Novel Excerpts–The Boaz Stenographer, Chapter 53

The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.

The Boaz Stenographer, written in 2018, is my fourth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.

Book Blurb

Walt Shepherd, a 35 year veteran of the White House’s stenographic team, is fired by President Andrew Kane for refusing to lie.

Walt returns to his hometown of Boaz, Alabama and renews his relationship with Regina Gillan, his high school sweetheart, who he had ditched right before graduation to marry the daughter of a prominent local businessman.  Regina has recently moved back to Boaz after forty years in Chicago working at the Tribune.  She is now editor of the Sand Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper.

Walt and Regina’s relationship transforms into a once in life love at the same time they are being immersed in a growing local and national divide between Democrats and traditional Republicans, and extremist Republicans (known as Kanites) who are becoming more dogmatic about the revolution that began during President Kanes campaign.

Walt accepts two part-time jobs.  One as a stenography instructor at Snead State Community College in Boaz, and one as an itinerant stenographer with Rains & Associates out of Birmingham.

Walt later learns the owner of Rains & Associates  is also one of five men who created the Constitution Foundation and is involved in a sinister plot to destroy President Kane, but is using an unorthodox method to achieve its objective.  The Foundation is doing everything it can to prevent President Kane from being reelected in 2020, and is scheming to initiate a civil war that will hopefully restore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.

While Walt is writing a book, The Coming Civil War, he is, unwittingly, gathering key information for the Constitution Foundation.

Will Walt discover a connection between the Foundation  and the deaths of three U.S. Congressmen in time to save his relationship with Regina, prevent President Kane from being reelected as the defacto head of a Christian theocracy, and the eruption of a civil war that could destroy the Nation ?

Chapter 53

I spent two days researching Professor Anton Romanov.  Charlette, my former girlfriend of a sort, had promised me when she left me for Tad Goldstein that if I ever needed any “gossip or world secrets” as she had put it, that all I had to do was ask.  That’s what I did.  I called her Monday night after returning from Snead College.  She seemed happy to hear from me, telling me she wished I was still in town and that Tad was getting too predictably clingy.  She assured me she could keep a secret, so I asked her to help me find out everything she could about the Professor.  I had not been disappointed.  Charlette’s response came Thursday morning.  Seems she had asked a pal over at the State Department who was also tied in with his own pal at the CIA. Anton Mikhailovich Romanov was born November 28, 1952 in Leningrad.  He studied law at the Saint Petersburg State University.  In late 1970, he became friends with a classmate named Vladimir Putin.  The two were part of the graduating class of 1975.  Putin spent the next 16 years as a KGB foreign intelligence officer, while Romanov spent seven of these years at the London School of Economics and Political Science earning a master’s and a PhD in Political Science.  In 1983, Romanov became a professor of Political Science at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow.  It is unknown the type relationship Putin and Romanov had during these 16 years, but it is thought they maintained a secret friendship.  

In 1991 Romanov became an adviser to Putin who by now had retired from the KGB and returned to Saint Petersburg to enter politics.  Romanov continued to live and teach in Moscow.  Putin moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin’s administration.  He rose quickly through the ranks and became Acting President on December 31, 1999, when Yeltsin resigned.  Putin won the 2000 presidential election, and hired Anton’s brother, Anatoly Mikhailovich Romanov, as Chief Director of Technologies.  It appeared Putin’s and Anton’s relationship ended in 2001 when the later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to become a full professor of Political Science at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  In February 2015, Professor Romanov moved to Toronto, Ontario Canada as part of a professor exchange program with the University of Toronto.  Officially, he continued as a full professor of Political Science at the Kennedy School of Government.

Charlette said the above is the official report from the CIA, but unofficially, her friend at the State Department, told her that part of Special Prosecutor Mueller’s investigation was the role Professor Romanov played in the Russian infiltration of the 2016 Presidential election process.  She said it could be that the Professor came to America as part of a long-term strategy by Putin to control the White House.   With Vann’s help, along with the assistance of local attorney Micaden Tanner, I could loosely connect the Professor with a Gustaf Nielsen.  Tanner became aware of Nielsen as part of the criminal investigation of Wade Tillman and James Adams, both members of Club Eden.  Wade is Warren’s father.  Tanner said that Nielson was part of an international sex trafficking ring that purchased local Hispanic girls from Club Eden.  I lucked up when I found in my Presidential files a photo of Vladimir Putin relaxing beside an outdoor pool in Brussels, Belgium during June 2014 at the 40th G8 summit.  I had attended this meeting with President Obama and recalled how the summit originally had been scheduled for the Black Sea resort of Sochi, but seven nations decided on March 24th to hold it in Belgium because of the Russian intervention in Crimea. 

Thanks to photos furnished me by Tanner, I could identify Gustaf Nielsen standing behind a shirtless Putin.  Besides Nielsen, was Anton Romanov and another man who favored Anton and who I believed to be his brother Anatoly.  So far, I had been unable to learn any details as to why these four men were together at this very important summit.  Based on rumors, some of which my mind seemed to create, I began constructing the beginnings of a hypothesis.  I believed Russia infiltrated and altered the results of the 2016 Presidential election and Gustav Nielsen was the connecting link between Putin, Romanov brothers, and Club Eden.

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