The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “We have to stop them,” Brandy spoke quietly, but with the voice of moral certainty.

  I was missing something, somehow.

  “What have they done?” It might take years to sift through and understand the fine details of the Civic Circle’s corruption, but Brandy got me up to speed on what they’d uncovered from the Civic Circle’s data breach.

  One of the leading Hollywood moguls in the Civic Circle had a shell company finance the establishment of “The Church.” Their “teachings” seemed to be the bastard offspring of New Age mysticism and Satanism with a pinch of Druid and Wiccan influence, but then spreading their Dark Gospel was secondary to their primary mission. As a “non-profit,” they allowed the Civic Circle to launder flows of illicit cash, while keeping the finance under the radar.

  The Church needed religious workers. They hired a couple dozen “pastors” from Eastern Europe under special visas. Each pastor brought in a half dozen children with a statistically improbable ratio of girls to boys and an age distribution slanted heavily toward young teenagers. Each pastor soon imported their remarkably young and attractive “wife,” with a similarly statistically improbable clutch of children of her own.

  They chose an area already dominated by a secretive polygamous sect that would ask no questions about the over-abundance of nubile young children in the community, particularly after suitable “donations” had been made to the appropriate local leaders.

  The principal activity of The Church was a drug and addiction rehabilitation clinic. The clinic where all the politicians, movie stars, and executives go when their debaucheries become public? That’s the one. Their clientele is almost exclusively male, and returns frequently for “follow-up” treatment. It was the usual Civic Circle game – the carrot of access to perversions, followed by the stick of having those perversions exposed.

  Of course, The Church had to provide a cover for these activities, so they funded charitable activities in Third World countries, and set up a medical care foundation. Offering low-cost human testing of experimental medical treatments under the guise of humanitarian aid became another profit center, as unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies leapt at the opportunity to slash drug development expenses. The Church found a friendly African government willing to turn a blind eye on the foundation’s human subjects testing in exchange for greasing the right palms. The Church made their human guinea pigs available to unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies for appropriately-sized “donations.”

  One team of The Church’s doctors experimented with vaccines for tropical diseases in a remote village. One of their experiments went haywire, however. They vaccinated a few people, and within a day of the patients’ first showing symptoms they were dead of a particularly virulent hemorrhagic fever – bleeding from their eyes, bloody bruises and splotches all over their bodies. It sounded ghastly.

  Within a couple of days, everyone in the village was dead. Their school-age children in a boarding school some distance away were orphaned. To hide the evidence of what they’d done, they arranged for the children to be “adopted” through a “charity” in Eastern Europe. The children ended up slaves and sex workers throughout Europe and the Middle East.

  In exchange, the Eastern European “charity” sent teens and tweens on “humanitarian missions” to a Caribbean country, where they got new birth certificates and passports that allow them to visit the United States.

  That was just the tip of the fetid iceberg. Non-governmental organizations ostensibly set up to help vulnerable children around the world were actually fronts to exploit them – sourcing victims from all over the world.

  A modern-day triangle trade in corruption.

  The Church figured they had a good thing going and “vaccinated” more African villages. However, some of the villagers fled, carrying the disease to the capital, and it got out of hand. That outbreak of blood fever that killed thousands in Africa a couple of years back? The one that narrowly avoided spreading into Europe and the Americas as aid workers returned home? That was them.

  The network of corruption was unbelievable, and it all tied together. Pleasure Island, the Caribbean paradise where the Civic Circle entertained favored members, rewarding them with access to these tweens and teens and documenting their perversions for blackmail had an even darker purpose.

  The Church had a clinic there as well. This clinic specialized in cosmetic surgeries and rejuvenation techniques. One of their main treatments was transfusing blood from teens and tweens. They needed a constant supply of young fresh blood – literally – to keep up with the demand. Only the youngest, freshest faces were good enough for the Church and the Civic Circle. They’d use them up in a few years. Those who survived their ordeals might be promoted into staffing the operation, but they exchanged the rest through several different channels in trade for various favors.

  I’d become accustomed to the Civic Circle ruthlessly murdering people who got in their way, but even I was shocked by what I was hearing – the industrial scale of their brutality and callousness defied my already low expectations of them. They managed an entire underground economy of sex and drug trafficking, illicit medical experimentation and treatment, and their clientele ran deep into the corridors of power.

  The capstones of it all, though, were the rituals they performed among themselves to ensure each other’s loyalty.

  The ceremony to join Team 500 was appalling. The highlight was a cake that looked like an amazing facsimile of a dead body. The initiates would all chop heavy cleavers simultaneously into the cake. Red jelly filling would ooze out. They’d all get a good laugh at the ridiculousness of their simulated cannibalistic debauchery, consuming the cake before adjourning to real, if less gruesome, perversions. Every moment was documented on video.

  The ritual to join the Council of 33 appeared to be almost the same. When the initiates chopped into the “cake,” however, the “cake” woke up and their victim died, gasping for breath, bleeding out from the many wounds they’d inflicted. Some initiates went into hysteria at what they’d done and had to be dragged off and sedated. Others vomited. Still others stared blankly in dawning realization of the price they were paying to take their place in the circles of ultimate power. Every moment was caught on video. I was stunned at how many faces were familiar to me. The politicians, media figures, and actors who’d risen to the top in their respective fields – a disturbingly large fraction were compromised and controlled.

  “There’s so much here,” Brandy looked overwhelmed by it all. I couldn’t blame her. I felt the same. “How can we get it out?”

  “We bypass the national media,” Rob explained, “just like we did about Gomulka in the first place. Get the data to local media outlets highlighting the incriminating details on local figures of interest. Breitbart will be all over this. I’ll get him an advance copy. He has contacts all over the place and some connection to Drudge.”

  “The truth will stand when the world’s on fire,” Sheriff Gunn noted. “Getting this out is the easy part. The hard part is when they start to trace back the source of the leak. They’ll know that the Network Operations Center was compromised somehow. That’ll lead straight back to TAGS and to you, Pete.”

  “Maybe,” I acknowledged the danger. “Maybe not. Maybe this is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Wilson killed my folks. Now he’s chasing after Amit, too. He’s dangerous, and it’s high time we eliminated him. What if Wilson is more upset about his superior’s decision to terminate Gomulka than he’s letting on? What if Wilson realizes his superiors are about to find out he was responsible all along? That he was working with Gomulka and tipped off the Albertians. That he took out his own strike team before they could get to Breitbart?

  “The man is a fanatic. He knows he’s about to get caught,” I considered a plausible motivation, “so he’s going to take the whole Civic Circle down with him by releasing their data, pinning it on the anti-Gomulka faction, and then killing himself.”

  “
We point all the evidence toward Wilson, and then make it look like a suicide?” I saw Rob mulling it over. “That will look awfully suspicious, even if we carry it off cleanly.”

  There was a solution. I knew it. I was certain. It was dancing at the edge of my conscious awareness, but I couldn’t quite get it in focus. I held up a hand to silence Rob as he started to speak further. I closed my eyes and tried to understand what I was seeing. We had to make a murder look like a suicide. Of course. That was it. The pieces started falling into place.

  I opened my eyes. Everyone was staring at me. I smiled back as the solution crystallized into a solid plan. “The way to make a murder look like a suicide, is to make a suicide look like a murder,” I explained.

  They still didn’t get what was so obvious to me.

  “The ‘pool chemicals’ in the warehouse next to the hotel – they’re not specifically mentioned in the info dump, are they?”

  “I haven’t seen anything about pool chemicals,” Burke offered, “but I can search.”

  Rob shook his head. “That’s such a low level detail, it’s unlikely to be highlighted. The info dump isn’t concerned with methods so much as it is with specific dirt on specific figures.”

  “That’s what I thought. We need a little help from Sarah.” I looked at Brandy. “She rescued your cat, Tigger, for you. Think we could get her to answer a few questions for us about where she got the materials for the senior design project she completed for you and Professor Chen?”

  “Sure,” Brandy acknowledged, “but I still don’t see what you have in mind.”

  “It’s simple,” I repeated myself. “To make a murder look like a suicide, we make a suicide look like a murder.” I explained what I had in mind. “The Reactance will defile their temple and reduce their New Babylon to rubble.”

  My words echoed in my ears as I disclosed my idea and watched their reactions.

  Rob got a huge grin on his face at the audacity of my plan. He tilted his head back, looked up at the ceiling, and mulled over the plan.

  “Don’t got to feather me into the fight,” Sheriff Gunn declared. “I’m with you.”

  I saw the others looking at each other, as the obvious solution became clear to them.

  “We can do this,” Rob nodded his agreement. “Brandy, you need to get George P. Burdell to reach out to Sarah with our questions. Let’s finish organizing this data and figure out how to make copies to distribute.”

  Chapter 16: A Fatal Disclosure

  The week flew by.

  True, Amit and I had long since hacked Wilson’s computer, but we still had to be careful he didn’t get a hint of what I was about to do to him. Wilson gave me the opportunity when he left his computer on while he ran out to dinner. I used his Omnibrowser to log some suggestive searches, so they’d be waiting in his search history when someone looked. Then, I placed some online orders for delivery to an unoccupied house on Jekyll Island using one of Wilson’s favorite aliases. I billed them to a prepaid credit card Rob’s team had acquired in Brunswick a few weeks back.

  Rick and a couple of the guys who’d stayed in Brunswick made the trip out to the island to pick up the deliveries. Now that the Civic Circle Social Justice Leadership Forum was over, security on Jekyll Island was back to normal. Securing the helium was the hardest part, but of course, it was essential to the plan. One of Rick’s team went shopping in Brunswick to secure all the supplies we needed – DVDs envelopes, postage. He made the all-day road trip back to Tennessee to deliver them to us. We weren’t taking any chances that a forensic investigation of our materials would lead back to us in Lee County, Tennessee.

  The Civic Circle still reeled from the blow. The high profile funerals of the Jekyll Island victims became platforms for more calls for war and appeals to bring the sinister forces behind the Jekyll Island terror attack to justice. The culprit had to be Saddam Hussein and his Axis of Evil.

  At the memorial service for the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, killed along with most of his family in an “unfortunate” airplane crash, the fervor reached its peak. A crowd of 20,000 packed the basketball arena at the University of Minnesota. The nationally-televised memorial had more the flavor of a pep rally as a pantheon of Democrats came to pay homage – Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy…. Even President Lieberman came to pay his respects.

  The Civic Circle thought they’d silenced one of the most outspoken opponents of war, but they only emboldened Wellstone’s supporters. Dueling eulogies passionately advocated war, while others counselled restraint. Some spoke out for immediate revenge. Still others called for careful consideration. Passions ran high, and the event devolved into a near riot. The Secret Service escorted the President out amid a seething hostile crowd.

  It was clear that the political resolve for war was wavering, but President Lieberman still vowed to rally the G-8 nations behind his plan at the Sea Island G-8 Summit. We were too busy to do more than watch some of the highlights.

  Somehow, we finished all our preparations in time.

  Rob and I joined Rick’s team in Brunswick for the final steps. One of Rick’s team members had printed several dozen cover letters at the business center at the Jekyll Island Berkshire Inn where Wilson was still staying, working on his investigation. We carefully sealed each cover letter in an envelope with a DVD and addressed it to a media outlet.

  That night Rick’s team mailed the envelopes and the DVDs we’d prepared using various mailboxes around Brunswick. They’d arrive at their destinations starting Tuesday. Rob had already primed Breitbart and other friendly media contacts what to expect. They were ready to do their part.

  The next step was critical.

  I drafted an email message from Wilson’s account and scheduled it to be sent at the time of his usual run, the following morning.

  To: Xueshu Quan

  From: Special Agent Wilson

  Subject: Gomulka Investigation; Jekyll Island Attack

  I have uncovered who was responsible for the Jekyll Island attack.

  Gomulka was a loyal and trusted servant of the Circle. His enemies framed him so as to deprive us and you of his services. He should not have been so casually eliminated.

  I now have conclusive evidence that a different faction within the Council of 33 allied with the Albertians. They used Amit Patel to incriminate Gomulka and by extension, the rest of Gomulka’s faction within the Council of 33.

  They plan to reveal the secrets they stole from the Inner Sanctum. I must act quickly to stop them.

  When you have a chance to review my evidence, you will realize the hidden truth.

  I will have a full report to you later today.

  Wilson

  “You’re sure about this?” Rob asked, looking over my shoulder. “They might just eliminate Amit.”

  “Wilson has been pointing the finger at Amit for a couple of weeks, now,” I pointed out. “We have to take the chance.”

  * * *

  The morning of the day I had to be in Savannah for the kickoff to the G-8 Summit, I returned to Jekyll Island to complete one final task.

  Rob drove a commercial van with a phony business name to the Berkshire Inn, and backed it up near the Civic Circle’s warehouse of horrors. One card sweep opened the door and gave us our window of opportunity. Rob pushed in past me. By the time I got the helium cylinder unloaded and in, Rob had picked the lock to the “pool chemical” storage area. Rob took the helium cylinder from me and locked it in with the barrels of acid, while I confirmed the server room was clear and deposited one last piece of evidence.

  We were in and out in under two minutes, the video surveillance of our activities automatically erased.

  Using a high gain antenna from the beach parking area next door, I was able to hit the WiFi node in Room 228 and access the hotel’s secret surveillance system. Wilson was still asleep. Rob and I settled in and waited for Wilson to take his final run.

  “He’s moving,” Rob announced about thirty
minutes later. “Let’s go.”

  The dawn’s early light was no match for the canopy of the Spanish-moss-cloaked trees. We traversed Wilson’s usual running course backwards, guaranteeing an encounter. We timed it just right.

  Wilson jogged along the path toward Rob and me.

  I’d been picturing what this moment would be like for nearly two years. “My name is Peter Burdell,” I’d say. “You killed my parents. Prepare to die.” In my imagination, many times I’d seen the dawning realization in Wilson’s eyes that the bill had finally come due for his crimes.

  The reality wasn’t anything like what I’d envisioned.

  “Hey,” Rob yelled at Wilson as he jogged past us. “You’ve got to see this!” Rob held up a colorful piece of beach debris.

  As Wilson slowed and turned, I carefully aimed my .45 and fired. One shot. At under a dozen feet, I could hardly miss. Did he realize what was happening? I wasn’t sure. It happened so fast. The back of his head exploded in a gruesome, bloody pulp, spraying red and gray goo over a small dark green palmetto just off the trail. The blood looked black in the dim light.

  I felt an almost sexual euphoria at the sight of my dead enemy, and just as quickly an even more profound sense of nausea at the gory scene I’d just made.

  “Look away,” Rob ordered. He holstered his own pistol which he’d hidden under the weathered plastic debris and pulled out a plastic bag. “Take a deep breath. It’s over.”

  “You’re expecting me to vomit?”

  “Natural reaction,” he consoled me. “You doing OK?”

  I took another deep breath and nodded yes.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” he commanded. “Back this way to avoid the splatter.”

  * * *

  The G-8 Summit was on Sea Island, just north of Jekyll Island. After the attack on the Civic Circle Forum, not to mention the latest violent assault on a key Civic Circle operative, they weren’t taking any chances with security. The press, and even the Civic Youth, were all sequestered in hotels in Savannah, Georgia, a good ninety minutes north of Sea Island. I figured they’d become rather tired of protesting crowds singing “Civic Circle Dandies,” also.