Operation Damocles Read online

  Tanner exchanged a look with Miller. Miller’s face was as passive as ever, but Tanner noted a hard glint in his eyes. They got up and left together. When they reached the outer foyer at the end of the wing, Tanner stopped a moment and looked at Miller.

  “Well, Joe, what happens now?”

  Miller returned the look for a long moment, as if weighing his next words. “Don’t be in Washington on the eleventh,” he said. He turned and left.

  XII

  Joseph Miller left Harold Tanner standing in thought just outside the White House, and got into his dark-blue Lincoln sedan. He instructed his driver to take him home, and sinking back into the plushly upholstered seat, he wistfully observed people on the tree-shaded streets, going about their affairs, seemingly without any cares. Tourists in shorts and colorful tops, with Washington monuments and patriotic slogans emblazoned on them, gawking and taking photos. Kids in multi-hued recreation-wear laughing and playing, or trailing along, bored, as they tagged after their parents. Happy people on vacation, seemingly without a care in the world.

  He knew their lives were not that simple, but in relation to the burden of foreknowledge that he carried, he envied them their blissful ignorance.

  Miller had worked for years with the economic leaders of the world as a United States emissary to the European Economic Council. Most Americans, if they had heard of the EEC at all, had no idea what it actually was, or what its aims were.

  Ostensibly, the objective of the EEC was to standardize currency and business practices between European states, and to further regional European interests in world commerce. By necessity, to some degree, they were involved in the control of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which of course included the United States and other western hemisphere countries. Over the years, they, too, had been infiltrated by wealthy corporate stockholders and bought advisors.

  One of their stated objectives was the institution of a cashless society. The subject had already been broached in magazine “feeler” articles in the U.S. and elsewhere, just to gauge public reaction. As usual, there wasn’t much of one. There wouldn’t be until legislation began to be enacted, and too late, people became aware of what was happening.

  The advantages of a cashless society that were touted to consumers included the convenience of paying bills and store purchases with one debit card and allowing the government to keep track of individual bank balances, interest accruals, etc. Miller smiled. Big Brother taking care of all that nasty, old bookkeeping for us.

  Another benefit was the savings in government expenditures for the cost of printing currency. A few billions saved here and there added up to a good bit of pork that could be spent profitably, someplace else.

  The unspoken downside was that the economic coalition espousing the “new world order” would then control world economic exchange. Individuals would not be able to sequester wealth in any significant amounts, and would be totally dependent on government regulators to keep a tally of their electronic capital.

  It meant absolute economic control, since the government could freeze an individual bank account at any moment, and even feign “computer error,” if they wanted to do it without legal sanction. What tangible proof would there be? Everything would be based on electronic records, including property transactions, inventories of goods, home mortgages—everything but grass-roots barter would be regulated. Even that would be discouraged in the end, by force, if it became substantial enough to permit a large underground economy.

  It was possibly the largest conspiracy in the history of the world. It was certainly the most ambitious criminal enterprise ever undertaken. Its goal was nothing less than total world domination.

  Miller reflected back to a day in his office in Geneva, three years before. He had considered resigning his position, outraged by the discovery of their agenda, but then he had decided it would be better to play along. Announcing the plot to the world would only have confirmed what many intelligent insiders already suspected. It might have made a side-bar article in a few papers and news magazines, but it would have been downplayed by the respective governments and forgotten in a week. He would have been forgotten in a month. Position and stature were extremely tenuous these days. Accidents were so easily arranged.

  No, if anything was to be done about it, it had to be done from the inside, or at least done by people with access to inside knowledge. Miller had decided to be that man. He had made himself invaluable to those within the circle. He had become an indispensable part of their plan by becoming the information filter, the nexus of communications and negotiations within the international economic brotherhood. He had even suggested a few ingenious methods for achieving their goals, in order to ingratiate himself to them.

  And to that end, he had divorced the woman he loved dearly, his wife of four years. He thanked God that they had been unable to have children. He had distanced himself from her and her relations in order to protect them, to let them become anonymous again.

  Miller remade himself into a man without a past, erasing official records of family, friends, acquaintances, school. He substituted a faultless history of an imaginary life, a life that might have been led by another Joseph Miller, if he had not died in an auto accident shortly after leaving military service in the 1970s. Birth records had been traded, along with social security accounts and early financial histories.

  His low-profile, but powerful, position had been perfect to accomplish his ends. He had high-level access, without the surveillance incurred by public prominence.

  When he was selected as Vanderbilt’s running mate, the false history had become concrete in the records of the world. There was no reason for anyone to doubt it, no need to probe into it. People he had never met remembered what he was like as a child—his girlfriends, his college pranks, his wonderful alter-ego parents that now rested under tombstones in Sadalia, Missouri.

  Those innocent references had been told of secret military missions, of plastic surgery and a falsified death for their childhood chum, all for the sake of national security. It explained away their questions and substituted a mythic hero, someone they would immediately embrace with territorial pride and unreasoned defense.

  As an only child, his other relations were either distant or dead, and easily handled by people passing as FBI agents. The hometown city fathers expressed regret that they hadn’t known him better, but one or two remembered his folks with fondness. His war record showed commendable service in the Desert Storm action during the early nineties. He was a hometown hero.

  His cover was not only solid, but unquestionable because of its prominence and open simplicity. Nothing flashy, just a good, solid background. He hoped it would hold up for another few months, at any rate.

  Miller sighed and looked inward, barely conscious of the light-and-shadow play of the trees and buildings on the windows of his passing car, and the humming rhythm of the tires on the brick-paved streets. He crossed the Potomac and headed toward Arlington. Bad times were coming.

  XIII

  At 10:00 p.m. Pacific Time, on the evening of August 10, an encrypted telephone conversation took place between two of the conspirators involved in the subjugation of the United States government.

  “Well, my boy, I’m afraid we’re finished. I halfway expected it to end this way. I guess, deep down, I just hoped that the bastards would have enough compassion that they would capitulate, rather than risk the lives of millions.”

  “Hector, I’m amazed at you,” the other voice responded. “You of all people should know that the only lives those bastards care about are their own.” The speaker sighed.

  “We can’t quit. After all this time working together, I thought I knew you. I’m disappointed, not so much in you, as in myself. I guess I was just wishing for your convictions and philosophy to mirror my own, and I made myself believe it. I suppose I need accomplices to reassure me that I’m not a lone lunatic. Nobody else seems to give a damn, so why am I beating myself up ove
r them?”

  “Why are you, son? I know you believe in what you’re trying to do. You want to save the world. If that makes you a lunatic, I guess all of us are crazy. There are ten of us, all supposedly intelligent people, who have worked right along with you these last two years. I’ve been proud of your accomplishments. We all have. The problem is, the world doesn’t want to be saved. So why torture yourself over them?”

  “Hector, I treasure all my friends, and I’ve been blessed with many good ones, but out of all of them, including even Paul, you are the one that I thought really understood what this was all about, the absolute necessity of it. You are one of the few people that I thought would really stick by his convictions to the bitter end. You’re the closest thing to a father I’ve ever known. Save Paul, there hasn’t been anyone closer since Judy died. What you’re saying makes me feel incredibly alone and hopeless right now, and a damned fool to boot.”

  “Hell, son, you’re not alone. We tried. No one can do more than that. We held out a life preserver to the public. They’re just too timid to reach for it. They won’t fight City Hall. Either that, or they actually believe the propaganda they’re being constantly subjected to. I’m sure some of them do. You figure those under twenty, by and large, don’t have the experience to weigh what they’re being told, and those over forty are so frustrated with the futility of trying to change things by the vote, that they’ve given up and don’t participate anymore. We may as well face it. Democracy has failed . . . failed for lack of interest.”

  “Not yet, it hasn’t.”

  “Come on, Leland, what more can we do? It’s time to give it up and get on with our lives.”

  There was a pause, as if by mutual agreement, where neither man spoke. After a time, the one called Leland broke the silence. His voice was resigned, determined. “I won’t let it happen, Hector. If they win, progress comes to a halt. We will sink into a dark age that will make life in Russia during the Iron Curtain era—even Germany under Hitler—look like the good old days. All the arts and finer things will vanish. Whole technologies will be lost. We can’t let it happen.

  “If we don’t strive to evolve, and to become something more than bloody, scrabbling vermin, the whole species has no reason to exist. If mankind is going to make it to the stars, and become a mature species, they have to have liberty. Maybe they just don’t have it in them. Maybe what we do won’t matter in the end. Maybe I’ll go down in history as the greatest monster of all time. All I know is that I am going to do what I can to keep the bastards from taking over. Whatever chance there is, mankind is going to have it.”

  “But what can you do? They’ve called our bluff. Our big stick has failed. There is nothing left but to cover our tracks and—”

  Angrily, “Does everyone feel like you do, Hector? Are they all ready to throw in the towel?”

  “Don’t get upset, my boy. The committee met this morning. We don’t like it any better than you do, but there just isn’t any use. If we go on destroying deserted bases and utility systems, and making a nuisance of ourselves, it will only prejudice people against us. God forbid, even if we fired on a small town somewhere, even Washington, and killed thousands of people, we would be branded as criminals and murderers. It would only turn them further away from us, and make the government agenda easier. They’ll think of us just as if we were any two-bit, foreign terrorists, and they would be right. It’s a no-win situation.”

  When he answered, the one called Leland was calmer. “I knew the others would cave in, Hector, but I never thought you would. For the record, I agree. We can’t continue just being an irritant, and I won’t destroy a bunch of innocents in a small town as another warning. I won’t escalate this thing incrementally, till we become the tyrants. If we don’t carry out our threat, we’ll just become ridiculous. That’s why we’re going to go through with it.”

  “You can’t be serious? Millions would die.”

  “Nothing else is going to move them. If they have a choice between passivity and a fight, they aren’t going to fight. We knew that starting out. I intend to remove all their options.”

  “The committee will never agree to it, son. Never. They’ve decided to destroy the weapon system. In fact, it is to be done at midnight tonight. It’s over, my boy.”

  “No, Hector, it isn’t. As I said, I knew the others would fall apart in the eleventh hour. So, after the last warning shot, I changed the control codes.”

  “What do you mean? For God’s sake, Leland, you can’t really mean to fire that thing at inhabited areas. It was supposed to scare them into action, not kill them. We trusted you, above all people. We all agreed it would take three of us to initiate the firing sequence. Everything we do requires agreement by all the leaders. Do you realize what you’re doing? It’s like the plot of a bad science fiction movie—one man having the power to destroy the world. It’s monstrous. It’s insane.”

  “Maybe, but just a few weeks ago, we all agreed that our society is insane, because it has permitted it to come to this. Regardless of what you and the others may think, that’s the way it is, and you may as well accept it. I don’t intend to argue. We have to have the guts to stop them, or we may as well give up and just eradicate ourselves. I don’t believe it has to be that way. If I did, I wouldn’t be doing this. What would be the use?”

  “For so many to die, so many innocents. They didn’t make things this way.”

  “Didn’t they? The ones who bow and scrape when one of the hired hands comes to town? The silly women that vote for someone because of his looks, or his stand on ‘women’s issues’? The stupid men who vote for someone because he espouses an agenda that will make them money, without regard for their impact on anything or anybody else? The exploiters of racial bias that swing the minority vote simply because they appeal to minority interests? The chronic complainers that always bitch about conditions, but don’t ever do anything to change things? They gave power to the civil servants. They entrusted them with their very lives, and refused to exercise the controls that might have kept them in check.

  “We are all to blame. God did not ordain that some people shall have the right to rule over others. We did that, by our apathy. We permit it. Rats and politicians simply get bolder if they get away with something, and we have allowed them to get away with damned near anything. Well, not any more, Hector. Not anymore.”

  ###

  Later that night, another encrypted call went through, this time to Geneva, Switzerland.

  “Conrad, I’m sorry to get you up in the middle of the night; I’m afraid I have news.”

  “Hello, my friend. You forget the time difference. It’s early afternoon here. I’m lounging about the house today. No point in working, now. Nikoli is off making calls, dismantling everything.”

  “Well, you had better tell him to stop. That’s what I’m calling about. It’s not yet over, after all.”

  “You didn’t destroy the machine? But we all agreed.”

  “Leland didn’t. I assumed that he would follow our lead, whatever we decided. Apparently, he knew us better than we knew ourselves. He took sole control of the system a few days ago. He fully intends to go through with it, Conrad.”

  “What do you mean, he’s taken sole control?” The voice carried astonishment.

  Resigned, the other replied, “Exactly that. He anticipated that we would waffle when it came down to it. He changed the control codes.”

  “Gott im Himmell. Where, Hector? Where will he strike?”

  “The primary corridor of power in the United States. All the nerve centers and support networks are headquartered along the eastern seaboard, from Washington to New York. Government, business, insurance, banking—all the controls and the people with the know-how to reestablish them are there. He intends to wipe the slate clean.”

  “What can we do?”

  “It’s my opinion, as clear as that can be after being up half the night, that we have to support him. We have to proceed with our preparations, j
ust as we planned. As he said, we have no other options.”

  “Can we reacquire control of the device?”

  “How? It’s a trillion-bit encryption key. It would take months just to break down the repetitive sequences and begin testing probabilities. The control system has four completely different base vernaculars, one each for targeting, navigation, propulsion and system security. Leland designed the thing. The security system has a dead man’s switch. If we start mucking around, we could even trigger it accidentally. The answer is no, not in your lifetime.”

  “Then we must stop work on the other systems. We can’t add to his arsenal.”

  “I’m afraid that he insists we complete the work, Conrad. He anticipated that argument, too. It’s logical that he would.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “He said that if you should refuse, he will translate the weapon across the Atlantic and begin systematically destroying Europe, one country at a time. If the weapons are not ready to launch, on schedule, he will destroy your home country—Germany. Each week thereafter, until the weapons are in place and he has assured himself that they are functional, he will destroy another country.”

  “My God, Hector, we’ve given a madman the power to destroy humanity.”

  “He’s not mad, Conrad.”

  “No? You think of him as your own, Hector. You would defend him, no matter what. Can’t you do something? Reason with him.”

  “I’ve tried, and as hypocritical as I feel, I’ll ask you the same question he asked me: Why did you help him do it if you never intended to go through with it? And I’ll tell you the answer: It was an adventure. We wanted to see if we could do it. We talked, and we planned, just as though we were all committed to going through with it, but we secretly knew, even if it was just in our subconscious, that we could always back out at the last minute. Now, we’re horrified to find out that we can’t.