The Great Crime Spike: A Dystopian Thriller Novel (Liberty Down Book 1)

by Eric M Hill

  “Power,” said several people.

  “Right! Power,” said Dr. Anderson. “Always a little more power. And we give it to them, don’t we? Yes we do. People can be like dumb rats. A hungry rat will see another rat with his neck slammed shut in a trap and climb over it to offer its own neck to the next rat trap. And why? Why do we ignore the rat traps of history? What is it about our rat trap that’s so irresistible?” He leaned over the podium and pointed as he whispered into the mic. “It’s the cheese. The peanut butter. It’s the promise…of security,” his finger bounced.

  He straitened. “Then something unprecedented happened that changed the nation. Something that forever opened our eyes to understand our federal government heroes as never before. A true hero…a patriot, a defender of the Republic, Malik Assad Muhammed—remember him? Faculty, I know you remember him.

  “A fearless, tenacious, and absolutely brilliant journalist who connected the bloody dots and discovered that the most venomous, lethal, and murderous domestic terrorist organization ever to curse America was in fact not a terrorist organization at all. Who were they?” Dr. Anderson asked accusingly.

  The room was eerily quiet. The brilliant firebrand’s heart sank. Three hundred and sixty-three mouths silenced by fear. Seven hundred and twenty-six eyes filled with caution. “Your silence says it all, doesn’t it?” He let the heavy weight of truth rest upon his audience for a few moments. “Malik Assad Muhammed, the son of Syrian refugee parents who fled their hell-hole of a failed state for the famed democracy of America, ironically a Muslim…of all things, discovered that the so-called radicalized domestic terror organization was none other than—”

  “Our own government,” blurted out a young journalism major. “It was the CIA.”

  Some of the heaviness melted away from Dr. Anderson’s heart. He looked warmly and admiringly at the young man. There was still hope for this republic. The government couldn’t kill them all. “Yes. It was. Our protectors and defenders were found to be the Islamic Front of America.”

  He sounded like a husband who had found his beloved wife in bed with another man. “But by then it was too late. Congress and the Supreme Court had already whittled away enough of the Bill of Rights that the lost treasures of its enviable freedoms—the freedoms that made us the envy of the world—may not ever be recovered.”

  He thought about whether to vocalize the provocative thought in his mind. Brilliant and rich as he was, he was still subject to the snake’s venom. He looked at the young man who had fearlessly spoken up when everyone else was silent. “But the tide is shifting and people are saying, ‘No more! You’ll not take one more ounce of our freedom! Not without a pound of government flesh! Not without a fight!” said Dr. Anderson.

  The smartest man to ever live continued his unassailable diatribe against the government until even the young man who had bravely spoken up was nervous. Dr. Anderson’s runaway train was coming to a slow roll. “Well, you knew I was brilliant, and you’d heard I was paranoid.” He smiled grimly. “Now the rumor is confirmed.”

  Dr. Anderson reached under the podium and took the black, rectangular box he’d brought and set it on top of the podium. It was six inches by ten inches by three inches and weighed only eight ounces. On each side and on the ends of the box were brilliant touch screens. They had small, evenly proportioned squares. These were keys, or signal boxes. On each key was a letter, number, or sign—signs created and programmed by the smartest person to ever live.

  The keys changed intermittently in what appeared to be random orders and at random times. The numbers changed to signs, signs changed to letters, and numbers changed to and replaced both letters and signs. Each signal box was activated by Dr. Anderson’s fingertips. The signal received from this transaction was received and interpreted based upon the precise angle of the box and other out-of-reach-of-NSA variables.

  Inside of this box were dissolvable materials created by Dr. Anderson in one of his home laboratories. The materials were not patented and not shared with the world—like many of his formulas, breath-throughs, and inventions—because despite the fact that humans had skyscrapers and walked upright on two feet, their treatment of one another proved incontrovertibly that they were nothing more than advanced savages.

  There were things he’d never share with the world.

  “Government, Technology, Science, and Freedom. Let’s end this little talk with a question. What ever happened to Malik Assad Muhammed?” His leading tone showed he had an answer in mind. “He was honored with a bunch of journalistic awards for his courage and his findings. The Pulitzer. The George Polk Award…and others. But that one proved prescient. George Polk Award winners tend to make enemies.

  “Malik Assad Muhammed was honored with the Polk at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. When the evening’s festivities were over, he went back to his room and hung himself, ladies and gentlemen. No suicide note. No signs portending anything was amiss in his life. Just the opposite. Mr. Muhammed asked his fiancé to marry him just three days prior to his suicide. She accepted. Two days later they were out together looking at homes.

  Now what person literally changes the nation for the better, asks his fiancée to marry him, attends a ceremony celebrating his work, and that very night goes back to his hotel room and hangs himself while his new wife-to-be is downstairs in the same hotel?

  “Am I paranoid? Yes, for good reason. Am I dangerous? Some believe I am.” Dr. Anderson looked knowingly at his audience. “But the really dangerous ones are those who despise our democracy, steal our freedom, and murder those who dare challenge them.”

  With this, Anderson placed the tip of his index finger on one of the black box’s signal keys. The box had been pre-programmed, complete with precise angling variables. He slid the box into the slot of a larger device. The box was pulled in and snapped in place. Anderson punched in a code and the box inside was positioned to its active variable. “Listen to this and decide for yourself who’s the dangerous one,” he said.

  The students and faculty appeared puzzled as parts of Dr. Anderson’s speech and other voices began to speak over the room’s high-tech audio equipment. There were others in the room who were more than puzzled as they heard their private conversations played before the stunned audience.

  Dr. Anderson: “For the sake of the government agents who are probably in this room spying on us…”

  Male voice: “If you only knew. We got eyeballs on you all the time, smart guy.”

  Dr. Anderson: “…Then an overwhelming sentiment that we had to respond. Always keen to an opportunity, in comes the imperial feds.”

  Male voice: “Imperial fed. Sounds like you, Ashley. The Department of Violent Crime Eradication is federal.”

  Female voice: “Up yours, little CIA man.”

  Male voice: “Now that hurts. I’d thought I made more of an impression on you. It’s DIA, sweetheart.”

  Female voice: “CIA, DIA, no difference. I’m sure you guys all wear the same government issue pink panties.”

  Male voice: “Red. Flaming…hot red. Not pink.”

  Female voice: “Not what I heard.”

  Dr. Anderson: “…Then what happened? Our heroes, the imperial feds, said, “Hey, we could catch these guys if we only had a little more what?”

  Student’s voice: “Power.”

  Male voice: “The messiah’s got a new little soldier.”

  The student’s bravado drained out of his shoes. He wasn’t trying to piss these guys off. Talking about the government “out there” was one thing. Talking about the government in that room—they’re really in the room!—was something altogether different. He was terrified, and his eyes showed it as he scanned the room for possible government agents.

  The other student who had bravely spoken out earlier and named the government and CIA as the real Islamic Front of America was nearly dead in his chair. For fear had nearly turned his heart to stone and his blood into a solid. Are they going to come after me? he wondered.
I didn’t say anything new. That stuff was on TV. Everybody knows they did it.

  The last snippet of recorded conversation that came across the speakers chilled everyone, with the exception of Dr. Anderson.

  Male voice: “How is that not treason? How is this guy still walking around?”

  Female voice: “How is it that he hasn’t hung himself?”

  Male voice: “I hope the hell he does. I’d like to be on that detail.”

  Female voice: “Thought you were just into intel. You sound like ops.”

  Dr. Anderson tapped the black box as he surmised his shaken audience. Had he done the right thing by proving his point so dramatically? For this would definitely be interpreted by the intelligence community (IC) as an escalation. And as much as many people considered him untouchable because of his brain, wealth, and influence, he knew that if he pushed too hard, if he put them in a no-win situation, the government would push back—hard. Carefully, stealthily, but hard.

  Dr. Anderson was as uncertain as he was brilliant. Yet although his brain weighed the consequences of his disclosure, deep in his soul he knew that even if his timing was off, the moral imperative of this fight was not. Maybe it had not been smart, but it was right!

  “Anything I say now would only be anti-climactic,” he said to the silent audience. He pitied them. They looked like little children wondering how or whether to cross a dangerous, busy intersection that had no signs or traffic signals. “Darkness is not our friend.”

  He looked at the two young men who had bravely spoken up. Defenders of the Republic. “You’ll be okay. Don’t fear the light, even if it’s blinding.”

  He looked down at the young lady in the white dress. It wasn’t fair. If she was super careful and super lucky, she may be able to stay a couple of steps ahead of common predators and keep her smile. But what of the uncommon predator—the United States government?

  He thought of his daughter.

  ***

  Only three days later, the university was rocked by the hangings of two of its male students on the same day, both of which had been journalism majors, and both of which who had coincidentally attended a speech recently given at the university by Dr. Kyle Anderson.

  The young men had chosen to commit suicide in places guaranteed to provide maximum exposure of their deaths. One had apparently gotten a ladder and used it to facilitate hanging himself on one of the football goalposts. The other had tied a rope around the leg of his bed and the other end around his neck and jumped out of his fourth floor window.

  Dr. Anderson heard of the unusual tragedies and the public nature of the deaths. The government was sending a loud message.

  The escalation had begun.

  Chapter 4

  He couldn’t live through another monstrous experiment.

  He had never set out to become the proverbial mad scientist. But he was under no illusions. What they had asked him to do was not only unethical and illegal; it was diabolical. It was nothing short of what the Nazis had done in the name of medicine and science.

  Dr. Azarel Engelberg’s lips pressed tightly together in bitter thought. His dark, bushy eyebrows hung over his eyes like hairy awnings. Men like Josef Mengele and his sickening medical experiments on twins, and Sigmund Frascher and his high altitude and freezing experiments on prisoners—if such beasts could be called men—were famous for the barbaric cruelty they had perpetrated upon prisoners, Gypsies, homosexuals, and even children. Absent a restraining force, men could and would justify and do anything their base desires lusted after.

  Dr. Engelberg had lost relatives at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. And despite the frenetic turmoil of Nazi Germany’s Pogroms that had dropped upon the Jews like an orchestration of tornadoes and had carried away the lives and every remembrance of whole generations, all had not been lost of the Engelbergs.

  He was alive today because his grandparents had been ferocious survivors and uncannily lucky. His grandmother, Eva, had testified at the Nuremburg war trials in December 1946. The so-called Doctors’ trial. He had even read his grandmother’s official testimony from National Archives Records 238, M887.

  The scientist felt a sudden strong urge to smoke a cigarette. It had been thirteen days. The longest he’d been without a cigarette in five years. For a weak moment, he felt he didn’t have the strength to say no to the little stick of tobacco. But then his thoughts went to his grandmother’s testimony of how Frankensteinian Nazi doctors had conducted several invasive medical experiments on her against her will. Some of which had left her permanently damaged, though not broken in spirit.

  She lived through that. You can live without a cigarette, he told himself, angrily. “Over a hundred years ago,” he carefully muttered to himself. “You can kill the Nazis, but you can’t kill the Nazi spirit. Always a good reason to do bad things.”

  Just following orders.

  That’s the defense many of the Nazis who had been guilty of war crimes had offered their inquisitors. As though they were simply following orders to take out the trash.

  He let the indefensible, incriminating thought roll around in his head. But really, he couldn’t stop it if he wanted to. He’d tried over and over to shut down the harassing thought each night for the past few weeks. Ever since watching a restrained man’s eyes dissolve in their sockets before he died a lingering and agonizing death for the sake of science. But the finger-pointing thought would jab him unrelentingly until he mercifully fell asleep under the weight of guilt that was growing more suffocating by the day.

  He was Jewish. His first name, Azarel, meant With the assistance of God. But he didn’t believe in God. How could he? How could any Jew? Nonetheless, although the God of the Hebrew Scriptures had been cruelly silent and inactive during the persecutions of his people, he felt illogically culpable of betraying his heritage. And logical or not, how could he not feel this way? Over fifty of his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis, and some by horrible experiments done upon them in the name of medicine and science. Yet here he was doing the same thing.

  He was a modern day Nazi. A Jewish Nazi.

  “Doctor Engelberg, it’s show time. They’re here.”

  “Thank you, Ashley,” he said, with a labored smile to one of his assistants.

  She smiled warmly. “Taking care of the good doctor. And the coffee’s ready when you are.”

  He pragmatically held his smile and watched the wolf assigned to watch him walk away. That she was a wolf and not the sweet, innocent young lady she appeared to be was without doubt. He had searched everywhere for information on her and found nothing except what he knew they wanted him to find. A background partially fabricated to protect her cover.

  Dr. Engelberg was a brilliant geneticist, not a sleuth. But his gut told him that several things about Ashley were false. She was older than she pretended to be. She was dangerous and not innocent. And most alarming, she probably was a government employee and not an employee of an unnamed pharmaceutical company, as he had been told. Could be military or any number of the alphabet agencies that thought the Constitution was a nuisance. But his bet was that it was the Department of Violent Crime Eradication, or VCE, as they were called.

  He discounted the coffee offer and walked down the long corridor of the below ground research facility. He knew that whether this experiment turned out to be an amazing breakthrough or another dismal failure, it would be his last.

  Dr. Engelberg was through being a Nazi.

  And he was going to tell them so.

  Chapter 5

  Dr. Engelberg and Ashley walked down the hall together. She a little ahead of him. Her heels knocked determinedly against the tiled floor. She knew where she was going. When she didn’t turn in to the door he anticipated, it was obvious she was the only one of them who knew where they were going.

  “New room?” he asked, with a plastered smile. He had counted thirty rooms on this level and only had knowledge of what one of them was used for. The one he used for research, and its re
stroom that he often used to fill the toilet with the retch of his guilt.

  “Yep, new room. And new people.”

  That peppiness. That toothpaste commercial smile. It was all so irritatingly phony. But Dr. Engelberg didn’t let his feelings show. “New people,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  Ashley placed the palm of her delicate she-wolf hand onto a large, black, raised square on the door. The sensor checked her prints and DNA. The windowless door quickly slid open. Dr. Engelberg was surprised at the second windowless door only six feet from the other. The she-wolf must’ve sensed his surprise.

  “A bit of overkill, I admit. But when’s the last time you heard of a bank being robbed. Ten…fifteen years ago? Works for them.” Her voice was light and cheery and lyrical. She turned her super phony smiling face away from the doctor and lifted her perfect nose upward and to the left of the door and smiled genuinely at a rounded black box on the wall. “Ashley Overton,” she said.

  The sound of her voice activated a small aperture in the box that opened. A soft yellow light emanated from the opening and covered her face for a moment. It searched nearly eighty unique features of her face. Then it used an advanced optics technology that had been outlawed for general use among the populace in America because its citizens were convinced the government was looking for ways to de-arm them and to make them instantly obedient.

  The last thing they’d trust in the hands of the overreaching imperial government was a technology that could theoretically be used willy-nilly to scan their brains or read their minds. Who knew what those scoundrels had come up with? One thing was for sure: the government had proven time and time again it could not be trusted.