Resistant Read Free

neighbors. No more, and no less.
    Bacon was a jovial, round-bellied Southerner, with a mind for numbers and an encyclopedic knowledge of Scotch. He was still a crack shot with a Remington, even after the hunting accident that had left him with a permanent limp and only two toes on his left foot. As the chosen director of the society, he was an ex-officio member of all seven of their current APs—Action Projects. From what he had been told just two days ago, AP-Janus, the most ambitious, far-reaching undertaking in the group’s history, was in trouble. Bacon took a sip of Macallan 18, one of his favorites, and smiled thinly. No one who knew him had ever seen him lose his cool. Perhaps Scotch was the reason.
    N-80, Dr. Carlton Reeves, was a professor of surgery at Michigan. When Bacon first learned of the Janus bacteria, he had assigned Reeves to look into it further. Later, when the stunning possibilities had become clear, he had made the physician the coordinator of the AP and helped him to form his team. It was Reeves who had convened this advisory committee videoconference.
    The members of the Society of One Hundred Neighbors blended with those around them as effectively as chameleons in a jungle. They wore business suits and ties to work, flannel shirts or uniforms or lab coats, and often carried briefcases. They lived in cities or towns in nearly every state, and whatever their talents, were uniformly respected for the quiet skill they brought to their jobs. But beneath their varied positions and appearances, the members of One Hundred Neighbors were joined by a singleness of purpose.
    They were all, by the most widely accepted definitions, terrorists.
    The goal of the organization, a straight line from Lancaster Hill, was quite simple. By any means, they were pledged to eliminate the suffocating government programs of entitlement that had brought America lurching to the brink of bankruptcy.
    Bacon took the brief oath as director in 1993, taking over from the woman whose failing health had led her to relinquish leadership of the society. It was the year Bill Clinton had begun his first term as president, and also the year Islamic fundamentalists bombed the World Trade Center. Bacon, a registered Democrat and universally revered investment banker, had squelched efforts to put him on a short list for a post in the Clinton cabinet. Too much visibility and too little mobility.
    His office was in the North Tower of the WTC. However, he was away at the time of the lethal bombing. His vacation was hardly a coincidence, given that he had financed mastermind Ramzi Yousef and had chosen the day of the truck bomb explosion. The goal of the Neighbors at that time was the erosion of the public’s confidence in the head of the House Armed Services Committee that would lead to his resignation.
    “Are we ready, Eighty?” Bacon asked. “I’m certain Nine will be here shortly, so we might as well begin.”
    Bacon’s face, like those of the others, was electronically distorted. The bottom of the massive screen displayed small boxes containing the encrypted video feed of each attendee, while the center area was reserved for a larger display of whoever was speaking. Bacon’s feed was the only one to run in the upper-left corner of everyone’s display.
    The director held fiat over all board decisions. The advisory committee was there to help plan a new AP or to deal with decisions involving a member. Bacon would be a Neighbor until he could no longer do the job, after which his number would be given over to his replacement. Lancaster Hill had wisely laid out the blueprint of succession seventy-five years before:
    Any Neighbor who no longer serves the cause because of an illness, shall be retired by the board, and their number reassigned to their replacement.
    Except for health issues, no one ever left the society of their own volition. Members were sometimes dismissed when they lost their positions, or their influence otherwise waned,