American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline

by Parker, Brian

  He walked back to the conference room, which was laughably unlocked. They’d prepared to breach the door with Plummer’s breaching tool, but it wouldn’t be needed. He turned the handle and the odors of piss and copper assaulted his nose.

  It was dark inside the room, so Rogan slapped the wall panel with his gloved hand. The lights came on and there was Haskins at the table, sitting in a chair. His head rose unsteadily, giving Rogan a full view of the damage. He’d been savagely beaten. Both of his eyes were swollen, one so much that it was completely closed. His lips were puffy, cracked, and scabbed over, the blood dried on his chin giving him the appearance of a vampire after a midnight snack. He looked like shit and probably felt worse.

  Haskins tilted his head so he could see through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “You too?” he grunted.

  “Relax, Haskins,” Rogan said. “We’re getting you out of here.”

  “What?”

  Rogan rushed over to the side of the table where Haskins was handcuffed to a chair. His boots splashed in a puddle of bloody urine when he got within two feet of the prisoner. There was the source of the smell. He pulled his handcuff keys out and began unlocking the ones around his hands first, then the ones keeping his legs restrained to the chair.

  “Cassandra is safe. North of town. We need to hurry. Can you walk?”

  “Is this one of Goodman’s sick jokes?” he asked in disbelief, rubbing at his wrists.

  “No, buddy. Me and Plummer are busting you out. Taya is doing her computer magic to override all the cameras and passive listening devices. But we’ve only got a minute or two before it gets noticed, so we need to leave. Now.”

  “Really?”

  Rogan stood and put a gloved hand under his arm. “Come on, I’ll help you up.”

  He pulled upward as Haskins lurched unsteadily onto his feet. “Um… I’m gonna…”

  Haskins bent away from Rogan and vomited. It splashed into the urine, sending the entire wet mess splattering against the wall.

  “You better now?” Rogan asked. “Time’s running out. We need to go.”

  Haskins dry heaved for a moment. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, shuffling out from behind the table. He walked hunched over, they must have done a number on his body as well. Rogan wondered which of the agents had volunteered to beat him so severely.

  They walked slowly toward the reception area. Rogan dropped his hand down to the pistol on his hip. He could see Plummer standing there, talking to Tony. Here was the shitty part. He wished it had been Newman up there guarding the door for the night, that would have been an easy choice.

  “We’re cool,” Plummer stated as they walked up.

  “What?”

  “Tony’s with us. He doesn’t like the way things are turning here either.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They’ll question him once they find out that Haskins is gone.”

  Plummer nodded and said, “We’ve already talked about that, boss. I’m gonna taze him and handcuff him. Only thing he saw was two masked people who exited the elevator and blasted him right away—same thing we did to the guy in the lobby.”

  Rogan grunted. They’d left the guard in the lobby trounced and handcuffed to the desk leg like a Thanksgiving turkey. “You sure you can withstand questioning, Tony?”

  The agent looked at the condition Director Goodman had left Haskins in. “Yeah. Anyone that would do that to one of our own deserves to go down. I’m not gonna say a damned thing about who you guys are. Get him out of here.”

  Plummer hit him with the Tazer as he was looking at Rogan. He fell, knocking paperwork and other items off the desk in the process. Rogan rushed over to where he lay convulsing and pulled Tony’s handcuffs from his belt, using them to securely tie him up instead of his own.

  He pulled the barbs from Tony’s chest and collected the wires. He didn’t know about the level of forensics associated with the Taser device, but the less connected they were to the crime scene once the investigation into the rescue began, the better.

  “Okay, Tony. Remember, you have no idea who we are.”

  “Got it,” he groaned. “Good luck, Bodhi.”

  Haskins mumbled something but Rogan wasn’t sure of what he said. “Let’s go.”

  Plummer helped him guide Haskins through the double doors into the elevator. They went down quickly and then across the lobby. A quick glance showed him that the guard had tried to stand up, but all he’d managed to do was knock over the computer monitor on his desk. There was no way he’d be able to get the leverage to lift the desk enough to slip his hands underneath the leg.

  The next elevator fed them out into the parking garage and they loaded up their prize in the back seat of Haskins’ truck that he and Plummer had retrieved earlier in the evening with the keys that Cassandra had given him. They’d drive north and link up with the wife, probably exchanging the 4x4 truck for the little car she’d driven.

  They pulled out of the garage and turned right, toward the interstate. They’d gone a few blocks and were at a red light when a text came in to both of their phones stating that the building was clear and the cameras were back online.

  Rogan really didn’t like leaving the loose end with Tony. Given enough pressure, the man would squeal, telling Goodman the truth of the matter. He had to hope that their cover was convincing enough though. The only other option would have been to shoot him, but wasn’t the reason they’d sprung Haskins to avoid killing an officer in the first place?

  Loose ends. He hated loose ends. Was this one gonna come back and bite them in the ass? He sure hoped not.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There was a tap on the car window that woke Cassandra up. She wiped at her face in confusion. Where was she? Why— Then she remembered leaving Austin. She’d laid down to take a catnap, but… What time was it? It was still dark outside, so she hadn’t slept the entire night.

  Another tap on the window froze her. She was supposed to move the car every couple of hours, it had been, what? She had no idea how long it had been. Was it the police knocking on her window? She tried to organize her thoughts and remember the cover story, but everything was jumbled together in her mind.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  She sat up, picking up the lever to raise the seatback as she went. She felt it slap against her back. A figure was silhouetted by the lights on the back of the truck stop. The shape leaned down, but she couldn’t see the face. She grabbed her cellphone and pressed the button to wake up the screen, then held it up to the window. Bodhi’s teammate’s face materialized from the darkness.

  She rolled down the window. “Mrs. Haskins,” the man said, smiling.

  “How… How’d you know where to find me?” He hadn’t called. She thought she’d disabled her GPS tracking on the phone, maybe she hadn’t though.

  “Taya gave me the heads up about where you were last. I figured I’d come up here before contacting you so I’d be close. Looks like you never left though.”

  “I drove around for a little bit. Decided to come back here to sleep.” She looked beyond him, but didn’t see Bodhi. “Do you… Did you get him?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “He’s passed out in the back seat of his truck. They did a number on him, so he probably won’t be himself for a few days.”

  She fumbled with the handle. “I want to see him.”

  “Hold on. Let’s get all of your stuff. We think it’s better if you take the 4x4. It might not be as comfortable for you, but you’ll be able to go places that you couldn’t with the car and you guys will probably be driving a lot of back roads to get wherever it is that you decide to go.”

  “Okay. You’re right.” She hit the unlock button to allow the man to grab the backpacks while she packed up the bottled water and the food she had remaining from her stop at the gas station yesterday. It wasn’t much, but she figured they’d have to get used to not having much from here on out. Bodhi was a fugitive. They’d forever be on the run now.

  They grabbed the bags and walk
ed from the car over to the truck that was parked about twenty feet behind it. She steeled herself for whatever the agent had deemed “doing a number on him” and opened the back door. What she saw took her breath away.

  Bodhi was asleep, like really deeply asleep. He had dried blood on his face and looked like he’d been beaten pretty badly. She wrinkled her nose. He smelled terrible. She glanced back at Bodhi’s teammate.

  “He should be okay,” the agent replied. “I mean, I’m not a medic, but it looks like most of his injuries are external. Probably has a head injury though. Lots of contusion to his face and head. Broken ribs. Maybe a broken finger or three. They wanted him to suffer and not check out too early.”

  She nodded. It was the best she’d get from him. He’d lived up to his promise to her to bring Bodhi back. “Thank you so much, Agent…” she still didn’t know the man’s name. “I can never repay you. I—”

  “You don’t have to repay me, Mrs. Haskins. I would never expect that. My payment is knowing that we did a good thing. The right thing. The agency is rotten from the inside out—the entire damn System is rotten and needs to be thrown out.”

  “Is that what this is? Is this the beginning of a revolution?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s definitely not going to sit well with the folks in Washington. They had the perfect opportunity to show the population what disobeying their orders means and we snatched it out from under their noses. It’ll be a crazy few weeks down in Austin, that’s for sure.”

  “Where should we go? I mean, what should we do?”

  He shook his head again. “Not up for me to decide. Frankly, I’d rather not know. If I get arrested for this, I don’t want to know where you guys went, that way I’ll never be able to betray you.”

  “What about your family?” she asked, glancing at his left hand, where she thought she’d noticed a ring earlier. He wore gloves now, so she couldn’t see if she was remembering correctly or not.

  “They’ll be fine. I made my choice to stand up for what’s right.” He looked back to where the car sat. “Do you have the keys for the car? I’ll drive that back to Austin and ditch it before I go home.”

  “Yeah, here,” she dug into the small pocket on her hip, producing the keychain. “Thank you so much.”

  He took the keys from her and patted the inside of the truck door. “Taya will keep the cameras off for a little bit longer. You get away from here. He needs to sleep for a few more hours before you wake him up. That should get you far enough away to be outside of the Austin office’s jurisdiction.”

  She nodded and placed a hand on his upper arm, then leaned in for a hug. He stiffened slightly, but allowed her to hug him.

  “Thank you,” she repeated. She could say it a thousand times—a million times—and it would never be enough.

  He pushed her away gently. “Go on. Get out of here now. Be safe, Mrs. Haskins.”

  “We’ll meet again,” she assured him.

  “I truly hope we don’t,” he sighed. “Because it will probably end up totally different if we do.”

  She grunted in acknowledgement. He was right. If they ran into each other again, it would likely be in his official capacity as a CEA agent, hunting them down. “This sucks,” she said, closing the door.

  “It’s only just beginning,” he replied.

  Rogan drove the small car around the front of the building to where Plummer waited. He waved at the big man. “Okay, switch is done.”

  Plummer tossed his cigarette butt on the ground—something that was a major no-no back in the city, but given the amount of other butts on the ground, it seemed acceptable here. The big man had taken to smoking naturally, almost like he’d done it his whole life. Stress will do that to a man.

  He got in and immediately began searching for the seat adjustment switches. “On the seat beside the door,” Rogan said helpfully.

  “Ah,” Plummer sighed as the seat began to slide backward and his knees came down from around his ears. “You know Bodhi didn’t ever ride in this bitch.”

  The seat went all the way back and Plummer still looked slightly less than comfortable. “You good?”

  “Yeah,” Plummer replied as he fitted the seatbelt over his shoulder. “She doesn’t know I was involved?”

  “Nope. Didn’t tell her.”

  He nodded and looked out the window as Rogan turned, then accelerated onto the interstate back toward Austin. When it became apparent that he was content to just stare out the window Rogan began to talk.

  “So, about the whole take out Director Goodman thing. Was that just talk in the heat of the moment?”

  “No, man. We need to remove that psychopath. She has us killing civilians for making false claims, harassing people for exercising their freedom of speech, hell, man, even going on no-knock raids. What the hell is that? Most of these guys aren’t trained for that sort of stuff.”

  “If we were to somehow do that, then who’s to say the next guy wouldn’t be worse?” Rogan asked.

  “You’re right,” Plummer agreed. “That’s why I said we need to take out the whole NAR. Everything it stands for is against the America that we were raised in. The System is not for the American people. You think George Washington and his buddies would have sat around letting their neighbors be murdered?”

  “You’re meaning a full-on revolution?”

  “You’re goddamned right I am. To be honest, it should have happened about ten or fifteen years ago, back when they were increasing taxes to pay for more and more social programs, while the government and media were purposefully race-baiting and creating more problems between the blacks and whites than there already was.”

  Rogan glanced over at the big man. He was black, without a racist bone in his body as far as he knew. Plummer reminded him of most guys in the military. It didn’t matter what color your skin was, where you were raised, or how much money your family had. If you could perform the job and were there for your brothers and sisters when shit went down, then you were alright.

  “I agree with you about the race-baiting part. Lots of problems that weren’t there before were suddenly huge, I—”

  “Nah, man. You were in the Army ten years ago, kicking in doors overseas and shit. Here in the States, as a cop, it got downright stupid. The media completely ignored every time a white person was killed, but went apeshit when a black guy was killed or an illegal was deported. Insane man. I never understood it. About half the time, it turned out that the suspect was at fault and about half the time it was the officer either being a complete waste of humanity or having poor training, but the media would simply stop reporting about it when it turned out that the suspect had a gun, a knife, whatever. Hell, remember all the marches and violence because of that gay black actor who faked that attack in Chicago?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I kind of remember it.”

  “The media went crazy, like twenty-four hours a day talking about the racism and bigotry in America, but once it came out that he faked it, the story just faded away. Tons of stuff like that, man.”

  “That kid in DC?”

  “Oh yeah, the so-called ‘Smirking Kid’ right? Yeah, same same. He was a racist asshole until they found out it was the old guy, the Native American who started it all while the kid sat there and didn’t do anything. Heard he got a few million out of it though.”

  Rogan nodded. He wasn’t really comfortable talking about race relations with a black guy… Or maybe that’s part of the problem, he thought suddenly. He was conditioned to not talk about race, while minorities in America did seem to talk about it. He’d been taught basically to ignore the problems instead of facing them. There had to be middle ground where everyone could meet and discuss things, then move forward as a society. Was that what the System was trying to do by codifying bigotry and racism as illegal?

  He asked Plummer that question.

  “I don’t know, man,” Plummer said. “That may be where it started—and don’t get me wrong, I do think w
e have problems that need to be corrected, namely the dependency of Americans on the government for support. Thirty-five percent, something like that? Last I heard, back when they kept track of that sort of stuff. Get those folks working and stop making them feel like the victim all the time. That’ll help a lot, brother.”

  “But you still think the System is bad?”

  “Hell yeah, I do. Look at Goodman. Those types of people are in leadership positions and the government is promoting that behavior to spread fear amongst the population. What the hell does a counterterrorism officer know about law enforcement? We’re enforcing their rules, turning America into a police state. Fuck, man, people can only go to the grocery store once a week. If they’re caught outside without a mask on, they get an automatic fine, and we both know that the Crud is just another one of them coronaviruses with about a one or two percent mortality rate, and most of those are the old and the ones with compromised immune systems.

  “I think the government was just waiting for another so-called pandemic to come around so they could implement the System. Think about it. They got a taste of power in ’20 and ’21 and some of those restrictions never went away. When the Crud came along, it was too easy to re-implement all those restrictions because everyone had already been conditioned to it six or seven years ago. They called in the Army and locked things down in the cities and the highways. They stood up all of these different agencies and bureaus in a matter of weeks.”

  Plummer gave him a sidelong glance. “How do you think that was possible if they hadn’t been planning it for years? Now we’re moving into the next phase, where agencies that were supposed to help the citizens get through this are becoming like the KGB or the Stasi or something.”

  “I don’t know what the Stasi is. Was that something like the Gestapo?”

  Plummer nodded. “Basically. The Gestapo were the Nazi secret police, the Stasi were the East German secret police during the Cold War.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I’m not just a dumb bodybuilder, Rogan. I got my PhD in European History from Texas Tech. I’m a smart bodybuilder.”