“The client’s tech guys won’t have access?”
Richard shook his head. “They shouldn’t have to. Diagnostic’s our problem.”
Jackson studied the schematic. “Hell of a lot of information for a diagnostic.”
“We want to be thorough.”
The man snorted. “There’s thorough, and then there’s trying to stuff the Moon in your hip pocket.”
“I told you, I’m dubious. But this is what the client wants.”
“Yeah. I guess. Do what they want, right?”
“My thinking exactly!”
* * *
The level of illumination was the same. The silhouette of shadows and window reflections—from dump trucks, Caterpillar tractors, the office trailer, and the material laydown—was the same, allowing for random movements of the equipment during the day. Brandon Praxis knew this because he had stalked the opera house jobsite from outside the fence line for four nights running.
He flipped down the QuadEye NVS barrels attached to his helmet, and the differences sprang into view. Green beams from his team’s IR laser targeting crisscrossed the open spaces. Waves of ghostly fog streamed up into the air from the neural inhibitor pads—probably picking up a bit of dust, too. Ranging sensors glowed at key points on the trailer and the truck cabs.
It crossed his mind that if the people they were going to meet carried similar night vision enhancements, then he and his team were screwed in the nude, as they say. But … no, the people who had been working this and other construction jobs in the city were not that sophisticated. These thieves carried flashlights and bolt cutters—the cutters now that they’d lost their inside man on the Nocturna Security payroll. Praxis Engineering & Construction was securing the site at a higher level of diligence these days.
“Sound off,” Brandon said, his voice hardly more than a humming mumble in his throat mike.
“Alpha clear … Beta clear …” and on down through the team of six under his command. They were all inside the fence, waiting. He still patrolled outside, moving from shadow to shadow on the other side of Franklin Street, as he used to do during a raid. His jumpsuit, helmet cover, and gaiters absorbed the light from occasional passing cars and trucks, and no part of his equipment—not even the lenses on his goggles—returned a reflection. No one on the ground had ever caught him or his scouts before a night fight. It was always afterward, when his unit had made their strike, secured the salient, and been denied reinforcements by the chickenshit chain of command that the tactical situation went south. Things were different now.
He was his own authority. And these men and women were handpicked from his old command, hired special, and trained in new and better equipment that was paid for by PE&C. All of them except his brother Paul, whom he’d called out of civilian life, now that he was comfortable with his prosthetic leg. “Comfortable,” hell! Paul was faster, stronger, and deadlier for having all that spring steel and carbon fiber attached to his thigh—as he kept reminding his older brother. Brandon had installed him as second in command and was grooming him to eventually take over his own team. PE&C really was a family operation.
A dark-colored—possibly dark blue—panel van pulled out of the traffic lane on Franklin and stopped by the curb just beyond the gate.
“Heads up,” Brandon murmured for his team.
The driver got out carrying—yes!—a pair of cutters. And as he approached the chain securing the gate, a semi pulled up behind the van and obscured Brandon’s view of the actual incursion. What the thieves thought they could take away in the tractor trailer was a mystery, since the jobsite was still basically a hole in the ground lined with concrete. Maybe they were hoping for bulk materials—steel rebar, copper plumbing and wiring, and maybe other early deliveries like window and door frames, glass and roofing tiles—plus the forklift with which to load them.
“My view is partially blocked,” he announced quietly. “I’ll tell you when everyone has dismounted. Wait until they all cross the pads before engaging.”
A series of contact clicks in his earphones signaled general acknowledgement. Because his last instruction was really unnecessary, having been covered a dozen times in training, one voice whispered, “Sheesh, Captain!”
When the last of the doors had slammed on the two trucks, Brandon counted and described five bogeys for his team. After they disappeared on the far side of the semi, he broke cover and ran—a depthless shadow articulating itself under the streetlights—across Franklin Street and crouched behind the hood of the semi’s tractor.
From there he could see the thieves walk, or rather swagger, through the gate and head for the laydown area beyond the office trailer. They walked right across the ghostly streaming pads. These were sending up waves of near-ultraviolet light, 300 to 400 nanometers, just beyond the range of human vision but intense enough to confuse the eye, and emitting warbling sounds between 10 and 20 Hertz but at more than 115 decibels, too low to actually hear but strong enough to be felt in cranial and body cavities.
The men staggered, turned, and one fell down. The others had guns and tried to draw or raise them. That was when Brandon’s team opened fire. Their weapons—silenced, which also suppressed the muzzle flash—were undetectable from beyond the fence. Brandon only knew they were working because the line of their infrared lasers bucked slightly with each recoil.
In ten seconds the thieves were all down. Master Sergeant Bill Pitt turned off the pads with his master key. One of the thieves was still rolling around—probably the only one wearing a ballistic vest—and First Lieutenant Sally Hungerford stepped out of her hiding place to put the grace shot through his head.
“Okay,” Brandon said. “Police your brass.”
His team used cartridges doped with a special dye that positively blazed in their night vision goggles. But they had counted their shots anyway.
They bagged the bodies and loaded them back onto the thieves’ trucks. Brandon had arranged a second team with a front address at an industrial park across the Bay in Hayward, where human remains could be made to disappear cleanly. Two of his main team would then drive the vehicles to a chop shop in Nevada which guaranteed to wipe the lojacks and destroy the VIN numbers and plates.
By an hour before dawn, and after Brandon and the remainder of his team had removed their equipment from the grounds, swept the dirt, and resecured the gate chain, it would be as if nothing had ever happened.
* * *
Bernardo Gorgoni was not, in Mariene Kunstler’s opinion, a particularly handsome man. Oh, he thought so. He had the curling hair, heavy brows, large liquid eyes, straight fleshy nose, and full pouting lips of an old-time Roman senator. She made the connection because she had once done duty in the Musei Capitolini in Rome and seen pieces of the colossal statue of a stern old Roman, including a huge but roughly detached head. One day, Bernardo’s swelled head would end up similarly removed from his shoulders—or so she suspected.
Gorgoni was head of Construction Workers International Local 320, the union that would get most of the labor contract on the Southside Sewer Project in Sacramento. They were meeting over dinner at The Firehouse, an upscale restaurant in the Old Town district, which had been untouched by the fighting. Before the salad course was over, Mariene made her pitch.
“What wages will your people earn for the construction work?” she asked.
“What do you care?” he asked. “It’s a city job, paid for out of municipal bonds. For Praxis, the cost is a pass-through.”
“We might want you to go a little higher on this one.”
“No can do. The contract rates are fixed. And public.”
“Then find a way to unfix them.” She made it an order.
“How? The sewer’s not critical infrastructure, doesn’t involve any Superfund sites, or cut through areas of archeological importance, so there’s nothing to—”
“It’s in a war zone, for God’s sake! Tell them you’re worried about unexploded bombs, or getting poisoned from lead
slugs and depleted uranium, or leftover traces of chemical weapons—”
“The Federated Republic never used any—”
“Don’t be thick, Bernardo!” She sighed. “There doesn’t have to be any evidence, just the concern. You want to invoke hazard pay or whatever you call it. Praxis will not challenge you in this.”
“Why would Praxis Engineering want to pay above union scale?”
“It’s a pass-through, right? And you’re not talking to Praxis now.”
“Okay, then who are you?” He seemed genuinely mystified.
“You’re talking to Kunstler. That is all you need to know.”
“And if I do this?” His stare was direct and intense. “What then?”
“Well, what could you get? How much of a percentage increase?”
“Oh, maybe seven percent in all classifications. Maybe a bit more.”
“Then take that for yourself,” she said. “And you pay me four.”
“You’re going to put my men at risk for a lousy three percent?”
“There’s no risk, remember? Besides, when the job starts, the rate will already be written into the contract and the work will proceed as normal. You’ll end up finding nothing dangerous at the site, and no one will remember the issue.”
“You do know this is all hugely illegal?”
“That’s why we’re going to keep it quiet. Three percent is your quid pro quo.”
“What’s that?” Now he was finally becoming suspicious.
“Latin. It means ‘you scratch my back’—”
He brightened, leaned across the table, and leered. “I’d love to, honey.”
She squinted at him. In some lights, perhaps, he was almost as handsome as he thought he was. It had been a long time for her, and maybe tonight was the night. That, too, would be part of the implied pro quo.
* * *
The Robert E. Coyle F.R. Courthouse in Fresno predated the war by several years and had never been touched in the fighting. It was an architectural blend of medieval and modern: medieval for the great square blocks of hewn stone, edged and beveled like the ramparts of a fortress; modern for the banked windows of blue glass, decorated with faux balconies in dark-bronze latticework. It was squat and ugly, with a simplicity that was almost attractive.
As Antigone Wells approached the entrance in the morning sunshine, arm in arm with John Praxis, she paused, turned to him, and asked, “Did your group build that?”
“God, I hope not,” he replied nervously. “It looks like a prison. Does it seem like something we’d build?”
“I don’t know … it rather fits the function, doesn’t it? Federalist brutalism.”
Inside, they were directed to the courtroom on the sixth floor, where the clerk led them back into the chambers of Judge Robert Rudolph. The State’s three attorneys were already in attendance. They were gray men: short gray hair, clean-shaven gray faces, sober gray suits, hooded gray eyes, and steel-rimmed glasses. They reminded her of clerks in a men’s clothing store, earnest strivers, good Rotarians, in the image of Harry Truman. They made Wells, in her cream-colored suit with her pink-and-orange silk scarf, feel like an exotic flower.
Before she and John could take their seats on the left side of the judge’s big oak desk, the clerk of the court waited a beat and said, “Please rise.”
Judge Rudolph entered with a brisk step, turned, and looked around. In contrast to the sober Rotarians, he was burly, like a lumberjack, with a permanently sunburned face and close-cropped sandy hair. Instead of black robes, he wore a red-plaid shirt, open at the neck, and khaki cargo pants with bulging pockets. It was plain he felt he had no one to impress here.
Antigone Wells had done her homework on the man. He was a recent transfer from the F.R. District Court in North Dakota, where the fighting had been unusually severe. Judge Rudolph had been an early advocate of secession and had opposed the U.S. government’s attempts to expropriate judicially—and later to destroy by force—that state’s share of the Bakken oil shale on the grounds of promoting carbon reduction. Once she learned he was going to preside in the case of State of California, F.R.A. v. John Praxis, Wells had started to breathe easier.
“Okay, let’s go,” Rudolph said and sat down in his leather-backed chair. Thirty seconds later, the court reporter hurried in with her steno machine and apologized for her tardiness—getting a grunt and a nod from the judge. She was the only other woman in the room, and she was dressed in sober brown. The clerk announced the case and the purpose of this conference, which was to hear pre-trial motions. Only one had been filed, the defendant’s, to dismiss.
“You may begin, Counselor,” Rudolph said.
Antigone Wells proceeded to paraphrase her brief, first summarizing the known facts: That the Stanislaus National Forest was originally controlled by the former Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That the land and its developed infrastructure had been legally disposed of under the National Assets Distribution Act, which was the law of the land at the time. That John Praxis had a valid future claim to this asset under the terms of the Act, and that he had abided by those terms.
She then addressed the State’s allegations of negligence, destruction of public property, and denial of public service. She demolished them with the same arguments she had outlined to John back in San Francisco: That he had followed good management practices as defined by the Forest Service at the time of disposal. That he had employed the same contractors as the State, and they had been operating all along under the same principles to maintain the property. That John Praxis was steadily ameliorating damage that had occurred decades earlier in the Rim Fire.
“This brings us to the central question,” she said. “As John Praxis is a valid tenant in fief of this property, is the State prepared to repay the loan which he made to the former U.S. federal government in order to secure these rights? To invalidate his rights without compensation would be a violation of the Takings Clause of the Reenacted Fifth Amendment to the Federated Republic Constitution.
“Second,” she went on, “is the State prepared to compensate Praxis for the costs of maintenance and upkeep which he has expended on the property over the past five years? Failing to do so would also be a violation of the Takings Clause.
“Third, is the State prepared to compensate Praxis for material improvements and the increase in the land’s value due to his efforts? Failure to do so again violates the Takings Clause.
“And finally, is the State now capable of maintaining the property in its current improved condition? Or would State appropriation lead to a deterioration of the asset, which is the condition currently pertaining to other publicly held properties in territory of the old United States?”
When she had finished, Judge Rudolph stared at her. “You’re placing a lot of weight on the Fifth Amendment, Counselor.”
“I understand, Your Honor. But that clause is the crux of the reasoning behind the NADA legislation to begin with. Without the Takings Clause, the State is free to appropriate whatever it likes of a citizen’s property by way of a tax or in the interest of the public good, without compensation or consideration.”
“Don’t teach me the law, Counselor.”
“Sorry, Your Honor.”
“I’m merely pointing out the narrowness of your argument.” He turned then to the State’s attorneys. “Do you have any arguments against the motion?”
They did, profusely, copiously, and repeatedly, taking more than an hour to explain and expand on them, until even the court reporter started to look bored and frustrated. Wells could follow the thread of their logic through their thicket of precedents. But when she summed up the matter in her mind, they were only leading back to the State’s original allegations: That John Praxis was negligent, had damaged the property entrusted to him, caused everyone intense pain, and should be booted off the land.
When the plaintiffs were done, Judge Rudolph said, “I will take the defendant’s motion under advisement. We will reconv
ene in one week.”
He didn’t have to bang a gavel for them to know they were dismissed.
Out of sight, under the front edge of the judge’s desk, Wells reached over and gave John’s hand a squeeze.
* * *
By the special courtesy of his being family, Brandon Praxis had been brought into the informal Friday lunchtime meetings of PE&C’s senior executives—which at this point included John and Callie as the two principals, Antigone Wells as the firm’s Legal Department and his grandfather’s unannounced consigliere, and Mariene Kunstler as marketing chief, although she was away on business at this particular meeting. Brandon sat and listened as the elder Praxis moved from one topic to the next, covering growth opportunities and business prospects, current operational problems, project details, and snapshots of the cash flow.
“And finally,” his grandfather said, “our theft problem has dropped off by—well, to nothing.”
“Not even pilferage, shrinkage, or whatever you call it?” Aunt Callie asked. She turned to Brandon. “How did you do it?”
“I just took some professional steps.”
“Care to elaborate?” John Praxis prompted.
“Well … we ghosted the people who were causing the problem.” Brandon shrugged. “Given the meltdown between the police department and the district attorney’s office—” Aunt Callie chuckled at this, then put on a sober face. “—it seemed the best way to handle the situation.”
“ ‘Ghosted’?” John asked, mystified.
“We made them disappear,” Brandon said.
“I assume you’re not talking about magic tricks.”
“You really don’t want to know the details, Grandfather.”
“But, if you—ghosted—the ones who were stealing from us,” he said, “won’t there be others who’ll come in their place?”
“No. Now everybody knows it’s bad luck to break into a Praxis site.”
Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Page 29