Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

Tritt parked the big truck in front of the building, putting the Desert Eagle back in the vertical sling holster under his nylon Windbreaker. He walked up a rickety flight of steps onto the wide, covered porch and rapped on the flimsy wooden door. A few seconds later the door was opened by a man wearing civilian clothes and a screaming eagle armband.

His hands were grimy, the nails thickly rimmed with grease, and there were long grease stains on his work pants. He was wearing heavy construction boots. He looked to be in his early twenties. A car mechanic, perhaps, or somebody who worked with machinery.

Behind him half a dozen people sat around a long, ersatz conference table made from two sheets of plywood supported on wooden trestles. The plywood had been covered with dark green oilcloth. There were six men of various sizes and ages standing around the roughly made conference table. Tritt was reminded of von Stauffenberg and the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Hitler was in the room, too, in the form of a large, framed portrait over the mantel of a big fieldstone fireplace at the far end. Unlike any conference room of Hitler's, however, the room was thick with smoke, clouds of it rolling up to the rough-log ceiling beams.

"Who are you?" The man at the door said. "Whadda you want here? This is private property." He scowled. "Why didn't Skinny stop you like he's supposed to?"

"Skinny, wearing one of those screaming eagle coats? Fat, lots of zits?"

"Yeah."

"He's down at the gate, lying on the ground with half his foot blown off."

"Shit," said the man at the door.

"Yeah, maybe that, too," said Tritt.

Another voice spoke up. This time it came from a short man standing at the head of the table. He was dressed in full desert camo and wearing a Fidel Castro-style green, flattop cap with two stars on it. Like the man at the door he was wearing a screaming eagle armband. There was a huge screaming eagle banner on the wall to one side of the table that bore Maine's Right Arm's motto: THE RIGHT ARM IS GOD'S ARM.

"You shot one of my men?" asked the man in the camo gear. Tritt noticed that he was wearing a sidearm. It looked like an old Colt auto.

"That's right." Tritt nodded. "And if you don't get someone down there in a hurry he's going to bleed to death. Take him to a hospital and tell the doctors he shot himself in the foot. He looks stupid enough."

"Daniel?"

The man standing in front of Tritt nodded at the man with the stars on his kepi and hurried past Tritt.

"You must be DeJean."

The man nodded. "I am Colonel DeJean, yes." He stepped out from behind the table, one hand on the butt of his open-holstered automatic. The holster was scarred and battered. War surplus. Tritt saw that he was wearing expensive-looking cowboy boots. The heels gave him at least two extra inches.

"In whose army?" Tritt responded belligerently.

DeJean's hand tightened on the butt of his weapon. "Mine," he said finally.

"This bunch? The fat guy at the gate? You must be joking."

"There are others," said DeJean. Under the cap, white, fluffy hair extended. "This is merely a training session for new recruits."

"Training for what?" Tritt asked. "The circus?"

"They laughed at Hitler in the beginning," said DeJean. "As far as the British were concerned George Washington was a traitor and Benedict Arnold was a great war hero."

Tritt laughed. "You're comparing yourself to Hitler and George Washington? Hitler was a madman and Washington was a career soldier from the age of twenty."

"I prefer to know with whom I am debating," said DeJean, drawing himself up stiffly.

"My name is Barfield," said Tritt.

"What exactly is it that you want, Mr. Barfield? The Eagle's Nest is a little out of the way for idle conversation."

"I'm here to make a donation to your cause."

"We don't take checks, I'm afraid." DeJean smirked.

"Send one of your boys out to my truck. There are a couple of suitcases on the passenger's seat. Bring them here."

"Pritchard, Samson, get the suitcases," DeJean ordered. Two of the men standing at the big plywood table headed for the door. They were back two minutes later, each one carrying a suitcase.

"Put them on the table," said Tritt. He reached into his pocket and threw a ring of small keys in DeJean's direction. He tried to scoop them out of the air with one hand but they fell at his feet. One of his "trainees" bent to pick them up and handed them over. The men put the suitcases on the table. DeJean dismissed them.

DeJean gave Tritt a long look, then fitted the keys into the locks of the big green suitcases. He threw back the lids. Each suitcase contained hundreds of pressure-wrapped bricks of used cash. DeJean tried not to look surprised, but Tritt could see his hands shaking slightly as he reached for one of the bricks and pulled it out.

"Uh, this is very generous of you Mr., uh… Barfield. Might I ask where it came from?"

"This isn't quite a donation, Colonel DeJean. It's a buyout. Maine's Right Arm is now mine to do with as I want. Your men will now follow my orders and only mine. Understand?"

"You must be crazy. This is a grassroots political movement. This is a cause!"

"Bullshit."

DeJean looked down at the immense amount of cash.

"There's slightly over two million dollars there, all in untraceable bills."

"Why are you doing this?" DeJean asked.

"September eleventh was a wakeup call to America," said Tritt, reciting the carefully written script he'd been given and which he'd memorized. A script written to ease DeJean's conscience and excuse his greed. "But that was nearly ten years ago, and this great country has fallen into a complacent slumber once more. It's time America was roused from its dangerous sleep. The men of Maine's Right Arm can be the ones to do just that."

"How?" DeJean said.

"By doing exactly as I tell them," said Tritt. He watched as DeJean stared down at the suitcases. He could almost see the wheels turning in the old man's head. Those suitcases were the stuff of pipe dreams and DeJean had been living in a pipe dream world for much of his adult life. He and Maine's Right Arm were the perfect thing for what was to come.

DeJean drew himself to a soldierly attention. "Mr. Barfield, Maine's Right Arm is yours to command. May God bless your endeavors, and may God bless America."

Mike Harris, deputy director of operations for the CIA, sat in the darkened bunker of the Homeland Security Predator Ground Control Station. The bunker was a windowless, half-buried blockhouse on the edge of the Grand Forks Air Force Base, just outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota. A glass wall separated the control room from the pilot's positions below. There were three drones flying today, one over the British Columbia-Washington-Idaho-Montana border looking for "humpers" carrying in loads of marijuana, another one cruising in a regular pattern over the Great Lakes from Duluth on Lake Superior to Rochester on Lake Ontario, and the third flying circles at 44,000 feet over the town of Winter Falls, New Hampshire. At that height the gray-blue, pilotless aircraft were invisible to the naked eye and even to binoculars. The drones were too small to show up on radar, turboprop operated to avoid being attacked by heat-seeking missiles and made out of carbon fiber rather than aluminum for further stealth.

General Angus Scott Matoon sat with Harris in the upper control room, smoking a cigar and watching the relay screens from the pilot's positions on the console in front of them. He'd been given a report by Major Neville, his adjutant, earlier that morning and he was feeling quite pleased. The prairie fire had been extinguished via a hiking accident in a State Park in the Catoctin Mountains. It had barely made the back pages of the Washington newspapers, and besides a single clip on Channel 4, there had been no TV coverage at all.