War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  Statement, ID, and debit card lay in her beltpouch along with a map, the location of the police station carefully circled. Best go in now, she thought, post bail quietly and get her students out. She had some notion of bringing them back to her on-campus house for breakfast.

  Better not, she told herself. She might as well tell her colleagues and her dean, accept the escort of however many university lawyers they would probably unleash, and, dressed in her most formal suit, drive ceremoniously to the station. Where, no doubt, things would take forever if they happened at all. She had suspicions that the lawyers would express “grave reservations” and other such language designed to stop her from doing what she thought was right until her brother could be called.

  A campus cruiser whirred slowly toward her. Jogging alongside was a cleaning crew in coveralls and sun visors. Workfare recipients? she thought. They ran in step, without the sloppy individualism of the Welfare Island denizens. Almost, she thought, as if they were programmed. Their coveralls bore the University seal. One lifted his visor to wipe his brow. His face was very young, his eyes blank. Students had an ugly word for the maintenance squads: campus nulls. No one knew where LAU found so many of them. Student myth insisted they had defaulted on their loans.

  She ran by them, noting from the corner of her eye the rent-a-cop’s surprised look. Damn! He’d probably call that in. She turned a corner, looking down as her running shoes sent broken glass cracking and scattering, and scuffed through stained, torn paper. Legs and feet assumed the rhythm of a thousand morning runs on the streets by the Observatory or on the beach by the big old family place at Manchester. The smells were painfully different—urine and fear instead of clamshells and the salt sea.

  She began to perspire, and her thick old gray sweatsuit settled into its familiar folds. She passed a broken shard of glass and saw the same lean woman she had seen reflected yesterday in the helmet of a hoplite’s riot gear: sandy-colored, rather than vivid, but wholly resolved. The street narrowed here. The station…that turn, or the next?

  She stopped and drew out her map.

  “Yo!”

  Wyn crumpled her map with one hand. With the other, slowly, she reached for her panic button.

  “Not gonna hurt you, lady. “It was a boy’s voice, reedy despite the tough street cadences. “What you doin’ here? Ain’ no place for you.”

  “I’m trying to help out some friends,” she answered before she thought. Don’t let him know you have money, not him, and not whatever friends he’s got with him. “They were…got caught in the riot yesterday.”

  “You the teacher?”

  “What?” She jumped at the voice and unfamiliar presence that questioned when she had expected threat. Something about its tones reminded her of her student she had come out to rescue, and she replied in Spanish.

  “Speak Anglo, lady, por favor. I need to learn it good and blow this fuckin’ Island like hermanito mio. An’ I don’ understand your kind of talk.”

  “Your brother?” Eyes and voice and face flickered as the boy rose from behind a scribbled-over, rusted dumpster.

  “In your class. How you think I know you?”

  “Want to go with me to the station?” Wyn asked. “He was arrested in the riot, defending some of the other students. I’m going down there now to bail him—”

  “No WAY!” cried the boy. “You stay clear. He’s gone now, you gotta think of him as gone.… I’m telling you the truth. Get outta here fast.”

  “It is the law,” Wyn said firmly, “that a Citizen—not just a Taxpayer, mind you—but any Citizen may post bail and be released unless he’s done something for which bail is, denied. It is the law.” Echoes—we honor the laws, and we honor the laws that are above the laws—rumbled like thunder in her mind. Or maybe that was the junker that clattered by on malfunctioning airtreads, forcing Wyn and the boy against a stained wall.

  “Law don’ work for us.” The street-crawler’s whine came back into the boy’s voice.

  “There is always law.”

  “For you, maybe. Rich lady. WASP lady. You go and talk, and maybe they give you coffee, maybe they call you ‘ma’am.’ But it won’t do no good.” The boy scrubbed a fist across his face. “They’re gone. Gotta think of it that way. Even our mama, and she cry all the time. Don’t go, lady. You don’t want them to know who you are.”

  “He’s your brother,” Wyn said. Her voice went high and reedy. It nettled her: here she was, prepared to go bail out her students, and this child warned her away. His own brother, for pity’s sake.

  The boy looked down. “He’s gone. And you’re off your turf.” He shifted from foot to foot, uneasy.

  “People coming?” she asked, arching one eyebrow up. “If we stand here too long.”

  “Walk me to the station,” she suggested. The longer she stood here, the less she liked the walls with their smeared graffiti and windows covered by broken boards or the way they pressed in on her, or how old-style dumpsters provided the sites of a hundred ambushes. “Get me there, and then take off.”

  He thought about it, glanced around with a sentry’s wariness, then nodded as if he were making an enormous concession. “Part way,” he grudged. “Gotta get home. Don’t want them to see me.”

  He turned his face away, but not before Wyn saw a dark flush of shame.

  She was used to precinct houses that aped the Georgian brick of her university, to police who nodded to her and called her ma’am. She was not used to the boy’s unease at approaching a police station or at the bunker that squatted between a garage and a locksmith’s; and she did not approve, either of the fear or the reasons for it. Booths heavy with Plexiglas and metal loomed up before it, well before it. The men and women in them stared down, not out. Wyn’s guide hesitated. “They know we’re here. Sense our body heat or something like that.”

  His feet shuffled, a strained, uncomfortable dance.

  What would be the point of giving him a reward? They were being watched: if not by the police, then by his friends or his enemies. No point.

  “I’ll be fine from here,” she said over a deep breath that made the lie believable.

  “They’re coming!” The boy’s voice cracked. At Wyn’s gesture, he vanished more quickly than she would have believed.

  “He bothering you, lady?” The officers who edged up to her wore gear only slightly less formidable than the visored helmets and shields of their riot equipment. One held a bell-mouthed weapon Wyn identified with some amazement as a sonic stunner: For me?

  “He was giving me directions. He was trying to help.” She raised her voice, hoping the boy would hear her.

  Their eyes raked her suspiciously. She wished for the protection that a car, a university escort, or the careful panoply of a dress suit might give her. She held her hands prudently away from the pouch at her belt.

  “I’m from the University. Wyn…Professor Baker, on leave from Harvard.” She managed not to wince as she brought out the seldom-used snobberies. “Classics department. Some of my students got caught up in yesterday’s disturbance. I came to bail them out.” And, seeing their disbelieving eyes on her gray sweatsuit and tousled hair, “I have ID and credit on me.”

  They gestured her to precede them into the stationhouse, a move that had everything to do with caution and nothing to do with courtesy. Her shoulder blades prickled every time she thought of the sonic stunner, of being clubbed down by a wave of inaudible noise, blinding, sickening dizziness.

  She was sweating as if she’d run the Boston Marathon by the time she moved through the metal detectors and stated her business, first to a uniformed receptionist, whose flat eyes blinked, once, skeptically at her, then widened as she produced ID and platinum card. The sudden respect in her voice made Wyn tighten her lips, and tighten them further as the officers who had brought her in escorted her past the barrier. Her show of money and ID made them more respectful, but only slightly.

  A flickering monitor and a bored officer faced her as she state
d her business. She knew her voice had taken on its most glacial New England snap as she stated her business.

  “All students who claimed Taxpayer status have been released to their parents. Unless, of course, they face additional charges.” His stubby fingers hit the keyboard with bored efficiency.

  “And the Citizens?” Wyn asked. “Several of my students had Citizen status only. I have their names and IDs.” She laid her list, culled from student records, on the man’s desk. He gestured it away.

  “Lady…” at her indignant eyebrow-lift, “Professor Baker,” he corrected himself, “don’t waste your time. All these…Citizens have been remanded to the proper authorities.”

  “Who are these ‘proper authorities’?” she, asked, her voice frosting over.

  “The Bureau of Relocation,” he told her. “They’ll be supplied with jobs, new homes, outside the urban infrastructure. It will give them new purpose and productivity.” His jargon came out pat, by rote, designed to reassure and, if not to reassure, to intimidate. She might not know much about BuReloc but she recognized a pacifying-the-tourists spiel when she heard it.

  “They were my students,” she insisted quietly, “They had perfectly appropriate jobs and purposes in life. I wish to restore what they had. How much?”

  For a sick instant, she feared the duty officer might take that as an offer of a bribe.

  “They’re out of my jurisdiction, Professor. Why don’t you go on home?” Go back to your library, Wyn heard. She flushed with anger.

  “I understand. Very well, then, officer. How do I contact the Bureau of Relocation?” she asked.

  “Lady, you don’t. And you don’t understand what you’re letting yourself in for. Now, you look like a nice person who just doesn’t understand the rules. So, I’m telling you: go home. Smith, Alvarez! Lady here can’t go back to campus on foot; it was crazy a thing to come out here at all. Give her a ride back, will you?”

  She could just imagine turning up on Faculty Row in a patrol car and having to apply CPR to half the cowards on campus.

  “I’d rather have you escort me to the Bureau of Relocation,” she told them.

  “Lady…” One man laid a hand on her elbow. She jerked it away.

  “Professor, you’re upset; you’ve had a scare; you’re not used to this. Why don’t you let us take you to a doctor.…”

  A nightmare vision of an outside physician, a diagnosis of nervous, over-privileged woman, a regimen of too many tranquilizers, blunting not just her anger but also the keenness of her mind, tore through her thoughts. She was afraid, more afraid than she had been as she jostled through the wrecked streets.

  She spun away, backing against the wall. They came at her as if they were trying to tame a spooked horse. Their out-raised, weaponless hands… she remembered hands like that on clubs, hurling her students down, hauling them here, then tossing them to the Bureau of Relocation….

  “Stay away from me,” she demanded.

  They kept advancing. Her back touched the wall. Her fingers touched the poli code and, as their hands fell upon her arms, she jerked one hand free and pressed the panic button.

  She had just exchanged jailers, Wyn thought as she sat in the soft leather First Class of what she considered an unnecessarily luxurious LAX/Logan shuttle. Muscle from the private security firm her brother had engaged to protect her—or keep her from making a fool of herself—sat guarding her. A woman sat on one side; across the aisle was a male guard.

  Even now, she didn’t like to think of the scene that she had caused by pressing the poli code. A jurisdictional war between private security and the LAPD was only the least part of it. As the lawyers screamed, she had been hustled out of the station and back to campus. The dean’s hysteria, her brother’s outrage at what he called her recklessness, a veritable feeding frenzy of reporters…in the end, packers had been called in, and she had been whisked off-campus and onto the first available transport for Boston.

  Her brother had wanted to charter a plane. For once, she had managed to overrule him on something. But a car would be waiting. She winced at the expense, at the needless, ostentatious care, as if she were some rock star or new rich who needed a vulgar display of paranoia to establish her importance. Her male and female companions seemed more captors than companions, and they muttered about her brother with the respect that a priest might use for a captious deity.

  Glancing over at her escorts for what was, essentially, permission, she reached into the carryall they had allowed her to bring with her. A few books, some tapes…there was her financial statement. She pulled out the prospectus for the BuReloc bonds and began to read.

  A very important and long-lasting anger smoldered within her. “Go back to your library.” Most recently, her brother had reinforced that order, which was right out of her infancy. “Don’t play with the children in the street. Stay in your own garden.”

  But there was blood on the roses. Even if she’d thought lifelong she wasn’t good for much else, she had to wash the blood off those damn roses.

  She looked down at the transaction record on her statement, found one of her guards watching, and turned the paper over.

  Something about those bonds…a name on the prospectus…surely she had seen that name before. She turned to the description of a limited partnership, of which her brother had made her a silent, but voting partner. Sure enough…she recognized one name as a judge, another as a congressman. She remembered a dinner table conversation about a few court cases; that is, she remembered hearing a few names—Bronson, Niles, Tucker—before she had turned her attention from what she had always thought sarcastically of as Important Business Affairs to faculty gossip.

  Foolish, wasn’t she? Her lips formed a silent whistle, and she recalled what one of her keepers had said. “It’s a wonder they let her out without a leash.”

  A wonder indeed, if she wandered about with her eyes and ears sealed by ancient history. What was that sanctimonious stuff about law she had told the street kid?

  The kid had known enough to run. But she wasn’t a scared kid, she thought. In that case…if she could find a conflict of interests, a bribe or some knowledge of inside information, which (she now recalled) had dealt one of the blows to the world’s economy from which it had never recovered…It would never occur to Putnam to think she would know that.

  And for once, she would have a weapon in her own hands. She thumbed on her hand comp. It was a small unit, more used to writing than to database searches. She had always been a good researcher. By the time she landed at Logan and was hustled into a waiting car and the indignation of various family members, she had what she thought was a clue, a weapon and an end to her naiveté.

  Over iced tea and poached salmon, her brother lectured her on discretion, security and what she owed the family. Wyn disagreed.

  May sunlight shone through the familiar, beloved ugliness of Memorial Hall’s stained glass windows. It stained the old floor, hollowed by footsteps, with the color of blood; and blood was in the air.

  In the year since her eviction from Los Angeles, Wyn had been through enough Welfare Islands to know when someone was being stalked. The pack was gathering; the hunt was on; and she was their prey.

  She shrugged one shoulder, adjusted the strap of the old-fashioned green book bag, and entered Sanders Theatre. Briefly, the smell of the ancient, polished wood overpowered the scent of blood. For more than a century, someone had taught the introduction to ancient literature here. She wondered how long it would take Harvard and the Department to name her successor—or if they would bother. Already, she had heard rumblings that the subject material was not just irrelevant to learning how to run a business or treat a cancer, but subversive. Look what it did to Mad Wyn Baker.

  This sort of thing happened in the best of families. They used to shut the strange ones up in attic rooms, or let them rove about the big old country houses. Now, of course, there were drugs and rest homes.

  She wondered what excuse would be fo
und when whatever was planned actually happened. Because no threats had been made, no protection orders could be issued. “They don’t mean squat!” one of the women in the Dorchester Project had assured her about such orders.

  It had been a mistake to inquire about her students, now long vanished. She knew that her inquiry had been reported where it would do her the most harm, in those carefully, lavish offices where her brother and his aides compiled a dossier on Professor and Doctor Winthrop Baker and her troubled state of mind. Did she seem…composed when she pressed her police call button? Did she perform her duties in a satisfactory manner upon her return? Would you call Professor Baker’s involvement in the Literacy Programs at the Welfare Islands characteristic behavior? Did you notice any…uh, behavioral quirks when she was arrested on charges of civil disobedience?

  Even her housekeeper had been questioned: Does Professor Baker appear cheerful? Does she keep irregular hours? Has she ever said…? The poor woman had reported the questions and her answers to Wyn. When she realized how her answers might be used, she had broken down in tears, and Wyn had to dose her with her best brandy.

  She suspected they would use her as another example of how professors shouldn’t interfere in business, much less politics. Probably the excuse would be the usual one for a woman and an intellectual. She was working too hard, poor thing. And then she started poking into business and wasn’t up to the stress. What could you expect?