ago. Misdemeanor disturbing the peace and assault. Charges were dropped. That's the only official line that's not sealed.'
Jupiter was a hundred miles up the coast, but a very long way from Afghanistan. Odds were, if Dixon Woods got in trouble in Jupiter for something, it was the same guy Cricket O'Connor was married to, or was somehow connected to her. Guy like Dixon Woods, if he got caught doing something really severe, odds were fair he had enough government chits that he could call in a few favors. Sam knew something about that, for sure, which made him think of something else.
'What about a marriage license? To a Cricket O'Connor?'
There was nothing. Sam thanked Kyle, gave him a brief story about taking down a terrorist cell in Montreal-a little-known group of French-Canadian separatists, Sam told him-and when even Sam realized how absurd this was all getting, hung up and headed to the offices of Longstreet.
Longstreet was hardly an anomaly in Miami. Since Iran-Contra, the war on drugs, the first Gulf War, and then up through the second war on drugs and the war on terror, private paramilitary firms have popped up all over the world, essentially offering the same service everywhere: military expertise on an a la carte basis. But since the destabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, groups like Longstreet have also become multimillion-dollar corporations willing to drop trained personnel into a hot zone for an appropriate fee. Diamond mines, opium fields, small cities and anywhere private security was needed. In Iraq, the United States actually subcontracted out firms to do the dirty work the military couldn't, by rule of international law.
Miami was home to a half dozen such firms. The reasoning was both natural and mundane: Florida works like a vortex for the international criminal trade, which is one of the chief employers of these firms, but it is also an easy access point into and out of the country to the unstable countries of the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, where most business is conducted. A flight from Miami to Dubai is just fifteen hours. An ambien away. Simple. Guyana, eight. Haiti, two.
And, in the realm of the mundane, there's no state income tax in Florida. Which means more money.
You want to find rich assholes with guns, find a state with no income tax, lax laws on personal firearms and easy access to one of the worst-secured ports in the country. That's Miami.
Plus, when people (or nations or warlords) want to hire you, appearances matter. A Miami address? That says sun, splash, Don Johnson and superfit hired killers.
What Sam found, however, was a warehouse in an industrial park adjacent to the airport district. Surrounding the warehouse was a barbed-wire fence and a front entrance that looked particularly fortified.
Gaining entrance to a secure facility is about understanding how security consultants and the people who've hired them to design their alarm systems think. The first issue is that they are most concerned about keeping you out. So they make the front door look imposing.
Sam saw a keypad.
An infrared camera.
Titanium bars over blast-safe glass.
A sign that warned unwanted visitors that an armed response was already on the way.
Average crooks see these things, the first thing they are going to do is decide it's not worth the effort. Average sales person cold-calling cold-calls someone else.
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.
