THE RED WAKE

Chapters 8-9

 CHAPTER 8

 

     When Special Operative Harry Bendix heard keys jingling in the hallway outside, he smiled. He knew that Lang would be tired, worn out from his last assignment.

     Vulnerable. 

     Good, Bendix thought.  Maybe he’ll catch pneumonia and die.  

     Lang walked in just as Bendix was savoring the fantasy of his partner gagging and sputtering, begging for his help while thick ropes of green snot flew out of his nose and mouth, covering Lang’s head like an executioner’s hood. Bendix smiled, momentarily filled with a pleasure that was both deep and satisfying. As Lang stood in the doorway, glaring at him with the contempt that had come to distinguish their relationship, Bendix dug his hand deeper into the box of caramel-flavored popcorn he’d found in Lang’s pantry. 

     For his part, Lang was intensely disturbed to come home after a hard day's work only to find his least favorite minority sitting in his favorite recliner devouring fistfuls of his favorite junk food. 

     Scott Lang was a man of many sins. In the last seven years he’d murdered in service to their employers. He’d facilitated drug addiction and narcotics crimes on a devastating scale. He was a man unburdened by the limitations of a conscience, hating deeply those things that offended his sensibilities, and for a moment, he seriously considered shooting his partner for putting his filthy paws into his personal box of Fiddle Faddle. 

     “He wants us at the Palomino Club in thirty minutes,” Bendix mumbled around a mouthful of sticky toffee and peanut goo. “Where the fuck have you been? ” 

     Lang took a breath, and placed his suitcase on the floor. Then he closed the apartment door. 

     “I had to take out some trash,” he growled. 

     Bendix nodded. 

     They were Operatives, employed by an agency so clandestine that even the current President didn’t know its real name. Compared to their employers the CIA, NSA, and FBI were like the A.C.L.U. 

     In a dark office, located beneath the Pentagon, a small, obscenely well-funded group of facilitators conducted the dirtiest, most covert work of the nation’s corporate kings. And although one of its installations was located in Washington, the Circle, (as it was referred to by its Operatives), held no single patriotic allegiance. Its facilities were located all over the world, in cities like Moscow, London, Johannesburg...When the Pope went to his lonely bed at night, a blue light blinked on somewhere inside the Circle Installation two miles beneath the Vatican. 

   Bendix mused about his employers; Want to know what really landed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947? Buried deep within the Pentagon Installation, there is an answer. The Circle had film of the whole “event.” The 20th century’s most notorious assassination was financed, coordinated, and ultimately buried by Circle Operatives who were present that day in Dealy Plaza. Paranoia, hate, greed and a slavish devotion to the status quo were the depraved progenitors of the Circle. Scott Lang and Harry Bendix were it’s direct descendants. 

     “What’s the situation?” Lang asked. 

   He was tired. He wanted to wash the blood from beneath his fingernails and scrub himself clean beneath the extra hard water in his shower. The last thing he wanted was to go with Bendix to meet at the Palomino for a new assignment.  

     “You think this is one of theirs?” Bendix asked. 

     He was watching news reports about the madness sweeping the streets.