by Peter Hartz
Craig knew he was on to something, though, and wasn’t about to let it go.
“What kind of deal did the prosecutor make with you to send me away? It had to be something good enough to be worth it. Leniency on another client? That must be it. It couldn’t be anything else. Who was it?” Craig suddenly knew he was on the right track as the blood drained completely from Harold’s face, and his intensity ramped up as he leaned forward, the shackles holding him to the table clattering as his hands pounded into the table, with entirely different effect from the time that Harold did it.
Harold was at a loss for words. When confronted with the truth of what he had done, he froze up entirely. All he could do was open and close his mouth in a remarkably accurate imitation of a fish out of water, trying to think of anything at all to say that would stop this interrogation. He was suddenly and intensely terrified of the man handcuffed to the table in front of him. His mind chased itself around in circles, before he found what to say.
“Fuck you!” In retrospect, it sounded better in his head, but it seemed to convey the right message, so he said it again, drawing it out for more emphasis. “Fuuuuuck youuuuuu!”
“No, I don’t think so. I have already gotten fucked over by you. I think you need to experience a taste of being powerless yourself.” A strange smile came over Sanderson’s face while Jameson watched, wondering what was going on in his former client’s head.
“You know, I used to have a favorite movie a long time ago. Jurassic Park. You know why I loved it? Because of the velociraptors. They were amazing. Incredibly vicious, completely fearless, and entirely lethal killing machines. Probably the most perfect killing machine in history. You know what would make them perfect? If there was a human intellect behind them, and that human brain had absolutely nothing to lose!” He almost roared the last four words, and stood up completely.
Craig shrugged his shoulders, and the shackles fell away from his hands and feet as if they were suddenly much too large, then right before Harold’s eyes, and to the astonished eyes of the guards, watching in the security room, Craig wasn’t there anymore. But Harold wasn’t alone in the room.
In a slight flash of light, Craig changed into a velociraptor, his favorite creature in his favorite movie.
Harold screamed like a little girl as his world suddenly turned into a nightmare of huge teeth and even bigger rage, while losing complete control of his bodily functions. As it was, it turned out to be very fortuitous indeed that he’d visited the restroom before entering the interview room in the prison. If he’d had anything in his bladder or bowels, those noxious compounds would have made its appearance at that time.
Craig hopped up on the table, then over, the massive form leaving indentations in the steel tabletop as he passed. He hoped he was allowing as much of his anger as possible show through the form he changed into, and from the look on the despicable lawyer’s face, it looked like he was succeeding.
Harold’s eyes bulged out, and he fell back into the wall behind him as the enraged horse-sized dinosaur swarmed over the heavy metal table, leaving deep indentations where his feet landed. He heard a high-pitched screaming noise that seemed to be in time with his breathing, but he had never heard the sound before, and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
Then all rational thought left him as the angry predator swung its head at high speed into him, throwing him along the wall into the corner, where he crumpled to the floor in pain from the impact of the hard head and the harder steel wall. His vision spun and went grey for a moment, but when it cleared, there was a massive open mouth full of teeth right in front of him. Then the form seemed to hunch back slightly, as if bracing itself for something and he slammed his head back into the hard wall behind him and turned his head to try to get away from it.
That something wasn’t long in coming. The velociraptor trumpeted its hunting cry at him at an impossible volume, the sound of an apex predator without equal in the modern world. It seemed to reach deep inside him and turn his guts to water, and he screamed again as the deafening sound hit him with all the concussive force of an explosion.
Nearby in the prison, inmates and guards alike jumped in fear as the impossible sound reached them. Some few seemed to subconsciously recognize that they had heard the sound before, having seen Jurassic Park all those years ago, but none really connected the two together to consciously recognize it. Virtually everyone that did hear that inhuman cry were terrified at the sound, shrinking back into a defensive slouch or putting their hands up in front of their faces.
The guards in the security office looking and listening to the camera feed from the room also jumped like they’d been shocked. Since Sanderson hadn’t been very forthcoming with his plans, none had known ahead of time what was going to happen, but all had seen the footage from the ‘shower incident’ as it was being called. They thought that nothing would surprise them. How wrong they were.
The guards and the sergeant all watched screens in front of them, paralyzed, certain they were going to witness the lawyer they now knew had sent a most-likely innocent man to prison get killed, or even eaten alive, based on the conversation they’d just listened to even as it was being recorded.
“Geez, boss, do we want to pull the P.O.S. out of there before he eats him?” The question came out in a fearful yet humorous almost-whisper, but the sergeant just shook his head.
“I’m not going in there. He’s... not in the best of moods right now.” The understatement was greeted with some nervous chuckles and laugher from the guards. “Do you want to try to take him down like that? If so, where do you want your remains sent? And besides, didn’t you tell me last week that the world has too many lawyers in it?” The sergeant shook his head again. “No way in hell. Just make sure you are recording this. We have to let it play out. I think I know how it’s going to end, though.”
The massively loud sound abruptly went away, and moments later, hands reached out and yanked Harold to his feet. He opened eyes he hadn’t realized he’d shut tight while he’d been expecting to be eaten at any moment. Then a hand flashed up and slapped him, not too hard, but with enough force to get his attention.
“Do you want to tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth now, so help you God, counsellor?”
Harold’s mouth opened, and he started babbling uncontrollably. Craig slapped him again.
“Knock it off! Slow down! Make sure I can understand you. Start over. Now, what the hell happened, and why am I here? Speak slowly and loudly. I want to remember this.”
And Harold discovered the knowledge that one is to be hanged does, indeed, wonderfully focus the mind, and he allowed his former client to pull him over to the table and into a chair, where he unburdened his troubled soul to Craig, and, unknowingly, to the video cameras recording everything happening in the interview room.
When Harold had said everything he could think of that related to the case, and a whole bunch of other things that really didn’t have anything even remotely to do with what he did to Sanderson, the guards all looked at one another in shock. This kind of thing only happened in the movies, or in books, right? Then, as one, they all looked at the sergeant, who gave a sigh. Why did this stuff have to happen when he was on shift? And what the hell did he do about it now?
“Hey, I have an idea.” The words came from one of the younger guards.
“And…?” The word came out of the sergeant’s mouth slowly, as if he was not going to like what he was about to hear.
The young woman shrugged. “Well, this needs to get out there. So, there’s always a chance that our security server gets hacked again and this gets put up on YouTube. It’s happened before, right?”
The incident had not been happy for anyone in the prison’s I.T. staff, but no one had been fired for it, since the video had only been of a prisoner confessing their guilt for the crime he’d been convicted of to another prisoner. The victim had been overjoyed at the confession, but no one else in any off
icial capacity was really happy about it.
Still, the external audit of the prison’s network security that had been released last month had been less than pleasant, with the final report clearly indicating that there was virtually no way to keep anyone with the intelligence of a fourth-grader out of the system to prevent another leak. There was a state task force gearing up to address the issue, blah blah blah. He was certain that the problem would be fixed sometime a decade or more after he retired. Of course, then the current system would be weeks away from replacement, and they would start the whole thing over.
The sergeant looked at the young woman with a beatific look on her face, then turned away.
“I have no idea what you are talking about. Footage from our secure servers got leaked to YouTube? Again? That would be shocking. Shocking!”
She grinned, and her hands flew over the keyboard as her plan began to take shape.
Chapter 38
"And now, the CBS Evening News with Richard Morse.”
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We begin tonight with three stories from the Internet; the video sharing website YouTube.com, specifically. For those of you who don’t know, YouTube.com is a website where people can share videos of any kind. There are lots of different types of videos on the site: music videos, trailers for movies, self-help videos, how-to videos for everything from working out to fixing things like cars and computers, funny people and animal clips people have recorded; almost anything you can think of is on YouTube.com these days. Most of it is pretty harmless and, usually, entertaining.
“But sometimes, something is posted to YouTube.com that makes the news. There are three such videos that came out in the last twenty four hours. One is a video that certainly looks fake, but may not be, that is of a mythical creature: a unicorn. And it appears that the unicorn can talk. We will have more on that video in a minute.
“The second is a darker video that seems to be of a recording of a defense attorney meeting with his client in prison some three years after his client had been convicted, wrongly and with the collusion of his own attorney along with the prosecutor in the case, it seems. We will also return to that video later.
“But the most shocking video that has hit the Internet in the last twenty four hours is of a senior U.S. Congresswoman, Rose Smithson, a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Ohio, talking candidly on camera about being involved in a horrific plot to murder a sister and brother, along with the brother’s wife, in order for the National Security Agency, commonly referred to by its initials as the N.S.A., to take over the company, all because the company has a new cryptographic technology that the N.S.A. was unable to decrypt or otherwise compromise. It is unknown whether or not the congresswoman knew she was being recorded.
“In the video, a man, who is off-camera, is asking questions of the congresswoman, who calmly answers the questions candidly, as if she were discussing the latest appropriations bill. Instead, what she is describing is a plot she apparently put in motion to use a black-ops team to murder the owners of the business, a privately-held company named MDST, Inc., which is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but also has a second location somewhere in the United Kingdom.
“The public is especially aware of the N.S.A. right now, after the recent revelations by a former N.S.A. contractor, who stole thousands of classified documents before fleeing the country. The documents were eventually given to two British journalists, who met with the NSA contractor in Hong Kong, after which he fled to Russia, where he is currently staying, with the blessings of the Russian Government.
“The congresswoman’s office tried to get YouTube.com to take down the video, claiming the congresswoman’s words have been taken out of context, but so far, YouTube.com has resisted. An emergency injunction was filed in federal court to compel the website to take down the video, but by now, several websites around the world have received copies of the video, and are hosting it themselves for anyone to view should they wish, so it is unclear what impact would be made by getting the video off of YouTube.com at this time.
“We are joined now by our legal analyst, Ellen DeMarais. Ellen, thank you for joining us.”
“Thank you for having me, Richard.”
“First of all, have you viewed the video in its entirety? What is your opinion of its legitimacy?”
“Yes, I have viewed it. And I have to say, things are not looking good for the congresswoman. She is clearly not being coerced in any obvious or visible way. The actual video is a composite of three different video sources running simultaneously, with the main video, as you can see here, thank you for bringing that up for me, forming the majority of the screen, with the two insets placed in the upper two corners. The other two video clips were uploaded full size to YouTube.com as well, and the comments for the main video provide links to them for anyone to view separately as well.”
“What do we know about the man in the video?”
“Actually, we don’t know anything about him at all. None of the camera angles ever reveal his face, and he is not wearing anything that is identifiable. His voice is non-descript, although I understand the FBI is running a voice analysis of the recording to attempt to discover his identity. They really want to talk to him right now.”
“Is there anything you can tell me about where the video was shot?” Morse asked innocently, as if they hadn’t discussed the question ahead of time off-air.
“Yes, from what people are saying, that is actually Congresswoman Smithson’s office in the capital building.”
“So you were saying that the video looks to be legitimate?”
“Yes, it certainly does look that way. When Smithson is talking, you can clearly see, in full High Definition video from the main camera the man must be holding, the congresswoman’s lips moving in synchronization with what is being said. And what she is saying is that she ordered a U.S. Government black-ops team to kidnap and kill three private citizens, and possibly two more if necessary, in order for the Government, and specifically the NSA, to gain control of encryption technology that the NSA was unable to break.”
“Is there any possibility that the video was faked somehow? That it was cobbled together from several others to manipulate what Smithson was saying?”
“Our own analysts have studied the video since it was posted, and have concluded that if it was cobbled together, it was an incredible job. This level of sophistication would be almost impossible to accomplish by anyone without millions of dollars-worth of editing and rendering equipment. The camera the man is obviously holding, since you do not see it in the other two video streams, is never visible, but it is moving in a seemingly random pattern as the man moves in the chair, causing the congresswoman’s image to move around the field of view so that she is not at any predictable point in the clip. That was actually quite brilliant, I must say. It makes aligning two different clips for the purpose of using an editor to string them together seamlessly all but impossible, adding further proof that the video is genuine.”
“Where does this case go from here?”
“Well, that is a good question. You can hear in the video that the sister, Michelle Wilhelm, was supposedly murdered, and the team that killed her was waiting to do the same to Michelle’s brother, David Wilhelm. That was the last that Congresswoman Smithson heard from the Black Ops team sent to commit these crimes, and no one has seen Michelle Wilhelm since. Allison Wilhelm, David’s wife, is also missing, and hasn’t been seen since the attack on Michelle several weeks ago. David has been working at MDST, Inc., but has refused all requests for interviews.
“At this point, the Justice Department has announced its intentions to investigate the congresswoman, MDST, Inc., Michelle Wilhelm, David Wilhelm, and Allison Wilhelm, and the possible connection to the National Security Agency. That could take weeks or months at this point. Additionally, the FBI has stated publicly that it will look into the matter, including the disappearance of Michelle Wilhelm and Allison Wilhe
lm, the use of a black-ops team to commit murder at the orders of a U.S. Congresswoman and the NSA, and the NSA’s involvement in all of this.”
◆◆◆
“We turn now to the second video posted in the last twenty four hours. This one is about a man in prison for life without parole for the sexual assault and murder of a young old boy, nearly four years ago. The man in prison is known as Craig Allan Sanderson, and he is now twenty-eight years old. His lawyer is captured in the video admitting that he made a deal with the prosecutor to let Mr. Sanderson be convicted in exchange for a plea deal for one of his other clients, who was later convicted of armed robbery in a crime that occurred after his plea deal, supposedly to support his drug habit.
“Ellen, what can you tell us about this case?”
“Well, Richard, on the surface, it certainly looks like Mr. Sanderson is guilty. There was an eyewitness for the prosecution, the police had some physical evidence linking Mr. Sanderson to the murder, and it appeared that in every respect, the case was airtight.”
“But that wasn’t the case, was it?” Richard asked in the effort to direct the conversation.
“Certainly not. It appears that the defense attorney, Harold Jameson, did not cross-examine the eyewitness, never contested the evidence, and generally did nothing to defend his client. We are not sure what caused Jameson to confess, but as everyone saw in the video, he was shaking badly, and sweating. A quick call to his office elicited the expected ‘No comment’ from the office. We are attempting to get more information for the viewers, including an interview with Craig Sanderson.
“When we called the prison, the person who answered the switchboard said they would pass on the request to the warden. Our producer asked some further questions about the situation, but something in the person’s tone of voice seemed guarded or maybe evasive, as if there were more to the story. Not sure what is happening at this point. We did find out from the court jurisdiction that heard the original case that no appeal has ever been filed on Mr. Sanderson’s behalf, something we found unusual in a murder case where the defendant was sentenced to life without parole.