Star Chamber Brotherhood (32 page)

“Yes, actually, I do,” he acknowledged. “Now, let’s say that this patient was recovering from serious injuries, say in a car accident, and was in severe pain and needed medication for it. Who would decide which pain medication to give him and who would administer it? And how would they determine the proper dosage?”

“As a matter of fact, that’s the sort of situation that we face every day in my department. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

“And what department would that be?” Werner broke in.

“I’m in the Pain Management Group. But, then, you knew that, too,” she observed.

“Yes, actually, I did.”

“And this patient of yours, he wouldn’t be a victim of a recent attack, would he?”

“To tell the truth, he was,” Werner continued. “And now that we’ve crossed that bridge, please allow me to explain.”

Chapter 18

Flashback: Early May, 2024
Kamas, Utah

April of 2024 was a deceptively peaceful month at the Corrective Labor Camp in Kamas, Utah. Unlike in March, no prisoners were shot or transferred north to camps in the Yukon. The guards and warders even used their nightsticks sparingly. In return, the prisoners mounted no strikes. But those who had participated in the strikes during March still lived under the cloud of further punishment. Meanwhile, Frank Werner’s fifty-third birthday came and went without notice.

As Werner had expected, promises that the camp administration had made the month before went largely unfulfilled. There was no joint investigating commission, no suspension of trigger-happy guards, no compensation for the victims or their families. Labor quotas remained the same despite fewer men on each work team. And food rations remained as before. The only promises that Warden Rocco kept were to show movies in the yards on Sunday evenings and to permit prisoners to petition for a case review by a special hearing panel.

Meanwhile, spring arrived late to the Kamas Valley, as had been its pattern for the past dozen years. Snow and freezing rain continued almost daily for most of the month, with the last big snowstorm taking everyone by surprise on April 24. Gradually temperatures rose, the snows thawed and the mud deepened. After the storm, Werner exchanged his heavy winter coveralls and insulated winter boots for thinner summer coveralls and standard-issue army boots. For the first week after the switch, the frosty mountain nights made it more disagreeable than ever to crawl out of bed in the morning. But as always, Werner adjusted.

 
Although food rations had not changed, the milder temperatures meant that the prisoners needed less energy to stay warm. Yet no one gained weight because the reduced numbers of men on each work team after the March transfers meant that each man had to work harder to meet his team’s weekly quotas. The failure to improve living conditions, the fear of reprisals and the lack of hope led to another outbreak of suicides during the last week in April.
 

It was a time of intense vigilance among both the government’s stool pigeons and the Star Committee’s stoolie hunters. Every day the camp’s security director and his staff summoned selected prisoners from the barracks, from the dispensary, from worksites, mess halls, and bathhouses for discreet meetings. There they offered the prisoners cash, food, tobacco, and easier work assignments to entice new informants to report on their fellows. Those who refused were threatened with solitary confinement, beatings, transfers to the Yukon, and even reprisals against family members outside the camps.
 

At the same time, the Star Committee counter-intelligence squads followed these same prisoners wherever they went, interrogated them after each suspicious contact, and warned them of dire consequences if they informed to camp security. Every week brought rumors of another informant who had been stabbed, smothered, or garroted.
 

As Werner had feared, the strikes and the administration’s reaction to them left the camp population more divided than ever. Those who continued to pledge loyalty to the Unionist Party went out of their way to distance themselves from the rebels and to curry favor with the camp authorities. Those who opposed the Party lost no opportunity to remind fence sitters of its illegitimacy and of their collective suffering under Unionist rule.
 

Many rookie prisoners became hard-line anti-Unionists during April, having shed any remaining illusions about the nature of the corrective labor camp system. Even moderates tended to harden their stance after the second strike was crushed. Only devoutly religious prisoners from persecuted sects like the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, and Seventh Day Adventists, together with a few pious New Agers, managed to steer a middle course between the opposing political factions, with both sides reluctantly tolerating their neutrality.

As for prisoners like Werner, who had been arrested on political or security grounds and who claimed no strong religious affiliation or belief, it had become increasingly difficult to avoid taking sides with one faction without being victimized by the other. Though Werner had opposed the President-for-Life from the start, he had never taken up arms against the Unionist government and had a visceral aversion to violence.

In fact, the week before, he had volunteered to give up a relatively easy work assignment in the camp distribution center for the very reason that political divisions had led to fighting among the work teams and reprisals by the pro-Unionist warders and guards. Rather than be caught in the middle, he volunteered for more demanding work at a remote worksite in the Deer Valley ski resort among more highly skilled prisoners, nearly all of them anti-Unionist, who worked well together as a team.

The site was a massive chain-link-fenced enclosure surrounding the Chateaux condominium complex along Royal Street in the Silver Lake Village area of Deer Valley. The entire Silver Lake Village had been covered by glaciation for nearly a decade but was now clear of ice at the lower elevations. Those housing units that had not been destroyed by avalanches or the weight of snow and ice were now being dismantled room by room by prisoners from the Kamas camp.
 

Every appliance, furnishing, plumbing fixture, or length of pipe or wire that was reusable or recyclable was stripped from the condos and sent on to Kamas for sorting, processing, and onward shipment to state-run construction sites. The private owners of the condos had lost all ownership rights years ago, when FEMA condemned Park City and Deer Valley as unsafe and declared them Restricted Zones accessible only to authorized government personnel.

The salvage season had begun on April 1, and Werner’s work team had been assigned to remove all salvageable plumbing and HVAC components from the Chateaux worksite. It was already past five o’clock and the mobile sodium vapor lamps had been switched on for the last hours of the workday, when the surrounding mountains cast their long shadows over the compound.

In a vacant lot that bulldozers had cleared for them, Werner’s team had laid out their sinks, toilets, and polished marble tiles on wooden pallets, to be lifted by forklifts onto flatbed trucks and trucked down the hill to the highway leading east toward Kamas. Today’s results were a good haul. Even without counting, Werner could see that the team would easily surpass their daily work quota. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, laid another empty pallet on the muddy ground and killed an extra minute or two setting it up before returning to the condo where he had been working all afternoon.

As he turned to leave, Werner saw a member of a rival team sneak up to one of his team’s pallets, remove a sink and transfer to one of the rival team’s pallets.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Werner shouted at the man, a dark-skinned Hispanic youth in his early twenties, who was about an inch or two shorter than he and perhaps twenty pounds lighter.
 

Rather than retreat, the man looked back at him provocatively and transferred another sink to his team’s pallet as if daring him to intervene. When Werner advanced to challenge him, he could see empty positions on three or four other pallets where someone had removed materials salvaged by Werner’s team.
 

“Drop it, hombre!” Werner shouted angrily as he looked around for another team member to back him up, or better yet, a foreman or the worksite boss. But the only other men on the lot were on their way back into the condos.

The man who stole the sink cast a quick glance back at Werner and retreated toward the condos. The moment he did, Werner retrieved the pilfered sink and carried it over to his own team’s pallet. No longer able to see the man, and assuming that he had reentered the condos, Werner identified another sink that appeared to belong to his team and bent over to pick it up.

When he lifted his head, he felt a stunning blow to the back of his head and dropped his load. Before he knew what was happening, he was shoved sideways and fell heavily onto the muddy ground. In an instant, someone in an orange prison jumpsuit was on top of him with a length of pipe in his hand raining blows onto his head and shoulders from behind. Werner curled into a fetal position and did his best to protect the back of his neck with his hands. But now his wrists and knuckles exploded with pain and angry curses in Spanish filled his ears.

Werner didn’t remember how long the attack lasted. At one point he wondered why he hadn’t lost consciousness yet and, no longer feeling the pain of the blows, imagined that perhaps he was already dead. Then, at last, someone pulled the attacker off his back and the blows stopped, though the crazed cursing continued.

When at last fellow team members lifted him to his feet, Werner found himself face to face with the worksite supervisor and with his Work Team Captain, Dave Lewis. Lewis was bleeding from both nostrils and from a cut above one eye. That’s when Werner noticed the wetness in his own scalp and the trickle of warm liquid down the back of his neck.

“I don’t know what this is all about, Dave,” the worksite supervisor commented to Lewis. “But I don’t want to see any more of it. Get your man to the dispensary and go there with him to get your face patched up.

“And as for you, Ramon, you’re off the site. I’m writing you up for a month in the Punishment Detail and then it’s back to the general labor pool. When the goons are done with you, I’ll guarantee you’ll think twice about picking any more fights in this camp, Macho Man.
 

“Hurst, pull up a van and drive these two to the dispensary. Release them to their barracks when they’re done. No point in bringing them back here tonight.”

“Got it,” replied Hurst, one of the Kamas guards who supervised the warders and foremen at the Chateaux worksite. “What about Ramon?”

“Give him to the warders. They’ll know what to do with him.”

****

Hurst locked the two men in the back of a rattletrap delivery van that doubled as a troop transport and ambulance. The van negotiated the steep descent to the valley floor and had nearly reached Park City before either man spoke.
 

Werner noticed that Lewis was watching him closely, as if impatient to strike up a conversation. This seemed odd, as Lewis had not spoken to him before despite being on the same team for a week.
 

“Thanks for pulling him off me,” Werner said to break the silence. “I might not have lasted much longer if you hadn’t.”

“You’re welcome,” Lewis replied. “And I apologize for not reaching you sooner. Of course, if Ramon had attacked you for real, he’d probably have killed you in the first ten seconds.”

“You mean that Ramon…” Werner hesitated, his mouth agape, “that the whole scene was staged?”

“I needed a way to talk to you. Alone.”
 

Lewis handed Werner a circular piece of paper about the size of a half dollar. It was inscribed with a five-pointed star inside a circle. The interior of the star was filled with black ink.

“Do you know what this is?” Lewis asked.

“I think so. It’s what the Star Committee gives someone before they kill him,” Werner answered warily. “Is that what this is all about? Did you bring me all the way down here just to kill me?”
 

Lewis smiled weakly and shook his head.
 

“Not at all,” he replied. “We also give the Star as a sign of the Star Committee’s authority. Yes, it’s given before an execution but it’s also given to officers assigned to covert missions. Which brings us to why we’re here.”

“But I have no connection with the Star Committee,” Werner protested. “Nor have I ever been in the military. So, if I’m not a target and I’m not in your chain of command, what other interest could the Committee have in me?”
 

“Your State Security file shows that you were once a civilian officer in the Operations Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Lewis answered. “No, yours wasn’t a military commission, but as a former intelligence officer, you swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. You’re still bound to that oath. Which is why the Star Committee is drafting you into service, effective immediately.”

“Drafting me into service?” Werner objected. “No, I don’t think so. By what authority?”

“By the authority of the only legitimate government in this camp,” Lewis responded, “which is the Prisoners Council. Since the President-for-Life suspended the Constitution back in ‘17, all current and former Federal officers who have ever sworn to uphold the Constitution are required to transfer that allegiance to the legitimate successor government operating in their area. And that’s us.”