Double Agent

by Gretchen Archer

  Filet leaned in and studied FEMA’s picture.

  “Nos. Not boss mans.”

  Whats?

  I didn’t ask if FEMA had locked Filet and Broom in Rocks because that couldn’t have happened. FEMA was busy compromising my daughters, my family, and my hometown at the time.

  I pushed Emergency’s picture forward. “So this man is your boss.”

  Filet leaned in and studied the picture, tapping a finger to his lips. “Nos. Not boss mans.”

  Nos toos?

  Whats?

  “No?” Bradley asked. “Are you sure, Filet? You don’t know either of these men?” Bradley asked.

  Filet studied the IDs carefully. With a wide grin, he held up an ah-ha finger. Now we were getting somewhere. He tapped FEMA’s picture. “Two lobsterses.”

  “Is that all?” Bradley asked.

  Filet’s eyes narrowed, his chin dropped, then he shook his head in a firm no. “Two lobsterses, the saladses, the rares steakses, bloods raseses—” of which he clearly disapproved “—and the crepses.” He began ticking crepes off on his fingers. “The bananas crepses, the spiniches crepses, the fat strawberrys crepses—”

  “Filet.” I waved a hand in his face. “We don’t care what he ate. Forget him.” I waved Emergency’s ID in Filet’s face. “What about this man?”

  Filet rubbed his chin. Then shook his head. “No lobsterses.”

  “Filet.” I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. “Did this man lock you and your cousin in Rocks?”

  Filet, confusion all over his face, said, “The rockses?”

  We were getting nowhere.

  “The velvet boxes, Filet!”

  “Ah, yeses!” Filet was so happy he got one. “This man!” He poked Emergency’s picture. “The velvetses boxeses.”

  “So he locked you in the room with the velvet boxes?”

  Filet scratched an ear. “Nos.”

  Nos again?

  Whats?

  “Filet, who is my person,” he patted his chest, “is sorrys. This not boss mans.”

  It was terrible news.

  “July?” I turned around with my penlight and Emergency’s ID. “This is the man who locked you in Rocks, right?”

  She took the ID from me and angled it. She gave it a second glance to be sure. “No.”

  It was even worse news.

  “I got one look at the back of him,” she said, “and he didn’t have black hair.”

  Emergency’s hair was jet black. Ink black. As black as the Bellissimo lobby.

  It meant we weren’t safe. From the weather or the Hurricane Heist. We’d been operating for hours under the assumption there were two hurricane heisters: one down and the other, identified and upstairs, to go. Yet Filet and July were saying it wasn’t Emergency who’d locked them in Rocks. That meant we had a third hurricane heister, the thought of which sent my already light head spinning. We were back to square one.

  What—who—had we missed in FEMA’s car?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Filet missed his calling.

  By all accounts—spiked lasagna notwithstanding—he was an excellent chef. I couldn’t remember my last real meal, so it wasn’t firsthand knowledge. However, it was safe to say that as good as he was in the kitchen, he was way better at theatrics. And for all he couldn’t grasp, translate, or communicate in English, he made up for by excelling in his native tongue, and in his past life, he was either a Vietnamese Literature Professor, the Vietnamese National Poet Laureate, or he won Vietnam’s Got Talent.

  It started as a circling mumble around the buggy full of Broom while the rest of us were mentally wandering planet There’s a Third Man and staring at the silent two-way radio. And it sounded, judging by Filet’s cadence and clip, like poetry, although, for all I knew, it was the entire script and score of Miss Saigon with him playing every role. The longer he mumbled, the more confident he became. His voice grew stronger and he began punctuating whatever he was going on and on about with choreography. One hundred percent, it was miserable, depressing, and gloomy. At one point, he flailed himself against the mezzanine staircase banister, writhing in agony, crying out in distress, scaring July to death. She almost ended up in my lap and I almost ended up in Bradley’s. No one had a nerve left for whatever he was performing, written by a mashup of Vietnamese Edgar Allen Poe, Vietnamese Stephen King, and the guy who wrote “The Vietnam Chainsaw Massacre.” Bradley put a stop to it just as I was ready to climb over FEMA’s car, then go stand in the middle of Beach Boulevard and surrender—“COME AND GET ME, KEVIN!”

  Bradley yelled, “FILET. That’s enough.”

  Filet snapped out of it, tugged his shirt cuffs, adjusted his bowtie, dusted his lapels, then sat down on the step he’d abandoned before his one-man rendition of The Nightmare on Ho Chi Minh Street.

  That was better.

  Whew.

  I asked July who abducted her. If it wasn’t Emergency, then who? Did she know him? Had she ever seen him? Did he say anything? A man in a Storm suit, which didn’t help a bit, because everyone except Weather One and our crew was wearing a Storm suit. She only got one good look at him when she arrived. He was tall, strong, no accent, and he overpowered her the minute she stepped out of the Suburban. Five minutes later she was locked in Rocks with Filet and Broom. Bradley asked how the unidentified Storm had known she was coming. She said before she drove into the hard rain, she still had cell phone service. North of Saucier, Mississippi, she’d called 911 and asked the Biloxi police to contact someone at the Bellissimo and let them know she was on the way. Leave a light on, please. The man in the Storm suit had been waiting on her in the dark at the main entrance. The main entrance? Then where was the Suburban? Whoever he was—The Third Man on our list of hurricane heisters—had either driven off in her rental car or moved it. Because one thing we hadn’t plowed through on our way in was a Suburban.

  July asked about the dedicated elevators to the thirteenth floor.

  Bradley explained the many reasons why a Disaster elevator wasn’t an option. One, if they hadn’t restored generator power on Disaster, the elevators were inoperable. Two, even if they had power, the only Disaster elevator on the lobby level was in the casino, and we couldn’t get to it. And three, even if we wanted to drag Broom up the stairs to the mezzanine level and try to shoot through a wall to get to the convention center for the Disaster elevator there, the chances of an elevator car being behind the elevator doors was close to zero.

  “Then what are we going to do?” she asked.

  I said, “We’ll do the same thing you did.”

  “What would that be?” my husband asked.

  “Call and get a message up to Disaster.”

  No one bothered to point out we didn’t have a phone.

  But we did.

  “FEMA’s car,” I said. “There’s an old rotary phone in the backseat.”

  “And what are we going to do with an old rotary phone, Davis?” Bradley asked.

  “Bradley, we don’t know that landlines are down. They might not be.”

  Filet broke into a one-note song. “Who we goings to callses? The ghostbusterses!”

  “This building was built in 1996,” I said.

  “And?” July asked.

  “There will be a way to plug a landline phone in at the front desk.”

  Bradley said, “Check-in has been remodeled ten times since the Bellissimo opened.”

  “I’ll bet you money there’s still a fax machine somewhere behind that desk,” I said. “Which means there’s a telephone cord. Which means we can hook up the old phone.”

  “To what end?” Bradley asked.

  Just then, a flash lit up the lobby and a clap of thunder followed. It was the first lightning and thunder we’d seen or heard in more than an hour. We had no way of knowing if it was a single event, if the
storm in all its fury had returned full force, or if Hurricane Kevin was finally making landfall.

  * * *

  We waited on the steps. What we were waiting for, I wasn’t sure. Daylight. A magic carpet. The National Guard. The X-Men. Christmas. Someone to save us. A way to save ourselves. We were waiting on everything; we were waiting on nothing. We were waiting on Hurricane Kevin, was what we were waiting on.

  Filet dozed off until Bradley shook him awake. “Why Rocks?”

  I’d been wondering the same thing. Of all the places at the Bellissimo to stash Filet and Broom, then July when she arrived, why Rocks? Why not one of the seventeen hundred guest rooms in the hotel? We’d never have found them. Rocks was a small shop, uniquely positioned just outside of the casino for high-roller impulse purchases, and cleared by security Storms of inventory two days earlier. So, why Rocks?

  “Filet,” I said.

  He pointed to himself, his face quizzical.

  “When your boss man locked you in the jewelry store, what did you do?”

  His brows drew together. He stood, straightened his jacket, then dropped to his knees. When he held up claw hands I was worried he was about to launch into Act Two of The Silence of the Bellissimo—but instead, he fell to all fours and crawled. After a few feet, he shot up, stooped to a wrestler stance, and swung at air. “BAM, BAM, BAM. The wallses.”

  We hadn’t seen any bam-bam-bammed walls in Rocks, which could have been because we couldn’t see. Rocks was next door to Beans. Why would anyone want Filet to knock down a wall to get to the coffee shop? If Filet’s boss man had entrance to Rocks, he surely had entrance to Beans too. And wouldn’t we have noticed a big hole in the wall? In Rocks and in Beans? Even in the dark? It made no sense, unless maybe the destination wasn’t next door to Rocks. Maybe it was behind. Bradley and I said it on the same beat: “Player Services.”

  It wasn’t flour on Filet’s face when we found him, it was sheetrock dust. Just inside the casino door, backing up to Rocks on the blueprints, was the Bellissimo Player Services office—easy to forget for those of us who worked there, because we weren’t players. Just behind it, between Rocks and Player Services, there was a small computer room housing the system that ran the Bellissimo Player’s Club. The person who locked Filet and Broom in Rocks had Filet crawl through the airduct and bust into the computer room behind Player Services.

  Our wait was over. It was the break we hadn’t known we were looking for.

  “Let’s go.” Bradley was up and running. I was right behind him. I could hear the thump of July and Filet and the buggy full of Broom behind us. We passed FEMA’s car at the front door—not that we could see it, but we could smell it—turned the lobby corner, which put us back where we’d started. At Rocks. For the nth time. We rolled Broom over the broken glass and parked him. Then we bumped and banged between jewelry display cases to the storage room where we’d found July, Filet, and Broom, that time finding the loose three-foot by three-foot louvered grille of the air return too. Bradley slid it. We all stooped to shine our penlights in the crawlspace behind the wall.

  “I’ll go.” I scooted closer. Filet and I were the only ones small enough for the job.

  “No, you won’t,” my husband said. “Filet? Get in there.”

  Filet looked down at his new clothes, at which point I was already halfway in with my penlight. I poked my head back out and sneezed. “We have a sledgehammer.” I sneezed again, then stuck my head back in the tunnel and bounced the penlight around a second time to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I pulled my head out and sneezed for a third time. I found my husband’s shadowed face. I nodded. Filet had busted through the sheetrock to the Player Services computer room for his boss man.

  Bradley sat down hard.

  “What’s in there?” July asked.

  “Filet?” I crawled the rest of the way out. “Your boss man locked you in here and asked you to bam-bam the wall.”

  Filet nodded.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Filet to nos understandses.”

  “What did you do—” I had less than an ounce of patience left for dragging information out of Filet “—after you bam-bammed through the wall?”

  Filet’s hands flipped forming a square. “The boxses. The box.”

  “Small?” Bradley asked. “Black?”

  Filet nodded.

  “The zip drive.” I picked sheetrock out of my hair. “A zip drive.”

  “A zip drive?” July asked. “Isn’t that last century?”

  “I’m sure a flash drive would have been the better swipe,” I told her, “but the power was out. There was no way to download the data to a flash drive. Someone took the zip drive backup instead.”

  “What was on it?” she asked.

  “Every player who’s ever walked in the door,” Bradley said, “their personal information, their banking information, and their Social Security numbers.”

  At which point the Hurricane Heist reached gigantic proportions.

  The cash heist was one crime. Identity theft on a massive scale was quite another. The cash heist would slow us down. The loss of personal data from everyone who’d ever entered our doors would shut us down.

  For good.

  Ten pensive minutes later, I said, “Filet?”

  “Yeses?”

  “Did your cousin bam the walls with you?”

  “Nos.”

  We waited. And waited.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  Instead of trying to explain, he launched into another round of Filet Charades. Broom’s job was to move the cash carts. Broom had been moving the cash carts for their boss man the entire time. According to Filet, the cash carts had been moved three times, to three different locales, each time by Broom.

  No wonder he was still asleep.

  * * *

  We were back on the mezzanine steps. We had the sledgehammer but had to abandon the idea of using it to beat through a security stairwell door. It would set off the backup battery-powered alarm system up and down thirty flights of steps and give us away; whoever had our zip drive would know we were coming.

  “They took our zip drive, we get it back with FEMA’s rotary phone,” I said. “We need that phone.”

  “Filet no to understandses.”

  Not that, by the looks on their faces, especially Broom’s, anyone else did.

  “It’s done, Davis, and we’re not going anywhere near FEMA’s car,” Bradley said. “Someone has the zip drive and chances are the data has already been downloaded and transferred. It’s done.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “How could someone have downloaded and transferred the data? The generator’s down on Disaster. There’s no processing.”

  “Filet no to understandses at alls.”

  “We don’t know for a fact the generator’s still down.”

  “Bradley, let’s say the generator’s back up. And let’s say the person with our zip drive finds a way to shake No Hair and Fantasy, then get to the computers alone.”

  “Okay,” Bradley said.

  “Which will never happen,” I added.

  He knew I was right. About that, anyway.

  Filet turned to July. “Do you to understandses?”

  July held a finger to her lips.

  “The zip drive is a terabyte of data, minimum,” I said. “Every player who’s ever walked through the door, all their personal information, and every casino transaction of theirs since the beginning of time.” Bellissimo time, I hoped everyone understood, although for sure Filet didn’t understand, and Broom, if he’d been awake, wouldn’t have either. “Even if they have power on Disaster, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have internet, because the satellite could be in Arkansas by now. If it’s not, the signal rate in the storm would be next to nothing. And even if they had Pentagon-level
processing speed, it would still be an eight-hour job.” I flicked sheetrock off my jumpsuit. “The zip drive hasn’t been downloaded. Whoever has it plans on walking out with it. We need FEMA’s phone.”

  “How is the phone going to help?” Bradley asked.

  “We do what July did and get a message to Disaster,” I said. “But we’ll call MBI.”

  “What’s MBI?” July asked, then answered her own question. “Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Why not call the police?” she asked.

  “We’ve called the police twice,” Bradley said. “We got FEMA first and Emergency second. Third strike and we’re out.”

  “FEMA?” She tried to catch up. “Is this a person named FEMA or the government agency FEMA?”

  “Sees?” Filet pointed at July. “No oneses to understandses!”

  I pointed in the direction of FEMA’s car. “Let’s get that phone.”

  “The car is a deathtrap of glass, Davis,” my husband said. “No.”

  “Filet.” He slapped his chest. “Filet gets the phoneses. Filet.” He went to slap his herringbone chest again but got caught up admiring the fabric.

  “How about this,” I said. “Let’s take Broom out of the buggy, hook a light-fixture chain around the handlebar, you push me over the glass, I’ll reach in, get the phone, then you pull me back by the chain.”

  “No.”

  “Filet’s too big, Bradley. I’m the only one small enough to get in the car window.”

  “The windshield is open, Davis.”

  “Right,” I said, “and he’ll slice his head off getting to the backseat through the windshield.”

  Filet girl-screamed.

  “It’s on the backseat,” I said. “All I have to do is reach in and grab it.”

  “It was on the backseat,” he said. “We crashed the car. That phone could be on Beach Boulevard.”

  Twenty tricky minutes later, after me climbing in and digging all the way through FEMA’s car, we had the thick stack of file folder evidence against him and Emergency from the front seat, the rotary phone from the floorboard of the backseat, and a spear of glass the circumference of a first-grade pencil from who-knows-where through the sole of my right $1,100 Manolo Blahnik embellished flat. Back on the mezzanine steps, I held my shoe in the air while everyone except Broom gathered to gawk. Bradley went back and forth between staring at the glass spike, running his hands through his blonde hair in frustration, and pacing a tight circle. “I told you, Davis. I told you.”