Max Collins - Executive Order

He drew in breath. Let it out. “It’s a group of patriotic Americans. As I said, powerful ones. Movers and shakers, you might say. Captains of industry... no, generals of industry.”

Rogers asked, “A right-wing group?”

“No, no...”

Reeder asked, “A leftist group?”

“No, no, you misunderstand. You underestimate. They have their own interests, but those are the best interests of America. These men are above politics, and yet they are the inheritors of everything our founding fathers put in motion.”

A little hysteria was in Morris’s voice now, the tears ever closer. Reeder hoped the man wouldn’t piss himself.

Reeder asked, “Does this group have a name?”

“It’s... it’s rarely spoken...”

“Speak it anyway.”

Morris swallowed. Barely audible, he said, “The American Patriots Alliance.”

Disgust clenched Reeder’s belly. How many evil bastards in history had wrapped themselves in the American flag? Or any nation’s flag?

Rogers asked, “Who exactly is on this board?”

Morris shook his head. “I have a sense of who they are, but not... exactly who they are.”

“No,” Reeder said, hard, his kinesics skills coming to the fore, “you do know them. Or some of them.”

Morris stiffened. “If I give you any names, I’m a dead man. And don’t threaten me with that hole in the forest again. Just go ahead and kill me. Because I would already be dead.”

Now when Reeder read the man, he knew Morris was telling the truth.

“If you don’t give us those names,” Reeder said, “what do you have to bargain with?”

“Your agent.”

Reeder, Rogers, and Wade exchanged looks. Back to square one...

“If I haven’t told you anything,” Morris said, “they’ll trade. If I talk, they’ll kill me, and you have no lever to get your agent back.”

“Portillium,” Reeder said.

Morris blinked. “What?”

“Portillium — hear of it? Know what it is?”

Morris shook his head. “No. It sounds made up.”

Shit, Reeder thought. He’s telling the truth.

“Well,” Reeder said, “it’s not a new additive in dishwashing powder. It’s a mineral, a very rare one, and almost certainly why the Russians went into Azbekistan.”

Morris squinted at Reeder, as if trying to get him in focus. “They... went to war for a mineral?”

“Does that strike you as unlikely? Haven’t we gone to war for oil? Someone on your board is responsible for sacrificing four CIA agents to that Russian invasion. Either your Alliance is in league with the Kremlin, or they’re trying to start World War III.”

Morris grunted something that was as close to a laugh as he could muster under the circumstances. “Make up your mind, Reeder! Is the Alliance in bed with Russia, or eager to go to war with it?”

“The frightening thing is, either is possible. Because as you said, these ‘powerful people’ do whatever it is that’s in their best interest.”

Another grunt of a near laugh. “You’re making all of this up. That mineral, portobello or whatever, you made it up.”

“Six Americans dead, Lawrence.”

He swallowed. “In war, sacrifices must be made.”

“We’re already at war,” Reeder said. “Your Alliance is at war with the rest of us. They’re calling it patriotism, Lawrence, but it’s treason. And you’re part of it. That’s how you’ll be charged — for treason.”

He could tell that Rogers wondered where he was going with this.

“Murdered Americans,” Reeder said almost offhandedly, “including an assassinated cabinet member... you’ll be executed.”

The color left Morris’s face again. “Try to scare me all you like... I can’t give you any names. That’s the only thing keeping me alive.”

“You think the CIA can’t get those names out of you, if I turn you over? They’ll waterboard your ass from here to Tuesday, and then drop you into a hole so black you’ll never see sunshine again.”

“You... you won’t do that.”

“Won’t I? I think the boys and girls at the Company would love to have some time with one of the conspirators in the deaths of five of their people.”

Morris stiffened. “I’m an American citizen. You kidnapped me. When that comes out—”

Rogers said, “Who says it will come out? Anyway, you’re an enemy combatant we apprehended. Under the Patriot Act, we can make you disappear.”

“I was just... all I want is to be a good American. A patriot.”

“Well, Lawrence,” Reeder said cheerfully, “you screwed up.”

“Sounds like... either way I’m dead.”

Rogers said, “We can protect you.”

Morris began to laugh.

He laughed until tears began to run and Reeder and the two FBI agents did not bother to hide their surprise and discomfort.

Finally Morris, jerking against his duct-tape bonds, said, “You have no idea!”

“No idea what, Lawrence?” Reeder asked quietly.

Morris, laughing near hysteria, was shaking his head. “What you’re up against!”

Rogers said, “Enlighten us.”

Only his head leaned forward now. “They’re bigger than you can imagine. Branches intertwining, growing, flowing. The Alliance is everywhere.”

“Conspiracies on that level,” Rogers said, “are the stuff of madmen and pulp fiction.”

Reeder nodded and said, “The late Carlos Marcello had a sign over his door that said, ‘Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

Morris had stopped laughing, although he came up with one last, “Ha! Wasn’t he in on the Kennedy assassination? Those who didn’t die kept as quiet as the ones who did.”

Rogers said, “It eventually came out.”

“Decades later. Special Agent Rogers, that’s the kind of thinking the Alliance depends on. You think they don’t, they couldn’t , exist — so they don’t exist. In fact, the Alliance teaches its recruits that if someone accuses them, simply laugh it off, using your line of conspiracies-are-nonsense logic.”

Reeder could see Rogers still wasn’t buying it, and he said to her, quietly, “Nonsense, not necessarily. Skull and Bones, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, the Ku Klux Klan — secret societies, one and all.”

She gave Reeder a hint of a smirk. “What next — the Illuminati?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “You’ve heard about these secret societies, you might even think you know something about them... but can you name a single member? Tell me their goals? Explain their infrastructure? We guess, but we don’t know, because... they’re secret. The Alliance could be the same kind of thing.”

Rogers was frowning. “In this day and age?”

Their prisoner joined in the conversation again. “The Alliance began as a response to the Cuban Revolution in 1959.”

That surprised even Reeder.

Morris said, “Recall your history, and the Bay of Pigs? Run in part by the budding Alliance. Kennedy took all the heat when it went south, but that was the first action taken by the American Patriots Alliance.”

Reeder said, “To what end?”

Looking at Reeder as if that were a question more worthy of a child, Morris said, “To keep America free of Communism, back in the day. Now? Now, the goal is to restore America’s greatness. To put the power back in the hands of the people who know how to properly run things.”

Frowning, Wade said, “You mean white people?”

Reeder was shaking his head. “Your loyalty, Lawrence, is to an Alliance playing very dangerous games with Russia. You really think a third world war, in the nuclear age, will make America great again? And if the Russians get all the portillium out of Azbekistan, they’ll have weapon-making capabilities beyond the imagination.”