Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) (30 page)

On the televisions Matti could see news coverage of the presidential funeral procession. It appeared as though the pallbearers were carrying the casket up the Capitol steps. On one of the screens Matti could see the inside of the Capitol Rotunda full of people. They were standing and awaiting the casket’s arrival. She didn’t have much time and she knew it.

“May I help you?”

The woman behind the desk was dressed in a dark blue cardigan, standard issue for the building’s hired security.

Matti tried a softer approach. “I need some help.” She handed the woman her driver’s license and her NSA ID badge without the woman having to ask for them.

The guard was comparing the two cards side by side. “What do you need, Ms. Harrold?”

“I need to speak with whoever is in charge of the cellular tower on top of the building.”

The tower here was taller than the one atop the Norfolk Southern building. It rose one hundred and ninety-three feet from the street. Because of that, Matti thought the chances of this being the right tower were greater than the first.

“Hold on a moment,” the woman picked up a phone and dialed a three-digit extension. Matti could hear the line ring and then someone answer on the other end. She was anxious. There was little time left.

The woman was looking at Matti’s green NSA card, running her fingers through the attached beaded chain. “This is security on the first floor. I have a woman here who is representing the National Security Agency. Her name is Matti Harrold.” The woman paused to let the person on the other end of the line speak.

“She says she needs to speak with someone who deals with the cellular tower on top of the building.”

Another pause before the woman looked up at Matti.

“Ms. Harrold,” she asked, “what is your question regarding the tower?”

“I need you to shut it down.”

“She needs us to shut it down,” the woman repeated in the same tone Matti employed. The voice on the other end of the line said something quickly, and then the woman behind the desk hung up the phone.

“I’m told you’ll need to speak with a gentleman in our New York office. I spoke with the engineering department here and they cannot help you.”

“What if I had a court order?”

“
Do
you have one?” the security guard asked without shifting in her seat. She raised the eyebrow above her left eye.

“No.” Matti took her ID cards and turned to leave. “Thanks anyway.”

She pushed her way through the glass door and back out onto DeSales. The driver was sitting behind the wheel, waiting for her. She crossed the street and jumped back into the cab.

“I’ve got one more stop to make,” she informed him. “I need to get to 1828 L Street as fast as you can get there.”

The man turned to look at her as if she were asking for the moon. He placed both hands on the wheel and sat there. Then he pointed at the meter. The fare was close to a hundred dollars.

“You have enough cash for big tip?” “Yes,” Matti assured him. “Big tip. Just get me there.”

The driver dropped his right hand onto the gear shift and put the cab into drive. He punched the gas and pulled out into traffic. As he turned left onto Seventeenth Street NW, a pair of Metro police cars and a black Chevy Impala sped onto DeSales and parked. Two officers from each vehicle quickly hopped onto the street and into the building Matti had just left.

Chapter 42

The Secretary of Energy was never one to turn down an opportunity for television face time. There was a running joke amongst the network correspondents who covered energy: The three most dangerous places in the world were Iraq, Afghanistan, and between the good secretary and a television camera.

The only issue for the secretary was finding a place from which to be the on-air analyst for the president’s memorial service. The network execs didn’t want him in the studio because they wanted it to appear as though he was “in the mix” somewhere in Washington. There was also the concern among network brass that having a much older statesman next to the relatively young anchor in the studio might diminish the journalist’s credibility.

There weren’t many independent broadcast studios available on such an important news day, but fortunately for the network, longtime friend Bill Davidson had come through. He’d learned about the conundrum and had offered the studios at Hanover.

The studio’s technician was helping the secretary get settled in his chair while adjusting the lighting.

“Mr. Secretary,” he asked, “could I get you to stand? I need to clip this earpiece to the back of your jacket.”

“Sure thing.” He laughed. “I’m an old pro at these things. What’s that called? An IBF?”

“IFB, sir.” The technician smirked at the secretary’s back. “Close enough.”

The technician then took a lavaliere microphone and clipped it to the right lapel of the secretary’s jacket.

“We have a few minutes before they come to you, Mr. Secretary,” advised the technician. “So you have some time to relax here. Just remember to turn off your cell phone before you’re on air.”

“Thanks,” the secretary nodded and adjusted his tie. He’d forgotten about his cell phone. He needed to check it. “My phone is over there with my briefcase. Could you hand it to me?”

The technician fetched the phone and gave it to the secretary before returning to the task of light adjustments. The cabinet member’s white hair was causing a glare.

The secretary checked his phone and found a single text message. He pressed a button to open the message and then read it:

“Urgent u call now. B4 u go on the air.”

The text ended with a ten-digit number to dial. The sender information was restricted. That wasn’t unusual in Washington—everybody’s number was restricted. The secretary looked at his watch again and figured he had time to make the quick call.

He looked at the phone number to remind himself of the numbers and then entered them one by one into his phone. He pushed send and placed the phone to his ear. He heard it ring once.

Then everything around him exploded.

The resulting pressure wave knocked him unconscious instantly. He was thrown backward from the stool and through a bookshelf on the opposite end of the studio. The fifty-five-year-old man sustained fatal internal injuries even before the blast sent shards of metal, glass, wood, and drywall through his fine high-twist weave wool suit and into his body.

The room collapsed around him and the technician. The technician suffered an instantaneous concussion, even before any external injuries. His orbital sockets blew; his lungs collapsed. And then both men’s bodies virtually disintegrated in the ensuing heat and flames.

Unbeknownst to anyone but Sir Spencer Thomas, the Secretary of Energy received a text instructing him to call the Nokia 6210 phone attached to a piece of six-by-six-inch plywood and a chunk of Semtex. It was the explosive hidden inside the Thoreau collection in the closet that shared a wall with the studio.

Bill Davidson had unwittingly aided the plot by placing the bomb and then inviting the secretary to use his studio for the memorial coverage. Only in death had Davidson lived up to the potential for which Sir Spencer once thought him capable.

As he had with Jimmy Ings, the knight had played the former AG perfectly. Never once did he let on what Davidson’s true role in the plot would be. He led Davidson to believe his worth was his connection to the current administration, that he could provide valuable timing and location information. That was far from the truth of it. Sir Spencer was rarely close to the truth.

The path was cleared for a single successor to the presidency. The plot was working.

*

At 2100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, the Cato Street Pub was exactly a mile from the Hanover-Crown Institute. When the Semtex exploded, the men felt the ground shudder. All three initially held onto the rosewood bar to steady themselves. The bottles on the bar rattled and a photograph of Tom DeLay fell to the floor, breaking the thin black frame.

Sir Spencer grabbed the throat of the Cutty Sark to keep it upright. “That was Bill,” he said impassively, “and the Secretary of Energy.”

George Edwards knew to what Sir Spencer was referring, given that he’d handed Davidson the hidden explosive the night before. He knew one of the cabinet members was also a target. The knight’s unaffected declaration didn’t surprise him. Art Thistlewood, on the other hand, became unhinged.

“What do you mean ‘that was Bill and the Secretary of Energy’?” Thistlewood said in a horrible affected British accent to mock the knight. It sounded at once Jamaican and Irish, but it wasn’t the Received Pronunciation.

“That was one of our four explosives. One at the aforementioned Arlington, two in the casket, and one at Hanover-Crown.”

“We blew up the Institute?” Thistlewood said incredulously. “With Bill inside?”

“Yes.” The knight took a drink directly from the Jubilee decanter. “And don’t forget the good secretary.”

Thistlewood turned to Edwards with a look of both confusion and disappointment.

“I gave Bill the bomb,” Edwards admitted. He shrugged his shoulders as if to suggest it was no big deal. “It was stashed in some books I borrowed from him.”

The professor was sweating now, his face red, and a full blood vessel was throbbing along his neck. “I don’t understand this. Why was I not told?”

“You were busy shagging the mortician’s daughter,” the knight countered. “If you’d not been so content to tell the same party joke repeatedly whilst having a litany of May-December romances, perhaps I’d have divulged more than you needed to know. But you weren’t, so I didn’t. I involved you to the extent to which you were needed. The same holds true for our good men Bill Davidson and James Ings. They too knew only what they really needed to know.”

“What about George here? What doesn’t he know?”

“George here—” the knight looked at Edwards and then back at Thistlewood “—he doesn’t know who the sixth is. I haven’t told him.”

“Really?” Thistlewood persisted.

“Really, Arthur.” The knight was weary of placating the puerility of his minion. “Understand you got out of this exactly what you wanted. You came to me wanting a change. You wanted to make a difference. You, in your tenured ivory tower, complained about the proletariat not getting enough cake from the bourgeois. I gave you the power to make that difference, to eat from the cake, and to effect a regime change in the most powerful country on earth.” He sighed. “And yet,” he continued, “it wasn’t enough. We are on the precipice of accomplishing the impossible. We are set to do with six men what empires and fuhrers could not do with gargantuan armies, and it isn’t enough for you.”

The knight moved around from behind the bar and stepped to within a foot of Thistlewood. “That is because this was never about patriotism for you. This was never about a better country.”

The knight was seething now and spitting as he spoke. Drool hung from his lower lip. “This was always about
you
! It was about Arthur Thistlewood the Enlightened. And that is why I could not trust you. You never thought about what you had to lose. You only dreamed of what you had to gain. That is the difference between you and George here.”

Before the professor could react, there was another loud noise that startled the men. They turned in the direction of the sound to see the large, solid wood red doors fly from their hinges into the room and slide onto the floor.

Standing in the doorway was a cadre of FBI special agents with their weapons drawn. They were yelling instructions at the men and inching forward as they surveyed the hickory-walled space for surprises.

In the chaos, the three Daturans raised their hands and dropped to their knees. They knew better than to fight. Arthur Thistlewood urinated in his pants and was forced to lie in the small pool of it on the floor.

“It’s over, gentlemen,” one of the agents said as he stood over the knight, the professor, and the artist. “You are all under arrest by the authority of the United States Department of Justice. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…”

“Spare me the Miranda,” the knight spewed defiantly from the floor. He’d underestimated both the feds’ knowledge of their plot and their ability to act quickly. He knew he’d pay dearly for that miscalculation. But good attorneys could work miracles, and they still had the sixth Daturan. He licked his lips and tried to crane his neck upward to look the lead agent in the eyes. “You’re already too late.
A Deo Et Rege
.”

Chapter 43

The third tower, rising two hundred feet from the ground, was the tallest of the three structures Matti targeted to shut down. It stretched skyward from a two-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-foot office building on the corner of Eighteenth and L Streets. The building’s exterior was alternating panels of glass and black powder-coated steel. On its ground floor were a Corner Bakery Café and a Fitness First Health Club. It was a beautiful expanse of a building.

Matti looked at it through the window of the cab before opening the door. She started to get out and glanced at the sun visor above the front passenger seat. Tucked between the visor and the roof of the cab was a large, legal-sized manila envelope. She had an idea.

“May I borrow that?” she asked the driver.

“What?”

“The envelope? May I borrow the envelope? I’ll bring it back.”

“Big cash tip?” He wasn’t joking.

“Big cash tip.” She sighed. “Huge!”

The cabbie reached to his right and leaned forward to grab the envelope. He slid it through the small slot between the panels of Plexiglas separating the front and back seats of the cab. Matti thanked him and slid out of the car onto the sidewalk. She could hear the screams of emergency sirens a block south on K Street, a lot of them. Was she too late already? She determined they were heading west toward Georgetown and away from the Capitol and was momentarily relieved. Then she looked to the west and saw a thick black plume of smoke pouring into the sky above the low horizon of buildings. Something had happened. She couldn’t worry about it now.