A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (15 page)

The right to guaranteed employment and pay;

The right of every family to a decent house;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education;

The right to rest and leisure...

Chapter Twenty-Five

Washington, D.C.

Chief of Staff Dennis Trout—perhaps it would soon be Illinois
Congressman
Trout if everything went well—hadn’t had a swig of Maalox since yesterday. He was thinking about it now though, on the phone with his wife. He had no idea what might have set her off this time. As best he could determine, she was raising hell for no other reason than that she was married to him. She should have been ecstatic with joy. After all, he
had
achieved insider status—and found a possible sugar daddy to fund his campaign in Illinois.

His stomach rumbled and he opened a desk drawer to find his Maalox. He was trying his best to placate the bitch. He didn’t want to piss her off, which in turn would piss off her brother and cause him, Trout, to lose everything he had kissed ass for these last years.

Whatever her other complaints, she quickly moved on to the issue of his having neglected to feed Reggie this morning before he left for the office. Marilyn had had an early spa appointment.

“I won’t forget again, Marilyn, I promise. Say, why don’t I take you out to
Komi’s
for dinner.”
Komi’s
was her favorite dining. “Not tonight. Tomorrow evening, okay? I’m working late tonight.”

He held the phone out from his ear. It seemed to vibrate from her on-the-other-end fury. The damned thing would explode if she knew he was actually meeting his mistress instead of working late. Judy had returned from her little foray into
Deliverance
and Trout needed his ashes hauled in the worst way. It took so little to make the blonde happy—a stolen night now and then when he was horny or needed a bedpost to talk to. She was so simple.

He finally got off the phone on a final refrain from Marilyn. “Damn you, Trout!”

Liz in the outer office transferred an incoming call to Trout for screening before he passed it on to Wiedersham. It was that idiot from Homeland Security again. Vladimir Gonzalez. Another ass kisser looking to get his toast buttered. Trout thought him a pompous little man with a little man’s complex. A Russian immigrant’s grandson who claimed direct descent from Vladimir Lenin via a Venezuelan his mother married.

“Hold one,
Officer
Gonzalez,” Trout said politely but with deliberate slight.

“
Director
Gonzalez.”

“Hold one,
Director
Gonzalez.”

Trout knocked once, then opened the door that separated his much,
much
smaller office from Wiedersham’s. Wiedersham didn’t like to be buzzed like some Michelin tire dealer from the Midwest. He was on the other line. One
Vigotti
shoe propped on top of his desk and his
Armani
suit looking cheap enough on him to have come off the rack at Wal-Mart. He held up a finger to Trout and laughed his odd bark at whoever was on the phone.

“It’ll be out of committee in two weeks latest,” he was saying. “It may take some arm twisting, but Teague assures me we have the votes in House and I have them in Senate. The web’ll be ours along with other communications.”

“It’s Gonzalez,” Trout announced when Wiedersham clicked off his phone and sat up in his chair.

Wiedersham scowled.

“He says it’s important.”

The Majority Leader took the call. Curious about what the two might be up to, Trout took his time going through the
Out
box on the table next to the door. Wiedersham transferred all his routine crap to Trout for him to take care of—such as the RSVP to the media formal dinner to be held Saturday night. Trout gofer’d the mundane for Wiedersham so his brother-in-law could gofer for the President. With a wry smile, Trout speculated on how
everybody
in D.C. was a gofer for somebody else. Even the President of the United States.

Wiedersham was less cautious about his Chief of Staff overhearing his conversations now that Trout had won insider status. Nonetheless, out of old habits of distrust, Wiedersham turned his back and lowered his voice, which made him sound like Marlon Brando in the old
Godfather
movies. Trout pretended disinterest, but he was mentally taking notes.

“Power is a matter of whose balls you can squeeze,” Wiedersham had once explained. “It’s who’s banging who, who’s cheating on his income tax, who’s a closet fag, who’s in bed with which lobbyist, who’s stealing campaign funds... Collecting that kind of dirt is like money in the bank. You can call your own shots. Everyone has something to hide. You find out what it is and use it when you need it.”

“
Blackmail?”
Trout had blurted out in astonishment. That was during his early idealism stage.

“Politics. Like insurance.”

Wiedersham’s
Vigotti
banged on the top of his desk. He snapped into the phone, “How could Kimbrell have lost them? Gonzalez, you could replace that doofus with Barney Fife and be ahead of the game... Of course, that cop knows something or he wouldn’t be snooping around with her. They have to be stopped, the sooner the better...We can’t have that loud-mouthed cunt taking Baer’s place and rousing the rabble... Just get it done.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Washington, D.C.

They had banged until they were both sweaty and out of breath and tangled in sheets. The bedside light was back on. Trout noticed he was starting to develop a little paunch from soft living and too little exercise. Judy didn’t seem to mind either it or his balding scalp. She wasn’t like Marilyn. She caressed his forehead, wiping off sweat, and then kissed him there.

“Want a beer, darling?” she asked.

She was smiling, gorgeous but as brainless as a cow.

“What do you have?”

“Bud or Bud Light.”

“Bud Light.”

Senate Majority Leader Wiedersham would never drink a beer unless it was imported. Pretentious ass!

Judy got out of bed, as naked and innocent as a baby in her nudity. She padded into the bathroom first and left the door open. He heard her brushing her teeth and taking a leak.

“For God’s sake, Judy! Close the door.”

He hated hearing women use the bathroom.

At a newsstand on the way over he had picked up a copy of
Truth
with the caricature of Anastos riding a donkey off a cliff. He had only briefly looked at the issue before when it arrived on Wiedersham’s desk. He opened it now to the
One Year Ago
article by Sharon Lowenthal and read it carefully while Judy finished in the bathroom and went to the kitchenette for beers. No wonder Wiedersham and the White House had their shorts in a bunch.

It was a little troubling to Trout as well, in what it portended for his own career if this Lowenthal woman continued Jerry Baer’s campaign. Deep down where he sometimes thought he no longer had a
down
, he was disturbed and a little frightened by the changes Anastos, George Zuniga and the White House “czars” were about to foster upon an unsuspecting nation. A lot of change that left very little hope.

He was staring up at the ceiling, hands behind his head in deep thought, when Judy returned with two beers in plastic promotion glasses from Taco Bell, on them colorful images of Spider Man. Classy. He sat up in bed with the sheet covering his legs and accepted one of the beers. Judy snuggled under the sheet with him. She tapped her plastic glass against his.

“Over the gums and down the hatch, watch out, belly, here she comes.”

Trout took a sip.

“Judy, what happened in Oklahoma at the cemetery? What do you know about this man Kimbrell?”

Pentagon Prepares for Economic Crisis

(Washington)—
Speaker of the House Barbara Teague announced today that the U.S. Government is preparing for widespread civil unrest. The defense intelligence establishment, she said, is looking at the threat to national security caused by the worldwide economic downturn.

The Pentagon has launched a year-long exercise called “Unified Quest.” A Pentagon spokesman said they are looking at responses that may be necessary during a national collapse that could force the military to keep “domestic order among civil unrest and deal with fragmented global power.”

White House spokesman Dewey Gubbins said a crisis could mean the suspension of Posse Comitatus that prevents U.S. troops from acting against U.S. citizens...

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Green Country, Oklahoma

When Big C came outside the cabin at first light, Nail had Sharon’s rental Saturn pulled up to the shed’s open door with battery jumper cables running between it and the old green Chevy pickup inside.

“I’m going to try to kick it over,” Nail said, ducking under the cables and climbing into the pickup. The pickup whined and gasped, but it finally caught and began rattling along until it finally leveled out and ran smoothly. Big C disconnected the jumper cables and hung them on a nail in the shed.

“You got wheels, man,” he said approvingly. He stopped and looked down the mostly-overgrown road. “Maybe we should get some food and guns and block off the road and shoot any sucker trespass until this shit over.”

“What makes you think it’s ever going to be over?”

“They
ain’t
no God if them motherfuckers win.”

Big C took his leave immediately after a breakfast of coffee and beef hash from a can. He shook hands with Nail and they nodded at each other; there was no need for words between them. Sharon hugged the black cop.

“Go fishing or something,” Big C advised. “I call you in a day or so after I get the sting set up.”

He mounted his red Ford pickup and headed toward eastern Oklahoma and “Green Country.”

* * *

Up until recent years, banks were reluctant to lend money to people east of the Grand River in that swath of northeastern Oklahoma known variously as the Ozark foothills, the Cookson Hills, the Cherokee Strip, or, in the hyperbole of the Bureau of Tourism, “Green Country.” The Cookson Hills had a legacy of outlaws and violence. From Indian Territory days into the Twenty First Century, infamous and not so infamous badmen and badwomen had fled into those rugged hills to rely on the close-mouthed and suspicious inhabitants to protect them from the law. Here hid out Jesse James, the Daltons, Belle Starr, Al Jennings, Ma Barker, the Kimes Boys, and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Nearly every old barn from Sallisaw to Pryor carried with it a story that “Purty Boy” once hid his car in it.

It was not surprising, therefore, that militia might have sprouted and flourished where people were a unique, independent breed suspicious of authority, quick to temper, backward by urban standards, and slow to accept outsiders and the outside world. Yet, even here, times they were a’changing. There had been a time when a black man ignored at his own peril the hand-lettered sign on a back road to nowhere,
Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your black ass.

In Sallisaw, Big C borrowed a phone at a service station to telephone Lieutenant Jack Ross and let him know James Nail was in a safe place.

“We trying to stay off of cell phones except in emergencies,” he explained. “Feds can trace them by satellite they want to.”

“Kimbrell and his Homies are sniffing around like garbage flies,” Ross told him. “Wherever James is, tell him to stay there. I’ve arranged to carry him on medical leave as long as we can. There are plenty of witnesses to what happened at ORU without bringing James in. But they’re still playing bloodhound when it comes to James and that girl.”

“They trying to stop Sharon before she get back on TV where it harder to shut her up,” Big C said. “James ain’t likely to give up till he got somebody by the balls—and Kimbrell ought be afraid them balls are his.”

Big C took I-40 east from Sallisaw and turned north on the Central High road to a crossroads known as Akins, in the cemetery of which Ron Sparks had recently been lynched. From there, roads into the Cooksons got rougher and rougher until some weren’t much more than graveled trails through the woods. There were farms with decent houses next door to unpainted shacks with half-naked kids playing in the dirt. If the commies, environmentalists, anti-modernists and various other wackos had their way, Big C thought, everybody in America would be living in shacks. Except the people’s keepers, of course.

Colonel Josiah Mosby lived in a rundown double-wide mobile home near the isolated community of Bunch on Big Sallisaw Creek. He claimed to be descended from John Singleton Mosby, the famous Confederate leader of Mosby’s Rangers. He assumed the honorary “Colonel” after he and Greg Morris organized the Defenders. As far as Big C knew, Josiah had never actually served a day in the military.

When Big C alighted from his pickup, three dirty-faced little boys in shorts tore around the end of the house chased by two black-and-tan hounds, a goat, and three geese. The elder of the trio, about nine, waved. But instead of mobbing Big C with rough affection as they usually did when he came calling, they stampeded onto the wooden add-on porch. Alice held the door open for them. Mosby’s half-Cherokee wife gave a febrile wave and ducked back inside with the children. The Colonel came out and closed the door behind him. He shook hands rather formally and the two men walked to a wooden bench underneath a shade tree and sat down. Big C, puzzled by the strange behavior of friends, stared at the trailer.