Quick Study

1

Parkins watched the Cumberland Police lot.   The fading sun filtered through the old oaks, and the colors got stretchy this time of day.  Maybe two months from a freeze.

“I got all 6,” he paused, checking his memory. “Yeah, All 6 are in, Pitter.”  He turned his thick black neck back, to look, but Pitt MacLaren was steeped in fever.  A cruddled ball.

The helodrones landed there across the street, and he could see them land, tuck up and roll in, then disappear into the police facility.  That door rolled up and shut so fast it was a wonder.  Nobody knew much about these new remote-piloted helicopters.  

Ocelot “Ossie” Parkins didn’t trust ‘wonders’ of any kind.  And because has was an incarnation of Morgan Freeman, you believed every word he spoke.  Because he wouldn’t say it if if it wasn’t true.

Pitt MacLaren was curled in the corner, sick with a wracking cough in the humid summer.  The worst time to get a cold.  He was useless.

He’d seen enough of it already.  But the rail gun was still on his arm, unused since Keaneville.

2

Christian DeLort strode the highly-polished Italian marble aisles like he owned the place.  And his ridiculous mustache went with him, salt and pepper in a controlled breeze.  Twin waxed points.  Copiously groomed but so odd.  (Against all AR-900 regulations, anyhoo.)

Delort loved the space.  Well-lit offices on both sides hummed with activity, showered bodies flowed through office spaces well-known, both landline and cell phones rang in their perverse music of electronic bird-song, the engine of it all was working!  Olive Branch was waving ‘freedom.’  And he was the erect flagpole.  He knew it like the sun rises.  And the sun hits that flagpole first.  And heats it!

Maybe his feet didn’t ever touch the floor of Olive Branch.  That’s a lovely thought.  An evil human hovercraft.  With charisma.

13 floors below what anybody passing by would reasonably think is a’ shit-hole apartment tower’ in Arlington, Virginia, there is something.  You don’t get to it where you think you might.  (Drive east past the Pillsbury Interchange, and there are discrete markings from there.  Underneath what looks like an abandoned northern New Jersey neighborhood is a garage, if you have the right license plate...)

It is vast.

Tip of the iceberg.

Built in the paranoid 50’s, the Trangen Complex was constructed out-of-view, off-the-budget, and ahead of the times.  No one lived this far out back then.  Sputnik made the first radio clicks from orbit and Trangen was getting final paint and door locks.  The excavation contractors had ran into hard rock they didn’t expect and yet still got it done on schedule.  (Just where that rock went was a huge guess until a FOIA request was granted.  7200 truckloads to Padycune Quarry, Virginia.  It closed way back in 1981.  The Feds had paid dearly to take local rock debris to where local rock was being taken and sold.  Someone made a shitload on that.  The roads look great there, to this day.  They didn’t have to dynamite or crush rock for two years!  Their family accountant took his own life in 1983.  What a shame.)

Trangen still looked regal 20 years later.  A bit scuffed, a few upgrades in key places, otherwise fantastic styling and finish.  Mothballs were lined up for it before Olive Branch grew and needed a home, just after Watergate, but it was re-named and re-financed and re-wired.  Hidden away.  (A curious freshman Senator from Wyoming sniffed around a lot, but didn’t get down there on his own until he became Vice-President.  Some other prominent names got there before he did.)

Down there, it is apparent the place was custom-made for a nuclear war that never materialized.  Over-pressured, filtered air down there tastes like PEZ candies because the nitrogen boosters are egregious.  Some people - but not the OB agents - giggle too much, a side-effect.  The toilets have a antiquated suction pump - it works - but you can hear your turds+water rising to the city system 300 feet above.  Schlork.  The major air-conditioning, heating, and ventilation systems (HVAC) are still over pressured, for defensive reasons.  Like a battle tank.  It is a battle tank, only way below-ground.

New people remark about their ears popping.  Even VIPs and Congressmen.  Delort had seen a Senator from a New England state vomit in the elevator lobby once - after the drop down, Jesuus Keeriahst!- but he wasn’t allowed to talk about her on premises.  She did vote for continued funding, so there’s that...  but granola barf is granola, barfed.  Liberal bitch.  

We all have jobs to do.  

Delort loved solving things.  It came naturally to him.  Like killing flies to a webless spider.  But they had to be tough, or they didn’t interest him.  

Any spider can catch a retarded moth.

The world spins, and turns, and wobbles.  And Delort had a huge wobble that he was behind.  And he would shaft his old buddy Pitt to ride it.

3

Pittson Pawtle MacLaren - the middle name is a long story - was neither retarded nor a moth, had he been an insect.  He thought of himself more like a praying mantis.  He could hide, he could wait, and he could strike.

Delort was after him, on a stupid bar bet.  I might not live through it, MacLaren suspected and thought, sometimes out loud, to no one in particular.  He knew his old buddy Delort could be, might be, a right asshole at times.  Most times he’d seen him since since track practice in 12th grade, MacLaren reckoned, he’d been a dick.  Ego on checks his parents cashed.  He’d beat him to a Double-major, and didn’t let him forget that.  

MacLaren worked his way through college.  Nobody had floated a god-damn thing to him.  His company knew that.  It was a practically a tenet at PPM that ‘you proved yourself before you moved yourself.’  

“Spitter” MacLaren  and “Chrissy” Delort had been close for a long while, and they had drifted apart after high-school, as friends often do.  Occasional Christmas cards and birthday phones calls with rum were shared, but until Boston they had been falling away from each other.  MacLaren thought his old friend was becoming a social hermit, not willing to talk, or go have a drink, or plan a kayak weekend with him in the San Juans.  (Neither MacLaren nor Delort had been back to Washington State in years.)

Now, Chrissy was beyond ‘full of himself’ to ‘over-inflated’ of himself.  A rich kid that graduated to a badge marinated in a few drinks and reputable degree.  He was damn good at his job - that much was...that much was obvious to those ‘inside.’  To outsiders, any stranger on the street, he was just another pompous DC bureaucrat, pushing a few more pounds than allotted.  But Delort still has a nicer, fitted suit collection than any of them.

“If I wanted to hide, you couldn’t find me,”  MacLaren laughed, pounding down the local Sam Adams seasonal.  Bar light sizzled in non-day colors.

He was eyeing that brunette bartender’s friend when she’d come in to chat hours earlier.  (By 10pm, she was getting quite buzzed, because he’d sent three rounds of dirty martinis to her, anonymously.  He would never see her again and he knew that.  But now he knew what she drank.) 

Delort was instantly piqued by the idea of hiding and coughed through his drink, whatever it was.  7 and Seven, martinis, he mixed it up.  The bubbles were running down the inside of MacLaren’s glass when his friend changed tone.  It wasn’t pretty.  Ruthie remembers.

“You hide?  And I can’t find?”

“Yeah.”

“I could,” he said, clearing the fog, ”I could find you anywhere.  In a week.  Tops.”

“Nyah.  You don’t know me as well as you used to.  I’m not gonna hide where we took those two Everett chicks.  I’ve been a few places, learned a few things.”

“Software pussy.” 

“Big-badge Dick-head,” MacLaren giggled back, having fun at beer Number 5.  

Ruthie the Red-head was looking at the jeans on the Italian guy that showed up late, ready to dance, at the wrong place.  This wasn’t an Italian bar.  Boston is Irish.  Pick and choose wisely, MacLaren wanted to say to her.  He knew he wasn’t getting any tonight.

“I don’t wear a badge, Spitter.”  His drink seemed gone again.

“You don’t need to.  It’s written all over you, Chrissy.”

He brewed over that for a moment too long to be comfortable, a dangling something.

“Maybe it is.  But I’ll win.  You know I would.”

“With my money!  Not a chance.  If you had a million dollars, you could trace me.  It’d take a lot more than that to find me.”

“I could find you and have you brought to me in chains.  And it wouldn’t take a week.”

“Fuck off Chrissy.  You’re a cog.”

“Put your money down, then.  I’m not a cog, I’m the grease.”  

“Oh, c’mon, you’re the man who tightens screws.”

Under his breath, but loud enough for Pitt to hear, he said the words that later made a lot more sense.

“Evidence matters more than fact.”  Oddly enough, his glass was back, but there was nothing in it, MacLaren jotted, to his mental notebook.

Sometimes Delort’s notoriety could be a problem, as far as the ACLU was concerned. (They were.)

His minions were far worse, and at his disposal.  The ‘sprigs’ of Olive Branch.  Growing like weeds.

Lushie O’Ryan was the worst of them.  She was a Special Agent, but she was still a bitch.  Like one of the small birds that goes relentlessly after a big bird.  She wasn't much of a woman, but she was a hell of an agent.

Pitt had asked for it, he remembered, in that bar that stank of the autumn Fens, in Boston.  Tarnahans?  Something like that.  Drinking heavily.  Ruthie was there, she could back him up.  (But she was three weeks dead, so she couldn’t.  MacLaren didn’t know that.)

It wasn’t worth it anymore.  Now they wanted his ass.  Like an old telegraph office poster - Dead or Alive!!!  

Based on what MacLaren had seen up ’til now, ‘dead’ was looking more likely.

Ossie Parkins had turned out to be the man.  He knew what he had to know, and he had the instinct to trust MacLaren immediately, like they’d been waiting to meet.

When it happened, MacLaren had just killed a drone.  And Parkins invited him in, without a word.  

Now they were both Watchers.  And MacLaren felt like he was dying.

Lushie was just drinking her latte to get started.  She coughed on an unseen hairball and wiped her mouth against her sweater sleeve, leaving a milky white trace.

No one would see it.