by Tom Abrahams
“Hmmm.” Sir Spencer handed back the phone, surprised at what he’d read.
“Who’s the leak?” asked the president.
“We’ll find out,” said Sir Spencer. “Just send our little butterfly to figure it out.”
“She’s the one who left the evidence in the first place,” argued President Jackson.
“So let her clean it up.”
*
WASHINGTON, DC
The message was simple. Find the leak and silence it.
It was coded and encrypted, but the assassin knew what it meant. She had work to do.
She popped open her laptop and connected remotely to a secure server that would mask her location and keep her online activity hidden. Once logged onto the network, she searched for all references to Horus and found the most recent article, written by Dillinger Holt.
She searched the server’s archival feature for Holt and found several references. He was on a watch list her employers maintained. There were more than two million names in the database, which was larger than the FBI’s one-point-five-million-strong terror watch list.
Her employers had reach.
The assassin studied Holt’s background and read a few of the articles deemed “of interest”. Most of the reports focused on the economy, world currency, state-sponsored terror, NSA data mining, and the PATRIOT Act. He was a political reporter based in Washington who’d covered the White House and Capitol Hill. He’d been the beat reporter at the State Department for a year and even filled in at the United Nations desk.
“No wonder he’s on the list,” the assassin murmured as she scrolled through report after report. “He’s a threat.”
Satisfied she’d absorbed enough cursory information about Holt, she searched the surveillance history. Her employer, the people who had taken her from caterpillar to chrysalis, had files on Holt dating back to 2005.
His report about the DNA connection dealt with two locations; Houston, Texas and Alexandria, Virginia. She cross-referenced his known acquaintances in both cities. Alexandria was daunting. He lived in DC. His connections in northern Virginia ran into the hundreds. Finding a leak there could take days or weeks.
However, in Houston, he had only three connections. One was a deputy constable in Harris County. One was a ticket broker. Neither of them piqued her interest. The third did.
Karen Corvus was a coroner at the medical examiner’s office.
The assassin checked cellular records and researched every phone call Holt had initiated within the last seventy-two hours. She isolated the numbers with Houston area codes and then used a backward directory to identify the owner of each number.
She learned Holt contacted Corvus within the last twenty-four hours. They had spoken for several minutes. She found a receipt for dinner at a seafood restaurant Holt had charged to his company account. There were two meals.
Karen Corvus was the leak.
After taking a deep breath, the assassin found her way into the website for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science. She clicked on the Missing Persons tab and then searched for a listing of Unidentified Decedents.
Underneath a bold red warning at the top of the page, she scrolled to a list of unidentified dead people organized by date, sex, and presumed age. Some of the listings included macabre photographs of corpses or less inflammatory pictures of identifying marks or belongings.
The listing went as far back as 1957, though most of them were from the last thirty years or so. One of them, from 2016, was a middle-aged Caucasian or Hispanic woman. The assassin clicked on the flyer associated with her case to learn more about her.
The woman was found at a Metro bus stop and was wearing a pair of blue jeans, a white shirt with black checkered trim, white socks with no shoes, and a pink and green rubber bracelet on her left wrist.
She was sixty-four inches tall and weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. She had a tattoo of a cross on the nape of her neck.
There were case numbers for both the police agency investigating the death and one for the medical examiner’s office. At the bottom of the flier was a phone number for the Identification Unit.
The assassin cleared her throat and dialed the number from her encrypted phone. It flashed a false, randomized number on the receiving end of every call she placed. It rang twice before a woman answered.
“Harris County Medical Examiner.”
“Is this Karen Corvus?” the assassin asked, using a hint of a Spanish accent.
“No,” the woman answered. “I can get her for you.” There was a click as the woman put the call on hold. A minute later, another woman answered.
“This is Dr. Corvus.”
“Hello, Doctor. I need your help.”
“Who is this, please?”
“This is Hilda Mentiroso.”
“Do I know you?”
“No,” said the assassin, “and I don’t know you. I do need your help.”
“You said that.”
“My mother’s been missing for some time now,” the assassin slowed her cadence, her voice warbling. “I—I—I think I found her on your website.”
“You found her?” Karen’s tone softened. “Do you mean you located her description in our Unidentified Decedent section?”
“Yes.” The assassin exploded into a sobbing blather about how she missed her mother, had feared the worst but didn’t want to accept it. Now she was certain the woman on the website was her mother.
“We can’t confirm anything over the phone, I’m afraid,” Karen explained. “You’d need to come here to identify her.”
“I could do that,” the assassin whimpered. “I could come there.”
“Our hours are posted on the website,” said Karen. “Just come when you’re able. We’ll help you.”
“I could be there later today.”
“Okay,” Karen acknowledged. “I’ll be here. So will the rest of our staff. Someone will be able to assist you with what we know is a difficult process.”
“It is difficult. Thank you for your kindness.” The assassin hung up the phone and returned to her computer.
She logged into a secure travel site at her disposal and logged into her account. There was a nonstop flight from Reagan National to Houston Hobby airport leaving in two hours. She could fly commercial without compromising the mission, she concluded. She ordered the first-class one-way ticket and began packing. There wasn’t time to waste.
*
Sitting on her bed, briefing notes fanned across the thin floral duvet, the ringing phone startled Mattie.
“Matti? How are you?”
“Hi, Dad.” She sighed. “I’m good. You?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks. I thought I’d call.”
“Sorry, Dad. I’ve been busy.” She’d been avoiding him.
“I know, but I worry about you. With the whole Spencer Thomas thing, I was concerned you were, I don’t know, emotional.”
“Me? Emotional?” She laughed.
“You don’t have to pretend with me, Mattie. I know you. None of this is easy. If you run yourself into the ground, you’re no good to anyone. You have to take time for yourself. Are you still seeing the counselor?”
She rolled her eyes and huffed. There it was. And that was why she’d avoided talking with him. Every time he called, it was the same thing.
“I’m fine. I don’t need to keep seeing the shrink. I’ve dealt with it. I’m over it.”
Matti and her father had only recently talked about things that mattered. For much of her childhood, he’d been the emotionally unavailable one.
In the wake of her mother’s death, he’d sleepwalked through life. He cooked her breakfast, went to teach at the high school, came home and made dinner, watched some television, and went to bed.
He never talked about his wife, Matti’s mother, except in his dreams. He’d call out to her in the middle of the night while Matti lay awake in the next room, powerless to help him.
“They killed her?” Matti snapped.
“No.” Her father’s voice softened. “A hit-and-run driver killed her.”
“The drugs killed her, Dad. It was the cocaine and whatever else she used. I know that. You know that.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That too. She never sought help for her demons. You have demons, Matti, whether you want to admit it or not.”
“I can’t do this now,” she said. “I’ve got too much happening at the moment. I’m at Camp David. I’m heading to Spain in a couple of—”
“I can hear it in your voice.”
“What?”
“You’re in pain,” he said. “You can’t get over the guilt you imposed on yourself in a few months. It can’t be done. You need help. You need to forgive yourself.”
Matti pulled her hand to her head and gripped her hair, squeezing her eyes shut, gritting her teeth. She wanted to throw the phone across the room.
“Do you remember McPherson Square?” he asked. “Do you remember what I told you there about your mother?”
Matti remained silent, tears welling in her eyes.
“I told you, ‘I’m to blame.’ And you corrected me, Matti. You said, ‘No, you’re not, I am.’”
“I remember,” Matti said against the knot in her throat. “I told you I could have saved her. I told you if I’d put the pieces together, I could have saved her. And I told you that if I’d figured out sooner how she died, I could have saved you.”
“What did I tell you then,” he whispered into the phone, “that applies every bit as much to what you’re going through right now?”
“You told me…” Matti whimpered and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You told me it wasn’t my job to save anyone.”
Matti’s father let the echo of what she said reverberate in her mind before he spoke again.
“I love you, Matti. And you have to move on from this. You have to reconcile that you did everything you could do. You, alone, cannot save the world.”
Matti understood what he was saying, and she knew he was right; however, it didn’t change her beliefs. It didn’t change that she’d failed. It didn’t change the idea in her mind that there was more to the attack on the Capitol than what it appeared to be. She couldn’t tell him any of that, so she appeased him.
“I know, Dad.” She sniffed back the remnants of her emotional outburst. “You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.” He laughed. “I wasted half of my life doing what you’re doing now. Stop living in the past. Cope with it, shove past it and—”
“Enough,” she interrupted. “I get it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“I really have to go, okay?” she said, looking at the notes she had yet to review. “I’ve got a meeting with the president this morning. I have to be prepared.”
“Understood,” he said. “We’ll talk soon.”
Matti ended the call and tossed the phone onto the pillow. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and started fishing through the stacks of papers on her bed.
Buried underneath was Bill Davidson’s journal. She found a dog-eared page and thumbed open the blue book, cracking its worn spine. Amongst all of the seemingly innocuous political rantings of an aging statesman-turned-would-be-terrorist were salient observations and countless clues to a hidden current of power flowing underneath the noses of everyone in Washington.
Bohemian Grove was just one of those clues. There were more. The word “chaos” appeared dozens of times.
“From chaos order is born,” he wrote. “It is irrefutable that people are most willing to accept order after enduring the terror of chaos. The greater the anarchy, the stronger the desire was for an enforced peace. Without chaos, however, the need for order is difficult to understand.”
She ran her finger down the middle of pages, scanning for more references.
“Even Churchill, the great statesman,” he’d scribbled, “believed in the social chaos theory. How can I refute it? Ordo ab chao.”
Matti fished her phone from the pillow and opened the browser. She typed in “Order and Chaos”. The first three items on the list were about Horus. He’d had a hit called “From Chaos Order”. His death had reignited the popularity of all of his music.
She thumbed past the Horus references to find mentions of Churchill, found several links, and opened the most interesting.
“From the days of Spartacus,” Churchill wrote in an oft-quoted letter, “this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.”
In the same link featuring the Churchill letter, Matti found a reference to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. She knew him as the man whose work had inspired Karl Marx. He wrote that the state has “Supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”
Hegel, she read, believed that the ruling body must enact a crisis to cause its citizens to demand a solution. The rulers then offered a predetermined, extreme solution to the crisis they created. The people became divided. The rulers created a villain. Hatred of the villain united the divided people. The rulers enacted the solution. It was the ultimate sleight of hand.
Her wheels were spinning. There was something to this.
Order from chaos. Ordo ab chao.
Matti stood from the bed and stretched. There was time for a quick run before the meeting, and she needed to clear her head, fighting against the urge to take another pill.
She slipped on a pair of Lycra leggings, a Georgetown T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes. It would feel good to sweat. Maybe the run would help the ideas coalesce in her head.
Who were the rulers? What was the crisis? What was the solution?
The air outside the cabin was still thick with Southern Maryland humidity and the late morning sun found its way through the towering trees. Matti strode north along the road until she found the nature trail at the Sycamore Lodge.
She leaned against a tall pine and grabbed her foot, pulling her calves against the back of her thighs, feeling the strain in her quads one at a time. She twisted at her waist, stretching her core.
Were the conspirators who blew up the Capitol the rulers, or were they pawns? Was the Capitol bombing the crisis? Or was there more? If there was a bigger crisis at play, did the conspirators know the endgame?
Matti took a deep breath and released it from her cheeks as she started her run. She headed south, running parallel to Camp David’s eastern perimeter fence. Her legs felt good, the breathing easy and in rhythm.
Matti’s mind, clouded by the need for pills, was clearing infinitesimally while she plodded against the pine needle floor of the nature trail.
The conspirators were pawns. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been caught. There was a higher authority at work.
Matti blinked against the first of the stinging drops of sweat in her eyes. She rounded the southeastern corner of the path, turning west toward the main entrance, her pulse thumping against her neck.
Bill Davidson knew there was more at hand, which was why he’d given her the journals. If the conspiracy began and ended with one act of defiance, of radical violence, why turn them over?
Matti reached the spot where the trail merged with the main road and turned right, picking up her pace as she passed the camp commander’s quarters. To her right was a building called Rosebud.
She smiled at the name, as she always did. It reminded her of the classic film Citizen Kane.
“Rosebud,” she whispered, licking the sweat from her upper lip. She moved toward the camp office in the center of the property.
“Rose
bud” was the deathbed confession of Orson Welles’s title character. The smile disappeared from Matti’s face as she imagined the close-up of Kane’s mouth uttering the word.
Confession…
To whom else had Davidson confessed his sins?
Matti recalled from his securities dossier he wasn’t close to many people. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, and his most trusted friend was a high-priced call girl, a hooker who shared Davidson’s secrets with the NSA.
What else did Davidson confess to his prostitute girlfriend? What did she know that she never got to tell Matti as an NSA asset? She’d provided so much valuable information, given Matti so many clues before she was killed. What did she know that she didn’t have time to reveal?
Matti strode past the bowling alley, rejoining the nature trail where it split the northern collection of cabins. Her calves were arguing with her about the upward slope, but she kept the rhythm. Her breathing was even, her heart rate steady.
It didn’t matter what the call girl knew. She was dead. Davidson was dead. It was a dead end. The answer was somewhere…
Even against the doubts scratching at the back of her mind, telling her she was irrational and delusional, Matti believed she could figure it out. She could stop it. She could fix what she broke. She worked in the White House. She had crazy clearance and friends in the intelligence community. If anyone could do it, she could.
As she pressed uphill, straining to finish the first of three laps, all of her doubts evaporated. She knew she wasn’t crazy, though she could have sworn she was looking at a ghost.
Standing in the open doorway of a cabin nestled amongst a cluster of tall pines, Matti saw Felicia Jackson, president of the United States, talking to a man who looked exactly like Sir Spencer Thomas.
PART TWO: ALL-SEEING EYE
“Very soon, every American will be required to register their biological property in a national system designed to keep track of people.”
—Colonel Edward Mandell House, 1921
CHAPTER 16
CARRER DE BERGARA