Excerpt

PROLOGUE


This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
Copyright 1944
Woody Guthrie

It could be any house in America. It could be a house painted white with black shutters bought on sale at Sears, and proudly installed by the owner. It could be a house in a neighborhood where kids play Frisbee and football on the street, or where they run through piles of golden leaves in the chill of a setting October sun. It could be a neighborhood where mothers still yell from porches to children that it’s bath time and are not shy about it either, because they all do it.
The house could have a big front porch with a wooden swing on it and an American flag attached to the post beside the cement steps leading up to it. The owners might have a dog, or cat, or a canary. They could have an eleven-year old freckled-faced boy who has a fascination for catching bugs and snakes or anything that crawls and scares the girls. It could be a house seen on any side street-- in any town-- in a place called America. It could be your house.










Chapter One

The black SUV rolled to a stop near the curb, just a few houses from the target. The location offered an excellent view to the two men hidden behind the car’s tinted windows. Under the dull glow of the buzzing streetlight, they watched the family enter their small car, and drive off. A measured voice from inside the SUV whispered, “perfect.”

The two men preferred black bagging on Fridays. This kind of neighborhood made their work easy. Friday paydays meant trips to the local Wal-Mart, and in honor of the ending workweek, most likely the operative’s targets would celebrate with dinner out. Such predictability offered the agents just what they needed--time.

With the family’s car safely out of sight the two men stepped out onto the sidewalk and strolled up to the house. The shorter man kept his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat as his eyes danced with the experience of a seasoned look out. The taller man wearing the casual brown windbreaker fumbled through a small black bag the size of a shaving kit. He found the lock picks, went to work, and in less than thirty-seconds they were inside.

The new Act permitted these searches; it didn’t require rules of law, rules of evidence, or probable cause. It didn’t require a warrant. It was for the protection of the citizens. It was the stepping-stone and the catalyst needed for change.

Tonight, the agents would do the standard op. If the suspect continued voicing his views on the Internet in support of those refusing to turn in their weapons, and if he continued writing editorials questioning the Homeland Protection Agency, the next step would lead the agency to take a stronger stand. In less than ten minutes, the video-audio bug was planted behind the lens of the man’s web cam, and he was added to the list of folks currently be remotely monitored.

These black-bag searches handily allowed evidence planting and many citizens were shocked when agents pounded on their doors, this time with a warrant. The evidence, sometimes easily uploaded from a secret site usually was enough to silence those irritating bloggers. Of course, any defense was nearly impossible for the accused; after all, everything a prosecutor needed was on their hard-drives--placed there without their knowledge.

Virus scanning programs were useless for detection, and most people just learned to live with those annoying pop-up advertisements on their screens, or E-mails that were slow to arrive to the recipient. The naïve users considered it just another pain in the ass of owning a home computer. The Homeland Protection Agency called it Simultaneous Data Retrieval, or SDR.

The new agency combined all federal law enforcement agencies under the Department of Justice and gave them a broad range of powers. Wiretapping, E-mail monitoring, black-bag searches, and random vehicle checkpoints were a few of the tools available. A growing tumor metastasizing across the land required one final step…the disarming of America.