[Lady Justice 22] - Lady Justice and the Conspiracy Trial

by Robert Thornhill

  I had heard that the recent terrorist attacks and the administration’s threats to make gun ownership more difficult had spurred gun sales, but I had no idea it was to the extent we were seeing here.

  When we were finally inside, it was wall-to-wall people.

  There were vendors selling knives, ammo, camping gear, rifles, shot guns and tasers, but the tables drawing the most attention were the ones selling handguns. People were lined up three deep looking at everything from tiny .22 Beretta’s to Dirty Harry’s huge .44 Magnum.

  I chuckled when I saw a poster with a photo of the president and a caption that read, ‘Gun salesman of the year.’

  We were worming our way to an ammo table when Kevin tapped me on the arm.

  “Isn’t that your dad and Bernice?” he asked pointing down the aisle.

  Sure enough it was.

  We pushed our way through.

  “Dad! What in the world are you two doing here?”

  He was a surprised to see us as we were to see him.

  “Hi Son. What are we doing here? Same as everybody else --- buying guns. Look what we got.”

  He opened a shopping bag. “Got me a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield, 9mm. Ain’t she a beauty? Got Bernice a .32. Not as much recoil.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But --- why?”

  “Why? Do you really have to ask? San Bernardino. Does that ring a bell? Fourteen killed and twenty-two injured --- at a party, for chrissakes. Paris. Terrorists killed 130 people, including 89 at a theatre. It’s getting scary as hell out there. If Bernice and I are at the supermarket, and some black gangbanger, or ISIS towelhead terrorist or some piece of white trash comes in shooting up the place, I don’t intend to be standing there with my finger up my butt.”

  It was comforting to hear that Dad was an equal opportunity bigot. Profiling was no problem to him at all.

  “And what about last night? My son was in trouble and all I had to help him was a pepperoni pizza and a prayer that I could stall the wacko until Ox got there. That’s not going to happen again.”

  “But Dad, what do you and especially Bernice know about semi-automatic weapons?”

  “Never too late to learn, Son. We’re taking instruction at the shooting range and have signed up for the Conceal and Carry class next weekend. Just barely got in. Forty people signed up.”

  “Swell,” Kevin whispered in my ear. “Just what we need. Two ninety-year-olds running around Walmart packing heat.”

  “Dad, we should talk about this.”

  “Nothing to talk about, unless you want to go to the range and practice with me and Bernice. Besides,” he said, holding up his shopping bag, “no refunds. All sales are final.”

  I was about to protest more, but he cut me off.

  “I’d love to stay and chat, but we’ve gotta run.”

  He walked a few feet, stopped and turned. “Oh, by the way. A manila envelope came for you the other day. It was too big for the mailbox so the postman left it on the floor. I picked it up and was going to give it to you the next time I saw you, but the next time was when you were in drag. You sorta blew my mind and I forgot. Sorry. Remind me and I’ll give it to you when we’re both home.”

  With that, he grabbed Bernice by the arm and they disappeared into the crowd.

  “Well, I know I’ll sleep better knowing Bonnie and Clyde are armed to the teeth,” Kevin quipped.

  I just shook my head, wondering how I was going to keep Dad and his moll from maiming each other.

  We finally worked our way to the ammo table and made our selection.

  The guy who came to ring up our purchase did a double take. “Kevin? Kevin McBride? Is that you?”

  Kevin gave him the once over. “Mark? Mark Greenway. Well I’ll be damned. How long has it been?”

  “Too long, old buddy.” He looked at his watch. “You guys got a few minutes? I need a break. Let me ring you up and let’s go to the coffee shop and catch up.”

  As we headed to the coffee shop, Kevin filled me in. “I met Mark at a gun show in Phoenix and bought some stuff from him for my P.I. business out there. We hit it off and had a few good times together.”

  After the three of us were seated, I remarked, “I can’t believe how busy it is. There must be a thousand people here.”

  “It’s been gangbusters all year. In September alone, the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System processed almost 1.8 million firearms related applications. That’s a 23% increase over the highest September ever. It’s estimated that twenty million guns were purchased in 2015.”

  “Holy crap! I wonder how many guns are out there all together.”

  “The Washington Post estimates as high as 360 million. Our citizens are better armed than those of any other country in the world.”

  “Yeah, but what good are guns if you can’t get ammo,” Kevin said. “You’re in the business, Mark. Any truth to the rumor that the government is buying up big chunks of our ammo?”

  “The Denver Post ran an Associated Press article confirming that the Department of Homeland Security has issued a purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. That’s not the military, mind you, it’s Homeland Security. Based on previous conflicts, that’s enough ammo to fight a hot war for twenty years. It’s estimated that Homeland Security has purchased 2.11 billion rounds since 2012. That’s enough firepower to kill a third of the world’s population. So the question is, why does a domestic agency need that many bullets?”

  “I don’t suppose it’s to keep us from getting them,” Kevin said.

  “That’s what fifteen congressmen wanted to know. Of course, Homeland Security denied it, but one congressman wrote that the extraordinary level of ammunition purchases seems to have created an extreme shortage of ammunition to the point where many gun owners are unable to purchase any. I’ve got connections with most of the big suppliers, and I’ve had difficulty getting enough stock for my gun shows.”

  Kevin and Mark shot the breeze for another twenty minutes before Mark declared he’d better get back to his booth.

  As we were leaving, I looked at the swarms of citizens leaving with bags filled with guns and ammunition, fearing for their safety in light of the recent terrorist attacks, and fearing that their government was primed to take away their Second Amendment rights.

  I remembered Dad’s words when I asked him why he’d bought guns for himself and Bernice. “It’s scary as hell out there.”

  I really couldn’t argue the point.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning, I had just retrieved my newspaper when Dad stepped into the hallway.

  “Morning Son. I figured that was you. Here’s that envelope I picked up the other day. Sorry I forgot about it. Hope it wasn’t important.”

  “I doubt it,” I replied. “Probably just promotional crap from some advertiser. Listen, about those guns you bought ---.”

  “Save it, Sonny,” he interrupted. “It’s a done deal. Coincidently, Bernice and I are heading to the shooting range to get the feel of the things. Care to come along?”

  I could see I was wasting my breath. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Ohh, right! This coming from the senior citizen who has been abducted, thrown off a roof, nearly blown to bits and shot in the ass? You’re a good one to give advice.”

  Then he softened a bit. “Don’t worry. I haven’t got ninety years under my belt by being stupid.”

  I wished them well and headed back to my apartment.

  I poured a cup of coffee and took a closer look at the oversize manila envelope. I figured it was probably filled with laundry detergent or the latest feminine hygiene product. Then I noticed that there was no advertising on the backside or even a return address on the front.

  My curiosity piqued, I found a pair of scissors in the drawer and snipped off the end.

  A moment later my worst nightmare came pouring out on the table.

  There were tapes, USB thumb drives, documents and ph
otos. On top of it all was a handwritten note.

  “If you’re reading this, it means they have found me. There are only two possible outcomes. I will make every effort to disappear and start a new life far away, but there is a very good chance I won’t make it out of town. Either way, I have done all that I can do. The contents of this envelope contain everything I have uncovered about the government’s chemtrail conspiracy. I hate laying this burden at your feet, but now it’s up to you to expose this horrendous program that is filling our skies with poison. Good luck! Jack Carson.”

  I sat back in shock and just stared at the stuff as if it were deadly poison, because in fact, that’s exactly what it was.

  A few months ago, I received a call from Jack. He called me hoping I could get some information from Ox, my former partner, on a vehicular accident he had worked the night before. The victim, Dale Fox, or Falcon, as Carson knew him, was an Air Force pilot who had supposedly been flying missions whose purpose was to spread deadly chemicals into the atmosphere for both weather manipulation and military defense. Falcon was ready to expose the government’s clandestine program.

  The whole thing sounded hokey to me until Carson shared the details of three previous meetings he had with Falcon. Dale Fox was on his way to a fourth meeting, supposedly bringing a sample of the stew being sprayed, when his car went off the road.

  Naturally, Carson suspected foul play. I pressed Ox for more information and the CSI team determined that Falcon’s brake line had ruptured, but there was not enough evidence to support that the line had been deliberately cut.

  Carson was livid, believing that Falcon had been killed to prevent him from talking, and vowed to continue his probe.

  I was curious enough to enlist Kevin’s help to break into Falcon’s apartment where we found photos of the planes used in the missions and the huge tanks in their bellies that held the chemical stew.

  Naturally, I passed the information on to Carson.

  The photos aroused my curiosity enough that I showed them to Frank Katz, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who had been referred to me as someone deeply interested in the chemtrail phenomena.

  Professor Katz was ecstatic when shown the photos and declared that they were the last piece of information he needed to finish a paper about the chemtrail conspiracy which he planned to publish in several scientific journals.

  Like Falcon, Frank Katz conveniently died before his paper could be published.

  Two people connected to the conspiracy were dead, but they weren’t the last.

  The chemical giant, Monsanto, had been mentioned often as a partner in the conspiracy. One of the agents supposedly being sprayed into the air was aluminum, and anything heavier than air eventually falls to earth. The accumulation of aluminum in the soil is a deterrent to normal crop seeds, so Monsanto applied for and was granted a patent for aluminum resistant seeds.

  Louise Shipley, an employee at the Monsanto headquarters in St. Louis, contacted Carson and came to Kansas City with the intent of blowing the whistle on Monsanto.

  Shipley disappeared the night before her meeting with Carson.

  Soon after that, Carson himself disappeared. I was determined to find him and was vigorously pursuing leads until I received a text with a photo of Maggie going into her real estate office with a caption that read, “Stop digging!”

  Later, I received another text with a photo of Maggie in front of our apartment building. That text read, “Back off!”

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to interpret the sender’s message. If I continued to hunt for Carson and pursue the chemtrail conspiracy, Maggie, the most important person in my life, would disappear just like the others.

  That was enough for me. I knew I was in way over my head and I was through.

  No one knew what had happened to Jack Carson or had even heard from him --- until today.

  Since that day, every time I go outside and see the trails crisscrossing the sky, I think about the people that lost their lives trying to bring the truth to the American people.

  I think about a quote from Dresden James, “When a well-packaged lie has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”

  I hate the fact that I know the truth and am powerless to pursue it and share it with others, but for me, nothing has changed. There is absolutely no way anyone will listen to a seventy-two year old private investigator, and even if I thought there was a chance anyone would, there is no way in hell I’d risk the life of the person I love the most.

  I stuffed everything back in the envelope, taped it shut and locked it in my safe. As I spun the dial, I muttered, “Sorry, Jack. I just hope you got away safely.”

  Needless to say, I was upset.

  I tried to read, I flipped on the TV, but I couldn’t get Jack’s words out of my mind. “Now it’s up to you to expose this horrendous program that is filling our skies with poison.”

  He had passed the baton, but I just couldn’t run the final lap.

  Then I thought of something. Before Frank Katz died, he emailed me a copy of the paper he had planned to publish.

  Someone broke into our apartment and corrupted my hard drive, destroying the paper, but not before I copied it on a USB drive.

  Knowing the document had most likely cost the professor his life, there was no way I was going to try to get it published myself.

  Then a thought occurred to me. There are fictional novels published all the time with themes of government conspiracies and corrupt politicians. If there was some way the information in Frank Katz’ paper could be published in a fictional format, maybe people would get the message without somebody else getting whacked.

  I knew just the guy for the job, Robert Thornhill.

  I had met the author at a craft show. He had a booth displaying his twenty volume mystery series. The craft show typically drew a crowd of several thousand, and we had learned that terrorists were planning on detonating bombs from one of the hundred or so booths in the show. Thankfully, members of our K-9 corps sniffed out the bombs, before they could be detonated. The terrorists made a run for the exit. One of them ran toward an exit that would take him right past Thornhill’s table. Timing his move just right, Thornhill upset his table, sending a hundred slick paperbacks into the path of the fleeing terrorist. The perp went ass over elbows on the slick books and due to Thornhill’s quick thinking, we got the guy in cuffs.

  We became friends, and when I thought of the fictional novel idea, I contacted Thornhill.

  We met and Thornhill agreed to get started on the book. Two months later, I received a signed copy of Lady Justice and the Conspiracy in the mail.

  The fictional story contained every detail in Frank Katz’ paper. All the programs that had been uncovered, Indigo Skyfold, Project Cloverleaf and the HAARP installation in Alaska, were woven throughout the book. Everything was there. All a person had to do was read it, then go outside and look up into the sky, and realize that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

  I had called Robert to thank him, but I hadn’t really had a chance to visit with him in person since the book was published.

  This seemed like a good time.

  I called Robert and we agreed to meet at Mel’s Diner.

  Since both of us were regular customers at the diner, Mel had our orders on the grill the minute we walked in the door.

  We chatted briefly between mouthfuls of hamburger steak and chicken fried steak, and when our plates were empty, we got down to business.

  “Robert, I loved the book. How have sales been?”

  “Not too bad, actually. It hit #1 on Amazon a few weeks after it was published.”

  “Congratulations! The subject matter was pretty heavy. How has it been received?”

  “I’ll show you,” he replied, opening his laptop.

  He punched in his author page on Amazon and clicked on Conspiracy. I was surprised to see that readers had
rated the book 4.8 out of 5 stars.

  “That’s fantastic. What are their comments?”

  He scrolled down the page to the reviews.

  One read, “Robert Thornhill has no fear when it comes to tackling enormous issues. He once again took on a very delicate and controversial subject, tackled it from all sides, exposed the inner workings of a conspiracy, and escaped cleanly out the other side. If this book doesn't get you thinking about what is going on in our world, then you need to take off the blinders and look up.”

  Another read, “Lady Justice and the Conspiracy may be the most controversial yet. It makes me wonder what is happening in our country and the world that we don't know about. A true five star read.”

  A third read, “Outstanding! Very clever how the author weaved truth into a book of ‘fiction.’ Wake up, people. The truth is in this book.”

  “Wow! That person certainly got the idea,” I said enthusiastically.

  Then I had a sobering thought. “If people like the book so much and are seeing the truth, why isn’t something happening? Why aren’t people up in arms? I just don’t get it.”

  Thornhill shook his head sadly. “I know you’re disappointed and so am I, but honestly, we’re not the first to try to sway public opinion with a book of fiction.”

  “Really?”

  “Have you ever heard of Robin Cook?”

  I shook my head.

  He started tapping keys. “He’s a medical doctor and author. He’s written dozens of books with medical themes. Here’s why he says he writes, ‘Cook says he chose to write thrillers because the forum gives him an opportunity to get the public interested in things about medicine that they didn't seem to know about. He believes his books are actually teaching people.’

  “You should read Acceptable Risk. It’s about the dangers of taking anti-depressant and mind altering drugs. It’s scary as hell, but people just don’t care. It’s estimated that one in ten Americans use anti-depressants regularly.”