Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  “You’ve got it, right?” said Turner, watching him closely.

  “Of course I’ve got it,” lied Donny. What he had was half a day to get it. But hopefully he wouldn’t need it.

  “Want one?” said Turner, holding out the pack of smokes.

  “No thanks,” said Donny.

  “You look like you could use it.”

  “If I do that I’ll only want something stronger.”

  Turner laughed, but Donny was already thinking about something else.

  “You think your friend Richie would be interested if I told him I had the code?”

  Turner gave him a long look. “I knew you didn’t have the dough.”

  “I can put it together. Just thinking about a way to really wrap the whole thing up with a bow. Maybe I should just talk to Bridget Kelly.”

  “That sounds like a real smart idea.”

  “I just want this girl to see another sunrise.”

  “She will,” said Turner. “Just maybe not in this hemisphere.”

  There was a sunrise right there behind them, gold metal inlay in the black granite of the Ares Memorial, image of the sun peeking out from behind the moon.

  “You ever wonder if maybe it was a bad idea privatizing NASA and sending corporations into space?” said Donny.

  “Nope,” said Turner. “It was the best thing that happened to this town since Spindletop.”

  “Until they shut it down.”

  “That won’t last forever. Trying to keep Texans off the moon is like trying to keep the Sooners from rushing Indian Territory.”

  “Nice analogy,” said Donny.

  “Except there aren’t any Indians on the moon.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Turner smiled.

  “I think that’s where the Comanches are hiding,” said Donny.

  “Well, I was up there for a year working security, right at the beginning, and I never saw no Indians, Donny. Least not that kind. And now the Chinese are running it.”

  “Yep,” said Donny. “That’s what I was thinking. That if we’d never made space into real estate, we never would have needed to militarize it, never would have let so much of our security rest on that satnet, and wouldn’t be grounded down here now eating austerity pie. We should’ve stuck with ‘For All Mankind.’”

  “You think too much,” said Turner, standing up. “If you had seen it, seen the mines when they were running full steam, you wouldn’t be asking that question. We’ll get it back. Quicker than you think.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You call me before five and let me know if this deal with Richie is on.”

  “Thanks, Turner. I owe you.”

  “Yes, you do. Don’t fuck it up.”

  As Turner walked off, Donny looked up at the actual moon there in the daytime sky and wondered if it was watching him, too.

  30

  As good as she was at keeping information from Donny that he had every right to have, once in a while Bridget Kelly helped him out. It was usually unintentional.

  When he accepted the friend request she disclaimed ever sending, the link took Donny to Breakroom. Donny hated that site, like he hated all the others. They always made him feel like he was trapped in the mall, modeling the clothes the department stores sold, but never getting paid for it. Breakroom was a Dallas company, of course. Some of his former colleagues at B&E worked on the deal. His own former client, Major Kovacs, was one of the investors. Maybe that was the red flag, the foreknowledge that if you got out of line on there one of the virtual mall cops would give you the Midnight Express. Any deal like that where the users don’t make the rules seemed like a bad deal to Donny. Some days it made him think about whether the country should work the same way, like that wackadoodle Maxine Price used to say when she was Green’s Vice President.

  The consequence was that Donny did not have many friends on Breakroom. Just the ones that had found him, most of them former workmates or people he had gone to school with. But he had a few, and when the page opened up to celebrate his new connection with the lady in charge of locking his clients up, it told him what one of his other friends had been up to lately.

  Donny, would you like to congratulate Amanda Zorn for being selected as lead financial advisor for the Governor’s Texas Gulf Region Reclamation and Restoration Fund?

  Hell yes, said Donny. And then he figured out how to do it in person.

  Amanda Zorn’s office was on the eighty-first floor of the Jupiter Energy building on Louisiana Street, a purple-looking high-rise that was one of the newest towers in the skyline and one of the last to be built before they stopped building new skyscrapers. The main lobby was all polished stone, with a big point of light coming from somewhere on the other side of the elevator bank. To get to the elevators you needed to get past the security guards at the fortified desk, who dressed in fancy uniforms like doormen of the future but carried the gunmetal and mien of privatized paramilitaries.

  Machine guns at the front door were something you got used to after a while.

  The investment bankers of Manaugh Feldman & Co. occupied two whole floors of the building, connected by an internal stair that created an atrium out of the reception area, where they had Donny wait on the sort of couch that was so comfortable it made you uncomfortable, in front of a table holding four unread newspapers. On the opposite wall was a huge screen streaming the financial news with the sound off and the captions on. The anchor was interviewing some expert about the boom in catastrophe bonds, which sounded like complex bets on permutations of apocalypse. Donny wondered how much money you needed to get in on that—and if you could even collect if you were right. And then a skinny young guy in a suit that looked too expensive for a secretary walked up and said Ms. Zorn can see you now, and escorted him up the stairs, past the young bankers at their open floor plan desks monitoring complex trajectories of capital on multi-screen boxes and working deals over headsets in a polyphonous murmur that filled the room with unexpectedly soothing white noise.

  “Mr. Kimoe,” said the secretary, announcing his presence as they crossed the threshold of the corner office where Amanda was working at her big glass desk, then closing the door on them.

  When she turned to look at him, before she even stood, you could see the welcome of an old friend in her eyes, even as you could also see how far their paths had diverged since school.

  She still had that inky hair, but now with a distinct tuft of early grey, all styled perfectly at the edge between fashionable and businesslike. She wore one of those trendy new power suits that looked like a cross between the topcoat of some Victorian gentleman and the oracular robes of an ancient cleric. Her jewelry had the signature patina of lunar platinum, rarer than rare earth, with one big diamond sharp enough to cut through that desk should the situation require.

  The diamond was not on her ring finger.

  “Donny fucking Kimoe,” she said, stepping around the desk to greet him with a smile and a hug.

  “It’s great to see you, Amanda,” said Donny. “You look amazing.”

  He meant it.

  “How long has it been?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Donny. “Maybe one of those parties after the bar results came in?”

  “I feel like I’ve seen you at some of the alumni events, across the room.”

  “Not likely,” said Donny. “I still owe them money.”

  That drew a patronizing smile. “And I’ve never even been to a courtroom, where you real lawyers hang out. Come on, sit down.” She pointed at the small sofa as she sat in the armchair across.

  For a long moment, she just looked at him across the coffee table, still smiling, almost squinting.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Now I remember that party. At that place Pooji rented, out in the country.”

  Donny smiled.

  “What a bacchanal,” she said.

  “At an actual winery, if I remember right,” said Donny.

  She nodde
d and smiled in agreement. “With Pooji’s pharmaceutical tasting notes blended in,” she said.

  “And that September weather.”

  “Oh God, yes. I remember that moon.”

  And then you could see the shock come over her face as she must have just remembered what Donny remembered the minute he saw her profile pic on Breakroom—that they had made out that night, at that crazy party after they passed the last exam they would ever take and before they would get on the hamster wheels that would pay for their heavily indentured educations. He couldn’t remember what kept them from getting more intimate than that, but he recognized her smile. A smile she now seemed to have lost, as she looked across the table resizing the man before her.

  Donny adjusted his suit coat, and noticed a new frayed spot at the cuff. Then he noticed one of the translucent cubes that were set out on the coffee table, and picked it up, initially so he could look at something other than her appraising gaze.

  Inside the cube was what looked like a tiny relief map of some little island, etched with a date, and a number that had enough zeros on the far side of the dollar sign that Donny wasn’t sure which multiple it was.

  “Isla Perdida,” said Amanda. “In the South Atlantic. Held at various times by the French, Spanish, and Argentines. Very tiny, rather barren, and likely to be underwater in a couple of decades, but very strategic and perhaps capable of being elevated through geoengineering.”

  “Is it for sale or something?”

  “Already sold. Last year, for our client the Argentine government, which needed the money. It was a very nice deal.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Beijing?”

  She shook her head. “Good guess, but no. It was a group of wealthy Africans, together with two Texans. Forward-looking entrepreneurs who understand where the growth will be in the long game.”

  “Is that what you do? Buy and sell countries?”

  “I hope to buy or sell a whole country before I’m done, but for now I’m happy to put together deals for smaller slices of sovereign territory. In a world that is changing so much in so many ways, it’s a valuable intermediary service, one that helps what wants to happen happen transactionally, not through force of arms. Win-win instead of win-lose. I’m working on another island deal right now, one that will be a brand-new territory on the map. Rather close to home at that.”

  “How close?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Donny thought about that as he looked at the world map that covered the wall next to them. The color coding showed how the world had changed in their lifetime, mostly through the win-lose of war. The central Asian states resurgent in the territory between China and shrunken Russia. The German-dominated bloc of central Europe. Lonely, loco Britain and its handful of far-flung chartered colonies. Chinese Hawaii, and the other territories conceded across the Pacific Rim.

  “It’s not one of those islands, is it?” said Donny, pointing at the blots across Texas that marked the Evac Zone.

  She looked at him with less friendly eyes than she had at first. “Who was it you said you were representing?”

  “I didn’t,” said Donny. “I’m working on a case that involves the Rovers’ occupation. And I’m trying to get a better understanding of what’s going on out there in the Zone.”

  “Creative destruction,” she said, relaxing a little at his lie. “The petrochemical economy was already struggling when the storms delivered their blows.”

  “Not exactly a knockout punch.”

  “No. There are plenty of people, especially around here and in Washington, who still think fossil fuels are a big part of the future. I’m not one of them. But the mess we are cleaning up presents some other interesting strategic opportunities.”

  “I hear the state is condemning huge swaths of real estate all through there.”

  “They are, and wisely so. Time for a fresh start.”

  “I don’t understand how they can afford it. Texas may be doing better than the Midwest, but we’re still pretty broke. Too broke to rebuild that whole industrial corridor, you’d think.”

  “Well, we can’t afford not to fix it, right? And just because eminent domain is a public power doesn’t mean it has to be funded with public money. These deals they are doing now involve simultaneous sales to private investors.”

  “Like when the Soviet Union finally collapsed and they auctioned off all those state-owned businesses.”

  “Kind of like that. But more like strategic sales than auctions.”

  “Subsidized by a lot of free refugee labor.”

  “Not free, Donny.”

  “Close enough. Do you work any of these deals?”

  “This office is proud to be involved in most of them. We are the state’s advisory firm in the project.”

  “I read about that. When did they have the election for that gig?”

  “Oh, come on, Donny. Don’t walk into my office and give me that sour bullshit. The world is changing. Physically changing. Maybe you can’t read our legending of it, but that map shows what our models say about what’s coming. Not just sea level rise, but other changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, animal populations, and the mass migrations of humans. Our machines tell us it could be decades before things start to recover in the Midwest, and they’re going to get worse before that. There are other blighted regions emerging across the hemisphere, and beyond. We’re helping clean up the mess to make room for new blood, here in a place where we at least have work, plentiful housing, and rain.”

  “Looking for water in a drowning world.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “That’s pretty much our business model, helping put deals together that build a viable future.”

  “Viable for who?”

  “Good stewards, we hope.”

  “How much do they pay?”

  She shrugged. “It varies, but usually about seven and a half percent of the gross proceeds, plus expenses.”

  Donny looked at the deal trophy again, the one with all the zeros, and tried to do the math.

  “Glad to know someone figured out how to properly leverage their law degree.”

  “I’ve been very lucky to work with some visionary people who helped me see the way.”

  “Will the election make a difference in any of this?”

  She looked at him with rising impatience. “Sounds like the political unrest pays your bills,” she said.

  “It does,” said Donny. “And that’s why I asked, because I think a lot of the work I’m doing now is about to dry up.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “Some trajectories cannot be altered.”

  Something about the way she said it made it seem like she knew. Especially when she stood and looked down at him.

  “Nice to see you,” she said, sending him off along with the memories of past lives you could tell she had already banished.

  31

  Miles kept his office in the 1920s version of a high-rise, one of the last such buildings left in downtown Houston. It wasn’t as nice as the Gulf Building or the Esperson Buildings, but it was pure Miles, a remnant of a mellower time that was also the era of a different kind of injustice, or at least an earlier version. Donny had been to the open house when Miles first got the space, and still remembered the remarks Miles had given to his gathered friends about what the civil rights regime was when the building was first opened, at a time when the law mainly served to enforce racial oppression.

  Miles’s suite was on the ninth of twelve floors, with views to the north and west. Miles had done well on his own, building a solid trial practice with a mix of criminal, civil rights, personal injury, and occasional commercial work. He had a partner, Cheryl, who helped share the load, and a team of reliable associates that now included Percy, two paralegals, and a secretary.

  But what Donny really envied was the corner office Miles had scored, a place that suited a guy who spent most of his tim
e at work—one of those expansive executive spreads that the prior century indulged before the spreadsheets took over, furnished with period pieces, including bookshelves stuffed with the lawyerly portion of Miles’s extensive library and half of his history books. The wall space not taken by books was covered with photos. Most were of Miles with his clients, but a few with judges and politicians—many of them now out of power, including two in exile, and one in jail.

  “I feel like the one thing missing in here is a hunting trophy,” said Donny, sitting in one of the big chairs and admiring the antique globe next to it, full of countries that no longer existed.

  “I don’t hunt, Donny,” said Miles. “White guys in the woods with guns and me don’t go together.”

  “Maybe you need one of them on the wall. Some old judge or cop.”

  “I guess that’s basically what some of these photos are, if you know the stories.”

  “No kidding,” said Donny, thinking about what stories he had hidden in the fabric of his own office. “How’s the Mayor?”

  “Glad to be home. That was crazy.”

  “I still can’t believe they put her in a military brig.”

  “You know what the sign says when you enter that place? ‘Headquarters, Texas Military Forces.’”

  “I know. Straight out of the state constitution. What’s scary to me is how they’ve been reviving that part about the Texas State Guard—the all-volunteer militia ‘organized under the Second Amendment’ or however they put it. That’s how the Governor’s been deputizing all these local parade clubs. It’s like telling everyone they’re a cop.”

  “It’s a lot worse than that. And you want to talk about parade clubs, you should see them out there at the base in Austin. They’re building another temporary detention camp, right there on the MoPac freeway, so all the locals can see.”

  “So much for home rule,” said Donny. He knew just the spot Miles was talking about.

  “No kidding,” said Miles.

  “Are you really going in front of the Fifth Circuit tomorrow?”