The next morning, after Riley explained her situation, Claire—the owner of the car Riley had passed out in and moments later, in a completely unremembered incident, threw up all over—said that she could sleep on the couch as long as necessary. She also explained that she was a second-year nursing student and volunteered to reset Riley’s jaw.
“It’s easy, it literally takes two minutes.”
By minute twenty-seven, Riley was trying to figure out a way to casually slip off the chair so she could beat Claire to death with it, but just as she worked out the problem, her jaw abruptly popped back into place.
“There,” Claire said, sweating and breathing heavily, “that wasn’t so bad.”
Riley nodded, too sore to talk. You have no idea how close you came to being buried in the backyard.
Using Claire’s three-generations-back iPad, Riley checked in with worried friends, arranged for the drives to be picked up, then did a web search on the hospital fire to see what was being reported.
The first hit was a headline:
EDWARD KAMINSKI,
BELOVED AREA DOCTOR,
KILLED IN TRAGIC FIRE.
Beloved my ass, she thought, scrolling through the article until she reached the part she’d been searching for.
As of this morning, police and firefighters were still searching the burned ruins of the hospital in search of an unidentified female patient who is still missing. Also killed in the blaze was Gerald Kane Jr., 26, institutionalized a decade earlier after murdering his parents.
The police booking photo showed the patient she’d known as Frankenstein, taken while he was still a teenager.
Gerald, she thought, trying to associate the name with the young man she’d come to care about. Gerald. I wonder if he went by Gerry?
Then she noticed the Jr. behind his name. Jesus Christ. Bad enough he was tortured his whole young life, but to have to bear the same name as the man who did the torturing? No wonder he was desperate to become someone else. Better to be that monster than the one that shared his name.
When a courier came by the next day, Riley hesitated at handing off the drives without doing a backup. She’d gone through too much to risk anything happening to them but she lacked the finesse and equipment needed to access the encrypted files without hitting a tripwire that might erase everything. But that didn’t stop her from saying she’d backed it all up, just to be safe.
A week passed with no further word about the drives, but there was plenty on the news about her. By now the authorities were able to confirm that she’d escaped in the confusion, and her face was on every NPF website in the state.
“I can leave if you’re worried about me staying here,” she told Claire. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry. Worst-case scenario, I’ll say I never saw the photos, and you lied to me about the whole thing. I’ll turn on you in a hot second, if you’re cool with it.”
“Yeah, I’m good. Go for it.”
Two more days passed in silence.
What if there was nothing useful on the drives? What if all that was for nothing?
Another two days.
Then all hell broke loose.
It started before dawn, when her borrowed iPad began blowing up with text notifications.
She clicked on the first link, and the screen filled with text.
Oh. My. God.
EMERGENCY DETENTION ACT
COVERTLY REACTIVATED
Email Dump Reveals Administration Plans for Dissident Internment Camps
By Jasmine Visconti
New York Times Exclusive Report
In a series of emails and documents obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by sources inside the covert program who prefer to remain anonymous, President William Jacobs signed an undisclosed executive order in late February reauthorizing the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 with the assent of Senate Majority Leader Roger McInnis, Speaker of the House Elaine Trent, Attorney General Fred Forsythe and the Office of Homeland Security.
Conceived at the height of the Cold War, the Emergency Detention Act was passed into law on September 23, 1950, by a bipartisan vote of 286 to 48 in the House and 57 to 10 in the Senate. It gave the executive branch and the attorney general’s office the authority to arrest and indefinitely detain dissidents without access to appeal, formal charges or attorneys in a system that operated independently of the judicial system.
These provisions allowed for the establishment of guilt by association, enabled administrators to decide on their own authority whether the protections granted by the First and 14th Amendments applied to the defendants, gave officials the right to designate defendants and their associates untrustworthy based on publicly expressed ideas or suspicions about future conduct, denied the right of cross-examination while allowing the participation of military officials in decisions of guilt and permitted the use of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses. Individuals convicted through this process would be held at military bases outside the jurisdiction of the penal code system and could only be released by an act of Congress or intervention by the office of the attorney general.
While the Emergency Detention Act was not utilized during the Cold War, provisions of the act have been cited more than once as grounds for the indefinite detention of United States citizens designated “enemy combatants” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a list that included José Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.
Once the bill supporting the new executive order had been passed in a joint confidential session of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Attorney General Forsythe signed off on the program only after lawyers at the Department of Justice drafted a legal opinion justifying its implementation. The document drew heavily on the work of Mr. Thomas McGann, a consultant with Homeland Security, and clinical psychiatrist Dr. Edward Kaminski, who was quoted by sources as saying that the structure of the psychiatric community could be used to justify institutionalizing individuals determined to be mentally unstable and a danger to themselves and others, a subjective evaluative process that would operate entirely outside judicial review.
Clinical interviews with detainees could also be used to gather information about other dissidents that could be developed into charges against these individuals in violation of Miranda rights, the laws of evidence and Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
According to classified documents obtained by The Times, the Office of Homeland Security provided funding to Dr. Kaminski and Mr. McGann to create a pilot program that would provide proof of concept while eliciting information needed for further prosecutions. The Times has also confirmed that 37 abandoned military bases were being set aside as holding facilities, with more than a dozen already fitted out for occupancy.
Responding to these revelations, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights organizations vowed to file legal challenges in federal court demanding an immediate injunction against the program’s implementation. The ACLU also called for congressional hearings and the immediate release of all individuals currently being held under the umbrella of Mr. McGann’s American Renewal Centers.
“This is the kind of thing we’d expect to see in the old Soviet Union or, currently, with the North Korean Sunshine Camps,” said ACLU Executive Director Harrison Thorne. “The only good thing is that we found out about their plans before the final trigger could be pulled on these detainment camps. As we’ve seen in prior administrations, it’s hard to reverse repressive policies once they become institutionalized in the name of national security.”
In preparation for this article, The Times reached out to Mr. McGann for comment, but a spokesperson for his office declined to reply, citing the tragic death of Dr. Kaminski, who perished in a fire at the Seattle ARC facility Saturday evening. However, others who worked at the hospital, including Director of Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Julian Munroe, Chief Nursing Officer Elizabeth Biedermann, and General Administrator Dr. Lee Kim expressed willingness to testify about alleged abuses committed under the authority of this classified program.
Elizabeth. Her first name’s Elizabeth.
Nice to meet you, Elizabeth. Looks like you finally found a match and some oil.
Riley closed the article and flipped to Twitter as reactions to the news spiraled exponentially up the trend line, watching an entire country become enraged in real time.
Then, more incoming texts:
Riley glanced at the trend line as the numbers grew, then back at the text.
She put her fingers on the touchscreen keyboard.
I don’t have to do this, she thought. I’ve done plenty. Wouldn’t it be nice to stay home for a change, watch it all on TV, let someone else carry the weight? After everything that’s gone down lately, I’ve earned a break.
You’re right, she thought back. Absolutely.
“I’M IN,” she typed back. “WHERE AND WHEN?”
You’re such an asshole, the back of her brain said.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
* * *
The crowd rolled down Sixth Avenue toward Times Square in what the TV Talking Heads said was the biggest protest they’d seen in years; fifteen thousand voices raised in peaceful defiance of the rules of repression. Patrol cars and vans lined the street, surrounded by NPF squads in body armor, clutching shields, batons, tear gas launchers, and guns loaded with rubber bullets. And maybe the other kind.
But nobody turned away.
That was the last rule she’d been taught, in the days before her parents were taken.
Once you open the book on these people, you don’t stop, you don’t turn back, you keep going until you win. Doesn’t matter how long it takes. That’s what united our family across the years back in Ireland. You stood on the same corner as your father and mother, which was the same corner where their parents and their parents’ parents stood, demonstrating for the same things: decency and fair dealing and humanity. It took four hundred years of families, united in hope, to push the English out of Ireland. That’s twice the life of this country, spent in a single struggle. A lot of us fell in the process, but in the end we won.
You stay and you wear them down until the job is done, until there’s peace, until the bully boys learn that using force against people doesn’t work anymore, because it requires fear on the other side. The fear is always bigger than the actual threat. Once you stop being afraid, the threat falls apart.
Never stop. Never give up. Never despair. Never.
The burner phone in her pocket buzzed at her. She flicked it on.
“Copy that,” she typed back.
She closed the text window, pausing to look at the home-screen photo she’d taken in the storeroom that showed Frankenstein sitting beside her and smiling. Thank you, she thought at him, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. Thank you for being there when the lights went out.
“Here they come!” someone yelled.
She slipped the phone into her pocket as the police line advanced toward them, shields raised, batons in hand.
Then she closed her eyes and took a long, low breath, feeling her parents standing beside her.
Riley Diaz opened her eyes and threw a fist in the air. “Boots on the ground! Bodies in the way!”
And fifteen thousand voices called back, “Boots on the ground! Bodies in the way!”
“Boots on the ground! Bodies in the way!”
“Boots on the ground!”
“Bodies in the way!”
Bring it!