“The Canucks are yellow,” said Modlin contemptuously.
“The Canadian voters the government is concerned about keeping alive to vote Liberal certainly are,” said Wallace dryly. “Admiral Brava, don’t worry, there will be more than enough pressure on the racists from the west applied by your colleagues in the navy. Five carriers is a hell of a lot of firepower: the JFK II, the Kitty Hawk, the Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Delmar Partman and the Hornet. Plus the missile subs Harriet Tubman and Jesse Jackson. We will flatten everything west of the Cascades from Eugene to Bellingham; Seattle and Portland and Olympia will be nothing but burning trash heaps in a junkyard, and our ground-based planes and missiles will blast Boise and Spokane and Missoula into powder until not one stone remains on the other, and racism will be but a bad memory in the world. There is no need for a fourth infantry prong. American air power is invincible; ground troops are just there to clinch the deal.”
Vice President Jenner tactfully refrained from reminding the President that even under optimum conditions American air power, while often decisive in the past, had historically been far from invincible, and the quality of their ground troops had been America’s greatest military weakness since the Second World War. “There is always the possibility that we are underestimating their partisan unit defense strategy,” said the Vice President diplomatically.
Wallace grinned. “Ah, yes, the terrible NVA guerrillas of old, ten feet tall with saber teeth, firing a machine gun in each hand while they leap through the northern woods like giant kangaroos. I wondered when they would make their appearance. I know the legend. Hugh, we’ve always known that was on the cards, and we have let it deter us for too long. What has always been these gangsters’ big threat that they level against us? That they will fight all of our high-tech weaponry with low-tech, a simple bullet to the head of people who matter. That’s how they beat us before, Hugh. When that guy lit that booby-trapped cigar and blew his own head off at the dinner table right here in the White House and right in front of Chelsea Clinton, she broke. They were sending America a message: no one is safe, and America’s ruling class quailed before that message and surrendered. Now we have to be man enough to answer it with come and do your worst, for you are an abomination, and we will no longer allow you to be. They know full well that we could have taken back the Northwest any time we wanted to do so during the past twelve years, but we haven’t done so because we let them buffalo us. So they threaten us with the one thing that the United States has traditionally feared more than anything else, the one way that America has always been defeated in the past—a long and drawn-out guerrilla war as we try to occupy a hostile country.”
“It won’t be hostile!” said Kanesha Knight. “We are the good guys! We will be welcomed as liberators!”
“No, we will not be, Kanesha,” said Hunter Wallace firmly. “These are white people who for almost half a generation now have been living on their own and among their own, seeing only people who look like themselves, with no way to compel them to confront and deal with diversity and multiculturalism. History shows that white people won’t do that unless they are forced to do so by the power of the state, so deeply is racism ingrained in us. You have no idea how seductive that kind of evil can be. Remember, when I was doing my intelligence work, I used to peddle that very same evil, and I never had to work very hard to make a sale.” Wallace always referred to his days as a Cognitive Dissonance operative on the internet for one of Cass Sunstein’s early White House internet disruption programs as “intelligence work.” He liked sounding like a glamorous James Bond type.
Wallace went on, “They have tasted the fruit of the poisoned tree, Kanesha, and I assure you, they will fight like the very devil rather than have that poisoned fruit taken away from them and be forced to eat healthy again, in both the moral and the dietary sense. Hell, never mind their racial hatred, some of them will fight like hell just so they can commit obscenities like lighting up a carcinogen or gorging on the flesh of a dead animal, as if humanity hasn’t progressed at all in the past few thousand years and we were still predatory beasts living in caves. Their big threat they use to terrorize us is that they will take us back to those last few bad months before Longview when we were losing fifty soldiers and FATPOs a week, and not so much as a dime of revenue was coming in from the Northwest, and when the Northwest was draining the nation of money like a gigantic black hole. My benighted predecessor gave in to certain pressures…”
Angela Herrin spoke up for the first time. “President Clinton the Third had no choice. Israel was in danger, and Israel had to take priority,” she said flatly, brooking no contradiction.
“Damn straight!” said the White House Chief of Staff, Ronald Schiff.
“Of course it did,” said Wallace smoothly. “But sadly, that pressure no longer exists today, the Light Unto the Nations is no more, and so the United States of America can concentrate on recovering her own lost sheep, so to speak. That being said, there is a price we will have to pay. We weren’t ready to pay it before.” President Wallace looked around the room gravely. “We all need to accept that just as any rat will fight when cornered, these evil people are capable of targeting individuals in this administration, not just because we are enemies, but on the grounds of their color and gender alone. Perhaps even some of us in this room.” Suddenly everyone else realized where the president was headed with this, and they all gave Kanesha Knight a covert glance that she didn’t pick up on. The director of the CIA was thinking about aliens, and whether they really flew down in flying saucers that made beautiful music like in that Close Encounters movie.
* * *
After the meeting in the Situation Room, President Hunter Wallace returned upstairs to the Oval Office and spent the next hour working, and doing so productively. Whatever one could say about Wallace’s off-duty practices, and one could say a great deal, no one denied that the man was a workhorse. He had to be; the United States was in such terrible shape that a Bill Clinton-esque, hands-off president who tried to phone it in simply couldn’t cut it any more.
In one hour, Wallace dictated a memo on shoring up the old Tennessee Valley Authority electric power grid, which was now verging on total collapse from years of neglect. He went over a speech his writers had produced for him to give to the Israel Remembrance Association at a $200,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner in New York next week. He checked his personal uncensored news feed from CNN on his computer, a feed available to only a few high government officials that reported what was actually going on in the world, and he made several calls to various functionaries based on what he saw there. Wallace conducted short personal meetings with the head of the NAACP and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Right, five o’clock!” he said, rising up. “Now for an hour of me time!” He punched the intercom, “Wanda, I have now ceased to exist until six o’clock. You know the drill.”
“Yes, sir,” came his secretary’s voice. This was known among staffers as the president’s “seventh inning stretch,” during which he disported himself with his personal services assistant of the moment. She would afterwards retire via a back staircase to the main bedroom in the residence itself, using her own special key card to enter. A discreet Asian waiter, who in the tradition of thousands of years of harem guards saw and heard nothing, would bring her supper at 6:30 p.m. There she would await the main bedtime session, which could begin as late as midnight depending on the president’s commitments for the evening. Afterward she might or might not spend the night, at the commander-in-chief’s discretion, before departing for her own home in an armored Secret Service limo. She reported back to the White House at 4:00 p.m. sharp, in case seventh inning stretch came a bit early. This routine went on seven days a week, although it was varied by weekend trips to Camp David and frequent, exciting and luxurious travel to the far corners of the earth on Air Force One. The world’s most famous jet was equipped with its own “executive lounge” for stratospheric nookie.
Wallac
e strode over to the door of the original executive lounge and opened it. Georgia Myers stood up from the sofa where she was reading a disarmingly innocuous Harlequin romance, and she greeted the president with a kiss. What followed would have made the average Harlequin reader double over and vomit.
“He tappin’ dat blondie again,” said Secret Service Special Agent Jimbo Hadding to his buttoned-down, buzz-cut detail commander, Special Agent Lee Lyons.
“Tapping?” said Lyons dryly.
“Well, what he do,” said Jimbo. Hadding was a gigantic black man, six feet five inches tall and three hundred pounds of ebony muscle, with a massive chest and shoulders. He literally looked like a gorilla dressed in a Brooks Brothers executive ensemble. When he stood straight, arms at his side, his knuckles almost reached his knees. His IQ was room temperature on a good day, but he did have two qualities that fitted him for his job: rare for a monkoid, he was a fairly good pistol shot, and he was just intelligent enough to memorize Secret Service security protocols and procedures and follow them to the letter, so long as nothing disrupted his routine and he didn’t have to think. Hunter Wallace knew the PR value of having a faithful and visible African-American appearing with him in public, so he had cultivated Hadding and made a kind of protégé or pet out of him. In return for his boss’s patronage, and a special permit to devour large amounts of barbecued ribs and fried chicken in the White House mess, Hadding responded with doglike devotion to his chief.
“I still don’t like the idea of him banging a Northwester, even a Cataclysm survivor who lost her home to the enemy, and especially not now,” said Lyons in a low voice. He was the one who had to do the thinking, and he didn’t like the direction his thoughts were taking. Operation Strikeout wasn’t quite as top secret as the command team liked to think; word had been trickling out for some weeks now, and those outside the rarefied zone of the Situation Room whose job it was to worry were concerned that rumors would reach the media soon. “I checked that Halberstam bimbo out myself, full court press, and I recommended against her. A few things were off. She doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
“Obviously she pass his sniff test,” replied the African with a wide, toothy grin. Lyons ignored him.
“She’s a heavy stoner and she sleeps around, and that usually means indiscreet. She had some neighbors down the street when she was a kid in Missoula, some people named Campbell, and they were NVA. It would be okay if she really was Jewish, but she’s not, her stepfather is. But the boss has been gaga for her ever since he saw her at that reception at the Corcoran Museum. Told me once she reminds him of his sister. He shouldn’t even have been talking to her that night. We had her flagged because she was born in Montana, and he’s supposed to follow our lead when we warn him off flagged individuals, but he didn’t this time. I had a quiet word with him and he blew me off, then he insists on our starting the PSA paperwork on her, when Carolyn’s contract still had six weeks to run.”
“We didden find nothin’ on de down-low,” said Hadding. “I ran her ass, too. She jus’ a junkie ho.”
“She still makes my ass twitch, and not in a good way,” said Lyons. “I’m keeping a close eye on her. I’m personally monitoring all her footage every minute she’s in the building and she’s not in the two dead zones where she actually works. You do that too, Jimbo. If that girl does anything that looks even a little off-kilter to you, you come to me and let me know.”
“Mos’ def,” replied Hadding.
At six o’clock, President Hunter Wallace emerged from the executive lounge smiling and adjusting his tie. Georgia slipped out a few minutes later, her dress slightly disheveled as everyone expected it to be, and she strolled out of the Oval Office through the rear corridor on her way to the East Wing and the residence. Since she arrived, Georgia had fit right into both wings. She figured everyone knew who she was and why she was there, so there was no need to be coy about it. She had reached the point where she now had a few acquaintances among the West Wing staff with whom she could nod and exchange a few words. Already a few staffers were sidling up to her in the White House mess, as the cafeteria was called, or in break rooms or her small cubicle where she played with the computer sometimes, trying to get close to the maitresse en tître and pick up some juicy gossip or information they could sell to the media, a traditional cottage industry in the West Wing.
Georgia moved along a private staff corridor, a euphemism for a servant’s passage that ran the length of the West Wing from the Oval Office behind the Cabinet Room, the Roosevelt Room, and the Press Briefing Room. She was not allowed to use the open walkway along the West Colonnade—too public. It would have been possible for her to crack open a door and eavesdrop on Cabinet meetings and on conversations in a number of private offices from the servant’s passageway, except that it was completely covered with closed-circuit cameras and she assumed audio mics as well, and any lingering or suspicious behavior on her part would have been instantly detected in the Secret Service control room.
The West Wing was connected to the Executive Residence in the East Wing by the center hall on the ground floor. Georgia entered the East Wing with her pass card. She nodded pleasantly to the uniformed Protective Services officer on the duty desk, walked past the Map Room, the China Room, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, then up the stairs past the first or State Floor and on to the presidential master bedroom on the right, in the actual residence on the second floor. She swiped her card and entered one of only two places in the entire White House complex that was completely free of any audio or visual surveillance or recording devices, the other being the “executive lounge” and its attached bathroom and shower off the Oval Office.
Georgia now had some hours alone and unobserved, but the problem was how to make use of that time. Not only did she have to collect every scrap of information she could about what was going on in the White House, but she had to get it out of the building and convert it into some kind of intelligible form and order for Bobby Campbell. The simplest way to do this was just to verbally report everything she saw or heard, but that was proving problematic. It was hard for her to meet “Richie” anywhere in the District without being recorded on a spy camera of some kind, and trips out of the self-contained Green Zone, which had everything government people needed for a hermetically sealed existence, would draw suspicion. Many federal employees now lived and worked for decades without ever even going across the river to Arlington.
It was true the Office could arrange convenient outages when it was necessary for them to get together for half an hour or so, but this could only be done so often before somebody at DHS handling her routine VIP monitoring would notice and report the quirky camera cut-offs to the Secret Service, which would get them suspicious and lead to physical surveillance. Georgia had not yet been taken to see the Zombie Master in his own surveillance-free bubble. She could of course go into the White House wired for sound and video in a dozen different ways, but there were all kinds of electronic sensors, frequency detectors, body scans at all the entrances, and random security sweeps by Secret Service techs seeking to detect any signs of surveillance (besides theirs) and any transmission or unknown electronic device in operation. This was a tall order in a building full of electronic communications devices of every known kind, and there were ways around this, but the WPB had to be very careful, because Belladonna was a diamond asset that could not under any circumstances be compromised before she was able to fulfill her primary mission—not just White House gossip and policy tittle-tattle, but hard details about the when and where and how of Operation Strikeout.
The criminal techie geek Birdie had come up with a solution, acting on Vinnie Skins’ request to come up with some way to get sensitive information such as bills of lading and shipping schedules out of bonded tobacco and kosher meat warehouses, which had anti-spying and hacking systems almost equivalent to those in the White House.
It simply wasn’t practical for the Secret Service to confiscate everyone’s personal devices of
various kinds as they came in the White House door, because the staff used them all day for personal and political business. As a precaution against unauthorized data theft, on entering the White House the Protective Service door guards passed each wireless phone, videophone, personal notebook, and Blackberry through a device which gave them an electronic configuration and snapshot of the drive and/or chips inside, together with their data content, X drive holding 300 gigabytes, Y chip holding 52.4 gigabytes, etc. These specifics were recorded on the security computer database. When each staffer left at night, their devices and laptops were again passed through the scanner and matched against their entrance data for that morning. Any extra data, or missing data causing a discrepancy, had to have a matching supervisor’s download permission code recorded for that device during the day giving the time when the download was performed and the source of the download.
The system was incredibly cumbersome and almost useless, because so few people bothered with it during the day. Half of them forgot what they had downloaded or added to their personal computers and handheld devices by the time they got to security checkout. The result was a line of irritated and arrogant government prima donnas at every security exit at quitting time, all of them convinced they were far too important and powerful players to have to bother with such nonsense, and many of them abusing and insulting the long-suffering FPS officers who wanted to know why they had two more gigabytes of data on their day planner than they’d had at nine o’clock that morning. The line to leave ended up slowed to a crawl as employees tried to locate authorized supervisors on the phone and get them to OK an upload to a guard, staffers made a game of finding ways to sneak out of the White House without checking out through security, formal complaints and reprimands and apologies and memos flew like confetti, and the whole thing degenerated into a typical American clusterfuck. This gave a genuine spy like Georgia a good deal of wiggle room.
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