The Patriot Threat

by Steve Berry

  “You have to wash away the sins of your mothers and fathers,” Teacher said to them. “So work hard.”

  Most of every day was spent reminding them of their uselessness.

  School had begun at 8:00 A.M. Absences were never allowed. Just last week, she’d helped a sick Sun Hi across the camp. The girl was perhaps Hana’s only friend, though she was unsure of that word’s exact definition. If it meant that she enjoyed being with her, then a friend she was. When Teacher provided them time to remove lice from their hair, she and Sun Hi would clean each other. Between classes, when Teacher allowed them to play “rock, paper, scissors,” they always gathered together. They’d both been born in the camp. Names were allowed for Insiders simply as a means of identification. But identities, personalities, character—those were forbidden. Still, she was drawn to Sun Hi, if for no other reason than just to be with someone her age. Someone not her mother. Simple interaction between two prisoners was not discouraged, as it helped root out rule breaking.

  School always began with chonghwa. Harmony. Time when Teacher criticized them for all that they had done wrong the day before. More reminders of their lack of worth. Only this time the sins were not those of their parents, but their own.

  She was nine and had slowly learned to read and write. Each year they were issued a single notebook. Pencils were fashioned from a sharpened piece of charred wood. Writing exercises were confined to explaining how she’d failed to work hard. Reading involved a mastery of camp rules. Today Teacher seemed especially angry. His criticisms had been harsh, but no one uttered a sound. If asked anything, the proper response was the same for them all. I shall do better today.

  “Be alert,” Teacher yelled at the class.

  She knew what was coming. A surprise search.

  One by one they approached and Teacher patted them down, then he rifled through their pockets. No one possessed anything that violated the rules except Sun Hi, who carried five rotten kernels of corn.

  “You bitch. You stole food?” Teacher said. “We cut the hands off thieves.”

  Sun Hi stood trembling, saying nothing, as no question had been asked.

  Teacher displayed the blackened kernels in his open palm. “Where did these come from?”

  A question. Which must be answered.

  “The … field.”

  “You dare steal? You worthless excuse of a person. You’re nothing. Yet you think you can steal?”

  His words came fast, his voice loud. His right hand had twice reached for the gun at his hip, but he had not, as yet, drawn the weapon. Shooting prisoners was a daily occurrence, though it had never happened inside her school.

  “Look at this worthless nothing,” Teacher said to the class. “Spit on her.”

  They all did as he ordered, including herself.

  “Kneel,” Teacher demanded of Sun Hi.

  Her friend dropped to the floor.

  Each of them wore the same black pants, shirt, and shoes issued a year ago. Now mere tattered rags covering little skin.

  “Repeat for me subsection three of camp rule three,” Teacher said to Sun Hi.

  “Anyone who steals … or conceals … any foodstuffs will be … shot immediately.”

  “And what have you done?” Teacher asked.

  “I have … broken that … rule.”

  She heard the fear in Sun Hi’s voice.

  None of the students moved, each stood straight and still.

  Concealing food was one of the camp’s worst crimes. They were taught that from the time they could speak along with the fact that anyone who violated that rule deserved harsh punishment. The will to steal was just another fault they’d inherited from the treasonous blood of their parents. Worthlessness only bred more worthlessness.

  Teacher reached for his wooden pointer, the one he used during lessons. His right arm whipped through the air, the thin line of wood crashing into the side of Sun Hi’s head.

  The girl collapsed to the floor.

  “Get up,” Teacher yelled.

  Sun Hi slowly righted herself, dazed from the blow. Another came. Then another. Not a sound slipped from her mouth, the face twisted with fear and failure. She started to collapse again, but Teacher held her upright by the hair and continued the attack, every blow aimed to the head.

  Lumps emerged on the scalp.

  Blood began to leak from her nose.

  Sun Hi’s shoulder tilted, an elbow dug into her side, the frail body listed sideways, then her eyes went glassy and she pitched forward. But Teacher kept pummeling, gritting his teeth in a weird grin, his eyes an even mixture of hate and contempt. Finally, he released his grip and allowed the girl’s body to topple to the floor.

  He stared down at his student, breathing hard. Then he stepped to the open door and tossed the five kernels of rotten corn out into the wind. He cleared his throat of disgust and said to the class, “No one is to touch those.”

  Sun Hi lay bleeding, not moving, the face swelled in sorrow.

  There she stayed for the rest of the day, while they learned their lessons.

  Disappointment always made Hana think of Sun Hi. Her friend had been dead fourteen years. And that was what she had been. A friend. Of that she was now certain.

  No one in the class ever spoke of Sun Hi again. It was as if she’d never existed. No one questioned the punishment, either. All realized that it had been necessary. Sadness and regret were two emotions she’d learned only after leaving the camp. Behind the fences survival was all that mattered. No prisoner ever judged another for anything. Nor did they ever judge the guards or Teacher.

  But that day changed her.

  Though she was only nine, she resolved that no one would strike her with a wooden pointer until her head burst open. And never would she spit on a friend again. If those refusals meant she died, then that was what would happen. Suicide, of course, always remained an option. Many followed that path, especially Outsiders. But any surviving relatives were severely punished for that defiance, which made that route all the more tempting. The thought of her mother being disciplined pleased her. But killing yourself inside the camp was a problem. Some tossed themselves down the mine shafts. Others chose poison. The quickest way was to rush the fences and wait for the guards to shoot. But the worse that could happen was for an attempt to fail. Then only more hard labor, hunger, beatings, and torture came.

  On the day Sun Hi died Hana had known nothing of what lay beyond the camp. But she decided then to find out. How? She did not know. But she would find a way. Her mother’s crimes were not hers. Sun Hi stole five kernels of corn because she was starving. Teacher was wrong. The guards were wrong. That day, while only nine, she stopped being a child.

  “You are so smart,” Sun Hi would tell her.

  “And you so obedient.”

  “That’s what my name means. Obedience and joy. My mother gave it to me.”

  “Do you like your mother?” she asked.

  “Of course. It is the sins of my father that placed us here.”

  She’d never forgotten Sun Hi, with her perpetual runny nose and wet-mouthed grin. Hana’s mother had named her at birth Hyun Ok. Which meant “clever.” But she hated anything and everything associated with her mother so she never spoke that name. The guards and Teacher called her bitch, as they did every other female. She liked the label Sun Hi had given her when they were allowed time to play in the forest or swim in the river, before five kernels of corn changed both of their lives.

  Hana Sung.

  It meant “first victory” and she’d never quite understood why Sun Hi thought of her that way. But she liked the name, so she kept it, never speaking it around her mother.

  Twice in her life she’d made a choice. The day her friend died and the day her father found her. Both had generated irrevocable decisions. And both were special because she made them.

  The time was approaching for a third.

  Which she, too, would decide.

  FORTY

  WASHINGTO
N, DC

  Stephanie kept reading The Patriot Threat, the text actually quite interesting, the reasoning thorough, its conjecture clearly delineated from facts. Howell dealt with the rebuttals against the 16th Amendment as skillfully as any lawyer. His arguments seemed a careful merger of legend, history, speculation, and hypothesis. Enough that she wanted to know more. Especially about Andrew Mellon, who seemed at the heart of it all. She recalled the sections read earlier at the courthouse about Mellon and Philander Knox. They were close friends, so much that Knox in 1920 convinced Warren Harding to appoint Mellon as his secretary of Treasury. She found one of the portions that had been flagged by the Treasury secretary and the words that had intrigued both her and Harriett Engle.

  Some say that, before his death, Knox passed a great secret on to Mellon.

  The next few pages expanded on this bold assertion, sections that had not been flagged by Joe Levy for them to read.

  Philander Knox was more a pawn than a rook or a bishop. His ability to move across the political chessboard seemed limited to only one space at a time. His success came from doing what others wanted. He personally wanted to be president, but was never able to make that a reality. Several questions remain unanswered about him.

  First, assuming there may have been problems with the ratification process in 1913, why would Knox ignore those concerns and declare the 16th Amendment “in effect”? Knox was a Republican. His boss, Taft, was a Republican president, and the amendment itself had been proposed by Taft and approved by a Republican Congress. Remember, the entire idea in 1909 had been for the amendment to fail, either in Congress or during the ratification process. But Congress overwhelmingly approved the language and the states, one by one, started to ratify.

  By 1913 the country had swung decisively toward the left. Progressivism became popular, and supporting the rich elite would be political suicide. All three candidates for president in 1912, Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, supported ratification. The Democrat Wilson won that election, handing the Republicans a decisive defeat. By February 1913, when Knox acted on the ratification (as one of his final chores as Secretary of State), the last thing the nation wanted to hear was that there might be problems. That type of “eleventh hour” revelation might even have been construed as a Republican dirty trick. Even if Knox had declared the amendment invalid, the Democrats who were, by 1913, in power would have just re-proposed and re-submitted it for ratification, taking all of the credit. So nothing politically productive would have come to the Republicans by challenging ratification.

  Biographers note that Knox was proud of being the center of all that attention. Legally, he was the sole decider of the 16th Amendment’s future and he chose to let it stand. But some semblance of conscience may have shown through. Instead of declaring the amendment “ratified,” as had been done with all previous and subsequent constitutional amendments, he chose the curious language of certifying it merely “in effect.” Was that a message? A hint at the truth? We’ll never know. All we do know is that during his short campaign to secure the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, Knox several times commented that he “saved the Party back in ’13.” Nowhere, though, is that assertion ever explained.

  The second remaining inquiry is a corollary of the first. If any of this is true, why would Knox ultimately reveal what he’d done? The answer to that comes from Harding’s snub of Knox. By March 1921 when Harding was inaugurated, Knox, though still a sitting United States Senator from Pennsylvania, had become a bitter man. It seems reasonable that, at some point, he may have told his close friend Andrew Mellon about what happened in 1913. As the incoming Secretary of Treasury, perhaps Knox thought Mellon should know that there may be problems with the income tax? Or perhaps he just thought Mellon a sympathetic ear? Or maybe he was simply expounding on his seeming importance? Regardless, Philander Knox died on October 21, 1921, and with him went any chance of further explanations.

  Of course, she knew things that Howell did not. Information that filled in the gaps and turned some of his speculation into fact.

  She definitely agreed with Danny.

  The Treasury secretary was hiding something.

  But what? How bad could it be?

  She paged to the end of Howell’s book and read the final paragraph.

  My legal case is not atypical. There are thousands of people who have been tried and convicted of either failing to file a tax return, tax evasion, or tax fraud. Many of those people were sentenced to jail, myself included. But what if the speculation is true and the 16th Amendment is somehow tainted? What if that fact was known from the moment Philander Knox declared the amendment “in effect”? It’s no secret that our government keeps secrets. Sometimes it’s in our best interests that things remain hidden. But other times the cloak of secrecy is used for nothing more than political advantage or to hide mistakes. Lyndon Johnson tried that with Vietnam. Nixon with Watergate. Reagan during Iran-Contra. Of course, all of those attempts failed and the truth was ultimately revealed. What will history say of the 16th Amendment? Is all that has been said all that will be said? Or is the final chapter yet to be written? Only time will tell.

  Her phone buzzed.

  She’d set it on vibrate so as to not draw attention, though the lounge surrounding her had become sparse on people. The LCD display indicated it was Cotton. Finally. She stood, walked to a far corner, and faced the papered wall. “I’ve been waiting.”

  “It’s a mess.”

  Not what she wanted to hear.

  “We have a multitude of problems,” he said, “all of them bad.”

  FORTY-ONE

  CROATIA

  Isabella sat in the cell with Luke Daniels. Two hours had passed since they’d been brought inside from the rain. During that time she’d said little. Neither had Daniels, who appeared unconcerned, lying on another steel bench, eyes closed. Rest was the farthest thing from her mind. Getting out of here and back on the trail, that was what mattered.

  She’d asked when they first arrived to use her cell phone, but the locals refused. From the abbreviated call in the car, Malone had most likely realized they were in trouble. So hopefully he’d send help. Never had she been in this kind of situation before, so its resolution was not all that clear. Apparently, Daniels harbored no worries.

  She stood, walked over, and shook him awake.

  “What the—” he said, rousing from his snooze.

  “You’re snoring.”

  He sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes. “I don’t do that.”

  “If you say so.”

  He checked his watch.

  “You have to be somewhere?” she asked.

  “No, Your Highness. It’s just that things should be happening about now.”

  “Care to explain?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Not really.”

  “You being Speed Racer got us into this mess.”

  “And how do you know about Speed Racer? That show was on back in the ’60s. How old are you?”

  She did not answer him. Instead she said, “Why not just hire the cab to take us where we wanted to go? Why steal a car? Then drive like an idiot. You could have hurt someone.”

  He sat back against the wall. “You need to go home, get your calculator, and chase tax evaders. This line of work is not for you.”

  “I get the job done,” she said. “And without causing so much trouble. It’s not necessary.”

  He stared at her with eager eyes. “I wish it weren’t. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. We can only hope Kim didn’t get away.”

  On that he was right. The documents had to be found. Those were her orders. But to do that she had to find Cotton Malone. Which did not seem like an easy task. And thanks to the wiseass sitting across the cell from her, Malone may be the only lead left.

  Metal doors opened beyond the bars and she saw a man in a damp suit enter the holding area. He was middle-aged with a balding head, an untidy mustache, and a bow tie. He wal
ked alone, the doors closing behind him. He approached the cell and introduced himself as a deputy attaché with the American embassy.

  “I drove down from Zagreb,” the man said.

  Daniels stood. “About time, we’ve got things to do.”

  “The charges against you are quite serious. The Croats want to prosecute.”

  “And I want to win the lottery, but neither one of those is goin’ to happen.”

  “There’s no need to be obstinate,” the man said.

  She couldn’t resist. “You should see him when he really gets mad.”

  Daniels chuckled. “Real cute. Look, we’re on a mission, dispatched through the Justice Department for me, Treasury for her. Were you advised?”

  Their savior nodded. “Oh, yes, I received a briefing from the secretary of state himself. He told me to get you out of here immediately.”

  “Then why are we talking through these bars?”

  She wanted to know, “What about Cotton Malone? Do you know anything about him?”

  The man nodded. “I just spent the last half hour with Mr. Malone.”

  Now she was interested. At least she knew Malone was nearby. “Where is he?”

  “At the American Corner. It’s within the city library, not far.”

  He explained that the corner comprised a collection of books and DVDs about American life, history, and society. There were eight such repositories scattered around Croatia, the first ever opened here in Zadar. The host library provided shelf space, utilities, an Internet connection, and an on-site coordinator. The embassy contributed a television, DVD player, and several computers.

  “It’s a way local people can learn about us firsthand, on their own. I helped set the program up.”

  “I can see you’re proud,” Daniels said. “But can you get us out of here.”

  The man nodded. “Of course. Mr. Malone said I was to bring you straight to him at the library.”

  Something was bothering her. “You said the secretary of state called you personally?”