Authors: Keith Domingue
“I don’t want any trouble. I just…”
He was cut short as Stern grabbed him from behind with a chokehold, quick and silent.
Alex instinctively pushed back against his attacker, sending them both to the floor, as he desperately tried to break the grip. Whoever had a hold of him was well trained, however, and the grip on his neck only grew tighter. He knew that in only a matter of seconds, he would be unconscious. He shot back an elbow to the ribs, but it was no use, and the room started to go black. He was just about unconscious when he heard the deep sounding triple thud of three hard kicks to his assailants’ ribcage, and the hold on his neck loosened. He threw a palm heel to the groin of his assailant, ripped the arm from his neck, and rolled free.
Chris Aldrich pulled a choking and coughing Alex to his feet.
“Who the hell is that?” Chris asked, as Yaw and Camila pushed their way past the crowds to Alex and Chris.
Alex looked to the floor at a crumpled Marcus Stern.
“Black Hat.” Alex told them between gasps. As Stern started to get to his feet,
Yaw gave him a quick kick to the face, and Stern went back down.
“Alright, party’s over. We gotta go. Follow me.”
Yaw began plowing a path through the crowd, Camila, Chris in tow.
Alex turned and locked eyes with Nikki. They stood across from each other, unmoving. She held his gaze, terrified, and took a half step back in fear.
“Alex!” Camila screamed, and he ripped away his stare and quickly followed his friends through the masses, towards the kitchen.
Stern slowly rolled himself upright, and onto his feet. He put his fingers to his face, and pulled back a handful of blood, the result of a broken nose. He grimaced in anger, and this time he didn’t text Wolfe, he called him.
“He’s comin’ out. And he’s got help.”
At first, Wolfe thought Stern was kidding. But the sound of Stern’s voice screaming into the phone made it clear to Wolfe that he was not.
He twisted the keys in the ignition and the Dodge Charger roared to a start, Wolfe slamming the car into gear.
If he had help, he wasn’t coming out the front, Wolfe thought to himself. Tires screeched as he tore the Charger free from its parking spot across from the club entrance. He eyed the alley entrance lane on the side of the building and turned hard left, the rear wheels of the car breaking free for a second before straightening out as the Charger roared into the alley way. Wolfe saw the metal door that had to be the kitchen exit to Club Sutra, slammed the brakes of the Charger hard, sliding the vehicle at an angle and blocking the alley entrance as it came to a stop. He got out of the car, pulled his firearm, and waited.
Yaw raced through the kitchen towards the side entrance, Camila, Chris, and Alex right behind him.
Camila eyed a large metal pot hanging above a food prep table. She grabbed its handle and ripped it free from its hook as she hustled by.
Yaw reached the alley entrance, kicked open the door, and immediately leaned to the left as the word “
Freeze!”
echoed throughout the alley.
Camila immediately hurled the heavy metal pot as hard as she could over Yaw’s right shoulder in the direction of the voice. It hit and hit hard, square in a man’s forehead, one who a split second earlier had had a 9mm aimed their way as he stood in the driver’s doorway of a Dodge Charger. He immediately went backwards and down, the gun skittering across the pavement.
“This way.” Yaw led, and they went left in the opposite direction, towards the adjacent building’s fire escape.
Chris Aldrich detoured towards the fallen assailant, scooped up the 9mm, bounded over the trunk then roof of the car, and followed his friends up the fire escape.
“Go, go, go.” He yelled out to Yaw as Yaw looked back for him, and then he quickly fell in line behind the rest of the group.
Alex climbed the metal rungs as fast as he could, zig-zagging up the fire escape balconies of each floor, trying his best to keep up with Yaw and Camila ahead of him. He watched as Yaw crested the building rooftop, followed by Camila, and despite the burning in his muscles in his legs, he grit his teeth and stepped up his pace. Heart racing and completely out of breath, he lunged for the rooftop’s edge and pulled himself up and over, rolling onto the concrete rooftop. He got to his feet just as Chris popped into view behind him, and the two of them sprinted across the building top as fast as they could in pursuit of the others.
Yaw reached the far side of the rooftop, and stopped to look behind him. Camila was next to him in an instant, and Alex and Chris fast approached behind her.
He pulled a cell phone from his back pocket. An “emergency use only” prepaid, it was a one shot deal, still traceable by satellite, but by the time they were triangulated on, they would be long gone.
“Joey. Back alley. Three buildings east.
Now
.” He relayed into the phone, before tossing it in the opposite direction, as hard as he could.
“Let’s keep moving.” He told the group, as Chris and Alex caught up.
• • •
Marcus Stern stumbled out of the kitchen entrance of Club Sutra and spotted Wolfe lying on the alley concrete. He helped him to his feet before steadying himself on the hood of the Charger.
“Bitch threw a fucking frying pan.” Wolfe complained, as blood flowed from a deep cut in his forehead.
Stern suddenly leaned past the front of the car and threw up.
“Jesus, are you drunk?” Wolfe asked.
“I’m fine. Which way did they go?” He asked, as he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Over the top of the building.” Nodding over at the adjacent six-floor structure.
“If they get away, we’re fucked.” Wolfe added.
“No we’re not.”
“They have my firearm.”
“What?”
Stern looked away in disbelief. He evaluated the situation a moment, looked back at Wolfe.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re fine. We’re fine because we found him. Let’s call Richard Brown.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I would.”
He pulled his cell phone from his back pocket.
“We gotta get in front of this. If Brown wants this guy, he won’t give a shit about our fuck up tonight. He’ll just lock down the fucking City.”
He dialed then held the phone to his ear.
He looked back at Wolfe and smiled as the phone began to ring.
“We found him. We totally found Alex fucking Luthecker.”
COALITION PROPTERTIES
“T
he Universe consists of countless patterns, some that intersect and some that do not, but all of which are related, and those patterns are what form the momentum.”
Even three years later, the sound of Alex Luthecker’s voice still made Richard Brown’s blood boil. He clicked off the tape recorder that contained the voiceprint of the young man’s words, the ones he had spoken inside the L.A. Police Precinct holding cell, only moments before he had managed to escape.
He smiled to himself. He had finally found the elusive terrorist. He took a gamble that day, to test Luthecker, this random informant who simply walked in the door and rattled off an alarming amount of detail regarding a planned bombing, the unique circumstances of the event having piqued the veteran war commander’s curiosity. Brown figured his senior interrogator would eat Luthecker alive, and that would be the end of it. He had never misjudged a situation worse, and it had cost him a valuable asset, one in considerable decline and about to be retired, but still his asset nonetheless.
To this day, Brown didn’t know exactly how he had done it. How Luthecker could have calculated all the detailed information that he did about David Lloyd so quickly, and then proceed to immediately turn it against him, and somehow convince a hardened war torturer to take his own life.
But he would find out now.
Still with a hawk-like demeanor but a little bit more grey, Brown had left the CIA and accepted the offer to run “Coalition Assurance” not long after that incident.
Coalition Assurance’ parent company, “Coalition Properties,” actually began its existence as a small aircraft manufacturer, shortly after World War I. McKinnley Aircraft, as it was originally called, was started by the McKinnley brothers, Brad and Martin, in early 1925. A family run outfit that built custom designed airplanes for the wealthy and elite, it’s untouchable clientele managed to keep the company afloat during the tough economic downturn of the late twenties and thirties in America. Being one of the few surviving aircraft design firms left standing after the stock market crash, McKinnley Aircraft was in prime position to become a major player in aviation when the demand for military aircraft exploded at the beginning of the Second World War. With the backing of unlimited wartime funds and a very motivated government, the firm began to open manufacturing plants all over the country in order to pump out thousands of fighters and bombers. At its peak, the small private aircraft manufacturer turned military weapons provider employed over one hundred and sixty thousand people across the United States.
Martin Mckinnley, an ace pilot himself, was killed in the war, and it was left to younger brother Brad to oversee the company. Not having the business acumen of his older sibling, Brad McKinnley borrowed enormous sums of money for the firm to keep pace with a war’s increasing demand for combat planes. When the end of the war inevitably came and the demand for military aircraft plummeted, it left McKinnley Aircraft with no customers and deeply in debt. Desperate to keep the firm that he and his late brother started from collapsing into bankruptcy, he reached out to a series of private banks for an infusion of cash, and the U.S. government for more work. He had but one asset to leverage, and that was his one hundred and sixty thousand skilled employees.
Both the Government and the investment community saw opportunity and agreed to keep the company solvent, but the deal they offered was harsh. McKinnley had to step aside. Left with no other choice, Brad McKinnley took the deal, which included a considerable severance package for him, and walked away from the company he and his brother had started in their father’s garage.
With McKinnley pushed aside and bankers now in charge, the new board of directors felt diversification beyond aircraft manufacturing was the key to sustained growth. And as the U.S. increased its military theatre of operations throughout Korea and Vietnam, which in turn led to the cold war with the Soviet Union, McKinnley Aircraft was always the first contractor in line to provide the necessary hardware. However now the firm not only supplied aircraft, but also Carriers, Destroyers, Submarines, Tanks, and Nuclear Weaponry. It quickly became the largest government contractor in the United States.
In the mid-eighties, the firm crossed over into civilian based equipment, branching out into telecommunications, software, energy, and even bioengineering, with global sales of all divisions combined climbing well into the hundreds of billions.
In 1986, the board of directors met to vote on a name change of the now publicly traded company, as aircraft manufacturing was only a small portion of their current business, and it was in that meeting that Coalition Properties was born.
Coalition Properties now employed over half a million people across the globe, and either directly or indirectly had a hand in nearly every human interaction that was electronic-transaction based or required the use of technology. And in the United States, for every tax dollar collected, it was rumored that a whopping eighteen cents found its way into the corporate behemoth’s pocket, although the actual numbers were considered a matter of national security, and therefore classified.
When Coalition Properties acquired the private security firm Nexus Solutions in 2008, a for-hire Army with over two thousand Special Ops soldiers worldwide, the new division was quickly renamed Coalition Assurance. The combined companies of Coalition Properties simply became known as “The Coalition” to insiders, and the management board had only one man in mind to run the new enforcement branch of the firm, one who had held considerable sway over much of Coalition Properties funding since Desert Storm in Iraq: Retired Army Colonel and CIA asset Richard Brown. To entice Brown, they included a seat on the board of directors to go along with his considerable compensation package, and with his political skills and strong personality, it wasn’t long before he positioned himself as President and CEO of the entire firm.
Brown sat quietly behind the acreage of polished oak that made up the surface of his desk, and opened the file his team had presented to him less than three hours after he got the call informing him that Luthecker had been spotted.
Much to the chagrin of the two troglodytes who had stumbled upon Luthecker in Los Angeles, there would be no intensive manhunt to capture the escaped “terrorist”. That tactic would not suit Brown’s overall objective. His plan to bring him in would be reconnaissance based, and not via aggressive military-style police action. The last thing Brown wanted was Luthecker dead, or worse, a source of entertainment for the public via his name being splashed across the media. Luthecker was of no use to Brown as a celebrity-martyr.
If Luthecker was part of an organization, Brown wanted to know who the group was, and what their motives were. If he had any close friends, had started a family, or had traceable business dealings whatsoever, he wanted the uninterrupted and undigested details. If he had learned anything from his days running interrogation ops, it was that leverage was the key to cooperation, not brute force, unless the latter proved absolutely necessary. And if there was one thing he wanted more than anything else, it was Luthecker’s cooperation.
He reviewed the case files on Luthecker’s accomplices that evening. Even though the security cameras inside Club Sutra were “mysteriously deactivated”, their physical profiles were caught on multiple cell phone cameras, both photos and video clips taken by curious club patrons and onlookers who eyed the evening’s disturbance as perhaps a way to add an interesting narrative to their Facebook pages. Access to the data itself was easy, as Coalition Properties Communications Division was behind nearly all cell phone data transmission in the United States, and a simple triangulation and data capture of all the calls and images taken in that area of Los Angeles at the time of contact was an easy enough request. And what was captured included more than enough to run through facial recognition software that in turn could be cross-referenced with records in order to provide identification, any known addresses, and so on.