Brink of Chaos (16 page)

Deborah Jordan stood silently in her cubicle, staring at the document she had just been given. Corporal Tom Birdow was next to her, rocking on his feet and looking up and down the hallway to see if anyone was coming.

Deborah realized she could spend all day looking at this paper, but it wouldn’t change a thing. She had known her mother’s name would be put on the list of nontaggers, all those who had refused to be BIDTagged, but that alone didn’t mean she would be apprehended as a violator. Another step was necessary. Someone high up needed to authorize a specific warrant for her arrest. Deborah had hoped and prayed that step might be delayed — or even overlooked in the morass of government red tape.

But her hopes had now been dashed. The notice read: “Order for Immediate Seizure — Failure to Comply with Identification Process — BIDTag Warrant List.”

Now, it seemed, nothing would be able to remove one special name from that warrant list: “Abigail Jordan.”

“You realize,” Tom said, snatching the paper back from Deborah, “how much trouble I could get into if my boss at DISA or the people at the Security ID Agency found out that I shared this with you.”

“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Which means …”

“I won’t tell anyone — except my family.”

Tom shook his head violently. “That’s what I mean.”

“Put yourself in my position, Tom. Tell me that
you
wouldn’t tell your own mother if she were about to be arrested.”

Tom tucked the document back into his DISA folder. “Fine. But just remember — you didn’t get this information from me.” Then he strode off.

In their downtown Washington hotel suite, Abigail was looking over Cal’s shoulder as he pulled up some data on his laptop.

Her phone rang. She checked the caller ID. It was John Gallagher.

“John,” she said, “what’s up?”

“Got some news on several fronts. First, I encrypted an email to you yesterday on that digging you wanted me to do in the public records in Miami-Dade. You know, on that refugee situation down there from years ago. I think I found what you were looking for. Not sure what that’s all about …”

“I read it late last night,” Abigail shot back. “Thanks. When I get a breather, I’ll explain. Life has been a whirlwind wrapped in a tornado around here. But a picture is starting to emerge. I’ve got a person of interest I’m looking at.”

“You know, Abby, you’re starting to sound more like my old buddies in clandestine services. Vague, intriguing — and smarter than me. Maybe you missed your calling.” Abigail chuckled. Then Gallagher gave her the rest of the story. “On the main investigation, the murder of Perry Tedrich, I’m afraid we’re at a dead end. I shadowed Ben Boling, the main FBI agent detailed to the Wichita killing, and dropped your hint that maybe it was an inside job. So Ben interviewed Katrena Amid, the only staffer who seems to have visited the victim. But she’s got an air-tight alibi. She met with Perry Tedrich all right, but she had left two days before he went missing. She flew out of Wichita while the guy was still very much alive and well.” After a pause, Gallagher cleared his throat. “So, Abby, where are we going with this?”

“Actually, that’s not bad news at all.”

“Oh?”

“No. I never suspected Katrena Amid.”

Another pause on the line. “You didn’t?” More silence. “Hey, maybe it’s time to spell it out for your pal John Gallagher. You know I’m a slow learner.”

She laughed. “Okay, maybe it is time.”

Just then, the call-waiting lit up on Abigail’s Allfone. At the same moment, Cal pointed to something on his laptop. Abigail trotted over and nodded as she read it too. Then she asked Gallagher to hold while she took the other call.

It was Deborah.

“Mom, Debbie here. I’m on a secure line.”

“What’s wrong? You sound stressed.”

“I am. I just saw your name on a list for immediate apprehension as a nontagger. It’s just a matter of time before they track you down.”

Abigail took a moment to process that.

“Mom, did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, darling. I did. It’s just that there’s a lot coming at me right now. The Lord is going to have to give me patience, to keep my feet on the ground in the middle of all of this.”

“Well, what I’d like the Lord to do is to give you a pair of wings because you need to get out of sight for a while.”

“Can’t do that.”

“You’re kidding. Why not?”

“It’s complicated. I’ve got to argue Dad’s case in three days … in the federal court of appeals here in D.C.”

“Oh, that’s great!” Deborah exclaimed. “You’re going to walk into a federal building that’s crawling with U.S. marshals and FBI agents. You’ll be toast within five minutes.”

“Maybe not.”

“How’s that?” Deborah asked.

Abigail glanced again at Cal’s laptop screen to a posting on a blog called
The Underground
. Abigail’s reply was cryptic. “Because I may learn a sleight-of-hand trick.”

Cal smiled when she said that.

“I still don’t understand,” Deborah said.

“I’ll explain later. Hang on, Deb …” Abigail clicked back to John Gallagher.

“Okay, John, one question: did you ever check into that health club like I asked? The one Perry Tedrich belonged to?”

“Yeah. I was able to wrangle a look at his records. He worked out at the fitness center early in the morning on the day he disappeared.”

“Anyone else check in with him?”

“Nope.”

“Bring any female guest to the gym?”

“Nope. Look, Ben checked all this out too … the member list … the whole bit. I shadowed his investigation to make sure he didn’t drop the ball.”

“How about anyone who might have seen him in the workout area?”

“You shoulda’ been an agent, Abby,” Gallagher cracked. “That’ll be my next assignment. Not that I expect anything to break on this. I can smell a cold case a mile away. This may be one of them. Anyway, I’ll check the list to see who else was there at that time. After that, I got to fly out of Wichita and get to Northern California. I’ve got an uncle getting married —” After a moment, Gallagher added — “for the third time. He ought to know better by now. I met his fiancé. I’ll just say that three times is definitely not a charm.”

“Do me a favor, John,” Abigail said. “The minute you find out anything, call me.”

“Will do, Señorita.”

Then Abigail clicked back to Deborah. “I need to see you right away. Can you come to my room here in the Mayflower Hotel after you leave the Pentagon?”

“Sure.”

“One more question. Do you still have some time off coming?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Is there any way you could take it right away … like starting tomorrow?”

“Well — I suppose I could put in for it before I leave. I could say ‘family emergency,’ that sort of thing.”

“Exactly,” Abigail said. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

Abigail directed her daughter back to the photo. It was laying on the hotel coffee table next to a file of papers. “Look again.”

“All right,” Deborah replied, “but all I see is a photograph of a guy sitting in a room with his back to the camera.”

“What else?”

Deborah raised an eyebrow and tucked up the corner of her mouth. She stared hard at the picture. “Well … he’s got his hand outstretched to the left, reaching, I guess, for a cup on a saucer on the end table next to his chair. It was shot from the back. Whoever took it was behind him.”

“Now, look at the next photo.”

Abigail slid another photo out of the file and laid it on the coffee table. After studying it, Deborah said, “Looks like a blow up — magnified several times. It’s focused just on the guy’s left hand.”

“Right,” Abigail said, “these were taken by an investigative journalist named Curtis Belltether. He mailed all this to the Roundtable, along with his article, just before he was murdered.”

“What are the pictures supposed to prove?”

“The man in the photo is Alexander Coliquin. At that time he was at the end of his tenure as the Romanian ambassador to the United Nations. But he was also the head of a global movement to enforce universal controls over all of the industries of the world.”

“The One Movement, right?”

Cal jumped in. “Actually, that’s just the religious aspect of it. I’ve
been studying this for the Roundtable.” There was audible pride in his voice. Deborah tossed him an older-sister look as he continued, “Coliquin has managed to create an international coalition of major religions to get behind his initiative. That gives him the moral and religious cover for his plan to regulate global business in the name of preventing catastrophic climate change. He was the architect behind the international treaties that created the world climate agency. By the way, the guy that’s been running that particular agency — this zillionaire from Belgium, Faris D’Hoestra — is one scary dude. They’re seizing control of industries that are supposedly out of compliance with their super technical green standards, including companies in the U.S.”

“I’ve missed a lot of that,” Deborah remarked, “buried in the Pentagon everyday at my desk. But I haven’t seen any of this on the news.”

“Apparently you haven’t been reading AmeriNews,” Abigail said. “That’s the only information source on the web that’s covering it.”

“All thanks to Mom, by the way,” Cal said. “She chased that FCC commissioner’s limo down I-66 just to get his attention.”

Abigail chuckled. “Actually, it was God’s doing. A miracle, the way it all transpired. But when Tulrude succeeded Corland, she appointed one of her cronies as the new chairman of that federal agency. Now AmeriNews is the only show in town in terms of alternate communications and news. Until we get another president, of course, which is what we are praying for and working toward.”

“Well, as much as I appreciate the political science lesson, I still don’t get it. These pictures. Where are you going with this?”

Abigail nodded. “Okay, so you know where Coliquin is now.”

“Sure. He’s secretary-general of the United Nations.”

“And very much supported by President Tulrude,” Abigail noted.

Cal had wandered off into the kitchenette to look for a snack in the fridge. He yelled out to them, “They’re like kissing cousins.”

Abigail nodded. “The point is that Coliquin is dropping obvious endorsements in the press for Tulrude, saying that if Tulrude wins the upcoming election it will not only be good for America, but for international peace, security, unity, and environmental safety around
the world. The fact is, Tulrude’s victory in November is a political necessity for Coliquin — it will be the glue that holds together the global power base that he’s built for his agenda.”

Deborah pointed back to the enlarged photo of Coliquin’s hand. She waited for the punch-line. “And this picture?”

“Okay,” Abigail continued, “look at the ring on Coliquin’s left hand. Very unusual. I’ve checked the design on it in several anthropology texts. It’s based on an ancient Egyptian design. Full of occult, pagan symbolism. Belltether must have thought this was highly significant because he obviously snapped the picture when Coliquin wasn’t looking. Then he enlarged it. The article he sent us documented the corruption — even allegations of conspiracy and murder — involving Coliquin back in his native Romania. Now that Belltether is dead, the AmeriNews staff is working overtime, double-checking his sources so we can publish it. But Belltether also included a note in the packet. He said he planned on a second exposé against Coliquin, a story he thought would have, in his words, ‘even more astounding revelations.’ But with his murder, we may never know what he had in mind.”

“Okay,” Deborah shot back, “maybe Coliquin’s a bad actor. So what?”

“Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you,” Abigail said, “and then decide if you can do what I’m going to ask you to do.”

She had Deborah’s attention. Her daughter had her head forward, eyes glued on her mother.

“Senator Hank Hewbright is in jeopardy. There’s evidence that he’s threatened, and I mean personally. I’m talking assassination. His chief campaign manager in Wichita was murdered. John Gallagher has heard rumors of Hewbright’s Allfone being hacked.”

When Abigail paused momentarily, Deborah cut in. “That’s all you have? That’s pretty sketchy.”

“No. There’s more. One of Hewbright’s closest advisors may be a fraud.” Deborah cocked her head and waited. Abigail finished the thought. “The name the traitor goes by is Zeta Milla. She’s an attractive foreign-policy expert on Hewbright’s campaign,” Abigail explained. “Supposedly a refugee from communist Cuba as a child, escaping with
her family on a small boat. After I met her in Colorado following one of Hewbright’s speeches, I asked Gallagher to do some background investigation into the records down in Miami. There were news reports back then about a family escaping Cuba on a little rowboat with a makeshift sail. The parents died on the trip over, but a young girl survived. Her name was kept out of the article because she was a minor.”

“Okay, so it checked out?”

“Not really. John told me he found a death certificate online in the Miami-Dade records for a young girl of Cuban descent, of the same age, who died about a week after the article was published. She was listed as ‘Jane Doe.’ The cause of death was listed as exposure, but John kept digging and found out that the birth certificate was a double. The original had the name of the girl on it, but someone had it destroyed and replaced it with Jane Doe.”

“All right,” Deborah shot back, “let’s say this Zeta Milla stole the identity of this dead Cuban girl and used the story for her own purposes. Even assuming that’s the case, it may prove she’s dishonest, but not that she’s a threat to Hewbright.”

“When I met Zeta Milla in Denver,” Abigail said, “I noticed something.” Abigail held up the enlarged photo of Coliquin’s hand. “She was wearing the same ring that Coliquin is wearing in Belltether’s photo. I think these two are part of the same little club.”

Deborah took the photo from her mother’s hand, a look of shock on her face. “Okay … I see. Right. What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to contact a friend of mine named Pack McHenry. He runs a private counterintelligence group, the Patriots. You’ve heard Dad and me speak highly of him. He has super-secret security clearance and has worked with American intelligence services.” Deborah nodded slowly. “First, you need him to supply you with a fake ID. Let’s call you Deborah Shelly. Use your middle name as your last.”

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“I need you to get close to someone important.”

“But I’m already BIDTagged. A fake ID won’t match my bio in the BIDTag system.”

“Another reason you need to contact McHenry. While his computer
guys haven’t been able to duplicate the actual BIDTag laser process — to our knowledge there is only one person in the world who has managed to achieve that — Pack’s IT team can do the next best thing — they can substitute personal data information in your government database. Look, Deb, the people you are going to be dealing with can’t know you’re part of the Jordan family. That’s crucial. Now, when you get hold of Pack McHenry, you also have to ask him something else. We need him to access the passport records of this Zeta Milla. See if she has a history of travel to Romania while Coliquin was ambassador.”

“And if she did?”

“Deb, I need you to undertake a dangerous assignment, and it can’t wait. I would do it myself, but for the next forty-eight hours I’m going to be otherwise occupied.”

“Occupied? Doing what?”

Abigail and her son gave each other a knowing nod. Cal filled in the blanks.

“Backpacking in the Northwest. Locating rebels.”