Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Not the White House?” asked Bob.

  “Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania is a special case,” said Cardinale. “We can get e-intercepts sometimes, but it’s a very hard nut to crack as far as getting anybody into the West Wing goes. I’ll get into it with you later on.”

  “How did you get the name Vinnie Skins?” asked Robert.

  “Supposedly I was into hijacking furs in my younger days.”

  “I’m a bad boy altogether,” said Duke. “All kinds of crimes of violence, shootings and stabbings and one arson-for-hire thrown in for good measure. I’m supposed to be the muscle in the outfit. Well, I am.” Bob was going to ask Duke if he were ex-NVA as well, but decided not to push it. He was sure he knew the answer in any case.

  “Three guesses what I’m supposed to be,” said Betsy with an ironic smile. “Plus a meat mule and leaf lady, of course. Duke and I are Vinnie’s street captains for the Green Zone, and we’ll be the ones over there giving you a hand on a day to day basis.”

  “You don’t mind people thinking, uh, that about you?” asked Bob. “Even if it isn’t true?”

  Betsy laughed sardonically. “Hot damn, they really are raising a whole generation of prudes back in the Homeland!” she said to Vinnie and Duke.

  “Yes, I guess we are at that,” admitted Bob. “When was the last time you were back?”

  “Long time,” the girl said casually. “I’ve got registered sex trade worker on my FLEC, and it accounts for my being almost anywhere, anytime, anywhere in the Green Zone. I’ve been stopped in the corridors of Congress at two in the morning and talked my way out of it by flashing my card and my baby blues, or in my case my baby greens.”

  “Don’t they ask who you’re there, uh, seeing?” asked Bob curiously.

  “Nope,” replied Betsy. “They’re not allowed to ask, under the law. I can’t even be made to tell in court. Courtesan-client privilege.”

  “What?” said Bob. All three of them laughed.

  “No, really, she’s not shitting you,” said Cardinale. “A few years ago an elderly federal judge here in D.C. died in a working girl’s apartment of a coronary. She and her pimp tried the old Dress-The-Corpse-And-Prop-Him-Up-Behind-The-Wheel-Of-His-Cadillac trick, but they forgot about the security cameras everywhere, they got caught on digital, and there was an unholy stink. All kinds of sound and fury about the girl’s client list on her Blackberry and who got to see it, was it public record, could the judge in the case seal the trial records, journalists offering millions of dollars of bribes all over the place for the list or interviews with the hooker, the whole insane zoo that breaks out whenever anybody in this jaded and corrupt society scents sex and scandal. The power structure and the media are always on the lookout for anything to distract the American people from the sludge pump of their daily lives.” Cardinale shook his head in disgust, then went on. “Anyway, without keeping you here until midnight, the nine Supremes closed ranks with their errant brother in justice, and after a long dramatic roll of sound and fury, they created something called courtesan-client confidentiality, so prostitutes of both genders—excuse me, ‘sexual services specialists’—cannot now be legally compelled to rat out their clients. It was a popular ruling in D.C., let me tell you. Believe it or not, all this grunge is in fact somewhat relevant to your mission, Rich, because courtesan-client privilege is what Hunter Wallace uses to cover his own activities along that line and prevent any scrutiny of what he actually does to his ladies in the sack, as well as a private personal services contract with a bitch of a confidentiality clause. Wallace always pays his women for their personal services, which is the accepted legal euphemism, and that keeps his ass covered in every sense of the term.”

  Bob was about to ask Betsy just how far she went using her peculiar cover in order to get the job done, then realized it was none of his business. Instead, he asked, “You said you were having trouble with other meat and tobacco dealers?”

  “Yeah, those gooks in Falls Church,” said Duke. “About six months ago, they jacked a truckload of spare ribs from us in McLean and killed the driver, but we lit up one of their warehouses, killed the two guards on duty and cleaned them out of a thousand pounds of beef and pork, as well as a hundred cases of Gauloises and knockoff Chinese Camels and Marlboros. The Greater Capitol Area Crime Commission stepped in and negotiated a truce, at their usual exorbitant fee, but it’s held for the time being. We hit back hard enough to maintain our own street cred and send the message we won’t be fucked with, but in view of our actual purpose here, we had to cool it down.”

  “We ended up having to pay the gooks a couple of million in compensation, and I pitched a real bitch about it, ranted and raved and cursed like a good wiseguy should, but we need this front and we don’t want a real gang war developing,” explained Cardinale. “Bad for business. Both our businesses.”

  Campbell looked down through the windows at the men unloading cases of bootleg cigarettes from trucks, including several obvious mestizos. “How many of those guys are with the Office?” he asked.

  “None of them,” said Cardinale. “Those are all real criminals. You run into any of them here or on the street, you say hello and act cool, but don’t get chummy or hang with any of them. Vinnie Skins runs a protected operation, but that doesn’t mean we’re not under intermittent surveillance by assorted law enforcement teams with nothing better to do. This station has a number of Office operatives, but you will only know a few of them as your mission dictates. As few as possible. If you get lifted you can’t betray what you don’t know. I wouldn’t be showing you this place if it wasn’t part of your cover and you wouldn’t be expected to know about it, as do the cops and feds, of course. You will mostly deal with me directly, but if I’m not available, you deal with Duke or Betsy, who have been briefed on the reason for your presence here. They’re your backup in anything that might get wet, or where you just need a hand with something. You will also meet a man we call the Zombie Master. He’s a proper psychiatrist and psychologist, and he needs to know all about the subject and your interaction with her, to make sure she’s functioning and she isn’t going off the rails under pressure.”

  “That’s assuming we can activate her and get her placed,” said Bob.

  “That’s why you’re here,” said Cardinale with a wintry smile.

  “I’m still not sure I get this whole idea of posing as tobacco and meat smugglers,” said Robert. “I mean, shouldn’t you be trying to avoid undue attention from the police?”

  “We need some excuse to move around the streets unfettered and go into neighborhoods where we couldn’t otherwise be,” said Duke. “By its very nature, our real work is covert and it involves suspicious behavior on our part, and that’s hard to conceal in the Green Zone, with spy cameras monitoring every square meter of sidewalk. What better disguise than as buttleggers and beefleggers? What better reason to appear on camera seeming furtive and trying to dodge the surveillance than the fact that we really are engaging in illegal activity, except the DHS in their all-seeing wisdom thinks they know us, that they know what illegal activity we’re engaging in, and it’s one which is more or less socially acceptable. In the 1920s during Prohibition, it was bootleggers. For seventy years after that it was drug dealers, until they legalized most drugs.”

  “Now it’s pork chops and ciggies,” said Betsy. “These shitheads always have to be outlawing something, so they can have big police agencies with big budgets to chase after it and lock a lot of people up in their prisons to be farmed out to the corporations as cheap slave labor. When Mexicans won’t do, use convicts. Been that way in America for over a century now.”

  “When they see us on their cameras here, there, and everywhere, in some government office building or at some soirée in Georgetown, the ZOG snoops pigeonhole us as leggers slipping some high functionary a few T-Bones or Cohibas, and they move on,” said Duke. “Same with Betsy here. They track her on the cameras all the time, but they figure she’s just working, and if sh
e makes house calls in a government office building or shows up at certain parties, she’s just being enterprising. This is Washington D.C., one of the few remaining places in the Western world where power and money are concentrated in serious amounts. Powerful and wealthy people have needs, and someone’s going to supply them, legal or not.”

  Cardinale chuckled. “It’s a basic rule of conspiracy: when you’re suspected of something, try and make the evidence point to a lesser offense. Human nature being what it is, you have more chance of being believed.”

  “The problem is that everything in the Green Zone attracts attention,” said Duke. “It’s designed that way, not even so much to stop wicked spies and terrorists like us, but just to keep the damned niggers from Maryland out and keep them from fucking everything up and making the place unlivable, as niggers always do. The Green Zone and some of the D.C. suburbs are small, very wealthy, very white and Jewish enclaves in a black and brown sea, but these are the people who keep what’s left of the United States government functioning, the civil servants and policy wonks and legislators and the whole range of business, technical and service personnel needed to sustain them. The team of surgeons who keep the patient alive, so to speak. The establishment needs them. If this privileged and empowered élite is to keep on doing its job, it requires twenty-four-seven security monitoring to keep the dedicated servants of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave from getting butchered and served up in a cannibal feast, and I mean that literally. That shit was going on last year up in Silver Spring.”

  “Welcome to Hunter Wallace’s magical Surveillance State,” said Cardinale. “The District of Columbia, the Green Zone as everybody calls it, is in fact officially known as the ESMA, the Enhanced Security Monitoring Area. Back around the turn of the century, Congress and all the senior bureaucrats got tired of the long commute, sometimes from as far away as Baltimore and Fredericksburg. They wanted to live within a short walk or ride to where they worked and their gyms and favorite watering holes and their mistresses’ apartments. Trouble was, other than a few areas like Georgetown and DuPont Circle, the District was a dangerous and crime-ridden black jungle unfit for human habitation. Back in the Nineties, the D.C. drug and street gangs were so savage they even scared off MS-Thirteen and the Triads. Then Clinton the First came in and they came up with the long-term gentrification project, the idea of which was quietly to run the niggers out of D.C. and whiten the place up. Needless to say, never was so much as a whisper of the true agenda allowed to seep into the public media, although everybody and his dog knew damned well what it was all about.”

  “That’s the way the United States has operated for a century,” commented Robert. “When necessary, things may be done for racial reasons, but never under any circumstances must anyone ever admit what’s happening. Officially, race doesn’t exist.”

  Duke took up the story. “Long story short, over a period of several decades they more or less traded the niggers Maryland in exchange for the District. Back in the Nineteen Seventies, Prince George’s County and Bethesda and Silver Spring were the poshest and whitest of the D.C. suburbs. Now they’re black-ruled, and they’re the worst slums in the country. You’ve got extended families of fifty or sixty niggers living in former suburban mansions, more if the mansion has been cut up into apartments. The sewers and the electricity no longer work half the time, and I won’t even try to describe how the area smells.”

  “You think that’s bad, try Baltimore,” commented Betsy. “Some UN commission reported that the quality of life in Baltimore is now statistically equivalent to Sierra Leone.”

  “That’s right, you had to go up there last year, didn’t you?” responded Duke sympathetically.

  “Yeah.” Betsy shuddered at the memory.

  “When Hunter Wallace got into the Oval Office he knew that in order to get done what he needed to get done, he had to keep the ruling class happy and safe,” said Vince Cardinale. “Diversity and multiculturalism are all well and good in theory, but in the real world people can’t do their best work for ZOG if they’re constantly worried about getting mugged, burglarized, raped and murdered by beasts of the field. Once again without any public acknowledgement that something racial was going on, at Wallace’s direction the government fortified the District of Columbia, making it the country’s largest gated community, which is another old-fashioned circumlocution for lily-white safe area. It’s a common phenomenon. What’s left of the United States of America now consists of a whole series of Green Zones in major cities—I think the largest ESMA geographically is in Houston’s American Zone, where all the Zionist Bible-thumpers are headquartered. The D.C. ESMA is surrounded by a fourteen-foot corrugated steel wall, topped with razor wire and electrified alarms.”

  “Entry into the District is only through checkpoints,” Duke told him. “If you don’t have the right card, you have to state your business at the checkpoint, convince the cop on duty it’s legit, and they issue you a day pass. If you don’t check out into Virginia or Maryland by seven p.m., then the cops come looking for you, guided by the GPS on your FLEC card, and you’re in trouble.”

  Bob remarked, “I remember reading in our North American history class in school that there used to be an expression in the old South and in South Africa, ‘white by night.’ It was a safety measure. The kind of thing I don’t suppose American students are ever taught these days.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of that,” said Duke. “That’s what the District of Columbia is now, white by night, and what all the Green Zones are, although there are a fair number of techie and bureaucratic Asians who have Class A FLECs and Green Zone residence permits as well. The régime considers certain skilled or connected gooks to be honorary whites.”

  “You need to know all this, Richie, because moving and operating in the Green Zone like you’ll be required to do is like living in an aquarium,” Cardinale told him. “You’re always on view, and virtually every move you make is watched and recorded. Even in public restroom facilities, because the secret police know that people tend to nip into the john for privacy to do things they shouldn’t. That’s another thing they will never admit, not even by a whisper, but be careful any time you have to go to the can over there. There is no place more certain to be monitored all the time. It took us a lot of doing to get that alpha card for you, and the money we paid Birdie just to make it was the least of it. We had to get an allocated code to program into the chip before we could hack and re-program the code in the server under your name. There are a limited number of those, and getting a new code issued from scratch requires too much background work on too short a notice. So we had to use someone else’s code, and make sure that person never tries to cross into the Green Zone while you’re there, or else all kinds of bells and whistles would be set off.”

  “You mean a man died in order to get this card for me?” asked Bob, turning it over in his hands.

  “Yes,” said Cardinale.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Betsy casually. “He was an asshole.” Bob glanced at her and put that remark away into the ever-expanding I-Don’t-Want-To-Know file in his mind.

  Cardinale continued. “Inside the District there are closed-circuit security cameras on every street, every corner, every parking lot, inside every bar and restaurant and store, in every public place and a lot of private ones that the DHS has been able to find legal excuses to invade, including rest rooms as I just mentioned. In some cases they actually have cameras in peoples’ private homes, either at their own request or by court order.”

  “DHS?” asked Bob.

  “Department of Homeland Security,” said Betsy.

  “Yeah, that’s a bureaucracy Bush Two created after 9/11,” said Cardinale. “They were always kind of a third leg among the old Amurrican secret police agencies. Nobody quite knew what they were for, until they finally found their niche, which is spying on every single American as far as they can, and for as much of the time as they can. It started back in 2010 when one o
f their subsidiary agencies came up with the first naked body scanners at the airports, and once the American people swallowed that with only a bit of grumbling, the Surveillance State was born. DHS has over a million employees involved in watching and accumulating files and video footage on their fellow citizens. And you can’t always see the cameras, either. A lot of the time they have micro-fiber optic gear in place. And they can also hear every word that you even whisper on a crowded street with their directional audio recording; 1984 has now come true in Hunter Wallace’s Amurrica.”

  “I still have difficulty believing that the Americans allowed the liberal régime to outlaw meat and tobacco,” said Bob. “I mean, why? Okay, smoking is bad for your health if you do it too much, but still, tobacco has been part of the Western world for five hundred years now. And meat?”

  “Meat is murder,” recited Betsy by rote. “Meat is cruelty to animals. We have to stop raising grain to feed beef cattle because it destroys the rain forest. Cow farts cause global warming. McDonald’s and Burger King were satanic capitalist conspiracies to make American kids fat. Red meat makes white males aggressive. Well, according to them.”

  “Maybe that’s how the NVA won,” remarked Bob, bemused.

  “Mmmm, I know the School of Intelligence gave you only a crash course on Whidbey, so I doubt they had much time to clue you in on the whole present political and social sitch here in the States,” said Cardinale. “How much do you know about what happened in this country after Longview?”