan, and they talked to someone in Iraq, and God’s Revenge is not only disavowing the guy who set up the hit on you, it’s claiming it didn’t sanction it, and will get out and stay completely out of the Americas from now on. But their leadership would appreciate it if we closed out the issue here in the States.”
“So we’re making deals with terrorists? I didn’t like the idea when you first told me about it, and I don’t like it any more now.”
He looks at me levelly. “This is all voluntary Cal. Of course. Think of it as like our alliance with the Soviets in World War II. It’s easy now to claim that it was a mistake, that we should have let the Germans and the Russians bleed each other dry. But that’s all hindsight, right wingers fantasizing about how perfect it would all be if we’d just of done it different in 1941 or 1913 or 1861 or 1789...”
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t respect you any less if you opted out. You’ve got nothing to prove. But be honest with me—you’d like to finish this guy, and make the country, maybe, a little safer in the bargain right? Sure, the truce may not last, there might be some kind of double-cross, and we might fail.”
He crosses the room to the table with his bag, reaches in and pulls out a small notebook, thumbs through the pages toward the middle, stops and looks up at me with a small grin.
“Dr. Malik Zaludi is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown. He was also an associate of God’s Revenge until yesterday, but they haven’t informed him of his change of status yet. We’ll be the ones doing the informing.”
“That son of a bitch?” I exclaim. “He was on CNN a couple of months ago saying that the acid attacks in New York were justified because “systemic racism” and “oppression,” or something. He did get some pushback but…”
“But he has tenure,” Jack says. We look at each other for a few seconds.
“That’s what I figured,” Jack says. “I already scoped out his house in Chevy Chase. Awfully nice property for an academic that’s constantly lecturing the country about the evils of capitalism. Lots of land between him and his neighbors. I could set up the trunk of a car like DC snipers did, stand off 500 meters and put a thirty caliber bullet in him.”
His eyes are still locked in on mine.
“Or, we can infiltrate the house and you can deal with him personally. It’s not as sure. Things could go wrong. But once in a while it’s not just about efficiency. ”
“The Bowie?” I say.
“Up to you. I can get a suppressed .22 pistol that will do the job. It’s no louder than a cough.”
“The Bowie,” I say.
50. Today, Aboard N916F, Enroute to Juneau, Alaska May 27, 4:40 pm
“Thirty minutes out,” the captain says over the intercom.
Lisa and I nurse bottles of mineral water that probably cost $10 because the place the water seeps out of the ground is a tiny hamlet in France. For the last hour I’ve gone through the stack of material that was in the folder, looking for anything, anything different on Eve Hart. Mostly it’s just boilerplate, articles clipped from newspapers and magazines over the years, all the way back to Eve at UCLA, starter on the Pac-10 volleyball champs and Academic All-American with a 4.0, majoring in psychology; that’s interesting, I always thought she was an engineer, too, like David and now Lisa, but the cut line under her photo says “I want to find out what makes people perform to their potential.”
The photo of her in her volleyball uniform shows a pair of long, smoothly muscled legs that any woman would kill for, but it’s the expression on her face that interests me. She smiling for the camera, but there’s just something about the Look, the eyes: Get out of my way or I’ll run you over. It’s remarkable that it comes through so clearly in a 24-year-old magazine pic.
Lisa has been working silently on her laptop for a long time, but she looks up at the intercom speaker above my head and smiles.
“Finally. I’ve taken some long flights on this plane before, and I always want out bad by the time we land. I’m not suited to sitting on my ass for extended periods,” she says.
“That’s good, because the less you sit on it the longer it will defy gravity,” I say, and wink at her. She smiles.
“Gravity eventually gets us all, though. It’s the fundamental of entropy here on Earth,” she says. “Everything goes to the bottom, unless you keep raising it up. I remember when I was seven and we were in New Orleans for a conference with my father. They have those graveyards there where the bodies are all in crypts above ground. For some reason I really liked the idea of not being buried. I’m a little claustrophobic, anyway. I’m a very lucky girl, never to have to fly commercial.”
“Amongst other things,” I say. “I re
member something in a business magazine years ago though, about how your parents made you mow the lawn to get your allowance. Was that real or was it just corporate PR bullshit?”
She laughs, amused. “Oh, it was real all right. My dad asked me when I was 10 if I saw any difference between the kids at my very private school, between the ones whose parents paid and the ones who were there on scholarship. Of course there was—mostly the rich ones never talked to the kids on scholarship, they talked to each other.”
“‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘They take a lot of pride in something they didn’t work for, didn’t pay for, didn’t sweat and bleed for. Most of them will be worthless when they grow up. Your mother and I will make sure that doesn’t happen to you.’”
She smiles, her eyes looking inward, back in time.
“He told me I was going to weed the rose beds, and showed me how. Then he left me alone.” She looks me in the eyes, again here, and now.
“That’s the best thing he ever did for me, left me alone when it was the time for it.”
“It took me a little longer. My parents weren’t quite so woke,” I say. “But I eventually got it.”
51. 3 years ago, Chevy Chase, Maryland May 18, 11:22 pm
I’ve been waiting for it, so when the sound of the garage door rolling up comes through the wall it’s no surprise, but I still feel the instant fight reaction, the quick deep breath and the sudden sound of my heartbeat in my ears, but I’m prepared and I regulate it, gently, one long slow breath, two, he won’t be coming through the door for at least 20 seconds, maybe 30, time to get out of the car, grab his briefcase, come around the car to the door into the kitchen, I’m seeing him clear as a movie against the dim background of kitchen cabinets, expensive stainless steel appliances, oh my yes, Dr. Malik Zaludi lives very well. Lived…I focus in on The Plan, like a spotlight, remembering.