Angels of Vengeance

‘Mr Culver,’ she said, making an effort to keep her voice neutral, ‘can I help you?’

‘Relax, Sarah,’ said Jed. ‘Because as a matter of fact you can. I could’ve brought it up during the meeting, except it wasn’t strictly an agenda item. Even though I think it is related to some of the problems we were discussing.’

Humboldt managed to look both intrigued and relieved at the same time. She smiled at James Ritchie as he slowed down to pass by, reassuring him that she didn’t seem to be in trouble with the Chief of Staff. From the open doorway of the Oval Office, Ritchie and McAuley said their goodbyes and left to see whether their drivers were able to get them back to their respective offices, across town.

The snowstorm had evolved very quickly into a reasonably intense blizzard. The President had no immediate responsibility for organising Seattle’s defences in such circumstances, but Jed could see the former city engineer’s mind already turning back to small-scale crisis management: clearing roads, keeping the power on, making sure all the kids who’d been dropped off at the city’s schools in the cold, if comparatively mild, weather that morning were going to be okay. It wasn’t the man’s job anymore, but for once Culver was happy to leave him to the distraction as, across the room from them, Kipper picked up the phone to check on the snowploughs.

‘Everything all right, Jed?’ he asked, standing up at his desk.

He had picked up on the interchange between the two, but his attention was really focused on the storm. He just wanted to get on with sticking his nose in where it wasn’t really needed. President James Kipper could be quite the micro-manager where Seattle was concerned. The city authorities resented the interference, but happily accepted the federal government resources it delivered to them as well.

‘We’re fine, Mr President,’ said Jed. ‘There’s a few things I need to discuss with Sarah about this new job you’ve given us.’

‘Sarah, is that okay?’ asked Kipper.

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine, sir,’ replied Humboldt. ‘I don’t think he’s going to throw me down an elevator shaft, and we do have a lot to talk about.’

Reassured that he wasn’t about to lose one of his top civil servants to Jed Culver’s legendary reputation for payback, Kip was already nodding and dialling out before she’d finished speaking.

While the President’s private secretary fussed around them, clearing up the debris from the meeting - china cups, sandwich plates and some leftover cookies - Jed shepherded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement boss out through the anteroom, snaffling a couple of Barbara Kipper’s choc-chip and peanut butter heart stoppers as he went. Ronnie gave him the stink eye as he scavenged.

‘In case we get completely snowed in,’ he told her. ‘Emergency supplies.’

‘You’re worse than Barney. Get out,’ said Ronnie. ‘And don’t get crumbs all through your office either. You’ll be cleaning them up yourself.’

He took his dressing-down with good grace. Besides Kip, Ronnie Freeman was probably the only person on staff at Dearborn House who could put him in his place. Bad things tended to happen to those who crossed her. For one, you might not get fed, which in Jed’s world was pretty bad. Or the food might be cold, or your coffee ration would magically disappear. Ronnie was on good terms with the army chefs who kept the kitchen running here. She too had a finely honed reputation as someone you just didn’t fuck with. With a bulk that matched Culver’s, she was likely to tackle you into a dark closet for what her father used to call ‘some wall-to-wall counselling’.

No, Jed thought, best not to upset Ronnie.

His office was only a few doors down from the President’s, and because of the antique layout of the old mansion, there was no separate room for his assistant, Ms Devers. She worked in the pool down the hall. He led Sarah Humboldt into his domain, a surprisingly small room for a man who was often thought of as the real power in the Kipper administration. A large wooden desk, carved from dark oak and topped with some sort of light brown leather, stretched two-thirds of the way across the width of the space. Bookshelves ran from ceiling to floor, crammed along their length with bound volumes of congressional proceedings, government reports and distressed, dog-eared buff-coloured folders fat with more paper. There were dozens of works of non-fiction, with a sizeable helping of biographies and history, including Bernard Bailyn’s work on the American Revolution and Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum. As busy as he was, Culver did his best to get at least an hour of reading in a day. The latest book on the stack was going to require a lot of those single hours. He was just a hundred pages into the massive tome, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction.

Brushing the Foner with one thumb as he flicked on the lights, Culver contemplated the book, and honestly wondered if it was worth his time. At least with it on his shelves no one could accuse him of taking the Dunning School too seriously. The room was dark and smelled slightly musty, for which he apologised. A large window behind his desk afforded a view into the gardens, but there was little to see at the moment, thanks to the snow plastered to the outside of the glass.

‘Sit down, Sarah,’ he said. ‘And relax. Please. I’m not going to go upside your head for that tag-team effort you and Ritchie laid on me back there. In a way, it was kind of admirable. The sort of thing I would do, since Kip was never going to go with my suggestion to just push them all off the end of a dock and tell ‘em to keep swimming until they reach France. With that said, this settlement scheme you’ve got can probably be turned to our advantage, as long as I can sell the harsher, more punitive aspects of it.’

‘I’m sure that’s where you’ll shine,’ she replied, accepting his offer of a chair, one of two single-seater Chesterfields standing sentry in front of his desk.

He closed the door and manoeuvred around the end of the long table into his own chair. It took some doing in the tight space.

‘The program will be fine,’ Jed said. ‘It’s just a matter of how we frame it. If we could choose a few diehards to expel from the country, or even better, to execute for crimes against humanity, it would show everyone we’re not a soft touch.’

Humboldt shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Well, I don’t know that I -‘

‘Of course, you wouldn’t put it like that, Sarah. You’re a nice person. Unlike me. You just want the best for everyone. I don’t, I want the best for this administration, because I think, most things being equal, that means getting the best for the country as well. Sometimes that’s going to mean hurting somebody’s feelings, possibly breaking a few heads - or even shooting a few guys in the back of the head. Guys who desperately need it, I’d add. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today.’

‘Good,’ she said, with real relief. She had not been at all comfortable with the direction of his thoughts.

Jed figured Ms Humboldt to be the type who lived in liberal blogistan and faithfully followed their constant bloviating about the conditions for detainees at Fort Leavenworth. Heaven forbid that we water-board anyone or use their holy book for cigarette papers. We couldn’t possibly sink to the same level as those guys, who saw off heads and put them up in streaming video feeds on the internet …

Frankly, such people reminded him entirely too much of his grade-school teachers and their endless preaching about how violence never solved anything. It was a funny thing; they never seemed to mention the hundred or so historical examples he could think of right now where violence really did solve problems.

He could have sighed. Sometimes it was a drag being the smartest guy in the room.

Humboldt straightened herself in the armchair, gathering the courage to speak her mind. ‘Jed, I must say I find the way you characterise these things to be very unpleasant and often unnecessary.’

‘Unpleasant, I’ll give you. Unnecessary is a moot point. But since we are on the topic, I wanted to talk about the unpleasantness down in Texas. Specifically, about the attacks on some of our settler families in the Federal Mandate.’

He could see he’d taken her by surprise. The incidence of settler families being run off their properties, and in some cases even murdered, wasn’t really high enough to have registered with the public, the efforts of the blogistan irregulars notwithstanding. Not when so many people had died in the Battle of New York. Not when a few thousand freebooters and pirates still roamed around the dead cities of the eastern seaboard, despite the efforts of the military and militias to drive them off. A family missing here, a homesteader there - it wasn’t much when laid against the butcher’s bill in Manhattan. Bloodshed was the one thing they had an ample surplus of and it saturated the media, numbing the much-reduced masses to anything but the most insensate savagery.

‘Do you propose to do something about the security arrangements?’ asked Humboldt. ‘My office has been arguing in favour of a Mandate militia for nearly two years.’

Jed smiled grimly. Technically, they did have federal troops in Texas, elements of the regular army and air force. Their ability to act, however, was strictly limited to territorial defence only; they were not a police force or a