1 -- The archive
Billman saw his sweaty face reflected in the screen of the
main computer as he punched the keys to copy the documents into the portable computer,
he brought with him.
The scent of warm circuitry filled the interior of the room
as well as the remnants of perfume left here by the staffers from a long hot
day on the campaign, and the smell of his fear induced sweat.
The screen saver showed a bird’s eye view of the Manhattan
skyline – like one of those cheesy 1960s detective story TV show shots,
skyscrapers seen straight down.
He felt a little like God, not as the ancients imagined, but
more executive in a suit and tie, a long stride from the streets of Newark
where he grew up, a stranger in a strange land, not quite accepted by the main
stream, which is why he took up with an old white haired man from New England,
rather than the liberal lady icon everybody hoped would become the first woman
president, just an earlier president had become the first black to sit in the
oval office.
All that being ancient history these days, after the liberal
lady and the first black president had worked to get another white male elected
– although elected was the wrong word, installed, perhaps was better,
considering all the shredding the party had done to hide the paper trail that
had brought about the sudden, dramatic overnight change in the election
results, and led to what many insanely described as an insurrection in
Washington, yet one more orchestrated event to help disguise the fact that the
party had pulled off a political coup.
A noise from the hall jerked his head around, as he studied
the more illuminated hall beyond the campaign office, a hall he had been
cleaned earlier and the staff gone, though Billman feared someone might return
for something forgotten to find him here, and uncover him, the way some poor
worker in building in Washington long ago had uncovered the burglary in the
Watergate hotel.
Back then, things seemed clearer; good guys and bad guys
were easily to distinguish, although as Billman quickly learned working for the
woman Senator from New York, things were never what they seemed, and the media –
nobody trusted today – seemed back then as the protector of the public
interest, when, in fact, it was no more reputable then than it was now – and those
famous journalists that had done their best to bring down an unpopular
president were nothing more than vigilantes hired by the same party that had
helped bring down a president all these long years later.
Billman knew nobody could be trusted, and that media then
and now worked for particular interests and only luck had kept this president
from the same downfall the media had brought on the president back in 1974.
And that media had done its best to help the party of the
woman senator abscond with an election her party could not win any other way
but by cheating. Media didn’t steal the votes. Her party did that. But the
media did its best to cover it up, casting doubts on anyone who dared question
the result, turning those who protested the election results on that fateful
day in January into criminals and insurrectionists.
Part of the problem is that woman senator’s party had done
its best to cover its tracks, and none who raised questions about how the votes
got tallied could actually prove cheating at taken place.
That was until now.
The same former woman senator who had been denied her place
in history, who had paid to create false file that connected the unpopular president
with Russia (a pure fantasy originally brought up by a bitter Green Party
candidate) did not intend to let history repeat itself, and while all of her cohorts
in her party had spent hours behind closed doors ridding every hint of voter
fraud, she had collected the data, keeping it safe, for a time when she might
use it to broker her way back into the national spotlight and perhaps once
again position herself to become the first woman president – provided the aged
nitwit the party had rigged the election for didn’t croak first and have his
even bigger nitwit of a vice president become president by default.
Behind the scenes, her party – and for that matter until
recently, Billman’s party as well, had done infinitely more ruthless things that
merely steal a national election. They had declared war on the American people,
although disguised behind a national medical emergency that allowed them to
shut down the economy long enough ahead of the election to reduce the chances
of the unpopular sitting president from getting reelected.
Even Billman didn’t know if the deliberate release of a
virus overseas was intended to kill a million Americans (not the mention the millions
elsewhere) or was intended merely to scare people into submission.
Did the federal agency really develop the virus in the first
place as an environmental weapon, released, and once let loose, an out of
control beast even the originators could not reign in?
The answers, of course, flowed from one computer into the
laptop Billman had brought for that every purpose, locked into the former woman
senator’s archives, immune to ordinary hacking or remote access. Only by coming
here, plugging in and downloading directly, could he get it all and perhaps
later release it to the public so that finally the truth might come out, and
the villains in jail for protesting a stolen election might be vindicated and
the leaders who let people die from a virus in order to steal an election, might
get punished for their misdeeds.
There was more, much more. The queen, the heir apparent, had
kept it all, going back to every dirty trick her party ever pulled, perhaps
even back to those days when they forced the other previous president to
resign. How much more, Billman could only guess, since he had only glimpsed it
briefly during his days working for her campaign, scared off, when others who
knew more than he did, began to turn up dead.
Billman knew he traveled a dangerous path now that a new
election loomed and if the queen bee was to replace the aged man the party had orchestrated
into becoming the president, she would have to act quickly, which meant Billman
needed to act quickly, too, and needed to get it all first, and then figure out
which media he could trust – trying to avoid that whole laptop debacle that had
allowed most mainstream media to lie boldface before the stolen election so as
not to disrupt the overall plan.
Would the liberal media in Washington, New York, Los Angeles
and Boston blatantly refuse to face facts the way they had with the laptop?
Could Billman rely on those few outlets that had pushed the laptop story to
carry this even bigger scandal?
Billman had to take a chance that those outlets would, and
enough people would believe the truth about the election, about the virus
murders and the rest to bring those who orchestrated the coup to justice.
Billman knew that if nothing was done, if nobody took a chance
to get this out to the public, the queen bee would blackmail the party all the
way to the White House, finally achieving what the Orange Man had denied her.
She would have the support of liberal media and progressive
leaders in major cities like Washington, New York and Boston, who would continue
their witch hunt, making up evidence when they could not find any, making sure
they hang the so called insurrection around the Orange man’s neck, even though
it was never an insurrection.
In the old days of the Pentagon Papers, media painted the
fiction that a whistleblower could waltz into the offices of The New York Times
or The Washington Post and feel safe. It was an illusion, then and more so now.
Federal agencies such as the CIA had long ago corrupted reporters – Bradlee,
the famous editor behind the Washington Post’s coverage had worked for the CIA
earlier in his career at Newsweek, leaking stories to political people such as
JFK, so it was difficult to tell if Watergate was simply another CIA coup with
wordsmiths, hiding behind the First Amendment like the assassins, killing
people’s reputations with lies based on anonymous sources or by taking things
out of context in order to support a preset agenda.
Truth has never stopped the party from crucifying people like
the president back in 1974, and again, the one in 2020, desperate to create
another Watergate in order to keep control of the government they overthrew.
The queen bee and the media were as evil as the
administration they opposed, and rules of order, ethics and such no longer
mattered as long as they could destroy their enemy.
The queen bee was only one of many bad apples in this corrupt
barrel. The former president, the black man Billman had so admired, had become the
puppet master pulling the strings of the senile old man sitting in the white
house now, ruthlessly steering the country into a new Marist state. But unlike
the Queen Bee, the former black president – to Billman’s knowledge – hadn’t
actually killed anyone on his rise to power.
So many people still in position of power still owed their
loyalty to him and were willing to do his bidding from the inside, dangerous
people, people who did more than just steal and lie, and that information was
in the download he was making, too. All of it, a master copy of a master plan
for the overthrow of the legitimately elected president of the
Billman didn’t know who killed that Sanders worker in the
weeks leading up to the election, but the worker was on the hit list for doing
almost exactly what Billman was doing, sneaking information out to the one
incorruptible press.
Because the former black president pulled the strings on the
old man in the white house, Billman couldn’t even go to him – after all, he was
the beneficiary of the coup, the man they had stolen election to get installed,
and if the laptop was an indication, these powerful forces had more on him than
even the conservative media did, blackmailing him to doing their bidding, selling
his office to China or the Green lobby, or whomever else the powers behind the
throne demanded he steer tax dollars to.
Too many of the black president’s holdovers filled the bureaucracy
to ever expect justice from government, corrupt FBI officials, Justice
Department, NSA, CIA, even the military seemed to be kowtowing, many of whom
were named in the documents Billman was currently stealing.
No, if anyone was going to do anything, it had to be Billman
and it had to be done now.
But he was scared. Another campaign worker had tried to expose
the queen bee during her election, and he had wound up dead, and no doubt, put alarmed
insiders to the possible threat. No doubt elements of National Security watched
every possible path to the truth, although none yet knew what the queen bee had
up her sleeve or they might have destroyed the computer banks in which she kept
all these files.
The irony here – if Billman’s plan worked – would be that
one of their own, the queen bee and her allies in media, which would bring down
the party.
The sound came again from the hallway. Billman gripped the
edge of the desk, trying to make himself look small, his dark skin camouflaging
him the way it did during the years when he wore a uniform and fought a real battle
with a real enemy, and earned commendations, even from the black president who
seemed to hand out medals to celebrities like candy, but did not particularly
like military men, unless they were part of the intelligence community.
Something fell in the hall, an echo of something plastic
hitting the floor, followed by a whispered curse, Billman knew was not good
news.
The uniforms appeared out of the shadows near the elevator,
two men, guards, not cops, one cursing the other for dropping something, most
likely the flashlight he banged to make work when it would not.
“You’re an idiot,” the taller of the two said.
“It slipped. I didn’t drop it on purpose,” the shorter
slightly pudgy man said.
Both men were white, middle aged, and wore patches on their
shoulders suggesting they worked for some for-hire security company, the name
of which was unfamiliar to Billman.
Neither one carried a weapon, so Billman’s other hand eased
off the butt of the nine-millimeter pistol he had stuffed in his belt.
“On purpose or not, if somebody’s up here, you just scared
him off,” the taller man said.
“There’s nobody up here,” the other man said.
“The alarm company says differently,” the taller man said,
pausing at the door to the office in which Billman crouched.
“The silent alarm,” the pudgy guard said. “That’s always
acted flaky. The other alarm didn’t go off.”
“It didn’t go off because somebody turned it off,” the tall
guard said.
“Or forget to set it, which also happens all the time.”
“Maybe this time they did set it,” the taller guard said.
“And if they did and someone’s in there, do you really think
we ought to be the ones to find out?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“The police would be better suited for this.”
“Forget it,” the tall guard said. “If there’s nobody in
there, we’ll look like fools.”
“And if there is, we could wind up dead.”
The two guards did not move from in front of the door.
Billman looked down at the progress of the transfer, the
green bar almost reaching 100 percent. Then it did, and it came with the sound
of a Bing, and this echoed through the office as thoroughly as an alarm.
“What was that?” the shorter guard asked.
“I don’t know. It sounded like a computer.”
“They leave them on sometimes, but I’ve never heard any of
them make a sound like that.”
“That’s it,” the tall guard said, the sound of key ringing
as he fished them off his belt and pushed one of the keys into the door lock.
“I’m going in.”
Billman disconnected the laptop, and put it back into its
case, along with about a dozen thumb drives he had used earlier to collect
information from some of the other office computers, mostly excel files with
names and addresses, and payment amounts.
Then, closing the case, he pulled out his pistol with his
freehand, waiting until the guards came into the room, and made their way up
one of the aisles to where he crouched. When they were close enough, he stood
up and pointed the gun at them.
“Stop right there and stay calm,” he said in a soft voice.
“I won’t hurt you if you do what you’re told.”
Both guards halted, the short guard blinking uncontrollably.
“Don’t shoot. We only work here,” he said.
The tall guard squinted. “Say, I know you. You’ve been
around here before.”
“Indeed,” Billman said. “But that’s not very helpful. If I
was an ordinary burglar, I would shoot you for saying that.”
The tall man gulped. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he
said.
“I know,” Billman said. “Just the same, I’m going to have to
tie the two of you up. I can’t have you calling the police until I’m far away
from here.”
He didn’t bother saying that it would not be conventional
police that would come looking for him after this. And those who did, would not
be coming to arrest him.
Both guards nodded.
Billman did not have the heart to even knock them out. He
had left that kind of behavior back on the front and hadn’t enjoyed killing people
even then.
He left the office with the two men tied back to back in
chairs, and blue work towels stuffed in their mouths.
He was not a mean man even though he had grown up on the
mean streets of
He took the keys, locked the office door behind him, and
then headed to the elevators, which also took keys at this hour to operate.
Then, when on the street, he dumped the keys into a public trash bin and headed
for the car he’d rented.
He needed to make a call back home, but he didn’t dare do it
yet.
They had a way of tracking things, and would no doubt use
the NSA to filter through all the calls made at this time and place until the
came to his.
He drove off, out of town, headed back to the rental place,
and then to public transportation downtown.
He knew better than to trust a cab or Uber or Lyft.
He trusted nobody.
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