Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  And for the most part … I do care. When I’m fully awake. Which is most days.

  But this … was not one of those days.

  “Mr. President?” Serena Abernathy asked me. She was a tall, willowy brunette, classically pretty, dressed in a nice little skirt that extended to mid-calf, and a pink t-shirt that said, “I Heart My Class.” I blinked as I stared at her, unaware that I’d gotten lost in thought. Lost in thoughts, to be more precise.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Ms. Abernathy,” I said, putting on my most charming smile. It was the one I used for campaigning. “What were you saying?”

  “That we’re understaffed,” she said, not really reproachful. She was being blunt, but she wasn’t unpleasant about it, as some tended to be.

  I looked away from Ms. Abernathy and out at her charges. We were standing on a playground, a small one, in the middle of a city—Chicago, that was it. I forget sometimes, because I go to so many cities. I’d slept on Air Force One on the flight in, and sometimes I get a little muddled. I looked around, trying to orient myself, but I was in one of the suburbs, and downtown wasn’t immediately visible. “You’ve been understaffed for a while, haven’t you?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going without giving it my full attention. Every school in the world was understaffed.

  “Yes, sir,” she said softly. “And your education bill … it doesn’t really do anything about that.” The cries of the children at play were loud, disruptive. They made following the conversation even more difficult. Ms. Abernathy waited in silence for a moment, her question unanswered and then changed the subject on me rather abruptly. “You don’t have any children of your own, do you?” It was just as well she changed the subject, because my response to her first comment wouldn’t have been likely to please her.

  “Hm?” I asked, to give myself a moment to respond without profanity. Her intent was mostly innocent, but there was a hint of an edge beneath it: Oh, you don’t have children, so how can you possibly understand what we parents go through? I measured my response carefully. “No, unfortunately not,” I said with an edge of sadness. “My wife died at age thirty, while we were still … contemplating … having a family.” I let my gaze drift over the playground, a modern knot of metal and plastic, with green slides and blue steel barriers around the top platform to keep children from falling off in fits of ecstatic joy. There were twelve up on the platform by my count, and only two slides.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ms. Abernathy said, and there was genuine sincerity in her voice.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. She’d already known that my wife had died young, of course. She was just fishing for my reaction, to see that I was human. I gave her what she was looking for. “Of course … not a day goes by that I don’t miss Elizabeth.” I added the appropriate amount of staring, slightly sad-eyed, into the distance.

  It hit the mark. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have …”

  “You’re fine,” I said, with just a tinge of faint, faint recrimination to warn her away from picking at that particular scab. One of the kids had caught my attention, trying to squeeze through the bars of the top platform. I pointed at him. “Uhh, I think he—um—” I stopped just short of shouting at him to knock it off before he hurt himself.

  “Jonah!” Ms. Abernathy called, catching the little bandit as he wriggled through. Honestly, who manufactures these things where kids can wriggle through? It’s as though they don’t know what their equipment is used for. “We don’t use the playground inappropriately.”

  Jonah, showing less remorse for his transgression than Ms. Abernathy had for her invasive questioning of the president, pulled his head back through the bars and ran toward the slide. There, he pushed three children out of the way and forced himself down the chute.

  “No, wait—” I started to chastise him, but it was fruitless, he was down before anyone realized what I was even saying.

  Little Jonah collided with a child at the bottom of the slide who was still in the process of extricating herself and her pretty little pink dress from the opening at the bottom. There was a solid SMACK! as two heads collided, and I cringed at the sound, audible even where I was standing. The tears started immediately, of course, and that made me cringe further, though I desperately tried to hide it. Ms. Abernathy darted off without so much as a farewell, off to soothe her troubled charges.

  It was just as well. She was insufferable.

  “Mr. President,” Jana Gordon slipped up next to me. Her official title was something like “Personal Aide to the President”; she was essentially the person who kept my life and schedule running on time wherever I went. Jana was young and vivacious, but also serious and professional. She didn’t smile much in public, which was a good call on her part. Too unserious and you get a reputation for being frivolous when you’re a young woman of her age. It’s a prejudice of the old against the young.

  “Jana,” I said. She’d been with me for several years, and I’d become quite accustomed to her steadfast way of doing things.

  “Your call with the premier of Revelen has been delayed to eleven o’clock,” Jana said, spouting out the next few details of my schedule.

  “I hope it’s due to severe intestinal malady on her part.”

  “She didn’t specify,” Jana said, glazing over my unkind words. There were a few flashes as the cameras here for photo ops caught me talking to her, smiling as I always did. “The Joint Chiefs have a briefing for you on the escalating situation in the Middle East—”

  “Is there ever not an escalating situation in the Middle East?”

  “Sometimes they de-escalate,” Jana deadpanned. “Because if all they did was escalate, they would have—”

  “Reached the sun by now, yes,” I said, catching the thrust of her joke before she could punchline it. “What about the progress on the education bill?” I gave her all my attention now, and registered her unease.

  “Speaker Thurston is working on it, sir,” she said, and I knew she wasn’t telling me the whole truth.

  “You’re far too edgy for that to be all.”

  “She says …” Jana hesitated, “… that we’re going to miss it by three votes.”

  “Three?” My eyebrows went up involuntarily.

  “That’s what the majority whip says.”

  “Who are the three most on the fence?”

  “I don’t know for sure, sir—”

  “Don’t give me that,” I said, turning to look at where Ms. Abernathy was trying to console poor Jonah, victim of his own stupidity and intemperance. “You either have a very clear idea yourself or you know someone who does.”

  “Probably McSorley, McCluskey, and Shane.” Jana spat out the three names without hesitation once I prodded her. She didn’t like the politics part of this job. She thought it was indelicate, so she played coy instead, trying to avoid giving me bad news.

  “Set up a meeting,” I said. “With them.”

  “You’re going to try and coerce them?” She sounded surprised. She shouldn’t have.

  “They call me the Persuader-in-Chief, you know.”

  “I know, sir, but—”

  “You think they’re too entrenched in their position,” I said, finally getting to the nub of it. “That when you say that they’re mostly on the fence, it doesn’t mean they’re actually on the fence at all.” I turned my head from the playground spectacle to give her my full attention. “They’re firmly against it, they’re just less firmly against it than anyone else because they’re members of my party rather than the opposition.”

  Jana stared at me for a second, then shrugged. “They’re unlikely to move. The bill lacks the carve-outs they’re seeking on—”

  “Yes, I am aware,” I said. “Listen … we need this victory. Just a little thing to whet the appetite of the public.”

  “The base hates it.”

  “Yes, well, you can’t please all the people all the time.”

  “Abe Lincoln said that, sir, and it wasn’t ‘please
,’ it was ‘fool.’ He was talking about—”

  “The electorate. That’s what he was talking about.” I looked back at little Jonah, now on his feet. His victim, the little girl who’d suffered for his stupidity, was still sniffling, leaning hard against Ms. Abernathy, who was very, very concerned about them both. About their feelings. It was touching, really.

  Of course, if Jonah had just been willing to follow the rules, it never would have happened. But that’s what people don’t see, because they lack perspective. Jonah couldn’t see the girl at the bottom of the slide, because he wasn’t far enough away from the situation—like I was—to know what would happen if he came down in a hurry. He didn’t know.

  But I knew. I had the gift and the torment of seeing, of knowing things that others didn’t. I had perspective, could see the game unfolding, could see the problems, and I knew I could solve them. All of them. I’d been working toward it for the last seven years.

  The education bill wouldn’t solve all the problems. Slapping around three congressmen who were not that interested in putting their names down in the “yea” column was unlikely to do much to aid the future of the world. In the long run, no one would even remember this small thing, done to try and streamline the American education system.

  But it was important for now. It was a gesture, symbolic to some extent, but with a few decent intentions written into it.

  “Set up the meeting,” I said, coming back to my conversation with Jana before she could try and direct my attention to the next thing. “When are we back in Washington?”

  “This afternoon, sir,” Jana said. “Three o’clock.”

  “Set up the meeting for four,” I said. “I’ll have a talk with them.”

  Jana paused, and I could tell she was racking her brain, trying to decide if she should ask. “Why, sir?” she asked, curiosity winning out.

  “Because the American people elected me to make their lives better,” I said, glancing at the Secret Service agents dotted around the playground. Beyond them lay the press, trying to take it all in and mercifully far enough away that I didn’t have to worry about being recorded. “And I’d be a lousy human being if I shirked that duty.” I smiled and waved to the press corps, the scum of the earth, while I waited for Ms. Abernathy to come back and lecture me some more on what needed to be done in the education system.

  6.

  Sienna

  The morning passed without incident, nothing reported on cable. I was just waiting around for stupid Phillips’s press conference, but when it actually happened, it was a pretty subdued thing, almost entirely bereft of substance.

  Almost.

  He got to about the middle and looked up from his statement, which had been pretty boring procedural stuff. He looked right at the camera and said, “In order for our system of justice to survive, wrongdoers have to be punished. Those who flout our laws, who make themselves enemies of the state, cannot, and will not, be suffered to live in their state of insurrection against lawful authority. Failure to yield to the laws of the people is not acceptable. They, by example and deed, are a threat to us all.”

  There was a snowball’s chance in a Texas summer of him actually having written any of that himself. He may have agreed with the sentiments, which were basically, “Sienna Nealon is a bad person who has thumbed her nose at all our supercool efforts to bring her to a cell, and we need to find her and kick her ass so other people don’t get the idea that this shit is okay,” but he didn’t write the words himself, mainly because Phillips didn’t speak like that. He wasn’t capable. He was a moron.

  And he was in charge of catching me. I felt relief, remembering that.

  Of course, he wasn’t the only one in charge of catching me. The fact that my brother had joined up with the cause, along with Augustus and J.J. and presumably everyone else … that stung. I hadn’t heard a peep about them since the press conference where President Turgid Penis Harmon (he should change his first name from Gerry to that; it flows better and it’s more accurate) announced the task force for my capture. I knew they were still out there, though, because they were still showing up in the background pictures on websites that were actually reporting what was going on in the Sienna manhunt. Unlike the news, which seemed basically to be taking everything at face value and not bothering with its own reporting.

  Speaking of which, it was about time for my daily sweep of the web.

  I was incognito in Cedar City, but part of maintaining my cover meant that I had to look and seem normal. I’d seriously considered not even bothering with getting a phone, but someone of my age group who didn’t have a cell phone would be absolutely inconceivable. It would go beyond hipster, cool-because-no-one-else-is-doing-it, and into the realm of weird-beyond-all-reckoning. So I had a smart phone—several, in fact—and I used them regularly.

  But I used them carefully.

  The GPS was switched off, for one. Location services were disabled; I checked in the menu, just to make sure the OS hadn’t somehow turned them back on in the night. Secondly, it was not registered in my name. I had a full boat of fake IDs, some very excellent ones, in fact, put together by one of the finest cobblers—that’s someone who makes fake documents—in Europe. So this phone was registered to Matilda McCoy. I didn’t know who Matilda McCoy was, or if she was even real, but it was unlikely that the FBI was looking for her. So there was that. Thirdly, I didn’t take or make calls on the phone. No one had the number.

  And fourth, when I went on the internet, I used a Virtual Private Network or VPN to hide where I was browsing from. To anyone watching, they couldn’t see what I was looking at nor could they tell where I was looking from. I always had it set for Canada, so my IP address looked like I was in Toronto. Just another Canadian browsing fringe sites, NSA. Nothing to see here. Finally, when I wasn’t using the internet, I both shut down the internet and turned off the phone. I had six different phones to browse from, and used them each randomly throughout Cedar City. Every one of them was the same model, with the same look, so that if anyone did take notice of me, it would seem like I was using the exact same phone. Five out of the six, I never used in the apartment. I was tempted not to use the last here, either, but checking my websites was a thing that kept me calm, helped me feel … not totally disconnected from the world.

  It let me feel like there were a few people in the world that didn’t hate me.

  There were a few sites that I checked daily, because they only added content once a day or less. There was one site, though, that seemed to have enough contributors that they were updating constantly. It was called SiennaWatch, though the web address was something totally random. They actually had photos from scenes where Scott and Reed and the hunting party had run raids on places where they’d suspected I was. They had a pretty big network of people crowdsourcing these photos and story details. Some of them sounded like bullshit ravings of nuts, but … the ones with pictures attached tended to be somewhat credible based on how I knew the FBI and Scott operated.

  Also, there was one photo two weeks ago where Guy Friday had gotten squirted—presumably by Scott—right in the crotch. So naturally, everyone in the comments section made fun of the big guy for peeing himself. Or worse. I don’t normally go in for internet comments, but in this case, I basked in the warmth. Like Guy Friday in his own pee.

  I pulled up SiennaWatch, waiting for my 3G super-slow service to load the damned web page. I hoped for a solid update, something like Scott and Co. raiding a women’s clothing store and getting tangled up in the lingerie section. Those sort of photos would make my day.

  What I got was something else. Not the sort of thing that would make my day at all.

  I looked over the image, the headline, and I didn’t quite comprehend what I was seeing. I flicked my gaze to the TV screen with Phillips’s face still hogging the majority of the real estate, his faded, thin blond hair and wide jaw still irritating me, begging me across the thousands of miles between us to punch him. It was a distinct co
ntrast from what I was reading on my phone. There was no mention of the website headline in the chyrons scrolling beneath his fat, stupid face, not a hint of the horror that I’d just taken in.

  FBI TASK FORCE LAUNCHES WARRANTLESS, NO-KNOCK RAID IN CHEYENNE, WYOMING, THAT KILLS LOCAL MOTHER, WOUNDS INFANT.

  I could scarcely imagine a more horrifying headline. The sheer gut-wrenching disgust I felt for what my pursuers had done in their overzealous haste to kill me almost caused me to drop my phone. My fingers felt numb, and I set it down on the table, internet still active, before my grip could fail me.

  I’d done a few no-knock raids in my time. When you’re up against an implacable foe, a really nasty meta with deadly powers, kicking down the door and bum rushing them seems like a far better alternative to someone blasting away at you in a civilian neighborhood with a pistol or rifle or energy-projecting powers.

  But this … whatever had happened in Cheyenne this morning, was, without a doubt, a full-scale disaster that should have gone down in history as a textbook example of the worst consequences of a no-knock raid gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  I looked up at the screen, though, and I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to make it to any textbooks. If the traditional media hadn’t publicized this little incident yet, it meant either it was untrue or they were ignoring it. I knew which one I was betting on, but I couldn’t say for a total certainty if I was right or just assuming the worst of the press because I hated their guts—and the rest of their smarmy, elitist, ass-kissing selves, too.

  I ran a hand over my forehead. It was greasy, the result of my failure to shower in the last twenty-four hours, if not more. It was funny how I had all this time and couldn’t seem to find any to take care of basic hygiene. Then again, I was trying to keep people at a distance, so this sort of helped.