Authors: David Vinjamuri
“There’s another secure room on this level. That might be it, but I really don’t know. I’m not a frigging IT guy, okay?”
“You’re going to help me get out of here. We’re going to drive your car out the front gate.”
He nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
I shook my head. “It won’t be that easy. The moment you see a guard you’re going to change your mind and switch teams again. I have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
I grabbed my jacket. I detached a seam from the lining and slid it open. Then I pulled a two-foot orange strip from the enclosure. It looked like very smooth Play-Doh formed to the diameter of a finger. I cut an inch off of the strip and compressed it onto the seat of the chair I’d been sitting on. I slid the chair to the other end of the room, then took off my watch and withdrew a slim stick of metal from the back. I pushed it into the strip. I stepped back across the forty-foot room and turned over a small metal table, then knelt behind it and shielded my eyes. I pressed another button on my wristwatch. There was a small explosion—thunderous within the room but not loud enough to attract attention on other levels. I hoped. The chair fell inwards, split in two. I turned back to Ventura, holding up the rest of the strip where he could see it.
“This is Semtex. They also call it plastic explosive or detcord. You can think of it as a chastity belt. It will help you stay true to your vows. Now drop your trousers,” I said as I cut off a longer strip.
22
I followed Ventura out of the interrogation room, glad to be away from the water basin and the dead bodies. I was wearing Old Spice’s black turtleneck. His blood added a sharp overtone to the cheap adolescent cologne. Getting it off the guard’s corpse was the low point in a day where I’d already been tortured, and it had been impossible to accomplish without getting it soaked in blood and laced with bits of brain matter. But it was still better than Flattop’s, which was much too large and had three holes in the chest. I wore a baseball cap with the National Front logo pulled down on my face as low as I dared. Flattop’s Sig Sauer was in a holster at my hip with fourteen unfired 9mm Parabellum rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.
“The room I was thinking of is around the other side.” Ventura pointed behind me. “Past the elevators and to the left.”
I shook my head. “We need to find the security room first.”
Ventura pointed me in the opposite direction. We walked down the hall.
“This seems like a bad idea,” he said.
“It’s necessary,” I said. “Will they recognize you?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the same group that wears these?” He glanced back and I tugged at my turtleneck.
“Yup.”
“Have you been in this room before?”
“Uh, yes. Not recently, though.”
“Describe it to me,” I said as we turned the corner.
“I dunno—it’s not too big. There are lots of monitors.”
“Are there offices or locker rooms connected?”
“No, they’re not down here.”
“Where?”
“At the back of the first floor—that’s where the main security office is. The room down here is just a monitoring room.”
“Where is the head of security?”
“His office is on the first level.”
“Good,” I said. We turned a corner and I caught sight of a very visible security camera mounted above a reinforced steel door with a biometric scanner.
“Tell them you need to review some footage. Make it sound plausible or we’re both dead.”
Ventura pushed a doorbell button below the scanner. I kept my head down.
“Yeah?” The voice sounded bored.
“I’m questioning someone in the Room. I need to look at some tape of him on the grounds a couple of hours ago.”
The door buzzed and Ventura pushed through. I stepped in behind him, pushing him aside as I drew the Sig. Two men were sitting ten feet from us at a control panel in front of a wall full of flat-screen monitors. I saw one of them reaching for an alarm button and pointed the 9mm at his head.
“It’s not worth your life,” I suggested. On reflection, he agreed. I had Ventura put them in flexicuffs, then I used a roll of duct tape I’d liberated from the Room to bind them to the chairs and blindfold them. Silently, I went to work on the monitors.
“You’re going to fuck—” Ventura started before I cuffed him on the back of the head and he shut up. In five minutes I ensured that it would take a half-day of repairs before any of the monitors functioned properly. It took five more minutes to program the phone so it forwarded to the main security office. I wasn’t optimistic. We probably had a better chance of getting out of the compound unmolested before we entered the security office. But I needed to disable the monitors to increase the chances that my next stop would go undetected.
* * *
It took me a couple of minutes to defeat the electronic lock on the server room door. We didn’t see anyone wandering the corridors in the basement level and I hoped that my luck would hold for a few more moments. I pulled out a special USB drive that I’d removed from the lining of my jacket opposite the Semtex as we stepped inside. It was a modern server room, several times the size of the video monitoring office. Racks of blade servers revealed a much larger operation than I’d have guessed, all housed in a dust free, climate-controlled setting.
The room was cold, so I looked around the edges for offices where the network managers would work. Off the end of the third long row, through a glass window, I saw a desk with an ordinary PC workstation under a bookshelf of technical manuals. The office was empty, though I couldn’t tell if that was normal or if the festival had changed things. I quietly opened the door, sat down at the desk, and inserted the thumb drive into a USB socket on the front of the PC. I opened the file from the Windows control panel and started an executable program. After a moment, the light on the drive started flashing and a program screen appeared. After thirty seconds, the program screen disappeared and I pulled the drive from the computer.
“What did you just do?” Ventura asked.
“I’m hoping I just opened a window to let some light into this place,” I said.
We left the room and I rewired the entry lock. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but if the Activity tech geniuses were as good as I remembered, the damage was already done.
As the elevator chimed for the main level, I leaned in to Ventura and whispered, “Straight out.”
The elevator doors opened and we walked briskly toward the glass doors to the courtyard. I walked two steps behind him as the guard I’d replaced had done. Ventura was exhausted and visibly disheveled. If anyone took a close look at him, I figured the game was up. There were four men sitting in the lounge area drinking coffee and talking football but they didn’t even look up as we walked past.
We strolled through the center of the courtyard and around the Spanish fountain at a relaxed pace. I nodded toward the dorm building.
“I want to see Harmon’s room.” Ventura altered our course without complaint.
Ventura tapped his ID on the lock in front of the dorms and the door clicked open. It was quiet in the middle of the afternoon. A cluster of maroon couches sat in front of beverage stations similar to those in the conference center across the courtyard in the lobby. The room was spotless and had the kind of sterile college dorm look that made it appear perpetually unused. We took the elevator to the third floor.
I used the pick I’d liberated from my waist, along with an improvised shim, to open the door to Anton Harmon’s room. There was a security camera at the end of the hall but I knew it was offline. The hall was as quiet as the lobby had been. When the door yielded, I stepped into a small apartment that had the same institutional feeling as the lobby. I took that to mean it had been furnished by the designers of the building rather than by Harmon himself. Nobody was home.
“How does this compare to your place?” I asked Ventura, who was looking around with an expression that told me he’d not been inside before.
“It’s bigger,” he replied. “I don’t have a separate bedroom.”
“What does Anton do in this organization?”
“I don’t know. He’s been gone a lot of the time I’ve been working here. I started about a year ago. Like I said, he’s in the inner circle. He has a lot of closed-door meetings with Price and that gang when he’s around.”
The apartment had a large tiled living room with a flat panel TV and a well-appointed en suite kitchen. The living room and bedroom shared a balcony that had a nice view of the mountains. With my nose pressed against the glass, I could just see the employee parking lot.
I walked into the bedroom with Ventura trailing behind me. He’d been as submissive as a puppy since we’d left the Room. I’d given him a few chances to jump me but he hadn’t taken the bait. The Semtex wrapped around his genitals had tamed him as completely as a full course of electro-shock therapy.
The bedroom was cozy, with just enough space for a queen-sized bed, a couple of nightstands and a long, low dresser. All the pieces were finished in a shiny white lacquered veneer that reminded me of Ikea. On the nightstand farthest from the window there was a picture of Anton and Heather. She was smiling, a genuine smile that started in her eyes. The photo was taken in the meadow where the Reclaim group had set up camp—I recognized the stream. It must have been some time in July or August; the light had that quality it gets when days extend far into the evening. I slid the picture from the frame, folded it and put it into my pants pocket.
I rifled through both nightstands. Her side had a couple of books, including a volume of Walt Whitman and a nonfiction book about food called
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
. I’d have bet it was the only copy on the National Front compound. A small polished walnut box held some braided bracelets, a few silver and turquoise necklaces and some modest silver earrings. On his side, there was lubricant, a folding knife and some change. That was it. The dresser was divided longitudinally between his and hers. Her side stocked a week’s worth of clean underwear—most of it sensible with the exception of a couple thongs—four pairs of jeans, some hiking pants and a couple of pairs of shorts. In another drawer I found a mix of tops, from tie-dye to some semi-dressy Ann Taylor stuff. The drawers on his side seemed a bit light. It fit with his absence. I stepped back into the hallway and found a sliding closet door concealing a washer and dryer. From his grunt of annoyance, I took it that Ventura didn’t have one in his unit. I opened the stacked units in turn, but both were empty.
I stepped into the bathroom and slid open the vanity. It confirmed what I suspected. Heather’s toiletries were inside but Anton’s shelf was half-empty and his razor was conspicuously missing.
I returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Divided again, with beer on one side and vegetable juice on the other. On the bottom row on her side, a line of self-injecting needles sat side by side in a precision rank. I pulled one out. They were once-a-day insulin shots for diabetics. Two weeks of injectors sat in the refrigerator, prescribed by a doctor in Beckley. I stepped back and my breath came out cold, in a rush.
23
“She was happy when they first arrived because they didn’t have much privacy at that eco-freak place. They were playing house here,” Ventura said.
“Did she know what this place was about? Really?”
“No, I don’t think she had any idea.” Ventura coughed, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. “Price is sort of a control freak. I don’t know where Anton met Heather, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to bring her here. Price went nuts when Anton showed up with her. He reamed Anton pretty good, but there was really nowhere for Heather to go so she stayed.”
“Why was Anton dating a Latina? What kind of supremacists are you guys anyway?”
“She’s not Hispanic. She wouldn’t have lasted here a day if she was. She was adopted. I mean, her mother was her mother, but her father wasn’t her father and her real dad was white. She found that out not too long ago and she was pissed. She kept saying ‘I can’t believe
Papi
lied to me.’” Ventura said ‘Papi’ with a cartoonish Latin accent. “Imagine thinking you had all that bad blood in you and then one day finding out you’d been lied to your entire life.”
I wanted to slap him. Didn’t. “Is that why she left home?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“You knew her? Aside from her being Anton’s girlfriend?”
“Anton was pretty busy when he got back. She didn’t know anybody here, so I ate lunches with her.” I translated that to mean he was hitting on the new girl when her boyfriend was tied up.
“How long did it take her to figure things out?”
Ventura laughed. “Longer than you’d think—maybe until the end of the first week. Anton got her a job working in the kitchen so she wasn’t really around the events. He avoided the evening programs too, and took her for walks and stuff. I guess it was romantic at first, but after a few nights she started to catch on.”
“And then what?”
“They started fighting. Pretty badly. I live on the next floor up, but I know security got called a couple of times. We have a pretty...
traditional
view of women’s roles here, but I think Anton was smacking Heather around and that wasn’t okay. Maybe that’s why he got sent out on another job.”
“So she’s been here alone?”
“Yeah for the last week or so.”
I saw something in his eyes that looked almost human, which made me hate him more for waterboarding me. “You like her, don’t you?”
He just sat there for a moment before he answered, like he was seeing her in the room. “Yeah, I like her. She’s...pure. Like nothing has touched her, even with what Anton’s done. She’s so gentle.”
I asked the question that had been digging at me for days. “Why did she take it? Why didn’t she just walk away?”
“Her biological dad walked out when she was two or three years old. She said she doesn’t give up like that. I think she figures that if someone hits you, it at least shows they care. It’s pretty fucked up what parents do to their kids.”