Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1)

by Tom Abrahams

  This is what we’ve waited for. This is our opportunity.

  Sir Spencer reached into the inside breast pocket of his cashmere jacket. He pulled out his encrypted cell phone and punched a series of numbers with his thumb, pressed send, and slipped the phone back into the pocket.

  “A Deo et Rege,” he murmured as he again lifted the glass to his lips. From God and the King. He could smell the strength of the scotch.

  *

  For American university undergraduates not prone to rising early, the news of President Foreman’s death was as much an excuse as it was a reason to miss class.

  Professor Arthur Thistlewood knew this, but he did not excuse from class the few who showed up for his American Government survey. Instead he found it to be the perfect teaching tool.

  “The order of succession for the presidency,” he started, “who knows what it is?”

  “Vice president,” offered a pimply boy in the fourth row, “then Speaker of the House.”

  “After that?” asked Thistlewood with his back to the auditorium. He wrote on an overhead projector. Most teachers employed computerized versions of the display. They used PowerPoint and other software to share their chalkboard musings. Thistlewood was bourgeois.

  “The cabinet?” said a young woman in the back of the room.

  It always amazed Thistlewood that students would actually pay to sit in the back. If he were a rock star or a stand-up comic, they’d shell out big money to sit in the front. But in college, they paid their sixty thousand dollars a year to sit in the back.

  “Not yet,” responded the handsome professor, rubbing the white scruff on his chin, eyeing the robust blonde in the third row. He paused and then counted with his fingers. “The president pro tempore of the Senate is next. He or she is followed by the cabinet: the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, and the Attorney General. Then it’s the Secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.”

  “What happens if they all die at the same time?” the boy in the fourth row asked with all seriousness. It drew some snickers.

  “Good question.” Thistlewood pointed at the boy as he turned toward the class. “And that is virtually impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “One of those in line must always be separated. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was the ‘designated successor’. They sent him to an undisclosed location. Had something catastrophic happened, he would have survived to provide what’s called a ‘continuity of government’.”

  “Why are the cabinet members after the Speaker and the president of the Senate?” A third student was now engaged. Thistlewood could hear the rusty gears turning slowly in his students’ heads. He eyed the third-row blonde again and imagined her wearing far less than a sweatshirt and jeans. Maybe next semester.

  “Favoritism,” Thistlewood responded. “By having elected officials at the top of the succession list, it prevents the president from essentially handpicking all potential successors. It was a key point of the 1947 Act of Presidential Succession.

  “Some constitutional scholars would argue the placement of the Speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore ahead of any cabinet ‘officer’ is unconstitutional,” continued Thistlewood. “But that’s how the law is written.”

  Thistlewood scanned the classroom, trying to catch the expressions of the few dozen students seated in front of him. He saw mixed interest and then felt a vibration against his hip.

  “Tell you what,” he reasoned aloud while checking his iPhone. “I’m going to leave a notebook up here for each of you to sign. Everyone who attended today gets ten points added to the next quiz.”

  After looking up from the series of numbers displayed on the screen, he again surveyed his students. A few sat up straighter. Some nodded and smiled at the student closest to them. Thistlewood knew how to enthuse.

  *

  The Hanover-Crown Institute was in a nondescript limestone, iron and glass building on South Street in Georgetown, halfway between Wisconsin Avenue and Thirty-First Street NW, just a block from The Shops at Georgetown Park.

  It stood three stories tall, not including a below-grade basement garage for employees and special guests. On the flat roof of the brownstone-style structure, hidden by the façade, was a pair of small satellite dishes. One of them received television signals and the other uplinked them.

  The Institute was a nonpartisan think tank that had neither the prestige nor financial prowess of the Brookings Institution. It resembled a European institute in that its research was heavy on opinion while being somewhat light on number crunching and measurable analysis.

  Hanover’s gem was a small production studio it used to showcase its higher-profile opinion-shapers. One of them was former attorney general Bill Davidson. He was a legacy politician whose father had served two presidents in varying capacities. While not much of a success as AG, Davidson knew Washington politics. He knew where the deals were made and where the bodies were buried. In that capacity, he was valuable to Hanover-Crown.

  The cable networks loved Davidson. He was always good for a sound bite or an unfiltered opinion of whatever was happening inside the beltway. Because the networks loved Davidson, Hanover-Crown loved him.

  There were deep furrows across his lengthening brow. His eyes were sunken and puffy; the skin beneath his brow was melting onto the lids. He lamented the sky blue surrounding his pupils had long ago faded to a soft gray, as though the life was slowly leaving them.

  Davidson’s strong jaw and chin were diffused by the skin and fat surrounding them. His ill-fitting bridge made his gums smack when he talked. Given his high profile, he knew it was ridiculous to live with bad dental work, but there was something comforting in the familiarity of the old bridge.

  Almost everyone saw him as a famous statesman and pundit, but Bill Davidson couldn’t get past the aging, sad man staring back at him in the reflective glass above the sink. He was a good actor.

  He would call on that skill for the next three hours as he prepared to sit in the studio as a guest on various cable news programs. They all wanted his take on the constitutional questions surrounding the president’s death.

  As he applied a light powder to his forehead to reduce shine from the studio lights, there was a knock at the bathroom door.

  “Attorney General Davidson?” It was the studio coordinator. “We have about five minutes, and I need to get you wired up, sir.”

  “Okay,” replied Davidson through a face stretched to apply makeup in the right places. “I’m on my way.”

  Davidson shook the makeup brush free of light chocolate powder and placed it in its plastic sleeve. He was slipping it into his pants pocket when his Blackberry vibrated against his hip. He pulled it from the clip attached to his belt and saw he had a new text message. Davidson pulled open the bathroom door with his right hand as he pressed the text icon with his left thumb. He saw a series of coded numbers on the screen.

  He looked at his watch and sighed, knowing it would be a late night. He then pulled from his coat pocket a small blue journal. It was a diary of notes he kept with him everywhere he went. It was useful for thoughts and appointments.

  A habit he first acquired in law school, it had stuck with him. At home in a file cabinet, he had stacks of small journals, each of them filled with almost indecipherable numbers and notes. He pulled a ballpoint pen from the same pocket and yanked off the cap with his teeth. He quickly jotted the series of numbers onto an empty page, recapped the pen, and put both items back in the pocket.

  Davidson slid into the studio and sat in a low-back leather chair, rubbing his palms along the brass nail heads on its arms.

  *

  George Edwards flipped open his cell phone and cursed at the series of numbers on the screen.

  “I hate these damn codes,” he grumbled, running a yellow ligh
t at the corner of Tenth and L Streets. He was heading east on L and had just passed the Washington Convention Center. He was late for a meeting at a local reception hall on the corner of Sixteenth and L. The hall doubled as a gallery at which he was premiering some of his latest work.

  Edwards was a digital sculptor. He used his computer to enhance/alter iconic portraits or designs, and they were in very high demand. His manipulated “sculpture” of the painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull sold for $105,000.

  Edwards called his version of the painting What Really Happened. He played off of the fact that the scene depicted in the iconic representation of the nation’s birth never actually happened the way Trumbull painted it.

  Instead of Charles Thomson standing directly across from Thomas Jefferson on the right side of the canvas, Edwards inserted a free-floating dartboard with the face of King George III. On the left side of the piece, Edwards altered a standing, cross-armed William Paca, putting a dart in the right hand of the Maryland lawyer. Thomas Jefferson held a pint of ale instead of a page of the Declaration. The entire painting was colorized with shades that differed from Trumbull’s original, making the work appear almost lifelike.

  Hidden amongst the signers of the Declaration in Edwards’s parody was the phrase “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.” The words were a direct translation from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Lithographs of the digital sculpture were amazingly popular on college campuses throughout the country. They were third in sales at the Harvard “Coop” behind a poster of Moe kicking a football off of Curley’s head and Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.

  Edwards stared at the numbers. It was a “Caesar Cipher” in which letters of the alphabet were replaced with numbers. Sometimes the numbers were shifted, sometimes they were not. This time he knew they weren’t. Off the bat, he knew the zeroes were spaces between words. If there was a shift, the zeroes would be multiplied to signal the shift. “00” would indicate a shift of one. “0000” would indicate a shift of three. “0” meant no shift. 1=A, 2=B, 3=C…

  Three separate zeroes meant four words. He knew three- or four-digit numbers were times of day. The “100” third to the last in the sequence was one o’clock. The “1 13” following the time was a.m. He had a meeting at 1:00 a.m.

  “Great,” he muttered. “Just what I need right now.” Begrudgingly, he deciphered the rest of the code to determine the location of the clandestine get-together.

  *

  The Cato Street Pub was a bar in the 2100 block of Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It was a favorite for politicos—dark, cheap, and served call brands for house prices.

  The red brick two-story building was squeezed between a drug store and a Vietnamese restaurant. It had the look of an eighteenth-century London home. The two windows on the second floor were twelve panels with white paint on the trim. There were sheer white draperies drawn on the inside.

  On the first floor the large, solid wood doors at the entrance were painted a glossy red. A large engraved brass plaque affixed to the brick, just to the left of the doors, bore the pub’s name and its hours of operation.

  The pub’s interior was wall-to-wall hickory. The twenty-foot-long bar was lacquered rosewood, as were the dozen four-seat round tables scattered across the dining portion of the first floor. Directly opposite the bar, which sat to the right, was a series of four red velvet booths.

  On the walls were black-and-white photos of famous politicians who’d sidled up to the bar aboard the brass and leather stools. From Ted Cruz and Tip O’Neill, to Hillary Clinton and Robert McNamara, the powerful had haunted Cato Street for decades.

  And yet, unbeknownst to even the most connected Capitol Hill broker, the bar and its upstairs apartment served as the place where the self-described disenfranchised would meet to talk treachery.

  The owner of Cato Street was Jimmy Ings. He’d purchased the bar in his early twenties as a place to commiserate and imbibe with friends. He lived in the upstairs apartment alone. Over the years, Ings used his profits to buy a nearby butcher shop and a coffee house. The coffee sales were good; the meat profits were nonexistent. Both were primarily cash businesses.

  He was a thin man who drank more than he ate and sucked down two packs of Camel unfiltered regulars a day. His thinning hair was white and tinged with yellow from cigarette smoke. The skin on his cheeks and nose was reddened from a severe case of aggravated rosacea.

  He was an unhappy man with a dry wit and a penchant for the television show Jeopardy! He was particularly good at historical and political categories.

  Ings was also a founding member of the underground Datura Project. The “Daturans”, as the small group’s members were called, had met each other at various political events in the Metro DC area. They shared a singular, radical idea about the future of their nation and of the world.

  They first met in Ings’s upstairs apartment as a group of four and soon added a fifth. The group determined that half of a minyan was large enough and stopped recruiting. They called themselves the “Datura Project” in honor of the poisonous plant certain Native American tribes would diffuse into a hallucinogenic tea during rites of passage. The Daturans believed their eyes were open. They could see what others could not.

  They also knew what was best for their country, and they believed they could best effect change with swift action. But in meeting after meeting their leader, Sir Spencer Thomas, convinced them the right opportunity had not presented itself. A shift of such magnitude, he’d reasoned, required the perfect, historic moment.

  Maybe that will change now that the president is dead.

  With chatter of the president’s death on the flat screen behind the bar, but nobody in the seats, Ings decided to close up early. He sent his barkeep and cook home with a few extra bucks, locked the front doors, and climbed the stairs into his apartment. The rest of the group would be there in a few hours, and he needed to be ready.

  Plus, Jeopardy! was on Channel 8 and he didn’t want to miss it. It was “College All-Stars” week. He hoped it wouldn’t be preempted by news coverage of the president’s death.

  Chapter 3

  Standing in the Cox Corridors on the House side of the US Capitol, Felicia Jackson’s mind was swirling with possibilities. She was transfixed by the large mural above her in the Central East-West Hallway that depicted the inauguration of George Washington. It was breathtaking.

  She was somewhat saddened she’d never taken the time to appreciate the work in the past. But with the halls eerily quiet as everyone on the Hill busied themselves behind office desks and in front of televisions, she had the perfect chance to reflect and admire.

  Felicia rubbed her neck as she kept her gaze upward. As Speaker of the House, she knew she might be the next American to take that oath and inherit the green office.

  She’d asked her staff for a few minutes of privacy as she took the short walk from her first-floor office to the Cox Corridor murals. She’d been in high-level, classified meetings all day. Her people were fighting for her to assume the presidency, while not-yet-sworn-in Vice President John Blackmon was staking his own claim.

  Her case was open and shut, she’d thought. But Blackmon’s attorney had quickly filed an injunction in US District Court in DC. He claimed her ascension to the presidency would cause irreparable injury for which no damage award could compensate. He also contended his case, on constitutional grounds, was in the public interest.

  While the district judge considered the case, she was temporarily stopped from taking office. Nancy Mayer-Whittington, the Clerk of the Court, had told her lawyers the injunction was filed along with her team’s response and that the judge would decide on its merits the next morning.

  Mayer-Whittington had called just before the office closed at 4 p.m. They were short staffed already, and Felicia imagined this case would only further stress the Clerk. She pictured lines of reporters banging on
the Constitution Avenue entrance, all of them asking for copies of the filings.

  It was a nightmare, as far as Felicia was concerned. By waiting overnight, the judge was effectively granting the injunction and giving Blackmon’s legal team time to better formulate their argument.

  To make matters worse, she was about to deliver a joint address with Blackmon to assure the American people the government was in good hands as both parties worked together to stabilize what was a precarious situation.

  She envied George Washington as she looked at him with his left hand on the Bible. He didn’t have injunctions. He didn’t have twenty-four-hour cable news.

  Still, the “People’s Business” had been good to Speaker Jackson. A school teacher, school board member, and county commissioner turned Member of Congress, she’d been on the fast track. She was witty and politically savvy. She had a handsome face and physique.

  Felicia was a Stanford graduate with a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina. Her husband was a well-known neurosurgeon, who’d given up active practice to support his wife’s rocketing political career.

  She won the seat in South Carolina’s first congressional district by a staggering fourteen points over a six-term incumbent.

  Over the course of four terms, the black-haired, blue-eyed shark had amassed a casino-full of favors. When her party narrowly won the house in a midterm coup, she’d cashed in her chips for a leadership position. She was named Majority Whip and then Speaker.

  She wasn’t the first woman to slam the gavel, but she whacked it the loudest. Every favor she’d amassed, every handshake and smile from across the aisle she’d garnered, disintegrated with the squeeze of her iron fist.