“I guess.”
“You know what you’ll say to her when you see her?”
“I’ll tell her I’m bringing her home.”
“And what if she doesn’t want to come?”
“She’ll want to come.”
“Hope is not a plan. Think it through.” Turnbull looked out the open window to Jackson, who stood wiping his hands. “Thanks,”
“Yeah, you’re welcome. Now forget you ever met me.”
Turnbull smiled. “Forget what?”
Jackson returned the grin. “Yeah, that’s right. Good luck. Don’t come back this way.”
“Never go back the way you came,” Turnbull replied. He put the sedan in reverse, backed out of the garage onto the street, and accelerated away.
They headed south to Wilshire and turned west. There was a little more activity in this area than in the others they had passed through. Some of the businesses were open and there were more cars the further west they went. Turnbull kept checking his rearview; nothing caught his eye.
Turnbull caught sight of a billboard featuring a beautiful blonde. It read, “I ESCAPED THE RACIST RED STATES. BE VIGILANT – THEY SEEK TO DESTROY THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE WE HAVE BUILT HERE!” Turnbull wanted to ask Junior if his sister spoke like a community agitator in real life – if so, they would need some of their hundred mile an hour duct tape. But he said nothing. Junior had obviously seen it and had descended into a silent funk.
The checkpoint was at Doheny. Three or four cars were lined up to cross into the Secured Zone. A cyclone fence ran north and south along the east side of the street. There was a sign reading “WARNING: AUTHORIZED ADMITTEES ONLY. 100% ID CHECK.”
“Guess they gotta keep out the riff raff,” Junior observed.
The gate was manned by the uniformed element of the PBI. The folks who lived in the Westside Sector could not be expected to put up with a bunch of barely trained thugs keeping order. The PBI were much better trained thugs.
Ahead, an officer was arguing with the occupant of an old Toyota. The officer waved her out of the line and she turned around, cursing that she would lose her housekeeping job as she pulled out of the queue and U turned around. The guards seemed more bored than excited; apparently this was nothing unusual. Lots of people wanted inside.
Turnbull put his hand out and Junior handed him his ID card, then rested his hand under his suit jacket. He counted five PBI officers, all armed with AKs. He would take the three on the passenger side and hope that Junior would be able to put down the two on his side should it all go bad.
It didn’t. Turnbull handed over the cards without a word and the bored officer scanned it on his handset. He stared at the screen for a moment, then wordlessly handed the cards back and gestured for Turnbull to drive through. The Lexus smoothly accelerated and they entered the Westside Sector.
It was an entirely different world. The businesses were open and the streets were clean. People were well-dressed and there was none of the seething sullenness they had seen before. Cars – nice cars, many newer models – filled the roads. It was not the gridlock of before the Split, but it was substantially more traffic than they had seen elsewhere.
“It’s almost like home here,” Junior said, marveling. “Restaurants, coffee shops. People doing things.”
“You need a privilege level of 6 or higher to live in here; if you don’t live in here you need a pass to get in. Mostly they give them to worker bees. Everyone who can live in here does. And they do patrol the walls.”
“How big is it?”
“It runs west to the ocean and north to just over the summit of the hills. Basically, anywhere that was a little fashionable. There are other ones too – the whole South Bay from LAX south, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and all of Palos Verdes are sealed off too. Things got bad and the folks running things decided the best way to solve the problem was to seal off the problem.”
“Wait, I thought the privilege levels were supposed to compensate for systemic racism and inequality and all that.”
“Yeah, well, in a stunning turn of events the same people who ran the blue states into the ground ended up with exceptions to the privilege level rules. So some poor Mexican kid from East LA gets a 3 and a Hollywood producer’s girlfriend driving a Porsche gets a 9. They did the same thing with the reparations campaigns. They got exemptions while the working stiff in Rancho Cucamonga got hit for 20% of his assets every time some group got paid off with another reparations tax, and when he couldn’t pay, they took his house. A lot of those guys showed up in the red with nothing after working for decades.”
“Until I got inside here, I didn’t see where all that money went,” Junior said. “This is living large in here.”
“Yeah, they pretty much stole the money and then flushed it. And now, I don’t think there’s much left outside of this sector to steal.”
They made good time heading west, passing out of Beverly Hills and into Century City, with its high rises that were modern-looking over a half century before. Junior pointed eagerly.
“Nakatomi Plaza!”
“What?”
“There! You know, Die Hard!”
“The movie?”
“Yeah,” Junior said, delighted. “That’s a great movie. A great Christmas movie. Every Christmas we used to watch it. You know, so many old movies before were filmed in LA that I kind of expected LA to look like them instead of… this.”
“Half of Hollywood followed the money and got out after the Split,” Turnbull said. “Now all the movies look like Houston.”
“I had an actor in my unit when I was doing my citizenship service. He’d been in commercials. Said he wanted to vote so he was doing his service. He was worried he might not get any work afterwards. A lot of the Hollywood people who crossed over are still pretty left wing and he says they’re pissed that they can’t become citizens without serving.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Turnbull said. “The best thing we ever did in the red was not let the people coming in from the blue bring their shitty politics with them.”
“Amen,” Junior replied, looking around. “How long you think the People’s Republic can hold up?”
“Shit, it could fall apart in a day or keep dragging on for a decade. I guess the bullshit stops when the people decide they’ve had enough of social justice and climate justice and economic justice and all the other kinds of justice except justice justice.”
Century City shrank behind them. Now they were among high rise luxury apartment buildings. PBI were visibly standing watch.
“Rich people land,” Turnbull said.
“You know, I haven’t seen any more of the billboards since we crossed in here,” Junior observed.
“Nope. They’re pretty ugly, and it won’t do to block these special snowflakes’ views. Besides, I think these people in here are in on the scam. The signs aren’t going to fool anyone in here. The propaganda is for the nobodies.”
In Westwood, Turnbull turned right. Up ahead lay UCLA and their target.
12.
Rios-Parkinson sipped a sparkling water from the cooler in the rear of his black SUV. Arthur and Sam were up front, separated from him by a thick glass partition. He was able to review his morning briefing papers, delivered earlier by courier, in quiet as they headed down from the hills.
His continuing operation in Los Angeles could not take up all of his attention, as much as he wished it to. All over California – all over the two halves of the People’s Republic, in fact – there was too much going on. Yesterday’s bloody chaos at the food center was hardly unique. Besides San Francisco – 12 dead – there were other riots of varying intensity by hungry citizens in Seattle, Oakland, San Diego, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and two in Fontana. He was slightly surprised that desolate Fontana even had two food centers. He made a mental note to cut Fontana’s food allocation as a lesson to them about power and its uses.