by Tim Tigner
Achilles slowed the treadmill to a brisk walking speed. “In my experience, two days is about what it takes to soften people up. After sucking on silence for forty-eight hours, the paranoia really kicks into gear. People start speculating well beyond the bounds of rational thinking. They come up with crazy conjecture like organ harvesting and snuff films. They also become more pliable. More desperate to do what they’re told.”
“So the silence is just psychological warfare?”
“Not solely. There’s also a practical reason for the delay.”
“And what’s that?”
“We were kidnapped on a Friday night, Kai. The banks have been closed.”
Kai raised his eyebrows, acknowledging the insight. Then he nodded at the obvious corollary. “So the excitement starts tomorrow.”
18
Rule One
Western Nevada
IT WAS 1:00 on Monday morning in Nevada when Danica brewed the day’s first two cups of coffee. She handed one to her husband before taking the seat beside him at the big desk that was serving as their command center.
They’d spent two days preparing for this moment. They had refined operational plans and performed tactical preparations. They’d shifted their bodies to an earlier schedule and stocked up on sleep. Danica couldn’t confirm feeling either completely confident or fully rested, but she wasn’t overly stressed either. Their plan was relatively simple and, by her best calculations, they had everything important under control.
On the card tables behind them, back near the open bookcase, forty-eight piles of personal belongings lay neatly arranged. One for each kidnappee.
On the desk before them were two laptops, hers to the left, his to the right. In the middle was the intercom’s parent module. Bruce had it connected to several components, including a large monitor. Danica expected to see it displaying a live video of the bunker below, transmitted in high resolution from the intercom, but the monitor was black.
“What’s up with the screen?” she asked.
“Wi-Fi’s off, remember?”
“Of course,” she said, standing.
One of the brilliant fail-safes Bruce had dreamed up was relocating the bunker’s Wi-Fi extender to the freight elevator. That way they could cut off the signal below while maintaining it above by cutting power to the elevator. This simple trick, Bruce explained, would allow them to sleep, leave or otherwise become preoccupied without worrying that someone would somehow hack the system and send out a message.
Bruce had stopped the elevator when it was about two-thirds of the way down. Then he’d removed the control panel up top as well. With the circuit disrupted that way, Webb explained, even an electrician couldn’t get the elevator working from below. Danica found that precaution a bit excessive, but acknowledged that it was better to be overly cautious than underprepared.
She crossed the oak floor to the elevator bank, which now lay exposed at the back of the library, the massive bookcase having been swung aside. Only when she found herself staring at the ruined call box did she recall that the circuit breaker was in the laundry room. With a shrug she course-corrected.
By the time Danica was back at the desk, the Wi-Fi had connected and the entire main room of the bunker was clearly in view, complements of a high-resolution camera. While most were undoubtedly asleep in the bedrooms at that hour, she counted twelve active captives. Eight playing cards at a round table and four more reading books.
After studying the scene for a second, she picked up her coffee cup and took that first sweet sip. “Is it time?”
“Cue the music,” Bruce replied. “Let’s wake 'em up and set the mood.”
Set the mood was right, Danica mused. For fifty years, Hollywood producers had been using the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” as the musical backdrop on darker productions, including Full Metal Jacket, The Devil’s Advocate, Tour of Duty, and more recently Westworld.
She hit PLAY on an iPhone connected to the intercom, and the opening guitar solo began blaring from the theretofore silent speaker fifty feet below. The drums started up a few seconds later, then Mick Jagger chimed in. Danica did not hear it directly, but rather via the intercom microphone. Although typically a push-to-talk device, Bruce had set it to vigilant mode, so sound was always transmitting.
The two of them watched with shared satisfaction as the dozen active occupants all jolted upright in their chairs and turned toward the intercom. Seconds later, both bathroom doors flew open and the bedrooms began to empty. Danica and Bruce sipped coffee and sat in silence until all forty-eight of their meal tickets and both their spies had congregated before the intercom as if praying to a god.
“They seem to have figured out the significance of the red box,” Bruce noted. “They’re gathered around it, but no one is standing in it.”
“It’s a smart crowd. Should I put the song on repeat?” Danica asked.
“No, once will do it this first time. We’ll get to the repeat phase soon enough.”
Bruce waited while the song’s entire taunting tail played out and faded to silence before he hit the TALK button on the sound distortion console. When he spoke, his voice echoed in the same cold robotic tone often heard in action movies. “Rule One: No questions.”
“What do you want with us?” came the immediate response. It was Webb, shouting on cue.
Bruce didn’t reply, of course. That was the point. That was the plan.
Beyond the never-to-be-mentioned Uber driver, whose death Danica had mentally filed away as a tragic traffic accident, they’d only suffered one significant deviation from plan. An unfortunate coincidence.
In an attempt to stop a group of angry bankers from lynching the Maltese couple, a do-gooder hostage had inadvertently forced Seb and Webb to ditch their ear mics, lest they be discovered in the proposed search for spies.
The mics Seb and Webb had worn were more a precaution than an operational necessity, but losing that verbal feedback loop had put a chink in her team’s armor.
Danica watched the crowd react with the intense interest of a researcher observing an experiment. Her medical specialty was anesthesiology, not clinical psychology, but she found the situation fascinating nonetheless. Four dozen people, detained, disoriented, endangered and deprived of information for more than two days are suddenly offered a ray of sunshine, only to see one of their own immediately extinguish it with his incompetence. The networks had never broadcast a drama so compelling.
Danica found that watching the events unfold on a screen that might otherwise be showing a sitcom or movie somehow made the experience seem normal, even though this was by far the most devious, dangerous and unusual thing she’d ever done.
About half the crowd either dipped their heads in defeat or rolled their eyes in frustration at Webb’s blunder. A quarter just looked confused. The remainder became belligerent, confronting and cursing the man they knew as Webster Gold. Trey even grabbed him by the shirt collar as he’d done the first day with Oz, but apparently remembering how that had turned out, released his grip almost as quickly.
Had real violence broken out, Bruce would have intervened. Demanded a stop. But fortunately it didn’t, so the scenario played out as planned.
“I’m sorry,” Webb said, both to his peers and to the intercom. “I got excited. I wasn’t thinking.”
Bruce did not key the microphone. He would say nothing—for two hours. Instead, he put “Paint it Black” on repeat.
Danica spoke, but not into the microphone. “It just occurred to me, reflecting on what we’ve seen the past two days, that we’ve done something historic.”
“What’s that?” Bruce asked, turning from the monitor to face her.
“We’ve confirmed the Stanford prison experiment.”
Bruce crinkled his brow, then took a sip of coffee. “The one where they arbitrarily split students into either prisoners or guards?”
Danica nodded. “And each student seamlessly assumed his or her assigned role—to the
point where the guards were enforcing authoritarian measures and subjecting their fellow students to psychological torture.”
Bruce set his mug down. “I never considered doing anything remotely like this before. My whole life, I played by the rules. But now that I’m here, I don’t feel bad about it. To be honest, I’m feeling pretty good. We’re fighting them the way they fought us. Cleverly and covertly.”
Danica saw a fire ignite in his eyes, cathartic and intense. She let it burn.
“The big bankers and blue-chip CEOs in the bunker didn’t build their careers without creating casualties and then climbing over the bodies. Sitting safely in their glass skyscrapers, those hotshots constantly lied, cheated, stole, bribed, cajoled and conned their way out of trouble and into riches while the rest of us suckers slaved away. For once and for all, you and I are going to beat them at their own game. They aren’t victims, they’re predators—and turnabout is fair play.”
Danica considered mentioning the dolphins who’d be netted with the sharks, but thought better of it. There was a term for that unfortunate but unavoidable circumstance, one acknowledged and embraced by law enforcement organizations worldwide. Collateral damage.
19
Direct Address
Western Nevada
WHEN THE ROBOTIC VOICE WENT QUIET, I bet myself there would be two hours of silence before it came back on. Long enough to inflict terror, short enough to fit nicely within a daily plan. I had no way to measure those 120 minutes, but enjoyed the speculation nonetheless.
In no time, some of my fellow prisoners began letting anxiety get the best of them. The music didn’t help. While I practiced memorizing playing cards, attempting to get through a deck in under a minute, and Katya immersed herself in Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, Trey went looking for trouble. No surprise where.
This time the obnoxious banker had seven sycophants in tow. Apparently, the diners from another table had joined him. It shocked me, the poor judgment that otherwise intelligent people sometimes showed when picking a leader, yet it happened all the time.
Like hyenas targeting a wounded caribou, the gang surrounded the small table where Oz and Sabrina were playing chess.
I stayed seated.
Trey put his hands on the back of Sabrina’s chair so Oz couldn’t ignore him.
The room went quiet.
Trey leaned forward. “I’m not feeling particularly politically correct at the moment, so I’ll skip the sweet talk and get straight to the point. It’s going to get ugly if you don’t tell us what you know.”
Katya looked up from her book, then over at me.
I stayed seated.
Oz looked up from the chessboard and met Trey’s eye. Although we didn’t discuss it, I knew he’d spent the past two days replaying his initial confrontation with the bigot in his mind. Oz had a tell. He kept a golden trinket in his pocket, a coin or token that he rubbed to vent nervous energy.
“You want to know what I know?” Oz asked.
“I insist.”
“Very well. I know bullies act because deep down, they’re intolerably insecure. They sense their own inferiority, and it bothers them incessantly. Their brutish behavior is an uninspired attempt to convince themselves that they’re not second-rate. But no matter how many pigtails they pull or sucker punches they throw, the itch never fades for long, because the reality is—they are lacking.”
Trey turned red and his face contorted this way and that, but his mouth couldn’t muster a comeback. After a short silence taut enough to crack glass, he nodded toward the pair poised behind Oz.
They lifted their suspect by both armpits while a third pulled his chair aside.
Trey walked around the table to stand toe-to-toe with his victim. He made a fist and cocked his arm. “Last chance.”
“It’s a reasonable tactic,” I said. “Threatening your suspect in front of the camera. Waiting to see if our captors intervene. But there’s a downside in it for you.”
Trey clearly wanted to ignore me, but when everyone else turned in my direction he didn’t have a choice. “Oh, really?” was his clever comeback.
There was nothing to be gained by pummeling Trey and his foolish followers. Escaping our shared cage would likely require cooperation. But I couldn’t permit any silliness in the meantime. Not if it meant watching innocents get hurt.
As with many professions, rock climbers acquire skills that appear miraculous to outsiders. That’s because the onlooker sees the end result without having observed the thousands of practice hours and countless repetitions required to make it possible.
I rose and walked in Trey’s direction, causing every onlooker to momentarily stop breathing. Then I brushed past him and walked a couple of yards further to the side of the staircase. Without so much as a glance back in Trey’s direction, I grabbed one of the aluminum balusters with both hands, one at shoulder level, the other up over my head. Zoning out everything around, the way I did when climbing at breakneck heights without a rope, I slowly made my lower body rigid and then lifted my legs off the floor. I pivoted them out until I was hanging horizontally, like a flag flying at head height. I rested there for a few seconds, still and perpendicular, before continuing upward until I’d swung a full 180-degrees from where I’d started.
While gasps erupted around the room, I moved one hand atop the handrail, then the other, at which point I began an inverted climb up the stairs on my hands. My feet eventually hit the ceiling, but I kept walking the handrail, up to the walkway and then along it until I was above the middle of the room.
“The downside is that whatever tactic you try on Oz, I’m going to employ on you, given that there’s no more evidence of his guilt than yours.” With that, I swung my feet around and down, releasing my grip on the handrail once everything was right-side up again. This landed me squarely inside the red box. Fortunately, my feet stuck.
Looking up at the camera, I spoke loud enough to be heard over the incessant Stones’ song. “You’ve clearly got us sufficiently riled up. Why not save us all a bit of time and get started?”
20
Reality TV
Western Nevada
BRUCE STUDIED the confrontational scene on his screen with the intensity of an air traffic controller. Flight operations wasn’t an unfitting analogy, he mused. His goal was to bring all that precious cargo home without incident. The gymnast now talking to the camera was like a brewing storm.
“Are you going to work with him or ignore him?” Danica asked.
It was a good question. “Who is he?”
Danica sorted through her files, the photo gallery that contained a snapshot of each guest’s driver’s license and business card. “Name’s Kyle Achilles. He didn’t have a card. He lives in Palo Alto.”
“So he’s a local. Google him. Let’s find out who we’re dealing with.”
Bruce kept his eyes on the screen while Danica typed. Achilles was already back in his seat, flipping playing cards as if fascinated by the pictures. Leaving the red box rather than standing there like a schoolboy waiting for a reply was a savvy move. His second of the morning. Achilles had also averted the lynching. The Maltese man and his wife had slipped away somewhere off camera while Achilles was doing his circus performance.
“That explains it,” Danica said, reading from her computer. “Kyle Achilles was an Olympic biathlete, but now he’s a rock climber. His specialty is free solo climbing, whatever that means.”
“So he’s not with the healthcare conference, but he likely has sponsorship dollars. That’s good to know. And if he’s an Olympian, then he’s tough, determined and capable. That’s even better to know. Who is he with?”
“She has a business card. Katya Kozara is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford.”
“So she might be part of the conference. Investment banks like using prestige professors as consultants. Makes for a good name drop, especially when they can’t point to their own pedigree.”
“So are you
going to work with him? Show our guests that you can be reasonable?”
“It’s not time to be reasonable yet. And I don’t want to empower anybody who’s capable. Let’s stick to the plan and let them stew another hour. Should be amusing to watch.”
Danica pulled her computer into her lap and put her feet up on the desk. “You do the watching. I’m going to keep googling our guests.”
Bruce studied the drama sixty feet below while Danica typed away. He couldn’t see nearly as much as he wanted to and cursed himself for the shortsightedness that left him with just one camera—albeit a very good one, equipped with battery backup and infrared.
During his preparation, he’d reasoned that with no way to escape, it didn’t matter what people did. They were essentially locked in a box. Plus he had spies. Two sets of eyes. So why bother watching? Add to that the fact that his to-do list had been packed, and he never seriously considered adding all the cameras required to put electronic eyes on every room.
Then Seb and Webb were forced to ditch their ear mics. That wasn’t really a problem. They were still there, still acting as his eyes, still able to intervene and capable of alerting him to anything serious using the intercom. It was just annoying.
Bruce chuckled at the irony of his own circumstance. Like his guests, he was craving information.
Sometime later, Danica broke his concentration with a sudden question. “What would we do if the police showed up right now?”
Reflexively, he looked toward the tables containing the forty-eight piles of personal property. “We’d throw all those bags in the gun room with the AcotocA headsets and swing the bookcase shut. Then we’d click our computers over to email and answer the door with friendly expressions.”
