Jack Mars - President Elect

Gunner, I love you.

Then he had waited. And waited. Nothing. The message had gone into the void, and nothing had returned. Luke didn’t even know if it was the right number.

How had it come to this?

He didn’t have time to ponder the answer. The elevator opened directly into the foyer of the apartment. There was no hallway. There were no other doors except the double doors in front of him.

The doors opened and Mark Swann stood there.

Luke soaked in the sight of him. Tall and thin, with long sandy hair and round John Lennon glasses. His hair was pulled into a ponytail. He had aged in two years. He was heavier than before, mostly around the midsection. His face and neck seemed thicker. His T-shirt had the words SEX PISTOLS across the front in letters that could have been used to write a ransom note. He wore blue jeans, with yellow-and-black checkerboard Converse All-Star sneakers on his feet.

Swann smiled, but Luke could easily see the strain in it. Swann wasn’t happy to see him. He looked like he had eaten a bad fish.

“Luke Stone,” he said. “Come on in.”

Luke remembered the apartment. It was big and hyper-modern. There were two floors, open concept, with a ceiling twenty feet above their heads. A steel and cable staircase went up to the second floor, where it connected with a catwalk. There was a living room here with a large white sectional couch. There had been an abstract painting behind the couch last time – crazy, angry red and black splotches five feet across – Luke couldn’t quite remember what it looked like. In any event, it was gone now.

The two men shook hands, then hugged awkwardly.

“Albert Helu?” Luke said, using the name of the Swann alias who owned the apartment.

Swann shrugged. “If you like. You can call me Al. That’s what everyone around here calls me. Can I get you a beer?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

Swann disappeared through a swinging door into the kitchen.

To Luke’s right, he could see Swann’s command center. Very little had changed. A glass partition divided it from the rest of the apartment. A big leather chair sat at a desk with a bank of tower hard drives on the floor beneath it, and three flat-panel screens on top of it. Wires ran all over the floor like snakes.

On the far wall, across from the sofa, was a giant flat-panel TV set, maybe half the size of a movie theater screen. The sound was muted. On the screen, about a dozen police vans and cars were parked on a city street, lights flashing in the dark. Fifty cops stood in a line. Yellow police tape extended in several places. A large crowd of people stood behind the tape, stretching down the block and away from the scene.

LIVE the caption below the scene read. CHINATOWN, NEW YORK CITY

Swann came back with two bottles of beer. Instantly, Luke knew why Swann was getting heavier. He was spending a lot of time drinking beer.

Swann gestured at the TV. “Did you hear about that?” he said.

Luke shook his head. “No. What is it?”

“About forty-five minutes ago a bunch of neo-Nazis tried to do some kind of group march through the middle of Chinatown in New York. Gathering Storm, ever heard of them?”

“Swann, what if I told you I’ve spent the past two years living mostly in tents?”

“Then I’d say you’ve never heard of Gathering Storm. Anyway, they’re actually a nonprofit organization, dedicated to preserving and promoting cultural… what? Whiteness, I suppose. American Europeanism? You know. They want to make America safe for white people. Jefferson Monroe is their major funder – they’re basically his modern version of the brownshirts. There are probably half a dozen groups like this now, but I think they’re the biggest one.”

“What happened?”

Swann shrugged. “What else? They started up beating random people on the street. You’ve never seen these guys. They’re a goon squad. Big guys. They were throwing people around. A couple of people in the neighborhood took offense. They lit the Nazis up with guns. A bunch of people were shot, five dead at last count. Shooters still on the loose. It’s what they call a fluid situation.”

“The people killed were all Nazis?” Luke said.

“Seems that way.”

Luke shrugged. “Well…”

“Right. No big loss.”

Luke looked away from the TV. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around what was going on. Susan Hopkins believed the election had been stolen. Her opponent, the incoming President, was funding a neo-Nazi group, which had just sparked a mini race war in New York City. Was this how things were done now? When had everything changed? Luke had been gone a long time, apparently.

“What have you been up to, Swann?”

Swann sat on the big white couch. He gestured at a seat across from him. Luke took it. It had the tangible benefit of facing away from the TV. From his spot, he could look out the darkened glass doors to Swann’s roof deck. The hot tub gave off a pale blue neon light. Otherwise, it was mostly dark out there. Luke had slept on the deck once upon a time. He knew that in daylight hours, it gave a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Not much,” Swann said. “Nothing, to be honest.”

“Nothing?”

Swann seemed to think about it for a moment. “You’re looking at it. I’m out on disability. When we got back from Syria, I just never could… go back to work. I tried a couple of times. But intelligence is a nasty business. I never minded it when it was other people getting hurt. But after Syria? I got panic attacks. The severed heads, you know? For a while, I was seeing them all the time. It was bad. It was too much.”

“I’m sorry,” Luke said.

“I am, too. Believe me. And it’s not over. I’m a little bit of a recluse now. I keep my old apartment in DC, but I mostly live up here now. It’s safe. Nobody can get in here if I don’t want them to.”

Stone thought about that for a second, but said nothing. It was true enough, as far as it went. The vast majority of people couldn’t get in here. Honest, mainstream people. Nice people. But bad people? Killers? Black operatives? They’d get in here if they wanted to.

“I rarely go out,” Swann said. “I order my groceries on the internet. I let the kid into the building from here, and monitor him coming up in the elevator. Watch him on the closed-circuit TV. I leave a tip for him in the hallway, he leaves the grocery bags at the door, and I watch him go back down. Then I go out in the hall and get my food. It’s a little pathetic, I know that.”

Luke said nothing. It was sad that Swann had been reduced to this, but Luke wouldn’t call it pathetic. It happened. Maybe he could help Swann, get him back out into the world again, but maybe not. Either way, it would take a lot of work, and time, and Swann would have to want it. Sometimes psychological trauma like this never really healed. Swann was a prisoner of ISIS, about to be beheaded, when Luke and Ed Newsam barged in. He had been beaten and mock-executed before they got there.

A silence settled between them, not a comfortable one.

“There was a period of time when I blamed you for what happened to me.”

“Okay,” Luke said. That was Swann’s truth, and Luke wasn’t about to argue with him about it. But Swann had taken the mission on voluntarily, and Luke and Ed had risked their lives to save him.

“I realize it doesn’t make much sense, and I don’t believe it now, but it took me months of therapy to get to this place. You and Ed have this weird glow around you. It’s like you’re superhuman. Even when you get hurt, it seems like it doesn’t really hurt. People get too close to you, and they begin to think this thing you have also applies to them. But it doesn’t. Regular people get hurt, and they die.”