America Rising (24 page)

The man stared at it for several minutes, deciphering its hieroglyphics. They said that the house had been searched by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms personnel on September 10, and that there were no obvious hazards within. But it was what was written in the bottom quadrant of the X that chilled the man’s soul: “3 DOA.” Then, beneath it, “CAT ALIVE.”

John Doe climbed out of his truck and picked his way through the weeds and trash and rubble around the house, inspecting it like a home appraiser doing his due diligence. It was in bad shape cosmetically but seemed to be structurally sound. It sat sturdily on its foundation, and though the roof sagged at the gutters, it was missing only a few shingles and appeared to be intact. Inspection complete, he went back to the truck and retrieved a crowbar and pried the plywood panel off the doorframe. The stench of mold and rot billowed out, clotting his nostrils and forcing him to step back. He stood on the porch, breathing deeply, then went inside.

His every move was followed by neighborhood children playing in the street, who halted their game and watched with mouths open and eyes big, as if the dirty red pickup truck had suddenly descended from the clouds and disgorged a battalion of little green men. When John Doe disappeared into the house, they looked at each other in amazement, then ran back home to tell their parents about the crazy white man who’d just broken into the old Everett place. Their parents wanted nothing to do with crazy white people, and they warned their offspring to stay away. The man was either a scavenger or a criminal. Or a mental defective. Hopefully he would soon take his crummy old truck and get the hell out of there.

Except he didn’t.

He stayed, and his neighbors watched, as once or twice or even three times a day he would pull up in front of the house with his ancient truck creaking under the weight of lumber and sheets of plywood and drywall, giant buckets of paint and copper tubing and rolls of electrical wire. The neighbors were impressed at his perseverance and prodigious work ethic, a little unsettled by it too. They made no attempt to talk to him and, save an occasional friendly nod, he made no attempt to introduce himself.

Though children and adults kept their distance, the neighborhood teenagers were bolder. A handful of them showed up one afternoon to taunt the crazy fool, but two stayed behind after the man offered them fifty dollars a day and lunch if they’d help him fix the place up. Another group gathered in front of the house long past midnight, intending to vandalize the truck but found it so decrepit they gave up and settled for bouncing their beer cans off its cracked and dirty windshield.

The neighborhood gangbangers made an appearance too. They didn’t come back, though, not after John Doe faced them down with a disconcerting lack of fear and a very large pistol, screwing its barrel into their leader’s mouth and promising to splatter his brains all over the home’s freshly painted porch if he ever saw them again.

Eventually, the rotting, sagging structure began to resemble a home. Eventually, the neighbors’ distrust turned to grudging admiration. Eventually, just as it had in the backwoods of Mendocino and suburb of Las Vegas and the other towns and cities where the quiet young man had been, a minor transformation was taking place, one that kindled a tiny spark of hope in even the most cynical and downtrodden onlookers.

Eventually too a delegation of neighbors knocked on the strange young man’s front door, now a slab of ornately carved and beautifully refinished mahogany, and welcomed him to the community. They tried, with subtlety and blunt directness, to pry any speck of personal information from him, but beyond giving his name and a knowing half-smile, John Doe calmly deflected their questions.

He did give them a tour of the house, though, which now had its plumbing and electric restored and drywall up in half the rooms. They noted too that he was almost completely devoid of personal possessions, that he slept on a sleeping bag thrown unpadded on the floor, ate at a rickety table held together by roofing nails and appeared to own nothing more than a duffel bag filled with books and a few changes of clothes, a small collection of cheap hotel toiletries and the tools he kept in a large metal box in the bedroom. As if he knew they’d be coming he’d procured a jug of sweet white wine and poured it out in paper cups and thanked them for the visit. Then he led them into the back yard and watched their eyes bulge at the piles of building materials secured under thick blue tarps.

“Feel free to take what you need,” he said. “I seem to have way more than I can use here.” Feeling their sudden discomfort, he added, “They’re not stolen; I can show you the receipts.”

The neighbors hastily declared that receipts would hardly be necessary and invited him to a block party the following weekend. He seemed pleased by the invitation, even more pleased when they told him the pitmaster at a local barbecue joint lived nearby and would provide the food, and that a group of neighborhood kids who’d achieved some success playing the local blues circuit would perform. He thanked them for the invitation and promised to bring potato salad and some better-quality wine, then thanked them again for coming and shook their hands as they filed out the door.

Two weeks after the party the blocks around John Doe’s house were humming with activity. Volunteers from within the neighborhood and beyond attacked the homes that had blighted it for so long, tearing down those that could no longer be saved and salvaging their materials, rehabbing those in good-enough condition to again fulfill their purpose. Many took advantage of the invitation to help themselves to his excess supplies and painted their own homes’ exteriors, made modest updates to kitchens and bathrooms, spruced up their bedraggled landscaping.

Through it all John Doe was a constant presence, though not so much that anyone really noticed. If the people who followed his instructions precisely to the letter were asked, they would say the slight young man sitting quietly in a corner merely offered a few suggestions.

AnnaLynn Conté might have said that once too. But she would come to know better.

* * *

Just after midnight on a rainy Monday morning a dark-colored minivan exited the winding, narrow road through the Mayacamas Mountains that connected northern Napa Valley to Sonoma County. The driver made a sharp left turn on Mirabel Road and headed for the tiny town of Forestville. Two minutes later, down to the second, a late-model American sedan did the same.

Half a mile outside the town center the minivan turned onto a barely paved country road shrouded by hulking pines and oaks, continued down it for another half-mile, turned again onto an unmarked road that was little more than a gravel path and stopped. The driver was dressed for the cold in jeans, heavy windbreaker and baseball cap. He was also dressed for something else, wearing disposable latex gloves and plastic booties over his workboots. He shut down the minivan’s engine and waited.

Precisely one minute later, the sedan stopped at the mouth of the unmarked road. The minivan’s driver got in and before he could close the door the sedan was moving again, back on Mirabel Road, heading for Guerneville Highway, US 101 and the California-Oregon border. The man from the minivan removed his gloves and booties and put them in a plastic sack for eventual disposal.

When the sedan was finally on the freeway he pulled out a cheap, pre-paid cellphone purchased weeks earlier at a San Jose liquor store and punched in the number of a cellphone held by a woman sitting in a car parked on the edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The man let the phone ring three times, then removed its SIM card, crushed in under his boot and tossed the pieces out the window. He did the same with the rest of the phone. When the woman heard the rings she dialed 911 and held a voice recorder to the receiver. At the dispatcher’s answer, she pressed “play” and a digitally altered voice announced, “Vice President Joe Josephson is in a van on an unmarked road a quarter-mile up Mirabel Road in Forestville, Sonoma County. He is uninjured but needs medical assistance. Send help now.”

The woman snapped the phone shut and placed it and the voice recorder in a heavy plastic bag. She took the car’s tire iron and smashed them into little shards of plastic and tossed them down a storm drain. Then she headed out of San Francisco towards Highway 5 and her eventual destination of San Diego.

In her more than ten years on the job, the 911 dispatcher had fielded her share of bizarre and crank calls but she instinctively knew this wasn’t one of them. Before the caller hung up she had notified the Santa Rosa police department, Sonoma County sheriff and the local hospital, which sent out a pair of ambulances and prepared for the arrival of a Very Important Patient.

The news quickly shot up the law enforcement food chain, from the agent in charge of the area FBI field office to his supervisor to his supervisor to the director, who called Ray Carmody a little after four o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. By then a phalanx of police cars had surrounded the minivan and paramedics were loading the still-drugged but conscious vice president into an ambulance.

“They found Joe,” the director enthused when Carmody answered. “He was in some jerkwater town in Northern California. A nine-one-one call came in. He seems okay. He’s being taken to the hospital in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco. Local law enforcement has full security but I’ve got a team heading up there right now and have already notified Secret Service. We’ve also got Joe’s SUVs. They’re being taken apart as we speak.”

He flashed back to the press conference he’d held after the “assassination attempt” on Joe Josephson, how he’d repeatedly insisted that the vice president was safe and uninjured, how rumors of something more were “irresponsible and uncalled-for speculation.” He groaned inwardly at the memory. “All that stuff I said at the press conference. . . Shit! We’re going to take a major reaming on this.”

Ray Carmody didn’t give a damn about the director’s press relations. “That’s your problem,” he said brusquely. “I’ve got to notify the president.”

Nancy Elias showed no emotion at the news, though inside she was roiling. This was the beginning of a whole new phase of the game, one that would decide the very future of the country. There would be many lies told, many arms twisted, many deals made, many powerful people making many ruthless decisions in the coming days and weeks. It was war, plain and simple. Either the system would endure or it would be brought down in flames and something very different would rise from its ashes.

“Thank you, Ray,” she said evenly. “Keep me informed.”

* * *

What Nancy Elias and Ray Carmody most feared came to be a few hours later. The president’s chief of staff was in his White House office, re-reading Task Force One’s mostly useless reports, when the red light on his desk phone began flashing. He frowned at the annoyance; he’d specifically instructed that he not be disturbed. But he picked up the receiver anyway. It was his chief aide, Martin Chang, and the young man sounded shattered, as if he’d been paid a visit by the Grim Reaper himself.

“You’d better—oh, my god, sir—it’s on PD’s website. The vice president. He’s. . . I don’t believe it, sir. . .”

Ray Carmody felt ill. It had happened already. I thought at least we’d have a little time to prepare. He ignored his aide’s anguished mutterings and banged on his keyboard. The New York Post-Dispatch’s front page appeared. It held a single story. Under the headline, “The World According to Joe,” was a video of Joe Josephson seated at a rough table in a dark room that gave away nothing of its location. The only illumination was a beam of light directed at the table from above. Next to the video was a block of copy. Ray Carmody read it and forgot all about Martin Chang.

“This video is the statement of former vice president Joe Josephson, made after he was removed from the Icon Gold Hotel in San Francisco and placed in our custody. It was made under duress but it is truthful and has not been edited in any way. Clicking
here
will bring up a full and unedited transcript of this video, which has been placed on the websites of more than one hundred news organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

“This same video and transcript have also been disseminated via various other media to approximately two thousand other organizations and individuals around the world. They make clear the true scope and nature of the disease that has infected our nation. Release of this information—and action upon it by the American people—is vital to the survival of the United States of America as it was conceived and built by our founding fathers. We have made this video and transcript available for one reason and one reason only so that, to quote Abraham Lincoln, ‘Government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.’”

Ray Carmody couldn’t bear to watch, he couldn’t afford not to. He clicked on the video and Joe Josephson came to life. The former vice president appeared ashen and nervous but unharmed. When he spoke he was less the Bulldozer running over his opponents than a broken man confessing his sins.

And confess he did. Joe Josephson gave away everything, from 9/11 to Vietnam. After only a few minutes Ray Carmody was numb. The thought of these revelations, played out on computer screens across the world, made his insides shrivel. This was worse than he’d imagined, worse than he could imagine.

He punched off the video and forced himself to click on the bank of TV monitors that lined the wall opposite his desk. As the screens flickered to life he began to breathe easier. There were no “Special Reports,” no “Breaking News Updates,” just the usual morning show pablum. He watched a celebrity chef pretend to cook a fancy hamburger, an over-the-hill actress plug her latest movie. He watched long enough to be sure the broadcast media, at least, had not been compromised, that there was no word of Joe Josephson and his revelations, that it was still fulfilling its purpose. Then he made himself ready to face the president and hurried down the hall to the Oval Office.