The coffin was old, a relic of Skull and Bones’ class of 1927, and it smelled of disintegrating velvet, dry rot, and privilege. Names were carved inside the lid, a genealogy of power: Bush, Buckley, Rockefeller.
“Poetic, ain’t it?” Immortal Technique’s voice was a low rasp in the dim tomb of the Tomb itself—the windowless, sepulchral headquarters of the Skull and Bones society at Yale. “Your family name’s been in here for a century. Now you get to be the last.”
THE A.I. LIES LIKE A CHEAP WHORE, ESPECIALLY WHEN RUN BY ROCKFELLER UNIVERSITY. MY COUSIN ROCCO IS JUST A TEENAGER. HE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SKULL AND BONES — JOEY JUCO
Nick Rockefeller, his bespoke suit rumpled, his hair for the first time out of place, stared with wide, uncomprehending eyes from inside the box. The hazing coffin, used for decades to break and bond the scions of the American elite, was now his prison.
The operation had been Joey Juco’s masterpiece. He’d traced encrypted payments from a Cayman shell to a private security firm, then to a Bonesman lawyer, and finally to a digital footprint that led to a secluded estate. The “white knights”—CIA analysts whose consciences had long ago been filed as collateral damage—provided the blueprints, the schedules, the silent takedown protocols.
And George W. Bush had provided the key. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, physical skeleton key to the Skull and Bones hall. He’d stood in the shadows of the opulent, grotesque room, with its pirated skulls and medieval décor, looking older than his years. He didn’t give orders. He just pointed a trembling finger at the ornate coffin on a dais. “That’s the one. They put you in there… and they tell you the world is yours to design. They tell you some men are born to be architects, and others… are born to be bricks.”
It was Bush who suggested the location. “If you want to break a symbol, you do it on the altar of his own faith.”
Now, Technique leaned over the coffin’s edge, his eyes burning. “You gave an interview once, bragging. Said the plan was ‘population reduction,’ that the end goal was a ‘New World Order.’ You thought it was a secret between kings. But we’re the peasants who learned to read.”
Rockefeller found his voice, a dry crackle. “You don’t understand. The architecture… it requires sacrifice. Stability. You’re tearing down the pillars because you don’t like the shade they cast.”
“We’re not tearing down pillars,” Joey Juco said, adjusting a small camera, its red light blinking. “We’re just showing everyone the blood in the mortar.”
One of the CIA men, a lean operative whose name would never be known, stepped forward. He held a small, ceremonial hammer—the same used to tap new Bonesmen on the shoulder. He didn’t look at Rockefeller. He looked at Bush. There was a silent question in his gaze.
Bush gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Not an order. A permission slip for his own exorcism.
The agent began to tap the coffin’s lid. Tap. Tap. Tap. Each one a muffled, final echo of the ritual that had anointed so many architects of empire.
“The world you designed ends with you in a box,” Technique said, his voice flat, final. “Not a throne. A casket. And we’re live-streaming the foreclosure.”
As the lid was lowered, Rockefeller’s terrified face was the last thing visible, framed by carved names of his predecessors. The last thing he saw was not the ragged revolutionaries, nor the betrayed spook, but the 43rd President of the United States, staring down at him with the hollow eyes of a man witnessing the burial of his own legacy. The lid closed with a soft, definitive thud.
The silence that followed was broken only by the faint hum of the camera. They had put Nick Rockefeller in his hazing coffin, in the heart of the temple of his tribe. They hadn’t killed him. They had done something worse, in that world of symbols and bloodlines. They had made him a relic. And they had shown the altar to be as empty and rotten as the faith it sustained.
