by Tom Abrahams
If Felicia were a man, she’d have been considered shrewd and opportunistic. As a woman, though, she became the very personification of a variety of misogynistic terms used to diminish the perceived power of headstrong women.
She was less than a year into her first term as Speaker, and there were rumblings all over the Hill that she would not keep the post another term. She’d heard them.
Yet here she was with the possibility of ascension to the highest office. There were three years left in Foreman’s second term, a political eternity. It was plenty of time to change her image. But standing in the way was a litigious ass who wanted to skip his way from the cabinet to the White House.
Felicia spun on her three-inch heels and plodded her way to the rotunda to address the nation. She prayed she would be the one speaking first. It wouldn’t look good, she knew, to have the secretary speak first. She needed to look like the leader, the one in command. Blackmon would have to take the backseat.
Chapter 4
Matti hurried down the hall to her office, still confused about the conversation with her supervisor.
What was the NSA really? What intelligence did they truly seek? How long had they been spying on Americans? Was she working for the good guys?
Of course I am, she convinced herself. There were white hats and black hats, and she knew the difference.
She thought she knew the difference.
She didn’t look at the file in her hand until she was at her desk. On the top of the front page was the title “DATURA PROJECT”. She’d never heard of it. In the pages that followed, she learned of what NSA believed to be a fringe group bent on producing some level of anarchy or global reconstruction.
The NSA believed the initial, informal meeting was during a “Tax Day” protest at Lafayette Park in the District. There were transcripts of what looked to be cellular conversations amongst members of the Datura Project. Matti also found evidence of intercepted text messages. Most were encrypted, and the contents unknown, but a few of the numeric codes were deciphered. They contained meeting information and alerts to larger, non-Daturan rallies or protests. It was nearly impossible to determine where they fell on the political spectrum. On one hand, they seemed to be conservative, part of the anger at the establishment so well defined by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, their ideas appeared to be farther left than Senator Bernie Sanders.
Matti puffed her cheeks. She let out the air in an exasperated sigh and ran her hand through her hair. She was reading secretly recorded voice intelligence.
These are US citizens on these tapes!
She was familiar with the Bush administration’s legal contention that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarded against unlawful search and seizure, did not apply to NSA activities. And in times of war, search and seizure was reasonable on US soil, even if the “enemy” was not foreign.
The Department of Justice asserted warrantless communications targeted at the enemy in times of armed conflict were traditionally acceptable, arguing the NSA’s signal intelligence was included in that exception. Lawyers went so far as to suggest the NSA was a domestic military operation.
Toward the end of the second Bush term, the Office of Legal Counsel backed off the assertion but never fully denounced it. Some suspected the government was essentially spying on its own citizens. Matti sat with the proof right in front of her.
There were twenty pages of short, clipped conversations between various members of the group. She flipped past the logs to the short biographical pages of the suspected conspirators.
One was a college professor; a second was an artist; another was a local businessman who owned a meat shop and a bar. Matti flipped through the black-and-white surveillance photographs snapped of the various alleged plotters. She made mental notes of the names and faces. Then one caught her attention.
“Bill Davidson?” she whispered. “The former attorney general?”
Davidson was connected. He was well-known. He used to run the Department of Justice and he had the ear of policymakers and financiers. He was the star of a DC think tank and was on television nearly every week. Bill Davidson could make things happen.
Any potential threat, especially one with a DC insider, needed serious oversight. Matti was reading about Davidson’s lesser-known post-AG proclivities when her gray phone rang.
Chapter 5
Art Thistlewood stared at the paper on his desk. He’d scribbled the translation to the code sent to his phone during class and couldn’t believe he was summoned to a meeting in the middle of the night.
“One o’clock?” he whined in his small office. It was on the third floor of the Ward Building on the campus of American University and overlooked the north end of the quad from the window next to his desk.
Every term, he found himself embroiled in a weeks-long affair with a woman at most half his age. He told them up front it was not forever. They usually obliged with a lack of interest beyond the posting of their final grades.
Professor Thistlewood was a good-looking man. His thick mop of white hair dropped over his ears and collar. His habit of fingering back his bangs off his forehead was an unintentional turn-on to the girls who sought out his extra credit.
Aside from women, he loved art by politically motivated artists. His small Embassy Row apartment boasted several collected pieces by artists Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal, and Trek Thunder Kelly. He especially loved Kelly’s iPod Ghraib. It was a shocking pink canvas with the dark silhouette of a thin Iraqi prisoner under hood and cloak at Abu Ghraib prison, electrodes attached to his fingers as he stood with his arms extended outward and his feet on a box.
In Kelly’s work, the electrode wires were replaced with earbud cables attached to a pair of iPods. It looked similar to the popular Apple advertisements in which a music listener’s dark profile was highlighted by the use of the digital music player. Thistlewood thought the piece to be magnificent and had purchased it directly from Kelly at the artist’s Venice Beach studio. As much as he enjoyed the juxtaposition of commercialization and torture, his love of the work fell second to the only piece of art hanging in his office at work.
On the wall directly behind his desk was a large color lithograph of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. The three former presidents stood beside an oversized unplugged ATM emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. Jefferson covered his eyes. Madison covered his ears. Jackson covered his mouth.
The work was titled We Three Kings. It was a social commentary on the failure of the Federal Reserve and the three men who first opposed its initial creation in the late eighteenth century. In the lower right of the poster, just above the frame, it was signed.
The inscription read To Art: A patriot who understands the hallucination. A Deo Et Rege, George Edwards. It was written in black marker.
Thistlewood shifted in his chair. He gazed out the window to his left, through the thin slats of the metal miniblinds that covered the pane. He thought of the meeting that night and the possibilities that lie ahead.
Thistlewood was a tenured associate professor at American University. For a time, he served on the Advisory Committee for the school’s prestigious Center for Democracy and Election Management. It was a labor of love to spread true American idealism and freedom to other parts of the world. But America, as he saw it, was changing. The world was changing.
He rolled his chair out from behind his desk and over to his office door. He closed it, locked it, and rolled back to the desk. There were evening plans to change. He picked up his desk phone and dialed.
A bespectacled twenty-four-year-old grad student with fantastic lips would have to wait to taste the tannin of a dusty 1996 Oregon pinot noir.
She’ll understand, Thistlewood promised himself as he waited for her to answer her cell phone. He would miss her legs as much as those of the pinot.
*
Sir Spencer Thomas’s dietician had warned him of “emot
ional eating”, but the knight found himself consciously ignoring her expensive advice in favor of stress relief.
He’d requested the daily menu from the hotel’s restaurant, The Lafayette, and was weighing the emotional benefits of the offered items.
Sir Spencer picked up the phone and dialed the operator, who in turn connected him with room service.
“Yes, Sir Spencer,” a woman’s pleasant voice answered. “How may I be of service to you?”
“I am ready to order an early supper.”
“Please, sir, go ahead with your order.”
He was emotional. “I’ll begin with the steamed jumbo green asparagus and diver scallops. And I would like additional ginger mustard vinaigrette on the side.”
“Yes, sir. And for the main course?”
“Pan-seared Maryland jumbo lump crab cakes with extra pesto.”
“Of course.”
“A large bottle of Fiji and two glasses of ice.”
He thanked the woman and hung up the phone. It was late afternoon and he needed to write an outline for the meeting he’d called.
He walked over to the small table positioned between the dining table and a pair of sofas in the living area of his suite. Already on the table was a pad of yellow legal-sized paper and a pen.
The pen was a jet black Mont Blanc Meisterstuck Rollerball. It was a gift to Sir Spencer from José Manuel Durão Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal and president of the European Union Commission.
Barroso sent the pen to Sir Spencer on the occasion of the birth of his third child, Francisco. The boy’s initials, FdSUDB, were inscribed on the shaft of the pen. Sir Spencer thought it much better than a cigar.
Sir Spencer Thomas was a world traveler with friends on every inhabited continent. He knew captains of industry, politicians, warlords, bankers, arms dealers, clergy—anyone who pushed the world to spin on its axis.
Still, he was an enigma to most of the power brokers from whom he sought favor. He was known well enough to be invited to their functions, but he was also the one in group photographs whose name nobody could quite remember.
Sir Spencer liked it that way. It was easier for him if the conversations always dabbled in light politics and stormy weather. Even Barroso knew very little about his friend, the colorful shadow.
His ancestry was only slightly royal (one branch of his family tree included a Marquess Douro), but he was a real knight. Queen Elizabeth II honored Spencer Thomas with an offer to join the Order of the British Empire in 1998. Sir Spencer and investment banker Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, were the only ones offered knighthood that year.
Sir Spencer was neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. He’d advised President Ronald Reagan against Operation Urgent Fury in 1983. But Reagan had disregarded Sir Spencer and invaded the Caribbean Island of Grenada, quickly deposing its military government.
Sir Spencer was not a pacifist either. The year before, he’d opposed the Grenadian conflict; he’d supported British action against the Argentinean insurgency in the Falklands. Years later, he helped provide the last bit of intelligence that led to the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.
Though not a US citizen, he privately thought of himself as one. And had it not been for his knighthood, he’d have renounced his British citizenship and become a naturalized American.
Sir Spencer knew the greatest empire in the world needed a nudge in a new direction. It was a potentially violent nudge that went against the knight’s more refined inclinations. As a willing martyr for his beliefs, though, Sir Spencer Thomas saw no other way. He picked up the pen and began making notes.
Chapter 6
The asset seemed uncomfortable and uncertain about playing both sides of the fence. Matti could tell that from the moment she picked up the gray phone at her desk.
She answered as she pulled the handset to her ear. “Harrold.”
“You don’t sound like a Harrold.” The voice on the other end was distorted. The caller had attached a portable voice changer to a cell phone. It connected to the phone through the miniplug headset jack and included two high-pitch and two low-pitch options. Should the recordings of the conversations ever become public, Matti assumed the asset wanted some level of deniability.
“Then who do I sound like?” Matti knew this was her contact.
“I don’t know,” the voice was low and robotic. “I assumed Harrold was a dude.”
“Not a dude.” She didn’t want to talk too much. Though she was inexperienced in HUMINT, she approached this as any salesman might confront a tough sell: the first one to talk loses the deal. Her mother had taught her that.
“Got that.”
Matti said nothing.
“So, you are my handler?”
“Yes,” she replied and picked up a pencil.
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you want to tell me?” Matti flipped to the front page of a small notebook.
“There is a meeting tonight.”
“Tell me more.” She was taking notes now.
“It’s a strategy session.”
Matti pulled the pencil to her mouth and bit on the metal ferrule that attached the vinyl eraser onto the wood shaft. It bent slightly.
“I think there is some big plan in the works to make a statement. The president’s death has the group anxious, I think.”
Matti spun the pencil and lightly chewed. It was a stress habit.
“They’ve talked about it for a while,” the robot voice droned. “You know, doing something that would make a statement about our cause.”
“And what is your cause?” Matti decided to prod.
“That’s complicated,” the asset paused. “I’m sure you spooks know all about it.”
“Spooks are CIA,” Matti corrected.
“Funny.”
“Not intended to be.” Matti didn’t like being compared to the CIA.
“There is a meeting tonight.”
“Details, please.”
“There’ll be some sort of plan discussed at the meeting. I think the president’s death has sped up the plans for action.”
“What plans?”
The asset sounded irritated. “I’ve already told people at your agency in the past. It should be in some sort of file, right?”
“I have a file.”
“Well, I think the action, whatever it is, will involve violence. Or at the very least it may include the threat of violence. I think it will happen soon,” the asset continued without prodding, “because the opportunity to have influence would diminish greatly once President Foreman is buried and the new president, whoever it is, settles in.”
Matti stopped nibbling and was again taking notes. “So are you thinking weeks?”
She knew that, despite her supervisor’s insistence on secrecy, the agency was recording every second of it, cataloging it, transcribing it, analyzing it, and filing it. She wouldn’t have access to the final version for hours, maybe days, though, and it was important that she have notes at her desk.
“No.” The robotic voice couldn’t have had less intonation. There was a pause.
Matti stopped scribbling and waited for the rest of the answer.
“We’re talking days. A week at most.”
“Okay,” she responded as though she was unsurprised. “Then I’ll need a debriefing after tonight’s meeting. Where did you say it is?”
“I didn’t.”
“Okay then.” She sighed in a way that conveyed frustration.
“I’m certain your people know where it is. I will call after the meeting. I’m thinking by 4 a.m. maybe. Will you be at work?”
“Yes.” Matti’s day had just gotten a lot longer.
There was a click. The conversation was over.
Matti picked up the black line to call her supervisor. She hesitated. Looking back over her notes, there were some things that bothered her. What stuck with her most was the first thing said when she answered the phone. The
asset expected a man named Harrold. Even through the electronic alteration, she could sense the surprise. Yet her supervisor told her she was chosen for the assignment because the asset requested a woman.
Had her boss lied? Was he trying to keep something from her?
She was a great SIGINT analyst, but it struck her as unbelievable she’d been handed the responsibility of deconstructing a violent act of terrorism just days from execution. Maybe her boss knew she was never one to shy away from a challenge.
She’d spent much of her adult life trying to piece together her mother’s final moments. She’d pored through the forensic photographs; she’d flown to Richmond and talked to the bartender who’d served her mother into a stupor; she’d even found the junkyard hiding the truck that had crushed her mother’s skull beneath its front tire. But there were so many questions she could not answer: Why was her mother at a bar so late at night? Why was she run over and left for dead in the gutter of a downtown street? Why was there cocaine in her purse? Was it an innocent night out with clients? Was it something else? She couldn’t decode the death of her own mother. What would make her boss think she could handle this?
Matti slipped the notepad into her desk drawer, locked it, and stood. She had questions for her supervisor, and she couldn’t wait for the answers.
Chapter 7
Bill Davidson stared into the camera. In his right ear was a custom-molded earpiece he used to listen to the program and to the producers in the production booth.
He was a guest on the cable program Constitution Avenue and was awaiting his turn in the live guest cue. As he waited, he listened to the current discussion between the host and a political reporter for the website PLAUSIBLEDENIABILITY.INFO. It was a site that reported Beltway news with a TMZ sensibility. The reporter’s name was Dillinger Holt.
“Our sources are telling us the president will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery and that his public viewing will be within the next three days. He’ll lie in state at the Capitol, and there’ll be some sort of memorial there. Then the burial will include cabinet members and Foreman’s family. There’s no word on when or how long the public viewing will be.”
