perspective you could share.’ He said it in an uncertain voice, as though picking his way through the sentence with great care. The National Security Advisor frowned as if he’d been presented with a lump of questionable street meat wrapped in a soggy hotdog bun.
‘The man should pay his bills,’ Ritchie replied flatly.
The bald statement fell into silence, punctuated a few seconds later by Kipper’s bark of laughter.
‘Yes, yes, he really should! But short of driving a tank into his office and demanding the money at gunpoint, I don’t see it happening.’
‘You could always haul him off to the courts, I suppose,’ suggested Ritchie, causing Paul McAuley to lean forward with avid interest.
‘Oh, believe me, we’ve thought about it,’ said Kip. ‘Even tried once or twice on some minor fed-state issues. But Jed here won’t let me go the full court press, so to speak.’
The Chief of Staff found every eye in the room turned on him. ‘We’ll have the same problem that Andrew Jackson’s Supreme Court faced,’ he explained. ‘Yes, the courts would find in our favour. Legally our case is sound. Enforcing the decision, on the other hand, is another matter.’
Culver rose from his warm chair and wandered over to the window. The world outside had turned completely white. It was difficult to pick out any details from the garden through the blizzard. A native of Louisiana, he wondered if Seattle had suffered from this sort of weather before the Wave, or more accurately before the pollution storms that had raged when the continent had burned.
He turned and faced the Garage Cabinet.
‘We have to stop thinking of Blackstone as a reasonable man. Outwardly he appears to be reasonable - but rest assured, he is not. He’s a power-seeking loon who probably would have talked his way straight into a quiet retirement if not for the Disappearance. He will overreach himself. The trick is for us not to be caught off balance at the same time.’
Jed took a wander around the Oval Office. Barbara Kipper had placed about the room framed photos and other relics from her husband’s college days. Pictures from mountain walks; a few knick-knacks picked up while scuba diving. The Secret Service would not let him anywhere near an open body of water with scuba gear on his back. The best they’d grant him was some time in a pool ringed with agents. Kip understandably thought it wasn’t worth the trouble.
‘The last thing we need to do, Mr President, is give this asshole the opportunity to say, “I’m laughing in the face of the Supreme Court.” I can already see him hee-hawing through a performance on fucking Fox, slandering each of the justices as some pissant backwoods lawyer who tripped over his dick to fall onto the bench. Again, apologies Sarah.’
Secretary Humboldt smiled. ‘Quite all right, Mr Culver.’
‘Fucking Fox,’ muttered Kipper. ‘Three hundred million people turned into jelly by the Wave, and Rupert Murdoch wasn’t one of them. There is no God.’
McAuley lifted his briefing note. ‘If I might, Mr President?’
‘Sure, Paul, knock yourself out.’
McAuley began quoting from reams of figures contained in a table that summarised federal government income and outlays for the next six months. Culver was all too familiar with the math. Even with the reduced need for federal spending, the fact was they weren’t generating enough revenue to meet that reduced need and service the debt at the same time. The line of credit would mask the shortfall in their receipts, but while they’d be able to meet their obligations in the short term, the underlying deficit would continue to grow. A population of twenty million simply could not handle the tab left by three hundred million. Land sales, speculation, trading away this for that, had only slowed the slide.
It simply wasn’t sustainable. Nor was it James Kipper’s fault, nor Paul McAuley’s. The Secretary of the Treasury was obliged to prepare the government’s financials according to law. But as long as Blackstone wilfully ignored the law as it required him to remit monies to Seattle, there would always be a black hole in the middle of the accounts, sucking everything into it like the fucking maelstrom in that Edgar Allen Poe story.
As McAuley droned on through his delivery, Jed turned his thoughts to the crux of the problem. He couldn’t advise military force. That simply wasn’t an option. Down that road was the ruin of both Seattle and Texas. But Mad Jack Blackstone had to go, one way, or another.
He snuck a peek at his President. A decent man, who would almost certainly demure when faced with the necessity for hard and questionable action. Culver made a note to himself that he would have to talk to Sarah Humboldt after the meeting.
7
NORTH KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Maive and Miguel settled into their seats on the crowded city bus. They had strolled down Armour Road, past the store-fronts, some still abandoned, some recently reopened, in an effort to see if there was anything worthwhile. As they walked, they passed a single-screen movie theatre showing the latest Aussie blockbuster,
Some people thought that, just like in the movie, the Disappeared were still alive somewhere, perhaps in some alternate universe. Young Adam Coupland could probably have explained it, but to Miguel Pieraro, it all seemed to be wishful thinking. He pushed the idea out of his mind as the bus coughed and stuttered down Swift towards the Missouri River. The warmth of the heaters allowed him to drop away from reality for a few precious moments into his own thoughts.
Miguel still wore the jacket in which he had set out from home a lifetime ago. He could have replaced it easily enough. They had passed through any number of small towns on the way north, and even skated around the edges of a couple of larger cities. At any point along the trail he could’ve ditched this filthy, often sodden lamb’s-wool-lined coat for something new, something that didn’t remind him of loss and grief. But he found it impossible to let go.
He still had the Winchester rifle with which he’d killed three of the men who had murdered his family, and with which he had killed more as he rode north, taking Sofia to safety. These days, the Winchester was secured within the gun cabinet he had erected back at the apartment he shared with his daughter. Kansas City might have been a frontier settlement now, but it was not the frontier. You couldn’t walk the streets here bearing arms; there were police officers to stop you if you tried. They drove ‘cruisers’, wore blue uniforms and made every effort to act as though the Wave had never happened. If they didn’t stop you, the local militia would, one way or the other.
For some months after they had arrived here, the lack of a weapon to hand left the Mexican journeyman feeling insecure, feeling like he was unable to protect his daughter. But he had recognised this as a form of madness. She was much better off living in a place where people did not routinely carry firearms. Particularly given the number of Indians and Pakistanis working in the city, he thought, just quietly. He had lost count of the number of fights he’d broken up at the railway yards, just as the Heartland resettlement authorities had long since given up trying to intermingle the two populations. The Indians tended to live down in the dilapidated buildings in the West Bottoms, spreading across the Kansas River to another part of the city. The Pakistanis ended up near the River Market, where Sofia was sulking right now.
In any case, over the weeks and months, he got used to sleeping in a bed each night, to not riding a horse every day, to not worrying about road agents, bandits or crazed wanderers stealing into camp to slit his throat and have away with the women. He did not want to get used to the idea of being without his family, however. For some reason he felt that keeping the jacket he had worn around his home, lately in Texas, and before that in Mexico, might help maintain a link with the past. For that reason too, he repaired his boots rather than picking up a pair from an empty store. There was the picture of Mariela and the children, also, which he carried with him - the one he had taken from the silver frame in the bedroom, the day he’d been forced to spirit Sofia away. He felt around inside the soft woollen interior of the jacket now until he found his wallet, where he knew the photo was safe. It gave him no ease, though.
The bus rolled onto Burlington Avenue and accelerated southbound past the warehouses and store-fronts. A loud, angry whine filled his ears as another military transport took off from the local airport. For a time, the planes were flying non-stop, bringing new settlers and equipment into the city while flying out valuable goods needed elsewhere in the country. When he’d first arrived in KC, the jets and the rumbling of the trains conspired to keep him awake at night. The trains still kept him up, but the planes now came every other day, always in waves, never
