That he was able to buy her freedom revealed just how corrupt the administration was in the later years. Corrupt in many layers, like some kind of rotting meat pie, every official focused on using their office to their own personal benefit. It was a sign of the imminent end, he now realized. But at the time, he took it as a sign of permanence. The natural endpoint of a society founded on appetite, self-interest, money, and mirrors.

It wasn’t Donny’s responsibility to obtain Joyce’s freedom. She was in a mess of her own making, the radical academic turned public agitator turned expat talking head, on TV and in her open letters from abroad, pushing for regime change and a radical reinvention of the American model. But somehow, he felt like it was his fault. That if he hadn’t bailed on her when they were supposed to leave the country together the day of the coup, she would never have been picked up the first time, and would have taken a different path after she crossed the border. They could have forgotten it all, in a permanent buzz on some Mexican beach. But Donny got the idea in his head that he needed to stay in Texas, and fight the power. A decidedly quixotic path that had its wins, as long as you radically recalibrated your victory conditions.

His old client Ward Walker was the one who hooked him up with the loan. That was the easy part, at least if you had Donny’s gift for willfully ignoring the future. He was on his own when it came to finding a public official to help, though a few friends pointed him in the right direction.

He had to go to Washington to seal the deal, carrying all that cash in his briefcase, five times the amount of cash it was legal to carry. Not just to Washington, but all the way to the Capitol Building, where his contact arranged the meet-up. He wasn’t even an executive branch official. He was a fucking Senate staffer. Wesley O’Brien, deputy staff director of the Committee on Motherland Affairs, working for Senator Grinsley, the guy from Georgia who had been a big opponent of the president in his first term and then switched parties when he saw the writing on the wall.