Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“What are you going to do?” Maryam’s worried voice brought him back to reality.

He had to make this right. He had to. If the man in the trailing vehicle was still alive, he had to rescue him. “I’m going to save him.”

Maryam turned right on Erato Street and doubled back on Carondelet and turned right again on Clio, which brought them back to the scene of the accident. The cops had not arrived yet and, knowing the New Orleans cops, it would be hours before they got out of the donut shops or the bars. Before they got to St. Charles, he jumped out, fully outfitted for the task, and ran. He gave a tug on his Tigers cap, making sure it obscured as much of his face as possible. In a situation like this, no one would remember anything but the truck hitting the car, but no point in taking chances; he’d had enough bad luck for one afternoon.

The Taurus was shoved up against the side of the underpass, and traffic had slowed. Good. This would make things a lot easier.

The first thing he had to do was stop traffic. A couple of smoke grenades rolled down the street accomplished that in a hurry; traffic, already crawling, simply came to a stop as it neared the underpass.

He tossed a couple of flares to mark the car’s location. Good Samaritans did that all the time. Psychologically, they would further serve to keep nosy civilians away.

He shone a light into the car, a powerful beam that he activated from his key ring: nothing fancy, the kind you could buy commercially to use both as a flashlight or as a distress signal, but amazingly useful.

The driver was alive but unconscious. His face was covered in blood, but Devlin could see at a glance the blood was coming from a cut forehead. He pulled up an eyelid and directed the light into the man’s eyes. The pupil reacted: good.

Maryam had the car right where he needed it, backed into the underpass, trunk opened. Devlin got the man into the trunk, closed it, and hopped back in. Then they were around the corner and up onto Highway 90, the famous Gulf Coast Highway that soon enough would turn into I-10 and get them to the airport.

Devlin lowered the rear seats and slid the unconscious man into the back of the car. He could give him some first aid, but they’d be at Charity Hospital in five minutes, and he’d never remember a thing.

Washington, D.C. -late afternoon

President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler slumped back in his chair in the private quarters, alone. As the first unmarried president since James A. Buchanan, he had the ultimate bachelor pad. If you couldn’t get chicks to come home to the White House, you were a sorry-assed loser for sure. But that was just the problem-even had he wanted to, he couldn’t get chicks to come back to the private quarters of the White House because, in a time of heightened security, the Secret Service would blow them out of their high heels. So he was a sorry-assed loser after all.

There was a soft knock at the door, which he at once recognized as Manuel’s. Manuel Concepcion was his private steward, bartender, shrink, priest, and rabbi all rolled into one short Filipino whose English was still inflected with the cadences of his native Samar. The Concepcions had been fighting on the side of the Americans since the Philippines insurrection of 1902; even in an age of ethnic grievances, there was no question where his loyalty lay. Since the death of Bill Hartley, Manuel was, in fact, the only person the president of the United States really trusted. “Come in.”

The door opened a crack. “May I get you anything, sir?”

Tyler ’s first instinct was to say no and then he decided to hell with his first instinct. “Bourbon and branch,” he ordered. The door opened and Manuel walked in carrying a silver tray upon which was a bourbon and water, fixed just the way he liked it. “You’re a mind reader, Manuel,” said Tyler.

“No, sir,” replied Manuel, setting the drink down in front of the president, “but I am observant.”

As Tyler reached for the liquor, Manuel straightened and reached into the interior breast pocket of his steward’s coat. “I brought you a cigar, too,” he said. Already, he had the cutter out, deftly sliced off the closed end, and handed it to Tyler at the same time producing a lighted kitchen match. Tyler accepted the cigar gratefully and leaned forward into the flame, which jumped as he breathed it in until the tip of the cigar glowed ruby red.

“I’m going to lose, aren’t I?” Tyler finally said.

“Probably, yes, sir, if you believe the polls,” Manuel replied. “She looks unstoppable.”

Tyler took a long sip of bourbon. This was not how he had envisioned the end of his presidency, tossed out after one term, not because the people despised him, as they eventually did all presidents, but because they liked the other guy better. It wasn’t as if his polls were in free fall. Instead they read like the chart of a slowly dying patient whose condition was terminal and it was just a matter of time before he was carted off from the hospital to the hospice, to make room for some son of a bitch who actually had a chance.

Four years ago, Angela Hassett had been the first-term governor of Rhode Island, of all places, a state barely bigger than one of Louisiana ’s larger parishes and even more corrupt. But when you stopped to think about it, it all made perfect sense. Providence was a wholly owned subsidiary of Beacon Hill, a kind of farm team for the gangsters and criminals who had turned Massachusetts from the cradle of liberty into what was, in effect, a criminal organization populated by suckers, easy marks, and robots, who regularly return the Party in Power to power no matter how many Speakers of the House got indicted.

Hassett and her handlers, however, had taken the unholy conjoining of politics and crime to a whole new level. In her, they had the perfect front woman: a Harvard-educated lawyer (were there any other kind?) with a thousand-watt smile, impeccable but understated taste in clothes, a way of mellifluously stringing an endless series of platitudes together, and absolutely ruthless political instincts. The media loved her as well, finding everything about her fascinating; the lockstep editorial pages of both the Boston Globe and the New York Times hailed her as the perfect, sophisticated antidote to the hillbilly regime of Jeb Tyler. The funny part was, Tyler had been hailed in exactly the same way when he first ran for the Senate, but the Zeitgeist had evidently tired of his rustic good looks, folksy ways, and cracker-barrel delivery. Just as black was the new white, Angela Hassett was the new Jeb Tyler.

Then there was that son of a bitch, Jake Sinclair…

That Skorzeny business hadn’t helped, either. Tyler ’s administration had foiled an EMP attack on the east coast that would have plunged America into a hundred years of dysfunction and darkness, but he couldn’t take any credit for it; in fact, he couldn’t even let anybody know how close they had come to the abyss. Instead, he was blamed for the death toll in Los Angeles and Edwardsville, Ill.

True, he had struck an onerous deal with the fugitive financier. In exchange for his relative freedom, Emanuel Skorzeny had become, in effect, a combination of debtor and confidential informant, forced to pay an enormous sum to the United States in compensation for the Grove bombing and the attack on the midwestern middle school, as well as to Her Majesty’s government in London, where the bombed-out London Eye had been transformed into affordable housing and a mosque for the capital’s burgeoning immigrant population.

That was not all. Skorzeny also had been forced to surrender all his domiciles save Liechtenstein and use his continuing influence in the world’s stock market to restore some of the lost capital his machinations had stolen. In exchange for his cooperation, and to prevent him from going completely stir-crazy, Skorzeny was free to fly on his private jet. But it could not land anywhere in the world that the United States of America had any political, economic, or military influence. All Skorzeny could do was go for a ride in his custom 707, refueling in the air if he could manage it, and occasionally stopping off in Chad, Vanuatu, and Lapland. Even Switzerland didn’t want to see him anymore, although the Swiss were still happy to take and harbor his money.