A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (42 page)

Banker Pay to be Cut

(Washington)—
As police clashed with protesters in the streets of Europe and America, UN world leaders preparing for the forthcoming G-20 meeting closed ranks to limit pay for bankers worldwide and to initiate action to bring world banks under UN control. Risky behavior by banks has contributed to the global financial meltdown...

Chapter Seventy-Six

Washington, D.C.

It was after midnight when Nail arrived at Judy Sparks-Taylor’s apartment near George Washington University. The air smelled freshly scrubbed in D.C. and there were puddles of water on the streets. Nail was taking a chance showing up at Judy’s apartment; there was no way to determine how much the Feds might know about her connections to Sharon, Big C and him. Still, it was a risk he had to take. Time might be running out for Sharon.

He circled the block twice while he looked for suspicious parked cars or other signs that hostile eyes might be watching her apartment. The neighborhood was mainly a college residential area, with stately old homes gone to seed and turned into apartments for let. The second floor light in the window of the address Judy supplied him on the phone was burning. He parked at the curb down the block and walked to the common door for the four or so apartments in the old house. It was unlocked; Judy said it would be. He stepped into the foyer and waited a few minutes to make sure he wasn’t observed before he climbed the stairs to Judy’s apartment.

She had sounded bad when he telephoned her before driving from New York. “I come back as soon as I heard about Dennis on the news,” she explained. “I found somebody done broke in my apartment and trashed the place like they turned a sow loose in it.”

“Stay put where you are, Judy, until you hear from me,” he commanded.

Before leaving the Big Apple, he tossed his TracPhone into the bed of a wrecker stopped to haul away what was left of a car crash. Let the feds follow
that.
He had used the throwaway enough by this time that the NSA might have latched onto his signal.

He knuckled Judy’s door and stood to one side out of the line of fire. She opened almost immediately; she must have been waiting up for him. She wore a long cotton robe and no makeup. Her Lady Clairol blond hair hung in wilted strings down to her shoulders. She looked as though she hadn’t slept. She pulled him inside and bolted the door.

“It’s all my fault Dennis got hisself kilt,” she wailed. “If I hadn’t gone gallivanting off to Oklahoma with Corey...”

It was news to Nail that Big C had taken her with him, but he didn’t inquire into it. There were more pressing matters.

“Whatever happened to Dennis, it wasn’t your fault, Judy. He brought it on himself.”

Judy led him to the sofa. The cushions looked to have been knifed. “Whoever broke in did it,” she explained, sitting on one end of the couch and rubbing her face wearily with both hands. “They pulled up the carpet and threw stuff out of the closet all over the floor. I ain’t got it all cleaned up even yet.”

“Any idea what they were looking for?” Nail asked her.

“It’s been all over TV about me and Dennis,” she snuffled. “Calling me a whore and all. It wasn’t like that. They said Dennis shot his wife and then shot hisself. I don’t believe none of it, James.
They
kilt him. As sure as God made little green apples,
they
did it. Listen to the message he left on my answering machine. I saved it.”

She got up and turned it on to release a thin voice sounding highly stressed or drunk, possibly both:
“Judy, this is Dennis. I took your pistol. They’re going to kill me.”

“Did you call the police?” Nail asked.

She nodded. “Neighbors told me there was an OK Corral out front. Somebody was shooting. It had to be Dennis.”

She opened her hand to display a broken necklace and gold locket.

“The burglars didn’t break in to steal,” she said, staring at the locket with clouded eyes. “This is all I own worth much. Dennis gave it to me.”

“You made a call to Sharon’s studio,” Nail reminded her. “What did you mean about the chickens coming home to roost?”

“You remember I told ya’all about Dennis’ notebook? He wrote down stuff in it about them secret meetings she was talking about.”

“They were looking for the notebook?”

“Some of these old houses has got secret places in the walls. Dennis knew about it. I guess he hid his notebook in it for safekeeping when he took my pistol. That’s where I found it.”

She got up and started toward the dinette table. Nail followed, struggling to rise from the sofa. He felt leakage from his wounds. Judy looked back.

“You’re still hurting, James.”

“A little stiff.” A thick spiral notebook lay on the table. It looked well-used. “Is this it?”

He sat down at the table.

“This is the page about the secret meeting,” Judy said, turning the pages for him toward the end of the notebook.

Joe thinks I’m drinking too much. He’s becoming a bigger nag than his sister. My stomach is upset all the time and I chunk up from stress when I get up in the morning. That’s what’s wrong with my eye too. I could say I had no idea what I was doing when I let brother-in-law draw me into all this, but I’d be lying to myself. I made a pact with Satan and now Satan demands his pound of flesh.

These people are as serious as a dead baby. Millions of people will be killed before this is all over. Next Monday, Joe and others like him are gathering with George Zuniga at Lake Ontario for The Sustainable World Conference to “establish new rules of international law and to rearrange the entire financial order.” They’re making plans to collapse the U.S. economy and implement martial law to install Anastos as the puppet in a communist regime...

Trout had been conscientious in dating his entries. “Next Monday” was two days away.

“Did Sharon call you back?” Nail asked.

“She got all excited when I read the part in the notebook about Lake Ontario. Like she knew exactly where it was. I tried to warn her, what with Dennis being murdered and all. I don’t think she was listening, James. That girl is done about to become a chicken in a house full of coyotes.”

Rage From The Right: A Report

(Washington)—
A report issued by the “Countering Violent Extremism Working Group” warned that so-called “patriot cartels” like the Tea Party Movement that see the Federal Government as part of a plot to impose one-world government on America have come roaring back after years out of the limelight. The report defines Rightwing extremists as “divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religions, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

“The Tea Parties and other such groups are shot through with veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” said Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham (D-Ill).

“They caught fire after the election of President Anastos,” said Speaker of the House Barbara Teague (D-CA). “There is little difference between them and mass murderer Timothy McVeigh who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. They are all terrorists or potential terrorists one match away from lighting the fuse...”

The report suggests worsening economic woes, potential new international restrictions on firearms, and the recruiting and radicalizing of returning military veterans are leading to the emergence of terrorist groups with violent potential. The report also warns law enforcement agencies and citizens to watch out for and report anything suspicious, such as: vehicles with anti-government bumper stickers; large secret meetings; Constitutionalists; individuals with radical ideologies based on Christian views; and individuals who oppose illegal immigration, increased federal powers, restrictions on firearms, abortion, taxes, and who express conspiracy theories about the loss of U.S. sovereignty...

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Colorado

An Apache gunship flew over on two separate occasions while Big C maintained surveillance on the detention camp and waited for Tom Fullbright to return with the militias. He rooted into dense brush not yet denuded by approaching autumn to hide while the chopper patrolled the surrounding mountains and forests before it returned north toward the Air Force base at Colorado Springs. Big C guessed he would have no more than an hour tops to pull off an operation against the hospital before air cover responded with missiles and Gatling guns.

Militiamen were going to die here in Colorado. The “mental health facility” was so well-armed and well-defended that a bunch of common Americans could never hope to overcome it by direct force. Victory depended on stealth and cunning. Even so, the inevitable price the militia must pay was worth it if enough prisoners could be liberated so that Americans saw what was happening and began to react.

If
the country hadn’t become so cowed-down that it was incapable of acting.
Newsweek
and others in the mainstream media were already declaring the U.S. a socialist state.
Now, aren’t you much better off for it?

More than a quarter of all Americans didn’t know from whom the United States gained its independence; eighty percent couldn’t name more than one of the Bill of Rights; most had never read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence; ninety percent of college grads couldn’t pick out Iraq on a map, even though the nation had been at war there since 2003...

So, take the average American conditioned to look to government to supply his needs and take care of him. He lost his job. The dollar bottomed out, his kids were hungry, he was afraid and angry, there was rioting and chaos everywhere... And, then, there
he
came, riding up on a white horse.
The One
. Promising, “I can restore order. All you have to do is give up freedom, which at best is messy and nasty.”

Did Average Joe Six-Pack ask about the Constitution?

The death camp in Colorado was one in a long tradition of such camps established to eliminate dissidents and dangerous reactionaries throughout socialism’s dark history.

Big C’s cynicism failed to improve when Tom Fullbright returned, arriving like a shadow out of morning mist to inform the ex-cop that only thirty-six Defenders and fifteen from Colorado’s Sons of Liberty volunteered for the mission. These few were waiting a mile back at the end of a narrow box canyon, crowded underneath a ledge to avoid detection from the air. Fifty-three men total, counting Fullbright and Big C, to take on an armed, electrified fortress defended by machinegun-equipped Humvees, armed troops and helicopters.

“I guess most didn’t mind a fight,” Fullbright alibied with a shrug. “But they consider this suicide. So they went home.”

Big C thought of the raven who torched itself on the electrified fence.

Most of the militiamen who accompanied Fullbright were in their late twenties and thirties. One or two, like old Tump Kinsey from Hanson, were Vietnam vets. A few were Iraq veterans. Sad, Big C thought, that none of them were of the under twenty-five, dumbed-down, entitlement-brainwashed generation.

The army, if such a shabby lot could be dignified with the title, sprawled about underneath the ledge, rested against their backpacks, or stood leaning against the rock wall sipping from canteens. They wore turkey-hunting camouflage or scraps of army uniforms and were armed with everything from hunting rifles and shotguns to pistols of various calibers. Tump Kinsey carried a Chicom AK-47 he brought back from Vietnam. One of the Sons of Liberty thought to set up security at the mouth of the box canyon with a .50-caliber Browning machinegun. A weapon worth its weight in gold.

“Good job,” Big C complimented the gunner, a Chicano named Campione.

“I brung two cans of armor-piercing ammo,” the man said. “You think this won’t stick a crick in their asses?”

After introductions all around, Big C squatted with a stick to sketch in the dirt while the men formed a grim circle around him. The briefing turned even more somber as the big commander detailed in frank terms what they were apt to encounter and his concept of the operation.

“This the road coming in to camp,” he explained, sketching with the stick. “Two transport buses arrive every day packed with patients. The road twist and turn between a creek and the mountains, which mean they have to drive slow. That’s good. Buses drive through the gate—
here
—and go to this tunnel underneath the hospital, where they stay overnight. Corpses are burned after nightfall to cover smoke coming from the furnace stack.”

Some of the men paled. Others looked angry.

Big C continued his briefing. The militia force would break down into three elements. Big C and one element would hijack the buses on the road coming in and use them as Trojan horses to get past the gate guard and into the compound. Once inside, they would eliminate the gate guards and deactivate the electrified fence to allow Tom Fullbright and his component to break through on the north and create a diversion while Big C’s men released and rescued prisoners.

“We can’t take out all the prisoners on two buses,” one of the men pointed out.

“Unfortunate,” Big C acknowledged. “But we still let everybody loose. Tear a hole in the fence so those we can’t get on buses can make a run for it. That a better chance than they got in there. What important is that we rescue as many as we can so they tell the country what is going on here.”

If at all possible—and if he was still alive—Lieutenant Ross had to be among those on the buses. Big C owed that to Jack’s wife.

Campione would lead the third, smaller element consisting of the .50-cal machinegun and marksmen armed with hunting rifles.