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  BLUE’S

  CODE...

  AND THE DEEP STATE

  JAMES E. ABEL

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, events and incidents in this book are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended. While certain long-standing institutions, agencies, public buildings and geographical locations are mentioned; the characters and events surrounding them are wholly imaginary.

  © 2020 by James E. Abel

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in Hellertown, PA

  Cover design by Joanna Williams

  Cover photos © Shutterstock

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020924306

  ISBN: 978-1-950459-25-4

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 paperback

  This book, the sequel to Side(H)arm, is dedicated to all the men and women who serve and protect law-abiding citizens. It was written in honor of the military, the police, the firefighters…and so many other professionals who put their own lives on the line every day to keep us safe…sometimes in spite of feckless politicians who would have them do just the opposite.

  PROLOGUE

  Heather Warring, a political novice serving her first term as governor, sat at her desk in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, Georgia. There was a knock at the office door. Before Warring could react, the door opened, and a thin, 60-year-old man with short, curly, grey hair entered and asked, “Hello, Heather. How are you today?”

  Warring showed deference to very few people, but this was one of the exceptions. She stood up, held out her hand, and said, “Mr. President, what an honor. I…I had no idea you were in town.”

  The man standing in front of her was Benjamin Ojelani, a former two-term Democratic President, who had won both of his elections in huge landslides. He smiled, shook her hand, and said, “That was intentional. I’m not here on official party business. In fact, I’m here to offer you a job in the private sector. At least that’s what we will call it for the moment. And I promise you this: It’s the chance of a lifetime—a chance for you to join us in remaking the world.”

  For the next 15 minutes, the former President explained that he, along with hundreds of others, was part of a privately funded organization with direct access to trillions of dollars, the world’s most advanced technology, powerful armies and nuclear arsenals. Members included many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people… private citizens and world leaders alike.. The former President further explained that the organization’s singular goal was to make the world a better place—a place where wars, sickness, famine, pollution, and social injustice would no longer exist and that members worked across continents, borders, and political parties to achieve this end.

  Warring looked at the President and asked, “But why me? What do I have to offer your organization?”

  He smiled and said, “What you have to offer is the use of your company.”

  “Warring Pharmaceuticals?”

  “Yes. Although we already work with most of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies, yours is different. It’s privately owned. We are entering the final stages of some vital research and we need complete privacy.”

  “What type of research are you referring to?”

  “In good time, Heather, in good time. I can’t tell you that yet. But what I can tell you is that if you choose to join us, you will be provided with unlimited resources.”

  Warring, both flattered and intrigued, wanted to ask dozens of questions. She eyed the former President and asked, “But what about my political career? Like you, I am very ambitious and now I finally have a strong platform to achieve my long-term political goals.”

  The President smiled and said, “Heather, I assure you that if you accept our invitation, you will be the next President of the United States. We are very experienced at winning elections, and not just here in the United States. Good things happen to members of the Guild.”

  “The Guild?”

  “Yes. But the very existence of our organization, even it’s name, is a closely guarded secret. In fact, if any member talks to anyone about our mission or our very existence, they are immediately terminated.”

  “Terminated? But you just told me!”

  The President laughed and said, “Then I guess you’d better join, or I’m in big trouble!”

  His mood sobered, and he added, “In all seriousness, I would not be here today if I thought there was the slightest chance that you’d turn us down. You are highly intelligent, very ambitious, and brutally ruthless—when you need to be. But I do need to warn you, like Noah in the Old Testament, you are about to build us an ark—one that will take us to the final testament of the human experience. And when your work is complete, there will be world wide economic disruption, pandemics, and likely bloodshed as well. Some of it will be by design, while some of it will be an unfortunate by-product of the need for change.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THREE YEARS LATER

  A tall, slender, 25-year-old woman wearing a white hoodie, jeans, and white sneakers dodged dozens of protestors carrying LUV Georgia signs as she moved through the streets in the Edgewood section of Atlanta. As she peeked out from underneath the brow of her hood, her thick blond hair was visible, along with a streak of light blue hair framing one side of her face. She passed in front of a couple of eateries and bars until she reached a place on the corner with small purple lights ringing the windows and a hand-painted sign above the entrance that read “Beat Nick’s.” She glanced back at the protestors, opened the door, and ducked inside.

  The smell of incense was immediate, and unmistakable. The one-time working-class corner bar had been repurposed into a retro hippie joint for neighborhood college kids and bohemian types. Eclectic art adorned the walls, bearing tags with the artists’ names and asking prices. Lava lights illuminated the bar, and half a dozen glow in the dark peace signs were painted on the black ceiling.

  The woman paused inside the door for a few seconds, pulled back the hoodie, and shook her hair into place. When she looked up, she saw three 20-something male patrons sitting together at the bar, taking those precious seconds to admire her. Her almond-shaped brown eyes were set perfectly between a thin, sculpted nose, framed by high cheekbones, and set off with an angular jaw. Her fingers were long and thin, as were her legs. Everything about her worked in perfect unison to create a beautiful yet unique look. As she was, without any makeup or nail polish, she looked like an athlete, maybe a golfer or a tennis player. Had she had been wearing full makeup and heels, she could have passed for a runway model.

  When the guys realized she was on to them, they stumbled over each other’s attempts at saying hello until one of them stood and asked if she’d care to join them. The bartender, a shaggy, brown-haired, 30-year-old man named Danny, looked on in amusement. He knew how it was going to end.

  Danny watched as she politely declined, offered a shy smile, turned, and walked to the far end of the bar. He’d seen this pattern repeat from the first day she had showed up there three weeks earlier. She always kept to herself and quickly cut off anyone trying to strike up a conversation.

  Danny moved down the bar to her and smiled. After glancing back at the men, he said, “Hey, Blue! I see you have some new admirers.”

  Blushing slightly, Blue said, “No, they were just being polite.”

  “Sure. Anyway, you’re a bit early today. The usual?”

  �
��Yeah.” Pointing to the TV behind the bar, Blue asked, “Would you mind pulling up GNN?”

  Danny set down a Dewar’s on the rocks in front of her and said “The Guilded News Network huh? Not too many people come in here to watch the news anymore. They come in here to forget it.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. But I need to watch something.”

  Danny turned his back, pointed a remote at the TV, and quickly found GNN. When it came on, there was some sort of political interview about to get underway. He turned back to Blue and asked, “This what you’re looking for?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Okay. Give me a yell if you need anything else,” Danny said then walked back to talk with the guys at the other end of the bar.

  On the television screen, the interview had just started. The man asking the questions was Brent Keaster, GNN’s young lead reporter off the Atlanta news desk. His guest was Georgia’s Democratic governor, Heather Warring. She was in her early fifties but didn’t look it. She was a trim, five-foot-six-inches tall. Her face was unlined, and with shoulder-length black hair that held the sheen of a 30-year-old, Warring was an attractive woman, even if some credit may have been due a skilled surgeon.

  But along with the looks came a palpable coldness. Warring’s movements were stiff and unnatural. Her steel blue eyes didn’t serve as windows to her soul; they were only used to peer into the souls of others—like laser beams through metal. Perhaps her persona was acquired, needed to maintain her standing at the top of her family owned pharmaceutical empire. Or perhaps she was just born that way, and that’s what made her successful. Either way, when you were in Ms. Warring’s presence, you were supposed to feel inferior.

  As Blue sat at the bar and watched the interview, she quickly sensed there was something more going on than a simple sit-down with the governor of Georgia. While Blue wasn’t into politics, she had seen the protestors outside and knew that it was not GNN’s style to attack anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle. That was supposed to be Fox News’s role. But at the moment, the questions being tossed her way by the GNN reporter weren’t softballs. They were tough—and national in scope.

  The reason for the tough interview was the confluence of two seemingly unrelated events. First, within the course of the past two months, Heather Warring had catapulted from virtual political obscurity to the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic nominee for the upcoming presidential election. While the primaries were still months away, two of the early frontrunners had recently dropped out, stating personal reasons. Both had endorsed Governor Warring.

  Second, within the same timeframe, the state of Georgia had found itself ground zero of a bold, Democratic party–led program intended to enact a wide ranging package of highly restrictive state gun control laws in all Democratically controlled states.

  It had all started three years earlier when the Dems had kicked off a new political strategy that its crafters privately referred to as the “Blitzkrieg.” The idea was to work with all the Democratically controlled states at high speed between presidential election cycles to achieve state level gun control laws that were uniform from state to state and pushed much further than any prior laws, essentially rendering the Second Amendment meaningless. During the presidential election that year, California’s legislature slipped the Limit Unnecessary Violence Act, or LUV Act as it was cleverly called, on the ballot as a referendum. It was almost too easy, being overwhelmingly approved by California’s liberal voting base and quickly passed into law. Within the LUV Act were packed a number of sweeping reforms that included 60-day mandatory waiting periods for the purchase of any weapon, full background checks under the control and direction of the state’s police force with unilateral authority to deny purchases to people deemed a potential threat to society, a reduction to a six-round limit that could be held in the magazine of any weapon forcing a major redesign effort onto manufacturers and instantaneously making many weapons illegal, a limit of five weapons that could be owned by any one person, a 100 percent state sales tax on any gun or gun-related purchase, and a full ban on the manufacture, sale, or use of bump stocks or any bullet specifically designed to increase mortality rates, including dum-dums and hollow-points.

  The crafters of the legislation knew that many of the provisions might ultimately be thrown out in a federal court, but in the meantime, Blitzkrieg could get out in front of the federal court system, perhaps changing the culture and laws of the land—forever.

  Less than a month after California’s referendum became law, similar legislation was passed in Oregon and Washington. In a tightly orchestrated move, both states, with many more to follow, saw busloads of paid activists carrying Re-Civilize Our Streets and LUV US signs at demonstrations designed to help kick-start the process.

  The movement soon hopscotched across the country through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Then the eastern seaboard states fell like dominoes from Maine on down, all the way through North Carolina. In the end, the only eastern holdout north of the Mason-Dixon line was, surprisingly, New York.

  With the Dems in control of both chambers of Congress, the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader used their bully pulpits to voice support for the new state laws while also using their leverage to steam roll over any state legislators or governors who waivered in their support.

  As all of this was happening, the President, Mark Reynolds, a Republican who had won by the slimmest of margins, watched his approval ratings fall through the floor. While his Attorney General had filed all the appropriate suits, injunctions were slow in coming. The Republicans on the House and Senate floors were not getting any airtime as the media focused on the violent protest rallies being held by redneck NRA bullies.

  When the first appeals case was finally decided, it came from the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and was in favor of the State of California. The court based its finding on the premise that “Any state can use the police powers as provided for in the Constitution to protect their citizens from violence to the best of their ability, and that such powers include the right to restrict and monitor the possession of personal firearms by its citizenry.” When the ruling flashed across the screen in the Oval Office, the man watching it knew he had just become a one-term President.

  With the New York initiative temporarily held up for review by the state’s court of appeals, the Dems turned their attention to Georgia as an important and “gettable” Southern state. It had a Democratic governor, half of the state’s population lived within the 10 counties surrounding Democratically controlled Atlanta, and the Democrats had made significant inroads into suburbia, fueled largely by the state’s booming film industry. Behind closed doors in Washington D.C., the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader both agreed that if Heather Warring wanted to be the party’s nominee for President, it was her turn to step up to the plate.

  And so, the Blitzkrieg had reached Georgia’s doorstep. But Georgia was a far cry from the slam-dunk states of California, Washington, and most of the others where it had been passed into law. Georgians have a long-standing love affair with hunting and the right to bear arms. As soon as paid agitators carrying Re-Civilize Our Streets and LUV Georgia signs started showing up at Warring’s public appearances, hunters, farmers, bikers, and NRA members started to show up to defend their Constitutional right to bear arms. For several weeks, the crowds and the tensions had risen. Finally, during a rally at the upscale Lenox Square Mall in Buckhead, Georgia, violence broke out. As the cameras rolled, ambulances took injured protestors to local hospitals while police vans carted dozens of agitators on both sides off to jail. The governor had run out of options. She would have to publicly announce her position on the proposed LUV Georgia Act.

  Warring quickly agreed to an exclusive interview with GNN, but only on the condition that it be handled through their Atlanta bureau. Although she explained to the Washington D.C. GNN team that she wanted to keep it a “local affair,” they kne
w the real reason. She wanted a political novice sitting across from her. She wanted to be in control, and she believed that Brent Keaster, the youthful face of the weekend news in Atlanta, would be punching above his weight class.

  Warring’s assumption proved to be wrong. Blue watched as Warring tried to bob and weave through the political minefield of questions Keaster threw at her. He repeatedly glanced down at an iPad on his lap and tried to pin her down on two key points. First, he wanted to know whether Warring believed if states had the right to impose their own gun control laws. Second, he wanted to know whether she would support the passage of the LUV ACT in her own state.

  As the interview dragged on, Warring knew she was coming across as weak, and her ego wouldn’t allow that to happen. When she noticed the producer pointing to an electronic clock sitting behind the camera, she saw her opening. She looked at the camera and said, “I see we are almost out of time, so in closing, let me say that as President of the United States, I will look to my Attorney General to diligently enforce all federal laws. But let me be clear. That responsibility does not equate to repealing state laws that are already on the books designed to protect the safety of its local citizenry. In the area of public safety, I view federal law as a baseline. Moreover, those laws extend beyond gun control, and they include such things as environmental safety as well. I believe it is time for the federal and state governments to work together on these issues for the benefit of our fellow citizens.”

  As GNN went to commercial break, Warring felt good. She had supported her party’s position—without being cornered into what it implied for the state of Georgia. She had dodged a bullet.

  But back at GNN headquarters in Atlanta, an animated discussion had broken out. Several phone calls were made, and a decision was relayed back to the interview team. Fifteen more minutes of interview time had just been carved out.