Disaster Inc

by Caimh McDonnell

  Not Gene Simmons went back to vigorously engaging with himself. They left him to it.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Matt typed in the commands to the various windows on the laptop in front of him. They were sitting at the large mahogany conference table in his office. Back on his usual desk, the three monitors filled with numbers were showing Wall Street’s nervous rebound continuing at a hesitant pace.

  Matt’s was a big office. He remembered how happy he’d been on the first day he’d moved in. Now, it was like a prison, same as everywhere else in the waking nightmare his life had become. Speaking of nightmares… he looked across the desk, where Brad sat looking eagerly back at him while Cole observed, his face the emotionless mask it always was.

  Matt spun the laptop around and placed it in front of Brad. “OK, Brad, just log in and give authorisation and I can confirm the transfer.”

  Brad bit his lips nervously. “Before we do this,” he said, in the whine his voice seemed to have permanently become, “can I just confirm about the bomb you put inside me?”

  “Relax,” said Cole. “You’re doing as you’re told. As long as you both keep doing that, you’ll be fine.”

  “But,” said Brad, sitting forward, “can I just clarify, after we do this and, y’know, you get your money, is someone going to take it out?”

  “It degrades naturally,” said Cole. “Nobody needs to take it out.”

  “I’m sorry, I just… No, I need more clarification than that.” Brad’s eyes were full of watery pleading. “Please, I’m being good. I don’t want to die.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I will. I know I will. Once you’ve got your money, I’m expendable.”

  “Brad,” said Matt in a firm voice, “pull your shit together and do what needs to be done.”

  “Fuck you, Matt. That’s easy for you to say. You haven’t got a fucking bomb inside you.”

  Matt’s voice came out as a snarl. “They’ve got Jennie, you asshole. Shut up and do what you’re told.”

  “OK,” said Cole, “just relax. Like I said, the device degrades – just like, as soon as this is verified, Matt’s sister will be released. We’re right at the finishing line here – let’s not get stupid. In fact, if it’ll make you feel better.” He pulled out a small white device, not much bigger than a cigarette lighter, and held it in front of Brad. “This is the detonator. Once you complete your part, I’ll hand it to you. OK?”

  Brad stared in wide-eyed fear at the innocuous piece of equipment that Cole placed on the mahogany desk – to his right-hand side, away from Brad.

  “Give it to me first!”

  Cole didn’t say anything, just moved his hand a fraction towards the device.

  “OK, OK, OK,” said Brad. “Jesus!” He started typing furiously into the laptop while glancing at the detonator every other second, like he had a nervous twitch.

  The laptop gave an unhappy beep.

  “For Christ’s sake, Brad,” said Matt. “Concentrate. You’ve put your password in wrong.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Brad refocused and typed in the passwords. Then he turned the laptop back to Matt. “There. Done.”

  Matt pulled the laptop towards him, checked the windows and then started typing away again. After a minute, he said, “Ok, and… we’re done.”

  “I’ve gotta call the boss,” said Cole. “Verify.”

  “Sure,” said Matt. “Call away.”

  Cole pulled out his cell phone. As it rang, he calmly slapped away Brad’s hand, which had been moving across the table. “Fucking idiot. Oh no – sorry, ma’am, not you. Yes, it’s done.”

  Cole listened for a minute in silence. His eyes bored into Matt, who was sitting on the other side of the desk, smiling at him.

  Finally, Matt looked at his screen again. “Oh, I see what’s happened here. Can I have a quick word with her, please?”

  Cole gave Matt a suspicious look and then passed the phone across.

  “Hi, it’s Matt. Yeah, there’s a slight problem. You see, I just executed a script on my end and all of your money got transferred into a password-protected account in the Cayman Islands. One that only I have the password for. And it has to be given in my voice.”

  Cole and Brad tensed on the other side of the table.

  Matt held up a finger to still them. “Don’t…” Then he continued, “See, here’s the thing. You get what you want, and me, Brad and my sister are all as good as dead. So here’s what’s going to happen. It’s now” – Matt looked at his watch – “2:47pm. At 4pm, I’m going to walk down the road to Madison Square Park, where I’m going to meet my sister. I’m going to say my farewells, watch her get into a cab and drive away, and then you’ll hand me a phone and I’ll make the call that will get you your dirty fucking money.”

  “I see,” said Mrs Miller on the other end of the line. “And what exactly is to stop Mr Cole extracting that password from you?”

  “Well,” said Matt, as he dipped his hand into his desk drawer, “here’s the problem with that, you sociopathic bitch. Seeing as I don’t believe you’ll really let my sister go, you’ve left me with nothing to lose.” He pulled out a certain razor-sharp letter opener and held it to his own throat. “So, I’ve just taken a hostage of my own. Me.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  New York was a weird city in general and in March in particular. You could get snow storms, typhoons and vicious thunderstorms like they’d had a few nights ago, or it could be like it was now – an unseasonable heatwave, with the temperature touching seventy degrees. People who weren’t insane, or making some kind of a point, were out in shorts and T-shirts. It was warm enough that an idiot could kill a dog by leaving it in the back seat of a car, although, it being Manhattan, if you could afford the parking, then you could certainly afford a dogsitter, the extra expense being justified by saving your soul from burning in hell for all eternity.

  It was into this balmy day that Matt Clarke stepped at 3:50pm from his office on Park Avenue, intent on making the short walk down four blocks to meet his sister in Madison Square Park. It was the kind of thing normal people did. He was wearing an overcoat, as if he’d not checked the weather forecast before leaving the office or, indeed, just looked out a window. He appeared to be chatting on his phone, although an observant person might have noticed that, while he held his phone to his ear, he wasn’t talking much. An extremely observant person might notice that under the sleeve of his inappropriate overcoat, a razor-sharp letter opener was held tightly to his right wrist by his watch strap, inches from his own neck. If anyone tried anything funny, he could slice through his carotid artery at a moment’s notice, and before anyone could do anything, the only key to millions of dollars in the Cayman Islands would bleed out over his inappropriate overcoat.

  Behind, keeping the agreed distance so as not to spook him, walked Mr Cole.

  “Do you think he’d really do it?” asked Mrs Miller through the earpiece he was wearing.

  “I am not qualified to give that assessment.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “What it means is I’m not a psychiatrist, although if you’d like my unprofessional opinion, as a man who has seen a lot of people lose their shit over the years, yeah, I believe he would do it. That’s the thing about pushing someone to breaking point: you can never be sure how they’re gonna break.”

  “Is that a criticism, Mr Cole?”

  “It’s an observation.”

  “I notice you’ve stopped saying ‘ma’am’ when you address me. Please direct your astute observational skills to Mr Clarke. Also, where is Mr Bradley?”

  “He became emotional. I knocked him out.”

  “Was that—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Cole. “The idiot still believes we actually did put a bomb inside him and he was losing his shit. I removed the variable.”

  “Very well, but—”

  She was interrupted when another voice intruded over the
line from Cole’s end. “The end is nigh, madam. Gobble ye not the hot dog of Satan…”

  “What the hell is that?” asked Miller.

  “Some lunatic street preacher with a sandwich board.”

  “Fucking New York,” said Miller. “We are still in control of this situation. Lola has just done a brief sweep of the park. It is busy with civilians but there is no sign of any law enforcement. I have contacted our NYPD contact and he has diverted foot patrols, citing a national security operation. Lola and Baxter have the girl. When she leaves the park, she will flag a taxi; we have two of them waiting. They’ll either get her or follow the one that does and reacquire the girl when appropriate.”

  “Why not just let her go?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, lying to the guy has got us into this mess. Perhaps we should try—”

  “I am not interested in your opinions, Mr Cole. Operational parameters say leave no trace and they have not changed. Why don’t you—” Miller gave out a moan.

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine. Do your job and let me do mine.”

  With that, Mrs Miller hung up the phone. “Christ, Jorge, go easy,” she said. She didn’t feel bad about shouting at Jorge, not least because he couldn’t hear her. He was mostly deaf and entirely Guatemalan, with the toned physique of someone who enjoyed the company of a mirror. His grasp of the English language didn’t extend much beyond what was required for his job. Having severely limited communication abilities as a masseur could be seen as a handicap in certain ways; however, for the right client, it could be very useful. He couldn’t overhear the wrong thing, and even if he did, he wouldn’t understand it. Mrs Miller appreciated his inbuilt ironclad discretion, as well as his willingness to go above and beyond in certain areas for tips.

  She was in her hotel suite, lying face down and naked on Jorge’s massage table. Initially, she had booked him as a treat for when the mission was completed. She hadn’t cancelled because that would have been a concession to the idea that the situation was out of her control – which it was not.

  Through the hole in the table, she could see the screen of her laptop, which she’d placed beneath it. She reached a hand down and pressed a button. “Lola, the primary is on his way. Are you in position?”

  The view changed from the back of a leather car seat to Lola’s face. She nodded at the camera. She had tried to conceal it with make-up, and she was wearing her hair down, but the scratch on her face was still visible.

  “OK, wait for my go.”

  Miller pressed another button. “Eagle One, are you in position?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Then turn on your damn camera.”

  “Sorry.”

  After a moment, the screen sprung to life, showing an angled view down onto the busy park.

  “Where are you?”

  “I was able to gain access to the roof of a building on the west side.”

  “Do you have an angle on the whole park?”

  “Negative. About eighty per cent. Best I could manage on this notice. There’s also some foliage cover.”

  “Yes. Well…”

  Miller watched the feed. It seemed like an ordinary day for the oblivious civilians below. She could see people playing frisbee. Eating picnics. Walking their dogs.

  “You’ve a lot of tension around de glutes. Would you like de special?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jorge.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Miller cursed under her breath. “Never mind. Eagle One, stand by for further instructions and, erm, well done.”

  She hit a button on the laptop to mute it and then slapped Jorge’s hand. He giggled, misconstruing entirely what this meant.

  Madison Square Park took up three blocks of the world’s most expensive real estate, slap bang in the middle of Manhattan, flanked by Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue on one axis and East 23rd street and East 26th on the other. In a world of perpendicular lines, Broadway delighted in doing its own thing, running at a more or less forty-five degree angle, and so where it met Madison Square Park it sliced off the corner where East 33rd met Fifth Avenue, ruining the park’s otherwise perfect symmetry. Broadway then went along its merry way, its peculiar path giving rise to the iconic Flatiron Building across the road, a slim triangle in a world of boxes. Looking down from Madison Avenue, amidst the trees you could see that the paths in the park formed two bicycle-like wheels, each with six curving spokes, the rear one looking a bit squashed by Broadway’s intrusion. The fountain was at the centre of that wheel. It was never not busy, but on an unexpectedly sunny day, more people than usual went there to enjoy the rarity of green amidst the skyscrapers and traffic, or to let their kid calm down after they’d become over-stimulated in the nearby Lego store.

  Amy took a deep breath. Under her helmet she wore a Bluetooth headset, connected to the phone in her pocket. When Bunny had explained the need for communication if the plan was to have any hope, she’d given Diller the cash and he’d gone out and bought them a bunch of burner phones.

  The plan felt absurd now. It had felt absurd yesterday, but in a “so crazy it just might work” kind of a way. Now it felt straight-up absurd. She’d only known Bunny for five days, and Diller and Smithy even less; the chances they were taking for her felt like lead weights attached to her body. She wanted to hit the speed-dial numbers, tell them all to forget it, go away – hell, run for their damn lives. They were playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

  Some impatient idiot in the line of traffic on Fifth Avenue honked their horn and Mabel shifted nervously beneath her. “Easy, girl. Easy.” The traffic for this time on a Friday was as advertised, moving at a crawl in almost every direction. She shot the driver with the happy horn hand a dirty look and he gave an apologetic wave.

  Amy nodded, trying to stay in character.

  Despite being New York’s most wanted for most of the week, today she had committed two crimes for the first time in her life, at least as far as she was concerned. The first was technically rustling – the unlawful acquisition of a horse. She’d left a thousand dollars and a note at the stables, promising Mabel would be back that evening. But still, theft was theft, and Amy was sure they’d still have called the cops. Speaking of which, that was the other crime. Smithy’s girlfriend had got her the outfit. From a distance, it did more or less look the part. Only close up would people perhaps notice that the pants were spandex and the shirt didn’t have proper buttons, this version having Velcro that allowed for instant easy removal. The gun on her belt was also fake. Of the many things that were feeling ridiculous now, the fact that all of the weapons in this situation were held by the other side was possibly the most ludicrous. And for a wanted murderer riding a stolen horse while dressed in a stripper’s cop outfit, that was really saying something.

  Douglas Randall sat back in his office chair and took the first moments of silence he’d had in the last hour to try to calm his breathing. It had not been easy. When Amy had called, he’d told her it wouldn’t be easy, and he’d been right. Still, he had managed to get them to agree to it. The director of news had looked at him like he was losing his damn mind, but when he’d laid it out and threatened to resign if they didn’t grant him this one unusual request, he’d agreed. He knew right now that he’d be up in his office talking to the station heads, informing them that the reliable old lapdog that presented the evening news had just gone rabid, but still, they’d at least let it play out.

  There were two versions of how the rest of today went. In one, Douglas Randall would be a punchline – divorced, disgraced and derided. In the other version, he’d receive the Pulitzer Prize. He looked at the empty space on his shelf beside the picture of him with George Foreman. He was either going to get some serious hardware to go alongside it, or else this time next week, it’d be someone else’s shelf.

  “This is nice,” said Cheryl.

  “Excuse me?” said Smithy.

  “This. Having a pic
nic in the park. It’s nice. It’s the kind of stuff real couples do.”

  “We’re not really having a picnic though.”

  Cheryl rolled her eyes. “I know that, dummy, but you’re the method actor. The easiest way for me to look like I’m having a picnic with my boyfriend in the park is to, y’know, actually have a picnic with my boyfriend in the park. Here, have a Twinkie.”

  “No thanks. Look, hon’ – you’ve got to take this seriously.”

  “What, the picnic? I am. You’re the one who isn’t committing. Alright, the food is Twinkies and a six pack, but you didn’t give me much time to prepare.”

  Smithy leaned in and put his hand on top of hers. “Seriously. This isn’t a game. These are some bad people.”

  “I know that, Smithy. I’m not an idiot. I’ve got an IQ of 148 and a full understanding of the situation as it has been explained to me. However, I also have a bag full of Twinkies so, y’know, for just a hint of normalcy in our fucked-up relationship, be a doll and eat the goddamned processed sugar.”

  She held a Twinkie out and Smithy bit into it. “Christ, I forgot how horrible these things are.”

  “Well, I’m a lot of things, but Little Miss Homemaker ain’t one of ’em. If I get gunned down in the forthcoming firefight, make sure your next squeeze is into home baking.”

  “Don’t say that. Christ, I should never have asked you to do this.”

  “Oh, calm down. Alright, I’ll stop with the jokes. It’s your loss though; I’m quite the dazzling conversationalist.”

  “I know just… promise me you’ll be careful.”

  Cheryl rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything more when she saw the look on Smithy’s face.

  “Just please, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you.”

  She put the remaining half of the Twinkie back into the bag. “Y’know, you’re one sweet little bastard when you want to be. I promise I’ll be careful. Also, y’know, I am a black belt in Krav Maga, so I’m pretty much the most dangerous person in this park.”