VICIOUS

Atlanta, Georgia

It is curious that although I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and have been living there off and on for most of my adult life, that only recently have I actually come to Atlanta for more than a quick change of planes at the airport. This is my third actual trip here, and the second to the Hilton Towers in downtown Atlanta. Another job. Close-protection. An artist from Birmingham is here to exhibit some of his latest works and to give a speech to what is supposed to be an adoring and receptive crowd.

But if the crowd is supposed to be so adoring and receptive, then you might ask why Gino Molina needs the services of a professional bodyguard? The answer is quite simple: because not everyone appreciates Mr. Molina’s art or his political views. Imagine that in such a tolerant society as the one we occupy today.

I’m not much of an art lover and I don’t usually travel in circles where it is discussed all that much. However, prior to taking this assignment I had heard of Gino Molina. He is sponsored by a wealthy Birmingham citizen for whom I have worked a number of times before and she had mentioned him and his work on more than one occasion. Plus there had been a few local news reports, and one on CNN that I had caught regarding him. Supposed to be very talented, the next van Gogh or something. I wonder if this means he’ll have to lose an ear before his career can really take off.

Anyway, not everyone appreciates Mr. Molina’s artistic expression or what he has to say regarding current American national and foreign policy. And as a result there have been numerous verbal and written threats against him, some rather graphic. A few times someone has broken into his downtown loft back in Birmingham and wrecked the place, spraying graffiti all over the walls. And once, about three months ago, somebody shot the windows out of his car in a drive-by. Fortunately for Mr. Molina he was not in it at the time; it was the middle of the night and the vehicle was parked on the street in front of his building. Even with all this he still refused to move.

So now there were private guards employed to protect his home, and on occasion they shadowed him from place to place in order to make sure no harm came to him as he went about his business in Birmingham. However, these guards were not really trained in the field of close protective services and since Atlanta would not be familiar territory to them, Molina’s sponsor decided it would be a good idea to hire somebody who was well-schooled in close-protection and comfortable operating in Atlanta.

Yours truly fit the bill in both respects and I was called in.

And now here I am. Derrick Olin, personal bodyguard to the arts and artists.

Ordinarily I don’t do celebrity jobs. Too much of a profile and usually the clients don’t really need protection so much as chaperons or babysitters. I’m neither, and despite how good the money is, I would prefer to starve rather than work those kinds of assignments. My temperament is just not compatible with that kind of job.

However in the case of Gino Molina, I was pleasantly surprised. He was not spoiled, he was not arrogant—well not so arrogant that I couldn’t stand to be around him—and he actually listened to my suggestions and did his best to adhere to them. Quite refreshing because one might be surprised at the number of clients who refused to listen to the advice and instructions that were given to them by the very people they had hired to keep them alive. Molina was different. I suppose he took the threats to his life seriously. And so did I.

That was the second reason I took this assignment. In my estimation, the threat was real. That had been rather dramatically demonstrated more than once. Even before the shooting up of his car. I would not be window-dressing hired to make him look more important or to scare photographers. Although the latter could be fun sometimes. In particular if the photographer was a real dick.

Before I took the job I did a thorough threat assessment, spending some time reading what information had been acquired regarding the threats and break-ins by the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the Birmingham Police Department, thanks to a detective I know there. My conclusion was that there probably was no organized, direct threat to Mr. Molina, but he was definitely on somebody’s shit list. Probably a few nutcases who were sitting around drinking beer one day and saw him on TV, didn’t like what he had to say, got pissed, got even drunker, and thought it would be a good idea to make some trouble for the guy. Eventually they would be caught. They were stupid. Careless. The only reason they had gotten away with the harassment so far was because Birmingham PD had a lot more pressing matters to deal with at the moment, chief among them the increasing unsolved murder rate and the further loss of officers through attrition.

A search on the internet revealed a number of right-wing blogs dedicated to deconstructing the works and positions of Mr. Gino Molina. I found some sites that rather explicitly suggested ways that his kind could be dealt with. One went so far as to call for his lynching with a very long and coarse rope. That blog was disseminated by someone who lived in Smyrna, Georgia, barely a hop and a skip away from Atlanta. I asked my detective friend to see if she could discreetly inquire into the background of the blogger, but her attempts to do so met with negative results, as we used to say many centuries ago when I was an agent with the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations. And since we didn’t have a warrant or subpoena, further official inquiry would have been illegal.

Be that as it may, the blogs just added weight to the seriousness of the threat that Mr. Molina faced, and therefore I took the contract and accompanied him to Atlanta. We actually flew instead of driving the two hours because neither of us likes long car rides. Of course, I’m not really a fan of flying either, but it does beat a couple hours in a car on the interstate. But there was one unpleasant moment on the brief flight that is still bothering me three days later. Actually it’s pissing me off.

There were a couple of guys sitting three seats up and across the aisle from me, both wearing traditional Muslim headdress, kufi, I believe they’re called. For a few seconds after spotting them I had the briefest of irrational thoughts. I knew better and it bothered me greatly that I had let the prejudices that were so rampant these days creep into my mind and momentarily cloud my good sense. I spent eight years working as a federal investigator, five of them in Antiterrorism. I was an expert at threat assessment and I knew better than anyone that all Muslims were not terrorists and that you couldn’t judge people by the clothing that they wore. Even so, for that brief instant I found myself doing what millions of other Americans do these days when they spot someone of Middle Eastern descent on an airplane with them. I started looking at the two men like they might be getting ready to hijack the fucking plane.

I knew better.

Or I should have.

Another mental slap.

Now it was time to get back to what I was supposed to be doing. Protecting Gino Molina.

This was day three and it would be the final full day that we spent in Atlanta. We were booked on a three-ten flight back to Birmingham tomorrow afternoon and once I got him back to his loft my assignment would be over.

It was a quarter to eight and in just fifteen minutes my client would be taking the stage in the Grand Ballroom on the second level of the hotel. He was scheduled to speak for forty-five minutes and then dinner would be served in the Grand Salon just across the way. Four hundred attendees. Not the largest group the hotel had ever hosted according to the banquet manager, but still large enough. And with that many people the opportunity for problems was fairly good. Molina just had me to look after him, however the hotel had its own internal security force and they seemed halfway competent, though I doubt seriously if they were skilled in high-threat protective techniques.

This is why I was glad to find out that the event had hired a professional private firm to oversee security during the function. The company was called Rossier International and was based right here in Atlanta. The CEO of the company, Lolita Rossier, was an Atlanta native and former detective lieutenant with the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department. She had also served fifteen years with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security/Diplomatic Security Service—DS/DSS—and had worked all around the world protecting high-risk clients. I knew all of this not because I had met Ms. Rossier prior to this event, but because once I learned that her firm had been engaged I went online and did some research. I was most impressed with what I had discovered, and when she and I had met three days ago I was even more so.

Her bio listed her age at sixty, but looking at her right now I found that nearly impossible to believe. I would have thought late forties, maybe right at fifty at the most. Lolita Rossier was nearly six feet tall and well built. Her bio said she held black belts in two highly specialized martial art forms and was an accomplished scuba and skydiver. It was easy to see that all of that physical activity had paid off for her. And it wasn’t just her physique that was remarkable.

She was smart as a whip, tough, funny, and one of the most professional professionals I have ever met. For this assignment she had chosen to act as lead security coordinator for her team, saying that from time to time she liked to keep her hand in and keep her skills current as a field operator. Her teammates also seemed well-trained and had no problems with their CEO running a field operation. I got the feeling that it was something she did a lot; and was very good at it.

Rossier was responsible for access control at all event venues and for providing close-protection to a few other VIPs in attendance. Lolita Rossier and I had set the lines very clearly at our first meeting, both of us agreeing that the physical safety of Gino Molina was my only responsibility and in the event of some sort of incident I would be moving to protect him and no one else; and if anyone else got in my way I’d run right over them.

That last bit had made her smile, her deep black eyes shining with a hint of devilish humor, but she also understood that I was being serious.

Five minutes to eight.

Gino Molina and I are getting off the elevator on the second level and walking over toward the side service entrance of the Grand Ballroom. In the corridor outside the elevators one of Rossier’s agents is posted, a brown haired young woman wearing a light gray pants suit and black blouse. Her name is Mandy Perkins. Mandy is ex-Army, spent nine years in the service, including two tours in Iraq. Compared to that duty this posting was a piece of cake. She smiled as my client and I passed and I nodded to her.

At the door to the service entrance stood another of Rossier’s agents, actually a senior agent. His name is Jack Jefferson, aka: J.J. He’s a former Secret Service agent, although according to him he never worked on the PPD—Presidential Protection Detail. After two years with the Counterfeit Division J.J. transferred to the Dignitary Protection Staff and spent the rest of his eight years in service protecting visiting foreign heads of state, mainly at the U.N.

As my principal and I approached the door J.J. smiled and opened it.

“Gentlemen,” he said.

“Mr. Jefferson,” I responded, then followed Molina into the small corridor that led to the back of the stage on which he would be stepping in just a couple of minutes.

There was a stage assistant and a makeup person waiting in the wings and when we arrived they immediately fell upon my client. I stepped out of the way and had a look around backstage, careful to keep my client in my line of sight. There were two uniformed hotel guards posted back here, one standing at the emergency exit with his arms folded across his flabby chest and looking rather bored. The other was leaning against the wall a few feet from where I stood and she nodded when I looked at her. I nodded back and then checked my watch. It was eight o’clock.

The stage assistant smiled and patted Gino on the shoulder, and the makeup person looked him over once more and nodded approval. It was time…

During the course of the presentation the audience seemed enthralled with the animated and passionate performance of my client. There was laughter, a lot of nodding, and free-spirited applause at various points. I stood just off stage, far enough back so that the audience could not see me, but close enough so that I could get to Molina if I had to. I could see a little of the audience from where I stood and from my vantage point everyone seemed to be pleased with him. Still, some of the things he was saying were not the most flattering in some quarters and I was reasonably sure that not everyone in attendance agreed with his message. Hell, if I really thought about it, I really didn’t agree with at least half of what he had to say, but then I wasn’t getting paid to listen to him or agree with him, just to make sure that he didn’t get hurt.

Three minutes to nine and the wrap-up was nearly complete. I have to say that Gino Molina has greater talents beyond painting. He has a flair for public speaking. When he was done everyone was on their feet clapping. I moved closer to the stage and watched as Molina stepped away from the podium, removed his glasses, and bowed several times with a great smile on his wide face, and then he turned and came toward me.

“I think they liked it,” he whispered with excitement, his face damp with perspiration.

I nodded, saying nothing, glancing around to make sure the way was clear. The stage assistant was there and she was all smiles as well, handing him a towel which he used to wipe his face. They spoke for a few minutes while I stood back. Out in the ballroom I could hear someone on stage directing everyone to please move across the hallway to the Grand Salon where dinner was to be served; pre-dinner cocktails available in the foyer. The plan was for Gino to wait until most of the rest of the attendees had made their move before he would go over and join them. Once he was seated I would move to a corner of the salon and try to look as inconspicuous as possible. That should be pretty easy. This was a crowd of artists or wanna-be artists. Most of them were self-absorbed or sycophants trying to kiss up to the true talents. As far as they were concerned I was nobody. And that was fine by me.

“All right,” Gino said to the stage assistant. “Thanks. Now I’m hungry. Did I see they were serving baked salmon as well tonight?”

The stage assistant nodded and told him yes. They spoke for another few seconds and then the young woman excused herself, saying that she would talk to Gino again before the night was over. After that he turned to me and smiled.

“I’m starving, Derrick,” he said. “Shall we?”

I nodded, moving past him and toward the service door. Gino followed.

I opened the door and found a uniformed guard posted outside. This did not alarm me because I knew that J.J. Jefferson had been reposted once the dinner function began. He and Mandy Perkins would now be across the hall standing outside the Grand Salon with two more of Lolita Rossier’s agents.

There were still forty or more people in the foyer, standing in small groups talking, some with drinks in their hands from the bar that had been set up in between the Grand Ballroom and the Grand Salon. Gino spotted someone he wanted to talk to and walked over, first stopping by the bar and asking for a dry martini. Then, with drink in hand, he moved over to a group of three and insinuated himself into their conversation. I stood a few feet back and glanced around. Just off to my right was a pair of escalators and there was a uniformed guard posted at the top of the one leading up. He had his back to it though and I had to suppress a desire to go over and tell him to turn around; or to kick him down it.

I kept scanning the rest of the area, and just before I turned back toward the escalators I heard a tray crash to the floor. Instinctively I moved closer to my client. Everyone else turned to look at where the tray had fallen. And then, off by the escalators, the guard was suddenly in a confrontation with a seemingly drunk young woman in a really tight pair of blue jeans. She was trying to get by him, falling against the startled young security guard, and he was doing his best to hold her up while trying to explain why she couldn’t come up on this floor.

I put my hand on Gino’s shoulder.

“Let me get you inside the salon,” I said in a low but firm tone.

He was about to object, but then two young men in dark T-shirts and blue jeans came up the steps from the first level on the opposite side of the floor near the service entrance to the Grand Ballroom. Both of them sported buzz-cuts and carried aluminum bats held low by their legs.

Fuck!

No time to get my principal to safety. So I shoved him to the floor and told him not to move. Everyone else was backing out of the way as they saw the two determined looking young men moving closer. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the security guards grabbing his radio and speaking frantically into the mouthpiece. Modern security training at work. Don’t try to intervene, notify your base and await instructions. I guess there was some logic in that. At least it kept security guards from getting hurt.

The first attacker started to growl deep in his throat and raised his bat above his head as he closed on me. I was already moving toward him even before he raised the bat, and once it was above his head his midsection was exposed. I hit him in the gut with a solid short jab, twisting my fist at the point of impact, and despite his firm abdominal muscles, the blow was sufficient enough to double him over and drop him to his knees, the bat falling to the floor behind him.

His partner had been about to move past me and go after my client, but when he saw his comrade go down he reversed himself and tried to swing his bat at my head. Unfortunately for him his position was off balance and the swing was awkward, which meant I had time to duck before the bat got close enough to my head to make contact.

Training took over at that point. Actually it had taken over the moment that tray had dropped to the floor. Everything I had been taught, everything I had experienced in the last eighteen years in my chosen profession suddenly flooded through me.

When you’re under attack the tendency is to defend. That’s all well and good, but if all you do is defend, then your attacker has the advantage, and sooner or later he will land a lucky blow. And for this reason I always counterattack when attacked. Hard and fast.

So when I ducked under the bat, as it passed just inches above my head, I swung the side of my left fist backwards and managed to connect with the side of the second aggressor’s belly. This blow was not as powerful as the one I’d delivered to the first man, but it was enough to move him back several feet and he grabbed his stomach with his free hand.

The first hostile was still on his knees but I knew this would not be the case for long. He was young and strong and had probably been hit a time or two before this. I circled to my right, keeping several feet of distance between me and the second man, also keeping an eye on my client.

The second attacker came at me again, this time very fast with his bat held in both hands, swinging high over his head, more than likely intent on delivering a devastating blow to my cranium. The problem was, in doing so he left himself open to what the Israelis call a burst attack. Simply put: an operator uses his leg muscles to propel himself forward at an attacker instead of backing away and assuming a defensive position. Then the operator hits the attacker with two parallel fists in the upper torso, thus conveying a brutal one-two shock to the hostile’s system that is guaranteed to take the fight out of him immediately; if properly executed. I’ve been training in these tactics for years and have had to use them in the field on more occasions than I can remember. Plus, I’ve got really powerful leg and arm muscles thanks to all the working out I do. The young man fell back, dropping the bat, and landing very hard on his butt, and then his head hit the carpeted floor with a loud thud. He was out of it for now.

But his partner was back on his feet again, murder in his eyes, and raising his bat. A crazy thought occurred to me then, something about me not really being a fan of baseball. I pushed that thought aside.

The swing was one-handed and full of youthful power and indignation, and a righteous snarl in accompaniment. I could have ducked under it but decided to move closer, turning slightly to the right as the bat came toward my left side. Then I struck with the blade of my left hand and chopped the wrist of the hand that held the bat, ducking as the broken wrist flopped and the bat went flying from that now useless hand.

The first attacker howled in pain and held his broken wrist in his other hand.

“Fuck man!” he bellowed. “What you do that for?!”

I simply looked at him for a second, and then turned toward my client. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have turned my back on a hostile who was still ambulatory, but I had seen J.J. Jefferson moving up behind the young man and just as I turned, J.J. took the kid down in a submission hold and dropped him to the floor; and the kid screamed in agony as J.J. grabbed his broken wrist and twisted it. Uniformed guards were moving in now as frightened attendees still clung to the walls on the far sides of the foyer.

I bent down and picked my client up and quickly moved him toward the stairs. For the time being dinner was postponed. I had reserved a spare suite in an anonymous name up on the fourth floor. We would remain there until everything could be sorted out. Molina did not object now. The fear in his eyes was palpable and he would do whatever I told him to as long as I kept him safe, which was my intention all along.

The whole incident had taken less than a minute and my pulse rate had barely ticked upward. The kid’s still got it, I thought with a smile as we reached the fourth floor and turned right…

“THEY WERE JUST SOME IDIOTS,” Lolita Rossier said a couple hours later as she and I stood outside the doors to a private dining room on the third floor of the Hilton. “Hired help. And not much at that. The cops have them and they’re spilling everything they know. Which isn’t much.”

I nodded, glancing around. It was after eleven and the hotel was much quieter. Most of the attendees had decided to either go back to their rooms after the ruckus or go out on the town and try to forget what had happened. Once Lolita’s people had done a thorough sweep of the hotel, the event organizers had decided to hold a small gathering in an easy to secure room with only a few guests in attendance, my client included. Satisfied with the security arrangements, I agreed to allow Molina to attend.

In addition to uniformed personnel covering every possible entrance to the floor, Lolita Rossier had her agents posted as well, and Mandy Perkins and J.J. Jefferson were roving the floor. She and I were personally manning the only entrance to the dining room.

“They say some guy approached them and offered five hundred bucks, total, if they’d come here and disrupt the event. One of their friends works here, on the banquet staff. He’s the one who dropped the tray. Their idea of a diversion. The girl in the jeans was one of their girlfriends.”

“So they did all this for a grand total of five hundred dollars?” I said, shaking my head.

“Like I said,” Lolita replied, glancing around. “Idiots. But they did get in here and up to the second floor with two aluminum bats.”

“And how did that happen?” I said.

“The bats were already here,” Lolita responded, adjusting her well-tailored black suit jacket. “Their friend on the staff got them in yesterday and hid them behind those big ugly plants down by the stairs on the first level, and that’s the way they came up. Not too sophisticated, but it worked.”

“They know who hired them?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said. “They know it was a guy, white, but couldn’t really give much of a description from what the police have told me so far. That might change. He gave them all of the money up front, and told them they had better not let him down.”

“They came straight for my client,” I said, looking directly into her cool black eyes. “They knew him.”

“Yeah,” Lolita said. “They had his picture on them. Said the guy gave it to them. Said he—your client—was anti-American and a terrorist sympathizer. Said he might send them a bonus if they could find and bust him up. They were really surprised to see him—Molina—standing out in the foyer when they got upstairs. Thought it was a lucky break for them. Until they ran into you that is.”

She allowed a small grin here, glancing at me.

I did not grin.

J.J. and Mandy passed and nodded, I nodded back, Lolita waved.

“I’m thinking your client is really pissing some people off,” the CEO of Rossier International said a moment later. “You might want to reconsider his security plan once you’re back in Birmingham.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it won’t be my problem. This is a short-term gig for me, just as long as he’s here in Atlanta. I’ll let his benefactor know and give them some ideas. I don’t do long-term jobs though.”

Lolita stared at me for a few moments, a curious expression in her eyes.

“Strictly freelance?” she said.

“Most of the time,” I told her. “Kind of like being my own boss.”

“I know the feeling,” she said. “Which is why I started my own outfit. You ever think about being more than just a solo operator?”

“Nope,” I told her. “When it’s just you, you know where you stand.”

“True,” she said. “But it is nice to have some backup and other resources from time to time.”

“True,” I admitted.

We were both silent for a time, watching as the security team around us continued to do their jobs. Finally Lolita Rossier reached into her side pocket and pulled out a well crafted business card, handing it to me.

“Give me a call some time, Derrick,” she said in a smooth, sensual voice. “Maybe I’ll have a short-term job for you on occasion. I checked you out after we met. Ten years in the Air Force, most of that time with AFOSI. Five years Antiterrorism Security and Dignitary Protection. You were even lead agent on a close-protection detail for the Under Secretary of the Air Force while she traveled in the Balkans. A rather impressive list of accomplishments. Both in and out of the service. And from how you handled yourself this evening—Mandy and J.J. were very astonished at how fast you moved—I’d say you are precisely the kind of operator I’d like to employ.”

I took the card and placed it inside my shirt pocket. For about a minute I didn’t respond, then I nodded.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Ms. Rossier. I took the liberty of checking you out as well. And not just your rather impressive physical attributes.”

This made her smile widely, and she covered her mouth with a hand, blushing. Good.

“Your background is quite impressive too. Fulton County Sheriff’s lieutenant, Diplomatic Security special agent, and now the head of a major private security firm that you built yourself from the ground up. You seem like the kind of operator that I might not mind working for from time to time.”

Lolita Rossier nodded, still smiling, though controlling her blushes. After a few more minutes she excused herself, walking down the corridor to say something to J.J. Jefferson, and then she moved on toward the elevators.

J.J. came over to join me, placing his hands behind his back in the parade-rest position. He didn’t say anything at first, but then he turned and glanced at me.

“So, the boss try to recruit you yet?” he said.

I simply stared at him for a moment, then continued scanning the corridor. It had been a long day, and a little exciting. Right now I really wasn’t in the mood for any more small talk, or attempts at manipulation. I would more than likely do some work for Rossier in the future, but it would be on my terms. And no matter how much Lolita Rossier tried to seduce me, or how much Jack “J.J.” Jefferson tried to play buddy to me, my terms were the only terms that would ever matter.

Like I said, it’s kind of nice being your own boss.

It’s good to be the king.[6]