Knave's Gambit

by Deforest Day

  Every Monday he paid an NCO in Personnel fifty bucks to photocopy the jackets of Marines due for their re-up. He was looking for non-coms with OccFld 58 as their primary MOS. Military Police and Corrections. And Secondaries that caught his eye. 5812: Working Dog Handler. 5831: Correctional Specialist. Marines with experience in military containment facilities. Each man had more than one Summary Disciplinary Judgement in their record. These boys enjoyed their work. He handed the record to the topless dancer.

  She didn’t have the biggest ones in the place, but they were firm and looked to be mostly God’s work. Maybe with a little silicone enhancement; he didn’t care enough to check for scars.

  She was the first phase of the job interview, although the twenty Marines at the bar, drinking beer on Gunny’s dime, didn’t know it. He turned the open briefcase, putting the packs of hundreds and the Colt .45 pistol on display.

  He liked to watch them interact with the half-naked girl as they crossed the big room to his table in the far corner. A girl who was nominally in charge, twerking them to the interview. Telling them where to sit, then sitting herself at an angle where they could look at her, or Gunny. Where Gunny could watch them watching her. Body language; he’d learned to read it over the years of luring high school kids with tales of adventure.

  The red neon above the door spelled out GIRLS!GIRLS!GIRLS! Truth in advertising; there were indeed three girls inside. One behind the taps, one mopping a wooden floor that would never come clean, and the one earning a C-note for an hour’s teaming with Gunny Talarico. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and the real girls girls girls wouldn’t punch in until after dark.

  “Here’s the deal, Corporal Heston. Bearclaw has a contract with Homeland Security, to provide a force experienced in crowd control, dealing with civil disobedience. Pulling guard duty, if it comes to detention.”

  Gunny Talarico tapped his forefinger on Heston’s service record. “I see you spent some time in the 'stans, Somalia. You have any problem with killing civilians?”

  The big kid shifted in the chair, flicked a glance at the girl. “Problem? What do you mean? They go down just like anybody else. Exceptin’ they ain’t carrying a Kalashnikov, what’s the diff?”

  “I was inquiring from a moralistic point of view.” Talarico stubbed out his cigarette. “Asked and answered. Pay is three fifty a day.” These kids were math challenged, so he elaborated. “That’s ten thousand a month, with a thousand dollar signing bonus.”

  “Holy shit! That’s, uh, that’s way more than we make in the Corps.” Heston transferred his eyes from the tits to the Sergeant. “Ain’t it?”

  “Unless you’re flag rank. Three hots and a cot; uniforms and weapons supplied.” He pointed Heston's bulging arms. “Are those Dianabol muscles?”

  “Uh, yeah? Most of the guys use D-Balls to bulk up, Sustandon to maintain. You have a problem with that?”

  “No, not me, but the boss is a candy ass about any drug use.” He reached in the briefcase, handed Heston a plastic vial and a pack of hundreds, along with a pen and a form. “Sign this, then get ahold of some clean piss, take it with you for your in-processing at The Compound. And Heston? You run into a little guy there, handlebar mustache and a Desert Eagle .50 in a shoulder rig? He’s the bossman; name’s King. You might mention that you have accepted the Lord as your personal savior.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kat lowered her window and held her ID in front of the camera. The yellow and black bar rose, and she drove down the steep ramp. The dim cavern beneath her building had space for six hundred cars. Three loops around, and she found her assigned spot, then followed the crowd to a row of turnstiles that reminded her of the Metro at rush hour. As she waited in line, watching people put their palms on readers, she heard her name.

  “Kat? Kat Sinclair?” She turned as her name echoed off the concrete. “It is you! I thought I recognized that back end.” A tall, slim man with hair blonder and better styled than Kat’s, spread his arms for a hug.

  “Levon Longstreet!” she cried. “I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment, or dietary advice. You’re working here?” She checked out his three piece suit, mentally comparing it to her skirt and sweater.

  “Two years.” He took a step closer as a steady stream of workers flowed around them, crowded through the cages and into elevators. “I’m tickled to be on the fast track, career wise, but this is most assuredly a weird place to work.” He reached for her green and black leash, read her ID. “I think they spray the place with Eau de Paranoia at night. You’re on the fourth floor? What in Nirvana’s name are you doing down with the drones?”

  “Just started. I think it’s a learning curve thing. She dropped her voice to match his. “From what I’ve seen so far, I’ve stumbled into Remedial Algorithms 101. I’ve been pawing through voter registration records, using the old Genoa I and II software. And Genisys.” She threw her eyes toward the low ceiling. The raw concrete smelled of damp lime. “When Secretary Edgerton hired me, I thought I’d be putting my spanky fresh doctorate to better use.”

  “Edgerton. I heard from the cyber vine you were fast-tracking in the doctorate hunt, but I didn’t realize you’d caught the eye of the top dog. Aren’t you the smartypants. The Secretary spends more time in the Oval Office than upstairs.” He glanced at his TAG Heuer. “I’ve got a gaggle of Congressional oversight people here from nine to eleven, but then I’m free. I’ll send a Floor Pass down, show you some of the inner workings of Five. Although I expect you’ll be up there yourself before one can say Alan Turing.”

  They each pressed their palms against the readers at the turnstiles, then Levon hooked her arm, and led her to an elevator at the far end of the bank. A head tilt to the left indicated the other cars. “Those don’t go to Five and Six. Or, as the proles call it, God’s Country.”

  Kat stepped off on Four and heard Mr. Hanford leading the troops in the pledge. She stopped at the back of the crowd and put her hand on her heart. After a moment's delay, she dredged up grade school memories, and mumbled the few words she could recall. Not much allegiance pledging went on in graduate school.

  A plump, pink man in a black suit with a cross on a chain took over. He purred for a bit in a liturgical voice about apostates and global strife and duty, then finished with a hand thrown skyward and a shout of, “Praise the Lord!”

  The gathered researchers followed as one, raising hands from heart to heaven, and they shouted ‘hallelujah’ and ‘Praise God’ in response.

  Kat raised her arm with the rest, silently said, ‘sieg heil’, and headed for her cubicle.

  —o—

  Immediately after the second accident the National Transportation Safety Board smelled an opportunity, and sprang into action. Seat belts and air bags had given way to automatic collision avoidance and the looming threat of self-driving vehicles. The NTSB budget was a shadow of the sixties, when fifty thousand Americans died each year on the highways.

  Now they had two spectacular accidents in two days, and two major highways closed for months, so the director argued, like the Coast Guard, the NTSB should become part of Homeland Security. More Americans died in cars than on boats.

  The first event involved a nearly new Freightliner, the second a twelve-year-old Kenworth. Investigators searched for a thread of commonality between their trailers, tires and brakes. After they came up empty, staff psychologists crafted a finding that blamed driver inattention, cell phones, and highway glare.

  Meanwhile, the cable channels called it ‘Fire in the Sky’, and endlessly replayed the footage. Many of the bodies were classified as BBR. Burned Beyond Recognition. Missing Persons reports led to dental records, resulting in Positive Identification of Remains.

  By the time anyone realized it was more than just a tragic accident the scene had cleared. Interstate 295 was closed, and backhoes and jackhammers began ripping up the fire-ravaged concrete and rebar. The twisted, burned hulks had already been winched onto rollbacks and unceremoniously
delivered to the Impoundment Yard.

  They would remain there until the insurance claims, wrongful death lawsuits, and finger pointing ended. Then the wreckage would move to the scrap yard across the street, to be shredded and the recyclables separated.

  The steel would be picked up by electromagnets and dropped into railcars for the short journey to Baltimore, and then a longer voyage to China. Where it would fuel the surging Chinese economy, then return to America’s discount stores.

  It wasn’t until the office of the DC Medical Examiner compared X-rays, and identified the Kenworth driver as Bucky Rayford, that evidence of a crime came to light.

  The light came from a digital radiography image on a morgue technician's screen. “Check this out, Doc. That look like a bullet to you?”

  The M.E. put on his reading glasses, studied the image. ”Sure does. I think I need to do some mineral prospecting in our corpus delicti.”

  Half an hour later he telephoned the FBI, a hundred grains of flattened copper and lead in his gloved hand.

  “Seven Millimeter,” the ballistics technician said. “FMJ. Too bent and burnt for me to tell you anything more. I can do gas chromatography, spectroscopic tests on the lead, the copper. Maybe get a match with our database of manufacturers. But the 7 mm has been the predominate military caliber for over a century.” He dropped the bullet in an evidence bag. “Our lab won’t be solving this one.”

  They had better luck with DC Metro. Traffic, not Police. Someone—quite a few claimed credit after the fact—had thought to look at the digitized images from the trafficam where 295 soared across the Potomac.

  Thirty Special Agents on the Terrorist Task Force were in the Director’s conference room, discussing the advisability of appointing a committee to initiate an all-encompassing, Bureau-wide investigation, when the Attorney General called.

  The Director had been a muscular young take-no-shit-from-nobody-nohow street cop when he caught the eye of Mr. Hoover. So when the Attorney General unceremoniously told him HomSec would lead the investigation, his Easter Island visage went from redwood to a dangerous shade of mahogany. After his boss hung up he called A. G. Oxenhammer a cocksucking motherfucker.

  He dismissed the Task Force, kicked a waste can across the conference room, and told his Deputy Director to send the digital images to the other motherfucking cocksucker, Larry Edgerton. “With no explanation, God damn it. Let those pointy-headed bastards do their own detective work.”

  —o—

  The morning pledge and prayer had sensitized Kat to Levon’s quip about Eau de Paranoia. As she went about the mindless task of tracking down desperadoes by examining their voting records she decided to do some snooping of her own.

  But first, a bit of insurance. A hastily-concocted autonomous bot accompanied her travels, and she learned her every keystroke was recorded. Either archived as evidence for some future misbehavior, or active investigation of subversive activity. The watchers were watching the watchers.

  So she used her laptop to write a quick spoof, and a thumb drive to add it to her work computer login script. Now her keyboard would report she was a busy, busy bee, toiling at her assigned task. That left her free to travel down Frost’s leaf-strewn road no step had trodden black. If the watchers are watching, I’ll give them something to watch. Later, she would mention it to Levon. Or maybe not; the paranoia creeps in on little cat's feet. She'd taken a poetry appreciation class as an undergraduate.

  Kat was hunting for watchers, and trying to make some sense of Homeland Security's mandate, when a middle-aged man stuck his head in her cubicle. “Bob Feld, Deputy Assistant Director Longstreet’s gopher.” He handed her a plastic card. “This will open the elevator door upstairs. He expects you for lunch at one.”

  At one o’clock Bob escorted Kat down the hallway to a large corner office. She curtsied in the open doorway. “Deputy Assistant Director. I had no idea!”

  Levon Longstreet leaned back in his rather magnificent leather chair, and clasped his hands behind his head. “I think it’s like the early days of the Army Air Corps. Colonels too young to shave. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, you and I are a different breed in this second decade of our War on Universal Terror. Most of the top programmers either left for better jobs, or were fired for impure thoughts. The ones left are political jobholders working on virtual reality surveillance and autonomous drone interdiction.”

  He had a holographic eyeball in a Lucite cube on his desk and Etheridge on his Bose.

  Kat asked, “What the fuck’s with the eyeball?”

  He smiled. Trust Kat to cut through the bullshit. “Eye-Cubed. Information Interpretation Integration.” Melissa sang Yes, I am. He stood, slipped into his suit coat. “Hungry?”

  The executive dining room occupied half of the top floor; the rest was Secretary Edgerton’s office and a panoply of conference rooms. The tables were covered with crisp linen and set with four star china and crystal.

  “Wow,” Kat exclaimed as a waiter held her chair, then offered her a carte du jour inscribed with a modest choice of entrees. She usually lunched at the university salad bar, and dined on take-out in her tiny apartment.

  Levon unfolded his napkin. “Last year’s appropriation hit the fifty billion mark. That’s six million dollars an hour, and we have to spend it before the end of the fiscal year. The result is Parkinson's Law.”

  “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

  “Well, yes, but I'm thinking of his corollary. ‘Officials make work for each other’.”

  They were joined by a pair of older men in well-tailored suits and introduced as Deputy This and Assistant That. The talk entailed budgets and the coming election, and she zoned out, turned her attention from the best meal she had ever eaten to the view of Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac. First paycheck she needed to spend some of the big bucks on a new wardrobe. Grad school grunge wouldn't cut it here.

  Then Levon’s gopher hurried across the thick carpeting and everything went to hell.

  “Something you need to see, downstairs,” the man said. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. “It just came over from the FBI, on the secure data line. Raw digital images. With no attachment or explanation.” The man danced a little two step, as though he had to pee.

  Levon laid his napkin beside his plate. “Probably the Feebs playing ‘gotcha’.” He stood, explained to Kat, “Every time they stumble over something that doesn’t smell of Organized Crime or political corruption, they pawn it off on us. Come along; you can watch us in action.”

  They entered a room the size of a basketball court, and the noisy confusion made Kat think of ‘Houston, we have a problem’. Banks of work stations were occupied by shirt-sleeved workers peering at monitors. Sweat-stained armpits and neckties at half mast added to the intensity. Levon put his hand on the shoulder of a woman wearing a wireless headset. “What do we have?”

  “Looks like trafficam images, we think from 295. We’ve cut the raw data down to the twenty-minute timeframe around the incident. I’ve got a dozen people studying each segment. No sense in going to enhancement until we have something worth a closer look.”

  The guy next to her muttered, “Why the Hell isn’t this bullshit down on Four?”

  Levon winked at Kat, told the man, “Because the Feebs sent it to Five, and I want our asses covered if it turns out to be something.”

  A shout from across the room cut through the din, and those not tied to a screen coalesced at the source. Levon pushed through the gathering. Kat settled for standing on tiptoes at the back of the crowd.

  The jerky black and white images jittered on the monitor. Cars and trucks flashed by so fast they were a blur. Not the man on the roof. Still as a corpse, he knelt at the parapet, pointing a stick, a pipe, at the Interstate.

  The gasoline tanker went sideways, and thirty seconds of realtime became two seconds of herky-jerky ballet. The technician isolated the frames, looped them. Slowed them fro
m video to distinct still pictures. Kat thought of those little flip books you got with bubble gum.

  The rooftop man stood. He turned. He became a head and torso disappearing in the rooftop doorway. Over and over and over.

  The tech blew up and enhanced the three images. The man wore a bulky coat. Not a stick, not a pipe. A rifle. Kat had a disquieting moment of déjà vu.

  Somebody said, “Will the NSA have Keyhole satellite of this?”

  “Yeah, but they won’t share anything from Echelon.”

  “Bastards.”

  “Where the hell is that rooftop?”

  “Try Google Earth.”

  They threw it on the big screen and the crowd turned, raised their faces to the wall. Northern Virginia shrank to the District of Columbia, which became a river, 295, and the D.C. sewage treatment plant.

  A second click and it showed a sea of cars labeled Blue Plains Auto Impound Lot.

  Kat gave voice to her déjà vu. “It’s the Tattooed Prick!” The crowd turned and stared at stranger. “That’s the impound place, where he towed my car.” Kat got some odd looks, but Levon knew her well enough to tell someone named Harry to access Metro DMV.

  Harry said, “The Impoundment Yard is just east of I-295, at the Naval Research Laboratory Exit.” His fingers raced across his keyboard. “Couple of dozen employees, mostly tow truck drivers.”

  “Pull up their employment records. DMV photos.”

  “Got it.”

  “Throw them on the big screen.”

  Kat walked to the front of the crowd, looked at the images. “That one,” she said, pointing. “Nicodemo Paloma.”

  Levon asked, “Phone?”

  Someone said, “I’m on it. Got him. Comcast.”

  Levon said, “Keep on it. Folks, put a package together on Mr. Paloma. I’ll be upstairs.” He reached for Kat. “Finishing my lunch.”