The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  The most complicated run Kicky went on was as back-up in a three-car convoy; the mission was to abduct the Portland bureau chief of CNN and discuss the Army’s concerns about balance in his network’s reporting with him. Kicky watched three of her comrades, unknown to her, walk casually and calmly unmasked into a tavern across the street from the downtown headquarters of CNN where reporters hung out, and then emerge a minute later dragging the stunned executive by the arms, throw him into the lead vehicle, a van, and the drive off. On Wingo’s direction, she followed the van for about a mile, heading west toward Highway 30, and then after a short conversation on his cell phone Wingo said, “Okay, that’s all for us. Wrap it up and head back to your car.”

  “Uh, they gonna kill him or what?” asked Kicky.

  “We wouldn’t have bothered to snatch him if we were going to kill him,” explained Wingo with a laugh. “Reporters require some delicate handling. Sometimes we just whack ’em, of course, if they’re non-white or Jewish, but this is another one of those cases where we don’t want the guy dead, we just want him to change his behavior. It’s far more to the benefit of all concerned if he does. They’ll have a quiet word of prayer and then cut him loose somewhere with his instructions forcibly imprinted on his memory. Maybe a little the worse for wear, but nothing permanent. You may well notice a change in the coverage we get from CNN here in Portland after this, like dropping that nasty term ‘terrorist’ when they refer to us. Betcha from now on we’re ‘white Nationalist insurgents’ or something of the kind, and from now on our media releases will get a lot longer sound bytes and be read out in full.”

  Once Kicky was doing a Bob’s Bowlerama run for Ace, at night. He had gotten into her cab at a corner—Kicky never did figure out how the NVA seemed able to track her all over the city almost at will, and it made her nervous. He simply told her “Drive around town for a while. I’m waiting on a call. Don’t get on any freeways, because you’ll have to stop somewhere in a bit.” After about five minutes of silent cruising he got a call on his wireless phone, spoke briefly to someone on the other end, and said “Okay.” He hung up, punched in a number, and told Kicky, “Pull over and turn on the overhead light.” She pulled into a parking lot and turned on the light. Ace reached over the seat and handed her the phone and half a sheet of folded typing paper on which were printed some words in large type. “Hit send and call this number,” he directed her. “If a man answers, or if it kicks over to voice mail, don’t say anything. Just hang up, because we don’t want them to get your voice just yet. It should be a woman who picks up. When she does, just read this out to her, and then hang up. Don’t get creative and don’t let her keep you on the phone.”

  Kicky took the phone and glanced over the paper. “Hey, neat!” she said. “I always wondered who did these things. Who am I calling?”

  “A reporter from the Oregonian,” replied Ace. “The CO likes to use her for call-ins. He likes messing with her head.”

  Kicky hit send. The phone rang and a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Caroline, this is Captain O’Neill,” read Kicky. “The confirmation code is Let Freedom Ring. Stand by for a communication.”

  The woman on the other end squawked in sudden fear and consternation. “What! This is a new cell and nobody has this number yet! I got it so you maniacs would stop calling me!”

  Kicky read the words from the sheet in a steady voice. “At 2035 hours tonight, elements of C Company, First Portland Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army carried out a General Order Number Four enforcement action directed against the Blue Lagoon Lounge on 82nd Avenue in Portland, a known resort of drug dealers, transvestites, and non-whites posing a clear and present danger to the white community. A vehicle containing two hundred pounds of explosives was parked in front of the main entrance and detonated, destroying the building and everyone inside it completely. All sexual deviates, Jews and other non-whites are reminded that Army General Order Number Four prohibits their presence anywhere in the Homeland, and if found within any NVA command’s area of operation they are liable to immediate termination as military targets. End communication.”

  “Wait!” squealed the woman. “Let me get a pen. What did you . . . ?” Kicky closed the phone and handed it back to Ace. “Uh, comrade, looks like this script was printed earlier today, before the bomb could have even gone off,” she inquired, handing it back to him as well. “How could you know beforehand that everything I just said would happen according to plan?”

  “It did. That was the confirmation call I got just now,” said Ace. “As to how we knew beforehand, the Red Baron never misses.”

  “Red Baron?” asked Kicky.

  “Best car bomb maker in the NVA,” said Ace proudly. “He not only makes ’em, he drives his own work. Maybe you’ll meet him one day.” A moment later, Kicky felt her own cell phone at her side vibrate. She guessed that Lainie Martinez was having an orgasm at the thought of getting close to a major NVA explosives expert, and was sending her a hint that she was to pursue the subject, which she ignored. The memory of the electrodes and the needles hadn’t faded by a long shot, but Kicky’s conscience and rebellious streak was starting to stir again, both fueled by the sense of freedom and near happiness she was beginning to feel when she was out with the NVA, striking back.

  After every outing with the Volunteers, Kicky was carefully extracted from her routine as soon thereafter as it could possibly be accomplished, and brought into the Justice Center for a thorough debriefing in a variety of unmarked vehicles as diverse as the NVA’s motor pool, unmarked cars with tinted windows, utility repair trucks and vans, taxis driven by undercovers, and once in an eighteen-wheeler delivering supplies to the Green Zone. She was usually taken up the back elevators to the same interview room where she had been tortured, just on the inside of the locked task force door marked “Maintenance Personnel Only.”

  But on one of her trips into the Justice Center to confer with Lainie Martinez and the hovering Jamal Jarvis, who seemed to have less and less to contribute to the proceedings, some questions arose about some mug shots she was looking at in an effort to put names to NVA faces, and in the end Kicky was finally admitted into the inner sanctum, the operations center itself. Two detectives were huddled over some computer printouts in the corner, and two more were doing something at computers on a long table against the wall beneath the obligatory framed photographs of President Hillary Clinton and Chief Linda Hirsch. One of them called out “Sharkbait on deck!” and the four of them stared at her in open curiosity for a long moment, then turned back to what they were doing.

  “Sharkbait?” repeated Kicky.

  “That’s your code name in here,” Lainie told her.

  “Well, that’s encouraging!” said Kicky in exasperation.

  “At least it ain’t Jailbait,” rumbled Jarvis.

  She found herself in front of the biggest whiteboard she had ever seen in her life, hanging on the painted cinderblock wall opposite her, almost covering one side of the room. On the whiteboard was drawn in multi-colored erasable marker a crude and confusing, but judging from the erasures and marginal scribbles a steadily growing organizational chart of the kind long beloved by FBI and other law enforcement bureaucrats tracking the Mob or other criminal enterprises. The table was headed “First Portland Brigade” with a small box flow-charted out to the right side labeled “Second Brigade?” Below the main heading was a spider of layered boxes going down to the bottom of the board. The first layer consisted of companies, marked A through F. Most of the boxes were filled in with question marks. Only A Company was filled in with the name of a company commander, Billy Jackson, and a set of old mug shot photos of Jackson were tacked into his slot. Below Jackson was the name “James Wingo” and a set of mugs from Angola Prison, marked “Team Leader.” Below Jimmy’s box four boxes spidered out, one marked “Mister Rogers?”, two with “Thing One?” and “Thing Two?” respectively, and one with only a question mark. This was the result of Kicky�
�s first NVA mission, the punishment beating of Gregory Booth. There were more boxes sticking out hither, thither and yon from the main stem with slots for Lavonne, Kevin, so forth and so on. Off to one side was a box containing old police mugs of a woman in her mid-thirties labeled “Racine Wingfield, recruits female subjects, married Carter Wingfield FBI #288995-3.” It took Kicky a moment to recognize the old lady who had interrogated her in the house in Gresham; the photos were thirty years old.

  Some of the other boxes were already filled with names and photos. Kicky was surprised to learn that Ace’s real name was Felix Biedermann, and she had to remind herself never ever to slip up and call him Felix. On another wall hung a row of clipboards on hooks, each with a file attached and covered with post-it notes holding little snippets of information, casual remarks made on one of Kicky’s wires that might lead to identifying the individual, a list of assorted crimes either committed in Kicky’s presence or imputed to that person in some conversation the surveillance had picked up, and other notations. “Slowly but surely, we’re building up the kind of picture we need of who and where these people are, and one day when it’s complete, we make our move,” explained Lainie proudly. “We get them all in one big strike. Except for Lockhart, of course. He goes one way, immediately. Any word on him?” she asked pointedly.

  “You should know,” said Kicky sullenly. “You hear everything I hear.”

  “Yes, but the chief is starting to put some pressure on us to begin showing some results,” admitted Martinez.

  “I only saw him that one time in Jupiter’s Den,” said Kicky. “They’re starting to trust me now. If I start asking questions about him or anyone in particular, like I’m trying to finger somebody, that will tip them off and get them really suspicious again.”

  “I know that and you know that, Kristin,” said Lainie with a sigh. “But you have to understand, we’re police, and police are supposed to arrest people who commit crimes. It’s very hard to sit here day in and day out with bullets flying and bombs going off all over Portland with egg on our faces. I mention this because the pressure from up top to start showing some tangible results is getting heavier and heavier. We’re going to have to start making some busts based on information you’ve provided, or mostly on what we’ve been able to figure out ourselves based on information you’ve provided.”

  “Oh, great!” moaned Kicky, burying her head in her hands. “No sooner do I start getting on the inside then you point them right at me! Oh, thanks a lot!”

  “Believe it or not, Kristin, for once I sympathize, and I’m in your corner on this,” growled Martinez. “The worst thing that could happen would be for something to alert the NVA that you’re in there, before we are ready to strike. As much progress as we’re making, that day is still a long way off. If we start making arrests we can’t really account for, then that’s going to set off alarms for them. I will hold off the chief as long as I can, and I will do everything I can to prevent you from being compromised. We just have to hope it’s enough.”

  “If you blow it, I’ll give you a collect call from beyond the grave,” muttered Kicky in sick apprehension.

  She noticed on further visits as the weeks went by, that the little boxes on the board were beginning to fill up, mostly with pseudonyms as the detectives attempted to match them with names. On a later trip into the operations center Kicky saw that Second Brigade now had its own whiteboard with names and a few pictures she had never heard of. “Are you getting all this information from me?” she asked Martinez. “I don’t remember meeting some of these guys.”

  “The information we pick up from your wire is what you might call our base line,” explained Lainie. “It’s recorded, organized, cross-referenced in our database, and then gone over with a fine-toothed comb by myself and a couple of private consultants, military-trained intelligence analysts whom you have no need to meet. Don’t worry, they don’t know your identity. No one outside the task force does.”

  “I’m just Sharkbait to them, right?” put in Kicky.

  “That’s all,” agreed Lainie, missing the sarcasm. “Even the people who are guarding your mother and your daughter don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, although they may guess. You would be astounded at what we can deduce just from analyzing the casual comments these men make when you’re with them. But you’re not our only source of information. This room is probably the most comprehensive and accurate intelligence resource now in existence on the Northwest Volunteer Army, because we are collating every scrap of data we get on the NVA from every source, not just in Portland but all across the Northwest. Anything we pick up from casual wiretapping, any forensic evidence from crime scenes, any gossip our regular CIs overhear, anything significant reported by our investigators in other departments, mountains of old pre-10/22 material some of which goes back a quarter of a century, even gossip and sensationalism off the tabloid newspapers and TV—it’s all in our databases now. Of course we also have access to the pre-10/22 federal and city hatecrime databases and intelligence files from across the country. One of your contacts will drop a nickname or some obscure bit of information that we can match, and then all of a sudden we know who and what the hell he’s talking about. We go into our files, and usually we’ve got either mug shots or some surveillance footage on these people if they were ever dumb enough to attend any kind of racist function or anti-immigration rally or anything of that kind. Every public event these people ever staged and most of their private ones were always riddled with law enforcement operatives. We start with a code name, and if we’re lucky a photo from your cab, we use holographic facial profiling and cross-reference everything, and we build up a profile, which eventually we cross-reference with something else, then we get a name and a bio, and that produces a hundred new leads. It’s like the ripples in a pond when you throw in a stone, ever widening outward. You’re the stone we threw into the pond.”

  “Let’s hope I don’t sink to the bottom for good,” replied Kicky dryly.

  “Every day we are learning more about their tactics, their mindsets and the way they think, and of course who they are and where they hang out. Eventually we’ll be able to scoop them up all at once, and they’ll never know what hit them.” Lainie was completely wrapped up in her vision, and the closer it got to fulfillment the more careless and the more inclined to risk Kicky’s life for a big payoff she would become. She had already made it clear that if Cat-Eyes Lockhart ever showed they were going to drop the hammer. This scared Kicky paralytic.

  Kicky lived for her visits with May and Ellie, the only thing that kept her sane. These had settled into a weird kind of twilight world where she appeared at the motel, played and watched cartoons with her daughter and socialized with her own mother as if she was just a working mom dropping in for a normal visit, forcing her whole situation out of her mind for a few hours, and then she disappeared again until the next time. She was amazed in her own mind that she hadn’t snapped under the pressure and either headed to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels in violation of NVA General Orders, or gone looking for a crack dealer in violation of General Orders and the law as well, but always the picture in her mind of the last time she had hugged Ellie kept her on the straight and narrow. She was terrified that if she slipped off the rails and did something while under the influence it would not only finish her with the NVA and maybe finish her literally, but that it would thereby destroy her daughter’s life as well.

  The tense new life seemed to be affecting May as well, for the better. Kicky noticed over the weeks that she seemed sober and alert even though haggard with worry, and the wastebasket in her room was no longer full of empty beer cans and broken-down twelve-pack cartons when she came in. May caught her looking at the empty wastebasket once, and even with the female contractor guard in the same room, she said, “I’m cutting back on the brew. It’s not good for my blood pressure, especially around here.” Kicky made some noncommittal comment, but her heart gladdened. Somehow she sen
sed that her mother had just told her that, in this extremity, she would do what she had to do in order to protect Mary Ellen. May might not succeed, but at least she would not fail because she was drunk. It was in its own way the deepest gesture of love Kicky had ever gotten from her mother. Again and again Kicky tore her mind apart trying to think of some way to get out of the deadly trap she was in, but so long as she could not get May and Ellie away from their captors, she knew that Martinez and Jarvis had her by the throat and she had no choice but to keep getting in deeper and deeper.