Chapter 27 -- BVROGHVHSTRZEGBQVFZS
The Council meeting was over and Donald had returned. He had called to let them
know he would be in around noon, so Jessica advised Mary that lunch would be a
little later than usual. The meeting had been out in New Mexico, too far to
driver, so he had one of the members from from a freehold in Kentucky stop at
the Columbia airport and pick him up.
The group gathered at the house in the late morning, chatting with Gordon and
Mary as they waited. Mary and Dalton had worked for Gordon for many years and
were more like family than employees, and they in turn played the part of
loyal long-serving retainers. Although they had a couple of children, it was
most likely that they would retire and live out their days on the estate.
Jessica had often suspected that there was some personal bond, but had never
asked her father about it.
Gordon called when he landed at Columbia. It was a two hour drive, so Mary
began preparations for lunch. It had been raining all morning, so Dalton was
limited to indoor activities. He looked in a couple of times, evidently bored
with nothing to do, and finally joined them.
Jessica was up and looking out a window as her father arrived, running to the
door leading to the garage to meet him. He gave her a quick hug before taking
his briefcase to his quarters. Dalton went out to get his luggage.
"Want to clean up a little before lunch?" Jessica asked. She always felt the
need for the entire ritual of shower, brushing her teeth and clean
clothes after a long trip. Especially after a long air and road trip.
"You kidding? I haven't eaten since breakfast. Let's have lunch."
There was no business talk at lunch. Jessica did not know how much, if
anything, Mary and Dalton knew about the family's hidden business. It was
possible, she thought, that they knew nothing. Still, she could not see her
grandfather and her father keeping them completely in the dark, given that the
family might, indeed would, likely be exposed to danger. Perhaps there were
plans to move them out of harm's way when that happened.
After lunch, they gave Donald a couple of hours to himself and, presumably to
brief Gordon. After a while Jessica got a message advising of a meeting at
four o'clock in the small house they had used previously. She and Carter
drove over, Tommy and James were already there. Carter felt a tension as they
waited, and Jessica picked it up, reaching over to squeeze his hand, something
she had never done. He looked over, caught her gaze.
"Me too" was all she said.
Tommy, too, looked more serious than usual. James was still perhaps not fully
unaware of the depth of the situation, but they had decided to bring him into
the deep end at once. He would have to adapt quickly.
Donald arrived, and they sat down around the dining table.
"Well," he said, "you already know what the big picture is, in terms of what we're
facing. The elections were even worse than we expected, not that it matters.
The only possible positive outcome was to take over one house of the congress.
That's been our only hope for the past several cycles, and even that wasn't
worth much. Being able to block more laws wouldn't have done much to reverse
the process. And now, with a president who isn't just an ignorant tool but is
actively malicious, it looks like the confrontation isn't far off."
He looked around the table. James was the only one waiting for some sort of
revelation. The others already knew.
"We were in unanimous agreement about the situation," he continued. "The only
questions are about how to proceed. And since our actions will, for the most
part, have to be reactions. Because we don't know which of the things we
expect will happen - the when and the how of them - we have to wait for some
things to happen.
"However, our enemies, while they have plans for achieving their objectives,
can't be assured of accomplishing it as easily as they believe. And that's
without us.
"Two or three things we expect - continued bad economic conditions, increasing
unemployment, rising prices, and certainly tax increases and new taxes. The
remainder of the productive sector is going to squeezed harder than ever, and
there will be no relief. And tax enforcement will be even more ruthless. The
IRS has been adding personnel in each new budget, and since they aren't yet
going after the big corporations that are still supporting them they'll be
going after the little people. The big fish will get theirs eventually, but
they're either too stupid to know it or they think they'll avoid it.
"And we're almost certainly going to see attempts to disarm the population.
They fear the millions, tens of millions, of people who will not give in to
either the economic pressure or the curtailment of their freedom. This
government is absolutely about forcing more and more people into the cities,
making travel more difficult and expensive, and making any degree of personal
privacy impossible. But there are too many armed citizens at this point. So
it's likely we'll see restrictive gun laws soon, and the Supreme Court has
already demonstrated that it will do nothing.
"So by the end of next year, we'll see the vice beginning to close. We may
have a year before we have to either strike back, or go into the darkness.
And none of us are willing to do that. Some men have said that it is better
to die on your feet that to live on your knees, to which I can only add that
if you choose life on your knees anyway, you'll still die eventually. And the
intervening time won't be pleasant.
"That's pretty much the feeling of every one of us, in the Council and in the
members of the freeholds, there are likely very few who don't feel that way.
It's why we're here."
He stopped, waiting for a response. While there was nothing new in is words,
at least for Jessica, Tommy, and Carter - James was being exposed to the full
gravity of the situation for the first time.
"What are the variables from the enemy point of view?" asked Jessica.
"In their minds, there aren't any," Donald said. "Which is obviously in our
favor. But since they know nothing about us, they're overconfident. We're
something they won't have counted on, or ever even imagined.
"As for the variables - aside from us - it's mainly two things. One, obviously,
is the unorganized resistance that will occur. They probably overestimate
their ability to deal with it. Evan a handful of small, poorly funded and not
very organized partisan outfits can give them a lot of trouble. The resources
needed to put them down could be considerable.
"The other thing is the conditions they've created in the cities. They think
they'll be easy to manage, but we don't believe it will. The size of the
underclass, by conservative estimates, is over forty million. That's mostly
in large blocks of hundreds of thousands in the inner cities. They've been
provided for, coddled for generations, never held accountable for anything.
What happens when they suddenly aren't getting what they want any more, it'll
get ugly."
"Will that be a gradual thing, do you think?" James asked.
"It might be," said Donald, "if we didn't help it along."
"How would we do that?"
"If you're fighting for survival, and you know that you either do what it
takes or die, then you do what it takes. Or you die. We're largely a people
now who don't have what it takes. It's one thing to obey someone with a gun
at your head when you think there's a chance to get out of it. When you know
there isn't, you had better be ready to do what it takes, or it's over. One
of my associates on the Council is fond of saying that anything worth fighting
for is worth fighting dirty for. He's a former special forces type who went
from the army into intelligence work. Was in some pretty bad situations. He
told me once that conscience is the first sacrifice on the road to survival.
"I hope none of us ever have to give up on our conscience, but the enemy we're
facing is far from even having a conscience - collectively or individually.
In their minds, everything they do is justified. They are sociopaths for the
most part, of which lacking a conscience is a symptom.
"As for how we use the mobs in the cities - we turn them against their masters.
We cut off the supplies - water and electricity, then food. One of the things
we decided on was to prepare to do that. If the government is dealing with
massive mobs of people who will use any excuse to burn, loot, and murder when
stirred up by agitators and now don't have food - it'll take a lot of
resources to deal with them. Leaving less to come after us."
"That's the conscience we struggle with," said Jessica. "We're at a point now
where there is no longer any doubt about what is right. If we have hundreds
of thousands of people who have already demonstrated their worthlessness, and
have no prospect for ever doing anything useful - we should have no guilt in
using them to protect ourselves."
"Yeah, I understand," James said. "I saw it, but it never registered. I was
too busy surviving. Until it happened to me. I knew about it, saw it happen
to other cops like Darrell. I looked at the garbage that was causing it, but
just accepted it as something I couldn't do anything about. When they came
after me..."
"That's the way with most people," Jessica said. "It's natural to be afraid of
challenging authority, to be uncertain if it's the right thing to do. Most
people wait too long, and know something is really wrong when they are being
arrested or killed. Now there is no uncertainty for us."
"So we use their own weapons against them," said James.
"Right," Donald said. "Unfortunately, it isn't the worst thing we'll have to
do. Besides using the unorganized resistance groups, by supplying them with
weapons and information to attack the enemy, we'll eventually, almost certainly,
strike at the heart, decisively. Which is to say with massive force.
"Whenever that time is, the prime movers will be taken out, en masse. And
that is when it will be decided. We may lose, but they won't win - they'll
be dead."
No one spoke for a while. Except for James, they had all known what the end
game was, if it came to that.
"If it comes to that," Donald said, "there will be more than enough other things
to worry about. When the mass arrests are occurring, when people are dying in
large numbers at the hands of the government, there will be no room for doubt.
For now it's pretty much under the radar for most of the population - they've
been killing people here and there a few at a time, and locking up the louder
voices, all in the guise of enforcing the law. But when it's all out in the
open, and there's nothing to lose, the time will have come."
"So we're probably looking at late next year," Carter said, "for some bad things
to be happening. Is there an overall strategy, beyond the big one? Or will we
be mostly making it up as we go along?"
"Unfortunately, in the short term, yes," Donald replied. "The Council will be
meeting more frequently, or at least committees will be. Probably like the
operation to extract James, operations will be planned and carried out by the
freeholds involved, and for the most part unknown to the others. The less is
known by the entire organization, the less can be leaked.
"So yes, we'll be mostly reacting in the beginning. We still hope, even
though we know better, that events may lead to some sort of solution short of
the big one. So as long as it's below that level, we're taking it a step at a
time."
"We'll be playing a waiting game for a while," Jessica said. "We can use some
of that time go get James some experience. We'll need to get your driver's
license update with a new picture, James, before you get out much. And by the
way, both you and Darrell's licences have motorcycle endorsements.
Motorcycles can be quite useful - how's your experience?"
"Not much," James replied. "Just a little casual riding when I was younger."
"About the same here," said Carter. "I'm guessing we have bikes in the motor pool?"
"Actually, just three or four that Tommy uses. We can acquire more. It's a
good way to morv around unnoticed, a lone biker or a couple, most cops don't
give them a second look unless they're doing something suspicious."
"The cool thing," Tommy said, "is if you're being pursued, you've got a better
chance on a bike. More maneuverable, go off road if necessary."
"Tommy's got a lot of experience," said Jessica, "so we're in luck there. One
of the freeholds we'll be visiting soon has a good driving course, and there'll
be a lot of guys there you can learn from."
"I'd like to do that. I can see where that would be a useful skill."
"There's also a combat survival course there," Carter said. "Practical street
fighting, improvised weapons, and other useful things."
"It probably would be a good thing for you to go out there with Tommy next
time they're having one," Jessica said. "We've been before, but you and
Darrell haven't. We can go out to the next one. They have them every two or
three weeks, whenever they have enough people signed up."
"I'll let you kids get on with it" said Donald. "I'll keep you updated on the
strategy end."