Authors: Jason Austin
“
How
much?”
Cleveland, Ohio, August 25,
10:47 p.m.
Emil
Bruckner sat at the table and spit the skin of another beer nut into
his hand. He had been instructed to avoid the obscure corner booths,
so as not to advertise a lame attempt at being inconspicuous. Trineer
fancied himself a practitioner of hiding in plain sight. Two men
sitting in a darkened corner booth of a practically empty bar just
screamed of something sinister...if not a homosexual rendezvous.
However, the latter would be most unlikely, given the mien of the
place—lethargic, not too dim, televisions locked into a dozen
different sporting events from a dozen different countries. Your
average straight-guys' home-away-from-home. And if any of it made
Trineer comfortable enough to drop his guard even further, then the
place was just perfect.
“
Shit,
you even look gay,” Trineer once told Bruckner.
Bruckner
had uncharacteristically soft, almost feminine features. His shiny
auburn hair and trim, hard body were the result of a vitamin regimen
and intense regular exercise. All part of the job as far as your
average rookie agent was concerned.
“
But
don’t worry,” Trineer insisted, “It works in your
favor. You don’t look the slightest bit dangerous.”
Bruckner
eyed the bartender filling a fresh beer-mug for one of the regulars
seated at the bar. He wouldn't have guessed this place to be one of
Trineer's recent hangouts. Agent Brisby had a damn good laugh over it
when he heard. McCutcheon, however, did not. All he did was just
shake his head and ask, “We are professional investigators,
right?”
“
Hey,
Butt-lick,” a brash voice said and Bruckner felt the sharp poke
of soon-to-be-broken fingers between his shoulder blades.
Still
with the Butt-lick shit?
Bruckner
thought. He had laughed the first couple of times Trineer used it.
Why not? Emil
Buttrick
wasn’t his real name
anyway. Now, every time he heard it, he just wanted to put his fist
straight through Trineer's skull. Bruckner turned to see Garrett
Trineer lingering directly behind him, the thin black stick of a
burning herbal cigarette teetering between his lips. Trineer was
grinning with his eyelids at half-staff. He still wore that same
faded denim jacket and hard cotton-poly blend work fatigues. His
short cropped hair was slightly mussed and he sported his perpetual
five o’clock shadow. He swore his rugged look worked wonders
with the ladies.
“
Sorry,
I’m a little late,” Trineer said and took a seat at the
table. “I met this
fine
young honey on the way over here.
Damn, she was holding!” He gestured, cupping his hands to his
chest.
“
You
should’ve seen her.”
“
Good
for you,” Bruckner said. “I spent my time studying.”
“
Well,
you have to keep up appearances, right?”
“
I
was just kidding.”
Trineer
blew off the joke and turned his attention to the big circular bar.
“Yo, pimp! Bring me a Michelob,” he shouted. He then
turned furtive and looked Bruckner straight in the eye. “You
got’em?”
“
Yeah,”
Bruckner answered and produced a slip-disk from a chest-pocket. He
opted not to transfer it to a more sophisticated pin or light-drive.
He wanted to avoid looking
too
resourceful. He stuck it in
Trineer's path.
“
All
right, all right, put it away. I don't want that shit. It's not like
I can verify it anyway. Leave it for when we get to D.C.”
“
D.C.?”
“Yeah.
He owes me money for a job—well,
now two jobs.” Trineer regarded Bruckner with a flick of the
wrist. “I'll deliver his hacker, but you're gonna hand him his
shit. Something's wrong with it, he'll know I never touched it.”
Trineer shook his head. “All this trouble just to hack into
school records and shit. Worthless.”
“I
thought he was coming here,”
Bruckner
sighed. He'd been thrown by the notion of traveling to Washington
D.C., but had hidden it well. “I don't want to travel with this
thing.”
“
I'm
not happy about it either. I just got back from busting my hump for
this guy my damn self, but that's how it is.”
“
Where
are you coming from?”
“
A
little place called None-of-your-fucking-business.”
Bruckner
looked humbled. “You're the one that brought it up, Jeez.”
“
Just
be ready when I come pick you up. I wanna get an early start.”
Bruckner
strained to contain himself. Less than a year on the job and he was
about to bring down
Calvin Ross,
t
he
leader of the most prominent anti-biotech terrorist organization in
the country. He had eluded capture a year ago when the bureau finally
dropped the hammer on PHANTOM. The same hammer they would eventually
drop on their own collective toes when it came to convicting all of
the scum.
Take it easy, Emil
,
the agent thought.
Can't
afford any mistakes.
He recalled what McCutcheon had said
about this being the bureau's only way of making up for the Thaddeus
Maguire fiasco, and if not for the painfully avoidable bungling of
certain agents, Maguire would be bunking three feet from a
stainless-steel toilet by now. “Believe me kid,”
McCutcheon had lamented. “There's nothing like a successful
domestic terrorist with a knack for staying under the radar to make
even the best agents impatient and sloppy.”
Emil
took those words to heart. Current laws covered a lot of black-bag
screw-ups, but illegally obtained shit was still illegally obtained
shit. A well-paid cadre of lawyers could make entire careers on
driving such cases all the way to the Supreme Court and once around
the park. Throw in a few conveniently dead or missing witnesses, and
lawyers like Miles Gabriel would have been suddenly considered
overqualified
.
“
Thanks,
pimp,” Trineer said and grinned as the bartender approached him
with a sweating bottle of Michelob. Trineer took the bottle and
chortled as he watched the bartender walk away.
“
Why
do you keep calling him that?” Bruckner asked.
“
Look
at him. See how he walks? Just like the pimps in the
nineteen-seventies, movies man. Fuckin' hilarious.”
Bruckner
shook his head. “Pretty sure he's got a bad leg, dude.”
He looked thoughtful and drummed his fingers on the table. “I'm
thinking he's gonna crack more than their servers with this.”
“
Don’t
ask me. All this fanatical shit was never my route. I’m a
professional. Tell you the truth, I feel sorry for you sign waving,
flag-burning...”
“
I
don’t burn flags,” Emil said, in authentic offense. He
may have had to portray some left-of-common-sense, Bio-eth
shit-kicker, but anyone who wanted keep their windpipe in its
original position dared not call him anti-American.
“
Whatever
you hippie-fakes are into,” Trineer said. “In the end,
it’s all a scam anyways; just another way to get over. Shit,
I've only met him twice, but he never asked
me
if I believed in his fight for
the soul of humanity. He just offered me a job because he knew I was
strapped for cash and I'd be cheap. So fuck all this bio-ethy stuff.”
Bruckner
smirked benignly. He was coming to the painful conclusion that
Trineer knew jack shit about the codes or why Ross wanted them. Other
than how to get from point A to point B without tripping over his own
feet, Ross probably hadn’t told him a thing. Ross was nothing
if not consistent about security. It was the single biggest reason
for all the blank spots in his bureau file. Also, Trineer didn’t
exactly inspire implicit trust amongst his peers. Most of his
connections from his gang days were lost to him because he’d
ratted out members of his own crew for a sentence reduction. Still,
he knew a stylized pro or two who could get in and out of high
security areas without leaving so much as a stray hair. That made
McCutcheon wonder if Ross might be thinking in terms of Trineer as a
liaison between himself and the professional crews. They weren't
terrorists, but criminals, nonetheless and that created potential for
lucrative mutual benefit. It wasn't likely that Ross would be dumb
enough to expand his tent in such a direction, but then he
had
tapped Trineer. A move that
sang
of desperation and impatience—the two things that deliver bad
guys to the business end of a badge like an email to the inbox. It
also meant Ross would probably have to kill Trineer somewhere down
the line if he failed to find additional use for him. But, for now,
Ross needed him. Ross’s old hookups couldn’t be trusted
anymore. There were too many of them walking around in federal prison
fatigues, looking to cut deals for his whereabouts. What Ross needed
were bodies that were willing to work without asking questions.
Annoying as he could be, Trineer didn’t ask a lot of questions.
He was having too much fun, feeling indispensable. Bruckner would
still try, but chances were he wouldn’t get shit from Trineer
tonight. And that would make for one painful meeting later on.
Emil
chose an aisle seat in the tenth row of holotheatre seven, per
instruction. A shameless disgorgement of techno-crap vandalized the
wall as he popped a handful of Milk Duds into his mouth.
Holotheatres—the storytelling always got lost in the
hardwiring. The movie-makers had to come up with some reason to get
people back in the theaters, so they input a peripheral challenge to
the audience—discern the living, breathing actors from the
computer-generated creations inside the recessed screen-stage hybrid.
It would probably work for another ten years, twenty at the most.
Funny, how people were too busy
being
in
the movie to realize it was no good. A gaggle of
high-schoolers who were gathered down front shouted, “Fake!
That’s fake! She’s fake,” pissing off the older
patrons who'd come to waste their money in peace. Emil almost
hollered at the kids to shut the hell up on general principle.
They
can't pull me out
, he thought as he rolled a single candy
between his lips.
Not now
.
Emil
had failed to loosen Trineer's tongue about MIT by buying a round.
Instead, Trineer had limited himself to two beers, watched ten
minutes of a soccer match and then headed out the door with what had
to be an H-head hooker fiending for a fix.
Was
Trineer smarter than he looked?
Did he know to keep MIT on
the down-low, to keep it from
him?
Was MIT even Ross at all, or one of the other eager beavers making
the transition to the big leagues? Emil's throat hardened.
They
can't pull me out
.
Assistant
Special Agent-in-Charge, Marcel McCutcheon, was putting on weight. He
was eating a bit more since his promotion and spending more time on
the job than in the gym. Not that he paid much attention. He defied
the increase in his girth like Stonewall Jackson facing off the union
army. Besides, this was the way it was for the men in his family once
they hit forty. He squirmed under the snugness of his pants, as he
entered the theater and took a seat in the row directly behind Emil
Bruckner.
Emil
felt the disturbance of the arrival and it made him wince as if
someone had stepped on his bunion.
McCutcheon
aimed his mouth at Bruckner's ear while staring at the screen. “
What
the hell happened?” he asked.
“
I
didn’t know,” Emil answered, pressing a knuckle to his
nose. He was glad procedure was on his side, allowing the option to
keep face-forward; he wouldn't have to look into McCutcheon's
probing, paternalistic eyes as he begged to stay on.
“
That
much is obvious. If you knew, then we would’ve known, and
would've been able to stop it.”
“
Trineer
never said a word. Maybe it wasn’t his people. Maybe the
claimer was a copycat, a hoax.”
“
We
should be so lucky. Preliminaries on the devices and M.O. so far
square up entirely with PHANTOM.” McCutcheon thought for a
minute. “We might have to pull you out. If you were kept in the
dark on purpose, you’re no good anyway.”
Emil
grimaced. “You can’t do that. I’m too close. He’s
going to take me to Ross.”
“
He
told you that?”
“
Yes.
Ross called him from Washington D.C. and set it up.”
“
When?”
“
We’re
leaving for the train station tomorrow night.” Bruckner paused.
“If I’m still on it.”
McCutcheon
lingered, watching the scene of a rowboat and its horrified passenger
dip over a mountainous waterfall. For a second, he thought he was
soaked.
Jesus,
would it have killed them to keep the damn movies flat?
“
Why
D.C.?” he asked.
“
Don't
know, but Trineer's buying the ticket and I figured it was best not
to ask too many questions or insist on Cleveland. Maybe he's just
being cautious, using a layover between here and Boston.”