‘Consider me a concerned party.’ Her fingernails were gripping, jawbone tightening, reacting to the force of his will, the strength of his gaze.
A static smile, eyes shining anticipation, the face serene. ‘I consider you party to everything.’
She felt threatened rather than reassured. ‘Spell it out Reverend.’
‘A challenge when the organs of state are illiterate, their servants also.’ He shot his cuffs, walked back to the centre of the room. ‘They are not yet ready to understand that the have-nots shall become the haves, the Jim Crows will rise to take what is theirs.’
‘What’s your take, your role?’
‘You’re asking grassy knoll or book depository? You’re asking did I have Professor Pitt eradicated? Was I involved in the termination of those police informants? Could I have ordered the killing of the white supremacists and the MacArthur Park policemen to initiate the cycle? Did I collude in the events on Highway 80 or the Mall? Have I engineered crisis?’ She did not reply, would wait while he played with the subject, toyed with her. It was one way of gaining insight, procuring intelligence. ‘If I’m charged, my lawyers will tear up the case, rip the stomach from the nation.’
‘Your followers appear to be jumping the starter-gun.’
‘They’re enthusiasts. Overthrow doesn’t come from folk sitting on their thumbs.’
‘Doesn’t come cheap. What have you contributed, Reverend?’
‘My life.’
‘For a man of faith, you give a fine impression of a man of violence.’
‘The recourse of the weak. This is how liberation movements start.’
‘This is where bullshit is initiated.’
Adversarial silence swelled between them, filled by the murmur of air-conditioning, by the distant sounds of corridors and offices preparing for a blockade. It added to the claustrophobia, the sandbag mentality, fed the uneasiness. Only Azania seemed content, happy to observe what he had created and ordained, tranquil atop the mountain. He had chosen well, picked the poisoned issue that would paralyse legislature, prevent response. Race could justify anything, command and coerce; race could divide, rule, pervert. The operation was underway, the switches thrown. Intervention would be futile. Hell, futility was a watchword for the FBI. She met the cobra stare. He was out to dominate, seeking to intimidate. Two could play-act. She blanked him.
His rhetoric had the certainty of a Bible-reading. ‘At the dawn of Man, it was the black who first rose to his feet and strode the African savannah, who carried civilization, who saw the world spread out before him. His inheritance. And it was snatched away, stolen by slavers, white land-grabbers, big government, international finance. It is our right, our duty, to seize it back.’
And so on. Pseudo-philosophy and mock anthropology that marked the divide, defined the Reverend and his followers. So similar to the eugenic utopia of the far right, determinedly white. It was a declaration of intent, a confirmation of strife. She listened wearily, aware of the insistent tone, immunized to its message. In her line of work, the racist riffs were all the same. It was the scale of noise that differed here. He continued, lecturing, filling time. One way to create a diversion, she supposed. Diversion. Something penetrated her cortex – doubt, the hint of recognition – gaining shape and mass. The Reverend was not interested in a chat, he was concerned with drawing attention: to an event, away from another. He wanted this.
‘That’s not the Harlem Boys’ Choir you’ve got outside, Reverend.’ She jerked a thumb towards the window. ‘You want to tell me why they’re gathering?’
Pretty girl, Azania thought, looked good with little make-up, could grace the cocktail set in T-shirt and jeans and still make other women want to scratch out her eyes and tits. Feisty and fun-loving were his favourite types. A sense of humour would be needed. She was up to her neck, sinking. He would use a shovel to pat down the earth.
‘I wouldn’t care to be an unarmed Caucasian in LA at this moment in time,’ he said eventually.
‘Or moment in history,’ she replied. ‘That what you’re pitching for?’
He winked at her, deliberate, stroke-victim slow. It was the knowledge of an insider. ‘How does it go – a bullet for every settler.’ The fingers were cocked, pointing at her.
* * *
Catastrophe had its own ebb and flow. This one was in flood. It did not follow the routine pattern of city riot – the initial assault on liquor stores, the subsequent raids on car showrooms, the resulting scavenge-and-pillage missions conducted by drunken mobs – for convention was for amateurs. Here, there was only professionalism. Random disorder, crowd rampage, was a smokescreen, arbitrary violence a tactical adjunct to strategic ends. Swamp the authorities, confuse the cops, paralyse the emergency services, and you could manoeuvre on the frontline, advance behind the black noise and rolling barrage, to strike at will, punch through anywhere. Discipline, precision and concentrated effort marked the opening; the weapons were handled by Tigers. They obeyed orders, pursued the design. Every quarter would be taken, no quarter given, while the metropolis lay moribund waiting for the coup de grâce. Azania could slit its throat, finish it with a fruit-knife. He was marching on America, and America would capitulate. It was the force of destiny, the strength of the African people. Los Angeles: a soft target ready to be taken down. The operation was underway.
On Hill Street, the elevator shaft was the sole indication of life below ground, of the hidden existence of the mole people, the clerks and archivists who populated the subterranean burrows and darkened reaches of the majestic Hall of Records above. Daylight did not intrude into these Downtown tunnels and chambers. It was a secret world of gloom, detached from the rest, where documents and humans mouldered, yellowed, to the same consistency, where bare and feeble illuminating bulbs straggled away to fade and die in labyrinthine paths. Depending on the mindset, the place could be disturbing or restful. But even shadows hated it.
Visitors – a rare occurrence. It was not a destination to which Angelinos flocked, nor even a location of which they knew. By day, the area of unalluring office blocks and scarcely alloyed ugliness absorbed commuters in their thousands, swallowed them whole from Union Station and the guarded parking lots. At night, it spat them out, cleared the desert concrete in readiness for the junkies and the homeless, for the playground antics of the poor, for the seamless switch from business to bodily functions. Vomit, shit, piss, blood and semen – the stuff of life, of life being well and truly stuffed. Beneath the surface, nothing changed. Papers were collated and filed, boxes were labelled and stored. Everything neat, everything catalogued. It would have been hard to classify the unannounced callers. The elevator ran silently, bringing the first group down. No one studied the image from the security camera, no one looked up as the activation button blinked, as an insider ushered them through. Public service was a contradiction in terms. Outlanders did not belong; there was no such thing as too unwelcoming. But attitudes could change.
‘Excuse me, may I ask what you’re doing?’
‘Making home videos,’ came the explanation.
‘You realize this is an archive?’
‘You realize this is an archive?,’ was the mimicked response. ‘Yeah.’
It was also a ready-made tomb and a conduit. The men were workmanlike, wore overalls , carried suppressed weaponry, their image-intensification goggles already recording and in place over hidden eyes. They had come to the underworld for a purpose. Shock was slow to travel, reality and realization as strange as the apparitions themselves. It was most irregular. Perhaps it was a joke. Except that pranks were forbidden. Perhaps it was an exercise. Except that warning would be posted. Perhaps they were urban cyber-geeks and thrill-seekers. Except that compulsive trespassers seldom went equipped for a firefight. Or for murder. The lights extinguished, the shooting started. Routine, humdrum business.
In Koreatown, central Los Angeles, the land campaign had launched with a column of armed pick-ups screeching off Venice and lurching with coercive wheel-spins into the turn up Vermont. Engines revved. Ahead lay the mid-Wilshire district. Capture that, and the city’s pulmonary artery would be choked. Only the Korean traders stood in the way. The Tigers checked the ammunition feeds, the belts of heavy-calibre machine-gun rounds, the grenade boxes. A shopping trip was never quite complete without them. The locals could be tricky. Store-keepers despised the blacks, overcharged, had a habit of aiming first and shooting fast. There was little love lost, a lot of grudge remaining. Their premises had been burned in 1992; they could be relied upon for an aggressive defence. Forewarned was forearmed, forearmed came with options of single shot, burst and full automatic. The return. A blue-smoked pause before action, the whining motor pitch of mass internal combustion, of overworked cylinders, chattering valves, rising towards a moment of rampage. Technicals are Go.
A scared resident bolted, his red Mazda drop-top leaping from the wired pound of an auto-repair shop and racing for the lead. The rabbit. He got a hundred yards, terror-pumped relief forcing the pace, propelling flight and euphoria, until a tracer shot found the range and jacketed .50 followed, Complete disintegration, car and body parting company, going their multiple and separate ways. The advance surged north, reaping as it went, properties mushrooming into flame, people falling where they stood or ran. A doorway and its huddled occupants disappeared; a thrift store frontage collapsed, the owner beheaded by shrapnel, his bloodied wife screaming and meaningless beside him at the counter; an SUV forced entry to a grimy and steel-gated medical centre, the Tiger in ear-defenders slewing his cannon to spread the salvo, before backing out. At the ruined store, the woman was finished off by a foot-soldier. It was comprehensive search, utter destruction. Behind, trucks brought teams to salvage and sift, to kill the overlooked and the wounded. Methodical, dirty work. Side-arms picked off the living, increased the dead. What were strip malls, if not to strip? A man in a soiled T-shirt and carrying a pump-action leant against a shattered vending machine and tipped a soda to his lips. Rest-time was brief. He snap-folded, his lower back blown away, a hole wet and large in his abdomen. On the roof of a budget eaterie, figures were crouching, Koreans rushing to beat off the onslaught with assault-rifles and handguns. The fight back, and it was unequal. One-by-one, or in tangled groups, they retreated or were shredded in burst detonations of rifle grenades and fragmentation rockets. Five Koreans were dragged, struggling, protesting, to line up against a wall Dali-esque with exotic graffiti. Voices were shrill, excitable. Shit, so much like the gooks, so much like anyone fidgeting, pleading to live. They yelled, cried, offered money, the key to their savings, the location of their valuables; a sideshow in the bigger picture. They were shot. Instant art, immediate mural, the wall reconfiguring to pockmarked abstract.
The sweep continued, on past Pico and Olympic and straight for Wilshire Boulevard. A squad car arrived, reversed, exploded, littering the ground, adding to the incendiary queue of automobile wreckage. Avenue had become abattoir. The area had once hosted law firms, insurance groups, had entertained professionals, courted the white-collar greenback. They had gone, persuaded by crime and reason to move with the times and make it fast. A clever call. Their offices stood boarded and bare, or crammed with the lower-tier activities of the next generation, testimony to blight and nervousness, to the pall of the ’92 riots. There was small-scale business, unfinished business. The convoy bounced over bodies and potholes, threaded its sanguinary way, smashing through. Break-out. It had reached mid-Wilshire, emerging through the smoke, spinning left onto the boulevard to link with the parallel forces striking up Crenshaw. An ugly stretch, bounded by churches, Korean banks, buildings as undistinguished and indistinguishable as the rest, a route that led past blocks defaced by poverty and the junction with La Brea. Closed theatres, restaurants, dealerships; the misery of matching blandness. It was about to get a makeover. In the distance was prosperity, capital affluence, the confidence that came with different territory, fashion boutiques, vigorous police and an improved zip code. Beverly Hills. A tough nut guarding a vulnerable heart. Beyond it was Century City, the glass, steel and concrete hub of LA corporatism, venue for the sudden and simultaneous detonation of three hidden bombs. There were casualties, the radio traffic of emergency, distress calls that pulled in ambulances, fire engines and the LAPD. Divide and divert. The Reverend enjoyed a challenge.
Back Downtown, a unit of the police Mobile Field Force had encountered the Tigers on the corner of Hope and Olympic and come off worst. Their tactical vehicles were brewing, their officers sprawled outside or cooked within. One and a half months of riot-control training comprehensively decimated by several years of revolutionary warfare instruction. Plastic baton rounds and tear gas versus high-velocity lead and sprayed steel. It was a scenario that would repeat itself throughout the district, a situation defying control or understanding. Spectators came – amateur enthusiasts, souvenir-hunters, politicized ghouls – drawn by the action, by the lure of participation, the promise of the law getting a licking, their champion getting released. Pride and inhumanity swelled. Stalls appeared on Central Avenue to feed the craving, handing out narcotics, alcohol and ammunition, directing the flow from Watts and South Central. On Flower Street, the first underground parking lot was raided, the vehicles seized, hot-wired and driven off to reinforce the push along Wilshire or to barrier-crash closer battle-fronts. Above it, office workers lay on floors and expected the worst. They would not be disappointed.
Anti-tank missiles, truck-mounted, wire-guided, were launched on command. They flew fast, accurate, their armour-piercing warheads thudding into the sides of the Parker Center, rocking and raking the building with multiple impacts. The police fortress was designed to withstand small arms, the low-intensity threat posed by tooled-up freaks and the urban disturbed. Defence against surplus Cold War artillery had never been fed into its civil design parameters. Reasonable enough, but a pity. Breach achieved, the bunker busted. Guerrilla warfare was underway, and the LAPD could retreat, surrender or die. It amounted to the same. The Tigers pressed home, poured through, smashing past melted glass and tangled metal, the fragments of opposition. They were here to collect, to lift their commander, to win an audience with the chief of police. A water cannon played ineffectively against the tide, was swallowed, its streams of indelible water cut off abruptly. The hands and clothes of Azania’s stalking packs would be stained a different hue. Sounds were swamped in the throat-clamour of thousands, the pulsing chants, bellowing suspended above the muffled crack of flash-bangs and the fainter hiss of gas cartridges. At City Hall, along First and N. Spring Streets, the art deco lobbies, the atria, rang to shots, shouts, the tread of boots emerging from the tunnels. Scouring below ground was complete; above, takeover was in train.
* * *
‘Hell, just take my wallet.’
The sight was threatening, a Jeep in splinter camouflage pulling at speed into Krista’s Playa del Rey driveway, Fletcher Wood jumping out in leather jacket, combat slacks, sneakers and a lot of gold. Special Agent to hoodlum in a single change of outfit; he could carry it off, carry off the entire contents of a bank vault without anyone daring to challenge. Menacing professionalism, professional menace, were transferable skills. Kemp greeted him with feet astride and thumbs tucked into waistband.
‘See everyone’s evacuating,’ the FBI man observed. ‘And I don’t mean only their homes.’ Car horns punctuated the delivery in the near background. It was the layered discord of intangible alarm turning to palpable terror.
‘Your designer wear hardly sends out vibes of peace. Where d’you find the kit?’