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  “What do you think President Pound would have to say about that?”

  “Is Pound still president?” Thorne replied. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  The host couldn’t help but laugh, then held up Thorne’s bestselling book, Don’t F*ck With We The People.

  The book’s title made Hudson think about Cherry Tree, the name he’d given his plan for using the people to rid the world of the REMies. He needed someone on the outside to rally the masses. Maybe Hudson could make sure the truth got out, but getting large numbers to take to the streets, boycott certain institutions, and galvanize all the diverse factions to demand change with one voice, would be almost impossible to do within the confines of the office of the president.

  Could Thorne help? Am I insane to even think of asking him?

  He smiled at the thought. Don’t F*ck With We The People. Hudson knew he was right. Thorne could help.

  After a report reviewing the little progress made on the investigation of who was responsible for the attack on Air Force One, the next segment featured two former officials from previous administrations talking about White House leaks. Many presidents had leak problems. In Hudson’s first six months, there’d been almost no leaks from the executive branch, but in the past few months they had started springing up, and in recent weeks they were almost daily. Crane had run them through Gypsy, trying to discover the source, but so far the sophisticated program had failed to produce anything conclusive. It did verify what they already suspected; that the leaks were an attempt to sway opinion to support war with China.

  The damned REMies, Hudson thought. Vonner wants me to take it slow and not push. The hell with that, I’m going forward anyway. Let’s see how many fronts they can fight on at once.

  Melissa walked in the room, putting on an earring.

  “Wow, you look fantastic,” Hudson said, seeing his wife adorned in a white and green dress designed by Martinus Andreas. As First Lady, it was no surprise that she’d graced countless fashion and political magazine covers, but Melissa had appeared on the front of just as many business publications. “Beauty and brains, how did I get so lucky?” Hudson had often said.

  While trying to decide what to wear, he told Melissa about his latest idea to use Thorne to implement Cherry Tree.

  “You’re crazy,” Melissa said, sitting on a sofa. “The man wants you dead or destroyed.”

  “Do you remember the letter from the former president?” Hudson asked, ignoring her statement while pulling on a pair of dark jeans.

  She gave him a look that said, How could I forget? It had been a rhetorical question. Hudson knew his wife never forgot even a syllable she’d heard. He often joked that Melissa remembered things she’d never even been told.

  He pulled out the letter from a locked drawer and read the last section.

  You ran on a promise of change. It may not go as you had planned, but there are many ways to change things. Always start with the preamble and go about it as if handling a photograph in a dark room. Careful and conscientious resolve will produce good results. With your love of history, I know you’ll find solace in the knowledge that all your predecessors have been where you are now. The key, my friend, is your intelligence. As for my remaining advice: keep the Constitution handy. The framers were incredibly wise. Just look at Article II—that is how to proceed. And rely on the Father. His will be done.

  “When I first read this, I thought that “Father” meant God. It doesn’t. It’s the Father of our country, George Washington.”

  “So?” Melissa, a good listener, had a talent for giving the appearance of enthusiastic interest to something she’d heard before, even many times before.

  “And the ‘Article II, that is how to proceed’ I assumed meant Article II of the Constitution, which deals with the president and the executive branch, where the framers laid out the structure of the government.”

  “Makes sense.” She looked for a necktie, hoping he’d finally wear one again, but then noticed they’d all been cleared out.

  “Yeah, but what we call ‘Amendments’ are written in the Constitution as ‘Articles’,” Hudson said, pacing the room. “So the Article II in the letter is talking about the second Amendment. ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’”

  “Why didn’t the president just write that?”

  “Because the REMies read the letter. Don’t you see? The president was trying to help me!” Hudson’s arms were flailing as he spoke excitedly. “And that’s not all. Remember, it was the portrait of Washington that made me think of using the people to fight the REMies. Well, I checked. The former president had that portrait of Washington put up there just before I took office.”

  “That does seem odd to change the portraits in the final days,” Melissa said, pausing to look closely into his eyes.

  “And it wasn’t just one portrait changed. Lincoln and Kennedy were also put up. Before that, Roosevelt, Jefferson, and Truman had been hanging. It’s no accident, Melissa. It was a message.” He buttoned up a light gray collared shirt.

  “What’s the message?” Melissa asked, getting up and walking over to a tray where she poured herself some orange juice. “I could see Washington, but why Lincoln? Kennedy?”

  “The message is that it’s possible to beat the REMies. Lincoln presided over a civil war—”

  “Lincoln was assassinated.”

  “The REMies killed him.”

  “Oh, how encouraging,” Melissa said. “Kennedy was also assassinated.”

  “Yeah . . . You know what I think? He tried to defy the REMies and they had him ambushed in Dallas.”

  “It sounds less like a clue to encourage you, and more like a warning to keep you in line.”

  “Maybe if Washington wasn’t there, maybe if the letter didn’t point me toward the Constitution and specifically the Second Amendment.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, handing him a charcoal-colored sport coat.

  “‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,’” he repeated, putting on the coat and looking approvingly in the mirror.

  “You want Thorne to help you sell an armed uprising?” Melissa asked. “Isn’t that what NorthBridge is doing?”

  “No one has ever proven a connection,” Hudson said, taking a sip of her orange juice. “And I’m not talking about an uprising. I just want the people to say ‘enough!’ I wish it could happen with people just gathering by the thousands, standing silently night after night and shaking their keys.”

  Melissa looked puzzled.

  “That’s how then Czechoslovakia freed itself from forty-one years of communist rule and oppression.”

  “Shaking their keys?” she asked, hearing something new in his voice.

  “The people had finally had enough. Without benefit of newspapers, radio, television, and before the internet and social media existed, solely by word of mouth, they began to gather in mid-November 1989, and by December twenty-ninth, it was all over. They were free!”

  “What did they do?”

  “Like Mandela in South Africa, the man they wanted as their leader had been in prison. They petitioned for his release, and in the early days of their new freedom, the poet, Vaclav Havel, became their elected president in the first democratic election since 1946.”

  “Amazing,” Melissa said. “But I still don’t understand about the keys.”

  “They symbolized the unlocking of doors for them and saying ‘goodbye, it’s time to go home,’ to the communists.”

  “Great story, but things are much different here.”

  “The fact that the people are armed just means the REMies will have to listen,” Hudson said.

  “I think the letter was a warning. Don’t wind up like Lincoln and Kennedy.”

  “Sure, it’s also a warning, but it’s mostly an answer�
��revolution, civil war. The people will topple the tyrannical government controlled by the elites.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Tarka measured the remaining moments until she would drop into the warm ocean. Counting seconds was something she did automatically. Every mission came down to seconds, or, more precisely, fractions of seconds. She knew everything she could do measured in the tiniest slivers of time—how long a muscle movement would take, a breath, a sprint to cover, to reach a target. Success or failure, living and dying, all came down to the timing. She could also calculate the remaining darkness prior to dawn, or in daylight, she’d gauge the flow of shadows, the sound of a breeze through the trees.

  In this case, the moonless night would provide most of their cover for the operation. The jungle, the tides, wind direction, ocean depths, all had been taken into account.

  Her entire life was the mission. Whatever the current one was, it acted as friend, lover, work, relaxation, purpose. However, this one was even more important to her. Not because it meant so much to the president of the United States, whom she’d already spent more than a year protecting, but because the woman she was seeking to rescue was a member of Tarka’s sisterhood. Like her, Rochelle Rogers had paid so much for events of their youth which were beyond their control.

  As Tarka dropped into the dark water, she worked to release the distractions. Like Rochelle, Tarka learned young the desperate agony of losing a loved one, to be crushed under the weight of being a victim. The two women also shared the empowering feeling of taking matters into their own hands, quenching a thirst for revenge so raw that one could kill easily and often. Having read Rochelle’s file, Tarka had been horrified at the events leading to the assassination of the Ohio governor, and impressed by the woman’s determination to want to make the perpetrators pay.

  And now a man Tarka despised was making Rochelle suffer yet again, imprisoning her yet again, and doing who-knew-what to her yet again. Tarka considered Bastendorff the devil incarnate, and not just because he was a master manipulator. Vonner, the man she worked for, shared that ugly trait. She considered that an unfortunate fact about her employer, yet Vonner’s version seemed somehow far more palatable than Bastendorff’s. Each man had used riots, lies, conjured news, fabricated causes, financial enslavement, coups, assassinations, whatever, to advance his agenda.

  After leaving Tarka and the rest of the extraction team, the boat set off to their rendezvous point, careful to keep a safe distance from the island until the VS agents had Rochelle. As she SCUBAed toward the beach, she was having difficulty clearing her mind. This was the closest mission she’d ever had to Bastendorff, whom she referred to as “sinister”. The REMie billionaire had a long history of sponsoring terrorists like those who had killed her parents. In fact, although she didn't have all the evidence yet, she had enough to conclude that Bastendorff had been the “master” behind the murder of her parents.

  He robbed me of my childhood, she thought as she adjusted the speed of her Underwater Propulsion Jet machine, or “UPjet”, the seconds still counting off in her head. She knew Bastendorff would never be at this remote island in the Philippines, but taking Rochelle from him would strike the first blow, help to undermine his grand scheme, and move her closer to revenge.

  Right now, though, she had to banish those thoughts, to forget Bastendorff even had anything to do with the mission. The island, anything but a fortress, was still well defended by cold and battle-hardened soldiers the billionaire had recruited from the vast network of mercenaries regularly used by REMies to do their dirty work. There was no backup for her team, no armed helicopters on standby. This was a lean, stealth operation that must remain invisible.

  The team emerged from the water twenty-five feet apart from each other and joined into a single unit only when they were sure they had not been detected. This part of the island was not monitored by electronic surveillance due to the impenetrable jungle. That meant they would have to navigate around the perimeter, sticking to the shoreline until they reached more open beaches, almost a mile around the rocky waters. The high tide left the beach non-existent, and the rocks, roots, and other hazards in the water meant their UPjets were useless.

  Utilizing night vision goggles, the team pushed on, and thirty-three long minutes later, they reached the first solar panel-adorned com-tower. Tarka spoke in hand signals. One agent peeled off and found the door. The tower, located at the beginning of the surveillance area, also told them they were less than five hundred feet from a guard station.

  They hit silently, in fast, practiced motions that gave the man no time to react. He wasn’t killed because there was no need. Instead, he was injected with a fast-acting sedative and bound. He’d likely awaken in a few hours, by which time Tarka and her team would be long gone.

  Picking up speed on the well-maintained trail, they were rejoined by the agent who’d remained at the first solar tower to sabotage the monitoring equipment. The team successfully repeated the procedure at the next two com-towers and guard stations. Advanced intel had shown there would be no other obstacles between them and the main compound, located a quarter of a mile inland. They would ignore and avoid the two remaining com-towers and guard stations located on the island’s northeast coast.

  The last guard station they’d hit had been located at a long pier, where two small powerboats were moored. After searching the entire area, the team put a series of small explosives in place. They moved silently onto an area they called the “crossroad.” One trail continued around the shore to the two remaining com-towers. The other, bigger trail, more like a narrow dirt road, went to the main compound.

  Tarka then led them swiftly, but cautiously, down the edges of the narrow dirt road toward the main compound where Rochelle was being held. After the extraction, the plan called for them to retrace this part of the route back to the pier. One of the powerboats would be their transport out to the rendezvous point.

  As they reached the end of the road, the team spread out and took up position on the edge of the jungle, where they waited and silently watched.

  “I don’t like it,” Tarka said to her second in command as she looked through night vision binoculars.

  “Why not?” the man asked. “It’s exactly as we expected. Three exterior guards in front, two of them look asleep. Two more should be in the rear. They sure don’t seem to be expecting trouble.”

  “I know. It all matches the satellite data,” she said in a quiet, tense voice. “There should be a total of thirteen soldiers on the island, we’ve taken out three, there are two more at the other stations, we’re looking at three—”

  “That’s eight,” the man said, finishing her tally. “Plus two in the back and three inside. Let’s do this and pull our target before the sun blows our cover.”

  Tarka scanned the trees, the roof, even turned the binoculars back up the road they’d just come down. “It seems too easy,” she muttered. They could take out the three soldiers in front in a matter of seconds . . .

  “Come on,” her second in command urged. “There’s no option to abort this one,” he reminded her. Most missions were go or no-go, at least to a point, but as soon as they’d slipped into the water, this one was a go. She knew international ramifications, the fate of Pound’s presidency, the lives of her unit, and, of course, the freedom of Rochelle Rogers, all rested in her actions over the next few seconds.

  She took one last quick scan of the area. “Okay, go.” She pointed to three of the VS agents who had already been designated. Those three would skirt the perimeter, take out the two rear guards, and come in from the back of the structure at the same time Tarka and the other three hit the front.

  One hundred and forty seconds later, they fired the first muffled shots.

  Moments later, they were inside.

  Eighty-two seconds after that, Tarka’s team had taken out the inside men and found their target.

  “Rochelle Rogers?” Tarka asked for verification.

  In the gl
are of Tarka’s flashlight, Rochelle awoke, startled, looking older than forty-six. The skinny black woman could have been sixty, but Tarka knew it was her, and didn’t wait for an answer.

  “We’re here to rescue you,” Tarka said, trying to force a smile, wanting to be as gentle as possible, but knowing they weren’t safe yet. In the dim glow of her flashlight, the house looked like an upscale vacation rental. Nice prison if you had to be in one. “I need you to cooperate. We’ve got a quick walk to the pier and a short boat ride. Can you do it? Are you okay?”

  Rochelle nodded, looking around. Tarka spotted shoes and handed them to Rochelle, who was pulling on a sweater over her night clothes.

  “Let’s go,” Tarka said to the two team members who’d gone into the bedroom with her. They picked up the rest of them as they moved through the house and back out onto the road.

  Rochelle managed to keep up as the team moved swiftly through the darkness. Tarka, with her night vision goggles, watched every tree they passed with suspicion. She simultaneously counted steps and seconds, constantly calculating contingencies and fallback positions. Near the end of the road, Tarka sent two agents ahead to be certain the pier was still clear and to ready the boat. Another was sent to watch the beach leading to the northeast side of the island to make sure soldiers from the remaining outposts didn’t show up.

  She paused to give her agents a head start to their assignments and let Rochelle catch her breath. That’s when the trouble began and Tarka stopped counting.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It was unlike the Wizard to send word for a call. Usually he waited for Hudson to check in with him, so when Schueller gave his father the message that the Wizard needed to speak with him right away, Hudson knew something big had happened.

  “What is it?” Hudson asked as the matrix pattern ended and the Wizard came through, staring into the camera with an expression of dread. Hudson’s small hope that the Wizard had some good news crumbled.