Nixon looked at him, puzzled. Why should I do that, if I dont believe you either?
Becker judged it a good time to give him the evidence. Read this, Mr President. He handed over the package hed held throughout their meeting a thick blue folder. Read it, sir. And try not to weep.
5. Mr Frosty is One of Them
Present day, Tonopah, northern Nevada
Frank pressed himself flat against the damp wall of his shabby apartment, further crumpling the ancient Che Guevara poster in the process. He knew from careful experimentation that in this position he couldnt be seen from the street below, though he could peer behind the tattered tinfoil-lined curtains at the frenetic street scene beneath.
The van was back again, two minutes thirty-seven seconds earlier than the day before. So they were varying their routine, trying to catch him out, but he could see through their shallow games. The operative was apparently busy serving a fast-growing line of eager children, handing them towering ice-cream cones and pocketing their payment, no doubt every cent going to swell the black-budget coffers that bankrolled the insidious Shadow Government. That in itself was a give-away. The real Mr Frosty never gave more than two scoops. What a shit-kicking amateur!
As Frank had been taught during his days with the ill-fated Michigan Militia, the best form of camouflage was often to be seen but ignored. The human scarecrow approach, his crazed Boer weapons instructor called it. Once Frank had pointed out that trying to teach him anything about military field-craft was like teaching a Federal employee how to waste taxes (which hed done by ambushing the South African as he took a thigh-trembling dump into a plastic bag in the bushes behind their firing range), theyd instructed the class together. What Frank had been able to pass on from his dimly remembered days in the military had served the band of flabby-bellied, flabby-brained fanatics well but in the long run it had done them little good. After Waco and Oklahoma City their troop had been busted faster than you could say One World Government.
But that had been in better days, before this intense harassment began, before the United Nations funded Gestapo had started bombarding his head with voices and flashbacks some of them most disturbing. It seemed at times he was being made to remember details of his former life. It seemed microwave energy was good for more than just heating waffles and frying the brains of gullible mobile-phone users.
Whichever government black-ops coven was behind this current mission, they knew what they were about. For a split second Frank experienced a rare iota of panic; he was up against some frighteningly clever opponents. Slowly, using a little-known Zen technique picked up in the jungles of Vietnam, he re-levelled his inner karma. This was undoubtedly part of an ongoing routine surveillance if they knew he had the merchandise he would have been taken out by now.
Frank pulled himself away from the window and loped across his cluttered flat, made all the worse by his preparations for imminent departure. Hed deal with Mr Frosty when he was good and ready. Even Frank admitted that as far as manifestations went of the International Papist/Masonic plot to elevate the Queen of England to a position of world power, enslaving humanity in the process, old Two Scoops Freddy was hardly the most deadly component. Recently hed heard rumours of something big brewing in the Far East some fiendish consumer device which would finally tip the balance in the Illuminantis favour though how and when he had no clue. What was certain was that in the coming struggle Frank was going to need every weapon he could get his badly blistered trigger-finger to.
Rubbing puffy red-rimmed eyes, Frank pushed aside a mound of ScUFODIN Monthly magazines and copies of badly printed pamphlets (Kennedy The Denture Suicide Hypothesis), to kneel down besides his battered VCR. After thumbing the well-worn eject button he slipped the cassette into its lurid rental-store case. The lengths the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex would go to influence the minds of the public never ceased to amaze him. What Troy Meteor lacked in subtlety he more than made up for in xenophobic gung-ho. Frank had noted all the passages containing subliminal messages, not that they were needed this particular piece of anti-alien propaganda laid it on pretty thick negotiations must have taken a turn for the worse since ET. It had been a long night of constant freeze-framing, but well worth the risk to his already tattered sanity. In time, Franks findings would be passed on to the relevant groups fighting the imposition of the New World Order.
In moments of doubt he wondered if it was worth it. Would they ever be free from the corrosive tentacles sprouting from the cancerous institutions of the state? At times it almost seemed a hopeless fight. The forces stacked against the brave few champions of liberty were insurmountable. What was needed was a victory that would shake the world to its very foundations with that thought Frank allowed himself a knowing smile.
Feeling a terrible thirst, he made his way over the jaundiced lino to his prehistoric fridge. Hed given up drinking the bottled water; they could get to that as easily as the tap supply. Beer was now his only hope.
Tearing at the ring-pull he did his best to ignore the sickly-sweet smell that spilled from the chiller-cabinet. Wedged inside, his slowly putrefying houseguest looked back at him with big oval, black eyes, its three-fingered hands still clutching the bulging hieroglyph-covered satchel. Frank undid the oddly shaped latch and slipped out the large blue folder marked MJ13 Property of the Committee.
With a sardonic grin he mused that the disinformation started on the very cover. That its contents were entirely true he had no doubt, but if this document really was known to the Shadow Government, then its author was in very deep trouble indeed. It read quite differently from any official report Frank had ever seen. During his time in the Service several of his officers had kept similar journals. They had invariably been scrawled in dog-eared notebooks, in the brief shattered minutes before last lights, or in the odd disjointed moments of spare time that a military career afforded. None had been neatly typed and housed in an armour-plated folder that seemed to warp space-time with its very gravitas. The thought of some junior officer carting this tome around on active service, in the hope of one day being hailed as a syphilis-free Ernest Hemingway, couldnt help but make Frank chuckle.
Besides, few government reports were written in the first person. Randomly Frank thumbed to a page and began to read.
After what happened to Apollo 11 there was no way we could go back to the moon. We had been warned off in no uncertain terms. Of course the great unwashed never got to know. A twenty-second transmission delay and solar interference saw to that.
Twelve was ready to go and on the launch pad, but we pulled the astronauts and launched the empty ship instead possibly the most expensive Fourth of July rocket to go up in history. My heart was heavy to think what my department could have done with the funds got another Committee member to the top of the Kremlin perhaps, but then first time around that had caused more trouble than it solved. Uncle Joe went soft on us when it mattered.
Thirteen was a nice touch if I do say so myself. By then we were better prepared to properly stage the event the entire production went down like clockwork. Not having to film the surface sequences made it less of a headache, and the fact that the mission was a near disaster meant that no one suspected a set-up. The simplest plans are always best.
One day I knew the story would make a good old-fashioned heart-warming patriotic film, wed keep that one up our sleeve until we needed it most. Our Hollywood contacts were proving increasingly skilful at influencing mob psychology, and would only get better as the years progressed.
Needless to say, the later ops were an entire fabrication. Golf on the moon I ask you! Filming them wasnt cheap, but far less expensive than actually firing those Jet Jocks off into space. Our unofficial funding was given some modicum of support when the billions of dollars officially earmarked for the space programme were diverted to our cause.
If he hadnt been such an arrogant son-of-a-bitch Frank could almost have grown to like the documents shady author a true professional in his chosen field. But Frank didnt have to read far from any point in the manuscript to be reminded just what an insidiously evil, hard-assed bastard this guy was the sort of faceless bureaucrat who usurped his nations power to weave his own personal web of lies and deceit, all the while, no doubt, believing himself to be a patriot.
Frank would nail him. Frank would nail them all soon enough, and hed especially nail Mr Frosty. His secret weapon, in this most secret of black wars, currently gazed back at him lifelessly from his fridge.
Not long now, good buddy, Frank said, taking the first sip of beer as he closed the file. Youre my grey ace in the hole.
6. Publication
West Virginia, USA
At his remote mountain retreat high in the Appalachian wilderness Beckers personal phone was ringing. He was much older now than he had been on that fateful night many years before when hed initiated that wide-eyed fool Nixon into the darkest secrets of the Committee, but even carrying his advanced years Becker moved nimbly for a big man. There was more than one telephone receiver on his cluttered writing desk, but it wasnt hard to know which one to answer.
One phone was so black it seemed to create its own gravity-field. A series of flashing lights along its extended surface indicated sophisticated scrambling circuits were in operation. It connected Becker to the Executive Sections Head of Communications in a bunker deep under DC. It didnt ring often Beckers underlings knew better than to disturb him when he was at the cabin. On the few occasions there had been call to answer it a superpower had been toppled or a pope had been shot.
The second phone was a translucent red. When it rang and flashed insanely it could only mean one thing, and it wasnt that Gotham City needed Batman to pop a rolled-up sock down his tights. It could only mean the saintly head-of-state of Beckers own Great Nation had got himself into very hot water and needed bailing out. After all, everyone needed a legitimate day job, if nothing else to keep those IRS bloodsuckers off your back. What a waste of his talents, Becker often pondered, to be reduced to buying off two-bit whores and arranging accidents for jewellery-encrusted pimps. Of late this second phone had done more ringing than the first. But today wasnt to be its day.
The third telephone was shaped like Mickey Mouse. There was no good reason why this should be so, but some things were beyond explanation, as Becker knew only too well. Of the three it rang least often, but when it did the thing more than made up for it. The whole plastic mouse would vibrate and wobble, its receiver-holding arm pumping away like a body-builder. When Becker had first purchased the cabin, to allow himself to escape the tortured freneticism of his double working-life, hed discovered the monstrosity in a box of junk pushed to the back of an outhouse. In a fit of whimsy, the sort that can only descend over a man under the mind-buckling pressure that he experienced every day, Becker had made it his own personal phone.
Today Mickey looked like he was having an epileptic fit. His eerily electric voice screamed, ITS FOR YOU! ITS FOR YOU! Becker reached for the bright yellow handset in disgust, as much to put the radar-eared rodent out of his misery as to answer the call.
But when the caller introduced herself, the Dark Mans face lightened considerably it was an editor from Karl Popf Stein, the major New York publishing house whose address he knew only too well. Two months earlier Becker had sent her a very special package. But as the conversation progressed, the look of hope slipped from Beckers face, badly staining his shirt in the process.
Look, Mr Decker. Time for a bit of honesty, I think. Theres no call for this sort of fiction anymore. The public dont go for this heavy-handed the worlds in peril stuff. They want fluff, and I doubt very much you can do fluff. So please, stop harassing this office or Ill be forced to call in the authorities. Your hysterical e-mails are giving our server a nervous breakdown.
Beckers face began to exude the sort of infrared radiation which had been known to cause men to spontaneously combust. This was too much to take, coming no doubt from someone who was a dope-smoking English Lit major, who probably wet her unbleached Nicaraguan-cotton panties at the first sign of a parking ticket.
Its not fiction, he just about managed to stammer. That manuscript covers my experiences running the Secret Governments Black Operations Programme. It details why what happens happens. Its all explained from what really went on at Pear Harbor to the lies behind alien abduction. From the Gulf War to daytime chat shows. Its political dynamite. Have you got any idea what a risk Im taking just sending it to you!
She cut him off mid stride. Quite frankly the only risk involved must have been to the poor Federal Mail employee who delivered it to our door quite a tome, isnt it. It needs severe pruning. I suggest you get yourself a ruler and a red pen and starting with the first line, get cutting. Then keep cutting all the way to the end.
Darkest despair gripped Becker, as his cultured voice reached a thunderous new intensity. But its all true! Dont you recognize the blockbuster of the century when you read it? This book lays the secrets of the world bare and breathless, like a big-haired White House intern one whos just had done to her what you can do to your competitors.
The editor sounded wary, perhaps suspicious of being further sucked in by the madman down the line. But why would an individual in your position bare his soul like this? If half of what you say is true you must be crazier than if it isnt.
Becker couldnt believe some peoples cynicism. The words tumbled forth in an avalanche that had been building for years. Have you even bothered to read my conclusion on the last page? Theres a paralysis at the very top of our leadership. A reluctance to face facts. We cant rule out the possibility that someone high up on the Committee has an agenda all their own!
Im afraid I didnt get that far. I found your claim that the Vietnam protest movement was all part of some vast CIA mind-control experiment alarming and offensive. I was part of that movement and I can assure you that CIA agents did not supply any of the LSD I took. I suppose youll be claiming they were sleeping with us next to monitor our responses.