First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  That took up most of the morning and allowed time for the real political business to take place—that is, hammering out the shape of the coalition that would finally rule the House and so the country.

  Being the junior member from the tumbleweed constituency, I could only watch the huddles from the other side of the chamber. Someone sitting closer might have heard my name mentioned more than once, for reasons I will explain shortly.

  While these overt and covert debates went forward in the House, my intelligence team at the farm worked on the prisoners we’d taken in the raid. If Randell and company had been given unlimited time and a hospital-sized facility—with a complete psychiatric panel, a well-stocked pharmacopoeia, and full-sensory digital imaging equipment—they could have regressed and drained the prisoners completely and painlessly. Unfortunately, they were working under field conditions. Three days of nonstop processing had uncovered only tantalizing fragments and dream sketches. It also killed one of the prisoners and destroyed the minds of the other two.

  On the evening of the fourth day, the team reported to me at our safe house, an antique brick townhouse on Warren Avenue behind Federal Hill.

  “The men were hired,” Randell said. “From what I could get, they were brought together for the snatch. Never seen each other before.”

  “Backgrounds?” I prompted.

  “New York area … It’s a big place.” She shrugged.

  “Is that it? Any connections? Associations? Are they from the drug circuit? The rebel groups? The old mobs?”

  “Yeah, all of that, a real grab bag. One was a small-time hood, did a little arson and insurance fraud. Another was a freelance chemist in the methadyne trade. He couldn’t have been very good, though, to have taken a job like this. The third one—he was strange.”

  “Half his stuff was in Russian,” Birdsong said. The colonel was standing outside our circle, at the window, looking toward the lights of the distant Capitol Complex.

  “What was he?” I asked. “An emigré?”

  “We think he was MIS. He actually used the phrase Ministerstvo Inostrannych Svedeniy— Ministry of Foreign Information—or pieces of it, at least once. The rest is babbles.”

  “Well, there must be something that ties them all together,” I said. “Who hired them?”

  “One name came up in each, um, interview,” Birdsong said. “Pollock.”

  “Not Gordon!”

  “No first name, but you guess.”

  “If it’s him,” from Randell, “he’s got Russian friends in low places.”

  “I have trouble believing that,” I said. “Gordon may be a creep, but he’s not a foreign agent.”

  “Here are the alternatives,” Birdsong said, turning from the window. “First, the Russians are playing their own terror game inside the U.S. They probably are hip deep in the social reaction to what our armies are doing in Mexico. That makes you a target, primarily as a G.V. officer and secondarily as a Federal lawmaker. And the name Pollock is either a red herring—”

  “You’re excused for the pun,” I said.

  “—or a freak coincidence,” Birdsong plowed on. “Second, the majority Republican party wants you out of the way and sent their third-choice errand boy, Pollock, to arrange it. Again you are a target because you are a power in Mexico, an important man in the U.S. Southwest, and, with your connection to Aaron Scoffield, a possible rallying point for the Democrats in Congress. That makes the Russian bully boy a coincidence.

  “In either scenario, they—whoever—wanted you out of the action, and ultimately disposable, at a time of their choosing. Setting the ransom astronomically high was just a way of saying they had no plans for giving you back anytime soon.”

  “There’s a third possibility,” I said. “That Pollock was acting on his own against me. For spite. For vengeance. For his brother.”

  After a pause, Robbi Randell looked up. “Does it really matter who did what and why?”

  “Well, of course …” from me.

  “But you have to …” from Birdsong.

  Then we went quiet and let her point sink in.

  “Knowing all that doesn’t help us decide what to do next,” she continued. “If you could know for sure who was behind the attack, would you retaliate? Probably not. Would you trust anyone less—or more—than you do now? Again, no.

  “General, you have a lot of enemies, always had them, and you know it. Up until two weeks ago, your security was equal to whatever they could throw. Now we’ve learned someone out there has thought of a new, more violent approach to taking you off the street. So, we’ve changed the procedures and doubled the bodyguard. Tactically speaking, that’s all you can do.”

  I looked from her to Birdsong. “Comments, Colonel?”

  “Randell is probably right, sir. … Gran. Still, I would watch my back around Gordon Pollock.”

  “I always do.”

  “What do you want us to do with the prisoners—whatever is left of them?”

  “Make them disappear.”

  “And us—the rest of the troops?”

  “Split up and make your way by different routes to Brownsville, in Texas,” I said. “Cross the Border Strip by night into Matamoros. Tamaulipas is under protection of the 94th Nebraska, General Barton. I’ll give you letters for Bart. He’ll move you down to Tampico and get you a plane for the crossing to Merida. … Unless he decides that you’ve all volunteered to join up with him. In which case, vaya con Dios, muchachos.”

  “Won’t you come get us, sir?” Randell asked seriously.

  “Be simpler if you just stole a transport, wouldn’t it?”

  She grinned at that. Birdsong laughed outright—for the first time in days. Then they said their goodnights and left. I would not see either of them again for three years.

  The wrangling in Congress went on. At the center of it was the Speaker’s gavel and rule of the nation. Which, to those most personally concerned, only coincidentally implied the responsibility for solving the rat’s nest of civil, military, and social problems afflicting the nation.

  The fight would have ended sooner if the party bosses who lusted after that gavel had not hated and feared each other more than any one of them wanted it for him- or herself. For every member of the House who had the political connections, the years in Baltimore, the favors owed, and the secrets buried to qualify him or her for the Speaker’s chair, there was someone with equal weight to block the nomination. It was a shoving match, with everyone intent on keeping the other guy out.

  In this arena, those of us whose only attributes were skill and knowledge, personal fortune, the backing of constituency, and standing in our home States—we counted for nothing. This was an in-fight among the in-crowd. Freshman congressman, cloakroom conspirators, and up-and-comers like Gordon Pollock, me, and six hundred others could only wait and watch, speculate, and resign ourselves to the inevitable.

  Finally, the party bosses and old-line committee chairman reached a kind of truce. The shape of it was an understanding that none of them would let any other of them have the chair and the gavel. Instead, they might agree to a timeout, a freeze frame while they discussed the deeper game.

  Let a dummy take the seat for the time being, they decided, someone we can control impartially and remove without prejudice when our differences are finally settled. … Someone? No, even a dummy might get ideas and begin to exercise the shadow of power he thinks he holds. Instead let us, they agreed, empower a committee of dummies. Yes, and choose them carefully—for their differences. Let them splash around in the shallow pool and make a public mess, while we, their elders, work on a more permanent solution.

  So, behind closed doors and with the microphones turned off, working only by verbal contract, they created the Special Executive. I can trace the time to within days: It must have been just before veiled references to “S.X.” began appearing in open conversation among the grown-ups and cognoscenti—to the confusion of the other six hundred. A month after my return to
the House, as the gentle rains of September took on the first cold tang of autumn, it was all hammered out.

  All they had to do was pick the dummies.

  They wanted a committee that would represent, oh so democratically, all those qualities they cared nothing about: geography, constituency, skill, knowledge, and personal reputation beyond the grounds of the Capitol.

  Let there be one dummy from the East, they decided. Someone who could speak for the Rust Bowl, the Silicon Beltway, the Glass Hats of Hartford, and the Money Moguls of New York. Take another dummy from the Sun Belt, the Energy Empire of the New West, the Fantoccini of Hollywood, the TENMAC States that were falling into the sticky goo that the cognos were beginning to dismiss as “the Mexican Adventure.” And add a third—three is a good number, isn’t it?—from the Midwest, from the Oil Patch, Hogland, and the Granary which, in bad years, they deplored as the Dust Bowl.

  By a series of cocktail interviews, feelings out, mysterious assurances, and pats on the back, the grown-ups began weaving their picked candidates, the three shiny new members of the Special Executive, into the fringes of the in-crowd.

  Without warning, I suddenly found myself bumping into Gordon Pollock at committee room huddles, in the side aisles of the library, going into staff lunches, in the foyers. Each time, there would be an instant of recognition between us, a narrowing of eyes and lips, and then an instinctive drawing back. Like bringing two north magnetic poles together.

  The other person who was suddenly at hand and under foot all around the Capitol was an elderly senator from Minnesota named Martin Luther Cawley. Twenty years he had served on the other side of the Rotunda, going back to the days in Washington, and there was nothing to show for it—not a decent committee chairmanship, not a position in the party, not even a personal fortune. Cawley had the face of an old, saddle-broken camel, a voice like plain yogurt with a raspberry at the bottom of it, the deferential manners of a myopic old butler who cuts into the sherry twice in a morning. A dummy.

  I could recognize him for what he was. I just didn’t recognize the similarity—which was clear in the eyes of the grown-ups—to Pollock and myself. We were too busy hating each other for past mistakes.

  Finally, a bipartisan press conference, hosted by the House leaders and the loyalists, announced the Special Executive as a “creative compromise in this historic moment of decision.” The three dummies—Pollock, Cawley, and Corbin—were taken out of their boxes and propped up with references to virtues we never suspected we possessed.

  Now why, you may ask, would the House, which had dominated the Federal government for a dozen years, include a senator in the new ruling body? Vulnerability. The vacuum that McCanis had left behind him was drawing attention and a few awkward questions from the other side of the building. Putting Cawley in the lineup was a subterfuge to muffle the gabby voices and tie back the grabby hands before they could latch onto any power—or any that was of real value.

  About four o’clock on the day of that press conference, after the media crews had raced back to their studios to splice clips and write copy, after the new outsiders in the Congress and their staffers had gone off to soak each other in gin and speculation, there was a knock on the inner door of my office in the New Dirksen. Normally, one of my clerks would receive and announce a visitor, but all of them had taken the afternoon off to celebrate. The office was empty. Even my security team was in the garage, four levels removed.

  “Come in!”

  Gordon Pollock moved in like a cat. His feet touched the carpet pile without thumping or scuffing. His clothes made no chafing or whisper around his limbs as he walked. He swung the walnut-paneled door shut like a bank vault’s on jeweled bearings.

  When he turned toward me, after latching the door silently, I could see the black stitch of concern on his face, drawing his eyebrows together and sewing up his mouth into a thin, sour line. The Apollonian young man, with his easy smile and his superior eyes, had been temporarily put away. It struck me that this was the first time Pollock and I had met privately, not surrounded by other faces, the murmur of other voices, in all our long association.

  “Well,” I began, brightly, “one third of the nation’s new power base has come to pay a call.”

  He stood over my desk and I saw a panorama of expressions cross his face: contempt, betrayal, fear, anger, and finally contempt again.

  “You are many things I despise,” he said slowly, “but I try hard not to think of you as a fool.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  “Can we talk honestly?”

  “Probably not …”

  “You don’t really believe we have been given the gavel, do you? Absolute executive authority—to us?”

  “That’s how it will look on the videos. That’s what they will believe on Main Street tonight.”

  “But really—in the reality that you and I know—?”

  I knew what he was driving at. It was time for honesty. “Depends on what strings they have on you,” I said.

  “And on you,” he shot back.

  “No strings. No promises. No secret understandings. I was completely surprised by what happened today.”

  “Completely?”

  “Well … After six weeks of whispers and closed-door sessions and rustlings in the bushes, then everything went quiet. Even the janitors knew something was about to happen.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t know—?”

  “Before this morning—?”

  “That you would be—?”

  “Jointly with you—?”

  “Named to this Special Executive?” he finished the question.

  “No.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “What do you know about this Cawley?”

  “He’s a zero. Not even a member of the chorus.”

  “What does that make us?”

  A look of pain crossed Pollock’s face. He was truly offended—not by my question, but by its implications. “They don’t think enough of us even to buy us off first.”

  “And how long does that give us?”

  “But I was a whip!” he said, cutting right across my question. “I was part of their organization.”

  “Evidently not a very important part.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Corbin. You hadn’t even begun paying your dues.”

  “Can you hear us? This is exactly what they want. We’re cutting each other to pieces before the sun is even down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are just a holding pattern for them. Not meant to hold together very long, either. We’re supposed to spend our time figuring ways to fuck each other over in public while they, in private, work out who’s going to grab the power McCanlis let drop. I repeat my question: How long do we have?”

  In Pollock’s face, I could see the awareness focusing in and shifting to a higher plane.

  “How secure is this room?”

  I laughed. “I’ve got four white-noise generators and an radio interfrequency scrambler running right now. The window surfaces are vibration-damped to mask any modulation from our voices and distorted to discourage telescope-toting lip readers. The subframes in these walls are fitted with random vibrators, also to mask voice modulation. Once a week my people—the ones I trust completely—burn every exposed surface here with hard gamma. I have taps and warblers, activated on a voltage drop, on every wire and pipe going into this wing of the building. If anyone knows what we’re saying, they’re using Tarot cards.”

  Pollock almost looked impressed. “We can have all the time we want,” he said, “if we act right away.”

  “If we tried anything serious, they would block us in committee, wouldn’t they?”

  “Pick the two top contenders,” he said.

  “Akers of Georgia and Walton of California.”

  “Good choices.” He did look impressed. “We’ll have them killed.”

  “How do you plan to arrange that? I mean, cleanly?”

  �
��Those people you trust …”

  “They’re just security forces, soldiers, not Mafia bullies—” I waited a two-count then added, “—or MIS assassins.”

  “Then we do it politically,” he sailed on, missing my jibe.

  “How?”

  And he told me.

  Two days later, standing together at the Speaker’s Rostrum, Pollock and I heard Triss of Arizona, a very junior congresswoman and another certified dummy, prefer charges of espionage and treason against Akers and Walton. The substance of the charges was that as chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the International Strategy Subcommittee, they had sold maps linking the locations of ballistic missile silos with radio abort codes. The deal was supposedly made with the Russians through contacts in Baja. Ms. Triss produced consular documents forwarding the papers and naming their sources.

  Were the documents genuine? Certainly the letterhead and language were. So, incidentally, were the abort codes—as of about nine months previously. Did it matter? The affair might have ended right there, with the disgrace, if not the actual impeachment, of Messrs. Akers and Walton. The score would then have been Dummies two, Elders nothing. But we wanted more.

  The specifications that Triss filed also contained twenty-five John Does and twenty-five Jane Does, listed variously as accomplices and informants. We didn’t have to advertise them, just let the fact be known—and hint that the Does were all congressmen and -women—as the House assembled an investigative committee. We made sure that panel was packed with our fellow Dummies. Meanwhile, other Dummies led the speculation on who might fill those fifty pairs of shoes we’d put on display.

  You’ve seen those action-adventure movies where the hero is suspended over the side of a boat, or maybe over a swimming pool, with a dozen triangular fins circling and criss-crossing beneath his toes. To get out of the jam, he pricks his finger and lets two drops of blood fall. That excites the sharks into a feeding frenzy. The water boils, the foam turns pink, and soon there are no more sharks.