Bestseller.
Excerpt from the forthcoming TRUE PATRIOT: HOW I SAVED THE COUNTRY’S SOUL by Steve Bannon, soon to be a major motion picture.
***
The parking garage was desolate, the last of the day’s mall workers long since gone home to whatever their tiny lives dictated. The rugged, bearded man in the overcoat who called himself Flycatcher was waiting in the corner, underneath the faded green sign that marked the collection of empty spots as 4G. I stepped over to him with a purposeful stride. If this was another Clintonite murder trap, I wouldn’t walk into it meekly the way my mentor Andrew had done. My mastery of Krav Maga was coursing through my muscles and veins.
“Talk,” I said with great masculinity.
“What do you know about Smarties?” he said.
“Smarties?” I asked. “Like the candy?” Flycatcher shook his head.
‘No, Mr. Bannon, not the candy. I’m talking about a designer drug that goes by the same name.”
“Never heard of it,” I sniffed, in the same confident manner as my candidate often sniffed.
“Not surprising,” Flycatcher said. “You’re media. This is strictly a street drug marketed to the legal and political set.”
“Tell me more.”
“Barry Bonds.”
“What?”
“Barry Bonds. You understand me?”
“You’re talking about PEDs. Performance enhancers.”
“What if I told you…” he began, in the same comforting tone as Morpheus offering Neo the red pill, “that for years now a number of Washington politicians have been using Smarties to unfairly game the system and undermine the will of the American people?”
“But how can a designer drug addiction do that?” I asked, because Steve Bannon was nobody’s fool.
“It’s simple,’ Flycatcher responded. “It makes you a more skilled debater and speechmaker than those who don’t use. Think about how legislation is passed, Mr. Bannon. Think about how campaigns for high office are won.”
“Debate…”
“…and speech.”
My mind was on fire. Smarties. This was diabolical. This was evil. I had only one question worth asking.
“Hillary?”
He nodded.
“Have your man call for a drug test before the next debate,” he said. “Don’t trust anybody who tells you that they’re an impartial testing group. Your own people. Tell them to check for this chemical compound.” Flycatcher handed me a slip of paper with a molecular diagram on it.’ I clutched it in my calloused palm, a palm that understood hard work and self-determination instead of asking for special treatment and handouts.
“This could blow the election wide open,” I said.
“One can only hope,” Flycatcher said.
Who are you?” I demanded to know.
“I’m a high school debate coach,” he said. “And I can already see the way Smarties are starting to affect our innocent forensics athletes. I won’t let that woman and her poison destroy the next generation the way she personally destroyed the embassy at Benghazi.”
Flycatcher sunk into the shadows. I never saw him again. Somewhere out there, I’m sure, there’s a high school whose debate coach took a sudden leave of absence. There’s a landfill somewhere with his bones rotting within it, his assassins not realizing that they’d gotten to him too late. Nobody would know how close we came to the end of America as we know it, if it were not for this brave patriot, and if not for me, Steve Bannon, who listened to him.
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