when he calls.”
The guard turned to Mark. “Who the hell are you really?”
Mark was trying to stand without his ribs puncturing a lung. “Nobody, man.”
The head guard helped Mark stand. He gave him a pair of shoes to wear and stuck out his hand. “I appreciate what you did in here. Senator Sloan was a friend of mine. Got me my job here a long time ago. What they did to his daughter was awful. That asshole you killed deserved it. I owe you one if you ever need it.”
Mark looked at Troy, and he smiled. “Making a difference already.”
Chapter 4
The Problem
Henry Sutter transferred a hundred thousand dollars to the account of the United Front Against Politics, UFAP, for the third time. They were his favorite group for bringing violence to any protest that was happening. They had a radical group of followers that never seemed to care about bloodshed for no reason.
Henry hated the United States and, in particular, its latest president. He had grown up poor in London. His mother had left him on the streets there at age six. He never saw her again. He never knew who his father was. He snuck his way onto a cargo ship coming to America when he was eight. In New York, he was scooped up by children and family services and found himself in an orphanage a week later. He was in the system, and he hated it.
The orphanage was small, and he still felt as poor as he was on the streets of London. All the money this country had and he was wearing rags for clothes. Barely had anything to eat and he felt like he was in prison. At ten he was adopted by a wealthy couple that couldn’t have kids. The first year was great. Henry saw how the wealthy lived. His new parents tried to buy his love. Henry had everything he ever wanted.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Henry’s rebellious nature came back, and he began to lash out. First it was at his new mom and then the dad. Henry was a big kid for eleven, and he used that to strike fear into his new parents. He would break things and shove his mother when she tried to stop him. Over the next year the relationship became so hard that eventually Henry was sent to military school.
Henry actually found this refreshing, and he did well there. The discipline and structure gave Henry the drive and inner strength he needed to thrive. He rose to the top of his class and graduated with honors. He then went on to West Point and enjoyed that as well. In his senior year, he was talking to several branches of the military, trying to decide where he would serve.
One week from his graduation, a man showed up at the school. He was his parents’ butler. Henry at age twenty-two had just inherited a billion-dollar company and hundreds of millions of dollars from his adoptive parents he barely knew. They had been killed in a plane crash, and Henry was the sole inheritor per the will. He barely knew them and had hardly kept in touch. He had gone home for the occasional Christmas over the years or birthday, but mostly he had stayed away. They had paid for all his schooling and had sent him money every month, but beyond that, they were basically strangers.
Henry found himself strangely upset over their death. He got emotional standing there in the courtyard of his dorm, talking to a man he didn’t even know about parents he didn’t know. The man reached out and took Henry’s shoulder in his hand to comfort him.
Henry stepped away quickly, causing the man’s hand to fall away. “Don’t touch me. You don’t know me.”
The man withdrew. “I’m sorry, sir. I was just trying to comfort you in your loss.”
Henry put on his uniform hat he had been holding. Squared the hat to his brow and looked at the man. “I have school to finish. When I am done, I will come and deal with this.”
The man took another step back. “Yes, sir. I will have a car here for you after graduation.”
Henry turned and walked away. He spent the next week in a haze. Bombed most of his last finals but graduated still in the top 10 percent of his class. He hung his uniform in the closet and walked away. He didn’t take one thing from his dorm room. His roommate came in expecting to find Henry so they could go out and party. Henry had left everything, including his class ring, sitting on his desk.
Henry found himself that next day in upstate New York in a mansion, alone again. No parents and no one that loved him. He had been alone his whole life. He assumed he always would. He spent the next week with attorneys finding that all that he had just inherited would be taxed at an insane amount. The money his parents had worked for all their life was being confiscated by the US Treasury Department. The billion-dollar business was being siphoned off as well and would hurt the operating capitol due to these same inheritance taxes. Henry grew angrier by the minute. His hate for the United States had begun.
The next ten years of Henry’s life were spent understanding and submerging himself in his father’s business. Surprisingly, Henry was good at it. The business was shipping, and in the back of Henry’s mind, he couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that the very ship he snuck to America on was probably owned by the company he now ran. Henry was reminded every year at tax time how much the treasury department had taken from him and continued to as a large business. Millions of dollars for what? He had seen the wealthy politicians get rich while children starved on the streets of this so-called great country. Millions spent on wars that did nothing to help anyone.
He found himself over the years donating money to multiple orphanages and then eventually several anti-government hate groups. He wanted to see serious changes to the way the United States used the money they took from its citizens. Now in his forties he had become bitter. His anger for the government had grown, and he was waging his own war against the elite Washington, DC, crowd. He viewed them all as arrogant and full of themselves. Power mongers that needed to be taken down.
The first donation to a terrorist group was an accident by Henry. The group’s name was the Brotherhood of Freedom. Henry gave them ten thousand dollars assuming they were an antigovernment group. He later, after a few meetings with the leader, found out that in fact, the group was Muslim and had direct ties to Hezbollah. It wasn’t discovered until sometime later that the group had been linked to several car bombings and small terrorist acts.
Henry only paused briefly when he learned their true nature. He viewed it as attacks on what America stood for, not the harming of innocent people. Henry had grown to despise the wealthy upper echelon here in America. He had become somewhat of a recluse in his life. Working a hundred hours a week typically. He despised the political system, and over time, in his mind, he had determined the only fix was to bring the whole thing down to nothing.
He never wanted to be directly linked to a group that drew blood, but through various channels, he made sure certain groups were well funded. He had grown his father’s shipping company into a worldwide conglomerate with office in every major port. He saw his support for Hezbollah as a way to get access to the Middle East shipping needs without the risk of security problems. If a few men were smuggled in a returning ship here or there, who would know? If a crate was delivered with no shipping manifest, he turned his head and didn’t ask. Over the next twenty years, Henry was funding multiple terrorist groups.
His Hezbollah contacts had led to Al Qaeda and then ISIS. He was a true enemy of the United States. All the funds were washed and clean that ended up in the hands of these groups, so the United States never could quite prove anything. Through various interviews and social media events, Henry was well documented regarding his hate of the US government machine. He used his ties in the Middle East to make billions off the shipping that came from there. In Henry’s fleet were multiple oil tankers, and there was a constant flow of business leaving the ports in the region.
Henry also dropped fifty-five-gallon drums on the docks full of money that were then distributed to the various groups to help fund their cause. This also allowed Henry the freedom to travel anywhere in the world, including the Middle East virtually harm-free. Every group in every town over there knew Henry as the white deliverer of money, and they welcomed him like a king. Henry made trips multiple times a year and flew into one country or another and stayed at this palace or that palace. He ate their food and sampled