Jude Devine Mystery Series (79 page)

“Yeah, it’s fucking awesome,” Lone replied in the deepest version of her unfeminine voice. “Hey, pal, have you seen a blond chick in a pink top?”

The guy gazed around, bringing his backpack into view. The peace sign in the center was a recent addition and the patches were extremely clean. He pointed to a young female waving a sign. “Over there?”

“No, that’s not her. Damn.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Fuck, no.” When the guy looked confused, she said, “Get with the program, man. Look around. It’s Babe Central and we’re in the minority. Know what that means?”

Her companion acted cool. “Oh, yeah, you gotta love the peace movement.”

Lone angled her head a little. “Check it out. Yellow placard. ‘Bring My Brother Home.’ Don’t let her see you looking.”

As her companion took a moment to ogle the braless female, Lone checked out his ankles for a concealed weapon. One hem lifted slightly, telling her all she needed to know. Anyone who had worked in covert ops developed certain instincts. Most often, she had no idea how she made someone. Her mind seemed to process the subtle clues unconsciously, and by the time she carried out a closer inspection she was simply working through a checklist, making sure she wasn’t mistaken. For this operation, agents were fair game, innocent civilians were not. She wondered which branch of Big Brother this faux peacenik took his orders from.

“Do you think the Democrats will impeach?” he asked in an unsubtle attempt to place her on the threat assessment spectrum. Liberal tree-hugger, crazy commie, or neurotic screwball with a martyrdom complex.

Lone hoped she would fall into that other category: horny loser. She wondered why she’d been tagged for closer inspection and decided she was just a statistic, one of the twenty percent of this crowd identified as a male between eighteen and forty-five. No one looked Middle Eastern enough to have earned instant arrest.

“Impeach?” She let a disgusted sneer show. “No way. Those pussies aren’t gonna strap on balls anytime soon.”

“I guess.” Her new best friend glanced around. “Do you know which house is the VP’s?”

“Nope, but if you find it let me know. That’s one doorstep begging for a steaming pile of dog turd.” Snorting with laughter, she continued, “Hey, Cheney steps out for another day at the golf course and ‘Fuck—what’s this on my shoes? Call the feds. Shoot some old guy in the face. It’s a fucking terrorist attack!’”

Her comedy skit raised a phony laugh from her companion and he glanced past her, no doubt lining up his next target. Lone could tell she’d been dismissed as a dork who should have auditioned for
American Pie
. All those years in high school drama had paid off.

The protestors wheeled the effigy closer to the stone-pillared gates of the tony country club and tied a rope around its neck. Lone stared up at the papier-mâché face of evil. Here in the midst of a beautiful, natural wilderness lurked the draft dodger who had cynically sent thousands of servicemen and women to their deaths. He knew all along that Iraq would be a quagmire. That’s what he told ABC news in 1991, explaining why we didn’t occupy Iraq in the first Gulf War. He repeated the same opinion over the years until he became VP of the Bushdom, then suddenly his rhetoric changed.

Lone knew why, and it wasn’t because Iraq was any different. The men of the evil alliance knew the American public had a short memory. They figured, after 9/11, they could sell anything with enough patriotic spin—invading counties, sidelining army generals who disagreed with them, torturing prisoners, suspending habeas corpus. Of course the decision to invade Iraq had been made long before the Twin Towers came down. Anyone who bothered to inform themselves could ascertain that fact. Not that the so-called “news” media would ever join the dots and ask tough questions. Those lackeys knew the truth, but they would never print it. They were in the propaganda business.

The simple fact was, war profiteers didn’t get to walk away with billions during peacetime. Lone’s family was dead because bloated fat cats didn’t have enough money. They needed to play golf on immaculate greens beneath majestic mountains while soldiers on extended tours of duty swallowed dust and sand with their jerky. Cheney “had other priorities” when his country was at war with Vietnam and had obtained five deferments. Nothing had changed. He was still out to lunch while heroes were paying for his comfort with their lives. He was eating lamb chops when Private First Class Brandon Ewart was being dragged out of a poorly armored Humvee by insurgents before they cut his throat.

Lone thought about her partner’s suicide note. Madeline wrote:
What did my son die for?
The answer she and every mother deserved was that her child had given his life for a noble cause. That he was defending his country, and there was no higher calling for a patriotic American. Brandon had died a Marine, and proud, and no one could take that away from him. But the truth was unspeakably banal. Brandon had died because war was good business and a few corrupt men were drunk on power.

Lone hadn’t always known what she knew now. She used to laugh at conspiracy theorists. She thought Iraq naysayers were deluded fools who refused to accept post-9/11 reality, misguided liberals who didn’t understand what was in their own best interests. People like her were trained to protect American interests even when they received no thanks for doing so. They were the active patriots, the bulwark between a free society and the external forces of hate that sought its undoing. She was proud to wear the uniform. She could look anyone in the eye and defend her beliefs, knowing she was right.

When Madeline started spouting left-wing rhetoric about blood for oil, Lone had tried to make her see sense. Back then, the commander in chief had her loyalty, and she gave him credit for knowing what he was doing. She couldn’t believe that a president would take the country to war without an imminent threat. Even if the bullshit about WMDs was just a smokescreen and the real reason they were there was to secure oil resources, Lone could have accepted that. She just wanted to be told the truth, to know what she was risking her life for.

Soldiers like her obeyed their commanders’ orders without question, but mutual trust was fundamental to that equation. The commander had to rely on the loyalty and obedience of his troops, and the troops had to believe their commander would only send them into harm’s way if there was no other choice. The idea of an elective war, a war to make money for friends in big business, was such a dire breach of trust that Lone had refused to entertain the possibility. Even after she lost Brandon and then Madeline, she thought if she got to the truth of the matter her beliefs would be vindicated. She simply couldn’t accept that she’d been duped and that the weak-kneed liberals she despised had been right all along.

A sob closed her throat as she thought about the facts she’d uncovered. The truth was hard to accept not only because it made a fool of her but because it changed everything. Ego was not an indulgence an honorable soldier could afford when her country was at risk. An evil alliance of men had stolen America out from under the feet of her citizens, using lies and propaganda to hide their real agenda. Now that she understood what was really happening, she saw evidence of their strategies wherever she looked.

There had to be a war so the big donors to the Bush presidential campaign could get their payday. The “plan for a post-Saddam Iraq” memo laid it out right there six months before 9/11—troop requirements, war crimes tribunals, and divvying up the oil assets. According to Paul O’Neill, the memo was all they could talk about at the National Security Council meeting that February. Screw the information about an imminent terrorist attack; they had more important things to think about, like which of their pals would get the Iraqi oilfield contracts.

Besides, back in 2000 Cheney and his neocon friends in the PNAC had lamented that American world dominance would progress slowly unless there was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.” Would they stand in the way of the dream-come-true scenario they hoped for? Lone seriously doubted it.

Every time she thought about the real reasons her country was at war, she was consumed with a wintry rage that made her physically ill. Some days she felt so angry she wanted to harm herself. She couldn’t believe she’d stayed in her brainwashed bubble for so long. Like others who’d drunk the Kool-Aid, she reacted like a wind-up doll to the familiar refrain: patriotism, American values, fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Her adamant beliefs had blinded her to Madeline’s despair. She’d read into her lover’s angry words nothing more than the grief of a mother who’d lost her child. She had kidded herself that time would heal and Madeline would come to terms with her loss.

Lone felt sick and her hands began to sweat. In her arrogance and blindness, she had invalidated Madeline’s feelings and left her terribly alone in her unbearable knowledge. The day she’d killed herself, Madeline left her diary open on the nightstand at Lone’s side of the bed. A quote was penned in the middle of the page:

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be “governed” without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.

—White Rose Society. Germany, 1942

Several weeks after she dropped dirt into Madeline’s grave, Lone finally Googled the source of the quote, a leaflet written by a handful of Germans who resisted Nazi ideology and dared to say so. They were executed, of course. Beheaded. Kids who dared to question the corrupt beast of National Socialism. Their story made her think about how an entire nation could be coopted and coerced into accepting the unacceptable. Her country could not be compared to Nazi Germany, but the lessons of history were undeniable. People could rationalize almost anything, even act against their own interests, when they buried their common sense under layers of fear, self-deception, obedience, and misguided patriotism.

Lone had done exactly that, and she had failed the woman she loved. She was not going to make the same mistake twice. She had Debbie to think about now, innocent, trusting Debbie Basher, who knew nothing about politics and saw only the good in people. Whatever happened, Lone was going to keep her safe. She would never let Debbie down. When she was done, Debbie would be proud of her. And so would Madeline, if she was looking down from heaven.

A loud cheer rose around her, calling her thoughts to order. Lone added her voice absently to the chants as the Dicktator effigy was pulled, Saddam-style, off its pedestal. She pictured the real VP there, toppled from his lofty perch, facing the fury of the little people whose lives he trampled as he pleased. Would he expect mercy, or would he concede that criminal conduct should have consequences? Even Nixon had finally understood that America was a precious idea and that the office he held should not be defiled by the dirty dealings of corrupt men. He’d had enough shame to resign.

Aware that she was standing too still, Lone followed a young woman dawdling away from the rally. She’d seen enough to know that this was not the right place for the delivery phase of Operation Houseclean. Jackson Hole was deceptively open and tranquil, but now that the millionaires had been driven out by billionaires, the area was knee-deep in private security. Of the three Cheney residences she’d scoped out, this one offered the easiest access but it wouldn’t suffice. The chances of getting her target close enough to a van packed with C-4 to be killed by the explosion seemed poor and the opportunities to get a clean head shot were extremely limited.

She considered the option of rigging a golf cart to explode. She could gain access to the eighteenth hole via one of the upscale houses that backed onto the green in that area, but escape would be impossible and she needed to get away so she could move quickly to the next name on her list of first-wave targets.

Talk about shock and awe.

Americans thought Republican sex scandals were shaking things up. They were startled by the departures of Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales. Well, she had news for them. They hadn’t seen anything yet. The evil alliance would thrive with impunity no more. Their days of gluttony at the trough of greed, amorality, and excess were numbered.

The men leading this country toward doom so they could wallow in wealth thought they were entitled. For them, the means always justified the end, when the end was about their wealth, power, and privilege. Screw the other ninety-nine percent of the population, they were just there to be used. The cabal that had stolen the country slept like babies. They threw sticks for their dogs and bounced their grandchildren on their knees. They could look at themselves in the mirror and ignore the blood on their hands.