Dire Means (3 page)

She repeated her instruction. “Remove your pants, and then enter the cart willingly.”

Brandon unbuckled his belt with trembling fingers and dropped his pants to the floor. He stepped out of them and stumbled toward the cart, dragging his Taser leashes. The woman nodded at him with no smile, approving his progress to the container.

He squatted and managed to squeeze into the cart. He fought his gut to raise his knees toward his chin. While one man strapped a ball gag around Brandon’s head, the other picked up his pants and fished through the pockets. He retrieved Brandon’s keys, cell phone, and then a wedding band that he handed to the woman. She sucked her teeth in disgust, reached down, grabbed the Taser wires two feet from Brandon’s stomach, and snatched the probes out. The man who held Brandon’s pants, pockets pulled inside out, tossed them into the cart. The bulky man slammed it shut and locked it before opening a slat on the side that exposed four quarter-sized holes for ventilation.

The padded separator wall that had blocked the elevator retracted into the ceiling and they pushed the cart onto the elevator. The cart shook a few times as Brandon moved his hips to adjust his position inside his padded container. The ball gag and foam lining of the cart’s interior dulled his pleas to garbled babble heard only by him.

On the loading dock, they wheeled Brandon’s enclosed container into the back of a shiny red and black truck. Its rear door swung wide to accept the cargo. Brandon Chargon’s final ride in a vehicle was not to be next to a gorgeous woman in the breezy freedom of his beloved ‘57 Ford Fairlane convertible. Instead, he rode entombed in a latched steel container carried in the locked bed of an armored truck.

Chapter Four

IT WAS 9:30 P.M. and forty-one year old Jackie Dunbarton had put in another long day at the office. She was an old timer with twelve years of service at Star Mortgage in the Terra Fina Tower Building, now the office manager after a promotion the week before. She intended to prove the wisdom of her bosses by burning the midnight oil six days a week to accomplish more than was expected of her. Her first week of late night departures had put her on a first name basis with Nate, the night security guard.

She reclined and looked out her eighth floor window. Arizona Avenue routed cars below that carried nine-to-fivers, probably on their way home from dinner. Jackie planned to enjoy a frozen turkey dinner she had purchased to get into a Thanksgiving frame of mind.

As she straightened some papers on her desk and thought about taking home some of those delicious oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies someone had brought for the office breakfast, her phone rang. She checked the time. Who could be calling this late? She considered letting the call go to voicemail, but figured that the call could be from one of her bosses and their discovery of her diligence was too great an opportunity to pass up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Star Mortgage?” a deep male voice said.

“Yes, but we are closed,” Jackie said. She rolled her eyes, sorry she had answered.

“This is evening security and we are contacting any tenants who remain in the building because we need to do some elevator maintenance. Could you tell us how much longer you’ll be tonight?”

“Nate? Is that you?”

“No, ma’am, there’s no Nate here.”

“Fine, well, I’m actually on my way out right now,” Jackie said as she slipped her purse over her shoulder and pushed her chair in.

“Well then, your timing is perfect. Could you please use the freight elevator instead of the passenger elevator when you leave?”

“Certainly, but I don’t have a key card,” Jackie said.

“That’s no problem. We’ll leave it open on your floor for you. Are you familiar with the location of the freight elevator?”

“Yes, it’s the one around the corner beside the restrooms, right?”

“Exactly. We appreciate your cooperation, ma’am.”

Although she had passed by it many times to and from the restroom, Jackie had never ridden the freight elevator. As promised, it waited, door open, and she stepped inside. The metal button panel was surrounded by scratches and gouges, engraved by movers and delivery personnel who had used objects to press buttons. The elevator car was twice the size of the passenger elevator, but was filthy and worn. It smelled like sweat.

In the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickered as the large doors slid toward one another, kissing with surprising delicacy, closing Jackie in.

The number 8 illuminated above the door blinked and changed to an L, but Jackie sensed the elevator rising instead of sinking. Although she felt movement and heard the air of the elevator shaft, the L stayed lit. After ten seconds, the elevator shuddered and stopped, and the large doors opened to an undecorated foyer with no chairs and only one door. Two men in matching red Polo shirts and black pressed slacks stood on either side of a metal wheeled container the size of a kitchen stove.

One man swatted his hand toward Jackie, instructing her to move back, deeper into the elevator to make room for their cart. She complied, stepping to the back of the elevator while patting the back of her hair—a nervous response to an order given more forcefully than she felt it needed to be.

“You’re welcome,” she said, making sure to inject plenty of sarcasm.

The men ignored her, focusing instead on positioning the cart. They turned their backs to her and faced the closing door. The man beside the button panel suddenly pressed all twelve of the floor buttons and the elevator began descending.

“Nice move. We might reach the lobby by tomorrow,” Jackie said to their backs.

The struggling fluorescent light blinked off, leaving the elevator in total darkness. Jackie heard feet scuffle on the floor and the container bang against the elevator wall.

She got out half a gasp before a hand clapped a cloth over her mouth. Strong arms hugged her, pressing her arms to her sides while another set of arms grabbed her kicking legs and tamed them into submission. She and her attackers fell to the floor. A long snarl of unspooling duct tape cut through the sound of the struggle. They pressed her ankles together and bound them. She got off two arm swings, one landing on what felt like a man’s shoulder and the other slamming the elevator wall. Within fifteen seconds, her arms and legs were secured and a soft rubber ball gag was shoved into her screaming mouth before its rubber strap snapped tight at the back of her head.

After subduing Jackie’s sound and movement, the men lifted her and gently lowered her into the foam-lined cart. When they closed the lid and latched it, she heard only her own panicked breath racing in and out of her nostrils. She tried to kick the inner walls of the container as hard as she could with bound feet, but the thick padding softened each kick to a thump barely audible outside the container.

The elevator door opened on the Terra Fina Tower Building’s freight dock, its fluorescent lights flickering. The men pushed the cart out of the elevator and a short distance onto the enclosed bed of a grumbling armored truck. They swung the truck’s steel doors shut, producing a heavy clunk and then the truck jerked away from the freight driveway onto Arizona Avenue.

Business was good.

Chapter Five

TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Mark Denny thrived on order and predictability. His immaculate apartment was the epitome of organization. The key hook just inside his front door was worn down by key rings having slid on and off thousands of times over the years. Mark never lost his keys. The shoes he would wear the next day were always placed under this hook.

Each evening, his coffeemaker was preloaded and set to turn on at 6:43 a.m. so that his brew was ready to pour into his thermos at 6:58 a.m.—in time to walk to the car and exit his driveway by 7:00 a.m.

He dressed in clothes he had laid out on a recliner in his bedroom the previous night. His bathroom was sparse and spotless, and his kitchen sink never saw a dirty dish or utensil for more than a few hours, and never overnight. This perpetual order kept Mark comfortable.

He began his career as a support technician for a small support company in West Los Angeles. After a short stint there, Mark left the company to begin his own entrepreneurial venture with his best friend from college, Carlos Rais. They began their own computer service business named Combobulators. They visited homes and businesses, providing desktop computer support and repair for a small-business clientele.

While fixing printers, correcting Internet connectivity problems, installing software, and performing general maintenance, they developed a bond of friendship with their short list of regular clients. In a business where trust is critical for success, Mark and Carlos earned more confidence from their clients with each task they completed.

In the beginning, business was sporadic, and for two years they struggled. Despite the tight cash flow, they invested in some newspaper ads and asked clients for referrals to generate leads. Recently, their efforts paid off with rapid company growth and a waiting list for their services.

Their clientele grew to include a rather exclusive list of powerful Los Angeles entrepreneurs that included publishers, producers, investment bankers, and several prominent CEOs. Each client had Mark or Carlos on speed dial.

While Mark played the “people person” of the duo, Carlos was technologically brilliant. A gadget freak, Carlos constantly took apart and reassembled computers, cell phones, pagers—anything that had a circuit board inside was a candidate for dissection.

Of particular interest to Carlos was electronic surveillance. Through his tinkering, he developed a device that could recreate screen images of a nearby computer by reorganizing electromagnetic radiation interference from the computer’s motherboard and monitor. It was the ultimate form of computer surveillance. Though that feat alone was impressive, Carlos wasn’t satisfied. He continued to refine his invention, barricading himself in his apartment for hundreds of hours of intense experimentation and testing.

One day he arrived at Mark’s place, bursting through the door and excited to the point of hyperventilation. He handed Mark a hollowed out novel with a bookmark antennae no thicker than a strand of angel hair pasta dangling from the bottom. Inside was a device that Carlos claimed could capture and reassemble the electromagnetic interference of computer monitors passively. It was the ultimate in undetectable electronic eavesdropping.

Carlos had Mark turn on a laptop in the next room and told him to open some random programs, browse web pages, and type a document on it for two minutes. Afterward, Carlos connected his device to his own laptop in the next room and played back for Mark every one of Mark’s laptop screens in perfect clarity. Such electronic surveillance in and of itself was not earth shattering, but to do it passively, without any two-way connection to the source computer, was a breakthrough. Carlos had created his invention by building on a little-known technology called TEMPEST.

“You’re out of control! This is bigger than you know!” Mark said as he high-fived Carlos.

“No, it is exactly as huge as I thought it would be. Keep this quiet until the patent is finalized,” Carlos said. He took back the mock-book and left with it tucked under his arm.

Over the next weeks Carlos continued to perfect his new surveillance device and included Mark in its development. He named the device the TellTale. They planned to market the TellTale through their company, with the goal of moving from a service-based business to retail sales.

Life was on the verge of being as good as it could get for Mark, until the first in a series of misfortunes occurred. He discovered that his girlfriend of three years had siphoned off nearly all the money in both his checking and savings accounts and opened several lines of credit in his name. A misstep on her part prompted a creditor’s phone call to his apartment to verify the purchase of a $2,500 armoire scheduled for delivery to the home of another man. The painful and surprising end of that relationship galvanized Mark’s determination to control the elements of his life. His preoccupation became an obsession.

A week later, he and Carlos were out on a new computer installation job, finishing their project ahead of schedule and grateful to be pulling up stakes early when Carlos’s phone rang.

“Yes…What? Yes…Which hospital...I’ll be right there,” he said. His face was pale and his hand trembled as he flipped his phone closed and slid it into his pocket. “Beth and the girls were in a traffic accident,” he said on his way to the door.

Mark hurried after him. “Can I drive you to the hospital?” he asked.

“No, I’ll call you!” Carlos shouted over his shoulder as he ran to the parking lot.

“What hospital?” Mark shouted, but Carlos was too far away to hear. There were twelve hospitals in a ten-mile radius from where Carlos and his family lived in West LA.

Mark called Carlos’s cell several times during the next hour. He finished up the job, and called again. Carlos didn’t answer. Three hours later, as Mark contemplated driving to some of the most likely hospitals to find Carlos, the phone rang. A sobbing Carlos said, “They’re gone, man. My girls are all gone…”

Two boys on a joy ride had blindsided Beth’s car, killing her and her daughters instantly, despite the fact that all people in both cars wore seatbelts. The teens had suffered only minor injuries from their frontal impact. Carlos was inconsolable and hung up on Mark after his words deteriorated into unintelligible sobbing.