Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) Read online

  SEDITION

  A POLITICAL CONSPIRACY

  BOOK 1

  Tom Abrahams

  A PITON PRESS BOOK

  Sedition

  A Political Conspiracy Book 1

  2016 (c) by Tom Abrahams

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

  Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

  Proofread by Pauline Nolet

  Formatted by Stef Mcdaid at WriteIntoPrint.com

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  http://tomabrahamsbooks.com

  Click here to join the free PREFERRED READER’S CLUB

  WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

  THE TRAVELER POSTAPOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES

  HOME

  CANYON

  WALL

  POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

  SEDITION

  INTENTION

  JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

  ALLEGIANCE

  ALLEGIANCE BURNED

  HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

  PERSEID COLLAPSE: PILGRIMAGE SERIES NOVELLAS

  CROSSING

  REFUGE

  ADVENT

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE: THE CONSPIRATORS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART TWO: THE PLOT

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART THREE: THE EXECUTION

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  For my co-conspirators: Courtney, Samantha, & Luke

  Prologue

  “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

  —George Bernard Shaw

  Dexter Foreman’s death was remarkably silent.

  He was alone in his office.

  Foreman required a half hour each morning to read the paper and drink a cup of fully caffeinated coffee. He often joked coffee was a drink that, without caffeine, served no godly purpose.

  It wasn’t just the quiet, the newsprint, and the Arabica he enjoyed in his office. A student of architecture, Foreman loved the neoclassical style of the room; the two-foot rise of its domed ceiling, the niches inset into the curved walls. He admired the eighteenth-century sentiment.

  He and his wife had chosen to honor the office’s first occupant with green accents throughout. The subtle pea green of the rug complemented the alternating white pine and walnut flooring.

  The matching curtains and valances on the windows were muted with cream sheers. It was colorful but tasteful. Historians loved the homage to an earlier time. Despite the office being more ceremonial than practical, Foreman loved his time there.

  He was reading The New York Times, a below-the-fold article about his efforts to enhance Public Law 107-56, an act initially designed to “provide appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism”. He’d not gotten past reporter Helene Cooper’s byline.

  Foreman drew the mug to his lips, blew on the hot coffee, and took a healthy sip. He placed the mug back onto his desk and spun so the Nationals baseball logo faced him.

  The moment the artery blew within his head, he felt a sharp lightning bolt of pain as the blood exploded into his brain.

  The last image he saw was the portrait of George Washington hanging in its gilded frame above the white marble fireplace across from his desk on the north side of the room.

  He lost focus. The portrait dissolved to black. His eyes fixed.

  His face dropped onto the thick English oak, cracking the bridge of his nose. Blood pooled resolutely around his head, sticking to the gel in his styled salt-and-pepper hair. It leeched onto the corner of the Times.

  Had it not been for a planned meeting in his office just three minutes later, his body might have gone unnoticed for a half hour. But because of the meeting, his senior aide knocked on the northwest door of the office just forty-five seconds after the vessel popped.

  That aide knocked twice, as was the custom with Foreman, and then opened the thick door from the hallway outside. The young man’s head was down as he entered the room. He lifted it to meet Foreman’s eyes with his. But instead of the expected nod from his boss, he saw him slumped on the desk across the room.

  His mind flooded with confusion and panic. At first he wasn’t certain he was processing the scene correctly. There was a bright diffused light from the triplet of south-facing windows directly behind the desk. It backlit Foreman’s body and made it difficult for the aide to focus. And what the aide saw before him appeared surreal: a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and an unconscious, bleeding Dexter Foreman.

  He hurried to the desk, lifted his wrist to his mouth, and spoke hurriedly.

  “Bandbox respond. Boxer is down. Boxer is down.”

  Two other doors swung open into the office from the rose garden outside and from an adjacent smaller room. Men in dark suits rushed to the desk, their fingers on the DAK triggers of their drawn .357 Sig Sauer P229 sidearms.

  “Sir?” The aide touched Foreman’s shoulder, not expecting a response.

  Regardless, he repeated himself as three more suited, armed men ran into the office. This was not the meeting on the schedule.

  “Mr. President?” The aide’s voice was shaky. He swallowed hard past the thick lump at the top of his throat, focusing on the empty distant gaze in Foreman’s eyes. His own welled.

  Steam rose from the cup of coffee to Dexter Foreman’s right. The president was dead.

  PART ONE: THE CONSPIRATORS

  “A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.”

  —Mark Twain

  Chapter 1

  Fifteen miles south of Baltimore, Matti Harrold was avoiding the main gate to her building. After showing her green identification badge to a series of M16 armed military police officers, she wound her way across the 5400-acre Fort George G. Meade toward the eastern side of the campus. Normally, she would have taken the “official” route, but today she felt like a change.

  It was a random choice she’d spontaneously made on the short drive to the office.

  Matti was taking baby steps. She was trying to be “less predictable”.

  Security at Fort Me
ade was at its standard post 9/11 level. Outside of the Oval Office, nobody yet knew of the president’s death.

  Matti turned the steering wheel as she approached her facility, a pair of high-rise, green reflective glass buildings. She parked and retrieved a small black, soft leather briefcase from the floorboard of the front passenger seat. The twenty-nine-year-old code breaker checked her watch and walked toward the headquarters for the National Security Agency.

  For nine years now, she’d driven to work on a secured base, pulled out her green (fully cleared) identification badge and slipped it over her head on a beaded neck chain. She invariably reported to work exactly fifteen minutes early. It could take a quarter hour to clear security on some days. Matti slid the badge into an access control terminal. She punched in her personal identification number and opened the door.

  Once inside, she waded through three checkpoints and was searched at each one. Her bag was checked for weapons, cameras, phones, iPods, and a host of other items banned by the agency’s M51 Physical Security Division.

  There were two distinct areas within the NSA headquarters: Administrative and Secure. Matti worked in the Secure area.

  She reached her fourth-floor office exactly on time. It was small and she shared it with three other analysts. On her desk were a computer, a notepad, and two telephones. The gray telephone was a secured line; the black phone wasn’t. Whenever a black phone was in use, the others in the office were alerted and they refrained from speaking aloud.

  She placed her bag on the floor next to her desk and sat down. She was adjusting her seat when the black phone rang.

  “Matti Harrold.”

  “In my office,” said a man’s voice.

  “Yes, sir,” Matti replied and hung up. She immediately stood and left her office for the unscheduled meeting with her supervisor. It wasn’t often he contacted her directly.

  What did he want?

  *

  Matti Harrold sat across from her supervisor’s desk, stunned as much by what he was asking of her as she was by the president’s sudden death.

  “Do you understand what your assignment is?” he asked without a hint of expression.

  “Yes sir,” she replied, refocusing. “Though I am confused.”

  “By what?” He was looking down at his desk, tapping on a closed letter sized folder. It was stamped “Secret” at the top left.

  “Well, sir,” she said hesitantly, “we don’t deal in human intelligence. We protect American systems and information. We collect adversarial signal intelligence only. Executive Order 12333 prohibits gathering or sharing information about US citizens. Isn’t this out of the realm of what we do?”

  She’d often impressed teachers and superiors with her ability to rattle off long streams of text or complicated sets of numbers. Technically, she was an Eidetiker, the name given to the estimated one in a thousand adults with an eidetic memory. It was a gift that had faded with age, as it did with most eidetic children. But she still possessed a significant ability to mentally retain detailed images for long periods of time.

  Her memory wasn’t truly photographic, but she could filter out the clutter and focus on particular images and structures. Matti knew there were always skeptics who thought photographic or eidetic memory was a farce. Even her own therapist, who’d helped her through the darkest days of her adolescence, doubted Matti’s ability until she’d recalled to him the verbatim details of police reports and eyewitness accounts from the night her mother died. They were pieces to a code she’d never been able to crack. But her memory wouldn’t let her let go of it. It was a gift and a curse. And at the moment, she knew her boss was cursing it.

  Her supervisor lifted his gaze to her without lifting his head. “No, Harrold,” he said. “There are many things we do here at NSA which are outside the realm of ‘what we do’. The Edward Snowden debacle should have made that clear to you. You’ve read the classified briefs on what that traitor did and did not reveal.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matti said. “I read the Snowden briefs and saw the news accounts.”

  “And if you recall,” he continued, “that same order 12333 directs all departments and agencies to share the responsibility of gathering intelligence.

  “SIGINT,” he offered without averting his glare, “is what the Congress asks publicly of us. But there are cases in which it is better we ask forgiveness than permission. This, Harrold, is one of those cases. Are you up to this?”

  Matti frowned. “Yes, sir.”

  She wanted to remind her boss the NSA was an agency born from a single memorandum in 1951. CIA director Walter Bedell Smith wrote to then secretary of the National Security Council, James Lay, that ‘control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective’. The memo suggested a detailed study of communications intelligence, which was approved and completed by mid-1952.

  But here she was now with all of that history shoved into a box marked “irrelevant”. Tradition did not matter; this was about the future.

  “Since 9/11,” her supervisor instructed, “we have found ourselves stepping on the toes of every acronym you can name.” He was leaning back in his chair, his hand still on the closed folder. “It is a painful dance amongst competing agencies that keeps us safe. To that end, our ‘responsibility’ is not limited to SIGINT. If anything, you should know that the Paris bombings, the Brussels attacks, all of them are giving us the ammunition we need to more effectively counteract the damage Snowden did.”

  Matti wished she’d never challenged her boss. It was unlike her to question authority. There was an order to things that she always accepted. But this assignment puzzled Matti. It was out of order. It didn’t follow the prescribed rules. Maybe, she thought, that was why I questioned the validity of the charge. She rubbed her elbows with her fingers.

  Her boss nodded. “We have an asset who has alerted us to a scenario that may require drastic action on our part. You’ll be the primary contact, will handle all levels and types of intelligence from this asset, and keep me informed of what you learn. We are on a tight time frame here. I need real, actionable information.” He pushed the file folder across the desk to Matti and waved his hand to shoo her from his office.

  She picked up the folder and stood to leave. As she reached for the handle of the door, she stopped and turned.

  “Sir?” She wanted crystal clarity.

  He’d turned his back to her and was beginning to punch numbers into his gray phone. “Yes?”

  “I report to you alone? I await contact from the asset? I do not initiate, correct?”

  “Yes to each of your questions. Gray line only. Nothing emailed. Period. And nothing written unless it is sent to me alone.”

  “Why me, sir?” Matti ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head slightly. She was unclear why a mid-level SIGINT analyst had been chosen for such an unusual, high-level assignment. It didn’t fit the pattern.

  He stopped dialing and turned to look her in the eye. “The asset requested a woman handler,” he said. “We obliged. There is additional ongoing surveillance. You will have access to what I determine you need. And as it states in the guidebook, which I am sure you’ve memorized, everything is ‘need to know’ only.”

  “Understood.” She assumed that was why, until that moment, dealing with human intelligence as an NSA analyst had never entered her mind.

  Until now she’d never needed to know.

  Chapter 2

  Sir Spencer Thomas stirred the Chivas Regal Royal Salute with his left pinkie then sucked the rare liquid from his finger.

  He’d saved the fifty-year-old scotch since 2003 when it was gifted to him at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Now was as good a time as any to self-medicate with a ten-thousand-dollar bottle of Strathisla malted scotch.

  From his high-back, brown leather chair in his suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel, he could see the White House, the Washing
ton Monument, and the fifty-two-inch LCD television alit with coverage of President Foreman’s sudden death. The news was minutes old and already the spin doctors were talking succession.

  The body isn’t even cold yet, he thought and crossed his legs.

  He took a sip from the leaded glass and listened to the commentary on television.

  “What complicates matters so much,” opined the pundit on the screen, “is that the president’s death comes so soon after the prolonged illness and death of the former vice president. It leaves us with a bit of a constitutional crisis. The replacement nominee is confirmed but hasn’t taken the oath. Does this mean the Speaker of the House becomes president? Does she take the reins only until VP nominee Blackmon is sworn in? Who is in control right now?”

  At the bottom of the screen flashed a crawl of announcements. Sir Spencer muted the television as he read the information moving from right to left across the screen.

  Wall Street trading suspended after sharp 900-point drop. Mourners gather outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cabinet meets in emergency session in White House. Leadership vacuum not a concern, says Speaker Jackson. Doctors say Foreman’s last checkup revealed no health issues. Aneurysm suspected in President Foreman’s sudden death. Autopsy is scheduled for late tonight with results tomorrow.

  Sir Spencer took another sip. The scotch was smooth and it finished with a creamy taste. He stood from the chair, using his left hand to balance his six-foot-five-inch frame as he rose. It was a simple task that had become increasingly difficult with age and indulgence. Sighing, he stepped to the window overlooking the People’s House and thought about the incredible opportunity fate had chosen to bestow upon him.

  The possibilities!

  He believed deeply in a broad, one-world government in which all people were protected and managed with equanimity. That government would need a strong America to lead the way.

  The death of a president and the ensuing uncertainty might be exactly what was needed for America to regain her authority and rightful place in the hierarchy of nations as the transformation of global power began its needed shift.