Henchmen (14 page)

“Frontier’s down the street.  Best tortillas in all of creation,” Jacob says.

“Mmm,”I say.  “Great cinnamon rolls, too.”

The Frontier is also a good place to forget about your day.

The next morning is planning.  We’ve come too far down this road to quit now.  DHS is probably looking around for us, Congress is still populated by idiots, and Jean is still dead.  At this stage in the game we’re not sure we can use anything we have, but frankly, we don’t have anything else to do. So why the fuck not?

We know what building we’re looking for, but have no idea what we’ll find when we go in. So some recon is in order. 

We follow the usual rules: Frank figures out the building; Jacob and I peek around on-site, Jessica has grown into a coordination role, and Eve reaches out to some shady contacts that we’re better off not knowing about. 

The building in question is the Simms building - a classic example of mid 1950s architecture stuck in the middle of Downtown.  The Simms building is 13 stories (which is kind of odd, if you think about it) of mid-century blue metal sheeting in stainless steel frames. 

Honestly: the building looks like a giant elementary school.

Since we’re not exactly sure what part of the building we’re looking for, Jacob and I hang out in the lobby and keep an eye on people coming and going.  Most of the people are run-of-the-mill office drones.  Some Pak-N-Mail attendants.  The occasional cop.  A few tourists looking for the DEA office that only exists on TV. 

One door, to an office in the southwest corner, never opens.  No one enters and no one leaves, but the mail carrier drops mail in the slot, so someone’s in the office sometimes.  We’ll have to stay late to see if anyone leaves.  Since this is probably a government operation, we won’t need to be here any later than 5.

In the meantime, we grab coffee. 

After a full day of drinking coffee, my nerves are frazzled and Jacob’s bladder is full, so he takes off to the head, and I try my best to not vibrate like a meth addict on a bender.  Caffeine is a wonderful thing.

At 5 p.m. sharp, the southwest corner door opens, and two guys dressed like security guards walk out.  The door closes behind them, and they part ways without saying a word.  One heads out a back door. The other heads toward me. 

Jacob’s just leaving the bathroom as I make a snap decision.  By the time I’m bumping this guy and stealing his wallet, I have enough presence of mind to hope I didn’t just fuck the whole thing up.  Fortunately, our guy is wiped out enough from doing whatever work he does all day that he barely notices when I snatch his wallet.  I take a step, open his wallet, pull out the first card I find, close the wallet and drop it behind me.  I keep walking and keep my fingers crossed that I grabbed something useful.

As I walk past Jacob, I hear him call out, “Hey, buddy, you dropped your wallet.”

The guy spins around - a hunk of meat that thinks he’s the toughest S.O.B. on the block, and is ready to beat down anyone who crosses him - until he sees Jacob’s crazy-ass biker grin.  He takes the wallet, mumbles thanks and high-tails it out. 

I keep going out the back and take a look at the palmed card.  Damn, I’m lucky sometimes.

I got a voter registration card with a name of Geoff Brance.  I calmly exit and speed walk around the building, keeping an eye out of Brance. I catch sight of Jacob, who motions left. Brance is making his way toward the parking garage across the street.  He takes the elevator, and I wait by the gate.  I reassure myself there’s only one way out, and I’m watching it.  Jacob grabs his car off the street and waits.

After twenty minutes of waiting, Brance finally rolls out in a beat-to-shit ’77 Firebird, blasting some God-awful southern rock.  I nod to Jacob, who follows him out over the tracks and back up Central to the Copper Lounge, where he calls me.

Now, at this point all you Junior Birdman Security guys are probably wondering why the hell we’re still using cell phones when everyone knows how easy to track someone through their phone.  In order to track you, someone would have to know what name you used when you set up your phone.  There are more cellular devices in America than there are people, and traces only work when you know what phone you’re looking for.  So creating a basically-untraceable phone for fun and profit is fairly easy: steal someone’s phone, hack the SIM card so your stolen phone looks like another one and set up a fake account.

As long as no one knows to look for you, or what number to check, you’re golden. 

Right now, we’re the only ones who have each other’s numbers.  Sure, the NSA is probably grabbing all our calls, but they’re grabbing everyone’s calls. We can get lost in the noise, as long we avoid key words like bomb, terrorist, Allah, etc.

The way Brance made a beeline to the Copper Lounge makes me think he’s probably a regular.  The Copper Lounge is a used-to-be-nice bar down the street from UNM, far enough away that the college students can’t walk down there easily, and because the bar’s not directly in Nob Hill or downtown, the hipsters ignore it.

Tonight’s not the night to check further into Brance, though. He’d probably recognize Jacob, and I’m too far away to keep an eye on him. I catch a bus back to Hotel Awesome, and meet up with everyone else.

Jessica and Frank are going over building plans when I get in.  Jacob is grabbing pizzas, and no one’s heard from Eve yet.

“There’s something off about this building,” Frank says. “The southwest corner office has an elevator, but the plans don’t say where it goes.  It can’t go up, because there’s nothing on the second floor that looks like a shaft. That same spot on the second floor is labeled an executive washroom.”

“So what?” I say. “It must go to the basement.”

“Why would you need a private elevator to go to the basement?” Jessica asks.

”How the hell should I know?”  I’m tired and grumpy.  Dealing with people downtown is has tried my patience. The caffeine is wearing off, and my head is thumping again.

The building blueprints show an empty space, about 20 feet on a side, with an elevator shaft dead-center against the south wall.  There’s one entrance - no windows, no closets, no offices.  “Is it me, or do these walls look thicker than normal?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Frank says.  “I noticed that.  They’re at least twice as thick as they should be.”

“Strange layout for an office,” Jessica says.  “It’s just an empty area.”

“Maybe they’re a phone support place and they need the thick walls to keep people from hearing the screams of the operators going insane,” I say.

“Yeah, a phone-support operation,” Jessica says.  “That explains why they had two guards.”

“Maybe they’re there to keep people from leaving,” I say.

“Did you see anyone else leaving?” Frank asks. “If it was quitting time, why didn’t anyone else leave?  And what kind of place employs just two guards to stand around in a room all day?  I’m telling you, something else is happening in that room.”

“Well,” says Eve, “we already knew that.”

Eve can move like a jungle cat when she wants to.  You’d think it would be difficult to miss a seven-foot-tall blonde bombshell, but she can sneak around like no one’s business.  One second there’s nothing, and the next second she’s right behind you.  I’m convinced it’s magic, but she swears up and down she learned how to do her stealthy entrances by reading a book on ninjas.

Must’ve been better than my ninja books.

“We know they’re hiding something.  It stands to reason they’d hide whatever it is someplace secure,” Eve says.  “Did I hear you say you only saw two people, guards, leave the place at 5?”

I nod. “There’s someone else in that room.  There must be,” I say.  “You don’t hire two guards to just hang out in a room.”

Although, I’ve seen government agencies do things almost as absurd.  One place I worked had a bomb shelter with a couple hundred cases of bottled water stocked away.  They had to completely restock the water annually, so once a year, everyone got a case or two of bottled water to get rid of the old and make room for the new.

“I asked around,” Eve tells us.  “No one knows for sure what’s going on, but everyone seems to agree that there’s another guard we haven’t seen yet.  No one’s seen him, except glimpses, in years.  He never leaves.”

“Job security,” Frank says.  “Gotta love it.”

“We should prepare for the worst,” I say.  “We’re assuming three guards, one of whom may or may not live there.  One of whom seems to have a taste for the Copper Lounge, and another who seems normal, but who we don’t know much about.”

Frank looks at me.  “Isn’t it a bit early to say the guy you saw leaving is a regular at a bar when you’ve only seen him go there once?  I mean, it takes more than one point to determine a line.”

“Jacob says he went straight to the bar,” I say.  “While it’s possible this was a fluke, guys like this are creatures of habit.”

“At any rate,” Jessica says, “it’s the only possible in we’ve got, so I say we take it.”

“Ok,” I say.  “What do we do?  Grab this guy and beat the shit out of him in the parking lot?”

“I have a better idea,” Eve tells us, “If Jessica doesn’t mind doing some dirty work.”

“You want me to seduce him, don’t you?” Jessica asks.

“Yes.  Yes, I do.” Eve says.  “I’d do it myself, but he’ll have a better reaction to you.  We’ll track him for a couple of days, see what we can find out, and then you meet him at the bar and pump him for information.  If he’s as pathetic as he seems it shouldn’t take much.  The rest of us will be in place for backup.  For added benefit,” she points at me, “you’re going to start a fight with this guy. And lose.”

At this point it’s probably a good idea for me to point out what seems obvious in hindsight, but is very difficult to remember in the moment: if a pretty girl starts hitting on you at a bar, and that sort of thing doesn’t happen to you much, you’re probably being set up for something.  Yes, even you.  This is an age-old technique for getting information out of men without having to resort to tedious things like torture.  There’s something in our genes that makes us stupid around women.  Spies have been doing this forever, and it’s one of the techniques that always works. All a female spy has to do is stroke that ego (with an implied promise of stroking something else), while she’s asking you questions about your work.  There’s even some actual science behind the process, albeit a simple science: start with small questions, things that don’t seem important, and gently work your way up.  Even if they don’t get everything they want, sometimes the small answers give up more information than you might think. 

There are other variations on this that work as well.  Someone meets you at a bar or a conference and pretends to be your best friend: laughs at your jokes, compliments you, etc.  Then that person will slowly pump you for information or, better yet, get you to join his or her friends at a larger table and they’ll all work you for information.  It’s human nature to want to share information, especially when that information seems trivial to us, and we seem to be impressing people with our answers.

Most people involved in the security world are well aware of these tactics, and are trained to be resistant to them. Unfortunately, when you’re in the moment it’s difficult, because it doesn’t seem like you’re being pumped for information.  Later that night you’ll wake up in a cold sweat and realize you just gave the keys to the kingdom to the Latvians, because that woman with nice breasts touched your arm and smiled at you.

Jessica shrugs. “Ok, no problem.  We actually had a class about this in college.  Maybe I’ll get some free drinks out of it.  Is he at least not totally hideous?”

“I’m not a great judge of these things,” I say, “but he wasn’t terrible.  He’s not exactly dreamy, but all his limbs are in place and he didn’t reek of anything other than desperation.  Should make it easier for you.”

Finally, Jacob gets back with the pizzas and, proving what a prince among men he really is, a case of decent beer.

Over the next couple of days we kept an eye on Brance.  He was at work at 8 a.m. sharp every morning, didn’t leave for lunch, left promptly at 5 p.m., and drove straight to the Copper Lounge. He always had two drinks at the bar, and then drove to his apartment off Yale, where he stayed inside for the rest of the night.  Like a lot of people, he’s fallen into a rhythm, and doesn’t even realize it.

Frank and Eve watched the Simms Building. Jacob followed Brance around. Jessica and I stayed out of sight.  Since she was going to seduce the guy, and I was going to get beat up by the guy, we needed to remain anonymous. We spent time playing poker, watching daytime T.V. and being bored.

On the second day, while I was reading some piece of dreck I’d stolen off the Internet, Jessica came in and plopped down on the bed.

“OK, I get why Jacob joined your little evil cabal: he hates the government, hates the restrictions, and watched ATF guys blow away a bunch of his friends.  Frank I get too - he’s spent most of his life hearing politicians tell everyone how gays are destroying everything from marriage to the Union itself,” she says.

“How’s Frank doing, by the way?  I haven’t seen much of him lately,” I ask.

“He’s devastated, but won’t admit it.  Why do guys do that?  Why can’t he just admit he misses Jean?  Eve said he cried on her shoulder for, like an hour last night.  This morning, nada.  It’s like it never happened.”

“Men are raised to not cry, not admit anything’s wrong,” I say.  “We’re told from a fairly young age to get over it and man up.  It’s a difficult cycle to break.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“It is what it is,” I tell her.

“Why is Eve so intent on hitting the government in the balls?  I’ve asked her, but she dodges the question.”

“I’m not completely certain since she’s never really opened up about that to anyone, but we got drunk one night, and she alluded to a couple of things,” I say.

“Like what?”

“She wants out.”

“Out of what?”

“I don’t know.  She was pretty ripped and just said, ‘I want out’,” I say.  “I never could figure out of what.”

“What else?” Jessica asks me.

“Well, I get the feeling she’s pretty old - hundred, hundred and fifty or so.  She talks about things that happened in the 1800s like they happened yesterday.

“Being a nearly seven-foot-tall woman couldn’t have helped, either.  She intimidates the hell out of most men.”

Jessica lays there thinking for a bit, staring at the ceiling.

“I never had a plan for my life,” she says.  “Everyone always tells you that you need to plot out what you’re going to do and you’ve got to follow this plan.  My mom always told me to get married, have kids - but I wasn’t interested in that.  I mean, look how her marriage turned out.  She drank herself to death my freshman year in college, because she didn’t understand what happened to my dad and blamed herself for it.  If she’d had a clue what actually happened to him, she probably would’ve drank herself to death much earlier.”

I let that soak in.  My mom’s still alive.  My dad died in a motorcycle accident years ago, but that’s better than being driven insane and left to wander Albuquerque in a drug-fueled haze.

“What did you want out of life?” she asks me.

“Same thing as every other guy,” I say, “a hot woman who’s into bondage and dressing like Velma.  Oh, and a fast car.”

Everyone deals with problems in their own way.  Some people completely break down; others go through a normal grief cycle and move on.  I try to use humor to laugh it off and act like it doesn’t actually bother me.  One of these days I’ll get around to grieving.

“Why not Daphne?” she asks me.

“Daphne was the pretty one, no doubt about it, but pretty only takes you so far.  At some point you need to actually talk to a woman, and Daphne never struck me as terribly interesting.”

“She didn’t seem like the brightest bulb on the marquee,” she agrees with me.  “I’ve known plenty of girls who felt being beautiful was the most important thing in the world, so it’s not just cartoon characters being nitwits.”

“I’ve met a lot of guys who would agree with you.  My own dad used to scope out college girls when he was in his late 40s.  I was visiting him once in college and pointed out some girl.  I tried to explain to him that I lived in New Mexico, and she lived in Phoenix.  You know what he told me?”

She shakes her head.

“He told me I was thinking ‘buy’ when I needed to think ‘rent.’”

She laughs.  “That sounds like good fatherly advice to me.  How did you wind up hooking up with these guys?” she asks me.

“I moved a chair,” I say.

“What?”

“I moved a chair.”

She stares at me.

“A few years ago my wife and son were killed.  Ever heard of Senator Lucius Bedfellow?  Sleazy guy, prided himself on always voting in a way that followed Biblical morals.”

She shakes her head, no.  That’s not really surprising.  How many people would you guess know who their own senators are, let alone the senators from another state? 

“His son was a real piece of shit, like most kids from rich, powerful families tend to turn out to be.  Into drugs, gambling, carousing - he had a couple of kids out of wedlock, but his daddy covered it all up.  Eventually the younger Bedfellow would’ve had a public mea culpa, and run for office, and probably won. 

Anyway, one day young Chet Bedfellow got his hands on bath salts – the kind you smoke, not the kind you take a bath with - and stole dad’s Ferrari to go for a joyride.  My wife was driving home, and Chet cut her off and caused a wreck.  He was so drugged up he got out of the car and started shooting.  Killed my wife and son.”

“Jesus, that’s terrible,” she says.

“It gets better.  Like all rich and powerful families, the Bedfellows had a history of covering things up.  They planted a gun, and made it look like my wife had started shooting and Chet was just protecting himself.  Chet got 90 days of drug rehab for a double homicide, and the Bedfellows poisoned my dogs to remind me not to fuck with them in the future.

“Senator Bedfellow himself used the incident to try to prove people needed guns to defend themselves, and the rest of Congress used it as some kind of political ammunition or another.  None of them gave a shit about what had actually happened they just knew they could use it to stay in power.  God forbid any of them have to get a real job.

“I waited patiently for six months or so, until Bedfellow scored a major victory, got a huge bribe and his family went on vacation without him.  During that time I kept my head low, and acted like the good little beaten-down peon everyone wanted me to be.  Like everything else, it all eventually blew over, and all the politicos moved on to the next media tragedy.

“One night when Bedfellow was alone, and I snuck into his house intending to shoot him in the face and disappear to Mexico.

“He lived in one of those huge houses up in High Desert where he could surround himself with other rich people, who would kiss his ass because of his position.  Houses are isolated from each other up there, because everyone wants their ‘space.’  Security is pretty minimal, because they all want their ’privacy.’  It was trivial to avoid the security, hop into his backyard, and loop the phone line so the alarms wouldn’t go off.  The back door was unlocked for some reason, so I waltzed in like I owned the place.

“His house was full of fine, if somewhat uninteresting, art and statues.  Nice kitchen - SubZero appliances and copper pots.  No one in his family knew a damn thing about cooking, though, because the kitchen was absolutely spotless, and the pots and pans absolutely shone, like they’d never been used.  I hate people like that.  How do you get through life never cooking?  And why the hell would you spend fifty grand on a kitchen that you never use?

“Anyway, the house was quiet and he wasn’t in his office - or in the gym, or the home theatre, or the study, or the living room.  I finally found him in the master bedroom.

“Did you know public speaking is the number one fear in this country?”

“I’d heard that somewhere,” she says.

“It’s true, people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death and this guy had to speak in front of Congress on a regular basis,” I say.

“What does this have to do with anything?” Jessica asks me.

“People do strange things to get over their fears.  I read an interview with a D.C. madam once, and she said most of her high-dollar politico clients were terrified of speaking in front of their peers. To get over the fear a lot of them would put on women’s underwear under their five-thousand-dollar suits whenever they had to give a speech.”

“Gross,” she tells me.

“Yeah, it probably helped them think they were pulling a fast one on each other, when in fact half of them were decked out in garter belts at any given time.

“So, back to Bedfellow.  I found Mr. Biblical Values standing on a chair, dressed in a corset, stockings, and bright-red high heels.  He had gagged himself with a big red ball gag, put a noose over his neck and cuffed himself with electronic hand cuffs.  He was standing there, masturbating,” I say.

“That sounds dangerous.  Isn’t that how the guy from INXS died?” she asks me.

“Yep,” I say. “Well, minus the lingerie and bondage gear.”

“What are electronic handcuffs?” She asks me.

“Someone figured out how to make a pair of cuffs with a timer in them for self-bondage.  Lock yourself in them, and you’re there until the timer runs out or the battery dies.”

“I was never into handcuffs,” she says.  “They’re too uncomfortable.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I prefer rope.  It’s easier to get off if something goes wrong.

“So, I walked in, planning on saying something pithy, and find this guy all trussed up.  I was so shocked, I just stood there and stared.  His eyes were huge and he was trying to talk to me but all that came out was ‘mumble mumble mumble’.”

“I started laughing, and he turned bright red and started to trying get the noose off, but couldn’t - because the cuffs wouldn’t let him reach around his neck and loosen the tie.  I stood there laughing at this guy, totally shocked. He kept getting more and more agitated, and his feet were slipping.  He started crying and snuffling, and since he’d gagged himself, he couldn’t breathe very well.

“Finally, I walked behind him and nudged the back of the chair with my hip. His feet slipped completely off the chair, and the noose tightened around his neck.

“I watched him turn purple and finally spasm and die.  He pissed all over the place when he finally died. I watched him the whole time and waved goodbye when the light finally faded from his eyes.

“The whole thing was kind of anti-climactic.  I’d spent months getting ready to pop this guy and disappear, and he had already done most of the work for me.  In fact, this was way better than I’d ever planned.”

“Damn,” Jessica says.  “How did Eve find you?”

“Oh, she and Frank were already there.  This was back when she was planning on taking Congress out one dipshit senator or representative at a time, so they’d already gone in, about a minute or so before me. That’s was why the door was unlocked.  Bedfellow was about as corrupt as a politician can be, and he was local, so they decided to hit him first.  When I turned around to leave, they were both there in the doorway watching.  I pulled out my pistol, guessing they were security. Eve held out her hand and said ‘Thank you,’ and offered me a job.”

“This is a job?” she asks.

“In a way, yes.  It’s not like I set out to be a henchman, and I can’t say it pays the bills, because I don’t really have any bills any more. It’s still an organization working toward a goal.”

“I always though henchmen were supposed to be big and dumb.  Expendable,” she says.

“I like to think of myself as big and dumb.”

Jessica laughs and looks like she wants to say something but decides not to.

“That’s the common way of looking at it,” I explain, “but Eve says she doesn’t want stupid people helping her because they tend to fuck it up too often.  She wants smart, capable people who can help her with her goals.”

“Why does Eve even need help?  She seems pretty capable.”