by Tom Abrahams
INTENTION
A POLITICAL CONSPIRACY
BOOK 2
Tom Abrahams
A PITON PRESS book
Intention, copyright © 2016
by Tom Abrahams.
All Rights Reserved.
Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan
Proofread by Pauline Nolet
Cover art by Hristo Kovatliev
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
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WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS
POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES
SEDITION
INTENTION
JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES
ALLEGIANCE
ALLEGIANCE BURNED
HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE
THE TRAVELER POST APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES
HOME
CANYON
WALL
PERSEID COLLAPSE WORLD: PILGRIMAGE SERIES NOVELLAS
CROSSING
REFUGE
ADVENT
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: LIGHTNING BOLT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
PART TWO: ALL-SEEING EYE
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
PART THREE: ETERNAL FLAME
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the enlightened ones: Courtney, Samantha, and Luke
PROLOGUE
“All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.”
—Arnold Toynbee, Historian, June 1931
NEAR THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE
ROME, ITALY
Feodor Ivanovich’s killer walked away and he couldn’t do anything about it. He was silently bleeding to death at a corner table in the back of a café.
An unexpected and brutally quick trio of stabs through his serratus anterior muscle underneath his left arm had rendered him minutes from death. He was having trouble breathing. He was slipping into shock.
Though Ivanovich tried gaining the attention of the waiter, the man was engrossed with a pair of giggling women on their third glasses of wine and didn’t notice the pasty, thin Slav. It was impossible to find good service in Rome.
Ivanovich searched the café for an ally but found none. People were thumbing through their phones or had their attention focused on those at their table. He reached for his own phone and couldn’t find it. It was in his pocket, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. Not with the pain and sweat dripping into his eyes.
The meeting had started unremarkably.
Ivanovich arrived at the prescribed time at the agreed-upon location. He found the tanned, muscled man in the back corner sitting alone, identifiable from behind by the thickness of his neck and a triangular tattoo at the base of his skull. On the table sat an empty water glass to his right and an espresso to his left.
“Have you been to the top of St. Peter’s Basilica?” Ivanovich asked as he slid into the seat across from his contact. He immediately saw the black in the man’s eyes and what he perceived as a complete lack of fear.
“I have not,” the man said, his English barbed with an accent Ivanovich couldn’t place. “The climb is too much for me. I have heard the views of the square and city are spectacular.”
Ivanovich exhaled and relaxed in the seat, sliding his bag to the floor next to him. He smiled, the wide gaps between his teeth evidence of his poor upbringing. He was new money.
“I am Jon Custos.” The man across the table offered his meat hook of a hand and squeezed Ivanovich’s fingers into submission. “You are Feodor Ivanovich?”
“I didn’t realize we were exchanging—”
“We’re not. I’m telling you who I am. I know who you are.”
Ivanovich gulped past what had quickly become a dry throat. He looked for a waiter but didn’t see one.
“You brought the merchandise?” Custos pulled the cappuccino to his lips. It looked like a dollhouse piece of china in his hand. “And it will perform as you say?”
“Yes,” Ivanovich replied. “I have it. It will work. It’s undetectable, I assure you.”
Custos nodded and set the cup on the table.
“And you have the payment?”
“Pull out your phone and check your accounts.” Custos licked his lips, his gaze never leaving Ivanovich.
The Russian did as he was told and pulled his phone from his pocket. He placed it on the table and punched in a security code. Then he accessed a secure banking application.
“It’s there, yes?” asked Custos.
Ivanovich looked up from the glow of the screen and nodded. The money was there, all eight figures. He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
“We’re finished with our transaction, then,” said Custos. “I’ll be on my way.”
“I’m going to try to find a waiter and have a drink,” said Ivanovich. “Business makes me thirsty.”
Custos stood to shake his hand.
Ivanovich reached out and accepted the bone-crunching grip, but instead of feeling the pain in his fingers, there was a burning sensation under his arm when Custos pulled him close. At first, he thought the man had sucker punched him. Then twice more a searing jab, thick with heat, and he knew it was worse.
Custos’s lips were close to his ear, his breath warm when he said, “A Deo et Rege. A cuspids corona.”
Before Ivanovich sank back into his seat, Jon Custos had grabbed what he needed and was gone. He slithered through the crowded café and out the front door. Ivanovich reached for the water glass, forgetting it was empty until he pressed it against his mouth. He blinked his eyes around the room, settling on the entrance where his killer had escaped.
Beyond the glass front of the café were a wide boulevard, the Arch of Constantine, and the walls of the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre. Trying to focus past the pain and confusion, Ivanovich saw Custos disappear into the throngs of tourists queuing for a tour of the place where, millennia ago, so many gladiators gave their lives for their emperor.
There was something Shakespearean about Ivanovich’s death. It was
as if Brutus himself had plunged the blade. The Russian died, his head dropping to the table. Only the clang of the flatware alerted the waiter to his customer’s condition. One of the inebriated women next to the server screamed when she saw the pool of blood leaching across the floor.
Custos, however, smiled to himself as he dropped the shiv into a trash can and wove his way through the tourists to a waiting car. He disappeared without anyone noticing him, whistling Bartók’s “Music for Strings.”
He slid into the back of the car, the air-conditioning cold against the sweat on his shaved head, and placed the bag on the seat next to him. He caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror and nodded. The car accelerated from the curb and sped toward the airport.
Custos had avoided Rome for so long. He didn’t like being there, of running the risk of people recognizing him and reporting him to people who probably wanted him dead. But he did the job because that was what was required of him. His loyalty to the man and to the secret organization, the Brethren, who’d changed his life so many years before, knew no restrictions.
He would do whatever they asked of him, and they paid him handsomely. Custos was nearly unrivaled in his abilities. He’d heard of others who were good. He believed he was better.
That was why they’d tasked him with the job in Rome: acquiring the bag and disposing of the man who brought it. It was step one. He had more tasks to complete.
Custos pulled an unfamiliar phone from his jacket pocket. He entered Ivanovich’s security code and dialed a number from memory.
“I have it,” he said. “I am on the move. Delete the money from his account.”
PART ONE: LIGHTNING BOLT
“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.”
—Felix Frankfurter, United States Supreme Court Justice, 1939–1962
CHAPTER 1
THE TOYOTA CENTER
HOUSTON, TEXAS
The needle punctured Horus’s left arm, nestling in the basilic vein above the crook of his elbow. He held a tourniquet with his teeth, only letting go of the rubber tube tight around his bicep when a burn followed by comforting warmth filtered through his body.
He smiled at the woman straddling him on the leather sofa in his dressing room. She withdrew the needle, placed it on a glass table littered with spoons, empty folds, lighters, a half-full bottle of Ciroc, and lowered her lips onto his.
“You’ve done this before,” he whispered. “I can tell. You found the vein no problem. It’s getting harder to do that.” His hands found her hips and squeezed.
“A couple of times, maybe,” she said with a throaty giggle. Her long, slow kiss made Horus think of a cat stealing a baby’s breath. It was sexy and frightening, like much of his debaucherous life.
“The ride,” he said, his eyes rolling back from the drugs racing through his bloodstream. “This is the ride, man.” He sucked in a deep breath before she kissed him again, pushing hard against him. She was hungry for him, like so many nameless women with whom he’d shared himself.
Horus was five minutes removed from a sold-out concert in Houston’s Toyota Center. The eighteen thousand fans screamed, danced, and sang along with him for the better part of three hours. He fed off their energy, the primal combination of his music and their pulsating, rhythmic sway. He was spent afterward, both from exhaustion and evaporation of the audience’s adulation.
This was his reward, his consolation; a woman pulled from the front row and ten milligrams of heroin. His handlers knew how to spot the right groupies, the ones who were ready, willing, and able to do anything with and to the most popular solo act on tour.
The blonde fit the bill. Tight skirt, loose top, inked, and heavy on the eyeliner.
Houston was the last stop on his thirty-five-city trip. Then it was back to Seattle and a few months off before producing another EP. His last effort went platinum, produced three number one sellers on iTunes and a video with forty million views on Vimeo. Rolling Stone wrote a glowing profile, putting his ice-blue eyes and five-day stubble on the cover. The issue outsold Britney, Cash, and Morrison combined. Forty million people followed him on Instagram, more than that on Twitter and Snapchat. He streamed a concert live on Periscope, and two million viewed it live on their phones and tablets.
“I’m bigger than John Lennon,” he told Oprah. “And we know who he was more popular than.” Oprah didn’t laugh, but the ratings were insane. Lady GaGa told MTV she could’ve learned marketing from Horus and his gift for pushing the right buttons at the right time. It was as if he had some secret force, some mind control over his legions of adoring fans.
He’d gone from a no-name wannabe hip-hop pretender to headliner in twenty-four short months. His label pushed him on tour. He was living a dream he’d had as a child.
His iconic hit, “Cleopatra,” had him fronting award shows, providing the back track for car commercials, and playing an encore which mostly consisted of Horus holding the microphone toward the crowd such that they could sing the words to the beat of a synthetic 808 drum.
“Am I your Cleopatra?” purred the groupie, her bottle-blonde hair tickling Horus’s neck and chest.
Horus enjoyed her hot peppermint-scented breath on his ear before she flicked her tongue and sucked on the black onyx gauge decorating the lobe. The sensation was acute, intense. He couldn’t respond. He was already floating above the groupie and looking down on the two of them. He could see himself splayed on the leather, his head back, mouth agape. He could see the surprising but familiar butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder.
A monarch?
Are its wings flapping? Is it escaping its confines, fluttering skyward?
This was a high stronger than he’d ever experienced. He was melting into the leather, disappearing into the room’s fabric.
“Mmmm,” she moaned into his ear. “Is it good, Horus? Can you feel it? This ain’t blanks. I brought you the good H.” She bit on his ear and pressed her hands against the back of the sofa, placing one on either side of the musician’s head, and pushed herself back. She took his arm in her hand and thumbed the spot where she’d injected him.
It was the freshest of the skin pops, but a few of the others were almost as inflamed. The tracks marked both arms and legs. There were more hidden between the spaces in his toes. Horus had been “riding the horse” for years, and his fame-fueled riches only amplified his search for that first high so long ago.
Drugs and alcohol, especially heroin, were his weakness. They were a salve for wounds so deep they’d never heal. His friends, as they were, enabled him. His family, what was left of it, distanced itself despite his efforts to reconnect. His enemies, and there were many, used it against him.
Unbeknownst to Horus, the smack-filled syringe was laced with Jackpot. At least that was one of many street names for the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl. Combined with heroin or any other opioid, the fentanyl spiked the dopamine levels in Horus’s brain.
His euphoria quickly morphed into confusion.
Who was this woman on top of him?
What did she do to him?
Who was he? Why was he here?
Then the world blurred. Horus crashed.
His heart slowed, and twenty-two seconds after he aspirated on the vomit bubbling in his throat, it stopped.
The groupie watched the life drain from Horus’s face. He was gray, his eyes opaque and fixed with the recognition of impending death. She’d seen it before. She’d induced it before.
Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she pulled the wig from her head and tossed it on the floor. She pushed herself from the sofa, using Horus’s chest for leverage.
The groupie looked in the mirror and ran her hands across her bald head. She’d shaved that morning. The scalp was smooth. She smiled at herself, pulled a lipstick from her cross-body purse and freshened the red sheen.
Smacking her lips, she replaced the gloss, zipped the purse, and slinked back over to Horus
. His skin was already slipping from gray to blue. She picked up the wig and carefully placed it back on her head, tugging on it at her crown, and slipped past the guard outside of Horus’s room.
The hulk watched her walk away, not at all paying attention to anything above the waist. He couldn’t have identified her if she’d been his sister.
However, she wasn’t the random groupie anyone in the Toyota Center believed her to be. She was sent there with purpose. A mission.
Silence him.
It was what they’d asked of her.
As always, she delivered.
CHAPTER 2
FEDERAL PRETRIAL CORRECTIONAL COMPLEX
PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
Prisoner 02681-044 shuffled across the rutted concrete, his eyes on the MAC-10 fully automatic machine pistol ten feet ahead of him. The man holding the pistol gripped it with both hands, the two-stage suppressor aimed at the ground. He was also armed with a standard nine millimeter Glock holstered on one hip, a Taser on the other.
“Keep moving,” grunted the prisoner’s escort, Deputy United States Marshal Bill Vesper. “We have a schedule to keep. You hear me?”
Prisoner 02681-044 suffered from too much girth and not enough stamina. Despite his time in pretrial custody, he’d not managed to lose much of the weight he’d gained during a life of excess.
“Is that three-piece suit bothering you?” asked Deputy Mario Sanchez, referring to the customary transport restraints at the prisoner’s hands, waist, and ankles.
The prisoner didn’t answer, keeping his eyes on the MAC-10. He thought it a curious choice for US Marshals. Perhaps, he considered, tighter budgets had prevailed and older machinery was the norm.
He ached to hold the pistol grip in his hands, apply pressure to the trigger and ply the deputies with its forty-five-caliber rounds. He didn’t like anyone controlling him, exercising authority over him. He took comfort in knowing it would end soon enough.
