DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3)

by T. J. Brearton

  Gide passed Brendan the can of kerosene.

  * * *

  Brendan rode in the ADK Taxi to the small airport. He smoked a cigarette with the woman driver, the same one who had picked him up from the train.

  The airport was tiny, out in the middle of nowhere. Commercial flights were grounded due to the total disintegration of the internet. Air Traffic Control wasn’t allowing charters until further notice. But, as Lazard said, money talked. A lone Cessna commuter plane sat on the tarmac in the sheets of rain. From inside the lounge, looking at the plane through the glass, Brendan spoke on a payphone to Russell Gide.

  Gide described the scene at the Heilshorns. The police had arrived — both local and state — and exhumed the remaining bodies from the garden. Prior to their arrival, Argon’s men had taken video of the entire scene, and then placed their anonymous call, taken Leah, left Greta Heilshorn in the basement, and disappeared.

  Within a short time, as expected, the whole property became the exclusive domain of the feds. There would be nothing in the papers about Wyn Weston’s body, or any of the others, or of the Heilshorns. Maybe the local paper, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, would try to write something, but the editor would receive a call from a no-nonsense FBI agent issuing a gag order. The editor would probably put up a fight, if she had any salt, about the right to free speech, and the federal agent would remind her, this is a matter of national security.

  But Philip Largo would get his daughter back, and XList would be soon be over. The internet wouldn’t be down forever, and even if Altnet emerged and was everything CSS hoped it would be — a completely regulated and government controlled internet, there was no way the people could be silenced, no way the truth could be stopped. Brendan felt like he was proof of that. He felt like Argon’s men were proof of that.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN / SUNDAY, 10:42 AM

  The private charter plane descended over the Cayman Islands on a Sunday morning. Brendan looked out the window at the bursts of palm tree tops and turquoise water with its frothy white fringe.

  Lazard met him at the gate. He looked completely at home in a short-sleeved shirt and linen pants, and sandals. He greeted Brendan warmly, shaking his hand with both of his large mitts. Then he stepped back, his eyes lingering over Brendan’s pale complexion.

  “You need some sun,” he said.

  Outside, the heat was like a sudden hug. The tropical breeze ruffled the Cape Rush surrounding the tiny airport terminal. He watched the birds cut silhouettes through the blue sky. He turned his head in the direction of the surf. He gazed out at it as they walked, Lazard chatting away about the weather and the sights.

  Brendan realized he’d never been to a place quite like this. He’d never even been to Florida. He’d spent his entire life in the north, even those four years he’d checked out of society, he’d never wandered south.

  “Hey,” he heard.

  They were in the parking lot, shining cars lined up. Lazard was standing by a convertible.

  “You good?”

  Brendan nodded.

  * * *

  They drove down the road with Lazard’s dark hair blowing about his head. He finally took to clamping down on it with one of his hands.

  Brendan looked over. Three days of beard stubble matched his shaved head. “Too much wind?”

  Lazard grinned. “I love it,” he called back.

  “How far is it?”

  “Couple more miles,” answered Lazard. He then cut Brendan a sideways glance, taking in his altered appearance. “What do I call you now, huh?”

  Brendan stared up at the blazing sun. “William Chase.”

  “William Chase? Can I call you Billy?”

  “No.”

  “How about Will. ‘Will Chase.’ That is appropriate, huh?”

  Brendan smiled, but his mind was elsewhere. He thought of Donald Kettering, the hardware store owner from Boonville, father of Rebecca’s one other child. Rebecca Heilshorn had named their daughter Aldona, which was an anagram of Donald.

  Ever since he’d first laid eyes on her, Brendan knew Rebecca had had something to tell him.

  * * *

  The Ugland House was a building containing thousands of safety deposit boxes. Over 18,000 corporations from around the world were registered. Many of the corporations would claim to have offices on the premises, though there was no economic activity at The Ugland House. It was a place solely for the books.

  “The bulk of corporations in the registry are your US corporations,” Lazard said as they neared. “Using the international tax rules to shift profits out of the US, a high tax rate country, into this, a low tax rate country.” He glanced at Brendan. “The tax rate here is zero percent.”

  Lazard’s large fingers wrapped around the steering wheel at 10 and 2. “You allocate as much as possible of your income to low rate countries, keep as much of your expenses on the books in your high rate countries, and hey, bingo. Or is it Yahtzee? But by any reasonable standard, when most of your business is in the US, most of the know-how, the research, the production is there. The profits that are taxed should also be there, yes?”

  “Yes,” Brendan said. It wasn’t a political answer. With everything he had seen over the past ten years of his life, it was the only answer.

  “Seventy billion a year in potential revenue lost to offshore tax shelters,” Lazard said. “And the CEOs come down here and eat dinner at the Westin Grand and look out at the ocean like gods.”

  They turned into the parking lot outside The Ugland House. The space was surrounded by Royal Palms, tall and bent, like sleepy sentinels. The high sun hit the fronds and threw long, crisscrossing shadows over the weather-bleached pavement. There were only a few cars in the lot, parked far away.

  “But,” said Lazard, “there’s no real money here. From a few private individuals, yes. But the corporate dollars, any physical dollars, are in the US onshore.”

  He zipped into a parking space, put the convertible in park and seemed to sink into his seat, the engine still purring beneath the expansive hood.

  Lazard settled into a contemplative silence, rubbing at his face. Then he killed the engine and turned to Brendan and smiled, his jowls lifting into creases of skin. “What’s here is even better.”

  * * *

  Lazard had a key to one of the boxes. He withdrew the contents and brought Brendan into a small room designated for box owners to view their inventory in private. Along the way to the room, a pretty, dark-skinned clerk smiled at Lazard, who grinned back and gave her a full up-and-down appraisal with his eyes.

  Once in the room, Lazard stood in front of a wall of security boxes with a certain reverence, as if the boxes themselves were holy artifacts.

  “There was a finite supply of bitcoin to begin with, but it is expansionary,” Lazard said. “Just like the money we spend every day that we think runs the world, it is completely faith-based, imaginary; it only has value based on the value that we give it. As long as people believe in it, whether it’s paper or it’s digital, it’s a viable means of commerce. But, by hiding your online transactions, being able to do whatever you want without Uncle Sam, the IRS, or the banks involved?”

  He reached up and ran two paw-like hands through his thick hair.

  “‘Oh boy,’ you say. That is terrifying to your US Government, more of a threat than they would ever let on publicly.” He dropped his hands to his sides and turned to Brendan. “So, what do they do? How do they stop it? Take out the new libertarian frontier? But the internet is not something you can just unplug, yes? Not unless there is a major attack. Something to blow it up and chop it up. And then, all of the executive orders kick in. The country is yours to control without anyone saying differently.”

  He stepped in so close that Brendan could smell the suntan lotion on his skin, the sweet café con leche on his breath.

  “But really you have generated this attack yourself,” Lazard said. “You have a frame-up for a group of hackers, libertarians with high
digital IQs, but not actual terrorists. So what? You say they did it; they did it. Meanwhile your own Cyber Division under the CSS has been running around sabotaging the data centers and cutting the sub-oceanic cables and setting C-4 explosives and leaving behind the clues that Nonsystem is responsible, killing anyone who knows otherwise.”

  Lazard then held up his hands in mock alarm, making his eyes wide for effect. “‘My God. Look what these cyber terrorists did! But don’t worry.” Then he reached out and threw an arm around Brendan, miming a good buddy, lowering the pitch of his voice. “Don’t worry everybody, rest assured, because we, your government, we have a surprise for you. We have a backup internet! Well, it’s completely regulated by us. But, you’ll be able to do all the things you love to do like shop Amazon and check your email and post pictures on Facebook and go to Etsy and get knitted booties for baby. This is going to be a lot better for you. A lot safer. Because it’s your safety we have in mind.’”

  Lazard stepped back and shook his head, incredulous at his own words. Then his eyes, dark around the edges, but afire in the center, homed in on Brendan.

  “But that’s just the icing on the cake, you see. Because really in doing all of this you’ve managed to spoil all the encryption applications which have been developed over the past twenty years for civilian privacy.” He slapped the back of his hand into his palm with a loud crack. “You’ve eliminated privacy in the digital world. Gone. There is no more Silent Circle or HTTP Everywhere. Project Bullrun becomes a success by default. There’s no more deep web, no Dark Wallet, nothing left enciphered or stealthy. It’s total exposure for the people, complete access for the government. The exact, and I mean exact opposite of how it was intended. Congratulations, Mr. William Chase, your country has come full circle.”

  Lazard walked to one of the boxes and slipped a key from his loose pants. He opened the door and withdrew a long slender metal box. He brought the box to the table in the center of the room and set it down. The room was refrigerator cold.

  “Of course, you’ll never be able to prove that,” Lazard said. He looked from the box on the table to Brendan. “No one can. Some cases, as your US Attorney General might say, are too big to prosecute.”

  Brendan folded his arms in the cool air. “But Greta Heilshorn will go down. That’s what you wanted, Didier. You’re not a martyr. You wanted the Heilshorns trashed, XList revenue clamped off, and Titan to take a blow because they’d been moving in on your own turf with bitcoin enterprises. And you want to watch the global petrodollar fail.”

  “I’m not hiding it.”

  Brendan stepped away from the table and dropped his arms. Suddenly he wanted a drink. He hadn’t felt such a craving since he’d been at Rikers. It was sudden and powerful, rolling up through his nervous system like a flash fire. But then it dissipated as he brought himself under control.

  He had to make peace with this. Within himself. It was hard to love your country and to see the truth behind the lies at the same time. But, it was possible. They didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

  Since he’d looked Heilshorn in the eyes that day at Roosevelt Hospital he’d understood that he was looking into the face of something which had taken seed in the country a century before. An exploitation of the love and faith of the people, a manipulation of the system that cost lives. He’d known even then, without proof, Heilshorn had been working with the government. He’d almost blurted it out to Jennifer Aiken when she’d come to Rikers. But he hadn’t. He’d tried to keep her safe. It hadn’t worked out too well, but at least she was still alive. And Sloane? There were mixed reports. Some indicated she’d been captured. Others speculated she was still at large. If Lazard knew, he wasn’t saying, not even to Brendan. If Sloane was free, she’d be deep underground. Never to come up again.

  There was some strange relief in that.

  Lazard had fallen silent. It was all on the table now, like the security box. Out on the table, but enclosed in this room, within the walls of The Ugland House. Where the world kept its secrets. While the titans dined, as Lazard had said, at the Westin Grand.

  “Like we discussed,” Lazard said finally, opening the box, “Philomena Argon and Sloane Dewan were always working with me. I was personally helping to finance Nonsystem. Even now there are Nonsystem hackers all over the world learning the protocols of the Altnet, how to get past the firewalls and logins. But, I’ve come to know you, Mr. William Chase. You don’t care about any of that. You want this. More, you want this because she wants this. Aiken.”

  He pulled a smooth, black storage drive from the box and held it in the air in front of Brendan.

  “But you also know, as does she, that proof of a private equity firm funding the collapse of American freedom, and the rise of totalitarianism, will never see the light of day. How does the government prosecute itself? This is your American conundrum, yes? But, all that said, this I give to you. The backup of all Philomena’s data. Everything she was working on while with me at the IMF, and with her brother, and with Sloane. You can send it to your friend in the Justice Department, to Ms. Aiken. But, like I said, it won’t do you any good. You’d be better off dressing in some cargo pants and going door to door with a fine-toothed comb, Mr. Chase, and going down this list one name at a time. Maybe that’s the only way left.”

  He paused for a moment, giving Brendan another look. “Keep you from drinking, anyway.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT / MONDAY, 9:12 AM

  In the Russell Building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Current and Projected Threats to the US had assembled in a massive room. From her desk on the floor in front of the broad dais, Jennifer looked up at the senators and ex officio members, their names on placards in front of them.

  Seated along the platform were the National Counterterrorism Center Director, the FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the CIA. There was also the Defense Intelligence Agency Director, and the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. So many ranks, so many departments.

  Conspicuously absent was the director of the NSA and the CSS. In his stead sat Brigadier General Wick, seated behind the FBI Director. Where the other men wore their crisp suits, Wick was in full formal military attire, his medals glinting in the bright overhead lights.

  Their names, ranks, positions — these felt pointless. She found it hard to concentrate on them, on who they were, men she had come to know over the years, but men she had never really known at all. She found it hard to keep their names straight in her head, when there was only one name she could think about.

  He had been listed in a department brief along with the other bodies discovered at the Heilshorn mansion in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. One name in what the media, with what little they knew, were calling a tragic shootout over the sinister black market enterprise known as XList. Brendan Healy, once a cop on the case of the murdered escort Rebecca Heilshorn, was counted among the dead, his body badly burned.

  The men and women on the platform were sworn in, raising their right hands in the air. The ex officio group was composed of the same individuals — save for Fogarty, the CIA head — who had served on another recent committee that had found that the CIA had misled the government and the public concerning its interrogation program during the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Justice had been involved then, too, to testify that the enhanced interrogation tactics employed by the CIA were effective in obtaining unique intelligence helping to disrupt terrorist plots and save lives.

  Now the CIA sat on the panel, represented by Fogarty, and it was a former agent of the Department of Justice who was about to be questioned. It was a game of musical chairs. A puppet show.

  “Ms. Aiken, thank you for being here today,” said Robert Cole, the Director of National Intelligence. Cole was the ad-hoc chairman of the committee, a handsome man in his mid-sixties with kind eyes.

  Jennifer leaned towards the mic
rophone. “Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It’s a pleasure to be here.”

  When in Rome, she thought.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, and the pleasantries were a faint memory. Jennifer was out for blood.

  “Mr. Chairman, the face of propaganda is complex. The problems of our country are systemic — most every one of us believes we’re working towards some version of the greater good. And we have a balkanized media to support our worldview.”

  She took a nervous fumbling sip of her water, then steadied herself.

  “What ultimately brings everyone here today is not some nefarious secret plan. It’s been right out in the open. We have a sort of critical obliviousness as a society, and are prone to the fallacy that everything as it is, will stay the way it is. Yet everything around us has evolved and grown. Population, technology, our laws. We normalize it, acclimatize to it, until the next thing comes along. Like cell-phone interceptor towers. Police responding to demonstrations with IRAD sirens and BearCat armored cars and Sky Watch towers. Surveillance that has people detained in airports for their tweets, cops knocking down doors for Facebook posts, FBI investigations launched over ‘Un-American’ sentiment. Or maybe, if you will, Article 215 of the Patriot Act. Liberty’s at a tipping point, Mr. Chairman.”

  She took a breath and pressed on.

  “The people know they’re being monitored. Some of them consider these instances of detainment as ‘taking one for the team.’ In the interest of that greater good, to disrupt terrorist plots, to stop the next mass murderer or respond to the next Waco. But to anyone who takes a look, there is little to justify these measures. FBI stings that lure in potential threats, aid them in obtaining materials to commit acts of domestic destruction. CIA interrogation tactics not yielding vital information, and then dissembled about. A US citizen today is nearly sixty-times more likely to be killed by an officer of the law than a terrorist. The conspiracy theorists are called paranoid, but I have to wonder, Mr. Chairman, if the paranoia isn’t on the other side? The side that says we justify all of this with the ‘known unknowns’ — the threats we consider possible but have no evidence of. Is it probable that we might actually be contributing to some of these threats? Alexander Heilshorn was out to make money, something obviously sanctioned — practically considered a holy endeavor — in our culture, but perhaps he believed he was serving his nation by aiding in the proliferation of a militarized police force, by contributing to an event which—”