Brewster's Brood - Part 34

Part Thirty-four

Aaron Stamford – 3/11/2017 – Sunday – 09:12 am

In just a few short hours, Aaron had gone from completely confident he would have this thing unraveled by lunchtime to wondering if he was ever going to find even a starting thread to pull on. There were forces at work watching over his friend Max that he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, and at a level he’d never seen before, and he’d worked the gamut, from local back alley short cons to big, multimillion dollar conspiracies put forth by the CIA and other international spy agencies.

This?

Whoever these people were?

They were fucking good.

No signs of moving heavy duty equipment in or out, which meant it either came in covertly or it was already here. No signs of a large influx of personnel, which meant the same about the people. Were they a local organization? If so, how had they managed to stay off the radar with all the intelligencia that were hanging around?

It had to be some well-organized structure that was pulling all these strings, but nothing pointed the finger to anybody in particular. Even the listening and tracking devices he’d had the chance to examine were all off-the-rack stuff – high-end, no doubt, but nothing so exotic that it could be traced back to any particular seller or distributor. He’d even gone so far as to try and track down device IDs based on the serial numbers for some of them, and they all just pointed to a variety of local electronics shops who bought and sold in bulk, and certainly couldn’t tie them to any particular buyer. The one singular device ID that he had been able to track down had been sold to a cash buyer in Cupertino, and the store’s in-store security cameras only kept footage for 90 days, when the sale had been over a year ago. Yet another dead end. He felt like after his eighth one he should’ve gotten a free sandwich or something.

He kept telling himself that people were human, and humans make mistakes, and that somewhere out there was a singular mistake that was going to lead back to this crew and explain away what they were doing with his old high school buddy.

His next step was to try and track either the servers or the signal, and in both cases, he was having to rely on an old hacker friend of his named Larissa, who’d been Larry when they’d first met a decade or so ago. Larissa was part of the bottomless paranoia clique that Aaron found himself running with a lot these days, although every single one of them would tell you the exact same thing if confronted about their erratic and sometimes questionable behavior – “It isn’t paranoia if they really are out to get you.”

That’s what had brought him to be sitting on a park bench in San Carlos, surfing the web on his iPad, looking for more information on paramilitary or paraespionage groups known to operate in or near the San Francisco Bay Area. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take for Larissa to show up, which was why he’d been there for the better part of an hour, working in public.

“You’re losing your touch, Aaron,” Larissa said, having sat down beside him sometime in the last minute or two without him noticing. “The old Aaron I knew would’ve made me before my knees were even starting to bend.”

“Yeah, well, we all get a little bit older, and lose a little bit of a step each and every year, even you,” he teased back. “You got my message, I take it?”

“The way your phone message described it, how could I let a mystery like this go?” she said to him with a wry smile. She was in her forties, fully transitioned now, dressed in geek coder chic, a black Misfits t-shirt at least four sizes too big for her, ratty blue jeans with massive rips and tears in them, black fishnet stockings on underneath, and the chunkiest Doc Martins he’d ever seen. Her hair had been dyed fuchsia with sapphire blue highlights streaking through it, long on the right side, shaved almost to the skin from the left temple downward. “You really haven’t a goddamn clue to go on?”

“I feel like I’m practically chasing my own shadowy tail,” Aaron sighed. “They made all the right moves – nothing easy to track or trace, nothing to loop back onto. You poke into the servers and signal routes I gave you?”

“I hoped it was going to be something ridiculously easy that I could just bat my pretty eyelashes at and it would fall over, but instead you had to give me something good and difficult to test my mettle against, and I had to wonder what sort of mess you stumbled into,” Larissa said sideways to him, the two of them never looking at one another. “How’d you stumble into this in the first place?”

“Guy I knew growing up called me up out of the blue, said he was tangled up in something, but didn’t know the what, how, who or why of it.”

“Do I get to know the guy’s name?” she asked.

“You think it’ll be relevant?”

“I think it’ll give me a little bit more to look into, because there’s no way somebody pulls this level of complicated heat onto themselves without doing something in their past.”

Aaron shrugged. “Guy’s name is Max Brewster, but if you think I didn’t do my homework before I went to go see him, you’re out of your tree.”

“I’ll have you know that my treehouse is a more secure home than any concrete bunker you could’ve possibly built,” she teased.

“You keep telling yourself that,” Aaron chuckled as Larissa pulled out a small Chromebook, flipping it open as she started to type. “Let’s dig into your guy here… Max Brewster, age 42, owner of Constant Rotation food truck. No prior felonies. Prior misdemeanor for possessing a negligible amount of cannabis before it became legal here in California. No history dealing with the dark web, the black market or even buying sketchy concert tickets. Parents both deceased. No siblings. No major debts. Hell, this guy’s actually saving pretty well for himself. He puts his money in low-risk, long-term, mid-yield investments, and he’s only tapping into it during real emergencies. Looks like he had a restaurant burn down a while back, and he’s spent every moment since then making smarter and more well-supported choices. Never married. Very, very light social media presence. His Twitter, Facebook, Instagram – everything’s basically just about the truck and/or his food. Has this guy of yours heard of fun, Aaron?”

“He has, and he doesn’t have much time for it these days,” Aaron shot back.

“Whoa…” Larissa said. “You weren’t kidding about this guy having some high rollers interested in this guy. This is nuts.”

“What’s that?”

“So there’s a… well, for lack of a better term, it’s a sort of free-floating algorithm attached to this guy’s identity,” she said. “Like a kiddie script on steroids times a thousand. It’s literally scrubbing the web for any mention or picture of him taken over the last couple of weeks. Even scripts I’m sending out to comb and look for mention of him are getting swallowed up by this leviathan program somebody’s got running. And it’s got inside roads to everything. The social media platforms, the search engines… shit, I bet this thing’s even making sure your boy doesn’t get called up for jury duty, if they don’t want him to be.”

“How many coders do you know with that level of juice, Larissa?”

She clicked her tongue a couple of times. “Personally? Me, and I know I didn’t do any of this. I’d love to get a look under the hood of how this damn thing works, but it’s got firewalls on top of its firewalls. I feel like even dancing around the outskirts of this thing it might’ve gotten a whiff I was looking at it, which is scary enough.”

“I thought you were past the point in your life where people could track you.”

“I am, thank you very much, but there’s limits to the sorts of things I can do on the fly, especially if I don’t know what I’m stumbling into,” she said, tapping rapidly on the keyboard of her tiny laptop. “Your guy didn’t kill JFK or something, did he?”

“He’s a bit young for that, don’t you think?”

She scowled a moment, her face an unpleasant expression of frustration. “Time travel? Magic?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aaron said. “Neither of those things are at all real, and even if they were, there’s no possible way I or anyone else who’d ever been associated with intelligence could admit they were real. Which they aren’t. So I’m told.”

“Then what the hell is bringing down all this heat on the guy?”

Aaron chuckled, rolling his eyes. “That’s what I’m asking you, you dopey bitch. I didn’t ring you up so you could ask my own questions back at me.”

“Alright, alright,” she grumbled. “Let’s see what happens when I poke into known associates. Good lord, short list, isn’t it? The Hernandez brothers, Carlos and Joey, and Frankie Yen. Nothing much about the two brothers. Some minor troubles when they were juveniles, but nothing since either of them came of age. And how about you, Mr. Yen? Huh. Trust fund kid living off his parents’ teats with nothing much to show for it, but no major debts or problems racked up either. What the fuck, Aaron? What sort of Batman villains are interested in your guy and why? I’m used to looking for the needle in the haystack, but I almost feel like you’ve given me an electromagnet to find the needle and I’m still turning up nothing.”

“I don’t call you every time I’ve got something minor, Larissa,” Aaron sneered. “You had to know this wasn’t going to be easy before you sat down.”

“There’s ‘not easy’ and then there’s ‘hey, help me bring back Edward Snowden’ levels of messed up, and you’re well past the second one here, buddy.”

“You’d prefer it had been a milk run?”

“Yes.” She paused for a moment, still typing. “No.” More typing. “Shit, Aaron, I don’t know. It’s just way beyond what I was expecting, that’s all, okay?”

“Well, if you’re done griping about it, maybe we can get to work finding something actionable that I can work with here, hm?”

“Right, right, there’s got to be something buried in all this clutter,” she said. “The guy can’t be so boring that there’s nothing to find.”

“Your other option is to look into this place that’s been the hub of his activity for the last week or so,” Aaron said. “Some sex club he got invited to join called Ironwood Estates.”

Larissa frowned a little bit. “Now that sounds like something I can dig a little bit deeper into. Know where it is?”

“Up in the Berkeley hills. Supposedly it’s been up there for a long time, a franchise from some larger organization out of town.”

“Look, Aaron,” Larissa said. “I’ve lived a big life. I’ve seen darkened corners of the Bay area you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the coast of Pacifica. I watched I-beams glitter in the dark near the Bay Bridge. All these moments—”

“C’mon, Roy Batty, let’s move it along now,” Aaron chided.

“All I’m saying, Aaron, is that if there was a sex club up in the hills of Berkeley, don’t you think I would’ve heard of it before now?”

“You don’t get invited to all the parties, Larissa.”

“Any party worth going to,” she sniffed. “And doesn’t it seem weird that this private little sex club could’ve existed in our backyard without either of us knowing about it until now?”

“There’s a club that meets in the back room of a San Francisco bar once a quarter made up of people who’ve killed more than a dozen people in close quarters combat during their time in either the military or intelligence services,” Aaron said. “You know about that club?”

“No, but it sounds like you guys don’t have your own clubhouse where you do everything, and these folks do,” Larissa said. “You know what it’s like trying to keep anything a secret here in the Bay. I feel like if there was a building, a physical building that was a swingers club of some kind, either you or I would’ve definitely known about it.”

“Maybe you’re not as popular as you think you are, Larissa,” Aaron said.

“I refuse to believe that,” Larissa scoffed. “It’s more likely the whole thing is a criminal front, or maybe somebody just made it up.”

“That’d be a pretty neat trick, since it’s filled with gorgeous women and a handful of pretty good-looking men.”

“That’s the first thing that throws me off, Aaron,” Larissa replied. “Sex clubs are inevitably always more men than they are women. And here in the Bay? I would imagine a lot of gay men joining a club like this.”

“The impression Max got was that gay men preferred a club just with other gay men, so there were other options for them, much like purely gay women preferred a club just for them. Straight and bisexual women opened an Ironwood Estates here so that they’d have somewhere for them to go without being judged all the time. Now, that said, I’m struggling to find any other Ironwood Estates that hint at being sex clubs anywhere else across the country,” he said, tapping his fingertips on his tablet. “I find a couple of retirement communities, some planned housing subdivisions and a couple of Erectile Dysfunction clinics, but nothing that even vaguely gives a whiff of sex club.”

“There’s no good reason to just be throwing endless amounts of beautiful women at one guy that I can find, unless it’s some sort of reverse Big Store con, and I can’t think of anything they could be doing to try and get money out of the guy, especially since you said they aren’t making him pay for it.”

“Whole membership’s free for a few years, he claimed.”

“Bet you’re jealous of what’s going on with him,” Larissa teased.

“Aren’t you? You’re a lesbian; tell me this isn’t a collection of women you can find several ladies you’d like to bang in,” he said, turning his tablet to show off a screenshot he’d captured off the food truck’s security camera, showing several women who’d either slept with Max or were trying to, all lined up and waiting for food.

“Oh, that’s just not even fair,” Larissa said. “Something like this should have a single smokeshow, maybe two or three. That’s, like, a dozen or two dozen gorgeous women crowded around the food truck. You’re telling me all these women are trying to fuck your guy?”

“That is, in fact, what I am telling you.”

She shook her head. “Not only does this not make sense, but this is also unjust.”

Max Brewster – 3/11/2017 – Sunday – 11:18 am

Getting past the morning rush was only the start of the day, but Max already felt like he’d run a few dozen marathons. Towards the very end of their morning shift, Brooklyn and Gwen Travers had shown up, and that had sort of given them a last hurrah for customers at the end, as people wanted to get autographs from the two famous acting sisters, or selfies with them, or just to stand in line with a pair of famous actors.

Having celebrities show up to the food trucks wasn’t unheard of – it was usually local sports celebrities more than actors or musicians – but each time it happened, the other food trucks stayed open a little bit longer than normal, and the 10 am shut down for breakfast was designed to allow food trucks to rotate in and out for the lunch rush. But with the celebrity clog, it was looking like plans were going to have to change, and none of the food trucks would be rotating in or out, just taking a short break to restock and get a bit of time off for the staff, since they didn’t have additional people they could rotate in. The trucks had all announced nobody would be providing food from 10:30 until 11:30, at which point they would all open back up again.

The Travers sisters had insisted on sticking around to eat with Max, which had only added to the mystique his food truck was currently building up, with people taking loads of pictures of the truck, the sisters and himself, although strangely no matter where he was searching, he never seemed to see pictures of himself actually posted anywhere. He was starting to wonder if he was too ugly for Instagram.

“How soon before you open up an actual physical location, Max?” Brooklyn asked him in between bites of her breakfast burrito.

“If you’d have asked me a couple of weeks ago, I’d have said maybe two or three years in the future? But based on all the intense interest we’ve been getting this last week, business has been booming. If it holds up like this, I could probably open a new physical location by next January.”

“You know, if you wanted to, we could get you an in over at the stadium in Atlanta, open up a franchise out there and give the Falcons fans something edible that isn’t utterly drenched in cheese,” Gwen said. “Dad was always complaining about how bad the food was at the stadium, but he never really had much of a plan on how to fix it. I say we start bringing in good food, like yours, and that’ll get us a long way.”

“Atlanta, Georgia is quite a long ways away from California, Gwen,” Max said with a smirk. “The commute would probably kill me.”

“You wouldn’t have to run it day-to-day,” Brooklyn said. “You’d come in, set it all up, hire people you liked, find suppliers you think can keep you flush with good and local ingredients, teach your staff how to work within your system and get new recipes weekly, whatever you wanted. And once it’s ready, you fly in once a quarter to check up on how things are going, but most of the time you just sit out here in California and collect your money. That’s the smart way of doing things – just a little bit of work upfront that pays out a lot in the long run.”

“Our dad was a big proponent of that,” Gwen said. “Of making money work for you, instead of having to work for your money. He wasn’t always good at it, but he tried his best.”

“Yeah, I was sorry to hear about his passing,” Max said. “Sounds like he was a very complicated man, so I can’t imagine how much more complicated he was as a father.”

“About as much as you’d suspect,” Gwen sighed.

“Maybe a bit more,” Brooklyn added.

“He didn’t always have a lot of time for us, so we had to learn a lot of things the hard way,” Gwen said. “He said it would toughen us up. Didn’t do shit for me. How about you, sis?”

“I feel like a side of beef jerky,” Brooklyn joked. “But, seriously, all jokes aside – you should give it some thought. We love your food, and we could give you an excellent deal to help you get started. Assuming we’re still holding onto the company this time next year.”

“Is that in some doubt?” Frankie asked the two ladies.

“It is,” Gwen said. “Dad left us in an utter mess. The whole thing is a circus sideshow played at maximum volume and top speed. We’ve got three or four armies of lawyers, each in their own faction, each claiming something different from one another, about whether or not we’re liable for any of our father’s debts, what’s transferrable and what isn’t, what assets we’re going to have to liquidate and where that leaves us after everything else shakes out.”

“It mightleave us both destitute and out on our asses,” Brooklyn said. “If that happens, we’ll probably both have to turn to taking acting roles that pay out for us showing our tits and asses in films, just to make ends meet.”

Gwen shrugged a little. “Then again, it might also shake out that we don’t owe anything, but we don’t really own anything Daddy had either, so you never can tell which way the wind will blow.”

“How long before it all gets ironed out?” Max asked them.

“Could be six weeks, could be six years,” Brooklyn shrugged. “The law is even more of a hurry up and wait than Hollywood is, so we’re just keeping ourselves as busy as we can without going out of our minds thinking about it.”

“It’s the thinking about it that chips years off your soul,” Gwen agreed. “What about you, Max? Your father leave anything for you behind?”

Max sighed, looking away for a moment, as they’d touched a tender spot. “Never really knew him all that well. He died when I was ten, so I have some memories of him growing up, but nothing that I can really hold onto. And Mom died giving birth to me, so I only have the half-related stories my dad told me growing up. When Dad passed away, there weren’t any relatives to take me in, so one of my Dad’s friends adopted me to take care of me until I was of age. Dad didn’t have much of anything to leave behind for me, so when Frankie jokes that I’m a self-made man, he’s not exaggerating all that much.”

“That must be… very lonely,” Brooklyn said, placing a hand on Max’s arm. “Holidays like Christmas? Thanksgiving?”

Max shrugged a little bit. “I usually find some job to keep myself busy, since anything working during that timeframe usually pays phenomenally well. If I’m working the whole time, I don’t ever stop to think about what I’m missing out on. It’s a survival mechanism, I’m well aware of that, but it’s not so bad. I’ve been doing it long enough that it’s easy not to think about what I’m missing.”

“Still, I think this year you’re probably going to have a much different Christmas experience,” Brooklyn giggled. “Find yourself at the bottom of giant pile of gorgeous women, all naked and exhausted, maybe?”

“I doubt that, but then again, it’s been pretty clear that I don’t know what’s going on in my own life anymore anyway,” Max chuckled. “As soon as I got invited into Ironwood Estates, everything got turned upside down and I’m just stuck trying to figure out which way is up.”

“It’s more fun that way,” Frankie added. “Anyway, we should get back in there, since we need to get stocked up ahead of the lunch rush. Usually Sunday lunch rush isn’t so bad, but there are reports that we had a couple of celebrities in to have our food in the breakfast run, and that means the whole complex is likely going to get swarmed. Speaking of which, if you two ladies want to stick around and give us additional endorsements to anyone who walks in—”

“You don’t need us hyping up his food, Frankie,” Gwen teased. “It’s good enough that it does all the heavy lifting for you. But maybe we’ll double back towards the end of the lunch shift, so we can go and get some dinner or something afterwards. Or do you two usually work Sunday night shifts as well?”

Max waved his hand. “Not often, but sometimes. Sometimes I let the B-squad handle it, but most Sunday nights, we’re just taking a break and not deploying anywhere, just because I need to be up and at’em for Monday morning and Monday lunch. After that, Team Hermanos Hernandez steps in to run the show, and I spent my time off on Tuesday and Wednesday thinking about what new things I want to throw onto the menu and what’s going to get yanked.”

“That must be crazy,” Brooklyn said. “Changing the entire menu out every week?”

“Not the entire menu,” Max replied. “Like, maybe a third of it. If I rotated everything out, people would bitch that there wasn’t anything they could fall back on that was familiar. People get favorites, and so you try and cater into that a little bit. Otherwise if you’re only presenting completely new things all the time, people tend to get overwhelmed and they get stuck in analysis paralysis. So I give them lifelines, familiar things they can cling onto when they don’t have any other ideas or know what else they can do. And it’s funny, but when they see a few things they know, it makes it easier for them to try new things.”

“Now that sounds like armchair psychology at its finest,” Gwen laughed. “Even if it does turn out to be true.”

“You learn a few things about people when you’re constantly trying to delight them with food.”

“I could say the same about women who are trying to be beautiful.”

Max clicked his tongue and tilted his head. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, don’t you know.”

“That’s quite an old cliché.”

“Except that it just so happens to be true. And people underestimate that. Some people like tall women. Some people like short women. Some people like them slender. Others like them curvy.”

“And what about you, Mister Brewster? How do you like them?”

Max chuckled, giving them a little wink. “Clever.”