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  Otis, J.A. and Curtis couldn’t believe what they were seeing. In addition to the two SWAT vehicles, at least a dozen police patrol units had converged on the scene. The building and all escape routes were impassable.

  “What’s going on?” Curtis said, not comprehending.

  “It’s a setup!” Otis yelled. “The inside man set us up. He got us to give him two million dollars and put our best guys in position for the ambush, and then he turned the tables. Those aren’t fake SWAT vehicles, they’re the real deal!”

  As if to punctuate his revelation, the Salento PD tactical teams spilled from the two vehicles. The firepower was incredible. A SWAT commander began to hail the auto body shop over a public address system.

  Inside, the men who were lying in ambush realized they were suddenly playing defense. They broke from their hiding places. The motion detectors were triggered, but they disarmed the system before the howlers were set off. They listened to the SWAT commander on the PA and wondered what on earth they were supposed to do.

  Five kilometers away, also watching on a webcam, the Colonel nodded to Diego, his computer and technical expert. Diego dialed a number on a cell phone. The signal activated two automatic weapons he had hidden inside the auto body shop, pointing out toward the front. The rifles went full auto, emptying their mags into the street in front of their former HQ.

  Outside the auto body shop, the SWAT commander gave the order to open fire.

  Otis, J.A. and Curtis watched as the building was riddled with assault rifle fire, shotgun blasts, small arms fire, and teargas canisters. After a five-minute firefight, the SWAT commander exhorted the men inside to surrender. One of the big bay doors in the front of the building opened slowly. Two of the seven-man crew who had expected to ambush the bandits plundering Otis’s operations appeared in the opening. They had their hands behind their heads. One of them was badly wounded and staggered forward.

  They were down and cuffed almost immediately. The Salento SWAT team and two dozen uniformed officers swarmed over the auto body shop like fire ants. As Otis watched, the rest of his ambush team were taken out of the building in body bags. Somewhere, he knew, the men who had been bleeding his organization were watching and laughing at him.

  The Colonel and his men were watching. But none of them were laughing. They were too disciplined and professional to indulge in gloating. All of them, especially Luis, were aware that this act of deception could easily have ended before it started, with J.A. nabbing Luis at their first meeting, torturing him to learn the whereabouts of the rest of the group, and killing them all the moment they left to raid another grow house.

  The Colonel had come up with the ruse, but Luis had volunteered for the assignment. Their offshore account was two million dollars richer, thanks to the plan. But from this point onward every dollar would be harder to earn. With this slap in the face they knew they would become Otis’s number one priority.

  Diego had activated the assault rifles in the auto body shop from their new base of operations. It was not far from the old, in a half-vacant industrial park. The Colonel had taken a three-month cash lease on the space. It was a former warehouse operation, with loading docks and more than enough room to store all their gear, which they had loaded into both vans when they left their old base.

  To complete the double-cross, the Colonel had left ninety thousand dollars cash and eighteen pounds of high-grade pot in duffle bags hidden in the body shop. The police officers would undoubtedly find it as they searched the premises, and conclude that they had taken down the paramilitary organization that was waging war against Salento’s grow houses.

  By the time the police figured out what had really happened, he would have three more missions completed and be eyeing their final prize. He was saving the best for last. It would provide the final large piece of financing he needed to get them back to their homeland and overthrow the corrupt regime.

  Simultaneously, he would deliver a political statement that would make the entire world take notice.

  33

  Mya arrived at the office at her customary eight a.m. sharp. Before she had a chance to boot up her laptop her phone rang. It was Peter Dunn. “Mya, can you come to my office please?”

  “Sure Peter. What’s up?”

  “I’ll explain when you get here.”

  She filled her water bottle on the way. When she arrived at Dunn’s office the entire executive management team was sitting around Dunn’s coffee table. For such a large company, it was a tight group, comprised of Dunn, the agency’s CFO Hec Moody, Charlene McCourt, executive vice-president of media, and Arden Monaghan, the chief creative officer.

  “Come on in, Mya,” Dunn motioned.

  “What’s up?” Mya asked. “Did we get an invitation to pitch the Nike business?”

  “I wish,” Arden Monaghan sighed.

  “No, it’s a bit more solemn, I’m afraid,” said Dunn. “Garrett Lawrence handed in his resignation. First thing this morning. Didn’t even come in to the office. He emailed me.”

  Mya suppressed a smile. No point in dancing on someone’s grave. “Didn’t he have to give notice? Or a reason?”

  Hec Moody answered. “He was legally obligated to give us two months notice, to allow for an orderly transition of the accounts he was working on. But for some reason he decided to just bail.”

  Dunn elaborated. “He says he needs time away from the business. Says he’s going to travel. If I find out he’s going to another agency, I will lawyer up and sue his ass off.”

  Monaghan thought for a moment. “I’m trying to picture him without an ass. It’s a pretty strange visual.”

  Charlene McCourt tried to elevate the conversation. “Are there any pieces of business that might be jeopardized by his sudden departure? The guys over at Four Horseman Beer seem to like what Garrett brought to their account.”

  Dunn agreed. “I’ll get on the phone and let them know before they hear it from someone on the street. Garrett was really into their account in a big way. Not surprising, since it was all beer babes and their Suds calendar girls.”

  Mya shuddered at the thought of Garrett connected with an unlimited supply of alcohol and beautiful women.

  They agreed on a strategy for breaking the news to the agency and any other clients Garrett might have had some influence with. Then Dunn filled them in on some of the new business he’d been cultivating. Finally, as the meeting wound down, he turned to Mya. “There’s one other thing that we need to discuss, and that’s you, Mya.”

  Mya looked startled. “Me? Why?”

  Hec Moody laughed. “No need for the deer-in-the-headlights look, Mya.”

  “I’ve talked to the others,” Dunn continued, “and we’ve all agreed that we’d like you to join the executive management team.”

  Caught off guard, Mya blurted out, “What?”

  Then she blushed, which wasn’t lost on Monaghan. “Geez Mya, could you at least pretend to have an ego? I could be a donor if you like. Mine is big enough that I need to book an adjacent seat whenever I travel.”

  Everyone laughed at the jibe. Mya made an effort to recover. “Are you sure, Peter? I’ve only been with the shop three years. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love it here. But are you sure you want to promote me over some of the other department heads who have seniority?”

  “We’ve been through all the possibilities and options,” Dunn said. “Sure, others have been here longer, but nobody’s had as much impact. Jean Zélat sings your praises all the time. Any piece of business we parachute you in on seems to immediately benefit. Your peers and subordinates respect and admire your attitude. You don’t seem to have any detractors.”

  Not any more, Mya thought.

  “If you’re amenable, Hec and I will walk you through your new compensation package. The others are dying to get back to work,” said Dunn.

  “Congratulations Mya,” Charlene McCourt said, giving her a hug. Arden Monaghan shook her hand warmly. “You’re the only suit in the sh
op who doesn’t have a voodoo effigy in the creative department,” he said. “Some of them are so full of pins that they’d sink like stones. You’ve earned this.”

  “Thank you,” Mya said.

  Hec Moody, the CFO, opened a folder as the others filed out. He handed a document to Dunn, who gave it a once-over and then slid it across the table to Mya. “You’re currently making six hundred. We’ll bump that to seven. You’ll also move to a new profit sharing multiple. Since your Porsche was a bonus just last year, I didn’t think you’d care for a vehicle allowance. Instead we are offering you a membership at the Alisse Spa.”

  “Ohhh, you know me all too well,” Mya said.

  Moody laughed. “My wife joined. She said if you ever book her favorite masseuse she’ll kill you. I believe she was joking.”

  “Trust me,” Mya replied, “I won’t get in her way.”

  “It’s not all fun and games, of course,” Dunn said. “This is the point where you sell your soul to the company. I could make some gratuitous remarks about how ‘we believe in work-life balance,’ but you know that’s bullshit. So what do you say, Mya? Care to dance with the devil?”

  Mya looked at the document and clasped her hands under her chin. “Let me give it some thought overnight. You know how much I love the company you’ve built, Peter. I just want to be sure I can make the kind of commitment I know you expect of your senior team.”

  “That’s the right answer,” Dunn said with a grin. “If you’d jumped at it without any consideration I would’ve been worried. I’m on a plane first thing tomorrow to Austin, Texas for a get-together with the people from Morgan Boots. They want to take me quail hunting to see if we can bond. But send me an email with your answer when you’re ready.”

  “Have you ever hunted?” Mya asked.

  “Dear Mya,” Dunn said, smiling. “My dad and I used to take epic duck hunting trips to Saskatchewan every year. I’ve got a 12-gauge Fabbri over-under shotgun that used to belong to King Juan Carlos of Spain. These good old boys don’t know what they’re in for!”

  They shook hands and Mya hurried off to her department. Her pulse was elevated and her mind raced with pros and cons. It wasn’t all about the money, although an extra 100K was amazing, and the agency was profitable enough that with bonuses and profit-sharing she could be flirting with a million-dollar annual take. She knew that the Alisse Spa had an eighteen-month waiting list, and she’d always wanted to go there.

  It was the “sell your soul” part that she was worried about. Dunn had said it with a smile, but it was vaguely serpentine. He was a charming, persuasive man—smoother than Belgian chocolate. He had been married twice and was now single because his business demanded it. The moment there was a crisis within the agency, he was fully engaged. She had seen him fly back from a holiday in Madagascar just because there was a rumor of a major new business pitch. Christmases and birthdays often fell by the wayside as he drove his people to build the company. Mya decided to put Dunn’s proposal aside for the rest of the day and talk it over with Mitchell that evening.

  Today was a crucial day for the Zealot Jeans campaign. The game was into the tenth stage and her team was pulling sixteen-hour days. The latest adventure involved feeding coordinates of a special location into Google Street View. The coordinates took players to a street in a downtrodden area of Detroit. Once players arrived on the street online, they had to move up and down the street looking for the next clue.

  The agency team had hired a graffiti artist to create a special tag on the exterior wall of a laundromat. It had taken some doing to get the Google people to update the street view, but in the end they had come through. The message spray painted on the laundromat wall was “LOCKER 21.” It directed people to airport locker numbers in fourteen major cities. The first player to show up to locker twenty-one at the international airport in each city was given a key to the locker.

  Inside each locker was a flash drive. When the flash drive was inserted into the player’s computer, it connected to a secret website. The players entered their name and address, as well as other vital statistics, and then they were sent a first class airline ticket to come to Salento for the final stage of the game.

  Amazingly, there were still over four hundred players at this level, so just one in thirty would qualify for the finals. The viral buzz the campaign had generated was off the charts, and unlike many web-based marketing efforts, sales of the product were following suit. The client, Jean Zélat, was ecstatic. And the success of this campaign had no doubt contributed to Dunn’s decision to ask Mya to join the executive management team.

  Two more weeks, Mya thought. Let’s keep the wheels on this thing for two more weeks.

  34

  At the Eighth Precinct, Captain Ramsey was conducting a debriefing of the entire squad, prior to a press conference about the successful raid of the grow-op robbers’ HQ.

  “I know we all think that Lieutenant Dukowski and his SWAT guys are a bunch of gung-ho, trigger happy jackbooters, desperately trying to compensate for below-average dick size by carrying above-average firepower, but in this case we gotta take our hats off. They greased five baddies and captured two more without any losses on our side. All you fuckers oughta give them some respect. But don’t overdo it. The last thing we want is for them to get swelled heads.”

  Hernandez piped up. “Hey Cap, we were thinking of taking up a collection and sending them a strip-o-gram. Whaddya think?”

  Ramsey grinned. “Anyone you know, Hernandez?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Whatever, put me in for ten bucks. Does anyone have an intelligent question?”

  “What’d the crime scene boys find at the auto body shop?” Ryerson asked.

  “The canine unit sniffed out a sizable stash of premium ganja, and there was a bag of cash hidden in a freezer. Enough cash to choke a fucking camel, supposedly. The five perps who bought it were ventilated pretty good. One guy took a high-velocity round through his neck. The blood spatter analyst got a hard-on talking about it. Said the arterial spurt was a thing of beauty…Freak. Any other questions? Okay, don’t think you can take the rest of the afternoon off. There are still lowlifes out there.”

  The captain left the room to meet the press. Mitchell, Sandovan and the rest of the detectives went back to their desks. Nelson switched on a TV to watch the press conference. “I can’t wait to see the captain drop an F bomb on live TV,” he said. “Maybe he’ll tell some reporter to go fuck himself.”

  Sandovan shook his head. “You’ve never seen Ramsey on TV? He’s like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Check it out.”

  They watched as the reporters put a variety of vapid questions to Captain Ramsey. A blonde with blinding white teeth the size of piano keys was first to catch his eye.

  “Captain Ramsey, describe the significance of this raid today.”

  Ramsey paused for effect. “The Salento Police Department, in conjunction with the DA and the Mayor’s office, has been purposeful and efficient in its efforts to safeguard the taxpayers of this city. A well-articulated strategy from command, coupled with operational and tactical precision, has made it extremely difficult for criminal elements to thrive. The perspicacious investigators we’ve tasked with infiltrating the drug trade in particular, have achieved impressive results.”

  Nelson was slack-jawed to see Captain Miles Ramsey field every question without a single profanity.

  “It’s like he’s running for office,” Nelson said.

  “Nah,” said Mitchell. “Say what you will about Ramsey, he’s a pro.”

  “Damn,” Nelson continued. “When that first reporter asked why the SWAT team didn’t shoot to wound instead of to kill, I thought Ramsey was going to tell him to shove the microphone up his ass.”

  “Hell no,” said Ryerson. “That’s why the Commish calls the captain ‘Extra’ Miles Ramsey. He can go all day long fielding the stupidest questions without losing his temper or giving away any real information. He once told me a trick he uses
to stay sane. If he would really love to swear at someone and can’t, he’ll preface his remarks with ‘FYI.’ To most people that means ‘For Your Information.’ But Ramsey says he uses it as a mental abbreviation for ‘Fuck You Idiot.’”

  As they watched, a male reporter with impeccably styled hair was trying to pin Ramsey down on the state of the city’s war on drugs. “Captain Ramsey, wouldn’t you agree that like every other major American city, Salento is losing its drug war?”

  If he was irritated at all, Ramsey’s face revealed nothing. Not even a twitch. “Well, Bob,” he began.

  “Actually, it’s Bill” the reporter corrected him.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” Ramsey replied without the slightest hint of regret.

  Sandovan laughed. “He actually knew that guy’s name. I heard him and Rodriguez making fun of his hair as they watched him on the TV the other day.”

  Ramsey continued to answer the reporter. “FYI, the war on drugs is a misnomer. I’ve been to war. In war, the battle lines are reasonably clear. You have an idea of what victory looks like. And there is more respect between the adversaries. When law enforcement goes up against drug dealers, we’re outgunned, out-financed, and sometimes handicapped by the justice system’s sense of fair play against a group of people who don’t have a sense of fair play. In the end, we do a very effective job with the resources we have. FYI, the city’s administration is fiscally responsible and manages the law enforcement budget extremely efficiently. So we’re not losing the drug war, as you put it. We’re prioritizing as best we can.”

  The reporter grappled for a handhold in the lengthy, generalized answer the captain gave him but it was like trying to climb a glass wall. Ramsey fielded two more questions, then yielded the microphone to a representative from the mayor’s office.