Choke Hold

  For Adam Koffman and Morgan Abbotts;

  for Samantha and Adelaide Coles,

  for Thomas and Tyler Hering…each one a joy.

  For Bob Salvatore, with thanks.

  For www.warrenmurphy.com,

  where one of us can be reached;

  for www.jamesmullaney.com, where the other one can.

  And for the Glorious House of Sinanju, e-mail:

  housinan@aol.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  1

  For some reason that morning, on the day he would die for unleashing an unimaginable plague on an unsuspecting world, Dr. John Feathers remembered the screaming girl.

  He did not even know her name. He had met her three years before on a commuter train to New York. The girl must have been a college student somewhere because she carried a textbook before her like a shield, and with jutted chin seemed to dare the seated passengers she passed to comment on the title. All the other seats were full, and so she and her fat book had wound up next to John Feathers.

  She attempted to appear casual as she angled the book so that John could read the title. The book was called Modern Feminists from Abzug to Zeigert by Nora Personning. John would have preferred to ignore it and the girl, but every time the train jostled, her book hand managed to bump against him and it was either allow her to bruise his ribs all the way to Grand Central Station or ask her what she obviously wanted him to ask.

  “Good book?” John queried politely.

  The girl who had been trying to get his attention for five minutes turned to him as if his question were as welcome as a dead horse in the Russian Tea Room.

  “It’s brilliant,” she accused.

  She was pretty, but exposure to academic life was clearly putting her through a metamorphosis to perpetual anger. She wore no makeup and her hair was cut too short. Her clothes were lumpy and formless, yet here and there when she moved was fleeting evidence of bumps and curves that suggested a good figure, one that might even emerge like a moth from a chrysalis when her twenty-something flirtation with militancy ended and her real life began. She had the very ordinary college-age bearing of someone with an infinite number of opinions but not one single thought of her own.

  “Dr. Personning is a genius,” the young woman said. “She’s opened my eyes to the reality of this bourgeois patriarchal society.”

  John didn’t think anyone still said “bourgeois” these days, and under normal circumstances he might have mentioned this. But this girl did not seem likely to respond well to criticism, so all he said was, “Hmm.”

  “Abzug was a pioneer, of course,” the girl said, whacking the book cover with the back of her hand, “but Zeigert is a fascinating figure. A proto-feminist from the early twentieth century, but she couldn’t stand the slowness of societal change, so she just dropped out. Disappeared in the 1940s.”

  “Sort of like Greta Garbo,” John suggested mildly.

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “She was a famous actress who dropped out of the limelight, I guess at the height of her celebrity or something. They chased her around for years after, trying to snap pictures of her, but she just wanted to be left alone.”

  The girl looked for something in his words to snarl at, but finding nothing she hummed a little noncommittal hum and sank into her seat. They rode in silence for a few long, awkward minutes until some vestigial polite impulse that Dr. Nora Personning and her fellow professors had not been able to eradicate completely surfaced in the girl and she asked what John Feathers did for a living.

  “I’m a research scientist for Cheyenne Tobacco,” he replied with a friendly smile.

  The next thing he knew, the girl was on her feet screaming bloody blue murder. At first he thought she must be accusing him of improperly touching her or something, but through the bugging eyes, frothy spittle and her finger pointing straight at his nose, he picked up a few words.

  “…mass murderer…innocents…baby killer…dying in the streets…worse than heroin…”

  She accused him of being a bigger murderer than Hitler and George W. Bush combined.

  “Please. Sit down,” John Feathers begged.

  But the girl would not stop. She just stood in the aisle, screaming and spitting and pointing, until John was forced to get off at the next stop and catch a later train.

  That was three years ago, and it had been the last time he ever admitted to a stranger what he did for a living.

  But on this morning, the last of his life, John Feathers felt even greater shame than he had that day on the train. On that day, he had walked a gauntlet of embarrassment past his fellow passengers, melting inwardly as he passed each set of accusing eyes. But this morning, he walked amidst peers who scarcely noticed him, so busy were they cheering one another and popping champagne corks. A white-coated scientist spied John skulking by and grabbed him in a bear hug.

  “This is the guy,” said the man, whose name tag read “Neil Speckman.” “This guy is responsible for the addition on my house that the old ball-and-chain has been nagging me for, and the brand-new, heated inground pool I’ll be building to get away from her. Ain’t it the truth, Tonto?”

  John hunched uncomfortably among the group of scientists. Although Neil Speckman was smiling, the rest sneered silent resentment at John as they scratched their arms and faces.

  That outbreak of skin-itching at the Cheyenne Tobacco labs had started a few months before and had been growing steadily. The little red bumps were worse around the mouths and right hands of most of the men and women.

  “Tonto here is going to make us all rich,” Speckman roared, gesturing with a Styrofoam cup of champagne. Sparkling wine sloshed over the rim.

  “Knock off the Tonto stuff, Neil,” someone nearby suggested.

  “Johnny doesn’t mind, do you, John?” Speckman asked. “I mean, look at him. He looks about as Injun as I do. Hey, is that really true what they say, John? You really Indian?”

  John nodded. “Excuse me,” he said, and extricated himself from the man’s bear hug.

  “No way. Can’t be Indian,” Neil Speckman whispered boozily as John headed for the exit. “Guy’s whiter than my lab coat.”

  One woman was still trying to hush the man silent as John Feathers stole out of the lab and into the hallway.

  There was a portrait on the wall outside the lab. A man with stony visage, steely gaze, and robust bearing stared unflinchingly at passersby. A tiny plaque at the base of the picture read, “Edgar Rawly, CEO Cheyenne Tobacco.”

  The caption was unnecessary. There was no one at the Cheyenne Tobacco complex who did not know their company’s founder and chief executive officer. Rawly was the picture of health, with an athletic red glow to his chiselled cheekbones and a hint of a smile on his full, manly lips. On his knee rested one hand, and between his fingers was a cigarette. The cigarette was painted so brilliantly white it should have had a halo.

  In portrait form, Edgar Rawly was living proof of the health-giving qualities of all tobacco products.

  The picture nearly made Joh
n Feathers retch. Panting, he raced down the hallway, away from the portrait, away from the labs. In the stairwell, John leaned against the wall. And then it came back to him….

  …mass murderer…baby killer…worse than heroin….

  That incident had been three years ago and now, still, the shrill, accusing words of that young college student on a Manhattan-bound commuter train echoed in John’s head as if she were shouting them up from the depths of the stairwell. He wanted to cover his ears, to run screaming from the building.

  From upstairs, he could still hear the happy buzz of his fellow workers. There were big bonuses all around, thanks to him. Most of the workers were stockholders as well, and their stock in Cheyenne was about to go through the roof. There were sales projections from marketing that had the guys from corporate doing cartwheels down the hallway. In three years, maybe less, Cheyenne would corner the world tobacco market. It was simple, it was neat, and the only things John had traded away in the deal were his soul, his people and the world.

  And for what?

  The Cheyenne Smooths.

  The first great tobacco product in a century. A gold mine of curling smoke that would make them all rich beyond their wildest dreams. And they could not have done it without Dr. John Feathers.

  For John Feathers, knowing what he had done—what he was about to do—it was all he could do to keep his breakfast from launching up out of his churning stomach.

  He took the back stairs down to the parking lot. Two men and a woman were smoking near a trash bin.

  “I wish I’d never tried these things,” one of the men commented, hacking a viscous glob of mucus onto the pavement.

  “It’s cheaper now anyway,” the woman said. She was puffing away as if possessed, launching plumes of curling white smoke at the eight-story glass and steel building across the parking lot. The Cheyenne Tobacco world headquarters reflected the yellow sunlight and brilliant blue of the West Virginia sky. “I figured it out. Back when we started, when the stuff was so hard to come by, it used to cost Cheyenne five thousand dollars a puff.”

  The second man was suddenly racked by a coughing spasm. Doubled over, he held his cigarette far away from his face as he fought to catch his breath. The woman, careful to keep puffing, patted him on the back.

  “You okay, Stan?” she asked once the spasm subsided.

  Stan sniffled, cleared his throat and stuffed his cigarette right back between his lips. “I hate this,” he said, his voice hoarse. He was nearly in tears. “It was never this bad with my old brand. I get up in the middle of the night to smoke now. I even dream about these damn things. If it wasn’t for that son of a bitch John Feathers, I wouldn’t have that spot on my lungs, I know that for damn sure. Someone should shoot that scumbag.”

  The woman noticed John walking by and nudged her companion in the arm. Stan glanced at John, scowled and turned away. But he and the others never stopped puffing.

  John noted that each had a rash around their mouths. The rashes were older now, and the early-stage cherry redness was now a lunar surface of tough, jaundiced boils. Although the morning was humid, each wore rubber gloves on their right hands, filched from the Cheyenne labs. Still, the rash was faintly visible on their forearms.

  John did not blame them for giving him the cold shoulder. He deserved whatever anyone gave him and much more. Like a zombie, he walked to his car. From his coat pocket, he removed a book of official Cheyenne Tobacco matches and slipped them in his trousers. After, he took off his lab coat with its ID tag and dropped it to the pavement. He would not be needing the tag any longer. He was never coming back to this place of death.

  John drove to the airport, bought a ticket to Montana, and flew back to the land of his people, to his home, back to the place where he was known as Johnny Crow Feathers of the Chowok Tribe. It was the father of Johnny Crow Feathers who picked up his troubled son at the airport.

  His father was waiting in the parking lot, perched on the hood of his old Dodge. He had not gone inside the terminal to wait for his son. William Eagle Feathers had told his son when he called from the plane that the health fascists did not allow smoking inside the terminal building.

  It broke Johnny’s heart to see the red rash on his elderly father’s face and hands. Like Johnny, William Eagle Feathers was light-skinned, with only a broadness to the nose that might have indicated Indian blood.

  His father tried to hug him, but Johnny leaned away.

  “I warned you about those things, Dad. Can you please not smoke?”

  It took all of the old man’s willpower, but he stubbed out the cigarette on the bumper of his car. Johnny noted with great guilt that his father did not toss away the half used cigarette, but slipped it into his pocket.

  Johnny shook his father’s hand, his left hand, where the rash was fainter. At the touch of his father’s weathered fingers, the floodgates burst. All the guilt he was feeling for what he had done poured out and he began weeping.

  “This is all my fault, Dad.”

  “No, Johnny,” his father insisted. “A man makes his own decisions. They might be stupid, but they’re his to make and no one else’s.”

  Johnny didn’t argue although he knew that was a load of crap. He had the test marketing data to prove it. Free will might open the door a crack, but Johnny’s work would make sure that door was kicked down and a loaded gun was held to the homeowner’s head.

  Without exchanging another word, they rode to the Chowok reservation.

  The Chowok were a puzzlement to researchers, and had been featured in many articles and documentaries through the years. DNA testing had proved that they were related to other North American Indians, yet there had been great influence from European immigrants. On his people’s land, John saw white-skinned and fair-haired men and women smoking. Worse, and to his eternal shame, many of the pink-skinned children he passed were puffing as well. And not just stupid teenagers, but kids as young as nine or ten.

  There were signs in front of every package store and the little main market: CHEYENNE SMOOTHS, A WHOLE NEW TASTE IN FLAVOR! Hand-painted signs made by the store owners read, “Smooths Available” and “Smooths Inside!”

  Johnny had heard the cigarettes were already being sold on certain reservations. The government had not yet gotten wind of that.

  When Johnny was a boy, the main village abutted pristine wilderness. Now he and his father drove past cultivated fields of gently waving leaves. The four-foot tall plants had already been pruned to direct nourishment to a few leaves. Although only recently transplanted, the plants had been manipulated for rapid growth and were racing toward maturity and would be ready for harvest in a few short weeks. In the distance were the greenhouses where the next crop of seedlings was being tended and big barns for drying the tobacco leaves. Other buildings would eventually be constructed for blending, shredding and packaging. Right now, all that work was taking place off the reservation.

  “I’ve unleashed a great evil on the world,” Johnny said as he watched the results of his handiwork speed past.

  “Now you stop saying that,” his father replied. The old man was gripping the steering wheel too tightly. More than once his blistered hand strayed out of habit to his pocket and his pack of Cheyenne Smooths. But then he remembered his son in the passenger seat and his shaking hand would retreat to the steering wheel.

  “It’s true, Dad. I should never have told them about it. I never should have come back here for it. It was dead, and I brought it back to life.”

  “It’s history and history makes its own decisions. That plant was important to your ancestors,” William Eagle Feathers insisted. “We only have to learn how to use it wisely, as they did.”

  “There’s no evidence they used it wisely at all, Dad. Have you seen PBS? Every documentary says something nearly wiped out the Chowok. Only we know the truth. We survived because of the ‘yellow fire’ that burned the old crops. From the oral histories, it sounds like that was a lightning-sparked fire, so you must
have some god or other to thank for that. Maybe he was trying to help our people out, Dad.”

  His father shook his head firmly. “It was not spirit aid, but wrath that destroyed the sacred crops, Johnny. Our people were able to smuggle out only a few dried leaves, but they were dead and could not be planted again. We kept them as sacred objects for hundreds of years. Then you came along with your science and genetics and you brought it back to life. You’ve restored our history. You’re the savior of the Chowok, Johnny, the savior, and don’t you ever forget it.”

  The savior of the Chowok felt sick to his stomach. He slouched down in his seat and closed his eyes on the freshly planted fields and new buildings.

  The legend of the sacred plant was one of the most mysterious of the Chowok past. The great migration from the east had come long before the forced resettlement of other North American tribes—before, in fact, there was a United States. Even without their sacred plant the Chowok were a mysterious people. So many of the tribe possessed white features that there was doubt until genetic testing came along that the Chowok were even true Indians.

  They were a strange people. And thanks to Johnny Feathers and a few dried leaves that he had brought back to life, illness and death would ensure that they—and many others around the world—would soon vanish into the mists of history.

  Fields led to a few scattered houses. William Feathers stopped in front of a modest ranch and the two men went inside.

  His father had turned his son’s childhood bedroom into a small study. John Feathers tossed and turned on the couch until eleven o’clock before he kicked off the old afghan his late mother had knitted and climbed to his feet.

  He carried his shoes in his hand. The floor still creaked in all the old spots, but Johnny knew just where to step to get out to the porch in silence.