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Updated Sunday 21 February, 2010 12:15 PM |
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SNAKE OIL
By Doctor What
Chapter Six
Family, religion, friends... these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. – Montgomery Burns
~~
February 7, 2017
Drake glanced up from the business card he was holding and double-checked the address again.
Yup…this is the place…
Shrugging his shoulders, Drake walked out of the rain and into the building.
The trip across the Atlantic had been rather pleasant for Drake. Sure, this wasn’t exactly a ‘social call’ but he always liked travelling to the U.K. He had a thing for cute blondes with foreign accents and being in Merry Ol’ England gave him ample opportunities to admire the ‘local fauna’.
Pity that it hadn’t stopped raining since he got here but then again…rain in England? How positively shocking and totally unexpected…
As Drake climbed the two flights of stairs to his destination, he idly wondered what kind of reaction he would get.
As near as he could have guessed, there was a 50-50 chance that he would be greeted with either surly but vaguely open arms or have a rather large object thrown at him at high velocity.
Good thing there’s gun control laws here…otherwise I would guess he would take a shot at me.
Although I’m fairly certain he would only shoot to wound.
Drake paused for a moment and thought about that statement a bit more.
Well…somewhat certain…
Drake got to the top of the landing and, seeing his destination, walked in through the door.
A woman was sitting at the desk –Drake was pleased to note that she was a blonde –working on her computer.
The woman spotted Drake and instantly broke into her best ‘Welcome!’ smile.
“Hello there,” said the woman, in an accent that would have instantly gotten her a job on the BBC, “Welcome to Falcon Security Consultants. Do you have an appointment?”
Drake shook his head.
“Actually, I don’t have one. And I’m not here for a consultant. I’m actually one of his old friends from the service.”
The blonde woman’s face fell, clearly disappointed. Sighing heavily, she picked up the phone and hit a button.
“Yo Peter!” said the woman, her BBC accent gone and now seemingly replaced by a New Jersey accent of all things, “One of your buddies from the service is here again! Get your lazy ass off that computer and talk to him!” There was a short pause as she listened to something the other person on the line was saying. “What do you mean ‘show him in’? What the fuck you think I am—your servant? Open the fucking door already! As for me--I’m going shopping!” Another pause. “Cause I need shoes, that’s why!” Yet another pause. “Oh that’s ironic coming from you, Mister ‘I have a different pair of shoes for every day of the week and two for Sunday’! Show him in already!” Still another pause. The woman nodded her head. “Oh, around six or so. Meatloaf okay? Alright, later, love!” The woman slammed the receiver down and stood up.
Drake took a step back in shock and surprise.
Drake had always considered his five foot ten inch height to be fairly ‘tallish’ but the woman beat him by at least two or three inches in the height department. She was also fairly…’large’.
He wouldn’t call her ‘fat’ (well—not to her face if he expected to live to see the next sunrise) but she was of that certain body frame that brought to mind certain adjectives like ‘Valkeyrie’, ‘Rubenesque’ or ‘Voluptuous’. Drake was friends with a certain bizarre Canadian who used to be with the JTF2 who would have used the term ‘BBW’ but the upshot was the same; this was a woman not to be trified with if she was even mildly annoyed.
At the moment, she looked pissed off.
Stepping gallantly aside and giving a little curtsy, Drake held the entrance door open as the woman stormed out of the office.
After ascertaining that the woman was now safely out of the building and now no longer a possible threat to his immediate well-being, Drake stepped forward into the main office.
The tall, lanky, black haired man was leaning back in his chair and sipping a tea when Drake walked in.
The man’s eyebrows shot up briefly at Drake’s appearance but he composed himself and went back to sipping his tea.
Taking one last sip, the man put his cup down and looked up to face Drake.
“What the hell you want, Drake?”
For Peter Chambers, formerly Captain Peter Chambers of the SAS, this was positively polite.
“Mind if I sit?” asked Drake, taking a seat without waiting for the reply.
“Feeling comfy? All nice and relaxed? Would you perhaps like a nice tea with a lemon twist?”
“Actually I would like a coffee if you have –“
“You’re getting a tea, Drake,” said Chambers as he stood up and poured a cup. He offered the cup to Drake and then sat down again.
“So—I’m still waiting for my answer. What the hell you want, Drake?” asked Chambers, sipping his tea again.
Shrugging his shoulders, Drake took a sip or two of his tea and then leaned back.
“So—what do you think of our illustrious Visitors?”
Chambers raised one eyebrow up, Spock-like, and took another sip of his tea.
“You travelled 6000 miles to ask me about the aliens? Has all that gin you swill finally destroyed your brain?”
“Humor me, Peter.”
Chambers shrugged his shoulders and resumed drinking his tea.
“What I think about our so-called alien benefactors is immaterial. While I grant you that many of the idiots—pardon me – elected representatives in the current government seem to have apparently lost their collective minds, I am no longer an active member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and, as such, am not privy to any discussions that may have occurred in private.”
“That’s the official line. And the unofficial line?” asked Drake, leaning a bit closer.
Chambers carefully took a sip of tea, staring at Drake across the top of the cup. Taking another sip, he put his cup down.
“Unofficially? I have…”, Chambers paused for a long moment, “…heard a few things here and there about what were some of the prices that had to be paid for all the nice bits and pieces of tech that the Visitors oh so generously offered. Of course, I officially have no knowledge of such highly classified information and even if I had such knowledge, I can neither confirm nor deny that that information is in my possession.” Chambers went back to drinking his tea, staring carefully at Drake.
Drake smiled.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said.
“Ye God—you Yanks and your ‘stories’,” said Chambers, rolling his eyes.
“You see,” said Drake, ignoring Chambers, “if the aliens had come down here shooting and blowing shit up like they do in all those Hollywood movies, we would have had no problem in convincing people to fight back. But that’s not what happened here.”
Drake leaned back, taking another sip of tea. He personally hated the stuff but he was going to go on a roll here and needed a bit of a ‘pick-me-up’.
“When you make contact with someone, there’s a lot of different ways to do so. Picking one guy is pretty much the easiest way to go – you only have one group to deal with so that saves a lot in administrative hassles right there. And boosting that one guy’s standing is pretty simple, especially if all his competitors are more or less the same level as the first guy. You pull a few strings to make him top dog and then –heh heh—you then start pulling his strings. But there’s a danger with that. You’ve invested all your eggs into one basket, so to speak. And if the top dog decides one day that he doesn’t want to be your lap dog anymore, it can cause all kinds of annoying hassles and annoyances. Especially if your former lap dog convinces everyone else to gang up on you.”
Chambers remained silent, still watching Drake and still slowly sipping his tea.
“So the other alternative is to ‘diversify’ yourselves. Instead of focusing all your attention on one guy, you make a whole bunch of guys ‘top dogs’. While this causes a bit of administrative hassles, the flip side of all this, of course, is that it makes good business sense. After all, if just one guy decides to get into his head that he doesn’t want to do business with you, you can then easily cut him loose with little fuss and bother. The really crucial part with this approach, of course, is that you make sure you don’t make all the groups ‘top dogs’. You make sure that there’s always a few groups that have been left out of the loop. The reason for this is twofold.”
Drake paused, taking a sip of tea.
“Aside from the shits and giggles you get from watching all these idiots yell and argue, the other thing is that –if you play your cards right – you can keep all these people too busy fighting each other rather than you while you’re happily making money from all sides.”
Darke leaned back, sipping his tea again.
“You know,” said Drake, keeping his voice neutral, “—in a way—that kind of reminds me of the way you Brits used to treat the world back in the nineteenth century. The Visitors wouldn’t be relatives of yours, would they?”
Chambers raised an eyebrow again and slowly took another sip of his tea.
“That’s odd,” said Chambers, also keeping his voice neutral, “I was actually thinking that they kind of remind me of the way you Yanks used to treat the world back in the twentieth century. The Visitors wouldn’t be relatives of yours, would they now?”
Drake smirked.
“Touché.”
“There will be none of that heathen language spoken in my office, Drake.”
Chambers drained the last of his tea in his cup and set it down.
“What, exactly, do you want?” he asked.
Drake leaned back.
“Suffice to say that I have decided that it is my duty, as a soldier who has put his life on the line defending his country far too often than I care to contemplate, that I would be in dereliction of said duty if I don’t find out exactly what the Visitors are doing and what are they planning. My goals are quite simple: Short term-- figure out what is actually going on or at least what our governments have actually agreed to and how it can be short circuited. Long term? If there is indeed a danger to the U.S. or humanity, then find the way to stop it or at least make it so damned expensive that the Visitors are no longer willing to pay the price in blood or treasure.”
Chambers did his ‘Spock eyebrow’ thing again.
“Are you seriously contemplating declaring war on the aliens?”
Drake leaned back in his chair, a frown on his face.
“Now? No. Right now we need intel and lots of it. I already have a few of my men from my old unit snooping around and I’ve been calling in a few favors. And if I’m reading you as well as I think I do, you have no doubt been doing the same as well.”
Chambers frowned and leaned back and stared at Drake for a very long moment.
Finally seemingly making a decision, he stood up and poured himself another cup of tea.
“More tea, Drake?”
“If you’re offering.”
Another poured cup later, Chambers sat down.
“Assume for the sake of argument that I think your insane plan actually has merit and that I actually go along with it. What do you want from me?”
Drake shrugged his shoulders again but there was a slight grin tugging at the corners of his lips.
He had spent quite a bit of time with Chambers during a joint U.S. –U.K. mission in Pakistan – one so ‘unofficial’ that even after nearly a decade there were only a dozen or so people who even knew of its existence, let alone what had actually occurred during the mission – and he knew from personal experience that this was Chambers’ way of indicating agreement.
“Like I said—we need intel. I have people working on it. Now I need your people working on it.”
Chambers took another sip of tea and pondered on this for a very long moment.
“Tricky,” he finally replied.
“But doable?”
Chambers took another sip.
“Indeed.”
Drake leaned back grinning.
“And the beginning of yet another beautiful friendship!”
Chambers hrrumphed.
“Well—I wouldn’t call it a friendship but more of a…acquaintance.” He paused, deep in thought. “Temporary and mutual cessation of hostilities against one another due to the presence of a common enemy, actually, to be more accurate.”
“I wasn’t aware that our two countries had hostilities against one another.”
“See how good we are?” replied Chambers, taking another sip of tea.
“In any case,” continued Chambers, “somebody is going to have to teach you Yanks a few lessons about the finer points of weapons and tactics.”
“Oh?” replied Drake. Now it was his turn to do the ‘Spock-eyebrow’. “Such as what?”
“Well, for starters, this strange obsession you have about bad-mouthing the 9 mm. Just remember that the Sig-Saur P228 is good enough for the SAS, so it should more than be sufficient for you guys.”
“I stand by my earlier assessment of the 9mm. Give me a Colt .45 any day,” replied Drake.
Chambers made a pfffft sound.
“The reason you Yanks prefer large caliber bullets is because you rarely aim before squeezing the trigger. Whereas we actually, you know, aim at our targets beforehand.”
Drake rolled his eyes but let that one slide. Once Chambers was on a roll, there really was no stopping him and it was best just to let him go on for a bit and let him wear himself out.
“So? Agreed?” asked Drake.
“How do you Yanks say it – I’ll have my people call your people.”
Drake stood up, grinning again.
“Very well then. Looking forward to another meeting soon.”
“Where to now?” asked Chambers, sipping his tea.
“Got to make a few more stops in a few other countries.”
“More ‘old friends’?” said Chambers, looking over his teacup.
“Well—one or two are more like ‘enemies for so long that we’ve developed a weird friendship’ to be honest but – yeah – some ‘old friends’ for the most part.”
“You know—there are these things called ‘telephones’ and ‘computers’ and ‘radios’ that allow you to communicate with people without having to fly thousands of miles in ridiculously cramped metal tubes of questionable safety. You should look into them.”
“Nah—don’t trust them new-fangled technological thingies,” replied Drake, grinning. Of course, both he and Chambers knew full well why he preferred to use the personal approach rather than the technological approach. Both were veterans for so long in their respective forces that they each – independently – developed the same saying.
The question is not ‘Are you paranoid’? It’s actually ‘Are you paranoid enough’?
Drake shot off a quick two finger salute.
“Later, Chambers. Be seeing you.”
Chambers watched as Drake left the office and heard him slowly walking down the stairs.
He took another sip of his tea.
“Damn Colonials,” he muttered.
He put down his cup and pulled out a small notebook from his pocket.
He leafed through the notebook for a few moments, alternately nodding or shaking his head. Finally making a decision, he tapped his finger on one page and picked up the phone with his other hand.
He quickly dialed a number.
It rang a few times before it was picked up.
“Hello?” said a man’s voice.
“Chambers here.”
“Sir?”
“I need you in my office in fifteen minutes…”
~~
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