Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  Armed and Dangerous

  $5,000 for Info Leading to Detention

  “Citizen emergency alert,” said Clint. “Probably pinging on every phone within a hundred miles.”

  Sig did not like seeing his picture like that.

  “But I have a feeling they won’t have a lot of luck if you just stay off the map or whatever it is you do. I’ll find you if I need you. I know some guys that might be able to help me.”

  “Can the dogs help?” asked Sig.

  Clint ignored him.

  Sig loaded the gold in the bed of the truck with the dogs and put his share of four into a canvas bag he found under one of the seats.

  Sig rode with Clint until they got to the freeway on-ramp, where he jumped out and walked, carrying a package that Clint told him was probably worth fifty thousand bucks.

  “Don’t worry,” said Clint. “Be cool. I’ll come find you if you’re still around once I get a bead. I appreciate what you did.”

  Sig nodded, and Clint drove off.

  Sig walked down the frontage road for a while, in the shadows, until he tired and the heavy load finally caught up with him. Then he walked back into the woodsy area he saw behind a Royal Petroleum station, found a dark spot behind a pile of concrete rubble, and dropped his load.

  When he woke just before the sun broke, the first thing he saw was the gas station sign on top of its tall pole, illuminated from within. A big yellow crown like a king would wear, glowing against a field of mellow green.

  There still were kings in the world. Some were elected.

  The red and blue lights of a police car flashed nearby.

  He hefted the bag over his shoulder and walked farther into the woods, away from the road. The woods were bigger than he expected, piney and sprawling. Good cover but easy to walk through. He worked his way south.

  After a while he saw houses off through the trees to his right. There might be food there, too, or other stuff for the taking. He followed a trail that meandered most of the way, but when he got to the development it was behind a tall fence of painted steel.

  It was late morning, warm, sunny. He stood in the shade of the trees and looked through the fence at a huge swimming pool in the backyard of a three-story house that could have a hundred rooms. The house looked like it was made out of pieces borrowed from a dozen famous houses of lots of different countries. Like something a kid would make up, but real, and perfect.

  Moco told him Texas was like this. It was where the pipelines ended, pumping from every part of the Tropic they could suck it out of. And when it got to here, it came out as money that flowed into the rich people’s bank like water comes out of a faucet.

  There was a lady swimming in the pool with sunglasses on. When she got out, she dried herself in the sun, wiping off the water beaded over her skin. She was tan, blond, and enhanced. Her man was sitting at a table on the patio, reading on a tablet and talking on his invisible phone.

  Sig wondered how many gold bars they had.

  A servant came out from inside the house to check on them. Then a bigger guy walked around from the front yard, wearing a loose-fitting resort shirt. He looked around, then looked right at Sig.

  The bodyguard tapped his ear and started talking to his thumb.

  The dogs ran around the other side of the house.

  The woman covered herself. Her man looked up from his work.

  Sig ran, as best as he could without dropping his gold.

  Five minutes later he could hear the sirens.

  He found a man-made creek that ran for a quarter mile, then hid in a culvert until it was quiet.

  He got really hungry that day.

  70

  While she hid in her room and waited for Odile, after she gave up looking for network coverage of the riot she had just witnessed, Tania looked for gold inside the screen of her government-issue laptop, seeing what she could find before they cut off her access, while the weird programming on Channel 11 of Mr. Wizard TV played in the background.

  Every command she typed, she half-expected to get a lock out alert.

  What she was looking for wasn’t in any of the places you would expect it to be. She looked to see if she could read into the records of the Federal Emergency Detention Facility—South Central Region, formerly known as the Superdome. The other screen, the analog box, kept distracting her.

  The program on Channel 11 was grainy color video. Footage from inside some shipyard of guys unloading a freighter, at night, under lamplight. MMCs, from the look of it. You could tell whoever had the camera wasn’t supposed to be there.

  The Dome was in a bit of an information lockdown. Contractors ran the inside, behind the perimeter maintained by the Army. It still amazed her that they let them use corporate security protocols without providing private keys to federal investigators. She could try to route a fix, but then she’d have to explain why she was following this thread.

  They said the President still maintained ties to his old company and used them as one of the instruments of the Executive. The guys running the Dome were probably some subsidiary of P-B.

  The corporates were unloading people now, herding them off the boat like livestock. They were brown people, Central Americans probably, what Bert sometimes called involuntary refugees, and the law sometimes called guest workers—like in Tania’s Reinbeck case. They looked tired, terrified, and hungry.

  Tania wondered if Odile would come through. And if she did, if that would be a ticket that could get her in.

  A couple of the men being herded off the boat tried to break for it. One of the corporates blew an air horn, like you’d use to scare off dogs, and then a gun went off. That spooked the whole group and started the stampede. And then a lot more guns went off.

  After the last lingering shot of blood on the dock, the screen went to a test pattern and then to a primitive animation. A robot armadillo waddled into view, stood up, and peeled back an armored hatch in his belly, revealing a television screen. Rabbit ear antennae came out from behind his ears.

  “Change the channel!” he said in a cartoon voice.

  Then he popped into little dots that dissolved into whiteout.

  Really.

  And then the channel changed itself. Blinking message in the middle of the screen.

  >>>>>FRESH FOOTAGE<<<<<

  Cut to lightpost surveillance camera view of men loading a plane. MMCs, by the look of it. The footage infrared enhanced, weird glow.

  What the image showed would make a very good start on a very serious case, were Tania still in a position to open new files. She tried to see where exactly they were. Made notes. Tail number. Signage.

  And then it went really crazy.

  A giant dog.

  A fat man.

  Guns guns guns.

  And . . .

  Sig.

  The little fucker. He was turning into a damn TV star. Reality bandit. That it was rebel pirate video only made it worse.

  She could yell at him after she saved him.

  71

  The day after, Sig walked from his squat down to the old railroad bridge by the water treatment plant, still carrying his heavy load.

  He followed the tracks over the bayou and north past the back sides of factories and warehouses and a baseball field to where there was another bridge, this one over the East Freeway. Sig stood up there for a minute, watching the ten lanes of cars and trucks going both directions, toward Florida one way and California the other. He thought of big fat Dallas relaxing on a beach. Then he imagined him in a cage.

  Then he imagined him dead.

  On the north side of the freeway was a big Siesta Mart, the grocery store where they also sold sombreros and cheap work boots. The Siesta anchored a run-down strip mall and a little retail business district, with a store where you could buy clothes on layaway, an AutoShack for folks who fixed their own cars, a chicken joint, a pawnshop, and a martial arts school.

  What caught Sig’s eye, though, was what was next to
the Siesta. A shop with a big sign in the window that read:

  We Buy Gold

  Sig went inside. The place was small, basically a counter with one window. The window was made of bulletproof glass. Behind the window was a skinny white guy with cigarette smoke skin and smudged glasses. The guy was haggling with a middle-aged black woman who was trying to sell him a handful of gold chains. The chains were balled up in the space between the window and the counter. The lady was upset.

  “What kind of country is it where you gotta work for forty years only to have to sell the things your dead husband gave you just to pay for the goddamn pills you need to keep walking,” she said, taking the hundred-dollar bill the man had slid in front of her.

  She walked out, giving Sig a mean look on the way.

  “Fuck you, too, Chief,” she said. “What are you looking at?”

  The door closed hard. The clerk took the chains and put them in a drawer.

  Sig set his duffel on the counter. The evident weight had the clerk’s full attention. And then Sig pulled the zipper across and revealed the contents.

  The clerk leaned forward, hands on the counter.

  “Can I see one of those?” he asked.

  Sig slid one of the bars through the slot.

  The clerk lifted the bar up to the light and smiled.

  “I’ve worked here for a year and a half and I’ve never seen one of these,” he said. “These are Good Delivery bars. Fort Knox stuff.”

  The clerk turned the bar and inspected the inscriptions.

  “Is that Chinese or something?” asked the clerk.

  Sig shrugged.

  “Where the hell did you get these?” asked the clerk.

  “I earned them,” said Sig.

  “Right,” said the clerk.

  The clerk weighed the bar. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s like four hundred ounces.”

  “How much money?” said Sig.

  “Oh, man,” said the guy. “I wish, pal. We don’t buy hot property. We buy people’s jewelry, basically. Look around. This ain’t exactly PetroBank.”

  “How much,” said Sig.

  The clerk stroked his chin.

  “I could do five,” he said.

  “They’re worth fifty thousand,” said Sig.

  “Maybe to a legitimate owner, with provenance and a bank or broker to sell it.”

  Sig scratched his head.

  “Pay me that for just one of them,” said Sig. “I’ll save the rest.”

  “Twenty-five hundred for that,” said the clerk.

  Sig nodded. They settled up.

  72

  Watching TV that night ended up being the way Tania finally found the Classified List of Banned and Suspicious Persons. Sort of.

  Limousine liberator Odile had been bugging her to look for it for years. But skeptical Tania had mostly believed her bosses when they told her it was an urban legend. An invention of the radical opposition designed to discredit the efforts of the Executive to keep the people safe. Maybe they were suckers, too. The security clamps on the file were insane. It would only be a matter of time before the autonomous auditors would find her trail.

  But once she got the idea that it could be real, she had to try. Todd had shown her some tricks awhile back, plus she had a few of her own.

  The real trick to finding the Enemies List, it turned out, was kind of simple. You had to be doing work inside the system on someone who was already on it.

  It started with trawling the property tax records of Orleans Parish, Louisiana. Which were kind of a mess after the years of disaster recovery, rebellion, expropriation, occupation, and corporate piracy, but they still managed to make sure they knew who to collect from on commercial properties like the broadcasting facility on the east side of New Orleans that Todd had pinpointed as the strongest source of the transmissions—radio as well as TV signals, with signal strength somehow amped up even further.

  Nine months earlier the property had changed hands, sold off by a holding company owned by the members of some old family who’d all run for Houston before the hurricane with the rest of the city’s owners, and given up after Maxine and the Colonel led the uprising and gave their powers to the people. The buyer was a Nevada company called CARMA-NET Inc. An hour and a half on the Nevada secretary of state’s database through a labyrinth of a dozen companies ultimately led to Zapata Communications Ltd.

  Walker.

  Walker was such a sleazeball Tania could almost forgive the Executive for tagging him like this. Then she found the portal, through the Leviathan server, that took her to the full Enemies List. The codes she had collected inside BellNet were the extra keys she needed to open the vault.

  After she found Lisbet’s name on there, she spent an hour looking for other people she loved.

  Mom, surprisingly, was not on it.

  Then she looked at everyone else.

  Tania had the young lawyer’s idea that the rule of law restrained the exercise of executive power. But the truth she now understood was that law merely served power, like the devil’s butler. Sampling the hundreds of thousands of entries, she saw how they had lawyered the thing up to make it look legit, even as its arbitrary and political character was evident on its face. The standard for inclusion was low—reasonable suspicion. Of what, exactly, the law was no longer terribly worried about making clear. Suspicion of whatever qualities the people in charge of eliminating seditious threats during the twenty-plus-year state of emergency thought made it worth a tag.

  “Enforcing the Constitution,” they called it.

  Once you were tagged, they pulled in all your history, from all the private data mines that had been tracking you as a unit of commerce and labor since you went through puberty, and sometimes before. They layered it over the more sober history maintained by the state in its official records, and your life was mapped from a thousand points of data—things bought, calls logged, trips made, content consumed—and a plausible narrative written to support your categorization. The ending of which might be enhanced surveillance, “temporary” detention, or extraordinary deportation.

  The Enemies List wasn’t the only thing she found. Walker’s files also led her into the classified MMC ledgers, the ones even her office couldn’t normally access, which showed the flow of funds from offshore plunder into the masked accounts of the President and his cronies, again under specious color of law. She felt like she had stumbled upon the hidden door in the wall of the library, where they keep the books she had always thought imaginary. It was probably a snow day glitch that she had access, something that would be corrected, maybe in a few minutes.

  All the more reason to act while she could.

  Tomorrow was her deadline to go back in. Gerson was waiting, and ready to come get her.

  Tania knew what to do. It would require her to violate all of her oaths, three confidentiality agreements, and a half-dozen federal criminal statutes. It was what her pre–law school self would have done. It was the thing the spirit of the law compelled, even as the letter of the law made it treason punishable by a life locked up in the Supermax (if you were able to stay off death row). She had worked with a lot of whistleblowers, but she never thought she would become one.

  If she took the list, she’d be added to it. Probably pretty close to the top. It might take them a few weeks to figure it out, or maybe a few minutes. The idea was horrifying and liberating at the same time. If she pulled it off—really pulled it off—there wouldn’t be any more list.

  It didn’t really feel like a choice.

  So she took the first step into oblivion. She shared all the files with herself, renamed the copies, put them all in a pocket drive, and packed them in her bag.

  She made a tiny excerpt for Davis the insurgent HR lady, the page that had her on the list, hashed it with the key, and put it in her dropbox. She had her Subway ticket for sure now.

  If Gerson and company came knocking before she could cross over, Tania would tell them she was trying to penetrate
the network. Which had the benefit of being true.

  She wanted to avoid that, though. She sent Gerson a note, saying she found the good stuff and was ready to come in. That made her imagine being back in detention, without a way out for her or any of the people she loved. Just to be safe, she moved to a different hotel in the middle of the night that night. One that was even dumpier, in another state, and accepted cash and fake names.

  And on her way there she threw the phone, the one Gerson gave her, into the Mississippi.

  Maybe it would get there before her, to the sanctuary city at river’s end.

  73

  There was a little bench outside the Siesta. Sig sat there quietly with an old Mexican man, watching the cars and people come and go, all trying to make it to the next day.

  Sig noticed a sign stapled to a nearby pole. Bold letters on bright yellow paper.

  CA$H

  FOR YOUR

  GUN$

  TOP DOLLAR

  1-866-437-9912

  Sig reached into the right front pocket of his blue jeans and pulled out the contents: some pocket change, the coin he had extracted from the boar, and a crumpled-up classified ad Dallas had ripped out of the paper and given to Sig.

  Adventurers wanted. Paladin Global. Security personnel. Travel. No background checks.

  Up on top of the Siesta was a big billboard with the face of a white guy with a suit and tie and dreadlocks. Donald Kimoe, Esq. The lawyer the law is afraid of. Free initial consultation. Toll-free number.

  A few feet away was an old pay phone, the handset dangling by a sectioned metal cord.

  He was finishing his call when Clint pulled up. Clint was driving a different vehicle—an old Volkswagen Amok with New Mexico plates. The thirty-year-old SUV was a sunbaked yellow. So was Clint’s face, even as he tried to look in charge of the situation.

  “What the fuck you sittin’ there starin’ at,” he said. “Let’s go. New Orleans is a long drive.”