Almost everything I know of Evan comes from Detective John Sharpe, who was one of the last people to talk with Evan. Detective Sharpe and I came to an understanding a few months ago, long after the conclusion of these matters, and began to share information on a variety of topics. Evan Grand was one of them. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to take a page from Adis and tell the tale of Evan Grand as a narrative story, so I will be forced to take some minor liberties. I will try and stay objective and in the third person, and once we’re done I’ll be back.
In the real world, Evan Grand was an unmarried man of twenty-six who lived in an upscale apartment in central Austin. He drove a two-year-old Camry, was cordial to his neighbors, and visited his mother once a month. He was raised as an only child in Brady, Texas, a small town northwest of Austin. His father was an auto parts manager who died under suspicious circumstances when Evan was fifteen. He attended Texas State University in San Marcos, and, after graduating with a degree in accounting and passing the CPA exam, he was hired by the IRS in Austin. He was an auditor, but preferred the term examiner. At the time of his arrest he had four years of experience, which put him near the middle of the seniority ladder, but had always scored high on the yearly employee reviews. Very few of his decisions were reversed, and to the entire world it appeared as if Evan would slowly work his way to the top. On the surface, Evan was a quiet, efficient, stable young man that would in time find a wife, start a family, and live his life in anonymity.
Except that below the surface Evan was also a closet Nazi. I don’t mean that in the generic, small ‘n’ sort of way. I mean that in the goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, capital N sort of way. Evan was more of a Nazi than Martin Bormann (head of the German Nazi Party during the 1930s and 1940s). Only, he was a New-Age Nazi that took racial purity and American nationalism to the very heights of lunacy. Indoctrinated by his father from a small age, Evan in a different time and place would have been perfect for the KKK. Born with an intelligence that flirted with genius, an utter lack of personal loyalty, and an innate ability to disappear even in the smallest of crowds, he probably would have been building and planting bombs that blew up dozens of Southern churches and little girls (if you don’t understand this reference you need to look it up; it’s important) within weeks of becoming a member. Fortunately, for all those involved, the KKK had a vanishingly slight presence in central Texas, so Evan did what most wackos do when they are trying to connect with other wackos, he got on the Internet. By the time he had finished college, he had an extensive but secret network of social misfits that subscribed to his way of thinking, and a smaller group of confidants that had already proven the courage of their convictions through acts of violence. As you have probably guessed, I really dislike this man. Sorry about that; I’m supposed to be dispassionate when I’m in the third person.
Despite the Bill of Rights, being a Nazi is not something that is going to jumpstart your career in the federal government, so Evan, as always, blended in. Having the confidence of your boss and coworkers is a great way of maintaining employment and, in Evan’s case, continued access to some of the most personal information the citizens of Texas possess. Despite the official position that the IRS computers are guarded by firewalls so secure that unauthorized access is impossible, Evan had no difficulty scaling those very walls and taking all he wanted from the hard drives of his coworkers and the servers of the entire IRS network without ever arousing suspicion. Working from within, he eventually gained access to the computers of Homeland Security and the FBI (as an aside, after Evan’s arrest his personal computer was decrypted and the FBI recovered the files of over six hundred Americans; files that included names, address, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, employment, income, medical records, marital records, phone records, arrest records, etc.; this inconvenient fact was never made public). After countless hours of research, he pared the list down to eighty-nine names. His list wasn’t a who’s who of liberal thinkers and policy makers. He wasn’t after the Hillary Clintons, Al Sharptons, or Nancy Pelosis of the world; he was looking for their support staff. People close enough to the power to influence it and tarnish it. Guilt by association was the American way. His methods were simple. Through as many websites as he could reach, he would disseminate the private secrets of his targets and let nature take its course.
A year into his project, Evan had accomplished very little. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but exciting a few hundred people who spent most of their time surfing it and doing little else was proving an ineffective tool. He needed crossover to the mainstream media, which meant massive Internet saturation, or an entirely different approach. The logistics of maintaining a low profile, as well as employment, severely limited what he as an individual could accomplish. It was clear he needed help, and so he reluctantly reached out to the small cadre of confidants that he had first encountered online while he was still in school. He vetted his team in the same way he vetted his victims: the various databases of the US Federal government. In the end he choose six men, all in major population centers scattered across the country. He met with each of them individually and explained his plan and his vision. He was a pragmatist and held no illusions of remaking America in his image overnight, a concept that several of his new recruits found hard to accept. There would be no direct violence, as that was certain to prompt a response. They would instead use the weapon most suited to the destruction of ideas: information. It would be a slow, gradual process that in the end would neutralize the various liberal influences that to his mind steered the political agenda and the social landscape. As the hypocrisy of each of the remaining eighty-nine was revealed, mainstream America would slowly awaken to the fact that their country and the natural order had been actively perverted by pedophiles, sodomites, and miscreants since the election of Kennedy.
Even with help, progress remained frustratingly slow. The group focused on a single individual at a time, beginning with blogs and chat-room comments designed to capture the interest of the Internet’s faceless masses, and on occasion to motivate its more extreme elements. Addresses, phone numbers, license plate numbers, and names of children came next, and usually the process became self-sustaining. In some cases, more personal information was deemed necessary and entire court records or medical records were dumped into Internet sites catering to the unstable. Two years into the process and halfway through the list they had some minor successes, including the implosion of the American Center for Justice (an organization dedicated to the appointment of progressive or liberal federal judges) after it was revealed that the founder and chief spokesman, Chauncey Lyon, had been arrested for solicitation three times and had contracted at least one sexually transmitted disease that he then passed on to his wife. The Appleton Research Center (a small but influential California-based think tank that professed to address the inherent inequities of American society—ironically, it was founded by six billionaires) also took a hit when their vice president was audited and found to have not declared hundreds of thousands in income. He was convicted of tax evasion, and Evan made certain that his partially obscured face was plastered over the Internet. Still, Evan and company were not having the impact anyone was hoping for. Several of the members began offering different, more active and aggressive ideas.
Three months before his arrest, just about the time his group was on the verge of disintegration, Evan received an e-mail without an address. The subject line stated simply: You can do better.
Evan deleted the e-mail without ever opening it. Before he could delete another message, his phone vibrated. A text message from a phone number with only six numbers again admonished him: You can do better. Evan stared at the words and nearly jumped when it vibrated a second time. An Internet address was listed on the screen below the first message. He touched the screen, and through the magic of cell phone technology he found himself at a website aptly named You Can Do Better. Only now the name Evan was added to the message. After a moment, a security video o
f him sitting at his desk opened. He watched the live feed of himself for several seconds, and then the image faded to black. The screen remained blank only for an instant, and then letters and words began to fill the small screen like snowflakes. They organized themselves into a new message. Now that I have your attention was all it said. It too faded to black, only to be replaced by a second video an instant later. A man shackled to a metal table stared into the camera. His face was puffy and swollen, clearly the victim of a recent beating. His complexion was dark.
“Sand nigger,” Evan said to himself and then quickly looked around to make certain none of his coworkers overheard his indiscretion. He was alone.
“State your name,” a voice off-camera demanded. The man hesitated and then jerked violently. His arms became rigid and his metal handcuffs cut into his wrist as he thrust his arms forward. His face froze in agony and he started making a strangled sound. Suddenly, he collapsed back onto the table, and Evan imagined a slight pall of smoke obscuring the man’s face.
“Let us try that again, shall we?” the voice asked with false sincerity.
“John Emmitt.” His voice was just above a whisper.
“That is the name you currently use, but that is not your real name is it?” The voice was soft but still communicated an undeniable threat. John Emmitt shook his head. “Good. Now will you please tell us your real name and where you were born.” This was not a question.
“I was born Hashmi Kassan in Muscat, Oman,” he answered quickly.
“Are you in the United States legally?”
Hashmi hesitated a fraction of a second and was again subjected to the electrical shock. As the man convulsed, Evan felt the smallest twinge of envy.
“No,” he said after recovering. “I entered the United States through Mexico six years ago.”
“Good. Please continue. Tell us why you came such a long way to sell water purification systems to the good people of Phoenix.” The voice was almost playful now.
“To raise money and recruit for an organization . . .” Hashmi hesitated and Evan waited for the disciplinary shock, but the off-camera voice cut in.
“An organization based in Yemen that the US government has found to be a terrorist front?” the voice asked in a leading tone. Hashmi nodded again. “Are you planning, or have you ever committed, a crime on US soil?” The voice was again firm and demanding.
“No!” Hashmi suddenly sat up straight, and even Evan believed his sincerity, which disappointed him. “I swear.”
“I believe you,” the voice replied. “Still, you are a member of an organization that actively works against American interests, isn’t that correct?” Hashmi slowly nodded. “An organization that has taken up arms against this country.” His nod now was almost imperceptible. “So let me ask you a hypothetical question. If I was found in Yemen posing as a water purification salesmen but was in fact a spy for the US government, how would your organization react? Would they ask me to collect my things and put me on a plane?”
“Probably not.” Hashmi’s voice was low. He looked off camera, presumably to his questioner, and stared with the eyes of a condemned man that had finally accepted his fate.
“Probably not,” the voice repeated. “Would they video tape me handcuffed to a table as electric shocks were administered to my genitals?” The voice received no answer.
I’m going to stop this part of the story now as I don’t think I need to narrate what came next. The last several seconds of the video was the disembodied voice telling Evan that this was not a time for half measures, and that if he was truly interested in making a difference and had the stones to do what was necessary that he should be at Barton Springs pool at seven that evening.
Evan did of course prove himself by going to the huge, natural pool in the heart of Austin. He arrived well before seven and at first meandered through the large summer-evening crowd looking for signs of anything unnatural, and then stripped down to his bathing suit and climbed into the cool, crowded water to maintain the appearance of normality. He was fairly confident that this wasn’t a law enforcement sting, but the possibility that his actions had been discovered and that this was an elaborate act of retribution resonated in his mind. After all, this is exactly what he would have done. After thirty minutes of wading through the water and scanning the crowd he was comfortable that no one was paying him any undue scrutiny, so he drifted towards the shallow end of the pool and climbed out. He dried himself, spread a towel on a dry patch of grass far from anyone, and waited.
After his arrest, Evan told Detective Sharpe that his first thought upon seeing the man we had named Sida was his striking similarity to Adis. “He appeared out of nowhere,” he said and then regaled the police with stories too fantastic to believe (at least to them). The mystery man offered no name. His credentials came in the form of personal information. He knew every last detail of Evan’s life, from the date and with whom he lost his virginity to how he had tapped into the computers of the FBI, Homeland Security, and a dozen private firms. He said that he had watched from a distance as Evan and his cohort proceeded with their smear campaigns until he could no longer abide such a tepid approach. Considering the information and access at Evan’s disposal, they should have been much more successful. The mystery man (for the sake of simplicity and consistently, I am going to use his given name of Sida) outlined a more aggressive and at times violent approach that would in the end effect the social change that Evan, his crew, and Sida wanted.
“You will have to get your hands dirty,” Sida told the younger man. “But I will protect you.”
Within a week Evan had sold the idea to his six confederates of pivoting from Internet attacks to a more active approach. It was an easy sell. Over the coming months Sida met with Evan on several other occasions and each time supplied the younger man with an assignment for one of the group. The targets were seemingly random: a bridge in Tennessee, a mosque in St. Louis, a synagogue in Chicago, a state senator from California, but Sida assured Evan, who in turn assured the others that in the end everything would become clear. On that point he proved to be telling the truth. Despite not having any prior experience, each of Evan’s six hackers proved to be spectacularly proficient in the tasks assigned them. The handling of explosives and the use of high-powered weapons seemed to come strangely natural to each of them. In a twelve-week period the group had successfully completed eight missions, and not a single law enforcement agency had made a connection. Then it came time for Evan to get his hands dirty.
The rest of the story is really rather simple. Sida briefed Evan in personal. He was given an address that he was told to memorize and instructed to arrange for the delivery of two hundred gallons of fuel oil. A week later he received an email giving him explicit instructions that explained how to mix fuel oil and ammonium nitrate. The day before his arrest Evan drove to a ramshackle farm in Bell County and found a large white Ryder truck (this was especially ironic as Timothy McVeigh used a Ryder truck in the Oklahoma City bombing) filled with six barrels of ammonium nitrate. It took him nearly an entire Sunday to carefully titrate and mix the exact amount of oil with fertilizer. When he was done, he double and triple checked the seals on each of the six barrels and then closed and locked the van. All that was left was to drive the truck to the JJ Pickle Federal Building in downtown Austin, park it on the south side of the building, and walk away. An hour later he was to call a specific number and then Boom! The ten-story building, along with most of the surrounding area, would be decimated. Only a broken seal and a relative humidity of seventy-four percent prevented the deaths of perhaps a thousand individuals. Or perhaps there was something more.
I have always found it unusual that Evan Grand spilled his guts so quickly and completely. He sung like a bird, as they say in the old black-and-white movies. Maybe it was the shock of arrest, or the effective interrogation techniques of the various law enforcement agencies that interviewed him. Maybe it was a sudden change of heart, a resurgent conscience? I dou
bt that. Evan was found dead in his cell before he was even arraigned. Like the Lees, the cause of his death was never determined. In my simple determination this man, as Adis put it, was evil, and I don’t mourn his fate. How Christian of me.
In the end, only three of Evan’s cohort were captured, and as of today they are awaiting trial. I presume the rest slipped back under slimy rocks, or perhaps they had a visit from a tall, well-built elderly man who had more than a passing familiarity to Adis, and perhaps with their last breath found a nine-inch combat knife in their neck. Sida, of course, had a different fate, but we’ll get to that.
Chapter Eighteen
The Unyielding Future Page 17