High tech surveillance software had been developed by the Micromerica Corporation. There were so many cameras and drones in the city that a person’s image could be entered into the Protect America database and a person’s generalized movement could be re-created for any given day over the past two years. There were holes in the network especially outside of cities or in rural areas but in places like New York it was hard for a person to interact in public without being continuously observed and recorded.
Agent Graham glared at West. “Let me get this straight Mr. Collins, you made hundreds of calls to Sloan but you really weren’t that close to him. Which is your explanation as to why you haven’t talked to him in two years. Yet you just happen to call his home on the day he was killed? I’d say that is quite a coincidence, huh?”
“I, uh … yeah,” West stuttered, having mentally determined there was no way he was going to mention the letter he had received. “Look, like I mentioned earlier I was home drinking and I started to clean out my desk and I found his card. I hadn’t talked to him in a while so I decided to call him and see what was going on. I don’t know what else to tell you. It was just a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences, Mr. Collins,” Graham replied.
“All right Mr. Collins,” Agent McCain interjected. “I think were done for now but if you can think of anything else that might be helpful give us a call.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks.”
The agents walked past West but Graham stopped and turned. “One last question, did Sloan give you any documents? More specifically a book.”
“No, he never gave me a book or anything like that,” West lied because something told him he better not get in any deeper than he was. Sloan had given him a book but if there was some type of incriminating evidence in it then West could be arrested for not reporting Sloan to DC.
Agent Graham stared at him for a few more moments then turned and left.
“So what the hell have you gotten yourself into now?” Simon asked.
West turned around. Despite the pill, he wasn’t in the mood for Simon’s shit.
“I don’t know what the hell they wanted. Typical Homeland bullshit harassment, that’s all”
“Yeah, whatever. Where’s my Mars Face article and alien WOW Transmission or whatever you call it?”
“I’ll forward it you tonight. I’m pretty much done. Don’t worry, you’ll have the article for Friday’s print, like always.”
Simon grunted something unintelligible, which usually served as West’s cue to leave. He returned to his desk and pulled out his file on the Mars rock formation. He stared at what appeared to be a human face on the Martian landscape that was filmed by the Viking orbiter back in 1976. The conspiracy nutcases argued the photo proved a humanoid sculpture or pyramid structure had been carved into the surface of Mars by aliens.
To add more bullshit to their delusion the very next year in August of 1977, the night before Elvis Presley died, a scientist at the Big Ear Radio Telescope recorded a supposed non-terrestrial non-solar system radio transmission. The event was called the WOW! Transmission and it lasted for 72 seconds. The source of the transmission was pinpointed to somewhere in the Sagittarius Constellation. The signal was received in a radio frequency of 1420mhz which happens to be the same frequency as hydrogen.
The ET believers argued this was proof of the existence of aliens because it would be logical to use the most common molecule in the universe for the communication.
Technical errors including reflected earthbound transmissions were all but ruled out but the signal was never heard again. So with the 50 year anniversary of the WOW! Transmission coming up this summer Simon was doing what he did best, and that was taking a little bit of fact and creating layers of conspiracies to get his whacked out subscribers fired up.
The article West was working on linked the Mars Face to the WOW! Transmission which was part of a communication link built by ancient aliens.
West looked over his notes, shaking his head in disgust. But he had a job to do and a deadline was a deadline. He started mindlessly typing on his laptop, knowing he’d have to work late tonight to get the asinine story done for tomorrow’s paper.
He started grinding out words and just like the good old days, West completely shut out the world and concentrated on the story at hand. Hours passed as he entered a time vacuum and when he finally looked up, the dingy newsroom was empty.
He stared out of the office’s window at New York City’s darkened skyline. He almost was ready to congratulate himself on a job well done when he realized what crap the story actually was and then he remembered Sloan and the agents. Any satisfaction he previously felt dissipated into a haze of melancholy as the thought of just dropping out of life resurfaced.
West opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of vodka wrapped in a brown paper bag. He had quit drugs but not the booze. He had to have some way to shut down his mind, at least for a while. West slugged down the fiery liquid while choking back both the rising fire from the cheap liquor and his growing disgust of what he had become.
“Screw it,” he announced to the empty office. “Time to go home.”
“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
– Morpheus, The Matrix
Chapter 4
West took the stairs down to the lobby and walked out of the building where he was greeted by a stormy night. Twenty-five years ago, even at 2 o’clock in the morning, New York was lit up like a Christmas tree. But now entire offices, apartment buildings and even city blocks were empty, abandoned and dark. The whole city was rotting from the inside out.
West lit up a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. He became transfixed watching the burning ashes of his cigarette as they disappeared unceremoniously into the night sky.
He pulled up the collar of his 20-plus year old trench coat and looked around. The Tabloid’s dilapidated office was in a rundown section of upper Manhattan, which was not safe during the day, but at night it was outright dangerous.
Although nowhere in the city was really safe at night except for certain sections that were sealed off and patrolled by armed security guards. These “safe zones” were populated mostly by the ruling class and unless you were able to show the proper identification the guards wouldn’t allow you to pass through the restricted area.
A pre-2000’s taxicab sped by and West watched as its brake lights faded from view then something strange, almost surreal occurred. He turned completely around. There was not a car or a person in sight. His senses kicked into overdrive and a deafening silence enveloped him.
West stood frozen in terror until his fight or flight instinct took over and without consciously deciding, he fled. He had no idea what he was running from but he sprinted to the train station where he caught the subway home.
Sitting alone, he drank from the bottle of vodka in the semi-dark subway car as it sped through a centuries old hole underneath the city. West couldn’t stop thinking about the strange note and Mark Sloan’s death.
Their relationship had been a unique one and to this day West wasn’t sure what to make of it. Generally, high-level contacts within Wall Street gave reporters information because they had an axe to grind or wanted to get someone out of the way in order to make their own career path easier. But Sloan was different. He had contacted West directly and after they had engaged in the usual dance of ‘can I trust you,’ a wary partnership was formed.
Initially, Sloan had provided him with information about the fragile state of Wall Street, including Lehman Brothers dire fiscal condition. But after the collapse of Lehman the nature of their relationship, and especially the information that Sloan started providing, morphed into some type of weird Twilight Zone episode.
Their conversations went from how Lehman ha
d overleveraged their book taking on way more risk than they could afford to how the Federal Reserve Banking system was a dangerous cartel run by a small group of international bankers that served a shadow group that controlled the world’s financial system.
As time went by Sloan opened up a whole new dimension of absurdity when he began telling West there was an even smaller group of individuals whom he called The Dracun who hid in a global shadow world. Sloan swore that this small super-elite group controlled it all: Central Banks, heads of state, the military, corporations, everything.
Sloan would go on tirades that the whole system, including the implosion of Wall Street and the constant financial crises, had been orchestrated by The Dracun to begin ushering in a New World Order and that all these events had been planned decades ago.
West had been grateful for the information Sloan provided him because it had basically jumpstarted his career. But he did not adhere to all the whacked out conspiracies about the Super Elite and their New World Agenda supposedly being carried out by the usual suspects. The main reason for his skepticism was the most obvious, why would those that have everything want to destroy that?
He owed Sloan a lot so he grinned and listened to all of his insane ramblings, even though he didn’t really believe most of Sloan’s shit. In West’s view the world had gone flat busted due to insatiable spending, massive debts and unsustainable entitlements run up mostly by a generation of people called the Baby Boomers who had now almost all died off.
In West’s thinking it was simple: he believed that bad times sprung all kinds of crazy ideas, but the fact was the United States was in a decade long depression because like all structures built on a rotting foundation, the collapse was certain to come and boy had it ever.
But he had to hand it to Sloan because he never wavered and steadfastly dismissed all of West’s counter-arguments and insisted this was just the beginning of a carefully constructed collapse and the next wave, the true unraveling, was almost upon them.
West had no idea what the hell all that meant but many of these conversations came after quite a few drinks so West never took any of it too seriously.
He distinctly remembered the last time they had met because he thought Sloan had completely gone insane. At the time he didn’t give it much thought because Wall Street had just been shell-shocked by a massive 25 percent stock market crash in the closing minutes of a Friday, and Sloan had every right to be rattled.
Once again the whole financial system was teetering on the brink of the abyss and the regulators had to close the markets for a full week in order to restore balance and order. Eventually, the crash was declared to have been a coordinated attack by an anti-Wall Street hacker group but that claim was growing old and no one trusted the markets anymore.
It was during that conversation that Sloan had asked him if he had seen the movie The Matrix, which, of course West had because it was a sci-fi classic. Then Sloan asked him if he was ready to take the red pill and see the world for what it truly was.
During those days he would have taken any pill someone had offered him without even asking what it was, so West humored him and nodded that he was ready. Instead of giving him some reality-altering drug Sloan handed him an enormous sheaf of documents haphazardly bound in leather. When West had asked Sloan what the documents were, he had just dismissed West only saying he would have to read and search out the answers to discover the truth on his own.
West repeatedly tried to give the book back but Sloan refused, saying he owed him so West relented and kept the book, figuring it was just easier to humor him. That was the last time West ever saw Sloan.
Weeks later, almost as an afterthought, West had picked up Sloan’s book from his desk and began thumbing through it. The whole thing was a jumbled mess of seemingly random and sometimes incoherent documents.
Some of the pages were hand-written, clearly by different authors, while other pages were typed. The book included newspaper articles from as far back as the 1800’s, obscure research papers, New Age shit, economic reports, philosophy journals, analyses of old Stanley Kubrick movies, Federal Reserve minutes, currency charts, pages of mathematical formulas that he would never be able to comprehend, UFO reports, conspiracy theories and even gossip columns.
There was even a college dissertation paper written by some student from the University of Alabama. After he read the dissertation he wondered how the kid was even allowed to graduate with the shit he had turned in. The paper took a speculative physics theory called The Grand Unified Theory and applied it to the current global socio-political economic world.
But rather than producing a thought-out academic theory, the paper contained a constant underlying fringe element about a massive global conspiracy involving a group of individuals who worked behind the scenes to create and control the world we live in and that many of the decisions being made resulted from a type of quantum gaming theory this shadow group was running. The paper was the same exact craziness Sloan kept repeating.
Also attached to the kid’s dissertation was a couple of newspaper articles about him overdosing after graduation. The kid’s parents had demanded an independent autopsy because they swore he didn’t drink or do drugs. There was even a quote from his roommate of four years stating that he was a strict Southern Baptist and never drank, smoked, and certainly had never taken any drugs.
West took another swig of the vodka and felt his eyelids beginning to close. He was exhausted and the motion of the train was lulling him to sleep.
• • •
Buildings burned far off in the distance, enveloping the city in a reddish hue. A noxious smoke filled his nostrils and stung his eyes. Pillars of blood-red clouds filled the dark gray sky casting a death pall over the city. He watched as an endless stream of faceless soldiers marched down the streets. A wave of revulsion infiltrated every cell of his being. The Army of Darkness had arrived and all hope was lost. He had lost his chance to flee so his fate had been sealed. A child in front of him held her mother’s hand, pressing her little body into hers for comfort.
Dread filled him, knowing that the child had no future and he hoped her suffering would be quick. He cowered back from the crowd into the crevice of the building and waited for it all to end. He wasn’t afraid of dying any more but what filled his soul with loathing was the knowledge that it all could have been stopped.
• • •
West awoke with a jerk. The raw emotions from the nightmare was almost too much to bare and he couldn’t shake the image of the child with her mother in front of the faceless goose- stepping soldiers.
The subway came to a halt at his stop. He left the train and walked through the dingy subway terminal strewn with litter, anti-government graffiti and dozens of homeless people or drunks bunking down for the night. He climbed up the subway stairs onto the street where he was only a few blocks from home. Despite being the height of summer, a cold gust of wind greeted him and he thrust his hands inside his overcoat. His body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
He pulled a cigarette out, bent his head to block the biting wind and lit it. As he exhaled a stream of grayish-white smoke, a figure from across the street caught his attention. A man stood motionless at the edge of the street with his hands tucked inside his overcoat pockets.
“Jeez,” he muttered under his breath. “Just what I need, some psycho stalking me.”
He turned and began walking toward his apartment. After a block he glanced across the street. West couldn’t get a clear look at him but the damn guy was following him. He stopped and his unknown pursuer also stopped.
A bus drove past blocking his view, and when it passed the guy was no longer there. Where in the hell could he have gone that fast?
“Screw it,” West flicked his cigarette into the gutter and briskly walked toward his apartment building. When he reached the entrance he took one last look across the street. The psycho had reappeared out of thin air with his arm held out and his fingers formed into a gu
n gesture.
Slowly, the mystery assailant pointed his hand at West and moved his thumb down gesturing like he was pulling the trigger of a pistol.
Eerie laughter echoed off the surrounding buildings. West took a step forward and a cab’s headlights cast a beam of light across his face, temporarily blinding him. The blinding light lasted only for an instant but whoever was following him had once again disappeared into the darkness of the city.
West pulled his keys out and hurriedly opened the door, making sure to lock it behind him. He took the stairs two at a time up to his studio where he locked himself inside.
He flipped the lights on and poured a large scotch. The message button was blinking on the SmartLink so he wearily pressed the listen button. When he heard the voice on the machine he instantly regretted checking his messages.
A voice from the grave began: “Hey good buddy, its Mark. Hope you are doing well. By the time you get this message you would have heard about my demise. I suspect you are beginning to question the world you live in. We share the same bond, West. I didn’t ask to be this way, just like you didn’t. I still don’t know what it means and neither do The Searchers. Read the book carefully and question everything. Start with Nigel Firth. Good bye for now, West.”
SmartLink clicked off and West looked at the time the message was received: June 5th at 9:45 am. Just before Sloan had supposedly killed himself.
He drank the entire glass of scotch trying to figure out what Sloan was talking about and why he had not seen the message yesterday.
“I’m just doing my job”
– Weak minded, immoral men
Chapter 5
Agent Larson Graham handed the Homeland Security force his weapon and began the lengthy identification and clearance process to enter the secure building. Even though he carried one of the highest security clearances available, he was still subjected to intense screening every time he entered the New York headquarters of Homeland Security. Only after his identity was confirmed and his body was scanned for any internal explosive devices or biological weapons was he waved through minus his weapon.
The Unraveling Page 4