“It is time, Camilla,” Maria continued, politely cutting Camilla short. “The moment is here. For all of you. There will be bloodshed. And nothing is yet certain. But let me remove this one hesitation. Let me save you from this one uncertainty.”
Maria approached Camilla.
As if on instinct, Kylie reached out to Maria, and Camilla let her daughter go to the ten year old.
Maria held Kylie close, and the child responded.
“This little one will be fine,” Maria said with confidence beyond her age. “She will lead a long life, one filled with purpose, like her mother. But you—you must go now. You must go to your friends and help them. Before it is too late.”
Part III
THE REVOLUTION
26
Destiny’s Align
“They chose to send you first,” Alex said to the man known as the Barbarian.
Ivan held out his hand.
Alex examined the Russian’s big mitt for several seconds before shaking it.
“It is an honor to finally meet you,” the Barbarian said to Luthecker. “May I sit?”
“Please,” Alex replied, as he waved his hand over to the large black leather couch.
“These plush accommodations, they are meant to imply civility, no? And, yet, we are captive. We are rats in a cage. They watch us, you know. They expect us to destroy one another,” the Russian added as he sat down.
“I know. I’ve been here before.”
“And you accept these conditions?”
“This situation was inevitable, for both of us, albeit from different Karmic paths. But make no mistake, it will be the last time, also for both of us, albeit with different ends,” Luthecker answered, not just to the Barbarian’s question, but also for all those he knew were listening in.
Much like the Barbarian’s cell, the small containment apartment that held Alex had the finest luxuries, with a well-equipped kitchen that had stainless steel appliances, a dining area, a well-furnished living room with a flat screen television, and finally a bedroom with a king-sized bed dressed with the finest silk sheets.
The only giveaway that this was, in fact, a holding cell somewhere deep within the Coalition Assurance Building was the lack of doorknob.
Luthecker took his seat on the plush leather chair at a right angle from the big Russian. With the ravenous eye movements, he took in every detail of this man’s life. The Barbarian sat, unmoved.
“So do you know the details of my fate now?” the Barbarian asked.
“I think you know your fate already.”
“Do you think I fear death?”
“No.”
“Do you sense that I regret my actions?”
“No.”
“Then what power do you think you have over me?”
“What power do you believe I have?”
“To frighten people with the truth that their lives are meaningless. To make them feel truly accountable for all the wretched things that they have done. Or at least, this is what I have heard.”
The Barbarian got to his feet, and moved toward the kitchen. “Have they supplied you with vodka?”
“Alcohol is not in my profile. And I’d tell you that you should drink less, but it really doesn’t matter at this point.”
The Barbarian grimaced at the dry bar and moved away from the kitchen. He started to pace behind the couch, visibly agitated by the constraint of his favorite habit. Luthecker calmly watched.
“You killed my partner,” the Barbarian continued.
“His choice. You killed my mentor.”
“Also his choice, was it not? Death is equal and absolute. Perspective and justification are not. So for my actions, I do apologize. It was not personal, what transpired in Trans Dniester. Only business. I felt that I was being stolen from. I did not understand who or what you were. Your actions were justified. Lucas Parks had kidnapped your woman. I would have done the same as you.
“Mr. Parks’ failure was that in his final moments he tried to change who he really was. A leopard cannot change his spots, no? He was and always would be ruthless man. He thought he could escape the responsibility for his brutal actions by becoming a philosopher in the end.
“I do not harbor such foolish delusions. There is no philosophy behind what we do in this world, and I do not entertain the way of guilt. Each and every one of us only does what we must do in order to survive and acquire the level of power we feel we deserve. Lucas Parks was held accountable for his decisions. As we all are. I accept this. And this is why, unlike others who cross your path, I do not fear you.”
“And, yet, you would use my abilities to harm others, if you could.”
“Morality is for those without power, and I make no excuses for how I attain it, nor doing the things necessary to those around me who threaten it. Sometimes a harsh hand is necessary in order to create the most profitable amount of stability out of the chaos.
“And make no mistake, the world always spins toward chaos. It has been that way since the beginning of time, and it is that way throughout all of nature. Throughout the entire universe, I suspect. Polarities define existence, and conflict at one level of magnification is simply harmony at another. These final words are not mine, but are those of a western philosopher.”
“Alan Watts. I know of him.”
“They are words that I believe to be true, words that speak of the need for balance. You believe in balance, do you not? Is that not what you seek when you view the fate of another? And you yourself—you have created conflict in order to bring this balance, have you not?”
“You create conflict for profit. Balance isn’t your goal—power is. The words you speak are words you hide behind.”
“I create profit to acquire the resources necessary in order to manifest balance from chaos. And I do this to survive. The human animal, no matter how evolved, is still just an animal. An animal that must be tamed, disciplined, and punished when necessary, lest he destroy everyone and everything around him. I do not see myself above this reality. I do not need you to tell me how my life ends. I know how it ends. I know that it ends soon. We are each born on a path, and we in turn die on that path. My life will end the way it began. With blood and violence.”
“True. You will meet a violent end. And soon.”
“As I said, I do not fear this. I am responsible for my choices. You have no power over me. No man does. No man ever has.”
“And your God?”
“There is none.”
“You’re sincere when you say you don’t fear the how. But do you care to understand the why?”
“I battled a rival and lost. That is why. It is…how you say? The law of the jungle.”
“Is that what you really believe? That you’ve lost?”
“Does it matter what I believe? I’m locked in a cage. With you.”
“You claim to accept your death as a battle loss, but that’s not why you’re here. Not the real why. The real why began long before you were born. As you admit, you were born on a specific path. That is true. And the scar on your left cheek, like a guide, benchmarks the timeline. Your father did that to you, when you were just eight years old. As his father did to him when he was only five, producing the scar on his back from the lash of a belt.
“You saw that scar on your father’s back when you were very young. You wondered about its origin. It captured both your fear and curiosity as a boy the first time you saw it. And then, one day, you knew. You understood. And once you understood, you made a choice, and your Karma was set. It was in that moment that your destiny was set. You made that first choice in your life, and it was the only choice that mattered.”
The Barbarian froze mid step. He had never told a soul about the source of the scar on his cheek or the one he’d witnessed on his father’s back. The fact that Luthecker mentioned these things so casually sent a chill down the big Russian’s spine.
“You are as good as they say you are,” the Barbarian finally responded.
“Holy shit,” Glen Turner said, his eyes locked on the security monitor.
“Told you,” Kirby said as he stood beside Turner. Kirby’s eyes were also locked on the security monitor with morbid fascination.
“It’s unbelievable, what he does,” Kirby continued. “He cuts through all self-delusion like a laser. And he’s going to pick this guy apart. I’ve seen him elevate someone beyond their despair, and now I’m going to watch him single handedly destroy one of the most brutal, violent rulers the modern world has ever known. And he’s going to do it all with a conversation. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe we should put a gun in there, just see what happens,” Turner mused. “See if Luthecker can get Ivan to pick it up and use it on himself, like he did to David Lloyd.”
Kirby didn’t respond to Turner’s brutal suggestion. He kept himself from looking at the Coalition CEO.
“It’s like the emperors watching the Coliseum death battles of Rome, but without all the blood,” Turner added. “You’ve talked to him already, and you want more?”
“This is different. The dynamics here are different.”
“In other words, you see it as a challenge. You want to be thrown in the cage with this guy.”
Kirby’s eyes stayed locked on the monitor that showed Alex Luthecker and the Barbarian. “Absolutely.”
“You people are crazy,” Muranaka said. “You can’t hold me here.”
Muranaka looked about the room. She was standing in a concrete basement beneath an abandoned building in the Union Street section of downtown Los Angeles.
She had followed Ellis away from the Starbucks café on good faith, moving in cloak and dagger fashion across downtown Los Angeles in an effort to remain unseen.
And as soon as they arrived here Ellis promptly disappeared, leaving her under the watchful eye of an admittedly good looking young man named Chris, who kept sentry over her with his very jealous Russian girlfriend by his side.
Muranaka had been told that she must wait here because of “new developments that could change everything,” according to Ellis. Muranaka felt like she had been inadvertently dropped into a spy novel.
“We’re not holding you,” Chris responded. “We’re asking you to wait until Nikki gets back.”
“And if I want to leave?”
“You’ll leave empty handed.”
At that moment, as if it was her cue, Nikki walked through the door.
“If something happens to me, there’s nowhere you can hide from the big guns at Coalition Assurance,” Muranaka said, not only for Chris and Masha’s benefit, but for Nikki’s as well.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you. I promise. Like I told you, there’s just been a change in plans.”
“Of course there has.” Muranaka started toward the exit.
“Wait,” Nikki pleaded.
Nikki had never relied on faith before, but she had no choice now. Alex was missing, and PHOEBE had shut her out, the program’s only action being to connect Ellis with Rika Muranaka.
It was clear to Nikki that this connection was the key, and that PHOEBE was looking for Nikki to put together what to do next.
“It’s going to take a bit of time before I can take you to see Alex,” Nikki finally responded. “But you’ll meet him. I promise. In the meantime, I’m going to give you what you originally wanted. I am going to connect you with PHOEBE.”
27
Coalition Fortress
The expansion of the Coalition Properties facilities in downtown Los Angeles had begun as a way for the mega-corp to park enormous amounts of cash with the least amount of scrutiny.
As the Coalition took more and more market share from its traditional business sectors—war, defense weapons, energy, banking, Internet services, computer hardware and software, and more recently, revenue from off grid dark money sources like unregulated products, human trafficking, and drugs—profit margins for the conglomerate began to grow exponentially into hundreds of billions per year.
The company was piling up American dollars so fast that it was literally running out of safe places to put it. The firm already owned several banks all over the world, including in places like Cyprus, a country where many considered the small island nation’s banking system to be the money-laundering capital of the world.
At this point, buying up more banks to park untaxed cash would only succeed in getting more unwanted attention from U.S. Federal authorities, which had eager and aggressive investigative branches that could easily trace abnormally large wire transfers or deposits, regardless of their origin.
The least regulated and most stable investment option currently available for large cash sums was therefore real estate investment, and it was in this area that the Coalition was more than happy to take advantage.
All it took was a purposefully complex array of shell corporations to make scrutiny of the transactions too difficult to pursue by the Feds, which when combined with the reality that not many agencies were in fact looking to scrutinize these real estate acquisitions to begin with, made it the smart play.
Regulatory bodies looked the other way because cash hungry state and city legislators were happy with the investment, as it boosted the local economy and tax base, allowing them to keep both liberal and conservative campaign promises. With lobbying to grease the wheels, legislators made the deals easy, as everyone wanted the deals to happen, and this allowed the world’s largest defense contractor to quickly become one of the world’s largest real estate holders.
In Los Angeles alone, the Coalition had purchased all the high-rise buildings that surrounded its west coast headquarters, known as Coalition Towers West. The real estate purchase in its entirety consisted of a tight cluster of six structures, the smallest of which was fifty stories, and in a first ever deal of its kind, it included all the connecting streets and power grid. The deal even included taking over the maintenance of water pipelines.
The firm paid well over market value for this all-inclusive patch of real estate, price not being a concern, which in turn sent surrounding real estate prices soaring. Between purchase price and the relocation costs of the previous tenants of the newly acquired buildings, along with all the interconnecting roadways, the tab of the downtown Los Angeles purchase was north of two hundred billion dollars.
The Coalition made it clear before the acquisition process began that they had no interest in keeping former tenants in the high rises that they bought; they fully intended to use the office space for their own corporate needs, and any cost to make that happen would not be prohibitive.
The total cost for the project was of no concern to the Coalition because costs, no matter how high, would be inconsequential against the super-conglomerate’s gross revenues, not to mention the tax advantages the deals created, which reduced the true cost to nearly zero when amortized over the next twenty years, all based on real estate tax laws that the Coalition itself had a hand in creating.
For the Coalition, it was top to bottom monetization. The firm helped craft the rules that allowed their meteoric rise in profits, and they crafted the rules to monetize their attempts to park all the loot. The Coalition literally could not stop making even more money from their attempts to stash the enormous amounts that they already had.
And the Coalition did not limit its real estate acquisition binge to Los Angeles. The company was purchasing large swaths of metropolitan property all over the world, including New York, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago in the United States, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, Frankfurt and countless other cities around the globe.
Metropolitan real estate acquisition was quickly becoming the “new Swiss Bank” for the uber-rich, corporate or private, and Coalition Properties was once agai
n the world leader as it continually parked its endless cash flow everywhere it could, as fast as it could.
But Los Angeles had always been a special place to the Coalition board of directors, away from the scrutiny of New York, and with far nicer weather. So, with a unanimous vote, it was the City of Angels that the Coalition board chose to make their personal homes as well as their corporate headquarters.
They all adapted to Los Angeles quickly, with the excitement of Hollywood, the constant sunshine, and beautiful beaches all serving as the backdrop to some of the prettiest people in the world. Every board member of the Coalition had a luxury penthouse apartment located at what was recently dubbed “the Fortress” to go with his or her Malibu beach home.
And since the Fortress was both the home of the Coalition’s top executives and the epicenter of its business, the sophistication of its security systems that guarded the Fortress were state of the art, with military-grade technology. In order to comply with civilian laws, the technology that went into the security system was labeled “proprietary” instead of “classified,” but the difference between the two now was only in the name.
The system would also prove to be a test bed for the Coalition’s latest civilian surveillance techniques and technology, with the plan being to monetize and export that technology worldwide. Governments would soon be able to monitor their citizens’ every movement, extrapolate their every thought even, down to the last detail. And it would all be done with Coalition systems, with all the data stored on Coalition servers.
As such, every movement throughout the Fortress grounds was monitored and recorded for testing and analysis. Every surface had an array of sensors to track contact, motion detection to detect movement, thermal and infrared imaging to detect life, as well as stride and gait analysis to detect identity, with all of it piped through the CCTV systems.
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