The African Conspiracy

About the Book

Dell Wheeler is a suburban CPA with wealthy clients and a prosperous practice, who has difficulty getting along with his wife and teenage son. By chance he stumbles onto an African American business client's dirty secret: double books linking them to an underground money laundering network known as "New Africa." Suspecting tax evasion and worse, Dell's real fear is for his own reputation: Shouldn't he have known what his client was doing? Will the IRS believe he didn't? Could this derail his lucrative practice?

Dell's wife Linda, involved in her own career, seems indifferent to his anxiety, but Suzy Drake, a flirtatious prospective client, listens willingly and is wide-eyed when Dell brags to her of his ingenuity in discovering his client's secret. In fact, she seduces him to get him to tell her all the details.

A surprise summons takes Dell to a clandestine meeting in Washington D.C., where Treasury Secretary Donald Brecklen himself reveals that Dell's client is indeed part of a huge African American drug money laundering operation. Dell proudly replies that he has already cracked the computer codes that will expose the operation, and Brecklen seems impressed and grateful. He asks Dell for the codes and, when Dell agrees, promises to send a man to get them.

But the wrong man comes--a brutal IRS agent named Cavendish. When Dell is reluctant to give him the codes, Cavendish takes him to a slum apartment where Suzy Drake is being held hostage.  To force Dell to talk Cavendish tortures Suzy, but she resists furiously and Dell tries to intervene. During the struggle that follows Suzy manages to get a knife, and Cavendish shoots and kills her.

Dell is able to knock Cavendish out and escape. Shaken, he knows he must see Brecklen again but he also knows Cavendish will have the police hunting for him.  Avoiding airlines and credit cards, he makes his way to Washington in an odyssey of railroads, gypsy cabs and buses, interrupted by a midnight flight from federal agents across the rooftop of a Baltimore hotel. He evades police, guards, the IRS, Secret Service and Cavendish, but when Dell finally reaches Washington, Brecklen is out of town.

Exhausted, Dell is captured by men he takes for Secret Service agents, who turn out to be from "New Africa" instead. Despite their supposed drug mob connections, they are strangely kind to him, and when he has rested they baffle him completely by taking him to see Donald Brecklen.

Brecklen introduces Dell to two renowned economists who now tell him a very different story: Despite the Administration's economic reforms, insiders know it's too late. Economic collapse, though still years away, is inevitable. Most of Washington is indifferent but a few, including Brecklen, understand that a strong, free underground economy could cushion the collapse and provide a nucleus for rebuilding. It is this that Dell's discovery jeopardizes. The IRS will destroy any underground it can find. Congress is hostile. And "New Africa" is an independent, Afrocentric community which could become the genesis of such an underground and which in fact has no drug connections at all. Suzy Drake was actually not a prospective client at all but a spy from "New Africa," sent to find out just how much Dell had discovered.

Chastened, Dell offers again to give up the codes, but now he knows too much and Brecklen wants more than the codes: he wants Dell to commit himself to "New Africa" as well. Dell refuses. Brecklen allows him to leave, asking only that he think it over.

Back at home, Dell is outraged when Cavendish tells his wife Linda of his affair with Suzy Drake and then threatens to frame Dell for Suzy's murder if he won't help destroy "New Africa." He stuns Cavendish with a frying pan and flees with Linda, telling her all he's been through and everything he's learned, and pleading with her not to believe Cavendish. As Cavendish pursues them in a desperate high-speed chase Dell

About the Author

Paul Wathen majored in English at Princeton University and has been a counterintelligence agent, an editor, and a television production manager. Today he's a CPA in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and likes to hike, study history, collect antique auto models and write. The African Conspiracy is his first published novel.