They made Lou watch while they made Helen eat her own diamonds, on a live feed they beamed out from their phones. That was after they shaved her blond hair off, and made her clean the toilets and bathe the feet of three of the guest workers. The diamonds were not crazy big, but they were big enough, and so were the guns, so she swallowed them all, no doubt hoping they would let her live.
They did not. At the press conference the next day, the government agents said the terrorists had shot them all, in the end, all the adults, in a big group. Then they fed them to the sharks.
Blood in the water.
They let the children go. One of children gave the press a different story. Said the insurgents had only asked for a small ransom and the release of three political prisoners. And that the hostages were killed when the government attacked. The government said the kid was a liar. A sympathizer.
That kid was Heather.
“Lou, just because I opposed the regime, and fought for due process for people who opposed it by other means, doesn’t mean I agree with all the actions taken. Especially not after things started getting really crazy.”
“You represented murderers, Donny.”
“Including the President. The violence started on your side, Lou. Or maybe you forgot about the first roundups. Right now I’m sitting in Dallas two blocks from where the vigilantes strung up those kids in Dealey Plaza. But I’m not here to talk about the past—I’m calling to see if I can help make sure it doesn’t happen again. Because I just heard about Heather. I can’t believe they took her. Especially since, last I heard, she was on their side.”
Donny listened for the reaction.
Some people whispered that Heather was in on what went down. That she had helped the guerrillas access the camp, told them where they could find the people they wanted. Donny didn’t buy it. Especially now.
“Heather is her own woman,” said Lou. “But she’s not a terrorist. And they’re not going to get away with it this time.”
“And that’s why I want to help,” said Donny. “I know I can get them to release her.”
Heather had been arrested for contempt of court, for failing to pay a default judgment the courts of the breakaway regime in New Orleans had awarded against her family’s holdings. That case was based on charges arising out of her family’s three generations of crimes against the planet, things that had not been crimes until the insurgents took New Orleans as the liberated territory they won in the war and made their own new laws. The family, like the other companies that had been sued in that court, denied its jurisdiction and refused to even show up. The result was damages in an amount not even that family could afford to pay. Damages that were more like reparations. And now if they didn’t pay, Heather would pay. Maybe with her life.
“You piece of shit,” said Lou. “You’re in on this fucking shakedown, aren’t you?”
“No, Lou. I told you, I don’t work for those people anymore. They fired me. But I know them. I understand them. I even helped them set up this new court. They will listen to me.”
Lou groaned. It was the sound of someone who really wants to end the conversation, wishes it had never begun, but now knows it can’t stop.
“We already have this covered, Donny.”
“Let me help. I have a plan. A better plan than whatever you have. Listen.”
Donny told him his plan. To his surprise, it sounded pretty good. Better than when he had thought it up an hour before.
“How can you do that?” said Lou. “Those are your clients you would be going up against.”
“It won’t be the first time.”
Lou grunted in agreement.
“It’s not a conflict,” Donny continued. “Not technically. There’s nothing they can do to stop me. Trust me.”
He could almost hear Lou thinking. There were voices in the background. One calling Lou’s name.
“Come on,” said Donny. “It can’t hurt. And I’m pretty sure I can pull it off.”
“It’s tempting, Donny. Even if it’s very unorthodox, and a little wacked. The thing is, I’m not calling the shots on this one.”
“What do you mean? It’s your kid.”
“Yeah, but it’s not my money.”
“It’s her money.”
“It’s more complicated than that. There’s another guy you’ll need to talk to. And he may be harder to convince than me.”
“Who’s that?”
Lou told him.
“I know him,” said Donny. “We go way back.”
“Okay, then maybe it will work.”
“Maybe,” said Donny, more convincingly than he actually believed.
13
As he rode in the self-driving cab headed to the meeting Lou had set up, Donny watched the news feed on the seatback. It wasn’t news, really. Just a curated freak show of videos they ran to try to hold your attention until the next ad. The newly wedded actors Newton Towns and Lauren Stern showing the crossbred giant vegetables they were growing in the urban farm they started at an old dump site, Lauren talking about what the crumbling old concrete does for the soil, how the pill bugs eat the hard metals right out. Some guys walking into a clearing in the Siberian forest, claiming they have found a landing site of ancient aliens. And a new sighting of Donny’s most famous—and most hated—client.
It was a blown-up photo of a guy on the deck of a yacht. He was with two topless women and one topless dude, holding instruments the overdub said were the assault rifles of bodyguards, but could just as easily have been fishing gear. The image was too grainy to tell, but at just enough resolution for you to see it kind of looked like it could be him, there in the Mediterranean sun off the coast of Ibiza.
“Hey, driver,” said Donny.
“Yes, sir,” said the voice of the bot. It was a perfectly pitched androgyne, with just a hint of an English accent to make it sound classier. Donny preferred it when they had German accents, which made the cars feel safer. “How can I help you?”
“Where is the president of the United States?”
A pause while it searched for the answer. “There currently is no president of the United States.”
“Smart answer. Where is former President Thomas Mack?”
Another, longer pause. “President Mack is dead, according to a plurality of government and media sources.”
“You’re no fun,” said Donny.
“I’m sorry,” said the bot.
“What about the sources that say he’s not dead? Like the one you just played for me on the TV. Any other recent sightings?”
A short pause. “Yes. Would you like to hear the sightings from this year to date?”
“Definitely.”
Outside the window, they were passing through a district of warehouses. Dallas remained a logistics center and distribution hub, where the products Americans still made that people wanted in other countries, like guns, televisions, and marijuana, were gathered for export. And one of the main places where international relief supplies were received for distribution to the slowly recovering heartland.
“In January,” said the bot, “a family returning from vacation in Cancun said they had seen him in the casino, playing blackjack. Also in January, a truck operator claimed to have found him running a Kum & Go convenience store on Interstate 70 in western Nebraska. In February The Fort Report republished a network post from user charliefiefortyfive that breakaway elements of the Department of Defense have him in an old missile silo in North Dakota. They also noted earlier speculations that the online self-help guru Jeremy Hardman is actually President Mack with plastic surgery and a beard. In March La Nación carried an interview with a ranch hand who said the President is in Paraguay as a guest of the regime on a big ranch stocked with game and guarded by the military. And two weeks ago the Chinese government released photos of him in one of their prisons.”
“I saw that,” said Donny. “Those were totally fake. Where do you think he is?”
“I don’t understand your qu
estion. Would you like to stop for lunch? I have a coupon for you for Karl’s Quick Grab, which is at the next corner and would only take you an extra twelve minutes to get to your destination.”
“I’m not buying anything other than this ride,” said Donny. “I asked you where the President is.”
The bot was still working on an answer when they arrived.
14
The neighborhood where Charles Lecker had his office was unofficially known as New Versailles among the locals. Officially, it didn’t have a name—it was just the zone between Highland Park and downtown that had been built up with new office buildings and hotels in the last decade, when Dallas had boomed under the prosperity the Mack administration had brought its way while most other parts of the country declined. The nickname came from the fact that most of the new structures were designed in a consciously French style, eighteenth-century Parisian models reinterpreted by expressive but collared architectural AIs and their human assistants working with advanced materials and additive manufacturing. Dallas had always had French affectations, from the strip-mall buffets that masqueraded as brasseries to the electric Citroëns that had become popular more recently, and somehow managed to make its Francophile appropriation seem perfectly compatible with the engorged suburban sprawl of the fat years. Maybe those lefty settlers had planted seeds that persisted, but mutated to adapt to the place the civic boosters used to call the “City of Splendid Realities.”
The suite occupied by Liberty Advisors Limited was on the top floor of the Savane Building, which was really three almost-identical buildings around a courtyard of parking spots and topiaries that looked genetically engineered to resemble the animals into whose images they had been clipped. By the main entrance of the central building grew a fox and a hedgehog. It was hard to tell which one was winning, but the hedgehog looked a little cocky the way it held its head up like it was about to proudly squeal.
The secretary who came down to escort Donny from security was an old white guy who reminded Donny of the retirement-ready marshals at the federal courthouse in Houston, but more Rotary Club than Shriner. He even had the lapel pin that signified his club membership. Donny wanted to ask him if he missed the memo, that the organizations that had incubated the dictatorship were now banned. But he caught himself, or more accurately the man’s steely look preempted Donny’s quip. And when they got up to the office, you could see it was still a safe place for allegiance to the Ancien Régime, which maybe helped explain the architecture as well.
The lobby walls hosted a gallery of war criminals. The General, Governor Jackson, Justice Korb, and the like, all pictured in a way that made them look both strong and kind. Patriarchally kind. One wall was devoted to young martyrs from Dallas’s finest private schools who had turned in their football and lacrosse uniforms for the kind of uniforms that came with guns, as captains of militia brigades or officers in the Guard.
“Please take a seat,” said the secretary, in a way that made it clear it wasn’t optional.
Donny complied, opting for the big couch. There was a peach-colored Financial Times on the table, with headlines above the fold about catastrophe-bond traders shorting the future, the Australian walkout from the Port Moresby talks on the rights of seaborne refugees, and rogue Prince Harry’s purchase of enough Honduran dirt to turn the small island he had bought into a new military airfield in the Gulf. Donny opted for one of the dog-eared back issues of American Heritage, from the years when it was edited by restorationist patriots. That magazine had been one of Donny’s transgressive vices in college, mostly for the illustrations that were perfect for perusing while stoned—paintings by artists of the Norman Rockwell school channeling the garish subject matter of men’s adventure pulps. The cover of the issue Donny grabbed featured a shirtless and bloodied dude shoving a large animal bone into the input drive of a wall-sized computer, under the headline my war with a chinese machine intelligence. Donny flipped to the classifieds in the back, with political recruiting ads that had seemed so laughable at the time, a decade before the networks they helped create managed to seize control of the nation-state. The memory of how clueless he had been caused him to put the magazine back. He looked at his watch, and then noticed the nearby display case full of vintage oral-surgery instruments polished to a stainless sheen, and remembered when Dr. Lecker had a very different office nearby, and Donny was one of his teen patients.
“Mr. Kimoe,” said the voice, older and harder than Donny remembered, but somehow less scary, maybe because he didn’t have Donny in a dental chair and his hands in Donny’s mouth. Dr. Lecker had retired from that practice, though there were stories that he still dabbled in a more experimental mode of oral surgery—or had before the Compact was signed.
“Thanks for seeing me, Doc,” said Donny, turning to face his childhood torturer.
Dr. Lecker didn’t look that different. Old but fit, with what appeared to be the same black-framed glasses. He still had his hair, but it was all white now, and the lines in his face cut deep, making the gray-blue of his eyes seem even colder. And when he shook his hand, Donny could remember one of those hands holding his head from squirming while the other pulled out the noncompliant tooth with dental pliers.
“It’s always nice to see an old patient,” said Dr. Lecker. “Even when they have failed to follow your advice.”
“Are you talking about your medical advice, or the political lectures you gave along with them?”
“They were all grounded in the same philosophy,” said Lecker. “And in your case, it was the mouthing off about politics that caused you to lose your tooth. Much to your father’s disappointment, as I recall.”
“Yeah, well, as much as we looked alike, what was inside our heads was as different as could be.”
“That’s what you think,” said Dr. Lecker. “He did great things, as a businessman. And you’ve accomplished remarkable things in your profession, even if your choice of clients reflects the misguided politics of your adolescence. And as we all learned, he and you weren’t as far apart in those matters as we once thought.”
“Let’s not go there, Doc. Okay? I came to talk with you about a different father and child.”
“Right,” said Dr. Lecker, smiling the smile of the lay pastor who plans to get his way with you. “Let’s go down here.”
He led Donny down a long hallway, passing private offices occupied by busy-looking people, presumably the investment professionals who helped support what had become Lecker’s core business. They ended in a surprisingly large conference room that took up a corner of the building, with windows on two sides running from the floor to the double-height ceiling. Lecker opened the door in one of the windows, stepped out onto the balcony, and looked back at Donny.
“Not afraid of heights, are you?”
Donny shook his head.
The balcony was ample, with a long view to the north and west. Along the railing a half dozen orange trees were arrayed in big planters.
“Let’s share one, shall we?” said Lecker, reaching for a big ripe fruit. “These are the last of the winter season. And very sweet, thanks to the freezes we had.”
“Is that from one of the family recipes?”
“Dr. Sava’s Great Plains Valencia, actually. So yes. One of the hardiest varietals the citrus division has developed. I’m what you might call a beta tester. Perk of being an early investor, and a board member.”
Donny put his hand on one of the oranges. The fruit was smaller than the oranges of his youth, with a more washed-out color. But it was still the first real orange he had held in a long time.
“Of course, it’s a very finicky plant, like most of the Tripto Labs hybrids. But those leaves suck forty percent more carbon from the air. And gardening help is even less expensive than it used to be. Come.”
He showed Donny to a wrought-iron chair at a glass café table, and took the opposite seat. Donny stood at the railing before sitting, taking in the view.
“It’s weird seeing
the airport so dead,” said Donny, focusing in on the empty runways off in the distance.
“It’s ridiculous, if you ask me,” said Lecker. “We need to be upgrading the power plants to the new low-emissions models, not grounding flights. That just slows down development. And further delays the day when we can get those people new homes.”
“Those people” were in the mosaic of color made out by the tents of Camp Lincoln—and past that, the green acres of Tripto Labs’ flagship farm. Donny had seen it up close. But from this vantage, you could see that it took up more space than the airport.
“Your clients, I take it,” said Lecker.
“Most of those cases were dropped after the uprising,” said Donny, taking his chair. “But what happened there and on the farms is what has me here in Dallas.”
“You mean the AMR case?”
“That’s the one,” said Donny.
“You know we used to work with that company,” said Lecker. “They were our security contractor.”
“I know all about that,” said Donny. “And there are some Tripto execs with dirty hands too. But if you’re on the board I guess we shouldn’t talk about that. Not without your own lawyer present.”
“You never struck me as the sort who lets the ethics rules get in your way.”
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