by Tom Abrahams
If this conspiracy, whatever it was, involved blowing up the United States Capitol as a precursor to something bigger, it would be nothing for them to silence her one way or another.
Regardless, Matti needed to reach the right people and reach them quickly. She clicked on Dillinger Holt’s byline and it linked to an email address. Matti copied the address without sending a message from her embedded laptop account. That was too risky. Instead, she went to an online email provider, created a new account, and sent Holt a message from there. It was the safest way to do it, even if it involved way too many steps. Strangely, Matti missed employing her tradecraft.
She’d joined the National Security Agency out of college because it fit her. She liked solving puzzles. And nowhere could one effect more positive change and solve puzzles than as a signal intelligence analyst. She was a code breaker. Codes were black and white. The job was easy, emotionless. Nobody got hurt.
And then her supervisor, out of the blue, had called her into his office and given her an assignment involving human intelligence. Humans weren’t black and white. They were colored with shades of gray, unpredictable Gordian knots whose actions defied natural law.
Matti had been neither an officer nor an agent before that assignment. She was just a YouTube-loving, emotionally detached, eidetic analyst who got thrown into the deep end of a shark-filled pool without much more than floaties. She’d figured it out and survived. For the first time in months, the pangs of guilt gave way to sparks of hope. Where a therapist failed, and pills only dulled the edge, returning to her roots would save her. She would employ all of the skills the clandestine agency had given her. She’d redeem herself. Matti felt a tingle of adrenaline as she typed her email to Holt.
Mr. Holt: I’ve read your recent reports with great interest. I’ve seen Sir Spencer alive. There is something big at play here. I’m in a position to help you, if you can help me. Please respond to this email address with a good phone number. When I tell you who I am, you’ll trust everything I tell you. The key will be getting me to trust you. Thanks.
Matti’s finger hovered a moment before she clicked send. She exhaled and checked her phone. She had a few minutes left.
She closed out her browser, deleted her history and the cookies, and then returned to the original online email server. Her pulse thumped against her neck as she checked the unsent message, hoping to find a response despite the late hour.
Matti flexed her hands and moved her fingers to open the message. It was longer than when she had left it, and she quietly pumped her fist at the three additional words added to the bottom of her request.
I will dig.
That was enough of a response from her contact. By the time she landed in Barcelona, assuming she was allowed to travel, she’d have a much better handle on what it was she faced.
She logged off the computer, powered it down, and removed the battery. She slipped the computer into her messenger bag and then checked her carry-on. Everything was packed.
Her phone buzzed, as if on cue. It was Goodman.
wheels up in ten. need u on M1.
The tension in her shoulders eased.
on my way. see you in a sec.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket and gathered her bags. She stepped from the Aspen Lodge into the choking humidity and looked up toward the sky. The moon glow illuminated the thick cover of clouds, which gave the sky a milky appearance. She inhaled the smell of pine and marched south toward the helipad. Amid the chorus of crickets and tree frogs, her feet crunched against the path. Matti considered the work ahead, that these might be her final moments of peace for the foreseeable future. An unconscious smile slipped from her face and she wondered if her momentary sense of relief was warranted.
CHAPTER 26
THE GALLERIA
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“I’m not sure what happened,” Dillinger Holt said. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong.”
He was sitting on the edge of his hotel room bed, his fingers tracing the thin stitch of the polyester duvet.
“I really did have a great time last night. I was hoping we could stay in touch after I left town. I really like you. And it was my mistake last time. I was a jerk. I…”
Holt ran his hand through his wet hair and felt the water drip onto his neck. A chill ran down his back.
“It’s pretty late. I waited for a few hours. Sorry to leave another message. This is…I don’t know. I’m just…call me back if you get a chance.”
Holt tossed the phone onto the bed, slid over to the desk, and opened his laptop. Half the night was over; he hadn’t slept. What’s another few minutes online? he reasoned through the fog of disappointment-induced insomnia.
He opened his email and clicked through a litany of press releases. One email in particular piqued his interest. At first he thought the random combination of letters and numbers in the address was indicative of spam. But the subject line, MR HOLT—HELP ME HELP YOU, got him to click it open.
The writer claimed to have seen Sir Spencer alive and insisted that he, or she, was well-known.
Reporters like Dillinger Holt got dozens of tips a week. Every subsequent call, text, or email promised bigger implications and more earthshaking revelations than the one before. Holt estimated one out of fifty of the tips turned out to be remotely close to what was promised. One of fifty of those had reportable evidence or information. And of those, maybe one or two had sources willing to go on the record.
His initial thought was to hit delete and move along. Instead, he wrote back.
Thanks for your email. If what you’re telling me is true, then your information is valuable and I would love to work with you. You can understand, however, my skepticism. You contact me from some random email account that appears as though it’s spam. You don’t give me a name or any other way in which to contact you. Give me another piece of information I can validate or something that tells me you’re not a flake. Then I’ll be happy to send you my personal phone number for further communication. Whatever you choose to tell me will stay between you and me unless you grant me permission to report it. I grant all sources that level of protection. I’ve gone to jail before to protect a source. I’d do it again. And clearly, you already trust me to some degree or you wouldn’t have emailed me in the first place. I’m looking forward to hearing from you ASAP.
—DH
Holt sent the email and then spun in the swivel chair to check his phone. No messages. He resisted the strong urge to call Karen again, for the fourth time, and plead his case. He feared he’d already come across as Jon Favreau’s character Mike from the movie Swingers.
He swung back to the desk and planted his elbows on it. His head in his hands, he gritted his teeth. In his mind, he saw Karen’s car in the parking lot. He’d been certain the woman walking through the rain, directly to him, was her. It turned out not to be.
It didn’t make sense. She’d texted him while he was in traffic, said she was already at the hotel and waiting for him. Five minutes later he was there. She wasn’t.
Holt slapped his hands on the desk and pushed himself to his feet. He paced back and forth in the tight space between the bed and the rest of the furniture. Something wasn’t right. He was growing more certain of it by the hour.
However, Holt, perpetually in a narcissistic coma, couldn’t admit to himself whether he was worried for her safety or whether his discomfort was with a woman ditching him. Either of those possibilities sent a thin trail of bile worming up his throat.
Treading the short distance from wall to wall, his socks dragging along the beige Berber carpet, he replayed, over and again, the last two days in his head. They’d moved quickly. Maybe he missed something. Maybe she’d played him.
She was cold at first, but she thawed. Then she warmed to him and, by the end of the night, shared her body heat. They’d laughed. They’d had fun. He’d told her how foolish he’d been not to keep in touch with her.
Karen forgave him, he
thought, at least four times, and she seemed eager to see him again.
Holt glanced at his computer; the home page of his employer refreshed automatically.
On PlausibleDeniability.info, across the top of the home page was a new banner:
DILLINGER HOLT: FINDING THE TRUTH, GETTING RESULTS
FBI PROBING TWO EXCLUSIVES:
DEATHS OF RAP STAR, FBI AGENT, AND CAPITOL CONSPIRATOR
The headline, while flattering, was misleading. There was no connection, as far as he knew, between Horus, Special Agent Majors, and Sir Spencer Thomas.
Was there?
Holt threw himself back into the chair and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut for clarity. He blinked them open and looked at the clock on the laptop. He should be asleep.
He opened three windows and started a search engine in each of them. In the first he searched for “Horus conspiracy”. In the second he chose the search terms “Erik Majors conspiracy FBI”. In the third, “Sir Spencer Thomas Capitol conspiracy”.
Each open window populated with thousands of results. Holt bit his lower lip and started scrolling through the links.
The Erik Majors search didn’t provide much help at first. The only credible element at all was his appearance at a political fundraiser for some Virginia state representative who was later convicted in a bribery scandal. Holt dismissed it as irrelevant and moved to Horus.
The rapper’s death was a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Countless sites argued his overdose was an offering or a sacrifice of some sort. They connected it to the deaths of other young, famous musicians and actors who’d overdosed. One site claimed Horus was a blood sacrifice for a group called the Brethren, some shadowy puppet master of an organization that funded coups and facilitated revolutions through mind control and devil worship.
The Brethren sounded vaguely familiar to Holt. He’d read about them on 9/11 conspiracy sites, but he’d always dismissed them as some Illuminati-esque rumor. After he clicked on a few of the embedded links referring to Horus and the Brethren, a pattern emerged. Holt slid a hotel notepad next to his computer and grabbed a pen to jot down common words.
In multiple posts he found references to new world order, one world government, ritualistic behavior, global influence, powerful families, and paganism.
He opened a new window and searched Horus’s lyrics. Repeatedly, Holt read references that could easily apply to the Brethren. It was so obvious, in fact, Holt was flush with embarrassment for not having seen it before. Still, despite the conspiratorial intrigue of what he’d found, there was no obvious link amongst the three. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock again. He’d been online for more than an hour and he hadn’t gotten to Sir Spencer Thomas yet. Then he clicked on a low-budget YouTube video with only thirty-three views. It made a case that the Brethren were employing a subconscious infiltration into mainstream society through music, entertainment, and Wall Street. Its goal was to ripen the populous, get them accustomed to the idea of the so-called “New World Order”, which was effectively a police state disguised as a socialist democratic-republic.
“Blah, blah, blah…” Holt was about to close out of the video and move on to his Sir Spencer keyword search when a photograph caught his attention.
Holt sat up, clicked pause, and rubbed his eyes. He slowly moved the cursor back a couple of clicks to get a better look. At exactly eleven minutes and six seconds into the video, there was a black-and-white photograph. Though it was grainy and suffered from being copied too many times, Holt was sure of what it showed, despite the lack of a caption or narrated explanation.
The photograph was taken in a bar. Behind the counter, on the wall, was a large sign that read Cato Street Pub. Leaning on the bar, from behind the counter, was a rail of a man Holt recognized as Capitol conspirator Jimmy Ings. Sitting on the stools in the foreground were Horus and music mogul Vav Six. In the corner of the photo, shadowed from view, was a tall, heavy man leaning on a cane. He was watching from across the room. “It’s just a photograph, right?” Holt mumbled. “So they were in the same place. What does that mean?” He puffed his cheeks and sighed. He could feel the weight of insomnia in his eyes. They burned.
Holt shook off the exhaustion and changed his Sir Spencer query. He added the words “new world order” and “Brethren” to the search. It yielded nothing. He tried “Sir Spencer” and “Horus”. Nothing again. Five similar searches got him nowhere. Ready to call it a night, he decided on one final search. “Sir Spencer” and “Erik Majors”. It produced a single result; an article from Erik Majors’s high school newspaper. It had featured him in an alumni section three years before his death.
Years before he signed up to be a special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Erik Majors was a standout student at Memorial High School and was a National Merit Scholar. He played varsity soccer and was voted Most Likely To Run A Country by his classmates. After graduation, he attended Yale and was the recipient of the prestigious Grove Scholarship.
In the middle of the article was a series of three photographs. One was Majors’s official FBI portrait, another was his yearbook photograph from his senior year in high school, and the third was a photograph taken at the Grove Scholarship awards ceremony. It featured, as the caption below it indicated, “a young Erik Majors with Grove Committee Member Sir Spencer Thomas.”
“Holy—” Adrenaline jolted Holt awake. He copied the link to the article and emailed it to himself. Then he put pen to paper:
THE BRETHREN—NEW WORLD ORDER
SIR SPENCER—THE BRETHREN
SIR SPENCER—ERIK MAJORS
SIR SPENCER—HORUS
HORUS’S DEATH—ERIK MAJORS’S DEATH
HORUS—THE BRETHREN
ALL CONNECTED??
THE TIMING??
WHAT’S THE GOAL??
Looking at it on paper made it seem plausible. Holt rubbed his temples. If this were true, and there was even the most tenuous connection among Majors’s death, Horus’s death, and Sir Spencer’s escape, the repercussions were incalculable. At least they were in the throes of Holt’s sleep deprivation.
Sir Spencer. New World Order. Horus. Murder. FBI. Karen. Conspiracy. The Brethren…
His mind swirling, he considered calling his editor immediately. He thought about calling Karen. He wondered if he should call the FBI. He needed time to think. He needed to rationally connect the dots.
He closed the laptop and leaned back in the swivel chair, wondering if something as simple as a Google search had pieced together something nobody knew was coming.
*
The assassin sat alone in economy class. She’d purchased three adjacent seats to ensure privacy on the transatlantic flight from Houston to Amsterdam. She’d just managed to catch the last Europe-bound flight of the night. Amsterdam wasn’t ideal, but it was a short layover and she’d be in Barcelona by the end of the day. Plus, there was a contact in the Dutch capital who could provide her with some much-needed supplies.
While most on the flight watched movies or slept, the assassin went to work. Using the aircraft’s Wi-Fi, she accessed a secure site and uploaded the newly added dossier to her account.
“Would you like a drink?” a flight attendant asked, pulling alongside the assassin with a large aisle-wide service cart.
“A cup of ice, please,” said the assassin. “No drink.”
“Certainly,” said the flight attendant, a big lipstick smile plastered on her face. “And I love your hair. It’s such a pretty color.”
“Oh.” The assassin touched her head, recalling which wig she’d chosen for the trip. “Thank you.” She smiled back before whispering with a wink, “It’s not my natural color.”
“Oh, girl,” the flight attendant said, shoveling ice into a cup, “mine would be eight shades of gray if it wasn’t for Nice ’n Easy.”
“Me too.” The assassin played along and took the cup from the attendant. “Me too.”
The attendant unlocked the
cart and moved it along. “If you need anything, just let me know.”
“Thank you.”
The assassin shook the cup and pulled a cube of ice into her mouth. She sucked on it for a moment before grinding it with her teeth.
She slipped on a pair of headphones, plugged them into her computer, and opened her music files. Scrolling down to “H”, she picked Horus and clicked on his latest, and last, album.
The music started softly, a thick beat accompanied by an alto saxophone. A couple of bars in, Horus began rapping, and the assassin inhaled through her nose. For a moment, she could smell him. She closed her eyes and she could taste his sweat. His voice was hypnotic. She allowed herself the first minute of the song, her head bobbing with the rhythm. Then she opened her eyes and popped another ice cube in her mouth.
Pity. He had talent.
With the music playing in the background, she clicked on the dossier. It opened and revealed a photograph of the mark. She was a beautiful young woman. To the assassin, she looked like the girl in Rebel Without A Cause, the one who drowned in the 1980s. The assassin couldn’t remember her name. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the information in front of her. The assassin would need to devour the information and formulate a workable solution before the plane began its descent. She forged ahead, scrolling to the executive summary.
Subject: Matilda Harrold (Matti)
Age: 30
Current: White House Special Assistant To The President.
Former: NSA SIGINT Analyst
Education: BA Linguistics, BS Mathematics Georgetown University
Skills: Eideteker. Photographic memory. Remarkable problem solver. 162 IQ.
