The Shop

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 But the pet project they’d come up with during one of those fishing trips off Cape San Blas was outdated, and worse, dangerous.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.

One thing Mike took away from it, though, was the realization that Indigo was bad mojo. Place was like a black hole, swallowing up all the good they had done, almost as if it were cursed. When you thought about it, where did the veep get carried away and actually kill a young man? On Indigo Island.

Franklin was a liability. Mike was sure Grace knew about the unit. Right there, that was enough. Not only that, but you couldn’t rely on Frank in any way. He’d turn on you as easily as he’d turn on his worst enemy. He was kind of endearing in a bumbling way. But the man had nothing inside him that was constant or reliable. It was all about self-preservation with Frank—he went on pure instinct. Like a cockroach.

Mike took his lunch at his desk, a chicken Caesar sandwich from Cosi. Outside, the traffic was picking up. Horns honking. Cars whooshing by after the light. Mike could smell Filigree’s perfume—patchouli oil mixed with the scent of sandalwood. He’d told her to stop burning that fucking incense! The last thing he wanted to do was make the place smell like there were foreigners doing business with his firm, even if Whitbread worked mostly with foreign governments now.

He wondered for the thousandth time why he put up with her. Realized that if he ever fired her, she’d probably lay a curse on him.

But nothing could spoil today. He was relieved to have finally made the decision. It would be easy to erase all traces of the Shop. He’d set the unit up so there would be no blowback. From the beginning, the operatives had been kept in the dark. They didn’t know exactly where their paychecks were coming from. They only knew their employer was associated in some way with the United States government, that they were working for God and country. But they didn’t know the who or the how or the why. The company was concealed—again, like the Russian dolls, dummy company inside dummy company.

Long ago, Mike had drawn up a cover story in case he ever needed it, revolving around Grace Haddox’s church. The weird but charismatic minister, speaking in tongues and making the news regularly with his antics. He fit the mold—the Jim Jones/David Koresh mold. There was even a rival Congolese church with ties to human trafficking and money laundering—a group that would be easy to blame.

One last black op for the unit, and they would be disbanded and sent to one of the foreign divisions.

Keep it simple. Use both teams. Two targets—the cultist church and the attorney general’s compound. Take care of everything in one swift motion. The result would be a dangerous cult consumed by a cleansing fire. By sunrise, he would have wiped out every trace of the Shop.

The phone rang. Filigree came on the line. “Franklin Haddox, sir. Do you want to talk to him or should I make