The CleanSweep Conspiracy Read online

  He hoped he would never have to make a getaway through there; it would mean he was in dire trouble. He’d paid the super to keep him from snooping around.

  But did I pay him enough?

  CHAPTER 3

  Cleansweep

  Charles Claussen—never Chuck—walked through the lobby, his stacked-leather heels click-clicking on the marble floor, his posture military straight. He didn’t just walk, he marched like a man with a purpose. In reality, he was deeply troubled. He had spent all his political capital and considerable financial resources developing CleanSweep, his top-secret project. “Imagine a world with streets swept clean—no crime and no criminals,” one of his PowerPoint slides boasted.

  His project was at risk, however; the safeguards he’d so meticulously designed had somehow been bypassed, and the project’s internal computer security had been compromised. Something wasn’t right. He thought he knew what the problem was—better yet, he now knew who the problem was.

  Not given to cursing, he made an exception as he muttered under his breath, “That damn blogger.”

  Clenched jaw muscles gave away his anxiety as he paraded with his entourage through the lobby and toward a waiting elevator. Two uniformed men behind the security counter stiffened to attention, the guard on the right tugging his jacket down.

  “Good morning, Mr. Claussen,” they almost shouted in unison, their voices combining to create a stereophonic effect. He raised his right arm in passing, a not-quite-casual wave. Later, they would both savor the moment, recalling how the great Mr. Claussen had acknowledged them in passing.

  The guard named Fred, who spent most of his free time watching the History Channel, thought the gesture seemed familiar—a sort of salute that tugged at his memories.

  Claussen had learned the gesture when he was a young boy, sitting in a darkened room with an old man. “Show me one of your movies, Grossvater,” he would often say to his grandfather, Otto. The two spent many hours during Claussen’s childhood watching grainy home films.

  “Geheime Filme,” the old man would mutter, lapsing into his native language. “They are old films. Old like me. And they are a secret, just between the two of us, eh?”

  When he was older, Charles understood why the old man had referred to them as geheime, or secret, films. They were from the old man’s private library, home movies from his days as a young officer. They showed him in German military attire, strutting around with groups of other men, each trying to outdo the other in form and frenzy, flaunting their importance before the camera. They all demonstrated tailored ceremonial poses, posturing in garish uniforms, mimicking high-ranking party officials—and especially the Nazi leader so familiar to viewers of newsreels from those days.

  His grandfather had patiently explained the rigid protocol for offering the official Nazi salute. “The right arm is to be extended to at least eye level or higher,” he said, insisting the little boy practice until it was absolutely perfect. But watching his grandfather on the screen, Charles detected something odd about that salute. The stiff-armed gesture was occasionally performed in a particular variation, one that copied top party leaders. Sometimes they would raise their right arm in a more casual manner, almost like a wave, the arm bent at the elbow and the palm facing outward.

  Like other men and women addicted to power, Claussen felt a need to create a signature habit that would set him apart from others. He adopted that old gesture as his personal salute, arrogantly, as though it were a casual, tossed-off wave. In his own mind, he believed it did indeed set him apart from his many subordinates. In fact, he considered nearly everyone to be subordinate, inferior. Claussen’s salute as he walked through the lobby that morning was his private, formal homage to his own personal heroes—the men in those secret films.

  Charles Claussen, at forty-nine years of age, had become a man of considerable power and influence.

  “He’s at the top of his game,” someone had said with a flavor of envy.

  “He’s a force to be reckoned with,” a national news magazine reported.

  As Claussen entered the lobby that morning, a member of his security team raced ahead, making sure an elevator would be at the ready. A young woman held the door open with a glare that warned away any uninvited persons who might think they could take the opportunity to share a ride with the boss. It was her job to remain at her station in the lobby until it was time for Claussen to reverse direction and head out at the end of the day. The security team was a constant presence, hovering around him like swarming insects.

  In the elevator, Claussen stood facing the door, hands clasped behind his back as the car whisked him to his floor. Claussen was a man who understood the meaning of posture and body language. Behind him, two men stood precisely two steps back, watching over him. He wouldn’t have approved if he had known one of them was secretly longing for a cigarette to smoke. A harsh reprimand awaited any team member who left his or her post—it could compromise the safety of Mr. Claussen.

  One small detail did not escape his notice, however. In the reflection of the polished elevator door, he saw the two guards look at each other and roll their eyes. It was a sign of impudence—close to insolence. Charles stepped out of the elevator and made a mental note to call his head of security, Angela Vaughn. It would be her job to make sure two different men shared his elevator ride down at the end of the day.

  The elevator slowed gently to a stop, and the doors opened onto a small foyer. There was no need for a receptionist—this wasn’t a waiting room for people with an appointment. This was a top-secret floor, one not listed on the directory in the lobby. Admittance was granted by electronic technology that determined a passenger’s eligibility. Unique biometrics were matched to a database profile comprising measurements of facial features, height, and weight—even identifiable body scent. If any unauthorized person happened onto that elevator, it would simply wait with the door open, chirping a simple warning message to vacate. It would repeat the message until the unauthorized person complied by stepping out.

  Optical recognition software scanned both irises of everyone entering and exiting the elevator. A special infrared digital camera focused on the eyes, scanning the structure of each iris in high resolution, noticing the subtle differences between the two. It was much more accurate than a simple retinal scan. All details of each iris were required to match the records of their intricate elements stored in the database before the door would open to the top-secret floor. Charles knew all this, because he had personally designed the technology.

  Charles strode across the small vestibule to a door, held his palm up to a glass panel that would grant him entry—his final security measure—and waited for a gentle chirp to signal that access had been granted. Once through, he started down a wide corridor.

  A young woman waving a paper blocked his path. She tried to avoid looking hesitant, a trait she knew her boss detested.

  “He’s been spotted, sir.”

  Claussen bellowed in a cold voice, “Boots on the ground!”

  There was no need to state who “he” was. Claussen glanced at the paper handed to him, then made a face as if he had been offended by a foul odor.

  “I want the bastard in handcuffs before my coffee gets cold,” he said. Then he stomped into his private office while his workers in the open office behind him scurried into a state of red alert. He closed the door and began preparations.

  Everyone knew he was talking about Matt Tremain.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tanner

  “When did I first learn about CleanSweep?” Matt repeated, echoing his friend’s muted question. He was having a beer with Bryan, a buddy he’d known since high school. “It started with a story Tanner told me,” he began. He signaled for a fresh drink. The bartender placed a mug on the counter. Matt picked it up and took a long swallow, his face set in a frown. “You have to promise me you won’t tell a soul.”

/>   Bryan nodded and drew his hand past his lips in a zipping gesture.

  “It was Woodson who told me about the meat of it. I learned his last name, Woodson, just before his ‘unfortunate accident.’”

  Matt thought about the TV report and the description of the crash as he talked. “You know that news anchor—Susan Payne—the one everyone seems to like? She mentioned something about mechanical problems, brakes not working. Then they showed a clip of what was left of his car after its tumble down to the bottom of a rather steep embankment.” He paused before continuing. “One man, an eyewitness, said it looked like he had been accelerating when the car went over the side. Does that sound like a problem with brakes to you?”

  Matt scrolled through his memory, then turned back to his companion after glancing around. “Before I met Tanner Woodson, I’d heard about some hush-hush program being backed by the feds. Some new, highly classified method designed to troll e-mails, instant messages, and voice conversations. I had heard rumors of the story before I met Tanner, but they were like mere whispers, voices talking just out of hearing range.”

  “When did you start to consider it more than a rumor?” Bryan leaned forward.

  Matt shivered as a feeling much like paranoia began clawing at him. “Terrorism became our new preoccupation, Bryan. People like Charles Claussen like to fan the flames of everyone’s fears to justify probing into our private lives, to give our privacy the equivalent of a body-cavity search. We’ve all become obsessed with security. Just look at the jump in the number of people buying guns.”

  After a pause, Matt continued. “Claussen thinks CleanSweep has a program powerful enough to troll through everyone’s electronic life. Tanner showed me the protocol. He said it was like a data scrub.” He gave an involuntary shudder. “A scrub is when a program goes through data to search for particular types of information—in this case personal information. Tanner told me CleanSweep could go beyond that, would electronically troll our streets to identify people he considers to be so-called errors. Claussen wants to do a scrub on people. Doesn’t that sound familiar?”

  “Are you sure you aren’t the one obsessed, especially with this program of Claussen’s? It sounds way over the top,” Bryan said.

  For a moment, the two sat in silence, sipping their beers.

  Finally, Bryan shook his head saying, “C’mon. It can’t be as bad as all that, Matt. If people aren’t doing anything wrong, what’s the harm?”

  “What’s the harm, you ask? A source said he was worried about the same things I’m talking about. We were having breakfast one morning. I can still remember the nervous way he glanced around the room and over his shoulder as he spoke. He even said he thought they knew we were having breakfast together. At the time, I was incredulous, like you. I laughed, telling him he sounded paranoid. He said that sometimes paranoia is justified.”

  “You didn’t take him seriously, did you?”

  “Not at the time. But I started asking around. No one seemed to know any real details, though rumors were flying that a new initiative was being considered based on PROFUNC, a nasty, malignant holdover from the Cold War. Another one of my sources said that this time, however, it wasn’t just Commies and pinkos being targeted—that the scope was much wider than we could ever imagine.”

  “Wasn’t a story about something like that reported in the paper a while back?” Bryan asked. “I didn’t think it had much substance. It sounded more like crazy conspiracy theorists on ecstasy.”

  Matt frowned. “I thought so at the time—until I overheard another conversation about it. I was on an elevator in Government Plaza. They were talking about something ‘worse than terrorism,’ one said. ‘Terrorism?’ I heard one ask the other. ‘Isn’t that what Claussen’s project is all about?’ ‘Something worse,’ the other one said, and then he stopped, realizing I was listening.”

  Matt rubbed his left shoulder with his right hand, massaging a muscle as he talked to Bryan. “I remember wondering at the time what could be worse than terrorism. But when they realized I was on the elevator with them, they both clammed up.”

  “And now you think it is worse? That whatever is going on is worse than terrorist attacks on our soil would be?” his friend on the bar stool asked, a sarcastic undertone lacing the question.

  “I’ve heard enough rumors to believe it’s the truth. We are all being warned about terrorists coming from the outside. I’m convinced the real attack is coming from within.”

  “I can tell you’re emotional about it,” Bryan said, hiding his feelings behind his mug.

  “I was already publishing a blog,” Matt continued, “so I began writing a second one, dedicated just to this story. I posted that ‘as a society, we are running out of groups to marginalize’ piece. Demagogues always need a scapegoat to use to create fear and panic in the population, to get more votes for safety and security programs, get more money for bigger and more lethal weapons systems. I wrote that maybe a new class of people was being pinpointed, a new target to be demonized and marginalized—and if we needed to invent one, we would. That one, single blog entry generated a lot of responses, let me tell you.”

  Matt could tell Bryan was still skeptical. “Tanner gave me a list of the people Claussen kept in his sights—all the people he considered misfits, or a drain on society.”

  Matt took a final swallow and placed the empty mug on the bar. He nodded to the bartender for another. He could tell Bryan still wasn’t buying it. “Look, since prehistoric times, tribes have indoctrinated the young about the dangers of assimilation into other tribes. Elders told stories about how evil other tribes were, how it was ‘our tribe versus theirs.’

  “At the turn of the nineteenth century, anarchists found bull’s-eyes painted on their backs and became the target of propagandists. They were demonized, used to create fear and panic. Newspapers declared that anarchists were out to destroy our very way of life. Soon people began to see anarchists lurking behind every tree. Then, when that fear faded, socialism and communism became the next great evils. They were quickly followed by the excesses of Nazism, and then by the many other fascist dictatorships since.”

  Matt looked at the melancholy on his face in the mirror behind the bar. “I tried to keep what I was writing simple and to the point. People wrote to me saying they loved reading my blogs, and they began to believe in what I was saying. Some people, anyway.”

  The bartender delivered another drink, but Matt didn’t pick up his mug immediately. He kept staring at his image in the mirror. He felt like he was talking to himself—that his friend was a silent, disbelieving audience refusing to acknowledge the truth.

  “Add Catholic versus Protestant to the mix for religious seasoning. Wait, not to mention the demonizing of blacks—another excellent example of us-against-them. It all happens so quickly…”

  Matt let his thoughts hover before continuing. “Soon after the events of September 2001, I wrote another blog post. Anyone who looked like they might be from the Middle East had instantly become an easy target. I tried to say we shouldn’t rush to judgment based on someone’s dress or beliefs. My in-box was bombarded with responses. Most of the people responding labeled me as the devil in disguise, and their responses were laced with vitriol. You should have read some of the crap that came in. People are always too ready to believe in a new Satan, and I was apparently one of the new Evil Ones.

  “Today, a large number of people support the idea of erecting walls around the country, hoping they’ll somehow keep dangerous terrorists out. Nobody seems to know how many domestic terrorists we have, though.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Bryan sneered. “I want to agree with you, but…”

  Matt wondered if he was making headway, but he didn’t really think so. “When I began hearing the rumors about the program called CleanSweep, I was determined to find out who might be on this list of ‘new devils’—the ones they were
going to target with propaganda. I asked one of my government sources to tell me who it considered the real terrorists now. She just shrugged and said they were all around us. That’s pretty cryptic, if you ask me. But it got my attention, I can tell you that.

  “Then I sat down and did my best to write a counterargument to the arrogance of hate, to express the opinion that we were all in the process of being brainwashed into targeting a new, imaginary group. That wasn’t a popular opinion, I soon found out. But I felt obligated to keep on blogging about it. I came to the conclusion that truth was on an extended holiday, and that civil discourse was also on vacation. ‘Who are the real targets now?’ I wrote. ‘Ordinary people?’ That post really brought out the crazies.

  “One guy wrote to me, saying it would be OK to give up some of our liberties to enhance public security. Another commenter honestly wondered what was wrong with surveillance programs. ‘The government,’ he stressed, ‘wouldn’t do something like that unless there was a good reason to.’ The idiot even said we should always trust the government.”

  Matt shook his head, remembering a similar letter from another fanatic. He was simply unable to understand their simplistic points of view.

  “Of course, some agreed with my blog, with the idea that we were already well down the slippery slope by then. One writer said our right to privacy was now a fading memory, that you couldn’t trust the government. I sided with that one, of course. The arguments flew back and forth in the blog’s comment section. I didn’t care what readers said—I was digging for anything I could find about CleanSweep. I thought it was some kind of new surveillance program. Something about it just didn’t feel right to me. If I could find out the truth, I decided, I would write about it. Now I realize how naive my earlier posts made me sound.”

  Matt tinkered with his mug, turning it around and around. He felt a growing tension in the friend who sat beside him. Bryan was teetering between belief and disbelief, and Matt searched for something that would give him that definitive little push toward believing.