A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “That would do it, if you really are suicidal,” Cody admitted. “If you do that, I’ll shoot you once dead center to put you down, and when you’re on the floor I’ll give you another couple of rounds in the face to make sure I mess it up good. That will scupper the conference right here, and the war will resume, and if the Americans don’t kill me here in this room I’ll probably face some kind of court martial from my people or yours, wherein I’ll simply tell them what happened, and we’ll see how it plays out. Is that what you want, Leah?”

  “Take it out,” she said, staring at his holster in fascination. “Your gun. I want to see it. Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Jesus, you’re turned on, aren’t you?” snapped Cody in disgust.

  * * *

  “Want a drink?” asked Stanhope inside the conference room, gesturing towards the well-stocked mini-bar.

  “We don’t drink in the NVA,” replied Barrow, sitting down at the table. “Regulations. Volunteers are not allowed to consume alcohol, for the duration. I’ll take a ginger ale if you’ve got one”

  “An amazingly sensible rule,” said Stanhope, handing him a bottle from a recessed fridge and a plastic cup, and setting an ice bucket down on a coaster on the table. “The United States government could do with a bit of abstinence as well, but we seem to be incapable of abstaining from anything.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Why is that?” asked Barrow.

  “When there is no spiritual core remaining, then life becomes all body, all cravings and needs of the flesh,” said Stanhope, pouring himself a generous tot of Chivas Regal which Barrow had to admit made his mouth water and awoke the old craving. He made a mental note that he’d need to be on guard against those particular demons from his past. Cleaning out the mini-bars was only a gesture; this place was awash in a sea of whole grain. “So, you’re a former cop, I believe? How did you end up in present company? Cynicism aside, one wouldn’t think a policeman would be comfortable finding himself among lawbreakers.”

  “Depends on who makes those laws,” said Barrow, sipping his ginger ale. “And who breaks them. When you’re on the street and you see that the overwhelming majority of violent criminals you deal with are black or brown, it’s hard to keep up the politically correct doublethink. Every major cop shop has a wall of slain officers, and even in a majority white town like Seattle, you notice that most of those officers were killed by non-whites. In my case, I made the silly mistake of believing that the law applied to well-connected black politicians. How did you end up in present company?”

  “Oh, I’m not a career diplomat. Frankly, I’m a time-server,” said Stanhope. “Are you familiar with the works of Gilbert and Sullivan? H. M.S. Pinafore to be exact? There’s a song in there called ‘Ruler of the Queen’s Navy’ which pretty much sums up my career. Stick close to your desk and never go to sea, and you may become the ruler of the Queen’s Navy. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, went to Yale. Skull and Bones, of course. Two term Congressman from Massachusetts before I went to the Senate, then I ended up turfed out of my Senate seat by a Hispanic woman. I was given State as a consolation prize because no one else wanted it. Hardly surprising since you guys keep killing the holders of my office, but more than that, the role of the State Department has been diminishing for many years and it now exercises virtually no control at all American over foreign policy.”

  “So why did you take it?” asked Barrow.

  “I found to my amazement that at the age of fifty, I had actually developed some ideals,” he said. “God knows where they came from. Ideals certainly don’t run in my family. My father and my grandfather never believed in anything in their lives, except money. But I grew up and I saw the atrocious mess that preceding generations had made of America, and for some unaccountable reason I felt responsible for it.”

  “Well, you and your kind are responsible for it. By the way, I understand that all of this may be complete bullshit,” said Barrow.

  “Yes, it might,” he said. “But it’s interesting bullshit, isn’t it? Did you ever see one of these little bumper stickers that said ‘Life is a play pen and whoever finishes it with the most toys wins?’ There are a lot of people in America who actually believe that, who have been brought up to believe that.”

  “And speaking of toys, how many microphones are there in here?” asked Barrow, looking around Stanhope’s suite.

  “None, actually, if I can believe the Department of Homeland Security, which is always problematic,” he replied. “Your rooms are bugged as well, of course, and there are fiber-optic cameras hidden in the television sets. I was able to dissuade the DHS from putting cameras in the bathrooms, so hopefully you can at least go to the can and take a shower in privacy.”

  “I have no idea or not whether to believe you, but if it’s true, thank you.”

  Stanhope swished his drink, downed it like a sailor, and poured himself another. “Yes, you can believe me, on that, anyway. But whether I can believe my own security people is another story. In theory we are alone right now, but I have no idea whether or not anyone is listening. If they are, I can assure you, I’ll hear about it later on, since this is in fact a little unauthorized initiative on my part and some of my colleagues are going to be very browned off about it.” He sat down at the table with the second Scotch, not across from Barrow but at the head of the table next to him. “General Barrow, I will begin by admitting to you something that I would never admit in public, and that is that your terrorist campaign over the past five years has forced us to come here today. In the first place, we are doing it because the Northwest Volunteer Army has effectively shut down New York and Washington, D.C., and we have discovered that the United States of America simply cannot function without those two cities. We were very foolish to allow all this to get that far, but we did. Secondly, you have created such a loss of income tax revenue that you are running the richest country in the world broke. We can no longer borrow any more money because the International Monetary Fund and other banking institutions have no more to borrow.”

  “Plus there’s the fact that Israel is about to go down the tubes,” added Barrow.

  “Ah, you’ve picked up on that, have you?” said Stanhope, trying not to sound impressed and a little nonplussed. “Clever boys. Been playing footsie with the Arabs as well as the Russkies, have you? But you would, wouldn’t you? We always wondered about that, but we could never catch you at it. Well, I’ll hand it to you. You have dragged us here, kicking and screaming. America will never be the same, whatever the result. The master of the house has been forced to sit down at the same table with his field hands, break bread with them, and treat them as if they were his equals. You have no idea of the hatred and rage that instills in the rulers of a plutocracy, which is what the United States is and always has been. I suppose you know us well enough by now to understand that you will never be forgiven for that, not a hundred years from now. You have my congratulations, sir. You have accomplished an incredible feat and I would be the last to withhold my applause, in private at any rate. That having been said, the first thing I should ask you is what you expect to accomplish at this meeting? You seem to be an intelligent man. You must be, to be sitting where you are. Surely, surely you have not come here under any delusion that you are going to walk out of here with three of the United States of America in your briefcase? Such a thing is literally unthinkable. We couldn’t do that if we wanted to. It’s—well, unthinkable, pardon the repetition. It is literally impossible for us to wrap our minds around any such idea. It’s not on, General Barrow, really it’s not. The one thing that terrifies me is that you and your associates may have committed the most fatal mistake in all of politics and statecraft, that of coming to believe your own propaganda. Is that the case?”

  “Trying to see if I’ll blow up and go into a tirade?” asked Barrow with a grin. “You want tirades, Corby Morgan’s your man, although I wouldn’t provoke him into one if I were you. He tends to strangle and bang heads on thing
s while he rants.”

  “Yes, so I understand,” said Stanhope, looking irritated. “Why, exactly, would you bring someone like that to a peace conference? You think we can be bullied into giving you what you want?”

  “He is here as a kind of watching brief for those among us who don’t really want this conference to take place at all,” said Barrow frankly. “I’m sure you have someone like that on your side, Brubaker or Weintraub. There are a lot of us who have developed a taste for killing our enemies and they don’t want to give it up, even for the main prize itself. You might want to bear that in mind, Mr. Stanhope. The fact is, you have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at us in an effort to stop us, violated every law and Constitutional protection and basic tenet of human decency, and you haven’t done too well.”

  “They say every major international treaty negotiation has a ghost at the table,” said Stanhope reflectively.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” concurred Barrow. “Ours is the Masque of the Red Death, the fact that we have broken your credible monopoly of armed force and you cannot restore it. I assume we’ll be coming in for our fair share of threats in the coming days, and we’re ready for that, but the fact is, Mr. Stanhope, you can’t stop us with force. You’ve tried and you’ve failed. Outlawry, informers, million-dollar rewards, an army of thugs, torture, internment, murder, the bulldozing of homes, the deportation of entire populations to concentration camps in Nevada. Nothing has worked. Just recently you thought you were going to stop us by turning Christian fundamentalists against us and using them as counterrevolutionary shock troops. That has failed as well. Your little Christian militia project, or perhaps I should say Mr. Weintraub’s little Christian militia project, turned out to be a dud. It’s fizzling even as we speak. There have been some incidents, yes, but the fact is that the majority of the people in evangelical churches haven’t been dumb enough to fall for your trap.”

  “Yes, I understand you were able to infiltrate one of the cells and that blew the operation prematurely,” said Stanhope with a wry smile of acknowledgement. “And you’re right, that was Howard’s little project, which I never approved, nor was I involved in it. We seem to have consistently misjudged your intelligence capacities.”

  “As an interesting aside, the two young people who accomplished that successful mission are in with me in our delegation,” Barrow told him, before he continued. “What are you going to try next? An atomic bomb on Seattle? You’re quite capable of it if you thought it would work, but you know it won’t. Now, I think I’ve strained all the outrage out of my system. Hope so. You sit there and tell me that we can’t have the Republic. All I can say is that you either don’t know us very well, or you’re just fishing. But fine, I’ll play along. There is a lot of detail we’re prepared to be flexible on, but the substance of independence isn’t one of them. We either walk out of here with at least three states in our briefcase, and I’ll be damned hard put to sell only three to the Army Council, or we go back to fighting and probably end up grabbing a great deal more a few years down the road when the United States finally implodes. You don’t think we can do it? You don’t think we’re perfectly willing to do it? Well, whenever you want, you can find out. This is your party, and you can pull the plug any time. Now, I know you think you can either dazzle us with brilliance or baffle us with bullshit into accepting some kind of faux Republic or white Puerto Rico or something of the kind, maybe not even that. Fine. We can sit here as long as you like and we can find a new way to say no every day. It’s your call how long you want to stretch it out before you either decide to sign off on a white Republic and let us get on with building a new world and new lives, or else we start shooting again.”

  “You mentioned flexibility,” said Stanhope with interest. “Define flexible. Look, please don’t take my terminology amiss, but we understand that your dogs are hungry, we’re going to have to throw you some bones, and there’s going to have to be some meat and juice on them. I think you’ll be amazed at what kind of compromise we would be willing to accept, so long as the Union remains intact, as was settled back in 1865. I know you have an officer corps, a leadership group. I’m not trying to bribe you when I say that if we can come to some kind of sensible arrangement here, that group among you has an assured and incredible future. You’ve demonstrated a kind of dedication, an initiative, adaptability and courage that I wish to hell we could find in our own soldiers and administrators.”

  “Let me guess. Like the ancient Romans, you want to hire us barbarians to command your armies and fight your battles for you?” chuckled Barrow. “Uh, not even close, Stanhope. I’ve been to Iraq once. Didn’t like it. Come on, you can’t be serious?”

  “A conference like this may have certain red lines that simply cannot be crossed, true,” said Stanhope. “I’ve just explained to you what ours are. We’re not letting you have your own country to play with. You play too rough. You’re not getting Washington and Oregon and Idaho, Barrow, but what you might come away with is a whole new racial dispensation for all your people across North America.”

  “I can see this is going to take a while,” said Barrow with a wry chuckle. “But eventually, one way or the other, you are going to learn to take no for an answer.”

  They came out of the conference room a few minutes later to find Susan Horowitz still curled up in the armchair with her cup of herbal tea, watching while Cody sat ostentatiously reading a magazine and ignoring her. He got up without a word, ready to accompany Barrow back to their own part of the hotel. “My, this looks frosty,” commented Stanhope. “But then I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it? Well, at least you’re not killing each other.”

  “The thought did occur to me, sir,” said Cody.

  “I especially liked the part where he said he’d shoot me a few extra times in the face to mess it up,” said Susan archly, rising to her feet.

  “All right, Stanhope, now on a dead serious issue,” said Barrow, politely but firmly. “Ms. Horowitz here wanted to make a personal point by coming to our part of the hotel, and she made it. I see no need for her to make it again, or for there to be any more petty provocations like this. It’s not a good idea, and it could lead to something very serious. Cody is a highly disciplined young man, but there simply isn’t any point in putting that kind of strain on him, or any of us.” He turned to Ms. Horowitz. “Ma’am, I presume you know history and you are familiar with what’s been going on over the past five years. I understand enough about the psychology of your people to understand why you are driven to pick and poke and nip and push, but you had better not do it again, or I will not be responsible for the consequences. If you insist on my spelling it out, then I shall do so. You and all Jews are vermin, and yes, we really do want to kill you. There is such a thing as pushing your luck. You pushed it today and got away with it. The next time you’ll probably end up with your elegant neck snapped like a chicken’s, and I won’t do a damned thing to stop it. This conference is entirely too important to get sidetracked by one arrogant little JAP who is too stupid to understand where she is and who has so far forgotten her racial memories that she no longer recognizes us for who we are. We will find our way back to the South Wing on our own, if you don’t mind.”

  “The feeling is mutual, I assure you,” said Susan, her lip twisting. “If you want a helpful hint on keeping the peace, I suggest you don’t let your little boy here play with anything sharp.” She turned to Cody and said “Kusch mir in tuchis, paskudnik grober jung! Geh red zu der vant!”

  “Madele shandeleh, du hat gevehn a kurva in din mamze bauch!” snapped back Cody.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” snapped Barrow in a heated whisper as the blue-bereted peacekeeper escorted them back to the South Wing via the tunnel. “Now she knows you speak Yiddish! You were supposed to be our secret weapon on that front!”

  “She already knew, sir,” said Cody. “I need to talk to you when we get back. Little Swedes have big ears, if our friend here will pardon my
saying so.”

  When they returned to Barrow’s suite, they saw that lunch had arrived, in the form of a cart full of fancy deli-style sandwiches and salads on which everyone was munching. “It doesn’t appear to have been defiled,” admitted Gair, a paper plate of corned beef on rye before him. Barrow gestured for Cody to sit down at the table. He did not ask the other primaries to leave, and Cody noticed that Nightshade and Captain Jane Chenault were in the room as well. He considered asking to speak to Barrow privately, but he decided it was best if nothing was concealed about his past from any of them. Anyone who had lived among Jews was bound to be regarded with at least a small bit of disquiet; Cody understood this, and he had always dealt with the situation through being completely open about everything except the one forbidden subject. Barrow said, “Okay, we’re just going to have to not worry about being overheard by the Feds, I guess. You really let the cat out of the bag back there, my son. What the hell was all that about?”

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but it seems to be my bad luck always to be running into women from my past,” said Cody carefully, glancing at Nightshade. “I know that woman from my days in California. Susan Horowitz is her married name. I knew her as Leah Sapirstein. She was a member of the Jewish family I was sold to. I refuse to use the word sister, or even stepsister. That little exchange was her way of baiting me. She knows I was taught Yiddish in their house and at the yeshiva, and so now the enemy does as well, which pretty much terminates my usefulness on this mission, General. As honored as I am to have come this far with you. I assume there is some way to get out of here via that Russian copter or otherwise, and so in light of this development I request transfer to a combat unit, preferably back to Captain DiBella’s command in Seattle.”

  “Mmmm, hold your horses, son,” said Barrow abstractedly. “You’re by no means a useless mouth, even if they have twigged to your little secret. Before we go any farther, what exactly did you two say to each other?”