The Devlin Deception: Book One of The Devlin Quatrology Read online

  Pam reached into her beach bag, pulled out a leather wallet and stepped in front of her men, holding the wallet up in the faces of the approaching deputies.

  "Secret Service; holster your weapons!"

  A huge, bald hulk of a man with Collier County sergeant's stripes lumbered up to Pam and reached out to grab her wallet. She pulled it back and said, "Look, don't touch, Sergeant."

  "Lady, I don't care who you are or what that badge says, you're in my county and you need to tell me what's going on, why you've got Marines on my beach, right now!"

  "Back down, Sergeant. This is a national security issue. Marines, with me NOW!" Hunsucker and Babcock immediately moved up to Pam's side and aimed their weapons at the sergeant's feet. Miller and Schwartz casually but pointedly swept their weapons back and forth, covering the other deputies, two of whom were still pointing their sidearms at Pam and the Marines.

  Pam got directly in the sergeant's face and spoke coldly and forcefully, "Stand. Down. NOW. Sergeant."

  The sergeant, his face now flushed, hesitated, then turned to the deputies and hollered, "Holster your weapons, deputies!" They all complied, both Lee and Collier.

  Pam lowered her voice, backed slightly away from the sergeant, and said, "Now, Sergeant, here's what's going to happen. A helicopter will be here soon ... hear it? ... and we will take our dead Marine ... accidental death, by the way ... and leave. My eyes are up here, Sergeant. Thank you."

  She hollered over her shoulder, "Murphy, come here." Murphy swam to shore and jogged over to Pam.

  "What did you find out there?"

  "Well, ma'am, there's a box on the bottom, with several scuba tanks and a remote relay to open them all, to inflate that gorilla balloon, plus a speaker that floated to the surface and made the sound, the roar. Nothing else down there, nothing that looks dangerous. I'm sorry for letting it startle me."

  "We'll deal with that later, Murphy." She looked at the sergeant again, "Now, Sergeant ..." she looked at his name tag "... Dooley, is it? ... that is something you CAN investigate. I'll expect to see a copy of your report. My office will contact you."

  At that moment, the helicopter returned and set down, half on the water, half on shore, and three more Marines in full BDU's exited, one with a black body bag. They ran to Danuski's body, zipped it into the bag and carried it back to the helo.

  Pam turned to Jake and said, "Jake, I have now officially cleared you of any national security issues. Good luck with your book. Sergeant Dooley, this is Jake Devlin, who is a witness, along with everybody on the beach, to that ... inflatable event. But as for that Marine we've just carried from your beach, that is off ... and I emphasize 'off' ... limits to you, and if I hear anything ... ANYTHING ... about any inquiries you make or harassment of anyone on this beach on that issue, I will have your job AND your certification, and you will wind up as MAYBE a mall cop, if you're lucky. Clear?"

  "Yes, ma’am."

  "Good. Jake, I will be in touch, and you let me know how it goes with Sergeant Dooley here, okay?"

  "Yes, ma'am, I will."

  "Sergeant, for my records, what's your first name?"

  "Thomas, ma'am."

  Pam smiled slightly, for the first time since the deputies arrived. "My sympathies, Sergeant."

  Sgt. Dooley's face reddened slightly; he did not smile.

  Pam then reached into her beach bag, removed a full-body coverup and wrapped it around herself. Miller folded up her beach chair, and she and the Marines, still keeping an eye on the deputies, all boarded the helo.

  A little boy ran down to the shore, waving at the helo. Ginny May's shrill voice rang out, "Stevie Bruce, no!!! Get back here or you'll get a whuppin'!" The little boy ignored her and kept waving.

  Pam looked out at the boy and then at Jake and burst out giggling again, mouthing “Stevie Bruce?”

  The helicopter took off and headed back north, toward Fort Myers Beach, leaving Jake with a final vision of Pam's laughing, gorgeous visage surrounded by grim Marines and the helo's side door sliding shut.

  Sergeant Dooley muttered, "Bitch," under his breath, then turned to Jake and said gruffly, "So, Jake Devlin, what the hell happened here?"

  Trying to suppress his own laughter, Jake said, "But only as to the inflatable event, of course?"

  Dooley glared at Jake and hissed, "Of course."

  -14-

  Sunday, December 11, 2011

  Morning, afternoon and evening

  All of the Sunday morning talk shows were filled, as Donne had predicted, with political and economic pundits, from both sides of the aisle, as well as the usual mudslingers and malcontents. Keynesian economists predicted the immediate demise of the country, with charts, graphs and statistics to back up their positions. Austrian school economists refudiated (that actually is a pretty fun word; JD) each and every one of the Keynesians' assertions and doomsday scenarios, in spite of the Keynesians' constant attempts to interrupt, out-talk and out-shout them.

  On one of the roundtable shows, two of the participants, both female, actually came to blows over the correct pronunciation of “divisive.” The video went viral and had over a million hits within two days. The apologies each of them issued five days later received minimal news coverage, but when they returned to the show the following week, they agreed that both pronunciations were acceptable and that that word absolutely applied to most of Donne's policies. They could not agree on their opinions of Donne, which they continued to argue strenuously, but they did manage to restrain themselves from creating another viral video.

  In cathedrals, churches, temples and mosques all around the country and the world, Donne's policies on abortion, gay marrage, assisted suicide and marijuana legalization were variously denounced and excoriated by passionate priests, pastors, rabbis and imams. All of them, however, agreed that his tax on nonprofits was a despicable, antisocial, even demonic money grab. Televangelists were especially vocal and passionate on that issue, continuously and passionately pleading with their followers to contribute before New Year's to avoid that tax.

  In Rome, the Vatican issued a scathing attack on Donne and his policies and excommunicated him, even though he wasn't Catholic. A British newspaper's Monday morning edition's headline read “POPE CURSES G.O.D.” Privately, the inner circle debated whether to call Donne the Antichrist, but the heads of the marketing, legal and financial departments objected vociferously, so that discussion was tabled.

  Unsurprisingly, no organized crime figures complained about the Al Capone tax in public, but it certainly was a dominant topic of angry discussions in English and a wide variety of non-English languages throughout the United States and around the world. None of those discussions were in Andorran, though.

  National union leaders burned up the phone and internet wires having similar angry discussions and working to energize their membership bases against Donne's anti-union policies.

  Up and down K Street in Washington, DC, and in their satellite offices in other major cities, lobbyists were scrambling to spread anti-Donne talking points to their paid bloggers and to multiple PR firms, as well as to their hired-gun talking heads, columnists and radio talk-show hosts.

  Nearly all leaders of all types of social justice and environmental groups spoke with their top groupies and supporters and started developing strategies and plans for marches, demonstrations and other ways of objecting to the tax on nonprofits.

  At two p.m. Central Standard Time, Steve and John and the other members of the trial lawyers society's board of directors met in their headquarters in Dothan, Alabama, and went over all of Donne's policies that affected their profession, progressively getting angrier and angrier as they discovered new restrictions on their ability to control (and fleece) their clients and pad their own paychecks.

  Bankers around the world, especially central bankers, used their backdoor communications channels to spread a single message, which boiled down to this: “We have GOT to stop him from paying down the debt. That would kill our
plan to bankrupt the US, along with all the other countries we've loaned money to, and we'll also lose the interest payments we planned to receive. Strategies, ideas? Time to advance the plan for the 2019 India-China-Arab war? Raise US interest rates immediately? Do a Biddle? Bust the bond bubble early?”

  Back in Washington, both the Democratic and Republican national committees movers and shakers had been shaking in their boots ever since Donne's speech, and in their all-day meetings both Saturday and Sunday, they were also unable to come up with any strategies to counter his policies, and their frustration levels rose, along with the blood pressure of many of their senior members.

  Predictably, most of those individuals and institutions with funds that would be confiscated put in transfer requests to their banks and other financial repositories, well aware that each of those requests violated Donne's Directives Numbers 213 through 217, but unaware that each of those transfer requests was routed through DEI's funds transfer platform, which flagged and rerouted them all to a special government account Donne had established on Friday, and equally unaware that each of those requests was noted in a report which landed digitally on Donne's desk Monday morning and was updated hourly thereafter.

  As he read them, Gordon Donne smiled and said to himself, “And the second step of my vengeance has begun.”

  -15-

  Monday, December 12, 2011

  Morning, afternoon, evening and overnight

  New York, New York

  With the Asian and European stock markets in disarray overnight from Sunday to Monday, US investors and traders were in near-panic mode, and the futures indicated a market opening down between eight and thirteen percent, with extremely high volatility.

  On the three morning network shows, stock pundits both roiled and calmed the emotions of viewers, but all of them agreed that the tax preparation services should be sold and that any pullbacks in the near future should be thought of as buying opportunities, but only in American-based companies. None of them were convincing in their forex predictions, some claiming the euro would go up versus the dollar, others taking the opposite view. Those who had been long oil, betting its price would go up, universally criticized Donne's putting the dollar on the oil standard; the shorts, who'd bet that oil would go down, cheered, but internally raged at the loss of that very profitable trading market.

  On the investment shows on cable, all of the talking heads tried valiantly to sound reasonable, logical and rational in their analysis of Donne's policies' effects on the markets as they interviewed traders and brokers, all of whom were “talking their book,” meaning what they said was driven in good part by the positions they held at the time.

  When the market opened at 9:30 EST, all three of the major indices immediately fell between seven and nine percent, the tax preparation companies between 65 and 80 percent, oil companies between 11 and 14 percent and the euro fell nearly 16 percent versus the dollar. But since oil was down nearly 35 percent in dollar terms, it was actually down in euros, as well. And since speculators could no longer trade oil futures in dollar terms, the euro's fluctuations versus the dollar would be affected in good part by supply and demand in the oil market. The same would prove to be true with the other currencies that traded against the dollar in the forex market.

  On the positive side, airlines, railroads, trucking and utility companies saw significant bounces, as did restaurant and many retail stocks, as well as the stocks of other companies whose input costs were significantly oil-related.

  By late morning, it looked like the markets were bottoming, as the shorts started covering, and the indices began moving up. By noon, they had all regained about a third of the morning's losses, and the sense of relief continued for the rest of the day, but the markets still closed down. At least the indices were only down between one and three percent, and the volatility index, which had spiked up in the morning, was only up a couple of points at the close.

  After the close, all three rating agencies announced that, although they were affirming the United States' current credit rating, they each anticipated that as Donne's policies took effect, they would all be inclined to raise the rating back to the highest level, where it was prior to the downgrade after the debt ceiling debacle last August.

  In after-market trading, all three indices regained all their losses, and by eight p.m., when after-market trading ended, they were actually positive, and the futures showed a decent upward bias for Tuesday.

  On the first of the two fake news shows on cable that night, the host began the show with his typically sophomoric trivialization of the weekends' events, with an overly caricatured cartoon of Donne, emphasizing his large ears and short stature, wearing a Napoleonic uniform, in the typical Napoleonic stance, but holding a pistol to a much taller cartooned Uncle Sam, cowering in fear. His satirical correspondents “reported” from a green-screened Capitol, White House and Supreme Court building, suggesting that Donne planned to lease those out to an entertainment company which would install animatronic robots and turn all three into tourist attractions with historical nostalgia.

  His guest, a left-leaning professor of constitutional law at a noted university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was treated with the host's typical highly intelligent second-half style, and argued with all his proud, pedantic and patronizing bluster that Donne's takeover of the government was absolutely, clearly and positively unconstitutional.

  The show after that followed a similar theme, with the tongue-in-cheek conservative host satirizing Donne's tax policies with fake interviews with greedy billionaires flaunting their newfound wealth and buying ostentatious yachts, limousines, watches and wines.

  But then he went into a raving rant against Donne's confiscation of his SuperPAC, which he'd planned to use in satiric fake ads in the Republican primary and in the general election.

  His guest was a noted conservative political columnist, who barely managed to get three words in edgewise due to the host's usual raised-eyebrow interruptive style. The point he was trying to make was to object to Donne's social policies on individual choice, but that was overpowered by the host's continuing rant against the confiscation of his SuperPAC.

  Overnight, the Asian and European markets stayed relatively stable, fluctuating a few points above and below unchanged.

  Everyone was awaiting Donne's press conference at one p.m. on Tuesday.

  -16-

  Six Months Earlier

  Sunday, June 12, 2011

  2:37 p.m. EDT

  Bonita Springs, Florida

  When Jake got home from the beach after an early afternoon rainstorm, he found an email from Pamela93 in his inbox: "Sorry about the chaos this a.m. I need to see you as soon as you get this. URGENT!!!!! Let me know where and when and I'll be there. Pam."

  Jake debated for a while, but finally responded. "Seabreeze Cafe, off Forester, in the tiki hut, five o'clock. JD" Then he went in to take a shower. When he came out, he found a reply from Pamela93. "See you then. Be careful and watch your six. Pam."

  Jake made a couple of phone calls, reviewed some emails, then got to the Seabreeze Cafe an hour early, drove around checking all the cars in the front and back lots and finding them all empty of passengers. Only then did he park his car and duck quickly through the drizzle into the restaurant, noticing two older couples sitting at the counter, six booths full of retirees and families, and as he headed out into the tiki hut area, he noticed the Mimosa twins, now wearing coverups over their bikinis, sitting at one of the tables in the back. He took a chair at a table where he could keep an eye on both entrances, the door from the restaurant and the steps from the back parking lot, the two choke points, staying alert to all the comings and goings. He saw nothing that aroused his suspicions, so he pulled his notebook out and started outlining Donne's press conference, glancing up frequently to check the doors.

  Chelsea, the only waitress on duty, came out of the restaurant and said, "Hi, Jake, the usual?"

  "Nah, Chel, just ice water for now
. Thanks."

  "Okay," she said, "one draft ice water coming up. Want some lemon in that?”

  “That would be great, Chel.”

  A few minutes later, when she set the glass in front of him, she said, "Did you hear about the excitement at the beach today? “

  "Oh, yeah; I was there, and I'm still shaking from it all. Never had bullets flying so close to me before."

  "You were there? Holy crap! What happened?"

  "I'm still not sure, but it was scary as hell. The cops asked me not to talk about it; I guess I'm a witness. But I can tell you that they evacuated the beach and brought in the bomb squad, interrogated everybody they could before the rain came and cut it all short. There musta been fifty or sixty deputies and thirty or forty cop cars. It was a madhouse, even more of a mess than when the Marines were firing at the … oops; probably said too much already. Sorry. Keep that just between us, okay, Chel?"

  "Sure, Jake.”

  "But if you search for 'gorilla head Bonita,' you'll probably find a video that got uploaded.”

  "I'll do that; thanks. Are you gonna be okay?"

  "I think so. But I'm still shaking."

  Chelsea patted him on the shoulder and said, "Good luck with that. And I'll leave you alone; I see you're writing."

  "Just making some notes; it helps, keeps my brain occupied and my body a little less shaky."

  “So how's the book coming?”

  “Kinda slow, but I'm still hoping to finish it by December; I've got his first speech set for then. But I get stuck a lot.”

  "How about a quick joke? Think that'd help?”

  Jake perked up and said, “Go ahead; try it.”

  "Did you hear about the two Irish guys who walked out of a pub?”

  Jake rolled his eyes around, but came up with nothing, “Nope.”