“…We can now confirm that the White House and the Pentagon are besieged… The Main State Building and the Department of Justice complex are on fire and large numbers of heavily armed insurgents are roaming apparently unopposed along the axis of Pennsylvania Avenue… There are reports of Rebel flags flying over the Pentagon… The Smithsonian is burning and Capitol Hill has come under sustained mortar and machine gun fire… There has been no word from the President for over an hour…”
Chapter 2
Three of Darlene Lefebure’s FBI four minders had not wanted to let her go. She had thought they were just being Feds but it had turned out that they were actually really worried about her safety. She was feeling a little bit guilty about the bad things she had thought about her ‘protectors’ because ever since she had come to California one of her silent, inwardly spoken mantras had been to try ‘not to think the worst of people’.
The World was full of good people; it was just that in her twenty-two years on Earth she had not actually met many of them yet.
A couple of hours ago the head honcho, Special Agent Christie, had taken a long telephone call, gotten very angry and there had been a lot of shouting — she was in her room at the top of the house so she had not been able to make out many of the words, most of which seemed to be uncouth and decidedly un-Christian — and soon afterwards she had been given back her own, freshly laundered and pressed clothes, and asked to ‘get dressed’. Things had calmed down a little by the time she was brought downstairs to the back room in which she had met the Governor’s errand girl Miranda Sullivan and the handsome naval officer, Lieutenant Brenckmann. Darlene still had the other woman’s number but she had not been able to make herself ring it. Part of her reticence was that despite herself — although she was not going to forget that the bitch had stolen her boyfriend on the night of the war — she had trusted her to do what she said she would do and break her out of ‘protective custody’; but a much bigger part of it was that she simply did not want to be beholden to Miranda Sullivan. Even the bitch’s name was prissy!
‘The word is to spring you, young lady,’ Agent Christie, a big crew cut man in his early forties with a Yankee drawl had explained to Darlene. ‘If the Agency wasn’t so all fired keen to keep in with the Governor’s Office in Sacramento we’d have taken you somewhere safe out of state days ago.’
Everybody back in Jackson Alabama — a small town, equally segregated and old-fashioned version of Jackson Mississippi some miles south of Birmingham — always used to remark upon what a polite, never say ‘boo’ to a goose, respectful little thing Mr and Mrs Lefebure’s oldest girl Darlene Rose was, such a meek and mild little thing, just the sort of girl who might one day marry into a ‘respectable’ family…
But that was then and this was now.
‘Spring me?’ She had demanded, stamping her foot.
‘Yep,’ the man snorted irritably.
‘Just like that?’ She did not even know where she was. She had no money — the Oakland PD had lost her handbag — and it was already dark outside by then. She had demanded to make a telephone call but that had gone horribly wrong when the number ‘Miss Miranda’ had given her was picked up by a bored sounding man called Gerry Devers.
‘Miss Sullivan is in San Francisco at present. I can take a message for her…’
Darlene had rounded angrily on Agent Christie, a slow, lugubrious man whom, to her surprise was anything but unsympathetic to her troubles.
‘Look,’ he groaned, ‘let me take you back to your place in Oakland,’ he had hesitated, given her a quizzical look. ‘You’ve got a room on McKinley Avenue, right?’ He checked, clearly not happy with the notion that a young woman should be living alone in that neighbourhood. ‘At least that way I can check over your place and make sure nobody is hanging around. Okay?’
Darlene had nodded sulkily.
‘I owe a week’s rent, maybe two I can’t pay because I’ve been here,” she retorted.
‘We’ll cover that.’
True to his word Agent Christie had mooched around her dingy back yard second floor room, quartered the darkened streets nearby and returned to talk in low tones with her landlord, a one-armed former Marine who drank too much and looked at Darlene like she was a lump of meat. The FBI man had paid off her two weeks arrears of rent and paid a further fortnight in advance, extracting a grubby handwritten receipt from Darlene’s landlord in case he was ‘too drunk in the morning to remember’. He had given her the receipt and the last twenty bucks, mostly in Greenbacks straight out of his own wallet ‘for food and suchlike’.
Agent Christie had viewed Darlene thoughtfully.
‘It’s my business to worry,’ he explained, paternally. ‘You’ll be okay. Just take care like I’m sure you always do. Promise me that?’
Darlene had nodded her agreement.
After mooching around for a few minutes she had had gone to bed and wrapped herself in a cocoon of sheets. Her apartment block was noisy at all hours of the day and night. Her one-armed ex-Marine landlord said it was ‘shift workers coming and going’ but she knew at least two of the other women in the building were ‘working girls’. She might easily have become one herself; she did not pretend to be any kind of beauty but most men preferred homely, plain prettiness to movie star glamour and she had a lot of the former and none at all of the latter, even if she had been ‘that sort of a girl’. Still, it would have been easier money than cleaning house for old folks and rich folks, or waiting tables for people she loathed and despised like the people who could afford to be members of the Sequoyah Country and Golf Club. The Club had probably already have fired her for not turning up for work on the day of the shooting.
After about an hour she finally dropped off into a fitful sleep.
Since witnessing the shooting of the Admiral and his wife, most times when she shut her eyes she pictured the man in the navy uniform opening the trunk of the black Chrysler parked on the verge on the other side of Sequoyah Road. He had stood up with a mean-looking black pump-action shotgun in his arms. In her dreams she smelled the taint of cordite burning.
That day she had been transfixed by the sight and sound of the man standing behind the Chrysler shooting time and time again into the back of the car. The back windscreen had shattered instantly.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The firing went on and on until he clicked down on an empty chamber. The gunman had not looked up, or paused; he had reached into his pocket and started pressing fresh rounds into the gun as he walked around to the side of the car and begun to fire again.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The front window of the Chrysler was splashed with blood.
Darlene afterwards swore she could see gobs of blood dripping down the outside of the car, and the suggestion of a red, bloody mist briefly suspended in the air in and around the Chrysler…
Now she smelled fire.
And somebody was screaming.
Chapter 3
John Charles Houlihan the fifty-three year old Mayor of Oakland was beyond angry, he was spitting mad. All that evening he had been watching the surreal images and reading the frankly bizarre wires coming into City Hall about what was going on in Washington DC, and now the madness had spread to his little haven of what, these days, passed for tranquil normality.