Tod Goldberg - The fix

The second issue is that like any other profession, security consultants are sloppy and human and prone to doing things in a half-assed way if they think appearances will be enough to stop inspection.

And that means, if you're lucky, all of the above will be proctored by a man with a clipboard sitting on his ass next to a plywood arm letting cars into and out of the facility, which is precisely what Sam found.

Fortunately, Sam hadn't bothered to change his clothes from the morning's activities, nor had he bothered to dip into a sports bar for a few hours. So he looked and smelled fresh, which worked to his advantage when he pulled up to the gate.

"Chazz Finley," he said to the guard. Sam stared straight ahead, trained his eyes on the cars in the parking lot, noted that it looked like a giant had crapped out the same ten brown Hummers right in a row.

The guard flipped through the papers on his clipboard. "Don't have you down here, sir," he said.

"Of course you don't," Sam said. He faced the guard now. Trying some of that Jedi shit. Confident. Stern. Not taking no for an answer. Official. After about twenty seconds of that, he said, "Are you going to wait here all day or do I have to drive through this gate?"

"Sir, I'm afraid you're not on the list." The guard put his hand on his gun, a real gun, not a toy like most security have, a little snub. 22 or something. No, this guy was holding a. 357. "Which means you're not getting in."

This was harder than Sam had anticipated. Usually, a guy working a gate is susceptible to double-talk, since at nine bucks an hour double-talk was too much trouble to fight with for most people. But this guy, he was some sort of monk with his mind-control abilities. He hadn't been trained. He'd been conditioned, and Sam actually appreciated that.

Nevertheless, Sam tried lobbing a grenade at him just to see the look on his face, hope for an inch of collateral, take a centimeter of recognition. A rat can get into a building if there's enough space under a wall for light to shine through. Sam figured Dixon Woods might be that light.

"I'm here about Dixon Woods." Sam spit out the name, figuring, Hey, it's true. Let's see what happens?

"Oh, yes," the guard said. He moved his hand from his gun like it was suddenly electric. "Very sorry." And like that, the plywood arm rose, and the guard went back to his post. Didn't even bother to get on the phone. Just went back to imagining it was five o'clock somewhere. A sentiment Sam could get behind, for sure.

Sam parked next to one of the Hummers, his Cadillac suddenly a dwarf. He never understood the desire people have to drive Hummers, particularly ex-military types. They always reminded him of the back pain he felt for the entire Cold War period he was involved in, hunched as he was in HumVees in places a helluva lot worse than an industrial park in Miami. You felt every bump in a HumVee. A Cadillac, well, that was like driving a Long Island iced tea. Power, grace earned through years of performance and, ultimately, comfort.

At the employee entrance to Longstreet was, predictably, another guy with a clipboard. At least this guy wasn't armed. He didn't even look of drinking age. Sam took a look at the guy's uniform and saw it was from Action Response Security.

Longstreet, one of the most powerful security firms in the world, with operatives in every conflict known and unknown, used rent-a-cops. But then, there was the natural question of just what they were keeping under cover. If there was anything with an outsized importance-ten thousand pounds of cocaine, maybe an actual poppy field grown hydroponically, things like that-they'd have their own guys at all points of entrance.

"Chazz Finley," Sam said to the man with the iron-on badge. His name tag said his name was Harvey. Harvey. Who named their kid Harvey anymore?

Harvey handed Sam a visitor's pass to clip to his shirt. "Keep this on you," he said. "It's my ass if you're walking around without it."

Sam winked, because that's what a guy like Chazz Finley would do, and Harvey opened the door for him. Before Sam walked in, but after seeing how empty and unsecure the corridors looked, he had a thought. "My associates will be joining me shortly," he told Harvey.

"Names?"

"Hard to say," Sam said and winked again, because when you're a guy like Harvey, a guy winking at you means you're part of a secret. And if you work at Longstreet, that's probably pretty cool, even if you just work the door. "And let Front-Door Freddie know about it, too. No screw-ups, Harvey."

"Understood, Mr. Finley," Harvey said. And then he gave Sam a salute. Christ, Sam thought. Poor sucker was going to lose his job.

When you think about the office space belonging to an elite security force, you'd probably imagine lots of blinking lights, massive computer screens on every wall detailing troop movements, satellite positions and the standing heart rate of every person currently in Longstreet's employ. You might think that the halls would be filled with people staring intently into files, shaking their heads, muttering about the military-industrial complex, maybe even holograms of Eisenhower and Patton that constantly spout motivational speeches if anyone with a body fat percentage under 25 percent walks by.

You'd be wrong.

Just like any other business where most of the sales are done outside the office, a successful multinational security firm is a pretty quiet place, the top guns more likely perched on a berm somewhere than in a cubicle; thus what's left behind is office staff. File clerks. Accountants. People in charge of ordering flak jackets and body armor and TEC-9s, but who were unlikely to need flak jackets, body armor and TEC-9s during the course of their own life.

Guys like Kyle versus guys like me and Sam.

All of which is good, because Sam wasn't looking for an armed conflict. He was just looking for records. Insight. A lead. A last known address. Anything to get us around Cricket's problem. And, it turned out, to see about my problem with Natalya as well.

In the lobby-which looked to be decorated with an eye toward reviving Communism as a design aesthetic and then combining it with some of the nicer floors of the Pentagon-Sam found an office map bolted to the wall. The bulk of the warehouse was taken up by a storage facility-Sam didn't need access to know what was in there, and why at least the front of the store was guarded by a man with a gun: assault rifles by the dozen, maybe a decommissioned Black Hawk or two, even more Hummers, a few rocket launchers, hell, maybe even a small nuclear sub if these guys were really pulling the bank in- while the administrative offices occupied a perimeter around the goods in a U.

Sam found what he was looking for. Across from the ladies' restroom and just adjacent to an emergency exit-a good thing to note-was the employee-relations office. A quick scan showed that the men's room was on the other side of the building, next to the office of the president.

You want to find the one woman working in a building likely filled with men, find the ladies' room and then count twenty paces, which, naturally, is precisely where the employee-relations office was.

Sam checked his reflection in his sunglasses-it wasn't going to get much better-and made his way down the hall.

The employee-relations office, like every other door Sam passed, was closed. The difference was that every other office was placard free, as if maybe all that was there was a door that opened into a brick wall. But right on the door was a sign that said employee relations and then, beneath it, a name: BRENDA HOLCOMB.

Sam gave the door a pound. It opened a few seconds later and revealed a woman in her midfifties. Her hair was straight and black and came down to her shoulders, though it looked like it had been cut using a rock. She wore a white buttoned-down shirt that she'd opened to the middle of her chest (where Sam saw a few red freckles and the outline of her sports bra) and a black skirt of, sadly, an appropriate length. Thick clunky sandals with heels probably two inches too tall. Painted toenails. Calves that showed about two dozen years of regular workouts. If pressed, Sam would guess she'd been an MP somewhere. She had that cop stance-one leg forward, one leg back, a hand on the hip reflexively, as if still looking for a gun, but instead holding a venti Starbucks cup.