The Stickmen (5 page)

The downtown lunch-hour rush packed the
sidewalks and streets. Well-dressed men and women hustled through
the crowds for their power lunches. Car horns from slogged traffic
brayed like irate mechanical beasts. At the corner Garrett passed
an x-rated movie house and at the same time could see the Lincoln
Memorial in the distance. Skin flicks and politics all wrapped up
in the same charming city. He wondered if Abe was ever tempted to
get off his chair and check out the video selection.

After two more blocks, Garrett ducked into
his favorite watering hole, Benny’s Rebel Room. It used to be a
strip joint until the city counsel had revoked all their licenses
for a new business district. Stepping off the hot, humid street
into the tavern’s cool darkness felt like walking into a nicer
world.

“Harlan,” greeted Craig, the Rebel Room’s
co-owner and main barkeep. “Damn, I knew I should’ve locked the
door.”

“Good to see you too,” Garrett replied and
pulled up a stool.

Craig was proverbially polishing glasses
behind the long dark-wood bar top. “Isn’t it a little early to be
drinking even? Even for an AA reject like you?”

“I didn’t come here to drink, but since you
offered, gimme a beer.” Garrett stubbed out his cigarette, wincing.
“And how about a real cigarette? These generic things are killing
me.”

Craig slid him a beer and a cigarette.
“Anything else?”

“Yeah, the phone.”

“What, don’t you have a phone in that
gorilla cage you call an apartment?”

“Oh, there’s a phone there, all right,”
Garrett elaborated, “but it’s not much good when you don’t pay the
phone bill.”

“That’ll do it.” Craig sniffed. “You forget
to take a shower today?”

“Couldn’t pay the water bill either.”

“That’ll do it.” Craig slid Garrett the bar
phone. “Local calls only, my friend. You

tip like you pay your bills.”

Garrett dialed the number, waited, then
heard Jessica’s voice over the line:

“Hi, this is Jessica. I can’t come to the
phone right now, but please leave a message and I’ll return your
call. Unless this is Harlan, in which case I
won’t
return
your call even if you have suddenly become the last man on
earth.”

Garrett frowned through the beep. “Honey,
please
pick up. I know you’re there. We’ll work this out, I
promise. I miss you, I— I…you know, I
love
you—”

He hung up and the line went dead.

Craig was shaking his head, aligning
half-yard beer funnels in wooden racks. “Don’t tell me. The redhead
give you the heave-ho again?”

“Yeah, but she loves me,” Garrett assured.
“Give her a few days and she’ll be back on my doorstep, you
wait.”

“I’ll wait but I won’t hold my breath. You
ever think maybe she wants a guy with, you know, motivation,
responsibility, a solid career and direction in his life?”

Garrett looked up after his next sip of beer
which left a foamy mustache. “What am I, Santa Claus?” Then he
glanced despondently at the phone. “Look, Craig, how about break?
Just one long distance call to New York. I gotta really good job
cooking. No lie.”

“All right,” Craig groaned.

Garrett anxiously punched in the number that
he’d scrawled onto the back of a parking ticket, waited for the
line to connect.

“They Are Among Us Magazine,” a male voice
answered. “John Peters, Editor-in-Chief.”

Garrett perked up at once.
I got him!
Finally I got him!
“Mr. Peters, I’m sorry to disturb you, but
you may not remember me, we spoke at the Roswell Convention last
July?”

“Who is this?” the editor asked.

“Mr. Peters, I won the 1997 MUFON Award for
Best Investigative Series, and, sir, have I got a story for you.
Three interviews,
with
names and pictures, of former Army
Science and Research Command employees. I’ve got the
full
scoop,
the whole tamale, nailed. These three guys have agreed
to go public with their knowledge of black-funding research at Fort
Meade and NSA. They were all hired as channelers for remote-viewing
missions against Russian intelligence vaults in the
mid-Eighties.”

“Wow, that sounds very interesting,” the
editor remarked. “But…
who
is this?”

“Sir, these guys actually psychically
penetrated a Russian defense mainframe and the records safe at the
Moscow Academy of Sciences, not to mention—”

“Great, great, but
who are you?
”

“—not to mention ECM codes on a Soviet
Whiskey-Class sub, plus they’ve got actual hardcopy documents of
their Army protocol orders, and—”

The editor interrupted a final time. “This
wouldn’t be Harlan Garrett, would it?”

Garrett’s shoulders slumped. “Uh, yes, uh,
sir, it is I won the 1997 and I have three commendations from the
Northwest Geological Survey for assistance during their search
for—”

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Garrett,” the
editor posed. “Does the word ‘blackballed’ mean anything to you? Or
how about the phrase ‘your name is mud’? I wouldn’t touch an
article of yours with a ten-foot pole. You’re a walking libel
action. Any publication you write for winds up getting sued.”

“Hold on now, Mr. Peters,” Garrett
stammered. “I don’t think you realize the impact of my most recent
research. I’ve got it lock, stock, and barrel, sir: the tracking
photos, the names and the actual codes, the docu—”

click

Garrett hung up and let out a long sigh.
“Who needs your rag anyway?” he tried to justify. “They make up
more of their features than the damned
Weekly World
News.
”

Craig was screwing on a Scheidmantel Silber
Bock tap-head onto one of the keg levers. “Hey, Harlan, you want
some friendly advice?”

“No,” Garrett said.

“Get yourself squared away.”

“You sound just like Jessica… Too bad you
don’t
look
like Jessica.”

“You’re a smart guy, you’ve got marketable
skills. But…writing about all this ESP and UFO bunk? Come on.”

“It’s not
bunk
,” Garrett
objected.

“Oh, sorry. I meant
poop.
It’s stuff
in tabloids, Harlan. It’s fiction for gullible people who’ve got
nothing better to do with the lives that God gave them than worry
about government conspiracies and abominable goddamn snowmen. All
this
poop
you write about is nothing but a bunch of
modernized folklore
.”

Garrett glared. “These guys I interviewed
last week used to be psychic technicians—”

Craig grinned. “Psychic technicians. That’s
rich.”

“—for the Army. By using telethesic
perceptions, they can read files locked up in vaults 10,000 miles
away.”

“Telethesic perceptions. Every time you walk
in here, you’ve got a new one. And you really believe that? You
don’t, do you? Please tell me you don’t honestly believe that
psychic technicians
can see through vaults ten thousand
miles away by using their
telethesic perceptions
. Tell me,
Harlan.”

“Of course I believe it. When General
Dossier was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, these techs were the same
guys who used their
minds
to get the address of the house he
was being held hostage at. I
know
it’s true. I saw the D-O-D
documents verifying it.”

Craig began to chuckle outright. “Yeah? And
today in the
Globe
I saw a photo of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse…in Arizona. Harlan, you’re losing it. You’re getting too
caught up in this stuff. Jesus, last month you were telling me that
‘government operatives’ were tapping your phones.”

“They were, and camphoring my mail too, and
tailing me. They put a direction-finder on my car, for Christ’s
sake!”

Craig just kept chuckling, just kept shaking
his head. “You know, Harlan, it’s really easy to see why the
redhead dumped you and your wife divorced your butt. I mean, no
offense, but…you’re crazier than a shit-house rat.”

Garrett winced over his beer. “No offense
taken, Craig, good buddy old pal. Oh, and fuck you very much. No
offense.”

««—»»

The maid’s name was Lynn but she wasn’t
really a maid. She looked like one, though, in the short black
gathered skirt with white trim, the serving apron, and the puffed
laced-cuffed sleeves. She was dressed exactly like the real maids
at this four-star hotel, and she’d even taken an occupational
familiarization class back at the Center.
Well, at least I know
I’ll be able to get a job here if Clinton cuts the C.I.R. budget
again.
She opened the door to Room 3112 and called out:

“Housekeeping! Anyone here?”

Several moments passed, and her inquiry was
not answered.

Thank God.
She closed the door, then
touched the tiny wireless earphone.

Myers’ gruff voice instantly responded.
“Thermograph’s clear. You’re the only one in the room—”

“Jack the nanos to 365 and start a lateral
cross-matrix sweep,” Lynn whispered. “The clock’s ticking.”

“Relax. The apex should find this baby in
about two seconds.”

Officially, Myers was brass, a SCD—Senior
Case Director—but when he got bored, which was most of the time,
he’d go on field assignments and run tech duties. Right now he was
communicating to Lynn from a loaded surveillance van parked thirty
stories down across the street. Parlance referred to these vans as
“Junk Boxes,” and the junk they contained were devices such as
cadmium thermographic processors, acoustic noise generators,
tri-point ultra-low-frequency radar, UV, IR, and passive zero-light
scopes, and about $10,000,000 worth of assorted other covert and
privacy-violating government trinkets.

At this moment, Lynn was walking around the
room in a manner that would appear normal in the event that hotel
security had a video in the room; she was dusting, in fact. Pinned
to her white-lace collar, however, was a 22mm digital wide-angle
lens which piped half-second digitizations back to Myers in the
van.

“Got it, Lynn,” Myers confirmed into her
earphone. “Check the night stand. Under that…thingie there.”

Thingie,
she thought. He meant the
doily. Lynn approached the nightstand, leaned over, and flipped up
the doily.
That’s about the worst hiding job I’ve ever seen.
Beneath the doily lay a silver-dollar-sized optical computer disk
in a plastic sheath. Lynn slipped it into her maid’s apron and
quickly replaced it with an identical disk, all the while still
pretending to dust.
I’m out of here,
she thought.
Thank
you, Mr. Scammell.

She began to wheel her cart toward the door,
but stopped, alarmed. The doorknob began to rattle; an instant
later the door swung wide. Standing there facing her now was their
target: one J.M. Scammell, a bald fat pock-marked scumbag in a
Brooks Brothers suit. Scammell was a simple private-sector courier
but these days couriers were paid very well considering the
potential worth of their deliveries.

“Oh, hello, sir,” Lynn managed without a
start. “I was just finishing up cleaning your room.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Scammell
said.

“I’ll just be on my way now.”

Scammell nodded and proceeded into the room
just as Lynn would push her cart out and leave.
God, that was
close,
she thought. “I hope you enjoy your stay, sir,” she
added.

“Stop!” Scammell said.

Lynn froze in the doorway, behind the
cleaning cart.
He must’ve made me! Did I forget to fold the
doily back over?
As she slowly turned back around, her hand
crept for her apron pocket, for her 4mm flechette pistol.

“What kind of a maid are you?” Scammell
griped. “Did you even
look
in the bathroom? How about some
fresh towels? How about cleaning the mirror? And—

come on! You didn’t even empty the
wastebaskets!”

“Sorry, sir,” Lynn peeped back, relieved.
“I’ll get right on it.”

Scammell stood tapping his foot for the next
twenty minutes, his arms crossed as he sternly watched Lynn clean
the room. Lynn felt humiliated…but at least she hadn’t been “made.”
Over her earphone, she could hear Myers laughing: “Looks like
Scammell’s pillows could use a fluffing too. Yeah, and Lynn? How
about giving the toilet a quick scrub, huh? We want our customers
to come back, don’t we?”

That’s real funny, Myers,
she
thought, bending over to grab some fresh towels.

««—»»

Lynn, now wearing an overcoat, approached
the WASHINGTON GAS & ELECTRIC truck on the other side of P
Street. She entered through the back door into the hardware bay
where Myers sat in his padded chair before ranks of display
terminals and surveillance apparatus. He was pink in the face from
laughing.

“Real funny,” Lynn said.

“See all the great things you get to do in
this job?” Myers said. He looked more like an over-the-hill high
school principal than a decorated technistics chief. Mid-50s, cheap
suit and tie, gray hair and a perennially bad haircut. “You get to
plant bugs, blackmail double-agents, put spies away for
life…
and
wipe toothpaste specks off mirrors!” Myers, then,
broke into more laughter.

Lynn frowned. “Laugh it up, Myers, but I’ll
bet I made more money than you did today.”

“How’s that?”

Lynn whipped out two fifty-dollar bills. “I
did such a good job cleaning the room, Scammell tipped me.” She
waved the bills in front of Myers.

“That’s an unauthorized gratuity,” Myers
reminded. “You have to turn it in to the finance-control
office.”

Lynn gave one of the fifties to Myers.

“Like I just said,” Myers commented.
“
Fuck
the finance-control office.”

“I thought that’s what you said.” Next, Lynn
gave him the tiny optical disk she’d swiped from Scammell’s hotel
room.