Interest (8 page)

“No.”

“Someone—no one knows who—built a homemade rocket and launched it from the Sierra Nevadas. The damn thing took out a recon satellite! Neith tells me we didn’t have anything to do with it. Then, in Montana, cops showed up to search a house, without a warrant as usual, and the whole damn thing was rigged with explosives. Took out nine of the little piggies. We weren’t involved in that one, either. People are following our lead and this is becoming a movement!” Jefferson sounded excited about the possibilities, like some yokel who’d discovered oil on his lower forty.

“Have you ever met Neith in person?”

“Can’t say that I have. She never says it, but I think the little lady’s worried about her safety. She only ever talks through that damned robot. Can’t blame her. She’s a genius, though, I’ll tell you what. Every operation has been a success. She’s got a sixth sense or something.”

Around lunchtime, the bus pulled into an old auto garage in downtown Philadelphia. The driver got out, closed the garage door, and the men got off the bus. As soon as they were certain that the place was empty, they began pulling submachine guns out of their duffel bags and changing into combat gear. Someone went around passing out sandwiches.

Once his men were assembled, Jefferson climbed onto a car lift so they could all see him.

“Can y’all hear me?” he bellowed. “Good. You boys know why we’re here today. Since 1913, this great nation, this beacon of hope for all mankind, has been raped and pillaged by a hostile conglomerate of evil men. They’ve established banks beyond the rule of law, forced our country to borrow from those banks, and do you know how they collect interest? Taxes. Our taxes pay interest to private bankers. You work for a lifetime and they claim they’re entitled to what you earn simply because you were born here. Think about that for a second: they believe they’re entitled to the work you do.” He paused dramatically. “There’s a name for that. Slavery!”

The men cheered and yelled obscenities.

“Nineteen thirteen, gentlemen, was the year the Federal Reserve System was established in this country. By no small coincidence, it was also the year when the federal income tax amendment was forced down our throats. Funny thing, isn’t it? For our first 137 years we had no central bank and we also had no income tax. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because they are two heads of the same monster. One head lends the money, the other sticks a gun in your face and forces you to pay interest!”

“Let’s kill the bastards!” someone yelled.

“We’re getting there, don’t worry. I like your enthusiasm, though,” Jefferson quipped. “Gentlemen, as you know, we are fighting the second American revolution, and today is our Saratoga. Today we will cut the beast open from the inside and cripple the very institution that has kept its boot on America’s throat for generations. And we will take no prisoners. Today we will show them as much mercy as they’ve shown us!”

The men roared with enthusiasm.

“Now let’s get suited up and kick some ass! Hoo-rah!”

“Hoo-rah!” they yelled back in unison.

Len was starting to sweat. Whatever was about to happen was going to be violent, dangerous, and he’d be right in the middle of it.

“Get dressed, Lenny boy. You’re coming with us,” General Jefferson announced while getting down from the car lift. “Here, I brought some stuff for you.” Len was given a duffel bag containing black fatigues, body armor, and headgear. Then Jefferson pulled an old M1911 from the shoulder holster under his jacket. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

“Of course I do. I’m from Pennsylvania.”

Jefferson chuckled and handed him the sidearm. “OK, boys, we’ve got about forty-five minutes to get into position. We want to hit ’em hard and fast before they leave for the day or figure out what’s going on. Squad A, where are you?” he bellowed. “Good. We’re going to do it just like we planned: kill the telecommunications, set up the cell phone jammer with the timer set to twenty minutes, engage the magnetic locks for all exterior doors to keep ’em in. Then kill the interior power to the top floors, find the support columns, and place the charges.

“Squad B, you’re going to make sure no one gets in or out of the exits. I don’t know if you boys noticed when we drove past on the way down here, but the place looks like a rat’s nest of barbed wire and machine guns. They’re expecting us, gentlemen. Only they’re expecting us to attack from the outside, not the inside. Neith is going to take care of the national guardsmen outside for us, so if you’d like to keep your gray matter where it is, I suggest you stay on the inside of the building.

“Squad C, you guys have the fun part. Lenny, you’re with us on Squad C. Last order of business, we rendezvous in the basement in exactly fifteen minutes.”

Len’s stomach felt sick. He looked around. Jefferson’s men were jittery with excitement. Len had the feeling this was the first time some of them had done anything like this, whatever it was.

“OK, let’s roll!” Jefferson yelled.

The men followed his lead to the back of the auto shop, then down some old iron steps to the basement, which was full of drums of used oil and smelled like mold. In the corner of the basement was a pull-up trap door, which revealed a vertical shaft with a steel ladder that went straight down eighty feet. The men took turns going down the ladder one at a time. It was pitch black in the narrow shaft, and Len’s heart pounded as he fumbled to turn on his headlamp. At the bottom of the ladder was what seemed to be a large, echoing cave. One of Jefferson’s crew lit a flare, which illuminated the place as bright as day. Len could see that they were in an abandoned subway station, the art deco style indicating it must have been from the 1930s.

“OK, boys, watch out for the rats and the crackheads,” Jefferson whispered. “In about three hundred feet, we’ll be on the other side of the Schuylkill River.”

The men followed the guy with the flare through the old subway tunnel until they got to another vertical access shaft. The men ascended the ladder. At the top was a trap door similar to the first, which everyone crawled through into a cavernous, concrete basement. The place was lit by sickly fluorescent tubes and was filled floor to ceiling with white file boxes marked with numbers. The men made gestures to each other to indicate silence was required as they came up the ladder.

“Where are we?” Len whispered to Jefferson.

“We’re in the subbasement of the old Philadelphia post office, now known as the IRS building.” Jefferson had a terrifying glint in his eye. “Now be quiet until we’re ready.”

13

Twenty-four years earlier, Len’s father had gone out to check his mail one afternoon as he always did. Inside the family’s little white mailbox was a letter from the IRS notifying him that he was being audited.

Bernard Savitz had owned a small bakery on the South Side of Pittsburgh. He had five employees, worked long hours, and was pretty squarely middle-class. He threw tremendous effort into putting food on the table for his wife and two children.

When the self-employed do business with one another, they are required to report to the IRS their payments made to each other with 1099 forms. One of Bernard’s customers, a restaurant that bought his bread, sent him an erroneous 1099 form that overreported the bread purchased by a factor of one hundred. It was a simple accounting error caused by a computer glitch. However, it made it seem as though Bernard had made twice as much money that year as he normally did. When Bernard filed his taxes for that year, he listed the correct amount he’d earned instead of the computer glitch amount that had been reported. The discrepancy between the 1099 and Bernard’s tax return caused the IRS’s computer system to red-flag Bernard for an audit.

As the Savitz family found out, an IRS audit is legalized persecution. Revenue agents began interviewing Bernard’s neighbors, business associates, customers, even the bank he’d borrowed money from to buy the bakery. They asked everyone whether they’d ever seen Bernard cheat or steal. The average person, upon being asked such questions by besuited agents with badges, is impressed upon that the subject of the audit is some sort of criminal. This is intentional. The point of these interviews wasn’t to find out information, of course; it was an old IRS tactic to destroy Bernard’s reputation in the business community. The more they soften up the target, the easier it is to fleece the target for money. And sure enough, Bernard’s business started failing. Restaurants and grocery stores stopped buying his bread because they were concerned about his character.

The IRS took three years to finish its audit of Bernard’s business. The IRS limits itself to three years for an audit, and by unwritten policy, it drags most audits out for the entire allotted time to maximize emotional and financial damage. During those three years, they seized Bernard’s business records, froze his bank accounts, and forced Bernard to close his bakery and sell the property. In the end, the lead IRS auditor unilaterally decided that it wasn’t a computer glitch at all, but malfeasance by Bernard. Bernard received a massive bill from the IRS: back taxes on money he’d never even received in the first place, plus penalties, plus fines, plus double-compounded interest on the first three. To pay it, he’d have to sell his house and put his kids out on the street.

Obviously upset at the injustice, Bernard tried to fight the matter in the legal system only to discover that if you don’t have the money to pay an unjust IRS assessment up front before the legal proceedings even start, then you aren’t allowed to fight the IRS in the regular court system. In other words, only the very wealthy have the right to a jury trial and a real court when fighting the IRS. If you are poor to middling like everyone else, you have to fight the IRS in a special kangaroo court run by the IRS itself, the United States Tax Court, where the house always wins. Unable to pay the IRS’s bill up front, Bernard had to contest the matter in the United States Tax Court, but he had a tough time of it because the IRS had seized his business records and refused to return them. It’s awfully hard to prove your innocence when those prosecuting you have taken all the proof and also serve as the jury.

The three years of auditing, plus the one year in tax court, plus the failure of his business and his subsequent inability to support his wife and children, all took a huge toll on Bernard’s health. One week after losing his tax case, Bernard had a massive coronary and died on a pier while fishing.

14

Jefferson waved his men into position. What Len presumed to be Squad A shuffled off quietly to do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. The rest just sat there among the file boxes, waiting. Len’s legs were shaking; he felt sweat dripping down his back as he sat there making nervous eye contact with the other men. One of them winked at him.

There was an abrupt, building-shaking, thunking sound of enormous HVAC units shutting down as the power was cut. Then a yell from somewhere:
“Let’s go!”

The men pulled down their balaclavas and ran behind Jefferson up two flights of stairs. Len did the same, wheezing from the exertion and years of smoking. As they reached the ground floor, about half of them peeled off to guard the exits. Len and some others kept following Jefferson to the top floor. Jefferson burst through a stairwell door into a lobby and, in a nightmarish explosion of violence, started shooting everyone and anyone he saw. Receptionists, clerks, it didn’t matter. Jefferson didn’t give a fuck. His men ran helter-skelter into the hallways and through the cubicle farms doing the same.

The muzzle flash of the guns lit up the room. Len watched a man’s head come apart as Jefferson fired a round into his face. Too shocked by the savagery to even be revolted, his mind had trouble believing what it was seeing. Len just stood there in the pandemonium in dazed disbelief.

Chaos. Pure, animal chaos. Even in Iraq, Len had never seen anything like this.

Brass ejecting, screaming, blood, running, papers flying everywhere, more screaming. A number of people ran for the exits. Jefferson and his men didn’t even try to stop them. They were allowed to escape because at the bottom of each stairwell was Squad B, waiting for them.

“This way!” Jefferson yelled, running down a hall.

Not knowing what else to do, Len followed. On the way down the hall, he happened to pass by a window. He stopped, transfixed by what he saw. The IRS building was right next to the river that they’d gone under. A Russian MI-24 helicopter hovered above the river outside the building. Sticking out of its side were two miniguns spewing flames, hosing the National Guard below with bullets. No one was flying the helicopter. There was no pilot or crew.

“Hey, snap out of it!” Jefferson rebuked. “Move!”

Len followed him to a corner office door, which was locked. Jefferson kicked it in and entered. Len didn’t see anyone. Jefferson walked behind the large oak desk and threw the chair out of the way. There, cowering under the desk, was a pasty, balding little man with glasses and a paisley tie. Jefferson grabbed the man’s throat and yanked him to his feet. The man looked like he’d just soiled himself.

“Do you know this man?” Jefferson asked Len.

He did indeed know him. The man’s name was Edward Burkholder, and he was the IRS agent who audited Len’s father nearly a quarter-century earlier.

15

Len often thought that people living in the developed world did not understand the holocaust of survival, the true nastiness it took to endure in an uncaring universe. He and everyone else were sheltered and naïve, like children. They bought meat from the grocery store having never seen the inside of a slaughterhouse. They went to their shores in the summertime, never thinking of the blood that had been spilled defending them. They went through life with televisions on and music at full blast, compulsively drowning out every possible silence. Len believed that silence was something most everyone avoided because when it was quiet, people came face-to-face with their Dark Thoughts.

After some time in Iraq, Len found out why veterans returning from combat didn’t like to talk about their experiences. Sometimes it was because they didn’t want to relive the experience by recounting it, sure, but sometimes it was because they’d been forced into a depth of understanding of human nature that the average person would never have and could not relate to. Indeed, the real horror of war was what you discovered about yourself.

Private Justin Waterhouse was a wiry, oddly brilliant kid with a biting, sardonic sense of humor that probably went unappreciated in his native Midwest. Of all the men Len had met in the division he’d been assigned to, he most related to Justin’s piercing observations and droll understatements about the military and life in general. Justin was not the walking cliché Len had come to expect: GI Bill education, ingenuous idealism, and a cheating girlfriend back home. No, Justin was shrewd enough to see that he was there to secure oil for powerful business interests, and he didn’t even bother trying to rationalize it. Justin had a genius for simply existing, without any sort of self-righteous ambition in life, and Len admired his utter lack of pretense.

Justin came from a farming family. By pure happenstance of genetics, he’d been born with an astronomical IQ into a clan of average Iowans who pinned all their vicarious hopes on him. Justin didn’t want to be successful, though, and he was sick of their expectations of him. He just wanted to enjoy his damn life. He’d gone to college for two years just to shut his mother up, then failed out once he realized he didn’t care enough to finish. Eventually Justin enlisted simply to get away from his father’s shrill insistence that he do something spectacular. So there he was in Iraq, creating the appearance of doing something so people would leave him the hell alone.

It was said that war was 98 percent boredom and 2 percent terror. During the frequent boring parts, Len and Justin often played chess or got drunk on the vodka that people would dye green and smuggle into camp in mouthwash bottles. Len found the booze took the edge off his sometimes crippling anxiety disorder and made it easier to get some sleep under the constant threat of mortar attacks. Iraq was when the drinking became a habit.

Some men, when given control, lost their minds; they puffed up their chests, spoke in authoritative tones, and committed heinous acts without thinking twice. Power made the weak-minded forget who they were. This was what happened to most young bucks when they were given a uniform and a gun. Justin, however, wasn’t like that. Len frequently accompanied Justin on patrols and noticed that he treated the locals like real people, even though they didn’t always return the favor. Justin’s motto was, verbatim, “Neither of us is here by choice, so let’s not make this any shittier than it has to be.”

On one particular October morning in Fallujah, Justin’s squad was ordered to go house to house to search for weapons. Such searches in the past had been largely fruitless, and the men usually gave a perfunctory run-through while looking for anything obviously bomb-like. At the third house on the list that morning, Justin knocked on the door. An elderly man let Len, Justin, and two other soldiers in. The men split up, with Justin and Len going upstairs to check the bedrooms.

In an upstairs bedroom, Justin opened a closet door. It was the last thing he ever did. Hidden inside was a sixteen-year-old kid with a Kalashnikov rifle. The kid fired off a single round, which went right through Justin’s carotid artery, one of the few places he wasn’t covered in body armor. Justin collapsed, holding his neck as blood soaked his uniform. The Iraqi kid next pointed the rifle at Len and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing. The boy had inserted the magazine into the rifle backward, meaning the round in the chamber, the one that went through Justin, was the first and only round that could have been fired from the gun. It was mechanically impossible for the kid to get off another shot.

Len, a sworn noncombatant, a journalist who was not allowed to participate in the fighting, picked up Justin’s M4, flicked off the safety, aimed it at center mass, and pulled the trigger.
Boom.
The kid clutched his chest, and Len could tell from the labored breathing and pink foamy blood that he’d shot him through a lung. In a haze of hate and adrenaline, Len watched the boy suffocate and die.

Len knelt down beside Justin to see if he could stop the bleeding. The other soldiers who had been downstairs came running up at the sounds of the shots, but they got there just as the awareness was draining from Justin’s eyes. Justin bled out before he could be medevacked to camp. He couldn’t be saved. The other men knew what had happened, but it was never spoken of again. The official report given to Justin’s parents stated that he had valiantly killed his own attacker to save the lives of his comrades downstairs.

Len wrote to his employer two days later asking to be reassigned somewhere stateside.

At first there was nothing but anger and sadness. Len spent a lot of time wondering why Justin had been brought into this world just to be cut down senselessly before his life had really gotten started. What was the point of his time here? Poor Justin was in Iraq serving a death sentence because his own family refused to understand him.

After a year or two, though, the anger subsided, and Len began to ask himself the same questions about the Iraqi kid. The unfortunate little bastard was just trying to defend his family from the foreign invaders destroying his country. He couldn’t even load a gun correctly. He was probably still a virgin. Before coming to Iraq, Len had spent five years studying a martial art in Japan, for Christ’s sake; he could have just wrestled the little punk to the ground and he’d still be alive today. Len couldn’t justify or undo the kid’s death.

Guilt over something that could never be made right again was the worst of hells, and Len spent an awful lot of time there, drinking himself to sleep at night. Len, Justin, and the Iraqi kid just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was made much shittier than it had to be.

___
_

And now Len found himself at the IRS building in Philadelphia, holding a gun to the head of the man who’d put his father in the ground, with the opportunity to avenge another death. The opportunity to make things still shittier.

Edward Burkholder had been the lead auditor in the Bernard Savitz case, the man who withheld evidence that would have proved the innocence of Len’s father. This was the man who’d intentionally ruined Bernard Savitz’s life in order to make a name for himself within the agency. And here he was, in the fancy corner office he’d earned by killing a decent, honest family man.

Len looked at the desk the man had been hiding under. There, next to the blotter, was a picture of Edward Burkholder with his wife, two grown children, and what Len presumed was a grandchild of about two. Burkholder’s kids were probably in diapers when he was auditing Len’s father.

“Are those your wife and kids?” Len asked.

“Yes! Please don’t kill me!”

“OK, I won’t,” Len said.

“Oh, thank Go—”

Before he could even finish his sentence, Len fired a .45-caliber slug into the man’s kneecap. Burkholder let out an ear-piercing wail and grabbed his bleeding appendage.

Len squatted down and grabbed Burkholder’s face by the jaw, which was now streaming with tears and spattered in blood and bone shards. He forced Burkholder to look him in the eyes.

“That knee will never be the same. I want you to have a constant reminder of all the misery you’ve caused in this world, you fucking prick. I’m letting you live to give you an opportunity to change for the better. Do you understand?”

Burkholder turned white and could only nod before passing out from the pain.

“Well, aren’t you merciful,” Jefferson sneered at Len. “So be it.”

Jefferson went out into the hallway and found two more Revenue employees hiding in a broom closet. “You two, today’s your lucky day. See that man there?” He pointed to Burkholder’s limp body. “He’s still alive. When we leave, drag him out of the building. Don’t waste any time.”

Len heard one of Jefferson’s men over the radio headset. “Eyes two. Honeymoon’s over, boys. The chopper’s been shot down, and like ten Humvees of Marines just showed up. Time to get the fuck out of Dodge. Over.”

Just then, all the power in the building came back on.

“Time to go,” announced General Jefferson into the radio.

Jefferson and Len ran through the building to the elevator lobby, where some of the other men were waiting for the elevators.

“We’re taking the elevators? Are you sure this is a good idea?” Len asked.

“Relax, we got this. Been planning it for months. Besides, the stairwells are a damn slaughterhouse. You wanna crawl over all those bodies?”

The elevator door opened, and inside were three IRS employees who had been trapped since the power went out. Jefferson’s men told them to get out, then shot them in their backs as they fled.

Len had never realized how slow a typical elevator was until it was all that stood between him and a squad of Marines. After a small forever, they reached the subbasement and filed out down the ladder to the subway tunnel. Along the way, Jefferson’s men left explosive charges.

Back in the auto shop, everyone hurriedly changed back into street clothes and shoved everything into the duffel bags. They boarded the bus, opened the garage door, backed out onto the city street, and drove off.

Len couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so alive, or so shaky and nauseous.

Despite the ocean of adrenaline, the men were very quiet on the ride through the city. Once they got onto on the expressway leaving town, though, everyone broke out into raucous celebration.

“Wait, wait. Be quiet, all of you!” Jefferson shouted. “Did we lose anyone?” He counted. Everyone was there. “Whore mother of Jesus, we pulled it off!” Shouts of victory and high fives. Someone pulled a cooler of beer out of the back. Jefferson pulled a dead cell phone out of the bus’s glove compartment, then put the battery in and waited for it to start up. “Who wants to do the honors? Lenny?”

“No, thanks,” Len said, having an idea of what was coming next.

“Of course not. Wythe?”

“Hell yes!” exclaimed Wythe.

“Hit the call button,” Jefferson said.

As Len found out later, left inside the IRS building was a prepaid cell phone cabled to a wireless transmitter. The phone rang. And when it did, every single explosive charge detonated simultaneously, leaving a large, burning crater along the banks of the Schuylkill.