An Unlikely Phoenix Read online

  “Why?”

  “People know about these attacks. They’re understandably outrage. You survived. People will listen to what you have to say. It’s an opportunity for important messaging.”

  “What kind of messaging?”

  “The truth, of course,” Potulny said. “That a valiant man was assassinated by terrorists. That we should remember that, and more importantly, him.”

  Ryan hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

  Potulny nodded triumphantly. “Good. Good to finally have you on board.”

  Chapter 6

  It is the particular hubris of the historian to look back upon the events of the past and point to the singular event, that glaring catalyst, which sparked the descent into war and madness, and proclaim it obvious. Such proclamations are clear only in retrospect, however. While the significance of an event may be evident to many contemporarily, its true impact can only be measured with the passage of time. In other words, just as it is patently unfair to judge men and women outside of the context of the period in which they live, it is likewise unfair to judge their contemporary understanding of events against the greater understanding we have achieved with fifty years of perspective. Even more to the point, we know how things turned out, and those in the midst of these happenings lack that luxury. Simply put, a mystery that seems simple once solved was still difficult while being investigated.

  And yet, is it hard to imagine the polarized reaction to the American Immigration Act of 2029? Is it entirely unfair to wonder how many people suspected that this would be the match that lit the tinder? Even a generous view of the contemporary man or woman of the 2020s would suggest not.

  Contemporary apologist Calvin Pickard’s rhetoric highlighted one extreme view of the issue. “Why should the white males of today pay for the purported sins of their fathers? Whatever happened, this generation of sons bear no responsibility for the deeds of their forbearers, whether those deeds were fair or foul.”

  Activist Emily Mellon’s response, however, was difficult to argue against, even in the suppressed environment in which she operated. “As long as the sons continue to enjoy the bountiful fruits of the fathers’ sins,” she wrote, “they remain responsible.”

  — From An Unlikely Phoenix by Reed Ambrose

  “DID YOU KNOW?” HE ASKED Nathalie, and her eyes told him the answer.

  It was the second time Nathalie had kept something from him. He didn’t like it, and told her so.

  “Je suis désolé,” she apologized quietly. “But it is like I told you before. All I cared about was you getting better. The doctor said that anything that upset you was counter-productive to that goal. And you were already devastated about Marcus.”

  “They murdered him!” Ryan blurted out.

  “I know this.”

  “Over politics,” he went on, shaking his head in anger and disbelief. “They didn’t even know us. Didn’t know Marcus’ politics. Didn’t know mine. Do you know how much shit I took for not saluting at roll call? For not joining the party?”

  “I do. I’ve been here all along, remember?”

  Ryan hesitated, realizing how he sounded. Nathalie’s career had suffered for her convictions, too. Working at The Archway was a far cry from the St. Louis Dispatch, and while the journalists had never been asked to physically salute the President, more subtle means of compliance were required. And much like he had refused to salute and instead looked downward, and been labelled a shamer, Nathalie’s fact-based reporting and incisive manner of questioning the status quo ultimately led to her being among the first victims of the newspaper’s ‘restructuring.’

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you have.”

  “Our country is slipping away from us,” she said. “It has been for a long while, I think, but now momentum is gaining. There is division everywhere, and no one seems to listen to anyone else.”

  Ryan smiled then, despite it all. He loved her fight, her brutal honesty. “You sure you still want to become a citizen, with everything going to hell?”

  “It saddens me,” she answered, not returning his smile. “You were born here, Melina was born here, but I chose America to be my home. She is becoming something different than the nation I fell in love with many years ago.”

  “Maybe we should leave,” Ryan suggested.

  “Where would we go?”

  “Greece? You still have your citizenship there. I could apply. We could start over. If Greece is unsafe, perhaps Britain, or –”

  “What about Senegal?” Nathalie asked quietly. “You don’t even consider the land of my birth?”

  Ryan hesitated. Senegal had once been a stable democracy in Africa, but in recent years had been usurped by a military junta. All foreign assets were seized and nationalized. People of his complexion were not particularly welcome.

  Nathalie took note of his hesitation, and his silence. “Ah, yes. I have forgotten. Senegal is one of those places the President so wisely labeled as shithole countries. Why would we go there?”

  “Nat—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I will not leave my home, mon amour. I will not let them take it from me. From us.”

  Ryan lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. His mind flitted over the events of the past twelve years, and he sighed. “Maybe they already have.”

  “Do not say such things. That is how they will win, if enough people believe this.”

  Ryan let it go. She wouldn’t surrender, he knew. At least, not when there seemed to be a chance. It simply wasn’t in her to give up, and arguing about it here would accomplish nothing.

  “All I can control,” he said, “is getting better, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed.

  He nodded at that. “Right,” he repeated.

  RYAN STARED DOWN AT the piece of paper in front of him. Potulny and Gleeson waited while he read it. When he finally finished, he looked up at the two of them. “I can’t say this,” he said simply.

  Potulny frowned. “Why not?”

  “It’s party propaganda.”

  “Be careful, Officer.”

  Ryan shrugged. “That’s how I see it. You asked me to condemn the terrorists that killed Marcus. I’m willing to do that. But I’m not going to spout all of this...party line agenda.”

  “What is your objection?”

  “Almost all of it. It reads like a party recruiting pamphlet.”

  “It reads like truth,” Potulny insisted.

  “Christ, you even have me calling Marcus a party member.” He shook his head. “I can’t lie about his life, or his death. I loved him too much for that.”

  Without a word, Potulny opened a folder and removed a piece of paper. He slide it across to Ryan. Ryan looked down at it, then did a double take.

  “What’s this?”

  “What does it look like?”

  Ryan peered more closely. It was a membership application for the New American Party. The blanks were filled in with Marcus Washington’s bold, firm script.

  “No,” Ryan said. “I don’t believe it. He wasn’t a party member.”

  “Associate member, technically,” Potulny said, taking the application back and replacing it in the file. “His membership was still pending when he was murdered.”

  Ryan stared back at Potulny, his surprise not fading. He tried to imagine Marcus embracing the ideals of the NAP, and it didn’t make sense to him. If he hadn’t seen his partner’s handwriting on the form, he would have refused to believe it at all.

  “So you were wrong about your partner’s party membership,” Potulny pointed out. “So can you allow that you may very well be wrong about other parts of the statement that you object to?”

  “No,” Ryan said, automatically. His mind was whirring. He wished he could have asked Marcus about this, wished he could have understood. But even as this thought occurred to him, so did another. Marcus already had one thing going against him – his skin color. Maybe he had joined in name only, just to take so
me of the pressure off or remove one more obstacle.

  It didn’t matter. He knew who Marcus was and what he truly stood for, and it wasn’t the New American Party. He knew that from a thousand conversations, and any reason the man might have had for filling out that form didn’t change that knowledge. The last thing he was going to do was let his partner get used as propaganda for the party.

  “I think we’re done here,” he said, his voice low and grim.

  AFTER THAT, POTULNY and Gleeson stopped hounding him about the statement. Their meetings became less frequent, and seemed to focus more and more on any mistakes he might have made during the ambush. He tried to ignore the potential consequences of a negative outcome of the investigation, and worked with Andrew every day, sweating and pushing through pain. As the days passed, he switched out the walker for a cane, and abandoned the parallel walking bars altogether. Slowly, he reached a point where he could take several steps without any support, and walk from the bed to the bathroom only using the cane.

  “You’re doing well,” Andrew told him.

  “I’ve got a great coach.”

  “Nah, you’re a hard worker. That makes a big difference.”

  Ryan developed a strong sense of trust in the physical therapist, and while they kept their conversations careful, he got the sense that the two of them had similar beliefs. But they stayed away from volatile subjects, including politics and policing, and how Ryan was injured, even when they were alone. One of the things he’d learned in his police career was to believe the adage that “there’s always a camera.” Besides, he wouldn’t have put it past Gleeson or Potulny to actively spy on his therapy sessions.

  Thinking that made him feel overly paranoid, though he’d come to view a healthy paranoia as a self-preservation strategy. Still, the sessions with Gleeson slowed down, and though they were always at least mildly contentious, he felt like the investigator had backed off. Ryan welcomed this development.

  He and Andrew were working on a weight machine the day the President made his immigration policy speech. Ryan had known there was something coming ever since Potulny had taken delight in telling him about the naturalization requirements shifting from seven to twelve years. But he’d forgotten the speech was scheduled for that day.

  The White House spokesman was on screen when he looked up, moving his lips, but there was no sound. Closed captioning followed along, advising that the President would be out shortly to deliver a momentous policy change.

  “Turn it up,” Ryan suggested.

  Andrew glanced at the television. “We got one more set to do.”

  “Turn it up,” Ryan repeated. “We’ll watch the speech, and I’ll give you two sets.”

  Andrew frowned, but didn’t argue. He found the remote and turned up the volume.

  “—will be no questions at the conclusion of his speech, though there will be a private consultation at the White House with members of the Majority party in order to plan how to properly proceed with the implementation of the President’s policy.”

  The spokesman adjusted his glasses, then absently touched his earpiece. “And I’m now being advised...yes, of course...ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America.”

  A recording of Hail to the Chief played as the forty-fifth President strode to the lectern. The trademark swoop of his hair was impossibly blonde, not showing any sign of graying, even after three complete terms of office. Ryan remembered seeing the before and after pictures of previous office holders and shaking his head at how much the responsibility of the position had aged each of them. Somehow, this president seemed immune to this phenomenon.

  Once at the microphone, the president took a moment to make eye contact with a couple of his favorites, even smiling briefly and pointing at one. Then he removed a sheaf of notecards from his interior jacket pocket and placed them on the lectern, before staring meaningfully into the camera. His expression grew serious and sank into what Ryan always felt looked more like a scowl than the presidential affect he was sure the chief executive was going for.

  “My fellow Americans,” the President began, and then stopped. “My. Fellow. Americans. What does that even mean?” He turned up his palms and pantomimed a theatrical shrug. “I mean, past presidents have been starting important speeches with that phrase for centuries, but has anyone ever stopped to really ask what it means? What it means to be American?”

  Something small clenched in Ryan’s stomach, and he had a vague premonition of something dark.

  “I’ll tell you what, folks. No president in the history of our country, of any country, has been faced with such difficult times when it comes to answering that question. Or running a nation, for that matter. You have no idea.” His hand swept across the top of podium dismissively. “No one really does. I mean, sure, there are still two former presidents alive who might have an inkling.” The president held his thumb and forefinger up, showing just a tiny space between them. “Maybe that much. But they didn’t face the kind of situations we’ve faced, and let’s not kid ourselves, folks...they were Democrats. Yeah, remember them?”

  He smirked, and polite rumble of laughter came from the assembled crowd, even some scattered clapping.

  The President smiled at the applause. “Oh, yes, they’re still around, just like my old party. And both claim to represent the voice of the loyal opposition, and all that, but come on. We know better, don’t we?”

  There was more applause. The President was clearly pleased by it.

  “But put that aside. I’m not here to divide. No, I’m here to unite. Unite all Americans. Because we all need to be together these days. These are dark, perilous times. Both out in the world and within our own borders. So let’s talk about those borders. That’s probably the best place to start.”

  He glanced down at his note cards and seemed to be ruminating what he read there. Then he looked back into the camera, his serious, presidential expression returning.

  “When I campaigned for election for the very first time, our border was a very important issue. And I was very clear about my position on protecting that border. I proposed a wall that would serve both as a symbol of how we viewed our nation’s sovereignty and as a practical way to enhance our ability to protect our borders. People laughed and made fun back then. Do you remember this? There were all kinds of doubters. But we did it. I did something no other president has ever even come close to doing. I built that wall.”

  “You built a sieve,” Andrew muttered, next to Ryan.

  “And as I promised, through our trade agreements, the money to pay for that wall came from Mexico. That’s only fair, isn’t it? Their country was causing the problem, so they should pay for the solution. And they did.”

  Applause broke out, then gained momentum. The president spoke loudly over the rising tide, punctuating his words with a jabbing finger. “I said it before, and I’ll say it now, either we have a country or we don’t.”

  The applause swelled to the point of the Congress members standing, and went on for almost thirty seconds. The president basked in the adulation before finally raising his hands to signal them to sit down again.

  “Now, some people don’t get this concept, folks. They like to say that wanting to protect your country is somehow racist or whatever other nonsense. But they’re wrong, and true Americans know it. You know it. And time after time, everywhere I go in this country, these Americans are telling me that is what they want. An America for Americans.

  “Hey, you deserve it. We all do. Don’t let people call you a white supremacist or other derogatory terms because you’re a patriot. Nowhere else in the world is being a patriot painted as a bad thing. Every other country can say ‘France for the French’ or ‘Russia for Russians’ and it’s viewed as their right. But we say that here in America and the liberals and even some of these same countries that are doing the same thing all jump up and down and cry like little babies. Racist, they say. Unfair, they say.” The President shook his head. “Well,
frankly, I’m sick of it. And the American people – the true American people – they’re sick of it, too. And it is high time we did something about it. Because that’s what government is for, folks. Carrying out the will of the people.

  “You wanted me as your President twelve years ago, and so you voted, and the process worked. The people got what they wanted.

  “You wanted trade agreements that were actually fair to our nation and to our business people, and you got it.

  “You wanted a tax plan that was fair to honest working people and business alike, and I gave you that plan right off the bat, in my first term.

  “You wanted an end to reckless foreign aid, just pouring money into holes in the ground all over the world, and I heard you.

  “Under my leadership, government carried out the wishes of the people.

  “In fact, I did such a good job of carrying out your wishes that when the end of my second term was drawing near, you people didn’t want me to leave office. You thought it was a stupid rule that a President could only serve two terms. It wasn’t always that way. What if he’s doing a great job? No other president was asked to go for a third term, but the American people wanted me to continue in this office. What was I to do? How could I say no? And so the government responded to your wishes. The New American Party was formed, and we put legislation before the people to repeal the Twenty-Second Amendment, and it sailed through faster than any Amendment in the history of Constitutional law. And I got to stay as your President, doing the will of the American people. For which, I’m deeply humbled.”

  Ryan heard an up swell of pandering applause that the President soaked in for a few moments, his expression anything but humble. Then he continued. “By the way, and I haven’t been campaigning like I usually do because I’ve been too busy doing the work you hired me to do, but do please remember that we have another election in just a few months. I am seeking a fourth term as your president, and if you elect me again...” He smirked. “And you will. Why wouldn’t you? I’m doing a great job. I’m doing the will of the people. But when you elect me again, I will officially surpass FDR as the longest tenured President in the history of our country. And I’m very excited about that. I’ve already done way more in three terms than FDR did in four, but it will be especially satisfying to pass him up.”