by Billy Roper
General Gene Ferguson, nearly seventy, positioned a whole company of hand-picked men around the block, before coming in to give the Speaker’s sole surviving heir a silent hug. The seasoned warrior’s eyes were wet with tears. The teenager was told the news of his father’s death, and his mother’s plane hijacking, by a dour-faced senior guard named Glenn, whom he had known all of his life. He didn’t react verbally, he just nodded his understanding. When Congressman Randy Balderson and his wife arrived, John Jr. gravely accepted their condolences and promises to do anything that needed to be done. As close friends of the late Speaker’s, they too feared assassination, and accepted his offer that they stay at the Warehouse, where a dozen other close associates were camping out for the rest of the night. The Representative from South Michigan’s left arm was in a sling, bandaged. The assassins had come close to getting him, too. One of them had lost their will at the last minute, and thwarted the plot. The traitor was now cooperating with the investigation.
In the morning, perhaps they would know more what was going on. In the morning, there might be word from or about his mom. None of the adults seemed to know what to say to him. He didn’t know how to act, either. John Jr. took the elevator to the top floor, to his parent’s room, and stood by the door for a while, before going to the armory down the hall. He sat up until dawn, loading magazines, and squeezing his hands into fists alone, where noone could see. In his mind’s eye, the teen kept picturing his dad, laying on his office floor, covered in a bloody flag with thirteen alternating red and white stripes, and a solid blue field in the corner.
General Ferguson looked like he had aged a century overnight, when the young man came down a few hours later to see if there was any news. A large vidscreen showed a reporter from Post Dispatch TV standing outside, talking about tensions running high in the streets, as lines of mourners dropped off flowers in front of the Warehouse. Below it, another vidscreen carried BBC coverage of Balderson addressing the New American Congress in an emergency session. “Ferocious” Ferguson, the hero who had brought the surviving Afghan contingent home and formed the New American Legion, left the officer he had been talking to in hushed tones and walked over to the teen.
“Did you get any sleep, John Jr.?” he asked. It was obvious that he hadn’t himself.
“I’m fine, Sir, but with all due respect, my dad is dead. I guess that just makes me plain John, now.” He responded. “Not ‘junior’, any more.”
The General smiled sadly. “I reckon you’re right, son. Okay, John, have you had breakfast, yet? You need to eat.”
“I will, Sir. But first, I’d like to see my father’s body. He would want to lie in state and allow people to pay their respects before he’s buried, and it looks like they need that, now, too,” John gestured to images of crying women holding their children up to look at the building they were standing in, as the morning fog burned off. “I’d like Pastor Reed from the Academy to perform the ceremony. Something traditional, Identity wise. Dad would like that.”
“Are you sure you want to, son? It’s…pretty bad.” Ferguson cautioned him.
“Yes, take me to him, please. And have your people been able to get ahold of my sister, yet?”
“We notified the Orangers of what happened, along with our other allies, but the safari camp Hope and her family are at is off the grid, north of the official boundary with the dead zone.” The General said. “It might take a while to raise her or Kip.”
John sighed and rubbed his eyes in a gesture that reminded the old man of his father. “Okay, well, keep trying, please. Any word on my mom?”
“Our fleet carrier wing and the Aussies and Kiwis have boats and planes out, still, but no sign of any crash or demands from the terrorists, so far.” His heavily lined face ventured a reassuring smile. “No news is good news, right?”
John didn’t feel like smiling at anyone. He had no idea who might have daggers behind their eyes, wet with his father’s blood. He also knew that eliminating him would make things neater for the conspirators, too.
“Absolutely, we have to just take things minute by minute. So, can we go take care of my dad, now?” The frosty smile he eased into, he had learned from the best.
“I am just a cowboy, lonesome on the trail. And I’m just thinking about that certain female…”
Kelly drummed her fingers impatiently as the Council dithered. This might, based on her experience, go on for hours, as the older and more stodgy ones pretended to buck any idea that the first female Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints proposed. In the end, it would be very simple: An offer of condolences for the loss of the longtime New American leader and arguably its’ Founder, combined with an offer to help apprehend the fugitive terrorists, whomever and wherever they might be. Kelly and the late Speaker had a lot of history, to be sure. As a matter of fact, in a weird way, she might not even be the leader of Deseret, from the Rockies to the Pacific, if it hadn’t been for him. Once again, things had come full circle.
After they approved her original state proclamation with meaningless rewording just to make themselves feel more important, the Council moved on. The desalinization plants were ramping up to full production in Brigham Beach, and should provide adequate irrigation for the Four Canyons Agricultural Region project to feed the growing Mormon population of Angels City. The Jefe of Hermosillo pledged his support in the search for two LDS Bishops instructing missions there who had gone missing. Nominally autonomous, the town of ten thousand boasted a Deseret Gull garrison, anyway, so that was under control. Like everywhere else where Deseret ruled, polygamy had become the rule of law there. Units patrolling the border with New America on the western slopes of the Rockies were to be placed on high alert due to the unstable situation out East. And the Australian government was echoing the New Zealand complaint about LDS Missionaries sneaking aboard Pacific bound ships in Moroni Bay. Nothing new there.
At the end of the morning session, Kelly left the Council Assembly Hall feeling drained and ready to kick off her shoes. Her feet hurt, and the warm late Spring day made the mountains above Salt Lake look more inviting than confining. She still didn’t know what to think about what was going on in St. Louis. Her Deseret Department of Public Safety agents there had confirmed that the icon, John McNabb, was dead. His wife, whom Kelly had never really liked, was missing, presumed dead or kidnapped. Hope, his daughter, who Kelly did like, and had been close to for years, was north of the Orange Free State controlled area in central Africa on safari, since her husband Kip was the New American ambassador to Orange. They and their six kids, four boys and two girls, were safe enough there.
Aside from John, his longtime Secretary of State, Mark Smith, had also been assassinated. His calm voice of reason in working through the inevitable conflicts between the four largest nations on the continent would be missed, she knew. Ever since General Fred Grace, the last legitimate vestige of the old U.S. government, had died from a heart attack five years ago, Gen. Harrison had been shifted over to serve as John’s Secretary of Defense, the post the only surviving member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had held for so long.
Kelly reviewed the printed chain of command briefing as her driver took her west towards the Salt Lake and the Sisters School where her two daughters, Julia and Abby, were expecting her to join them for lunch, as she normally did. The thirteen and ten year olds were on that fragile cusp of womanhood which makes a mom want to hang onto every second of little girl they had left in them.
The New American Continuity of Command structure was a bit vague on whom the successor to the Speaker, who had ruled like a Constitutional Monarch for nearly two decades, would be. Her people on the ground pointed to Congressman Randall Balderson as the heir apparent, absent a military coup. Since Gen. Harrison had been killed by his driver even before the attack occurred inside the Old Courthouse capitol building, a coup by the armed forces seemed unlikely.
The Sisters who ran the girl’s school smiled at the familiar site of Kell
y’s armored sedan, a Ford Firmament imported from New Detroit, pulling up to the guardhouse. Some of the older ones, who were still getting used to the idea of a female Prophet, had to force their smiles, a bit, still. She looked at her driver’s noncommittal expression staring back at her in the rear view mirror, and thought about Harrison’s last moments. Well, it did no good to live in fear, Josh had always told her. Her Texican cowboy husband was usually right about the vague things in life, and left the details up to her, or to chance. Kelly swore that if it wasn’t for having her sister Karen as a full time live in nanny, the girls might never take baths or have clean clothes, but Josh would have them out of sight of their security and down at the lake or fishing in some creek or hiking in the desert. She should have given him boys instead of girls, but it hadn’t exactly been a multiple choice selection process, and now as she neared her mid-forties, it was too late for any more rolls of the dice.
Abby absent-mindedly munched her sandwich while her sister dominated the conversation, as usual. Kelly listened gravely as her eldest complained about the daughter of the English ambassador, a tall blonde girl named Evelyn, whom Julia appeared to be envious of. At least with a gender segregated school, there was less potential for boy drama, the Prophet thought to herself. Which was, after all, precisely the point. For the daughters of working class and most middle class families, no school beyond the homemaking apprenticeships at their mother’s sides were considered appropriate, anyway. They would all grow up to be some Elder’s sister wife. Hopefully a first or second, if they were pretty enough. Her daughters were being groomed for the oligarchy of Church leadership. Especially with the ground she had broken for women, within it. Of course, it had taken the Reichstag fire of a Fundamentalist attack that caused a war which nearly destroyed their nation before her rise to power had been possible. That hadn’t been a coincidence, either. Kelly wondered if the cooling brain of the Speaker had ever thought his hypnotic suggestion would lead to all this.
After giving each of the girls a pastry from the cafeteria in her office lobby for dessert, she kissed them both on the forehead, waved at the Sisters, and clicked the button on her comm for her driver to pick her back up. He was there in less than a minute, looking innocent enough.
With Josh in Sacramento negotiating water rights from Lake Tahoe as her Foreign Secretary, the well-maintained brunette knew that she could easily read over this paperwork at home tonight, once Karen had put the girls to sleep. She felt driven, though, to get a handle on how things might play out in the next few weeks, back East.
Balderson had given a speech before Congress where he had most of the Cabinet standing beside him in unity. It had been noticeably less religious in tone than McNabb had become in his latter years. Jason Roberts, the New American Attorney General, and his much younger nephew, Andrew Pender, the Congressman from the recolonized state of Arkansas, had been present, just behind Randall. Dr. Tina Edwards, the venerable Surgeon General, and Paul Martin, the Governor of Manitoba, had physically lent their support. Balderson had been wounded himself in a failed attempt to remove him from the equation the night of the assassinations, and gave an angry, vengeful polemic in his trademark rockabilly style. Lots of rhyming, from all reports.
After he wound down a bit, Randall had invoked martial law as the Speaker Pro Tempore, and under his authority as acting Commander in Chief of the Unified Command, promoted Major General Victor Brown, the former commander of the Legion, to General of the Army, and asked Gen. Gene Ferguson to delay his planned retirement in order to serve as Secretary of Defense. Both men agreed. The Congressional delegates favored the coalition of civilian and military leadership onstage with a standing ovation, then a benediction by the Congressional Chaplain. It looked like the transition would be smooth, all things considered.
Kelly’s D.P.S. agents had compiled a list of suspects in the assassinations. Internally, they had suggested Lt. Gen. Matthew Ball, the officer in charge of the New American space program, whom they suggested might have been frustrated by McNabb’s reluctance to militarize their lunar base. She looked at his file. A former U.S. fighter pilot and naval aviator, who’d seen action in Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific, as well as in North America. Maybe Ball was a stereotypical war hero gone ambitious? It had happened before. Did he want to be Caesar?
The next page was a dossier on Thomas Bullens, the reclusive Secretary of Intelligence for New America. Few people besides the Speaker ever even talked to him, so he was something of an unknown quantity, politically. If he wasn’t responsible, and didn’t know who was, he would be one person highly motived by personal pride to find out. The file suggested that he might be socially awkward and corruptible through a female agent. Kelly would hold off on that order, until she eliminated the possibility of an external actor.
One of her D.P.S. agents had red flagged a Captain Andrew McDonald, a paperpusher in the New American Unified Command’s Kansas sector who had already been corrupted, and served as a confidential informant for Deseret. McDonald was stationed in southern Colorado. He would serve as a go-between for any large scale infiltrations required while things were a bit loose at the border.
It was doubtful that any of the current Cabinet, or McNabb’s administration, had been involved, or her agents would have known about it. She had that much confidence in the network she herself had built up, over the years. As a former spy herself, Kelly knew the business.
Of course, the leader of New America had made plenty of external enemies, inevitably. There were pages in the report on Sur Moerdani, the Caliph of Java. After successfully creating a vaccine for the Turkish Flu virus which had been genetically engineered to target Asiatic populations before mutating, the immunologist had brokered his way into power over the Indonesian population, and as their savior, had become an absolute dictator. They had never gotten over their embarrassing losses in a couple of engagements with New America’s combined naval fleets. As radical fundamentalist Muslims, they hardly really needed that excuse, though. Moerdani’s nation of nearly one hundred million was, in terms of population, the third largest in the world, after the Russian Empire and Greater Germany.
Dr. Neiman, the creaky old literature professor who had tottered to the position of President of Argentina, which had swallowed up most of South America? Kelly highly doubted it. Nor did she think the Presidente of Mexico, controlling Mexico City and Monterrey and the strip of land in between, had any ambitions further north, aside from trade. If anything, the slowly growing European population of Mexico depended on the stability of New America to protect them from French and Catalonian pirates and ‘salvage’ teams…just like they had in centuries past. Mexico City’s population was right at 90,000, and Monterrey’s half that, for a total national population of less than a quarter million left.
A European power? Maybe because of some entangling alliances? The French were the obvious suspects from that corner, with their possessions in the NorthEast bordering New America…but the surviving Turks East of Constantinople’s Greek-held suburbs had an old axe to grind, too. Against Ferguson, and Brown, but also against all of them. Was Russia wanting Alaska back, and more? That seemed a stretch. St. Louis and Paris had been at odds not so long ago, so the Gallic sphere might have made an underhanded move, maybe.
As the office buildings rolled past, the Prophet considered the red flagged reports of a couple of suicides among the New American Secret Service guards they had been gathering intelligence on, over the last few weeks. And the case of the fiance’ of one who had placed a call to his commanding officer, before being found dead of a drug overdose the next day. Interesting.
Kelly’s head hurt from running the contingencies. Right now, she just didn’t have enough information to go on. Stepping out of her car as soon as it eased next to the curb, she made sure her dark brown dress was modestly low around her calves before striding through the bullet-proof glass doors into the outer offices where her secretaries all tried to look busy. This would take some more
thinking. Later tonight. Maybe over a bottle of contraband tequila seized from their southern neighbors. She’d dismiss her guards, lock the doors, have Karen put the girls to bed, and get illegally drunk. She might even cast some runes to help her decide whom to blame for the death of her oldest enemy, after drinking a blot to him.
“Oh that’ll be the day, when you say goodbye, yeah, that’ll be the day, when you make me cry…”
The good thing about a Stetson was that people couldn’t tell, in the shadow of that brim, just what you were thinking. That was good, Scott Hampton thought, because right now, he didn’t know what to think. The President of the Republic of Texas (and New Mexico and Southern Oklahoma and the ‘Eyes of Texas’ orbital station), he reminded himself, as well as a big chunk of what used to be Mexico, was going to miss having John McNabb to follow around. He had been, well, not a friend, though they’d been friendly enough, over the years. He had been a worthy adversary. No, that wasn’t true, if he was honest. It hadn’t quite been the other way around. And, it sure had made it a lot easier for Scott to ease into becoming President-for-Life, with his neighbor to the North doing the same thing. But, more than anything, he chafed from spending half his lifetime, it seemed like, under McNabb’s shadow. When he hadn’t been treated like a little brother by the German Chancellor, it was the New American Speaker being condescending to him. Well, that was over.