Or maybe not. But whatever he’d said, the former KGB general didn’t like it. He was shaking his big, shaved head in disagreement. He tried to interrupt Sarkesian, a big, thick finger in the Armenian’s face, but got cut off with a quick look that was downright scary.
The slim Iranian had a smirk on his face. He stood with his arms crossed petulantly. His body language told me that whatever the Russkie was saying, or trying to say, Ali Sherafi wasn’t buying it. He was siding with Steve-o.
Then the Russkie turned, his face flushed with anger, stomped off, and headed for the exit. Probably looking for the vodka truck. Ali Sherafi put both of his hands on Steve Sarkesian’s shoulders, hugged him, and kissed him, thrice, in the Arab Terrorist style common to such folks as Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal. Which I found somewhat funny, because Iranians ain’t Arabs.
Well, whatever the fuck they were into, it didn’t frigging matter. Not right now, anyway. Because I’d achieved what I’d set out to do: the shadow-goons had been pulled off the case. So, it was time for me to go to work.
First things first: unzipping my fly as I went (there’s nothing like really making sure people really understand the sort of character you’re playing), I lurched toward the head, bifurcating the swells in my path as I did so. The men’s john was off the outer side of the long hallway, about halfway between the foyer and the ballroom. It was what my friends from West By-God59 call an uptown two-holer: two stalls and a sink. And it had an outer door that locked with a dead bolt.
A gent with a bunch of ribbons on his tux already had his hand on the doorknob. I tapped him on the shoulder (leaving finger smudges), pointed to my unzipped fly, and nudged him out of the way. “I’m gonna be a while,” I said.
Inside, I put the plate in the sink, twisted the heavy bolt closed, then double-checked to make sure the door was secure. I didn’t want Mister Murphy interrupting anything.
I hit the elapsed-time counter switch on my little-watch-big-dick-watch, opened the right-hand stall, climbed atop the commode, and cranked the small, frosted glass window open, and poked my big Slovak snout through. Damn—just beyond the frame was a thick knot of ivy vines. I cranked the window until it wedged against the ivy, squeezed my head and right shoulder through the opening, and tried to move the green foliage aside.
It wouldn’t budge. But I could still muscle my way through. I forced my left shoulder through the window, and wrestled with the dense vines, which abutted the narrow bathroom window like jail cell bars. Then, with both arms, I rent the pair of thicker-than-my-dick vines that blocked my egress. Shit—they weren’t just thicker than my dick, they were harder, too: as stiff as fucking steel. But I’m a big, strong motherfucker, and thick or not I muscled them far enough apart to poke my head through, and grab a quick look-see.
Seven feet below me sat a thick, dark hedge. Beyond it lay a wide swath of lawn, which ran up to the tree line just behind the mansion’s outer wall. I swiveled my head and looked for the security camera. I guess I loosened my grip as my attention was distracted, because the fucking vines came out of my hands, snapped back, and caught my head between ’em as firmly as if I’d been locked in a set of Puritan stocks.
But I don’t press 450 pounds, 155 times a day for nothing. I took the offending pair and, straining as I did, forced them back apart, and extracted my head. I lost a fair amount of skin on my cheeks and ears as I pulled through, but WTF, it was only skin.
Okay, on to Plan B. I closed the window, dropped onto the tile floor, moved to the left-side stall, opened the window, and checked for obstruction. Here, the ivy was less dense—more tendrils and fewer dick-thick vines. I pushed my shoulders through, pulled myself out and stood, partially concealed by the bulky vegetation, on the narrow window ledge.
Now I could really do some recon. Eight feet or so above me was the bottom of a narrow balcony. And over there, sixty feet away, at the corner of the building, the surveillance camera pivoted on its gimbal, sweeping from the wall of the mansion with its thick bushes, out across a wide swath of lawn, toward the graveled parking lot, and back again.
I ticked off seconds in my head as I watched the camera go through two full observation cycles. My guesstimate was that I had thirteen seconds in which to jump or pull myself up the ivy high enough to grab the bottom of the balcony, work myself up, hoist myself over the rail, and drop down flat, before the camera swung back far enough to catch any possible movement.
No, that is not a lot of time. But it was all the time I had. And so, I watched and waited another full cycle, and then, as carefully as any surfer times the way he catches the Big One, I reached up, grabbed a handful of ivy vine, tested it, and when I knew it would take my weight, I heaved myself out of the window, put my foot on the sill, and pulled myself up-up-up.
Which, of course, is when Mister Murphy disengaged all the fucking ivy tendrils from the fucking stonework; I lost my balance, my feet slipped off the windowsill, I fell backward and tumbled ass over teakettle, landing face first on the nicely watered, densely packed lawn, just outside the neatly trimmed hedge.
Here is the good news: I did not break my neck. Here is the bad news: I hit the ground hard enough to stun myself, and I lost count of how many of those thirteen fucking seconds I’d used up by falling. Wild-eyed, I looked over and saw—fuzzily—that the camera had hit the apogee of its arc, and was heading back my way.
Oh damn, oh shit, oh, doom on Dickie. Cover—I needed cover. Which meant the hedge. I rolled over, scrambled to hands and knees, and hurled myself toward the bushes, which were dense with small dark green and purple leaves.
And thorns. Beaucoup thorns. Big, spiky, prickly, sharp thorns. Nasty, body-piercing, skin-lacerating, pain-inflicting thorns.
Oh, that fucking hurt.
I lay quietly, trying not to move, because every time I moved, another quadrant of the ol’ Rogue body was impaled. I had so many things sticking in me I looked like one of those fucking fourteenth-century Florentine-school martyr paintings. And don’t fucking ask how I felt.
But guess what: I couldn’t just lie there and take it. That’s not the SEAL WAY. The SEAL WAY is to OVERCOME ALL OBSTACLES AND FUCKING TOUGH IT OUT.
And so, thorns be damned, I rolled over far enough to be able to make out the position of the security camera. Then, when it had swiveled far enough out of the way, I began my count (one thousand, two thousand) and quick and quiet, pulled myself up against the wall of the mansion and clawed my way up, up, up (three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand) past the bathroom window. My fingers found the edge of the balcony ledge (nine thousand, ten thousand, eleven thousand), I chinned myself, muscled my body over the low wrought iron railing (twelve thousand, thirteen thousand) and collapsed, silently but completely exhausted, on the cool tile floor.
There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t hurt. But as you know, I have a very special relationship with pain. Pain was created so that I know I am alive. At that moment, I knew I was very much alive. My crisp white shirt was neither crisp nor white anymore. Well, sure, it had been somewhat food stained. But now it was flecked with blood. My blazer was pierced and ripped where the thorns had pulled against the fabric. My grass-stained trousers were shredded too.
But that was all cosmetic shit. Cuts and bruises heal quickly, given a long soak between warm thighs and enough Dr. Bombay. I checked the elapsed time on my watch. It showed 00:02:01 since I’d locked the bathroom door. God, how time flies when you’re having fun.
I reached down and untied my shoe, extracted my set of lockpicks, checked to make sure the French door windows weren’t wired, and when I’d ascertained they weren’t, I went to work.
00:02:57. Inside—no sweat. I eased the doors shut behind me, and looked around. I’d let myself into some sort of drawing room. There were no alarms, no motion detectors, and nothing of interest either. I could see light under the double doors on the far side of the room, which is where I made my way carefully (no creaking of
floors allowed).
I tested the right-hand door. It was not locked, and so I cracked it ever so slightly. I could hear the buzz of the party going on downstairs. The string quartet was playing a very passable Mozart.
Okay, the question was, where the fuck was I going. You know, in all those pogue Rogue action-adventure flicks Hollywood puts out or you see on the TV, the Good Guy just absofuckingunswervingly heads for the Bad Guy’s HQ, or the secret room, or whatever the fuck, without having received one goddam iota of tactical intel about where the goddamn room is.
Well, that is what’s known in the real world as horseshit. People like me don’t like to operate without intel. It doesn’t make sense.
Which is why I’d asked Avi if he knew where Stephan Sarkesian’s office was, and why Avi, being a sneaky, manipulative, and altogether thorough intelligence operator, had told me (in his lovely, Israeli accent), “Fairst floor, bleck eleven.”
“ ‘Bleck eleven,’ ” you ask.
Yeah, bleck eleven. Like me, Avi Ben Gal uses the SAS Colour Clock to provide physical location in structures.
You say you forgot how the SAS Colour Clock works.
Well, fuck you, you have bad retention. What the fuck do you suffer from, ADD?
Okay, I will explain. But this is the last fucking time.
The SAS Colour Clock is a designator by which we SEALs (and lots of other SpecWar operators, too) can define where a location within a structure is, without having to be redundant or confusing. All structures are divided into four quadrants. The back side is black; the front is white; the left-hand side as you face it is green; and the right-hand side is red. Then, starting at the rear center, you overlay a twelve-hour clock. Thus, when Avi told me I’d find Steve Sarkesian’s office at bleck eleven, he was telling me that I should head toward the rearmost left-hand corner of the mansion.
Now, since the men’s loo was about a third of the way back along the mansion’s port side, I knew where I had to go. I turned left, and made my way down the corridor.
You had to hand it to the fella who used to be called Sirzhik—he did have taste. The marble floor was covered in more of those beautiful, antique Azeri rugs, rich antique patterns that featured robust reds and rich blues and delicate ivories. The walls, which reached ten feet to the ceiling, had been stripped and replastered to give them the look of old bleached stone. On the walls, huge Persian wooden gates and narrow, antique Arab olive-wood doors, inlaid with ornate patterns made of mother-of-pearl, had been artfully hung so that they appeared to be suspended in space, sans any support.
But I wasn’t here to admire the fucking scenery. I was here to commit burglary. And so I started paying less attention to the decor, and more to the environment.
00:03:29 The corridor went left. I peered around, to make sure it was empty—and it was. I stepped around. In front of me was an antique double door made of paneled, burled walnut. Instinctively, I tried the ornate brass knob. It was locked. I looked for a keyhole, so I could jimmy the damn thing—but there was none.
And then I saw the fucking keypad sunk into the wall just to the right of the door frame. An electronic lock. The motherfucker’d had an electronic lock installed.
Now, I can bypass electronic locks—if I have the right equipment. But all I had tonight was my fucking set of lockpicks. I shook my head in disbelief, and looked to see where the hell Mister Murphy was lurking, because I knew the sumbitch was somewhere close by. The clock was ticking, and I was not getting anywhere. This was not Good News.
Now, here is a bit of SpecWar sooth, as provided to me many years ago by Roy Henry Boehm, the Godfather of all SEALs. I’d gone to visit Roy down in Florida, to get some Froggish advice about a problem I was having with a tight-assed three-star. We were sitting in a bar on the wharf about a mile and a half from his house, nursing a couple of brewskis, and I idly asked him how he problem-solved when he was stuck in the middle of a tactical goatfuck.
Quoth Roy: “Listen, asshole, when you’ve been butt-fucked by Mister Murphy, you have to butt-fuck him back ASAP. So just fuckin’ railroad crossing, and the solution will come to you.”
I chugged the last of my beer and ordered another round. “Railroad crossing?”
Roy slapped his glass on the table so loud that everyone in the whole frigging bar turned toward him. He waited until they turned away, then stage-croaked, “You worthless, shit-for-brains pencil-dicked tadpole pukes don’t know fuck-all, do you? Yeah, railroad crossing: fuckin’ stop, fuckin’ look, and fuckin’ listen. And if you take the fucking time to take a deep breath and assess your situation—and it generally doesn’t fucking take much fucking time at all to do it—you’ll realize exactly how to fuck the fucking fuckers.”
As you can see, Roy is a very direct fellow. And his advice is always good. And so I stopped futzing. Then I looked—really looked—at the door. And I listened to the sounds of classical music wafting down the empty corridor, freeing my brain from all the stress of the moment. And sixteen seconds later, staring me in the ol’ Rogue puss, was the solution to my problem.
I’d had tunnel vision. I’d been fixating on the lock. Well, fock the lock. When I looked, really looked, I realized that Steve Sarkesian’s office doors opened outward. I’d been staring straight at the goddam door hinges, but I’d never really seen ’em until I’d stepped back, took a deep breath, and followed Roy’s advice.
10
00:03:51. I USED THE POINT OF A PICK TO POP THE HINGE bolts. I pocketed ’em, pried the door open without disturbing the electronic lock mechanism, then e-a-s-e-d it back (more or less) into position from the inside.
That had been easy. I looked around the office. It was dark, but there was enough light coming from outside so that I could see pretty clearly. And, when I opened the drapes all the way, the visibility improved some more.
He’d done the place in a kind of French château style. Lots of hand-carved wood, and rich carpets. There was the Washington-style “OH, FUCK, BUT I’M IMPORTANT” wall, which featured warmly inscribed pictures of Steve Sarkesian shaking hands with a panoply of world leaders. But I wasn’t there to admire the scenery. I was there to gather intel. And I wasn’t going to be altogether subtle about it either. Remember, I wanted to hock the ol’ Sarkesian teacup. And so I headed for Steve-o’s desk, and when I discovered it was locked, I pried it open with a convenient letter opener.
I fumbled around. There was a cellular phone—the same model I’d taken off the POG. I thought about pocketing it, but decided not to. I had one of Steve’s phones, I didn’t need another. But way back in the drawer my fingers came upon a computer disk. I slid it forward, then looked it over. It was unlabeled, but I took it anyway.
I went through the rest of the office, but found nothing of interest. Finally, I rifled the credenza, a nice, eighteenth-century, French burled walnut piece. Not a lot there, either. I found half a dozen notes scrawled in Russkie and stuffed ’em in my pocket. And another computer disk, which I also took, and a bunch of Sirzhik Foundation letterhead—thick, expensive stuff from Cartier in Paris. But basically, this office was a showplace, not a working area. There were no files; no business correspondence; no nothing. I even tried tapping the walls but could discover no secret compartments.
Well, in the intelligence business, sometimes what you don’t find is as important as what you do find. And in this instance, I’d learned that Steve Sarkesian either kept all his work with him at another location, or didn’t do much work at all in this office.
Except . . . I had this nagging feeling that I was overlooking something significant. Just like outside the door, I was tunneling. I sat on the edge of the desk and let my mind wander.
That was when I realized what I’d missed, and missed, and missed. I reached into the kneehole under Steve Sarkesian’s desk. There, where I’d seen it without seeing it, was his thin, black leather attaché case. I retrieved it, put it on the desk, and examined it, running my fingers over the mottled surface of the leather. Geezus�
�the fucking thing was made of crocodile. I flicked at the combination locks with my thumbs, but they didn’t open. Well, time was getting short, and I wasn’t in the mood to screw around, and so I took the letter opener, pried the brass flanges from the frame of the case, and flipped the lid up.
Inside lay four bundles of papers. I looked at the top sheaf, and saw it was a photocopy of an official U.S. government document. The cover sheet bore the seal of the National Security Council, and the stamped notation TOP SECRET.
That got my attention fast enough. I leafed through the ten-page report. It didn’t take long to figure out that what I was looking at was a draft briefing paper detailing our negotiating positions about the oil pipeline that the United States wanted to build between Baku and Turkey, and outlining our public and private stances toward Iran, Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
The paper provided an inside look at how we would proceed; it summarized potential fallback positions; it was undiplomatically direct in its political assessments of the region, and the regional players. Obviously, it hadn’t been put together by the folks at State, because the prose wasn’t sufficiently wishy-washy.
Judging from the date on the cover page, it was an early draft. But early or not, it had no business being in Steve Sarkesian’s briefcase, unless he was a fucking NSC staffer, which we all know he wasn’t.
I flipped through the other three documents. One was a draft of a long memo from Ambassador Madison to the secretary of state, suggesting ways in which the Sirzhik Foundation could be used to help further American goals in the region. Here is the bad news: the memo hadn’t been written by the ambassador; it was on the Foundation’s letterhead. Here is the good news: there was a Post-it note attached to the last page. It read:
Dearest—this sort of thing won’t fly back in Washington, so, I’m going to have to respectfully decline to allow it to go forward in any form. But I can’t wait to see you again and hope my negative reaction to this draft won’t spoil what we have. —M.
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