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including taxation -- especially progressive taxation that penalizes the most productive members of society and seeks to redistribute their wealth for political gain.
    Rick had only two points of reluctance in taking a job with GlobalMAP. The first point was that Scotland had legalized abortions in 1967 and that they were ongoing. If he was leaving the American genocide, then he would have preferred that his destination be a nation where it was illegal to murder unborn babies. To leave the scene of one genocide only to witness another deeply saddened him. The majority of countries where abortion was illegal were in Africa and in Latin America, and any of those would have been his preference. The only country with this distinction in Europe was Ireland, but Ireland’s draconian gun laws bothered Rick nearly as much as the abortion issue in other countries.
    His second point of trepidation in addition to the expected background investigations and drug screening was that the company made all employees consent to key logging. Every keystroke and mouse click that he made would be accessible to the company’s security office. The thought of that chafed him, but he didn’t consider it too much different from his experience in the Air Force, where he had lived under a microscope.
    The e-mail from Mrs. Vo granting a lengthy meeting with Harry Heston raised Rick’s suspicions that the company’s security department might have somehow become privy to his meetings with Meital and Alan. He wondered if they had somehow been able to eavesdrop on him. He muttered aloud, “Maybe they deduced it, based on my web page searches. Clever.”

     
    Meital had been raised in a non-observant Jewish home near Tel Aviv. Her father was a very successful raw materials import/export trader and broker who mostly handled purchases of billet steel. Her mother had worked for just a few years as a legal secretary before devoting herself to child-rearing. Meital became a Messianic Jew while she was attending art history school at Escola Superior de Disseny (ESDi) in Sabadell, Catalonia. Her recognition of Christ as the Messiah was prompted by seeing the Hebrew language documentary film Other Side of the Cross (“ Ovi Ha Kora ”).
    Once they heard that she had “Gone Yeshua,” her Sabra parents disowned her. They made it clear that they would cease supporting her and that she would not be invited to any family gatherings until she regained her senses. It was her secular aunt and uncle who stepped in to pay for Meital’s last year at ESDi and who helped establish her in the art world. Her wealthy uncle was a benefactor of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. With her uncle’s referral, she got her first job as an art auction cataloger with Bonham’s in London immediately after she graduated with a baccalaureate degree in Art History.
    After just two years as a cataloger, Meital Landstuth (or Kathe M. Landstuth, as she was known professionally) started “bringing in estates” -- the auction world’s parlance for negotiating the sale of collections that included artworks, antiquarian books, collections of autographs, ancient arms and armor, fine wristwatches, saddles, and even wine collections. Her mastery of languages (Hebrew, English, German, Spanish, Catalan, Latin, and Arabic), her near-photographic memory, and her charming but subtly forceful personality all contributed to her becoming an art broker before she was 30 years old. One of her early estate acquisitions was a group of John Constable landscapes that had long been anticipated in the art world. That auction was a huge success and cemented her position as a fine art broker. Although she was still formally associated with Bonham’s, she was no longer on their payroll, instead becoming an independent contractor.
    In addition to auctions, Meital also arranged private treaty sales between buyers and sellers. This work was tricky and involved a lot of travel. These brokered sales also required great