The Gatekeeper, page 15
Dez thinks about it. He could give her a flippant answer, but he won’t. He could dodge the question as none of her business, but he shouldn’t. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can put the words pediatric and oncology in the same sentence. I’m sorry. But if there’s a higher being, I fear he’s drunk an’ mean. And I’d rather imagine no higher being than that one.”
Renata Esquivel nods, understanding. She says, “I believe in God. I’ll pray for you.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take it, and be glad for it.”
Dez leaves Renata and Hector Esquivel in their modest clapboard house. He’s tempted to tell them to flee but he doesn’t.
They won’t.
Dez walks back to the fairgrounds and collects his stolen Ford pickup. Then he drives toward the Triton Expediters server farm on the north side of town.
CHAPTER 42
Joint Base McKinzie-Clark
General William Tancredi is in his office, as head of the dilapidated, soon-to-be BRAC’d military base. He’s on the phone getting an update from the Pentagon regarding the murder of Navy Secretary Admiral Gerald Lighthouse.
“Lighthouse was asking about your base out there,” the caller says.
“How far did his questions get him?”
“Unknown. I’ve bottled it up, for now. But you need to move quickly. You do not have unlimited time.”
“Well, thank you for whatever time you’ve bought us,” Tancredi says. “Things are ready on our end. Our guests are almost here.”
They talk a bit more and hang up.
Tancredi is sixty, a short and stocky pit bull of a man, military haircut, and not popular within the Army. Investigations at his last two commands into sexual assault and theft of Army materiel torpedoed his career. Command of a fleabag base, destined to be shut down, is the best he could have hoped for until retirement.
Retirement is Tancredi’s plan, as far as the Army knows.
William Tancredi has other options up his sleeve.
He’s watched this once-great nation fall apart, under attack from leftists and communists, crime and drugs, an unparalleled invasion by illegals. By abortion and the unchurching of the American populous. By the emasculation of every male role model. Most recently, an African sleeper agent actually made it to the White House. There’s almost no America left anymore.
Tancredi wants to do something about all that.
He uses a dedicated website created by one of his coconspirators and initiates a three-way conference call with the two people into whom he’s poured a great deal of trust.
Oliver Lantree, one of his coconspirators, is only miles away, on the west side of Highway 1, in the town of Sloatville. He’s been doing his job and doing it brilliantly for months now. The powder keg is primed.
His other partner is in an office in Los Angeles. Hawthorne, California, to be exact.
There’s a knock at the door and General Tancredi knows who it is before growling, “Come!”
It’s Captain Bart Weaver, barely recognizable in his full, bushy beard, civilian clothes, and Red Wings cap. The captain has been deployed to the Ryerson Ranch under the false name of Jones, or Jonesy, for the past month. But his work there is done. His left forearm is wrapped in gauze.
Oliver Lantree takes up half the screen on General Tancredi’s computer. Their partner in Hawthorne takes up the other half.
“The Pentagon is sniffing around,” Tancredi says. “They know zip. That won’t last.”
“Things are coming to a head here,” Oliver Lantree says. He’s barely fifty years old, fit, and recently cultivated a Southern drawl for his ascent to the top of the polls in conservative media circles. He attended Harvard and lived for half his life in New England, but doesn’t want people to know that. He’s excessively rich, even by American standards, and doesn’t want people to know that, either.
“Good Americans are pouring in. Pouring,” he drawls. “I admit to bouts of pessimism, friends. Not today. Not today.”
“We have some … loose ends here,” says their coconspirator in Hawthorne. “The faster we move, the better.”
General Tancredi glances at Captain Weaver, who nods once.
“We’re set at this end. Let’s say … tomorrow?”
Lantree says, “Indeed. Tomorrow.”
The third party on the call says, “Tomorrow,” and disconnects.
When she’s gone, Oliver Lantree says, “Can we trust her?”
“We won’t have to for long,” Tancredi says. “Her usefulness is coming to an end.”
He disconnects. Then turns to Captain Weaver.
“Trouble?”
“Two guys down,” Weaver says, standing at parade rest. “In town. They said they were attacked by a bulky guy with an English accent.”
Tancredi rubs his temples, feeling a headache ratchet up. “The same asshole who was at the Tremaine.”
“And who attacked our men on the highway, and those guys in Los Alamitos,” Weaver says. “For sure.”
“Who is he?”
“Don’t know yet, sir. He’s trained. Special Forces? Someone Admiral Lighthouse sent?”
“Maybe,” Tancredi says, pulling on his lower lip. “Find the son of a bitch.”
“I’ve got everyone looking for him, sir.”
Tancredi nods and Weaver exits.
He’s got some hunting to do.
CHAPTER 43
Petra Alexandris is stalking through the halls of Triton Expediters global headquarters when her phone vibrates. It’s Dez.
She slips into an unused conference room. “Chef?”
“It’s bonkers up here,” he says without preamble. “You should see the place. Lunacy.”
“It’s not noticeably better here. I’ve been meeting with my father, Colin, and Brittany. Since I don’t know who I can trust, we’re tracking through all of the evidence of the theft together. I know more than they—presumably. If any one of them tries to hide evidence or obfuscate, I’ll know.”
He can hear the worry in her voice. He says, “Lovely word, obfuscate. From the Latin, meaning dark. Jaysus but you’re a posh bit.”
Despite everything, he makes her smile. “Yes, I am. Are you being careful?”
“No.” Why lie? “But I’m making headway.”
“Then you’re alone. Would you believe, this day of all days, Dmytro Rudko is in Los Angeles? Holy hell.”
“An’ who’s that, then?”
“Russian ambassador to the UN. Triton does a lot of business with Russia. He wants to talk. I can’t blow him off.”
“Let the record show that it was Ms. Alexandris, and not I, who uttered the words blow him. I myself am far too gentlemanly to suggest anything of the sort.”
She laughs. “Would that it were so easy. No, I have to go talk business with him. This slows everything down on my end.”
“No worries,” Dez says. “Plenty to do here. Who knows? Might even get interesting.”
CHAPTER 44
Dez needs to meet this Oliver Lantree fella. He’s never before met a media star. The guy was here, stirring up trouble before trouble itself arrived. Lantree is one of the people behind this thing. Dez is sure.
He cruises past the Triton Expediters server farm and sees three micro- wave trucks out front. Two of their long, extendable necks are down, one of them giraffed up, and a pretty blond thing is doing a stand-up with the Patriot Media logo on the side of the van, right behind her very, very feathered hair.
Two other guys are unpacking cases of water and grocery bags from the back of an SUV, carrying them in.
Dez spots soldiers and a government-issued Humvee. He’s not ready to meet any real soldiers just yet. So it’s time for subterfuge. Dez enjoys himself some subterfuge.
The server farm draws vast quantities of ocean water for coolant, and the town of Sloatville is on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It’s the only beach town he’s seen in California without a decent beach. Dez isn’t clear why anyone started a town here on this boil on the buttocks of the planet. There had to be some attraction. Dez doesn’t see it.
He parks the stolen F-250 near the cliffs and legs his way down to the beach, using waxy weeds as handholds so he doesn’t drop ass-over-teakettle to the rocks below. It’s slow going.
When he gets to the rocky edge of the Pacific, he walks north until he comes to a gated-off sector and a massive pipe that runs from the ocean, turns ninety degrees, and runs straight up the cliff face, before turning another ninety degrees. A tin sign on the fence says TRITON ENVIRONMENTAL INC.—A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF TRITON EXPEDITERS.
If you’re a gatekeeper, padlocks are like doors. Each represents a challenge, a fun little puzzle. Dez keeps lockpicks in the sheath that holds his folding knife. The padlock on the pipe facility is massive and iron. The size of a lock does not reflect the complexity of the mechanism. He picks it in under five seconds.
Once inside the paddock, he can see that the massive pipe has been secured to the rock face with bolts driven into the cliff. Perfect. They make ideal hand- and footholds.
He looks around to make sure no one’s watching. He spots a mega- yacht perched a kilometer off the coast. Too far away to keep an eye on a dull old pipe, that’s for sure. The yacht has a tall conning tower and a helipad but no helicopter. Even at this distance, he can spot a bikini and a long cascade of blond hair on the foredeck. The rich never fail to amuse Dez.
Dez adjusts the guns and the knife clipped to his belt, then begins climbing.
It’s a fifty-foot climb, using only the hex nuts screwed into the bolts driven into the rock face. He has good boots, Wolverines, which have served him well.
He’s caked in sweat and dust by the time he reaches the top.
The water pipe dives into a metal housing, ten meters from the edge of the cliff, and Dez uses that as cover, to rest and get his breath back. He’s leaning against it, forearms on his raised knees, feeling his lungs expand and contract. Since meeting Petra Alexandris, Dez has missed a couple of trips to the gym. On the other hand, her calisthenics in bed probably helped increase his lung capacity.
The server farm is an ugly one-story building with no aesthetics to speak of. It was constructed to house a bunch of computers, and the computers sure don’t care what the building looked like. Not too many windows; in fact, none back here. The roof is a ragtag jumble of air-conditioning and ventilation mechanics: ripples of heat emanate from them. Also, four huge radar dishes, all facing south.
Dez rises and sprints to the edge of the building, sitting again. He hasn’t drawn a weapon. Truth be told, he doesn’t much trust the two guns he took off the fellas at the police station, because he hasn’t disassembled them and cleaned them. Mostly, they were for show while walking around Sloatville.
There’s a maintenance door back here. Dez draws his lockpicks. Beginnings and gates. Transitions and time. Duality and doors. Passages and endings. He glances at the tattoo of Janus and makes easy work of the door.
Inside, he decides to brazen it. He finds a bathroom and gets the dust and sweat off him. Then he stands tall, walks the halls, smiles at whoever he sees. He passes maybe a dozen people. He nods. They nod back. He’s a white guy with guns. This is RacismLand. He passes a locked room marked ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS.
The building is hot and humid. All the ocean water and all the HVAC in the world can’t stop that. It’s about 80 percent computers, full rooms of standing mainframe arrays.
Patriot Media folks have set up shop in the front. They’ve created a broadcast room out of a reception area, with automatic, robotic cameras, and a big desk with the Patriot logo, and a green screen behind it. Dez peers through a horizontal window in the door and watches two presenters—anchors, they’d call them here—talking. Dez wonders what the home audience sees on the green screen. All he sees is, well, green.
“Help you?”
It’s a guy with a walrus mustache and a considerable gut. He’s mostly bald, with a ring of gray hair that he wears in a ponytail. He’s carrying an old-style, long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver in a lovingly designed holster on his belt, wearing it up front for a cross-body draw.
Dez says, “Model 19 Classic. Very nice.”
Walrus Mustache just nods. The mustache itself nods for a half second after his head stops moving.
“Supposed to see Mr. Lantree.”
“He’s in the office over there.” Walrus Mustache gestures to the left. “Where you from?”
“Auckland. Pearl of the Pacific. Me sister was Miss Auckland, two years runnin’.”
More guys who look like soldiers in civilian garb arrive. Walrus Mustache says, “Whatever, man,” and gestures to his left again before wandering off.
Dez heads the way he was instructed. He sees an office and, outside it, a guy with a full, bushy beard and a Detroit Red Wings hat. The guy says, “Help you?”
“Supposed t’see Mr. Lantree.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“New Caledonia. Pearl of the Pacific.”
“He’s this way,” the guy says. He opens the office door and, as Dez passes through, he presses a Taser against Dez’s lower back.
Dez spasms and falls to the floor.
The guy kneels and hits him with the Taser again.
Dez blacks out.
CHAPTER 45
Dez is handcuffed and taken out of the building by several largish guys. He’s placed in the back of a truck. He’s hit with the Taser a couple more times. It hurts like hell. His phone, the guns he stole, and his folding knife are taken. Though not the olive green, belt-clip knife sheath.
Two guys, including the tall, bearded man in the red ball cap, sit with him the entire trip.
Dez recognizes the truck. Americans call it a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, or MTVR, series. Because Americans are nuts for abbreviations and fancy names. It’s an all-purpose-designed truck; simple as that.
He doesn’t know where they’re going but they leave town pretty soon. He can tell by the sound.
Dez lies doggo. You can learn more that way. Then again, you also can get driven to a shallow grave in the desert that way. Life is not without risks.
* * *
The road noises change from urban sounds, to highway sounds, to the sounds of a more isolated road. Dez hears a guard at a gate asking for ID, then the lifting of a guardrail. He’s pretty sure they’ve taken him to Joint Base McKinzie-Clark.
Okay, well, he wanted an invite there anyway.
Dez is hustled out of the military truck and squints at the bright sun. Yes, this is an American military base. It has most definitely seen better days. The place was last remodeled in 1960, he suspects. It’s also fairly bustling but the men he sees don’t look like regulation soldiers. He thinks a lot of the white pride types have been given billeting here on the base. The fairgrounds he saw earlier might simply be the slop-over for whoever couldn’t fit in here. Which means the number of people in the opposition is much higher than he realized.
He spots the driver: the walrus mustache and ponytail he met earlier, who gives him a long look.
He’s marched by the two armed guys into a stockade. A third man waits inside, jail door open. Dez is shoved in and the door is locked in his wake. It’s a basic cinder-block building, with four sets of cells sectioned off by simple iron bars. Each cell has a cot and a sink and a coverless toilet made of metal. Each cell has a small window, eight feet off the floor and too small for any but the youngest child to crawl through. Each cell has a drain, and the floors slope toward the drains. It’s utilitarian as hell. Dez has been in far worse.
“If you think the Sloatville Chamber of Commerce isn’t going to get an earful about this…”
The men stand guard, do not take any bait from him. They’re professionals, these three. Dez stops trying to razz them. The tall fella with the red ball cap speaks to someone on a walkie-talkie. When he does, Dez notices his left forearm wrapped in a stretch bandage. That clicks a memory. He’s seen the tall guy before. He just can’t remember where. It’ll come to him.
A man enters wearing the standard Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP, uniform. Anywhere else in the world, and they’d be called fatigues. Americans and their acronyms. U.S. ARMY is stenciled over his left breast, TANCREDI over his right, and he sports a patch with three stars. This is the general in charge of the base, Dez suspects. His uniform is not immaculate: a little rumpled, a little wash-grayed, one collar stay missing. Dez has rarely been around anyone with the rank of general who didn’t present himself or herself in a manner that demands respect. The general in charge of Joint Base McKinzie-Clark—and Dez assumes this is he—is having a bad year.
“This is him, Captain?” The general addresses the tall man with the red cap.
Captain, Dez notes.
“Sir. His name is Limerick.”
Now, that is interesting. Dez has a fake California driver’s license, given to him by his Ethiopian friend, Ephrem Kebede, when his crew repainted and relicensed the stolen F-250. The license has a fake name. So how is it the captain knows his real name?
Dez remembers reading off his name and basic information to the three men in shackles, in the back of the military prisoner transport vehicle with no tires. It’s possible this captain gained access to them. But not likely; after the aborted jailbreak, those guys are being held in maximum security.
Which suggests the captain learned of Dez’s background through some other means.
The general studies him. “Who sent you?”
Dez has had no luck razzing the captain and the other soldiers, but the general seems a little tightly wound, a little fractious. So Dez responds, not to the general, but to the captain in the red cap. “Working with the legal counsel of Triton Expediters, Captain. She tasked me with finding out what’s going on up here.”
His response, the snub of addressing the junior officer, annoys the general. “We know about Petra Alexandris. She’s been accounted for.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can put the words pediatric and oncology in the same sentence. I’m sorry. But if there’s a higher being, I fear he’s drunk an’ mean. And I’d rather imagine no higher being than that one.”
Renata Esquivel nods, understanding. She says, “I believe in God. I’ll pray for you.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take it, and be glad for it.”
Dez leaves Renata and Hector Esquivel in their modest clapboard house. He’s tempted to tell them to flee but he doesn’t.
They won’t.
Dez walks back to the fairgrounds and collects his stolen Ford pickup. Then he drives toward the Triton Expediters server farm on the north side of town.
CHAPTER 42
Joint Base McKinzie-Clark
General William Tancredi is in his office, as head of the dilapidated, soon-to-be BRAC’d military base. He’s on the phone getting an update from the Pentagon regarding the murder of Navy Secretary Admiral Gerald Lighthouse.
“Lighthouse was asking about your base out there,” the caller says.
“How far did his questions get him?”
“Unknown. I’ve bottled it up, for now. But you need to move quickly. You do not have unlimited time.”
“Well, thank you for whatever time you’ve bought us,” Tancredi says. “Things are ready on our end. Our guests are almost here.”
They talk a bit more and hang up.
Tancredi is sixty, a short and stocky pit bull of a man, military haircut, and not popular within the Army. Investigations at his last two commands into sexual assault and theft of Army materiel torpedoed his career. Command of a fleabag base, destined to be shut down, is the best he could have hoped for until retirement.
Retirement is Tancredi’s plan, as far as the Army knows.
William Tancredi has other options up his sleeve.
He’s watched this once-great nation fall apart, under attack from leftists and communists, crime and drugs, an unparalleled invasion by illegals. By abortion and the unchurching of the American populous. By the emasculation of every male role model. Most recently, an African sleeper agent actually made it to the White House. There’s almost no America left anymore.
Tancredi wants to do something about all that.
He uses a dedicated website created by one of his coconspirators and initiates a three-way conference call with the two people into whom he’s poured a great deal of trust.
Oliver Lantree, one of his coconspirators, is only miles away, on the west side of Highway 1, in the town of Sloatville. He’s been doing his job and doing it brilliantly for months now. The powder keg is primed.
His other partner is in an office in Los Angeles. Hawthorne, California, to be exact.
There’s a knock at the door and General Tancredi knows who it is before growling, “Come!”
It’s Captain Bart Weaver, barely recognizable in his full, bushy beard, civilian clothes, and Red Wings cap. The captain has been deployed to the Ryerson Ranch under the false name of Jones, or Jonesy, for the past month. But his work there is done. His left forearm is wrapped in gauze.
Oliver Lantree takes up half the screen on General Tancredi’s computer. Their partner in Hawthorne takes up the other half.
“The Pentagon is sniffing around,” Tancredi says. “They know zip. That won’t last.”
“Things are coming to a head here,” Oliver Lantree says. He’s barely fifty years old, fit, and recently cultivated a Southern drawl for his ascent to the top of the polls in conservative media circles. He attended Harvard and lived for half his life in New England, but doesn’t want people to know that. He’s excessively rich, even by American standards, and doesn’t want people to know that, either.
“Good Americans are pouring in. Pouring,” he drawls. “I admit to bouts of pessimism, friends. Not today. Not today.”
“We have some … loose ends here,” says their coconspirator in Hawthorne. “The faster we move, the better.”
General Tancredi glances at Captain Weaver, who nods once.
“We’re set at this end. Let’s say … tomorrow?”
Lantree says, “Indeed. Tomorrow.”
The third party on the call says, “Tomorrow,” and disconnects.
When she’s gone, Oliver Lantree says, “Can we trust her?”
“We won’t have to for long,” Tancredi says. “Her usefulness is coming to an end.”
He disconnects. Then turns to Captain Weaver.
“Trouble?”
“Two guys down,” Weaver says, standing at parade rest. “In town. They said they were attacked by a bulky guy with an English accent.”
Tancredi rubs his temples, feeling a headache ratchet up. “The same asshole who was at the Tremaine.”
“And who attacked our men on the highway, and those guys in Los Alamitos,” Weaver says. “For sure.”
“Who is he?”
“Don’t know yet, sir. He’s trained. Special Forces? Someone Admiral Lighthouse sent?”
“Maybe,” Tancredi says, pulling on his lower lip. “Find the son of a bitch.”
“I’ve got everyone looking for him, sir.”
Tancredi nods and Weaver exits.
He’s got some hunting to do.
CHAPTER 43
Petra Alexandris is stalking through the halls of Triton Expediters global headquarters when her phone vibrates. It’s Dez.
She slips into an unused conference room. “Chef?”
“It’s bonkers up here,” he says without preamble. “You should see the place. Lunacy.”
“It’s not noticeably better here. I’ve been meeting with my father, Colin, and Brittany. Since I don’t know who I can trust, we’re tracking through all of the evidence of the theft together. I know more than they—presumably. If any one of them tries to hide evidence or obfuscate, I’ll know.”
He can hear the worry in her voice. He says, “Lovely word, obfuscate. From the Latin, meaning dark. Jaysus but you’re a posh bit.”
Despite everything, he makes her smile. “Yes, I am. Are you being careful?”
“No.” Why lie? “But I’m making headway.”
“Then you’re alone. Would you believe, this day of all days, Dmytro Rudko is in Los Angeles? Holy hell.”
“An’ who’s that, then?”
“Russian ambassador to the UN. Triton does a lot of business with Russia. He wants to talk. I can’t blow him off.”
“Let the record show that it was Ms. Alexandris, and not I, who uttered the words blow him. I myself am far too gentlemanly to suggest anything of the sort.”
She laughs. “Would that it were so easy. No, I have to go talk business with him. This slows everything down on my end.”
“No worries,” Dez says. “Plenty to do here. Who knows? Might even get interesting.”
CHAPTER 44
Dez needs to meet this Oliver Lantree fella. He’s never before met a media star. The guy was here, stirring up trouble before trouble itself arrived. Lantree is one of the people behind this thing. Dez is sure.
He cruises past the Triton Expediters server farm and sees three micro- wave trucks out front. Two of their long, extendable necks are down, one of them giraffed up, and a pretty blond thing is doing a stand-up with the Patriot Media logo on the side of the van, right behind her very, very feathered hair.
Two other guys are unpacking cases of water and grocery bags from the back of an SUV, carrying them in.
Dez spots soldiers and a government-issued Humvee. He’s not ready to meet any real soldiers just yet. So it’s time for subterfuge. Dez enjoys himself some subterfuge.
The server farm draws vast quantities of ocean water for coolant, and the town of Sloatville is on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It’s the only beach town he’s seen in California without a decent beach. Dez isn’t clear why anyone started a town here on this boil on the buttocks of the planet. There had to be some attraction. Dez doesn’t see it.
He parks the stolen F-250 near the cliffs and legs his way down to the beach, using waxy weeds as handholds so he doesn’t drop ass-over-teakettle to the rocks below. It’s slow going.
When he gets to the rocky edge of the Pacific, he walks north until he comes to a gated-off sector and a massive pipe that runs from the ocean, turns ninety degrees, and runs straight up the cliff face, before turning another ninety degrees. A tin sign on the fence says TRITON ENVIRONMENTAL INC.—A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF TRITON EXPEDITERS.
If you’re a gatekeeper, padlocks are like doors. Each represents a challenge, a fun little puzzle. Dez keeps lockpicks in the sheath that holds his folding knife. The padlock on the pipe facility is massive and iron. The size of a lock does not reflect the complexity of the mechanism. He picks it in under five seconds.
Once inside the paddock, he can see that the massive pipe has been secured to the rock face with bolts driven into the cliff. Perfect. They make ideal hand- and footholds.
He looks around to make sure no one’s watching. He spots a mega- yacht perched a kilometer off the coast. Too far away to keep an eye on a dull old pipe, that’s for sure. The yacht has a tall conning tower and a helipad but no helicopter. Even at this distance, he can spot a bikini and a long cascade of blond hair on the foredeck. The rich never fail to amuse Dez.
Dez adjusts the guns and the knife clipped to his belt, then begins climbing.
It’s a fifty-foot climb, using only the hex nuts screwed into the bolts driven into the rock face. He has good boots, Wolverines, which have served him well.
He’s caked in sweat and dust by the time he reaches the top.
The water pipe dives into a metal housing, ten meters from the edge of the cliff, and Dez uses that as cover, to rest and get his breath back. He’s leaning against it, forearms on his raised knees, feeling his lungs expand and contract. Since meeting Petra Alexandris, Dez has missed a couple of trips to the gym. On the other hand, her calisthenics in bed probably helped increase his lung capacity.
The server farm is an ugly one-story building with no aesthetics to speak of. It was constructed to house a bunch of computers, and the computers sure don’t care what the building looked like. Not too many windows; in fact, none back here. The roof is a ragtag jumble of air-conditioning and ventilation mechanics: ripples of heat emanate from them. Also, four huge radar dishes, all facing south.
Dez rises and sprints to the edge of the building, sitting again. He hasn’t drawn a weapon. Truth be told, he doesn’t much trust the two guns he took off the fellas at the police station, because he hasn’t disassembled them and cleaned them. Mostly, they were for show while walking around Sloatville.
There’s a maintenance door back here. Dez draws his lockpicks. Beginnings and gates. Transitions and time. Duality and doors. Passages and endings. He glances at the tattoo of Janus and makes easy work of the door.
Inside, he decides to brazen it. He finds a bathroom and gets the dust and sweat off him. Then he stands tall, walks the halls, smiles at whoever he sees. He passes maybe a dozen people. He nods. They nod back. He’s a white guy with guns. This is RacismLand. He passes a locked room marked ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS.
The building is hot and humid. All the ocean water and all the HVAC in the world can’t stop that. It’s about 80 percent computers, full rooms of standing mainframe arrays.
Patriot Media folks have set up shop in the front. They’ve created a broadcast room out of a reception area, with automatic, robotic cameras, and a big desk with the Patriot logo, and a green screen behind it. Dez peers through a horizontal window in the door and watches two presenters—anchors, they’d call them here—talking. Dez wonders what the home audience sees on the green screen. All he sees is, well, green.
“Help you?”
It’s a guy with a walrus mustache and a considerable gut. He’s mostly bald, with a ring of gray hair that he wears in a ponytail. He’s carrying an old-style, long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver in a lovingly designed holster on his belt, wearing it up front for a cross-body draw.
Dez says, “Model 19 Classic. Very nice.”
Walrus Mustache just nods. The mustache itself nods for a half second after his head stops moving.
“Supposed to see Mr. Lantree.”
“He’s in the office over there.” Walrus Mustache gestures to the left. “Where you from?”
“Auckland. Pearl of the Pacific. Me sister was Miss Auckland, two years runnin’.”
More guys who look like soldiers in civilian garb arrive. Walrus Mustache says, “Whatever, man,” and gestures to his left again before wandering off.
Dez heads the way he was instructed. He sees an office and, outside it, a guy with a full, bushy beard and a Detroit Red Wings hat. The guy says, “Help you?”
“Supposed t’see Mr. Lantree.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“New Caledonia. Pearl of the Pacific.”
“He’s this way,” the guy says. He opens the office door and, as Dez passes through, he presses a Taser against Dez’s lower back.
Dez spasms and falls to the floor.
The guy kneels and hits him with the Taser again.
Dez blacks out.
CHAPTER 45
Dez is handcuffed and taken out of the building by several largish guys. He’s placed in the back of a truck. He’s hit with the Taser a couple more times. It hurts like hell. His phone, the guns he stole, and his folding knife are taken. Though not the olive green, belt-clip knife sheath.
Two guys, including the tall, bearded man in the red ball cap, sit with him the entire trip.
Dez recognizes the truck. Americans call it a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, or MTVR, series. Because Americans are nuts for abbreviations and fancy names. It’s an all-purpose-designed truck; simple as that.
He doesn’t know where they’re going but they leave town pretty soon. He can tell by the sound.
Dez lies doggo. You can learn more that way. Then again, you also can get driven to a shallow grave in the desert that way. Life is not without risks.
* * *
The road noises change from urban sounds, to highway sounds, to the sounds of a more isolated road. Dez hears a guard at a gate asking for ID, then the lifting of a guardrail. He’s pretty sure they’ve taken him to Joint Base McKinzie-Clark.
Okay, well, he wanted an invite there anyway.
Dez is hustled out of the military truck and squints at the bright sun. Yes, this is an American military base. It has most definitely seen better days. The place was last remodeled in 1960, he suspects. It’s also fairly bustling but the men he sees don’t look like regulation soldiers. He thinks a lot of the white pride types have been given billeting here on the base. The fairgrounds he saw earlier might simply be the slop-over for whoever couldn’t fit in here. Which means the number of people in the opposition is much higher than he realized.
He spots the driver: the walrus mustache and ponytail he met earlier, who gives him a long look.
He’s marched by the two armed guys into a stockade. A third man waits inside, jail door open. Dez is shoved in and the door is locked in his wake. It’s a basic cinder-block building, with four sets of cells sectioned off by simple iron bars. Each cell has a cot and a sink and a coverless toilet made of metal. Each cell has a small window, eight feet off the floor and too small for any but the youngest child to crawl through. Each cell has a drain, and the floors slope toward the drains. It’s utilitarian as hell. Dez has been in far worse.
“If you think the Sloatville Chamber of Commerce isn’t going to get an earful about this…”
The men stand guard, do not take any bait from him. They’re professionals, these three. Dez stops trying to razz them. The tall fella with the red ball cap speaks to someone on a walkie-talkie. When he does, Dez notices his left forearm wrapped in a stretch bandage. That clicks a memory. He’s seen the tall guy before. He just can’t remember where. It’ll come to him.
A man enters wearing the standard Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP, uniform. Anywhere else in the world, and they’d be called fatigues. Americans and their acronyms. U.S. ARMY is stenciled over his left breast, TANCREDI over his right, and he sports a patch with three stars. This is the general in charge of the base, Dez suspects. His uniform is not immaculate: a little rumpled, a little wash-grayed, one collar stay missing. Dez has rarely been around anyone with the rank of general who didn’t present himself or herself in a manner that demands respect. The general in charge of Joint Base McKinzie-Clark—and Dez assumes this is he—is having a bad year.
“This is him, Captain?” The general addresses the tall man with the red cap.
Captain, Dez notes.
“Sir. His name is Limerick.”
Now, that is interesting. Dez has a fake California driver’s license, given to him by his Ethiopian friend, Ephrem Kebede, when his crew repainted and relicensed the stolen F-250. The license has a fake name. So how is it the captain knows his real name?
Dez remembers reading off his name and basic information to the three men in shackles, in the back of the military prisoner transport vehicle with no tires. It’s possible this captain gained access to them. But not likely; after the aborted jailbreak, those guys are being held in maximum security.
Which suggests the captain learned of Dez’s background through some other means.
The general studies him. “Who sent you?”
Dez has had no luck razzing the captain and the other soldiers, but the general seems a little tightly wound, a little fractious. So Dez responds, not to the general, but to the captain in the red cap. “Working with the legal counsel of Triton Expediters, Captain. She tasked me with finding out what’s going on up here.”
His response, the snub of addressing the junior officer, annoys the general. “We know about Petra Alexandris. She’s been accounted for.”
