by Heskett, Jim
But today, in the moment, this felt correct. He felt a buzz of righteous anger, but no accompanying dread. No uncertainty.
“In the video,” he said, pacing back and forth, “Jules passed something to Conner. Since he’s dead, we can’t ask him what it was. But, you three can still talk. First one to tell me the truth gets to walk out that door, free and clear.”
Wellner stopped in front of the scarred Westminster member, since he had so far been the most cooperative. But, the kid shook his head. His eyes were down, like a dog who knew his master was about to discover the pile of crap on the rug. “I didn’t see it.”
“You’re lying. This happened two feet to your right, and you’re telling me you didn’t see it? Tell me what she gave him.”
“I don’t know,” the kid said, his lip curling and tears welling in his eyes. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Wellner turned toward the others. “And, you two?”
Both of them shook their heads.
“I find this hard to believe,” Wellner said, then he walked over to one of his bodyguards and held out an expectant hand. The bodyguard raised an eyebrow at him, then Wellner nodded toward the beefy revolver sticking out of his hip holster. The guard frowned, but he handed over the weapon.
Wellner walked over to the first of the Five Points members. He hefted the heavy gun to point against his temple. Feeling bulky in his hand, he braced his arm. “What was Jules talking to you about that night?”
The young man closed his eyes. “We already told you.”
Wellner pulled the trigger. The blast forced his arm back, throttling his shoulder. His ears filled with white noise, his eyes shut from the intensity of the boom. Before he could open his eyes, he felt blood dotting his face.
The young man’s head hung down, blood dripping down onto his shirt. Since he was restrained, he stayed in place, seated. The other two in their chairs kept their eyes forward, lips pursed, trying to steal peripheral glances at their dead co-conspirator.
But within seconds, the one on the far end whimpered to himself, lips quivering. “Jesus Christ!” he moaned. He wiggled around in his seat, trying to scoot away. The legs of the chair danced on the floor, tapping out a pitiful rhythm, then died out as the man grew silent once again.
Wellner wiped blood from his face. He commanded his arm not to shake, then he sucked in a deep breath and shifted one step to his right to place the pistol against the next young man’s head. “You: same question.”
"Please, Mr. President, don't do this. I can't tell you what you want to hear, because I don't know anything. Whatever you think it is, it's not that."
Bam. Another pull, and the noise and flash didn’t bother Wellner as much this time. His ears still rang, his arm still hurt, but he did a better job of concealing his reaction. With a lungful of air, he stifled the shudder that wanted to course through his body.
He took another step to his right. A bead of sweat dribbled down his back and collected where his dress shirt had been tucked into his slacks. Wellner paused and adjusted his glasses, giving the last remaining suspect a few seconds to think it over.
“Okay! Okay!” said the Westminster kid. “Okay, please stop. I’ll tell you everything that happened that night at the meeting.”
Wellner held the pistol with the barrel pointed at the ceiling. His arm tingled, feeling numb from the recoil. “Go on.”
“Jules wanted us to sell coke and stuff for her. That’s what was in the package she gave to Conner, and that’s what we were talking about. She had a plan, and she was feeling us out to see if we were interested. She fronted him a kilo to see if he could handle it.”
“Cocaine, huh?”
The kid nodded, his head shaking up and down. “There are all kinds of people in the Club who sell drugs. Jules wanted to start a cartel inside it, to control who could sell and who couldn’t. But it didn’t go beyond that meeting. I don’t know if she changed her mind, if she found other people, or what. But I never heard from her again after that night. I don’t know why. The whole thing was so weird, I tried to pretend it didn’t happen, so I never asked around about it. I haven’t seen her since that night. I promise.”
Wellner lowered his arm, the gun pointed. The kid tried to turn his face away. Wellner leaned forward until the barrel of the gun kissed the young man on the side of his temple.
“I told you: no more lies.”
Wellner pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty-Three
GABE
Gabe hadn’t wanted to wait forty-eight hours to infiltrate the Golden Branch Post Office. He hadn’t wanted to break in at all. But all of his efforts to find Ember’s location or this mysterious “RHF” person via technological means had failed. Even asking around had revealed nothing.
He had to break in and gain access to that personnel database room. Ember was running out of time, so this needed to happen tonight.
Gabe sat in his car at the parking lot of the Indian restaurant across the street. How the Golden Post Office hid so well in plain sight continually amazed him. The false front, the extreme security measures inside… a marvel of organization and care. Someone had even added Halloween decorations in the last two days.
But, tonight, Gabe had to push past the appearances. He would infiltrate one of the most secure places in Colorado and retrieve the info he needed without taking a bullet. Hopefully.
The exterior of the building was stone and glass, sheer, tall, intimidating. Another reason Gabe had to wait an extra day to complete this task: acquiring the equipment. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder as he exited the car and crossed the street. He knew from previous study that there was a small path through the shrubs on the northern side of the building that kept him out of range of the exterior security cameras.
He pointed his feet along this theoretical path and dropped his duffel bag next to the building. From it, he removed his backpack and cinched the shoulder straps tight against his back. Also, a coil of 9.9mm rock climbing rope, which he put over his right shoulder.
Gabe took a climbing harness, smaller lengths of rope, carabiners, and four suction cups. He applied the first two suction cups to the glass exterior. He pumped the buttons on the sides to secure them to the surface, then looped rope around each of their handles to make foot stirrups. Gabe then stood up into those stirrups and applied two more suction cups to the glass. He attached a climbing rope from his harness to one of those cups, then took a step up.
He looked down, two feet off the ground. “This is probably not the most brilliant plan I’ve ever had,” he said as he shifted the top two cups higher.
But, it had to be this way. The external building had multiple ground-level failsafes. No way could he disable them all to make a direct break-in. But, if he could reach the roof and then rappel down to the courtyard, he’d be home free.
Maybe not home free, exactly, but the path to the inside had fewer complications.
Climbing the side of the building proved to be a tedious process. Snow fell, but that didn’t bother Gabe. The suction cups worked better with moisture, actually, as long as he made solid contact with the glass each time.
For an hour, he trudged up the building, moving the foot cups, then the hand cups, pumping and releasing the vacuum seal of each cup over and over. He had to be careful whenever moving over a space of glass that was actually a window. While he’d chosen a side of the building that was out of sight from onlookers, he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t suction cup over the window of a boardroom full of people burning the midnight oil.
He mitigated that risk by popping his head up and over the edge of each new pane of glass, stealing a glance inside, and then moving over the window. Thankfully the windows were all deeply tinted as well, and he hoped it would be enough to make anyone inside peering out have to look twice.
He moved methodically. Over the course of that hour, the cold descended, biting through his jacket and gloves. The snow fell harder and harder. He c
hecked behind him a few of times to see the city of Golden become increasingly white. He'd heard there was a storm coming, but this looked like a doozy. Last time he'd seen snowfall this dense, there had been a foot of mucky powder on the ground the next morning.
When he finally put a hand on top of the roof ledge, he breathed a sigh of relief and threw his right leg over before disconnecting his climbing harness.
The rooftop spanned the outer edge of the open courtyard, covered in gravel, about fifty feet wide on all four sides.
And, there were drones.
Four of them, hovering, sweeping back and forth over the rooftop. Quads, like the kind he’d used himself for remote surveillance. They were cheap these days, and the smaller ones ubiquitous enough and easy to find at big-box stores. Best of all, no one suspected a young person flying a drone around, so they were a perfect way to gain semi-secret access to a location without looking terribly suspicious.
These drones were a bit beefier than the ones he’d used. He could see a small cube-shaped device attached atop each of them — aftermarket homing and tracking equipment, most likely used to keep the drones in sync and manageable by a single remote control source.
Gabe removed all of his gear as fast as he could, keeping only his backpack and the coil of rope. He studied the drones. They did have built-in cameras attached to their undersides, but they did not appear to be rotating or angling around on their gimbals. As long as he stayed away from any area directly underneath a drone, he should be fine. The problem was, the drones rose and lowered autonomously, so he couldn’t predict how wide that path of vision would be from one moment to the next.
Also, they wobbled a little in the increasingly-thick snow. Maybe the thickness of the snowfall itself was enough to mask him, but he couldn't be sure. The wobble worried him. If a gust of wind pushed one off-course, he might accidentally land under a camera before he could scramble to safety.
But, Gabe devised a plan to fix that. He set his sights on the metal ladder leading from the interior of the roof to the courtyard. One drone between him and his path to the interior. He took a small, bullet-shaped powerful laser pointer from his back pocket and pressed the button, aiming the beam directly at the drone's camera. He had to move it around a few times to aim properly, but when he did, the drone froze in place.
That told Gabe that they were not being controlled in real-time by someone in a room somewhere. They were programmed to sync to a pre-recorded flight path. Unable to see, the drone had frozen. Probably running automated diagnostics checks on its systems.
Hopefully, the hunk of metal and plastic wasn’t calling home to alert a human about a problem right now. Either way, Gabe would know soon enough.
He moved smoothly enough to keep the laser pointer directed on the drone's camera as he shuffled across the gravel. It seemed that while one of their own was down, the other drones weren't interested in patrolling. They had all frozen in the air, waiting for their comrade to come back online.
At the ladder, he turned off the laser and the drones returned to their normal flying patterns. Gabe now stood safely out of range and out of sight. There were no guards down in the open courtyard, but a handful of security cameras pointed down into it.
He crouched next to one. First, he took a small can of rubber cement from his bag and used it to obscure the nearby security camera, painting over the lens. It would appear as though the lens had simply gone out of focus, and unless the lackey in the surveillance room had a paranoid streak, it wouldn’t raise the red flag of sabotage. He could have unplugged it altogether, but figured that might trigger an alarm somewhere. Just because the drones were autonomous didn’t mean there weren’t guards ready to mobilize.
He tied the rope to the ladder and let it drop. It jiggled on the way down then stopped, ten or twelve feet off the ground. Not long enough to reach.
“Aww, crap,” he muttered.
Ember had always referred to his love of gadgetry as “Batman obsession,” and Gabe had to admit he had an affinity for the dark knight. But in his haste to pack everything he thought he might need for this excursion, he’d opted for a slightly shorter rope — climbing rope took up a lot of space in a backpack.
He could lower himself and try to drop the rest of the way, but the distance from the ground to the end of the line meant he was not getting back out this way once he was done inside. Not without cobbling together a makeshift rope with the other climbing stuff he had brought.
“Guess I’m going out the front door when I leave,” he muttered. Not ideal. He would certainly alert security if he wandered anywhere near the lobby. There were obviously side doors the members used to enter and exit, but Gabe had no idea where those access points were. Given the small size of the lot, he guessed there was a subterranean parking garage, but he had seen no way to access it.
How he escaped depended entirely on how quickly they found him, he supposed.
Gabe dropped off the end of the rope and bent his knees before he hit the ground. Smooth landing. Then, he turned and raced toward the east wall as quickly as possible. From his tour the other day, that seemed like the least-observed area. As long as he hugged the interior wall, he figured he was out of view of the cameras. But, like everything else, that was an educated guess.
Gabe rushed over toward the building and pressed his electronic device against the door. It clicked open. No alarm. It might have triggered a silent alarm, but Gabe couldn't tell. Either way, it didn't matter. He had to move.
This door opened into a space he hadn’t seen before. It was east of the lobby and hall where he’d sneaked to the third floor the other day. At least, he thought it was east. Hard to tell. It felt as if this place had been constructed to be confusing on purpose.
Either way, this small and dark room he was in opened to a hallway. He moved along the slick floor, laser pointer in one hand. He wasn’t familiar with the layout, so he had to be prepared for anything. There was only one security camera in sight, so he used the laser pointer to blind it until he could move past its cone of vision.
At a door with a plaque showing an image of stairs, he used his device to unlock the door and found a dark stairwell inside. He raced to the third floor.
A few seconds to catch his breath, but no more. This being Gabe’s first major instance of corporate espionage, he didn’t want to give himself too much time to reflect on the insanity of it all.
He entered through a different door than last time, but when he saw the break room on his left, he knew the way. The Personnel Records room was up on his left.
Gabe ran for it as he dug a hand into his backpack to scour around for his traditional lock picking kit. He jabbed the two pronged tools into the lock and swished them around.
Five seconds later, the door swung open.
He eyed a server rack and started checking the slots to locate the banks of hard drives along the rack. There was a rack-mounted shelf nearby, with external Firewire drives plugged in and seated in a stack. It was precisely what he’d hoped to find — these were likely backup drives, and more importantly, they weren’t screwed into the RAID drives like the ones in the rack next to them. A redundant backup — which usually meant the data on them was worth protecting.
He reached out to grab them at the exact moment the armed security guards appeared in the doorway behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
ZACH
Zach paced from one end of the motel room to the other. He picked up the antique-looking flip phone from the nightstand and checked for missed calls or messages. He’d done this four or five times an hour for an entire day now, ever since the stealthy flight from his apartment to this motel room.
He didn’t have his own phone. No laptop. The cable in the room went in and out, and he’d been debating if asking the hotel staff about that would bring unwanted attention to himself. So far, he’d thought yes.
This old cell phone had no internet access, or, if it did, it would have been maddening to try t
o navigate the web on such a tiny screen. He thought he’d seen a library a few streets over. But, last time he had visited a public library, that hadn’t turned out so well for him.
Basically, Zach had nothing to do but pace. He checked the parking lot one more time by pulling back the curtains. The motel was one long block of rooms, with the hotel office and reception at the east end. Zach could see from one end to the other.
He’d killed a few minutes here and there by making mental notes about the types of cars in the lot, cataloging how they came and went, if they parked in different places when returning. But, the cars were mostly static. Not like a restaurant where a car might come and then leave after an hour.
Three light posts illuminated the parking lot. Beyond their fields of light, Zach could see the highway. He could hear the eighteen-wheelers thunder by, making a bridge shake. Some of the same cars from yesterday were still in the lot. A few were new, as of the last few hours. But none of them contained anyone suspicious.
Snow assaulted the city, and winds made the chunky flakes fall at an angle to the earth. Gusts whipped up drifts of snow in the parking lot, turning them into little tornados that would twirl violently and then die a second later. Already, there were several inches of white atop the cars that had been parked here all day.
He checked his phone again. Obviously, nothing had changed in the last two minutes. He didn't even have anyone to call. Zach didn't know anyone's phone numbers, they were all in his regular phone, sitting back in his apartment in Fort Collins. Even if he'd brought it, Zach wasn't sure if calling anyone would be a smart move. Not after his roommate had shown up with a black eye after one conversation with Zach. He felt like he was a plague carrier, and anyone who came near him would become infected.
