America Rising (43 page)

“Fuck your papers, lady,” snarled one of the black-uniformed men. He was as big in the legs and torso as Joe Turner but a good six inches shorter, with an oddly high-pitched voice and the vaguely mechanical movements of an over-muscled weightlifter. The D.C. cop turned on him, face hot. “I thought I told you to get your people under control. You’re supposed to be breaking down this camp, not acting like a bunch of goddam thugs.”

Behind them the black uniforms were still at it, tearing down what was left of the encampment, beating those neither fast nor agile enough to get away. Some of the uniforms were breaking into the RVs parked to house other Bonus Army campers. They hauled people out, threw them to the street. Beat them too.

“Oh, pardon me,
Captain
,” the burly man said, his voice brittle with sarcasm. “You’ve got no authority over us, so stay the hell out of our way.” He stalked off, left Joe Turner steaming. AnnaLynn gripped the captain’s arm. “You’ve got to
do
something,” she pleaded. “You’ve got to stop this. Please.”

Joe Turner detached her hand and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. But my orders come straight from the White House. And those bastards—” He waved at the black uniforms chasing down the last few campers. “I don’t even know who they are.” He stopped, looked at John. Stared him up and down. “Mr. Doe,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you—”

I don’t know what Sheila Boniface saw. Or if she saw anything at all, if she didn’t just pick up an alien scent riding the breeze, a faint disturbance in the atmosphere. Whatever it was, none of us saw it, picked up on it, not even her Red Team colleagues. But without warning, without a sound, she pivoted on one foot, clutched John Doe to her, placing her body between him and the captain and the black uniforms and what was left of the camp and drove him hard into the ground.

Our guardians started moving while he was still in mid-air. Weapons drawn, facing outward, they formed a cordon around the two fallen bodies. Joe Turner’s head swiveled, following their eyes, searching the darkness for. . . He didn’t know. I stood speechless, bile rising in my throat, as a small crimson circle expanded with terrifying quickness between Sheila Boniface’s shoulder blades, darkening her blouse and filling my heart with despair.

Now everyone saw. “Oh, no,” our driver moaned. She knelt and gently lifted Sheila and set her body on the ground. Captain Turner cursed the black uniforms, shouted at deputies to seal off the area, yelled for paramedics on his two-way. The other three members of Red Team looked ill. I bit my lip until it bled. John lay still. In shock, uncomprehending. His head tilted. He saw Sheila. Her eyes were closed, her face was peaceful. Her blouse was soaked with blood. A thin skein of red hung from the corner of her mouth.

Then the horror hit him. His face seemed to deconstruct before my eyes. Planes rolled and twisted, axes bent, angles turned soft and rubbery. His eyes clouded, his lips moved, “No, no, no,” each whispered word a piece of him torn off by blunt teeth. He threw himself on top of her and wrapped her in his arms, as if he could force his own life into hers.

None of us dared speak. Could speak. It began to rain. Not hard, just a drizzle, enough to dampen our hair and stick our clothes to our bodies. The paramedics arrived, rolling a stretcher across the wet grass. They tried to pick up the body but the fierce faces of Red Team drove them back. I knelt down and touched John on the shoulder. “She’s gone,” I said softly, my eyes tearing up. “We need to get her out of here.”

He turned on me like he wanted to rip my throat out. But he let me lift him off Sheila’s body and sit him on the ground, head between his knees, silent sobs heaving in his chest. The paramedics moved in again but our driver stepped in front of them, her expression feral, her own sobs barely contained. “Don’t touch her!” She and her three teammates lifted Sheila Boniface, placed her on the stretcher, covered her face with a jacket.

“John?” one of them said.

He didn’t seem to hear but he stood and walked stiffly to the stretcher. Stood over it for a long minute, the longest minute I’d ever known, oblivious to the rain, the paramedics, the crowd. The world. He lifted the jacket and kissed Sheila on the lips, his tears mixing with the mist on her cheeks. He lowered the jacket and the transformation was remarkable. Frightening. His face seemed to reconstruct as quickly as it had fallen. Planes reasserted themselves, axes straightened, angles grew sharp and hard. There was something burning in it, something infinitely determined and virulently dangerous.

“Take care of her,” he said to the guardians. To me and AnnaLynn: “We’re going back.” To Joe Turner: “An escort, captain?”

The captain barked at a deputy. “Take these people to the National Mall,” he said. “Lights, siren, the whole nine yards.” His gaze fixed on John. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Doe. Beyond words. Godspeed to you.”

The ride back to the mall was grim and silent but for the wailing of the siren and the distant booms of fireworks. The deputy drove fast, badged us through police checkpoints to within a block of the mall. We ran for the stage. John ran like a machine; AnnaLynn and I struggled to keep up. When we burst into the tent all conversation stopped, every eye on John, his bloody clothes, the ferocious set to his face. Without realizing it, they flinched, stepped back. I thought right then that they’d caught the smell of death on us. Fireworks boomed. Patriotic music blared. The crowd oohed and ahhed. “What do you want to do, John?” AnnaLynn asked quietly.

“Speak.”

A man handed AnnaLynn a walkie-talkie. She said something into it, then something else, sharply. Like do what I say or I’ll have your skin for a wetsuit. Minutes passed. The fireworks stopped booming. The music stopped blaring. The sky went black. The giant crowd fell silent. More minutes passed. The sky stayed black. A technician hustled onstage and plugged in a microphone. Murmurs rose, wafting on the breeze. Bewildered. Disappointed. Unsettled. More minutes passed. John Doe stood in the tent. Alone. Apart. Lost in himself. Lost. No one spoke or went near him. Another minute passed.

Then he roused himself. He strode out of the tent, up the steps, onto the stage, this time like he owned it. Strode out from behind the bank of amplifiers and up to the microphone. A single spotlight flared and held him in its incandescent shaft. The crowd gasped, a collective drawing of breath that sounded like a gust from a hurricane.

Caught in the finger of light, John Doe looked haunted, ghostly, gray. His shirt and pants were stained with blood. Caked in his hair, under his fingernails. A pinkish smear ran down his face and disappeared under his shirt collar. He swayed. Started to speak. Choked up. He looked out over the mass of people, every ounce of their being focused on him, and seemed to draw strength there. Then he spoke:

“A few minutes ago the finest person I have ever known, the light of my life, was taken from me. She stepped in front of a bullet that was meant for me. She bled to death in my arms. She gave her own life for mine. I don’t know who pulled the trigger. I don’t know who gave the order. But I do know why.”

He paused. He wanted everyone from the White House to Frank Bernabe’s Manhattan office to hear the next words.

“They want me to be afraid. They want me to run, to hide. They want you to be afraid. They want you to run and hide.”

He paused again. Raised his arms. Held them outstretched so everyone could see his bloody shirt, the rust-colored stains that ran from his wrists to his shoulders, his chest to his waist.

“I stand before you tonight wearing the blood of Sheila Boniface. And I say that I am
not
afraid. I will not run. I will not hide.
We
will not run.
We
will not hide. But to the people who have taken her from me, who have taken so much of what we all hold dear, who live by no law but their own interest, no code but their own ambition, no morality but their own gain, I say this: When I am
President of the United States of America
you will learn what it is to fear. It will be
your
turn to run, y
our
turn to hide. Because as of this moment your time is over.”

He paused once more. When he spoke now his voice was barely audible, spent and weary beyond the grave.

“God help me,” he said. “God help us all.”

P
resident Nancy Elias declared martial law at nine o’clock the following morning. She suspended habeas corpus and established a dusk to dawn curfew. A bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators introduced the Economic Terrorism and Homeland Protection Act. AnnaLynn Conté and the rest of the New American Independence Day organizers were arrested at their hotels or the homes of friends where they were staying.

John Doe, his four Red Team guardians and the body of Sheila Boniface disappeared. The black uniforms tried to pick up his trail leaving the National Mall but the enormous crowd closed around them and practically suffocated them with its bulk. An official APB and unofficial orders to shoot on sight were issued but neither Frank Bernabe’s teams nor the agents of several acronymical government agencies turned up even the smallest clue to their whereabouts. When informed of the teams’ lack of success, Nancy Elias could be heard screaming at Frank Bernabe over the telephone, shocking her listeners less by the vulgarity of her language than to whom it was being addressed.

I had no knowledge of any of this, no knowledge of anything but rage boiling in my veins. Seeing Sheila Boniface gunned down in cold blood, her life slowly spilling out of her, did something profound to me. In common parlance, I guess I “snapped.” I saw that scene play over and over in my mind. I saw the boots in the chest of Eldrick Brown, the leering face of Armando Gutierrez and fearful, desperate countenance of Julie Teichner, the contemptuous smirks of the black uniforms who’d driven her from her home and the man who fitted my finger in his razor-sharp tinsnips.

I saw the faces of people I didn’t know, of Trish Oliver’s brother, driven to take his own life, of the people brutalized by Leland Elliott’s thugs and assaulted for the greater glory and ratings of Ed Bane. I saw the faces of millions of Americans who had been foreclosed out of their homes, “downsized” from their jobs, abandoned—further assaulted—by the very institutions created for their protection. I saw the faces of millions treated as fodder for the enrichment and empowerment of a few. It lit a rage inside me that was primal, unthinking, all-consuming. It demanded pain and death and destruction. It demanded revenge.

And I knew just where to get it.

After John Doe’s speech I said an abrupt goodbye to AnnaLynn and hailed a cab for Reagan airport, snagging a seat on an early-morning flight bound for Miami. My very persona was toxic. Other passengers averted their eyes when I walked down the aisle, dared not sit next to me. In Miami I caught a shuttle bound for the Keys, the fire still burning. Ninety minutes later the shuttle dropped me off at my house on Largo Sound. I didn’t bother going in. I marched down the street to Robert Ford’s house, threw open the front door without knocking and stormed in like an invading army.

Robert was on the deck, his back to me, gazing out at the Sound. At my noisy entry he turned, surprised at first, then alarmed. If I had been myself I would have noticed the grief that pinched his features, the sag in his normally erect posture. Instead I strode up to him, shoved him in the chest and shouted, “She’s dead, Robert! She’s dead! They killed her!
You
killed her!”

Had any other man laid hands on Robert Ford like that he would have been on the floor with two broken arms and a crushed larynx. But my friend merely stepped back and brushed me aside. His voice was calm. “Josh, Josh, I know what you must be—”

But I was too far gone. I got in his face and pushed him again. “I know who you are, Robert,” I said, low and ugly. “I know what you are. I figured it all out. Sheila Boniface was one of yours. The others too. You were the one with John Doe in Memphis. You kidnapped Joe Josephson, Senator Hammer. You were the one who scared off the K Street vultures, the bankers, those slimeballs in the House. You’re the one with the calling card that reads ‘FEAR.’”

It took a lot to shock Robert but that did. “Listen to me, Josh,” he began. “You don’t have any—”

I was having none of it. My rage had boiled over. “You were supposed to protect John but you couldn’t even protect one of your own! Sheila’s dead because of you and you’re standing here looking at the water like some kind of goddam tourist!”

That hurt him. He could take a bullet in the gut and bite down on his pain but the accusation that he’d left one of his own on the field of battle was more than he could bear.

“Why are you standing here?!” I screamed, eyes wild, spittle flying. “Kill him! Bernabe did it. Even I know that. You’re the great avenging angel. Kill him! Kill him!
Kill him!”

The effort it must have taken to hold himself in check was enormous. Even in my delirium I could see the muscles cording in his neck, bulging beneath his clothes, his lungs expanding, chest swelling.

“Trust me, Josh, his time will come. But not—”

“Trust? Bullshit!” I totally lost it now. “You deal in fear but you’re afraid yourself. You’re a coward and a hypocrite, Robert. Sheila’s blood is on your hands!”

Without another word I turned and stomped out of the house, slamming the front door so hard its etched-glass panel shattered. I slammed the front door at my house too, punched the wall with my good hand, then dropped onto bed still in my clothes and slept for twenty straight hours.