Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  “Can you still deputize people?” Boxers asked. “Or, is that just in Westerns?”

  Kramer’s expression had changed from mocking disbelief to interest. “We don’t have to be specific,” he said. “We can form a kind of hometown militia and call it a way to send a message to the terrorists that our town is not as soft a target as it looks.”

  “Wait a second,” Gail said. “We’ve got to tell them something of the imminent threat. They need to know that this is more than a symbolic gesture. They need to know that real bullets may very well start flying.”

  “Gail’s right,” Jonathan said. “That’s where the fine line comes between awareness and panic. We need to use a soft touch.” He looked to the chief. “Can you recruit one person at a time? I don’t think this is a town hall kind of announcement.”

  Kramer nodded as he thought it through. “Yeah, I think I can. But I’ll need to give them something to do. What am I asking for, other than a hypothetical yes?”

  “First of all, encourage them to arm themselves,” Jonathan said.

  Kramer laughed. “This is Virginia. Half the population is packing heat anyway.”

  Jonathan smiled at the point. “Think like a terrorist,” he said. “What are our most attractive targets?”

  “That Vitale asshole already told us that the targets are what’s important to you,” Boxers said. “That puts RezHouse at the top of the list.”

  “I agree,” Kramer said. “I think I can sell people on the notion that until these Black Friday attacks are over with, we should increase the security presence outside the school. Especially since it’s already been hit once.”

  “Talk about attracting attention,” Gail said. “The press will have a field day with pictures of civilians standing guard with battle-slung ARs in front of a school.”

  “These are scary times,” Boxers said. “Who gives a shit about public relations?”

  “I do,” Kramer said. “And the mayor does. What do I tell him?”

  “Billy Babcock’s a town lifer,” Jonathan said, referring to the mayor to Fisherman’s Cove. “I’d make him your first recruit and then take him along for the others.”

  Two quick raps drew Jonathan’s attention to the open office door. It was Venice, and she seemed agitated. “I have news,” she said. She cut her eyes to Doug Kramer and then back to Jonathan.

  He got the hint. He turned to the chief. “Do you feel like you have a plan?”

  Kramer laughed. “Absolutely not. But I have things to do. I believe I’ll be on my way.”

  As he headed toward the door, Venice stepped back to let him pass.

  “Thanks, Doug,” Jonathan called after him. “Let me know if I can help.”

  Venice waited till the chief had exited the Cave before she said, “You and I need to talk.” This was directed straight at Jonathan.

  “That’s your news?” Jonathan asked.

  “No,” she said. “My news is that we’ve got a new hit on Mr. Kellner. But you don’t get it until we finish our conversation.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ven,” Jonathan scoffed.

  Her features hardened. This thing had to happen.

  Jonathan turned to the rest of his team. “I need you to leave us, please. But don’t wander far.”

  He got nothing but confusion from the others, but they left, closing the door behind them.

  Alone together, Jonathan gestured to the collection of leather chairs and sofa that framed the stone fireplace. Soon, it would be time to stoke that hearth up. “Let’s have a seat,” he said. “Give my back a rest.”

  Venice took the sofa. Jonathan’s reserved seat was a wooden rocking chair emblazoned along the back with the Seal of the College of William and Mary in Virginia. More than a memento of his alma mater, the chair was the only seat in the office—apart from his Aeron desk chair—that gave his lumbar spine the support he craved. Ah, the price of a misspent youth.

  “You go first,” Jonathan said once they were in place.

  “Not me,” Venice said. “You’re the one who has a problem with Derek. You’re not my big brother, you know.”

  Jonathan recoiled in his seat. “No, I’m not your brother, but I am your boss. Do you really think this is personal?”

  Venice said nothing. She pressed her lips to a thin line and tears rimmed her lids. “This is important to me,” she said. “Derek is important to me. If you know something about him—if you think you know something about him—you need to share it with me. After all these years, you owe me that much.”

  Jonathan leaned back in the rocker and closed his eyes, pressing his head into the Great Seal. How was he going to say this?

  When he opened his eyes, she hadn’t moved.

  “Okay,” Jonathan said. “I’ll just put it out there. I think your buddy might be a spy.”

  Venice’s face fell. And her lips pressed tighter. She was beyond pissed. “He’s not my buddy,” she seethed. “His name is Derek.”

  “Fine. Derek then. I think your colleague Derek might be a spy. And before you go ballistic and quit, look at things from where I sit. Derek finds a secret prison on our behalf, and the prison is invaded. We’ve never been identified before, yet after he joins the team, some psycho sails into town and threatens me directly. The only variable is Derek. What other conclusion could I possibly draw?”

  Venice’s expression hardened even more. “You could draw any conclusion that did not insult me.”

  “I’m not insulting you.”

  “When you think that I’m stupid enough to invite that level of danger into our lives, you insult me. Do you believe for a moment that I haven’t vetted him? Do you think I don’t know every corner of his life?”

  Jonathan started to object. “But—”

  She slammed her hand on the arm of the sofa. “You didn’t even have the courtesy to ask me before you passed judgment on him. Derek has been a joke to you and Boxers since the first day his name came up, and Gail isn’t much better.”

  Jonathan started to say something but withered under her glare. “I have never been this angry with you, Digger. Don’t forget that I remember when you were Jonny. I remember when you and I first talked about starting Security Solutions, and yes, I remember when you intervened to keep me out of jail. Do you have any idea how many times I have intervened to get you out of trouble or keep you out of it? I can’t count that high.”

  The tears on her eyelids finally spilled onto her cheeks, and she angrily wiped them away. “In all these years, Dig, this is the first time you’ve shown me utter disrespect. Now, you have a decision to make. Am I a part of this team or am I not?”

  “Of course, you are.” Jonathan heard the meekness of his tone.

  “Don’t just say it if you don’t mean it,” she snapped. “Skills don’t come much more marketable than mine, you know. Just ask Wolverine.”

  Something clicked in Jonathan’s head. “Wait a minute,” he said with a snap of his fingers.

  “I’m not done yet,” Venice said. “In fact, I’m just barely—”

  “What? Oh, fine. Sorry about the Derek thing. You were right, I should have talked to you first. That wasn’t right of me.” He’d already moved on to a more pressing bit of news. “Derek isn’t the only moving part. There’s Wolverine, too. Your mentioning her brought that into focus.”

  Venice gaped. For a few seconds, she said nothing, clearly knocked off balance by Jonathan’s effortless capitulation. “So, now you think Irene Rivers is spying on us? How could she possibly benefit from that?”

  Jonathan was too far inside his head to hear anything she was saying. “At the park,” he thought aloud. “When I met with Wolfie, one of her security guys gave me a weird look.” He rose from his rocker and walked to the window on the opposite wall, through which he could watch the masts in the marina sway gently in the calm river. “Normally, it’s a ballbusting interaction with those guys, but this time Tweedle Dum didn’t rise to my bait.”

  “Because he did
n’t insult you back you assume that he’s a spy?” Venice said. “That’s a big leap.”

  “It’s the other variable,” Jonathan said. “It’s sure as shit not Wolfie herself, and with you vouching for Derek, there aren’t a lot of feasible options.”

  “Except all the unknowns we don’t know,” she said.

  “Yeah, those. Can we call in the others now?” Jonathan said. “Are we done here?”

  “Can Derek join the team?”

  Jonathan turned away from the window to face her again. “If we can figure out something for him to do, yes,” he said.

  “And you’ll keep Boxers at bay?”

  Jonathan’s shoulders sagged. He couldn’t believe he was having a high school conversation like this. “No,” he said. “And that’s a job for Derek. You know the rules here. Respect is earned, and you can take the heat or you can’t. I’m not going to tell Box what he can and can’t say. Jesus, that would just spin him up more. We play by big boy rules. To be continued. We have countless lives to save. Can we back-burner the personnel shit till later?”

  Venice’s anger was fading. Jonathan could tell she wanted to be more pissed than she was, but she wasn’t exactly new to the dynamics of the place.

  “I don’t believe you just said personnel shit,” she said. “Suppose the network news heard you? I’d have to file suit.”

  “And then I’d have to shoot the reporters.” He sold it with a smile, then yelled, “Okay, team, let’s get back together!”

  A few seconds later, the door opened, and Boxers and Gail entered.

  “Have a seat around the fireplace,” Jonathan said. As he walked back to his rocker, he added, “I think we’ve been unfair and dismissive of Derek Halstrom. There’s a good chance he’s going to join our team in some capacity, and we all need to wrap our heads around that.”

  Boxers made a growling sound. “He’s got to change his friggin’ name, then.”

  Jonathan laughed. “I’ll come up with something.” He sat in his seat and opened his palms to Venice. “Ms. Alexander, you have the floor.”

  She looked uncomfortable. “Um, not here,” she said. “We need to go back to the War Room.”

  Boxers made a show of hauling his huge frame out of the leather chair he’d just collapsed into. “Oh, this is fun,” he said. “Not only do we have to cool our heels for the information, we get to march around the office, too.”

  Gail smacked him on the arm. “You know you’re a baby sometimes, right?”

  “I like the diaper,” Boxers said. “Especially when it gets all squishy.”

  “And now it’s time to puke,” Jonathan said.

  Thirty seconds later, they were gathered in their seats around the big teak table. The projector was already fired up.

  Venice clicked, and the screen filled with pictures of Frederick Kellner in his natural state posted next to the fat man from Culpeper. “I can’t take credit for this,” she said. “It comes from information sent by Derek.”

  Jonathan could not possibly express how tired he was of hearing that name. And she always said it with that singsong quality that spoke of new love.

  As they watched, the fuzzy picture of the fat guy who killed Cindy McVeigh superimposed itself over Kellner’s face. The combined image magically magnified and rotated until they had a mildly fuzzy picture of a fat Kellner.

  “There’s a ninety-eight point three percent chance that Kellner murdered Cindy McVeigh, the young girl who did the brush pass,” Venice said.

  Jonathan noticed that she was reading from her screen.

  Venice continued, “It turns out appearance and identity are two different things. You can change the look of your nose, for example, but you can’t change its location on your face. At least not in a meaningful way. You can’t change the position of your eyes or your ears, and two of the biggest tells of all are posture and gait. People can disguise as many of those factors as they like, but on a minute-by-minute basis, it’s too many moving parts to keep track of, and all but the most experienced operators drop the ball on something.”

  “So, what we see up there,” Jonathan said. “Where the fuzzy profile turns and morphs into a full face. Is that the new technology from your guy?” He couldn’t make himself say the name. Baby steps.

  “It’s evolving technology,” Venice said. “I don’t know what parts fall into the supersecret category, but the totality of what we’re watching is what the FBI doesn’t yet have. Make sense?”

  Jonathan nodded.

  Venice continued, “The more factors that remain undisguised, the easier it is to find the person you’re looking for.”

  Boxers grumbled, “Is there a ‘so, therefore, we’ve got the bastard’ at the end of this?” He recrossed his legs from left-over-right to right-over-left.

  Venice said, “So, therefore, we’ve got the bastard.”

  Jonathan leaned into the table. This was not what he’d been expecting.

  She smiled. “At least we think we do. Eighty-four-point-seven percent chance.”

  “How good is that in the world of facial recognition?” Gail asked. “It’s not nearly enough for a sniper to take a shot, for example.”

  “Is it enough to take a trip to Alexandria?” Venice asked with a smile. She tapped her keys and another image of a man appeared on the screen. This one was the opposite of the fat guy. This one was athletic, tall, and young, and he sported an old-school crew cut. Not quite full-face, it was still a distant image.

  “This comes from an ATM security camera,” Venice explained. She tapped some more, and the image shifted and magnified and bloomed over the fat suit disguise. When she was done, all three images—Kellner in his natural state, in his fat suit, and in his new look—were ghost-like images, all stacked on top of each other. “Note how the features line up,” she said.

  It was remarkable. The eyes, noses, and ears all lined up perfectly.

  “I don’t understand why this is only an eighty-five percent match,” Jonathan said. “I mean, everything looks spot-on.”

  “It’s the digital manipulation,” Venice explained. “Every time you zoom and magnify, you shave a couple of points off the probability.”

  “Definitely worth a trip to Alexandria,” Jonathan said. “Can you track him somehow once we’re there?”

  “Not in real time,” Venice said. “Once we program the camera management software to keep an eye out for the latest disguise, we can tell you where he’s been, but the information will always be old.”

  “How old?” Boxers asked.

  “As much as an hour.”

  “Crap.”

  Gail turned her head to look at Jonathan. “When are you going to tell Wolverine?”

  Jonathan leaned back in the rocker and cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “I don’t think I am,” he said.

  Gail gasped. “Digger! You have to. Too many lives are at stake.”

  He met Gail’s gaze. “I think she’s got a mole in her shop,” he said. He shared the concerns he’d discussed with Venice.

  “Then she needs to know that.”

  “Why?” Boxers said. “She’s got thousands of agents working for her. If they can’t find a mole in their own ranks, that’s their problem, not ours.”

  Jonathan agreed. “Look, I don’t know for sure about the mole. Here’s where eighty-five percent means nothing. It’s high enough for me to shut off the information spigot, but not enough to create ill will with Director Rivers.”

  “But if there’s a terrorist plot in Alexandria, somebody needs to tell them,” Gail persisted.

  “We don’t know that there’s a terror plot in the works,” Jonathan said. “We think we’ve got a guy who’s the guy we suspect might have caused a terror incident elsewhere. That’s a suspicion on top of an observation on top of a guess. That’s not much. If you want to clear your conscience, feel free to call their tip line—preferably from a pay phone and without giving your name.”

  It was a rude kiss-off, and Gail clearl
y did not appreciate it. “It’s not the same, Dig, and you know it.” Color was rising in her cheeks. “Coming from you, the alert will carry more weight.”

  “It will also expose Derek,” Venice said. “We’ve always protected means and methods. This is not the time to start breaking our own rules.”

  Her words sucked the air out of the room. Gail’s shoulders settled, and she leaned back into the sofa.

  Case closed.

  “Let’s go to Alexandria,” Jonathan said.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Kellner had never considered how long a time forty minutes was when you’re riding in a big circle and you’re tired of looking at the view.

  Finally, the Potomac Eye finished its revolution, and Kellner was waiting at the door to pop out as soon as it opened.

  “Have a nice day!” Molly called to him. While he was on the ride, she’d shifted to the arrival side of the machine.

  “I’ll do my very best,” Kellner said. He prayed that he’d just issued his last forced smile of the day.

  Now to find his contact. This would be a one-way effort, because Iceman had no idea what Kellner looked like now. There weren’t but a few people within his field of view, so how could he not see anyone in a green coat and red hat?

  As he left through the exit turnstile, he button-hooked to the left and started walking back toward the buildings along the shore. He saw a man and a boy standing together pointing to something in the distance. A young lady sat on a bench reading her electronic tablet, while a man of the same age read his phone. From their physical closeness, Kellner assumed they were a couple. Maybe they were texting their love to each other.

  When Iceman told him to meet his asset at 13:00 hours at the Potomac Eye, Kellner had acknowledged without having yet seen the place. For all its boring design, the wheel took up a lot of real estate. Beyond the physical footprint of the ride itself, you had the complex of ticket booths, chained off areas where lines formed, and two picnic areas on either side. Where, specifically, were he and his contact supposed to meet?

  Maybe they were supposed to share a gondola on the wheel itself. If that were the case, then Kellner was going in the wrong direction.