by Vincent Heck
“Well, to begin, the bull crap story that those buildings were able to come down on its own.”
“What’s your fascination with the fact that you don’t know all the answers behind a colossal tragedy?” The chairman asked. “Isn’t that what this commission is about? Trying to find answers that a lot of us don’t know?”
“I need the answers so I’m sure how to feel about what happened.”
“Don’t we all, son. But, hey, let’s say building seven turned out to be demolished, then what?”
“Then I’d have to know who. And why you all got it so wrong. And how could you have let it happen. And why our rights had to be taken later.” Czyra began to tear up. “And why you took my friends from me.”
“Now, now. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I did not take anyone from you.” The chairman placed a stack of papers in front of Czyra. “This is the investigation folks are asking for. It was done, already. This – what we’re doing now – is being done as a formality for the public. The official 9/11 commission was done in a way in which we could protect national security. This complete investigation that sits in front of you, however, is classified for future reference.”
“Why?
You see, there was a game created in northwest India during the Gupta Empire. It was called, Chaturaṅga. It consisted of the four divisions of Indian military: cavalry, elephants, and chariotry. The game was later adopted by the Persians, the Muslims, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Greek before finally being evolved into the game of Chess by the Europeans.”
The chairman walked over to the front of the desk in front of Czyra and sat one cheek on the corner edge, crossing his wrists.
“And what the game’s objective is, is to conquer the opponent’s army. You have to use the army you have—which evolved from the cavalry, elephants, and chariotry into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively — to battle.
It’s already bad enough, in the game chess, that your opponent can see your every move. So, in order to have advantage in the game, there has to be a superior strategy that you plan, but without the opponent knowing.
Of course one-on-one, that’s simple. But, in real life, with a group of nations filled with people you’re responsible for demanding information, it puts us in a predicament. You see? So we need our constituents to realize that while they have the right to know how they’re being protected, there is a game of chess taking place in real life, everyday on a massive scale. Some things we need to keep to ourselves for strategy purposes. Surely you can understand that.”
Czyra listened as he flipped through the paperwork. The chairman continued, “Hey, look up Kennedy’s address to the public. He says the same thing that I just did. It’s imperative we balance the two; what the public knows, and public safety. In the meantime, you look through that, and hopefully you understand: not all can know everything. That’s for later to look back on in history. We only need your faith. We’ve done right by you so far. There are a lot of things going on here that you don’t know of. We’re trying to get to the bottom of it. So do with that info what you’d like. You can keep it to yourself, or we’ll just do what we see fit in this game of chess we’re all playing.”
“Project F.A.I.T.H.?” Czyra asked.
“See, youngin’. You didn’t know as much as you thought.” Czyra continued to flip through the pages. “In a perfect world, this makes sense. I just see things have turned into something else.”
An awkward silence passed through the room.
“So, what do you need us to do?” Jason asked.
“Fall back. I need you to hand over your equipment and retire out of the picture as we handle this.”
Jason looked towards Czyra who had tears caught in his bottom eyelid. “Alright. Deal.” Jason said. He needed a vacation, anyway. He needed time to heal. He needed time to think. And Czyra needed to grow.
“You’ve got it, young guy?” The chairman asked Czyra. Czyra looked as if his whole world had crumbled around him.
Jason nodded towards the chairman while lipping, “He’s got it.”
Czyra flopped the papers back onto the desk. “So all of these agencies really said this stuff?”
“Not just agencies, but science labs, and even big-time media companies such as Popular Science. Once this all declassifies, the world will know the great operation we executed to fix things around here. This is monumental.”
Jason gathered his keys out of his pocket and dropped them on the desk. “The Broadway lot. Here’s my things.” He dropped his gadgets on the table. “The rest of the things are in my car.”
“I’m gonna have someone see you two out of here. If you need anything else, here’s my number.” The chairman handed Jason a piece of paper. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we have a public commission to carefully look over. Oh, and Jason, you think you can testify tomorrow?”
“Sure, sir.”
The deflated walk out of the office into the hallway felt like a billion years. “Well, pal.” Jason said to a sulking Czyra, “I know this is difficult for you, but this is what it is right, at the moment. Maybe we can come back to this later. We should try to lay off of this. This is a ‘let’s sleep on it’ moment.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should wait for the commission to be released.”
As they exited the building onto the street Jason agreed. “Let’s wait a while then we’ll decide.”
Nebraska Avenue Complex
Michael received a phone call.
“We’ve got him, and we’ve gotten all of his technology. We’ve got his body chip under full surveillance and he has no way of figuring us out anymore. He’s done. He has taken an oath to stand down, and he’s going to retire. We’ve gotten him out the way. It was simple – he came to us.”
“Cool. I’ll let the fellas know.”
Michael dreaded the possibility that he may have had to kill Jason. He dialed the guys and prepared a meeting with the Brendenhalls.
“Emergency meeting. We’ve got’em. His car, his technology—everything. He’s tapped, and highly under all the agencies’ surveillance. We’ve assigned an additional UAV to him, as well. It’s time to proceed with F.A.I.T.H. We’ll discuss the details when we get there.”
PART FOUR
The surveillance age
XXIV
Brooklyn Heights, NYC
February, 2007
HSAS: ORANGE – HIGH TERRORIST RISK
Stillness filled the Brooklyn air in a way only the city that never sleeps knew. The Heights definitely became desolate during late nights, but the view of the piers in lower Manhattan out on his back patio showed him that there was definitely an activity still present within the city. The cars across the East River on the FDR Drive told him time never sleeps. That, combined with the peace in the Brooklyn Heights kept him both alert and serine.
Where the towers used to sit, there was an emptiness—except for a lone construction crane. That crane represented the rebuilding of the skyline lost in 2001.
Often, Jason would sit out on the patio until late hours staring into Manhattan. He could never shake the fact that September 11, 2001 didn’t quite go as planned. None of it did.
He couldn’t remember much – only bits. Occasionally, after scanning his body chip with Tameka’s memory scanner, he’d have dreams that seemed real, but clearly didn’t happen. He’d have dreams of meetings with the Megiddos, or memories of his daughter in the towers, just before being buried under a large pile of rubble. Nightmares. Nightmares that only played tricks with his emotions.
The commission meetings, three years ago, ended unsatisfactory to him and a lot of other people. The closing statements concluded that the cause was ‘a failure of imagination.’ To Jason, that just wasn’t true. On the day of the happenings, he had planned a drill almost exactly like what was happening. He had planned those drills two times before that same year. The scenario was a maste
rful, imaginative, concoction from his own brain. He knew that. But, it happened.
A drone puttered up from below his balcony and stopped just in front of the rail. Jason smiled and waved. “Hi, Michael. Hi Grambling.” He mocked.
The drone did a 360 spin, as if it were dancing, and puttered off into the darkness. The lights on the device shrank smaller as it flew away into the starry atmosphere that were the other city monitoring drones.
Behind him, in the background, inside his duplex apartment, the TV ran. There had been another American tragedy earlier that week.
He listened in on the latest for a minute and heard the replay of a screaming thousands rushing out of a sports stadium. A lone gunman somehow breached security and rushed the Super Bowl field with massive guns.
The story hadn’t become clear who and why someone would do this. But, the TV replayed the gruesome horror over and again. Football players were injured, a bigtime wide receiver star was killed, dozens of fans and police were hurt.
The tragedy was probably the biggest since 9/11.
Jason rested, caught in mixed thoughts, with his laptop on his propped up, stretched out, legs. It was beginning to burn his thighs. His browser sat idle with some 17 tabs open. To the fore, sat the face of Cyzra.
He hit play on Czyra’s web video.
Cyzra, now 24, was more mature. He was famous in the underground media world. He was regarded as a journalist, and he ran a website called MediaBattle. His company’s claim was that the mainstream media was not trustworthy.
Jason kept up with his channel vehemently. Some things he viewed as erroneous, while other things were spot on. All of Czyra’s work was outside of the box, for sure.
Czyra questioned everything about 9/11. That’s where his fame began. The 9/11 truthers took a hold of his very well collected info, and used it for their cause.
His new video, as usual, always lead back to that tragedy. It was an impossible battle because a lot of the site’s claims seemed so egregiously speculative. A large amount of Americans would reject most of it. He had a huge following, but as many as there were following him, there was a double fold of those who casted the site off as tin-foil, not mentally sane, weirdos—or paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Jason knew that’s exactly how Czyra and his reporters appeared, but he felt what was being done was necessary, if nothing else, to the public who had gotten into a pattern of following whatever came out of D.C. via the television.
A portion of his insides made him feel that there was something good about what Czyra was doing, despite the wide criticism by the mainstream. The right idea, but in the wrong tree. There’s, indeed, a huge conspiracy, but Czyra’s claims were lukewarm at best.
The actual conspiracy, in fact, may make someone look crazier than the ones that exist on the internet.
Jason buried his head into his hand, dug the tip of his fingers into his temples and attempted to rub the tension out. He wondered if it was time for him to go back to work. His time of letting things develop was over. That familiar nagging feeling that began some four years ago was telling him it was time to act. He hadn’t felt the feeling this strong in three years.
He picked up his head and carried his burning hot laptop into his apartment. He needed a starting place. The chaos on TV was playing in rotation; a series of video from UAVs showed the terrorists entering the stadium, charging the field and shooting at players. They’d show the mayhem of the fans fighting to get out of harms way, too.
From those scenes, they’d switch to interviews. The disastrous imagery was constant. Is that where I should start his new investigation? Or should I pick up from where I left off with Tameka and 9/11?
He had so much information gathered and known about 9/11, that he figured he’d start there again. His first contact was obvious. Czyra.
Upstate New York
Covert underground Warehouse.
A desolate spacious underground bunker housed Jason’s car. A group of hackers were put on a team to try to crack into Jason’s vehicle computer system. In 2004, when the car was seized, it was issued as routine data collection. After the DHS’ staff of hackers couldn’t get into Jason’s car system, they raised the priority on the task, and employed white hat contractors to get it done.
“Sir! We’ve got a breakthrough on UPT-1. We’ve cracked the code. We’re in.”
The lead hacker in the bunker ran over. “It’s about time. Took us four years to do it.”
“Three.”
“What do you see?”
“I see a lot of text messages from two people. A Christine and a Max. I see phone calls to and from the … I don’t know where this is. Look it up.”
As the working hacker looked up the number, the lead man searched through the information. “This is nothing but benign usage of stolen government caliber equipment. This car is loaded with military grade technology. It can do things that most humans couldn’t even think up in a movie script. Most of it is unused, though. That’s the biggest thing about this car. Don’t think there’s anything really damaging on here. What’s this last folder though?”
The hacker attempted to open and it asked for another code. As he began to try to decode it, the apparent became more focused: this code was more encrypted than the initial.
He approached the working technician and flipped him hacking software. “You’re going to need the big boy stuff for this. You have even more work on your hands than before. Good luck.”
“Well, where are you going?”
“I’m going to report to defense our findings. Search what you’ve found today, and have a detailed report on my desk by the end of the day. We can learn from what he may still have through his interactions with his wife. Tomorrow we’ll begin trying to crack the next code.”
“OK. Sir, one more thing.”
“Wassup?”
“This system says ‘one of three’.”
“There must be two other vehicle prototypes out there like this, then. We’ll attempt to track those down, too. Good catch, my man.”
Westfields Marriott Hotel.
Chantilly, Virginia 1:00 a.m.
Czyra sat at the edge of a stiff mattress in a hotel room, wired up on endless cups of coffee. Jason had contacted him, and he wanted to have an event big enough for his arrival and speech.
It was time to get the ‘take back America revolution’ going faster than usual; faster than they normally could without a man of Jason’s caliber.
As Czyra and his camera man captured footage of what they believed was going to be an exposing of the world governments for once and for all.
His crew viewed this mission as just short of a suicide mission. Czyra looked into the camera’s lens with focus. His whole body surged with an electrical pulse from head to toe. He could hear a hum of anxiety in his head. He spoke firmly into the camera:
“This is the same hotel that I lost Jasmine in, folks. During one of these meetings. I’m ready to face this and show the world how revolutionary Americans are. Let’s show them what happens when we band together. Let’s change the world, again.” He held up a note on the Brendenhall paper with the “B” on it. “This note accompanied five fingers that they sliced off of Jasmine – it represents to me, how far they think they can go to dominate all of us. Now, I’m here, to face them head-to-head. My fingers aren’t going anywhere but in their eye-sockets if they come within arms length of me.”
Czyra shook his head in attempt to stave off his anxiety and emotion. “There are a few Brendenhalls in here tonight. The rest will come tomorrow. At some point in between that time, they’re going to have to do something to evacuate this hotel. They cleared most of it out by setting everyone’s checkout for yesterday morning. But, I refused to leave. They didn’t plan for this, and now they probably don’t know what to do. As far as they know, I’m just a citizen that they have to deal with tomorrow. I’m forcing their hand. Come and get me!”
Czyr
a had a gut feeling that he was going to get to the bottom of this by disrupting their plans. And with him being known as “the biggest conspiracy theorist in America”, they couldn’t kill him. It would spark too much uproar.
He continued to speak into the camera, “This is frequent place where they meet with the President’s administration. They do it, maybe, every six months. Now, I don’t know for certain what they discuss, but it’s no doubt something that is intended to change the world.”
He looked at his watch again. 12:59 a.m. He had worked hard to gain this sort of status. He rejected the title of ‘conspiracy theorist’. He more saw himself more as a ‘truth talker’—a truth seeker—a revolutionist. He also knew that title was the only thing that allowed him to reach such a far audience – his audience were mostly conspiracy seekers. His title as ‘leader of the conspiracy theorists’, in his mind, was the elites’ way of managing people who spoke some of the more tough issues to face.
“You have to understand. The Brendenhall Group’s motives are not strictly political.” Cyzra continued. “They’re a group of men who are all rich; the richest in the world. Geoff Gastroton from the head of CBS, Heath Masterly, the head of Heath Oil, Yaris Boschan, the head of Boschan Bank and 20 other members like that all the way from electronic companies to car companies. Random rich people who control our economy. They live all over the world—but, this morning, they’re all gonna be in this hotel—with our President’s administration and only lord knows who else -- discussing their self-progression and the domination of we the people. What is their goal?”
Barely taking a break from his last sentence, he broke into his next point. “Now let me ask you this: what if all the richest people in your church, or your workplace all formed a clique—made a pact, and met with your priest or boss on a regular? What if you began to notice that things for the rest of you in the congregation or workplace started to deteriorate, but nothing ever seemed to happen to them? In fact, they became more comfortable. What would that make you think? How would that make you feel? We, the people, need answers. They haven’t offered up one.”