A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  With orientation over, we hid Petrel’s final payment, logged on yet again to tell him where to go to collect it, and we returned home to Tennessee. After a long day’s drive we pulled into town at dusk. Amit drove through town and then up into the mountains to my home at Uncle Rob’s place. The gate was locked, as usual, with a no trespassing sign. I used my key to unlock the gate, Amit drove through, and then I locked the gate back up behind us. We drove under the sign that labeled the property, “Robber Dell.” Uncle Rob was proud of the legend that his little cove had once sheltered Unionist guerillas. Then, we drove up the narrow incline to the old abandoned farmhouse, then across the knee-high corn field to Uncle Rob’s trailer. He was sitting on the porch in front of his double-wide trailer when we drove up.

  Uncle Rob and my father built a hidden complex underneath the new barn last year, but he was adamant that even Amit was not to know anything about his underground refuge. Rob maintained the illusion that he lived in his old, rundown trailer, or in the small apartment he’d built out on one side of the garage. Getting trucks up and down the narrow incline to his property was a real pain, so he’d moved his business to another nearby location.

  “Welcome back, boys,” Uncle Rob said cheerfully. “I just got in myself, not long ago.”

  “Did the shop rats keep the operation running well while you were gone?” They were some friends of mine from high school who’d decided to bypass college and go straight to work. Uncle Rob had taken them on to work with him.

  “I left Bud Garrety in charge of the boys,” he confirmed. “Nice getting to the point where I can be away a few days.”

  “How was your trip?” I asked.

  “There’s lots of potential down in Texas. They have even more idled gas fields than we do up here.”

  The Preserving our Planet’s Future Act was passed as a memorial to President Gore, not long after his death. In addition to imposing steep taxes on carbon, it included “safety” regulations specially crafted by lobbyists for the Tolliver Company and other large producers of natural gas. Although it was perfectly safe to drive tanker trucks of natural gas from a railhead to a distributor or from a distributor to a customer, it was terribly dangerous to fill up the tanker truck at a gas field and transport it to market. The result was only large gas fields with railheads could ship natural gas to market, idling the gas fields of many small independent producers and driving up the cost of natural gas.

  My father and Uncle Rob had an idea to do something about that. They designed and built a truck-mounted rig that could be hauled up to a gas field. Their rig burned the gas on site to compress and liquefy air. Then, they transported and sold the liquefied air. The gas owner got a return on an otherwise idle field, and my father and Uncle Rob got a cut-rate price on the gas, which let them undercut traditional liquefied air suppliers. Uncle Rob had been “bootlegging” liquid air for over a year now, with the help of the shop rats and a number of free-lance truckers and wildcatters who’d been left idle by the devastation caused by the new regulations. Nothing illegal in it. The regulations that throttled independents from transporting natural gas said nothing about liquefied air. Of course, if the regulators who were in the pockets of the big producers realized how Uncle Rob was exploiting this loophole, they’d probably figure out a way to shut down his lucrative business.

  Uncle Rob described his plans to expand production and his ideas for other energy intensive processes that might burn natural gas on site. The ideas seemed to have lots of potential, but in the end, his business was only really viable because of a loophole that could be closed at any minute. The challenge was to grow the business, but to do so in such a way that if it ever got shut down on short notice he wouldn’t lose money. Uncle Rob seemed in a good mood, so I figured it was as good a time as any to break our news.

  “We discovered something interesting when we were in Atlanta.” I explained how we’d anonymously hired Petrel to check on Sweeney’s papers, and how we’d confirmed that MacGuffin had hidden the “rod of divination” with his “thorny friend.”

  I could see the good mood evaporating from Uncle Rob’s face. “I thought we agreed that you boys would not be engaging in any tactical operations without my approval.”

  “We realized the opportunity was there, and since you weren’t available to discuss it, we decided to go ahead,” I explained.

  “The risk was very low,” Amit argued. “We used an anonymous researcher we found on Craigslist. He calls himself ‘Petrel.’”

  “Petrol, as in British gasoline?”

  “No, Petrel with an ee-ell as in the sea bird,” Amit explained. “We laid out all the risks for him. We told him that the information was important and people might kill for it. He had a cover story to explain why he was accessing the papers.”

  “Did you provide him with a false ID?” Rob asked. “Was he using gloves to handle the papers so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints?”

  “No,” I acknowledged weakly. That hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Suppose they got your Petrel. He talks. Then, what?”

  “We paid him in a dead drop, and we used a throwaway encrypted email for communication with him. They couldn’t trace him back to us,” Amit insisted.

  “Let’s take a closer look at your assumptions.” I could hear the skepticism in Rob’s voice. “First off, you may have isolated yourselves from this Petrel, but if there was a trap, you’d have thrown your researcher in it. You know how hypersensitive the Circle is. He’d be dead, and it would have been your fault. If they killed a few people to protect the Heaviside secret, they’d think nothing of killing everyone in the library and your hotel alike if they had reason to believe they might catch someone there who knew the MacGuffin secrets.”

  Rob was shaking his head. “What was your contingency plan to get Petrel out if they were interrogating him?”

  Amit and I could only look guiltily at each other.

  “Pete, the reason you got away from the Circle’s agents last year was because your father had been working with an ace of a lawyer. Mr. Burke got in the middle of their interrogation of you and kept them from going anywhere with it. What’s more, you had Sheriff Gunn pulling strings behind the scene as well. You don’t just plan how to avoid trouble. You have to have a plan for what to do when trouble finds you.”

  “Suppose the Circle was more restrained in their response,” he continued. “They’d have concocted another terror fantasy, and they’d have the real FBI, the Atlanta police, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation looking through every bit of security camera footage, interviewing the desk clerk at your hotel, and anyone else in the area. People saw you, and they’d have a good chance at catching you in their dragnet. You were there most of the morning?”

  “That hotel runs my network software,” Amit explained. “I got in and flagged that room as having broken AC. I got the key code. There’s no record of us at the hotel, and we never even had to talk with the desk clerk.”

  “Clever. But they do have video surveillance at the hotel, right? If they really looked hard, they’d see you going into and out of the flagged room. Or an overly efficient clerk could have sent maintenance up there to check on it while you were in the room. Did you bring all your food with you or did you go out to get something to eat?”

  Amit looked at me and Rob guiltily. “I got us something at Dunkin Donuts, down the block.”

  “And you flirted with the cashier?”

  “It was a guy.” Amit was defensive, but we all knew if it had been an attractive girl he’d have tried.

  “And they probably had video surveillance at the donut shop as well. This is why I plan any of our ops,” Rob said patiently. “Your plan sucked, plain and simple. True stealth is way difficult to achieve. Get in and get out without anyone realizing you were ever there. You have to do everything right. One mistake and you leave yourself vulnerable. You have to be prepared for when things go wrong, also. You confirmed what you already knew – that MacGuffin’s d
eath was probably another Circle hit. Maybe this thorny friend bit is something of a lead. None of it was worth the risks you ran.

  “I went over Amit’s protocol for intercepting the emails of Circle agents when they stay at hotels that use his software. That’s solid and secure, and it’s giving us good intel.”

  “We already have so many of the Circle’s secrets.” I was frustrated at Uncle Rob’s enforced inaction. “We should be doing something with them. Releasing them to the world. Or acting on the information. Or seeking out the people who burned down the library. We know the Circle didn’t do it. Their enemy may be a potential ally.”

  “I’m sure Amit could release the MacGuffin text anonymously, and no one could trace it back to us directly. The problem is the Circle would realize that the last hint they had of the MacGuffin text’s existence was in the Tolliver Library,” Rob explained. “That would bring them right back to taking another hard look at just what happened that night. They accepted that the book burned up in the Tolliver Library fire, and they overlooked the problems and loose ends. They lost a couple of agents and almost exposed their whole operation what with Sheriff Gunn poking around. They didn’t come after you, Pete, between Mr. Burke throwing a legal monkey wrench into your interrogation, Sheriff Gunn’s protection, and your Uncle Larry having ties to the Civic Circle.

  “Last thing we want is for them to reopen that investigation and take a cold hard look at what happened. If they do, they’ll figure out there was something screwy and they’ll be looking to interrogate you again. That will lead straight back to me and Amit as well. If you boys don’t get it through your heads how dangerous this is, we’re going to have more victims.”

  “Victims like Robb LeChevalier?” I asked.

  LeChevalier was still a sore spot with me. The man was a brilliant physicist in Colorado who invented a way to make a miniature particle accelerator on a semiconductor chip. His system could be used as an ion propulsion drive or as a cheap and safe way to build a fusion power source. Instead of one big expensive reactor, he’d prototyped an array of miniature reactors on a chip. He was convinced he could take advantage of Moore’s Law and existing semiconductor manufacturing technology to make limitless cheap power available to everyone.

  It was a work of genius.

  It was also, apparently, a threat to the Circle’s plans.

  LeChevalier’s research funding was placed on bureaucratic hold, slowing, and then stopping his work. Amit intercepted orders to a Circle action team dispatched to Colorado to deal with “the situation.” A week later we intercepted the team’s reports describing how they set up a plan to ambush LeChevalier and subject him to an intense beam of radiation.

  It was like watching a slow motion train wreck, knowing exactly what disaster was about to happen and hoping against hope that something, anything, would happen to change the obvious outcome of the events. At any point over the course of a few weeks, we could have intervened. We could have tried to save him. I begged Uncle Rob to do something. I begged him to let Amit and me warn LeChevalier. We weren’t ready to undertake such an operation, Uncle Rob insisted. It could lead right back to us. The risks were too high. He wouldn’t believe our warning anyway. What could he do?

  Then, it was too late.

  A few months later, LeChevalier began suffering from seizures. A few weeks after that, his doctors diagnosed him with a particularly aggressive glioblastoma – a brain tumor – and gave him a few months to live. I was still furious with my uncle at our forced inaction.

  “If we don’t act sooner rather than later,” I continued, “there won’t be anything left to save.”

  “If we act prematurely and expose ourselves,” Rob countered, “there won’t be anyone left to save them. Besides, you must not have been keeping up with Amit’s online monitoring. LeChevalier went to a cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. Apparently, he’s found an old-fashioned cancer remedy that appears to be helping – Coley’s Fluid. He may yet pull through.”

  “That’s good news,” I acknowledged, “but it doesn’t change the point. If we continue to do nothing, if we refuse to act at all, before long there won’t be anything left to protect, because the Circle will have completely taken over. You need to stop shielding Amit and me and start helping us take them on.”

  “We are doing something,” Rob insisted. “We’re getting you ready to figure out the technical secrets of the Circle. As for the Tolliver Library fire,” Rob was shaking his head. “You simply cannot go poking around the library fire. This is a very dangerous game we’re all playing. The Circle is enough of a threat without risking contact with yet another player. I don’t think you fully realize how much of a risk we’re all running.”

  He looked away as if thinking about something. Finally, he continued. “I guess Amit needs to hear this, too, Pete. I stopped by Nashville to see Kira,” Rob said. “Your sister still blames you for your folks’ death. She knows intellectually that it was the Circle’s doing, but she can’t shake the feeling that if it weren’t for you and your curiosity, none of this would have happened. I considered intervening, trying to patch things up between the two of you. Honestly though? I figure it may well be for the best.”

  I was shocked. I’d lost my parents, and now he was deliberately driving a wedge between me and my sister, too? “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Because you two are just like Kira. You understand intellectually that the Civic Circle is a threat, but you feel invincible and you act accordingly. You feel that since they didn’t get you the last time, you’re too smart for them to get you ever. That disconnect between what you know and what you feel is going to get all of us killed. The way I see it, the more distant Kira is from us and from our secrets, and from our battle with the Circle, the safer she’ll be. I owe it to your folks to try to see that at least one of their offspring survives.”

  He looked at me as he let that sink in. I could feel my sister, the last member of my immediate family, slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Your father was great man, Pete: hardworking, talented, and proud of it. He wasn’t about to bow down to the Tollivers, or to the Civic Circle, or to anyone. Your mother made a matched set. She turned her back on the Tollivers to live life on her own terms with the man she loved. Beautiful, brainy, full of spunk. She was a real firecracker,” he added wistfully. Then, he continued. “Now they’re gone, killed by the Circle. That leaves me here, trying to fill their shoes and look after you. You know how I envied your father? There was a time I thought I’d find the right woman and start a family of my own, just like my big brother. I can’t do that now. We’re in a fight to the death with the Circle. I can’t expose anyone else to the risks involved. I’ve had to give up my dream.

  “I’ve been shielding you and Amit. Protecting you. Guilty as charged. I don’t think you have the least idea what you’re up against. You, me, and Amit are going to tangle with the Civic Circle? Try to take down the group that pretty much runs the country and maybe as much of the entire globe as matters? What happened to your parents should serve as a lesson to you. Unless we are all very, very careful and very, very lucky, that’s going to happen to us, too.

  “We’ll have a little help – Burke knows the score, and he’ll provide some legal cover. Sheriff Gunn is on our side, so we have some help from our local law enforcement. Your father’s friends, men like Dr. Krueger, may not know the score yet, but they’ll lend a hand if asked. In the end, though, it all comes down to the three of us: me and you two boys to draw a line, to stand against the darkness, to defy a vast conspiracy with the power to crush us like bugs.

  “We escaped in our first encounter. We know a bit about our enemy. We have a few of their secrets and leads to more. We paid full price for that ‘victory’ with your folks’ blood. We simply can’t afford another ‘victory’ like that. The war is just beginning. I don’t much like our odds, but we each have a job to do. I have to get you boys ready for the ordeal t
o come. You need to work hard to prepare yourselves. Together, we have to learn more about our enemy. We have to identify pressure points where our modest capabilities might throw some sand in the Civic Circle’s gears. We have to find the Inner Circle – the bastards calling the shots. We have a debt to pay – in blood. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to accomplish it all, but we are – the three of us – going to try to teach the horse to sing.”

  “Teach the horse to sing?” That didn’t make any sense to me.

  “There’s a story I read somewhere about a thief captured trying to steal the Emperor’s horse,” Uncle Rob explained. “The Emperor sentenced him to death. ‘Oh great Emperor,’ beseeched the thief, ‘if you will but spare me, I promise you that before the year is out, I will teach your horse to sing.’

  ‘“Teach a horse to sing?’ The Emperor was incredulous. But what did he have to lose? He accepted the thief’s proposal.

  “Day after day the thief spent his time in the stable teaching the horse. Day after day the horse ignored him. Finally a stable boy said to the thief, ‘You fool! Why did you promise to teach the horse to sing? The Emperor will only torture you worse at the end of the year when it becomes obvious you’ve failed. What have you accomplished with your lies?’

  “The thief turned to the stable boy and replied, ‘I’ve accomplished much. I have another year. Who knows what might happen. The Emperor might die. I might die. Or maybe, just maybe, the horse will learn to sing.’

  “We, all three of us, are going to have to teach the horse to sing.”

  Chapter 2: Rambling to Tech

  Maybe Uncle Rob was right. Maybe our fight against the Civic Circle was a noble but probably doomed crusade. Maybe he was making sense. His fatalistic wisdom just didn’t make an impression on me, though. I was in the fight to win. I had no interest in dying heroically for our cause. I was committed to making the Circle and their minions die heroically for their cause. I didn’t want to throw sand in their gears. I wanted to wreck their whole miserable machine.