American Terrorist Trilogy

by Jeffrey Poston

  Carl pressed L, the light came on, and the door started to close. He pressed the button a couple more times, mostly out of habit, just like he did at crosswalk signs. That was just in case the elevator light was lying to him, and the elevator wasn’t really going to the lobby, even though he knew there were no levels between P1 and the lobby. Crazy.

  The front wall of the elevator, the sliding door, and the ceiling were all reflective brushed steel with a subdued gray color. The back, left, and right walls were highly polished wood. There were posters on the left and right walls of the elevator. The one on the left advertised a new shop in the mall section of the lobby. The shop sold authentic southwestern art and jewelry—turquoise and silver and copper and Native American wall art—no doubt for out-of-state conference attendees looking for high-quality souvenirs, but lacking the time to find the same merchandise in Old Town or Santa Fe for half the price.

  The other poster to Carl’s right showed a stunningly beautiful plate of food. The color poster was so vibrant, he figured it could make a tourist get hungry on the spot and go immediately in search of the new restaurant.

  A bell dinged, and the elevator slowed to a stop. The L light went out as the door slid open to the left. He stepped out into a wide hallway. Directly in front of him was the lobby bar, but it was closed at that early hour. To his left, the long wide hallway led to the elevators that serviced the south tower of the Hyatt Hotel complex.

  Between his elevator and the south tower elevators were several offices that catered to business travelers staying at the hotel—a copy shop, a popular shipping outlet, a dry cleaning drop-off, and a rental car outlet. There were also a couple more tourist shops—jewelry, art, and other knickknacks. Two stores were vacant, but the front display windows were tastefully papered so the vacancies weren’t glaring to hotel residents.

  To Carl’s right, the lobby opened up to its full splendor. It wasn’t as extravagant as he’d seen in conference centers in larger cities, but for Albuquerque it was a top-tier hotel lobby. The space measured perhaps fifty feet by fifty feet, and had a step-down section in the center with couches and chairs for lounging, along with two long desks with power outlets and Internet access for computer work. All the furniture was arrayed spaciously around a seven-foot-high clay vase. Water gurgled from its top, slid down the exterior, and disappeared into a rock-covered grating in the floor.

  Arranged around the upper edge of the lounging area were more chairs and small tables for one-on-one meetings. It was, in fact, in this area that Carl was to meet his eleven o’clock client, who had pushed back the meeting just fifteen minutes ago. Now he had an hour to kill.

  Normally, he rescheduled clients who were late to meetings. He made them wait a few days. His cash-flow returns for commercial income properties were typically a hundred thousand a year, sometimes more, so he had the leverage of a valuable product that clients wanted.

  The woman he was due to meet today had been referred to him by another investor in his network. She allegedly had access to several partners with significant cash reserves. She wasn’t looking for small one- or two-million-dollar assets. She was shopping in the ten- to twenty-million price range, so that level of interest earned her an additional hour of Carl’s time.

  The direct route from the elevator to Starbucks in the northeast corner of the lobby was blocked by a janitor working on a stain in the carpet, so Carl took the scenic route to the coffee shop. He proceeded around the lobby, past the bar and the restrooms, the check-in counter and the valet entrance, the ATM, and two competing art stores—one of which was the new art shop advertised on the poster in the elevator. Then he stepped through the open door of the coffee shop.

  The cream and sugar station was along the wall on his left and the pickup counter was just inside the door on his right. The order counter was just beyond that, featuring a glass case full of pastries, chilled water, and juices one could order if one wasn’t in the mood for coffee. Beyond that glass case, the order line stretched almost to the other entry door from the street on the opposite side of the coffee shop.

  Carl walked across the shop and took his place at the end of the ordering line. When he got to the counter he ordered a “tall house with room”—Starbucks lingo for the store’s house-brewed blend in a tall cup, the smallest size available, with room meaning a half inch or so left at the top of the cup so he could add cream.

  He got his coffee fairly quickly because the two servers had a well-rehearsed procedure. The first charged his debit card while the second, who had just delivered her customer’s fancy order—some kind of frou-frou “Venti half-caf ninety-degree Brevi” something or other—grabbed a cup and filled it with the house brew. She slid it into a cardboard sleeve and placed it on the counter in front of Carl, just as the first cashier finished ringing him up.

  He thanked both servers, and they both told him to have a wonderful day. He made his way to the cream and sugar station where he waited behind two women in business suits as they dressed up their coffees. One of the women wore a two-piece, dark gray pantsuit, and the other wore a dark blue skirt suit. Both had small airplane carry-on bags on tiny wheels by their sides with the pull handles fully extended. He wondered if that was just a business fashion statement or if they actually had laptops and presentation materials stuffed into the small rolling cases.

  They reminded him of his time as an Air Force engineering contractor, but that was back in the days when real men and women carried their stuff in briefcases without wheels and toted their laptops in over-the-shoulder satchels.

  At fifty-three, though, that life was far behind him. He’d left the corporate world almost ten years back, gotten his real estate license, and opened up his one-man shop. Then he got bored with selling houses and moved into commercial brokerage, selling income properties.

  As the women departed, Carl did the “man thing.” Almost by subconscious habit, he examined them both with a quick glance down their physiques and back up.

  He stepped up to the creamer station and set about dressing up his brew. He carefully pried the plastic top from the cup, then grabbed three yellow packets of fake sugar. He pinned their edges together and shook the group with a couple of flicks of his wrist to get all the sugar away from the top edge that he planned to tear off. He ripped the tops off all three packets, dumped the contents into his coffee, then reached for one of the stainless steel jugs of half-and-half cream and filled the coffee cup almost to the rim.

  He grabbed a thin wooden stirring stick, and on a whim as he stirred, he decided to steal another glance at the two departing business women to his left as they passed through the doorway into the Hyatt lobby. He just wanted to see how they walked. That was when he noticed the man in beige slacks and a black windbreaker eyeballing him from the lobby doorway. The man’s bearing and short-cropped haircut screamed, “Cop!”

  Carl held the man’s gaze for a moment, then glanced to his right and behind him to see what the man was looking at, but there was no one else near him at the moment. The man had been clearly concentrating on him. He turned back to the cop, but the guy had turned away.

  Carl pressed the lid of his coffee cup back on and took a sample sip before departing the cream station. He inhaled the bitter fragrance as he swallowed and decided his coffee was softened and sweetened perfectly. He took another long sip, gently slurping in enough air to cool the liquid so it wouldn’t burn his mouth.

  Smiling to himself, he walked through the doorway and headed back into the hotel lobby. He glanced to his right and saw the cop window-shopping at the jewelry store—the new one from the elevator poster. Carl sat down in the lounging area and listened to the quiet trickle of the fountain while he checked email on his smartphone and caught up on the latest tech blogs. After ten minutes, he started getting drowsy and decided to take a walk outside.

  He stood and walked back through the coffee shop and made his way to the street exit that opened onto the corner of Third Street and Marquette. Knowing it
was chilly outside, he stopped and put his coffee cup on an empty table near the door and pulled his head glove from his right coat pocket. He fit it on properly, then retrieved his cup. His right hand holding the coffee would be plenty warm enough, but he parked his left hand in his jacket pocket and used his butt to back his way through the glass door.

  As soon as he turned around, cops in black tactical gear jumped him.

  Chapter 4

  1120 MST Friday

  Albuquerque, NM

  The first time for any difficult experience is always the hardest. Carl’s first terrifying experience with the police happened four years ago. It prepped him for his current experience.

  Pop quiz: How many white cops does it take to beat the crap out of an unarmed black man?

  It was a question he and his friends discussed every now and again. All of his black friends—every single one of them—had been taken to the ground by white cops at some time in their lives. It didn’t matter who they were, where they were from, how highly educated, how rich or poor, how properly they spoke, or how nicely they dressed. It had happened to them all.

  He always wondered why the vast majority—over ninety percent—of Albuquerque cops were white, when white folk made up only forty-three percent of the city’s population. He’d researched it four years ago. Minorities on the police force were severely underrepresented. There had to be some kind of strategy behind that statistic. The police chief back then was quoted as saying that minorities couldn’t pass the entrance exam.

  Yeah, right. It’s not like you need to be a rocket scientist or something.

  So, if someone had asked Carl the “how many” question four years ago, he would have given the answer as two. Back then, he had gotten bored with living in a five-bedroom house in the foothills all by himself. He rented out his house and found a loft downtown just a block south of Central on the corner of Fourth and Gold. One particular Saturday, the mayor had shrubs planted on all the downtown streets to make the deteriorating area look more inviting for shoppers. On Sunday, Carl went downstairs to water the shrubs planted in huge pots on the sidewalk in front of his loft. In the middle of that event, he glanced up to see two cops walking toward him. Their right hands were on their guns, and their concentration was focused fully on him. They jacked him up good.

  “Up against the wall! Hands high and wide. Feet spread. You know the position!”

  Up to that point in his life he, in fact, did not know the position. He had survived forty-nine years with zero police encounters. But he did what his father had told him and his siblings repeatedly while growing up. When you get stopped by cops, just say, “Yes sir, or no sir, or I don’t know, sir. Don’t give them a reason.”

  He didn’t give those particular cops a reason, but they jacked him up anyway. He had just gone downstairs to water the plants and didn’t take his ID with him. All he had was a water bucket and his door keys because the exterior door to his loft was always locked. The downtown cops didn’t believe he really lived there, though, and they were ready to haul him to jail. The cops didn’t even know there were lofts on top of the stores until he gave them his keys and told them to go up and check. They did so, after cuffing him to a lamp post.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, so while there was minimal street traffic, there were plenty of folks window shopping, perhaps while waiting for their movies to start at the cinema two blocks away. The stores near his loft were open, so the word about what was happening to Carl spread quickly. A few workers came to their front windows or stepped out their doors and stared at Carl standing handcuffed with his back to the lamp post. They all knew him. They knew he lived upstairs. They spoke to him daily or waved to him through the windows whenever he walked by. Now, he could see by the expressions on their faces that they were wondering what crime had been committed by this man they previously thought was such a nice guy and a successful local businessman.

  The experience was totally and utterly humiliating.

  The cops came down a couple minutes later and released him. One said they had responded to a silent alarm, and then they left. Carl was seething inside, and there were a lot of things he wanted to say. He wanted to ask the cop what the fuck a silent alarm had to do with him, but instead he just said, “Yes, sir,” and watched the cops walk away toward the jewelry store.

  They walked right by a young white couple who had been standing under the awning of the bar right next door to the jewelry store with the silent alarm. They’d been standing there the whole time, but the cops didn’t give the young couple a second glance.

  They simply started asking questions of a man who was actually carrying stuff out of the jewelry store the entire time the cops had been jacking up Carl. No hands on the guns, no hand cuffs, no harsh language, no asking for ID. Carl later discovered the man was the owner of the jewelry store and was moving his merchandise to another store. He didn’t know he had tripped the alarm. After the cops left, the store owner—who had watched Carl get jacked up along with all the other store workers on the block—walked up the street and apologized to Carl for “the misunderstanding.”

  It occurred to Carl that the cops hadn’t even confirmed there was actually a crime taking place. They simply thought he had committed a crime. They assumed it was him.

  The next day Carl packed up all his belongings and moved out of downtown. He took a hotel room while he moved the tenants out of his big Foothills house so he could move back in there.

  If he was going to be completely fair and honest to Albuquerque’s cops, Carl had to admit that most of the homeless guys and panhandlers that hung out downtown were minorities. Brown Native Americans or Hispanics or Blacks accounted for the overwhelming majority of complaints for disorderly conduct and other minor crimes. In all likelihood, even if one or both of the cops had not been white, the same thing would have happened to him.

  At the time, actually being victim of the police and racial profiling, Carl didn’t want to hear about any rational explanations for what had happened. Actual crime statistics meant nothing to him. Instead, it made him feel somehow vindicated, being able to blame the whole event on racial injustice. It was easier to place blame on the cops. It invoked a sense of historical righteousness and empathy, and it certainly made for a better story to tell his black friends.

  You’ll never guess what the white cops did to me downtown.

  But that was four years ago. Today the “how many” question had an entirely different answer because the sea of anxious faces that had magically appeared in front of him spanned the entire spectrum from white to dark brown. There was even an Asian face in the group.

  So, the current question was: How many not-necessarily-white cops does it take to beat the crap out of an unarmed black man?

  Answer: All of them. Every last goddamn one of them.

  They came out of nowhere. One second the sidewalk was empty of all life, not a living soul, not a single car on the street. The next, the sidewalk was filled with men in black. All were fully decked out in black tactical gear and Kevlar vests with the big, white capital letters S-W-A-T over the left breast. They all wore black helmets with face shields, and they all had shotguns and automatic rifles.

  He froze, stunned, with his coffee cup inches away from his lips. He’d been just about to take another sip. The steam wafted up through the tiny hole right in front of his face.

  “Well, fuck me sideways,” was all Carl could think to say.

  Then suddenly everyone was shouting at him, all converging on him. The cacophony of voices behind all the face shields sounded like a muffled cheering section at a sporting event. Every man seemed to be shouting something different.

  “Freeze!”

  “Hands!”

  “Get on the ground!”

  “Drop it!”

  “Up against the wall!”

  “Show me your hands!”

  On the street in front of him, behind all the screaming SWAT cops now rushing toward him, three big black SUVs race
d from the west on the one-way street in front of the Hyatt and slammed to a stop just shy of the corner. Just like in the movies, two tactical agents rode on the runners on both sides of each vehicle, one hand gripping a railing on top of each SUV and the other gripping an assault rifle. They all jumped off their vehicles in unison before the SUV had even come to a complete stop, and they all headed straight for Carl, rifle stocks jammed against their shoulders, barrels aimed at Carl. Their Kevlar vests had big white capital letters F-B-I stenciled on the front. Then, all the doors of the vehicles opened at once, and even more FBI men in black jumped out.

  And a woman.

  Carl heard more vehicles screech to a stop to his right, and another stampede of combat boots thundered across the sidewalk toward him. He stole a glance to his right and saw a dozen FBI combat troops weaving around the big brass statues of family figures—walking parents and kids on skateboards. Some of the troops took cover behind the artistic structures and aimed at him, while others proceeded toward him, staying out of the lines of fire of the squatting troops.

  As a result of the confusing calls for action, Carl didn’t move a muscle. Not only did he not know what to do, he didn’t want to pull his hand out and get shot by some nervous rookie SWAT cop on his first takedown. He could see some of the rifle muzzles wavering in front of his face, and he knew this was the first time up at bat for some of these kids. They were nervous.

  Carl just stood frozen in mid-stride. Then, in a weird alignment of cosmic events, there was a sudden brief moment of complete silence. Maybe, Carl thought, they all had to catch their breath before they began shouting again. He heard the coffee shop door hiss closed automatically behind him.

  It occurred to Carl that he was strangely calm in the face of all the hardware pointed at him.

  The first take-down is always the hardest. The second, not so much.