She stepped out the door in four and a half minutes, dressed casual and wearing a stylish backpack. She walked to the corner coffee shop to await the Uber she texted. Minutes later her ride dropped her off at a mall. She went into a restroom, and within minutes emerged with a different appearance and under a different alias. Her backpack and her meager belongings were stuffed inside a duffel bag she had pulled out of the backpack.
Discretely hidden away in a sanitary napkin and placed in the bathroom’s sanitary disposal slot were her dark contacts and the chemical packet she’d used to change her appearance. That was one product she developed exclusively for herself with no plans to patent or market. Without using any water or even gloves, in three minutes this particular pouch of chemicals safely changed her hair color and eyebrows from black to strawberry blonde. That product alone would generate a worldwide annual revenue of over eight figures. For Karen, that was just pocket change. But being able to quickly morph from one identity to another? Priceless.
The transformation was very routine, just typically not in such a rush. And never before accompanied by such overwhelming fury.
I’m going to kill that man.
She knew his security was extensive, not only as a senator but more so because of his extra-curricular activities. Even Karen hadn’t cracked through all the layers yet, but she suspected international crimes including drug trade and human trafficking. She even speculated that he made his second million by harvesting and selling aborted baby organs. Lord knows—and she faithfully prayed to Him often—how she had tried to expose him, to get him put away where he couldn’t hurt others. But in spite of her prayers and years of hard work, she hadn’t been able to nail down any evidence that would stick. Of course, she could personally testify against him. But that was absolutely out of the question.
As she walked the five miles to the bus station, she began plotting how to execute a United States senator.
Two hours later, a young woman boarded a Greyhound bus outbound from Nashville. She brushed back her strawberry blonde hair as she sat in an empty row of seats. Her hazel eyes flashed with resolve as she planned her next step.
Lynn Blalock was on a bus to Atlanta, Georgia.
+ + +
Jason was furious. You could tell by; well, as usual, you really couldn’t tell. Back in his heavily remodeled, ultra-secure penthouse condominium, he poured his first drink. Even in private he tried to maintain the façade. His goals and his tactics to reach those goals required the utmost personal discipline at all times.
He told his multimedia system to play “normal.” His seven-channel, high-def multimedia surround system responded with acid rock and a kaleidoscope of flashes, explosions, lightning, and chaos.
Two of his best men, almost instantaneously devastated by a single older woman!
I told those idiots to take her seriously! Both men in the hospital, facing surgeries and months of rehabilitation. And Clyde will probably never be of use again.
His fury gave way a little as he again thought of the bigger picture. And he always returned to the bigger picture.
He sat back in his recliner, took a deep breath, and turned what he called music up even louder. The tension slowly melted away.
I have got to get that woman back and see what makes her tick!
He remembered some of the other pleasures he had allowed himself to experience at her expense and smiled.
Oh yes. And I’ll definitely enjoy some private time with her again. In the meantime?
Jason checked his smartphone calendar to confirm that he had a rare day off tomorrow. He muted his multimedia system, placed a call to a special number, and identified himself by a secure code.
“Yes, Sir? What’s your pleasure tonight?” a personable male voice responded.
“Female. Fifteen to seventeen. Hmm…don’t care about the race. At my place in an hour; pick her up at 9 am.”
It was time to play. The teenager will be delighted to give him anything he desired, as often as he desired, for another hit of the designer narcotic his team perfected just two years earlier.
Jason poured his second drink—he never had more than two—and turned his multimedia system back up, basking in the pandemonium.
His plans would put him exactly where he wanted to be by his mid-sixties. FSAT would give him forty-five years or more to enjoy it. And no one could stop him.
“No one will stop me!” he stated out loud, and took a deep gulp of very expensive Scotch, straight up.
3. PLANS
Lynn had plenty of time to think during the bus ride from Nashville to Atlanta. The three-and-a-half-hour drive became six thanks to several stops along the way. Many pundits expected bus transportation to go the way of the pay phone years earlier, but it still had its place. She found that it provided a good transition between locations when the distances weren’t too great.
As she reclined her seat back, she thought forward to her next actions.
She assumed they would never expect her to return to Atlanta. It would take her no more than a week to find and rent a suitable apartment and furnish it. She didn’t require much, and always chose furnishings that would eventually go to a worthwhile charity which she’d identify during her second week. She would pay the rent by check from one of her many secure accounts. Her furnishings would be bought using a credit card from another account.
Same with a car; never new, always a different model, and always paid by check.
All of her secure accounts, corporations, aliases, tax reporting, and hundreds of other details would easily require dozens of lawyers, CPAs, financial planners, stockbrokers, and more to manage. Lynn—Karen—did it with an average of one hour’s effort each day. And she still took the time to support hundreds of carefully-selected and monitored ministries. Only God knew how many thousands of orphans and elderly she had helped, how many clean water supplies had been provided in Africa and elsewhere. And the hundreds of evangelists and missionaries she supported. As Jesus said, we must work while it is still light.
But her thoughts were not currently on the next medical center she might set up in the Appalachia’s.
There were perhaps thousands of ways to eliminate Jason Matthews. She would meticulously consider each one in terms of her safety, the safety of others, and potential second and third order effects of each option. What if an Islamic terrorist group took credit for the execution and it reignited some region in the Middle East? What if someone innocent was arrested, tried, and convicted as a scapegoat? And she certainly could not permit any collateral damage.
Memories flashed back to what he had allowed and even directed during her captivity. It was all so clean, so white-coat, so scientific. So cruel.
While they took countless samples, even liters, of her blood and dozens of bone marrow samples – all without anesthesia – they mercilessly tested the “left and right limits” of her abilities. How long did it take for her to heal from cuts and burns in various locations? Did she scar? How did her body respond to extended fasts or lack of water? How did she cope with polluted and bacterial-laden water? Could she develop antibodies that might be profitably marketed?
The “medical research” team played against each other to win Jason’s approval by concocting increasingly bizarre tests, taking her to the ragged edge of death again and again. How well might she survive sub-zero temperatures? Fully nude, of course, and covered with electrodes to better monitor all physiological processes. Same with high temperatures, approaching and exceeding Death Valley in the middle of summer. Rapid ascent in an altitude chamber to 18,000 feet. And far, far more.
Always shackled. Always closely guarded. No privacy. Molested and raped by Jason, usually after one of his test subjects painfully died when FSAT failed to do for them what it had done for her. She would hear the screams of pain as they would insanely beat themselves against the walls of reinforced rooms in their final hours. Their short-gained superhuman strength and intelligence would fail, leaving them curle
d and whimpering in a fetal position until death mercifully overcame them. Jason would be furious and vent his wrath on her, as if was somehow her fault.
Jason’s team would find someone else, maybe a homeless addict, to use as experimental subjects. Physically, Karen would quickly recover from his abuse. But mentally and emotionally from the shame and cruelty?
Karen awoke from her nightmare of remembrance as the bus drove over some rough interstate road construction. Her thoughts turned from a quick, clandestine kill to far more intimate, slow and painful ways of taking him down. She would make sure he knew exactly who his executioner was, how she was going to do it, then complete the kill in the same unemotional, clinical fashion as his team had treated her. Her creative side began to emerge…
“Alright, Mr. Matthews. I have successfully transferred all your personal financial assets to various accounts. I want to assure you that I will personally direct them to support multiple organizations that represent everything that you, yourself, oppose. Now, to make sure I have your full attention and cooperation, I plan to break both of your arms, and then both of your legs. Next, I will place a sound meter at exactly one meter from your mouth. We’ll see how many burns I have to inflict, and where, to obtain the desired reading of, let’s say, 128 decibels, ‘A’ weighted. At least, that’s where we’ll start. Then for our second day’s activities…”
Her thoughts were very dark, indeed. The bus arrived in Atlanta. She checked into a hotel, showered, and went to bed. It didn’t occur to her that for the first day in many years she had not spent a single minute reading or meditating on Scripture. And not a moment in prayer.
+ + +
“Good evening, Senator.”
Billionaire Stan Bishop stood in Jason’s doorway, hand outstretched. He smiled slightly, but his gaze seemed always to be just beyond whoever he was talking to as if he were already planning his next step. Jason would never be so presumptuous to say so to the younger man, but the two of them had been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Jason knew it. Stan? Probably not.
“Good to see you, Stan.” Jason returned as he stepped aside to let his long-time acquaintance, in many ways his benefactor, enter. Two hefty bodyguards remained outside. Jason knew the men to be heavily armed. He was just as certain that more guards were scattered around the building; some obvious, others not so much. Reminds me to beef up my security, Jason reflected, especially since Skylar and Clyde were taken off his active list the previous day.
Jason rarely entertained company. Typical visitors were security personnel scanning his penthouse for any wireless bugs or other vulnerabilities. Occasionally he allowed in people from his various teams, his security detail, and, of course, the males and females, eight and up, brought there to entertain him.
Stan, of course, was the rare and welcome exception.
They walked quietly into his inner room, and Jason shut the door. No eavesdropping devices made would be able to penetrate the security there, and they could talk openly. Jason poured generous portions of his rare, expensive Scotch for them both.
“Are we making progress?” he asked the billionaire.
Stan took a sip, sat in the elegant recliner, leaned it back and stared at the high vaulted ceiling. He looked over at Jason, or rather through him, pursed his lips and slightly shook his head.
“Not really. Sure, we’re always moving in the right direction. But who would have imagined that your Founding Fathers created such a system that it would take decades to bring it down? From international and monetary perspectives, the United States is still surprisingly stable in spite of everything. Your read?”
“Same,” Jason replied. “We’ve left the doors wide open for undocumented immigrants to drain our health and welfare systems. We’ve facilitated crime, drug traffic, and terrorism. Homegrown ‘lone wolves’ are shooting up theaters and blowing up high-value targets. We and our media sources keep pounding against guns but we’re no closer to disarming civilians than thirty years ago. Much of the country is still pro-Second Amendment. And I’m frustrated that we haven’t been able to take down the First Amendment to shut up preachers and religious zealots.”
Jason paused, carefully choosing his words. “I’d say we have made little progress beyond Obama’s days. We’ve blurred the lines between the branches of government. We’ve all but eliminated the checks and balances. Public education is completely on our side – has been for decades. We’ve gone further with wealth redistribution than anyone would have imagined at the turn of the century. Everything’s close to anarchy, and still the U.S. is our biggest hold-out.”
“Then Trump came in, totally unexpected, and set us back decades. Ever get the feeling that there’s almost a force, a Presence that keeps getting in our way? Like a power that’s holding us off from our final takeover? It’s like he was raised up by divine intervention.” Stan mused.
“I hate to think about it, but my mother was a religious person. She used to talk about some kind of spirit holding things back until the Church is removed. Something superstitious like that,” Jason said.
“Hmm. But once the Church is gone that Presence is gone as well? Interesting,” Stan replied.
They were silent for a beat, brooding over their drinks. Jason always admired the younger man’s decorum. He was always open and to the point, but left you guessing what else was on his mind. We’re cut from the same bolt of cloth, Jason mused again. He even admired the man’s wardrobe, the casual elegance of slacks, shirt, sports coat and shoes that was always appropriate, always stylish and expensive looking, but never extravagant.
He also appreciated Stan’s business acumen. The man built a small overseas software company he sold for a huge profit just before the dot-com bubble burst. He took his “lessons learned” and tackled international financing. While Jason didn’t know all the details—Stan was almost as secretive as himself—he developed a highly proprietary program. “Overlord,” as he called it, monitored international financial, political, environmental and other factors. He continued tweaking the complex algorithms to codify the mantra of buying low and selling high. Timing in the finance world is everything, and Stan’s program made predictions and then executed critical buys and sells that came down to critical minutes or moments. No other program—and there were many—came close.
Overlord had made Stan millions. Then those millions made billions, especially during the Great Recession of the first decade of the century. Now the program tracked so many simultaneous variables that it had to run on a supercomputer. If all the hidden accounts ever came to light, Stan was probably the wealthiest man alive. And while he had no political aspirations of his own, he had a plan. He used his money to execute that plan. Overlord would set him up as the Financial Minister of that plan. But while he was a patient man, he wanted it within ten years. He had no interest in studying Forex candle charts and stocks the rest of his life.
Jason also admired Stan’s isolation. No marriage, no family, just always surrounded by well-paid people who would give their lives for him if necessary. Or would be brutally murdered if they didn’t, Jason speculated. Of course, Stan enjoyed all the physical pleasures imaginable. He was one of the first and continued to be one of the most prolific customers of Jason’s little side business.
Stan rarely visited Jason as his normal activities were beyond the borders of the United States. When he did, he typically punctuated it with some directive, some new task.
The silence lingered.
“Jason, I think we need to execute your plan for a vectored crisis. Some inciting incident that will expedite our takeover.”
Jason nodded. “Maybe set off a series of interrelated incidents worldwide, leading to a crisis we manipulate to our benefit?”
Stan took another sip and pondered. “If we target well enough in advance…say five or six years…we might even bring about a sudden change in leadership within key countries and plan our transformation at that point. We should be ready by then. Agreed?”
&
nbsp; Jason smiled. “I do. I’ll work on putting pieces together at this end, send you several scenarios, and you can see what the rest of the team might have ready by then. I think it would be most helpful if I were on the Armed Services Committee. I’d like access to deeply classified programs. And I have something in mind that would help drain the U.S. military budget and also might help our cause.”
“Agreed. Consider it done.”
Within half an hour, the little-known international financial leader had left. His visits ended within thirty minutes; most lasted less than fifteen.
Jason had received his new direction and immediately tweaked it so it precisely fit into his own plans.
4. PREPARATIONS
Lynn awoke from her customary four hours in bed. It had been a restless night, resulting in under two hours of actual sleep.
She absent-mindedly poured peanuts, walnuts, and almonds into a blender along with raw fruits and vegetables to make her SNS; her super nutrition smoothie as she called it. She poured the blend into a large sixteen-ounce insulated beverage container, opened her sliding glass door, and stepped out onto her third story balcony. An intriguing thought had taken form through the night, now three weeks after her escape.
What if she were to give Jason what he wanted? Let him experience for himself the rush, the power, the clarity of thought that FSAT would give him? Her research had brought it a very long way since she took the last true, original dose. Maybe she would inject it from a safe distance by micro-dart.
The discomfort in the pit of her stomach she always experienced whenever she thought of Jason was now continuous. She was oblivious to the flavors she had perfected over the years as she sipped her SNS. The man is pure evil, she would remind herself throughout the day, every day. He deserves to die. She shuddered once more as she remembered the unspeakable things he orchestrated against her and others. And the direct personal violations of his own, not based on sexual need or lust, but on a need to exhibit raw power and control.
The Guardian Collection (End of the Sixth Age Book 2) Page 2