America Rising (26 page)

Thursday, the protests continued unabated, but the more savvy protestors began to realize that flash-mob demonstrations had only limited effect, that they needed a more concerted national effort. Tapping into the network of activist groups around the country and riding a tsunami of texts and Facebook and Twitter posts, that notion grew into plans for a series of simultaneous demonstrations in major American cities, a one-day national strike to take place the following Monday, exactly one week after the release of the Josephson video.

In more than thirty cities from coast to coast, frantic preparations for what was dubbed Rescue America Day were launched. In New Orleans, AnnaLynn Conté and SayNo threw themselves into planning for a rally they hoped would bring fifty to seventy-five thousand people to Audubon Park, three hundred-plus acres of fields and facilities in the city’s tony Uptown neighborhood. On such short notice, the organizational and logistical hurdles were daunting, even more so to already exhausted staffers running on po’ boys and Red Bull.

Thursday evening a slight young man with short reddish hair and a quiet, diffident manner walked into SayNo’s office and volunteered to help. He wore blue jeans scuffed and stained at the knees and a faded plaid shirt. His hands were rough and calloused, his fingernails embedded with the grime of his Lower Ninth Ward home.

He was immediately put to work—running errands, accessing and copying documents, filling out forms, answering phone calls—the scut work of any busy office. He worked through the night, never stopping, saying little, his bright blue eyes missing nothing. When staff members who’d finally gone home around four in the morning returned several hours later, he was still working, looking as fresh and relaxed as if he’d spent the night sleeping peacefully in his own bed.

AnnaLynn Conté had noticed the quiet young man, noted his preternatural calm, his remorseless efficiency, his quick grasp of detail and iron constitution. She introduced herself and he said simply, “John Doe.” Then he shook her hand and went back to work. She stood and watched him go, vaguely unsettled by their meeting yet somehow light-hearted, though she couldn’t say why.

By Friday afternoon he was indispensible. By Friday evening he was shouldering the responsibilities of any of SayNo’s senior staffers. He seemed to have an alchemist’s touch with people. When one staffer got into a screaming match with a city bureaucrat over some detail of the coming protest, John Doe politely asked if he could help, took the telephone into an empty cubicle and emerged ten minutes later with the issue resolved and an apologetic official only too glad to help. Every eye in the office watched him return to his makeshift desk, feeling vaguely unsettled and—like AnnaLynn Conté—just a little bit hopeful too.

* * *

In the White House, Ray Carmody and Nancy Elias watched the week’s events unfold with faint hope curdled by rising apprehension. Everything had gone according to plan, the media had played its part. Everyone except ever-growing numbers of the American people. They ignored the media campaign, worked around the Internet roadblocks, and gathered with increasing frequency and building anger to voice their opposition to the system that had spawned the likes of Joe Josephson.

It wasn’t just the ferocity and resilience of the public response that kept Ray Carmody awake at night, it was its spontaneity and self-generation. There was no single head to chop off to ensure that the body would die. The SayNos and other activist groups had a role, to be sure. But they were riding the bus, not driving it.

The coming demonstration was more worrisome still. One of Ray Carmody’s first rules of politics, learned over decades of give-no-quarter fighting in the trenches, was to never let your opponents feel their own strength. Keep them weak, divided, fighting each other. Helpless. He’d worked that rule so successfully for so many years he had taken it for granted. He wasn’t taking it for granted now.

In the executive offices and studios of the media companies there was apprehension too. They’d done everything the president had asked—churning out a constant stream of news stories, exposes and special reports, unleashing all their “journalists” and pontificating heads—all aimed at denying Joe Josephson’s revelations and heaping scorn on their believers. Yet their only success was to drive away even more of their continually shrinking audience.

Their worry over Rescue America Day was even more pronounced. Too-positive coverage and the president would be pissed, their lucrative, back-scratching arrangement with the government at all levels would be jeopardized. Too-negative coverage they’d lose even more viewers. Ground between two irreconcilable extremes, all they could do was flounder.

In the boardrooms of the nation’s Internet providers, executives there were also caught in a crossfire of unpalatable options. Acceding to the president’s demands, they allowed her “unforeseen technical issues” to take the ‘Net back to its dial-up roots. But that hardly slowed the circulation of the Josephson video. Copies on flash drives and DVDs multiplied and were passed around like heirlooms, were shown in private homes and theaters and libraries and rented halls. Even the lowly transcript was copied, distributed and devoured. Indeed, the only real success of their efforts was to throw a monkey wrench into the workings of the rest of corporate America, which depended on a fully functional Internet to conduct business. To survive. Presidential directive or no, this could not go on much longer.

* * *

In his office in New York City, Frank Bernabe heard his cellphone ring with the one call he did not ever, ever want to take. He stared at the number displayed on the tiny screen, afraid to answer, even more afraid not to. When he finally forced himself to pick up the receiver and raise it to his face, he heard nothing but his own breathing.

Then a voice broke the silence. It was soft, sibilant and deadly.

“What’s going on there, Frank?”

He tried not to let his shaking hands betray him.

“Just a temporary setback. I’m dealing with it.”

This time the silence was longer. It went on so long Frank Bernabe thought he might void himself. When it ended he didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more frightened.

“See that you do.”

* * *

Chasing down Joe Josephson’s revelations was the single most frustrating task of my career. No one would talk, even to answer the most innocuous of questions. Some people literally ran away when I identified myself as a reporter. Others had already run. When I got to fifty I stopped counting the number of disconnected phones and “no longer at this addresses” I encountered. People had been gotten to and told to keep their mouths shut. I felt like a man with a four-foot reach chained five feet from a pot of gold.

I switched gears and went back to tracking Leland Elliott and Tutis International but that was a dead end too. Elliott’s cell phone had been disconnected, and there was no longer a directory listing, or any listing, for his company. When I went back to the Miami highrise that had housed its corporate offices I found its name stripped from the building’s list of tenants. A helpful security guard told me the company had moved out in a hurry about ten days ago, right around the time of Joe Josephson’s kidnapping. Then he told me he shouldn’t be seen speaking to me and that I had to go.

I said all this to Jeff O’Neill and he said the same thing had happened to every one of my Public Interest colleagues. He wanted the Tutis International story, though. It was a good story, better than nothing, so I banged it out quickly and sent it off. I was still frustrated at how thoroughly the Josephson pipeline had been choked off but at the moment I didn’t know what I could do about it. Soon, however, that would be the least of my worries.

* * *

Frank Bernabe sat at his desk, regulating his breathing, waiting for his nerves to stop jangling. When he felt ready he went to his wet bar and poured himself a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, noting with satisfaction that his hands were no longer shaking. He downed the amber liquid in a quick, greedy gulp, savoring its soft, warm burn as it coursed down his throat. Then he resumed his position at the desk and began plotting how to make good on his promise.

* * *

Russell Millar always enjoyed the commanding view of the world’s greatest city from the wraparound windows of his 21
^st
floor Manhattan office. Today he was wondering if he had the nerve to launch himself out of one of those windows and into the nothingness, if the terror of falling twenty-one stories would kill him before he landed. He decided there were easier and less messy ways to do himself in, if it came to that. Thankfully, it hadn’t come to that yet.

He backed away from the windows, thoughts of suicide temporarily banished. But his dilemma remained. Ed Bane had really done it this time. True, he had followed through on Bill Bigby’s request to beat down the Josephson revelations, had done so with such malevolent, maniacal glee it made Russ Millar uncomfortable. But he didn’t stop there. Oh, no, Ed Bane never stopped there.

Millar had listened to the taped open of yesterday’s show so many times he could almost recite it from memory.

“In two days this great nation will come under attack by the forces of pure evil. This brazen assault on our freedom, our liberty, our Constitution, our very American way of life is being planned even as you listen by a band of godless communist-socialist-fascists who will turn the land we love into a giant concentration camp and begin feeding you and your children into its ovens. ‘Rescue America Day,’ these scum call it. Do you believe it? And do you think our Rug Muncher in Chief, the witch in the White House, that spineless sack of pus on Pennsylvania Avenue will do anything to stop them?

“Hah!

“But that’s alright, ladies and gentlemen, fellow Bane-iacs, that’s alright. Because by the time we get through with these wastes of good oxygen, it won’t be America that needs rescuing. God is calling you,
I
am calling you to stand up against this evil, this conspiracy of One Worlders and atheists and liberal-fascist-terrorists who would take this most blessed of all nations from you and turn you into slaves in your own country.”

The next words made Russell Millar shiver.

“If it takes a fist, make a fist. If it takes a rock, pick up a rock. If it takes a stick, grab a stick. If it takes a knife, unsheathe a knife. And if it takes a gun, dammit!, lock, load and
ready, aim, fire!”

Russ Millar had never felt so helpless. He was not adverse to violence, to its judicious application on the right people. But this was playing with fire in a room painted with nitroglycerin. Ed Bane has to be reined in, profit margins be damned. Bill Bigby may think he can forever ride the tiger that Bane has become, can use him as a wrecking ball without getting blasted by the inevitable backswing.

But Bane doesn’t see himself as a tool for the Bill Bigbys of the world, he sees himself as their superior. Declaring war on the demonstrators was implicitly declaring war on his nominal boss, not to mention the President of the United States. Ed Bane was feeling his power, intoxicated by it, and now all Russ Millar and Bill Bigby and Nancy Elias could do was watch hordes of Bane-iacs run amok and turn the rest of the country against them.

Russell Millar contemplated the scene outside his windows and began to reconsider his decision.

R
escue America Day turned out to be bigger than even its organizers had anticipated. More than one million people jammed into Washington’s National Mall, almost as many overwhelmed New York’s Central Park. In Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other major cities the throngs numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Small-town parks and public squares were filled too.

The crowds could have been mistaken for those jamming the average suburban shopping mall. They were a cross-section of America, good-humored but somber, anger stoked by the betrayals enumerated by Joe Josephson crackling just below the surface. Still, there were no outward displays of violence. They listened to speeches and music, talked amongst themselves, waited patiently in lines for bottled water and bad food, but mostly just gathered to make their numbers and determination known.

Some of them also died.

Ed Bane’s call to ready, aim, fire was taken literally. Mobs of Bane-iacs, joined by remnants of the old Tea Party, various fringe groups and paramilitary types, fell on the demonstrations and exacted their vengeance. They may have been outnumbered but they were not out-armed. With rocks and sticks and knives and guns and their own fists they attacked. Six people were shot and killed in D.C., four in New York, more than a dozen in other cities. Injuries reached into the hundreds. In several cities, police lines were pulled back just before the attacks took place, to the consternation of many cops on-scene. The major media blamed the violence on demonstrators.

AnnaLynn Conté would always remember this day as a turning point. One hundred thousand people swarming Audubon Park, spilling onto side streets, gathering with quiet dignity and sober resolve to say the America they loved could not be taken, had not died, could be reborn.

She would also remember it as a day of great sadness, a day when American turned on American at the ravings of a cynical manipulator of his own people. But above all she would remember it as the day that John Doe burned himself into the national consciousness and set the country on a path no one, even Doe himself, could have ever imagined.