Chapter 18

“The drinks flow, people forget.
The big wheel spins, hair thins, people forget.
Forget they’re hiding.
The news slows, people forget.
The shares crash, hopes are dashed, people forget.
Forget they’re hiding.
Behind an Eminence front. Eminence front.
It’s a put on, it’s a put-on.”
-The Who, “Eminence Front“

The “back from commercial” jingle played, as Sally and Cara, America’s favorite contractually-obligated BFFs, pretended to have been involved in an intense conversation and just now noticed that they were back on.

“Welcome back,” Cara said to the camera. “To Up Your Morning! With Sally & Cara.” She turned back to her co-host; whom she would always silently resent for getting front billing, because ‘Cara & Sally’ even made fucking sense alphabetically, but noooo! “Well, Sally, like we were discussing during the commercial, lots of big news out of Seattle yesterday!”

“I’ll say, Cara.” Sally replied, aware of her co-host’s resentment, but not giving a fuck, because HER tits would be ‘television-worthy’ without surgery for two years longer than Cara’s, so of course the co-hostess leads the audience to the real one. “First STRANGERS and the protests, and that weird violence on the first day. All of that business with the phones. And then, of course, what happened yesterday, on DAY TWO!”

“Thank you, Sally.” Cara said, because that’s what the HOSTESS says to the CO-hostess, even if she is only made bearable by the contracts that say that they can drink wine on TV. “Yes, especially the big news about friend of the show, Contessa Helena de San Finzione! Her name’s been in the news coming out of Seattle a LOT these past two days! First, that terrorist attack on her hotel Monday, and then what happened YESTERDAY! Can we even show the footage?”

“I’m not certain we can.” Sally responded. “It’s probably too shocking for our viewers.” She perked up for the camera. “But it’ll be up on the show’s website, at the link at the bottom of the screen! Remember, it’s not suitable for the faint-of-heart.” She quietly wondered if anyone had ever said “Oh yeah, this is totally for the faint-of-heart. Come check it out, faint-of-heart!”

“That’s right, Sally! And speaking of San Finzione, what do you suppose this secret movie project going on there is?”

While Sally & Cara were three hours into their previous day’s episode, Contessa Helena de San Finzione was being offered caviar by a passing server at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.

“No, thank you.” She told him in English, before turning back to the men she’d been talking to and returning to Farsi. “But no, you don’t get America to change anything by killing their soldiers. You do it by inconveniencing their soccer moms.”

She wore an asymmetrical black dress, with a light-blue collar detail; which Vincenzo’s pendant hung down over. Houndstooth heels almost completed the outfit, but there was one more vital accessory that she had to get at the convention: a half-empty champagne glass.

That was as much as she ever drank at these things. From that point, the glass qualified as an accessory. It wasn’t that she’d been afraid of being poisoned; everything she drank had been supplied by the San Finzione vineyards and was under Ultimado guard from the vineyard until it was in her hand. She knew she had the genetic pre-disposition to walk over and consume the whole bar if she wanted; but the problem was that she knew she had the genetic pre-disposition to walk over and consume the whole bar if she wanted.

There were better drugs than alcohol, anyway; she’d had them. Everything but heroin and that skin-eating one, that she knew. She’d almost tried heroin once, had the vein tied off and everything, until the thought “Whatever happened to Persephone, this is probably how it started,” ran across her mind, so she stopped and never looked back; except to deal with the guy who’d thought he’d get to take advantage of her once she’d shot up and felt ‘cheated’ somehow. Alcohol held little appeal for Helen for a similar reason. When it started to look obvious that she’d been holding the same glass for a half-hour or so, she’d refresh it and share some with the plants. George Carlin had been right, yet again. If you really want kids to stop drinking with a warning label, try “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole as your dad.”

“Well, it was a bold decision to come today; after yesterday, Contessa.” One of the men said to her.

“The only kind I make.” She replied with a wink. “Like a few bullets have ever kept me from anything.” She lit a cigarette. There was no smoking allowed in the convention center, but hers wasn’t the only one burning. Nor was tobacco the only substance she could smell burning, as someone else in the hall had decided to one-up her and others’ flaunting of their Diplomatic Immunity.

Cocaine was undoubtedly being snorted close by, as well. She’d never had a problem with it; it was something she’d done for fun, and quitting had been as easy as her husband asking her to. Count Vincenzo Ramon de San Finzione had led men to repel the Nazis from his castle and then his nation at the age of thirteen, saved his country’s post-war economy by merging La Familia’s business interests with the government; taking a direct hand in both, always with the good of the people foremost in his mind, at twenty. When he died at 79, convincing his fifty-seven years younger second wife to give up smoking was the only fight that he never won. But cocaine had been no problem. Nowadays, on the rare occasion that someone convinced her to do a line, when she came down, she felt a feeling that only Troy could get away with describing as “very Helen Parker of you.”

She’d at least been able to do The Thing to a few of the delegates that morning. Mostly convincing the ones who really were there to attend the various sub-conferences to go in with an open mind; but not too open, because all of the issues for discussion did have clear right and wrong sides, and she told them what they were. Helena recognized another face in the crowd and excused herself from the conversation. She walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

Supreme Comrade and President-for-Life Simon Kiburi, of The People’s Democratic Republic of Uongo turned around and his eyes widened. He must have managed to avoid Rita yesterday. Helen hadn’t had time to get a proper debriefing from Rita, so had to go in cold, not knowing for certain whom “she” had talked to or hadn’t yesterday, and what the subject was. Helena greeted him with a warm smile, and put her hand up to his neck, forcing him to bend forward a little so she could whisper into his ear.

“Simon, dear. There’s no way you give a fuck about any of the topics, so that means you’re here for the Auction, too. You can’t possibly afford Lot 15, so you want something else. Whatever it is, you’re enough of a dumbfuck to try to use it on San Finzione’s troops or the Uongoian people.”

The dictator was about to open his mouth to bluster something. Helena put her finger to his lips, stopping him.

“The Leopress of San Finzione has tolerated you until now, Simon, because she’s always had you under her paw. But the warlord partners who were going to betray you are gone, and it’s time to give the country back to the original owners. So now, she allows you to run. Because the Leopress has better things to do today, and she knows that she can always catch you. Whatever you think you have to say, this is not the time for it. This is the time to go home and start trying to figure out how many golden candlesticks you can stuff into a suitcase. It’s four, by the way. It’ll look like you can get one or two more in there; but gold’s heavy stuff. Any more than four, and you’ll destroy a perfectly good suitcase.”

Kiburi turned and left the building. Helena didn’t finish watching him leave the room, because she’d heard a grumbling moving through the crowd. An ocean of murmured profanities in a miasma of languages; all of which, she understood, washed over her. When she noticed that everyone in the throng who’d uttered them had been looking down, she took out her phone.

It was 10:13 AM, and there was no signal.

She gave a half-smile. Whyte seemed to be counting on her overestimating him, so a hit on the summit itself wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, but it would certainly be foolish in the extreme. In addition to her Ultimado detail, other attendees had their own security as well. A hit squad would be lucky to make it through the door. The building was being continuously swept for bombs after the explosions at her hotel yesterday, so he wouldn’t strike that way. Helen considered for a moment that he might gas the convention hall, but wrote that one off. Despite what he wanted her to think, Whyte wasn’t The Joker; his goons weren’t about to rappel down from the skylights, firing machine guns, wearing costumes, and being named around a theme.

The murmur was rising now, as people even more unaccustomed to inconvenience than most began shouting at their phones for failing to give them a signal. Waving and holding their phones at arm’s length and up in the air, trying to get a bar.

And then, as quickly as it began, it ended. Most of the attendees were too happy to have their own phone service back to have noticed that it happened to almost everyone.

“Except the ones carrying Whyte Telecom phones.” Helen thought. She looked at her phone to see if Whyte was about to call. The only message delayed by the lack of signal was one from Ramirez, which she replied to. She looked up to see someone with a video camera running toward her, security running behind.

Before the man got close enough to say anything, something hard had slammed him in the stomach, causing him to double over. Another impact to the back of his knees forced him to the ground. Finally, the first collapsible metal baton that had nailed him in the stomach was pressed down onto the back of his neck, forcing him to kiss the floor of the convention center.

Primo Tenente Marisol Velasquez of La Squadra de Ultimados knelt down onto the man’s back, ready to send the next blow into his skull at the slightest provocation. Helena motioned for her to let the man up to breathe. Once she mentally appraised the man’s outfit and camera, she realized what he was; a ‘reporter’ from some conspiracy site, who broke through the press line to ask her about being a witch, or a sex-assassin, or wanting a confirmation or denial that La Familia de San Finzione’s wealth came from being bequeathed the lost treasures of the Templars, and that the Ark, the Holy Grail, and Excalibur were all in a secret vault, a mile beneath Castle Finzione.

Sometimes, the beatdown itself was what they wanted, to “prove” that she MUST be hiding something! Otherwise, why would she be so “afraid of the truth” as to sic her guards on the “intrepid reporter” for running up and getting in her face with “a simple question” one month after someone had just done the same thing and ended up stabbing her four times and trying to cut her throat? He still had one hand on his video camera, and pointed it up from the floor, trying to aim for her face from this angle.

“Contessa!” He gasped out when Velasquez let up on his back and let him breathe. “What do you have to say about the video?”

That made Helen pause. Video? Did the one with her and Rita get out? Or the one with her and ... she racked her brain, thinking of how sex tapes she might potentially have out there.

“There are a number of videos that you could be talking about, sonny.” She said to the man ten years older than herself. “I’m afraid I’m going to need a little more information than that.”

“The one the internet’s talking about; of you ordering men to torture each other.”

Helen stopped in her tracks. There was, in fact, a video like that, of which she was aware. She bent down to look directly into his camera and smile.

“Young man, everything they say about me is true. The lies, doubly so. Oh, except that one about having Excalibur in my vault. The sword won’t leave England without the One True King, everyone knows that. Won’t go onto a ship or a plane, can’t even fool it with the Chunnel. It just ‘refuses’ to go past the shores of the Isle without Arthur’s true heir.”

She motioned for Velasquez to release him to security and turned around, only then allowing her Camera Smile to vanish. She knew Whyte had her on video, but would he really just release it? Helen told another of her guards to bring the limo around as she dialed Whyte’s number. She lit another cigarette while it rang.