America Rising (30 page)

For some reason that seemed to scare me more. My heart thumped harder. But I knew what I had to do. It was my own personal therapy. I locked up the house, walked across the street to the beach and pulled a chair to the waterline. This time I didn’t contemplate the sky, ponder life’s mysteries, ruminate on my place in the universe or any of that metaphysical crap. I just sat. It felt good.

* * *

Ray Carmody bustled down the hallway to the Oval Office. He had just received a disturbing phone call. Disturbing in its content, disturbing that he received it just after midnight, East Coast time. Disturbing that he’d received it at all. He knew the president was still up and working in the her study so he buzzed her and said, “I need to see you.”

The call had come from the doctor he had hand-picked to “treat” former Vice President Joe Josephson, who since his release by his kidnapers had been held at the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton in San Diego until the president could decide what to do with him. The doctor’s nerves were unraveling as he spoke.

“The patient is becoming uncooperative and belligerent,” he said, careful not to mention the patient’s name nor the name of the man he was speaking to. “I had to call the guards so I could sedate him. He’s demanding to be released. He says we have no right to keep him. He’s made threats.”

Ray Carmody knew what was coming next but he forced himself to speak calmly.

“What—precisely—did he say?”

The doctor practically hyperventilated getting the words out.

“He said, ‘I’ll tell the world everything I said is true if you don’t get me the hell out of here.’”

“Thank you for the information,” Ray Carmody said grimly. “I’ll have instructions for you shortly.”

Nancy Elias was seated behind her desk in the Oval Office when Carmody hurried in. He knew she preferred to receive bad news there rather than in her study; the trappings of the presidency seemed to boost her confidence in her ability to handle crises. She would need that confidence today.

“What’s so urgent, Ray?” she said as he sat down across from her.

“It’s Joe,” he said simply. “He’s acting up. He wants out. He’s threatened to go off the reservation.”

The president sighed and shook her head. “I suppose it had to come to this.” She sounded both sad and relieved. Then more briskly, “Who else knows?”

“Me. You. The doctor and nurse at Pendleton. Some of the guards. Apparently they had to hold him down so he could be sedated.”

“Can we keep it quiet?”

“I think so. We emptied out an entire wing of the hospital for him, brought in some of our best contract employees to keep it secure. They’re dressed military but aren’t. There’s no record they were ever on base. The doctor is someone I’ve known for twenty years. He can be trusted. He vouched for the nurse so she can be trusted too. But we can’t hold Joe forever. At some point we’ll have to deal with him.”

“What do you advise?”

Ray Carmody ran his hand through his thinning hair and wondered if there was such a place as hell and if he might be spending eternity there.

“If we let him go we’ll have this problem hanging over our heads for. . . who knows how long? You know Joe. Every time he wants something, wants us to do something, he’ll beat us with the same stick. And what if he gets religion and decides he has to confess? Plus, he’s a target for any hot-shot reporter who wants a big excloo, not to mention a lot of the people on that video, who’d just as soon put a bullet in him. That will just open the whole can of worms again and we’ll have two messes to deal with.”

Nancy Elias spoke without emotion.

“So what you’re saying is that we need to deal with the situation now rather than later.”

“Yes.”

“And the doctor and nurse?”

Ray Carmody swore he could see the gates of hell swinging open to welcome him.

“Yes.”

“Then make it happen.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

* * *

Preparations for the New Declaration of Independence-slash-New Bonus Army march on Washington continued at a fevered pace. Despite an army of volunteers and assistance from activist groups across the country, AnnaLynn Conté and the staff at SayNo barely had time to eat or sleep. Most hadn’t been home, showered or changed their clothes in days. The atmosphere in the crowded office was growing ripe.

Everyone missed John Doe, AnnaLynn most of all. He was invaluable in so many ways; no one was better or more useful in a crisis. And he had a soothing effect on the staff. Everyone seemed to work and feel better when he was around. She hesitated to admit it, but she missed Josh Henson too. He was still grieving over his late wife and she didn’t want to intrude on that. But those few weeks in the Keys were like a window on a life she never imagined had existed. She could see why he loved the place and thought she might be able to love it too. She caught herself daydreaming. Stop it, she told herself sternly. None of this work is going to get done by itself.

There was a lot of work, but plans were beginning to firm up. Say-No would lead the main caravan out of New Orleans, skirting the Gulf of Mexico on I-10, then breaking north to Atlanta, where they would honor Dr. Martin Luther King at Ebenezer Baptist Church and wait for caravans from the north and west to join up. It was important to AnnaLynn to commemorate King’s legacy, the life’s work of a man whose heart and intellect spoke to equality for African-Americans and to economic justice for Americans of every color.

From there the caravan would head due north and east, joining up with other caravans and arriving in Washington, D.C. early July Fourth for a rally and celebration to take place on the capitol’s National Mall. Based on the responses on SayNo’s website and Facebook page, as many as five hundred thousand people could roll into D.C. that morning, joining two, three, maybe even four million more for the rally.

After that, the New Bonus Army marchers, their numbers so far around a hundred thousand, would caravan down Pennsylvania Avenue away from the White House, cross the Anacostia River and settle down for a month-long stay in Anacostia Park. The planning for this was beyond complex, demanding the kind of highly specialized knowledge neither SayNo nor any of the other activist groups possessed. But help had come from a seemingly unlikely source: hundreds of current and former members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Most had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and were expert at the logistics of moving large masses of people, providing for their sustenance and giving them some basic organization.

Surprising too was the cooperation of the federal government. It was as if an order had come down from the very top to be polite and cooperative and make sure the rally and subsequent occupation of the park were a success. It all seemed too good to be true, which made AnnaLynn Conté seriously consider they were being played. But she’d take the cooperation now and face the consequences when they arrived.

She had little doubt they would.

* * *

John Doe pulled a tattered baseball cap over his reddish hair and shrugged deeper into his oversized plaid shirt. He knew the instant the weeping giant with the shotgun released him that he had been painted with a giant bulls-eye, that the forces he fought in his own quiet way would already be moving to pin him to a spreading board like a dangerous and exotic insect.

In the aftermath of the confrontation at the park he’d managed to lose himself in the crowd, stripping off his blue workshirt to the white t-shirt underneath and picking up a trampled Yankees baseball cap he found laying on the ground. With that minimal disguise he hitchhiked back to his Lower Nine home, packed up his few possessions, left a brief note to his neighbors and hitched another ride to the bus depot.

He’d heard that the governor of Tennessee was trying to crush the state’s public employee union, that the union had responded with daily sit-ins and rallies in the state capitol. So he would go to Nashville. There, he thought, he could be of help. But he’d give himself a break and go by way of Memphis, a city he’d always loved. Stretch his legs after a day-long bus ride, eat some barbecue, drink a few beers while taking in some blues on Beale Street, get a good night’s sleep. Then in the morning catch a bus for Nashville.

While in Memphis he’d have to do something more about his appearance too. His face was likely already on TV screens from one coast to the other; a baseball cap and different shirt would only keep him hidden for so long. The bus ride was as tedious as he’d expected, as uneventful as he’d hoped. He got off at the Union Avenue depot and made the short walk to Beale Street and A. Schwab Dry Goods, a local landmark and the last original business left on the now furiously touristy street. Picking through its long aisles strewn with everything from Elvis Presley coffee mugs to voodoo candles, he found a pair of khaki pants, a plain white button-down shirt and a skinny black tie.

He purchased the items, put them in a plastic bag and walked a few more blocks to a drugstore, where he bought toiletries, a cheap pair of sunglasses, another baseball cap with no markings at all, a large bottle of water and a container of blond hair dye that he thought would come close enough to matching the beard he’d started growing. A few blocks further was the kind of hotel he was looking for—inexpensive, unpretentious, full of people who nobody would ever notice. He got a room, dyed his hair and changed his clothes, stuffed his old clothes into one of the plastic bags and dropped it in a sidewalk trashcan on his way back to Beale Street.

There he caught a cab and rode a few miles east to Cozy Corner, a funky little barbecue joint he’d eaten at once or twice before, and treated himself to half a slab of ribs and iced tea, then cabbed back to Beale Street and bought a ticket for both shows at The Blues Room restaurant and niteclub. It was a tourist trap that no self-respecting local would be caught dead in, he knew, but he wanted the anonymity of a roomful of strangers studiously avoiding looking at each other. Besides, the beer was cold and the white boy band on-stage had a guitarist who got off some pretty good licks.

He left after a well-played tribute to the master—”The Thrill Is Gone”—and ambled back to his hotel, enjoying the soft, warm night air. The day had been a pleasant respite. Tomorrow morning he’d fill up on the hotel’s free buffet breakfast and hike to the depot and his ride to Nashville.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

* * *

The man whose calm, implacable voice was embedded in the memories of Joe Josephson and Josh Henson poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the head of a heavy butcher-block table in the kitchen of a ranch at the foot of Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains. Seated to either side of him were his five team leaders, three men and two women: Intelligence, Tactics, Technology, Weapons and Logistics. The five called him Leader. They never used their given names when working. He had just told them of the incident with the reporter in the Florida Keys, and their concern hung in the air like the faint wisps of smoke from the fire burning in the ranch’s massive stone fireplace.

Intelligence, a chubby man in his mid-forties with searching eyes only partially concealed behind thick glasses, was particularly upset. “I should have kept closer tabs on Elliott. I should have known,” he said over and over, wringing his hands in his lap.

“No way you could have,” Leader responded. “We all knew we’d have to suspend operations after Josephson. The hunters are out there, and now there are more of them and they’re hungrier than ever. Luckily, the rest of Josephson team is already out of the country and secure. We’ve done all we could. So stop blaming yourself.”

“How did you find out?” asked Weapons. She was in her mid-thirties, barely five feet tall, with a lean, mannish body and a face that made her appear ten years younger. But she could field-strip an M4 carbine in thirty seconds in the dark and empty its clip dead-center on a target three hundred yards away. Anyone who underestimated her would not live long enough to regret it.

“A hunch,” Leader said. “It’s the reason I called this meeting.”

He tapped the screen of his iPhone and it blossomed with the still photograph of John Doe standing in the middle of Magazine Street with a shotgun at his forehead. He slid the phone down the table and said, “You’ve all seen this video. This is the most popular man in America. You can’t turn on the television, click on the Internet, without seeing his face. They’re already printing it on t-shirts and posters. There’s a John Doe for President website. And no one knows who or where he is.

“I reached out to some of my own sources and all they could say with certainty is that sometime in the last year or two he bought a truck in Northern California. Born, raised, parents, work history, bank account, driver’s license. . . nothing. I did get confirms from several different locales, mostly in the West, that he’s something of a wandering do-gooder, going from place to depressed place, working with the people there, then taking off. I know he’s been in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. His last stop was in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He was working with that SayNo group to organize the demonstration there. After that, he disappeared. He’s in the wind.

“Bottom line is, he’s a very, very dangerous man. Perhaps the most dangerous man in America, at least to the people we’ve spent the past year fighting. He’s a man who has nothing and apparently wants nothing. There is no more dangerous man than that. Now he’s become a symbol of everything this country used to be and no longer is, which is why I believe he’s touched so many people, why they see him as almost a modern-day messiah. Which is also why he must be eliminated.”