The White House
2120 EST
It was a little late for the Fourth of July, but the mood across the city was one of jubilation. The war for the cultural and political heart of the nation had been won. And on the grounds of the White House, the victory party was in full swing.
Musicians from the Campus and the Theater took turns, belting out everything from alt rock covers to folk music standards. At one point, Ricky Tarvey jumped up on the improvised stage, snagging a fiddle, and smiling as he drew the bow across the strings slowly. Annika Bundmeister joined him as she heard the opening bars of an American classic, her mezzosoprano voice rich in the summer night's air as she sang melodiously.
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh! Hard times come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh! Hard times come again no more.
Lowell Ryckmen stood apart from the bulk of the crowd, a beer stein sitting on the corner of a small container as he fiddled with his watch. With the defeat of the True Sons, and his own personal removal of Antwon Ridgeway, it was time he dealt with some old business. "Establishing connection," chimed ISAC in his earbud.
A moment later, a familiar voice exploded in his ear. "Lobo?!"
"Howdy, Lena," he said, his voice faintly husky.
"Jesus, it's good to hear your voice! You back from the dead or just out on parole?"
"Awww, you know me. Heaven wouldn't have me and Hell's terrified I'd take over," he chuckled. "How's farm life suiting you?"
"Wouldn't know. I'm back at the Post Office," Urquidez said smugly.
"Since when?"
"About April. You know they lifted the quarantine around the start of spring, right? Wanderley came and picked me up. He told the Mennonites he was from the IRS and I was wanted for tax evasion."
Ryckmen shook his head. "Putz," he said roundly.
"Actually, I think he's had a lot of the snot knocked out of him since we left. He's almost pleasant company most days. I only have to cut him down to size about once a month now. And Rhodes, he built me a prosthetic arm. It's very cool, but he didn't think I was serious when I told him I wanted a derringer built into the index finger. He says he'll have to do some more design work first. I think he's dragging his feet." There was a noticeable pause. "Heard things got pretty wild down in D.C."
"Oh, yeah. Made New York look like a pillow fight, but not nearly so bad as Philly. Or Richmond, from what I understand. Not even the ghosts are left around there."
"And Keener?" Urquidez asked quietly.
"The trail went cold," admitted Ryckmen. "A few scattered 'catch me if you can' messages left here and there, his usual antics, but nothing concrete. Now that things have settled down here, I'm going to see if I can get a team together and head north to Fort Detrick. If Keener wants or needs viral samples, that's about the only place he could really get anything useful. Best case scenario, there's still enough cohesion and firepower at AMRIID to keep him out or put him down. I won't begrudge them if they bag him." He didn't speculate on what the worst case scenario would be, and Urquidez didn't press him. Both of them knew how bad it would get if Aaron Keener plundered the viral sample collection at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
"You gonna be OK, Lowell?"
"Yeah, Lena, I'm going to be OK. A few days off the line, get used to the idea that things are starting to return to almost normal, and I'll be right as rain."
"Good to hear. Walk softly, Lobo."
"Vaya con Dios, Magdalena." Ryckmen ended the call, then looked around for Paxton Gregory, frowning a little as he failed to find him. He wandered through the party, nodding and smiling as JTF members and other Division agents came up to him to congratulate him. In truth, Ryckmen didn't feel like he'd done anything particularly important. Ridgeway had to go down. The fact it was Ryckmen's bullet which did the deed mattered very little to him.
Outside the inner southwest gate, Ryckmen found Gregory sitting in a plastic patio chair. A bottle of tequila sat on a crate off to his right, a pair of tall shooter glasses sitting close by to it. Ryckmen cleared his throat. "You're missing the party," he said quietly.
"I'm not exactly in the mood for a party, Lowell. Think it's premature," Gregory countered. "The job's not over yet."
Ryckmen shivered a little as he pulled up another crate and sat down across from Gregory. "Weird hearing somebody else say that." Sighing heavily, he locked eyes on Gregory. "The big fight's done, Peace. And I told myself we'd start looking at the irregularities once that happened."
Nodding, Gregory poured the shooters full, handed one to Ryckmen, then raised his glass slightly. "Salud." Taking a sip, he leaned back in the chair and took a deep breath. "I don't have the kind of evidence that would fulfill the requirements for a warrant. But Directive 51 is still in effect, so I'm not particularly worried about habeas corpus and due process at the moment. And honestly, I'm not certain I would be even if Directive 51 was rescinded this instant. Let me tell you a story, Lowell. See if the narrative holds up enough for you to back me.
"The story begins with Andrew Ellis, the Honorable Representative from the State of Delaware, Speaker of the House, and currently President of the United States. You know at least a little of the story. Went to Annapolis, graduated twenty-third in his class, by the way. Ricky mentioned he was a surface type, as opposed to somebody who sailed on subs. What I didn't know at the time he mentioned it was that Ellis spent most of his time in the Navy's R&D section, doing a lot of coordination with DARPA, brief detached duty as a liason at NATO headquarters in Brussels. He wasn't quite a staff puke, but definitely not a line officer.
"He retired from the Navy in '96, went into politics. Despite his relatively brief Navy career, Ellis made lieutenant commander in less than fifteen years, at a time when the Navy was already suffering from a lack of promotion opportunities even for non-line officers. He easily won the only House seat for the state, and his prior background put him on several choice committees, including the oversight committee for DARPA. In 2004, he became Speaker of the House and stayed there except for a brief period when the House changed parties and he became minority leader. In mid-2015, he announced he was forming an exploratory committee as the first step towards a run at the White House in 2016. Eight weeks after that, he puts out a press release stating the results of the committee have indicated to him that he lacked the broad recognition among the electorate to entertain an effort as a presidential candidate." Gregory sipped the tequila slowly, then leaned forward. "Think about that for a minute, Lowell. He's the third most recognized political figure in America after the President and Vice President, but he thinks he doesn't have 'broad recognition.' Tell me that doesn't pass the smell test for you."
"When you put it like that, it does sound more than a little suspicious," Ryckmen admitted. "But politics is usually more about perceptions than reality. Just because his committee researchers told him he didn't have that level of recognition doesn't necessarily mean they were right."
"I might find that argument more convincing if I hadn't dug up an interesting little factoid. Starting in 2002, Ellis served for about a year and a half on the boards of directors for some very interesting organizations. He didn't resign those chairs until right before he was named Speaker. Now, it's not illegal for a member of the House to serve on a board of directors so long as the member isn't financially compensated for it. Senators are prohibited, but not House representatives. And while they can't draw a salary, there's nothing to prevent a representative from buying or selling stock. Ostensibly, this allows House members to sit on the boards of philanthropic and non-profit organizations. And one of the organizations Ellis sat for certainly fit the bill. The Pachyderm Conservancy was a non-profit aimed at stamping out elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade. Their physical address was an office suite over on K Street, but the organization's charter and corporate paperwork was all filed in Wilmington, Delaware. You know, Ellis' stomping grounds. Despite their prestigious digs, they had to be the most hilariously incompetent non-profit ever assembled. Not one single poacher or ivory smuggler was even investigated due to the assistance of the Conservancy. In addition to the Conservancy, Ellis also sat on the board of an organization known as Mastodon Capital Services. Officially, Mastodon was a financial services company with a focus on sovereign wealth fund management for developing nations. Unofficially, and more accurately, it was a hedge fund, or a portfolio of hedge funds to be really picky. They seem to have been made up primarily of global macro type funds, lot of bond and currency positions in a very 'counter-trend' long term strategy. And up until Black Friday, Mastodon was getting some serious side eye from the Department of Justice for potential violations of the Neutrality Act." Gregory shrugged expansively. "I found it interesting that one of the many stocks in Mastodon's portfolio was Novissima Hominis, LLC. A holding company for a PMC you tangled with in New York."
"The Last Man Battalion?" asked Ryckmen incredulously.
"Indeed. And it seems Ellis was heavily invested in them, albeit through Mastodon. Hell, Ellis was due to fly up to New York right before Black Friday for some PMC business convention. What I found more interesting was the location of the Pachyderm Conservancy's only overseas office. They had a building, with a dock and warehouse, at the port of Namibe, Angola. Which is weird, since Angola's not exactly noted for its poaching interdiction work. Nairobi, I could believe. Harare, I could believe. But a port in Angola, far removed not only from the interior but from the most well known elephant habitats on the continent? That's just all kinds of suspicious. Particularly since we've got examples of refurbished weapons coming out of Angola and into the hands of the Hyenas."
"Sounds hinky, but nothing that couldn't be chalked up to either coincidence or somebody looking to skim off a real estate deal in Africa." Ryckmen sipped his tequila, his mind racing as he considered the story carefully.
"The Universe isn't that sloppy, Lowell, and you know it," snapped Gregory. "But since you're trying real hard not to be convinced, allow me to share the next part of the story, with special guest star Bardon Schaeffer."
"Schaeffer," muttered Ryckmen. "Why does that name sound familiar?"
"He was the guy who tried to recruit Odessa into whatever little scheme he was running in D.C. prior to our respective arrivals. A guy who had contact with Ellis a week after Black Friday, before they started evacuating the District. There's a note in Ellis' private appointment calendar when he was serving as Speaker about a meeting with 'B.S.' from Colmillo Negro Internacional. They're a company which lists their main offices in Suriname, but their US subsidiary's corporate paperwork was filed in Wilmington. Also, unsurprisingly, their stock was part of Mastodon's hedge fund portfolio."
"Where'd you find the calendar entry?"
"I snagged it when we cleaned out the Capitol."
Ryckmen's eyes widened. "You stole the Speaker of the House's private calendar?"
"I recovered it during the course of a tactical operation," said Gregory virtuously. "If 'B.S.' is the same Bardon Schaeffer, then Ellis met with a man who for certain arranged the assassination of Thomas Mendez, and for all we know may have arranged the assassination of Lawrence Waller. I've got an ECHO file of Schaeffer meeting with the Secret Service agents he suborned to kill Mendez, and him having an unknown associate murder those same agents to tie off the loose ends. I can't prove Waller was assassinated, but I'm having a hard time believing he wasn't. Hell, Lowell, there's two or three drugs I can think of right off the top of my head which could induce a heart attack. And Waller's medical records indicate he wasn't at a particularly high risk for it. With everything that was going on, it would have been absolutely perfect. Nobody would have looked at it because they had a full blown pandemic tearing across the world. Even if Waller did die of natural causes, Mendez sure as hell didn't, and it wasn't a suicide. Ellis sat down face to face with this guy. It strongly suggests accessory after the fact if Ellis didn't say anything after Mendez died. It also suggests accessory before the fact if Ellis didn't warn Mendez, or Manny, or whoever else was on duty at the time." Gregory's eyes bored into Ryckmen's. "And from what Odessa told me about what she knew of Schaeffer, setting up an assassination like this was an exercise in light lifting. I found his 201, and there's a lot of odd gaps in his record. When I asked Odessa what those gaps might mean, she indicated Schaeffer was very likely sheep dipped, his file slipped into a drawer nobody opens and kept there till he came back and resumed his official career. So, while his jacket says he was in Ramadi with an engineering battalion, despite not having any engineering related MOS, he was probably somewhere else in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or who the hell knows where doing God only knows what for whoever was paying the freight. CIA, DIA, NSA, somebody else, I don't know who. But he's clearly somebody's black bag specialist.
"This isn't just a case of bad judgment, Lowell. This is not merely coincidence. I'm sure there's a lot of pieces missing, and there's something bigger going on. But right now, the operative point is that we've got the President of the United States in contact with an individual who's responsible for arranging the assassination of his immediate predecessor." Gregory's eyebrows crept up as a horrified light filled his eyes. "And it suddenly occurs to me that this individual may have been trying to obtain samples of the broad spectrum anti-viral therapy, the ones Ellis couldn't get to because he lost his briefcase when Air Force One went down."
A terrifying scenario began to blossom in Ryckmen's head. "Jesus, Peace, if this black bag guy got those anti-virals, Keener suddenly becomes irrelevant. He could cook up a new virus every day for a year, murder a dozen cities a week, and Schaeffer's bosses wouldn't care because they could ensure their people were protected. People who are likely part of a PMC whose stock was hiding in the leaves of Mastodon's hedge fund." Taking a few deep breaths, Ryckmen looked Gregory in the eye. "All right. I think we need to go over to the Oval Office and have a word with the President about this. And I will be keeping my hand close to my sidearm. Because if I don't like the answers he gives me, I may end up beating you to the punch."
The two of them finished off the shots, then got up and strode shoulder to shoulder up to the White House, walking through the West Wing to the Oval Office. They scanned the room, checking every corner, looking behind every piece of furniture.
"Where the hell is he?" asked Gregory harshly.
Ryckmen tapped his watch, fighting to keep a growl out of his voice. "Ricky, Lobo. Where's Ellis?"
"Haven't seen him since the fireworks were shot off. What's going on?"
"Get Bunny, search the White House top to bottom. You find him, keep him right there, and let me know. Don't ask me why, don't argue with me." Breaking the connection, Ryckmen looked over at Gregory. "Peace, check the south gates. I'll check the north ones." He trotted out of the Oval Office and down the main corridor of the West Wing before heading upstairs and out the door towards the north gates. The northwest gate seemed fine. The sentry posted inside the outer gate had not seen Ellis. As he approached the northeast gate, Ryckmen couldn't see the sentry who was supposed to be on duty. A plate of venison barbecue and a red plastic cup sat on a table off to one side, but no sentry was visible. Drawing his sidearm, Ryckmen moved over towards the gate and looked around the table.
The sentry lay sprawled out, hidden from view, his chest moving slowly. Ryckmen checked the sentry's pulse, making certain they really were alive, then looked at the food. Kneeling down, Ryckmen pried one of the sentry's eyelids open, seeing the wide pupil dilation and lack of response to light. A furious scowl grew on his face as he tapped the watch. "Peacemaker, this is Lobo. The sentry at the northeast gate is down. Looks like somebody slipped him a mickey. Inform Manny that Ellis is missing, then lock this place down. I want to know how he got out and who helped him!"
* * *
Tidal Basin, West Potomac Park Sector
2210 EST
Bardon Schaeffer watched as the engineering teams erected the barriers and ran system tests. So far, they'd been in place for just over an hour, and the efforts to secure their beach head had gone without any complication or resistance. By sunrise, the base would be laid out, barracks and armories established, and their hovercraft waiting to drop the hammer on any armed resistance group large enough to be targeted. It wouldn't last, of course. Sooner or later, the Division would show up and raise all manner of hell. Schaeffer wasn't particularly worried by the prospect of an assault by the Division, but he regretted the inconvenience of having to fight them in the first place. He'd always known getting them to step aside gracefully so Black Tusk could assume responsibility for securing the nation's capitol was a long shot. Schaeffer shook his head ruefully. He'd forgotten Ellis was a politician, and politicians could get you to believe almost anything, if only for a short while. Nothing would give Schaeffer more pleasure than to shoot Andrew Ellis right between the eyes. Unfortunately, his bosses had made it clear that President Ellis (and God, how he gagged mentally on that) was a necessary evil for the immediate future.
A woman clad in a suit of highly advanced body armor came over but did not salute him. "Termites are reporting they're ahead of schedule," she began primly. "All primary quarters will be erected and the command post will be structurally complete within four hours. They might be able to get at least some of the primary power runs laid in and core servers online by the original construction deadline."
"Sounds good, Wyvern. Any word from the Raptor teams?"
"Eight locations secured so far. Light resistance on four others. We'll have all targets secured by dawn." She paused, her expression hidden behind the full faceplate attached to her helmet as she looked north. "You think they have any idea what's about to hit them?"
"Nope, and if we do this right, they never will." Schaeffer clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously. "Let's get to work."
So, a few stats just to start things off:
• Number of Words - 87,459 (Congratulations, you can honestly say you read at least one novel this year.)
• Average Number of Words Per Chapter - 3,498 (rounded down)
• Cups of Coffee Drunk - 2,160 (A ballpark figure, but probably not too far off)
• Number of Times I Had To Edit Out F***, S***, and Various Other Profanities - 500 (Also a ballpark, also probably not far off)
The opening chapter, "Prologue," came out May 20th, and I went on a bit of a writing jag at first before settling into a once-a-week routine. Some of you may have noticed a little lag towards the end of November. National Novel Writing Month got in the way. I had some chapters written and ready to go, but ran out of them at the tail end of the month.
When I first started this, one of the inspirations of the storyline was the announced Division movie, which originally had Jake Gyllenhall and Jessica Chastain attached to the project. As far as I know, it's still in development hell. Much as I like Gyllenhall as an actor, there are some roles he's just not terribly convincing in, and playing a Division agent struck me as one of those roles. I'd been noodling my own ideas for a film script for a while (Ming Na as Faye Lau or GTFO), and it occurred to me I could use the setting for the final scene as the start of this story. So, yeah, Jake Gyllenhall was the inspiration for Roger Wanderley.
The members of Team Peacemaker are unquestionably composites of various people I've met and known over the years. And while there's a little bit of me in all of them, Lowell Ryckmen and Paxton Gregory probably have a little more of me than Ricky Tarvey or Annika Bundmeister. In some respects, Lowell's the version of me that didn't stay home after graduating high school and certainly not after 9/11. He's been an interesting character to write. By the same token, Paxton is probably closer to the version of me that exists right now, save for a couple different forks in the road and a global pandemic to complicate his life.
One of the big challenges on this project was trying to convey the story without making it seem too much like a canned description of a "let's play." I wanted to try and evoke the feeling of a good Tom Clancy novel (not all of them are great) rather than the video game which just uses his name. I also had to be mindful of tech advances that would be available around the time the game was set, and which ones would not have been available. It's easy to forget that within the game's setting, computer technology, electronics, material sciences, and a lot of other things basically flash froze at the end of 2015. Any technical errors or anachronisms in the text are purely my own fault.
Further complicating matters is the fact that in the wake of a global pandemic as godawful as Green Poison has been played up to be, populations become a significant factor for an author to keep in mind. The game can infinitely respawn faction members and bosses. The "real world" can only offer them up once. I tried very hard to avoid the idea of infinite mooks waiting in the wings. Hopefully, I pulled it off. To that end, I mostly kept things focused on the main missions as story fodder. Astute readers will notice that most of the game's side missions never showed up here. While there was a bit of handwaving involved, vaguely mentioning other teams of Division agents roaming around the city, I wanted to give the impression that Team Peacemaker was the varsity, the go-to guys for the toughest jobs in the city.
I'm the sort of writer who hates like hell to be writing something for the sake of a theme. Themes are good to have, particularly for long form pieces, but if you're spending all your time beating your readers over the head with ponderous writing that screams, "Look at my important theme!", you're not going to keep your readers very long. The steelbook for the game had a copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on the back of it, which I thought was nifty. Combine that with the splash screen/cover art shot from the Lincoln Memorial, and it was pretty much a no-brainer that Lincoln and the Civil War would be coloring a lot of scenes. The fact America is effecively finding itself in a new civil war within the game, and one far more savage and tangled up than the one in the 19th Century, made references to that earlier conflict not only sensible, but added a sense of realism.
The Epilogue contains the first verse and chorus of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More," a song which was less than a decade old when the Civil War started, and popular enough that a more satirical version ("Hard Tack Come Again No More") sprang up during the war. There are a lot of really good renditions of the song out there, but I will cop to using an instrumental version which was recorded for Civilization VI as a reference for that initial portion of the Epilogue. If you've got the soundtrack for that game, it's the "America - Medieval Era" track. If you don't, I'm sure somebody who does can play it for you.
So, what happens now, gentle readers? One could argue I've been a bit of a jerk by finishing the story on the same sort of cliffhanger the developers left players with initially before Episode 1 came out. I did shift away from our intrepid agents to briefly describe Black Tusk's arrival, and possibly tease a sequel, but at this particular point, even Massive hasn't finished telling that story completely. As of the time of this particular writing, Episode 3 hasn't come out yet. Ellis is still at large. So, too, are Aaron Keener and Vitaly Tchernyenko. Bardon Schaeffer is who knows where at this point. The only loose end the Division has been able to tie off is Emeline Shaw. And who knows what fresh hell awaits agents before the end of Year 1. Beyond that, there's certainly the sense that this whole novel is basically the first draft, and one which (due to constraints inherent in the forum) could be rewritten and expanded upon. It'd be fantastic if Ubisoft hired me for an official tie-in, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. Anoxia is an ugly way to go out.
For now, this story has finished. But Team Peacemaker is only getting started.