The phalanx code, p.20
The Phalanx Code, page 20
“The motorcycle hit squad at Pignada?” I asked.
“Drewson’s guys. Just as it was his guys that killed Emily Sedgewick and his entire team in Grass Valley, California, at their server farm.”
“Why would he do that? Kill his own people?”
“Drewson is a power-hungry madman. He’s everything that he’s told you that I am, only worse. He’s trying to destroy me and use you to help him do so.”
While Blanc appeared to be truthful, I had a hard time believing that Drewson had co-opted Blanc’s persona and was wreaking havoc on the world.
“But why?”
“How else could he destroy me? He’s tried everything else,” Blanc said. He looked wistfully out the window into the eerie blackness of Central Park.
“The person I’m closest to in this world is Evelyn Champollion, for reasons I’ve already disclosed. Drewson knows this. He also knows that you and Evelyn … connected in Africa. She speaks very highly of you, and I believe has fallen in love with you. She was the perfect honeytrap for you.”
“Evelyn’s no honeytrap,” I said.
“On the contrary. She’s the best kind. Neither of you know it and the affection is genuinely mutual based upon what I’ve learned.”
“But why? To what end?”
“As I said, Garrett, family is everything to me, as I believe it is to you. Drewson and I compete on a global stage vying to be the wealthiest man in the world, or the first to invent something, or to build a space station on the moon to mine Helium 3. You name the competitive arena, and he and I are slugging it out. And he never wins.”
“And so, come after Evelyn and me? For what?”
He paused.
“Where are your children? Misha? Your team? At this very moment?”
I looked at Blanc’s face. His eyes were sad, his face drawn.
“In Drewson’s compound,” I responded.
“While we just met, you are my family. He knows that I have sought a relationship with you.”
A shiver of fear ran down my spine. The one burden I believed retirement and refusing to engage with Drewson had freed me from was the weight of responsibility for the lives of my team and, by extension, my children.
“What are you saying?”
“Mitch is a monster, Garrett. He will stop at nothing to destroy me. If he can destroy you, using my tools, my technology, and your people such as Misha, that would be devastating to me. To lose my closest living relative aside from my mother would be the end of it.”
I stood up and paced the room realizing what he was saying.
“Drewson is holding everyone you love hostage,” he said. “And by extension, he’s holding you, me, and Evelyn hostage, as well.”
“What does he want in return?” I asked.
“My empire. My company. My technology,” Blanc said.
“I don’t believe this,” I replied. “I don’t believe you.” There was anger in my voice. The men in the corners stook steps forward.
“The Phalanx Code? Mitch teased you with that, correct? Misha has been trying to break it?”
“Yes. Written by your girl, Ximena. Evelyn saw the trademark ‘X’ with crossed sabers.”
“Ximena is dead. I sent her to find you. She was trying to tell you this, but Drewson’s men, not mine, killed her. All these assassin squads work for Drewson. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“That can’t be true,” I said, but my voice didn’t carry any authenticity with it. I was thinking about Ximena’s comment about Coop and his relation to Phalanx. My grandfather founded Phalanx?
“I’ll show it to you. The Phalanx Code, such as it is, was a compilation of letters I wrote to Evelyn about finding you. You were the hardest person in the world to contact. There was no access to Fort Bragg and certainly not to Fort Leavenworth.”
“Misha showed me a video of you, inside your command center trying to find me,” I said.
“I have been trying to find you, yes. But that was a deepfake video. Drewson has a secret team of coders, his Zebra team, who create misinformation for whatever politician is happy to pay his price. He connects social media to any of the corrupt journalists, which is most of them, to Wikipedia, and then the proverbial chicken or egg is in place. The fake story is in the Wiki and can’t be disputed. He has trackers on the Wiki to keep the page locked down from accurate changes. It’s real. It happens. And Drewson is the master at this. My team running the BackInTime Machine are in constant battle with Drewson’s information operations. We are the vanguard of truth.”
“Seriously?” There was a bite of sarcasm to my reply.
“I have no reason to manipulate public opinion. I’m taking a beating in the media and your president even named me and my organization a terrorist organization. Who do you think got her to do that? She’s taking huge donations from Drewson and is publicly promoting his Project Optimus.”
I thought about that. The duplicity was stark. I remembered the distortions around the edges of the people shown in the video. Was that all done on a green screen somewhere? As if reading my mind, Blanc continued.
“I do not have a command center in the United States that can fly to Fort Leavenworth in an hour or so. I have a presence in Washington, D.C., as all companies nowadays must have to bribe the politicians. And we’ve got the usual presence of recruiters and coders in Palo Alto, California. I have no commando teams other than Sharpstone, which Evelyn and I jointly own and use primarily for our mutual protection. It was her company initially, and she owns the lion’s share, but my family office bought a stake in it. That’s it. The rest of my team are in other countries. There’s no Phalanx conspiracy.”
“Let me see the code,” I demanded. “And why couldn’t Evelyn hack it if you’re business partners? Why would she even need to?”
“Certainly, you can see it. But first, it’s not like Evelyn and I talk every day. Maybe once every few months. She has her part of the business. I have mine. With that, Misha and Evelyn are the best cryptologists in the world, among other things. They can hack anything, but Drewson put a layer of quantum security on it, and it seems impossible. For every two steps forward, they take one maybe two back.”
“But the names? The kill list?”
“The names are not a kill list. They are list of everyone I want to bring into my fold, my universe. I want you and your Dagger team as part of my team. I sent these suggestions to Evelyn in my letters, which in reality were digital communications by way of the dark web. Drewson’s people, his ‘Zebra team’ to be precise, intercepted the letters and rearranged the information into a fake ‘code’ suggesting I had created a kill list to justify their own nefarious actions. They are protesting, and projecting, too much, as the saying goes. Anyway, Evelyn went to Drewson’s lair to meet you about the time I sent that, and now they have successfully implicated me in a conspiracy.”
He used air quotes around the term “conspiracy.” He played with his phone for a second and a printer behind me whirred as it spit out sheets of paper. Blanc grabbed the stack of paper and evened it out on the table by bouncing it along its long and short edges. He handed it to me.
“The ‘code,’ such as it is, with a translation beneath it, is a simple letter to Evelyn outlining my desire to meet you and offer you and your team onboarding to my company to help support the decentralization of finance, internet, and power in general.”
“That’s what Drewson said his mission was,” I replied.
He nodded and lifted his hand to emphasize his point. “Mitch is a con artist. He had a hand in the FTX debacle, if you remember that crypto meltdown. He’s a multi-billionaire because he wisely bought Bitcoin aggressively in 2012 and sold all of it in 2020 at the peak. Other than one lucky stroke, everything he touches fails. This Project Optimus is a scam just like Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX were scams, or Bernie Madoff, or you name the carnival barker that evangelized in pursuit of other people’s money, which is the fuel that drives these charlatans.”
I held the paper and read.
Dearest Evelyn, I hope this note finds you well. I miss our chats and visits. These are extraordinary times. The most devoted engineers, developers, and coders are in grave danger. Project Optimus has chosen war with Phalanx Corporation to steal our LanxPro technology and stop our pursuits of improving mankind by empowering individuals by giving them control of their digital identities. They have a devious plan to create a global security state that provides them ultimate power through complete privacy penetration. Our intercepts show these are the names of the people on the Optimus kill list: Emily Sedgewick, Blair Campbell, Evelyn Champollion …
The list continued with about fifty other names, presumably of those killed in Grass Valley and elsewhere. I continued reading.
More than anything I want to connect with Garrett Sinclair for three reasons. First, if you are on this list, you need protection and Sinclair can join forces with Sharpstone to do so. Second, other than my dear mother, he is the only family I have. While I understand that the situation may be uncomfortable for him, I would like to get to know him personally and begin a relationship with him. I know that the two of you met in the Eye of Africa, and he saved you from the hands of that bastard Sanson. I’ve been in talks with his friend, President Kim Campbell, to both try to recruit her daughter, Blair, to our global cause and to release Garrett from prison. I’m not sure why he’s there, anyway. You were there when the FBI came after him. Maybe you have some answers? I wish I could talk some sense into my former colleague, Mitch Drewson, but he has gone off the rails. C’est la vie. Now is the time to fight to protect humanity. I want Misha Constance on the Phalanx team, also. I’ve looked at her code and there is no one better at developing other than perhaps you. She may be the best in the world. Somehow Blanc got his hooks in her and is using her naivete for his own purposes. The definition of evil.
The third reason I would like to speak with Garrett is that he and his Dagger team would be a great leadership structure for your Sharpstone Private Security enterprise. Perhaps a Sharpstone America? We could be a global security juggernaut that protects the downtrodden while we pursue our lofty digital goals, as well. My analysis of Garrett from afar is that he would be the perfect executive to run this enterprise.
Safe travels as you try to negotiate with Mitch.
Love and respect, Aurelius
I looked at Blanc. My mind was buzzing.
“Evelyn had this before she met with Drewson?”
“No, as I said, she was on her way to meet with him when it was intercepted, but this is the original. We are reacting to the information as we receive it, but Evelyn is ever the peacemaker. She’s tough and brilliant, and she wants the best for humanity, believing that laudable efforts triumph over the diligent labors of evil even when there is no reason for optimism.”
I thought of Melissa’s maxim, “Good wins.” Maybe that was my connection to Evelyn. They had similar hearts.
Blanc continued.
“As you might imagine, running a global multinational business with a presence in every country in the world keeps me busy. When I need to communicate with Evelyn I do so in a chat room in the dark web. Ximena was my personal coder. She wasn’t as good as Misha, but she was good. She lived in El Salvador and would translate my text from our corporate Slack account. Someone apparently breached what Ximena did and put a real-time code editor into the document. Maybe Drewson himself. That’s one thing he knows how to do. He could make it so that when Misha or Evelyn try to hack the document, all the words legitimately in the text rearrange to say something entirely different when someone opens the document. Just like he made that deepfake video, this is the text version of that. Every time you breach the security of the code, it rearranges into my supposed kill list.”
I knew enough about the cyber domain of warfare to understand that what he was saying was possible, but that still didn’t make it true. As a military officer, I was trained to be loyal and do my duty, assuming that everyone else in that institution did the same. I built a false sense of security around me and my team because I believed that most people would do the same, and if they didn’t, the system would surely expel them in due time. It wasn’t naivete; rather, it was training, and choosing to believe in a system filled with rules and checks and balances, not unlike our government. Removing the worry of internal sabotage from my daily command responsibilities was paramount to focusing on the mission at hand so that I could lead my men and women into combat in support of vital national security interests.
But now, after being imprisoned for a year and having stopped an insider threat at the strategic levels not once but twice, I had no illusions. Many, if not most, people with any semblance of real power were angling to increase that power by whatever means possible. This reasoning didn’t exclude Aurelius Blanc, who was standing in front of me with a sincere, earnest look on his face. I was in the rare position of not knowing who to trust in a world filled with deceitful charlatans. Were they both lying, manipulative assholes or was it only one of them? They both had slithered their way through corporate backstabbing and accumulated unimaginable sums of money and power, which accounted for something. If Drewson was the one-hit wonder with Bitcoin that Blanc painted him as, that would make Blanc the more successful, and therefore palatable, of the two.
“A franc for your thoughts?” he said with a grim smile.
“That’s a lot more than a penny,” I replied.
“Yes, well, inflation and all that. Plus, I intend to compensate you well if you do me the favor of joining our team.”
Two job offers in the last week since Mahegan blew a hole in the Disciplinary Barracks. The brief spat of news stories that followed were something that both Drewson and Blanc claim to have eradicated from the internet. It was mind-boggling.
“Honestly, I don’t know who to believe, Mr. Blanc.”
“There’s a difference, General, between serving your government and serving the people of your country,” he said. “Your country, any country, is but a grouping of bureaucracies filled with people mostly concerned about their own aggrandizement. You will come to appreciate my frankness and by extension my honesty. I have no reason to lie or play games. My chief interest here, as I said, is twofold: first, to get to know you better, and second, should we click, to offer you an executive role in Phalanx, an organization that I started with the help of your grandfather, my father.”
“What role did Coop play in starting Phalanx and Sharpstone?” The Ranger patch–shaped rhombus tattoos, business cards, and flash drive weren’t a coincidence.
“As you must know, Papa was an international consultant to many militaries around the globe. He spoke about leadership and strategy to forums in most of the Western nations. Much like you, your Coop was a champion for peace, having seen the carnage of war. It was his idea for Evelyn and I to team up. He was the first investor in Phalanx and Evelyn’s security company, Sharpstone.”
The first investor? Coop led an entire double life, it seemed. His long absences made sense now.
“For now, Max runs the Sharpstone business, but he is a tactician, not an executive. Phalanx, as I’m sure you’re aware, is thriving. With Sharpstone, though, we obviously need to grow our capabilities that have heretofore been focused on personal protection of Evelyn after the Eye of Africa incident, and now of me, as well. But Papa believed that with my computer science training and her cryptological and linguistic skills, we would be a formidable team. I think adding you would be the third leg of the stool. Especially since you’re family. You could carry out Coop’s legacy.”
Coop’s legacy? Who was this interloper to tell me about Coop?
I remembered Coop being gone a lot when I was younger. He was a famous general, but I was just a kid proud that he was my grandfather. I didn’t realize the business opportunities open to retired flag officers and even today hadn’t given it much thought. When your life was consumed with leading men and women to defend your nation there wasn’t much bandwidth left to consider alternative opportunities. Intellectual energy and passion were somewhat of a zero-sum process. At least that was the case for me.
“On your previous point, I’ve always served a constitution, which happens to begin with, ‘We the People,’” I replied. “I understand the distinction. My government imprisoned me for doing nothing wrong. I led a small fraction of the fabric of our nation, and I led them well, but I don’t understand what role I could play in Phalanx when much of the world believes Phalanx is killing innocent civilians. On your assertion that Coop is a plank holder in Sharpstone, I’d need to see some evidence of that. There’s no record of this anywhere in any of his affairs,” I said.
“Really? Do you think your father living the good life down in Florida is all on his own accord?”
“He’s got a good pension,” I replied.
“He owns a two-million-dollar house on the Gulf of Mexico and plays golf every day,” Blanc said.
“Are you saying that my father knows about you?”
Blanc chuckled. “Knows about me? He was very upset at the reading of Papa’s will. He not only knows about me because Papa extended to me all his overseas portfolio upon his passing, but he has aligned himself with Drewson.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When was the last time you spoke with your father?”
“Just yesterday to warn him about you,” I said. What Blanc was implying was beyond believable.
“Yes, well, how did that work out?”
“He was playing golf. He didn’t care.”
“Precisely my point. He has Drewson’s assassin squads all around him for protection,” Blanc said.
“I don’t believe you,” I replied. But somewhere deep inside me, I did. I had been unable to find any other explanation for my father’s alienation of me and my children. I recalled Coop’s funeral and my father’s subsequent anger and dissociation from all of us, including my mother and grandmother. I assumed that he was genuinely upset about his father’s death, and he was handling it the only way he knew how, which was to withdraw. Could he have been upset about Coop’s will? Finding out about Blanc? Splitting Coop’s fortune, whatever it was, with this gatecrasher who descended out of nowhere to claim half the stake?
