America Rising (14 page)

A hidden surveillance camera trained on a vacant lot in the gritty Miami neighborhood of Overtown recorded a fortyish white man with a short pony tail and wearing jeans and a faded tropical shirt asking nearby shopkeepers about the rock- and rubbish-strewn site. The woman who monitored dozens of such cameras punched a few keys on her computer. The property was registered to something called Genesis Group. She had no idea what that was but it didn’t matter. Anyone who showed more than a passing interest in it was to be reported immediately. She punched some more keys and isolated the man’s face, sharpened the focus, plugged it into the same facial-recognition program used by the CIA, NSA and other agencies she wasn’t even aware of. The face belonged to a man named Josh Henson, a reporter for an obscure news organization called Public Interest. He lived by the water in Key Largo. He had a decent-sized bank account, a small house, little debt, no outstanding warrants. His wife was dead. He was considered a troublemaker. She opened a file, filled it with the details, the video and the photo from his driver’s license and sent it off to her superiors.

 

In the woods of Humboldt County, a young man driving a beat-up red pickup drove to an isolated encampment of tents and lean-tos that was home to close to close to one-thousand people, many of them families with children who had no other place or means to live. Within days he was helping organize a governing council and provide for sanitation facilities and safe drinking water. He convinced a local physician to make regular visits to the encampment and treat its residents in exchange for such services as they could render. He prevailed upon the local outlet of a giant national supermarket chain to truck in a portion of its meat and produce that might otherwise be thrown away. When two months later he left what had grown into a small city of three thousand, he was as much a mystery as the day he arrived.

 

In New Orleans, AnnaLynn Conté’s shock had turned into anger and hardened into determination. After a jazz funeral for one of her staffers, who died from the beating administered in the same series of attacks as hers, she resolved that SayNo would launch a new campaign, a New Bonus Army march on Washington. She further resolved that SayNo’s New Declaration of Independence kickoff would take place at a giant rally at the National Mall in the shadow of the Washington Monument, and that following the rally as many people as were willing would camp out for the entire month of July in Anacostia Park, site of the original Bonus Army encampment in 1932. Would a new General Douglas MacArthur order soldiers to fire on their own people to preserve government authority? That was a question AnnaLynn Conté couldn’t quite bring herself to ask.

 

* * *

Beyond that fruitless trip to Miami to check out the non-existent offices of Genesis Group, I spent the rest of the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day happily succumbing to Keys’ Disease. Robert had taken the week off too, and with the season’s first big cold front having just blown through, we decided to forgo spending New Year’s Eve getting blotto and bleating “Auld Lang Syne” and instead do a little Keys-style shrimping.

Robert checked the tide tables and gassed up the Dauntless. We bundled up like Eskimos, and shortly after 11 p.m., slid into the water and motored slowly across Largo Sound to Adams Cut, a short, narrow man-made channel linking the ocean and bay sides of the island. With the rest of the world out partying, we had the Cut to ourselves, waiting for shimmering masses of pink shrimp to glide toward us on the chilly current.

I steered with one hand and played a powerful spotlight on the water with the other. Robert hovered over it, wielding a long-handled net like a jai alai player and scooping up dozens of the wiggly creatures as they swam to the light. As quickly as he could he dumped them into a cooler packed with ice, which after an hour’s work and as much cold as our warm-blooded bodies could stand was so full we could barely get it closed. Half an hour and half a bottle of brandy later we were both at home in bed, refrigerators packed with bags of shrimp awaiting a New Year’s Day feast.

Robert came over a little after two bearing two six-packs of cold Sierra Nevadas and we got down to preparing our bounty. By halftime of the Your Name Here Corporate Bowl they were ready. I spread newspapers over the coffee table in the living room, turned up the sound of the football game and we attacked the sweet-succulent crustaceans as if they might jump up off the table and attack us first.

By dark we’d created an impressive mountain of shrimp shells and empty beer bottles, USC was beating the crap out of another bunch of hapless farm boys from the Midwest, and Robert and I were both pretty well lit. When the Trojans went up by three touchdowns I flicked off the game in disgust and landed on CNN, where this week’s Great White Anchor Hope was running down the outrages of the year just past and speculating earnestly about the outrages to come.

Feeling the effects of excessive consumption of cold adult beverages, I wadded up a napkin and threw it at the TV screen.

“Do you believe these people?” I snapped. “Unemployment is through the roof, people are losing their houses right and left, we’re still fighting insane wars, there’s still not a decent system of health care, and those worthless fuckwads in Washington aren’t doing a goddam thing about any of it. The whole damn system is broken.”

“Now, what makes you say that?” Robert said, a sly smile on his lips. “I think our worthless fuckwads and ‘the whole damn system,’ as you put it, are actually working quite splendidly.”

I almost spit out my beer.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Name one problem any of them has even tried to solve.”

“Ah, Josh,” Robert sighed. “For a supposedly skeptical journalist you can be so conventional. It depends on how you define ‘problem.’ Take health care. To you, not having a system that provides reliable, affordable health care to everyone is, in fact, a problem. But to the CEO of a big pharmaceutical company or health insurance company, that’s not the problem at all. The problem is people like you, people who are so pissed off about the pathetic state of health care in this country that they’re starting to demand their ‘leaders’ do something about it.

“Or take our various and sundry and endless wars. You might think it’s a problem that kids are coming home in body bags or missing arms and legs, that the Pentagon is eating up money that could be spent fixing up the country. But to the head of a company that supplies the military or a private contractor that does construction and security for an oil company that wants a lock on Middle Eastern oil fields, the problem is you, people who want to ‘cut and run’ and throw all of them off the gravy train. So if you look at it that way, our ‘worthless fuckwads,’ as you put it, have actually solved both ‘problems.’ There is no decent national health care, and the wars will continue until the end of time. Is this a great system or what?”

It was so cold-bloodedly cynical it had to be true. But I couldn’t force myself to go there. “Okay, I get what you’re saying. But if the system doesn’t work for ninety-eight percent of the American public, doesn’t that prove it’s broken?”

Robert studied me as if I were a particularly dim-witted child.

“That’s the second time you’ve said that and you’re still wrong. Look, have you contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to those politicians’ campaigns? Have you gone to their fundraisers and eaten their rubber chickens? Let them ride on your corporate jet and sponsored ‘fact-finding’ conferences in Hawaii and Paris and Singapore? Hired their wives and kids and relatives to high-paying, make-work jobs? Given them low- and no-interest loans, insider stock tips, the chance to buy into IPOs before the rest of us even know they exist? Have you hired them for millions of dollars a year after their ‘public service’ is over to bribe their former colleagues on behalf of some mega-corporation?

He took a sip of beer and threw down a challenge.

“If you haven’t, then just what is it that makes you think those people work for you? Government isn’t broken, it’s just another business. And in business, you work for the people who pay you. So if you’re not paying everyone from the president on down to some crappy little first-term representative, you don’t even get a seat up in the nosebleed section. Money talks, ideals walk, Josh. It’s Capitalism 1A.”

That was just about the most goddam depressing thing I’d heard all year. I grabbed the remote and clicked back to the Rose Bowl. It was halftime. USC was ahead by four touchdowns. It was still better than this. I cranked up the volume.

“Hey, Robert,” I said, reaching for the last two bottles on the table. “Want another beer?”

T
he Falcon 2000 sat on the tarmac at Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas waiting for the arrival of U.S. Senator John Hammer. It was a quick trip for the influential Republican while Congress was in recess, flying out of Washington D.C. to his home just outside Little Rock, Ark., on the corporate jet generously provided by the state’s largest bank, U.S. Bank & Trust, and then on to Vegas to address a convention of banking industry executives.

Luckily, it wasn’t all business. The chairwoman of the local Republican party was hot and hot for him, or at least for what she hoped he could do for her, getting her out of this sun-singed hellhole to D.C., where the real action was. She didn’t have a prayer of that happening, but Hammer wasn’t about to spoil the fun.

His pipes freshly cleaned, a pound of Kobe beef and expensive California cabernet in his belly from last night’s dinner, the fit, tanned, sixty-seven-year-old Senate minority leader was downright jolly when he clambered into the Falcon’s plush leather-and-walnut-trimmed cabin with his long-time aide, Miles Severn. Hammer loosened his tie and dropped into one of the cabin’s overstuffed leather captain’s chairs, while Miles went to the bar and fixed him his usual Stoli rocks. Heavy on the rocks; it was, after all, barely noon in Vegas.

“Some shindig, huh, Miles?” Hammer said, as his aide uncapped a bottle of sparkling water and sat opposite him. “These Vegas guys really know how to throw a party.”

Severn, who’d spent much of the evening trying to convince local reporters that the dyed-blond, silicone-enhanced chairwoman wasn’t giving his boss a hand job under the table, didn’t think it was such a swell party. But he kept his opinion to himself.

“That’s what makes America great,” Hammer continued, oblivious to his aide’s indifference. “Good hootch, fast jet, fine Corinthian leather.” He jiggled the ice in his drink and took another long sip. “God, it’s good to be out of the bog”—his private name for the nation’s capital— “and out here with real people. I’m so sick of hearing from one more bunch of whiners.” His voice took a mocking tone. “We need more unemployment. We need help with our mortgage. We need free health care. We need protection from the evil banks and insurance and oil companies. We need, we need, we need.”

He finished his drink and slammed the glass down hard enough to spill ice on the thick pile carpet.

“Goddammit, we’ve become a nation of wimps! Lying around on our asses sucking at Big Government’s tit, crying about how bad everything is. Boo-hoo-hoo. Go out and get a fucking job! Stop whining! Stop expecting someone else to do something for you. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps! Stand on your own two feet! Nobody owes you anything! You didn’t see those people last night asking for a government handout, did you? Whining about Wall Street, the banks, the
e-con-o-mee?”

Miles Severn fought the urge to point out that Wall Street, the banks and the rest of corporate America had bought their handouts fair and square by purchasing the services of John Hammer and his colleagues like so many pairs of underpants at Walmart. It was a battle he was losing when the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“We’re cleared for takeoff, Senator. We’ll be in the air in a few minutes.”

Hammer thrust out his empty glass and Miles Severn got up and made him another drink. He was glad to do it. His boss was a nervous flier, and he knew the senator would be white-knuckling it until the aircraft reached cruising altitude and leveled off. Spared another boozy sermon, he closed his eyes and laid back in the big, comfy seat. The soft whine of twin Pratt & Whitney engines and the tinkling of ice in the senator’s glass had a hypnotic effect and as the aircraft rolled down the runway and pointed its nose towards the sky he felt himself dozing off.

That grip pinching his shoulder, that strange voice greeting the senator, Hammer answering back. . . They must be in a dream. He tried to shrug them off but the grip tightened, the voice said sternly, a little louder, “Be still.” Then Miles Severn was wide awake, gazing unbelieving at the man standing over him. He was dressed in the blue uniform of the bank’s private pilots, not large but filling out the uniform. He wore an opaque plastic mask that obscured his features but his hair was cut short, his face was clean-shaven. His hand was incredibly strong. It shoved Miles Severn back in the chair, eyes flicking over him in warning. Then he noticed the small black gun with the long, fat barrel.

“What is the meaning of this?!” John Hammer’s voice was a frightened screech masquerading as outrage. “How dare you! How
dare
you! Do you know who I am?”