Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  When Tania stepped out of the machine, she saw Odile there smiling, as one of the shiny helmet dudes passed the wand over her body while another watched.

  “All dressed up and nobody to shoot,” she joked.

  The guards gave each other a look but let them pass.

  Tania shook her head and noticed the sweat under her armpits as she pulled her jacket back on. But the anxiety from lying to the law bled off quickly once you got through, aided by her friend’s contagious smile. Odile probably knew this was how they would get in, but didn’t want to spoil the fun of watching Tania freak. Tania should have been mad, but instead felt excited, like she was in on the prank.

  They walked on, through public spaces turned into DMZ.

  There were even more boots and armor in Lafayette Park, impeding their view through the layers of hurricane fence, bollards, and razor wire erected as temporary barricades. They elbowed and smiled their way to a spot where you could see the familiar profile of the main entrance and the East Wing. It was weird to see the big yellow earth movers and trenching machines parked on the ceremonial lawn, maybe waiting for it to get warm enough to start digging again in the big black scar where the West Wing used to be. Tania saw smoke there, which was surprising all these months later, until she realized it was just steam coming up from some heat exhaust vent.

  “This is intense,” said Odile. “Pictures don’t do it justice.”

  “Kind of crazy they’re spending all that money on rebuilding it,” said Tania. “Everybody knows the real White House is underground.”

  “When it’s not flying around in the air,” said Odile.

  And then, lucky day, almost as if it was because Odile asked for it, just as they were about to leave, it flew right in. Eagle One. The pitch of its turbines humming at a frequency that sounded like the future.

  “No wonder the security is heightened,” said Odile.

  They waited to see if it would land on the front lawn. And if it was true. How he looked now.

  “His scars are America’s scars.” That’s what they said in the interstitials. And when she thought about it as it came into her head just then, Tania realized how true that was. Just not exactly the way they meant.

  15

  The night before, Tania fell asleep watching the President on TV.

  She hadn’t meant to watch it, but when she sat down to find the numb after an intense few days fighting lopsided battles at work, she forgot that it was Third Thursday—time for Hello America, the President’s monthly show where he talks to his people.

  It was easy to forget, because it was so rare that it actually ran on Thursday anymore. Instead, it was whenever the President felt like, which seemed like it was more often than monthly, and usually Sunday.

  When it was on, it was the only thing on, at least on the main channels.

  It was already in progress when Tania turned on the Feed. Hello America had no time limits. It was scheduled for an hour, but it went on as long as the President wanted. For this episode he was sitting in the den of Rancho la Paz, the executive retreat he had carved out of the mountainous military range above Alamogordo. It was a nuke-proof bunker, but they made it look like some kind of fancy cabin, with antlers over the fireplace, wood furniture, and Navajo blankets, which Tania thought was kind of messed up. One time when Tania was watching, the President had gone off on a ramble about why all the U.S. military helicopters were named after conquered Indian tribes, “honoring their fierce spirit.”

  Tonight when Tania tuned in the President was sitting by the fire, badly lit—the way he often was since the bombing—talking to one of his bodyguards about some businessman in Texas who had earned his wrath. As the President ranted, the bodyguard flipped through a slide show of incriminating surveillance shots of the guy.

  When the show first started at the beginning of his first term, people watched it mostly with hope, or at least an expectant curiosity. The leader was live without a script, talking with seeming authenticity about his plans for change, solutions for a country that felt increasingly broken, run out of frontier to tame. Tania thought it was like at work when a new boss would call an all-hands meeting and you went to hear what the new plan was, who got promoted, and who just got fired.

  But at this company, you found out who just got arrested. And when he said so-and-so is no longer with us, he usually meant it literally. One time he announced a small invasion. He would also give out dispensations. Grants to worthy causes. Rewards and bonuses for special achievements. Or the ultimate prize of all, his attention. That was the highlight of every episode, the part where he would call one “lucky” American, and depending on how the conversation went, your future could be determined. Especially if, when he called, it was evident you hadn’t been watching the show.

  So Tania left it on, but started reading a book as well, and nodded off at some point when he was rambling on about the philosophy of property rights and how what we find in nature becomes ours, exclusively, as soon as we possess it.

  It was only hours later, when she was awakened on the sofa to the jarring tones of a Citizen Emergency Alert blasting from her devices, that Tania learned what the big announcement was that evening. Counterterror raid in the heart of the Tropic. Some senior VP for the St. Louis Restoration Corporation had jogged a little too far south on the riverfront and got nabbed. Ended up on camera in a private upload with bad sound, but not so bad you couldn’t hear he was reciting fragments of classified clauses and dronecodes. Cut to family members of alleged cell leaders the Chief had authorized SLoRC security to round up “for their safety” as they prepared to hunt down the kidnappers.

  When they ran the hostage videos, Tania found herself looking for signs hidden in plain sight, signs of what was really going on behind the screen spectacle. The eyes of people she had grown up with peering out through the balaclavas. Evidence of false flag production stages, like the dissidents claimed. Tania came from both those worlds—the federal state and the restless zones it had given up on—but mostly felt like she belonged to neither. There was a time when she thought maybe she could help find a new third way into a better future, but these days she was just happy to find her way to Friday, working a good job doing things that could make a small difference, with a few trusted friends and a safe, comfortable apartment to come home to.

  But when she woke up scared from dreaming about Him, it put other ideas back in her head, ideas that were getting harder to banish.

  16

  Eagle One flew in fast from the west, then yawed back over the East Lawn, engines whining overthrottle, blasting air onto the ground.

  Eagle One was the flagship of a new line of Anglo-American tactical aircraft the President had promoted as superior to the helicopter. It could fly faster and higher, with even better vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. All jet, no wings—just stabilizers at the tail. Manufactured by a company he still had stock in.

  Tania tried to see through the cockpit window, to see if he really was the pilot, but the glass was as opaque as the midnight blue fuselage.

  It was a beautiful and scary thing, with its Luftwaffe ’46 lines guided by twenty-first-century electrorobotics. Visitor from a different tomorrow. She’d seen it on the big screens for the last inaugural, when it flew in from Camp David, but seeing it in person was a whole different deal. Pure wonder. Like some cross between a royal yacht, an experimental supercar, and a unicorn.

  Piloted by God.

  “Dark Apollo has landed,” joked Odile, barely audible through the noise.

  Tania had been close enough to see him once before—two years earlier, on the day they swore him in for his third term, wearing his medals. Tania had watched the parade, just down the road, on an office balcony with Odile and a bunch of other silk suits cheering on their sugar daddy in chief. Tania remembered the snowflakes melting on the military robots as they rumbled down the street. The big land drones with their black beret Engineer escorts walking alongside. The double-wide flo
ats with their maudlin pageants of the martyrs of Tehran, Seoul, Panama City. She’d seen a guy in the crowd throw a snowball at the Vice President’s limo, then watched the silver helmets swarm him.

  “Which one’s your boyfriend?” she teased Odile now, as they watched the soldiers mark out a landing pad with their regimented bodies, so close Tania could almost reach them through the fence.

  They felt the thrust as the turbine turned down, like a hot hard wind. The craft dropped fast, then slowed just above the flickering turf, gently moving through the final phase into a soft landing.

  There were no tourists on this side of the checkpoint, but everyone around turned to watch. The President, even just the idea of his imminent presence, compelled your gaze.

  The Secret Service detail assembled around the rear of the aircraft, waiting for the door to drop. The sanctioned cameras were right behind them.

  Tania’s view was occluded, but she could see the colored light leak out from inside when they opened the hatch.

  The personal guard emerged first. A detail of three. All tall, handpicked from the best corporate security firms. One of them, a blond woman with a white scarf instead of a necktie, looked right at Tania, through lenses that clearly read her face.

  “Don’t forget to smile,” said Odile.

  “You’re the one she should be checking out,” said Tania.

  “Look,” said Odile. “The dogs!”

  Sure enough, the presidential pets trotted out on cue. The wolfhound, then the ridgeback. Everyone knew their names. Ulysses and Lee.

  The man who followed looked like the President, but wasn’t.

  Odile squealed.

  “Newton!” she yelled.

  Others joined in with shouts and whistles. Tania gasped.

  The man turned, flashing a white porcelain smile. Newton Towns. The actor who played the President in the movies. The one that popularized Mack’s narrative before he first ran for office, dramatizing his escape from the North Koreans after his fighter jet went down in the DMZ. Then the sequel, a miniseries about the Panamanian crisis of his first term. They were working on a third one now, about the retaking of New Orleans.

  “He’s fucking glowing,” said Odile, and Tania laughed with her.

  He wasn’t, really, but he had that aura. Opposite of what Tania expected, he was even better-looking in person. Beautiful, in an unreal way, yet there he was, magazine cover model of a good-looking, friendly white man, the archetype they wanted you to believe in. He wore a suit, but no tie. One of those suits built to your scan, that draped elegantly and suggested superhero bulges all at the same time.

  One of the cameras came in close for the star, then moved toward the crowd. Not that you could tell what it was filming. There was more than one eye behind the black glass of those rotored orbs.

  As she thought of it scanning them, Tania got anxious for a second, then remembered how that inspector sucked up to Odile. If they were watching them, it was probably to protect her.

  Two women walked out. The girlfriends. Newton’s date, the country singer Ashley Lionel, and the presidential companion, triathlete Patricia Wood. They looked rich, unnaturally young, and happy.

  Then He emerged.

  The Commander in Chief, wearing an old-school bomber jacket with flight patches and the left sleeve pinned up over his stump. He didn’t look back. All business, the busy boss headed back to the office. His hair was going white. It looked like some of his skin was, too, scar tissue you could see on the back of his neck. He was shorter than they made him look on TV. And something about seeing him in the flesh, feeling him that close, made all your deep down feelings about him come right up to the surface.

  Tania wished she could see his eyes.

  “Yo, Tommy!” she yelled, insanely, uncontrollably, as if momentarily possessed by the rabble-rousing spirit of her mom. “Look at your people, tyrant!”

  Odile gasped.

  And as soon as the words left her mouth, Tania could feel she had breached the terms of their unofficial permission to be here.

  Shit.

  Tania was right at the fence now, fingers through the chain link, eyes on, like some crazy starfucker. Or assassin. She suddenly realized how very close they were to the most protected man in the world.

  She glanced at Odile’s freaked-out face, and the uniformed dudes gaping behind her, all staring at Tania.

  But she got what she wanted.

  She got the President of the United States to look right at her. They locked gazes. No more than a second, but long enough to register the judgment of those cold blue eyes.

  It was not a safe feeling.

  “Let’s go,” said Odile.

  The President turned. Barked something at his guard. One of his dogs actually barked.

  The blond lady bodyguard was really watching Tania then. So were half the people around her.

  Tania felt the shudder of fear come up through her body.

  She looked up and around, at the cameras you could see, and the ones you couldn’t. One of the news cameras was on her now.

  OMFG.

  “Come on!” said Odile, grabbing Tania, pulling her hard.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Tania. They turned and headed back the way they came.

  “What the fuck!” said Odile, glaring, as they walked as fast as they could without running.

  “Sorry!” said Tania. “I think you just got me all riled up with all that crazy talk at lunch and hollering at Newton.”

  “That was all you,” said Odile. “I say what I think sometimes, but in the right time and place. I thought you knew how this town works!”

  “Same way the whole country works,” said Tania. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She knew that was a lie, even if it was true.

  When they got to Lafayette Square, they were waiting for them. Of course they were. The soldiers surrounded them, separated them, frisked them. Tania saw Odile crying as that same inspector, Nichols, escorted her back behind the checkpoint. Then four Secret Service agents took Tania away in a car with windows tinted so dark she couldn’t see where they were.

  She asked what cause they had to detain her, but they didn’t say anything. As she knew, they didn’t have to.

  It was an emergency.

  It had been an emergency for as long as Tania could remember.

  17

  The Secret Service agents took Tania’s phone, took off her handcuffs, and locked her in a room without windows.

  The room was cold. Sweater temperature, but they had taken hers away, along with her winter coat and suit jacket, and left her to shiver.

  She waited there for a very long time. She couldn’t be sure, because they took her watch, too, and her bag, and everything from her pockets.

  The only things on the walls were the official portraits. An old one of the President, leading-man head shot from the first term, before the job started to really show on his face, way before they tried to blow him up. Next to him was an even bigger one of the General, chest garnished with the campaign ribbons of long wars over diminishing resources, stern eyes that had been staring at her since childhood.

  They omitted the portrait of the President who came between. The one they deposed. They would have written him out of the books entirely, if he didn’t provide such a convenient scapegoat.

  He was still in office when the computers first tagged Tania for her “talents.” She scored the way they liked on the tests, and they transferred her out of the combat zone and into the elite academy across town in St. Paul. That bought her a scholarship slot at university, where the professor for her senior seminar on Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles gave her name to a government recruiter. She took those tests, and a few weeks later people in suits were taking her to lunch. They said they needed people with her gifts, a compliment she devoured without really asking what it was they liked so much. They offered her a federal service package that would put her through law school, guarantee her a five-year empl
oyment contract, and get her out of the Blocks and into the capital. They said she would be able to help people, fight the nation’s enemies, protect the people she loved. She took it, against her mom’s advice. Tania wanted something better than the hard world of her childhood.

  During summer vacation after her second year, while most of her law school classmates worked cushy clerkships at big firms, they sent Tania and a few others off for special training. They would crowd into conference rooms with trainees from other schools to learn computer forensics, predictive analytics, surveillance and countersurveillance. They spent hours writing their own algorithms to analyze data harvests, learn how to code their own little bots. People from Fleet trained them on the latest drone protocols. The year before the President had made some of the drones semiautonomous, and the teacher said getting one to really work your case was like having a cross between a supercomputer and a pack of bloodhounds.

  At the end of the first month they put Tania and five other trainees in a room with two shrinks from Quantico to work on techniques of noncoercive interrogation. Being chosen like that felt good, and what you learned seemed so secret and so powerful, it converted you without you even knowing it. Or so it seemed.

  They learned techniques for reading personality, signs of lying, signs of fear. They learned how to manipulate time, atmosphere, and language. They learned how to glean truth from bullshit.

  The shrinks peddled some of the oldest knowledge. “Witchcraft and psychopomp,” one of them joked. They taught Cold War interrogation breakdown strategies like Nobody Loves You, News from Home, Alice in Wonderland, and Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd. Tania didn’t know who Mortimer Snerd was, until she looked it up, and then lost an evening watching early-twentieth-century ventriloquism videos and seeing if she could throw her voice.

  They taught new strategies, too, tailored to the neuroses of the age. What’s Your Movie, All Nine Eyes, Who Shot Yoko, We Have a Winner, Do You Know Who My Dad Is. The last one was Tania’s favorite, tailor-made for penthouse provocateurs.