Chapter Ten
NO VACCINE, NO PEACE!!!! Sheriff’s Office in Clark County has some according to insider eyewitness but no plan to distribute to the people! WTF!!!1 If I was WHITE like YOU, could I have my innoculation then, OFFICER??? [“unDead Amerikkka” electronic newsletter, distributed via email 4/9/05]
Men with machine pistols and brown baseball caps patrolled Terminal Two of McCarran international airport in Las Vegas. They moved in teams of two or three. One of them lead a pair of Doberman pinschers directly past where Bannerman Clark sat, waiting for the next flight to Washington.
“They don’t have any badges,” Clark observed to the man sitting next to him in the cocktail bar. He sipped at his ginger ale—a little sugar always helped with his jet lag—and watched one of the dogs shove his snout into a trash can. “No insignia. Is this new?” He had never been to Las Vegas before, and was only there now because it was the last airport in the West that hadn’t been overrun. A military helicopter had brought him that far but lacked the range necessary to get him to the Capital.
The businessman sitting next to him hunched his shoulders, wrinkling his tweed jacket and looked at Bannerman with some surprise. “This is the only city in a hundred miles that isn’t crammed full of dead maniacs and you’re worried about identification? They’re private consultants. We don’t ask a lot of questions about them, and you shouldn’t either. Excuse me, I have a flight to catch.” He dropped a five on the bar and hurried off.
Who had hired the private consultants? The mayor of the city? Organized crime? It wasn’t Clark’s jurisdiction. Yet when he finally arrived in Washington twelve hours later (after an unannounced layover in St. Louis where he was not allowed to deplane) he found more private consultants at Ronald Reagan, though at least these wore some insignia on the back of their flak jackets: KBR. A man in a KBR vest with a long, fluttering mustache checked his ID before he was herded into the baggage claim, even though he had no bags to pick up.
At least the driver of the car that picked him up at the terminal was military—a regular army corporal with a stubbled dimple on the back of his head. In Georgetown the corporal gave him a snappy salute and indicated the door of a building Clark had never seen before. It was not the same building where he’d met with the Civilian the first time, nor was it anywhere near the Pentagon. There was no sign on the door except for the street number.
Inside he found what must have been a cheap hotel at one point in its life-cycle. It had been converted into office space, the rooms on the first floor broken down into cubicles, but it took Clark a while to find anyone inside. Finally a man in a buttoned-down white shirt lead him to a conference room and knocked on the door. Inside the Civilian sat silhouetted before dust- and fly-specked Venetian blinds, a fresh box of Marshmallow Peeps on the table in front of him. “Mission creep,” he said, and stuffed one of the treats in his mouth.
Clark removed his cover and stepped forward. “I have something I’d like to show you,” he began, but the Civilian’s eyes didn’t move at all. He looked deep in thought.
“Mission creep,” he said again. “Powell Doctrine. A million Mogadishus.”
Clark stepped a half-step closer. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Bannerman,” the Civilian drawled. “I’m coming down from my afternoon dose of hillbilly heroin. I have a bad back, you see. A really. Really. Bad back.”
He did not ask Clark to sit down, nor were there any extra chairs in the office.
“It’s a shame about Los Angeles. And, uh, Colorado, right? Colorado. They had some nice scenery there. I really need to re-velocitize. Hold on. Marcy!” he shouted. “Not even an intercom in this office. Marcy! I need my pick-me-up!”
A young woman brought in a tray and set it on the desk. It held a glass full of ice and a can of Red Bull. The Civilian ignored the glass and drank straight from the can. “Good of you to come out, Bannerman. I appreciate the face time. Listen, there’s someone I need you to meet. You ready? Need to freshen up?”
“No, I—” Clark looked down at his briefcase. “With your pardon, though, there are some papers I need to show you. This is crucial material.”
“I know that, Bannerman. I heard what you said on the phone. Now come on. I’m counting on you for my dead cat bounce. Did you know you were the only military type to come out of Denver without losing a single troop?” He held up a hand for patience though Clark had not interrupted him. “It’s definitely a shame about Sanchez. Read all about her, wish I could have met her. Come on. The person we’re meeting for lunch will want to hear about your papers.” The Civilian rose from the desk and headed out the door. It was all Clark could do to keep up.
He protested a few times that they should really talk in private first but the Civilian just smiled. Clark played along—he needed the man. He needed the authorization to put together the last two pieces of the puzzle. He needed satellite time.
And he needed to find the blonde girl. She would have information that he crucially needed. She would be the answer he sought. She had to be.
They moved quickly through the maze of the dilapidated office building, weaving through rows of cubicles and passing through two steel fire doors. Finally they arrived at a corner office in the third floor of the building. A keycard reader had been installed hastily next to the door, the plaster underneath broken and crumbling. The Civilian swiped a card through the slot and they stepped inside.
An aged woman in an immaculate business suit rose from behind a desk and hurried toward them. Her face was so slack and bloodless that Clark reached for the sidearm that he’d left in Florence.
“I’m not dead yet, Captain,” the woman said, her mouth an unmoving slot in the middle of her face.
“Botox,” the Civilian whispered behind his hand.
“This is not a town that respects wrinkles, not anymore. Special Agent Purslane Dunnstreet,” she said, and took Clark’s hand. Her skin felt as dry as paper. “Welcome,” she said, waving one skeletally thin arm expansively, “to the War Room.”
Clark looked around at the office, a cluttered room maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Paper in every conceivable form filled the room, stacks of it on the carpet, rolled sheets like scrolls stuck into actual pigeonholes, bound volumes squeezed into overloaded metal shelving units. One wall was lined with dozens of old grey enamel filing cabinets. A row of laser printers sat on the floor by the window, wired to a beige desktop computer. Page after page rattled through their mechanisms, filling the air with the smell of baking toner, more paper being created by the second.
“Agent Dunnstreet, meet Bannerman Clark, my favorite metrosexual. Clark, Purslane here is an old spy, one of the original Cold Warriors. I’ve never met anyone who hates Communists more.”
“Jesus has taught me,” Dunnstreet said, her frozen eyes piercing the Civilian, “to hate the sin, not the sinner. Communism is a perversion, a sick compulsion of thwarted self-hatred. Communists are persons, and as persons they can be re-educated, re-oriented, brought back into the flock. Most of them. The fact that this country is longitudinally trending Republican should demonstrate that much.”
“Yeah… anyway… she’s been back here since the sixties. She was, what, NSA originally? She was funded all through the Reagan years and then got funded down under Clinton. Except nobody bothered to check if she was still here. She came in day after day, her very existence so heavily classified the Dems didn’t have a chance of rooting her out, and kept up her lonely vigil. After 9/11 she surfaced again, or at least she chose to remind certain well-placed individuals that she was still here. Her particular field of expertise appealed to the DHS and she was rolled up under Ridge and friends… now we’ve reached a kind of tipping point and she has become one of the most important people on the planet.”
Clark frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What exactly do you do?”
Dunnstreet folded her arms across her narrow chest. “I deal in abstracts, Captain, intangibles that I keep in a ledger book and next to them I copy down numbers, as I may. I’m a hypotheticals modeler, a what-if specialist. For the last forty years I have been positing one terrible scenario after another, and plotting ways to deal with them should they ever arise. In specific I have been imagining a land war fought on the territory of the United States. This is Warlock Green, my masterwork.” She gestured at the printers humming under the window. “These are the operational parameters and legal instruments necessary to win such a war. It is a fail-protected strategy that I stand behind one hundred per cent.”
The Civilian beamed. “Warlock Green is a protocol for the end of the world.”
