In this way, he manipulated the Machine. When he chose to advance a cause, major or minor, his skill and personality allowed rapid movement through layers of grinding bureaucracy. But there were many serious issues that he simply allowed the befuddled bureaucrats to bludgeon with their ineptitude.
He did this because the system deserved it, and so did the system’s perpetrators.
Even the sheep.
Especially the sheep.
He was a patriot in the truest sense. He had long ago taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The Constitution, he believed, represented man’s highest organizational attainment, the best mechanism yet devised to balance the benefits of collective effort with man’s innate freedom. It wasn’t perfect, but Stalwart believed it was worthy of defense.
But the Machine had manipulated and twisted that oath, slowly substituting loyalty to an insipid self-serving organization in place of loyalty to the liberties enshrined in the Constitution. He had the clarity, as he saw it, to understand the difference.
With that vision came the clear belief that the great governmental bureaucracy, the lumbering parasite of public treasure, was itself functioning at odds with the Constitution.
This was a hard realization, from which there could be no retreat for a man like Mr. Mike Charles, Co-Director of the ASAT program.
His adoption of this belief was a byproduct of his insatiable curiosity, which took him to the dark corners of the institution. There, buried beneath bromides and false assumptions, he found gleaming fragments of reality. He gradually pieced these fragments together.
What he learned had demanded action.
The final piece of the puzzle had been the hardest for Stalwart to place. Something had nagged at him, a vague, inchoate perception that something significant was amiss. He had the sense that it was right in front of him, maybe even clubbing him over the head, yet he couldn’t quite place it.
He was right. It was something enormous, glaring, pervasive, and with a prominent public face. Yet it was also absolutely secret.
It started to click into place for Stalwart when he accidentally heard a sentence uttered on television by a thoroughly marginalized congressman and erstwhile presidential hopeful. The hapless politician meant well, but was relegated to crackpot status because of his predilection for publicly disagreeing with what the mainstream considered to be self-evident economic truths.
The politician felt that many of the commonly revered economic precepts most people believed weren’t in fact true, and were, instead, little more than unexamined dogma.
But the poor fellow just couldn't speak in public without harping on currency inflation as an insidious and dishonest method of wealth redistribution. His time on the national stage was brief, and since his decisive defeat in the most recent primary, every picture shown of him seemed to have captured his face in a strange, cartoonish contortion.
The politician’s name didn’t help. “Arvin Duff” didn’t roll off of most tongues without a snigger.
Stalwart made it his practice to studiously ignore the politics staged for public consumption in the news media. But on one particular occasion, he was trapped in a clinic waiting room, his ears assaulted by loud, compressed audio from a cheap television tuned to the "Inside Washington" segment of the high-pitched, hard-right daily news agency.
He felt his annoyance growing with each salvo of anti-left invective that invaded his senses. He wasn't annoyed because he leaned left—he was long past picking sides in the Kabuki Theater otherwise known as American politics, and he thought there were sufficient idiots in both camps to make "None of the Above" the only viable choice. He was just irritated because he was forced to listen.
At half past one, Stalwart had asked the receptionist sardonically whether she knew what time his one o'clock appointment would begin. He had smiled at her to take the edge off his sarcasm, and she muttered an officious apology for his inconvenience.
Politely, he had made it clear that they were within ten minutes of losing his appointment and his patronage. He didn't have anywhere in particular he needed to be, but he had decided that he was finished waiting. Life was short.
His message delivered, Stalwart had been on his way back to his seat in the waiting room when Arvin Duff, the crackpot anti-inflation guy, appeared in a television interview. "In 1933, the US government banned the ownership of gold. It was punishable by ten years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine," Duff’s nasal voice squawked.
Stalwart stopped in his tracks. Could that be true? The US had banned the ownership of gold? We—the United States of America—had forbidden American citizens from owning . . . gold?
Assault weapons, vicious animals, and nuclear weapons he could understand.
But gold?
One might expect something like that from Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China, but never in his life would Stalwart have guessed that the United States government, bastion of liberty and justice, would ban the ownership of a precious metal. It seemed so . . . out of character.
His curiosity was piqued, and Stalwart had turned to his smart phone for answers. As he waited for the browser page to load, he found himself thinking that someone must have lost his mind temporarily and instituted this bit of one-off governmental quackery, only to be corrected by more clear-thinking successors. How could it be otherwise?
But he was wrong.
By executive order number 6102, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had banned the ownership of gold and ordered that all bullion, coins, and gold certificates be surrendered to the US Treasury no later than May 1, 1933, for which citizens were to be compensated $20.67 per troy ounce.
Eight months later, Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which outlawed the ownership of gold by any US citizen anywhere in the world.
This law also arbitrarily raised the price of gold to $35 per ounce, almost doubling the value of the confiscated gold that by now had accumulated in enormous quantities in the national treasury.
The government had taken all of the citizenry’s gold, and then, months later, had arbitrarily declared the confiscated gold to be almost twice as valuable.
In effect, Stalwart mused, the government had scooped up all the gold, then declared the dollar to be half as valuable by comparison. A chilling thought.
The law remained in effect until 1977. Forty-three years was too long for temporary insanity, Stalwart decided.
That revelation had marked an inflection point for Stalwart. Over the following year, he had slowly gained the insight and resolve that would ultimately lead to action.
His fellow bureaucrats had a name for the kind of action he took.
Treason.
The elevator took Stalwart to the top floor of the mid-rise Crystal City office building. He stepped past the secretaries and into his large office, with its incredible view of the Washington Monument, and settled in for a long afternoon of meetings.
He also prepared for some other activity, the kind that could never be put on a calendar at work.
2
Somewhere in the Adirondack Mountains. Thursday, 10:24 a.m. ET.
The slight, athletic young man wasn’t particularly nervous, but the gravity of what lay ahead of him was never far from his mind. His training had been lengthy and thorough, and he felt confident in his abilities. Soon Chaim would prove his mettle.
He settled his cheek against his rifle, centered his attention on the target, and calmed his breathing.
He was a recent graduate of a lengthy and rigorous training syllabus. Throughout the yearlong course, he had focused on the martial aspects of his regimen, and as young men tended to be, he was quite oblivious of the more important result of his time at the training camp: he had emerged thoroughly indoctrinated.
Extremist groups and mainstream militaries have long known that the most effective indoctrination methods didn’t involve hours of dogmatic instruction or rote memorizatio
n of political or religious precepts.
Instead of preaching, the most thorough indoctrination efforts merely provided skills training. When done well, the curriculum rarely, and only peripherally, addressed the ultimate purposes to which the newly acquired skills were to be employed. The ideology was taken for granted. It was counterintuitive, but remarkably effective.
Chaim had emerged from his extensive training with an embarrassment of praise and accolades from his superiors. He had been handpicked for his upcoming assignment.
He adjusted his aim for both wind and gravity, exhaled slowly, silenced his mind, and slowly added pressure to the trigger with his index finger. The rifle’s report echoed off the far Adirondack hills.
He trained his sight back on the target and discovered that he had missed the center circle by a little more than an inch. Not bad for a 420-yard shot.
He was ready.
It was time for Chaim, now just over twenty years old, to live up to his promises to God.
Over the past weeks, to prepare for his upcoming duty, he had learned of many atrocities committed against peoples of faith in Southwest Asia and North Africa. He had watched hours of grisly footage, and had seen countless grief-stricken survivors laid low in their misery. Bloody mothers clutched dead infants, and husbands tore at their hair in grief at the loss of their families.
Along with a more senior member of the Faithful, he had also flown to see the gruesome aftermath of one of these attacks with his own eyes.
He saw the maimed and grotesquely disfigured children struggling to function normally, and he felt the seething rage of heartbroken parents helpless to remove the pain from their young ones’ lives.
He was Jewish, born in Tel Aviv. The disfigured child he had held was Arab, born in Iraq. It didn’t matter to him. Humanity was his family, Earth his home, as God had designed.
He was angry in his bones, stricken in his soul. The atrocities were ordered by men in suits and executed by men in uniforms under a banner of justice and freedom.
He had seen the footage and aftermath of many attacks, but they were all linked by a common thread. The weapons that had both cruelly ended some lives, and cruelly failed to fully end others, were all guided by components made by a single company, Langston Marlin.
This company reported to shareholders and was run by a board of directors. Its employees lived in modest homes not altogether unlike the homes their products had decimated.
For the moment, this company also had a chief executive officer, John Averett.
But it would not have one for long.
The young sharpshooter was not looking forward to ending a man’s life. The suffering wrought by violent death was all too real to him now, and he loathed bringing this heartbreak upon anyone’s wife, children, and grandchildren.
If there was another way, he had pleaded, it would be so much better, so much more righteous.
His superiors had not attempted to justify their strategy. They had merely invited him to help them find a better way, if one could be found.
Together, they had worked through myriad ideas, each dashed by the same limitation the weak always had when they wished to stop the tyranny of the strong.
None of the other ideas had a prayer of working.
In the end, Chaim had concluded, it was simply a matter of mathematics. If he and his comrades did nothing, the mass killings on the other side of the globe would continue.
But if he did something, a thing so significant, powerful, frightening, and serious that it couldn’t be ignored, then things just might change.
There was no guarantee that his efforts, his sacrifice, the rending of his soul with the guilt of murder, would bring about any change whatsoever.
But Chaim knew with a calm, bottomless clarity that he no longer had the ability to do nothing.
He had held the blinded and legless child in his arms, and through his own tears, he had promised God with the full force and depth of himself that he would expend everything, including his last breath, if need be, to stop the barbarism.
He would sacrifice the purity of his conscience. He would descend to savagery himself.
This price he was willing to pay. He was already broken, indelibly altered, by the horrible things he had seen. There was no turning back.
He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see a familiar face. “I am told that Mullah has confirmed it. It is time, my brother.”
3
Arlington, Virginia. Thursday, 12:32 p.m. ET.
Special Agent Samantha Jameson caught her breath. Beside her in her bed, breathing heavily himself, was Air Force Colonel Brock James.
They were an item, had been for a couple of years, and often played hooky from work to hook up in bed. He stroked her hair and kissed her face and neck, and she ran her hands down his trim, muscular back.
“I am so glad you exist.” He bit her ear tenderly.
“Thanks for stopping by, stranger. I thought I had lost you to one of your hookers.” Her fiery green eyes held mischief.
He smiled, a hint of crow’s feet appearing near the touch of gray at his temples. “Cinnamon wanted to join us, actually, but I told her I wanted you all to myself.”
She laughed. “Good thing. I wouldn’t want to have to change the sheets before my boyfriend comes home.”
“When is he due? I’ll wait for him with a blunt object.”
It was a running joke about their hectic work schedules. They playfully accused the other of a parallel life, but even though they had found each other later in life after more than a few false starts in other relationships, there had never really been anyone else. Not even close.
Brock’s cell phone buzzed, and reality descended. “Shit. Looks like our lunch date is officially over,” he said. “The boss is on the war path again, that little bastard.” He dressed hastily. They shared a long kiss.
“I love you madly,” he said, pulling on his flight suit.
“I’m really glad you do,” Sam replied, retrieving articles of clothing from the floor. “Otherwise I’d have to stalk you, and that could get awkward.”
4
Crystal City, Washington, DC. Thursday, 1:14 p.m. ET.
“Detective, I’m afraid we may have a chain-of-custody problem. Monsignor Worthington’s wallet has gone missing.” Officer Wilkins braced for the inevitable onslaught of profanity from the lead detective on the scene of the murdered priest.
He wasn’t disappointed, but was surprised at the volume of the man’s voice as he cussed and hollered. Detective Hank Thierrot had a pair of lungs.
When the tirade seemed to have paused, Wilkins elaborated. “Sergeant Bryant bagged it and binned it. I watched him do it, but it’s not there now.”
A chain-of-custody problem involving evidence in a murder investigation could make a conviction impossible. Detective Thierrot’s career had included a number of investigative anomalies over the years, and he sure as hell didn’t need another problem.
Thierrot had a reputation for many things, but an even keel wasn’t one of them. He looked around at what had become a chaotic crime scene, and a vein on his forehead began to bulge.
Dozens of onlookers milled about in the Crystal City office building lobby outside the restroom where the priest’s throat had been slit, and there were easily that many first responders on the scene as well.
“All of you, stop what you’re doing!” Thierrot thundered. “You clowns have a wallet to find!”
As Officer Wilkins turned to join the search, Thierrot grabbed his arm. “Not you. Go shoo away those fucking gawkers. There’s bound to be a reporter in that gaggle, and I don’t need another goddamned news story about lost evidence.”
5
Crystal City, Virginia. Thursday, 2:04 p.m. ET.
The recent years had seen Air Force Colonel Brock James grow gray around the edges, and a furrow had dug its way into his brow. Aside from frequent and outrageous sex with his brilliant and gorgeous redheaded girlfriend, Homeland Sec
urity Special Agent Sam Jameson, they hadn’t been particularly kind years.
Brock’s eyes were clear, piercing, and merciless, until you earned a smile. Even then, one tended to feel a bit naked under his gaze.
When among his titular betters, he somehow managed to enforce an assumed equality and ease while others of his rank and station were frozen in obsequious deference. His lack of diffidence was occasionally interpreted as arrogance. He didn’t mind.
Brock knew what he was, and he knew what others thought he was. The difference didn’t bother him.
But he had been through a long, rough patch. There was the Incident, followed by the Fallout. Both were painful and embarrassing. He had weathered them with trademark stoicism, licked his wounds in private, and emerged even stronger.
But it recently became a matter of public record: his career hadn’t survived.
There were both circumspect and angry moments for him, but he knew it was for the best. He and his employer had been on divergent vectors for some time.
One man in particular, his immediate boss, was the proximate cause of the most recent, and permanent, falling out.
It was to this man that Brock addressed the e-mail, a polite bureaucratic, “Go to hell.”
He clicked “send” without hesitation, and sat back in his seat with a satisfied smile. It would be several minutes before the message was opened by its recipient, but it had already had its intended effect: Brock felt great.
His boss, Major General Charlie Landers, was an asshole. Landers was the co-lead of a large government acquisition project, which was developing a way to disable satellites in orbit using mobile ground-based weapons. Brock was the head of the Guidance and Control IPT, or Integrated Product Team, and he reported directly to Landers.
He was pretty certain Landers was crooked. Brock had overheard a conversation recently that suggested the ambitious but under-talented general had an inappropriately cozy relationship with Winthrop Gorman, the large contracting firm that had lost the bid for the multi-billion-dollar project.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 114