“I like to hire people who have skills I don’t. Now spare me the human resources consulting and get to the point.”
Ward looked around again. Maybe he knew about the ghost of Dr. Birdsong. “You do contracts work, right?”
“No, Ward. I do criminal defense work. A little bit of civil plaintiffs work.”
“But you could look at a contract, right?”
“I guess. I mean I took the class like everybody else. And I dealt with a couple of breach-of-contract disputes back when I was at the firm, but those were part of white-collar crime cases.”
“This is totally white-collar,” said Ward.
“I bet,” said Donny, looking at Ward’s eyes through the yellow lenses. They looked more lucid than Donny expected.
“Seriously,” he said. He handed Donny a manila envelope.
“Can I look at this tomorrow?” said Donny. “After my hearing in the morning?”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“It’s a contract, I’m guessing.”
“Right.”
“So tell me what you need me to look at.”
“You’ve heard of Texical?”
“Sure,” said Donny. “I even know some folks who work there.” Texical was the kind of company that Major Kovacs would like. They had started as an oilfield services company, and branched out into paramilitary logistics, disaster relief, and natural resource extraction. His former colleague Trey, who had been at B&E with Donny and Lou, had gone in-house and was now Texical’s General Counsel.
“They have some bad hombres over there.”
“Can’t be that bad,” said Donny. “They got that big contract to clean up the Evac Zone.”
“Exactly,” said Ward. “That’s got them going from bad to worse. And kind of how I got hooked up with them.”
“I guess that means they’re doing business with you now.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time. A way to go legit. Make even bigger margins on totally legal deals.”
“What are you selling them?”
“I’m not. I’m buying.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Drugs, mainly. Botanicals, from the jungles. The good shit. But it’s legal. Grey market stuff.”
“You and the feds must be using different color wheels.”
“Nothing wrong with getting people what they need to feel good.”
“Yeah, cut off their supply and they might realize they need to change the system.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Kind of shitty, today. Just the drugs?”
“No, that’s the thing. These guys I’ve been dealing with, they bring their stuff in through the Evac Zone.”
“No customs.”
“Not really, not right now, the way they have it set up. That’s the whole idea. These companies operating the leases are like their own customs bureau.”
“So they can bring in stuff that’s banned under the Accords. Evade the sanctions.”
“Bingo. And the crazy thing is, they say it’s legal under U.S. law.”
“What about international law?”
“They say it’s unenforceable, at least for what I’m doing.”
“As long as you don’t take any foreign vacations.”
“No, seriously, they say they have an angle. It’s all covered in that contract.”
Donny peeked in the envelope. The document was thick, but not as thick as he expected. “Looks like you already signed this,” he said. “Who’s Fredonian Enterprises?”
“That’s me,” said Ward. “My LLC. The other party is the outfit I’m dealing with. Patriot Logistics.”
“They sell flags, too?”
“Yeah, right,” said Ward. “That’s a new company set up by these Texical guys. But the relationship is evolving into other stuff now. Like pirate stuff. Foreign cash, narcotics, black market smokes, some bullion, some scary porn, and a ton of guns. All of which they still insist is legal, since it’s just for re-export. But I’m not taking their word for it, which is why I really want to make sure I’m covered on this contract.”
“Where do the guns go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t deal with stuff that can kill you.”
“Not that quickly, at least. What else are they bringing in that’s above your pay grade?”
“I shouldn’t even tell you.”
“I’m your lawyer.”
“I mean I don’t think you even want to know about this.”
“Try me.”
“Your funeral,” said Ward. “Aerospace stuff. Mostly Russian, some German, via transshipment through Namibia and British Honduras.”
“Of course.”
“Space program is the number one ban.”
“And they want their milsats back.”
“I think it’s about water.”
“Water from space.”
“Yeah, dude. Fucking giant planetoids of ice, ready for capture. Make it rain like Bible rain.”
“Getting high on your own supply again, Ward?”
“Whatever. What I know is I saw them rolling a big-ass rocket engine off a tanker there in the port. In the closed-off part of Corpus. Middle of the night, straight into a big hangar.”
“Rockets.”
Ward nodded.
“Texical isn’t doing this,” said Donny.
“I don’t know. Definitely some of their people.”
Donny could tell Ward was giving him the straight dope. “You could do a lot with this information,” he said.
“I guess,” said Ward. “Makes me not want to go back in there.”
“Into Corpus?”
“Into the Zone, period. Any part of it. I’m afraid what else I’ll see.”
“So they even got you a pass to work in there?”
“Yep,” said Ward, holding up his phonescreen so Donny could see. “It’s an app.”
“Just like the new passports.”
“Yeah, but this one doesn’t make you do citizenship quizzes or any of that bullshit. This is like the passport to the place no one wants to go.”
“What’s it like in there?”
“In the Zone?” His eyes lit up, even behind the yellow lenses. “It’s the goddamned petrochemical Chernobyl out there, man. I try to not even get out of the car if I can manage.”
“Cleanup’s going to take a long time,” said Donny, imagining. He remembered the maps that came out in the weeks after the storm, showing the areas Zelda left too polluted for human habitation, like a densely packed archipelago of islands from the East Side of Houston down to the Gulf and along the coast.
“Cleanup?” said Ward. “I don’t think that’s the real business plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe, but that’s not the priority. This is about liberated territory, bro. Place where you can make your own rules. Like this whole state used to be.”
“Now you sound like Gregorio.”
“Who?”
“The guy who occupied that park out there. City Council member.”
“Oh, right, that idiot. The one who thinks no one should own anything. Took all those kids out there camping on the banks of a benzene river.”
“He’s dead,” said Donny. “One of my clients witnessed it, and now they have her locked up to keep her from talking about it.”
“Heavy,” said Ward, shifting like he didn’t want to hear any more.
“I guess that means I’m fooling myself thinking you might have some information about what happened to him.”
“You would be correct.”
“How about if I look at your contract tomorrow, you make some calls and see if you can get some intel on that tonight.”
“You got that in the wrong order, Donny.”
“You’re the one coming to me for help. You get me some info, I’ll get you squared away on your contract for free.”
Ward still looked shifty as he considered that. “I know one guy
I could call. Hopefully without getting dragged into whatever mess you’re sticking your nose into. But if he can’t help, you still need to look at that. I’ll just pay your normal deal.”
“Or maybe we call my guy at Texical, and see what they’d pay to keep you quiet, rocket man.”
“You scare me sometimes, Donny,” said Ward as he got up to leave. But you could tell he kind of liked the idea.
“Thanks . . . I guess,” said Donny, looking at the red folder Percy had left him, and then at the clock on the wall. “Wish I could scare the people I need to scare.”
“Well, if you need any study aids, I left something in that envelope to help you see things more clearly,” said Ward. “Especially good for late-night brainstorming.”
“See you, Ward,” said Donny, turning to his work and trying not to look inside the envelope. He was proud of himself that he waited until Ward left to slide the contract and the contraband out onto the desk. Then he put the cellophane-wrapped treat in his suit pocket, and reached for the phone.
12
The message Percy had left was this:
Elizabeth Corley
Justice Dept
(202) 555-6070
Donny called the number. He got voicemail, with a prompt identifying Ms. Corley as someone from the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Donny looked her up, and learned that she was not the Pardon Attorney herself, but a member of the staff.
He searched the BellNet directory for a personal number, but it was unlisted. He tried all the other numbers he could find for the Office of the Pardon Attorney. He got an answer with the fifth one.
“Perkins,” said the voice at the other end, a man.
“Hey, Perkins,” said Donny. “Is Elizabeth still there?”
“You mean Liz? No. Who’s calling?”
“Donald Kimoe. I’m a lawyer in Houston. It’s urgent. She was calling about a clemency application.”
“Oh,” said Perkins. “That one.”
“Yes, that one. Any news?”
“I can’t really say.”
“Come on, dude. They’re scheduled to kill my client in like three hours. If I need to call somebody else, tell me.”
“I think Liz just called you to ask who all you had sent this to, because we have been getting all sorts of press calls.”
“I covered some bases. Hoping His Leaderness will see the potential goodwill he can generate by locking my guy up for life instead.”
“I really can’t talk to you.”
“Don’t you have a professional—”
Click. Bastard hung up on him.
Donny checked the other messages on the phone. Five spambots, two impatient clients, and four reporters calling about his press release. They would have to wait.
He called Lou. Straight to voicemail.
He called the White House. Main switchboard, the only number listed. The answering service was a robot. He tried to make it comply, and then he tried to make it cry, and then he tried to make it scream. There was no limit to how long a message you could leave.
What he should have been doing was preparing for Xelina’s hearing in the morning. But instead he recorded an unsolicited oral argument with an unintelligent AI, improvised on the fly, that he knew no one would ever hear.
When he was done venting that rant, he hounded Lou again, until he finally picked up.
“Sorry, Donny. No dice.”
“Shit.”
“I tried, for real. I wish you had let me see what you had written.”
“I did.”
“I mean before you sent it, you crazy fuck. I think you’re done.”
“I’m just getting started.”
“Whatever. Tell that to your client.”
White noise.
13
Even before he ate the nugget on his way to watch them put his client to death, Donny got a little wiggy. Literally, because he was thinking about dudes in wigs. The Founding Fathers, specifically, the ones who made treason one of the three crimes defined in the Constitution, along with piracy and counterfeiting. As he hauled ass down the highway to get there by midnight, he saw this old dude with long stringy white hair in a weird coat with his socks pulled up over his pants pushing a shopping cart loaded with loose paper and found objects along the shoulder, and for a minute he was sure it was old Publius 1.0 himself, James Madison, as ghost or time traveler. And as he drove on Donny’s mind drifted into this almost dream where the two of them were hanging out drinking PBR by a fire behind the liquor store, Madison talking about the kinds of changes in government that would be allowed and the kinds that weren’t, Donny asking him what the fuck’s an antirepublican, and all this other crazy shit that was like a mix between Federalist No. 43 and a drunk poetry reading, both of them laughing and then Donny crying, partly because of what he was about to go see happen all because Donny had not been able to prevent it, and partly because he realized that, contrary to what they taught you in school, especially law school, James Madison was an asshole. They all were, every one of those slave-owning old bastards, except maybe Aaron Burr, the first one who had the excellent idea to start his own new country. The feeling was so real that Donny looked back to see if he could still see the guy, and even wondered if he had time to swing back. Maybe Madison could tell him how to get the last-minute clemency that would happen in the movie version. Or maybe he would tell him the truth: that Donny better get used to it, because they are just getting started.
When he exited at Mannheim for the facility, Donny finally pulled over and ate the thing Ward had given him, just chewing it and swallowing it down fast instead of licking it slowly like Ward suggested. It looked like weird candy but it tasted like one of those synthetic air freshener cakes. As he put the car back in gear and approached the checkpoint, he decided that taking an unknown hallucinogen on the way to an execution was either a really good idea, or the worst idea he had ever had. And as he talked to the guard in what felt like slow motion and started to feel the paranoid coming on, he checked it by willing himself to remember how much worse his client had it.
They had an impatient lady guard waiting for him, at what once had been the door to the emergency room. The only established federal death chamber was in a maximum-security facility in Indiana, and the feds didn’t have a properly equipped prison in the Houston area, so they were repurposing this old community hospital they had commandeered the year before as a refugee medical clinic. The guard escorted him down a long corridor past closed clinical doors until they came to a little portal at the end, unmarked. She knocked, unlocked it with a big key, and ushered Donny into a room the size of a walk-in closet, one wall of which was a window into another, bigger room—an operating theater repurposed as execution chamber. And already strapped to the table not more than four feet away was Jerome Hardy, Donny’s client.
Donny assumed the window was a one-way mirror through which the people on the other side could not see, but then Jerome turned, as if sensing commotion, and made eye contact with Donny. Or at least that was how it seemed, but Donny wasn’t sure whether his senses were still trustworthy. He returned the gaze, and tried to convey a sense of apology, sorrow, and farewell across the chasm, while the reptilian trio of suits clumped together in the closet with him murmured about who he was.
“Fuck off, lizardman,” said Donny to the one closest to him, who was taller and balder than Donny.
The guy laughed at him and turned away.
Jerome’s head had been shaved. By him or by his captors, Donny didn’t know. They had dressed him in something like white pajamas. A big white sheet was draped from his ankles to his chest, and a crazy thick leather strap pulled across it at his waist, holding his center of gravity to the table, which was more like a crucifix than a bed, with drooping branches for his arms extending off to either side. Intravenous tubes ran to each arm from translucent bladders of lethal chemicals hanging off wheeled metal racks. The bladder on the rack that was closest to the window had a purplish fluid in one an
d another the yellow of beer or piss, and when Donny looked at that he looked into a spot where a lightbulb was shining through from the other side and it made a weird grey portal into which he was momentarily certain he was about to fall, into the place where he deserved to go more than Jerome. But then he noticed the way they had both of Jerome’s hands all wrapped up in Ace bandages, and remembered Miles telling him how they do that not for medical reasons but to keep the prisoner from giving his executioners or the attendant watchers the finger.
In the role of the warden was Ned Szabo, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Gulf Region, a black-haired ideologue with the blood blue suit to match, the bright red tie a somewhat tasteless touch. He looked to the crowd, looked to the pair of executioners in their red scrubs and black surgical masks, looked at the clock again, then turned to the prisoner and asked if he had any final words.
Jerome was breathing kind of quickly, giving off the energy of a small animal that knows it is trapped and has a pretty good idea of its imminent fate, but is not yet quite sure. For a moment Donny saw him as an actual animal, the way we all are. He noticed for the first time that Jerome’s feet were bare, and that the big toe of his left foot had been painted gold.
The last time the death penalty had been administered for disloyalty to the nation was long before Donny had been born. Another tradition they were reviving in the name of the flag.
General deterrence was the general idea.
It wasn’t until Jerome looked up at it that Donny noticed the camera there in the ceiling, red light illuminated to indicate they were filming this. Outtakes would probably appear on the morning news shows, between the perky weather forecasts and celebrity interviews. The premonition of that, and the names and numbers of reporters he had written down from his answering machine, gave him more bad ideas.
“Water,” said Jerome with difficulty. You could see how parched he was, and you could hear the barely contained sense of horror in his voice.
“Guy needs water!” yelled Donny. The suits in there with him looked at him like he was crazy. He tried the door, but they were locked in. He went to bang on the window, but then he saw Jerome was looking right at him.
Rule of Capture Page 8
