The Liberty Intrigue

by Tom Grace

  “So they’re defrauding the utility?” the President asked with a smile.

  “That’s the only plausible explanation. I have some of the speechwriters distilling this report into sound bites—it’s damning as hell.”

  “Hell is exactly where we need to damn Ross Egan.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  COPPERHEAD, MONTANA

  “Got a minute, Double-H?” Deb McColl asked. “There’s something I need to run by you.”

  She stood at the door to a horse stall in the resort’s large barn, a messenger bag slung over her shoulders. Hopps was brushing down the golden buckskin coat of his prized Akhal-Teke after their daily ride. The horse whinnied softly, clearly enjoying the attention. Hopps set the brush into a bucket and fed the horse a handful of apple slices.

  “Sure. Let’s step into my office.”

  Hopps closed up the stall and accompanied McColl to the stable office next to the tack room. The barn was largely empty, save for the half-dozen horses Hopps and his wife transported with them. Spring had brought with it a foal that had become the mascot of the Who Is I team and had been named Liberty.

  McColl pulled up a stool as Hopps dropped into a wooden office chair behind the desk. The office radio was tuned to Garr Denby’s show and the host was discoursing about a fatuous federal court decision allowing the government to regulate an individual’s mental activity under the Commerce Clause.

  “Whatcha got?” Hopps asked as he turned down the radio.

  “The Vice President’s assassination—something about it just doesn’t add up.”

  “Seemed pretty straightforward to me. What’s troubling you about it?”

  McColl set an iPad on the desktop and roused the device out of sleep mode. The screen displayed a web of lines connecting nodes—a digital mind map. She tapped one of the nodes and a photograph filled the screen. It showed Unden and his father dressed in hunters camouflage, armed with rifles, posing with the body of a large buck.

  “Look at their rifles,” McColl said.

  Hopps studied the image closely but failed to discern what McColl was trying to show him.

  “I pride myself on possessing a wide breadth of knowledge,” Hopps admitted, “but sadly firearms is not among my fields of expertise.”

  “I’m an army brat, so I do know something about firearms. Look at the bolts on their rifles. Unden’s father is holding a right-handed weapon. Unden has a left-handed model.”

  “So, Unden was a southpaw.”

  “Most likely. Left-handed rifles are the exception rather than the norm. The choice is based primarily on your dominant eye.”

  “Dominant eye?”

  “Everybody has one eye that’s stronger than the other. This is the master eye, or dominant eye. Doesn’t matter if you’re shooting pistols, rifles, or arrows, you always use one eye to sight a target. If Unden is shooting lefty, he has a dominant left eye.”

  “It makes that much difference?”

  “It’s the difference between a hit or a miss. Unden was a Marine sniper, and a good one according to the news reports. They would have dialed him in with his dominant eye.”

  McColl returned to the mind map and located a second photo. It showed the rifle mounted on a bipod, resting atop the desk in the hotel room.

  “This is the weapon used in the assassination. It’s a right-handed rifle,” McColl explained. “Now, I checked and the company that makes this rifle doesn’t produce a left-handed version.”

  “Can a southpaw fire a right-handed rifle, like Hendrix playing right-handed guitars upside down?”

  “Sure, the problem is chambering the next round.”

  McColl braced her elbows on the desktop and held her arms as if aiming an imaginary rifle.

  “I shoot lefty, so I’m familiar with this problem. With a bolt-action rifle, you work the bolt to load a round, fire, and then work the bolt again to load the next round. If I’m a lefty using a right-handed rifle, I have to reach over the barrel to work the bolt. Doable, but awkward and a bit slower, even for someone really familiar with the weapon.”

  “Okay, lay it out for me.”

  “Unden’s out of the military for a few years and he hunts with a left-handed rifle. He decides to off the President and Vice President and sets out to purchase the firepower necessary to do the job. He buys a right-handed rifle and mount and, with just a few days to practice with the weapon, uses it to near perfection.”

  “You don’t buy it?” Hopps pressed.

  “It’s possible Unden could have fired, reloaded, and fired again, but unlikely. And here’s the clincher.”

  McColl brought up a copy of the FBI report on the assassin’s rifle.

  “You hacked the FBI?”

  “I pulled his Marine service records, too, just to be thorough. I’m sure they didn’t even notice I was there.”

  Hopps smiled, certain McColl had left no trace from her illegal trespass.

  “The ballistics report confirms this is the rifle that fired the two shots,” McColl continued. “Fingerprints show that Unden held this weapon and the gunshot residue test of his hands indicates he recently fired a weapon. The problem is the fingerprints. The FBI pulled Unden’s prints, both fingertips and palm, from the rifle. The location of these prints shows that he could have only held the rifle like this—”

  McColl crouched back into firing position, this time shooting right-handed.

  “The clincher is in his service jacket. During an overseas tour, he was injured in an off-duty altercation.”

  “Bar fight?” Hopps guessed.

  McColl nodded. “A bottle was broken and a tiny sliver of glass struck Unden’s right eye. The damage wasn’t severe, but it degraded his vision in that eye.”

  “So there is no way Unden could’ve made these shots firing right-handed?”

  “None.”

  “So somebody else pulled the trigger and left poor Unden to take the blame,” Hopps surmised.

  “Which leads us to logistics. A political convention is a big-ticket event that fills hotels for miles around the hall. How does a guy like Unden land a primo hotel within walking distance of the convention center just days before the event?”

  “More important, a room with the perfect view of the convention center,” Hopps offered. “And if Unden isn’t the shooter, how did he get there?”

  “His truck was valet parked at the hotel,” McColl replied. “He drove, or to be precise, I believe he was driven. The FBI tracked his credit card use from North Dakota to San Francisco and even pulled security camera images of him pumping gas. Grainy shots, and he always has a ball cap on that obscures his face, but the license plate is clear.”

  “So the FBI has a definite trail of Unden driving across the country and checking into the hotel, where he kills the Vice President and wings the President before taking his own life. Open-and-shut case?”

  McColl nodded. “The evidence against Unden is so overwhelming that there is no reason for the FBI to look deeper.”

  “But you did, I take it.”

  “Yes, and I found something very interesting. Every time Unden’s truck stopped for gas, another vehicle stopped for gas, too. Not always at the same gas station, but always the same rental car, at the same exit, at the same time.”

  McColl ran through a series of still photos taken from gas station security cameras. Each showed the same vehicle and the same driver pumping gas. There did not appear to be any other passengers in the car.

  “This car and Unden’s truck get different gas mileage,” McColl explained, “so it’s highly unlikely both would pull off the highway at the same time unless they were traveling together.”

  “And if Unden is an unwilling patsy, then we have at least two other people involved,” Hopps said. “How’d you piece this together?”

  “I spotted the chase car in two of the FBI’s photos,” McColl replied. “Once I knew Unden couldn’t have made the shot, I followed the other car. It led me to look at credit ca
rd numbers, and the rest fell into place. The same card was used to rent the car, to pay for fuel, food, and motels on the trip, and to rent the connecting room next to Unden’s in San Francisco. That connecting room also happens to be wheelchair accessible.”

  “Which is how you might bring an incapacitated man into a hotel without drawing much attention. Very clever.”

  “Still not the best part, Double-H. The credit card the assassins used is part of the same block of numbers we found swirling around the President’s online piggy bank.”

  One of Hopps’s bushy eyebrows arched up like an angry cat as he quietly considered the implications of McColl’s findings.

  “You make a convincing case,” Hopps said. “But the trick is how to point the authorities to this line of inquiry without exposing our other activities. I think I’ll run this past our patrons.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  COLUMBIA, MISSOURI

  OCTOBER 9

  “Good evening, Mr. President,” Egan said warmly as the two candidates met center stage at the Jesse Auditorium.

  “Ross,” the President replied flatly as he shook Egan’s offered hand.

  Both men smiled as they met, cameras recording the moment, though the President’s expression seemed less genuine, as if he would rather be anyplace else but here. They then greeted news anchor Hannah Douglass, who stood beside the moderator’s desk, before all three took their places for the third debate.

  “Mr. President,” Douglass began, “in January, either you or your opponent will be sworn in as president. The presidential oath of office includes a solemn vow to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. When the current Congress was sworn in almost two years ago, the Republican leadership felt it necessary to open its session with a recitation of the Constitution to remind lawmakers just what it was they had sworn to support and defend. The debate over the constitutionality of government actions and constitutional interpretation is nearly as old as the document itself. How do you view the Constitution?”

  “Thank you, Hannah,” the President began. “The Constitution is a remarkable expression of a political vision. It describes the framework of a government that is of, by, and for the people. It also establishes the rule of law as the operating ethic of our nation. As you noted, debate over the meaning and intent of the Constitution began while the ink was still wet on the page, and this debate is a good and healthy thing. There are those who view the Constitution within the rigid confines of originalism, and others who see it as an artifact of its day whose meaning has ebbed with the forward progress of our nation and the world around us.

  “I believe the Constitution is as relevant now as the day it was written. It’s a living document that’s relevance must be interpreted anew with each step in the evolution of our ongoing experiment in democracy.

  “I do not agree with those primarily on the right who revere the Constitution as some sort of sacred text, as if the Framers descended from a mountain with it chiseled in stone tablets by the finger of God. Our nation is a work in progress, and the Constitution simply provides the guidelines within which our national government must operate.

  “The Constitution was by no means perfect when it was first ratified, and the Framers themselves knew there was much work left undone. The failure to abolish slavery and establish equality for all men and women was clearly the most significant missed opportunity for this country to live up to its professed belief in the self-evident truth that all people are created equal. To the Framers, that meant all white men were created equal among themselves and more equal than everyone else. It’s only through an enlightened, progressive view of the Constitution as a living document that it ultimately addressed our nation’s original sin and expanded liberty to the slaves and suffrage to women.

  “As a constitutional scholar and elected official, I find that the Constitution’s bias toward the individual renders it a charter of negative liberties with regard to government’s role in promoting social justice and the common good. It is in addressing these weaknesses in the Constitution that my administration has been most effective in serving the American people.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Douglass said. “The question now goes to you, Mr. Egan.”

  “This is an ideal question to start this debate, because our respective understanding of the duties and limits of government are rooted in how we view the Constitution,” Egan said. “While I respect the President’s constitutional scholarship, I approach the Constitution and the supporting documents left to us by the Framers with a humbled respect and gratitude after my experience on the council that wrote the constitution for the nation of Dutannuru. It’s one thing to argue political theory from the comfortable confines of an academic ivory tower, and quite another to debate natural law and the rights of man knowing that the results of those heated discussions will have an immediate and lifelong impact on the citizenry of a nation. In crafting Dutannuru’s constitution, we drew heavily upon the founding documents of this country. We did so because the principles our Constitution so clearly articulates are directly responsible for the success of these United States.

  “Consider that the nations in this hemisphere are the offspring of the European colonization of the New World. None has a monopoly of natural resources or favorable geography, yet only one rose from the wilderness to become a global superpower. Only one.

  “And less than two hundred years after the rebels shook off the chains of tyranny and reclaimed the God-given right of liberty for themselves and their descendants, that one nation of free people set foot on the moon.

  “The accomplishments of the United States are unequalled in the history of human civilization, both in the pace of our nation’s intellectual and creative output and its sheer magnitude. And there is a simple reason for this—the Constitution.

  “In fashioning a form of limited government whose authority lies only within the bounds of a few enumerated powers, the Founders unleashed the potential energy of the entire populace. Unfettered by the tyranny of an oppressive state, the people did what came naturally—they created and they prospered.

  “I do not share the belief that the Constitution is a living document, that its intent is malleable and can be refashioned to suit particular political ends. Such a belief is akin to football referees replacing the chains used to measure a team’s progress toward the goal line with rubber bands. Like a yardstick, the restrictions placed on the government by the Constitution are not meant to be elastic.

  “While I greatly admire the Constitution, I readily concede it is an imperfect work. It was, after all, created by imperfect beings. That is why only the people, and not any of the three branches of government, have the power to alter and amend the Constitution.

  “The Constitution is the political DNA of our nation and the source of our exceptionalism. It is far and away the finest expression of faith in the individual.”

  “So, in nominating judges to the Supreme Court, you favor strict constructionists, Mr. Egan?” Douglass asked.

  “I do,” Egan replied, “and the Constitution is clear on this point. Congress writes the laws, and the courts judge whether those laws are constitutional. It does the people no good if the court’s basis for measuring the constitutionality of a law flexes from one decision to the next, or if the result of a decision is, in effect, the creation of a new law.

  “Each of the three branches is limited in what it can do by design, which is a good thing. Judicial activism oversteps the constitutional bounds of the judicial branch, in effect usurping the constitutional authority of the legislative branch. Judicial activism is a means of creating laws that legislators could not or would not pass, and that in most cases the people do not want. Where the Constitution is silent on an important issue, it is up to the people to provide the courts with guidance through the amendment process. Judicial activism is to be avoided.”

  “Any rebuttal, Mr. President?”

  “Judges who share
my belief in the Constitution as a living document are essential to the continued progress of our democracy. I will continue to appoint judges whose thinking is not limited by archaic notions of originalism.”

  “Since you raise the topic of constitutional amendments,” Douglass said as a segue, “I offer my next question to you, Mr. Egan. In your campaign literature, you propose not just one but four amendments to the Constitution. Not since the drafting of the Bill of Rights have so many amendments been offered for discussion. Is our nation in such dire straits that only an overhaul of the Constitution will remedy the situation?”

  “If by overhaul, you are asking if I favor a constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution, then my answer is an emphatic no. The amendment process is more than adequate for addressing the fundamental issues that affect this nation.

  “A century of progressive attack on the liberties enjoyed by our citizens—liberties that make this country the envy of the world—have exploited a fundamental flaw in the design of the Constitution. John Adams identified this flaw early on when he commented that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other kind of people.

  “Enlightened progressive socialists in high office and on the courts, who are often both amoral and irreligious, pervert the explicit meaning and common sense woven into the Constitution to their own ends. In the case of abortion, they have created an unresolvable wedge issue that festers in our national psyche and provides cover for their other dangerous but less emotionally charged actions.

  “Justice Blackmun identified the crux of the abortion problem in his majority opinion in the landmark Roe versus Wade case. He wrote that the Constitution does not define person in so many words. Blackmun’s comment begs the question: Where in the Constitution does an inferred right to privacy trump the explicitly enumerated right to life?