Authors: Ben Bequer
“So?” he pushed.
“I did it.”
“The Jet Propulsion Laboratory thing?”
I nodded.
“That’s some badass security right there,” he responded, beaming, and totally surprising me. Like breaking into the C.I.A. or the Pentagon.”
Sandy shook his head, returning to the doodle and now drawing a female figure, something that he was even more familiar and comfortable with, placing the heroine in the path of my arrows.
I had expected him to be upset with me, to want an explanation for the crimes which I didn’t really want to give, because it was revenge, plain and simple, payback to the bastards that ran the JPL, the small thinkers who had fired me for no good reason. That hit and all the other tech firms I had targeted were run by former schoolmates and colleagues of mine at Cal Tech, guys who wouldn’t even have the courtesy to return my calls after I got tossed from JPL.
Maybe I’m not good with people.
That’s one of the things that attracted me to archery. I was able to do it alone, just me, the bow and the target. The archery thing went way back, back to my early childhood, when aunt Jenny, my father’s sister, had come to visit one day, and horrified with the conditions my step-mother kept me and my brother in, had insisted on taking us to the store to buy me proper clothes, and also got me one toy.
That one toy had been a plastic bow with suction cup arrows. I played with it until my older brother Jason broke it over my back, angered that he hadn’t been home during Aunt Jenny’s visit. I fixed it and played with it still, then with what money I could scrounge, I bought a better replacement and through the years, I always had a bow to practice with.
Archery was in my blood, through and through, as if I had served Edward III at the Battle of Crécy or rode on the back of a horse for one of Attila’s lords. I knew everything about archery including the science, the history. It was one of my passions, and it led me to a State Championship in high school but once I got to college, I put the bow down. I had bigger things to do.
But again, I was hamstrung by their system, their bullshit protocol that required you to learn Class A before you moved on to Class B. What if I already knew all that stuff and needed to get to Class F? It was a weird experience, reading through all the books and understanding them without further explanation, then going to class where we had to go at the pace of the slowest moron, and listen to all their banal questions. Hell, after my first year, I had read through the entire curriculum, and was working on my own, advancing my knowledge by reading the latest publications, not even bothering with the classes they gave me. School wasn’t for me. I knew it, and they did as well, and the brightest minds in the Cal Tech faculty decided to be done with me. I shouldn’t have I cared, I was working at a level none of them could even comprehend.
But I took it personal and broke into Cal Tech’s most precious facility, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and destroyed projects amounting to thousands of man-years of research and development into the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft.
Blackwell’s list also included series of other, private labs, belonging to ancillary projects of Cal Tech’s teachers and faculty. Their labs, and most importantly, their creations were now lost in ash and flame. Dozens of projects ranging from Higgs-Boson particle research to experiments in chemical thermodynamics to projects studying thin film photovoltaics, all lost in a night’s work by my hand. And not for a damned cent either. Another villain would have stolen data, files and prototypes, extorted a pretty penny for their return. I wanted total destruction and I was thorough, destroying hard-drives, paper records, online archives and even prototypes.
“That’s not bad,” Sandy said, still bewildered that I had made it into a facility as secure as the JPL, though I didn’t want to tell him how easy it had been. I had left not a sign of my passing, save for a few seconds of blurry video footage (before my EMP arrows took out the signal) showing a big dude wearing a cape running in the shadows.
But as far as Dale was concerned, things weren’t looking too good. Blackwell was trying his hardest to lump such a massive case against me that he’d overwhelm Sandy into capitulation. It was a fact that was becoming clearer to me, whenever I was referred to as by my real name; that the whole “Dale McKeown” part of my life was one big misadventure, dragging me down. Hearing my civilian name filled me with a sense of apprehension, with a lengthy baggage train of painful memories.
It was time to drop the pretenses, to quit playing around and pick the bow back up, become Blackjack for real.
Someone shifted behind me, and I turned in time to notice a tall, leggy blonde, wearing a striking black suit that contrasted against her short, platinum blonde hair, walking out of the courtroom. It surprised me not to have seen her before; she was the kind of woman that was impossible to miss in even the most crowded room. Yet she had sat a few seats behind me without my knowing. As the woman reached the door, she turned back to me, making sure to make eye contact and flashed a playful smile that was both tantalizing, and made me feel like a vampire’s next prey.
Blackwell also noticed her, staring as she closed the door behind her, and smiling bashfully as he switched his line of argument to defend Atmosphero, the man who had arrested me, and the main thrust of our defense. As he did, Sandy inexplicably let out a loud chuckle that silenced the courtroom and drew everyone’s attention to him. Yet he continued his drawing, filling out the super heroine’s legs, making them too curvaceous and sexy for a real person.
“It looks like she’s going to kick my ass,” I said of the heroine he was drawing, who looked to be dodging my arrows and coming closer to hit me in the face with a power-charged fist. Sandy looked over at me, befuddled at first, but smiling once he understood.
“I know a few that’d give you a beating,” he said.
As Sandy ignored the case, content with his attempt to draw my virtual demise, Blackwell and his cadre of assistants prepared to destroy me for real. The prosecutor now brought up the subject of Atmosphero, the one weakness in his case, the one chance I had, according to Sandy, to get off and be a free man again.
He outlined a long list of awards and credentials, including Keys to the Cities of Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Blackwell also presented to the court a stack of letters of reference from dozens of heroes, worldwide business leaders and figures in local, state and federal government, including from two former Presidents of the United States.
Blackwell then followed up with all of Atmosphero’s greatest moments, including working with big name national and international groups, fighting against the biggest threats to humanity, defending the innocent against monsters like me.
His presentation was impressive, and at the end of it, I should have been dazzled by it all, if not for my overwhelming desire to push Atmo’s jaw through the back of his head. Still, the guy had been around, had mingled with the biggest and the brightest, and had a spotless reputation where it counted, with the good guys.
“Ok, Mr. Blackwell,” the judge said raising his hand and interrupting. “That’s your time.”
Blackwell stopped, held aloft mid-sentence, but smiled and said, “Thank you, your Honor.” He gave me a “you’re fucked, buddy” look as he walked back to his chair to a round of high fives by his fan-like crew then studied a document as if it was the most important thing in the world in order to avoid my return glare.
“My pleasure, Mr. Blackwell,” the judge said, rubbing his nose to ease the tension. “Well, I’m a bit at a loss here,” he continued, looking over at his clerks. “It’s your motion, Mr. Hamlin, but you’ve declined to make a statement before the court – which is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen – are you certain you want nothing for the record?”
Sandy flipped his pencil in the air absentmindedly and looked over at Blackwell. Since it was our motion to dismiss, we had to go first, and Blackwell got the chance to rebut the merits of our arguments, but Sandy had chosen to forgo any statement. Yet here the judge was giving him another chance to get something in the record, to even go second and get to rebut the prosecution’s testimony, and Sandy still hesitated.
“I’m sure the prosecution would have no objections to some abbreviated comments, no Mr. Blackwell?”
Blackwell rose, “not at all, Judge. As long as we can have a brief reply thereafter, we have no objections.”
Sandy looked at me, “Think I should say something?”
“I really hope you’re fucking with me.”
He laughed. “Ok, I’ll say something,” he said and stood.
“If it pleases the court, I am Sandy Hamlin for the defense. Uhm…yeah. Well, I’d like to thank Mr. Blackwell for this opportunity. Yes, judge, I’ll be very brief.”
He did the opposite of Blackwell, who liked to pace the room like a lion roaming his territory, marking each corner against newcomers. Sandy stood in one spot; his only notes the near complete doodle of Blackjack fighting the random busty heroine.
“I’m not really sure why we’re even here,” he started. “Atmosphero wasn’t registered under the Wattley act, so he wasn’t sanctioned to-”
“Judge, if I may?” Blackwell interrupted. “We’ve already stipulated to that, based on the condition that he was out of the country, with the rest of Rising Force and hundreds of other heroes, helping defend Japan from a return of the Golgothra.”
“Yeah, but he let his registration lapse,” he started again, but once more Blackwell jumped in.
“Judge, the Wattley Act gives you wide discretion on these matters.”
“Is he even registered now?” Sandy asked. “My math may be off, but it’s been at least nine months since his registration expired.”
The judge leaned over to one of the clerks, “Can we check the database and see if Mr. Atmosphero is registered?”
Blackwell shot to his feet, waving his hands to his aides, “Judge, really. This is all covered in the third Appendix and...” one of his aides found the right page in the massive Wattley Act, and Blackwell took the book from his hands.
Sandy didn’t wait, it was time to go for the kill, and here, he was the best.
“Judge, he wasn’t registered. And you know what else? They found nothing in the remnants of my client’s house that implicates him in any crime whatsoever. I mean, who’s the hero and who’s the villain here?” he asked, opening his arms wide and shooting me a wink. It was thanks to Sandy that the house was clean. It was something he drilled into me like a mantra, “never give them anything to pin on you.” He had been the mastermind, routing money all over the world in order to return it to me clean (at a fee). Though Blackwell had seized every red cent, clean or not, there was nothing they could do to make it all stick.
“Here,” the prosecutor sang out, finding the right wording. “The judge will have discretion over-”
“Can Atmosphero come to anyone’s house and do this?” Sandy interrupted. “He destroyed a multi-million dollar home, thousands of dollars in furnishings, wrecked several vehicles, and what evidence did he have? Hell, where is he? I don’t see him here.”
Sandy looked around the courtroom dramatically.
“He wasn’t registered, Judge, so his attack was illegal. He didn’t even have authority to arrest my client. I don’t know what else there is to discuss.”
Sandy sat down, and then rose again.
“Judge, if I could ask you to rule on the motion to dismiss right now,” he said and went back to his drawing.
“Nice, huh?” he whispered to me, but I didn’t know if he meant the drawing or his argument.
“Judge, if I may?” Blackwell said, rising and ready to read from a heavy legal tome, but the judge was checking something on his laptop, and put his hand up in the air.
“Mr. Blackwell,” the judge said. “I’m not certain that we need to go any further. If the information presented here is correct, and from my search in Westlaw, it is, then the arrest was unlawful. Have you anything to say specifically pertaining to that?”
Blackwell shrugged, knowing he was beaten.
“Then I suggest you reorganize and re-file charges,” the judge said. “Case dismissed.”
* * *
And just like that, I was free, out on the street and paranoid as hell.
Every helicopter or caped super that flew by made my heart start, as did every cop or cop car. The streets of downtown Los Angeles are replete with cameras of all sorts, including at most traffic lights. Private security cameras jutted from most buildings, coverage that was available to law enforcement and I was sure they were all keeping track of me, following my every move. By the time Sandy picked me up I was imagining the proverbial Men in Black following me in silent helicopters, dressed in tactical gear and ready to pounce on me should a shoelace go untied.
Sandy drove like a maniac to a cafe nearby, a few blocks from the courthouse, more concerned with the conversation on his cell phone than any laws or rules of traffic. It was like a race to him, like a contest where he was losing points if he didn’t accelerate his Mercedes SLR McLaren to the redline on the tachometer, and roar the engine to top velocity between red lights. The only problem was he was a distracted driver, and the conversation with his secretary was more a concern to him than his or my life.
As a passenger, the ride felt exhilarating and terrifying at the same time, as he cut people off aggressively, turned corners while squealing the rear tires, and weaved through traffic at two, even three times the speed limit. And for at least a few minutes, I forgot about Blackwell, the cameras, and the figment Men in Black.