A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  I could only read a paragraph or two of MacGuffin’s Taoist mysticism before my eyes would begin to glaze over. Many of the fortune telling techniques he described seemed unremarkable: face reading, palm reading, astrology, and the like. One caught my eye, a “rod of divination:”

  “The Lord our Father revealed his words, wisdom, and laws through a burning bush. Not so with these Chinese. Their gods impart wisdom of a more subtle nature through the agency of a rod of divination. This rod does not foretell the future. Rather, it identifies the time and place where the mandate of heaven will soon be revealed.”

  We knew that the Civic Circle had what they called a “Nexus Detector,” a device that let them identify the turning points where a few critical players and crucial decisions change the world. MacGuffin’s “rod of divination” sounded an awful lot like the Civic Circle’s Nexus Detector.

  MacGuffin’s memoirs described the violence and chaos he witnessed in China. The Japanese invaded Manchuria and warlords ruled the interior. MacGuffin taught his Chinese neighbors about Christianity, and his Chinese neighbors introduced him to Confucian thought and Taoist mysticism. When conflict came to their province, MacGuffin’s desperate Chinese friends entrusted him to hide some sacred scrolls and the rod of divination. An unknown gang killed his friends and burned the mission. MacGuffin barely escaped, fleeing with the scrolls and rod. The same mysterious yet implacable foe pursued MacGuffin for months as he fled China. Finally, MacGuffin laid a false trail to make it appear he’d taken a boat to San Francisco. Instead he travelled under a false identity to Buenos Aires, via South Africa.

  MacGuffin spent years hiding out in Buenos Aires, translating his scrolls and writing his memoirs. He sought out assistance in understanding his results.

  “Discreet inquiries led me to the Dominicans at the Convent of Santo Domingo. They called themselves the Ordo Alberti. ‘Investigare, cognoscere, defendere,’ these Albertian Brothers like to chant: investigate, know, defend. Although such mummery merely obscures the power of God’s word, they nevertheless showed an interest in those aspects of my work I shared with them. They introduced me to an intense young Italian, Mr. Bini – a scientist of sorts, although his background was never quite clear to me.”

  Mr. Bini convinced MacGuffin that there were technical secrets within his pages of mysticism. “He showed me how the curious yin-yang symbol followed from the calculations of ‘a Russian mathematician’ and an American named Smith, though I could not understand the mathematics behind his calculation,” MacGuffin explained. The manuscript had a peculiar drawing of a yin-yang symbol, with a single line through it.

  The diagram had a number of curious arcs and circles to it as well. Overwhelmed by the Taoist mysticism and confused by the diagram, the first time I’d read the book, I was ready to give up on it right there. Then, I read MacGuffin’s next paragraph.

  “Mr. Bini was convinced that my pursuers were connected to the men who drove him out of Europe. ‘I came too close to their secrets,’ Mr. Bini explained. ‘I derived the heavy-side theory they thought they had hidden. They pressured me to join them. They burned my poor little cousin to death when I refused, and they threatened others in my family. That’s when I knew I had to flee.’ Mr. Bini had found shelter with the Albertian Order at the Convent of Santo Domingo.”

  “Heavy-side” as in Heaviside? It was a suppressed electromagnetic discovery by Oliver Heaviside that led me to discover the Circle’s hidden truth. That sounded promising. But a Russian mathematician and an American named Smith? Could it possibly be more ambiguous? It seemed a dead end.

  Finally, with war having broken out in Europe, MacGuffin chose to return home to the United States. Something gave him away, however. Sweeney’s article described the brutal result. All we had was MacGuffin’s proof and the inscription on the title page. “To my friend Bill, Angus,” it read.

  “Bill” was tough to track down, because there were several Bill’s or William’s at Tolliver Tech in the 1930s. The most likely candidate appeared to be a professor of Oriental languages who enlisted in 1940. The Army sent him to the Philippines to work as a translator, and he did not survive the Bataan Death March. Quite possibly, he never saw the MacGuffin proof. Another dead end. Tolliver Tech was taken over as a military training facility in the war, and never did regain its pre-war stature. Somehow in all the chaos, the proof ended up in the Tolliver library, the only legacy of the life of Angus MacGuffin.

  I felt a strange kinship to this forgotten man, dead decades before I was born. Like me, MacGuffin tried to discover secrets that the Civic Circle wanted to hide. It cost him his life. I intended to pick up where he left off, and avoid his mistakes.

  “There he goes!” Amit exclaimed, hours later. The two of us watched the man who called himself Petrel emerge from the library and walk off unmolested in the direction of the MARTA station. “Unless they made him in the library, he should be home free,” Amit observed.

  “Let’s get going,” I replied. “We need to be checking in at Tech.”

  I’d driven past the school any number of times – it’s right off I-75/I-85, the downtown connector in Atlanta. Now, Amit and I were about to get an in-depth introduction by attending freshman orientation: “FASET” – Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environs of Tech. We were to stay in the dorms a couple of days, do tours, attend orientation lectures, and get signed up for classes.

  Amit had been waiting for this moment for a couple of years. He’d been reading online about what he called “pick-up-artists” and their “secret methods” for attracting girls. I was skeptical that conversational and behavioral tricks could have that much impact. On the other hand, I’d seen how Amit landed a girlfriend our senior year using some of his methods. Emma was fun, smart, and cute, but Amit was eager to apply his ideas at the much larger hunting grounds of the Tech campus. Amit proposed what he called an “open relationship” to Emma. That basically meant that they could go ahead and date other people at school while remaining “friends.” Emma would have nothing of it, and she broke up with him. Undaunted, Amit was ready to make his mark on the young women at Tech.

  He forced himself to be outgoing, the center of attention, eagerly greeting girls and guys alike. “Just laying the groundwork, Pete,” he explained. “First impressions are important.” At one point, our rather attractive guide suggested if we had any questions, we could write them on the board of the lecture hall, and she’d answer them after lunch. Amit made his way promptly to the front and wrote: “Where are the best places on campus to make out with girls?” He got hoots and giggles from the class, and I swear the guide was blushing a bit when she came back from lunch, saw the question, and said, “You’ll have to find out for yourself.”

  We learned Georgia Tech history and the school song, “I’m a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer…” Since Burdell is my family name, one school tradition made a real impression on me: the legend of George P. Burdell. Back in 1927, a resourceful engineering student found himself with a duplicate enrollment form. He signed up the fictitious Burdell for a full load of classes. He and his friends turned in duplicate homework and submitted multiple versions of the same tests, enabling George P. Burdell to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in 1930. George P. Burdell served in World War II, was on the Board of Directors of Mad Magazine, and is often paged over public address systems wherever Georgia Tech students and alums congregate. He may have been a made-up character, but as a Burdell myself, I took some satisfaction in knowing Georgia Tech’s most famous alumnus was, in a sense, a member of my family.

  We couldn’t wait until we got home to learn what Petrel had found. We’d promised him another payment for his report. That night we used a directional antenna to tap into the Wi-Fi at a hotel on the other side of the Interstate from our dorm. Then, we connected to our encrypted email account using TOR – The Onion Router – to hide our IP address.

  Petrel had struck pay dirt: Sweeney had a f
ile on Angus MacGuffin. “G-men say: ‘Nothing to it; some reefered up jigs had a razor party,’” read Sweeney’s notes. That quote prompted another search to discover “G-men” were federal agents, “reefer” was slang for marijuana, and “jigs” was a racial slur for black people, not a dance. I must live a sheltered life. “They’re hiding something,” Sweeney’s notes continued. “McG agrees.”

  “Maybe Ralph McGill, editor at the Atlanta Constitution?” Petrel helpfully added.

  The notes were fascinating. Sweeney “slipped a fin” to a bell hop to get into MacGuffin’s hotel room. He found a pad of paper MacGuffin had used. Rubbing a pencil over the sheet underneath to draw out the impression of the letters yielded a cryptic message: “Bill, please keep this safe! Our thorny friend helped me hide the scrolls and the rod where they won’t find them. Angus.” A cover letter for the proof MacGuffin sent to his friend Bill up at Tolliver Tech? But who was this “thorny friend?” Sweeney also managed to tie MacGuffin’s death into the mysterious fire at the Magnolia Press, but the Magnolia Press editor who worked with MacGuffin was dead, and Sweeney couldn’t pursue the lead further. Finally the G-men prevailed on “McG,” and McG made Sweeney drop the story.

  “I’m not sure it was worth the risk,” Amit opined. “We knew everything already, except the bit about the thorny friend.”

  “Another piece of the puzzle,” I countered. “Now we know a bit more about how the Circle was operating as early as 1940. Also, we have a clue that the Circle either got their Nexus Detector from MacGuffin, or at least that it probably came from China, too. Maybe MacGuffin’s rod of divination and those scrolls are hidden away somewhere, so we can find them.”

  “We’re David, and the Civic Circle is Goliath,” Amit argued. “I just don’t see how this information gives us a bigger rock to throw or a more accurate sling.”

  “It’s more like an army of Goliaths backed by comprehensive cyber-surveillance,” I agreed. “Someone burned down the Tolliver Library before the Circle’s Technology Containment Team could arrive,” I reminded Amit. “The Civic Circle has enemies. If we can figure out who they are, maybe we can ally with them. We need all the help we can get.”

  “True,” Amit acknowledged. “But a missionary and his Chinese friends dead sixty-five years probably didn’t burn down the Tolliver Library and won’t be good allies. And you know exactly what your uncle would have to say about it.”

  “China’s a big place. Maybe some of MacGuffin’s Chinese associates are still around,” I speculated. “Eventually Uncle Rob is going to have to let us reach out and recruit some more allies.”

  “Our job for now is to prepare ourselves,” Amit replied in an excellent parody of my uncle, “to make ready for the battle to come.”

  “He was out of town,” I insisted, “so we had to take the initiative without him, and we were successful.”

  “You don’t have to persuade me,” Amit agreed. “It was my money you spent on the researcher. I’m on your side. Save it for your uncle.”

  The next morning we signed up for classes.

  We wrangled our schedules so Amit and I were in the same section of Introduction to Programming – not that either of us really needed the class. We’d both taken a basic course in programming at our high school back in Sherman, Tennessee, as well as an additional class at the local community college. Amit took programming to the next level – his passion, second only to girls. He’d written a script for policing the network at his parents’ hotel. Amit’s code monitored the IP addresses of all the traffic, so if any of the guests used the network for downloading child pornography or other illicit purposes, he could check the logs and tell the police which guest was responsible. He’d put a graphical user interface on top of it, drawing on his experience helping his folks run their hotel, and it had been adopted in lots of other hotels in the Berkshire Hotels chain.

  When the Circle’s agents came to town, they stayed at his family’s hotel. Amit forked their traffic and figured out how to decrypt some of it. With Amit’s manipulation, the Circle’s agents made it to Double Platinum in the Berkshire Rewards program in record time. Apparently, they liked taking advantage of the upgrades, because they were staying in Berkshire Hotels whenever they were on the road. Amit included routines in his software to capture their traffic wherever possible, giving us insights to their activity.

  In addition, he’d included an encrypted Virtual Private Network or VPN capability using his software that let us make it look as though our Internet traffic came from someone at one of the hotels running his software. If the Circle managed to bypass TOR, trace our IP address, and hunt us down again, Amit was determined they’d lose our trail back at a random hotel on the other side of the country.

  Unfortunately, none of this expertise mattered to the folks at Georgia Tech – not that we told them all the details! Our high school and community college classes didn’t meet their requirements, so we were back in the most basic, introductory class.

  For my major, I was undecided between electrical engineering and physics. For my first year, I could take classes from both schools. Once I’d chosen a major, I could use the classes from the other school as electives. For my first semester, I signed up for an electrical engineering class, linear circuits, and an electromagnetics class from the physics department. I already had credit for calculus, so I took an introduction to differential equations class. I had to take freshman chemistry for both programs, too.

  I was more convinced than ever that MacGuffin’s work was key to figuring out the Circle and the rest of their technical secrets. MacGuffin reported that “Mr. Bini,” an Italian scientist, told him there was a link to Heaviside’s suppressed electromagnetic discoveries. MacGuffin’s Chinese associates also had a Nexus Detector or something very much like it. I found MacGuffin’s Chinese mysticism and history overwhelming, though. There was simply too much he was taking for granted due to his familiarity with Chinese society. I thought that taking a class or two in Chinese language or culture might help me better understand his work. I planned to take a suitable elective, but other events intervened.

  When I got into Tech, the school calculated my “need” based on my parent’s income. Other than being ruthlessly murdered last November, Dad had had a great year, financially. The folks in the Financial Aid Office figured he could pay a big slice of my hefty out-of-state tuition. The problem was that my parents’ estate was still tied up between probate and the asset forfeiture the Circle’s agents had arranged. No amount of reasoning with the Financial Aid Office that I could not pay tuition with assets I did not control seemed to work. Uncle Rob said he’d help. He’d bought me a truck and was paying for the insurance, but even with his business doing well, he couldn’t afford the full cost of out-of-state tuition payments either. I’d reconciled myself to saving up money, another year of community college, and transferring into Tech as a junior. Then, Uncle Larry came to my “rescue.”

  He’d hinted “times were a-changing” at Georgia Tech. The school had begun a “Social Justice Initiative” funded by the Tollivers and Uncle Larry’s friends at the Civic Circle. In the first phase, launching this year, the Civic Circle offered a select cadre of students full-ride scholarships to serve as “social justice ambassadors” to the Tech community. Instead of the usual humanities elective, we had to enroll in a special class: “Introduction to Social Justice Studies,” and we were supposed to share the ideals of social justice with the broader Tech community.

  Uncle Rob didn’t like the idea. “You’re playing with fire. You barely got away from them last time, and now you’re going right back in again, drawing yourself to their attention.”

  “We’re planning on fighting them, Uncle Rob,” I pointed out. “I’m going to be drawing their attention anyway, one way or another. Better to do so from the position of trusted insider and protégé of Uncle Larry.”

  “You don’t have to be in the Civic Circle to study the MacGuffin manuscript and all the other clues we’
ve acquired. That’s what you need to be doing, not running off trying to play spy.”

  “It’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what’s going on from inside the periphery of the Circle than from a distance. Plus, the Circle’s planning on re-investigating me in a few years, anyway. I’ll be safer with a clean bill of health as a trusted junior member than if they discover I’ve holed up somewhere and start wondering what I’m up to.” Then, I played my trump card. “I need a first rate education to understand those clues and to figure out who’s really behind the Civic Circle and what they want. Are you going to pay for it?”

  Uncle Rob had no good answer or alternative. I got one of the social justice slots. I figured Uncle Larry pulled some strings on my behalf to get me in.

  Amit found out about the opportunity when I submitted my application. He promptly submitted an application of his own. His essay, “Growing Up Colored in Appalachia,” spun a couple incidents of bullying into a heroic tale of surviving pervasive white oppression amid the hillbillies and rednecks of Tennessee. “It’s what they want to hear,” he explained smugly as I rolled my eyes at his gross exaggerations. He was clearly on to something, though, because he won a spot in the program, too.

  The upshot of it was instead of a free elective I could use to study Chinese language and culture, I now had to suffer through what looked like a class in political indoctrination. At least I had Amit as an ally. “Look on the bright side,” Amit pointed out. “The Civic Circle is trying to subvert Tech. This gives us the perfect opportunity to subvert them.” We had a good idea of their political agenda, thanks to Uncle Larry’s attempts to recruit me. I’d already planned on stringing Uncle Larry along as best I could to try to get more information, so Amit’s plan made good sense. We both agreed to play along and parrot back the social justice ideology. We aimed to use the class as an opportunity to establish credibility, so we could better infiltrate the Civic Circle.