An hour later they merged onto I-95 and entered the outskirts of Boston. What had once been Boston's thriving hi-tech Route 128 Corridor was now a gray, shabby wasteland. Derelict cars and trucks with broken windows and missing tires lined the side streets and access roads along the highway. Shopping malls and major retailers were with few exceptions dark and boarded over, tall weeds sprouting from cracks in their sprawling parking lots.
Tall office buildings, once the headquarters of computer software and hardware companies, had somehow shed their mirror-like shells and looked down upon streets filled with broken glass. Boston's once prosperous economy had already been brought to its knees by the time of Werner's arrest in 2022 but he never expected to see its rotting corpse on his return only five years later. It frightened him to think of what he might encounter as he entered the more densely populated areas of the city.
A vision of Werner's former existence in Boston before his arrest suddenly flashed in his mind. He remembered what a visceral dislike he had once had for this congested, noisy, dirty, decaying, ungovernable city. Sometimes, despite being statistically affluent, he had felt like a prisoner in Boston. The idyllic lakes, mountains, and beaches of the surrounding New England countryside seemed distant and expensive, while the fashionable entertainments of Boston's Theater District, Beacon Hill, Newbury Street, the North End, and even Fenway Park were also priced beyond reach. He felt the doors of Boston's famous attractions closed to him because of his meager budget. Sometimes he had wished for a cosmic leveler to descend upon the city and narrow the gap between the rich and the middle class. Now, seeing how calamitous had been the city's decline, he felt ashamed to have ever harbored such thoughts.
The eighteen-wheeler passed the exit for Route 2 and Concord and was approaching the exits for Weston and Waltham when Jonah Tucker asked Werner where he would like to be dropped off.
"I can't take you any closer into the city than I-95. But if you'd like to go downtown, I can let you off at Exit 22 and you can walk from there to the Riverside T station and take the Green Line in. How about it?"
"Good idea, Jonah. Yeah, let's do that," Werner agreed.
"You sure you're going to be okay?" Jonah continued. "Might you be needing a ride back when you catch up with that young daughter of yours? You know, I swing by here every couple of weeks."
"Thanks, but I have a return ticket. And if I get lucky enough to find her and she wants to come back with me, I guess I'll have to earn enough money for another one."
"Well, if you need any help, I want you to call me," Jonah insisted.
He handed Werner a business card with the address and phone number of his trucking company's office in Burlington, Vermont.
"Call this number and ask for me if you need anything at all."
Then, as an afterthought, Jonah retrieved the card and wrote a second phone number on the back.
"If you get into an emergency, I want you to call my nephew over at MIT. Come to think of it, Sam is probably going to want to meet you sooner or later, anyway, seeing as how Uriah was his father and you knew him in his final days. So, forget about waiting for an emergency and just give young Sam a call. Tell him his Uncle Jonah sent you and he'll straighten up right smart."
Werner took the card, committed the phone numbers to memory and tucked it into his wallet.
"Jonah, I can't thank you enough. May we meet again."
"Count on it," Tucker replied. "The Lord went to a lot of trouble to bring us together and I have a feeling he'll find a reason to do it again."
With that, the massive tractor-trailer pulled onto the exit ramp and slowed to a halt to let Werner out.
CHAPTER 8
Sunday, April 15, 2029
Jamaica Plain, Boston
Head-high mounds of frozen snow thinly coated with soot still lurked in the corners of parking lots and along the edge of the Jamaicaway but the sun felt warm on Frank Werner's back as he made his way along Leverett Pond toward the Hyde Square neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. He had decided to walk the mile or more from Carol's Brookline apartment both because the day was so lovely and because he wanted enough time to run a counter-surveillance route to be sure that no one was following him.
As he made his way east on Heath Street the stench of urine, smoke, and rotting garbage grew steadily stronger. On the residential blocks, piles of trash bags spilled onto the pavement from overfilled dumpsters, many of them showing gaping holes where feral cats had clawed their way in looking for food. He wondered why neighborhoods like this always seemed to be teeming with cats, yet he never saw or heard the packs of stray dogs that were so commonplace in Third World slums. He had heard that Asian immigrants killed stray dogs for meat but this was a Latino neighborhood. The shortage of dogs still didn't make sense to him unless food had become scarcer than he thought or Latino tastes had changed.
Werner turned down a side street and made for the four-story row house where Hector Alvarez lived with his widowed sister and her two young sons. Unfriendly eyes followed him from nearby front stoops and first-floor windows. Across the street a flea market had been set up in a vacant lot. In addition to trading in second-hand clothing, furniture, kitchenware, and other household goods, men in a delivery truck were selling cases of canned foods from the tailgate, probably diverted from a local factory.
At each corner of the truck stood a serious-looking youth to guard against looting of the goods or robbery of the cash proceeds. Overhead, a tangle of wires trailed down from poles overhead into various windows where the locals had managed to tap into the city streetlights for free electricity. This was a place where government rule seemed far from complete, Werner mused, and the thought buoyed his spirits.
Hector Alvarez answered the reinforced steel door with a welcoming smile. As he closed the door and bolted it behind him, Werner noticed a slender woman in jeans and a tank top usher two young boys of around eight or ten around the corner toward what he assumed was the kitchen. This was Alvarez's widowed younger sister, Cara, and her two sons, who had moved in with him two years earlier when her husband died from an untreated heart condition.
Hector saw the boys' retreat and gave a soft chuckle. He was darkly handsome in his black-and-white warm-up suit and white running shoes, though in Werner's view the outfit gave him the sinister look of a narcotics trafficker. At the age of forty-four, Alvarez remained a physically imposing figure, standing six feet two inches and retaining the chiseled physique of his years as a Marine non-com. He wore his graying hair buzz-cut short, adding to the impression of a controlled but ruthless power. Though Hector Alvarez was no dope peddler, Werner knew him to be a highly successful gray-market trader and a cynical and possibly dangerous economic outlaw.
Werner had met Alvarez within a month of arriving in Boston, through acquaintances active in the gray market and second-hand automobile trade. When he had asked them where he could borrow or rent a small truck or moving van without having to deal with government red tape, they had referred him to a man in Jamaica Plain, who had in turn referred him to Hector Alvarez. The two men, as Werner later learned, belonged to a loosely organized commercial network that bought, sold, and sometimes rented gray-market cars and trucks.
Though they claimed not to handle stolen vehicles, it seemed improbable to Werner that, with their disregard for official documentation and the high volume of vehicles they exported covertly all over Latin America, none of them was stolen. And it still puzzled him how someone could make money exporting cars and trucks in a country where roadworthy vehicles were in such short supply.
Alvarez led Werner up freshly painted stairs to a sunny second-floor drawing room. The room plainly belonged to a bachelor. Soccer photos and posters were tacked at irregular intervals along the mustard-colored walls while a flotilla of faux-leather couches and armchairs were gathered in a semicircle around a flat-screen television that hung on the far wall. Along the rear wall stood a trestle sideboard that served as Hector's bar.
Alvarez remo
ved two cans of beer from a compact refrigerator and handed one to Werner. From the looks of his TV room, Alvarez had prospered in recent years in a way that set him apart from his peers in Hyde Square. Werner knew how much this meant to Alvarez, since the two men had become close friends and shared secrets with each other that neither man had shared with any other.
Though neither talked openly of having spent time in a corrective labor camp, both shared certain subtle traits or habits, imperceptible to normal people but detectable by the criminal class, which distinguished them from those who were strangers to the camps. One evening at a bar in Newton, after Werner mentioned to an associate of Alvarez that he had recently arrived from Utah, the associate raised an eyebrow and commented that Werner must be a tough hombre to have returned alive from the camps there, because his boss was the only other man he had known to survive the experience; it had nearly killed him.
The man introduced Werner to Alvarez later that night. Though the two ex-prisoners were wary of each other at first, only hinting at where each might have worked within the Restricted Zones and the years when they were there, before long each realized that the other had been a prisoner at Kamas during the revolt of 2024. Although, unlike Werner, Alvarez had been sent to the camp as a criminal and not as a political prisoner, Hector had sided with the politicals during the revolt and therefore shared Werner's hatred of the warden, the Corrective Labor Administration, and the Unionist Party.
Fortunately for Alvarez, however, his sentence for smuggling and his status as a common criminal operated as a prejudice in his favor and protected him from being identified as a rebel. Instead of being sent to the Yukon with the political prisoners who had participated in the revolt, he was transferred with other criminals to a conventional penal facility in Colorado that was outside the jurisdiction of the Corrective Labor Administration. Within a year Alvarez was back in Boston, having been released in a special one-time amnesty for common criminals who had served at least two years of their sentence in a corrective labor camp.
Werner accepted the beer from Alvarez and sat across from him in a low leather armchair. Each man raised his beer can in recognition of the other and drank. Before speaking, Werner set his backpack on the floor and removed a bottle of fifteen-year-old Matusalem Gran Reserva rum imported from Alvarez's birthplace in the Dominican Republic. Hector accepted it with enthusiasm and placed it on the sideboard after opening it and inhaling its rich vapors. The bottle was a sign of respect for his host that Werner calculated would reinforce his rapport with Alvarez, for today he intended to draw heavily upon it.
"Thanks for agreeing to see me on your day of rest, Hector. I wouldn't have come if there were anyone else I could go to."
"I am always happy to see you, Frank. And I am honored that you visit me in my home," Alvarez added. "There is no favor too great to ask among friends who have shared what we have shared. Five years ago, when we both sat on the parade ground in the Kamas camp, waiting to be picked out by traitors and executed as rebels, I never expected to have a house of my own and the life I enjoy today. And you, to have escaped Kamas and the Yukon, and to be healthy again and free in a great city like Boston, you must be blessed by the Virgin herself."
"If it's the Virgin who arranged it, I thank her from the bottom of my heart," Werner replied. "Every morning, Hector, I look in the mirror and I ask myself how I am still alive. And until a few days ago, I didn't have an answer. But now I think I do. And the answer may apply to you, too, which is why I have come today."
Werner removed a manila envelope from the backpack, opened it and handed Alvarez the short newspaper article inside. It was dated within days of Fred Rocco's arrival in Boston and contained a brief profile of his recent government postings as well as new FEMA programs planned for the Northeast Region.
Alvarez's face darkened and his eyes turned hard.
"I see you still remember the Warden," Werner observed.
"A man like that has no right to live," Alvarez replied.
"Yet he lives. And he prospers," Werner remarked. "Within a mile or two of where we sit now."
"What is being done about it?" Alvarez asked with an indignant expression. "Is there no resistance organization to deal with this?"
Werner withdrew from his pocket a white paper disc the size of a half dollar inscribed with a five-pointed star having the numeral "1" at its center.
"There will be one shortly. A Star Committee has already pronounced sentence on Rocco and they've asked me to form a team to carry it out. I'll need your help, Hector."
He held out the star to place it in Alvarez's hand.
To Werner's surprise, Alvarez recoiled as if from a venomous snake.
"It must be done. Yes, Frank, I understand that. But I cannot be involved. If it were only me, I would join you with my whole heart. But my sister and my nephews, they depend on me."
"This is not a suicide mission, Hector. If everything goes as planned, each of us will continue with our lives as if nothing had happened. And you will never again be contacted by anyone from the Committee. Look, Hector. You already take certain risks in your work with automobiles. You could be arrested for that and the effect on your sister would be much the same."
"In that you are wrong, my friend," Alvarez disagreed. "If I am caught as a criminal, I will get a small punishment or maybe none at all. The Unionists have a soft place in their hearts for the criminal. But if I am caught as a rebel, Rocco's people will kill me and send my sister to the camps. My nephews will grow up in a state orphanage. I was once an orphan, Frank, and I cannot let that happen to my nephews."
"I understand, Hector. I know how important your family is to you. I had a family once, too. I came to Boston for one reason only: to find my daughter. But now that the Star Committee has given me this mission, I have set aside my own dreams for the sake of achieving justice for the prisoners who never made it home. I didn't accept the assignment right away, either, Hector. But in the end I did, just as I think you will.
Hector Alvarez rose from the sofa and paced back and forth before the blank television screen.
"Do you know what it is like to be an orphan, Frank? An orphan from a poor immigrant family from Santo Domingo with no money? Do you know what it is like to see your little sister be treated like a slave by her own relatives because she has no father to protect her?
"Let me tell you what it was like for me. When I was sixteen, my family lived on a migrant farm south of Orlando. One night, fire broke out in our housing unit. Nobody knew why. Twelve people were killed, including my parents and my two younger brothers. Only my sister and I survived.
"My father's relatives blamed me for the fire. They kicked me out of their house and kept my sister but they treated her like a slave. I moved in with a friend's family until I earned my high school diploma. Then I enlisted in the Marines. The first chance I got, I took my sister out of my uncle's house and found her a place to live with an old couple in Orlando. Before long she married a good man and they were doing well. But now he's dead and her life is difficult again. Cara needs my help. I promised her that those boys would have a better life than we had and, by God, they will."
"I'm certain they will, Hector. And I would never want to come between you and your sister or your nephews. Everything you've told me reinforces my impression of the kind of man you are. It's clear that you give your complete loyalty to your family and friends and that you have a deep sense of justice."
Werner paused to measure his friend's reaction before continuing. He now had Alvarez's full attention.
"Once you commit yourself to something, Hector, I know you never quit until you finish it. You've paid your dues and earned the respect of everyone who knows you. At Kamas, for example, you stood up for what was right and joined the rebellion even though you weren't a political prisoner. Among those rebels were some of the finest men I've known. And now very few are left.
"You see Hector, it can't be just anyone who carries out the sentence against Ro
cco. This has to be a judicial act carried by the Star Committee under authority from the Kamas prisoners. And to do it properly, we need men of integrity who risked their lives in the Kamas rebellion and suffered the consequences. There aren't many of us left, Hector, and you're one of the very best we have. We need you on the team. Will you join us?"
Hector Alvarez stopped pacing. He stood at the window and looked out upon the flea market across the street with an anguished expression.
"I cannot say yes, yet I also cannot say no. If I say yes and break my promise to my family, I am not a man. But if I refuse to avenge the deaths of my comrades when my help is needed, I am also not a man. What will be the meaning of my life if I turn my back on what I have lived for?"
"Only you can answer that, Hector," Werner answered. "You must do what you believe serves the highest good and gives your life its highest purpose and meaning. But, if it makes your choice any easier, I can offer you this: if you join us and become unable to support Cara or her boys because you are killed or captured, I will take personal responsibility for the boys' care and education until they are adults. I'm an old man, Hector, but I ought to be good for another ten years. And in my heart I do believe God will preserve at least one of us long enough to see those boys become U.S. Marines like their uncle."
Hector remained expressionless as he left the window and approached Werner. For a moment, Werner thought his host might attack him with his bare hands. Then he saw Hector's eyes glisten with welling tears. A moment later Hector Alvarez held him in a tight embrace.
"God help us both. May he help us all," he answered in a hoarse whisper. "I will join you."
****
The sun was low on the horizon when Werner returned to Carol's Brookline apartment. He could detect the odor of boiled cabbage the moment he entered the stairwell. It was apparently not coming from Harriet Waterman's ground-floor apartment, which was dark. Probably the Russians on the second floor, he thought. He had come to know many Russian prisoners in the Yukon and grew to love and respect them. He introduced himself to the family on the second floor, ethnic Russian refugees from the Caucasus, within a week of moving in.
Star Chamber Brotherhood Page 10