Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

only a few hours from Washington, D.C., rather than in physical proximity to Wall Street.

      Of course, Rufus Schmied would not have wanted to be in New York City for the life of him. Baltimore itself was already stock-full of undesirable flesh trying to pose as humanity, but there was little chance that the 64 percent of the population who were black could ever hope to blend in with the society that Schmied sought to build. And the Jews held too much power in New York.

      Schmied looked out the window on a city in which the rot was far too strong yet was a center of power in his state. Schmied didn’t want to leave behind Maryland, which for the most part was pure outside the rotten core known as Baltimore. He’d even leave the city’s demographics alone; after all, not counting the city, the state was fairly clean.

      Big cities, with their “melting pots,” were sources of violence and corruption. Farther inland, on the other hand, where Americans were still Americans, things were so much different, so much kinder and simpler, so much easier. Schmied didn’t want to lose that.

      After all, it wasn’t the blacks’ fault that they were crammed into housing projects that seemed specifically designed to make them accustomed to prison, or engaged in soulless, mindless rote learning that reduced their abilities to think constructively. Liberal policies, intended to give them a break, were nothing more than the morphine used to diminish opium or heroin addiction—the trade of one soul-crushing addiction for another.

      The phone on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Schmied, your two o’clock is here.”

      “Thank you, Inga,” Schmied replied, pressing the speaker button. “Please hold all calls.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Schmied pulled the cable from the back of his desk phone. He opened a locked drawer and began to scan the room with a hand-held electronic device, even as the appointment walked through the door. Schmied put his finger to his lips, sweeping the area. He then took a small white-sound generator and pressed one of its speakers to the glass. The static vibrations would make even a laser microphone incapable of picking up their conversation.

      “Don’t you think that’s a little much?” Warren Lee asked as he closed the door firmly behind him.

      Schmied raised an eyebrow. “This from you?”

      Warren Lee was tall, well-tanned, brown-eyed. If Schmied hadn’t known the man was half Chinese and half American, there would be little to give away that Lee was anything other than a white man. It was uncanny, but then, Schmied had little problem with Asians. After all, they had their ties to the true Aryan race, as well. For them, except for those who had fallen under the fetish of communism in mainland China, life was honor and discipline, unlike the poor rats that teemed in American cities.

      “Don’t give me any of that,” Lee grumbled. “I have to congratulate you on this morning’s event.”

      Schmied nodded. “It was not my personal work. I merely set the balls in motion.”

      “And you threw a perfect strike,” Lee told him. “The pins are falling exactly where we want them.”

      Schmied pointed to a seat for Lee, who sat across from him. Schmied poured a fresh cup of coffee for his visitor, leaving it black and setting it on the desk in front of Lee. He poured one for himself. Alcohol had proved the downfall of too many—the downfall of entire ethnic groups—so Schmied remained a teetotaler. Control was his drug. Anything that impaired his clarity was to be avoided like the plague.

      “I’m pleased for your approval,” Schmied said. He took a seat and crossed his legs, steepling his fingertips. Lee began to talk about the project they had allied themselves to accomplish.

      Schmied smiled pleasantly, channeling his amusement. “Precious” Lee thought he was trying to convince the Fund that he was somehow part of a Taiwanese “interest” looking for a means of discrediting the Japanese economy. If there was one thing the American Vanguard National Fund possessed, it was the resources to thoroughly vet any person walking through their doors with a scheme.

      Sure, Lee’s bona fides seemed to be legitimate enough to survive moderate scrutiny, but Schmied had not transformed a hundred million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine and automatic weapon sale profits into a multibillion-dollar bank by only making moderate inquiries. Laundering the business of biker gangs into a respectable banking conglomerate took attention and caution equal to the audacity necessary to raise that cash.

      Lee spoke eloquently, pointing out how the AVNF could further increase its earnings by investment into the project, but Schmied knew exactly what he was putting his work into.

      Hiring a highly skilled group of young men from Gehenna, Texas, dressed up as consummate professionals and equipped with the best weaponry money could buy, turned the sniveling milksops of Greenpeace and PETA into victims and national heroes. The Gehenna crew struck and disappeared, utilizing every ounce of intel they could to appear like a corporate security force taking vengeance upon a group of rabble rousers.

      Already, donations to both groups had doubled, and the liberal cable stations were demanding the renunciation of diplomatic ties to Japan. Schmied’s investments in Japanese businesses had quickly been sold off, filtered through dummy corporations, so that he wouldn’t take a bath in his own stock department. He’d turned that influx of money around deftly. Everything the AVNF made would stay firmly in the pocket of true American patriots. Let China’s SAD—the red Communist version of the CIA or the older KGB—continue to bluster and boast of the profits to be earned. It only confirmed the truth that the so-called socialists were simply common thugs, centralizing money and power for themselves. There was only greed, and SAD’s greed was going to sate itself on the wounded, floundering whale that had been Japan.

      Schmied was enjoying the crumbs torn off into the water by scavengers tearing at the bloody carcass. Now that the blood was in the water, every opportunist in the ocean was circling, looking for a bite of that thick, succulent blubber.

      Schmied blinked and laughed at himself. The allusion to the dying whale must have been unavoidable, given the targets of those first anti-shipping missiles.

      “Mr. Schmied?” Lee asked.

      “I’m sorry,” the “banker” answered. “I just had a mental image cross my mind.”

      “Oh?” Lee inquired. “What mental image?”

      “Japan as a wounded whale. And you and I, Mr. Lee, are the sharks waiting to dig in for the feast.”

      Lee smiled. “I see.”

      “I just want to know what we can do to tie in the Iranians to one side or the other,” Schmied said. “They will be an unavoidable link in the chain.”

      “Trust me, Mr. Schmied,” Lee offered. “We have the perfect personages to take the fall for this.”

      Schmied tilted his head. “Let me guess. Iran is currently one of the nations exporting liquid natural gas to Japan, having doubled it in 2013. Someone is attempting to hurt Iran’s petro-bucks, which means we can cast suspicion on Israel.”

      Lee’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “How very perceptive...”

      Schmied waved it off. “You sit behind a desk like this one, you know which way the money flows. Besides, one of the problems with Japan in international circles is its ignorance of Iranian sanctions. If anyone wanted to hurt Iran, taking a few points off the yen would be one of the best ways to do it.”

      Lee chuckled. “Most canny.”

      “Yeah.” If there was one thing Schmied didn’t appreciate, it was smoke being blown up his ass, and Lee seemed to have backed a foundry chimney between Schmied’s cheeks.

      The business speak was on autopilot, all the while allowing the AVNF president to channel his thoughts into what dilemma he’d run into if he hadn’t kept the Chinese under tight wraps. So far, the Gehenna commandos were lost in the wind. It was a shame that a proud American warrior patriot had to take escape-and-evasion precautions in the land