by Liscom, Sean
Major Jackson pulled all of us to one side and began an investigation of his own. By the time he was
done questioning everyone that was involved in the shooting, it was nearly 10pm. His parting words were for us to return to the ranch and he would keep us up to date with his findings. He seemed sure that this was nothing more than a one off attempt and our safety was still intact. He told Melissa that she and her squad had done a fantastic job and that he was proud of the way that they had handled themselves.
The elderly lady who had been manning the fabric kiosk was still there, she'd stayed so that she could fill out a statement and answer any questions. I guess she had seen the whole thing. On our way out, I stopped and purchased the supplies for Megan. I paid her with five, one ounce, silver coins, over double what her asking price was. It seemed like the right thing to do for her trouble.
When we pulled through the gate of the ranch and the MRAP was parked, all of us got out and I was greeted by Braden. The look of concern on his face was unmistakable.
“Heard you had some trouble,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks to Melissa and her squad, we're fine though.”
“Good! One hell of a first day on the job for your security people. I'm glad they were there.”
“You and me both!” I replied. “How was your search for the missing journal?” I asked him. He extended his right hand and in it, the 44th journal. “Are you kidding me?” I asked incredulously.
“The old man didn’t make it easy! The journal
wasn’t buried there. All we found was a clue that led to another clue and another….. It took me and Megan almost 6 hours to finally find this and you are going to shit your pants when I tell you where it was,” he laughed.
“Where was it?”
“It was sealed in a dry bag, inside a sealed ammo can at the bottom of the pond,” he said, pointing to the pond behind me.
“No way!” I exclaimed. By now, Jill had joined us and Braden commenced to filling her in on what he had found. Twenty minutes later, he finished his tale. Her eyes gave away her astonishment.
“Have you read it yet?” I asked.
“I’m about a third of the way through it and I’m adding all of the code to the notes that we have going. If you think that all of this is pretty wild, look at this,” he said as he opened it to the first page and pointed to the date. July 1st, 2015. Nine days before I went to work to find Bill Butler in my office. Seven days before his death. Braden then flipped to the last dated entry. July 6th,, 2015. The day before his plane went down. I stared at the page, my mouth wide open.
“Read the last few lines,” Braden instructed as he flipped to the last page and held his finger where he wanted me to begin. I scanned down and read it aloud.
“I’d tell you boy’s good luck but you’re going to need a whole lot more than that. Divine intervention maybe. Stack your magazines deep, keep your powder dry and be ready to fight the devil himself,” It abruptly
ended there. “What the hell?” I said looking up at my brother.
“I don’t know, Jason. What I do know is that this journal has a very ominous feeling to it. From what I’ve read so far, something went shit sandwich on dad. It’s almost like he knew what was going to happen.”
“What? You mean the EMP?”
“Yeah. He hasn’t come out and said it, but he knew something,” he closed the journal and tried to hand it to me.
“You finish it. I’ll read it when you're done,” I told him.
“I’ll finish it tonight and get it to you tomorrow.”
“Alright. That sounds good. Do you think this contains the cipher for the rest of the journals?” I asked.
“It’s too early to tell, but my gut is telling me that this is exactly what we were missing,” he said.
“Okay. We can talk about it a little more in the morning. Maybe we can finally figure this thing out.”
“I hope you’re right!”
“Me too,” I said. As Braden turned to leave, I caught sight of Jill’s father, Bill, standing by the front of the MRAP. He watched Braden as he walked past, his eyes were locked on the journal. When he realized that I was watching him, he smiled and walked up. He made one glance over his shoulder at the diminishing form of Braden.
“You guys still obsessing over those journals?” he asked.
“All the time, Bill. I think Braden just found the last clue we needed to decode them,” I said. That caught his attention. He stared at me for a moment, the look in his eyes was totally unreadable. He made small talk with Jill and me for a few more minutes before he excused himself.
I put my arm around my wife’s shoulders and we walked back to the house. I could tell that the incident at the trading post had left her a little uneasy.
CHAPTER 6
Thursday, August 3rd, 2017
Jill and I were back in the gym at 3:30 that morning. Instead of weight training, today we were working on flexibility and range of motion exercises. We had talked about the incident at the trading post the night before and both of us were at a loss as to what happened. Neither of us recognized the man but he apparently knew who we were. That, in and of itself, wasn’t strange. Most of the people down there knew us by sight. What was strange was his reaction to both of us. We continued to talk about it during our exercise session and it was decided that we would just let it rest until the Sheriff and the Major concluded their investigations. There really wasn't anything else to do.
The other thing we spent a lot of time talking about was the 44th journal. Both of us were in agreement that the way that it ended was indeed ominous. I don’t know why I hadn’t asked anyone before, but I asked her about the weeks leading up to my father’s death.
“Jack had been gone for almost two months when he got back on the 1st. He flew into Elko in a rented plane. When he got here that afternoon, he seemed….. Distracted,” she said.
“Do you know where he was for that two months?”
“He was on a business trip up in Alaska. That’s
what he told us anyway.”
“Did he tell you what kind of business?”
“No, he never really talked about his work and we never asked.”
“When you say that he seemed distracted, what do you mean?”
“Normally, Jack had this laser beam focus. He would set his mind to something and then do it with no hesitation. When he got back here, he spent a lot of time going over supply lists with Allan. Then he would ask about the extraction plans for you and Braden. He wouldn’t stick to one subject. He was all over the place with his questions for us. He spent almost every minute of his visit going over all of the details of everything. Food, fuel, water, solar........ He wanted to make sure everything was up to spec and I mean everything. He'd even had a company come out and empty the septic tanks. They didn't need it, guy said they should have been good for another eight or ten years but Jack insisted that they be emptied.”
“Did he seem nervous about something?”
“No, not nervous. I’d say he was agitated. He also spent a lot of time locked in the study and when he wasn’t in there, he was making phone calls. When he left here, he did it without so much as a goodbye or anything. He just left and that wasn't like him.” she recalled. “It was like he was rushed and in a hurry the entire time he was here.”
“He didn’t tell you where he was going or anything?”
“No. The last conversation he and I had was when he radioed me and asked me to open the gate for him. That was around 5:00 in the morning. He just left,” she said.
“Did anyone come around and ask questions after his plane was reported missing?”
“Sheriff Case brought two guys out that said they were from the NTSB and they asked a few questions. We didn't really have any answers for them though.”
“Did they say anything that might have seemed odd at the time? Maybe a question that was out of place?” I asked. She thought about it for a minute before she answered.
“What do you mean?”
“They had notes from the tower in Elko that his plane had left at 8am. Three hours after he left the ranch. Then it showed him arriving in Reno at 9am, departing again at midnight. His last contact was 50 miles off the coast of Honduras. The tower in San Jose, Costa Rica had reported him overdue at noon on the 7th of July.”
“That would mean that he had filed flight plans to land there, right? I asked.
“I would assume so.”
“Did your dad ever say anything about him being in Reno?”
“No, he didn't and I never asked,” she replied. I guess I would have to ask him about it sometime I thought to myself. Other than learning about his flight plans and his apparent agitation, I really hadn't learned anything new so I decided to let the conversation go at that.
Jill and I finished up in the gym and headed home for hot showers and breakfast. She didn’t have a shift to pull today and she was planning on sitting down with Kalin and Braden. She wanted to discuss Kalin’s request to join class 4 when the time came. I, on the other hand, did have a shift to pull.
I'd been on shift all of 20 minutes before Braden came through the door of the shack. The journal was tucked under his arm. As he passed the desk, he dropped it in front of me without a word and continued on to the coffee pot. Returning with his full mug, he sat in the chair across from me.
“Let me tell you something, little brother,” he began. “That journal, scared the living hell out of me!” he pointed to the book in front of me. I picked it up and began to leaf through the pages.
“Can you give me the cliff notes version?” I asked, looking back up at him.
“Yeah. I can sum that whole journal up in one sentence. Dad knew that the shit was about to hit the fan!”
“Seriously?” I asked with raised eyebrows.
“Seriously,” he paused for a sip of coffee. “About 12 years ago, he was hired by a small firm to do some cyber security stuff. Mostly threat assessments and things of that nature. This little firm was nothing more than a front that was being used by a couple of dozen large corporations. They used this fake firm as a go between to keep him from knowing who they really were....”
“Who were they?” I interrupted.
“I'll get to that. Anyway, they wanted to keep dad at arm’s length to begin with. He was hired full time when he figured out that their cyber security really wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. They wanted him to oversee the construction of what they called a “Vault” for their sensitive information. This is where they were going to house all of their super-secret R&D files, financial data and so on. The idea being that should anything bad ever happen, these corporations had backup information that they could draw from to get them back on their feet quicker and make them even more profitable after a cataclysmic event.”
“Okay, so what? There was a lot of that post 9-11. That's nothing new,” I said.
“Very true. That's probably why it didn't raise any real suspicion with dad. At least in the beginning. Ya see, Jack wasn't privy to the all of the information for this vault they were building. He was strictly in charge of any cyber threat assessments and building them a fortress in the cyber world. They kept everything compartmentalized. They paid him really, really well to
mind his own business. It was nearly two years before he realized that the vault was an actual location, not just some exercise in the virtual world.”
“Wait, you said he was in charge of the construction.”
“He was. He was in charge of building the cyber defenses for something that he had been led to believe only existed in a virtual world. He had no idea that there was an actual vault being built to house the servers containing all of the information he was charged with protecting.”
“How did he find out about the actual vault?”
“Relax, Jason. I'll get to that,” he chuckled. I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “After they completed the actual construction, they had to move all of the information from their servers to the new location. Rather than transmit the data from one server to another, they elected to physically move the servers. Dad said it was like some sort of military operation. They had an 18 wheeler that drove from location to location, picked up the old servers under heavily armed guard and transported them to the new location. He wasn’t supposed to be involved in that end of it but when they ran into a problem with the software not getting along with the hardware, they had to take him to the site so he could sort it out.”
He continued. “They picked him up in a limo, took him to the airport and put him on a private jet. Shortly after boarding, he was blindfolded. They took him to the vault's location and had him physically hard wire
the old and new servers together and sort out the software problem so that the information could be transferred. That took three days and dad was confined to this little room with an armed escort to the bathroom 30 feet down the hallway.”
“Once all of that was done, he was blindfolded again, put back on a plane and taken home. Again, he was written a big, fat check to shut his mouth and remember nothing. About a week later, they called on him again. The new servers were having issues and since he was able to sort it out the first time, he ended up going back to the vault. This time, however, he needed to actually see what was causing the problems and that entailed actually opening some of the encrypted files. It didn’t take him long to figure out what was really being kept on those servers besides financial and R&D files.”
“He found evidence of multiple murders and the cover-ups to go with them. Financial transactions that went way up the government totem pole. There were
files regarding the use of pathogens on human guinea pigs. We ain’t talking about clinical trials, we’re talking about shit like Ebola and the likes, and their labs were in places like the Congo and Rwanda. It didn't end there though. They were also screwing with our food. Ever wonder why cancer and autism rates were soaring? Apparently having people sick all the time is really big business!”
“You're joking? Right?”
“No, dad said the proof was all right there in front
of his face. Anyway, he was done fixing the problem with the servers and getting ready to leave when four armed men escorted him to the director’s office. This was the big Kahuna, not some underling. This guy knew what Jack had seen and he confronted him about it. Dad was sure that he was going to get a bullet in his head and end up with Jimmy Hoffa as a roommate. After a few tense hours, he walked out of there as the Director of Cyber-Security and Information Technology. Somehow he managed to convince this guy that he was onboard with their plans.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really. Dad took the job and over the course of the next five years, he learned what the whole operation was about. Dad didn't like it. Not one bit. He stayed with the job because it kept him alive and he was feeding information to one of his government contacts.” he reached across the desk and picked up the journal. Flipping through the pages, he stopped at
a hand-drawn image that looked like a space station. He handed it to me and I looked it over.
“What's this?”
“It's one of 12 facilities that they were building worldwide. The nearest one is outside of Los Angeles. They are entirely underground and can house 500 people for up to 10 years. They have their own power grids, their own aquifer to draw fresh water from, incinerators to handle all of the waste, aquaponics farming and they are basically impenetrable from the outside world.”
“What are these? Bomb shelters?”
“They are referred to as Ark's,” he said. I looked from the drawing to my brother.
“There are 12 of these?”
“Yes, 12 of them and
they were scheduled to be fully on-line on July 1st, 2016,” he stated flatly. It took a moment for that implication to sink in.
“That was just before......” my voice trailed off in shock.
“It was just before the world ended,” he finished for me. I sat in stunned silence, just staring at the open pages of the journal. “You ready to hear the rest of it?” he asked. I nodded.
“Dad goes on to explain that he started embezzling money from them. They were paying him a seven figure income, but he needed more. He never says why or where the money went. They were spending billions of dollars to build the 12 Arks and there were really no controls on that money. When he would place an order for supplies or equipment or when he would pay a contractor, he would overpay and siphon that off into a different account. He had access to all of their financial information so he would manipulate the records in his favor. Where that money went from there, he never said, but my guess is that he took them for tens of millions of dollars.”
“Dad knew that the EMP was coming because they knew it was coming. How they knew, I don't know. Just before he showed up here, he had been in a meeting with his bosses. They told him that his services
were no longer needed and that if he were smart, he would find a hole and hunker down for a while, a long while. Without really telling him anything, he knew that time was getting short. It ends when he had been let go from his employment but he mentioned that the residents of these Arks had already begun to arrive.”
“That would have been a full year before the EMP,” I said.
“That's right.”
“Who were the people that were supposed to fill these Arks?”
“He doesn't really say who but he mentions that they were pretty powerful people and their families. They were supposed to be the cream of the crop, the ones who could put the world back together after it fell apart.”