The Compound: A Thriller

by Ben Follows

“So I took them to the video room and set them up to see the video. They had me point out the two guys who had come in asking about this guy, Jake. After that I set them up with the video of last night and let them pane through it for a while. About fifteen minutes later, they came out and told me that I’d been lied to and the guy had never been here. They gave me a card and asked me to call them if anything came up. I didn’t believe them but didn’t want to say anything. After they left, I checked the tapes myself, and they were right. Jake and his friends hadn't been here last night, none of them. I pushed it out of my mind, assuming it was above my pay grade, and got to work. Are you seriously saying they weren’t FBI?”

  Obrasey shrugged. “I don’t know. Can I see the tapes?”

  Keith leaned over, running his hands through his spiked black hair. “You won’t find anything. I went over them like five times.”

  “That isn’t what I want. I want to see what the FBI agents looked like. If they’re impersonating agents, we have a major problem. I also want to see the guys who came in looking for Jake.”

  Keith obliged and led her into the security room. Obrasey printed out a screen shot of the two FBI agents and then had Keith rewind backward to the guys who had come to inquire about Jake.

  “You still have the cards they gave you?” said Obrasey once they were done.

  Keith allowed her to take photographs of the cards with her phone. She thanked him and gave him her number before he returned to the bar.

  The music was still pounding loudly in the back of her head as she exited the club, nodded to the bouncer, and walked back to her car.

  During the drive back to Crescent Point, a wave of fear came over Obrasey, and she had to pull over to the side of the road to allow herself to breathe and calm down. What did the FBI have to do with this? Why were they looking for Jake? Who were the other two men, and why were they pretending they had been at the club with Jake when they clearly hadn’t been?

  Obrasey had been right, but now she began wondering if it would have been better just to leave it alone. Who was Jake Lavelle?

  Chapter 6

  Edward Stamper splashed his face and brushed his teeth before exiting the bathroom and pulling on a t-shirt and sweats. After ensuring the woman was in bed, he fell onto the couch and turned on the television.

  He almost let out a high-pitched scream at the face before him. It was a face he hadn’t seen in almost three years.

  Frank Tanners stared at him from the television screen, his arm around a woman and his hand resting on the shoulder of a young girl.

  The line across the bottom of the screen stated “Frank Frederickson still missing.”

  Ed panicked, scrambling for the remote on the other side of the couch with a lack of coordination that would normally have embarrassed him, but it didn’t matter. He grabbed the remote and turned up the volume as quickly as he could, but the news had moved on to a story about a Florida woman who had found an alligator in her pool.

  Ed cursed and ran to where his laptop was plugged in on the table. He opened it so quickly, he almost ripped the screen off and then cursed again as the computer slowly started up.

  Once the computer had booted up, he opened a browser and searched Frank Frederickson. Within seconds, he was reading an article about how Frank Frederickson, loving husband and father and owner of a small automobile repair shop in a town called Crescent Point, which Ed had never heard of, was missing.

  He ran to the closet, opened up his suitcase and its hidden compartment, and pulled out his cell phone. He hesitated for just a moment, calculating what time it was in Nevada—just after two in the morning—and whether Cuminskey would be irritated at being woken. He would want to know this, Stamper decided, and hit the call button.

  “Office of Mark Larson, attorney at Law,” came the answer. “You’ve reached Emma, how can I direct your call?”

  “Emma!” shouted Ed, his blood pressure rising. “It’s Ed Stamper, I need to speak with Cuminskey right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Emma. “You have the wrong number, there’s no one here by that name.”

  Ed cursed silently. He didn’t have time for the goddamn code phrase. “Get me Cuminskey!” he roared into the phone. “Frank Tanners is alive!”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then Emma said, “Please hold.”

  Elevator music came onto the phone, and Ed put the phone on speaker and placed it on the table in front of him. He'd worked for Frank Tanners for years. He knew that Tanners had been killed and was buried with his family in New Mexico. That was what everyone knew.

  About ten minutes later Emma came back on the line and notified him that Cuminskey was awake and that he would be getting transferred. Then Cuminskey came on the line.

  “This had better be fucking important, Stamper,” said Cuminskey. He sounded irritable, like he had been woken.

  “Get a computer,” said Ed, “and look up Frank Frederickson.”

  Cuminskey asked Stamper how to spell the name and then, a few moments later, he went silent.

  “Cuminskey?” said Ed.

  When Nicholas Cuminskey came back, any indication of fatigue was gone. “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I only just saw it on the news here in Boston a few minutes ago.”

  “It’s on the fucking Boston news?”

  “A thirty-second segment.”

  “Shit. Stamper, can I trust you?”

  “For anything, sir.”

  “Even if I asked you to kill that piece of shit Frank Tanners?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  He could hear Cuminskey tapping the table.

  “I need you to go to Crescent Point, wherever the fuck that is, find him, and kill him. Get rid of whatever whore is with you. Leave no traces you were ever there. I’ll work damage control here, try to see if anyone else knows about this. Tell no one what you are working on. Kill them if they get too suspicious. I don’t care if it’s the fucking pope, you hear me? I need to be certain that he’s dead. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me when it's done.”

  The line went dead. Stamper had some things he needed to prepare first, but he believed he would be able to get to Crescent Point by noon, based on his cursory glance at the map. He changed into a more professional wardrobe, a dark suit and sunglasses.

  He packed his suitcase without waking the girl. He took his gun from the suitcase,

  “Goodbye, my love,” he said, standing over the bed.

  He raised his gun and shot her once in the head. Her blood stained the white sheets a dark crimson.

  Chapter 7

  Jake woke up without a hangover. The previous night Carl had dropped him off at the hotel, muttering something about saying hi to Agatha.

  Today the mission really began. He sat on the side of the bed, preparing himself. Yesterday he had been trying out an identity he wasn’t comfortable with, but today he could change to the instinct-driven mastery that had been drilled into his mind. He got up and pulled on a white t-shirt and jeans before looking in the mirror to make sure his focus was razor-sharp and his expression didn’t waver. He made sure to meet his own eyes.

  All cleanup missions had a familiar structure, and Jake refreshed himself on it before leaving the room. First, he made a mental list of everything he already knew about Frank Tanners, a.k.a. Frank Frederickson.

  He had to admit it wasn’t much. If Carl was to be believed—a big if—and Frank had become a good family man, someone that would never abandon his wife and child, then most of Harold’s theories were wrong. Carl had seemed convinced that the police were wrong about Frank, and Jake needed to give credit to his opinion.

  Jake had asked him about the tourism and crime issues, and Carl laughed. “They say the same thing every year,” he'd said. “They always make everyone scared that no tourists are going to come and the entire town will fall apart. It happens every single year. Give it a week and thi
s place will be bustling and the crime rate will be back to normal levels.”

  Jake stood from the bed and grabbed his clothing, trying to remain as nondescript as possible. He thought back to Dirk standing at the bar after the fight. There was something about the look Dirk had given him that made Jake uneasy. Jake decided he would ask Harold about Dirk, or maybe he would ask Karen when he finally got to have a conversation with her.

  His mind drifted to Karen, and he had to splash his face with water to bring his focus back. He decided to stop by the bar and ask Karen out for dinner, rationalizing she could help him know the town better. He ignored the thought that he would have asked her out even if she was from somewhere else and knew nothing of the town. It wouldn’t be approved by The Compound.

  The first stop when Jake left the hotel was the local newspaper. He had to stop any news from escaping to the outside world. No one from Frank’s former life could be allowed to know he was alive. It was a delicate balance that required stopping the local media from publishing any more stories.

  For this task, he took a newspaper clipping from the folder Harold had left him. The newspaper clipping was from the San Francisco Chronicle, the fifth page of the sports section. It was a game report for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but the important part was the photograph. The photograph depicted a player for the Dodgers swinging at a pitch, his bat just missing the ball, which was headed toward the St. Louis catcher’s mitt. In the crowd a man who appeared to be Frank Fredrickson was sitting, his face clear behind home plate. He was sitting with a woman with bleach-blonde hair—clear even in the black-and-white newspaper clipping. He had been circled with red marker.

  It wasn’t Frank Frederickson in the picture, but it was close enough. For a minor news story, it would be enough for an editor to tell his writers to focus elsewhere.

  The picture was not in the newspaper by a mere fluke. The Compound had found a member of theirs who resembled Frank Tanners, purchased him tickets to the game just behind home plate, and placed him in the crowd beside a Vegas showgirl. Once the game was over, they got in contact with an editor at the Chronicle and promised that if he put that picture in the paper they would give a heavy donation. The editor didn’t care about the donation, but he had been deciding between that and another photo anyway, making his decision easy.

  The picture had run without any need for doctoring or trying to submit a fake news article to the local newspaper in Crescent Point. Jake could also have submitted it to the police, but the media was faster, and the photo would have landed on the newspaper’s desk a few days later anyway. This would streamline the process.

  Jake didn’t draw any attention to himself. He walked into the newspaper’s main office, handed the article to the secretary, and told her that the editor would want to see it.

  He left before she had a chance to question him, but she would know what it meant. The picture would almost certainly run in the next edition of the Crescent point paper. Most of the regional news stations probably wouldn’t even provide an update; it would just fall into the past.

  The media taken care of, he moved on to the next order of business, meeting with the mysterious Zeke, their contact in Crescent Point. The video store where he resided was in an easy location to find, but Jake walked past it three or four times before he noticed the small sign hanging from the door of a single-story yellow building that was smaller than most gas station convenience stores. He had initially mistaken it for a public restroom.

  The sign on the door read, “Crescent Point Video Store.”

  Jake stared at the sign, shrugged, and entered. The inside was in a similar state of disrepair and filth. The store was lit by a single light bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the room, ready to fall on the ground and cover it with glass at a moment’s notice. It smelled of Cheetos and rotting paint. Chipped tiles coated the ground, cobwebs had gathered in the corners, and a thin layer of dust covered the entire store, including all the VHSs and DVDs that lined every square inch of the walls, even behind the counter. Behind that glass counter, within which there were dozens more movies, was the only employee of the store, who did not look up as Jake entered.

  The employee was a morbidly obese man in a bright yellow sweater that matched the exterior of the store. It was impressive that he could fit behind the counter. His hair and beard hadn’t been washed recently. He was leafing through a magazine about the most recent Marvel movie.

  “Excuse me?” said Jake, approaching the counter.

  The man looked up and frowned at him before returning to his magazine.

  Jake frowned as he tried to remember the code phrase.

  “I had something I had to tell you,” said Jake, tapping on the counter, sending up a small poof of dust. “Oh, purple wombats!”

  The storekeeper’s reaction was instantaneous and so shocking that Jake jumped back, feeling the crunch of broken tiles underneath his feet. The storekeeper was on his feet in a second, panting.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know who you were. Harold sent you?”

  Jake nodded, frowning.

  The man held out a hand. He was out of breath. “I’m Zeke. Nice to meet you.”

  Jake took the hand and felt a strange squishing feeling as he did so, like crushing blueberries.

  Jake unlatched his sweaty hand and introduced himself.

  “You want to see the room?” said Zeke, giddy with excitement.

  Jake said he would, and Zeke squeezed his way out from behind the counter and walked to the back corner of the small, disgusting video store. Zeke removed one of the DVDs from the wall and revealed a hand-hold. He grabbed it and walked backward, pulling a section of the wall—about the size of a door—with him.

  Behind the wall was a staircase. Lights shaped like torches lined the walls the stone staircase that seemed to be carved into the earth and worn away by centuries of use. Jake wondered how much input Zeke had in its construction.

  “I’m not allowed to go down," said Zeke. "You have the key. I’ve been down the staircase, but the door at the bottom, that I can only dream about.”

  Jake nodded. “I won’t be long.”

  Jake made sure he had the key Harold had given him and walked down the stairs, the fake torches lighting his way. The staircase wasn’t long, perhaps two stories, but it felt longer. The smell of the video store disappeared, replaced by a stagnation, like the air wasn’t fit for breathing. The stairs were firm and steady despite their eroded state. When he made it to the bottom it was dark enough that he felt certain that Zeke had closed the door behind him, but when he looked up, he still saw the light of the video store. He turned back to the door at the bottom of the stairs. He knew how it was made, but he tested the handle anyway. There was less give than if he had been pulling on a pure rock wall.

  The door was two feet of solid steel, filled with mechanisms to detect any unwanted intrusions. It was plain except for the handle and the keyhole beneath it. If the cops ever found this place, they would need equipment well beyond the budget of the Crescent Point Police Department to get inside. He took the key out of his pocket and slid it into the door.

  He turned the key and was greeted by sounds of gears turning within the door. The door clicked open just a crack. Jake grabbed the door handle and pulled the door the rest of the way open. The room inside was dark, not giving away any secrets just yet.

  Before entering, he looked over his shoulder and saw the round form of Zeke standing at the top of the stairs, watching him. Jake turned away and entered the room, pulling the door shut behind him. The ground inside was smooth marble and the air was fresh.

  The door clicked shut, causing the lights to turn on, revealing what had been hidden. The room was equipped to deal with just about any situation that could possibly be thought of, just like every other Compound bunker. Calling it a room was even a misnomer, since it was closer to the size of a barn loft. The walls were steel and covered with every kind of weapon imaginable, from a handgun
to a chain gun to an AK-47.

  There were grenades of every kind, knives, other close combat weapons, Kevlar vests, and military-grade clothing. To the right of the door was a large briefcase which had to be opened by a code. It was another level of security in an already highly guarded and secretive base for The Compound because—even if the bunker was compromised and the armaments discovered—it was impossible for anyone but the intended recipient to open the case. After three wrong codes, it would burn the contents within. The contents of the case were far more valuable than all the guns and armor combined.

  Jake entered the four-digit code he’d been given, and the case clicked open.

  He ensured that the door behind him was closed before opening it and laying out the contents on the steel table.

  It contained fake identities, from passports to driver’s licenses to Costco membership cards, thousands of dollars fresh off the presses, documents detailing what exactly his mission was, reiterating everything they knew about Frank Tanners, and any connections that might be involved in his disappearance.

  He spent about half an hour refreshing himself on the details and making sure they were committed to memory. The fridge in the bunker was fully stocked with drinks and nonperishables, so someone could hide out here if for any reason they had to disappear from the world. There was a phone, but it was only to be used in the direst circumstances, since it was a direct line to the top executive of The Compound currently on call.

  Thinking of the executives brought back memories of Jake’s time at the academy and his roommate Doug, with whom he had shared his room for the entire duration. He smiled at the memory. He hadn’t spoken to Doug in almost three weeks and was beginning to miss him.

  He selected a small handgun, which he slid into a holster at his side, making certain his shirt covered it. Among the identification he took from the case was a diplomatic concealed carry permit—the same that the FBI and CIA had—which allowed them to claim they were on official business. If he were questioned by police, he could flash it and swear them to silence. Almost no one knew how those permits really worked, and if he said it with confidence, they would believe him without a second thought. They would go home and tell their spouse or significant other about it, but it wouldn’t get to the public unless they were very smart or very stupid.