Last War (28 page)

    
Once in the small office, three of the members from the committee sat down. The chairman pressed a button on a device sitting in front of him.

    
“Now, we know you’re both wanted. Dead or alive. Neither of you have been making anything easy, and all we want is some cooperation. Particularly, with you, Jason. Problem is: when we have folks who are disturbing government proceedings, it tends to make our job a bit more difficult.”

    
The chairman shimmied back into his chair. “Are you, Jason, willing to stand down? You should know better. As a man who has worked with us for a decade you know how it is when we have an annoying civilian trying to make waves against us. We need cooperation. I don’t expect a young squirt like this to understand, but you—you should know.”

    
Czyra blurted, “Young squirt? I happen to know more than you do. That’s why you killed my girlfriend, and that’s why you killed my buddy.”

    
“Czyra. Stop it.” Jason said.

    
“No. Because this is what they do. Tell me why I heard a man in the hallway talking about covering up the WTC 7 demolishing?”

    
Jason interrupted, “Excuse me, sir.” He said addressing the chairman. Looking towards a young Czyra breathing heavy he calmly said, “Kid. You’re way out of your league, here. I suggest you let me do more of the talking if you’d like to get some result out of this experience. In fact, I suggest you let me do more talking if you want to get out of here and live another day.”

         
The chairman got out of his seat and circled around to the front of the desk and approached a cabinet. “You know, kid,” he said unlocking the drawer and digging into it, “I’m going to give you an opportunity to confront me with your so-called knowledge. What is it you need to know?”

    
“Well, to begin, the bull crap story that those buildings were able to come down on its own.”

    
“What’s your fascination with the fact that you don’t know all the answers behind a colossal tragedy?” The chairman asked. “Isn’t that what this commission is about? Trying to find answers that a lot of us don’t know?”

    
“I need the answers so I’m sure how to feel about what happened.”

     “Don’t we all, son. But, hey, let’s say building seven
turned out to be demolished, then what?”

    
“Then I’d have to know who. And why you all got it so wrong. And how could you have let it happen. And why our rights had to be taken later.” Czyra began to tear up. “And why you took my friends from me.”

    
“Now, now. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I did not take anyone from you.” The chairman placed a stack of papers in front of Czyra. “This is the investigation folks are asking for. It was done, already. This – what we’re doing now – is being done as a formality for the public. The official 9/11 commission was done in a way in which we could protect national security. This complete investigation that sits in front of you, however, is classified for future reference.”

    
“Why?   

    
You see, there was a game created in northwest India during the Gupta Empire. It was called, Chatur
aṅ
ga. It consisted of the four divisions of Indian military: cavalry, elephants, and chariotry. The game was later adopted by the Persians, the Muslims, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Greek before finally being evolved into the game of Chess by the Europeans.”

    
The chairman walked over to the front of the desk in front of Czyra and sat one cheek on the corner edge, crossing his wrists.

“And what the game’s objective
is, is to conquer the opponent’s army. You have to use the army you have—which evolved from the cavalry, elephants, and chariotry into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively — to battle.

It’s already bad enough
, in the game chess, that your opponent can see your every move. So, in order to have advantage in the game, there has to be a superior strategy that you plan, but without the opponent knowing.

Of course one-on-one, that’s simple. But,
in real life, with a group of nations filled with people you’re responsible for demanding information, it puts us in a predicament. You see? So we need our constituents to realize that while they have the right to know how they’re being protected, there is a game of chess taking place in real life, everyday on a massive scale. Some things we need to keep to ourselves for strategy purposes. Surely you can understand that.”

    
Czyra listened as he flipped through the paperwork. The chairman continued, “Hey, look up Kennedy’s address to the public. He says the same thing that I just did. It’s imperative we balance the two; what the public knows, and public safety. In the meantime, you look through that, and hopefully you understand: not all can know everything. That’s for later to look back on in history. We only need your
faith
. We’ve done right by you so far. There are a lot of things going on here that you don’t know of. We’re trying to get to the bottom of it. So do with that info what you’d like. You can keep it to yourself, or we’ll just do what we see fit in this game of chess we’re all playing.”

    
“Project F.A.I.T.H.?” Czyra asked.

    
“See, youngin’. You didn’t know as much as you thought.” Czyra continued to flip through the pages. “In a perfect world, this makes sense. I just see things have turned into something else.”

    
An awkward silence passed through the room.

    
“So, what do you need us to do?” Jason asked.

    
“Fall back. I need you to hand over your equipment and retire out of the picture as we handle this.”

     Jason looked towards Czyra who had tears caught in his bottom eyelid.
“Alright. Deal.” Jason said. He needed a vacation, anyway. He needed time to heal. He needed time to think. And Czyra needed to grow.

    
“You’ve got it, young guy?” The chairman asked Czyra. Czyra looked as if his whole world had crumbled around  him.

    
Jason nodded towards the chairman while lipping, “He’s got it.”

    
Czyra flopped the papers back onto the desk. “So all of these agencies really said this stuff?”

    
“Not just agencies, but science labs, and even big-time media companies such as Popular Science. Once this all declassifies, the world will know the great operation we executed to fix things around here. This is monumental.”

    
Jason gathered his keys out of his pocket and dropped them on the desk. “The Broadway lot. Here’s my things.” He dropped his gadgets on the table. “The rest of the things are in my car.”

    
“I’m gonna have someone see you two out of here. If you need anything else, here’s my number.” The chairman handed Jason a piece of paper. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we have a public commission to carefully look over. Oh, and Jason, you think you can testify tomorrow?”

     “Sure, sir.”
 

    
The deflated walk out of the office into the hallway felt like a billion years. “Well, pal.” Jason said to a sulking Czyra, “I know this is difficult for you, but this is what it is right, at the moment. Maybe we can come back to this later. We should try to lay off of this. This is a ‘let’s sleep on it’ moment.”

    
“I don’t know. Maybe we should wait for the commission to be released.”

    
As they exited the building onto the street Jason agreed. “Let’s wait a while then we’ll decide.”



Nebraska Avenue Complex

       Michael received a phone call.

     “We’ve got him, and we’ve gotten all of his technology. We’ve got
his body chip under full surveillance and he has no way of figuring us out anymore. He’s done. He has taken an oath to stand down, and he’s going to retire. We’ve gotten him out the way. It was simple – he came to us.”

     “Cool. I’ll let the fellas know.”

     Michael dreaded the possibility that he may have had to kill Jason. He dialed the guys and prepared a meeting with the Brendenhalls.

     “Emergency meeting. We’ve got’em. His car, his technology—everything. He’s tapped, and highly under all the agencies
’ surveillance. We’ve assigned an additional UAV to him, as well. It’s time to proceed with F.A.I.T.H. We’ll discuss the details when we get there.”



PART
FOUR

The surveillance age



XXIV

Brooklyn Heights, NYC

February, 2007

HSAS: ORANGE – HIGH TERRORIST RISK

     Stillness filled the Brooklyn air in a way only the city that never sleeps knew. The Heights definitely became desolate during late nights, but the view of the piers in lower Manhattan out on his back patio showed him that there was definitely an activity still present within the city. The cars across the East River on the FDR Drive told him time never sleeps. That, combined with the peace in the Brooklyn Heights kept him both alert and serine.

    
Where the towers used to sit, there was an emptiness—except for a lone construction crane. That crane represented the rebuilding of the skyline lost in 2001.

    
Often, Jason would sit out on the patio until late hours staring into Manhattan. He could never shake the fact that September 11, 2001 didn’t quite go as planned. None of it did.

    
He couldn’t remember much – only bits. Occasionally, after scanning his body chip with Tameka’s memory scanner, he’d have dreams that seemed real, but clearly didn’t happen. He’d have dreams of meetings with the Megiddos, or memories of his daughter in the towers, just before being buried under a large pile of rubble. Nightmares. Nightmares that only played tricks with his emotions.

     The commission meetings
, three years ago, ended unsatisfactory to him and a lot of other people. The closing statements concluded that the cause was ‘a failure of imagination.’ To Jason, that just wasn’t true. On the day of the happenings, he had planned a drill almost exactly like what was happening. He had planned those drills two times before that same year. The scenario was a masterful, imaginative, concoction from his own brain. He knew that. But, it happened.

     A drone puttered up from below his balcony and stopped just in front of
the rail. Jason smiled and waved. “Hi, Michael. Hi Grambling.” He mocked.

     The drone did a 360 spin, as if it were dancing, and puttered off into the darkness. The lights on
the device shrank smaller as it flew away into the starry atmosphere that were the other city monitoring drones.

    
Behind him, in the background, inside his duplex apartment, the TV ran. There had been another American tragedy earlier that week.

    
He listened in on the latest for a minute and heard the replay of a screaming thousands rushing out of a sports stadium.  A lone gunman somehow breached security and rushed the Super Bowl field with massive guns.

The story hadn’t become clear who and why someone would do this. But, the
TV replayed the gruesome horror over and again. Football players were injured, a bigtime wide receiver star was killed, dozens of fans and police were hurt.

    
The tragedy was probably the biggest since 9/11.

    
Jason rested, caught in mixed thoughts, with his laptop on his propped up, stretched out, legs. It was beginning to burn his thighs. His browser sat idle with some 17 tabs open.   To the fore, sat the face of Cyzra.

    
He hit play on Czyra’s web video.

    
Cyzra, now 24, was more mature. He was famous in the underground media world. He was regarded as a journalist, and he ran a website called MediaBattle. His company’s claim was that the mainstream media was not trustworthy.

    
Jason kept up with his channel vehemently. Some things he viewed as erroneous, while other things were spot on. All of Czyra’s work was outside of the box, for sure.