The Gates of Babylon (6 page)

Jacob stepped away from the money with a wary look, though Eliza could see the temptation on her brother’s face. She could see what he was thinking. Silver may be illegal to trade in quantity now, but what about after a collapse? How would you keep a community running without money backed by the government? How would you trade with the surviving outposts beyond the valley? Silver and gold, that’s how.

Would it really come to that?

Civilization went through periodic upheavals, but even the worst wars didn’t last forever. Even the Great Depression had come to an end. Yes, there were huge, cataclysmic events, but what were the odds of a complete collapse? That’s the way Eliza thought when she was talking with Jacob. Other conversations turned her mind down more terrifying paths, usually involving war, famine, and dead bodies covering the land.

What Trost was offering was insurance against the worst-case scenario. Total collapse. And what did he want in return?

When Jacob turned his back to walk a few paces away, Eliza let the silver coins slip through her fingers with a tempting clink, closed the satchel and set it at her feet. She looked into Trost’s eyes.

“You’ve made your point,” she said. “The silver is valuable, and we’ll take it.”

Jacob turned with a frown, opened his mouth to respond, but then said nothing. He looked at Eliza expectantly.

“But it’s time to stop beating around the bush,” she continued. “You didn’t ride three days on horse, smuggling silver coins, to ask for help teaching you how to tan a leather hide or bottle tomatoes.”

“No, I didn’t.” Trost glanced at Jacob, and then turned to Eliza and held her gaze. “I need you to crash the gates of Babylon.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Governor Jim McKay showed his ID once when his driver penetrated the bunkered entrance to Capitol Hill, a second time when he left the car at the base of the stairs to the capitol building itself, and a third time after he passed beneath the rotunda, through the west atrium, and approached the governor’s offices. This in spite of the fact that his face was one of the most recognizable in the state. He swiped his badge twice to get into the inner offices, waiting each time while his two bodyguards—one to guard the governor, the second to guard the guard—swiped their own badges. There would be no repeat in Utah of the assassinations in Indiana and South Carolina, or even the failed attempt on the governor of Idaho.

And so he was surprised when he took his missed phone calls from his secretary, Gloria, dismissed the guards, and pushed into his office to discover two men inside, waiting for him in the dark. One man sat behind his desk, the other at the closed blinds, as if
the frosted, bulletproof glass wasn’t enough to conceal the crime he was about to commit.

Jim froze. He tried to back out of the room, to scream for help through a throat choked closed by a pair of strong hands. The terror, the nightmare returned. It was two years ago and he was trapped in a room with his cousin from Blister Creek, Abraham Christianson.

“One noise, cry, or scream and your brains end up on the back wall,” Abraham says.

He presses his gun barrel against Jim’s forehead. Jim freezes in terror.

“You have wronged me and mine,” Abraham continues. “And that makes you my enemy. I destroy my enemies.”

Christianson hadn’t shot him that day. Threats only. But he’d destroyed Jim all the same. The man crushed Jim’s presidential campaign by passing rumors to the other campaigns in the presidential primaries. But that wasn’t the worst of it. No, it was the paranoia with which Jim watched the violent struggles at the heart of the polygamist communities that led to his cousin’s death, and Abraham’s son Jacob taking over the reins. And Jacob no doubt remembering, in his black polygamist heart, his hatred for the McKay brothers. And now, with Jim governor, that hatred must be consuming him.

He staggered backward, reached for the door now swinging shut behind him. The man behind his desk stood. He had something in his hand.

No, not like this…

And then the man pulled the chain on the desk lamp. The light came on and dissolved the shadows in the room, and sent Jim’s foolish, cowardly fears scurrying away. It wasn’t the polygamists
after all. Why would he have thought that? Only his brother Parley and a man Jim didn’t immediately recognize. Of course. No one but his brother could come and go from the governor’s office at will.

Jim looked over the other man. His face was red, as if terribly sunburned, and he was nearly bald, but in clumps, like a man with a bad hair transplant that was falling out. White gauze wrapped his hands and he sat stiffly, as if in pain. Jim met the man’s gaze and looked away quickly.

“What’s the matter with you?” Parley said. “You look like you’re about to throw up.”

Jim’s galloping pulse slowed, and he took deeper breaths instead of the shallow gasps of a rabbit in the coils of a snake. “Nothing, nothing. The usual, you know.”

A raised eyebrow. “Trouble?”

“There was a food riot at the Green River refugee camps. The state controls the town and the army the camps, and nobody took responsibility until five people were dead. Then I got a call from Hill Air Force Base threatening martial law in Ogden if we can’t control the streets.”

“And how do we do that,” Parley said, “when they’ve called up half the Ogden PD for the war? Tell them we’ll restore order if they give us a Bradley and fifty thousand rounds.”

These days Parley spoke as if he’d been upgraded from an elected attorney general to head of secret police for some banana republic. Jim never knew if he was serious or not.

Turning from his brother, Jim made his way to the window and opened the blinds. Beyond the Jersey barriers, the sandbag bunkers, and the armored half-track parked in front of the stairs
with its guns turned down the hill, Salt Lake itself looked normal. Light traffic inched along State Street and up West Temple, past Temple Square and up the hill to the university and the neighborhoods at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. Most of the businesses were still open. Didn’t look much different than last spring, in fact, before a third of the population lost their jobs.

And at least the food was still coming in—for now. But when it stopped? The gun nuts that made up his loyal constituency—those same legislators and their followers who had clamored for the former senator to take over when the previous administration resigned under federal pressure—would march on the capitol building and burn it down. Demand that the fire breathers in the legislature secede and hang ’em high if they didn’t. A nightmare.

“Where were you this morning?” Parley asked.

Jim didn’t turn from the window. “Church Office Building. Meeting with the brethren.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “You know how it is. The LDS Church is led by octogenarians. Not exactly light on their feet. The prophet himself is sick again. Don’t know if he’ll make it.”

“All we need from the church is for them to pass the word,” Parley said. “Get the bishops to speak from the pulpit against rioting and disorder. If we can’t manage our own house, the Feds will do it for us. What about the mayor? Was he there?”

Jim stared at the third man. “What’s going on here, anyway? Who is this guy?”

“You don’t recognize me?” the man said. He had a slight Hispanic accent. “Maybe you know my voice.”

“Lazario?” Jim said. “What the hell happened to you?”

“A barbecue gone wrong. Too much lighter fluid. About eight thousand gallons of it, in fact.”

Jim wasn’t altogether pleased to see his old mission companion from Bolivia. He hadn’t seen Lazario Alacrán since the presidential campaign broke up two years ago and he laid off his entire staff, save a few fund-raisers to retire campaign debt. The campaign failure wasn’t Alacrán’s fault—he’d expertly directed opposition research and quietly found work-arounds for campaign finance limits. The man knew how to game the system. It was the same way he’d played in Bolivia all those years ago when the two men were young missionaries wheezing up the streets of La Paz at twelve thousand feet above sea level.

Alacrán always had an angle. He perfected a repertoire of anecdotes—heavily embellished when they weren’t outright fabrications—that induced the proper spiritual feelings in the city’s slum dwellers. When investigators balked, Alacrán told them what they wanted to hear.

No, you don’t have to give up beer. The Word of Wisdom is just advice.

Only wealthy families have to pay tithing.

LDS Church members get preferential access to American visas. Why do you think I speak such good English? I was born right here, but the church sent me to Salt Lake for an education.

Jim squirmed when the lies started flowing, but the man got results. Month after month the mission president would push the young elders forward as the example all the rest of the mission should follow.

Alacrán proved equally adaptable after his mission. He somehow finagled one of those same visas to the United States, prospered
with a shady import-export business, extracted millions from rich donors on behalf of the McKay presidential campaign, and landed on his feet no matter how far he fell. Let the world’s last crumb of bread be consumed, Alacrán would no doubt find a lost warehouse full of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs and set himself up as king.

Under better circumstances, he even
looked
like a survivor, with a wiry body and a weather-beaten face. The kind of guy who can hike fifty miles across the desert living off grasshoppers and his own filtered urine. The burned face and the gauze-wrapped hands diminished this impression at the moment.

“I thought you were in California,” Jim said.

“Nope,” Alacrán said. “That state’s going down the crapper.”

“The whole country is. Maybe you’re better off going home.”

“To Bolivia? Are you kidding? I like it better here. So many opportunities.”

“Opportunities? What are you talking about?”

“So it’s a disaster. Doesn’t mean we can’t make money, collect power. It’s a salvage operation.”

“Sounds dangerous.” Jim eyed the man’s burns. “Playing with lighter fluid, was it?”

Jim sank into the chair behind his giant mahogany desk. He glanced at his brother to see Parley rolling a gold-tipped Montblanc pen between his thumb and forefinger, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Okay, you two,” he said at last. “What are you playing at?”

“Lazario says the gig is up,” Parley said. “After what he tells me about events close to the ground, I’m inclined to agree.”

“You mean total collapse?” Jim shook his head. “No. We’re winning the war. Soon as those bastards reopen Suez and Hormuz.”

“And why should they?” Alacrán said. “Until the Yankees resume food aid.”

“We can’t, or we’ll starve. Our friends up north, too. And if we don’t keep Canada fed, there goes the rest of our oil.”

“So you’ve decided the Arabs can starve. Do you blame them for shutting off the spigot?”

“Fine, it’s a war. People will die, sacrifices will be made.”

“Don’t forget the rebellions at home,” Parley put in.

“They’ll end as soon as the weather turns.”

“The soonest that happens is spring,” Alacrán said. “And that’s assuming the damn volcano shuts its pie hole. What if it doesn’t? Or what if it doesn’t matter, because the damage is already done? Look what has happened in one summer. You think we can survive a second year of global crop failure?” He shook his head. “Think how fast things have changed. Used to be, half the food in this country was never eaten, we had so much of it.”

“He’s right,” Parley said. “Six months ago we were turning corn into gasoline additives. Now we’ve got half the Southwest in refugee camps. The other half is descending on the Midwest like a plague of locusts, looking for food and jobs.”

“And that’s the States,” Alacrán added. “You want to know what I’ve seen in Mexico?”

“Not really,” Jim said.

His chair creaked as he leaned back. He’d considered all of this before. Thought about it every time he saw the protests, every time he saw hostile faces watching his motorcade in the street, wondering if those men carried guns tucked into their belts. And feeling like he was standing in front of a huge, crumbling earthen dam, as raging floodwaters turned it to mud.

“You said you’d seen things,” he said to Alacrán. “What kind of things?”

“Have you been to the Green River camps lately?”

“Yeah, just a few weeks ago,” he said.

“Wasn’t that the end of August?” Parley asked.

“I guess.”

“Three thousand refugees in August,” Alacrán said. “Tops. You’ve got fifty thousand now.”

Jim felt irritated. “I know that. The state still polices the town, you know.”

A smile came across the Bolivian’s face. “And doesn’t set foot in the camps, unless invited there by the army. General Lacroix is building a major military base in Green River. Military police patrol the camp, but they only care about political dissent. Drugs, prostitution, even rape and murder are around every corner.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“That’s Utah. Nevada is a hellhole. I was in Vegas two weeks ago. Half the city is pouring out as fast as they can as thugs and gangsters take control of one block after another. But the airport is still open, and billionaires take private helicopters to hotel islands along the strip. To gamble. Can you believe that?”

“See, how bad could it be?”

Alacrán laughed. “You don’t get it, Jim. For a man who once ran for president, you’re naïve.”

“Tell him what you told me about Cache Valley,” Parley said.

“What about Cache Valley?” Jim demanded.

“The Department of Agriculture is about to take it over,” Alacrán said. “Morgan County, too. Maybe even Rich County. Too much black market activity in agricultural goods.”

“But that’s a third of the state’s food,” Jim said. “What do they think this is, Soviet Russia?”

His brother gave a grim shake of the head. “The USDA has already got armed men in Monticello and Manti.”

“I don’t believe it. You’re making stuff up.” Jim took a deep breath. “You know our problem? It’s the two of you. Instead of trying to stop this thing, you keep kicking at it, trying to knock it all over.”