of the line of sight and stopped breathing. A thin white blade pierced the darkness, lengthened, strengthened, grew into an arc of incandescence that swept toward them, the area of illumination increasing as a familiar male voice asked the age-old question:
“So – how many mercenaries does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“As many as we fucking say so,” John said, hustling Jane through the door and into a major league HVAC room, full of pumps, pipes, gauges, and compressors. “Oh wait – is this a no-bid government contract?”
“If you have to ask,” Jane blew Vinnie an air-kiss, “you probably can’t afford it.”
Having ascertained that there were no mercks to deal with and no signs of pursuit, Vinnie slammed the door and ran to catch up. “I was gonna say ‘Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out.’ But looks like you guys beat me to it.”
“But we’re still looking at a forecast of Hiroshima with a chance of Armageddon. Now,” John stressed, taking the grey-painted aluminum stairs two at a time. He threw open the door at the top and found himself facing - a bright blue curtain spangled with glittering stars. Vinnie shoved the handgun he was carrying inside his white exterminator’s jumpsuit and reached around Jane to pick up a silver insecticide sprayer.
“Got cooties?” he teased.
“Oh look,” Jane retorted, as they drew back the curtain and stepped into a fabulous toy store, “if it isn’t Peter Pan.”
“Uh – kids? We need to get lost before we get found. Or worse,” John said, ejecting the clip from the girl gun and clearing the chamber. A bin of plastic Uzis provided the perfect hiding place. Not to be outdone, Jane gifted the M4 to a larger than life-sized stuffed flamingo.
“WHAT you all think you doing?” Emerging from an aisle strewn with orange CAUTION signs, where he had been quietly mopping the floor, the elderly and slightly deaf proprietor accosted them. “Trompin’ in here on my nice clean floors. Can’t you read?” He pointed to a sign on the door that led out to the Crystal City underground mall: PUPPET HEAVEN: CLOSED FOR THE INAUGURATION. The metro entrance was visible from where they stood. “You go on out of here. Get along now.”
They departed with alacrity, only to find themselves poised at the edge of what seemed to be a mad rush to the metro. In a one-way torrent of motion, they stood apart and alone. Well, almost. Souvenir hawkers prowled up and down the banks of the DC-bound multitude. To them, our trio stuck out like toothsome lambs separated from the tougher, hard-bitten flock. They crowded in. They besieged.
“Baby, you best cover them pretty legs. It’s cold outside.”
“You got to have a t-shirt. Something to show the grandchildren.”
Money and goods were hurriedly exchanged and the plague of hawkers moved on.
“I gotta call the girls, who are still looking for you in all the wrong places. You gotta disappear,” Vinnie said, eying the oversupply of cops in attendance.
“Like a coupla needles in a haystack,” John promised, bumping fists with his pal, in keeping with the man code: ‘Thou shalt not publicly display affection toward another brother.’ PS - Not even when he has just saved your raggedy ass. PPS - Especially if the wife or gf is present. John cleared his throat. “We owe ya big time, bro.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vinnie said, walking backward. “Thanksgiving. Your place. It’s all about the stuffing. I’ll send you mom’s recipe.”
“You got it. Right, sweetheart?”
“Mom’s recipe,” Jane repeated, waving gaily. “Can’t wait. Of course,” she confided to John as they bought their passes and headed down the escalator to queue for the next DC-bound train, “ you and I both know I can’t cook worth shit.”
“To say nothing of our overall kitchen deficit. But I’ve been known to find my way around a turkey. What say we jump off that bridge when we come to it?’
“Works for me,” Jane said charitably, trying to figure out how to get a pair of sweats on over her boots. “Let him dream.”
She had to hurry. The train was pulling in. Since it was almost noon and the official ceremony had already begun, they were able to squeeze aboard the very last car. As they shuffled to the rear, John raised his head. He heard a familiar violin riff. The Verve? On Muzak? But no. Just down the platform two buskers had set up shop with the aforementioned violin and a cello. Their music soared over the incoherent crackling of the announcement system. John recognized the opening bars of Bittersweet Symphony:
It's a bittersweet symphony, this life
Trying to make ends meet
You're a slave to money then you die
“I can change, I can’t change, I can change,” Jane sang. Then the doors slid shut and the train moved on. John and Jane squeezed onto the bench seat at the very back and looked around the car. It was filled with people from every age group and almost every walk of life. Grandmothers sat with strippers, college kids listened to war vets, street punks made room for young families. John spied the little girl from the Pentagon, still clutching her origami dove. It was one of those rare moments of mass happiness. Everyone was smiling, kind, some shade of euphoric - about what you’d expect from a train full of people bound for the afterlife. Despite their ‘Got Hope?’ and ‘Change We Can Believe In’ hoodies, John and Jane presented the sole somber note, a grave and slightly blood-stained contrast to the spirit of carnival around them. As if catching their mood, the little girl looked up at her mother.
“We’re too late, aren’t we?”
Taking her hand and squeezing it, her mother smiled down reassuringly, “Oh now, you never know. Maybe not.”
John laced Jane’s fingers between his own as the train broke out of the underground into the light, flashing over the Potomac toward DC just as the ring of explosives beneath Crystal City detonated. The earth and the train moved as one for an instant. The passengers swayed against one another, knocked together, landed in strange laps, but came up laughing like kids on a roller coaster. Behind them, out the rear windows – and unobserved since all eyes were directed forward in joy and anticipation – the Crystal City skyline seemed to shudder and heave. Then the train was in the city proper and vanishing in a sea of people. Millions of people, more than the city had ever seen at any one time. Millions of people, who had journeyed thousands of miles from hundreds of places all across America to witness the crowning moment of a history they had helped to make on a single November day. And out of those happy innocent well-meaning millions exactly two had the slightest inkling that nothing was as it seemed, that the world was far different than they imagined it to be, that their future had in fact been determined elsewhere - incrementally, by a relative few, over the course of half a century - and that it awaited them now with jaws wide open.
After – Army of Me
Outside the portholes of the Casablanca, the day was sharp and cold as a Viking sword. The sloop was anchored in Reykjavik’s Old Harbor, tucked in between the whale-hunting and the whale-watching vessels. Snug and cozy down below, Jane and John were in conference via Skype with the ever-faithful Gerald.
“Good news, you two.” On the computer screen, Gerald could be seen adding a splash of Irish whiskey to his morning coffee. “Your loans failed to materialize BUT – for reasons I am totally unable to explain or comprehend - there has been a multiplication of the ones and zeroes in your joint account and as a result I can now pronounce you financially solvent.”
“Till death do us liquidate?” John quipped.
“Well at any rate till the next round of banking crises. Which I for one expect at any moment. But I have to ask you, how did you do it? I’m just dying to know.”
“Interesting turn of phrase,” John observed.
“We could tell you,” Jane said, “but you wouldn’t believe it.”
“We could tell you,” John said, “but if you did believe it, we’d have to kill you.”
“Point taken, dear boy,” Gerald waved his hand in surrender.
“I worked for Enron in a previous life, so I can well imagine. Is it also taboo to ask what you will be doing with yourselves?”
“Off with his head! Off with his head!” a fourth voice joined the conversation as a brightly colored parrot landed on John’s shoulder.
“Louie!” Jane said, admonishingly.
“Ah! I see, said the blind man. Going in for corrections are you?”
“Strictly upper end,” Jane insisted.
“For the top 1%,” John added.
“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. I follow you. Sounds like a brave new market. I can’t think of any competition you’re likely to encounter. On the other hand I can’t begin to imagine how you’ll go about building your brand.”
“Well, we’re going to keep the start-up pretty lean. Mostly word-of-mouth. Plain black business card, white letters –“
“Cream, angel,” Jane inserted.
“With our names and the name of the company - ‘Elite Solutions.’”
“And,” Jane added brightly, “we do have a logo…”
And so they did. An updated pirate emblem. Sort of a Jolly Roger-U.N. mashup, with a Guy Fawkes mask set against the skeletal outlines of a gridded globe. No cross-bones. A prototype was flapping in the wind at the very top of their main-mast, above the American and Icelandic flags dictated by custom and the law of the sea. The black and white cloth had attracted the attention of a