by Bill Thesken
The head of the organization was at one time second in command at the FBI, and he modeled the business after it. He saw a need in the private sector, as well as a lot more money for his pocket, and started ESP, short for Elite Security Protection.
With his inside connections he nailed down a couple of prime accounts both foreign and domestic, and cherry picked some of the best and brightest of the agencies, the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA and all the armed services were scoured for workers.
Highly trained by the U.S. government and now highly paid for their services with ESP, the turnover ratio was just about nil. When the money people came to the country they looked for ESP to provide the extra layer of security, and for a guy with a lot of money, money was no object to stay alive. There was no advertising.
ESP employed the best spies, intelligence and muscle in the world. When the Pope came to New York and provided one of the greatest security challenges of the decade, the U.S. government paid ESP to provide an added circle of surveillance and protection. They neutralized two hit squads that the public never even found out about. Things didn’t go wrong when ESP was involved. Their reputation was built on guaranteed protection, so when the star was nabbed and their guy on the perimeter disappeared, the only thing you could guarantee was that heads would roll.
“Here he comes,” said the Bulldog, as he watched through the glass pane window towards the center of the building. A silver haired man walked through the reception areas. Dressed in a black suit and tie, tall and smooth and moving like a cat, alert measured and slow, with two tough looking bodyguards on either side, he nodded at the people working at their desks as he made his way towards the interrogation room. It didn’t look like he’d ever smiled in his life.
The larger of the bodyguards opened the door and entered first, there was a good reason for this, since if someone were to start shooting, the bigger guy would offer more blocking for the bullets, standard bodyguard procedure. The head of ESP, at this point in time, didn’t trust anyone. The burly bodyguard motioned with his hand and Bulldog and Eraser pulled out their service pistols and slid them across the table. The second bodyguard entered next and brought a small wand out of his pocket and motioned for the two prisoners to stand up. He waved the portable metal detector up and down their sides and put it away without a word. This wasn’t a gun free zone by any means. In fact everyone on this floor was packing a weapon, every single employee of the agency was fully trained in self-defense and firearms. The interrogation room however, was a gun-free zone when the boss was in it.
They all sat down at the large square table, the Eraser and Bulldog on one side flanked by the two bodyguards, the silver haired Mason facing them.
Mason wasted no time. “You really screwed up this time Jerry.”
“I know, we’ve been going over the…”
“I didn’t ask you to speak.” He interlocked his fingers and tapped his forefingers together as he looked at them. “The Sultan of Brunei cancelled the service we had scheduled for next month on their trip to the States, their head of security said they would get back to us for rescheduling sometime in the future. Three days of perimeter security, half a million dollars.” His eyes never left the two on the other side of the table.
“The house of Saud has rescheduled their trip to Los Angeles, five days, three quarters of a million dollars in security. Goldman Sachs asked me to reschedule the security arrangement for the Chicago conference. One day perimeter, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I’m telling you the financial details so that you both understand the gravity of the situation in which you’ve placed us. In a single day we have lost one and one half million dollars of contracts. By tomorrow we could be out of business. People don’t pay to get killed or kidnapped, they pay SO THEY DON’T GET KILLED OR KIDNAPPED!” He slammed his hand on the table and everyone on the third floor looked over at the glass walled office, then quickly went back to work. “They didn’t explicitly say it but we have been removed from their A-list for now, until we fix the situation.”
He smoothed his silver hair and sat back in his chair. “Jerry, you set up security for this operation.”
“Yes.”
“You put one of our best assets on the perimeter.”
“Yes. Badger was one of the best we had.”
The word ‘had’ lingered in the air. Past tense. History.
Mason nodded. “We lost four of our bodyguards, and our perimeter guy survived. It’s supposed to be the other way around, if there’s a problem, it doesn’t get past the perimeter. So you were interrogating him to see if he was part of the opposing operation, and he escaped. You had him drugged and incapacitated and he escaped. He assaulted you and escaped and is now somewhere on the loose and at this point in time we have no idea where he is. Correct?”
Jerry nodded. It was pathetic. “I don’t think he had anything to do with it, there’s no way he would pretend to crash his motorcycle into that building. He was too busted up for real. There was no fake to it, I’m telling you. I don’t think he’s involved.”
“I don’t care what you think. I need to know. If you weren’t aware of it by now, I don’t take chances. Our company doesn’t take chances. Our clients don’t pay us huge sums of money to take chances. This isn’t a casino where you roll the dice and hope for the best Jerry. I need to know without a single doubt that Badger did not have any connection to the other side. Simple as that. I’m not going to take a chance with my hundred million dollar business on what you think.”
He unfolded his hands and pointed across the table. “Are those your reports?”
They both nodded and slid them across the table. Mason scanned them and shook his head.
“Unbelievable. It was a simple job, escort the babe to a club and back. She’s not even that famous. But, what I’ve learned over the years is that a small job can up and bite you just as easy as the big jobs.”
He brooded, tapping his fingers on the desk as he thought.
“All right, here’s the deal. We have all our assets looking for the girl. If we can’t find her no one can. And if we can’t find her soon, we might as well just close up shop forever. Your job…” and he pointed at them with an angry finger, “… is to find Badger. I don’t care what you have to do to get it done. Break down doors, break bones, break faces, break every damn law on the books for all I care, just find that guy. Understood?”
10.
I wanted to get a good look at the competition so to speak. See what I was up against with the agency or whoever else they had on my tail. I needed to find out what type of assets were lined up against me, if any, and there was a quick test I could use.
Heck, I thought hopefully, maybe they’d forgotten about me, given up and moved onto bigger and better things. Maybe they realized that I had nothing to do with the heist, and they were wasting their time looking for me. They had their shot at me and I’d gotten away and now the odds of them getting me back in their clutches was pretty remote. There was one way to find out just how deep their tentacles reached in their quest to find me.
I had the taxi drop me off near a strip mall on the edge of Burbank. The city block was a mix of convenience stores, warehouse type buildings and a one story brick motel, the type where you parked right in front of the room, an air conditioner hanging out of the bottom of a window, and your view was the hood of your car in the parking lot. Convenient, and cheap.
The neon sign at the front said ‘Vacancy’, and I didn’t doubt it for a minute. It seemed a little dirty around the edges, a little seedy and worn, in need of a coat of paint or at the very least a week long rainstorm. The kind of place where you could pay cash for the room, no ID necessary and no questions asked, a place for one night stands and drug deals and fugitives hiding from the law or their exes.
I kept to the shadows as I walked to the office and pulled my cap down over my eyes. This is the kind of place where you wouldn’t normally find cameras filming the patrons or they’d lose all their busi
ness, but you never could tell these days.
The clerk sitting behind the desk was smoking a long cigarette and squinted at me as I came in the door. There was very large ashtray on the table next to him with a hundred butts in a pile of gray ashes.
He was thin and pale and his skin sucked in around his face and neck as he took another puff of the stick, and let the smoke slowly filter out of his mouth and nose as he watched me.
Dressed in a white tee-shirt and stubbly tinted reddish hair with the smoke streaming up and around his face, he looked like a living breathing cigarette. I wanted to reach over and grab him by his skinny neck, turn him upside down, and put him out in the ashtray.
It seemed that his puffing on a cigarette was his method of greeting the customer, so I initiated the conversation. “I need a room for the night. Nothing fancy, single bed will do just fine.”
He must have noticed my disdain for his lack of customer service and there was a flicker in his eye. “All we have left is the Presidential Suite.”
Wise guy. I didn’t see an inkling of a smile on his face or in his eyes and I could tell that he was actually trying to screw with me. I had a choice to make here. These were the kind of people that you generally tried to avoid. A chain smoking crackhead with a death wish. I’m sure he could tell that I was the kind of guy who packed a weapon or two, but he probably had a sawed off shotgun sitting on his lap under the table aimed at my mid-section. I definitely would in this neighborhood, so I didn’t argue with him.
“How much?”
“Too fitty.”
My face remained emotionless and he took another drag on the cigarette while watching me for a reaction. Too fitty, ghetto slang for two hundred and fifty dollars. A skinny white chain smoking crackhead speaking ghetto and trying to work me over like a patsy.
I shook my head no. “I’ll give you one fitty. I only need the room for an hour. Take it or leave it.”
He almost smiled at that and seemed to look around me to see if I had a girl with me. He seemed ready to keep the bargaining going, but looked closely at my eyes and thought twice, then ground the butt of the cigarette into the ashtray and let the smoke evaporate into the air. He was impatient to get me out of there. “Alright. One hour, one fitty. Cash.”
I peeled off seven twenty dollar bills and one ten. “Keep the change,” I told him.
He shined a little blue pen light on all the bills to make sure they were legit, and folded them into a tight wad. Somehow I had the feeling the money wasn’t going into the cash register. He pulled a key off the rack next to his chair and tossed it on the desk. “Room one ten.” And then lit another cigarette.
The room itself wasn’t too bad, it had a bed, a TV and a bathroom, but it stank like mold and air conditioner fluid and there was a dark stain on the floor near the front door and faded chalk like an outline of a body. No back windows or doors. One way in and one way out, and the guy who made the stain probably went out in a bag. Presidential Suite my eye.
I turned the lights out and opened the drapes a crack and used my night scope to survey the area across the street. I’d already checked it out on my way over here and just wanted a second look from this angle. There were two warehouse buildings side by side and some nooks and crannies where I could hide. It was far enough away that I could get out of there quick if they spotted me. I figured I would have about ten minutes to half an hour after I made the call.
I pulled out one of the cell phones and double checked the address and contact info that was stored on it to make sure it was empty, and then dialed up my ex brother in law Danny Willett. A real piece of garbage, he started beating up my sister about a year after they were married, until I found out about it and broke both his hands with a midnight tap dance while wearing steel heeled boots on a concrete floor.
Still, he was family, sort of, and even though to this day he held the broken hands thing against me, I made it a point to call at least once a year to check in and see how he was doing and to make sure he was staying far away from my sister.
The phone on the other end rang twice and a gruff and burly voice answered. “DW.”
“Danny boy, it’s your favorite ex-brother-in-law.”
Silence on the other end for a moment and the sound of a quick startled breath mixed with a muttered damn and a hell, and his phone clattered to the ground.
Like a Pavlov response his hands remembered the pain of the tap dance and he dropped the phone every time.
He came back on the line again, suddenly less gruff, now that he knew who was on the other end.
“Look I haven’t called or seen her in five years, we’re divorced, it’s over, and I’ve told you and her I’m sorry a thousand times. What more do you want from me?”
“Keep up the good work,” I said and hung up.
Half an hour at the most, ten minutes at the least I figured before someone showed up to pay me a visit. I checked my watch and made a mental note. It was half past eight, and I’m guessing fifteen minutes, so eight forty five is when they’ll get here.
I decided to up the ante and make another call, just in case they weren’t monitoring the old brother in law. I punched in a ten digit number and it rang five times before a woman’s voice answered. She sounded sweet and nice but I knew better.
“Hi this Patti!” A little too perky and bouncy to be real. My ex fiancé, met her in Texas after boot camp when I was in the best shape of my life, flush with cash from the signing bonus and stupid when it came to dirty blondes. Took me for every penny I had when I was over in Baghdad, drained my bank account, wrecked my car, lost my dog, and took out a couple of big credit card loans in my name for good measure.
“It’s Badger.” And her tone changed instantly, from bouncy to bitchy.
“What do you want? I should just hang up, you bastard. You got your money back, and I did my time in jail. Why do you have to call me every year?”
“Just checking to make sure you’re staying out of trouble. Are you?” I could hear the hiss from her breath as she inhaled like a snake on the other end of the line.
“Sure, I’m working down at the soup kitchen for the homeless during the day, and at night I run the bingo games at the old folks home.”
Liar, she was probably bilking some poor bastard soldier that very minute. Maybe two or three at once.
“Well that’s good to hear,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll take a trip down there to see that you’re doing just that. Maybe next week.”
“Oh I wouldn’t if I were you Badger.” I could hear the tremble in her voice as it cracked. “I’ve got a new boyfriend now and he is way tougher than you’ll ever be. If you so much as set a foot in this town…”
I hung up and tossed the phone onto the middle of the bed and checked my watch. Two phone calls, three minutes elapsed time and if these guys in the agency were worth their salt they’d have my phone pegged and mapped, and be on their way.
I slid out the door and across the street to the warehouses and found a little cubby hole in one of the little alleyways that led to the next city block and a residential neighborhood. There was a little stairway to a second floor and I could crouch next to the wall and have a good view of the motel with my scope.
The cell phone had a GPS device as they all do nowadays, and all an intelligence agency needed to do was monitor any of the phone numbers that a subject had ever called in the past and when the monitoring computer tagged a call that didn’t have a genuine caller ID associated with it, it would trigger an alert with the GPS ID number which could be instantly tracked. And since every phone call on the entire planet was constantly tracked and recorded all they had to do was set up a program and let it run itself.
It took them longer than I had thought to get to the motel. I looked at my watch, twenty minutes I’d been waiting, and I watched with amusement as the scene unfolded.
An old lady came hobbling down the street carrying a shopping bag. She looked about a hundred years old, all bent over and walk
ing as slow as molasses. She turned towards the motel parking lot and made her way towards the building, stopping once in a while to catch her breath and adjust her shawl. Poor thing.
A middle aged man walking by tried to help her and she shooed him off with her cane. When she got close to my Presidential Suite, two black sedans with tinted windows quietly pulled up at opposite ends of the block and parked with their engines running, blocking any escape.
The little old lady paused at my front door and then jumped to the side as a small explosion ripped the door open, she threw off her shawl while tossing a stun grenade through the open doorway.
There was a flash of light in the once darkened room and she pulled a stub nosed gun from the shopping bag and darted into the room while the black sedans burned rubber into the parking lot and nearly crashed into the building while more guys with guns ejected out of the cars and covered the front door and dashed into the room.
After a few short minutes the old lady came out of the door and it turns out she really was a young man with a moustache. Imagine that. I was over half a mile away, but with the night scope I could see the stubble on the old lady’s chin. I’d never seen any of these guys before, but the agency was rather large and I’m sure I hadn’t seen even one percent of the muscle.
The human cigarette came out of his office to see what all the commotion was about, and was greeted by a couple of the suits. He was busy shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head in full denial of any knowledge of the offending guest and finally put his palms up as if to say “I know nothing.”