Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  The inside of the van was lit up. Sig saw two big black duffels behind the guy, just like Betty said there would be.

  “Hey, Pete,” said Betty. “They should be up in a minute.”

  “They should hurry the fuck up,” said Pete, tossing the duffels out onto the pavement. They hit with a soft thud. Sig imagined their contents.

  “Got my other package?” said Betty.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” said Pete. “Hold on.”

  He grabbed something from inside the van and tossed it to Betty. A plastic bag. She pulled two small plastic cases from the bag and zipped them into her jacket pocket. Then she handed the bag to Sig. The contents were hard, the size of a book.

  “Two little ones for me, one big one for you,” she smiled.

  Sig looked through the clear plastic. It was a videocassette. Messages from Lemuria. Sig shoved it behind his waistband.

  The driver stepped out, standing in front of the open door. He held a black metal machine gun that flickered blue in the moonlight. It was a nicer gun than most cops had. The driver wore a black down jacket and his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked Asian, maybe indigenous from way up north.

  “Crazy Betty,” said the driver. “Who’s your boyfriend?”

  “Need to know, Nik,” said Betty. She whistled again for Merle and the guys.

  Sig looked back toward the woods behind them, at the other end of the bridge. He sensed something, like maybe an owl was watching them.

  “Looks like your high school mascot,” said the driver, smiling a mean smile.

  “He’s not, and we don’t have one,” said Betty. “What’s your problem tonight?”

  “Cranky from dealing with your boss,” said crewman Pete.

  “I don’t have a boss,” said Betty. “Maybe Merle does.”

  They heard the clanking of the lockers, then saw the guys bring them up over the edge of the hill and out from the trees. They carried them on their shoulders like boats, four guys on each locker.

  “Hey, you brought your own coffins!” said the driver.

  “Shut up, Nik,” said Pete.

  “We definitely brought a lot of death,” said Merle, knocking the side of the locker with his free hand.

  The driver sized up the crew while he watched the delivery. A couple of the guys Merle brought looked even younger than Sig. “Got a lot of interns with you tonight, Uncle Mo,” said the driver.

  “You didn’t hear them coming, did you?” said Merle. They set the lockers down on the pavement. The metal boxes sounded even heavier than they looked.

  The driver shrugged, and shifted his machine gun.

  Merle and Cottonmouth went for the duffels.

  Sig looked for the owl again.

  Instead he saw lights come on in the woods. Headlights. Then another set, on the other side.

  Sig pulled out the revolver they had loaned him.

  “Fuckers!” yelled Merle.

  Merle and his crew all went for their guns. Sig shot first, at the second car.

  You could not hear the nightbirds flee as the bridge lit up with gunfire from five directions at once.

  Cottonmouth and the other guys fired back hard, but it was hopeless, aiming at headlamps and shadows, taking it from two sides. Sig shot at the guys in the van, but they got him first.

  The first shot felt like a hornet had dug its way up inside him and exploded.

  The second shot felt worse.

  The cacophony of gun chambers mostly stopped, replaced by moans and men barking instructions at each other.

  Sig crawled toward Betty, who lay motionless ten feet away. He saw the corporate skinhead, Holt, walk up to her.

  “You dumb shits broke the rules,” he said. “Pissed off the people we work for. Make us do things I don’t enjoy.”

  Holt aimed his pistol at Betty and put a bullet through her head.

  “Videotape that,” he said.

  Then he saw Sig staring at him. Sig pulled out his knife. Holt kicked him in the face, then in one of the spots where he’d been shot, and everything went white.

  11

  Sig came to when he hit the icy water. Gasping for breath as the cold seized his chest, he saw them hanging Merle’s body from the bridge, naked and carved with a warning that looked like a corporate logo.

  He saw another body thrown over the bridge, and felt the impact as it hit the water near him.

  He saw Holt look down at him. Sig went under and swam as best he could.

  The cold made it hard to breathe but also made it easier to ignore the pain.

  Then the cold took him, like a white tendril pulling him down into the darkness.

  12

  Sig woke up with the morning light, curled up like a broken baby on a cold wet bank.

  He had lost his hoodie and one of his sneakers. He felt his belly. It felt like his T-shirt was glued to his insides with a layer of frozen mud between. The spot on his leg felt like there was a big rock in there, but when he touched it, it was all gooey. His mouth tasted like blood. Two of his teeth were loose. There was a lump at the base of his spine. He felt it and realized it was the videocassette, still shoved down his pants.

  He vomited, blood and coffee, and felt like all of his internal organs were trying to climb out.

  He curled up tighter, shivered, quivered.

  An hour later he started crawling.

  He pulled himself up the bank through the snow mixed with leaf litter and mud. He got up to where there was a gravel road. He didn’t know what road it was, or even what country he was in.

  He crawled out into the middle of the road, fighting sleep and looking up for turkey vultures, until, after what seemed like a really long time but could have been no time at all, a truck drove up. He could hear it coming from a ways away, enough to try to sit up, and he could remember the sound of a man’s voice and the tires on the gravel from where he lay on the floor as the guy drove so far that Sig fell asleep.

  He woke for a minute when the people were staring at him in their white smocks, then again later, when he was in a bed and the two old women and one old man were talking to him. They asked their questions very patiently, but he did not have any answers.

  Part Two

  Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd

  13

  Tania was the one who had the idea to walk down after lunch and take a look at the White House. What was left of it.

  “Let me go with you,” said Odile, leaning in and turning on that smile, the one that combined mischief and privilege in a way that usually worked to get her what she wanted, even when it shouldn’t.

  “You’re dangerous,” said Tania, smiling and shaking her head.

  “You should try it,” said Odile. “This town needs more dangerous people.”

  “You should try driving while black,” said Tania. “Then tell me about living dangerously.”

  “Touché,” said Odile. “I forget you got your fill of danger before we took the bar.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said Tania, looking down into what was left of her espresso and stirring the sugar back up with the little silver spoon.

  “I promise to behave if you get me in there,” said Odile.

  Tania looked up and raised her eyebrows. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t even know if they’ll let me in. Just because I have government ID doesn’t mean I have clearance for that zone.”

  Odile smiled at her. Behind Odile, Tania saw a room full of murmuring power lunchers, dark flannels and mostly pink faces against the posh white minimalism of the restaurant, watched over by well-groomed guards in their designer Kevlars. The outfits made them look like posable action butlers, maybe because they seemed to spend more time looming over the patrons than checking who walked in the door. Odile swore there were no listening devices in the restaurant, that the customers were too powerful to put up with it, but every time Tania looked at that owl sculpture hanging on the wall she had to wonder.

  Lunch with Odile, her best girlfr
iend from law school, was one of the only things that would get Tania downtown these days. Tania had settled into a more suburban reality, which suited her just fine. Her office was way out in Herndon off the toll road, her apartment up on Georgia Avenue just this side of Silver Spring, not far from the disabled veterans camp. That made her one of the drive-time Beltway bots who shuttled between different points in the outer limits, listening to banal hits of a mellower past when she couldn’t stomach the news. She liked to go to the museums when she had a Sunday off, but with all the new checkpoints and barricades it was getting to be too much of a pain. Today was a special occasion: celebrating the payment of Odile’s year-end bonus, which was more than Tania’s whole salary.

  Lunch was on Odile.

  Odile worked at one of the big K Street firms, negotiating military merchant charters for $635 an hour and then bragging about how many nonbillable hours she spent on pro bono cases for the Detainee Project. They had met as section mates their first semester at the Liddy Institute for Law and Public Policy, bonded by a shared sardonic humor that bridged their divergent backgrounds. Odile was an affluent white girl who grew up behind so many layers of protection that she could afford to be an idealist, with a politician mother and businessman father whose access to power was the ultimate insurance. This restaurant she picked was just Odile’s kind of place, from the security that vetted you with your office before you could get a table to the way who saw you was more important than what you ordered. Even the name was pure Odile: Minerva, the preferred daughter of the most powerful man in the castle city that rules the world.

  The stuffiness of the venue didn’t hinder their laughing. They traded gossip about classmates, debated whether the miseries of private practice or public service were worse, and talked a ridiculous amount of time about the new show they were watching: In My Eyes, a stupid but charming romantic comedy about a drone pilot who gets a crush on one of the bad boys she’s tracking. They enjoyed fancy-ass crab cakes on white tablecloths and told jokes about X-ray cameras and how people like to undress the last secrets they have left in their lives. They avoided politics and Odile’s tendency to say the kinds of things most people know better than to say when the machines might be listening. Until it was time to pay the check.

  “Who do you really think tried to kill that fascist?” she said, not even bothering to whisper. “And why couldn’t they finish the damn job?”

  “Okay,” said Tania, trying to see who was around without really looking. “I knew it was a bad idea to let you order wine with lunch. Let’s go. You can come with me if you promise to keep it cool.”

  Odile brushed off Tania’s paranoia with a dismissive hand and a wry smile. As caring as she could be, Odile never really got it, never really understood the gulf between them. Odile could literally afford to say the kinds of things that would get other people arrested.

  Tania couldn’t. No matter how much she sometimes wanted to.

  As they waited for their coats, Tania wondered if the guard who was talking into his hand was talking about them, but figured that was being overly paranoid, even for her. Outside, you could see, the sun was shining bright.

  14

  The streets were closed south of Eye Street. Had been since the event. So they walked to the checkpoint at Farragut Square, which had been converted into a staging area for the federal troops that protected the new perimeter around the White House. Marines, Motherland Guard, and uniformed Secret Service. The Secret Service were the most intense, with their black uniforms, patent leather, and chromed gunmetal.

  “You know I dated one of those guys,” said Odile, as they stood at the crosswalk and admired the scene. “A lieutenant. The algorithm said we had a ninety-two percent chance of compatibility.”

  “Seriously,” said Tania. “Like that movie about the girl and her bodyguard. How’d that work out?”

  “Fun at first. Lots of fitness fun. Then he got a little too strict.”

  Tania laughed.

  “Don’t even ask about the tattoos,” added Odile.

  The image that flashed in her head was darker than Tania expected.

  They joined the queue of office workers headed back from lunch, lined up half a block along the barricades waiting their turn to get through. It was one of those winter days that were as sunny as they were cold. You could hear it in the harsh rotor chop of the helicopter patrol that flew over low while they waited.

  “Seriously, though,” said Odile. “What do you think really went down?”

  There were a lot of theories. It had happened when Maxine Price, Vice President of the ousted administration that had come before—and more recently leader of the separatist political experiment that took root in New Orleans after the flood—led a delegation for cease-fire talks at the White House. That much everyone agreed on. Theories about who brought the bomb, or if there even was a bomb, varied widely. The less people really knew, the crazier the stories they invented to explain things. What Tania was sure of was that Maxine Price was killed that day, whether by her own hand as the ultimate American suicide bomber, by a heroic Secret Service agent, by a rogue corporate coup attempt, or all of the above, and what was left of the idea of a real change in this town, and this country, disappeared with her.

  Tania made the sign for Odile to zip it. The bulletproof kiosk of the officer in charge was getting closer. She watched the people pass through and tried to reverse-engineer the protocol.

  “I don’t know about this,” said Tania, sizing up the seriousness of the guards. “I need to get back to work anyway.”

  “We’re here now,” said Odile, gently tugging at Tania’s arm. “It’s no different than standing in line at a fancy nightclub. Just try to look like you belong there.”

  “Computers don’t control who gets into nightclubs,” said Tania.

  “No, they don’t,” said Odile. “And they don’t control it here, either. People do. That guy does. We just need to figure out what he wants to hear.”

  Tania nodded, got an idea for a safe strategy, and then it was their turn.

  “IDs, please,” said the unit officer, a thirtyish white dude who had taken his shiny helmet off but left his government-issue sunglasses on.

  Tania looked at Odile, who registered no doubt.

  Tania handed him her badge, and Odile her firm credentials, and they both flashed real enough smiles that they almost got one from the officer. He scanned their IDs, looked at his screen, looked at them, typed something, and made a cop face.

  “Sorry, ladies,” said the officer. “Heightened alert today, on-site personnel only, and you’re not on the list.”

  “That’s annoying,” said Tania. “We have a meeting in the Annex, kind of last minute, and they were supposed to log it this morning.”

  She gave him her most innocent face and watched to see his reaction. What she said was not entirely untrue. Just mostly.

  “Nope,” said the officer, looking back at his screen. “Who’s your meeting with?”

  Two of the other guards moved in behind them.

  “Andrea Fox in the Office of the Chief Procurer,” said Tania, using the name of someone she really did work with on occasion.

  “Okay, I will check on that.” The officer closed the window to his kiosk so you couldn’t see or hear what he was doing. Tania looked at her reflection in the black glass and didn’t particularly like what she saw. As if the icy wind and the bright sun exposed the truth behind the lies you told yourself thinking others would believe them.

  She looked away, at Odile’s still-smiling face, which managed to show the cold in lush rosy cheeks, the kind of skin that was made to look good in cold climates. She looked at the Secret Service soldiers, three of them now, clearly blocking them in. And she glanced at the growing line of workers behind her, starting to grumble at the delay.

  When the officer opened his whole door instead of sliding back the window, he had shifted into a more alert mode. You could see it in his eyes.

  “
Deputy Assistant Secretary Fox is not in the office,” he said. “Out all week.”

  “Right,” said Tania, thinking on her feet. “But we’re not actually having an in-person meeting. Just reviewing documents. Someone in her office was supposed to meet us.”

  “Uh huh,” said the officer. “Why don’t you two come with me and we can figure it out.”

  “Forget it,” said Tania, getting scared now. “We’ll just go back to our offices and reschedule. Sorry to hold you all up.”

  “Not that easy,” said the officer.

  Just then another officer walked up, plainclothes, kind of short for a Secret Service guy, blond hair working on gray.

  “Inspector,” said the officer. He handed them their IDs and pointed at the display on his screen, which Tania could not see.

  “We just want to see it,” said Odile, as the inspector assessed the situation. “To pay our respects. We didn’t know it was so restricted.”

  The inspector looked up at Odile, then back at her ID, and the screen.

  “Miss La Farge,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Odile, with the smile.

  The inspector tapped on the officer’s keyboard, then pointed him at something on the screen. The officer shrugged, and the inspector nodded.

  “Okay, Miss La Farge,” said the inspector. “You and your friend can go on in, up to the next perimeter, and take a quick look. Fifteen minutes. We’ll keep your IDs here at the box and you can collect them when you leave.”

  “Oh, thank you so much, sir. You are so kind. Please tell me your name.”

  “Nichols. Inspector Nichols. You can express your appreciation to your mother, and give her our regards.”

  “Oh, I will,” said Odile.

  “Come on through,” he said, guiding them to the radiation detectors.