Star Chamber Brotherhood

by Preston Fleming

  Doherty gave Werner an obliging smile and slipped the pallet jack under the nearest pallet. As the work did not take long, he enlisted Doherty to help him recount the inventory, though it was only mid-month.

  When they had worked for an hour, Doherty notified the office manager that he needed to help a customer and joined Werner in the delivery van. They drove two blocks to a deli where the checkout girl was young and pretty and the coffee was always fresh. After Werner paid for the coffee, they took it out to the curb and drank it in the parked van.

  "How's Moira been doing?" Werner asked, breaking the silence.

  "Not so hot," Doherty replied. "She went in for another checkup on Monday but the doctors still don't know what's wrong with her. So now she's on the waiting list to get approved for more testing. But in the meantime they won't give her any drugs for the pain so she can go back to work. So Moira's still at home. I offered to move in with her to help with the boys but she won't hear of it. To be honest, I don't think she trusts me to stay sober around her boys. Can't really blame her for that, I suppose."

  "What about your sister," Werner inquired. "Don't you have one who works in Longwood at one of the big teaching hospitals? Couldn't she help?

  "No, Sharon moved to Georgia to live with her husband's family. She says it's healthier for the kids down there and her husband found a good job at the Air Force base. So it's just me and Moira and her kids. And Uncle Ed, of course, but I don't think he'd miss me much if I were gone. You know, in all the time I was overseas, I never thought for a minute my life would come down to this. If I had, I don’t know if I'd have made it."

  "Don't talk that way, Greg. It may be tough, but at its worst moment it'll never be half as bad as the best day in C227."

  "What you say may be true, Frank, but that place still took a huge piece out of me," Doherty confessed. "If you want the honest truth, I don't think I've been good for much of anything from the day I left the Yukon.

  "It's like my Dad's voice coming back at me from the dead. There he is, drunk as a skunk, screaming at me that I'll never do anything or amount to anything as long as I live. Until I got off that plane from Russia, I knew he was wrong. I had been more places and accomplished more than he could have ever imagined.

  "But up north on the Canol Road, all I could think about was those Unionist bastards selling us out to the Chinese and then putting us away in camps to keep us from talking. And it was the best men that they treated the worst. The born leaders among us, the ones who could see what had happened and wouldn't keep their mouths shut: those were the ones they went after first. I'm only alive because I gave in to them. When the amnesty came through, I thought to myself, I'll do anything and say anything they want just to ride the amnesty train out of here. But they got their pound of flesh, all right. Sometimes when I think about it, I wish I'd said no."

  "What if there were something you could do to bring to justice some of the people who created and ran the camps?" Werner asked, turning to look Doherty directly in the eye. "Tell me, would you even consider an opportunity like that?"

  "Frank, what you're saying could get both of us arrested and thrown back into hell," Doherty answered with a dark look. "You'd better be damned serious if you expect me to answer that."

  "And if you're not serious, Greg, I wouldn't want you to answer," Werner replied. "It would be better to forget we ever spoke about it."

  "Well, I am serious, so keep talking."

  "Greg, when you were in the Yukon, did you ever hear of the Star Committee?"

  "Weren't those the hit squads that used to knock off the stool pigeons?" Doherty asked.

  "Well, you're warm," Werner replied. "Star Committees put accused stool pigeons on trial and then Star Teams carried out the sentences. In those days, it was considered every prisoner's duty to serve on a Star Team if called upon by an officer of higher rank who showed him the star."

  Werner opened his palm and showed Doherty a small paper disc inscribed with a five-pointed star and the numeral "1" at its center.

  "The number ’1‘ means that a Star Committee has chosen me to lead a Star Team and my showing you the star means that I'm asking you to join my team. Will you accept the assignment?"

  "Is this an up or down choice or do I get to ask questions?" Doherty asked with narrowed eyes.

  "It's up or down, I'm afraid. Questions come later."

  "Then count me in," the younger man answered after a moment's hesitation. "The only thing is, Frank, I didn't know you were an officer. What was your branch of service?"

  "I did a few years overseas in the C.I.A. after college. I didn't really think it counted as military service, but the Star Committee said it was close enough for them."

  "Okay, then, what can you tell me about the assignment?" Doherty pressed. "Will I have to kill somebody?

  "The Team will, but it's not clear just yet which one of us will do it," Werner explained. "A Star Team is rather like a firing squad. The squad is collectively responsible for taking the life of the condemned person while acting under orders from a higher authority. But if for some reason you had to carry out the sentence alone, could you do it?

  "I'm a soldier," Doherty replied flatly. "I understand orders."

  As Werner observed the younger man's face, it seemed all at once as if a light appeared in Doherty's eyes while a thin smile spread across his face.

  "You're going to think this is really weird, Frank, but all week it's as if I've expected something like this to happen to me. Every morning when I get up, I have this feeling that there's something important I have to do. And get this: Wednesday night, as I was walking into a bar on Beacon Street, it felt as if a giant hand was holding me back. I stepped back a few paces and tried again but I just couldn't get through the door.

  "That's when I got the message–not a voice, but more like a thought–that I had to stay stone sober from now on because there was something very important I would be asked to do."

  Doherty reached out to shake Frank Werner's hand. To Werner surprise, in under a minute he seemed to have become a different man.

  "You know, Frank," Doherty went on, "I used to wonder why God or Fate or whatever you want to call ‘Him’ saved my life over there in Russia and brought me back to Boston. With my parents gone and the rest of my family dead or scattered across the country, I often thought that there wasn't any point to it. Well, now I believe there is. When do we start?"

  CHAPTER 7

  Flashback: September, 2027

  Highway I-93, Central New Hampshire

  Werner awoke from a deep sleep at the sharp blatting noise from the compression brake as the eighteen-wheeler began the steep mountain descent. It had been nearly two hours since the truck had crossed from Canada into Vermont and they were now leaving New Hampshire's White Mountains behind them as they hurtled down I-93 toward Laconia and the Lakes Region.

  Shaking the slumber from his eyes, Werner looked out upon the autumn landscape. Though it was only mid-September, the foliage season was already past its peak, with most of the red, orange, and yellow leaves having fallen to earth.

  A decade and a half earlier, the Vermont foliage season had begun in mid-September and extended as late as the end of October. But New England weather patterns had been thoroughly disrupted by nearly ten years of oceanic current shifts, jet stream diversions, and volcanic eruptions so that winter now arrived a full month earlier than it had for most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

  Werner gazed out at the western horizon, admiring the reddish orange sky and the purple-mauve glow at sunset created by fine volcanic ash lingering in the stratosphere years after the last major eruption in the Cascades three years before. So far, the scenery along the last leg of his trip east, which had begun that afternoon in Sherbrooke, Quebec, did not look much different from his memories of it five years earlier. The traffic was thinner, the potholes more abundant, the bridges more badly rusted, and more of the roadside buildings burnt or abandoned, but the
rustic beauty of the place had lost none of its charm for having retreated two steps toward the primitive.

  The driver, a well-built black man in his late forties with a neatly trimmed beard, took a sip from a covered plastic mug and asked Werner if he would like some coffee. Werner declined. The man had driven Werner all the way from Windsor, Ontario, and his name was Jonah Tucker.

  "Looks to me like you had a good sleep there, partner," Tucker continued in a friendly way. "Can't blame you for being on edge at the border. Those guards can be pretty fierce. But you haven't seen anything till you try it going the other direction. Those boys don't like it one bit when they sees someone trying to leave this Union-made heaven of theirs."

  "Yeah, I could feel it when I crossed from Detroit into Ontario two days ago," Werner replied.

  "Back in the day, I used to drive that route every week. But not much goes on in Detroit nowadays. I was lucky they transferred me to Vermont before the fires hit the place. Last time I drove through the Motor City, my old neighborhood was nothing but trees and weeds."

  "Your company sent you to Vermont?" Werner inquired. "Or did you go there for your other work?"

  "The company sent me," Tucker concurred. "But I decided a long time ago that I'd keep doing the Lord's work no matter where I was sent."

  Werner hesitated to press any further, as he had been counseled at the start of his cross-country journey not to exchange more than minimal personal information with the volunteers who helped him along the way. In the event anyone were questioned by the authorities, it would be safer for both passenger and driver if each knew as little as possible about the other. Nonetheless, both men shared the common value of promoting the free movement of peoples within Unionist North America and each had a natural admiration and liking for the other.

  On Werner's side, he owed an enormous debt of gratitude to the men and women of the New Underground Railroad who had agreed to help him defy the prohibition against former corrective labor camp prisoners leaving the Restricted Zones where they were required to reside in internal exile. The NUR organization in Salt Lake City had agreed for humanitarian reasons to help Werner search for his only surviving daughter in Boston. In his case, the NUR people saw a relatively low risk of blowback for helping him escape from Utah because Werner had been released under amnesty and thus was not likely to be rearrested so long as he did not commit any new crimes.

  As for Tucker, he was a founding member of NUR, having been descended on both sides from runaway slaves who had fled to Canada before the Civil War and settled in Detroit in the 1870s. His family's church had been one of the first Detroit congregations to call for NUR's creation as a direct successor to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

  After breaking publicly with the Unionist Party following the stolen election of 2016, NUR had dared to expose the secret creation of the Corrective Labor Administration within the Department of State Security and its system of concentration camps for political dissidents of all kinds. In retaliation for their defiance, the DSS had arrested top leaders from the leading churches behind the creation of NUR and persecuted anyone suspected of having joined or supported the clandestine civil rights organization.

  After a minute or two of silence Tucker spoke again.

  "They told me you came to us from one of them Restricted Zones out west. How long have you been traveling?"

  "I left Salt Lake City about a week ago," Werner replied. "It could have gone faster, but we ran into delays with a couple of the transfers."

  "Are you one of them Mormon rebels the Unionists have taken off after? You don't have to say so, but if you were, I'd want you to know I'm right proud to have you in my rig."

  "No, can't claim that distinction," Werner replied. "I'm not even a Utah native. I just lived there for a few years before my arrest and I grew to like it. When I'm finished in Boston, I plan to go back."

  "Were you ever in a camp back in Utah?"

  "Oh, yeah," Werner replied tersely.

  "Listen, I know I'm not supposed to be asking you a lot about your experiences and all," Jonah explained uneasily, "but did you ever hear of a camp in Utah by the name of Kamas?"

  "Why do you ask?" Werner replied.

  "I mean, is Kamas a real camp? Were you ever there?"

  "Jonah, you’re a good man and I like you very much. But this is not something I can talk about. Could we discuss something else?"

  "All right," Jonah continued, undeterred. "We'll leave it alone. But do you mind if I ask another question?"

  "Go ahead."

  "Have you ever run across a man by the name of Uriah Tucker?" Jonah pressed.

  Frank Werner stopped breathing for a fraction of a second. The muscles in his face may also have betrayed an involuntary startle reflex, because Jonah Tucker appeared to have noticed it. Of course, Jonah and Uriah shared the same last name and the same powerful build and a striking facial resemblance that Werner had not connected until this moment.

  "Yeah, I knew him," Werner offered. "Uriah's the one who first told me about NUR. I wouldn't be here in your rig if it weren't for Uriah. He was a fine man in his day."

  A smile spread across Jonah Tucker's face and his eyes welled with tears. Perhaps it was the glow of the sunset emerging from behind a bank of clouds, but it seemed to Werner as if Jonah's face shone with a soft light as he gazed expectantly at this stranger who apparently held the answer to a long-standing question.

  "Uriah was my brother," Jonah revealed, his voice close to breaking. "Four years ago we learned he was being held at a place in Utah called Kamas. But since then we've heard nothing. It's as if the place had been wiped off the map like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible."

  "Uriah was as close to a saint as I think I'll ever see," Werner acknowledged quietly, choosing his words with care. "The last time I saw him was about three years ago. I heard he might have died in a camp in Colorado not long after that. I'm sorry, Jonah."

  "I think most of us in the family have felt for a long while that Uriah was dead," Tucker remarked. "A few of us have seen him in dreams. But my dreams were scary and ugly and left me with a feeling that Uriah had failed somehow or fallen from grace. Hearing good news from you about Uriah lifts a heavy burden from my heart. Clearly the Lord had a hand in sending you to us today, my friend."

  "Perhaps so," Werner replied carefully. "Anyway, I'm honored to help."

  Werner replayed the conversation in his mind and knew that he had said the right thing, the kind thing, the charitable thing. He had honored a man who, until close to the end, had lived an exemplary life. But Werner had not told the full truth about Uriah Tucker. And for that, he knew, many would condemn him if they had heard his words tonight.

  Jonah Tucker nodded and drove on. But a few minutes later he broke the silence again.

  "When we get to Boston, do you have a place to stay?" he asked.

  "I have cash for the first couple nights," Werner disclosed. "It ought to be enough for a flophouse, I suppose."

  "How are you going to get by after that?"

  "I figure I can stay with friends," Werner answered. "I used to live in Boston. There are people I can look up."

  "How about money?"

  "I'll find odd jobs, I suppose. There are always old people in the wealthier suburbs who need help."

  "Not so many, not since the Saigon Flu swept through," the driver noted soberly. "And not so many wealthy ones, either, since the Moneymen Purge. You may go through a lot of shoe leather between meals."

  "Whatever happens, it can't be any worse than what I've been through in the camps."

  "Amen to that," Jonah responded with a sympathetic smile. "But would you mind if I gave you a friendly piece of advice?"

  "Please do," Werner responded, returning the smile. "Give me all the pieces you can spare."

  "Okay then, in Salt Lake did they tell you about the new residence permit system?"

  "They did, but I'm sure I didn't catch all the technical details. Why don't you fill me
in," Werner proposed.

  "Just remember one thing: as long as you live off the grid and don't ask the government for anything, chances are you can last a long time in Boston without a big problem. We already know your ID checks out and shows you're not in any trouble with the FBI or the DSS. But don't ever use it to try and get yourself a ration card or treated at a government clinic or a public housing unit, because that's just the kind of thing that could put you on a lockup train back to Utah."

  Werner pondered the implications of this advice.

  "Okay, let's say I get caught up at a checkpoint somewhere in Boston a month from now and the police figure out that I've been in Boston for a few weeks without a residence permit when I'm not even supposed to set foot outside of Utah. What happens to me?"

  "Do you have a return ticket you can show them?" Jonah asked.

  Werner patted his breast pocket and nodded.

  "Good. Then, unless you've done something else to piss them off, I'll lay ten-to-one odds they'll let you go. You see, the government needs people like you. The city, the state, the feds: they all count on the black market and the gray market and the indocumentados who do the work that no one else will do without entitling them to government benefits. They may hassle you or shake you down for protection money, but they probably won't arrest you unless you make a nuisance of yourself. If you support yourself, look respectable and act like you belong, the cops won't give you a second look."

  "That sounds reassuring enough," Werner replied. "Is there any point in asking what it might take to actually get a Boston residence permit? How big a bribe might it take?"

  "Forget about it. Unless you're a big-shot Party member or one of their relatives, you'll never get a residence permit for a city like Boston. The quota's filled."

  They drove through Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire, after dark without comment. Traffic was light and with so many of the overhead streetlights broken or inoperable, Werner could see little of interest from the highway. As they approached the Massachusetts border, Werner expected to see heavy northbound commuter traffic but found little. Nearly all the vehicles on the roads were trucks, and even they were few and far between.