by Tim Tigner
I couldn’t think of a more pleasant or uplifting song, and that was a bit freaky. Was the music intended to make us docile prior to slaughter? Or was it acoustic camouflage?
As my mind parsed the possibilities, I realized that its intent might be mental distraction. In which case it was working.
The woman returned quickly, very quickly. Again she walked to a seemingly random table. This time a group of four.
“What did we do?” a mature, gravelly voice asked.
The reply came in two parts. First, I heard cold steel cracking against bone. Then, after the resulting groan, a repeat of the earlier warning. “No talking! Not … a … sound.”
Hitting someone with your weapon was a stupid move. It took the muzzle off target. Perhaps only for a second, but a second was often enough. Another tactical blunder I’d bear in mind.
As the woman led two more people out, I came to an unsettling conclusion. Even with only a couple of data points, the pattern was clear. Within the next few minutes, Katya and I would be led from the room.
7
Bad Directions
Napa, California
KATYA CLOSED her eyes and took a deep breath. This was not her first extreme emotional rollercoaster. Despite living an academic lifestyle, she’d suffered through quite a few stomach scrunchers.
The wild rides had begun when Kyle’s brother entered her life. Katya had met Colin Achilles while completing her Ph.D. at Moscow State University. At the time, Colin had also been living and working in Russia.
Colin had eventually asked her to marry him, and she had wholeheartedly agreed to be his wife until death did them part. But on the very night of his proposal, Colin and his father had both died of carbon monoxide poisoning in an incident that Katya and Kyle had barely escaped.
It hadn’t been an accident.
When the culprits had subsequently come for Katya, Kyle had raced to her rescue. Not an easy feat, given that he’d been jailed for murder at the time. Together, the two survivors had unraveled the contorted conspiracy that had ensnared his family and her fiancé.
They had ultimately rendered justice, but only after surviving attacks on two continents. During the process, their relationship had blossomed. A taboo attraction had grown. One of those irresistible, undeniable forces that they both had felt honor bound to resist.
After many months of heart-wrenching struggle, she and Achilles had mutually come to the conclusion that their union would actually make Colin happy.
But still, they had put off the final step. Until tonight.
Now, on the very night when Kyle Achilles was prepared to propose, they were again thrust into a life-threatening situation. How was that possible? As a mathematics professor, she found herself stuck on the odds.
And yet it was happening.
Was she cursed? Was there a demon determined to make her miserable? She didn’t believe in such things but still the coincidences were hard to swallow without question.
Kyle kept rubbing her calf under the table while the restaurant emptied out, two by two. He was always thinking about her comfort. He did it in little ways that she rarely acknowledged but always appreciated. She wanted to express her gratitude—but not now. The penalty for clandestine communication had proven swift and harsh.
With each round, Katya struggled to hear what was happening to those who left the room. The only words she ever detected above the jazz song playing loudly on repeat were “face the wall.” Presumably that was prior to a patdown. After each command, Katya strained to hear a suppressed gunshot or the thud of a dropping body, but neither ever followed.
Before she knew it, their turn arrived. “On your feet,” the man commanded.
As Katya rose, she saw that they were the only two diners remaining in the room. That probably wasn’t a coincidence. By saving Achilles for last, they had kept him in a passive stance until the second gun was freed to focus on his center mass.
With the woman’s submachine gun pressed into the small of her back, Katya marched toward the entrance with Achilles at her side. She could feel him raring to react, plotting to turn the tables and pulverize the people who threatened his sweetheart. He wasn’t one to tolerate being pushed around.
But she knew he wouldn’t act.
Not now.
Not while she was under a gun.
As they entered the reception area, Katya was surprised to see two more men waiting. She could practically feel Achilles’ spirits drop at the sight. Two armed assailants was already a stretch, four was out of the question. Even for him.
The new guys were clad in black and wearing ski masks. They weren’t pointing guns, however. Each held something that looked like a large pair of headphones.
“Face the wall,” the man behind Achilles said.
8
Mixed Messages
Napa, California
BRUCE FELT like he was having an out-of-body experience as he guided the final pair of diners toward the door. He’d never done anything like this before. He wasn’t violent or scheming and he certainly wasn’t a criminal—by nature. Although he couldn’t deny that whacking Kai in the head had felt fantastic.
Like the best of his species, Bruce had adapted to an unwelcome change in his environment. Now he and his people wouldn’t just survive, they’d thrive.
Other than Seb and Webb, the first forty-eight diners that Danica had escorted out of the room had all been desk jockeys. Corporate captains or big shot bankers. Men who, like Bruce himself, made their money from the comfort of a chair.
This last guy was the odd man out. He was like a panther in a room of pussycats. Not a caveman or a thug—one look into his intelligent eyes told you that—but a man who could rule the jungle.
Fortunately, Tarzan was there with Jane. As long as she was under the gun, he would be neutralized. Tarzan couldn’t know that his captors would never actually kill anyone—or that the cartridges cramming the twenty-round magazines in their MP7s were blanks.
“Face the wall,” Bruce said, his H&K pressed to the small of the big man’s spine. He kept it there while Seb or Webb—he couldn’t distinguish the two with ski masks on—slipped AcotocA sedation systems over Tarzan’s ears and he collapsed into unconsciousness. A second later, so did Jane.
“That’s all of them,” Bruce said, removing the itchy mask.
“We did it!” Seb said. “Mother of God, we did it!”
With the risky part of the operation behind them, the four exchanged high fives.
“I promised you that AcotocA would make us all rich,” Bruce said.
AcotocA, a palindrome created from acoustic, was a revolutionary product. Instead of using chemicals to block nerve signals, their technology effectively plunged the human nervous system into deep sleep by forcing brain waves into the relatively low-frequency, high-amplitude delta waves experienced during dreaming. When powerful enough, the acoustic transmission didn’t just induce immediate deep sleep, it also jammed other nerve transmissions, effectively preventing pain from registering.
With an AcotocA device on someone’s ears, you could put them to sleep with the flip of a switch. And you could keep them asleep as long as the system was in place and transmitting. They’d kept rhesus monkeys anesthetized for an entire month, nourishing and hydrating them intravenously.
The FDA’s stated reason for rejecting AcotocA’s approval for sale was not based on efficacy. That was immediately apparent. They cited safety concerns.
According to the FDA review panel, AcotocA Inc. had not sufficiently demonstrated that there would be no long-term impact on cognitive health. They had set an impossibly high hurdle. Cognitive health was too multidimensional a parameter, and long-term was too vague a condition, to ever be overcome—if someone was bribed to rule against them. As their panel obviously had been.
No matter what Bruce said or did, the corrupt official could always say, “Not enough.” One bribed bureaucrat could keep AcotocA’s revolutionary product off the marketplac
e simply by noting that there were tried-and-true alternatives whose long-term impacts were well established. Period. Full stop. End of story. Death of dream.
Tricks like that were one way the rich and powerful remained rich and powerful.
Well, not today.
Today, Bruce had the power. And soon, he would have the riches too.
As the four of them carried Tarzan and Jane out to the U-Haul trucks parked just outside the door, Seb said, “You were right about the demographics of the diners. I’ve been checking the business cards in their wallets as we load them. Most are either from Wall Street or the C-suites of Big Pharma.”
When Seb hacked the reservation system at Cinquante Bouches, he obtained the names and phone numbers of every reservation holder. Bruce could have investigated them, confirmed their caliber, but time was tight with all the other prep work required. He verified that Kai Basher had his regular reservation, then moved on, trusting that the healthcare conference had put the right clientele in the other forty-nine seats. “Timing is everything,” he replied.
“And thus the rush to be ready this Friday,” Webb added. “Good call. Although there is one potential complication.”
“What’s that?” Bruce asked, his heart skipping a beat.
“One of the men at Kai’s table—the tall one with a tan and thick white hair—”
“Yes?”
“He’s Whip Rickman.”
“Name sounds familiar.”
“He’s the governor of Florida.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, nothing we can do about that now. Who knows, maybe that will work in our favor,” Bruce said, anticipating exactly the opposite.
They laid the last two diners on the floor of a U-Haul beside the others, sardine-style. With AcotocA systems on their ears, their cargo was completely oblivious.
“Danica, please get the restaurant staff all traditionally sedated. We want the marks on their arms and the ketamine in their veins for camouflage.”
Before sedating the diners, Bruce and Danica had used AcotocA to disable Cinquante Bouches’s employees—the chefs, servers and other staff. Thus, like the diners, they would have no recollection of the event.
Memory loss was a side effect induced when AcotocA abruptly shifted brain waves from beta to delta, from waking to deep sleep, skipping the intermediary alpha and theta wave states. By disrupting the chemical process that converted experiences into long-term memories, AcotocA effectively erased the last five or so minutes of memory. The staff would have absolutely no recollection of the kidnapping process. Their last memories would be of business as usual at the restaurant—creating quite the mystery.
“On it,” his wife replied.
“Seb, get to work on the restaurant’s logs and computers. Make certain there are no records of any kind indicating who was here tonight.”
Once Bruce had conceived of his plan—while standing there studying the rich crowd of carnivores in the remote restaurant—he had his computer guru hack into Cinquante Bouches’s online reservation system and erase all records for this particular evening. He’d also picked one of the three couples that had reservations and phoned them to reschedule, thereby making room for Seb and Webb to join the party.
“On it,” the engineer replied.
By this point in the evening, with the physical confrontations behind them and the rest of the operation arranged to run on rails, Bruce should have been ecstatic. His beleaguered brain should now be sipping the sweet nectar of success, enjoying that first cool trickle of the lemonade he’d made from the big lemon life had dealt him.
Adding to the emotional feast was the satisfaction of serving up revenge. Revenge against not just the individual who had stolen his dream, but also a significant sample of the smarmy elites who destroyed others’ lives on a daily basis—all for their personal gain.
But Bruce found himself feeling neither ecstatic nor satisfied.
Standing there with all forty-eight hostages safely sedated at his feet, he couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that something was about to go terribly, horribly wrong.
9
White Knight
Napa, California
DANICA EXHALED long and slow after completing the final anesthetic injection. She’d used veterinary-strength ketamine in combination with lorazepam to minimize injection volume while maximizing incapacitation. The restaurant staff would now be dead to the world for at least two hours and groggy beyond arousal for an additional sixty minutes.
Bruce walked in as she was closing up her bag, a bag she’d pull back out again in a few hours for a similar exercise with the restaurant’s diners. He paused with hands on hips while surveying the scene. She had everyone laid out in a recovery position with mouth down to drain the drool that ketamine created, chin up to keep the airway open, and arms and legs interlocked in a stabilizing position. “Are you sure they’re completely unconscious?”
“Dead to the world.”
“But their eyes?” Bruce said, his face scrunched with skepticism. “They’re cracked open and moving.”
“The lights are on, but nobody’s home,” Danica replied, enjoying a moment of levity. “Eyelids at half-mast is a characteristic effect of the drug I used, as is the nystagmus—the rapid eye movement.”
“It’s going to be one weird experience for them, waking up,” Bruce said. “With all their colleagues in a similar state and with no memory of how they ended up on the kitchen floor and with nothing else out of order.”
“Except the missing reservation information,” she corrected.
“Yes, but that vanished days ago.”
“It also occurred to me that they’ll be able to tell from the remaining food that the dinner service was interrupted.”
“And yet there will be no sign of the diners or any record of who they were. It will be baffling, for sure.”
“They could run DNA tests and take fingerprints using the dirty dishes, you know,” she said as yet another concern struck. Danica worried that they’d missed something critical when throwing the plan together so fast. It had been a conscious tradeoff, exchanging prep time for a restaurant guaranteed to be replete with medical industry executives and investment bankers, thanks to the big conference.
“DNA testing takes way too long to be a threat. Fingerprints are much faster in theory, but in practice the police won’t spend the time or money until they have a good reason. By the time they have one, it will be too late to matter.”
“Even with Governor Rickman among the missing?”
“Granted, that’s an unfortunate and unforeseen complication. But I don’t see it tipping the scales against us. Even the feds can’t follow a trail that isn’t there.”
Danica hoped her husband was right. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that they had everything riding on his master plan. Of course, as AcotocA employees, the four of them were used to having everything riding on his plans. This twist, the diagnostician in her argued, was simply an acceleration. They were condensing the work and the wait from one of his plans down to hours and days rather than months and years. After three long, legitimate shots on goal, she was ready to risk a shortcut.
“If you’re done here, I need your help with the cars,” Bruce said. “That’s going slower than I’d hoped since hardly any of the diners carpooled.”
“Okay, but you didn’t brief me on that part of the mission.”
“Come with me and I’ll show you.”
He walked her out of the kitchen and into the guest parking lot, which still contained eight cars according to her quick count. She saw eight white drawstring kitchen trash bags lined up on the ground, each anchored with a set of car keys. Beside them were two Mini-Segways, compact versions of the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporters popular among mall cops and tour operators.
Danica knew that Seb and Webb had emptied each patron’s pockets into an individual bag. Apparently, the bags that had car keys were now he
re.
“Grab a key and the bag beneath it,” Bruce said, demonstrating. “Use the key to find the car.” He pressed the unlock feature on the fob and a 7 series BMW blinked in reply.
She did the same with a Mercedes CLK.
“Now hop on a Segway, ride it to your car and pop the trunk. Empty the contents of the trunk, glove box, arm rest, and other interior items including the registration information into the bag. We’re hoping to find laptops and tablets, but take everything and we’ll sort it out later. Just be sure to keep the items discrete. Don’t mix one person’s stuff with another’s.”
Danica knew what was coming so this all made sense to her. “Got it.”
“Leave the packed bag on the ground, put the Segway into the trunk, and follow me a mile to the clearing in the woods where we’re hiding the cars.”
Danica understood. “Then I ride back here on the Segway and repeat.”
“Exactly. But first put the used key into the appropriate bag and drop it off in our rental van.”
As Bruce spoke, Seb and Webb came into sight, returning from their latest drop-off. Unfortunately, their Segways weren’t the only vehicles cresting the hill. Danica also spotted a car. A white sedan. Could it be a cop? Was their plan about to fall apart? Had they climbed a mountain only to trip on a molehill?
She looked over at her husband. Bruce had also spotted the intruding vehicle. Judging by his expression, he wasn’t happy.
10
Overkill
Napa, California
AT FIRST, Bruce thought the car was a patrolling cop. Granted, they were well off the beaten path, but perhaps the restaurant used its clout to get extra protection around closing time.
