Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  “Well, he got the death penalty anyway,” said Blonk.

  “No,” said Donny. “He got life. Several life sentences, in fact. We won that. But then he was murdered.”

  “He was assassinated,” said Blonk. “When he was to be delivered into our agency’s custody to be prosecuted for his crimes against humanity.”

  “So I heard,” said Donny. “And I really wish that hadn’t happened. Because we needed that trial. Our own prosecution was too hamstrung by our broken politics, and people’s desire to ‘move forward.’”

  “Is that why you helped them kill him?” said Abboud.

  “What?” said Donny.

  He looked at them. You could see they meant it.

  “That’s nuttier than French socialists in Dallas,” he said.

  Abboud smiled.

  “Maybe even nuttier than these people who say he’s still alive, tanning on some faraway beach,” added Donny. “Waiting for his comeback. I saw them kill him, just like you did. And when it happened, I was a thousand miles away in Houston, working. What are you suggesting?”

  “Well, we are not suggesting you are a hit man,” said Abboud. “We have been investigating this for close to a year now. And we have good information that there was a team of assassins sent by the Popular Front. A group which you already acknowledged you have been associated with in the past.”

  “The Popular Front never really existed as more than a name,” said Donny. “That’s like talking about a bunch of competing gangs and calling them the Mafia. And to the extent the factions had an alliance, it broke up after the uprising petered out.”

  “Maybe,” said Abboud. “What we know is your client was on the team.”

  “What client?”

  “Daryl Harrison.”

  “Slider?” said Donny. “That’s why you came to the courthouse today? That’s preposterous.”

  It wasn’t preposterous. Donny just had never considered the possibility.

  “Is it?” said Blonk, clearly thinking what Donny was already coming around to. “The man was a hardened guerrilla, a veteran of the fighting in New Orleans, and a committed ideologue. He had already done several ‘special missions’ for the Front’s leadership during the years of resistance. And now he has been killed on a very similar mission for the People’s Council, most of whom came from the Front.”

  “What do you want from me?” said Donny. “I kind of have my hands full, as you may have noticed at the courthouse this morning. And I have nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Who else knew about the plans for the prisoner transfer, and was also in contact with Harrison and others in the movement?”

  “Oh, come on,” said Donny, trying to convey the most dismissive possible expression.

  “You look a little squirmy,” said Abboud. The way she said the last word, with that accent, made him actually squirm.

  “I know how to keep my clients’ secrets,” said Donny.

  “You met with Harrison a week before the assassination,” said Blonk. “Are you sure you didn’t talk about the president’s case?”

  “How do you know my calendar?” said Donny. “Never mind—I don’t even think that timeline’s right.”

  “Oh, it’s right,” said Abboud. “We have our sources. We just want you to be one of them. Come clean with us about Daryl and whoever else in your network as counselor to the revolution you told about this. And we, in turn, will be able to avoid having to treat you as a co-conspirator.”

  “You’re fishing in the wrong hole, Deputy Commissioner,” said Donny. “That’s a fascinating theory, but it’s fiction. And even if there were truth to it, you’d be out of your jurisdiction. I suppose you could report it to the feds, but they have their hands full trying to keep the country from falling apart. Did you hear they’re starting to auction military equipment off to corporations and NGOs?”

  “All the more reason why we need to step in to fill the vacuum,” said Abboud. “And we do have jurisdiction, by treaty and international law, over what was an incident involving our prisoner. I can send you the authorities if you don’t believe me.”

  Donny didn’t need to look it up, because he realized it was true the moment she said it.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Because I’m not your leaker. Now, speaking of missing bodies, I need to go find Mr. Harrison. And when I do, you can talk to him yourself.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Abboud. She stood to leave. “Here is where you can contact us if you remember anything you think we might be interested to hear. It would be much easier if you would tell us anything you know now, rather than having us find out through other sources that you haven’t been truthful.”

  When Abboud smiled as she handed him her business card, Donny realized that she was probably the type who could get him to say whatever she wanted, given the right interrogation setup.

  But that would never happen. Because Donny was pretty sure that the people who could pin him for what they were sniffing out were either dead or in a place where no Eurocop will ever find them.

  5

  Donny went through his calendar, trying to piece it together.

  Donny was probably the last lawyer left in America who kept his calendar on paper. It was a habit he had formed during the prior administration, when he was working the secret cases, representing people under government surveillance. He had learned the hard way that the federal agents fighting what they viewed as a revolutionary insurgency did not let attorney-client privilege get in the way. And the judges backed them up, most of the time. That meant anything you recorded in digital form on a device connected to the network was likely to be caught in the net. And they even had ways of getting into devices that were off-network. So Donny carried a hardbound daily calendar just like his grandma used to. They could search that, too, if they wanted to harass him in person—something they often did. What they couldn’t do was make him write legibly. And it would take a lot more than some Motherland men in black to get him to read his own handwriting. Assuming he could if he tried. The legibility of his own scrawl had a rapidly diminishing half-life even to its author, such that the older the entry the harder it was for him to fill in the gaps.

  That worked great, until he found himself needing to dig into last year’s calendar and put together a chronology of his meetings with Slider.

  Normally, he would have billing records to help him. But Slider’s case was on a contingent fee, meaning he didn’t need to generate a bill, at least not at this stage of the case. So all he had were his chicken scratches.

  He looked at the case file, to find the documents the client had had to sign.

  Putting all that together, he realized the last time he had met with Slider was almost a year earlier, when they were in the initial stages of drafting their pleadings in this case they called Harrison II. Donny dug through the file and found his handwritten notes from that meeting. They were high-level, because he hadn’t needed much information from Slider, but looking at those and the documents Slider had signed helped him remember quite well the discussion they had had.

  Slider refused to meet Donny at his office, which was a pain in the ass. Getting around Houston had been bad enough under martial law. Now, even though the checkpoints were gone, the damage from heavy weather and sometimes heavier fighting meant so many streets were closed and sections of town blocked off that most trips took twice as long as they used to, if not longer. Luckily Donny had managed to get himself loaned a pretty nice bicycle from one of his clients, a courier for the underground who had been locked up for information smuggling and was free now but trying to get his record expunged. Donny hadn’t ridden it much, but he did that day, when he decoded Slider’s message and saw where he wanted to meet. He never would have thought riding a bicycle would be the fastest way to get around Houston, or that doing so wearing a suit would improve his mood. He wished he had the time and the knees to take his old skateboard.

  Slider had never been
willing to come to a law office, unless it was the only path to liberty. So instead, Donny always said why don’t I come to your place. It was only after they had been working together awhile that Donny realized Slider didn’t have a place. He just couch-surfed. Stayed with people in his network. A habit he had developed when he was a wanted man. Sometimes he stayed outside, something he had done as an intermittently homeless kid after his parents were arrested and disappeared, and before he got connected with the Front.

  The directions took Donny to a little bungalow just south of downtown, in a spot near a paved stretch of bayou. Donny knew that area because he had fished it after the floods a few times, and seen you could ride it like a Veloway when the water was down. And that day there was just a trickle, though that didn’t stop the overflying geese from following its path north.

  The house looked almost abandoned, with a lawn gone wild, the way Rovers liked to keep it, and all the windows blocked with heavy curtains, which was also how they liked to keep it. But the mastodon was there stenciled on the doorjamb. And when you walked up onto the porch, you could see signs that people had been hanging out recently—a saggy old couch, an old crate turned into a stool, empty beer cans, two burned-down candles, a book that had been set down open to save the page. Donny looked and saw it was a copy of Brigada’s prison notebooks, another sure sign of a Rover.

  The door opened before Donny even knocked.

  “Can I help you?” The woman standing there was young and black, probably mid-twenties, big braids pulled back in a bright-red band, wearing a plain black T-shirt, blue jeans, and boots. The jeans were held up with a thick black belt, and tucked into them was a handgun she made no effort to hide. Among the liberties the change in government had secured was to make Texas an open-carry state again, now that the federal firearms controls that restricted ownership to licensed militias, deputized posses, and registered hunters had been suspended. The international peacekeepers had tried to impose their own ban, but it didn’t stick in Texas.

  “I’m looking for Slider,” said Donny. “Name’s Donny Kimoe.”

  “Yeah, I recognize you,” said the woman. “You’re the lawyer who switched sides. And I can see now you look the part.”

  “We all have a job to do,” said Donny. “And I never switched sides.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “He said to let you in, and you wouldn’t stay long.” She ushered Donny through. “Hey, Slider!” she yelled back into the house as she triple-bolted the door behind them.

  The living room was simple and bare, like a furnished apartment. Nothing on the walls but a beat-up old poster of Maxine Price screaming to a crowd, and ancient wallpaper fading from green to brown.

  Slider stepped out of the shadow of the hallway. He moved like an athlete, or an actor, or both, with a healthy dose of moody teen. And he looked like a rock star. Lithe but strong, wearing his revolutionary couture—tight jeans, some crazy patterned vintage dress shirt, a leather necklace strung with shiny little totems of his war and roams, and lace-up leather boots that looked like something a British officer would have worn in a colonial war in some other timeline. And those green eyes on brown skin working its way to black, with inky hair just long enough that it always looked like he just got out of bed, or was ready to take you there.

  “Hey,” said Slider, friendly enough in his gaze when their eyes met. Donny liked to think he had earned Slider’s trust after successfully helping him out of a few jams, yet every time they met, he could never be sure.

  “Holler if you need me,” said the woman. “I’ll be in the shed.”

  Slider nodded.

  “Can we sit?” said Donny.

  Slider nodded again, in the direction of the living-room furniture. Slider took the armchair, and left Donny the loveseat, which tried to swallow him when he sat in it.

  Slider laughed.

  “For my next trick I will step right onto the trapdoor,” said Donny.

  “We actually have one,” said Slider. “This safe house has a basement.”

  “Really,” said Donny. “Doesn’t sound like such a great idea here in the city of underwater freeways.”

  “Yeah,” said Slider. “That’s what I thought, but this spot is pretty high and dry. Not much of a basement, just kind of a rough cellar, but a good place to cache stuff.”

  “What do you keep down there?”

  “Better if I don’t tell you,” said Slider. “Even if you are my lawyer.”

  “Maybe your lawyer isn’t even sure he wants to know why you still need a safe house. The fighting is over, in case you missed the memo. You won.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” said Slider.

  “How so? We were both there, when the people took over Washington.”

  Slider nodded. “Yeah, and that was awesome. But just the beginning.”

  “I hear you,” said Donny. “We still need to work out what the new Constitution is going to look like—”

  Slider rolled his eyes like Donny didn’t get it.

  “That kind of thing takes a while,” said Donny. “Especially when you want to make sure executive power is never concentrated in the hands of a single individual ever again.”

  “Man, I thought you were smarter than that,” said Slider. “The change we need is so much more radical than what any of those do-gooder dorks think. The only ones who half get it are in New Orleans, and even they don’t have the balls to take it far enough.”

  “Your parents would have been pretty happy with it,” said Donny.

  “What do you know about what my parents wanted? Give me a fucking break.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I’ve just been reading up on their work. Watched some old interviews, found their manifesto. I feel like their ideas helped us get here. And I think I’ve figured out a way to get justice for what happened.”

  “You mean lawyer justice? For what they did to my parents? The amnesty deal your friends in Washington cooked up is what that is. Fucking nada, sorry, thanks for playing. In case you didn’t get that memo. That’s what killed the case your buddy Miles Powell tried after he gave me the same speech.”

  “I know. I helped Miles and Percy with that case.”

  “I miss Percy being my lawyer.”

  “I don’t blame you. She’s the best. Maybe even better than Miles. But maybe I should blame you, because from what she told me you had a big part in converting her into a true believer. You and my ex-girlfriend. Do you still see her?”

  “I see both of them. Percy more than Joyce. And I didn’t have anything to do with Percy quitting her job and moving to New Orleans. She did that when she heard Joyce was back in-country, helping to reboot the project.”

  “Say hi for me next time.”

  “Yeah, maybe not. You’re not so popular there, Donny.”

  Donny nodded. He didn’t like to acknowledge it.

  “But I did talk to Percy about the case. She said it’s a waste of time. That they all got amnesty.”

  “She doesn’t know the facts I have.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Slider, reddening a bit. “You gonna be my white knight now?”

  “Come on,” said Donny. “You don’t have to like me, but I’m here to finish what we started, and make them pay. I got a new source. A good one. Inside the company. I think I can expose the whole thing.”

  Slider’s demeanor shifted. He was more interested now.

  “I got the names of the guys who did it,” said Donny. “I can put all the facts together when I file the lawsuit.”

  “Bullshit,” said Slider.

  “You don’t believe me?” said Donny. “Hang on.”

  He opened his briefcase, pulled out his working file on the case, found the page with those notes, and showed it to Slider.

  “Is that shorthand or something?”

  “No, just shitty handwriting. They’re right here.” Donny put his figure right on the three names, and read them aloud to Slider:

  Gannon

  Peña
/>
  Lee.

  Slider listened, and stared at the paper for a long moment, like he was recording it. Then he looked Donny in the eyes.

  “You for real?”

  “Absolutely,” said Donny.

  “Who’s the source?”

  “Can’t tell you,” said Donny. “Just like you can’t tell me what’s in the basement.”

  “Where are these guards?” he asked, pointing at Donny’s scribbles.

  “Two guards, one driver,” said Donny. “And the answer is, I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out. First, I want to get this case on file. If we wait much longer we could have a statute-of-limitations issue. We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary, and if we miss that they can bounce the whole thing.”

  “Okay,” said Slider. “But what about the amnesty?”

  “That’s the thing—I don’t think it applies on these facts. Your parents were pranksters, not fighters. And with these names, we can put together the real story. Of the real reason they killed your parents, and a lot of other people who got disappeared for their politics.”

  “You gonna be able to put them away?”

  “No,” said Donny. “I can’t do that. That’s up to the prosecutors. Most of whom can barely keep up with the dockets they have, and don’t want anything to do with war-crimes cases. In Washington they’re talking about giving all these guys amnesty.”

  “I heard about that, man. What bullshit.”

  “Well, the good news is that bullshit would apply to you too. At least for stuff you did fighting the government. Not to suggest you committed any crimes, of course.”

  Slider smiled, which was kind of creepy.

  “We might be able to feed the information to the international courts,” continued Donny. “See if they will pursue war-crimes charges. But there are other kinds of justice. When I say make them pay, I mean make them pay. With money. Lots of it.”

  “What kind of money do prison guards and bus drivers have?”

  “Not their money. The company’s money. We just have to show the company was in on the whole program.”