Free A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller by Charles W. Sasser

tried... I couldn’t get to Jamie in time.”
    He batted his eyes.
    “I blame myself,” he said.
     

Federal Judge Strikes Down Oil Ban
     
    (New Orleans)— U.S. Federal Judge Orville Fielding struck down the Anastos administration’s ban against deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the disastrous AP oil spill that continues to leak about two million gallons of oil daily into the Gulf...
    The White House promised an immediate appeal...
    White House spokesman Dewey Gubbins said President Anastos “is not trying to put oil companies out of business... He believes either Big Oil act more responsibly or it will leave government no choice but to take more control...”
     

Chapter Fourteen
     
    Washington, D.C.
     
    Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham was hosting an important meeting in the conference room of the Russell Senate Office Building, the exact details of which Dennis Trout had not been made privy. He was routinely excluded from such meetings even though he had been his brother-in-law’s chief of staff for the past three years. Wiedersham normally called the meetings before major legislation was introduced—like the TARP bailout funds for General Motors and Goldman-Sachs, the Healthcare and Finance Bills, FAD—or when the President was about to sign new Executive Orders to impose additional federal regulations on the nation.
    Trout nursed his resentment and tried not to show it as, like a good gentleman’s gentleman, he escorted arriving participants to the big soundproof conference room down the hall from Wiedersham’s office and made sure there were fresh hors d’oeuvres and coffee and that the bar was stocked with drinks and mixes. His eventually becoming Congressman Trout depended on playing ball with the Big Boys, getting his toast buttered on the right side.
    The meeting, Trout noted, and which he later recorded in his notebook, seemed restricted to some of the top players in the continuing economic crisis. One of the first to arrive was veteran Congressman Frank Barnes, chair of House Ways and Means. Openly gay, he was flaming down to his limp wrists and a lisp. A year ago, he got caught up in a scandal involving his “partner” operating a homosexual prostitution ring out of Barnes’ Washington apartment. Barnes naturally had the support of the Washington establishment. The media dutifully glossed over the incident and Barnes won reelection from Massachusetts. Voters, Trout had discovered with growing cynicism, paid little attention to what went on in the rarified air along the Potomac. All they cared about was that their representatives bring home the bacon and keep the entitlements coming.
    Duane Smith arrived in the company of Speaker of the House Barbara Teague and Senator Harry Roepke (D-PA), who headed the White House Economics Commission. Ms. Teague’s losing battle to retain eternal youth included Botox injections that turned her face into a big-eyed mask in which only the lips and eyelashes were capable of movement. Harry Roepke wore a wig and had his nails, hand and foot, done weekly at taxpayer expense. Smith, the White House Environmental Czar, was also president of the powerful Public Employees International Union, PEIU, and had recently assumed a position on the Board of Directors for the SIDA Corporation.
    Curious, Trout had conducted some research on SIDA. It was not listed publicly anywhere, but he discovered a document on Wiedersham’s desk touting the Serious Infectious Diseases Association as an enterprise created “to design and develop novel countermeasures to prevent and treat serious infectious diseases with an emphasis on biological warfare defense and...to develop population control measures through military application in a crisis.” Whatever that entailed.
    Two or three other senators and congressmen and a like number of industrialists completed the small congregation of movers and shakers. George Zuniga kept the others waiting and the meeting