America Rising (44 page)

When I woke just after sunrise I felt like a malaria patient whose fever had just broken. I was weak and listless, wobbly from dehydration and lack of nourishment. My shirt was still damp with sweat; my own body odor made me gag. My confrontation with Robert came back to me in a rush and my face burned with shame.

The burning grew even more fevered. The soft, deadly voice that pierced my fading consciousness when two men I didn’t know broke into my house, when razor-sharp tinsnips closed down on my finger. . . that was Robert Ford’s voice too.

If the tears could come I would have wept with shame. I’d barged into the house of my best friend, a man who’d saved my life, whose courage and fortitude were greater than anything I could hope to possess and demanded that he murder the most powerful man in the country, then called him a coward and a hypocrite for not instantly acceding to my madness. By all rights he should have slit my belly and tossed me into the Sound.

I stumbled out my front door and down the street. Even at this early hour the heat and humidity were oppressive; a wave of nausea rolled over me. At Robert’s house it was clear that he had gone. The hurricane shutters were closed, the gate to the driveway locked. I hauled out my cellphone and punched up his number but there was no answer. Another wave of nausea hit so I stumbled back home, stripped off my filthy clothes and parked my reeking body in the shower under water as hot and stinging as I could make it.

Freshly showered, I sat at my computer and was hit with another shock. President Elias had declared martial law, banned public demonstrations and imposed a nationwide curfew. AnnaLynn and her colleagues had been arrested, held without bail at an undisclosed facility. Bills had been introduced to define non-payment of one’s debts as economic terrorism, punishable by a lengthy prison term.

MSM coverage was predictable, mostly stern warnings to obey or suffer the consequences. Public Interest and a few other independent sites had blasted the moves, put up some analysis, but the corporate media had fallen dutifully in line. I logged into my email account and saw a string of messages from my boss so I dialed Public Interest and got Jeff O’Neill on the phone.

“Where the hell have you been?” he barked before I could get a word out. Then, reconsidering, “Were you there when it happened? Are you alright?”

“Not really,” I said. “And to answer your questions: On a plane to Miami. Yes. And not really.” I filled him in on Sheila’s death, the scene at Anacostia Park, the transformation of John Doe from unwilling candidate to avenging warrior.

“You’re going to get me a couple thousand words on this, right?” he said eagerly. “Before noon.” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Good. Now, have you seen what your buddy John Doe is up—” His gasp sounded like the air escaping from a punctured tire. “Jesus Christ! Are you seeing this?! It’s everywhere!”

I heard his phone clatter to the desk, him shouting at his editors, his fingers skittering across the keyboard. “I’ve got to go, Josh,” he said breathlessly. “They’re doing it again. Go to our website. Go to any website!
Jesus Christ!”

I tabbed over to the Public Interest home page and there was John Doe. Or to put it more accurately, a live streaming video of John Doe. I opened up a few more browser windows and he was there too. He was everywhere. He was seated at a wooden table in front of a plain white backdrop, what could have been a sheet attached to a wall. He looked tired, wan. Haunted. But his eyes were clear and his words reverberated with the simple honesty that had always drawn people to him. He was halfway into his message when I cranked up the volume.

“. . . ask yourselves, Is this the America I believe in? Is this the America I love? Is this the America I want for my children, for their children and their children? In my America, no one is taken away in the middle of the night and carried off to an unknown ‘detention facility.’ In my America, the right to speak freely, to assemble and demand that wrongs be redressed is enshrined in the highest law. In my America, our representatives do not sell themselves to the highest bidder, then turn around and demand that those least able foot the bill.

“But as painful as it is for me to say, as painful as it is for all of us to see, that is the America we are living in today. It is a terrible sight. But our vision is clear. Our America, the America of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, of generations of men and women who have worked and fought and bled and died to preserve, is about to be reborn. Beginning today, in every city, every town square, every speck of public land we will assemble—calmly, peacefully, resolutely—and we will stay there until the actions that have robbed us of our America, the America we love, the America that will be, are reversed. I will be with you until that happens. God help us all.”

By noon the crowds had already begun to assemble. By nightfall they had doubled. By the next day they had tripled. The weather turned brutal. It stormed relentlessly in the Northeast. The crowds stayed. Heat and humidity broke records throughout the South. The crowds stayed. The Midwest was hot and parched. The crowds stayed. The West was cool and drizzly. The crowds stayed.

There was no violence. People simply got together and sat. Police and military units called on to disperse the demonstrators refused. They would take up position, keep the peace, protect and serve. But they would not attack. Ed Bane raged daily against police and demonstrators alike, but the black uniforms, the Bane-iacs, Revere Corps and the rest stayed away. They had no illusions about their chances for survival if they tried to interfere.

By the end of the first week the crowds had formed cities within cities, towns within towns. An elaborate support system sprang up. For all the hundreds of thousands camped out in the streets, hundreds of thousands more spelled the weary, brought in food and drink, tended to sanitation and medical emergencies, even provided entertainment.

John Doe resurfaced and kept a relentless schedule, every other day at a different city, a different encampment. He’d arrive without fanfare or entourage; though he’d banished Robert Ford’s guardian angels they ignored his order and protected him anyway. He handed out bottled water and emptied porta-potties and bandaged cuts and scrapes. He cajoled local merchants into providing tents and other forms of shelter, cooking equipment, better sanitary facilities, fresh food and immense quantities of water. Then he moved on and did it all over again. Two more hit teams were sent out. None of their members got close. Or survived.

By the end of the second week the business of America had virtually ceased. There were no shoppers in stores, no passengers on airplanes, little traffic on streets. Offices were dark and empty. Manufacturing plants sat idle. Service industries had no one to serve. More than forty million people had signed on to SayNo’s “Starve the Beasts” economic campaign, sending shivers down the spines of the heads of banks and other financial institutions.

By the end of the third week, as the stench of fear bloomed in executive suites and government offices, a sense of their own power bloomed among the millions who had risen in their own defense. I felt it in Miami, where I joined three hundred thousand determined South Floridians alternately sweltering under a laser sun and cowering beneath ferocious summer thunderstorms.

By the end of the fourth week Frank Bernabe and his “people” gave up. The prospect of economic ruin was too great, the pressure from corporatocracy impossible to ignore. The president lifted martial law, released AnnaLynn Conté and the others, abandoned efforts to pass the Economic Terrorism and Homeland Protection Act, promised amnesty to everyone involved. She also announced her resignation and handed over her duties to the vice president, a bureaucratic cipher named Caldwell. Bill Bigby and several of his colleagues made plans to leave the country. Frank Bernabe informed the staff at his Hamptons estate that he would be there soon. He contacted the head of the black uniforms and gave him one final assignment.

Tired, filthy, sunburned but exhilarated, I went back to the Keys, taking refuge from the rest of the world and, in truth, from myself.

I
t took me two days to reach AnnaLynn Conté. When I finally did she sounded shaken but ebullient. When I asked her about her detention she grew quiet and her voice got small and she said very carefully, “I was scared, Josh. Really, really scared.

“After you and John left, Ian and the rest of us found a hotel for the night. We were supposed to be staying in the RV we drove from New Orleans, but it was in the park and we didn’t feel safe going back there. About four in the morning these men in black uniforms broke down my door. They put me in handcuffs, put a bag over my head, took me out to a van. All of us from the rally were there. It was so crowded we barely had space to breathe.

“They drove us for maybe an hour, maybe two or three. I was so disoriented I had no sense of time. Then they marched us into some kind of holding facility—like a jail, but newer and nicer. They took all our belongings, made us wear these pajama-like things. We each had our own cell and were forbidden from talking, but we passed notes and could whisper messages when the uniforms weren’t around. There weren’t any windows, so we couldn’t tell what day it was, how long we’d been in there.”

I didn’t want to ask the next question.

“Did they hurt you?”

She hesitated a little.

“No. Well, not really. Not physically. They kept asking me about Sheila, about John’s guardians. Did I know their names, who they were, who they worked for, where their headquarters was. I told them I didn’t know, didn’t know anything about them except they just sort of appeared with John. They didn’t believe me. Threatened me with some pretty horrible things. Twice they gave me injections but I don’t think I told them anything then either because they still kept asking.

“Then one day they came, put us in handcuffs and bags again, marched us back into the van and dropped us off at the bus depot in D.C. in the middle of the night. I caught a cab to the airport and flew back to New Orleans, got in yesterday.”

Suddenly my days of rain, sunburn, bad food and no decent chardonnay in downtown Miami didn’t seem so noble. But she had something else to tell me.

“John wants me to help manage his campaign.”

I did a quick double-take but I really wasn’t surprised. “There’s nobody better,” I said. “But what about SayNo?”

“Ian will take over,” she said. “He’s good and smart and committed. But there’s something else too.”

“Yes?”

“John wants you to handle the media.”

That
was
a surprise.

“Me?”

“Why not you? He likes you, Josh. He trusts you. And he needs someone to help him with the media. Not a formal press secretary or anything. He’s not going to have a formal campaign anyway. More like what he’s been doing—going from place to place, seeing what people need, getting his hands dirty. He’s been meaning to call you himself but you know how it is. . .”

It was a hugely flattering offer. The responsibility that came with it scared the shit out of me. But what else could I say?

“Tell him yes, AnnaLynn. But only for a few weeks. As Candide said, it’s time to cultivate my own garden.”

* * *

Sitting in a summer rental in East Hampton, Robert Ford reviewed the files that had just been downloaded to his computer. He picked up his cellphone and texted, “That all?”

Immediately came the reply, “Yes.”

He put down the phone and printed out the files. Wei Lee closed the door of Frank Bernabe’s Manhattan office and caught a cab for JFK airport. Two hours later she was on a flight bound for Hong Kong.

* * *

At three o’clock on a mid-August morning, two cars converged on a narrow country road paralleling Threemile Harbor just west of the town of East Hampton. The road was really little more than a barely paved path tunneling beneath a dense canopy of oaks and maples leading to Frank Bernabe’s twenty-two-acre compound.

Over the years the head of Meyer Financial had purchased five adjacent homes and properties that ran from the main road all the way to the beach. Three he had razed, the foundations torn out and planted over. The smallest home closest to the road was the compound’s command center and housing for its staff. The other was Frank Bernabe’s residence, a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot monstrosity three times the size of its predecessor, built at a cost of upwards of sixty million dollars. The whole compound was then walled off behind concentric circles of security. For a man obsessed with privacy and keeping the world at a distance, it was ideal.

Just after midnight on that mid-August morning, the leading edge of a powerful storm system rolled over Long Island Sound and blasted the area. Fierce winds bent and snapped tree branches, whipped stinging gusts of rain sideways. Barbed strings of lightning split the night sky, followed by thunder that sounded like sonic booms. The weather was just what the men in the two cars had in mind. They had, in fact, been monitoring forecasts for days, waiting for the storm to arrive.

It was at its full fury as the cars pulled out of the driveway of their rented home. No one else was crazy or desperate enough to be out in this weather; they had virtually the entire island to themselves. They approached their target from opposite ends, roughly north and south. A quarter-mile away the vehicles ran up on the shoulder and slowed to a fast walk. Each disgorged a team of four men. Two wielded scoped and suppressed HK MSG-90 sniper rifles, two others M4 carbines with undermounted grenade launchers, two more held full-auto M4s. All carried SIG Sauer pistols and wore CADPAT rain gear designed to foil infrared vision technology.