‘Commendable.’ Delivered as an insult. ‘But if you work from this end, she’s as good as buried.’
‘We’ve got locations of a safe house pinpointed by the captured Forresters, a description of the man who gave them orders at a desert rendezvous.’
‘Requires detail. And while you search, they’ll see you coming. Leave it to others along the corridor. Go for the head. The Feds can address the limbs, the tactical issues. They’re better placed.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Easy indifference, the soft face hardening behind it. ‘You know that upsets my sleep. And you appreciate that it’s non-negotiable. Red sky at night, Downing Street takes fright. The British sky is very red, very frightening, at the moment. It encourages our PMs and their ministers to do foolish things.’
‘They need encouragement?’
‘The government is prostrating itself before the minority communities. They call it carrot and stick. The carrot is up their own rectums, the stick in the form of the Metropolitan Police is close to breaking. In the meantime, Carnival season is upon us.’
‘Notting Hill?’ Rhetorical; half-statement, part-question.
‘At the end of the month. The thinking – what there is of it – is that if you throw people a party, they’ll lose the fighting impulse.’
‘Or they merely spread the aggression.’
‘Local council has been coerced into agreeing. So you see, madness abounds. It usually does where race is concerned.’ The eyes were pig-small, swill-opaque. ‘Welcome aboard the Aubyn St Clair float, Josh.’
No calypso bands, no chance of diverting to save the woman to whom he had once been married. The high command of the Forresters would roam unopposed. He held the photograph of a South African businessman in his hands, had lost purchase on events in Los Angeles. St Clair had invited himself in, was now offering a route out. It was the way things had been the day he appeared on board the Maria Johanna, the day a headless torso was pulled from a net in the Thames. There were few other options, none for Krista. She had people on the outside who cared. Who were deserting. He remained still, resignation and acceptance working to anaesthetize feeling. Only then could he make the decision. It was why he had joined, why he had left.
* * *
Evening shadows were banished, the sunset outshone. A line of royal palms burned spectacularly on a deepening sky, regimented silhouettes consumed and arching in the heat, elevated heads turned to raging balls of napalm pyrotechnic. Dystopia, the other side of liberation, a place hewn from desert and rapidly being returned. Ghouls and gangbangers roamed the streets, mania replaced normality. This was Azania’s revolution; this was protest; this was where destruction was legitimized and enforced. Cut off by mountains, shut off from airports, it was a kingdom in isolation.
Party noises, high-powered engines getting ready to race. The entertainment industry in overdrive, festivities officially open. On one of the pans, tuned-up cars emitted fuel-injected smoke, their drivers doped or drunk, their supporters lolling and shouting, placing bets, fucking, freebasing, to the body beat of stadium phonics. The fighting had been hard that day, the law flouted, routed, the haul brought home to savour and consume. Anything went, everything had gone. What a riot. The Reverend made them feel good about themselves, gave justification, confidence, the means to right wrongs, an ideology. He spoke their language, expanded their vocabulary, their minds, pushed the envelope, was right from the start, with them from the beginning. A true leader. Just as well. They would never have achieved so much, acquired so much for free, without his inspiration. Man, he had kicked ass.
The starter gun – a combat rifle cracking out a brief volley – and the vehicles chased off, some fast, others weaving, stalling, playing catch-up. Roars pursued them, the roadsides crammed with the curious and enthusiastic. They were here to lend support, swagger, to show brotherhood and common purpose, to get down, get off, brag, smoke a little, to get dirty. Promenading and politics were not mutually exclusive; politics and public execution were a rite of passage, a right of the oppressed. Elsewhere, the revolution was gaining ground, taking different forms – Manhattan Beach was something, Venice a playground, Downtown real hardcore and happening – but, as ghetto fringe activities went, this wasn’t bad. One hundred metres, two hundred, on the straight, speed climbing, eyes widening. Excitement, tension, careered from the dial. Customized metal streaked by, trailing sparks, accelerating, carbon and rubber friction-melting beneath the motorcade. Heads whiplash-turned, money changed hands. A tow-rope snapped, a familiar shape flung from behind a contender and tumbling clumsily to a staggered halt. Mass whooping. Dollar bills were counted. The vehicles sped on, dragging loads that bounced and rebounded erratically in their train, humans losing parts and lodged in flaming tyres. A Korean gained on a cop, was beaten to the turn by a businessman who slithered by on the inside. The man had surrendered ground, clothes, dignity and life in the initial dash. He spread himself too thin. From the rear came a charge, a butcher’s cut with a weight handicap and unknown form. Breakneck, break-dance, break through. An awesome sprint. Unsustainable. The challenge – and the challenger – fell away, to pieces. Teams would soon change to slicks. On the pan, the next wave was prepared, the struggling participants tied firmly in position. They seemed reluctant to be in the spotlight, unenthusiastic for the red carpet ahead. Taste came a poor second to spectacle.
An interview was underway between microphone-wielding MC and a stammering, chill-frightened captive. How d’ya feel? Money’s ridin’ on you. Hey, say somethin’, fucka. You deaf, dissin’ me? You wanna die? You wanna blow me? Hey, no tears now, bitch. Inanity and insanity spiked every phrase, the recipient locked away on a higher plane of oblivion and distress. A balmy sundown. Announcement was given of a firefight off Normandy, a request made for volunteers to rub out remaining police resistance, to act as pickets in deterring forays by the National Guard. Gunmen stepped forward, were hailed, applauded, joined their cohorts for an impromptu parade. Intermission over, the games could restart.
Above, the unmanned airborne drone flew slowly, remote, its cameras compensating for lower light, its systems relaying stabilized imagery to law enforcement officials in bunkers and command posts. Technology was comforting, gave an illusion of initiative and control. Both had been lost; cigarettes and coffee were poor substitutes. Even software could not put a gloss on events at ground zero. The pictures flickered, switched to new perspectives, jumped from wide-angle to narrow-field, from hazy long shot to explicit close-up. Vignettes with a common theme. Each came with a story, each was accompanied with shouted outbursts of desperation and revulsion that withered to impotent silence. A mounted police officer galloped frantically from a scene – appeared centre-stage of another – made it to the panning shot before somersaulting in a flurry of hooves, horse flesh and small-arms fire. The cheers at the command station choked off to a groan. Outside a nightclub, stretchers queued at a field dressing station; close to a coffee bar, an ambulance was surrounded by Lilliputian figures, rocked and tipped on its side. It would be carrying medication, an injured patient. Whatever made a rabble high. The air vehicle travelled on. Along Wilshire, the diehards of Museum Square and Wilshire Courtyard had died all too easily, their environment ransacked, their bodies heaped and shoaling, bubbling, in the sulphurous brown waters of the Tar Pits. They were in company. Few had believed it would come to this, would ever reach so far.
A pair of coyotes gave a fleeting cameo-canine performance, tussling and snapping over divided spoils. The larger of the two, its muzzle and chest bloodied, its ruff sleek from foraging in a stomach and ribcage, wrenched free and paced off with the prize. In its jaws, held tight, was a human pancreas.
CHAPTER 15
The USA
Emmy had visited in the dream. Must be serious; it always was when she appeared in teenage form. Her hair was long, her smile High School-wide. So beautiful, so forgiving. It was still a mystery how someone that wise, that loved, ended face-down in a pool of blood and brain matter, finished with a gunshot. It took a daughter’s death to mine the purest truths: everyone made mistakes, everyone died like beasts. No exceptions. But Krista was pleased by her company. If things were going well, Emmy would come running into her consciousness as a small child, would reach out to be picked up, laughing with a simple joy that resonated even now. But things were not going well, not so simple. Between fitful slumber and the snatched half-wakened state that selected facts and wove in fantasy, Krista remembered Fletcher Wood bucking, spinning, to the impact of bullet strikes, Mary’s trauma-wide eyes, the trolley stretcher carrying Professor Pitt’s corpse from poolside to ambulance in Woodland Hills. Then Emmy’s body was lying cold on the slab. She should have been there for her, should have stopped her going on the yacht with friends to Catalina. Lesson learned. They would stick together, stay trapped together, mother and daughter.
She blinked, struggling to comprehend. Emmy’s face had fallen away, replaced by a devil mask with triple horns, red nose and snaggle-teeth. It grinned rigidly, head tilted, eyes intense behind the guise. Something familiar about it, an apparition risen sinister from another’s nightmare rather than her own. She worked her eyelids – found her hands tied – squeezed and opened to drive out sleep, generate belief. Mary had talked of such visitation, spoken of this thing. It was the embodiment, the solid form of an idea, of a repugnant creed attired in crimson zodiac robes, dressed with the pagan symbolism of religion; it belonged to a Forrester.
‘You don’t look like a master race,’ she ventured, mockery substituting for confidence. ‘I hope they don’t clone you.’
‘I’m sure you have a lot of hopes,’ it replied. She had a lot of fear.
‘You’re a Forrester.’
‘That I am.’
‘Are you one of the fascists they expelled from Airborne, or just their boss?’
‘They said you was assured. Didn’t tell us you was stupid too. Girly, this ain’t one of your cosy FBI chat rooms.’
He was right. It was not even an interview room at San Quentin. They had stolen the initiative, ripped her from her habitat. She was in the field, out of a loop, without back-up, devoid of charts, stratagems, stripped of her micro-tag, shorn of her friends. It was hardly a position of strength. With arms bound, it was barely a position at all. Sand dust had collected in the corner of her eyes, abraded like powdered glass; uncertainty crowded in her mind, equally raw.
She strained her neck and viewed the bare bunker walls, her gaze settling back on the gaping face. ‘No, it’s not one of my cosy FBI chat rooms,’ she conceded. ‘More like a circus.’ More like a fucking freak-show. ‘Ditch the clown costume, enter the adult world, and we’ll begin again, shall we?’
‘You’re nowhere near the beginning. We’ve outpaced you all the way.’
The man was perceptive. She was not exactly proud that the edifice of extremism had been constructed beneath the Bureau’s very nose. Each supremacist side had supported and protected the other, drawing up blueprints, building foundations, adding layers, an invisible structure of offensive and counter-offensive, stroke and masterstroke, rising to lay siege, camouflaged by racial taboo and hypocrisy. First, the killings of white racists, the murder of police officers; then the response, the attack on Highway 80, the sniper at the rally in DC, the homicide of Professor Pitt and arrest of Reverend Azania. Language inflamed tension, tension encouraged protest, protest engendered riot, riot provoked clampdown, clampdown inspired backlash that in turn created further conflict. To dismantle it required courage, vision, a course of action. Unlikely among politicians. The fanatics had relied on that. They sure as hell were not counting on Krista Althouse to intervene.
He reached out a hand and lifted her chin roughly. A small act, enough to summarize her vulnerability. ‘Sorry we found your ’lectronic trace. No one to save your pretty li’le ass, huh?’ To reply was to confirm impotence, to admit she was alone, needed saving. ‘Even Josh, your ex, has gone back home, lost interest. Guess he must’ve done that ’fore.’ By way of explanation, goading. ‘’S why he’s your ex, right?’
‘Fletcher Wood?’
‘Don’t you fret. The nigger’s dead. That grown-up enough for you? That part of the adult world?’ The fingers squeezed.
‘I don’t believe you.’ She believed him, stated the opposite in flat monotone. Self-control, self-denial.
The grip eased. He wanted to witness the collapse, the poise crumble. ‘And then there was one.’ Soon to be none was the implication. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. Tender-harsh, violating. She refused to shrink from it. ‘We don’ often take prisoners of war.’
‘No one could mistake you for an army.’
‘We’re greater than that. We’re a concept, an ideal.’
