Dot Gov, Page 2

  Take this guy, Hicks. Not only had his purchases at Marty’s Feed and Seed been recorded, the fact that he had used a preferred customer card along the way to buy a pack of Nabs (eighty-nine cents) and a Coke (a buck) at a large chain not only told JB when and where he had been at a particular time, but what his buying habits were. And if push came to shove, the Dept. Of Agriculture wouldn’t have to look the other way every time Hicks rolled out of Marty’s Feed and Seed with a thousand gallons of diesel fuel and no Hazmat license. It was all there, all waiting to be called up and used, stored in limitless databases in Bluffton, Utah.

  If, after all that, one were still as spotless as a girl scout’s panties, the biggest gun of all was the oldest and most effective: The Lie. Most people knew the government lied to them. They simply didn’t want to believe just how much, how outrageously, and how blatantly. When all else failed, incriminating evidence could be planted and disseminated widely with only a few mouse clicks. And one couldn’t fight it. Once it was out there, and it circulated long enough, and lodged itself into the search engine databases, and couldn’t be expunged, it -like a stubborn stain- became truth.

  JB’s stomach rumbled a little. A midmorning snack would do him good. He ordered a sub sandwich and a bottled water sent in. While he waited for his meal to show up, he carefully watched the green vector arrow of Jack Benny Hicks’ vehicle slowly nosing its way back home.

  **********

  It wasn’t, Jack thought, as if he hadn’t considered giving in. The sum of years of creeping regulation and the burdens of compliance with government edicts had made him consider chucking in the towel long before. In his day, only criminals had to keep lawyers on retainer. But, he reminded himself, his day was past and it appeared that every citizen, at least in the eyes of the government, was a threat or a criminal. No great surprise. Lawyers infested the legislatures and their overriding priority seemed to be to make sure that the forty-five thousand new lawyers cookie-cuttered out each year had plenty of work. The headwinds that lashed him year after year -headwinds that were only gaining in strength- had worn him down. He could only bang his head against the wall for so long before suffering a mortal wound. He didn’t want to sell out his children’s legacy, but if he didn’t, they would simply take it, leaving his kids with nothing. It was, he mused sadly, a brave new world.

  Now, with the unpleasant odor of diesel fuel and the coarse and acrid smell of fertilizer jumping the broom in the cab of the overburdened vehicle, he made a sudden, spur of the moment decision that was very unlike him. And why not? The game had been rigged, the rules rewritten, and nothing he did would change its ultimate outcome.

  He thumbed his hands-free phone and dialed his lawyer. The Rollsback Bridge switchback was coming up and he needed to get this done and over with to pay attention to his driving.

  On JB’s monitor, an “incoming call” icon flashed in his task bar and JB clicked on it, allowing the intercepted phone call to be transmitted to his headset.

  “Foster and Tillis legal,” the receptionist answered. “May I help you?”

  “Meg, this is Jack Hicks. Is Mark around?”

  “I’ll ring him for you.”

  On the second buzz, Mark picked up.

  “Jack,” he said. “Tell me you’ve finally come to your senses, son.”

  “More like I’ve finally had them beaten out of me. I can’t fight it anymore. Do you think you could get hold of the G-man and tell him I’m ready to sell?”

  “I can try. It might not be easy. You rejected their first offer and forced them to send out the Brown Shirts. They might just want to push it all the way. But maybe they’ll see sense and take the path of least resistance. I promise you, I’ll do my best.”

  “Thanks, Mark. Maybe,” Jack conceded, “I can get a job as a doorman.”

  He thumbed the phone off and watched the blue sky stream by over the dark ribbon of river on his left. Life might never again be sunshine, fluffy bunnies, soft clouds and rainbows, but maybe he could live his last twenty years with some dignity.

  He moved up the steady upgrade, ready to top the hill that dropped down to the dangerous curve. The truck squeaked and rattled, pitching a little from side to side as the fuel shifted to and fro. God willing, Jack thought, this would be the last time he would make this run.

  **********

  The overheard conversation might have given a lesser man a moment of reflection, but JB didn’t waver. His brow was smooth and dry, his eyes focused. Too much had been set in motion to turn back now.

  He set the hot keys for ‘left control/delete’ to limit the possibility of an accidental execution. He loaded the macro, which, in days long gone, might have been called a batch file. It was only a few lines of code, its real magic hiding in the embedded instruction set sleeping in the cache of the target vehicle’s CPU. It was a simple tweak of the same instruction set that had been encoded in new vehicles at the request of lenders that allowed a vehicle to be disabled by a remote radio signal if payments were missed. All it would take to wake it up was a simple combination of keystrokes. The text box flashed on the screen, a flashing ‘Execute’ blinking calmly within its orderly rectangle.

  The arrow shaped vector indicator approached its intersection with the circle of pixels that would trigger a tone for a ‘system event’, a rather doomy phrase that meant that the vector and the nexus had converged. JB took a sip of mineral water and a bite of his sandwich before setting them to the side, wanting no accidental spills or falling morsels to botch anything. His fingers hovered over the left control and delete keys. His heart ticked like a calm metronome, his hands did not tremble. The blinking, green vector steadily edged towards its fateful tryst with the blue nexus. Seconds passed and the two points converged, the green of the moving vector and the blue of the nexus now a single Bull’s Eye of static red. A high pitched tone beeped and JB pressed the left control and delete keys. The flashing ‘Execute’ changed to a sedate and anticlimactic ‘Done’. The tone went mute and JB sat back to wait. It wouldn’t be long.

  **********

  There was no evident trigger to what happened next. Jack approached the downgrade towards the hairpin turn, easing off the accelerator. He expected to feel the slight deceleration as torque unwound from the wheels, but instead the accelerator pedal inexplicably sank precipitously beneath his foot as if the cruise control were compensating for an uphill climb. The pitch of the engine roared higher and the heavily loaded vehicle suddenly raced down the incline. It took a precious second for Jack’s brain to process this unexpected turn of events and by the time he reacted and stepped on the brake, the paltry wooden guardrail of the turn loomed in his windshield.

  The roar of the engine was a scream as the accelerator was staked pedal to the metal. The speedometer jumped quickly from forty-five to seventy miles per hour. Jack stomped hard on the brakes and felt the spongy pedal sink all the way to the floor. There were no tell-tale pulsations of the ABS brake system engaging and the truck’s engine howled in even greater agony as it pulled, still at full throttle, against the poor friction of brakes laboring uselessly against unfettered tons of rotational force.

  The brakes weren’t completely nullified, but the ABS system had been disabled and power assist was gone. Discs and rotors spewed sparks and flashed a fiery red as the wheels continued to scream against the friction pads. The smells of glowing metal and unburnt gasoline blended in Jack’s nostrils as he, too late, reached to ratchet up the emergency brake. The already locked brakes failed to respond. He twisted the steering wheel into the turn but the vehicle continued to power forward, shredding off chunks of rubber from the front tires in a smoking squeal. A thousand gallons of diesel fuel racked from side to side in the tank, making the runaway truck rock and bounce on its leaf springs, a ten-ton low-rider.

  The truck smashed grill-on through the wooden guard rails like a football team bursting through a paper banner, showering shattered wood like fireworks through the air. The seat belts of th
e supplemental restraint system abruptly constricted and pinned Jack to the seat as the air bag went off with an explosive “Poof!”, dazing Jack and breaking his nose with a crunch.

  The truck was briefly airborne as the stumbling giant rumbled over the embankment, its undercarriage exposed, its drive shaft still spinning. It plummeted down and crashed into the steep embankment before beginning to tumble and ricochet down the rocky faces before splashing into the river below with a hissing crash.

  The overloaded vehicle sank like a stone, red diesel fuel from ruptured tanks spreading out on the surface in an oil slick. Water gushed into the cabin of the vehicle. Still dazed and uncomprehending, a groggy Jack struggled desperately to disentangle himself from the belts, but the ratcheting mechanisms had lashed him so tightly to the seat he could barely move. The belts constricted his breathing and he opened his mouth, gasping. A river of oily water spilled in. He sputtered and gagged as water filled his lungs. His hair swirled around his head as the passenger compartment flooded and his futile struggles diminished. The next minute saw Jack’s lungs completely saturated and he sat motionless as a stone Poseidon, still in the driver’s seat, his eyes open, his hair waving like seaweed around his face. He might have found some solace in Orwell’s words from “1984”, “to die hating them, that was freedom,” but the bitter irony that had left the stinging taste of oil and water in his choking throat was that Jack Benny Hicks died not even knowing why.

  **********

  Seventy miles away, JB monitored the transmissions from the stricken vehicle. As planned, once the air bag went off, a signal was transmitted to the truck’s monitoring company before being abruptly choked off as the vehicle sank beneath the water. Rescue units would be automatically dispatched to the last recorded GPS location before the airbag deployed. On JB’s end, part of the macro of the executable file he had used to trigger the acceleration and brake failure had been to clear the memory as soon as the airbag went off. There would be no trace of the malfunctions left in the computer’s black box. Still, it never hurt to be sure.

  He made a quick call to Andrews AFB and had the UAV operator re-task the nearby drone for a quick look at the accident site.

  “Mike, this is JB at NSA. Could you do a quick recon of sector thirty, grid twenty-eight, the Rollsback Bridge? I think I’ve got a vehicle in the river.”

  “Sure thing, JB.”

  The buzzing UAV, flying almost invisibly overhead at four thousand feet, was rerouted. Mike brought the circling vulture down to two hundred feet to surveil the area where the truck had met its sorry end. Aside from the splintered guard rail, a few roiling air pockets and a spreading brick-red stain of dyed petroleum, there was nothing else to see on JB’s computer screen.

  “Looks like it, JB,” Mike said. “You gonna call it in?”

  “Yeah, Mike. Thanks. I got it.”

  A few keystrokes later, the UAV had returned to its scheduled patrol.

  Pushing back from his terminal, JB shut down the system and removed the flash drive. The endeavors of the last two hours dematerialized in digital smoke as the RAM modules discharged. He stood up and stretched, cracking stiff joints and loosening cramped muscles. He took another sip of water before flipping open his cell phone and calling Sandra. He sighed as he waited for the connection to complete. Maybe, he thought, No-One’s Safe Anywhere wasn’t an unfair reading of the NSA, after all.

  Sandra answered the phone. It was time to put the grand finale to this show.

  **********

  Even before the on-scene officers had pieced together all the circumstances of the accident, Sandra Lamb was delivering her report as the lead-in on the midday news.

  “In an exclusive for Channel 8 News,” the grave voice of Sandra’s co-anchor, Jim Woods began, “News 8’s Sandra Lamb’s investigation into domestic terrorism ended today with the death of a suspected terrorist. Sandra?”

  The scene shifted to Sandra standing with a microphone in her hand by the demolished bridge railing. A crane towered in the background with its cables in the water. Peppering the view were assorted emergency and police vehicles with rotating beacons and blaring, pizzicato radios screaking and kvetching.

  “A Department of Homeland Security investigation into suspected domestic terrorist Jack Benny Hicks, fifty-three, of Hamlet, Maryland, ended today in tragedy when Hicks lost control of a home-made truck bomb constructed of diesel fuel and fertilizer and crashed into the Mantagua river. The truck bomb was allegedly intended for a target in Washington, DC.

  “Sources inside Homeland Security told this reporter that Hicks’ purchases of diesel fuel and fertilizer had been closely monitored and that there was never any risk to Federal employees or property. Hicks came to the attention of Homeland Security during an ongoing dispute with the Bureau of Land Management and his subversive activities were discovered soon after. He was a regular visitor to anti-American websites and a member of several radical groups...”

  **********

  That Saturday was vivid and sunshiny, the type of day that persists in memory for years. A further seven days into Spring had warmed the air and the temperature was in the mid-seventies. A little unusual, but welcome. JB had been as good as his word and Sandra, as promised, had agreed to a dinner date. She didn’t want to admit it, but it was kind of exciting to be on the inside of the shadow world of which JB was a part. Who knew where they might go? Besides that, he seemed like an honorable man, and he was working for the good guys.

  She was dressed comfortably in jeans, flip flops, and a Brown University sweatshirt, her hair pulled back. She had the steaks and baked potatoes on the grill and was inside making the salad when she heard a car pull up. JB was here.

  At his knock on the open door, she called for him to come in. When she turned around, he stood there in the kitchen doorway, a bottle of wine grasped by the neck in each hand. He was smiling, and with good reason.

  The $100,000 life insurance policy he had taken out on Jack Benny Hicks had been paid before his body was cold. JB had set it up under a false name in a shell corporation he had wizarded up a week before. The insurance company had paid the claim with zero quibbling and less investigation. When the beneficiary’s work address (fake though it was) included an office in the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center in Bluffton, Utah, it was wisest not to inquire too deeply. It wasn’t like it was real money, anyway. The insurance company was owned by a large, New York bank. It could borrow electronically created money from the Fed discount window for practically zero interest, loan it out to subprime borrowers at ten to one under the fractional reserve banking laws on credit cards charging twenty-eight percent interest, and make one hundred times their outlay.

  Under RICO statutes and laws of civil asset forfeiture, Jack Benny Hicks’ farm was now the property of the Federal government. It would take only a couple of favors for congressman Savage to buy the land free and clear. Savage now owed JB. Even though the publicly traceable filaments in the web of deceit and death JB had woven had vanished, each keystroke and instruction -for this misdeed and others like it- still existed on his flash drive. It was JB’s insurance policy against a three-shots-to-the-head “suicide”, a drunken fall from the top of a tall building, or a mysterious case of lethal botulism. Those who owed JB would honor their obligations because JB knew where the bodies were buried. JB was the smoking gun. Powerful people, even if turned out by the next Fall’s elections, always had connections and could be counted on for favors, especially if their personal freedom or fortunes were threatened.

  The Canadian development company could now build their strip mall, providing hundreds of jobs and millions more in tax revenue to the government. Local residents would now have a place to spend the newly created fiat money, trading ever more of their finite time and labor to the usurers who issued the magic plastic, and keeping a Potemkin economy afloat for a few more quarters. Everybody was a winner. What, compared to all that, was the life of one
apple farmer?

  And finally, JB thought, looking at the very well-appointed Sandra, he was having dinner with a beautiful woman. It had been, he summed up, a good week.

  Coda

  It had been an historic election two months previous and the newly elected senators had been sworn in a week ago, on January 3rd. The writing had been on the wall early on as it became clear the opposition party was about to post massive gains and make an almost clean sweep of the current ruling party, all the way from President to Justice of the Peace. Running on a platform of monumental change, house cleaning, and no more business as usual, the new leadership was frothing at the mouth to muck out a US Senate that had become as filthy and corrupt as the Augeian stables.

  Many of those in appointed positions around JB fretted over their jobs. In typical fashion, the ousted party’s crestfallen apparatchiks had spray painted offices with obscene graffiti, vandalized buildings, stolen computer equipment and memorabilia, and generally stomped and pouted like petulant rich kids who’d had their sports car taken away by the glaring stupidity of the American serfs who didn’t know what was best for them. JB had seen it all before.

  He checked his calendar. His first appointment was with the chief of staff of the newly elected senate majority leader. He had his secretary buzz him in.

  “Good morning,” JB said, standing up and offering his hand. “What can I do for you?”

  JB and the chief of staff shook hands.

  “I have,” the chief of staff said, “a problem...”

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