Jenny would understand.

17

Confucius said, “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance … a blade of death in his hands is a dangerous man to be around; be he friend or not.” Really, he said that. I don’t know why I was thinking about that as I drove to the gym the next morning. The report was going to be my weapon. It was not as sharp as I might want it to be, but I had been taught to fight with the weapons I had. You can kill a person with a pen, for example, literally and figuratively. Martha McDonnell’s weapon was her integrity. She shamed those people and they were going to have to live with their moral failure for the rest of their lives.

It would plague those of them with a conscience. The rest of them, unfortunately like so many of their fellow Americans, were afraid or unwilling to take a stand. Maybe they convinced themselves it was acceptable or for them it served some purpose, or maybe they had been bought out, but it still amazes me today that so many seemingly decent people could have watched this unfolding and done nothing to oppose it.

Wrightman’s so-called peacekeeping force had done its job. The city seemed amazingly calm as I sat patiently in the shadow of a Staples awning, watching the entrance to the gym. It was pretty much impossible to disguise a wheelchair, even one as versatile as Mighty Chair. When I was awarded my Silver Star, I’d ridden into that ceremony dressed as a farmer astride his John Deere, and two years ago I’d shown up at the Pro’s Halloween party as a vendor inside a hot dog stand, but slipping into the gym to meet Hack was far more complicated. There was little I could do but surveil the place carefully before going inside and hope my name hadn’t reached the top of someone’s list.

I’d found a parking spot on the street several blocks away. I used a second burner to call Jenny, but I’d hung up when it went directly to voice mail. I called her office, hoping a staffer might know where she was, but again it went to voice mail. Finally I’d sent her a text, asking her to “get back to me on this when you can.” When you can. I guessed she was in an office somewhere, fighting to get Martha released; that was a whole lot better than the darker possibility, that she too had been “detained.” It didn’t matter, really; whatever her situation, I couldn’t do anything about it. My mission training kicked in; those efforts made by my instructors to distract me from my assigned mission paid off as I put all those thoughts and fears in my pocket and focused entirely on my objective.

I got there early. Soldiers and police officers were patrolling the streets, but in the dull sunlight of the early morning, they somehow seemed less ominous. As I waited, I checked my devices. In only a few hours what already had been dubbed Resin, the Resisters’ Network, had gone totally social. It had moved like a shark through social media, never pausing in one place long enough to be tracked and killed. It had just showed up on my phone. I didn’t have any idea who sent it and who else was receiving these updates. I didn’t know how extensive Resin was, how information was being gathered, or even whether it was sending from America. But it was welcome evidence that an active resistance movement was probing at the system, figuring out how to fight back.