“The White House sent them here,” another council member declared. “Let the White House feed them.”
“Wait a minute,” Peter said at last. “That’s easy to say. But it’s us who have to deal with them. I don’t know if you heard, but the exiles rioted in Missouri last week. I don’t want that here.”
“Let ’em riot. The Special Service Units can handle ’em.”
“Not in my county,” Peter said firmly.
And so it went. Peter thought that whoever said “divide and conquer” damn sure knew what he was talking about.
As the meeting broke up, the men headed for the doorway amid a humming chorus of gripes, groans, and unresolved complaints. Peter Bradford, having heard enough of his neighbors’ sorrows for one morning, hoped to slip away without being buttonholed. But as he was halfway down the corridor, Ward Milford motioned him over. The deputy sheriff looked dramatically pale and tenser than he had seemed at breakfast that same morning.
“What is it, Ward?” asked Peter, with ill-concealed impatience.
“New Exile list just came in.”
“Can’t it wait? I really need to get out of here.”
“No, Peter. It can’t wait. Read it.” He thrust the computer printout into Peter’s hands and scrutinized his expression as the county administrator scanned the list of unfamiliar names. For a moment he had the distracted look of a busy man whose time is being wasted. Then he winced.
“Devin.”
“Yes. My brother Devin’s coming home.”
Peter paused and his gaze seemed to look back twenty, thirty years. “Your brother; my friend. You’d think we’d be a little glad. Know what I mean?”
“You get used to things the way they are,” said Ward. Not too many bumps. “Everything in its place.”
“And some people’s place is to be gone.”
“We’ll get used to him not gone just like we got used to him gone.”
“Maybe not so easily,” said Peter. “I love your brother, and he’s trouble.”
“I love my brother, too. And I hate myself for half wishing that he wasn’t coming back.”
Peter Bradford walked out into the daylight alone. His mind reeled and the sudden glare stung his eyes. He wrestled with his conflicting emotions about Devin Milford’s imminent return. He’d worked so hard to establish order, to keep the peace, to maintain some semblance of normalcy among his neighbors. Yet he knew all that he’d achieved was fragile. He knew the unrest and the anger that remained, just waiting to be set off. He trembled to acknowledge that maybe he himself yearned secretly for the explosion. It was the kind of daydream he could not allow himself.
Suddenly, Peter was seized by an urgent longing to talk to and be comforted by his wife. Walking quickly across the town square, seeing nothing along the way, he hurried to the state-owned grocery store where he knew Amanda would be shopping. Amanda, as the wife of the county administrator, didn’t need to stand in line with the others as they waited for their scanty rations of flour, vegetables, and sometimes meat. She chose to. The thought of special treatment was repellent to her.
“Peter,” she said cheerfully as he moved toward her, “what brings you—”
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Come across to the park with me.”
Startled by his urgency, Amanda Bradford hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder and thought of asking the woman in back of her to hold her place in line. But no, even that might be perceived as special privilege, might create resentment. She silently abandoned the queue and followed her husband.
Peter Bradford sat down on the edge of a battered bench, oblivious to the cold. His wife sat beside him. She reached for both his hands and tried to read his agitated face. “It’s Devin…
Amanda’s first thought was that Devin Milford was dead. Her breath caught.
“He’s,coming home.”
“Thank God.” Amanda caught the fleeting wounded look on her husband’s face, but it was already too late to explain. “When did he get out of the hospital?”
“He wasn’t in the hospital, Amanda. He was in a prison camp.”
“All this time?”
Peter nodded.
“Those bastards.”
Peter moved toward her, then thought better of it, staying where he was, a little hurt, perhaps half angry. “Yeah. Well, I thought you’d like to know.”
“Oh, Peter,” she said. “Don’t. I hate what happened to Devin, and I’m glad he’s going to be all right— whatever that means—but we’ve been married twenty years, for God’s sake.”
She took his arm, and he looked down at her sadly. “That’s the way it is when you’re second choice to a hero.”
“He wasn’t a hero when I married you—I’m not sure he’s a hero now.” She smiled. “I think you’re a hero. You’ve held your family together and this county too. I don’t love Devin Milford. I don’t even know who he is anymore. I love you.” Her eyes glistened. “For such a smart man, you can really be dumb sometimes.”
She kissed him and he smiled almost bashfully. “And to think I risked my place in line for this,” she kidded, feeling anew about Peter the way she always wanted to feel about him.
Chapter 4
For two hours they were shown “indoctrination” films: crude, committee-approved rhetoric about the administrative areas and the PPP and all the other glories of the Transition. Finally there was a lecture, warning the almost-ex-prisoners to be Good Citizens, to be Positive and Patriotic, lest they once again be declared “antisocial” and in need of “reeducation.” Devin nearly shuddered at the prospect.
After the films, Devin and forty or fifty others were herded into a converted barracks that now contained a dozen green metal desks and twenty or so file cabinets left over from World War II. Each desk had a clerk behind it, checking records. In time, Devin was called before a thin and severe young woman who studied his file with a glazed expression.
“Your records were left in the truck from Fort Davis. That’s why you had to wait so long.” She spoke with a slow Texas drawl, her large brown eyes focusing on his file. “Are you somebody important?”
“No.”
“Well, you got a red tag on your file and that usually means something important.” She looked at the file again. “Huh. It says here you ran for president in 1992.” She scrutinized Devin’s face. “Is that a joke?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “You must’ve really screwed up. Were you a fascist?”
“No.”
“It says here you were in a mental hospital too.”
“No. They sent me to Fort Davis.”
“Well, the file’s probably screwed up. Most of them are. But if it’s peachy with you, it’s peachy with me.” She regarded him again and smiled. “The prison record’s what counts anyway and yours looks real good. You have to go through orientation and delousing and then the magistrate’ll see you.”
“What? We were cleaned at the camp.”
The interview had ended. The young clerk closed Devin’s file. “Next.”
When Andrei’s jet Sanded at Dulles Airport, west of Washington, a military helicopter was waiting to whisk him westward to the command headquarters of General Petya Samanov, an “adviser” to the American government. In fact, Samanov was the single most powerful man in the country.
His estate, Birdsong, was built in the 1790s by one of Virginia’s first governors. The red-brick mansion sat atop a low hill, circled by oaks and lush farmland composed of gently rolling fields where generations of Virginia’s finest, fleetest horses had grazed. A bronze plaque by the front door boasted that Washington,