The CleanSweep Conspiracy

by Chuck Waldron

  Carl and Susan tried to absorb the implications of what Tanner was reporting on the video.

  “He wrote about being impressed with an eleven-page document from PROFUNC. It outlined harsh rules for the camps. People could be held indefinitely. If they tried to escape, they would be shot. He even wrote on the margin, ‘That would add a tempting touch.’”

  Matt broke the silence. “I bet he had an erection while he was writing this.” Nobody snickered. “Look at this newspaper account he cites next.”

  Matt, Carl, and Susan could easily read it. It was a story reporting on the 2010 rioting in Toronto during the G8 summit.

  Matt read it aloud. “Press sources indicate hundreds of citizens were detained and documented by police during the 2010 summit. During a three-day period, people were stopped, questioned, and documented by police in key patrol areas downtown and near a temporary jail location…collecting names, ages, names of associates, and places of birth. Police also took notes on skin color, identifying those stopped as being white, black, brown, or other.”

  “This is where he got the idea to include stuff like that in CleanSweep?” Susan asked it as a question, but she knew the answer.

  “Read this next part.” Matt clicked to advanced to the next page. “He had it all planned. Get the government to host a similar event again, bring in agitators to stir up hatred. He would make sure there would be enough going on to cause panic in the general population. The he would add widespread destruction. People would demand protection. The government could easily pass emergency legislation to grant police powers similar to those in situations of martial law. Guess who got the contract to implement CleanSweep?”

  “Good-bye, habeas corpus,” Carl muttered.

  “I still have a hard time believing it could happen,” Susan whispered. “Tanner said it wasn’t about the money for Claussen. Imagine the power he would have.”

  “Look at this, too,” Matt said, pointing. “Claussen’s advice to an influential government committee chairman was to nationalize four zones in the city. One would be marked to include City Square, between Bloor Street to the north and Front Street to the south, from Bathurst Street to the west and Parliament Street to the east.

  “He sent the chairman one e-mail detailing how he would bankroll public demonstrations, riots, and hooliganism to stir up the desired public sentiment. He said they would start among the crowds in Nathan Phillips Square. Claussen’s goons would work their evil. When the police moved in to stop the violence, it would be easy to herd crowds into a marshaling area, a fenced-in area bordering a streetcar line. Another nationalized zone would lie farther to the west, a last to the east.

  “His plan was to convert some streetcars to act as prisoner transports. Detainees could be quickly processed at places like City Square and then transported to the primary holding facilities in warehouses in the western zone. It’s brilliant,” Matt said. “He committed his entire fortune to secretly buying properties and constructing facilities that would support CleanSweep. If anyone noticed anything, it would look like ordinary construction taking place. Anyone curious would likely think it was a good sign—that the economy was finally on the way to a full recovery.”

  “I saw that construction, and that’s exactly what I thought,” Susan said.

  “Claussen is a poster boy for evil,” Matt said. “The worst thing is that he looks and acts normal. Every news story about him sings high praise. Who would suspect anything like this? Sure, his ultraright leanings are well known, but that by itself doesn’t make someone evil. It’s the…” Matt paused, searching for the right words. “It’s taking the final step from not liking certain elements of society, the people he doesn’t agree with, to this.” He pointed at the screen. “He’s planning their eradication. To Claussen, the people he deems unworthy are no more than cockroaches. He sees himself as the exterminator called in to fumigate the undesirables in society.”

  Matt loved to write but was not one given to talking much, but talking about Claussen’s evil genius brought out his emotions. He rubbed his temples, scowling.

  “This is like fitting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” Carl said. “I need to charge the phone again.” When it was plugged in, he nodded.

  “Do you know who’s supporting him?” Susan wanted to know. “Who are his other backers?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt admitted. “Claussen’s obsession with secrecy is evident on that score. He used private communications channels, not Enseûrtech’s. One person I suspected early on was Richard Waverly. He’s the only one in the government with enough clout to make this happen. But I’m not sure; it’s only a guess.”

  Susan gasped at the mention of Waverly’s name. “He’s slime. We tried to do some background checks on him. There are questionable things in his past, but when we attempted to investigate them, the trail disappeared down rabbit holes. We do know he pulls a lot of political strings behind the scenes.”

  The three sat quietly in the room. Its sounds and smells provided an appropriate backdrop to the tawdry topic. Scratchy AM radio music competed with the running toilet, annoying them all. An unappealing mixture of smells—tension sweat, fear, disinfectant, and lingering cigarette smoke—filled the room.

  They flinched in unison when the beam of a car’s headlights filled the room. The room returned to dimness when the lights were turned off a moment later. The car had stopped just outside their room. They waited for the sound of multiple car doors opening and closing—a sure sign of an impending arrest. All they heard was an ominous nothing.

  CHAPTER 13

  Close Call

  Two men sat in the car, gazing at nothing in particular, both wearing an end-of-shift bleary stare. The sharp pings from the cooling engine were the only sounds, until the man on the passenger side took a loud slurp from his takeout coffee cup.

  “I gotta piss!” The driver grunted and released his seat belt. “Be right back. You OK with that, boss?”

  “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Take your time, Jimbo. The Westside guys are having all the fun anyway, while we cruise around doing next to nothing.” He recoiled as the driver’s door slammed shut.

  Jerk, Brian thought. Why does he insist on calling me boss?

  He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.

  What’s Sam’s name for it, our C-phone? He never came right out and said it, but we all got the idea. The C didn’t stand for cell. The C meant a phone Claussen couldn’t listen in on.

  The C-phone didn’t have any bells or whistles—it was just a basic voice, text, and photo phone.

  It’s a not-so-smart phone, Brian thought as he looked down at the screen.

  He pressed his thumb against it until it brought up the text. He’d just started to read the message when Jimbo returned.

  “What’s that, boss?” He nodded at the phone as he slammed the door.

  “Why do you always have to slam the door? We just got an alert, a flash. These are the two we’re supposed to be on the lookout for. See? Susan Payne and Carl Remington. She’s the one on TV, Action 21 News. The guy, Carl, is her cameraman.”

  He held the screen up so they could both see the photos. The two men squinted; the dim dome light didn’t help much.

  “Them the two that Sammy let get away?” Jimbo asked.

  “I’m sure of it. Sammy was sure they had headed west. Our guys staked out a motel on Lakeshore, but they didn’t show. Wait.” He held his hand up. “There’s more.” He read while Jimbo tried to look over.

  “What’s it say?” Jimbo asked.

  “We’re supposed to be on the lookout. What are we supposed to do here? We know who we’re looking for, but there’s nobody around at this time of the night. The streets are deserted. I suppose they could be in a motel like this. Yeah…right.” He started laughing.

  “There isn’t anything going on here in this dump,” Jimbo
said, wiping his hands on the tail of his shirt. “There wasn’t even anybody in the office. It was locked tight. I had to piss on the side of that wall.” He pointed at his makeshift urinal. “At least I found a corner with a shadow. Hey, boss, wouldn’t it be something if they were in this shithole? You think they might be here? They could be in that room right in front of us.”

  “Get serious,” Brian said. “This coffee tastes like crap.” He rolled down the window and turned the cup on end, letting the dregs spatter on the asphalt. He was careful to put the cup into a recycling bag he kept next to the seat, though.

  The phone began to vibrate again.

  “Now they say that Matt Tremain is on the move,” Brian said. “Damn, I sure would like to be the team that catches him, eh?”

  “Do they have any idea where he might be?”

  “If they do”—Brian snorted—“they aren’t keeping us in the loop. Can you believe it? They had Tremain’s building cased, and nobody bothered to look for a back door. That would have been the first thing I looked for, if it was up to me. Sometimes I think we work with a bunch of amateurs.”

  He gave little thought to the fact that he likely fit into that category himself. There he was, sitting in a car with someone named Jimbo, assigned to the far edge of the story. He was definitely not on Claussen’s A-list.

  “While the two of us drive around on the graveyard shift,” Jimbo added, “useless as teats on a boar hog.” There was a slight chill seeping in, so Jimbo started the car for some heat. “Screw going green and saving the planet.” He laughed and let the car idle until the vents spewed warm air.

  They were at the end of a ten-hour shift. It had been a dreary ten hours, with no excitement to break the monotony. One problem with a long period of tedium is that boredom creeps in, and monotony leads to a lack of focus and attention. Jimbo and Brian sat in the car, their minds wandering to what they would do on their days off.

  “Remember that couple we saw back there?” Brian broke the silence. “It was an hour or so ago. Did you see how they ducked into that doorway pretty damn fast? I don’t think it was these two, but maybe we should cruise back that way. That place we saw them isn’t far from here.”

  “Why not?” Jimbo turned on the headlights, flicking on the high beams. “Ain’t it fun shining the high beams into a motel room this time of night?” He laughed as he backed out of the parking spot.

  Neither of them noticed the slight movement of the drapes directly in front of their car.

  CHAPTER 14

  Detective Carling

  He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t one bit happy. Wallace Carling couldn’t remember what it was like not being a cop. Some of his colleagues didn’t like being called cops, preferring to be called policeman or policewoman, police officer, or detective—always insisting on getting the rank just so. Not Carling. He was a cop first, a detective second.

  None of that mattered to Carling. What mattered to him was catching the bad guys. But tonight he was sitting in a seedy bar, nursing a glass of whiskey. He found this place when he’d walked the beat in his rookie days, and he knew there wouldn’t be any other cops hanging around. Carling wasn’t a drunk, but he was just beginning to slip out of the reach of sobriety just then.

  “Too many cops are just a bunch of dickheads,” he told his anonymous drinking buddy, his words beginning to slur.

  He looked at the old man sitting on the next stool, sporting a week’s growth of graying beard.

  “They strut around, pumping one another up with self-importance, claiming they are protecting the peace and keeping everyone safe. ‘Protect and Serve,’ my ass.” His current companion was an old pensioner who didn’t look up from his cheap whiskey, and was only pretending to listen to what Carling was saying because Carling was buying.

  “Get my buddy here another drink—and another for me,” he held up two fingers for the barkeep and patted the old man next to him on the shoulder. The man responded by trying to focus his eyes on his free drink. He never quite managed to focus his attention on Carling’s story.

  “The justice system is a revolving door, a joke. We push our way through, and once we get to the other side, we turn around and shove our way back. We keep going around…and around…and around.”

  The old pensioner sitting next to him stared ahead and tried his best to nod.

  Later, at three in the morning, Carling was back at headquarters, sorry he was feeling sober and reaching in his pocket for heavy-duty aspirin. His workstation was situated among a cluster of writing desks. He was glad to be alone. He often did his best thinking at this hour of the morning. Stale coffee was always available in the squad room, he knew, but he reached into his desk’s bottom-right drawer instead. He stared down at a flask full of whiskey for a moment, then closed the drawer without picking it up.

  He was trying to figure out how he had entered this story, one that had begun long before this moment and would continue long after.

  Carling was a veteran cop who had risen from his uniform days to become a detective in SIS, Special Investigative Services. He thought about his personal history, littered with the debris of four failed marriages. It all amounted to this: sitting at his desk at three in the morning, trying to ignore whiskey that was calling to him. He thought about his ex-wives. The first was Angela. Then Brittany. Charlene was the one he missed, but she had remarried and moved away. His biggest blunder was the marriage to Tiffany, which had lasted all of three weeks. He’d realized it was a mistake even as he was saying “I do.”

  “I should have been sober at the altar,” he’d told a friend.

  Carling liked to pretend his current state of celibacy was by choice. He was reluctant to admit to himself it had more to do with bouts of hard drinking and his lack of personal grooming when he was focused on a case.

  What set him apart from the other detectives was something subtle but very significant: patience. Coupled with the tenacity of a snarling pit bull.

  Carling would remain at a crime scene long after other officers, detectives, and forensic specialists left. He would often sit in the middle of a crime scene for hours, saying nothing, appearing to look at nothing in particular. If anyone tried to intrude on that time, he would turn on them with an angry scowl and tell them to buzz off. Buzz wasn’t precisely the word he might use—suffice to say meddlers left with their ears burning.

  He would be the first to admit he didn’t know how it happened, how he solved crimes. He saw them as puzzles, and those extended periods of silence would pay off, draw him to an important clue or a trail that led to solving a case.

  “What is it, Carling? Some kind of Zen thing?” people would sometimes ask him.

  Carling never bothered to answer questions like that.

  Cheap whiskey, memories of ex-wives, and current events were all converging on that still-dark morning. Rage was building in him like steam in an overheating boiler, the meter registering dangerously high readings. His blood pressure was keeping pace. He put his hand on his chest, and he could feel his heart throbbing. He wanted to blame it on caffeine, but he knew better. He wondered if he was equipped with a safety valve.

  “Fuck it.”

  He reached into the bottom-right drawer and pulled out the flask. He took a long swallow, swishing the whiskey around as if it were mouthwash. He finally let the liquid heat scrape down his throat, take his mind off his anger. He swallowed and recapped the flask. The whiskey did nothing to quell his anxiety, or the false sense of sobriety he was feeling.

  It would be dawn soon, and daytime would bring another story. He cleaned up, changed into a clean outfit he kept at the office, and put on his professional face. Day people never saw the night version of Detective Wallace Carling.

  He knew why he was angry, and most of all he knew the target of his anger. It wasn’t a what, it was a who. He fanned pages from a file folder on the top of his desk. The fir
st page he looked at had a photograph stapled to the upper-left-hand corner. Everyone told him it was all about computers these days, but Carling preferred the feeling of actual paper.

  “It just seems to make a case more real to me,” he had told his supervisor, “to hold something tangible.”

  “He’s a dinosaur,” he’d once heard someone say behind his back.

  I very well may be, he thought as he looked at the neatly printed case number on the top of the file. Using a marker, Carling wrote Matthew Tremain’s name next to it.

  Why did they assign me to investigate this guy? What has he done, really? All I can tell is he’s some kind of douchebag blogger. What law has he broken?

  He sat looking at the printouts from Google searches and scanning through copies of Facebook pages. Carling liked to pretend he was old school, but he was actually quite savvy when it came to computers, smartphones, and social networking.

  He picked up and reread the printout of an e-mail addressed to him from Angela Vaughn, director of security for Enseûrtech Corporation.

  “With regard to your investigation of Matthew Tremain, please be advised that this office has first standing in this matter, per Article 7 of the new National Security Act. Attached is a copy of the security order issued by CleanSweep. Further police investigation is superseded by this decree. Please forward all records to the address below. Failure to comply is not an option.”

  Carling squeezed the e-mail copy into a ball and then unrolled it, trying to smooth out the wrinkles.

  This guy hasn’t broken any law, but now I have to send all my case material to this new…whatever. He read the last sentence again. ‘Failure to comply is not an option.’ This bitch is more officious than most cops, he thought.