The Hermetrius Conspiracy Read online

  Rick was smiling so they all knew he had something good for them. “When I dug into Jim Norton’s background, I found some very interesting stuff. He retired from the FBI three years ago and was hired by Winston Financial Services as their security director, a job he still holds. If you recall, I was able to trace the embezzlement funding back through a web of subsidiaries to Winston Financial Holdings, Headquartered in Atlanta. It looks like our Mr. Big might be Charles Winston, head of the entire Winston financial empire. He is a tycoon with extreme right-wing political views, who believes America is doomed if the Government doesn’t do about face and rush back to conservatism and capitalism. His net worth is over 20 billion dollars, so he certainly has the money to fund this conspiracy.”

  “Great work, Rick! Think of ways we could get independent verification that he’s the head man.”

  Jack moved on to the second objective, vetting Jim Norton and his information. “After comparing what we put together with the information revealed in the document Jim gave me, I believe he’s being straight with us. I don’t know if he’s having a crises of conscience or a crises of fear, but either way he can be a real asset to us.”

  Tom asked the question they were all wondering about. “How do we get him away from Winston and back here?”

  “Here’s what we can do. Tom and I will do a snatch and grab near his home and, as soon as he’s in the car, search him for bugs. If he’s clean, we put a blindfold on him and bring him back here for questioning. I’ll email Norton at the secure email address he gave me and see how he responds. Let’s hope Winston doesn’t have him in a torture chamber already. Tom, have you made any progress on finding out who they plan to put in the White House?”

  “I made a list of several possible choices, but there’s really no way to zero in on who it really is. Senator Roberts is still the most likely. We should throw that out to Norton when we question him and see what his reaction is. That may give us the positive verification that it’s Roberts. We can also ask him if Winston is behind everything.”

  “It looks like Norton has what we need to pull this all together. Let me get that email off to him.”

  Jack sat down and typed a short email outlining their plan, and asked Norton where would be the best place to grab him off the street. Thirty minutes later Jim got back to him.

  Jack,

  I go for a run every morning at six a.m. using the route on the attached map. The last mile is through a park that is usually deserted that early. That would be a good place to pick me up, but use your own judgment. Pick any location that you like. They are really putting the screws to me, so make it tomorrow morning if you can.

  Jim

  “That was pretty quick. He must be desperate. Tom, do you think we can get it set up that soon?”

  “If we want to get to his home in Bethesda by six a.m., we need to leave in the next two hours, but that should be enough time. Rick, send him a reply that says ‘Tomorrow morning during your run.’ I’ll get some laptops and weapons to take. Are we using the old station wagon, Jack?”

  “That’s the only one that we have that isn’t in their system.”

  After another tearful goodbye from Lynn, they were on the way.

  #

  Jim was excited when he saw their reply. Now he needed to finish his preparations without looking busy. When he searched for bugs in his house he found cameras with microphones in the kitchen, living room, and master bedroom, but none in the guest room. He had to look for them without giving away what he was doing, so it took awhile, but he finally found them all – he hoped. His plan was to strip the sheets off the master bed and put them in the washer just before bedtime. That would give him an excuse to “sleep” in the guest room, where he could use his laptop to move money into his anonymous accounts that Winston’s people didn’t know about.

  Chapter 52

  The “kidnapping” of Norton went off with out a hitch. There were no bugs planted on him, but they could be tracking his cell phone, so Tom removed the battery and SIM chip from it. Jack drove them back toward Pittston County while Tom put a blindfold on Norton so he wouldn’t know the way to their hide out and started interrogating him. The questions were simple ones designed to verify that he was who he said he was – when and where were you born, when did you start at the FBI, how long have you worked for Winston Securities, what is your position there, what was your mother’s maiden name – things that could easily be verified when they got back to the Double Wide. Tom gave him a break for awhile, then started in with the same questions in a different order with other distractions added, like what was your father’s occupation (policeman), what was the name of the dog you had as a child (Rusty), and what was the make and model of your first car (Ford F-150). When Tom was satisfied with Norton’s answers, he left him alone as they drove on in silence.

  They got back to the Double Wide in mid-afternoon, and took Norton inside before they removed his blindfold. He squinted his eyes against the sunlight coming in the window and looked around. Jack said, “Here’s the rules, Norton. You will stay locked in the storage room to keep you away from computers and cell phones. We will come in to question you and bring food. There’s a sleeping bag on the floor. Once we have independent verification of everything you have to tell us, we may trust you enough to let you leave.”

  “That’s fair, Mr. Preston. Speaking of food, I haven’t eaten yet today. Can you make me a sandwich or something?”

  “I may not trust you yet, Norton, but please call me Jack. And this is Tom, Rick, Harriet, and Lynn. Do we call you James or Jim?”

  “Jim’s good. Once I get that sandwich, I’ll be ready for your questions. I slept most of the way in the car.”

  Lynn added, “We have baloney and cheese or cheese and baloney. You want a beer with that sandwich?”

  After they had eaten Jack started in with the questions. “I’ll lead off with the big question, Jim. Who is behind this conspiracy to take over the country?”

  “That would be my boss, Charles Winston. Seven years ago he decided to set a plan in motion to make himself president in this upcoming election. He wanted to personally lead America back to the conservative principles he believed would save the country. He put together a select team of advisors to put together a plan to get there.”

  “The team – those were the names on the summary you gave me?”

  “That’s the current group. He replaced two of the original choices because they thought he was going too far. And that was before he went off the deep end. Until two years ago they focused on getting as many ultra-conservatives into congress as possible. Then he gave his team some ideas for making the changes as quickly as possible after the election. Two of them thought the measures were too harsh and even violated the Constitution, so Winston fired them and added replacements he could trust. As his plans got even more radical, some of the others grumbled a bit, but Winston has blackmail material on all of us, so no one else quit.”

  “So Winston is going to be their presidential candidate?”

  “Not any more, Jack. The team convinced him he didn’t have the personality to get elected. In public he says anything that comes to his mind, no matter how unbelievable it is. They told him that he would have more power if he stayed in the wings and found a puppet to be the president.”

  “So who did they pick to replace him?”

  “They needed someone who had a respectable political career, charisma, and was a great speaker. But he also had to be someone they could completely control, someone who would go to prison if Winston released certain information about them. Senator Roberts of Idaho fit the requirements perfectly.”

  “He was at the top of our list of probables. What do they have on him to make him toe the line?”

  “He murdered his first wife. He staged a break-in at their home and clubbed her with a lamp. Then he took jewelry, a laptop, and booze from a smashed liquor cabinet, put them in a pillow case, and sneaked out the back door. Unfortunately,
the neighbor next door was a peeping tom who had been watching Mrs. Roberts undress in her room for months. She suspected he was watching and left the curtains open to tantalize him. With a good looking woman like her, the guy was soon photographing her. He saw the murder and snapped several incriminating photos. Instead of going to the police, he started blackmailing Roberts to the tune of ten thousand dollars a month.”

  “How did Winston find out about this?”

  “When his team was analyzing potential candidates, they got into his bank account records and saw the monthly payments. With a little more digging, they found out who they were going to and sent some professionals to question him.”

  “Professionals?”

  “Let me be blunt. Winston hired a couple of thugs who were known for interrogation by beating. In this case they beat the guy to death, but not before they got the peeping tom’s photo collection. And, as a bonus, the peeping tom had followed Roberts to where he buried the stolen items. Later the “ tom” went back and dug them up, and let the Senator know he had all the goods on him. Winston has all that now.”

  “So if Roberts doesn’t do exactly what Winston tells him to, he has life in prison to look forward to.”

  “That’s it, Jack.”

  “O.K., I want to change direction a bit. We have a list of dozens of right-wing senators and representatives who were elected over the past two election cycles. Harriet and Rick have been trying to find out which of them got elected through election fraud – buying off other candidates, smear campaigns, blackmail. In other words, which of these on our list did Winston’s people fix the elections for. Would you look over the list and jot down what you know about how they got elected? We’ll take a break in the questioning so you can make the list.”

  #

  When Jim was finished with his notes he called Jack. Instead of Jack, Rick and Harriet showed up to question him. “We put this list to together, Jim, so we’re primed to understand what you know. Of those on this list, how many of the elections were fixed by Winston?”

  “Every one of them. You don’t understand how powerful Winston has become. He’s got enough money to buy every seat in congress that can be bought, and those he can’t buy he has enough blackmail information on them to keep them in line. He would rather have representatives and senators who truly believe in his cause, but if he can’t get their loyalty, he controls them with fear.”

  Harriet left to confer with Jack, then came back. “Guess what, Jim? You get to eat at the big table with the adults tonight. We want everyone to hear what you have to say, and we need your help in finding a way to head this off before Winston owns the country.”

  “You want the short answer? I don’t think you can stop it. I’m not sure anyone can.”

  They went downstairs and joined the others around the table. Jim shared everything with the whole group and fielded questions. When he got to his last comment about no way to stop it, everyone went silent. Tom spoke up first. “You mean that now, when we have all the pieces put together, there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  Jack answered. “We still have the same old problem – lots of unsubstantiated information, but no real evidence. To make this public and make it stick we need documents, recordings, emails, and speeches; and all we have is six forged contract documents about embezzled funds and bank deposits in the names of five presidential candidates. And if we release the bank account information we’ll be arrested. If we could claim freedom of the press, we might get away with it, but otherwise, we’re stuck.”

  After another quiet spell, Lynn had an idea. “The word “press” got my mind working. What if we give the information about the contract files and the bank account numbers, without connecting them to individuals, to a well-known investigative reporter and let him dig up the evidence for us?”

  That got everyone’s attention, but Jack put a damper on it. “If we tell a reporter about a right wing conspiracy trying to take over the country, he or she will think we’re crazy and walk away.”

  “Then we don’t tell about the conspiracy. Let the reporter uncover it. We can drop a few anonymous tips about Winston and his advisors, just enough to keep the reporter moving forward. If he’s any good he will uncover most of it – enough to get the story printed and talked about on network news.”

  “I think that could work, Lynn. But who do we pick to give the story to?”

  Jim spoke up with an answer to that one. “I think I know who that should be. There’s a reporter who’s been nosing around Winston Securities. He has some inside information about big campaign contributions that he traced back to Winston’s firms and wants to see how deep it goes. He wants to take this all the way to the top and uncover Winston’s personal involvement. Winston had me keeping an eye on him to make sure our people – sorry, his people –didn’t talk to the reporter.”

  Lynn almost yelled at him, “Well, don’t keep us in suspense. Who is he?”

  “Jeb Collins of the American Reporter Daily in D.C. That newspaper leans to the left a bit, so they would love to run a story about a possible conservative conspiracy.”

  “Perfect.” Jack exclaimed. “What is the best way to get the embezzlement information to him, Jim?”

  “I can help you out there I think. I could write an anonymous letter on Winston Securities stationary telling him I’m an insider who’s worried about what I see going on. I’ll add a few facts that Collins has already uncovered to make it seem credible. That should put him in the attack mode.”

  “Let’s get to it then. Harriet, why don’t you put some photocopies of the material from the embezzlement stuff – the file I retrieved from Silicon Systems and the MTX Military Systems file we found in Foreman’s CYA files. We can add a list of all six embezzlement file numbers and the offshore account numbers. We’ll put those in a mailing envelope and I’ll drive down to Pittston tomorrow to the FedEx office to mail it overnight.”

  Harriet had a question. “Do we want to give Collins a way to contact us, in case he wants to talk?”

  “No, we don’t want him digging into who we are. We’ll just have to hope this information will be enough and wait to see what happens. If we don’t see anything in print after two weeks we’ll have to send him a few more hints.”

  “Wait a minute, Jack. If you FedEx it from Pittston and Winston’s people get their hands on it, they will be swarming all over this county.”

  “Good catch, Lynn. I should have thought of that. It has to be a large city to throw them off the track. Cincinnati is a four-hour drive, but I don’t want to head east. So I’ll go there.”

  Chapter 53

  Jeb Collins sat staring at his computer. He had four unfinished stories at various stages of development, but he couldn’t get motivated to finish them. They were boring pieces about Washington’s political elite that his editor had assigned him to write. Stuff like that paid his salary, but he was a Pulitzer Prize wining investigative reporter, dammit, and these bread and butter stories made no use of his talents. If he could find something big to sink his teeth into, his editor would give this crap to junior reporters and let him make some big headlines for the paper. But big stories don’t come along often enough.

  He thought he was onto something big in his preliminary investigation of funding sources for the campaigns of several conservative members of Congress. He traced the money to several financial firms that didn’t seem to be connected, but he believed they could be linked back to Winston Securities and probably to Charles Winston himself. Winston was an outspoken opponent of what he sees as ‘the extreme liberalism that’s destroying this country,’ and has enough money to buy whatever he wants. He is an iconoclast of the first order, bullying anyone who gets in his way. There was talk a few years back that he was going to make a run for the presidency, but that idea has all but disappeared.

  He tried every angle and information source he could think of to connect the dozen or so financial firms to each other or to Winston, but he just cou
ldn’t get the breakthrough he needed. He thought ‘I haven’t given up yet, though. I’ll keep prodding and poking until I find a crack somewhere, and then I’ll have the story of the decade.’ He opened up one of the unfinished fluff stories and started writing. Maybe he could get this one out by the end of the day.

  He was just putting the finishing touches on the story when Jenny from the mail room came by with her cart. She was attractive and unmarried, so Jeb didn’t pass up a chance to talk to her. “Afternoon, Jennifer. Anything for me today?”

  She smiled as she handed a few letters and a FedEx document pack.

  He asked her, “I’m about finished for the day, do you want to join me for a drink?”

  “You never give up, do you Jeb. You have asked me out a dozen times and have I ever said yes?”

  “A guy can always hope, Jenny. In the words of a British poet, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast.’”

  “Well, not in my breast. . . . Oh, did I just say that? I didn’t mean that kind of breast.” as she blushed.

  Jeb pulled his eyes off her breasts and responded “Blushing makes you even more attractive, Jenny.” And that made her blush an ever deeper shade of red.

  “Here’s my quote for today, Jeb: ‘Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor impudent men shall stay this courier from the her appointed rounds.’ See ya.”

  Her enjoyed the rear view as she walked down the hall, then turned to his mail. The letters were from people who (a) really liked his latest story, or (b) were offended by his latest story. He scanned them just in case it was the Publisher’s Clearing House informing him that he is now one of 3% of entrants who made the final cut. ‘Let’s see. If I assume a modest number of original entrants, say one million, then 3% puts me in the company of . . . 30,000 other people with a chance winning $100,000 a year for life.’ But today’s mail was just reader comments about his story on how conservatives in Congress had introduced a bill to cut funding for after-school programs because ‘They are just baby sitting programs paid for by the Government so parents can stay at work until six p.m. If they are working, then they should pay for their own babysitters.” The letters ran 70/30 condemning conservatives for trying to rob the poor working class.