David Dun - Overfall

“Uh-huh.”

“The face does not come naturally to you.”

Joshua was tall and slender and charming. He had a large, friendly mouth with perfect teeth, not unlike Anna’s. He was nothing like Sam in the physique department, but he was nice-looking, even naked.

More pleasantries followed. He offered her wine, one of her current favorites, a 1996 Turley Zinfandel. Josh loved wine, was very thoughtful about it, and always knew what she was drinking. For dessert he would offer her a Sauterne Chateau d’Yquem 1990 and she would choose a beer.

He lived in a four-thousand-square-foot apartment and was one of the most successful pension fund managers in New York-the youngest and one of the richest partners in his Wall Street firm. He had picked all the right tech stocks, exited before the 2001 collapse, then gotten back in very judiciously. Josh was the quintessential “catch.”

They sat on the small sofa by the gas fireplace and near the window where they used to sit, she at her end, he at his. Immediately she curled her feet beneath her, which made her more difficult to approach. Over the wall-to-wall beige carpet lay a beautiful Persian, a wedding gift. The couch they had picked out together after they moved in.

They talked about her current movie, a tale about the desperate girl who is really a jewel, who starts out poor, ends up rich, becomes detached and even cold.

“And of course, as she draws from the hairy-chested man his buried humanity, they fall in love.” Anna concluded her summation.

“If you’re trying to make this your life story, can I be him?”

“Do you think I’m detached?”

At that Josh grinned.

High-Grade was one of the best auto parts stores in LA. It sold every imaginable accessory and part and also did custom fabrication. The building occupied a full fifty thousand square feet on a single floor. In front of the building a huge parking lot circumscribed nearly half of the structure and ended at a ten-foot-high stone wall. On the wall were signs, every five feet, warning of cut glass atop. Behind the wall and out of sight was a second Cyclone fence with razor wire. At night security patrolled the outer fences. The property was flanked by a large wholesale plumbing outlet and a retail lumberyard.

To the right side of the building was a break in the wall, a large iron gate, and a small guard shack. Trucks with parts came and went through the gate, as did Sam and his staff. Sam owned the building and kept his offices in the back-difficult to find if you weren’t one of the chosen few.

In order to gain access a person had to go through the gate in the stone wall, past the guard shack, and through a door on the side of the building constantly monitored by cameras. To get through the outer door one needed a plastic fob to unlock the computer-activated dead bolt After going through the first door, a room with comfortable chairs, magazines, artwork, and more cameras waited. If Sam’s staff liked what they saw of you on the closed-circuit TV, they opened a thick steel door embedded in a concrete wall. If there was some question, you never got in and they called the guard shack for an escort off the property.

The entire building was concrete block, but the portion housing Sam’s offices had an additional reinforced concrete wall inside the outer block wall, and lining the office interior under the Sheetrock was a layer of Kevlar. There were windows in Sam’s office, but the panes were manufactured from the type of glass used on the president’s limousine. The openings looked a little like tunnels because it was a full eighteen inches from the Sheetrock interior to the exterior of the concrete block.

The furnishings and finish of the place felt like a government office-practical, functional, not particularly expensive, and definitely not elegant except for the conference area, which was wood-paneled with built-in bookshelves that housed various collector’s items: a ship’s telescope from the early nineteenth century; a bread-loaf-sized Inuit polar bear statue carved two hundred years ago from the tusk of a woolly mammoth; a bronze sextant used by Sam’s mentor, Professor Alfred Channing, when he was a young officer in the merchant marine; a ceremonial Tilok headdress worn by his grandfather Stalking Bear; and an original Leonardo da Vinci drawing of a partially dissected cadaver that, Sam was always careful to explain, had been made before the pope forbade the artist to dissect bodies.

This was where Sam greeted visitors. There had been a number of visitors in the year before he’d quit to go sailing-government officials from noteworthy gumshoe organizations of several nations.

All such visits were made to enlist Sam’s help in obtaining information. These were by no means all of the meetings with these men or these agencies. Many occurred at a beach house owned by Sam, with Paul presiding in his place.

Only the officials Sam knew personally, and trusted, were invited to his office to meet him face-to-face, and when invited they brought no uninvited guests. Everything in life, even true love, comes with a price, and Sam had taken on certain obligations when he accepted certain data downloads from the government.

The government was no more eager to talk about their work with Sam than was Sam himself. Sam helped the government, and usually he helped a great deal, but he never charged a fee that they didn’t claim was unconscionable unless it struck him that he should accept favors and information in trade.

Since the advent of U.S. domestic terrorism, the government had been extremely forgiving of Sam’s legal excesses, especially when they were producing valuable leads on terrorist activity. The government never seemed to notice that some of their questions could only be answered by means of rather obvious invasions of privacy, such as the time he hacked into a national rental car agency computer and the suspect’s personal computer to successfully thwart a bomber who had filled an entire car trunk with C-4 plastic explosive. By the time the FBI had enough evidence for a search warrant, Sam had violated the suspect’s legal rights several times over. Hence Sam had to provide the government not only the necessary evidence, but also a legitimate way to discover it.

Anonymous tips may be used in the presence of corroborative evidence to support a search warrant, and Sam was responsible for many such tips-including leaving a suspect chained to a police station guardrail with a sign around his neck. The sign said: I DEFRAUD MY CLIENTS. At the man’s feet were financial records in a box that proved the fraud. The state court judge ruled that the sign constituted a legitimate tip and created probable cause to search the box.

The centerpiece of the offices and the heart of all that Sam did was Big Brain. Big Brain’s claims to fame were the immensity of its database, the speed with which it could be fed, and its ability to simultaneously operate for its own purposes hundreds of computers over the Internet. The secrets of its success, however, were found in the search tools and computer code that sorted and sifted the data and ultimately decided which of the billions of bits of information were relevant to a particular inquiry.

Even when Sam was off sailing, the data never stopped rolling into Big Brain, and the dozen or so technicians who worked for Grogg never left their stations. At the moment they were crunching and gobbling information about Grace Technologies and thousands of people associated with it and comparing that with information already in the database. Grogg worked to set out parameters in the software that would outline search modes of interest. This activity would increase tenfold with the arrival of his investigators.

Sam worked in a big room filled with cubicles and acoustical dividers occupied by all his in-house investigators. They seldom left the office. The actual gumshoe work was contracted out to licensed and unlicensed private detectives around the nation and the globe.