Goldstein

by Troy J. Grice

  “Maybe he just doesn’t like nats,” Oatfield interrupted. “What did you do to him before you hotwired him?”

  “Nothing! We found him unconscious in an alley. His multi was hacked and his bank account was drained.”

  “Could he be a Manchurian?” asked the President.

  “No. Hypnotic routines definitely show up in the brain dump. He was probably sent here just to spook us— to get us off track. We didn’t find anything.”

  “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” interrupted Oatfield.

  They stopped at Jack’s ball. Jack took hold of his wedge and deftly pitched his ball up onto the green. Jack had parlayed his years of CEO schmoozing into an acute golfing skill. He waited for a compliment from the President but was left hanging.

  “So Axel, sum it up for me,” continued the President, “do we have anything to worry about in Alaska?”

  “Nothing, sir. There’s no coherent plan, just a lot of nebulous threats. We should act now before they get something together.”

  “Jack,” asked the President as they continued their stroll to the fringe.

  “Mr. President?” he responded, expecting a belated compliment.

  “Your Board is okay with the plan, then?”

  Deflated, Jack answered. “They’ve given the green light, Mr. President. They were a little concerned with China not going along but we’ve made arrangements with them.”

  “So I can count on the Board for their campaign support?”

  “Absolutely. Numenor has no more vested interests in Goldstein.”

  “Excellent. So Axel can replay his homecoming game and we can finally put this embarrassing chapter in our history to bed.” The President stopped short of the fringe. Oatfield was shaking his head with a contemptible look on his face which compelled the President to ask for his input. “Oat? Do you have something to say?” He prayed Oat would just give up. “Oat can be such a pain in the ass about things like this,” the President thought.

  “I think we could use a little more due diligence, Sir. Goldstein is really good at hiding their capabilities from us. Do we really need to rush in to this?”

  “Decisiveness, Oat! I’m a man of action!” the President exclaimed. “Are we ready to proceed or not?”

  “We have a division in Anchorage waiting for the order,” Morgenthau replied.

  “A division? Isn’t that overkill?” asked the President.

  “They’re mostly NaPol tacticals rather than regular Domestic Army. All the Reserves are tied up overseas. It’ll be great experience for them,” Axel explained.

  “Fine. Just make it quick and clean. Keep our body count low and keep theirs low too, at least on paper anyway. I want you to call Anderson at Freemerica and make sure that the story gets spun the right way. Give him the ‘democratic necessity’ spiel. It works every time. Threaten access if they start to whine. They’ll roll over. We don’t want any bad publicity getting out. No pictures of charred corpses or kids missing limbs. This needs to be spun as a revolt by a bunch of redneck nut-jobs getting put down by the forces of freedom and democracy. People need to believe that this was the only means possible.

  Oh, have Anderson drop some embeds in there, too. Show some soldiers handing out sugarless candy and American flags or something. Hell, give his embeds a seat on the top of a tank or something back in the rear. You know how those journalists are. Those arrogant assholes’ll make themselves into the story. While they’re on screen, getting face time, pretending to be Ernie Pyle, they’ll miss the whole damn thing. All the sheeple will see is holograms of dumbass reporters showing the world how brave they think they are. Oh, and make sure they know there’s a Pulitzer in it, too.”

  “God bless the media,” Jack remarked.

  “Give me my putter,” demanded the President. The caddy obliged and President Teddy Mellon addressed his ball which was resting on the fringe. “Oat, do you have anything else?”

  “Well Sir, there’s an old axiom that goes ‘be humble or be humbled’.”

  “Fuck you, Oat,” replied the President with a chuckle. “I got something that’ll make you humble and it’s right here, between my legs.”

  Oat felt embarrassment but not for himself. “I’m a little concerned about the completeness of Axel’s findings. No disrespect intended, but these guys aren’t a bunch of militia nuts with pre-ban, bolt action rifles up there. They’re very savvy. They’ve made a great many technological breakthroughs in recent years. Their jamming equipment exceeds our detection and mitigation. They have better pulse emitters and cloaking devices. And I’m sure their entire zone is booby trapped and mined to the hilt. I think even Axel would concur that they know we’re coming. They’re ready, no doubt. Didn’t your detainee tell you that, Axel? I watched your tapes of Mr. Moore and I think we need a little extra time to make sure this goes as absolutely as smooth as possible. I am not in favor of rushing this.”

  “Mr. President, it’s gonna be a cakewalk,” Jack burst in. “You’ve got the absolute best equipment that Numenor makes up there.”

  “With the best Chinese chips,” added Oat, sarcastically.

  “And the best trained paramilitary in the world,” Axel added, trying to blot out Oatfield by stepping in front of him.

  “Do you disagree with Oat?” the President asked.

  “Not entirely, sir,” answered Axel. “I think Oat is just being Oat. But there won’t be any problems. It’ll be a cakewalk.”

  “Didn’t your Goldstein suspect escape?” asked Oat.

  Oat’s question froze the foursome still. Jack and the President looked at Axel who was caught off guard. Oat wasn’t supposed to know that but Oat seemed to know everything, the son of a bitch. Axel should have been ready for this. He fidgeted while rifling through plausible lies to respond with. He had to get off the hook and diffuse the tension with an explanation that Oat could not expose. A flush came over his leathery face. He had not felt so awkward since he was an intern at the Department of Transportation Security.

  “Our convoy got caught in an insurgent crossfire,” he explained. “His transport was blown to pieces and burned to a cinder. He was bound in the hold so he was completely vaporized in the fire.”

  “Did you recover any DNA?” asked Oatfield.

  “God damn you, Oat”, Axel thought.

  “Well?” asked the President.

  Think. Think. Think.

  “No, sir. There was nothing to recover. Phosphorus burns too hot.”

  “I didn’t know that insurgents had access to phosphorous,” observed Oatfield.

  Director Morgenthau fumbled nervously. “God damn Oat. Damn him to hell,” he thought. “I hate him. He’ll ruin everything. Maybe I’ll sick the IRS on him,” he thought. “He’s on to me. He knows we incinerated the scene to cover up the embarrassment.” He thought.

  “Well, they used it this time,” Axel assured the President hoping his pathos would be convincing.

  “I’m not waiting any longer,” explained the President as he addressed his ball again with his putter. “Like I said, I’m a man of action! Jack, you’ll get your cartel operating authorization renewed by executive order just as soon as I get my campaign contribution. Oat, you’ll get to fight an easy, closed-ended battle for once, and win, legitimately, with honor.”

  “I’m going to sit this one out, Sir, if you don’t mind,” Oat remarked. “I think Axel is more than capable of handling such a ‘cakewalk’, as he calls it.”

  “Dirty bastard son of a bitch,” Axel thought. “Fine. I’ll run the whole damn thing.”

  “Axel,” continued the President, “I guess you’ll finally get your homecoming revenge.”

  “Are you gonna put that?” asked Axel, relieved that the ordeal was over and that he had escaped further scrutiny.

  “Gimme some odds,” asked the President.

  “How about twenty to one!” offered Jack, still feeling slighted for the President’s failure to recognize his spectacular wedge sho
t moments earlier.

  “Twenty to one it is. How about five thousand dollars?”

  “Sure, why not?” answered Jack. “I can expense it.”

  “Gentlemen, how does this sound: we execute the operation on July 4, Independence Day! And it’ll all be over before the solar grills cool and the Susa marches fade.”

  “Of course, during my vacation to Fiji,” thought Axel. “No worries, I’ll coordinate from the air en route.”

  President Theodore Mellon swung his putter. His ball bounced off the fringe, rolled straight up the green, up and over a goose turd, and plopped directly into the plastic cup ten meters away.

  During President Mellon’s self-congratulatory celebration and Jack’s ass-kissing-regalia, Mellon’s milquetoast caddy mentally accessed his cloaked brain chip and sent a short transmission to the processor in Brook’s glasses back in Goldstein. It read simply: “July 4”.

  Chapter Nineteen

  One hundred and forty kilometers per hour was the speed at which the auto pilot guided the behemoth tractor-trailer on the long straight-a-ways of the Canadian prairie. The diesel hummed as it barreled down the lonely concrete road; its nano-processor brain navigating by laser-spacial-recognition and by pinging embedded RFID chips.

  Bear was no truck driver in the classic sense. His function was more that of strategist, leaving the mundane tactics to the onboard computer systems. If it wasn’t for the political clout of the Teamsters, his job might have been automated completely long ago.

  Outside the cab it was black and moonless. The arc of the truck’s headlamps on the narrow river of cracked cement was the only light besides the stars. The fringe of the road and the centerline were outlined in incandescent green on the holographic windshield. Approaching obstacles, curves, or traffic was illuminated on the glass giving Bear several seconds to overrule the navigational computer’s proposed course of action. Bear had made no overrides in the last hour. The highway was completely desolate.

  Devin gazed out one of the cab’s portal windows in the back. The far off black horizon slowly rolled past the backdrop of a star-spangled Canadian sky. The Milky Way was prominent— like a swath of diamond dust streaking across the black dome of the heavens.

  Devin imagined the intrepid pioneers aboard the Magellan, en route to Mars some years back, gazing out from similarly shaped portals, contemplating the infinite as the cosmic radiation slowly unzipped their DNA. There wasn’t enough room in the six hundred trillion dollar budget to develop better shielding.

  Man on Mars was a grand diversion from war, hyperinflation, and boiling domestic chaos. It was birthed with the sparks of international fireworks and it died by the radiation of a rogue solar flare. All that was left were seven frozen corpses in a tin can hurtling towards the Oort cloud.

  The brilliant sky also reminded Devin of Goldstein. It contrasted the grayish, starless, murky nights that reigned over the Amerikan megalopolis.

  There was once an environmental mandate to curb the “insidious evil” of light pollution. Homes were required to install windows with opacity controls. It was a boon for the fledgling, sensor-glass industry which lobbied hard for the environmentally conscious legislation.

  But soon after, certain governmental offices were exempted from the rules. Next, certain neighborhoods were exempted, then politically connected businesses. Eventually, the only ones left complying with the mandate were the minority of citizenry that had no money, no identity, and no political clout. A fifty story condo would remain fully illuminated with flashing advertisements and a halo of safety lighting at all hours of the night while a next door neighbor would have to go completely black lest Pollution Enforcement cut their power off and issue them a $10,000 fine.

  “Come on up front if you want,” offered Bear to Devin. Devin slid into the co-captain’s chair. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely,” Devin replied.

  “We’re two days away. The road winds into the mountains soon so I’m gonna pull over in about an hour or so and get some rest. I’m saving my syn-phetamines for the last push to Fairbanks.”

  “Works for me,” Devin replied.

  “Your friend asleep?”

  “She is.” Devin rubbed his eyes. He was tired but the drone of the engine and the coziness of the sparsely lit cab appealed to him. He wanted to savor the safe feeling as it was one he had not felt in longer than he could remember.

  “Why do you do this, Bear?” Devin asked.

  “Do what? Drive trucks?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Hmm. Well, I guess I’m what you’d call a ‘free agent’. I’m just selling my skills to the highest bidder.”

  “Don’t you ever worry about what would happen if you get caught…you know…smuggling?”

  “Sure. That’s why I take precautions. You could say my client list is very selective.”

  “But if they did catch you…”

  “They won’t catch me. Or should I say, they won’t bust me. I have well-connected clients on all sides. They’d get me out of a jam one way or another.”

  “So you’re a double agent of sorts?”

  “Like I said before, a free agent.”

  “Do you work with Goldstein much?”

  “Not directly. I’ve worked with your friend Roth before but he’s not officially a Goldsteiner.”

  “I owe Roth a great deal.”

  “Roth is a free agent just like me. He’s paid me to move product from Goldstein to container ships and super-jets and trucks like this very one you’re ridin’ in.”

  “What do you know about Brooks?” Devin asked.

  “He’s the guy that makes them chips. Trillionaire, I’m told. I guess he’s sold a lot of them little gold things.”

  “He’s made a lot of Chinese businessmen wealthy,” Devin remarked.

  Bear laughed.

  “Why do you laugh?”

  “He’s made a few Numenor suits wealthy too.”

  “He deals with Numenor? Wouldn’t Goldstein would cut him off if he did that?”

  “Not at all. He’s free to do what he pleases. We’re all part of the ‘supply chain’. From Brooks to Roth. From Roth to me. Me to the Chinese. The Chinese to Numenor. Numenor to NaPol. And each of us takes a big fat cut along the way.”

  “So Brooks enables NaPol? I just can’t believe it, a Goldstein Council member selling chips that go into Numenor pulse emitters.”

  “You can’t believe it because you don’t understand the world yet. You ain’t got no perspective. You can’t…what do they say?…you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  Devin laughed. “I would never do anything to help NaPol.”

  “You’re already helping them. We’re all pawns. You help them in one way or another. You can either be their errand boy or their whipping boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your problem,” Bear continued, “is that you didn’t make your abilities available to any of them. That’s why they want to break you down.”

  “NaPol?”

  “NaPol, Goldstein, Numenor, whoever. What good are you if you don’t make yourself useful? No one can really go it alone, Devin. Not unless they want to live in a cave somewhere. Take me for instance. I make my skills available to all sides, for a price of course. Funny how they have no problem payin’ it and funny how I seem to stay out a trouble, too.”

  “What about your principles?”

  “Principles? Principles are bullshit. Principles are for fools. You’ve got to be more realistic if you want to survive in this world. Those crusader types always think that utopia’s right around the corner. Well, I’ve got news for you: It’s not. Things’ll never change. The guys that can print the money and carry the guns will never let it happen!”

  “So give up?”

  “You know what happens to crusaders?”

  “What?’

  “They end up ruined. Don’t piss off the guys with guns. You don’t have to sell your s
oul to them, just figure out how to make yourself useful to them so they pay you and leave you alone. That’s the best revenge. Exploit’em I say. Leave the lost cause to the nut jobs.”

  Bear changed the subject. “Look in that glove compartment.” Devin opened the console. Inside was a bundle of folded papers. “Look under those papers…” Devin pulled the papers out of the way revealing a pistol. “Now, I know I just said that I always stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, you did…”

  “Well, that’s true for me but there’s no guarantee for you. In the event that we get pulled over and they want to poke around in here you’re gonna have to make some tough choices.”

  “Which are?”

  “…Which are totally up to you. I doubt it’ll come to that way out here in the middle of nowhere. Mounties would rather make a deal than start a confrontation with folks on these lonely roads. But just in case...”

  “Just in case what? You mean shoot it out?”

  “Either shoot them or shoot yourself. The Mounties’ll hand you over to NaPol just as quick as you can say ‘rendition’. And I don’t think you wanna go back there.”

  “No, definitely not. But what about you?”

  “If you shoot a trooper it’ll make things real complicated. We’ll have to make a run for it. You’ll, of course, be a madman who held me at gunpoint the whole way, at least that’s what I’ll say. If you shoot yourself then everything works out fine and dandy for me. But if they get you alive, I doubt Brooks’ll be able to rescue you again. Whatever you do, please don’t shoot me. And if you do decide it’s hopeless and shoot yourself, try to keep your brains aimed out the window.”

  “Will do,” Devin assured him as he handled the 9mm.

  “Son of a bitch! Speak of the devil…”

  An alert beacon flashed in the windshield with the logo of the Canadian Mounted Police. Bear took the controls of the truck, slowed the diesel down and guided it onto the gravel shoulder.