She’d been badly shaken when they’d hidden beneath the desk and again when he’d first suggested they go upstairs. Over the past two days, he’d thought he’d seen all her emotions. He’d seen anger, frustration, and pain. He’d seen her smile, and he’d heard her laugh.
She had a wonderful laugh, a sparkling laugh.
He’d never thought he’d see her frightened, not like she’d been beneath the desk and in the basement. No matter how many taekwondo classes she took, no matter how many sessions in the ring or at the gun range, she’d never completely conquer the fear that had been instilled in her three years ago by a crazy brother and his ruthless hitman. She’d learn to cope with it, but she’d always be looking over her shoulder, wondering what evil lurked behind.
That ate at her. She deemed fear a sign of weakness, and Fiona loathed the thought of weakness.
She’d rallied, though, as he’d known she would. Now, despite a past thirty-six hours that would have shattered the composure of most women and men, she sat in near-total stillness, every few minutes turning a page in her brother’s journal with long, artist’s fingers, her exotic face a study in tranquility. She was a beautiful woman, but her character, her strength and dignity, was her greatest asset.
And she was his. Or would be. He’d seen it downstairs when she’d waffled on her stance about working in separate rooms. It wasn’t that she was warming toward him; that would take time. It was that she was relaxing around him. She no longer feared or hated him. She might be starting to trust him. With trust would come like, and love would follow.
Had that been desire he’d seen in her eyes during the discussion of book covers?
In the process of turning a page, Fiona spoke without looking up. “If you keep staring at me like that, I’ll crush your windpipe with a single blow.”
She was joking. At least, he thought she was joking. “Ask me how many KKKers it takes to screw in a lightbulb.”
She raised her face to look at him and frowned. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because that’s the way jokes work. This one’s been eating at me, and I only now came up with the punchline.”
“You are a simple man with simple pleasures.”
Grant grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “I am. Ask.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. How many KKKers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“They don’t screw in lightbulbs. They do their best work in the dark.”
She gave him a jaundiced stare. “That’s the best you can do?”
He felt offended. “And you can do better?”
“Please. A child could do better.”
“Show me what you’ve got, then. How many KKKers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“It depends on whether it’s a white light or a black light.” She turned back to the journal, flipping the page.
She was right. That was a better response. He’d been bashed on the head yesterday morning. Head bashings tended to compromise a man’s mental acuity. “I can better mine if you give me time.”
She didn’t look up. “A monk in the throes of a vow of silence could better yours if you gave him time.”
“Are you ready to hear what I’ve learned?”
She continued to leaf through the journal, and when she responded, her tone was distracted. “Although the mere thought of listening to you wax loquacious once again makes me for the first time in my life perceive suicide in a positive light, I suppose I do need to hear what you’ve learned.”
“See? What did I tell you? You’re starting to warm to me.”
She set her book to the side, staring at him in disbelief. “How do you get that from me threatening to kill myself if I have to hear you talk again?”
“Yesterday, you would have threatened me with bodily harm. Now you’re threatening yourself with bodily harm. That’s progress.”
“If you say so,” she replied, her voice dry. “Please, don’t make me wait any longer. I am so anxious to hear your discoveries I find I can barely contain my excitement.”
“Did you know sarcasm is against the law in North Korea?”
“I shall renounce my citizenship in that country posthaste. Tell me, Grant. What have you found?” The look on her face showed a decided lack of enthusiasm.
Satisfied he had her full attention, he flew a paper airplane toward her, pleased when it made a smooth blanket-landing beside her on the bed. “First to Zeitgeist, as it is depicted in the brochure at your side. Zeitgeist is the NSO’s version of Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter. Linda was right. Delaney.com is attempting to deliberately alter America’s culture with a ten-year plan to foment revolution through race wars, religious intolerance, and moral reconstruction. Civil unrest and hatred will be the new Zeitgeist, the new spirit of the time we are now living. Taking it one letter at a time, our friendly neo-Nutsies have cleverly come up with a mnemonic device utilizing every letter of the word:
Zionistic obliteration,
Encouraging race conflicts and wars,
Indoctrination of youth in the principles of National Socialism,
Targeting promiscuity and pornography,
Genocide of inferior races,
Extermination of undesirables,
Inciting revolutionary thinking,
Stamping out homosexuality, and
Trusting no one but members of the people.
“Get it? Z-E-I-T-G-E-I-S-T.”
Fiona picked up the paper airplane, unfolding it and staring down at the list. “Incredible. How exactly do they propose to foment this revolution?”
“Like Charles Manson, they hope to remain behind the scenes, planning and setting into motion actions that will stimulate strife between all the forces they hope to eliminate. Once all those forces are eliminated, they’ll step in and proclaim a new world order. The neo-Nutsies downstairs said Whitley will be blowing up a synagogue. In Whitley’s manifesto, he proclaims his faith in Islam and declaims the Jewish faith, signing the manifesto as ‘Abdul Shafi,’ which is supposed to be his Islamic name. That sets Muslims against the Jews.”
“They can’t think anyone will believe that.”
“Ah, but people will, especially given the current atmosphere of hatred.”
“When did this ten-year plan begin?”
“It’s hard to say, but I’m betting the experimental phase began several months before your father’s death, as long as four years ago. That’s when Linda began to notice the disturbing search results. After the plane exploded, they planted the first seed of an ongoing five-step plan by staging their first incident. Step one is to stage an incident. We’ll call this putting the pan on the burner. Maybe it’s black against white. Maybe it’s Muslim against Christian. Maybe it’s homosexual against redneck. An example of an incident will be the bomb Whitley’s delivering tomorrow. Stage the incident using either a sacrificial lamb, a member who has expended his or her usefulness, or someone foolish or nervous enough to be nudged into action.”
“Interesting,” she stated, pursing her lips. “The day after tomorrow Whitley will be their latest sacrificial lamb. Thursday morning, he’ll deliver a bomb at a Jewish synagogue. It will blow up too early, killing only Whitley and innocent bystanders. Whitley’s manifesto will be found during a search of his home. Islamic extremists will be blamed for the act, and NSO will sit back and enjoy watching Islamic extremists and Jews square off.”
“They won’t sit back,” Grant countered. “They have several other five-step schemes in progress right now. This one’s important enough to warrant the presence of the Grand Poohbah himself, Damon Reinhardt, but only because it’s a double-tap strategy: Igniting hatred while simultaneously gaining a valuable resource.”
“So incident-staging is step one. What’s next?”
“Step two is wait-and-see, which can be likened to setting the pot to simmer. They’re confident the races, the religions, the creeds will take things from there. Tensions rise. Already, three years after the plane expl
oded, most police officers exercise extreme caution when approached by black men and vice versa. This extreme caution leads to blunders. Adrenaline runs high; deadly mistakes are made. What’s ironic,” he mused, “is the true racists are the ones who automatically see racism in a white-on-black incident. A trigger-happy white police officer who kills a black person might have done so for any number of reasons: poor training, sloppy pre-hire evaluations, even a physical or mental disability. It doesn’t have to be about race, but both the whites and the blacks assume it’s about race. In my opinion, that in itself is racist. If a white police officer kills a white man or a black police officer kills a black man, no one cries racism.”
“That might be off topic.” She cocked her head, her eyes distant, before looking at him again. “Yes. Your commentary labeling the angry people as themselves racists was off topic. I worry I’m becoming accustomed to your lightning shifts. Back on track: There has to be more to the rise in hate-crimes than a few incidents of poor judgment.”
“I would resent your suggestion I am unable to hold a thought if I believed it, which I don’t. I told you there are five steps. After the step two wait-and-see, step three sets the pot to boil by using social media. The members of NSO get on Twitter, Facebook, chat rooms, discussion forums, et cetera with assumed names and phony photos, and they turn up the heat by encouraging demonstrations and retaliatory actions to show the opposing forces they refuse to take any more. Whitley has a list of Twitter handles in the Zeitgeist folder. I researched some of the tweets made from those handles. I’ll read them to you:
“Were it me, I’d stage a protest so big whitey would think twice before messing with us again.”
“How many more of our children must die? We need to strike back!”
“F#& whitey’s flag! I’ll respect it when whitey respects me.”
“Candlelight vigil tonight at Sandy’s. BYOG.”
She interrupted. “BYOG?”
“Bring your own gun. NSO members attend the protests, staying in the background unless the demonstrators remain peaceful. If no violence occurs, they’re there to toss a rock or shout an insult or scream in outrage. Blood’s running high, and one rock encourages others to grab whatever’s handy: rocks, bottles, the person standing next to them. It’s classic mob mentality. This is where the nation of sheep I mentioned earlier comes into play. Instead of defusing the tension by counseling the patience and love advocated by Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Jesus Christ or Henry David Thoreau, the opposing forces blindly follow an anonymous Twitter account’s advice, worsening the situation by not considering either the source of the advice or the potential repercussions.”
“For example?”
“For example, an NSO member pretending to speak for the black community encouraged passive resistance, in particular, a refusal to recognize the American flag.”
“The same flag Union soldiers died beneath while abolishing slavery?”
“That would be the one. This practice has gained strength across the country and has been adopted by celebrities, most notably, sports figures, which further ignites the conflict. People with a strong sense of patriotism, citizens who previously weren’t drawn into the conflict, now sit up and take notice. ‘Hey, that’s my country’s flag you’re disrespecting.’ These people weren’t part of the problem before, but they become part of the problem once they think someone is showing disrespect to a symbol they honor. Their anger has nothing to do with race, but that doesn’t matter. They might even be white. Lines that didn’t exist are drawn, the numbers on both sides rise, as does the tension, and no one even realizes they are puppets dancing to the NSO’s tune.”
“What does the nation’s flag have to do with violence in individual cities? That’s like telling people to boycott all fast-food vendors because a person received poor service at one McDonalds.”
“My opinion? Their refusal to honor the American flag isn’t designed to lessen the crisis. It’s designed to worsen it. It’s about black pride and stirring the youth to violence. Maybe they realize they’re encouraging more violence, violence that will result in the loss of more lives, and maybe they don’t. I like to think they don’t. Either way, they’ve played right into the NSO’s hands. One staged incident leads to increased tension leads to an unstaged incident leads to ostensibly non-violent protests leads to overtly violent protests, and Zeitgeist assumes life.”
“You said five steps. Initial incident plus wait-and-see plus social media equals three.”
“Step four is the rise of full-blown anarchy. The pot boils over, scalding everyone. We’re not there now, but we’re on our way. In step four, no one wants to be a police officer, which even now is pretty much a death wish or, at the very least, demonstrative of suicidal tendencies. Police departments across the country will have to dig to the bottom of the barrel for recruits, ignoring negligible concerns like psychological testing of new hires. The mistakes in the field will rise. Soon no one in his or her right mind will want to be a police officer, and we’ll have real nuts patrolling our streets, a bunch of genuine racists who see an opportunity for sport. The new spirit of the age will ultimately be a race war like the one Manson dreamed of, with citizens facing off in the streets and people, black and white, killed as they sleep, like they were during the pogroms in Russia.”
“And step five?”
“This one is right out of Manson’s playbook. Once the pot is boiling over, they won’t need to supervise Zeitgeist. They, the members of the NSO, will flee to an isolated location. He doesn’t specify the location, but construction has begun of a fortified city. Guess what it’s named?”
“Zeitgeist.”
“Zeitgeist. Once the city is up and running, they’ll occupy it, and after the wars are concluded, the NSO will be in a position to move back into the nation’s ruined cities. The nation will have been cleansed of inferior races, inferior religions, and inferior creeds. Deviance and promiscuity will be a thing of the past. Not to get off topic or anything, but they’re assuming some other country isn’t going to see opportunity in our woes. They may have to learn a new language when they emerge from the city of Zeitgeist, maybe German, maybe Chinese, maybe North Korean.”
“Daddy would have hated the thought of Delaney.com being used to finance a city of hatred. Whitley will have handed them both money and media, a hate group’s two greatest assets.”
“That’s why it’s difficult for me, an outsider, to believe your father knew nothing about what was going on. No, don’t yell at me. I accept he was a good and loving man lacking in a suspicious nature, but based on what we saw upstairs in the turret room, I’d say this particular plan has been in the making for over two decades, long before you were born. They are a patient lot, these neo-Nutsies, and the disturbed young son of a prominent businessman, an entrepreneur involved in the media industry, would have been impossible to resist.”
The look on her face, one of a mother hen about to fly to the defense of one of her chicks, suggested a change of subject was in order. “Did you find the name of Whitley’s friend in the journals?”
“No. His friend must have warned Whitley not to mention him by name, so I was right. It’s a name Daddy would have recognized. The outings took place during times our father was out of town. Whitley mentions in one entry that his father was meeting with several New York publishers. This would have been when I was two. My mother must have approved Whitley’s relationship with the man because he seemed to encounter no resistance in going off with him. That’s how far I’ve gotten. His comments about my mother are unsettling.” She looked sad, maybe a little confused.
“How about the codes sheet?”
That stripped the sorrow right from her face, and her eyes brightened. “I have an address.”
He was confused. “For what?”
“For the bomb placement.” She actually looked smug. Like any other facial expression, she wore it well. She’d look beautiful crossing her eyes.
“How did you
do that?”
“The codes. They were really pretty simple: Every fourth word starts with a letter corresponding with a letter or a number on the code list. I only had to determine the coded document and which word started the message. It had to reference something on Delaney.com. Why make a code list for one person? I decided the codes must be for a document many people could see. Reasoning NSO members would be checking the novels we found this morning, I tried it on the first page of both, but it didn’t work. So, I applied it to the descriptions of each, matching the corresponding letter or number with the first letter of every fourth word.
“Here’s where it gets interesting. The message on the first novel, the one about the white man stuck in the projects, reads ‘13th and G, San Diego.’ The message on the second one reads, ‘1300 Lexington Street, Saint Paul.’ Now, add to this the topic, the publication date, and the reviews on each, and the first novel’s message reads, four days from now, at 7:45 PM, at 13th and G in San Diego, a racist incident will occur. The message on the second one reads, two days from now, at 9 AM, at 1300 Lexington Street, Saint Paul, a religious incident will occur.”
“Fiona, I do believe you have left me speechless.”
“I doubt that’s possible.”
The insult stung, but as the better person, he ignored it. “Did you look up the Saint Paul address?”
“Yes. It’s the City of God Temple, a Jewish synagogue. Depending upon how big a bomb he’s carrying, he could take out a whole lot more than the synagogue in that part of town. I had a disturbing thought. Do you suppose Whitley knows he’ll be delivering a bomb?”
“He knows. Whitley’s mystery friend mentioned the bomb would be set for 9 AM but actually go off at 8:30. They wouldn’t include that misdirect if Whitley didn’t know exactly what he was doing.”
She grimaced. “Isn’t it odd that, even though I know my brother killed my father and tried to kill me, I find it hard to believe he’s a domestic terrorist? We have to stop him. I know I’m going to regret asking this, but do you have any ideas, short of calling the police? Me being dead and all, calling the police could prove awkward, and after three years on the run, I’m the one who’d wind up being committed to the state mental facility. These journals are a good start, as far as evidence goes, but he’s careful not to implicate himself in anything illegal. I leafed through the last volume. He stopped writing the day before our father died. His last entry hints at Daddy’s upcoming murder, but there’s no written confession there.”
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