The Nassau Directives

PREFACE

This is a book that refuses to give up on me. And vice versa.

1988 - I first started THE NASSAU DIRECTIVES in 1988, then got distracted by my role in starting technology companies or helping other people start theirs.

So, Nassau Directives languished in a drawer. And other ideas took over.

1999 - DAUGHTER OF GOD was published.

2003 - SLATEWIPER was published. The plot of THE NASSAU DIRECTIVES never left my consciousness.

2004 - I pulled the pages out of a drawer in 2004 and scanned them since I had lost the original file. The plot was still solid, but the technology had evolved. So, I re-edited the manuscript, updated the technology. But by then, I got more interested in writing PERFECT KILLER which was a science-based thriller wrapped in a Southern novel that pretty well described my life until the immune system of my native Mississippi rejected me for having organized a civil rights march.

2008 - After PERFECT KILLER, I returned to THE NASSAU DIRECTIVES again in 2008.

The plot was still solid, but the technology had — once again — evolved. So, once again I re-edited the manuscript, updated the technology then got more interested in writing DIE BY WIRE.

2011 – DIE BY WIRE was published.

2015 - I added a lot more chapters, right up to the point where all the ticking-clock dominos were all set up and ready to be pushed over for the race to the grand finale.

Then got distracted. Again.

Early 2016 - I still really like the plot which really harkens back to the early Ludlum style.

But I am getting haunted by this zombie, this UNdead thriller. Now that I’m ready to write the race to the finish it’s time to do it.

So, to avoid being distracted before finishing, I have decided to publish this excerpt by excerpt.

Late 2016 — In the process of Rethinking the original resurrection, I realized that the excerpt idea never worked. The crush of outside work — including being made Chief Marketing Officer of a technology firm simply ate my time.

All of it.

So ….

I believe I will hold a contest for potential co-authors. The rules are still somewhat fluid, so check" The Nassau Directives" website for details as they develop. However, my basic plan is to ask for readers to send me a 250-word (max) synopsis of how they would finish the book.

From among the synopsis winners, I’ll choose *someone* to finish it off. I’ll work with them and offer them co-author credit and 25% of sales (or royalties if it goes mainstream).There are some procedural things that need to be worked out so stay tuned at: The Nassau Directives.

Here’s the original, early-2016 plan that never happened. Enjoy the author’s process.

My plan was… well, not specifically sure. Maybe weekly. Maybe biweekly. I’m thinking that I should publish this over about a six-month period.

Free? Paid?

Probably yes.

I’m thinking that the excerpts published here will be free until the next excerpt comes out.

With every new excerpt, the previous installments will be behind a paywall.

People who pay once don’t need to pay again. They will have paywall access to every word in the book leading up to the current free excerpt.

And at the very end, they get the whole book for whatever they paid.

I will be using a reader-friendly payment system I design, not Amazon etc.

After the book is finished, then it *maybe* either goes to a mainstream publisher or to Kindle and Smashwords.

Price?

Still an unknown.

I’m thinking $0.99 for the first people in.

Then gradually higher prices as more pages are published.

$1.99 when the book is 20% done. $2.99 at 40% done. $4.99 at 60% and $6.99 at 80%.

That’s not set in stone.

Regardless, whatever the price is, it will always be lower than the ultimate price charged by a mainstream publisher.

PROLOGUE

Laguna Nigel, California.

Muzzle flashes freeze-framed a midnight killing field.

On a gnarled ribbon of beach wedged between sheer cliffs and chest-high breakers, slugs closed in on a running man.

A hundred feet above, a tuxedo-clad man watched the chase from the Hesse Corporation’s observation deck. He braced himself against the railing, elbows locked, low-light Swarowski binoculars at his eyes following the drama as it moved toward his left. He focused on the faint glow from the running man’s right hand.

You fool! You of all people should remember that 911 has orders never to send civilian police here.

The chase had begun at the foot of the corporation’s beach access stairway...

Where is the dossier?

... and was about to end.

How did you get into the vault? What did you expect to accomplish?

The running man ran out of beach where the sheer cliffs marched into the Pacific.

Seven long strides into the surf, his face dimly illuminated by the phone screen he held close to his eyes.

Powerful flashlights converged.

He stumbled. Fell. Held the screen above the roiling waves that churned with lead.

Miraculously, the man evaded the deadly metal swarm, regained his balance.

The tuxedoed man lowered the glasses and let them rest against his chest, hung by the leather neck strap. He shook his head at the evening’s events. Never in his tenure as founder and chairman of the Hesse Corporation had such a thing as this happened. Never, in fact, in the think tank’s history.

As a think tank, Hesse was not as well-known as the Rand Corporation or Battelle. The Hesse Corporation’s distinguished board of directors liked it that way. The secret studies Hesse created for its government and private-sector patrons were classified at levels higher than any standard the government had ever created.

But never had they ever produced a document as overwhelmingly important as the one that had initiated this night’s violence: The Nassau Directives. Ironically, the directives had been developed by the hunted man down on the beach. He had single-handedly created a plan to save the republic.

And he would pay for that with his life.

The Nassau Directives: three surprisingly simple proceedings that would drastically alter the face of America and improve its quality of life for generations. The Directives would success where all the hundreds of billions spent by the government on the war on drugs had failed.

Everything the U.S. military and law enforcement had thrown at the cartels had done nothing more than chop off a few of the hydra's heads. Heavily armed Mexican drug gangs had all but taken over the government, assassinating even the highest law-enforcement officials at will. The few honest police chiefs who survived eventually fled to the U.S. and sought asylum. The Mexican drug lords openly recruited members with posters and banners hung over busy streets.

In Colombia, newer, smarter, richer and more dangerous organizations emerged to replace the cartels smashed in Cali and Medellin. They formed alliances with their counterparts in Mexico, Venezuela, Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bulgaria and Turkey. Using the latest in technology, modern business management techniques and readily available armament they formed global organizations capable of subverting and overpowering smaller nation-states. The ability of powerful, well-funded crime syndicates to co-opt sovereign governments meant that votes in the United Nations were increasingly cast by globalized organized crime bosses.

Desperation had driven the U.S. government into insanely improbable schemes, ridiculous in their conception, suicidal in their incompetent execution. The spectre of failure somehow blessed these global Hail Mary passes a degree of supremely undeserved rationality. The attempts were many, but few of these delusional anti-narcotics efforts ever leaked into the public's attention. But when some did come to light -- like Operation Fast and Furious -- it exposed the extent to which the government had run out of ideas, sanity and patience. Fast and Furious's covert -- and illegal -- operation to sell powerful weapons to the Mexican drug cartels in order to track the pipeline was just the faintest tip of a mostly successful cover-up that kept the vast extent of its operations hidden from Congress and the American public.

But Fast and Furious brought reality home to the very highest levels of the American power structure: The war on drugs was lost. Cartel money and its threats of violence had penetrated Congress, the federal agencies and was corrupting law enforcement and American society at every level, just as it had in Mexico and all-too-many other countries.

Only a powerful, innovative, bold plan -- The Nassau Directives -- could keep America from being one more narco-nation ruled by grotesque violence and fear.

When the third and final directive had run completely its course, there would be no more market and that meant no more windfall profits for growers, processors, smugglers, money launderers, wholesalers and pushers.

No more drug billions to corrupt governments and finance terrorists.

Maniacal gunfire down on the beach brought the tuxedoed man’s attention back to the violence below. He raised the binoculars. Through the fine, expensive optics, he saw that one of the hunted man’s pants legs had been torn away. Blood flooded into the surf. Still, the man fled desperately.

It would be over in moments, the tuxedoed man thought with satisfaction, the last of his troubles with a brilliant -- but ultimately expendable -- troublemaker.

Why did you do this? You knew you'd never get out of this alive.

A wedge of pale light broke his concentration. It spilled out on the deck’s marble tiling. The tuxedoed man turned toward the source and spotted a man's familiar silhouette, lit cigarette in hand making his way toward the guardrail. He stopped next to tuxedoed man and gazed down at the beach.

The director turned, nodded to the man he had taught at Harvard law school – an extraordinary student who had ridden a wave of voter naivete to an unimagined greatness that far exceeded his experience, intelligence or abilities: the President of the United States.

I heard the gunshots, from my suite, the President said without alarm or judgment.

Harvard professor, Nobel Peace Prize, leader of the free world and frequent guest at the Hesse Corporation's palatial guest quarters.

He took a drag on his cigarette. The glow illuminated a tall, lean man with a permanently arrogant expression and a way of always looking down his nose at you even when he was trying to show his toothiest, most winning campaign smile.

The director looked at him. Couldn’t be helped. He sneaked in somehow. Security called me; I left the celebration, came here, caught him red-handed.

Police? The President asked as he motioned for the binoculars.

The tuxedoed man shook his head. They know better.

The President nodded noncommittally. Actually, I first thought might be someone with an itchy trigger finger on the New Year’s fireworks. He raised the binoculars to his eyes.

On the beach, flashlights nailed the hunted man. Well-aimed slugs followed, slammed into the man’s back, lifted him off his feet, hammered him facedown on the sand.

The man in the suit lay still.

Lavish red froth bubbled from a grievous wound below the man’s right shoulder. His torso heaved spasmodically. A winded, lung-shot man struggling to pull his last breaths.

The shots stopped. The President scanned the beach and caught sight of the two hunters, sprinting toward their wounded prey. What's that in his hand?

Apparently a phone.

Why?

Why do we cling to anything at all as we die?

Photo of a beloved?

Why wonder?

Miraculously, the wounded man sprang to his feet then and lunged into the surf. Gunshots quickly picked up his trail, stitched a ragged line of red splotches between his shoulder blades. He shuddered, took a last close look at the phone.

The next shot entered the back of the man's neck and severed his spinal cord. He pitched forward, arms outstretched to embrace the next life.

The President nodded thoughtfully as he handed the binoculars back to the director.

The sky lit up then. First with a small Roman candle, Then the dull thudding bombardment of the professional performance up in Laguna Beach.

Happy New Year, the President said.

The director cast a brief look down at the beach then smiled.

Yes. Yes it is. Happy New Year to you too.

CHAPTER 1

Washington, D.C.

The opulent luxury apartments on upper Wisconsin Avenue shrugged off the bitter January wind and swaddled their wealthy occupants in thick, expensive, stylish walls and decorator designs often featured in Architectural digest.

Just before 9 p.m., a Mercedes CL600 approached the garage of one of the better buildings. Vertical steel bars of the entrance gate sliced the light from the car’s highbeams and laid them in fat slabs on the concrete floor beyond.

The Mercedes’ driver retrieved a small electronic transmitter, pushed the button. The gate lifted obediently. The driver parked next to a classic Jaguar XJ12, and opened the door.

A tall muscular man with light brown skin and piercing eyes climbed out of the Mercedes, gracefully closed the door. The alarm chirp echoed off cold concrete. He scanned the garage, noted, the presence of a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren with U.S. Senate license plates, then headed for the elevator lobby. He moved with grace, menace and barely restrained menace. One hand slid cautiously inside his tan cashmere coat. Cold gunmetal in the shoulder holster.

A faint smile animated his lips as he and keyed in the combination to open the door. Once inside the elevator, a small round key brought the call button to life,

Four floors up, he stepped out, turned left and made his way six doors down to a man who appeared to be a uniformed butler. The butler was not a butler, but a guard with a .44 magnum holstered under his uniform jacket

The uniform looks good on you, the dark man said to the butler who wasn’t a butler. It was as close to humor as the dark man ever got. The man in the butler’s uniform knew this and managed a smile. Then he let the tall, dark man into the ostentatiously decorated apartment. They walked silently among furnishings that cost more than most Third World families earned in their miserable lifetimes.

In the bedroom, a different story: stark, utilitarian tables and chairs and the unmistakeable odor of men working too long in confined surroundings. Surveillance electronics jammed the space: video monitors, computers, hard-drive arrays, an elaborate control panel. Shirt-sleeved technicians with shoulder holsters and headsets sat before the monitors, acolytes before the digital tabernacle.

They were all the tall, dark man's comrades, colleagues, brothers in arms fighting a secret war for the survival of America.

Like other tight covert squads around the globe, the men in the room did not formally report to the tall man. But they all knew his reputation and treated him as the most equal among equals. They were the foot soldiers of Talon Gold and he was the web that bound them all to common purpose.

The tall man paused. Turned slowly.

All but one of the monitors in the room displayed images of empty rooms one floor directly below. That apartment was leased by Raoul Salazar, the number three man at the Colombian embassy.

Neither technician turned as light from the living room played briefly through the room. They focused on the one screen filled with lurid acts that defied imagination. A time stamp showed that the video had been recorded less than two hours before.

The tall dark-skinned man stood behind the men and watched a stage that he had set as the operational head of an unofficial organization of the U.S. government. It had taken months of stealthy maneuvering, but he had leased the units on both sides of Salazar’s apartment and directly above. Then he had packed all of them with the most sophisticated electronic apparatus, capable of picking up the slightest sound and of showing the sharpest images even under lights-out conditions.

The men who monitored and operated the equipment had been assembled from half a dozen federal bureaus: men who had never met each other before this assignment and who would never see each other again once they finished the mission.

The teams rotated every 60 days to keep them from learning too much: about each other, about the operation. But this was an almost unnecessary precaution. Every task force member had been chosen not only for skill, but because they were men who obediently followed the orders that came from the authorities above them. As long as their orders had been issued from the proper sources with the salient codes and command authorizations, the men were utterly reliable to the letter of their instructions.

The tall man watched the monitor, a close-up showing the unruly graying hair, potbelly and puffy face of the senator who belonged to the Mercedes parked in the apartment’s garage. Veins stood out on the man’s nose.

The tall dark man watched the monitor as the image tilted and zoomed. Then it pulled back, bringing the gray-haired senator into view, a naked mass of sagging rolls of fat and pasty skin. The tall dark man frowned, found It hard to believe the man had ever been seriously considered for a presidential nomination. The monitor image pulled back more: a blonde woman, naked from the waist up with large, silicone-enhanced breasts.

Some dish, the first technician said.

The tall man glared. Okay, we got an ID, he said. Back to a medium shot.

The woman knelt before the senator. The time stamp numbers passed on the screen as she worked on the senator’s erection.

Finally, the senator beckoned for her stand. He knelt before her, unzipped her skin-tight jeans, pulled her panties down to reveal a long healthy penis and two well-formed testicles. The penis grew erect as the men watched silently.

The senator proceeded to fellate the transvestite.

You’re sure you got it all? The tall man asked the man in the butler’s uniform.

Everything, the butler replied. "Every last word. Before the she-male arrives, Salazar and the senator sit there for a full two hours. They eat. They talk. The senator tells Salazar that he doesn’t have to worry ... that Congress'll talk big about drug enforcement and border control then never appropriate enough money for anything.

"Then, the senator leans over and hands him the file.

You get a close up?

The butler smiled. Got the security classification stamp, the DOD seal and even the document number. Then when they’re finished with their meal, Salazar tells the senator, ‘You’ve been very kind to us. I have a bit of dessert for you.’ Then he trots in the TV and that brings you up to now, he nodded toward the bedroom door.

The room fell deadly silent.

What if ... one technician broke the silence. What happens if he starts voting against Salazar's cartel? I mean ... after he sees the video? They --

The lethal implications of the video weighed heavy on each man present.

The tall man took a deep breath and exhaled audibly.

He will have a choice, the tall man said. Just as he has always had choices. Just as we all have choices.

My God, the tall man thought to himself. What kind of world was it when you had to become a pornographer and blackmailer to see justice done?

Never forget: regardless of what happens ... what you might read in the paper, his own personal choices turned the senator into an accomplice of a deadly cartel. Your work here will only confront him with doing something he has never done before.

The men looked at him expectantly.

The senator will be challenged to do the right thing.

Then he left. Feeling dirty.

CHAPTER 2

Easton, Maryland

The body was missing.

And the eyes.

Impaled on the fence post by the driveway, the severed head gazed vaguely toward a struggling Eastern Shore dawn all sooty with gloom.

The gloom swept through the tall dark man's heart as he sat quietly in the front passenger seat of the tan-colored government sedan. And took in yet one more of these.

Who are you?

Octavio Cruz wondered.

How do you know what strikes so deeply in my heart?

Cruz paid no attention to the sedan's driver who leaned out the door and retched onto the frozen tarmacadam of the neatly edged driveway. Even a decade of extreme duty in Middle Eastern wars did not inure the driver against a horror that would only grow worse as they stepped on to the property.

Already in the driveway in front of them was a panel van with a rack of emergency lights on top and ambulance markings. Two men waited in the front.

Behind Cruz, sat a woman.

She was in her mid-30s, fitly taut in a curvy sort of way with auburn hair and intelligent green eyes that harvested every last bit of information from the world around her. She wore jeans, a down vest over a plaid wool shirt and a Smith & Wesson M&P .45 ACP on her hip.

The woman ran a nameless and highly classified program concealed within the Justice Department’s Witness Protection Program. Her energy usually intimidated her enemies and inspired her staff and friends. But on this day she sat inert, emotionless, gazing through the dim morning light at her latest failure. Dread pressed on her heart like lead ballast.

Cruz paid no attention to the nauseous driver or the woman in back. They held no meaning for him. Only the head carried significance. He dreaded what he knew awaited them inside the neat brick and white clapboard house just beyond the winter-naked oak trees.

He never forgot the first time he had seen this. The living nightmare played in his head time after time, undimmed by the years. He felt it coming for him now in all its lurid detail. For a moment, he felt the insanity, the naked terror ripping through him. He was a child again, running through the rain forest of southern Nicaragua, limbs slapping against his face, lianas groping for his arms, legs, a careless ankle, threatening to snare him, throw him down to the forest floor where soggy masses of rotting vegetation waited to be his grave.

He heard the crashes behind him: the sounds of death stalking his path. The sounds grew louder. His small feet tangled with the extended roots of a huge tree; the unthinkable happened and he went down heavily, holding one trembling hand over his mouth so they would not hear his cry of pain. To cry was to die ... like his mother, his father.

Mr. Cruz?

The voice reached out from the rear seat.

Tavio turned from his vision. He searched his memory for her name. Petra Armstrong. Yes that was it. He looked at her and found a strong, open face with a firm jaw and high cheekbones.

Yes? Cruz’s voice was flat, distant.

You okay?

He cocked his head inquiringly. Of course, why do you ask?

She had watched him go rigid, like a man in a trance, his eyes fixed on the head. It had alarmed her, but now, as she looked at him, at the deadly white-hot eyes burning beneath the tangle of eyebrows. He looked normal now. Or as close as this odd cold man ever got to normal. Had she imagined it?

I thought that – She paused. Nothing, she said quickly. I think the shock.... she let her voice trail away for lack of words.

It happens, he said flatly. Especially the first time.

I wish this were the first time, Armstrong responded.

Cruz raised his eyebrows. You've seen this before?

She nodded.

Operation Croesus Traveler. Cruz nodded knowingly. Yes, of course. Your name was in the file. I remember now.

The file? Exactly who was this strange cold man with the NSA ID badge that he had read the most secret files that her department handled. Who had authorized the reading of the file? She was the head of the department and she had never seen the man before the tan government sedan had pulled up in front of her Capitol Hill townhouse a little less than two hours before.

Who had authorized him to read the Croesus Traveler file? The file’s contents were restricted to a need to know basis. Above her, only her boss and the Attorney General had the authorization to release the file. Beneath her, there were but three people with access and only one of them had authorization.

Petra Armstrong wrestled with the anger that burned in her gut. Anger had always been like a Marine: it could be her best friend or her worst enemy.

As a friend, it drove her to perform near-miracles. But too often it proved a liability that distorted judgment and made enemies when she really needed an ally.

No more enemies. Not this morning.

Armstrong concentrated instead on the bloody head of a man who, seven years ago, had been a U.S. Attorney, the chief prosecutor of a multi-billion-dollar drug-money laundering operation. The investigation had been code-named Croesus Traveler and had spanned 19 countries on four continents. They’d jailed four of New York’s top bankers, executives with big name banks, and seized more than $12 billion.

But it was the last case the prosecutors and investigators would ever work on. The billions of bloody dollars they had not yet found would do them all in. The billions that still hid in illicit bank accounts in prominent and complicit banks around the globe fueled a relentless vendetta.

That revenge had waited patiently. Three years to the day after the guilty verdicts were returned, the judge in the case died in the spectacular crash and fire of his new Jaguar. Some called it ironic coincidence. Then there were the jurors. Three of the 12 died in other accidents before the Justice Department caught on to what was happening. Seven of the remaining nine jurors were placed in the U.S. Marshals Service’s Witness Protection program. The two that refused died quickly in extravagantly violent ways that clearly sent a message to the world.

But even the most case-hardened veterans were not prepared for the onslaught unleashed against anyone from the government who had had anything at all to do with the prosecution: investigators, prosecutors, even clerks, court reporters, bailiffs.

Many had been gratuitously tortured. Some simply killed. Others bore the twisted, horribly, maimed features of those allowed to survive as examples of those who might aid the prosecution of Cartel executives. A number of these people with their nightmare faces and painfully distorted bodies had committed suicide.

In most of these cases, quick damage control by the Justice Department produced cover stories that kept the press and general public from learning about the outrages or drawing connections among the incidents.

But the warnings had reached their intended audience. These days it was not uncommon for court employees to resign rather than work Nassau Cartel cases. Good investigators were increasingly hard to find; there was a rash of missing evidence misplaced by police; prosecutors suddenly found more and more creative reasons for dropping or reducing charges. Most often they explained their actions by saying they were just picking and choosing our cases carefully to assure convictions. Our critics just don’t understand the criminal justice process. Besides, if Congress appropriated more money, we would be able to tackle more cases.

Bullshit!

Petra knew plomo o plata when she saw it. Lead or silver.

The Colombians had invented the tactic; Nassau had globalized it.

Take the money or take the lead -- get rich or die.

By the time Petra had been brought in, all but four prosecutors had been ritually tortured in a classically medieval manner, then beheaded.

Like this morning.

Petra had been second in command of the Witness Protection Program when her boss suddenly resigned just weeks after they had started hiding the Croesus Traveler jurors.

Plomo o plata? No one knew. He never said.

But to avoid a repeat, Petra was put in charge of developing a super-secret program to help the remaining government personnel associated with Croesus Traveler to disappear. The program had no official name, no official funding that appeared on any fiscal memos or appropriations. And most importantly -- to avoid the threats and temptations of Plomo o plata, neither Petra nor any of the other U.S. Marshals had any connection with any of the Croesus Traveler personnel.

No written records were kept, no trails left to follow. Information passed verbally in secret places, introductions and arrangements discretely made, money passed as cash in plain white envelopes.

And now someone had passed the Croesus Traveler file on to this strange who looked as if he could be a Colombian hit man.

The sound of the driver’s dry heaves brought Petra back to the reality of the frigid gray morning. She watched as the man pulled himself upright behind the steering wheel. Cruz rummaged through the glove compartment and found a wad of old Burger King napkins no doubt left over from some stakeout or another. He passed them over to the driver who accepted gratefully and wiped his face clean.

The interior of the car filled with the corrosion of fear and the driver’s foul breath.

No use putting it off any longer, Armstrong said opening her door. Besides, it’s getting light. Won’t do to have that ... She looked at the impaled head, ... thing up there for the neighbors to see.

The two men grunted their reluctant agreement, opened their doors and climbed out.

Petra and Cruz walked toward the house, resolute and ready to be horrified. The driver followed reluctantly behind.

Petra paused by the van and greeted the all-too-familiar face of the clean-up driver.

Same as last time, she told him. Pictures from all the usual angles as quick as you can and get that ... she looked at the mutilated head that had once housed the intellect of a brilliant lawyer," ... get that thing out of sight