There was a device on the back door that led into the kitchen and a wire curling through the dining room into the living room, where it connected to a central apparatus. Several chairs were arrayed there in a circle, each of them holding a car battery and flanked by cans of gasoline. Shane hadn’t learned everything about explosives over the years, but she’d learned enough. If she’d opened either the front or back door, the whole house would have gone up.
She allowed herself only a single flash of grief and rage. She’d told them Lali wasn’t with her. Or maybe they didn’t care that she might walk through the door with her child. Either way, this heartbreak, she understood, would follow her forever. Yet another sorrow to tally for people she’d once loved who were now, one way or the other, gone.
She gingerly stepped over the wires that led from one incendiary to the next, until she reached the bookcase. She pulled all the volumes from the third shelf, The Stand thunking to the floor, and removed the wooden plank they’d rested on. She stripped off a piece of electrical tape and shook the wood until the blue folder slipped out with its documents. One of the folktales her mother had written for her fell to the floor: “La Leyenda de Juan Machete.” She scooped it up, returned it to the folder, and tucked it all in the back of her jeans.
Looking around, she tried to think if there was anything else she should grab. Maybe a toy of Lali’s or at least her VR. Fifteen years in a place, and all of it was utterly disposable. She did take one book from the shelf, Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, because Kate’s notes were still inside.
Buried in a field near the fishing cabin in Tonganoxie was a waterproof box and its contents of cash and passports wrapped in plastic. She would drive northeast to pick it up, and then quickly double back west. After all these years to think about where they would go if they ever had to run, and she might as well have thrown a dart at a map now. Where do you hide in a world on fire, and you never know where the next border guard might be? In every direction lay nothing but another dark and burning city. She tipped over one of the gas cans in the kitchen, turned on all four burners, and tossed a towel on top.
Back through the bathroom window, grabbing her pack, hurtling into her truck, Lali asking where they were going, what was happening.
“What’s happening, Lals,” said Shane, buckling her belt, “is we’re going to blow this popsicle stand.”
In the middle of town, all the gas stations were surrounded by students wearing particulate masks or scarves around their mouths, holding signs about the dust, the system, the atmosphere, the deluge, and singing songs in the dirty fog. The drivers honked angrily, but the kids refused to let them pass.
Luckily, Shane’s truck was electric.
T
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EVENTH
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2036–2037
When I left the office midday, I lied to Carmen, the receptionist, and said I had a gynecologist appointment. “Tell the boss I’m sorry for missing the meeting.” I acted like I was in a hurry, perhaps stressed about a test result. Sitting on the foam-green plastic seats of the Staten Island Ferry, I kept trying to read my book while my mind wandered. When I met the man now scrambling toward the presidency years ago in that Chicago bookstore, I’d been a reader. I’d always had a book on my commute on the L, but when I moved to New York, I stopped taking the train. A car picked me up every day, and I’d spend that time thumbing through investor reports or my phone’s cornucopia of distraction. Now I was trying to become a reader again, but I’d chosen a tome both dense and horrific. A Savage and Unforgivable Empire described the race to profit from the ecological crisis. Not to mention, the man I’d known for a night all those years ago dominated the ferry’s TVs.
With the election thrown to the House of Representatives and going to a vote on January 6, The Pastor had consolidated support and was promising bloodshed if he wasn’t certified and sworn in on January 20. Maria had asked if I wanted to try an antianxiety medication, probably Ativan, but what was the point? Ativan’s calming effects were not up to the task of The Pastor actually sitting in the White House. The memories of this man itched under my skin, so I went outside to breathe fresh air as the ferry churned toward the tip of Manhattan.
I was meeting Moniza Farooki at the Trade Center Memorial, one of the most heavily surveilled places in the world. When I asked her if this was safe, she sent me an encrypted text: We will never meet all your top secret 007 prerogatives.
Her bombshell investigative feature, “The Fund That Would Rule the World,” had detonated on Wall Street that summer only to be quickly buried beneath the crisis in Bangladesh, the debacle in Pakistan, and an unhinged election. The documents I’d delivered to her described Tara Fund’s investment strategy, its long positions in the Arctic, Norman Nate’s solar management endeavor, Xuritas and the private security industry, and most damningly, CLK and its efforts to subvert elections with tactics that amounted to psychological warfare. If you thought about it, Moniza had pointed out, manipulating stock prices had become de rigueur for banks and hedge funds. One needed an edge, and this was the natural evolution in a decriminalized and deregulated financial world: pay a psychometrics firm to manipulate companies, elections, CEOs, politicians, shareholders, and anyone else who got in the way of a winning bet.
“No one innovates financial crime like hedge funds,” Moniza told me. “In another age, this would’ve been the biggest scandal in the history of finance. Now it’s just another Tuesday.”
Fred seemed less upset that Tara’s dirt had spilled in the New Yorker than the article’s insinuation that Tara was mostly a bit player in this drama, “and not a particularly profitable one,” as Moniza wrote. Despite being on the cutting edge of these tactics, Tara had actually lost money for two consecutive years. While most of the Street lawyered up, Fred fell into a funk about what kind of damage this would do to the fund’s reputation, if clients would ask for redemptions after their lock-in ended.
The other issue the story highlighted had to do with the Sustainable Future Coalition and its ties to Tara’s head of investor relations, Fred Wimpel. The SFC, having won stunning victories with the defeat of climate legislation during Randall’s term and the election of its ally Loren Victor Love, wanted more. It wanted “carbon maximalism”; it wanted an administration that would not just stave off the challenge to fossil fuels but make a hard push toward new energy horizons. The sudden upswing in the fortunes of The Pastor, the article implied, were no accident, as it poured dark money into his campaign and set land mines for his competition. I’d never told Moniza about the night in Chicago. Whistleblowing was one thing, frightening intersections with vast historical forces another.
Walking up Greenwich Street, I stepped onto the vast tundra of the 9/11 Memorial and made my way to the northwest corner of Tower One’s footprint, my eyes grazing the names of the dead as I passed. I’d been in the ninth grade when these people lost their lives. I remembered getting out of gym and my friend Mandy taking me by the hand and leading me to science class where the TV was on and the towers were burning.