The Liedeck Revolution Book #2: Endgame

by Jim Stark

  The putt was sidehill and downhill, and with the speed of these greens, that would require a journey of perhaps ten seconds, maybe more. Randy's resolve not to look up for three seconds lasted only one second—he just had to watch this crucial voyage.

  Too much borrow, he thought immediately when he viewed the results of his efforts slowly unfolding. The ball was going to miss on the high side, on the right. No way can it bend enough, he said to himself as the gravity of the big green ball worked its evil magic on the little white one. And ... it might not even get there! he realized with horror. Lesson #1 from Lee Trevino, as every aspiring pro knew, was that if the ball doesn't go as far as the hole, the odds are that it won't fall in the hole! Coach is going to nag me forever for coming up short, he thought through a starburst of facial perspiration.

  About three feet from the hole, the ball's motion had shrunk to a crawl. Randy could practically read the black imprint—"Maxfli 8"—as the white ball turned slowly over and over. Then it hit a spike mark in the turf and made a minuscule hop, and the direction of its movement flicked ever so slightly to the left. There was now the faintest chance that it could catch the side door. It rolled up to the right edge of the hole ... and with probably two-fifths of the ball suspended over the opening ... it ... stopped.

  Randy could almost feel Howie's heart restart. He cursed Lilly Petrosian under his breath, stood erect, and walked up to bunt the “gimme” in before Howie could have the sweet satisfaction of conceding the next putt. But just as he reached his ball and prepared to tap it in, it fell in of its own accord!

  "YYYESSS!” Randy shouted, with a piston-like jerking of his clenched fist, the way Tiger Woods used to do it thirty years ago.

  "Putt-of-a-lifetime,” he heard his coach holler.

  Randy had won! He picked the Maxfli out of the hole, kissed it amid the applause, threw it into the Atlantic, and shook Howie's hand. Then he hugged him. They were pals again, and Howie was hurting bad.

  "We'll be doing this again in the bigs,” said Randy, “and ... maybe next time..."

  "Great putt,” said Howie through his pain.

  "Great match all ‘round,” said Randy.

  His coach—their coach, the man they called “Coach"—strode onto the big green and congratulated both warriors. “So,” he said to Randy as they all headed for the uncontested eighteenth fairway, “you got the old flat stick working while you were up in Canada. Did someone—"

  "Québec,” said Randy, in his never-ending effort to educate America about the new political geography up north.

  The coach nodded acknowledgement and yanked the conversation back to stuff that mattered. “Did someone give you some secret advice up there or something?"

  "No,” Randy lied. “I just did a little growing up ... and made a couple of decisions."

  "Like...?” asked Howie, who was walking on the other side of Coach.

  Randy shifted the heavy golf bag on his shoulder. “Well, my dad ... he reminded me that golf is just a game,” he said, keeping his eyes down and his pace steady.

  "Meaning...?” asked Howie. The question was as bitter as it was sincere. They were friends, yes, but Howie had never lost to Randy before. In the past, he could always count on Randy to choke on the green.

  Randy took a few steps to slough off the several zingers that he could have shot back at Howie. “Life isn't,” he finally said. “A game,” he added, for the memory-impaired.

  The three men—two boys and one man, really—walked in pleasant silence down the eighteenth fairway, followed by a small murmuring crowd composed of the eliminated competitors, other students, and a few rabid fans. Coach feared that his protégé was about to quit school, or, worse yet, quit golf. He had never learned exactly how to relate to a kid who wasn't money-motivated. Everybody knew that Randy Whiteside could puchase the whole university if he had a mind to, or half of downtown Miami, if the rumors were true. The boy had talent coming out the wazoo, but he was ... strange, too cerebral, and a bit distracted, even a tad weird, thought Coach. He wanted to respond, but he couldn't use his usual barking style on a youngster like Randy. Lord knows what other involvements are complicating his life.

  Some of Howie's friends pulled him aside to offer him encouragement, and probably a long list of rationalizations he could choose from to explain why he lost. Coach walked on with Randy, and wondered why this Canadian couldn't even allow himself the luxury of a gloating post-mortem—maybe a smile—something to indicate that he understood the significance of his achievement.

  "I'm going to be away for a couple of days,” Randy finally said.

  "Washington?” asked Coach.

  "Yeah,” said Randy. “I'll be back for the final match on Tuesday,” he added.

  Few people knew that Yolanda Dees—"Lucky” to her friends—was the one thing that Randy coveted and couldn't buy ... well, that and a truly reliable putting stroke. Once, in the throes of a particularly acute golf depression, Randy had talked to Coach about his girlfriend Lucky, and Coach had forever destroyed his credibility on that front by saying that there were “lots of fish in the sea."

  Randy asked Coach to give his apologies to those who would have expected him to stay around for a few drinks and laughs. He just didn't feel very celebrative, he explained ... or even victorious, he thought. He waved goodbye to the few who bothered to notice, and headed around the side of the clubhouse to the waiting limo.

  He'd heard on the news the day before that Lester Connolly's condition had taken a turn for the worse, after a month of impressive recovery and real optimism. Randy had turned off his Sniffer long before he went out on the course, as always; in fact he'd been out of touch since 10:00 p.m. last night. The thing he wanted most to know was that the body and soul of USLUC were still glued together. He worried that Lester's illness was not exactly an “act of God,” as insurance companies still called such things in this post-theological age. Everybody knew that Gil Henderson had hinted on the Net that the WDA might have been responsible. Kill the head and the body will surely die, Randy recalled, from Klauswitz or de Sade or some other such psychopath.

  He handed his golf bag to Lou, his own chauffeur, and fell into the backseat. He was tempted to turn on his Sniffer right away and get up to speed on the state of the world, especially the state of Lester Connolly's health. He was tempted to Netface with Lucky, but she worked for USLUC, so that would lead back to the Lester Connolly situation. He felt bad that he couldn't brag to her, or bask in the afterglow of his surprise victory over good old Howie Pilaster—she'd be completely engrossed in the news from the hospital, and he worried that golf-talk would seem insensitive. Besides, he thought, I really stink! For reasons he never understood nor felt the need to explore, he always thought he should be fresh and clean to Netlink with Lucky.

  Bang! It was only the trunk lid closing, but Randy wasn't expecting it, and he was startled. I must be on edge, he thought as Lou got into the driver's seat and started the engine. The air conditioning washed over him as the limo rolled towards the beach house that he had purchased a few miles north of Miami. He felt as unlovely and sticky inside his mind as he did on the surface of his body, so he went about deciding whether to opt for a dip in the Atlantic or a long, self-indulgent loll in the jacuzzi. He'd had a mid-sized MIU installed over the foot-end of the dark blue tub. That settled it. He would get clean, and then Netface with Lucky from the jacuzzi, soaked and starkers.

  He touched a button and lowered the glass partition that shielded VIPs (usually just Randy) from the rest of humanity. “So what's new and exciting?” he asked Lou Messel, his personal chauffeur and sometimes confidant and psychotherapist.

  "Same old same old,” said Lou from the front. He never volunteered a thing until he had a solid fix on the boy's mood. Randy was unpredictable, mercurial, and occasionally showed the dismissiveness of the moneyed class.

  "No ... really,” said Randy. “I've been unplugged since last night."

  Lou glanced in the rearview mi
rror, even though he knew what he had to do. “You're not going to like it,” he offered, hoping faintly that “the boss” would let him off the hook. Randy had leaned forward reflexively. “Your friend, Lester Connolly?” said Lou with an upturned cadence. “He—uh—he didn't make it, and there's been...” He stopped talking when he saw the boy's reaction in the rearview mirror.

  Randy fell back and closed his eyes. “Fuck,” he mumbled.

  "The—uh—fever came back around midnight last night,” said Lou, “and they—uh—couldn't seem to get him ... stabilized, they said. I guess ... the virus got into his neck or shoulder or chest ... or something. They announced it around nine o'clock this morning. You got a big bunch of faces waiting for you ... Yolanda ... Lucky, rather ... and your mom in Québec ... your dad from Freeport, and a bunch more. I told them that you were unplugged, and out on the course ... you know, important match and all that. How'd you do, anyway?"

  Randy buzzed up the black partition without responding. He ordered up the on-board MIU and instructed a Netlink with Lucky. It occurred to him—not for the first time—that she meant more to him than anyone, even his folks. “Aw jeeze—I just heard,” he said as her face appeared on the screen—she was sitting at her MIU, in her office. “You ... okay, sweetie?"

  Lucky had been crying. She knew he'd been unplugged since last night, for the golf match, and she knew she would be his first call. Her red eyes were shunted upwards; her chin quivered. “Can you come up here for a few days?” she asked, still unable to look at her MIU screen, at Randy. “I just need ... to be with you."

  "I was already planning to come up,” said Randy. “I'll be there in a few hours. I just have to—"

  "Look, I gotta go,” said Lucky. “The whole USLUC Board is here on the warm, at the office, and things are pretty freakin’ tense. You better catch up on the news. I have to tell you ... people are going ... kind of nuts ... like all over. Net, down, now."

  It was about twenty minutes from the Liberty Cove Golf Course to the beach house, and Randy decided to use that time to think. He shut down the on-board MIU and leaned his head back on the soft upholstery. The chilled air penetrated his clothes now, and his damp armpits felt cold. His “putt-of-a-lifetime” was suddenly an utterly irrelevant pixel of ancient history, as the world seemed poised for a painful spasm. Rumors about the real cause of Lester's death will be rampant on the Net, he figured. Even if Sheena Kalhoun denied everything on a stack of Bibles, and had her veracity confirmed by a LieDeck, the members of USLUC—and a lot of other people—would never believe it was the whole truth.

  What did Lucky mean ... “kind of nuts"? he asked himself. He called her back, this time using his Sniffer, and found her sitting in the Boardroom at USLUC headquarters. “I ... are you okay to talk?” he asked hesitantly. He noticed that she was also using a Sniffer now, and that her hands were trembling, judging by the shaking black-and-white image on his screen. “What did you mean by people going—uh—kind of nuts?"

  "Randy, the Board is all here and things are escalating fast, spinning out of control,” she said. “At first, people were marching around in the streets, shouting, spitting at WDA agents and all that, but now some people are smashing windows at WDA offices, turning over WDA cars, even setting them on fire. We haven't heard of anybody getting killed or seriously injured yet, but it's real bad. We don't know how to stop it. You got any ideas?"

  Randy was on the USLUC Board in an ex-officio, honorary capacity, and as he had feared, with Lester gone, the USLUC leadership was in total disarray. Maybe we should do like Victor did when reality got to be too much for him, he mused. Just shut the fuck up for a couple of decades. The more he pondered it, the more this random, idle thought seemed to make some sense, or seemed at least to offer a basis for the development of a practical plan.

  "What if...” he started. “What if we decided that—uh—at least, say, until the WDA is proven innocent, that we—uh—we asked everybody in America to—uh—oh, what the fuck—let's ask everybody in the world to refuse to talk to any WDA agent ... except for their LieDeck-verification, of course. Ah hell, let's go all the way and include LieDeck-verification too. The WDA has been forcing us to prove ourselves innocent for nineteen years. We'll pull a Lysistrata—withhold what they need most. We'll assume the WDA is guilty until or unless it's clear that they're totally innocent, and until proof is established, we just pretend the WDA doesn't exist. Christ, they can't put us all in jail!"

  Lucky's pale face sat on Randy's Sniffer screen, but he could also see several of his Board-mates peering over her shoulder, and he could hear numerous conversations in the background, behind her. “...it could work ... retaliation ... no way that ... no time for a ... arrest ... what else ... as president ... just no clear policy on ... perhaps as an interim measure...” Randy could catch only occasional words from the jumbled mix.

  "I'll call you back in a couple of minutes, okay?” asked Lucky. “They seem to need some time to—"

  "No problem,” said Randy. “Net, down. now.” Jesus Christ, he thought, it sounds like they're taking it seriously. If they go with that, the WDA will know it was my idea. I don't know how, but they always know everything. They might even be waiting to arrest me, at the beach house.

  "Lou,” he said as he lowered the divider, “head out to Musky Airfield, and call ahead to charter a small plane. Tell them to have it warmed up and ready to take off and—uh—tell them to make sure there's parachutes on board."

  "Parachutes!?” asked Lou as he slowed down to make the required U-turn.

  "Just do it!” Randy ordered—he knew he could be a real prick at times, and he knew some other people saw him that way, but such was life, he figured. Lou Messel was quite the good fellow, but ... he has a cushy job, for which he's absurdly overpaid, so...

  The parachutes were a red herring. Randy loved reading his 20th-century spy thrillers, and he particularly liked red herrings. He knew nothing about parachuting, however, and the very idea terrified him. He buzzed the glass divider back up and re-established a link with Lucky. “Hi honey,” he said. “Did they—"

  "Listen, Randy,” she interrupted, “they approved it, but they—uh...” She swallowed and looked around the room. “They want you to take Lester's job and do the Netnews release yourself ... partly because it was your idea, but I think—uh—mostly because the WDA would be more than a little reluctant to arrest you, you know. You'd be the interim president, they said—just to get through the next few months. What do you think?"

  Randy was stunned. There might be no next golf match, no career as a pro, no more beach house, no university degree, at least not for a while, and a huge fight in the family, and ... God, nothing would be the same! he realized. Sweat formed on his face in spite of the air conditioning. It was simply too much, and a lot too fast, even if there was no time to waste. “I'm ... only eighteen,” he said. “And ... I really don't know if I could handle it ... at least not alone,” he tried weakly.

  "You won't be alone,” said Lucky. “The Board will be there to help you and I ... it's just for a while, and there are...” She seemed to have run aground on some mental shoal. She brought her Sniffer close, so her face filled Randy's entire screen. “YES!” she said assertively.

  Randy was confused. From her face, the assertive “yes” was clearly aimed at him, not at someone in the background who'd asked her something. “Yes ... to what?” he asked. “I didn't—"

  "Yes to the question you're always asking me,” she said.

  Randy's beads of sweat began to connect up with each other and dribble down his forehead. Suddenly, he was engaged to be married! Real life, it appeared, could be as iffy and arbitrary as golf. Still, you play the lie you get. Rub of the green. This wasn't a time for careful consideration. It was a time to sooth the mind, calm the instinct, make a best bloody guess and clobber the little white ball. At least she was prudent enough not to say the whole thing over the Net, he thought. And I already told her I wouldn't want to tell my folk
s for a while if we took this step. She knows I don't want her to be more of a “target” than she already is.

  "Okay, honey,” he said evenly. “Just one thing ... you know those six monks, those Jesus-Eers that said they sort of—uh—kidnapped Lester while he was in hospital? I want them—at least some of them—for me ... for us, really. Can ... that be arranged?"

  Lucky knew what he was referring to. Ancient kings needed food tasters as well as a loyal palace guard. She and Randy would need those monks if they were to at least try to avoid contracting an ugly disease as definitive as necrotizing fasciitis. She got the sense of things from the chorus of bobbing heads around the table. “It's ... approved,” she said, “Mr. President."

  "See you soon,” said Randy. “Mrs. Whiteside-Dees,” he mouthed.

  Lucky blew him a kiss. “Dees-Whiteside,” she mouthed as she signed off.

  Chapter 42

  AMAZING GEORGE

  Monday, March 14, 2033—10:20 a.m.

  General George Brampton eased himself out of the backseat of the WDA limo and stood on the chilly, bare sidewalk. He carried himself erect in spite of the howling pain in his lower back—a high school football injury, from seventy-odd years ago. He loathed being ninety-one. The rest of his body hurt too, mostly just from too many years of living. No matter, he reminded himself as he accepted his slim briefcase from the silent soldier who did the ferrying about. My mind's in top form, he assured himself as he checked his Rolex watch. It was 10:20 a.m. He was late again ... not that anyone gives a shit. He didn't have to be here at all, and as a matter of fact, as the years crawled by, it seemed that more and more WDA officials actually preferred that he stay home. Fuck ‘em all, he thought. They wouldn't even be alive except for me, he reminded himself, harking back in his feelings to the glory days of 2014.

  Brampton dismissed his driver with a cursory salute, and stood alone on the concrete until the car pulled away. He liked watching those two little flags flutter from the front corners of the brand new Cadillac. He had won the competition for the flag design back in 2015, and not just because he had control of the whole world's unified nuclear arsenal. It made sense, his design. It conveyed the essential message of the new WDA: “Peace on Earth.” It consisted of a stylized version of a satellite photo of the Earth, a blue-green ball half dressed in white floss, a stainless steel peace symbol superimposed over the whole works, all on a randomly star-spangled, pitch-black background. “A thing of beauty,” he mumbled.