Amateur Megalomania

The rain never penetrated down the Floor, sheltered beneath the canopy of mega-scrapers. Instead, the humid air interacted with the cooling concrete labyrinth of alleys and streets, condensing in a scummy layer on every surface, as if Atlanta oozed liquid toxin from its clammy skin.

I liked the honesty of the Floor. This was the underworld, where the derelicts and losers lived, and the ambiance reflected this truth. You knew what you were getting here, which was more than you could say about the engineered perfection of the Canopy.

Up there, threats were hidden behind plastic smiles and affidavits.

I wrapped my long coat around me and set out from the bust, walking back to the station. Uniformed police were taking Slick down for processing, and the narc team would be downloading the audio from the bust and preparing a written draft for me to sign later. Judging by Slick’s babbling after the arrest, he was more than willing to give up his whole network in exchange for some consideration in sentencing. The unit should be busy in the next few days, rounding up the new leads.

I preferred to walk. It shook out the adrenaline and gave me some time to cool off. The lights of the police cruisers faded behind me as I turned the corner to walk down the main thoroughfare. The evening was still young, and the usual crowd of carousers were milling up and down the strip, spilling out of the various bars and clubs in a motley tide of humanity, punctuated by the occasional Salucidian. I passed a clump of wild eyed kids from the Canopy; tourists from affluence, down here to gawk at the common man, hoping to return to their homes above with a good story. Their flashy clothes and naïve expressions marked them better than a sonic tag.

I walked by without a second glance. They would be a problem for Robbery at best, Homicide at worst.

Coke and Meth dealers stood on corners, barking their wares and doing a brisk business. I pushed through the line of customers and continued on my way, ignoring the calls that offered their product in exchange for non-monetary payments.

Maybe it was time for a transfer? The thought had been running through my mind for awhile now. Narc was pretty much all Bleach containment now, and that meant working with Salucidians practically full time. After ten years of dealing with the Salads, the ministrations of Slick seemed preferable in comparison.

But the work was important. The quantity of bleach seized today would have sent a thousand Salads into a killing frenzy. I’ll never understand people willing to make a buck off the slaughter of innocents. Humanity at its finest.

I turned off the main avenue and walked down a side street, leaving the garish revelry behind. Pausing long enough to slip my glasses in place, I wrapped my hand around the Sig Sauer in my pocket. The dark side street came to life in my lenses, painting the scene with a composite of infrared, ultraviolet and radar. Heat plumes illuminated a couple of derelicts passed out in a doorway to my left, while a cluster of figures played some sort of card game inside the shop to my right. I tapped the tattooed icon on my wrist and dialed up the gain, stripping away the brick and mortar wall to bring the figures into sharper detail. The computer tagged an assortment of weaponry stashed on the various participants. By the looks of things, no one had better get caught cheating.

I moved on, stepping out into the street to distance myself from the derelicts, just in case.

The work wasn’t exactly dull, but the lifestyle was getting old. I used to spend my off time down in Newnan, partying in circles that didn’t overlap my work district, enjoying the endless night and bottomless well of energy that came with youth. Now, a cup of tea and an early bedtime was just fine. I spent a moment trying to remember the name of my last date, but his face faded against the jumbled memories of too many long work assignments.

A slight flicker passed across my lenses, stopping me in my tracks. I turned my head from side to side, following a ripple in the sensor array. The patch remained centered on the right hand side of the street, outside of visible range. I refrained from staring and adjusted my shoe, hoping to cover my hesitation.

As I drew nearer, the faint outline of a limousine emerged from the darkness. The lenses refused to acknowledge the car, but there it was in visible light, such as it was. I shut off the lenses and sighed, diverting my course to approach the car. The driver side door opened and a tall man emerged. He walked around the car and opened the back door, giving me a polite nod. “Good evening, Ms. Thatcher.”

“Timothy, isn’t it?” He nodded. “He’s up a bit late, isn’t he?” Timothy gave me a half shrug. I stepped into the limo and the door closed behind me.

“Picking up a lone woman late at night in the seedy section of town isn’t wise, Senator. Voters might draw the wrong conclusions.” I settled into the plush seat and leaned back.

The man on the other side was as handsome as usual, impeccably groomed even at this late hour. His square face and firm jaw suggested strength, which translated to a few points every election day. Green eyes and black hair provided an air of youth, while the gray patches on the temples offered the perception of wisdom. On the surface, he was a man who could work a room, making friends with ease and inspiring loyalty simply by remembering your name.

He was a leader to the earnest; and a shallow politician to the cynical.

This was the only instance where my natural cynicism was displaced by virtue of the fact that I grew up with this man standing over me. The former assessment was correct.

“What are you doing down here, dad?”

“Can’t I check up on my girl?” He turned his panel around to show me an enhanced still frame. I was looking down at myself slipping on my glasses just a few moments ago. The drone image was sharper than anything produced by police gear. Of course the limo would be outfitted with the best military hardware available. Somewhere overhead, a couple of security details were circulating in a parking orbit, keeping watch over the Senator.

I turned the panel back around. “Shouldn’t you be in Washington? Congress is in session.”

“I’m just down for the night. Forgive me for snooping on you, but I couldn’t wait for you to get home, and I didn’t want to interfere with your work. This seemed like a good place.”

I nodded. “I appreciate you being discrete.” The Senator’s daughter shtick never really went away, but I had done the best I could to stamp it down at work. People didn’t forget something like that, but they at least had stopped thinking about it whenever I walked into the office. “How’s Amanda?”

To his credit, he never tried to get me to call her ‘mom’, but I could still see the unease in his face whenever I asked about her. It had nothing to do with disapproval of dad remarrying after mom died, but I simply didn’t like Amanda. It had nothing to do with feelings of a strange woman replacing mom, or moving in on my childhood memories, or whatever else a shrink would try to tell me. I just didn’t like the bitch, but I tried to suppress it for dad’s sake. He deserved to be happy.

“She’s well. She’s up in New York for the next week, prosecuting a case.”

“That’s right. I saw that on the news. That’s next week?” It all blurred together lately. The only thing keeping my days separate was the time stamp on my email.

A soft chime proceeded Timothy’s voice filling the compartment. “Excuse me, Senator, but the detail is insisting we move. They don’t like us sitting still this long.”

Dad looked at me and I nodded. He could always drop me around the corner from the station. “Go ahead, Timothy. Drive around for a while.”

The car rumbled once before the vibration damping kicked in. I glanced out of the window to see the ground fall away as we rose and slipped into the traffic stream a hundred meters above the Floor. The traffic AI buffered out the flow, leaving us in a two hundred meter isolation zone, embedded in the flow of cars while the security detail joined us in formation. It looked like we were heading out toward Stone Mountain.

“So what’s up?”

“Your last email suggested some dissatisfaction in your work. Needless to say, I wanted to follow up.”

Dad hated my job more than I did, but he had the decency to let me make my own choices. “I’m going through a rough patch. Chasing down bleach dealers is starting to get old. It seems like we stop the flow for a time, but someone always fills the gap and we’re right back to the previous volumes. I’m starting to believe that interdiction isn’t the way to go.”

Dad smiled. “Still subscribing to the Weed Killer view?”

“Not quite,” I smiled back at the suggestion. A Senator’s daughter lining up with a Salad-phobic hate group would make for juicy media. “I can’t stand the Salads, but I’m not ready for genocide. It would just be a lot easier on everyone if they weren’t so damn weak when it came to bleach abuse. Killing humans while in a psychotropic rage doesn’t make for good inter-species relations.”

“That’s why I flew down here. I have a proposal for you if you are interested.”

I sighed. “Not another desk job in DC…”

He held his hand up. “No, hear me out. This could be meaningful work, and I need someone I can trust. You wouldn’t even have to leave Atlanta unless you want to.” He pulled a thin file out of a pouch and handed it over. “National intelligence suggests the various bleach cartels are about to organize on the East Coast, from Miami to Atlanta, all the way up to New York. The center of the organization attempt is here in Atlanta. You’ll find a list of names and aliases there that might be familiar to you. The cartels are ready to put aside the competition and parcel out the available business. They are going to go Corporate, and are already stamping out the resistors in New York and Jersey. In a couple of years, you aren’t going to be able to deal unless you own a franchise and take orders from the top.”

I flipped open the file and scanned the list. A few of the names did jump out at me. “Why doesn’t the Atlanta PD know about this?”

“The intel is black. We can’t reveal any of this without compromising our sources and technique. It’s better if the bad guys don’t know we are watching.”

I looked up from the list. “That sensitive? This is Bureau data?” The page had been sanitized of all logos or department mastheads.

“No.”

I felt my eyebrows climb under my bangs. “Domestic intelligence is exclusively Bureau turf.” I said it without thinking, like I was responding to my freshmen Civics teacher.

He stared at me with a slight smile, waiting on me to put it together. Dad always believed in making me work to figure things out. “If it isn’t Bureau, it has to be CIA or DoD. That means foreign involvement.”

He nodded. “There are a number of possible sources, but the cartels are getting a lot of funding and data from foreign powers. Obviously, someone is trying to destabilize the US by stirring up the Salicudian population. The list of possible nations is short, but spectacularly worrisome.”

He went on. “If you are interested in more, you’ll have to take the job. I’ve already crossed a few lines by handing you that list. Speaking abstractly, foreign meddling on our soil is something we take very seriously. It requires a response, but we need to know more before any appropriate action can be taken. God help us if we don’t have airtight proof for the current administration. He won’t blow his nose without UN approval.”

“Unfortunately, the wheels are turning slower than I like. The President is unwilling to do anything ‘extreme’.” Scorn dripped from the word. “The DEA Director refuses to act without direct Presidential orders, so we are left working with whatever informal authority we can put together. I have a dozen Senators and a bunch of Congressmen lined up to pull whatever strings they can, but we need something more substantial to put in front of the President.”

“Is it really that bad?” I knew the government was dysfunctional, but this was silly.

Dad shrugged. “Its paralyses. Typical bureaucracy. People are more interested in the ‘process’ than results, so long as they can remain part of the process. It’s all a bunch of ass covering, and the worst comes down from the top. But we’ll do what we can with whatever we can put together. If we get proof , they’ll have to act on it.”

“So, that’s why I’m here. The problem seems to be centered here, and I need people I can trust to start looking into it. I’d like to pull a few strings and get you into the DEA desk locally. I know nepotism horrifies you, but the situation has changed here dramatically. This isn’t for the sake of your career; it’s for the good of the nation.”

Dad was one of the only people I knew who could say ‘the good of the nation’ and make you feel like he was sincere. I considered the ‘Senator’s Daughter’ syndrome again. I suppose I could handle it, and it would be a change of pace having DEA resources available. “I’m not saying no yet.”

Dad nodded. “I get you transferred and you use your contacts and informants to head up a small task force reporting to me. You focus more on information gathering than enforcement, and you’ll carry authorization that’ll give you significant legal room to maneuver. The local DEA branch head (title?) is an old friend, and he’ll give you plenty of room to work. When this is over, you’ll be in a position to pick whatever job you would like, and it won’t be because of me.”

I closed the file and laid it on my lap. The job was still bleach work, but it seemed more meaningful. Instead of sticking my finger into a leaking dam, it would be a serious effort to break up the organized cartels. The bleach would always flow, but at least it would be left to the local thugs, which meant a higher concentration of stupidity. It was always easier to take down the stupid.

I loved Atlanta, but working a national job held a lot of appeal. Dad’s position would always earn me the murmurings behind my back, but a job like this would go a long way toward making people see me for my ability rather than parentage. And I could get out of bleach work.

“I need a night to think about it.” I handed the file back.

He smiled. I hate it that he knew my answer before I did. He must have been confident to say what he said next. “There is one more thing. You’ll be working with a Salad.”

I don’t enjoy making my dad uncomfortable, but he deserved the torrent of profanity. I was still muttering curses when he dropped me off a few minutes later.

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