All the Company Men: Marcus Grimshaw #2 (The Secret State)

by C. J. Steinberg

  As he was stepping back into the pick up truck, a noise came to his ears. “It can’t be more of them,” Marcus said.

  “Go, go, go!” Jack yelled.

  Marcus pressed the gas pedal and got the car in the right position before he pressed on toward the city. He took a sudden right, looking at the last remaining rearview mirror, on the left side of the car.

  Another black SUV appeared on the horizon behind them. “How many of these bastards are mobilized, for Christ’s sake?”

  The car was toiling at maximum speed, approaching a breaking point. Marcus needed a plan. And he needed it quickly.

  EIGHTEEN

  A rthur was watching a contact he had been courting for a while from a safe distance. He had selected a public place, one that he could observe from a building near by, making sure that the contact was neither planning something malicious nor being followed. It was the same tactic Marcus employed when the two of them met, back when Arthur was just a budding blogger, someone who wanted to make it big, to put himself in a position from which he could change the world. This was was his chance, and he simply could not let go now; he could not allow himself to have all his hard work and knowledge he had gathered evaporate. Before I die, he told himself, I will prove this conspiracy. He looked at his watch and decided it was time to go down.

  Arthur never felt more in control than after discovering all the secret information behind the Company; it was as if he was given a true purpose for the first time in his life. His confidence had never been higher and his meticulousness never more impressive. As he headed toward the man who had promised to give him proof, Arthur was aware of how far he had come, and how much harder the road ahead was going to get.

  He was sure that the Company had him on some sort of watchlist, perhaps even a blacklist if the rumors were true about the spy community. He knew that it was only a matter of time before Daniel comes after him. Which he saw as motivation to keep threading forward. Especially after compiling a blacklist of his own. He had found out who all the players on Daniel’s side of the chess board were, and he was pretty sure about their plan, an audacious, dangerous, and frightening plan. Arthur had spent weeks picturing the world they wanted to create after going through all their documented meetings, all their developed weapons, and all the plans that are meant for the future. It was a scary world to say the least.

  The man looked flustered, but what he had told to Arthur on the phone was more than reason to behave like that. Arthur had never forgotten that night Marcus contacted him; it was embedded so deep into his mind that he had used the exact same strategy for his meeting; he had bounced the man from one location to another the whole day, observing him. Then he decided to approach the old man with a fading hairline.

  “Mr. Robinson, I presume,” Arthur said.

  Mr. Robinson flinched at the sudden appearance of a young man behind him. “It is you,” he said.

  Arthur shushed him, his face hidden under a cap and a mask. The rules in London were strict. “What is this about,” Arthur asked.

  “How can I know I can trust you,” the man asked.

  Arthur stared at him in silence, mellowing in his own frustration. “You called me.”

  The man looked around frantically. His eyes revealed that he had not slept in a long time. “Yes, indeed, I forget,” he said. “Do you know, Mr. Erickson, who I am? Or, rather, who my wife is?”

  Arthur nodded. He had seen her name in the decrypted files more than once, embedded deeply into Daniel’s plans.

  “Yes, of course. My wife is... Well, she is dangerous. I had met her many years ago, on a luncheon during the Reagan administration. My father had taken me to that function to make sure to learn how the family business works and to introduce me to all those people. I was to inherit his good name and his empire.” Mr. Robinson fell into a sullen and sudden silence.

  “Go on,” Arthur said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Robinson came to. “That is where I met Catherine. She was like something out of a movie. Something unreal. I started talking to her and I realized quickly that she was not like any other woman I had ever met. She was truly remarkable. Her voice, her eyes, her intellect. It mesmerized me. I fell in love with her then and there. Later I learned that she was there as an escort to a dignitary. I don’t mean a prostitute, but a date, as the kids these days say it. She was just there, for my good fortune, I guess.”

  Arthur was growing anxious. “Sir, with all due respect, we don’t have time for this,” he said.

  “Yes, indeed. It wasn’t long before she proved herself stronger than me. I was never going to take over my father’s empire as I never really desired it, to be honest. But she, oh, she really wanted it. And when my father passed everything to me, she was effectively in control of everything. I didn’t mind. I wanted to see her happy and I wanted to be happy myself,” he coughed. “Oh, God, what am I doing here?”

  “Sir?”

  “A few months ago, I realized that she had been using my father’s good name to do some horrible things in this world. I knew that as a businesswoman she was doing all kinds of illicit things, but this—what I had found out—is truly horrible. I couldn’t sleep for nights. I couldn’t even look at her the same way I always have. My darling Catherine, the woman who had grown my father’s empire and our good name into some of the most influential entities, is someone who has become a monster, corrupted by greed and the insatiable lust for power. I never was a very good leader and I never would’ve achieved what my father wanted me to achieve, so this was a natural order. However, she is siding with a diabolical lunatic, Mr. Erickson, a lunatic that intends to kill people on a massive scale. I can’t live with that.”

  Arthur was now focused on what he was hearing. “What are you talking about?”

  Mr. Robinson let out a long sigh filled with pain. “Daniel Clarkson and my wife, Catherine Robinson, are part of the same scheme that you have unearthed recently. I know that. And I can prove it.”

  “Can you tell me more?”

  “You do know that mine is the second-largest charity in the world? And you know that the recently-deceased George Morrow was the CEO of this charity? Yes, exactly. That is their connection. That is how George and Daniel had met in the first place and where their affair began.”

  “Sorry, affair?”

  Mr. Robinson significantly looked at Arthur but decided not to comment or answer his question. “My wife is the centerpiece of the grand money-laundering scheme behind Dark Forrest. You were publicly attacking Jim Morris, saying that he laundered his money through Morrow. But it wasn’t Morrow’s charity—it was mine. The practice itself was started by my late father. I was supposed to continue it, but, like I said, I never was good enough for that role.”

  “So, wait, you’re telling me that Catherine Robinson, your wife and chairwoman of the Green World Initiative, is, in fact, the brain of this whole operation?”

  Mr. Robinson sullenly nodded. “We all have a destiny to fulfill. Some of us know what that destiny is and others spend their whole lives figuring out what it is. My father thought that my destiny was to continue his work. But there are people out there like my good wife who take an opportunity to invent their own destiny. Green World Initiative is her baby. She is the heart of the money of the Dark Forrest.”

  Arthur couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The thought that worried him the most was that if he had missed out on such an important detail, what else was he wrong about? Was he attacking the wrong people?

  “You think, like almost everyone who is a part of Daniel’s masterplan, that the players are obvious—Jim Morris, George Morrow, Patrick Don—but the truth is that there is no clear line there. This is an intricate network that Daniel has spent decades to build; the line between truth and lie has long ago faded. All the people you think are involved are, in fact, involved. But there are others, like my wife, whom you never see coming.”

  “How do you know all this,” Arthur asked.

  “I have be
en a part of this since the earliest days, when Daniel had just inherited his father’s company. He and I had, in a sense, have grown up together. He was a good boy, until one day he wasn’t. He went into the forrest next to his father’s house, where I often visited, and came back different. Since then, he had grown dark and distant. But he was still my friend, someone I love. And he was the only one who had approved of my marriage to Catherine. Maybe he recognized what took me decades to face because he was building this since an early age.

  “At any rate, I was there for him. We grew up together, got initiated into the Order together, and we worked together ever since.”

  “What Order,” Arthur asked.

  Mr. Robinson looked at him, puzzled. “The Dark Forrest Order,” he said like it was an obvious fact. “The Order started by Daniel’s father and mine. This is the origin of all of Daniel’s ideas,” he responded to Arthur’s confusion. Then he suddenly smirked. “You thought you knew everything. You thought you were the smartest man ever to see the conspiracy,” he laughed. “There are layers to this, layers that go deeper than you could ever hope to imagine.”

  “And you are certain that you can prove what you are saying?”

  Mr. Robinson nodded.

  “But if this goes deeper than the government and the Company, aren’t you worried for your safety?”

  “Naturally,” he said. “I am worried about my life. You know, in the Order we always talked about a better world over a barbecue, how it could all work. Many of us strived to make it better, but Daniel grew frustrated. He wanted real change. He wants a good change. But his plan... I can’t live with that. If it kills me, then let it kill me. I don’t want to wake up in sweat at night and spend my last days with ulcers. That is not the life I want or, frankly, deserve.”

  Arthur was suspicious of the man next to him. The information he was divulging looked more like a move Daniel would make to confuse Arthur and have him reveal or undo his own strategy. The game he was playing was a shadowy one, dangerous and complex, against a very worthy opponent.

  “What is Daniel’s plan,” Arthur asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  Arthur was looking around for anything out of place as Mr. Robinson spoke. There was a family of three walking around, a man reading a book on a bench, and a group of guys drinking. One woman passed by, taking her daily jog in the park. Arthur impressed their faces into his mind, seeing them as the victims of what was happening around him, as collateral damage to one man’s delusion. He was someone who had planned on taking the entire world for himself, someone who thinks that eliminating half the world’s population was a solution to a problem, and not a problem in itself.

  “How can he get away with that,” Arthur asked.

  “He can’t,” Mr. Robinson said. “That is why I’m sharing my knowledge with you. You need to know about the Order and about his real plan. I have fallen ill before the last meeting of the Order, but he has shared much of his philosophy at the gala.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Arthur said absentmindedly.

  “Then you know what he is planning. And now you know how he is planning to do it.”

  “But Jim Morris is out,” Arthur said.

  “The plans are still moving forward somehow,” Mr. Robinson said. “I was not at the meeting, like I said, so I do not know how. But they are moving forward. And his plan will be completed.”

  “How can he think he could make something like that happen? And how can he think that is a solution? The scale of his intentions is too great to be reasonable, too great not to have severe impacts on everything around him. This can’t be true.”

  “I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “And you can prove this?”

  “Indeed I can.”

  Arthur’s phone rang. He screened the call, but remembered that he had been sitting on the bench for a very long time and suddenly felt naked, exposed. “Can you deliver that evidence?”

  Mr. Robinson reached into his coat pocket and gave the key to Arthur. “It is in a locker at this location. No one knows it’s there except you. Make sure to claim it soon nonetheless.”

  Arthur took the key and said nothing more. When he stood up from the bench he felt nauseated, lost, and confused. He had thought that he was unmasking a conspiracy of evil deeds already done. He thought that he was going to discover a canopy-type move from Mr. Robinson. Instead he found out that the faith of the entire world rests on his shoulders, that the faith of the entire planet, as a celestial being, rests upon his shoulders. It was no longer just his youthful arrogance, the belief that he can change the world, that he has to do it. He couldn’t accept it. Lost in thought like that, Arthur kept on walking the streets. He had no sense of direction, but his brain must have felt like it knew where they were going.

  Arthur suddenly stopped. His nausea had gotten him to the point where he felt suddenly pulled back by a force stronger and larger than him, a force unknown that took control over his mind. Then he violently unloaded all of his stomach’s contents into a trash can. When it was all out, the reflex kept pushing him toward vomiting, with only spit left in his stomach. “Oh, God,” he said. “What have I gotten myself into? Please, God, help me,” he said. Why was he praying? To whom was he praying?

  Arthur noticed that people were looking at him oddly, but he couldn’t pay much attention to their opinions and feelings. He had to continue. He had to walk. He had to move.

  Then he suddenly came to a stop again, as the image of a man that had stopped to watch him next to the trash can flashed before his eyes. Arthur turned around as the man stopped to watch the shop window before stepping into the store. No, you’re paranoid, he said to himself and trekked on down the alley, feeling like some of his energy was coming back. Then he turned around for an unknown reason and spotted a man walking behind him. It was the man who entered the shop. But wait, he thought. I know this guy.

  Then he remembered the man who was reading the book on a bench across from him, and their eyes met. The man stopped, staring at Arthur who could feel the man’s chill even from forty yards away. Suddenly, he awoke. His heart was pumping, his mind was racing, and his legs darted into a run. There was no time to think, to plan, to search for strength. There was only time to run.

  Arthur turned the corner and the man followed him, his steps silent, absent almost, forcing Arthur to look back every once in a while just to see where the man was. As Arthur took another corner the bullet clinked against a gutter of the building, making Arthur twitch, but not hesitate. He kept running. He kept pushing. Then he turned into a warehouse and hid behind a crate. Why am I hiding, he thought. What was the logic behind this? Sometimes, when the heart rate is up, a man does things in a vacuum, a state of mind in which everyone does everything without remembering any cause.

  Arthur moved around a large crate as the man slowly stepped into the dark and damp warehouse with his gun at the ready. Arthur had to be careful not to make any noise, not to reveal his position or his intention. As he snuck around the crate to hide from his chaser, Arthur realized one important thing—he hadn’t turned into that warehouse to hide. He had turned into the warehouse for a tactical advantage so he can fight for his right to breathe freely in the world. In that moment he realized that the year the world had to endure has made him stronger, not weaker. He was not a coward that runs away from the bullies and hides beneath the stands. He was a fighter. A fighter with a beer bottle in his hand.

  He moved around the crate and peaked from behind the assassin. He could throw that bottle as a diversion, to lure him away in the wrong direction. But then he thought that even if he ran away, it wouldn’t make a difference because that man would surely go after him. Besides, Arthur always theorized, it made no sense to put your chaser on higher alert.

  So Arthur decided to crouch toward his target, shaking like a leaf as he did, knowing that one beer bottle probably wasn’t enough to stop a man from hi
s ill-intentions. But he was ready.

  Then the man turned slowly and Arthur went for his head with the bottle, only to hit the man’s arm and drop the bottle to the floor and see it break. He quickly moved his left hand to grab the assassin’s pistol-holding arm. Then the man head-butted him and Arthur replied with a fearsome cross on the man’s jaw, making him stumble. Without a moment to spare, Arthur moved forward and kicked the assassin in the stomach, crouching down to hit him, again, and again, before the man kicked him in the head and flew up into the air by pushing himself with his arms from his shoulders. Arthur realized that he was in very big trouble in that moment as the man clearly knew martial arts. Maybe it was a bad idea to fight. He pulled the pistol from the back of his pants and aimed it at the man. Am I really going to take a life, he asked himself.

  The assassin gave him no time to answer that question, moving quickly forward and using his heel to go for Arthur’s hand, knocking the pistol out of his hand. The man’s back heel momentum took him up in the air, allowing him to perform a tornado kick, which Arthur managed to escape in the last second by bending backward. Though the assassin was relentless, immediately swinging at Arthur with the other heel, missing, then doing another tornado kick that landed on Arthur jaw and knocked him down.

  Arthur rolled and crawled on all fours toward a rock he had spotted, hoping to gain enough momentum to run away from the man. The assassin, however, was much faster. He grabbed Arthur’s ankle and pulled him in with a groan. Arthur rolled on the opposite side and threw the rock at the assassin’s head, immediately after leaping to his feet and charging at the man like he was playing football. They both went to the ground and rolled, trying to unclench their hands from the others’ grasp. Eventually the assassin threw Arthur off and rolled toward him. Arthur tried to fend the man off, but the assassin was powerful, well-trained, and his strong arms were not willing to let go of Arthur’s throat.