The Big Wheel

by Scott Archer Jones

  Sibyl, on the other hand, expressed great admiration for the field greens with mustard dressing. She waved her fork—he ignored her. She stabbed him in the back of his hand.

  “Oww.”

  “Check this out. This file is a hyper-tree. O’Brien’s Security must have turned over a bunch of raw data. This one is about headquarters, and here’s O’Brien’s residence. Look!” She opened up the branch for the mansion and touched a leaf. “It’s a floor plan with the electric wiring.”

  “That’s the alarm system. There, up in the corner, the symbol for a motion detector, and that’s a camera.”

  “I want one of your Chinese parsley gnocchi. That buttery stuff smells so good. Look, here’s a map of the grounds.”

  “Ground shakers. They installed geophones.” He nodded sagely, and little lightning flashes went off. He listened to afternoon rain softly coming his way, and he huddled up against a Polish tree.

  “Here’s another part of the hyper-tree, flagged in red. Maybe an industrial complex.”

  He pointed at the lower right corner. “Research. In Georgia. Maybe where they built the Artifact?”

  “This could take days. There’s so much stuff in this memdevice.”

  “Of course it’s huge—we stole raw data. The important thing is that it provides us with one of five pieces we need.” He cracked his knuckles and stretched his shoulders. The dream of his Prababcia’s orchard faded, even as he tried to tease it back.

  “Which are?”

  “The first is good intelligence—and this is a huge step forward. The second is a crew. That’s you and me now.”

  “And the last three?”

  “We need to know what would break O’Brien. That leads us to number four, a plan.” He had lost count. How many pieces of the puzzle?

  “Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the fifth?” She raised one eyebrow, and his pulse leapt.

  She wore his bathrobe, and he imagined how it could fall open. The grin started building up from within his chest. “Another heart-stopping bout of sex.”

  “Give me my five hundred back.”

  ***

  After the Mousse Grenadine, Thomas and Angie had settled into coffee and cognac. The room hung around them, soft and ivory colored, like a linen tent. Trouble evaporated, disappeared from his horizon.

  She was heartless. “So you don’t have a clue on how to beat LeFarge….”

  He grunted. “True. But I’ve got a good team to help, once we root out our spy.”

  “If there is one.”

  “An awkward point.”

  She forgave him. “And this trip is half about finding out.”

  “We need to keep our focus. It would be nice to capture Zlata—that’s the key thing. With him in hand, I can come to terms with the Governor, and LeFarge’s purpose will go away.”

  Her phone chimed; she picked it up from the white tablecloth. “Message. It’s from our detective.” She peered at it. “Goddamn! He lost them. He went next door for a burger, and they left before he got back!” She held the iMob screen out to him.

  He stared. Staring did not change the message. “Aaah. Coast to coast for nothing.”

  She leapt to her feet and stomped about the room. He could hear her muttering under her breath. He thought it was Italian. With an angry gesture, she cocked her arm back to throw the vidi across the room. She stopped. Whirling towards him, she flashed out a smile like the dazzling sky. “Oh well. Sometimes you hire a ritardato.” Those shoulders came up in a shrug and her breasts saluted him.

  Too many disappointments had piled one on the other. His lip came up in a snarl. “We don’t even know if it was them.”

  Angie grinned. “Cheer up. You got a great meal out of it.”

  It was true. A snicker toyed around at the back of his mind. He nodded. “Tell your private dickhead he can kiss his fee goodbye unless he comes up with something. Maybe he can get a description. Maybe they said where they were going. Maybe they paid with a check. Something.”

  She tapped away at the screen. “Done.”

  “That’s half the trip’s goals wasted.”

  “And the other half? We can’t draw out LeFarge’s people sitting in a hotel suite.”

  He was nonplussed. “So you want to go out?”

  “It could work.”

  “Too late for shopping or sightseeing. It’s clubbing, then.”

  She dipped her head. “Gay or straight?”

  “Loud.” Maybe he could score a little something.

  “I’ll ask the concierge.”

  ***

  “Now what?” asked Sibyl. “It’s hours and hours before breakfast.” She rolled up off the plush rug and grabbed the bathrobe up in her arms.

  “Well, I could pay you the five hundred. Then you could spend it on me. I do feel like celebrating.”

  “And how do you want to celebrate?”

  He fished at the dangling hem of the robe trying to get it back. The room was a little chilly. “Let’s find a band.”

  “And champagne.”

  “And where do we find a punk club with champ?”

  “I’ll ask the concierge.”

  Chapter Seventeen: Yo, Bartender

  The fourth day after they hit Los Angeles, Robko had a job interview in a location he found remarkable. The address was unmarked. A brutalized gate bent and bowed away from the parking lot towards the street, and it had a lock he didn’t want to mess with. He ghosted up the chain link and dropped to the other side. He hiked across a desolate, pockmarked spread of concrete to an industrial building. Just beside a giant rollup door, an open man-door yawned. He slipped inside. The vast space opened out through the warehouse with some sky-walks, some portable toilets, and small job-site trailers crowding the sides. Halfway down, two semi-trucks were parked, their doors open. Men swarmed about unloading them. A man in a beret, leather jacket, and sunglasses paced forward and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here for the job interview.”

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “And your name is?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  The man in sunglasses jerked around towards the crowd milling about the back of the trucks. “Manny,” he shouted. “Your new dude is here.”

  Robko strolled over to an obese man waving at him. “You looking for me?” It came out a growl, but perhaps one not unkindly.

  “If you really are Manny.”

  “Cautious little shit, aren’t you. I’m Manny, all day every day. What’s your name?”

  “Steve Gordon.”

  “That’s who they told me to expect. You don’t look like no Gordon… or a Steve.”

  Robko shook his head. “The Gordons are on my mother’s side.”

  Manny scowled. “Funny, too. Have you bartended before?”

  “Yeah. A couple of roadhouses, a club back east, a restaurant in a ski resort.”

  Manny jutted a finger up in the air. Stiff, black hair covered the back of his hand. “What’s in a Pink Lady?”

  “Gin, cream, egg white. Normally served in gay bars.”

  Manny held up a second finger. “What’s a Strangler?”

  “Schnapps, vodka, rum, and cranberry juice. Normally served to people who plan to puke later.”

  Now Manny had three fingers in the air as he counted up. “What drugs and drink are you into?”

  “If I said ‘nothing,’ would you believe me?”

  Manny closed his fist and scrubbed it across the black bristle on his chin. “Yeah right.”

  “Downers. I don’t drink, and I don’t do opiates or barbs while I work.” On my jobs, not yours.

  “You’re hired. Just for a week, to see if you make the cut. When can you start?”

  Robko raised his shoulders and opened his eyes wide. He cocked his head sideways. “Now’s fine.”

  “I hoped you’d say that. We’re short-handed. Let me show you the set-up.” They trod through the hu
ge space.

  Robko asked, “What do you call the operation?”

  “We used to call it PowerUp. Now it’s Phatal. With a ‘Ph.’ Get it?”

  “How often do you move?”

  Manny said, “We pick out a new joint every weekend or so. Sometimes we slip the owner something; sometimes it’s abandoned, and we just move in. These trailers bring in the lights and the stage, including the sound equipment. My stuff, the bars, they come in catering trucks. We sell booze and only booze—we got customers in the crowd who handle everything else, and we stay drug-free. If I catch you stealing, dealing, high, or screwing the customers—either male or female—you’re finished. I’ll be watching. A little buzz is all right with me, but if you go space-cowboy, I will personally kick in your teeth while your replacement holds you down.”

  This suited Robko. He now knew where Manny stood on labor relations. “What days do I work?”

  “We’re only open Friday and Saturday nights, but we spend Thursday and Friday setting up and Sunday tearing down. We always tear down and park the trucks somewhere else, even if we’re using the joint twice. The job runs four days a week, but they’re long days. I pay at the end of each night, just in case the Bluemen interrupt us sometime during the weekend.”

  “What’s the risk factor?”

  “Big enough to make the pay worthwhile. We’ve been caught once in five years.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “Four C a day. We take January and February off, so if you’re permanent, the gig is fifty three large a year, tax free.”

  “Are there concessions besides the bars?”

  Manny stuck his little finger into his nostril and dug around. He withdrew the fat digit and inspected the end of it as if an unusual gemstone perched there. “Curious little dick, ain’t you? Well, you’ll find out anyway, so there’s no harm in saying. I got a couple of upscale restaurants that send us roach coaches. The celebs love the designer food. They like the performance art too.”

  “Performance art?”

  “Yeah. Last weekend Dickie Bettson brought in his motorized pterodactyl. This weekend, they got two guys in gold lamé tuxedos with jack hammers. They’ll bust up rocks by the front door.” Manny held his hands out in front of him, clenched his fists, and jerked them up and down. His belly jiggled.

  “How many customers?”

  “Usually three to four hundred, sometimes more. It’s all viral. We message a few of our outlaw hosts where the location is and who the bands are, and they spread the word around the community.”

  “So you draw in three hundred party animals a night. What’s the cover?”

  “Only a hundred and fifty a pop. And there’s what you might call substantial markup on the alcohol and food.” Manny rubbed his thumb and forefinger together—his hand resembled a fat, wriggling badger biting the end of his arm.

  Robko cracked up, delighted by the whole setup. “Have you ever considered buying a liquor license and a legit location?”

  Manny slapped him on the shoulder—it caused Robko to stagger a bit. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  ***

  Thomas needn’t have worried. The Tran Cam deal proved to be simple. O’Brien held a secret or two over the head of the CEO. Once the man rolled over to the pressure, a first Tran Cam stooge added the search for the bike into the stack of national security requests. Stooge two labeled the feed to the team as a real-time report to a secretive Federal department. It happened so casually, Thomas knew all other types of abuse must occur all the time.

  Thomas gave three of his staff the job of tracking Tran Cam. Between them, they checked the data feed all day every day, a recipe for burnout that Angie remedied with rotation. The rest of the team moved on to the missing memory devices, the other nine. The team invented something called the Wolf Trap.

  “Here’s the deal,” Thomas said to the assembled team. “We have nine loose memory devices out there that contain sensitive material, both financial and political. Zlata boosted them, and Dupont sold them on to a single buyer who’s now auctioning them.”

  He talked about the recovery of the first two and segued on to current efforts. “O’Brien is paying some serious talent to search upstream for Dupont’s buyer, but the buyer has masked himself well. The memdevices show up on the market through different salesmen—we know that by the first two.”

  “So, do we search for the buyer, or do we stay out of the way of O’Brien’s other talent?” asked Accounting. She wore her glasses pushed up on her forehead, her mouth a block of teeth surrounded by red lipstick.

  “Let’s move downstream, see if we can find another path to the devices,” Thomas said.

  Legal drummed on the table with his favorite yellow number 2 pencil. “O’Brien had good instincts on the second device.”

  Angie said, “Look for the victim.”

  Insurance sniffed and blew his nose. “We can track the devices as they come into play. We need to single out the most vulnerable people in the O’Brien net, the ones who would be blackmailed, and watch them.”

  “Behavioral change,” said another team member. “We keep track of what they do, and if it changes big-time, someone has their hooks into ‘em.”

  The idea gelled right in front of Thomas. “So you stake them out like lambs and wait for the wolf to come hunting?”

  Auditing bared her teeth… on the hunt. “Right. Focus on the high-risk targets. Either the ones who could do the most for a blackmailer, or the ones with the worst secrets.”

  Patents dug at his cheek with his fingernails. He needed specifics. “What do you look for?”

  Legal twirled his pencil through his fingers like a drummer showing off before the cymbal crash. “Changes in voting patterns. Any financial change that smells like it gives up some control. Major liquidation of personal assets.”

  Thomas said, “It means slow going, trying to find each device one at a time.”

  Insurance rubbed his tall, shining forehead. “Chasing Miss Sibyl turned out a total bust. We don’t have anything to do until Zlata and his bike surface anyway.”

  Angie said, “We go down through a list—”

  Patents jumped on it like a dog, his head swiveling as he shot a demanding scan up and down the table. “What list?”

  Auditing spoke the unspeakable. “O’Brien has to give it to us. He’s the original blackmailer.”

  Patents slapped the table. “Yes! We take each possible lamb and make an individual profile for what to look for, and then we watch the lamb.”

  Auditing asked, “How do you watch?”

  “That part is easy,” said the IT guy. “I can make sofbots that crawl the news feeds and report back on pattern changes of your lambs. The first ones will be crude, but I can refine them over time. Add artificial intelligence, learning systems, that kind of thing.” He beamed a round face full of joy. At least he was going to have fun.

  Insurance wagged his head. “O’Brien won’t want to give up the names and the crimes.”

  Thomas said, “I’ll offer him compartmentalization. For each lamb, only three staffers—Angie, the profiler and our botmaster—will know who the lamb is.” Thomas’s phone messaged him. It read “I Once Ruled,” and the sender’s i.d. was blocked. “Anyone else getting weird-ass texts?”

  Blank looks washed across the room. “Never mind. I’ll set up some time with the Governor, today if I can, and explain what you want and why. Good work, everyone. Jean, could you stay behind? I’ve got a side project I want you to work on.”

  Jean came from Auditing. Thomas knew her better than some of his staff; she had been one of the original four, all Angie’s friends. A brusque, thick-skinned woman, she defined the role of career hard-nose. She had to be; she inhabited the world of corporate auditing. Thomas gave Angie the lead with a nod.

  Angie hunched forward toward her friend. “Since everything we do is confidential, I won’t say the obvious. I will tell you it’s political. I need you to keep this from the rest of
the team.”

  “Sure. Understood.”

  “We need to know what Egan LeFarge is up to. He’s been there each time we’ve found and lost Zlata.”

  “You want to spy on O’Brien’s private army?”

  “Uh-huh. We think LeFarge will catch on to any ordinary surveillance, so we believe we should follow the money at first, till we know the ground.”

  “The money. I understand following the money. Can I have carte blanche on this?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “An open mandate for audit. It’s what I know, what I do. Once we know where the money originates, in what department or which O’Brien company, we’ll also know the account numbers that receive the money. Then we can buy additional information from your sources on those outside accounts.”

  Angie grinned the smile of a shark. “Okay. Go audit the right people. Be bold and wave around the Head Auditor’s name, but let’s keep this off O’Brien’s level.”

  “Got it.” She jumped up to go.

  “And Jean,” Angie said. Jean stopped. “This is something that has to go fast. LeFarge is a danger to the team’s mission.” Jean nodded.

  “And to me and you,” Thomas said under his breath to Angie.

  ***

  For his first night Phatal billed a New Zealand surf punk band as the headliner and lined out a Jewish hip-hop power crew as an opening act. Robko had trouble wrapping his mind around the bands, thinking it could be pretty awful. But by mid-afternoon, he could see as they focused on setup and sound checks that they were competent.

  Part of his job was hooking up electricity, whether he was trained or not. The wires were run down the rafters and dropped to the trucks. While on top of a catering truck, he spied the flowing graffiti that swept down the factory floor. It ended with a flourish in the familiar cubist signature. When he got a chance, he ambled down the words. He wondered what message had been sent to him. Four black silhouettes of a man in a top hat and long coat formed bracketing quote marks. The message read, “The mimbo and the bimbo drop, the brainiacs pop, everyone happy does the stone.” He repeated it to himself twice and laughed out loud. That was his bio. It was also as strange as he’d ever seen.