by Mike Dagons
“And she could be alive and well, and busy going through that damn computer and getting the information we were sent to get. We need to close this deal. You know that man.”
“Okay, maybe it’s still not too late. We know where she lives, so let’s go and see if she has it.”
My cell vibrated in my pocket, making a steady humming sound that gave away my position. I mentally kicked myself for forgetting to turn the damn thing off.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“The buzzing sound coming from the vent up there, you hear it?”
I laid there holding my breath in the smothering silence, waiting for one of them to climb up and find me. And then miraculously, the air conditioner clicked on with an even louder buzzing, camouflaging the sound of the phone.
“It’s the air conditioner blower kicking on. Let’s go.”
I relaxed my body and breathed. It sounded like they had been keeping tabs on me, and had somehow managed to go undetected.
Rayce was staying at my apartment for our cover story, and I had to warn her. I listened to them walk through the loft to the front door, and then I heard it open and close.
Steven had been killed for what—his computer? And who ordered it? Knowing he was killed for the computer, confirmed Tyler Basin wasn’t behind it. He had access to all of Steven’s data, and if he wanted the computer, all he had to do was ask for it.
I waited a few minutes to give them time to get out of the building, and then I climbed down, and called Rayce.
“We may have been comprised, so you need to stay clear of the apartment. If you’re there now, you need to get out, right away.”
“Are you alright?” she sounded breathy like she was running.
Rayce was very athletic and like me, she had a daily workout routine that included swimming laps at the local Y. It was only six in the morning, but she had probably already finished her laps, and was in the middle of her five mile run back home when she answered my call.
“I’m fine. I’m on my way to Evanston to meet Ryan. Meet us there, and I’ll give you an update.”
“I’m on my way,” she ended the call without questioning me further.
The giants had been gone for over ten minutes. Hopefully they didn’t have the foresight to post somebody at the front door. I took a second to look for the bottle of Cognac, so Ryan could have it analyzed.
The bottle was sitting in the glass liquor cabinet in plain sight, and I wondered why they hadn’t taken the evidence of their crime with them. I started to reach for it, and then stopped. Maybe they hadn’t taken it because they wanted the cops to find it. I had touched the bottle, so it had my prints on it. I grabbed a towel off the counter and wiped the bottle down, and then put it back. Knowing who had poisoned him was enough. I didn’t really need to know what they used to do it.
I walked over to the door, and put my ear to it, and listened a second before I opened it. I didn’t hear anything, so I eased the door open and looked out into the hallway. It was clear. So I walked out, and pulled the door closed behind me. I quickly made my way down the empty hall to the elevators. I pressed the down button, and waited impatiently for the car to arrive.
When the doors chimed open, I found myself face to face with a giant wall of musculature.
His eyes darted to my startled face. It took thirty seconds for recognition to register, and I was already sprinting for the stairway by the time it did.
“Hey,” he shouted, running after me.
I hit the fire door handle with my hip, and rushed through it without breaking stride. Each flight of stairs was fifteen steps. I knew this because I had counted them. I had also ran down them a few times just to see how winded I’d be when I reached the bottom. I gripped the handrail for balance, and then leaped off the top step of the second flight of stairs to the landing below it.
The giant barged through the door a few seconds behind me, and we looked like something from the pages of the Jack and the Beanstalk fable.
He was fast for a big man, but I was already two floors below him, and there was no way he was going to catch me as long as he kept running the stairs, and I kept jumping them. By the time I reached the halfway mark, I had a three floor lead, and he was huffing and puffing so loud that I almost laughed.
I had just jumped the stairs down to the eighth floor landing when I heard the fire door opening on a lower floor. He’d called his partner, and they were trying to box me in. It was alarming, but it wasn’t totally unexpected. I didn’t know what floor he was entering on, but he sounded close, so I exited the stairwell, and then ran towards the one at the opposite end of the hall.
I stopped when I reached the elevators, and pressed the call button. Leaping the stairs wasn’t exerting as much energy for me as running them was for them, so they’d be tired if they happened to catch me. It would tilt the scale in my favor some if I had to fight them, but not much. They were both three times my size, so my first and best option was not to get caught.
I pulled the old Colt revolver out my bag, and held it down by my side. It was an unfamiliar weapon, and I didn’t know how accurate I’d be shooting it. The elevator doors slid open before either of them exited the stairwell. I moved between the doors to keep them from closing and waited to see if they were going to follow me out the stairwell.
I didn’t have to wait long for the fire door to open, and then SCORE! Biggums number two came out the door running. He had a little less muscle and a little more fat than the man who had chased me into the stairwell, but he was equally as tall.
He saw me and started running towards me, gun in hand, but not at the ready. “Hey, bitch! Stop right there!” he shouted.
He didn’t fire at me, so I knew he was only showing me his gun to scare me. It was stupid. Everybody knows that you never show your gun unless you’re pulling the trigger.
I could have killed him, but it wouldn’t have been the best strategic maneuver. His partner wouldn’t be far behind. Killing him now would give the other dude a reason to keep chasing me. Wounding him would give them both a reason to stop.
I brought the Colt up and fired a bullet into his thigh. “Gotdammit!” he shouted, and hit the floor like a downed rhino.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have tried that kind of tight shot on a moving target, with an unfamiliar weapon. But his thigh was as wide as some men’s chest, so I knew I wouldn’t miss even with a piece of shit gun.
I didn’t run. I held the elevator door and waited to see if I had been right not to kill him. A minute later, the other big guy came through the fire door. He saw his partner down in the hall, and fired a couple wild shots at me as he ran to him. I didn’t return fire, and when he kneeled beside the downed man, I stepped backwards into the elevator car, and let the doors slide close.
“Fuck that bitch, and help me, Jamil!” I heard the wounded dude shout.
I pressed the ground floor button, and then got down on my knees to make myself a smaller target, just in case they had somebody waiting for me on one. I held the Colt in a two hand grip pointed at the doors.
I watched the floor indicator LED numbers change until the number one appeared on the panel. The doors chimed open, and my sudden appearance with a gun in my hands aimed to fire solicited an ear piercing scream from the woman standing there waiting to get on.
“Chicago PD,” I announced. I lowered my gun and sprang to my feet. “Did you see two big men exiting the lobby?” I asked her.
“No, I didn’t see anyone,” she stammered.
“Stay clear of the elevators,” I said as I rushed out by her and ran out the door. I hoped that since I’d announced myself as a cop, she would heed my warning. If not, she could be mistaken for me by the chunky brothers. Warning comes before destruction. She’d been warned, so whatever happened next was on her.
I ran over a block to Wabash, and then wiped my prints off the gun, and dropped it in a mailbox. I hailed a cab, and instructed him to take me to Evanston.
Chapter 4
I had the cabbie let me out four blocks east, and two blocks north of my final destination. I paid him and then got out and walked to headquarters, which was an old three story graystone apartment building in a quiet residential neighborhood. The building had been modified, and converted into what looked like office space, completely staffed with statistical analysts, but it was so much more.
I walked up the stairs and into the second inside vestibule, and entered my code on the keypad to gain entry. On the other side of the decorative steel door was a modular concrete lined hall which led to a reinforced steel door that needed a hand print, retina scan, and facial recognition to open it. I keyed in my code, put my palm on the scanner, and then looked up at the camera.
The door popped open, and I walked into the inside front office, which was separated from the other areas of the house by a wall of steel. In an emergency, it automatically converted into an isolation chamber that was impenetrable by weapons or chemicals. A secured room like it was located on each of the three floors.
I walked through a short passage and into a room of 3D halo-screens, multi touch monitors, and cubicle sofas, with nerdy techs lounging on them. “Where’s Ryan?” I asked Esther Macon, the desk techy closest to the door.
“He’s upstairs in the war room waiting for you.”
The tech team offices and lockup was housed on the first level. The war room, which was the head technology advisor’s hub, was also the conference room. It was located on the second level with Ryan’s office, and medical. The sleeping quarters and the kitchen were on three, and the munitions store and entrance to the parking dock was in the sub-basement.
The elevator opened into an alcove on every floor. I took it up to the second floor, and went directly to the conference room. All the interior walls in the building were bullet resistant glass, so I could see Ryan, Rayce, and Blue where already sitting at the conference table waiting for me.
I walked the few feet to the door hurriedly, and then entered without knocking. “Hey, everybody, the Cognac he purchased last night is what killed him. It was poisoned,” I reported as I walked over to an empty chair, and then sat down. “The brothas who own the lobby liquor store came looking for our dead bodies and his computer right after I talked to you this morning, Ryan.”
Ryan pushed a button on his side of the table, and spoke into a com-phone. “Esther, is Janie in the building?”
“No, she left about twenty minutes ago. She said she had to run an errand.”
“Send Valow to her house. I want her back here right now, and send D’Agon in here.”
“You think she knows something about this?” I asked.
“She was supposed to run a background search on everybody in that building. Now, either there was no connection, or she failed to find it. I need to know which.”
I took a breather while we waited for D’Agon, our thirty year old resident programmer. Byron D’Agon, who looked like a preppy white teenager, had close ties with Ryan’s father, and was ex-Charter like me.
The tech team was small, but it was comprised of the best e-geeks in the business. There were four desk techies, Jon Jordan, Esther Macon, Liam Fields, and Tracy Edwards. Their immediate supervisor was computer analysis, Janie Delores, a white woman in her late thirties. She had worked for the FBI with Ryan before she joined Genesis, like the majority of our field team.
Then there was, Salvatore Vivirito, a lanky Italian in his early forties, who we called Bender. He knew everything there was to know about cyber technology, and he was the head of the technical team.
I’d heard two different stories about how he got the code name, Bender. One pertained to his talent as a systems cracker. It’s rumored that he was a black hat hacker who was recruited by the government to hunt them. Allegedly, there hasn’t been a program written that he can’t bend, or a security system that he can’t crack, hack, and/or annihilate.
He is also an extremely masculine looking, openly gay man, which is supposedly the other reason people called him Bender. I don’t think I have to explain the meaning behind that colloquialism. In any case, everyone agrees he is the best, and can work magic with a computer.
Bender is also best friends with Melvin’s wife, ADA Samantha Jawlins, and he worked for the Chicago PD as a forensic technical advisor before he joined Genesis. Like everyone that worked for Genesis, he had a personal connected to Melvin, either by family or friends. So, we were more than just co-workers.
We saw D’Agon get off the elevator. He pushed his hand back through his long blonde hair nervously before he opened the door and stuck his head in. “You called for me, boss?” he asked.
“Yeah, D’Agon,” Ryan responded with a smile. “What you know about the men who own that liquor store in Steven Chandler’s building?”
“Janie told me that she checked that building personally. She didn’t flag any of the tenants as potential threats. You want me to run another search?”
“Yeah, can you do it without Janie finding out?”
“Yes sir…how soon you need it?”
“Right away, and I’m only interested in the men who own the liquor store. I’m looking for a connection to them and anyone who might want Chandler dead.”
“I’ll get on it right away,” he smiled at me shyly before leaving.
“No romance on the job, Severe,” Blue teased.
“He’s too young for me.”
“He’s six years older than you. He just looks like he’s twelve, like you.”
“Whatever,” I rolled my eyes at him playfully, and he laughed.
Mitchell Anderson, or Blue as we call him, was a dark skinned African American with eyes that were a deeper shade of blue than Melvin’s. His eye color was very rare, and it made his face memorial, so he seldom went operational without wearing brown contacts. Like Ryan, he was in his early forties, retired army sniper, and ex FBI agent.
“Is he old enough for you, Rayce?” he asked.
“No, but you are,” she flirted.
“Don’t play with me,” he chuckled.
He keyed in a code on the tabletop monitor to activate the privacy screen. The glass walls behind us turned dark, and I knew scrambling devices were engaged to prevent outside audio surveillance. Only the people inside the room could hear or see what was going on.
“Did they get the computer?” Blue was all business now.
“Nope, I got it right here,” I took it out my bag, and gave it to him.
“Good girl,” he said, and then immediately started fiddling with it.
“You think we have a leak, don’t you,” Rayce said.
“Don’t know, but we’re going to play it safe until we find out if we do,” Blue answered.
“Steven asked me to go back home with him last night.”
“It’s what we wanted initially, but his murder changes things,” Ryan said.
“But we’re still going in, right?” I asked.
“We’ve devoted a lot of time and resources to milking him for information. We’ve learned a lot, but there are still a bunch of unanswered questions,” Ryan explained “We don’t know how to get invited to the auction, and since Steven is dead you can’t go to the big party to try to find out. I’d like to see it to completion, and not have all the time we invested go to waste, but it might not be feasible.”
“Steven told me that he was going to be sending Basin his final report tonight,” I said. “As you know, he was conducting things from here instead of back home because Basin wanted the broker’s identity to be hidden. None of the potential buyers were supposed to know it was Steven, so it’s unlikely that one of them was behind his death.”
Blue put the computer down on the table. “We knew he was the broker. We didn’t kill him, so it’s a safe assumption that we weren’t the only ones that knew his identity,” he said.
“If we can get the answers we need from his computer, why can’t we still complete the job?” Rayce asked.
&nb
sp; “The problem with continuing on the same course is we don’t know how much they know about our involvement, or if Severe’s cover has been compromised,” Blue explained.
“Well, I’m lobbying for salvaging the op?” she said, and then looked at me. “What about you Severe?”
“We’ve been working this thing day and night for two months. I’d definitely like to see it through if we can.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, ladies, but our current plan is flawed,” Ryan said. “With Steven dead, I don’t know how we can get Severe invited to the party. We certainly can’t get anymore information from Steven. And as soon as Basin gets the word that he’s been killed. He’s going to put a lock on security. It’ll make getting any reliable information nearly impossible.” Ryan hit on the negative.
“Let’s wait and see what Bender can find out before we tank the job,” Blue suggested. “Wait Ryan,” he said when Ryan started to protest. “I think it’s time we let the ladies know how important this job really is, not just to Genesis, but to America.”
Ryan nodded approvingly. “You take the floor,” he said.
Blue stood up and started the briefing. “Ladies, a little over a year ago, Basin’s right hand man, Derrick Forbes entrusted the card to their head of security, Maverick, and the son-of-a-bitch lost it. Forbes hired Viper to help them get it back, and he insisted that Maverick be allowed to head the recovery operation. They were good friends, so he wanted to give Maverick the chance to redeem himself in Basin’s eyes. Maverick fucked it up, and there was a lot of fallout. Some good people lost their lives for nothing. Viper went over Forbes’ head, and got Basin’s permission to give Maverick to us, and a hefty payoff for the injured families, in exchange for the card. Severe you were involved in us getting it back. We put that card back in Tyler Basin’s hands because we didn’t know how dangerous the thing would be in the wrong hands. We also didn’t know that our government wanted it.”
“Steven said it was a weapon. What does it do exactly, and why does everybody want it so bad?” I asked what I thought was a logical question.