American Magna Carta

Robert Hamblett

Description

A novel for our times, American Magna Carta holds to account the 0.1% of the 1% who act with total impunity above the law. When a fifth original Magna Carta is discovered, a cabal of bent academics, investment bankers and elements in the surveillance state conspire to possess the founding document of western democracy. Leaving a trail of destruction they are prepared to break every law in the book so they can bask in the glow of the 800-year-old Great Charter of Liberties that, ironically, embodies the notion we are all equal before the law. Standing in their way are Ricky Taleb, a Harvard Law student, Alison Sinclair, an art history intern from London, and Harry James, a new kind of action hero - a veteran of the Occupy Movement. Set against a backdrop of iconic landscapes from Glastonbury to London and from Boston to New York, the deft plot gathers pace towards a dramatic showdown at the very heart of global power. American Magna Carta is favourably comparable to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta. Author ROBERT HAMBLETT explains his inspiration behind the characters: "Harry James, the activist hero, does all the things I wish I had the courage to do." He adds, "I had imagined a new kind of hero, one who wasn't a cop or a spy. There's a lot of my mother in him. Harry became a composite of activists and site crew I have met over the years. Alison Sinclair is thrown in at the deep end. She grows in strength. It all depends on her resolve. Ricky Taleb really goes on a journey. He finds a courage he never knew existed. Welbeck, the Glastonbury bookseller is a Prospero figure. His role only becomes clear at the end... or does it?"

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Adventure fiction
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784629533
• Langue: English

Extrait

American Magna Carta
Robert Hamblett

Copyright © 2015 Robert Hamblett
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations,
places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1784629 533
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Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB
Contents

Cover


*


I


One Nation Under CCTV


It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy


Welcome to the Club


A Drive in the Country


Conquering Hero


Your Name Is Inscribed on the Pages of My Heart


Dissecting the Book


In the Dragon’s Lair


The Book Deal


Their First Date


The Announcement


II


The Road to Glastonbury


Aquarian & Antiquarian


A Drive in the Country


Meanwhile


The Chase


South of the River


Meanwhile II


Up the River


Not out of the Woods


Cat and Mouse


Messin’ About on the River


The Law of the Land


The Merryweather Crew


Meanwhile III


On the Road Again


Home and Dry


III


Life’s a Party


The Hangover


One Big Party


One Big Party


Postscript
*

To no one shall we sell, to no one shall we deny, to no one shall we delay Right or Justice.
Magna Carta 1215

“We have to be vigilant. Beware Henry VIII clauses which allow ministers to amend primary legislation. But the burden to stop legislative creep, which interferes with basic rights, is partly the responsibility of every citizen.”
“The big condition in Magna Carta that really mattered was the one in which John accepted that if he were in breech of the charter, the barons were no longer obliged to obey him. And that security clause is the one on which every single principle about the Rule of Law, and everyone being subject to the Rule of Law, is based.”
Lord Judge, former Lord Chief Justice 2015

MAGNA CARTA – NOT FOR SALE
HUMAN RIGHTS – CAN’T BE BOUGHT
Lawyers protesting outside Parliament and the Global Law Summit 2015
I

America

*
One Nation Under CCTV

Beside the Charles River, Cambridge Massachusetts
A bead of sweat came into focus and dripped from the short dark hairs at the nape of the runner’s neck. It fell into the tee shirt that stuck to the target’s back. A patch of perspiration spread out in a delta that reached down to the line of his running shorts. The image widened to take in the runner’s body. In a windowless building covering half a square mile of Virginia swamp somewhere south of Langley an operative switched away from the gyro-stabilised bird drone cam and focused on the runner’s face from a high resolution camera mounted on a building at the intersection of Memorial Drive and John F Kennedy Street, the thoroughfare that led to the heart of Harvard. From this viewpoint the operative watched the runner adjust a device clipped to his shirt as he approached the traffic lights. With a couple of keystrokes the operative opened the audio feed to the runner’s earphones and listened in.
‘It’s another sunny morning in downtown Boston. This is the news at the top of the hour.’ An electronic hiatus of white noise hissed into the concrete shed as the runner fiddled with the controls of his device. Then the building in Virginia shook to the insistent drums and sweeping strings of an Arabic melody, and a woman’s operatic voice. She stretched the words ‘ Ya Haaaa … biiiii … biiiiii ,’ along a swooping melodramatic line weaving arabesques through the instrumental weft of a full symphony orchestra. ‘Oh belovéd’, she repeated the words, varying the intonation, pulling new meaning out of each syllable, deepening and heightening the resonances until she reached the point that set pain free. The operatives at adjacent desks back in Virginia raised their heads from their terminals in irritation, so the agent switched the sound to his headphones.
“Rag-head music,” the operative muttered to show he hadn’t gone native.
“Better check that song out,” his colleague said.
The operative tapped his keyboard and summoned the Cybersecurity Data Centre in Utah. It cross-referenced yottabytes of data using search engine algorithms requisitioned for the War on Terror. Music recognition software soon identified the track by Umm Kulthum, recorded at a live performance in Cairo several decades earlier. It was a song beloved of a long list of terrorists that appeared on the operative’s screen.
The runner jogged on the spot waiting for the lights to change. The operative zoomed in on his face. As the lights turned green, the runner turned his head to the right, full face towards the camera. “Gotcha!” The operative punched the air. Facial recognition software went to work. Distance between the eyes: larger than average. Width of nose at nostrils: wider than average. Shape of cheekbones: obscured by soft flesh. Length of jawbone: shorter than average. A thousand variables were checked. It was a match. Height: 5 foot 7½ inches. Weight: 160 pounds. Files and photos cascaded onto the operative’s screen. They showed a dark tanned, soft round face frozen in poses that stretched from startled to embarrassed. On archived footage his freeze-frame image jerked along black and white alleys and entered a club with belly dancers and hubble-bubble pipes. Faces at the tables were scanned, and searches begun into contacts.
When the target resumed his run, a taller, more muscular, fair-haired man in shorts and singlet put on a burst of speed and carved an athletic trajectory though the riverside air. He caught up with the dark-haired runner on the crossing.
“This way,” the operative said beneath his breath. “This way.” He willed the Caucasian suspect to face the camera. “Just turn your head this way for one moment,” he muttered. But the second man, anticipating the lights, surged past under the thick foliage of the spreading plane trees that lined Memorial Drive and the riverside jogging track.
“Hey Ricky,” the fair-haired contact panted and then assumed his no-sweat composure. The music device clipped to the target’s shirt was remotely commandeered as a microphone.
“Hi Jack,” he gasped a lot too loud and very clear on the operative’s headphones.
Phrase recognition software made a thousand correlations in a microsecond in Utah’s labyrinth of letters. The trigger-word alarm system, understanding ‘hijack’, fired off alerts to a thousand terminals with top security clearance. The target’s risk index moved from green to amber. The flashing light changed and the operative accrued points on his monthly bonus rating.
“Can we have satellite tracking on these two suspects, Tariq Taleb and the other guy?” his line manager in Utah suggested, alerting a dozen Homeland Security agencies engaged in protecting the Republic.
Within seconds the satellite’s lens was zooming down on the eastern seaboard of the United States to Boston/Cambridge and the Charles River, coming to rest at the Memorial Bridge intersection. The two joggers cast shadows to the north until again they passed beneath the plane trees. The operatative manipulated the levers on his console and perched a bird drone on a branch fifty yards in front of the runners. He zeroed in on the fair-haired man’s face. “Watch the birdie!” The remote mobile camera captured his image. Face recognition software sprang into action. Distance between eyes: average. Width of nose at nostrils: thin. Shape of cheekbones: prominent. Length of jawline: longer than average. The face wouldn’t look out of place chiselled in Mount Rushmore granite. Height: six foot two. Weight (estimated): 180 pounds. Body/mass index: in rude health.
The bird drone’s directional microphone pointed at the two runners’ heads.
“You know, Ricky. The Old Man has a job for you, I hear,” the blue-eyed suspect said.
“What’s he want?”
“Search me,” the new contact said. “But you are totally on the inside track – all the way to Big Law. Just ride the wave.”
“You mean another piece of pro bono work and I’m partners in crime with offices on Wall Street?’
“Laughing all the way to the bank,” the Caucasian target said with an enigmatic smile. Jack flexed a secret muscle and his athletic frame peeled away to the right in effortless acceleration, crossing the grass in a graceful curve, heading back up John F Kennedy Street. He ran past the Kennedy Center for International Development and jogged on the spot while he withdrew cash from the ATM opposite the bus stop. Five hundred dollars the operative noted. Ricky plunged into the shade of the spreading plane trees that fringed the Charles River. He followed the river towards the New England interior – a land of hi-tech start-ups and satellite communities which, when viewed from space, looked like silicon chips scattered across a circuit board.
The operative read the second runner’s bank statement. Nice stash of cash, he noted. Then his driving licence mug shot appeared on