“Well,” Tony said. “If not a lawyer, how ’bout a cigarette?”
Wallflower finally leaned forward. She drummed four crimson fingernails, the same color as her hair, on the table in a syncopated rhythm.
“What about the Concert for the Climate?” she asked.
They don’t know, he told himself. “What about it?”
“You’re part of the executive committee overseeing it. You plan to speak.”
“So you’ve read the website. Good detective work.”
“It connects you to a wider network of POIs. What do you know about the concert?”
“I know Zeden demanded there be no meat anywhere in the greenroom, but she also wanted twenty-four bars of Ivory soap. You know what Ivory soap has in it? Animal fat. Funny, right?”
Lounging back in her chair, Agent Wallflower regarded him, unamused. She let Novotny continue.
“The attorney general is focused like a laser on bringing the eco-terrorist threat to heel.”
“Jerome Greenstreet is a hack vizier of Victor Love. He’s a Xuritas lackey looking to shred whatever’s left of the Constitution. Why would I give a fuck what he thinks?”
Novotny ignored him. “Clay Ro is the first operational actor we’ve caught in a decade. And then”—she picked up the tablet and tapped up the photo of Tony and Clay again—“we find this. Deleted from his social media in 2021. A mistake? A slipup? Tell me why we shouldn’t be interested in this, Dr. Pietrus.”
“Speaking of the Constitution,” said Tony. “Arrest me or I’m leaving. I’ll get a lawyer and you can talk to him. Or her. Don’t want to be sexist.” He glared at Novotny.
Wallflower stood and knocked on the door. “Tony, you’re being held as an unlawful enemy combatant under Statute 1034 of PRIRA.” A man opened it, and Wallflower and Novotny filed out, looking back at him pitiably. “There’s no writ of habeas under 1034. No right to a lawyer.”
“Get cozy,” said Novotny.
The door closed and locked again. Tony went to it anyway and tried the handle. He banged on the tan surface. “Goddamnit, I want a lawyer!” he shouted. “You can’t hold me here! You can’t do this!” He carried on like this for five minutes, hoping it would at least summon somebody to calm him. But when it didn’t, he quit. No point in wasting energy. He was hungry, and he had to pee. He waited for as long as he could but once he’d thought of the urge, it acted on his prostate. He peed into the mother-in-law’s tongue and hoped they’d smell it when they came back. He paced the room for an hour. He hadn’t thought about this in a long time, but there it was: the clathrates cracking in the ocean’s darkest offshore corners, the methane molecule slipping up through the lightless depths. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t focus.
By the time Agents Wallflower and Novotny returned it was late in the day and the west-facing window was awash in slanted orange rays. They sat in the opposite chairs so that Novotny faced him and Wallflower flanked him. As Novotny spoke, the vertical blinds formed a triptych of shadows on her face.
“What do you know about Clay Ro?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“What is your knowledge of or affiliation with the group calling itself 6Degrees?”
“Dumb anarchist punks spanking their monkeys. Now charge me or let me go.”
Wallflower removed three pieces of paper from a folder. She spread them on the table in front of Tony. Crammed with legal jargon, statutes demarcated by roman numeral, he didn’t bother with more than a glance.
“You have three choices here,” said Novotny. “The first is to cooperate. Give us information on the Weathermen. You’ll be charged with lying to federal law enforcement, and in all likelihood only receive probation. Option two: You clam up. You force our hand.” She leaned over to tap the middle sheet. “You’ll be charged with criminal conspiracy with a terrorist enhancement. Minimum sentence twenty years, but we’ll push for the maximum. Next stop, a prison cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and a communications management unit. You’ll be in a cell twenty-three hours a day. You’ll have nothing to do but stare at a wall for the rest of your life. You will not see your family. You will effectively vanish.”
Tony crossed his arms against his chest and kept his eyes steady on the table. A feeling had risen as though these two had packed him into a suitcase and were smuggling him across the border of reality itself. None of this made sense. This was so irregular, so against the protocol of how disciplined federal law enforcement was supposed to function, that he still wondered if it was all an enormous bluff.
“This third option.” Her fingernail moved to tap it twice. “These are charges of criminal conspiracy against Holly Pietrus.”
“Fuck you,” Tony snarled.
“A web of communications via text and email tie her directly to you, and by association to Clay Ro and the Weathermen.”
“Yeah, no shit, she’s my fucking daughter, you cunt.”
Novotny smirked. Tony had delivered the reaction she wanted, and he immediately scolded himself. He needed to not panic. He needed to show that their intimidation wouldn’t work.
“We leave you alone for five minutes, and you run to call her. She’s worked closely with Kate Morris and has ties to numerous other environmental activists, many of whom have expressed sympathy for the Weathermen on social media. Would you like me to read some of these activists’ reactions to the destruction of pipelines, coal plants, and refineries in the past ten years? We have files and files of their cheerleading.”
“This is all horseshit,” said Tony.
“We can build a case against her brick by brick,” Novotny continued. “If we get a terrorism enhancement, I’m talking upward of thirty-five years. She’ll be an old woman when she gets out.”
“Get fucked.”
“All you have to do is cooperate and the rest of this goes away.” She pushed the first piece of paper toward him.
“There’s nothing to cooperate about because I didn’t do anything, and I don’t know anything.”
Novotny and Wallflower looked like they more or less expected this.
“This first option is going once, going twice,” said Novotny as Wallflower stood. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone, you understand? And believe me, things will only get harder from here. We are going to find these people one way or the other. President Love and AG Greenstreet are taking the gloves off.”
“So am I under arrest? If so, I want a goddamn lawyer!” He smashed his fist against the table.
“It doesn’t work that way anymore,” said Wallflower, and then they both left and locked the door behind them.
Tony sat in the plush conference room chair for a long time as dusk descended. In the parking lot, government employees and contractors were filtering out, heading home after a long day. The window was sealed shut into the wall. He wondered what they would do if he banged his fists against the glass and screamed for help. His only living company, the mother-in-law’s tongue, respirated silently. He checked the dusty clock above the television, and only now did he realize it was the wrong hour. Had to be.
He tried not to watch the time, but he couldn’t help it. He was starving and needed to pee again. He sat in silence as the sky darkened. In an hour he would be in a windowless truck, in two more on a plane. In a day he’d be somewhere hot, a desert where they tried to compensate by filling the facility with bone-chilling AC. Then he would be in a room with nothing but a bunk, a toilet, and a sink. It would be a week before fear turned to panic, a month before panic turned to despair. Though he didn’t know it then, it would be almost a year and a half before he saw a sunset again.
T
HE
Y
EARS OF
R
AIN AND
T
HUNDER:
P
ART
IV
2034
The train lurched to a stop at Fiftieth Street, and I was dragged from the unsettling headlines of the day back to the immediate moment. Having lied to Kate, I’d been on edge since arriving in New York and on the subway made the mistake of turning to the news for distraction. Two children shot dead in Dallas, and the city had exploded. Jason Mollier and Lamarr Daniels were stuffing candy in their pants at a convenience store and the security guard pulled a gun. This wasn’t 2020 or 2024. People weren’t asking for justice anymore, they would go get it themselves, and within days, Dallas was on fire. The police and Texas National Guard cleared the city block by block, guarded by low-hovering drones with obsidian-black panels for faces, firing tear gas and rubber bullets while shielding police from bricks, rocks, and bottles hurled by the city’s enraged residents. Torched supermarkets and police barricades had left whole neighborhoods without anything to eat. I’d seen protests throughout New York City that morning, but the NYPD was taking no chances, kettling protestors. Everything had remained peaceful so far, but cities around the country were in the same tense standoff. Just another spasm in a never-ending American saga. I spotted a lone Black man on the street corner holding a cardboard sign: MY FUCKS BUDGET ALL FULL UP. I CAN GIVE NO MORE. KILL NYPD.