Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [70]
But he had heard the rumors about how under the previous administration, the Department of Homeland Security had turned most of its attention away from outward threats and begun to concentrate on what it considered homegrown terrorism.
In theory that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were violent nutjobs of all nationalities and beliefs. Always had been and always would be, more than likely.
But the previous President’s paranoia about right-wing conspiracies against her had infected Homeland Security until anybody who expressed the least bit of disagreement with her policies, from an editorial writer for a small-town paper to a radio talk-show host to the executives of the one cable news network that didn’t toe the liberal line, had an official file in Washington labeling them as potential terrorists.
It wasn’t just Homeland Security that was affected, either. People who disagreed publicly with the President suddenly found their tax returns being audited at a much higher rate than those of the general public. New wiretapping and surveillance laws that were much more intrusive and frightening than previous ones were rammed through Congress by the very liberals who had decried such tactics only a few years earlier, a blatant example of the double standard that ruled Washington.
The new Federal Protective Service was part of the Department of Homeland Security, Ford knew. But it had just been formed, and as far as Ford was aware, a director for it hadn’t even been named yet.
When he said as much to Earl Trussell while he wrestled the pickup around a bend in the road, Earl asked, “Have you heard of a guy named General Stone?”
“Weldon Stone?”
“That’s him.”
Ford grimaced. “Yeah, I know who he is.”
General Weldon Stone was a career military man who had been eased into retirement a couple of years earlier after a series of public clashes with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Stone had been in command of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and his growing reluctance to pursue Islamic terrorists because of what he termed “their legitimate grievances against Israel and the United States” had finally led to his removal. That had brought on an anti-Semitic tirade to the news media that was bad enough to force the previous administration to sever its ties with him.
“Stone’s the director of the FPS,” Earl said. “As least according to the file I saw, he is.”
So the new administration, which was cold if not openly hostile to Israel, had brought back General Stone and placed him in charge of the new national police force. That was not good, Ford thought. Stone was a maniac, the sort of inflexible fanatic who thought that anybody who disagreed with his political views was not only stupid but evil and ought to be wiped off the face of the earth. And since his political views had slanted more and more to the left over the years, he was now very much at home in Washington.
“This is the guy they’re going to give that new nerve gas?” Ford asked. Despite the heat of the day and the sweat that made his shirt stick to him, he felt an icy chill inside.
“Yeah,” Earl said. “You can see now why I was worried.”
“There’s no way they can get away with using it against our own people. The country wouldn’t stand for it.”
“Are you kidding? The country will stand for anything if the guy in the White House says it’s the right thing to do.”
Unfortunately, that was probably true. A large part of the population thought the President could do no wrong, and with the media constantly reinforcing that idea, that percentage grew larger and larger all the time.
“Anyway,” Earl went on, “they’ll probably try to keep it quiet. Say somebody’s giving the administration a lot of trouble. They pipe the stuff into his house, kill him and his family, and then blame it on a carbon monoxide leak or something. Even if they wanted to use it for something bigger, like taking out a whole town, they could say the water supply got contaminated by some