Excerpt: Malleus Illuminatus: The Illuminati Hammer

Chapter One

“May God have mercy on my enemies …
because I won’t.”
— General George S. Patton Jr.

The world faded away from view as the black van snaked its way along United States Route One entering Salem, yet to Edison Adams the threatening onset of daylight seemed like an onslaught, as unstoppable and unmerciful as an invading army, and equally as focused. Sneering, he felt the flesh of his wrists burning with each brush of the woven nylon restraints.

Fingers of the Atlantic Ocean flowed inland under the Adamski Memorial Highway, easing under the roadway as it morphed into the Linden and Town Line Brook. Crossing that water way meant time was dwindling. Only another half an hour or so and the van would arrive at its scheduled destination. Another twenty five minutes after that … Edison Adams would be separated from the rest of the world for all eternity.

As the van exited United States Route One and headed north on Salem Street, the world outside seemed to reside on an entirely different plane of existence, devoid of any knowledge of the occupant inside the van. That was the way Edison wanted it. If people had discovered the route the van was scheduled to take on its way to Salem Harbor, throngs of onlookers would surely have gathered just to catch a glimpse of their hero.

Better they do not know, he had told the driver.

Harassed by the land fall of Hurricane Barbara as it lashed out at the van, the tires shrieked and struggled to maintain a solid hold on the asphalt. But the storm had been anticipated. It was for this reason that this particular van was chosen to transport the prisoner to the landing zone in Salem. Regular transport would have entailed movement from Boston to Salem in an unmarked sedan, suitable for ambiguous transport, but nowhere near able to withstand the force and ferocity of a Category 4 hurricane.

And today was the day for transport. Nothing would stand in the way.

Not even Mother Nature.

The rage just outside matched the storm inside Edison’s head. Cardboard boxes filled with hope were thrown by two hundred mile per hour winds smashing up against the walls of his mind, destroyed forever amid the fury of hate feeding on the destruction of various other emotions. They were all of no use to Edison now.

His soul had died long ago. All that remained now was blinding, enraged hatred.

* * * * *

Arriving at the landing zone, Edison gave in to a wave of realization. So this is it, he thought. For a few moments life seemed to stutter and skip, as if his life were being played out on a movie projector, fast forwarding and then reversing almost in unison and almost so fast as to cause the movie reel to become unstable enough to skip off of the track.

As he stepped down from the van’s open back door, a young man dressed in a United States Air Force flight uniform stood at his side and clasped an iron hook into the space between Edison’s wrists, grabbing on to the nylon restraints. He said, “General, as you know, this is a very short flight. The better you treat us on the way, the better you will get treated in return. Do we understand each other?”

What is to understand? Edison thought. I never offered any thing to ask if you understood it, so why does any of this even matter?

“If you will kindly step right this way, General,” the kid said, “we will get this over with just as quickly as possible and without any difficulty.”

The helicopter sat idling just thirty yards away, its rotor wash reminding Edison of the countless times he had used such transportation in all his United States military years. As he climbed aboard and sat on the passenger bench seat directly behind the pilot, the nylon restraints dug even deeper into his skin.

“I apologize for this, General,” the kid said. He closed the iron hook around the eyelet stabbing out from the wall to his left. It was not a hook after all … it was a master hook designed to connect two nylon restraints to the helicopter’s confinement system for prisoner transport. Having ensured the connection was impossible to break, the kid added, “That’s not too tight, is it, General?”

What a stupid question, Edison imagined at first. But then he realized that the kid was actually serious about it, as if somehow caring about the prisoner’s comfort and well being. The end result, however, would still be the same. Twenty five minutes or so from now he would arrive at his destination, where he would remain segregated from society for the rest of his natural life. Comfort and well being, at this point, were of no relevance. Instead, they had been replaced with the sensation that his skin had been doused with sulfuric acid, eating away at the top layers and leaving only the underlying nerves exposed to the grinding action of the nylon restraints. He knew, without having to be told, that the next fifty years would rank among the worst anyone could ever hope to endure.

Fast forward … the movie reel seemed to skip ahead then.

The helicopter lifted off. It was heading south east, head first into the hurricane. Sitting right beside the bay door, he could see just enough rushing past outside to know there was still a chance the helicopter could crash right down into the Atlantic Ocean, however vague that chance might have been. It seemed to be raining sideways at that vantage point, perhaps even upward, driven by the churning force of the hurricane. Still, the lack of solid ground did nothing to deter the helicopter from its scheduled flight route.

As furious as the storm raged onward just outside, the scene inside the helicopter remained calm and almost silent, echoing with stuttering movie reel motion and obscurity, replacing chaos with a kind of serene stillness which warned Edison that the coming years would be made up of that very stillness. The lack of sound would resonate within his mind forever and ever. He felt his heart beat quicken then as he glanced first at the pilot and then at the co-pilot. The illogical anticipation of a notion shaped by what might be, if only the circumstances turned out just right, and suddenly he realized that he not only imagined the helicopter slipping beneath the angry waves below, he wanted it to.

Fast forward … this time with such an instantaneous jolt that for a moment time seemed to have skipped right over the preceding five or six whole minutes, ending up here, now, as waves rushed up to meet the helicopter’s skids.

On the ground now, being led out of the helicopter and away to a building standing one hundred yards to the right. Three other men accompanied him, one on each side while another followed from behind, all holding MP5 assault rifles, all with their fingers on the triggers, guiding him to make sure he made it to the building without a single wrong move. The leather straps binding his ankles ensured that any hasty getaway maneuver would prove to be a slow stepping one, to say the least.

Moments that seemed to be years later, he stood at the iron doorway to the building. As it creaked open, popping each time its bulk rode over iron spikes angled out of the ground … the kind that warned drivers not to back up after driving over them in the toll lane, lest their tires become shredded beyond repair … blackness greeted him from inside. As the shadows inside rushed out to usher him in, he began to hear the insistent crackle of radio traffic. When he could no longer hear the hurricane churning away outside, as the iron door slammed shut and all of its tumblers thumped and hammered into the concrete and steel surrounding it, the finality set in.

He would never see the light of day ever again.

Though now in a state of separation from the rest of the world, frustrated and unable to do a single thing to alter his present situation, Edison was alert enough to take stock in this new state and assess it for what might benefit him most, instead of the decisiveness which stood before him now. He would never see the light of day again? Was he still, decades later, still so torn up about his wife’s murder that, even after thirty years, perpetual darkness would only perform the functions of an enemy, rather than a helpful ally?

Why did I not just end it all on the very day of my capture? he wondered. Why did I not just force the military police to engage me in a gun fight, have them gun me down, and be at peace with my darling Ruth right now?

The few remaining pieces of unfinished business, of course. He had started his own personal war and it just was not finished yet. He had been ready to die the day the military police caught up to him in the war zone of Afghanistan. But he had not been able to walk away for good from the war he started, and to walk away would have meant much more than that. It would have been an admission of defeat, surrendering to the sweet conclusiveness of death, but submitting to the very enemies he had sworn to destroy.

With a rattle and a sudden jolt, an office door swung open at the end of the hall way, out of which stepped a man so well dressed that he might well have passed for a business man in Manhattan. He carried a file folder at his side.

“Major General Edison Adams,” the man said, flipping through the open file folder. “As a formality, I must inform you that you have arrived at Boundary Peak Island. This is a research facility wholly owned and operated by the United States Department of Defense. You have been transported here for the execution of the sentencing guide lines set forth by United Nations Security Council Resolution five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen, enacted in May of 2003 for the crime of Violation of the laws or customs of war. As you no doubt are already aware, you are to spend the next four hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred years confined solely to this island, its research facilities, and its boundaries. Do you understand all of this?”

Edison said, without hesitation, “I understand.”

“Good.” The smirk on the man’s face stretched further. “I am Doctor Jefferson Stoker. I am the superintendent here at BPI. I am, for all intents and purposes, who you should consider to be God here at this facility. Now then, we will need to get you out of your dress uniform and into the only uniform you will ever wear again.”

Thoughts of Ruth spread across the surface of his mind then. And for a moment, nothing else mattered.