Render Unto...

T-tick; t-tock; t-tick; t-tock

           Jedediah Cypress shuddered. The room was warm, his bottle of water cool, the lights about him soft and yellow-white. In one corner of what he could not bring himself to call the cell stood an overstuffed recliner, plush and welcoming, and in another stood a bed—neither a camp cot nor a trundle, but an honest-to-goodness bed, with just the kind of floral duvet he and Marsha had always kept, a veritable cocoon of luxuriant high thread-count sheets and weighty down pillows. A lamp sat upon the bedside table, a rechargeable model which had no cord, lest he put it to an unintended use.

           All in all, it was far from an uncomfortable place.

T-tick; t-tock

           And yet.

           And yet, upon the wall hung two clocks: round, analog, and nondescript, both bearing the same branding, glow in the dark green-white hands over identical black faces. One of the pair read 7:18, and the other 6:48—and their mechanisms moved a mere fraction of a second out of time, a maddening echo which cut through the peaceful quiet of the cozy room.

           Perhaps it was a cell, after all.

           For two days’ time he had sat in this chair, this spindly wooden rocker which he had chosen to call his home, desperate to keep himself alert, to keep his head as the twin clocks glared down at him from the wall; once or twice he had dozed, his head lolling to his chest, only to awaken with a start and a stiff, aching neck.

T-tick; t-tock; t-tick

           He had wracked his brain for answers as he stared up at the two clocks—not twins, but siblings, with that half-hour and half-second time difference. He rather doubted that he’d found himself in St. John’s. The flight which had brought him here, aboard a C-130, had been too long and too smooth for a Newfoundland winter—and blindfolded though he had been as they had unloaded him from the plane, he had felt the ambient humidity sinking into his bones from the moment he’d set foot on the tarmac. It couldn’t be Australia. Not the interior, anyhow—and the coastal cities would never have cooperated, not like this.

           Once upon a time, Jedediah Cypress had been a political animal. The political animal, if truth be told. And yet it had never been he who had pulled the strings. No, that had been Marie de Lis, whose money—old money, blood money—had financed the war. It had been Colin Rosen and Nina Serrano, whose spiderweb off the coast of Florida had caught so many flies. It had been his own father, the venerable Jesse Cypress, whose best-laid plans he had followed, and whose dreams he had done his best to fulfill.

           Even Judd had been more involved. It had been he who had swayed the election, he who had seen to it that Jedediah had found himself a head of state, he who had for so long posed as a pitiable loser in that Godforsaken state.

T-tock; t-tick; t-tock; t-tick

           But it had been Jedediah who had taken the arrows—who had endured the relentless attacks from the media empire which his own father had built. And never before had he seen it so clearly: that his father’s hands had conducted the symphony of his fall from grace. Had Judd known? He hated to think of it. And yet, all those years ago, as the dust and rubble of American industry settled in the city streets, he had seen that manic light in his brother’s eyes.

           “Don’t you realize, Diah? It’s all been leading up to this.”

           He had only had it in him to sputter, to stare. “Judd, we’ve been attacked.”

           “Have we?”

T-tick

           He had stammered out speech after speech; he had saluted that flag, stood with his hand upon his breast. And he had given himself heart and soul to the measures proposed by congress, to the war plans laid upon his desk by his Secretary of State.

T-tock

           It had been the right thing to do, they’d said. To throw the greatest military might in the world behind the cause. And yet, when he’d gone to shake the soldiers’ hands, they had scorned him; when he’d thrown out the first pitch for the Yanks, they had booed him; and when, late one night, he’d settled under the floral duvet with Marsha, his spirits sunk so low as to erode the earth, he’d turned on the television, where they had derided him.

           “They hate me, honey,” he’d said to her—his loving wife—and she hadn’t looked up from her book, only given him a pat on the knee and turned the page.

T-tick; t-tock; t-tick; t-tock

           He had only ever followed orders. Perhaps he’d never been the smartest man—that dubious honor, of course, having been bestowed upon his father—but he had never expected that things would shake out like this.

           To see his own name become synonymous with incompetency, with pathological control, with treason, with untold brutality visited upon villages half the world away, had come as a surprise.

           He had only ever followed orders.

           When that wretched man had told him that the invisible, unknowable they had “weapons of mass destruction”—he had taken it as a thinly-veiled reference to nuclear weapons, and he’d acted accordingly.

           When that wicked woman had told him the name of the man responsible—he hadn’t questioned, only listened, nodded, done as he was told. It mattered damned little that the man himself had been trained and taught by that Agency—the one of which Jesse Cypress had always spoken with a secret smile, the one which to this day answered to him.

T-tick; t-tock

           It had neither been his people, nor his father’s, who had suffered in the wake of that catastrophe—who had rebuilt in the aftermath of that event which had forever changed not only the skyline, but the landscape, the greater atmosphere of what once had been the greatest country.

           No, it had been the people. The mayor, an irascible little bastard, had put his all into reclaiming the streets, into rescuing the wounded, into memorializing the fallen. New Yorkers had given of their hearts to their neighbors. Firemen and paramedics had spent days, weeks, currycombing the debris to find signs of life. And that wildman, John Horatio Miller, had thrown his considerable fortune into restoring the city former splendor and safety.

           And now, thanks to a cosmic roll of the dice, it was Miller who sat behind the Resolute Desk—the President of the United States, who had gained gravitas and grey hair over the last fifteen years, but who remained every bit a New Yorker in his heart and his grit.

           Miller had humiliated Judd on the debate stage—a simple off-hand comment had seen his poll numbers plummet—and Jesse Cypress hadn’t been the same since that night. He had called meeting after meeting to address what he called This Miller Problem, and Jedediah had respectfully bowed out.

He had served his time.

T-tick

           “President Cypress.”

           The words startled Jedediah; the chair beneath him gave a groan, and so did he, rubbing a thick knot at the base of his aching neck. “Yes?”

           “John would like to see you. Are you presentable?”

           He cast a glance about the room and found the source of the voice: a heretofore hidden window which looked out upon a hallway of grey, sparkling concrete in low light. A man stood outside, one whom he almost recognized—military, by the cut of him, with a handsome English face and pale white-blond hair swept back from a tall and lined forehead.

“Mason Quinn? Is that you? You work for—?”

           “John would like to see you,” said Quinn again.

           “I’m not exactly prancing around in my birthday suit,” Jedediah said crossly. “But it’s damn near on three days since I’ve had a shower.”

           “He’s not taking you on a date, Mr. President.”

           With a grunt of assent, Jedediah got to his feet, and the window slid shut, leaving him momentarily alone again with only that accursed, stilted ticking to fill the room—and suddenly it made so much sense, the way that the sound had bounced off of concrete walls to burrow into the space between his ears. Then the hidden door swung open, a dark shaft cutting through the cheery wallpaper, offering him a vista of concrete and bars, an aged prison somewhere outside of the continental United States.

           Stiff and sore, he fell in behind Lieutenant General Mason Quinn—whose distinguished service in the Kalahari Desert had earned him medals, respect, and, apparently, a place in the White House—and followed him down that dim hallway, each twist and bend affording him a new view onto cells, empty and disused, save for a handful which contained ragged-looking men with black hair and haunted eyes, clutching ratty blankets about skinny bodies.

           Jedediah cleared his throat, and Quinn continued on, casting a glance back over his shoulder at him.

           “Who—?”

           “You don’t recognize them?” Quinn asked, and Jedediah shook his head. “Your father’s people. Professional agitators. Destabilizers.” He paused. Chuckled. It was a strange and foreign sound, and perhaps it was the cold in these long tunnels, or perhaps simply the way those pale blue eyes regarded him in the half-light, which made him shiver. “Embedded long ago. You’re a part of history in the making, President Cypress; you just don’t know it yet.”

           For some time, they wended their way through the dark dungeon—and then, mercifully, they reached an elevator, and in the hazy reflection of its stainless steel doors, he saw himself: a wraith, a shadow of the man he had been in 2001, his hair shot through with white, his shoulders sloping and narrow.

           Wordlessly, Quinn summoned the elevator, and those doors opened onto a richly-upholstered car, gold-appointed and gleaming, which they entered and rode to the top of what seemed a tall tower; there was no display panel, no instrumentation, merely a single button which caused the car to glide seamlessly and quietly upward, and though Jedediah tried to count the floors, he lost himself along the way, swaddled in the silence, liberated from the damnable ticking of those twin clocks.

           The doors slid open again, too soon—and stirred from his sudden calm, Jedediah found himself gazing out onto an office, rather unassuming compared to the out-and-out luxury of the elevator. And yet, behind a handsome wooden desk, hand-carved in an oriental style, sat John Miller, in his trademark navy suit and scarlet tie. Jedediah’s pale attempt to return his smile died and fell away, and he instead cleared his throat, his voice froggy.

           “President Miller.”

           “President Cypress,” said Miller pleasantly. “I assume you know what I’m offering.”

           For a moment, all was still; he felt Quinn leave his side, and for a fleeting moment, he was no longer a prisoner. Then Miller nodded to the chair opposite his at the desk, and at once, he obeyed, taking the seat and marking himself once again a captive.

           “Where are we?” he asked, not expecting an answer. Least of all did he expect the answer which came, as Miller’s smile broadened, his face lit with a million watts of pleasure and joy.

           “Nampho.”

           “N—what?” Jedediah frowned, looking about, seeking and then finding a window; Miller raised an arm toward it, bidding him stand and see, and Jedediah stood again, clumsy with surprise, and crossed the room to look out over the water, over the port, over the aging buildings of pastel ticky-tacky so endemic to communist nations. And at once, it rather seemed to fall into place: those two clocks, the bent and broken prisoners, his father’s so-called agitators. “How?”

           “International cooperation,” said Miller, “is much simpler without interference from the likes of Central Unintelligence. Tell me, Jedediah: if you could have done this, would you?”

           Would he?

           Jedediah stared out the window, his hands clutching cracking concrete and crumbling plaster. During his presidency, he’d been warned not to bother with North Korea—that the reigning dynasty had no use for Americans, for commerce, for community. And yet here he stood, staring out the window of this secret palace, so jealously guarded, so carefully kept. His own father had told him—

           And yet, as quickly as the thought had entered his mind, it was replaced by the memories of years past: of the jeering faces in the stadium, of the soldiers who had refused his hand, of the talking heads on the television. Of Marsha’s patronizing hand upon his knee. The sound of pages turning as he lay awake, wishing never to rise from sleep.

           Your father’s people. The words returned to him, again and again.

           “Nampho,” he said, the sound little more than a laugh as he shook his head, disinclined to believe the proof of his senses. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, John. If I may call you John.”

           “It’s my name,” Miller replied. “And the game’s over, Jedediah. All over, as they say, but the crying.”

           For a long moment, Jedediah could not pull his eyes from the scene before him: a country like any other, perhaps poorer and less developed than his own. But there were no tanks in the streets, no missile silos reaching to the sky, no sign of preparation for war.

           Your father’s people.

           Jedediah turned on the spot, seeking out Miller again, and found him as he had left him: placid, smiling, his hands steepled upon the desk. “You’re declaring victory, are you?”

           A laugh cut through the quiet, and a dark silhouette in the doorway caught his eye, approaching, entering the office with a smile. And with a shock, Jedediah Cypress realized that he had seen the man before on television, decrying the United States, threatening the nation’s capital with his considerable arsenal.

           “Better that you should be dogcatcher than pretend to politics,” Supreme Leader Park Hangyeol had said. And yet here he stood, looking slimmer and healthier, at the elbow of the very man he’d mocked.

           “Victory has been won, President Cypress,” he said—and his voice was different, gentle, almost unaccented.

           Jedediah cleared his throat, the words fighting inside him to break loose. That look upon Park’s face was so enticing—joy, exhilaration, and, somehow, the aura of freedom which radiated off of the man.

           “And, uh... I don’t suppose I could change teams?”