by Fritz Galt
“Oh, sure,” he slurred, and waved her off.
“Look!” Jade cried out. “It’s Brad and Earl.”
May swiveled back to the television screen. Sure enough, two handsome young men were strutting onto the stage. To be honest she thought of Brad as handsome no matter what he wore, but she had never thought of Earl as handsome until she saw that shiny white tuxedo. What a fine figure of a man he cut, if only he wasn’t using those crutches.
Standing on a set of risers, the gaggle of governors prepared to pose for their group photo. Meanwhile, a piped-in recording played “God Bless America.”
The men and women looked distinguished enough. But none had the suave manner of the ruggedly handsome man at the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Brad began. “It’s good to see a crowd in front of me, for once!”
He was met by stunned silence. Maybe this was a magic act. May leaned forward to pay closer attention.
“So, is everybody having a good time?” He paused for a long time. “Up to now?”
Again, dead silence. She looked at Jade, who was trying hard not to laugh. May didn’t see what was so funny.
“I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing.”
Someone snickered, and May was offended.
“I know a lot of comedians try to act sincere when they say…” and Brad changed to a phony-sounding voice, “‘Hey, it’s really great to be here!’ But I want you to know that I really mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say…” and again he used the same phony-sounding voice, “‘Hey, it’s really great to be here!’”
She was so happy that he was happy. It was great to see him smile.
“You know the difference between a comic and a comedian?” he went on. “Comics say funny things. Comedians say things in a funny way. That makes me…an anthropologist!”
May turned to Sullivan. “It’s true. He is an anthropologist.”
But Brad seemed to be suffering on stage. “Take this routine, please.”
The governors’ picture-taking was over and they looked uncomfortable behind him. May glanced at her father. It looked like he was asleep during Brad’s big moment. She gave him another nudge with the toe of her boot.
“Ladies and germs,” Brad said.
She winced. He must have meant to say “gentlemen.”
“I want it known that I do do impressions. That is, I do impressions. I don’t ‘do do.’”
English was a tricky language.
“Okay, here’s my rendition of a baby chick. ‘Peep, peep, peep.’ Now for a baby chick running over hot coals, ‘Peep, peep, peep.’ Okay? Here’s a baby chick being eaten alive by a Rhodesian Ridgeback.” Again the same “Peep, peep, peep.” Brad stood back from the microphone and beamed. “Thank you very much. It’s a gift.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Earl.
“And my friend over here does a Scooter Libby impression.”
Earl dropped a crutch and waved at the crowd. Behind him, the governors looked as bewildered as the crowd.
Brad gave a distressed look and briefly consulted a paperback book that he was holding behind his back.
“Uh, my math professor is so fat, that when she sits around the classroom, she, uh, encompasses the entire arc of 360 degrees.”
The silence was deafening.
“Shoot, my brain just froze.” He checked his watch. “It must be getting near suppertime.”
Then the boos began.
Brad hesitated and looked across the stage at Earl, who gave him a significant glance.
The lights suddenly dimmed, and exotic Latin music filled the convention hall. The two friends on stage reached behind their necks and yanked forward. Their entire suits fell to the stage before them. Underneath, they wore nothing but bow ties and tiny pouches held in place by silk ribbons.
On cue, the two began a dramatic show of muscle, flexing every quarter of their bodies, front and back.
The women in the crowd shrieked. May leaned so far forward, the folding chair crumpled under her. A moment later, Sullivan was helping her back into her seat.
“Why are they doing that?” she exclaimed.
“Who cares?” came Jade beside her.
May couldn’t take her eyes off the screen, particularly her boyfriend’s fine physique. She had never seen him demonstrate his masculinity in quite that way before. It brought out increased screams of approval from the crowd.
Brad dipped left and touched his toes. Earl cast a crutch aside and reached over the round mound of his tummy to touch somewhere near his knees.
Then Brad locked his fingers and placed them behind his head. He flared his deltoids out and bounced his biceps up and down. His pectoral muscles were round and taut, his abdomen rigid as a washboard.
The other crutch dropped, and Earl locked his fingers together. The display of loosely moving tissue was impressive in its own right.
May scanned back to Brad, who was forming a discus thrower pose. The hills and valleys of his back rippled under the roaming spotlights.
Beside him, Earl availed himself of the opportunity to reach for one of his crutches.
Brad preened before the audience and strutted around in a circle, each leg taut, his thighs flexing nicely with every step. He reached the center of the stage and came face to face with his double, an overweight, short-legged, pasty-white figure with a cast.
The whistles that had initially driven Brad to new heights in his performance suddenly ended. As he stood face to face with his pal, the sparks in the air seemed to fizzle. He ventured a look downward. The audience was no longer in awe. In fact, they had tears in their eyes. They were laughing.
He turned to the soundman backstage and gave him an angry “Cut.” His exotic male review might have been undermined and emasculated by his good buddy, who was trying his hardest, but at least Brad had the crowd’s undivided attention, which he had nearly forgotten was his primary purpose for putting on the show.
The house lights came on and he made a desperate grab for the microphone. “My fellow Americans, we will have a slight change in our evening’s program. Due to new information recently uncovered by U.S. intelligence, there is no threat to our nation, and the governors assembled behind me will reopen their ports as of tomorrow morning. The crisis is over.”
The audience stared at him, confused.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our dear Governors Stokes and Walsh have fallen victim to a mind control scheme designed to ruin the American economy and to elevate Terry Smith to the presidency. In fact, these two governors are completely and unwittingly under hypnosis.”
He turned around and several women screamed with ecstasy.
“Governors Stokes and Walsh, will you please step forward?”
He turned back to the audience, but could hear the two men marching toward him in lockstep. He hoped that May’s father was paying attention and issuing telepathic commands.
“I will now demonstrate how these men have been manipulated through a combination of mental telepathy and negative reinforcement.”
From the stupefied look of the crowd, something was happening. Then he noticed that they weren’t looking at him. He glanced around. What was it?
The two governors, the smaller Stokes followed by the rangy Walsh, were goose-stepping around the stage, their fingers up their noses. Then, as if turned by an invisible hand, they reversed direction and began hopping backwards on one foot. They flapped their arms like birds. This stopped only when they reached the edge of the stage, in full view of the horrified governors. Then the pair of statesmen locked elbows and began a perfect grapevine dance back across stage.
“Stop!” some man yelled from the audience.
The spectacle was too frightening even for Brad to watch. But he needed it to go on. It had to continue until all America realized that a horrendous crime had been perpetrated against the entire country. The festive atmosphere had died and was replaced by sober reflection.
Brad rea
ched for the microphone.
“The embargo is lifted. Go back to your states. Open your ports. Inspect your incoming containers. The show is over, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow morning, when you pull your sorry selves out of bed, you will put on your business suits and uniforms and work boots and hard hats and g-strings and pasties, and you will show up for work. By the end of the week, President Nelson Burrows will have this country back in working order.”
He grabbed Earl, who had gathered up his second crutch. Together, the nearly nude pair walked off stage past the applauding governors.
Stokes and Walsh approached the microphone, and the shorter one began to speak. “I am gratified to announce that our state will open its port of entry to imports from all countries of the world. We are terribly sorry to have put America through this trying ordeal.”
Earl cast a sideways glance at Brad as they reached the stage curtain. “Nice muscles.”
“Er, nice crutches.”
Brad tried to focus on the future. He had climbed several rungs that evening. He had achieved what he needed to accomplish most. He had rescued May and restored the governors to sanity.
“Now we can follow Smith and Liang to Honolulu,” he told his friend.
“Now we can find something to wear.”
“Huh?” Brad looked around. “Where’s our stuff?”
“Good buddy, we left it on stage. Care to retrieve it?”
Owing to the surplus jet fuel stored in reservoirs under Nellis Air Force Base, the CIA plane was tanked up and ready to take off for Hawaii by the time Brad and friends arrived.
But as they lined up on the tarmac to board the plane, Sullivan pulled away from the group to wave goodbye.
Brad was surprised. “Don’t you want to help us expose Smith and catch Liang?”
“I can’t join you on this leg of the mission,” Sullivan said. “With all the states opening their ports, there will be countless logistical complications to attend to.”
“You don’t intend to fly to Hawaii ahead of us and set me up again?”
The corners of Sullivan’s black mustache quivered a moment, then he finally gave a dry laugh. Now that Brad could joke about his role in the Corral sting, all was forgiven.
Brad didn’t know how he was going to complete the mission, nor if he would even succeed. “I might need your help out there.”
“You’ve made it thus far,” Sullivan said over the sound of the engines firing up. “You can go all the way.”
Maybe it was the late hour bringing out his maudlin side, but Brad felt a surge of confidence sweeping over him. Never had he received such support from a person who mattered so much to him. And what Sullivan said was true. Brad had come a long way, from fighting off assassins on chairlifts, dodging trains at Beijing Station, scaling the ivory towers of academia, convincing the president, and exposing the mind control scheme that had paralyzed the nation. He could go all the way.
With a final heartfelt hug, he left his dad and climbed aboard the plane.
An hour later in flight high over the Pacific, he was ready for a much-needed rest. But he hadn’t fully debriefed May, and some questions still lingered. He tapped her on the shoulder and she stirred.
“So as soon as Liang caught you, he implanted a pain device in your brain?”
“This is what he explained to me,” she replied sleepily.
“We’ll have to remove it as soon as we reach a hospital.” But something else was bothering him. “So everything you did on that stage was programmed into you?”
“Absolutely.”
Brad breathed a sigh of relief.
Seated opposite them, Earl doubtless overheard their conversation. He turned to Jade. “Did you have an implant, too?”
Jade cupped her breasts. “You mean these?”
Earl looked uneasily across the aisle. “Not those. I mean the brain implant.”
“What brain implant?”
“Good.” Then Earl knit his eyebrows. “So everything you did on stage…”
She nodded bashfully.
“…was not…”
A crooked smile formed on her lips.
“…programmed into you.”
Her eyes pleaded for forgiveness.
“Cool!”
Chapter 40
Terry Smith took Liang in his chartered jet to Honolulu that evening. Before turning in for the night at his late brother’s hillside estate, he couldn’t resist a stroll through the grounds with Liang.
The walk ended up on the lanai with a magnificent view down the southwestern slope of Diamond Head volcano. A full moon and a galaxy of stars shined brightly over the glittering sands of Waikiki Beach. The Pacific shimmered to the south and bulged high beyond the city. Oahu offered him the perfect getaway, one he owed himself in his grueling campaign for the presidency.
He turned and lifted his champagne glass to his weary-looking friend. “I believe we’ve done it. The governors of all fifty states are behind me. America and China’s economies are in a death spiral. We’ll be toasting each other in the White House and Great Hall of the People by year’s end.”
Liang lifted his glass in acknowledgement, but said nothing.
Then Terry heard a frantic knock on the front door. He reentered the house and crossed the spacious living room to the foyer, where he opened the door. It was only Barney Boone.
“Turn on the TV,” Barney said at once.
“You’re my manager,” Terry said, unsure he could handle even more great news. “Tell me in person.”
“Everything has gone wrong,” Barney said, and wiped the sweat off his face. “The Las Vegas convention ended up a disaster. All the governors agreed to reopen trade.”
Terry exchanged accusatory glances with Liang. “How in the world did that happen?” he asked Barney.
“Apparently, two exotic male dancers came on stage and showed how Stokes and Walsh were under hypnosis or something, and they dehypnotized them.”
Barney crossed over to the television and turned it on. Sure enough, news clips replayed humble confessions by all fifty governors. They vowed to resume normal trade with the rest of the world. Terry watched in absolute horror.
“Liang!” He turned around for an explanation.
Liang stood in a corner brooding over his champagne. Shame was written all over his face. “I have to admit I lost the old man.”
“You lost Dr. Yu? How can one lose an old man? He is the key to our campaign strategy.”
“I didn’t exactly lose him. Bradley West kidnapped him.”
“Brad? How did Brad ever find you? You have a new identity and you’re traveling incognito and out of sight.”
Liang shrugged. “He has friends at the CIA.”
“Hell, the CIA doesn’t even know where bin Laden is. I can’t believe they’re the ones who found you. Tell me the truth.”
“Okay.” Liang spat out his confession quickly. “I knew that Bradley would pose the largest risk to our operation. So I got him to come to Las Vegas to rescue his girlfriend, where I would be able to shoot him. But for some damned reason, he moved and I missed. Then someone was firing back at me. I think I was set up.”
“You were caught in your own trap?” Terry couldn’t believe the sheer incompetence. Maybe he had overestimated his Chinese cohort. “And how did all fifty governors end up like this?” He pointed to the television screen and the contrite politicians.
“During the shootout, Bradley took control of the old man. Police had surrounded the building, so I had to escape without him.”
“So you didn’t lose the old man. You invited Brad to Vegas and handed him over.”
Liang’s face hardened. “I needed to use Yu to eliminate Bradley West.”
Terry began to pace the room. “Why put everything in jeopardy? Now we’ve lost every bit of leverage we had with the electorate.”
“Not quite.”
Terry stopped in his tracks. “What do you mean?”
Liang pointed out at the
peaceful ocean beyond the lanai. “You were not aware of this, but I had a backup plan. I wasn’t convinced that economic disaster would be enough for the People’s Liberation Army to take control of the Chinese government, and the PLA is my strong suit, my ticket to power. So I had the old man start something that he might not be able to stop.”
“What’s that?”
“A giant tsunami to hit the Pacific rim of China and America.”
Terry remembered the grass huts swept away in the Indian Ocean tsunami. “A tsunami?” he said with disgust. “A few hundred thousand dead. That’s all you’ll get.”
“No. I’ve projected millions dead in China alone. Perhaps a million in America as well.”
“But we have an early warning system,” Terry said. “People will evacuate the coastline before it hits.”
“I’ve taken care of that.”
At that point, Barney began to back out of the room. “I don’t think I ought to be hearing this.”
Terry had forgotten that his campaign manager was still present in the room. He softened his features. “That’s right. Forget you heard any of this. Get some sleep. It’s late. We were just fantasizing.”
Once Barney had left the mansion and the door was safely locked, Terry turned to Liang with newfound respect. “So, tell me how all this will work.”
All were asleep on the CIA jet except Brad when they approached Honolulu. Then something caught his attention. May was rising from her seat and brushed past him. As if in a trance, she advanced on the cockpit.
Brad sat up to watch. She opened the cockpit door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her. Was she sleepwalking? Didn’t she know that the lavatory was in the rear?
Surely she would run into the pilot and realize where she was. Since the captain was flying solo due to weight restrictions, he could probably use some relief behind the wheel.
Suddenly he heard a low, startled cry from the cockpit followed by a thump on the floor. Moments later, the plane’s pitch altered dramatically and they began to lose altitude. She must have pushed the wrong lever thinking she was flushing a toilet.
