“I have someone else overseeing phase one.” He paused, not needing to explain that he wouldn’t give their name due to OpSec—Operation Security. “And I want you to head up phase two. You know the details?”
Leland did know the details. There were, as they spoke, a hidden army of Movement soldiers in the city ready to perform their role in the revolution.
“Good,” replied Butler. He leaned his gaze around Leland and shouted toward the door. “Suzanne?” he yelled. Seconds later the door opened and a woman walked in. Leland knew little about her, other than the fact that she wasn’t ex-military but worked in an office which dealt with building planning permissions and regulations before she abandoned the decadent city lifestyle and devoted herself to the Movement. She wore cargo trousers and a drab green T-shirt with a heavy sidearm strapped to her right thigh.
Suzanne handed Leland a Manilla envelope, which he took and guessed it held all but twenty sheets of paper. She nodded to him, smiled, and left the room.
Colonel Butler sat at his desk again, leafing through papers as his attention was already moving on to the next item on the agenda.
“Your contact details are in there,” he told Leland, “and, son?”
“Sir?” he said, turning back from the door with his hand paused on the handle.
“We are T-minus seventy-two hours and change until Go. Make us proud,” he told him over a steely gaze.
“Yes, sir,” he said simply, returning to his truck to make the 250-mile journey to New York City.
Just after Leland left the Movement headquarters, Suzanne changed into a smart skirt and jacket over a white blouse, suggestively left with one button too many undone. She knew how to blend in, and how to be seen by men at the same time. She was driven out of the woods by another fit-looking young man in fatigues to the town of Underwood, where she got out and switched her muddy boots for a pair of glossy high heels.
Climbing into an anonymous-looking dark sedan, she adjusted her seat and mirrors, checked the sun visor for the relevant documentation for her lease of the car, reapplied an additional layer of lipstick, and drove south.
LIFE IS A MACHINE SET IN MOTION BY MONEY
Tuesday 2 p.m. – Steakhouse in Albany
Suzanne Emmerson, formerly of the New York State Department, perused the menu in the steakhouse near the Hudson River as she sipped her vanilla latte and waited casually for her guest. As much as she was dedicated to the cause, to the overthrow of a modern society that was so accepting that it practically welcomed terrorists into their towns and cities, she still enjoyed the small luxuries in life when she had the opportunity. Camp coffee and steak got boring after a while.
A nervous-looking young man entered clutching a battered leather satchel a little too tightly and scanned the room. Suzanne saw him come in as she had strategically asked the waitress for a booth offering her a clear view of the only entrance and exit. She waited until he saw her and put on a broad, fake smile and waved at him as she stood.
She disliked the man. He lacked the vision of the men she was used to, and she looked down on him as a man who wouldn’t survive without fast food and internet access. Still, she—they—needed him, so she played nice.
“Hi!” she exclaimed, maybe a little too happily making up for her distain for the weak man. “How was the drive? How have you been?” she said, making their meeting seem innocuous to anyone who may be listening.
The man mumbled his responses, sullen and bitter as he had been for so many years that it became his personality.
The man, Quentin Aaronson, sat but still held tightly to his bag. A look of warning over a smile flashed from Suzanne’s eyes.
The message was clear: relax.
He had no idea how her group had found him, how they knew so much about him, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t really care. He had been forcibly ejected from MIT, marched off campus by security, and sent home in shame. Scientific journals, which once heralded him as a genius in the making, now shunned him. He was reduced to returning to his hometown, Boringsville Nowhere, and to a low-paid job repairing electrical items. He was forever known as the boy who threw away a career selling drugs to make his living expenses more manageable. He did not come from a rich or influential family, and nobody spoke up in his defense, so he served two years in a minimum-security state correctional center in Plymouth before returning to his parent’s house, having wasted the most promising years of his life and ruining any future prospects.
Now, this woman, who had walked into the store where he worked six months ago and offered him money—enough money to really make a difference—was there to collect.
Ordering herself a salad as a reprieve from the diet of fresh meat she usually lived on, she sipped her second latte and looked at him. He ordered a regular coffee with steak and eggs, well done.
“You can put the bag down,” she said quietly through her smile as the waitress walked away. Quentin relaxed and carefully placed the bag beside him. He knew it wouldn’t detonate just as well as she did, but the unit he had brought in to show her was still delicate and he didn’t want to damage it.
“You didn’t have to bring one in here,” she said softly as she looked out of the window and over the highways to where the Hudson River flowed out of sight.
“I thought you wanted a demonstration?” he said with a smile. He may not feel comfortable in dealing with her and the people she represented, incorrectly assuming that he was supplying arms to an organized crime group, but his wounded pride dictated that he should earn the ridiculous sum of money she was going to give him. She smiled in response.
They sat in silence until their food arrived, then they ate in silence. Suzanne had no great desire to hear the peevish young man lament about how unfair his life was.
“Can I get you guys anything else?” asked the annoyingly perky waitress.
“No thanks, honey, just the check please,” Suzanne answered. She left the table and returned shortly afterwards with a folded piece of paper. Suzanne looked at it, seeing the hand-written thanks signed by Gabby, who had put three kisses on the paper in the vain hope that she would get a bigger tip.
Suzanne paid the thirty-eight-dollar sum with two twenties, ignoring the attempt to illicit extra cash for someone she saw as simply doing their job. Quentin regarded her quizzically, not that she left such a small tip but more that he rarely saw anyone pay in cash any more.
“We don’t do plastic,” she told him, understanding his look.
“Do you do cell phones?” he asked her, retrieving his own from a pocket and holding down a button to switch it off before slipping it, along with his watch and wallet, into a thick bag.
“No,” she said, “we don’t.”
“Good,” he said, before wordlessly reaching into the satchel and audibly flicking a switch.
It was the strangest sensation, to be at the epicenter of a bomb blast without the bomb part. As one, the lights and the music in the restaurant blinked out. The coffee machine, a weaponized array of chrome spouts hissing steam, went slowly quiet. People looked around, checked their dead phones, and the ambient conversation grew louder as people asked what had happened.
Smiling to each other, Quentin and Suzanne rose from their booth and left. Walking side by side into the parking lot, Quentin pointed to a battered old car which he swore to himself would go as soon she paid him the rest of the money. He opened the trunk with the keys, flicked back a blanket and uncovered a dozen other devices like the one he had used in the restaurant. Nestled in between them was a similar device, only twelve times larger and already seated inside a wheeled suitcase as per her instructions. He handed her a sheaf of paper with the handwritten instructions for the devices and smiled, waiting for his money.