Eli Churchill was a talker. Once he got rolling it was unusual for him to stop and listen, but now a distant noise had him concerned.
“Hold on,” he whispered.
He cradled the pay-phone receiver against his shoulder, glanced down the narrow, rutted Mojave dirt road he’d traveled to get here, and then up the long, dark way in the other direction.
In this much quiet your ears could play tricks on you. He could have sworn that there’d been a sound out of place, like the snap of a stalk of dried grass underfoot, even though no other human being had any business being within twenty miles of where he stood, but he couldn’t be sure.
The moon was bright and his eyes were well adjusted to the darkness. He didn’t see anyone, but with the kind of guys Eli was worried about, you really never do.
When he put the phone back to his ear an automated message was playing; the phone company wanted another payment to allow the call to continue. He worked his last six quarters from their torn paper roll and dropped them one by one into the coin slot.
He had just three minutes left. In a way, it was ironic. After years of planning, he’d brought all the evidence he needed to back up his story, but not nearly enough change to buy the time to tell it.
“Are you still there, Beverly?”
“Yes.” The signal in the phone was weak and the woman on the other end sounded tired and impatient. “With all due respect, Mr. Churchill, I need for you to get to the point.”
“I will, I will. Now where was I…” As he riffled through his pile of photocopies a couple of the loose papers got caught up in a gust and went floating off into the night.
“You were talking about the money.”
“Yes, good, okay. Two-point-three trillion dollars is what we’re talking about. Do you know how much that is? From sea level that’s a stack of thousand-dollar bills that would reach to outer space and back with thirty miles to spare.
“That’s how much Don Rumsfeld told the nation was unaccounted for in late summer of 2001. Don’t you see? Two-point-three trillion dollars is three times the amount of all the U.S. hard currency in circulation. You can’t misplace that much money. That’s not an accounting error, that’s organized crime.”
“Mr. Churchill, you said in your message that you had something to tell me that I hadn’t heard before-”
“I know where they spent that money. Or at least some of it.”
A brief rush of static came and went on the line. “Go on.”
“I’ve seen the place, one of the places where they’re getting ready for something-something big-planning it out, you know? I got a job inside in maintenance, as a cleanup man. They thought I was just a janitor, but I had the run of the place overnights.
“I saw what they’re planning to do. They’re building a structure.” He checked his notes to make sure he was getting it right. “Not like a building, but like a political and economic and social structure. They’ve been working on it for a long, long time. Decades. When they collapse the current system, this new one they’ve put together will be all that’s left.”
“I’d like to meet with you, Mr. Churchill,” the woman said. “Where are you right now?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone…”
“Say that again. You’re fading in and out.”
The dry desert wind had been steady and cold since he’d arrived, but he noticed now that it had died down to almost nothing.
“They’re changing the books so that in a generation from now almost nobody will remember what this country used to be. They’ve got the economy set up to fall like a house of cards whenever they’re ready to tap the first one at the foundation. They’ve got the controlled media all lined up and ready to carry out their PR campaign. And they’ve got people so indebted and mind-controlled and unprepared, they’ll turn to anybody who says he’s got the answer.”
“Where can I meet with you, Mr. Churchill?”
“We don’t have the time; just listen now. They’re going to stage something soon to get it all started. Just like that two-point-three trillion dollars that’s missing, there are eleven nuclear weapons unaccounted for in the U.S. arsenal, and I’ve seen two of them-”
A glint of brilliant red light on the wall of the booth caught his attention. He turned, as the man behind him had known that he would, and let the phone drop from his hand.
Eli Churchill had enough time left to begin a quiet prayer but not enough to end it. His final appeal was interrupted by a silenced gunshot, and a.357 semi-jacketed hollow point was the last thing to go through his mind.