by Martha Carr
“Shit,” he whispered, realizing that a very well-trained operative, Fred Bowers, had decided to change the game plan.
Fred was one of the few people entrusted with the next phase of the war plan. He was read in because he was believed to be someone who would not slip and give away details, even under pressure.
Tom had to admire that even though Fred was completely off the reservation, he was still working within a Circle operation. This wasn’t just a random act of violence. It was an act of armed conflict, part of a battle plan that had been carefully weighed and thought out among advisors.
He was just forcing their hand in order to exact a little payback. Tom knew that Fred was already in the wind. He would have planned this part out as well and cleaners were sent to his residence to make sure no evidence of Fred’s real background was left behind.
Every square inch would be searched to make sure there were no hidden compartments or closets that still had weapons or caches of money or secrets left for someone else to find.
Then they would start the new backstory that Fred had decided to bury Maureen’s ashes near her fictional sister. The funeral home would say, if anyone asked, that Fred had been there to make the arrangements himself and had taken the ashes with him. He was already on a plane.
Pieces of the story would be spread out in the neighborhood at the appropriate time till everyone slowly forgot about Fred and Maureen Bowers, except at the occasional backyard cookout. Maureen’s official cause of death was hit and run. There was no mention of bullet holes or gunfire. The EMT’s who picked up the body were with the Circle and had taken her body straight to a designated funeral home where she disappeared into the system.
Everything was neatly handled and the coroner signed off, making it official. The women who had been at Bunko night were kept apart from each other. The Circle agents who had spilled out of nearby houses and were on the scene made sure of that. The women were to be questioned all night, wearing them down, while having an alternate story suggested to them, till they thought it was really what they must have seen.
The detectives assigned to the case were part of the Circle and made sure that the case made a nice loop back on itself, answering all of the questions except for who might have been driving the car that hit poor Maureen. Must have been a drunk driver, how awful.
Most of the people who lived around Wallis Jones and her family were Circle operatives, put in place to watch over the family and keep out prying eyes. They had tolerated the Watchers who parked on their street because of orders to not give away their positions.
They all knew what to do if there was ever an attack on the family and they had all played their parts well, even Maureen. By the time the night was over there wasn’t a trace of a gun battle but there was evidence of a car accident and broken windshield glass left behind for others to see and draw their own conclusions. Poor Maureen. She probably never even saw it coming. Thank goodness, Wallis got out of the way. Did you hear her mother had a stroke?
Tom Weiskopf gave the order that he knew Fred was forcing him to, the failsafe, and found he wasn’t even annoyed. It was all inevitable anyway. Somehow, this made it a little easier. He had wondered when the plan was devised if he’d have the stomach to do it. Now it was here.
The Circle One battalion with almost a thousand men and women was activated. The companies that made up the battalion were sent out over all of the surrounding counties. Soldiers were fanned out in squads in every direction to finish Fred’s work.
None of the Circle One battalion was from the Richmond area. This battalion came from the Northwest and were loaded onto a transport plane, arriving by dinnertime. The soldiers were hunting down Management operatives in an American suburban setting. They needed to at least not be able to recognize their target or know their life’s story.
There needed to be some separation so that everyone had at least a shot of being able to ever sleep peacefully again.
Management was also starting to gather information and knew there would be more trouble. It didn’t take them long to understand that the war had suddenly moved to Richmond. Local commanders were warned and soldiers were called up to the area but before the planes could take off, headed for Richmond, a vicious battle broke out along the Canadian front.
The Circle had started a human wave attack on the northern border, sending a massive wall of soldiers to overrun a known Management base, capturing prisoners who were sent even deeper into Canada to be interrogated.
Another wave started simultaneously in Texas, pushing into Mexico and another in the west, in the Bay area. They were all distractions, meant to keep Management from concentrating troops in the Richmond, Virginia area.
The Circle had designs on the Federal Reserve in Richmond that was currently staffed mostly by Management operatives. That portion of the Reserve was set aside for the entire system’s software and was the brain of the U.S. banking system and therefore, Management’s banking system.
The Circle wanted to take it all over but in order to do so they needed to get some people out of the way. None of it was going to be easy but in the end, the Keeper and his advisors, along with President Hayes and his aides had all decided it was necessary. The Keeper gave the order. The battles shortly got underway.
Some of them were portrayed in that evening’s news cycle as police operations in suspect neighborhoods, trolling through looking for gang leaders. Others were random violence that was shocking and unexplainable and would require a little national mourning to deal with before everyone could get back to their routines.
Several of the Management operatives went on the run and spread out through Church Hill, just across from Mosby Court, another public housing complex that sat on a hill neatly overlooking what there was of the Richmond skyline.
The fighting became close-range. Circle soldiers ran through the streets in what might pass for casual weekend dress for a long hike with heavy backpacks, looking for their targets who were scurrying just ahead of them. One target was found just as he took the corner by St. John’s Church but he didn’t make it any further. A van pulled up quickly and took away the body before anyone could take notice.
The Circle squads were doing their best to push the Management targets toward Mosby Court. The Management operatives were running for the highway just beyond Mosby Court where there would most likely be transportation vehicles prepared to take them away to safety.
Between them and the highway lay Accommodation Street and hunkered down all along the edges of the road for at least a mile were Circle soldiers waiting for their orders. Once the targets were all running in the same direction and too close to successfully turn back, the soldiers rose up and marched forward, all in local police uniforms, looking as if they were playing out a drug sweep, picking up everyone who got caught in their net.
The locals who were caught up in the net would get released later that day, a few the next day if they were caught with illegal weapons or too much illegal drugs to ignore, while the rest would never make it to Accommodation Street or anywhere else.
The mission was thought to be a success by the Circle and when the day was over the Federal Reserve and a few other key businesses in the area had openings that needed to be filled.
Norman stood in his kitchen and watched the news, wondering how all of it got started.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maurel Samonte understood her new orders perfectly and sent the orders to the pharmacists who were operating as moles for the Circle on the mail order floor of Westin Fullerton. The next phase of the Keeper’s plan was put into motion. It was decided that enough personal health information about key Management players had been collected and Maurel was too valuable to leave in place much longer.
Once the second phase was well underway she was to depart for the Midwest. It was good news. Maurel was returning to her last assignment and becoming a Mother Superior once again.
When the time was right, Maurel was to finish the job
and unleash a virus into the Kroton system that would eat up all remaining space and permanently scramble all of the stored information whether it was legitimate or not. This would accomplish two goals.
It would be almost impossible for Management to find out what the Circle had collected on who and for how long and it would cripple one of their bigger cash cows, Westin Fullerton. It would take days, maybe even weeks for the company to be fully operational again and it would cost Management millions of dollars as well as put a nice dent in the company’s sterling reputation.
All it took was three pharmacists in the right places at the different mail order locations to complete the Keeper’s project. They had been planted a long time ago before there was ever a reason to worry and did nothing over the years but be good employees, slowly getting cost of living pay raises and small promotions.
Each facility looked almost identical. They were non-descript, wide-open warehouses that covered areas as big as a few football fields. Inside, the noise was deafening and everyone who worked on the floor wore headphones to cut out the noise. Pharmacists had small cubicles where they checked medications against the prescriptions to make sure everyone was getting the right medicine and the right amount. They even checked to make sure that there was no toxic combination just because someone took the right dose for their order.
They were the last guardian against anything going wrong and took their jobs very seriously.
Most patients ordered the same medications at just about the same time, every few months. Everyone loves a routine.
That made it easier to select certain prominent figures from all over the country based on the information that Maurel Samonte had gathered from her post, glean what they were taking and therefore what condition they were suffering from.
From there it was easy to create a plan to poison them.
It was the simplest kind of warfare that could reach out anywhere, started long before a war was even thought of by anyone except an overly-cautious Keeper. He had grown up hearing the stories from his father about what Management had done just two generations ago to millions of people.
The uppermost cell had devised the plan and were the only ones who knew about it. Those who worked at Westin Fullerton, including Maurel, only knew pieces of the plan.
The selection of who would die was always changing as time passed but the intent was still the same. They would not go after the uppermost tier of people because they were usually older and closer to retirement.
The real targets would be their replacements, the mid-level managers and vice-presidents who were still young enough to have years left but had developed chronic conditions that could be exploited.
It wasn’t an easy plan for Tom Weiskopf or any of his advisors to stomach but it was only meant as the failsafe in the event that circumstances became dire.
The day had arrived.
The war was growing worse and harder to contain. If it was all true. If Management’s aim was to create enough havoc in the country to bring the presidential election’s outcome into question. If there really was an inner cell that had burrowed itself into a place where they could cause a war in order to change Management’s top level and take over from them.
If that cell had enough resources to not only find Harry Weiskopf but take him away from the comfortable prison.
Then it was time.
This would be the Circle’s atom bomb to end the war before too many more people were hurt or before an even darker force than anyone was used to managed to take over control of an organization that had almost endless resources.
The medications came to the pharmacist, the Circle mole and with a sleight of hand the prescription was switched out for pills that looked exactly the same to anyone but a professional who was looking for a mistake. Even then, it would have been close to impossible. Once they successfully left the pharmacist’s cubicle the contents would be sealed and not reopened until they were in the hands of the customer.
The next step in the process, the medication was labeled and put in a small green tub two feet by two feet and placed on the rolling assembly line that wound around the top till the contents came to the other side of the room where they spilled into a plain, greyish-white padded bag, ready for shipping.
It was a simple, transparent process with checks and balances everywhere to make sure nothing went wrong. After all, fouling up the medication could lead to deadly results. Everyone knew that and it was why anyone standing above on the glassed-in catwalk could easily see what anyone down below was doing.
It was another way of keeping everyone honest.
No system is perfect.
A long time ago, an employee who delivered the mail and walked the floor of one of the plants every day, pushing a cart, had spotted the hole in their system and reported it back to the Circle. The idea was simple and only required enough time and patience.
Each of the pharmacists had been recruited in a group of children when they were still in middle school growing up on a children’s home and showed a proclivity for math and science. Slowly, they were groomed and over time, some decided to stay with the Circle and devote their lives to the service of the organization.
Just as many decided they wanted out of all of it and moved away to start a life without answering to anyone but their boss or their spouse. They wanted to forget they ever knew there were really two giant powers going at it, all the time behind the scenes.
That was the difference between the two groups. The Circle wanted their recruits to stay a part of their system but once someone had decided they were leaving, no one stopped them. There was a guarantee that no one would threaten them or their family in order to get them to stay.
It was true that the Circle couldn’t always offer the highest reaches of the business or political world like Management could but anyone who opted for the Circle held on to something even more precious than an upper middle class life, if they only understood it. They could always choose something different.
This was the day, though that being in Management’s upper reaches turned out to truly be a career move without enough options.
Each pharmacist had slowly over the years put themselves in such a place of trust that they had access to all of the orders that came through the facility.
In order to block out the noise of the machinery overhead, most of the people who worked at the plant had purchased their own noise-killing headphones that could also play music. The pharmacists were no exception.
They streamed music all day long that randomly selected songs from the internet.
Each day at precise times throughout the day the songs that were chosen contained key words that let them know all was well.
Once they were home, they received coded messages over their iPhone that were quickly decoded with the current OTP, telling them what playlists to expect if all was well the next week. There was a different selection if something changed and their reason for being there was suddenly put into play.
They were expected to memorize both lists every week.
No one in the small group brought the iPhone to work with them. They all used a different phone at work that they had purchased on their own and was setup like everyone else’s.
Their lives, these three pharmacists, were to be as normal as possible with the usual birthday celebrations for their kids at Chuck E. Cheese’s and trips to the dentist and worries about car repairs or the weather. They were to blend right in with everyone else till they became invisible because they just did their jobs and went home to their families. This had been going on for almost a generation, waiting for different orders.
The day the playlist suddenly changed over to the alternate list, each of them knew that their assignments were coming to an end. It was part of the original agreement.
Their families would be relocated with them and given entirely new identities. They would have to start over in new professions that didn’t leave a trail back to pharmaceuticals in any way. It wasn�
��t because the Circle was trying to keep them entangled but because if Management ever figured out what they had done, they wouldn’t stop searching for them. Their families would be tortured for information and destroyed. That was common knowledge.
This was the failsafe operation and each of them had been groomed so that once things were put into play they wouldn’t hesitate. There was no backup plan and if one of them hesitated, it would mean that an entire third of the targets would escape unharmed and possibly lead to failure for the entire idea.
The Circle had to be sure these three people would act swiftly the moment they heard the music change and begin to manipulate the correct orders. They would only have days to infiltrate the system before the mail orders would reach their destinations. There would even be days before the deaths would be attributed to the medicine and more time before someone would realize there was a pattern.
By then, the three pharmacists would be gone and every trace of them wiped away by the cleaners. Management would be left to marvel at the patience of the Circle.
That is the one thing the smaller dog who bears all of the scars has when going into a fight. If they want to survive, they learn to be patient.
The operation started on a Monday and by Wednesday afternoon the three pharmacists, one at a facility not too far from Maurel, one in Texas near the gulf and one in Colorado, all left for lunch and never came back. They all mentioned doctor’s appointments that might run long and asked their backups to take over for them, just in case.
No one missed them till the next morning. By then, they were on planes bound for other locations, spread across the world with entirely new lives waiting for them.
To buy more time for the medications to do what they needed to do, each of them called in sick. No one would be alarmed by three employees in three different areas who had always been model workers calling in sick. It would be routine. It happened so rarely. They hoped to be back on Friday.