cobra and the delinquents 12 cliffie bonus

 

Chapter 12 Cut off the Head

 

The tried and tested method of impersonating a janitor would not be enough; I had Willow set me up a persona, and with Tarquin’s aid, made sure I had supposedly been through all the vetting process, to become a new hire.  I was going in as building maintenance at the main FBI HQ in Washington DC. A long way, in so many ways, from my home in Washington State.

And a long way, too, from this midwestern ranch.

I bounced around the country by air to preclude being followed, changing identity, right down to new luggage bags. I fetched up in DC having driven there in a secondhand pickup, slightly beaten up, and with secondhand luggage, likewise, to start my new job.

I was signed in by a Miss Erlwig,[1] whose first name should have been Karen, even if it wasn’t. She was one of these women with a college education who despise the men who actually keep things running, and who probably thinks that a stopcock is a declaration for lesbianism, and that to stop a leak you fire all junior office staff. I doubted she could tell her AC from DC, and that goes for slang too, as she did not look as if she could let rip with a good orgasm whatever her orientation. It would probably crack her face if she even smiled. She got frostier at my cheekiest grin. I was being Hispanic, with a touch of negro, and was tanned dark enough to pass. You’d think, this long from abolition and human rights that there would be more tolerance, but the N-word still exists, and the predominantly white staff would probably define me by that, and would be hard put to tell two black guys apart. Liberal ideals only stretch as far as the personal dislikes of the idealist.

“I am not sure we need another maintenance man,” she said, and looked as if she was considering firing me before I even started.

“I’m here because apparently your elevator makes ‘wheep-wheep-wheep-urrrrrrggggnnng’ noises and has a tendency to stall between floors four and five,” I said, brightly. “I’m an elevator expert.”

Tarquin had animadverted about the lifts, and Willow had improved upon their deficiencies, if you might put it that way.

I do know my way around elevators.

I’ve climbed more than a few elevator shafts in my time to reach a sanction. A lot of people with private penthouses who have a lockbox to open only to them to press buttons for the top floor tend to forget that the shaft goes up, regardless of any lockbox. And you need to be able to get engineers in there.

In fact, most people don’t think about the menials who keep the boiler running, who empty waste bins, who keep the fridge, kettle or coffee-make,  and microwave in the staff restroom running, unblock lavatories, stop taps from dripping, scrub the floors, iron the tablecloths, and all the million little jobs that have to be done to keep even one junior secretary in a position where she may paint her nails in peace, untroubled by anything so mundane as work.

And yes, that is a slander on the many junior secretaries snowed under by work, but Miss Erlwig brought out the snarkier side of me.

She clopped on regulation cloppy heels, menials for the intimidation of, and introduced me to William Blunt.

“Just Bill,” said Bill. Bill was the senior maintenance man who had grown old with the building, and looked as if he had been here when they built it in the late twenty-first century.

Well, I could imagine it, anyway.

There were three elevators. The express elevator just to the top three floors for the bigwigs, Tarquin’s level and up, the ordinary elevator for the grunts, and the service elevator for shifting heavy stuff. It was the general one which had problems.

All the shafts were side by side, which made sense.

I introduced myself to Bill as Dan Phelps. It made sense to me.

Those old 20^th century flat-screen TV shows…

Now, if you want to hear how I got into the elevator and straight away went up to the top, switched elevators, and went and killed Zeke Q. Gartin, and made a daring escape abseiling down the outside of the building, you should be reading the sort of stupid books where daring agents do such things and slip away through the numberless plot-holes. You should know by now that I take caution, and the safety of my own skin, very seriously.

I went into the elevator shaft, and identified the problem.  Two cables were misaligned and were rubbing on each other. It wasn’t dangerous yet, but it would be, if not sorted out. I drafted a report, with photographs, and outlined three possible solutions.  One, replace the cables, meaning the elevator would be offline for about 20 hours. Two, replace the cables leaving the old ones in place as well, meaning the elevator would be offline for about four hours plus as much in a time when use was light. Three, splice in new cable sections above and below to reinforce the old cables, which could be done in a period when use was light, in the four hours of the dog watch.

Guess which they chose.

It took four days for them to go through the report which I had made after two hours crawling about.

It had to go in front of a committee, of course; and we all know that a committee is an organisation which keeps minutes, and takes hours. I am not sure who said that first, but he knew a thing or two.

In the meantime, I found my way about the building, with Bill’s help and advice, and a little judicious exploring as well. I found all the stopcocks in case of flooding, all the electrical cut-offs, lots of crawl-spaces, routers, uplinks, hidden computing storage, drains and drainage, waste chutes, with and without shredders, the drop to the furnace. I managed to disable the shredders and put baskets to catch confidential paperwork supposedly on its way to the furnace via shredders, and I discovered that some agents routinely shredded everything, and others only shredded the most classified of work, and only Tarquin also shredded any papers he might have made impressions on when working over the top. That was worth noting for the future. A little graphite blown on a pad where the top layer of doodles and notes had been torn off could reveal a lot.

I collected a few complete sets of fingerprints for my collection as well. Mostly of people Tarquin disliked for one reason or another.

I also discovered the emergency stairs for the exit of staff during power outage or in case of a fire.

I set off a fire alarm to see how many people knew about them.

How shocked would you be to discover that more than half of those in the building went to the elevators [not to be used in case of fire] and kept fruitlessly pushing the button?  Yes, I had disabled them. It was more than half the people in the building.

A significant number ignored it and carried on working.

And they turned the fire brigade away.

The place was a disaster waiting to happen, and I sent a memo of my findings to Tarquin, who had wiped his caches, turned off his computer, and headed obediently down the stairs.

If I had been doing this as an exercise in checking the security-consciousness of the inmates for their safety, I’d be reaming them out.

Interestingly, the big cheese also stayed put. Perhaps they were used to faulty fire alarms.

That might prove an advantage.

 

I wanted to make Zeke’s demise look natural. He was a fit man in his fifties, but even so, a heart attack might not be ruled out.

The office door had a time stamp on how often it was opened.  That was not a way in. His security was fairly good.

 

I discovered that there was a false ceiling with a crawl space for electric wiring; or at least, it was a crawl space once I had planks installed between girders.  It was anticipated that access would be from below in removing the panels, so the roof space was not stressed for interlopers.  The way round this was to spread the load, and wriggle on my belly. I may be claustrophobic, but I had earned my early soubriquet of Ricky the Snake honestly, and I managed to get above Zeke’s desk. I spent one night there, testing this, and realising that I would have to be in position to poison him as I made a noise slithering in. I took the opportunity to open myself a small trapdoor in one of the ceiling panels. I cut it in an irregular shape so it looked like natural damage. I glued heavy cardboard all around the edge so it dropped back in, but not through.

I did manage to get in place by the time Zeke arrived, and dropped a cocktail of over-the-counter medications into his coffee by the old ninja expedient of letting it dribble down a black thread, whilst he was fussing over his files.  It contained such things as will make the heart race; and as his chair contained monitors for his heart, which were logged by his own security guard, that should go on record as a tachycardia Event without apparent cause. It paved the way towards an eventual heart attack, and was a dry run to see if I could do it. And no, I am not going to list what I used. Anyone clever enough to research side effects probably already know. And I’m not about to make it easy for anyone else.

Leave it to the professionals.

He did indeed have a spike of increased heart rate, and his bodyguard burst in, alerted by an alarm; and left, advising Zeke to see a doctor.

Having established that Zeke could have such Events, I managed to find a safer way to introduce contaminants, and cursed that I had taken the risk of using ninja tricks. I could break into the water supply to his drinking water, and add a small tank through which I could introduce anything I wanted. Really, he has all that security, cameras of who goes in and out, the need for palm-prints to get anywhere close to his office, the time log on when the door opened, a key-pad with a security number for access, and I can get to his personal supply of drinking water in the service passages.

Menials are invisible.

I had expected better of the FBI, which was why I had not looked right off. I found it by accident when tracing the pipes in the hopes of getting somewhere close.

A few tachycardia events, nothing serious, should set things up.

And they did not need to be serious enough to cause his guard to be alerted; just a little discomfort, but it would still log it.

And because I planned to kill him with digitalis, I had to hope it would mean there would be no autopsy – or he was assumed to be self-medicating. Plenty of people do, and high-level executives are no exception. They don’t want to see a doctor because the advice might not be palatable.

In the meantime, I mended the lift, sorted out some leaking pipes, fixed the broken sprinkler system, rewired the rats’ nest in several places and generally did my job as maintenance. Bill thought me a good worker. What Miss Erlwig thought, I had no idea, and nor did I want to. Her thoughts were not the sort of thoughts I wanted to hear without danger pay. I was too male, too handsome, too dangerous, and worst of all, too menial for her to want to think about me at all, however.

I’ve noticed that a lot of college-educated women, even those who aren’t rabidly Karen-like or who take feminism into misandry – that’s the counterpart of misogyny – want a tall, handsome man, if he is a bad boy, so much the better, who has a huge throbbing bank account… and who has a position socially above hers.  Willow fell for me when she was still convinced I was a gravedigger for the city, bless her.  Finding that I had an interesting job interested her, but it has never been a turn-on for her; merely part of me.

My salary as a highly skilled maintenance worker was actually higher than some junior executives; but given the choice, people like Miss Erlwig prefer the white-collar worker with the lower income. And once married to him, nag him into applying well past his competence level by applying the sort of rabid ambition on his behalf which usually ends in a messy divorce and 2.14 messed up kids.

I have never accepted a sanction in domestic disputes, save where abuse of kids is involved, and I research it myself.

I confess, I was much comforted in having an easier access to himself, and with enough time to get away. I installed a stopcock on Zeke’s water system, far enough away to allow him to fill the kettle. When I was ready, I turned off the water, added enough digitalin to kill a man half as heavy again as he was, to allow for wastage, removed the tank and mended the pipe, and left a drone to access to turn the water back on. If it got out, fine, if not, well, there was enough junk in these crawlways it could squat sullenly powered down and probably would be looked over.

So, I introduced the toxin, got out of the system, made sure I was seen fixing someone’s printer – I did not even need to undertake sabotage, printers have always been the most unreliable part of office equipment – and listened to Willow, who was watching Zeke, tell me when he drank his coffee.

I’d wired Willow in to set off the fire alarm.

Supposedly it was to startle Zeke into a heart-attack.

I exited, with the rest of the sensible members of staff, down the emergency staircases, and we stood around, outside, being counted, under the blazing July sun.

“Are fire drills so frequent, or is there a glitch in the system?” I asked Bill.

“There’s a glitch in the system,” said Bill. “But I’ll tell you now, I’m not about to ignore a fire alarm. When I was training in engineering, there was a fire drill scheduled at the community college I attended, and we shambled out as it was close to lunch, and it took thirty-five minutes to clear the building.  Turned out to be a real fire, in the chemistry labs, caused by some professor who handled things carelessly. Could have been very nasty. So, I never ignore fire alarms.[2]”

“Why don’t we knock off early, and go over to the patisserie for coffee and cream cakes?” I said. “It was an hour before we were let in last time.”

“I’m not about to argue,” said Bill.

So, the dozen or so of us in maintenance shambled over to the rather nice patisserie, which was not best pleased to have menials in its hallowed interiors, but were willing to take our menial money.

I stayed at work another three days, whilst the upper echelon entered headless chicken land. Then I invented a spurious domestic crisis.

Meanwhile, Willow quietly hired Troy and Evans to take down the other alumni of the Washington Academy who were in the Feds.

“What are you doing, messing with the Washington Wolfpack?” asked Troy.

“You know about it?” asked Willow.

“I know about it,” said Troy. “Oh, don’t tell me Rick got all righteous and decided to take them down?”

“We adopted a kid who had a girlfriend,” said Willow.

“I’ll do you half price,” said Troy, gloomily.

 

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[1] Virtual chocolates for anyone who knows where the name came from; she’s drawn from the female in charge of the former mammogram I had which left me traumatised when approaching this last one.

[2] A true story, from IIRC 1975 in Suffolk College.  And there was so much else going on there [which led to the firing of the fire officer] that I dare not put it in fiction as that level of incompetence would not be believable.