One moment you’re a big shot—the next nobody trusts you.
Excerpt
Surprise
Drake Wentworth didn’t have the slightest idea of what was happening. A moment before thousands of humans were greedily salivating at the prospect of a winning their bet. A second later, bullets were flying everywhere! He couldn’t see them but heard the ping or thud that announced their long-ago arrival at that killing point in time inches from him! No response was allowed except terrified relief that he was at least for another second still alive!
The world was exploding around him triggering bedlam among the herds of people! They all scurried about into repeated collisions with each other as if every one of them was a muscle twitching uncontrollably! They looked like balls in a pinball machine. It took them several such bizarrely humorous panic-driven impacts before their minds began planning workable routes to run, dodging those still randomly bouncing.
Drake Wentworth hugged the floor frantically peering about searching for causes – that hypothetical handle on the unknown that provides a chance to react purposefully to life’s surprises. But such threads of meaning to grasp were nowhere in sight.
What to do?
He began slithering on his belly toward the nearest door. His body had made that decision. His mind was still stunned with shock stumbling through a series of unworkable solutions.
Suddenly the glass of the door ahead of him shattered splaying silicone shards in his direction!
Wrong move! He turned instantly about and started slithering rapidly in the opposite direction feeling the blast’s explosion of sharp glass-pricks catch up with him gaining purchase on his suit-coat and pants, a couple of them piercing his skin!
For an instant he thought he’d been shot! But his legs were still working. Why argue with success? He continued.
The thud of a bullet just ahead wiped all awareness from his mind making any move folly, leaving Wentworth stunned with indecision!
After several moments deafened by silence his body rolled across the room without asking him, intending to survive even if he couldn’t.
It was a purposeless move sending him into a pile of glass shards digging into his arms and back, urgently tempting him to remove himself from this medieval torture by instantly standing.
With will power finally given a purpose he held himself painfully, heroically in check within the field of razor-sharp knives digging into his skin.
But he was at his wits end. The situation was fast turning up ‘no solution’! His brain was forced into a whirlpool of unbearable indecision! Death was stalking him close by!
Without further delay he knew he had to make an intentional move. His sanity depended upon it. If he panicked, as he desperately wanted to do to escape the nails of his Indian Fakir’s bed, it would surely get him killed from panic’s precipitously random moves eventually colliding with disaster.
He rolled onto his knees and leapt to a crouching position and spied the farthest-away door. With his briefcase still in hand through all of these precipitous events he began running toward that exit in as low a stance and as fast as he could. Twice he nearly fell from little-used muscles starting to fold under the superhuman strength that adrenalin had forced into the sinews of his body.
For two terrifying seconds he was on the verge of becoming a human projectile about to have a head-on collision with a glass wall! Yet both times he barely managed to keep himself upright and bent over, restoring belief again to the possibility of survival.
To risk such body-exposure he’d become deaf and dumb, oblivious to any sound as if by not hearing the bullet would prevent it from striking him. He became numb to any thoughts in his brain except how to keep himself moving forward most effectively. He had no thought or memory of what had just previously happened. He’d become a terror-driven blank-minded fanatic for survival.
Reality broke through this carefully arranged deaf-and-dumbness with a terrible gash! A bullet grazed his left arm from behind spinning him about as much from the fear of it happening as the bullet’s impact – sending him sprawling, his body twisting him over onto his back!
Like a cat he tried twisting in mid-air desperately seeking to reverse the spin so he would hit the floor with his hands in front of him. Unlike a cat he only half succeeded, the left front of his head hitting the marble floor of the casino with a terrible thwack!
The blow fortunately happened at one of the strongest parts of his skull. For a moment he was stunned. But good luck and fear brought him quickly back to focus. He realized he was almost at the door. His headlong plunge had gained much of the last ten yards. Ignoring the pain in his head and body he slithered the rest of the way managing to shove the door open with his feet and wriggle through as it closed behind him.
His mind breathed an enormous sigh of relief fully believing that he’d finally escaped the greatest part of danger. But he had to get still farther away to be sure.
‘Why did that son-of-a-bitch have to meet in a goddamned casino?’ He shouted to himself referring to his boss.
He turned his attention briefly to his body that hurt from all its wounds. But his left-arm wound was not bleeding profusely and no bones seemed to be broken. He turned his attention back to his surroundings.
He raised himself into a crouching position ready to run now painfully aware of his body’s bitter complaints. For he was a man of forty-one and, although in good shape he wasn’t prepared for the huge expenditure of energy and strength this experience had required. His muscle-motor had only two speeds when this day required at least three or four.
But at least the worst was over. He looked about and heard no more shots. There were lots of people rushing to his right toward the front of the building. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. Clearly he was moving in the right direction away from death.
He started running to his left down the sidewalk to get far enough away before he stopped to examine himself more carefully and make plans for medical care.
But something strange started to happen. Two large men suddenly appeared from behind, one on each side of him. They half-lifted him up as he ran moving him in the direction of a large van the back door of which instantly opened, threatening to swallow him like the jaws of a Great White Shark!
“Where are you taking me?” Wentworth shouted.
He suddenly realized these must be the guys who had been shooting, probably casino-robbers and he was to be their hostage!
His heart broke. He had inadvertently, probably randomly fallen among the pack of murderous thieves. He was rushed into the van and could feel it rapidly accelerate.
Once out of the terror of immediate death, and having acknowledged his tragic fate Wentworth settled into a cool mind capable of cleverness that could delay the emotional outbursts of feeling for which his body and heart craved. This was a time of life or death. Unlike many people it didn’t take him long to accept the dreadful truth. He became intensely frightened, but for a very good reason – which gave him purpose again.
He got immediately to the point, as much to activate him as to challenge others.
“Why do you guys need me?” Wentworth asked.
“Insurance.”
What Came Before
In the weeks prior to this cataclysmic event nothing of significance had happening. Drake Wentworth was trapped in the status quo, a high level manager of business projects never married but making excellent money.
“Ah, the sweet smell of success,” echoed around the Boardroom and in the corner offices. But when he got home Drake began feeling other things that contradicted this idyllic vision.
Immediately upon returning home he turned on one of Mozart’s piano concertos. If he was feeling negative he put on a Beethoven symphony. Beethoven’s indomitable spirit always moved him out of depressing moments. But Mozart was soothing when he had thoughts of discontent.
Lately Mahler had captured his attention. He’d been listening to the 2nd symphony delighting in the plethora of melodic elements in this man’s music. He loved the emotional variability of Mahler’s music that moved him from dread to joy to comfort then back to fear. Its complexity more accurately reflected the mixture of his emotions. In the absence of love and a woman, golden parachutes were pretty bad company.
At home and on vacation Drake wondered if his dream of sufficient wealth to retire was what he wanted most. He’d begun to realize that residing in the status quo future-ized living by putting the best part of life in the ‘yet to come’ column, making the present tense something that belonged more to others than to him.
Though enjoying times of happiness Wentworth was disappointed in his life. His deepest ambition had never been fulfilled. He wanted to be a composer. The problem was that he was in love with classical music, which was by far the most complex and difficult to compose. He’d had no education in music essential to writing music of that enormous intricacy.
In college he’d written some songs and even learned to write the accompaniment enough to make a decent amateur recording. But when he tried to stretch those meager skills to write instrumental music using several instruments his ignorance became blatant. He had a hard time writing anything he really liked.
He had accomplished one additional thing toward his ambition. Three years before he decided to take classical piano lessons on the premise that to write music you had to have an instrument that you could play at least rudimentarily. He didn’t always practice so his progress was slow, though he continued to improve.
Time was the crucial impediment to his dream. To make money he’d employed his considerable organizational skills to become a high-level corporate manager – one of the sergeants and captains of corporate life who like their military counterparts are the ones who actually make things work. He had a superior retirement system. Though these perks required long hours at the office. He had fifteen more years of such dedicated employment before he could comfortably retire retaining his present standard of living. But to wait until then before he invested serious effort toward his musical ambition felt far too long.
In the last couple of years he’d become increasingly discouraged about his life’s progress. His work began feeling more and more like something he wasn’t any longer doing entirely for himself, more to follow the plan that he’d always known. But was it the right one?
‘What happened to living,’ he would ask himself?
Then there was the question of women and love. He had a steady girlfriend most of the time but never one he wanted to marry. They just didn’t seem right for him though each of them had very appealing talents. The idea of having a child appealed to him but he never felt compelled to marry in order to achieve that goal before it seemed too late.
Jennifer had been a characteristic female experience. She was a manager in a different department of his corporation that he’d met at a company party. She was well thought of and he admired her business skills. Sexually they were very attracted to each other and both regarded their common business background as an excellent foundation for intimacy.
But after sex she liked to talk about her latest business achievements—which really turned him off though he would accommodate her for a while. He wanted very much to be doing something very different than work when he was enjoying himself. But when he tried to meet women from different walks of life at dating bars, non-business women found him a but stuffy. Of course he would have called it reserved and cautious. But whatever the explanation the results were the same. It didn’t work.
His life was held together by the dream of being rich enough never to worry again, too appealing an illusion to consider ever giving up.
Richard Nixon
There were four of them, Drake observed, three in the back of the van with him, and the driver. They wore costume masks of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and George Bush Jr. Drake couldn’t see the driver’s mask.
‘It’s probably the other George B if I get the political innuendo of this choice of false identities,’ Drake thought. His assumption was of course that masks were a parody of the characters represented by dramatizing them as robbers.
The realization that politically he might share common philosophical views with his abductors sent shivers down his back.
‘This must be what they mean by identifying with your abductors.’
Wentworth was Republican by profession but a Democrat in his heart who disbelieved in war, hoping for good will and the possibility of building a peaceful world community. But since in modern times the business mind is in charge, its abstracted perspective chose his clothing and his politics. He wore the Republican costume, a dark blue pin-stripped suit with a white shirt and conservative tie.
One of the men started to pull off his mask.
“He’s taking his mask off,” Drake shouted looking away. “I don’t want to see your faces.”
“Put your mask back on, stupid,” the man to his left shouted. “Maybe I should have hired this guy. He seems to have more sense than you do.”
The man in command, wearing a Nixon mask spoke with the hint of a German accent, probably his place of origin. But he had lost most of it undoubtedly by living elsewhere.
“Oh, stop ordering me around,” Kissinger challenged Nixon. “Just because…”
An arm shot by Drake’s face. For an instant he thought he was being knocked out. But it was Kissinger to his right that took a blow that knocked him over.
“Just remember, meathead, that I’ve got the brawn too,” the man of authority said. “Keep your mouth shut! If you give this guy any more information about us you will have to kill him. Or maybe I ought to let him kill you. You know how queasy you feel about certain parts of the work.”
‘Parts of the work’, Drake wondered. ‘What the hell is going on here? What work?’
“Am I part of your scheme, gentlemen? Did you grab me on purpose or by accident?”
“You shut up too,” Nixon said. “You’re talking makes everybody else want to talk.”
“Sorry, sir, but please answer my question,” Drake carefully insisted.
For a tense moment Drake braced himself to be struck as Kissinger had been.
“You’re asking for it mister,” the third man, George Bush Jr. said. “He likes to hit people.”
“See what I mean,” Nixon said to Drake. “Now you’ve got junior over here making one of his few intelligent remarks. So shut up all of you!”
Bush and Kissinger spoke with obvious New York accents, to which they added a measure of arrogance perfectly expressed in the belief that New York is the world’s superior city.
Prevented from getting vital information Drake started to worry. It happened easily when nothing made sense. Worry is what he got paid good money to do as a manager, to anticipate all the things that could go wrong and to fix the problem before it happened – preferably yesterday, whichever came first. His mind went into worry overdrive.
‘This is a hierarchy just like the corporation. And Nixon is still in charge.’
Drake loved political metaphors. Using them was his way of trying to lighten the load of fear if he could find something amusing to think about this crisis.
‘Tricky Dick proved you can lie and cheat, and everybody knows it and still you’re elected President,’ Drake mused. ‘Which makes him great 20th century Republican hero.’ Maybe these guys are just taking it a little bit farther. The Mafia has moved into politics and out of gangster-dom. To get them out we might have to shut politics down.’
But that would be like turning off the computers at the corporation. It would mean the collapse of existing habits.
Drake had such radical social and political thoughts that he never connected to his political choices, which came largely from his interests as a businessman. Only in private was he was a liberal.
But now he was terribly frightened. He searched hard for another way of looking at what was happening to him before he lost momentum and passively submitted to this kidnapping, relinquishing any desire to escape. Though that would have been the wiser, status quo way of behaving that posited above all ‘don’t make matters worse’.
Having radical thoughts around others made him very uncomfortable. And his kidding around with himself wasn’t making him feel any better.
‘Are these guys just robbers? Or is this political?’, he added looking at the masks. ‘If it is then I’m in deep shit. Give me an old fashioned robbery where the aim is simple and to the point – get the money and get lost.’
He didn’t usually take these ideas seriously. Thinking about pending problems in various silly ways was his best personal and social trait. It’s how he’d been so successful in managing teams of people. When the chips were down and the pressure was on he kidded around with his workers, making his employee’s work much easier for them to deal with.
To aid him in this effort Drake had a considerable imagination. It’s what made him amusing to others, and why he’d always had a girlfriend. Women found him attractively funny even though he was always a bit awkward around the opposite sex when things got deeper. What’s more he didn’t behave very romantically.
Travel and adventure were the metaphors of his romantic musings, which gave him a feeling of excitement in the midst of the present danger. But it was much less appealing than he’d expected it to be. Fear was too dominant in this adventure.
But then fear told him something very disturbing.
‘There’s something funny about this,’ he mused. ‘They don’t need a hostage. No one was about to catch them. And what are these political masks? What’s going on here? Did they target me? No. Why would they?’
Now he was really scared. But one thing was certain. These questions meant he couldn’t play it safe. No sinking into passivity. If he got a chance he had to get away from these guys.
Read more about IDENTITY THEFT and Don Fenn HERE.
Copyright 2008 Don Fenn. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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