America Rising (38 page)

“We’re hot in five,” the pilot said.

Lights off, the SUVs exited the warehouse, crossed the canal on North Claiborne Avenue into the Lower Nine. It was three-twenty in the morning. Three minutes to go.

The men about to converge on the house where John Doe and Sheila Boniface had been traced were sure they had planned for every contingency. They had the element of surprise, the latest technology, overwhelming firepower and superior numbers. They could never imagine being defeated by the children employed by neighborhood drug gangs.

Nathan Franklin had done more than just get a mattress and clean sheets for his two guests. He reached out to his former associates in the drug trade, told them of the situation and secured an agreement to defend their turf against the attack he knew would come.

As soon as the two SUVs flashed across the Industrial Canal, a twelve-year-old boy whose “day job” was lookout for the Fourteen-Thirty Mob IM’d his gang leader, who relayed the message to his fellow gangbangers. They’d already discussed what to do. They took their positions and waited.

Then all hell broke loose.

The SUVs drove deeper into the Lower Nine, lights out, running hard. The dull roar of the approaching helicopter split the warm night air. The vehicles turned onto John Doe’s street. Three blocks away. Then two. The helicopter roar was louder, almost directly overhead, descending. One block away, almost there. The men in the SUVs stiffened with anticipation. They flicked off their weapons’ safeties.

Suddenly, without sound or warning, a junked Caddie shot out from behind a decaying house, blocking the street. The driver of the lead SUV didn’t have a chance. He t-boned the Caddy, his vehicle went airborne, landed upside down, collapsing its roof like a tin can. From their hidden positions the gangbangers opened fire, pinning both SUVs in the center of a lethal triangle.

The second SUV almost made it. The driver gunned the engine, ran the big truck up on the sidewalk, a front lawn, back on the street. But he couldn’t outrun the bullets that fell like rain. Its windows shattered, sheet metal perforated, the SUV jumped the curb, tore through a patch of grass, half collapsed a sagging front porch. The four men inside never made it out.

The helicopter was over John Doe’s house now, holding it in a beam of blinding light. A door slid open. A rappel line snaked to the ground. Figures appeared in the doorway. The line tensed. One by one, the figures dropped swiftly, silently. Then they tumbled, out of control. They were dead before they hit the ground. They never figured an ambush, never saw their attackers, never heard the soft spits of suppressed M4s that tore their flesh apart. The helicopter pilot panicked, clicked off his spotlight and fled, rappel line trailing like a forlorn streamer.

On the ground, the gangbangers melted away. Now the noise was the wail of sirens. The four members of Red Team hustled out of the house, through vacant lots, neat backyards, empty streets, to a blacked-out van. John Doe and Sheila Boniface were already there. Nathan Franklin was there, waiting. Red Team climbed in, the van took off. The woman called Weapons, her lips tight, eyes fierce, nodded at the tattooed gangbanger, a gesture of respect. He took it, gave it back. The van crossed the Industrial Canal. John Doe was safe again.

For now.

A
powerful spring thunderstorm chased pedestrians off the streets and flung jagged shards of neon lightning across a midnight-black sky. Rain poured down so fast and heavy it sounded like white noise. Nancy Elias got up from her desk in the Oval Office and stood in front of the room’s bank of tall windows, contemplating the storm’s fury. It matched her own.

A paramilitary assault in the heart of a major American city was not something easily bottled up. Reports of men rappelling out of a helicopter and eleven corpses in full body armor with military-issue equipment and not a trace of identification had local law enforcement in an uproar, at least until they called in the FBI. The director immediately dispatched every agent within two hundred miles to the scene with instructions to seal it off and sequester residents for two blocks in every direction. The bodies, vehicles, bullet casings, every speck of evidence was to be bagged, tagged and transported to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington, D.C. That done, the director called the White House.

Nancy Elias’s first step was to get the heads of local and national media companies out of bed, threaten them with “national security” and demand they throttle any coverage of the battle until an appropriate cover story could be worked up. She promised to have that for them in a day or two. Her second step was to call the director back and tell him that if any of his agents leaked a single word of what happened they would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act and federal conspiracy statutes and “anything else I can think of.”

Her third step was to buzz Ray Carmody.

Even from across the Oval Office she thought her chief of staff looked terrible. He’d lost weight, his eyes were dull, his skin papery and pulled tight on his face. He moved with the shuffle of an old man. He sat down in front of her and she thought about New Orleans again and her anger got the better of her sympathy.

“I got a call from the director, Ray,” she said, her voice a sharp instrument probing an open wound. “About New Orleans. What in the hell have you done down there?”

“What you instructed, Madam President,” Ray Carmody said listlessly. “Eliminate John Doe.” He seemed lost in some private recollection, then brought himself back. “We tried in Memphis. Twice. Frank set it up. The second time it was supposed to traced back to Bigby; Frank wanted to neutralize him. But Doe apparently had some guardians. Even Frank didn’t know about them.”

He looked at her with pleading eyes. “We had to do something, Nancy. Frank said there wasn’t any other way, that we had to just go in there and get him. We didn’t have a choice.”

Nancy Elias exploded.

“My God, Ray! You declared war on American citizens!”

Something twisted and broke off inside Ray Carmody.

“Isn’t that what we
do,
Nancy?” he said savagely, his voice and body suddenly animated. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for years, what those before us have been doing for decades? We declare war on the American people every goddam day for the benefit of Frank Bernabe and Bill Bigby and anyone else with thirty pieces of silver to slip into our pockets. Then we lie to them and ourselves and say it’s for the good of the country. What a joke. We don’t give a damn about the good of the fucking country. You know it and I know it.”

Ray Carmody was just gathering steam.

“And now
they
know it too. That’s why you wanted John Doe dead, because now the peasants know what we’re all about, because they just might throw us off the gravy train, run the whole goddam engine straight off the tracks. But you didn’t want to get your hands dirty, did you? You wanted to see Doe shot down like a dog and act like you had nothing to do with it. At least those people in New Orleans had the courage to pull the trigger themselves. We pay other people to pull the trigger for us. We’re a thousand times worse than they are. We’re the ones who deserve to die.”

Finally, Ray Carmody stopped. Panting. Spent.

Nancy Elias stared at her chief of staff with eyes glazed and cold, like diamonds under ice.

“I expect your resignation within the hour,” she said stonily. “You’re no longer of use to me.”

Ray Carmody’s face was gray.

“I’m no longer of use to anyone, Madam President,” he said.

* * *

The same summer thunderstorm battering Washington D.C. was also sweeping through New York City, filling the sky with angry clouds and slaking rainwater down the windows of Frank Bernabe’s Manhattan office. He unconsciously rubbed his temples to ease the throbbing in his head as Nancy Elias’s voice rang metallic from the speakerphone.

She’s starting to come unglued, Bernabe thought bitterly as the president’s tirade continued, alternating between furious over the botched attempt in New Orleans and weepy over the disintegration of Ray Carmody. The time and effort I have to spend keeping these people together, holding their hands, wiping their noses, is ridiculous. Don’t they realize if they let themselves go to pieces the peasants really will bring the system we’ve given our lives to building down around our ears?

“I understand you need to vent, Nancy,” Frank Bernabe said soothingly. “But we have to focus here. I regret that the attempts in Memphis and New Orleans were unsuccessful and I’m sorry about Ray, but we can’t let ourselves be distracted by occasional setbacks. Look at the big picture; there are other ways we can accomplish our goals.”

He’d thought long and hard about what those ways might be, lying awake until early morning as the storm raged outside. Doe and the coming rally and Bonus Army march were threats that had to be dealt with, Doe in particular. Yet his attempts to rid the country of the do-gooding bastard had failed, the last spectacularly, something Bill Bigby and his coterie of supporters would hold over his head like an ax. They were pushing ever harder for a nationwide crackdown, mass arrests, martial law.

Unfortunately for him, he now believed they were right. The old ways of controlling the masses no longer seemed to work, and his covert methods of denying them leadership had been a disaster. But he couldn’t concede to Bigby and his faction just yet. That would be an admission of failure. His failure. What he needed was to buy some time. Time to shift the blame, to get out in front of the battle he knew was coming with or without him. This wasn’t just about the survival of the system, it was about the survival of Frank Bernabe. But he couldn’t afford to fail again. Or to put it more precisely, to be
perceived
to have failed again.

Nancy Elias, on the other hand. . .

It’s too bad he had to set her up. He knew what he was preparing to force on her had only the remotest chance of success. Of course, if by some miracle it did, he would claim the credit. If it didn’t. . . Well, that’s what happens when you swim with sharks. Sometimes you get eaten.

“Madam President,” he heard himself saying, “we need to reach out to Doe and the people around him. Unfortunately, the time for eliminating his threat has passed. The best we can do is to take control of it, channel it, co-opt it. Every man can be bought; all it takes is the right price.”

Nancy Elias was aghast. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you, Frank. It sounds like you’re giving up.”

“Oh, come now, Nancy. You know me better than that. But as you told me yourself, there’s a time to send in the cavalry and a time to regroup, to build your advantage and attack by other means. My advice—my strong advice—is to reach out to Doe before that July Fourth rally. Invite him to the White House, ask for his advice, offer him a position. Be humble. Then leak it—very carefully—that he asked for the meeting, that he wants a job, money, that he’ll back off this man of the people bullshit if you give in to his demands.

“In the meantime, your earlier suggestion about how to deal with Conté and the rest of them applies equally to Doe. Put together a backstory on him. No one knows who he is so you can say anything; just make sure it’s believable. We don’t have to destroy him, just chip away at his reputation, bit by bit. Then, when he’s discredited, yesterday’s news, we can take him out and no one will give a damn.”

He wasn’t about to let her object. “I know, it may seem humiliating, the President of the United States catering to an itinerant shit-disturber. But in times like these we all have to swallow our pride, perform unpleasant tasks. Myself included. And,” he added pointedly, “we all have people we have to answer to.”

Nancy Elias took the threat and twisted her own knife in. “Even you, Frank,” she said calmly. “Even you.”

* * *

I didn’t expect an early morning phone call from John Doe. Or any phone call, for that matter. But there it was, a message from him on my cell: “It’s John. I’ve been thinking about what you said. Let’s talk.”

Let’s indeed.

I called back immediately. When I got him on the phone he was blunt and to the point. “I’ll do the interview. But on two conditions: It has to be just you and me, one on one, here in New Orleans. And it has to be this week, before we leave for Washington.”

I couldn’t accept fast enough. “How about tomorrow? Any time and place.”

“Tomorrow’s fine. I’d prefer it to be at your hotel. We have a ton of work to do here before the rally and I don’t want this to be a distraction. Let me know when you arrive and where you’re staying.”

I threw some clothes in a suitcase and by noon was standing outside of Louis Armstrong airport locked in the full Nelson of New Orleans’ late June heat and humidity. A lot of people hate that wet, heavy air and ferocious blast of heat but not me. After more than thirty years in and around San Francisco, I’d had enough cold, wind and fog to last several lifetimes. No matter where I was, that soft, moist air on my skin and sun warming my face made me feel at home.

I checked into a hotel a block off Bourbon Street, texted it to John Doe and strolled over to the Desire Cafe for an oyster po’ boy and a cold Abita. When I got back he was waiting in the lobby, at his side a serious-looking but not unattractive black woman who gave me the once, twice and thrice-over look that said make a single false move and I’ll tear your arm off and beat you to death with it. Apparently satisfied that wouldn’t be necessary, she stepped back and let her charge approach.