The Monaco might have been one of the hippest little boutique joints in the world a month ago, but now it was full of rowdy conventioneers and tobacco-chewing soldiers who clomped so much mud through the place that the management had given up attempting to keep the public areas clean. Instead the hotel staff had laid down massive canvas tarpaulins everywhere. As Culver was leaving the establishment just now, he’d found a quartet of soldiers standing around one of the carpet-shampoo machines, trying to figure out how it worked. He overheard someone, probably a sergeant, saying he wanted to leave the place in a better condition than they’d found it. If they left, Culver thought, as he trudged through the quiet streets.
Huddled deep inside his coat, he shuffled quickly past an abandoned building site where oily water gathered in pools and dripped from torn plastic sheeting. Some locals had told him it would have been their new public library, but nobody expected it to be finished now. Jed walked on down 4th Avenue, with his free hand jammed into a coat pocket. He pressed a leather document wallet up against his body with that arm. Despite the thin leather gloves he wore to protect his hands from the burning rain, he preferred to keep them tucked away anyway.
The streets were quiet; save for a few council workers who all wore bright yellow ID laminates around their necks, and small groups of soldiers who tried to stay under cover at every street corner. Some managed a little respite under an awning or a bus shelter. Those who didn’t looked as miserable as Jed Culver had ever seen grown men and women look. His own laminate, which guaranteed his passage through the downtown area, was an embarrassing hibiscus pink, identifying him as one of Governor Lingle’s representatives to the convention.
A gust of wind, whipping through the canyons of the city, threw a spray of toxic water into his face, forcing Culver to stop and wipe it down with a handkerchief, one of a collection he carried for just that purpose. He had stopped outside Simon’s Espresso Cafe, where he’d managed to score a quite decent prime-beef sandwich on his first day in Seattle, two weeks back. But between grousing about the ‘fascist-pig-dog-maggots’ who’d ‘taken over’ the city, and muttering darkly about the secret military experiment that had caused the Wave in the first place, his waiter – a life-support system for three hundred and ninety-two stainless steel ringlets, studs and spears – had advised him to enjoy the dead flesh. It was one of the last sandwiches Simon’s would serve. And sure enough, the cafe was soon closed and dark, like most of the retail outlets in the city. As he wiped the stinging water from his face, Jed wondered idly what had happened to the freak with all the piercings. Probably joined ‘the Resistance’.
He had to laugh at the studied pretension of those losers styling themselves on the French Underground. As bad as things were in Seattle, it wasn’t Paris under the Nazis. And when you got down to it, these Resistance idiots were simply making things worse. Every time they hacked a server at Fort Lewis, every time they broke into a food bank to ‘liberate’ the supplies for ‘the common people’, every fucking time they chopped down a tree or spread small iron spikes on a road to ‘deny’ it to military traffic, they aggravated the situation. They weren’t achieving anything – a major sin in Jed Culver’s book – and they were handing Blackstone one rolled-gold opportunity after another to maintain martial law. What was worse, of course, was that they played right into the hands of the pinhead lobby who wanted to hijack the convention as the first step in reframing the Constitution, adapting it into something that Ferdinand Marcos or some Argentine general might have approved of in the 1970s.
Still, thought Jed, as he shuffled down the road, dabbing away the stinging water on his face, these Resistance characters were an element of the game, another piece on the board, and they could be played, too. That’s why he had contact numbers and encrypted net addresses for some of the larger cells in his smart phone.
‘Hey, buddy. Got a mouthful, did you?’
The lawyer looked up with a start. He had no idea where the man standing beside him had come from. Correction: the soldier standing beside him.
‘Sorry, hope I didn’t scare you. Ty McCutcheon’s the name. Major Ty McCutcheon. But you can call me Mac, if that suits.’
‘Uh-huh,’ replied Culver, warily. He felt he’d been put off balance on purpose, but for what reason he wasn’t sure.
‘I’ve seen you at the convention,’ said McCutcheon. ‘I’m heading up there myself now if you’d like the company. It is kinda lonesome round here at the moment. I feel like the Omega Man some days.’
‘The what?’ asked Culver in a flat voice.
‘You know, Charlton Heston? End of the world, last man alive – a great, great flick. Even with those dumbass hippie vampires. I’m telling you, Jed. They won’t ever make ‘em like that again.’
‘No,’ said Culver, who was about to point out that he had not introduced himself. He decided not to, though, wondering what game this character was into, and what role that little gambit with his name was supposed to play.
He scrunched up the damp handkerchief and jammed it deep into a pocket. He could feel the smart phone in there. Loaded with dozens of names and numbers, any one of which could see him hauled in by the military police for extended questioning. That’s how things ran in this city.
‘Well, I am headed that way, Captain… uh…’ Culver knew what the gold oak leaf on the stranger’s Gore-tex jacket represented.
‘McCutcheon. Major McCutcheon,’ the man replied, smiling. If he’d taken Jed’s calculated affront to heart he gave no sign of it.
‘So you’re an army man, then, McCutcheon,’ said Jed, even though he knew full well that wasn’t the case. Precisely modulated buffoonery seemed to be the appropriate response to this gladhanding mountebank.
‘Nope. Air force,’ he replied as they continued towards the Municipal Tower, cutting across Marion into 5th Avenue.
‘Well, that’s all right too, I suppose. And what threat to national security are you dealing with down here, Major McCutcheon?’
‘Oh, I’m just a humble liaison officer, Jed… You are Jed Culver, right – one of Governor Lingle’s people? It is my job to know.’
Culver’s smile was knowing, but he allowed just a small twinkle of admiration to light up his eyes too. This guy wasn’t half bad. He certainly wasn’t nearly as stupid as he pretended to be. It was telling that he’d referenced Culver’s official designation as a Hawaiian delegate, and not his more infamous profile as the prime mover behind the ‘No’ lobby, the makeshift alliance opposed to any radical change in the nation’s constitutional arrangements.
They turned the corner into Fifth, where a line of trees leading up to the Municipal Tower had shed all their leaves and died. The exposed branches called up an image of witch’s hands, clawing at the poisoned sky.