Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Fifty-five minutes,” said the Zombie Master.

  “Under an hour, then,” said Cardinale. “We have to assume that Belladonna will be under a lot of electronic surveillance and at least intermittent close surveillance by FBI and Secret Service agents. It’s like she’ll always be on stage, so every minute of her time has to be accounted for. We’ve diddled with the Watergate cameras a bit, and we have laid out a special route for you to use whereby you can enter the building by a back way, unseen. That’s when you’re doing the debriefings here, which won’t be for the first couple of weeks. During that preliminary time, you have to meet with her alone. As part of her contract, she had to agree to the DHS putting fiber-optic minicams everywhere in her apartment except for the bathroom, which fortunately is taking place today and not yesterday. Damn, we were lucky she called in for her smokes when she did! Otherwise, it would have been impossible for you to contact her without showing up on their digital. Since we can’t figure out any way to get you into and out of the un-bugged bathroom in her place without being spotted, we need to figure out some way for you to get her alone before you start bringing her here.”

  “I can make deliveries as Richie the buttlegger, like I did yesterday, but I can’t see any excuse for Richie to hang around after he hands over the smokes and takes her money,” said Bob.

  “I’d like to keep you completely off their digital if possible,” said Cardinale. “While she’s doing the Doughboy she’s going to be watched like a hawk, and anybody who comes near her gets a file opened up on him. Your persona as Richie Carroll will hold up to any ordinary online check, but still, we don’t want them looking too close at you, or looking at you at all if it can be helped. I think what we’ll have to do is have you meet in certain restaurants and bars and parks, like in the old Cold War days, but arrange for the surveillance to be interdicted long enough for you to debrief. Happens all the time; these systems are as highly strung as race horses and they’re always breaking down, especially since most of the maintenance people these days are incompetent Third Worlders. I think one or two mysterious camera outages as Belladonna is walking down the street wouldn’t be overly suspicious, but we can’t do it too often. You made sure she has the burner number and the substitution code?”

  “I drilled them into her before I left,” said Bob. “She’s not dumb and I’m sure she’s got it. I text her an innocuous code word, she calls me on the disposable and false-FLECed cell, I give her the coordinates for a corner in the city which she then decodes in her mind, and we meet there in either an hour or half an hour depending on her situation.”

  “Okay, on Tuesday morning, after her first night of presidential passion, we’ll get you two together at a taqueria I know on Constitution,” said Cardinale. “Duke and I will work out a camera disruption sequence that will look natural, like a rat chewed through a cable or something. We’ll try to give you an hour of down time. You’ll need it. This is going to be the morning after her first Hail to the Chief, and from what I gather of that son of a bitch’s bedside manner, she may be pretty shaken.”

  “I can imagine,” said Bob.

  “That’s the problem,” said Cardinale grimly. “You won’t have to imagine. She’ll probably tell you.”

  The intercom buzzed on Shapira’s desk. “That’s my next patient. Bagwell, the Secretary of Defense. By the way, Vin, I’m working on something with him. He’s undergoing hypnosis therapy for transvestite and other deviant urges, and I’m carefully planting post-hypnotic suggestions in his mind. I think it’s possible that when the shit does hit the fan, and I say a special trigger word to him, I can turn him into a chicken.”

  The meeting on Tuesday went off without a hitch. It was a fine spring day, and Georgia looked breathtaking in a golden yellow Easter dress and broad hat. All she did was shrug. “Yeah, he’s a freak,” she told Bob. “But I’ve done worse.”

  * * *

  Two days later and three thousand miles away on the opposite coast, in Olympia, the intercom on President Henry Morehouse’s desk buzzed. It was Annette Sellars, his personal secretary. “Yes, Annette?”

  “Mister President, General Barrow is here to see you.”

  “He’s my three o’clock. Why is he early?” asked Morehouse.

  “He says it’s important,” said Annette.

  “He knows where the door is,” said Morehouse. The door opened and the Security Minister came in, grinning. “I hope that cheery mug denotes good news, Frank,” said the president. “We could use some.”

  Barrow slapped a file down on Morehouse’s desk in front of him. “Damned good news! Charlie Randall just sent this over. First NAR humintel report ever from inside the White House! Operation Belladonna is up and running. She’s in, Red! We got her in!”

  XI

  THE CARRION CROWS

  (Twelve years and seven months after Longview)

  How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!

  What is’t you do?

  —Macbeth—Act IV, Scene 1

  On a warm spring day in May, with the D.C. cherry blossoms in full bloom outdoors along the Potomac and the Ellipse, the United States executive and military command team for Operation Strikeout assembled in the Situation Room in the White House for a progress briefing on how they would restore truth, justice, and the American way to the Mordor of evil that was the Northwest Republic.

  No corner of the White House with the exception of the Oval Office itself starred in more movies and television shows than the Situation Room, the presidential decision center under the main floor of the West Wing. Hollywood imagines the situation room as a beehive of activity, where grim and dignified presidents command covert operations around the world. In reality, it was something of a high-tech dungeon full of scurrying rats. The main situation room had six huge flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls for secure video conferences, satellite-linked through state-of-the-art technology to generals and prime ministers around the globe. White House technologists settled on NEC plasma flat-screens for the president’s main conference room and LCD screens in the remainder of the chamber. The main room had less mahogany and more 21st century whisper wall than the private conference room, which is where today’s meeting was taking place. There were five secure video rooms and a direct, secure feed to Air Force One. In the main room, the watch officers from every branch of the service were arrayed on two curved tiers of computer terminals that could be fed both classified and unclassified data from around the country and the world. While Secret Service agents or uniformed Protective Service officers always confiscated cellular phones and two-way pagers that could serve as bugging devices, the situation room left nothing to chance. It had sensors embedded in the ceilings that could pick up cellular signals and alert the guards if anyone was attempting to transmit anything from the room.

  Operation Strikeout was D-minus forty-some-odd days and counting now, and they hadn’t even decided on the final date for the attack yet. Withholding that crucial detail even from his own troops was the Commander-in-Chief’s own idea. He thought it was brilliant. He called it “tactical flexibility”; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all of the other field grade officers in the military called it moronic and indicative of how little Hunter Wallace understood about the logistic realities involved in moving huge numbers of troops and vehicles and massive amounts of materièl around out in the real world. They called it “the damned Doughboy playing soldier,” although not where the DHS’s listening devices could overhear them.

  Of course, it was not unheard-of in military history to plan major operations within a loose window of a few days or even weeks, but there were way too many other loose ends, half-assed aspects, slipshod logistics and vagaries about Strikeout that bothered the brass. The generals attempted without success to explain to the president that there was a difference between flexibility and sloppiness. One Air Force three-star said, “I understand the Northmen require in their Constitution that their president be a military
veteran. Now we know why.” He made that remark in the bar of the Pentagon officers’ mess after his third martini, and it was picked up on a hidden microphone. The three-star was now a lowly private waiting in a cell in Fort Belvoir for his secret military tribunal. Most likely, he wouldn’t get the needle, but a trip to a penal coalmine in Pennsylvania was probably in his future, pour encourager les autres.

  This core group meeting today in the Situation Room consisted first and foremost of U.S. President Hunter Wallace himself. The Doughboy was a pallid, lumpish, middle-aged man with hair so blond as to be almost white, and eyes that were technically blue, but in reality so pale as to be nearly colorless. It was as if nature had started to make an albino, and then changed her mind.

  Wallace was always nattily well-dressed in carefully tailored clothing, everything from formal tuxes to crisp and gleaming tennis whites as the occasion demanded, and his hair received a thousand-dollar coiffure every other day from a stylist employed by the White House for the sole purpose of maintaining presidential spiffiness. He could not, in all honesty, be called fat. That was a tribute to a delegated White House dietician whose sole function it was to ensure that nothing that was not green, leafy, crunchy, or all three passed his lips or was even present at his table; the White House waiters were instructed to keep sweets physically out of his reach at all times during state dinners. Of course, meat was illegal these days in America, a prohibition no more honored in the White House kitchen than anywhere else. The Jewish staff all kept personal stashes of burgers, brisket, chicken and unlawful pizza toppings in the kitchen refrigerators that they gave or sold to their fellow employees, but the word had been laid down long ago by presidential Press Secretary and minder Angela Herrin: if President Wallace got hold of so much as a single slice of pepperoni, someone’s job was out the window. Wallace underwent a strict regimen of workouts in the White House gym supervised by a personal trainer who was authorized to literally drag him out of meetings if necessary, and make sure he got in an hour a day on the treadmill and swam fifty laps in the pool minimum, thereby maintaining an acceptable photogenic minimum of lean body mass, muscle tone, and definition in his limbs.

  Yet one could somehow tell by looking at him that Hunter Wallace’s body yearned achingly to go to seed. He was one of those people who’d been struggling with a weight problem all his life, and was only barely staying on top of it through grueling, frantic exercise combined with a near starvation diet of rabbit food. One got the impression that if Wallace so much as looked at a slice of cheesecake his waist size would go up an inch, and if he ever slipped up and ate a single Danish pastry or bowl of ice cream, he would blow up into a blimp and burst the buttons on his Armani suit jacket. Even so inveterate a Wallace-hater as Vinnie Skins found it difficult not to sympathize a little. After reviewing one intelligence report he commented, “That Jew bitch don’t let the poor bastard eat nothing but broccoli and carrot juice. Plus he ain’t got no balls. No wonder he’s fucked up in the head!”

  The Vice President of the United States was Hugh Jenner, a lean and acerbic former Senator from Oregon in his sixties who did his daily laps and handball sessions not out of sheer necessity like the president, but because he enjoyed exercise and a healthy lifestyle. Jenner was a former insurance executive and investment banker from Portland who had considered Northwest Finance Minister Ray Ridgeway to be a business rival before the War of Independence, and who now loathed him to the point of madness. Needless to say, Jenner had spent the entire past twelve years bellowing at the top of his lungs for something along the line of Operation Strikeout in order to recover his state, as well as his 35-room mansion on Skyline Boulevard in Portland. The mansion had been destroyed by shellfire during the Battle of Portland, and the Republic had built a local clinic on the site staffed by pediatric nurses, paramedics, and nurse practitioners from the National Medical Service. Jenner’s dream ever since had been to tear down the clinic and rebuild his former home down to the last detail.

  Hugh Jenner’s Northwest origins had been his ticket onto the ticket, so to speak, at the last combined convention where Democrats and Republicans had met under the auspices of One Nation Indivisible to sort out the ONI Bipartisan Unity Nomination which effectively meant the presidency, although the formality of running a November election against a few minor third and fourth party candidates and eccentric billionaire independents was always scrupulously observed. When Hunter Wallace had raised Jenner’s hand beside him at the cheering convention he had said, “Hugh, I promise you that the next time this convention meets, you will be watching it from your own living room in Portland!” This set off a brief flurry of punditory speculation from the cable news talking heads as to what exactly Wallace meant by the remark, before a few phone calls from the ONI National Committee and a few heavy-handed FBI visits caused the pundits to find other things to talk about.

  The other attendees at today’s briefing were bureaucratic as opposed to electoral products of the American system of government as it had come to be. Marlon Bagwell, the Secretary of Defense who was also the Zombie Master’s patient, was a large and overweight man with a seamed boozer’s face and four decades in Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the private sector under his well-stretched belt. He was one of those uniquely American polymaths and political chameleons who moved effortlessly between boardroom, government office and media studio. Bagwell’s face just kept popping up everywhere on screens for years until everybody knew him: a cable talk show here, a Congressional hearing there, an ambassadorship to London and an energy consortium chairmanship in Houston, a media interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on his recent appointment to head up the latest neo-conservative or sometimes liberal think tank in D.C. But Bagwell was not just a yes-man to the people in power: he was a fixer, an able sergeant major who, once he picked his general of the moment, could get things done for him. He was the ideal man to provide civilian oversight of the reconquest of the Northwest. He was able, efficient, and as far as anyone knew, Marlon Bagwell had never in his life entertained anything remotely resembling a political or moral principle.

  White House press secretary Angela Herrin and White House chief of staff Ronald Schiff were the two acknowledged Hofjüden at the presidential court, but the situation with them was more complex than it first appeared. In theory, the chief of staff was a much more powerful office than that of press secretary, but appearances were deceiving. Of the two, the raven-haired and statuesque Angela Herrin was actually the primary contact and conduit between the U.S. government and world Jewry, in whose hands was still concentrated such massive wealth that while the loss of the state of Israel was a crushing blow to Jewish morale, in the practical sense it was little more than a blip on the Tribe’s total balance sheet. She was 35 years old, born Angela Herrnstein on a kibbutz outside Herzliya, and a lifelong Mossad agent who didn’t admit to being Jewish at all. She had a fake Episcopalian background and past life every bit as mendacious and every bit as well documented as the Zombie Master’s, except courtesy of a different crew of crack computer hackers. It was not true that it was impossible to hide or keep any secrets in Hunter Wallace’s Surveillance State; you just had to be tech-savvy and well-connected to do it.

  Angela kept a low profile outside her White House press briefings; her Lincoln Town Car was armored and bomb-proofed but very discreet, and she relied on her burly Israeli-born Secret Service agent and chauffeur Motti as her lone bodyguard. Motti lived in a garret over her fortified and high-security brownstone in the discreet neighborhood of Brookland, occasionally going downstairs to the master bedroom either to sleep in the king-sized bed with his boss, or to remove other unwanted male bodies from that bed, sometimes alive and sometimes dead. Angela’s sexual tastes were straight enough, but tended even more toward the bizarre than Hunter Wallace’s.

  Ronald Schiff, the paunchy and balding White House Chief of Staff, was openly Jewish down to his Yiddish accent and the knitted blue kipa on his nut. He not only provi
ded the administration’s necessary public genuflection to the Tribe’s power, but also acted as more or less a decoy to turn attention away from Angela Herrin, who so far as most people knew was the Barbie Doll spokesperson for the administration wielding only the power and influence of a press secretary, and supposedly was nowhere near the decision-making process. They all hoped (in vain) that this arrangement was able to fool foreign intelligence agencies, especially the Northwest War Prevention Bureau.

  Schiff was aware of the fact that part of his function was to draw hostile fire away from Angela in the sense of media attention and Congressional political scrutiny as well as bullets and explosives, and it made him paranoid. He always traveled with an entourage of Secret Service bodyguards second only to the president’s, and he resented Angela mightily for the inconvenience. In public Schiff was cool, calm, witty and supercilious, earning himself the media nickname of the “Iron Chancellor” in a fawning Bismarckian reference. In reality he never quite pulled it off; he actually came across as a little ridiculous. Schiff tried to be Henry Kissinger but only made it as far as Jackie Mason. In private, he was a bundle of nerves and neuroses, apprehensive about maintaining his position, and terrified of Muslim and Northwest assassins under his bed. The Zombie Master had been carefully angling and trying to get Schiff onto his couch as a patient for some years, but without any luck. Schiff’s own father had been a psychiatrist, and so Schiff hated the breed. He preferred to spill his guts to $50,000-per-night hookers in expensive hotel rooms. A number of these sessions the WPB station had been able to bug in advance, thanks to Betsy’s contacts among the capitol’s high-end professional women. It had been from one such late night intíme that the Circus had first heard the name Operation Strikeout, and realized its significance.