The List Conspiracy (Wallis Jones Series 2016)

by Martha Carr

Norman held out his arm and Wallis took it as they walked through the restaurant making their way to the cash register.

  “You’re not staying?” the waitress asked Norman as they neared the front.

  “No, onto other things,” he said, “good coffee, though.”

  Wallis smiled and stepped aside as a middle aged man in a business suit tried to get by her.

  “S’cuse me,” he muttered, as he slid between Norman and Wallis, heading back toward a booth in the small atrium off to the side.

  Wallis shrugged and said to Norman, “This must be the hot spot for meetings.”

  “I forgot to leave a tip,” Norman said, “I’ll be right back.” He walked quickly in the direction of where they had been sitting and turned, disappearing around the corner.

  A small woman in a blue business suit who had been sitting in the other row of booths got up, draping her coat over her arm and quickly approached Wallis.

  “No good can come of what you’re doing,” she hissed at Wallis. “You’re only an incidental.”

  “What?” Wallis was caught off-guard and quickly looked around for Norman. “What are you talking about?”

  “No good can come of it. It’s a much larger web than even the Black Widow is used to, let it go,” she said and turned for the door, quickly walking out to the parking lot.

  Wallis leaned against the counter, trying to make herself calm down, suddenly feeling clammy.

  Norman came strolling back up but picked up his pace when he saw Wallis.

  “You okay? What happened?”

  “A woman, she told me to let it go. Said, no good can come of it.”

  Norman looked all around. “What woman?”

  “She headed for the parking lot,” said Wallis, running outside quickly followed by Norman. “She’s gone. She must have really been moving.”

  “Did she threaten you?” said Norman, putting his arm around Wallis.

  “Not exactly, but it felt like a threat.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Our age, shorter than me, brown hair. Pretty non-descript Richmond white woman,” she said, frustrated. “This must have been how Ray Billings felt trying to explain all of this to Lilly.” Wallis looked down at her purse still swinging off of her arm. “The file! The file is gone! Do you see it?”

  “No, I’ll check inside. You okay out here?”

  “Yes, go, go. I’ll be okay.”

  Norman took the few steps back to the Shoney’s in a run, his silk tie fluttering up over his shoulder, leaving Wallis by herself in the parking lot.

  Wallis looked around at the parked cars trying to see if anyone was huddled down inside one of them. She took a few steps out further into the lot, trying to shake the feeling of being watched.

  “Not there,” said Norman, running up next to her, a little out of breath.

  “I put it in my purse, I know I did. I couldn’t have lost it in the past five minutes.”

  “Maybe we should call the police,” said Norman.

  “What are we reporting? Stolen paperwork? Rude strangers?” Wallis was getting angry, something she rarely did. She knew she had no control over what was happening, no way to get control.

  “Try to take a deep breath, Wallis. You still have the drive?”

  “Yes, I think so, it’s here,” she said, pulling the small race car out of her purse. “But that damn file.”

  “There must be something,” said Norman, rubbing the back of his head, looking out toward West Broad Street.

  “I know one damn thing I’m going to start with,” said Wallis. “I’m going to stop playing by their rules and make up some of my own.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Wallis’ cell phone started ringing. She dug it out of her purse and looked at the caller I.D. It was Stanley Woermer. Before she could answer the ringing stopped.

  “It was Stanley,” she said to Norman, calling the number back. “No one’s answering. He made a point of saying he was never going to call me. Something must be wrong.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “No, but I think I can come up with the address,” said Wallis.

  “Call Alan, let him check it out first,” said Norman. Alan Vitek was a former Navy Seal with his own investigative firm and was a regular consultant for the more complicated cases at Weiskopf, Jones and Bremmer.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “You want me to follow you to the office?”

  “Have we ever done that before?” asked Wallis. “No, no, I’ll be okay. They were just trying to scare me.”

  “I’m afraid it’s working,” said Norman.

  Wallis looked at Norman and realized he was still breathing hard. “You’re really worried, aren’t you? That can’t be good if a Weiskopf is sweating. They’re very good, Norman, whoever they are. If I didn’t have you, I’m not sure I’d be able to find anyone else who would believe any of this. It’s like someone is trying to chip away at me.”

  Norman walked Wallis to her car and hugged her tight, waiting by the car as she drove off, turning back out onto Broad Street. She gave him a wave and watched him get smaller in the rear view mirror. It wasn’t until she got back to the office and went to take her brief case out of the back seat that she saw it. Carefully scratched into the paint on the other side of the car was a small spider inside of a tight circle of stars with a line cut diagonally through the middle.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tom Weiskopf sat outside of the local coffee shop in downtown New Berlin, nestled in Waukesha County, Wisconsin taking quickly glances down at his iPhone waiting for the transmission that came every day at this time. Top of the hour every afternoon at four o’clock central time.

  New Berlin was former farm country that had reluctantly become a suburb back in the 1970’s to accommodate a white flight while still managing to hold on to some of its old rural identity.

  Everyone knew who you were, what you did and what you had done to someone else. That kind of broad-based knowledge made it harder to hold a grudge and easier to forgive most transgressions. It also meant that after enough years had passed and Tom had ingratiated himself into the community he could ask for help, no questions asked, and there would be plenty of people at the ready.

  There were very few lapel pins in this territory from either side of the dangerous game. Here, everyone was still related to everyone else unlike down South where a steady stream of outsiders were moving in. The new faces had made it easier all across the Bible Belt for Management to move in and start scouting out new recruits at the elementary school and warm up to parents at local civic groups.

  Tom saw the potential in New Berlin when he first arrived back in 1987. He drove up West Main Street in a beaten up blue Ford E-150 van and saw the subtle glances from everyone in town. He knew they’d pass the word quickly that a suspicious looking character had arrived. That made it a perfect staging area. The next few years were spent joining the biggest local church, Church of the Redeemer, swinging a hammer on the annual volunteer repair crew for elderly folks around town and hanging out at the spring fish fries until he was accepted as one of their own.

  He knew he was on the inside the afternoon someone arrived in town and the local gossip quickly reached him at the coffee shop.

  It was a perfect system.

  Tom looked at the clock hanging in the store window across the street as the local Presbyterian Church tower pealed off four loud bongs from a prerecorded CD. His iPhone quickly converted the series of three-numbered transmissions it was receiving into a short message.

  ‘The Citizens of each State…’

  He felt his throat tighten as the prelude spilled onto the small screen.

  What’s gone wrong, he thought, as he tried to make himself take a deep breath and relax back into the chair.

  The phone was a fully functioning computer that had been adapted to do double duty as a hand-held radio receiver with an XOR operation to make moments like this less consp
icuous. Tom was receiving a sudden burst transmission from a numbers stations far away that was used to get a message out quickly to everyone in cells spread out across the country. Different times of day were assigned to different operational cell levels.

  Anyone could pick up the signals but unless they also had the right thumb drive with the OTP, the electronic one-time-pad with the decoded encryptions to the random pairings, it meant nothing. No level of cells possessed another level’s OTP.

  The system could not be broken unless one of the drives fell into Management’s hands and they were able to discover the hidden algorithms underneath the music tracts or word documents that were carefully laid over the sets of numbers or letters. If a drive were found by anyone other than a member of the Circle or Management they’d overlook its real importance.

  Transmissions usually began with the opening lines from one of the twenty-seven Amendments to the Constitution, which was meant as a signal that the message was either nonsensical or mundane, depending on the chosen amendment. Reams of them were sent out each week as cover and to crowd the airwaves, making detection of just where the transmitters were more difficult. Only a handful of the transmissions were of any value and most were updates on possible activity by people of interest, nothing more.

  Tom had gotten used to seeing the words fly by and had seen most of the amendments so often he had almost memorized the text over the years.

  But this time was going to be different. The broadcast began with the opening lines to Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution.

  ‘… shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.’

  It was an opening Tom had never seen on his phone before and had hoped to never see. The carefully laid out plans that had been meticulously cultivated for the past sixty years by the Circle were in danger of being exposed. Management had detected a thumb drive and may already be in possession of the encryptions. If they had identified a handler and their family in a high enough cell it was possible that torture had exposed other key players. The inner American Circle may already be in danger.

  No new faces had recently arrived in town but Tom instantly began to wonder if he was being watched. The short message took less than a minute to download and unscramble before being immediately dumped after sprawling across the screen. He couldn’t afford to take his eyes off of the phone for very long to check his surroundings.

  ‘Richmond, Virginia. SOS009 Leave immediately.’

  “Hey, Tom, why so serious?”

  Tom jerked the phone, his thumb instinctively jamming down on the off button as the screen faded to black. He looked up into the fading sun at the face of his elderly neighbor, Wilbur Vernon, dressed in faded overalls and a Deere hat tilted down toward his nose. His lined face and curved shoulders gave away that he’d spent too many seasons hunched over a crop, willing it out of the ground.

  “Hey Wilbur, just looking at the news crawl. Probably shouldn’t do it, just pulls me into a mess that doesn’t really have anything to do with me.”

  “Know what you mean. My TV gets a hundred channels, makes me feel like I ought to watch a few of ‘em. Suddenly I’m worried about Chinese wheat crops till I remember I don’t grow wheat no more and I never sold to foreigners no how. Fancy phone you got there. I remember when they couldn’t even get moved around in the house,” said Wilbur, who was already walking away.

  Tom slowly let out a breath as he called out, “Point taken, Wilbur. Maybe it’s time for a rest.” He was already laying the groundwork for leaving town without raising any suspicions.

  Wilbur raised his hand in a salute but kept walking.

  SOS009 was a direct communiqué to Tom to head back to his old hometown. It stood for Survivors of the Original Solution with Tom’s designation as a member of the top cell, number nine out of the twenty. They had earned their way into the inner circle by surviving the slaughter of the original plan. The original strategy had been put into motion across Europe in 1918 after the First World War. Its origins were with German Jews who had faithfully served the Kaiser only to watch him sell out to the ever-growing menace which had nicknamed itself the Management.

  Many of them had seen what happened in the pogroms of Russia and were determined to see a different outcome this time. Jewish residents of Berlin banded together and spread the word through the synagogues. They would create their own network and call it the Circle or Kreise.

  Norman’s grandfather, Isaak, held some of the first meetings in his parlor. But Management had found out about the plan and came up with a solution to their problem. It began across Germany in November of 1938 with Kristallnacht and by the time it was over in 1945 most of the original members had died in camps or as part of the underground.

  The SOS, as they came to be called, escaped with their lives, erasing enough of their heritage to go undetected as the remnants of the first great design to overthrow the Management. Only twenty members remained and one of them was Norman’s father and his brother, Tom’s namesake. Thomas took his young wife and left immediately for America with the help of some unusual allies.

  By 1942 a new plan started to evolve and right underneath the noses of everyone who had conspired to murder the Circle. The twenty young men and women who had survived the Holocaust were smuggled to America through an underground created by a chain of sympathetic Episcopalian nuns and priests. Together the twenty vowed to build again and learn from their mistakes.

  Management was learning from its past mistakes as well. They had learned to coat their threats with promises of power and money and began working with smaller governments in an ever-growing number of countries, creating bands of insurgents when they ran into too much opposition. A vast system eventually grew over the past decades until it was difficult for anyone but the few at the top to know just how far Management’s reach extended. Most members of either side assumed it was everywhere.

  That was when the Circle looked for a new entity to cultivate those who were disregarded by Management and seen as useless, at least by them, and beyond saving. The Circle started with the large orphanages spread out across the states, using some of Management’s same techniques of recruiting and offering a chance at a better education, more opportunity, but without the threats or the dangerous clause.

  Management’s greatest weakness had always been their inability to see that those with nothing to lose could still believe in something better. The Circle’s losses in the past taught them that and laid the groundwork to foster and care for the thousands of forgotten children as they built a new counter of force that could spread across the globe.

  The plan quietly grew as they waited patiently for two generations to grow older and relinquish their power. Management grew as well, infecting every government across the globe until they believed the fight was all but over. As far as they knew, the Circle had been contained and was seen as an ineffective nuisance.

  Tom was to go and see his handler, the number two member of The Circle.

  Things must be bad, he thought, to risk putting anyone from the top twenty within shouting distance of each other. He turned his phone back on and hit the speed dial.

  “Wallis? It’s your favorite brother in law, Tom. I’m coming for a visit. Need to relax a little, away from the busy streets of New Berlin. You got room for one more?”

  Wallis hung up the phone, wondering what that was about. Tom rarely left Wisconsin as far as she knew. She went in search of Norman to tell him the string of strange occurrences hadn’t ended just yet.

  “It’s not even a holiday,” she mumbled, trying to recall if Yom Kippur was imminent.

  “Does your brother, Tom celebrate Jewish holidays?” asked Wallis. Norman was sitting at the kitche
n table poring over the local paper. The sections were spread out as if he were sampling from each one, simultaneously.

  “What? Not that I recall. That was a good one. Normally, your questions have a lot more to do with something relevant.”

  Wallis smiled and raised an eyebrow. “They still do. I’m far too practical to start asking for random bits of information. If that’s what I wanted I’d read the local paper too.”

  Norman didn’t look up but Wallis thought she detected the faint beginnings of a smirk.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Why the interest in Tom’s eternal soul or what’s left of it?” said Norman.

  “He called and said he’s coming for a visit. I was trying to figure out the why.”

  Norman looked up from the paper.

  “Now, that is interesting. You didn’t ask Tom why he was gracing us with a visit?”

  “I don’t like to ask questions when I don’t already know the answer,” said Wallis, laughing. “That and he hung up too quickly. The whole, Tom leaving Wisconsin thing caught me off guard. Plus, I didn’t want him to think we weren’t delighted at the thought of seeing him.”

  “Which we are,” said Norman, as he went back to scanning the business page for a small classified ad buried in the announcements. Underneath a grainy photo of a local print shop was the phone number that ended in the sequence, 680. Norman slowly sat back and let out a long breath. All hell is breaking loose, he thought. Not again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mark Whiting was never a stupid man. He knew from his early days in training with the Circle that the Richmond Federal Reserve was the key to the entire U.S. banking system. It controlled all of the information technology for the entire banking system. Mark was aware of that when he arrived on the Reserve’s doorstep in 1993 at the dawn of the internet age.

  The Circle had given him the assignment to take his prodigious talents as a software specialist and offer them to Management.

  Management knew who he was, of course. He had originally been one of their children and was seen as a boy genius who was being groomed for bigger things. That was all before he grew disenchanted and crossed the aisle. Mark was smart enough to know that he couldn’t leave the game altogether but perhaps he could find a different team.