The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  That raid may have been our last chance to take out the Thirteen and block the Civic Circle’s plans to embroil the U.S. in a deadly war of attrition in the Middle East.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought Rob got away. All I could do was trust the plan. Rob knew what he was doing. Bulldog? It didn’t look good. The whole point of the operation was to stop the war. It appeared the Reactance had failed.

  The Civic Circle was determined to bleed us of our best and most heroic young men, squandering their precious lives in the desert sands to leave our nation weakened and ripe for their takeover.

  Countless more soldiers, young men just like me, would be sent over there. They would fight bravely, with courage and determination, trying to impose some semblance of order on the chaos. Some of them would never come home again.

  We hadn’t been able to stop it.

  The puppets had rebelled against their puppet masters, but there they still were pulling our strings.

  * * *

  We got in late to the hotel, and didn’t get enough sleep. When we went down to breakfast, the USA Today headline screamed: MASSACRE – Jekyll Island Attack Kills 54. The attackers broke into the Jekyll Island Club Hotel – apparently they weren’t going to disclose the existence of the tunnels and underground complex – and killed over a dozen “business, media, and intellectual leaders.” This was no random slaughter of hicks in the hinterlands. The elite had lost at least a dozen of their own. The story listed the prominent individuals killed. Were some of the victims among the mysterious hooded figures who made up the Thirteen? I wondered if we’d ever find out the details. The Fidei Defensor may have been slaughtered, but they took an impressive honor guard down with them. I offered a silent toast to their memory with a glass of orange juice.

  The Jekyll Island attack pushed other tragic news below the front page fold: Senator, Family, Killed in Plane Crash. Senator Wellstone’s aide hadn’t taken Rob’s warning seriously. I was still reeling from the enormity of all the news when I saw Amit freeze, his eyes bugging out.

  I looked at him curiously.

  Finally, he handed me an inside page. “It’s Gomulka,” he said. “Gomulka ‘committed suicide’ last night in his prison cell.” We looked at each other, each of us understanding the subtext. Our little game was deadly serious. The Civic Circle was tying up their loose ends. Would their housecleaning extend to us?

  They cancelled the final day of the Social Justice Leadership Forum. They called off Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closing keynote speech “for security reasons.” Overnight she’d been whisked off Jekyll Island by Secret Service Agents. Amid high security, Bernard called together the Civic Youth for a final meeting.

  “After last night’s tragic events, we need our next generation of leaders more than ever,” Bernard told the assembled Civic Youth. “We’re going to Pleasure Island to reflect on our losses and re-energize ourselves for the struggles to come. Then we’ll be back to help the leaders of the world achieve universal peace by uniting against Saddam Hussein and the Axis of Evil at the G-8 Summit.” I don’t think he realized the ambiguity of just who was the real “Axis of Evil.”

  Bernard directed us to pack our bags and report to the airstrip on Jekyll Island to board the jet departing for Pleasure Island, the Civic Circle’s Caribbean island paradise. As I joined the crowd swarming for the elevators, two security guards stopped me. “Peter Burdell?”

  “Yes?” I acknowledged.

  “Come with me.”

  I followed him down the first-floor corridor. Suddenly the guard behind me grabbed me and forced a cloth over my mouth and nose. I think I got a good blow into the bastard with my elbow before I passed out.

  I came to, tied in a chair, my head covered by a hood. From what Amit had been telling me, some girls and even guys like getting tied up. They find it exciting in a perverse sort of way to be helpless. This was the second time now it had happened to me, and as far as I was concerned it was two times too many. Unlike the Albertians who’d kidnapped me in Chattanooga, these captors had my arms tied to the arms of my chair, not behind my back. I flexed slowly against my bindings, testing them.

  The hood came flying off. I blinked and cringed involuntarily at the bright light shining in my face.

  “Good, you’re awake,” my interrogator said, stating the obvious. “We have some questions for you, Peter.” There was something familiar about his voice.

  I glanced down and realized they had me hooked up for a polygraph exam. I kept a poker face. I didn’t know the stakes just yet, or the cards in my hand, but this was a game I was going to win.

  “What’s this about?” I tried my best to appear confused and disoriented. We were probably in the control phase where the interrogator was collecting baseline data, so I amped up my anxiety, bit my cheek, tasted my blood, and transitioned to fast, shallow anxious breathing.

  Then, I took a closer look at the man interrogating me.

  It was Agent Wilson: the Civic Circle’s lead troubleshooter and investigator. The man who killed my parents and so many others. Behind him stood his mysterious partner. Suddenly, I had no trouble pretending to be afraid. A couple of years ago, I had barely escaped their interrogation with my life. That was with Sheriff Gunn and a hot-shot lawyer, Mr. Burke, in my corner. Now I had to face him alone, and he had the help of the polygraph to assess my truthfulness.

  Now I was having to work not to panic.

  My heart pounded.

  The polygraph needles danced.

  “We have a spy in the Civic Circle,” Wilson explained. “We have taken someone into the circle of trust who is unworthy of the honor bestowed upon them. Cooperate, and this will all be over quickly. Resist… and it will not go well for you. Do you understand me?”

  I paused to take it all in and continue revving up my body’s stress reaction without succumbing to my fear. “I do.” I imagined ants crawling on my feet, and involuntarily twitched in discomfort. I looked around and recognized the room from the videos I’d seen. I was in room 129. Somewhere behind me was the door that led to the barrels of acid.

  “What is your name?” The interrogator ran through his control questions while I imagined the ants crawling between my toes, up my legs, up my body, nibbling their way into my orifices. The ants were just about to go to work on my face when we switched to the real questions.

  “Where were you last night?”

  I imagined warm water washing off the ants. I was on my imaginary beach, soaking in the rays, relaxing, and calmly sharing my carefully prepared alibi. Amit and I went out to dinner with Caitlin. We arrived a full hour before any of the excitement began, had a long leisurely dinner, then the State Troopers showed up, questioned us, and Caitlin dropped us back at our hotel. I casually told them the story.

  “Do you recognize me?”

  “You look familiar,” I paused as if trying to place him. “I’ve seen many new faces this last week. I don’t know.” He stared impassively at me, then back at his graph. Even I could tell I’d calmed down considerably. He’d been trying to provoke me into revealing I recognized him from his interrogation of me after he’d murdered my folks. I dodged that one.

  “Do you know Wladislaw Gomulka?” Wilson asked.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t bother trying to analyze my responses and launched right into his line of questions.

  “How do you know him?”

  “I took his Intro to Social Justice Studies class at Georgia Tech,” I acknowledged, “and I worked for him as part of the Social Justice Initiative at Tech.”

  “But you didn’t think much of his performance?” Wilson led me through the reservations I’d expressed to Bernard and the Thirteen about Gomulka’s failure to execute the Civic Circle’s planned convergence of the campus.

  “Did you frame your teacher?”

  Did he suspect I had something to do with Gomulka’s downfall?

  I clamped down on the anxiety before it had a chance to rise. “Frame
him? What do you mean?”

  Wilson paused, looked at the graph. Were the needles a twitch more active? I was certainly still much calmer now than the baseline reading he took.

  “Gomulka was framed,” Wilson explained. “He wasn’t the type to import a container load of sex slaves. He loved people in the abstract, only, and didn’t care much for individuals. He was hopelessly repressed. He could barely maintain his composure with women. The closest he’s come to a sexual encounter in decades is getting off to watching porn. You see, it’s my business to know these things.

  “Some of my colleagues are convinced it was an outside hacker. That’s bullshit. I’ve reviewed this Reka’s emails. Gomulka was played. He was played by someone who knew him well. He had no social life outside the movement. That makes for a very small pool of suspects. The folks under him – that would be you, Amit Patel, and Madison Grant. His colleague, that Dean at Georgia Tech. His boss, Bernard. Of the five of you, only one potentially has the skill to pull off this scheme. Amit.”

  He paused to let that sink in and checked my reaction. I resisted the urge to babble. Finally, he continued.

  “Your friend Amit has the means. Hell, he has a huge side business in selling network security software to hotels. He could easily be a secret hacker with the skill to cover his tracks from a casual check. He certainly had the opportunity. You two spent a whole year working with Gomulka and could easily have penetrated his laptop and email. This online seduction, though, took place this summer. Amit was working for the Civic Circle. Our security is airtight. No way did he perpetrate this. So, Amit had help. Who’s closest to Amit?”

  “You think Amit framed Professor Gomulka?” I tried my best to appear confused. Ironically, Amit had Wilson’s own email thoroughly penetrated long before we hacked into Gomulka’s laptop.

  “You.” Wilson stared at me. “You sent the emails to Gomulka, didn’t you?”

  “What emails?”

  Wilson kept staring at me, and finally looked down at his readings. He smiled a smug smile. I was still confident I was very calm, and I hadn’t given anything away.

  Then Wilson looked up at me and said softly “MacGuffin.”

  Oh, shit. He was expanding the scope of the interrogation to include what I knew of the Civic Circle’s hidden truth. Calm. Waves. Beach. Back to my happy place. I successfully remained calm.

  “What?” I pretended to be confused.

  “MacGuffin,” Wilson said louder and more clearly. “Do you know about MacGuffin?”

  I pretend to think about that. “No,” I shook my head, “I don’t know any MacGuffin.”

  “It is a term from drama,” Wilson explained. “It means, ‘That for which the hero seeks.’ You’ve never heard the term?”

  “I don’t think so,” I lied. Wilson had offered the conventional meaning of the term. Hitchcock had popularized the term in the 1930s – at a time when the Civic Circle was scouring the world for the real-life Angus MacGuffin, the missionary who uncovered the secrets of Xueshu Quan and died attempting to reveal them to the world. I still wasn’t sure how Hitchcock came across the term, but he’d probably overheard it somewhere.

  Wilson must have been satisfied, because he didn’t press further along that dangerous line of questioning. He changed tack.

  “Where were you the night before last?”

  How should I play this one? Better to run with the story I knew Mr. Humphreys would tell. I decided to let him work for it, transition to short answers, to try to hide my alleged tryst with Caitlin. “I was working in the Network Operations Center with Mr. Humphreys.”

  “Did you leave at any time?”

  He knew. Maybe he’d spoken with Humphreys already? “Yes.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “To one of the cottages,” I replied evasively, “to fix a network problem.”

  Wilson launched into the next question without waiting to interpret the polygraph data. “What was the problem?” He already knew the truth. He just wanted to see if I’d admit it.

  “One of the access points was not responding,” I continued to be evasive.

  “Why was it not responding?”

  “The firmware became corrupted.”

  “How did the firmware become corrupted?”

  I paused guiltily and consciously amped up my anxiety. “Hard to say. There’s lots of things that can corrupt the firmware. Cosmic rays, bad chips, software bugs…”

  “Is it possible you had something to do with it? Perhaps accidentally?”

  I knew that was a trap. I transitioned to shallow rapid breaths and tried my best to max out my nervous reaction. He was giving me an out to claim it was an accident instead of intentional, but since he clearly knew all about it, he’d be able to nail me for the lie. I decided I may as well ‘fess up.

  “I did it,” I acknowledged, allowing the tension to release and starting to calm down.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “So I could hit on one of the women staying there.”

  “What happened?”

  I let him pull the story out of me bit by bit – the same one I’d made up for Mr. Humphreys about seducing Caitlin, since he was probably their source. I could see he was enjoying my account, but it wasn’t the sexual aspect that turned him on. It was my humiliation he relished. No time to think about that. I had to focus on my story and simulate a modest level of physical discomfort in being forced to tell these “embarrassing secrets” about myself. The experience was creepy enough that it wasn’t difficult.

  “It’s a good thing you were so forthcoming Peter,” Wilson replied. Was he being sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. His partner standing behind him glaring at me was deeply unnerving. “You can’t hide anything from us,” Wilson continued smugly. “We captured the whole thing. Here’s a little sample.”

  A monitor flicked on in front of me.

  Caitlin, in her sexy green kimono leaned over to kiss me. “Thank you,” she smiled. “I’ll show you out.”

  The monitor flicked off.

  Oh, shit.

  That was the end of my meeting with the Ordo Alberti. They had a camera I hadn’t spotted in the network closet. What other surveillance had I missed? Somehow their video cameras had been working, after all. They had everything. They had me. My thoughts raced. Did they have Rob too? Amit? Maybe I could convince them I was working for Uncle Larry?

  “Yes, Peter,” the interrogator smiled, glancing down at the furiously scribbling needles. Damn. I’d completely forgotten to even attempt to control the reactions from my stress and fear. “We have you,” he answered my unasked question. “We have it all. Your pitiful attempt to defeat our surveillance failed. We have every moment of your little adventure documented.” He stared at me. Reveling in my defeat. Letting the words sink in.

  It was end game.

  Rob was rather fond of a poem about an old Roman named Horatius who, with two comrades, held off an army to buy time for a bridge to be destroyed behind them. His favorite part went like this:

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds

  For the ashes of his fathers

  And the temples of his gods…

  I may not have subscribed to his creed, but Bulldog demonstrated for me how a man was supposed to die – standing, alone if need be, against the overwhelming threat, buying precious time for his friends. Deus vult, Bulldog, my comrade. I will pick up your banner from where it fell. I will fight my final battle under your banner, your battle cry in my heart: “Deus vult.” God’s will. I accepted my fate and made myself ready to buy as much time as possible for Amit and Rob to get away and save as much of the Reactance as possible.

  Chapter 15: The Temples of Their Gods

  I felt the weight of my fathers behind me, as I prepared myself for my final bat
tle. Would my enemies dispose of my remains on their 55-gallon drum of acid in the warehouse next door? It seemed a pitiful but strangely appropriate altar, though, for a temple to the false gods of the Civic Circle’s new Babylon. I silently resolved to my fathers, “I will make you proud that I am your son.”

  “Nothing to say?” Wilson mocked me.

  I accepted my fate.

  I was calm.

  I was ready.

  Bring it on.

  I would not give that bastard the satisfaction of a reaction. I met his gaze.

  “We have every moment of your sad little performance captured,” Wilson smirked. “Not even worth sharing the highlights around the office.”

  Curious… I’d have expected them to compartmentalize that information. Surely they didn’t want the rank and file thugs, even at Wilson’s level, to know about the Civic Circle’s history or Xueshu Quan, or the secret complex under the hotel, or…

  “Hard to see what that bank whore sees in that naked ass of yours,” Wilson stated in a matter-of-fact manner tinged with a hint of smug satisfaction at my discomfort.

  My head swirled in momentary confusion.

  Then, I got it.

  I was not going to die this day.

  That clip of Caitlin kissing me? That was just after I reconnected the router.

  Now the bastard was trying to convince me he had the full video of my “tryst” with Caitlin to extract more details and data out of me.

  The weasel.

  The lying little shit weasel.

  He had nothing.

  My fathers standing behind me? I imagined them having a good laugh at my expense. My mother, I could see standing beside Dad, wagging her finger to admonish me on my vulgar language.

  “Nothing to say?” The interrogator interrupted my thoughts.

  Sullen.

  Trapped.

  Resigned to my fate at the exposure of my “indiscretions.”

  I could work with this.

  I put on my game face and took the field.

  “Yeah? So you got me on video. So what?”

  “You’re some kind of hillbilly aren’t you? A hick from the sticks. A backwoods redneck from Appalachia?”