by Joshua Guess
Her only response was a single, sharp nod. “Fine. How will I know if something goes wrong?”
“You won’t hear from me,” I said. “I’ll keep you updated as much as possible. Now, I need to do some shopping before the stores all close.”
“Think I’ll take a nap, then,” Kate said. “Long day.”
It’s possible I’d never seen anyone more in need of a hug, some basic level of human contact and comfort, than her at that moment. I knew the look in her eyes, the sense of all compass being lost. Asking herself over and over how, just a day before, she’d gone from the casual problems of everyday life to what she was dealing with now.
I also knew I wasn’t the one to give it to her. It was safer if I remained the hardened killer in her eyes rather than a figure she could lean on. My chances against the entire Russey organization weren’t great, and if she managed to get through it alive the last thing I wanted was for her to mourn me. Not after I’d gotten her into this mess.
My shopping trip was fast. The bugout bag had a small kit with most of the harder to find items I needed, but nothing in the way of standard stuff I could get anywhere, such as clothes. Kate was still asleep when I came through the cabin door carrying the plastic bags.
One I set to the side. The other I opened and took out an array of burner phones, all of which I activated and loaded with minutes. When that was done, I opened the bugout bag and rummaged through the dense mass of guns and money until I found what I needed.
Kate woke up and walked in the room to find me seated on the couch with a makeup sponge in one hand, a compact in the other, carefully applying a dark shadow to my jaw. Normally I shaved every morning, and I wanted to make the light stubble on my face stand out a bit more.
To my surprise, Kate laughed. She laughed hard. So much that she put one hand across her belly and the other on the door frame. I smiled and kept right on working.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a minute or so, laughter punctuating the words in fading bursts. “That was just the last thing I expected to see.”
“Pssh, girl,” I said, pitching my voice high, “you should see how well I can contour.”
Kate laughed again and sat in the ragged but comfortable old recliner across from me. “Why didn’t you go do that in the bathroom? That little mirror has to be a bitch.”
I shrugged. “I would have had to go through the bedroom to get there, and you were sleeping with the door closed. I assumed you wanted either privacy or just not to be bothered. Besides, I’ve done it this way plenty of times. It’s not that hard.”
Kate cocked her head as if remembering something, then sprang to her feet and dashed into the bedroom. She returned with a hand mirror about nine inches on a side.
I took it appreciatively. “Not hard, but this will make it easier.”
“You don’t look very different,” Kate said. “I’m starting to think you’re just making this stuff up as you go along.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? Challenge accepted.”
She watched as I finished dusting my facial hair, which admittedly didn’t do a lot to change the way I looked. A full beard would have been better. I took out a tube of skin glue, the kind special effects artists use to create scars, and carefully dabbed my face with it in several strategic locations. When I fanned my face to dry it, I felt the familiar tightness begin to take hold. The trick wasn’t to change any one thing very much, but create many small alterations that added up. The line of it running across my forehead lifted my eyebrows slightly, increasing the curved shape of them. Dots above the corners of my eyes created wrinkles where there weren’t any. My cheek looked a bit hollow when the dabs above and below where my ears met my face finished drying.
“Okay, that’s not bad, but you still look like you.”
And I did. A casual, distant glance would still mark me, but the face is only a fraction of how we identify people. “Mind if I use the bedroom for this next part?”
Kate waved a palm generously. “Be my guest.”
I went inside and changed into the first set of clothes. I came out wearing baggy jeans, a flat-billed hat, sunglasses, an open button-up shirt with a tank top beneath, and pure white sneakers. I saw another laugh bubbling up in Kate’s face.
Then I moved.
My shoulders, normally high and square, dropped down and forward enough to change their shape without looking weird. I walked forward with the confident gait of a much younger man, someone who worried about the way every aspect of his appearance was consumed. I didn’t just ape the mannerisms, though careful study of them was vital to the art. I made the difficult leap of putting myself into that young man’s place.
As I moved about the living room, I became him. I didn’t have to constantly think about how I was walking or how weird it felt to be out of my suit. I just did it. My movements lacked their previous ingrained economy, becoming more languid and relaxed. I wasn’t Carter Ash, whose every step was a clinic in how to be ready for the worst. I was another, nameless man in his early twenties, simultaneously worried what everyone around him thought while also believing himself casually superior to all of them.
“You…actually look like one of those douchebag college kids I see every time Louisville plays at home,” Kate said, a note of disbelief in her voice. “It’s like looking at a magic eye. I know it’s you, but I see that too. Were you an actor or something?”
“Studied with one,” I said. “She taught me to observe everything about a person from the way they talk and move to how they react to conversations, then showed me how to figure out why.”
“Why what?” Kate said, eyebrows scrunched together.
“Why they do all those things, the reasons behind their behavior,” I explained. “A good example is why some guys work out and get really bulky. Some of them puff out their chests and scowl all the time, making themselves look bigger and more scary than they are. Ever see anyone like that?”
Kate huffed out a chuckle. “I go to school with a bunch of them.”
I nodded. “Ever wonder what motivates them to act that way? It could be narcissism, or compensating with being bullied when they were younger. Could be just about anything. The point is that creating a character, inhabiting a character, means understanding how they work, how they think. It’s critical when going undercover. It’s how you keep from being noticed, or having your cover blown if you are.”
I walked back to the bedroom and made a few small, fast changes before reemerging. I wore the same baggy jeans, but pulled up and buckled. The button-up was replaced with a worn flannel shirt open only at the throat and tucked in. I’d removed the stylish new hat and replaced it with a threadbare and dirty baseball cap, its bill bent and cracked. The sunglasses were gone to better showcase the wrinkles.
Now my shoulders were truly round, my back hunched and bent. I moved with a whisper of a limp, as if I’d had it for so many years it was nearly an afterthought. My carriage was stiffer, even more thoughtful than my usual, the body language of a man careful about every step because the next might end in a fall. I narrowed my eyes slightly to make the wrinkles pop.
“Holy shit,” Kate said. “You look old. Like, fifty. That’s impressive.”
Anyone who tells you people who want to thump their kid on the head for statements like that are bad parents are fucking liars. Being a good parent means resisting the urge. Great parents will calmly explain why calling someone in their fifties old is wrong.
“Fifty isn’t old, dick,” I said, as I was no sort of parent to Kate. “But thanks. It’d be better if I had a wig. Some hair sticking out from under the hat would really sell it. Maybe I can find something in the city when I go, but this’ll have to do for now.”
“You really think it will work?” Kate asked.
I shrugged, then straightened out. “I’m not planning on walking up to anyone I know, but at a distance it should be fine. I’ll need to gather information before I make any moves, and that means observation. D
isguising myself is just one layer of doing that safely.”
She seemed pleased with that answer, and I let it be the last I said on it. No need to worry her with a more honest evaluation of just how dangerous it would be to get anywhere near my old crew, no matter how deep undercover I was.
14
Though I made a show of confidence when I left Kate behind, I did worry. She took the short, concise escape plan I put together for her to heart, reciting it back to me three times without missing a beat. I didn’t expect anyone to find her. Hunting people down was not in the Russey organization’s main wheelhouse.
Which was how I found myself back in the city one stolen car and a fitful eight hours of sleep later.
Early morning wasn’t ideal for observing the enemy, but it was what I had to work with. I needed to know whether Russey was scared enough to pull his full-time operatives to secondary locations. To know that, I needed to see who showed up to the small, unassuming offices Amanda ran her information services hub out of. It was the most valuable asset by far, which made it a perfect litmus test.
If no one appeared, that would tell me Russey was playing it smart. Keeping his anger controlled. As I sat in the coffee shop, my disguise in place as I sipped a cheap cup of brew, a deep hope bloomed in me that wouldn’t be the case. Russey—and by extension his entire operation—would be most vulnerable if he were running with emotions unchecked. Angry people made stupid mistakes, like leaving your employees dangling as easy bait, which could be exploited by a ruthless enemy.
“Can I refill that for you, sir?” asked the single roving barista, a carafe of house blend clutched in her fist.
“Please,” I said, my voice carrying the rough edges of a man with his better days behind him.
I hunched over the steaming cup after she left as if I were reading the newspaper spread out in front of me. I had a good viewing angle, one that only required me to flick my eyes to the right every couple seconds in order to take a look at my target.
I was close to giving up and moving on to my second choice when a young man wearing a thin hoodie and overlarge sunglasses hurried into view from the opposite end of the street. It was Chad, one of Amanda’s team. He fumbled a set of keys and let himself into the office, darting through the glass door and vanishing into the darkness behind it.
My first, powerful urge was to follow at once. I remembered an old lesson of Russey’s, though, which was that any time you were casing a location and something looked promising, that was when you had to be your most skeptical. I replayed the scene in my head and wove the facts in with what I’d seen.
First off, this was obviously what I thought it was: bait. The only reason to leave valuable assets in the open was to chum the waters for your target. I’d assumed that from first principles. Which meant I had to act as if someone would be watching. In fact I was pretty sure the coffee shop had eyes on it, as every public place with a view on the office should. These things I knew.
But.
Chad was never the first into the office. Amanda was a nightmare to deal with partially due to her obsession with security, which meant she came in hours before her code monkeys each day. Chad’s nervous trot could have been a function of knowing I might target him, but his early appearance was anomalous.
Also, he hadn’t paused by the inside of the door to key in the disarm code for the security system. He’d just waltzed right in. It could have been a thoughtless error that would lead to a phone call and a bashful deactivation, though I doubted it. Amanda kept the system set at full volume all the time so no one ever made that mistake more than once.
The logical dominoes fell pretty easily. Chad showed up and went inside without bothering with the code, implying the system was already off. Which further implied that people were already in the office.
Chad was actual bait, sent out here to draw me in. I doubted I’d been spotted, or someone would have moved in on me, but Russey would know this would be my first target. In any war, crippling the flow of information and intelligence was crucial.
So I sat there for another half hour, letting a handful of other patrons come and go. I flipped to the last page of the paper and folded it, tucking it beneath the arm holding my coffee, and left.
There were two possibilities. Either whoever was waiting in the office had been there hours before dawn, unlikely given how cramped the space was, or their was a secondary entrance they’d kept hidden from me. I knew the layout of the building. There was only the one door. The rear wall of the office was a partition that split the building in two. Another business was set up on the other side, its entrance facing the opposite direction.
It made a lot more sense to have moved people here in cover of darkness and told them suck it up in the tight confines.
I sighed as I walked back to my stolen car. Much as I wanted to pick one of the two options and run with it, there was only one of me. I had to be careful. Which meant I needed more information.
An hour and a half later I had it.
I walked down the road running parallel to the one the coffee shop sat on. I’d moved to a safe distance and watched, my observations paying off in minutes. I carried the newspaper and the cup, my haggard-man routine still bending my back and putting a shake in my steps. I’d added flecks of gray to my stubble, because when you’re putting on a persona it’s the small details observers will notice. No matter how well trained, even the best will see gray hair and tend to drop you into an older age category. People work on pattern recognition. A good disguise fucks with the pattern in subtle ways.
Weird that subtlety was on my mind, because I walked right up to the door and tried to open it.
Oh, not the door to Amanda’s lair. No. I was trying to get in the business on the back half of the building, a small tax firm. I frowned grumpily at the door and rattled it in its hinges again as if I didn’t understand the concept that the place was closed.
An annoyed face appeared behind the dark glass, intent on turning the bolt rather than paying attention to me. I’d watched long enough to see a few other people try entering and even from a distance the irritation at the repeated interruptions was clear in the body language of the man running back and forth.
“Closed,” the angry face said when it appeared through the crack.
“I know that, Stephen,” I said. The moment of shock in his eyes, the second of whirring gears realigning with new information, was precious time where I had the advantage. My free hand slid upward and jammed the stun gun into the shelf of his jaw, the meat where his throat and mandible met offering excellent purchase as I electrified the living shit out of him.
I caught the door with my right foot and let Stephen’s twitching form fall against me. I lowered him to the floor as quietly as possible with just one free hand, letting the door swing shut behind me.
With quick motions I put my things on the floor and whipped out several heavy cable ties. With practiced, fluid ease, I restrained Stephen hand and foot, then jammed a rag I’d found in the car in his mouth and ran another tie around his head. It was sloppy and would only hold for a minute or two, but if I needed longer than that I was definitely going to die.
When I was done, I picked up the paper and cup and walked deeper into the building.
I ran right into Chad, who stopped short when he saw the apparently crippled older guy in front of him. “How did you get in here?” he asked, running his eyes over me.
Human brains are fascinating. They’re equally capable of amazing feats of brilliance as missing the glaringly obvious. In that split-second my own did an instantaneous calculation and took the risk.
“That young man let me in,” I said. “Told me to come see a woman named Amanda.”
“Amanda?” Chad said, confused. “She’s in the other—oh, fuck.”
His mistake realized too late, I tossed the cold coffee in his face and hit him with the stun gun at the same time. Fortunately he’d come through one of the doors dotting the long hallway leading to
the back office, so he fell back through it and out of sight. With a quick look around first, I followed him in.
“That was a tiny jolt,” I said as I crouched over him, my voice a harsh whisper. Indeed, he had begun to recover almost instantly. “I don’t have much time, so believe me when I tell you the next one is going in your eye, and I’ll drain the fucking battery.”
Chad was on his back, working himself up with his elbows. His dark eyes shone with unchecked terror, but he nodded.
“Who’s here, and how many?”
“Amanda is in the other office,” he replied at once. “Just Stephen and me on this side, since I was the bait. Uh, the rest of the gamma team is spread out watching the streets for you from other buildings.”
“Who’s with Amanda? They wouldn’t leave her alone.”
“Susanne,” Chad said.
I wanted to curse but didn’t. “You stay quiet and count to sixty, then you leave out the door of this office and run. If I see you again before this is done, I’ll kill you. Got it?”
Chad nodded.
Once I’d seen the tax place was closed and witnessed Stephen turning away customers with increasing ire, I knew what they’d done. There was only drywall between the two sides, just like the strike we’d run on the meth lab. I guessed that Russey either paid off the owners or threatened them—maybe both, knowing him—and cut a hole from the back. The idea being that if I came to hurt the operation, the rest of the gamma team could run in through the back while Susanne kept me busy.
It was smart. Damned smart. A little over the top, but for every trick Russey taught me I was sure he had five outlandish ones like this kept in reserve.
I heard scraping noises from the small lobby as Stephen struggled against his bonds, a warning bell that my time was getting short. I pulled the combat knife from its hiding place inside the newspaper and took a reverse grip, then sprinted down the hall.