“Just what I learned in school and what I see in the papers back home, or from watching The World as It Is on TV.”
“Yeah, great series, that,” said Duke. “I saw it last time I was Home. It will get you ten years for hatecrime here if you’re caught with a copy.”
“Some of the other mobs have a good sideline in bootleg discs of Northwest programs, and The World as It Is is one of the most popular,” said Cardinale. “We can’t do that, because it’s a lot more dangerous than butts or beef. In the eyes of the American law it’s not just hatecrime, it’s Unauthorized Contact, which is a National Security Felony and carries up to life in prison, so we don’t dare take the risk. It would draw too much heat. I know the Ministry of Culture inserts untold terabytes of propaganda into the American internet and media networks every year, but most of it’s done safely from the Homeland. Anyway, to make a long story as short as possible, after she survived impeachment by handing over the Southwest to the beaners and committing America’s full remaining military strength to the defense of Israel, Chelsea Clinton served out her term as a complete lame duck and the world went to hell in a handbasket all around her. That’s probably all to the good, in the sense that it kept the Americans distracted during the formative years of the Republic’s existence.”
“I remember those years in Montana,” said Bob soberly. “We were struggling. No way we could have met a full-scale assault back then.”
“How about now?” asked Duke bluntly.
“You’ve been fully briefed?” asked Bob.
“Actually, we’re the ones who have been briefing Olympia on the situation,” said Cardinale dryly. “Us and the CMI guys here in La Cesspool Grande, whoever and wherever they are, God bless ’em.” Bob understood the concept of compartmentalization and he got that Cardinale did not know and could not contact the CMI station in Washington. No one can betray what they don’t know.
“Oh, yes sir, of course.” Bob looked at Duke. “Now? I think we’ll win, but we need to stop it here. We need to stop it here bad.”
Cardinale sighed. “Which we’ll get into in a bit, but let me go on with my little historical lecture, because if you’re going to be a good spy you need to have a full understanding of the politics of the situation. Israel went down a couple of years later, not with a bang but with a whimper. Instead of using their nuclear arsenal at Dimona to blow away half the Muslim world in a real Holocaust, Israel sold their nukes off to various countries, especially Canada and the U.S.A., for the purpose of buying refugee status and legal visas for their Jewish population. In other words, when it came down to the rubber meeting the road, for all their brag and bluster about the Masada Option, the Jews turned and ran instead.”
“Big surprise,” grunted Betsy.
“Then along comes Hunter Wallace and his One Nation Indivisible,” Cardinale went on. “We’re still not sure how much of the ONI concept was Wallace’s and how much of it came from the think tanks and the various Jewish handlers who already had their hooks into the young Congressman from Alabama from back in his blogging days, but it was well thought out and well planned. America needed help, bad. It was obvious that the old two-party system was on its last legs, that it had failed miserably as successive administrations had made bad call after bad call for decades. They’d just lost a quarter of the country to us and the Aztlan beaners, Israel was gone and the economy was crashing, and the perceived wisdom was that if Amurrica followed the usual pattern of declining empires, it was time for a man on a white horse.”
“Yes, we got that in senior class political science in high school,” said Bob. “Usually that means some general marching into the corrupt halls of power, the legislature or the executive palace, and taking over by force. Sometimes he sticks some heads on pikes, sometimes he sticks a lot of heads on pikes, and sometimes not. This phase is usually followed by a few wars of conquest which fizzle out and leave the country in worse shape than before. Napoleon springs to mind. Then more instability, and depending on how the economy goes, either total collapse or some very anemic state much reduced in size and scope and power. But that didn’t happen in the U.S.A. At least not exactly like that.”
“Yes, the situation was a bit unique,” agreed Cardinale. “In Amurrica’s case they’d already tried and failed at the wars of conquest, so it looked like total collapse and the geopolitical breakup of the North American continent into about ten small nations was on the cards.”
“Then along comes the Doughboy,” said Duke.
“What?” asked Bob.
“One of the nicknames for our illustrious Commander in Chief and Leader of the Free World,” said Cardinale. “Don’t use it in public, though. Five years for Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy, meaning us. It comes from some old television advertisement, but nobody can remember what it meant originally.”
“He looks like he’s made of dough,” said Betsy.
Cardinale continued. “Anyway, what either Wallace or the Jews running him, or both, managed to pull off was a kind of controlled man on a white horse scenario that preserved the outward form of the United States. Then through a deliberate retrenchment, they managed to stabilize the remaining U.S.A. into a pale shadow of its former self, but a functioning one nonetheless. That retrenchment is what makes the whole ONI thing so amazing. What Wallace did was he managed to remove ideology from American politics altogether, by creating a moral and ideological tent so big that it has something for everybody. Ever hear the old expression about creating a desert and calling it peace? Hunter Wallace created a cesspool and called it a national consensus. All the special interest groups that comprised the Gorgeous Mosaic were, and are, willing to put up with some really outrageous crap being forced on them, in order to get their own outrageous crap forced on other people. It’s like Wallace took the very worst from both right and left and made it the law of the land.”
“He was able to get the politicians and pressure groups to go for some weird trade-offs, all right,” said Duke with a nod. “Like legalizing prostitution and marijuana, and banning tobacco and meat except for Jews, who of course due to their unique heritage and thousands of years of suffering blah blah blah are exempt from the rules the rest of us have to follow. Well, they always were, but ONI is the first time that’s ever been formally acknowledged. In exchange for giving the loony lefty-libs all of the above, Wallace gave the neocons and the 700 Club tub-thumpers their doggie bones as well. He banned abortion, tacitly acknowledging that if the United States wants to survive, they’d better stop slaughtering millions of future taxpayers at birth. He banned the teaching of evolution, and so now American kids who want to get real science degrees have to go to Canada or Europe to take certain courses, which are then quietly accredited to the student back at his American university. That way the hoot-and-holler crowd is placated without stripping America of doctors and biologists. Wallace also allowed prayer back in the schools, and a nationwide ban on alcohol and marijuana sales on Sundays, not to mention giving shelter and automatic citizenship to three million Jews when Israel became Palestine again, so both the kikes and the tub-thumpers love him to death and can’t do enough for him on election day.”
“The current president had a unique perspective on America that no else ever had, or if they did they never acted on it,” said Cardinale. “Hunter Wallace realized that a lot of the so-called social issues under the old order had to do not so much with people wanting to do things that were forbidden, but with forcing other people whom they didn’t like to do things they didn’t believe in or want to do. If you can give Americans that triumphalist feeling that they’re controlling the way other people live, they will adore you for it.”
“America isn’t about freedom, it’s about fun,” said Betsy. “The fun of always winning and rubbing other people’s noses in the dirt.”
“The Germans call it Schadenfreude,” said Cardinale. “I think that’s the reason why the old conservative American élite can never forgive the Northwest Republic—beca
use we won, and Amurrica never had to deal with just plain defeat where you count your dead, get over it, and move on. Europe could have taught them a lot about that, if they’d ever had a mind to listen. But there was a good deal of method in the madness. Wallace pulled the remaining American military forces out of most of the rest of the world, and he abolished the draft, and that alone saved enough money to keep the economy from tanking. He has re-professionalized the American military to a great degree, not to mention whitening it up through strictly enforced educational and legal requirements for enlistment, so forth and so on. The days of drafting street gangs en masse into the army and FATPO are more or less over, until now, anyway, when they seem to have revived that kind of recruitment policy for this Operation Chain Link thing they’re running down at Fort Bragg. I think we know what kind of muscle they want occupying the Northwest. But the American military itself is actually in the best shape it’s been in for decades. Wallace never made any bones about the fact that the new improved American military is to be used to re-conquer the Northwest Republic and re-unite the country from Sea to Shining Sea, as he puts it.”
“How about re-conquering Aztlan?” asked Bob.
“Ah, but he has a legal fig leaf for not doing that,” Cardinale reminded him. “Technically speaking, Aztlan is still part of the United States, remember. They are a territory like Puerto Rico used to be before it became a state. They still send two Senators each to Washington from California, Nevada, Arizona, Nuevo Mejico and Tejas Españoles. It doesn’t have to be re-conquered, and also that means that no one can complain about all the beaners here in the rest of the country, because technically speaking they’re all Americans now.”
“Okay, I suppose we’d better move on to why I’m here now,” said Bob with a sigh. “Operation Belladonna. Who chose that name, by the way? Belladonna is a poisonous plant.”
“I chose it,” said Cardinale. “In Italian it also means beautiful lady. You’ll see why when you meet her. But you’re supposed to remember her from before she became a Lost Baby, right?”
“I last saw her when she was ten years old,” explained Bob. “I was fourteen when the war ended. She had a crush on me, which I treated with the usual adolescent silliness and rudeness, and I’ll always regret that, because we never got old enough together to sort it out. Yeah, Peanut was a cute kid, a sweet kid, and she actually helped hide my NVA sister after that slaughterhouse in Helena. She thought it was all a big game, of course, but she kept her lip zipped about it until after Longview. She’s got brains and guts and circumspection, or at least she did at age ten. But at Whidbey I was also given the file you guys accumulated on her once she popped up on your radar, and I understand that she’s pretty messed up now. I guess forcible separation from her family and twelve years growing up as a pampered rich kid in a lefty-lib household full of money and drugs and bullshit will do that to a girl. She has a baby of her own now, you say?”
“A toddler,” said Cardinale. “A daughter, Allura, aged eighteen months. The father is some trust fund weenie from New York she met at Brown University, who now seems to be out of the picture. We checked him out, and he’s a dweeb interested in nothing but spending daddy’s money on fast cars and heavy dope. He’s never even seen the child, and she is legally Allura Halberstam. Interestingly, her official legal guardians are Marvin and Amber Halberstam.”
“What kind of man doesn’t want his name to go on in his children?” wondered Bob, shaking his head.
“Very few white American males of that age are men,” said Betsy.
“One of the hooks the Office recommended I use to get her on board is to promise to get both Georgia and the child Home if she co-operates,” said Bob. “If she doesn’t even care enough to maintain legal custody of her own daughter, I’m not sure that will work.”
“That’s why you’re here. You need to make contact with her in the guise of an old friend to go over old times and deliver those messages from her father and her brother you brought with you. You’ll have to evaluate her as a person and as a potential intelligence asset, and if we think there is even a chance she might go for it, you have to lay our proposal on her.”
“‘Hey, Peanut, will you do us favor? Fuck a perverted president for your country, a country you haven’t seen since you were a child and probably don’t remember much?’” sighed Bob. “No need to look concerned, sir. I know this has to be done and I’m the guy best suited to do it. I wasn’t allowed to bring anything personal Out Here, but if I could, I’d show you a picture of my wife and my two children back in Missoula. Georgia’s my past, and they’re my future. Don’t worry, I’m up for this.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Cardinale dryly.
Betsy spoke up sympathetically. “Since we’re talking nasty details, I suppose you need to know there will be very little actual… well, Hunter Wallace’s proclivities aren’t normal. They can’t be. He’s not medically capable of it, not for any sustained period.”
“Yeah, I know, hypo-gonadism. They told me all that at Whidbey. He has to…” Bob waved his hand in the air vaguely.
“Substitute,” Betsy completed for him. “I know. I run with a lot of other licensed girls from the high-end agencies. I have to. They’re a mine of information the Office has to tap, and I’ve heard things. If she goes for it, you need to do your best to make her understand what she’ll be getting into so she’ll be prepared and she won’t freak.”
Bob stared. “How the hell am I supposed to tell her… I mean Jesus, sir, men and women who aren’t involved with one another don’t even talk about things like that back home, not even the normal stuff! Not like here, where the weirdest and filthiest crap I’ve ever seen is on every front page and every screen!”
“You probably shouldn’t try to talk to her about it,” said Cardinale. “Let Bets do that. We run our assets in pairs, which is a little dangerous if it goes bad, but much more effective in the long run. It helps for an asset to know there’s more than one of us and if one handler has to disappear quick, a new one doesn’t have to start cold and re-build the trust relationship from scratch. Plus a female asset can often relate better to a female handler. You’ll need a backup handler for this girl if anything happens to you, and there may be times when she needs some tag-teaming to keep her steady and keep her on point. You may have to play good cop-bad cop, or good spy-bad spy. Betsy will be your backup, and later on, you’ll have the Zombie Master as well. I’ll tell you about him in a bit. Belladonna won’t ever see me or Duke. We’ll get you inside with her first to scope her out, get a read on her state of mind, and then when it looks safe we’ll bring in Betsy. She’ll handle all the down-low girl-talk stuff with Georgia.”
“That’s if we get that far at all,” said Bob. “You know there’s a chance Georgia may have gone totally bad? Maybe she’s in love with a nigger. She may be perfectly happy with her life, such as it seems to be. She may not want to see me at all. She may not want to Come Home, ever. She may not want to be reminded of what she left behind. Or she may just plain freak out as soon as she realizes who I am and why I’m here. She may pick up the phone and call the FBI.”
“That’s a possibility,” agreed Cardinale. “We’ll have contingency plans to E&E you if it looks like you’re in danger, but I grant you, the risk is not small. But we don’t think she’s totally lost. For one thing, she kept the baby, even though she didn’t have to. ONI may have outlawed abortion, but people on the Halberstams’ socio-economic level in this society can get around that easily. Hell, anybody can, for the price of an air ticket to Toronto or London. Plus she could have picked up a pretty penny by selling the kid on the adoption market. It Takes a Village is still around, and white infants go for top dollar. She didn’t do that.”
“For another thing, we did a sneak-and-peak in her apartment in Georgetown when she was spending the weekend with her family in the Hamptons,” said Duke. “Had to arrange a localized outage on the security cams to do it, but we had about half an hour inside. S
he’s not dumb enough to look at NAR stuff on her computer—almost nobody is, since the FBI and DHS don’t bother to conceal the fact that they do random searches on millions of people every month, and anybody caught with anything originating in the Republic gets five years and mandatory Attitude Modification.”
“Chemicals combined with electroshock to purge your mind of wicked racist thoughts,” put in Betsy.
“But she does have a secret stash of old coffee-table books hidden in one of her closets,” Duke went on. “She must have done the rounds of every old bookshop in the District and New York to find some of these books. All of them full of big full-page color photographs of the Northwest, Washington and Oregon and Idaho, but especially Montana. The pages with pictures of Missoula on them are all loose and well worn, and most of them have some odd stains on them.”
“Tears,” said Betsy.
“You’re sure?” asked Bob. The thought of Georgia taking out her forbidden books and weeping over pictures of Montana in the night filled him with sadness.
“I’m sure,” said Betsy.
“She remembers, Richie,” said Cardinale. “She remembers enough, anyway. You’re going to have to make her remember more, make her willing to do anything to break away from the luxurious toilet she’s spent the past twelve years in and go back to where she and her daughter belong.”
“And we will do that?” demanded Bob.
“You’re damned straight we will,” said Cardinale, and Bob knew he spoke the truth. “Always with the proviso that death and history don’t intervene, and there’s never any guarantee against that. I can’t say when or how, and I’m not going to lie to you, this is a damned dangerous thing we’re doing. You and she both might get hurt, bad. But if she does this for us, the very minute we believe she is in any danger, then we’ll find a way to extract her and you can take her and the child back to the Homeland.”
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