The document open on the screen, already well on its way to lasting notoriety, was the list of people who had been slated for execution as soon as Gurney's takeover began. It included a great many major public figures and no shortage of minor ones, but down near the bottom was a name known only to a select circle of Washington operatives: Emil Pohjola.
That had been an unpleasant surprise. What it might mean, now that Ellen Harbin was in jail awaiting trial, was even more unpleasant. Pohjola's harsh trade had its own code of ethics. Part of it was you didn't turn on your own people without very good reason, and if you did, you didn't expect them to cover for you, because they knew you wouldn't return the favor.
After a moment, he picked up the phone, dialed a familiar number in Camden. “Mr. Capoblanco? This is Emil Pohjola.” He waited through Capoblanco's effusive greeting, then: “I'm sorry to say we may have a problem. I was just tipped off that last April's transaction will be getting some unwelcome publicity in the near future.” He listened. “No, I don't think the new team has anything to do with it. Someone with a grudge, or so I was told.” After another pause: “Exactly.” Another: “You're most welcome. Good luck.”
The call finished, Pohjola put the phone down and stared at nothing in particular for a while. The logical next step was to go to ground, the way Capoblanco and his people would be doing, but there was at least one other option, and his name on the ExAcList document made that other option tempting. Finally, with a thin smile, he minimized the document, looked up a phone number on the internet, and dialed.
TWENTY-NINE
11 December 2030: North Charleston, South Carolina
“Another beer, if you don't mind,” McGaffney said.
“Sure, hon.” The waitress gave him a smile and went back inside the restaurant. Out in front, though summer was long past, outdoor tables and big umbrellas splashed with liquor logos had been pressed back into service. The day was warm for December, but that wasn't the reason for the crowds that packed downtown Charleston.
“Dammit,” somebody said a few tables away. “They know what they gotta do, what's keepin’ ’em?”
McGaffney tapped the words into his tablet—local color, always good for a story—then brought up a window, checked the newsfeed from the convention. No word yet; he minimized it again, kept typing.
Just over a mile away, in the Charleston Convention Center, the delegates to South Carolina's ratifying convention were deciding whether their state would be the first to vote for dissolution. It was a fine bit of irony, since their state had been the first to vote for an earlier attempt at the same thing, back in 1860. The session was under tight security; there were state troopers in riot gear all around the convention center, and helicopters up above, reminding McGaffney of nothing so much as Dar es Salaam during the riots before the war. Word was on the internet that President Bridgeport had asked to be allowed to address the convention, and been told to go away.
All at once the man who'd spoken a few tables away jumped to his feet. “Woohoo! They did it!” An instant later others were up, shouting one thing or another. Their voices blurred into a roar that set the air shaking. McGaffney clicked on the window again, saw the news: the vote had gone for dissolution, 103 to 21.
As McGaffney went back to typing, someone at the next restaurant along the street started singing loudly:
“We are a band of brothers and native to the soil,
Fighting for our liberty with treasure, blood and toil…”
The man who'd jumped up a few tables away from McGaffney whooped again, and joined in, off key:
“And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far,
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”
By that time dozens of others had joined in:
“Hurrah, hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”
The crowd was still singing—they were onto another verse, something uncomplimentary about the Union—when the waitress came back with McGaffney's beer. He paid, then asked, “What's the song?”
She gave him an incredulous look. “Where y'all from?”
“Brisbane, Australia,” McGaffney told her.
“Oh! Well, then, of course you wouldn't know. That's ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag,’ one of the old songs from the Confederate days.”
McGaffney nodded, noted that down. “What do you think of all this?”
“I don't know,” the waitress admitted. “I hope it turns out better than it did the last time. You let me know if you want another, you hear?”
She went back inside. McGaffney took a swig of the beer, glanced around, and frowned. Something had changed, though it took him a moment to realize what it was. Before the singing started, the crowd had been the usual mix of American faces, white and brown and black.
Now every face around him was white. He hadn't noticed any of the others leaving, but they were nowhere to be seen.
13 December 2030: Silver Spring, Maryland
“They kept it up all night,” McGaffney said. “That song and a dozen others. Thousands of ’em, just in the parts of Charleston I saw, singing and drinking and waving a couple of flags—the blue state flag, and one I don't know.”
“Red,” Melanie Bridgeport said, “with a blue cross like this—” She crossed her forearms in an X. “—and stars.”
“Too right.”
“The old Confederate flag.”
He let out a whistle. “Much of that going on in the other states down south?”
“That's what I hear.”
They were sitting in the kitchenette of her condo, takeout Burmese spread across the little Formica-topped table between them. His luggage was in the living room, still sporting airline tags; he'd flown back into Dulles that afternoon, and hadn't mentioned a next flight. Melanie wondered if that meant anything, and decided to ask. “And now?”
“For me?” He looked at her, tilted his head to one side like a cockatoo, a mannerism she found delightful. “Depends on whether you can put up with me. Not much point in hopping from state to state while the conventions make up their alleged minds. If that's the Confederate flag—” His hand cupped his chin. “I could play that angle. Get some interviews up in that town in Pennsylvania, the one where they fought the big battle—”
“Gettysburg.”
“That's the one. Other places around here, where some of your history happened. They'd eat that up back home.”
“I think I can put up with you,” she said, smiling.
“Now that's a compliment.” He helped himself to two more scoops of kat kyi hnyat.
4 January 2030: Annapolis, Maryland
“The chair recognizes the delegate from Silver Spring,” the PA system boomed.
Melanie got to her feet, took the microphone, drew in a deep breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I think most of you know that I'm a colonel in the Air Force, and I was in East Africa during the war. I did time in a POW camp, and I got to see a lot of people I cared about get killed, because people in our government were more concerned about their careers than the quality of the weapons systems your tax dollars paid for, or the sanity of the plans they sent us there to carry out.
“I'm saying this so you know that I have as much reason to be bitter about the government in Washington as anybody in this room. I want you to remember that when I tell you why this convention and this state needs to vote against the 28th Amendment.”
She could hear voices murmuring in the balconies, ignored them. “When I was in the POW camp in Tanzania, I had a lot of time to think about patriotism. All these years we've acted as though patriotism is all about the sort of chest-thumping arrogance that shouts ‘We're number one!’ even when we're not. That's not what patriotism is.
“Love for your country is like love for your family. If your family has problems—your dad's having an affair with somebody at work, your mom's drinking herself under the table eve
ry night, your kid brother's starting to run with a gang—you're not showing love for your family by insisting that there's nothing wrong and if anybody disagrees, there's the door. There's another alternative, which is sitting everybody down and saying, look, we've got problems, and we need to work together to fix them.
“That's what we need to do as a country. That's what the convention in St. Louis was supposed to be about, before it ran off the rails. America has problems. We all know that. But there's an alternative to storming out the door.
“We've heard delegates insisting that it doesn't matter if Maryland votes against the 28th Amendment, that it's a done deal. That's not true. If thirteen states vote against this thing, it dies, and then we can actually sit down together as a nation and do the job they were supposed to do in St. Louis. Five states have already voted no. Let's make Maryland the sixth, and turn this thing around, so this country can solve its problems instead of running away from them. Thank you.”
A whisper of applause stirred the air around her as she sat down. “The chair recognizes the delegate from Hagerstown,” the PA system boomed.
Whether or not her speech made any difference in the outcome was anyone's guess; informal polls of delegates just before the Maryland convention showed narrow majorities against the 28th Amendment. When the delegates balloted that evening, though, the vote was 59 in favor of dissolution, 93 opposed.
“I don't know,” said Melanie later that night. She'd agreed, laughing, on dinner with McGaffney at one of Annapolis's best restaurants, in exchange for an interview on the convention. “Maybe it was just wasted breath. Still, I think we did the right thing.”
“To the State of Maryland,” McGaffney said, raising his glass with a smile.
“To the State of Maryland,” she repeated. The glasses clinked.
Over the next week, four more states voted for dissolution.
29 January 2030: Lincoln, Nebraska
“Whaddya think?” said the man in the plaid wool coat.
“Haven't the least idea,” McGaffney answered genially. “I'm with the media.”
“No kidding?” The man shook his head. “A damn shame, I call it. A goddamn shame.”
They were standing outside the Nebraska statehouse, in a crowd the news websites estimated at 20,000. Two feet of snow and a brisk wind off the prairies further west were no obstacle to the locals, McGaffney gathered, and not much more to the media—there were dozens of camera crews present and scores of reporters, waiting with everyone else for history to happen.
“It's a goddamn shame,” a woman not far away said, “that this didn't happen a long time ago. We'd have been a lot better off without those idiots in Washington screwing us over.” A murmur of approval circled through the crowd.
“Look at that,” said the man in the plaid coat. He waved a gloved hand at one of the flagpoles in front of the statehouse, where the American flag snapped and stretched in the wind. “Doesn't that mean anything to you folks any more?”
“Oh, give me a break,” the woman said, in tones of utter contempt.
Before anything else could be said, a buzz went through the crowd. McGaffney looked up to see one of the doors of the statehouse opening. A single figure came out, bundled against the cold, and walked to the podium that had been set up on the front stairs.
Already? McGaffney thought. They've only been at it for two hours.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the man, “the convention has made its decision. Nobody saw any point in revisiting the same arguments, so as soon as the preliminaries were over, the convention voted unanimously to close debate and go straight to a roll call vote.”
The wind rushed past, setting the flags snapping.
“The final vote on the 28th Amendment was 118 in favor and 32 opposed.”
Whatever else he might have wanted to say went unspoken. A wordless roar went up from the crowd; it sounded, McGaffney thought, like the cry of a dying animal. A moment later some of those around him were whooping and cheering, while others had tears running down their faces; still others stood there with mouths and eyes wide, trying to grasp what had just happened.
The door to the statehouse opened again, and two men in the uniforms of the state police came out. They went to the flagpole with the American flag flying from it and began lowering it. As it got within reach of the ground, the crowd surged forward; there was a scuffle McGaffney couldn't see clearly, and then more whooping and cheering. A few moments later people came pushing past him from the front of the crowd, shouting something he couldn't make out; one of them shoved something into his hands.
It was a scrap of blue cloth with a bit of white on one side. A moment passed before McGaffney realized that they'd torn the flag to pieces for souvenirs.
He turned to go. The man in the plaid wool coat was behind him, clutching a similar scrap of cloth. As McGaffney watched, the man crumpled to his knees and doubled over, pressing the scrap to his chest and bawling like a child.
McGaffney looked down at the scrap in his own hand and tossed it aside in disgust. He tried not to notice when someone else dove for it.
29 January 2031: The White House, Washington DC
President Bridgeport was in the library on the ground floor of the White House when the news came. The old building was silent around him; there had been staffing cuts, part of the desperate effort to bring costs down to what federal tax revenues would support, but it was more than that. He guessed that everyone else in the White House was watching the same thing he was: the news feed from Nebraska, where a bunch of farmers and local politicians meeting in the Lincoln statehouse were about to decide whether the United States of America was still going to exist when the sun came up the next morning.
No surprise if it ends that way, he thought, since the whole thing began with a bunch of farmers and local politicians meeting in a hall in Philadelphia. He recalled the men who'd gathered there, in their coats and smallclothes and powdered wigs, to try to invent a country like no other in history out of a bundle of colonies on the shore of a mostly unknown continent. What would they have thought if they'd guessed how their experiment would end?
He had no shortage of other things to attend to just then. The latest statistics on the economy had come in that morning, with another slight uptick in employment and job creation; the Iranian and Turkish governments had started negotiations in Geneva, aimed at ending the stalemated fighting in Arabia and Kurdistan, and oil prices were down as a result; a consortium of banks had tentatively agreed to settle the US debt for much less than face value, though details still had to be worked out and plenty could still go wrong; the Council on Economic Advisors had come up with a plan to issue a new, more stable currency, and get the inflationary spiral under control for good. Under any other circumstances, those would have taken up Bridgeport's attention. As it was, none of them mattered, unless…
The words BREAKING NEWS scrolled across the news feed banner at the bottom of his computer screen. Then: NEBRASKA VOTES 118-32 FOR DISSOLUTION.
He'd wondered many times how he'd react if—when—the news finally came. As it was, he stared at the headline as it advanced across the screen and tried to make the words mean anything at all.
After a moment he got up and walked out of the library into the Center Hall. His footsteps sent quiet echoes whispering off the walls, past the paintings of dead presidents and the trophies and mementoes of 250 years. It's over, he thought. After all the hopes and the struggles and the blood that was shed for it, it's over.
The reporters would be arriving soon, he knew. After a moment, he drew in a deep ragged breath, made himself go to the stairs.
THIRTY
1 February 2031: Beijing
The little nameless restaurant just outside the Party enclave of Zhongnanhai was quieter than usual when Liu arrived. The doorman and the hostess greeted him as effusively as ever, and he chose the same little table where Plan Qilin had first been discussed most of two years before.
He
had just settled comfortably into the chair when a familiar voice spoke. “General! I trust I have not kept you…”
Liu got up. “Not at all, Fang. It's good to see you.”
“Likewise,” said the professor.
The waitress appeared the moment they both sat, and for the next hour the two men ate dim sum and talked about irrelevancies: the doings of their wives, the latest projects at the Academy, the latest gossip from the upper circles of the PLA. Finally, when the meal had reached that pleasant moment when two cups of green tea made everything perfect, they fell silent, looking at each other. They had discussed the events in America more than once over the months just past, and noted the faint but unmistakable signs of overseas funding and planning.
“Apparently,” Liu said at last, “someone else recognized the same opportunity you did.”
“It has been fascinating to watch.” Fang sipped his tea. “I am far from sure that whoever funded and directed it had the entire plan worked out in advance. I would have expected to see propaganda for dissolution start circulating well before the convention in St. Louis, for example, and there was little of that. Still, if there were improvisations, they were done quickly and well. Whoever directed this has a first-rate mind.” Glancing at Liu: “I certainly don't mean to inquire into state secrets, but I wish I knew which nation funded and planned this.”
“I have my suspicions,” Liu said, “but nothing more.”
They were both silent for another long moment, sipping their tea. “It will be a very different world without the United States,” Liu said then. “Different, and I'm by no means certain it will be any safer.”
“Granted,” said Fang. “Much depends on what happens in the future. If the states are able to gather into viable regional groupings and establish functioning governments, we can hope for a peaceful outcome. If fighting breaks out among the states, or the attempts to form new nations fail—” He shrugged. “And that depends, above all, on the intentions of those who fed the collapse. If their goal is to turn America into a war zone, then a war zone it will likely be.”
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