Southern Republic (The Downriver Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramsay, Lex

  “But even that wasn’t the worst part, Lewis.” Lewis had heard this sermon at least a dozen times since he began working for the Senator, and half those times had been in the last couple of months while the Assembly was puzzling out “The Negro Question” as they so quaintly called it. He knew that his main job at this moment was to be a sounding board as the Senator came to the same conclusion they both knew was inevitable.

  “The worst part, the absolutely most asinine part of the whole shootin’ match, Lewis, was that just when we had the Yanks by the short hairs, instead of takin’ a page out their book and playin’ the smart money, we held steadfast like a mule with a pork chop to ‘Our Way of Life.’ We could have beat them at their own game and become an industrial powerhouse, but we were stuck on that ‘to the manner born’ bullshit instead. Well just lookit where that’s landed us, Lewis. We’ve got a small population of producers surrounded by a bunch of worthless clods—an’ you know I’m not just talkin’ ’bout the slaves.”

  It always seemed to calm the Senator to put down the F.F.C., Lewis had long ago realized. Probably because of a life-long inferiority complex that wasn’t helped much by the rumor his last political opponent started about the Woolridge clan rising up from a madame whose grateful customers deeded her property. Lewis figured that right about now, Woolridge would be winding down to his conclusion, the exact same conclusion the Assembly reached—the slaves had to go.

  “No, Lewis, we’ve puzzled over this for the last 3 meetings of the Assembly, and the answer keeps comin’ up the same: we’ve got to kill ’em without making it look like we did it. And now we’ve got a plan that’ll work beautifully. No slaves, no blame, and no obstacle to the Great Southern Republic taking its rightful place of dominance in the global economy of the 21st Century.

  “Lewis, get your contact with the R.A. on the link, and start the ball rolling. Make it so.”

  Lewis thought he had the perfect R.A. dupe for the job. The Assembly had long ago infiltrated the R.A. at its highest levels, seeing as how it was useful to be able to “loose” a few slaves now and again. For years, he’d had his eye on Patrick Edgerton, a tech genius who had just the right mix of idealism and cunning to serve their purposes now. Lewis used the link with the special encryption software and punched in his contact’s number.

  CHAPTER 7

  ‌Patrick stared at the image of his client at Chronitronics Worldwide Industries on his vid-phone. “You want me to do what?” Patrick tried to keep the incredulity from his tone and adopt his normal unflappable demeanor.

  “I want you to come to our annual awards dinner next Friday to be honored for your work on the St. Louis Project, Patrick … come on, fella, you’re something of an exotic commodity—not the least because of your reputation as a tech wunderkind, do me a favor and show up, will ya?”

  Patrick stifled his annoyance at the use of the word “exotic” since he knew what it really meant. “Look, Alfred, you know I’m great with systems and lousy with people, and besides, why don’t you take the award, you’re the one who works there.”

  “Because this is one of our ‘Business Partners Success Stories’ awards, it’s meant for outside consultants and stuff.” Alfred replied.

  “Alright, look, I’ll think about it, O.K.?” Patrick said and broke the connection before Alfred could come up with a response.

  Sometimes Patrick wondered whether people were impressed with his tech skills because they were extraordinary, or because of the fact that as an African descendant, a fairly rare commodity in the U.S., they were fascinated by his “exoticism.” He had to admit that he had never really felt like he was treated differently in a negative way, though. Not at school, or at work or in any of the cities in which he frequently traveled. Hell, there weren’t enough folks of African heritage in the entire country for anyone to feel threatened by; and he had long speculated that this was the main reason nobody seemed to pay much attention to things like race—at least where Africans were concerned.

  They only comprised about 1% of the total U.S. population; and most of them had been in the country for longer than their white counterparts. As a result, they were appropriately represented in all the professions, occupations and prisons as their numbers in the general population would dictate.

  Patrick and all the American Africans he had ever known were tolerated, but not really seen. It constantly amazed him how white people could simultaneously extol them as exotic, while refusing to wholly countenance their humanity. Nothing quite so uncivilized as overt race prejudice, rather they seemed to view those of African descent as different—but not really significant enough to trouble themselves to study.

  Most American Africans had lived here long before the Civil War, Patrick mused, and even the small number of refugees from the South were retrained—if they stayed in the country at all—and tended to blend right in with everyone else. No, Patrick thought, other than the occasional comment about being “exotic” or “special” that had plagued him and every other American African he knew, he couldn’t honestly say his race had ever caused anything bad to happen to him.

  Of course, Patrick knew the same couldn’t be said about Mexicans or Asians, somehow the numbers in which they had made the exodus to the U.S. gave rise to hateful racism on the part of many Americans. Patrick didn’t understand it completely, since he pretty much figured the same saga played out by the English, Italians, Slavs and Irish was just being repeated with different players. But he knew that in this, as in many things, he was in the minority.

  • • •

  Patrick adjusted the collar of his tuxedo, all the while muttering to himself about getting roped into going to this awards dinner, wearing this stupid monkey suit, feeling as out of place as he was sure he looked.

  He drove to the Woodley Park Omni at the edge of Rock Creek Park, pulled into valet parking and checked his coat inside. He figured he could grab a drink from one of the roaming waiters, stand in a corner until the seating for dinner began, then suffer through an evening of inane small talk with people he wouldn’t remember tomorrow and didn’t want to be with tonight.

  “Hey, Patrick, I’m so glad you could come,” yelled Alfred as he strode purposefully his way with a woman who just had to be his wife on his arm. Alfred Kowalski was the stereotypical glad-hander, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy that Patrick had earnestly attempted to avoid all his life. He was the type of man who seemed to know everyone, and could toss out a quip about the spouses, children, hobbies and hometowns of almost anyone he encountered with the ease of a practiced politician.

  Alfred’s wife (as indeed she proved to be) Marjorie was a mousy looking woman who seemed to scream with her every word and gesture, “I’m just happy to be here in Alfred’s world!” She had the practiced air of a perennial second in command, always eager for every word her husband might utter, ever vigilant in her role as the one-woman support system to a man she had clearly identified as her ticket out of the lot of the ordinary.

  They were good, Patrick had to acknowledge, although what exactly their game was, he wasn’t sure. Something about their one-two punch act didn’t feel right to Patrick. When Alfred wasn’t rambling on about all the people he needed to introduce Patrick to, Marjorie was prattling about the eligible women in the crowd, giving biographical data that would have made the Census Bureau proud.

  “Now you see that tall woman standing next to that column—Andrea Tucker-Dowd … she’s an investment banker from Wichita who’s just broken up with a loathsome little man who wasn’t nearly good enough for her and I’m sure she’d love to make your acquaintance… why don’t I just accidentally on purpose wander you over in her direction and let you two meet?” Marjorie whispered conspiratorially.

  Between repeating his “nice to meet you’s” to the parade of luminaries Alfred felt duty-bound to steer Patrick’s way, and declining the offers to get “fixed up” with the thousands of single women Marjorie knew; the cocktail party portion of the evening flew by.


  Patrick suffered through dinner with as much good grace as he could muster, and was saved from further mortification by the fact that his award was one of those stand-up-and-be-acknowledged types, rather than the walk-to-the-podium-and-make-a-fool-out –of-yourself types.

  Walking Alfred and Marjorie to the coat check after dinner, Patrick was actually congratulating himself for escaping the evening unscathed and unhitched. As Patrick held Marjorie’s coat for her, Alfred being engaged in last minute hand shaking of some company higher-up or another, he felt her slip a note into his hand as she pushed her arm into the waiting sleeve of her coat. She completed the maneuver without a glitch, and the look on her face never changed.

  In one fluid movement, Patrick pocketed the note, and was torn between his fear that Marjorie had just come on to him, and his curiosity about the contents of the note delivered so smoothly from such an unexpected source.

  “R.A. business, Watcher,” Marjorie spoke in a low voice. Then she turned to her husband and joined him in greeting yet another of their seemingly endless group of friends.

  Patrick said his goodnights to their backs, and walked out into the driveway as the valet fetched his car. For security reasons, the R.A. was organized in cells of three, with one leader each; and for each leader, there was one contact within the organization from whom he took direction. The obvious beauty of this simple structure was that no one R.A. member could ever betray more than three people, and usually only two.

  There had been a few occasions in which his contact had gotten a message to him by somewhat unorthodox means, but the introduction of a fourth person into the system was unheard of. Marjorie’s use of his code name, “Watcher” was the only thing that gave this message any legitimacy. He hesitated to try and reach his contact over this, though, since if it were a set up, he’d be leading them right to another R.A. member.

  Patrick waited until he was in his car and heading out of the hotel driveway before unfolding the note in his pocket. At a stoplight on Connecticut Avenue, he looked down into his lap, illuminated by the streetlight above. Patrick read the note, then read it again: “Watcher—Urgent that we meet. Unusual channels required by circumstances. Tomorrow—boathouse at 2 P.M.” The note was signed Relic, the only name he’d ever known for his contact.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‌Jogging down the path that skirted the Potomac, the traffic on Ohio Drive to his right, Patrick rounded a curve and the boathouse came into sight. Carrying nothing but the key card for a locker at the old train station and a small square of metal in his pocket, he slowed his stride to scrutinize his surroundings.

  He had taken a cab from the old train station, making the kind of mindless chatter that was geared toward creating a vague memory in the cab driver’s mind of a pleasant, non-descript fare—the kind of fare whose recollection is readily replaced by the more colorful drunk or obnoxious fare that is the stuff of cabbie lore.

  The cab dropped him off in West Potomac Park, within sight of the Lincoln Memorial; and Patrick thought for the thousandth time how ironic it was that a president who had been assassinated for losing the Civil War would be lionized a mere forty years later. In the etiquette of monument building, it is unthinkable to honor a leader of a vanquished people—but that was just it, Patrick mused. The North had never been vanquished.

  None of its cities devastated, none of its civilians murdered. And when, after industrialization had firmly taken hold, the North realized that it had indeed received the far better end of the bargain, suddenly Lincoln was glorified as a leader of vision, viciously cut down by a lunatic who couldn’t appreciate the wisdom of the surrender that gave birth to the superpower of today.

  Turning from his view of the monument, Patrick started jogging in the direction of the boathouse. Patrick had decided that jogging yielded the best cover in the event he was being lured into a trap—no identification, no Personal Identifier Module, no cell phone, nothing to connect him with anyone or anything.

  Even the locker was subterfuge, since both his apartment and his car had keypad entries; but Patrick figured that if he was killed or captured and the key card was traced back to the train station locker, he could at least provide a little misdirection. The locker contained keys to a flophouse hotel room, a set of I.D. papers, completely legitimate except for the fact that they belonged to someone else, some unsuspecting rube whose entire life had been intercepted from a seemingly harmless web transaction.

  Stopping at the bench to the North of the boathouse, Patrick saw Relic coming from the opposite direction, slowly closing the distance between them. Picking up an abandoned newspaper, Relic took a seat at the same bench and without turning his head in Patrick’s direction, started to speak.

  “Watcher, I apologize…”

  Patrick interrupted him with an abrupt, “Excuse me, were you talking to me, …” pulled the disrupter from the pocket in his running shorts and swept it in front of Relic. The disrupter was a handy little gadget that rendered electromagnetic devices of almost any kind inoperable, just in case Relic had flipped and was transmitting or recording their conversation.

  “Hope you don’t have your cell phone or P.I.M. on, ’cause if you did, they’re trash.” Patrick said unemotionally.

  “Look, I’m sorry for all this, Watcher, but we had no choice. Something huge is coming down, and my contact’s not sure who we can trust. There’ve been 6 disappearances of R.A. members in the last 2 weeks, and we’ve got to assume that we’ve been compromised. We had to use a member from a nearby cell to make contact in order to insulate us from further damage.”

  “How do they know I haven’t been flipped?” Patrick asked.

  “They don’t, but I do, and I convinced my contact to take a chance. I’ve known you for 15 years; and stories of your missions are legend in the R.A. If you’ve been corrupted, then we’re doomed. But if not, if you’re still the same loyal cell leader you’ve been since I’ve known you, then we might have a chance.”

  Patrick gazed at Relic, and sensed from him sincere desperation, from the slight sheen of sweat on his upper lip, to the nervous tic in his left eyebrow that anyone who didn’t know him might take for deceit, but which Patrick knew to be a sign of genuine fear. The only other time Patrick had seen Relic truly frightened had been when they’d been millimeters away from death, so Patrick took Relic’s words to heart.

  “Okay, Relic, what’s going down?” Patrick asked softly, stooping to re-tie his running shoe. He stood up slowly, bending to relieve the stiffness that was already settling into his knees, and using the opportunity to look around him for any signs of surveillance. Seeing none, he turned to face the bench and lifted his foot to the seat to stretch his calves and thigh muscles. He turned his head slightly in Relic’s direction and waited.

  “There’s been a lot of chatter we’ve picked up, and based on the intelligence we’ve been able to gather, we think the S.R. is planning a mass extermination of the slaves sometime within the next couple of months.” Relic expelled his breath as if the effort of even saying the words had been painful.

  “Extermination! How in the hell can they ‘exterminate’ half of their entire population?” Patrick nearly stammered.

  “We’re not sure, but remember, all the slaves are on Protectorates, isolated from the cities and, to a large extent, from each other. True, there are transportation hubs linking the high-speed train system the S.R. uses to move product; but beyond that the Protectorates are pretty much closed systems.

  “Hell, they could fall into a crack in the Earth and no one would know it until a shipment didn’t arrive—probably for several days. That’s always been one huge Achilles’ Heel in the Protectorate system, one you’ve exploited on more than a few occasions, Watcher. Because tech on the Protectorate is limited to the control room, even F.F.C. that visit are expected to be out of contact for the duration.” Relic frowned in frustration, still unsure of how all this fit together yet.

  “So how do they mean to do i
t?” Patrick wondered aloud. An idea was forming about just how it might be done, though, given the train configuration.

  “The only thing we know for sure is that the target date is sometime in mid-December, which gives us almost three months to prevent the mass killing.” Relic paused, hoping Patrick’s gift for navigating a course from disconnected facts to a cohesive plan of action wouldn’t fail him now.

  “Genocide. Let’s call it what it is, Relic, it’s nothing short of genocide. Those bastards stole those people to make them slaves, and now when they’re no longer convenient, they want to massacre them. But how could they hope to get away with something so massive?

  “Even aside from getting away with it, what about the logistics of that kind of huge undertaking—we’re talking 65 Protectorates in 12 states.” Patrick was thinking of the transport hubs, and how each state had one hub with feeders to each Protectorate in the state; and with four regional hubs located in Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri.

  “We just don’t know, Watcher, our intelligence is just too scant so far. But get this, seems like the code name for this project is ‘Exodus,’ can you believe the gall of those people?”

  “Yeah, well of all the things I’ve learned about the S.R. and its ruling elite, one thing they don’t lack is gall.” Patrick chuckled. “It’s one of the few things you can dependably count on when trying to figure them out, the more outrageously egotistical, the better they like it.”

  “Watcher, this will be the most important project of our entire history,” Relic finally looked his way, and the pleading in his eyes was unmistakable. “We need you to get on top of this thing right away. Can we count on you?”