Ben Steiner walked out of the governor’s office and closed the door behind him.
Jack Hays put his hands on his face and tried to force himself to relax. Various right-wing groups in Texas had argued for independence for years. They were the lunatic fringe, the village idiots. Hays had kept his distance. Now Ben Steiner had taken his turn at the independence podium, and he was no crackpot.
The way people lived in early-twenty-first-century Texas depended on the American monetary system, Social Security, military retirement, banks stuffed full of U.S. Treasury bonds as their capital, the national telephone grid, the power grid, all of that. Companies here paid wages to Texans to manufacture goods and sold them all over the United States — all over the world — and the stores in Texas that supplied the stuff of life were filled with goods manufactured all over the world; Texans used their paychecks to pay for what they needed. Independence, he thought, would take a civil war, and that would destroy the very fabric of life for a great many Texans. Cutting Texas out of the United States would be like trying to cut Mona Lisa’s face out of her portrait and arguing that the operation wouldn’t harm it.
Jack Hays didn’t believe it could be done. In this interdependent world, Texas had to be part of the United States, a state in the Union.
Or did it?
He was thinking about his deceased uncle, Joe Bob Hays, and the drug smugglers who killed him when the phone on his desk summoned him to duty.
THREE
There were five people in Grafton’s tent, all males, when he went in after sunset. Everyone introduced himself: three civil servants, one broadcaster, and one congressman.
“Where are the women?” Grafton asked.
“They have their own tents,” he was told. “Politically incorrect, but those are army regulations.”
“If Elizabeth Warren only knew.”
The tentmates had just arrived, and were still outraged that they had been arrested. Being taken in handcuffs from their homes or work, with family or colleagues watching, and physically transported to Camp Dawson, a three-hour ride from Washington, had filled them with adrenaline that had to be burned off. They had been frightened, humiliated, and shamed, and now they were very angry. They told each other their stories and talked long into the night while Jake Grafton slept.
On his second evening in Camp Dawson, Jake Grafton ran into Washington Post columnist Jack Yocke in the chow line. Yocke was in his late thirties, lean and ropy, with shoulder-length hair and a fashionably grizzled face, the lumberjack look. His name was pronounced Yockkey.
“When did you get here, Admiral?” a plainly surprised Yocke asked.
“Yesterday at noon.”
“Seems to be a lot of people here,” Yocke said, looking around.
“Welcome to the American gulag archipelago. I think I was one of the first, but there were a bunch of people already here. Spies, I think. Stool pigeons. I would be careful what I said and who heard it, if I were you.”
They ate together in silence, put their leftovers in a large garbage can, and stacked their trays, then went to sit under a shade tree near the wire, where they could talk privately.
Grafton managed to get the first question in, always a feat with Yocke. “Did you piss on the establishment or did they dump you here on general principles?”
“I’m an unreliable bastard. I wrote a column that was uncomplimentary to the administration, and a political apparatchik in the editor’s office called the troopers. Needless to say, I don’t think my column will be in tomorrow’s paper.”
“Brave editors.”
“They were threatened with arrest, their families were also going to be arrested, their bank accounts and property seized, and the IRS would prosecute them. Not audit them, but prosecute them. The only thing they weren’t threatened with was execution.”
“Why did you flout them?”
“Stupid, I guess. And you?”
“The same.”
“There’s a lot of that around. Soetoro is going to be surprised.”
“They’ve made their preparations. The administration didn’t decide this after they got a look at Saturday’s terror strikes. They’ve been getting ready for this for years.”
“When this is over,” Yocke mused, “someday, the only heroes will be the people who stood up to them and went to prison.”
“Martyrs,” Grafton murmured.
“Christians versus the lions.”
“Martyrs don’t win wars,” Grafton stated. “That’s a law, like gravity. So what’s happening out there beyond the fence?”
“The country’s falling apart. Inner-city riots: Chicago, Detroit, Saint Louis, LA. Just getting worked up, getting the car fires set. Agitators and race-baiters screaming about overturning white America once and for all. What they are going to do is loot Walmarts and Safeways and burn down the inner cities, then starve. We’ve got martial law, but there’s no National Guard, no soldiers, no police stopping the rioters, there’s no fire departments putting out the fires, and there’s apparently no Border Patrol at the border. Go figure.”
Grafton didn’t say anything.
“The cops have got the message. Let it burn, baby.”
Yocke got out his cell phone and checked his messages.
“You have a charger for that?” Jake asked.
“Yep. All I need is a place to plug it in. If cell phones go flat, civilization as we know it will be stone cold dead. Teenagers, millennials, reporters, and real estate agents will go through seismic withdrawal and drop dead left and right.”
“The camp authorities will pass out chargers when they can lay hands on some,” Jake said.
“Why?”
“The NSA can listen to every cell phone and telephone transmission in America. They’ve been working on it for over a year. Soetoro’s orders. It used to be all they got was your number and the number you dialed. Now they can record the conversations digitally and mine them for key words or names. They want you to talk on your cell phone. That’s why they didn’t confiscate the things.”
Jack Yocke sat with his cell phone in hand watching the shadows lengthen. Finally he put the device on the ground, took off his shoe, and pounded on it with the heel until the glass screen broke. Then he threw it over the fence.
After a while Yocke calmed down. “So when do you think we’ll get out of here?”
Grafton snorted. “They didn’t let me pack my crystal ball.”
“A few days, months, years?”
When Grafton remained silent, Yocke decided to answer his own question. If you are going to make your living writing newspaper columns, you must have opinions, on everything. Yocke did. Almost every living human had opinions, but no one wanted to hear them. People paid to read Yocke’s because his were better thought out and expressed. “People are upset and angry right now, but few if any are willing to risk everything they own, everything they have, even their lives, to oppose Soetoro and the federal government. That will change over time. Government oppression in the short run pisses people off. In the long run it transforms them into revolutionaries.”
“Conquer or die,” Grafton mused. “Too bad you weren’t there at the White House when the aides discussed how to keep Soetoro in office for life.”