Liberty's Last Stand by Stephen Coonts Page A

Carmellini.
    â€œHey, Tommy.”
    â€œI heard you are now famous, Admiral. Saw the news on television last night when I was eating dinner. Been trying to call you.”
    â€œMy fifteen minutes.”
    â€œWhere are you?”
    â€œCamp Dawson, West Virginia.”
    â€œYou got a charger for that phone?”
    â€œI can get one. Why?”
    â€œKeep it charged and on. I may want some investment advice. The stock market has the giggling shits, and you know how I am about bargains.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œDon’t bend over to pick up the soap.” And Tommy was gone.
    Jake snorted, smiled, and put the phone in his pocket. Tommy Carmellini was one of the good guys he had known through the years. Amazing that there had been so many.

FOUR

    I turned the iPhone off and looked at the ceiling in the motel room. Since I heard that news broadcast while munching a burger at the bar of a TGI Friday’s at a little town in Ohio, I had tried Grafton’s phone eight times before midnight, and two times since. Then, voila!, he answered.
    Not that he had anything to say. I remembered that classified file that crossed his desk about the NSA going to comprehensive monitoring of all American telephone conversations. And I well knew how good they were at triangulating cell phone signals. They could put you within a few meters, whether you were using the phone or not, just as long as it was logged into a network. I was on teams that used that technique to find wanted terrorists in Pakistan and Syria and Yemen.
    The way to defeat that was to wrap your phone in tinfoil. So I wrapped mine back up and put it in my pocket.
    The thing that bothered me was the announcement by the FBI that former CIA director Jake Grafton—note that “former”—was being detained and investigated for a possible role in the right-wing conspiracy to assassinate the president. They could have just locked him up and thrown away the key, but no, they decided to create a conspiracy to help justify martial law. I had no doubt when the trolls in the White House were finished writing this fiction the guilty bastards would make quite a list. I might even be on one of them. Along with the many enemies of the administration who didn’t believe in global warming or Soetorocare or his give-a-pass-to-terror treaty with the death-to-America regime inIran. Soetoro’s enemies would be in deep and serious shit that no doubt would ruin them for life. Maybe they would get a show trial before a military commission. And afterward, be put against a wall in front of a firing squad, or permanently locked in a cell somewhere to figure out where they went wrong. Barry Soetoro had that in him. He was the savior of the planet, after all.
    So the question became, what was Mrs. Carmellini’s little boy Tommy going to do about it?
    Well, at least I knew where Grafton was. Tonight. I suspected they would not keep him long at Camp Dawson. They would want him to sign a confession they were busy writing now, so I suspected they would move him soon and go to work on him with torture and drugs.
    Personally, I didn’t give a damn what he signed. I had to get to him before they killed him.
    I crawled out of bed, took a shower, and shaved because I had no idea when I would get another chance, then loaded my stuff into my car. I paused for a good look at the Benz. What an impractical car. I needed a pickup. Tomorrow, maybe.
    I filled the car at an all-night station, got a cup of coffee, and pointed the front bumper east. There wasn’t much traffic. The sky lightened up and the tires hummed on the pavement and I passed some trucks. I left the radio off.
    Normally I don’t think much about politics. I am like most people, I suppose. I get wrapped up in the business of earning a living, giving pleasure to select members of the opposite sex, spending time with friends, and following the fortunes of my favorite sports teams. I vote for people