The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “Growing up,” I noted, “is when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.”

  “Heh,” Rob snorted. “You do a better job channeling your old man than I do.” He looked off into the distance. “Roy left some mighty big shoes to fill. I’m doing my best, but in many ways, I’m not the man he was. He made it look so easy the way he’d organize a job, get all the subcontractors in line, and drive them to complete a job on time and under budget. Things would just happen. Me? I’m struggling trying to make a living and training a militia for the Reactance at the same time.”

  “You’ve done a good job keeping it all secret from me,” I observed.

  “We all have our part to play. Those men and boys,” he gestured at the seemingly empty forest around us and continued softly, “they count on me for their living and for the training they need to stay alive when the Reactance gets down to a fight. I can’t do it alone. None of us can. But we can do it together.

  “Bud Garraty’s running the business side of things. Some of the guys wanted to get into smuggling cigarettes or worse. I put my foot down on that. Skirting the environmental regs is bad enough. With all the expenses, though, I’m hemorrhaging cash. Had to mortgage Robber Dell to make ends meet. Heading down to Jekyll Island after July 4th. Got me a gig on the catering team for the Social Justice Leadership Forum. I’ll be there with the rest of the Reactance, but it’s going to cost me a couple months’ income, and we’re all going to have some mighty thin paychecks for a while.

  “Another year of this, though, I can’t be sure I can keep the wheels on. Lot of these guys been out of work for years what with the Gore Tax and the regulations killing the economy. Unless things change, it’s all going to fall apart. I’ll lose my place, and the whole team will be unemployed again.

  Rob glanced around again and lowered his voice. “There’s a lot going on you don’t know, and I can’t tell you, but I can give you the broad strokes. Buddies of mine, including… well just call him a senior officer I can trust. They’re in… positions of responsibility. In military intelligence. In three letter agencies. Elsewhere. They have other buddies. They can all see what’s going on – the corruption, the betrayal of the oaths we all swore to uphold the Constitution against all enemies: foreign, as well as domestic.”

  “I’ve reached out to a few old friends. I don’t tell them who I am. They just know I trust them, and I share enough to let them know I must have served with them. I’ve been feeding them intelligence from Amit’s intercepts, helping them figure out what’s going on, who’s dirty, and who they can trust. Predict an assassination or two in advance, and the information from ‘the Reactance’ really speaks for itself.”

  “You think we can trust these friends of yours?”

  “I have before, with my life. We have a motto – ‘Where we go one, we go all.’ They’ve got my back just as I’ve got theirs. I only know a few of their names: the ones I trust and reached out to. We only communicate over secure channels. A few of them might suspect who I am, but they don’t know for sure.

  “There’s an enormous opportunity here. The enemy is careless and overconfident. They’re hoovering in every bit of data they can, monitoring every communication they can get hold of, confident that they hold the reins of power, and it could never be used against them.”

  I hadn’t thought through the implications of that before. “They’re not only collecting what everyone else is doing, they’re collecting all the evidence anyone would need to document the very crimes they’re committing.”

  “You got it,” Rob confirmed. “My friends are moving to secure the evidence. When the time is right, they’ll act. That time isn’t now. There are people, people in high places who are corrupt or who have been corrupted. Plenty enough to block any effort to move within the system. We already have a long list, thanks to what you and Amit have been able to uncover.”

  “How can your friends act upon that list, if the people who are supposed to do the policing are part of the conspiracy?”

  “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

  I frowned as Rob rattled off the Latin phrase.

  “Who shall watch the watchmen,” he translated.

  “Is that from the Commentary on the Gallic War by Julius Caesar you put on my reading list?”

  “Nah,” he grinned, “I read it in a comic book.” The humor left his face. “My friends think they can hide in the shadows, gather the evidence, and eventually move to kick out and arrest the scoundrels. I think they’re dreaming. They don’t see the big picture. We’ve already lost, and the Civic Circle is busy consolidating their power and easing out, or eliminating, any opposition. The fish rots from the head. The only way to get them out now would be if we got a strong president uncorrupted by the Civic Circle, a president willing to use his power to drain the swamp. I don’t see that happening. The only other option is a military coup, and obviously, that’s guaranteeing we drop to the level of some corrupt banana republic.”

  “Like cutting off your head to cure a cold,” I offered.

  “Exactly,” Rob continued. “The Circle won’t allow us a real choice. They’ll continue offering up a false choice between an establishment Democrat and an establishment Republican. Whoever wins, we the people lose.”

  “We’re learning more about who they are and what their secrets are almost every day,” I pointed out. “We already know enough to blow the lid off the conspiracy and show that they’re the heirs of a secret society that’s been working for global domination for hundreds of years.”

  “Who would believe you?” Rob looked discouraged. “They’d file your ‘Civic Circle’ conspiracy between ‘Chemtrails’ and ‘Clinton Body Count’ and let it gather dust. The Civic Circle would realize that our information came from the MacGuffin manuscript which would lead them right back to the Tolliver Library and your parents. The only solution is for the Reactance to take direct action against the Civic Circle.”

  Rob was going to lead us all into some kind of a military strike against the Civic Circle.

  “It’s too soon,” I argued. “We’re just beginning to get inside their decision making. The opportunities for sabotage and monkeywrenching with what we learn this summer will be huge. We can take away their power if we take away their secrets. Make it look like a disgruntled insider. There may be a copy of the MacGuffin manuscript in the National Library of Argentina.” I explained my suspicions from Borges’ story.

  “Maybe we could work with that,” Rob still seemed skeptical, “but the best option is take them on directly. If we can figure out how to decapitate the Civic Circle when they assemble for their Social Justice Leadership Forum, we might be able to make the opportunity my friends have been waiting for – an opportunity to move against the corruption.”

  Now it was my turn to be skeptical. “They killed my parents. I want the bastards to pay for it as much as you do. I don’t want to waste the opportunity we have this summer by running in there, guns blazing, in hopes of getting lucky. Jekyll Island’s a big place, and there’ll be lots of security,” I pointed out. “A squad of irregulars wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “It’s more like a platoon of light infantry now,” Rob corrected me with a smile. “I’ve been busy training them on infiltration and tunnel clearance techniques. We just need to know where and how to get in. The network plans you got suggest the Jekyll Island Club Hotel is the main node, but it could just as easily be the Sans Souci, here. There’s more to it than that, though. Petrel thinks he may be on to something.”

  Petrel was an astute researcher Amit and I had found last year. He’d helped us unravel the story of how the Civic Circle assassinated Angus MacGuffin in 1940, and he’d been fascinated by the historical ties to Jekyll Island.

  “Here’s what he found.” Rob handed me Petrel’s report.

  Greetings Anonymous Patron,

  Your suggestion that the Civic Circle has roots going back to Imperial China appears correct. I believe I have
uncovered certain details of when and how that happened.

  James Flint was a merchant and diplomat working for the British East India Company. In 1759 he lodged a trade complaint with the Imperial Court. Flint was detained for three years. A few years later, the Chinese detained Samuel Bowen, another East India Company employee, for four years. There was ample opportunity for both men to have been recruited.

  Flint teamed with Bowen. In 1764, Bowen married into the Savannah, Georgia, gentry, and purchased nearly a square mile of land for a plantation, possibly with money contributed by Flint. They introduced the cultivation of soy beans.

  There were others in the area or who arrived after the Revolution, friends and associates of Bowen, with similar ties to the Far East trade, including the Payseur family. Christophe Poulain DuBignon, a French aristocrat, acquired his wealth through trade with India, and later as a privateer during the American Revolution. He started buying land on Jekyll Island in 1791, acquiring the whole island by 1800, and settling his family at “Horton House,” on the island.

  In 1886, the family sold the island to the Jekyll Island Club, whose principals were such men as J. P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, and William K. Vanderbilt.

  Attached are two maps of the island. This first map dates back to the DuBignon acquisition. Note the pit near the Horton House, and the single mound shown near the future site of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Compare to the second map dating to just after the DuBignon family sold the island. The pit near the Horton House is gone, and there is a more elaborate network of “Indian Mounds” and walls shown near the Jekyll Island Club Hotel site.

  I believe a small outpost was initially buried in the pit by the Horton House and later, a larger outpost was constructed, now buried near the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and nearby cottages. Note how the Sans Souci Building, a condominium built by James J. Hill, William Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, now occupies the site of the principal mound, and other cottages were constructed on the sites of smaller mounds. For what it’s worth, “Sans Souci” is French for “without a care.” That may be a reference to the palace of Frederick the Great in Berlin. Or it may be a coincidence.

  Wishing you well in your own investigations. Kindly let me know if you learn anything relevant.

  Stay safe,

  Petrel

  “The radiation signature we saw in Professor Chen’s data last year suggests the facility on the north end of Jekyll Island was destroyed.” I studied the maps intently. “The main complex is here under the hotel and the cottages of the historic district, but there must be a half dozen back doors to the complex. Even with a platoon, I don’t see how you could take the facility what with all the security they’ll have.”

  “That’s why you’ve got to get to Jekyll Island in advance and scout it out,” Rob explained. “I’ll be there with my team – got us a gig catering for the big event. Before we get there, we need you to figure out how to get in and how to block off the exits. We’ll panic them into running right into an ambush.”

  Rob’s notion of a direct assault on the Civic Circle didn’t seem as crazy as it did at first glance. I could see how a small team with the right intelligence might just be able to pull it off. “The problem is, there are three ways out of or into the complex under the Sans Souci. North to the Jekyll Island Club hotel and on to any of the cottages along the river, south to the riverfront cottages there, or east and inland.”

  “If the Jekyll Island complex is attacked from the river,” Rob pointed out, “the Civic Circle will be inclined to evacuate inland. Control this cottage,” he pointed to the map, “and you’re on top of their evacuation route. We’ll attack in toward the Sans Souci complex, then evacuate from one of the south cottages. We need you there to scout it out for us.”

  This wasn’t a suicide mission Rob had concocted as a desperate last chance to win the day. Executed smartly, we could be in and out quickly while the heavy security, unaware of the tunnels, never knew what hit them.

  “Getting myself there is going to be challenging.” I explained the difficulties I’d encountered.

  “Larry wants you there,” Rob pointed out. “Dump the problem in his lap.”

  “He also wants to hide any link between him and me,” I pointed out. “Sure, he could order Travis to have Mr. Humphreys bring me along, but that would blow my cover.” I left unstated that fact that Uncle Larry was offering me a fairly substantial amount to serve as his mole within the TAGS delegation to the Social Justice Leadership Forum. He wouldn’t want to tip his hand, and if he did, I could kiss the money he’d promised me goodbye.

  “One way or another, you need to be there,” Rob insisted, “with the rest of the Reactance.”

  “Couldn’t I just get a job on the catering team?”

  “I already got that covered,” Rob pointed out. “Work side-by-side with my team, and you won’t discover anything new and useful. No, you need to get in on your own through your TAGS connection. We need all the boots-on-the-ground tactical intelligence we can get from you and Amit to pull this off. Where we go one, we go all. I’m counting on you.”

  “I’ll make it happen one way or another,” I promised, not knowing for sure how I would resolve the situation I found myself in.

  “I have a cat to collect,” Rob smiled weakly, shaking his head. “Marlena’s been moping around. She says living in my beautiful underground refuge is like being ‘confined in Château d'If’ and how I’m her jailer.”

  Beautiful underground refuge? Functional maybe, but given Rob’s lack of attention to housekeeping, a reasonable comparison might be made to the dungeon from The Count of Monte Cristo. I leapt to Marlena’s defense. “She’s had her whole life ripped away from her. She has a right to be upset and depressed about it.”

  “Sometimes life sucks,” Rob acknowledged. “You have to embrace the suck, put it behind you, and get on with life, not mope and whine about it.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be happier once you retrieve her cat for her, and a few of her things.”

  “I hope so,” Rob said. “Sometimes that woman is just impossible.”

  I was secretly a bit glad and relieved that Rob was not getting on very well with Marlena. If only it had worked out that I was the one who’d get to spend most of the summer with Marlena. I had to play the hand I’d been dealt, though.

  “Good luck.” I shook his hand.

  “Good luck, Pete.” Rob surveyed the surroundings one last time. We appeared to be alone. He smiled and held out his hand with his thumb up. Then he gestured, “move out.” All around me, there was motion in the woods. Camouflage covers vanished into backpacks as a half dozen guys suddenly appeared from nowhere. An initial group of three took off back down the hiking trail. I was impressed at their stealth.

  “See you around, Pete.” Rob followed at a distance, and the other three fell in behind him.

  * * *

  It would have been tempting to take Mr. Humphreys' advice – give up, take it easy, and enjoy the summer. I could have made it my project to chase after Kirin, or one of the other cute girls interning at TAGS. There seemed to be an awful lot of them.

  There wasn’t much I could do to win Marlena over remotely – a long letter confessing my feelings and desires? No, that was silly. It needed to be in person, and I hadn’t found the right opportunity when I had the chance. I’d be back in a few weeks for the Independence Day holiday. I’d have to make my move then.

  In the meantime, I decided Amit was right. Practice picking up girls in general would help me pick up the particular one I wanted.

  I forced myself to be outgoing and gregarious when I ran into attractive girls in the halls or the break room. I'd make a casual suggestion for a lunch or a dinner out. I had a couple of dates, but none of them really seemed worth the effort. I tried to keep up what Amit called an aura of “amused mastery.” Maybe it would land someone interesting in my orbit – at least that's what I told myself. Between the fact I was spending most of my time in the server r
oom, and had far bigger worries than landing a girlfriend, I had a suspicion it was going to be another lonely summer.

  Where we go one, we go all? Unless I got my act together, my friends were going to go into danger without me. I had to do something about it. I just wasn’t sure what.

  One afternoon I managed to get myself lost in the warren of modular office buildings that had been installed in a parking lot adjacent to the TAGS facility. Somehow, IT had gotten stuck with the job of checking all the fire safety equipment. I had to verify that all the firehoses were intact, all the fire extinguishers’ pressure gauges were in the green zone, and I had to initial the inspection labels.

  The buildings appeared to be assembled from pieces, a bit like how two trailers come together to make a double-wide, but on a much larger scale. Every twenty-five feet I came to a new hallway, punctuated by a firehose halfway between. Each hallway was a hundred feet long with a mix of ten- and fifteen-foot-wide offices, each ten feet deep – I'd gotten bored one day waiting for a big print job to finish, so I could swap out the toner, and I'd calculated it while I was waiting.

  I’d finished the fire safety inspection, but I had some inkjet cartridges to deliver, too. Somehow I’d thought my destination was on the second level of the building. Finally, I came back down the stairs. Halfway down the third hall, I came to a large room that extended to the next hallway.

  “Good afternoon,” I poked my head in the door. “Hello?”

  “Hi, yourself.” A head popped up from behind a stack of boxes. “What can I do for you?”

  “Other way around. Pete Burdell from IT.” I held up the inkjet cartridge. “You need a new inkjet cartridge for your printer?”

  “Ah yes,” the man replied. “Over there.”

  I got to work. “Big space you have here.” I said, taking in the boxes and the clutter. A shielded screen room occupied one corner. The room looked like a storage area but there was a table pressed into service as a desk.

  “There was supposed to be a team working with me,” he explained, “but there’s been a hiccup with the funding.”