Castle Danger--The Mental States

by Anthony Neil Smith

Then again, this had happened earlier. What she’d discovered about herself later came at a time when she knew things were turning sour between her and Andrew, which meant that it became more important for us to find out the truth about her than about her brother.

  But when she’d found out about Andrew and Raske, Hannah had still been playing politics. Back then, she was still confident enough to keep that stuff so close she could bring it up at the snap of her fingers, right on the Senator’s own campaign computer server.

  So much for the theory. In practice, I still had no clue where to start. I pulled up the C drive to see just how many documents we were dealing with.

  Over four-hundred-thousand.

  I cradled my head in my hands.

  “Aw, fuck.”

  5

  A ‘real’ man sometimes has trouble admitting defeat. At least in our macho world of American politics, that’s been proven over and over again. When there’s testosterone pumping, a man is going to keep banging his head against whatever proverbial wall he happens to be close to, until he’s tossed out of office, or he listens to one of the women who have been standing behind him, telling him of a better way since he first started bleeding.

  As for me … I guess my body was still undecided.

  So I tried searching:

  Hannah

  Hannah Raske

  Hannah Fancy Rooms Raske

  Raske Marquette

  Marquette Fancy Rooms

  Hans Raske

  Hans Fancy

  Hannah Hans Hhhh Marquette pron porn Andrew WHERE THE FUCK IS IT?

  And more. Plenty more.

  Until my fingers stopped typing and before I knew it I was calling Nice from my good ol’ office landline.

  “How am I supposed to find this? There’s too much. There’s way too much. All these documents, hundreds of thousands of them.”

  She sighed. “Hold on.” Covered the phone, so I only heard her muffled voice: “Fergus, get me another Red Bull, please, doll.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Then some shuffling sheets.

  “Manny? Look, she’s not going to have made it easy. And it certainly won’t be a doc file.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. It’s either compressed into some sort of zip that’s been tucked away, or it’s hidden in the code itself. Hannah wasn’t stupid.”

  “Are you saying I am?”

  “I’m saying we all have our talents, Manny.”

  She liked that trick, saying someone’s name to them, highly inflected. Makes some people feel important. Makes others wither before her cunning wit.

  “You want it, tell me how to get it.”

  Another sigh, then a quiet “Thank you,” then the crack of a pop can opening, then a sip.

  And then she finally walked me through some impressive hacking.

  Well, impressive to me, anyway. She yawned through a few of the steps, but at least she delivered the goods — an algorithm that would help decrypt files, assuming that Hannah was several steps ahead of everyone else on this. As soon as Nice’s text with the code came through, I plugged my phone into the USB port on the side of the monitor and transferred it over. It was too late to worry if I was being monitored electronically now.

  Soon, I had a list of several hundred files instead of thousands.

  But I also had a visitor.

  He floated past my window, a shadow through the blinds, but the knock on my door was firm as, well, as firm as the rest of the man.

  Tennyson, still looking at me like I might be better off abandoning this treasonous path and following him to the nearest motel. “How’d it go today? Thought I would have heard from you sooner.”

  “Very busy, very busy.” I minimized the window on my computer and enlarged the back-up plan, some half-assed remarks I was working on for the next round of interviews. “Sorry I forgot to call.”

  “I must say, you don’t look very … well, let’s say this isn’t the Manny I expected to see.”

  He held out his hand, started at my head, and waved me down as if I was a museum exhibit.

  “What?”

  “I thought we were only going to see the woman here from now on.”

  Guess it hadn’t occurred to me to ‘pretty’ myself on the way out the door. I’d grabbed jeans, a hoodie, sneakers. My face was washed clean of make-up. It didn’t change who I was, not to me, but to have it pointed out like that stung. Maybe Dr. Stravinsky was right after all. I should’ve listened. There was no fast-track to what I wanted, no matter how many pills I took.

  “Gender is fluid. Only so much I can do at this point.”

  “But women will tell you, you still need to take care of your appearance, especially if you want to be taken seriously. You need to build that time into your routine. No more fifteen-minute showers and out-the-door for you, miss.”

  At first I took him seriously, but then I considered the tone. The uplift, almost sing-songy phrasing. The smile. This wasn’t someone reminding me to ‘look the part’. This was a cat about to eat a canary.

  “Anyway.” He looked over my shoulder. “What’s got you up so late, anyway?”

  He knows.

  Shit.

  “I don’t want to be stumped by tomorrow’s interviewers. I almost dropped the ball today.”

  “Nonsense. I watched and listened. There wasn’t anything shaky at all about you.”

  Oh, he knows. He’s never complimented you like that.

  “Still, better safe than sorry.”

  He took a step into the office, got uncomfortably close. He turned to avoid my shoulder and slip right on past me. “Mind if I take a look? Help you polish it up?”

  I moved to cut him off, but he’d anticipated that and kept ahead of me, now standing behind the desk. All I had left was to pick up the flat screen monitor, wires and all, and turn it away from him, hugging it to my chest. “Don’t do that. Not until I’m finished.”

  He started to take the monitor from me. “Come, now. It’s okay. Nothing on the line here. Just a couple of pals trying to help each other out. We’re on the same team, you know.”

  Behind me, in the hallway, another knock on the already open door, followed by the voice of Repo Man: “Hey, Mr. Washington, you wanted to see me?”

  I would say that I felt like peeing my jeans, but whatever piss was in there froze solid right then.

  He knows.

  “Just a sec, Colin.” Tennyson’s fingers slipped around the edges of the monitor and he pulled harder. I was no match for him. “Let it go. Don’t do this. Take it easy and we can talk about it after.”

  How did they know? Were they just guessing? Why hadn’t they already been in here if they had watched Nice and me talk things through? Were they setting a trap?

  Think harder. Until I or anyone else had the hard proof, it was all hearsay. Tennyson and Colin hadn’t been able to find Hannah’s secret on their own. So they did the next best thing: set up some sort of ‘alarm’, I guessed, so that anyone poking around in the files like I had, or using an algorithm like the one Nice gave me, would set it off once they’d unlocked the right window.

  In short, not only did they have me dead to rights, but they had the info I was looking for, right at their fingertips, ready for deletion.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m going to go to the bathroom.”

  “You can’t take that with you.”

  Don’t show them the fear. “Yeah. I’ve got to go.”

  My grip slackened and Tennyson caught the flatscreen, turned it back around, and set it on the desk. With a flick of his head, he called Colin over and offered the hacker my seat.

  “Do your thing.” Then to me. “I’ll come along.”

  I backed into the hallway, glad that neither of them had seen me unplug my phone and shove it into my hoodie’s giant front pocket. “I’m a big boy. I can go to the potty on my own.”

  He shrugged. “Never know. They say this place is haunted.”

  Back thr
ough the cubicles, almost to the elevator. Men’s room. I pushed my way in, Tennyson right behind me, and headed for one of the two stalls.

  “Why don’t you use the urinal instead?”

  “Number two.”

  “I don’t believe you.” He waved me towards a urinal.

  I started towards it, hand on my belt buckle. “You going to watch me?”

  He shook his head. “You’re right. Maybe if you go back to the stall, sit down, and tuck your junk in real tight.”

  “Are you serious?”

  That smile. “I know everything about you, Manny. You’ve shown me who you really are. A little bit more ain’t going to hurt, is it?”

  I started back for the stall. Fuck it. I spun, aimed low, slammed into him like a linebacker. It took him by surprise, but didn’t take him down. A double-fisted jackhammer rained down on my back. The jolts sent electric shocks of pain up and down my spine. I arched up and kneed him in the balls once, twice, three times, then dumped him off to the side and got out of that bathroom before he was back on his feet. Full on run down to the stairway at the far end of the floor. Just as I slammed my shoulder into it and fell through, I heard Tennyson’s shouts echoing from way back.

  I took the stairs by threes at first, then in big flying leaps until my legs couldn’t take it anymore. It felt like forever before I was at ground level, out of breath and ratcheted with pain, but I had to keep on. Out the door, onto the street, and on the run until I could find a place to hunker down.

  A phone full of secrets. But now they knew what I knew. I had to hurry. Somewhere in all those files was Hannah’s revelation of the Fancy Rooms’ address. At least I hoped so. If not, I’d just burned the last bridge for sweet fuck all.

  Time to find out. I texted the files to Nice, typed, FIND TH ADDRES! HURY! TEHY KNOW!

  Then almost collapsed on a bus stop bench and tried to catch my breath.

  After fifteen minutes, I began to realize that Tennyson had better things to do than chase me.

  My phone dinged.

  A street address in Superior, Wisconsin — Duluth’s poorer, dirtier neighbor. (Sorry, Superior. I have a soft spot for you, though.) With all of Marquette’s men on my case, I would just have to trust her.

  I texted the address on to Joel and typed GO GET EM. He was waiting for my signal, him and his soldier pals.

  As I climbed into the back of a cab, the driver asked, “One-night stand?”

  I reclined and rolled my neck. “Bad decision.”

  “I get it. I make a lot of money driving home people who made bad decisions.”

  Then he turned on Prince’s ‘Get Off’, almost like a DJ playing a request.

  I relaxed into the warm leather. “How about ‘Delirious’ instead? It’s been a crazy night.”

  And wouldn’t you know it …

  6

  A race against time.

  Tennyson knew that I’d opened their Pandora box and I was sure they didn’t want to risk me telling the press about its horrid contents. How fast could the dungeon masters at Fancy Rooms shut down their operation and move the victims? OR were these Fancy Rooms scattered all over, one in each basement, perhaps?

  I just hoped and prayed — yes, I said ‘prayed’, believe it or not — that Nice had sent me the right address, and that Joel and the crew would get there in time.

  I had to assume I was being watched, but I couldn’t just drop off the radar. I still had to live, drive, eat, go to the bathroom … I wasn’t trained in all this investigation and counter-surveillance stuff. How was I going to pull it off? I looked at my watch. Six in the morning. I hadn’t really thought about where to go, although I’d told the Uber guy that I’d hand over some cash if he ignored my destination and just kept driving until I figured it out myself.

  Which I soon did because, complicated though this case may have been, hey, I’d been involved in bluffs and crosses and double-crosses before.

  “Hey, could you take me to the airport?”

  The driver laughed. “Gonna get away for a while? Just like that?”

  “Yeah, just like that.”

  He dropped me off at the Humphrey terminal, and I headed for car rentals. I didn’t want to take the Lincoln. I didn’t even want to take my phone. I wanted to get out of town, head to the cabin where I had a head-start and could see them coming, if they were coming for me. Maybe they were just trying to scare me. Maybe, to Tennyson and Marquette, it looked like I’m the crazy one, a paranoid wreck.

  No, that was wishful thinking. This had to be a real threat. I’d seen it with my own eyes, hadn’t I?

  I had to follow this to the end.

  As I left the airport grounds with the rental, I pulled over on the shoulder of the highway, peeled the back of the phone off, found the sim card, and threw it out the window onto the pavement. Should be smashed to bits soon. A little while later, I threw the phone out, too. For the first time since my life went into a tailspin — what, a year ago? — I was truly alone.

  Cut to Joel and his boys on the road.

  What should have been a two-hour drive from the Cities turned into an hour and twenty-two minutes. Joel, Dogged, and Soulfather had taken out the backbench to prepare for the ‘hostages’, as they slipped easily back into their war lingo. They had dreamed about it. They had yearned for it. And here they were actually doing it. Hallelujah.

  Special ops. Camo paint smeared on their faces, H&K MP5s cocked, loaded, except for Joel’s, who preferred his modified Bushmaster ACR, beaten to hell and back but still in one piece. They didn’t have a lot of time for recon, just a few drives around the block, some binocular time from several points. The venue was on the edge of a residential neighborhood, so no businesses open nearby. The closest was a used car joint, closed for the night, whose lot was dominated by three RVs priced to move!!!

  They were mighty surprised to discover that the address was for a long-abandoned Lutheran church, the glass on the sign out front busted, the letters moved around to spell “Satan Loves You 666” and “Butt Shit”. Surprised that no one had come to take that down. Surprised to see any church left to rot with all the End Days fervor whipped up by the elections, both local and national.

  Not surprised to see a white Ford van in the parking lot, parked with its rear close to the side stairs leading to the basement. What else would they use but the go-to van for anonymous dirty dealings? No one gave a white Ford van a second thought, unless you had had your share of dirty dealings, of course.

  How did Nice know? How did she find the address so quickly?

  She knew what to look for. An abandoned Lutheran church in Superior, Wisconsin shouldn’t need an active cable internet line, paid for by a proxy for Daniel Raske.

  Joel pointed ahead through the windshield of the SUV. “That, my brothers, has all the signs of a trap.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure does.”

  “Jesus.”

  “But …” Soulfather’s comment hung in the air for a moment. He shook his head. “Maybe they’re too dumb to set a trap. I mean, this is a small-time porn site, not a drug cartel.”

  “All it takes is one gun.”

  Soulfather shook his head. “I’m not feeling it. I don’t think we’re going to have a problem.”

  Joel wished he could agree, but he had goosebumps. His teeth chattered. He flexed his fingers. But there was only so much stalling …

  “Ready?”

  Out of the vehicle. Fast and low across the street to the side of the church, checking the van for a driver, or someone in the back.

  And yeah, there was someone in the back. On a stretch. In a body bag. Shit.

  Joel sneaked into the back of the van, while Soulfather and Dogged stood watch. But whoever had been assigned to guard the body had decided to wait it out right inside the door to the basement, watching out the window. When he saw Joel hop in and hover over the body bag, he opened the door and raced up the steps.

  “Hey!”

  Dogged wrapped his hand arou
nd the guard’s mouth from behind then laid into him with a stun gun. Hopefully enough juice to keep him disoriented for a while. Dogged eased the man to the ground face-first, taped his mouth and bound his wrists and ankles with plastic cuffs.

  One down.

  The guard was in his twenties, not carrying any weapons. He hadn’t even worn a thick enough jacket for the night air. Maybe Soulfather was right. Just some misfits following orders, not a well-oiled fighting machine.

  Joel reached for the bag’s zipper, tried to one hand it. It got hung up, threatened to rip the plastic. He set his gun down, got a better hold on the bag, zipped it down, spread it.

  He’d seen that face before. Even though it was now drawn, his mouth frozen wide and in terror, caked around the edges with insect legs and goo, a nasty smell blooming from it, he still recognized Phil Konzbruck.

  He shuddered. Fell back.

  Of all the things he had expected to see tonight … fuck.

  But why? Joel unzipped more.

  “Come on, man.” Soulfather, rifle up, pointed at the basement door. “Come on!”

  “Just a sec.”

  No obvious signs of death. No gunshots. No trace of strangulation. Drugs? Suffocation? Joel felt around. The smell was getting to him. Right on the edge of what he could take.

  He pulled out Konsbruck’s arm. His wrist and forearm, gashed as if by a jagged piece of glass or metal. It had been cleaned up, but there was no denying this was a fatal wound.

  Joel looked at his back-up. “I think he killed himself.”

  Nothing the others could say.

  Joel hopped off the back of the van, knelt beside the guard lying on his stomach. Groggy but aware. Joel ripped the tape from his mouth.

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t kill me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know until … I didn’t know.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “They said he did it with the table leg. Took the rubber tip off and did it.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I swear, I didn’t know!”

  “You know who else is down there? How many of you?”

  He shook his head. “Four? Five? It’s like, I don’t know what’s going on in all the rooms.”