Michael realized he was hungry and decided it was part of the suffering he deserved for his crimes. He watched the constant passing of people, yawning. Slumping down into the hard chair, he was surprised when, what seemed just moments later, the agent was handing the sheets back to him. Michael realized he had dozed off.
“Thanks for your time sir, but we happen to have solved all those right after they happened. The SWAT team suffered some casualties taking down an Islamic terror cell, but most of them survived. We have no record of any professor killed or even injured at that college a year either direction. There is no record of a bomb scare in Las Vegas hotels during that year. As for the NSA station, we understand there was some sort of equipment malfunction, but they don’t release much information even to us. Those cases are closed, and we aren’t amused by your fictional version. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some real work to do.”
Michael rose in a daze, and then stood slack-jawed as the agent hurried away down yet another hallway. He was still there in that pose a few minutes later when someone behind said loudly, “Excuse me, Sir!”
Turning suddenly to see a cart loaded with boxes, Micheal sputtered an apology as he stumbled back against the wall. After watching the cart pass, he stood a few seconds longer and then practically ran out the front door.
Back on the busy street, he stood at the corner for a few minutes, wondering if he was dreaming, and that his body was still asleep in the waiting area, about to be arrested. Managing to find a cafe, he wandered in and sat down. Ordering absently, he stared into space awhile, then looked around again, still confused. He eventually ate mechanically. Coming back to himself, his eyes lighted on a row of public computer terminals at one of end of the cafe.
Chapter 39
Logging onto the activist bulletin board, he was about to post a query, when he saw a message from Burk. It said,
Back yet?
Michael sat for a long moment, and then typed a response:
What do you know that I don’t?
He doubted Burk was online at the time. Checking a couple other sites, he came back to the first just in case. Burk must have been at a library somewhere that very moment.
Nothing. You’ve forgotten the principles of propaganda. A timely and useful lie is far more important than solving a crime.
Then he remembered that one conversation about propaganda. Not the words, but he recalled the content and its impact on him. Cynical as any reporter should be, Michael was unprepared to hear that al-Qaeda was fake. When Burk showed him the evidence, carefully concealed in plain sight, he was stunned. From there, Burk worked through an explanation of the Neo-cons, and the vision of Leo Strauss. Strauss cynically taught it was vitally important to build a mythical American civil religion, so the masses would really believe the US had some divine destiny. Even when a side-by-side comparison of facts indicated the US had done more harm than some of her “enemies,” Americans were still somehow better than them, and they hated the US unjustly.
It took some time back in those early years, but the Neo-cons had convinced Conservative Evangelical preachers to damn communism, and when the Soviet Union fell apart, to damn Islam. It was the very same radical Islam the CIA had created by torturing a few conservative Muslim philosophers in countries where there was some resistance to our Westernizing cultural evangelism. When some of the radicals proved only good at preaching and teaching, but unable to do much damage, it became necessary for CIA field agents to create the likes of al-Qaeda. America needed a big bogey to keep her focused, and her leaders funded all the terror attacks necessary to create the climate of fear.
Thus, the SWAT raid was more useful for anti-Muslim propaganda than as a criminal case to catch a couple of guys who could never pull it off again in a million years – if they could drive Michael insane in the process, so much the better. Covering up the damage to the NSA station was more about testing infiltration of the radical Greens. He still wasn’t sure about the professor and the effect of their pointed warning against overuse of SWAT teams. He asked Burk,
Why did they coverup the professor?
A few minutes later, the response came:
Dunno. Maybe too busy with the Amero and NAU.
Okay, that’s plausible. They’ve been too tied up getting the North American Union going and crashing the dollar to force everyone over to the Amero, a new currency like the Euro, which was also about to collapse. There really was an awful lot of activity in those areas lately.
Just to settle some nagging doubts this was really Burk, he asked a question about Burk’s favorite drink:
What do you pay for a beer these days?
Burk never drank beer, or course. The response came back,
Wine coolers are twice what they were two years ago.
Burk liked wine coolers, and understood the question. That was about all he could do to make sure it was Burk. Not that it really mattered. Michael had come to a new resolve:
Time for hobo hiding. God bless, and see you in Heaven.
He didn’t wait for a response. Moving over to the pay phones, he dialed the Baptist church. When the secretary picked up the phone, he asked for the Men’s Minister, who had been the ramrod on most of the building at the mission in Juarez.
“Bro. Tom, this is Michael. Yeah, I’m on this side today. You seem to know an awful lot about mission building projects. Seems to me the Juarez hill mission is about to become self-sustaining. I was wondering if you knew anything about similar projects farther south... How far? How about South America? Yeah, I know, but I have a recent donation that should cover start up costs. Where? Paraguay...”
His home was everywhere on earth, because it was nowhere on this earth.
###
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[email protected] Blog – Do What’s Right
Site – Kiln of the Soul
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