A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (6 page)

Takoma Park, Maryland

Dennis Trout was still peeved over last night’s Paul McCartney concert at the White House. His brother-in-law was an arrogant, pompous piece of work who fit right in with the Parliament of Whores in Washington. Joe Wiedersham would do anything in order to maintain power, no matter how shady, unethical or downright illegal. No man’s ass was too dirty for him to kiss if it furthered his personal ambitions.

So what did that make him, Dennis Trout, who kissed the ass of the man who kissed dirty asses?

Trout didn’t want to go there, not this early in the morning. He put on coffee in the kitchen and made his way to the downstairs bath where he brushed his teeth, shaved, splashed water on his face and finally studied himself in the mirror as he toweled off. There was little youthful idealism left in the face that looked back at him. He was already starting to bald, forcing him to let his sandy hair grow longer in a comb over to conceal it.
You, sir,
he self-mocked,
are no John Kennedy.

He swigged directly from a bottle of Maalox. Someone once observed how there were more sour stomachs in Washington, D.C. than in any other capital of the world.

Marilyn had been waiting for him when he walked through the door yesterday evening after a longer-than-intended “Happy Hour” at
The Fountains
with Judy. She was already dressed to the nines. Still a handsome woman with her raven hair and green eyes. Gained a few pounds. Cultivated a dirty motor mouth, which only seemed to make her more acceptable to the politicians who made up the inner circle with which her brother Joe ran in Congress and at the White House.

“Damn you, Trout.”

She called him by his last name when she was pissed.

“We’ll be late for the special Paul McCartney concert at the White House with President and First Lady Anastos,” she accused. “It’s the event of the season, an opportunity for the President to notice you. You’re behaving more like an insufferable little prick than a future U.S. congressman.”

“I thought Paul McCartney was dead.”

That set her off. He closed his ears and mind and let her rant, a skill he had learned over the years of their marriage.

After the McCartney concert—apparently, he wasn’t dead—Senator Wiedersham and the President disappeared into the basement War Room with other senators, congressmen and White House “czars.” From across the room, Marilyn shot her husband a look that expressed her disappointment in him. The look suggested he wasn’t kissing enough ass to be included.

A portly man in his sixties arrived late and was immediately ushered downstairs. Talk had it that multibillionaire George Zuniga, one of the richest men in the world, and an avowed Marxist, had funded Anastos’ campaign for the presidency. Trout had run across him several times and found little about him to like.

Not having been invited to the War Room reinforced in Trout’s mind his status as consummate outsider. No matter how long he put up with Wiedersham’s crap, he was never going to make the true inner circle of power, never be much more than a glorified gofer. Even if he were selected to run for the Illinois 9
^th
District seat, he would still be holding down a brother-in-law job.

“Somewhere, deep down, Dennis, you have a conscience,” Wiedersham once admonished him. “That’s a dangerous thing to have when you’re trying to do what’s best for the world.”

His major fault was that he
might
have a conscience?

He had drunk too much last night at the White House. Now, nursing a hangover, he burped at himself in the mirror and took another bolt of Maalox. On his return to the kitchen for a mug of coffee, he stopped and looked up the carpeted stairway to see if Marilyn was stirring. The hallway lights were still off. Good. He liked to have mornings to himself with his coffee and the cable news channels before he threw himself back into the rat race. He added honey and flavored creamer to his coffee and padded to his study.

Politicians lived and died by the daily news cycle. Trout retrieved his notebook from its hiding place in one corner of the bookshelves that lined the walls, sank into his favorite easy chair, raised the leg rest, and turned on the wide-screen TV. Even if he wasn’t an inner circle guy, he could generally tell what was going on in the inner circle by the spin politicians fed the news media and the media dutifully regurgitated.

This morning, there was some more brief handwringing over Judy’s cousin found hung in the cemetery, a recap or two about the terrorist attack at the ORU Convention Center in Oklahoma, and some heads talking about how the Tea Party Movement was producing extremist militias with the mindset of Timothy McVeigh. Most of the chatter this morning, however, was about the American Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that was pouring a couple of million gallons of crude into the Gulf every day and polluting the coastlines of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, killing pelicans and mucking up the fishing industry. An environmental disaster, no doubt, but why all the coverage today after the spill had been on-going for more than six weeks?

Trout listened closely, sometimes scribbling furiously in his notebook.

Anastos’ speech delivered last evening prior to the McCartney concert led the news cycle on every channel, charting what was apparently to be the government’s new approach to the spill. The President appeared on screen from the Oval Office: Mr. Cool, chin arrogantly tilted, big ears like antenna to catch the populist murmur, head moving side to side in his now familiar “teleprompter wag.” Something about the guy annoyed Trout. He suspected Wiedersham’s own regard for Anastos extended no further than as a means to advance his personal ambitions.

“It’s not the presidents who rule the world,” Wiedersham liked to say. “It’s the power behind the presidents.”

“We have laid out a battle plan, uh, that we feel will successfully, uh, bring this greatest disaster in the history of our nation to successful closure,” Anastos declared in exaggerated hyperbole from the TV screen. “What we, uh, have here is the moral equivalent of war against the, uh, oil spill that is assaulting our shores. In the same way that, uh, our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by Nine-Eleven, I think this oil spill disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come, and, uh, one of the biggest leadership challenges for me going forward is going to be to make sure that we draw the right lessons from this disaster and, uh, that we move forward in a bold way. I won’t accept that we can’t change our energy plan to wean the nation off its ruinous dependency on oil.”

What the media talking heads said about the President’s address was more revealing than the speech itself. In an age when “truth” was relative, almost everyone could be bought and sold like whores—the press, Hollywood, universities, unions, education... It seemed everyone was willing to line up for research grants, favorable legislation, insider tips, access, social perks, pork from the public trough...

Trout took a long swig of coffee. Damn, he was getting cynical! He switched channels.

Junie from
Table Talk
was spouting off as usual to a mainstream news anchor. “I say seize AP’s assets right now. Take over the country. I don’t care. Issue an executive order. Call it socialism, call it communism, call it anything you want.”

The news anchor, who had once confessed over the air that just being in President Anastos’ presence “makes shivers run up and down my leg,” also demanded government action.

“Mr. President, I want to see the boot on the neck of AP tonight. I want to see finger pointing whether it’s in your personality or not, to act kind of like a dictator and call the shots.”

Trout had seen both Junie and the anchor several times in the Russell Senate Office Building conferring with Senator Wiedersham and other Progressive politicians. They had been bought and paid for.

Another channel aired a clip from yesterday afternoon showing a raucous mob of ACOA and PEIU union demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue. Although such gatherings had been outlawed in Washington, Trout saw no signs of black-clad Homeland Security Police. Just ordinary cops standing back out of the way to guarantee the demonstrators their First Amendment rights. The rowdy demeanor of this bunch, the atmosphere they created, the tenor of their protest signs throbbing against the backdrop of the White House made sharp contrast to the nonaggressive behavior of the Tea Party march that ended in bloodshed in front of the Capitol Building.

THE PEOPLE MUST ACT

STOP THE OIL CAPITALISTS

RALLY TO STOP OIL CAPITALISM

PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT

SPREAD THE REVOLUTION

THIS SYSTEM HAS NO FUTURE FOR YOUTH

THE REVOLUTION DOES

Duane Smith appeared with a bullhorn to speak to the demonstrators. Smith, a community organizer and former Black Panther, was President Anastos’ environmental czar.

“The President is on your side,” he assured the mob. “The President wants to do what is right, but what he needs is the will of the people behind him. We have to start from the bottom up. The President needs the right atmosphere to do what he knows is right.”

The mob went wild, shouting and screaming and stabbing with their banners.

“I think something has shifted this week,” Smith shouted. “When we look back on the Anastos presidency, I think we will see that this week marked when Progressives became Progressives again.”

Something
was
shifting. Trout could feel it. He wasn’t exactly sure what. Maybe, if he were honest with himself, he didn’t want to face up to what it was.

Senator Wiedersham’s fierce countenance popped up on another channel. Red power tie, costly suit that didn’t quite fit, narrow eyes glaring. “The way to cure this crisis is to give us more authority to act on behalf of the people...” he was saying.

Trout flipped channels and landed on the Zenergy News Network. He let out a bitter little laugh. Zenergy was “the enemy.” He felt like a traitor for watching, but it provided a different take and some relief from the orchestrated collective baying of what that character Jerry Baer referred to as “the drive-by media” before he got waxed in Oklahoma.

A Zenergy reporter was interviewing a group of people in Detroit who had lined up for blocks to receive free government cash from the economic stimulus packages passed by Congress. It was a sad sort of comic relief against modern reality.

“Why are you here?” the young newsman asked a group of overweight women.

“To get some money.”

“What kind of money?”

“Anastos money.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“Anastos.”

“And where did Anastos get it?”

“I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us to help us. That’s why we voted for him. We love him.”

Whereupon the women began dancing around, waving their arms and chanting, “Anastos! Anastos! Anastos...!”

Trout heard Marilyn up and about. He changed channels again. Marilyn hated Zenergy even more than her brother did. The flip landed on a CSPAN special featuring the head of the Communist Party of the USA giving a speech at a Columbia University campus rally. He was a portly man with gray hair in a ponytail, an old hippie, standing with a microphone on the august marble steps of higher learning, surrounded by students.

“The capitalist oil spill is the result of a system not fit to be caretaker of this planet,” the old hippie harangued the rally goers, who responded with roars of approval. “The oil spill crisis will help provide the revolution we need. In building the New World Order, we’re building it on the kind of principles we all want to live with. The Revolution is real. And we have to take up this real battle.”

Trout wrote in his notebook:
They’re building up the crisis of the oil spill the same way they did when they created a crisis of Health Care and nationalized it, when they nationalized the big banks and took over General Motors. They aim to nationalize energy...

Marilyn entered the study, accompanied by her poodle Reggie, whose white hair was dyed a shocking pink. Trout was propped back in his easy chair sipping his coffee, notebook stuffed out of sight. Marilyn’s raven hair was mussed and she had sleep in her eyes. Only the matching-Reggie-pink dressing gown she bought in Paris at the price of an average workers’ monthly salary saved her from looking frumpy. She didn’t bother taking a chair. She was on her way to the den to watch TiVo reruns of
Oprah
or
Whoopi.
That she tarried along the way was only because she had something on her chest other than a C-cup bra.

“Trout, you’re about as assertive as a Chihuahua,” she forthrightly accused.

He sipped his coffee and continued staring at the screen.

“It was embarrassing after the concert,” she continued in an injured tone. “All the wives noticed you were the only one excluded from the meeting with the President and Mr. Zuniga. I could have died, literally died.”

“Paul McCartney was excluded.”

That was small consolation.

“If you have no backbone to stand up for yourself, I’ll have to do it for you,” she snapped. “I just got off the phone with my brother. I gave him a piece of my mind. A future congressman from Illinois ought to be treated more respectfully. Mr. Zuniga is very powerful and influential and can direct your political career like he did the President’s.”

She sniffed and wheeled to depart, that sycophant Reggie on her heels. She paused in the doorway and looked back.

“Joe offered us a hot tip on investments. It came directly from Mr. Zuniga,” she said. Trout knew she was rubbing his nose in the fact that
she
had more access to the inner circle than he. “He suggested we buy oil shares.”

He frowned. Because of the oil spill, the President had already suspended deep sea oil drilling off the coasts. Private investors would be left out in the cold if he nationalized America’s energy industries.