From early on, Devin Culhane navigates the political world like a pro. When President Milan handpicks Devin as an intern, he comes to idolize Milan as a sort of demigod.
Until Devin finds himself confronted with Milan’s past. Devin’s response to that information could change the course of history—but sometimes change brings consequences too harsh to bear.
“Twenty Years Later, By Separation Peak,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here.
Twenty Years Later, By Separation Peak
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
A fox will be elected without saying a word,
Playing the saint in public living on barley bread,
Afterwards he will very suddenly tyrannize,
Putting his foot on the greatest ones
i
Seven of us stood in the shadow of Separation Peak. Even though the Peak was twenty miles away, it looked as if we could reach out and touch it. Thunderheads loomed to the west, dark purple laced with lightning. The air was cool despite the higher-than-normal humidity: what had been seventies in Cheyenne was fifties here. Our rusted cars were parked along the side of I-80, nearly hiding the blue plastic Porta-Potty that had somehow survived the decade.
I never expected to stand here. My grandfather once told me that promises made when a man was young were rarely remembered into his middle age.
I didn’t know how I would forget.
The wind from the approaching storm whipped our jackets, pressed our thin shirts against our chests. Margarite’s breasts showed round and firm despite her forty-five years. She shivered and pulled her jacket tight. I longed to press myself against her and steal a bit of her warmth.
Twenty years. Twenty years and the emotions were as raw as they had been the day we separated.
“I suppose we should start,” Sven said. His eyes were dark behind his taped and battered glasses. Scratches on the lenses reflected on his pale skin.
No one looked at me, but I could feel the expectation. Tell us what to do, Devin. Show us how to be. But I wasn’t going to bow to it. This time they were on their own.
Paolo turned away from me. Chibu kicked a chunk of the interstate. The concrete was shredding under the weight of too many winters. Our cars had broken the weeds in the center, a clear path for any urban tracking guide. Lobo had his back to all of us, the wind teasing his long brown hair. His muscles were still firm, his body still the one I remembered. He and Margarite were almost unchanged. The rest of us had allowed age to sag us, to add lines around our mouths, memory marks beside our eyes.
Quinlin looked at me. His tanned face had taken a leathery quality. “You started it, Devin. You get to end it.”
The wind had blown the storm closer. I wasn’t going to dodge it any more than I was going to dodge their expectations.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see if he’s still here.”
ii
Twenty-five years before, in finals week for fall quarter, we held a vote in our American Government Seminar. To this day, I wonder if Professor Wiggins had been a visionary or merely a man trying to grapple with his own fear. We saw nothing, of course. We were children merely pretending to be adults.
Professor Wiggins held his seminars in a lounge on the first floor of Baxter Hall. Twenty students sprawled along couches and slouched in easy chairs. The green décor made everyone’s faces sallow, even Paolo and Chibu, whose dark skin would take on a greyish cast.
Two weeks before, we had been appointed Electoral College delegates for a mythical presidential election. Then we had studied the system. Our final grade was based on our performance in this afternoon’s class.
“I don’t understand it,” Lobo had whispered to me as we waited for class to begin. “All we do is write our guy’s name on a piece of paper and then leave. What’s so tough about that?”
I didn’t know but I had a feeling I was going to find out. Even then they looked to me, not just because I was Wiggins’ favorite, but because I was heir apparent to the Culhane political dynasty. My father had been a senator, just as his father had before him. Although my parents had been dead for most of my life, and financial necessity (and a jealous aunt and uncle) had shunted me to this tiny backwater college, everyone here knew that I had the power, the charisma and the political sharpness to reclaim the Culhane family destiny.
Wiggins was up to something—and we weren’t going to like it.
He arrived a minute later, carrying a tray of cold sandwiches mounded high and wrapped in plastic carrying a local deli’s logo. Two large thermoses of coffee already waited on the table, as did another of hot water. Soda was on ice in a cooler beneath the window. Quinlin had already scouted that out and confirmed what we all suspected: no beer.
Obviously we weren’t going to write names on a paper and leave.
Wiggins set the tray down and leaned against his favorite kelly-green overstuffed chair. “You have just flown in from all parts of the country,” he said, his gravely voice taking on a power it didn’t usually have. “Because of scheduling conflicts, the meetings begin this morning instead of giving you all a day to recover. While some of you were on the red-eye, and the rest of you were sleeping, the president-elect’s plane went down over Indiana, killing all on board. The current president, as we all know, is a lame duck, and his veep has already announced his retirement from public life—”
“Jeez, just like Kastlebaum,” Sven whispered to me. President Hurley was a lame duck and his vice president, Mark Kastlebaum had announced that he wasn’t going to run in the current election because he had just been diagnosed as HIV-positive.
“—and so, you, my friends, are entrusted with the fate of the country.”
“Can’t we just hold another election?” Chibu asked. The rest of the class groaned.
“Since we haven’t officially started, I will not hold that remark against you,” Wiggins said. “But remember, the popular vote does not choose a president. You do. And as Electoral College members, you may place your state’s votes behind any candidate—”
“—Or any person,” I said.
“Very good, Mr. Culhane.” Wiggins smiled. “Any person or any candidate you may like. Are we ready?” The class sighed. He handed me a slip of paper. “Mr. Culhane has my home phone number. You will call me when there is a new president of the United States.”
I slipped the phone number in my pocket. That part was for show. I had already memorized Wiggins’ home phone. We had spent many a late night talking theory and batting political what-ifs back and forth. We never discussed this one.
Wiggins left with a half smile on his face, and we fell into it. We argued and screamed and pleaded with each other. We cited case after case, looked up the 12th Amendment to the Constitution which defined the Electoral College’s role, and decided that we didn’t want to throw the vote into the House of Representatives. We examined the hypothetical candidates and their histories. We also toyed with inserting a wild card—a person who had not been on the November ballot—and we even mentioned Milan’s name. In the end, we didn’t choose an outsider, figuring it would be too much work.
Of course, that was our mistake.
We ate the sandwiches and drank too much coffee. At 10 p.m., pizza and more soda arrived, courtesy of Wiggins, and still we had made no decision. Finally, at 4 a.m., I called a vote. We did as Lobo predicted and each scrawled a name on a piece of paper. Chibu counted the votes. Twenty people divided between two candidates—evenly—and continued to do so with each vote taken thereafter.
Wiggins arrived at 8 a.m. with more coffee as well as doughnuts. As he set the doughnuts on the table. He passed around blue books with the doughnut boxes. “It’s January 20th, people,” he said. “Time to inaugurate a president. Write the name in the blue book of the person who will take the oath of office at noon. You have—” he glanced at his watch “—one hour.”
No sleep and all that wrangling. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I ate four chocolate doughnuts and stared at the empty page in my blue book. Who became president? No one. The vote had to go to the House of Representatives. But the lame duck’s term was over. Someone had to head the state.
Finally the chocolate hit and with the sugar high came the answer: The vice president-elect. As in all other cases of incapacity of a president, the vice president became president. The vice president would have been voted along the normal course. The Electoral College would have had no trouble with that vote. I scrawled down the vice president-elect’s name, took another doughnut and left the room to get a much-needed shower and sleep.
When I woke up I learned that I was the only student to ever pass Wiggins’ final.
iii
We trudged along the rocky surface of the Divide toward Separation Peak. Losing sight of the Interstate filled me with a dread that seemed irrational now. No one wanted to get lost in the Rocky Mountains, but we weren’t going very far. The Interstate itself was no protection: few people had the resources it took to buy a tank of gas. That we all made it to the reunion spoke of our determination instead of our wealth.
It also spoke of our fear of Milan.
By unspoken agreement, Lobo led. His athlete’s muscles could respond to any danger quickly and he seemed to remember the trail that time and weather had dispersed. The wind had died down to an unnatural calm, and in the distance thunder boomed. The air smelled of rain.
I dug my hands into my pockets, fingers toying with the frayed edges of the holes that had long ago torn through the seams. The jacket wouldn’t provide much protection when the storm broke. Perhaps it would wait until we were done, and I could return to the relative safety of my car. At least my windows were intact. Sven’s weren’t.
“Here,” Lobo said.
We fanned out around him. The rocks still formed a cairn—an obvious grave to anyone who was looking. But no one had looked. Not once in twenty years. Even the animals had left the site untouched.
Nights alone in my small apartment I had envisioned that cairn, top busted open, the body gone. The night before we came, I dreamed that Milan was standing next to the open grave, laughing at us.
I walked over to the cairn and ran my hand along the sharp pointed rocks. I had set the last rock on top, my fingers dirt- and blood-covered. Even then, we hadn’t believed Milan was dead. We had joined hands over the grave and vowed to return twenty years later, to make sure Milan’s body remained at rest.
I don’t know what the others feared. I told them I was afraid someone would find his body and make him a martyr. But really, I thought Milan more than human. I never expected him to remain in a prison of my own making.
I clenched my fists and pulled my arms against my side.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Chibu said. He glanced at me, his black bangs nearly covering his eyes. “So what do we do now?”
iv
I loved Milan. Not in a carnal way, but in that deep, abiding, worshipful love only a young idealist could have.
He had been the hero of my college days, the savior the country was waiting for. Each generation had someone like him—a hope for the future, untapped as yet by the electoral process. Teddy Kennedy in late ’68 before Chappaquidick, Mario Cuomo after his speech in ’84; Constance Brownwin in ’96—politicians who didn’t run, who never really spoke, and yet the country waited for them to ride into the government, turn it around and save us from ourselves.
When Brownwin died four years later, a tainted president-elect, her vice presidential choice already considered more incompetent than Dan Quayle, the Electoral College turned not to the candidates who had lost to the Brownwin team but to Milan. And when he, with grace and reluctance, stepped in—the first white knight ever allowed to play the role—very few people in the country complained. Only a handful of commentators pointed out that Milan had never held an elected office, and even fewer noted that Brownwin’s plane had flown out of Milan’s home airport or that Milan’s newspapers had first initiated the charges of the vice president-elect’s incompetence.
I first saw Milan on a CNN Special Report. They called him The Man Behind the Throne, and The Greatest Hope for America’s Future. They had film clips of him walking out of buildings, his lean graceful body belonging to a movie star instead of a corporate executive. He never gave speeches and rarely made public comments. He never acknowledged the crowds as he walked by, and he never smiled for the cameras.
I read everything I could find about him. I studied his impoverished roots, the fortune he had made in the computer industry, the way he turned that fortune into billions.
Even then, though, his enemies had a way of disappearing, and his detractors often changed their minds. I had one of the few copies of Milan the Fox written by a renowned political commentator who turned up dead weeks after his book trashing Milan was pulled from the shelves.
But Wiggins hated him and after the election, Wiggins withdrew. His lectures were rote, his eyes often gazed as if they were staring at faraway places. Our late-night phone calls stopped, and I never even thought to invite him to my graduation party two years later.
But he thought of me. He tried to call me in the week before he died. His name had become so much a part of my past by then that it took me a day or so to place it. It took another day for me to return the call.
His phone had been disconnected.
He had resigned from the department.
His family had no idea where he was.
And I forgot about it until Paolo handed me the file, almost two years later.
v
The wind had a chill to it. Strands of Margarite’s hair whipped around her face and stuck to her lips. She brushed it away absently. “I don’t know,” she said. “This looks too new, too fresh. Shouldn’t the rocks be weather worn?”
“It takes years for rocks to wear away,” Sven said.
“I don’t like it,” Quinlin said. “I think we should check.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, it was a stupid agreement to make in the first place.” Lobo crossed his arms and leaned back on his heels. “We’ve been acting as if Milan had supernatural powers. He didn’t. No one can rise from the dead.”
“If anyone could, he could.” Chibu said.
The first drops of icy rain splashed on my face. I glanced up. The black clouds in the distance had that melted look brought by hard rain. “We had better decide soon.”
“If Milan were still alive, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Paolo said.
“Are you saying what we did was wrong?” Margarite was standing alone, arms wrapped around her waist as if to keep herself warm.
“He’s saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time,” Quinlin said.
“No, I’m not,” Paolo said. He walked over to the cairn and ran a hand along the rocks’ sharp surface. His brown skin stood out in sharp relief to the pale gray of the stone. “Don’t you guys wonder how it might have been? Don’t you think about whether or not things would have been better? Sometimes I dream about it and I wake up wishing for that righteousness of youth.”
“Wiggins hated Milan.” Chibu had knitted his fingers together. His knuckles were white.
“Wiggins was a political science professor at a small private school that eventually lost its endowment. If he was one of the world’s great thinkers, he would have been at Harvard or Yale. If he were one of the world’s great politicians, he would have been in office somewhere instead of planning odd final exams.” Paolo picked up a rock and ran his finger along the sharp edge. “By the age of 24, I had done more government service than he had. That should tell you something.”
I remembered the file Paolo had given me, the stern look on his face all those years ago. What had happened to him to change his mind? Had he been victim of the riots that shook D.C.? Did he live, like I did, in an area so remote, so cold, that just survival was difficult? Did he sleep on a bed or on the hard, dead ground?
He had to have some wealth. He had a car, after all.
Margarite took the rock out of his hand and set it back on top of the cairn. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“We killed a man,” Paolo said.
“We killed a monster,” she said, “and saved thousands of lives.”
“Did we?” Paolo asked. “Or did we condemn them to die more slowly in this wasteland?” He brushed his hand on his faded jeans. The rain fell harder, its steady patter a counterpoint to the words. I shivered.
“Let’s dig him up,” I said. “We need to remember.”
vi
Milan greeted me himself on my first day of work. He called me into the Oval Office, and I went in promptly at nine, my throat dry, my heart hammering against my chest. I had spoken to other political interns from previous administrations. The only time they had met the President had been on the day they left, the day they had their pictures taken with the chief executive. And here I was, sitting in a room filled with history, on the day I arrived.
The office had the damp dusty smell of an ancient building. Most of the furniture was for show except the brown leather chair on the other side of the desk. Milan had brought back the Kennedy furnishings, including the huge brown desk that John-John had played under while heads of state visited. John-John. I had never been able to reconcile that little boy with the skirt-chasing celebrity lawyer who was twenty years my senior.
The only thing that brought the room into the 21st century was the small terminal on a wooden computer desk to the side of the chair.
The desk was empty except for a file, and the room was empty except for me. I stood on the expensive rug embossed with the Presidential seal and tried not to look nervous, although each muscle was held rigidly in place.
Then the door opened, and Milan made the entrance he was famous for. His black hair was swept away from his face and his dark eyes snapped with energy. He was taller than I expected and whipcord thin, moving with the grace of a natural athlete.
“Mr. Culhane,” he said, with that deep warm voice. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long.”
“N-No. I just got here.” I felt twelve years old again, being humored by an adult for a small accomplishment.
His glance seemed to catch my discomfort. “Sit. Let’s talk.”
I took the wing-backed chair to the right of the desk. The cushions were hard as wood.
“Mr. Culhane,” he said. “I plan to treat my young interns different than my predecessors did. Young minds are a national treasure, and I think yours is more valuable than most. I chose you myself.”
I swallowed. “Thank you, sir.”
He leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I read your files. I understand that you are an expert in Constitutional history. You must find me quite interesting.”
“Your election was unusual,” I said, voice trembling, “but not illegal.”
He smiled, revealing teeth whiter than any I’d ever seen. “Yes, unlike John Kennedy’s electoral college victory or that of Rutherford B. Hayes. The dead did not vote for me nor did I bribe any state officials.” He put his hands down on the desk. His actions seemed less like nervous fidgeting and more like they were calculated for effect. “Still, I find my every move questioned. Even Gerald Ford had been elected to an office, although it wasn’t the office of President. I have never responded to a mandate of the people—and that terrifies the underlings here in the White House and all of Congress. You know about the amendment?”
“To ban the electoral college? Yes, sir.” I hadn’t moved at all. My body felt rooted to that hard chair.
“And what do you think of it?”
“I think it was only a matter of time before someone proposed it. The average American has never understood the Electoral College, and now it’s placed someone in office without a popular vote. People are scared because they don’t understand.” My voice had gained strength as I spoke.
“But you understand. I want to know what you think of the Amendment.”
I swallowed, uncertain of the test. “The founding fathers believed that the people were not educated enough and not interested enough to directly chose their own government.”
“Not all of the founding fathers believed that.”
“Enough of them.”
“And you agree?”
My hands were moist. I kept them resting on my knees. “Except for a handful of people, everyone I knew voted based on press coverage and campaign ads. They read nothing and often didn’t know the background and voting records of the candidates they chose.”
Milan laughed. The sound startled me. “Mr. Culhane, you are truly the son of a politician. Three different answers to the same question and none of them reveal how you feel about the process. We will go no farther until you are frank with me.”
Frank. I had to stand up. I rarely let people know what I thought about anything. But I was standing before the President of the United States, a man who claimed he had handpicked me to be a student intern in the White House. A man with a plan. And unless I told him the truth, I would not know what that plan was.
“All right.” My voice had an airy quality to it. It felt as if I were speaking through someone else’s throat. “To be honest with you, sir. The fact that you have been chosen to lead the country in this manner frightens me. You have a wonderful business track record. You have treated your minority employees well. You seem to have a head for global affairs, and yet you have run a corporation not a government. I worry about your ability to compromise. I worry about the nation’s ability to accept you.”
“I will face a referendum in a few short years,” he said quietly. “I can be voted out of office.”
“Or you can resign. Or you can be impeached. Honestly, sir, when they said that the Electoral College had chosen you, I expected you to offer to serve a shortened term while we held emergency elections.”
“The constitution does not provide for that.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“Nor does it provide for many things,” Milan said. He stood too. He was a few inches taller than me but it seemed like more because he was so thin. “It doesn’t provide for most of the jobs in the federal government, and it doesn’t provide for the position I am going to offer you.”
I looked up at him. The feeling of being a child in an adult’s presence returned. “Sir?”
“I would like you to be one of my personal advisors. I need youth, energy, an understanding of the system, and a willingness to look for loopholes.” His voice took on the rhythm of a campaign speech. “You were right, Mr. Culhane. I have run corporations. I want to run this government like a business. I want to show the people that decisiveness—not politics—can improve their lives. And perhaps, after that, they’ll be able to make changes in the 200 year-old document that rules our lives. Informed changes instead of fear-based ones. Are you willing to work with me on that, Mr. Culhane?”
I didn’t understand it, entirely. Even now, as I run through that speech in my mind, I do not know exactly what Milan wanted. Although I know what he achieved.
“I’ll work with you,” I said, and thereby sealed his doom.
vii
The rain came down in hard pelting sheets. My hair was plastered to my skin, and my clothing hung like heavy armor on my frame. The wind had died down, but the frigid drops more than made up for the chill. My hands were red and raw as I pulled on the rocks before me.
The others worked in silence around me. The clatter of falling rocks was half hidden under the rain’s steady drumbeat. An occasional peal of thunder boomed overhead. I did not watch for the lightning. I did not want to know how close the storm was to us.
Margarite’s lips had turned blue. Chibu’s left hand was bleeding. Lobo had cleared twice as much as the rest of us, the pile of brown stones resting at his feet. Only Paolo refused to help. He sat on the grass like a scrawny Buddha, his arms crossed over his chest, impervious to the rain.
“What happens if you don’t find him?” he asked.
“We’ll find him.” Quinlin sprayed water as he replied. His curly hair had gone straight with the weight of the rain.
But I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t remember putting this many rocks on the cairn. I didn’t remember the rocks being so heavy. My muscles strained, and my back hurt, but still I didn’t stop.
Paolo leaned back and put his hands on the wet grass behind him. I could feel his gaze on me. “What are you looking for, Devin? Your conscience?”
A shiver ran down my spine. “I have a conscience,” I said.
Paolo unfolded himself like a deer sleeping in the grass. He stood, towering over me. “I suppose you do, after a fashion. And that’s why you expect the ghost of Milan to smite you, and why you made this silly pact in the first place.”
I stopped working for a moment and caught my breath. “If you had no plans to keep our agreement, why did you come?”
“To take a good hard look at my past and my choices.”
His voice was soft, but his tone had a self-righteous edge I didn’t like. I wiped my hands on my already stained jeans and felt the damp cloth press against the cold skin of my thighs. “Milan had too much power,” I said.
“Only because you helped him achieve it,” Paolo said. “Then you discarded him when you discovered that your idol had feet of clay.”
“Milan was an evil man,” I said.
Paolo shrugged. “Perhaps. But I often wonder if we’re any different.”
viii
Milan laughed a lot in the late-night meetings. We came to his apartments—four other interns and myself—and huddled around the president as if he were a popular professor. He acted the role, handing out assignment after assignment, and we completed them all, like good little devoted servants.
He would order pizza and beer and place them on the Duncan Fife table near the fireplace. We would pull armchairs over, and eat the pizza with our fingers—no napkins or plates—and let the grease run down our hands.
“Alexander Hamilton believed that a President should be elected for life,” he said one evening.
“That’s why the compromise happened,” I said. “A four-year elected term with no limitations on the amount of time served.”
“The 22nd Amendment changed the limitation to two terms,” Milan said, reaching for the pepperoni pizza with anchovies that sat in the middle of the desk.
“Because FDR’s four terms were too much for the Republicans,” I said. “And he died in office, just like a King.”
“So the secret then is pleasing the opposing party should the 22nd Amendment be repealed.”
I shook my head. “You have to be more global than that,” I said. “You make the new Amendment throw out term limitations—which every politician suffers under now—and you make the Amendment retroactive to include politicians in power when the Amendment is proposed.”
Milan laughed—the warm, throaty sound that he always made when one of us did well. “You are devious, Culhane,” he said, biting into his pizza. “I’m sure that’s why I like you.”
ix
Paolo and I were staring at each other. Margarite stepped between us. She looked thinner, less beautiful with her hair glued to her face and her cheeks red with cold. “We can’t change it,” she said to Paolo.
Rocks clattered to the ground beside us. Lobo, Chibu and Quinlin were still working. Sven was watching us. He crossed his arms, a Norwegian god ravished by age and bad times.
“You have no right to be holier than the rest of us, Paolo,” Sven said. “You’re the one who blew the whistle. None of this would have happened without you.”
“I know that,” Paolo said. “But it wouldn’t have happened without the rest of us either.”
He was right. I had thought over the scenario night after night as I huddled in front of my woodstove in my tiny, worthless apartment in Cheyenne: Our friendships engineered by Wiggins, our relationships forged by his class. Whether it was vision or merely luck, we would never know. But we had been the perfect team to take down Milan.
Margarite: the only daughter of a skilled diplomat. Doors opened for her where the rest of us saw only walls.
Chibu: raised as a migrant farm worker, in college only by the grace of the system and a Texas teacher who had believed in him. Saved by brains and a circle of friends. The vox populi, arbiter of the simple way, speaking an underclass’s logic.
Lobo: His father’s reentry into the states had been denied the year Lobo entered college for trading illegally with countries not recognized by the United States. Trading arms.
Sven: whose father owned the largest exercise equipment firm in the Midwest. If anyone needed money, Sven knew how to find it.
Paolo: A lawyer’s son with a passion for the truth. His clerking position with a judge who was later appointed to the Supreme Court opened another door.
Quinlin: whose father was serving a life term in New York State for a crime billed as the most gruesome murder of the century. Computer digitized photographs of the “hobos” who had been found near the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963 revealed one with Quinlin’s father’s face.
Friends of friends of friends.
It all boiled down to who I knew.
x
Paolo met me in Tony’s Deli, a rundown establishment on a backwater street in the slums just inside Maryland. I was surprised at how much the neighborhood had improved. When Milan had taken office, a business would not have been able to survive here, no matter how marginally.
Inside, the place smelled of onions and beer. It had a warmth that I never would have guessed from its unpainted exterior.
It was two weeks into Milan’s new term—the one he had achieved through a slim popular vote and a large Electoral College victory—and I hadn’t seen Paolo in nearly a year.
Paolo remained in his clerking position, the traditional job held by a traditional man. He was still thin, his tailored suit hugging his frame. He carried a laptop and hugged a file to his chest. Clerking in for Justice Levin in the Supreme Court building had benefited Paolo as much as interning for Milan had benefited me.
I had already taken a scarred table far from the window. Behind the steamy glass counter, a large man in a butcher’s apron piled beef on rye for me. Paolo ordered, grabbed a pint of lager, and sat down.
“Still working to repeal the 22nd Amendment?” he asked with no preamble.
“It’s not work,” I said. “We’ve got more than enough support in both houses to ratify the change on the first vote.”
Paolo sipped his lager. The deli man brought me my sandwich, which stood higher than my palm. “Yours be coming in a minute,” he said to Paolo. Paolo nodded.
I pressed the pieces of the sandwich between my fingers and tried to take a graceful bite. A bit of mustard-covered lettuce slapped against my chin. I brushed it away.
“I hear that this version of the new Amendment lacks a clause.”
“Which one is that?” I asked around my food.
“‘This Article shall not apply to anyone holding office when the Congress proposed this Article….’“ Paolo’s smile did not reach his eyes. “No wonder you’re getting it through.”
I shrugged. “You have to know how to manipulate the system.”
“Milan is good at that.”
The deli man set down an oversized turkey and cream cheese in front of Paolo. Paolo nodded and handed him the empty bottle of lager.
His comment had made me defensive. But then, a lot made me defensive in those days. “What do you mean?”
“You know that the Rider Bill which just passed gives Milan the equivalent of permanent emergency powers.”
The rye was tart, the beef fresh and the mustard hot. I hadn’t had a sandwich that good in days. “I trust that your branch will overturn it.”
“I thought this smacked of you.” Paolo pushed his untouched sandwich aside. “Look, Devin. The justices hate that new law, but it won’t get overturned for a year, maybe more. You and Milan knew that when it got proposed. That gives him time to consolidate and make even bigger changes. Once the 22nd Amendment is repealed, he’ll be able to do whatever he wants.”
“He’s already done a lot of good,” I said. I set my sandwich down and wiped my mouth. Crumbs littered the table in front of me.
“He’s already done a lot of bad. Did you know there was a link tying him to Brownwin’s plane crash?”
“So give the information to the media. They’re supposed to start that kind of shitstorm.”
Paolo laughed. “As if that would do any good. Milan clipped their feathers last term. And besides, three days after the link contacted us, she died.”
The food twisted in my stomach. “Milan is not tied to any murders. He’s done everything above ground.”
“Everything you see maybe,” Paolo said. “But it’s time you see more.” He slid the file across the table to me, then picked up his sandwich. “Got a bag for me, Petey? I’m late for the office.”
The deli man pulled a crumpled white bag from behind the counter. “This okay?” he asked.
“Sure.” Paolo stuffed the sandwich and a few napkins inside. Then he looked at me. “Happy reading, Devin. When you’re through, leave a message with Levin’s secretary and I’ll find you.”
Then he grabbed the bag and his laptop, and left.
I opened the file and nearly jumped when I saw Wiggins’ face staring back at me. The first four pages were in his handwriting, documenting Milan’s history of corruption from his college years (when he had been a student with Wiggins) to the first ten years of his business. There was more: a history of dead associates, and embezzled funds. Plus complete analysis of the changes in the states of Montana and Wyoming since Milan took office. From Wiggins’ point of view, the pattern of corruption by the president was the same as the pattern of corruption by the young man building his business.
But it wasn’t that which stopped me. It was the pictures of Wiggins toward the back of the file: naked, too skinny, covered with bruises and lacerations, eyes open in death. He had been found on a dry reservoir bottom a week before delayed spring runoff would have covered him forever.
I closed the file and pinched the bridge of my nose. Wiggins. I owed so much to that old man. And I hadn’t contacted him since coming to D.C. because I had been hurt that Wiggins hadn’t acknowledged my appointment. I returned his one phone call but never tried to track him down when he mysteriously disappeared. Now we would never reconcile. Now we would never talk.
I took a deep breath and closed the file. Just because Wiggins was dead didn’t mean that Milan had anything to do with it.
And I would prove it.
xi
The rain stopped. Small pools of water had formed in the holes left by the rocks. The trail had become mud. The wind was gone, but I shivered anyway. Paolo had shut up after Sven’s challenge, and we had all gone back to work.
No one spoke. The clink of rocks against each other provided the only noise. Paolo had moved a few feet away from us, staring at Separation Peak.
The others had the same feverish look that I knew was on my face. We would find Milan. We would uncover him. We would make sure he was dead. We needed that. We needed to know that Milan would never haunt us again.
“This is ridiculous.” Margarite wiped her face with the back of her dirt-covered hand. Her gaze met mine. I knew nothing about her any more. The last time I had seen her had been on this bit of land, in front of this cairn. Since then, a government had fallen apart, the world suffered the largest economic crisis ever, and the United States had gone from a major power to a third-world country.
Yet all of the living we had done, all of the years we had spent apart, seemed less important than finding Milan one last time.
Lobo stopped pulling rocks off the cairn too. He peered inside. “I think you people need to see this,” he said.
xii
Friends of friends of friends.
A friend in Justice put me on the trail of a man who had seen Wiggins last. Another friend in the FBI tied Milan to the death. And a third friend, a former journalist, showed me the pattern. All of Milan’s old colleagues were dead. Most of his detractors had been silenced.
All of the Electoral College had been bribed.
Friends of friends of friends. I followed the path Paolo had sent me on like a police dog sniffing a cocaine trail. Then I flew back to Wyoming, gathered the group together and we had our first conversation.
We had our second after the New York Times massacre. Our third when the order went through to shut down the computer nets. Hundreds of people died at the hands of government troops called in to quell local emergencies. Even more disappeared. Milan was consolidating his power.
When the 35th Amendment passed, repealing the 22nd and placing no limit on Milan’s stay in office, our group met for the fourth and final time.
I never knew the details. I don’t even think Quinlin knew. His father escaped from prison about the same time as Milan’s murder, and I overheard Quinlin explain to Chibu that the real coffin had been switched with one that had a different body inside—easy to do, since no one opened the coffin after Milan had been placed in it. No one wanted to see a man with his face blown away. Margarite found the burial site—a lonely place at the top of the continental divide where she had been brutalized by a trucker and no one had come to her aid. No one had driven by—even though it was the days of long-haul traveling and easy gas. She believed it appropriate that Milan would be placed to rest there.
We arrived on the morning of May 29th to find the body had already arrived. The coffin was gone. Someone had left a body bag behind a rock. Paolo had opened it and then turned and got sick in the grass. The smell was rich and fetid, the smell of decaying flesh, something I had only encountered roadside before—as I drove past a dead and abandoned deer.
No one else looked at the corpse.
We left him inside the body bag and built the cairn around it. Then we swore to return in twenty years, thinking the world would be a better place.
Politicians should never predict the future.
Milan’s vice president—the man Brownwin had chosen and Milan had kept—turned out to be truly inept. Milan’s changes had weakened Congress and pulled power from the states, leaving most of the strength in a now-incompetent executive. When the global economic crisis hit—the one Milan had foreseen and been planning for, according to papers that turned up later—America shattered.
And we all shattered with it.
xiii
The body bag was open. The zipper’s teeth were rusted and spread out the width of a man. Someone had disturbed the grave.
We pulled rocks off the cairn with renewed intensity. Even Paolo helped. Our breathing was ragged, our fingers flayed and bleeding. We finally yanked the last of the rocks off the top of the body and stared down.
The sun had come out and illuminated the darkness inside.
The rocks had crushed most of the bones. Milan’s big hands had become skeletal fingers, identifiable only by the heavy gold watch and matching ring he wore on his right. His skull had no eye sockets, no cheekbones and no teeth, only the cranium with a bit of gray matter still lodged in the back. His silver presidential belt buckle had fallen into his pelvis, and his fake leather shoes still covered his feet.
The smell of rot was long gone, replaced by a dusty, dry scent—the smell of rocks, the smell of opportunities long gone.
My legs would no longer support me. I sat down beside the cairn. One by one the others viewed his remains and turned away, like polite mourners at a funeral. I reached inside and touched his index finger. The three bones rolled apart.
A shudder welled up inside me. I hadn’t looked the first time. I hadn’t seen that long, graceful body motionless, a bloody mess where the face should have been.
But Paolo had.
“He’s really dead,” I whispered.
Paolo turned from his position near the edge of the trail. “Yes, Devin. He’s really dead.”
The soft voice, gone forever. That laugh—silenced. The probing mind that knew how to find the answers to questions other people had only dreamed of—shattered.
By my hand.
As clearly as if I had wielded the gun myself.
Paolo’s expression softened. He walked toward me, then sat down beside me. The ground’s wetness had seeped into my jeans, making me even colder.
“You didn’t know, did you?” he asked.
I could barely breathe. My whole body was shaking. All these years I had lied to myself. All these years, I had hoped—hoped—that Milan would come back and ask the right question which would save us from ourselves.
I had loved him once—thinking him to be a minor deity.
Then I had hated him for loving power and games more than people. I had hated him—not for the deaths, but for the corruption.
I had hated him, but I had never stopped believing in him.
No wonder he had liked me. I had been just like him.
I put my face in my hands. Paolo grabbed my shoulder and squeezed. Then the grass squished as he walked away.
Paolo had been wrong. What Milan would have done didn’t matter. The only thing that had mattered was what we had done.
We had had the power to change things at our fingertips, and we had taken the coward’s way out.
I had taken the coward’s way.
I gripped the side of the cairn and stood up, staring at those bones for one last moment. They looked so frail, all that remained of a man who had once held an entire country in his grip. A man with a vision, a man with a plan.
A man who killed to get what he wanted.
Chibu, Lobo and Margarite were staring at me. Quinlin, Sven and Paolo watched me too. Waiting, as always, for me to tell them what to do. Waiting for some kind of guidance, some kind of leadership.
I had none to give them.
Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The Secret Prophesies of Nostradamus, edited by Cynthia Sternau and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1995
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Leolintang/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.