The Illuminati

by Larry Burkett

  Mowr had not wanted to kill the man before they had their gas. There was always the chance that someone would hear the shots and come to investigate. Well, that’ll be their tough luck, Mowr thought darkly. The old hick deserved what he got. “Get out and fill the tank,” Mowr ordered one of the agents in the back seat.

  He lost no time doing as instructed and began pumping the gas. He had barely begun when someone came out of a store down the street, staring in their direction. He called out, “What happened? I thought I heard shots.”

  Mowr cut him down where he stood. He slumped to the dusty street just as his wife came out of the store. She began to scream when she saw her husband fall to the ground.

  Mowr leveled his weapon and pulled the trigger again. The woman died instantly as she fell across her husband’s lifeless body.

  “Too bad,”Mowr said without emotion. “She wasn’t bad lookin’.”

  In the other stores several people were peering out their windows. They were shocked at the drama unfolding before them. In the rural community of Compton, most of the problems confronting the nation had passed them by. They had seen the Christians and Jews hauled off by government agents, but they assumed they were terrorists. They had never seen anyone killed—certainly not their own friends.

  Mowr knew what had to be done. The little town was dead from the time the agents entered it. There could be no witnesses. “Fan out,” he instructed the other two men, who were still in the car. “Kill ’em all.”

  With that, he began spraying the store windows with his weapon. As the glass shattered, screams of terror could be heard. Those who tried to flee were cut down in the streets. Those who begged for mercy were shot where they stood. In less than three minutes, the carnage was finished. Twenty-three law-abiding citizens had learned, the hard way, that their rights could be violated too.

  The killing was like a narcotic to Mowr. He searched every building, looking for someone still alive that he could kill. When he was sure there were no witnesses left alive, he went back to the car.

  “Are you finished?” he growled at the agent pumping the gas.

  “Y-yes,” he stuttered, still staring past Mowr down the street.

  “Then stop pumping gas into the street, stupid,” Mowr said, as the gas poured out of the nozzle.

  The other man quickly released the trigger and replaced the nozzle in the pump. The four men piled into the car and roared away toward the interstate again.

  In the back room of the hardware store, a small figure opened the trap door to the cellar where she had been taking inventory of the canning supplies. When she heard the shots, she had opened the door only enough to see outside. What she saw frightened her so badly she had slammed the door shut and cowered in the cellar. That reflex had saved her life. Now she exited to find her mother and father both lying dead on the floor of their little store. She almost fainted at the sight. The hatred that took over her gave her the strength to overcome her anguish. She had seen the car as it had pulled up to the gas station across the street.

  She had noticed it because they seldom saw strangers in town. She tried to recall as much detail as her racing mind would allow. She knew it was a white car, a Chevrolet, with four men inside.

  She reached the phone and called the country sheriff ’s office. Even the automated Data-Net phones had not reached her little town yet. The call was routed through Jackson where the transaction was recorded for Data-Net billing.

  “Sheriff ’s office,” the phone dispatcher answered.

  “This is Melissa Graves in Compton,” the young woman said sobbing. “Someone has just murdered everyone in town! I was hiding, or I would have been killed too. Please, you’ve got to come. It’s awful!”

  “Calm down now, and tell me exactly what happened,” the dispatcher said.

  Melissa told the entire story, including a brief description of the car involved. The dispatcher, who would normally not issue an alert until an officer had investigated, sensed Melissa was telling the truth. She instantly sent out an all-points bulletin to the state police. At the same time, she dispatched a local deputy to the town.

  At the CRC headquarters in Dentville, Jeff was pondering what to do. He was totally comfortable working with computers, but when it came to planning for an attack, he was at a loss. Should we evacuate the camp? he wondered. And if we did where would we go? That was Shepperd’s or Pastor Elder’s responsibility, but he had the nagging feeling that if he did nothing they were in trouble.

  Come on Jeff, he told himself. Think. Then it came to him. What would Rutland do if he knew where we are located? He sure couldn’t get out of Washington in time himself—not with me watching his every move, or more correctly, his every transaction.

  Transactions, Jeff said silently. Rutland would need to contact someone close to find the camp. New Orleans was the closest city of any size. Even as he was thinking, he activated the Data-Net link. As his fingers flew across the keyboard, he initiated a search for any phone calls made from the White House to New Orleans. Immediately the system responded: a call had been made from the president’s office to a number in New Orleans. He searched the matching file for an address. He found it and cross-matched the address to known government facilities. They matched. Rutland, or someone, had called New Orleans almost immediately after Dr. Loo’s trace had been initiated.

  Going on a hunch, Jeff searched the New Orleans police files for reports of stolen vehicles, believing that any agents assigned to locate the CRC headquarters would not take the chance of being tracked through a government vehicle. There were hundreds of stolen car reports in New Orleans, but only one that coincided with the time and location he was interested in: a white 1999 Chevrolet.

  Jeff set up a routine search for subsequent police reports involving any vehicles matching that description. There was just one. A white Chevrolet carrying four men was involved in a multiple homicide in a small town in Mississippi, about two hundred miles from New Orleans—on a direct line with the CRC’s headquarters. Coincidence?Well, maybe, Jeff thought to himself. But on such coincidences, wars have been won or lost. He had to decide what to do, in a hurry.

  Mowr and his team of cutthroats continued on in a direct line toward Dentville, Mississippi. “Shouldn’t we ditch the car?” the driver asked Mowr. “What if someone spotted us back there?”

  “Don’t be stupid,”Mowr growled. “There was nobody back there left to spot us. We’ve got nearly a full tank of gas left. I’m not dumpin’ this car now.”

  The others knew they were violating the cardinal rule of an assault mission: They had committed a crime and continued on in the same vehicle. By now there would be a stolen car report out too. But they did what Mowr ordered; they knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do to them what he had done to the people of Compton.

  Jeff decided what he had to do. He patched into the Mississippi State Patrol emergency network. He knew it was a risk; it left him vulnerable to a trace within Data-Net as long as the link was open. If Dr. Loo was monitoring, it was possible to identify the source. But it was a risk he had to run. If the attack on Compton was the work of an assault team, the CRC camp was in grave danger. The agents could be closing in even now.

  Jeff sent an all-points bulletin to Highway Patrol stations from Compton to Dentville, giving the description of the stolen vehicle and the four men. Jeff was laying out all the cards. If the team was not headed in a straight line to Dentville, he had just diverted all the Highway Patrol units in southern Mississippi to the wrong place.

  At the Mississippi Highway Patrol stations, the bulletin was received, notifying all units to take up positions along the interstate and all main roads between Compton and Dentville. The all-points bulletin said the men in the car were armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.

  Mowr ordered the driver to pull off the interstate and find a back road into Dentville. It was nothing he could put his finger on, but somehow he knew the police had been alerted. He had made his living most
of his life by obeying his instincts; he felt nothing for the people he had killed, including those in Compton. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. To Mowr, the only life that counted was his.

  “We’re gettin’ close,”Mowr said to the others. “I can smell it. Pull into that farm. We need some information.”

  Mowr knew only one way to do anything: brute force. He intended to grab one of the locals, find out what he could about any unusual activity in the area, kill the hostage, and attack the target he had been assigned. He knew they had to be close, but his information only narrowed the search area to a few square miles.

  Jeff called all the men in his camp together and told them what he knew, or at least suspected, about the assault team headed their way. Once the highway patrol had been alerted, all they could do was wait until something happened.

  The former FBI agents working with the CRC had their orders from Shepperd: they were to take no chances if attacked. Although Shepperd had agreed to Elder’s decision not to attack government forces, he did not interpret that to mean they could not defend themselves. His agents were armed at all times. In this emergency, they went into their hidden cache of weapons and brought out some bigger artillery. If the assault team hit their compound, they would not find them as passive as most of the people they confronted.

  “What the . . .” the startled driver said as he pulled on to the dirt road leading to the farm. There was a large tree blocking most of the road.

  Suddenly alert, Mowr’s eyes darted back and forth looking for any signs of a trap. He had set enough traps himself to be wary of anything out of the ordinary.

  “It looks like it blew down in the last couple of days,” the driver said.

  “See if you can get around it.” Mowr ordered even as he armed his weapon. Everything looked normal, except for the tree. It was possible that whoever lived on the farm simply lacked the equipment to move it.

  The driver eased the car onto the shoulder of the road. Even as he did so, several armed men watched from their well-concealed positions in the corn field. As the car swung around the tree, the driver saw a large silver-colored cylindrical tank, hitched to a tractor, directly in his path. He swerved to the right to avoid hitting it. Suddenly the ground gave way beneath the car’s tires, and it lurched to one side as the frame bottomed out in the ditch.

  Mowr let out a string of obscenities at the driver. He couldn’t know that just such a mishap had been designed into the old road. “Get out and see how bad it is,” Mowr ordered the others. He sat in the car with his weapon out of sight . . . but ready.

  As the three men stepped out of the car, someone shouted from the field, “Lay down your weapons and put your hands over your heads. You’re surrounded.”

  By pure chance, Mowr had found the compound he was looking for. But instead of catching them by surprise, thanks to Jeff’s warning, they were ready.

  The startled agents dropped their weapons shouting, “Don’t shoot. We’re government agents. . .”

  “Shut up you fools,” Mowr snapped. He raised his weapon to spray the field where the shout had come from.

  When the ex-FBI agent saw the barrel of the automatic weapon peek over the car windowsill, he reacted instinctively. The LAARS rocket he was aiming was armed and ready. He squeezed the trigger gently and the solid motor rocket roared into action. It covered the distance to the car in less than a second, even before Mowr could fire a single round. The explosion of the rocket and the silver cylinder obliterated the car and the men who had been riding in it.

  The fireball was visible from a mile away. A highway patrolman positioned at one of the county road blocks saw the fireball as it erupted. The sound reached him a few seconds later with a deafening roar. He fired up his engine and raced in the direction of the explosion.

  When the patrolman arrived at the farm, only a solitary figure was visible. One of the ex-FBI agents dressed in coveralls was standing by the entrance road.

  “What happened?” the startled patrolman asked as he saw the burned wreck.

  “Some fools in a white car drove into the propane tank I hitched to my tractor,” the agent said in a Mississippi drawl. “Had guns stickin’ out of every window. I guess they were gonna rob the place. Serves ’em right, I guess. Besides, we don’t have much to steal.”

  “You’re very lucky,” the patrolman said. “These are probably the killers we’ve been looking for. They killed twenty-three people in Compton. Wiped out most of the town. I’ll get some of our forensic people out here to verify who they are. Just don’t touch anything.”

  “You betcha,” the agent said casually as the patrolman called on his mobile phone.

  The state police took pictures of the crash site and did a forensic analysis of the bodies. Satisfied that they were the men who attacked Compton, they removed the bodies and the demolished car.

  Activity on the farm was slowed for several days until the area was cleared. Then Shepperd and Elder returned to the headquarters.

  “We have to move quickly,” Shepperd told the others the first evening they were back together. “It’s only a matter of time until Rutland tries again. The next time it might not be a bunch of thugs. It could be the army.”

  “I agree with Donald,” Elder told the group. “It’s time we pulled out all the stops. If we get caught, there will be no second chance.”

  30

  THOMAS GALT

  The largest media corporation in the world, the Galt Network, owned twenty newspapers, the World News Network, and the World Satellite Broadcasting System. The head of this conglomerate was Thomas Galt. Galt traveled throughout the world, checking on his empire. But when he was in America, he made his home in a small town just outside of Atlanta.

  For years he had led the media assault against Christianity. When the government propaganda against Christians began, he gave maximum coverage to the stories. The liberal perspective of the other networks paled when compared to that of Galt’s. He felt Christians were bigoted and tried to force their “Victorian” values on everyone else. Since Galt had lived a decadent lifestyle for most of his years, the attack on Christianity was his defense mechanism against the truth.

  During the last year, however, Galt had begun to doubt his convictions about everything, including Christianity. He had often fought the Christians on abortion, the Crack Babies Bill, legalized drugs, and many other issues he personally believed in. His irritation over their absoluteness had motivated him to support any issue opposed by John Elder and his “mob,” as he referred to them. But now, having observed the state of the world since all of his pet issues had been implemented, he knew he had been wrong. Clearly the legalization of drugs had spread their use throughout American society. Where the liberals had once been certain that the legalization of drugs would reduce crime, the exact opposite had happened. The former drug lords became legitimized businessmen, but youth gangs had taken over the illicit drug trade. The use of cheap substitutes that killed thousands of users every month became the new underground drug scene.

  Once the Crack Babies Bill was passed and became law, it was assumed that humanity would benefit. Instead, a huge new business had been developed. Women on drugs were solicited to have children just so they could be processed for their organs. Wealthy clients, many of them his own friends, would place orders for mothers with compatible blood types to be artificially inseminated so that the organs of their offspring could be harvested. In their quest for eternal life the wealthy were literally killing their own children.

  Galt, now almost eighty, had built his company from a small advertising agency in Atlanta to a worldwide empire. In the process he had gone through several wives, lost his own children to drugs and alcohol, and lived a wretched, tormented life. He was simply tired of life and what was happening to Christians and Jews in America. The evidence was overwhelming that they were being persecuted, perhaps even murdered. He had been in the media business long enough that he didn’t believe the world’s publ
icity. He knew the facts could be selectively skewed to make them appear any way the broadcaster desired. He also knew this latest information about the Society was true. He had been contacted more than a few times by influential men, including Jason Franklin, who wanted him to join a secret society. Several years back he had even attended one of their meetings. All that garbage about serving mankind and honoring the one they called the “Great Leader” reminded him of a college fraternity. The whole idea was ridiculous to him, and he had told them so.

  He had helped to spread the propaganda about Christian terrorists though his media empire, but he really was tired of it all. Death would be relief. But in the back of his mind was a nagging doubt, planted there by his grandmother. She had been a devoted Christian and had often told him Bible stories when he was a child. Some of them he remembered even now, more than seventy years later—especially the one about the rich man and Lazarus. What if he was wrong? What if, instead of finding peace at death, he did go to a place of eternal torment?

  He had gone through this argument with himself many times. There was no resolution to it. Maybe it is just the addle-brained thinking of a senile old man, he thought. He often thought about God. But, he reasoned, if he were God he would never allow someone like Thomas Galt into his kingdom. He had done too many things to too many people in his climb to the top. And through his media empire, he had even helped kill or incarcerate many of God’s followers.

  In one of those divine coincidences, Donald Shepperd called Thomas Galt just as he was seriously considering suicide. The boldest move the CRC group had ever made was about to take place and they needed the help of a major network. Since the WNN was the biggest network, Shepperd decided to contact Galt. The decision was made after Jeff searched the records and verified that Galt was not a member of the Society. He had never donated funds to any of their hundreds of front organizations, nor had he attended more than one of their leadership meetings. Wells had obtained Galt’s private home number at his farm near Atlanta. All Shepperd could do was hope he was actually there.