Chapter00

 

Billman saw his 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.

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 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.

A noise from the hall jerked his head around, as he studied the more illuminated hall beyond the campaign office, a hall he had seen cleaned earlier and the staff vanish and feared one 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.

Things seemed clearer back then when good guys were really good guys, and the press was someone that could be counted upon to protect public interest. These days, Billman could trust no one, knowing perfectly well that media had already taken a side, steering the election to the candidate of their choice.

But this was not his candidate.

Behind the scenes, even more ruthless people did even more ruthless things to assure that the public never actually got its chance to decide among the so called good guys.

The party – his party – wanted to crown a queen, and did it’s best to make sure of it, the evidence of which he now downloaded, along with a lot more.

He knew he traveled a dangerous path now that the election was over, and the queen bee had lost, and the media went on a rampage, orchestrating a political coup against the other party’s candidate.

The papers in Washington DC were on a witch hunt, and if they couldn’t find evidence to bring down the man who would be king, they would make it up – with the help of the queen bee, a well-orchestrated overthrow of government made to resemble Watergate, with one exception, 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 wasn’t the only one, only one tool of the party, working behind the scenes with media and others, the former President – the black man Billman had so admired – did as much to help this, too.

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 United States, complete with names, and amounts of bribes, and black mail, and death threats, and possibly even some people already disposed of.

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.

In the old days of the Pentagon Papers, someone could waltz into the offices of The New York Times or The Washington Post and feel safe.

Not now.

Now these and others respectable news agencies were involved, corrupted, their reporters more like CIA agents than wordsmiths, hiding behind the First Amendment like the assassins they were, killing people’s reputations with lies based on anonymous sources.

Billman couldn’t even go to the current president – if he could ever reach him – because nobody around the president could be trusted any more than media could, all those holdovers from the black president Billman once so admired, all waiting for their marching orders from the outside. Many of their names were in the documents he was stealing, too.

Billman could not even follow in the footsteps of the dead Sanders worker because the queen bee and her minions were wise to that, and elements of National Security watched every possible path to that door.

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 batter 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 cops 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 Newark.

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 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.