“Welcome to the counterrevolution!” said Holt. “We are going to show your viewers at home what you weak-minded freaks are really made of.”
Sig rolled over and looked around. Moco was bound up and gagged the same way as Sig just a few feet away. Mongoose was offstage, hog-tied on the floor, next to the body of Dallas. Fritz was working in the booth at the barrel of a gun. Walker was behind Sig, trussed up to a swivel chair, with his arms tied behind the seat back and his legs tucked up under the seat. His shirt was drenched now, his skin chalky.
Behind Walker, the bodies of two young men, the Masques who had been with Fritz when the studio was captured, hung from the metal rafters by their legs, dripping blood on the floor as their bodies slowly swung in front of the American flag draped over the backdrop map.
“These skunks are real sneaky,” said Holt, walking between Sig and Moco. “But you can still smell them a mile away. Especially this one, who wandered in off the street, after he snuck across the border.”
Holt kicked Sig in the stomach. Sig swallowed back the bile that couldn’t get out through the gag.
“His buddy here,” said Holt, stepping over Moco, “is one of these little illegal gangbangers we found hiding in the bushes with a little boy.
“These terrorist runts came here to rescue their master, this suit who’s been stealing from the people. And who even had the nerve to take a wild shot at the national treasure who’s been helping us clean up this city of traitors. Come on out, Newton!”
Towns stumbled out of the shadows, pushed from behind. He wore olive coveralls and held a military pistol in his unsteady hand. He flashed his million-dollar smile when he saw the camera eye, but his eyes told the truth.
“Newton already cut two scalps today, and he’s just getting started,” said Holt.
Towns looked at the dangling bodies, and back at Holt.
“Ward Walker here,” said Holt, “is wanted for other crimes, too many to count—fraud, treason, money laundering, aiding the enemy, and even stealing from the enemy. He’s the one who’s been putting all the propaganda and filth out there out of this lawless zone, poisoning the minds of patriots, of our kids. So we’re going to make some new TV here. Let Newton Towns show you how he dispatches the bad guys in real life.”
Towns chambered his pistol and stepped over to Walker.
Sig heard a noise in the rafters. He looked up and saw Slider, crawling on the rails from which the TV lights and mics hung.
“Make him confess!” said Holt. “Just be careful if you take that gag off. His mouth is dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Towns said. He ripped the tape from Walker’s face, then used the barrel of his gun to draw out the necktie ball. Towns was crying again.
“Don’t,” Walker coughed, barely audible.
Holt smacked Walker in the side of the head.
“Give the people your admission,” said Holt.
Walker muttered. Sig heard the words love, hate, and America.
“He’s guilty,” said Holt. “A traitor. Dangerous. Deliver the verdict.”
You could see in his face how Towns coexisted with the camera. Inhabited its gaze.
Sig felt the broomstick start to give.
Towns lifted the gun up and looked at it. It looked polished and oiled under the lights. You could see the blue in the metal.
Towns pointed the pistol at Holt and shot him in the face.
CRACK.
Sig snapped the broomstick, just as Slider dropped from the ceiling onto Towns.
Holt staggered. Sig scrambled up and tackled him, low, in the knees. Holt couldn’t see but he was still fighting.
The ball gag came loose as they wrestled. Holt was stronger than Sig, but fading.
Slider came up with Towns’s pistol, aimed at Towns’s head.
“You rednecks better back the fuck off!” said Slider. “El Presidente won’t like it if we get to kill his pet movie star ’cause you guys couldn’t secure the building.”
The masked policeman backed away and signaled the guys in the booth with Fritz to follow him. They tried to take Fritz with them, but Sig, standing with Holt’s gun now, negotiated a better deal.
When they had the room under control, the camera was on Sig as he smelled the blood on his hands.
Part Ten
Tropic of Kansas
113
The troops pulled back when they found out about the rebels’ new hostage. Tania was in charge of interrogating the prisoner while they negotiated ransom and other terms.
They moved their headquarters to Walker’s station facility, which was between Bywater and Echo Sector. Tania survived the strike on the Church. Claude did not. Mom was going to be okay, and Tania was there when they took her away in one of the vans headed to the hospitals in Baton Rouge. The Colonel’s injuries were worse, and she would probably not be okay. Maxine Price was alive, at her side. She went on camera. Delivered a message. It lit it up.
They pulled the foreign news reports down off the satellite after Andrei went ahead and released the rest of the material to his contacts. Even the British were shocked.
The Kill List wasn’t just Americans, it turned out.
Nor were the beneficiaries of the movements of money recorded on the secret ledgers.
The firewall tightened up like a fisherman’s knot, but it was too late—the word was out there.
None of the techniques the wizards had taught Tania were necessary to get a movie actor to talk on camera. It was more about conventional deposition techniques, the kind of stuff you learned as a young lawyer. Ways to get self-impressed people to let out their glib.
That, and a little bit of Stockholm syndrome.
She used Socratic dialogue, clips from his movies, and material Andrei and the others pulled together to lead Newton through his on-screen reeducation. It wasn’t hard. While he wasn’t terribly bright, he had a particular gift for sensing the feelings behind the eyes watching him through the screen.
Newton’s father was an actor, too. A serious actor, and a serious radical, who had been a supporter of the prior regime. Newton let the parts he played dictate his politics, such as they were, and the deconstruction was weirdly pleasurable. For both him and Tania, you could tell. Except when she played the dissonant daddy clips and it looked like something was going to snap.
The truce talks broke down while the interviews continued. You could hear the gunfire while they talked on camera. Booms of artillery uncomfortably close. Newton looked kind of jumpy at times, which made it even better.
Then they got the idea to get him to read names out loud, off the Enemies List and the Kill List.
It wasn’t long after that they had to flee for the swamps.
114
The federal raid on Camp Zulu came on a Saturday night.
They came in armored cars and emerged in full riot gear. Boots on the ground, with masks on their faces.
One of the trucks was a corporate, loaded with killers who followed their own rules of engagement.
They came looking for terrorists.
They came to the right place.
A large number of the people they wanted were there that night, partying into the wee hours at the wedding of two of their number.
The boots and the trucks were not welcomed.
A group of teenagers started the fire when they dropped a homemade napalm bomb on one of the trucks.
The troops called it in and the rotor drones were there in two minutes, dropping gas canisters. The canisters made that noise when they hit the ground. Sounded hollow.
Clink. Clinkety-tink.
It was a new gas, designed to be nonlethal. It wasn’t. At least not in the peculiar atmospheric conditions of Camp Zulu and the Crescent City.
There were news cameras there that night. Nassra brought a bunch of French documentarians from TV Sezz who wanted to go slumming.
The footage of the kids with their eyeballs bleeding did not get much airtime domestically at first. But eve
ryone else in the world was watching. It got out there on the alternet, and then it broke into the back channels of the Feed.
Then Nassra got an interview with Maxine Price, as she was dying from the aftereffects. She told them what really happened in November, and why.
There were a few people who actually cared.
And a whole lot of people ready to tear shit up.
115
Tania liked to call it the March on Washington.
It broke out two weeks after they fled New Orleans.
She was in the group that got out in one of the boats. Walker was on there, and Andrei. They went to Matamoros, then overland to Juárez, where Walker had another border blaster that had a dual use as armory and barrack. The crew waiting for them called themselves the Chisos Mountain Boys, except for the ones who were girls. Walker called them saddle leather Valkyries.
They took in footage of the riots breaking out in the big cities, and shaky clips from the fighting in rural areas, and put it back out over the air, through the border blaster and the foreign press.
They watched through binoculars across the valley that afternoon when three battalions of the First Armored Division and a full brigade of infantry deserted. The deserters took over Fort Bliss. Then they occupied El Paso long enough for the company waiting on the other side to come over.
Tania’s crew went east through the empty expanse of the Transpecos, then north, up the I-35 corridor. She rode with Walker, in the Rover at first, until it broke down. Their convoy was more swarm than column, coordinated by distributed network connections rather than a centralized command. It made for more surprises, on both sides. Not to suggest there were only two sides. There were twenty, two hundred, or none, depending on how you counted.
She thought it would be scary. War. And it was. But it was also exhilarating, and less scary than when she first crossed over and betrayed the government. Now, like then, she convinced herself it was the only way she could truly fulfill her oath.
She helped Andrei with politics. She spin doctored for the network, missives from Max, inspirational aphorisms about the imminent rebirth of American democracy on a more authentically participatory model.
They followed an imaginary line through American mapspace they appropriated from the old fictions of Maxine Price. The original Tropic of Kansas. Walker said it was the line in our heads “where ingenuity runs into loco.” To Tania, it was about riding on the cresting wave of the revolutionary impetus—the same energy that fuels a rock band, or a start-up, or a new religion, or a new American idea—before it gets co-opted by peddlers and power trippers.
Maxine’s death was what the movement really needed, Tania realized. Maxine was right when she said the movements of the future only work without leaders, organized by their own network logic. And the Maxine they had found in the tower was no longer really capable of leading—even her messages from exile were barely coherent. Maybe that’s why they worked so well—as oracular koans to be situationally interpreted, like horoscopes for an ailing nation-state. In her death she became something more like an authentic prophet, and the spread of the news worked like religious revelation, the call to a new communitarian congregation.
Law and order broke down quickly. The population was ripe. It didn’t take much to light the fire in people weaned on myths of revolution and pent up with a century of media-induced numb.
It didn’t take much to light the fire in people covered in petrochemicals by the kleptocracy and told it was actually freedom.
Walker’s alternet was the sparkplug. Cells activated by test patterns, intelligence, and tactical plans shared through encoded spurts in the blanking interval. Until the feds took out the main relays and broke the network’s spine.
Then young rebels hacked the Citizen Emergency Alert network and filled it up with disinformation and misdirection until it broke.
Tania’s crew found sanctuary in Austin, which was already experimenting with distributed democracy. They set up camp and used it as a base of media operations for the movement. People from New Orleans and other cells were already there, and more came in their wake. That’s where they picked Sig’s trace back up.
Sig had stayed behind, occupying the occupiers while the others fled. With him were forty-seven bandits, his new buddy Newton Towns, and Nassra with her camera and uplink kit. When New Orleans was lost, they moved east into the ruins of Biloxi, then disappeared into the woods.
Sig, it turned out, was just the exemplar people needed to fill the vacancy left by Maxine. The replacement of talk by action.
They hijacked a C-130 in Mobile. They flew it to Wichita, loaded with explosives that took out the main build hangar of the Boeing drone factory. They gathered new forces by liberating Leavenworth—first the five hundred military convicts at the Armed Forces Disciplinary Barracks, then the two thousand political inmates at the federal penitentiary down the road. In Kansas City they broke open the vaults of the Federal Reserve and distributed the contents on the streets. They moved fast through territory depopulated by drought, depression, and robotized agribusiness. Lands that thought they were protected by their importance to Mack’s regime and their relative obscurity.
Sig’s band killed the robots when they saw them along the way, and rogue makers followed in their path, harvesting the remains to be repurposed as counterdrones.
Government missiles took out the bridges across the Mississippi, so they forded it in big, slow barges that made easy targets. They lost half their people that day but found new cells self-activated and autonomously engaged on the other side, all up and down the economically decimated swath of the Ohio River Valley. The bands from Chicago were even more lethal, when they came down out of the high-rise projects ready to retake their own streets and then move east.
Appalachia was the real bulwark of federal power. The rebel armor got bogged down there, and the loyal divisions and agency forces radiated out from D.C. implementing defense plans developed and refined over 250 years of official paranoia. The autobots owned the roads, the skyways, the streets, and the networks, maintaining order along the eastern seaboard with inhuman mechanized tactics—deploying derivatives of algorithmic machine processes developed to manage massive livestock operations, remixed with surveillance and interception operations brewed in far-flung theaters of asymmetrical warfare.
When the robots started developing their own new models, it got weird fast.
Tania saw the footage when Tracer’s cell was fighting for a BellNet network node in suburban Atlanta, and the thing came up out of the ground, like a giant octopus made out of chain saws. She turned her head the first time, but they made her watch it again to confirm ID. Tracer’s head rolling onto the green office park turf, some life still visible in his eyes before the footage cut.
Tracer was an early indicator of how things would go that penultimate week of the push.
116
They captured Sig when they burned the rebels out of the woods around the Occoquan Reservoir, east of Manassas and the battlefields of another civil war, where the waters of the blue hills found their way into the Potomac and on to the ocean. It was the first time a private country club with adjacent gated communities had been napalmed. The ground troops moved in from all directions behind the fires, accompanied by combat bulldozers and little motion-seeking drones that saw every stray dog, deer, or naked ape moving through the scraped battlescape.
Tania saw it live from their bunker. Andrei was there, and Walker, and even the Colonel, who had mostly recovered from her injuries. Fritz was there, too, and he kept them online as best he could. They were losing, and you could see it in the long faces hollowed by the yellow lights of the concrete cave.
They locked Sig and the other survivors in the brig at Quantico. There weren’t that many survivors. They had resisted too hard, and too long, for that.
Newton Towns was one of the survivors, but they kept him hidden.
The brig at Quantico was famous as the place where the Re
agan assassin had died under mysterious circumstances, way back in 1981. Since the attacks it had grown into a little gulag where temporary detention of dissidents for questioning turned into interminable extraconstitutional imprisonment. Most of the detainees were political types singled out in the Executive’s periodic Beltway purges. Sometimes pictures of the brig 2.0, a windowless metal building behind a thirty-foot-high sharpened fence, showed up on the network. Tania had been there once for training, back in the day that seemed so long ago now, even though it wasn’t. It was the place where they refined the particular type of enhanced interrogation techniques best suited to making journalists reveal their sources, and dissidents to name their fellow travelers. The guys in charge called it the Hotel. The D.C. streets called it the building where no one can hear you scream.
Sig was not a screamer.
So they trotted him out for public humiliation. General deterrence. Right out there on the runway where they bring in the planes with high-value detainees from other parts of the country. They invited cameras. Loyal network cameras. They even invited a few popular bloggers and commenters known for unwittingly relaying the State’s unofficial fear meme with tabloid enthusiasm.
The counterrevolution would be televised.
The official narrative was this:
The man the streets knew mainly as “the Minnesotan” was an enemy combatant of unknown citizenship. They did not know his true name. In military and intelligence operations, Tania knew, representatives of the State frequently referred to him by the code name “Nomad.” But for the public they called him Enemy Fighter N174. The Feed Nets went along, mostly, their producers well trained in the things you have to do to keep your access to the information that keeps eyeballs on and advertisers up. They talked about the different theories of Sig’s background—that he was incubated in some foreign training camp, raised as a kind of superterrorist, or that he was a sleeper agent raised in America by alien spies who trained him from birth in service of his mission of destroying America. They explained how the entire rebellion by the “anticonstitutionalists” was in fact a campaign sponsored by foreign powers to destroy our way of life.
Tropic of Kansas Page 32
