America Rising (21 page)

His scavenging trips increased in number and duration as what its members jokingly referred to as “Doe, Incorporated” grew in size and ambition. By mid-March its workforce had grown to fifty and the total of reclaimed homes to ten. When he suggested they rent the properties to families forced out of their own homes and use the money to rehab more houses and pay themselves a small stipend, they took a vote and unanimously agreed. Interestingly, though, no one recalled the idea as being his. The slight young man had an uncanny ability to influence others while leaving them thinking that his ideas had been theirs all along.

As March flowed into April, Doe, Incorporated was a smoothly functioning machine. The workforce had grown to sixty and the number of refurbished homes to sixteen. The formerly unemployed workers were putting in full days and weeks, and though they weren’t making anywhere near the kind of money they did at the peak of the real estate boom, it was enough to keep their heads above water.

Despite the near reverence that the denizens of Diamond Rock felt for the young man, as the days fell by they realized he was hardly a saint. He liked to drink and held it well, except when he didn’t, and could become prickly and difficult. He enjoyed women and their attentions and enthusiastically bedded any and all who showed an interest. He was prone to mood swings, not quite manic-depressive but ranging from long bursts of furious activity to shorter periods of black despair. On one occasion a former lover had peeked through his bedroom window and found him curled up like an infant in bed. Still, his neighbors’ gratitude ran deep, even as he shrank into the background, letting Bob Johnson and others take more and more control.

Then one day they noticed that the battered red pickup was no longer in his driveway. That wasn’t unusual, but after several days more another delegation trooped over, found the front door unlocked and entered. The house was as it had always been, as neat and orderly as a hospital operating room, nearly devoid of furniture, still smelling of fresh caulk and paint. They went from room to room, calling his name, feeling vaguely unsettled, as if they were violating some kind of sanctuary. On the kitchen counter they found a small scrap of paper.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” read the scribbled handwriting. “I have to go. I love you all.”

That evening the neighborhood held what felt like a wake. More than two hundred people congregated in John Doe’s former backyard. They brought food and wine and beer, and Bob Johnson grilled hot dogs and hamburgers just like John Doe did all those weeks before. They exchanged stories and reminisced, and as the sky darkened and the night grew chilly they raised their glasses in silent toast, a silence they held for a full minute as a gesture of gratitude and of respect. Then they cleaned up and one by one, in small groups, they wandered home.

Life goes on.

I
n the time it took Henry Desmond “Joe” Josephson to slice into his overcooked filet mignon all hell broke loose.

The former Vice President of the United States in the Howard Trask administration, two years out of power with the election of Nancy Elias, was sitting down to dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Icon Gold Hotel in downtown San Francisco after having been named a “Great American Patriot” by the American Progress Institute. Joe Josephson despised such ceremonies almost as much as he hated the city itself, a place, he was fond of saying, with “more communists than Beijing.” But it was the price to pay for the largesse of the Institute, a lobbying group thinly disguised as a think tank, funded by wealthy families and business executives whose fortunes had increased exponentially during Joe Josephson’s eight years in the White House.

Seventy-four, recently divorced from his wife of thirty-two years, with a wrestler’s build, hard eyes and lips that seemed fixed in a perpetual sneer, Josephson made his fortune as a corporate takeover artist, buying up companies for shadowy investment conglomerates, installing himself as chief executive, then leveraging them to the hilt, gutting staffs and facilities, breaking the firms into pieces and selling each off at record profits before their inevitable collapse. Then he moved on to the next victim.

His efforts earned him a fortune estimated at $100 million before he was fifty-five and entrée into Republican Party politics. The politics went swimmingly—two terms as governor of his home state of Montana before being chosen by Howard Trask as his running mate. Trask was an amiable sort, unmatched at the public relations aspects of running and holding the presidency and thoroughly uninterested in actually governing. Which suited “Bulldozer”—Josephson’s nickname and Secret Service handle—just fine.

His fortune, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. His nasty and well-publicized divorce, series of bad investments, extravagant spending and millions spent defending himself in lawsuits brought by former colleagues and employees in his legion of deals, had reduced his status from obscenely wealthy to merely rich. But the beneficiaries of his years in politics had stepped in, aware that even out of office he could still be useful. They appointed him to their boards of directors, offered him consulting contracts, no-interest loans and insider deals, and in return expected him to use his considerable behind-the-scenes influence on their behalf and to grace the occasional glad-handing function such as this, giving a speech to hundreds of people he didn’t know or care to know in cold, gray, communist San Francisco.

His speech concluded, Joe Josephson picks up his steak knife, jabs his fork into a grayish filet and begins to saw.

7:05:35 p.m. A call comes in. The hotel operator answers. “There is a bomb in the Grand Ballroom,” a mechanical-sounding voice announces. “It will go off in one minute.”

7:05:40 p.m. The operator, new on the job, scared and flustered buzzes the head of hotel security and relays the warning.

7:05:45 p.m. The head of hotel security, a man named Laskey, speaks urgently into the earpieces of Joe Josephson’s three bodyguards, deployed around his table. Four hundred forks and knives clink on bone china plates. Two hundred jaws bite down on tough meat.

7:05:50 p.m. Three things happen simultaneously. Joe Josephson’s bodyguards rush the table, haul Josephson out of his chair. The lights in the Grand Ballroom flicker and die. A loud explosion rattles glasses and silverware, and a brilliant white light illuminates the room. Smoke billows. The light disappears. The room goes dark.

7:06:00 p.m. Shouting. Wailing. Chairs are flung back from tables. Fear. A woman shrieks: “Oh, my God! It’s a bomb!
It’s a bomb!”

7:06:05 p.m. Panic seizes. The crowd stampedes, heading for the ballroom’s only exit.

Joe Josephson’s bodyguards form a triangle with the vice president in the center. “Code Red! Code Red! Bulldozer is on the move!” shouts one into his two-way. Drivers of twin black SUVs idling at the curb in front of the hotel fire up their engines. The triangle bulls mercilessly towards the exit. Women, the elderly, the infirm are pushed aside, knocked down, trampled. Panic increases. The frenetic surge grows even more so, trapping the triangle in a sea of pushing, shoving bodies. Progress is nearly impossible, trying to force a raging river through a single straw.

7:06:35 p.m. Another explosion. Smaller. More bright light, more smoke. Panic becomes hysteria. The crowd’s screams are deafening. The river rages harder at the straw. The triangle is compacted into a tight little ball. It’s a street fight now. Practiced fists, elbows, knees strike soft, pampered flesh. Bodies give way, more fall. Finally the triangle begins to move, cleaving through the frenzied mob like a sword.

7:09 p.m. The triangle reaches the exit, bursts through the door, charges down the hall, down the stairs, into the lobby. Panic has reached there too. Elevators have been shut down. Guests mill around in the halls, cram into stairwells, flow downhill like water. The triangle bulls through them, through the lobby, through the giant double glass doors at the entrance and onto the sidewalk. The SUVs are waiting, engines revving. The triangle peels off. Two bodyguards lift Joe Josephson by the armpits and throw him into the second SUV. The third slides into the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, screaming,
“Go, go, go!”

It’s 7:11 p.m.

The SUVs rocket off the curb onto Geary Street. Strobe lights blinking, airhorns blaring, they slice through traffic on Geary, make a screeching turn on Mason and then on O’Farrell. They head for Fourth Street and the quickest freeway access to San Francisco airport and Joe Josephson’s waiting private jet. At precisely the same moment, a bodyguard in each SUV switches on a small GPS-jamming device, then pulls a Glock .45, jabs the barrel behind the driver’s right ear and commands, “Drive or die.”

In the back seat of the trailing SUV, one bodyguard flings his arm over a still-stunned Joe Josephson and performs
shime-waza,
trapping the vice president’s neck in the crook of his elbow and compressing the carotid artery. Josephson loses consciousness within seconds.

“Eyes straight ahead. Turn off the flashers. Slow down,” are the bodyguards’ next commands. The drivers obey. The two SUVs merge into the flow of traffic. Cross Market Street, then Mission, Howard. Folsom. Almost to the freeway. In the lead SUV, the bodyguard digs the gun barrel deeper. “Past Bryant, second left,” he says. In the trailing SUV, the command is, “Don’t follow. Go to Townsend, make a right. I’ll tell you where to turn next.”

The drivers obey. The SUVs enter the perpetual gloom underneath the concrete spaghetti of freeway on and off-ramps. They break free. The trailing SUV turns left onto a narrow one-way street. The man with the gun commands, “Kill the lights.” The vehicle rolls past dilapidated warehouses, factories, the occasional seen-better-days Victorian.

The lead SUV continues down Fourth Street, then turns onto Townsend. Half a block and then another turn, this one into an alley between two commercial buildings. “All the way to the end. Then lights, engine off. Eyes straight ahead,” comes the command. The driver obeys.

The bodyguard palms a cigarette-sized stun gun and touches its prongs to the driver’s neck. The man twitches, then slumps against the window. The bodyguard pockets the stun gun, produces plastic ties and a small metal box. He binds the driver’s hands and feet, opens the box, removes a syringe, plunges 500 mg of Diprivan into the driver’s arm, rolls him face-up on the seat. He locks the SUV, strolls down the alley to Townsend Street, is met by a woman arrived seconds earlier in a silver Mercedes. More seconds later they’re on the freeway, heading south.

The SUV with Joe Josephson rolls up to a chain-link fence topped with swirls of razor wire. Behind the fence is a warehouse, a windowless monolith faced with a heavy steel garage door. A tap on a remote and a gate lurches back on rubber wheels. A second tap and the garage door grinds upwards. Two more taps and the gate and door close. In the warehouse, the SUV squeaks to a stop on the dank concrete floor. “This might sting a little,” the first bodyguard says. He uses the stun gun on the driver, injects him with Diprivan, passes a third syringe to the back. The other bodyguard injects the vice president.

The lights in the warehouse come on. Next to the SUV are a pair of nondescript Japanese sedans and a black Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle. Next to them are a man and a woman. The woman is tall, willowy, dressed in a tailored pantsuit, her auburn hair cut fashionably short. The man is the same height, lean, tanned, a neatly trimmed beard. A stylish couple ready for a night on the town.

The five people in the warehouse now move with swift, precise economy. The three bodyguards strip off their dark suits and ties, stuff them in garbage bags, pull on jeans, sweaters and leather jackets. The woman secures the driver’s hands and feet with plastic ties, slaps a strip of duct tape over his mouth. The man does the same with Joe Josephson. The bodyguards wipe down the SUV for prints. The man and woman heft the vice president to one of the sedans and drop him in the trunk. They get in and start the engine. Two of the three bodyguards slide into the other sedan; the third climbs aboard the Suzuki.

7:14 p.m. The kidnapping of former Vice President Joe Josephson is right on schedule.

The man on the motorcycle dons a helmet, opens the garage door, the gate, circles around the side streets to Bryant Street, listens to the frantic chatter on the police scanner. He says “Go” into the microphone built into the helmet. The sedans creep out of the warehouse, circle around Bryant, fall into traffic. The sedan bearing the vice president follows the motorcycle east to the Bay Bridge, across to Oakland. The other, trunk filled with the bodyguards’ discarded clothes, shoe lifts, hairpieces, other cosmetic disguises, heads in the opposite direction, towards the 101 freeway and points south.

At the Grand Ballroom, police, bomb squad personnel and paramedics sort through the chaos. A bomb squad check shows no more unexploded devices; quick analysis of the bomb remains shows they were little more than larger and more sophisticated flash-bang grenades. Maximum effect, minimum damage.

Police take the names and contact numbers of dinner guests from the event registry and begin interviewing those who hadn’t already fled, noting those to be interviewed the following day. Paramedics wheeling stretchers hustle into the ballroom and begin treating the injured. They’re clustered close to the exit, mostly old, fragile, lying down or sitting up, moaning softly. Something strikes a patrolman as odd, though. Three men—big, fit, filling out their identical dark suits—are sprawled on the floor far from the exit, away from the others. They make half-hearted swimming motions, like marionettes with tangled strings, trying futilely to stand.