Washington Horror Blog

SEMI-FICTIONAL CHRONICLE of the EVIL THAT INFECTS WASHINGTON, D.C. To read Prologue and Character Guide, please see www.washingtonhorrorblog.com, updated 6/6//2017.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Carnage

"Your new title is what?" asked triple agent Charles Wu, staring across the Chez Grand Mere table at the man formerly known as the Assistant Deputy Administrator for Hope.

"I don't have the new business cards yet," he replied.

"I'm sorry--I just don't think I heard you right," said Wu.

"Assistant Deputy Administrator for Carnage," said the State Department official.  "Could we just move on now?"

"Carnage?"  Hong Kong-born Wu had learned English at some of the best schools in Britain, but he was suddenly doubtful about his grasp of this word.  "Carnage?  As in--"

"I don't know what it means!  Let's move on."

"Massive destruction?  Loss of life?"

"It's just a title!  We have more important things to discuss," wailed the ADAfC, fighting back the tears.

"Look, I would very much like to work together in the coming weeks," began Wu, but the ADAfC interrupted him.

"Weeks?!"

"Do you think he'll last more than a few weeks?  My point is that Beijing, quite frankly, is content right now to sit back and let Trump blow up your country.  If Trump does not want to be a global leader that anybody actually follows, Beijing does not have a problem with that."

"China needs to throw him a bone, or tariffs are coming," replied the ADAfC, stabbing at his food.

"A bone?" asked Wu, incredulously.  "Have you forgotten that Beijing is financing the federal debt here?"

"No," said the ADAfC quietly, reaching for another swallow of expensive French brandy.  "He just wants China to show some favorable response to his leadership, such as retreating from those islands."

The ADAfC was now eating his rosemary potatoes, not even making eye contact with Wu, who could see the facial tic and feel the vibration coming from the ADAfC's foot tapping nervously on the table leg below them.

"That's a non-starter, I'm sorry," said Wu, and he was sorry--sorry that this man must have barely escaped the State Department massacre, sorry for himself that he could earn very little espionage money (or brownie points) in a country where diplomacy was dead, sorry that his SuperPAC adviser at Prince and Prowling had been told to start up a Russia Practice, sorry for his young daughter to have to grow up in a country with a disgusting pig calling the shots.  "Please convey to your boss that China would welcome a new role as the strongest country on the United Nations Security Council.  Please convey to your boss that the U.S. cannot win a trade war with China.  And please convey to your boss this."  With that, Wu handed the ADAfC a printed-out email, recently hacked, which the State Department official promptly read and started having a panic attack over.  "They say Rex Tillerson only cares about drilling oil, but he might care about that," added Wu.

Meanwhile, Prince and Prowling staff attorney Chloe Cleavage had already received her first anonymous payment from Charles Wu, which the British agents claimed to know nothing about.  Humiliated that her secret call-girl life had been exposed by Nigel ("Prickly") Hawthorne and Richard ("The Third") Mollington, she was just as eager as Wu had predicted to run with the agents' suggestions that she work at getting the Russian businessmen staying at Trump International Hotel to compromise Trump on tape.  After they had arranged her training meeting with Wu agents Apricot Lily and Camisole Silk, and assured her that her activities would ultimately lead to freeing a lot of Eastern European women from sex trafficking, she was ready to return to the swank hotel for another party in the "Russian" suite.  She smiled nervously at the young girls, who looked paler and more glassy-eyed than last time.  She thought she recognized a couple of Prince and Prowling's Exxon clients, so she made a beeline to the other end of the suite.  Apricot Lily and Camisole Silk had told her that the fattest, baldest, ugliest men were the easiest to manipulate, but they still gave her the willies, so she walked up to youngish Sergei, who handed her his own drink.  "Nice Muslim ban, eh?" he asked.

"Yeah!" she fake-giggled.  (Worst pick-up line ever!)  "Does Russia have a Muslim ban?"

"Oh, they don't come to Russia," he said.  "We have a big wall!"  Then he started laughing at his own joke.

"In more than one place!" she said, suggestively, but the comment only confused him.

"No, that was joke--no wall."

"I know," smiled Chloe, "but this is hard."  She pressed her hand against his pectoral muscles (which, she was disappointed to find out, were not actually hard).

"Yeah, lots of hard things," he said, putting an arm around her.

"How hard are Trump's things?" she asked.

"Would you like me to tell you about Trump's things?" he asked with a smile.

A mile to the west, it was the most chaotic meeting the Heurich Society had ever held.

"Silence!" shouted the Chair, Condoleezza Rice, from the giant flat-screen television beaming her face across the country into the upper-floor meeting room of the Brewmaster's Castle.  "We will discuss every item in agenda order!"

"You promised that Tillerson would protect our interests!" complained the international banker.

"Give him a chance!" exclaimed Rice.  "He doesn't even have a full team in place yet at State."

"A team?" cried the former CIA officer.  "What does any of this have to do with teams?  Trump is uncontrollable!"

"He can be controlled!" insisted Rice.  "He's just got some egomania steam to blow off first, and then--"

"And then what?!" interrupted the international arms merchant.  "Israel makes a first strike against Iran?  Beijing drops a neutron bomb on Taiwan?  I can't sell arms to people who are wiped off the map!"

"Don't be so melodramatic!" retorted Rice.

"We have reports from ten of our overseas mining operations that they will be expropriated in the event of a trade war with the U.S.," said the Treasurer.  "U.S. currency is about to take a nose-dive."

"I admit it's a rocky start--"

"There are Homeland Security agents attacking journalists in a New York airport," said a Midwestern Congressman.  "Things are spinning out of control!"

"Oh, it's not that bad," said Captain Tyler Glockmann, rolling his wheelchair into the room and waving to Condoleezza Rice on the video screen.  "Turns out I'm not the only rogue employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency.  Let me tell you:  it's been a very interesting week there!"

Over at the White House, Nazi Barbara Hellmeister--with a new face and a new name--entered the West Wing for her interview to be a Special Scientific Adviser to the President, while demons danced and angels wept.

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COMING UP:  White House diaries!

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