Debt Bomb Read online

  Squinting, he saw nothing.

  Then, just as he was about to turn back to his car, three more bursts of the yellow light appeared in the distance. Each burst lasted about a second and was separated by one second of darkness.

  Dropping any concerns about noise, he pressed the key fob and quickly opened the car door, jumped in, and drove off.

  After fifty yards or so he looked in his rearview mirror. There was a shadow of a figure he could not identify. Then he saw three more bursts of the yellow flashlight. Again, the pattern was one second on and one second off, three times.

  Acorn floored his car and raced back to Washington.

  It was dark by the time Andrea pulled up to her house with her mother. The moving van followed her into the driveway. Andrea got out, walked to the passenger door, and opened it. Ryan was already on his way down the driveway.

  “All right, Mamie, let’s get you inside. I’ll have them move everything to the upstairs guest room where we’ll put you. Ryan, help me bring my mother into the house. We don’t have a ramp and she can’t climb stairs.”

  Ryan helped Mamie from the passenger side and escorted her into the house.

  Andrea heard the television in the den and saw her kids watching it. NBC was broadcasting a special edition of its Nightly News featuring the effects of the emergency budget on the country. What Andrea had witnessed at her mother’s assisted living home was happening throughout America. Seniors unable to pay for medicines or rent without Medicare. Hospitals discharging or turning away patients who could not pay out of pocket or with private insurance. Veterans denied prescriptions and appointments by VA hospitals. Immigrant processing facilities and their associated health care facilities shut down completely. NBC treated her children to a nationwide parade of misery, the same misery Andrea had witnessed with her own eyes a couple of hours earlier.

  “Mommy, the kids in school are saying you did this,” Michelle said.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Andrea responded.

  Aaron chimed in, “That’s not what the kids say. They say you forced them to do it because you are a cheapskate who wants people to die if it will save money.”

  “Aaron, President Murray told me not two hours ago he thinks we’re doing the right thing. The President of the United States.”

  “The kids say he’s a cheapskate who’s killing people too.”

  Andrea left the room and went into the kitchen, leaving Ryan with the kids and her mother. She stood over the sink, staring down into the drain, frustrated and exhausted from defending herself. Hate mail from strangers was one thing. But her son? Kids on a playground? Those kids were repeating whatever they heard their parents say. How could she even show her face in public if everyone thought she was a monster?

  She slammed her fist on the countertop in frustration.

  Couldn’t someone explain to people what would have happened if she hadn’t implemented this emergency budget? They were vilifying her for what was happening, but couldn’t someone explain how much worse it could be?

  From the kitchen she heard Ryan taking the children to task. “That’s enough. Your mother is trying to save the country. Tell those little morons at school that.”

  Andrea caught her breath. Hearing Ryan defend her made her feel slightly less alone.

  Just as she was getting back to herself, the doorbell rang. It was after eight. Who could possibly be wandering the streets at this hour on a weeknight?

  Andrea went to the door and peeked through the window, expecting a salesman or reporter, but it was her neighbor Ellen Frost and another woman Andrea had seen around the neighborhood. At least it wasn’t an angry mob.

  Who knows, maybe they’re here to give me a morale boost.

  Andrea opened the door. “Hi, Ellen. It’s good to see you.”

  “Do you have any idea what you have done?” Ellen’s eyes were puffy and red.

  “Come again? Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay,” Ellen said. “Do you know what you have done to my family?”

  “I have no idea.” Andrea didn’t know what else to say.

  Then it hit her. Ellen was an auditor in the Department of Labor, and her husband Paul was an IT contractor there. They had to be losing their jobs.

  Ellen motioned to the woman next to her. “This is Sarah Robinson. She lives across the street from you. She was a program analyst at the Department of Agriculture until last week. And her husband Steve worked as a real estate manager in the Department of Education.”

  “Hi, Sarah,” Andrea said, offering a handshake. “I’ve seen you around the neighborhood.”

  “You’ve destroyed our lives!” Sarah shouted as Ellen began to cry uncontrollably. “We’ve all lost our jobs because of your damned budget. What are we going to do? How am I going to compete with a million unemployed federal workers for a new job?”

  Andrea looked down at her shoes, then back at Ellen and Sarah. She wanted to run screaming from her doorstep. “I tried so hard, I did everything I could,” she said. “When people stopped buying American bonds, we just ran out of money.” Even as she was saying it, she wondered, Did I really do everything I could?

  Andrea scratched her eyes, fighting the tears she felt coming. Once again, the raw reality of her handiwork was confronting her. Victims of her budgetary hardheartedness were literally laying the blame at her doorstep. Desperately trying to restrain her anguish, she tracked a moth as it flew around the overhead porch light and periodically grazed her cheek. Anything to avoid looking at Ellen and Sarah.

  These women were just like her. Parents who had worked hard for a good life, for stability, to provide for their children. If her accounting practice had failed, Ryan wasn’t making enough money in his job to keep things together. They would have to dip into their savings, sell the house, and put the family on a tight budget.

  Andrea looked helplessly at her neighbors. She desperately searched for something to say, some way to help, but she came up with nothing. Her brain simply had no more capacity for creative thought.

  “I wish I could do something to help,” Andrea said. “I really do.”

  “You’ve helped us enough, thank you very much,” Ellen seethed. Then she and Sarah turned their back on Andrea and left, not even saying goodbye.

  Andrea went back into the house and sat down in the small family study. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed uncontrollably. “I’ve ruined the country, I’ve ruined everyone’s life,” she burbled over and over.

  There was a light rap on the door. It was Mamie in her wheelchair, still covered in the blanket the assisted living facility had given her. Andrea gently wheeled her mother into the study.

  “I take it you heard all that,” Andrea said. She gently wiped her eyes and nose.

  “Honey, the entire neighborhood could hear all that. Those people were speaking at the top of their lungs.”

  “Mamie, I can’t take it.” Andrea’s voice cracked. “I’m getting hate mail every day of the week. People say they want me dead. My neighbors hate me. Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake. Three hundred million Americans can’t be wrong.” She sobbed and wiped her eyes with her mother’s blanket.

  “Yes, they can.” Her mother calmly caressed Andrea’s hand. “These people who are upset with you probably don’t understand everything going on. I don’t really understand either. Let me ask you something, sweetie. Do you think you did the right thing?”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it was the right thing to do.”

  “And the president agreed?”

  Andrea nodded. “He thought it was the right thing to do.”

  Mamie nodded. “Don’t you think it’s possible everyone else doesn’t understand?”

  “I’m sure they don’t. But they are the judges of this.”

  Mamie shook her head in disagreement. “Honey, remember what your father used to say?”

  “That people are idiots?”

  Mamie laughe
d. “No, not that. He used to say, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ What he meant was that people are wrong. A lot. If you think it was the right thing to do, just forget it. You just go back in to work tomorrow and do your job.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Well, what’s done is done. You’ll manage, they’ll manage, we’ll all manage. We’ve got no choice.”

  “We’ll see, Mamie. We’ll see.”

  Acorn sat at his desk in his Longworth office in ominous quiet. For a week, his Ministry watch had told him only the time. No one from the Ministry had contacted him since his last meeting with Xu Li. She had told him to await instructions, but the Ministry’s silence had grown deafening.

  Acorn stared at the picture on his office desk of his parents and him on a trip to Niagara Falls. He remembered the trip like it was yesterday. He was ten. His best friend had just gone to Disney World and he had begged his parents to take him to no avail. “Playpen of the capitalists,” his father called what everyone else called the Happiest Place on Earth. “Exploring nature and not handing over hard-earned money to exploiting corporate capitalist overlords is the kind of vacation a true socialist takes.” They were that devoted to overthrowing the capitalist order and the United States.

  Acorn held back tears as he looked at his parents smiling with the falls in the background. His father was wearing his usual plaid shirt and jeans, and his mother was in her typical dowdy dress. “We are workers and we wear the clothes,” his father would say. Ten-year-old Frank had a sourpuss look. Acorn remembered thinking Mickey Mouse would have been a lot more fun than watching water go over a cliff.

  He thought about his parents’ sacrifices and his own. Never going to nice restaurants. Never taking a nice vacation. Dedicating themselves to bringing down capitalism. He felt a hole in the pit of his stomach. All that sacrifice and he’d failed. He’d failed his parents. He’d failed Xu Li. Despite the horrors of the financial crisis Operation Pripyat had created, the United States was still alive and still capitalist.

  Twenty-two years he’d spent burrowing into American life. Twenty-two years he’d worked to get to the height of staff power in Washington. Twenty-two years of preparing to bring down the United States.

  And he’d blown it.

  Just as he was about to bury his head on his desk, Mason walked in. “Let’s talk strategy,” he said.

  Mason’s strategy talks were legendary among his staff. Walk or drive to a nice restaurant, sit, and listen to the old blowhard ramble about politics. Sometimes it was strategy. Sometimes it was politics. And sometimes it was just venting. You could never be sure which you were in for. Mason’s strategy talks were more like strategy monologues. But the food was good.

  “Sure, let’s go.” Acorn never said no to a strategy talk. Maybe Mason would pass along some nugget of information he could take back to Xu Li. Maybe he would have a chance to show Xu Li he wasn’t a total failure.

  They got into to Mason’s BMW and drove west on Constitution Avenue, past the White House and Washington Monument, past the Lincoln Memorial, onto Interstate 66, and then onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

  It was unusual for Mason to leave DC in the middle of the day. “Where’re we headed, Mr. Mason?” asked Acorn.

  “This new sushi place in McLean I discovered. Tachibana. Delicious stuff. You like sushi, right?”

  “Sure, that sounds great.”

  Acorn hated sushi.

  He noticed the silent construction sites along the parkway. Work had ceased under the emergency budget. Another monument to his failure to prevent the emergency budget from passing.

  “We really fucked up that hearing, didn’t we?” said Mason.

  “Andrea beat us,” Acorn said. “I’ve never seen her like that before.”

  “Why don’t we talk strategy someplace a little more private before we get to the restaurant,” Mason offered.

  “Fine, but we have a three o’clock hearing, so we can’t screw around and enjoy nature or anything like that,” Acorn reminded Mason. “We have to eat and be back in the Capitol by three.”

  “I’ll be there, don’t worry.” Mason seemed calm but distant, almost preoccupied.

  He pulled the car off the parkway and into the secluded Fort Marcy Park between Washington and McLean. No one was around in the middle of the day. The park was a low-key, low-traffic destination, quiet on the weekends, desolate on weekdays. It was notorious in Washington for having been the site of Vince Foster’s suicide during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

  “Walk with me, Frank.” Acorn was getting nervous. Mason hated nature. He hated parks. And he hated leaving DC in the middle of the day. What the hell was going on?

  “You know that failure comes with a price, don’t you?”

  “Of course, Mr. Mason. I know the hearing went badly. I have a plan—”

  “Frank, that’s not the failure I’m talking about.”

  “Then what gives?” Acorn asked nervously.

  “You know the emergency budget wasn’t supposed to pass. And I know it was your job to make sure it didn’t pass.”

  Mason turned to Acorn.

  “By the way, I have something I want to show you.”

  Mason opened the small satchel he often carried with him on the Hill. He pulled out a grainy photo with washed-out colors.

  “What is this?” Acorn asked.

  “It’s a photo, Frank. I took this a week ago. Used a special camera.”

  “That’s why the colors are weak?”

  “That’s right. The camera uses short bursts of light to help illuminate the subject. Three short bursts of light each separated by a second of darkness. But it hasn’t been perfected yet.”

  Acorn did a double take.

  Three short bursts of light?

  He thought back to the mysterious bursts of light at the cave.

  It couldn’t be. Could it?

  “What’s in the picture, Lew?”

  “Frank, I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. See that little shadow in the center?” Mason pointed to a black image the height of a fingernail. “If you look closely you can make out the head and the arms and the legs. It’s you, Frank.”

  Acorn glanced down at the photo more closely and his eyes widened. Thoughts rushed into his head like water after a dam break.

  Did Mason know about the abandoned drive-in? Was Mason CIA?

  Mason looked at Acorn with a slight air of contempt. “Did you really think I didn’t know who you were and what you were up to, Frank? Or should I call you Acorn?”

  Acorn opened his mouth to speak but his voice cracked and nothing came out except a light squeak. His world was crashing down around him and he stood paralyzed.

  “There are penalties for failure, Acorn. Agents have to know the consequences. Examples must be made.”

  Holy living hell.

  Mason wasn’t CIA.

  He was Ministry.

  Acorn staggered backward in terror. “You mean you . . .”

  “Frank, I’m sure you are a good agent. But did you really think you were so good you could work your way up to chief of staff in a congressional office? Did you really think I didn’t know who you were?”

  “All those years of constitutional conservatism, of railing against the deficit, of opposing the Establishment . . . all this time you were an agent too?” Acorn stammered.

  “Come on, Frank. Like you weren’t doing the same thing? Can you imagine deeper cover? Who could possibly think a Debt Rebellion-loving, boxing elephant flag-waving, cowboy boot-wearing constitutional conservative could be working for the Ministry?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Mr. Mason? We could have worked together. Imagine what we could have done.”

  “Compartmentalization, Frank. Ministry frontline agents like you are cannon fodder—the most likely to fail, and the most likely to be eliminated and replaced. Agents like you exist to protect agents like me. Surely you’ve figured that out by now.”

  Acorn’s m
ind was racing and his limbs shook. He continued to backpedal slowly away from Mason.

  “Now we can work together, right?”

  “Come on, Frank. You know that’s impossible. You failed. You’re no good to us now.”

  I have to get out of here!

  Acorn dropped the photo, turned, and began running away from Mason in the direction of the Potomac River.

  Suddenly a gun went off behind the shrubs on the edge of the park. A bullet ripped through Acorn’s abdomen. He crumpled to the ground, writhing on his back in pain.

  “Shit, Pyotr, you were supposed to kill him dead,” Mason shouted.

  The shrubs rustled and a man in a black suit and tie emerged. Glancing up at his attacker, Acorn noticed he was about the same height and build as Mason and shared his round face and large nose. Unlike Mason, the man wore a beard of medium thickness.

  “Do not complain, Crimson,” Pyotr said, looking at his wrists. “You were supposed to knock him down for me to kill him quietly, not let him run away so I had to shoot him. And now I have blood on my suit. Ermenegildo Zegna suits are not cheap. The Ministry only gave me a few of these.”

  “I’ll get it cleaned later,” Mason replied. “Give him the tranquilizer.”

  Pyotr kneeled and opened a black bag that was by his feet. He quickly pulled out a syringe and a small vial of clear liquid and filled the syringe.

  “Ohhh, Lew . . . what are you doing . . . why . . . help me . . . Lew, please don’t kill me,” Acorn pleaded.

  Pyotr brandished the syringe, liquid dripping from its tip. Acorn raised his hands to protect himself. He smelled something awful, a combination of human sweat and rotten eggs, but he couldn’t tell if it was the assassin or the dripping liquid.

  “Shhh, Frank. This isn’t going to hurt. It’ll just slow things down for you.” Mason turned to the assassin. “Now.”

  “Yes, Crimson.” Pyotr then grabbed Acorn’s left arm, pinning it to the ground, and jabbed the needle into his shoulder, pushing the plunger down quickly.

  “Don’t worry, Frank. This won’t hurt much. This tranquilizer will just paralyze your muscles. You’ll bleed out. It’s a bit rudimentary but a very compact and clean way to kill someone.”