EMMA: Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists

By Michael Segedy

Silver Medal Winner for best terrorist thriller in the 2013 Readers' Favorite Annual International Award Contest.

Imagine a couple young hacktivists, both former members of the internet freedom fighters group Anonymous, and one of them an ex-black ops officer, breaking away and creating a militant group of anarchists committed to social change. But social change precipitated by acts of violence against CEOs of major corporations responsible for crimes against humanity.

Their group, Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists, or EMMA, believes the power elite will never listen to hollow threats or become intimidated by pranksters like Anonymous. They will listen only when they are forced to live in a state of terror.

That’s the mere skeleton of the plot, but what follows, the twists and turns, the surprises, the action and suspense, and the masterful way the author delves into the lives of the principal characters, adds the beef.

A black ops officer turned terrorist is not the story of a renegade NCS commando gone bonkers. Rather the novel tells of a young man, Brent Cossack, accepted into Georgetown University, who decides to forgo college and join the military. As a CIA operative in Iraq, he discovers an ugly truth, and resigns. He returns home and falls in love with a beautiful political activist. Everything seems just swell, until a terrible event in his life pushes him over the edge.

FBI agent Rick Clark finds himself in the middle of an investigation that forces him to relive the saddest time in his life. Since his divorce, he has lived alone, avoiding relationships, except those established at work out of necessity, and one established at home, out of choice, with his commiserating dog, Thomas.

Marty Robins, a psychologist involved in the investigation, helps resuscitate life into Rick, but his real savior comes later in the form of an unexpected hero that restores hope and meaning in his fragmented life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Segedy
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301223374

Michael Segedy

Michael Segedy is an award winning author. Over the years he has lived abroad in faraway places such as Taiwan, Israel, Morocco, and Peru. His life overseas has inspired him to write thrillers that include scenes set in foreign lands. Several of his works have won recognition in international book awards contests. Novels to date: Hampton Road, young adult thriller In Deep, a political thriller Cupiditas, a political thriller Evil's Root, includes In Deep and Cupiditas EMMA: Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists, a terrorist thriller Our Darker Angel, a political, psychological thriller The Bed Sheet Serial Killer, crime thriller A Lethal Partnership, political thriller Sanctimonious Serial Killers, includes The Bed Sheet Serial Killer and A Lethal Partnership Why Blame the Stars? young adult thriller mystery Into the Twilight, social science fiction Apart from writing novels, Michael has published three non-fiction works: A Critical Look at John Gardner's Grendel Teaching Literature and Writing in the Secondary Classroom Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson with Introduction, Notes, and Lessons by Michael Segedy He's also published numerous academic articles about literature and writing in various scholarly journals. Gwendolyn Brooks, former poet laureate of Illinois, presented him with Virginia English Bulletin's first place writing award.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Brent Cossack, the Antihero

When it came to selling weapons to politically unstable third-world countries, Ken Farrow was king of the hill, of Capital Hill that is. And his congressional ties made him filthy rich along the way. As a US government sanctioned arms contractor, he’d filled his coffers from the protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Syria headed towards a civil war, his moneymaking arms enterprise was on cruise control.

But he was a greedy devil with an insatiable lust for money. So, for years he’d trafficked in clandestine arms sales, indiscriminately supplying high-tech military weapons to rebels and tyrants alike, at prices ten times that of his legitimate government contracts. His avarice did not end there. His reach extended far beyond military sales to mafia bosses and drug lords. A few months back, his company, Alliance Advanced Technologies, arranged for high-powered assault rifles to end up in the hands of Mexico’s largest drug cartel. As a result, drug related homicides in Mexico increased threefold.

He was a thing without a conscience, untroubled by the murder and mayhem his illicit arms deals engendered. Of course, he was not alone in his endeavors. He had devils enough to assist him. For more than a decade, he’d worked closely with the notorious international arms smuggler Viktor Bout, now serving 25 years for supplying weapons to the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Brent Cossack’s sole mission on earth was to put an end to the likes of men like Ken Farrow. Brent was an artist, so to speak. Farrow’s end would not only be fatal; it would be poetic. For this reason, Brent planned to use on Ken Farrow the same genocidal weapon Farrow had delivered to the Congolese rebels. He would provide him with a closeup demonstration of how his weapons had been used in the Congo. In the absence of any political will to deal with the likes of criminals like Farrow, Brent would assume the role of judge and jury, ending Farrow’s bloody business once and for all.

Brent’s previous target, Mark Bernstein had been stamped from the same mold as Farrow. Bernstein’s crimes had been every bit as dark as Farrow’s. To protect his company’s oil investments in Nigeria, he recruited death squads and paid for them handsomely out of his company’s bottomless pockets. Over 28,000 Nigerians had been disappeared by paramilitary groups. Apart from the thousands murdered, his oil company had contributed greatly in leaving large tracts of Nigeria a toxic wasteland, virtually uninhabitable by any living creature, man or beast, for decades.

Bernstein was now history. Brent Cossack had sent his black soul back to its maker. And tomorrow, Farrow would join him.

Brent leaned back in his office chair, staring out the window at the traffic on Quincy Boulevard. The steady stream of cars flashing by in both directions made him think of an alternating current of electricity. The image perfectly described how he felt inside. Tomorrow, the voltage would step up. Right before he pulled the trigger, every nerve in his body would be charged, awaiting his order. Then after he’d flipped the switch, and done the deed, the current would shut down automatically, as if an invisible hand had pulled the plug.

His first assassination, back in his NCS days, had excited the same emotion. He’d been briefed that his target, an Iraqi colonel, had been passing information to an al-Qaeda informant. As a consequence, the US military had lost over a dozen men in roadside bombing attacks, including a decorated major. The major had been assassinated while leaving a meeting with an Iraqi leader. The killer had used a Tariq 9mm handgun, a standard weapon issued to the officers in Saddam Hussein’s Red Guard.

His NCS operations commander had made Brent’s mission very clear to him. Brent was to terminate, with extreme prejudice, the Iraqi behind the attacks, Colonel Ahmed Hussein Ahmeni, a high level officer engaged in counterintelligence. The CIA had provided Brent with the necessary details. The colonel would be leaving his office for his routine Wednesday afternoon game of racquetball at Club Baghdad in the Green Zone. Brent, using the name Jonathan Green, would be issued a fake club card, and the method of termination would be his to improvise.

At the club he waited in a toilet stall while the colonel finished his game of racquetball. Thirty minutes later, he heard the locker room door swing open and the voices of the colonel and his partner as they entered.

Between a crack in the door and doorframe, he watched the colonel’s partner enter a stall at the far end of the locker room and then the colonel step into a shower a few stalls away. When he heard the colonel’s shower come on, he slid out the pistol holstered at his ankle and clipped on the silencer tucked away in his jacket pocket. Then, as stealthily as a fox approaching the hen house, he crept over to the shower stall and softly pushed open the door.

Before the colonel could react, he pressed the gun against his gray head of hair and pulled the trigger twice. All that could be heard above the water jetting from the shower head was a low, barely audible chug, chug as two bullets entered the colonel’s skull, splattering the tile wall with blood and gray matter. The colonel crumpled to his knees like a ragdoll, while the two dark holes in the back of his head stared up at Brent like eyeless sockets.

Brent had chosen the weapon judiciously, a Tariq 9mm, the same handgun that had been used in the assassination of the American major. Using the weapon on the Iraqi colonel had been an example of poetic justice, and in the future would be Brent’s trademark.

After returning to NCS headquarters, Brent’s stomach began rumbling like a boiling cauldron of stew. He hurried over to the nearest barracks latrine, rushed in, hung his head over the toilet, and puked his guts out.

Once he’d finished retching, he rose and staggered over to the sink. He remembered staring at his pale image in the mirror and seeing tiny beads of cold sweat collect on his forehead. The disquietude he felt surprised him because the operation had gone as planned, smoothly, with no screw-ups. His stomach’s violent reaction to the assassination made little sense. He’d felt nothing after pulling the trigger.

As he doused his face with cold water, he told himself that the uneasiness he’d felt inside would pass shortly. Other SAD officers had probably experienced similar reactions after their first assignment.

As it turned out, the illness he’d felt during the aftermath happened only that one time.

The Iraqi colonel had not been the last victim he laid to rest before completing his tour in Iraq and Afghanistan as a SAD officer. Leaning back in his office chair, he chuckled inwardly as he thought of the acronym. SAD. An appropriate word to sum up his time in Iraq. As a Special Activities Division officer, he’d become nothing less than a highly trained CIA Black Ops murderer.

Fortunately, his SAD military career was all behind him. Not the targeted assassinations. But killing for the wrong reasons. Although as a member of EMMA, he could not right the wrongs he’d committed while in the employment of the NCS, he could settle a personal score, as well as cut the strings of the puppet masters responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent people, even thousands. Already he’d cut the strings of two of them.

Brent stood up and stretched his arms out and did several deep knee bends, followed by fifty quick pushups. His desk job would turn his muscles to licorice, if he wasn’t careful, he reflected. Still, IT director wasn’t a bad job. It gave him access to a computer all day, and that was important in his new role.

Brent sat back down in his chair, moved his head from side to side to work out the stiffness, and then looked at the long queue of emails in his inbox. Requests from teachers asking for help with the grade program, or lost files, and an email from the principal wanting him to see if some kids had changed login settings on school laptops. Small, routine stuff. Nothing to complain about or get worked up over. Actually, the job as the school’s IT director was ideal. A perfect cover. The kind of job where no one would ever suspect that he was a key figure in what would soon become the most dangerous and feared underground militant organization in America. Someday, EMMA, the Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists, would be a name everyone knew.

Brent had once been a member of Anonymous, but the group had ended up being no more serious than its iconic Guy Fawkes mask, now a Halloween favorite. This loose innominate confederation of hacktivists had become famous for their denial of service attacks on federal institutions and corporate giants. By hacking into company databases and shutting down government and corporate websites, they gained some notoriety. Mostly in the name of Internet freedom. But they hadn’t gone far enough because they’d been hesitant to push the envelope. Although many members were socially concerned hackers, and their attacks on child porn sites showed this, they were basically pranksters, not serious political activists. They were anarchists, but without a vision and a plan. EMMA’s ad hoc leader, Sacco, never failed to point this out. Even if Anonymous came up with a specific plan, the group didn’t grasp the importance of intimidation in bringing about real change. EMMA did.

Brent had been introduced to Anonymous his first year at Georgetown, six months after he left the NCS, returned to the States, and began auditing computer science classes at the university. He’d planned to matriculate later as a fulltime student, which unfortunately never happened, like so many other things in his life. But not having an actual degree hadn’t impeded him from obtaining a job as a high school IT director. He had all the documents he needed. While in Iraq, the CIA had provided him with a fake identity, and a dossier that included a fake birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license, passport, and college degree.

But it had been Sabrina who had sparked his interest in politics and in life in general.

Sabrina. Lovely, full of the joy of life, Sabrina. He met her for the first time at a P!nk concert he decided to attend the last minute. P!nk had just performed Dear Mr. President, a popular anti-war song. His mind still retained a vivid snapshot of her that day. Her red hair pulled back and tied off with a silky, black bow; her purple vest opened at the front; a paisley scarf tied in makeshift fashion around her head; and a colorful hippie-looking handbag slung over her thin, sexy shoulder. She looked like an anachronism, a freckled flower child, transported through time from the sixties.

He never believed meeting her had been an accident. He always thought it had been fated, that some wonderful synchronicity had brought them together. When P!nk got to the line in the song, Let me tell you ‘bout hard work, rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away, she looked over at him, and as his eyes met hers, she coyly diverted her attention to the stage. Moments later their eyes met again, and this time she smiled confidently.

When the concert ended, she sauntered over to him and casually started up a conversation about the music. She was such a totally uninhibited spirit, as innocent, bright, and fresh as a spring morning. The memory of their first meeting stung his heart. God, how he missed her. Their brief life together seemed ages ago. Another time, another world.

One thing was certain and would always remain so. She had a larger influence on his life, on the way he saw the world, than anyone he’d ever known. She’d torn the cataracts from his eyes and made him see the world as it really is, clearly, without the red, white, and blue lenses he’d been obliged to wear.

Brent picked up the pencil in front of him and began tapping it on the edge of the desk anxiously, but lightly, wondering what Sabrina would think of EMMA. It was a foolish question, really. Sabrina had believed in peaceful change, and that if the right dialectic was applied, our lives would improve. She hated violence and Marxism. Loved Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

But what had it gotten her? What had it gotten them?

He stopped tapping and set the pencil down. He’d never said a word to her about his work with the NCS. He’d been afraid to. Although he’d meant to tell her, it never seemed to be the right time, and before he could get around to explaining, it was too late.

Hey, did you see Dafuski yet? It was Emily, Brent’s tech assistant. She’d poked her head into his office, breaking his reverie with her vivacious voice. Her upbeat mood often acted as an antidote for his more sullen moments.

Yeah, he stopped me on the way in this morning.

What did Doofis want this time? she laughed, highlighting the smile marks around those enormous brown eyes of hers. Her eyes made him think of Anne Hathaway, as well as her wavy, dark hair. Not only was she a cutie, she was a talented techie. A real find. After a fifteen-minute interview with her, he pushed for Dafuski, the high school principal, to offer her a job on the spot. He knew that if he ever quit as the IT director, she’d be a perfect replacement. That is, if her boyfriend the P.E. teacher didn’t cart her away with him to California. He was always going on about getting a job in Sacramento. Mark, the gym teacher with the tight slacks that showed off the muscles in his ass. Brent had no idea in the world what Emily saw in the guy. He was about as interesting to talk to as a parrot, and about as original, though to give him some credit, his vocabulary was a tiny bit larger.

So tell me, what was it? What did our fearless leader want?

He had a problem with his computer. He couldn’t get it to come on.

What was it? she asked.

His monitor was turned off. Duh. You know what they say about administrators. Those who can’t do…

Teach, and those who can’t teach, become administrators, she laughed. So, Jonathan, anything big on our plate today?

Brent had been using his old covert operations name, Jonathan Green, the one he’d been given in Iraq. It was an easy choice since it came with all the necessary documents.

Nothing real big. By the way, before I forget, I need to take my car into the garage tomorrow morning. If anyone asks, especially Doofus, I’ll be back around three.

Okay, boss. Ain’t it about time you trade in that piece of crap car? She sat down at her small desk in the corner of the room.

Please don’t bad talk Lucy. I had the engine gone through last year and my mechanic said I could get another 50,000 out of her.

Yeah, right. Lucy? That’s what you call her. 50,000 miles? You got to be kiddin’.

Yep, another 50,000 or more.

Well, I’m sure your mechanic can keep old Lucy limping, as long as you’re willin’ to dish out the moolah. You got the cash, he’ll probably tell you anything.

Boy, aren’t you cynical this morning.

I’ve been meaning to ask. How old is that clunker anyway? Was Lucy a high school graduation present?

Eleven years old, this year. And good as the day I bought her.

Sure. That’s why you’re off to the garage tomorrow, she teased. Don’t worry, though. I’ve got you covered. Then getting up from her desk, I’m going to see Mr. Carter about a laptop issue and then I’m off to the teachers’ lounge for a coffee. You want one? I should be back in thirty minutes.

No thanks. I’m fine. Don’t spend too much time with Carter, if you can help it. I need you back here to update the grade program.

Yes, sir. She saluted him as she took on an exaggerated military pose.

Oh, and please close the door behind you, Hot Lips Houlihan.

Hot Lips Houlihan?

"A character from the old Mash series my parents used to watch."

Oh, she said, sounding disappointed.

You didn’t think I…

No, of course not.

As soon as Brent heard the door click shut, he logged into Tor, an anonymous network he used. He wanted to check his Tormail and see if there was anything back from Sacco about tomorrow’s hit.

Chapter 2: The Hit

Outside Brent’s apartment, the fall air was chilly and the weather overcast. It looked like it might rain. A strong gust of wind stirred up the withered leaves on the trees bordering the large gravel parking lot. According to the letter in his mailbox, the homeowners’ association planned to have the lot paved in the spring. Brent had chosen the area because of the quiet neighborhood and the luxury of having no apartments above him. No sound in the middle of the night of scraping chairs and clicking heels. For some time now, he’d had trouble sleeping and needed peace and quiet.

Breathing in the thick air, he hoped the weather this week wouldn’t be as chilly and humid as the week before. As he made his way across the parking lot listening to the gravel crunching underneath his feet, his mind went back to Baghdad. A time very long ago. His first mission. When he’d resigned, he thought he put his career behind him. How wrong he’d been, as today would prove again.

As he pulled out onto the main avenue, he mentally went over his plan. Last night, he’d parked the rental car, which he’d paid for using a fake ID, near New Hampshire Avenue NW, a short distance from La Trattoria, the restaurant where Farrow planned to have lunch today. Sacco had hacked into Farrow’s email and found his weekly agenda and then emailed the information to Brent’s Tormail account.

La Trattoria was a posh restaurant with parking in the rear, but no valet service. Brent had made a reconnaissance of the place last week. It appeared to be a quiet neighborhood with an ideal escape route. The side street off the parking lot led to New Hampshire Avenue NW and then to Dupont Circle, a large traffic circle where several avenues split off in all directions.

Once he took care of Farrow, he’d abandon the rental car, pick up his car, and head for his mechanic’s. He’d leave his car to be tuned up and then take a taxi to work. That way his bases would be covered.

Right after Brent arrived at the corner of H Street and Blend, he parked his Corolla under a large oak tree fifty yards from the intersection. He reached in his side pocket and removed a stocking cap and a roll of transparent tape. After he finished taping the ends of his fingers, he slipped on the cap and then took off on foot toward 23rd Street NW and the rental car.

Once he reached his destination, he unlocked the car door and slid inside. The weapon was on the rear floor out of view. He’d thrown an old blanket over it, which he’d picked up at the Salvation Army. The weapon was the perfect choice, an EG25 grenade launcher, sold by AAT Corporation, Ken Farrow’s company. This 25mm semiautomatic launcher weighed less than five-and-a-half kilos and had a range of 500 yards. Although relatively small, this weapon could rip a hole in a concrete bunker large enough for a grizzly to climb through.

As Brent pulled away, he checked his watch. Twelve thirty. He was just a couple of minutes from the restaurant.

The midday mist, instead of lifting, had grown thicker. As the damp, chilly air rolled in through the crack in the car window, cutting through the opening in Brent’s thin blazer, he gave a rattily cough, spraying the steering wheel and dash with spittle. Shit, he muttered, and then used his jacket sleeve to wipe down the affected area. The last thing he wanted was to leave DNA trace evidence.

As he turned onto 17th Street NW, the engine sputtered, but then caught instantly. It was probably the thick air affecting the carburation, either that, or the motor had not yet warmed up sufficiently. Probably, the engine just needed to clear out its lungs, he thought. What shitty weather.

He pulled up to a traffic light and waited. Sacco was right, he mused, as he stared into the growing gloom. In time the power elite might listen, but not until they were on their knees and begging for the violence to end. Not indiscriminate violence, but violence directed specifically at them, at the greedy assholes responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands. There was no other way of stopping the bastards, certainly not by playing by their rules. Their game was one where they held all of the cards, and it had to change.

If anything, starry-eyed liberals like Mickey Poore only prolonged the suffering by believing they could work within the establishment. Beat them at their own game. It must have looked that way to him, for awhile. In New Hampshire, the polls showed that he stood a good chance at winning the nomination for the senate seat. Of course, New Hampshire was a progressive state. Still, it never happened. He lost big time, and more than just an election. That’s because Poore had no real notion of the measures the pigs in power would use to win.

In recent history, what lasting gains had others on the left made? Pretty much everything they’d tried, failed. Like Occupy Wall Street. It had been turned into a joke by the media. They made the participants out to be crazy college kids, clueless liberals, homeless drug addicts, and unemployed malcontents. They showed the unemployed as career vagabonds looking for a handout from the state. And depicted the whole Occupy Wall Street gang as nothing more than a coalition of misfits blind to economic realities. Blind to how the capitalist system and corporate America functioned for the benefit of all. The media’s underlying message was that the losers just needed to get with the program. And because they wouldn’t, newspapers and TV pretty much dismissed them. In a few years, Occupy Wall Street would be no more than some stuffy academic’s footnote on failed twenty-first-century social protest.

Well, EMMA wouldn’t be a mere footnote. Sacco would give it full exposure. Minutes after the assassination, he would spread the news over the Internet. He’d announce the hit on a dozen IRC channels. In short shrift, the assassination would appear everywhere. CNN and Fox News would rush to cover the event live, though the coverage would be mostly hype, sound bites, and sappy sentimentalism. Nothing of real substance. That could be expected, but chat boards and blogs would be a buzzing beehive of relentless political discussion.

As long as the Internet remained free, the word would spread to those who mattered, those who might want to join EMMA, or if not join, at least support the movement. Brent had already seen the phenomenon work. The assassination of Mark Bernstein had gathered accolades over dozens of IRC channels, though the majority of Anonymous members had kept quiet. He imagined they didn’t like being upstaged or else, as pranksters, they’d become befuddled by EMMA’s sobriety. Support for EMMA had grown by leaps and bounds after the Bernstein assassination. Sacco boasted that he’d received thousands of accolades on the hit, which meant Farrow’s demise would certainly boost EMMA’s reputation as the chief scum remover.

Brent slowed and steered the gray Ford Tempo to the curb under a tall maple fifty yards from the restaurant parking lot. The lot was half-full of cars. He waited to try to get a feel for how many more patrons might be arriving or leaving.

After a couple of minutes, he reached over the backseat and grabbed the case with the EG25. He took the weapon out and carefully loaded it with a 25mm armor-piercing missile. The toy-like look of the squared off, mud-colored rocket launcher belied its hellish potential.

He glanced at his watch. Farrow should arrive in the next fifteen minutes. Soon, it would be time to perform. As he looked out his windshield at the prevailing gloom, he thought about his parents. Would they understand? Probably not. No more than your average Joe would.

Well, they were gone, anyway, rest their souls. For twenty-four years his parents had been at each other’s side. They’d

Reviews for EMMA

[agentx216 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Reading the synopsis really hit all the interest points for me: techno-thriller, espionage, hacking, detective, anarchism. It also starts the story off strong. Unfortunately, it is a very middle-of-the-road novel that doesn't really take any of those tasks through in an interesting way.

It doesn't show a Hackers/Kevin Mitnick knowledge of anything cyber-related. The espionage is a bad guy that doesn't really show until the last 10 pages of the book with no real motive and no real need to take the route he did. The detective story pretty much boils down to the suspect calling the detective and giving him all the details. As for anarchism - either right or left - I couldn't tell where the author was coming from. At certain points, it seems like some of the characters (and therefore the author) supports a left-center viewpoint but then there's a very big misstatement about Silk Road. Silk Road never had child photos or hitmen available as the founder had a non-aggression principle as the basis for it.

It's not all bad but it didn't really deliver on any one of the genre points. It was also difficult to tell who's POV the audience was suppose to follow and the flipping between past and present didn't really do much to endear any character in reading it. There is an interesting character with a more than photographic memory but then she disappears from the story towards the end; really a shame she wasn't fleshed out more. Final Grade - D

[bjarnerostaing · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

EMMAEMMA is a tough, sly book about home-grown terrorism. Most thrillers are simplistic fantasies with little grounding in real world experience. They grab you by the lapels, but the characters rarely live up to the plot. There will some kind of game set up by the bad guy, which will end in godawful catastrophe if it succeeds. It fails because a good guy comes along, and events race along through a dream-world in which brave, red-blooded clear-minded conservative men come together to secure the situation in the nick of time while waving the flag.This two-dimensional patriotism is rooted in a kind of island psychology created by our geographic isolation. But the really good spy novels are international, which is why the best ones in English have been written by Brits living cheek by jowl with the French, Germans et al. No American espionage writer can go the distance with real heavyweights like Graham Green, John Le Carre or Len Deighton. Michael Segedy isn’t there yet but he’s coming on, and EMMA is as promising as anything I’ve come across in this century. In his way he’s as international as John Burdett, the young expat Brit master. You don’t get the Bangkok chongos or Zen excursions, but the deadly cultural critique is there, along with action that periodically explodes out of nowhere. Segedy has lived much of his adult life abroad, and it’s in his books. He understands the dirty little secret of how big business hooks up with politics and war, and lays it out. It’s the real world, not some quasi-historic quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo. At his best, Segedy works your forebrain and the primal section all at once, which he can do because he’s done the thinking we tend to avoid. He comes up with some rather shocking and intelligent stuff that keeps you reading, the funky reality of how things actually happen, and what happens when things go wrong. If you wanted to know what Iraq is like, and what it does to the people we send there, buckle your seat belt, because that’s the heart and guts of EMMA, Segedy’s acronym for Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists. Emma Goldman was the leading anarchist of her time, a notoriously hard-nosed celeb who attempted to assassinate Henry Frick, a malefactor of great wealth. And lest we forget, Emma is a Jane Austen classic – Segedy’s assortment of academic degrees have not killed his sense of humor.Brent Cossack is a stand-up American guy who puts off college and goes to Iraq because his folks don’t have the money to put him through school. He’s smart and talented, serves his hitch, returns, and then steps into another world, with a job most people can’t handle. He does it, but when he finds out what’s really going on, he has a problem, because he just isn’t a mercenary type. He’s been used, and it’s eating at him. Between his tech aptitude and an attractive woman, he becomes involved with Anonymous. From there he graduates to EMMA, which does not limit itself to internet attacks.While Cossack is living that life, Rick Clark, a guy not unlike himself in many ways, is working for the FBI, trying to figure out some curious assassinations in which the killing has been done by weapons associated with the victims, corporate execs in the military industrial complex and arms trade. It’s a kind of hard-core poetic justice for people who profit from helping kill other people for money. Like Cossack, Clark is smart, and another a loner of sorts, his wife having left him because he’s too much into his job to be in a relationship. Like Cossack, he has an empty life until he becomes involved with and influenced by a woman with a mind of her own. Segedy’s sense of humor comes out again in the tech-expert partner that Clark has been saddled with, a twisted dick. The surgical assassination of war-profiteers is hard to get very excited about in this century, given the scale of their crimes. But EMMA turns to politically motivated mass murders, lifting the story to a desperate urgency in which hunter and hunted both seek a vicious, elusive psychopath who has seized the reins at EMMA. His line of work and his depersonalized thinking rub our noses in the nastiness of tech-worship/addiction. Which is interesting, because Segedy is professionally knowledgeable about computer technology.