Secession: The Storm Read online

  He was led into the employee break room, finding all of his staff seated around the small tables stationed there. Everyone looked absolutely scared to death.

  “I want to see the warrant,” Abe demanded again. “You have no right to intrude on my….”

  Agent Hammond appeared, unfolding a three-page document and shoving it in front of Abe’s face. “Sit down and shut up, Mr. Hendricks. Here is our warrant. We are seizing all computer hardware, filing cabinets, and any records on the premises. While we are boxing these items up, all of you must remain in this room. Your private cell phones will be returned to you when we have finished.”

  “I want to call my lawyer,” Abe snapped. “This is outrageous.”

  “You are welcome to call your attorney as soon as we’ve finished gathering the evidence. That should only take a few more hours.”

  In reality, it was actually two hours and thirty minutes before the IRS agents finished their task. Abe watched in horror as every computer, copy machine, telephone, and file was boxed and carted off.

  He counted at least fifteen agents roaming through his offices, three times the number of people employed by his tiny firm.

  While they waited, the IRS men entered the break room twice, once to ask if the bookkeeper was present, the second time to announce that they were leaving. Tina, the receptionist, wasn’t even allowed to go to the restroom during the entire ordeal.

  And then they were gone, leaving behind a ransacked, hollow shell of what had been a bustling little enterprise.

  Abe’s first call was to his lawyer, his second to Kara. Neither answered.

  His next priority was his employees. Most of them seemed to be in a daze, ambling around the office without purpose, staring at what had once been their livelihood. Abe didn’t blame them.

  “If I were in their shoes, my first priority would be worrying about my job,” he whispered. “I need to reassure them and then give them something to occupy their minds.”

  After calling them all together, he pulled a company credit card from his wallet. “I want you all to hop in Tina’s minivan and head over to the computer store. Everybody’s wanted new laptops anyway, so we might as well seize this opportunity to upgrade. I’m going to call our telecom company and get a few phones over here right away. If we do this right, we’ll only lose a day or two of downtime and may come out the other end even stronger.”

  His quick action seemed to dissipate some of the stress, the half-smiling employees dividing the assignments among themselves.

  Abe, mind racing with thoughts of anger, revenge, and fear, half-heartedly went about tidying up the mess the government goons had made of his office. The ringtone of his cell phone brought more bad news. “The company credit card isn’t being accepted,” Tina informed him. “Do you think they’ve frozen all of the corporate bank accounts?”

  “Damn, I never thought about that. Come on back over. I keep some cash at home, and we’ll use that in the morning. Tell everyone they can have the day off with pay,” he added before hanging up.

  Now Abe was scared.

  His attorney finally called back after Abe had driven halfway home. At least a dozen times the lawyer replied saying, “They did what?” and “They can’t do that,” while his client relayed the story of the IRS visit that morning.

  “I’ll get on this first thing in the morning,” the lawyer promised.

  “You’d better. I can’t do business without phones, computers, or bank accounts.”

  “It’s Patriots Now, Abe,” the attorney replied. “I’m hearing all kinds of rumors about the feds getting nasty with Republican-leaning grassroots organizations. The IRS seems to be the enforcement agency of choice.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Abe replied. “Everybody would go nuts if the government started using the tax guys to leverage politics.”

  “The next election is going to be close, my friend. Politicians have done worse things to stay in power. Remember a guy named Nixon and Watergate?”

  It took Abe’s attorney six days to free up the company’s bank accounts. Hendricks Engineering was forced to put up a $50,000 bond before the federal judge would release the company’s funds.

  “Mr. Hendricks is a flight risk,” the IRS representative had told the judge. “It will take the service several weeks to examine all of the seized records. However, by documents submitted to the IRS under Mr. Hendricks’s own signature, his firm has known business dealings with several international customers. We, therefore, request that he be considered a flight risk and ask that his passport be surrendered.”

  It was another five weeks before a rather harried man wearing the uniform of a delivery service entered the firm’s reception area and announced that he had a truck full of boxes for delivery, courtesy of the Department of Treasury.

  Abe’s legal bill consumed practically the entire $50,000 bond. In addition, the IRS found $137 in questionable expenses, which with penalties and interest amounted to a new tax bill of just over $200 dollars.

  No sooner than the last box was unpacked, Abe received a call from one of his most active supporters at Patriots Now. The man was being audited.

  Within a week, three more of the founding members received visits from the IRS, all of them near panic after hearing Abe’s story.

  Patriots Now was disbanded 45 days before the November election, Abe convinced that his labors were all for naught.

  Abe retreated into the dark recesses of depression. His business had been severely damaged, his bookkeeper recommending bankruptcy, or at least extreme measures of austerity. That meant letting employees go – people that had stuck with him during the lean times, folks whose entire families he knew by name, age and scout merit badge.

  Kara tried her best, remaining upbeat and optimistic, pretending she didn’t notice the depth of his funk.

  He was parked on the couch one night, watching an old movie, unable to sleep. Nothing was on but a spy flick with a mediocre plot and B-grade acting.

  The protagonist stumbled upon a government secret and couldn’t resolve his conflict with the authorities. Instead, he spent the next hour and a half of the movie dodging hired assassins.

  As a last, desperate resort to save his own neck, the hero turned over critical documents to the New York Times, hoping the exposure would keep the well-armed wolves at bay.

  As the credits scrolled across the screen, Abe couldn’t help but compare his life to the actor’s role. He’d tried the legal system… and gotten screwed. He’d tried the justice system… and had almost gone to jail. His latest attempt, the political system, had almost resulted in the loss of his income.

  But what about going to the press?

  Like the guy in the movie, Abe knew what he considered a terrible secret. Yes, he’d signed a gag order, but so had the government… and they had surely violated it. Abe was convinced that his fledgling political organization of less than 50 members was no major threat to big government and could not command an audit by itself. It was extremely unlikely the IRS would have invaded his business without a more evocative catalyst - New Orleans. No doubt someone violated the federal order and bird-dogged those agents on Abe’s company. The resulting audits were merely the method for delivering the governmental wrath.

  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he whispered.

  Sleep still wouldn’t come, regardless of the hot cocoa and mind-numbing movie. Abe laid wide-awake, weighing his options.

  He considered the risk he was taking, exposing the illegal duplicates of the documents he’d managed to sneak out of the New Orleans courthouse. All copies of those papers were supposed to remain sealed, never to see the light of day again.

  Abe had watched the clerk wheel out the heavy cart housing several boxes of papers, all associated documents and records having been surrendered to the court as part of the binding agreement. The final signatures and instructions having just been completed, Abe felt a wave of nausea roll over him. Fearing he would
lose his lunch then and there, he excused himself from the judge’s chambers to splash some water on his face and collect himself. On his way to the facilities, he had passed by a small room, the clerk’s cart resting unattended next to a massive shredding machine.

  To this day, he couldn’t explain why, couldn’t justify the risk. Maybe it was the thought of losing the paper trail of his father and brother’s demise. Perhaps, it was his way of retrieving the last evidence of his family honor. Maybe he was just a sore loser. For whatever the reason, those documents seemed like a magnet tugging at his very soul. With a racing heart, he’d reached inside, pulled the top two folders from the stack, and stuffed them in the small of his back under his jacket.

  Shortly after moving to Texas, he had rented a bank lockbox, guilty of even more crimes in doing so. Using a copy of a driver’s license provided by a job applicant, coupled with a fake address, he secured the box. He dropped in once a year, paying cash for the annual rent. There, he had stored the evidence of the injustice done to the Hendricks family.

  So was it time to expand his life of crime? Was it time to throw a federal judge’s orders out the door and contact the press with those documents?

  Maybe he was being a little melodramatic? Maybe he could pass the documents along anonymously? Maybe he could be like Deep Throat from the Watergate era, and no one would guess his identity.

  The fantasy pleased Abe, allowing him to drift off with happy thoughts of politicians scrambling to cover their asses, powerful, influential people quaking in their boots.

  In his magnificent dream world, Abe gloated over the damage his information would inflict, visions of his favorite news programs carrying his release of documents as their lead story. He would have his day in court yet… in the court of public opinion.

  Tomorrow, he would figure out how to contact a reporter and read about how to cover his tracks just in case it all didn’t work out.

  Over breakfast, Abe decided that purchasing a burner phone from a local box store was his best chance at remaining anonymous. A few quick internet searches armed him with enough knowledge to stop by a national chain on the drive into the office.

  It took three phone calls to the Houston Post, the first two resulting in unfulfilled promises that someone would call him back.

  Finally, after making an ass out of himself on the third try, Abe was passed on to a weasel-sounding kid working the city desk.

  Despite having visions of some indifferent, pimply-faced journalism student, Abe relayed the highlights of his scoop. The response was less than enthusiastic.

  “So let me get this straight,” the reporter responded. “Your brother and father were killed by the New Orleans police right after Katrina. There was a shootout in your father’s home. When you sued the parish, they had you arrested on what you believe are trumped-up charges. Do I have this so far?”

  “Yes.”

  The reporter actually yawned before continuing. “In the end, the prosecutor decided to offer you a tit-for-tat deal - everything would be dropped by both parties, and everyone would live happily ever after. So far so good?”

  “Yes,” Abe replied, a sinking feeling beginning to fill his gut.

  “And then, six years later, the IRS comes down on you like a ton of bricks. You believe it’s because you were forming a voter registration political group and the agency had access to what are supposed to be sealed records.”

  “Yes, there’s no other reason for them to have acted the way they did.”

  “Did they say that to you?” the kid asked.

  “No, but…”

  “So you don’t know… you can’t be 100% positive that’s why they crashed your business – right?”

  Abe was beginning to seriously regret making the call. “No, I have no proof of that connection.”

  “Sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems to me that you should be talking to an attorney, not the press. I don’t think your account is something that would interest our readers. If you feel there’s been a violation of your previous agreement, then a lawyer is who I’d be calling.”

  “But that’s not really the point. They murdered my father and brother,” Abe pleaded. “They killed two men in cold blood and then covered it up.”

  “But you signed an agreement with the court. You said yourself, at the beginning of this call, that you couldn’t divulge your name because of a federal judge’s gag order. So I do not see any cover-up or conspiracy. If a judge was involved, then it must have been an above-board deal. Thanks for calling.”

  And with that, the reporter hung up.

  At first, Abe was embarrassed. Hearing that voice on the other end of the line retell his story, the entire affair didn’t seem all that noteworthy. The fact that his business had practically been destroyed didn’t mean anything. Many businessmen claimed the IRS was doing them wrong, yet when the truth was finally uncovered, some level of tax cheating was usually involved.

  Abe looked around his office, deciding he’d be more comfortable licking his wounds at home. Maybe Kara and he could take a walk to clear his head.

  After advising Tina he was out for the rest of the day, Abe began driving home. He’d managed less than 10 minutes on the road when a sign touting “Grand Opening – Guns and Ammo,” caught his attention.

  “Can’t hurt to stop in,” he thought, switching on the turn signal.

  Abe entered the store, intent on browsing for a new shotgun. He’d seen a few articles about the latest recoil-absorbing designs and was considering a bird hunt later in the fall.

  The young man behind the counter was friendly enough, letting Abe gaze at the long rows of rifles displayed on the wall. Like most gun stores in the area, this shop had a large section of tactical rifles and accessories.

  Abe typically ignored such trinkets, unsure of any practical use, considering them mostly for show. “So what’s the big deal with those battle rifles?” he asked the salesman in a somewhat surly tone. “What good are they anyway?”

  Much to Abe’s surprise, the young man’s answer made absolute sense. “A lot of people buy them because they don’t trust the government,” came the response. “I’m not much of a conspiracy theory guy, but I have a few myself. For some reason, I feel more secure knowing they’re in my safe at home.”

  Abe tilted his head, the guy’s words resonating with his deflated mood. “Can I hold one?”

  “Sure, let me show you our most popular model. This is an AR15, one of the most configurable rifles in the world. It is the civilian model of what our military uses in battle.”

  Abe hefted the piece, listening intently as the man behind the counter itemized the features and described the blaster’s capabilities.

  For some reason, Abe felt more secure holding the carbine. In the grand scheme of guns, including almost every other weapon warehoused in his safe, the AR15 wasn’t very powerful. In fact, it was downright anemic compared to the majority of his hunting rifles.

  Nor was the AR light, easy to handle, or as simple as most of his collection. Yet, there was something about the rifle that made him feel secure, empowered to protect himself against the worst the world could offer.

  The array of available accessories and configurations was another surprise. “These grooves here, along the barrel, are called rails. One of the reasons why these guns are so popular is because you can mount all kinds of goodies there. Lasers, lights, optics, night vision, thermal imaging, slings… you name it. Each AR15 is configurable to what the owner needs, and it’s a snap to change things up depending on those requirements.”

  Another customer appeared, a man about the same age as Abe. Flashing a familiar smile to the fellow behind the counter, the newcomer chimed in, “Government conspiracy theories aside,” he began, obviously making fun of the salesman, “it’s the flexibility of that rifle that I like. I can mount a flashlight for nighttime hog hunting and then turn around and attach a high-powered scope for deer season. Don’t let all that military-looking apparatu
s fool you, that gun is one of the best small game rifles ever made, and probably the best home defense configuration in the world. I have a couple of them, and the rest of my collection gathers dust in the safe. It seems like I am always reaching for one of those ‘evil black rifles,’ first.”

  After being shown the necessary controls, Abe didn’t want to hand the weapon back. Its weight and balance felt comfortable in his hands, the capabilities and ruggedness of the design obvious even to his uneducated touch. He was tempted to purchase the gun right there.

  Finally passing it back, Abe motioned to the long rack of similar looking rifles. “Are all those the same as the one you showed me?”

  “No, not really. There are multiple calibers, different barrels lengths, and features all around. There are a thousand different options.”