CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
I
’m old enough to remember when the Beltway was a highway, not a dike. Even then, there were miles that had to be elevated over low places that periodically flooded.
We lived in suburban Maryland when I was a child. I remember seeing on television the pictures of downtown Washington after Hurricane Hilda, with the Washington Monument and the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial all isolated islands. My brother and I helped our parents stack sandbags around our Bethesda house, but the water rose over them. Good thing the house had two stories.
That was when they built the George W. Bush Dam to regulate the flow of the Potomac, after Hilda. (My grandfather kept mumbling “Bush Dam...Damn Bush.) That really was the beginning of the end for the UniParty, a symbol for all that went wrong afterwards.
The politicos claimed they didn’t cause the water to rise—it was supposed to be a slow process, hundreds or even thousands of years before a greenhouse crisis. I guess they built the dam just in case they were wrong.
Then there were three hurricanes in four weeks, and they all made it this far north, so the dam closed up tight—and people in flooded Maryland and Virginia could look over the Beltway dike and see low-and-dry Washington, and sort of resent what their tax dollars had bought. Maybe what happened was inevitable.
Over the next decade, the dikes also went up around New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Miami. The Hamptons, Cape Cod. Temporary at first, but soon enough, as the water rose, bricked into permanence. While suburbs and less wealthy coastal towns from Maine to Florida simply drowned.
By the time the water got to rooftop level, of course all those towns were deserted, their inhabitants relocated inland, into Rehab camps if they couldn’t afford anything else. We spent a couple of years in the Rockville one, until Dad had saved enough to get into an apartment in Frederick. It was about as big as a matchbox, but by then we two boys had gone off to college and trade school.
I was an autodidact without too much respect for authority, so I said the hell with college and became a SCUBA instructor, a job with a future. That was after I’d been in the Navy for one year, and the Navy brig for one week. Long enough in the service to learn some underwater demolition, and that’s on my website, which brought me to the attention of Homeland Security, about a day and a half after the Bush Dam blew.
Actually, I’m surprised it took them that long. Most of my income for several years had been from Soggy Suburbs, diving tours of the drowned suburbs of Washington. People mostly come back to see what’s become of the family manse, now that fish have moved in, and it does not generate goodwill toward the government. They’ve tried to shut me down a couple of times, but I have lawyers from both the ACLU and the Better Business Bureau on my side.
I returned to my dock with a boatload of tourists—only four, in the bitter January cold—and found a couple of suits and a couple of cops waiting, along with a Homeland Security helicopter. They had a federal warrant to bring me in for questioning.
It was an interesting ride. I’m used to seeing the ‘burbs underwater, of course, but it was strange to fly over what had become an inland sea, inside the Beltway dike. The dam demolition had been a pretty thorough job, and in less than a day, it became as deep inside the Beltway as outside. They can fill up the collapsed part and pump the water out, but it will take a long time.
(The guy who did it called it “civil disobedience” rather than terrorism, which I thought was a stretch. But he did time the charges so that the flooding was gradual, and no one but looters drowned.)
Since I was a suspected terrorist, I lost the protection of the courts, not to mention the ACLU and the Better Business Bureau. They didn’t haul out the cattle prods, but they did lock me in a small room for twenty-four hours, saying, “We’ll get to you.”
It could have been worse. It was a hotel room, not a jail, but there was nothing to read or eat, no TV or phone. They took my shoulder bag with the book I was reading and my computer and cell.
I guess they thought that would scare me. It just made me angry, and then resigned. I hadn’t really done anything, but since when did that matter, with the UniParty. And not doing anything was not the same as not knowing anything.
The smell of mildew was pervasive, and the carpet was squishy. When we landed on the roof, it looked like about four stories were above the waterline. I couldn’t see anything from the room; the window was painted over with white paint from the outside.
Exactly twenty-four hours after they had brought me in, one of the suits entered through the hotel-room door, leaving a guard outside.
“What do you need a cop for?”
He gave me a look. “Full employment.” He sat down on the couch. “First of all, where were you—”
“I get food, you get answers.”
“You have that backward.” He looked at the back of his hand. “Answers, then food. Can you prove where you were when the dam was sabotaged?”
“No, and neither can you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Food.”
Yet another look. He stood up without a word and knocked twice on the door. The guard opened it, and he left.
A few minutes later I tried knocking, myself. No result. But the man did come back eventually, bearing a ham sandwich on a Best Western plate.
I peeled back the white bread and looked at it. “What if I don’t eat ham?”
“You left a package of sliced ham in your refrigerator on K Street. You ordered a ham sandwich at Denny’s for lunch on the twenty-eighth of November. I checked while they were making the sandwich.”
Now that was scary, considering where my refrigerator was now. I tore into the sandwich even though it was probably full of truth serum. “If you know so much about me,” I said between bites, “then you must know where I was at any given time.”
“You said that neither you nor I could say where we were when the dam blew.”
“No...you asked where I was when it was sabotaged. That could have been a week or a year before the actual explosions. The saboteurs were probably back in Albania or Alabama or wherever by then.”
“So where were you when it blew?”
“At my girlfriend’s place. It rattled the dishes and a picture fell off the wall.”
“That’s the tree house she’s squatting in, out in Wheaton?”
“Home sweet home, yeah. Her original apartment is kind of damp. She paid a premium for ground floor. Wrong side of the Beltway.”
“So we only have her word for where you were.”
“And mine, yes. What, you don’t have surveillance cameras out in Treetown yet?”
“None that show her place.”
I guess it was my turn to respond, or react. I finished the sandwich instead, slowly, while he watched. He took the plate, I suppose so I couldn’t Frisbee it at his head, take his keys and gun, subdue the guard, steal the helicopter, and go blow up the New York dike. Instead I posited: “If the saboteurs could have been anyplace in the world when it blew, what difference does it make where I was?”
“You weren’t in town. It looks like you knew something was going to happen.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really. We got a warrant, and a Navy SEAL forensic team searched your apartment.”
“Are my goldfish all right? Water’s kind of cold.”
“It’s interesting what’s missing. Not just toiletries and clothes, but boxes of books and pictures from the walls. Your computer system, not portable. All the paper having to do with your business. Your pistol and its registration. You moved them with four cab rides between your apartment and the Sligo dock, all two days before the Flood.”
“So I moved in with my girlfriend. It happens.”
“Not so conveniently.”
I tried to look confused. “That’s why you’re on my case. I’m one of the dozens, hundreds, of people who moved out of D.C. that day
or the next?”
“You’re the only one with underwater demolition training. On that alone, we could haul you down to Cuba and throw away the key.”
“Come on—”
“And you were already on a watch list for your attitude. The things you’ve said to customers.”
“The apartment was too expensive, so I got back my deposit and moved out. My girlfriend—”
“A week before the first of the month.”
“Sure. It was—”
“In a blizzard.”
“Yeah, it was snowing. No problem. Or the cabbie’s problem, not mine. We wanted to have Christmas together.”
“For Christmas, you just sort of boated through twelve miles of blizzard. By compass, for the fun of it.”
“Oh, bullshit. I just kept the Beltway to my left for ten-some miles and turned right at the half-submerged Chevron sign. Then about a hundred yards to a flagpole, bear left, and so forth. I’ve done it a hundred times. You try it with a compass. I want to watch.”
He nodded without changing expression. “One of the things we lost when the dam blew was a really delicate sniffing machine. It can tell whether you’ve been anywhere near high explosives recently. The closest one’s in our New York office.”
“Let’s go. I haven’t touched anything like that since the Navy. Four or five years ago.” I’d been in the same house with some, but I hadn’t touched it.
He stood up very smoothly, one flex, not touching the arm of the couch. I wouldn’t want to get into anything physical with him. “Get your coat.”
I got it from the musty closet and shook it out, shedding molecules of mold and plastic explosive. How sensitive was that machine, really?
He knocked twice, and the cop took us to an open elevator. The buttons under 4 were covered with duct tape. The cop used a cylindrical fire department key to start it. “Roof?”
“Right.”
“Where’s my stuff?” I said. “I don’t want to leave it here.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” He buttoned up his coat and I zipped mine up. We got out of the elevator into a glassed-in waiting area and went out onto the roof. There was no helicopter on the pad. Not too cold, high twenties with no wind, and the air smelled really good, almost like the ocean.
I followed him over to the edge. There was water all the way to where the horizon was lost in bright afternoon haze, the tops of a few building rising like artificial islands in a science-fiction world. Behind us, the Beltway, with almost no traffic.
“It’s quiet,” I said. Faint rustle of ice slurry below us. I peered over the rusty guardrail and saw it rolling along the building wall.
“They said ‘Power to the People.’ This isn’t power to anybody. It’s like the country’s been beheaded.”
I didn’t say that if you’re ugly enough, extreme cosmetic surgery could help. I might be in enough trouble already.
“Whoever did this didn’t think it through. It’s not just the government, the bureaucracy. It’s the country’s history. Our connection to the past; our identity as America.”
That was something Hugh was always on about. The way they wrap themselves in the flag and pretend to be the inheritors of a grand democratic tradition. While they’re really alchemists, turning the public trust into gold.
“Hugh Oliver,” he said, startling me.
“What about Hugh?”
“He disappeared the same time you did.”
“What, like I disappeared? I left a forwarding address.”
“Your parents’ address.”
“They knew where I was.”
“So did we. But we’ve lost Mr. Oliver. Perhaps you know where to find him?”
“Huh-uh. We’re not that close.”
“Funny.” He took a pair of small binoculars out of his coat pocket and switched them on. The stabilizers hummed as he scanned along the horizon. Still looking at nothing, he said, “A surveillance camera saw you go into a coffeehouse in Georgetown with him last Wednesday. The Lean Bean.”
Oh shit. “Yeah, I remember that. So?”
“The camera didn’t show either of you coming out. You’re not still there, so you must have left through the service entrance.”
“He was parked in the alley out back.”
“Not in his own car. It had a tracer.”
“So I’m not my brother’s car’s keeper. It must have been somebody else’s. What did he—”
“Or a rental?”
That much, I could give up. “Not a rental. It was clapped-out and full of junk.”
“You didn’t recognize it?”
I shook my head. Actually, I’d assumed it was Hugh’s. “Why did you have a tracer on his car?”
“What did you talk about?”
“Business. How bad it is.” Hugh’s a diver; not much winter work. Idle hands do the devil’s work, I guess. “We just had a cup of coffee, and he drove me home.”
“And what did you do when you got home?”
“What? I don’t know. Made dinner.”
He put the binoculars down on the railing and pulled out a little sound recorder. “This is what you did.”
It was a recording of me phoning my landlord, saying I’d found a cheaper place and would be moving out before Christmas.
“That was at six twenty-five,” he said. “When you got home from the coffeehouse, you must have gone straight to the phone.”
I had, of course. “No. But I guess it was the same day. That Wednesday.”
He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the middle distance. “It’s okay, Johnson.”
The big man slammed me against the guardrail, hard, then tipped me over and grabbed my ankles. I was gasping, coughing, trying not to vomit, dangling fifty feet over the icy water.
“Johnson is strong, but he can’t hold on to you forever. I think it’s time for you to talk.”
“You can’t...you can’t do this!”
“I guess you have about a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Can you hold on a minute?” I could see Johnson nod, his upside-down smile.
“Let me put it to you this way. If you can tell us where Hugh Oliver went, you live. If you can’t, you have this little accident. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because you don’t know, or because you refuse to tell. You’ll just fall.”
My throat had snapped shut, paralyzed. “I—”
“You’ll either drown or freeze. Neither one is particularly painful. That bothers me a little. But I can’t tell you how little guilt I will feel.”
Not the truth! “Mexico. Drove to Mexico.”
“No, we have cameras at every crossing, with face recognition.”
“He knew that!”
“Can you let go of one ankle?” He nodded and did, and I dropped a sickening foot. “Mexico returns terrorists to us. He must have known that, too.”
“He was going to Europe from there. Speaks French.” Quebec.
He shrugged and made a motion with his head. The big man grabbed the other ankle and hauled me back. My chin snapped against the railing, and my shoulder and forehead hit hard on the gravel.
“Yeah, Europe. You’re lying, but I think you do know where he is. I can send you to a place where they get answers.” He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Maybe I’ll go along with you. It’s warm down there.”
Cuba. Point of no return.
My stomach fell. Even if I knew nothing about Hugh, I knew too much about them.
They couldn’t let me live now. They’ll pull out their answers and bury me in Guantanamo.
Johnson picked me up roughly. I kicked him in the shin, tore loose, ran three steps, and tried to vault over the edge. My hurt shoulder collapsed, and I cartwheeled clumsily into space.
Civil disobedience. What would the water feel like?
Scalding. Then nothing.
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO “FOUR SHORT NOVELS”
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This is another “thousand years in the future” story, but its genesis was more specific than “For White Hill.” The French publisher Flammarion asked Robert Silverberg to put together an anthology of stories called Destination 3001, and he asked me for one.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 49
