Liberty's Last Stand

TWO

Martial law! Rule by decree from the White House! Barry Soetoro, emperor of the United States. People had been whispering for years about the possibility, but like most folks, I dismissed the whisperers as alarmist crackpots. Now, according to Sal Molina, the president’s longtime guru, the crackpots were oracles.

I sat at my desk in my cubbyhole and thought about things. I wondered if there was any truth to Grafton’s crack that Soetoro and company had been waiting for a terrorist incident so they could declare martial law. Well, why not? The nation was fed up with the Democrats. Seniors and the white middle class had deserted the party by the millions. Cynthia Hinton didn’t have a chance. The Republicans were going to take over the government in November if there was an election.

I felt hot all over. Suddenly the room was stifling. It looked as if the nation I had grown up in, the crazy, diverse republic of three hundred million people all trying to make a living and raise the next generation, was going on the rocks. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to be able to put it back together again. That must have been the thrust of Grafton’s remark before Molina arrived.

I felt as if I were on the edge of the abyss, like Dante’s hero, staring down into the fiery pit. What next?

Grafton would be gone. Like tomorrow. The agency would become another arm of Soetoro’s Gestapo. Molina had implied that much.

I opened the locked drawer where I kept my stuff. I had a shoulder holster and a little Walther in .380 ACP in there. Since I did bodyguard duty for Grafton, I had a permit for it signed by the director, who was Grafton. I took off my jacket, put on the shoulder holster, checked the pistol, and made sure I had a round in the chamber and the safety engaged. Put the pistol in the holster and put my coat back on.

I stood there looking around. There was nothing else in my office I wanted. Not the CIA coffee cup, the free pens, the photo of me and the guys on a big campout in Africa that hung on the wall… none of it. I locked the drawer and cabinets, left the room and made sure the door locked behind me, then headed for the parking lot.

Driving out of the lot was surreal. There were still some cars there, and people trickling out, just as there were every evening. The streetlights were on; traffic went up and down the streets obeying the traffic laws; news, music, sports, and talk emanated from my car radio… and it was all coming to an end.

As I drove I took mental inventory of my arsenal. If you live in America, you gotta have some guns, so when the political contract falls apart… yeah!

I drove over to a gun store I had had prior dealings with. A few people in the store, about as usual. I bought two more boxes of Number Four buckshot for the shotgun, another box of .380 ACP for my Walther, and four boxes of .45 ACP for my Kimber 1911, which was in my apartment. Three boxes of .30-30s for my old Model 94 Winchester.

“Expecting a war?” the clerk asked.

“Comes the revolution, I want to be ready,” I replied.

I used a credit card to pay for the stuff. If the future went down the way I suspected, in a few days no one would be able to buy guns or ammo for love or money. Soetoro would shut down the gun stores. Screw the Second Amendment.

Then I drove over to Maryland to visit the lock shop I owned with my partner, Willie “the Wire” Varner. He was a black man about twenty years older than me, and had been up the river twice. Now reformed, he was my very best friend. Don’t ask me why a two-time loser should be the only guy in the world I really trust — besides Jake Grafton — but he is. Maybe because he’s so much like me. As I unlocked the front door and went into the shop, I realized that I couldn’t tell him about the bomb Molina dropped, but I did have news.

Willie was in the back room of the shop wiring up the motherboard of an alarm system for installation in an old house. The final innings of an Orioles game were on the radio. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey. Stopped by to tell you, I quit the agency this evening.”

He stared. “No shit?”

“Honest injun. I am not going back.”

“They give you any severance?”

“Uh, no.”

He turned back to the alarm system. “They goin’ to be lookin’ for you, Carmellini?”

“Naw. It’ll be days before they figure out that I’m gone. Maybe weeks.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Just did. All I can.”

He straightened up and gave me another look. “And I thought I had a monopoly on fuckin’ up my life. If you ain’t gonna tell me nothin’, just why the hell did you drive over here tonight?”

I was at a loss for words. Why did I? I knew the answer, of course — because I needed some company — but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Don’t think you’re gonna start workin’ here on salary,” Willie declared. “We ain’t got barely enough work for me. We divide it up and neither one of us will be eatin’.”

I nodded. Stood looking around. Maybe I should just give Willie a bill of sale for my half of the place and be done with it. He would never leave the metro area, and I wasn’t staying. I didn’t know where I was going, but I did know I wasn’t staying in Washington.

I decided that was a problem for another day. Said good night and left.

I wasn’t ready for my apartment. Hell, I had nothing better to do, so I headed for Jake Grafton’s condo in Rosslyn. I had certainly been there often enough these last few years, so I knew the way. I was going to try to find a parking place on the street, but instead decided to cruise by the building and see who was sitting outside in cars. Sure enough, a half block from the entrance there was a parked car with two men in it. They were of a type. FBI. After a while you get a feel for them. Trim, reasonably fit, wearing sports coats to hide a concealed carry, maybe a tie. Who, besides middle-level government employees, dresses like that at ten o’clock at night?

I decided I didn’t give a damn if they saw and photographed me. There were no parking places on the street, so I steered the Benz into the parking garage and found a spot on the third deck. Took the stairs down, crossed the street, and went into Grafton’s building.

Grafton buzzed the door open and I went up. Knocked and he opened the door. Callie was sitting in the kitchen. The admiral led me there and asked, “Want a drink?”

“Sure. Anything with alcohol.”

Callie Grafton was a tough lady, but she looked about the way I felt. Bad. “Tommy,” she said, trying to smile.

I realized then that coming over to Grafton’s was a really bad idea. But I couldn’t just walk out. The admiral opened the fridge and handed me a bottle of beer. I unscrewed the top and sipped it. “Car out front with two men in it. Maybe FBI.”

“A dirty gray sedan? They followed me home,” he said.

“So are you going in tomorrow?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, scrutinizing my face.

“Not me. I’m done. Gonna hit the road tomorrow. I think the time has come for Mrs. Carmellini’s boy Tommy to go on to greener pastures.”

The admiral didn’t say anything to that. Mrs. Grafton hid her face behind her tea cup.

On the way over here I wondered if Grafton had told his wife about the conversation with Sal Molina. From the silence and the way she sat looking at the dark window, I knew that he had.

“I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I’ll take this road pop with me to remember you by, Admiral. Good-bye.” I stuck out my hand. He shook it.

“Mrs. Grafton.” She rose from the table and hugged me. Fiercely.

Then I left. Pulled the door shut until the lock clicked. I took the elevator down, put the half-empty beer bottle in my side pocket, crossed the street, and climbed the stairs.

The next morning, Tuesday, August 23, I was wide awake at five in the morning. The sky was starting to get pink in the east. I hopped out of bed, showered, shaved, put on jeans and a golf shirt, and got busy packing. Everything had to go in my car, which was a 1975 Mercedes. Guns and ammo, of course, plus some of my clothes. No kitchen utensils, pots, pans, dishes, or coffee pot. No television or radio. I did decide to take my laptop and charger, but I left the printer.

When I had made my selections and the stuff was stacked in the middle of the little living area, I began shuttling stuff down to the car in the elevator.

When I got the car loaded, I stood in the middle of my apartment and took stock. Nothing else here I wanted.

I wrote a short letter to the landlord and enclosed my key and building pass. He could have everything left in the apartment. The stuff in the refrigerator I emptied into a garbage bag and carried down with me.

In light of what happened subsequently, perhaps I should have been worried about the country and martial law and what was to come, and perhaps I was on a subconscious level. I must have suspected the future might be grim or I wouldn’t have worried about the guns and ammo. Still, after I packed the car, I was thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

It was a nice problem. I had daydreamed about afterward for years, after the CIA, but that eventuality was always somewhere ahead in a distant, hazy future. Now, boom, the future was unexpectedly here, and it wasn’t hazy.

Of course I didn’t have to plot my next fifty or sixty years today. I decided that this day would be a good one to head west, following the sun. A few weeks of backpacking in Idaho or Montana would suit me right down to the ground.

Already I was late for work — at Langley — as if I were ditching school. Feeling rather bucked with life, I drove to a breakfast place in a shopping mall and ordered an omelet and coffee. I scanned a newspaper while I waited for my omelet. The journalists had dug up a lot more on the dead terrorists. They were from Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The experts were speculating on where and how they acquired their weapons, all of which were legally for sale in many states in America. Two more of the Saturday gunshot victims had died, bringing the grand total of deaths to 173.

At 9:45 I was standing in line in the lobby of the suburban Virginia bank where I had my accounts. When I reached the window, I wrote a check for the amount in my checking account, leaving only a thousand bucks in the account to cover outstanding checks.

“And how would you like this, Mr. Carmellini?” The teller was a cute lady wearing an engagement and wedding ring. The best ones are always snagged early.

“Cash, please. Half fifties and half hundreds.”

She tittered. “Oh, good heavens. Since it’s over ten thousand, we must fill out a form. Are you sure you don’t want a cashier’s check?”

Titterers set my teeth on edge. On the other hand, she wasn’t still swimming around in the gene pool looking for a man. I silently wished her husband luck. “Pretty sure,” I replied. “Cash, please. And while you are at it, I want to close out my savings account. I’ll take that in cash too.”

She had to go get more cash from the vault, then the paperwork took another few minutes. When I had my money, a little over twenty-two thousand monetary units — they gave me a little cloth envelope with the bank’s name printed on it to carry it in — I opened my safe deposit box with the help of one of the ladies who didn’t titter.

Back in my younger days, when I thought the day might come when I wanted to leave town in a hurry — like today, for instance — I had stashed thirty grand in cash in the box, along with a couple of false driver’s licenses in various names, credit cards, and a genuine false passport. Getting that paper had taken time and money years ago, but I did it and kept the stuff. Of course, the credit cards had long expired, but they added heft to my wallet and looked good to anyone who happened to glance into my wallet while I had it open. Some people think that people with credit cards are more trustworthy than those without.

Under the money at the bottom of the drawer was another 1911 .45, an old Ithaca made during World War II with brown plastic handles and most of the bluing gone from the slide, plus two extra magazines and a box of cartridges. The pistol was marked “United States Property M 1911 A1 US Army.” It had either been liberated from the army’s clutches many years ago or sold as surplus. It was serviceable, although it didn’t have the good sights and fancy grips of my Kimber.

If there is a possibility that you might get shot at, you should at least be prepared to shoot back. In this brave new world that Emperor Soetoro envisioned, I thought the odds of getting shot at would be increased for a great many people, me included. I emptied the metal box into my briefcase, then with the help of the vault lady, who had discreetly faded while I plundered my treasure box, put the box back into its slot where it would rest undisturbed, safer than a pharaoh’s sarcophagus, for all eternity, or until my annual box rent was due and I wasn’t around to pay it, whichever came first.

As I was leaving the lobby with my now-bulging briefcase, Barry Soetoro was on the television high in the corner, reading from a teleprompter. That was, I had long ago concluded, his one skill set. The audio on the TV was off, so I was spared his mellifluous tones. There were people standing behind him, but since I knew Jake Grafton wasn’t among them, I didn’t bother to check out the crowd of toadies. I walked out of the bank with my money — earned, not stolen, with taxes paid on every dime. I kinda wished I had stolen it, then I would have felt better about this whole deal. I was just too goddamn conventional.

To hell with all of it! I walked out of the bank into the rest of my life.

Barry Soetoro’s declaration of martial law stunned the nation. His reason — the need to protect the nation from terrorism — met with widespread skepticism. After all, at least three of the Saturday jihadists had entered with Soetoro’s blessing, over the objections of many politicians and the outraged cries of all those little people out there in the heartland, all those potential victims no one really gave a damn about.

His suspension of the writ of habeas corpus went over the heads of most of the millions of people in his audience, since they didn’t know what the writ was or signified. He didn’t stop there. He adjourned Congress until he called it back into session, and announced an indefinite stay on all cases before the courts in which the government was a defendant. His announcement of press and media censorship “until the crisis is past” met with outrage, especially among the talking heads on television, who went ballistic. Within thirty minutes, the listening audience found out what the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant: FBI agents arrested select television personalities, including some who were literally on camera, and took them away. Fox News went off the air. Most of the other networks contented themselves with running the tape of Soetoro behind the podium making his announcement, over and over, without comment.

During the day FBI agents arrested dozens of prominent conservative commentators and administration critics across the nation, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, George Will, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ralph Peters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Matt Drudge, Thomas Sowell, Howard Stern, and Charles Krauthammer, among others. They weren’t given a chance to remain silent in the future, but were arrested and taken away to be held in an unknown location until Soetoro decided to release them.

Senators and congressmen, from both sides of the aisle, were told in no uncertain terms that they too would be arrested if they publicly questioned the administration’s methods and motives.

Plainly, life in America had just been stood on its ear. All the usual suspects who had supported Barry Soetoro for seven and a half years, no matter what, through thick, thin, and transparent, rushed to find a reporter with a camera so that they could say wonderful things on television about their hero, the self-proclaimed messiah who had said when he was first elected that he would lower the level of the sea and allow the earth to heal.

While all this was going on, Jake Grafton was fired as director of the CIA. Two White House aides arrived in Langley with FBI agents in tow and delivered a letter from the president. Grafton was summarily relieved and the assistant director, Harley Merritt, was named acting director.

As Grafton departed with the FBI agents, the two White House aides remained for a talk with Merritt about what was expected of him.

The FBI took Grafton to a federal detention center that had been set up at Camp Dawson, a National Guard facility near Kingwood, West Virginia. Grafton should have been surprised to find that the holding facility had concertina wire, kitchens, latrines, and a field full of erect army tents containing a dozen cots each, but he wasn’t. Obviously someone had done the staff work to have facilities ready and waiting, with only the date that they were to be used remaining to be selected.

Grafton arrived in time to shuffle through the lunch line, which contained about forty people. Most were men in their twenties and thirties, with here and there a few women salted in. The women huddled together. Everyone was in civilian clothes. He recognized several of the other detainees, or prisoners: two army four-star generals and a couple of former cabinet members. He picked up an aluminum tray from the stack, and a soldier in uniform spooned out mashed potatoes, mystery meat, and corn. At the end of the food line, he could select paper napkins and plastic tableware. No one trusted the detainees with real knives or forks.

Afterward Jake was given a plastic Walmart bag for his stay, one containing a disposable razor, soap, a towel, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. The tube of toothpaste was small, TSA size, and he hoped that was an indicator of how long he would be here. He suspected it wasn’t.

He still had his cell phone, but he had no charger, so he turned it off in the car on the way here. He had managed a call to Callie before he left the Langley facilities, so she knew he wasn’t coming home this evening, even if she didn’t know where he was.

He sat on the side of the cot he had chosen in his assigned tent. He was the only occupant of the tent, so far, but he expected plenty of company. Finally he unrolled his sleeping bag and stretched out on it.

Barry Soetoro had just decapitated the American government in a coup d’état. Furthermore, Soetoro and his aides knew that Grafton was politically unreliable. How long they would hold him, if indeed he would ever be released, was unknowable.

Jake Grafton was a political prisoner.

The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and declaration of martial law in the United States stunned the world. Abraham Lincoln did both during the American Civil War in the 1860s, so there was precedent. The Constitution itself, Article 1, Section 9, stated: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Clearly, this past week there had been no rebellion, as there had been during the Civil War. What there was, Soetoro declared, was an “invasion by terrorists,” and in Soetoro’s opinion, “public safety did indeed require martial law.” During the Civil War Lincoln had also declared martial law, claiming he had a right to do so to preserve the Constitution; his actions were quickly ratified by Congress and the Supreme Court. Army officers arrested several politicians, including one prominent one, Ohioan Clement Vallandigham, and closed down several newspapers. Lincoln’s generals caused him more trouble than the people they arrested; the newspaper editors were quickly freed, and Vallandigham, a copperhead Democrat, was taken south and handed over to the Confederates, who didn’t want him either. He wound up in Canada, slipped back across the border, and ran for governor of Ohio. Lincoln ignored him and told his generals to do likewise. Vallandigham lost the Ohio governor’s race of 1864.

The Constitution was silent on Soetoro’s two other declarations: the adjournment of Congress until he recalled it and suspension of all federal cases in which the government was the defendant. There was absolutely no precedent for either action, which hadn’t been attempted in the history of the republic, which spanned a civil war and two world wars. Critics immediately claimed that Soetoro had unconstitutionally attempted to seize power, subordinating the legislative and judicial power to that of the executive. Strident voices compared him to Hitler and Napoleon, both of whom took over the government and made themselves dictators. Soetoro’s supporters — including ardent white leftists and more than ninety percent of black Americans, who had backed everything he had done in office since his first election and damned his critics as virulent racists — loudly supported him now. Amazingly, those who cheered his actions were given space in newspapers and time on television, while critics weren’t. Those editors and producers who were not inclined to fall in line, and most of them were, were threatened with arrest. If that didn’t make them behave, they were hustled away to detention camps.

Social media websites also received government attention and were told if they allowed “criticism of the government” on their websites, they would be shut down. Since they had no way to stop the wired-in public from posting anything they wanted, these websites were soon shut down by their corporate owners. Pirate social media websites quickly sprang up, but unhappy people could make little noise on them in the near future. Mouse squeaks, someone said.

The result of all this in much of America was an ominous silence that afternoon.

The news that Soetoro had declared martial law and suspended the holy writ arrived like an incoming missile in Austin, Texas. Legislators crowded the governor’s office and all wanted to talk to the governor, Jack Hays. And they all wanted to talk at once.

State Senator Benny “Ben” Steiner copped a seat in a corner and listened. The consensus was that Barry Soetoro had declared himself dictator.

“Anybody have any idea of when America will get its Constitution back?” Charlie Swim asked. He was the most prominent black politician in the state, a former Dallas Cowboys star. He was, arguably, also one of the smartest and most articulate politicians in Texas.

The hubbub subsided somewhat. Everyone wanted to know what Charlie Swim thought. “The problem here is that Washington politicians haven’t had the guts to impeach Soetoro. And I’ll tell you why. He’s black. They’re afraid of being called racists. If Soetoro had been white, he’d have been thrown out of office years ago. Rewriting the immigration laws; refusing to enforce the drug laws; siccing the IRS on conservatives; having his spokespeople lie to the press, lie to Congress, lie to the UN; rewriting the healthcare law all by himself; thumbing his nose at the courts; having the EPA dump on industry regardless of the costs; admitting hordes of Middle Eastern Muslims without a clue who they were… Race in America — it’s a toxic poison that prevents any real discussion of the issues. It’s the monkey wrench Soetoro and his disciples have thrown into the gears that make the republic’s wheel turn. And now this! Already the liberals are screaming that if you are against martial law, you’re a racist; if anyone calls me a racist, he’s going to be spitting teeth.”

Charlie Swim wasn’t finished, and his voice was rising. “The black people in America were doing all right, working their way up the ladder, until drugs came along. Then welfare, and payments to single mothers — when you pay poor people not to work and not to marry they are going to take the money. Barry Soetoro had a real chance to do something about what’s taken black America down — drugs, welfare rather than work, kids without wedlock — but he didn’t bother.” Swim’s voice became sarcastic. “Climate change is his cause, and discrimination against Muslims. And expensive golf vacations.” His voice rose to a roar. “I’m sick of this self-proclaimed black messiah!”

“That won’t do any good, Charlie,” Jack Hays said conversationally. He was standing behind his chair and now addressed the crowd. “I have no doubt we’ll hear from Washington soon, and in great detail, and when we do I’ll pass it on. You’ll know what I know just about as fast as I get it.”

“What are you going to do about this mess?” someone demanded.

“What am I going to do if it rains?” Hays said. “What am I going to do if it doesn’t? You people go back to your chambers and make speeches, hold press conferences, tell the people of Texas what you think. That’s all we can do right now. Tomorrow is another day. Now git!”

And they did. All except Ben Steiner. A lawyer from Abilene, he had tried civil and criminal cases all over Texas for forty years. Politics was his hobby. Now he closed the door behind the last of his colleagues and seated himself in one of the chairs across the desk from Hays.

“You are avoiding the issue, Jack, and you know it.”

“I know a lot of things I don’t talk about in public,” Jack Hays replied curtly.

“Barry Soetoro is ripping up the Constitution and declaring himself dictator. All he needs is a crown. That’s indisputable. This crap about terrorism — the FBI can find terrorists, and they don’t have to go any farther than the nearest mosque. What’s really happening here is Barry Soetoro taking out his political enemies. What are we Texans going to do about this? Are we going to knuckle under?”

Hays moved around in his chair, trying to get comfortable. He rearranged his scrotum. “You’re working up to something, Ben. What?”

“We need to secede from the Union. Declare the Republic of Texas, again.”

Hays made a face. “This isn’t 1836. There are forty-nine other states and the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. The last time Texas got uppity, back in 1861, the roof caved in. It would again.”

“Really?” Ben Steiner leaned forward and lowered his voice. “The roof has already caved in. Give me a better idea, Jack. Tell me what we are going to do if Soetoro calls off the election. If he declares himself president for life.”

“He hasn’t done that,” Hays shot back.

“Not yet,” Steiner admitted. “What he has done is declare martial law, adjourn Congress, shut down the courts, muzzle the press, and arrest his critics. How are we going to preserve our way of life, preserve our liberty, preserve our democracy with a dictator in the White House?”

“I don’t know,” Jack Hays admitted. “I need to think on it.”

“Better not think too long,” Ben Steiner said as he got out of his chair. “There’s a lot of people in Texas who won’t think long at all. They hate that son of a bitch and they won’t take this lying down. While you’re thinking, think about how to head them off if they get out of hand. If you don’t, or won’t, or can’t, we’re talking anarchy. No man’s life or property will be safe. Think about that. Also think about what you’re going to do if Soetoro sends some federal agents to drag you out of this office and throw you into a prison somewhere. Until such time, if ever, that he decides it’s safe to let you out. Think about that too.”

Ben Steiner walked out of the governor’s office and closed the door behind him.

Jack Hays put his hands on his face and tried to force himself to relax. Various right-wing groups in Texas had argued for independence for years. They were the lunatic fringe, the village idiots. Hays had kept his distance. Now Ben Steiner had taken his turn at the independence podium, and he was no crackpot.

The way people lived in early-twenty-first-century Texas depended on the American monetary system, Social Security, military retirement, banks stuffed full of U.S. Treasury bonds as their capital, the national telephone grid, the power grid, all of that. Companies here paid wages to Texans to manufacture goods and sold them all over the United States — all over the world — and the stores in Texas that supplied the stuff of life were filled with goods manufactured all over the world; Texans used their paychecks to pay for what they needed. Independence, he thought, would take a civil war, and that would destroy the very fabric of life for a great many Texans. Cutting Texas out of the United States would be like trying to cut Mona Lisa’s face out of her portrait and arguing that the operation wouldn’t harm it.

Jack Hays didn’t believe it could be done. In this interdependent world, Texas had to be part of the United States, a state in the Union.

Or did it?

He was thinking about his deceased uncle, Joe Bob Hays, and the drug smugglers who killed him when the phone on his desk summoned him to duty.