No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2)

by Mark E Becker

  Through with reflection, she retreated to the bedroom to shower as Max made his typical breakfast of fruit and poached eggs on toast. She dried her hair and quickly pulled on her flight uniform, not bothering to apply makeup. She was in a hurry. It was Wednesday, time for her to head over to Andrews Air Force Base for another lesson in flying Air Force One.

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  edundancy , he thought. If the president won’t let me do my job in the way I have been trained, I will find a way to do it his way. He’s going to make me gray in no time if I keep reacting

  instead of strategizing.

  The challenge for Justin Armstrong was in thinking like Max, anticipating his every move. The Secret Service head had had free reign since the fall of the previous administration, and he was amazed at the sudden gap in security when they departed. Protecting the president had become his sole purpose in life, but he had forsaken everything to rise to the top.

  He had never been much of a husband to his first wife or his second, and his daughter from his first marriage had to beg for him to take time off from his obsession to be a part of her life. At sixteen, Jessica spent more time with her boyfriend than either of her parents, but once these years had passed, he could never get them back. All he had from her first years of life were pictures of birthday parties he had missed, the empty chair at the table with a cardboard sign labeled in a child’s hand in magic marker: Daddy.

  Armstrong rationalized that his wife and daughter had accepted his role as a highly-decorated Navy SEAL, and later, as an upwardly mobile member of the Secret Service. His constant absence from the family for months at a time had taken its toll in loneliness and longing, and he couldn’t blame his wife for taking up with a horny insurance agent while he was off doing black ops in the mountains of Pakistan. He couldn’t share his triumphs with family; SEALs took a solemn, life-long oath to remain loyal to all of their members, and family fell outside of that circle. There would never be a tell-all book from a SEAL, or a reality show. He was, and would always be, a SEAL first and a spouse and parent second. It had to be that way.

  Armstrong could have been the nation’s darling hero if he had disclosed that he was a part of the team that had killed Osama Bin Laden. But that would have ended his career as a SEAL, and that thought, to him, was unthinkable. After all, what would he do in the civilian world? He was SEAL trained and duty-bound. He was where he wanted to be, despite the regret. There would be days tied to a desk. The mere thought of doing busywork made him nauseous, but it had to be done.

  He busied himself with the duties of the job, creating codenames for the president and those in his inner circle for use by his Secret Service detail. It was tradition, and he took delight in the choosing. He wanted the words to have a connection to their personality. He knew with silent pride that his choices would become a part of history. The codename he chose for Max was Wizard, for his habit of disappearing and evading security.

  Before becoming the most guarded person in the country, Max had mastered the cheap thrill of keeping the press guessing, emerging from places they never suspected. When it came time to leave, which seemed to happen less than a minute after the press had found him, he would disappear without warning. While other candidates would spend hours quoting statistics and droning on and on about the issue of the day, Max had made his comments short and to the point, and then he was gone. Rachel’s codename was Flygirl, and aviation was so much a part of her that no other words would suffice. He knew that his subordinates would refer to her by other names in private, as men do, but if he heard any of them using those words in his presence, it would be misconduct that would get them reassigned. They knew it, and in their daily briefings, he reinforced his rule.

  When it came to Vice President Conroy, Armstrong became more judicious in his choice of words. Previous codenames had little connection to the person, and in his research of the history on the subject, he was disappointed that his predecessors were so lacking in imagination. Obama was Renegade. Clinton was Eagle. Poor Gerald Ford was Passkey. Scarlett Conroy’s code name would be Hairbrush, he decided, for her penchant for combing her hair before every speech. History will support my decisions, he reflected.

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  here are two ways to take back our country. One is by overwhelming force, and that would involve a coup. We would need to convince the American people that Masterson is intent on ruining our country, and we would need to take control

  of the combined force of our military.” Adam Pryor sat passively on the deck of his mansion in the Hamptons, casually discussing the overthrow of the United States government and the demise of his nemesis, Max Masterson.

  The longtime Director of Homeland Security had officially retired on election day, announcing to the public that he was returning home to take a position with a think tank named the National Security Foundation. In his reality, Pryor was leaving before he was forcibly removed. For more than thirty years, he controlled the security of the United States, or perpetuated the illusion that the country was secure from terrorism. He used this position to ensure his personal wealth and the wealth of those who placed him in that position of power and control.

  Pryor owed no allegiance to his country, and he had no stake in the prosperity of the nation. He recited this chant on a daily basis, and perverted the meaning to suit his selfish agenda: “To thine own self be true.” To his way of thinking, that meant he would sacrifice the lives of other Americans to accomplish his personal goals, and over the years, his mania made the needless sacrifice of lives a goal rather than a consequence.

  Adam Pryor was warped by hate. In his mind, discrediting the new administration by launching a massive terrorist attack on the United States would vindicate him. During his time as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Pryor had no supervision and no peer. He was free to do whatever he chose, while creating a branch of government that failed to exist before September 11, 2001. The first large-scale terrorist attack within the borders of the United States spawned Homeland Security, and for the following decade, Pryor had a free ride.

  Along with the ephemeral duty of protecting America from the unknown came a great deal of power. Pryor used that power to control and eliminate his political enemies, and he was ruthless in creating the path to their devastation. The word in Congress was that if you messed with Homeland Security, your days in politics were numbered, and ignoring that adage had ended the promising career of a large number of politicians.

  They had suddenly found themselves defending scandals that sprung up following their efforts to question the functions and funding of Pryor’s department. It didn’t matter that the allegations would prove to be false after the firestorm of titillating controversy died down. By that time, public interest was turned elsewhere, and the powerless politician was left floating in a sea of mistrust and hostility.

  He had been publicly humiliated by Max’s father, John Masterson, during Senate hearings long before Max was born, and that hate had never subsided. It was merely transferred from father to son. Max Masterson and his presidency had inherited an anger that could only be quenched by the humiliation of Max and everything he stood for, in the most public way possible.

  His audience was composed of two members: a man known as “Darkhorse” and another known only as “Bob.” This meeting was their first in person. All previous communications were made by secure wireless contacts at remote locations. Nobody would suspect that the Director of Homeland Security would be involved in a plot to destroy the presidency and install a dictatorship in its place, he was confident of that. Pryor had instituted the same policies that he was in the process of circumventing. If anyone was capable of using security to cause mayhem, Pryor was an expert.

  “I need you to move fast. At precisely noon eastern standard time on Inauguration Day, January 18, we will detonate the first and smallest of those devices in Washington. It is desig
ned to disrupt anything with electronics. All vehicles with electronics and all communication devices, we will make useless. We are going to spoil a celebration of patriotism.” He smiled in a wicked leer.

  “At a time I choose, the larger plan will begin. We will place EMP bombs in high-rise penthouse condos that we own in six major metropolitan areas. They are to be on the top floor of the tallest buildings we could find. They are designed to knock out all geostationary communication satellites and power stations in each city with one blast,” declared Pryor.

  “You are going to kill a lot of people,” responded Darkhorse. “How will it feel for you to be hated worse than Hitler?”

  Pryor ignored him. “I don’t intend for you, or I, or anyone who is involved in this mission to be revealed to the public. We are going to shift the blame to Masterson and gain the support of the U.S. military in ensuring the continued existence of our way of life. You, Darkhorse, will be my minister of mayhem, and I expect you to maximize that mayhem at every opportunity.” Pryor’s voice took a sinister tone, and privately, the two mercenaries harbored doubts as to his mental stability. “These bombs are not designed to kill people. The electromagnetic pulse emitted from these explosions will be focused on eliminating satellite communications, the grid, and all electronics within the blast area. We will knock out all electronics in large metropolitan areas and bring down the power grid that supplies all of the comforts of society. They won’t be able to talk on the phone, watch TV, cook their food, or even keep warm.”

  “But why?” said Bob.

  “Survival of the fittest, that’s why.” Pryor was beginning to show outrage at the insolence, his face reddening with anger. He would not tolerate the questioning of his commands from a subordinate, and he considered everyone a subordinate.

  “You are being paid an outrageous amount of money to carry out my commands without question,” he rose from his Adirondack chair and pointed his index finger inches from Bob’s face. The swift motion was unexpected, and Bob backed off.

  “The city dwellers are weak. They are like sheep being led to slaughter. I don’t need to kill them. When I turn off technology and they lose the comforts to which they have become so dependent, they will die from the struggle or kill themselves to end their discomfort. America will become a nation where only the strong will persevere, and we will become stronger than any time in our history as a nation,” Pryor proclaimed in his most self-righteous voice. “The American people are like sheep. As long as they have full bellies and a shelter over their heads, I can make these wage slaves do anything I want. You think Lincoln freed the slaves? I’ll tell you this. The only difference between this country in 1855 and today is it is no longer a matter of race.. They’re all slaves, and they’re still living hand to mouth. If I can control the money and the basic necessities of their lives, I can control whether they live or die,” proclaimed Pryor.

  He’s truly deranged, thought Darkhorse. Once this job is over, I’m going to disappear for good. That crazy son of a bitch has used and abused me for the last time.

  Bob was oblivious to the implications of Pryor’s plan. He was good at taking orders from people with the money to hire him, and in his tiny niche of technology, he was an expert. The years he spent in Pakistan defusing nuclear devices had prepared him to do the work that the former Director of Homeland Security required, but this time, he was arming nuclear devices, not disarming them. He heard the discussion, but his involvement in decision-making ended with which route to take to get to the destination and the proper wrenches needed to install the devices at the locations he was given.

  His crew would accompany him on his three-week trip by truck to assist with the installation, but for all they knew, they were installing expensive icemakers in rich people’s penthouse condos. They would be spared the true intent of his mission. It was an easy diversion; move the devices into place and send the crew to the nearest bar to wait while he armed the devices and programmed them for detonation by cell phone.

  Once installed, Pryor could carry out his plan by speed dialing three preset numbers for each location. Each device had its own numbers, and Bob’s employer had memorized the codes. Once installed, he destroyed those codes, so that total control over detonation resided within the mind of Pryor.

  The only exception was the device entrusted to Darkhorse, and he had installed and programmed that one minutes before their meeting. In three weeks, he would be paid enough money to live for a year. It was more money than he had ever seen at one time, and it was more than he could make in two tours of duty in the Middle East. He felt lucky to have been chosen for this special assignment.

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  nce Bob and Darkhorse had been given their orders and had been dispatched to perform their tasks, Pryor reminisced about his singular victory over the Masterson family, and the many defeats that had forged his hatred for them and everything they held sacred. It was a coup of his design; after the House of Representatives had voted unanimously in favor of funding to harden the nation’s infrastructure against solar storms and man-made gamma radiation from EMP bombs, the Senate almost unanimously voted the measure down. It was unprecedented, and it was solely of his making. Pryor had secretly labored, through the use of threats and the calling in of favors, to convince and coerce the United States Senate that the bill was too expensive, and that the security of America was secure on his capable watch.

  Max’s father, John Masterson, had attempted to appeal to the reason of his fellow senators during a speech before the Senate Standing Committee on National Security. “The Carrington event is the only example we have of the effects of gamma radiation on our ability to communicate. It had nothing to do with man or the ability of mankind to wreak havoc,” he said in his commanding voice. “It was a solar superstorm that happened in 1859, before electronics, before electricity. The only electrical disturbance it could have caused back in that time in our history was to the telegraph system that was still in its infancy. It shut down the telegraph everywhere and caused sparks to ignite paper that burned down more than a few telegraph houses. It essentially shut down modern communication,” he had explained. “Today I stand before you with a problem that is a billion times more dire than the solar storm that shut down the primitive communications of 1859. If we don’t harden our electronics against the very same gamma rays that the sun emits, all of our electronics are vulnerable to attack. Not from nature alone, but from a device that is man-made, the EMP bomb. The irony of this story is that the same event could shut down our communication infrastructure today, and we have done nothing to protect ourselves from that eventuality. Senators, the House has unanimously approved this bill to protect our communications infrastructure from solar storms and EMP attacks, and we must do this to protect our way of life.”

  Senator Masterson’s reputation as the protector of American privacy and dignity would have no influence on his peers. The day before, the House of Representatives had unanimously passed a bill authorizing funding to harden the sensitive electronic infrastructure against an EMP attack, but the Senate voted the matter down in a nearly unamimous vote against. His message had fallen on deaf ears.

  Pryor relished his victory over Senator Masterson more than any other accomplishment in his long career as Director of Homeland Security. Contrary to his official duties as protector of the nation’s security, he fought to preserve the one vulnerability that he could use to control the nation and nurture his megalomania.

  The day following the Senate vote, the following article was posted in WorldNet Daily:

  according to a retired senator who has raised alarms over

  EMP, the U.S. Senate has dropped a House-approved plan that would prepare the United States to defend itself from an attack from any electromagnetic pulse source—whether it would be from a natural solar flare or the detonation of a space-located nuclear weapon by enemies intent on destroying America’s infrastructure.

  A demon
stration of Pryor’s power was his ability to take a unanimous vote of the U.S. House and turn it into a defeat in the Senate, and the next day, the bill to protect Americans was scarcely noticed by the press.

  “The news is what we say it is. Keep them dumbed down, and pacified, and in the dark, that’s what I always say. You don’t have an opinion until I say you do. I don’t make sense because the world as I let you know it doesn’t make sense,” Pryor had pontificated. He had manipulated the world of politics for as long as he had directed Homeland Security, and he lacked remorse. Through fear and intimidation, he had created a dynasty of one. This time, he had the ability to carry out his grand plan. A decade after the defeat of the EMP bill, H.R. 5026, he had his plan in place.

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  he terrorist didn’t perceive himself to be anything more than a young man just trying to make a living. He was trained by his nameless superiors to follow orders without question and to execute those orders with exacting precision. He entered the

  Statue of Liberty by the service door, dressed in the same coveralls as the rest of the restoration crew. The statue had been closed late in 2011 for restoration of its ever-corroding metal sheath and to install a second stairway for public access to the top. In recent years, the existing stairwell had become unstable, and public safety inspectors had mandated the closure until safer access could be made. The last thing they wanted was the death of visitors to America’s most visible symbol of freedom, a gift from the French to the United States in an era forgotten by time.