Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) (3 page)

*

George Edwards flipped open his cell phone and cursed at the series of numbers on the screen.

“I hate these damn codes,” he grumbled, running a yellow light at the corner of Tenth and L Streets. He was heading east on L and had just passed the Washington Convention Center. He was late for a meeting at a local reception hall on the corner of Sixteenth and L. The hall doubled as a gallery at which he was premiering some of his latest work.

Edwards was a digital sculptor. He used his computer to enhance/alter iconic portraits or designs, and they were in very high demand. His manipulated “sculpture” of the painting
Declaration of Independence
by John Trumbull sold for $105,000.

Edwards called his version of the painting
What Really Happened
. He played off of the fact that the scene depicted in the iconic representation of the nation’s birth never actually happened the way Trumbull painted it.

Instead of Charles Thomson standing directly across from Thomas Jefferson on the right side of the canvas, Edwards inserted a free-floating dartboard with the face of King George III. On the left side of the piece, Edwards altered a standing, cross-armed William Paca, putting a dart in the right hand of the Maryland lawyer. Thomas Jefferson held a pint of ale instead of a page of the Declaration. The entire painting was colorized with shades that differed from Trumbull’s original, making the work appear almost lifelike.

Hidden amongst the signers of the Declaration in Edwards’s parody was the phrase “
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.”
The words were a direct translation from Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
. Lithographs of the digital sculpture were amazingly popular on college campuses throughout the country. They were third in sales at the Harvard “Coop” behind a poster of Moe kicking a football off of Curley’s head and Salvador Dali’s
The Persistence of Memory
.

Edwards stared at the numbers. It was a “Caesar Cipher” in which letters of the alphabet were replaced with numbers. Sometimes the numbers were shifted, sometimes they were not. This time he knew they weren’t. Off the bat, he knew the zeroes were spaces between words. If there was a shift, the zeroes would be multiplied to signal the shift. “00” would indicate a shift of one. “0000” would indicate a shift of three. “0” meant no shift. 1=A, 2=B, 3=C…

Three separate zeroes meant four words. He knew three- or four-digit numbers were times of day. The “100” third to the last in the sequence was one o’clock. The “1 13” following the time was a.m. He had a meeting at 1:00 a.m.

“Great,” he muttered. “Just what I need right now.” Begrudgingly, he deciphered the rest of the code to determine the location of the clandestine get-together.

*

The Cato Street Pub was a bar in the 2100 block of Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It was a favorite for politicos—dark, cheap, and served call brands for house prices.

The red brick two-story building was squeezed between a drug store and a Vietnamese restaurant. It had the look of an eighteenth-century London home. The two windows on the second floor were twelve panels with white paint on the trim. There were sheer white draperies drawn on the inside.

On the first floor the large, solid wood doors at the entrance were painted a glossy red. A large engraved brass plaque affixed to the brick, just to the left of the doors, bore the pub’s name and its hours of operation.

The pub’s interior was wall-to-wall hickory. The twenty-foot-long bar was lacquered rosewood, as were the dozen four-seat round tables scattered across the dining portion of the first floor. Directly opposite the bar, which sat to the right, was a series of four red velvet booths.

On the walls were black-and-white photos of famous politicians who’d sidled up to the bar aboard the brass and leather stools. From Ted Cruz and Tip O’Neill, to Hillary Clinton and Robert McNamara, the powerful had haunted Cato Street for decades.

And yet, unbeknownst to even the most connected Capitol Hill broker, the bar and its upstairs apartment served as the place where the self-described disenfranchised would meet to talk treachery.

The owner of Cato Street was Jimmy Ings. He’d purchased the bar in his early twenties as a place to commiserate and imbibe with friends. He lived in the upstairs apartment alone. Over the years, Ings used his profits to buy a nearby butcher shop and a coffee house. The coffee sales were good; the meat profits were nonexistent. Both were primarily cash businesses.

He was a thin man who drank more than he ate and sucked down two packs of Camel unfiltered regulars a day. His thinning hair was white and tinged with yellow from cigarette smoke. The skin on his cheeks and nose was reddened from a severe case of aggravated rosacea.

He was an unhappy man with a dry wit and a penchant for the television show
Jeopardy!
He was particularly good at historical and political categories.

Ings was also a founding member of the underground Datura Project. The “Daturans”, as the small group’s members were called, had met each other at various political events in the Metro DC area. They shared a singular, radical idea about the future of their nation and of the world.

They first met in Ings’s upstairs apartment as a group of four and soon added a fifth. The group determined that half of a minyan was large enough and stopped recruiting. They called themselves the “Datura Project” in honor of the poisonous plant certain Native American tribes would diffuse into a hallucinogenic tea during rites of passage. The Daturans believed their eyes were open. They could see what others could not.

They also knew what was best for their country, and they believed they could best effect change with swift action. But in meeting after meeting their leader, Sir Spencer Thomas, convinced them the right opportunity had not presented itself. A shift of such magnitude, he’d reasoned, required the perfect, historic moment.

Maybe that will change now that the president is dead.

With chatter of the president’s death on the flat screen behind the bar, but nobody in the seats, Ings decided to close up early. He sent his barkeep and cook home with a few extra bucks, locked the front doors, and climbed the stairs into his apartment. The rest of the group would be there in a few hours, and he needed to be ready.

Plus,
Jeopardy!
was on Channel 8 and he didn’t want to miss it. It was “College All-Stars” week. He hoped it wouldn’t be preempted by news coverage of the president’s death.

Chapter 3

Standing in the Cox Corridors on the House side of the US Capitol, Felicia Jackson’s mind was swirling with possibilities. She was transfixed by the large mural above her in the Central East-West Hallway that depicted the inauguration of George Washington. It was breathtaking.

She was somewhat saddened she’d never taken the time to appreciate the work in the past. But with the halls eerily quiet as everyone on the Hill busied themselves behind office desks and in front of televisions, she had the perfect chance to reflect and admire.

Felicia rubbed her neck as she kept her gaze upward. As Speaker of the House, she knew she might be the next American to take that oath and inherit the green office.

She’d asked her staff for a few minutes of privacy as she took the short walk from her first-floor office to the Cox Corridor murals. She’d been in high-level, classified meetings all day. Her people were fighting for her to assume the presidency, while not-yet-sworn-in Vice President John Blackmon was staking his own claim.

Her case was open and shut, she’d thought. But Blackmon’s attorney had quickly filed an injunction in US District Court in DC. He claimed her ascension to the presidency would cause irreparable injury for which no damage award could compensate. He also contended his case, on constitutional grounds, was in the public interest.

While the district judge considered the case, she was temporarily stopped from taking office. Nancy Mayer-Whittington, the Clerk of the Court, had told her lawyers the injunction was filed along with her team’s response and that the judge would decide on its merits the next morning.

Mayer-Whittington had called just before the office closed at 4 p.m. They were short staffed already, and Felicia imagined this case would only further stress the Clerk. She pictured lines of reporters banging on the Constitution Avenue entrance, all of them asking for copies of the filings.

It was a nightmare, as far as Felicia was concerned. By waiting overnight, the judge was effectively granting the injunction and giving Blackmon’s legal team time to better formulate their argument.

To make matters worse, she was about to deliver a joint address with Blackmon to assure the American people the government was in good hands as both parties worked together to stabilize what was a precarious situation.

She envied George Washington as she looked at him with his left hand on the Bible. He didn’t have injunctions. He didn’t have twenty-four-hour cable news.

Still, the “People’s Business” had been good to Speaker Jackson. A school teacher, school board member, and county commissioner turned Member of Congress, she’d been on the fast track. She was witty and politically savvy. She had a handsome face and physique.

Felicia was a Stanford graduate with a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina. Her husband was a well-known neurosurgeon, who’d given up active practice to support his wife’s rocketing political career.

She won the seat in South Carolina’s first congressional district by a staggering fourteen points over a six-term incumbent.

Over the course of four terms, the black-haired, blue-eyed shark had amassed a casino-full of favors. When her party narrowly won the house in a midterm coup, she’d cashed in her chips for a leadership position. She was named Majority Whip and then Speaker.

She wasn’t the first woman to slam the gavel, but she whacked it the loudest. Every favor she’d amassed, every handshake and smile from across the aisle she’d garnered, disintegrated with the squeeze of her iron fist.

If Felicia were a man, she’d have been considered shrewd and opportunistic. As a woman, though, she became the very personification of a variety of misogynistic terms used to diminish the perceived power of headstrong women.

She was less than a year into her first term as Speaker, and there were rumblings all over the Hill that she would not keep the post another term. She’d heard them.

Yet here she was with the possibility of ascension to the highest office. There were three years left in Foreman’s second term, a political eternity. It was plenty of time to change her image. But standing in the way was a litigious ass who wanted to skip his way from the cabinet to the White House.

Felicia spun on her three-inch heels and plodded her way to the rotunda to address the nation. She prayed she would be the one speaking first. It wouldn’t look good, she knew, to have the secretary speak first. She needed to look like the leader, the one in command. Blackmon would have to take the backseat.

Chapter 4

Matti hurried down the hall to her office, still confused about the conversation with her supervisor.

What was the NSA really? What intelligence did they truly seek? How long had they been spying on Americans? Was she working for the good guys?

Of course I am
, she convinced herself. There were white hats and black hats, and she knew the difference.

She thought she knew the difference.

She didn’t look at the file in her hand until she was at her desk. On the top of the front page was the title “DATURA PROJECT”. She’d never heard of it. In the pages that followed, she learned of what NSA believed to be a fringe group bent on producing some level of anarchy or global reconstruction.

The NSA believed the initial, informal meeting was during a “Tax Day” protest at Lafayette Park in the District. There were transcripts of what looked to be cellular conversations amongst members of the Datura Project. Matti also found evidence of intercepted text messages. Most were encrypted, and the contents unknown, but a few of the numeric codes were deciphered. They contained meeting information and alerts to larger, non-Daturan rallies or protests. It was nearly impossible to determine where they fell on the political spectrum. On one hand, they seemed to be conservative, part of the anger at the establishment so well defined by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, their ideas appeared to be farther left than Senator Bernie Sanders.

Matti puffed her cheeks. She let out the air in an exasperated sigh and ran her hand through her hair. She was reading secretly recorded voice intelligence.

These are US citizens on these tapes!

She was familiar with the Bush administration’s legal contention that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarded against unlawful search and seizure, did not apply to NSA activities. And in times of war, search and seizure was reasonable on US soil, even if the “enemy” was not foreign.

The Department of Justice asserted warrantless communications targeted at the enemy in times of armed conflict were traditionally acceptable, arguing the NSA’s signal intelligence was included in that exception. Lawyers went so far as to suggest the NSA was a domestic military operation.

Toward the end of the second Bush term, the Office of Legal Counsel backed off the assertion but never fully denounced it. Some suspected the government was essentially spying on its own citizens. Matti sat with the proof right in front of her.

There were twenty pages of short, clipped conversations between various members of the group. She flipped past the logs to the short biographical pages of the suspected conspirators.

One was a college professor; a second was an artist; another was a local businessman who owned a meat shop and a bar. Matti flipped through the black-and-white surveillance photographs snapped of the various alleged plotters. She made mental notes of the names and faces. Then one caught her attention.