Interest (7 page)

12

“Mr. Rivington, welcome back,” said one of Neith’s men at the airport.

“Thanks. Look, fellas, I’m not riding in the trunk again.”

The two men looked at each other blankly, as though it hadn’t occurred to them that riding in the trunk might be uncomfortable.

“You got what I left for you, right?”

The men nodded.

“So I completed the assignment in Japan?” Len asked. “I think I’ve earned the right to sit shotgun without handcuffs or a bag on my head.”

“I suppose we can make an exception.”

Walking past a restaurant on the way out of the airport, Len did a double take at the headlines on the television: “Entire Federal Reserve System Bombed, Hundreds Dead.”

“Wow. How the hell did you lunatics pull that one off?”

“Mr. Rivington, we have no idea what you’re talking about,” the shorter man said through his teeth in annoyance, looking around to make sure no one had heard Len’s comment.

Amazingly, they did let him sit in the front of the car on the way to Neith’s compound. Len tried to keep mental notes of the location. As he’d suspected, it was in fact in the mountains of West Virginia. Around three in the afternoon, in the middle of the woods, they pulled up to a barbed-wire gate, which opened after they’d sat there for a few seconds. The road beyond the gate led to a vast mining facility that looked like it hadn’t been in operation since the 1940s. Smokestacks, rail spurs, coal elevators, water towers—it looked like the place had been a massive enterprise at one point, but its cavernous buildings now sat empty and wasting; its open spaces had grown into forests. The mine was ringed by mountains, and it seemed to be the only thing in the entire valley.

The men pulled the car into an old pole barn and got out. They opened a door and led Len into the old mine elevator that he had ridden in once before.

“What is this place?” Len asked on the way down.

“The mine ran out of coal during World War II,” said one of the goons. “After that, Uncle Sam bought it and made it into a nuclear bunker in the 1950s. One of those continuity of government programs. When the Soviet Union fell, they just abandoned it and forgot about it.”

“So it’s still government property?” Len asked.

“Yep.”

“And you haven’t blown it up yet? Aren’t you worried they’ll get suspicious?” Len could see gears turning in the man’s head.
You know you’re dealing with zealots when they take deadpan seriously
, he thought
.

The elevator came to a jerking stop at the bottom of the shaft. The men escorted Len down a long concrete hallway to General Jefferson’s office.

“Lenny, m’boy, come on in!” said an unmasked man with the general’s voice. Without his ski mask, the general looked about as bald and Cro-Magnon as Len imagined he would. He had beady little blue eyes, a hulking brow ridge, and a jawline that looked like a concrete seawall holding back a tsunami of testosterone. His thick mustache barely moved as he talked. “Your field work has helped us tremendously! Do you see now what this uprising is about?”

Len guessed he had earned some respect; the general seemed a lot less hostile than he had previously. Downright affable, even.

“Yes. It’s starting to make sense.” Len hated himself for agreeing with Jefferson, but if what the Ich-Ca-Gan had said were true, then he’d have to choose a side.

“People think we’re crazy, but I don’t think they realize who is behind the curtain. Neith had a hunch before she ever sent you to Japan. She figured the world is being run by—what do you call them?”

“Dranthyx,” Len said.

“Yes, Dranthyx. We intend to verify what the Ich-Ca-Gan said by seeing if these Dranthyx creatures exist. But you know, I think the human race has long had a feeling that our governments were just puppet shows and that the shots are really being called by powerful figures in back rooms. Those of us who had the nerve to say it out loud were shouted down and called conspiracy theorists or paranoid-delusional. But we all suspect it, don’t we, Lenny?”

“I guess we do.”

“Neith thinks your intel is right: our entire banking and money system was designed to enslave us. I’ll let her explain it, I’m not a math person. This morning, when you were on the plane, we took out the entire Federal Reserve System. All twelve banks plus the headquarters in DC.”

“They’ve still got lots of guns and lots of manpower,” Len said.

“You’re right. But let’s see them try to pay for all that when they have no money. We intend to cut off the blood flow to the tumor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they can’t borrow money from the Federal Reserve because we destroyed it. The only other way they can get the money to fight us is through taxation.” Jefferson leaned back in his chair dramatically, then smiled. “Lenny, I have a treat for you.”

___
_

At dawn the next day, Len, General Jefferson, and about forty-five of his men piled into a school bus. They were dressed in t-shirts, sweatpants, and athletic shoes and were carrying large duffel bags. Should they have been stopped by the police, they could easily have passed for an amateur sports team. No one would suspect what was really going on.

“Where are we going?” Len asked as the bus pulled out of the coal mine.

“Philadelphia.”

“What’s there?”

“You’ll see.”

Len looked around the bus. “How do you recruit these guys, General?”

“Neith finds them on the Internet. Chat rooms, message boards, that kind of thing. They’re all hardcore anti-authority types. My kind of people.” Jefferson grinned. “It started out as just me and Neith, but now we’ve got over three thousand recruits and growing across the continent. Hell, we’re even in Canada now. I think Neith was onto something. People are pissed off enough about the way this country is going that they’re ready to pick up arms and fight. It also helps that we pay them more than they’d make at a real job.” He laughed.

“We live in a country where everyone has a computer and running water. What do they have to be so angry about?”

“Lenny, I hope you don’t mind if I answer your questions with some questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“How many children did your grandparents have?” Jefferson asked.

“My maternal grandparents had four kids, my paternal grandparents had five.”

“And were they able to afford that many kids?”

“I think so, sure,” Len said, trying to recall.

“Why?”

“Because my dad’s dad worked in the steel mill, and that job paid well.”

“Did that grandfather have a college education?”

“No. He was an immigrant from Poland. You didn’t need a college education to get a job back then.”

“How many hours per week did he work?”

“Probably about forty.”

“Did his wife work?”

“No, she stayed home with the kids.”

“Now, what about your parents, how many kids did they have?”

“Two. Me and my younger brother.”

“Were they able to afford to raise you both?”

“Yes, until my dad’s business collapsed.”

“OK, did your mom work?”

“Not when we were younger, but she eventually went back to work when my brother and I were older.”

“Did your parents go to college?”

“Yes.”

“How much did it cost when they went to college?”

“My dad said he paid for his whole tuition by working at McDonald’s during the summer break.”

“And what about you, Lenny? How many kids do you have?”

“You know how many I have.”

“Can you afford that child?”

“Not really.”

“Do you own a house?”

“No.”

“Have you ever owned a house?”

“No, my credit is wrecked by student loans.”

“And if my understanding is correct, you were married to…I’m sorry, what’s her name again?”

“Sara.”

“Did she work?”

“No. But she should have. We couldn’t pay our bills.”

“And did you go to college, Lenny?”

“Yes.”

“Are you starting to see a pattern here? With each passing generation, we’re getting poorer and poorer. We’re working longer hours than our forebears and making less per hour, adjusted for inflation, while having to be better educated. Your grandfather had no college degree and worked forty hours per week, yet he owned a house and could support a wife and five kids. You have an extremely expensive college degree, my file says you work sixty hours a week, and yet you can’t afford a house or a kid without a second income.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Len asked.

“We’re being robbed. Robbed of time and wealth. The world is run by an elite that has figured out how to make us work harder than ever yet pays us less than before. But we think we’re getting wealthier because of the illusion called inflation. If you took your granddad’s paycheck and compared it to yours, you would think you made more money than he did just because the dollar figure is bigger. But the truth is, your money is worth less. Despite earning more, you can’t buy as much as he could because things were cheaper back then. Why? Because Wall Street figured out how to steal from you without you noticing. Take a look around this bus. What do you see?”

“A bunch of guys?”

“Yeah, young guys. Twenties, thirties. Their whole generation has known nothing but debt and peanuts. Economically they’re fucked because the age of growth is over. They’ll never own houses of their own. They won’t have kids because they’ll never be able to afford ’em. They’ll never do as well as their parents did. There are no steel mill jobs paying high wages to high school dropouts anymore, are there? Those mills all went to China.”

“That’s what this is about, money?”

“You know, Lenny, there was this brilliant dude name Camus. Ever heard of him? He once said, ‘It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.’ I’ll never forget that quote. Money is a big fucking deal. It can’t buy happiness, but it certainly is the foundation for happiness. It’s hard to be happy when you’re going blind from malnutrition. Been to the grocery store lately, Lenny? Unless you’re getting government assistance, you can’t buy a cart full of groceries anymore. Everything is too damn expensive. But that’s what they want, isn’t it? They want us to be dependent on them. They want us on that leash so we can’t rebel.”

Len just stared at Jefferson blankly. He hated it when wisdom came from people he didn’t like. And what kind of jarhead read Camus? Now that the general had warmed up to Len, it was a different person talking. Jefferson seemed to have a Southern-gentleman refinement hidden underneath that military meathead persona.

“It’s also about the police state we live in,” Jefferson continued, “where we’re being watched all the time and you need to beg bureaucrats for permission to do anything. We’re not free men. No, sir, we live in fear of our masters. This wasn’t what America was supposed to be, Lenny. These kids don’t believe me when I tell them there was a time when no one grabbed your dick or demanded to see your ID before you boarded an airplane. They can’t fathom that the spooks once needed a warrant to listen to your phone calls. Let me ask you something. Do you get to print whatever you want at the newspaper, like the Constitution says you can, or are you under the constant threat of government reprisal?”

Len considered it for a bit. The general had a point. There were a number of stories over the years that Jack had refused to run because they’d have angered local politicians. Many years ago, the
Examiner
had run a story critical of one of the local city councilmen, and within days the newspaper building was overrun with inspectors from every government agency from OSHA to the codes and zoning office to the local department of revenue, most of whom were threatening to shut the paper down. It took nearly three years, several lawyers, and the paper’s entire legal budget to clear away all the red tape.

“You don’t need to answer,” the general stated self-assuredly. “I know the answer. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Take a random man off the street. Think of the sort of guy the comedians find for those man-on-the-street interviews. Do you trust him? Would you let him babysit your kids or hold your billfold? Probably not, right? He could be a saint, he could be a Hitler, you have no idea. Ethics aside, he’s probably an idiot, statistically speaking. But give that same man a government job with a badge, a gun, unchecked power, limitless funds, and no accountability whatsoever, and suddenly everyone assumes he’s just and wise beyond reproach. That’s government in a nutshell, Lenny. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the human race because we assume we need to be led by corrupt idiots whom we’ve never met. We always assume others know what’s best for us. We assume we need to be told what to do. We assume we need to give up control of our own lives. For what? I can’t figure it.”

“Some say government is an anachronism,” Len offered.

“Yes, anachronism. Good word. But the tide is changing, isn’t it? I think people all over the world are waking up to the fraudulent power-and-money racket known as government. Our founders made a huge mistake, you know that? They tried to create a government for the purpose of guarding our liberties, which was kinda like asking a fat kid to guard the cupcakes. They had the temerity to think they could write a bill of rights that wouldn’t be whittled to splinters by a bunch of corrupt judges and legislators. The media—no offense—are trying to spin things by saying that because our resistance is antigovernment, we are necessarily anti-American. Those in power want the public to conflate America and its government. They want us to think there’s no difference between the two. Nothing could be further from the truth. America is not a government. America is a land, a people, and an ideal—one my men and I have pledged our lives to protect from all enemies, foreign and domestic. America’s number-one enemy, Lenny, is the scumbags who rule her.”

Len sat there for a while, digesting what Jefferson had said.

“Hey, did you hear what happened in California while you were away?” Jefferson asked.