Failed State
Page 29
Tania tried to see through the cockpit window, to see if he really was the pilot, but the glass was as opaque as the midnight blue fuselage.
It was a beautiful and scary thing, with its Luftwaffe ’46 lines guided by twenty-first-century electrorobotics. Visitor from a different tomorrow. She’d seen it on the big screens for the last inaugural, when it flew in from Camp David, but seeing it in person was a whole different deal. Pure wonder. Like some cross between a royal yacht, an experimental supercar, and a unicorn.
Piloted by God.
“Dark Apollo has landed,” joked Odile, barely audible through the noise.
Tania had been close enough to see him once before—two years earlier, on the day they swore him in for his third term, wearing his medals. Tania had watched the parade, just down the road, on an office balcony with Odile and a bunch of other silk suits cheering on their sugar daddy in chief. Tania remembered the snowflakes melting on the military robots as they rumbled down the street. The big land drones with their black beret Engineer escorts walking alongside. The double-wide floats with their maudlin pageants of the martyrs of Tehran, Seoul, Panama City. She’d seen a guy in the crowd throw a snowball at the Vice President’s limo, then watched the silver helmets swarm him.
“Which one’s your boyfriend?” she teased Odile now, as they watched the soldiers mark out a landing pad with their regimented bodies, so close Tania could almost reach them through the fence.
They felt the thrust as the turbine turned down, like a hot hard wind. The craft dropped fast, then slowed just above the flickering turf, gently moving through the final phase into a soft landing.
There were no tourists on this side of the checkpoint, but everyone around turned to watch. The President, even just the idea of his imminent presence, compelled your gaze.
The Secret Service detail assembled around the rear of the aircraft, waiting for the door to drop. The sanctioned cameras were right behind them.
Tania’s view was occluded, but she could see the colored light leak out from inside when they opened the hatch.
The personal guard emerged first. A detail of three. All tall, handpicked from the best corporate security firms. One of them, a blond woman with a white scarf instead of a necktie, looked right at Tania, through lenses that clearly read her face.
“Don’t forget to smile,” said Odile.
“You’re the one she should be checking out,” said Tania.
“Look,” said Odile. “The dogs!”
Sure enough, the presidential pets trotted out on cue. The wolfhound, then the ridgeback. Everyone knew their names. Ulysses and Lee.
The man who followed looked like the President, but wasn’t.
Odile squealed.
“Newton!” she yelled.
Others joined in with shouts and whistles. Tania gasped.
The man turned, flashing a white porcelain smile. Newton Towns. The actor who played the President in the movies. The one that popularized Mack’s narrative before he first ran for office, dramatizing his escape from the North Koreans after his fighter jet went down in the DMZ. Then the sequel, a miniseries about the Panamanian crisis of his first term. They were working on a third one now, about the retaking of New Orleans.
“He’s fucking glowing,” said Odile, and Tania laughed with her.
He wasn’t, really, but he had that aura. Opposite of what Tania expected, he was even better-looking in person. Beautiful, in an unreal way, yet there he was, magazine cover model of a good-looking, friendly white man, the archetype they wanted you to believe in. He wore a suit, but no tie. One of those suits built to your scan, that draped elegantly and suggested superhero bulges all at the same time.
One of the cameras came in close for the star, then moved toward the crowd. Not that you could tell what it was filming. There was more than one eye behind the black glass of those rotored orbs.
As she thought of it scanning them, Tania got anxious for a second, then remembered how that inspector sucked up to Odile. If they were watching them, it was probably to protect her.
Two women walked out. The girlfriends. Newton’s date, the country singer Ashley Lionel, and the presidential companion, triathlete Patricia Wood. They looked rich, unnaturally young, and happy.
Then He emerged.
The Commander in Chief, wearing an old-school bomber jacket with flight patches and the left sleeve pinned up over his stump. He didn’t look back. All business, the busy boss headed back to the office. His hair was going white. It looked like some of his skin was, too, scar tissue you could see on the back of his neck. He was shorter than they made him look on TV. And something about seeing him in the flesh, feeling him that close, made all your deep down feelings about him come right up to the surface.
Tania wished she could see his eyes.
“Yo, Tommy!” she yelled, insanely, uncontrollably, as if momentarily possessed by the rabble-rousing spirit of her mom. “Look at your people, tyrant!”
Odile gasped.
And as soon as the words left her mouth, Tania could feel she had breached the terms of their unofficial permission to be here.
Shit.
Tania was right at the fence now, fingers through the chain link, eyes on, like some crazy starfucker. Or assassin. She suddenly realized how very close they were to the most protected man in the world.
She glanced at Odile’s freaked-out face, and the uniformed dudes gaping behind her, all staring at Tania.
But she got what she wanted.
She got the President of the United States to look right at her. They locked gazes. No more than a second, but long enough to register the judgment of those cold blue eyes.
It was not a safe feeling.
“Let’s go,” said Odile.
The President turned. Barked something at his guard. One of his dogs actually barked.
The blond lady bodyguard was really watching Tania then. So were half the people around her.
Tania felt the shudder of fear come up through her body.
She looked up and around, at the cameras you could see, and the ones you couldn’t. One of the news cameras was on her now.
OMFG.
“Come on!” said Odile, grabbing Tania, pulling her hard.
“Yeah, okay,” said Tania. They turned and headed back the way they came.
“What the fuck!” said Odile, glaring, as they walked as fast as they could without running.
“Sorry!” said Tania. “I think you just got me all riled up with all that crazy talk at lunch and hollering at Newton.”
“That was all you,” said Odile. “I say what I think sometimes, but in the right time and place. I thought you knew how this town works!”
“Same way the whole country works,” said Tania. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She knew that was a lie, even if it was true.
When they got to Lafayette Square, they were waiting for them. Of course they were. The soldiers surrounded them, separated them, frisked them. Tania saw Odile crying as that same inspector, Nichols, escorted her back behind the checkpoint. Then four Secret Service agents took Tania away in a car with windows tinted so dark she couldn’t see where they were.
She asked what cause they had to detain her, but they didn’t say anything. As she knew, they didn’t have to.
It was an emergency.
It had been an emergency for as long as Tania could remember.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER BROWN is the Campbell and World Fantasy Award–nominated author of Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he also practices law.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Praise for Rule of Capture
“This one is fresh, intelligent, and emotional, with a plot that envisions an alternate reality hard to dismiss as unreal. It’s a legal thriller, with a big twist, stirring and imaginative, brimming with skulduggery, that will have you asking: is this possible?”
> —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry
“A kind of madcap Texas Gothic dark comedy, as the Houston good ole boy network is displayed like a courtroom scene in an unpublished Hunter S. Thompson novel [ . . . ] It moves rocketing along at a ferocious pace—and then it lingers, haunting you.”
—Cory Doctorow, for BoingBoing
“Christopher Brown looks to be cornering the market on future dystopias . . . ‘Rule of Capture’ is not just sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Rule of Capture is a taut, smart legal thriller set five minutes into the future in a dystopian postwar America that looks scarily plausible from the vantage point of 2019, and marks Brown as one of our most tuned-in science-fiction writers.”
—Adrian McKinty, Edgar and Ned Kelly Award–winning author of The Chain and Rain Dogs
“Peel back the dystopian and science-fiction layers of this fast-moving and entertaining story, and what remains is a smart, taut legal thriller bound to keep readers turning pages deep into the night.”
—Robert Bailey, bestselling author of the McMurtrie and Drake legal thriller series
“Interpersonal drama fuels the story as much as legal maneuvering, and Brown keeps tight control of his narrative even as this alternate America slips its gears.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This dark, dystopian story will appeal equally to readers of John Grisham and Cory Doctorow.”
—Booklist
“Put this one on the shelf next to Orwell.”
—Locus
“An exhilarating, all-too-real journey into a scary place, where the fall of democracy is sure to be streamlined: the courts. Chris Brown’s frenetic prose will keep you turning the pages, make you laugh, and fill you with horror—it’s the long-awaited, judicial dystopian thriller for our times.”
—Fernando Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig
“If this first installment is any indication, I will buy the others the day they appear on shelves, mute my phone, and cancel all appointments for the next couple of days.”
—Lone Star Literary Life
“Compelling, timely, and disturbing, Brown’s expertly crafted legal drama asks its reader a number of tough questions: When the collapse of society comes, what role will you play? Will you be complicit? Will you stand and fight? Or will you try to just carry on, business as usual? And perhaps more urgently: has that collapse already started?”
—Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail
“A sharp, no-holds-barred view into a desperate future that is terrifyingly close to our present. This is the stuff of which today’s nightmares are made.”
—Eileen Gunn, author of Questionable Practices
“Rule of Capture is a smart and stirring political thriller set in a dystopian America that feels like an unsettling version of our own waiting in the shadows. Brown’s world is deeply immersive, his concepts richly realized, his themes sweeping but centering on the imperative and cost of resisting tyranny.”
—Craig DiLouie, author of Our War
“A captivating page-turner ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.”
—Gavin J. Grant, Stoker Award–winning author and editor
“Magnificent.”
—Jack Womack, author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence and Ambient
“Read this! A dark, funny novel of homegrown revolution, constitutional crisis, and edgelands biology [deponent affirms he could not stop reading].”
—Endless Bookshelf
“I can’t remember a legal thriller having made me cry before—though I suppose terrifyingly near-future compassionate dystopian SF is another story. Rule of Capture is both.”
—The Mossy Skull
Praise for Tropic of Kansas
“Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer bat-shit genius . . . a truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment.”
—William Gibson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author
“The great American novel about the end of America. This book is marvelously propulsive, bighearted, and whip-smart.”
—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of Get in Trouble
“This vision of the future is violent, unforgiving, and bleak: Cormac McCarthy meets Philip K. Dick. It’s disturbing because of how believable it is . . . It’s remarkably effective. Recommended for fans of Paolo Bacigalupi and China Miéville.”
—Booklist
“Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not ‘make America great again,’ but then again, it just might.”
—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Homeland
“Tropic of Kansas is like a modern dystopian buffet. . . . It is, in this particular moment in history, frighteningly prescient. It is the nightly news with the volume turned up to 11.”
—NPR
“This funny, heart-wrenching book cuts through genre expectations with the speed of a jackhammer.”
—Seattle Times
“This book is a powerful vision of an America that might be, an America that some nights seems as though it is all too likely to be, filled with powerful characters and a chilling presentiment of how far our country could fall . . . a novel well worth reading.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“Tropic [of Kansas] is a knockout first novel, paradoxically solemn yet exuberant, restrained yet inventive, as attested to by well-deserved encomiums from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow.”
—Locus
“A new mutation of the alternate-history novel.”
—Norman Spinrad (Asimov’s Science Fiction )
“This stunning novel of a time all too easily imaginable as our own highlights a few of the keen-voiced, brave-souled women and men who balance like subversive acrobats on society’s whirling edges . . . Read it to burn with the joy of realistic hope.”
—Nisi Shawl, Tiptree Award–winning author of Everfair and Writing the Other
“A unique blend of Philip K. Dick, Kafka (just a smidgen), and a whole lot of Christopher Brown. Adventure novel meets political satire and the finest elements of realistic sci-fi, and it’s so well written it goes down like a greased eel. It’s hopeful dystopia. What a book.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, author of the Hap and Leonard series
“Tropic of Kansas is the tale of a politically desperate USA haunted by a sullen, feral teen who is Huck Finn, Conan, and Tarzan. Because it’s Chris Brown’s own imaginary America, this extraordinary novel is probably more American than America itself will ever get.”
—Bruce Sterling, award-winning author of Islands in the Net and Pirate Utopia
“Tropic of Kansas is a great novel. Brown’s writing is tightly composed, and flows nicely . . . Definitely recommended.”
—Civilian Reader
“Fun, fast, violent, smart, and with enough adventure and science-fiction elements to keep fans of both genres happy, this was more than a superb novel: it was the kind of book that announces the arrival of an author at the top of his game.”
—LitReactor (Best of 2017)
“Tropic of Kansas is savvy political thriller meets ripping pulp adventure—a marriage made in page-turning, thought-provoking heaven. . . . It’s a vision both frighteningly prescient and already too real, and a story of valiant heart and brain up against the worst architectures of greed and power.”
—Jessica Reisman, SESFA Award–winning author of Substrate Phantoms
Also by Christopher Brown
Tropic of Kansas
Rule of Capture
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organiza
tions, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
failed state. Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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first edition
Cover design by Owen Corrigan
Cover photographs © justhavealook/Getty Images (statue); © Ricardo Reitmeyer/Shutterstock (clouds); © Konstantin Kirillov/Dreamstime.com (ivy); © Venus Kaewyoo/Dreamstime.com (vines); © Harald Biebel/Dreamstime.com (rust)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-285912-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285910-5
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