Kingdom (16 page)

However, staring down at the field, watching his candidate come apart at the seams, the prospect of a Jack Heffernan presidency was growing dim. And those prospects would be nonexistent, Morrison knew, if he allowed a full-on meltdown to take place on stage that morning.

Reaching into the pocket of his suit, Morrison pulled out his phone and after typing a single word pressed send. Aware of the potential need for a diversion, Morrison’s men had recruited several members of Tiber City’s ever-swelling homeless population to pose as protestors who would, if necessary, disrupt the rally. If questioned by any members of the media, these “volunteers” would admit to being supporters of a rival candidate. Morrison’s people had assured these homeless men and women there would be no violence. Morrison’s people had lied.

Less than a minute later, to the left of the stage, a cluster of protestors appeared, carrying signs with slogans countering Heffernan’s vocal support for genetic engineering: “Man Cannot Make Man” and “God Created Man in His Own Image.”

Several of these protestors pushed their way forward, steamrolling the crowd, moving closer to the stage. This sudden surge sent several Heffernan supporters sprawling to the ground, prompting the crowd to push back, angry barbs flying between the opposing groups. All of a sudden, two protestors leapt up from the snarling mass of flesh roiling in front of Jack Heffernan and
onto the stage, screaming and shouting snippets of rehearsed catchphrases and shop-worn rhetoric. Police—plainclothes and uniformed—along with Secret Service and Morrison’s private security detail swarmed toward the two protestors. Seconds later, a cop took out one of them, tackling him from behind; it was one of those strange occasions when, during a moment of chaos, for the briefest of seconds, life seems to freeze, everything goes silent, and even the most insignificant sound is amplified, so as the two men crashed to the earth, the sickening snap of broken ribs reverberated across the arena. Then, all hell broke loose.

Just about the time several of his accomplice’s broken ribs were puncturing his spleen, the other protestor who stormed the stage turned and leapt back into the crowd, knocking over Jack Heffernan’s podium in the process. Several officers dove in after him, their fat faces bright red and swollen as they plowed into the crowd. Heffernan, standing where his podium used to be, his lips moving but his microphone long since cut, was still attempting to deliver his speech. And then he was gone, hustled away by Morrison’s men as the initial clash between police and protestors escalated into a full-blown riot. Seconds later, a series of small explosions shook the earth and smoke began snaking out across the arena.

Watching the smoke curl up toward his private box, Michael Morrison was suddenly aware he was no longer alone in the booth. Without turning his gaze away from the chaos consuming the field below, Morrison spoke:

“Welcome, lieutenant.”

“A pleasure as always sir,” the voice behind him said, a voice Morrison knew belonged to Malachi al-Salaam, his head of security and a former special operations agent that one of Morrison’s government connections found dying in the atomic wastelands ringing the Persian desert. The enemy had tortured the man, then bound his hands and feet and left him to be picked apart by the beasts foraging through the fallout zone. Any other man would have allowed himself to die: Anger—a festering, all-consuming rage at those who left him behind, those in whose name he had committed unspeakable atrocities—kept this particular man alive.

Morrison augmented al-Salaam’s genetic makeup through the same somatic treatment by which he stalled his own aging process. Rather than preventing him from aging, however, Morrison enhanced all the physical and
mental attributes that had made the man one of the finest mercenaries in the Middle East wars of the early 21st century.

Al-Salaam was more than just Morrison’s first lieutenant: He was Morrison’s death-dealer, the physical instrument through which the CEO advanced his vision of the world. From the moment he laid eyes on al-Salaam, even before the augmentations, Morrison knew he was perfect; it was something in al-Salaam’s face, something in his eyes and his expressions—an emptiness reflected, a glare so devoid of feeling or empathy most men couldn’t bear to sustain eye contract—absolute oblivion, Morrison’s kingdom come.

“Lieutenant,” Morrison began, his gaze still locked on the chaos below, “things seem to be progressing a little quicker than I expected. We will respond in kind. Send one of your men to retrieve Campbell—that won’t be difficult; it’s unlikely he’ll be conscious, let alone sober.”

“Let me go, Sir,” al-Salaam replied, cool and detached, his accent gone, replaced by a geographically neutral, timeless whisper. “The Jungle is an unpredictable place, and Campbell has friends…”

“Under other circumstances, I would agree. But I have another task for you, one that requires your…personal touch.”

“What would you have me do?” al-Salaam asked.

Smiling, Morrison began to explain.

Tiber City: Jungle District
Aug. 27, 2015
4:49 p.m.

One of Dylan’s earliest memories was of traveling with his father’s campaign. They were somewhere in the Midwest
—
maybe Kansas City, maybe Tulsa, but it could have been anywhere
—
and the entire campaign was staying in some chain hotel that gave coupons for breakfast, left individually wrapped multicolored mints
—
the kind that tasted the same no matter what unnaturally bright color you selected for consumption
—
and pamphlets for local attractions next to the entrance. They boasted conference rooms with tan buckets full of melting ice and lukewarm soda, the aluminum cans slick with sludge from the ice and the dirt off the hands of everyone else who reached into the bucket before you; and, covering folding tables, tablecloths that inevitably bunched up or slid off the side of the table, revealing splintered wood and tarnished metal
.

Everyone would always be awake before dawn, scurrying back and forth in those last few moments of darkness, the moments when electric light felt inappropriate, as if the night was offended that you were rushing the entire process, and the hallways seemed to shimmer and pulse with a surrealism that left man feeling like an unwelcome guest, acutely aware of the wind and the cold and the fact that the sky stretched eternal. In those few minutes before the sun broke over the horizon, Dylan always found it impossible to believe that there were people on the other side of the planet,
stockbrokers and waiters and teachers
—
that there was life anywhere other than in this anonymous chain hotel with its breakfast coupons and brochures for local attractions and the rumble of eighteen-wheelers blasting out across the plains
.

These moments always filled Dylan with a sense of dread and he would burrow in the hotel’s Technicolor comforter and wait until his mother
—
who usually accompanied her husband on these trips
—
came to wake him. But on this particular morning, his mother wasn’t out on the campaign trail
—
it was just him and his father and the legions of staffers. There was a pale light leaking from the bathroom out into the darkness; the light barely made it five feet beyond the cheap tile threshold before the night caught up and swallowed it whole. He could hear his father getting ready; the man’s heavy sighs competing with the halfhearted spray of the shower and faux energy-efficient faucets and ceiling fan
.

From underneath his comforter Dylan watched his father putting his suit and for a moment there was no dread, no sense that the day was already over before it even began, just a son with his father, who, in his Savile Row suit looked like he belonged atop Olympus rather than struggling with a jammed armoire in the last days of the American century
.

Dylan’s father noticed him and, smiling, came over and sat down on the bed next to his son. Dylan shut his eyes tight and pretended to sleep, not because he wanted to deceive his father but because he did not want this moment to end. Yet this moment was, as all such moments are by their very nature, unsustainable. And peering out at his father from the scrum of blankets, he noticed that there was something on his father’s tie
.

“Dad,” he had said. “Dad, there’s something on your tie.”

He father looked down at his tie, at the streak of crimson, and smiled, in a sad and soft way to which Dylan was unaccustomed
.

“Guess I flossed a little too hard this morning,” his father had told him
.

And then the train was screeching to a halt, jarring Dylan back to the present. A mechanical voice was bleating out from somewhere, reminding passengers that this stop was the end of the line. Dylan opened his eyes, wincing, the lights lining the side of the subway car a reminder that he was still hung-over. Even though the voice continued to inform Dylan that he had reached the end of the line, the doors remained shut, the memories fading but not fast enough—he could still picture his father in that hotel room, trying to explain to his son why he was bleeding. Then saw it: The side of his own hand was streaked with crimson but there was no cut, no visible source
of the blood, but his nose was tender and there was a good chance he had done some damage last night.

With a hiss, the doors pulled apart and Dylan was on his feet, moving out of the car and into the above-ground station at 98th and Hazor—the only subway stop in Tiber City’s notorious Jungle district. The rain had stopped, but the humidity persisted and, before Dylan had even gone a dozen feet, he was sweating. The sounds of the Jungle were suddenly audible: the electric hiss of neon struggling to come to life; a man and a woman arguing in a language Dylan couldn’t recognize, the words ancient and sharp, alien to the soft cadence of the Western tongue, their words cutting downwind from the immigrant slums scattered like buckshot throughout the Jungle. These sounds fueled the desperation pressing down across the shattered landscape and every time long-haul truckers—one of those jacked-up knights of American highway mythology, jaw clenched from too much speed and too little sleep—hit a pothole while barreling down one of the distant freeways that framed the Jungle like a quarantine zone, the entire district seemed to shudder.

Although many of Tiber City’s denizens regarded the Jungle district as a single monolithic slum, Dylan had come to appreciate the area’s geographic subtleties—an appreciation that kept him alive. The south end—which included the subway stop at 98th and Hazor—wasn’t always part of the Jungle. Over the last decade, a reverse gentrification had been underway, the Jungle’s aggressive sprawl devouring the failed industries and abandoned homes along its border. Neon sprung up seemingly overnight and the junkies, hookers, pimps, and street preachers followed like moths to the flame, driving away any square holdouts: the hipster couple with Ivy League degrees hunting for
authenticity
(and a bargain-basement mortgage), the businessman who was
convinced
that this time the area was going to realize its potential and wanted in on it. Generally, those folks learned quickly that the Jungle offered a lot more local color than they bargained for.

Not that the Jungle’s south end was completely off-limits to the rest of Tiber City; there were enough dive bars, live sex shows, and hourly rate motels catering to bankers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians that the mobsters who took a piece of all the action knew too many headlines were bad for business. So the odds you might get jacked stepping off the subway were only about 50-50 and considering how fucked the rest of the world was—not
to mention how boring the burbs could get—those odds weren’t so terrible. Too bad Dylan wasn’t staying in the south end.

Turning north, Dylan began moving through the dying light of the late August sun. Unlike the rest of Tiber City, there were no skyscrapers in the Jungle. Yet even as night crept over the horizon the temperature lingered in the mid-90s. Empty newspaper dispensers lined the side of the street, serving as a canvas for aspiring taggers, a toilet for bums, or both and as Dylan moved past them he noticed several fresh pieces of graffiti—territorial markers indicating a new king had been crowned.

Not that it mattered; Dylan had made this run enough times that he was familiar with some of the local players and he knew which blocks to avoid, which streets to take as he hit the sidewalk, striding north, deeper into the Jungle.

His hangover was almost gone by this point, the over-the-counter shit curbing the pain just enough to keep him functional but the image of his father, the old man’s tie stained crimson, stayed with him as he pressed forward, eyes locked on the horizon, on the black clouds attacking the sun. Dylan could sense the expectant energy building around him; like vampires, the junkies would soon rise from their chemically induced comas and hit the streets to score. Even the speed freaks, the meth heads who had been up all night, were coming down—and the crash was never pleasant, which meant more meth was needed to avoid the crash. The doors to some of the shanty houses cracked open; bloodshot eyes peered from behind the blinds hanging in front of broken windows: The Jungle had begun to stir.