Frankly, it was all beyond Jones-he had no idea how these guys worked out who owned what. One of his former captains, Maria O’Brien, had been a legal affairs officer attached to the War Crimes Unit on the Clinton, and she had tried to explain it to him once, without much luck. She’d been just a few weeks from finishing her hitch in the corps when the Transition had ripped her out of whatever life she’d been supposed to lead. Now she made more money than God as a civilian lawyer, smoothing out the intersection between the economy of 1940s America and twenty-first-century intellectual property law. Her personal “Death Star”-as she jokingly called it-was a weird, contorted mass of polished concrete and black glass out on the fashionable western edge of 51, amid a streetscape of expensive restaurants and lush parkland. Jones always thought her building, which had been designed by some very important architect whose name completely escaped him, resembled a bagel turned inside out, if that made any sense. It looked to be about six floors high, although he doubted it ran to anything as mundane as actual “floors” on the inside.

As far as he was concerned, she could have it all to herself. The less Jones had to do with the ’temps, the better.

A born conservative, even as a kid in the projects he’d never had time for politically correct bullshit. In his America men and women, black or white, got the chance to make a success out of life. And if they didn’t succeed, it was probably their own fucking fault. He’d gotten no special treatment from the corps, but he’d suffered no discrimination, either. Every decoration he had pinned to his dress uniform had been honestly earned, mostly by killing people who badly needed it. The Bible at his bedside table had lain beside his daddy’s pillow, and like his daddy he allowed himself one reading every night that it was possible, starting at Genesis and slowly working his way through to Revelation, before going back and starting all over again.

He had supported the same baseball team-the Cubs-for thirty-five years. The same basketball team-the Bulls-for thirty-six. He loved his country, his corps, his friends, and his family, most especially his wife who was, as he never tired of telling people, as white as the Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. By way of contrast General J. Lonesome Jones disliked whining left-wingers, network news broadcasts, and steamed brussels sprouts all about equally.

He wasn’t the sort who saw himself as the victim of anything.

Yet nearly every time he had to deal with the ’temps, it seemed like he was instantly cast in bronze as the object of their fear and loathing. At the very best they treated him with a stiff reserve. That was the standard response whenever task force business took him down to Camp Pendleton to meet with the “old” Marine Corps brass. He was treated with courtesy, and every formality due his rank. But never once were the informalities observed. Even after Hawaii, he’d never been invited to take a drink or share a meal with anyone at Pendleton.

Jones pressed his lips together as his boots crunched along the gravel path. The insults to his own dignity he could suffer in silence. He didn’t give a shit about the opinions of ignorant assholes. But the endless shitcanning of his marines was intolerable.

The sun burned the back of his neck, and he could feel sweat beginning to stream between his shoulder blades, under his uniform. His eyes remained hidden behind a pair of powered-down sunglasses, but anyone who ran across his path would have had no trouble telling that he was mightily pissed about something. Around him the camp was relatively quiet, a counterpoint to the seething anger that threatened to get the better of the Eighty-second’s commander.

A platoon jogged by, singing cadence, a tune he recognized from his earliest days in the military. The lyrics had changed, though, in this post-Transition world.

We care a lot

About the Nazis and the fucking Japanese.

He really hated the fucking song, truth be known, but an old roomie had played it incessantly many years ago, and in a strange way hearing it calmed him down a little as he returned the salutes of a couple of lieutenants he passed on his way to the final staff meeting. Mary Hiers and Nikki Christa from the landing support team. Good young officers. ’Temps, but most of the brigade were, nowadays. They’d taken 20 percent casualties on Oahu. Added to the losses in Australia, it meant he’d come home with an effective fighting strength of one reinforced company.

He was still humming the old “Faith No More” standard several minutes after the platoon had passed by.

They’d had no choice but to rebuild from the ground up. There’d been no shortage of volunteers from among the ’temps, allowing his recruiters to skim off the cream.

And given that so many of his newest marines were never going to be welcome in the old corps, you might have thought they’d have been left in peace. But no. He and Kolhammer had been forced to wage a series of small bureaucratic wars just to keep the Eighty-second alive. Everything was contested. For instance, there was no Fifth Marine Division when they had arrived. It would not have been established until November 1943 for the Battle of Iwo Jima, but the contemporary corps insisted on placing a caveat over the designation anyway, demanding that Jones give up the “Fifth.” Indeed, he and Kolhammer had been forced to fight battles over lineage for virtually every one of the “new” units they’d spun up. In every case they’d refused to give ground.

The Eighty-second MEU had fought as part of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Division of the United States Marine Corps, since it was raised for the Second Afghan War in 2012. They had earned the right to be who they were.

He noticed that his speed had increased when he’d become angry again, stirring up a small storm of gravel as he double-timed it over to the First Battalion ops room. Jones screwed a lid on his temper. He reminded himself that for every dumbass he’d encountered, there were old-fashioned Americans like Mary Hiers and Nikki Christa, or Master Chief Eddie Mohr, or even Dan Black, God rest his soul, who were good people. As good as people ever got, really. He slowed his breathing and dropped back to a normal pace. It wouldn’t do to go charging into battalion in such a foul mood. Somebody was liable to get an ass chewed off for nothing.

The view from the top floor of the Davidson Building-which had, until recently, been the Oviatt Building-was nothing compared with his New York base. Back east the company had leased about twenty floors of the Empire State, and on a clear day Slim Jim could stand at the window of his personal office suite and almost see his own power as it pulsed outward across Manhattan, racing away toward the horizon like a blast wave. That was what real wealth and power were like. A force of fucking nature that swept everything in front of them. He’d always known that, of course. But only because for most of his life he’d been the one getting blown away. By cops. By judges. By bigger, tougher, meaner crooks. By wardens. By parole officers. By the whole fucking system.

“Now I am the fucking system,” he said with a grin.

“What was that, Mr. Davidson?”

“Sorry,” he said, turning away from the window in his LA headquarters. The place was on Olive, near Sixth, and afforded him a good view of Bunker Hill, which looked like a natural rampart laid across the western edge of the old pueblo. Downtown Los Angeles lay at his feet, but it was obvious that his building was going to be dwarfed before too long by the skyscrapers rising around her. Not that he cared much. He owned a couple of construction companies now, and he loved looking out at all the cranes soaring over the city’s rooftops. It was sorta like they were there to scoop money up off the streets and dump it into his pockets.