Star Chamber Brotherhood (13 page)

“How about money?”

“I’ll find odd jobs, I suppose. There are always older people in the wealthier suburbs who need help.”

“Not so many, not since the Saigon Flu swept through,” the driver noted soberly. “And not so many wealthy ones, either, since the Moneymen Purge. You may go through a lot of shoe leather between meals.”

“Whatever happens, it can’t be any worse than what I’ve been through in the camps.”

“Amen to that,” Jonah responded with a sympathetic smile. “But would you mind if I gave you a friendly piece of advice?”
 

“Please do,” Werner responded, returning the smile. “Give me all the pieces you can spare.”

“Okay then, in Salt Lake did they tell you about the new residence permit system?”

“They did, but I’m sure I didn’t catch all the technical details. Why don’t you fill me in,” Werner proposed.

“Just remember one thing: as long as you live off the grid and don’t ask the government for anything, chances are you can last a long time in Boston. We already know your ID checks out and shows you’re not in any trouble with the FBI or the DSS. But don’t ever use it to try and get yourself a ration card or treatment at a government clinic or a room in a public housing unit, because that’s just the kind of thing that could put you on a lockup train back to Utah.”

Werner pondered the implications of this advice.

“Okay, let’s say I get caught up at a checkpoint somewhere in Boston a month from now and the police figure out that I’ve been in Boston for a few weeks without a residence permit when I’m not even supposed to set foot outside of Utah. What happens to me?”

“Do you have a return ticket you can show them?” Jonah asked.

Werner patted his breast pocket and nodded.

“Good. Then, unless you’ve done something else to piss them off, I’ll lay ten-to-one odds they’ll let you go. You see, the government needs people like you. The city, the state, the feds: they all count on the black market and the gray market and the
indocumentados
who do the work that no one else will do without entitling them to government benefits. They may hassle you or shake you down for protection money, but they probably won’t arrest you unless you make a nuisance of yourself. If you support yourself, look respectable and act like you belong, most cops won’t give you a second look.”

“That sounds reassuring enough,” Werner replied. “Is there any point in asking what it might take to actually get a Boston residence permit? How big a bribe might I have to pay?”

“Forget about it. Unless you’re a big-shot Party member or one of their relatives, you’ll never get a residence permit for a city like Boston. The quota’s filled.”

They drove through Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire, without comment. It was after dark, and traffic was light, but with so many of the overhead streetlights broken or inoperable, Werner could see little of interest from the highway. As they approached the Massachusetts border, Werner expected to see heavy northbound commuter traffic but found little. Nearly all the vehicles on the roads were trucks, and even they were few and far between.

An hour later they merged onto I-95 and entered the outskirts of Boston. What had once been Boston’s thriving hi-tech Route 128 Corridor was now a gray, shabby wasteland. Derelict cars and trucks with broken windows and missing tires lined the side streets and access roads along the highway. Most shopping malls and major retailers were dark and boarded up, tall weeds sprouting from cracks in their sprawling parking lots.
 

Tall office buildings, once the headquarters of computer software and other technology companies, had somehow shed their mirror-like shells and looked down upon streets filled with broken glass. Although Boston’s once prosperous economy had already been brought to its knees by the time of Werner’s arrest in 2022, he never expected to see its corpse already rotting upon his return only five years later. It frightened him to think of what he might encounter as he entered the more densely populated areas of the city.
 

A vision of Werner’s former existence in Boston suddenly flashed in his mind. He remembered what a visceral dislike he had once had for this congested, noisy, dirty, decaying, ungovernable city. Sometimes, despite being statistically affluent, he had felt like a prisoner in Boston. The idyllic lakes, mountains, and beaches of the surrounding New England countryside had seemed distant and expensive, and the fashionable entertainments of Boston’s Theater District, Beacon Hill, Newbury Street, the North End, and even Fenway Park were also priced beyond reach. The doors of Boston’s famous attractions were closed to him because of his meager budget. Sometimes he had wished for a cosmic leveler to descend upon the city and narrow the gap between the rich and the middle class. But now, seeing the city’s decline, he felt ashamed to have ever harbored such thoughts.
 

The eighteen-wheeler passed the exit for Route 2 and Concord and was approaching the exits for Weston and Waltham, when Jonah Tucker asked Werner where he would like to be dropped off.
 

“I can’t take you any closer into the city than I-95. But if you’d like to go downtown, I can let you off at Exit 22 and you can walk from there to the Riverside T station and take the Green Line in. How about it?”

“Good idea, Jonah. Yeah, let’s do that,” Werner agreed.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” Jonah continued. “Might you be needing a ride back when you catch up with that young daughter of yours? You know, I swing by here every couple of weeks.”

“Thanks, but I have a return ticket. And if I get lucky enough to find her and she wants to come back with me, I guess we’ll just have to earn enough money for another one.”

“Well, if you need any help, I want you to call me,” Jonah insisted.
 

He handed Werner a business card with the address and phone number of his trucking company’s office in Burlington, Vermont.
 

“Call this number and ask for me if you need anything at all.”
 

Then, as an afterthought, Jonah retrieved the card and wrote a second phone number on the back.

“If you get into a jam, call my nephew over at MIT. Come to think of it, Sam is probably going to want to meet you sooner or later, anyway, seeing as how Uriah was his father and you knew him in his final days. So, forget about waiting for an emergency and just give young Sam a call. Tell him his Uncle Jonah sent you and he’ll straighten up right smart.”
 

Werner took the card, committed the phone numbers to memory and tucked it into his wallet.

“Jonah, I can’t thank you enough. May we meet again some day.”

“Count on it,” Tucker replied. “The Lord went to a lot of trouble to bring us together; I have a feeling he’ll find a reason to do it again.”

With that, the tractor-trailer pulled onto the exit ramp and slowed to a halt to let Werner out.

Chapter 8

Sunday, April 15, 2029
Jamaica Plain, Boston

Head-high mounds of frozen snow coated thinly with soot still lurked in the corners of parking lots and along the edge of the Jamaicaway, but the sun felt warm on Frank Werner’s back as he strolled along Leverett Pond toward the Hyde Square neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. He had decided to walk the mile or more from Carol’s Brookline apartment, because the day was so lovely and because he wanted enough time to run a counter-surveillance route to be sure that no one was following him.

As he made his way east on Heath Street, the stench of urine, smoke, and rotting garbage grew steadily stronger. On the residential blocks, piles of trash bags spilled onto the pavement from overfilled dumpsters, many of the bags showing gaping holes where feral cats had clawed their way in looking for food. He wondered why neighborhoods like this always seemed to be teeming with cats, yet he never saw or heard the packs of stray dogs that were so commonplace in Third World slums. He had heard once that Asian immigrants killed the stray dogs for meat, but this was a Latino neighborhood. The absence of dogs didn’t make sense to him.
 

Werner turned down a side street and made for the four-story row house where Hector Alvarez lived with his widowed sister and her two young sons. Unfriendly eyes followed him from nearby front stoops and first-floor windows. Across the street a flea market had been set up in a vacant lot. In addition to trading in second-hand clothing, furniture, kitchenware, and other household goods, men in a delivery truck were selling cases of canned foods from the tailgate, probably diverted from a local factory.
 

Four serious-looking youths stood guard around the truck, making sure nobody would try to loot the goods or steal the cash proceeds. A tangle of wires trailed down from poles overhead into some windows where the locals had managed to tap into the city streetlights for free electricity. This was a place where government rule seemed far away, Werner mused, and the thought lifted his spirits.

Hector Alvarez opened the reinforced steel door with a welcoming smile. As Hector bolted the door behind them, Werner noticed a slender woman in jeans and a tank top usher two young eight- or ten-year-old boys toward an adjacent room he assumed was the kitchen. This was Hector’s widowed younger sister, Cara, and her two sons, who had moved in with him two years earlier when her husband died from an untreated heart condition.
 

Hector saw the boys’ retreat and gave a soft chuckle. He was darkly handsome in his black-and-white warm-up suit and white running shoes, though in Werner’s view the outfit gave him the sinister look of a narcotics trafficker. At the age of forty-four, Alvarez remained a physically imposing figure, standing six feet two inches and retaining the chiseled physique of his years as a Marine non-com. He wore his graying hair buzz-cut short, adding to the impression of a controlled but ruthless power. Though Hector Alvarez was no dope peddler, Werner knew him to be a highly successful gray-market trader, and a cynical and possibly dangerous economic outlaw.

Werner had met Alvarez within a month of arriving in Boston, through acquaintances active in the gray market and second-hand automobile trade. When he had asked them where he could borrow or rent a small truck or moving van without having to deal with red tape, they had referred him to a man in Jamaica Plain, who had in turn referred him to Hector Alvarez. The two men, as Werner later learned, belonged to a loosely organized commercial network that bought, sold, and sometimes rented gray-market cars and trucks.
 

Though they claimed not to handle stolen vehicles, it seemed improbable to Werner that, with their disregard for official documentation and the high volume of vehicles they exported covertly to Latin America, none of them was stolen. For unless the cars were hot, it simply didn’t make sense that anyone could make money exporting cars and trucks from a country where roadworthy vehicles were in such short supply.

Alvarez led Werner up freshly painted stairs to a sunny second-floor drawing room. The room was a stereotypical bachelor pad. Soccer photos and posters were tacked at irregular intervals along the mustard-colored walls, while a flotilla of faux-leather couches and armchairs were gathered in a semicircle around a flat-screen television that hung on the far wall. Along the rear wall stood a trestle sideboard that served as Hector’s bar.
 

Alvarez removed two cans of beer from a compact refrigerator and tossed one to Werner. From the looks of his TV room, Alvarez had prospered in recent years in a way that set him apart from his peers in Hyde Square. Werner knew how much this meant to Alvarez, since the two men had become close friends and shared secrets with each other that neither man had shared with any other.
 

Though neither talked openly of having spent time in a corrective labor camp, each possessed certain subtle traits or habits, imperceptible to most people, yet detectable by those who had spent time in the camps, which distinguished them from someone who had not. One evening at a bar in Newton, after Werner mentioned to an associate of Alvarez that he had recently arrived from Utah, the associate raised an eyebrow and commented knowingly that Werner must be a tough hombre to have returned alive from the camps there. His boss was the only other man he had known to survive the ordeal and it had nearly killed him.
 

Later that same night, the man introduced Werner to Alvarez. While the two ex-prisoners were wary of each other at first, avoiding direct mention of the camp system and only hinting at when and where each had lived inside the Restricted Zone, it did not take long for each to realize that the other had been a prisoner at Kamas during the legendary revolt of 2024. And even though Alvarez had been sent to the camp as a common criminal and not as a political prisoner, Hector had sided with the politicals during the revolt and thus shared Werner’s deep hatred of the warden, the Corrective Labor Administration, and the Unionist Party.

Fortunately for Alvarez, his sentence for smuggling and his non-political classification operated as a bias in his favor and protected him from being considered a rebel. So instead of being sent to the Yukon with the political prisoners who had participated in the revolt, he was transferred with other criminals to a conventional penal facility in Colorado that fell outside the jurisdiction of the Corrective Labor Administration. Within a year of the Kamas revolt, Alvarez found himself back in Boston, released in a special one-time amnesty for non-political prisoners.