Read Online Against All Enemies by John Gilstrap - Free Book Online Page B

he is?”
    “Remember that I’m just the messenger, okay?” Venice said. “The police narrative emphasizes that the senator challenged his victim, drew his gun first. If he hadn’t done that, then the victim would never have felt compelled to draw his gun to defend himself.”
    “The dead guy,” Boxers said. “Was his gun legal?”
    “Of course not,” Jonathan said. “This is all politics. I say Haynes is screwed.”
    “I hate DC,” Boxers growled. “It’s a den of rats, every one of them waiting to feed on the mistakes or misfortunes of others.”
    Jonathan and Venice gaped in unison.
    “What?” Boxers said.
    “Mistakes and misfortunes of others?” Jonathan parroted.
    “Positively eloquent,” Venice said.
    Boxers blushed. “Y’all suck.”

Chapter Six
    L ieutenant Colonel Ian Martin’s heart sank when he saw the man enter the Washington Metro car at Foggy Bottom. Reflexively—instinctively—he saved the document on his laptop to its heavily encrypted home on his hard drive. When the computer sensed a connection, the drive would upload to the World Wide Web and then cleanse itself.
    This was the third time in two days that Ian’s path had crossed with this guy. He was on the tall side of average height and the thick side of average build, with a shaved head whose ring of shadow above his ears spoke more of male pattern vanity than tough guy fashion statement. A voice inside his brain told him that he was just being paranoid, but far fewer graves were filled with the bodies of paranoid people than people who chose not to trust their instincts.
    Paranoia had been a driving force in Ian’s life in the months since he’d launched his Uprising website. He’d covered his bases as best he could, thanks to the unwitting assistance of Uncle Sam’s bazillion-dollar encryption software, but everyone knew that there was no such thing as true anonymity on the Internet. Ian wasn’t even sure that he’d broken any laws—at least not yet—but just the notion that he might have meant that it was a good time to listen to the paranoid voices when they sang a unison chorus in your head. He just wished that the paranoia would be less of a shadow over his life.
    Ian had started the Uprising website as a lark, maybe even as a joke—a place to anonymously post his frustrations as an army officer under the clueless leadership of the Darmond administration. It was hard enough to cast one’s lots as a pawn to political gamesmanship, but Ian wondered if there’d ever been a time in modern history where incompetence had touched the cluelessness of this team. The asshole in the presidential palace—and let’s be honest, that’s what the White House had become—was ready to surrender to anybody at the slightest provocation, and as a result, the world hailed him as the new prince of peace. Just be sure not to ask the residents of fallen democracies in the Middle East or the former Soviet states. They might confuse the American sense of peace with thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. But apparently, they weren’t the United States’ problem, either.
    The fact that the media so loved Tony Darmond, despite all of the scandals that had plagued his administration, frightened Ian more than the incompetence itself. The media lauded peace at all costs. The media outlets that had noticed the Uprising had already labeled the site as a terrorist link, and painted those who’d joined Ian’s side to be anti-American racist homophobic killers of senior citizens. Or something like that.
    As a military officer, Ian had dedicated his life to turning a blind eye to politics. He’d been sent to good wars and he’d been sent to stupid wars, and the secret to escaping the meat grinder with a sane mind was to embrace the truth that his was not to reason why. His job was to salute and make sometimes stupid stuff happen. To be a warrior for one’s country was among the noblest callings a man could