“Duke and I will pick up the Doc as soon as he can get clear of the White House,” Cardinale told him. “Then we have something we need to take care of. We had a contingency plan if Operation Belladonna went south. The pissed-off mood I’m in right now, I say fuck it, let’s see if we can go for the record, two presidents in one day. Never mind that. You and that little girl need to be long out of the city by then. After today I’m shutting the whole Vinnie Skins operation down, and we’re all going to ground until we can figure out how bad the heat is going to get. They’re going to tear Georgia’s life apart second by every second she was in the White House. Eventually they’ll find you, and they’ll make the connection with that dead Secret Serviceman Duke Dear-Johned in the alley, then it all starts to unravel. We’ve got a procedure in place whereby we all go completely under and keep on fighting. If it comes down to it we have some packages stashed away to deliver in the Washington, D.C. area that will pretty much bring this whole sick toilet of a city to a stop. I really hope we get those orders. Now you and Betsy need to get rolling. The Halberstam residence is going to be crawling with wall to wall goons once they catch their breath and start the wheels of investigation and retaliation going.”
“Got it, sir,” said Campbell.
“If all goes well, we won’t be seeing each other again,” said Cardinale, sticking out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure, kid. Sorry about the result, but there’s never any guarantees.”
“It’s been a privilege for me, sir,” said Campbell, shaking his hand. “The result was the one we wanted, it’s just the price was higher than we thought.” He nodded to Betsy. “Let’s go.”
Cardinale was right: the Secret Service was already on the move, beginning the official investigation into the late president’s death. Bob and Betsy were lucky there were only two agents on the doorstep when they arrived at the sumptuous K Street brownstone of Marvin and Amber Halberstam. It was still very early in the morning, not even 7 a.m. Two suited agents, one black male and one woman who was some kind of off-coffee color, were standing in the portico arguing with a small dark-skinned woman in a gray dress and apron. This was either a maid or Allura’s nanny. The federals were apparently demanding entry. The café-au-lait female in her Power Womyn suit was arguing with the maid or nanny in Tagalog. Bob checked them out over the neatly manicured hedge. “We’d better move fast; there will probably be more of them along to search the house any minute now.”
Bob and Betsy took the direct approach: they marched up the flagstoned walk and as the two Secret Service agents turned, they both raised their silenced weapons in unison, and each of them drilled one of the goons through the head. The guns spat and the feds collapsed onto the portico in an Armani heap. The brown woman disappeared into the house screaming, and they followed her, stepping over the corpses. “Upstairs nursery!” he yelled to Betsy. “I’ll clear the downstairs!” She leaped up the stairs three at a time.
Bob slipped through the luxurious and plushly carpeted downstairs rooms, his gun at the ready. He found Amber Halberstam sprawled on an antique brocade sofa in the den, richly dressed in an evening gown and almost comatose. Apparently, she had been out all night at some kind of formal function, and never bothered to go to bed once she staggered in.
Bob was shocked at the way Amber had deteriorated from her days in Montana. He remembered a vigorous if obnoxious woman in her prime, healthy and strapping in a hairy-legged Earth Mother kind of way. The creature dripping off the couch in front of him was a desiccated hag with hollow, haunted eyes, blue varicose veins in her legs and quivering, wrinkled hands. My God, after only twelve years at the top of the shitheap? he thought to himself. I guess the liberal life takes its toll.
Amber stared up at him blearily, no recognition in her eyes. It was obvious that she was either stoned out of her mind, blind drunk, or both. A priceless hundred-year-old Waterford crystal decanter stood on the side table at the end of the sofa, almost empty of some golden liquid, either whiskey or brandy, and a smeared empty highball glass sat next to it. “Good morning, Mrs. Myers,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would remember me, but I used to hang around at your house a lot with your son, Kevin. I’m Bobby Campbell from back in Missoula.”
“Bobby?” she burbled, screwing up her eyes and her forehead, trying to remember. “Oh, yeah, Bobby Campbell from down the street. Jenny’s brother. She was a fucking racist merfer, murderfer, murferder. Uh… no, you can’t be here…”
“Is your husband at home this morning?” he asked politely.
“Marvin’s spending the night with his girl friend,” said Amber. “We gotta kinda open marriage, you know. Real fucking civilized.”
“Of course you do.”
“You can’t be here,” she said, struggling to sit up as it finally percolated into her pickled brain that no way should that little racist hooligan, Bobby Campbell from Missoula, be here in her house on K Street, and something was going on.
“I promised Georgia I wouldn’t hurt you,” said Bob. “I lied.” He shot her once dead center between her sagging breasts, leaned over and forced the silencer between her teeth, and blew the back of her head off, splattering the exquisite Louis Quinze wallpaper behind the sofa with blood and brains and skull fragments.
Betsy appeared in the doorway. In her arms, she held a small blue-eyed blonde girl about fourteen months of age, wearing only a disposable diaper and clasping an old-fashioned Raggedy Ann doll. She had a pacifier in her mouth and stared around at the world, taking it all in but not crying or afraid. “The nanny?” asked Bob.
Betsy drew her finger across her throat with a “Fffft! We need to roll, Richie. I’ll get her dressed in the car.” With Georgia’s help, they had long ago put together a travel bag for Allura in case of sudden need. It included several suits of clothes, more diapers and changing gear, bottles and baby food, a few toys, and so on. The back of Bob’s car had also been fitted with a child seat.
As they left the house, stepping over the two Secret Service corpses again, Bob looked up and saw the closed-circuit television camera hanging on its bracket over the door. “Damn!” he cursed. “Now they’ve got us on video downtown, coming and going!”
“Shit happens,” said Betsy.
On the way out of town, Betsy rode in the back seat, dressing Allura in a light cotton pants suit and strapping her into the child seat. The child simply sucked on the pacifier, hugged her Raggedy Ann and stared out the window watching things go by, barely making a sound beyond occasional squeaks and gurbles. Bob didn’t dare try to get back into Virginia over any of the bridges, in view of the virtually certain Code Red security alert the city was on, even though the assassination of Hunter Wallace hadn’t been publicly announced yet. The bridges wouldn’t be shut down, since that would screw up the whole grid beyond measure and make search and control in a city paralyzed by traffic jams infinitely harder for the authorities. But on that stage of alert, every license number and FLEC ID and VIN number of every person and vehicle leaving the District would be automatically run through the DHS computer network, and he couldn’t risk anything tripping an alarm somewhere in the system. For all he knew they now had an alert out for the car.
Bob got onto Canal Road and drove westward, through Georgetown, and then onto the Clara Barton Parkway. He was going to have to risk going through one of the many unauthorized entrances and exits to the ESMA used by buttleggers, beefleggers, and other criminals or individuals who, for whatever reason, did not find it convenient to go through an established checkpoint with its surveillance gear and database cross-referencing. Bob got off Clara Barton at Manning Road, and slid through the streets running parallel to Macarthur Road, until he came to Capital Crescent Trail. He pulled over into a filling station right by the border wall that sold expensive gasoline as well as ethanol and charge-ups for electric vehicles; the day manager was a customer of his who had a sideline. “Hey, Joey,” said Richie.
“Hey, Rich,” said the pump jockey, a middle-aged man with
several days’ stubble and the lean build of the true tobacco addict. “Wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Joey ran through three cartons of Chinese Camel knockoffs a week.
“Actually, I need a favor, Joe,” said Richie. “I need to get over to Bethesda real quick to do some business, and I don’t have time to fight the traffic at the checkpoints. I was hoping you’d put your magic finger on your magic button and let me slip out the back.” This was pure bullshit; the only thing in Bethesda was violent niggers. Joey looked in the back and saw Betsy and the child.
“You sure about that, Rich?” he asked. “The sun may be up here, but Maryland is still kind of dark this time of day.” Joey wasn’t just being coy or silly; long practice with living under draconian hatespeech laws made white Americans reflexively fall back on code words and circumlocutions any time a conversation even came within shouting distance of race. It was a survival mechanism; between the FBI and the unofficial Brotherhood Volunteers who sniffed out racial dissidents for the FBI and DHS (mostly white women married to black and Third World men), no one ever knew who was wired or when a casual remark would mean a nickel in one of the penal factories, mines, or oil refineries along the hellish American Texas coast. The factories were hungry for labor; America’s black and brown minorities were now too privileged to work with their hands or their backs much, so every year the hate laws got worse.
“Business is business. What can I tell you?” said Richie/Bob, leaning his hand on the open window frame of the car, a couple of thousand-dollar bills grasped loosely between his fingers. Joey looked at the money and made it disappear.
“Well, if you’re sure you know what you’re doing, drive on around.” Bob swung the car around back of the filling station. A minute later, a concealed electric engine groaned, and a section of the corrugated steel security wall began to move aside. Bob drove through the wall into Maryland. The illegal gate rumbled closed behind him.
Black Maryland was as bad as Bob had been told. The streets were piled high with ancient garbage and cratered with potholes that forced him to drive slowly, dangerously slowly, because it meant that niggers on foot could get at them. None of the traffic lights worked; driving through the streets of Bethesda was like threading an obstacle course. Bob had to avoid the huge holes in the asphalt, since a breakdown or broken axle pretty clearly meant death. Fortunately for them it was still very early in the morning, and few of the local denizens were out and about. Bob could see groups of black figures loping through the alleys and the intersections, some apparently foraging, eyeing the car sullenly with hate in their eyes and snarls on their thick bubble lips. Several times sniper shots whined in and cracked the bulletproof glass on the windshield and the rear window.
They were finally attacked in Silver Spring by a mob of about thirty blacks of all ages and sexes who swarmed out of nearby alleys and overran the car, as Bob slowed to avoid a pothole the size of a tank trap. They hammered on the car with clubs and lumps of concrete and started rocking it, trying to overturn it. Betsy cracked a window and fired out, killing several of the animals. The rest ran away. In Rockville they ran into a crude barricade made of old furniture and boxes manned, if that was the word, by shaven-headed monkoids, presumably some local gang. Bob smashed through the roadblock and drove on. They eventually made it out into the wasted countryside, green with summer but eerily deserted now. They drove past fire-gutted houses and old strip malls, mostly rubble now, that stood silently in the muggy heat and whirring crickets.
Frederick was a fortified white enclave with police blockhouses at key intersections and points along the road. From there Bob was able to get up onto Interstate 70, which was passably maintained and drivable, so they made better time. Around two they halted at a truck stop in Hagerstown surrounded by Bremer walls and barbed wire, guarded by armed white men wearing some kind of private security uniforms. They were able to get some food and gas, albeit at exorbitant prices charged by the Hindus who ran the place. Bob glanced at the TV over the bar in the restaurant. Apparently, there still had been no official announcement that the President of the United States was dead and the regime’s hold over the state-controlled media was still sufficiently powerful to stifle even rumors.
At Hagerstown Betsy changed Allura, fed her a jar of strained plums, made her a bottle of juice, and secured the little girl in her seat. She had cried a couple of times on the way up, but now she fell peacefully asleep in the child seat, clutching the bottle and the Raggedy Ann, one in each hand. Betsy was now riding in the front as they headed down 80 to Martinsburg, West Virginia. “You know you’re compromised now,” Bob told her. “They surely recorded us on the cameras whacking those two federals.”
“Yeah, well, I was getting tired of D.C. anyway,” said Betsy with a shrug. “The Office will find me a new gig. Maybe New York or Chicago or American Houston.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Bob. “We’re not out of the woods yet, and that little girl is going to need caring for by someone while I do the driving and take care of all the details of getting us Home. It’s a two-man job. Why not come all the way Home with the both of us, Bets? I gather you’re not actually in the WPB; you’re a civilian employee, so to speak, so you’re not under military discipline and you can take some time off. You’ve been fighting for the Republic all your life, comrade. Why not Come Home and see what you’ve been fighting for? You’ve earned it.”
“Not the way it works,” replied Betsy. “I don’t get happy endings.”
“Never know until you try,” said Bob.
“I guess somebody told you about me,” said Betsy, without rancor. “If they told it right, then you know I have nothing to go back to.”
“Nothing from your past, no,” agreed Bob. “But you’ve got the rest of your life to go to. Look, I won’t push it. But the Party and the NVA made the Northwest Republic so white people wouldn’t have to live in this kind of shit all their lives, never again. That includes you. I get it if you don’t want to go back to Washington, but my part of Montana is pretty cool. Just think about it, okay?”
“Okay, I will,” said Betsy. She pulled out her phone and turned up CNN. “I guess Hugh Jenner’s going to be making that Fourth of July speech instead of the late President Wallace,” she said. “It’s set for two p.m. I’ll turn it up so you can hear it.”
“This should be interesting,” chuckled Bob.
“Oh, yeah,” said Betsy with a giggle. “It will go over with a bang.”
* * *
At that moment, Vinnie Skins and Duke were pulling a medium-sized flatbed truck loaded with what appeared to be six lengths of 14-inch black iron pipe lying side by side into an alley behind the Café Soleil, just off 17th Street. Duke parked very carefully, right on a red line that had been spray-painted across the alleyway the night before. “I sure hope Birdie’s computer knows what the hell it’s doing,” said Duke. “I know he vows and swears this is the right firing position and the right range, but this thing has no sighting on it besides the hoist. How the hell do we know where the hell these rounds are going to hit?”
“That’s half the fun,” said Cardinale with a laugh. “You never popped the top on one of these babies back in the day, but I did, four or five times. There just isn’t any way to make them pinpoint accurate, hence the six barrels. But believe me, even if we don’t cack Jenner, we will definitely steal his thunder as he announces to a bereaved nation the death of their beloved leader. God, I hope the camera shows his face when the roof caves in on his ass!”
“If we even manage to hit the roof of the White House,” said Duke pessimistically.
“Hey, if not, maybe we’ll overshoot and bring down the Washington Monument!” said Cardinale in a jovial voice. “Got your E & E memorized?”
“Sure,” said Duke. “After we pop the top, I leg it over past Farragut Square to the metro station where Tricia picks me up, you head for your rendezvous with June Bug at Burrito Brothers. Needless to say, if Birdie can’t pull down the camer
as we’re both going to have pretty short trips.”
“Even if he can’t, we fire anyway,” said Cardinale firmly. “If that happens, we abort the pickups and we bop our way out as best we can. Our chances won’t be good, but at least we won’t take Tricia and June Bug down with us.”
“Roger that, sir,” replied Fitzpatrick.
“If I don’t make it and you do, Duke, you’re in charge,” Cardinale reminded him. “You know the order codes for the phosgene and the anthrax? Can you pop the top on them if you’re ordered to do so?”
“Me get a chance to clean out this cesspool once and for all?” Duke responded. “No problem at all, sir.”
Inside the Oval Office, the Acting President Hugh Jenner was seated behind the famous desk with the Rose Garden visible through the French windows behind him, the setting for so many famous presidential addresses in the past. Hunter Wallace’s blood and bodily fluids had been scoured from the floor and the well-known carpet with the presidential seal had been removed for cleaning; the whole room still smelled of disinfectant. The White House media staff were busily setting up the camera and the teleprompter in front of the desk for him when Agent Lee Lyons came into the room. “Guys, could you give us a minute?” he asked the technicians. After they left, he said, “Mr. President, I can confirm the two agents killed at the Halberstam home, as well as Mrs. Halberstam, the mother, and a Filipino nanny. Illegal of course, not that that matters much anymore since the effective suspension of all immigration law in this country a generation ago. All the decedents were shot to death with nine-millimeter rounds. Allura Halberstam is missing and has been kidnapped by the two assailants captured on the security cams, who were recorded leaving and carrying the child with them. These have both been identified from the video footage from their FLEC cards, using facial recognition software. Oddly enough, this doesn’t seem to be spies, it looks like a mob thing. One of the gunners is named Richard Carroll, a low-level soldier in Vincent Cardinale’s butt-and-beeflegging crew over in Arlington. A lot of White House staff use Vinnie Skins, and so there may be all kinds of connections there. The other one is Elizabeth Parris, a registered sex trade worker and also a street captain for Cardinale.”
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