Star Chamber Brotherhood (2 page)

He looked through the double doors that led from the bar to the dining room. The last diners had departed by eleven and the headwaiter had finished resetting the tables for the following day. Business had not been bad for a Wednesday night. Fortunately for the Somerset Club, bar revenues more than compensated for poor attendance in the dining room. That was good, because Werner owned the bar.

The Somerset Club, a venerable institution dating back to the 1850s, had been a private social club for wealthy Bostonians for more than 160 years, when the Unionist government imposed new regulations that drove most private social clubs out of business and forced them to sell their assets to local governments for pennies on the dollar. A decade later, during the nascent economic reforms following the death of the President-for-Life, the City of Boston auctioned off the former clubhouse at 42 Beacon Street. The double-bayed structure, of French design decorated with hand-carved stone cartouches, had once been the most expensive private dwelling in Boston. Two centuries later, the buyer was a straw man representing a leading member of the City Council, who then sold it at a quick profit to the current owner, an immigrant dealer in recycled building materials and gray-market construction equipment.
 

Werner turned his attention back to cleaning the granite counter behind the bar and putting his jiggers, shakers, strainers, muddlers, and other cocktail equipment in their proper places on the shelf behind him. With his attention focused behind the bar, he failed to notice the stranger who took a seat at the barstool directly across from him. Upon looking up, he spotted him in the mirror.

The man was dressed in a brown tweed sport coat and gray flannel trousers, his knit tie clipped to his shirt with a gold tie bar. The visitor removed his olive loden hat and set it on the stool beside him. Werner turned around to take his order.

His attire seemed to suggest that the man was a former Somerset Club member who had found his way back upon hearing about the bar’s growing reputation for quality spirits and cocktails. There were still people from Old Money in Boston, and they did tend to gravitate to their old haunts. But most of them were broken men: frail-looking, weak-willed, gray-complexioned creatures who survived on remittances from their émigré children or the proceeds from selling off their dwindling cache of family heirlooms.

But this man was anything but weak, Werner thought. He was a few inches short of six feet, barrel-chested, thick-shouldered, and yet spare at the waist. By his trimmed gray beard, receding hairline, and weathered complexion, Werner judged him to be in his fifties. The man folded his hands on the bar and looked at Werner with a trace of amusement. The hands bore the unmistakable signs of hard labor—very hard labor. These were the hands of someone who had served time in the labor camp system.
 

A thrill seized Werner. Did he know this man? Had they perhaps been fellow prisoners? He strained to recollect where he might have seen the face before.

The stranger’s eyes showed an unmistakable spark of intelligence. Werner detected humor, curiosity, self-assurance, and a complete lack of fear. This was unusual in Unionist America of 2029. Nearly everyone Werner met in Boston had been traumatized in one way or another by what most people now referred to in shorthand as “the Events.” The only people who did not show fear were the Unionist
nomenklatura
and their New Class protégés, along with the criminal underclass. And, of course, the special breed of men who had mastered their fear in the camps.

“What would you like?” he asked the stranger.

“Pour me a shot of your best bourbon,” the man answered with a half-smile.

“That could get expensive,” Werner informed him with a raised eyebrow. “Do you have a particular mark in mind?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Any pre-war bourbon or sourmash will be fine. Bonded if you have it.”

“You’ve come to the right place, my friend. How about some Woodford Reserve? We just...”

“Make it a double. Straight up. No ice.”

Werner nodded and reached down to fetch the bottle from a low shelf. He measured three ounces and poured a bit more, meeting the stranger’s gaze as he did so.

“That will be twenty New Dollars. I think you will be pleased with it. The final batch of this bourbon was bottled over fifteen years ago. Bought it from a widow in Brookline…”

The man peeled off a twenty and a ten and laid them on the counter without looking up. He took the glass and drank.
 

“What’s the matter, Frank? Don’t you remember me? Do I look that different without a jumpsuit?”

Werner felt a shock. He could not place the face or the voice, but now he knew where had met the man. Suddenly he realized why he had felt so odd all day. The long-awaited turning point had come; his life was about to change.

The stranger pulled a folded piece of newsprint from his inside jacket pocket and laid it on the bar. As Werner reached for it, the man downed the remaining whiskey and stood to leave.

“I have something else for you, Frank. Hold out your hand,” the man announced in a tone that remained cordial but did not permit contradiction.

Werner did as he was told. The man handed him a white paper disc the size of a half dollar. At its center was a drawing of a five-pointed star with the numeral “1.”
 

“If you remember the man in the article, I expect you’ll remember me. Now, listen carefully. When you leave here, I want you to walk up the hill and turn right onto Park Street. If I pass you, follow me. But if I don’t pass you, just go on home and look for me another night. I will explain later.”

Without waiting for a reply, the man turned and walked out the door.

Werner felt the blood rush to his cheeks as memories of his incarceration at the corrective labor camp in Kamas, Utah, overtook him. He glanced around the room but no one was paying any attention to him. He unfolded the newsprint and read.

One side of the paper contained single-spaced government notices in small print. On the other side was an advertisement for a state-run department store and an article showing a photograph of a middle-aged government official under the heading, “Former DSS Official Appointed Regional FEMA Director.”
 

A wave of rage and disgust washed over Werner as he read the laudatory article about Frederick Rocco’s career progression: first in the FBI and the Department of State Security and now in FEMA, where his new challenge focused on providing emergency housing for refugees from flooded coastal areas in northern New England.
 

Of course, Werner remembered Rocco. Fred Rocco had been commandant of Kamas during the prisoner revolt of 2024. It was Rocco who had brought in tanks and troops to quash the revolt and retake the camp. And it was Rocco who had signed the order sending Werner and three thousand other prisoners to punishment camps up North, where they were intended to die without a trace.
 

The presentation of the star could mean only one thing: the Star Committee had sentenced Rocco to death for his crimes at Kamas. And Werner had been selected to carry out the execution. This was an honor and a duty, and he knew he could not refuse. And yet he questioned it.

****

Though April was nearly half over, the weather was still wet and cold, with heaps of frozen snow generating pockets of fog on Boston Common. Ever since the decade-long series of volcanic eruptions that rimmed the north Pacific from Japan to Mexico, and darkened the skies over the entire Northern Hemisphere, America had experienced a mini-Ice Age, from which it was now only emerging. Much of Canada and Northern New England had been barely habitable until the mid-2020s. Fortunately for Werner, his two years in the Yukon had occurred after the thaw had begun.

Werner had been fifty-one at the time of his arrest, fifty-three during the Kamas revolt, and fifty-five when he was released on the brink of death from the Yukon’s infamous Mactung tungsten mine. Now, at fifty-eight, he had recovered much of his former health and strength, and still possessed the phenomenal resistance to hardship that only the rarest combination of extraordinary genes and the trials of the labor camp system could have imparted.

He had survived Kamas and the Yukon only by what seemed like a series of miracles, and made his way back to Boston. Werner was astounded by the evidence that someone else had accomplished the same feat. Now he was eager to learn how this extraordinarily fit and prosperous-looking fellow prisoner had done it.

Werner locked up the bar and wished the headwaiter a good night, then opened the door onto Beacon Street and felt the brunt of the icy wind across Boston Common. After years of working outdoors, sometimes with clothing that was woefully inadequate, Werner still suffered the misery and pain of cold weather the same as anyone else. What distinguished him from most people facing such conditions, was knowing that the human body can tolerate terrible cold and having developed the mental practices that enabled him to withstand it.

Werner wore a handmade wool sweater from Maine under a traditional Burberry-style trench coat, without scarf or gloves, and felt adequately equipped to undertake the walk across the north side of Boston Common to the Park Street T Station.
 

He was halfway along Park Street, having passed a row of boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots opposite the north edge of the Common, when he saw the stranger step out of a doorway some fifty meters ahead. The stranger turned left onto Tremont Street, and Werner followed.
 

On most nights when Werner left the Somerset Club, the sidewalks along Park Street were lined with unruly drunks, prostitutes, and panhandlers who harassed most every person passing by. The alleys and doorways along Tremont Street, where the homeless and the insane crowded together on cardboard flats against the cold, reeked of urine and feces. To Werner’s relief, at this hour, the chilly north wind had driven the homeless off the streets, leaving only a few random night workers, all-night coffee venders, and transit police outside the Park Street T Station, while a few meters away on the Common, a pair of horse-mounted police surreptitiously shared a flask of hooch.

When Werner saw the stranger vanish into a gated alley just short of the Tremont Theater, he followed. The stranger closed the gate behind them and the two men finally met in a recessed doorway that was invisible from every direction, except straight up.
 

In the darkness, Werner could see that the stranger wore an authentic Austrian hunting coat of green loden cloth, with the leather collar turned up to meet the brim of his Tyrolean hat. Werner could not begin to imagine where he might have obtained such stylish relics.

Werner waited for the stranger to explain, but when he didn’t, Werner began:

“Excuse me, but I still can’t recall your name. Would you mind refreshing my memory?”

“Of course,” the stranger replied. “I’m Dave Lewis. I was your inside contact on your first Star Committee mission. Remember? And later we were at Mactung together.”

“Yes, right, I do remember,” Werner replied hesitantly. “Again, please forgive me, but both of those episodes are a bit blurry, since I spent a week in the isolator after the first, and nearly died from exhaustion during the second. But I do remember your face and have the sense that we were buddies once, at least at Mactung. Am I right?”

“You are.”

“Then I thank you, Dave, because the isolator turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. And, if it weren’t for the fluke of being sent to Mactung, I would probably still be chopping wood in one of those Yukon death camps, or else be buried. Tell me, how on earth did you make it out?”
 

“I’m afraid that’s not something I can share with you just yet, though I look forward to doing it soon. That is, once our mission is accomplished,” Lewis added.

“So a Star Chamber still exists for Kamas after all these years? And are you the Star Master?”

The visitor nodded.

“It took us a while to reconstitute, but we did. And now we have lists of those in the CLA and the Kamas camp administration accused of serious crimes against prisoners. Very few remain alive. Hardesty, Cronin, Whiting, Chambers—all died within a year or two of the revolt, some with our help. Of those we convicted, only one is still at large: Rocco. When his sentence is carried out, the Committee will dissolve.”

“Okay, that’s clear enough,” Werner acknowledged. “But why come to me? I already did a mission for the Committee. I thought each man would only be called upon to do one.”

“ Correct, Frank. But, as you may recall, that mission was never completed. Our target, Uriah Tucker, survived and went on to betray hundreds of prisoners to Rocco, including you and me. And nearly all of them died in the Arctic without a grave, without a record, without a memory. Except for us and a few others.”

“And none of the others is available to help?” Werner probed.

“Frank, you are the only one who can possibly do what needs to be done. You live in Boston, you are an experienced intelligence officer, you’re under their radar, and most importantly, you have a stake in the outcome. We’re counting on you to make it happen.”

“But for God’s sake, Dave, I don’t even know how to begin! How do I put together a team for this? Where do I find people willing to risk their lives over a place that no longer exists?”