“OK. I’m going to need some money, though. The bobblehead people aren’t going to give me a paid vacation, and I’m already way behind on my rent.”
“Yes, I know. I was just coming to that.” He handed me a Jungle Cash ticket that had already been scratched off.
“Um, True,” I said, looking at the prize amount. “This is too little.”
“It’s enough for a long-term storage locker. A small one. You don’t have that many possessions.”
“You want me to give up the apartment?”
“Weren’t you planning to do that anyway?”
“Well yeah, but…How long is this Vegas operation supposed to last? I mean, does it make sense for me to burn all my bridges here?”
True held up the crumpled eviction notice that he’d fished out of my kitchen garbage can. “I’d say this bridge is already blazing, wouldn’t you?”
I put my stuff in storage. I stopped by the bobblehead company, intending to give my notice, and instead managed to talk this guy in payroll into giving me two weeks’ pay in advance. Then I called Black Helicopters, the subdivision of Catering in charge of transport. Even though I should have known better, I was honestly expecting them to fly me to Vegas. Hah.
“At five p.m. this evening,” the voice on the phone said, “go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific Heights. Someone will park within sight of you and leave their keys in the ignition.”
“What kind of car will it be?”
“At five p.m. this evening, go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that. But how will I know it’s the right car?”
“The license plate will have an even number.”
It was almost six by the time a black SUV pulled into the Safeway lot, driven by a mother with two kids; the kids were screaming at each other, which gave their mom a perfect pretext to forget her car keys. The SUV’s license number ended in an 8, and it was a Nevada plate, which I thought pretty much clinched it—but just in case, I waited until Mom had dragged the kids into the store before making my move.
I found a Mobil credit card in the glove compartment and used it to top off the tank. Then I blew town. As I drove south, I thought about the Scary Clowns.
The Clowns are the remnant of another secret society that got taken over by the organization way back in the day. They specialize in psychological ops: mind-fucking for the greater good. Like everybody else, they’re supposed to answer to Cost-Benefits, but because of their special history they’re actually semiautonomous, and their insistence on playing by their own rules creates a lot of headaches for the bureaucracy.
What sort of headaches?
Well, one of the things that distinguishes the Clowns is that they’re a lot less publicity-shy than the other divisions. They consider urban legends a form of tradecraft. It’s how they got their nickname.
I don’t recall an urban legend about scary clowns.
It was a variation on the old Men in Black gag. Used to be, when the organization got wind of a predator operating in a small town or a suburb, they’d send in a bunch of guys in freaky clown makeup to drive around and menace the locals. The idea was to raise awareness, get people to lock their doors and stop trusting strangers, until Bad Monkeys could eliminate the threat. It was a pretty effective gimmick, but they had to stop doing it after this one clown actor named Gacy got a little too into his role.
John Wayne Gacy was an organization operative?
Not one of the better ones, but yeah. He’d worked in Panopticon before switching to psy-ops, so he knew how to spoof Eyes Only surveillance; that’s how he managed to rack up so many bodies without getting caught. And then when the cops nailed him, before the organization could? You can bet heads rolled in Malfeasance over that screwup.