The Phoenix Agenda: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 6)

by JC Ryan

  Owen smiled, “Oh, that’s easy. I’m a client of Levinson-Scott and got the newsletter about you leaving the company a few days ago.”

  Peter laughed, “Good news can also travel fast, it seems.”

  Owen pointed to the empty seat in front of Peter, “Expecting company?”

  Peter shook his head, “No. It’s my first time; I thought I’d come and check it out first before I bring anyone else here. That way I don’t ruin friendships by suggesting bad restaurants.”

  “Would you like to join my wife, Alison, and me for a drink while we wait for our orders?” Owen suggested.

  Peter had to think quickly. He’d come to the restaurant for a different purpose. He expected some form of contact from Sam Lewis. How it would happen he had no idea. He knew Sam wouldn’t show up in person. There would be a third party. He didn’t want to make it difficult for that person to get to him, but he also didn’t wish to attract too much attention by being the only loner in this packed place. He decided it wouldn’t hurt if he joined them until the food was served.

  “That’s very kind of you; I would love to join you. Not every day that a man gets the opportunity to rub shoulders with a famous author,” Peter responded with a smile.

  Peter soon found out that Owen and Alison were extroverts, and it was impossible not to laugh and have fun when around them. Owen wanted to know why Peter said earlier that his resignation from Levinson-Scott was good news.

  “I guess it’s the onset of early male menopause. I’m tired of the rat race and want out, I’d like to travel the world and just do whatever I want, whenever I want.” Peter smiled.

  “That sounds like the two of us. A few years ago Owen and I made the discovery that, even if we managed to win the rat race, we would still be rats. That’s when we did what you just did. We sold everything and moved to a little farm near Nucla, Colorado. We wouldn’t swap that lifestyle for anything,” Alison explained.

  By the time the food arrived, they’d already had a few glasses of sake, and Alison had convinced Peter to stay with them at their table for dinner. Peter had a lot more laughs listening to Owen’s witticisms, but he was also getting a little uneasy as he was still on the lookout for the messenger to turn up. He was beginning to worry that he could be in the wrong place, or maybe he’d misunderstood that message. He hadn’t done this cloak and dagger stuff for quite a few years now. Maybe he’d lost his touch.

  “Peter, whenever you are in the Western Slope area of Colorado, you’re always welcome to come and visit us,” Owen said, as if he’d read Peter’s mind. He handed him a business card with their address and contact details, without saying a word about the card. When Peter felt the card in his hand, he looked at Owen and Alison and saw the smiles on their faces. He then realized that he’d been talking to Sam Lewis’ messengers for almost two hours already.

  “Thank you for the invite. I’ll be sure to accept your offer. I’ve never been in those parts, but I hear it’s beautiful. I’d certainly like to see it,” he said as he put the card in the inside pocket of his jacket, without saying a word about it.

  Back in his apartment, Peter took out the business card from his jacket pocket. It looked like an ordinary business card. It had all Owen’s and Alison’s contact details and address printed on the front. It certainly didn’t feel like a business card, though. It was made of plastic like a credit card. On the back, a little piece of paper was stuck to it, with the words – Connect it to a Computer Screen Only - No Computer.

  He disconnected the second screen from his laptop and connected the card via a cable. Then he entered his password - B34rTr33E4gl3 – for his code words ‘bear tree eagle’, which he and Sam Lewis had used on his last mission.

  On the Sunday morning at ten o’clock, as per the instructions on the business card if he had accepted the mission, Peter walked into a luncheonette on 25th Street where Owen and Alison were already waiting for him.

  He was to get from them all the information and tools he required. During brunch, Owen inconspicuously moved several tiny items over to him, including another business card. The last piece was a pen with a little blue light on it that Owen took out of his pocket and handed to Peter to write down his cell phone number. Peter commented on what a nice pen it was, and when he handed it back after writing down his number, Owen told him he to keep it.

  The second Friday

  Kelly was on her Friday escape, seated at Luigi’s wearing a beautiful red silk scarf. She placed her order, replaced her sunglasses with her reading glasses while she took out a book, and hung her handbag over the back of the seat. One of the side pockets was unzipped.

  It had been a soul searching two weeks for her since she got that first message from Sam Lewis. She did not support the new government - she never had and never would. She hated them with a passion. To her, they were the personification of evil.

  In her position at the TV station she was privy to all of the inside information, gossip and potential news stories, and she was horrified at what she saw and heard. The very idea of chipping people like animals caused revulsion in her every time she thought or heard about it.

  From the time the Supreme Council took control of the world, she couldn’t bring herself to enjoy what she was doing anymore. There was absolutely no freedom, news bulletins were controlled, her talk shows were not recorded live, and many times the recorded shows were edited beyond recognition before they were broadcast. If, that is to say, they were broadcast at all. Broadcasts seldom contained the truth, not to mention the facts that were deliberately not reported.

  Kelly Edwards was an American patriot, and she loathed the new world order. She would do anything to help bring about their downfall, but she couldn’t see how it would be possible. With what she believed was the death of Sam Lewis, her last bit of hope went up in smoke. Since then, she’d been quietly preparing to resign and disappear to some small, out of the way country in South America or Asia.

  That had all changed two weeks ago when she opened the message from Sam Lewis that asked her help to destroy the evil regime. That was why she made sure that she was sitting in Luigi’s at ten o’clock, wearing a red scarf and reading a book – The Thornbirds, 1977 edition. That was the signal to the messenger that she had agreed to be activated.

  She noticed the man with spiky hair, reading on his smartphone, sitting a few tables away when she arrived. She gave him no further thought. Until, when she opened the book and started reading, she saw from the corner of her eye the man got up and brushed past the back of her chair on his way out.

  That night when she got back to her apartment, she did not follow her usual spa-bath routine. Instead, she immediately took out the small parcel from the side pocket of her handbag and unwrapped it. Within minutes, she was reading her mission instructions from the mini flash drive and making mental notes. She took out the rest of the contents of the parcel and studied them carefully. The operating instructions for each of the miniature devices in the package were in documents on the mini flash drive, displayed on the screen in front of her.

  The mission instructions and other information she read required her to stay on at WONN in her current role, from where it would be necessary for her to perform various tasks from time to time. She would have preferred not to stay on at WONN, but if that was best, then that was what she would do.

  Her first mission was to get a message through to former President Harper and establish a permanent communications system with him when she interviewed him and Mrs. Harper the next Tuesday.

  ***

  When Raj returned to the Rabbit Hole, he was pleasantly surprised to see how much progress his team had made. They had the laser connection with Mount Ararat working and were now planning to expand the communications system to cover all of America in the not too distant future.

  Roy was still working on various ideas to get relays deployed at a high altitude to cover longer distances.

  His team also had the voice impersonator application work
ing to near perfection. Computer generated impersonated voices, even those of people they’d recorded from radio broadcasts, could not be distinguished from the real voices by the human ear. There was a little bit more work to do before the voice analysis software would be incapable of distinguishing between the real and impersonated voices.

  Raj reported to the Steering Committee about his trip to New York, during which he’d succeeded in contacting and activating Sam’s two non-existent former agents. He’d also been able to establish a connection and solid relationships with the Tectus group.

  No walk in the park

  Peter read the instructions on his first mission, which was to commence in a few days. It was expected of him to be in Nashville the next Tuesday to observe what color scarf Kelly Edwards would be wearing when she and her crew returned from the much-publicized interview with the President and his wife.

  No scarf, or any color other than blue or turquoise, meant he’d fly back to New York the next day. Blue or Turquoise indicated he would extend his visit by a few days. Peter looked at her pictures again and smiled. That means the famous Kelly Edwards also worked for Sam Lewis. It’s a pity I can’t meet her in person. He knew that wasn’t going to happen, at least not on this mission and maybe never.

  Next, he brought up the information about the biochips and studied the contents of the folder. Many hours later, he had gone through every bit of detail, from the plant in China, the shipping, and the warehouses - right down to the point where it was implanted at the clinics. He had the complete list of the locations of every warehouse and implant facility in the world and the exact stock levels for each of those locations as it was at the time of the report. He went through the processes again and paid close attention to the security measures, looking for a loophole.

  The warehouses were guarded like a maximum-security prison. No one was allowed within three miles of the buildings, which were surrounded by walls, barbed wire fences and watchtowers. There was a no-fly zone for airplanes and drones of any kind within a radius of five miles from the warehouses.

  Inside the warehouses, the boxes containing the chips were uniquely numbered and fitted with Radio Frequency Identification, also known as RFID, tags that were wirelessly connected to a central control unit and database. Each box contained two-hundred and fifty chips and was kept in a small, locked, safety-deposit type container. Opening the container required a command from the central control unit. The entire process of picking and packing was automated with warehouse robots. The first time a human would touch a box of chips was when it was loaded into the armored vehicles before it was transported to the implant facilities. Every worker and guard handling the boxes was chipped.

  At the implant facilities, ranging from hospitals, clinics, courthouses and police stations, the security measures equaled those of the warehouses. The boxes were stored in a safe, inside carefully guarded rooms. A quartermaster was placed in charge of the stock and would make sure that the chips would only be handed out to authorized staff, who were also chipped. Stock levels were not allowed to be more than what was required for two days of implants. Stock checks were done every eight hours.

  He was well aware of the fact that what he had been reading thus far were the instructions that were supposed to be followed. With such a big and globally distributed operation, and the number of people involved, there would be a place or time when someone would not be following the instructions. His challenge was to find that place and to be there when that time came.

  Warehouse stock levels were many thousands of times that of the largest implant center he could find. His first thoughts were that it would be a lot less conspicuous to let a box disappear from one of the warehouses than from an implant center. The first hurdle was going to be getting close enough to a warehouse to be able to deploy the spyflies on the inside. Of course, it would be simpler to deploy the spyflies inside an implant center such as a clinic, hospital or police station, but the danger was that missing stock would be detected much quicker.

  He wouldn’t dare to search for the locations of the warehouses or implant facilities online, which was why he went out to buy a few books, including a book with maps of New York and surrounding areas. This mission was not going to be a walk in the park. It was going to require a lot of surveillance and information gathering before it would be even possible to think of a plan.

  I have a message for you

  When Kelly arrived at the Harper’s farm with her camera crew for the scheduled interview and saw the humiliating circumstances in which they were interned, she almost succumbed to tears. She had never met them before, but she’d been an unwavering admirer of the President and his wife for many years. It hurt when she had to call them Mr. and Mrs. Harper in front of the crew, rather than affording them their rightful titles, but she soon got a chance to rectify that.

  The formal living room was prepared for the interview, and, as usual before recording an interview, she had time alone with the participants to explain everything and make them feel comfortable. She was well aware of where the surveillance cameras were in the room and that the agents would be watching. She would make sure that she always had her back to the cameras when she spoke to the Harpers, so that no one could read her lips. She was sure the agents would not hear a word of what she was going to say in the next few minutes.

  The moment everyone was out of the room and the doors closed, she took her tablet out of her bag and in the process switched on the pen of silence, inside the bag. She walked up to the Harpers and said in a whisper, “Mr. President and Mrs. Harper please listen carefully to me. I have a message from Sam Lewis and Daniel Rossler for you. I am going to move around you to fix your earphones and microphones while I’m talking. Please trust me, no one can hear us. Please act as natural and as relaxed as you can and speak to me if you want to.”

  The shock and confusion showed briefly on their faces. “I think we would rather listen than talk. If you have something to say to us, say it. I don’t trust you at all.” Nigel said.

  Kelly was prepared for that reaction; she didn’t expect them just to accept what she was saying. As she moved around them and fitted their earpieces and microphones, she kept on talking. “Mr. President, I understand your hesitation, it’s good enough for me if you prefer to remain quiet. I’m going to drop a small packet in the inside pocket of your jacket when I fit your microphone. Inside the box is a message from Sam Lewis and four tiny electronic devices. Mrs. Harper, I’m going to drop three capsules on your lap when I fix your microphone. They contain more of the message from Sam. Hide the capsules somewhere.

  “Make sure you read the messages at a time and place where there are no surveillance cameras, then destroy the messages. Follow the instructions about how to use those electronic devices carefully. You will be very glad you did.”

  Nigel and Esther were looking at her, following every word she was saying, but it was obvious they were very suspicious and remained quiet. Kelly kept on talking and told them that the Rosslers had handled Lewis’ escape and that he and his family were safe. They wanted her to let him and Mrs. Harper know that they were busy working on a plan for their escape. - This message was the first step in the process.

  Kelly finished the fitting of the earpieces and microphones and said, “Please play along during the interview. I promise I am going to make it very easy for you. Don’t say anything negative about the Supreme Council.” She stepped back and sat down.

  Nigel and Esther were scared. They had been through enough deceit, backstabbing, intimidation and humiliation already and they did not trust anyone or anything anymore. This could very well be a setup to manufacture evidence of their dissent and a reason to throw them in jail or kill them. Nigel didn’t mind the killing, but he wanted that done on his terms, not theirs.

  Kelly got back to her seat, and while fitting her own microphone and earphones; she switched the pen of silence off. “Mr. and Mrs. Harper can you hear my voice coming through in your earphones?
” They both confirmed, and she was happy that everything was setup correctly.

  As she stepped them through the questions she was going to ask, Nigel and Esther started to get second thoughts about Kelly’s trustworthiness. She was indeed making it easy; she was not going to ask any question that would call for a political opinion; she was not going to humiliate or insult them. Maybe she was who she said she was, but doubt remained.

  Nigel looked at Esther, nodded his head slightly and she understood that meant they were going to play along and be as polite and friendly as possible, as Kelly had requested. They knew they had nothing to gain by being hostile. It would be edited out before the broadcast in any event, and maybe, just maybe, they had a lot to gain.

  With the last bit of footage shot, Kelly and her crew got back into their vehicles and drove back to Nashville to have lunch at their hotel before they would check out and fly back to New York. Kelly took a beautiful turquoise scarf out of her handbag and draped it around her neck.

  That afternoon, when the Harpers went for a walk, it was their first opportunity to talk about the interview earlier in the day. They hadn’t had the chance to read the messages yet. They were both still scared and extremely suspicious. They agreed that nothing they said or did could be used as evidence against them. However, they knew that ‘evidence’ would have a different meaning in the courts these days than what it used to be. Nevertheless, they were cautiously optimistic and hopeful that what they’d heard from Kelly Edwards could be true.

  Only that evening, when they took a bath, were they out of sight of the cameras and had the chance to read the messages. However, although they were burning to talk about it, they could not say a word to each other because of the ever-present microphones. That would have to wait for the morning walk. They read and reread the messages many times. They were both desperate to believe it was true that Sam Lewis was alive and had teamed up with the Rosslerites.