Chapter 526

The courier quickly left. Mike Doyle opened the box; I could tell by his expression that it was not good.

I looked in the box; it contained a mass of computer parts, all disassembled. I was pissed but after seeing Ormond Mohammed Patel on the Prince’s payoff list, I was not surprised. That answered why the courier left so quickly.

I took the components out and started placing them on the table. I only had a few pieces left in the box when the light went on. The initial evidence pictures of Balthazar’s items were of a HP laptop; all the big pieces had the Dell logo on them. He didn’t even bother to at least put the same brand parts in the box. On top of that, there was no hard drive included. No matter; his goose was cooked.

I had Bobbie make copies of the file Robert had put together and then made a phone call.

“Troy; are you and the President able to come down here? Bring a General with you that has the authority to have other Generals arrested. By the way, have the Secret Service keep Lewis Hill from leaving until the meeting is over. You may want to lock down his security clearance until then,” I said.

“Kathy; get me an arrest warrant for Ormond Patel; the charges are treason, aiding and complicity in terrorism, along with accepting bribes from a terrorist. Then I need arrest warrants for all Americans here and abroad listed on the report I just gave you,” I said.

Kathy Shellman was the federal prosecutor assigned to the task force. She was getting a name in federal justice circles because of the sheer numbers of federal warrants she was getting and the Justice Department team assigned to her was getting convictions without plea bargaining. She knew I hated plea bargains with a passion.

Kathy and her two assistants were typing out requests for warrants as fast as they could. The process was not easy; each name had to be checked for state of residency and all the other rules that applied. Once the request and warrant went to the federal judge for his approving signature, then a warrant was printed out on the printer on the proper legal forms. When that was done a copy of the warrant was sent to Eric’s group in the DHS. It was sent to all DHS connected outlets to flag that individual, stopping him or her from traveling by air or rail. And to Treasury, any financial transaction by the individual plus the bank cams created an alert at the DHS.

The DHS connected all public information to the warrant, driver’s license, car tag numbers and now the car’s computer GPS and all highway cameras that have tag readers on their system.

Big brother was not only watching, it was following and reporting. The days of being on a federal list and hiding were long gone. The one problem was that there was only a tiny fraction of the manpower needed to monitor the system. Thousands of terabits of data were generated; never to be evaluated in a timely manner, if ever.

Fort Meade was a major storage site on the East Coast for all the data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence and other agencies. The five story buildings housing storage server farms were under continuous expansion. As soon as one was completed, another was started. There were thousands of analysts that worked around the clock making usable reports from critical data.

“Mike Doyle and I will make that arrest ourselves.” I said.

Everyone was looking at me puzzled as to what was going on.

As soon as the President, Troy and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Frank and Eric) had made it here and were in their chairs, I started to speak.

“The documents before you are similar to the ones captured from the computers at the New Jersey learning complex with a major difference. This list has only hi-level individuals listed; those that received more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollar bribes or payoffs,” I said.

“Mr. President, page twenty four has the entries you need to see. The third one down is Cabinet Secretary Lewis Hill. There are notes that describe the payments and what was expected for them,” I replied.

“The next entries that you need to look at are on page twenty eight, Senators Almost and Clements both have received multiple payments,” I said.

“Page thirty two has payments to five representatives; California’s Morse, South Dakota’s Harris, Delaware’s Boomer, Virginia’s Callaway and Georgia’s Mabry. All are on intelligence or military oversight committees with the highest level of clearance and all have made multiple fact finding junkets to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries that correspond with the dates of the payments,” I said.

“General Ingram; the ones you need to look at are on pages sixty and sixty two. There are three Generals that have been paid. They are assigned to the US military bases in Saudi Arabia,” I said.

“They are Army Lt. General Albert Hoover and Lt. General Howard Custer, along with Air Force General Buzz Arden,” I added.