Murray Hill || A Superhuman Tale - 1

Chapter Fifty-Six

Tommy slouched at the bar of a small restaurant two blocks from Valhalla corporate headquarters in Eugene. If all went well, Alain Meeker shortly would arrive with several business colleagues for a late lunch, a very late lunch. Tommy fully intended to eavesdrop on the proceedings and then, through some means he hadn't quite worked out, follow Meeker outside and have a long and exhaustive discussion with the flaccid CEO.

***

During the 30 or so hours since he'd left Camille, Tommy had engaged in a flurry of activity. The first two things he'd done upon arriving in Eugene was to rent a hotel room and to buy a new wardrobe. The room he took was in a nice, if somewhat antiquated, building two doors down from where he currently sat. It made up for what it lacked in modern amenities by being near Valhalla headquarters and by having no video surveillance. (The ubiquity of video cameras in modern society was a growing irritant in his life.)

The wardrobe was crucial. At that stage in his surveillance, the worst thing that could happen would be for someone to learn his face, a process that was accelerated if a person encountered him repeatedly under similar circumstances. He would be meeting a great many people, and the same clothing in the same tavern or nightclub was a no-no.

At first, he only went near the heavily secured Valhalla HQ to make his initial assessments of the people working there. Then, in his various guises, he targeted people he recognized as Valhalla personnel at other places near their downtown offices: in bars, restaurants, snack bars, bookstores, coffee houses, and even on street corners. Such encounters had the outward appearance of being random, but were calculated to elicit the information Tommy sought.

He relied on simple human impulses. People love to talk about themselves, to feel important and respected, and to grouse about their bosses and their jobs ... especially when flirting or chatting with a handsome young man who generously has offered to spot for a few drinks. Tommy's many faces were like catnip to women and men alike, especially when he unlimbered his assorted and well-practiced charms; he had many ways of getting people to open up.

He'd set several goals before arriving: First, who really ran Valhalla? It often wasn't the person whose name was on the letterhead. (Tommy's small business enterprise was living proof of that.) Second, he wanted to know all he could about their domestic operations. Someone was pulling the strings behind this wave of abductions. Ultimately, there had to be someone in government signing the checks. That goal was the most important.

The third goal, however, was the most pressing: Where was Valhalla's Human Resources department sending people? There had to be some unknown facility or facilities where those abducted were being held, otherwise, why abduct people? Why not just kill them and be done with it? If Amy and Sam were to be found, it would be in such a place.

Despite its apparent complexity, the third goal was the first to yield results. After just a few hours of chatting and flirting with various officers and clerks in Valhalla's HR department, Tommy discerned that the company was sending people to three destinations: Tampa, which he knew about, as well as Great Falls, Montana, and Salt Lake City.

Tommy's new friends in HR knew little about operations in Montana and Utah, save that the personnel they sent there were all part of a single contract that supported either the Army Corps of Engineers or the U.S. Army—it wasn't clear which. Tommy even provided Philly with the names and basic information of a half dozen Valhalla employees involved in the contract.

On the surface, this news was thin, but it was extremely exciting. They'd already linked Staff Sergeant Kissinger to Salt Lake City, and Philly's last call from Camille was from the road not far from Great Falls. Valhalla employees who went to these two destinations were also doing extensive driving once there, suggesting their ultimate destinations were farther away, more than 100 miles farther.

This information narrowed their search from 50 states to two. In fact, it likely narrowed the search to a relatively minor portion of each state, one which was within a 100 mile or so radius of each city.

His other goals had been more elusive, and had been complicated by the hubbub of the previous evening.

At about an hour after midnight that night, the Eugene offices of Valhalla erupted into what Tommy could only imagine was a full-blown panic. At that time, a group of Valhalla managers he'd been surreptitiously observing at a bar three blocks from their offices received simultaneous texts and promptly decamped, drinks scarcely touched, to the Valhalla headquarters building.

Tommy followed, but his late-night surveillance of the Valhalla building met with negligible success. It was the headquarters of a secretive corporation, and the building obviously had been engineered and constructed to defeat the most sophisticated technical surveillance. Even with his heightened hearing, only bits and snatches of the conversations within were audible from his various street-side roosts.

Such words as "Canada," "client," and "the range" came up over and over, but there was no common thread to tie them together. Some conversations by officers and board members—many of whom had arrived during the night—spilled over into the streets, but even those provided little context.

The best possible course of action was to continue cultivating employees and hope their gossip might provide a general sense of what was going on. To that end, Tommy contrived another series of "random" encounters with Valhalla staff and officers who left the building for meals or errands during the late morning and early afternoon that day.

The only interesting piece of information that arose from these encounters was the fact that Meeker, several board members, and some outside officials from "the client" would be meeting at the restaurant in which Tommy now sprawled.

He had another whiskey sour and waited.

***

At 3:32 pm, a small gaggle of middle-aged men entered the barroom in which Tommy waited. Meeker was among them. There were two other men who Tommy recognized as being Valhalla board members, and all were significantly older and more dissipated than their official photos would have suggested.

Two other men were unknown to him.

The first was older, and though Tommy remembered the man's face from the previous presidential administration, he was certain he'd never known his name. The man, silver-haired and bloated, was some sort of political lackey, though the swaggering way by which he deported himself around the others suggested he thought otherwise. A second, younger man accompanying the lackey clearly was some sort of flunky to the lackey.

Alas, he learned very little.

The tension at the table where the men sat was tangible, but the conversation carried on normally, about mundane topics. For nearly 40 minutes, the five-some merely droned on and on about golf. Tommy already had eaten and now nursed whiskey sour after whiskey sour, doing his best semblance of a drunk. To all outward appearances, he paid the men no mind, but carefully weighed and balanced their every word, seeking any hidden or ulterior meaning. There were none.

So tedious was their conversation about the fifth fairway at Harbour Town, in fact, that Tommy nearly cried, wishing the whiskey might have some actual effect on him so as to numb the pain even slightly.

There has to be more, he thought.

The temptation simply to grab Meeker and drag him outside grew nigh unbearable.

At 20 minutes past the hour, Tommy was saved by a phone call. It was Philly. He answered cordially, momentarily giving up his guise as a drunkard. "Hello?"

"Tommy, please come!" were the only words from a frantic Philly on the other end before the line went dead.

He got up, went outside, and shot into the air.