by Blake Banner
“Don’t be naïve, Lacklan. Russia would not come in on the side of Iran. But Europe would impose severe sanctions on the U.S. if we struck at Iran with a nuclear missile. Our military presence in Europe is very significant. We have U.S. Naval Forces Europe, U.S. Army Europe, U.S. Air Force in Europe, U.S. Marine Force Europe and U.S. Special Operations Command Europe. In addition to which we have about 250 nuclear warheads deployed in Italy, Turkey, Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium. Now, if those assets were seized by the European Union, driven by general public outrage, how do you think this president would respond.?”
A wave of nausea swept over me. I stared at him, and then at Hennessy. I heard my voice, but it was as though somebody else was speaking.
“Dear God… You were trying to trigger a war with Europe?”
Ben shrugged. “Why not? The last one was the best thing that ever happened to the U.S. The British Empire was crippled and we became top dog, remember?”
Twenty Two
Ben rose and walked toward the window that overlooked the internal garden. He stood in stark silhouette and stretched, making his vertebrae clunk. After a moment, he turned back to face us.
“You become pretty tedious sometimes, Lacklan. You’re hard work. We need a war. So does Europe. It used to be easy. Countries went to war on a regular basis. Now public opinion has become so damn precious, even when we go to war, people expect our soldiers to get through it without getting hurt.” He laughed and turned to Hennessy. “Hell! They even expect the enemy not to get hurt! So we needed a new 911. More than that, a new Pearl Harbor.”
Marni was staring from him to Hennessy and back again. “Why? Why in God’s name do you need to go to war with Europe? You must be insane.”
Hennessy sighed like he was getting bored of having to explain the obvious. “Come on, Marni, get real. Why does anybody go to war? Why has anybody ever gone to war? Religion? Of course not! Ideology? Of course not! People go to war over resources, land, arable land, food, water, minerals.”
Her voice was shrill when she answered. “And we are short of resources in this country?”
I said, “No, but we will be. Draw a line from Washington, D.C. to Washington state, and in twenty years, everything south of that line will be desert.”
She hadn’t lost the shrill edge to her voice. She almost screamed, “So what? Now we are going to invade Europe? Is that it?”
Hennessy said, “Don’t be absurd.”
“Don’t be absurd? Really? You are telling me not to be absurd? You want to start a fucking war with Europe!”
I said, “Marni.” She stared at me like she was ready to hit me. “We should have seen this. This should not be a surprise.”
She flopped back in her chair. Ben said, “Are we good?” I nodded. He went on. “Every so often, the world needs a war. As globalization and industrialization progress, necessarily those wars get bigger and their impact is more far-reaching. The wars in the Middle East have been beneficial, but we need something bigger, much bigger. Because when climate change really kicks in, we need to be in a position where we profit from it. Originally, our rival was Britain, then it was Russia, now it’s Europe. Does that answer your question, Lacklan?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Now, Dick was going to make a proposal. We establish the committee, as he already outlined. In exchange, we want something from you.”
“What?”
Ben looked at Hennessy. “Dick?”
He smiled, like he was granting us some great boon. “We want you to become permanent members of Omega. Lacklan, you will step in to your father’s position as Gamma. You will be second to me. Marni, you will come in as Psi. You will both manage the Commission on Education and Reform, and you will marry. You will be man and wife, and you will commit to Omega.”
I sat forward. “What? Why the hell…? What fucking business is it of yours…?”
“That’s the deal, Lacklan. We know you both have strong feelings for each other. We would like you to marry and have a family.” He laughed. “It’s not so unusual, guys! All over America, all over D.C., corporate culture is the same: we want you to get married, make a home, have kids! It breeds stability, loyalty, harmony, and integration. It cements the culture of mutual support. Don’t you love each other? I think you do.”
I drained my glass, stood, and went back for another. I poured a generous measure and turned to face them. They looked complacent, like they already knew the outcome of the meeting. I said, “What about Gibbons?”
Ben said, “He returns to Oxford unharmed.”
“What about his supposed murder?”
“A mistake. You are hailed as a hero and ISIS claim responsibility for the attempt, and you and Marni get a period of grace to make your plan work. But there is one thing we have not discussed yet.”
Marni said, “My father’s research…”
Ben said, “We must have that. That is not negotiable.”
She looked at me. We held each other’s gaze for a long moment, then she said, “I don’t see that we have much option, Lacklan.”
I looked at Ben and swore to myself that one day I would kill him. “OK, Ben. You have a deal.”
Hennessy smiled. “Excellent. That is very good news, and I am confident that you will not regret the decision you have made today. Marni, where is your father’s research?”
She buried her face in her hands and was silent for a long while. When she finally dropped them into her lap, her face was wet with tears. “It’s in a box in a bank vault in Oxford. I have to instruct them to send it here.” She turned to face Ben. “It must come via the diplomatic bag. The material contained in it is much too sensitive to risk any other means of transport.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a card. He wrote a name on it and handed it to her. “Have them send it to this man at the U.S. Embassy in London. I’ll advise him to expect it and forward it to former President Hennessy at this office, as a top priority, via the diplomatic bag. Will that satisfy you?”
She nodded.
He pointed at the desk. “You can use the phone over there.”
“Now…?”
“Yes, Marni, now.”
She looked at me, like she was begging me to do something, to stop this from happening. There was nothing I could do. She got up and went to make the call. Ben was studying me carefully. I didn’t give him much to read. Finally, he said, “I am quite serious about the marriage, Lacklan. I want you to see to that straight away. I want you living together and making a real commitment to Omega. Have kids. Be happy. Is that understood?”
I nodded and stood. “It’s understood, and now I’d like to get the hell out of here.”
Marni finished making her call and came and joined me by the door. She was having trouble controlling her tears. I put my arm around her but she shook her head and pushed away. Hennessy smiled at me, though his eyes were hard and cold. “It’ll take a bit to adjust, but give it time. Meanwhile, we’d like you to stay in D.C. just until the package arrives. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, just to make sure everything’s OK. My advice? Use the time to get acquainted. It’s been a long time since you two had a proper conversation.” He gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Hell, Lacklan, take your lady out to dinner, show her a good time, talk about the future. Things are going to be good for you guys from now on. You can stop looking over your shoulder.”
I held his eye a moment too long, then said, “Yeah, you, too.”
I opened the door and we stepped out. We didn’t speak in the elevator, or as we crossed the Pentagon rings, moving toward the exit. We didn’t talk until we were back outside in the sunshine. Then I took her in my arms and held her for a long while, feeling the cool breeze from the river on my face, listening to the cry of the gulls overhead and the mournful bray of a riverboat in the distance. She looked up into my face and I kissed the tears from her eyelids and her cheeks.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go and get drunk.”
>
* * *
We wound up in the Free State, a rustic basement on G St SW. It had only just opened. The place was almost empty and we were able to get a small table by the bare-brick wall, with a couple of high stools and a couple of draught beers. We sat in silence for a long while until she said to the table, “Why does he want us to marry?”
I stared at her beer for a moment, at her fingers holding it. “Would that be such an awful thing?”
She looked at me in astonishment and blinked. “If I were ever… If we ever married, Lacklan, I’d like it to be because we chose to, not because some weird-ass organization dreamed up by Chris Carter on a bad acid trip, tells us to.”
“I agree.”
“Why? What’s in it for them?”
I shrugged. “Control. With each of us operating randomly, doing our own thing, we were out of control. We did a lot of damage.” She held my eye and it was hard to read her expression. I went on, “You know ‘guerilla’ in Spanish means ‘small war’. If waged in the right way, it can do a lot more damage than a direct military confrontation, not only to the actual infrastructure of your enemy, but to their morale.”
“So you’re saying they want to convert us from wild guerillas into a small army that they can control?”
I nodded. “It’s what empires, ever since the Romans, have done. The Gauls, all of those Nordic and Celtic tribes, they were a pain in Rome’s ass, but they were too small and too quick to be effectively confronted by huge, slow moving armies. So they gave them incentives to consolidate, and then they employed them. They became some of the most effective legions in the Roman army. The British did the same in India and Africa, but they lost America because, here, they failed to do that. Bring the guerillas together into a force you can handle, then either destroy them or employ them.”
She sighed. “Literally marry them together.”
“Yup.”
“So I was right to avoid you for so long.”
“No. We need to act together. Marni…” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “I was wrong in London, when I said no. I wanted to protect you from what I had become. But I was wrong.”
Her eyes strayed. She nodded. “So what now?”
I stared down into the froth in my beer. It seemed to me to be clinging to the edge of the empty glass for dear life. I knew how it felt. I said, “Will you allow me to digress for a moment?”
She gave a small laugh. “Sure, it can’t do any harm.”
“I was in Afghanistan. We, the Regiment, we operate in groups of four.” I gave a small laugh. “We are recruited for our skill, resilience, commitment… all that stuff. But we are also recruited for being eccentric individualists. Not many people know that. Four eccentric individualists can do an immeasurable amount of damage to a Third Reich, a Soviet Union, ISIS, to any organization that wants to standardize human beings. It’s a very English way of looking at things.”
She nodded. “I get that.”
“It’s a long story, but, cutting to the chase, we were in the north of Helmand. We were attacked and we were separated. Sergeant Bradley, Bat Hays, and Nick Barns went one way, toward the extraction point, and I went another. I had to make my way south, back to Camp Bastion, through the desert, where there was no food and no water. So I had to make small raids on villages and farms that were trying to eke an existence out of the sand.” I paused and sighed, not sure myself what point I was trying to make. In the end, I said, “I was one man. All I was trying to do was survive. The regime of the Taliban demanded one thing, and one thing only, absolute observance of the Koran, absolute obedience to Allah and his prophet Mohamed. I was a bacterium. I was one, single organism that by its simple presence threatened the integrity of their entire body. Not by anything that I was doing, because all I was doing was stealing a chicken here, a tomato there, a canteen of water from a well. The threat came from the simple fact of my presence. Because I was an eccentric individualist, and my intention was to fight against their culture of absolute obedience.”
She studied my face for a long while, then said, “And only give up when you were dead.”
I nodded. “They want—they believe—that our marriage will make us easier to control. Let them believe that, Marni. But let our marriage be eccentric and individualist, and let our marriage be a virus in itself, that undermines the very fabric of Omega.” I hesitated, then went on, “Marni, because you are a mad scientist and I love you, because I am an eccentric individualist, and I love you, will you please marry me?”
She gave a small yelp and covered her mouth with her hands. The barman looked over and smiled. I saw tears spill from her eyes. I laughed, and she laughed and cried and reached for a paper napkin to mop her eyes and blow her nose. After a bit, she leaned across the table and took my hands. “Yes, Lacklan, I will.”
We talked then, and made plans. We ate, and talked more, about us, her and me, as unique, eccentric individuals, and what we wanted from our lives. Then we walked through the city streets, down the boulevards and avenues, strolled in the parks and the gardens. Indifferent to whether we were being followed or not, we made our path and we made our plans. And, as the sky turned to copper and the shadows grew long in that city designed by dreamers, libertarians, and Masons, two hundred and thirty years earlier, we fled. We hailed a taxi and fled, holding each other in silence in the back seat of the cab, traveling north and west, toward our temporary home, our refuge in the woods.
When we got there, my car was in the driveway. I felt a brief surge of anger at the thought of one of them driving my Zombie, as though they had somehow violated it. But I suppressed the feeling and told myself I would find the tracking devices later. There would be at least two, one for me to find, another for them to follow. Marni and I looked at each other and shrugged. Then we went inside.
Mrs. Henderson was there in the kitchen, and we told her our news, that we had got engaged. She was delighted and insisted on cooking us a meal that night. She lit the fire, though it wasn’t necessary, set the table with a linen cloth, a candle, and crystal goblets, and even retrieved a bottle of twenty year-old Burgundy from a wine cellar we didn’t know the house had.
At eight fifteen she placed a roast leg of lamb, a dish of roast potatoes, sautéed vegetables, and the wine on the table, gave us both a huge hug each, and cycled away into the gathering evening, ringing her bell and waving happily.
We stood on the doorstep and, after she’d gone, we kissed, for all the world to see. Then we stepped inside for our engagement dinner.
Twenty Three
As I started to carve, Marni dropped into her chair and buried her face in her hands. I kept carving, but after a moment I asked her, “Are you OK?”
She rubbed her face, then ran her fingers through her hair and heaved a huge sigh.
“Yeah. No. I don’t know, Lacklan. This… all this…”
“What about it? We discussed it. The least we can do is try to make it work.”
“I know, I know. And in theory, that’s fine. But I can’t shake the feeling that I am being a hypocrite. That I am somehow betraying my father.”
I handed her her plate with three slices of lamb on it. I smiled, though not exactly happily. “Do we have to do this now? We are supposed to be celebrating our engagement.”
She looked distracted. “I know. I’m sorry.” She helped herself to potatoes and vegetables and I poured the wine. When I sat down, I raised my glass to her.
“Here’s to us, and to the future.”
She stared at me for a long moment, hesitated, then raised her glass with little enthusiasm.
“To us.”
We drank and I set down my glass and leaned back in my chair while she started to eat.
“You know, I was in the Regiment for ten years.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“In many ways they were very happy years. I made very good, very loyal friends. They were more than friends, more than family. I could have stayed, made major or even colonel.”
She was chewing, watching me. She sipped and said, “But…?”
“Two things conspired to make me leave and come back, buy my shack in Wyoming and retire from the world.”
“What were they?”
“In no particular order, I grew tired of killing. You develop an emotional callus after a time, but it’s strange, your own lack of feeling ends up nauseating you. You want to feel. You need to. And when I’d done my ten years, I decided it was time to stop.”
I paused, and she said, without looking at me, “And the other?”
“You. Five years earlier you came to London and asked me to go home, so that we could be together. I told you no.”
“That’s something I am not likely to forget, Lacklan.”
“I regretted it the moment I’d said it, and I have regretted it every day since then. When I left the Regiment, I had a hope, maybe it was more of a hopeless dream, that if I came back to the States, maybe, somehow, one day, we might come back together. It is the one thing that has kept me going all this time.”
She looked serious and laid down her knife and fork. “This should be a joyful occasion, Lacklan. You know how I feel about you. But we are not alone at this table. Ben is here with us, Dick Hennessy is at this table. The whole damned organization is listening to our conversation, recording every word we say so that they can use it against us if they need to. It’s fake. It’s not real.”
“Marni, we have been through this! We talked about it! We decided it was the only course open to us. We may as well make the most of it. Those were your words.”
“Well…” She took another deep breath. “Maybe I was wrong.”
I frowned. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know if I can go through with it. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Lacklan! I am not a hypocrite!”
“So I am?”
“I didn’t say that…”
“What about Gibbons? You know what will happen to him if you back out?” She didn’t answer, just sat staring at her plate. I pushed. “They’ll kill him! And they’ll make it look like I did it!”