Experience

by Brandt Legg

  “Gouge may pull through,” Hudson said.

  “No, I saw his chart.” The Wizard shook his head slowly. “We’re his best and oldest friends. We owe it to him to pray . . . pray that he dies tonight.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Crane pecked away at his keyboard, spurred on by his astonishing discovery. The hacker rubbed his thin, stubbly beard, impressed with himself. He couldn’t stop smiling. “I got you, NorthBridge!” he said to himself.

  Although he didn't yet have the true identities of all the AKAs, Crane had IDed the big shots and secured conclusive evidence of the driving force behind the most secret and successful terror network the world had ever known. As he sat flying through the DarkNet, cross-corroborating details and data, Crane was in awe and edged with fear. NorthBridge had the ability to bring the United States to its knees, and it was going to happen soon. The terror organization was closer than anyone realized to igniting a second American Civil War. He could see it all there on the screen, no longer a prophetic theory. There would be battles in the streets.

  Crane hadn't even been looking at NorthBridge, but came across them while scouring the complex world of international crime, conspiracy, and corruption that lay in a labyrinth of arms deals, money laundering, payoffs, murder, and betrayal. Viewed from the DarkNet, that shadowy world showed the REMies connected to everything. They used the population’s naïve belief in the illusions of “free markets,” “democracy,” and “fair, objective media” to steal more wealth and take more control. The strings of power were pulled, cut, and tied into knots.

  While scouring REMie transactions, Crane found that the trail led through the central banks, corporate tax havens, and eventually into cryptocurrencies, and, of course, digiGOLD. That’s where the paths crossed. Once he stumbled upon NorthBridge, he took all he could find on their digiGOLD transactions and fed it into Gypsy. The computer program automatically overlaid and churned through a hundred years of data, looking for patterns, anything with similar markers.

  Suddenly, the shocking answer to a question he had never asked, appeared. An untrained eye might have missed it, particularly if they weren’t looking for it, but Crane caught the anomalies and followed the sequence, still expecting something different. Now that he had the explosive information, he didn't know exactly what to do with it. Publicly releasing the names of the founders and force behind NorthBridge could create as many problems as it solved.

  “That’s above my pay grade,” the hacker said to himself as he continued to plow through the endless code in front of him, unconsciously sucking down Red Bulls. “The president will have to figure that out.”

  But even as he muttered the words, he wondered if it was wise to give the source to Hudson.

  There would be time to think about that later. Right now, he still needed to focus on confirming two more things, and everything had to be preserved with at least triple redundancy. Crane had learned one thing during his thousands of hours of wandering the DarkNet: information, particularly in the digital realm, could change or vanish instantly. He looked up to a pegboard above his workplace and fished out a flash drive from a bin. A poster caught his eye, a photo of a lone backpacker at the base of Denali, something he’d always longed to do. He wished he were there now.

  Back to the screen, navigating the most treacherous place on earth—the canyons of code on the DarkNet. Just as he found the final confirmation, he heard the noise. It wasn't very loud, but when someone lived alone and worked in the dark, he heard every sound; a filter in the subconscious deciding if it could be ignored, or warranted a nervous system alert, maybe even the more critical fight or flight reflex. Crane, used to traveling through billions and billions of bits of information every waking hour, searching for anything incriminating on the world’s most powerful people, constantly lived in a paranoid state, on edge so that even a trip to the grocery store had him looking over his shoulder. His best friend Zackers had died on the same quest—to bring back proof of the REMies’ crimes.

  The sound, like cloth rubbing against drywall, magnified, and alarmed him more than it normally would because of the NorthBridge find. Crane, not a big, tough, physical man, fancied himself a secret agent type, but in truth, he was a coward. So after the second sound—a slight creak—his mouth went dry. It still might be nothing, but it could also be a killer.

  Preserve the data, he thought. It might be all that saves you.

  Crane had two choices and almost no time to make them. First, he could grab something and fight. The only thing close was a putter. He kept the slender golf club around as a reminder of his father, who had putted golf balls into fancy crystal glasses on his office floor. Crane had done the same into a red plastic cup, but not nearly as often. He stole a quick glance at the club and the balls. Maybe he could throw the balls at an intruder, then swing the club, but a swift look back at the screen told him those weren't good options with the type of information he’d been delving into. NorthBridge or the REMies wouldn’t send somebody who could be defeated by a computer geek with a putter and a couple of cheap golf balls.

  That meant the only other option was to run. The small room where he worked was windowless, but the adjoining bathroom had a window. He didn’t think the drop to the ground was too far, but he’d never really thought about having to drop from there. His caffeine-infused mind came up with another thought.

  Maybe I’m imagining the danger. Those sounds, even if they’d been real, might've been nothing more than one hears occasionally in apartments and houses when alone—settling, plumbing, furnaces, whatever.

  That made him feel better, but just to be sure, he hit a series of keystrokes to preserve and protect the data.

  Crane stood quickly, looked at the golf club, then at the bathroom door. He peered down the dark hall toward where he had heard the sounds. It only took an instant for him to make the decision.

  It must have been nothing.

  Just in case, he picked up the golf club and the balls and headed down the hall. He’d make sure, and then grab another Mountain Dew from the fridge.

  The computer blinked and continued working as he headed down the hall. In six or seven steps, he reached the light switch. Just as he flicked it, an amber glow lit the hall, and he saw a shadow move at the other end. Crane dropped the balls, turned, and ran back toward the bathroom.

  He never made it.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  As usual, the Wizard had eight monitors full of data open in front of him as his servers filtered and saved endless streams of data. He was deep into looking for clues as to who was behind the tire shop fire, and pushing to obtain information Hudson could use to pressure members of congress to vote against war.

  Just before nine p.m. Pacific time, hundreds of encrypted files came in from Crane. However, the stream had been interrupted before all the transfers had been completed. Crane regularly sent data backups, and sometimes there were glitches. The Wizard gave them only a fleeting glance, figuring it was a routine upload.

  After a couple of hours, when Crane still hadn’t resumed the transmission, the Wizard figured he might have gone to bed since it was around two a.m. Eastern time—a little early for Crane, but not a red flag. He kept working on digging for dirt on the congressmen and senators on his list. Finally, at two-twenty on the West Coast, the Wizard checked the files Crane had sent.

  Seeing the magnitude of the contents, he immediately tried to contact Crane, first via computer, and then by phone. Getting no response, he called Schueller just before six a.m. Eastern time. The Wizard told him enough to scare him. As the president’s son, getting out of the White House for an unscheduled outing was neither quick nor easy, but Schueller moved with urgency, fearing for his friend.

  Schueller checked his phone again as he pulled up to the apartment. He’d left several messages for Crane. Nothing. The two Secret Service agents accompanying him followed as he entered the building. After getting no answer from quickly repeated knocks on the apartment do
or, he used his key and entered. One agent remained in the hall while the other went in with Schueller.

  They found Crane hanging by an extension cord from a ceiling beam in the windowless room where he worked. His feet dangled five inches above the floor. A typed suicide note on the floor next to a knocked over chair claimed:

  Life is too dark and lonely. I cannot go on now that Schueller has ended our relationship. I’ll love him forever, but he cares more about our band than me. Good luck finding another bass player.

  The Secret Service agent was already on the phone with the police. Schueller, too furious to mourn the loss of his friend at the moment, called the Wizard.

  “They killed him! It’s Zackers all over again!” He told him about the fake note. Crane wasn’t really in the band, couldn’t even play an instrument, and certainly was not romantically involved with Schueller. “They made it look like a suicide, but—”

  “It’s not,” the Wizard said, swallowing his emotions. “This is no time to get upset. We can mourn later. Right now, we’ve got to get through this. It may not have been the REMies. Crane discovered enough on NorthBridge . . . check his computer, see if they wiped it.”

  “Okay,” Schueller said, wiping his eyes and inhaling. “Hold on.”

  “Schueller, what are you doing?” the Secret Service agent asked. “You can’t touch that, this is a crime scene. The police are on the way.”

  Schueller ignored him. “Nothing,” he said, talking to the Wizard again. “The only thing on here is the bogus note. No one’s going to believe this set-up.”

  “You’d be surprised by what Washington will accept as truth.”

  The president was up early working the phones, trying everything he could to convince senators and members of congress to vote against the war resolution. A congressman from New Mexico who was waffling told Hudson that all but one paper in his state were running favorable stories in support of the war.

  “How can I go against that?” the congressman asked.

  “There were hundreds of editorials supporting George W. Bush's disastrous plan to invade Iraq,” Hudson responded. “In the months before the Iraq war, even the incredibly liberal Washington Post ran one hundred and forty-one stories on its front pages promoting the war, while the editors buried any dissenting articles. And The New York Times ran even more than that. Even liberal darling Michael Moore said, ‘I blame The New York Times more for the Iraq war than Bush.’ The media’s been selling the wars of the elites for more than a century. ‘Remember the Maine!’”

  “Maybe,” the congressman said, “but the polls.”

  “The polls are not real.” The president laughed. “There’s nothing easier to fake. At best, the polls simply measure the effectiveness of the media’s spin. At worst, they just spit out bogus results, and somewhere in the middle answers can be manufactured by phrasing the question in the right way and selecting a favorable sampling area or demographic. You simply cannot believe them.” He stood up, walked over to the portrait of George Washington, and thought, When all seemed lost, how did you know to follow your instinct?

  “But the media cites them,” the congressman said.

  “It’s a vicious circle of lies!”

  “Maybe. I wish I could go with you on this, but your approval ratings are just too low right now.”

  “My point exactly,” the president said. He knew he wasn’t going to convince this politician of anything. How do these people get elected? he wondered. He knew, of course, and the answer made him sick to his stomach. On to the next call.

  Hudson got the news about Crane in the middle of a call with a senator from Texas. Already weary from a morning spent trying to convince politicians, all of whom were owned by REMies and defense contractors, that war was a bad idea, Hudson abruptly ended the conversation with the senator. Yet another victim of his war with the REMies, Hudson paced the Oval Office, eyeing different items he could smash—a historic vase, an antique lamp, the damned Remington sculpture.

  Crane had had a lot in common with Schueller, in spite of not really being a musician. Hudson had known him better than Zackers, and Crane had always felt like another son to him. He grimaced briefly, remembering the funny email Crane had sent him two days earlier: What's the difference between a politician and a flying pig? The letter F.

  Hudson shook his head and made a silent vow to find who was responsible for Crane’s murder. Whoever it was had made sure that Schueller would be embroiled in a scandal. Not today, but it was brewing. The contents of the note would not be released immediately, but at the most inopportune time, it would leak. Then the whole Zackers mess would be rehashed and the media would smell blood—in this case, actual blood—but they would pursue the wrong man, the wrong angle, sent off in entirely the wrong direction as happened again and again and yet again.

  The president, still reeling from the fire at the tire shop, his uncle’s death, with Gouge clinging to life, tried not to give way to his emotions. Even if Gouge managed to hang on, his life would be excruciating and distorted, lived in a completely disfigured form. Hudson clawed at the Resolute Desk. He didn’t even know whom to blame. Had Bastendorff ordered the Gouges killed? Or could Rochelle have somehow orchestrated the vigilante hits on everyone who had been there? In the many years since that night, nothing had happened to any of them until she got out of prison. And what about Crane—the REMies or NorthBridge? All he knew was that the “accidental” fire at the tire shop and Crane’s “suicide” had been deliberate attacks on him, and he couldn’t help but think how different things would have been if he hadn’t come back after those nine minutes.

  Maybe I should have stayed dead.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  By the end of the day, the president had failed. The House and the Senate had both passed a Joint Resolution approving war on China. The REMies had won. Incredibly, the vote had been bipartisan, with only sixty-four nays in the House and eighteen against in the Senate. The REMie influence was easy to see. The war made no sense, and yet the peoples’ representatives had chosen to start it.

  Hudson immediately issued a statement: “This is an unjust and perilous decision which jeopardizes our national security, and, more importantly, risks our very existence as a species. In spite of the decision by our legislative branch this evening, I, as your Commander in Chief, refuse to act upon its call to arms.”

  Fitz entered the Oval Office carrying a six pack of Cokes, the classic, tall, thick green glass bottles imported from Mexico, where they still made the beverage he called “the nectar of the gods” with real sugar. He waited until Hudson completed a call with the president of Taiwan. “I just spoke with the Speaker of the House,” the chief of staff said, downing a swig of his own Coke and handing the president one of the icy-chilled colas. He’d just pried the top off with an old Sharon Steel opener Hudson always kept in the table between the two sofas. “He isn’t happy with your defiant statement, says they’re going to censure you.”

  “Let them.”

  “And then they will impeach.”

  “Clinton survived impeachment.”

  “You won’t,” Fitz said. “As you know, Clinton was impeached by the House, but the Senate didn’t follow through. I’ve also had a call from the Senate majority leader. The Senate will also vote for impeachment if you don’t carry out the war resolution. Then, you’ll be removed from office.”

  “That’ll take a while.”

  “Maybe, but in the meantime, they’ll sue you in the Supreme Court.”

  “I’ve got the US Constitution to defend me. Separation of power.”

  Fitz shook his head. “What are you trying to prove? This is a necessary war. Otherwise, the Chinese will be running the world for the next hundred years. Do you really want to be the president who let that happen? The fall of the American empire will be on your hands.”

  “Why do you think the REMies can do a better job than average people at deciding their own fate?”

  “REMies?” Fitz
asked as if it were a foreign word.

  “We’ve never had this conversation about the REMies, and don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Fitz opened another Coke, then stared at the president for a few moments. “You can’t take them on,” he finally said.

  “I am taking them on already.”

  “Mr. President, don’t.”

  “I have to, Fitz, I just have to . . . ” he said, sounding regretful.

  “They won’t let you,” Fitz said. Silence hung as the two men held each other’s eyes. “And I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t. First, you can’t possibly win. Your power, as president, is mostly for show. Their power is virtually infinite. The second reason is that they’re better at deciding than the average person. Look at the amazing world we live in. The REMies created it!”

  “It has lots of amazing aspects, that much is true,” the president said. “But there’s plenty that could be better.”

  “Sure, and they’re working on it. Vonner’s one of the ones leading the way at improving the world.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Seriously. Do you know that the Illuminati was originally founded as a group meant to liberate the world from oppression? They were known as ‘the enlightened ones,’ the few who understood the truth. This was back when religion and government were ruling and controlling people’s lives.”

  “They still are.”

  Fitz smiled. “Not like they once did. You should know, history teacher, the Illuminati tried to spread what they knew to the masses.”