Swifty and the Terrorists: The Survival of Order

By Roger F. Greaves

Swifty King and Kyle Faust are lured by a former nemesis into the search for a program that progressively influences behaviors and could threaten the world. Aided by a tough, smart pal named Kelly, the fellows chase all over the world, searching for the Synthenet and its financial master. In their quest, the boys use another former adversary as bait and almost get her and Swifty killed. Kyle takes out his first bad guys, and both guys screw up their love lives. What’s new? Just another (figurative) day at the office for Swifty and Kyle. This time, their office turns out to have the smell of cordite and salt.

Swifty King gets lonesome, so he invited his pal Kyle Faust into the “advice” business. It turns out that Kyle fits well because they are both a little nuts.

Kyle is busy trying to solve a problem for the son of one of his ex-wives when he and Swifty eventually discover there is a nexus between the kid’s dilemma and this strange Synthenet thing. In the process, Swifty has a near-death experience, and Kyle ends up having to shoot back when he encounters bad guys.

As usual, with these gents, it is mile-a-minute fun and games with a twist around every corner. Imagine how a couple of senior citizens who still think they are thirty deal with the aches and pains of age while they measure up to the challenges of today.

The adventures are never in short supply with Swifty Inc., and neither are the convoluted switches and changes. Come join us again!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524524166

Roger F. Greaves

ROGER F. GREAVES grew up in Southern California. During his six decades in the business community and the military, he has come in contact with many interesting characters. He characterizes many of them in the Swifty Series of novels. Roger graduated from California State University, Long Beach and has done a good deal of graduate work. He is an Air Force Veteran, a private pilot and a story teller. Roger and his wife, Erika live with their lone Westie, Spatz, at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale. They stay active in local and national politics as well as community affairs.

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Copyright © 2016 by Roger F. Greaves.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911126

ISBN:   Hardcover          978-1-5245-2418-0

              Softcover           978-1-5245-2417-3

              eBook                 978-1-5245-2416-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/14/2016

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Love Clarise, Hate Jackson …

Chapter 2 Molly and Gunpowder

Chapter 3 Coral

Chapter 4 Behavior Progression

Chapter 5 Held, Inc.

Chapter 6 Lippell

Chapter 7 Cops and Non-Cops

Chapter 8 Seeking the Synthenet

Chapter 9 Adjudication

Chapter 10 The Resurrection of Janice

Chapter 11 Skull Valley

Chapter 12 The Reprobate General

Chapter 13 Jail and Other Social Spots

Chapter 14 Tel-a-Aviv or Bust

Chapter 15 The Golan

Chapter 16 All Is Not Quiet on the Syrian Front

Chapter 17 The Chairman

Chapter 18 Golan Redux

Chapter 19 Soliloquy

Chapter 20 Shen

Chapter 21 The Dead Sea Awaits

Chapter 22 Barrett-Jackson Light

Chapter 23 Cowboys and Bad Boys

Chapter 24 Janice Strikes Again

Chapter 25 Double, Triple Cross?

Chapter 26 The Nexus of Evil

Chapter 27 Charlie and Lady Geneva

Chapter 28 Up, Up And Away …

Chapter 29 The Cavalry

Chapter 30 The Payoff

Chapter 31 The Playoff Payoff

Chapter 32 Jackson Takes A Dive …

Chapter 33 DRONES and COPS

Chapter 34 The Wrap-Up

This book is dedicated to my soulmate, the love of my life, my collaborator, my direct and immediate supervisor and my wife and yes, they are all the same person: Erika, Thank you.

OTHER WRITINGS

BY ROGER F. GREAVES

Poetry

Pearl (1995)

Swifty Stories

Swifty (2009)

Swifty and the Magic Man (2010)

Swifty King, Advice (2012)

Swifty and the Wife Killer (2013)

Swifty and the Terrorists (2016)

See the website links Swiftybook.com and Swiftybooks.com

PROLOGUE

S ociety depends on order to survive. Every day we hear of pinpricks interrupting that order. They take the form of market variabilities, economic failures, mini-wars, revolutions, disease, and famine, not necessarily all earth shattering … but they all interrupt order to some degree. So do the hundreds of terrorist attacks that take place every day. When they are over, they may continue to fester before eventually dying out and giving way to a new wave of interruptions, but general order pers ists.

What if a system was put in place that would gradually tie all of these pinpricks together into a super interruption? What if the process became progressive, cumulative, and geometric? Order would eventually give way to chaos, perhaps opening the door to a kind of disorder … or perhaps continuing until everything we know is destroyed.

The Synthenet has the potential to stimulate such a move toward chaos—to use the continuing and expanding imagination of mankind to inflate the results of cumulative acts until the balloon of society is full … and it POPS!

Swifty King and Kyle Faust, innocent bystanders, have found themselves in the middle of such an inflation. They, along with friends and a few foes, find themselves attempting to block the progression before it goes too far … before the balloon expands toward calamity. Two senior men, a few tough-guy contacts, a girl, and the imaginations of these fellows who have seen a lot and know how to use common sense to interfere with genius, follow their instincts to a logical conclusion … hopefully stalling the inevitable.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer said every man. He was including geniuses in that profound statement. Perhaps genius provides its own complex limitations. But you don’t have to be a genius to recognize impending chaos or to stick your finger in the dyke. Every institution that we consider pillars of our society is now under assault. Religion, marriage, parenting, government, and even our schools are being attacked by the Left. It may not take much to push the whole thing over. So, all of us have to look for the breaches and stick our collective fingers in to stop the pressure from bursting the bubble.

INTRODUCTION TO A FELONY

T he fire was intense and it hurt. Jackson couldn’t see through the smoke! He could not breathe. He ran toward the stairs. He heard another explosion. The blast sent him sprawling; flaming timbers and ceiling tiles were falling all around him. He felt the thundering impact of the main explosion and felt hot splinters and glass splatter on his face. He tried to cry out but he couldn’t breathe. He cast away his university-implanted atheism and thrust his mind to heaven, Help me … please, God, help me, his brain cried as his muscles f roze.

As he faded from consciousness, two strong hands seized him by the neck and arm. He was strangling, but he was moving away from the fire. He was being choked! His head was swinging. It struck a wall … his brain plunged into the depths.

Then he was awake. He was on a meadow buried in deep grass. The grass was wet. His hands and face stung. His neck ached. There was a sharp pain in his temple. He rolled and retched. He tasted whisky and smoke. His throat burned. When he heard the buzzing of one of the drones high above his head, he remembered. He had become a felon, a fugitive, and an enemy of his country. He was scared to death.

Mauer—Mauer and his uncle had done this to him. They had convinced him that in the age of black is white and white is black, nothing seemed to matter anymore. Values haven’t changed. They had been thrown out the window in place of the new paradigm.

Social justice! The rights of the oppressed! The getting even of the masses against ‘them.’ Them—the 1%, the rich, the moguls, the bad guys, the ones who are not us! The ones in the suits, in the nice cars, in the big houses, with club memberships, with kids in private school … them—the ones with boats and jets and beach houses and bank accounts and stocks and bonds and all the things we, the people, the workers, the forgotten do not have. Earned with our blood, sweat, and tears, these ‘devils’ with the spoils needed to pay! Reagan, Bush, Nixon, Clinton, even their black surrogate in there now … Obama, they all need to pay!

As Jackson listened to Mauer and his uncle, he began to see it their way. Hey, they were right. Society had been wrong all along. America was a sham, a haven for slave mongers and whore masters, a pit of evil.

Through the rhetoric, the booze, the drugs, and the haze, Jackson found himself swept up in a hurricane of hate. He had gone with them. He had now helped light the fuses. He had helped blow up a building full of people. He was guilty of arson, assault, maybe murder! But he was not dead.

CHAPTER 1

Love Clarise, Hate Jackson …

S o here I am, me, Kyle Kenneth Faust, back dating my second wife, the ever-wonderful Clarise. Her jerky twenty- one-year-old son, Jackson, has gotten himself into a bit of a pickle and in order to empress the mom, I have pressed myself into service to help extricate his scrawny ass. First thing I did was call his dad—the jerk, Rick Ward. Pop had heard the news and said he was calling around, whatever that meant. Probably checking to be sure he had no personal jeopardy.

There are some things you don’t do in Washington D.C. Those things include possessing guns with no license … even in view of the landmark Heller Second Amendment decision … and, of course, possessing drugs for sale. Only if you are mayor (oops! Marion Barry just died … apologies to the deceased) can you get away with the latter … but I digress … again. This spoiled little shit takes after his father, the lawyer, loudmouth, sports agent, and licensed asshole, the aforementioned Rick Ward. But since I am once again in love with his mother and in hopes that my amore might be returned, whatever it takes to pull Jackson out of the hole … a little play on words there … K. K. Faust is on the job.

Here’s what unfolded: Jackson was bunking with two guys in a D.C. rental house in an okay neighborhood. One of the so-called friends got pissed that the other two would not split with more drugs. Plus, Jackson had been hitting very heavily on the other guy’s squeeze. That means girlfriend for the more sophisticated. Anyway, the aggrieved kid threatened the child of my intended, the ever-mouthy Jackson. An altercation ensued and Jackson suddenly remembered all the moves his aunt Cloris and his dad had taught him, resulting in a badly kicked ass, the other boy being the recipient.

So, the injured and spoiled kid dropped a dime (old school for calling the cops) on Jackson, saying, "This kid near Georgetown has guns, ammo, and drugs in his pad and intends to shoot up a school or the White House.’’ Enter the D.C. SWAT team. They rousted poor Jackson, confiscated his two rifles, three handguns, four thousand rounds of ammo, and enough molly to be considered that he could be dealing. Not good.

When informed by a crying Clarise, I tapped my best friend Swifty King for support and he called our lawyer, Bo Slattery. Big help. He wasn’t there. Five minutes into ruminating over options, the phone rang. Swifty held up a hand signaling temporary time-out.

It was the callback from our erstwhile lawyer friend Bo with a report on Jackson’s case.

He said: ‘The kid is going away. Nothing I can do on this one, short of ‘bribing the judge … just joking.’

What do you mean, ‘nothing you can do!’ I was exasperated and screamed into the speaker. You have to do something. This kid can’t make it in jail. He’s a little prince, for God’s sake!

What’s the deal? Swifty interrupted.

Can’t have a gun in D.C. unless you have a license or you are a gang member. Can’t have that much ‘molly’ either. It constitutes enough to be pilled up for sale. The other kid says Jackson was a dealer. He’s going down. Get used to it. Bo was not the least bit helpful or sympathetic.

Wait! This kid can’t do time in D.C. or anywhere … he won’t last a day! I continued to rant.

Swifty held up his hand again, Bo, what about that lawyer guy in D.C. who successfully argued Heller a few years ago … uh, Gura. And, what the hell is ‘Molly’?

Yeah, Alan Gura. He and Levy argued that one before the Supreme Court. He is an appellate guy. He doesn’t mess with stuff like this. You need a hard-nosed D.C.-savvy pit bull who knows the local judges. But the kid is still going down. No way he can beat this one in D.C. Maybe minimize with good counsel.

Bo said it with a tone of finality, but leaving a sprig of hope.

Who should we get? Give me some names, I mumbled, thinking of what I could say to Clarise.

Let me check it out. I am not too D.C. savvy … never was, but I know some guys who are. I’ll get back to you. He closed the circuit.

Shit, Swifty, what am supposed to say to her? This is bad, very bad. I threw a wad of paper toward the wastebasket, missed as usual, and squatted to pick it up and listened to my tendons pop and creak. As I stood, I felt pain in both knees, another signal of my increasing age.

Tell her you love her and you will do all that is humanly possible to save the lad, but whatever happens, you will be there for her and for the little bastard. He laughed through it and broke up at the end, laughing through his teeth, convulsing and dribbling saliva on his chin.

You rotten no-good son of a bitch! I blurted and started to laugh too.

Let’s get coffee and plot. Please, tell me what this ‘Molly’ stuff is. You and Bo know, but not me. Swifty shouted at the ceiling as he threw his arm over my shoulder and pulled me toward the door.

Down at Starbucks, we saw a couple of ladies we know and asked if we could sit with them. They were young by our standards, maybe mid-forties, both hot in a businesswoman sort of way. The chitchat was amiable, but immediately turned ugly, if you are a man.

How is it going with Estelle? one said to Swifty.

I hear you are going to ask Clarise to marry you … that’s the word on the street, the other one said to me.

Like I said, ugly. When the word gets out that a guy is off the market, being claimed by another woman, well, there is no chance to score even with a fat wallet. Which, by the way, is the only thing guys our age have going for us these days. Looks are gone, muscles—if they ever existed—are gone. Without bucks, you are a permanent back bencher, related to the junk pile of humanity or huwomanty. It is hell, or something like it.

Then Swifty throws in a bomb. It looks like Stellee and I are done. She is moving to L.A. Selling the shop. Feels like our relationship is going nowhere, at least nowhere good. I am the guy’s best friend and he doesn’t tell me this until we are in front of a couple near-strangers … girls … I mean, women. I was shocked. I was mortified and I was pissed off, though I did not let on in front of these hotties.

The oooohs and aaaahs were palatable. You could cut them with a knife. I saw some careful scheming going on right before my eyes so I moved myself into the fray.

Clarise and I are sort of an on-again, off-again item. You know we were once married, but we are still good friends. Not sure she is completely over Rick … That was the best I could come up with, but it got the rise I was looking for from one of the gals. The other was transfixed on Swifty.

We chatted for a while, finished our coffee, and agreed to consider going to the races together soon. They got very interested when Swifty asked them what Molly was. They both giggled.

A while later, back in the office, I blurted out, What is this shit about Stellee and why was I, your best friend and business partner, not informed?

I was afraid to tell you because you would ask why. Then I would have to tell you that she caught me with my little college president friend. He walked into the alcove and I heard the bathroom door shut.

When he came out, I was ready. You mean that you are once again falling under the spell of the vixen herself! Nora Williamson is the most evil and conniving woman in the Western world and you, Mr. Savvy Boy, are letting a perfectly good woman get away just for a blazing adventure in the sheets with the giant killer? You sir are nuts … crazy … idiotic and stupid. Besides that, you are very silly and typical. I may be ashamed of you, but I want the whole story before I judge. Give … now!

Well, Nora called. She wanted to talk … talk about us. She asked if she could come to the Castle. That is why I was out of town last weekend. She was there … with me … with phones turned down. We talked. We … well, we …, Swifty drifted.

Yeah, that gets us every time, that talking and stuff. What does the bitch want … a permanent thing with you … for God’s sake, not marriage!

No, no marriage … more like a permanent relationship, a ‘closeness’ and confidence that we are always there for each other … something like that. Swifty looked wistfully weird. Not a good look for a man.

Of course there was sex … lots of kinky sex, right?

Of course. Why else would I destroy my life and future? You dumb shit, there is always sex. This is Nora we are talking about! What would you do?

Dumb question.

You let Stellee know?

"No, you idiot! She came out to the Castle looking for me. Couldn’t get me on the phone. Was worried I had a heart attack or something. She opened the gate on her own and came out to the pool through the guest patio … opened that door with her key or she jumped the fence. Nora was in the water … no clothes, I guess.

I was looking for a game on TV. I heard a commotion and came out. Nora had put on one of my sweatshirts and was exposed, dripping and yelling. They had a little confrontation. It was really bad. Two women screaming at each other.

Sounds pretty good … women fighting over you . . . I—

Stellee told Nora to get dressed and get out.

What did Nora say?

She laughed and said, ‘You poor little thing … this is a man, not a boy. He needs a real woman, not a dog sitter. You get out and go back to your kitty litter.’

Oh God. What did Stellee say . . . ?

Stellee started to cry and looked at me like I killed her puppy.

Evidently she left the way she came. Swifty was in bare feet and had to run for shoes. By the time he got them on, Stellee was out the gate at high speed.

She texted me that we were finished and that she is out of here. Out of Scottsdale. Swifty looked very, very sad.

Ouch! This is bad. Can you get her back? Nora will blow like the breeze. I mean she will be off and out for six months before she comes back. You know her history. Stellee is steady, man. Get her back. I paced.

No way. It is the second time she caught me with Nora. It is over … as in O-V-E-R. Swifty came as close to crying as I had seen since Kim’s funeral.

Estelle is a solid citizen for a girl. That sounds sexist, I know. I didn’t mean it that way. Let me restate it. I mean she is much more of a person than I originally thought and she is the best thing to happen to Swifty since Kim died. The lady has really grown on me and on Swifty. At first I thought she was a lightweight. You know, smart, but not very deep. Well, it is easier to describe in guys … for a guy. But the more I watch her operate, the more I know she is for real. She is bright, attractive, very caring, and thoughtful.

This thing needs to be fixed. Nora is not worth this. Nora is a siren. I mean I would not mind spending a weekend with her, but I would check with a priest and a psychiatrist immediately thereafter and I am not even Catholic. Nobody is smarter than Nora—nobody. But she is a wild, self-serving, shockingly overpowering female. Not many people can compete with her in anything. Frankly, I am afraid of her. Women should not be that beautiful and smart. It is not natural!

Of course you realize that all of this is coming from a man who has been married three times and has had numerous unsuccessful relationships. Maybe it isn’t Nora, or Stellee, or Clarise, or Fiona, or Janice, or any of them. Maybe it’s me. Maybe my insecurities reflect in my behavior and my analysis of people. I will have to talk to somebody about that. Maybe I will renew with my shrink. Maybe I will ask Swifty, after I help him try to get Stellee back. After he apologizes for calling me an idiot … again.

Talking about women, I had an interesting conversation with Janice Gauchin, the thief who faked death in order to bilk the older men she married out of their fortunes. (See Swifty and the Wife Killer.) As we crossed the Pacific from Sydney to Honolulu last year, heading her back to China, we had lots of time to talk. She told me that as a little girl she listened over and over to the old tapes and wire recordings her folks had saved of their appearances on radio mysteries. She loved the parts when her dad fooled the Shadow and Nero Wolfe or temporarily outfoxed Sam Spade or Marshal Dillon. She saw a few remastered videos of her mom in Rawhide, Colt .45, and Richard Diamond, Private Eye. Occasionally she would see her mother as a teenager in the background of popular kid movies of the ’40s with Eddie Bracken and Alan Young. She always wanted to be an actress like her mom but lacked the confidence to go the professional route. And, there was an itch to be more like the characters in the radio thrillers than the actors. She wanted to be a real bad guy and she succeeded.

I had complimented her on her skills and wondered why she chose the con as a way to live. She said that it excited her. The thrill of the score, the break when she faked the death, and her exit were more exhilarating than hearing Joshua Pintel read off her bank balance. Like with a gambler, it seemed that the action meant more than the win. What a waste … this sexy broad might have been a movie star, another Ava Gardner, or, more appropriately for today, Jennifer Lopez or Angelina Jolie. What a waste. Wait, Ava Gardner. She did look like Ava Gardner in Mogambo. So, I went back and checked out some Gardner films. There was a look there, but a couple of the guys she skewered said she looked like some other movie star. Got it! The girl copied a role she saw in a film and became the character while she deceived some poor guy.

Swifty keeps asking me about the woman to get his mind off Stellee.

Did Janice Gauchin talk about her personal relationships with those guys she cheated?

Some.

What did she say about them?

Uh, well, she liked most of them.

Say she could of hung with one … or more?

Yeah, said she really liked Dan Chanute … could have stayed, but had a job to do. The way she put it was ‘I had a role to play.’ Said Dan was a little larcenous himself and lots of fun. Did not trust the son though.

Yeah, well, I get that. Anybody else?

Yes … Fred Letterman, or ‘Freddie,’ as she called him. Scrupulously honest, she said. She really felt bad to hurt him … and the same for Joe … liked him as a friend.

Friend! She slept with all these guys. Friend, my ass!

Yeah, well, she talked a little about that too.

Oh, really …

Yep. Said except for Fred and Dan, they all drank so much they were out early and didn’t bother her much.

This is so much bullshit. Hey, she is supposed to be a sociopath. How could she have feelings about any of them? Nora would buy none of it.

Do you?

Did you?

Yeah, I did.

Maybe I do too.

So both Swifty and I have fallen for Ms. Janice Louise Gauchin’s line. She is a good actress and obviously very convincing. Maybe there is something about women that we don’t understand. I always thought Swifty was kind of normal—not like me—but normal, like not easily influenced by women. But with Brenda Bouquet, the Madam of the Mountain, and Nora Williamson in the mix, maybe he is secretly just as screwed up as me—with women, I mean. Then again, the guy had a thirty-year normal marriage.

By the way, a few months ago our guy in Hefie said Janet Louise Gauchin was still there, lounging around one of the pools, teaching English classes, coaching swimming, hiking in the hills, and attending cocktail events with top party leaders and foreign dignitaries. She ventured to Beijing or Shanghai occasionally for shopping, but that is it. No doubt at some point the itch