“I’ll be careful,” I say.
My “brother” is waiting for me in the bus depot at Vernon. He catches my eye then steps into the restroom. By the time I follow him in, he has checked all the stalls; we are alone.
He hands me a leather belt that is identical, right down to the stainless-steel studs set along its length, to the one I take off and hand to him. Squeezed between the new belt’s two layers of cowhide, I know, is a web of circuitry. While I am putting it through the belt loops of my jeans, he unscrews one of the buttons on my denim jacket, fills its hollow with a small, shiny battery, and screws the button back on. Through all of his, we do not speak and his gaze does not meet mine. When he is finished, he turns on his heel and leaves the restroom. Our association has lasted less than thirty seconds.
Not long after, I am on the bus to Kamloops.
“Loops,” as the locals call it, is where two major rivers—the North Thompson and the South Thompson—meet to run as one down to join the Fraser on its way to the Pacific. Long before the whites came, the river junction was a gathering place where native tribes met for peaceful trade, making it a perfect site for the Hudson Bay Company to establish a trading post. After the fur traders came the gold-seekers, and when the placer deposits were all played out, the high, dry plateau country around the junction of the two rivers was recognized as good cattle country.
Today, the city has spread from the river bottom up into the surrounding hills. It’s a prosperous place, peaceable in the Canadian way. And home to a colony of American asylum-seekers granted “landed immigrant” status—the equivalent of a US green card.
All this, and more, I know from the briefings given me in San Antonio. I never saw the Escalade man again, though I heard his voice in the hallway outside the room they put me in once I was cleaned up. That’s where the “more” came from. The door had been left ajar and I could hear him giving crisp, clear orders:
“…don’t tell me your problems, Major,” he was saying. “Just get it done. The snatch team will be in the safe house on the twenty-second. Every hour they’re in-theater, they’re in danger. We know the senator is in the vicinity, but they move her constantly. I want our Judas to find him not later than the twenty-first.”
There was a mumbled reply, but he cut it off. “I don’t concern myself with that level of detail. If you can’t cut it, I’ll have you transferred to one of the Wall camps, and you’ll find yourself nitpicking for real.”
A moment later, a worried-looking Apprentice-Major came into the room and took the other chair across the table from where I sat. He placed a thick file of papers between us, opened it, and said, “Straighten up, loser. We’ve got work to do.”
Kamloops’s Greyhound depot is on Notre Dame Drive, just east of the intersection where the street widens and turns into a divided boulevard. And not far west of that is the White Spot restaurant. It was getting on for evening and this far north the spring sun is long gone when I climb the concrete steps from the sidewalk and push through the front doors. The place is half-empty, not too brightly lit, but I can tell it’s a family-friendly restaurant from the scattering of parents and kids in the booths and at the tables.
There is a counter with stools near the kitchen walls and I make my way to it, setting my duffel down at my feet as I sit. I pick up a folding menu from the steel rack that holds salt, pepper, and vinegar and flip to the burger section.
I’m only doing what the Apprentice-Major and his subordinates told me to do, but the sight of the illustrations and the waft of cooking fat coming from the kitchen door behind the counter, brings not only saliva to my mouth but tears to my eyes. I remember, when Sharon and I were newlyweds, we loved the burgers at Le Diplomate on Fourteenth Street a couple of blocks from Logan Circle in the northwest part of DC. It seems like a thousand years ago now.
That’s not going to help, I say to myself, knuckling my eyes as a young man in waiter’s garb emerges from the kitchen, sees me, and comes over to give the counter in front of me an unneeded wipe. “How’re ya doin’?” he says. “Coffee to start?”
“Yeah,” I say, then have to say it again to make it come out clearly. I look through the menu again and say, “Didn’t you use to have a blue cheese burger?”
He has his back to me, pouring coffee from the carafe on the shelf behind the counter. Now he pauses halfway through before finishing. He turns and passes me the cup and saucer along with a spoon and two little containers of half-and-half cream. He is not looking at me but glancing around the restaurant. Finally, he says, “You must be thinking of the A&W.”
I say, “You know, I might just be at that.”
“Okay,” he says, and now he’s looking directly at me, “order some food and stay where you are.”
I point to a burger on the menu and he brings out a handheld device and pokes its screen then asks me if I want fries and coleslaw. I nod and he pokes again. Now he puts the handheld away and reaches into another pocket, coming up with a basic cell phone. He turns it on, pushes a speed-dial button, waits for a long moment, then says, “Sorry, wrong number.”
He turns off the phone, slides the back off it, slips out the SIM card and puts it on the counter, then reaches under and comes up with a pair of shears. He cuts the SIM into small pieces and throws them into a trash basket.
“Okay,” he says, though I think he’s talking to himself. Then he says to me, “I’ll get that burger platter. More coffee?”
The coffee is strong and flavorful, better than you’d get in most American burger joints. I’ve worked my way down to the bottom of the cup when he brings my food on an oval platter. Despite the coffee, my mouth is dry, but I take a big bite of the burger and find it juicy, with some kind of sauce beyond the usual mustard and ketchup. It tastes good. It tastes like freedom, and my eyes begin to tear up again.
I swallow another bite, then try the fries. Good again, and the coleslaw is chunky and chewable. My San Antonio trainers fed me decently, the same as they ate, but that was institutional food; after the slops in Camp 17, this is heaven.
The waiter is hanging around the counter, pouring me more coffee, but his attention is all for the front door. I see him come to alert and my hand holding the coffee cup shakes so I have to use the other one to steady it. I take a sip and wait.
A man slips onto the stool to my left, another takes the one on my right. They both order coffee and the young fellow brings out cups and pours.
The one on my left sips his black while the one to my right is stirring cream and sugar into his. Then the black coffee drinker puts down his cup, turns his head my way, and says, “How’s it goin’, eh?”
“Gettin’ better,” I say, careful to drop the “g.”
And the one on my right says, “Holy shit! Is that really you?”
I turn, and I’m looking into the surprised and delighted face of Charlie Wedley.
They take me to a house in the old part of town, down by one of the rivers. Charlie has already hugged me before we get into the car and he sits beside me in the back and chatters about a dozen different things. How did I get over the border? How are Sharon and Arthur? How he and Jeannine broke up after they got to Montreal and he immediately signed up for the Resistance that was already beginning to form. What kind of camp was I in? Was it as bad as they say?
The other man, sitting in the front passenger seat, leans over and tells Charlie to lay off. There’s a procedure for debriefing and he’s screwing with it. Abashed, my old editor puts up his hands in a gesture that says sorry. But he pats my knee and says, “We’ll catch up later.”
The debriefing is what I’ve been told to expect. First they take my bag and every stitch of clothing off me and examine it minutely. They scan my belt and boots with an electronic wand, the same with the buttons on my jacket and jeans. They find nothing and let me get dressed again.
Then come the questions, but the trainers have drilled me well. I tell them about how the A-Corps began shipping selected “losers” fro
m the Wall camps to new places in Oregon and Montana for “special handling.” We didn’t know exactly what that meant, but those of us familiar with the history of the Holocaust had a pretty good idea.
They shipped us in boxcars, I say, and the one I was in had a hatch at one end of the ceiling. It was loose, and one of us had hidden a four-inch nail in his rectum. We stood on each other’s shoulders and managed to slip the latch. Then we climbed out and lay flat on the roof of the moving car until it slowed on a long bend somewhere in southern Oregon. One by one, at half-mile separations, we dropped off the boxcar and went into the woods.
I tell them I stole clothes and a pickup from the back yard of a rural house in Deschutes County and made my way north and east, traveling mostly at night and taking logging roads and two-lane highways, cadging food from Dumpsters behind roadside eateries. The truck had a full tank and it took me all the way to Whitefish, Montana, where I ran it into a lake. Then I hitched a ride to a lumber town named Fortine and walked through the woods along Highway 93.
“What about A-Corps patrols?” my interrogator asks.
“I could see their lights coming up the road,” I say. “So I’d just duck back into the trees. They were dogging it.”
I crossed the border at a place called Roosville, I tell them. An eastbound Canadian trucker picked me up and took me all the way to Lethbridge, Alberta. He told me to look up Quakers in the phone book and contact them. They would help me.
“They did,” I say, “and they told me about Kamloops and what to say at the White Spot.” I know it’s safe to tell him that. Quakers won’t talk to anybody about refugees they help, not even to the Resistance. What they do is between them and God.
There are more questions. I give more answers. Finally, they put me in a room with a lock on the door. I’ll stay there until they can check my story. Charlie tells me not to worry. I tell him I won’t. That’s the truth because the A-Corps has fitted my story around elements of truth; there are new camps up north and people are being sent to them; there was an escape in Oregon, though most of the escapees were killed or recaptured within hours, some of them shot by local patriots alerted by radio and TV bulletins; Apprentice agents stole a truck in Deschutes County and left it in a Montana lake; their border-watchers at Fortine are due for replacement and punishment duty.
Eventually, as new information comes in, they might pick apart my cover story. But by then the senator will have been snatched and the Resistance will need to find a new leader. And I’ll be back in the States, with my wife and son, writing for some organ that supports Our President and the new order.
I won’t like myself, but Sharon and Arthur will be able to live like human beings again.
It takes two days to vet me. I spend the time reading and resting and eating. My system is beginning to recover from the abuse and neglect of Camp 17. Charlie comes by each day but the people watching me won’t let him do more than put his head around the door and say hello. On his third visit, he comes right into my room and says, “You’re cleared. Get your stuff. You’re staying at my place till we get you set up.”
“I’ll need a job,” I say. “Won’t I have to apply for legal residency and so on?”
“You’ve got a job. You’re going to work for the senator. I’ve been telling her about you and we figure you’ll fit right in.”
“A writing job?” I say. “That all seems like a million years ago.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” he says.
Charlie has a house up in the hills overlooking the junction of the two rivers. He shows me my room then says, “We’ll need to get you some more clothes. Tonight we’ll have dinner with some of the other staff, people you’ll be working with.”
I tell him I like the clothes I’ve got. “I see a lot of jeans and denim jackets on the streets. Dressed like this, I blend in.”
He shrugs. He was always more fashion conscious than I was. “Whatever,” he says. “The boss wants to meet you, too. We’ll go out tomorrow.”
“Out where?” I say, but Charlie doesn’t know. They move the senator around constantly and only her closest inner circle know where she’ll be at any time. When she’s ready to see me, Charlie will get a call on a burner phone with the code name of the meet’s location.
“Is all the cloak-and-dagger stuff really necessary?” I say.
“They would love to get their hands on her,” he says. “A few sessions of waterboarding, then they’d trot her out for a show-trial confession. It would undercut all the work the Resistance has been doing all these months.” His face turns bleak. “Or maybe they’d just kill her, get her off the internet, shut her up.”
The next day is the twenty-third of April. According to that conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear, an extraction team—maybe even the same Navy Seals who brought me up the Columbia River—should be in the area now. It won’t be long now before I’m back with my wife and boy. Once I’ve done my job, I’ll need to get down to Vancouver and present myself at the American consulate. I don’t like to think about the way Charlie will feel, or the other good people I had dinner with the night before. As for the Senator’s fate in the hands of A-Corps operatives like the Escalade man… well, plenty of people are suffering worse building the Wall—if the rumors are true, what is happening in the new camps is worst of all.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Just do what you have to do and get back safe with Sharon and Arthur.
It is not my fight anymore. Camp 17 kicked all the fight out of me. I just want to live and see my loved ones safe.
In the late afternoon, Charlie and I are driving around Kamloops. He makes sudden turns and U-turns, watching to see if we are being followed. Before we got into the car he used a handheld electronic device to check for tracking bugs. The car’s built-in GPS has been disabled.
The sun is just touching the dry hills west of town when the cell phone in Charlie’s pocket vibrates. He pulls into a service station and answers the call. After a few seconds he says, “Got it,” then strips the phone’s battery cover and removes its SIM. He tears the little piece of cardboard into several pieces and has me throw them out the window as we drive on.
We get onto Highway 5, heading north, paralleling one of the Thompsons. Traffic is light. If anyone is tailing us, Charlie says, we’ll see them miles back. But nobody is following us and after ten minutes or so, Charlie turns off the highway, crosses a cattle guard and goes through an open wire gate. We’re on a dirt road that winds up into hills covered in dry grass and sagebrush. The landscape is eerily similar to Texas where the Wall is still being built.
We’ve left a dust trail in the air but in two minutes of bumping over the rough track we’re between two hills and out of sight of the highway. We continue to snake our way through the hills, climbing as we go, until we come to a fork in the road and go right. Five minutes farther on, and we’re meeting trees, some scrubby conifers growing on top of a ridge. Now the road levels off and up ahead is a clearing with a log house too big to be called a cabin. It’s getting dark and I see lights from the windows.
We pull in. There are men on the porch and in the trees at the edges of the clearing. They are wearing clothes like mine, but they have the look of soldiers. Some of them have rifles like the ones the A-Corps guards used to point at us in the camp.
I follow Charlie up onto the porch. A man stops us there and tells us to put our arms out while he searches us. Charlie does as he’s told—throwing me a look that says What are you gonna do?—then it’s my turn.
We’re clear and we go inside. The senator is in an inner room; I can hear her distinctive voice through the closed door. Then it opens and she comes out and offers me her hand. She looks older than she did back during the campaign: there is gray in the short brown hair and lines around her eyes and mouth. But she still has energy and her grip is strong and warm.
She is talking, saying we’re going to do great things together, and how she’s glad I made it out of “that hell t
hey’re making of our country.”
I agree, nodding and smiling. I’m sure my smile looks wrong because inside I’m numb. The senator is saying something about getting my wife and child out of the devil’s grip, and I can only nod and say, “Thank you, thank you.”
And then it’s over. She goes back into the inner room and I hear other voices as the door closes. Charlie touches my arm and says, “That went well. Let’s get going.”
“Is there a toilet?” I say. “I need to pee.” My voice sounds shaky. I clear my throat but it doesn’t help.
The man at the door says, “Just go out to the treeline.”
I do as he says, going over to where the evergreens start. There is a man with a rifle standing nearby but he turns his back when I pull my zipper down. That is when I undo the button on my jacket, remembering to push in and turn to the right as I do; it’s a reverse thread.
The top of the button comes off and the little battery hidden inside it falls into my hand. I use my other hand to lever up the phony hinged rivet on my belt, making a hole exactly the size of the battery. I push the little disk in until it makes contact; then I wait, counting off fifteen seconds.
Now I pry the battery free and put it back in the button and close it up, snap the false rivet back into place. I zip up my fly and turn back to where Charlie waits. I want to get him away from here before the snatch team comes. I can see that there will be shooting and men will die.
“Okay?” he says to me. But before I can answer there are shouts from inside the house. A man comes out holding what looks like a phone, but probably isn’t. He is holding it up, pointing it here and there, then looking at its screen and cursing.
Now everybody but Charlie and I are in motion. A knot of men, the senator at their center, come running out of the log house, heading for one of the cars. The guards around the perimeter are at full alert, weapons up, sighting along them, looking for targets.
“You!” shouts the man with the scanner, looking at me. “Stay where you are!”
Welcome to Dystopia Page 16