Masonic Madness

By Hilbert Haar

After Major Thomas Baker is kicked out of the US Army he becomes depressed and develops a love for Black Label until he is recruited as a bodyguard for a high-profile security company. When he discovers the company’s true intentions, he becomes the target of a deadly manhunt, fueled by the dark agenda of powerful entrepreneurs and political powerbrokers, united in a criminal Masonic brotherhood. To save his life, his sanity and his lover, Baker becomes the hunter in a high-stakes deadly game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilbert Haar
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005706128

Hilbert Haar

Hilbert Haar (1950) started working as a journalist in the Netherlands in 1969. He has worked for newspaper and magazine publishers and also worked as an independent writer with his own company V.o.f. De Stijl. He spent seven years in Greece on the island of Crete, and lived also briefly in Utah and California. He worked as the Editor-in-Chief at Today, a muckraking English-language newspaper published in Philipsburg, St. Maarten - Dutch West Indies, for ten-plus years, until the paper closed down after Hurricane Irma in 2017. He is currently traveling with his wife Myriam in Asia.He finished his first full-length thriller - The Ultimate God Conspiracy in 2018, and published a second thriller - Diary of a Psychopath (Dutch title: Dagboek van een Psychopaat) in 2021.Het luchthartige zelf-help boek Achttien Tips Voor een Gelukkig Leven verscheen eveneens in 2021.

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Masonic Madness

Hilbert Haar

Published by Hilbert Haar at Smashwords

Copyright 2022 Hilbert Haar

* * *

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

1. Blackjack

2. One year ago

3. A fucked up complication

4. Better than being dead

5. A conspiracy

6. One more chance

7. The cherry on the cake

8. Stone

9. Shareholders

10. Men of good character

11. One week earlier

12. Damage control

13. Rules don’t apply

14. Talking business

15. Brothers in arms

16. Where is Tommy Baker?

17. Money talks

18. Pulitzer Prize material

19. Consequences be damned

20. Whiskeytown

21. A padded envelope

22. Finnigan

23. A run for the border

24. Mexico

25. Three months later

About the author

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1. Blackjack

Tommy grabbed the blackjack from underneath his pillow and slid out of bed, careful not to wake Rebecca. He moved up to the mezzanine above his bed from where he had a clear view of the entrance to his temporary apartment. Then he waited.

It was four in the morning and a faint sound outside the door had put all his senses on high alert. They had come for him, which is what he had more or less expected. Sooner rather than later. He breathed slowly, listening to what sounded like someone scratching at the cheap lock. Somebody was swearing softly and Tommy knew their next move by heart.

The door exploded and a fat guy dressed in black moved into his room, weapon at the ready. When he looked to his right he must have seen Rebecca. He smiled, but before he could make another move Tommy jumped down from the mezzanine, hitting the intruder’s neck with his heel bone. It hurt like hell but the guy’s neck snapped like a reed. He was dead before he hit the floor. Game over.

From the corner of his eye, Tommy detected movement. He pivoted, swinging his blackjack in the direction of the door. The flexible steel spring connected with a sickening sound to the temple of the fat guy’s backup. Two down.

Tommy dragged the second intruder inside and closed the door. When Rebecca looked at him he smiled. The bad guys are zero and two. Don’t ask any questions, just get moving. We have to get out of here.

Tommy yanked open the rickety closet and grabbed a black nylon bag. He stuffed it with some clothing, his Apache Falcon hunting knife and his Magnum Research Desert Eagle. He was proud of this weapon. It would send a 300-grain bullet with a velocity of 1,475 feet or close to 500 meters per second towards its target. Its rather modest pressure of 35,000 per square inch did not bother Tommy. His Desert Eagle still produced a power factor of 442, placing it among the most powerful handguns on the market.

He put on his pants, combat boots, a black tee shirt and a leather jacket, before looking at Rebecca.

Hurry up, they’re coming.

Rebecca just stood there.

I don’t know what’s happening Tommy but I am not going to run.

He sighed.

You’d rather be dead? Your choice.

Then he slipped out of the room and closed the door behind him, marking the end of a friendship; or so he thought. He wondered how she would explain the two dead guys to the hotel reception and after that to the police. Or to the next goons that would enter the scene.

But the dead guys were not his problem. Not anymore. There were bigger headaches down the road.

Tommy stepped out of the elevator and peered into the deserted lobby. The lone security guard was slumped over the reception desk with a neat hole in his temple. No surprises there.

Tommy had no idea how they had found him but he knew one thing for sure. The dead guys in his apartment were guns for hire. Professionals. Not professional enough.

He knew that there had to be a backup team somewhere. Standard procedure. Tommy figured that those guys had the front and the back of the building covered. So he slipped back into the elevator and rode all the way to the top floor. They would discover soon enough where he had gone but by that time Tommy would no longer be anywhere near the building that had almost turned into a deadly trap.

He did not particularly like the idea of being hunted. You can run but you cannot hide. At least not forever. Time to turn the tables.

From now on, he would do what he was good at. He would become the hunter.

When the hunt was over, he would be safe again.

2. One year ago

Tommy hated AR600-9. AR stood for Army Regulation. The number 600-9 was attached to the nightmare of every soldier: the Army Body Composition Program, Pentagon-style morphed into just another member of the American alphabet soup as ABCP.

Some asshole, Tommy had thought more than once, must have spent part of his career composing the 40-plus page document that regulated into minute detail how much a soldier should weigh and what his body-fat percentage was allowed to be.

At 5’ 10" Tommy’s minimum required weight was 189 pounds or 85.7 kilos and the ceiling for his body-fat percentage was 24. The pen pushers who executed the ABCP under the responsibility of the Deputy Chief of Staff were a real pain in the ass, at least in Tommy’s opinion.

Once every six month the bastards called him in to check whether he still met the requirements of being a good soldier. He’d never been more fit and healthy in his life. But Sergeant Art Johnson had found a problem.

The primary objective of the ABCP is to ensure all soldiers achieve and maintain optimal well-being and performance under all conditions, Major Baker, he mumbled while he scrutinized the results of Tommy’s examination.

Jeez, sarge, did you learn that regulation by heart? Tommy said. Well done.

Johnson just smiled. Just doing my job brother.

Fuck you. I am not your brother.

The smile disappeared but otherwise Johnson was not impressed. Careful soldier, unless you really want too piss me off. Since you just did that, I have a surprise for you.

Wow, wow. I can’t wait.

Your body-fat percentage does not meet the required standards, soldier. It is 24.25 percent and the limit is 24 percent.

How is that even a problem, asshole?

It means that you are unfit for active duty. I’ll have to find you an utterly boring desk job.

For one fucking quarter of a percent? Tommy yelled. You’ve got to be kidding me.

Sergeant Johnson pasted his smile back on his face. Fraid not soldier. The rules are the rules.

Tommy lost it. I’ll show you how unfit I am for active duty, he growled. Sergeant Johnson was a big black guy and he was still smiling when Tommy jumped over his desk and dealt him a hook that knocked him out cold.

Tommy’s superiors were not impressed. They knew his impeccable record and they knew he was special, but they still did not see any other option than to kick him out of the army, be it that they granted him a half-decent pension on the condition that he would never bad-mouth the army in public.

This is how Tommy saw his military career go up in smoke over one rather satisfactory action. He returned to the place where he grew up in northern Nebraska, a small village on the banks of the Niobrara River. Gordon had just one thing going that pleased Tommy: a rowdy honky-tonk where they served alcohol as long as you managed to stay on your barstool.

His aging parents still lived on the farm where they grew corn. His father gave him a hunting rifle when he was just eight years old. The present came with a deadly serious assignment: shoot anything that threatens my corn, his father told him. And so, young Tom was out there with his rifle, hunting for all those deer, beavers, raccoons, squirrels and birds that had the gall to turn his dad’s crop into a tasty dinner.

He still remembered that the old man had no sympathy for wildlife damage management. Just shoot the fuckers, he’d told Tommy, who quickly understood that dad was not joking.

But after his return to the farm it