The Wallis Jones Series Box Set - Volume Two: Books Four thru Six

by Martha Carr

  So far, thankfully, there was no violence along the western coast of Ireland other than reports of the occasional brawl, but tension was building.

  She looked toward Norman who was busy greeting people at the door. Behind him, she could see across the street and the long line of old wooden shops, each one painted a different, bright color.

  It gave everything a false sense of cheeriness, especially given how the world was unraveling in so many different ways, in so many different directions.

  The different colors that dotted the street were the idea of a mayor from another era who thought it would attract more tourists and save Clifden. Tourism and fishing were their only industries, and these days, bed and breakfast signs dotted the roads with vacancy signs, while fewer boats went out in the early morning.

  Tourism had dried up since the Great Relief, and that had left everyone with less money to spend. Everything trickles down eventually.

  That’s what the media had dubbed that day, the Great Relief and the catchphrase had caught on around the globe. It was the day countries, corporations, even average homeowners woke up to find that there was no trace of the millions of accounts that spelled out who owed what to whom and inevitably spelled out how everyone ranked.

  As it turned out, that was the real ranking of world order, and everyone cared about knowing where they stood more than they realized, until that day.

  There were only a handful of people who could really mark the day the world changed. Knew when it happened down to the minute. Wallis Jones was one of them. It was the day her own teenage son, Ned Weiskopf had pushed the button, one small button on a computer and sent out the final instruction that awakened the virus. The Butterfly Project had come to a fruition no one had intended. Hitting the reset button on the world and making everyone start over again.

  Wallis spent more than one sleepless night wondering if it was inevitable because of her family legacy.

  Norman Weiskopf, her husband, called it unintended consequences. “Really, we should call it, life in general,” he said.

  Vast computer networks were sent a virus that once it gained entry, sat dormant waiting for a final instruction. Once Ned pushed the button, a command went out throughout the world to different corporations, different government systems, different banking systems and erased every kind of known debt of any kind of size, right down to the credit cards people carried in their wallets.

  A complicated game of dominoes that a network of millennials had come up with as a way to save the world from a disaster they didn’t even know existed.

  With any luck, thought Wallis, they never would know about George Clemente and his drive to gain power by controlling the flow of drinkable water.

  Wallis raised her hands to see if this time people would stop arguing in small groups and look up front, toward her. Only the first two rows settled down.

  “Okay, that’s better,” she said, smiling encouragingly, and nodding toward Norman.

  Wallis and Norman were already in Ireland when the virtual world began forgetting how much everyone owed to everyone else. Ned Weiskopf, along with everyone in the Butterfly Project, thousands of millennial orphans raised by the Circle organization, had come up with a solution to the problem of George Clemente and his decade-long plan to control the flow of potable water to millions of human beings and gain power over the world.

  Every time Wallis thought about Clemente’s real intentions she lost her train of thought and her mind ventured down that path of wondering how someone would even think up something so big and methodically work to pull it off over so many years. The focus that must have taken.

  But there it was and there was no escaping it, at least for Wallis or her family. Every time Wallis thought she had stepped away from someone else’s plan to make her as they saw fit, it turned out she had stepped deeper into it.

  That was my mistake, she thought. Walking away, even running away. You can’t run from a bully, they only chase you, she thought.

  That was the idea cemented in the middle of her brain ever since they discovered Clemente’s plot. He was never interested in Management or the Circle, the two shadow governments that for hundreds of years really ruled the world. He had so carefully planned out everything. He even knew something so big would need an even bigger distraction.

  Wallis Jones and her family were the key to his distraction.

  Wallis clenched her jaw tightly, briefly counting all of the ways they had helped him out.

  “We want to hear from everyone,” she said raising her hands and frowning, as everyone tried to shout over her and the hum in the room rose in volume.

  “What are we supposed to do when the supplies stop coming? There isn’t enough food to go around in town. Are we supposed to go back to fishing for what we need?” asked a middle-aged woman.

  Wallis squinted trying to remember her name. Rose something. She knew it was important to remember names, get to know people on a personal basis. It wasn’t easy.

  “You look like you’re used to getting more than your fair share,” shouted an older man from the other side of the room. Laughter rippled across the room as the woman scowled and sat back down.

  Wallis curled her fingers together and raised them to her lips, letting out a loud, piercing whistle. She took a deep breath and did it again until the room finally quieted down.

  “This isn’t helping,” said Wallis. “Right now, we have options. More than you think. But, if any of it’s going to work were going to have to work together. The European Union is holding together and they’re willing to back the euro.”

  “But no one is willing to take it!” said a worried looking mother sitting in the front row, holding a squirming toddler on her lap.

  Wallis looked at the sea of nodding heads and worried expressions, knowing they were all hoping she would say something that would at least give them a good night’s rest. She slowly took in a deep breath and let it out, buying herself some time.

  Norman had walked to the back of the crowd and was standing there patiently waiting for her to answer. It was helping to ground her. The love of her life was still on this journey with her as he had been from the beginning, even if she didn’t know she was on it for far too many years.

  She was born into Management with a mother, Harriet Jones who was leading a double life as an agent for the Circle, keeping everyone’s deepest secrets. It had divided mother and daughter until all of it came spilling out, finally, almost costing Harriet her life.

  If it wasn’t for that horrible night when friends died but Harriet was saved, and Wallis learned something about a Keeper, her mother the second Keeper, she would have never known her mother was not the villain of her life’s story.

  Now, certain factions saw Wallis as the legitimate heir of something she never wanted, and wanted to place her in the same kind of permanent service, living out a life she didn’t want. What made it bearable was through the worst of it Norman was with her.

  That’s what gave her hope, and made her determined to fight her way out of it.

  “As a town, you can make the decision to trade the euro with each other. You can decide that you believe things will straighten out, and they will because they have to. Everyone will want life to go on, and so it will. We will figure out a way to start trading again. Human beings have figured out how to give something to get something since we first showed up on the planet. That won’t change. What can change, the opportunity we all have here that we may never get again, is how fair the system turns out to be. We control that right now,” she said, pointing at different people in the crowd.

  “We control that in ways maybe that we never have before.”

  Wallis like to talk with her hands, and when she really believed in something she would reach toward the very people she wanted to convince. It’s what made her a good trial lawyer. She did it without even thinking, without even knowing she was doing it. Norman called it being in the zone.

  They had already survive
d the years of one close call after another as someone played cat and mouse with their lives. Things got decidedly worse the day Stanley Woermer showed up in her driveway yammering about that damnable list that exposed the two shadowy powers.

  That was when everything popped open and Wallis found out about her true origins. Her late father, Walter Jones was thought to be a direct descendent of the original founders of Management, created hundreds of years ago to give average workers the chance to economically rise. A good idea that went wrong somewhere along the way.

  For some reason, people are rarely happy staying middle class, even when it’s comfortable if they can see a path to power. That was how Harriet had explained it to her during one of their recent Skype calls.

  Harriet ended up explaining a lot of things. Like letting it be known about Wallis’ father’s lineage, and finally admitting that was just one more lie. The ancestor never actually existed. Still, most people didn’t know that because the biggest part of Harriet’s role as the Keeper was to make sure no one found out Management was worshipping a false memory. The Circle wanted to keep some sort of balance in the world, even if it meant propping up their enemy to some degree.

  The Circle was a younger organization who owed their creation to the need to push against the murderous hierarchy Management had become in the last century, almost wiping the Circle out of existence. Norman Weiskopf’s father was one of the few people to survive the purge, and along with Esther Ackerman, an old friend and Circle operative, and as it turned out, Harriet Jones, had made it to America to rebuild their ranks. The twenty remaining zwanzig who restarted the Circle.

  They would do thing differently than Management who wanted allegiance over everything else. The greatest good, they called it.

  Management’s idea was to invite tweens into their system of elite schools, promising a more direct path to a secure upper middleclass lifestyle in exchange for following some basic rules about blending in and making sure everything ran smoothly.

  The one fatal flaw was the lack of an out clause. People left Management by fleeing and hiding and running their entire lives, or by death and usually a convenient and gruesome death that served as a message to others but looked like an unfortunate accident to everyone else.

  That was the most amazing part about the two super giants. Most people didn’t realize they existed at all.

  That’s what Wallis had really learned from all of this. Information is king and who controls it can control the world.

  The noise level in the room started to pick up again.

  “Do we give up here?” she asked, hearing the catch in her voice. Not now, she thought, stay steady. “Every family here has been connected to every other family in Clifden for generation upon generation. In hard times, which have surely come before, like in the 1840’s to Ireland, people here pulled together. That’s why the potato famine didn’t win.”

  “The Orange didn’t win, you mean.”

  Wallis couldn’t see who had said that and smiled cautiously at the reference to the British.

  “When someone has lost a job, or gotten sick or just needed a friend to listen, one of you has stepped up. Nobody has had to suffer alone. Okay, so now it’s all of us, even the British,” she said, batting her hand at the grumbling.

  “We can’t give in to dividing lines, not right now. You want to make it through all of this with the least amount of suffering? Start looking for the ways we connect and become willing to try. When this first happened and everyone realized the banks were closed and none of the ATMs worked, it was one of you that organized the sign-up sheets to make sure no one went without basic food or medicine, and no one started hoarding out of fear. Someone else organized a neighborhood watch and you’ve all taken turns walking the streets, day and night, armed only with a flashlight and a whistle. That says something. You believe, not just in each other, but basically in a system, even if you have to rewrite the rules.”

  The mayor of Clifden, Ann Flaherty, a stylish older woman with silver hair cropped around her face, stood up, her hands clasped neatly in front of her. “We’ve tried this before, you know,” she said, the Irish accent making it hard for Wallis to catch every word. It was clear she was well respected, something Wallis had learned right away, and her family had played a prominent role in the town for as long as anyone could remember.

  Everyone quieted down to hear what the mayor had to say.

  “With grim results.”

  Wallis felt her chest tighten and took in small sips of air. If the mayor was turning against her ideas, then the momentum here would be all but lost. All of the work Norman and Wallis had already done in other towns that dotted the western coast might unravel as well. Everything was still so fragile. The local alliances were crucial to the Butterfly Project’s bigger plan.

  She waited to see what came next, bracing herself for the changing tide.

  “But the past does not predict the future,” said the mayor, “or we would all still be great Celtic warriors,” she said, turning and giving the crowd a wink.

  “The last time the Irish saw their old way of life change, no one was asking for our opinion, much less our help. We were forced into change to serve others,” she said, contempt in her voice. “This time we sit at the table. Wallis Jones is right. The world, the human beings in it are going to find a way to get things moving again. Either we start, and start right here with what we can do, or the world will ignore us again.”

  “So, we fight?” asked a tall thin man in a bright, red sweater whose voice shook with every word.

  “No, something a lot more radical than that,” said the mayor. “I believe, what the lady is asking us to do is to cooperate.” The mayor held out her hand to Wallis. “The floor is yours, my dear. Tell us your plan.”

  Wallis looked back toward Norman, her eyes shining with tears.

  “The world, to a large degree, is how you look at it. I can tell you all about the differences I see that stand between us, or I can do something courageous and tell you about the ways we need each other and are connected, and I can act on that. My belief system, our belief system, our origin stories that we carry around can change right now, today. If we choose to believe in ourselves, and each other.”

  Wallis’ origin story had changed completely. From a successful lawyer, a good mother, a loving wife, a great friend and someone who tolerated her mother to warrior who was still trying to hold on to all of the rest. It wasn’t easy.

  She had believed for her entire life that her mother, Harriet Jones was in lockstep with Walter and even colder and more calculating than he was. That last part was true, but the reasons that Wallis didn’t know till recent years, changed everything else.

  Harriet Jones, as the second Keeper and a hidden Circle operative who had been placed in the highest position in Management, purposely next to Walter Jones when she was still a young woman in what was an arranged marriage, even if Walter never knew it, believed more strongly in the possibilities than almost everyone else. Her entire life was donated to the cause of the Circle so that everyone else in the world would still have a choice, including and especially her only child, Wallis Jones, named for a failed monarchy.

  Harriet’s sense of humor had always been bent. Wallis was just coming to appreciate that too.

  “We have to be able to trade with the outside world, as well,” said a burly man in the middle of the crowd. Wallis recognized him from previous meetings. He was her personal sandpaper, always shouting something that she couldn’t ignore. But, she appreciated that he seemed to want to work with her, if only she could give him answers.

  “Finn, right? So, Finn, let’s figure out how to work with them. They have the same problems we do. We’ll start with the basics. What do we have that the outside world needs? How can we make ourselves more valuable? But we’ll do it as a group. As a town,” she said, opening her arms wide, “you will all decide together. A group conscience where everyone gets the chance to speak, everyone gets a vote.
” A vote that will actually count, she wanted to say, and not one that would be diluted by what the powers behind everything wanted. No struggle with Management, no intervention by the Circle.

  “What will you do?” asked the young mother in the front row.

  “Good question,” said Wallis. Her hands reached out again toward the crowd and she moved them around, feeling the passion rise inside of her. “I will help you to reason things out. I will do what I can, along with my husband, Norman to negotiate, to ask questions, and to keep looking for the solutions. We will be a part of your town for as long as we’re here. The only way we can lose is if we get stuck in the problem.”

  “You’re not really a part of the town, though, are you? As long as you plan to move on, you don’t have to really worry if things get solved here. At some point, if we fail, you can leave,” said Finn, crossing his arms across his chest.

  Norman was still standing in the back of the room. They had learned early on that things went better if they split up and talked to people individually.

  Norman was at his best at that. He had this way of listening to anyone without letting them know how he felt about the situation. It seemed to make what people want to talk more, to trust him, and to want to work with him. It’s what made him such a good lawyer. Eventually, everyone wanted to work with Norman.

  Wallis was better at the bigger picture. She was better at pointing out how they were all connected to each other.

  “Like it or not, Finn, there’s no place left to go and not be a part of what comes after the Great Relief. That’s the problem and the opportunity. We can’t ignore each other anymore. That’s what we said when we first got here. We think something big is coming, the next part, and we might have a solution. As it turns out, it’s all of you being willing to work together and then each town, knitting itself to the next town over and making a decision as a group. Everyone putting down the fear that they won’t get what they need.”