Corporativos
A loud argument the evening of their third day in T-Town announced Dan-boy’s arrival. The kid assigned to protecting or imprisoning them, depending on how you looked at it, rapped on the door.
“Yeah?” Anna said.
“Friends of yours outside.” He scratched under his ballistic vest. “Don’t wanna give up their guns. Mayor wants to see them, but they’re saying no. Askin’ to talk to you.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Really? Fine.” She shrugged on her hoodie. “Stay here.”
Nadine sat fidgeting on the bed. Loud voices came from somewhere down below. Eventually, the voices quieted, reaching a consensus of some sort. The kid parked outside opened the door to hand Nadine a large backpack. “Your friends say you look after this while they see the mayor.”
“They’re not my friends,” Nadine said.
The boy flashed her a genuine smile. “Good choice.”
Nadine slung the backpack in a corner. She paced back and forth, chewing her thumbnail. After what felt like an eternity but was probably less than twenty minutes, Anna returned with Dan-boy, Lena, and two men Nadine didn’t recognize. All of them wore sullen expressions. “I don’t see why we couldn’t talk to him tomorrow,” Dan-boy complained.
“His place, his rules,” Anna said.
Dan-boy glared at Nadine. “What’s she doing here?”
“Haven’t you heard? She’s a wanted terrorist.”
“She’s—”
“She’s in this,” Anna said. “She’s part of this, whether you like it or not.”
“It’s her fault what happened!” Dan-boy said. “If she didn’t insist on bringing Marcus to the hospital—”
“If you didn’t insist on bringing Marcus to scout out that chemical company,” Anna interjected, “we might not be here. We still don’t know what’s happening. Pointing fingers won’t get answers or help Marcus, so do me a favor and stow that shit.”
“But—”
“Nadine’s lost as much as I have. Maybe more. She didn’t sign up for this. You don’t like it, go away.”
“I need you.”
“Then Nadine stays. This is her life too.”
Dan-boy bristled. One of the men put his hand on Dan-boy’s shoulder. “Fine. What now?”
“Jacob.” Anna nodded to the second man. “Kev. Lena. Dan-boy. How many others are left?”
Kev and Lena exchanged glances. “Nobody,” Kev said. “Everyone else has disappeared or been arrested in the past 48 hours.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“Dunno. They must’ve squeezed Marcus.”
“That or Anna screwed up and they traced the cab.”
Anna clenched her fists. “I didn’t screw up.”
“So you say.”
Lena held out her hand again. “This isn’t helping. We need a plan.”
“We go underground,” Jacob said. “Take new identities. Disappear.”
Anna laughed bitterly. “They’re calling us terrorists.” She shook her head. “Something very weird is going on. This all goes back to Marcus and whatever you saw in that factory. Someone took Marcus out of that hospital, and it wasn’t the police.”
“How do you know that?” Lena said.
“Because the police wouldn’t tamper with the records to make it look like he was never there.”
“If not the police, then who?” Dan-boy said.
“Dunno. Dunno. We need to find out. I fried my computer on the way out. Didn’t want LAPD to have it, but I’m blind without it. I need to get a new one. Tonight, I think.”
“Where are you going to get a computer tonight?” Dan-boy said.
“There’s a mall in Santa Monica. Computer store right next to a chocolate place. Figure we could go there, maybe get some nice dark chocolate while we’re out. The fuck you think, Dan-boy? I know a guy who knows a guy, he’ll hook us up. I want you and Kev with me. Jacob, you and Lena stay here with Nadine.”
“So now you’re giving orders?” Dan-boy said.
“You’re the one got us into this,” Lena said. “I’m okay with trying it her way.”
“Good,” Anna said. “We head out after nightfall.”
When night came, Anna unpacked her duffle bag and repacked one of the backpacks Dan-boy had brought with him. She took a sealed bag of black plastic from her bag and cracked it open. Nadine goggled. A solid brick of cash, neatly bundled and shrink-wrapped in clear cellophane, lay inside. Anna slit open the cellophane wrapper and transferred the bundles of bills to the backpack. “I had no idea you had this kind of money,” Nadine said.
“I won’t after tonight,” Anna said. “Gonna be an expensive trip.” Lena caught Anna’s eye and smirked. Anna zipped up the backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“What if someone mugs you?” Nadine said.
Anna smiled thinly. “I’d like to see them try. Stay here, darling. We’ll be back soon.” She kissed Nadine’s cheek and disappeared into the muggy night air, Kev and Dan-boy at her back.
“How long have you known Anna?” Nadine asked Lena in the silence that followed.
“Why? You jealous?”
“Just making conversation. Should I be?”
Lena shrugged. “We had a thing for a while. I’m okay with that if you are.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason. Some people, they just get funny around their main squeeze’s ex.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Nah. We were pretty casual about it. I’m more into guys, truth said.”
“You two go back a ways.”
“Yeah. Met her when I signed on to Dan-boy’s crew.”
“I don’t really understand…” Nadine waved her hand. “All of this. Who is Dan-boy? What do you do?”
“Hasn’t Anna told you anything?” Lena said.
“No.”
“Huh. So you’re in the shit and you don’t even know why?”
“That’s about the way of it.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Underground dance party.”
Lena leaned back on the bed, regarding Nadine like she was waiting for a punchline. “You’re serious.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
Lena laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. Honey, you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“So enlighten me.”
“Not my place, sugar-pie. That’s between you and your squeeze.”
Jacob shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Only because you aren’t keeping up.” Lena snorted. “We’re way past bad feelings.” She produced a small metal tin from her pocket. “Card game, anyone?” She leered at Nadine. “We can play strip poker if you like.”
Anna arrived back hours later, carrying a large, multi-pocketed case in place of the backpack. Dan-boy wore a surly expression. Nadine embraced her. “Listen,” Anna said. “I’m going to try to nail down what happened to Marcus. Whatever’s going on, it all starts with him.”
“How do you know that?” Kev said.
“There are no coincidences. Everything went to shit after he got shot.”
“Wouldn’t have happened if your girlfriend wouldn’t have insisted on taking him to the hospital,” Dan-boy said.
Anna whirled. “Don’t. You don’t get to have this conversation with me. You brought him to my place. What did I tell you? I told you never. Never do that. Don’t you even pin this on her. This is all on you.”
“I still think—”
“Think it somewhere else. I have work to do.”
Dan-boy opened his mouth. Lena stepped smoothly between them. “C’mon. She’s right, and I’m hungry.”
When they left, Anna seemed to deflate. Nadine sat on the bed beside her. “You okay?”
Anna turned tired eyes to her. To Nadine, she seemed beaten. “No.” She pressed something small and hard—a key, its round barrel indented with irregular cutouts—into Nadine’s hand. “Santa Monica Storage, locker 531. Insurance in case something happens to me.”
“What?”
“Santa Monica Storage, locker 531. Say it.”
“Santa Monica Storage, locker 531.”
“Again.”
“Santa Monica Storage, locker 531. Is this really necessary?”
“Don’t lose it.”
“Do you think something’s going to happen to you?”
“Nature of the business. I should never have dragged you in.”
“Bit late for that now. I’m sorry,” Nadine added at Anna’s wounded expression. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Still true,” Anna said softly. She stared into space for a moment, then blinked and shook her head. “I better get busy.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Anna squeezed Nadine’s hand. “No. I expect to be under for a while.”
“What should I do?”
“Stay inside. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t call anyone. I’m sorry, but that’s all I got.”
For the next three days, Nadine paced in the stuffy, airless room while Anna immersed herself with her terminal, coming up only occasionally to eat the limp sandwiches that Tony or one of his people brought. A tangle of music thumped and boomed through the walls. Sounds of machinery, power tools, and occasional raised voices drifted in nonstop from outside at all hours of the day or night. Dan-boy, Lena, and the others stopped by occasionally, only to be chased away when Anna growled that she had nothing to report.
The routine changed on the fourth day. Anna, who’d taken to rolling straight out of bed to her computer without bothering to dress or shower, surfaced in the late afternoon. Nadine offered her a cold sandwich and a bottle of lukewarm water, courtesy of Mayor Tony. Heat shimmered in the air, turning the small room into a muggy hotbox. A film of sweat covered Anna’s skin. Her eyes, red and baggy, peered out from beneath unkempt bangs. “Found him,” she said.
“What? Where?” Nadine said.
“Let’s wait for everyone else.”
By the time Anna had showered in a weak stream of tepid water and dressed in what little clean clothing she had, Dan-boy, Lena, Kev, and Jacob had gathered in the stifling room. Tony was there also, flanked by two teenage boys in sweat-stained, badly fitting body armor. “You look like hell,” Dan-boy said without preamble.
“I’m in good company, then.” Anna looked him up and down. “Company, anyway.” Lena sniggered.
“So what you got, mi mala?” Tony said.
Dan-boy spun. “What’s he even doing here? This is private business.” He glared at Tony. “You understand? Private business.” The boy to Tony’s right, a gangly kid of perhaps fifteen with dark eyes and scraggly, unkempt hair, bristled.
Tony folded his arms. “I understand you are a guest in my house, and you disrespect my hospitality. You and your friends here, I don’t think you appreciate the magnitude of your situation. The police, they say you’re a wanted terrorist. All of you. They have video. It’s all over the news. You, Anna here, all of you. Building bombs, they say. Radiological. Even Anna’s lovely friend. There’s a reward, you know. Hundred and fifty large. That’s a lot of money, mi amigo.”
Dan-boy lunged at Tony. The two boys flanking Tony tensed. Nadine blinked. Her vision blurred. A quick flash of color floated in front of her, green arcs fanning out from Dan-boy’s hands and from the two people flanking him. She shuddered. Tony raised his hands. “Relax. We’re all friends here, right? Anna is family.”
The boy to Tony’s left, a skinny brown-haired kid whose arms were decorated with complex tattoos of half-naked women, scratched his head. “Dunno, boss, that’s a lot of money.”
Tony shook his head sadly. “For shame, Enrico. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul? These people are family to us.” He glared at Dan-boy. “Even if they don’t always act like it.”
Dan-boy tensed. Kev put his hand on his shoulder and shook his head slightly. Dan-boy turned away with a look of disgust. Nadine shivered. Adrenaline she hadn’t even felt drained from her. “What do you mean, they have video?” she heard herself say.
“On the news,” Tony said. “Surveillance footage, they say. You and Anna, SWAT team raiding your house, bombs, barrels with radiation symbols painted on them.” He turned toward Anna. “Something I should know? You makin’ bombs?”
“You know me better than that,” Anna said.
“Ah, I hope so, mi mala. What news about your missing friend?”
“Taken from the hospital,” Anna said. “Whoever did it erased the patient records. Far as they’re concerned, he was never there.”
“So it’s a dead end?” Kev said.
“No. Harder than you think to erase anything completely,” Anna said. “Big corporations live and die on data, see? Everything is replicated, backed up, tucked away into duplicate databases. Sometimes the people who run the systems don’t even know how it’s all set up.”
“Get to the point,” Dan-boy said.
“They thought they were clever. I am more clever.” She dragged her computer onto her lap. A glowing rectangle hovered in front of it. “They record video all the time, in every hallway. Video goes to an off-site contractor. Contractor subcontracts backups to a data replication service. All seamless, all real-time, very expensive. Video got erased from local storage and the contractor’s main data store, but not before it got replicated.” Her fingers danced. An image of a long, wide hallway floated ghostlike in front of her. “Watch.”
A door opened. Two men dressed in black wheeled a gurney into the hall. Nadine leaned forward. Blankets covered the man strapped to the bed. He wore a transparent breathing mask over his face. One of the men caught his foot on the door and cursed silently. Anna’s fingers moved. The image froze.
“That’s your friend?” Tony said.
“Marcus. Yes.”
“Are you sure?” Lena said. She walked over to study the floating image. “It’s hard to tell.”
“It’s him.”
“Can you enhance it?”
Anna shook her head. “Not without magic. Cheap-ass camera. It is what it is.”
“How do you know it’s him?” Dan-boy said.
“I’ve watched this footage a hundred times. They bring him into that room. The next day, these two take him out. It’s him.”
“Who are those guys?” Tony said. “Orderlies?”
“No. And they aren’t hospital security or police, either. I think they’re private security.”
“Back up a little,” Tony said.
Anna wound the video back. Tony walked over to Lena, frowning. The two boys shifted nervously. “I know these uniforms,” Tony pointed. “See that patch? Black Tiger. Corporate security. Why are corporativos taking your friend?”
“Why, I don’t know. Where, on the other hand…” Anna’s hands tripped gracefully across her computer. A new video floated in the air. “Look here. Three minutes and twenty-eight seconds later, external cameras catch this van pulling out of the back of the building. It’s the only vehicle big enough for a stretcher in the eight minutes after they took him from the room. Unmarked, no windows, but…” The video zoomed in. “I got your license tag!” she sang. “From there it was easy. Just a matter of hacking LAPD automated tag and transponder recorders—”
Lena snorted. “Easy.”
“Easier than you think,” Anna said. “LAPD outsources the whole network to outside contractors on a lowest-bid basis. Place in Hyderabad. Their security is shit.” The image changed again, an overhead view of the city’s streets. A row of red dots overlaid the map. “Each of these dots is an automated snapshot of the tag or transponder signal,” Anna said.
“Hermano Mayor les está vigilando, hmm?” Tony said.
“Hermana Mayor, perhaps.” Anna zoomed in on the map. “The van disappears somewhere in here. Industrial park. No transponders or license cameras. Doesn’t appear again for another twenty-eight hours.” She stabbed her finger at the glowing image. “Here. They took him here. I’d bet money on it.”
“Okay, so what now, hmm?” Tony said. “You ride in, guns blazing, rescue your friend?”
“It’s a thought,” Jacob said.
“A stupid one,” Lena said.
Nadine withdrew from the conversation. As the sun settled outside, she wrapped Anna’s hoodie with its cartoon faces around herself and wandered down to the sweltering courtyard, where a heavyset woman with face and shoulders decorated with simple geometric tattoos offered her some kind of roasted meat over a bed of yellow rice. The others argued for hours. The voices of Anna and Dan-boy frequently rose above the rest.
Nadine wandered into the garage and settled on a narrow round stool of cracked wood, where she watched the relentless, frenetic activity. The place ran night and day, people in sweat-stained overalls swarming over cars as they were brought in, reducing them to piles of parts. Electric motors were stacked neatly in the corner. Computers and sensors were carefully wrapped and placed in scuffed fiberglass bins. Battery sleds went in one of the garage bays, piled on pallets with blocks of wood between, awaiting their fate. Harsh, merciless white work lights glared down from above. Three different stereos pumped competing music into the space, loud and discordant. The workers paid no attention to her.
Anna found her, late that night, wandering aimlessly between the wall and the rear of one of the warehouses, trailed by a dark-eyed kid in a badly-fitting ballistic vest who looked slightly embarrassed to be following her. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Nadine said. “Did you make a decision?”
“We’ve come to a consensus, or near enough to,” Anna said. She wiped a film of sweat from her forehead. “Listen. I want to say I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” Nadine held up her hand. “I knew something was off the first night we met. Normal people don’t get envelopes full of cash in the middle of the night. I stayed. I’m here. You can’t undo what’s happened.”
Anna kissed Nadine’s hand. “I’m still…I wish things had been different.”
Back in the small, stifling room with its plywood walls and scratched Plexiglass window, Anna undressed Nadine and led her by the hand to the bed. They lingered over each other for hours, patient and gentle, until eventually they both fell into a fitful sleep, coiled around each other despite the heat.