by Michael Todd
Jeremiah couldn’t determine from their jokes whether the wife was merely giving him the silent treatment or if the situation had actually escalated to a pending divorce. They stopped short of making jokes about what was actually happening and kept the jokes to whether the stripper’s work was worth the trouble he now faced.
It was a typical scenario—friends giving other friends a hard time. He was used to it, except that he had once been on the receiving end of it from his friends. It surprised him to realize that he missed the comradery, the kind that came with having people around you who were more than happy to watch your back and make sure that nothing bad happened to you.
They all piled into a large black van and waited silently as the big Mercedes made its way to a tall, brick office building.
“Hey, new guy!” one of the men snapped as Jeremiah peeled away from the group. “You stick close and you listen up. I don’t like repeating myself about all the stuff that needs to be taken care of before our big shots get here and ignore us for a couple of hours, got it?”
He nodded. “Roger that.”
“Roger…come on, man. You’re not in the army anymore.” One of the others laughed and they moved as a group to one of the service entrances. The jokes continued for a few more minutes when they entered the building, but once they reached the part that was full of actual employees, they quieted. Their attitudes reflected the professionalism that might inspire confidence in the people they protected.
“We need people to cover the elevators on every floor,” the man in charge instructed as the group of ten men continued through the building. “We’re only here to supplement the security they already have, so follow the lead of the folks that we’ll work with. They know the building and the escape plans should an emergency come up. Stay on your toes but don’t look nervous, and never, ever stand alone at your station. That’s how dumbasses get themselves killed—or worse, fired.”
“It sounds like someone needs to reevaluate their priorities there, boss,” another of the men chuckled. “What, is your ex draining you dry for alimony?”
“None of your damn business, Krovski,” the leader snapped. “Where the fuck is the new guy?”
“He said something about having a nervous stomach and ducked out to find a bathroom,” one of the others piped up from the back.
“Shit, we don’t have time for this,” he muttered and squinted down the hallway. “Okay, if any of you see him, send him my way. I’ll man the command post in the basement. The rest of you have your assignments. Stick to them and don’t get lost. I swear, if that dumbass gets in trouble, I won’t bail him out. He’ll have to get himself out of the fryer. I don’t care that he’s new at this.”
The group moved away and stopped to chat as they waited for a service elevator to make its way down to the sub-basement to take them up to wherever it was that they were going. Jeremiah didn’t have time to keep track of them as he pulled off the uniform that they’d given him and slipped into the locker rooms. At the moment, they were all but deserted with only a handful of men talking in corners.
He quickly picked the lock on the one that he had been given the number to and donned the employee’s clothes. The man apparently worked at the front desk, which meant that the uniform—a suit and tie—would make the operative invisible to the eyes of those who might look for him.
He hated ties—or cheap ties like this one, at least. The way that they constricted around his neck made him uncomfortable. Still, he was willing to put up with it so long as he could get the job done. Anderson still hadn’t told him where he could go to oversee the meeting that was supposed to start in… He checked his watch to make sure. Fifteen minutes.
“Fuck,” he mumbled and tugged at his tie. Maybe nobody would notice if he left it a little looser than was fashionable. People didn’t look at simple employees too closely, right?
He was making his way out of the locker room when a man in a matching suit and tie came in.
“Hey, buddy, let me fix that tie for you,” the youngish-looking man said as he stepped in closer than Jeremiah was comfortable with and tightened the tie until it literally squeezed his Adam’s apple.
“There ya go, bud,” he said cheerfully. “Say, I don’t recognize you. Are you new around here?”
“You could say that,” he replied and tried to relax as he felt the tension in his shoulders tighten against the confining suit. “They transferred me from the other building downtown.”
“No shit,” the man replied. “Anyway, my shift just ended, but we should meet up sometime and get a drink. The Eagles are playing this weekend.”
“I don’t really follow football,” he said with a grin. “Look, my shift’s about to start.”
“Hey, don’t let me hold you back,” he said with a chuckle. “Have fun out there, tiger.”
Bud? Tiger? Who was he, a caricature of a sitcom character from the eighties? Jeremiah shook his head and headed out into the hallway in a jog as he checked his watch. He was running late. Where would Anderson send him? More importantly, how would the man contact him?
He reached the elevator, which opened as he came up to it. A pair of the security men he’d arrived with stepped out and almost bowled him over. They didn’t bother looking back to apologize as they made their way past and talked about their smoke break.
Well, at least the uniform did, in fact, make him all but invisible to the people around there. He smirked and stepped inside to press the button for the tenth floor. Anderson had told him that the uniform would work since it was what most of the employees in the office level would wear or was at least similar enough that he wouldn’t be noticed. He stepped out of the elevator and followed the map that he’d committed to memory before coming in. He’d had to ask Anderson for it, and damned if it wasn’t worth the trouble. Navigating these halls without some sort of frame of reference would have been a nightmare.
“Mr…um…Savage? Saváge?” Someone said from behind him. He whipped around, not sure if he should be alarmed that someone used his real name, but when he realized that it was one of the interns, he relaxed. Damned if this whole infiltration thing was so much more stressful when he didn’t have a gun in hand.
“Savage is fine, I’m not French,” Jeremiah said with a chuckle.
“Is it an office joke or something?” the teenager asked and looked a little confused.
He opened his mouth to answer but wasn’t sure what the right thing to say would be. And he didn’t want it advertised that someone called Savage actually prowled the building. “Did you need something, kid?”
“Uh…yeah, I have a package here for you,” the young man said and lifted a manila envelope from a trolley behind him. Jeremiah signed for it, took the envelope, and waited for him to move away before he opened it. He was confused for a second as a tiny, pink earbud fell into his palm, but the confusion dissipated as a small piece of paper dropped out with words printed on it.
Put it in your ear. Now!
“Huh.” He grunted and toyed with the little piece of tech before he pressed it gently into his ear.
“Okay, can you hear me, big guy?” The Russian voice was familiar. Anja, was it?
“Big guy?” he asked and kept his voice low. There were still people around, and he didn’t want to attract attention by appearing to talk to himself. From what he remembered from the quick lessons he’d had with intelligence officers, the idea was to always be as unnoticeable as possible.
“Yes, I can’t really call you Savage,” Anja said into his head. “I mean, I’ve tried, but I always laugh. Who the hell calls themselves that? Willingly? I’d understand if it was a family name, but from what I heard from Anderson, you actually chose it. Seriously, who would do that?”
“Well, me, for starters,” he retorted. “And it was supposed to be a joke. When he pitched his recruitment thing to me, he said that he needed a savage on his side. He then called me Jeremiah Savage, as a joke, and it sounded like fun. So, I kept it.”
“Well, Jeremiah was my real name before I changed it, and I thought I’d keep it,” Jeremiah said. He didn’t like how he had become defensive about his name.
“Oh…” Anja grunted. “Well, I won’t call you either of those names. Can I call you Jay? Or Jer?”
“That’s a negative on both,” he said firmly. “Now that my name is out of the way, would you mind doing… Wait, you’re the one who’s supposed to tell me where I have to go from here. I’m flying blind and the meeting will start in under five minutes.”
“Only if I get to call you Jer,” Anja insisted. He ground his teeth. From what he could tell about the woman, she wouldn’t have decided to imperil their mission simply because she wanted to give him a nickname, which meant that she behaved like this because she knew that he was close to where he needed to be.
“Absolutely fucking not. But in the interest of putting this argument off until we actually have time for this kind of banter, I don’t think there’s any way that I could reach out and smack you over the back of your head from here if you were to call me by any nickname you want.”
“Good point,” she said, and he could almost hear the grin of triumph in her voice. “Well, if you feel like eavesdropping on the meeting that will start in the next three minutes, I suggest you make a hard right…Jer.”
“Fuck, I already regret this,” Jeremiah protested. He turned right down what appeared to be an almost abandoned hallway. The whole place looked like it had been closed for renovations from the sight of the exposed wiring in the walls, but there weren’t any signs that told him he shouldn’t be there, so he continued.
“Okay, there aren’t any cameras in that area of the building, but it should be the seventh door on your left,” Anja said, and her voice had taken a more serious tone. He counted them quickly, pulled the door open, and winced as it creaked on its hinges. There wasn’t anybody around to notice, though, so after a few seconds of listening for a reaction, he slipped into the room and closed the door behind him.
What he saw was odd. It was hard to really pin a description on a room that was about five feet by five feet, with the entire left side of the room covered in monitors. As he stepped inside, they turned on to display a wide variety of camera feeds from all around the damned building. He dropped onto the office chair provided at the screens.
“I assume that this whole thing is more your area of expertise than mine,” he said as he scowled at the mouse and keyboard in front of him. “Which begs the question of why I’m here if you’re more than capable of running this whole operation from the comfort of your desk?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” She brought the cameras from a conference room up on the screens directly in front of him. “I’m not close enough to be any help if Anderson suddenly needs backup. Plus, from what I saw in those videos, you are way better at punching people until they die than I am.”
“Right.” He leaned back in his seat. A horde of questions had already risen in his mind regarding precisely who this woman was. He knew a thing or two about computers, and he thought that he would be able to hold his own against the average Wi-Fi connection, but what this woman was currently doing was impressive. He had no doubt that she had accessed what he had to assume were secure camera feeds from wherever the fuck it was that she sat comfortably in her office.
Hell, it was downright scary. He’d never left much of a digital footprint before, and he seriously considered never doing so ever again. Knowing that there was someone out there who could actually track him down from anywhere on the globe and know as much about him as he knew about himself was enough to make a man wonder if the comfort was worth the loss in privacy.
For a lot of people, it wasn’t much of a debate. They loved their luxuries and didn’t mind the loss of privacy so long as it didn’t intrude too deeply into their habitual laziness.
“The meeting’s starting so you might want to focus,” Anja said and drew his attention back to the screens. “I can see these people and process the data, but you’re supposed to be the one who reads the people in there to assess the danger levels and act on it. Just saying.”
“How did you know I was distracted?” he asked and leaned forward to prop his elbows on the desk in front of him. “I thought you said there weren’t any cameras in this part of the building.”
“Well, there weren’t any in the hallway.” He could hear the grin in her voice. “This is one of the older monitoring stations that was shut down for repairs and they never came back to it, even though they left the camera feeds and connection open. They needed to have someone watch the watchmen, as it were, so they put cameras inside the security rooms too. They only activate them when they’re in use, so I had to do some electronic calisthenics to bring this feed online while not alerting anyone that this room is in use. Ain’t no thing, as you Americans say.”
“I can honestly say that I’ve never said that,” he said with a soft chuckle. “And wait a second—why the hell would you want to keep an eye on me, anyway?”
“Well, I don’t want it to sound like Anderson doesn’t trust you or anything,” Anja said.
“But he still wants someone to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t do anything stupid. Right,” he said with a nod. “I get that. Oh, and by the way, I love that fucking movie.”
“How good was Rorschach in that movie?” she asked.
“So good that I’ve actually used some of his lines out in the field.” He grinned at the memories. “‘I’m not stuck in here with you. You’re all stuck in here with me’ is a favorite. You’d be surprised at how relevant it becomes out in the field. Of course, you can say it out there, but you can’t expect it to have the desired effect on people who don’t speak English.”
“Right,” Anja said with a chuckle. “You know, I think we’re getting off track here again. The meeting has already started.”
“I’m following it, don’t worry.” Savage propped his head on his hands as he studied the screens closely. “I can multi-task. Don’t worry about that.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Do you see anything?”
He shook his head, knowing she could see it. There were a couple of men standing up, and while there was an audio feed from the cameras, he mostly studied their body language. It had been a skill that he’d had from a young age and had developed with the help of some of his mentors from boot camp onwards. They told him that it wasn’t a skill you could acquire. You had to have it, and only then could you hone it.
Right now, he wasn’t sure about that. As he looked at the men who stood and delivered pre-prepared speeches welcoming a new member to the board and saw the mixture of boredom and annoyance in their faces, it seemed almost too obvious. Like they tried to let the newcomer know that she wasn’t welcome.
The woman herself looked perfectly comfortable as she took her seat at the head of the conference table. She looked calm and collected, and yet there was something about her that seemed poised and on edge. It was as if she expected a fight and the dirty glares and false platitudes fed her anticipation. This was Anderson’s benefactor, of that he had no doubt.
She looked young—almost too young to be in a place like this with so many veterans of the business game. Jeremiah didn’t know enough about the woman to be able to pass judgment on her age, but it did make him wonder if she was a little out of her league in this situation.
Which was why Anderson was there, he mused. And it was also why he had been brought into this mess of corporate politics.
Chapter Seven
“So, who is this woman?” Jeremiah asked and stretched as most of the speeches came to an end, which opened the opportunity for her to finally make one of her own. It wasn’t so much a meeting, he realized, as an introduction. She looked like she would take up a position of some authority over the men and women present, and while they didn’t seem too
happy about it, they appeared more than willing to let her have her say before they joined forces to depose her.
“Her name is Dr. Courtney Monroe,” Anja explained. “I’ve actually met her. She’s nice. A little intense, but nice. Anyway, she spent almost two years going in and out of the Zoo and was one of the first people to actually work inside the jungle. It made her…something of a legend.”
“A doctor, huh?” He leaned in closer as she gathered her papers. Despite all appearances, she did look a little nervous at this point. It was perhaps a hint of glossophobia in her past that had been dealt with but still left a mark on her that itched every time she was called upon to speak in front of a large group of people. “Tell me something, Anja, have you ever been in the Zoo?”
There was a pause on the line as Monroe started her speech and addressed and thanked the various members of the board for their time.
“I went into that fucking jungle once,” Anja finally said and a tense, uncomfortable tone entered her voice. “I didn’t much care for the place. How about you?”’
“I’ve never been, I’m afraid,” he said. “Although ‘didn’t much care for it’ does seem to be the consensus among the people who went in there. Those that I met, anyway. But that raises a fascinating question. If the Zoo is such a terrifying place to be, what would drive someone without any prior combat experience—I’m assuming, anyway—to keep going in there for almost two years? Because if it’s a death wish, I have to say that didn’t work for her.”
“I don’t know, honestly,” Anja said, and her chuckle sounded mirthless. “I’ve actually met a couple of people who are of a similar mind. I mean, they don’t really enjoy going in there, but when they get back, they always look…refreshed. You know, the way that a person looks when they’ve returned from the gym?”
“Huh.” He grunted. It was a common feeling—an adrenaline high was what his shrinks told him it was, one that made everything else feel like it was grey and lifeless by comparison. He knew that it was something screwed up in his brain, and while it was a common side effect of being crazy enough to charge into a war zone willingly, it was still interesting. In the back of his mind, he’d always assumed that there would be some kind of line that he would feel hesitant to cross. Now, though, he knew about a place that was even more dangerous than anywhere he’d ever gone before. A part of him wanted to at least try it out to see if it was as bad as everyone made it out to be.