Double Team
PART XVII: RETALIATION
Chapter 207
“It is a risk. They also may save everything.”
—G.S. Jennsen, Sidespace
26 AUGUST 2022
In a different life—one I might have lived at a different time and place—I would have looked at all this as no big deal. Congress argues about shit all the time. It keeps them from doing anything drastic and screwing up the world. The Senate Leader keeps a tight rein on what comes before a committee or to the floor. The Speaker of the House follows his lead in nearly everything. There’s nothing about service reform that makes it stand out as different.
Except it’s personal.
I wonder sometimes if I was manipulated around this position by being heard by the commission, consulted on the bill, and touring the camps in California. But what difference does it make? I believe in service reform and I believe I’ve helped move it forward. But someone considers my voice to be too loud and made a move to silence it by kidnapping me and pressing me into service in a survival, search, and rescue team. If I’d stayed with them another four weeks, I don’t know if I’d ever have played the guitar again.
That pisses me off.
I’m recovering, but we still don’t consider it far enough along for me to play the concert this afternoon with Cindy, Desi, and Remas. Three concerts this weekend and I’m benched for all three. These won’t have political speeches attached to them, but I still regret that I won’t be able to play at the National Cathedral Sunday. Or at Kennedy Center tomorrow. I guess I’m okay with skipping the concert at the school today because it’s really just a warm-up. But I’m going to get those bastards who did this to me. And the only weapon I have is words.
I need to talk to Donna again.
I spent Friday morning at the OCS office. We discussed strategy for capturing the boss and for uncovering who was responsible for the kidnapping in the first place.
“We’re only partly trying to hide you,” Ron said. “We don’t want you to feel like you have to duck into corners. I think, though, that having your ID sealed in the Faraday bag is preventing a passive search for you. If they were actively searching, we’d have spotted someone around your house. Anyone with a little curiosity could find out where you live.”
“Like next door to the President’s daughter,” I said.
“That was a bit of a shock to us, too. Abigail got called on the carpet for not letting us know what was going on. The first encounter between our security watching your house and the secret service watching hers was tense. We’ve met now and there shouldn’t be any problems. We don’t have the budget for complete protection of your pod at the level of protection for the President’s daughter.”
“I thought the President’s kids didn’t get protection after they turned sixteen.”
“That’s past presidents. As long as her mother is a sitting president, she’s entitled to two agents. Everyone else you see hanging out there is contracted by her family. It’s good. They’re clean.”
“What do we have about who’s responsible?” I asked. “Can I get access to the National Service data base?”
“No, of course not,” Ron said, shaking his head. I knew that but it was worth a try. “However, you can have this list of information that is considered ‘public’ even if you’d have to get into some controlled servers to access it. I read a statement that a certain musician made this spring that said he was challenged to ‘follow the money’ and uncovered eight companies profiting from the current National Service administration. This is a list of candidates they’ve donated to for this year’s election. It’s… interesting.”
I quickly scanned what he called ‘a page.’ It was more like twenty pages and at the top of the first page was Senator Jeffries’ name with an unbelievable total campaign contribution from all eight companies. I grinned at Ron and he pretended not to notice me put the page in my backpack.
I was backstage for each of the performances over the weekend. At the school, a number of students and teachers who had heard Cindy and me before came by to renew their acquaintance. Several expressed sympathy for my ‘hand injury,’ and I assured them I would be back on the tour soon.
No one really knew me at the Kennedy Center or at the National Cathedral. In all likelihood, there would be few local DC people at those concerts. But the name would get out, even if I wasn’t performing. It was still Marvel and Hopkins and Company.
Sunday afternoon, after the cathedral concert, we were all invited to Abigail’s house for dinner.
“You and your mother are the only ones who have ever invited our entire pod to dinner,” Rachel said.
“And for your mother, we had to entertain for our dinner,” I laughed.
“Well, you have to admit that having your whole family over for dinner is about the same as throwing a party,” Abigail laughed. “I wouldn’t have done it without help.”
“We’re happy to have you over for get togethers. We get so used to cooking and feeding thirteen of us that we don’t think about what a strain it is for others,” Donna said. “Something smells wonderful!”
“It’s been cooking all day. Ramon says it is just bean soup, but knowing him it’s made with some rare flavorful bean that only grows in the Andes or something,” Abby said.
“Ramon? Sounds exotic.”
“We got along well when I was living at the White House. I asked him to come over and help me today. It’s usually his day off.”
“I hope we’ll be able to thank him!”
“Come and take the whole house tour. I think it’s built much along the same lines as yours. I think you did a much better job on the decorating, but this one was decorated by my father’s secretary. We don’t always see eye-to-eye.”
“It seems like such a waste for you to have bought this house in order to have secret service people near us when we’ll be hitting the road for the next two months,” I said.
“You’ll have someone to water the plants then,” Abby said. “Um… and I might have assignments that take me to some of the same places you go.”
“Really?” Rachel asked, raising an eyebrow. “What kind of assignments could take you to the same locations as our tour?”
“Oh, busywork, you know. The office wants to know if there is any sign of voter discrimination or discouragement going on in certain districts. I won’t be at all of them, but we’ll stop and visit when our trips overlap. I don’t plan to go by bus.”
“Speaking of which, how is that going to work, Em?” Beca asked. “Are we doing the motorhome routine again? It was kind of crowded with seven of us in it. What will it be like with thirteen?”
“Even more when you count the crew that is traveling with us,” Em said. “Logistics for this tour have been a nightmare since the day I reenlisted. We’ll have a motorhome, but it has been reconfigured with four beds and the kitchen. It’s really a moving hotel room. In general, we won’t be riding in it while traveling unless someone is super tired or wants a private space while in transit. The motorhome will simply be driven from location to location and will be parked and set up when we arrive. Our general transportation is a coach, a step up from what we used in California. It’s arranged for conversation and practice, has WiFi, and is as much our office as our transportation. And finally, instead of towing a trailer and maneuvering it behind one of the buses, we have a twelve-foot box truck for all equipment, props, costumes, and instruments. When we’re moving, the box truck will go straight to the venue and will be secured there. The mobile bedroom will go straight to either an RV park or designated parking area. The coach will be a leisurely ride and will take the family to the venue, park, or anyplace else it needs to go.”
“Which are you driving?” Desi asked. Em scowled at her.
“None. I’m in management. We have people for that.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I hated having you isolated from the rest of us and having to do all the driving,” I said. “There are times when we’re traveling that I just want to have you next to me. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. I think we all know.”
The ‘bean soup’ Ramon served us was actually a French cassoulet and possibly the richest soup I’d ever tasted. It had duck, sausage, beans, and a pork and vegetable ragout. It was served with hot crusty bread, fresh out of the oven. There was a small green salad served before the soup and dessert was a very light fruity salad. It was perfect, but I ate too much, of course.
“You really enjoy eating, don’t you, Jacob?” Abby said.
“You know, I never thought about food that much,” I said. “But four weeks in the mountains without a hot meal and with sometimes questionable ingredients changed my perspective,” I said. “I don’t just enjoy eating, I’m more aware of my food. I guess I’m a little prone to overeating, but I run ten miles a day, so I’m burning off 1400 calories before I even start my day.”
“Did you do that during your survival training?” Abby asked.
“My responsibility on the team was to build endurance and the ability to move long distances quickly. Each morning we ran ten to twenty miles before we started our other training. Believe me, with a diet of 2400 calories a day, no one gained weight.”
“Tom has trailed your run a few times. He says you and Nanette and Lyle really keep a good pace, but it’s nothing like when Livy runs with you.”
“Tom’s one of your secret service guys?”
“Tom and Jenny. Tom is more engaged in area security, watching the neighborhood and environment. Jenny is the one who’s always stepping on my toes when I try to do something stupid,” Abby laughed.
“Like what?”
“Like getting a coworker to buy me a bottle of rum and sitting in the park getting drunk while I listen to punk rock on my headset. Not that the daughter of the President of the United States would ever do something like that!”
I liked Abby in spite of myself. I was still suspicious. I thought the whole idea of having the President’s daughter living next door smacked of spying on us rather than protecting us. But it was hard not to like her. I knew Rachel had to deal with her a lot more than any of the rest of us, but Emily, Joan, Beca, and even Donna had all run across her in the office.
Donna had elected not to join the service and not to become employed by them. She held on to her independence as the producer of Marvel and Hopkins. Jo was responsible for getting venues and Simon for marketing concerts. Rachel was the onsite coordinator with local service personnel who provided security and other services. Donna was in charge of everything that happened inside the venue. She worked with the stage techs, lighting, sound, and facilities to make sure our shows were flawless. Or as flawless as Cindy and I could make them. I was concerned that she was no longer teaching, but she’d assured me in bed that she was spreading her wings in an area she’d always been fascinated with.
“Jacob,” Abby said, “I don’t plan to be a messenger but there are times when the President wants to get information to a needed location and can’t have anyone trace it. She puts it in a plain envelope and gives it to me, hoping that my path will somehow cross with the person she wants to have the information. A plain envelope like this one.” She held out an envelope to me.
I always thought secret information came in brown manila envelopes with flat pages, photos, and maps. This was just a white letter-size envelope. I think they call them a number ten. I took the offered document from her and stared at it.
“You’ll probably want to open it later in private,” Abby said. She looked meaningfully at each of us. “I know ‘private’ means all of you, but it doesn’t include me or Ramon or Tom or Jenny. I neither know nor want to know anything that is in that envelope.” I stuffed it in my pocket and we enjoyed the rest of the meal.
“Interesting,” I muttered. “Strange.”
“What is it?” Beca asked as she looked over my shoulder. “Doodles?”
“Sort of. It would certainly look like it if you didn’t know who it came from. And that it was sent to me, specifically.”
“It’s a mind map,” Donna said. “Remember? We discussed mind mapping in Sophomore English related to story construction and getting details organized.”
“Yeah. You put down the ideas and then see how they are connected and what connects them. You need to understand all the symbols and abbreviations, though. Like, I know who Sun Logistics is. I found them when I was doing research last spring. They are the ones with the contract to provide housing, meals, and healthcare to the field workers. They get $600 per day per person working and let them sleep in tents.”
“But who’s this above them?” Beca asked. “RSI? And it’s got lines to all the other agriculture businesses.”
“All connected with money symbols. I think this one is an ‘influence’ symbol. What’s this?”
“Based on the others, I’d suggest it was a management symbol. A person or organization with direct control of the next level,” Donna said. “They aren’t standard mapping symbols. Someone made them up to show what they were thinking.”
“And that someone was the President,” Beca said. “Unless she happened to find it on the floor of the oval office and thought you’d enjoy being confused by it.”
“I think, basically, that it shows this holding company owning or managing a sizable portion of the US agricultural market. And the big agribusinesses are funneling tons of money into the pockets and campaign funds of a Senator and a General. That could explain reluctance to reform the system. But it goes a lot deeper. It shows the senator funneling money to other candidates. And then National Service funds are shuffled back to the agribusinesses,” I said. “If I understand it correctly, it’s exactly what Mr. Richards challenged me to do. It’s the path of the money and shows who owns America.”
“Look at the back,” Beca said. “It’s a very simple drawing. Three spots. The two-star general, direct management of the SSR, with J in a bag. That says the general was directly responsible for your kidnapping.”
“Shit. How do I go after the General Director of the National Service Corps? This will be impossible.”
“Well, you have a week left before the first concert. We need to figure out the path to expose this.”
If Emily had told us what the real logistics were for this tour, I think we would have run away screaming. The best part was having at least a day of travel time between venues. We’d start the tour Labor Day weekend with a Saturday concert at the Everyman Theater in Baltimore. But we wouldn’t be staying there. It was a shakedown cruise for the coach. The motorhome would already be on the way to Philadelphia. After the Saturday night performance, we’d return to our home in DC for one last night in our own beds.
Sunday morning, we’d board the coach for the first major leg of the trip, about four hours to Philadelphia. We’d play a double header at the Perelman Theater at two o’clock and at eight o’clock on Labor Day. We’d just stay parked at our RV slot outside Philadelphia for the next few days while people got shuffled around. Livy had to report to an event in Oregon on Tuesday where she’d be training for a week before running in a national competition. Nanette had decided to go with her and cheer her on.
Beca, Joan, Brittany, and Sophie were catching the train to DC. Brittany and Sophie were starting classes at the National School—Sophie as a teacher and Brittany as a student. They’d be joining us again in a few weeks. Beca and Joan were on point to launch the new tour messaging on our website and would be working in the offices. They’d fly up to meet us in Boston next weekend.
We had a concert on Thursday at Carnegie Hall in the Zankel Hall on Thursday night and would take the coach to the venue where our equipment should already have arrived and be waiting for us. After the performance, we’d board the coach to New Haven where the motorhome was to have moved during the day. We wouldn’t get in until way late, but we had a couple of days there to recover before we did a Saturday performance there. We’d stay camped in New Haven like we had in Philadelphia. On Wednesday, we’d drive the two hours to Providence, Rhode Island and after the performance, rejoin the motorhome two hours north near Boston. We had Saturday and Sunday performances in Boston. Joan and Beca planned to rejoin us there for the next week. Nanette would be home in DC by that time and Livy back in Blacksburg.
I was glad all I had to do was keep track of Cindy, Desi, Remas, and me. As long as we were onstage at the appointed times, that was all we had to worry about. Rachel, Donna, and Emily kept everything else moving on schedule.
Everyone was set up for our Baltimore performance. We, meaning Donna and Sophie as our agents, had negotiated live streaming of our concerts to our patrons. We had to pay for the airtime and equipment and access, but as a result of promising our patrons a live stream from every stop on our tour, we’d managed to keep at least eighty percent of them.
And Saturday in Baltimore was when my ID was coming out of the Faraday bag. We’d see if anyone started tracking me. It would be an interesting few weeks.
We’d been watching the news on the coach as it drove to Baltimore and saw the dire predictions of Hurricane Brendan approaching Texas out of the Gulf of Mexico. It was picking up speed and water as it headed north as a Category 5. A lot of people who might have tuned in to our live stream were probably evacuating the coastal areas.
Our show went fine but the concern about the hurricane put a damper on any triumph we might feel. It crashed into Galveston and points west where the evacuation window had been much shorter than predicted and destruction moved inward from there. Houston hadn’t felt anything like this in twenty years.
We had cloudy skies in the east when we boarded our coach for Philadelphia. It was an easy trip and our motorhome was set up and ready for us when we got there. Someone was not only driving the motorhome, but also preparing meals for us and putting them in the refrigerator so we didn’t have a lot of effort to make ourselves at home.
Nanette, Livy, Emily, and I scouted out trails near our RV park and had a nice long run.
The coach picked us up in the morning and delivered us to the Perelman Theater in downtown Philly. Our instruments and equipment were onstage with a crew of three guys ready to help move things around and set up our Labor Day concert. Donna worked with the theater staff and gave them the cue sheet for lights. We had a quick rehearsal and a sandwich for lunch, provided by a National Service kitchen that served the homeless in Philadelphia. We thanked them profusely for sparing time and energy to feed us, and, of course encouraged them to vote for service reform so programs like the one they were working on could truly thrive and not be shorted because of other abuses.
I was still working on my messaging, having so far just focused on the same message I’d delivered through June. It was warmly received at both our performances Monday afternoon and evening in Philadelphia.
Aside from getting partners off to the airport and the train station and settling down with only half our number, Tuesday was a relaxing day. We had a meal and cuddled on the big master bed while we watched the evening news and hoped for something fun to entertain us later.
“The important news this evening is the devastation brought on by Hurricane Brendan and the heroic efforts to save those stranded and trapped in Galveston. The winds lost most of their destructive power before reaching inland as far as Central Texas, but currently there are over two million people without power and an estimated 800,000 evacuees living in shelters farther inland,” the reporter said. Images of the devastation taken from a helicopter overflying Galveston.
“And speaking of heroic efforts,” the other news anchor said, “a new emergency response team of the National Service was the first on the scene to begin rescue efforts. It’s our understanding that this is the first emergency they have responded to, having just come out of training. Reports indicate this team of just a dozen National Service Corps members was responsible for reaching and rescuing hundreds of citizens before National Guard and Coast Guard rescue workers arrived. They are currently taking a well-deserved break to rest and recharge but have vowed to return to the effort by morning. We have this brief interview from their base before they collapsed in tents to sleep.”
“We are just glad we could get here as quickly as we did. We were given news reports and tracking information on the storm and just knew it would be bad here. We deployed before the storm made landfall,” the spokesman said. I recognized him. Paul was there with my eleven team members. I looked in the background to see if the boss was with them as I gripped Emily’s hand hard enough, she had to pry my fingers loose. I couldn’t see him anywhere.
“We understand this rescue effort was not without cost to your team,” the reporter said.
“That’s true. We’re very sad to report that one member of our team was lost in the flood waters diving to rescue a family pet. He was caught in a moving debris field and unable to surface. We mourn the loss of our partner, friend, and teammate, Jacob Hopkins, who gave his life in this rescue attempt.”
“What??” I screamed. “Those fuckers!”
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