America Rising (13 page)

* * *

Three days to Christmas and I received an early present, albeit of the coal and stick variety. Jeff O’Neill called. He was pissed.

“Our so-called partners bailed on your politicians piece,” he said. “Bunch of chickenshits.”

I wasn’t surprised. Public Interest had contracts with most of the big national newspaper chains to provide the kind of investigative stories they no longer had the manpower—or willpower—to do, though their support was mostly a financial pittance and the occasional tip and legwork. But video of four of Florida’s most powerful legislators getting their dicks sucked by coke-snorting hookers on a developer’s private island was going to cause a major shitstorm, and stirring things up was not what the media were about any more.

“They tell you why?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” O’Neill said, disgust filming his words. “They got all ‘ethical’ on me. You know, you were trespassing, filming without permission, invading their privacy. Finally, I got hold of Ted Janks of U.S. Media—we went to J-school together a million or so years ago—and he said their new owner is a developer buddy of the guy who owns Rock Island and if any one of his papers even mentioned your story he’d fire everyone on staff and tell them to sue for their severance. Plus the two of them are working together to build a shitload of tract housing—excuse me, ‘planned communities’—right up against the Everglades and they don’t want to piss off the politicians they’ve spent so much money buying.”

I shrugged. “Same as it ever was.”

“You got that right. But fuck ‘em. We post tomorrow, and let the shit rain down where it will.”

I liked the image of that one. “I’ll get my umbrella,” I said.

* * *

I’ve never been much of a sleeper. The next morning I woke at four, was out of bed at four-thirty, at the computer poring over Mongoose’s file on Armando Gutierrez at five. The phone on my desk gave its electronic chirp and I wondered who could be calling me at this ungodly hour.

“Josh, it’s AnnaLynn.” She sounded dazed, empty. Like someone who’d just walked away from an airplane crash and couldn’t believe she was still alive. Then the words came tumbling out. “They came for me, they came for me. You were right.”

There was no satisfaction in that.

“Oh, Jesus, AnnaLynn. Are you okay?”

She didn’t hear the question.

“It was a man. He cut the power to my house and picked the lock. I. . . I drank a little too much the night before and couldn’t sleep. He stepped on a Christmas ornament and I heard it and when he came into the bedroom I—” She stopped and I could hear her rapid breathing. “I shot him. With my dad’s gun.”

“Are you alright? Are you at the house? Are the police there?”

“I’m okay, I guess. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. The police are here now; an officer is going to drive me to a girlfriend’s house in a few minutes. I can’t imagine staying here tonight.”

“Do they have any idea who the guy is?”

“Not yet. He was dressed in black, wearing a ski mask. I told them about your call and took a picture of him with my cellphone. I’m sending it to your cell now.”

My phone beeped and I punched up the photo. It was a tiny, grainy shot of a man with a round head, meaty face, short goatee, a lightning bolt tattoo creeping up a thick neck. Except for the smear of blood on his cheek he could have been sleeping.

“That’s him, AnnaLynn,” I said. “Armando Gutierrez.”

I heard her say something to the cops. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, then she came back on the line.

“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “But thank you, thank you, thank you. I was mad at you earlier today but you saved my life.”

“AnnaLynn—”

“I’ve really got to go, Josh. I’ll call you later. Some merry Christmas, huh?”

A very Merry Fucking Christmas, indeed. As bad as I felt for AnnaLynn, I wasn’t in all that great shape myself. I hoped she’d keep her promise and call me again, then caught myself and felt guilty for hoping. The holidays were like that. On Christmas Eve I drove down to Pilot House and joined the other orphans for an impromptu party that lasted well into the early morning and made me realize how much I loved the tight little community of people who lived here.

Christmas Day bloomed glorious. Eighty degrees, no humidity, not a cloud in the vivid blue sky. I sat on my little beach and talked to Carolyn like I did sometimes, told her everything that had happened. I didn’t mention AnnaLynn Conté but I believe she knew anyway and understood.

Later in the day Robert came over with a present; I hadn’t realized he was an orphan too. He set a plastic bucket on my kitchen counter with two hogfish he’d speared only half an hour earlier. We went to work gutting and scaling them, tossed them in a hot skillet with a big knob of butter and a few squeezes of lemon and ate them out on the deck with a bottle of white Burgundy I’d been saving for a special occasion. When the wine was gone we switched to cognac and Cuban cigars and sat staring quietly at the sky, contemplating all those things bigger than ourselves.

T
he stack of reports on Raymond Carmody’s desk was half a foot thick. Unemployment was up, the stock market was down. Foreclosures were rampant; under water homeowner were walking away from their mortgages in unheard of numbers. Crime stats were through the roof. Small businesses were closing at the rate of a hundred a week. Local governments were begging for more federal money. The states of California, Florida, Nevada and Illinois were essentially broke. Then there was Iran. Iraq. Israel. Afghanistan. Syria. Yemen. And those weren’t all the issues President Nancy Elias’s chief of staff had to take up with his boss at their regular morning briefing.

But his mind kept going back to one file in particular, four densely written pages winnowed from mountains of data compiled by the FBI, CIA, NSA and local police departments around the country, supplemented by information gathered from Carmody’s own sources, sources he’d cultivated in more than twenty-five years as a member in good standing of the Democratic Party establishment.

He adjusted his reading glasses, picked up the file and read it through for the third time, then flipped it shut, a troubled frown on his face. This could make all those other problems seem insignificant, shatter the very bedrock of the country. The facts were there, lots of them. But the conclusion was speculation. His own speculation, to be sure, arrived at grudgingly and with great trepidation but speculation he couldn’t ignore. If he was wrong, his usefulness to the president would likely be at an end. His career too. But he had to tell her anyway. Somebody had to warn her of the thunderclouds gathering just beyond the horizon.

The briefing began at precisely 8:01 a.m., Nancy Elias being nothing if not punctual. She was a big, ungainly woman who over the years had learned to use her size to intimidate fellow politicians, almost all of them male, while appealing to voters who found in her horsey features and adamantly unstylish appearance something of a common bond.

Moving quickly, Carmody went through the agenda, getting instructions, giving the occasional word of advice, adjusting the president’s schedule and updating her on what had transpired since the briefing of the day before. Raymond Carmody was not just the president’s gatekeeper; he was her friend and most trusted advisor, someone who’d had her back since her first campaign for the Los Angeles City Council, then California state senate, House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate and, finally, the presidency. Nancy Elias knew she’d still be arguing with L.A. Public Works over potholes if not for the crusty, bearded gnome of a man sitting across from her in the Oval Office. Her trust and confidence in his judgment was absolute.

“There’s one more thing, Madam President,” Carmody said, taking off his reading glasses and engaging her directly. “I’ve been hearing some very unsettling rumors for the past several months. So unsettling, in fact, that I thought it best to check them out myself. I have reports from several agencies if you’d like to see them.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose as if to sharpen his thoughts. Nancy Elias watched with surprise; she had never seen Ray Carmody so concerned.

“Forget the reports now, Ray,” she said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know of any other way to say it but to say it,” he said. “I believe we have the beginnings of a real class war on our hands, maybe a revolution.”

“What?”

“I know that sounds preposterous. But bear with me. You remember the thugs who were out there during the past couple of elections, the ‘accidents,’ the beatings, the intimidation. I know you were embarrassed by it and asked Frank to make it stop. And mostly it did. For awhile. But they’ve come back—in Oregon, California, Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania. Those factory workers in Illinois, the ones who took the place over to get their back pay after it was shut down? They got beaten up, ‘accidented’ too. It was pretty ugly.

“And it gets worse. One of them was arrested a few weeks ago for beating a talk jock to death in San Francisco. African-American. A flaming liberal. The cops didn’t have enough to hold him so they had to let him go but my sources tell me there’s no question he was involved. Then just before Christmas the same man broke into the house of that SayNo woman, Conté. She shot and killed him. That same night someone firebombed her office, attacked two of her colleagues. They’re both in the hospital; one of them might not make it.

Ray Carmody spread his hands placatingly. “I know you and Frank are close, and I’m not saying he orchestrated this. Or even knew about it. But it’s something we have to consider. And it goes even deeper than that.”

Nancy Elias rubbed her thumb and forefinger together like she did when she was worried. “How deep, Ray?”

“Someone is targeting our people,” he said soberly. “Not just yours and mine. All of us. Remember Senator Stens and the bomber project? Charles Cooper of Republic Fund? Somebody got to them. No one knows who. Remember how surprised we were when Chalmers and Rifkin and Mathers retired, then disappeared? Well, I did some checking. Right before he quit, Chalmers’s house blew up. Gas leak, supposedly. Rifkin went ‘missing’ for three days on a camping trip. I couldn’t dig up anything on Mathers but his neighbors said he was practically in seclusion for two weeks before he walked away. Now they’re all out of the country. Chalmers is in Bermuda, Rifkin in Paris, Mathers in Belize. I reached out to them—discreetly, of course. And they wouldn’t say a word. Literally, not a word. Not hello, good-bye, fuck you. Nothing. They’re terrified of something, Nancy. Absolutely terrified.”

The president’s fingers rubbed harder. Worry lines deepened on her face. Ray Carmody thought she looked a little pale.

“And that’s not the worst of it. Remember Jeff Dalworth’s heart attack? It really was a heart attack. But his mistress—you know Lauren Pinter—found a DVD next to his body and passed it on to the FBI. It showed him in a Miami hotel room, performing some, ah. . . highly illegal and immoral acts on a young boy. Someone had both the knowledge and the skills to bug his hotel room. Knew he and Lauren were having an affair and had the DVD delivered to her house. The coroner thinks the shock of seeing it could have triggered a heart attack.”

Nancy Elias grew a little paler. A blister rose on her thumb. “You’re right, Ray,” she said. “It does look bad. But what makes you think they’re connected?”

Ray Carmody opened his folder and removed a plain white business card printed with a single word in big black letters. He slid it across the president’s desk.

“In every one of those instances,” he said. “They found this.”

Nancy Elias’s face went white beneath her makeup. She licked her lips. Swallowed. Blinked.

Ray Carmody was really worried now.

“What is it, Madam President? What’s wrong?”

Nancy Elias ignored him, stared without seeing at the rectangle of white paper in the center of her desk. “I warned them,” she said softly. “I told them this day would come.”

“What day, Nancy?
What day?”

She couldn’t take her eyes off the card.

“The day they decided to fight back.”

I
n the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the following events occurred:

Nancy Elias called Frank Bernabe on a number only she possessed and said, “Frank, call the others and get them down here. What I was afraid would happen is happening.” She sounded shaken and anxious. “We’ll call it an emergency economic summit or whatever but I want you all here in two weeks.” Frank Bernabe sighed into his hand but said meekly, “Yes, Madam President.” He despised weakness in anyone, especially the woman he so successfully sold to his fellow titans as presidential material, but alternately playing wet nurse and taskmaster to weak-willed politicians was part of his job description so he resigned himself to spending several frigid days in the charmless shithole that was Washington D.C.

 

Sixteen Congresspeople—eleven in the House, five in the Senate—were delivered DVDs in plain brown envelopes, just like Jefferson Dalworth’s. On them were videos and audio tracks that revealed a startling variety of personal peccadilloes, from the mundane to the revolting, plus the most intimate and closely guarded financial records showing secret payments, money transfers, kickbacks, no-interest loans and every credit card purchase for the past five years. The DVDs came with a message stating that instructions for keeping their contents from public view would be forthcoming and must be obeyed. They also came with a plain white business card bearing a single word printed in big black letters.