As Cian Magee had guessed, the small band of Manxmen smugglers with their families had created an empire more powerful and wealthy than many of the world’s governments. They’d learned the art of deception from the past, and had the patience to await the right tides and fortuitous winds that would enable them to slip past British men-of-war.
Avoiding any publicity outside of their legitimate roles as successful businessmen, lawyers, politicians, and military officers, they’d slowly shifted the family business away from purely criminal enterprises to a balance between legal and illegal endeavors. However, they’d never abandoned their smuggling roots—from bootlegging liquor during Prohibition to providing arms to Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution.
In the early 1960s, they’d recognized the enormous potential of the drug trade and arranged with the organized crime syndicates like the Mafia, and newcomers such as the Crips, to provide the transportation and border-crossing expertise. They’d been smart enough to be satisfied with their piece of the pie and never got into dealing drugs, which might have brought them into violent competition with their clients. But they could also be ruthless if someone tried to cross them or cut them out of the loop.
Drugs had been lucrative and remained so, as well as a way to control the mud people in their ghettos and barrios. But currently the greatest profits were in smuggling the second most traded commodity in the world behind oil. Weapons. Always a good money-maker, going back to the days of supplying American Indians and the Confederate army. World events in the last half of the twentieth century had made arms dealing more profitable than ever.
In fact, the end of the cold war had been a godsend. The fall of the Soviet Union had freed all those little states to buck Russian rule, and they needed guns for that. Dean Newbury and his associates had found high growth markets in the Balkans and Africa, and then a new surge with the rise of Islamic extremism. At times they’d even cooperated with governments, like the United States when it wanted to supply rebels in Afghanistan with the arms to fight the Soviets. Dean Newbury and his partners could have cared less who got hurt. If Slavs and Arabs and Jews wanted to kill each other, more power to them—as long as they had the money to buy weapons.
The families’ worldview had evolved with their fortune and time. Dealing in slaves had taught them that the Negro was an inferior species, hardly human. And Arabs could boast all they wanted about being the originators of algebra or ancient civilizations, but this was a “what have you done lately” world. And the answer was: little more than breed like vermin and remain ignorant slaves to a seventh-century dogma.
The Sons of Man had bigger plans…plans Hitler and Stalin had failed to realize, but that were possible and headed in the right direction. The first major step would be the control of the U.S. government and the American public. There had been some among them who prior to World War Two thought that the time was near for taking over in the United States. Hitler had been on the rise in Germany, a man who truly understood that Jews and subhumans would someday overrun the world and drain the resources if there wasn’t a “Final Solution.” And the council had energetically supported the American Nazi Party and, ironically, the isolationist and peace groups who wanted to keep the United States out of the war in Europe. The hope was that a United States government controlled by the Sons of Man could join hands with Nazi Germany and rule the world. But the dream was ruined when the damned monkey-men in Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war on the other side.
The next opportunity had been the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue whose anticommunist fear mongering had convinced the American public that the communists and lefties were at the door. They’d spent a lot of money wooing the senator and tried to influence him, with some success, but that moment, too, had passed when the senator flamed out.
After President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American public about the growth of the “military-industrial complex,” there were those on the council who felt he was hitting too close to home and wanted him assassinated. We are the fucking military-industrial complex, one of the older men had snarled. But cooler heads had prevailed by pointing out that there’d be hell to pay for a popular president’s murder.
Now there were new opportunities to cement their power. White America was growing paranoid about unchecked illegal immigration and the growing numbers of mud people. And they were frightened of terrorism perpetuated by Islamic extremists. Using the bogeymen of the public’s fears, the Sons of Man had seized on the moment to push the populace of the United States into easing the grip on their precious rights in exchange for the safety of an all-powerful, all-knowing government. A government influenced covertly by the council.
The current strategy was to use the terrorists until the Sons of Man could consolidate their power, and then with their friends in Russia, who had similar designs on controlling that part of the world, they’d crush the Muslims along with any other troublesome people in the world. And they’d do it with nuclear bombs and other WMDs if necessary. After all, who could stop them—moral arguments against such necessary slaughter were for the weak.
However, the terrorists weren’t always easy to control. The council received the warning that the World Trade Center was about to be attacked with barely enough time to sell off stocks that would be negatively affected and buy into companies whose stock would rise. But those are the breaks when dealing with sand niggers, Dean Newbury reminded himself.
The road to ultimate power was not a smooth one. A case in point was the continued existence, and even interference, from the Jew Karp and his family and friends. Somehow they kept escaping the best attempts to eliminate them, and they’d managed to foil what should have been major steps forward in the plan.
However, the latest failure could be chalked up to one of those firstborn sons who some of his fellow council members were arguing were so important. “Have you forgotten that Andrew Kane was a firstborn son of a firstborn son?” he asked the others.
“An abomination,” the general snarled. “The bastard kid of the father fucking his whore daughter. Kane should have never been allowed to inherit his father’s seat.”
“My point exactly,” Newbury said. “A useful tool, and if he’d pulled it off, we might be singing a different tune. But my point is that from time to time we’ve realized that we should not be iron-bound to the canon of first sons if the candidate is defective or untrustworthy. We seem to be forgetting that until Kane’s personality disorders got the best of him, he was our golden boy—the next mayor of New York City, and a strong candidate for a run at the White House.”
“Well, at least he was brought up in our ways,” one of the bankers said. “Your nephew is fiftysomething and a lifelong ‘public servant’ known for his fundamentalist views on the Constitution. And then there’s his friendship with Karp. I don’t see how it can work.”
Dean shrugged. “Granted, it may be a difficult sell,” he said. “Unless he can be convinced that it’s for the good of his country.”
“Brainwashing?” the congressman scoffed.
“A version, perhaps,” Dean replied. “But gentlemen, I’m not suggesting that he be initiated straight into the council. We can bring him along slowly and see what sort of candidate he makes. Perhaps blood will tell. If not, there is a spot next to his father in the Newbury plot.”
“And what will you do for an heir if this experiment fails?” the senator asked.
“The daughter of one of my sisters has a ten-year-old son who seems bright enough. The family might prevail upon his parents to let him live under my wing, where he can be provided with all of life’s best advantages.” And maybe persuade them to allow me to adopt the boy so that the Newbury name is not lost, he thought.
“A wiser choice, I think,” the television commentator said.
“Perhaps if I had the time to raise another boy,” Dean replied. “But I want the wheels set in motion for our great triumph before I die.”
> With that said, Dean moved to put the debate over his heir aside for the time being. They had a more pressing matter to attend to: Senator Tom McCullum. Bad enough that he was questioning the legitimacy of the Patriot Act; the council had supported the act as a small step forward toward a government they’d control. But now he was also calling for a full-out congressional probe into the attack at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the involvement of the Russians, and allegations—all true—that the “act of terrorism” had been arranged to turn world opinion against Chechen nationalists. McCullum had gone so far as to hint that he believed that certain factions in both governments were using Islamic extremists for their own ends. And that was really hitting close to home.
McCullum was one of the most persuasive speakers on the Hill. He had a way of uniting both liberal and conservative factions, especially as a champion of the Constitution. After much debate, and going back and forth—after all, assassinating a U.S. senator was not to be taken lightly—the council had decided that it could not risk the potential that a congressional hearing might lead Senator McCullum to them.
The council’s plan had been set in motion by Newbury’s conversation in Manx with Jamys Kellagh. The Sons of Man would march with the Sons of Ireland to silence the critic for the good of all.
Kellagh was next on the evening agenda. Dean pressed a button beneath the table and spoke so that the receptionist could hear. “Miss Rauch, would you let Mr. Kellagh know that we are ready to see him.”
A minute later, Jamys Kellagh entered the room. It was not his real name, but he had not used that since he was a teenager and it had been determined what career path he would take. He was the son of a male family member but not a first son, and groomed to be a second-level operative like his father.
Kellagh remained standing while the others questioned him about his mission in the East Village that December.
“Do we know for certain that the book perished with the bookkeeper?” the old general asked.
“I was there when the girl climbed out of the window,” he said. “She did not have the book, and the place was gutted.”
“Good,” the general said. “But are we confident that what she was told does not compromise the bigger mission?”
Kellagh shook his head. He hated reporting failures to this group, both because he believed in the cause and because it could be dangerous. Too many things had already gone wrong. It started with the mess at St. Patrick’s because of Kane. But it continued when the man he’d sent to murder the reporter in her apartment had tumbled off the roof. The man’s name wasn’t Don Porterhouse, a piece-of-shit rapist who’d been killed and his identity switched with Kellagh’s man, one of his best assassins and a former colleague at the agency, years earlier. Then the bitch had survived another attempt to kill her at the café in Brooklyn, though that he could blame on Nadya Malovo.
“I don’t think there’s a problem,” he said in answer to the general’s question about Lucy Karp. “She heard a story about some odd group from history about which there’s never been anything more up to date than the book. They were able to translate a message in the old tongue between Mr. Newbury and myself, but they had no clue what it means. I think we are safe to go forward as planned.”
“What about Butch Karp?” a banker asked.
“He’s supposed to be taking it easy, doctor’s orders, and is occupying himself with a civil case in Idaho of all places,” Kellagh replied. “Right now, he’s still here in New York, but he doesn’t go to the office and about the only other activity he seems to have is breakfast with a bunch of retired old duffers who sit around arguing about the Constitution. To be honest, I wonder if the latest attempt on his life didn’t take some of the fire out of him.”
“And your counterpart with our Russian friends?” one of the retired judges asked.
“She is taking care of the reporter and the gangster herself,” Kellagh said. He looked at his watch. “In fact, I would say they are no longer an issue.”
“I wonder if we should concentrate more on removing these impediments, Karp and his associates,” the other lawyer said.
Kellagh shook his head. “I wouldn’t recommend that,” he replied. “For one thing, these missions have put them on a heightened alert, and we cannot account for all of their friends. The Indian and the Vietnamese gangster have disappeared, and of course, tracking David Grale is impossible. My advice is to wait while we concentrate on accomplishing the main mission. We can deal with these issues later.”
When Kellagh left the room, the retired general turned to Newbury. “There seem to be a lot of excuses for failure these days from Mr. Kellagh.”
“He’s your nephew, what would you have us do? Up until now he has performed well.”
“Yes, but any more failures and we may have to rethink his position,” the general said. “Too much hinges on him and we can’t afford weak links that fail us. Keep that in mind with your own nephew, Mr. Newbury.”
“I will do that,” Newbury agreed icily. “Now, if there’s nothing else that anyone needs to discuss, I call an end to this Tynwald…. Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh!”
“Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh!” the others replied.
18
THAT SAME NIGHT, MARLENE AND BUTCH WERE CUDDLING on the couch when she told him about Santacristina and his theory that there might be a connection between his daughter’s disappearance and Mikey O’Toole’s case. She’d just returned from Idaho following Huttington’s deposition and some initial inquiries at the Sawtooth police department regarding Maria’s disappearance, and it was weighing on her mind.
Karp was skeptical. “I’m sorry about what he’s going through,” he said. “It doesn’t sound good. But I don’t see the connection except that Huttington is involved in both at least at some level. You know as well as I do that parents of missing children will grasp at any possibility. Every time the cops catch some serial killer—no matter what part of the country he may have terrorized or when—these families converge on the off chance that the killer might know what happened to their son or daughter. But thousands of these cases go unsolved, and their bodies are never found, and—while Santacristina might not want to hear this—sometimes people do run away.”
“I understand that,” Marlene conceded, “however”—she began ticking off her counterpoints on her fingers—“her passport was found in her apartment. No one has used her credit cards or her checking account. She’d laid out her clothes and her books, like any good student getting ready for school the next day. Also, I did some nosing around in the Basque community, which is like one big family, and by everybody’s consensus, Maria and her father were as close as we are to our own children. Do you think Lucy or the boys would ‘run away’ and leave us wondering what happened to them?”
“No, of course not,” Butch replied. “If I had to give an opinion, I’d agree Maria’s dead. I’m even willing to concede that it’s a plausible theory that the reason she is dead is because she was pregnant and Huttington was the father. But it’s just one theory and there’s another that says she’s the victim of a complete stranger who saw a pretty girl and took her into those mountains, killed her, and left her body there. It’s a big country. What I’m having a harder time wrapping my arms around is that her disappearance, and probable murder, is somehow connected to Mikey’s case.”
It was a fair point, and they’d dropped the conversation. Then the telephone rang. It was Murrow calling to alert them to a forthcoming story by Ariadne in the next morning’s edition of her newspaper.
“Let me read you a little of it,” Murrow said. “It’s, uh, written in the first person and starts with Ariadne meeting with an anonymous source on the Staten Island Ferry this evening.”
This reporter and her source were ambushed last night on the ferry by terrorists led by alleged Russian agent Nadya Malovo—the same woman captured after the hostage crisis at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and turned over to Russian authorities by U.S. law enforcement.
&nb
sp; Malovo confirmed to sources that she was responsible for planting the bomb at the Black Sea Café earlier this month. She also boasted that she worked for powerful individuals in Russia who were encouraging acts of terrorism by Islamic extremists. Their aim is to frighten the public in Russia and legitimize their violent suppression of Chechen nationalists to Western governments by claiming to be fighting the worldwide “War on Terrorism.”
“Wow, heck of a story,” Karp said.
“Um, yeah, but boss, I feel like I better tell you something…”
“Uh-oh, I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Yeah, well, it probably won’t get out,” Murrow replied. “But in case it does, I wanted you to hear it from me first…. I, uh, well, I was there when this all happened.”
Karp wasn’t the only one who swore after the story hit the streets. There was an immediate storm of criticism aimed at Stupenagel from congressmen, federal law enforcement agencies, the State Department, and the Russian embassy. They dismissed her story as “fantasy” and “fabrications.” It was pointed out that all the men found dead on the ferry were from Muslim countries and several were on the Homeland Security Department’s list of terrorism suspects. A few days later, a spokesman for the department announced that an investigation had determined that the purpose of the terrorists on board the ferry had been to take over the boat and blow it up. “Any reports of a more massive conspiracy have been discounted,” he said without referring to Stupenagel’s story specifically.
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