Rule of Capture Read online

  Dedication

  For my brother Alex Brown (1966–2019)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE: NON-COMPLIANCE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PART TWO: DISCOVERY 21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  PART THREE: JUDGMENT 50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  Acknowledgments

  Chapters from Tropic of Kansas 1

  2

  3

  About the Author

  Praise for Tropic of Kansas

  Also by Christopher Brown

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  NON-COMPLIANCE

  1

  In the year of the coup, Donny Kimoe spent Monday mornings at the federal courthouse trying to help torture victims remember what happened to them in lockup over the weekend. Judge Broyles liked having Donny in his courtroom to take on-the-spot appointments. They had worked together in the U.S. Attorney’s office back in the day, before the country went crazy, and relationships like that had legs. Even when you ended up on different sides of what was starting to feel like the beginning of a civil war.

  More importantly, Donny had the security clearance you needed to be able to appear in that court—a hard thing to come by without having worked for the machine, and a harder thing to maintain when you switched sides to work for the defense. Not that having the clearance meant the prosecution would share much of what they had compiled in their classified files on your clients.

  Getting justice at secret trials for people the government wanted to disappear was not easy.

  Especially when you had to show up on time.

  “Late again,” said Turner, laughing at Donny as he buzzed open the bombproof main door. Turner was one of the four beefy old marshals they had manning the security checkpoint: one on this side of the machines, one viewing the screens, and two on the other side waiting for their opportunity to shoot someone. They looked like a gang of Shriners gone wrong.

  “Donny likes to party,” said the guy manning the machine, the one with the drone pilot eyes.

  “Have you guys been watching my surveillance feed again?” said Donny. “Guess they cut off the cable at the home for old fascists.”

  All four of them laughed at that, a heartier and creepier laugh than you would have expected.

  Then Turner took Donny’s phone and his ID and put them in the lockbox. Somehow that was the most invasive part of the protocol, even more than the man-hands all over your body. It made you wonder if this was the day you would exit through the same door as the prisoners.

  As Donny emptied the rest of his pockets into the plastic bin, he looked back through the window at the mothers of Houston crowded behind the barricade, holding up pictures and names of their missing kids as if it would help. You couldn’t hear their chants through the soundproofing, but they still echoed in Donny’s ears from his walk up to the building. One of them had called Donny by name as he squeezed through, but he pretended he didn’t hear them. The tears of anguished parents couldn’t improve the odds on those cases, or pay the fees for trying, and Donny already had his hands full that morning with deadlines past due.

  “Come on,” said Turner, brandishing his big electric wand. When it passed over the contours of Donny’s tired body, it sounded like an old radio tuning in whalesong.

  “You play me like a theremin,” said Donny, as if being a wise-ass would keep the horror at bay. But Turner didn’t laugh. He just shoved him into the body scanner.

  A German shepherd stared at Donny from the other side, on alert. The kind of dog that wears a uniform.

  Donny stood for the scan, looked back at his spectral avatar, endured the fat white hands groping his sweaty spots, and collected his stuff. That’s when he noticed the little tin of breath mints he had left in his jacket pocket, the one that had something other than mints in it.

  He looked at the dog, and was glad to confirm it only seemed to care about the kind of homebrew that could explode.

  “See you on the other side, fellas,” he said, grabbing his briefcase and hurriedly collecting his stuff. As he stepped toward the elevator, he noticed what it said on the dog’s police vest.

  DO NOT PET.

  The Vice President John Tower United States Courthouse for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, had been built by the prior administration, which broke the budget on public projects to keep people working after the war. They also had the idea that justice should look nice, at least on the outside. The main corridor riffed some cross between a Greek temple and a museum of modern art, the way it opened up into these vaulting spaces of concrete and wood filled with light from unseen sources that highlighted the absence of people. They’d warmed it up a little with some timbers harvested from the building that came before, but when you knew that wood was from now-extinct forests, it kind of killed the feeling. And then you noticed the little domes of black glass in the ceiling and walls, and remembered this was a courthouse where justice was not blind, but all-seeing. There were cameras everywhere, except where they could do some good—in the courtrooms.

  Especially the one Donny was going to.

  Courtroom Five

  SEALED PROCEEDINGS

  Hon. Harold W. Broyles

  Special Emergency Tribunal

  Gulf Region

  Donny collected himself at the big wooden door, trying to summon a confident composure as he cued up excuses from his compilation of sins committed and lies told, the way a kid prepares to face an angry father. The only thing you could be sure of before you went in there was that the clients they assigned you to represent were probably guilty. It was the laws they had violated that were unjust—laws a government at war with its own people invents to make sure it wins. And to make doubly sure, they did everything they could to keep you from knowing what they knew about your case, often things even the clients did not know, things that only the electronic brains plugged into the eyes of the state could know.

  As he reached for the door handle, the jitter in his hand reminded Donny he was guilty, too. He looked up at the government seal laser-cut into the door, an abstracted image of the eagle squeezing the snake, and remembered which one he was. And then he pulled the door open, assuring his slithering avatar the story wasn’t over yet.

  When he stepped through, he found the crowd. They were watching the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Kelly, recite the state’s coded reasons why the boy in the dock, some s
crawny white kid with the hand-me-down clothes and homemade tattoos of one of the resettlement camps, should be detained on suspicion of membership in a rebel gang that had vandalized a FEMA command center.

  Donny couldn’t see the kid’s face, but as he listened to Bridget, he got the sinking feeling this was the case he was assigned to handle, and he’d missed it.

  Fortunately, when he looked to the defense table, it wasn’t empty. Loni Sandler was there, a veteran public defender whom Donny admired even though he could always tell the feeling was not mutual.

  The gallery behind the bar was packed with feds waiting for their cases to be called. Government suits lined up like buzz-cut funeral directors, Coast Guard special operators in their blue-and-orange camo, Texas Rangers in their government-issue Stetsons, a pair of game wardens outfitted for hunting humans, and one Border Patrol agent in her dirt brown DMZ dungarees, no doubt preparing to testify about some dissident she had nabbed trying to escape the country and sneak into Mexico. Most were members of Counterinsurgency Task Force Foxtrap, though Donny knew some of the suits were also there to make sure the court did its job, ready to report back to Washington or Austin as needed. A few of them turned their heads and looked back at him as he entered their domain, with a judgmental group gaze designed to remind him he was on the wrong side. There was one friendly face, but even that one looked worried. Donny joined him in the front row, on the defense side of the aisle.

  “Good morning, Miles,” whispered Donny. “I thought you were supposed to be in Austin today with Mayor Chung.”

  Miles Powell was the smartest lawyer Donny knew, the most ethical, and the best dressed. All class, no flash, a black man in grey flannel. Where Donny got access to the secret court from having worked for the government, Miles got his from a career fighting it. That Miles somehow prospered in the process only heightened Donny’s sense of moral inferiority.

  “I am,” said Miles, speaking under his breath. “This afternoon. Arguments at three. Heading out in an hour.”

  “They still have her in custody?”

  Miles nodded. “Special detention in the brig at Camp Mabry. Live camera feed anyone can view.”

  Donny considered that as he watched the marshals escort Loni’s client away, relieved to hear the name and learn it was not the case he had been assigned.

  “That’s messed up,” said Donny. “I wish Mayor Barthelme were still around. He would know how to handle these guys.”

  “If Barthelme were still alive, he’d be too drunk to fight these guys.”

  “He might have the right idea,” said Donny, looking around to see if he could figure out where the muffled squeal of pain came from. “So what did I miss?”

  Miles just shook his head, put his finger to his mouth to shush Donny, and turned his attention to the court.

  Which had now noticed Donny. And did not look happy to see him.

  “Mr. Kimoe,” said the voice from the bench, the voice of life tenure and final judgment.

  “Your Honor,” said Donny, standing at the bar. The honorific was reflexive, something they programmed into you in law school moot courts, and if you thought about it, about the system to which it kneeled, it made it hard to say. But Donny had learned to be part of the system before he learned how rotten the system is, and now paid his bills guiding people through it, a job that required a habituation to losing, or at least a rather compromised idea of what constituted winning. When she’d had enough of it, Donny’s ex-girlfriend Joyce, a philosophy professor at Rice, told him it was like dating the riverman of the underworld. Donny said sometimes I bring them back, but Joyce was already gone.

  “Nice of you to join us this morning,” said Judge Broyles, looking down over the rims of the old wire-framed glasses he had been wearing as long as Donny had known him. Broyles was all grey now, and it showed in his eyes. The silvery grey of old money, from one of those blue-blood Houston families that had come down from the East way back when and made successive fortunes building the railroads and then the oil-and-gas business and now the commercial space business. The first lawyer in a long line of financiers, he had the demeanor of a prep school headmaster in charge of a secret prison. One that needed to turn a profit.

  The stockholders were watching. Some were right there in the back of the room.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” said Donny. “I was stuck on a call in another case. A matter of life and death.”

  “You look about half-dead yourself, Mr. Kimoe. Still trying to annul my sentence in the Hardy case?”

  “Exhausting our client’s rights of appeal, yes.”

  “As is your right, even if you are wasting your time and the People’s money.”

  “We’ll see about that, Your Honor.”

  “Yes, we will. Before sunrise tomorrow, if I’m right.”

  Donny looked at the clock on the wall behind the judge. The execution was scheduled for midnight, and would proceed unless Donny could succeed in getting a last-minute reprieve. But the law governing his service required him to be here this morning, taking whatever cases the court assigned him to defend—which made it hard for him to do a good job for any of his clients.

  Just the way the government that called itself “the People” wanted it.

  “Well,” added Broyles, “fortunately for the client I was going to burden with you today, you were AWOL when his case came up, so I had Mr. Powell cover for you.”

  Donny looked over at Miles, who just raised his eyebrows.

  “Mr. Powell proceeded to persuade us to let one detainee go free this morning. It will probably be our last. And so, Mr. Kimoe, I am going to give you the case I had assigned to Mr. Powell.”

  “Your Honor,” said Miles, standing. “That’s not fair to the defendant.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Austin trying to spring our scofflaw mayor, Mr. Powell?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. But—”

  “Please give my regards to Judge Leakey. And good luck getting her to invalidate the Governor’s declaration of martial law. Though I have to say you have a better chance of winning that one than those avocado-sucking carpetbaggers they are flying in from San Francisco to help you.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said Miles, over the laughs from the gallery at the judge’s derisive quip. “I’m happy to have all the help I can get.”

  “There’s an election riding on the outcome, I hear.” Broyles didn’t mention it was the election of the President who had appointed him, one he had helped get elected the first time. “Go forth,” he said, pointing Miles to the door. “I will help Mr. Kimoe wake up and provide our next contestant with an effective defense.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Miles. He glanced at Donny with a face that shrugged. Then he grabbed his briefcase to go.

  “Judge,” said Donny, “I don’t have time to take up—”

  “America is waiting,” said Broyles, cutting Donny off. “And justice is not.” He hit the gavel with a hard knock, the forgotten call of some vanquished wood god, and then summoned the appearance of Donny’s new client, spinning the Spanish vowels with Anglo-Texan inflection. “Bring in Xelina Rocafuerte.”

  A door opened in the courtroom wall, just a few feet away. Through it stepped a young woman wrapped in chains, with a black hood over her head.

  She was sandwiched by a pair of marshals in their black-and-tan tacticals, one young and burly and the other old and wiry, but both with the eyes of trappers. Each held a stretch of the clanking alloyed link that encircled the prisoner’s elfin body and locked onto the shackles around her wrists and ankles. You wondered how she moved, until you noticed the way the marshals held her.

  Broyles made an imperious gesture with his hand. The older marshal pulled the hood from the girl’s head. And suddenly you could sense why they were afraid of her.

  They had clothed her in the red jumpsuit of non-compliance, a message that was also sent by her haircut, the kind of exclamatory coif that could get you pulled over in some of the outer sub
urbs. That and the way she carried herself locked in this steel sandwich of mean-ass white guys projected an aura of defiance so strong you could feel it roll through the room. She was barely as tall as the shorter marshal’s shoulders, but she had her chin up, and after glancing at Donny she looked right at the famously temperamental Judge Broyles, making sure he could see the burn mark on her cheek, which matched her jumpsuit.

  “Miss Rocafuerte,” said Broyles. “While I have your full attention, may I ask if you know why you are here on this rainy Monday morning?”

  He said that knowing she probably hadn’t seen the outside for days.

  “Because you are afraid of us,” she said. Her voice betrayed the uncertainty she was trying to hide with her poise. They never told them why they had taken them in, because the not knowing made them more scared. And usually more glib.

  “Your Honor—” said Donny, standing.

  “Let us talk,” said Broyles. “You’re not her counsel, yet.”

  “You don’t have to answer him,” said Donny, speaking to Xelina.

  “Sit down, Mr. Kimoe,” said Broyles.

  “He’s just trying to trick you,” said Donny, refusing to sit. “Save it until after you and I can talk.”

  The look in her eyes was an intense mix of anger, intelligence, and fear.

  “Miss Rocafuerte,” said Broyles, leaning forward a bit, to where the forelock of his wiry grey widow’s peak flipped over. “You are here because the government has identified you as a rebel. A subversive. A conspirator against your own government. A traitor against the People. Do I have that right, Ms. Kelly?”

  “That’s correct, Your Honor,” said Bridget Kelly, standing sharply at the prosecution table in her creased blue suit, blond hair pulled back tight. Bridget was one of the lawyers they had recently transferred down from D.C. to handle the case flow coming out of the crackdown. She was a true believer, with the Old Glory lapel pin to prove it, and a flair for the official narrative. “Our investigators have identified the defendant as a member of the Free Rovers Organization. She is a leading producer of their terrorist recruiting videos.”