A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth Read online

  Other Books by Hans G. Schantz

  The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas,

  2nd edition, Artech House, 2015

  1st edition, Artech House, 2005

  The Biographies of John Charles Fremont,

  Kindle Direct Publishing, 2015

  The Hidden Truth:

  A Science-Fiction Techno-Thriller,

  Kindle Direct Publishing, 2016

  A Rambling Wreck

  Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

  Hans G. Schantz

  2017

  www.aetherczar.com

  A Rambling Wreck

  Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

  by Hans G. Schantz

  ISBN-13: 978-1548201425

  ISBN-10: 1548201421

  All rights reserved.

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, major blockbuster film, epic Broadway musical, or otherwise – without prior written permission from the author, except as provided under fair use provisions of copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Hans G. Schantz

  All rights reserved

  Cover Design by Hans G. Schantz

  Graphics elements courtesy of Dreamstime.com, including contributions from Oleg Zabielin, Rawpixelimages, Laralova, and Marilyn Volan

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  To my family

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Whatever Happened to Angus MacGuffin?

  Chapter 2: Rambling to Tech

  Chapter 3: A Serendipitous Discovery

  Chapter 4: An Unorthodox Shortcut

  Chapter 5: A Tale of Two Uncles

  Chapter 6: The Secret Kings

  Chapter 7: In Plain Sight

  Chapter 8: A Failure to De-Platform

  Chapter 9: On Death Ground

  Chapter 10: The Enemy of My Enemy

  Chapter 11: The Eye of the Storm

  Chapter 12: The Final Showdown

  Chapter 13: Epilogue

  Afterword: About A Rambling Wreck

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: Whatever Happened to Angus MacGuffin?

  It was Angus MacGuffin’s last day on earth, but he didn’t realize it until too late.

  Between the salacious speculation why a missionary might frequent so seedy a neighborhood and the ample amounts of blood from the slaying, the Atlanta press was all over the case. “Missionary Slain,” the headline proclaimed from just below the front-page fold of the next morning’s Atlanta Constitution, displaced by the details of Hitler’s latest aggression. The account, by reporter Jack Sweeney, made hard-boiled pulp out of newsprint, describing in breathless terms how MacGuffin almost ended up an unknown John Doe in a pauper’s grave. A fellow Presbyterian had recognized MacGuffin’s picture in the evening’s Atlanta Journal from a church “Jubilee” held in 1913, and church leaders confirmed the identification. Was it just a random slaying? Who would want to kill a humble missionary back in the country after a quarter century abroad? Why was MacGuffin living under an assumed name at a hotel? Sweeney clearly knew there was more to it. His article had more questions and speculation than answers.

  I already knew much more than appeared in Sweeney’s decades-old article. In the weeks before his brutal demise, MacGuffin had completed a manuscript,” Suan Ming or the Art of Chinese Fortune Telling.” The fire that “coincidentally” consumed the Magnolia Publishing Company the day MacGuffin’s body was found accounted for most of the copies. The Civic Circle’s “Technology Containment Team,” or whatever they were calling it way back then, must soon have secured any remaining copies or notes.

  All but one.

  Forgotten over sixty years in my hometown up in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, that last remaining copy, a bound proof inscribed to his friend, “Bill,” at the Tolliver Technical Institute gathered dust on a shelf in the Tolliver Library, until that library, too, burned to the ground last year. Only we got there first, and preserved MacGuffin’s legacy. Now, I was trying to piece together the puzzle of whatever happened to Angus MacGuffin and why.

  Because the people who murdered Angus MacGuffin also killed my parents.

  Of course, I doubt the same individuals were involved – they cut up MacGuffin in 1940, after all, and they ran my parents off the road and shot them in “an unfortunate drunk driving accident” just last year. Different players, but on the same team. If I was going to take down my parents’ killers, I needed to know more about who they really were and what secrets they were hiding. The MacGuffin slaying might be the key to unlocking the mystery. Like me, MacGuffin had discovered parts of the hidden truth. I needed to discover what MacGuffin knew and what it meant, while avoiding his fate.

  I’d already figured out that Jack Sweeney wasn’t the usual police-beat hack. He was one of the top reporters for the Atlanta Constitution. Throughout 1940, Sweeney filed an article nearly every day. I’d read them. Good, sometimes even thoughtful stuff. Not so after the MacGuffin slaying. Nothing from Sweeney for over a week. Now maybe it just so happened that Sweeney took a vacation right after filing his MacGuffin piece. Maybe. Or maybe he spent the week digging for more information. Perhaps he didn’t find anything of note, but it’s hard to imagine his editor turning him loose for an entire week unless they both thought he was on to something. Sweeney had a long career in Atlanta journalism, and his widow donated his papers to the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library on his death in 1972. Perhaps there was nothing to find. Or perhaps he’d written additional details in his personal notes that didn’t appear in the paper. That was a long string of maybes and perhapses, but I’d learned to trust my instincts. I had a hunch there might be something there.

  My hunch was why we were here in a hotel conveniently across the street from the library.

  “That’s him, Pete!” Amit exclaimed, peering through the hotel room window with binoculars. I peeked through the curtain and saw a man going into the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library. I couldn’t tell for sure from our vantage point, across the street and several stories up. I had to trust Amit’s confirmation that the same man who we saw entering the library was the same one who’d picked up our payment and instructions yesterday. Next time we did something like this, we really ought to bring two pairs of binoculars.

  We’d been taking turns as lookout. Amit’s fifteen minute shift was almost over, anyway. “You may as well make that coffee run now,” I suggested. “I’ll keep an eye on the library by myself. He’s not likely to be out any time soon.” Now we just needed to wait patiently. Either the man would eventually emerge, or the police would show up, and we’d retreat quickly down the fire stairs and out the back of the hotel to Amit’s car a few blocks away. Amit handed me the binoculars, and he headed out of the hotel room to get more coffee.

  Why didn’t we just walk on into the library and ask to look at the papers, ourselves? Why had we anonymously hired a researcher through Craigslist who called himself “Petrel,” paid him cash in an anonymous drop, asked him to take a look through the papers, and told him to report back via encrypted email to an anonymous account? Why were we keeping a close eye on him, half expecting a police tactical team to descend upon the library? It’s a long story. Sit down. Relax. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll explain.

  Have you ever stopped to consider ho
w difficult it is to protect your privacy?

  In the years since the 9/11 terrorists killed President Gore and a good chunk of the Congress, President Lieberman and Vice President McCain had pushed through a draconian cyber-surveillance law to “help prevent future terror attacks.” All phone calls, emails, and online searches were screened and stored as a matter of routine. They nationalized the Internet into a government-run public utility called “Omnitia.” The information was only supposed to be used to catch terrorists, but civil liberties activists insisted that soon everyone would be under scrutiny and no one was safe.

  They were right.

  No doubt, the people running the surveillance were patriots: loyal Americans who swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. But the data was there. It had other uses. The temptation was too great. Suppose a deranged student was planning on shooting up his school. Would you stand on some abstract principle, refuse to stop him, and let children be killed? Would you let a man plot to murder his wife and do nothing? What about thieves? Child pornographers? Pimps? Drug dealers? Gang members? Obnoxious people who let their dogs poop on your impossibly green and beautiful lawn? Where does it stop? Where do you draw the line?

  “Actionable intelligence” from this haul of data was already making its way into police hands in the form of “anonymous” tips. The police would concoct an excuse to justify a warrant. They’d use the warrant to secure the evidence they already knew was there. No one needed to know the actual source of the original tip was a constitutionally dubious surveillance. “Parallel construction,” they called it.

  And if some stuffy judge or politician wants to adopt an old fashioned attitude on privacy, and stop all the good the police are doing? There’s a complete record of their every indiscretion, every questionable activity, every bit of dirt they might not want the public to see. What a wonderful tool to make those constitutional literalists see the benefits of a more flexible interpretation of “rights.”

  Worse, what if someone else had access to all that information? What if they were even less scrupulous? What if they weren’t afraid to use that information to secure their hold on the corridors of power? What if they’d already been in the business of pulling the strings, running the show, and calling the shots for a very, very long time?

  Meet the Civic Circle.

  They keep a low profile, and have only become public in the last few years. If you’ve heard of them at all, you know they’re all captains of industry, political leaders, top financiers, media moguls, and leading academics, who aim “to serve society.” For decades, probably longer, they’ve met periodically to discuss how “we” can make the world a better place. Then, they go off and do it, whether the rest of “we” like it or not. The “Preserving our Planet’s Future” act, which imposed those steep carbon taxes to slow global warming, the Gore Tax, is just one of their more recent accomplishments. No doubt, many in the Civic Circle are sincere and mean well. Some are merely corrupt and venal, like my uncle, Larry Tolliver, who’s been trying to worm his way deeper into the Civic Circle to twist the national agenda for private advantage.

  Then, there are the others.

  Somewhere within the Civic Circle lies an inner circle even more reclusive and secretive. They’re a sort of parallel global government. They dispatch “FBI agents” who aren’t really FBI agents whenever anyone gets close to the hidden truth of their existence or learns secrets they wish to hide. They appear to be firm believers in the maxim, “Three can keep a secret if we kill them all, destroy their records, burn their house to the ground, and then do the same to any associates who might have an inkling what the three were up to.”

  I know. I learned the hidden truth last year. I love puzzles. I love figuring things out. I love understanding the subtleties most people overlook.

  I found a physics book in the Tolliver library that didn’t match the Omnitia scans. I began to dig. I found an electromagnetic breakthrough by a 19th century physicist named Oliver Heaviside. Someone had suppressed his discovery and stricken every mention of it from period texts. As I dug further, I found other scientists killed in their prime before they could complete their life’s work. I uncovered evidence that the course of history itself had been twisted and altered to serve someone else’s purposes.

  When the Circle’s agents stayed at his family’s hotel, Amit had broken into some of their emails. The Circle had rewritten and suppressed old books for over a century, but somehow they forgot to sanitize the old Tolliver Library. Amit uncovered a list of books they were after, including the MacGuffin proof. Amit and I and my Uncle Rob snuck into the Tolliver Library and stole them all before the Circle could show up to take the books themselves, and just before the library mysteriously burned down.

  Amit and I took every precaution we could, but the Circle still tracked us down. They fingered Jim Burleson, a friend of my father, as the culprit and killed my parents just to be sure their secrets were safe. The Tollivers never forgave my father for “stealing” my mother away from them, but with the help of Uncle Larry on my mother’s side and Uncle Rob on my father’s side, my family came together to help save me. Uncle Rob worked with Dad’s lawyer, Mr. Burke, to get me through the Circle’s interrogation, and Uncle Larry’s ties to the Civic Circle meant they gave me the benefit of the doubt. The wild card was Sheriff Gunn. He figured out we were up to something, but he also saw through the Civic Circle’s lies. By tilting the scales of justice in my favor, he saved my life and threw the Civic Circle off my trail. It was a close call. I learned the Civic Circle’s hidden truth, but at the price of my parents’ lives.

  I swore I would bring the Circle down, but I was going to need help.

  Amit delighted in outwitting the Circle and tapping their communications. Sometimes he seemed to treat it all as if it were just a game, but at least it was a game he was determined to win. Also, if the Circle caught me, it would lead back to him.

  Amit and I could probably count on some help from Sheriff Gunn, and from Mr. Burke, but our true mentor was Uncle Rob. My Uncle Rob was a wealth of information in what he called tradecraft – keeping out of sight, avoiding surveillance, sending secret messages. After the Circle killed my parents, Uncle Rob taught me and Amit how to avoid trouble. There was only so much that Uncle Rob could do to prepare me, however. Amit and I both needed more education and more training to understand the Civic Circle’s history and to unlock the technical secrets they were hiding. Soon, we’d be off to Georgia Tech to get ready for round two. For now, we had a promising lead to follow.

  And that was why Amit and I were spending the day before freshman orientation watching “Petrel” research Angus MacGuffin’s last day on earth.

  We knew the Circle was hypersensitive about MacGuffin. Back when we first began researching the Circle, we were trying to find out about Xueshu Quan, a book collector chasing the same books we were after. A webpage about him had an exploit – a sneaky little tangle of code that made our computer ping the Circle’s server directly, bypassing the anonymous connection we were using to hide our identity through TOR – The Onion Router. Only the fact we were logged in wirelessly from a vantage point across the Interstate saved us when Homeland Security and the Tennessee State Troopers converged on the truck stop whose wireless network we were using. “Cyber-Terror Plot Foiled by Homeland Security” explained the headlines and pundits, never questioning why cyber-terrorists sophisticated enough to hack into a nuclear plant and try to induce a meltdown would be stupid enough to do so from a truck stop only ten miles away.

  There was a webpage about MacGuffin with the same exploit.

  Once we knew what the Circle was doing, it was actually quite informative to go searching for that particular exploit. The presence of the Circle’s exploit on a webpage indicated a sensitive topic. If they were that interested in MacGuffin, they just might go to the trouble of laying another trap in the papers of the journalist who’d written about him. Or perhaps, they’d leaned on Sweeney and his paper to suppr
ess his further reporting and then failed to follow through decades later when Sweeney’s widow donated his papers to the library. I was hoping for the latter, but we needed precautions against the former.

  “Anything happen yet?” Amit was back from Dunkin Donuts with coffee and some pastries.

  “Nope,” I acknowledged continuing to keep my eye on the library.

  “See?” Amit said triumphantly. “You were all worried for nothing.”

  “Petrel’s not out yet,” I cautioned him. “It takes time to assemble a strike team.”

  “Bah,” Amit snorted. “They sent the strike team after us at the truck stop because they’d already traced our activity to the area. If there’s a trap here, they’d have dispatched the Atlanta police to deal with it. Petrel knows not to tell anyone he’s even interested in Sweeney. He’s got a solid cover story all planned out – he’s researching how Atlanta journalism reacted to the outbreak of World War II. Even if there were a trap, it would look like an obvious false alarm.”

  I hoped Amit was right, but I still wasn’t comfortable sending someone else in the line of fire. He took over the watch, and while he kept an eye on the library, I reread Angus MacGuffin’s Suan Ming or the Art of Chinese Fortune Telling.

  The book was part history, part mysticism, part folklore, and part memoir. MacGuffin wove his experience as a missionary in China in the 1920s and 1930s into the story. His book described fortune-telling methods, their use in Chinese history, and the underlying Chinese philosophy:

  “Non-polarity and yet Supreme Polarity! The Supreme Polarity in activity generates yang; yet at the limit of activity it is still. In stillness it generates yin; yet at the limit of stillness it is also active. Activity and stillness alternate; each is the basis of the other. When the Supreme Polarity is Non-Polar, there is a balance of yin and yang. Each contains its own beginning and its own ending, and together they flow harmoniously. In imbalance, yin exceeds yang or yang exceeds yin. Yin no longer begins at the end when there is stillness without activity.”