Proportionate Response

by Dave Buschi

  Not for the first time he pondered on the dynamic between Marion and Johnny Two-cakes. It was a rueful thought. His gut was telling him this was a dead man’s house. That took any fun out of this.

  Lip was more optimistic. He hadn’t quite come to terms with that fact. “He’s not dead till we see his body,” Lip said. “I can’t wait to bust his balls when we see him.”

  They finished up with the garage, no wiser. It was time to hit the other wing of the house. Logic dictated it would have better pickings. There’d be the master. The office. Hopefully some stuff that would shed some light on what happened to Johnny Two-cakes.

  First room they hit was a guestroom. Didn’t yield much. But the guest bath certainly did for Lip. He found the setup hilarious. Something to do with how the toilet paper was stacked, and how the soaps, ointments and hand lotions were all organized by their brand names.

  Marks moved down the corridor. Tried the handle for the next room. “Locked door,” he barked.

  Had to be the office. Had its own deadbolt. Lip came out and did his deal with the picks. They entered the room.

  Curtains were drawn and the space was dark. Lip flipped the light switch.

  Whoa.

  No giggling this time.

  Johnny Two-cakes’s office was large. Probably a former bedroom that had been converted. It took things to a whole other level. Marks had never seen anything like it.

  82

  “WHACKED,” Lip said.

  Marks didn’t disagree. It was out there.

  The walls were completely covered with hundreds of photos, newspaper and magazine clippings. Markers had been used to circle items and make notations.

  “I love the guy,” Lip said, “but this is not normal.”

  No comment there, either.

  Marks touched one of the few bare spots on the walls. It was smooth like plastic. It appeared to have been painted with some sort of whiteboard dry-erase paint for the markers. On the floor were labeled boxes. They were stacked everywhere. The desk was covered with In/Out bins like you’d find on an administrator’s desk. Those bins were labeled, as well.

  There weren’t many places to stand. The room was large, but it felt claustrophobic. “Pathological,” Lip mouthed.

  Place almost looked like a hoarder’s. But that wasn’t it. Marks knew what he was looking at. “Conspiracy theory.”

  Johnny Two-cakes would have another term for it. Some term that wasn’t pejorative. Pejorative, that’d be a Johnny Two-cakes word. Like obfuscate and dissemble. Man always talked big when small words would do.

  “Can I say loony?” Lip said. “How ‘bout craaazzzzy?”

  Johnny Two-cakes was always searching for patterns. Chasing common denominators. Going after the black wolves… the anomalies within the anomalies.

  Back when they worked together, when they weren’t on a particular job, man was obsessed with making sense of the “soup”. The streaming petabytes of data that the NSA took in and analyzed daily.

  Johnny Two-cakes was convinced that too much actionable intel was slipping past the filters, bypassing all the sophisticated algorithms and keyword-spotting technology. The exploitation systems like Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) and “Glass Box” weren’t good enough for him. Johnny Two-cakes had developed his own pet systems; models and formulas to take another look at the fire hose of chatter.

  The man was chasing something. Some elusive shadow. Lip used to tease him relentlessly, asking him if he’d found the back room where the guys with cigars were. “The smoky room where they’re pulling all the strings,” Lip would say then laugh diabolically.

  “Look, it’s the weapon Capone used,” Lip said as he lifted a golf club out of a box. It was wrapped in plastic, like it was evidence for a jury.

  “That was a bat, dummy.” Marks eyed the walls. No, the man wasn’t crazy. Even though, at times, it certainly looked that way. “Look at the tats.”

  Lip’s bemused expression changed. It took him a moment to see what Marks had already seen. When he did, his face went serious. The tats were on one swath of wall. It was just a handful of them. They were close-ups. Judging by the graininess of the photos, they might have been still shots of videos that had been enlarged and cropped.

  Lip stepped over and examined them. Some showed some pretty extreme body art. Entire torsos and backs were covered. Lip touched a close-up that showed a tat on an arm. It was a ringlet of thorns.

  “Vlad.”

  Lip touched another photo. It showed an iron cross speared through a bleeding heart. “This guy too. I recognize it from one of those guys we took out.”

  “Yep. And the star on the neck. That was on the guy with the AK-47.”

  Next to those photos were two articles. A NASA engineer that was killed in a freak traffic accident and some CEO’s wife that was still missing. They were separate events. Recent articles. Marks hadn’t heard of either of the two people—the articles were short and didn’t have much in the way of details.

  “What do you think is with this number at the bottom?” Lip pointed to the ‘487’ that was scrawled in red marker. “And all these other numbers?”

  Those “other numbers” were under other groups of photos and clippings.

  “Don’t know, but they correspond with the bins on the desk,” Marks said.

  Lip looked at the desk. The bins were labeled with the same numbers: 97, 487, 499, 511, 73, 109, 31, 137, 1097, 383, 419, 2003, and 2557. They weren’t in any numerical order.

  Marks walked to the desk and looked inside bin 487. There were several pieces of paper in it. The one of top had been torn from a yellow notebook pad. It had some of Johnny Two-cakes’s handwriting.

  DLorenzo487@earthlink.net

  VVaughn12487@yahoo.com

  BGarbonzi21487@yahoo.com

  RVance5487@msn.com

  “Bunch of email addresses,” Marks said. He handed the paper to Lip. “See the last digits?”

  “Hmmm…” Lip scanned the addresses. “487.”

  Marks looked at the other paper in the bin. They were printouts of emails. They were all addressed to JT_groska7@hotmail.com. The senders were the same four as Johnny Two-cakes had written down. The emails were all blank. There was no subject line, but they each had an attachment, which was stapled to the email.

  Marks flipped to one and checked it out. His mind paused, absorbing it. It was a recipe. He handed it to Lip.

  “Fried dumplings,” Marks said.

  “Hate ‘em.” Lip’s face lit. “Wait.”

  Marks nodded. “Yeah.” The recipe he’d found on Rudnitsky’s printer.

  Marks went through the other three in the bin. “More recipes.”

  “He must have hacked into Rudnitsky’s account,” Lip said. “That’s probably him.” He pointed to the address: JT_groska7@hotmail.com.

  “Yeah, we need to check that out.”

  “What do you mean we, Kemosabe?” Lip said.

  Marks checked out some of the other bins. It was more of the same. The only difference was the last digits of the email addresses. Bin 511 had email addresses that ended in ‘511’. Likewise for the others. All were blank emails with recipes attached.

  “This is getting weird,” Lip said, flipping through some of the others. “Do you think these are code?”

  “Could be. Don’t know. Not our speed, though. We’re going to need to call in some favors to get them run.”

  Lip nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll use our go-to boy.”

  “Lawrence?”

  “He owes us.”

  Lawrence Simpson. He still worked at the NSA. Man was a lifer. And he owed them big.

  “They’ve got the Black Widow now,” Lip said. “I’d love to work with that baby.”

  The Black Widow. The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer. Thing could scan through millions of emails, phone calls, you name it, in seconds. It could find patterns, search for key words, and do it on a scale that was unfathomable.

>   “Keep dreaming,” Marks said.

  Lip could get carried away. Like the NSA was going to let ‘em use that. Thing was needed for its job. Like spying on the world.

  First time on the job Marks was pretty blown away. Didn’t faze him in the least now, knowing that the NSA captured every bit of correspondence every day and every second from around the world. Phone calls, cell or land lines. Domestic and international. Emails. Text messages. Fuckin’ everything.

  It was all captured, scanned and stored. And Lip and he had a hand in helping with that. Still were helping. Information in motion. There were always new pipes that needed to be tapped, more splitters to put in place somewhere around the world. Dubai, Chóngqing, Bangalore… Marks and Lip, just two of your friendly cable box installers. No job too small or too far away.

  Marks eyed the walls again. In a micro sense this was almost like a snapshot of the soup. Random and nonsensical. Just a bunch of non-related groups lumped together.

  He examined some of the newspaper clippings. It was weird to see the paper content. Johnny Two-cakes was usually a digital man. These papers were old school.

  Man was working it like a private dick. In one section the theme seemed to be Wall Street. Some of the headlines he recognized and others he didn’t. “Dow drops 1,000 points!”, “Computer Trading Triggers Market Panic”, “Market Implodes with Unusual Trading”, and “Dow Swings 600 Points in 7 Minutes!”

  Underneath those clippings was the number 2003. It wasn’t for the year, as the clippings were all from May and June of 2010.

  Marks put his finger on one of the articles. “Remember this?”

  Lip nodded. “Thousand point drop. Talk about red meat. May 6th, 2010. Now that was fucked up. A trillion dollars of market value lost. It went down the tubes in about seven minutes. It was never explained. Media tossed out some half-assed theories, before they tagged it on some trader in Chicago that accidentally sent in an order with a few too many zeroes. Exploited some trigger effect with computer algorithms is what they said. A computer glitch. Believe that? You and I know that’s bullshit.”

  “Alright showoff.”

  “What? You asked?” Lip said.

  “It was a yes/no answer. Didn’t ask you to tell me what you read in your sissy paper.”

  Lip smirked. “My bad. I forgot that FOX doesn’t give you the details.”

  Marks flashed the bird and checked out other stuff on the walls. There were some articles on voting machines. Some company named Diebold buying another. In another section it was a political scandal. The one about Senator Reed. He was chair of the Homeland Security committee at the time, Marks remembered.

  Lip piped in again. “Remember that guy? Holier than thou Reed. Took a bunch of kickbacks. What a hypocrite that guy was. Denied it to the end.”

  They skimmed the others. Lip kept with the quips. Man read too much.

  There were three articles on the crime wave in Mexico. A couple photos of drug lords. Some clipped out articles on a smalltime drug smuggling operation in Tulsa. Other random newspaper clippings: “Chinese Triad has Stranglehold on Shipping!”; “Thai Crime Wave Unleashed”…

  To Marks, there didn’t seem to be any logic. It was all over the map. There was stuff that happened in South Korea, Europe, the Middle East. Most of them were crime or political grist, but some of them were man-made disasters. One section showed photos of a hydroelectric dam and there was an article clipped: “Ruptured Dam Takes out Pipeline!”

  Everywhere were numbers tagging the different groups. Lines and circles had been drawn in certain spots. Like some sort of bizarre matrix.

  “Classic Johnny Two-cakes,” Lip said. “But this time he’s finally lost it.”

  Looked that way. It was hard to see how any of this stuff could be related. Admittedly, they’d seen some peculiar connections in their day. But this…? Somehow tied together? No friggin’ way. Didn’t seem possible. But Johnny Two-cakes did have that habit of pulling rabbits out of a hat. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d found some bizarre connection.

  Lip’s forehead knit. “Hmmm… I just noticed something about the numbers.”

  “You seeing a pattern?”

  “Yeah.” Lip went over to the boxes.

  He opened one and began to check out the contents.

  “Well are you going to tell me, or are you going to make me stand here and feel stupid?”

  “I’m going to make you stand there and feel stupid.” Lip started to leaf through the contents in the box. “These are all emails, but they’re not blank. Got some email trails here. LOL. I miss you, Francis. You always know the right thing to say…What the fuck? He’s snooping on teenagers. Here, you gotta listen to this.” Lip glanced over and noticed the clouded expression on Marks’s face.

  “Okay, sore ass,” Lip said. “They’re all prime.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re prime numbers.”

  Marks examined the numbers again. What do you know? They were prime. Not that that meant a damn thing. Still didn’t explain what the emails and recipes meant.

  “By the way, you can go fuck yourself,” Marks said.

  Lip smirked. “You’re like a big gorilla sometimes. Too sensitive.” He shook his head. “Wait… hold on …I got something else for you.”

  “Another pattern?”

  “No better.” Lip lifted his leg. Bluppppttt!

  It was a peeper and a stinker. Sausage.

  “You suck.”

  “Where are you going?” Lip said. “Wait hold on you big gorilla, I got another one for you.” Lip lifted his leg again.

  It sounded like a lawnmower.

  Lip frowned. “That wasn’t me.”

  It had come from outside. They both walked out of the office and glanced through one of the front windows. A landscaping truck was parked along the street. Two men were working on Johnny Two-cakes’s lawn. One of them had a mower and the other had a leaf blower.

  “Landscapers,” Marks said, stating the obvious. He realized they’d been wasting precious time. It was time to get serious.

  “Let’s wrap this. Since you crapped in this room, you finish it. I’ll hit the last rooms. I want us out of here by the time those landscapers are done.”

  Lip frowned. “You’ve got to be joking. How am I supposed to go through this that quickly? They’re a million boxes here.”

  “Figure it out. Take pictures. That’s what your camera is for.” Marks left the room.

  He adjusted the M1911 pistol he had tucked under his shirt, and moved the extra mag he had in his pocket so that it wasn’t so uncomfortable. He would have preferred his shoulder holster rig, but he’d forgotten to grab it when they first packed.

  He checked out the last two rooms. One was another guest bedroom and the last was the master. He made short work of it. Five minutes and done. Nothing of import, except Johnny Two-cakes’s sock drawer was a little scary. His socks were in plastic baggies.

  Marks walked past Lip, down the corridor again, and into the big room with the soaring A-frame ceiling. The rear windows gave a good view of the grounds. Backyard had a covered pool and what looked like a cabana and built-in grill.

  Johnny Two-cakes had a pretty sweet setup here.

  Marks’s thoughts drifted back to the letter Johnny Two-cakes had written; the instructions for Marion. He was trying to see if he’d missed anything. Anything else he needed to put eyes on.

  As he passed the foyer, he caught a glimpse through the front door’s sidelight of the leaf guy outside. Not many leaves to blow. Wondered why the guy was even bothering?

  That thought wedged. Stuck in his head. Fuck!

  “Lip! Weapon up, we’re getting company!”

  Craasshh! Craasshh! Craasshh!

  The sound of breaking glass erupted like fireworks.

  83

  PROJECTILES sailed into the room. Marks dove behind the kitchen counter. His peripheral vision caught a glimpse of one of the projectiles before he hit the f
loor. He immediately covered his ears and closed his eyes. He knew what it was.

  Two in one day. What are the odds?

  BOOOOMMMMM!

  The explosion obliterated the air with a concussive sound and a blinding super-white flash. It seemed someone was turning the tables on him. Flashbang. Those things are a bitch.

  He knew all too well, and all too recently, that a person had no hope of withstanding one. You could cover your eyes, but the light would sear right through your eyelids. Covering your ears didn’t help either. That concussive blast was about 180 decibels. Louder than sustained rounds. Louder than a jet plane. That level of sound could jelly up your brain in an instant.

  Only thing that helped was distance from the thing. Flashbangs were meant for tight enclosed spaces, where they detonated right next to the target. They were ideal for close-combat situations when you were breaching a room and wanted to level your opposition without killing them. As he could certainly attest to, flashbangs were just about perfect for that.

  In this case, Marks had about thirty feet from him to the searing white flash and powerful explosion. It had sailed into the room and landed dead center in that vomit posing as a rug. Normally, he should be done. Because even from that distance a person would be majorly affected. Not totally out, but pretty close to it.

  What saved Marks was the kitchen counter. It took the brunt of the boom and the flash. Sound and light work on linear principles. They travel in straight lines. They don’t bend around obstacles, because they can’t; that would go against the laws of physics. Instead, those forces deflect and ricochet. Bounce off surfaces. Those deflections hit Marks hard. But they were only deflections. Not the full charge. He was stunned, but not out.

  That was the good news. He groggily rose from the floor. Jesus. He swayed and almost fell down. What…? What was that?

  That was the bad news. It was in the center of the room, expanding, spilling out… dense, gray, and moving fast. Oh man.