The Last President d-3

by John Barnes

  Jason must have felt strange about all this, because he ran Interrogation Suspect 162 through half a dozen more seizure-inducing routines, but he passed without difficulty, complained of being sleepy, and curled up under the blankets as soon as they said he was done for this session.

  AN HOUR LATER. PUEBLO. 9:15 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026.

  “If I win the election there is going to be an executive order that all national security personnel be able to bake.” General Phat spread butter on the thick slice of fresh bread, slid the poached egg onto it, lifted it, and ate reverently; it had only been in the past couple of months that they had gotten egg production up to satisfactory levels, and though they were becoming common again, eggs still tasted like a treat.

  A snow-rain mix of big damp flakes and stinging, spitting droplets flung itself against James Hendrix’s windows, but inside, the woodstove had been fired up for hours, and the house was warm and comfortable. Heather sprawled on the couch, with Leo on her lap; Hendrix and Phat leaned back in the armchairs.

  When they had finished, Phat said, “All right. Look, I don’t have any more idea than Grayson does what the enemy is up to, but he’s right. The hordes pulling back from the rivers doesn’t look like a retreat; it looks like they’re going to try something different. Whatever it is, Grayson’ll handle it.”

  James said, “I’ve got some intel from one of our best interrogation sources that might be relevant.”

  Phat nodded, and James explained, “Two things, really. One is that Daybreak apparently can do foolish things just like a more conventional person. Right now it’s overreacting because we’ve scared it and hurt it so it’s pulling back. I guess once you get the momentum going, they’re not likely to stop running. The other is that this campaign is very likely to produce some heroes, if we deliberately create some big battles deep in their territory that really make our people look like conquerors.”

  Phat nodded. “Assuming that it’s not a trap. Or that we couldn’t just let them go back to their inadequate farming and hunting and count on starvation to do the job this winter. But your source recommends against that?”

  “The argument seems to be that we have them on the ropes and now we should knock them out,” James said.

  “Well, since Grayson is the theater commander for this, I don’t intend to second-guess him. I’ll mention the possibility of a knockout, and of course if he’s serious about winning the presidential election, being a bold hero instead of a prudent winner-on-points won’t hurt either. But he can make those decisions himself. I’m not worried about his competence. I am worried about what’s going on inside him, and what’s going to happen if he is handed a big bad surprise, like a major defeat or reversal.”

  Heather and James just looked at him, quietly, for a while, until finally Heather said, “Look, he’s a pushy jerk. He’s an entitled spawn of the old ruling class. He’s a deeply weird guy who married a really smart woman who chooses to look like a porno star, and cut a deal to sell out our republic to a bunch of dumbass hick just-barely-graduates of Bible college, and most of all, he assassinated a friend of yours—and mine!—for reasons of purely personal ambition. So you and I both detest him, no question. But for some reason you also think he’s—what? the weak reed? the defective cog in the machine? You talk and act like you expect him to crack up and destroy everything, any minute. And every now and then you hint that you know something really bad about him. Normally I’d regard that as your business and his, but we’ve got the whole future of our country bet on that asshole, and I think we’re entitled to know more than that you don’t like him and don’t really trust him but you think he’s the best we can do. Now for the love of God, tell us what it is. We sure as shit have a right to know.”

  Phat turned toward the window, and then seemed to realize, himself, that it was a melodramatic gesture. He raised a hand as if to make a point, then let it flop uselessly at his side. At last he obviously forced himself to look Heather, and then all the others, in the eye, before he blurted out, “I didn’t think I’d ever tell this story.

  “Grayson and I were in the same entering class of second lieutenants, back in 1996. Busiest generation of officers with more combat time in more places than any since World War Two, maybe since the Indian Wars. Grayson and I happened to be posted to the same places, more than once. He was an old-family Southerner, ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, too many uniforms to count in the family tree, a trust fund back there someplace he never touched, the kind that saluted when the doctor slapped his bottom.

  “My folks thought I was going to be a concert pianist or maybe a brain surgeon, or ideally both, though they’d have settled for CEO of IBM. Remember that stupid old saying that the last people who believed in America were Asians? Well, maybe there was some truth in it. At least we believed in all the work hard and get ahead stuff.

  “It was a big rebellion for me to go to West Point; the fact that Uncle Sam paid for it all meant my parents couldn’t cut me off, and they had no connections from which they could pull strings for my career. For Chinese-American parents that’s like being fired. So Grayson belonged there from birth, and I was there in defiance of my upbringing, and we were going to not mix about as thoroughly as any two men were ever going to not mix. We never socialized, only ate at the same table when we happened to land there because of a mutual friend, that sort of thing. I don’t think we traded fifty words before the story I’m about to tell you happened. We went our ways, at the Point, and after graduation, and through the beginnings of our careers. And, like I said, just purely at random, we drew a lot of assignments where we were around each other, but we didn’t get to be friends and we barely interacted.

  “Then one night a sergeant named Trimble that I barely knew came to me about something that had happened at a very-out-of-bounds party with, among other things, a couple teenage hookers, and officers fraternizing with enlisted, and some pretty serious drug issues. One of the prostitutes had been hurt badly enough to go to the emergency room—not anything lethal but, well, bad enough for an emergency room.

  “By the time I was hearing about it from Trimble, it had already gone to the County Prosecutor. After a night of everybody-take-a-turn-on-the-drunk-girl, somebody had beat her bad enough to crack ribs and put a major hematoma in each breast and buttock, then dumped her in the emergency room.

  “Since she left the party with Trimble, it was a real good circumstantial case, but probably not good enough to convict. It was a small-town ER and nobody saw Trimble bring her in; literally the desk attendant came out of the bathroom and there the girl was on the floor, whoever dropped her already gone, and the place was so backwoods there was no surveillance camera.

  “Two, the party was in a hotel room, and although Trimble had said he’d take his turn with her and then take her home, witnesses thought they remembered Trimble asleep at the party after, but no one remembered him coming back; only one person remembered him leaving.

  “If he kept his mouth shut, probably the judge would dismiss the charges, and he’d leave the Army with a general discharge. And he was even willing to accept the punishment, because… well, the Trimbles of this world seem to think it balances out between what they never get caught doing, which is a lot, and what they get blamed for that they didn’t do. It was just that he wanted one officer to know he didn’t do it.”

  Phat turned back toward the window and watched the foul weather.

  James Hendrix asked very softly, “Grayson did it?”

  Phat nodded. “According to Trimble, he and the girl went down to the parking lot and she realized he was way too drunk to drive, and while they were arguing, Grayson came up and offered to give her a ride if she’d put out on the way home. Trimble said he especially remembered because it gave him the creeps that Grayson had to humiliate the girl, making her agree to trade sex for a ride in front of someone else; he said, come on, of course, she was a hooker, she’d been used all night, one more for a rid
e home, of course she would, but Grayson made her stand there crying and say exactly what she’d do for a ride, and that made Trimble a little sick.

  “Anyway they went off in Grayson’s car, which was the last Trimble ever saw of either of them.”

  Heather said, “I was a cop for a long time. I can tell which witness you believe.”

  Phat made a face and balanced his hand. “I’m a lousy judge of people and situations. If I’d taken two minutes to put a spine into Norm McIntyre, make Cam Nguyen-Peters back down, and backed up Graham Weisbrod when I had the chance, none of this would matter and we’d have a functioning national government today. I misread all those men right when it was critical to get it right.

  “So any judgment I make about people, you shouldn’t be too quick to accept. Still, I still think Trimble was telling the truth, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that about Grayson. Maybe I just disliked him because he’d inherited most of what I worked for, or maybe because he acts weird around Asians, though I’m not sure anyone else would even notice. But whatever. I believed Trimble.

  “The case never came to trial. The girl didn’t want to testify, and took off to go live with relatives in another state. By the time I heard about it, the girl had already gone across the state line and Trimble knew he wouldn’t be tried, or court-martialed, but he asked me to put in a word for him; like I said, he just didn’t want all of the officers to think he was that particular kind of monster, ‘just see if you can put in a word for me so people don’t think the worst, okay?’ with a little rising whine on the ‘okay’ that made me want to shake him.

  “So I went to my CO and told him, and he took me up to the major, who listened carefully, and made a couple of phone calls.

  “I have a lot more experience now. I’d recognize that major as a guy who had decayed slowly on stateside duty.

  “You might say there was something in the air. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, but things nobody remembers anymore like the car bomb in the World Trade Center and the attack on USS Cole had. Without anybody quite knowing or saying why, guys like that major were being routed into time-serving jobs where they’d finish out without doing much more harm.

  “Well, maybe he didn’t do much harm. He just told us that Grayson had a lot of family connections and political pull, and we could get into a sticky mess that would hang up everyone’s career, but he’d do it if we wanted to pursue it. Or we could quietly take Trimble’s word and he’d personally do his best to make sure Trimble didn’t get burned.”

  “Which meant Grayson would get away with it,” Heather said. Funny, she thought, as a Fed, I saw clowns walk when we just couldn’t get the right guy into a cell for something we knew damned well he did, and I learned to shrug about that, but this story is getting to me.

  “Yeah. Some years later Trimble—I kept track of him—was killed instantly by a sniper in Fallujah. The major was allowed to retire at a time when the Army was trying to retain anyone of any value, and I guess that says it all right there, eh?

  “And time passed and Grayson and I made general. I can’t prove that Grayson was sidetracked or I was fast-tracked, but I did get it three full years ahead of him, and a couple of times I was his commanding officer. Relations with him always had a little prickle in them, like he was waiting for me to do something obviously unfair, or I was waiting for him to complain about something he had no right to. After a while, I came to think that he knew that I knew. Maybe I couldn’t quite conceal my contempt and distrust, or maybe I treated him like a guilty man and a weak reed, or maybe he’d found out I was Trimble’s protector, but Grayson took it. It felt like, on some weird level, he agreed with me that he was a piece of shit.”

  Wind spattered a spray of sleet against the window. The stovepipe moaned. James tented his hands. “Quite a story.”

  Heather nodded. “Isn’t it possible that he’s different now?”

  Phat shrugged. “We’re modern Americans. We believe in redemption and second chances. But in my experience, some people hug the evil they did inside themselves until it takes them over, like somehow they are always saying ‘This thing I did, and got away with, is the real me, and I’m still getting away with it, and it owns me, and it has a right to’ down inside. I think that Grayson believes, with all his heart, that he’s the kind of phony who does something repulsive and lets another man take the fall for it.”

  James’s mouth distorted into a lopsided wince. “If Dickens had written him, he’d set him up with a moment of redemption. ‘It is a far, far better thing I do,’ and so on. Maybe Grayson will surprise himself that way, too.”

  “I sincerely hope that happens—and it brings him peace,” Phat said, rising from his chair. “Well. We all have duties.”

  Heather looked up from bundling up Leo. “Ambitious, flawed guy with a young sexy wife he has to keep up with. And his boss, who knows his secret, is coming for a visit. Let’s hope he’s being scripted by Dickens. What if it’s Shakespeare?”

  James and Phat shared the experience of forcing a laugh.

  ABOUT 2 WEEKS LATER. ON BOARD USS DISCOVERY, IN CHRISTIANSTED HARBOR. 6:15 AM ATLANTIC TIME. THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026.

  The rising sun turned the thin fog in Christiansted harbor a soft gold, and then dissipated it. Red roofs, white walls, a perfect Caribbean sky, and the deep green low hills pulled the eye from one warm, eye-pleasing color to the next. The light breeze from the west smelled clean and fine; the tide was almost fully in.

  Highbotham had rowed out to see them off. She and Halleck were reviewing everything that had been settled for at least a week. They paused for a moment by the group of sailor-scholars waiting by the railing, and Halleck said, “Captain Highbotham informs me that there is an opportunity I really should share with all of my junior seamen; I think she’s trying to steal some of my crew.”

  Highbotham shook her head. “Couldn’t be done, and besides I wouldn’t be the one stealing you and this wouldn’t be where you’d go. I just got a note from James Hendrix at RRC, the guy who writes the Jamesgrams. They are opening an Academy of the United States in Pueblo, first classes starting in January.” Highbotham shrugged. “For many young people it’s a golden opportunity, I’m sure. Sounds like it would beat being a farmer learning the hard way, or a refugee, or a foot soldier, which are the growth fields right now. But the crewmen on Discovery already have a better start than that. And maybe I flatter myself but I think the Caribbean Academy of Mathematics can take care of local needs for a while. If anyone wants to go a thousand miles inland to enjoy Rocky Mountain weather and spend all their time in a classroom, and live on noodles and potatoes and beef jerky all winter, instead of…” The sweep of her arm took in the town, the harbor, the island, perhaps the whole Caribbean. “Well, it seemed only fair for people to know the chance was available. I just think you’d have to be somewhere well beyond crazy to take it. And since time and tide waiteth et cetera, I’ll wish you bon voyage and get myself off your deck, Captain. My prayers and envy are with you.”

  For the next hour, Whorf, Ihor, and every other sailor-scholar were far too busy with all the business of taking a sailing ship out of a harbor to look around much; by the time they had a moment to catch their breath, St. Croix was a low, lumpy green line on the horizon behind them.

  2 DAYS LATER. PULLMAN, WASHINGTON. 1:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026.

  “Did they hurt your mouth bad this time?” Thompson asked, as soon as the other guards had gone. He was just outside the door, opening it a bare crack and keeping his foot planted against it. Not quite ready yet, Darcage thought, but still, he asked without being prompted. He nodded his head, slowly and carefully, as if changing the tension in the straps of the ball gag was hurting his teeth.

  His teeth did hurt, but not because he was being beaten in the face, the idea he had been planting in Thompson. It was just that the mouthpiece they gave him could not fully protect him from the Daybreak seizures that they were triggering as a sort of daily ritual. He was
not being tortured for the three hours a day he was absent; all that happened, every day, was that they brought him into the padded room, put the mouthpiece and a padded helmet on him, strapped him carefully to the floor, and threatened to force him to repudiate Daybreak. Instantly the world would become dark and confusing; three hours later he would wake up still in the restraints.

  But over time he had convinced Thompson that he was being punched in the face for hours. A smarter boy than Thompson might have wondered why his face was never bruised, or why they were injuring a man’s mouth if they wanted him to talk, but then a smarter boy than Thompson would never have opened the door or undone the gag in response to Darcage’s tears, sighs, and whimpers.

  “Skootch on over here,” Thompson said, “and I’ll let you out of that gag so’s you can rest your mouth a little.”

  Making sure it looked like he was aching all over, Darcage crab-scooted on his ass, pushing with hands that he pretended were tender, and pushed his face upward so that Thompson could undo the gag; as Thompson removed it, Darcage stretched and flexed his jaw. He really was tired and sore there; it didn’t take much acting.

  “I’m just as glad to have somebody to talk to,” Thompson said, “but we got to keep it real quiet. You heard ’bout Norman the Spanker?”

  Darcage slowly shook his head, though he had overheard, and waited to see if he could learn anything new.

  Thompson’s whisper was furious and urgent. “That son of a bitch General Norman McIntyre, a.k.a. The Biggest Fuckin’ Fag in the Army, he got this bug up his ass ’cause he figured out some of us that’s on half-week duty, we been getting ourselves busted and stockaded just at the end of every shift, so’s we wouldn’t have to go home to our civilian jobs canning fish or digging potatoes and all that bullshit, instead we’d draw stockade time, and serve that here for a couple days, hell, it’s a bed and food and no work, just pushups and shit, and then come round to we got out of the stockade, it was time for us to do regular duty here again. If he’d just let us militia soldiers be regulars when we want to he wouldn’t have none of this trouble, but no, he made this big fuckin’ deal out of it and so now there ain’t no stockade no more. Stead of that it’s a caning, like a fuckin’ little kid, they just beat your ass with a stick and send you off to work, sore and all.”