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  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  MAX Melee

  Brain Stew

  Trials

  Anka's Place

  Change of Plans

  Mystery Machine

  Training Day

  More Money

  Infiltration

  Exfiltration

  Hard Target

  Grreat

  Cubano Tango

  Los Federales

  Creamed Corn

  Poker Face

  Fat Head

  Michelle Kwan

  The Bowels of the Mall

  General Hospital

  Respite, Respite

  Smoking Cubans

  Fund Raising

  Nosebleed

  I'm Stephenson

  Infiltration Deux

  Treatment

  Stephenson Strikes Back

  Dead to Rights

  Drone and Quartered

  Hacktivism

  Game Over

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Contact Me

  Copyright

  Copyright© 2013 by James T. Wood

  jamestwood.com

  This, my friends, is a work of fiction. I made it up or am using real things in a made up way. Sure I borrowed from the news and I did my best to research the details, but the end result is a flight of fancy.

  I’m going to go ahead and copyright this work. Please don’t make any copies of it without asking. Thanks, I appreciate it. Oh, plus all applicable copyright laws are in effect, so abide by them. Like “The Dude.”

  Cover Design by Jason Gurley

  jasongurley.com

  Dedication

  I offer my humble and sincere thanks to television for filling my brain with moving pictures, to books for, um, filling my brain with different moving pictures, and to my wife for communicating with me in a nearly indecipherable code of references.

  MAX Melee

  When I sat down, I pulled out my smart-phone as quickly as possible. On the surface I looked like everyone else on the MAX but while the other riders were calm, bored even, I was a hunted animal.

  The video couldn’t load fast enough for me, despite the super-fast connection I paid so much for. I kept checking around me to see if anyone was watching me. Of course someone was watching me; I just wanted to see them doing it.

  Once the video started I locked in. The squealing train wheels and muttered conversations faded as I saw the jujitsu maneuver explained by “Billy” the friendly internet black belt. In two minutes the video was over and the recorded transit voices announced the next stop in both English and Spanish.

  This was my moment, in the crowds exiting at Pioneer Courthouse Square, I might be able to escape and figure out what was going on and why these people were following me. I stepped between people, ignoring their personal space, and receiving angry looks for my trouble. But I reached the doors just as the train lurched to a stop. They slid out of the way and I immediately stepped onto the red brick of the square.

  For a moment, I was the only one outside the train. I checked to my right and left again. Then I saw him step out past several moms with strollers. He wore a tan sport coat that barely contained his muscles. His button down shirt and dressy jeans caused him to blend in with everyone else in Portland, but the intense, angry look on his face starkly contrasted with the laid-back attitude of my adopted home.

  I took off walking across the square, hoping he would follow. But I felt crazy for hoping that a burly, angry man would follow me based solely on my viewing of a simple instructional video. The surreal nature of my life nearly overwhelmed me as I reached the top of the amphitheater stairs on the south side of the square.

  I felt his hand on my shoulder, just like in the video. I reached up, grabbed his thumb with one hand, pulled it down and in front of me, and pushed my other hand against his elbow. Despite his strength and size, I controlled him with this simple move. But I panicked and threw him forward - down the amphitheater stairs. He grunted when his face hit the first step, he moaned when his feet flew over his head to land farther down. After that he just made the flopping, meat-sounds of a steak being tenderized.

  A yell from behind me said he wasn’t alone. I took off for the other side of the square. At the bottom of the stairs I stepped over Mr. Burly who was already starting to swell and bleed where the brick had pounded his body. Soon I was in the center of the square, at the base of the amphitheater, when the other one yelled from behind me.

  “Stop where you are!”

  Why did I listen? I’ll never understand how that simple command worked, but it did. I turned to face a man who, if anything, was more blandly burly than the first. As I stood there, my mind raced to anything I could use against him. The jujitsu move would only work if I could get a hold of his thumb. His tightly clenched fists made that an impossibility. I’d have to do something else, or more likely, get beaten up in view of all the dreadlocked hacky-sackers of Portland.

  Something about the way he strode toward me gave me a flash of memory. I thought of The Matrix when Neo and Mr. Smith are fighting in the subway. He walked up to me and swung his right arm in a haymaker that would crush me. But, mimicking Mr. Smith, I blocked with my forearm and swept his arm down until I had it pinned at my side. He tried to punch me again with his left, again I blocked and pinned him. Then I went in for the finishing head-butt.

  You never see on TV or in the movies how much it really hurts to head butt someone. I saw stars and nearly passed out, but Captain Burly-pants just staggered back a few steps. If I didn’t do something else, he’d finish me off. My store of videographic fighting moves was running dangerously low. There was one finishing move that must trump all others.

  I closed the distance between us with a few steps, rose up on the ball of my left foot while simultaneously pushing off with my right. The only thing that could have made the roundhouse kick look more like Chuck Norris had delivered it was a set of Texas cowboy boots.

  The man crumpled and I ran like a scared kitten. I got to the opposite side of the square in time to catch the westbound MAX. I watched stair-face stumble over to kicked-head as the doors closed and we headed off toward Jeld-Wen Field. Just before I lost sight of them, I saw stair-face pull out a radio. I don’t know who he was contacting, but I guessed that it wasn’t good for me or for continuing my streak of not being punched in the face.

  At the next stop I got off, jogged to the eastbound stop and boarded the Yellow Line. That’d take me close to my house in North Portland and, hopefully, give me some time to think. I settled in to a seat close to the door and pulled out my phone again. No new messages had come in while I was pretending to be an action star. I had no idea how I was going to figure this out without help.

  Earlier in the day I’d responded to a Craigslist ad and went to OHSU - Oregon Health Sciences University - up on “pill hill” as it’s affectionately known. It was something about a study, blah-blah-blah, and fifty bucks. Rent was coming up, and I hadn’t sold any computers for a while, so the extra cash would help. I got there and waited for a few minutes before being led back into a room for, what they called, screening.

  “Have you ever been outside the country?”

  “Yeah, I went to Amsterdam last summer.”

  “Anywhere else?”

  “Does BC count?”

  “As in British Columbia? Yes.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there too.”

  The cute girl asked me questions about everything. My drug use, my sleeping habits, my schooling, my diet, my allergies. I figured after she knew all my deep-dark secrets she probably wouldn’t want to go out for beers afterward. Too bad, I dig redheads.

  After
the inquisition, they took me for a “few tests” which meant they would take about three-quarters of my blood and zap me with tons of radiation. The worst was the fMRI - functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. That’s the one where you lie still in a giant, noisy tube and they cook your brain with magnets. I guess it was supposed to give them a way to see what my brain was doing right that minute. They showed me a series of pictures on this tiny screen in the tube and then asked me questions about them.

  Mostly it was boring. I remember they were all excited about the splotches on the screen, but I just wanted my money and to see if the cute girl out front would have a beer with me. She’d gone home or something because the guy who walked me out was definitely not cute. He was more like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island mixed with a manatee. I always thought mouth-breathers were dumb, but this guy proved me wrong. He gave me a crisp, new bill with Grant on it and walked me to the exit. At the door he asked if I’d be willing to come in the next week for some follow-up tests. The pay would be double.

  After setting the appointment and heading out, I decided to splurge and ride the tram down the hill. After I got home, I settled in to watch my favorite movie, The Matrix.

  I didn’t think anything of the manatee-professor or OHSU until I saw them on the news the next morning. He was trying to cover up his face, but the whiskers, slobber and mouth-breathing made it clear. I turned up the volume to hear:

  “…the doctor is being charged with seven counts of felony manslaughter. His study was not approved by OHSU and his lab has been sequestered as evidence. The President of the University offered his condolences and assurance the families of the deceased will be notified. At this time we know that all those who died had responded to an ad on the classified site Craigslist before dying. Local emergency rooms cite conditions similar to stroke, but in people with little or no risk factors.

  “Thank you, Wendy. Now let’s hear about how the Blazers are doing and what that means for your weekend…”

  I already knew about the Blazers, so that part didn’t really interest me as much as the murderer-manatee that had shot microwaves at my brain. I jumped on the station’s website to see if there was a contact number for people affected by the doctor. The best I got was the general operator at OHSU and they wouldn’t tell me anything over the phone. They just asked me to come in for questioning. I scheduled an appointment and hung up.

  With nothing to do until the appointment, I went to my workshop to try and finish my latest creation. I sold custom computer cases online. This one was made from an old typewriter. I had to cut out the innards of the typewriter to get the computer to fit inside. Overall it was a fun job, even though it didn’t pay much. I could watch TV and movies while working.

  That’s when I figured out something was wrong.

  Brain Stew

  It used to be that watching TV was a release for me. I could let it flow through the empty spaces of my day, wash over me and gently relax me. Old favorites would be on repeat, new shows would cause tense anticipation, and all the pretty moving pictures were friends. But whatever Dr. Manatee did to my brain ruined all that.

  The familiar glow of my computer screen set up to stream my latest addiction, reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger, set the stage for my work. I fired up my Dremel to patiently grind out the space for a computer to fit inside the typewriter. But I couldn’t work. I kept stopping to stare at the screen. Any time there was the remotest form of action or dialog I was rapt. I lost several hours to the auto-play feature queuing up the next episode in the series.

  Finally I turned off the computer and tried to get back to work, but I kept feeling like I needed to do something else. My legs were restless (I even considered that it might be sudden-onset Restless Leg Syndrome). Finally I got up and decided to walk around the block to get some air.

  Outside, on the North Portland streets, the pavement was wet. During the long months from October to May it seemed like the pavement was always wet as if it had just rained or was just about to rain. The smell of moldering leaves mixed with the burning scent of the coffee roaster down the street. I felt at home again, at peace.

  Slowly I started walking down the street to the coffee shop. Whatever it was about my workshop faded away out here. My legs, and my whole body, were relaxed.

  Then several bike commuters rode by, joking and laughing as they rode two abreast down the street. I watched them intently and my legs almost immediately started to twitch in response.

  Whatever this was, it wasn’t limited to television viewing. I went back inside to my basement workshop and locked the door behind. I needed to figure this out. Desperately. So I spent the rest of the day just watching videos online. At first it was whatever seemed to be entertaining, but I found that the videos that made me most twitchy were the ones where people were moving. Walker kicking something nearly made me go crazy with the need to move.

  So I did. Chuck Norris delivered a smashing roundhouse to a bad guy in a black hat. I roundhouse kicked a coat tree into oblivion. Norris punched a criminal in the nose; I beat up my couch cushions.

  I discovered two things that day. First, I can exactly mimic anything I see someone else do. I can do it perfectly the first time after seeing it just once. I know, it’s crazy, but I’ve tested it over and over, and it can’t be a coincidence. I’ve never played soccer before, but after watching a bicycle kick, I was able to do it exactly right in my back yard. I’ve never danced an Irish jig, but after watching some videos I was Michael Flatley (except with my shirt on).

  The second thing I discovered is that I don’t have to do what I see - at least not right away. I want to do it. It’s that feeling of seeing someone else yawn and needing to yawn yourself. Just like that, I almost need to do what I see, but I don’t have to do it. I felt like I was Neo in the Matrix learning all the stuff by jacking in. Except I got tired and hungry so I went to the kitchen to eat a microwave burrito.

  I supposed I should have gone to OHSU the next day to get things checked out, but I wasn’t too keen on getting connected to the police investigation. They might have a few questions about my, um, recreational activities that I wouldn’t want to answer. So I hopped on the MAX to head over to the free clinic on the west side. They did a bunch of tests and couldn’t find anything wrong with me. It was on the way back that I noticed the burly twins following me.

  Once I got back to my house, I figured I should do some research to see what was going on with all this stuff. But Googling: “OHSU Dr. Manatee” didn’t give me much. I didn’t remember his name and Google wasn’t offering any helpful hints in response. They’re so good, and condescending, when I misspell a word, but they can’t figure out the mouth-breather that works at OHSU.

  I finally realized that I could find it through the website of the local news station. Dr. Brenten Grosskopf hadn’t actually worked at OHSU, but he had lab space there. He applied for the space under false pretenses and they didn’t bother to check his credentials until people started dying. I guess rent is rent.

  Dr. Grosskopf’s credentials were good, but spotted with tragedy. He studied neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, but there was an unexplained death in one of the volunteer test subjects. He was the chief of neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic, but too many wrongful death suits caused him to resign. At that point, Google stopped yielding new results and just started regurgitating the same old stories from different sites. No matter, it was enough to make me nervous.

  After another frozen burrito (hey, they’re cheap and I’m poor) I decided that I needed some training. So I found all the videos I could of kung fu fighting. It turns out, most of those videos are of guys breaking boards and stuff. Since I didn’t really want to break a bunch of wood, I started looking to other disciplines for help. Boxing offered some good tools, but I was afraid that the gloves would make things too different (translation: I was scared of breaking my hands). Then I looked at kickboxing because, well because it sounds cool and Jean-Claude Van Damme was in the movie (the
first one anyway). But it’s even worse than boxing if you want to come out without broken hands and shins. Finally I looked to the MMA crowd - Mixed Martial Arts - to see what they do to avoid the hand-breaking.

  Brazilian jujitsu. That’s the main discipline that nearly every MMA guy studies. It’s all about grappling, locking people up and taking them down. I figured I could do that, and it wouldn’t leave me with bloody stumps where my hands used to be. So I watched all the jujitsu films I could find on YouTube. It was like crack to me. I just kept going, long into the night, until I nearly couldn’t keep my eyes open.

  So I switched off the computer and headed up to bed. Just after I crawled under the covers my phone buzzed with a text message. I reached over and grabbed it to see an unknown number with the message: “If you’re not dead, meet me at Powell’s @ 10am.”

  I immediately texted back: “I’m not dead yet. Who are you?”

  “See you tomorrow,” came the reply.

  “But who are you?”

  No response came, so I tried to fall asleep, but I could only think of my potential death as foretold by the texting-harbinger. But eventually I started thinking of Monty Python quotes and drifted off to sleep.

  Angry buzzing woke me too early. Another text message: “Get up or you’ll be late.”

  “Maybe I’m not going.”

  “LOL, I’ll see you soon.”

  Damn it. Whoever it was knew me well enough. I groped around for pants and a mostly-clean shirt. My late night and my rude awakening led to a grouchy mood. I rejected the next frozen-burrito-meal (breakfast this time) and stomped out the door to get some coffee and breakfast. I considered getting a beer too, but I didn’t know if I’d need my wits for this meeting or if more burly-pants were waiting to fight me. Though my new jujitsu skills were formidable, I wasn’t that anxious to try them out in real life.

  The ubiquitous airpot of Stumptown coffee gave me my caffeine fix--and that sour taste of French-pressed coffee that’s too mixed up after running through an airpot pump--and helped me to shake off the angry-tired-confused state I’d been in since waking. The local, organic, vegan, gluten-free muffin tasted like moist sawdust with raisins in it, but it did the job of soaking up coffee.