by Devon Ford
His men. They were what mattered most to him.
His men and women, technically, but the females under his command were the last ones to make a gender distinction, unless to point out that they could kick a man’s ass just as easily as anyone else. His brigade was well trained, and they looked up to him because he looked after them when they felt that their country no longer cared.
His trusted members of the Movement, a great portion of his fighting strength, were disillusioned servicemen and women, the majority of which found themselves pulled from the frontline and sent home with no time to adjust. They were thrown back into a society torn between looking down on them or thanking them for their service. A good number of his troops were from poor families who had joined up fresh out of high school, and now faced rising unemployment, a total lack of belonging, and conflicting media reports that their God-given second amendment rights would be taken from them by a government they felt was unconstitutional.
They felt abandoned; they needed something to believe in and something to fight for. They were part of the biggest war machine in the Western world, and they were trained to kill. There was little space for people like them back in the world; sure enough some went into law enforcement or the Department of Corrections, the lucky ones went home to families and jobs, but many were just hung out to dry.
So, thought Taylor with resignation, plan B it is.
And he made it happen.
Wednesday 9:30 a.m. - 5th Avenue
Cal, having gorged himself on steak and seafood in the exquisite restaurant before washing it down with an entire bottle of red wine, woke with the echoes of a hangover bouncing around inside his skull and ricocheting off the walls of jet lag.
After throwing off the covers in the enormous and impossibly comfortable yet firm bed, he stepped into the waterfall shower again and let the decadence wash away the stress of yesterday. He dressed, ate a big breakfast of pancakes whilst surreptitiously pocketing a few pastries for later—no sense in buying lunch—and headed outside.
He had never seen so many people congregated in one place. Never seen so many cars packed bumper to bumper. Never heard such deafening ambient noise as every sound in the possible world competed for space in his ears under the overriding wail of sirens and car horns.
He swiped across the lock screen on his phone and brought up the map, even though as something of an afterthought he’d picked up a paper map from a stall near the decadent reception desk, which thankfully wasn’t manned by Bridget and her fake smile. First stop, which was the nearest, was the Rockefeller Center.
The plan, which had been Angie’s plan that he found himself agreeing to, was to see the sights of the famous New York City. Cal still felt bitter about not going somewhere with a beach, among many other things, which made his default position in the world rest at angry, but with the sidewalk under his feet he felt the stirrings of something resembling happiness.
Finding the Rockefeller within minutes, he swiped his phone from map to camera and reversed the lens. Leaning back and holding the phone at arm’s length, he grinned his best “I’m having the time of my life” smile and snapped the shot with the iconic buildings in the background.
Done. Get that online later, he thought, needs a hashtag though … something like, #whoneedsawife? or #f*ckyouangie?
Deciding that he had seen the iconic buildings, he felt that they looked too busy and the line of people waiting to pass through a security checkpoint was too long, he changed his mind about going inside. His intention was to see, if not experience, as many of the landmarks as he could to show the world that she hadn’t broken him. Switching back to the map, he retraced his steps to hit 5th Avenue again. Almost immediately the building across the wide street from him took his breath away, so much more impressive and attractive than the skyscrapers people talked so much about. The cathedral was packed with people out in front and the sidewalks were cluttered by people trying to take their own picture with selfie sticks. It was like an assault course for anyone trying to just get by. Cal snapped a couple of pictures from his side of the street; even if he’d managed to cross over in one piece he’d end up having to take his own selfie from an angle which would look straight up his nose to get the beautiful building in the frame.
As with so many other people who have never visited a place laid out in a grid, he marveled at the high buildings to either side as his progress was halted for each street he had to cross. His earlier elation at his sense of freedom faded somewhat when he tried to walk casually and enjoy himself. He soon found that acting like a rock in a riverbed was less fun than he imagined, because instead of the people flowing around him like water, he found himself bumped and shoved by every fourth man or woman to walk by him.
He gave up and quickened his pace to that of a New Yorker: hurried. Another six blocks north took him to a towering monstrosity of dark glass. Catching the name over the doors finally forced him to make the perilous journey across the street to take his photo with the sign behind him. He hoped the face he pulled would make people laugh and like it when he posted it later. Slipping his phone back in his pocket he carried on, his eyes peering inside the windows of Tiffany & Co. where a glance at the big diamond rings removed his good mood like a pin connecting with a balloon.
Everywhere he looked people were bustling along, utterly sure of where they were going and in a rush to get there. People shouted into their cell phones or into the small mics in the cables to the earbuds they wore. He was startled the first time he saw the venting steam rising from the street ahead, like some layer of hell waiting just below the surface. He had dressed for colder weather, but soon found that the concentration of people and fumes inside the narrow alleyways of skyscrapers made it warmer than he expected.
Glancing to his right he locked eyes with a man in the back seat of cab. A real gen-u-ine NYC yellow cab, as iconic the world over as the bulbous, noisy, and uncomfortable black cabs of London.
Being British and being abroad in an unfamiliar city teeming with tens of thousands of people who all seemed to know where they were going, his embarrassment took over in an instant and he tore away his gaze knowing that he could never look back in that direction for as long as he lived. It was almost as awkward for him as accidentally touching a stranger’s hand in a crowd.
Now that he was very aware of the cab next to him, he realized that there seemed to be no point in anyone driving anywhere in New York. For almost six blocks he and the cab leapfrogged each other, both making slow progress through the streets which just didn’t seem to have been built with this many people in mind, until blessedly the cab turned off down a one-way street ahead of him.
Now he saw that the buildings ahead to his left dropped away, and the imposing skyline of glass and brick and stone gave way to daylight and the color green, bringing with it a renewed chill in the air. His elation at walking solo in the big city caught up with him, and he realized his feet were already starting to hurt. He had spent more time on his feet in the last twenty-four hours than he usually did in a week, and he placed his ass on the nearest bench in Central Park with a sigh of relief.
He snapped himself another selfie, then retrieved a small pastry from his pocket and ate it, all the while keeping watch on a street preacher yelling on the sidewalk from his left, promising eternal damnation to all who didn’t repent their sins. From there he intended to walk through the park, visit the zoo, then head back to his decadent hotel room.
Angie may not have been there, may have ruined his life, but their goal when they booked the honeymoon was to see the city.
The plan had changed, but the goal remained the same.
DUCKS
IN A ROW
Thursday 6 a.m. - Free America Movement Headquarters
“Suzanne!” barked Colonel Butler as he returned to his command center following his morning run. Two other Movement soldiers had run through the steep forest trails with him, both men half his age if they were a day, but he had still le
d the way and dictated a fierce pace which they struggled to match.
“Suzanne!” he called again, annoyed that he had to repeat himself.
“Here, sir,” she called out from inside his office. Nodding to his running partners, their misting breath combining to form a steamy cloud enveloping them all, Butler went inside.
“Good morning,” she said, handing him a cup of coffee and perching herself on the corner of his desk. Butler chugged down the hot coffee, wiping his mouth with a hairy forearm. Suzanne waited patiently for him to finish, watching as his thick chest rose and fell.
Any normal operations command center would be bristling with wires and screens, radio headsets buzzing and phones ringing, but this was more like the command post of a general in the civil war; runners came and went with information written on pieces of paper and each one was decoded using the same method the Movement used throughout the country. People quietly shuffled the papers, sometimes getting up and calling a runner to take messages out to town where their wider network of contacts would distribute them. There was always a flurry of activity first thing every morning, after that the slow-moving flow of information and intelligence ground almost to a halt until the afternoon brought new information.
The only nod to modern technology at all were six plasma screens mounted on the wall, all of them showing twenty-four-hour news from the US as well as international news. Each was fed through the satellite mounted outside, and it was the only electronic connection with the outside world. The satellite let news in, but nothing out. It was safe, and even Butler was sure that the NSA or Homeland Security couldn’t eavesdrop on them through the news channels.
The news, national, international, and local, was the best way to stay abreast of events and come tomorrow, would be his window to the world to see if the plans he had so painstakingly created and nurtured, in some cases over years, were working.
“T-minus thirty hours and change,” said Suzanne, as though Butler hadn’t been aware of the countdown clock. Bizarrely, she was the only person in the movement not to call him sir or treat him like some kind of mortal god. She was different. She wasn’t ex-military, had no military family members—she had no family at all that Butler knew of—and she had no personal axe to grind at the dissolution and disarming of American soldiers. She had carried a 9mm, a purse gun as Butler would call it favoring his heavy forty-five, and went to her local range every so often to keep her eye in. She was no militant, no wounded ex-servicewoman left to rot on a pension too small to keep a roof over her head, but she had found the Movement, she had recruited herself, and she was invaluable to him.
The device clipped to Butler’s waist emitted a shrill chirping noise, and prompted everyone around to disappear. This was the only connection via modern telecommunications allowed, and was never used to contact other members of the Movement; calls on this satellite phone were a one-way only thing. When Butler was alone in the room, he flipped up the ruggedized rubber antenna and hit the button to answer the call.
“Butler,” he said gruffly. He paced as he listened, nodding to himself and occasionally acknowledging something before he finished with, “Yes, we are on schedule.”
The phone was given to him when he was recruited to run the Movement. He believed the person who gave it to him when they claimed to be high up in the CIA, and the flow of intelligence proved to be 100 percent accurate, 100 percent of the time so he had never been given any reason to doubt their integrity. The voice on the other end of that phone had assured him that the encryption software used for their calls was not of US origin, and that no domestic security services could access it. The CIA man had provided funds and munitions, and Butler had never felt like he was a puppet on the end of the strings, but more like he had an equal, a true believer and patriot, helping him achieve his goals.
Returning the phone to his waistband he called Suzanne back in to the room.
“Sir?” she answered as she strode in confidently.
“Get a runner to go to D.C.,” he told her. “Taylor’s eyes only.”
“Replacement EMP?” she asked.
“No,” Butler said, unconcerned at the risk of collateral damage. “Plan B. There’s a bomb for him to collect.”
~
Suzanne had been navigating the desperately dull world of planning and development, and had been a bored woman. She was bored with life, bored with her job, bored of working hard and never actually seeing a difference to the people she felt mattered.
She had harbored this boredom for years, counting down the weeks of her life as just one catastrophic Tinder date and disappointing sexual encounter every Friday at a time. She wasn’t there because she really believed in the cause, although she did believe in many things the Movement stood for, but she was there all the same. She was there because she just wanted something, anything, to change. She wanted to see the cycle broken. She wanted to find a more fulfilling way to live her life.
The final straw had come when someone from the Office of Professional Integrity walked into her office one morning and shot her a steely, yet almost gleeful gaze as he bypassed her and walked straight into the office of her supervisor, another failed romantic involvement, and shut the door.
Ten minutes passed until her supervisor, a man who felt that wearing a bow tie to work made him seem young and relevant, when in fact it made him look a little like a child molester, smiled a fake smile and asked her if she would kindly join them.
She had packed up her purse, logged off her computer terminal for the last time, walked into the office, and sat down.
“Hi Suzanne,” said her boss, desperately hoping that their brief affair didn’t become public knowledge as a result of this, “thanks for joining us. This is Mr. Andrews from the—”
“I know who he is,” Suzanne interrupted, just about fed up with her life. “Well not who he is, but where he works.” She turned to regard the man sat next to her, and he returned her smile. She hated people like that; people who reminded her of snakes and grease, internal affairs people. “I could smell internal affairs when the elevator door opened, and that was before the temperature dropped twenty degrees,” she said, silencing the room as the smile on the face of Mr. Andrews dropped off the earth.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” she said, rising from her chair, “I quit. I haven’t taken a holiday in months so I expect my notice to be a paid absence.” With that she left the room, leaving both men stunned.
As an afterthought, the door burst open again and she leaned her head back inside.
“And say hi to your wife for me,” she told her boss. “Tell her I’m sorry she has to sleep next to you, because I sure as hell didn’t enjoy it.”
With that, she slammed the door and left an incredibly uncomfortable silence in the room.
“It was just an informal talk about her use of the internet during work hours,” said Andrews, openmouthed at the hostility she showed them both. The man opposite him was too shocked, too scared that Suzanne would say something to his wife, to anyone, to answer.
The internal affairs man rose to return to his office, and to tell his boss that the woman had quit before he even had chance to produce his reams of printouts showing when she had been searching the internet for things not related to work activity. He dropped the ream of paper in the secure recycling bin on his way out, saddened that he wouldn’t get to showcase how meticulous he had been in counting up all the hours she hadn’t been working when at her desk, even if he would get to gossip about the office manager not keeping it in his pants.
If he had taken the time to see what sites she had visited, had bothered to look further than the end of his nose, he may have discovered that Suzanne had been researching off-grid living, had booked herself on a wilderness survival course, had purchased another firearm and items of clothing and equipment a lady working a desk in the Planning Department shouldn’t have need of.
But he didn’t.
Suzanne went home, gave almost all of her po
ssessions away to Goodwill, listed her house for rental, and sold her car for cash. She forwarded her mail to a PO Box, took a train and a cab to her survival course, and spent two glorious months in the woods where she met one Colonel Glenn Butler and seemingly became an eager convert. She didn’t want the ideology, she just wanted the excitement. And she found far more than she had expected to.
LIFE
IS A ONE-TIME OFFER
Thursday 8:15 a.m. - Battery Park Ferry Terminal
Cal regretted his decision to book a place on the first ferry of the morning. He regretted his decision this time not to bring a coat, thinking it would be as warm as the previous day, as the wind blew bitterly after he had passed through another airport-style security checkpoint and took his seat. He regretted drinking enough alcohol for two people and eating in the same restaurant as the previous night, and he now regretted booking his ticket through the reception desk and requesting his wakeup call.
When he woke to the sound of the ringing telephone by his ear, he almost cursed down the line and decided to forget the trip.
Lying on his back, tangled in the covers with both eyes covered by his hands, Cal groaned aloud as he accepted that he now had a hangover. The groan deepened and grew in intensity when he remembered how much he had spent on his credit card, not realizing the expensive kindness Sebastian had showed him by granting his first night’s meal on the house.
No, he told himself, get out of bed and experience life.
He got out of bed, brushed his teeth, and threw on his clothes. Rushing down to the lobby, he rounded a corner and almost cannoned into a man in a suit which cost more than his car back home. Smoothly recovering as though his DNA was coded toward always showing a publicly acceptable face, Sebastian turned to face him.