J. Black - The Shop

She heard Kay’s scornful voice again. Loved each other!

Jolie pushed the door open further, thinking of her small family, “just the three of us” as her dad liked to say. She thought about what little childhood she’d had here. The Soap Baby’s house. No memories. The card Kay had given her pricked against her palm—Belle Oaks. A bad feeling welled up inside, and her hand clenched, crushing the card. Something hot and hard as iron clamped around her chest, making it hard to breathe.

Then came the thunderclap, the chasm yawning underneath her feet. The feeling she was being crushed to death, blackness dropping like a curtain over her eyes. Her heart rate jumped into the red zone, fear hurtling through every synapse and nerve.

45 MIKE CARDAMONE

WASHINGTON, DC

As he approached his building on F Street, Mike Cardamone glanced at the American flag flying above the mansard roof. It never failed to inspire him. He loved this country—its strength, its resilience, the fact that it was a beacon of light to the world—even if the world didn’t appreciate it. He climbed the steps briskly to the back entrance, glancing at the gold plaque by the door. Whitbread Associates, LLC. Suites 201 A-E. Discreet, not showy. Old Washington—exclusive.

He’d come a long way from trading fire with Iraqis in the heat and sand of Desert Storm. Even his stint at the CIA seemed like a century ago. He was where he wanted to be—the CEO of an up-and-coming security firm in DC.

His Jamaican administrative assistant told him the new advertising material was on his desk. Her name was Filigree, no kidding, and she wore bright colors, bracelets, and scarves; she gave everybody in the building the willies, but she was the best assistant he’d ever had.

He walked into his inner office and set his briefcase down on the chair by his massive mahogany desk. He could look out the bay window and see the Old Executive Office Building from here, but today he barely noticed it. He had a lot on his mind.

Two boxes sat on the desk. He opened one of them and took a promotional booklet off the top of the stack.

“Whitbread Associates LLC is uniquely positioned to address the challenges of a perilous world, drawing on experience, ingenuity and versatility to meet the global problems of the twenty-first century. We offer a roster of incisive strategies that transcend the traditional values of the past, forging a new order in an increasingly uncertain world.

“Whether you wish to open new markets in out-of-the-way places, require due diligence on recent acquisitions, or seek new strategies for old problems, Whitbread Associates LLC offers a full roster of services.”

Then the bullet points:

“When a Dallas CFO was kidnapped and held for ransom, a Whitbread team was sent to recover him, with a net result of two dead kidnappers and a fortune saved.

“When a foreign minister of an oil-rich country needed counterterrorism experts to protect their oil fields, Whitbread Associates LLC stood guard.”

“When a well-regarded pharmaceutical company fell prey to product tampering, Whitbread Associates LLC tracked down the culprit, who is currently serving a lifetime sentence in a federal prison.

“If you have a problem, we can solve it.”

He read it over, smiling. They’d managed to squeeze everything into this striking six-page booklet: risk assessment; providing due diligence on prospective mergers; personal protection for foreign and domestic executives; stolen asset recovery; and protection of prominent individuals and companies from media attacks.

Only one thing bothered him. If the actions of one unit ever saw daylight, he might as well take these boxes of slick booklets and chuck them in a landfill.

One small division, burrowed deep within Whitbread LLC like the smallest Russian nesting doll, could bring down the whole company. Whitbread Associates did many things, every one of them at a high level. But one division—a paramilitary unit, a domestic version of the Joint Special Operations Command—had become a liability.

Business was good. Mike was poised to reap the rewards of a decade of war, individual freedom, and intense paranoia. But the pet project they’d come up with during one of those fishing trips off Cape San Blas was outdated, and worse, dangerous. There was a new administration now, and that bitch with the Texas twang must have been a bookkeeper before she became the president of the United States. She had unloosed the bean-counters, and pretty soon they would get to Whitbread’s place on the ledger, and someone would start asking questions. Like: Just what do you do? What exactly are you outsourcing? At the very least, they’d cut Whitbread loose. At worst, they might start an internal investigation inside the DOJ.

The big money was overseas. Face it: the unit had outlived its usefulness.

Mike stared out the window at the sullen summer sky.

Times had changed. Celebrities weren’t the draw they once were. It used to be the media flocked to a Paris Hilton, or a Britney Spears, or a Lindsay Lohan. If one of them stubbed a toe, it was big news. But with all the troubles the country had suffered lately, there seemed to be a change of tone. People were preoccupied with their own problems, not personalities.

One thing the American people weren’t interested in: how the U.S. government did its business—even its dirty business. They were interested only when the government raised taxes. Then it was Katie Bar the Door. Nothing else mattered to them. They were too busy trying to hold on to their mortgages or keep their kids in college.

Frankly, the program he’d thought up along with the (now deceased) president and the attorney general wasn’t necessary anymore.

Although you have to admit, it did come in handy when the veep killed that boy.

Filigree brought in a contract for him to sign. Today she wore a saffron peasant blouse, a purple and green print skirt, and a red sash.

Moments after the boy’s body hit the water miles off Cape San Blas, the operation was a go. Doubtful anyone would have raised a stink about a promiscuous gay kid, but the vice president’s sexual proclivities had made the cover of the Enquirer twice. Even though it was the kind of sensational stuff the voting public as a whole ignored, the story had been released into the ether, like an invisible gas waiting for a lit match.

The lit match couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The day of the VP’s trip down to Indigo, Owen Pintek’s chief of staff received a call from a writer with People magazine concerning their upcoming article on Owen and a male prostitute.

People wasn’t the Enquirer . This would be believable. In the interview, the prostitute, who was amazingly photogenic, said he feared Pintek.

And where was Owen? Down in Florida, choking the life out of a young man as if nothing had happened.

And so Whitbread deployed its A-Team to Aspen before the People article hit.

Mike was stationed in Kuwait during Desert Storm. He saw his share of oil rig fires, and he saw how KBR dealt with them—by setting off massive explosions that sucked the oxygen from the fire, thereby giving it nothing to feed on. Fight fire with something bigger—an explosion.

They’d needed to manufacture a virtual explosion to take up all the media’s considerable resources, something that would suck the air out of everything else in the news—

And it worked. The media always chased the Next Big Thing—one bright shiny object after another. The murders in Aspen swallowed the news week whole, like a python swallows a pig.