Without warning

Jed Culver had scored himself three adjoining rooms at the Hotel Monaco, and standing in the centre suite, straining to listen to a CNN report on the nearby Constitutional Convention, he wondered if he should’ve grabbed a couple of spares. For the overflow. There had to be more than a hundred people in here. The roar of such a large crowd in so closely confined an area was loud enough to bury the sound of the television unless you knelt down in front of the set and jacked up the volume. He’d done that a couple of times, but within a few minutes the background noise had simply grown in response.

Dozens of people pressed in close around him, also trying to listen to the report, but their own cries of outrage drowned out the TV just as effectively as the background roar. On the screen, a doughy-faced man with an unfortunate comb-over banged his fist on a podium, shouting out his words. ‘It would only be temporary… a three-year sunset clause, with… extension only if the emergency requires it. But we need… measures now. We face annihilation without…’

A small band of type flashed up, identifying him as Reggie Guertson, whom Jed now knew of as a GOP mayor from some pissant burg out east that for the last month had been holding its breath right up against the edge of the Wave.

‘The military got us through the worst of this,’ yelled an increasingly red-faced Guertson, ‘and they’ll get us through the worst that is to come. But only if we give them what they need to get the job done.’

‘He’s a poet and don’t know it,’ cried out one of the hecklers standing behind Culver.

On screen, the camera panned around as the auditorium erupted with fierce catcalling and jeers, but Jed estimated that at least half of the howls of protest were directed against anyone who’d objected to Guertson’s proposal to reserve a third of the new congressional seats for the armed forces. As an emergency measure.

The reaction behind him, in the hotel room, was uniformly negative. Deafeningly so. Nobody here was backing the idea. The Louisianan lawyer frowned and tried to get some more volume out of the television, but it seemed to have been programmed by the hotel to preclude inconsiderate or hard-of-hearing guests from annoying their neighbours. He could just make out a rising cacophony as Guertson attempted to shout down a sizeable chorus who were chanting over and over again, ‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’ The image cut to a shot of the convention chairman, newly elected Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, banging his gavel and calling for order, entirely without effect.

Culver shook his head and pushed himself up to his feet. His knees hurt and he felt a little giddy, probably from all the smoke in the room. All three suites were choked with cigarette smoke, despite all of the non-smoking signs, and the whole space reeked of wet clothes, body odour, recirculated air and stale farts. The carpets had disappeared under an inch-thick mat of crushed potato chips and pizza rind, and every flat surface was full of empty bottles and paper cups. Clear plastic bottles of spring water stood next to crushed cans of Canadian beer. He wondered sometimes how many people were here simply because he had a proven supply of snack foods and free beverages.

Well, not free. There was nothing so gauche as a cover charge for entrance into Jed Culver’s lair, but everyone in these rooms would pay a price for being here. Sometime, somewhere.

‘Hey, Culver. Been looking for you.’

He turned, looking for the owner of the harsh Brooklyn accent. Or Brooklyn by way of Warsaw, to Jed’s well-travelled hearing.

‘Mr Cesky,’ he called back, over the din. ‘I’ve been looking for you too. Wanted to thank you for your help yesterday.’

Cesky, a short, thick-shouldered man, with the hardened hands and beaten-down features of somebody who’d worked in construction all of his life, waved him off with one hairy, bandaged paw. ‘Nah. Fuggedaboutit,’ he said. ‘What’s money for if you can’t fuckin’ spend it to gets what you want?’

Culver smiled but said nothing. For all of Cesky’s two-fisted, roughneck routine, he’d found him to be quite a shrewd operator. A hard nut, his old man would have called him. Not likely to crack under the hammer. The businessman was covered in suture marks and bandages from whatever misadventures he’d endured getting himself and his family out of Central America. Cesky had said nothing to Jed, but the lawyer had done his background work before taking the man’s favours, and he knew that after a couple of failed attempts, Henry Cesky had pulled off a remarkable escape from Acapulco, right in the middle of the city melting down. He had to have some kind of smarts, and he was obviously tough enough to have come through intact, if not unharmed.