The Bracken Anthology (12 page)

I replied, “But those were Mexicans. And not two thousand.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have the majority leader on a leash. I could drag him around the White House on all-fours if I wanted to. We have nothing to fear coming out of the House. Without the majority leader, Congress can’t do anything but hold hearings that the media won’t cover.”

“But he hammers us every day in the press…”

“Of course he does, he has to maintain credibility with his base. But it’s pure bluster. Trust me—I own him when it counts.”

In the right company (particularly mine, since we go back so far), Dennis liked to brag about the political enemies he held under the control of blackmail. It was a measure of his power, and whom else could he tell? You could count the people he trusted on one hand, perhaps two. One way or the other, all the dirtiest secrets wound up in his hands. Some said it was a mafia thing. Or the unions. Or the red net that had helped us at critical junctures most of our lives. There were advantages to growing up in the second or third generation of the movement. Certain doors opened before us at critical junctures.

Dennis’s knack for finding the hidden scandals almost seemed occult-like. After the big national health care decision, he showed me compromising “men’s health club” photos of the younger chief justice and his pals. Dennis just couldn’t resist the irony and had to share it with me, but that was a rare case of candor about his methods.

So I wondered what he had on the majority leader, that holier-than-thou redneck prick. Was he kinky, greedy, or both? Had Dennis’s minions discovered ancient history long buried, or had they lured him into some new honey trap? It didn’t matter, and I didn’t really care. But it did explain why the Congress could never seem to move past first base on Fast and Furious, even with so many dead.

But I still wasn’t ready to believe he was serious. I said, “Four hundred dead Mexicans are not the same as two thousand dead Americans.”

“It depends on what’s going on at the time. We would need a thick smokescreen, that’s for sure. Lots of background noise. The right emergency.” He lowered his voice and said, “Anyway, they wouldn’t necessarily be ‘dead.’ Technically, they’d just be ‘missing’.”

We held long eye contact across the table. He needed to clean his eyeglasses, but didn’t seem to mind the smudges. I said, “The Iran thing could blow sky-high any day. And Egypt, and Syria…”

“Exactly. And that kind of an emergency might lead to all sorts of opportunities.” He smiled, and gazed at me.

After another long silence I asked, “Does this plan have a name?”

“There’s no name.”

I asked him, “How many people know about this … idea?”

“Just a few, but that doesn’t matter. It’s designed to be self-reinforcing, once it gets kicked off. A positive feedback loop. Unstoppable.”

“The President?”

The smile again. A cocked eyebrow. Dennis was as slippery as an eel. A charming eel, when he wanted to be. “He knows that bold action might be called for. We’ve spoken about it for years, in a hypothetical sense, using historical precedents. But I know from those discussions that he’ll back the plan, once the parts fall into place.”

I said, “The military wouldn’t stand for it, not two thousand.”

“The military won’t be in the loop—this will all be handled at the federal agency level. The AG is fully aboard, and so are his directors. They’re facing federal prison time if the majority leader is replaced. Once he’s gone, we’ll be totally exposed on that end. So it’ll happen soon, or never. Let’s just say that forces are in motion and leave it at that.”

“So … what do you want from me?”

“I just want you to influence the President and his wife favorably when the time comes. You know what to say to them. ‘Sometimes in the life of a revolution, hard decisions must be taken. Cross the Rubicon and cement the gains of history, or get washed out to sea and be forgotten.’ You know what to tell them. But what about you? Jacinda, when the time comes, can we count on you?”

My mind was in turmoil. I was being asked to engage in a conspiracy. Perhaps this was a setup, and my answers were being recorded for another piece of Dennis’s trademark blackmail. Yet to refuse Dennis could also be dangerous. I decided to sound favorable yet remain noncommittal. “I understand history as well as you do. Sometimes dreadful actions are called for during a revolution, I know that. But I won’t support a fool’s crusade that goes off half-cocked and damns us all as traitors.”

He nodded, and smiled again. “That’s good enough.”

The war broke out a few weeks later.

I am referring to the cruel and insane but necessary war with Iran.

As necessary for them, as for us. The Iranian missile strikes were followed by the Israeli bombing raids. Or perhaps it was the other way around, the timeline depending on which news network you believe. When is a pre-emptive strike self defense, and when is it aggression? I will leave it for future historians. The simple fact is that within a few days cities were burning from Cairo to Islamabad, while at home we were struggling against Iranian terror cells and cyber sabotage, and an anthrax attack that had crippled our mail and package services. The dirty bombs in Houston and Long Beach were overrated initially, but they stopped port operations around the country for weeks. It all added up to a lot of hurt on the home front.

Basic electrical service, phone service, the internet, and our entire digitally managed infrastructure went haywire while the stuxnet-like viruses were continuously fed into our own digital bloodstream. Trains derailed and all of the planes had to be grounded; everybody knows what happened. Many thought the Russians and Chinese were using the opportunity to add to our misery. In any event, Dennis was right: there was plenty of smoke and noise available to conceal the arrests of two thousand reactionary opinion makers. Men, most of them, who spent nearly every waking moment busily stamping out every little spark of popular democracy, social justice, or true human progress.

The internet was shut down for a week, and was erratic and unreliable after that. Most of the arrests happened during that early period of maximum confusion and fear. Those on the secret arrest list were isolated from communication by the total sabotage of their digital lives. They could not make cell phone calls or send texts, or use the internet in any fashion. They could not find one effective portal to untangle their wrecked virtual lives. Pay phones and land lines were all they had left, when they were working. In the total confusion and disorder of that week, it was understandable that many people might have suffered complete digital blackouts. We were all on uncharted ground, so almost anything was possible. Like the genuine beginning of the Iran war, it could never exactly be sorted out until long after it mattered. Dennis was a genius about that part of the plan.

Down in the secret federal law enforcement fusion centers, our thousands of social network warriors swung into action as the internet was brought back on line—but this time on our own timing, and on our own terms. Questions about missing right-wingers were deflected by our internet imposters with rumors about embezzled funds, foreign girlfriends, car accidents, distant vacations, non-existent medical emergencies and other stalling tactics. It would take a long while for a true count of the missing to be made, and by then it wouldn’t matter.

Like I said, Dennis was a genius. At first he gave me a daily update, in private. Later, more of us met in the situation room. If Dennis wasn’t the leader, I wouldn’t know who was. I never met a new member of the circle unless Dennis was there to make the connection. What I mean is that I already knew them; I just didn’t know that they were in on the plan, until Dennis brought us together. And I never spoke to any of them about it when Dennis wasn’t there with us. Naturally, not a word about the plan was ever written down.

Most of the original two thousand on the arrest list were picked up in the first week. In fact, in their desperation to reconnect, they sent out their precise locations with every attempted cell phone call, text, tweet, email or credit card use, making them easy to find. The FBI and other federal agencies were already on a war-footing tracking down the Iranian and other foreign terror cells, and they didn’t question the odd Americans arrested among the rest.

Anyway, ninety-five percent of the people on the list were basically nobodies, and they were rarely missed. It’s funny how social network analysis works—it’s not the famous people, it’s the important people. People behind the famous names. The critical nodes. Bloggers in the basement that nobody had heard of. SNA found them all, and plucked them from obscurity.

Only proven-loyal teams of agents were used to arrest the handful of well-known people on the list. The warrants were prepared by tried and true federal attorneys, and signed off by trusted judges. Dennis did not only make a secret list of enemies to arrest—he also prepared a list of key personnel we could depend on to run the dodgy paperwork through the federal law enforcement system with no hassles. Mostly they used “National Security Letters” instead of regular warrants, because then no questions were asked. Dennis and his little circle had mastered the architecture. It was seamless, and for the most part it went like clockwork, especially at the beginning.

Once each of the arrested was “tagged and bagged,” the normal federal prison bureaucracy handled them like so many UPS or Fed-Ex packages. After the domestic terrorism label was slapped onto their files, special prisoner handling rules applied, mandating their seclusion. Gagged and hooded, if need be. Unlawful enemy combatants, foreign or domestic, could be held incommunicado. It was already in the law. The legal machinery existed; it just needed to be switched on. I give Dennis all the credit for grasping the enormous potential.

In the confusion during the Middle East war and the domestic terror attacks, including the cyber attacks, it took several weeks for reports about the missing Americans to grow into rumors of a possible purge of political enemies. Our own thousands of internet cyber warriors tamped down the rumors with continuing obfuscations. Many of them had been burrowing into the virtual world for years under multiple false screen names, building trust and credibility to expend during just such an emergency.

The most effective of the right-wing muckrakers chatting about purges and political arrests were digitally sabotaged and lined up for the next wave of arrests. Once they were isolated they could get in a car and drive, but only as far as the cash in their wallets would carry them. None of their cards, phones or other wireless devices worked. This kept them close to home, and made them easy to arrest.

For the first few weeks, the internal war conducted by our security services was going as well for us as the external war was going badly for our armed forces. The President had to struggle to keep his facial expressions under control in his rare on-camera appearances: I knew that secretly, he was as pleased as any of us that so many American warships, fighter planes and bombers would no longer be available to menace the globe. So in truth, at about one month into it, we were actually winning on both fronts, from our special point of view.

For the most part, our friendly media outlets continued to use our talking points, staying on board with all aspects of the gloriously jingoistic war effort—including the war against all forms of domestic terrorism. Even the right-wing talk radio hosts were cautious about making wild accusations against the government while our heroic armed forces were busy being decimated thousands of miles away.

Crazy black-helicopter talk about a secret political purge was kept beyond the acceptable fringe of polite news network mention during the first month of patriotic fervor that surrounded the war. Our army of social network warriors did a masterful job of remessaging any mention of a “purge” as delusional. No respectable news network or reputable website would touch such rumors. (Some of the most rabid of the bloggers promoting the purge rumors were, in fact, our own cyber commandos, working to discredit truthful reports through bizarre and outrageous exaggeration.)

After a month, though, the missiles and planes had seemingly run out on all sides, and a new stalemate was reached across the Middle East. The fog of war began to lift, and a clearer picture began to emerge that we could no longer keep completely hidden from sight. It was not plausible that so many right-wing opinion makers were suddenly unavailable for comment. They could not have all had heart attacks, or fled to Panama, or gone on vacation in New Zealand, or into hiding.

Some of the hate radio hosts began to fan the flames with crazy rumors that really weren’t so crazy, not to us. When they were taken off the air through a variety of means (but mainly for violating the “fomenting domestic terrorism” laws), the right wing nut jobs went absolutely mad with fury. The accusations about a secret purge continued. The plan was being laid out for all to see, even while it was being officially denied at every level, and was never reported on at all by our cooperating media networks and other friendly outlets.

And then the shooting started.

At a month and a half or so, it sometimes seemed that the plan was in danger of falling apart. I asked Dennis about it in private, but he appeared unworried. “It’s all part of the action-reaction calculus. It was all taken into account. We needed them to react. We’re in the second phase. We smoked them out into the open with phase one, and now we can go get them. Why do you think we bought billions of bullets for the DHS? Why do you think we paid for SWAT teams and armored cars in every Podunk town in America? We’ve been getting ready for this moment for years.”