He sounded close to sobbing again. He obviously wasn’t going to stop me, so I grabbed some of the papers from the mess. The topmost one was written in what appeared to be Russian, but there were notes scribbled in the sides: a sharp handwriting that said to “POST THIS” with an arrow to a circled paragraph, and “REDACT” next to a part that was scratched out with black marker. There were pages of that report stapled together, with diagrams of an airplane and arrows denoting specific seats.
I pushed it off and found more beneath that. There were memos bound by paper clips, messages exchanged in a circle of email addresses that were jumbled letters and numbers. The message chain was long but the newest post was circled by a highlighter pen, which only read:
TO: 100-964
FROM: 1094-57
Confirmation of activity in Japan, now moved to March 16, earthquake. Keep away from the area for two days leading up and following the date.
Relocate all invested assets from Dreycorp a week preceding.
It was odd, until I recognized what they had been talking about. That was the earthquake that’d hit Japan days ago—the same that my teacher had shown us in class.
At the top of the page, a date marked when the email had been sent…four months ago.
I remembered suddenly what I’d read in the eyes of Dreycorp’s own CEO, that dramatic change that had overcome Harold Wolf some time before his death. Now it clicked into place: the fear of something that he was certain was coming to get him. He’d known all along, too. Maybe he’d been running from them, hiding in another country to escape the inevitable. It became painfully obvious to me that the earthquake—all that massive destruction, and all the lives that it had taken—had somehow been artificially created to kill this one man.
“How does Anon get this information?” I asked, looking up. “This is…this is almost unbelievable.”
And a treasure trove for me—a strange feeding of my addiction to truth. I didn’t give the monk a possibility of answering, digging further into the papers. There was a chart attached below the email, showing two graphs side-by-side. The one on the left showed a large circle with DREYCORP typed in the center, dated this year. There were uncountable smaller circles inside its bounds with even smaller names: food companies whose brands I saw all the time when we went grocery shopping.
The graph on the right also had DREYCORP, but it and its circles were now far smaller and beside two others, all three enveloped by another that simple said EXCELSOR. This chart was dated ten years into the future. A predicted merger, I guessed. Or rather, an inevitable one.
It was like crawling down into a hole only to find that just around the corner was another world, right under my feet the entire time. An email spoke of a nationwide banking chain that was going to fail, the deadline still two months away. It was brief and to the point: Pull your assets. Place them as investments in this other company. They were like instructions with no signature, no way of telling the author or the receiver. There were other attached pages detailing numbers and figures I didn’t understand, lines of text in some finance language. The email circle appeared to be a group of moguls and investment operators, sometimes posting emails that were forwarded to them by others. There were never any names: only the codes as identification.
Everything was a photocopy. Who was Anon to have access to all these things?
“That’s just some of the finance stuff,” Brother James said from beside me. “These are nothing. They’re far down the chain of power. We’ve only identified a few based on their anonymous handles. Have you ever read an email to a president before?”
“I didn’t even know the President had email,” I said in a quick breath, taking a paper that the monk slid in front of me. It was one page, dated for 2012 and addressed from 916-88 to 55-614, which only said:
Stay out of NY this October.
“You think you know what the world is?” Brother James said. “A lot of people think they do. But people are sheep. Humans are easily led when they don’t know they are following.”
“And Father Lonnie…” I said. “They killed him because he knows.”
“Because he knew,” Brother James corrected me like a machete slicing through the air. Past tense now; Father Lonnie was already gone.
“But he had proof,” I said. “He could have gone out and told someone. He could have used all of this to expose who they are!”
“You don’t understand,” the monk said. “It sounds so easy: take these documents and expose them. But to whom? The police? The FBI? Late night radio shows who’d broadcast us in the same segment they talk about alien space saucers?”
He scratched his arms. “They control everything, Michael. They command everything. Do you know how large the world is? Can you imagine how much power it would take to run the entire world, when few can even run an entire country?”
His voice had started to rise as he became more frantic. He yanked the papers out of my hands, tossing them across the desk into the pile.
“Some people believe in families that run the world,” he said. “Rich, powerful families who have been around since kings, still commanding countries in secret, causing wars at whim to build their wealth and releasing plagues as a part of procedure. But the families still report to these… to the Guardians.”
He shrugged. “But you probably think I’m crazy, still. You’re like everyone else. But the Guardians made it that way. They control the media and thus control the way people think: make anyone who believes in this to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a ‘crazy old man talking about Illuminati’. But we’re not making it up. We’re right.”
I was becoming more and more alarmed as the monk’s voice sped up, his hands shaking as he grabbed papers from the desk and stacked them up, then shuffled them, only to reorganize them again.
“Look at Lonnie,” he said. “You don’t think this happens all the time? They want someone dead, so they make him dead. And not just his body: dead to anyone who’d loved him before. Tomorrow they’ll find meds in Lonnie’s room. Some prostitute will say his name in the news. They’ll find all these lies so that people will want to forget him, think his death was his own fault—a suicide by a drug-abusing, tithe-stealing, whoremonger of a priest. ‘Not Lonnie!’ they’ll say. But even his friends will believe it just because they’re told to.”
The monk hit the desk, making it rattle. “Anon didn’t do anything to save him. He just let him die. Where was Anon when Lonnie needed protection? Did he just let him die because it was for some greater good? To keep you safe?”
The monk pulled open one of the drawers and shuffled things around in it furiously. I glanced at the locked door. My heart had started to beat faster, afraid that the monk would soon faint into a shock. Which pocket had he put the keys in? Would I be able to drag him out to get the paramedics, who likely were still outside?
“I wish I was Lonnie,” he went on. “I wish I could be as brave as he was. But I’m not. This isn’t my war. And I’ve got a family: I’ve got brothers and sisters and both my parents.”
“Calm down, you’ll be alright,” I told him, holding my hands out.
“No it won’t be alright!” he exploded into a scream, and suddenly his hand whipped out from the drawer. In it was a pistol, aimed at me.
“Nothing will ever be alright now!” he shouted at me, his voice bouncing off the bricks and the metal furnace. I was frozen, hands extended, heart nearly stopping. The gun was a 9-millimeter: long and slender chassis, black and metal. It was so close I could see its front sight.