The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “One squad stays here as a reserve and to protect our entry. When the shooting starts, the other squad infiltrates the tunnel to the Inner Sanctum. We cut them off here, and either catch them as they try to evacuate, or break into the Inner Sanctum and take them out there. We eliminate the Thirteen, and exfiltrate back here with the Civic Circle’s data files. We run a data line from the Sans Souci, set up a wireless link, and ‘negotiate’ with the rapid response teams while we get away.”

  “The reaction force will either cover the end of the tunnel, or move in to reinforce the perimeter around the Sans Souci,” Bulldog said thoughtfully.

  “Either way, we sneak out from the cottage, board a boat here,” Rob pointed to a location on the river side of the island, “and we’re lost in the marsh here within ten minutes.”

  “They have a helicopter,” Bulldog pointed out.

  “Which will suffer a fortuitous mechanical failure,” Rob assured him. “I’ve got it all covered.”

  “The data files…. You’re sure they’re here?” Bulldog’s eyes lit up.

  “Tolliver Applied Government Solutions just finished installing a massive amount of data storage for the Civic Circle,” Rob explained. “Armed guards brought in a delivery from a high security data vault in the past week. It’s either the Civic Circle’s complete files or a backup of them. We’ll share whatever we recover with you and your Order.”

  Bulldog turned to Brother Francis. “This is feasible. A chance to fulfill the goals the Brethren have worked toward for centuries. We should agree… provided I get to come with Gunny, here.”

  “You’ve done tunnel clearance before?” Rob asked.

  Bulldog nodded.

  “I can accept that,” Rob offered.

  “I cannot commit the Order to this action,” Brother Francis shook his head. “My vows do not allow me to shed blood, nor may I command or allow another to do so on behalf of the Order.” He cut off Bulldog’s objection before he could make it. “However, I will communicate your proposal to… the head of our Order. I will recommend he accept it. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning what is our decision.”

  Bulldog and Rob continued hashing out the details. Finally, I interrupted them. “I get to go with the strike team to the Inner Sanctum, right?”

  “No.” At least Rob had the good graces to appear guilty. “You will need to stay out of it.” He cut me off as I started to object. “Tunnel clearance is a very specialized operation. I’ve been working with the strike team the past month on demolitions and operations in a compromised atmosphere. You don’t have the right training. You’ll stay back here with the support squad covering our egress.”

  He promised me. He promised when the time came to take out the Inner Circle I’d get a piece of the action. Instead I was relegated to the support squad. Before I could argue, Caitlin piped up.

  “What about me?”

  “You’ll stay here, too” Bulldog declared. “Gunny’s right. It takes special training.”

  “You know what I owe those bastards,” Caitlin snarled. “I want a piece of the action, too.”

  I wasn’t the only one unhappy. What Rob and Bulldog were saying made sense. That didn’t mean I liked it.

  Before long, Rob and Bulldog were satisfied they’d completed their planning. Rob popped the champagne bottle and poured it into the glasses he’d brought. “Confusion to the enemy and death to the Thirteen.”

  “Death to the Thirteen!”

  “I’ll second that!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  I finished off my small cup of champagne. It tasted like a sour fruity Coke.

  “I’ll get word to your young associate here,” Brother Francis assured Rob, “no later than 9 am tomorrow morning. Meet me on the ground floor of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Given the magnitude of the opportunity, I don’t know why the answer won’t be yes.”

  Rob shook their hands. “Pleasure working with you Albertians. Tomorrow by this time we’ll have rid the world of the Civic Circle’s leadership and be ready to exploit their secrets. I need to get back to my catering.”

  Rob wasn’t about to share with the Albertians that he was actually off with his team to try to disrupt the assassination attempt on Andrew Breitbart.

  “Yippie-ki-yay… Gunny,” Bulldog bade him farewell with a grin.

  “Yippie-ki-yay… Bulldog,” Rob smirked back.

  What was that all about?

  Rob completed his round of farewells and departed.

  “That reminds me,” I added, “I’ve been here nearly an hour. I need to replace your access point, restore your Internet connection, and get back on duty myself.”

  Caitlin followed me back. “I’m sorry I was rude to you,” she apologized as I opened the closet.

  I switched out the routers as I replied. “Understandable, given what you thought of me.”

  “You’ve given me hope that the victims of the Civic Circle may be avenged at long last.”

  I finished connecting the new access point. The connection light lit right up.

  “Thank you,” she surprised me with a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll show you out.”

  My head was still spinning a bit from the memory of her kiss and her perfume as I passed through security, back into the Jekyll Island Club, through the secure door, and down to the Network Operations Center.

  “Problem’s solved,” I told Mr. Humphreys. “Looks like the cottage is back online.”

  “Just ‘cause I’m lazy don’t mean I’m stupid, Burdell,” he replied with the grin of a predator about to devour his prey. “You crashed the access point by re-flashing the firmware. You’re busted, Burdell, and now… now you’re gonna pay.”

  Chapter 13: Facing Fearful Odds

  Oh, shit.

  “What do you mean?” I tried to stall for time.

  “Cut the crap, Burdell,” Mr. Humphreys replied. “You faked an outage to kill the feed on that cottage. I have you dead to rights. I saw you hitting on that Holy See Bank babe earlier. Thought she’d shot you down something good, but now you’re sneaking off and spending more than an hour with her? In her private cottage? On company time?”

  That was not what I was expecting. Caitlin and me?

  It took a moment for me to wrap my head around what he was implying. Better to take the blame for what he thought I was doing instead of what I was really up to. “Yeah, well sometimes persistence pays off,” I replied smugly, playing along.

  “You made it with her?” he demanded to know.

  “That’s none of your business,” I snapped back.

  “Oh yes, it is,” he leered back at me. “You’re going to tell me exactly what happened.”

  I tried my best to buy more time by looking shocked while I tried to imagine a plausible scenario of seduction. I was just going to have to make it up as I went along. I ‘reluctantly’ decided to fess up to my ‘misbehavior.’

  “I knocked on the door,” best start at the beginning, I figured. “She was wearing this silky green kimono.” So far, so good. “Her hair was still damp. She’d just gotten out of the shower.

  “‘You,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’”

  “‘Your Internet’s down,’ I explained to her. I had her take me back to the service closet, and I opened it up. I asked her to get me a glass of ice water.”

  “Yeah,” Mr. Humphreys confirmed. “Get ‘em used to doing what you tell ‘em, and they’ll go all the way with you.”

  “So, she got back with the ice water,” I continued. “I told her to step into the closet and I’d show her how it all worked. I could tell she knew what I really meant. I told her to shut the door. That’s when I knew I had her.”

  “You get them alone, you get them used to doing what you tell them, you get ‘em in the groove, and they start to lose their inhibitions,” Mr. Humphreys explained, knowingly. He must be reading the same pick-up artist sites that Amit followed.

  “She had the most amazing scent.” At least I’d have no trouble
describing her perfume!

  “Oh yeah,” Mr. Humphreys replied knowingly. “Those European girls… They don’t shave their pits, do they?”

  Not exactly where I was heading, but in improvisation, you sometimes have to go with your audience. “Yeah,” I confirmed his expectations. “Let’s just say she’s a natural red-head.”

  His mouth opened. “Even… down below?” He wasn’t quite drooling, but it was clear I had his attention now.

  “You’re getting ahead of my story,” I countered. “So I pushed her back against the wall, and she just sort of melted in to me. We kissed. She pulled off my shirt. I undid the tie on her kimono and ran my hand up her side. That’s when I realized,” I paused to build some dramatic tension, “she had nothing on underneath.”

  Humphreys was transfixed – a lewd smirk on his face.

  “I turned out the light.” I gave him the details of my imaginary make out session in the utility closet including some rather creative and unconventional uses for ice cubes I’d heard Amit describe. “We did what we could, but it was tiny – too small, too awkward to do much. I could tell she wanted more. So, I asked her if there was someplace else we could go. We got our clothes back on. She called room service for a bottle of champagne, and then she took me up to her room.”

  Mr. Humphreys looked smug. “I knew it! I saw the catering guy deliver it.”

  Good thing I added in that detail.

  I made up an imaginary tryst in Caitlin’s room, drawing on the highlights of exploits Amit had shared with me over the past couple of years. Mr. Humphreys listened slack-jawed to my storytelling. I was certainly giving him his money’s worth in entertainment value, but I was concerned he’d just rat me out to get even with me for forcing him to bring me along. I closed my story

  “They’re having a reception tomorrow night,” I explained. “Lots of hot European women looking for a good time. I bet I could get you in.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I assured him. There were parties and receptions all over Jekyll Island. Surely I could leverage my contacts to get him in to one somewhere. “I’ll be seeing her again tomorrow. How about I see what I can do to get you an invitation?”

  I could see he was tempted. He slowly nodded his head. “OK, Burdell.” Then he gestured back at my workstation. “But first, you gotta clean up all the log files before you get us both in trouble. We gotta sign over this whole place to the Civic Circle people tomorrow morning.”

  They wanted us out before the Thirteen assembled for their meeting tomorrow night. At least that meant fewer innocent people would be around when Uncle Rob and his team came calling.

  It took another hour to get everything cleaned up. Mr. Humphreys found a bunch of other network and internal logs I hadn’t been aware of with traces of what I’d done. The man was scary competent when he put his mind to it. Finally, he declared our work complete. I caught the shuttle bus back to the Beach Village and then south to the Berkshire Inn and Suites.

  I woke up to find Amit had let himself in. There was a note on the counter to wake him up when I got up.

  “I swear she had to be on cocaine or something,” he said bleary eyed. “I couldn’t keep up with her.”

  I started a cup of coffee for him. “I’m hopping in the shower. You can tell me about her at breakfast, OK?”

  Amit was doing much better once he’d had his coffee and a shower. He regaled me with his exploits over breakfast. “It’s simply amazing,” he said in awe. “Just being here prequalifies you to all these girls. Their inhibitions are down, they’re looking for a good time, and all you have to do is isolate one and close with her before some other stud beats you to it. The cock-blocking is amazing. I could really use a wingman to help me run interference on some of these smug pricks.”

  “Some of us have actual work to do,” I reminded him. Cell phones off and secured, we walked up Beachview Drive so we could talk in privacy.

  “I wonder if they keep track of all these suspicious cell phone outages,” I thought out loud.

  “Maybe,” Amit replied. “Everyone does it, though. It’s common knowledge among the Civic Youth that if you want privacy, you need to turn your phone off. Remember we saw Bernard do it, too.”

  I brought him up to speed on my lunch with Ding.

  “Great,” he muttered. “Our Chinese ‘friends’ actually want the United States to dissipate its strength in stupid international conflict.”

  “Can’t really blame them. They’re allies of convenience at best,” I acknowledged. “I hope the Albertians will do a better job helping us out.” I explained the plan.

  “We’re finally going to take down the Inner Circle?” Amit seemed surprised at the thought that in a little over twelve hours it could all be over for us. One way or another.

  “Not us, exactly.” I explained how Rob refused to let us on the Strike Team.

  “He does have a point,” Amit conceded. “We haven’t done any serious tactical training since last summer. I bet Rob’s been drilling the guys non-stop since he got the plans in June.”

  I still thought it really sucked being left off the Strike Team, but if Amit and Rob both agreed, it was probably time for me to embrace the suck and let Rob run the show.

  “What about that reporter dude? Breitbart?”

  “He’s not exactly a reporter,” I began, “he’s a conservative writer, publisher, and activist. He’s also a collaborator with Matt Drudge.” The Beach Village was getting close, and I didn’t really have time to elaborate. “Rob sent me the ‘all went well’ code text, but of course there were no details. We may be able to get more from Rob. We’re supposed to get the confirmation this morning from Brother Francis that they’ll cooperate in the attack on the Inner Sanctum tonight.”

  As we got to the shuttle stop and lost our privacy, Amit segued seamlessly into more details of his exploits with the rest of the Civic Youth. “At the Women in Media reception, I had this drop-dead gorgeous babe eating out of my hand, eager to show how enlightened she was by hanging out with a ‘person-of-color.’” He put it in ironic finger quotes. “Turns out her daddy is some kind of billionaire. Now I’m thinking I’ve got this heiress on the line. I mean, I could be set for life if I play my cards right. So I’m in the groove and playing like I never played before – a subtle neg, a push, a pull, escalate, withdraw. I can tell I’ve got her hooked, and it’s time to escalate and isolate her somewhere. And then, her father shows up.”

  “Wow! What did he do? Did he intervene? Break it up?”

  “Not exactly,” Amit said, the disgust clear in his face. “He walks up to us all smooth and suave. The man was alpha, pure alpha, I mean, James-Bond-level alpha. But I figure what can he do? Anything negative he says just makes me more the bad boy rival his little girl will swoon for. So the bastard says to his daughter, ‘What a nice young man you’ve found. You’re the best piece of tail he’s ever going to get, so I’m sure he’ll treat you right.’ Then he just leaves her with me.”

  I was confused. “He actually complimented you? And called his own daughter a ‘piece of tail?’”

  Amit rolled his eyes at my ignorance. “You don’t get it. The last thing that girl wanted was to sleep with a ‘nice’ boy she’d just met that Daddy likes. She wanted to virtue-signal – show how enlightened she was by sleeping with the bad-boy of color who’d piss off dear old Dad. And that ‘piece of tail’ comment was a vulgar reminder that she was lowering herself, that her sexual market value was way above mine, that I wasn’t good enough for her, and she shouldn’t be selling herself cheaply. Sure enough, the spark was gone, and despite some of my best game ever, she makes a lame excuse to go to the ladies’ room two minutes later.”

  I could see how that played out once I thought about it. “Maybe you should have rejected her then and there as too much of a ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and tried to hook up later on the rebound?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “That might have worked fairly....” Amit looked at me with
surprise, the realization dawning that for once, I was the one giving him pick-up advice.

  “I do listen to your game tips, you know,” I answered his unasked question with a smile.

  Amit looked around and decided it was private enough to risk an admission. “I am so tired of hanging out,” he confided softly, “with the ‘best and brightest.’ They all think they’re intrinsically superior to everyone else because of their social-justice enlightenment. They verbally joust to see who feels worst about being so innately superior. Then they feel even more superior for having the refined moral sense to feel bad about their amazing superiority.”

  I really despaired for the future of our country if the people Amit was describing were going to be our future rulers. “One way or another,” I whispered, my lips barely moving, “it’ll be over tonight.”

  We got through security at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and found Brother Francis holding court in the Aspinwall Room. I almost didn’t recognize him. Gone was the sober, modest clergyman. In his place was a dissolute, flamboyant impresario.

  “You can’t just manipulate the prices of precious metals,” someone was telling him. “The market’s too big.”

  “I used to think that, too,” Brother Francis began, “but not two years ago, Lord Winslow, himself, came to our bank’s London Office. No small talk, no preliminaries. He is a Lord after all, and the rest of us mere peasants. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer requires that you make the price of silver fall at least ten percent.’ We were all slack-jawed in amazement. ‘Gold, too, naturally,’ his Lordship adds.

  “Our head trader,” Brother Francis looked around the room, “you boys know McNew, right?” I could see a few nods of recognition. “As stubborn a Scot as ever pinched a penny. So McNew says right to Lord Winslow, ‘We can’t just push a price out of thin air and make it stick! Every tosser is buying right now. We could sell our whole position, leverage all we could to short the market and it wouldna be more than a blip in the graph. It canna be done.’”