Luthecker

by Domingue, Keith

  He appeared to be talking.

  Her fingers worked the keyboard.

  “Come on girl, if there’s video, there’s audio, find me the audio.” She said to her electronic other half.

  • • •

  “Well? What do you see?” Brown asked Alex, defiance in his tone. He held the sleek black baton in both hands across his lap.

  Alex stared at Brown’s face. A million page flipbook of color images scrolled through Alex’ mind.

  Star Wars, pizza and Church. Cop and Robber TV, belt-whippings and bullying. Rejection from women, which would plant the seed of resentment that would eventually morph into desire for vengeance. The taste of vengeance turned to lust for power. From this comes the early forging of an ideological structure. Me against the world turning into Us against Them turning into Good versus Evil. Everything begins to filter Black and White. This polarization becomes strongly reinforced by the simple structure of the military.

  War. Death. The search for its purpose begins to turn towards nationalized interest.

  The Twin Towers.

  Paranoia. Fear. Wealth. Power. Contempt. Hatred. Rage.

  Righteousness.

  Alex had to look away.

  “Theatrics are for the weak, Alex.” Brown reacted. “Now look at me again and tell me what you see.”

  • • •

  Nikki smiled as she heard the sound of Richard Brown’s voice. Phoebe’s running search matched the audio frequency being recorded in the room and piggybacked it. Nikki kept the audio link on, and began to listen in. She checked her watch: 6:07pm. Stern and Castillo should be in place soon. They would call in as soon as they were ready. She juggled the three screens, splitting them each to make six. Electronic control systems for the building operations on the left most screen. Security video, the eyes and ears, on the right. And Alex in the middle. She piped the audio in the room through the Mac’s speakers.

  • • •

  Castillo pulled the modified Honda Civic across from the Coalition Properties West building entrance. He checked his watch: 6:08pm. He looked over to Stern.

  “Call in.”

  • • •

  Nikki tapped the blue tooth in her ear to take the call, her eyes roaming all three split-screens.

  “Be walking in the door at exactly 6:20.” She immediately told them, bypassing any pleasantries. “You’ll hear a fire alarm as you enter. Security cameras will go static for twenty seconds. Walk straight to the elevator service entrance. The door alarm will be deactivated. You don’t have twenty-one seconds. You have twenty.”

  “Got it.” Castillo replied. He looked at Stern. “It’s set.”

  “Let’s do this.” Stern replied.

  Both men exited the car simultaneously, and walked towards the entrance to Coalition Properties West.

  Butterflies danced in Castillo’s stomach. His hands shook. He tried to stay calm and tried to stay focused. He reminded himself why he was here. The department had let a private company walk all over procedure. It had led to the murder of his partner. And the answers as to why were on the seventy-second floor of this building.

  He glanced at his watch. 6:19. He eyed the building entrance just ahead.

  Stern felt the adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was trained for this, he told himself. An internal mantra he always used before entering a hot zone. He was born for this, was how the mantra concluded. His jaw line tightened. His watch hit 6:20 just as he pulled open the glass doors, never breaking stride as he entered the Coalition building.

  Both men entered the lobby to the shrill and loud sound of an alarm going off. They casually walked through people standing still like a cluster of stone statues, confused looks on their faces as the shrill sounding klaxon interrupted their routines. Stern and Castillo slowed to let security personnel pass in front of them to investigate, and then slipped behind the Eastern elevator bank. So far, everything had gone just as Nikki had orchestrated. They found themselves standing in front of the service entrance door.

  “Here goes.” Stern said, as he pushed open the door without hesitation. The external fire alarm went silent and no new alarm sounded as they stepped out of the plush marble lobby and into the stripped down cavernous concrete of the elevator service corridor.

  Castillo quickly shut the door behind them. They waited a moment for some sort of reaction, some sort of evidence that they had been detected. There was nothing but the whine of oversized electric motors and the roar of elevator cars roaming overhead. Everything seemed to be timed perfectly.

  “Looks like she got us in.” Castillo commented.

  Both men examined the angular mechanical housing that held the elevator cars. It was large and imposing, with pulley and cable systems seemingly built for giants. It looked as if it extended vertically into forever. Stern looked to a set of iron rungs made from rebar built into the concrete and followed them upwards with his eyes until they too disappeared from view.

  Stern looked at a nervous Castillo.

  “Like she said, I hope you’re in shape.” He said to the detective, before he grabbed a rebar rung, and started to climb.

  • • •

  “Maybe we should rethink the idea of running.” Aldrich said as he Camila, Yaw and Winn watched the Blackhawk helicopter circle just above rooftops like a bird of prey.

  They all looked at him.

  “I’m kidding. But seriously, what are we going to do?”

  They looked to the street below. Three matte black Hum Vees screeched to a halt in formation in front of the building.

  “We get the eyes of the world on us.” Yaw answered. “And the eyes of the world on them.”

  He looked back and forth between Chris, Camila, and Winn.

  “That’s what we do. If we’re going to go down to these bastards, let’s make sure the whole world knows.”

  They all nodded in somber agreement.

  Three loud thumps rattled the front door and made them all reach for their Kali sticks.

  The Vietnamese men and women instinctively huddled in the kitchen in fear, used to unexpected and ominous intrusions.

  Winn nodded to Chris and Yaw, indicating they take point on either side of the door. They silently approached and stood ready on either side as Winn approached the door, and checked the view hole.

  It was Rooker. Behind him, half a dozen men armed with AR-15’s.

  Winn stood there a moment, unsure what to think. He finally took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  Rooker stood across from Winn, dead serious and somber, 9mm in his hand, held low and ready.

  He then broke into a wry grin.

  “Fuck it.” He said.

  • • •

  “Did you ever think, for even one second, that the momentum of all your decisions, what you’ve worked for all of your life, is wrong?” Luthecker asked Brown. He kept his eyes locked on those of his adversary, but in periphery, he watched the baton.

  “Morality is an arbitrary deal cut between the weak and the strong designed to keep order. Now stop wasting my time. You said that by reading me, you could tell me what I need to know about Zemin. So tell me.”

  “He’s aware that it was you behind the terrorist attack on the oil refinery in Saudi Arabia.”

  “That isn’t future intel, Alex. That is past. I’m not going to ask you again.”

  He slipped both hands down to the handle of the electronic stun baton. He twisted it and it suddenly crackled to life.

  • • •

  The blood drained from Nikki’s face. What she had just heard off the audio feed made no sense. Her mind instinctively flashed back to images of twisted metal and thick black smoke. The mass murder carnage of smoldering bodies being laid in a row on a pier. The attack on the Saudi refinery had changed everything for her. It had led to her getting fired from her job and coming to California. It had led her to questioning everything. It had led to her meeting Alex Luthecker, and him warning her to not get in a car, which had p
robably saved her life, which had set her on a new path, the path that led to her being right here, right now. And Alex somehow knew that Richard Brown was behind it. Then it hit her-- It wasn’t Luthecker who had abruptly changed her life. It was Richard Brown.

  A pop up alert on the left screen focused her attention. It was Phoebe. Warning her that the building security system had detected their presence. Phoebe could out run it, overriding alerts, making it look like common malfunctions and sending search functions into infinite loops and jamming up the system’s countermeasures, temporarily avoiding a full blown security breach. But she wouldn’t be able to do this for long. Castillo and Stern had twenty minutes, tops before a breach would be detected and serious alarms would hit. If that happened the facilities would lock down and there would be no getting out, even if they reached Luthecker. She had to find a way to buy them more time, or none of them would make it out alive.

  • • •

  Stern’s forearms were nearly numb with lactic acid burn. His face dripped with sweat. His heart pounded, and his legs were on fire. They had climbed nearly forty floors in fifteen minutes. He stopped briefly, looking down to check on Castillo’s progress. The detective struggled nearly three floors below him.

  “Pick it up.” He yelled, his voice echoing throughout the concrete elevator shaft.

  Castillo stopped to catch his breath. His hands could barely hang on to the rebar rungs. He looked below, and saw nothing but abyss, and got dizzy. He wrapped his arm through the metal step and tried to stay calm.

  “Keep going.” He yelled back to Stern. “I’m fine. Don’t wait for me, I’ll catch up.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait for you at the seventy-second floor.” Stern yelled back down.

  He started back on the climb. Stern’s mind flashed back to a particularly dangerous recon detail early in his first tour in Afghanistan. Loaded down with a sixty-pound pack, he had been isolated from his unit by guerillas high in the mountains along the Pakistani boarder. His radio was dead, and he had run out of water. But he had to keep moving if he wanted to survive. For three days he wandered the mountains, eating bugs, hiding in caves, and exchanging gunfire with the men who hunted him.

  Compared to that, this was nothing, he thought.

  With a surge of energy, he picked up the pace. He noticed the floor marker, a simple black paint stencil on concrete, as he passed by. It read “63”. There were less than ten floors to go.

  Stern saw it first, beginning with the giant cables moving, like snakes asleep in the sun slowly disturbed awake. There were three loud metal on metal clicking noises before the entire seventy-five story concrete square shaft that housed the main elevators began to shake. It was minimal at first, but then came the sound, a slow Doppler whine that quickly approaching a defining roar. Stern froze on the rebar steps. He knew what was coming. He dared a glance below: From sixty-three floors deep, a black box was screaming upwards in his direction. The shaking quickly became violent in its intensity. Stern’s foot slipped off the rebar step, but held on with all his strength, and pulled himself upright with his arms, twisting both his hands and feet around the rebar. He gritted his teeth, and hung on as hard he could, just as the giant black elevator car ripped by him less than an arm’s length away at over five-hundred and fifty meters per minute.

  Dust and debris flew upward in the car’s wake, as the vacuum created by the velocity and air displacement of this fast moving car up a narrow tube nearly ripped him free from his grip on the rebar ladder, and it took all of his strength to hang on.

  In less than three seconds it was over.

  He gathered himself, and shook off the bits of dust and debris. He thought about his partner. He looked below.

  There was no one.

  “Castillo?” He yelled out. There was no answer. “Castillo!?” He yelled again, this time at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing ominously throughout the elevator shaft.

  There was no response.

  He yelled out a third time, more out of frustration and anger than hope.

  When there was again no answer, Stern hung his head in silence, said a prayer for the detective. From here on out, he was on his own.

  He resumed his climb.

  • • •

  Nikki looked at the screen that showed the building alarm grid. There were literally over a hundred thousand alarms in the building, ranging from fire warnings, water sprinklers, lighting systems, to door security. The security system itself was a victim of its own complexity, as it was nearly impossible for there not to be at least one faulty unit that the software management system had to account for and correct, and it was this flaw that Phoebe took advantage of. It had not been difficult for Nikki to modify her modeling software for hacking duties, and now she focused on the elevator service door on the seventy-second floor, switching it off, while at the same time temporarily bypassing the detection circuit. She checked her watch: 6:46pm. Stern and Castillo should be at that door soon. She looked to her far right monitor, pulled up the security camera grid located on the seventy-second floor. She locked onto the freestanding camera and moved its focus from the elevator doors to the service access door.

  Phoebe chirped with an alert. The building system had picked up on the move, and was investigating. Nikki knew she had minutes at best before Phoebe would be forced to flee the system or risk the total shut down of a detected systems breach.

  She watched the security video show the service door slowly open, and Stern carefully step through and into the hallway. She breathed a sigh of relief, and immediately tried him on her cell phone. She watched Stern hit his blue tooth.

  “You made it.” She said. “Where’s Castillo?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “What? How- “

  “We don’t have time.”

  Stern did a visual assessment of the hallway. Several metal doors, each with what looked like food delivery slots in the center.

  Stern recognized the design from prisons he had seen in Kabul, Afghanistan.

  This floor looks to be all holding cells. Can you tell me which one’s Luthecker’s?”

  “He’s in the northeast corner. I’m not exactly sure which cell. Look, I have to bug out. The building’s beginning to suspect there’s a burglar in the house. I’m afraid you’re on your own. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You got me in. I can take it from here.”

  He hit his blue tooth to end the call, and stepped out of camera view.

  Nikki sat there, unsure what to do next. She looked at the 9mm Stern had left her for protection. Should she wait here, or should she go down to the building to try and help? She already knew the answer. One thing she was sure of-- She had to pull Phoebe back, and now. Otherwise, building security would be alerted, and Stern would be a dead man. She looked at the center screen, of Alex Luthecker and Richard Brown.

  An idea suddenly dawned on her.

  • • •

  Stern felt lucky he had stepped from the service corridor into an empty hallway, but he knew his luck wouldn’t last. He hustled passed the elevators and turned left and that’s when his luck ran out. He literally ran into a security guard, easily six and a half feet tall, easily three hundred pounds. Stern bounced off him and landed on his back.

  The guard immediately went for his weapon, and Stern hit him in the ankle with all five million volts from the Streetwise stun gun before the guards’ hand reached his holster.

  The guard went rigid and dropped to one knee, before tumbling to the floor, unconscious. Stern zip-cuffed the man’s hands and feet. He stayed low over the body, and checked the hallway for others.

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Stern slowly rose to his feet, as he looked at the source of the plea-- A small, frail looking man standing at the end of the hallway. Wearing glasses with thick black frames, he looked like the proverbial deer-in-the-headlights. His hands were up and shaking.

  “I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me.” Isabella s
aid to Stern.

  “Alex Luthecker. Do you know him?” Stern demanded.

  Isabella remained frozen.

  “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Where is he?”

  Isabella stayed silent.

  “Where is he?” Stern yelled.

  Isabella jumped at the intensity of Stern’s voice.

  “I, I think he’s in the cell at the end of the hall.” He stammered in response.

  “Take me.”

  • • •

  “No guns, my friend.” Winn told Rooker.

  Rooker looked incredulous as he stood with his men in the apartment building hallway.

  “What are you going to fight with, sticks and rocks?” Rooker replied.

  “Just the former.” Winn answered back. “We can’t be drawn into their strength. We can’t out shoot them. If we start trading weapons fire, we lose every advantage we have.”

  “And what advantage is that?”

  “The advantage of being the oppressed.”

  Rooker looked at Winn like the old man had gone crazy.

  “But that doesn’t mean we can’t use your firepower.” Yaw chimed in, suddenly standing behind Winn.

  • • •

  “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.” Coalition Properties mercenary and former Marine Sergeant Bill Harris said to his fellow squad leader, Mark Labaton, as they carefully examined the building entryways and windows, along with a half a dozen vehicles parked along both sides of the street. Both men, hardened war vets turned private, had stepped from their Hum Vees onto an eerily quiet 108th street in Watts, and had their M-16 rifles at the ready.