The MIM Index: It Isn't Murder If You're Killing The Right People

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Prologue

'Many and sharp the num'rous ills

Inwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves

Regret, remorse, and shame! And Man, whose heav'n-erected face

The smiles of love adorn,

Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn!

-Robert Burns

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity."

— Maximilien Robespierre, 1794

Chapter 1

Pollice Verso

It isn’t murder if you’re killing the right people, she assured herself as she waited. Nervous. Her squinting eye was seeing things with a bit of a blur. Not so bad. Her closed eye was throbbing with every beat of her heart. The earpiece had a low static accompanied by a pulsating tone ticking down seconds, as the moment she had trained for was about to arrive. Four times she had been here before. In position. Sweating. Ready to die. Three times the tones became steady and a voice in the earpiece shouted abort, abort. The second time she was in position, the order came to fire, but the bullet in the chamber had no powder. It had been a test to see if she had the courage to actually pull the trigger. This time?... This time felt different. The tone continued. Her crosshairs were trained on a doorway. The doorway that, through her months of training, she could picture in her dreams. If all went as planned, the targets would come through the door in the pecking order that they had assumed in so many observed moments before. She knew there were more than fifty others like her in positions around the world, lying in wait with their crosshairs trained on their respective doors or windows, street corners or parking lots. This moment had to be perfect. There couldn’t afford to be a single miss. The targets all had to feel the heat of the speeding lead projectile, if only for a fleeting second, as their life was extinguished. Their reign would soon end and an era of peace would be at hand. Their deaths wouldn’t be seen as martyrdom, but as a turning point. The point when the people did what was right for the world and took out the puppeteers that had taken power and used it for nothing more than the enrichment of the few that they deemed worthy. The meek shall inherit the earth with the spilling of the blood of the powerful. Guess what assholes? It’s time to die.

This has to be it! There were less than thirty-seconds left before it was trigger time. Her targets were beginning to emerge from the door in the predictable and shameful order that defined their power structure. As she watched with one eye, the view from her scope was being transmitted through her phone to a central computer that was monitoring the action. Around the country and around the world, after nearly a year of observation, tracking and computer simulations, the individual targets were emerging from their offices, their studios, their favorite restaurants, their places of worship and their automobiles. Humans are such creatures of habit that plotting this world revolution with surgical accuracy was really not that hard. It was finding the shooters that had the courage and fortitude of their convictions that took time. Not really to find, but to train and prepare for the possibility that they might die themselves. Keeping the operation a secret was easier than one might think. The committed participants knew what loyalty meant. Most of them had, at one time, known betrayal. Many of them were victims themselves, knowing that what they were doing was part of something bigger than any one of them.

There was a slight breeze on her face as she lie on her rooftop perch, a piece of bacon in the mid morning sun. She was hardly the stereotypical assassin. She was barely five-foot five inches tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, toned, fit and beautiful. Her swift departure from the roof would only acquire glances from men whose later recollections would be of sexual mind darts rather than nefarious suspicions as they mentally sorted through suspects. Of course, that would only matter if they were ever questioned. None would be. She was more than three quarters of a mile away from the kill.

The moment arrived. Every target was predictably in their place. Of the fifty-four snipers in position, only twenty-five would get the order to fire. Twenty-five of the most powerful people on the planet had only seconds left to exist...... The order came. And with the methodical squeezing of each trigger within moments of each other, things changed forever. As their bodies crumpled in their cars and onto the pavement and grass, the few nearby witnessed a singular horror. Those accompanying the now disfigured corpses were hovered over them screaming and looking around to see where the shots had originated. Others fell to the ground in fear that they would be next.

But, they wouldn’t be. The surgery had taken place. The world had a spreading cancer that required an operation to remove it. Now that the decapitation had taken place, the rest should soon die off, cut off from the nutrient brainwashing, policymaking and fear-mongering of their departed leaders and cheerleaders they would wither and, hopefully, die.

The next twenty-five on the list now elevated their ranking positions. How would they react? What would they do? Would they recognize the common fundamental trait that set into motion their predecessor’s synchronic demise? Or would they go after the surgeons?

Chapter 2

Media Frenzy

It wouldn’t be long before the news organizations began to put the pieces together as the reports came flooding in. First, one assassination, then two, three...four, five. My God! Who survived? Asked one of the vacuous blondes on the lone conservative cable news channel. Their news models were flummoxed. They had gotten reports that one of their own had been among the fallen, then two. In a telling exposure of clueless ego, one started to conjecture that she might even be targeted next. As the reports came in, a pattern began to emerge. One past president and a former defense secretary were among the dead. Radio and television talk show hosts, US supreme court justices, senators and house members, oil, industrial, media and retail tycoons, Saudi Arabian, German, British and several Middle Eastern people of influence, African warlords and even members of the federal reserve were among those exterminated in the Singular Moment of Vulnerability. Singular Moment of Vulnerability was a term one reporter had pulled from a recent popular novel to dub the mass killing and the other news agencies ran with it. Within minutes there were 3D graphics on television screens around the world with the words Singular Moment of Vulnerability emerging from a blood-red field. It was magnificent. That day, there was something missing from the media conversation: Fear, because some of the chief mongers were among the dead. When the total list was compiled, it became apparent that the surviving media correspondents were acting like responsible journalists reporting what had happened in a cold and factual matter. The absence of fear-mongering opinions wasn’t lost on the public.

Every news agency was trying desperately to get a comment from the author of the book that had essentially been the how-to manual that had just been followed. Nearly a year earlier, Jake Hughes’ book The Mim Index became the center of a deadly controversy soon after it was published and his marketing efforts to sell it had proven to be dangerously convincing. Mr. Hughes was, at least for now, nowhere to be found.

Local television news organizations began to cover the crowds that started to gather in the streets. At first it was assumed by the media that these were spontaneous moments of group mourning similar to the throngs that gathered after the tragic Newtown child slaughter or the Tucson nightmare, when a member of congress along with innocent citizens were shot during the deadly rampage of a deranged follower of the vitriolic political rhetoric.

It didn’t take very long for them to realize that these were not moments of mourning at all. What was really occurring was mass celebration. It was taking place all over the world. In Haiti, still feeling the effects of a cholera epidemic and so much of the country still in ruins after a massive earthquake, thousands poured into the streets to celebrate the cleansing of a particular senator that had long delayed relief funds. It only took a few hours for the word to spread and millions of citizens around the world had taken to the streets, cheering and celebrating the passing of those that, in life, created so much fear and hate, suffering and death.

Everyone interviewed was consciously biting their tongues to remain civil. Within the gatherings, the occasional exuberant outburst of Fuck yeah, I’m glad they’re fuckin’ dead, was quickly shunned by the surrounding crowd. The awareness of the gravity of the loss of such a cancer on society was so strong that most didn’t want to be seen as picking up the torch of hatred and fear. The Singular Moment of Vulnerability had appeared to work, at least temporarily. It could have been chaos.

On the lone conservative cable news channel, the spouse of a fallen Supreme Court justice was calling for the capture of her husband’s murderer. The wife of a popular conservative radio talk show host was doing the same. She made a statement to the public pleading, All of you are out there celebrating while I mourn the loss of a great man. Who are you to celebrate the cold-blooded murder of a man who was only exercising his first amendment right? He never hurt anyone, he just spoke his mind. To the person pulling the trigger that took my husband from me, I want you to know that whatever good you think you have done, you haven’t. All you have done is commit murder, pure and simple. ...The celebrations continued...

They were similar to those that spontaneously occurred upon hearing the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. There were those who commented on how un-American it was for people to be celebrating the killings of so many. Unlike the killing of Osama Bin-Laden, whose demise was orchestrated by a president that placed the terrorist leader’s appointment with justice at the top of his priority list. No one really knew who to credit for the deed. There were no known navy seals or elite team to assign hero status to. No one was coming forward to claim credit.

Every player in the corporate media heavily interviewed the general public about the SMV. One interview in particular was a young man’s comments recorded in Chicago. It hit the wires and, because of its power, went viral and was played repeatedly enough to become the general theme and narrative that would evolve into the conventional wisdom. He was recorded at a spontaneous rally. As he spoke, the John Lennon chant All we are saying is give peace a chance was being sung in the background. The young man was asked what he thought about the spouses of the dead calling for justice. He spoke eloquently: Do the parents of soldiers killed in war know the person that killed their son or daughter? No, they don’t. If you look at the list of people killed in the SMV, you will see that they all had the dubious distinction of being voted by people all over the world to be at the top of the list of the Mim index. The Mim index claims that there is a war being waged that doesn’t involve one country or one government’s laws. It is a war being waged by the powerful on the powerless. Those killed today all have an extensively and impeccably documented irrefutable history where the powerless were harmed as a result of their actions or propaganda. Their spouses may feel that the departed were innocent, but they simply weren’t. Each and every one of them had blood on their hands. That fact is fully documented and verified. They may have believed that what they were doing was right, but the world disagreed. As difficult as it is for a parent to say goodbye to their soldier son or daughter, they find comfort in knowing that the sacrifice was for the greater good. There are no investigations to find the killers. That is war. I believe that the people who carried out the dangerous mission known as the Singular Moment of Vulnerability, are heroes. Yes, heroes. When the rich and powerful know that the world is watching and is no longer powerless against their lust for more wealth and power at the expense of others, things will change. The powerful no longer answer to no one. They answer to the Mim Index.

Chapter 3

Aftermath

Immediately after pulling the trigger from nearly a mile away, Ahmed in New York, Kathy in Dubai, Daryl in Italy and twenty-two others had dismantled their Chey-tec long-range sniper rifles, put the pieces in a case and stealthily left the scene, disappearing into the crowd on the streets or driving away in complete anonymity. After each dropped their weighted case into a river or other predetermined location for permanent disposal, they made their way to an airport to leave the country before the extent of the SMV was realized. Not a single sniper was captured. In other locations around the world another twenty-five snipers went home without firing on their target. They were never given the order to pull the trigger. Every one of them followed their training impeccably. Since the kills took place at such a distance with such a large round, the bodies of the victims were pulverized and it was virtually impossible to tell where the bullet had come from. The shortest distance for any of the assassinations was more than three-quarter mile. The deed was done.

Hours later each of the covert operatives would be back in their homes and in their living rooms, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from where they had taken part in changing the course of humanity. They would be watching the news of the spontaneous celebrations in awe and joy. Some watched together with their parents. Others with their children on their laps. Among the assassins were Christian, Muslim, Protestant and Jew, black, white, Asian and Middle Eastern. They were men, women, fathers, mothers; patriots to peace. They had no allegiance but to the plan. The plan to eradicate the world of Mim. Each of them had hopes for what would soon follow. The simulations had been run by computers hundreds of times. The scenarios of government collapse, and ensuing chaos had all been played out before in computerized virtual worlds. This singular moment of vulnerability was calculated by the computers to have a ninety-five percent certainty that of the fifty-four targets, all would appear in their predicted location within one and one half minutes from the predicted center time. A set of variables determined which combination of twenty-five would have the greatest positive effect on the world. If the wrong combination were killed, the results could possibly create more chaos than before.

Chapter 4

Anthony Anton Trusk

Fifteen months before the SMV

Anthony Trusk was a fit 77 years old, living in a secluded, stately villa in Tuscany, Italy. He was currently in bed with two 28 year old beauties that were satisfying his primal urges. A prescription of Viagra was open on the nightstand next to a tube of lubricant, a bottle of Dom Perignon and his cell phone. He wasn’t discreet about his taking the erectile enhancement drug. He wanted to make sure that he would be there for the performance of these two women that he was now putting through an active session of oral, anal and vaginal exploration with skin, rubber, polished glass and leather.

He was only a young, brash FBI agent when President Kennedy was assassinated. Even though that was the beginning of his turn to the dark side, it was only a logical course correction in a life that seemed destined for antisocial activities. When he was a teen, one of his hobbies was taxidermy. He spent hours posing dead creatures to look as they did in life. By the time he had become an agent, his character solidification didn’t include sympathy, empathy, or charity. He was cold and calculating. His mother had left when he was eleven, and his father had thought his son was creepy since he was seven, so he pretty much let him be. If he needed supplies for his taxidermy his father would say, yah, sure, and throw him some cash to get him out of his face. Anton’s later successes were the results of cheating. His graduation from the FBI training center at Quantico, Va. was largely due to his ability to threaten blackmail. Anton had a knack for spotting human weakness and coldly calculating how best to use it. Quantico hadn’t really grown up yet. It had basement classrooms and dorms where eight trainees shared a room. For the study of human weakness, Anton couldn’t have asked for a better laboratory.

Trusk was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Because of his assignment, he was witness to several orders and a chain of events that simply didn’t add up. To satisfy his curiosity, he used his position and access to acquire information that, in a matter of days, allowed him to essentially extort his way into a better position within the agency. He had discovered what would later be known by conspiracy theorists as the shadow government. His extortion attempt was so brazen and displayed such balls of steel, that the man who could have simply made the decision to silence him forever, instead, brought him in.

President Eisenhower, by the end of his second term, warned in a speech of the possible dangers to freedom from what he called the military-industrial complex. In reality, by the time he coined the term it had already grown into an intelligence-military-industrial-political-financial-media-criminal complex, with tentacles extending into virtually every institution in the United States, and many other countries. Like a shark, Trusk flourished in this environment where teeth and fear were his tools. As years passed, he and a few choice associates found it beneficial when he formed Trusk Industries. With a non-governmental corporation that owned several smaller companies and had an inside track to seemingly harmless government contracts, Trusk traded in the valuable commodity of information. If he wanted to corrupt a politician, he would simply have him followed until a photograph or recording was taken during their inevitable succumbing to one of the beautiful seductresses that Trusk would continually put in their paths. It was always just a matter of time. Congressional aides were the easiest to pay off. Those little pismires were arrogant little pukes that, if they didn’t deliver, knew they would either lose their coveted positions, or worse, be found months after their disappearance in the wooded area off the jogging paths in a DC park. There wasn’t a secret in congress, the Pentagon, or the White House that Trusk didn’t know. After the last administration, there were now three Supreme Court justices that had the taint of a Trusk encounter.

The cell phone next to the Viagra bottle started vibrating and playing Sinatra’s I Did It My Way. The eyes of the woman, with her mouth full of him, looked up as he motioned for her to continue while he reached for the vibrating and singing phone. He saw the caller ID, slid his finger on the face of the phone and answered, Trusk here. How are you doing Dick? As he listened for the response, he pushed the back of the woman’s head further onto him. As he listened to the man speak on the other end, Trusk put his head back to soak in his fortunate multitasking situation. While he was being pleasured by beautiful women, one of the most powerful men in the world was asking him to help solve a problem. I’ll come right away, Trusk said as he hung up the phone. And he did.

Chapter 5

Tara Smith

One year before the SMV 7/24

Tara Smith’s alarm had been blasting its annoying submarine red alert sound for a long fifteen seconds. With a heavy lifting and dropping of her arm, the alarm was silenced while her face remained in her pillow. The alarm clock fell to the floor. Only in the last few years had she even needed an alarm clock to awaken her intense type A personality. As she reached the age of 44, her desire to go on some of the more exotic clandestine service operations that had shaped her CIA career had dwindled as her lifestyle became more cerebral.

Her hi-rise apartment screamed OCD computer geek. In her home office with a huge window overlooking the Chicago skyline, her work center had a six-monitor grid, each screen alive with numbers and letters flowing as the microprocessors calculated who knows what.

Tara had become obsessed with computers and had become one of the country’s leading cyber terrorism specialists in encryption and network security. Her history as an international operative who spoke several foreign languages and understood exotic cultures, through years of actually being immersed in them, had made her even more valuable as she transitioned from CIA to the relatively new U.S. cyber command wing of the NSA that was set up by the Obama administration. To her knowledge there were only a handful of people that had as much access to the world’s networks as she did. She knew that if she wanted to she could hack into most anything. Wait, scratch that.... ANYTHING. In the crevices and digital haunts of the deep hacking community on the internet she was known as CCBurn. She had become a bit of a legend to hackers in cyberspace who had no idea whom or where CCburn was or where he/she was located. The serious coders witnessed how effective she was when many fabled heroes of the cyber-hacking world were traced and brought to justice. She was excited about the prospects of her latest assignment: building the most powerful computer on the planet designed only for hacking.

Her face hadn’t hit the pillow until 2:00 am that morning because she was working on the secret Chicago cyber terrorism project, assembling what she dubbed the Chicago cluster computer. The NSA was connecting one thousand two hundred off-the-shelf computer servers to become one of the fastest computers on the planet. Currently, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Terascale Simulation Facility in California holds the computer speed record with the Sequoia super computer for advanced scientific simulations. After its recent upgrade it has 73,728 GB of memory and a peak speed of 20 petaflops. A petaflop is one thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. This is the most powerful supercomputer in the world used for simulating nuclear explosions.

Agent Smith’s finished computer would just be slightly more than two-thirds the speed as Livermore’s, but the cost to assemble it was less than one-thirtieth of the more powerful system. Her project was only just now in its final assembly phase after months of design and fabrication of the special fiber optic cabling that will become the circulatory system for this pragmatic use of off-the-shelf computers which was finally becoming a reality. They had waited to the last possible moment to decide on which server brand would be at the core of the system so that the fastest possible processors with solid-state drives and incredible memory capacity would be installed. The Chicago cluster was to be the first in several hacking nodes for the Perfect Citizen program that aimed to analyze incredible amounts of information and look for and recognize anomalies and potential threats to national security. The then NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander explained the need for the program in testimony to US Senators:

We face a growing array of cyber threats from foreign intelligence services, terrorists, criminal groups and individual hackers who are capable of stealing, manipulating or destroying information that could compromise our personal and national security, he told the committee. The Department of Defense in particular requires a focused approach to secure its own networks, given our military's dependence [on those networks] for command and control, and logistics and military operations.

The US had built massive super computer centers so demanding that one even maxed out the Baltimore area power grid. Consequently, the next $3.2 billion center was built in Utah where the electric grid overhead was more forgiving.

Tara Smith knew that the NSA had set up sensors on the country’s computer networks in order to detect possible attacks. Hidden away from the daily cable news channels, there was a cyber war being waged. A war where the enemies were internal or foreign and CCburn was as good as any four-star general on the battlefield that understood the digital terrain and tools of the trade.

While her face remained in her pillow, her phone began to ring. A muffled growl percolated from within the pillow only to immediately become ear-piercing as her head popped up and she silenced herself, took a breath, looked at the caller ID, growled again and answered her phone. Hey Fred, she said with a smile as she answered. She listened to the voice on the other line and then made a face betraying her incredulity. A mission? You’re kidding me right? A mission? Now? We’re like three days away from loading the software into the cluster! The voice on the other end of the line was her new partner, Fernando Fred Garcia. Why the NSA decided a few months earlier that she needed a partner was now becoming clear. He knew his way around a computer and had a gift for reading people’s intentions. She was teaching him all about mass surveillance and the cluster-computing methods behind ganging several thousand processor cores together to create incredible performance and speed. He was teaching her about field investigations like she had never known. Her intelligence gathering in the past was always more about role-playing the beautiful, diminutive brunette and gaining confidence to acquire intelligence. The initial hunt hadn’t been her area of expertise. Fred’s tenacious boots-on-the-ground investigative style was being translated from the real world to the virtual cyber world in which she had become a denizen.

All right, name the hotel, she sighed. I’ll see you here in an hour, she replied to Fred who told her that he’d come and pick her up. She tossed the phone on the bed and let out a loud growl of dissatisfaction. She picked up the alarm clock off of the floor and set it back on the nightstand before she headed to the shower.

Chapter 6

Jake Hughes

One Year before the SMV 7/24

The barrel of the gun was coolly smooth against his lips. He could feel its tip touching the roof of his mouth. His imagination played the movie of the bullet’s trajectory through the roof of his mouth, pulverizing the center of his brain and exiting in a crimson explosion at the top of his head. His right hand was shaking as he squinted his eyes, let out a scream, and squeezed the trigger. BAM, AAAH Jake’s eyes popped open as he startled to a sitting position in bed. He was wet with sweat. What the fuck! he thought to himself. He had never, EVER had a thought about suicide AT ALL. He quickly sorted through the last day’s events to see if there was a food or a movie or something that would have set his mental dream state onto such a self-destructive course. He was certain it wasn’t just some subconscious mechanism to awaken himself on time. In his entire life he had needed an alarm clock only once. In that case, it was because he was out late the night before, drinking with his wife. They nearly missed their flight to New Orleans the next morning. He swore from that point, it was time for an alarm clock. In the fourteen years since, however, he rarely went out drinking, and his eyes always popped open like clockwork two minutes before the alarm would go off. On top of that, he always set the alarm to go off a half hour before common sense told him he needed to, but the dream state prior to awakening was never violent. Something had changed. Something was wrong.

He looked over at the clock. Two years earlier he had switched from a dedicated alarm clock to placing his iPhone in a dock running an alarm clock app. It was 5:28 a.m. in Kenosha Wisconsin, less than an hour north of Chicago. He started his morning sit-ups. He did them in bed to be easier on his lower back. People told him that doing them on his bed took away from the effectiveness of the exercise but he didn’t care. Whatever effect they were having on his abdomen was OK with him. His abdomen was trim and his lower back didn’t hurt. He figured, everyone is different. Do what works for you he thought. After only about 30 sit-ups he laid back for a moment and sketched out the day ahead of him in his head.

Jake Gerard Hughes was a video editor. He thought like one. Ever since computers took the editing field into the nonlinear realm, where bits and pieces could be moved around in time in non-sequential order, his brain had slowly wired itself that way too. It was annoying to his wife, who had filed for divorce just shy of their twenty-third anniversary. When his brain was in overdrive, he had trouble finishing sentences before leaping to entirely different subjects of conversation, only to insert the end of one sentence three subjects later. To understand him at times, it would be best to video tape him and edit the topics back together into a linear fashion. He knew what he meant and was frustrated that people couldn’t keep up or understand. When he spoke with other editors, an onlooker would be hard pressed to know what they were talking about. The learned practice of speaking in nonlinear fragments, combined with the nomenclature of the editor using terms like jump-cut, dissolve, and pulling frames, it was nearly impossible to fully grasp what was being discussed.

Today he would be finishing up a video program for a corporate legal department. He had taken his camera into the boardroom of a manufacturer in Racine, WI and recorded the senior vice president and legal council. The final DVD was to be sent to all thirty-one manufacturing facilities around the world. It was to be the introduction to training sessions on compliance and the importance of getting things in writing and living up to the terms of the written agreements. It seemed like that should have been commonplace already, and it was. But, as a company grows and agreements are made with suppliers and dealerships, there can be no grey area. Jake needed to check his email to see if the Portuguese translation for the video had been sent to him. He needed to subtitle it and upload the video so that it could be shown in Brazil next Monday. It was Wednesday.

The Portuguese project would be his main focus today. On separate tracks of production were videos about the local golf course, and the city’s e-cycling program. There was also a commercial for a rosary, which Jake thought had many great images. That project should have cost the client more money than Jake was charging him. It was more art than work for him in this case. Even though Jake didn’t have an ounce of religious faith in his body, he respected the client and wanted to convey exactly what the man was trying to get across. The images in the commercial showed children in dire circumstances. The Tsunami in Thailand and Japan, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, New Orleans after Katrina, Darfur, Iraq and on and on. The commercial was for a rosary that allowed people to pray continuously without it tangling as they prayed. The completed piece spoke to Jake in a different way. The tagline said, There definitely is a need for prayer, and Jake supposed that, if you were religious, there was a need for prayer in the world. But, prayer?... as Jake had explained to his son when he was seven years old, ...is for people who need to feel like they’ve done something without having done anything at all. Prayer does more for the person praying than it does for what or whom they are praying about. It gives the person praying the feeling like they’ve helped. Jake remembered telling his son, If I ever fall overboard on a boat, don’t pray for me, throw me a life preserver.

Like most days there was more to do than there were hours to do them. It was typical for Jake’s nonlinear mind to program his life in this way. At 5:32 a.m. his phone gave the familiar sound of a text message coming in. Never getting texts this early, he pulled the phone from it’s dock and slid his finger over the face of it only to see a picture that read RU E? The first two letters were black in color and the third was red. The meaning was obvious to Jake because it was a plot device that he had used in the book he had written that had recently been published. It meant are you ready? The accompanying text said it begins today. Still confused as to who sent the message, he