OUTCAST Ops: The Poseidon Initiative

TWENTY-ONE

Stephen Shah exited the elevator onto the first floor and passed through the cubicle farm. He caught some odd looks on the way. Yeah, I’m the guy who just shut your asses down. Deal with it. At least he hoped that’s what the looks were about. But as he neared the end of the cube farm just before it opened into the expansive lobby area, he saw a man bolt upright, his head shooting above his workstation wall like a hyperactive prairie dog emerging from its hole in the ground.

Shah did his best to ignore him but saw the man point dramatically at him. Heard him say into the phone, “He’s here! Yes, right now, he’s about to walk out of here into the lobby.”

Shah picked up his pace as much as he could without seeming like he was acting suspicious, but then came the shouted commands.

“Mr. Rahim! Stop, please, we need to talk to you! Mr. Rahim…”

Then a duo of suited security personnel emerged from a row of cubicles and headed right for Shah. One of them held up a badge. Shah didn’t take the time to figure out what it represented. His ruse hadn’t worked.

A few of the workers began to catcall at him.

“Close us down?”

“You with Hofstad?”

Shah took solace in the fact that they didn’t yet know who he was.

One of the security men silenced these rabble-rousers with a wave. One of them touched an earpiece as if straining to hear better, and then he pointed assertively in Shah’s direction. He and his associate ran toward the OUTCAST operator, blocking the thoroughfare to the main exit.

Shah sidestepped down a row of cubicles, eliciting screams from surprised female workers who feared what this imposter among their ranks might do now that he’d been outed. He was dangerous in the same way a wild animal was unpredictable when cornered.

Halfway down the row of cubes Shah jumped up on a desk surface and leapt over the cubicle wall. He landed on the desk of the cubicle on the other side. Fortunately it was unoccupied but he slipped on some papers before he regained his balance enough to jump to the floor.

“We just want to talk!” one of the guards implored.

“Don’t make this worse than it needs to be,” chimed in the second.

Shah’s voiceless opposition made it clear to the security detail that they would have to forcibly take this man down. No surrender here.

Shah, who had long practiced Krav Maga, saw potential weapons everywhere as he began to make his course more erratic. A pencil jar holding a pair of scissors here. A pewter paperweight there. A computer cable. Even a thin notebook computer could be flung into a windpipe with devastating force. But for now he concentrated on evasive action.

He reached the end of a row and knocked over a five-gallon water cooler as he rushed past, flooding the floor. A pair of hands stretched out to grasp him and he deftly snapped one of the wrists, little yelps of pain receding behind him as he crashed into double glass doors that led out into the lobby.

And then came the command he’d known was coming.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Shah grabbed a passing man with a briefcase, whirled him around and flung him through the still open doors into the work area. He took off at a dead sprint through the lobby. He got to the main entrance too late — four more armed officers poured into the lobby area from outside.

He ran past the main exit, mentally recalling the building design as he fled. The lobby was actually a rectangular hallway, sort of like a moat that circled the inner work areas of the building. He traced its way around looking for a way out. A few people stepped aside to let the fleeing man pass. One man, a forty-ish civil servant who looked like he maintained a strict fitness regimen, tried to stop Shah. He put both hands out, sidestepping to block the intruder’s path.

Shah feinted right, then ducked left, sweeping his right foot across the back of his foe’s ankles. He went down hard, swiping at Shah’s legs with a hand as he passed but his fingers clutching only air.

“Over here!” the would-be hero yelled to the unseen security force in pursuit.

Shah guessed he was about halfway around the loop now. No way he’d be able to make it through the heavy security at the main entrance. He had to find a way out. Behind him the heavy footfalls and squawking two-radios were catching up to him.

He spotted a door up ahead on the right marked ROOM A. He slowed his pace as he reached it, willing himself to slow his breathing. He pulled the door handle and was relieved to feel it swing open. Quickly he ducked inside, where a conference was underway. A white-bearded man was speaking at a podium to an audience of perhaps fifty people. No one turned to look at him as he entered. Shah casually walked down the rows of folding chairs until he found one with an empty seat on the edge. He took it and waited.

The speaker was droning on about Dutch-American trade deficits. A man two rows up asked a question and a heated exchange followed. Shah looked around until he was certain no one was watching him. Then he scanned the room for exits behind the speaker. Saw a green lit EXIT sign on the left wall behind the small stage. He had no idea where it led, but sitting here would only buy him a few minutes at most.

Just before he got up, Shah caught himself smiling, a huge shit-eating grin on his face. He was living, wasn’t he? Goddamn if he wasn’t. For a while there, after he was terminated from The Company, he’d thought his life was destined to be a parade of drudgery; that he was ordained to live out his days doing mundane things until he was shoehorned into some nursing home where the highlight of his day was to be wheeled out into the hallway to sit for a couple of hours. He was exaggerating his fate, perhaps, a form of mental self-flagellation, yet that reality was on the spectrum of his possible fates. But here he was, every nerve ending pulsing with electricity.

And he was at least trying to do some good in the world, to help people. Thanks to OUTCAST, his life had purpose once again. If all he cared about was getting a cheap thrill he could go throw himself off a bridge tied to a bungee cord, or take up sky-diving or race car driving some other self-serving adrenaline junkie habit. But he wanted, as he always had during his twenty-year career at CIA, to help his country, to help people lead better lives.

He glanced at his watch, a gold Rolex with Roman numerals, and reminded himself that more Americans were likely to die in the next few hours if he and the rest of the team were not successful. He had personally failed his long-shot mission, that much was clear. So the hope now lay with Tanner in South Carolina, and with Dante, Naomi and Jasmijn in the lab.

Speaking of which, Shah thought, rising as the audience erupted in applause, it was time for him to get back there. As the talk concluded, those not hanging around to try and engage the speaker in a little post-talk one-on-one Q & A were streaming out of the room from two exits. Most left the same way Shah had come in-through the main double-doors out into the perimeter hallway. But a smaller crowd vacated by way of the single door at the rear left. Shah mingled in with this group and followed them through the exit.

It led to a short hallway with two elevators at one end and a stairwell at the other. He followed the group to the elevators and got in when the doors opened. A man pressed the B button and Shah rejoiced at his good luck. He remembered from his visits long ago that there was a basement parking garage. His car was parked above ground, but he would be able to reach the outside from the garage.

The elevator doors opened just as Shah realized that a man was asking him what he had thought of the talk.

He looked at him and nodded agreeably. “Most liberating.”

Shah saw the sliver of gray daylight and strode briskly toward it.