Greg showed up at the office that evening, as Cell T was dining on Thai take-out. He gave the shave-and-a-haircut knock and Vic opened the door.
“Hi, I’m Greg,” he said. “I’m here about the opera tickets.”
Vic smiled. “I’m Tonya. Come on in.” Greg had two large shipping cases with him, and he brought them into the office behind Vic.
“This is Terry and Thomas,” she said, gesturing to her compatriots as they put down their chopsticks.
“Alphabet city, huh? I must be on Sesame Street.”
“Yeah,” Abe replied. “But we’re sponsored by the letters D and G.”
Greg smiled and sat the cases down on the floor. “So Alphonse didn’t tell me much about this op. He just said you guys were on surveillance detail and didn’t know your asses from your elbows.”
Stephanie laughed. “Yeah, that’s about right. That your gear?”
“And my silk boxers. What’s the target?”
Vic nodded towards the large window in the next room. “See that walled compound down there at the end of the road?”
Greg walked over to the doorway. Memphis Private Investigations’ new suite consisted of a small windowless foyer and two larger private offices with big picture windows. Cell T had set up in the foyer for privacy—their surveillance had to be a one-way street. Through the window in the nearest office, Greg could see the compound. It sat on a chunk of property maybe ten acres in size, with a twelve-foot stone wall that enclosed the perimeter. A single gated entrance gave way to a road that ran about a hundred yards to a single-story building without a single window. There was a parking lot large enough to hold dozens of cars, and a small road ran from the parking lot around to the back of the building, presumably for deliveries. He didn’t see any phone or power lines—probably buried.
“Binoculars?” he asked.
Abe took his collapsible pair from a drawer of the desk and held them out to Greg, who took them and shook his head. “Got these from a gumball machine, huh?” Abe rolled his eyes.
Greg stepped back into the doorway and sighted on the roof. A moment later, he whistled.
“What is it?” Vic asked.
“These guys are serious. They’ve got a microwave transmitter and a laser transmitter on the roof, plus whatever phone lines they’ve got in the dirt.”
“Transmitters?” Stephanie asked.
“Yeah, probably redundant communications channels, or else heavily encrypted so they can stay off Ma Bell. No satellite dish, though, which is interesting. They don’t trust the eyes in the sky, I guess. I bet their receivers are seriously tricked out.”
“You’ve lost me,” Vic said.
Greg lowered the binoculars and closed the door. “Microwave and laser transmitters work on line-of-sight. They have to have receivers someplace nearby, probably on a rooftop of one of these office buildings—maybe even this one. The receivers catch the signals and then either shunt them into land lines, feed them into a satellite dish, or redirect them on to another set of receivers further out. The receivers are vulnerable to tampering, so I bet they’re tricked out with alarms up the wazoo. If these guys are smart, they manually inspect the receivers on a regular basis to ensure that no one’s bypassed their security. If you wanna listen in on what they’re sending out, you’ll need a specialist. I’m just a camera boy.”
Vic shook her head. “That’s all we want. Our first priority is building an employee list.”
Greg nodded. “So we’re on license plate detail. Gotcha.” He gave the binoculars back to Abe and started opening his cases while Cell T watched, curious. As he pulled equipment out, he rattled off brief descriptions, clearly proud of his gear.
“Okay, I got three autowinding Nikon n5s with an assortment of zoom & telephoto lenses, a Sony Hi-8 vidcam, a Palm ir-250 thermal-imaging vidcam, a g3 PowerBook with a FireWire PC card for the video, some tripods, and a shitload of film and tapes. This place got running water?”
Stephanie nodded. “There’s a bathroom off the other office.”
“Sweet. I’ll set up the darkroom there. I need to do some shopping, though. I hope you guys got buckage ’cuz I can’t put this on my expense report. Fifteen hundred should do.”
“We’ll talk to Alphonse,” Abe said. “This sumptuous meal represents the last of our petty cash.”
“Look out, the big geek’s quoting Ghostbusters!” Greg exclaimed, then struck a formal pose. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.”
Vic smirked. “And that means?”
“Who watches the watchmen?” he replied, fiddling with his equipment.
Abe snorted derisively. “Ecce dorko.”
The next morning was Saturday. Over breakfast, Cell T and Greg made plans. The bulk of their license-plate surveillance would start on Monday, when they expected the heaviest employee traffic. This weekend Greg would go shopping, set up the darkroom, and check them out on the still cameras. They’d practice on whatever traffic happened along, in the hopes that Greg would have them ready for the work week. Greg also suggested that they scout around to figure out where the receivers were, for future reference.
Alphonse stopped by briefly to greet Greg and drop off a manila envelope full of cash—about three thousand dollars. He looked at Greg pointedly. “No funnybooks.” Greg whistled and stared at a wall. Abe cackled.
That afternoon, they piled into their rental sedan and went shopping. Greg had called around to some camera shops in D.C. after breakfast, and found one that he said had its act together. He spent an hour there, picking through the merchandise. He settled on a Beseler 67 enlarger, easel, five-roll developer tank, 8*10 trays, tongs, thermometer, digital timer, two amber safelights, a grain focuser, film dryer, bolts of darkroom cloth, T-Max developer for the film, Dektol for the paper, stopbath, fixer, hypo, and three boxes of variable-contrast rc paper. He also got another bushel of film, all of it Kodak T-Max p3200, a multi-speed black-and-white film suited to rapid-fire, high-detail surveillance use. All told, they spent almost two grand.
Moving Greg’s purchases to the office took two trips. The MPI suite’s bathroom was much too small to serve as the entire darkroom, so he’d use the office it was connected to, as well. Whenever it was darkroom time, they’d have to black out the big window and the door in that room. Abe suggested they do this only at night, since the blacked-out window might look suspicious from the street. Greg glanced at Vic archly: “Look—it’s trying to think.” Abe looked at Stephanie for sympathy, but she was too busy cracking up.
Greg was both tall and scrawny. Next to Abe, he somehow looked like Rumpelstiltskin. He had long brown hair in a ponytail and Buddy Holly glasses, and thus far had showed a predilection for retro bowling shirts, khakis, and dingy canvas basketball shoes. He spoke with a Chicago accent—not too thick, but noticeable—and had an infectious, mocking laugh that suggested everyone was an idiot except for Greg and those in his circle. In the case of Cell T, his circle extended only to Vic and Stephanie, a point that was not lost on Abe. Abe tagged him as a horndog on the make, his technique as old as time: first, cut down the competition. Unfortunately for Abe, Greg had a wit as quick as a shutter.
The rest of the weekend passed quickly. Greg got his darkroom set up and led the Cell in camera lessons. By Sunday night, they were doing a passable job of catching license plates. Tomorrow morning the real work would begin.
Monday’s “real work” had mixed results. Three hundred vehicles turned onto Marginal Way over the course of the day, about fifty of whom went to OUTLOOK; the rest were divided among a handful of office parks. Between Cell T and Greg they shot more than four hundred pictures, the quantity owing largely to some heavy-handed operation of the speed-winders by the neophytes. Since they only had three cameras running, they took turns, with the extra Cell member loading film; Greg stayed on his camera nonstop. He worked in the darkroom until very late that night running contact sheets, which they then pored over. Greg scored fifteen useable license plate shots from his rolls; Ce
ll T totaled a collective twelve, from which they had six overlaps with Greg’s. Stephanie created a multi-page grid in a spiral-bound notebook and worked until the wee hours transcribing as much information as she could from the contact sheets about the makes of cars, while Greg made fast, grainy prints of the best license-plate candidates. Vic and Abe went back to the motel for some shut-eye.
Tuesday they fared better, despite some snow flurries. Three hundred pictures got them forty license plates, of which twelve were new. They had thirty-three now, plus better makes on a lot of the cars and some useful information on the number, gender, and race of the occupants. Greg was supposed to leave Tuesday night, but he opted to stay on. “You guys are hopeless,” was his only explanation.
Wednesday through Thursday were a blur. The office reeked of darkroom chemicals, and Greg was running ragged. He visited a circuit of photo shops and had large prints made of everything they had to date, which Stephanie inspected and logged in the notebook. The work of cross-referencing all the cars, license plates, and occupants to improve her data was exhausting.
Friday morning they assembled in the office before rush hour to check the results. Stephanie’s book had forty-six rock-solid license plates and car makes, with another dozen cars made but not plated. She had decent occupant profiles for thirty of the plated cars and six of the unplated ones. When the traffic hit, Stephanie played spotter, pointing out unplated cars she recognized from her book so the others could triple-dog them on the cameras. It was Stephanie who first noticed the truck.
It was a private waste-hauler, different from the utility trucks that came through the neighborhood to pick up the regular garbage on Wednesday. The logo read “Stoli Bros. Medical,” and it headed straight to OUTLOOK, staying there twenty minutes. Stephanie made sure they got plenty of shots of the truck. In her job with the EPA she’d become familiar with the intricacies of the medical waste-disposal industry. If OUTLOOK had medical waste, it meant they should have a sheaf of permits and contracts on file; it also suggested that OUTLOOK had, indeed, left its think-tank days behind.
They ran a final barrage of shots during the evening rush-hour exodus. By three o’clock Saturday morning, she and Greg had filled out the book: sixty-two vehicles made, plated, and with at least partial occupant notes, compiled and cross-checked while Abe and Vic puttered and made hot-coffee runs. Before they hit the sack, all four of them pored over Stephanie’s meticulous notebook, dozens of photos cropped and glued into the pages within grids of lines and notes. Greg pronounced them honorary Peeping Tom Perv-o’s, and for once he and Abe laughed with each other, rather than at each other. They bombed back to the motel and sat up until dawn, trading shots of bourbon and laughing hysterically, winding down from the week. When they finally crashed, they stayed down until two o’clock Saturday afternoon.
Alphonse came by that evening, after the team was cleaned up and fed. He went through the book, nodding pleasantly as they rattled off their observations and anecdotes. Greg played the staggered thermal videos he’d had running on a timer, and Stephanie pointed out the one piece of useful data they contained: very late on Thursday night, there was a protracted discharge of heavy smoke from a vent at the rear of the building, probably coming out of an incinerator. The only tasks remaining were the photographic survey of the facility and locating the two receivers, neither of which the frazzled group had managed to accomplish during the week. They did both of these on a drizzly gray Sunday, after Alphonse had taken the notebook and said he’d be in touch when he had results.
The survey brought few surprises. They made the two building entrances, and got good shots of the transmitters and other rooftop features. The stone walls had coils of concertina wire hanging just inside and below the top, making a climb difficult. The grounds were dotted with trees and even some aging picnic tables, but there were no other discernible structures or features of interest. The photos did show that the two security booths on either side of the gated entrance had what appeared to be thick, bulletproof glass and “murder holes”—slots through which weapons could be fired at attackers. There were no guards roaming the grounds, but they caught one guard taking a smoke break outside the delivery entrance, armed with what Abe recognized as a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, not exactly standard security-guard issue. They also made a small patch on the guards’ shoulders that identified them as employees of a security company named Wackenhut. Greg took the photos and sketched out a somewhat accurate map of the compound, noting features such as clusters of trees and the picnic tables.
As for the receivers, they were mounted on the rooftops of two different office buildings, blocks apart but still in line-of-sight with the facility. Greg spotted them using Abe’s binoculars, since he was the only one who knew what to look for. They considered sneaking up to take a closer look, but ruled that out—they didn’t know what security measures OUTLOOK might have in place on the receivers.
Greg was booked on a red-eye flight to Chicago late Sunday night. The team sat up again, drinking and laughing, until the taxi came. Before leaving, Greg attempted to get Vic and Stephanie’s phone numbers—and real names—in private, turning on the charm to each in turn. Both were amused but declined, and shared this information with each other shortly after Greg’s taxi came. To Abe’s horror, they spent a couple minutes trying to sort out who Greg had asked first; the results were inconclusive.
Cell T, alone again, hit the sack. When they rose groggy in the morning, they once more had nothing to do but wait.
Monday moved along. Since action was not imminent, Stephanie suggested that they find a gun range and blow off some steam. Vic and Abe agreed readily, and they found a facility near Andrews Air Force Base that sounded promising. They ended up making a day of it. The range had a variety of firearms available for use, so once the trio had finished squeezing off a couple hundred rounds from their own handguns, they worked their way through the rentals: a Desert Eagle, a Ruger Super Redhawk, an FN FAL, and a few others. Abe, being an FBI field agent up against a park ranger and an EPA scientist, expected to easily ace his companions, but Stephanie handed him his ass on a silver platter. When he boggled at the results of her latest paper target, she smiled and shrugged. “Practice,” she said. Vic trailed Abe substantially, but both were well below Stephanie’s results.
After leaving the range that evening, they retired to a bar that turned out to be lounge central for the Andrews flyboys, many of whom gave Vic and Stephanie the once-over—and, in some cases, the thrice-over. The two received several dance invitations from extremely polite Air Force personnel; Abe had made a guy by the bar as a captain keeping an eye on his boys, which perhaps explained their unusually gentlemanly behavior. Stephanie danced briefly with two of the men, but Vic demurred graciously. “My husband,” she nodded towards Abe, “would get jealous.” Abe grinned and put his arm around Vic, who made a show of scooting closer and batting her eyelashes at him while the flyboys made apologetic exits.
“Rug muncher,” Abe whispered.
“Starfucker,” Vic replied.
Alphonse finally PGP’d them on Tuesday afternoon, scheduling a meeting for that evening. It couldn’t come soon enough for Stephanie.
She had a hunch. That medical-waste disposal truck and the incinerator discharge had gotten her curious, and she’d made a few phone calls on Tuesday morning while they were killing time. She didn’t discuss the hunch with Vic and Abe, brushing off their questioning looks.
Tuesday evening, Alphonse showed up at their motel room. The briefing began. Alphonse looked tired.
“I’ve got a tentative employee list for OUTLOOK, based on your surveillance work. A lot of them are pretty mundane. Valentine Krogen is still there—that was his gold BMW you spotted. Presumably he’s running the place. The big news is that about half the personnel are medical. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists. They’re straight medical private-sector, as far as I could find. None of the people you made had government backgrounds, at least not on casual inspec
tion. And besides Krogen, there isn’t a single political scientist or academic among them. I guess they’re out of the think-tank business.”
“What about the security guards?” Abe asked. “Saturday we made them as Wackenhut personnel.”
Alphonse nodded grimly. “Yeah, I found that, too. Something’s rotten in Denmark.”
“Huh?” Vic said.
“Thomas, what do you know about Wackenhut?”
Abe thought for a moment. “Well, they have a lot of government contracts. The founder was old FBI, one of Hoover’s boys way back when. I think they run some prisons in Australia, maybe here, too. They’re pretty big.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Alphonse shook his head. “Wackenhut is bad news. The reason you don’t hear much about cowboy operations like Iran-Contra is because they’re mostly handled by the private sector these days. Goes back to the Pinkertons, really, though the CIA and the FBI pulled a lot of dirty tricks on their own for a while in the ’50s and ’60s. Feeling their oats I guess. Anyway, Wackenhut guards nuclear power plants for the Atomic Energy Commission, and they do a lot of perimeter security for the military. Whenever you see those UFO nutjobs getting chased off Area 51 by the guys in white Broncos, that’s Wackenhut at work.”
“So?” Stephanie asked.
“Companies like Wackenhut are tight with the intelligence community. A lot of them get started by former federal personnel whose political agendas got them in trouble. So they go private, call on their contacts, and do cowboy dirty-tricks work that they couldn’t get authority for when they were in the government. The CIA has used Wackenhut as cover for their own personnel at times—agents get contracts as security guards under fake names to provide deniability.”
“You think those guards are CIA?” Abe asked.
“Maybe, given Krogen’s background. But they could be anyone. A ten spot says they aren’t legit Wackenhut hires, though.”
Vic looked pensive. “Do you know anybody at Wackenhut? Could you find out?”
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 19