The Compound: A Thriller

by Ben Follows

  A plump woman wearing a red-and-white-striped uniform smiled at them and held up a finger.

  “Hey,” said Harold, making the first sound since he had bailed Jake out of jail.

  Jake said, “I thought we were going somewhere to discuss my assignment?”

  Harold nodded. “We did.”

  “Here?”

  Harold looked over his shoulder. “That’s the plan.”

  “Won’t somebody hear us?”

  “Not likely.”

  The plump woman finished with the table she was serving and walked toward them. When she was a dozen feet away, Harold straightened his back, leaning back casually with his hands in his pockets. He grinned and smiled as the hostess approached. He moved his teeth around as though he was used to chewing on a toothpick.

  Jake stared at him for a moment in shock. All the rumors about Harold at the academy could not have prepared him for the complete transformation the man had made. He seemed like a different person.

  “Janet,” he said. “Long time no see. Meet my nephew, Jake. Came into town last night and needed me to bail his ass out of prison.”

  “Is that so, Harry?” said Janet, gathering menus from behind the hostess counter. “Isn’t he a sweetie? You don’t put too much stress on your uncle here, he has enough stress down at the farm.”

  Jake didn’t know anything about the farm or the work there, but he nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re adorable,” said Janet. “Usual table, Harry?”

  Harold rubbed his mouth on his sleeve before nodding. “Yeah, we need to talk about some stuff in private. His mother won’t be too happy when she hears about this.” He smacked Jake on the back.

  “I’m sure,” said Janet. “Follow me.”

  She led them to a table in the farthest corner of the restaurant, secluded from any other tables and doors. Even still, Jake worried about privacy.

  Harold took the seat that afforded him a view of the entire restaurant, and Jake took the seat opposite him, shifting the seat to one side so his back was against the wall, minimizing his blind spots. Harold nodded as he did so.

  “Can I get you two started with some drinks?” asked Janet.

  Jake noted that she seemed to be the only waitress. Perhaps there wasn’t much of a lunch crowd here. Maybe they would get privacy.

  “Coke for you, Harry?” said Janet.

  “Yes, please.”

  “And for you, dear?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Milk or sugar?”

  “Black, please.”

  Janet smirked sideways at Harold. “I’ll be right back with those drinks.”

  Janet left, and Harold watched her go. She came back with the drinks, and Harold requested that they be left to discuss a few private issues, touching her and speaking in long, flowing sentences. He would flag her down if they wanted anything else.

  Once she was safely distracted by other customers, Harold seemed to dissolve, his cheery attitude disappearing, replaced by the sneer he had worn during the drive. His posture slumped, and he looked across the table at Jake.

  After a few seconds, Harold laughed. “Which is the real me? The stoic, silent man who reveals nothing and never speaks a sentence longer than three words? Or the farmer with a gentle attitude, willing to help anyone who asks? Or is it this one?”

  Jake didn’t know, and Harold continued without waiting for a response.

  “They’re all pretty similar, aren’t they? No change of clothes, no dirt underneath my fingernails for the farmer. The trick,” he leaned forward onto his elbows on the table, “with fooling people into thinking you’re someone else is in the details, in the small changes. Keep the fake personalities as close to the truth as possible. Tell the truth before you lie, change only the details about your life that need to changed.”

  “I already learned all this at the Academy,” said Jake. “Can we talk about—“

  “No. I need to talk to you about this, because you made some major errors at the police station. That lady cop suspects something, even if she can’t place her finger on exactly what. The story about being in Boston last night works pretty well; it's too absurd to believe it was fabricated. However, the details need work.”

  “There were no flaws in my story.”

  “No, but there was no stunning detail, no recollection of something amazing taking place. When you were giving your story to the chief, you said you were at a bachelor party, got drunk, and drove almost three hours. I’m assuming you already have the speedometer and GPS set up to confirm your story?”

  “Of course,” said Jake, offended. Harold seemed not to notice.

  “Good. Before I tell you, do you want to take a guess?”

  Jake shrugged. “I figured that my methods aren’t as polished for work in the field as they could be. I figured it was a rookie thing.”

  “No, technically you were fine. It was your story that makes it so you’ve already fucked yourself.”

  Jake looked around the restaurant to see if anyone was listening, but no one had reacted. Janet was standing at the counter of the bar, cleaning the same spot over and over.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jake, turning back. “I think you’re playing me, testing my ability to see a lie.”

  “Truth, “said Harold, echoing a mantra of the academy, “lies in the details, the useless details we remember and bring up when we tell our stories.”

  “I know that, but what did I do wrong?”

  “What did you drink last night?”

  Jake hesitated, sensing another trap. “Beer, mostly.”

  He took a sip of the coffee, letting it warm his body.

  “No one gets that drunk on beer,” said Harold. “You piss it out. For how drunk you were last night and how hungover you are, that requires a bachelor party where everyone was drinking a lot, and not beer.”

  Jake swallowed, and he felt as though he saw the mistake.

  “When someone wakes up from the kind of night you had,” said Harold, “they do a few things. They’ll make some comment along the lines of ‘I’m never doing tequila shots again,’ and then swear they’re quitting drinking. Maybe not those exact words, but that’s the tone. You also didn’t mention anything about who you were with? Whose bachelor party was it? Where did you go? Who was the most drunk and made a complete fool of themselves?”

  Jake could still taste the entire bottle of Jack Daniels he had forced down his throat, the chugs spread out over ten minutes, as fast as he could get it over with, standing about a dozen miles from the border of Crescent Point beside his car. He didn’t understand why his first assignment from The Compound had required him to show up in the town completely drunk, but he had a few guesses. Perhaps they wanted to see how well he withstood any questioning and stayed in character with a heavy amount of liquor running through his system. Maybe they wanted to give him a reason for being in Crescent Point that wouldn’t draw the suspicion of the authorities. Maybe they wanted him to be forced to stay there because of the impounding of his car.

  He had gotten into the car and driven toward Crescent Point. The empty streets were pitch black, no streetlights anywhere in sight. He passed the population sign for the town of Crescent Point. He was concerned he would get too close to the downtown area, where he might actually hurt someone before he had a chance to crash the car. He considered crashing on purpose, just to prevent hurting anyone. He was going less than twenty miles an hour, but people had been killed by less.

  Less than five hundred feet past the sign, the whiskey hit him like a tidal wave, and he went from sober to wasted in a blink. He estimated he had lasted about twenty seconds before swerving off the road and into a ditch, throwing his arms in front of his face just as the airbag exploded. It was there that Officer Obrasey had found him.

  Jake bit his lip, looking across the table at Harold. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, at least you can admit when you’ve fucked up. Don�
�t worry about the cop. I’ll take care of her.”

  Jake’s eyes widened.

  “Not like that,” said Harold, taking a sip of Coke from the edge of the glass. “I’ll just get some things set up to make your story seem as true as possible in case she goes digging around. Don’t do anything to piss her off. If she’s the one I’m thinking about, she’s engaged to a local hero. They have pull in this town, at least until his celebrity dies down. You shouldn’t know anything about that, though, so I won’t tell you.”

  Jake let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks.”

  Harold placed the glass of Coke back on the table. “You’re going to have to get used to the idea that sometimes people will die as collateral, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

  Jake nodded.

  “But not this time," said Harold. "This time, it would cause more problems than it would solve. Push it out of your mind. I’ll deal with it. It's definitely a strike against you, but far from a reason to fail you. It doesn’t give a great first impression, though.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Jake, sipping at his coffee.

  Harold laughed. “Don’t call me sir. I’m your uncle, remember?” He raised an eyebrow. “Who calls their uncle 'sir'?”

  “Yes, Uncle Harold.”

  Harold stared at him for a few moments, eyebrow still raised, then relented. “Not very convincing, but better.” He took another long swig of Coke. “Now, on to business. How much do you know?”

  “Actually, there is one other thing,” said Jake.

  “What now?”

  “Officer Obrasey asked me if I knew anything about Frank Frederickson.”

  Harold leaned back. “I was told you didn’t have your assignment yet.”

  Jake shrugged. “When I was told where I was going, I did some research. The fact that a local bigwig had gone missing, and that I couldn’t find anything about him prior to a few years ago, indicates he hired us. He was a criminal. Something goes wrong. He needs to disappear. He comes to us, and we set him up with a new life in a small town in Maine. Someone comes here from his old life, someone who thinks he’d dead, through a complete fluke, and all of a sudden they’re making sure he’s dead. That’s where the cleaners—us— come in to make sure that no one finds out about us or about how we faked his death. Did I hit close to the mark?”

  Jake was smiling, but he couldn’t help it.

  Harold smiled. “Right on the bullseye. Except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not ‘us’ yet. You haven’t passed your test. This is where I come in. At best you’re a consultant on my case.”

  “I was told that I would be given free rein on this case.”

  “Then a contractor.”

  Jake sighed. “What does the thing with Obrasey mean? The fact that she asked me about it?”

  “A shot in the dark, I assume. She has no reason to assume anything. The only clues she had were that you had come into town under suspicious circumstances and that you were acting strangely for reasons she couldn’t place. It’s probably her case, or she wants to be involved. What was your reaction?”

  “At the time I thought I had done perfectly, but after you ripped apart my performance, I’m not so sure. What happens now?”

  Harold shrugged. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether she’s the kind of person who listens to her gut or who trusts her logic on whether she believes the best or the worst in people, on whether she’s ever arrested someone who you remind her of. People are complicated. It’s impossible to understand the human soul in general, let alone an individual human soul. The only thing you can do is play the odds. I will deal with the worst-case scenario. You focus on your assignment.”

  “Which is?”

  Harold turned and pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolding it and laying it on the table. Harold hadn’t done any checks to make sure no one was watching.

  Jake looked down at the page in front of him. In the center of it was a mugshot of Frank Frederickson. It took Jake a few moments to realize that it was the same person he’d seen on the newspaper front pages the previous day. In those pictures, Frank had been smiling while posing with his wife and child, who the newspaper had identified as Judith and Suzie Frederickson.

  In this picture, a mugshot, he was holding up his information, which identified him as “Frank Tanners” and stated his crime was vehicular manslaughter. He was injured, his right shoulder heavily bandaged, and the rest of his arms were scarred. His face held a grisly smirk, his eyes making him seem in control even as his mugshot was taken.

  Harold spread the three pages across the table. The first contained Frank's basic information, the next his criminal history prior to being relocated by The Compound, and the third contained the information that Jake needed to know pertaining to his disappearance. Contained in this folder, Jake knew, was more information than the cops could receive, no matter what they bargained or promised to the FBI or anyone else. Most of this information was not even available to the top-ranking security officials within the American government. Not because it was classified, but because—due of the intervention of The Compound— they had never learned it.

  Jake knew that on other cases there was a fourth sheet that detailed where within driving distance an agent of The Compound could get weapons, living quarters, and other considerations. In this case, Harold would simply tell him.

  All this information came with a condition. If he was caught, he was expected to kill himself immediately, using whatever methods were available to him. Full agents had a false cap on their back right molar, which contained poison that would be released with a hard bite, but Jake didn’t have that yet. He did have the cap, but it was filled with water.

  There were two kinds of agents within The Compound, officially known as the Relocation Specialists—those who established the new lives of their clients— and the Recovery Specialists—those who salvaged an operation when something went wrong. Normally this meant taking out a client who was a risk of talking to the police, but sometimes it was more complicated than that.

  Jake preferred the names “Movers” and “Cleaners.”

  “I’ll give you the quick rundown of what you need to know for this operation,” said Harold. “The most important thing is that this is most likely a mission that will amount to nothing more than Tanners running off to Las Vegas with some Hollywood bimbo. That is the most likely conclusion you’re going to come to.”

  “Which is why I get to take it,” said Jake. “Because it’s easy. If I mess this up..."

  Harold snapped and pointed at him. “Exactly. So, the basics. Down in Southern Nevada three years ago, Frank Tanners, our good friend here, was the go-to business man if you wanted someone killed, especially if you wanted them dead without anyone knowing it was you. He was the guy. It was almost impossible to get an audience with him if you weren’t referred through six or seven channels, all of which needed to vouch for you, but once he agreed to the job, it was a guarantee. He didn’t fail. He was known as ‘The Specter’ to local and federal law enforcement. They heard whispers of the guy for years in connection with hundreds of murders, only most of which we believe he actually had a hand in, but they could not find this guy, not matter how deep into the criminal underworld the FBI got their sources. They could not get an audience with him.”

  Jake was about to interrupt, but Harold held up a hand. “Let me finish. Save your questions.”

  Jake nodded.

  Harold continued. “The important thing to remember is that he never actually shot a bullet. We don’t know if he’s shot a gun or fought anyone in his life. The thing he was phenomenal at, the thing that allowed him to rise through the ranks, was the fact that he terrified people. There are stories of him sitting behind his desk, staring at someone until they broke and told him everything he wanted to know. We don’t know if that’s true, but it’s the myth of him that’s import
ant. He killed politicians and rapists, athletes and insurance salesman. Anyone you wanted dead, he was happy to oblige for the right price.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  Harold stared at Jake. “What did I just say? Let me finish and you’ll know.”

  Jake sat back and crossed his arms.

  “Okay.” Harold paused and thought for a moment, as if trying to remember where he was, before continuing. “The problem with that entire system is that someone has to know where you are. There need to be people who are working for you, who know where to find you. There was hundreds of millions of dollars passing through Frank Tanners each year. He would have needed accountants and lawyers, as well as whatever other administrative staff he decided he needed.

  “Being a middle-man for assassins is a dangerous job, and sooner or later one of those people who know you are going to have a change of heart or an unfortunate run-in with the authorities. Which is what happened. One of his lawyers was arrested for a completely unrelated case to do with tax fraud of about a hundred thousand dollars. This was a guy who had defended and worked for some of the most despicable people in the world. The feds hadn’t even listed off his charges before he started begging them not to send him to prison, that he would tell them everything they needed to know about The Specter. Of course they listened, and a warrant was put out for Frank Tanners’s arrest. Tax evasion, so that they could search his home and office.

  “We aren’t sure how, but Tanners got tipped off to the raid and destroyed all the evidence. When the feds came to his house, he put up a fight, raging at them like a holier-than-thou banker who thinks he’s above the law, which was the public image he had cultivated. As I said, a fake identity needs to be as close as possible to the truth.

  “Anyway,” said Harold, “he fought the cops and was arrested for assaulting an officer but was released on bail a few days later. He knew his entire racket was blown and that he wouldn’t be able to resume work, that the feds would be in his rear-view mirror until he died or was in their clutches. That was when he got in touch with us. We gave him a new life here, and he’s flourished. He has a new wife and a four-year-old stepdaughter. As far as we can tell, he’s completely changed his life and hasn’t been involved in any crime at all. He’s followed the rules we set out for him, staying out of criminal activity or the public eye and not going to any major cities where he might be recognized.”