Empire

by Brandt Legg

Chapter Forty-Seven

  The following morning, the idea of making a secret alliance with NorthBridge seemed even more imperative.

  Fonda’s been right all this time, he thought, suggesting we needed each other to break the REMie empire.

  But instead of contacting Fonda, he called Linh.

  “I need the truth,” he said while walking among the trees on the west side of the south lawn. It was one of his favorite places on the White House grounds, an area where he didn’t feel as much a prisoner. He often meditated there.

  “Of course,” the leader of the Inner Movement said, as if nothing else were possible.

  “Are you AKA Adams?”

  The silence lasted so long that he was at first convinced he’d been right, and then wasn’t sure she was still there.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m just extremely surprised you could imagine me part of NorthBridge.”

  “Only after I saw the statement by AKA Adams denouncing the NorthBridge violence—”

  “Don’t forget those nine minutes. Don’t waste the second chance you were given,” she said, her voice still quiet, yet full of reverence. “You think the REMies have created this world, so out of balance in the last hundred years . . . it’s started long before that. We’ve been lost for millennia. Now we’re at this moment in history, and you have a chance . . . your words can show the people not just about the wrongs, but of the hope, not only pointing to all the darkness, but actually point them toward the light.”

  “Okay,” he said. She always made him feel like he could do better, as if the cheapness of politics was weighing him down. He spotted Fitz coming through the trees. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’m sure you can count on AKA Adams to help.”

  “Then you know who Adams is?”

  “So do you.”

  “I need a name,” he said firmly, then added more gently, “Please.”

  “I wish I could help, but that is not my story to tell.”

  “It’s important,” he pressed.

  “Very.”

  Fitz was standing in front of him now.

  “When you change your mind, you know where to find me,” the president said.

  “Look within,” were her final words.

  “What?” Hudson snapped at Fitz.

  His chief of staff ignored his boss’s mood. “We need to talk.”

  The president began walking back to the White House, his mind still distracted with speculating who AKA Adams was. As soon as he was done with Fitz, he’d contact the Wizard.

  We have to find Adams and Franklin, we need to talk to them.

  “The American public is being asked an awful lot from you Mr. President,” Fitz began. “Even before your election, you claimed to be an outsider, yet you were backed by one of the wealthiest and most influential insiders there was. Arlin Vonner and all his baggage came with you into the White House.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You stood against NorthBridge, with their attacks on your fellow candidates, the assassinations of your rivals, and finally you endured the repeated attempts on your own life. The people mourned for you when you died. Then, like Lazarus, you rose from the dead and came back to life!”

  The president was hardly listening.

  “After all of that, you opposed a popular war and somehow managed to hang on to their trust, or at least some of it, just a little longer.”

  “Are you going anywhere with this, Fitz?” the president interrupted.

  “I am,” he said, smiling and taking a sip of his Coke as if it were life-saving medicine. “And you’ve led the country through the most tumultuous time in American history, even more frightening and divided than the Civil War. I think even you’ll admit that fact, based on where we are now, the scale of the country’s problems in relation to its size.”

  “Are you writing my eulogy?”

  Fitz would not be hurried. “The voters have forgiven you of all that. Even when their patience has grown thin with your inability to stop NorthBridge and the violence that has escalated throughout your term, even when a dozen or more women accused you of sexual harassment and misconduct dating back decades, you managed to keep their faith and hold on to some surprisingly positive numbers in your approval rating. You also got past all of that at the same time you’ve been pushing for radical changes in the way we all live our lives.”

  “And?” the president asked, showing the impatience he was feeling in the way only he could do—with a forced smile, his good looks accentuated by fiercely piercing blue eyes.

  “If you go forward with Cherry Tree, from the shaky ground on which you stand, I don’t believe they will go with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s too big. You know the old line ‘it is easier to fool people, than to convince them they have been fooled?’ Don’t you see, Mr. President? That’s exactly where we are. You’re going to try to convince the American people that all this time, all their lives, and their parents and grandparents before them, has all been a lie. You simply cannot convince them they have been fooled.”

  “We have proof.”

  “What is proof anymore? Artificial Intelligence can photoshop reality so well that none of us can even be sure who we are.”

  “They’ll know the truth.” He stopped close to a large tree and put his hand on its trunk.

  “No one wants to be told that they’ve been manipulated, especially when you try to explain how the whole system is just part of an empire controlled by a few dozen wealthy families. The people aren’t going to go there with you. They won’t want to believe it, and don’t forget it’s almost impossible to believe. At the same time, the media will be calling you crazy. Everybody will be against you—the media, the banks, the politicians, the teachers, the business community. Everybody is going to show that you’re wrong, that you’re a conspiracy freak. They’ll claim that you’re just making excuses for your failings. The timing is wrong. You. Have. To. Wait.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The president broke his schedule and flew to the Hunter Mill mansion to confer with Granger and the Wizard.

  “Fitz thinks Cherry Tree is DOA,” the president said as the three men took advantage of the beautiful summer morning and walked outside. More than twenty VS and Secret Service agents were nearby, most of them invisible. “He thinks the REMies are just hoping I go public, then they’ll pounce to totally discredit me. Fitz pointed to how the media buried AKA Adams statement about the REMies, and how politicians and business leaders made the claims into a joke.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the Wizard said. “We’re inside.”

  “Wait a minute.” The president stopped and grabbed the Wizard’s arm. “You’re telling me you hacked into the CIA and NSA computers?”

  Getting “inside” had long been a goal of the Wizard, going back to the early days with Zackers. Crane had also worked on the project, which certainly contributed to the murder of both hackers.

  The Wizard smiled, looking gaunter than ever, his black hair pulled back into a stringy ponytail. He seemed to have developed a twitch on his left eye, too much Red Bull or something.

  “I’m the president, I can just request the information that’s in there.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Granger asked as they walked the worn footpath along the edge of a deep creek in the woods that bordered the house.

  “No, not anymore,” Hudson admitted. “What did you find?”

  “Stuff that will show the REMies to be the evil scourge that they are,” the Wizard said. “We’ve got three occasions over the last fifty years, and four more over the last sixty, when the US military developed plans that were approved at the highest levels that would use special teams to commit acts of terrorism within the borders of the United States.”

  “To what end?” the president asked, already knowing the answer.
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  “The purpose was to convince the public to support illegal and unnecessary wars,” Granger replied.

  “It wasn’t too long ago when this would’ve surprised me,” the president said, “but I recall documents being released during the Trump administration that referred to Operation Northwoods. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had created that plan in the early 1960s with the intent to blame Cuban terrorists for attacks on Americans that would actually be conducted by secret US military units. The idea was to find a reason for the public to support a war against Cuba. Apparently, Kennedy decided not to go ahead with the false flag operation. Perhaps the idea of having our special ops units kill innocent Americans didn’t sit so well.”

  “And the mainstream media, always a REMie tool, buried the story when those documents came to light fifty-five years after the fact,” Granger said. “It should have been front page outrage.”

  “Obviously the military, the CIA, and the REMies were not happy with Kennedy,” the Wizard said, letting the implications of his statement hang in the air.

  “There’ve been dozens of other times when they’ve done similar things; committing atrocities and then blaming the attacks and other incidents on someone else. you can see them detailed in the reports.” Granger paused and looked at the president carefully.

  The president sensed that Granger was struggling with information. “What is it?”

  “The most significant occurrence of their dark strategy . . . was carried out in September 2001.”

  The president stared at Granger. The brilliant technologist never took his eyes from Hudson’s. He only nodded.

  “My God,” Hudson said, looking over at the Wizard and thinking about how Schueller’s wildest conspiracy theories had been true.

  “We can also directly link the CIA to propaganda against the American people, beginning with a plan known as Operation Mockingbird, when the intelligence agency gained and exercised control over the media in a decades-long grand effort to sway public opinion and collect intelligence on our own citizens.”

  “I’ve heard of Operation Mockingbird,” the president said. “The Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church, exposed and ended the program.”

  “Only after some leaks,” Granger said. “That was merely a cosmetic move. Most of their actions were never revealed, and they certainly never stopped. It goes on to this day. We have the evidence. The CIA has influence at hundreds of media outlets. The Agency internally creates bogus news stories to fit their narratives and objectives and distributes them with reporters who are either on-board with the program, or those who believe the news is legitimate. Then it snowballs as those reports are cited by other media outlets or picked up by the wire services.”

  “Fake news is real,” the president said.

  “Out of control real,” the Wizard said. “We’re way down the rabbit hole, Dawg. There’s no way to figure out where we are in the alternate reality generated by the faux stories, because it’s like a fictitious report causes ripples that become true . . . facts created from fiction. Things made true because of lies.”

  “So are the REMies controlling the media, or the CIA?” the president asked.

  Granger shook his head. “Do the REMies control the CIA? Do the REMies control the media? Does the CIA control the media? Rhetorical questions, all with the same answer.”

  “The answer being we’re screwed,” the Wizard said.

  “I’ve got proof of MADE events that have started wars from the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction.”

  The president looked down the steep bank of the creek, lost in thought. “We’ve got to put all of this into Cherry Tree. Can you have it fully authenticated so nobody can question it? If the American people see what’s been done to them, they won’t let the REMies stay in power for one more minute.” Fitz is wrong. After so long without the truth, the people crave it. It’s water in a desert. They know something’s wrong. “They just need the truth.”

  “Absolutely.” Granger stepped close to the edge and almost slipped, but the president grabbed him and hauled him back up. “Thanks,” Granger said. “That’s a slippery slope. A damn slippery slope.”

  The three friends all laughed.

  “The thing is,” the president said, turning serious again, “it’s not just America. The REMies have done this to the whole world. And we have to make sure the whole world turns on the REMies at the same time. They must find no refuge.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The president’s phone rang. He glanced at the lit number and groaned in disbelief.

  “Unbelievable . . . it’s Fonda Raton.”

  “You’re not going to take it?” the Wizard asked as the three were heading back to the mansion where Marine One was waiting to return the president to the White House.

  Hudson pressed “Accept” and said, “Where are you?”

  Fonda laughed. “Nice try.” I just called to give you a chance to comment on the Mandy Engelbert story. Of course, it’s a lot more than Mandy, isn’t it? Maybe you could help us, because we’re having a tough time keeping track of just how many women you’ve harassed, abused, damaged, or whatever.”

  “I thought you were a terrorist,” Hudson said, “and here you are pretending to be a journalist again.”

  Granger rolled his eyes.

  “Cute, very cute,” Fonda said. “But I didn’t call just about the bogus womanizing story.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  “It’s the CapWars,” Fonda began. “In case you haven’t noticed, the REMies are out of control right now. They’re desperate. The elites all sense this is the final CapWar, and you, Hudson, are the main obstacle.”

  “I know all this.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said emphatically. “We’re out of time. There are REMies actually trying to take the CapStone by monopolizing the world’s food supply. Others are attempting to control all the pharmaceuticals. They’ve been working for years on these schemes and have made great progress in getting greater numbers of the population to depend on those pharmaceuticals. Booker has uncovered a REMie-backed group called the ‘Aylantik’. They’re planning a plague, a worldwide pandemic.”

  “Why would they do that?” he asked, keeping his voice determinedly calm.

  “It’s a lot easier to control three billion people than seven billion,” Fonda answered.

  Hudson stared stunned at Granger and the Wizard, who could both hear the conversation. He might not have believed her if not for the information they’d just given him about the CIA killing Americans in order to further REMie objectives. Now he felt sick. Can I stop these people in time? With their limitless power? Lately he’d been wondering if the only reason he was still alive is that it served one of the REMies’ schemes in the CapWar against the others.

  “Are you there?” Fonda asked.

  “Yes, I just don’t know if I should believe you.”

  “Fair enough. You don’t have to. Just look into it. Have your brain trust there prove me right or wrong. But it’s true,” Fonda said, pausing taking a deep breath. “You still make the mistake of thinking of the CapWars as normal, conventional wars. This isn’t one country against another with militaries and rules of engagement. CapWars are more complex than that. Way more. The opponents work together at the same time that they fight each other. It’s extraordinary. You’ve never seen anything like it. We’re all pawns in their game. The mighty emperors will do anything to control the empire. Anything!”

  “I’m trying to stop them.”

  “I know you are, but you aren’t doing a very good job,” she said, her voice brimming with resignation. “You’re not even on the same playing field as they are. You think truth can beat them, but truth doesn’t exist in their world. Bastendorff will create some horrific, damaging MADE event with somebody—another REMie, say Miner—and at the same time he’ll be plotting against Miner with Gates or someone else. Their first objective is to consolidate control for the REMies, and then,
within that, their next first objective becomes to consolidate control for themselves. It’s all happening at the same time.”

  “It’s all insane,” the president said. “The REMies all need to be in prison, and I will put them there one by one. They’re just people, subject to the laws and arrest like everyone else.”

  “Not really.”

  “It may be harder to catch them because of their power and resources, but they still count on rigging the system to protect them, and I’m not rigged.”

  “The best thing you’ve got in your fight is Booker Lipton,” Fonda said.

  “Yeah,” Hudson said dryly. “There were two good REMies, Vonner and Booker, and now there’s only one.” His sarcastic tone was beyond bitter. “I don’t buy it. There’s no such thing as a good REMie.”

  “Tell that to Schueller,” Fonda said. “Or is he too busy counting Vonner’s money to talk?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m going to keep helping you whether you want or deserve it.”

  “You know what they say, with friends like you—”

  “You’ll thank me one day. Now, I better go.” She added sarcastically, “Before someone traces this call,” and then she was gone.

  Hudson looked back to Granger, who was smiling, obviously amused.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How she drives you crazy.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny.”

  “Only because you know she’s right,” Granger said, “and you don’t want to admit it.”

  “No such thing as a good REMie?” the Wizard asked. “You and I were both wrong about Vonner.”

  The president voiced what he’d been wrestling with for some time. “You think we should form an alliance with NorthBridge?”

  Granger nodded.

  “It would have to be so secret that it could never leak,” the Wizard whispered.

  “That’s impossible,” the president said, thinking of the leaks that had plagued him since he’d gotten into office.

  “There might be a way,” the Wizard said as they reached Marine One. “But we’ll need Tarka.”