The Army of the Republic: A Novel

PART I

THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

Television is the closest thing we’ve got to God in America, an all-present eye that creates the world, ceaselessly and seamlessly, twenty-four hours a day. A comic book bible made of light; they build their phony universe with pictures, pictures, picures!

Business figure John Polling was shot to death today outside a Seattle apartment building.…

A visual of an ambulance in the black drizzly cavern of television night, a cordon of hard-eyed cops, a dead body under a sheet.

Yes! Tonk shoots his fist into the air, does a few quick struts across the living room. "Check it out, America! The big man goes down!"

It’s kind of awesome to see the divine stamp of Big Media imprinted on our sketchy little lives. Lilly, Sarah, and Kahasi say nothing, sit uneasily with their tea and toast. People are frightened by large moving objects, and an assassination is a very large object, moving very fast.

But not fast enough to scare Tonk. Handsome football hero Tonk spins away from the screen and cups his hand to his ear. Hear that popping, everyone? That’s the sound of champagne corks hitting the ceiling in every state of the Union!

Shut up, Tonk! Sarah says, I’m trying to watch this!

Tonk … I trail off. I’m in a quiet mood, tarnished by the long night and that last image of Polling’s girlfriend screaming her lungs out as she looked down at his body. I’m having trouble making this all lie flat. We did something horrible to someone who deserved it. It’s nothing to celebrate.

Polling had been visiting Seattle on business, says the news gal, and we all snort at that one. She follows it up with a couple of euphemisms about his career. Financier, she says, Controversial modernizer of public—

"Try swindler,"Sarah spits at her. Criminal! Murderer!

Not exactly a room full of sympathy for John Polling. Polling was a man who’d gotten everything he wanted. He’d feasted on the war and let the People pick up the tab, bought out public assets at a fraction of their value. He had deals with everybody worth owning and a small enterprise of lawyers and PR flacks who cut the water in front of him like the bow of an icebreaker. He was a master con man. He beat every rap. He was bulletproof.

Metaphorically, at least. When his goons clubbed an organizer to death in a Boston parking garage eight months ago, the clock started ticking on John Polling.

Ms. Blah Blah goes on: The assassination was claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Army of the Republic.

That’s right! Tonk cries. Corporates, meet the Army of the Republic.

On the screen, Polling’s body is being carried to the ambulance yet again in a flash of blue strobe lights. At the bottom of the screen, the crawler’s giving the latest entertainment news: PARAMOUNT SIGNSPITT FOR REMAKE OF HIGH NOON!

Tonk looks at his watch. Eight-oh-one, Lando. Where’s the hack?

Chill, Tonk, I say. Your watch is fast.

We watch another fifteen seconds, and then Tonk erupts again: Hack on!

The crawler at the bottom of the screen has changed now. The show biz news had given way to a communiqué hacked in by our IT group.

JOHN POLLING FOUND GUILTY OF CORRUPTION THEFT RACKETEERING AND MURDER. SENTENCE CARRIED OUT BY THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. FOR DETAILS GO TO WWW.ARMYOFTHEREPUBLIC.ORG.RU.STAND UP FOR YOUR COUNTRY!— PEACE JOHN POLLING FOUND GUILTY OF—

One thing they know now, I announce. They’re not dealing with amateurs.

I think of Gonzalo in his electronic cave, watching our message shimmy across Polling’s fake obituary in blue-screen blue. Tens of millions of our e-mails are ripping away to mailboxes all over the country from servers in Russia, Brazil, Estonia. Our site will be frantic now, all the busy bees of the Internet clicking into the chronology of Polling’s whole stinking career, with every charge leveled against him and which strings he pulled to beat it. This time, we’ll be the ones telling the story, not the Corporates. I hope McFarland is catching this.

We’re on the crawler a good three minutes before the network techs break through our hack. The basketball scores start playing under the footage of Polling’s shocked widow ducking into a limousine. She’s trying to hide her dazed expression, but the cameramen crowd in and turn her reddened eyes into entertainment. I flash on some imagined Thanksgiving dinner, a young John Polling holding a little boy in pajamas, and then those useless second thoughts that keep skating in and out of my head start coming back. They disappear when Polling returns, waving triumphantly at the cameras in front of an American flag. Yeah, that’s the man.

Here comes the mockumentary.

They start in with more footage about Polling, showing him climbing the stairway of a private jet and standing in front of his corporate logo. A few shots of construction machinery with army tanks nearby, then the pipelines and highways that illustrate his privatization of the Philadelphia water system and the Ohio Turnpike. A shot of him shaking hands with the president. No word about the organizer his security force had murdered, only the inevitable network cheap shot from a think-tanker with spectacles and a pale, sappy complexion. Susan, we have unconfirmed reports that the terrorists shot Mr. Polling in nonlethal areas like the knees and groin first to inflict maximum suffering before they killed him. In essence, it looks like John Polling was tortured to—

That’s a lie! I shout. Goddamn them, that’s a lie!

Everyone looks at me and I can see by their alarm that I shouldn’t have gone off. I’m the guy who never goes off, but I haven’t slept in two days and things feel distant one second and then suddenly raw and infuriating. Sarah stands up and puts her hand on my shoulder. Let them sell their crap, Lando. Because you know what? They’re running out of buyers.

I look at Sarah, with her long curly brown hair and her cashmere sweater. In another life she’s a career girl, busting balls for the networks. In another life she’s a model. But not this life. Let’s go, you guys. We need to set up for the meeting with the DNN people.

Tonk and Sarah drop me off at the Transit station and go on to the funnel. I catch my image in an empty window, surprised to see myself with short blond hair, a smooth white chin where my black beard used to be. That owlish face above the sports jacket. Too much waiting, too much adrenaline. I close my eyes and suck in the cool Seattle mist, try to expel John Polling in one long breath.

It doesn’t last long. At the station the big screen’s playing sanitized Greatest Hits from the life of America’s most successful criminal. Innovator. Water Entrepreneur. Billionaire. AW running into the career-topping Gunned Down by Terrorists! The Blue Wave howls through the tunnel.

At the Pike St. stop little knots of people gather around the monitors with slack mouths and upturned faces, getting their dose of phony scripture from another think-tanker. I catch fragments of his speech as I pass each screen. Don’t know who this Army of the Republic— name of convenience— established terrorist groups— Jefferson Combine— the American people— The reason God banned graven images: he knew people would confuse pictures with reality, and that men would use them to create a lying vision of the world. God sure called that one.

A couple of Whitehall boys manning the tollbooth, staring up with a smile at the Hammer on his morning TV rant. The Hammer looking good in his Harley T-shirt and tattoos—a Fascist for the youth crowd. "Army! Get real! This is three or four bleeping amateurs who pop out and sissy-punch somebody, then crawl back and hide under their mama’s skirts."

I smile and keep moving. I guess he hasn’t seen the hack.

This is the riskiest kind of meeting, between a surface group and us. They reached us through Lilly, who roomed with one of the DNN organizers at the UW. The two had kept up, and I told Lilly to drop a very discreet hint to her friend that she had some connections with people who knew people. Three days ago the DNN decided to click on the link.

Everybody is in place now. My sunglasses are on. Today I’ve gone Youthful Professional, which is less invisible than guy-in-a-sweatshirt but an easier sale to authority figures if there’s anything to explain.

I take up my first position at a coffee shop across from the Borders bookstore, get a triple shot to travel and dump in a few packets of sugar. Within a few minutes the contact comes fluttering down the street in her red neck-scarf and her Nordstrom shopping bag. Past the store windows and their Halloween themes, paper jack-o’-lanterns grinning at her gal out shopping disguise. We’re all in costume here. She turns into the Borders, and I wait for confirmation.

Our part goes perfectly. Sarah does a bump pass and disappears. Kahasi picks up the DNN person a minute later exiting the back entrance, as instructed in the note. She’s heading for the newsstand at the Pike Place Market, where Tonk has stashed the directions in the back copy of Model Railroader magazine. The contact looks conspicuously inconspicuous as she pulls it out, takes a big obvious scan of the area, stuffs the directions into her pocket then disappears into the labyrinth of stairways and corridors of the market. A minute later she pops out the back and heads down the stairs to the water. The funnel. Kahasi watches from the pier as she walks five blocks north. She’s clean, he says.

She turns into a restaurant and Sarah is waiting for her in the bathroom, checks her pockets and her clothing. The text comes in over my phone, CLEAN.

I start the car and pull up in front of the restaurant as she walks out. I roll down the window. Always nice to meet another model railroading fan. Need a ride?

She’s prettier than her picture, with black hair and dark eyes set above a slightly long chin. A handsome, resolute sort of face, but looking quietly freaked at the moment. Yes, please.

I unlock the passenger door of the Toyota and she climbs in. I smile at her. I’m Lando. We shake hands; then I reach down to the floor of the car and give her a big floppy hat and a black satin sleep mask. Put on this hat and this mask, please, then lean back and pretend you’re sleeping. No peeking.

We make a few turns and then approach the tollbooth at 1-90. Privatized last year to cover the deficit. I flip a dollar into the basket. Click. Get it while you can, fuckers.

We cruise along without speaking and I find myself listening to the sound of the transmission revving upward to the next gear change, then starting at a lower pitch and revving up once more. A comforting machine noise that makes things normal. We’re on a straight part of the highway and I can’t help taking a moment to scope out her body, which, from the corduroy legs sticking out from beneath her red raincoat, is a rather pleasing one. Need more data. Her wavy black hair is falling across her shoulders, with one little strand dyed purple. Armenian? Italian? She reminds me a little of Lilly, but less flower child.

So, I said, "you’re Emily Cortright. You live at the Apex, downtown, Seattle’s favorite communal apartment building. You graduated from the UW in Environmental Sciences then did a two-year stint at cooking school—interesting—then you abandoned the food service industry for law school at Lewis and Clark. You’ve been organizing at the DNN three years and two months. Which brings us to the one burning question that jumps out at me from your bio."

And that is …

Do you do Thai?

I see her mouth curl into a smile below the black circles of the sleep mask. Everyone does Thai now, she says. The new thing is Coastal Peruvian.

I like her voice. There’s something very calm about it, sweet, almost old-fashioned. Okay. Excellent. I’m glad I know that. If we ever need an event catered, you’ll be my first phone call.

Thanks. And you are …

I’m sorry, Emily, but at this point the ‘getting to know you’ part has to be kind of one-sided. Not that I don’t trust you, but these days you never know when information is going to become a liability.

Her voice firms up. Well, who do you represent?

And you need to know that because …?

Because I was sent to make an offer and I have to know who I’m making it to.

I wonder for a second what McFarland would want me to answer. I represent the Army of the Republic.

Oh, she says softly. It’s quiet for a minute.

I pull off in Bellevue and make my way toward Sarah’s apartment. We’ve selected it carefully, a ground-floor one-bedroom right next to the underground parking garage that we can move things and people discreetly into and out of. I park right by the door and ask Emily to keep the mask on. We’re through Sarah’s door in less than ten steps. The apartment itself has been purged of anything remotely political. No Malcolm X posters, no heavy theory by troublemakers like Chomsky or Klein. A few canned photos of ballet slippers and nature scenes hang on the mostly empty walls, and the bookcase is heavy with mindless historical romances we picked up from the Salvation Army for a nickel each. It’s an environment that you forget as soon as you turn your head. Her computer’s loaded with a decoy memory card filled with Web sites about self-improvement and eating disorders. Not a trace there of the real Sarah, a survivor of the Earth Liberation Front who watched her eco-vandal compañeros get hard time as terrorists and decided to step it up a notch. The orga covers the rent, along with three other houses and apartments around Seattle. The rest of us have to keep our day jobs. Emily looks around as I close the door behind us. I catch her staring at me.

You were expecting the guy with the flat-top, right? USMC tattooed on his biceps? Or the guy with hair down to his shoulders and pierced everything.

You’re just so …

Young Corporate? I loosen my tie and take off my jacket. I can only aspire. She laughs, a good sign.

She takes off her raincoat, and I have to admit that I can’t help but enjoy that small moment of undressing. She’s wearing a ribbed white turtleneck and her red silk neck-scarf, and she’s covering up her chest and waist with some sort of Guatemalan vest. She’s long-limbed and robust. I can hear Tonk saying Mamacita! in my head, and shutting him up brings me back to the cool calm Revolutionary mind-set that has to be. We’re professionals here, right?

Can I make you some tea? Root around in the fridge for something edible?

I’m okay, thanks.

I move to the kitchen and open up the cupboard. Are you sure? We’ve got Bi Luo Chun green. The label says it’s grown on a single island in the middle of a lake in China. Or here’s Lipton. Very exclusive—it only comes from several huge warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey.

She acquiesces and sits down on the beat-up sofa as I putter away. I entertain a brief fantasy of blowing off this whole meeting and just riffing with her about how bizarre and ironic life is. Instead, I bring her a mug of tea and a biscotto, then half sit in front of her, resting my butt on Sarah’s desk.

She looks down into the cup. I can see her fumbling for an opening. You’re really from the Army of the Republic? she says, then there’s that uncomfortable shifting of facial expressions. Is it true your organization killed John Polling?

I don’t blame her for being squeamish. You feel sorry for him, don’t you? I shrug. So do I. He was a human being. Somebody’s father, somebody’s husband. But, let’s do a brief postmortem of the man before we get too nostalgic. He made his first fortune fleecing taxpayers on the war, then used his political connections to develop supposedly protected wetlands in the Everglades. His next stage of self-actualization was to borrow money from the federal government to take over the public water supplies of most of the mid-Atlantic seaboard, resulting in increased rates and reduced water quality—

I worked on the DNN Water Project for a year. I’m totally familiar with that.

Good. Then you probably know that racketeering charges were brought against him four years ago and he beat them on appeal to a court stacked with his cronies. And that last February he was linked to security agents that murdered Jeff Lansing, an antiprivatization organizer, but was never prosecuted because the Justice Department dropped the case.

I know about Jeff Lansing.

She says it as if there’s nothing more to add about him, and that annoys me a little. I say, very slowly, Polling’s thugs beat Jeff Lansing until his eyeballs exploded. She flinches a tiny bit. You know why they did it?

Why?

Because they wanted to send a message to people like you.

She’s quiet for a few seconds, then recovers. So the Army of the Republic really did kill him?

I take a deep breath. The Army of the Republic judged John Polling and executed a sentence on behalf of the American people. But let’s move on. You’re the one who sent the Bat-Signal. What’s up?

She shifts positions so that she doesn’t dissolve quite so much into the spongy couch. We want you to declare a cease-fire.

I take in the idea and grin. Is that all?

She stumbles on into her pitch. I don’t mean just you, personally, I mean all of the militants. Democracy Northwest feels that Americans are decisively against this government and they’re ready to stand up to it. They’re sick of the corruption and the wars and they’re sick of watching their whole country get parceled out to Big Business.

Seen your Web site already, Emily.

Sorry. She flashes a coy little smile at me. I didn’t realize that only one of us is licensed to diatribe here. That takes me by surprise. A pretty bold cut: I like her. She brushes a curl of black hair off her forehead and rolls right on. But my point is, Americans are tired of this Administration and they’re ready to act. If they ever had a majority, they’ve lost it.

Yeah! I rub my scalp, massaging out a little stab of caffeine headache at my temple. You’re right, Emily: They have lost their majority. The problem is, you don’t need a majority to control this country. You need maybe thirty percent, because forty percent of the people won’t act. They’re equally happy with a dictator or a president as long as you don’t take away their guns or cut off their last little trickle of gasoline. That leaves thirty percent who might actively oppose you, and you’ve got the entire security and media apparatus to attack them with. It’s like that in every country in the world.

She tilts her head toward me. That’s a pretty unforgiving analysis.

It’s an accurate analysis. I put my cup down so I can make my point better. "I mean, I wish every cop that fired on a demonstration would suddenly say, ‘Hey! These guys are right! I’m not going to shoot that kid in the face with a rubber bullet because he doesn’t want to see the last redwood get axed! I’m not going to club that old man whose pension got ripped off!’ I mean, I really wish I could believe that this whole country would rise up because of their democratic ideals and sweep these fuckers away. But I’m a student of history, Emily, and I’m a member of the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now. And in that Church, thirty percent call the shots. It’s our thirty percent against their thirty percent."

Her eyebrows come together. So you think you’re going to fight a guerrilla war and defeat them militarily?

"No! They’ve got the Pentagon, for Christ’s sakes. Our strategy is, you go straight to the top. You take down the brain of the machine, the guys who are getting all the benefits. The open and notorious crooks like John Polling. You punish them for their crimes, you mess up their toys and their tools, and maybe that lazy, numbed-out forty percent in the middle starts to see the Boss-man isn’t so untouchable after all, and they say, ‘Hey, aren’t these the guys that ripped off my pension and got my kid’s leg blown off in the last oil war? Who put them in charge?’ And I’ll tell you: Nothing will bring down a government faster than when Uncle Joe and Aunt Sally and Jim Bob from the hardware store show up on Main Street with their Masonic rings and their beer guts hanging out and say, ‘Get the fuck out of my government!’"

She answers slowly, picking her words carefully. I have the same hopes you do, Lando, but I’m not sure your methods can achieve it.

I’m pacing back and forth now, sweating a little bit from the tea. "You don’t think there’s a hundred million people out there trading high fives at the water cooler because Polling got what he deserved? I mean, sure, a lot are probably saying, ‘Oh, I don’t approve of their methods!’ But down in that Old Testament part of the brain, way down there where lightning bolts still reach out of the sky and strike down those who transgress, people need justice! We are that lightning."

She doesn’t answer, and I feel a little silly standing up in front of her. I sit down on the floor, knees folded up and my back against the wall. Aside from everything else, she’s still a woman around my age and we’re all alone in this room and the intimacy comes flooding over me every once in a while.

You say you’re the lightning, she says after a bit, but lightning doesn’t form institutions and it doesn’t put Uncle Joe in a mailgroup and tell him when, where, and why the demonstration is going to be. And without that, Uncle Joe doesn’t hit the streets.

I nod from my crunched-up position, push back my newly short hair. I can see why she’s the number three person at the DNN. I grant you that point. What does that have to do with a cease-fire?

Now she stands up, comes to rest on the arm of the couch, looking down on me. The harem girl disguise is gone; she’s all lawyer. The Government’s using Terrorism to legitimize themselves. You know that. It’s a package for them: Islamic fundamentalists and groups like yours. They lump you together in their propaganda and they present themselves as the only alternative to chaos.

People don’t believe that crap!

They don’t have to believe it one hundred percent; they just have to believe it enough to stay on the sidelines. This struggle is a war of narratives, Lando, and you don’t control the narrative. They do. They’ve got the reach and the repetition, and you’re Brand X. I start to object but she rolls over me. "We need a wide movement based on a simple fundamental idea with high symbolic value, and that idea is vote. Not an Internet vote, or an electronic vote, but a real vote, with paper ballots, counted one at a time. That’s something everybody in America can understand."

That’s a plausible argument.

She softens up a little. And it would be extremely helpful if the militant groups like yourselves and the Jefferson Combine issued statements that they were going to put down their arms and work peacefully for change. I think that could have a profound effect on people. And it would take a card out of the Government’s hand.

The headache’s pulsing again and I push on it with my fingertips. Okay. Sounds great. But what’s your strategy when the Regime starts shucking and jiving?

She leans forward, and her voice gets harder. The government exists by the consent of its people. Right? We take back our consent. We stop cooperating in the thousand ways that the government and its backers need cooperation. We do general strikes. We boycott. We inform and organize. We go into the streets and shut cities down. We challenge them head-on with the full weight of the American people behind us and we don’t quit until the Administration crumbles. In other words, we get Uncle Joe into the street.

Just Seattle?

She becomes less certain. We’re working with groups in Boston and New York, too. That part has just started coming together.

I don’t say anything. The truth is I’ve kept our link to the DNN live for exactly this reason. No underground group can be effective without a much larger surface group to exploit its psychological gains. Revolutions are always essentially political, rather than military. That’s what Mao and Ho understood, and what Chiang Kai-shek and General Westmoreland never did. India, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Poland, East Germany, Russia. They all booted out their tyrants without firing a shot. I suspect that Emily Cortright is no stranger to history.

She clears her throat. I see the awkwardness come back into her face. Lando, I’m sorry, but I have to ask you again: How many people do you really represent? I mean, I’d never even heard of the Army of the Republic until a few hours ago. But, I mean … is there someone else I should talk to? Is there any sort of central committee of militant groups?

I stand up and fetch her empty tea mug from the table, throwing out an answer from the kitchen sink and winding it through the living room as I come back to face her. Outside of the East Coast, the militant groups are pretty much autonomous. There is no central council or chain of command. This isn’t like the Montoneros or the PLO. Nobody can snap their fingers and get you a cease-fire. She looks disappointed. That being said, I can probably touch base directly or indirectly with most of the West Coast groups. Just realize that nobody’s in charge of this movement. Everyone does what they see fit in their own eyes. Like in the Book of Judges. ‘At that time there was no King in Israel, and each man did as he saw fit in his own eyes.’

The Book of Judges?

You know, after Joshua, before Samuel. The twelve tribes each doing their own thing in the Promised Land. That’s where the Resistance is at now.

She looks at me quizzically, like she’s trying to figure out exactly which flavor of fanatic I am. Are you, uh … Do you read the Bible a lot?

I play it off. It puts me to sleep. And when you have insomnia, that’s a very good thing. She nods but doesn’t say anything. And you’re thinking I can’t sleep because my conscience bothers me.

No, actually I was thinking about a class on the Old Testament I took at the UW. What did you study in college?

Who said I went to college? Her face stiffens, and I feel like a moron. I’m sorry. Little factoids like what obscure topic I studied in college are the kind of thing that can make a profile snap into focus. Nothing personal. I’d like to tell you, actually. I wish we could just sit here for hours and talk about books and movies and where we grew up.

A deeper truth there than I like to admit, neatly put on display by the cluttered silence it brings over the room. I hand her the sleep mask. I’ll take you back now.

We get into the car and she leans her head against the seat so that her hair spills down over the blue upholstery of my late-model utterly un-rememberable Japanese sedan. I take a different route back, a longer one, avoiding the highway, not so much for security reasons as to spend a little more time getting to know her. That’s part of my job, after all. It’s noon now, and I imagine the news about Polling is mostly out, except for the mistress, which will be a great new plot twist for tomorrow. We discuss a few details of the DNN’s timeline; I implore her again about proper security precautions. Then we do chat a bit about books, about her favorite artist, Marie Cassat, and mine, Caravaggio. As we reach downtown I tell her she can take off her sleep mask and that I’ll drop her a few blocks from her apartment. We continue north toward Belltown and the conversation seems to run out, which disappoints me a little. She’s silent for a time.

So, does it bother you at all?

It comes out of nowhere but I know what she means. Canceling John Polling’s account? I didn’t say I was the one that did it.

Your organization did it.

My throat feels heavy and I can hear a slight strain in my voice.

We didn’t kill John Polling, I say. The People of the United States killed John Polling.

She starts to frame a reply but leaves it there. We get a few blocks from her house and I pull over to the curb. She opens the door a few inches then stops. Well, it’s nice meeting you, she says. Like the end of a first date.

Yeah, you, too. I’ll be in touch. Give me a couple of weeks. I feel almost like leaning over to give her a kiss. Instead we find ourselves looking at each other for a few seconds too long. I’m riding the tiger here, I say, without really intending to.

I know. She touches my shoulder. Thank you, Lando.

I leave the car downtown for Tonk and head back through the Blue Wave. A new entertainment is flashing across the monitors above the platform. A mob is swarming toward a limousine. A zoom to the window and I’m startled to recognize the face: James Sands, water privatizer and corporate predator. Almost up there in Polling’s league. I feel a buzzing in my chest that moves up to my throat as he gets out of the car to face them. He raises his hand. The crowd closes in. My train comes roaring into the station but I just stand there, watching. It’s a picture I can’t escape.

I was in the limo on the way back from Barrington when Walter called. It felt good to hear his easygoing voice after a particularly acrid meeting.

Jim! You were wondering how much more they could hate you …

What’s up?

About sixty nuts from Protect Our Water just showed up at headquarters. I recommend you go in the back way.

I felt my stomach start churning again. My creditors had just handed me my ass, and now the Flat Earth Society was weighing in. Screw them. It’s my building.

I’m not on-site yet, Jim. I think you might be wiser to end-run ’em—

I’m not going to run from these people, Walter. He didn’t say anything, so I went on. Maybe this is a good opportunity for me to talk to them directly.

You’re starting to sound as crazy as they are.

Okay. You’re on record as warning me not to. I spoke to my driver over the seat. Go to the front door, Henry.

We pulled up and Henry turned around. You sure about this, Mr. Sands?

I looked at them clustered on the sidewalk. Most were probably just confused and misinformed. Maybe in their shoes I would be angry, too. Sometimes people just need to be listened to.

I opened my door and the crowd started to spread toward us. There were kids, but also a surprising amount of gray-haired people, and a few young children. They were holding placards that said WATER BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE and HANDS OFF OUR WATER! Amateur little signs, handmade with Magic Markers like the posters for a child’s lemonade stand.

I got out of the car and raised my hand to get their attention. I half shouted Hello! I’m James Sands, but before I could get any further a middle-aged woman came straight toward me, her face a mask of anger. James Sands! she barked. You greedy pig! How much is enough for you? Her face disappeared behind Henry’s shoulder as he interposed himself between us. Great business plan! yelled an older man who looked like a retired accountant. Your buddies bankrupt the country and you come in and buy us out cheap!

That’s an oversimplification, I answered him, but I understand where you’re coming from. You think—

My words were drowned out by a round of chanting that sprang up: Our Water! Your Greed! Our Water! Your Greed! His mouth started moving along with the others. They pressed closer as their slogan caught on and grew louder. There was a young woman with a bandanna covering her nose and angry blue eyes, a housewife whose baby watched me quizzically over her shoulder. An old man with age spots on his hollowed cheeks and thinning gray hair looked at me as if I was the final evil he had roused himself to confront. They were too densely packed for me to move forward; all of them were chanting or yelling catcalls. I’d been wrong; it didn’t matter what I said. I was just a symbol. Whitehall! I yelled. It sounded frightened, so I cleared my throat and lowered my voice. Whitehall! A camera thrust in the air, a flash.

Get your filthy hands off our water! shouted one of them, a balding man with glasses who kept shifting his attention between me and the mob he was trying to inspire. Our water! Your greed! Come on, everybody! Our water! Your greed!

The blood seemed to surge to my brain, and I stuck my finger inches from my assailant’s face. Well, it’s not your treatment plant and it’s not your pipes! You want your water? Go drink out of Lake Erie!

Fuck you! he shouted, and as he reached for my hand one of the Whitehall people came up behind him and guided him down to the ground. Fuck you, brownshirt! he shouted at the guard, and then I heard him bawl as Security made a quick movement. He was quiet after that.

Walter appeared in front of me. Stay close to me, he said tersely, and he began pushing roughly through the crowd toward the front door, his eyes moving across the crowd.

Then, strangely, I felt a soft impact on the back of my head and heard a snapping sound. Liquid started running down my neck, and a sudden nausea clouded my stomach. In the next instant I felt something like a slap in the face, then saw something red go flopping at my feet. A yellow blur flickered past my eyes; a blue one flew over my shoulder. They seemed to come from every direction at once, bursting with wet little sighs across my back and my shoulders. Directly in front of me a young man had pulled a giant green water gun from beneath his coat. A stream of liquid came shooting out of it into my face, and I realized from the stinking saltiness that it was urine.

I felt the panic rising from my stomach. Walter! Walter grabbed me and pushed my head down as he bulled us through the crowd. As we went in the door, I glimpsed one of our people tackling the kid with the water gun. Somewhere behind me a baby started crying.

In my office I took off my piss-soaked tie and jacket and threw them onto the floor. I was shaking. A towel materialized, a fresh set of clothes, and I rushed into the bathroom to shower off the filth, yelling over the steam to my assistant, or whoever else might listen to me, They’ve gone too far this time! Just too fucking far! My hand was still trembling a little as I combed my hair and examined myself in the mirror, as if I might get a glimpse of what it was in that face that they so hated, something I hadn’t noticed in the last fifty-eight years. I couldn’t find it. On the contrary, I was often told that I resembled a certain heroic lawyer in a popular television show. He was a slightly younger, better-looking version of me, with hair that was coal black while mine was salt and pepper, and a graceful body instead of my bulky, Eastern European peasant build. But the same long face was there, the same dense black eyebrows. The irony was that he always played the earnest and upright prosecutor plodding relentlessly toward the People’s justice in all those cases labeled The People vs So and So, while I was, to many, exactly that goddamned So and So.

Walter was standing there when I came out, unshakable and heroic. He’d gotten rid of his jacket, and I saw his black nylon shoulder holster hanging beside his ribs. Even though he stank of stale urine, he was as calm and focused as if he’d just come off a coffee break. Thanks, Walter. I appreciate your help out there.

He looked me in the eye. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, Jim. He went back to business. I took your clothes to have them analyzed. We need to know if there was anything in those balloons besides water. When I find out who was supposed to screen that crowd, I’m going to have their ass.

Punks! I couldn’t stop myself. You should tell our guys to beat the shit out of that little asshole with the water gun!

You’d regret that one very quickly. Don’t worry. He’s looking at six years for his little stunt. I sat down at my desk and Walter started thinking out loud. I was told that they showed up five minutes before you got there. Who was the joker with the video camera working for? And how’d they know just when we were coming? We need to interview the people in charge of your motor pool and scheduling. I want to take a look at Barrington’s personnel, too. Those didn’t have to be water balloons, you know. They could have been hand grenades. And there wouldn’t have been a damned thing we could do about it.

I nodded, but my mind was somewhere else. Finally I said, I used to be one of those people, you know.

Walter stopped dialing his phone and gave me a puzzled look. What do you mean?

After college, in the eighties. Central America and all that. I gave a little laugh. "I remember being out there with a sign heckling Oliver North and John Poindexter. ‘NO to the Shadow Government!’ I really hated them."

My friend considered that, then pressed out an arch little smile. "Looks a little different when you are the Shadow Government, doesn’t it? He laughed at my reaction. Don’t take me so seriously, Jim!"

He went back to his calls while I sat and stared at my desk, too unnerved to get to work. Some part of me still wanted to explain everything to the protesters, while another part just wanted to turn a fire hose on the bastards and wash them down the street. I logged on to my computer and glanced at the headlines. There it was, with a time stamp that showed it as being only ninety seconds old:

Water Exec Attacked by Mob

It had a picture of me grimacing as a balloon crushed against my head, an amorphous cloud of water arching into the air. The caption said Direct Hit.

I stared at the image, at the cowering way I raised my shoulder to protect myself, and the expression of surprise and fear on my face. The guys over at Halliburton would certainly get a kick out of this.

Walter put away his phone. Someone had brought him a new white shirt to put on and he washed up in my bathroom and came out wearing one of my spare ties. How’d things go with Barrington?

I’ve had better meetings, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. The friendly folks at Barrington Capital Fund had called me within hours of John Polling’s assassination to demand a meeting. It hadn’t been a cozy one. My Cascadia pipeline stretching from the Columbia River to the Southwest was the boldest private water project ever attempted, a jigsaw puzzle of rights-of-way and supply contracts that would cement Water Solutions as the largest private water provider in the world. We were heavily leveraged, though, and lawsuits in Seattle and Oregon had put us dangerously behind schedule. Now companies ten times our size were looking for an opening to pry Cascadia away from us, and Barrington was turning the screws, trying to make me put up my personal assets to secure any further financing from them. John Polling had been the white knight in that particular scenario, ready to ride in with his billions and bail us out. But John wasn’t riding anywhere now.

Well, Jim, this little water-balloon skirmish actually ties in with what I wanted to talk to you about today. He dragged a chair alongside my desk, went on in that rural twang of his that always sounded like the wise old football coach in the movies. "I want to show you some