“You think we’ll find her tomorrow when we go to UCLA?”
“I don’t know. I’m still wondering how they picked up our scent and followed us to the food center.”
“Do you think they know why we’re here?”
Turnbull lay back on his pillow. “I don’t know. But if they do, then tomorrow they’ll be waiting for us.”
10.
Martin Rios-Parkinson stood in front of his mirror and scrutinized his haircut as he listened to the report over his cell phone. The corner of his mouth trembled, half fury, half fear.
“We would not be in this situation if you had ensured the loyalty of your people,” he said. “I do not need to remind you that we must recover the hard drive. And if we do not, it is on you.”
“I understand,” replied the reedy voice on the other end. An incompetent, but one department had to have a gender non-binary head and xe was the best one available. That was the problem – there were always considerations beyond competence.
“Find them,” Rios-Parkinson said, now calmly. “But we need to be ready to execute the alternate plan in case you can’t. We know where they are going regardless. We can reacquire them up there and they’ll take us to it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Director.”
“Then do it. And do it right. Because if you do not, you will be accountable.” But, of course, so would Rios-Parkinson, and this disaster could mean the end of everything he had worked for. Unless, of course, he recovered what had been stolen. And if he could capture the spies who had probably been the ones who shot their way in from Utah while doing so, he could turn this fiasco into a coup.
He hung up and considered his hair. It was perfect, projecting the image of efficiency, yet projecting an edge of nonconformity that would fit in well in the circles he navigated. It was a far cry from the white boy dreadlocks he had sported as an undergrad at UCLA twenty years ago.
And now there were flecks of gray, but that was understandable. He now had responsibilities beyond the minimal requirements of getting up and getting to class as a student. And beyond getting up and getting to class to teach as a graduate student teaching assistant, and then as an assistant professor of political science.
Yes, as the Director of the People’s Bureau of Investigation in the California region, he had many responsibilities.
And perks. He heard his latest one stirring in the bedroom. Rios-Parkinson stepped out of the spacious bathroom into the master bedroom. The south wall was a window looking out over Los Angeles from high in the hills. There was downtown on the left, Century City on the right and beyond that, the ocean. In the distance, hazy and dark, beyond the Palos Verdes Peninsula, was Catalina Island. And, in the bed, a blonde, rising to her elbows.
“You need to get ready,” he said.
“I don’t want to go,” she moaned.
“Education is important,” he replied. “In your case, reeducation to correct the red lies that still infect you. Now get out of bed.”
Rios-Parkinson was not his birth name. Born in Huntington Beach to a housewife mother and an aerospace engineer father, Martin chafed at the unfairness of his position in the social hierarchy of his Orange County public schools. He was no surfer, and no soccer or football player. He was not blonde, and not conventionally handsome. And he was not rich; his parents drove a Ford, not a BMW or even a Volvo like everyone else’s parents.
What he was was clever; his grades were always good right from the beginning, and repeating back what the teachers wanted to hear came easy to him. It occurred to him as early as middle school that it was therefore cruelly unfair that those who were clearly his mental inferiors dominated his little society, and that he was nothing.
And the anger grew inside him, the gnawing resentment that the power and respect due him was instead invested in the dull and the frivolous-living Orange County stereotypes that surrounded him. He should be the one walking the halls that everyone greeted. He should be the one they should respect, and fear. He should be the one with the power. But instead, he was nothing, just another kid who wasn’t handsome or athletic who no one noticed and no one ever thought about.
But then, he found his path. In ninth grade, his social studies teacher’s casual leftism offended the default conservatism of his classmates. He was someone who stuck his finger in the eye of everything everyone held dear. He told them their comfy Orange County lifestyle was born from the exploitation of others. He told them that they were pawns of corporations and shadowy rich power brokers who manipulated the system for their benefit. He told them that maybe America was not the greatest country on Earth.
Rios-Parkinson – back then simply “Parkinson” – was fascinated as the former hippie dropped new and powerful words he had never heard before, words that seemed to have the power to knock the other kids back on their heels. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia.
He had never thought much about minorities growing up – there were some around, but no one really seemed to care. Yet Rios-Parkinson found that when he spoke about other’s crimes against race or gender or the like, the tenor of the conversation changed. The assured and the powerful became uncertain and weak, and suddenly he was in control. They were reacting and responding to him for once. And he savored it.
He had never been particularly patriotic, or unpatriotic, but when he was a junior and saw an opportunity, he ran a Mexican flag up the school flag pole, and in the ensuring uproar a television news crew came and put a camera on him and he said, “I reject the racism that the American flag represents.“ All hell broke loose – his parents were beside themselves – and suddenly Martin Parkinson was no longer some brain on the fringes of the Huntington Beach High Class of 2009, but the school’s most famous student.
After he went on Fox News and argued with Bill O’Reilly, a cheerleader led him behind the bleachers and demonstrated to him an unexpected fringe benefit of his notoriety. “I always wanted to do that for someone famous,” she said, wiping her mouth. He was too stunned by the whole experience to respond to her, but not to learn the lesson. This was his path.
Before applying to college, he took the name Rios-Parkinson to honor the Hispanic heritage represented by his great-great-grandmother, whose stepfather had been named Rios and adopted her. He was inspired by some of the news anchors on television. A blonde would be “Susan Wilson” one day on Channel 7, then show up on Channel 5 the next day with a tan calling herself “Susana Wilson-Suarez.” He understood the game.
That he had not a drop of actual Hispanic blood was beyond the point. He only knew that checking the “Hispanic” box on his application would up his chances for acceptance exponentially.
At UCLA he insinuated himself into the network of leftist organizations and groups, learning to navigate their intricate power structures and becoming fluent in the language of progressivism. He certainly believed the views he embraced, but he never fetishized them as some around him did. He simply believed them because to be a leftist meant he had to believe them. The language of Marxism and critical studies were merely his tools, like the hammer and saw of a carpenter, and he used them to build his career. He earned his PhD and was accepted as a political science professor; his thesis was titled “Genuflection and Reflections: Centralizing Core Paradigms of Racism and Sexist Power Structures for Progressive Empowerment.”