People were told to contact us—and they did. Within two days, Murdock had been sighted in fifty-five countries, every major city in North America and half the small towns.
Luckily for us, Berkshire paid for all the extra staff, phone lines and follow-up on all the leads, just as Noni had promised.
Noni—and Fritz—weren’t quite so understanding on everything else.
Eventually, after several meetings, some of them heated, they had to agree that with the money trail dead and none of the leads leading us anywhere Joe’s instinct to “follow the sex” was all that was left.
“And if he dumps
Joe and I could only shrug.
Some three months later I’d just gotten to sleep when a phone call from Andy woke me.
“I’m on a rocket to Tokyo. Just took off.”
“So? What? Why?”
“I nearly lost her on the way to the airport.”
“Who?”
“Sophia Ackerman. Are you asleep or something?”
“I was.”
“I didn’t get a chance to call in earlier. We land in Tokyo in forty-five minutes and I’m going to need backup.”
“Okay. I’ll call you back.”
It was a wild night. We couldn’t arrange backup in time. Luckily, Andy kept up with her as she got on the Mag-Lev to Osaka. When the train arrived he had all the help he needed.
She took him on a merry chase, from Osaka to Shanghai, to Singapore, to Hong Kong and finally Manila. At each stop she changed her appearance. And at each stop from Osaka on, a female operative followed her into the bathroom. Otherwise we might have lost her entirely: each time, she had a new identity to go with each disguise.
She ended up in a condo in a high-security walled and gated village.
Andy sent us a picture of the happy couple by the condo pool.
“My god,” said Joe, “I’d never have recognized him. But it has to be him.”
Murdock had a goatee and mustache, had changed his hair and eye color (contacts, I figured), and had picked up a new nose somewhere along the line.
“Right,” I said. “If she was going to meet anyone else, why the merry chase?”
“Manila, hmmm,” Joe murmured. “No mountains, no beaches, no snow. Clever.” Among the useless information we’d piled up about Murdock was that he loved skiing, hiking, mountaineering, boats and deep-sea fishing.
“All you have to do now,” he said to me, “is go to Manila and pick him up.”
The only nonstop service to Manila was an aging Super Jumbo. I didn’t fancy a twelve-hour flight, so I took the rocket to Hong Kong and connected. Hong Kong-Manila took longer than San Francisco-Hong Kong.
As a kid, I loved hearing my granddad’s stories about the tax revolt—but I never knew until after he died that he was one of its heroes.
He’d sit on the swinging chair on the porch at night, set me on his knee and tell me how people hated the government, but were afraid. Some arm of the government called the “HSS” was rounding up terrorists, and nobody ever knew where they’d strike next. I’d wake up sweating from nightmares of giants, dressed in black, storming into my room in the middle of the night. Even so, I could never resist another of his stories.
He told me about Amanda Green, a teacher in a small town near San Francisco. When she didn’t show up at school one morning, someone went to see if she was hurt—and found her house trashed, all her files and computer gone, but no sign of her.
And her valuables untouched. No ordinary burglars.
Her neighbors had nothing. But they’d heard the familiar sounds of the sirens and car doors slamming and thumping feet in the middle of the night… and closed their houses up tight.
A terrorist, claimed the HSS, inciting her students to rebel against the state.
A homely grandmother, a dedicated teacher, loved by her students, and respected by the community a terrorist? For teaching her students the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Amanda Green was the spark that lit the fire. It started quietly, like a burning ember, as groups held sporadic protests here and there. Only to be brutally repressed by the HSS police.
The TV coverage inflamed the nation. Within days millions of people across the country were parading with signs saying “Liberty or Death,” “Don’t Tread on Me” and even “Taxation is Theft.”
One night an IRS office was burned down and somebody calling himself Tom Paine appeared on the web, urging people to strangle the government
The way my granddad told me as a kid, the people united against the hated government and brought it tumbling down.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple or that easy, as I later found out. And I also learnt how granddad had persuaded some of his fellow policemen to do their real duty: protect the public. The sight of police standing between the army and the people inspired thousands of other policemen to do the same. When soldiers started joining them, the government had no choice but to cave in.
When the government collapsed the oil-rich states of the Middle East spotted an opportunity and hired a remnant of the US army to “liberate” the Muslims of the Philippines. They had no trouble at all gathering a seasoned force of veterans who were highly skilled in killing people.
That generated an enormous controversy. The soldiers were severely criticized for working for a government. Some pointed out it’s a free country—at least now it is, with government gone—so anyone’s free to work for anyone… including mercenaries. Others said that, right or wrong, it’s better for us that these people are somewhere on the other side of the world.
The oil sheiks started a trend: pretty soon American mercenaries were fighting other people’s wars for them all round the world. As they still are.
The Philippines—which used to be pretty much all the islands between Taiwan and Borneo—disintegrated. The Philippine Army was no match for the Americans, who threw them out of Mindanao in a couple of weeks. Once Mindanao declared its independence other islands followed suit. Local elites grabbed control, often with the help of a few hundred American mercenaries, and the country disintegrated into a patchwork of competing warlords. What’s called the Philippines today is the island of Luzon and not much more.
The ride from the airport to the hotel—a slow crawl through an almost continuous traffic jam on what was labeled an “expressway,” interrupted only by detours around numerous potholes—did nothing to convince me that much had improved in three generations. Beggars in rags cadged pennies from millionaires riding in chauffer-driven air-conditioned limousines. Here, a glitzy apartment building that wouldn’t have been out of place in San Francisco stood opposite a pile of garbage blocking the sidewalk and spilling out onto the street; there, a wall topped by razor-sharp barbed wire prevented the wealthy occupants of a village from seeing the teeming slums across the street.
My guess was that Murdock was merely waiting for the heat to die down before moving on.
Andy had set up twenty-four-hour surveillance on Murdock. Two of our operatives had moved into one of the condos as a “couple,” and had even become vaguely friendly with Murdock and Sophia Ackerman. Murdock’s story, they were told, was that he and his “wife” were retired and were taking a slow, multi-year trip around the world. His next stop? “Well, when we’ve finished here we’ll decide. Maybe flip a coin. Who can say?”
