The Culling

by Charles Ray

  “Be well, Leland,” Hiroshi said. He turned and caught up with Moses at the head of the group of Freelanders.

  “Next stop, home,” Moses said as Hiroshi came alongside.

  Hiroshi gazed toward the west. Home. It wasn’t a concept that he’d thought much about before. He realized, though, that he’d never thought of New Liberty as home after being separated from his parents. Until he and Clementine ran into the arms of the Freelander patrol, he’d been floating in limbo like a dandelion spore in the breeze.

  “Yes, home,” he said quietly.

  Moses cleared his throat. “I was wondering, Hiroshi. You never mentioned the books to Gravius or the others. Why was that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was just habit. I kept the secret for so long I maybe just kept quiet as a reflex. Or, maybe I’m just not ready to completely trust them.”

  “Hm, you have a point,” Moses said. “I think Gravius is an honorable man, and I feel sure we can trust young Leland. But, changing the direction of a society takes time. They must learn to crawl before they walk, and the knowledge in those books would enable them to run. That could make them dangerous, not only to others, but to themselves. In the proper time, we can share with them.”

  Hiroshi nodded. There was wisdom in the older man’s words. But, he was also reminded of something Moses had said, ‘power corrupts.’ That was the disease infecting Cruz. With his knowledge of where the books were hidden, he possessed a kind of power over others. Could he remain uncorrupted? Always remember. His father’s words reassured him. As long as he remembered the dangers of being seduced by the possession of power, he should be able to stay on the proper course.

  50.

  Hiroshi awoke from the first sound, peaceful sleep he’d had for as long as he could remember.

  The gray light of early dawn seeped through the gaps in the curtains.

  They had arrived back in Freeland after the two-day journey from New Liberty, arrived to a hero’s welcome. Sarah Moses had organized a large banquet. There was a long night of eating, drinking and dancing. Hiroshi remembered dancing with Clementine, Sarah, and several other Freeland women, and probably drinking more of Sarah’s dandelion wine than was good for him, but, except for a slightly dry mouth, he felt no ill effects.

  In fact, he felt warm – warmer than he should feel.

  As he tried to turn in bed, he bumped against something warm and soft. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the warm and soft something resolved itself into Clementine, snuggled against his arm. He distinctly remembered going to bed alone after they returned from the banquet. Clementine had gone to her own room in the house they’d shared since their arrival in Freeland. But, here she was, nestled against him, her slender hands tucked beneath her chin.

  Hiroshi felt the breath catch in his throat. He could hear his own heart beating.

  Clementine’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked up at him.

  “Good morning,” she said sleepily. “I hope you don’t mind, but it got lonesome in my room, so I sneaked in here and crawled in next to you.”

  She lifted her shoulder, pulled one of his arms under her body, and rested her head in the junction of his neck and shoulder. Her hair tickled his nose.

  Looking down at her, Hiroshi felt a strange sensation – unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Clementine moved her body against his. She then reached up and grasped his neck gently. Smiling, she began pulling his face toward hers.

  At that moment, Hiroshi knew that he had finally found a home.

  The White Dragons. A novel of international intrigue by Charles Ray.

  Uhuru Press, North Potomac, MD, 2013.

  Critical acclaim for The White Dragons

  ‘From the first few pages, this sinister mystery will have the reader wanting to know more . . . the eerie uneasiness and chilling sense of cruelty due to the desolate location and cut-throat atmosphere of KGB-like politics are palpable.” The Foreign Service Journal.

  Thursday, May 8, 1975, Washington, DC

  Lesley Carter was worried.

  First, she’d been held up by her boss, and feared she’d miss her bus. The L1 Metro bus arrived at the stop at Twenty-third and I Streets at 6: 40 pm, and was seldom late, nor did it wait long. If she’d missed it, she would have been looking at more than an hour wait for the next bus. She could take a cab for the 20-minute ride to her neighborhood, on Calvert Street, near the National Zoo, but didn’t feel like paying the ten dollar fare.

  She was breathing hard as she arrived at the already crowded corner, near Washington Circle, just north of George Washington University Hospital. She’d nearly run from the Department of State building’s E Street side, fearing that her short legs wouldn’t enable her to move fast enough. She found a clear spot near the front of the crowd and proceeded to pay her fellow commuters no mind; a small group that included several elderly black ladies in gray-green scrubs who worked at the hospital, a portly white businessman in a suit that was rumpled from his own walk in the humidity of mid-May in Washington, DC, three young men who looked like students from the university, and two girls in the plaid skirts and white blouses of a nearby private Catholic high school. She didn’t notice the slender, narrow faced man with close set eyes and dark brown hair combed straight back from a high forehead, dressed in dark blue shirt and pants who had been behind her from the moment she crossed F Street, and who now took up a position at the rear of the crowd.

  She was breathing hard from her walk, but a glance at the cheap Timex watch on her left wrist showed her that she’d made it with ten minutes to spare.

  Despite not missing her bus, she still felt antsy. It had been a surreal day.

  She was just settling into her first month on the job as desk officer for the tiny Central Asian country of Dagastan in the European Bureau of the Department of State. A grade 3 Foreign Service Officer, she was on her fourth tour, the first domestic assignment since finishing the orientation course and French language training seven years earlier. Getting the desk officer slot had been a surprise; she was a consular officer, and would normally been assigned to the Bureau of Consular Affairs upon return to the U.S., but, in her last posting, at the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, she’d been assigned to the political section’s most junior position with responsibility of reporting on activities among the country’s ethnic minorities. She had so impressed the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, he’d run interference to get her a coveted desk officer job, which would prepare her for more senior assignments outside the consular area; and, this was her dream.

  A conscientious person; typical of her Wisconsin Protestant upbringing; she threw herself fully into the job, often working late into the evening, surpassing even some of the workaholics who routinely stayed in the office until past six to show how ‘hard’ they were working. In her case, she actually worked.

  A detail oriented person, she often noticed the small things that others missed; thus, when she noticed a small item, only a few sentences really, in the intelligence digest prepared by the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, about the killing of two Dagastani government officials with the suggestion that foreign elements might have been involved, and then, after crosschecking, discovered that the embassy hadn’t reported anything on it, she sprang into action. First, she drafted a cable to the embassy, for the political counselor, asking for any information the embassy had on the incident, and its assessment of the impact it would have on Dagastani politics. Not wanting to bother the office secretary, a sour faced civil servant who liked to remind the young desk officers that she worked for the country director, not them, she’d prepared the cable herself, requiring the typing on a cumbersome multi-copy form of ten green sheets with carbons interlaced, requiring that each sheet be dealt with to make corrections. For that reason, she kept the message short; tactful, but brief. It was when she’d taken it to James Whitman, the country director for that region that sat on the border between Europe and Asia, that her troub
les began.

  As soon as Whitman had finished reading, he put the paper on his desk, pushing it away as if it was a dangerous animal; and frowning up at her.

  “Just what is the meaning of this, Lesley?” he asked. His New England accent, not quite British, but close, was cold, as was his expression.

  “Uh, well, sir,” she said. “I saw a report about this in the intel traffic. I noticed that the embassy hadn’t reported it, but, because of the implication that there might be foreign involvement, I thought they should look into it.”

  Whitman’s expression got even colder. “You thought they should look into it? And, just what makes you think you have any business telling the embassy what they should be doing? Ambassador Ellingsworth is a capable Foreign Service Officer, and if he hasn’t reported what is no doubt a minor incident, I’m sure he has his reason, and it’s not for a mere desk officer to question him. Do I make myself clear?”

  Lesley felt like crying, but held back the tears. She knew he’d expect her to do that. Whitman was one of the people who’d objected to her assignment, stating that a woman, and a consular officer at that, didn’t have the necessary qualifications to perform well in the high stress environment of the country directorate. That had been, Lesley find out early on, total bullshit. While they worked often insane hours due to the time difference between Washington and most of the embassies with which they worked, the stress level was less than having to deal with a plane crash or a missing American whose relatives in the U.S. were constantly on the phone insisting that the U.S. Government find their kin, things that even the most junior consular officers had to learn to deal with very early in their careers. The desk officers read cables, wrote bullshit instruction cables, and wrote or cleared on even more bullshit memos for the various senior officials on the sixth and seventh floor of the State Department’s C Street headquarters.

  This, she thought, should have been just another routine request for additional information. The frosty look on Whitman’s face, though, told her it was anything but. She’d done enough time behind visa interview windows, querying foreigners seeking visas to the United States, that she could spot deception with her eyes closed. Whitman was concealing worry; no, she thought; fear; behind his expression of frosty superiority. As he tore the green sheets, carbons included, into pieces and dumped them into the brown paper bag at the corner of his desk, the ‘burn’ bag into which classified trash was placed for incineration; she noticed that his hands trembled ever so slightly.

  Something about the incident bothered him. Lesley Carter was determined to find out what, but decided not to press the issue with him.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, trying to put a tone of meek submission into her voice. “I just thought it might be useful, but, I see your point.”

  He nodded, looking at her from beneath his bushy brows. “Very well then; you have more important things to do, so I suggest you get to them. Where, for instance is that analysis of the crop production reports I asked for this morning.”

  “Uh, it’s almost completed. I’ll have it for you first thing in the morning.”

  This meant, she knew, that she’d have to take the files home and would be up all night drafting and redrafting. She’d been working on it intermittently for most of the day, taking the occasional break to read items in the thick read file that circulated through the warren of tiny boxes that passed for office space for the half dozen desk officers she worked with. When she’d come across the intelligence report, it had piqued her interest; here at last was something besides boring columns of figures enumerating the hectares of wheat and other grains produced by the large state farms of Dagastan, outputs that were barely enough to feed its small population, requiring large shipments of grain and other foodstuffs from the country’s Russian neighbors.

  Dejected and disappointed by Whitman’s reaction to her initiative to do something interesting, and to work on something that might actually have some political impact on U.S. relations with the tiny, insignificant country, she turned and with shoulders slumped, headed back to her tiny space; little more than a broom closet in comparison to the large corner office Whitman occupied. She would have been even more dismayed had she seen Whitman reach for the phone as she left; his narrowed eyes on her retreating back.

  Back in her little cubbyhole, Lesley took the carbon copy of the cable Whitman had so casually dismissed and started to crumple it up to put in the burn bag. Then, she hesitated, looking at the purplish type on the green paper.

  “No, dammit,” she said quietly. “There’s something here, and I’m getting to the bottom of it, one way or another.”

  She carefully smoothed out the single sheet and folded it in thirds. She put the folded paper in a legal size envelope, folded it in half and stuck it in her purse. Technically, she was about to commit a serious security violation, because, as was practice, she’d classified the cable CONFIDENTIAL, but she was so angry at the way she’d been rebuffed, she decided, to hell with it. No one checked employee purses on the way in or out of the State Department, and she could always burn it later.

  She then took a sheet of plain paper and in her precise handwriting, wrote a short note. She folded the paper in half taped it, then put it in one of the brown interoffice envelopes used to ferry documents around the warren of hallways of the Department. Addressing the envelope to Alison Chambers, Central Asia Analyst, INR/ EUR, she got up and went outside. The secretary was bent over her desk, reading the Washington Post, and paid her no attention as she slipped the envelope into the stack of outgoing interoffice mail.

  Back in her office, she spent the rest of the day making notations on the report Whitman had demanded. She was almost cheered up by the fact that she might actually be able to get most of it down before leaving for the day, alleviating the need to spend all night working on the damn thing.

  When the hands of the circular clock mounted on the corkboard wall of her office were at six-fifteen, she removed the ribbon from her typewriter and locked it in the single drawer safe behind her chair, cleared her inbox of all papers, grabbed her purse, and, without looking around to see if anyone was noticing, left for the day. She had no doubt that some, if not all, the desk officers, all male, were sitting hunched over their desks watching the clock, waiting for a suitable ‘late’ hour to depart. She figured one or more of them would be making a mental note of her ‘early’ departure. The eight-to-five announced workday was a joke throughout the building. Only the civil servants who had permanent tenure could afford to actually work an eight-hour day.

  To hell with it, she thought. The annual performance evaluations, the EERs, had already been done for the year, and she hadn’t been in the section long enough to warrant a rating; she’d gotten a glowing evaluation from her last post, which would stand her in good stead when the summer promotion boards met beginning in June.

  She was thinking about her prospect for promotion when the big red, white, and blue Metro bus pulled into the stop with a loud hiss of its air brakes, and the group on the sidewalk surged forward even before passengers getting off at that stop could exit the bus.

  In the middle of the mass of people, Lesley managed to get on without being pushed around too much, and, luckily, snagged an inward facing seat near the front.

  Sitting with her back against the wall, jammed in between a sweaty businessman who smelled of too many martinis with his lunch and an elderly black woman who was reading a dog-eared Bible, she kept her gaze fixed on the scuffed floor of the bus. She didn’t notice, therefore, the quick glance she got from the man in black as he made his way past her to the back of the bus, where he stood, holding one of the overhead straps.

  The L1 bus made its way up Twenty-third Street, around Washington Circle and onto New Hampshire Avenue, and then northwest on Connecticut toward Woodley Park and the National Zoo. By the mid-way point of the journey, and several stops where people got on, but few got off, the bus was crowded to capacity.

  The twenty minute journ
ey to Connecticut Avenue and Calvert Street, Lesley’s stop, seemed like an eternity on the crowded vehicle with the smell of sweaty bodies and sweaty clothing assaulting her nostrils. The evening air, even with the mixture of gas fumes from all the cars roaring past on Connecticut, was a relief when she stepped down from the bus and headed up the hill toward the little town house she’d been able to rent a week after arriving in Washington for her assignment. Her air freight had arrived, but she was still waiting for her sea freight shipment, so the place was empty except for a card table and folding chair that did duty as dining surface and work space, and a futon upon which she slept. The few books she’d included in her limited air freight shipment were stacked neatly on the floor next to the futon, beside a gooseneck lamp she’d bought at a little shop in Bethesda. She hadn’t bought a TV, so when she didn’t spend the time before bed reading, she listened to a little transistor radio that her cousin had given her for her thirtieth birthday the previous year.

  She was looking forward to getting inside her empty house; empty though it was, it was her territory, and she felt comfortable there, away from the pretense and coldness of official Washington.

  She was completely unaware of the man in black, who had exited via the center door when she went out through the front, and was now trailing her, about twenty feet back. The sidewalk was deserted but for the two of them, and even at seven, the sky was still too light for the street lights to be turned on. Towering trees cast islands of deep shadow across the sidewalk. The man stayed as much in the shadows as possible, but it wasn’t necessary, Lesley’s attention was focused in front of her, and her destination, about half a mile farther along.

  The dark stranger used the pools of shadow to close the gap between them, and it was only when he was no more than six feet behind her that Lesley Carter became aware of someone near; it was a feeling of sorts, the kind of itching tingle at the base of your neck that tells you that you’re no longer alone. At first, she merely increased her pace. Only another hundred yards or so to go, and she would be inside her house; not, she thought, that she should really have anything to worry about. After all, Woodley Park was a nice area, populated by middle class families and professionals; not at all like some of the other DC neighborhoods where it was unsafe to wander out alone at night. It was probably just a neighbor, like her, coming home from a day of toil in some government office downtown.