“The Circus?” asked Jason.
“Yeah. I want to ask you two: how do you do it? How do you move and function and fight and survive in it all? I imagine it must be like a diver at the bottom of the sea in one of those old-fashioned suits with the brass helmet and the air hose, having to watch every step and make sure you don’t get tangled or sucked into anything, but I don’t really know what that means. How do you do it? How do you get the job done and come back alive? I have a lot to come back to.”
“I know,” said Jason sympathetically.
“Any tips?” he asked.
“Rule number one,” said Jason. “Stay focused, as psycho-babblish as that sounds. Always be aware of your surroundings. Know where you are, know where everything is, know who is around you and where. When you go into a room, you register every single person in it, every exit, every object. Watch people. Every move they make, every word they say, every gesture, anything that marks them as a friend or a foe, or in most cases neither, just part of the shifting scenery. But you have to be able to tell the difference. You start drifting or daydreaming about Millie and the kids and you’ll end up lying on a gurney dressed in orange with a needle sticking in your arm, and they will never see you again.”
“Never forget who you’re supposed to be,” said Jenny. “Be that person. If you’re supposed to be Cherry Cahoon the trashed-out crack whore, you’re Cherry the trashed-out junkie. If you’re supposed to be Molly Hansen the soccer jock chick, you’re Molly Hansen down to your socks and your cleats. If you’re supposed to be Louise Benteen the junior U.S. Attorney, you swing that briefcase right through the security check like you’re Louise and no one else.” Bob got the impression she wasn’t just pulling names out of the air. “If you just put on an act, if you’re just playing a role, you’ll forget your lines or slip up on a name or something that Cherry or Molly or Louise should know, and some gun thug will pick up on it.”
“Keep your weapons clean as a whistle with just enough oil so they will function,” said Jason. “When you need it, you’re going to need it in a split second, and a stoppage means death. Always carry a backup gun, something small like a .380 or a .22 that will fit in an ankle holster or a pocket or even up your sleeve. Don’t carry a knife unless you know what you’re doing, and you can use it without a second’s hesitation.”
“Any time you get a chance to go to the bathroom, take it, whether you need to or not,” Jenny told him. “Same thing with sleep. A revolutionary lives on cat naps. No drugs to stay awake and don’t touch a drop of booze while you’re working, which is always. Any of this sound helpful at all?”
“I guess,” said Bob. “I got all that in—well, I was taught. But mostly I just want to know how you did it, year after year, without going nuts?”
The two of them were quiet for a bit. “Bob,” Jason finally said, “I’m not sure how to put this, but—during those years, Jenny and I were both scared shitless most of the time. We were scared of death, we were scared of prison and the waterboard and the electrode and the Dershowitz needles, and above all we were terrified that one of us would die and the other would have to live on, that this house and this life and those kids upstairs would never be. But the one thing we were never afraid of, not ever, was that we would lose. The NVA and the revolution were part of history and we were part of the NVA and the revolution. It was who we were, and we were that because we knew, we knew, that the survival of our race was the will of God, and that so long as we did His will as best we could, we would be sustained, and that someday it would be over, and the world would be right again. When you know that in your soul, as we did, then once you get Out There, you’ll know what to do.”
IX
OUT THERE
(12 years and six months after Longview)
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically be disqualified from ever doing so.
—Gore Vidal
Lieutenant Robert Campbell sat on a wooden chair in a cramped office overlooking a loading dock and the interior of a warehouse, just off Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia. Cardboard cartons of cigarettes and cheap cigars were piled in the corners. He was listening to his new boss scream threats and obscenities into the phone.
Vinnie Skins sat behind a huge mahogany desk and scowled into the videocam on the handset. He was a square blockhouse of a man and could look menacing even over the phone. His brown hair was combed back over his head into a ducktail with fragrant pomade, and his blue-scraped face and jaw reeked of aftershave. Skins wore a $27,000 suit (at present inflated American costs) underneath which was a pink silk shirt and blue tie, Gucci shoes in the $8000-a-pair region, and a huge diamond pinky ring. He finally calmed down a bit and went on in a more reasonable voice. “Tony, look, you know I always liked you. You’re a nice guy, you got a pretty wife, hey, I do like you. I like having all tings pleasant about me, and I hate it when guys I like take advantage of my fucking good nature like youse is doing now. But because I like you, I’ll make you a deal. You get me four hundred pounds of pork chops, a whole side of beef, an’ twenny racks of lamb by Friday, and you don’t send it in some piece of crap truck wit’ de refrigeration busted so it arrives here thawed out, and I won’t peel de skin off your face like a fucking onion. Don’t dat show how much I like you? Can’t say fairer dan dat, now, can I? Now go fuck yourself.” He folded up the phone.
“Does Richie have to swear like that?” asked Campbell.
“Think of it as a foreign language you have to learn in order to communicate with the natives,” said Major Vincent Cardinale of the War Prevention Bureau. “Listen to the niggers on the street and on the tube, and imitate them. Blacks have been setting the cultural and linguistic tone on the streets in this country for a long time. Until you pick up the real rap, just throw a couple of shits and fucks into every sentence, and you’ll pass. The Office tells me your Spanish is fluent?”
Bob had already learned that no reference was ever made on station to the WPB or even to the Circus, as part of the operatives’ ingrained wariness against the electronic eavesdropping from a dozen public and private agencies that was everywhere in America. Out Here it was always just the Office. “Yes sir, although it’s classroom variety. We read Don Quixote in school in the original Spanish, but I can barely understand this gabble I’ve been hearing from all the beaners around me since I crossed over.”
“Cervantes wrote in classical Castilian, the Spanish version of Shakespeare,” Cardinale told him. “These mestizos around here speak pig-ignorant peasant dialects from a hundred different localities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of them don’t even speak Spanish; they’re from so far out in the jungle, only obscure little Paleolithic Indian dialects. You’re Chicago Irish from Bridgeport, remember, so you won’t be expected to know more than a couple of hundred words of pidgin Spanish, mostly swear words. When you’re dealing with beaners, you can just throw in a few essays and vatos along with your shits and fucks.”
There was a knock on the door. “Getcha ass in here!” Cardinale yelled. The door opened and a man and a woman came in. The man was tall and about forty years old, with long blond hair and a drooping moustache both tinged with a little gray, and a gold earring in his ear. He was wearing a blue overall with pleated shoulders, a cloth belt with a silver buckle displaying a dollar sign, and expensive shoes with pointed steel toes, the height of fashion for an edgy underworld player type in America’s current quasi-negroid, media-fueled subculture. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties, with a hard face that might have been pretty if she’d tried, and long auburn hair tied behind her head. She wore cut-off jeans and sandals and a sleeveless gray sweatshirt. She had several tattoos on her arms and legs, including a dove on one shoulder and an intricate depiction on her shin of Jesus Christ giving the world the finger. She carried a small, holstered automatic on her belt and the man’s overall bulged from the weapon he carried beneath it in a shoulder holster rig.
Bob himself was weari
ng simple jeans, a T-shirt, and heavy work boots, as well as several prominent new tattoos of his own, including an Irish shamrock on one bicep, a dagger piercing a heart over the name “Lila” on his left forearm, as well as minor bits and pieces of prison ink, but he had no weapon. The WPB decided for him that the tats were necessary to his cover, and the technician-cum-artist who decorated his body assured him that that upon his return, they would come out of his skin after a series of treatments with a special solution. “This is Duke, and this is Betsy,” said Cardinale as they sat down on the office sofa and nodded to him. “Guys, this is Richie from Chicago, our new associate from the home office. He’s here to take point on Belladonna.”
“I know I had to come in clean because of the airline security, but am I supposed to be strapped?” Bob/Richie asked, nodding at the gun riding on the girl’s slim, hard waistline.
“Nothing heavy, unless needed. I’ll give you a .380 junk gun to carry on the street,” said Cardinale. “Since your cover is that you’re a legger, you’ll need a piece for your deliveries, both for show and also in case some jonesing hufflepuff or some other crew tries to jack your freight.”
“Huh?” asked Bob.
“In case some cigarette fiend who doesn’t have the two hundred bucks to light up tries to rob you, or else some other hoods try for both your product and your roll,” translated the girl.
Cardinale went on. “You’ll be servicing our crème de la crème route over in the Green Zone, in order to bring you into contact with the subject, so you shouldn’t run into that problem, but better safe than sorry. Guns are illegal, of course, have been since the Schumer Act all those years ago, but everyone in American cities ignores the law, and the cops have pretty much stopped bothering to enforce it unless they want an excuse to hold you for something else, like they more or less stopped busting people for a couple of joints back when marijuana was still illegal. Usually these days, they just issue a citation and confiscate the piece. Don’t worry too much about the D.C. cops finding it on you during a stop-and-frisk. They would be surprised if one of Vinnie Skins’ crew wasn’t strapped. Most likely, they’ll just write you a ticket, confiscate the gun, and then sell it back to me. Unless somebody’s looking for a bigger taste, and then they’ll throw you in the tank and make me come down and spread some lettuce around, but that shouldn’t happen. I have formal arrangements with both D.C. Metro and the Park Police, and I pay a pretty penny for our guys to do business with no hassles in the Green Zone, so they should leave you alone once they come to know you. It won’t be nearly as rough as if you were dealing in Virginia, and we stay out of nigger turf in Maryland altogether, but we do occasionally have some trouble inside the Green Zone with jumpers.”
“Jumpers?” asked Bob/Richie.
“What Betsy said,” explained Duke. “Hijackers. Guys from other crews who jump you and try to rip off your butts, or your steaks, or sausage, or whatever you’re holding.”
Cardinale picked it up. “Like any expanding business in a dynamic market, we’ve got ongoing problems with a couple of other outfits, mostly the Lon Tran Vietnamese mob from Falls Church, but they most likely won’t bother you in the District. They can’t get the proper FLECs for the Green Zone and so they have to sneak in, and usually they don’t go to the effort just to hassle our runners. Getting caught in the ESMA without a Class A FLEC is a mandatory six months in a penal factory, and Lon’s boys won’t risk a hiccup like that unless it’s something important, which jacking a single legger isn’t.”
“Oh, by the way, Rich, here’s your own new alpha FLEC.” Duke took out a plastic ID card and handed it to Bob. “Hang on to your old one for your trip Home, but use this one while you’re here. You’ll need it for the Green Zone. I stopped by Birdie’s on the way up here and I paid for it.”
“How much?” asked Cardinale, taking out a roll of bills.
“Thirty grand,” said Duke. “He says he has to raise his prices since he had to shell out big for this year’s recognition codes twice, because DHS changed them last month.”
“Jesus Christ! I know Birdie does the best work in town, but dat’s fuckin’ highway robbery,” said Cardinale, lapsing into Vinniespeak. He peeled some $5000 bills off the roll, bearing Jimmy Carter’s picture, and handed the money to Duke, who added it into his own roll of bills.
“What can I tell you?” said Duke with a shrug. “Everything costs at least twice as much as it did this time last year, and that includes ID. Oh, by the way, Rich, when you’re making your pickups and deliveries, be sure you carry your cash in a roll, like this. Only amateurs carry a wallet, and you’re supposed to be a long-time player. Anyway, with the inflation, most people have to carry more money than they can stuff into a wallet anyway.”
“Roll, got it,” said Bob. He looked at the laminated plastic Federal Law Enforcement Confirmed Identity Document, to give it the full nomenclature. FLEC was now the American national ID system, but it was more than that. Your FLEC was your driver’s license, your bank and credit card, and in most cities, it was required by law to be the key to your home or apartment. Actual locks were forbidden, in case the police or FBI needed to use their own master cards to get in. The card’s memory chip contained all of a person’s medical records and employment history, as well as their military and criminal record if any, whether or not they were one of the few Americans now favored with a legal gun permit and for what weapons? And of course it was also one’s legally mandated Global Positioning beacon, so that the authorities could physically locate an individual any time of the day or night. To be challenged by police and not be able to produce a FLEC was a class C federal felony, and to be found in possession of a false one like this meant serious time in prison or a privately run penal factory.
Not that any of it really worked. Probably no law in United States history, with the possible exception of Prohibition, was more completely disregarded and evaded by its remaining citizens than the Amended Real ID Act. There were simply too many things that Americans wanted to hide, from a bogus resumé to unreported income to an adulterous affair, for them to carry it all around with them in their wallet or purse. Evading the FLEC card and its microchip had become a kind of national sport, and so many people were doing it that despite occasional draconian examples, it was simply impossible to impose credible punishment on all violations. Anyone who surfed the internet could find dozens of ways to disable one’s FLEC card, hack into the chip and alter the data on it, or re-program it to show one location to the GPS satellite while the card and its owner were actually somewhere else. And if they weren’t sufficiently tech-savvy to do it themselves, there were hackers and forgers who specialized in monkeying around with FLECs. Some even advertised in the Yellow Pages.
The bogus card Bob held in his hand showed his name as Richard Carroll, and his birthplace as Chicago, Illinois. His current address, according to the card, was an apartment in Arlington which was in fact occupied by a Malaysian couple and their extended family. Robert’s WPB trainers back on Whidbey Island had discussed his new identity with him, and it was decided to make him Richie Carroll from Chicago because Bob had picked up enough stories, bits and pieces of knowledge, and local color about That Toddling Town from his wife and his in-laws to fake it. His photo as Richie twinkled in special pixels for the various electronic scanners and readers the card would be passed through. “This has my whole rap sheet on it?” he asked curiously. “Or Richie’s rap sheet, I should say?”
“Yeah,” said Cardinale. “Eight or ten beefs, petty to middling, couple of B&Es and disorderlies and car thefts back in Chicago in the days of your uproarious youth, the rest of them possession charges. One bust for ten cartons of Rothmans filters, mysteriously dropped down to four to get it below distribution weight, which will build your cred for being mobbed up. One ADW just for panache, when you shot a rival legger who was trying to jack a backpack full of Macanudos off you.”
“Did I kill him?” asked Richie.
“No, just wound
ed him,” said Cardinale. “We don’t want to make you too violent, or else the FBI or the Metro OCB might think I’ve brought you in for muscle, and we want to keep Vinnie Skins’ crew as low profile and smooth as we can, considering our high-class clientele. Young Richard is also showing one bust for using a fake rabbinical ID claiming you were a Jew in order to buy legal kosher brisket. Then comes your pièce de resistance. You did two years in the federal pen at Allenwood for getting pulled over on the New Jersey turnpike driving a whole truckload of chilled kosher chickens with a false end-user certificate to a licensed Jewish delicatessen in New York, which it’s assumed you meant to sell under the counter to certain mob-controlled chew-easies in New York. You refused to rat out your boss, presumably me, Vinnie Skins, hence my offer of employment here in the nation’s capitol once you got out. All of this will check out if the cops pull you over and run your card. The cyber-whizz kids back at the Office have hacked into all the necessary servers at DOJ and NCIC and the FBI, and you’ll show as up as Richie Carroll.”
“You will,” said Duke. “I had Birdie run you himself on his own private rig before I paid for the card, just to make sure. It’s good.”
“So all of you have these criminal records on your ID cards?” asked Bob. “I know one doesn’t ask real names and real past details, but what’s on you guys’ rap sheets? I mean, we’re supposed to be thick as thieves, literally. I could need it for my cover. Who exactly are you supposed to be?”
“Fair enough,” said Cardinale. “In point of fact I really am Italian, but there the resemblance between me and Vinnie Skins pretty much ends. No one knows my real name or where I’m really from, except I’ll tell you I was born and raised in the Homeland.”
“NVA, judging from your age?” asked Bob daringly.
“Yes,” said Cardinale briefly. “According to my FLEC card, I have a criminal record dating all the way back to the age of fourteen in New Jersey, which is ironic, since New Jersey is one of the few places on the continent I’ve never actually been. Well, a stopover in Newark airport, once. Vinnie Skins is a low-level wiseguy who may or may not be a made member of the Atlantic City Cosa Nostra family, no one’s quite clear on that. Six years ago, when they passed the Healthy America Act, I spotted a cushy market peddling cancer sticks and stogies down here in our indivisible nation’s capitol, and here I have been ever since. I am known to be very well connected and the purveyor of fine smokables and comestibles to some very distinguished clients indeed in Congress, the Pentagon, the judicial branch, and the bureaucracy.”
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