“Then it’s ten o’clock back home,” she replied, drinking a gulp and staring.
“Your problem is you still think of the US as your home. Sometimes I wonder if you really meant it when you told me you came here because you believed in what we are doing.”
“I did. Then I got here.” That was true. She had come believing the blue would be a Utopia. She had been thrilled when a valiant defender of the People’s Republic had selected her as his own. And then she came to know both the People’s Republic and Martin Rios-Parkinson.
“I have arrested people for less than that, Amanda. You should watch your mouth. Now put the glass down.” Rios-Parkinson could not have her drunk. She was too important to his plan.
Amanda smiled and took another swig. “You’re going to arrest me? That’d be pretty embarrassing for you, your own domestic partner, your defector girlfriend in a camp. That’d be the end of the famous, powerful Director Martin Rios-Parkinson.”
That pushed him too far. He stepped forward and slapped her on the right side of her face – she tried to dodge the blow but drowsiness and the booze had slowed her enough so it connected. She dropped the tumbler onto the carpet.
He stood there for a moment, himself shaken. He had rarely done any violence himself. Though sometimes he liked to watch it done, he always had others to do it for him. But she had gotten under his skin, probed at the festering sore of resentment that would never quite heal.
She blinked for a moment, and then smiled, and then she began to laugh.
“You call that a slap, you fucking pussy? You hit girls, and you hit like a girl!” She continued laughing, a bitter but genuine laugh. “The big, bad Senior Director of the PB fucking I and he hits like a little girl!”
“You better shut up, bitch,” he said quietly, and her expression changed and she fell silent. “I need you at UCLA today, and if you aren’t in the car in ten minutes I will send Arthur and Sam up here to bring you to UCLA. Do you understand?”
She stared at him with hatred. Arthur and Sam were the two thugs who escorted him in to work each morning. They would smash her face in as soon as they would look at her.
“Do you understand?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she hissed, and now Rios-Parkinson smiled as he watched her dress. He had broken her to his will. And now he would put her to use to turn this disaster into another triumph.
11.
The Lexus turned over and hummed; Jackson had tuned it up nicely. The tank was full; the range read as 456 miles. Their packs were in the trunk, along with two extra sets of People’s Republic license plates. Junior held a thick, tattered paper map book Jackson had handed him. The cover read “Thomas Guide – 1995.”
“You use the index in back to find the page with the map section for wherever you are going,” Jackson had told them.
“My dad used to have one of these in his car, back before nav systems. Everyone did,” Turnbull had replied.
“It’s forty years old, but it’s still pretty accurate,” Jackson continued. “Obviously it doesn’t show the new names of the streets they renamed for being offensive or for PRNA bigwigs. And it doesn’t show the security sector walls or the gates, but other than that it’s pretty good. Best of all no one can trace you online when you look something up.”
They wore suits; Junior had selected a red power tie. Their new IDs were in order, with Level 8 privilege, a nice bonus. Getting that done, arranging for someone inside to make the changes in the national database, had cost plenty – all 20 gold coins.
“You ready for this?” Turnbull asked Junior, who sat in the passenger seat checking his Glock.
“I guess.”
“You know what you’ll say to her when you see her?”
“I’ll tell her I’m bringing her home.”
“And what if she doesn’t want to come?”
“She’ll want to come.”
“Hope is not a plan. Think it through.” Turnbull looked out the open window to Jackson, who stood wiping his hands. “Thanks,”
“Yeah, you’re welcome. Now forget you ever met me.”
Turnbull smiled. “Forget what?”
Jackson returned the grin. “Yeah, that’s right. Good luck. Don’t come back this way.”
“Never go back the way you came,” Turnbull replied. He put the sedan in reverse, backed out of the garage onto the street, and accelerated away.
They headed south to Wilshire and turned west. There was a little more activity in this area than in the others they had passed through. Some of the businesses were open and there were more cars the further west they went. Turnbull kept checking his rearview; nothing caught his eye.
Turnbull caught sight of a billboard featuring a beautiful blonde. It read, “I ESCAPED THE RACIST RED STATES. BE VIGILANT – THEY SEEK TO DESTROY THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE WE HAVE BUILT HERE!” Turnbull wanted to ask Junior if his sister spoke like a community agitator in real life – if so, they would need some of their hundred mile an hour duct tape. But he said nothing. Junior had obviously seen it and had descended into a silent funk.
The checkpoint was at Doheny. Three or four cars were lined up to cross into the Secured Zone. A cyclone fence ran north and south along the east side of the street. There was a sign reading “WARNING: AUTHORIZED ADMITTEES ONLY. 100% ID CHECK.”
“Guess they gotta keep out the riff raff,” Junior observed.
The gate was manned by the uniformed element of the PBI. The folks who lived in the Westside Sector could not be expected to put up with a bunch of barely trained thugs keeping order. The PBI were much better trained thugs.
Ahead, an officer was arguing with the occupant of an old Toyota. The officer waved her out of the line and she turned around, cursing that she would lose her housekeeping job as she pulled out of the queue and U turned around. The guards seemed more bored than excited; apparently this was nothing unusual. Lots of people wanted inside.
Turnbull put his hand out and Junior handed him his ID card, then rested his hand under his suit jacket. He counted five PBI officers, all armed with AKs. He would take the three on the passenger side and hope that Junior would be able to put down the two on his side should it all go bad.
It didn’t. Turnbull handed over the cards without a word and the bored officer scanned it on his handset. He stared at the screen for a moment, then wordlessly handed the cards back and gestured for Turnbull to drive through. The Lexus smoothly accelerated and they entered the Westside Sector.
It was an entirely different world. The businesses were open and the streets were clean. People were well-dressed and there was none of the seething sullenness they had seen before. Cars – nice cars, many newer models – filled the roads. It was not the gridlock of before the Split, but it was substantially more traffic than they had seen elsewhere.
“It’s almost like home here,” Junior said, marveling. “Restaurants, coffee shops. People doing things.”
“You need a privilege level of 6 or higher to live in here; if you don’t live in here you need a pass to get in. Mostly they give them to worker bees. Everyone who can live in here does. And they do patrol the walls.”
“How big is it?”
“It runs west to the ocean and north to just over the summit of the hills. Basically, anywhere that was a little fashionable. There are other ones too – the whole South Bay from LAX south, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and all of Palos Verdes are sealed off too. Things got bad and the folks running things decided the best way to solve the problem was to seal off the problem.”
“Wait, I thought the privilege levels were supposed to compensate for systemic racism and inequality and all that.”
“Yeah, well, in a stunning turn of events the same people who ran the blue states into the ground ended up with exceptions to the privilege level rules. So some poor Mexican kid from East LA gets a 3 and a Hollywood producer’s girlfriend driving a Porsche gets a 9. They did the same thing with the reparations ca
mpaigns. They got exemptions while the working stiff in Rancho Cucamonga got hit for 20% of his assets every time some group got paid off with another reparations tax, and when he couldn’t pay, they took his house. A lot of those guys showed up in the red with nothing after working for decades.”
“Until I got inside here, I didn’t see where all that money went,” Junior said. “This is living large in here.”
“Yeah, they pretty much stole the money and then flushed it. And now, I don’t think there’s much left outside of this sector to steal.”
They made good time heading west, passing out of Beverly Hills and into Century City, with its high rises that were modern-looking over a half century before. Junior pointed eagerly.
“Nakatomi Plaza!”
“What?”
“There! You know, Die Hard!”
“The movie?”
“Yeah,” Junior said, delighted. “That’s a great movie. A great Christmas movie. Every Christmas we used to watch it. You know, so many old movies before were filmed in LA that I kind of expected LA to look like them instead of … this.”
“Half of Hollywood followed the money and got out after the Split,” Turnbull said. “Now all the movies look like Houston.”
“I had an actor in my unit when I was doing my citizenship service. He’d been in commercials. Said he wanted to vote so he was doing his service. He was worried he might not get any work afterwards. A lot of the Hollywood people who crossed over are still pretty left wing and he says they’re pissed that they can’t become citizens without serving.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Turnbull said. “The best thing we ever did in the red was not let the people coming in from the blue bring their shitty politics with them.”
“Amen,” Junior replied, looking around. “How long you think the People’s Republic can hold up?”
“Shit, it could fall apart in a day or keep dragging on for a decade. I guess the bullshit stops when the people decide they’ve had enough of social justice and climate justice and economic justice and all the other kinds of justice except justice justice.”
Century City shrank behind them. Now they were among high rise luxury apartment buildings. PBI were visibly standing watch.
“Rich people land,” Turnbull said.
“You know, I haven’t seen any more of the billboards since we crossed in here,” Junior observed.
“Nope. They’re pretty ugly, and it won’t do to block these special snowflakes’ views. Besides, I think these people in here are in on the scam. The signs aren’t going to fool anyone in here. The propaganda is for the nobodies.”
In Westwood, Turnbull turned right. Up ahead lay UCLA and their target.
12.
Rios-Parkinson sipped a sparkling water from the cooler in the rear of his black SUV. Arthur and Sam were up front, separated from him by a thick glass partition. He was able to review his morning briefing papers, delivered earlier by courier, in quiet as they headed down from the hills.
His continuing operation in Los Angeles could not take up all of his attention, as much as he wished it to. All over California – all over the two halves of the People’s Republic, in fact – there was too much going on. Yesterday’s bloody chaos at the food center was hardly unique. Besides San Francisco – 12 dead – there were other riots of varying intensity by hungry citizens in Seattle, Oakland, San Diego, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and two in Fontana. He was slightly surprised that desolate Fontana even had two food centers. He made a mental note to cut Fontana’s food allocation as a lesson to them about power and its uses.
The security forces had quelled all of these disorders, but the trend was ominous. Moreover, Rios-Parkinson had already been briefed that the food projections were running just 62% of the levels called for in the Tri-annual Plan. That meant the recent ration cuts would not be the end of it – the rats would have to be cut again. He had been privy to some of the discussions of what to do about the chronic food and resource shortages over the last few months. No one at the table made any truly out-of-the-box suggestions, like deregulating the food production sector and returning control to the nominal owners of the farms, processing plants, and distribution companies. Instead, they agreed that the problem was likely saboteurs and wreckers whose selfishness was responsible for the nation’s miserable output. New regulations would be drawn up, and Rios-Parkinson resolved to his comrades that he would prosecute and punish the offenders.
There was some talk of alleviating the shortages in the short term by stepping up purchases from foreign producers, but the huge commodity buys that were currently keeping the people from starving had had the effect of raising food prices world-wide, and the People’s Republic was already short of cash. China and the EU, though publicly supportive, were behind the scenes resisting the PRNA’s demands for additional credit.
There was no discussion of ending the trade embargo with the United States. And there was not any discussion of how foreign nations were selling their own production to the People’s Republic at inflated prices, then buying food for their own populace from the United States’ prosperous, barely-regulated farmers.
Nor was there any discussion of ending the Special Rations program or closing the Restricted Shops for VIPs. Rios-Parkinson had no qualms when he had shared a pair of delicious filets with Amanda the evening before. After all, to provide his very best service to the People’s Republic, he and those like him needed to be insulated from mundane concerns about material matters. Nor was there discussion of limiting the Security Force Special Rations that helped secure the loyalty of the people who wielded the guns.
Rios-Parkinson resolved that stronger measures were needed to control these outrageous betrayals by ungrateful social criminals. He would order that in the future, disorder at food centers in his region be always quelled by deadly force as the initial response. There would be zero tolerance for such disruptions from now on; he would set the example for the whole country in his area. And he expected his innovation would be rewarded.
The SUV did not bother stopping at checkpoints. The guards knew it and the ID transmitter alerted them moments before it even arrived. He was able to drive out of the security cordon around his neighborhood without even slowing down.
Once down from the hill, they made good time. Rios-Parkinson’s focus was his reports – memos on operations, interrogation summaries, interesting transcripts from wiretaps and computer monitoring operations. The intercepts rarely identified traitors, and the people with the phones and the internet access his minions monitored were primarily connected members of the elite. What they provided him was information – who was sleeping with whom, who was stealing, that sort of thing. He rarely used any of it for prosecutions. He preferred to use it for leverage. It was remarkable how compliant people became when they found out they were compromised. He had learned that watching the Hillary Clinton email debacle of the mid-teens. If they have your communications, they have you, he noted, and he resolved to be the one who had them.
The Bernie Sanders Internal Security Complex occupied several skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles. Most corporations departed for the US once the political and economic course of the newly split blue states became clear, leaving the huge buildings almost empty. The new government nationalized them, then proceeded to attempt to connect the buildings with a series of walkways and tunnels while simultaneously renovating them to meet the newly enacted green construction standards. This turned into an utter disaster; the bureaucrats knew nothing about managing massive building projects, and the people who did were long gone. By the time the only entity big enough to fill the towers – the internal security apparatus – moved in, the buildings were barely functional. They were unbearably hot in summer and frigid in the winter, and the elevators only worked intermittently. This is why Rios-Parkinson’s massive office was on the second floor of the old Library Tower, rather than near the top.
The walls were of dark wood and covered with framed photographs of Rios-Parkinson wi
th all manner of celebrities and legends. There was him with an ancient Hillary Clinton, another receiving a medal from President De Blasio, and another shaking the elderly Jesse Jackson’s hand. Just after it was taken, the doddering Jackson asked if he was “One of them hymies,” which Rios-Parkinson found extremely offensive. He hated that anyone might think him Jewish. It still galled him how the United States had remained Israel’s staunch ally after the Split, ruining everything by cooperating to wipe out the Iranian nuclear program that could have ended the Zionist Entity forever. Hunting Israeli spies was second only to seeking out United States spies on his personal “To Do” list.
Jacob Wiseman was waiting in the outer office when Rios-Parkinson strode in, flanked by two beefy uniformed PBI tactical officers from his personal security detail.
“Bring him in,” Rios-Parkinson had snapped as he walked past. Now the pair of goons marched Wiseman to the front of the massive oak desk. Rios-Parkinson sat in his black leather chair; Wiseman stood unsteadily.
“And?” the security chief began.
“They left yesterday,” Wiseman said. “They were gone when I got back.”
“I know that already. What else?”
“Nothing, Director.”
“Nothing?” Rios-Parkinson replied, bored. He played with a pen on his desk. “No indication at all about where my hard drive might be?”
“No, only David knows. He won’t say.”
This displeased Rios-Parkinson. It meant he had to go forward with the more risky Plan B. But then, there was a fringe benefit – he would learn where Amanda really stood.
“You know, Jacob, I am very disappointed with you, and I simply do not trust you. You signed our dual loyalty disclaimer years ago and that clearly meant nothing to you. You still believed in your ridiculous superstitions and when you had the opportunity you betrayed your country.”
“I’m sorry,” Wiseman said miserably.
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