by John Etzil
I stood up and retrieved an old-style flip phone from my go bag. “You’ll answer on this and set up a service call. In the meantime, we’ll break into the Axis parking lot and steal one of their vans. They have quite a few, and it’ll be over the weekend, so no one will notice the missing van.”
“Don’t they get emergency calls over the weekend?”
“They won’t have any this weekend. I’m taking down Axis’s phone service, so all incoming phone calls will go direct to the voicemail system instead of rolling over to the answering service after three rings. They’ll have quite a few angry messages come Monday morning, that’s for sure. I’ll set up an admin passcode in the voicemail system for us so that we can check messages, just in case the clowns at Cosmo’s house are too lazy to get up and use the house phone.”
Debbie studied me and took another sip of wine. “I’m liking this. Go on.”
“I’ll grab a pair of overalls from the Axis office when we get the keys to the van, and I’ll pose as the repairman, which is how I’ll gain access to the house.”
“Okay, then what? Kill everybody and rescue Catherine? I love it!” She leaned over to high-five me.
I left her hanging. “Er, not so fast. I wish it was that easy, but they always have between six and ten men inside the house. They actually live there, along with Cosmo, Catherine, and a few other ladies. It’s like a giant weaponized frat house.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, and since I’m an outsider who can’t be trusted, they’ll all be on their toes. Watching me like a hawk. It’d be foolish for one guy to take on that many.”
“Right. So…”
I went back to my go bag and took out a can of Freon. It was about the size of a one-liter soda bottle with a hose attached to it. A digital timer was duct-taped to its side. “This is sleeping gas. I’ll connect it to the system and set the timer to disperse into the ductwork of the HVAC system at four a.m. Even if some of them are still awake, they won’t smell anything. Ten minutes after the can’s emptied, they should all be passed out. I’ll walk right in and carry Catherine out.”
Debbie frowned, and I could see that she’d already thought of the first problem. “But how will you know how much of this stuff to put in the house? What if you put in too much and kill everyone? Or not enough, and everyone is wide awake?”
“Right. I thought of that, so I worked the math out to be conservative. The medical term is twilight anesthesia. Once you know the square footage of the house and the subject’s bodyweight, the calculation is quite simple. That assumes that there’s no other source of ventilation, like an open window, which in this heat is very unlikely. Nobody should OD with my twilight calculations, but if one of the smaller occupants is really high, this could put them over the edge and possibly kill them. On the downside, the conservative twilight calculation won’t knock everyone out.”
“Well, that’s no good. You could be back to being outnumbered.”
“Honestly, that’s likely to happen since I had to math out the dosage using Catherine’s bodyweight. That means that the anesthetic will have less effect on the fatties and muscle heads, some of whom must be more than twice her weight. The good news is that I’ll still have two things going for me. First, I’ll surprise them. Second, the sleeping gas will help, even if they aren’t knocked out. The ones who are drunk or stoned will likely be hardcore KO’d. The rest will at least be groggy and have delayed reflexes. Taking them out will be a walk in the park.”
“Hmm. All right, it definitely has potential. I need to sleep on it to come up with worst-case scenario questions.”
My eyes lit up. “Oh, I guess we’re done? Does that mean it’s Barry White time?”
She looked at me and smiled.
20
I used one of my burner IDs and credit cards to rent a van that Debbie would be driving down to New Jersey, a five-hour ride. Our plan was to have her meet me at a small airstrip just outside of Camden. We’d stay in the van until the following day, which was a Saturday, when we would wreak our HVAC havoc.
After sending Debbie on her way, I loaded up my Cessna and confirmed the weather for my night flight. As luck would have it, the weather was forecast to be clear with a half moon most of the way, but starting to cloud up as I approached New Jersey. I’m instrument-rated, which means that I can safely fly in inclement weather, but I don’t do it a lot, and a pilot gathers rust fast in the instrument-flying venue, so I made sure I went over everything a second and third time.
At one hundred and fifty knots, the trip would take a little over an hour. The en route weather was a little better than forecast, with light winds and good visibility. Before I knew it, I was lining up for the runway at my destination airport.
I landed, taxied to a tie-down spot, and shut down my Cessna. Debbie pulled up a few minutes later, and we unloaded the tools and equipment that we’d need to achieve mission success. I didn’t want to have Debbie riding around with all the weapons in the back of the van. If she ever got pulled over and the Statie decided to search her vehicle, she’d be late in meeting me. By a few decades.
We left the airport and pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center. I parked in the corner, broke out my laptop, and using HFS intel, I logged in to the Axis security system. I disabled the alarm, added an admin code for my personal use, and paused the recordings of the sixteen different cameras they had throughout the parking lot and inside by the reception area of the office.
I logged in to their phone system and changed the routing of the afterhours call forwarding so that any incoming phone calls would go straight to the operator’s voicemail box. If Cosmo or one of his henchmen were too lazy to get off the couch and use the house phone to arrange the service call, I wanted to be able to retrieve their message and have Debbie call them right back, so I set up a passcode for myself to check voicemails. I closed up my laptop and smiled at Debbie.
“We’re all set with Axis. Let’s do this.”
We left and made our way over to the Axis office building. I got us past the parking lot gate using the new code I’d programmed, and we drove over to the rear entrance. I punched in the six-digit code and pulled the door open. I went into the secretary’s office and over to the metal box that held all the keys to the vans, pocketing key number 18. I entered the small locker room and jimmied the lockers until I found a set of overalls that didn’t smell too bad and almost fit my six-foot-six muscular frame.
I went out the back door. Debbie had pulled our van out to the street and was waiting with the headlights off.
I peeled off the magnetic AXIS signs on van 18, unlocked the driver’s-side door, and climbed in. She started up on the first try, and I drove away.
Debbie followed me over to a quiet little state park just outside of Medford, and we pulled into our side-by-side reserved camping spots. I climbed into her van and gave her a big kiss on the lips. Just another happy couple on a weekend getaway.
After a short nap, we unpacked and set up our equipment, which consisted of two MacBook Pros, complete with TOR browser, of course, and two satellite links through HFS. We also had a spare Sierra Wireless Raven device, which was basically a cellular Wi-Fi hotspot, for backup.
At seven a.m. sharp, I ran Operation Hot Stuff and brought up Cosmo’s thermostat on my laptop. We sat in the back of the van and watched as the temperature inside the house started climbing. Eighteen minutes after the temperature inside the house hit eighty-seven degrees, the burner cell phone rang.
21
Debbie answered the phone on the third ring. “Hello, Axis Heating and Cooling answering service. How may I help you?”
“Yeah, we got an emergency.”
“Can you explain the nature of your emergency, sir?”
“Yeah, AC don’t work. It’s blowing hot air.”
“Oh no. Can I have your name and address? I’ll look up your account.”
Debbie took down the info and pounded some keys on her laptop to give th
e impression of typing. “Hmm, I can’t seem to find you here…oh, wait, there you are, sorry about that. Stupid computer. Let’s see, soonest that I can get a technician out to your house is today after lunch. Will someone be there between noon and six p.m.?”
“Yeah. But can’t you get someone here sooner? Hot as shit in here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir, but being a weekend and all…”
“Yeah. Someone will be here. Just have him hit the buzzer at the front gate when he gets here.”
“I’ll tell the technician that. Thank you for your business, and you have a nice day, sir.” Debbie flipped the phone closed and smiled at me. “Okay, you’re in, Mr. HVAC technician. That was almost too easy.”
“Don’t jinx me.”
She smacked me on the forehead. “Listen, Patrick, there’s no such thing as a ‘jinx.’ You make this work.”
“Of course I will. Now let’s go launch Amelia and get a good look at Cosmo’s crib.”
I let Debbie drive while I programmed the HFS drone software. Amelia would have to fly higher than normal over the residence, since I couldn’t take a chance on anyone hearing her. Cosmo’s house was located in a quiet area, and even a drone as small as Amelia could be heard from a few hundred feet away. As far as the FAA was concerned, I couldn’t legally fly a drone higher than four hundred feet, but since this was life-critical, I decided to break that law.
We found a small playground that had a kids’ swing set and some monkey bars. We pulled into the empty parking lot, and when I finished programming Amelia, I launched her from the back of the van.
She went straight up in the air, hovered for a second at five hundred feet, and made a beeline for Cosmo’s. I watched the live feed on my iPhone as she got closer to the front of his house and started her orbit. She got about halfway around when I spotted two shirtless men with muscles out the wazoo, in the backyard with three topless white women. They were drinking Molsons and sunning themselves by the in-ground pool. I eyed them closely to see if one of the women was Catherine.
A blonde woman with a cupid tattoo on her left breast shielded her eyes and pointed in the air. I was caught up in using my zoom lens to study the intricacies of her beautiful artwork, and it took a second, or three, for it to register that she was pointing at Amelia. So much for my stealthiness. Or focus.
One of the men reached under his lounge chair and pulled out a Mossberg 500 shotgun with a pistol grip. Before I could react, he fired two blasts at Amelia. He missed, and I hit the auto-land button. My mighty drone tore ass out of there at her max speed of a whopping twenty-eight miles per hour. Two minutes later she landed next to the rear of the van.
“Wow, that was quick,” Debbie commented. “Almost as fast as you the other night.”
I scooped up Amelia and jumped into the back of the van, slamming the doors behind me. “Drive. Now.”
She must have sensed the urgency in my voice, because she gunned the van and we took off out of the parking lot and down the street. I watched out the rear window with my hand on my Glock just in case we were being followed. I didn’t see anyone.
A few seconds later, I heard the loud rumble of motorcycles coming from the other direction. I turned and looked through the front windshield. Two shirtless muscles-out-the-wazoo men on Harleys thundered by us and turned into the parking lot of the playground.
Debbie made a right at the first intersection, and as we turned the corner, I saw the two Harleys leave the playground parking lot and head in our direction.
Uh-oh…
22
Leo Kennedy went over to his supervisor’s office and was waved in before he had a chance to knock.
“Come in, Leo. I need you to drop what you’re doing and head on over to Newburgh. The shit’s hit the fan. Must have been a full moon. Two local cops stumbled upon a drug deal gone bad and recovered over two thousand in cash and about two million dollars’ worth of heroin.”
“That’s a great haul. But—wait a minute… only two thousand in cash? That’s an eyebrow raiser. You’d expect a lot more cash with that quantity of heroin.”
“Yes, but that’s not why you’re going in. We can look at the prospect of missing cash at a later date. There was a full-blown shoot-out at a heroin house on Landers Street. So far, we have seven deceased. All males. Plus we have three females in the hospital.”
“They expected to survive?”
“Fortunately, yes. Believe it or not, two of the females are in the hospital to have duct tape surgically removed from their eyes.”
“What? Who duct-tapes eyes? That’s sick!”
“Crazy, right? First time I’ve seen that in my life. It could’ve been much worse for them, though. They were in the heroin house when the gunmen showed up and started shooting.”
“They give descriptions?”
“Yes, but they only saw one perp. Tall, Caucasian. Called themselves the Old Fuckin’ White Guys.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I were, but they both swore it. The cops interviewed them separately, and their stories matched to a T. Vasquez is out sick, so I want you to grab Russel Blake and go do some digging.”
“Sure. But why are we getting involved? Shouldn’t this be a local police problem?”
“Ordinarily, yes. But our president is all gung ho about gang arrests, and this has to be gang-related.”
“Maybe it was a straight-up robbery?”
“No, too many things in motion. A family on a fishing boat was awakened close to dawn by someone drowning in the Hudson. They managed to get a spotlight on him, but he disappeared before they could rescue him.”
“Could just be a coincidence…”
“Unlikely. They found the body washed up a few hours later. I just spoke to the medical examiner. The deceased had his eyelids ripped off. And there appears to be some type of residue on his face. As in duct tape residue. The Newburgh cops ID’d the guy as a local dealer.”
“Could be the work of a serial killer. Or maybe a vigilante?”
“I want you to put the Lamburt thing on hold. No way he’s involved in all of this. Interview the female witnesses at the hospital. See if you can get a better description of the shooter. After you’ve finished with them, check in with me, and by then I’ll have more for you. Dismissed.”
“Roger. Will do, sir.” Leo went back to his desk, gathered all his notes on Lamburt, and stuffed them in a folder. He opened a drawer and tossed them inside. Cefalo must be right. There was no way one man could inflict that much destruction…
23
Debbie stayed calm. She made two quick rights and lost the steroid junkies without breaking a sweat. She was much better at this sort of thing than I gave her credit for.
“Good work. You lost them.”
She nodded. “Get any good footage?”
“I don’t know. Let’s circumvent the area and take the long way back to the campsite. Then we can check the video.” I felt the van turn before I finished my sentence.
“Already on it,” she said.
With all the running in circles we did, it took us nearly an hour to get back to the campsite, but at least I was sure we weren’t tailed. While Debbie was making us hard to follow, I downloaded Amelia’s video to my laptop. We pulled into our spot and I hit play. The video was short, only a few minutes long, and aside from the closeup of the topless woman, it didn’t have much to offer. Debbie didn’t appreciate that.
“Jeez, Jack, you’re like a teenage boy. You see a nice pair of tits and your brain gets hijacked. You could have at least filmed the information you were looking for before you zoomed in on her tits.”
“What? I was calibrating the lens.”
She didn’t buy it. “You’re a terrible liar, Patrick. Now you’re stuck with intel from Google Earth and HFS.”
“Don’t worry, I already have a backup plan. I’ll see enough of the backyard to confirm what I need to. I’ll make this work.”
“You better. It’s not just th
e rescue that’s at stake with this part of the op. Our lives are, and there’s no room for error.”
I ate my granola bar lunch and washed it down with a protein shake. I checked my watch. It was go time, so I left our van, stuck the magnetic signs back on the Axis van, and kissed Debbie goodbye. “I should be back within two to three hours. If anything goes wrong, go back to Eminence and wait for me there. I don’t want you anywhere near this place if the shit hits the fan.” I hopped in the van and headed over to Cosmo’s house.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled up to the front gate at his house, rolled down my window, and pressed the intercom button. I was met with the same grouchy voice that had called Debbie on the phone earlier.
“Yeah?”
I used the name on my uniform. Not sure if I pronounced it correctly, but so what? “Barry Eisler, Axis Heating and Cooling, here for your service call.”
“Yeah, ’bout time. Hot as shit in here.”
What a dick. The big iron gate swung open, and I pulled up the curved driveway. I made a mental note that when all this was done, I would set up the HVAC software to turn their heat on every morning. I could hack into their water meter and turn that off too, maybe kill any who survived tonight by dehydration…
I watched through my side-view mirror as the gate thunked to a close. I was officially inside the lion’s den, with no way out unless they let me.
I parked the van by the front of the house, grabbed my toolbox from the back, and hopped up the wide steps to a massive oak front door. Before I could finger the bell, a swarthy-looking middle-aged man swung open the door. The heat from the house poured out and carried with it body odor that would have made me gag if I wasn’t busy fighting back the urge to smile.
He was short and built like a fridge, typical Jersey boy. Must be something in the drinking water. He had on denim shorts that hung down past his knees and a loose-fitting T-shirt, and he was carrying a red bandanna that he wiped his brow with.