First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Then my chief scribe will just write it up.” He laughed.

  I did not see anyone move to start writing, but the lights were too bright to see much of anything.

  “And about the gen—er—congressman?”

  “Five cars went roaring through the projects about a week ago,” he said simply.

  “Last Thursday. We know that. What else?”

  “Nothing else. We shot at them. Hit the center car straight on. Bullet bounced.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “West. To the river.”

  “And then?”

  “Disappeared.”

  “What, with a flash of light and a puff of smoke?”

  “Went into a warehouse.”

  “Any name on it?”

  “You are a pushy bastard, ain’t ya?”

  “Part of my job. What name on the warehouse?”

  “LaTiffe Fine Meats, used to be.”

  “He still there?”

  “Ah now, Red! That’s what you don’t know, is it?”

  “Did I tell you, the rockets we will be carrying are 110s? Blow the door right off a warehouse like that … Blow out a D-block wall … Put an armored car over on its side and across the street …”

  Another deep, lively laugh came from behind the lights. “Yeah, I’m just a pantin’ and a droolin’, huh? Don’t worry, Red, we’ll get everything you got. So you might as well know. The crew that took him were white, but done up blackface and for that shit, we’ll make an example of those fish ourselves. Want to play at Black politics and give us a bad name, they get the death sentence. We put the eye on that building. We see men, white men, come and go. But always in singles, always alone and looking around. … So you work it out for yourself.”

  “The congressman is still inside.”

  “Hey! You ain’t half dumb.”

  “That’s what we came to find out,” I said, relaxing finally. “So, what happens now? I sign your release paper, you cut the lights, blindfold us, and take us out the way we came, right?”

  “Yeah, sure, Red. All of you, except the girl. When we get the hard goods—and that pardon, signed on nice legal pa’chment by the man himself—we’ll let her go.”

  I glanced at Randell. Her face was pinched, but she had the courage to nod at me.

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Ain’t no deal, Red. That’s the way it is.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were out on the street—with our carbines, but minus our intelligence operative. It was full dark, sometime after nine o’clock, or 2100 hours.

  I sent one of our comm men back to the vehicles to get a dozen sets of talkies and all the IR gear we were carrying. I also told him to patch us into the nearest voice-and-data lines, making a relay that would connect us with the rest of the force back at the farm. Then Stalk and I dug out our city maps and traced the nearest route to the waterfront and the LaTiffe warehouse.

  It was difficult to get near the building. The neighborhood was so densely overbuilt that sidewalls leaned against each other, with not even slither space between. A network of alleys wound their way to almost anonymous panel doors. We finally took up position in a recessed doorway, wide enough for a truck, a block and a half down the alley from the front of the warehouse.

  Stalk wanted to go over the nearby roofs on a recon and I approved it. He and a squad, all wearing running shoes instead of boots, put on the IR goggles, tachpads, and harness and went up the walls across the alley.

  The rest of the troop and I kept watch on the only entrance we had found to the LaTiffe building. The door next to us was a roll-up and, every couple of minutes, one of my men would lean on it or bang it with an elbow. The boom and rattle this caused was making us all jumpy.

  Twenty-two thirty hours.

  “Talk to me, Larry,” I whispered into the comm set.

  A mouse-sized voice came through my earplug: “Getting the slope of the roofs now. Looks like our building goes right out over the river. It’s wedged in on either side. So unless a door goes through into an adjoining warehouse, no exits there. Over the river is a half-dock and a cargo hatch. No boats tied up there. Anyone goes out that way, he’s gonna swim.”

  “What about the roof line?”

  “Row of cupola ventilators and some flat boxes that might be skylights. Do you want me to cross over and check them out?”

  “No, keep off the LaTiffe roof for now. Tell your men to hold position and scan for movement.”

  “Copy that.”

  I went through the relay to talk to Jeanne Powers, my other lieutenant at the farm. I gave her directions to the warehouse, places to park our light trucks, and two assembly points for men and equipment.

  “I want you rolling by 2330, Jeanne.”

  “We’re going in tonight?” She seemed surprised.

  “Half an hour before dawn. Unless we spot some major activity. Now, what are we missing?”

  “Medevac?”

  “We got three corpsmen. Have to do with them.”

  “If we rush that building,” she said, “they may shoot the General before they start sending it our way.” Powers was a smart soldier, thinking ahead.

  “Suggestions?”

  “We have some canisters of Null-B.”

  “Bring them. I know just where to use it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Put Carlotta to bed with a stick in her milk and get down here by 0300 latest.”

  “I copy.”

  The rest of the troop who were with me, I sent back to the vehicles to sack out—and so they would stop thumping on that door. Meanwhile, a runner and I settled in to watch the LaTiffe main entrance. Half an hour before dawn, everyone was in place except the rocket man who was going to blow the warehouse door.

  I was getting really worried. We were supposed to be dealing with fairly professional outlaws. Slick enough to time a four-vehicle accident and snatch a U.S. congressman. Now they were supposed to be holed up in a perfectly blank building. My men had been clumping over nearby roofs and rattling roll-up doors all night and still they had not yet run into a peeper, a sleeper, or a perimeter walker. I had a deep-gut feeling that, no matter what the senior Vice Lord believed, we were going to blow the front off a long-empty building.

  At 0550 hours, I signaled the rocket man to start setting up for a straight shoot down the alley. Then for Stalk to walk barefoot over the LaTiffe roof and start pumping Null-B down the ventilators.

  That gas was the best thing that ever happened to crowd control. The old tear gas and mace were hysterical stuff: One whiff and everyone around you is choking, crying, screaming, vomiting. It stung. But if you did not get enough to knock you over, you had a powerful urge to kill the sonofabitch who was shooting it at you. Smart rioters learned to hold their breath, grab the gas grenade, and lob it back to the police.

  Null-B was different: colorless, odorless, and strong enough to work by skin contact alone. It went straight to the brain and scrambled the signals. Under its influence, most people simply went to sleep. The most violent cases became twitching paralytics, dizzy and disoriented. The effect lasted about twenty minutes and I never heard of a healthy person either dying or suffering relapses from Null-B. Best of all, there was an antidote, administered by slapshot, which completely countered the effect. I made sure all of our people had taken it.

  In other words, in five minutes we were going to blow the door just to see the fireworks. Behind it there would be no one to shoot at us.

  “What do you hear, Larry?” I knew Stalk would have his ear to the ventilator.

  “Nothing,” he whispered over the comm set.

  “Any light inside?”

  “Yes, not much. Wait. Sounded like something—maybe metal—dropped on a plank floor. A couple of words. Half a shout. They’re in there. Blow it in two minutes, Colonel.”

  “Okay. Make sure you got a squad covering the river door.”

  “Already have.”

  The LaTiffe door was an
other roll-up: horizontally hinged panels, two inches wide, and made out of forty-gauge steel. You could probably cut a man-sized hole in it with a torch in ten minutes.

  Our rocket flew forty-five meters and went off with a great yellow flash. Like kicking in a Venetian blind. Twisted pieces of metal came whickering back down the alley like Aussie boomerangs.

  I suddenly got a sick feeling: the same twisties were cutting up whoever was inside. Including, possibly, the General. Too late. We were already running toward that gaping archway. Someone on the other side of that door still had enough coordination to begin firing an automatic rifle. Half a clip. At least three slugs caught Powers, beside me, and tossed her back on her ass.

  I was number two through the door, saw the man—half on his knees—swing the muzzle toward me, and put a bullet into his brain.

  Everyone else in there was either down and twitching or down and dead from flying metal. I signaled the dozen or so of my people to begin tagging and bagging. Sent somebody back to help Powers, if they could. Then looked around for the General.

  It was a desperately empty place. Bare wood floor with grease and other stains. Red brick walls going up to the rafters. A few buckets and some scrap lumber. A small table stood to one side with a cluster of chairs, probably where the guards ate and played cards.

  No place to hide a man. Except, along the back wall, a row of heavy, old-style meat lockers. Four of them: three with simple safety latches and one with a padlock and chain.

  “Bolt cutters!” I called. I gave up shooting at locks the first time I saw what a lead-splattered mess it made—and still had to cut the lock off with a torch.

  Stalk was down from the roof and handling the cutters for me. “Powers is dead, sir,” he said under his breath.

  “Aw, shit! She was a good woman. … A good soldier,” I said. All the epitaph she would need from me. “Work the jaws more to the left. Take one side of a link at a time.”

  Cut through, the chain slithered to the plank flooring. I got three fingers behind the door latch and pulled hard. Velvet blackness inside. Our flashlights drew zig-zags across the floor until we found a foot, a pantleg, and finally the General. He was lying on his side, twitching with the effects of the Null-B. But his eyes were aware. I gave him a shot of the antidote. As fast as it got into his blood, his palsy stopped. He knew enough not to try sitting up right away.

  Only then did I cautiously, half-fearfully shine the light on either side of his head. He still had both of his ears. Randell’s analysis was the right one.

  “Colonel Birdsong,” Stalk said, one hand to his earplug still taking messages. “Perimeter reports hearing sirens. That rocket blast must have caught somebody’s attention. We ought to dust off this place.”

  “Right. Are the prisoners loaded—dead ones, too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then withdraw the perimeter. Crank up and move out by the numbers.”

  Stalk touched his throat and began giving orders.

  “Gran, can you move your legs?” I asked.

  “Sure … Have to.”

  With a surprising surge of energy, he rolled to his knees, then rose straight up. I put an arm under his ribs and we stumbled out through the empty warehouse.

  Our last three-ton truck had been brought down to the ruined door. Stalk climbed in back. I pushed Gran across the cab seat and climbed in after him. We were moving before my door slammed. At the far end of the alley, ahead of us, a patrol car swung into view, its gumballs flashing. It was cruising down toward us.

  Our driver licked the sweat off his lips. “What do I do, sir?”

  “Keep moving.”

  He gunned the big diesel engine and the truck picked up speed. The police car did the same. The two cops inside it hunched forward and glared at us through the windshield. Neither vehicle was going to stop and there was no room to turn aside.

  Beside me, I felt Corbin start shivering. I looked over and saw his eyes, fixed on the squad car’s revolving lights. A dribble of saliva was starting down from his mouth.

  “Sir!” our driver called. “We’re gonna—”

  I threw an arm across Granny’s chest and braced myself against the dashboard.

  Our front bumper hit the forward front edge of the patrol car’s hood and rolled it right back into the windshield. The glass crazed and sagged, hiding the cops’ surprised faces. Our crankcase caught somewhere on their engine block and our momentum pushed them, wheels spinning and screaming, back out onto the main street.

  The police car was still pushing into us on little slicks of burning rubber when our driver switched gears, hauled the steering wheel around to the right, backed off a yard, switched again and drove to the left. Our big tires thumped the car’s fender and the vehicle spun around and drove itself into a brick wall. We tore off down the street.

  I looked over at Gran. By this time his eyes had rolled back and the tendons were standing out around his jaw. He was halfway into a grand mal. I ripped off my shirt cuff, rolled it into a tight plug, and jammed it between his teeth. All I could do then was keep him from flopping around too much.

  “Gee, what’s wrong with the General?” the driver asked.

  “Bad reaction to the Null-B, I guess.”

  “Never saw it do that before,” he said doubtfully.

  “Just drive, soldier.”

  Chapter 16

  Granville James Corbin: S.X.

  One of the advantages of paying for a good staff is they know which stories to tell under which circumstances. After my security team had verified me as missing that Thursday night, the Baltimore office told all callers that I was at the district office in West Texas. Our part-time secretary there told them I had been called away to an emergency in Vegas. And the home phone in Vegas said I was unavailable for comment, hinting at a bereavement.

  Only Carlotta and my security chief knew about the kidnapping. If others on the payroll guessed, there was an incentive bonus for keeping their mouths closed.

  After the dawn raid the following Wednesday, Colonel Birdsong and his troops drove back to the farm at Loch Raven by three different routes. They put the three live prisoners, thoroughly drugged by our unit corpsman, in the woodshed. When we wanted to talk with them, we could wake them up fast.

  I told Birdsong to see that the two dead kidnappers were buried at least twenty miles away from the farm in opposite directions. Lieutenant Powers we put deep under the vegetable patch at noon with full military honors—against Billy’s strong advice.

  “What if they are watching the farm?”

  “Who’s watching?”

  “Anybody could be—the Baltimore PD, the group that snatched you in the first place. …”

  “This property is not in the public knowledge,” I said. “We’ve never entertained here or even declared it in holdings. It’s deeded to a third party.”

  “What if we were tailed? What if—two days, two months, two years from now—the Baltimore police come with a search warrant? How will you explain a woman with three machine-gun bullets in her?”

  “I will take responsibility for the lieutenant.”

  “We could return her to Mexico with us.”

  “Not on the route you’ll be taking, Billy. … Powers will have to rest here.”

  Birdsong flapped his arms in disgust, but he gave in.

  Right after the funeral, Lieutenant Stalk took a farm truck loaded with the remaining weapons back into the city. In his pocket, he had a blanket pardon, drafted in the most legal language I could summon, for “any and all members of the unchartered association operating generally under the name of The Vice Lords.” There were fourteen whereases and six therefores. It was signed by a congressman with two USGV officers as witnesses. It might even stand up in court. The lieutenant was going to make the trade for Corporal Randell who, as our intelligence operative, would lead in processing the prisoners.

  That same day, Carlotta went west to Vegas. There, she said, she would lie in the desert
sun and try to recover from the shock. She no longer felt safe in the city, I knew, and what my soldiers planned to do at the farm disturbed her.

  I returned to my seat in the House. To protect against a further attempt at kidnapping, we integrated about half of Birdsong’s clandestine troop with my in-country—and quite legal—security force. Now, even as I walked across the marble floor of the New Rotunda, we had plainclothes watchers in the gallery. The weapons they carried were made of glass and plastic and nonaromatic chemicals that would pass the metal detectors and gas sniffers that guarded every entrance.

  What a difference a week’s absence made! It was clear to anyone with a fresh set of eyes that the country was falling apart. Uncontrolled urban rioting, committees of vigilance roving in the countryside, roadblocks and militia units at the State borders—all added to the atmosphere of rising general panic.

  During that week, Speaker McCanlis had resigned. The trailing candidate, Vorhees, a man handpicked by McCanlis and voted by the House to succeed him eighteen months ago, had now attempted to take the gavel and been shouted down—literally—from the floor. The business of the House hung suspended. Not only were the wild horses of civil disorder carrying the country away from them, the members could not agree on a strategy for dealing with the breakdown—nor even on a successor who might lead them to a strategy. The government was paralyzed by lack of options and the howling depths of Hell followed on the unchosen alternatives.

  In spite of all my staff’s routine denials—and perhaps fed by them—the rumor on the House floor had linked my disappearance to the rioting. So, when I entered the chamber a week later, the 692 other representatives rose in a body to applaud me. It was spontaneous, I believe, and even heartfelt—but who could say?

  The membership then returned to what the minority leader had termed “debate by the numbers.” The roll was called and each member was allotted one hour to express his or her views on the succession. It had been going on for four days. Yankel of Delaware was just finishing up, having claimed an extra three minutes for the interruption occasioned by my entrance, and a linguistic and alphabetical squabble broke out over whether the District of Columbia or the Distrito Federal should speak next.