“What happened with you and Kate?” Rekia asked.
The waiter chose that moment to come take our orders, which gave me time to think. I had to be careful.
“We sat for an interview,” I said when he left. “Our lawyers were there. That’s it. Nothing came of it.”
We’d driven up to the Portland field office the month before and spent most of the time sitting in colorless rooms like we were in a doctor’s office. When they interviewed us together, Kate did her best to bore them with drivel.
“ ‘The whole point of Climate X is to build an antidote to the alienation and desperation people sometimes don’t even know they’re feeling,” she told the agents. “That you guys are probably feeling. Politics has become entirely about individual self-expression instead of collective revolution, and I’ve been trying to push back against self-referentialism and sanctimony and dead-end radicalism. We want to reorient people around a shared vision.’ ”
“ ‘Right,’ ” said a supremely uninterested special agent named Chen.
“ ‘But that’s why it’s so utterly unreasonable that I or anyone in FBF ever worked with 6Degrees. Our missions are entirely dissimilar. They want insurrection against the state. Like the stupid children they are.’ ”
“ ‘They’re awfully crafty for children,’ ” said Agent Chen. To which Kate just shrugged.
“ ‘It’s your surveillance state, dude.’ ”
In the end, it was less Kate’s mesmerizingly abstruse blather that got us out of there after only six hours than the fact that none of the captured operatives linked to the Weathermen had any connection to A Fierce Blue Fire. According to a New Yorker exposé by my old friend Moniza, the guy caught trying to get back into the States from Canada, Clay Ro, had never so much as visited the FBF website.
Rekia slid her arms over her breasts now, watching me. “The FBI’s interviewed everyone on staff. They’ve subpoenaed emails, audited our financials. They’re tracing every last dollar we’ve ever spent.”
“What do your lawyers say?”
“They say cooperate.”
I breathed slowly through my nostrils and nodded.
“According to my contacts, Love is trying to merge his own security empire with the normative functions of the DOJ, FBI, Homeland, CIA,” said Tom. “Moving quick but not too quick.”
“It seems like, for the most part, they’re sticking to low-profile activists,” said Rekia. “No one who’ll command too much outrage—with the exception of Holly’s dad. We think he’s a test case. They put out that picture of him with the Weathermen op Ro to sell it.”
“Is there any other evidence against him?” I asked.
“Of course there’s not,” Holly snapped, and I didn’t blame her. “This guy Ro had a picture taken with him at a speech back when my dad was touring campuses with his book.”
“Right. Obviously.” It had fallen out of my mouth, and I regretted it. In Moniza’s article, she’d described how Clay Alvin Ro had tried to erase the young activist version of himself before getting his plumbing license and slipping into a life of anonymity. This gave ample clue as to how the Weathermen operated, while also clarifying just how blindly and illegally the government was pursuing them. From my brief interaction with Pietrus in VR, he seemed about as likely a terrorist operative as my mother. I asked Holly, “How are you doing? You and your family?”
“We’re freaking out is what we’re doing. I’ve never— None of us have any experience with this, and it’s been a total hall of mirrors. My uncle hired serious criminal lawyers, and even they seem unnerved.”
“And you still don’t know where he’s being held?”
“No.” Her brow furrowed in anguish. I was afraid she would burst into tears. “I got this call from him, and he said he was in Bridgeport, and that’s the last I’ve heard about him or from him.”
“Matt, that’s why we wanted to talk to you,” said Coral. “We’re cooperating, and you guys should too. Our aim is to fight this in the daylight. We don’t want to give them an excuse right now.”
I forced myself not to look at Tom. He’d promised he wouldn’t say a word, and I still believed he hadn’t. “What other choice do we have?”
Coral exchanged another look with Rekia.
“Matt, what are you, Kate, and Liza up to with the concert?” they asked.
I laughed as if it was as silly as it sounded. “Who even knows? This thing has been a logistical nightmare. Pop-star egos—Jesus.”
“Oh right,” said Holly, coming back to the conversation. Her lips were tight with anger. “Your concert. We’re out here getting death threats, getting harassed by every Jen Braden fanatic, harassed by the FBI, my dad’s in some black-site prison.” Her voice rose. “And you and Kate are hanging out with Zeden, planning a singalong on the National Mall like it’s 2007. Concert for the Climate? Gosh, why didn’t anyone think of that before?”
Our food came, and we all sat awkwardly while the waiter set the plates in front of us. No one touched their meals after he left.
“Kate is trying to keep the pressure on for actual binding emissions reductions,” I said as evenly as I could manage.
“Good luck,” said Holly. “Aamanzaihou is on her own island now. All our other allies have lost elections or are lining up behind the new so-called climate security czar, Dahms.”
“What’s your read on him?” I asked, trying to calm the conversation because she was so upset.
Coral answered instead. “He’s an albedo modification advocate. Geoengineer our way out of this.”
“Ready the monster, Igor.”
“Exactly.”
Coral nodded to Holly. “I am interested in your answer, Matt. The concert. Why is Kate doing this?”
Carefully, I said, “I’m not sure what you guys mean.”
Coral shook their head. “It’s out of character. It’s the kind of thing she would’ve mocked when I first met her. Pointless performative politics.”
I hated lying. I’d never been good at it. I tried to make my dread sound like exasperation. “She’s just working with what she’s got at hand.”
Coral nodded, but clearly this did not satisfy. Holly had picked up her fork but had not taken a bite. Now she set it back down.
“I’m sorry, I know we just met, but— Kate spends ten years building this groundbreaking political movement, then embarrasses herself beyond all reason, and her major idea is to get a few pop stars and rock-and-roll skeletons to play a concert? I can’t even tell you— I idolized Kate Morris. Kate Morris was the reason I came to work here. And now this is all so, so— I don’t know, so mortifying! Everything everyone said about her—that she’s toxic, a starfucker, a phony—it’s like she’s admitting it was all true.”
Her voice cracked, and she sounded more upset about Kate than her own father’s imprisonment. No one spoke for a moment. Finally, Holly stood.
“I apologize, guys. I’m just trying to swallow a lot of terror right now.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “And I don’t feel much like eating. It was nice meeting you, Matt.” Before leaving our private room, Holly stopped and turned back to me. “Kate needs to know how badly she’s wasting this moment. It won’t be long before we’re all disappearing into black sites.”
My nerves were already so shot, and I almost exploded: Oh, and what are you doing? Meeting with the SFC? Taking money from every greenwashed corporation this side of Exxon? Fuck you, you child.
Instead, I waited until she left.
“Hey.” I looked at my three old comrades. “I want you guys to know—and Kate would want you to know too—neither of us bears any ill will toward you. About how things went down. You all were our friends, and you’re still our friends. She would want you to know how highly she thinks of you, and even if our paths have diverged, that doesn’t mean we’re not still in this fight together.”