CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Jimmy Platt didn't know why no one had yet acted on Mark Haddonfield's call to arms in his manifesto. To Jimmy's knowledge, nobody had tried to punish Jessie Hunt. Of course he could be mistaken.

As he pondered the issue, Jimmy drove carefully, making sure to keep several vehicles back to avoid suspicion, watching closely as his target drove through the city. It wasn't easy. She drove with the arrogance of someone who didn't think the rules applied to her. But that was about to change.

It was always possible that someone had already tried to make a move against Jessie or one of her minions, and it had been kept secret from the public. He knew from his internet deep dives that it wasn't uncommon for the media and government officials to work together to cover up the truth. If someone had made an attempt on Hunt, there was no way that the establishment would let regular people like him find out.

It was just like how the news kept saying that the assassin named Ash Pierce had been in a coma for weeks before recently waking up. If that was true, why hadn"t anyone interviewed her? Why were there no photos of her, either in a coma or after she regained consciousness? The answer, at least according to people he trusted online, was that she had been taken to a CIA facility where she was being reprogrammed to go after foreign government leaders. It made perfect sense.

But none of that mattered now. Wherever Pierce was these days, he'd knew that he'd never find out. And if anyone had attempted to make Jessie Hunt suffer the consequences of her actions, regular people like him were being kept in the dark about it. He had accepted that this was the way it had always been.

It was his turn to change all that. He would be the one to make a difference. When he made his move, it would be brutal, and it would be public. There wouldn't be any way to hide it. He would livestream it to make sure.

In addition, there would be countless onlookers around, with their phones at the ready. They would all capture his victorious image, with his freshly cut blond hair, wearing his bright red puffy jacket and his camo pants, both chosen specifically for the occasion. No amount of government and press collusion would prevent the truth from getting out this time.

And Jimmy would be the one to get the glory. His name would be splashed across the web and whatever channels were still wiling to broadcast reality and not just the red-pill, Matrix-style universe that most people accepted as real. Most important of all, his hero, Mark Haddonfield would notice.

Even with a prison media blackout, word would get to him. Jimmy had considered trying to visit Haddonfield at Twin Towers, but doubted they'd let him in. And whether they did or not, it wasn't a smart move. He would be on their radar from that point on. They'd red flag him and follow him home, monitor his communications, and eventually grab him up before he could complete his mission. He couldn't take that risk.

He was too smart to make such a dumb mistake. After all, he had gone to college for two years. Of course, that was before his bitch of a professor had failed him for supposedly plagiarizing some political scientist on his Government class essay. So what if he"d borrowed a few lines from the guy and neglected to put them in quotes or footnote them? It was just an oversight. Maybe it was cause for a warning or even a drop in letter grade. But to flunk him entirely? It reminded him of how Mark Haddonfield had described Jessie Hunt refusing to let him take her seminar, which basically ruined his college career.

The same thing had happened to Jimmy. Flunking government dropped his GPA below 2.5, which was required to keep his financial aid. Without that, he had to drop out. His mom made him enroll in a community college, but he lost interest, mostly because no one there took seriously his plan to start a new political party that focused on the needs of the voiceless, people like himself who constantly got a raw deal when going up against powerful interests.

So he dropped out of that school too, got his old high school job as a pizza delivery guy, and used his spare time to focus on getting the truth out to the masses. It seemed to be a fruitless effort until that night two weeks ago when he was, as usual, surfing the web.

Just after midnight on Thanksgiving day, he started getting alerts about some manifesto written by the guy who had taken out multiple people that Jessie Hunt had previously saved. He already knew about Mark Haddonfield and how close he'd come to snuffing out Hunt in a hospital room a few months ago.

Now the guy was challenging others to pick up where he"d left off. Jimmy knew he didn"t have long. He immediately printed out the document, which was 43 pages long, and then took screen shots of every page. Sure enough, just hours after it popped up, the manifesto was pulled down. It appeared other places after that but was always scrubbed soon thereafter.

That was okay. Jimmy had his copy, which he referred to constantly. It spoke to him so deeply that he had large chunks of it memorized. He didn't need to know Jessie Hunt personally to have animosity towards her.

He felt a kinship with Mark Haddonfield, as if they might have been close friends if not for the prison walls separating them. And Mark said that this woman was the reason his life had fallen apart. That wrong demanded righting. It was unconscionable that Mark was behind bars while Jessie Hunt was out and about, living her life with family and friends surrounding her.

But it wasn't until recently, after news broke of a trial date for Mark Haddonfield, that it hit Jimmy. His hero was facing hundreds of years in prison for multiple murders. There was no way the man was ever getting out.

That meant that it was up to those who admired him to do what he could not. It was up to Jimmy if he had the courage to take action.

So he'd come up with a plan, one that was elegant in its simplicity. And after several days of hemming and hawing, he'd finally woken up one day and found that his resolve was as steely as his spine.

That day was today. The time was now. Retribution was coming.