The Army of the Republic

by Stuart Archer Cohen

Genres: Dystopian; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

In an America stretched by crisis to the breaking point, billionaire entrepreneur and government insider James Sands is riding high. Over the protests of civic groups and the increasing alienation of his wife, Anne, Sands is poised on the brink of an immensely risky and controversial deal that will give him control of all public water in the Pacific Northwest. But when his business partner is murdered by a radical group called The Army of the Republic, Sands finds himself losing control of his business and his life. Desperate, he turns to Whitehall Security, a private intelligence firm with far-reaching political connections. For a steep monthly fee, Whitehall will hunt down and eliminate any threats to Sands's enterprise.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, a young guerrilla named Lando leads The Army of the Republic into a dangerous war of ideals. Charismatic and cunning, Lando is obsessed with the goal of saving the country from its corrupt ruling alliance by any means necessary. His reluctant ally is political organizer Emily Cortright, coordinator of a network of civil, religious, and labor groups. Bound together in a web of common aims and conflicting loyalties, the two plan a massive peaceful protest against a conference of national business leaders, which they hope will stagger the Regime.

Beyond his control, through, Lando's Army of the Republic has already unleashed a chain of events that will electrify and frighten an uneasy nation. Hemmed in by their lethal compromises, Emily, Lando, James, and Anne struggle to redeem or destroy those whom they love most.

Thrilling and unforgettable, The Army of the Republic is a brilliant, provocative novel about what it means to live in a democracy.

Release date: September 29, 2009

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

Chapter One

Television is the closest thing we've got to God in America, an all-present eye that creates the world, ceaselessly and seamlessly, twenty-four hours a day. A comic book bible made of light; they build their phony universe with pictures, pictures, pictures!

"Business figure John Polling was shot to death today outside a Seattle apartment building.…"

A visual of an ambulance in the black drizzly cavern of tele vi sion night, a cordon of hard-eyed cops, a dead body under a sheet.

"Yes!" Tonk shoots his fist into the air, does a few quick struts across the living room. "Check it out, America! The big man goes down!"

It's kind of awesome to see the divine stamp of Big Media imprinted on our sketchy little lives. Lilly, Sarah, and Kahasi say nothing, sit uneasily with their tea and toast. People are frightened by large moving objects, and an assassination is a very large object, moving very fast.

But not fast enough to scare Tonk. Handsome football hero Tonk spins away from the screen and cups his hand to his ear. "Hear that popping, everyone? That's the sound of champagne corks hitting the ceiling in every state of the Union!"

"Shut up, Tonk!" Sarah says, "I'm trying to watch this!"

"Tonk… " I trail off. I'm in a quiet mood, tarnished by the long night and that last image of Polling's girlfriend screaming her lungs out as she looked down at his body. I'm having trouble making this all lie flat. "We did something horrible to someone who deserved it. It's nothing to celebrate."

Polling had been visiting Seattle "on business," says the news gal, and we all snort at that one. She follows it up with a couple of euphemisms about his career. "Financier," she says, "Controversial modernizer of public—"

"Try swindler," Sarah spits at her. "Criminal! Murderer!"

Not exactly a room full of sympathy for John Polling. Polling was a man who'd gotten everything he wanted. He'd feasted on the war and let the People pick up the tab, bought out public assets at a fraction of their value. He had deals with everybody worth owning and a small enterprise of lawyers and PR flacks who cut the water in front of him like the bow of an icebreaker. He was a master con man. He beat every rap. He was bulletproof.

Metaphorically, at least. When his goons clubbed an organizer to death in a Boston parking garage eight months ago, the clock started ticking on John Polling.

Ms. Blah Blah goes on: "The assassination was claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Army of the Republic."

"That's right!" Tonk cries. "Corporates, meet the Army of the Republic."

On the screen, Polling's body is being carried to the ambulance yet again in a flash of blue strobe lights. At the bottom of the screen, the crawler's giving the latest entertainment news: PARAMOUNT SIGNS PITT FOR REMAKE OF HIGH NOON!

Tonk looks at his watch. "Eight-oh-one, Lando. Where's the hack?"

"Chill, Tonk," I say. "Your watch is fast."

We watch another fifteen seconds, and then Tonk erupts again: "Hack on!"

The crawler at the bottom of the screen has changed now. The show biz news had given way to a communiqué hacked in by our IT group.

JOHN POLLING FOUND GUILTY OF CORRUPTION THEFT RACKETEERING AND MURDER. SENTENCE CARRIED OUT

BY THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. FOR DETAILS GO TO WWW.ARMYOFTHEREPUBLIC.ORG.RU. STAND UP FOR YOUR COUNTRY!—PEACE JOHN POLLING FOUND GUILTY OF—

"One thing they know now," I announce. "They're not dealing with amateurs."

I think of Gonzalo in his electronic cave, watching our message shimmy across Polling's fake obituary in blue-screen blue. Tens of millions of our e-mails are ripping away to mailboxes all over the country from servers in Russia, Brazil, Estonia. Our site will be frantic now, all the busy bees of the Internet clicking into the chronology of Polling's whole stinking career, with every charge leveled against him and which strings he pulled to beat it. This time, we'll be the ones telling the story, not the Corporates. I hope McFarland is catching this.

We're on the crawler a good three minutes before the network techs break through our hack. The basketball scores start playing under the footage of Polling's shocked widow ducking into a limousine. She's trying to hide her dazed expression, but the cameramen crowd in and turn her reddened eyes into entertainment. I flash on some imagined Thanksgiving dinner, a young John Polling holding a little boy in pajamas, and then those useless second thoughts that keep skating in and out of my head start coming back. They disappear when Polling returns, waving triumphantly at the cameras in front of an American flag. Yeah, that's the man.

"Here comes the mockumentary."

They start in with more footage about Polling, showing him climbing the stairway of a private jet and standing in front of his corporate logo. A few shots of construction machinery with army tanks nearby, then the pipelines and highways that illustrate his privatization of the Philadelphia water system and the Ohio Turnpike. A shot of him shaking hands with the president. No word about the organizer his security force had murdered, only the inevitable network cheap shot from a think-tanker with spectacles and a pale, sappy complexion. "Susan, we have unconfirmed reports that the terrorists shot Mr. Polling in nonlethal areas like the knees and groin first to inflict maximum suffering before they killed him. In essence, it looks like John Polling was tortured to—"

"That's a lie!" I shout. "Goddamn them, that's a lie!"

Everyone looks at me and I can see by their alarm that I shouldn't have gone off. I'm the guy who never goes off, but I haven't slept in two days and things feel distant one second and then suddenly raw and infuriating. Sarah stands up and puts her hand on my shoulder. "Let them sell their crap, Lando. Because you know what? They're running out of buyers."

I look at Sarah, with her long curly brown hair and her cashmere sweater. In another life she's a career girl, busting balls for the networks. In another life she's a model. But not this life. "Let's go, you guys. We need to set up for the meeting with the DNN people."

Tonk and Sarah drop me off at the Transit station and go on to the funnel. I catch my image in an empty window, surprised to see myself with short blond hair, a smooth white chin where my black beard used to be. That owlish face above the sports jacket. Too much waiting, too much adrenaline. I close my eyes and suck in the cool Seattle mist, try to expel John Polling in one long breath.

It doesn't last long. At the station the big screen's playing sanitized Greatest Hits from the life of America's most successful criminal. "Innovator." "Water Entrepreneur." "Billionaire." All running into the career-topping "Gunned Down by Terrorists!" The Blue Wave howls through the tunnel.

At the Pike St. stop little knots of people gather around the monitors with slack mouths and upturned faces, getting their dose of phony scripture from another think-tanker. I catch fragments of his speech as I pass each screen. "Don't know who this Army of the Republic—" "name of convenience—" "established terrorist groups—" "Jefferson Combine—" "the American people—" The reason God banned graven images: he knew people would confuse pictures with reality, and that men would use them to create a lying vision of the world. God sure called that one.

A couple of Whitehall boys manning the tollbooth, staring up with a smile at the Hammer on his morning TV rant. The Hammer looking good in his Harley T-shirt and tattoos—a Fascist for the youth crowd. "Army! Get real! This is three or four bleeping amateurs who pop out and sissy-punch somebody, then crawl back and hide under their mama's skirts."

I smile and keep moving. I guess he hasn't seen the hack.

This is the riskiest kind of meeting, between a surface group and us. They reached us through Lilly, who roomed with one of the DNN organizers at the UW. The two had kept up, and I told Lilly to drop a very discreet hint to her friend that she had some connections with people who knew people. Three days ago the DNN decided to click on the link.

Everybody is in place now. My sunglasses are on. Today I've gone Youthful Professional, which is less invisible than guy-in-a-sweatshirt but an easier sale to authority figures if there's anything to explain.

I take up my first position at a coffee shop across from the Borders bookstore, get a triple shot to travel and dump in a few packets of sugar. Within a few minutes the contact comes fluttering down the street in her red neck-scarf and her Nordstrom shopping bag. Past the store windows and their Halloween themes, paper jack-o'-lanterns grinning at her "gal out shopping" disguise. We're all in costume here. She turns into the Borders, and I wait for confirmation.

Our part goes perfectly. Sarah does a bump pass and disappears. Kahasi picks up the DNN person a minute later exiting the back entrance, as instructed in the note. She's heading for the newsstand at the Pike Place Market, where Tonk has stashed the directions in the back copy of Model Railroader magazine. The contact looks conspicuously inconspicuous as she pulls it out, takes a big obvious scan of the area, stuffs the directions into her pocket then disappears into the labyrinth of stairways and corridors of the market. A minute later she pops out the back and heads down the stairs to the water. The funnel. Kahasi watches from the pier as she walks five blocks north. "She's clean," he says.

She turns into a restaurant and Sarah is waiting for her in the bathroom, checks her pockets and her clothing. The text comes in over my phone. CLEAN

I start the car and pull up in front of the restaurant as she walks out. I roll down the window. "Always nice to meet another model railroading fan. Need a ride?"

She's prettier than her picture, with black hair and dark eyes set above a slightly long chin. A handsome, resolute sort of face, but looking quietly freaked at the moment. "Yes, please."

I unlock the passenger door of the Toyota and she climbs in. I smile at her. "I'm Lando." We shake hands; then I reach down to the floor of the car and give her a big floppy hat and a black satin sleep mask. "Put on this hat and this mask, please, then lean back and pretend you're sleeping. No peeking."

We make a few turns and then approach the tollbooth at I-90. Privatized last year to cover the deficit. I flip a dollar into the basket. Click. Get it while you can, fuckers.

We cruise along without speaking and I find myself listening to the sound of the transmission revving upward to the next gear change, then starting at a lower pitch and revving up once more. A comforting machine noise that makes things normal. We're on a straight part of the highway and I can't help taking a moment to scope out her body, which, from the corduroy legs sticking out from beneath her red raincoat, is a rather pleasing one. Need more data. Her wavy black hair is falling across her shoulders, with one little strand dyed purple. Armenian? Italian? She reminds me a little of Lilly, but less flower child.

"So," I said, "you're Emily Cortright. You live at the Apex, downtown, Seattle's favorite communal apartment building. You graduated from the UW in Environmental Sciences then did a two-year stint at cooking school—interesting—then you abandoned the food service industry for law school at Lewis and Clark. You've been organizing at the DNN three years and two months. Which brings us to the one burning question that jumps out at me from your bio."

"And that is…"

"Do you do Thai?"

I see her mouth curl into a smile below the black circles of the sleep mask. "Everyone does Thai now," she says. "The new thing is Coastal Peruvian."

I like her voice. There's something very calm about it, sweet, almost old-fashioned. "Okay. Excellent. I'm glad I know that. If we ever need an event catered, you'll be my first phone call."

"Thanks. And you are…"

"I'm sorry, Emily, but at this point the ‘getting to know you' part has to be kind of one-sided. Not that I don't trust you, but these days you never know when information is going to become a liability."

Her voice firms up. "Well, who do you represent?"

"And you need to know that because… ?"

"Because I was sent to make an offer and I have to know who I'm making it to."

I wonder for a second what McFarland would want me to answer. "I represent the Army of the Republic."

"Oh," she says softly. It's quiet for a minute.

I pull off in Bellevue and make my way toward Sarah's apartment. We've selected it carefully, a ground-floor one-bedroom right next to the underground parking garage that we can move things and people discreetly into and out of. I park right by the door and ask Emily to keep the mask on. We're through Sarah's door in less than ten steps. The apartment itself has been purged of anything remotely political. No Malcolm X posters, no heavy theory by troublemakers like Chomsky or Klein. A few canned photos of ballet slippers and nature scenes hang on the mostly empty walls, and the bookcase is heavy with mindless historical romances we picked up from the Salvation Army for a nickel each. It's an environment that you forget as soon as you turn your head. Her computer's loaded with a decoy memory card filled with Web sites about self-improvement and eating disorders. Not a trace there of the real Sarah, a survivor of the Earth Liberation Front who watched her eco-vandal compañeros get hard time as "terrorists" and decided to step it up a notch. The orga covers the rent, along with three other houses and apartments around Seattle. The rest of us have to keep our day jobs. Emily looks around as I close the door behind us. I catch her staring at me.

"You were expecting the guy with the flat-top, right? USMC tattooed on his biceps? Or the guy with hair down to his shoulders and pierced everything."

"You're just so…"

"Young Corporate?" I loosen my tie and take off my jacket. "I can only aspire." She laughs, a good sign.

She takes off her raincoat, and I have to admit that I can't help but enjoy that small moment of undressing. She's wearing a ribbed white turtleneck and her red silk neck-scarf, and she's covering up her chest and waist with some sort of Guatemalan vest. She's long-limbed and robust. I can hear Tonk saying "Mamacita!" in my head, and shutting him up brings me back to the cool calm Revolutionary mind-set that has to be. We're professionals here, right?

"Can I make you some tea? Root around in the fridge for something edible?"

"I'm okay, thanks."

I move to the kitchen and open up the cupboard. "Are you sure? We've got Bi Luo Chun green. The label says it's grown on a single island in the middle of a lake in China. Or here's Lipton. Very exclusive—it only comes from several huge ware houses in Oakland and New Jersey."

She acquiesces and sits down on the beat-up sofa as I putter away. I entertain a brief fantasy of blowing off this whole meeting and just riffing with her about how bizarre and ironic life is. Instead, I bring her a mug of tea and a biscotto, then half sit in front of her, resting my butt on Sarah's desk.

She looks down into the cup. I can see her fumbling for an opening. "You're really from the Army of the Republic?" she says, then there's that uncomfortable shifting of facial expressions. "Is it true your organization killed John Polling?"

I don't blame her for being squeamish. "You feel sorry for him, don't you?" I shrug. "So do I. He was a human being. Somebody's father, somebody's husband. But, let's do a brief postmortem of the man before we get too nostalgic. He made his first fortune fleecing taxpayers on the war, then used his political connections to develop supposedly protected wetlands in the Everglades. His next stage of self-actualization was to borrow money from the federal government to take over the public water supplies of most of the mid-Atlantic seaboard, resulting in increased rates and reduced water quality—"

"I worked on the DNN Water Project for a year. I'm totally familiar with that."

"Good. Then you probably know that racketeering charges were brought against him four years ago and he beat them on appeal to a court stacked with his cronies. And that last February he was linked to security agents that murdered Jeff Lansing, an antiprivatization organizer, but was never prosecuted because the Justice Department dropped the case."

"I know about Jeff Lansing."

She says it as if there's nothing more to add about him, and that annoys me a little. I say, very slowly, "Polling's thugs beat Jeff Lansing until his eyeballs exploded." She flinches a tiny bit. "You know why they did it?"

"Why?"

"Because they wanted to send a message to people like you."

She's quiet for a few seconds, then recovers. "So the Army of the Republic really did kill him?"

I take a deep breath. "The Army of the Republic judged John Polling and executed a sentence on behalf of the American people. But let's move on. You're the one who sent the Bat-Signal. What's up?"

She shifts positions so that she doesn't dissolve quite so much into the spongy couch. "We want you to declare a cease-fire."

I take in the idea and grin. "Is that all?"

She stumbles on into her pitch. "I don't mean just you, personally, I mean all of the militants. Democracy Northwest feels that Americans are decisively against this government and they're ready to stand up to it. They're sick of the corruption and the wars and they're sick of watching their whole country get parceled out to Big Business."

"Seen your Web site already, Emily."

"Sorry." She flashes a coy little smile at me. "I didn't realize that only one of us is licensed to diatribe here." That takes me by surprise. A pretty bold cut: I like her. She brushes a curl of black hair off her forehead and rolls right on. "But my point is, Americans are tired of this Administration and they're ready to act. If they ever had a majority, they've lost it."

"Yeah!" I rub my scalp, massaging out a little stab of caffeine headache at my temple. "You're right, Emily: They have lost their majority. The problem is, you don't need a majority to control this country. You need maybe thirty percent, because forty percent of the people won't act. They're equally happy with a dictator or a president as long as you don't take away their guns or cut off their last little trickle of gasoline. That leaves thirty percent who might actively oppose you, and you've got the entire security and media apparatus to attack them with. It's like that in every country in the world."

She tilts her head toward me. "That's a pretty unforgiving analysis."

"It's an accurate analysis." I put my cup down so I can make my point better. "I mean, I wish every cop that fired on a demonstration would suddenly say, ‘Hey! These guys are right! I'm not going to shoot that kid in the face with a rubber bullet because he doesn't want to see the last redwood get axed! I'm not going to club that old man whose pension got ripped off!' I mean, I really wish I could believe that this whole country would rise up because of their demo cratic ideals and sweep these fuckers away. But I'm a student of history, Emily, and I'm a member of the Church of What's Happenin' Now. And in that Church, thirty percent call the shots. It's our thirty percent against their thirty percent."

Her eyebrows come together. "So you think you're going to fight a guerrilla war and defeat them militarily?"

"No! They've got the Pentagon, for Christ's sakes. Our strategy is, you go straight to the top. You take down the brain of the machine, the guys who are getting all the benefits. The open and notorious crooks like John Polling. You punish them for their crimes, you mess up their toys and their tools, and maybe that lazy, numbed-out forty percent in the middle starts to see the Boss-man isn't so untouchable after all, and they say, ‘Hey, aren't these the guys that ripped off my pension and got my kid's leg blown off in the last oil war? Who put them in charge?' And I'll tell you: Nothing will bring down a government faster than when Uncle Joe and Aunt Sally and Jim Bob from the hardware store show up on Main Street with their Masonic rings and their beer guts hanging out and say, ‘Get the fuck out of my government!' "

She answers slowly, picking her words carefully. "I have the same hopes you do, Lando, but I'm not sure your methods can achieve it."

I'm pacing back and forth now, sweating a little bit from the tea. "You don't think there's a hundred million people out there trading high fives at the water cooler because Polling got what he deserved? I mean, sure, a lot are probably saying, ‘Oh, I don't approve of their methods!' But down in that Old Testament part of the brain, way down there where lightning bolts still reach out of the sky and strike down those who transgress, people need justice! We are that lightning."

Excerpted from The Army of the Republic by Archer Cohen.

Copyright © 2008 by Stuart Archer Cohen.

Published in 2008 by St. Martin's Press

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.