Dire Means (25 page)

A row of large metal containers with wheels sat along a side wall. Each had a prominent Trail Bladers logo. Two uniformed men worked in the room, one sweeping the massive floor and the other wiping down a far wall with a cloth. Morana waved to them. They stood up straight to return her wave. “Have you heard of Trail Bladers Subterranean Data Destruction?” she asked Mark.

“Yeah, sure. I see your trucks all over town,” he said. “I think I have some clients that use you guys.” He slowed his walk and looked at each of them again. The level of their excitement still confused him.

Halfway across the red room, Raphael, the muscular man, pointed Mark toward a wide freight elevator on the opposite side. Its black frame and red doors matched the walls. This time Teddy placed his hand on another glass console beside the elevator door. After a flash under his hand, the elevator display blinked to life and Mark heard the sound of the elevator car en route to their floor.

“This was one of our main destruction facilities,” Teddy said, turning to Mark as they waited for the elevator. “We’ve moved our equipment to a larger location—completely underground.”

Mark glanced around the room and then back to the four people who still had the gawky grins of celebrity watchers as they beamed at him. “Where are we taking the elevator to?” he asked.

“Relax,” Morana said, putting her arm around him. Mark looked at her hand on his shoulder—uneasy with the physical contact. Yes, she was beautiful, but he didn’t know her and he didn’t know where he was going. “Papa is waiting to meet you at our new corporate headquarters. We’re going to take you there.”

“Pop? You call him Papa?”

“Oh, yes. He insists.”

“Where exactly is your headquarters?”

“I’m sorry, Mark we can’t disclose that to you—yet,” Morana said. “But I can tell you it’s nearby and we’ll have you back safe and sound within two hours.” She smiled warmly at Mark then reached over her shoulder to Raphael, her hand open. He fished in his front pocket and pulled out three crisp hundred-dollar bills and tucked them into Morana’s hand. She opened the bills, and handed them to Mark.

“What’s this for?” Mark asked.

Teddy said, “Timing is everything for Trail Bladers, so we pay our consultants and vendors promptly, if not in advance.”

Mark whispered a barely audible, “Thank you.” He shook his head, trying to make sense of this situation. The freight elevator opened and they entered it, surrounding Mark. The elevator bumped and began going down. Mark saw the illuminated floor display count down from floor three.

“What floor were we on?”

“Five,” Teddy answered.

“Why did Pop tell me to meet him on floor fourteen?”

“He’s going to answer all your questions. For now, let me just say that Papa is extreme with the privacy of our operations. It’s the nature of our business. After all, secrecy is our profession. You’ll find Papa isn’t so personally secretive when you talk to him face to face.”

The elevator door opened to a freight dock. A shiny black and red armored truck was backed to its edge. Mark recognized the logo—a shiny circular blade with jagged red and black lettering. A uniformed Trail Blader stood guard beside it. The diesel engine glugged as they approached it. The guard stepped to the rear of the truck and swung open its steel doors. “Welcome,” he said, turning to face Mark and the crew.

“I’m not going anywhere in that truck,” Mark said immediately.

Nanette smiled. “Trust us—it is the safest ride you’ll ever have.”

“We don’t have far to go,” Morana added.

Trail Bladers had an excellent reputation around town. A peek at their operation and a chat with its founder could be fascinating. After a quick assessment of his options, he decided to go along.

Raphael and Teddy stepped into the truck first and lowered the legs of a modified bench. They rotated it to face backwards and then clicked its feet back into floor slots. Morana gave Mark a gentle tug on his arm, urging him to enter. He leaned forward to keep from bumping his head and sat down. Teddy and Raphael went back toward the building and disappeared through an unmarked door beside the freight elevator.

“It is such an honor to meet you,” Morana said.

“What do you mean?” Mark asked, still perplexed by the excitement of his four escorts.

“Papa can’t stop telling us about your heroic, selfless act on the Brennan building. We’ve seen the clip of your dive a thousand times at our office.”

“I can’t believe I’m really sitting here with you,” Nanette giggled.

“Well, here we are,” Mark said. It was the only reply he could think of. He knew his act was admired by many, but he didn’t understand the level of his new escorts’ fanaticism.

Raphael and Teddy reappeared, carrying metal chairs. They clicked their chairs into slots in the floor of the truck so that they faced Mark and the women on their bench. The Trail Blader who greeted them outside, closed them in and locked the door before climbing into the driver’s seat. The truck had two small windows high on the back doors. A console sat on the wall of the truck—identical to the one that had opened the door in the building.

They sat in darkness until an interior light blinked on, giving them only enough light to stave off claustrophobia.

The truck jerked ahead. As they drove, Mark could see only sky and an occasional tree, power pole, or street light sinking from view through the back door windows. Inside, he noticed scrape marks on the walls of the truck.

His four Trail Blader escorts smiled a lot, but spoke little while in the truck. Mark had no sense of direction as he felt the vibration and shifting motion of the truck. He felt the truck stop and turn a few times, but he had no bearings on his location or distance traveled. After ten minutes of stop-and-go travel, he felt the speed of a freeway.

The ride was taking a bit longer than he had expected—especially after Morana’s assurances that his entire meeting with Pop would be short. “I need to know where we’re going,” he said to Morana.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you specifically. The secrecy of our location is part of our business protocol.” Her face drooped in sympathy. “But we’ll be there in less than ten minutes,” she promised.

“Seven and a half minutes,” Teddy said. Raphael laughed.

They offered Mark water, but he had grown too uneasy to drink. His concern grew each minute he spent locked in the back of the armored truck.

When they stopped, Mark strained to look out the tiny back window. Raphael leaned forward in his seat ready to stop Mark from standing up, but Morana raised her hand to him.

Mark peered out, but saw only a garage door sliding down, and then the window went dark.

“Papa’s going to be so jazzed that you are here,” Teddy said to him.

“Are you kidding? He’ll be beside himself,” added Nanette, who had kept quiet, with a star-struck gaze fixed on Mark for the whole trip.

“It would be great to get out now,” Mark said. Although he wasn’t prone to claustrophobia, being packed inside an armored truck in dim light with four strangers had him antsy.

“Sure,” Teddy said. “We’re dropping in. We’ll be down and out in just a moment.”

Mark felt the truck bump and heard the whine of a motor. His four escorts sat comfortably, wearing satisfied smiles as if waiting to exit a roller coaster. The truck bumped again as it stopped its descent.

When the doors swung open, the driver stood outside, his arm extended to assist the occupants out.

“Mark, you will want to leave your bag here in the truck, please,” Teddy said. “Believe me, it is safe.”

Mark tucked his computer bag under the bench and stepped out of the truck. His laptop was fully encrypted so he wasn’t concerned about anyone snooping on it. The rest of his bag’s contents were unimportant.

The whine of a motor sounded again, this time louder, not muffled by the truck’s closed doors. They stepped out into a clean, white-walled garage that held four shiny black and red armored trucks—identical to the one he’d exited. Shiny truck maintenance tools hung in orderly rows on one wall. Another wall held cabinets and a large sink.

High above them, he saw two slabs sliding closed to form the ceiling through which they had descended. Mark leaned down and saw a hydraulic lift underneath the truck.

The Trail Bladers ushered Mark to a side door. Raphael placed his hand over another glass console and the door clicked open. Inside, a small group of uniformed Trail Bladers stood in a foyer. They began to clap and cheer when they saw Mark, greeting him as if he was a long lost family member.

Morana beamed and gestured for Mark to enter the foyer to join his admirers, but Mark was too dumbfounded to move. He forced the best smile he could muster and gaped at the cheering strangers. He felt like someone whose friends had thrown him a surprise birthday party on the wrong day.

After the applause subsided, Teddy addressed the group, saying, “Back to work—Papa has only a few minutes with Mark before we must return him.”

As the Trail Bladers turned and filed out of the foyer through a black door, some of them saluted Mark and gave him a thumbs-up sign. One hollered, “Welcome, Mr. Denny. We’re glad to have you!”

As the last Trail Blader exited the foyer, Mark stepped in. What he saw next took his breath away and his mouth dropped open. An enormous floor-to-ceiling photographic mural covered the foyer’s far wall. It was an image of Mark, standing in his underwear moments before he leapt to rescue Al. The resolution and detail of the photo were excellent, but the angle was odd—it was as if it had been taken over Al’s shoulder, or shot long-range with a telephoto lens from another building top. In the image, Mark’s hand extended toward Al. His toes were curled under from the cold and his other arm was pressed against his side as he shivered. His discarded clothing was visible in a heap a short distance from his feet. The photo caught a portion of the crowd three stories below, cropped by the building’s edge. The camera had captured Mark’s worried expression, but also his slight smile of encouragement and his eyes wide with hope as he reached out. Below Mark’s image, three words, printed in bold white type read, “THEY STILL EXIST.”

“That, my friend, was amazing,” Teddy said, jabbing his finger toward the wall. He shook his head and repeated, “Simply amazing.”

“Thank you,” Mark barely whispered, unable to pull his eyes from the mural of himself. He remembered the blitz of flashbulbs every time Al had made a gesture to the crowd. He remembered the gasp of the spectators when Al pulled the fake jumping stunt. But he was positive that he and Al had been alone on the edge of the building. And Al had no visible camera. Certainly the police who eventually arrived couldn’t have taken the photo. They got nowhere near Al while he was still standing.

“Who took…how did you get this photograph?” Mark asked, still fixated.

“You’ve already met Papa,” Morana said. “He took the photo moments before you risked your life for him.” Mark turned to her as her perfect smile grew larger.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Nanette, holding a black felt-tip marker. “Mr. Denny, would you do us all the enormous honor of signing your wall?” she said. The marker quivered in her hand and she averted her eyes from Mark’s.

Mark took the pen. The faces of the four Trail Bladers beamed, as they celebrated him with clear pride. Raphael nodded and pointed to the wall, coaxing him.

During the last week, public focus had made Mark uneasy. Now his celebrity had risen to an entirely new level within this clandestine operation—some secret world that he never knew existed and maybe no one knew existed—except these people who lived in it.

Mark felt light headed. “I need to sit down a minute. I need a drink—please,” he said.

“We’re on it,” Nanette said to Morana and Raphael. She and Teddy ran to the black door. Teddy placed his hand on the console, the door clicked open and they disappeared through it. On the opposite side of the foyer was a red door with no handle or hinges showing. Mark wondered what it was for.

Morana took the pen from Mark and said, “You can autograph our photo in bit—if you feel we are worthy.”

“Worthy?” Mark had gathered himself enough to cough a nervous laugh.

Morana didn’t laugh. “Yes, if you feel we are worthy,” she repeated, her face serious.

Morana and Raphael led Mark through the door that Teddy, Nanette, and the other Trail Bladers used. They wound their way through a maze of door-lined hallways bathed in fluorescent light. Raphael split off at an intersection, and entered a room at the end of a short hall. Each door had a glass hand-console mounted in the wall beside it.

As they turned a final corner, Morana said, “I’m taking you to a place where you can rest while I check to make sure Papa is ready to meet. Nanette is on the way with some refreshments for you. We will return you to the ALCO building the moment your meeting is finished.” She stopped at a door and placed her hand on its console. The door clicked opened.

Inside, Mark saw accommodations that rivaled a presidential suite in any five-star hotel. A hand-tiled entryway led to a great room with plush furniture and tables decorated with fresh flowers. A sitting area separated the full kitchen from a polished dining table that seated ten.

In the rear of the suite, a master bedroom featured an enormous bed with grand, carved bedposts. On the far wall, silk draperies hung from ornate wrought iron in a graceful ceiling-to-floor fall. A marble master bath included a sauna and a sunken whirlpool bath. Every fixture and surface glistened. Just outside the master bedroom, a den with a television, sofas, fridge, and snack bar was bigger than Mark’s apartment living room. Attention was given to every detail of the room, from the number of stems in the flower vases to the pearly white bathroom wash basin, beside which plush towels were fanned.