From Filth & Mud Page 2
“Fucking great. I’ve got interviews all day. What the fuck do you think? I’m sitting here with you in this uppity hellhole.”
“C’mon man do you want a job or what?” John was prodding.
“What kind?”
“How old are you?”
“Man you know… ”
“Do you feel old? What do you bench? 250? 300?”
“I haven’t in years… benched, that is. I’m lucky if I can keep up my yoga…”
“Did you just say yoga?” There was that look again. John was appealing to his smaller side, the macho side, the one that had been on life support for far too long.
“It’s a back thing… or hips… something.”
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a sand-in-your-ass thing.” John responded with one of the colloquial phrases common to the Corps that would draw the disgust and ire of any civilian within hearing. There were many such colloquialisms.
“I’m just saying I’m not ready for anything like that.”
John leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and blew out an exasperated torrent of curses.
“Not ready for what? You haven’t even let me tell you what it is! It’s not even that big a deal. You don’t need to be high speed, low drag, just passable. These guys are only looking for bodies right now.”
The truth was that Jacob was intrigued by the proposition. Slowly over the last couple of months he’d let John know that he needed help finding work. He’d dropped hints that maybe he’d want to do something less office related. He’d flirted with the idea of doing something, anything, physical.
“So what is it exactly that I would be doing? What is it exactly that you do John?” Jacob asked with an inflection that suggested that he didn’t really want to know.
“I told you corporate security.”
“Well that’s specific.” Jacob rolled his eyes as he took a sip of coffee.
“Stop busting my balls. I baby sit execs when they are on the move. I baby sit shipments of crap. I basically provide escort services to companies, without the happy ending part.” There it was again; the look. John minced his words, but his eyes always betrayed something, like two obsidian, one-way mirrors, reflecting the outside world while obscuring the one inside.
“And if I say yes?”
“Just call this number. They’ll take your info. They’re expecting your call.” John handed him a business card. “A spot came open, and I told them I had a guy in mind.” John flashed his patented grin.
Jacob took the card and admired it. It read simply: John Baez, Senior Consultant, a logo reading, XPS, was emblazoned on the top of the card.
“Call the number. Promise me you’ll call. Don’t make me look bad!”
“I’ll think about it.” Jacob smiled.
- - - - - - -
By the time he got home, Jacob had forgotten about the conversation. He was tired. Nathan had a bad day at school, as bad a day as an eight year old could have.
“– I, kinda, sorta but not really like. She said that I stink, Dad.”
“Yeah, bud. Why?”
“I don’t know; she’s a girl.”
“You stink! Nate stinks.” Luke helpfully chimed in.
The elder brother quickly admonished the transgression with a swift punch to the arm.
“Both of you stop it. Pizza’s here.”
The boys frenzied toward the door. Jacob imagined that the delivery guy was probably freaked out by the sound of the chaos hurtling itself toward the front door. The pizza was great: pepperoni and extra cheese. Pizza-time was always a good time. Jacob ate his half of the pie, as usual, except tonight, he skipped the customary beers.
After he had put the boys down for the night, Jacob should have headed toward the den for his usual TV time, but tonight he detoured toward the garage.
Could he do it? The thought crept in uninvited, thieving itself into his mind.
CHAPTER 2
The next morning Jacob awoke in his usual, frantic, sweaty manner. Sarah was stalking around the bedroom preparing, the ever present case on her mind. Sarah’s law firm demanded a lot from its attorneys though she probably demanded a lot more of herself. She had a family to support. The firm demanded two thousand billable hours a year; she’d done more, for seven years and counting. The demand broke down to forty billable hours per week, which meant that she had to work at least sixty hours of real time to meet the quota. Clients nowadays refused to pay every charge on their billing statement. The quota was the bare minimum, and the firm frowned on the bare minimum. Lawyers did not survive at Bodner James billing the bare minimum, so Sarah sacrificed. Jacob knew that.
He took a deep breath and broke the silence. “Hey, hun.”
“I’m in a hurry; what’s up?” The prosecutorial tone, though expected, made him pause.
“I think I got a lead on something.” Jacob was unsure.
“Insurance?”
“No. Remember I had stopped looking into that. We talked about it.”
“What then?”
“Something else…”
“Insurance is a decent paycheck… ” She couldn’t let go, but what good lawyer could?
“Yeah but it isn’t… Can you let me finish?” It had been like this lately. Volleys. “It’s something John talked to me about.”
“Oh.” Her hurry slowed to concern.
“Relax; I’m not going back in. That’s long gone. I’m too old for that.”
“Damn right!” That one hurt.
“He made a call. He told me that they had an opening at his company working security, corporate security. It sounds like they want a guy with my background, but not necessarily to do anything with it. They want people who can make clients feel safe and special. It’s probably just a way for the company to collect some government tax-break for hiring veterans or something like that.”
“Security? What are you talking about? A rent-a-cop job?” She was already grabbing her briefcase, pumps in hand, heading toward the door.”
“Wait! What the hell? Wait a minute, Sarah! God damn it, I’m just trying to…” He lunged out of bed and grabbed at her arm. She whirled back around, her eyes piercing through his. His hand firmly clenched her wrist.
“Let go!”
He was terrified. His hands trembled. He loosened his grip, and Sarah stormed off. The tears washed the mascara from her eyes.
His outbursts too had become routine.
- - - - - - -
The fury of the morning routine awaited Jacob, and this morning it was worse than usual. The boys seemed to feed off of his tension, fighting the entire drive to school. Jacob would’ve normally ended it with a profanity-laden tirade, but today he just stewed.
He emerged from his frustration as he sat in the diner, hovering over his tepid mug of coffee. He couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation he’d had with John the day before. He guzzled what he could manage before the heartburn set in and stormed off angrily toward the minivan. Tanya, the diner’s proprietor, had come to know his moods well, so she didn’t remind him that he’d forgotten to pay. He’d be back, possibly in better spirits tomorrow, he’d settle his tab then.
Jacob rummaged around the minivan for his charger. His phone’s battery constantly ran on life support. After a few moments, he found it tucked behind one of Nate’s soccer shin pads. The phone barely had enough charge to make the call, though he wondered if the tension in their voices could possibly charge it.
“Hey, hun. How are you? I love you. How’s work going? Hi. Okay. Love you, too. The same.” Every call seemed like an apology. He felt like an AA member trying to make amends. The calls were short, awkward, stressful, which is why he’d started calling less frequently.
“Can I talk about the job?” There was no point in acknowledging the tension.
“Sure.”
“Look, John referred me to these people. I asked him to help. He’s been looking for me for a while now. He’s a good guy, just
trying to help. It’s probably nothing I’d be interested in. I just can’t turn it down before I even know what it is. It would be a slap in his face. He’s… Look, I practically begged. No, I fucking begged.”
“Well, what the fuck do you want me to say?” Sarah hissed into the phone, as she tried to avoid attracting attention to her middling office. She did not want to look the part of the stereotypical, partner-track, female lawyer who was clinging to a failed marriage, even if that was her fate.
“Would you listen for a second? I’m just saying that I have to make the call at least. It’s better than me staying at home waiting for the walls to close in!” Jacob would never confess to her what he meant, but he sensed that she knew.
The long silence was interrupted by Sarah: “Is it dangerous?”
“No.”
“Would you have to carry a gun?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. John didn’t mention anything about that.”
“Did he grin?” Sarah was a good interrogator. She always knew the answers to the questions before she asked them: a dirty lawyer trick.
“Do you think I should call?”
“You’ve already made up your mind, Jacob.” The line dropped.
Jacob looked at the phone. It still had a charge.
He sat fidgeting in the sputtering minivan for a few minutes until he mustered the courage to make the call. The phone rang three times before a proper female voice picked up and introduced herself as Maggie. She expected his call and informed him that she would be his on-boarding concierge. He hoped that Maggie could not hear the screeching, loose fan-belt in the background. He would have turned off the minivan, but he didn’t want to chance the phone dying. The conversation was friendly, businesslike, and succinct. They were impressed with his resume. John had been so kind as to forward that. Apparently Jacob had already passed their intensive background check. Jacob inquired about an interview and he was informed that all interviews were conducted in person at XPS, Inc.’s main office in Washington, D.C. Would a week’s time work for him? He assured Maggie that it would.
CHAPTER 3
Miles Baker awoke to the warm aroma of his coffeepot as it strained its filtered, natural spring water through the freshly ground, dark-roasted beans waiting eagerly to give up their drained goodness—Ahhh! The best part of waking up, yeah that’s how that commercial went. Miles stretched as he dreaded what came next. The part the commercial never talked about, the rest of the goddamn day.
His television had come to life moments before his feet hit the cold, faux-wood floor. The television helped clear the cobwebs but never quite like mother-nature’s call. The bladder was the morning’s best motivator. A series of quick tip-toes led him down the cold corridor, toward the bathroom, just as his bladder sprang to life. The bathroom lights flickered to life then peaked to a controlled brightness, bright enough to make him squint, but dim enough to prevent the migraines that had been coming on stronger and more frequently in the last few weeks.
“Miles, you’re getting old.” He stared, saggy-eyed, at the old man who pierced deeply back into his vacuous eyes. The two dark spheres seemed to sap the light from the overhead bulbs as the dimmers responded to the sun creeping through the wooden slats of the second floor condo’s bathroom windows. He brushed his teeth and scolded himself for not having replaced the batteries in his toothbrush last time. For all of his engineering degrees he’d never been able to remember to fix the electric toothbrush or to just buy a new one. The bristles whirred pathetically for a few seconds before sputtering to a halt. He scowled disapprovingly at the brush. With half-a-mind to make a half-hearted attempt at a decent brushing, he dropped the brush into the sink. He’d just get another one, today, for sure. The problem was the cold. Definitely the cold! Batteries were horrible in the cold.
Now in the living room, he checked on his computers. It was chillier in here. He had to keep the computers running cool. That was more important than him freezing his butt off. Besides, Miles was concerned with something much more pressing. He had to find little green men. The living room was filled wall to wall with computers, twenty in all, not counting his various tablets and smartphones. All of them, when not otherwise occupied by his work, were churning out data packets for the S.E.T.I. @Home project. He was a nerd of the highest-most order, a romantic optimist fundamentally. He had to be if he believed that one day he would find intelligent, alien life.
He took a quick glance at his 70-inch, wall-mounted, display where he’d patched in all of the data from his computers. However, like yesterday and every day for the last fifteen years, there was no signal. He waved his hand vaguely at the display and brought up his ‘Von Neumann’ screen. A couple of months earlier, he had decided to increase his processing power exponentially, but there was no way of reaching that goal without a massive cash inflow. Unfortunately, his employer was not the bonus-giving type especially since Miles wasn’t exactly bringing in the kind of money that his classmates from MIT were with their high-frequency trading algorithms on Wall Street, in London, and Hong Kong.
So he just had to be clever. Miles put on his hacker’s white hat, and wrote a little code that would find the computers of conservative fundamentalists, mostly from the Bible Belt; the kind that didn’t believe in evolution. The little code would run through the browser histories of all of the computers it encountered looking for search terms such as ‘Evolution lies’, ‘Bill Nye + sucks’, ‘Neil de Grasse Tyson + sucks’, and not surprisingly ‘porn’—boy there was tons of that in the histories. Once located, his program would inconspicuously download the S.E.T.I. program onto the hard drives of the unsuspecting and witless owners. While the computers were actively in use by their owners, presumably on social media or on various pornography sites, the program would borrow half of their processing power to run the S.E.T.I. algorithms through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing protocol, BOINC for short. As an added bonus, Miles had added a few lines of code, which he had called, ‘One for God, One for Science’. The bonus code created a Twitter account for each of the pious. The Twitter account would follow and retweet anything Bill Nye and Neil de Grasse Tyson tweeted whenever religious messages were being tweeted or posted on social media. In the case of ‘gay porn’ queries, the pious would receive social media feeds from George Takei; Oh my!
Miles had converted approximately 30,000 computers so far, and he had catapulted in the standings of the S.E.T.I. top participants. But even with the growing flock, he had not heard a message from the heavens. Despondent, he poured himself a steaming-hot cup of coffee and pulled his never-ironed khakis out from under a keyboard that itself was covered in coffee stains, some fresh, some dried, and some added by Miles’ unsteady hand as he reached across the clutter of electronics. He grunted—annoyed at the balled-up denim shirt that he couldn’t quite reach. Miles hurried his clothes on, waved god-speed to his relentless listeners, and headed out the front door, tired, wrinkled, and brilliant as ever.
Moments later, Miles stepped outside into the parking lot. It was bone-chillingly brisk this morning.
“Should’ve brought my jacket,” Miles muttered as his lips trembled at the cold bite of the morning chill. He managed a stuttering “m…morning,” as Tracy from the third floor bounded out in front of him. Tracy had that cheery, springy bounce in her step that made her legs that much more attractive and gave her breasts that extra perk that drove him nuts at all other times of the day but made him want to strangle her in the mornings.
Miles drifted off, daydreaming about Tracy, as he followed her long, exposed legs down the parking lot toward her car. A sudden, loud sneeze startled Miles back into the world, and he recoiled instinctively as he caught the moist mist in his face; some had definitely gone into his mouth.
“Damn it! Cover your mouth,” he growled as he rabidly pawed at his face with his sweater sleeves. The guy kept walking, face buried in his hands. He offered an apology that was interrupted by yet another sneeze.
“Asshole!” he yelled back over his shoulders at the now distant man.
Miles wiped at the spray that had gotten into his left eye and rubbed at his cheek vigorously trying to scrape off several layers of skin. The best part of waking up so far this morning had definitely been his cup of coffee. He was still pawing at his face when he reached his car. He had a forty-five minute drive to work that was sure to be lengthened by the traffic on I-95 south, toward Boston. He shuffled angrily into his car, his toy, a Tesla S Roadster, the envy of all nerdom. Other guys might have their Beamers and Benzes, but he had this and hardly anyone had it. He named her ‘Tracy’. He knew how to turn her on. A wry smile crept onto the corner of his mouth.