by a b
She would learn later in life in the trial and error of dating that it was because this attitude got the most attention from men who wanted to be challenged, but in her first brush with the blonde agent, it came naturally. The hall door shut behind her and her brain was like an FM dial flipping from static to music then back to static to music, drowning out her recent anger.
Chapter 52 Fall Guy
Legacy kicked a rolling chair and sent it scuttling into a “wall” which had been framed, but had no drywall to stop or slow any approaching object, such as a rolling chair. It was not the only thing in motion. The morning clouds passed quickly out to sea, the afternoon batted an eye a moment later and the sunlight angled through the shades of Tykes’ apartment. It was almost the next day.
Legacy thought of the riders moving across the country, a steady march toward their unsuspecting target. They had practiced this six times already and their professionalism at taking someone was daunting. They could have her by now, he thought.
Seventy glowing faces played on a loop; he hadn’t gotten rid of a single one in almost seven hours. Each was totally different in character, but all matched every single criterion that Legacy could squeeze into his head about Blue. He was getting a headache – without some kind of new criteria, there was no way to match her to Blue’s type. Legacy knew that he had all of the motives of Blue the criminal, but he was lacking some connection into Blue, the man who desires sex because he can’t have it.
Legacy knew that mimicry could not replace experience any more than his imagination could blunt the real blade that was about to be put to some young girl’s throat. Useless random thoughts popped into his head.
The beguiling beauty of Helen of Troy had created the first literary reference of a sex crime. Few people viewed her case the way he had, as an abduction and subjugation that led to dependence. Legacy had no problem rewriting literature to suit a more behavioral view of the subject. Anna Karenina was the story of a woman who went mad because of a lack of creativity, unable to think up more than one solution to her failed marriage, not because of a heated indiscretion. Legacy felt like Abelard, after his cutting recommitment to God, the tools to manufacture hysteria over sex had long since dwindled in him. Whenever Legacy could not manage to manufacture a certain way of thinking within himself, he looked to others who had done it for him in literature and the arts. It didn’t seem to be helping today, except that it increased the tempo of the pounding in his head. Maybe his mind was in countdown mode and it wanted the rest of his body to understand the urgency in the form of an aching throb.
He walked into the kitchen where Tyke was almost swallowing the phone his mouth so close to the receiver. It had to be Kelly. A brief search of the cupboards produced a bottle of Advil sitting among aging condiment bottles and spices. Tyke put down the phone and a thunderbolt struck Legacy at the same time.
Legacy knew where to get his missing criteria, the answer was staring him in the face.
“You always want to have sex but you don’t right?”
“That’s a nice way to talk to a friend.”
“Right?”
“Sums up my existence.”
A glow welled up behind the corneas of Legacy’s eyes as he formed a question and it burst into a bright fireball at Tyke’s answer. “What is it about Kelly that tortures you, and what brings you bliss?”
“It’s the same thing, dog.” Tyke let down some of his slang and a surprisingly raw young man’s voice spilled out “I never know what’s going to happen next.”
Legacy thought back, it was exactly what Wagner had said about him. He should have seen this part of Blue’s attraction, his screening process the physical, and but it was all about the mental.
“Mystery, and defiance.” Blue valued the emotional response to the pictures as much as he did the physical. He rushed back into the room with the screens. “Speed them up Tyke, do it now!” One new filter might get him down to a manageable number. Images flew by, the cycle played twice and he seemed to be lying in wait for a certain picture on the second run through. He walked up to the screens like a man possessed as it paused on a single image. “Is she famous?” He pointed to the beautiful image on the screen. The shadow of his finger brushed a fresh rosy cheek, devious eyes pushed out through the filtered light and color. The response time seemed like it was ages.
Tyke nodded. “She is the next Britney.”
’Where is she, now?” Legacy barked, breaking into a run to the phone.
*****
Boots thudded against the compressed soil, kicking up the top layer of dust just enough to cloud the next foot’s descent into the fresh footprint that came before. It was too organized for a stampede, anyway. Hooves rarely supported the kind of weaponry of these lethal pack animals.
A sea of cars separated a battalion of agents from multiple sets of ascending stairs that led to a brightly lit arena thumping with bass in an evening sky dominated by a an almost metallic silver full moon.
Wilkes didn’t like the long shadows cast by his agents, they were shrieking announcements in a quiet business. Everything was amplified tonight however. The voices on the radio were a little too frosty, they knew who their prey had in captivity. Laura wasn’t a picture on the news to some of these young men and women. Imagine the effect of the personification of the agency they served, on continual tortured display. A bitter anger fueled an acidic smell on the breath of his field agents. Wilkes knew that he had to keep everyone on a short leash tonight, and even if he didn’t he had Legacy in his ear reminding him.
“What if it’s not tonight?” Wilkes had asked Legacy not an hour before while he was on route to the site.
“It will be tonight, I’ll stake your reputation on it.” A hint of warmth in the ice that had formed between these old acquaintances, Wilkes had to cover his chuckle by clearing his throat.
Chrome reflections of helmet-clad agents distorted their strides making them impossibly long and fluid. The tightly packed cars forced the agents into a single file zigzag path. The private security guards had told Wilkes that the situation was under control.
Sabita Fare was a complicated, sarcastic version of the reproduction of youth and beauty that pop promoters had almost given up on before she came along. Her name, pronounced like Tabitha with an ‘S’, was better known than the president among teens and tweens. Of course the president never had a hit single or a show on Disney TV. She had a private army guarding her because at 17, she was the most stalked persona in the world. Smeared eyeliner became her trademark, as well as her ability to well into tears while standing strong and belting out her newest hit “Tear Seduction” in a crystal clear lyric pop voice. The story within the song told of a girl who used the tears of one break up to seduce her next man.
The childish whim embodied in the double entendre of the bridge she currently shouted into the night sky with a mixture of triumph and loss, “irresistible miss, irresistible misery, irresistible miss me, miss me, now you’ve got to kiss me.” Lyrics like these set her above the bubble gum, boyfriend-likes-my-best-friend songs that earned her contemporaries one record in the charts followed by a predictable spokesmodel gig in the mid-twenties, and a predictable thirties rehab.
The crowd roared as her voice cracked - a well-practiced, oddly melodic squeal. The commotion around her in the deep shadows of the wings was not unusual, not that she would have noticed anyway. When Sabita took the stage, her devotion was to the next note.
The cheers of a packed crowd of teenage boys and girls filled the outdoor auditorium to capacity and spilled out of the exits. It reached fever pitch when she put her ruby lips to the microphone and chirped, “Thanks, goodnight.”
In a spry transformation, she walked gracefully off stage, her hips following the beat of an internal tune. Calls of “We love you!” and “One more song!” followed her into the pitch black. A hand clamped down on her arm immediately as she came off the stage and a voice shouted above the crowd. “No encore tonight hon
ey, we need to get you out of here.”
It was her father. He had taken a call from an FBI Agent Wilkes as his daughter first stepped out into the spotlight. He hurried her through the backstage maze toward the sanctuary of the trailer. Wilkes had promised to take her into protective custody. Until then, there was hardly a safer place for her than in front of twenty thousand adoring fans. On the way from the stage, he ran into two private security officers, one a towering man, the other a bit diminutive. They proceeded to grab the outside arms of the couple protectively and guide them backstage.
The corridors were surprisingly empty as they navigated the way down below street level. The security officers were of the minimum wage variety, and they exuded boredom and more of a commitment at sneaking peaks at Sabita’s low cut bustier wet with sweat after a strenuous concert than noticing their surroundings. They never paused to look deeply enough into the shadows to notice two unconscious guards, stripped of their uniforms. The bodies were hidden only feet from the intersecting corridors they were about to pass. Everyone was looking straight ahead.
“Wilkes.” Legacy’s voice crackled in Wilkes’ ear, and in an unconscious reaction his teeth ground together. Enamel on enamel, he hadn’t taken orders in the field in almost a decade. Legacy showed his characteristic sensitivity. “Wilkes, I’m telling you to seal off the area now, the men who have Laura are in that arena.”
“That has yet to be established.” Wilkes grumbled.
“It’s a fact.” Silently, and eagerly, a part of Wilkes already knew that it was true. Skepticism was the inherited mask of caution that all upper level bureaucrats wore to work. Rising to the position of director had changed Wilkes. It had made him risk averse, but his memories still overflowed with decisions made that were way over the lines as they were currently drawn. He was like an impressionist painter who’d gone back to painting realistic bowls of fruit – his current product was solid, tangible and acceptable.
Wilkes responded, “I thought I’d wrecked this train.” It was the first time he’d mentioned the leak. Legacy said, “It would be more appropriate if this concert were in Phoenix.”
“Out of the ashes, eh?” Wilkes warmed up.
“Who do you have leading the team?” Legacy asked as if no answer would please him.
“The best I’ve got. I had to pull him off of his assignment babysitting on this wasteland of an agent who used to be my friend.” He said.
Legacy replied, “How many people were watching me?”
Legacy remembered the operations that Wilkes supervised back in the day. “I don’t want perfect intel, that’s the easiest kind to fuck up. I just want to know one more thing about my opponent than he knows about me.” He still operated that way. Wilkes would have one more person-watching Legacy than he knew about if he had to fill the entire Alexandria office.
There was something strange laced into his memories of Wilkes, it felt like respect but tasted bitter. He had known that Wilkes answered to a higher power, which meant he twisted the information that Legacy exacted from his targets like a rifle spins a bullet inside a barrel. It’s supposed to make the result more accurate, deadly – but part of Legacy never believed that Wilkes had the aim or the taste for the kill. People who rise to director status either have a taste for the kill or they live in compromise. Legacy didn’t trust compromise.
Wilkes’ voice crackled through, coming to a sharp point “They’re at the gate.”
Legacy changed gears for a moment and thought about how boring it must be assigned to look over his shoulder. There was absolutely no challenge to eavesdropping on Legacy. After a short time, the unfortunate agent certainly would figure out that he barely noticed additional presences when they shouted at him. He’d come out of the woodwork and stand paces from him in the sunlight, but he’d never understand a thing about Legacy. So unless Legacy himself opened up – the mistake he’d made with Wagner – the poor mole would be privy to absolutely nothing.
Poor bastard, he thought with a sardonic grin.
Chapter 53 Abduction Junction
Brent felt his senses sharpen with each angular footstep he made toward the shining jewel that was his goal. He took the stone steps three at a time, his gear silent like he was hovering in space. His team were ghosts behind him – well-armed ghosts with a serious, solid purpose.
Brent was surrounded by a jacket of anger barely kept in check, and that was why he didn’t chatter. He kept his orders in tight bursts. Brent blew by the gate guards, delegated one of the agents at the rear to explain what looked like a small invasion to a couple of fat men in neon security shirts and caps. He heard their voices become raised behind him. This was his chance to let out some of his mood.
“Don’t shoot the civs unless you have to.” He spoke into a headset that connected everyone in his troop. There were no laughs, but a thaw of tension.
The crowd was pressing for an encore. It rang through outer halls and passages of the near deserted stadium. The only stragglers were the few people who’d left the venue to smoke. What an oddity to have people leave a concert to smoke, Brent mused, giving hand signals to his team to fan out across the natural flecked granite stone floor. Shrieks of surprise greeted the approach of the militia, but the sound melted into the evening sky blanketed by a chanting teenage army inside the venue.
Brent could see the door to the backstage at the end of the hall. Three men in neon polo shirts rose from their folding chairs, dropping stale crumbs from the ribbing of the material that betrayed their sedentary style of “guarding.” On cue, their radios crackled.
“Send the agents through, problem at the trailer.”
The security guard with the largest waist and shortest inseam then pointed to Brent with his walkie-talkie and said, “Are you the agents?”
Obviously, he was the brains of the operation.
Brent ignored him, and jumped the tables set up to barricade the backstage door in a single fluid movement. He plunged into the dimly lit passage, seeing out of the corner of his eye a sign that said “Restricted Area.”
The chanting suddenly stopped, that was a very bad sign.
Moments before and farther ahead, another group was still on the move, the security team escorting Sabita and her father down the grated steps to ground level. On one side of them was a private parking area, on the other the sound of the crowd chanting in rhythm was a booming heartbeat vibrating in the metal doors, even in the silence between syllables, “SA – BI – TA”
Sabita had heard it a thousand times, but the wall of sound seemed to annoy her father who wanted to be alert to any approach in the corridors. They came to the exit. The short one slammed into the wide bar with his elbow and the door swung out to reveal a world that concert goers seldom see.
The grounds behind the venue hummed with a rumble of generators and idling diesel engines. This was where the equipment buses and dressing trailers parked. Forget everything commonly associated with the words bus and trailer, however, when putting them together with a superstar tour. The trailers were packed tightly with luxury items, furnished with the latest in chic decor. They closely resembled a compact version of a five star suite. Sabita’s had large tinted windows for a public display of privacy and a walk in glass refrigerated pantry that housed three carefully sculpted fruit bouquets (fruit cut to look like flowers) and an assortment of sushi flown from the coast twice a day.
Sabita seemed eager to get back to her refuge and lock herself in and wait. Her father kept glancing in to the shadows that fell between all of the parked trucks. He didn’t notice what the tall security guy did. He put his hand in front of Sabita protectively and hushed the group as he brought them to a full stop.
A pause when he looked at the gleaming trailer. Squinting seriously, like he was surveying a prizefighter lined up to separate his head from his shoulders. He shook his head and pointed at an empty chair beside the door, “Wasn’t there a security guard in front when you left?”
Sabita’s father let
his anxiety show “I left so quickly.”
Sabita raised an eyebrow. “There were two, there are always two.”
The small guard sounded a little excited like an unconcerned onlooker in a bar fight, “There aren’t two now.” He was obviously the kind of prick that thought that other people’s problems were amusing.
The tall one said in a quiet ominous tone, “Someone’s inside.” He took charge, backing them through the door from which they’d just come. A door across the hall emptied into the front of the auditorium, the guard put the walkie-talkie to his lips and announced “Send the agents through, problem at the trailer.” He switched frequencies in order to talk directly to the house manager. “House lights up.”
“We’re going out into the crowd, it’ll be safer there. Wear this.” He pointed to the short guard.
