Once Is Never Enough

by Haris Orkin

  “Maybe you should just let her go to Miami.”

  “So she can go on Instagram and tell everyone where I am? I don’t think so. Go talk to the Chief Steward. He’ll set you up with a cabin.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When Sancho returned home from work, an eviction notice hung from his front door. He wasn’t surprised. Not after his apartment and most of the building was wrecked by those mercenaries and Mendoza. Still, he knew he was lucky to be alive. If not for Flynn, he wouldn’t be. Of course, Flynn was also responsible for the complete destruction of his domicile. Just like he was responsible for the trashing of his last one.

  Cardboard held in place by gaffer tape covered his kitchen and patio door windows. His computer and TV were demolished, his coffee table lay on the floor, snapped in half. He’d cleaned the place up the best he could, sweeping up the broken glass and cracked plaster. Blood stained the carpet, the walls, and the ceiling, and the place still reeked of tear gas. No wonder his landlord wanted him gone. There was no way in hell he’d ever get his security deposit back.

  As pissed off as he was at Flynn, he still worried about him. Mendoza had carried him off before the police arrived. At least that’s what Sancho assumed. That Wendy girl was gone too, dragged off by that last mercenary in black. Who the hell were those assholes? Bettina survived, but she didn’t stay to commiserate. She took off right before the police showed up.

  The LAPD took Sancho to a cop shop on San Fernando Road. There they threw him in an interrogation room and asked him a million and a half questions. Most he didn’t have the answers for. The cops didn’t believe him, however, and threatened to lock him up if he wasn’t more forthcoming. If not for Dr. Nickelson, they probably would’ve kept him overnight.

  Sancho tore down the eviction notice and dropped it on his wobbly kitchen table. He sat on his Ikea couch, balanced a psychology textbook on the armrest, and studied while he ate the tacos he brought home from Senor Fish. He had a test in the morning, and he was behind in his reading. Sancho stayed up half the night studying and finally went to bed at 3:00 a.m. Still, he laid there, wide awake, worrying about Flynn.

  He loved Flynn like a brother and hoped he was still alive, but he never wanted to see him again. Sancho never should have listened to Bettina. Never should have set up that meeting. He knew better, but she played on his affection for that lunatic. Well, no more. That was it. He was done.

  With that decision made, he finally slept.

  A fist pounding on his front door roused him awake. Sancho glanced at his alarm clock—6:17 a.m. Who the hell could that be? Drowsy and in a fog, he climbed out of bed, pulled on his sweatpants, and wiped the sleep out of his eyes.

  The pounding continued.

  He had a test today. He needed more fucking sleep. Who the hell would be pounding on his door this early? Sancho dragged his tired ass to the door. “All right! All right! Keep your pants on!”

  He peeped through the peephole. Sick lurched in the pit of his stomach. Mendoza’s massive and terrifying face filled the entire field of view. He was there to kill him. He had to be. Sancho was the last loose end.

  “Fuck me.” Sancho backed away and hurried to his patio door. He ripped down the cardboard and there was Flynn, standing on his little balcony, smiling his charming smile.

  “Mendoza’s here!” Sancho whisper shouted.

  “I know. Which is why I’m standing on your balcony. I was worried you might make a run for it. But there’s nothing to fear. They are with us now.”

  “They?”

  “Goolardo too. Let’s not leave them standing out in the hall.”

  Flynn stepped through the shattered patio window and crossed to Sancho’s front door. Sancho followed.

  “Don’t open the door! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I told you. They’re on our side now. They understand the threat and they want to help.”

  Flynn released the deadbolt and opened the door. Sancho turned to run. He tripped over his broken coffee table and hit the floor with his face. Rolling over on his back, he watched Mendoza walk right in, followed by Francisco Goolardo.

  “They talked to Wendy.” Flynn reached down and pulled Sancho to his feet. “They know what Belenki intends to do. And now we know when and where.”

  “When and where what?”

  “The launch is at Cape Canaveral tomorrow. Our flight leaves in two hours.”

  “Flight where?”

  “Bimini. Francisco has a yacht at the Bimini Bay Resort and Marina.”

  “The Queen Ann’s Revenge,” Goolardo added. “It’s not as large or impressive as Mr. Belenki’s Argo, but it will get us to where we need to go.”

  “So, you all think Belenki intends to kill every computer on the planet?”

  “Miss Zimmerman was quite convincing,” Goolardo said.

  “Who?”

  “Wendy,” Flynn explained. “The whistle blower. Why do you think Belenki’s men came for her?”

  “Those assholes worked for Belenki?”

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t know? But this all seems a little crazy.”

  Mendoza nodded his massive head. “You’re not the only one who thinks so, amigo.”

  “You’ve already met Daisy.” Flynn looked at Sancho hard. “You’ve seen what she can do. She tried to kill you. Tried to kill us all back at the mansion, on the road…”

  “Machines fuck up, mano. Maybe it was just a malfunction. Some kind of bug.” Sancho turned to Goolardo. “I can’t believe you’re buying into this.”

  Mendoza nodded, glad to have an ally. “I know, right? How many times are we going to go down the same stupid road?”

  Goolardo glowered at his enforcer. “It doesn’t matter if this AI exists. What matters is Belenki believes it does. If that idiota intends to do what Miss Zimmerman believes and we don’t stop him, then we really are taking the bus to stupid town.”

  Sancho looked at Goolardo. He looked at Mendoza. He looked at Flynn who looked back at him with confidence and purpose.

  “I know you want to walk away, but if you do, you will live to regret that decision until the day you die. You believed in me once and we saved the world. Believe in me again and we will save it once more.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  During the golden age of piracy, he struck terror into the hearts of merchant seaman everywhere. He was a ferocious fighter and his appearance was just as fearsome. Tall and powerfully built, he wore a bandolier with a cutlass and a brace of three pistols hanging in holsters. His long, black beard was often braided into pigtails tied off with bright beaded ribbons. Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, menaced the West Indies and the East Coast of North America while it was still a British colony. He once was a sailor on a privateer during Queen Anne’s War. He later went rogue, stole a sloop and committed numerous acts of piracy before capturing La Concorde, a French slave ship he refitted with forty guns and renamed Queen Anne’s Revenge. He freed the slaves who didn’t want to join his crew and now had a force of three ships, commanding the vessels with the consent of the men who fought alongside him. Fierce as he was with his enemies, there is no known account of him ever harming or murdering those he held captive.

  At the age of nineteen Goolardo was convicted of armed robbery and sent to Brazil’s infamous Candido Mendes penitentiary on Ilha Grande. The maximum-security prison, just off the coast of Rio De Janeiro, once held the worst of the worst. Common street thugs, like Goolardo, were incarcerated with political prisoners and leftist revolutionaries. Young Francisco was taken under the wing of a guerrilla leader named Emilio.

  The former professor and intellectual became Goolardo’s surrogate father and showed him how to read and think and taught him about history and economics, science and politics. Goolardo became a voracious reader and consumed everything in the prison library. He especially enjoyed Robert Lewis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. But he also read Captain Blood and that led to A General History of Py
rates by Daniel Defoe. He read about Blackbeard, saw him as a revolutionary and decided to follow in his bucket-booted footsteps.

  To fight the powers that be, he would have to become a power himself. Since he knew they would never allow him to join their fraternity, he created his own club, a drug cartel, and became as rich as any of them. He would become a modern-day Blackbeard, looting the one percent by laundering money through their banks and properties. That was why he called his yacht the Queen Anne’s Revenge; a nod to Blackbeard and what he achieved before his ignominious end.

  A shell corp out of Barbados owned Goolardo’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, it was a subsidiary of a shell corp in the Caymans under the umbrella of another shell corp in Bermuda; all islands once trod upon by Blackbeard himself.

  Goolardo still had millions in banks all over the world in secret and anonymous accounts owned by phony corporations all under his control; money that would do him no good if he was incarcerated in some federal supermax. Part of his intention was to bring down the system and level the playing field between the haves and have nots. Killing every computer on the planet would do just that. But he also knew that those on the bottom would suffer the most just as they always do. Belenki was planning for this and most likely poised to put himself back on top as quickly as possible. He would be the king of the world and that was a job Goolardo wanted for himself.

  Queen Anne’s Revenge was 210 feet long, Once owned by the Sultan of Oman, it now flew the colors of Barbados and its owner was rumored to be a mysterious hedge fund manager. It had all the bells and whistles billionaires love; a media room, a fully equipped gym, a swimming pool, and a helicopter pad.

  The diving platform was outfitted with its own compressor, dozens of tanks, and other scuba equipment. The fifty-two-foot-long landing craft was designed to ferry divers to sites off the beaten track, and a mini submarine known as the Seawolf seated five and could reach depths of nine hundred feet.

  Goolardo stood on the top deck and marveled at the billions of stars above. He loved being at sea. Especially at night. When he first left Ilha Grande, he found work with the Cali Cartel, smuggling cocaine into the Florida Keys. He became an expert seaman and learned the waters all up and down the coast of Florida.

  Hearing footsteps behind him, he turned.

  “Beautiful night,” Flynn observed.

  “Indeed,” Goolardo replied.

  “How does it feel to be on side of right for once?”

  “I’ve always been on the side of right. We are all the hero of our own story, are we not?”

  “I suppose we are.”

  “Have you seen my man, Mendoza?”

  “I saw him down below. He’s apparently under the weather.”

  “He tends to get seasick. It’s quite annoying. He hated riding in that mini sub we took to Angel Island.”

  “So, he wasn’t all that upset when I blew it up?”

  “He wasn’t, but I was. I still am.”

  “You know it wasn’t entirely intentional.”

  “Yet you blew it up just the same..”

  “And now you have a new one. An even better one.”

  “Are you going to blow this one up too?”

  “I have no good reason to.”

  “You had no good reason to blow up the last one.” Goolardo’s fury rose and he took a deep breath to calm himself. For now, he needed Flynn, but when this was done, he would deal with him. “We should be in range of the Argo in about two hours,” Goolardo said.

  “You said you had a plan to infiltrate it?”

  “Yes, we’ll take the Seawolf below Belenki’s yacht and you’ll be able to access the vessel via the Argo’s submersible dock. Have you decided on a weapon?”

  “I’ll be bringing two. The Bullpup and the Sig Sauer P320.”

  Goolardo nodded. “What if Belenki isn’t there?”

  “He hasn’t missed a launch yet and he always watches from the Argo.”

  “And your intention is to try and talk him out of it?”

  “If I can.”

  “You may need to put one of those guns to his head to convince him.”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “Just make sure he calls off the launch before you kill him.”

  “If he calls off the launch, I won’t have to kill him.”

  Mendoza wanted to die. He sat in the large lounge area with the long wooden bar and the large picture windows that overlooked the dark, roiling sea. The constant lurching made Mendoza feel like he was going to lose his last seven lunches.

  Flynn and Goolardo seemed perfectly fine as they sipped their espressos and discussed the operation. Sancho didn’t look the slightest bit sick either. He did look worried, however. Mendoza caught his eye and he could see that Sancho shared his trepidation with Flynn and Goolardo’s stupido plan.

  Mendoza stared hard at the full moon hovering on the horizon; it was the only fixed point to focus on. Cold sweat beaded on his face. He wanted to get up, but knew he’d be too dizzy. His head pounded with the beginnings of a migraine.

  “Are you okay, mano?” Goolardo asked.

  “This plan you’re planning. I don’t understand it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Flynn goes on Belenki’s boat and hopes he finds him before all the bodyguards blow him away?”

  “That’s the idea,” Flynn said.

  “Blundering in like an idiota?”

  “You don’t like our plan?” Goolardo stared hard at Mendoza. “Do you have a better one?”

  “We could blow up the whole pinche boat! Shoot the fuel tanks with an RPG.”

  “Kill everyone on board?” Sancho asked.

  “Problem solved. No more boat. No more Belenki.”

  “And what if that doesn’t stop it?” Goolardo asked. “What if people are working with him at mission command? What if they shoot that nuke up into outer space anyway? Then what?”

  “Then we…we could…maybe…I don’t know,” Mendoza stammered. “It’s just an idea.”

  “A stupid idea.”

  A gorge rose inside Mendoza and he lurched to his feet. He stumbled out of the lounge, teetering down a narrow corridor as the yacht rocked back and forth. Charging up topside, he ran to the railing and puked his guts into the ocean. For a brief moment he felt like himself and then the anxiety and the nausea, the cold sweat and the pounding pain in his head returned.

  “Puto pendejo baboso!” he shouted.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The deeper the Seawolf dove, the greater Sancho’s anxiety grew. The cockpit had a panoramic view. The Atlantic was deep and dark, murky and impenetrable. Even at this depth, fish swam in and out of sight. Big fish. Scary fish.

  “Have you ever been deep sea fishing, Mr. Flynn?” Goolardo asked.

  “I’ve done my share,” Flynn said.

  Bullshit, Sancho thought, but kept his mouth shut. Flynn sat just behind Goolardo. Sancho sat parallel to Flynn and between them sat a hulking, pale, and sweaty Mendoza. His skin had a greenish tinge and his eyes looked terrified. Seasick and claustrophobic, the perfect person to sit next to in a mini sub.

  “The fishing is quite spectacular off the coast here at Cocoa Beach.” Goolardo was exuberant and in his element as he piloted the Seawolf. “Tarpon, sea trout, yellowfin, sailfish, snapper, bull sharks, barracuda. Once I saw a Goliath Grouper. Had to be three hundred pounds. It was almost as big as Mr. Mendoza.”

  Sancho looked up through the viewport and saw a giant ship looming above. “Is that it?”

  “Indeed. The Argo. I’m sure it has short-range sonar, which is why we are two hundred feet below it. Are you ready, Mr. Flynn?”

  Flynn nodded, unstrapped himself from his seat and offered them all a dashing grin. He headed down the narrow corridor and Sancho followed and found him just outside the lock-out chamber, struggling to put on his wetsuit.

  “Dude, what are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” Flynn said as he wrestled with t
he wetsuit.

  “Like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Are you even certified?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To scuba dive. I got certified five years ago. At the YMCA. We did our open water dive in Catalina and I froze my huevos off.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Then why’s your wetsuit on backwards?”

  “It’s not on backwards.”

  “Dude, that’s a chest zip. It goes in front. Not in back.”

  “I think this suit is far too small for me.”

  “It’s supposed to be tight. But don’t put your arms in before you pull the suit up. Look, the knee pads need to be over the knees. Here let me give you a hand.”

  Sancho helped Flynn off with the wet suit and then gave him a hand getting it back on correctly. Flynn looked uncomfortable and stiff as he walked around and tried to adjust his crotch. “It feels too snug.”

  “It’ll be fine once you hit the water.”

  Flynn picked up a regulator and part of it fell off. When he bent over to pick up the fallen piece up, he banged his forehead on a scuba tank.

  “Man, I think I better come with.”

  “I assumed that was a given.”

  “You need to stop assuming things. But here’s the deal. Once I get you to the Argo, I’m done. After that, you’re on your own.”

  Flynn put on his mask and it immediately fogged up. “Something’s wrong with this.”

  “Yeah, you need to take it off and spit in it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And rub it around.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “It keeps it from fogging up.”

  Flynn removed his mask and spit in it and smeared the spittle around. Sancho did the same. Then he helped Flynn with his flippers before putting on his own.

  Flynn looked as uncomfortable as an eight-year-old wearing his first suit. He kept tugging and trying to rearrange his gear and adjust his crotch.

  “Remember now,” Sancho said. “We ascend slowly and stop twice on the way up to decompress.”