In years past, terrorists struck symbolic targets, causing indiscriminate deaths. Al-Qaeda changed the rules of engagement. 9/11 demonstrated their willingness to inflict heavy casualties on civilians and register greater fear and uncertainly as a strategic end.
Western nations now had a true understanding of the terrorists’ objectives, even if they couldn’t identify the enemy. Their ultimate goals were to devalue democratic institutions, weaken infrastructure, and supplant existing governments with moderate or fundamental Islamic rule. They attacked people, and they targeted buildings. They couldn’t win conventional wars but took their holy fight to the new unconventional battlegrounds—civilian centers. Among the various landmarks identified as potential targets in Australia were the Sydney Opera House and the lavish hotels along the bay, including the towering cement, brick, and steel St. George.
An elite tactical unit was dispatched to the hotel.
Thirty-three minutes out.
They were backed up by the SASR—Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment—which arrived by helicopter atop the St. George.
Fifty minutes.
By then, the night assignment editor at Sydney’s Sky Television News had detected the surge of emergency chatter on the police frequencies.
Sixty-one minutes. The first of many microwave broadcast vans arrived at the hastily set-up police barricade a long block away.
Seventy-four minutes. Sky went live with a report carried cross-country.
“This is Sky Television News, approximately 200 meters from the recently completed Ville St. George Hotel, where a mandatory evacuation is now underway,” the young reporter began. “Though we can’t see it from our vantage point, our bureau, monitoring the police frequencies, reports an emergency of undetermined origin.”
At seventy-nine minutes since O’Gara’s find, the CNN night desk noted the coverage. With a special reciprocal arrangement with Sky, an editor patched the signal to his uplink and alerted Atlanta of the events that were unfolding half a world away.
Eighty-three minutes. A hot quick lead was typed into the teleprompter, and the Atlanta anchor read what was put before her.
“Breaking news from Sydney, Australia, where it is five forty-three A.M. Approximately 1,100 guests and staff of the new 535-room Ville St. George Hotel are being evacuated. There are unconfirmed reports of an electrical fire or the failure of an elevator. For details, we join Sky Television News with live coverage.”
Far across the International Dateline, an overnight CIA officer at Langley, Virginia, monitored the news channels. Silvia Brownlee noted that CNN interrupted its domestic news for a story from Sydney. Using her remote, the fifteen-year veteran turned up the volume and jotted down the details.
Ville St. George. Sydney. Evacuation.
Brownlee added equal signs between the key words and then wrote a large question mark. She swiveled her chair to her computer and typed in the hotel name. Then she clicked on a password-protected file. As she suspected, one floor of the St. George had been designed and built to White House specifications.
Brownlee called upstairs. Her boss needed to know there was an alert at a Rip Van Winkle House. Although she didn’t know it, it was the most important phone call she ever made.
Los Angeles, California
Sunday, 17 June
the same time
He wondered if anyone had stopped to think about the absurdity.
There it was, just on the other side of the chain-link fence: Rancho Golf Course. The home of the annual Los Angeles Police/Celebrity Golf Tournament.
Every spring the LAPD takes over the tees for a fundraiser that supports the Police Memorial Foundation. But Rancho Golf Course was also where O.J. Simpson used to play. That was the irony.
Simpson was on the greens as the jury deliberated his civil trial for the deaths of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. The case Simpson lost. He was also playing the day a single-engine plane crashed on the course just a few hundred yards away. One of the first things the two injured men heard as they were pulled out of their badly damaged plane was that O.J. was “over there.”
Nat Olsen almost laughed at the thought. The police and one of L.A.’s most notorious citizens sharing the same $18-a-day public course. But he didn’t laugh. That wasn’t part of his character…not as the jogger today or the man he might become tomorrow. He was focused and waiting at the Cheviot Hills Recreation Park that bordered the Rancho Golf Course.
Olsen wore loose-fitting black sweats and gray running shoes that he’d picked up weeks ago from a secondhand clothing store on La Brea. The only thing that distinguished him from any other jogger was a pair of thin leather gloves. They weren’t quite de rigeur for running, but they were definitely necessary for his particular line of work.
Affixed horizontally inside the zip-up top, at the small of the back, was a 4″-by-l” heavy duty, all-weather Velcro strip. It could self-adhere, but he’d sewn it into the fabric for extra reinforcement. Another strip of the hook and loop tape was stuck to his Sog Specialty FSA-98 Flash II serrated knife. The $39 switchblade is lightning quick. It opens with a simple press of a thumb. The blade is less than four inches and generally rated as a defensive slash-and-retreat weapon. But not in the hands of someone more experienced. Not in his hands.
Olsen certainly wouldn’t have used such a simple over-the-counter purchase for something more difficult, perhaps on a worthier target. But this was going to a simple matter, reflected by a smaller fee than he’d recently been earning. Fifty thousand.
His quote was normally much higher but so were the risks. Today’s job required very little planning, though he always did more than required. Where others screwed up, he never did. The sloppy ones forgot that it wasn’t just the kill, it was the exit that counted. He’d be as discreet in his departure as he was in his job.
To the normal passersby, he looked like a struggling and winded mid-to-late-forties jogger. He was neither struggling nor over thirty-five. If he chose, he could run for miles. But not today. With black hair extensions added to his closely cropped cut, dyed eyebrows, and a foam rubber gut that put on an additional forty-five pounds under his sweats, he easily passed as another middle-aged man trying to beat back the years.
He carried a Dallas license to prove he was Nat Olsen. He also created a convincing legend he’d share with anyone who stopped to talk. Nat Olsen was a nice guy, a Fidelity mutual fund trader relocating to Los Angeles. He was scouting a home for his family. There was nothing unusual about him—not a gesture or mannerism that would ever raise suspicion. He would pant, stop and start, double over, grab his sides, and shake his head and wish he were in better condition, just like so many others.
In reality, he barely taxed himself. Everything was completely planned out, rehearsed, carefully considered. Surprise would be on his side. However, he clearly understood that a daylight hit brought its own extra risks.
He had any number of ways to escape. Bicycles hidden both north and south of his intercept point. A car parked along a side lot off Motor Avenue. The Pico Boulevard bus. And his preferred method: simply joining a pack of other early evening joggers and going out inconspicuously.
He figured he had an hour more to kill. Funny how that sounds, he thought. Maybe he’d watch the golfers on the other side of the fence. He’d take his time and stay near his initial contact point. He’d politely nod to runners faster than him and stay behind anyone slower—like his target, who should be along well before dusk.
Lebanon, Kansas
the same time
“Let’s go to the Midwest line. Hello, you’re on Strong Nation.”
“Hey, Elliott. This is Peter in Detroit. Long-time listener, first-time caller,” lied the voice over the telephone. He was in a six-week rotation, either playing up to the audience with an anti-administration rant or throwing in an incendiary left wing comment that would generate an hour’s worth of bitter conservative reaction. He was there, like do
zens of others, because Elliott Strong didn’t count on his audience to provide enough controversy. The 52-year-old national syndicated talk show host, broadcasting from his home studio in the geographic center of the country—Lebanon, Kansas—had his ringers. They always helped.
Unseen to his millions of listeners, Strong took a sip of his hot Darjeeling tea and went through a quick set of mouth exercises that he watched in a mirror in front of him. This wasn’t just a physical routine. Strong liked looking at himself during his live broadcast. It added to his performance and inflated his ego.
Strong also always dressed for his shows. Tie and jacket, sometimes a suit. He resisted the urge to install web cameras. He felt that the magic of radio presented more opportunity than television. He held the historic Nixon-Kennedy debates as case in point. Over the radio to an unseeing audience, Nixon was the clear winner—concise, authoritative, composed. To TV audiences, however, Nixon appeared drawn, tired, and evasive. Strong would resist TV, even though he knew the offers would be coming. His ratings were growing too fast to be ignored.
In the control room, Strong’s engineer watched the meters, keeping them in the legal limits. Strong did less to modulate his opinion, openly criticizing public figures, while remaining vague about the details. He had only two other people on the payroll: his wife, who served as his screener, and his web master, who constantly updated the StrongNationRadio.com website with right-leaning polls, editorials that supported his harangues, and links to like-minded Internet sites.
During broadcasts, the studio was off-bounds to everyone. No friends or visitors. No live guests. The shows belonged to Strong and his callers.
“State your case,” the host said.
“What the hell’s going on in Washington?”
Strong recognized the voice and smiled. Last time was on his late night show. Strong had become so popular over the course of the election and the controversial aftermath, that he now occupied two time slots: a three-hour afternoon shift and another four hours overnight. Depending upon the time zone, he was carried live or replayed at a later hour. In eighteen months, Elliott Strong had out-paced his rivals, and Strong Nation had become an extreme conservative mouthpiece for an audience who thought they were getting the news from talk radio.
“What’s going on?” Strong said through a laugh.
“We’ve got a president we didn’t elect and a vice president we voted out, that’s what’s going on. Both are part of the military establishment, which I don’t remember electing. And now they’re running everything. Two people, and as far as I can remember, Americans didn’t give either of them their jobs.”
The caller was pressing a nationwide hot button. Henry Lamden ran hard for the Democratic nomination and probably would have gotten his party’s nod until Vermont congressman Theodore Lodge, clearly in second place, was thrust to front-runner status after his wife was shot on the campaign trail. A gunman fired just one bullet. It appeared to be a bungled assassination attempt. It wasn’t.
Lodge quickly swept ahead of Lamden in a wave of sympathy. Lamden, a decorated Navy commander, became a reluctant number two on the ticket. The Lodge-Lamden team won the November election, defeating the incumbent president, Morgan Taylor. However, minutes before Lodge was to have been sworn in, he was killed on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda. The assassin, presumed to be the same man who killed Lodge’s wife, had disguised himself as a Capitol Police officer. He escaped.
The rules of succession, enumerated in the 25th Amendment, required that the vice president-elect take the Oath of Office. To the surprise of everyone watching, Henry Lamden became President of the United States. He then proceeded to startle the country again with two revelations. The first: Lodge was not really an eligible candidate, but a sleeper spy, posing as an American. Second: former President Taylor, a Republican, would be his nominee as vice president.
The reporters covering the inauguration were as shocked as the millions of people tuned to the ceremony.
Other countries have based their rule on a parliamentary system, where fragile coalition leaderships typically struggle through constant and predictable disarray, until they ultimately implode. This has not been the case with the U.S. Executive Branch. One party controls the presidency, with both the chief executive and the vice president representing the same party, though serving the entire nation. On the state level, there are instances where a governor from one party is elected along with a lieutenant governor from another. The scenario usually leads to infighting, a dubious lack of cooperation, and a recipe for political disaster. But in the case of the Lamden-Taylor administration, the new president made the controversial choice to solve problems, not to cause them.
Lamden sought to lay down the spirit of cooperation with his inaugural speech. The country narrowly averted a constitutional crisis, he told the people. America had elected a Russian-trained, Arab national sleeper spy as president. His ultimate intent: to end U.S. support of Israel and change the balance of power in the Middle East. Lamden explained how proof of the conspiracy was extracted by an American Special Forces team dropped into Libya just hours prior to the inauguration. In a well-orchestrated assault, they took a building in Tripoli that housed the media empire of Fadi Kharrazi, son of the dying Libyan dictator, General Jabbar Kharrazi. Records proved that Fadi had not created the plan. He bought the three-decade-old operation from Udai Hussein prior to the fall of his father’s regime. In Fadi’s mind, the plan would have propelled him into a leadership position ahead of his brother Abahar.
President Morgan Taylor personally oversaw the mission and returned to Washington with hard evidence, minutes before the chief justice was to swear in Teddy Lodge. Taylor confronted Lodge and his chief aide, Geoff Newman, in the Capitol Rotunda. Newman grabbed a gun from a Secret Service agent. Before it was over, two law enforcement officers were dead. So were Newman and Lodge.
Back in Libya, Fadi Kharrazi made indignant denials. One week after the general’s death in March, Fadi’s brother, Abahar, assumed power. A week later, Fadi died in a car accident that no one witnessed.
Congress convened an unprecedented emergency session to begin its inquiry. Thousands of pages of testimony later, Morgan Taylor, on a strangely bipartisan vote, was enthusiastically confirmed as vice president. The United States had its first coalition government in more than a century.
Reporters dove into the history books for precedent. They were surprised it existed. John Adams, the nation’s second president, served as a Federalist. His vice president, Thomas Jefferson, was a member of the unified Democrat Republic party. America’s sixteenth president also ran on a coalition ticket. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, had Democrat Andrew Johnson as his second VP.
“It’s a jackalope,” the caller continued. “I don’t care if they did it way back when. We’re talking about now. And I can’t tell what kind of government we have. It’s not Republican. Lamden is a liberal Democrat. And it’s not Democrat. Taylor, who got defeated, is a moderate Republican, if you can call him a Republican at all.”
“My friend, you hit the nail on the head,” Strong said, nudging him on more.
“But it’s even worse. They’re moving us toward a military regime. Next thing you know, they’ll be clamping down on our freedoms.” The caller was beginning to sound the survivalist clarion call. “We’re gonna have the army running the police, and the navy boarding everybody’s boats. From the Great Lakes to Tahoe. I don’t care where you live. And you know what they’ll be after?”
“No, what?” asked the radio host in a smooth, soothing, encouraging voice.
“Our damned guns, that’s what. From a governor we didn’t elect president, and his vice president-master who’s really running things…who we voted out.”
“So you’re not happy?” Strong said jokingly.
“How can any American be happy? The election was a total fraud. We should have a new one.”
“But according to the Constitution, there
can’t be another election.”
“Then what the hell can we do?”
This was just where Elliott Strong wanted the conversation to go. It would start simply enough. A question. Then a call to action. Then another listener would up the ante. An echo. More callers. A chorus. In the morning, a publicist for Strong’s national syndicator would mention it to a few newspapers. It would make the wire services, certainly Fox News, and after that, the network news, CNN and CNBC. Then an e-mail campaign to the House and Senate, blogs, then…
“A good question. What can we do?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Yeah. Well, why not another election? We elected a foreign spy, and now we got two losers. There’s got to be something better.”
Here was the moment. The seed needed watering. “The only thing I can think of…and I don’t even know if it’s possible…it would take an amazing effort…a really Strong Nation…” He loved utilizing the name of his show, “…to make it work. I don’t know.” The talk host drew it out. “Probably impossible. Unless…” he stopped in mid-sentence for impact. “Unless we band together.” The operative word was we. It brought his listeners closer to the radio. “Then it could happen.” He hadn’t even hinted at the idea yet, but Strong knew that the truck drivers tuned in were mesmerized. The insomniacs lay in bed with their eyes now wide open. The conspiracy theorists were hanging on his words.
Elliott Strong had his faithful in the palm of his hand when he answered the caller’s question.
Century Plaza Hotel
Los Angeles, California
the same time
“Goodbye, Mr. President,” Lynn Meyerson said as she left the president’s suite at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel. It had been another tiring day—her fifteenth in a row. But she ate it up. In a very short period of time she had earned access to Henry Lamden and now enjoyed what few others in the entire country could claim: The President of the United States appreciated her advice, and he shared his thoughts with her.
Executive Treason Page 2