Hap squeezed his trigger first. Jones’ head snapped back sharply, the back of his cranium disintegrating as pieces of red and gray matter splattered onto the mossy green rocks. His body collapsed on the rocks. Hap didn’t move, keeping the scope of his Lapua Magnum focused on his fallen comrade and then raising it slowly to view the highway. He remained in position on the wet, grassy knoll for another seven minutes, until the unidentified man with Jones and Kamin exited his car and crossed the highway, approaching the bluff above the abandoned pier. The man crouched down in the grass of the bluff, looking through his binoculars until he located Jones’ near headless body lying on the rocks. He immediately drew his weapon and looked around cautiously. Hap pressed the trigger of his Lapua Magnum again and the man was thrown back in spread-eagle fashion with a hole the size of a grapefruit between his shoulder blades.
Hap jumped up from his prone position and ran toward his car, which he’d hidden beneath a cluster of pines. His third target would not be so easy, but he was determined to finish this himself. Without turning on his headlights, he drove to the highway where he turned right and continued another two hundred yards before stopping. He quickly worked his way through the trees and brush to the eastern side of the peninsula and then along another bluff overlooking the ocean, searching for the fishing boat that had brought Kamin and the other two to the island earlier in the evening.
Suddenly, there was a steep rise in the terrain and a pathway with cobblestone steps that took him into a thick grove of trees. When he emerged from the trees he was in full view of the secluded cove below. He pulled out his binoculars to examine the small pier. But Kamin was a step ahead of him, having already spied Hap through his own binoculars. By the time Hap dropped to the ground in a prone position and flipped the safety on his rifle, Kamin was five hundred yards farther away in the sixteen-foot fishing trawler and about to disappear behind the point of the cove. The independent contractor got out of his camper and prepared to take the shot.
“I’ve got it,” Hap said into his collar microphone. He fired his third round.
Kamin collapsed to the floor of the boat, his right arm and shoulder completely severed from his body. He was struggling to get up when Hap’s fourth round caught him in the chest and propelled him overboard. Kamin’s lifeless body rode the waves for several seconds before sinking out of sight.
Hap returned to his car and drove back to the knoll near the marina, parking under the same cluster of pines. He waited a few minutes and then walked down the dirt road to the gravel ramp leading to the marina. His two independent contractors emerged from behind the marina store.
“Targets eliminated,” Hap said. “Thanks for the good work. If the local police show up before dawn, call my cell phone and talk to Ms. Kohl. Otherwise, I’ll let her know what happened here when I get to Boston.”
“You leaving now?”
“Yeah,” Hap said. “Let them sleep or do whatever they like, but don’t let them out of your sight.”
“You got it.”
63
Wilson — Bailey Island, ME
When the sounds of the lobstermen woke Wilson and Emily before dawn, the first thing they did was turn on the TV. Nothing. They watched patiently. Then, at exactly forty-eight minutes past six o’clock, it finally happened. The event his father had spent the best years of his life trying to accomplish. Disclosure: full and complete disclosure to the American public of an eight-year-long conspiracy to manipulate the price of company stocks traded on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. The breadth and depth of the conspiracy’s impact was apparent on Anderson Cooper’s solemn face as he reported.
“CNN has just learned that a massive stock market manipulation conspiracy involving the nation’s largest corporations, over the past eight years, has been uncovered by the FBI. More than three hundred arrests have been made in the past twenty-four hours, with more expected today. CNN’s financial expert, Lou Dobbs, is here to help us understand what all of this means,” Anderson Cooper said as he looked over to Dobbs. “Lou, how could something like this go on for so long without being detected by the SEC, the Justice Department, boards of directors, company employees or shareholders?”
“That’s a question we’ll all be wrestling with in the weeks and months to come, Anderson, but one thing we’re certain of; the enormity of this crisis makes the recent mortgage credit debacle look like a misdemeanor,” Dobbs said, and then faced the camera. “Based on what we now know, the manipulations were orchestrated through what appeared to be normal business practices such as the hiring and firing of senior executives, company reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, the spin-off of a company division to create a new publicly traded corporation, new product introductions, and the involvement of high-profile management consulting firms, all of them legitimate business activities.”
“So why all the arrests?” Cooper asked.
“For two reasons: first, the FBI claims it has obtained sufficient evidence to prove that the CEOs and some senior executives, from more than three hundred of America’s largest corporations, secretly organized themselves with the express purpose of systematically causing their own companies’ stock prices to rise and fall. Second, these same CEOs and senior executives shared information with their secret partners from other corporations regarding the orchestrated ups and downs of their companies’ stock prices. Trading on so-called insider information is not legal. So, as I understand it, they’re being arrested on multiple counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The charges could carry mandatory life sentences.”
“Financial markets in Europe and Asia are already predicting major declines in anticipation of Wall Street’s response,” Cooper stated. “What are the domestic and international ramifications of this conspiracy?”
“Domestically, the fact that this could happen on such a large, widespread scale, involving the nation’s most respected corporations, without government agencies, industry analysts, or the news media knowing about it, simply means that America’s stock exchanges, our economic and financial systems, and the nation’s practice of capitalism, in general, will have to change. The war against the middle class has now escalated into open warfare. We now have documented proof of what some of us have long known-the privileged class has been widening the gap between rich and poor by manipulating the system while our government turns a blind eye.
“Internationally, the implications are staggering. The United States with its long record of economic success has been the main impetus behind the globalization of free market capitalism and the democratic rule of law. Every country in the world will be thinking if this can happen in the U.S., it can happen anywhere. And worse, it will most certainly erode confidence in our capital markets, giving some countries reason to question the future of global capitalism and others the justification to wage war against it. Much of what happens either domestically or internationally, however, will depend on how our government responds to this crisis, Anderson.”
“We’ll have more from Lou Dobbs and a panel of Wall Street experts later, but now, let’s go to Wolf Blitzer, outside FBI Headquarters in the nation’s capital, to see how the government is dealing with this economic crisis. Wolf?”