$2,575,200,000
bribes
Daniel stood at parade rest in the briefing room, his lower back beginning to ache in that familiar way, watching the President’s face fill the projector screen. The “emergency announcement” had pulled them off shift rotation, all personnel required, but fifteen minutes in, the only emergency Daniel could identify was the air conditioning, which had died sometime around minute three.
“The radical elements in this country.” The President paused, letting the words hang. “They want to tear down everything we’ve built. They want chaos. They want destruction.” Another pause. The man’s timing was immaculate; Daniel had to give him that. “But we’re not going to let that happen, are we?”
Somewhere behind him, someone exhaled in a way that wasn’t quite a laugh. Sergeant Howell’s boots squeaked against the linoleum as he shifted his weight toward the sound.
“And I want you to know,” the President continued, leaning toward the camera with the practiced intimacy of a man who had learned to simulate closeness to people he would never remember, “My military, my soldiers. I see you. I appreciate you, all one-point-four-five million of you. That’s why I’ve signed an executive order, effective immediately, providing every active-duty service member with a direct payment of seventeen hundred and seventy-six dollars.”
The feeling in the room changed. Daniel felt it in his peripheral vision, the small movements of men doing math in their heads. His own calculation was automatic: rent in nine days, four hundred in checking, his wife’s prescription copay still sitting on his credit card from last month.
“The checks are already in the mail.”
Someone two rows up rolled his shoulders, a gesture that could have meant anything or nothing.
“That’s right. Seventeen seventy-six.” The President smiled, teeth catching the studio lights. “Because you’re patriots, and patriots deserve to be recognized.”
The screen eventually went dark. The lights came up, buzzing and institutional. Daniel filed out with the others into a hallway that smelled like floor wax, then began preparing for another night of pointless patrols.
That night, the city held its breath around him. Daniel walked his route past federal buildings that glowed like terrariums, their lobbies visible through glass walls, empty desks and silent monitors and the occasional security guard scrolling through a phone. The monuments rose in the distance, bone-white and floodlit. A wind came off the Potomac carrying something that might have been rain or might have been the river itself, that mineral smell of water that had traveled a long way to get nowhere in particular.
He wasn’t armed. None of them were, not on these patrols. Visible presence, the briefings called it. Reassurance. Daniel had stopped trying to decode what exactly was being reassured, or for whom.
A homeless man slept on a bench near the Archives, his shopping cart arranged beside him with the careful geometry of someone protecting what he had. A group of young professionals spilled out of a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue, their laughter stopping when they saw Daniel’s uniform, their bodies angling away as they passed. A woman walking a terrier nodded at him without breaking stride, her face giving nothing.
Patterson materialized beside him near the end of shift, falling into step with the easy rhythm of someone who’d learned to match pace in basic and never unlearned it.
“So,” Patterson said. “Seventeen seventy-six.”
“I was there.”
“No, I mean.” Patterson’s voice dropped, not quite a whisper, just the register of someone who’d developed instincts about what carried and what didn’t. “Rodriguez. Finance. You know Rodriguez?”
“I know who he is.”
“He’s saying the money’s not coming through normal channels. No appropriation. No DOD budget line.” Patterson glanced at a passing Capitol Police cruiser, waited for it to turn the corner. “Executive discretionary fund. Straight from the tariff money.”
Daniel kept walking. His boots found the cracks in the sidewalk, the rhythm he’d established three weeks ago and hadn’t varied since. “Still spends the same.”
Patterson was quiet for a while. They passed the Mexican embassy, its windows dark, its flag hanging limp in the windless air.
“Yeah,” Patterson finally said. “I guess it does.”
The next morning, Captain Vance stood at the front of the briefing room with her hands clasped behind her back and her jaw set in a way Daniel had learned to read. It was the expression she wore when she was about to say something she’d been told to say, word for word, in a tone that made clear the words weren’t hers.
“I want to be direct with you,” she said. Not clear. Direct. Daniel noted the word choice, filed it away. “The payment you’re receiving is a direct token of appreciation from the Commander-in-Chief. It is coming directly from his office.” She paused, and something moved behind her eyes, there and gone. “This is not standard military compensation. I’m told you should understand it as a personal gesture. From the President. To the troops, as a thank-you for your loyalty.”
The room held its silence like a held breath.
“Questions?”
No one moved. Daniel thought about the check in his mailbox, or on its way to his mailbox, seventeen seventy-six in paper form, and he thought about the word loyalty, which Vance had leaned into just slightly, just enough.
“Good.” Vance looked down at her tablet, and when she looked back up, her face had rearranged itself into something more familiar, more operational. “We have new orders. Effective eighteen hundred today, patrol protocols are changing.” She read five names. Daniel’s was the last. “You’re being reassigned to a rapid response detail. Draw your service weapons this afternoon, fourteen hundred hours.”
The cold started in Daniel’s fingertips and moved inward, settling somewhere behind his sternum. He heard himself speak before he’d decided to. “Ma’am. What kind of response?”
“Civil unrest contingency. There might be an Antifa demonstration this weekend. We’re taking precautions.”
“Riot control rounds?”
Vance looked at him. The silence stretched. For a moment, something like apology flickers there.
“No,” she said. “Live.”