America Rising (34 page)

Their shoes, for another. Or rather Sport Coat’s shoes. They weren’t the shoes worn by someone hanging around a seedy downtown bus depot. They were the shoes you saw at fancy charity events in Palm Beach or trendy restaurants in Beverly Hills—gray suede, monogrammed with the initials of some poofy designer, worn without socks. The third tell was a slight hitch in the men’s right arms as they walked, as if the weapons in their shoulder holsters were chafing a bit.

“We’re on,” One said, calmly. “Two, you’re still on the subject. Three, take Black Jacket. Four, take Sport Coat. I’ll cover.”

Now everything happened at once.

John Doe shoved off the wall, rounded the corner of the depot, passed Blue Two on his way to a line of cabs at the curb. Sport Coat and Black Jacket, saw him, exchanged knowing glances, followed. John Doe nodded at the first cabbie in line. Blue Four slid out of the minivan parked behind the cabs and moved up the street. Blue Three exited the depot, trailing Sport Coat and Black Jacket. John Doe opened the cab door and said, “Graceland.” Blue Two came up behind, covering his back.

Sport Coat and Black Jacket were within striking distance now, hands inside their coats. John Doe climbed into the cab. Blue Two leaned over him. Smiled and said, “I was going to Graceland too. Mind if we share the ride?” John Doe smiled back. “Sure, hop in.”

Sport Coat closed in fast, gun in hand, still beneath his coat. Blue Four moved faster, cut him off, pretended to stumble, bent down, pretended to tie his shoe. Sport Coat tried to maneuver past. Black Jacket trailed his partner, closing in fast too. Blue Three moved to intercept.

Sport Coat was at the cab, gun out now. Blue Four was on one knee, fiddling with his shoe. Threw an elbow, felt Sport Coat’s knee bend sideways, heard bones crack, ligaments snap. Heard a scream, saw the man fall, heard his gun clatter on the sidewalk. Black Jacket was startled, looked down, lost his focus. Blue Three came up behind him, hooked an ankle with his foot, swept the man’s leg from under him, dropped him as if poleaxed. His head banged hard on the pavement.

Blue One pounded on the hood of the cab. Shouted, “They’ve got guns! Go, go, go!!” Then to the bystanders, “These bastards tried to mug me! Call the cops!”

The cab shot off the curb. Blue One stomped Black Jacket’s gun hand, felt tiny bones crunch beneath his foot. Three and Four were already at the minivan. Sport Coat and Black Jacket were surrounded, held down by an outraged crowd. Sirens wailed faintly, then louder, coming closer. The minivan joined traffic on the street, turned right at the depot. Blue One was waiting. The van stopped. He got in.

A minute later they were watching a red dot move across Blue Four’s computer screen. “Two’s tracker is on,” he said. “Let’s see where they’re going.” They watched the dot and settled in for the ride.

* * *

Leland Elliott saw the odds for his survival shrink dramatically. Only minutes earlier he’d been blessing his good fortune, just happening to cruise down Union Avenue as John Doe stepped out of that crappy old hotel. He too was sure Doe was heading for the bus depot so he radioed the two shooters who’d been cruising Beale Street and told them to get there and make the hit.

It was a spur of the moment thing, not the well-thought-out plan Mr. Flowers had ordered. But as long as Doe was dead and the patsy set up to take the fall, Elliott was confident that Flowers wouldn’t mind. True, he hadn’t figured out the patsy part yet but he would have come up with something.

Instead, it had all gone to hell.

Somebody had Doe’s back, somebody good enough to pick up on his shooters, take them out, then vanish. He’d seen the group of people at the cab as he flashed by in the rented Ford, noted the gathering crowd and the construction worker pounding on the cab’s hood, but he couldn’t make it as anything other than a bunch of citizens who’d just witnessed an attempted mugging.

In any event, he was in deep shit now. Terminal shit, even. Mr. Flowers would know he’d screwed up again, maybe before the day was out. His only chance to stay alive and in one piece was to eliminate Doe before Flowers sent someone to eliminate him. So he goddam better well find out where Doe was heading, get his ass over there and come up with some way to kill the bastard. He’d have to improvise again, have the patsy in position this time. But it was still better than taking his chances with Mr. Flowers. That was no kind of chance at all.

A
reporter bulldogging a story is like building a house. You start with the right piece of land. Shape, size, elevation don’t much matter, it just has to be solid enough to support a structure. Then you lay your foundation—no bigger than what the land can carry, making sure it’s strong, true, can bear the weight of what you’re about to set upon it.

Now you can start building. Brick by brick, layer by layer, stopping often to check your work, examining it for poor construction, shoddy materials, the inevitable shortcomings of any human endeavor. You throw up the walls, attach the roof, and if you’re smart and good and did everything right you should have something that can withstand the jostling of time and Mother Nature.

I had my own piece of land. Figurative land, that is. It was an idea that had been kicking around my head ever since my conversation with Chloe Enders, an idea so outlandish and yet frightening I could scarcely admit it even to myself. It was a terrible piece of land—full of boulders and sinkholes and poisonous foliage. But I couldn’t stop thinking it was just sitting there, waiting for me to build a house on it.

So I did. And history moved with me.

* * *

“What was that all about?” John Doe asked, baffled, as the cab merged onto I-240 for the short trip to Elvis Presley’s mansion-turned-museum.

“Hell if I know,” said the cabbie, a wizened black man with short gray hair who looked as if he’d been hacking since cars started with hand cranks. “Some kind of stick-up or something. I wasn’t going to wait around to find out.”

“There were a couple of creepy guys hanging around the depot,” Blue Two said, deftly palming her earbud and slipping it in a pocket. “I thought maybe they were following me. That’s why I had to get out of there. To be honest, though, I’m not really much of an Elvis fan. More a John Lee Hooker type.”

John Doe arched an eyebrow. “
The Healer
?” he said, suddenly interested.

“Great album,” Blue Two said. She didn’t have to feign her enthusiasm. “Santana, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, George Thorogood. Charlie Musselwhite’s harp. But I like the roots stuff too:
Boogie Chillen, King Snake, Boom Boom.”

“Did I tell you I love you?” John Doe said, a big grin splitting his face. He stuck out his hand. “John Doe.”

“Sheila Boniface,” Blue Two said, then immediately wanted to crawl into a hole, pull the opening over her and disappear.

She’d just given the subject her real name.

She could have slapped herself. Fifteen years of iron discipline, gone after a few minutes in a cab with a man she had never met, never even heard of until a few days ago. Former Staff Sergeant Sheila Boniface had been around her share of charismatic men—Leader was one. But this guy was like human crack. You were swooning and drooling with your pants around your ankles at hello. She’d have to be especially careful around him.

To cover her embarrassment she pumped John Doe’s hand and said, “What about you? Are you an Elvis fan?”

He shrugged noncommittally, extricating his hand, thankful she didn’t make the usual cracks about his name. “Not really. But he is an icon, and I’ve been to Memphis three or four times and never got around to seeing the place. So when my plans fell through I figured, What the hell?”

“What plans? If you don’t mind my asking.”

John Doe shrugged again. “Not at all. I was heading to Nashville. The governor was trying to gut the public employees’ union. I thought I might be able to help. But then I got to the depot and saw the newspaper and it looks like the union won. So I thought I’d stick around Memphis a little while longer, figure out what to do next.”

Suddenly he grew wary, like he’d just remembered he was on the run.

“What about you?” he said. “What brings you here?”

It was Sheila Boniface’s turn to shrug. “I get antsy staying in one place too long,” she said, not entirely untruthfully. “My parents died a few years ago, left me a little money and I’ve been traveling ever since. I was born and raised in California, haven’t really seen the South. I was thinking of going to New Orleans next, then hit the Delta Blues Museum in Mississippi, maybe join up with that New Bonus Army caravan. You heard of that?”

“Oh, yes,” John Doe said, grateful to be spared revealing any more by the their arrival at the Graceland complex. Sheila Boniface’s hand went to her purse but Doe waved her off and paid the fare himself. They got out and headed for the ticket window but halfway there he stopped. He looked at her, looked at the ticket window. Looked at her again. Gave an embarrassed smile.

“You really don’t want to do this, do you?” he said.

Sheila Boniface laughed and shook her head. “Not really. Tell you what, though, since you paid for the cab, how ‘bout we go back to town and get something to eat? My treat. A pulled pork sandwich and a cold beer sound like heaven to me. That is, if you feel like it.”

John Doe surprised himself by answering without a second thought. “I do feel like it,” he said. “I absolutely do feel like it.”

* * *

In New Orleans, AnnaLynn Conté punched up some numbers on her computer and allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. More than thirty million people had now signed SayNo’s New Declaration of Independence pledge, vowing to pay nothing to corporate America for the entire month of July.

It was an impressive achievement. Of course, not all of them would follow through. But more people were signing up every day, and if even half of them lived up to their pledge, the hit to the country’s economic and political elites would be substantial, the message unmistakable. It would be painful for the people too. She didn’t delude herself about that. But it was plenty painful now, and it wouldn’t be getting better any time soon. The least they could do was spread some of that pain around.

The pledge list for the New Bonus Army march was growing as well. Projections called for up to four million people at the New Declaration rally, more than one hundred thousand committed to spending July camped out in Anacostia Park. Her smile faded. The enormity of the task, the responsibility were like weights pressing against her chest. She turned off the computer, the lights, and sat in her darkened office until the weight lifted enough for her to get up, lock the door and head for home.

* * *

In Washington D.C., Ray Carmody was also looking at numbers on his computer. But he felt no satisfaction, only a sickening feeling that the day of reckoning Nancy Elias had long feared was finally poised to arrive.

The numbers were bad. Very bad. Eighty-nine percent of the American public no longer had any trust in business or the government. Eighty-six percent said both parties were pawns of corporations and the rich, and served their interests to the ruination of the country. Seventy-nine percent feared that ruination would occur within their lifetimes.

Three out of four Americans had a favorable opinion of the mysterious John Doe. “Guts,” “honest,” “cares,” “not a politician,” were all used to describe him. If the election were held today, forty-seven percent of Americans would vote for him for president, a man who had never uttered a single public word, whom they knew only from a few minutes on TV and a handful of mostly derogatory news stories.

Ray Carmody felt a crushing weight too. How had it all come to this? All those dreams and ideals, all those years of long days and longer nights, serving what he’d once believed was the greater good, all come down to acquiescing in the murder of the one man who gave Americans hope, of forcing two innocent people to murder a vice president and then ordering their murders too. He looked inside himself and was frightened by what he saw.

He thought of the .40 caliber Smith & Wesson he kept in a lockbox beneath his bed. He thought it might be his only way out. He thought it might be salvation.

* * *

In Memphis, John Doe and Sheila Boniface hailed a cab and fled Graceland for downtown. Blue Team followed. Leland Elliott too. He’d tailed the cab to the garish Presley complex, so intent on keeping his quarry in sight he didn’t notice the white minivan hanging back in his wake. When the couple got off at a barbecue restaurant on the fringe of downtown and went inside, Leland Elliott parked across the street where he could see the restaurant entrance and waited. The white minivan circled around the block, parked around the corner so the silver Ford was still in sight.

Blue Four ran the plates, hacked into the rent-a-car company’s database. “Rented this morning to an Edward Jones,” he announced after a few minutes fiddling with his computer. “Fake name, obviously. I’ll run the credit card numbers but it’s probably stolen.” More fiddling. “It is.”

Blue Three squinted at the Ford. “Looks like it’s only the driver,” he said, “But I can’t see a face. We should get some eyes on him.”