Double Eagle
Headquarters
M Street Georgetown
Washington, DC
November 12, 2017
The dark black car with tinted windows glided into an underground parking lot a block from the lazy Potomac. A former warehouse had been gutted top to bottom and extensively renovated to serve as the secretive Washington-based Headquarters of Double Eagle Industries. The Double Eagle building façade blended well with the traditional boutique offices that lined Georgetown’s M Street. Whether old money or new, those building fronts reflected an abundance of it. Behind those doors, deals were brokered by some of the most powerful men in Washington. Though many lobbyists and think tanks still called K street home, Georgetown had become synonymous with influence peddling and Washington politics. Though not readily apparent, what was unique about the Double Eagle building was its size. The façade ended some sixty feet from the sidewalk and the building extended for another 100’, ending just short of the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal.
The building renovation ended at the point that would be appropriate for most offices and the latter two-thirds of the building were nondescript, with few windows and none of the stately glitz. Some of the extra space on the M street fronted buildings had been converted to loft apartments or condos that could be accessed from the side or rear of the building and offered a proximity that attracted well-heeled commuters tired of spending hours on the road each day.
The driver stopped, got out of the car and made a sweep of the empty garage. There were three cars present. He then strode around the car and opened the rear door. The butt of a machine pistol was exposed beneath his jacket.
“All clear, Mr. Spence.”
The tall beefy man moved quickly from the back seat, walked a dozen steps to the adjacent elevator and pressed his index finger against a biometric pad. The door opened and closed behind him. Though the Double Eagle building extended five floors above street level, this elevator stopped only in the garage and on the top floor.
“Good morning, Mr. Spence.” The voice came from behind a massive mahogany desk guarded by a professionally attired woman who served as his Executive Secretary with an annual salary that had grown to $250,000 dollars in the twelve years since she had started working on the top floor.
He nodded and walked through the open door to his office. Even with all the security, Spence was always on guard, vigilant to the smallest variations in patterns, whether physical or emotional. He could detect change of any sort and had developed a very sensitive coup d’oeil.
Born in the sleepy town of Durres on the western coast of Albania, he’d had an unremarkable childhood, an only child produced by a loving mother and a cold and suspicious father who regularly beat her and the child as well. The family eked out a living with his father, Agim, working at a local garage that specialized in providing new identities for the steady stream of stolen luxury cars flowing in from Europe. Anna cleaned the houses of several families that could afford domestic help.
He spent his childhood like all the children, sometimes fishing off the docks with a hand line, running around the Roman amphitheater in the center of town or hiding out in one of the concrete bunkers that still dotted the street corners and countryside. By the late 1990s, Albania had overcome its national paranoia and was trying to re-define itself after years of corruption. But another crisis overwhelmed the country. In the aftermath of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, a new optimism had swept over the country, and money had poured into the economy with the prospects of incredible returns. Everybody was bought in to what amounted to a national-level Ponzi scheme of staggering proportion. When the bubble burst, the citizens took to the streets and drove out the new government with several thousand deaths attributed to the chaos of massive, country-wide uprisings. Finally, the UN mustered the courage to recognize the problem and restore some semblance of order. Beneath the surface, men talked of the future and how this would never happen to their country again.