Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(30)
The spa is in southwest Salem—not too far from the teahouse—a nondescript windowless brick building tucked between a pawnshop and a moneylender, the street busy with rusted-out cars missing their mufflers.
In a back room, the recessed lighting gives off a dim orange glow. Music trembles—piped in through the overhead speakers—something acoustic, what Chase recognizes as the same instrument played at the teahouse, the koto, the plucked strings making him think of spiders’ legs dancing across a web. In the center of the room waits the massage table and against the wall squats a glass-doored, marbled-topped bureau, full of white downy towels, bottles of oil and lotion. On top of it, a plug-in fountain, water gurgling over colored stones.
Buffalo used to tell him not to come here. For a long time, his principal duty, as chief of staff, seemed to be telling Chase what not to do. Do not bad-mouth Weyerhaeuser. Do not make fun of the Trail Blazers. Do not curse during live press conferences. Do not get intoxicated at black-tie fund-raisers. Do not punch Ron Wyden. Do not tell the Oregonian that you think Nancy Pelosi is one smoking-hot old lady.
The attacks changed everything. “You realize,” Buffalo said, more than a month ago, when the planes came down, “that this is the best thing that could have possibly happened?” At the time they were at Mahonia Hall, the governor’s mansion, a place Chase never liked much. The pretention of it—Tudor-style, ballroom, wine cellar, surrounded by thorny rose gardens. Not to mention that ten thousand square feet can feel pretty lonely in the middle of the night, when the dreams come to him. Sometimes he wakes up gasping—believing he is still in the Republic, where he served two tours—his nose choked with the smell of cooking flesh, his eyes imagining clawed hands scrabbling out from beneath the bed like a pair of gray spiders. He has more than once brought the security guard a beer to split on the front steps at three a.m.
The afternoon of the attacks, he and Buffalo were sitting in wingback oxblood leather chairs, watching the flat-screen, flipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News. Same footage, different talking heads. Outside Denver, the wreckage smoldered in a wheat field. At PDX and Logan International, the planes were parked on the tarmac like giant white coffins.
A reporter interviewed a woman wearing a Looney Tunes sweatshirt and purple leggings. The tape at the bottom of the screen identified her as a family member of one of the passengers. “It’s the most horrible thing in the world,” she said, roughing away her tears with the remains of a tissue. “And it’s happening right here.”
The footage cut to Jeremy Saber, the leader of the Resistance movement, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. In a video he posted online, he sat at a desk in a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was a mess of curls—his face square and shadowed with whiskers—and his arms were sheathed with tattoos. He looked more like a barista or hip college instructor than the spokesperson for an extremist group. “Some will say we do not value human life. We value it very much. That is why we have taken it away. We do it with remorseful intention. You are paying attention now. That is what we need for you to do. Pay attention. Our demands have not been met.” He went on to list enforced medication and blood testing, limited employment opportunities, the U.S. occupation of the Republic, and the proposed construction of a public lycan database as chief among his complaints. “If the government does not respond to these very reasonable requests, we will be forced to be unreasonable again. The terror will continue.”
Buffalo stood then and tucked his hands in the pockets of his sport coat and walked over to the window, the gray light coming through the water-spotted glass reminding Chase of his Marine Corps woodland-pattern cammies.
“One way of looking at it is this,” Buffalo said. “As a tragedy.” He turned to Chase and removed a hand from his pocket and pointed it like a gun. “Here is another. It is a game changer. It is timely. It is advantageous. You are the only politician in the country who has fought in the Republic. We need to remind people of that.” He has a way of talking, carefully enunciating each word as if it were a tiny gem delivered between his teeth.
He worked as a lawyer for ten years before joining a management consulting firm that told businesses what machines to buy, which people to fire and locations to close. He developed strategic marketing platforms to boost or reinvent a corporation, making a WorldCom into an MCI, he liked to say. He was the one who approached Chase about running for governor. And now, for the first time—Chase can see it in his trembling mouth—Buffalo seems to believe in the possibility of reelection. “We need to get you behind a microphone by this evening, ideally with that plane in the background.”
“We’ll bang out a speech on the drive up?”
He considers this a moment. “No. Speak from the heart. Just make sure your heart is more furious than mournful.” On the television, another shot of the flaming wreckage. Buffalo’s glasses catch the shimmering orange light and the lenses glow like twin suns. “People are ready for fury.”
Fury is what Chase gave them, two hours later, outside the open hangar that now housed the plane, rain wetting his face, a crowd of reporters gathered around him. “What do I think?” he said to them. “I think it’s time to tighten the leash, roll up a newspaper, say bad dog.”
Since then he has spoken to every major news network, every magazine and newspaper, made a villain and a hero. He has earned, for the first time, his own nicknames. Dog Soldier is one. The Game Warden another. He sees his face when he logs on to AOL, when he opens Newsweek to read the editorial comics, when he flips the channels on the flat-screen with a cold Coors resting against his crotch. He supports a continued occupation of the Republic and a greater reliance on nuclear energy and quotes polls that indicate that the Republic by and large feels the same, its citizens dependent on the jobs and infrastructure and security the U.S. supplies. He supports the public registry—a watchdog list, he calls it. He supports vaccine research, segregation, suspended rights. “Extremism in the face of extremism,” he calls it.