First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  If Willoughby had gone in from the west or south, he would have spent a week negotiating the passage of every two or three blocks with rival gangs that hated him and the Widows about equally. He would have had to pay them indemnities as well. But those gangs on the perimeter would have kept his secrets. It’s a good bet, too—maybe sixty/forty?—that they would have let his units withdraw without swamping him. And they would certainly have stopped the centrociudados when they counterattacked. The gangs stay bought, especially when their territorial instincts are on the side of the agreement. Willoughby never paid off Lake Michigan.

  It really didn’t matter. When the trap was tight around Willoughby and his 1,400 Federal troops, and the first burst of autofire came down from the rooftops and upper windows, his men forgot all about tactics. With the tracer streams coming down and the ground pocking all around them, they did the natural thing and fired back. With the 440Ts. Maybe only one or two hundred soldiers made that mistake, but they were in a panic and they all made it at the same time.

  Our consultants estimated the combined force of the primary blast at about 85,000 tons of TNT. They arrived at that number by sifting the area, studding how the walls went down, working backwards from structural analysis, and so on. The force of that explosion would have been enough, they said, to ignite the grenades still in their launchers. It was the secondary blast that made the crater.

  “We ought to give Willoughby a commendation,” Pollock cracked, “for innovative thinking and initiative under fire.”

  “Give it posthumously?” Cawley cackled.

  They could afford to laugh. Willoughby had destroyed the insurrection for them—in Chicago, anyway. We could even gloss over the political situation: We claimed to know nothing of the blast and opined that “terrorist and insurgent groups” may have built or stolen a nuclear device and tried to use it. That raised a useful specter on our side. And anyone who claimed to have seen a convoy of troop carriers with Federal markings driving up the lakeshore that day we dismissed as a crank or a co-conspirator. But as a military operation it stank. The cost in lives and usable real estate, not to mention the blind stupidity, sickened a soldier like me. I was almost ready to do something rash, like offer to take the field myself, when Pollock and Cawley agreed not to undertake similar military action again. They argued, sensibly, that the States would probably object to another Federal force leveling one of their cities.

  So, instead, we authorized all sorts of new police weapons. We put a bounty on the head of every radical leader we could identify. And, as an emergency measure, we proposed suspending about half the Bill of Rights for a period not to exceed one year. Congress voted enthusiastically for all this. Our rumor that the street gangs were toting atomic bombs cleared away a lot of the political deadwood.

  Within that year, December 2015 to November 2016, we broke the quasi-military power of the gangs in the cities. We couldn’t eliminate them. The kids still owned the streets, moved their drugs, and ripped off whatever caught their eye. But they no longer invaded the police precinct houses, erected barricades, issued deeds to property, or bankrolled their own wholesale credit operations.

  Enclaves like Denver Free State, Taos Colony, the Memphis Xone, Empire of East Oakland, the Century City Badlands, and Inner Houston were dissolved. But in Miami—there was nothing we could do with Miami, not for the past forty years and not today.

  Our overall success against the insurrection cemented the Special Executive’s position in Congress. Everyone had been sure we would fail—that had been the point of setting us up in the first place. But we had not failed and it was too late to cancel the arrangement now.

  The elections of 2016 completed our control in the House, as each of us brought in a few more supporters. I called Mike Alcott north to run for a seat from his home district in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With the right backing, he won easily. I took one or two others from the 64th’s officer pool, knowing that Colonel Birdsong could always train up replacements.

  At about this time, the pecking order in the S.X. seemed to settle into a regular groove:

  Step one, Cawley would do something stupid on his own or refuse to do something intelligent that we wanted—it always came out the same in the end.

  Step two, Pollock would complain about it to me, not because I was a sympathetic ear but because Cawley’s slow smile and thick head were complaint- and idea-proof, and Pollock knew it.

  Step three, I would try to keep the peace between them by suggesting a middle course or occasionally by divining Cawley’s point of view. (I never managed to step off this path and avoid the trap.)

  Step four, Pollock would privately take offense at my support for our camel-faced friend.

  Step five, like the workings of some Rube Goldberg contraption of gears and levers, about 2.5 days later Pollock would find a petty and spiteful way to cross me up.

  We were like three sides of an old marriage, knowing where to gnaw at the open places until the blood flowed again.

  Over those months, I was satisfied with the decision to take my nephew, Gabriel Ossing, into the page system. The Special Executive formed the most closed society within Congress and a friendly ear down in the cellars was serving me well. Time and again, he brought me news of a plot or a coalition that might have upset our triangle, usually by cutting into my side of it. With enough warning, I could always wiggle out of the knife’s way.

  All of this is not to say that the S.X. never accomplished anything, or that the only thing we did achieve was the half-megaton destruction of the Chicago Loop. Our years were not all war and deception. Pollock endowed a magnificent theater in Baltimore, the New American. We underwrote the production of new plays and symphonies in many cities. We built new road systems and finally began work on an orbiting anti-ballistic-missile defense, based on plans and broken technological leads that were left over from the last century. We finished construction of the first commercial Troikamak mirror-loop fusion reactor at Syracuse. We even, in a small way, began a commercial program for distilling fresh water from brine domes in Louisiana.

  But still, that pattern of squeaks and chafing spots persisted. In 2017, we went to a new plane of animosity and angst. Cawley and Pollock were then engaged in a subtle war of political blockade. One would propose a bill, say to raise the tariff on coffee beans, and the other would launch an opposing measure to lower that particular tariff, or all the tariffs with that particular trade group. It was done with a lot of courtesy and secret smiles, but Gabriel told me that anyone in or near the Congress could sense the lines of force building up between them, like a static charge growing between two electrodes.

  That, I think, is when I blundered. I began to care about the job of governing and, in one single area, really tried to do something right for the country and the people. In a politician, this is deadly folly. It had its root in the insurrection.

  A lot of urban property—homes, small businesses, office complexes, streets, and utilities—had been destroyed in the rioting and our suppression of it. The owners naturally had turned to their insurance carriers for compensation; after a single incident two or three thousand claims might be filed in a week. And the insurance boards rejected every claim out of hand. They pointed to the fine print about “exclusions in time of war,” sat back and folded their hands. Let those who insisted take their case to the courts. The claimants did, and the dockets filled up so that the average person would not see judge or jury before 2035. This was a tricky legal area.

  While Pollock, Cawley, and I might have privately talked about the urban rioting as “insurrection” and our reaction as “going to war,” we never said those words in public. The strongest terms we used were “disturbance” and “civil unrest.” Only the mediacasters called it a war, and their pronouncements had no force of law. So the insurance boards didn’t really have a clear-cut objection. But then, a couple of trillion in hard cash was at stake. And when was the wording of any insurance policy so clear that you did
n’t need six lawyers to define a sneeze?

  What made the situation more onerous was that, for twenty years, the insurance boards had virtually managed every business in the country and prescribed the home life of every household. They were involved in every decision. For a small business: where to build, what to sell, how to arrange the stock, what to print or say in advertising it, how to do the bookkeeping. For a homeowner: what terms for a mortgage and collateral were acceptable, how often to clean the front steps, what kind of bleach to keep in the laundry room, how to discipline and counsel the children.

  To get life insurance, a person was summarily enrolled in a health maintenance organization and an exercise program. Usually, he or she was also given a list of proscribed activities, foods, and drugs; there would also be a list of countries and cities the person was forbidden to visit.

  The objective of every decision, of course, was to find the path of least risk and greatest safety. The right of the insurance company or broker to hold surprise inspections was written into every policy. So the insurance boards had contractual powers that overturned the Fourth Amendment.

  Of course, the boards charged high fees for this counsel and advice. Then they turned around and charged higher premiums because of all the potential risks their mandatory investigations had uncovered. This was just a huge, well-oiled money machine. And Gordon Pollock was the chief mechanic; of that I had proof. His vote on the Finance and Banking Subcommittee had many times protected the boards and their rogue power. No doubt he profited handsomely from the business. More than that, he had a personal hand in several sectors—real estate, banking, entertainment— that ran most profitably when their economic environment was risk-free.

  Now, when the greatest number of the country’s small policyholders had lost almost everything, the boards and their client insurance carriers disappeared through a loophole. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And, if I had anything to do about it, it wasn’t going to happen. For six months, my legislative staff and I drafted and redrafted a package of reforms. On paper, the legislation bore the title “Insurance Industry Fair Claims Act,” but it went a lot farther than that.

  It redefined the relationship between the insurance carriers and the boards that had been set up to regulate them. It specified the findings of fact and conclusions of law any court would have to make before denying a claim under an existing policy. Further, we streamlined the entire litigation process. We created new standards for risk and compensation that fairly apportioned the burden of a loss between the individual and society. We redefined the Banking and Credit Act so that terms for “adequate indemnity against all losses,” as written into most loan agreements, were not a license for the insurance companies to shear the sheep and take the skin, too. And, to boot, we imposed new antitrust restrictions on the largest insurance carriers.

  Oh, we brought in a broom and meant to sweep hard.

  And while we polished the wording on our draft legislation—using computer systems that were isolated from the national network and locking everything under my private codes—I had my spies out tasting the winds for me. Gabe turned up a surprising talent for a farmboy: He was a first-class data dabbler. For three months, he had been nibbling around the edges of private storage blocks in the net, especially Pollock’s. Finally, around the middle of December 2017, he claimed to have found an entry point there.

  “He’s on to you, Uncle Jim.” A grim smile bent the boy’s horsey face.

  “How much does he know?”

  “Congress is really ready to support legislation about the insurance mess and Pollock’s staff are passing memos about it.”

  “General memos? Just tone of the times stuff? Then he doesn’t have ...”

  “Your name or initials come up as a cross reference sixteen times out of twenty possibles. When you pop that bill, he’s going to be looking in the right direction.”

  “We’ll have the votes to beat him.”

  “If you get a chance to.”

  “He wouldn’t—”

  At this precise instant, the door to my private office banged open and my personal assistant, Janna, backed into the room, propelled by Pollock himself. If I’d ever seen a man with a black cloud over his head and little lightning bolts shooting off, it was Pollock at that moment. With a hook of his thumb he sent Janna out of the room. Then he turned his mammoth attention on Gabe.

  “Get out of here, Puppy,” he said with a glare that should have cleared up the boy’s acne for good.

  “But I am Mr. Corbin’s—”

  “I know who you are, Snot. Go.”

  Gabe glanced at me and I nodded for him to go. He did, with his head down.

  Then the searchlight of Pollock’s gaze came around and settled on me. He advanced on the desk and leaned over it, supporting himself on his knuckles.

  I stood up to meet him, instinctively going on the ready. My karate reflexes were humming.

  “There are ground rules, Corbin. … I didn’t think we’d have to teach you about them.”

  “Yes? What rules are those?”

  His fury relaxed marginally and he went smooth before me.

  “Let’s—ah—see if I can find a metaphor that you can comprehend. If you were a farmer, like your clod-footed nephew there, I would tell you not to plow across another man’s field. If you were a merchant, I’d tell you to keep out of my markets and off my sales floor. If you were a real politician, I’d tell you not to canvass among my constituency. …” Then the words choked up in his throat once more and his face went pale where before it had merely been red-brown like a brick.

  “You’re angry about something, Gordon. I can tell.”

  “Of course I’m angry! Each of us has certain spheres of responsibility and influence within the government. You are about to poach on mine.”

  Do you want to tell me what it is you’re talking about? Or would you rather remain mysterious?”

  With a visible effort, he took control of his face and emotions again.

  “You are about to launch major legislation—”

  “That’s an interesting idea. How do you know?”

  “Oh, come on! You reserve twenty-minute blocks of video time and schedule half a dozen enabling votes, we can all guess it’s not to propose a national ice-cream flavor. There is only one subject that could interest you and your pack of Dem-Nat Coalition populists.”

  “You mean the insurance scam—um—scandal?”

  His face went dead sober, even reasonable. “We’ve built an orderly system of indemnity and risk coverage in this country. We’ve created safety in an uncertain world. Brought order out of economic chaos. You’re an outsider to that system, Corbin. You can’t expect to understand the intricacies—”

  “I understand grand larceny when it splashes my shoes.”

  “I’m telling you: Don’t interfere.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Don’t think too long.”

  “Or you’ll what?”

  Pollock’s eyes locked with mine. He said nothing. He just smiled. But as clearly as if he had spoken aloud, I heard him tell me how I would be killed. By torture. With wires and springs and tiny, tiny knives. After I was made to disappear.

  Then, without another word, he turned his on his heel and stalked out.

  I wasn’t afraid, but after he was gone I blinked back cold tears of rage. Who was this character to try and intimidate me? He was mortal, too; he was fallible, and—I suddenly realized—he was scared. He knew what would happen if I went ahead with my legislation. The economic matrix would shift. He would lose a measure of control. The ripples would unsettle too many of our small boats. And no one could say where the new powers would rise.

  Pollock’s display of anger had given me power over him. The urge to use it immediately, to push ahead just because it would surprise and hurt him, was irresistible.

  That night, I told Carlotta about our encounter. Her reaction was swift.

  “You mu
st stop work on that bill immediately,” she said, with real fear in her eyes. “Dump the program and destroy your files. Who’s your chief aide on that—Ronson? Send her to the Deaf Smith office tomorrow. Or fire her. I only hope it’s not too late.”

  “Why? We’ve got Pollock on the run. This can hurt him.”

  “Yes? Ah, Granny, you don’t put a man like Pollock ‘on the run.’ He’s like a great hunting cat: His brain is wired for the kill. He can’t think about meeting an enemy and turning away. He can’t run. Now, you must go to him as soon as you decently can and tell him you’ve seen it his way. Apologize and hope with all your heart that he believes you.”

  “Oh, not now! No, Carlotta,” I said. She was telling me to do something my brain wasn’t wired for.

  She gave me a level stare. “I told you once, I would back you as long as you won and kept on winning. Crossing up Gordon Pollock on his home turf is not a winning strategy.” With a slow shake of her head, Carlotta left the room and went to bed. Since the first day of our marriage, she had been drawing lines. Somewhere in the course of this conversation, I had crossed an important one. And that still wasn’t going to stop me. I had thirty-six hours left.

  The next day, Gabriel Ossing disappeared. He was late for our routine morning meeting. After half an hour, I had Janna call down to his cubicle in the Page Room. The voice message he’d left there was at least a day old. When it finally rolled over on the sixth ring, Janna discovered that no live human had seen him that morning.

  She called his apartment in the city, and the answering machine there told her to call a woman named Jenny Tancredi in Cleveland, Ohio. Being the thorough type, Janna followed up that lead. She got a sleepy voice that sounded, she told me, a lot like Gabe’s saying his aunt was out of the house and could she call back. Janna wisely excused herself, said she had a wrong number—which was almost impossible with the new BioComm liquid switches—and hung up. Janna was mystified, but the tangle jelled a suspicion for me.

  “Call my sister in Nova Scotia. Tell her to send her son to my place in Las Vegas. She should buy three different plane tickets in his name and hers out of Halifax, then put him on a boat for the mainland. He’s to go by bus to—umm—Augusta, and then fly. Use the scrambler on this as far as you can, at least on the beampath out of Baltimore. And have someone from the security team get up to Augusta’s airport or bus station, whatever, and snatch him.”