It amounted to corporations, bad; equal distribution of wealth, good. In a word, socialism. Or in its worst incarnation, communism. The environment was the catch-all that enabled these factors to coalesce. Corporations could never be seen as caring conservators of the environment if they had no human face. Because their purpose was to make a profit to benefit an elite few—the shareholders—their interests could never be deemed as socially or environmentally favorable.
The concern about world population drew many people to the movement as well. According to their thinking, climate change was decimating the planet. The earth couldn’t sustain human life much longer the way things were going. To solve the problem, there needed to be fewer people consuming resources. Only then could the environment regain the harmony that overpopulation destroyed.
All this led to a huge coalition of people around the world who wanted nothing more than to obliterate the one thing—capitalism—that could improve the lives of the poor; all in the name of creating a gentler, greener world. In fact, the question in all this was if a bigger agenda was in play.
And this, Jason thought, was extremely dangerous.
***
Not long after Jason’s plane landed at the Tri-Cities Airport in Johnson City, Tennessee, he was on his way through the rolling hills of the rural North Carolina countryside in a rented Chevy Blazer. By early afternoon, he was making his way up the winding, wooded drive toward Lizzy’s house.
Springtime in his former home state was a riotous profusion of wildflowers: Ladyslipper, Trillium, Trout Lily, and myriad blossoming trees: Beech, Dogwood, Redbud, all awakening from their winter slumber. It was glorious, and Jason felt a pang at ever having left.
Lizzy’s Tudor was a house style that Jason liked with its mock beams, massive chimney, and steep gables. Her red Audi stood near the garage, a reminder of the evening they’d witnessed the fall of HoneyCrest. As Jason stepped from his car, the front door of the house opened and Lizzy bounded out. He was raising his hand in greeting when she said, “We need to go,” and got into the passenger side of the Blazer without further explanation. With a shrug, Jason accepted her haste and headed back down the tree-lined lane to the main road.
She was silent for several minutes, Jason letting her bring the explanation for her strange behavior to him. The frown creasing her brow and the biting of her lower lip only touched on, from a physical manifestation, the emotional distress emanating from her in tangible waves. Finally, she turned to him. “Jason, I’m scared.”
He took his eyes from the road to examine her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She blew out a breath. The hand resting on her knee trembled. She saw him observing her fingers shaking uncontrollably and intertwined them with the others until both hands were white. Tears came unbidden. “Yes.” The word came out as a plea.
Jason nodded. “I know a place.”
It wasn’t long before they were headed up the mountain. With Jason driving and taking the turns less recklessly than Lizzy had that surreal night, he didn’t have the sense of hurtling into space that she had created in her mad dash to the top. He parked in the same secluded spot, pointing toward the remains of the HoneyCrest tower on the opposing mountain. The thought crossed his mind that she had brought him here that night to witness what she knew was coming.
“Nice sense of the dramatic,” Lizzy said, scanning the distant ruins. Work had progressed in cleaning up the bomb site but probably not as quickly as most people would have preferred. “I heard they’re going to rebuild.”
“Even after the environmental hullabaloo from the first time round? It’s got to be even worse now.”
“The developers are determined not to let terrorists dictate their terms.”
‘Terrorists. I’m surprised you’re using that term. The terrorists in this case are environmental wackos, and my understanding is that, as an attorney for the Cause, you cavort with them.”
Lizzy turned away, silent for a time. Finally, she said, “Some things have happened.”
Jason reached for her and gently tilted her chin so that she faced him again. “What things? You said you were scared. Is this part of it?”
Her hand caressed his, bringing it down to her lap where she held it tightly. Her fingers were bloodless and cold.
“I didn’t want to talk on the phone when you called because it’s tapped.”
Jason’s blood quickened. “Who? Why?”
“I’m not sure. A friend was over the other day and was talking about what he said was a new toy. I asked him what it was, and he said he’d been to one of those spy shops where he’d bought a bug detector on a whim. It cost him twenty-five hundred dollars, but he’s an attorney, too, so he’s rolling in it.” She laughed, bitter and cynical. “Maybe we attorneys have too much disposable income. Anyway, he asked if I wanted my home swept and I shrugged, sure, why not? He found the place loaded; at least one device in every room of the house. It freaked me out. We removed the ones we found, but I’m not sure we got them all or whether someone might have slipped back in and planted more when I’ve been gone.
“It could be anybody: BATF, the mafia; I just don’t know and I don’t know what to do.” She raised the back of his hand to her cheek once more and stroked it with the soft skin below his knuckles.
Jason shifted uncomfortably in the bucket seat of the SUV. There was no denying that he was attracted to Lizzy, but there were issues that needed resolution between them, not least of which was her potentially radical politics.
He gently pulled away and rested both hands on the top of the steering wheel. Across the valley, the top of HoneyCrest buzzed with activity. Bulldozers shoved parts of the stone foundation toward two cranes which lifted the huge pieces of concrete into dump trucks. “Looks like they’re making a final push in cleaning the place up.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t care.
“Okay,” Jason said, “what do you want to do? You said earlier you wanted my help. You also said the source of the bugs could be, what, BATF? The mafia? What are you into?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Uh-huh.”
She flared at him. “Look, don’t get judgmental on me!”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m the paragon of blind justice. Remember, I work for the IRS.”
The sudden anger had diffused her face, but it dissipated as quickly as it came. This time her laughter had a pleasant ring to it. “You’re funny, Jason. I like that.”
A breeze sprang up that ruffled Lizzy’s hair and blew strands into her face. She brushed them back and sighed. “This is difficult.”
“Try me.”
“I recently learned that a covert group in the environmental movement is training children as suicide bombers. Other things—bigger, impossibly big—are also going on. And there are people who know that I know.”
Chapter 29
It was what he’d feared, what he’d seen with his own two eyes, but hadn’t wanted to believe. Jason sat back in the car seat, suddenly exhausted. His mind had tried to block the reality he’d witnessed—when was it?—only last night. He’d done an admirable job thinking of other things, but now he couldn’t stop the flood of images, including those of his daughter and her children. These mixed with the scene he’d viewed through the cabin window at Smithfield Academy: children under the tutelage of an adult playing at blowing people up. The implications were clear and horrendous.
Lizzy watched him, her blue eyes boring into his soul when he turned to ask a question. He stopped himself, biting back a harsh accusation which leapt to his lips. She was part of this monstrosity. As their attorney, she participated in these acts and protected these people.
She saw the change come over him and shrank against the door. It made her small and vulnerable, and he realized she was here telling him about it. His breathing was ragged. Gaining control and handling this situation correctly was the most important thing he could do. Slowly, the heat drained from his flushed face.
“On the phone I asked you about Mary Sue,” he said.
“I’ve seen her. I haven’t spoken to her. She’s been…kind of busy.”
“What do you mean?”
It was her turn to flush an angry red. Her hands clenched and unclenched. “I guess you could say I’m the woman scorned.” Her laugh was self-deprecating, mocking. “Yeah, I walked into it with my eyes wide open and didn’t see what was right in front of me.”
Jason kept his gaze steady on her, silent, letting her work up to telling him. Instead she pulled the door handle and got out of the car, moving toward the edge of the gravel area toward the HoneyCrest side. He followed her, his feet crunching on small stones in step with hers.
She hugged herself, clasping both elbows, her forearms beneath her breasts. The lightweight blue sweater she wore clung to her, and he realized with a start how beautiful she was. The rest of her was every bit as appealing. She wore khaki hiking shorts, which exhibited the muscular leanness of her legs, along with a sturdy set of ankle-high leather boots. With her outdoor tan and the athleticism of her movements it was hard not to be attracted to her. Jason forced himself to watch her face.
She continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself with the exodus from the car. “You remember the man I was with the first time you came here?”
Jason stopped to think. “Y-e-s,” he said, drawing out the word. “You were arguing—on the trail. The guy would just as soon have knocked me down.”
“That’s Moriarty for you.”
“Moriarty?”
“Stephen Moriarty, but he prefers using just his last name. Styles himself after the villain in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. He’s an A-1 jerk. And I let myself think he cared for me.”
“Hmmm.”
A jet flew high overhead through the cerulean sky, crossing contrails with the dissipated stream from an earlier plane. Around them on the mountaintop, crickets chirped and a woodpecker tap-tap-tapped in a nearby tree. The rustling in the bushes could have been a squirrel, maybe a deer. Jason heard the squeal of tires from a car traveling too fast rounding the curve behind the cutoff to their secluded spot. The sound disappeared once it made the bend and headed down the steep road.
“I…I was in love with him, or thought I was.”
“What happened?”
It took her a while to answer, clearly hurt by what she revealed. “I caught him cheating on me. He’s a key player in the Movement, and because of the work I was doing for them, our paths crossed. We started seeing more of each other, went on some hikes, attended some rallies. He moved in with me, and I thought maybe this was IT. I had thoughts of our getting married and visualized a pretty nice life together.”
Lizzy picked up a small branch, extracted a Swiss Army knife from her pocket, and opened the longest blade. With quick, sure strokes the knife bit into the end of the stick and within moments she’d sharpened it to a fine point. She put the knife away leaving only the make-shift spike in her hand.
“I was so naïve,” she continued. “He started having meetings that I couldn’t attend for one reason or another. He came home very late at night. Sometimes he didn’t come back at all, saying he’d slept at the office or an unexpected trip took him out of town. I accepted his explanations. Why wouldn’t I? We were in love, right? He wouldn’t hurt the woman he loved.”
She twirled the sharpened branch in her hand between her knuckles. It ended up in her fist pointing downward.
“Then I caught sight of him one time when I was in Ashville. I was going to come up from behind and surprise him. Hah! He surprised me. He was waiting outside an office building. I was across the street and began to cross, then a woman came out. Before I could blink, they were in each other’s arms, lips locked, bodies grinding. I shrank back like a battered child. Sheesh, they would have done it right there on the street if a homeless guy hadn’t come up and tapped Moriarty on the shoulder looking for a handout. That broke them up, and good liberal that he is, Moriarty gave the man a kick in the seat of the pants and sent him sprawling. He and the woman walked away, laughing their heads off.
“I followed them to a hotel and didn’t need to see anything else. From then on I kept tabs on him, observed several more assignations. That day in the woods when you came to my house I’d confronted him. He denied it, but I knew what I’d seen with my own eyes.”
“I’m sorry,” Jason said. He knew the pain of loss: the helplessness, the anger.
She raised her face to the heavens as though searching for answers. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away with a vicious swipe of her hand.
“Yeah, it sucks. I could have killed him.” She made a stabbing downward motion with the sharpened stick, and Jason was glad Lizzy wasn’t angry with him. “I wish that was the end of it, but it’s not. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d been suckered and dove back into my work after I kicked him out. I still had to interact with Moriarty, of course, but I kept my physical and emotional distance. Every time I’d see him he’d give me this nasty grin that told me how little I really mattered. Really ticked me off.
“One day I’m going over legal paperwork and some phrases catch my eye. I’d been privy for a long time to questionable practices—no, not questionable, unethical—which I’d accepted because I believed in the justness of the Cause. Now I looked at this legalese and something popped into my head. I went back and reviewed other documents I’d prepared. In my new state of mind, I couldn’t believe what I was accepting as SOP. There was a whole framework of agreements between organizations that was dirty. All standard operating procedure. I’d just never seen it this way before.” Lizzy turned to Jason. “You ever have a revelation like that?”
Thinking of the recent events he’d witnessed, which included incidents involving IRS personnel, he nodded. “I have.”
“I started digging,” she continued. “Correspondence, secret memos, all sorts of incriminating documents and horrific plans came to light through the lens of my jaundiced eye. You remember that book The Skeptical Environmentalist?”
Jason shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
“It caused a lot of waves when it came out. It was written by this Danish scientist who started having doubts about the veracity of the evidence claims by environmentalists in proving their points, whether about global warming or GM—genetically modified—foods, or what have you, and this guy had been as committed as anyone to preserving the earth. Well, he did all this statistical research and determined that most of the claims by those supporting the Movement were bunk. They rested on junk science, experiments that couldn’t be duplicated by other reputable organizations, manipulation of statistics, along with simply unfounded statements declared as fact.
“Of course, Greens went wild, accused him of selling out, that he’d been paid off, that he’d been blackmailed; you know the whole gambit of character smear. But he’d done his homework and couldn’t be shaken. Our people resolved to push for more legislation to keep the Agenda on track and to make sure people ascended to power who could influence, if not outright deny, alternative voices like his being heard in the arena of ideas. Then, a manifesto surfaced that hit me like a brick right between the eyes.
“I came across plans I would have dismissed as pure fantasy a couple months prior, but I was in a position to hear things as well as read them. The problem is that I opened my mouth and expressed my concern to another attorney. Not long after that, I started getting personal notes containing the subtle message that I’d better shut up and begin thinking right again, or there’d be trouble. After my friend discovered the bugs in my house, I realized this was more than I could handle alone.”
Lizzy wound up the long story by pitching the sharpened stick down the steep slope at their feet. “I don’t know what to do.”
Jason was puzzled by a seeming contradiction in what she’d conveyed. “Didn’t you say that you weren’t sure who was bugging your house? It’s clear it’s your Green employers. Just qui
t. Be done with them, and they’ll leave you alone.”
“Yes, you might think that, but I left one thing out.”
Warily, Jason said, “What’s that?”
Lizzy searched the sky once more as if expecting answers to drop from the heavens. A huge cumulus cloud had scudded overhead. In another couple of minutes, it would block the sun.
“I…ah…somebody tried to kill me.”
“You’re kidding.” It was a dumb response and Jason knew it immediately, but it was hard to accept what she’d said.
Lizzy could have gotten angry at him; he’d known women who would have. Instead, she said sadly, “Sabotaged my car; tried to blow me up.”
“The Audi?”
“Uh-huh. I couldn’t sleep one night and was up really early. The moon was full and I happened to look out the window. I was storing some things in the garage for somebody for a couple days and parked the car in the turn-around outside. There was motion and a shadow that didn’t fit with the one the car was throwing. Then I saw a man get up. He’d been under the car or crouching right beside it. I flung open the window and yelled. It startled him. He cursed under his breath but I clearly heard him. He said, ‘Rotten whore.’ In Italian.
“Naturally, I wondered what he was doing by my car. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. So, I called up the garage and asked them to send a mechanic out, that I’d pay double whatever the price.
“When the mechanic arrived, I told him what I’d seen and of my intuition. He was a nice guy and humored me. Good thing he did. He looked under the car and found a wire that didn’t belong. He traced it and…he found enough explosive to blow up a bus. Said he’d been in the military around Special Ops and learned a couple things. My visitor had wired the device to go off when I started the car. That’s all I had to do. Just start the car. The police had to send their bomb squad to defuse it.”
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