Must Come Down

by Brett Baker

  And if he reacted negatively, then she had no qualms about killing him and throwing him overboard, just as she explained.

  “I ended up in the water due to a plane crash,” Mia said. “I’d been floating on that cargo net for hours by the time you showed up. The Miami boyfriend story was bullshit.” Randy nodded in acknowledgement of the obvious. “I made a parachute from the cargo net and plastic wrap, and jumped out of the plane. When I hit the water, I balled it up and used it as a float.”

  “Why were you on the plane?”

  “Never mind that right now,” Mia said. “If it’s important I’ll tell you. Right now I think you just need some background. We can talk details later.”

  “Wait a minute, before we go any further,” Oglesby interrupted, “you made a parachute from a cargo net and some plastic wrap?”

  “I did,” Mia said. “The plane had depressurized, the pilot had already jumped out, and left no chutes behind. Either I improvised or I went down with the plane.”

  “How’d you know it would work?” Krasner asked.

  “I didn’t know. Seemed like it should work, but I’m no engineer. When I jumped I knew that either I had come to the end, or I had come up with the greatest survival improv ever. I’m glad I’m still here to talk about it.”

  “How’d you even know how to do it?” Randy asked. “I don’t think I would have come up with that.”

  “This ain’t my first rodeo,” Mia said.

  She looked at Oglesby as if to offer him a chance to tell her to put on the brakes. Instead he just looked back at her, neither challenging nor confirming her plan of action.

  “Oglesby, Krasner, Brown and I all work for the same organization. I’ve never met them before, but we understand each other. We know each other. And although I won’t specifically ask them, it’s my impression and understanding that we’re all working on the same thing here.”

  “Which is?” Randy asked.

  “Patience,” she said.

  “You’re working on patience?”

  “No, you need to have patience. Let me explain who we are, then maybe you’ll feel more comfortable and you’ll realize that you need to be honest about who you are.” Mia looked at Randy for affirmation, but he returned a blank look.

  “There’s something you need to know, Randy, before Mia even gets started,” Oglesby interrupted. “The very next sentence she speaks is the point of no return. This is the moment where you decide whether you’re going to shy away from the truth, or embrace it. So this is your last chance. You’ve got ten seconds to change your mind before Mia starts talking.”

  Everyone in the room looked at Randy, who directed his eyes toward Mia, nodded his head once, and then waited for her to begin speaking.

  Mia waited a few additional seconds and then said, “These gentlemen and I work for the same organization. We’re tracking a gold shipment from New York to China.” Mia paused, looked at Oglesby for confirmation, but the veteran agent’s expression didn’t change.

  “Tracking it how?” Randy asked.

  Mia put her finger to her lips. “Shhh. Let me talk.” She smiled and continued. “A connection told me about some gold bars that had moved around the country on eighteen wheelers, mixed in with dry goods, unloaded a few dozen at a time, and taken to an underground vault in New York City. It’s not associated with a bank or any organization. Seems freelance. Six days ago I found out about a shipment on its way to New York from Vegas. Delivered to McCarran International by a group of guys in a U-Haul and stored in a private hangar. My source had seen such an arrangement before and guessed a truck would pick it up the next day. I flew out there, found my way into the hangar, and discovered not only the bars that my source knew about, but a few dozen other bars stacked on another pallet with cases of paper towel thrown on top.”

  “I found a pallet without gold, just stacked high with paper towel. I climbed inside there, stood up straight for seven hours until the next morning, when a crew came in and loaded a semi truck with all the paper towel, but not before putting the pallets with the gold bars at the nose of the trailer. And then I waited. Thirteen hours that first day before the truck came to a halt for more than a few minutes. Cut through the ceiling in the trailer, grabbed a bite to eat, stretched my legs, climbed back in and waited. Must have been more than one person driving because they never stopped overnight. Kept on going. Made it to New York in about 53 hours. Not bad. A little slow, but I’m sure they wanted to stay within the speed limit so Joe Friday didn’t pull them over and stumble upon the find of a lifetime.”

  “We got to New York and I huddled inside the paper towel pallet again and hoped that the gold wouldn’t disappear before I scoped out the situation. Turns out I didn’t have to worry about that. As soon as I got there they unloaded the truck with me in the middle of one of the paper towel pallets, and left all of the cargo, including the gold, in a wide-open airplane hangar. With the place locked up at the end of the night, I climbed out, found a place to hide, and watched the next morning as they put a couple dozen pallets of gold bars, and a couple dozen pallets of paper towel and gray plastic totes onto the plane. I waited for the right moment and just snuck through the rear door and hid on the plane.”

  “Still in New York, right?” Randy asked.

  “That’s right. Kennedy airport. We took off, and I didn’t move. Seemed like we were in the air forever, but it was really just about ten hours. We landed, but no one got off. I don’t know where we were, but we weren’t on the ground long. Refueling, I guess. We took off, then about an hour later one of the guys on the plane comes to the back. I must have been a bit sloppy because I caught his eye, and he saw me and came back to investigate. We engaged, he had some unfortunate luck, the plane ran into problems, a couple of other guys tried to cause problems, and I was left with no choice but to make my own parachute.”

  “What’s the deal with the gold? What were they doing?”

  Mia shrugged. “We don’t know. I didn’t get anything out of the guys on the plane, and the gold’s at the bottom of the ocean now, so it’s not like we can trace it.” Mia turned toward Oglesby and said, “Unless I’m wrong about you guys and you’re treasure hunters instead of who I suspect you are.”

  “You’re not wrong about us,” Oglesby said. “You know who we are.”

  “Who are you?” Randy asked. “Why are you working alone on this?”

  Mia sighed. The Summit required secrecy. It preserved and manufactured it. Only those immersed in it knew that it existed, and more often than not anyone who discovered The Summit did so at the end of their life. Or at what became the end of their life. Mia had heard of people who learned of The Summit and lived, but they almost always became part of The Summit. Few people outside The Summit knew that it existed.

  But more than secrecy, The Summit required self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency requires making judgment calls. The Summit trained its agents to evaluate a situation, decide the best course of action, and then act. Mia and the other agents of The Summit never questioned each other’s actions because they all knew that they shared the same training, if not the exact same experience.

  So if Mia decided that divulging the existence of The Summit to Randy was the right course of action, then she didn’t expect Oglesby, Krasner, or Brown to object. And their stone silence thus far satisfied her expectation.

  “I’m tracking this down for our organization.”

  “What organization? Are you law enforcement?”

  “No. That’s too simple. We don’t just track down every bad guy who breaks a law. We do human rights work. We find missing people. We protect the natural environment. We protect the integrity of organizations that can’t protect themselves. We eliminate entities that might create chaos. Yes, we do some law enforcement. But as I’m sure you can imagine, law enforcement isn’t an objective pursuit on a worldwide scale.”

  “So who are you? CIA? NSA?”

  “Nothing like that,” Mia said, shaking her head.
“We’re independent. We belong to no one.”

  “NGO then.”

  “More than that. We’re not just non-governmental. We’re more NEO. Non-existent organization. We’re a shadow. A hologram. No more tangible than an early-morning mist.”

  “How can you say that? You’re right here,” Randy said. “I can reach out and touch you.” He grabbed Mia’s arm.

  “We’re just agents. We do the work. We’re real. But The Summit doesn’t exist except for the people who are in it, or the people who benefit from it.”

  “The Summit. That’s your group?” Mia nodded. “Who runs it?”

  “Nobody. Everybody.” Mia looked at the other three men and asked, “Do you know who runs this?” They all shook their heads. “It doesn’t matter who runs it.”

  “What they hell does that mean?” Randy asked. “Someone has to run it. Someone’s making decisions.”

  “We’re all making decisions,” Mia said. “I decide things for myself, and these gentlemen decide things. We’re taught to manage ourselves. We problem solve. We investigate. We coordinate. But we don’t rely on others.”

  “You just relied on these guys to get us off of that trawler. How can you say that you don’t rely on others?”

  “I didn’t rely on them. They came to get us. They saved us. I thought they might come, but I didn’t rely on them. I assumed I’d have to save myself. That’s what we all assume.”

  “What the hell would you have done? There’s no way that piece of shit boat was going to make it back to shore. We’d have been stuck in the middle of the ocean.”

  “Maybe you’re right. We didn’t get to that point though. If they hadn’t rescued us then I can’t say what I would have done. I didn’t end up in that situation, so I don’t know how I’d react. You never know, Randy. Until you face something with your own brain, body, and spirit, you can’t say what you’ll do. I didn’t plan to turn that cargo net into a parachute until I started to do it. I can’t anticipate everything that might happen, or who I might encounter, or in what environment I’ll find myself, so I have to adapt to anything. That’s what we do. Whatever happens, we deal with it.”

  Randy looked at the other men in the room as if to verify Mia’s claims. None of them reacted.

  “Why are you tracking this?”

  “Tracking what? The gold?” Mia asked.

  “Yeah. What’s it got to do with your…summit?”

  “The Summit. What’s it got to do with The Summit?”

  “Call it what you want. Why are you tracking the gold? How’d you find out about it?”

  “I already told you how I found out about it,” Mia said. “Someone I know told me about gold shipments heading to New York under shady circumstances.”

  “But why do you care? Who told you? What do they know?”

  “I don’t know why I care.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Randy asked.

  “It means that maybe I shouldn’t care. Maybe I should care. I can’t answer that question until I find out what’s going on. It could be legit, but I fucking doubt it. Most gold shipments aren’t transported in unsecured semi trucks or on repurposed airliners. So I doubt it’s legit. But I could be wrong. It’s happened before.”

  “You mean to tell me that you don’t even know who’s behind this? Or what you’re chasing?” Mia shook her head. “Then why the hell are you wasting your time?” Randy yelled.

  “Look, people don’t move tons of gold in ways to avoid detection if they’re on the level.”

  “I get that it might be shady, but I don’t understand why you think it’s worthy of your time. Or how you even decide what’s worthy of your time. If no one’s telling you what to do, then how do you know what to do? There’s got to be someone calling the shots.”

  Mia leaned back in her chair as if she’d just realized that she might have to settle in for the long haul in this conversation with Randy.

  “Have you ever seen how a local news crew covers a storm after it’s just passed through a town? Maybe right after a tornado? There’s the official response—firefighters, ambulance, cops—but you’ll also see people who are helping for no other reason than to help another human in need. There are guys with chainsaws chopping up trees that are blocking the road, and women going door-to-door checking on their neighbors, and kids acting as messengers on their bicycles because the communication system has collapsed. No one tells these people what to do. They see what needs to be done and they do it. Those involved with the official response help assess damage, and they might rescue a few folks, but when there’s that much carnage it’s up to the average Joe to pitch in and help keep things from falling apart. We’re that average Joe, but to a higher degree. There’s plenty out there to keep the FBI and CIA and Interpol and the various armies of the world busy until the end of time. We do the jobs that might not otherwise get done. Or might not get done in time. If a tornado comes through and your neighbor’s house falls on top of him, it might be a day or two before the firefighters comb through the wreckage from every other house on the block and finally make their way to him. But if you’re there when it falls, and you see him peeking out the basement window ten seconds beforehand, you have a better chance of saving him. The firefighters are fine, but we have a job to do as well.”

  “So you’re just concerned citizens of the world?” Randy asked. “I find that a little hard to believe.”

  “Why? You don’t think there are people who want to do good in the world?”

  “No, I know some people want to do good. I just doubt there are many people who are capable of organizing and financing the sort of operation you’re describing. How can something be so decentralized, yet so organized?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of McDonald’s?” Mia asked.

  “As in hamburgers?”

  Mia nodded. “How many restaurants do they have? 25,000 or something? You go to any McDonald’s in the world and you know what you’re going to get. Sure there are variations among markets, but no one’s going to McDonald’s for an expensive bottle of wine and a dinner that costs $800. They have a set of standards, and a unifying theory about how a restaurant should operate, and it doesn’t matter that there are thousands of them or that they’re spread out. The Summit is the same way.”

  “I notice you’re avoiding the question about how you’re funded,” Randy said.

  “I’m not avoiding it. I just don’t know the answer.” Mia looked at the other three men in the room. “If any of you know how The Summit is funded, please enlighten Randy and me.” All three men shrugged their shoulders.

  “Maybe the money falls from the sky,” Randy said. “Or maybe you’re the pirates. Are you in search of this gold to pay for your organization?”

  “None of us know where the funding comes from, but it’s always there. I haven’t had any other job since high school, and I’ve never struggled for money. The Summit has given my family thousands of dollars. There’s always money. As far as I know our operations don’t fund the organization. If I find this gold I’m not going to skim any off the top. I’ll return it to its rightful owners, to the extent I can figure out who the rightful owners are.”

  “But how you are funded? I mean day-to-day. If that plane didn’t crash, and you made it all the way to China, what would you have done when you got there? You’d need money to continue your operation. Where does the money come from? You just carry thousands of dollars in cash with you all the time?”

  “Money’s not a problem. We each have credit cards on which we can rely. We can go into any bank in the world, and have money wired to us right away. No bank will ever deny us because The Summit’s banking system is setup to respond every single time a request is made upon a routing number and account number that it controls.”

  “Don’t forget about the drops,” Krasner said. “Those have saved me more times than I can count.”

  Randy looked at Mia. “Explain.”

  “There are places in the wor
ld that don’t having a banking system. If you’re in some jungle in Myanmar you can’t just go into a bank and withdraw money in the local currency. In those instances The Summit will do a drop. A local will come up to you, speak a certain series of words, and then lead you to a location. He doesn’t know why he’s leading you there. He only knows that someone gave him a bunch of money and asked him to complete this task. When you show up there are instructions on the next place you should go, and usually in that second place you’ll find a bag of money.”

  “It’s a fucking scavenger hunt,” Randy said. “This whole thing sounds like one big game to you.”

  “It’s not a game,” Mia said. “We’re very serious. But we’re resourceful.”

  “There are times when the drops are actual drops,” Krasner said. “We’ll be abroad somewhere, and a helicopter will show up out of the blue, just like we did with you guys, and drop a bag of money. Those are the best. The bags always have much more money than you need because the locals are curious about what’s going on, so you have to spread some to them.”

  “So money does just fall out of the sky,” Randy said.

  Krasner chuckled, and said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Unbelievable,” Randy said. “I’m still unclear on how you know what to do though? If no one’s calling the shots, then how do you know whether to follow a truckload of gold bars across the country, or pursue an arms deal in North Korea, or a terrorist in Budapest? Who tells you where you’re needed?”

  “It just works out,” Mia said.

  “These things just fall into your lap by magic?” Randy asked. “Forgive me, but I find that rather hard to believe.”

  “That’s how it happens sometimes. Like with this. It started with a tip from someone I know. The longer I follow it, the more odd it seems, which makes it worth pursuing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that the old adage is true: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”