Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) (15 page)

The pixie folded her arms and drew one hand up to her chin. “Now we need to get you some shoes, maybe a necklace. And yes, on those items, I
am
trying to sell you.”

The two laughed and Matti felt good about herself. She would use the advantages the good lord had so generously, if not belatedly, bestowed upon her to help with the evening’s work. She felt a little bit like Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie
True Lies
.

A half hour later she walked out of the store with a pair of shoes, a necklace, and the size four dress. She only had a few hours to get home, get ready, and make her way back into the District for the event.

Chapter 24

Jimmy Ings unlocked the walk-in cooler that held the cache of Semtex. He’d closed the store for the day and paid his two employees to go home. They didn’t know what their boss kept in the smaller of the shop’s two walk-ins. He’d instructed them upon being hired that they should not ask.

Ings mumbled as he puffed on the cigarette that hung from his lips. He didn’t enjoy paying people not to work, but he knew he had no choice in the matter. He slipped the ring of keys back in his pocket and wiped his hand on his flannel shirt.

He took a final long drag off his Camel and tossed the butt onto the cement floor of the shop. He was in the back of the building in an area behind the meat counter and through a door. He stepped on the still-smoking cigarette and rubbed it into the floor with the toe of his shoe. He knew better than to mix a lit cigarette with high-order explosives.

Ings was about to step into the cooler when he heard a knock on the glass door at the entrance to the shop. He was expecting help and emerged from the back room to see George Edwards standing on the sidewalk, holding a backpack by its strap.

Ings waved and walked around the counter to the front door. He turned the lock and opened the door. Once Edwards walked past him, he closed the door again and relocked it, then reached up and pulled down a cheap vinyl roller shade to cover the glass.

“Hi, Jimmy.” Edwards extended his hand. “You ready?”

Ings shook Edwards’s soft but muscular hand. “I just unlocked the cooler,” he said. “Come take a look.”

He led Edwards behind the counter and into the back of the shop, pulled the large metal latch on the cooler door and opened it. He reached in to the right and flipped on a fluorescent overhead light, which hummed and flickered to life.

“It’s impressive in there,” Ings said. “You ever seen sixty pounds of explosives?”

Edwards shook his head. He’d looked at some pictures on the Internet, but he had no concept of scale.

The two men walked into the large ten-by-ten space. Edwards noticed it was significantly cooler inside the box, but it wasn’t as cold as he thought it would be. He looked to the right and noticed a long table and a couple of plastic fold-up chairs.

He scanned left and saw a large grouping of yellow-orange bricks wrapped in a thin cellophane-like material. The individual packages were unlabeled, and they looked to him like blocks of sharp cheddar cheese. The stack rose from the floor to waist level and stretched half the length of the cooler.

“That it?” Edwards motioned toward the cheese with his head, careful not to stand too close to it.

“Yep.”

“Looks like cheese.”

“Yeah, it does.” Ings walked up to the stack. “This is the old stuff. There’s absolutely no odor. The manufacturer didn’t add little metal pieces to the mix. They did that with the newer stuff so that metal detectors and X-ray machines could pick it up more easily. You know, for tracing. This stuff also decomposes really slowly. The newer plastic supposedly goes bad after three years. Not these babies.” He gestured at the stack. “This is the nasty Semtex.”

“That’s why I suggested it,” boasted Edwards. “A little research on the matter made me think this was the most viable tool.”

“Smart boy,” Ings remarked. He wasn’t really impressed, but he didn’t want to hurt Edwards’s feelings. “You bring the phones?”

“Everything we need is in here.” He held up the backpack and then slung it over his shoulder. “Did you study the instructions on how to put all of this together?”

“Yep.”

“Let’s get to work, then.”

The two men sat down at the table, and Edwards unzipped his backpack. From it he pulled four older model flip phones, four pieces of plywood cut to measure six by six inches, a small cardboard box containing inch-long Phillips-head screws, a screwdriver, a bundle of black plastic zip ties, six packages of AA alkaline batteries, a spool of thin copper wiring, wire cutters, a hand crank drill with an eighth-inch bit, a plastic wrapper full of double-ended alligator clips, and four packages of model rocket sparkers. Edwards made sure to arrange all of the materials neatly on the table.

He read the instructions aloud while Ings took apart the cell phones. When disassembled, each of the phones contained five major parts. With Edwards’s help, Ings located the small vibrators on the lower right portion of an internal board.

“Do the vibrator motors work?” Ings asked. “These are old phones.”

“Yes, I found the parts online and I replaced both of them. They also have newly refurbished batteries that have full charges. They can last one hundred twenty hours on standby. That should be plenty of time.”

Ings used the wire cutters to notch out a small hole in the shell of the phone next to where the vibrator sat. He then reassembled the phones and inserted two small pieces of copper wire that Edwards had cut for him.

The men set the phones aside, and each pulled out the pieces of plywood. First Edwards and then Ings used the hand crank drill to bore eight holes in each of the boards.

“Can I have the zip ties?” Ings asked, holding out his hand. Edwards passed him a handful, which he used to strap his phones to the left side of the board; Edwards followed suit with his phones.

They used two additional ties to strap four batteries to the right side of each board. Between the phones and the batteries, the men affixed two screws, one atop the other.

“Clips?” Ings asked, as though he was a surgeon asking a nurse for a scalpel. Edwards obliged and handed them over.

Ings took one alligator clip and attached it to the batteries and snapped its other end onto the top screw. He then took a second clip and attached it to the bottom screw but left its opposite end unattached. A third clip was clamped to the batteries with its partner also unattached. The two open clips were then connected to the model rocket sparker.

Edwards completed the same tasks on his board but took somewhat longer. He was more meticulous than Ings. When he was done, he scrolled through the menus of each phone, setting them to vibrate. Ings took the two small copper leads that ran from the vibrator through the opening of the phone and attached one to each of the screws on the boards. The detonators were ready.

“Let’s test the numbers.” Edwards handed Ings a small card that contained the phone numbers. Ings pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed the first number.

As soon as the first phone rang, the end of the model rocket sparker popped and ignited for a brief second. They repeated the process with the three other phones and got the same results.

“Tell me about the numbers,” Ings requested.

“We’re covered,” Edwards replied. He started picking up the wrappers and excess wires from the table and put them in his backpack. “First off, I was able to purchase a month’s worth of coverage with a prepaid credit card. Then I went to another service provider and paid cash for four prepaid phones. Those are the numbers you dialed. I set those numbers to automatically forward to the detonator phones. The accounts are temporary and have no names attached.”

Ings stood from his seat and placed his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath and thought about the complexity of their assignments. It all seemed so simple on the surface: make a phone call, change a democracy. But he knew it was more than that.

“How do we know when to trigger the bombs?” he asked.

“I think that’s the information Bill is providing. He’s supposed to get the inside scoop of the exact timing of the day’s events. He knows somebody who knows somebody.” Edwards stood and stretched. “That’s why we’re using remote detonation instead of the phones’ internal alarm clocks. We need to make sure they go off at the right time. If something gets delayed, we can adjust.”

“How do we know where to put the two extra bombs?” Ings felt like he was out of the loop. There were questions to which he thought he should already know the answer, and it bothered him a bit that Edwards seemed to have all of the information. Why was Sir Spencer so much more open with the artist? After all, Ings was the one who’d cleaned all of the money and stored the explosives. He was the loyalist beyond reproach. What had Edwards done?

“Sir Spencer will figure that out. Again, maybe Bill has the answer to that.”

Edwards was too focused on packaging the detonators so they could be transported to sense the rising resentment in Ings’s posture or tone. He did find himself surprised that Ings hadn’t asked why they needed two additional bombs or for whom they were intended. Unless Ings asked, Edwards wasn’t going to tell him.

*

Standing just above the south bank of the Tidal Basin, the asset knew that the NSA was keeping tabs. Two blocks away there was an agent drinking coffee, reading a paper, and pretending not to be who he was.

Ever since the NSA first made contact, the agency was like a sexually transmitted disease. It might hide for a week or two, but then it was back and irritating.

If given a choice, remaining a blind Daturan sympathizer would have been the most appealing. But given the temerity of the feds to essentially blackmail cooperation, the asset knew there was no choice. The NSA and the FBI made that abundantly clear. They knew the asset’s activities, associates, financial situation, and emotional baggage. They would use it if they didn’t get the help they needed. It was a dangerous game, in which there were likely no winners. Either people would die or people would go to prison. Maybe both. There were no other options.

After spending part of the morning with a paranoid conspirator, the asset needed to engage in some stress relief. A trip to the Jefferson Memorial was always calming. Even if there was a spook keeping watch.

Regardless of one’s upbringing or profession, it was hard living in DC without knowing a little bit of American history. Maybe it was because the asset visited the Memorial as a child that it held a special meditative quality. Perhaps it was because the architect, John Russell Pope, had modeled the structure after the Pantheon in Rome that it seemed so grand yet so intimate. Regardless, it was the perfect place to go when the weight of democracy fell heavy upon the shoulders. Only a memorial to Atlas might have seemed more soothing.

Once inside the building, the asset looked up at the five-ton bronze statue of the third president. It was nineteen feet tall and gazed out from the interior of the Memorial to the White House. The intention of the sculptor, Rudolph Evans, was to represent the Age of Enlightenment and Jefferson as both a philosopher and statesman. Along the walls of the Memorial surrounding the president were noted quotations that best symbolized the principles to which historians believe he dedicated his life.

The asset stared at what was called Panel Four, reading the ninety-four words excerpted from an 1810 letter that Jefferson wrote to historian Samuel Kercheval. Part of the passage seemed particularly prescient for the present times: “
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Did it mean that democracy was a living, breathing animal not confined to the laws of the past? Did it mean that the Constitution should be considered a reference point rather than the law upon which all others were based?

Whatever Jefferson’s intended meaning, the asset took it to convey a sense of governmental evolution. He was a man who believed the people should rule above all else. Wasn’t that exactly what the Daturans were doing? Weren’t they seizing control from a misguided government? The asset became agitated, standing there in what was normally a place of solace.

It was time to leave. There was no respite. There was no break from it. The NSA made sure of that. They knew it was only a matter of time before the Daturans grew bold enough to act. They’d latched their hooks at just the right time.

Walking from the inside of the Monument toward Ohio Drive, the asset noticed the spook was gone. Maybe they’d gotten what they needed. Maybe they were somewhere hidden. It didn’t matter. This would be over soon enough, one way or another.

*

“The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case,” the sixth Daturan said, wondering what effect, if any, it might have on Sir Spencer’s plans.

“I know.” Sir Spencer was in his suite at the Hay-Adams. He was on his encrypted Sigillu cell phone, a modified consumer-grade Nokia that Sir Spencer purchased directly from the encryption company.

Sir Spencer knew that the data from wireless communications could reveal the date, time, and duration of any given call. Any eavesdropper could also determine the geographical location from where the call was placed, not to mention the identity and location of the person receiving the call. The company assured him that decryption of his calls was impossible. Even the mathematicians who created the encryption technology were incapable of decrypting a call.

The software, which converted voice information into encrypted data using a constantly changing mathematical equation, was developed by an Israeli security company. Sir Spencer believed that if it was good enough for Israeli needs, it would serve his purposes.

Because the technology required that both phones involved in a call must be Sigillu equipped, Sir Spencer had provided each of the Daturans with an encrypted phone. But he often needed to remind the others that when answering a call from him, they needed to hit the C button before answering. If not, they needed to inform him that they were not secure. In this case, the call was secure.