Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  Tania scored high on all the tests. She proved a good shot on the firing range. She studied her butt off, as always, and had amazing grades. She was slotted for a choice job—maybe even an embassy posting. Until the semester before graduation, when they assigned her to the next class of Motherland special agents. When she imagined herself spying on her own people, on Americans, on people who still lived in places like the one she came from, she realized that was what they had wanted her for all along. And when she said no thanks, try again, they made her take more tests, and then posted her to an obscure office of the Defense Department providing investigative oversight of companies with military merchant contracts.

  They thought it was punishment, but the tests failed to predict she be would so good at that job that they would want to fire her, and so good at it that they couldn’t, at least until her contract ran out.

  She was sitting there in the cold, wondering if maybe that’s what this was really about, when she heard the steel door buzz open.

  18

  A man and a woman entered the holding room. They both wore gray suits, the prosecutorial uniform of people who see the world in gradations of criminal guilt. The woman, who was taller, flashed her Secret Service credentials and said she was Agent Gerson and her colleague was Agent Breland. Breland looked like a cross between a soldier and an accountant. Gerson reminded Tania of a girl who picked a fight with her in middle school.

  “Where’s my friend?” said Tania.

  “What were you doing at the White House today?” asked Gerson, making it clear who got to ask the questions.

  “Looking at the White House,” said Tania.

  “You were inside a secure area,” said Gerson.

  “They let us through,” said Tania.

  “That doesn’t make it okay,” said Gerson. “Almost makes the violation worse.”

  “You tried to lie your way in,” said Breland.

  “Come on,” said Tania. “We just wanted to see it. See how it looks now.”

  “It looks like a reason to clean up the country,” said Breland.

  “Was it your idea or your friend’s?” asked Gerson.

  “I don’t know,” said Tania. “Mine.”

  “But she’s the real troublemaker, isn’t she?” said Gerson. “A rebel in patriot’s clothing. She wants to hurt him. Probably put you up to it. If you tell us what she’s up to, this will go a lot easier for you.”

  “She—”

  Tania could feel it, how everything her mom taught her about sticking up to authority crumbled in the face of indefinite detention. Along with all the lessons learned in law school about never talking to cops. Instead, everything she’d learned about pleasing teachers came out to say hello. Maybe they already knew how she would act. She assumed they had access to all her profiles.

  “Ma’am, she’s harmless. Talks big, but in the end she likes living in the tower. Hard to blame her. I’m the one who acted out.”

  “Why did you threaten the President?” said Breland.

  “I did not threaten anybody, sir.”

  “That’s not what he thought.”

  Tania looked Breland in the eyes, trying to convey disbelief. Instead she shuddered at the sense that it might be true.

  “You want to see the video?” said Breland.

  “I don’t need to, sir, no thank you. I just want to get back to my caseload. I’m sorry if we caused any trouble. We didn’t even know he was going to be there, and when I saw him, I just got excited, and—”

  Every time she blinked, the President’s eyes were there, burning a hole in her.

  “What kind of cases do you do, anyway?” said Breland. “Office of Special Investigations.”

  “They think they’re special,” said Gerson. “They investigate our own troops.”

  “No, ma’am, that’s not right,” said Tania. “We investigate contractors. Corporate licensees, not uniformed service. For bad stuff. Fraud, charter violations, dark markets, vice.”

  “Working hotline snark from chickenshit whistleblowers,” said Breland. “You should be investigating who put that hole in the ground, instead of gawking at it like some tourist.”

  Gerson laughed.

  “I just do my job, sir,” said Tania. “Ma’am. I don’t make the laws.”

  The door opened, and another man walked in. He was black, and older, with white eyebrows and a charcoal suit. He wore a metal lapel pin, the flag-hued F of the President’s party. The others looked up when he entered, but the man said nothing. Just glanced at Tania and then stood at the side of the room, watching.

  Breland looked back at his tablet screen, scrolling.

  “No wonder they washed you out of the elite services,” he said. “Before you even started.”

  He held his screen up to Gerson. She smiled, a smile of adverse judgment.

  “They knew better than to let her get close to the power,” said Gerson. “Knew she’s a threat.”

  “I am not a threat!” yelled Tania, suddenly steaming, repressed anger tripped, anger at a lot of things that were reflected in this moment. “I called out his name! I was excited. He was with Newton Towns! And the girlfriends!” She looked at the other man, who should have understood, but he registered nothing.

  “I think you have serious loyalty issues,” said Breland.

  “Runs in the family,” said Gerson.

  Mom, thought Tania. That turned out to be only partly right.

  “Like your brother,” said Breland.

  “My what?” said Tania.

  “This guy,” said Breland, turning his tablet to show her the screen.

  The image was the mug shot of a man that looked nothing like Tania. For starters, he was white, or something close to it, with long straight hair and crazy green eyes. It took a kind of internal double take before her mind did the morphing, and she felt the blood drain. A face she had not seen in a very long time.

  “I don’t have a brother,” she said, a legal truth that was also false.

  Sig. The little fucker. He was alive.

  “That’s not what your mom told us,” said Gerson.

  Tania felt the air leak out of her.

  “You talked to my mom?” she asked, weakly, after a long pause.

  “We detained her for questioning,” said Breland.

  “Fuck!” said Tania, the crazy coming on.

  “We think she has been helping him,” said Gerson. “Harboring a fugitive.”

  “She runs a coffee shop!” said Tania. “And we have nothing to do with that kid.”

  “You lived in the same house,” said Gerson. “Your mom was his guardian.”

  “Never for long,” said Tania, caving all the way in, the words coming out like a sigh of surrender. “More like a stray dog than a brother.”

  “Modern family,” said Breland, letting out a snicker.

  “When did you talk to him last?” asked Gerson.

  “Years. He disappeared.”

  “Escaped from custody, more precisely,” said Gerson.

  “He was just a little kid,” said Tania. “A juvenile.”

  “A juvenile terrorist cop killer,” said Gerson.

  “You have no idea,” said Tania. “His mom—”

  “His mom was the leader of a cell,” said Gerson. “What happened was as much her own fault as anyone else’s. If she were alive today she’d be in prison.”

  “For her nonviolent protests?” said Tania.

  “Like I said, loyalty issues,” said Gerson.

  “I am a loyal citizen,” said Tania. “And so is my mother. You can be a good employee and not love the CEO.”

  “Not sure I agree, in this context,” said Breland.

  “Mom is definitely not on the team,” said Gerson. “We’ve been learning a lot.”

  “You still have her?”

  Gerson nodded. Held up the screen with Mom’s intake photo, dated three days ago.

  Tania imagined her sixty-eight-year-old mom in the interrogation cha
ir, getting the treatment, being pressured to rat out people she knew.

  “Would you like to prove your loyalty?” said Gerson.

  “Will it get her free?”

  “It should keep you both free, if we get the right results,” said Gerson.

  “We need you to find your brother,” said the man with the white eyebrows, breaking his silence. “You have the training, and you have the access to that community.”

  Tania processed that for a long minute. She looked at the man, tried to intuit what his story was and what her real options were.

  “Why do you need him so bad?” she asked. “What else did he do?”

  “Maybe we just think he’s going to go on to bigger and better things,” said the man. “Predictive analytics are getting pretty good.”

  “And it will help us map the cells, all through the Tropic and the Sector N/C,” said Gerson.

  “Is that where he is?” asked Tania.

  “Last seen in the sunny Minnesota borderzone,” said Breland. “That’s where they took this picture. Before whatever B-team knuckleheads they have running that igloo let him get away again.”

  “I see,” said Tania. “You want me to capture my ‘brother’ and out my people.”

  “Help us find him, and you and your mother will walk, no charges,” said Gerson. “Everything else you find along the way is extra credit.”

  Tania took a deep breath.

  “You are helping us keep the peace,” said the third man. “Keep these people safe, from misguided leaders who want to take us all down the path to chaos.”

  “Where do you think your brother would go?” asked Gerson.

  Tania shrugged.

  “Think harder,” said Breland.

  “I can find him,” said Tania. “Just let my mom out.”

  “That comes after,” said Gerson.

  Fuck you, thought Tania.

  “We already have three felonies on her,” said Gerson. “Including a conspiracy charge. And we’re just getting started. This is a nice deal we’re offering.”

  “Put it in writing. Immunity for her, and for me. And for Odile La Farge.”

  “The deal is real,” said the third man.

  When she looked at him, Tania believed him.

  “Agent Gerson has your paperwork,” said Breland. “And you don’t need to worry about Miss La Farge.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We dropped your girlfriend off at her mom’s,” said Gerson.

  “The office,” smiled Breland. Tania imagined the scene.

  “Your breach of presidential security wasn’t the only reason we brought you in,” said Gerson. “Though it made it a lot more fun, and conveniently gives us three felonies to pursue if you don’t help us. But not on your cute rich friend. She’s untouchable, for now.”

  “Unlike you,” said Breland, standing up. “Agent Gerson is going to escort you out, and you are going to get to work.”

  “What do I tell my work?”

  “You’ll think of something,” said the third man. “We’ll be watching.”

  19

  Tania was seventeen the first time Sig stayed with them. A bad age for babysitting, when Tania was more interested in taking the bus across town for “study halls” with the cool kids from the fancy high school she’d managed to get into.

  Tania bitched at her mom about it from the get-go, asking why they had to adopt a weird little white kid as a pet when Tania wanted a cat. Mom said that wasn’t nice, and it wouldn’t be for long. They weren’t adopting him, he wasn’t really white, and it was their responsibility to help a sister in need. Even one with thick blond hair like the Viking-looking chick who first came by that night for coffee to drop off her brat. She seemed nice, but crazy, talking about how she had to go underground for a while. How the General had put her on a list. And that wasn’t even the craziest thing she said.

  Erika, the mom, had almost no control over her kid, as best Tania could tell. No wonder she wasn’t taking him underground with her. When it was time for Erika to go, they found her little freak on the fire escape, holding a bird in his hands. A live bird.

  Mom said he’s kind of like a cat, right?

  He let the bird go.

  Tania knew Erika was part of the same movement as her mom and agreed to give it a try. Maybe she could get the kid to do stuff for her. Teach him. It was summer, after all, summer in Minneapolis. School was out and the days were stacked up in front of her like one big long afternoon that would never end.

  It was the same summer that the local committee set up the mesh network in their neighborhood. They called it the Island. They put these little antenna units up on rooftops and telephone poles and gave everybody a box that turned their TV into a primitive computer. Keyboard and everything. It was secure, they said. No one else had access except for people in the neighborhood.

  The neighborhood was not like the neighborhoods they saw on TV. It was a half-dozen apartment buildings spread over a couple of blocks, former public housing that got cooperatized after the feds cut the funding and the residents were on their own. Tania’s mom was one of the leaders of the residents’ committee that put it together. She took advantage of the opportunity to move to a bigger place where they each had their own bedroom, on the thirty-first floor of B Block.

  The TV was in the main room, where little Sig slept on an air mattress on the floor. Most nights he would fall asleep right on the rug while Tania helped put the node to work. When she woke up in the morning he was usually gone, out hunting with the early birds or whatever it was he did before breakfast. Maybe Tania should have gone looking for him, but she just wanted to log back in.

  They used the network for all kinds of stuff. Mainly, the people in the neighborhood got more organized than they had ever been. They shared information about food shortages and power outages, jobs and informal financial networks, traffic and weather, potholes and politics. They reported on police activity and arrests, and the incursions of the first militias as the bankrupt city, state, and federal governments started to look to citizen posses to do the jobs they could no longer pay for. The militia, unsurprisingly, were mostly white guys who already had their own guns. So the committee used the network to organize their own militia. Like a neighborhood watch with attitude, said Mom. They had their meetings in her coffee shop on the ground floor, which was also a bookstore, even if it functioned more like a library. They put a bunch of terminals in there for the people who didn’t have the right kind of TVs. Tania made a program to track the books in circulation—mostly so she could find who had the copies of her Max Price books when she wanted to reread one. Tania spent a lot of her time “on air,” as they called it, helping out as a community dispatcher.

  This conveniently let her spend most of her time talking to her friends.

  The kids figured out how to use the network to make their own computer games. Tania played the one they called Rat Race with her friend Esther, while Tania was at home and Esther was sitting in her apartment two blocks away. Tania showed it to Sig, and he kind of got it, but he didn’t really seem to parse how the little dots and lines were supposed to be rodents and cats running through buildings.

  The best thing about Rat Race wasn’t the game itself. It was the pages it had where you could leave messages for each other. Like the August night when Esther told her about the meet-up at Arthur’s. Tania said she was on babysitting duty, but Esther pressed, with the best Esther enticements, and Tania caved. She woke up Sig, made him put on his shoes, and said they were going out for candy.

  That was a bad idea. Not just because there was rarely any candy at the corner stores, not just because it was after curfew, and not just because it was the hottest of a long summer of nights above 100 degrees. She knew all that before they left. What was really bad was that when they got two blocks from home, right around 11 p.m., the raid began.

  When they came out of Topo’s Grocery, each with a hand-wrapped chocolate drop in hand, Tania told Si
g they were going to stop by her friend’s place in the old office building. Sig pointed at the armored trucks rolling down the street, with their red and blue police lights spinning disco on the walls of the buildings. The men came out of the trucks, with guns and helmets, and ladders and wire cutters. They came to remove the network. They did not ask permission. They closed the streets and took over the neighborhood, four trucks per block, while they did it. The only explanation was that it was illegal. A violation of the Federal Communications Act. Tania and Sig were standing right there when Mr. Kingston, Mrs. Wilson, and rowdy Angie Brown came out and talked to one of the commanders. When Tania looked around, she realized there was a crowd of folks that had come out.

  She never figured out exactly how it got out of hand. Part of it definitely was when they detained old Mr. Kingston for asking too many questions. But for sure some of the boys in the neighborhood were looking for a reason to fight and took up the opportunity to extract some justice. When the first of the police trucks went up in flames, the riot got going in earnest.

  She tried to get Sig back to the apartment, using every secret route she knew, but she didn’t. He freaked out, broke loose, and ran—between people’s legs—like a crazy mini critter.

  Rat Race.

  Twenty minutes later, she was screaming, holding the little freak, trying to keep the bleeding under control with her hands and his balled-up T-shirt, the one with the picture of a moose on it. She held it hard against his stomach.

  They said it was a stray bullet.

  When they were at the hospital that night, Tania promised Sig she would never let anything bad happen to him again. No matter what stupid things he did, what trouble he got himself into, she would protect him. Even if she had to lock him in.

  The government sent a check two months later for $21,000 for what happened to Sig. His mother, Erika, showed up just in time to cash it. She gave a thousand to Mom, saying maybe they could use it to help rebuild the network.

  That night that Erika came back she was with two weird-looking dudes that Tania had never seen before. She said they had been in the country, planning. The guys didn’t say anything. Just looked really uncomfortable. They didn’t even spend the night, just grabbed Sig and the money and split.