“What?” asked Georgia, uncomprehending.
Bob turned to face her. “They’re coming for us, Georgia. This time it’s for real. A full-scale invasion of the Northwest Republic. B-52s and Tomahawk missiles and maybe nuclear weapons and anthrax.”
“My God!” whispered Georgia.
“We figure sometime in June, but we may be wrong,” Bob went on. “We don’t know for sure, and we have to know. We have to know when they’re coming, and how, and how many. There’s only one man who has all that knowledge in his head. We have to know what he knows, and what he is thinking. That’s why I’m here, Georgia. I am here to ask you to go into the very belly of the beast and prostitute yourself, betray the man who’s paying you, and maybe get caught and die with a poison needle in your arm, so that your little nephew and your father and your brother and his wife, and my wife and my two children, and Jenny and her children, and our whole country can have some kind of chance to fight these evil sons of bitches off and survive as free people with some kind of future besides the sewer I’ve seen all around me since I’ve come here. That’s what I am asking you to do, so don’t feel bad about yourself, because regardless of the reason, that makes me just as rotten as you. That also means I don’t have any right to judge you, Georgia. I wouldn’t anyway, because you’re not responsible for what this filthy society made you into. You have a chance now to change what you are, when this is over and you Come Home, and you have a chance to make sure that Allura never goes through what you had to go through, but only if the Republic survives. I’m not just asking for your sake or mine, but for millions of free white people who are threatened with death and slavery, but I don’t care why you do it. Please, Georgia!”
She was silent for a long time. “I don’t know if I can,” she finally whispered. “Bobby, thanks for listening to my little monologue just now, but I’m afraid you still don’t get it. I’m fucked up, Bobby. My life, my head, my heart, my addictions, my whole life, everything about me is fucked up like a Chinese fire drill.”
“Well, you just made a racial joke,” he pointed out. “That shows your mind isn’t completely under control, and that’s a start.”
“Do I get to go to some kind of spy school?” she asked. “I guess you must have done.”
“I got a kind of crash course when they sent me Out Here, yes.”
“That was a serious question,” she responded. “What exactly will I have to do? How the hell am I supposed to be a spy, a real one? I don’t even watch spy movies on TV or disc. I always thought they were boring and silly.” She got up and went to a drawer in the glass-fronted liquor cabinet. She opened it and pulled out an old-fashioned Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum detective revolver, stainless steel and with a three-inch snub barrel and a black Pachmayr grip. “I have my own gun, but do I get a silencer with it?” she giggled. “I’ve never seen a silencer outside of a movie.”
“You can’t really silence a revolver too effectively,” said Bob, taking it from her. “These older pieces are hard to silence to begin with, because unless the weapon is manufactured to take a specially fitted suppressor you have to thread the muzzle and screw it on to seal off the expanding gases from the cartridge, which is what makes the gun go bang. See the gap here between the cylinder and the barrel? Gas and powder ash from the round firing escapes out that way, and they still make a bang loud enough to be heard. Plus they cover your hands with GSR, gunshot residue, which can be detected by a forensic unit in about five seconds if they run a test on your hand, and they’ll know you’ve fired a gun recently. You’d need an automatic that’s been engineered to take a silencer. We’ve got a lot of those, but you won’t be given one because there’s no way you’d be able to get a gun into the White House past the metal detectors, the sniffer dogs, and the X-ray scanners.”
“Cool, real spy stuff, huh?” said Georgia with a smile. “So you don’t want me to blow the president and then blow him away?”
“No, we’re not asking you to assassinate Hunter Wallace or anyone else, Georgia. We know you’re not up for that. Neither are we asking you to steal or photograph any secret plans or classified documents, or plant any listening devices, or listen at keyholes. That’s too dangerous. You’ll be in an environment that’s monitored twenty-four-seven from the Secret Service control room in the sub-basement, both audio and visual, and they’d pick up on any suspicious behavior right away. We’re asking you to go in there and be the best, uh, personal services assistant you can be, stay on everybody’s good side, keep your ears open, and report back to us and let us know what you hear and see. Everyone who meets with Wallace, some idea of what was discussed if you can give it to us, everything you can pick up from pillow talk or just overhear in the corridors and the ladies’ room, White House gossip, anything to do with the security arrangements or protocol, what the general morale and mood is like, the whole nine yards. Every few days you will meet with me, or sometimes with one of two other people you will be introduced to. There will be a woman named Betsy who can help you out with the more intimate stuff if you want, and a guy we call the Zombie Master. Then we’ll go over what you have seen and heard. You will be given some emergency phone codes and some numbers where you can text or call out and let us know in code if anything major is happening, but you need to use those only in an urgent situation, because every call out of the White House is monitored and recorded.”
“And if they catch me?” asked Georgia. “Will you guys stage a raid with SS commandos in ski masks and machine guns and rescue me?”
“No,” he told her with brutal honesty. “There is no way we could raise the necessary muscle and intel to do anything like that, break into the White House or the National Security Facility in the FBI building where you would be taken. If you are detected, you will be arrested and charged with treason and espionage if they decide to do it in public, but most likely they won’t. Most likely you will simply be taken to the cellars below the FBI building, where you will disappear. You will be interrogated, and if you don’t break down and tell them everything immediately, they’ll beat you first, a very scientific and precise beating that will break some of your non-essential bones and will hurt worse than anything you can imagine. If you still refuse to talk you will be tortured, the good old-fashioned waterboard if they have a weakness for the classics, then the Dershowitz needles. In the unlikely event you still won’t break, they’ll get creative. Maybe the electric chair, maybe dentists’ drills, maybe a medieval device called the strappado. Don’t ask. They had five years during the War of Independence to refine their techniques, and a lot of those interrogators are still working for DHS and the Bureau. The NVA used to ask captured Volunteers to hold out for only twenty-four hours to give them the time to break down and move anything and anyone the captured individual could betray. Nobody was expected to hold out longer than that, although some like Cathy Frost did, to their eternal honor and the glory of our nation. We don’t expect you to hold out that long. I understand that you will betray me, and if I don’t get a chance to say so later on, I will forgive you with all my heart and implore your own forgiveness for doing this to you. On my part, I think I can give our guys their twenty-four hours, but we’ll see how that plays out. Afterwards we will both be executed, probably in secret. Your mom and Allura will never know what happened to you, although they may guess.”
“Wow,” said Georgia, shaking her head. “That’s quite a sales pitch! How can I resist?”
“Would you rather I lied to you?”
“No.” She looked up at him. “And if it works? If we can somehow stop Hunter Wallace from launching a war against the Republic, or win it if he does?”
“Then that little boy you saw on the screen just now will grow up among his own kind, in a free land. So will Allura. When we think it’s time and you’ve done all you can, I will take you both home to Montana, and there won’t be any more bad dreams.” Bob picked up the revolver and broke open the cylinder; he saw one single round inside. “And you wil
l be able to find something better to do with your time than playing Russian roulette.” He pressed the extractor pin and dropped the cartridge into his palm, then stuck it in his pocket. “I’ll hang on to this. I suppose I should hang on to the whole weapon to make sure you don’t do something stupid, but one of the fundamental principles of the Republic is the right to bear arms, and nobody has the authority to abridge that right. It’s one of the things that makes us different from them. It’s who we are.”
“I don’t do it a lot,” she protested feebly. “Just sometimes when I’m really high or drunk.”
“You shouldn’t be doing it at all, and I ought to slap you silly for even thinking about it,” he told her. “But I suppose that really would be poor salesmanship. I don’t expect you to say yes right away, Georgia. Take some time to think about it, but do me a favor? Lay off the weed and the booze for one night while you do. A decision like this needs a clear head.”
“No need,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“That was quick,” said Bob, startled. “You sure?”
“It’s the same game I play with that gun, only in a much bigger league,” said Georgia. “Bobby, some nights I look at that poem over there on the wall for a long time, and I want to put all six bullets in that piece. Or take a few too many pills, so the sailor really can come home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. If it weren’t for Allura I probably would have. I just don’t want her to grow up thinking I abandoned her, and I don’t want to leave her to Amber and Marvin to raise, because I know what she’ll turn out to be like. But I want my life to end, Bobby, one way or another. I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve had enough. I want this life to be over, either because it’s really ended in death, or because I somehow start over from scratch. America won’t let me do that.”
“Why didn’t you say to hell with it and just Come Home before this?” asked Bob curiously. “Thousands of people do, every year. They find some way to Come Home legally or else they run the McCurtain, but with all the money you’ve had access to, you could have bribed your way into a tourist permit or something like that. A lot of people do it that way.”
“Yeah, well, the Office of Northwest Recovery issues those permits, and they’ve gotten wise to that,” said Georgia. “They wouldn’t have let me take Allura, and neither would Amber and Marvin. They would have read that one like a book. And I won’t lie to you, it all just seemed so hopeless, so… I didn’t learn much in school, but one passage from Shakespeare stuck in my mind:
“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed;
Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.”
“Hamlet,” said Bob, recognizing the lines.
“Yeah,” said Georgia. “I don’t know why I remember it. I must have been straight that day in class, for once. But that’s pretty much how I felt. I thought about snatching Allura and heading Northwest and smashing through the McCurtain, but it was just a fantasy. Just too lazy or too ground down. I could never imagine actually trying it.”
“That’s how my wife and her family got Home,” said Bob. “It was about the same time Amber snatched you. It’s ironic. You and Millie both had the same experience in a way, only in reverse. But her family didn’t sleep in any Sheratons or Holiday Inns along the road. When this is over and you’re Home, you’ll meet her and you can compare notes.”
“Okay, so tell me exactly how I get to become a spy?” demanded Georgia briskly.
“The first thing you’re going to have to do is adopt the old NVA General Order Number Ten,” said Bob sternly. “The booze and the grass and the pills have to go, Georgia. That worries me. You’re not just risking your own life now when you get high, now you’re risking mine and Kevin Junior’s. You’ll have to do it cold turkey, too. No rehab. No expensive spas and counseling and therapy. You’re going to have to just stop, because your will is stronger than the chemicals. Can you do it, Georgia? Can you beat that stuff?”
“I think so,” she said. “Because now, for the first time in my life, I have something better to do.”
* * *
The next day Bob/Richie and Vincent Cardinale met with Doctor Jake Shapira, aka the Zombie Master, in his carpeted and mahogany-paneled office in the Watergate complex. Shapira was a real psychiatrist running a high-end D.C. practice under a false Jewish name. The degrees on his wall from Hofstra and Johns Hopkins Universities more or less replicated his actual qualifications, and they would check out impeccably in the face of any inquiry. An entire background history and public record had been constructed by the WPB computer hacking team for “Jacob Shapira,” down to grade school records from New York and video clips from his eighth birthday party on his personal web site. All of his records were verifiable and cross-referenced; if anyone looked in the online versions of the Brooklyn telephone directory from forty years before or his college yearbooks, they would find him. The actual printed yearbook or telephone directory would show a discrepancy, but no one ever bothered to hunt up original paper documents anymore. It entailed too much effort. In his own way, Doctor Jake Shapira was as real as Winston Smith’s “Comrade Ogilvie” from 1984. The Surveillance State had a lot of gaping holes in it.
“I’ve been able to wrangle approval from the White House to take on Ms. Myers as a patient,” said the Zombie Master, a dapper little man in his late forties. “It’s standard operating procedure with the president’s personal services assistants to have them in government-approved therapy for the duration of their contracts anyway. She’s already had a lifetime of therapists as it is, and I can glom their records, which will give me a good overview of her. Ironically, I’ll be reporting on her both to the Secret Service and the Office.”
“Why do they call you the Zombie Master?” asked Bob curiously.
“Behold my book of magic spells,” said the psychiatrist, waving his prescription pad in the air. “I use it to turn a lot of the most powerful people in Washington D.C., into zombies. My patient list includes some of the most influential people in America: Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle, senior civil servants and policy makers, top Pentagon brass, a couple of Supreme Court justices and a lot of federal judges, scads of FBI agents and lesser fry, business leaders, media people, and of course all their spouses and kiddies. I listen to their moronic problems, nod and tut sympathetically, tell them they are way too overworked and underappreciated, then I put them on a variety of medication cocktails that affect their judgment and thought processes in the long run. Nothing obvious, nothing that will send them into a psychotic break and make them go berserk with a Ginsu knife in Trader Vic’s or anything like that, just enough to render their thinking fuzzy, induce short-term memory lapses and impede the parts of the brain dealing with creative and deductive reasoning. A slight dose of artificially induced Alzheimer’s. I don’t drive them crazy, just make them a little more stupid than most of them already are. Plus there’s the incredible mine of information they provide for the Office.”
“We’re bringing in the doc here for two reasons,” said Cardinale. “First, he’s a real shrink and he needs to keep a close eye on Belladonna, and make sure she stays off the booze and the dope, and doesn’t go bonkers under the pressure, which is gonna be heavy.”
“Yeah, heavier than anything she’s ever undergone in her life,” said Bob. “I admit, I’m worried. She seems to be committed to it now, but that’s just based on one meeting, and I have no way of knowing what happened after I left. She’s damned unstable. She may have poured a bottle of vodka down her throat and lit up a joint the minute I was out the door, or she may already have gotten the heebie-jeebies and called the FBI on me.”
“That’s why we don’t introduce her to the Doc here until she’s been inside Sixteen Hundred for a few weeks and we see how she’s holding up,” said Cardinale. “He’s an asset we can’t place at risk unless we’re a little more con
fident in her than we are now. If she can make it on her own for a bit, he’ll step in and keep her head tuned up, although you’re the primary and you’ll always have to bear the brunt of that. But the second reason we need her coming here to this office is, well, this office.”
“Eh?” asked Bob.
“You are now sitting in one of the few places in Washington, D.C., that is truly clean, in the electronic surveillance sense,” said the Zombie Master. “Doctor-patient confidentiality went out the window in so-called national security and terrorism cases many years ago, of course—the DHS and FBI can simply walk into a doctor’s office and take whatever records they want if a U.S. Attorney says it’s terrorism-related—and the bugging of psychiatrists’ offices and consulting rooms is now common practice, one DHS doesn’t bother to conceal much anymore. But my patient list is so high-powered that a couple of years ago, when I found a DHS bug in here, I was able to raise such unholy hell about it through my patients who didn’t want their secret quirks and perversions on any government databases, that they backed off and granted me an official waiver, which so far they seem to have honored. Vince and one of his tech wizards do regular comprehensive sweeps just to make sure, but we can use Georgia’s weekly meetings here in this office to do her de-briefings free of any eavesdropping by unfriendlies.”
“Nowhere else is safe,” agreed Cardinale. “Not a restaurant or a chew-easy, not a park, not a church, not the Lincoln Memorial, no place. They’ve got directional mics in the parks that can hear a squirrel fart. At first you alone, then you and Betsy, and finally you and the living dead guy here, will have to debrief her as completely as you can, wring every drop of information out of her like she was a wet rag, then write up a summary and give it to me for encoding, encryption, and transmission back to our friend from Down Under back in Olympia. Plus you’ll have to hold her hand, calm her jitters, soothe her disgust at some of the things she’ll be doing, pep up her morale, keep her on the straight and narrow and send her back into that pervert’s bed bright-eyed and bushy tailed. And you’ll have to do it all in an hour.”
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