A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  Trout listened closely, sometimes scribbling furiously in his notebook.

  Anastos’ speech delivered last evening prior to the McCartney concert led the news cycle on every channel, charting what was apparently to be the government’s new approach to the spill. The President appeared on screen from the Oval Office: Mr. Cool, chin arrogantly tilted, big ears like antenna to catch the populist murmur, head moving side to side in his now familiar “teleprompter wag.” Something about the guy annoyed Trout. He suspected Wiedersham’s own regard for Anastos extended no further than as a means to advance his personal ambitions.

  “It’s not the presidents who rule the world,” Wiedersham liked to say. “It’s the power behind the presidents.”

  “We have laid out a battle plan, uh, that we feel will successfully, uh, bring this greatest disaster in the history of our nation to successful closure,” Anastos declared in exaggerated hyperbole from the TV screen. “What we, uh, have here is the moral equivalent of war against the, uh, oil spill that is assaulting our shores. In the same way that, uh, our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by Nine-Eleven, I think this oil spill disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come, and, uh, one of the biggest leadership challenges for me going forward is going to be to make sure that we draw the right lessons from this disaster and, uh, that we move forward in a bold way. I won’t accept that we can’t change our energy plan to wean the nation off its ruinous dependency on oil.”

  What the media talking heads said about the President’s address was more revealing than the speech itself. In an age when “truth” was relative, almost everyone could be bought and sold like whores—the press, Hollywood, universities, unions, education... It seemed everyone was willing to line up for research grants, favorable legislation, insider tips, access, social perks, pork from the public trough...

  Trout took a long swig of coffee. Damn, he was getting cynical! He switched channels.

  Junie from Table Talk was spouting off as usual to a mainstream news anchor. “I say seize AP’s assets right now. Take over the country. I don’t care. Issue an executive order. Call it socialism, call it communism, call it anything you want.”

  The news anchor, who had once confessed over the air that just being in President Anastos’ presence “makes shivers run up and down my leg,” also demanded government action.

  “Mr. President, I want to see the boot on the neck of AP tonight. I want to see finger pointing whether it’s in your personality or not, to act kind of like a dictator and call the shots.”

  Trout had seen both Junie and the anchor several times in the Russell Senate Office Building conferring with Senator Wiedersham and other Progressive politicians. They had been bought and paid for.

  Another channel aired a clip from yesterday afternoon showing a raucous mob of ACOA and PEIU union demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue. Although such gatherings had been outlawed in Washington, Trout saw no signs of black-clad Homeland Security Police. Just ordinary cops standing back out of the way to guarantee the demonstrators their First Amendment rights. The rowdy demeanor of this bunch, the atmosphere they created, the tenor of their protest signs throbbing against the backdrop of the White House made sharp contrast to the nonaggressive behavior of the Tea Party march that ended in bloodshed in front of the Capitol Building.

  THE PEOPLE MUST ACT

  STOP THE OIL CAPITALISTS

  RALLY TO STOP OIL CAPITALISM

  PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT

  SPREAD THE REVOLUTION

  THIS SYSTEM HAS NO FUTURE FOR YOUTH

  THE REVOLUTION DOES

  Duane Smith appeared with a bullhorn to speak to the demonstrators. Smith, a community organizer and former Black Panther, was President Anastos’ environmental czar.

  “The President is on your side,” he assured the mob. “The President wants to do what is right, but what he needs is the will of the people behind him. We have to start from the bottom up. The President needs the right atmosphere to do what he knows is right.”

  The mob went wild, shouting and screaming and stabbing with their banners.

  “I think something has shifted this week,” Smith shouted. “When we look back on the Anastos presidency, I think we will see that this week marked when Progressives became Progressives again.”

  Something was shifting. Trout could feel it. He wasn’t exactly sure what. Maybe, if he were honest with himself, he didn’t want to face up to what it was.

  Senator Wiedersham’s fierce countenance popped up on another channel. Red power tie, costly suit that didn’t quite fit, narrow eyes glaring. “The way to cure this crisis is to give us more authority to act on behalf of the people...” he was saying.

  Trout flipped channels and landed on the Zenergy News Network. He let out a bitter little laugh. Zenergy was “the enemy.” He felt like a traitor for watching, but it provided a different take and some relief from the orchestrated collective baying of what that character Jerry Baer referred to as “the drive-by media” before he got waxed in Oklahoma.

  A Zenergy reporter was interviewing a group of people in Detroit who had lined up for blocks to receive free government cash from the economic stimulus packages passed by Congress. It was a sad sort of comic relief against modern reality.

  “Why are you here?” the young newsman asked a group of overweight women.

  “To get some money.”

  “What kind of money?”

  “Anastos money.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “Anastos.”

  “And where did Anastos get it?”

  “I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us to help us. That’s why we voted for him. We love him.”

  Whereupon the women began dancing around, waving their arms and chanting, “Anastos! Anastos! Anastos...!”

  Trout heard Marilyn up and about. He changed channels again. Marilyn hated Zenergy even more than her brother did. The flip landed on a CSPAN special featuring the head of the Communist Party of the USA giving a speech at a Columbia University campus rally. He was a portly man with gray hair in a ponytail, an old hippie, standing with a microphone on the august marble steps of higher learning, surrounded by students.

  “The capitalist oil spill is the result of a system not fit to be caretaker of this planet,” the old hippie harangued the rally goers, who responded with roars of approval. “The oil spill crisis will help provide the revolution we need. In building the New World Order, we’re building it on the kind of principles we all want to live with. The Revolution is real. And we have to take up this real battle.”

  Trout wrote in his notebook: They’re building up the crisis of the oil spill the same way they did when they created a crisis of Health Care and nationalized it, when they nationalized the big banks and took over General Motors. They aim to nationalize energy...

  Marilyn entered the study, accompanied by her poodle Reggie, whose white hair was dyed a shocking pink. Trout was propped back in his easy chair sipping his coffee, notebook stuffed out of sight. Marilyn’s raven hair was mussed and she had sleep in her eyes. Only the matching-Reggie-pink dressing gown she bought in Paris at the price of an average workers’ monthly salary saved her from looking frumpy. She didn’t bother taking a chair. She was on her way to the den to watch TiVo reruns of Oprah or Whoopi. That she tarried along the way was only because she had something on her chest other than a C-cup bra.

  “Trout, you’re about as assertive as a Chihuahua,” she forthrightly accused.

  He sipped his coffee and continued staring at the screen.

  “It was embarrassing after the concert,” she continued in an injured tone. “All the wives noticed you were the only one excluded from the meeting with the President and Mr. Zuniga. I could have died, literally died.”

  “Paul McCartney was excluded.”

  That was small consolation.

&nbs
p; “If you have no backbone to stand up for yourself, I’ll have to do it for you,” she snapped. “I just got off the phone with my brother. I gave him a piece of my mind. A future congressman from Illinois ought to be treated more respectfully. Mr. Zuniga is very powerful and influential and can direct your political career like he did the President’s.”

  She sniffed and wheeled to depart, that sycophant Reggie on her heels. She paused in the doorway and looked back.

  “Joe offered us a hot tip on investments. It came directly from Mr. Zuniga,” she said. Trout knew she was rubbing his nose in the fact that she had more access to the inner circle than he. “He suggested we buy oil shares.”

  He frowned. Because of the oil spill, the President had already suspended deep sea oil drilling off the coasts. Private investors would be left out in the cold if he nationalized America’s energy industries.

  “Not our oil,” she clarified with another sniff. “That would be stupid. Brazilian oil. Joe said to sink everything we can in shares of Petrobras. It’ll make us billionaires.”

  She left with Reggie. Trout rubbed his eyes wearily. He thought of Judy. Bugfuck, Oklahoma, might not be so bad after all. He got up and padded in his house slippers to the bathroom to take another shot of Maalox.

  U.S. Provides Oil Aid

  (New Orleans)—Due to environmental damage caused by the American Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the White House is expected to announce today that the U.S. moratorium on deep water oil drilling will continue indefinitely. However, Secretary of State Linda Johnston said yesterday that the U.S. will provide financial aid to Mexico and Brazil to drill in the Gulf to help offset any energy shortfalls...

  In the meantime, hundreds of people are starting to congregate on oil-stained beaches around the Gulf coast to protest oil drilling. Protestors carry signs demanding President Anastos seize control of the oil industry...

  Chapter Eleven

  Tulsa

  Sharon Lowenthal drove Nail in her rental Saturn to his apartment on South Lewis in order for him to change out of his hospital gown and purloined sheet into something more appropriate. Weak and dizzy, he sat at his dinette table to rest after exhausting himself changing into jeans and a yellow button-up shirt, over which he drew a light tan windbreaker to conceal the S&W .38 revolver stuck in his waistband. Homeland Security had seized his bloody clothing and police-issued Glock 22 as evidence.

  “Do you want something cold to drink?” he asked Sharon.

  She surveyed the one-bedroom efficiency as though considering the probability that the only thing in the frig if it was as Spartan as the rest of the place was a partial gallon of milk past its expiration date.

  “Coke?” she requested.

  He started to get up.

  “I can find it,” she offered, rising. He dropped back down at the table.

  She opened the frig door. A sour odor assailed the kitchen. Something in a bowl had mold growing on it. There was one bottle of Coca Cola, open and flat. She settled on the last Mountain Dew and slammed the frig shut before anything alive escaped.

  “We can share a drink?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I take it you aren’t married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You?”

  “Also divorced.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why? You think I’m an old maid or something?”

  “Don’t be so touchy.” He clambered to his feet, bracing himself against the back of the chair. He started to remove the bandages from his head but thought better of it. “Let’s go.”

  “To where?”

  “The county jail downtown.”

  “Joshua Logan?”

  She drove them downtown. Nail slumped in the passenger’s seat with his eyes closed, nursing his headache. Sharon turned on the radio and caught a live broadcast being delivered by President Anastos from a D.C. high school gym.

  “The old order has been shaken,” he was saying in his rich baritone, “the old ideas and institutions are crumbling, and, uh, a new generation is called upon to remake the world...”

  Nail opened one eye. “You can’t get away from that man.”

  She glanced at him. “Remind you of anything from history?”

  “Only that I have a headache and he’s making it worse.”

  He switched the radio to Classic Country FM 99.5. Linda Ronstadt crooning Blue Bayou.

  Sharon stopped at a red light. “What will we learn from Joshua Logan?”

  He shrugged. “That’s why we’re talking to him.”

  She waited for him to continue. He didn’t. She prompted, “You said there were connections between Ron Sparks and the shooting at McDonald?s...?”

  “We don’t have diddley yet. It’s a cinch the Homies aren’t about to tell me anything. I’ll have to start from the outside and work my way toward the center.”

  “Don’t you mean we?” she corrected. “I have a stake in this.”

  He said nothing. The light turned green. She pulled on through the intersection.

  “I need to help in this, James. I was with Jerry almost from the beginning. What he knew and what he said got him—and your daughter—murdered.”

  They were almost to the jail.

  “It’s too soon to speculate,” Nail pondered. “The way you work a homicide is like you throw a bunch of marbles on the ground. You start picking up the marbles one by one until you get to the center.”

  “And Logan is—?”

  “Marble number one.”

  Nail studied her as she looked for an open meter in the courthouse parking lot.

  “I’ll get to the center one way or the other,” he said.

  She stopped the car in the middle of a lane in order to meet his steady gaze. “We will,” she said.

  * * *

  The county jail consumed the entire sixth floor of the district courthouse. By the luck of the draw, Deputy Johnson happened to be on duty, manning the security desk in front of the electronics door to the cellblocks. He was too old and too fat to work the streets anymore.

  “Man, you look like—” Johnson began when Nail got off the elevator. He saw Sharon and amended the last of his statement to “—awful.”

  “Good seeing you too, Johnson. This is Sharon Lowenthal.”

  “Meecha,” Johnson said. “I’m Jewish too. ‘Johnson’ don’t sound like no Jew name, but it is. Johnski.”

  He laughed heartily.

  “You know how to get on the right side of a girl,” Nail said.

  “That’s what my three ex-wives say. You got my message about Logan.”

  “You want to bring him out?” Nail asked. “We can use one of the interrogation rooms?”

  “No can do. The Feds came and picked him up about two hours ago. Custody slip says they taking him to the Homeland lockup in Oklahoma City. I’ve transported prisoners there before. They don’t let no other law enforcement in that joint. They meet you out front and that’s as far as you go.”

  Nail had had run-ins with Oklahoma City before, trying to interrogate homicide suspects in cases the Feds considered sensitive.

  “Logan knew they was coming for him,” Johnson added, “so he left this for you.”

  He opened a desk drawer and extracted a sealed envelope with Nail scrawled on it. Inside was a sheet of lined legal yellow paper filled with barely-legible handwriting. Sharon read it with Nail.

  Det. Nail. I seen you at McDonald’s when the feds kilt Greg Morris so I thought you a straight arrow. One of the cops told me who you was when they arrested me. I don’t got much time. They coming for me cause I know some things, like how the Defenders didn’t kill Ron Sparks and who did. I know it sounds crazy, but it ain’t. Ron was what you call a double agent who knowed things from somebody he knew in Washington, D.C. He was supposed to infiltrate the militia cause the militia is the only ones standing up to fight. Understand what I’m saying? He was working for Homeland, but
he was really with us. Det. Nail, the commies ain’t going to let me live either, sure as God made little green apples they ain't. Not much time left. I hear them coming for me…

  The letter ended abruptly. Nail took it to mean Logan had had only enough time to slip the envelope to Deputy Johnson before Homeland Security took him away.

  “Anybody else read this?” Nail asked Johnson.

  “I put it in my pocket so the Homies wouldn’t see it.”

  “Much obliged.”

  “Nail, I’m real sorry about...your daughter and all.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Tulsa

  Sharon suggested Nail return to the hospital to complete his treatment. He shook his head.

  “I’m apt to run into Kimbrell and take his head off. Drop me at my apartment. You have a place to stay?”

  “I took a room at the Kensington.”

  He thought about it. “Is Baer’s security still in Tulsa?”

  “Ernest was sent home to Iowa to be buried. Herb, the other bodyguard, escorted Jerry’s casket back to New York. They were good friends. Do I need security?”

  “Whoever these people are may have intended to kill you too,” he said bluntly.

  They went quiet, she in sober reflection, he in dark and revengeful thought.

  The route to Nail’s apartment led past the ORU campus, which Sharon had avoided earlier on the drive downtown. Both glanced at the dome-topped stadium where so much blood had been spilled and where their lives had been suddenly changed forever. The stadium and parking lot were still roped off with yellow tape bearing warnings every few feet along its length: Homeland Security. Restricted Area. Tears filled Sharon’s eyes. Nail’s jaw hardened and his eyes narrowed.