A PBI trooper came up behind him and shot the gardener through the head with his AK, then moved on.
“Let’s get to the car,” Turnbull said. They were well-dressed so they would not attract any PBI attention, but those idiots were shooting wildly, and there was also the threat of enraged blue shirts along the way.
The chaos was clearly winding down. They ran east, sometimes against, sometimes with the flow of terrified civilians. It was a few minutes until they got to their parking structure, and it was calm inside. They went up to the second floor and found their Lexus unharmed. However, someone had thrown a trash can through the back window of the Tesla.
There was more commotion in the street out front. Junior and Turnbull walked over to the side of the building and looked down to the street below. PBI men were marching a half dozen blue shirts under guard. In the middle of the road, they halted the column and ordered the workers to their knees in a line.
“No way,” Junior muttered.
Four PBI men behind them lifted their AKs and, on order, fired into the backs of the prisoners until all six sprawled dead on the pavement.
“Oh, shit,” Junior said.
“That’s insurgency, Junior,” Turnbull said.
“They just shot them down right there in the open!”
“Yeah, that’s how it works. You need to understand. When push comes to shove, when it gets real like it did today, when they are faced with a real threat, they are going to do whatever it takes to hold on to power. These aren’t nice people. They aren’t good people. They care about one thing, their own power, and when that’s endangered they take no prisoners. Literally.”
“So that’s why you don’t take prisoners either.”
“I stopped playing nice back in Indian Country, kid. That good guy bullshit goes right out the window when the killing really starts.”
“Okay, what now?”
“We wait,” Turnbull replied. “We aren’t going out on that road anytime soon anyway, and we aren’t doing anything until tonight anyway. Let’s get in the car and sleep.”
“I wish we had at least gotten to eat.”
“Yeah, I think the restaurant’s going to be closed for a while. At least until they hire a new staff.”
14.
It was a bad day for Martin Rios-Parkinson, meaning it was a bad day for everyone around him.
“You failed to reacquire them?” the Director asked Larsen. His aide shifted uncomfortably. Next to him stood, silently, three of Larsen’s department heads, a man, a woman, and a non-binary wearing a flowered muumuu.
“They never showed up. We watched her all day. They never came anywhere near her.”
“But they were there in Westwood, inside the secured sector we control, weren’t they?”
More uncomfortable shifting. Rios-Parkinson turned his laptop around 180 degrees so Larsen could see the screen from the far side of the desk. It was displaying several freeze frames of grainy surveillance camera footage of Westwood Village taken that afternoon at the height of the chaos in the restaurant as it spilled outside. Rios-Parkinson tapped the screen, pointing out two vague shapes walking away from the melee.
“That would be them, correct? At least the software thinks so from their size and gait. Do you know something the software does not know?”
“There’s no way to tell…”
“No, they just happen to be two gentlemen who appear to be the same ones who you have been trying and failing to monitor and who just happened to manifest in the middle of a rioting outbreak right in the middle of the Westside Sector. My sector, my responsibility.”
Larsen swallowed, weighing a response. Rios-Parkinson did not wait for it.
“This is more than just a pair of intruders, more than just another pair of spies. They are here to incite. I am not having another Indiana explode on my watch, not in my city.”
“No,” said Larsen. He had fought in Southern Indiana, Indian Country, though you would never call it by that name out loud in the blue. Larsen still walked with a slight limp from a 40-pound homemade Tannerite bomb that a farmer turned guerilla had detonated with his .30-06 just as Larsen’s armored personnel carrier rolled past down a country road on the way to shoot up an unruly town inside the Hoosier National Forest. The reds had sent in trainers to organize the populace just as the blues had almost managed to assert control over the rebellious region. Larsen was well aware of what a few operatives with combat experience could do in terms of mobilizing an angry population, especially one that had buried all of its many, many guns the minute the People’s Republic announced it was banning the civilian possession of firearms.
“You need to find them,” Rios-Parkinson said. “You need to do that tonight.”
“Cyber Division is screening the web for likely searches and map queries. We also have the best photos we could download out to every sector gate,” Larsen said.
“Yet you had them out this morning and they still got inside the sector without us picking them up.”
“The pictures were grainy, with no good shots of their faces.”
“Because they are trained in counter-surveillance. They are aware of cameras, and they kept their faces down, wore glasses, and they never looked at the lenses.”
“We are devoting all of our efforts to finding them, Director.”
“They obviously know we are looking for them. Do you need more men – I mean personnel?”
“All you can spare.”
“Which would be none,” said Rios-Parkinson. “We are still engaged in arresting those associated with the various unrest incidents, including the Westwood riot. If you had not shot all of the ones taken into custody at the scene, we might have gotten some information from them about how our guests managed to inspire them to murder a number of our Westside citizens in broad daylight this afternoon.”
Larsen said nothing in his own defense; they both knew that Rios-Parkinson had ordered that maximum force be applied to suppress mobs. The lack of prisoners Rios-Parkinson was lamenting was a direct result of his direct order to summarily execute on the spot anyone caught engaged in “lawless rebellion against the will of the People.”
There was nothing left to say on that topic, so Larsen moved on. “The team is prepared to clear the Jews’ building on your order, Director. The PSF will secure the perimeter. Surveillance teams are still in place.”
“Keep them back. I do not want them knowing we are watching. They are not to have any warning. But nothing happens until I order it, and I will not order it until the spies have the hard drive and we have the spies.”
“I understand, Director.”
“You had better. Now get out,” said Rios-Parkinson. Larsen turned and walked out, followed by the man, the woman, and the other, xis muumuu rustling as xe walked.
Rios-Parkinson sat back in his leather chair once the door slammed shut. The reports were uniformly bad. The ration cuts applied to Privilege Level 5 and below, meaning almost everyone, and the impacted majority was angry. There were outbreaks of violence everywhere along the West Coast, his area. It made him feel only slightly better to know that the East Coast was doing no better, and perhaps even worse. Near Boston, a routine anti-firearms raid had led to a shootout with a bunch of rebels, leaving several PBI and PSF officers dead. The town where it happened was called Concord; Rios-Parkinson had a sense that name was significant somehow, but because his study of history had focused mostly upon America’s legacy of oppression he could not quite put his finger on why.