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THE
MINISTER OF PLANNING
The New Brazilian Dictatorship - 2012
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JF Thrall
© JF Thrall - 2010
Hated by fools, and fools to hate,
Hated by fools, and fools to hate,
Be that my motto and my fate.
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
It is perilous to study too deeply the arts
of the Enemy, for good or for ill.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Council of Elrod
“Escancarada, a ditadura firmou-se. A tortura foi o seu instrument extreme de coerção e o extermínio, o ultimo recurso da repressão política que o Ato Instítucional No. 5 libertou das amarras da legalidade. A ditadura envergonhada foi substituida por um regime a um só tempo anárquico nos quartéis e violento nas prisões. Foram os anos de Chumbo
O Milagre Brasileiro e os Anos de Chumbo foram simultâneos. Ambos reais, coexistiram negando-se. Passados mais de trinta anos, continuam negando-se. Quem acha que houve um, não acredita ( ou não gosta de admitir ) que houve o outro.”
Elio Gaspari
Esplicação
“A Ditadura Escancarada”
Nota do Author
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The Hows and Whys
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J.R.R. Tolkien began his preface to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings “This tale grew in the telling…” In the late 1960’s those six words were enough to set my interest in gear and nothing more was required for me to sit down and read his tale, stopping only for sleep. I read while I ate and even carried my book to the bathroom. That is what a great storyteller can do to his reader.
Of The Minister of Planning I could say that the tale took form over many years. Today I am not sure just when the idea to put it into story form came about but I do know that it was first conceived as a book in 1978 and the first ideas were put down in electronic form in 1980 on one of those large floppy disks of an Apple II+ computer, smuggled into Brazil long before the customs officials at the airport knew what a personal computer was or how it would change Brazil and the world. Before that time, I suppose that it began by my having conversations about how I would go about making changes in Brazilian society, politics and finance. I also remember that many of those ideas offended the nationalistic sensibilities of my Brazilian friends and acquaintances, so as I developed the ideas and sought to refine them through discussion, I remember inventing the idea that it was all part of some novel that I was planning to write and told them that while I myself did not particularly believe in all of the premises of the principal character, Minister of Planning Jaime Jackson, they were all valid from the perspective of a character in a novel. That relieved some of the pressure of my friend’s anger, and their misplaced nationalism, that at times brought them to call me an arrogant ‘Gringo,’ or even a ‘closet fascist.’
With regard to a real book, that never began to take form beyond a general outline and idea until 1998 and another twenty years of living in Brazil, where daily events passed into Brazilian history. My knowledge of Brazil increased along with my frustration at the country’s inability to accomplish even the most basic reforms in government, infrastructure and culture and I came to see Brazil as a country that was driven by events, rather than a nation that controlled them. Change came from internal and external influences, both good and bad, but little happened in the country that was the result of decisive action or planned intervention. In my way of thinking, those who spoke of change in Brazil were still too culturally Brazilian to influence the sequence of events. The laws that were enacted were designed to funnel more power and wealth to the corrupt and deceitful, wrapped in the language of making things better for the people, while the common man of the nation shrugged his shoulders and used a daily phrase to describe his lack of power and participation in the control of his life “E defecil.”
I continued to talk about the necessary measures that were needed and continued to use the idea of a book as a forum for expressing them. I continued to offend and there were those who thought the ideas contemptible, arrogant and inhumane and I learned that I should never be surprised at the lengths that humans will go to justify their shortcomings, my own included, especially when they attempt to place their individuality within a collective whole. Humans, especially in the West, like to say that people are the same everywhere. That the differences between people don’t really matter. But more than a half a century of living has taught me is that people like to be different, they emphasize the differences, hoisting themselves on their own petards of imagined individuality and the illogical extensions of collective individuality that takes the form of religion, nationalism, race and the many other idiosyncrasies that make up the human condition. This illogical thinking is of course the cause of much of the continued suffering of humanity, for the values that come from moral premises are easily lost when thrown into the context of nation states, religious dogma or philosophical beliefs.
The Minister of Planning wasn’t a tale that I could tell as Tolkien did, with minor characters taking a major role in great events, so I used a format somewhat like that of the techno-thriller of Tom Clancy, whose books I greatly enjoy as a change from my usual fare of history and non-fiction. I must apologize for the use of Clancy’s idea of crashing a plane into the Brazilian Congress but I couldn’t resist making art into reality, even if it was only fictional reality. When Bin Laden’s terrorists hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon I knew that the idea of a plane crashing into the Brazilian Congress was far from absurd.
In 1999, I thought that if this book was ever to be published, I would, for a short time, become the most roundly detested person in Brazil and I must admit to a bit of malicious pleasure in the thought. I often wondered if Salman Rushdie ever felt the same. Blasphemy and heresy, in any form, even the using of it to denigrate the integrity of a nation state is a dangerous business. And there have been many throughout the years who have told me that I have never learned when to keep my mouth shut. But publish it I will, in one form or another. It was no surprise to me that Brazilian publishing houses lacked the courage to release this book and it was offered to all of the big ones whose representatives either gave no reason for rejecting it or they openly stated that it would be bad for their company image if they published a book that insulted the Brazilian character and culture. This is the reason that the book is being offered on the Internet.
Critics of the book will undoubtedly focus on the fact that I have not provided details of exactly how the Jackson Administration implemented all of the changes that are mentioned in the book. As the book deals more with general social concepts and attitudes than the detailed aspects of written law codes, economic policies, educational curriculums, and the supply and demand of materials, it was a distraction from the story line to attempt to define each process. These details could fill another twenty or thirty books and would bore most readers.
Let me just add that if there is anyone in Brazil that I have failed to offend with this book, I ask their forgiveness for the oversight. “Tirando Sarro” is one of the national characteristics of the Brazilian people and one of their most redeeming qualities and this book is but another form of the same. For those who read the book and think that I dislike Brazilians and Brazil, I would only remind them that I have lived a great many years in the country and did so by choice, not by accident of birth and I would hope that those who believe that I have given offence to their “patria” would redirect their anger and dislike to the reasons the country is always in dire straits and to those real life individuals that have, through their selfish actions, always brought a great nation to its knees. For those who think that a Jaime Jackson and his regime is impossibility in this new millennium, I would suggest that they remember Russia at the turn of the last century, Germany in 1939 and Brazil in 1964.
It is my sincere wish that Brazil will begin to resolve the many inequities and social problems that it faces and can finally assume a leadership role in the community of nations. Again I do not expect too much along these lines, but I suppose that hope is eternal.
JF Thrall
Guararema - 2011
Prologue - October 12, 2012
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Assassination
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The dark-haired man opened the bolt on the Remington 7mm rifle and slid the brass cartridge carefully into the breach of the weapon, pushed the bolt slowly forward and locked it in place with the palm of his right hand. He then laid the weapon on the long padded gun case he had placed near his chair and returned to the back corner of the room and Sat down, leaning against the wall, looked at his watch, checked the alarm which had been set for midday.
The sun was just beginning to rise and there was still little noise from the traffic on Avenida Faria Lima, one of the principal business avenues of São Paulo. His last look out the window had revealed the headlights of cars and trucks moving quickly along the avenue, much faster than the normal flow of traffic which was the result of a megalopolis with eight million vehicles, far too many for the number and size of its streets.
The man laid himself down on the dust-covered floor and composed his mind in an effort to sleep. The room was somewhat small for an office building on the sixth floor, but the building had been constructed thirty years earlier and most of the other buildings along the avenue towered over the old concrete faced edifice. The man had chosen the building because it was old and there was only a single security guard who sat bored at a desk in the entranceway during working hours and another who dozed most of the night in a chair near the front door. He had entered the building the day before wearing the uniform of a FedEx deliveryman and went directly to the sixth floor. After checking that the hallway was empty, in a matter of seconds he bypassed the single lock on the front door of the office for rent, entered and locked the door behind him. This had been his second trip to the office since he had examined the building the week before to see if it was suitable for his task. He had found that access was simple and as opposed to most of the newer buildings in the area, there was no one was interested in checking identity cards or even record the names of those who came into the building on business.
In his examination he discovered a set of stairs at the rear of the building that led to a door that opened onto an alleyway and provided access to a side street that ran into Avenida Faria Lima. The rear door was made of metal and had a locking system that opened by an actuating lever that slid three dead bolts back into the door allowing it to be opened only from the inside. He knew that he would have no trouble leaving.
The front room of the office that he had chosen had two windows that looked down on the avenue and were covered by an old style canvas awning that kept the glare of the afternoon sun from hitting the windows, thus offering some coverage from eyes that might be stationed in the taller buildings along the street. On his previous visit the man had covered one of the windows with cardboard and duct tape and had tacked a green plastic screen over the other and then cut a hole in the screen large enough to pass the barrel of the rifle and to allow a clear view field for the high powered telescopic sight. The screen would also restrict the view of anyone who looked directly at the window and if the barrel of the weapon was noticed by anyone at all, they would only be able to see a shadowy figure moving in the room.
At precisely twelve o’clock the alarm on the man’s wristwatch went off and he awoke with a start, quickly looking around the room as his mind came into focus with his surroundings. He rose and went to the small bathroom in the office, relieved himself and washed his face and hands. He returned to the main room of the office and picked up a Sackcloth bag that had been placed inside of the FedEx delivery box and returned to the bathroom. He removed a set of dirty clothes, took off his FedEx uniform and dressed in the rags of a homeless street person. He placed a wig of dirty black hair on his head and then added a stringy beard after having darkened his skin with theatrical makeup, adding a nose that was larger than his own and placing rolled wads of cotton under his lips, which gave his mouth a swollen, distorted shape and made speech difficult. He then examined himself in the mirror and smiled at the effect of the transformation. He rolled the other set clothing and placed them in the bag and then returned to the larger room. He walked over to the window and looked down on the avenue below. The streets were lined with people and the police had cut off all of the traffic on the other side of the six-lane street and set up barricades to keep the people on the sidewalks. He removed a damp cloth from the bag and once again wiped every surface of the bathroom, the main room, including the door handles, any surface that he might have touched. He threw the rag into the Sack and removed a pair of thin rubber surgeon’s gloves and drew them on. He then went to the rifle and wiped it down with an oiled rag and repeated the process for the single shell in the gun and finally the gun case itself. The serial numbers had been filed off both the gun and the scope and he knew that it could never be traced. The rifle had come from Germany and had been smuggled into Brazil from Paraguay, but it had been manufactured in the United States. Those who had brought the gun into the Brazil had no idea who was to receive the weapon and did not even know its destination or use.
He himself came into the country on a set of false Argentine documents and although his native language was English, he spoke Spanish with a perfect Argentine accent. Juan Miguel Lopes, according to his papers, was an Argentine tourist and he crossed the border in an Argentine-built Jeep Cherokee registered in the name of his Argentine alias. The border guards at the Brazilian frontier hardly gave a second look at the prosperous man in expensive sports clothes that smiled and appeared relaxed and in no particular hurry. They were trained to look for the nervous person who was probably attempting to smuggle something across the border and this elegant man would not be smuggling cigarettes and DVDs into Brazil.
He had driven slowly to São Paulo and upon arriving registered at one of the medium class hotels in the center of the city near the Praça da Republica, one that provided a place for him to park his car within five minutes walk of the hotel. During the day he drove the streets of the city, learning the traffic patterns and in the evening he played the part of the foreign businessman, frequenting the bars and night spots of the center of the city, sometimes bringing back a woman to his hotel room for the evening.
He had picked up the weapon at the drop point on his third day in the city and even this had been planned with care and circumspection. The weapon had been placed in a house that was for rent in the exclusive suburb of Morumbi and he simply entered the house with a key he had received by mail at a drop box in Buenos Aries. The envelope had been left at the desk of a Buenos Aires hotel and in addition to the key there was only an address in São Paulo, the address of the house where he would find the gun. The message had been printed on a computer laser printer and was untraceable because it had been destroyed after being used to print the message.
The day after his arrival in São Paulo he had walked the length of Avenida Faria Lima examining every building and entering buildings that appeared as if they would suit his purposes. Some years earlier the long avenue had been extended in length by a public works project and the city planners had implemented a new numbering system for all of the buildings and many of those buildings had failed to change their numbers. He would enter each building that he thought would serve his purpose and check the entrance security by asking for an imaginary firm. When the security guard said that no such firm had offices in the building, the old or new numbering system would be given and he would patiently listen to the explanation of how the building numbers had been changed and often a lengthy explanation of how to find the correct address that he had requested.
When he had finally made his choice of buildings and entered dressed in an expensive suit and carrying a brief case, he located an empty office that faced the avenue and would suit his purpose. The following day he made the first delivery as a FedEx employee and inside the long box was the rifle and case which had been broken down so that the entire weapon fit into a box that was about the size used for delivering long stemmed roses. This he left in the box and had placed it in one of the closets and closed the door and locked it.
It was nearing the time for the motorcade to arrive. After once again checking his change of costume, he took the clothing bag and returned it to the cardboard box and placed it in front of the door so that it could not be forgotten in the haste of his departure.
He walked back to the window and again looked down at the crowds below. It was time to get ready. He quickly assembled the aluminum tripod and mounted the gun on the swivel at the top, then slid the tripod and gun closer to the window. The legs of the tripod were extended so that he could stand, insert the barrel through the screening material and have full coverage of the opposite side of the street. He placed the cross hairs of the scope between the eyes of a young woman who had stationed herself on the front row of the crowed street, both her hands resting on the wooden barricade. He knew that when he saw the President’s motorcade arriving all he would have to do is slide the tripod forward a little and he would be ready for the shot. Then the assassin took a deep breath, picked up the oiled cloth and wiped down the tripod, and every part of the weapon, throwing the oiled rag into the box by the door and settled down for the wait.
He let his mind range back to the first and only contact that had given him the assignment for the assassination of the Brazilian President. The coded message had come to the computer of a boutique in LaCrosse, Wisconsin and he checked it once a week for messages that were sent by e-mail. They were junk mail messages and he knew how to recognize the ones that carried a code for contact. He downloaded these messages onto a pen drive and used the computer at his apartment to decode the text. The message had carried the name of the target and an offer of 500 thousand dollars for the job. On making his decision to accept the job, he caught a flight to Boston and entered the library at Harvard University, accessed the Internet and typed in the e-mail code of the library and sent a coded message in return to the address that have been given to him. It was basically a simple message and right to the point.
“Accepted. Order will be delivered within two months. Funds to be deposited in account number 65N-1123R-789F of the Banco Caymin de Investments. Fifty percent in advance, remainder within twenty-four of delivery.”
The instructions for the account in the Caymans called for an immediate transfer of any arriving funds to another account in Singapore and from there to a third in Switzerland. Within a week the man would draw the money from the third account in cash and then deposit it in a fourth account where it was transferred twice more and again withdrawn in cash in US dollars and taken to a Safe deposit box in another bank.
Within a week the contract fee had been transferred and the man had made all of the arrangements, retaining two hundred thousand for expenses. He then called a number in Austria and made the arrangements for the weapon and documents with a group that operated out of Libya, then flying to Europe and North Africa and leaving the payment for the services at specified drop points that were prearranged by those who supplied the tools of the trade of international arms Sales.
* * *
Jeff Mueller pulled the ham and cheese Sandwich from the brown paper bag that he had put in the bottom drawer of his desk when he had arrived at the office. His eyes glanced at the banks of tape recorders in the large room that was enclosed in glass and totally air-conditioned. Whenever he looked over his domain he always thought that it seemed as if he was in some clean room where computer chips were manufactured but in fact his clean room had another purpose. Some of the tape recorders were always in motion and he could see the large reels turning on the machines recording signals that were captured off Satellites and telephone switching systems and then were downloaded to the Signals Processing Division of the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. The computers that operated this sophisticated and extremely expensive digital/analog system was not available on the commercial market. They were circular arrays of Cray computers and the matrix was commonly called a super computer.
As he bit into his Sandwich he reached for a paper napkin and tucked it into the neck of his white short-sleeved shirt. He was glad that he remembered. His wife was always telling him to use the napkin because she was tired of taking his ties to the cleaners, covered with mayonnaise. He never thought of mayonnaise but remembered his idea for a television ad where some monk in a monastery kitchen would Say, “Man cannot live by bread alone, he must have Hellmann’s.” He chided himself for not keeping his mind on the job and he knew that his idea for a mayonnaise advertisement was ridiculous and then told himself that sometimes his work was boring despite being part of national security.
The software that operated the computers was programmed to examine the telephone signals that were monitored from all over the world. There was a domestic division and an international division and the intelligence gathering for the rest of the world was pulled off the multitude of telecommunications Satellites that orbited the planet. Space had become a junkyard and it had been just a few years ago that telecom technology allowed cellular phone connections anywhere in the world. It was impossible for the NSA to monitor each and every phone conversation but with time they had located some that they monitored constantly and through the use of digital voice print technology they were even able to recognize specific individuals without a reference to names. For the billions of other phone messages, the software was programmed to recognize or pick out key words which actuated the recorders to provide permanent records of the conversations. Mueller often wondered if this was all entirely legal under international law but he speculated that because most law was a good ten to twenty years behind the actual state of the art technology, the law had not yet caught up with the activities of the agency. Some of the words that were programmed to set off the bells and whistles of the system were bomb, kill, cocaine, heroin, assassination, as well as the names of prominent political figures, know terrorists, leftist guerrilla groups like the Shining Path in South America and the Irish PIRA or any specific information that the intelligence community believed important at the time.
It was Mueller’s job to monitor these systems on his shift, as well as program any specific requests that might come in to the agency while he was on duty. Things had been pretty quiet for weeks. The world was quiet. There had been no natural disasters, the Israelis were still having daily running gun battles with the Palestinians and keeping a close watch on events in Lebanon, the Kurds had not taken any action against the Turks in weeks and even Africa was quiet for a change, despite the ever present hunger and machinations of corrupt governments. In Latin America, a constant watch was kept on Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and of course Columbia and its ever present drug trade. Mueller knew that this peace and quiet would not last and it always seemed that everything happened at once, but he hadn’t been able to work out the pattern after all of these years on the job. He knew that police departments expected an increase in the crime rate during periods of the full moon and it had become his perverse hobby to attempt to find a pattern for natural disasters, war and violence.
* * *
The motorcade was emerging from the tunnel that passed under São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, led by the six Federal policemen on big Harley Davidsons, followed by two black Chevrolet Omegas carrying security guards and then the open Rolls Royce which carried the President, the leader of the Worker’s Party and two security guards, one of which was the driver. The assassin remembered the Kevin Costner film about the assassination of Kennedy and smiled. A turkey shoot. But he didn’t need any backup. There would be no need for a cross fire here. He worked alone. The more people involved, the greater the chance of being caught.
The President of Brazil, Telma Ana Machado was making her first motorcade appearance in São Paulo since taking office after replacing his predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, in January of 2010. The country, according to both the local and foreign newspapers seemed to have taken a step backward. Foreign capital was leaving Brazil at an alarming rate after an initial surge of growth and stability. The recent changes in the country were the secret by wholesale of Brazil to to countries like the Chinese that had begun during the eight years that the Worker’s Party had controlled Brazil and the company nationalizations of basic infrastructure that the Workers’ Party and their support in Congress had implemented during the first year of Telma’s administration had made foreign investors avoid the Brazilian stock market. Prices and salaries had been frozen by Presidential Decree in an effort to hold down the runaway inflation that had returned with the internal loss of confidence in the economy. Speculation and hoarding were becoming common once again and there was less and less dialogue between the private sector and the government. Other decrees had made it against the law for any company to dismiss an employee, remove money from the country and this applied to Brazilian companies, individuals, as well as foreigners.
The assassin waiting for the presidential motorcade in the office building had no interest in Brazil or its politics and he only read enough Brazilian news stories from the Internet to acquaint himself with Brazil’s first female president; all in preparation for his job. The only other Brazilian president to be assassinated had been João Pessoa in June 1930 and the event had sparked the Lieutenant’s Revolution that sent the country into civil disorder in October of that year. Another president had committed suicide and he was glad that Brazil did not have a tradition of violence against political leaders. The result was lax security and a myth that Brazilians were not a violent people, despite the daily violence in the facwlas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. At any rate, he was grateful for the open Rolls Royce which made his job that much easier. The President had chosen to use this old vehicle for his motorcade on September 7th and it had been well publicized in the media and was a determining factor in the assassin’s choice of method. He knew that he had less than ten minutes after the shot to get himself out of the building and down to the street and begin moving out of the area. He had to reach the place where he had hidden a change of clothing that would once again turn him into an Argentine businessman, get back to the hotel, check out and drive to the international airport at Guarulhos to catch his flight to Buenos Aires that had been reserved for a week. He would leave the car in the São Paulo airport parking lot, wiped clean of prints and on arriving in Buenos Aires, immediately catch a flight to Madrid using a different set of documents than those he had used to arrive in Argentina.
He heard the noise from the street below increase and moving to the window could see the crowd begin to wave and point. The motorcade was approaching. He slid the tripod closer to the window, clicked off the Safety on the weapon and lowered the barrel to where he could see the street. He then moved it to the right along the slit in the screen until it was at the maximum edge of the building waiting for the Rolls Royce to appear. When he saw the Rolls, he quickly focused his attention to the rear seat of the vehicle. A man and a woman were in the back seat, the man on the right. In the front seat was a driver and there were not even any security people walking along the side of the slow moving motorcade. “A turkey shoot,” he thought again. He placed the crosshairs on the head of the woman and slowly followed the movement of the car until it was exactly in front of the building in which he was positioned. He waited until the vehicle had passed the center point and the man was out of the field of the rifle’s scope. He took a deep breath and let some of it out and squeezed the trigger.
* * *
Mueller heard the alarm go off and he dropped his Sandwich on the top of the desk and walked quickly through the glass door that opened electronically, then immediately closed behind him. He moved to a bank of tape recorders and stood in front of the one that had set off the alarm. He watched the reel turn and waited for the red light to indicate that the phone message had been recorded. He quickly hit a button that automatically rewound the tape to the beginning of the last message and then used a remote control to start a digital recording of the telephone message on a pen drive that he had inserted into the front panel of the recording unit. After the blue light on the pen drive stopped pulsing and put the large recorder back on line in the event some other message needed recording. He removed the pen drive and took it back into his office, slipped it into the USB port of his desktop unit that used voice recognition technology to transfer the spoken word into the written word and he saw the conversation come up on the monitor of his computer in Portuguese. When the message was complete, he hit his mouse and opened the translation program that was tied to the translation software in the Cray and selected Portuguese to English and hit OK when the box presented itself on the monitor. In less than a minute there was a complete translation of the telephone conversation. He quickly saved the file, then printed a copy on the laser printer which first printed a header on the page with time and date, tape number and as each sheet came out of the printer he began to read.
Voice 1: Hello, who is speaking? I want to speak to the ambassador.
Voice: 2 This is Oliveira Santos. I am the secretary to the ambassador. Who wants to speak to him?
Voice: 1 This is Wilson Ferreira, the secretary to the president. This is an emergency; please put the ambassador on the line immediately.
Voice: 2 Please wait while I get the ambassador, Sr. Ferreira.
Pause: Silence on the line
Voice: 3 This is Ambassador Carneiro, what can I do for you Sr. Ferreira?
Voice: 1 Ambassador, the President has just been assassinated in São Paulo.
Voice: 3 What! What did you Say?
Voice: 1 The President has been killed on Avenida Faria Lima by an assassin. She was shot in the head and is dead. I need for you to inform the American President and then I think that it would be appropriate if you caught the first plane back to Brazil.
Voice: 3 But how … Who did this thing?
Voice: 1 We don’t know yet. Somebody fired from a window of a building on Avenida Faria Lima and the police and the security forces are investigating as we speak. You need to inform the Americans as quickly as possible and then have one of your staff inform the other ambassadors at their embassies in Washington. It isn’t protocol to do it this way, but Brasília is in chaos and I trust you to handle this.
Voice: 3 Of course. I will do so right away. Thank you for calling. I will be on the evening flight to São Paulo.
End of message.
Message recorded from telephone conversation pulled from Satellite link on 9/7/2012. Time: 09:34 Eastern standard time.
Mueller picked up the phone and hit a button that speed dialed the office of the National Security Advisor to the President.
“White House, office of the National Security Advisor, Barbara speaking, how may I help you," Said a female voice that seemed to run the message together as if it was all a single sentence.
“This is Mueller over at NSA. I have a priority one message for Mr. Landau.”
“Just one moment and I will try and get him on the line. He is with the President,” Said the voice. He waited less than a minute and the National Security Advisor came on the line.
“This is Landau, Jeff, what have you got for me?”
“We just pulled a message off the Satellite from Brasília to the Brazilian Embassy in Washington. The message was from the secretary of the Brazilian President in São Paulo to the ambassador informing him that President Machado has been assassinated. He asked the Ambassador to come immediately to the White House and inform the President.”
“Any details, Jeff,” asked Landau.
“Not much, sir, just that she had been shot in the head from a building when the motorcade was passing.”
“Good work, Jeff, thank you. Type it up and send copies to all the agencies and one for the president. Program for all information on this and have the watch officers keep a constant flow coming to everyone that needs to know. Have the techies set up a special download of all Sats that handle Brazilian phone traffic and the internet.”
Mueller heard the phone go dead and turned back to the message. He dialed up the secretarial pool and started the process moving. He grabbed another bite from his Sandwich and turned to his computer and began to program. This was the interesting part of his job. He hated the day-to-day routine and when something new came in the hours passed quickly. He forgot about everything around him and lost himself in the job.
* * *
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