59, Journalist
“Fuck you and your silicone darlin’, these are all natural corn fed Kentucky tits.” Master thief Owens giggled immaturely at his lie as he adjusted his bra, then straightened out the turtle neck he was wearing.
“You’re an idiot.” Special agent Alexi Blacktide wasn’t mad. She spoke plainly, without emotion, as dry as a desert.
“No need to be jealous of my curves, Lex. I’m just a small town girl that wants to be a big time journalist someday,” Owens joked. He looked feminine, not trans, and his insecurity being dressed as a woman made him momentarily question everything he’d ever known about himself. “Would any of you ladies be jealous of me if you didn’t know me?”
“Well those two guards who let us in want to fuck you,” Blacktide joked back. “Wait a minute, don’t most guys wanna fuck you when you dress as a man anyways?”
“More you than me,” Owens muttered. “Gay guys rarely hit on me.” He ran a ballpoint pen over a note pad to make sure it had ink. “I have a gay friend who begs me to bang him when he gets drunk. He insists he only lets straight guys fuck him. He says that straight guys fuck way harder than gay guys.”
The joke didn’t make sense to the crew but Blacktide was all business. “Um, by definition, aren’t you gay if you’re a dude banging another dude?”
“By definition, yes, but my buddy swears they’re straight. Again, he only hits on me when he’s drunk. I must not be his type but his standards get lower the drunker he gets. Fuck it, I take it as a compliment.”
“I didn’t see any of the guards giving you a second look, Owens. Don’t worry, you are a very pretty girl.” Blacktide lightly ruffled up her beautiful black hair then pulled the short cropped sides behind her ears.
“Let’s face it gang, all of the eyes have been on Em. She’s the star journalist here, no doubt.” Special agent Bradley McVandalay rolled the shoulders of his big six foot frame back and his muscular chest naturally protruded forward as a large TV news camera rested in his lap. He grinned at his friend Emerald Blitz who was wearing a shirt that showed off ample cleavage. “Your boobs are something out of a teenage day dream, Em. Jesus, Joseph and Mary!”
“If I had a nickel for every boy that drooled in my general direction when I showed my cleavage, well,” Blitz paused, “I’d have at least a few bucks.” She yawned. “Isn’t it sad that I’d only be hired because of my body instead of my brain?”
Master Thief Owens was able to contort his body into strange shapes to sneak in and out of buildings through vents, so he knew well what it was like to only be hired because of his body. “I’d be out of a job if I wasn’t triple jointed.”
“Not the same thing, but I’m too much of a mess to judge.” She tapped on the hand held microphone. An audio control panel sat on the conference room desk and lights lit up with each tap. “The mic is hot. Roar, are you hearing us?”
Yen Roar sat in a van parked outside in the parking lot. Her eyes watered from staring at a handful of computer screens. She had to remind herself to blink. The screens showed security camera footage from every angle of the huge max security prison. She spoke into a headphone mic and her voice filled their ear pieces. “I can hear all of you, loud and clear.”
McVandalay, Blacktide, Blitz, Owens and Boothausen sat impatiently in the empty conference room. Roar had created a fake documentary film company online, then emailed the warden to arrange an interview with one of the inmates. The agents were waiting for the night manager of the prison to bring them the low profile white collar prisoner to be interviewed for a supposed journalistic piece on how the white collar criminal mind worked. It was a decoy for Owens and Boothausen to break out two fellow master thieves who didn’t belong in a max security prison.
“Men are pigs,” Blacktide said with her stereotypical dry delivery. She held a device that looked like an old school palm pilot. She flipped it over and popped the battery cover off to make sure the the batteries were secure. Satisfied, she concluded her thought. “Pure pigs.” She tossed the device to Owens.
“But you can’t live without us,” Owens retorted as he pocketed the device. The straight blond hair of his wig came down and dangled in front of his neck which was covered by a turtle neck collar. The combination of the hair along with the collar made it difficult to focus on his Adams apple. He was half as pretty compared to how hot Blitz, Blacktide and Boothausen looked, but his feminine presence made him less conspicuous amongst the women. “Admit it, Lex, you need men.”
“I kill men, unapologetically,” Blacktide said with no emotion. A smile creeped across her face. “But I admit, I do love to fuck men, so there’s that. Not the same ones I kill, just for the record.”
“See, we’re good for something,” Owens joked. He couldn’t get comfortable in his women’s clothing. “This bra is fucking killing me. How in the fuck do you ladies wear these everyday?”
Anastasia Bootshausen had been quiet and focused. Her heart beat was mellow, but the talk of women’s undergarments spurred her to speak up. “It gives you a new appreciation for the bullshit we gotta go through as women, doesn’t it?”
Emerald Blitz felt chilled as the air conditioning in the room blew against her exposed skin. “Owens, when a woman finds a bra that fits perfectly and comfortably, it’s a sacred thing.”
“I’m beginning to understand.”
McVandalay checked the settings on the camera and was satisfied. The contraption looked like a camera and did indeed have a high definition video recorder, but most of the space was electronics that had access to the prison WiFi system which in turn connected to Roar’s computers out in the parking lot. McVandalay saw that everything was in working order as he said, “I had to dress up like a woman for a mission that was at a fancy cocktail party in a museum once, Owens.”
“Oh yeah? How’d that one turn out?”
“Well if you must know, criminals crashed the party and it turned into an ugly shootout. No patrons were hurt, and I killed several of the bad guys, but one guy got away with a very, very expensive diamond.”
Owens nodded appreciatively. “No guns tonight.”
All the agents nodded. “No guns.”
At that moment, the door opened and three armed prison employees walked in with a chubby white male who didn’t look like a prison thug at all. They sat the criminal down and McVandalay got into character instantly. It turned out that he was very good at setting up lighting for a video shoot, and the scene in front of them looked like a real life television interview set up. It was the perfect distraction.
Blacktide held a second large camera to focus on Blitz while McVandalay’s focus was on the prisoner. The guards sat back and watched a scene that looked very professional.
“Excuse me,” Boothausen asked, “I need to use the restroom.”
Owens stood behind Boothausen and Blacktide and said in a quick, quiet feminine tone, “Me too.”
Boothausen said in a professional, sweet voice, “Can one of you gentlemen tell us where the ladies room is, please?”
One of the guards politely asked the two agents to follow him. Owens and Boothausen exited the room with little fan fare as Emerald Blitz began the conference room interview.
A minute later, the two master thieves were in the women’s bathroom. Boothausen spoke quietly. “Roar, we are in the restroom.”
Owens slipped off his high heels and stuck them in the trash can. “Those fucking things are killing me. I have a new found appreciation for women, let me tell you.” He slipped on cotton socks and he exhaled a huge sigh of relief. He clicked his ear piece and said, “Roar, checking in. Boothausen and I are good to go. Do your thing.”
Yen Roar’s voice replied in all of the agents ear pieces. “Begin phase one, now.” She paused, then said, “All clear.”
Unbeknownst to the prison employees at the time, all of their security cameras stopped broadcasting live footage and began playing loops of prerecorded footage where there was minimal movement or action. The cameras only broadcast live footage to Roar in her van while the security screens inside the whole prison became useless without arousing suspicion that anything was amiss.
“I’ve got cell block C, you’ve got cell block E,” Owens said quickly. “What are we gonna do about this guard outside the door? Got a plan?”
Boothausen smiled. “He had a bottle of water in one of his hands when we met him, so I stole it and added two drops of medicine to it before slipping it back into his hand. He’ll have the shits anytime now.”
To anyone who wasn’t a master thief, the idea of stealing something right out of someone’s hand and then slipping it back into their hand unnoticed seemed impossible. For Owens and Boothausen, it was just another day at the job. They heard the guard outside of the door bellow in discomfort. He sounded almost like a dog yelping. They heard a door slam to the men’s restroom next door to the women’s.
Owens grinned. “Wanna race?”
“You’re on.” Both agents exited the ladies room and took off fast. Boothausen muttered to the microphone in her earpiece for Roar to hear, “we’re headed to the targets. Commence phase two.”
Roar’s voice spoke in their earpieces again. “Commencing phase two, now!”
Back in the conference room, Emerald Blitz had been asking tough questions to the inmate. He had been a banker, got greedy, got caught, and now he was an open book talking to a gorgeous journalist who wasn’t shy about showing her cleavage. McVandalay and Blacktide heard text message notifications from the two remaining guards who had their phones in their pockets. Both men looked embarrassed and pulled the phones out quickly to silence them. The agents gave assuring nods as if to say, “no worries,” then went right back to the interview, but they watched as the guards both put their heads down to interact with their screens.
The guards had gotten a group text messages from an unknown number. “Tana and Nicole are drunk and making out! This is amazing!” The guards didn’t know who in the fuck Tana or Nicole were, but they were curious right away as a quick series of pictures showed two beautiful women kissing each other on a couch surrounded by wine bottles and glasses.
The voice of Emerald Blitz brought them back to the moment as they heard her interview the prisoner. “So ultimately you used the fake stock market trades to send the money to the Cayman Islands?”
As the prisoner answered, another text appeared on their phones beckoning the guards to join the imaginary party. “Guys, you gotta get to my apartment NOW!” Another text followed, “Bring condoms!” The next pic showed the two women taking each other’s shirts off. The guards were now entertained and distracted. They never noticed that Owens or Boothausen never returned to the conference room.
Yen Roar was a computer coding genius, but she was also an excellent psychology profiler. Before the mission, she’d learned all of the guards’ personal info by hacking into their social media accounts. She programmed an algorithm to text the cell phone of each guard with a series of messages, pictures, videos, responses and website links to make it appear like a real life human was texting. She could also intervene in the program and send real time texts from her computer to reply to texts that might not be covered in the algorithm.
All over the prison, guards were getting text messages from numbers they didn’t know. Some were about sports, a couple were about classic cars, but most were about women. Employee after employee found themselves with their heads down, typing to reply to unknown cell numbers, interacting with a computer algorithm that kept them distracted from paying attention to their jobs.
“Owens, I’m at C eleven. Did I beat you?” Boothausen asked.
“Dammit! Yup. You’re good Ana. I’m still a minute or two away.”
“Hustle.”
“You win, no changing that now. Get your girl outta there and get back to the restroom.”
“Roger.” Boothausen reached behind the back of her shirt and pulled out a package that was taped to her skin. “Roar, open C eleven.”
Roar’s voice was chipper in her ears. “Affirmative.”
A small woman kicked her feet over the edge of a prison bed and stood up. She looked Boothausen in the eye as both women barely stood over five feet tall. “Who in the fuck are you?”
The cell door opened and Boothausen threw the package to the prisoner. The move startled the prisoner. “I’m Ana. I’m also a master, and I’m getting you out of here. Put that uniform on.”
The prisoner caught the package and instantly recognized it as a prison guard outfit. The prisoner grinned and started ripping off her bright orange jump suit. Boothausen turned around and looked up and down the hallways to give the prisoner some privacy. Twenty seconds later, the prisoner now looked like a guard. “You’re even faster than I thought. Impressive,” Boothausen said sincerely.
“Thank you. And thank you for helping me. But I can’t leave without my boyfriend.”
“Already on it. Another master is busting him out as we speak. I gotta get back to the conference room to not blow my cover. Meet your boyfriend at the east gate. We have a red Corolla in the parking lot with the keys in it and five grand in the glove box. The car doesn’t have GPS, I promise, but if you leave it in the Kolar Mall parking lot in the next week, I can use it again later. Just park by the Taco Bell somewhere.” The prisoner looked at Boothausen suspiciously. “That car has gotten me out of lots of sticky situations. I know I shouldn’t be emotionally attached to it, but I am. Fuck the haters.”
The prisoner could hardly believe what she was hearing. She trusted Boothausen without knowing why. “Ana,” she paused, “thank you.” She reached out for a hand shake. “You obviously know the name that the State calls me, but my real name is Stills.”
“Good to meet you, Stills. I gotta get back. My master hacker friend will make sure doors are unlocked, and all of these cameras are offline for a bit longer.”
Stills stiffened up. “The guards will notice their dead security screens, Ana!”
“They’re watching stock footage currently, and once you’re gone, the screens will go live again.”
Stills couldn’t help but appreciate the thought that Boothausen had put into this endeavor. “How can I thank you?”
“I left a business card in the cup holder with a burner email address. Write me in a month to tell me you’re doing ok and we’ll call it even.”
Standing in her prison guard uniform, Stills grinned. “Deal.”
Anastasia Boothausen turned to head back to the conference room but remembered one more thing. “My master hacker friend sent paper work to the prison here that your transfer was tonight and came early. She also canceled the transfer to the prison up north, so technically, they’ll be satisfied here that you’re gone and they won’t be suspicious up north when you don’t arrive. The law outside will still think you’re behind bars. You won’t hear about this break out on the news and no one will be looking for you. Do whatever you want with this information!” Boothausen didn’t wait for a reply. She took off to head back to the conference room. At the doorway to the west hall, she turned around to wave goodbye, but Stills had vanished like a ghost. “I love Master Thieves,” she grinned to herself.
Roar sent a private message to Boothausen. “So I’m a master hacker, huh? I like that title, Ana.”
“Well, you are. Got anything for me that I gotta worry about on my way back to the conference room?”
“All clear. Owens looks like he’s heading back to the ladies room too.”
Master Thief Owens had the same luck at his own cell. Roar had opened it, the male prisoner had changed remarkably quickly into a prison guard outfit, then introduced himself as “Bird” to Owens. In less than two minutes from that moment, Owens had returned to the restroom to retrieve his high heels, then found himself standing outside of the conference room back in costume. Boothausen walked up to him as he slipped on the second shoe. He grinned at her and said, “Roar says you beat me to your cell by way over a minute.” He gave her a knuckle bump. “Show off.”
Being a decade younger, she joked back, “Keep up, old man!”
At that moment, the guard who’d had diarrhea came waddling up from the end of the hallway. He apologized for leaving them unattended, completely unaware of what they’d been doing. The three of them walked back into the conference room and saw the interview wrapping up. The two guards had their eyes glued to their cell phones and didn’t even look up to acknowledge them while McVandalay and Blacktide nodded ever so slightly at the Master Thieves. They returned the gesture.
“Thank you for your time today, and thank you for agreeing to do this interview,” Blitz said to the white collar criminal. With that, the guards put their phones back in their pockets and left the agents alone in the conference room as they returned the prisoner to his cell.
It took five minutes to wrap up the lighting stands and cables, then the five agents were being escorted out the front door. When back in the van, Roar was shaking with excitement. “That was the most fun I’ve ever had, for real. I was nervous but not nervous, you know?”
McVandalay secured the cases of equipment into their proper places and was super complimentary. “That went ridiculously easier than I thought it might. You crushed it, Yen. Holy shit.”
Owens pulled off his wig and kicked off his high heels. “I will never talk shit to any of you ladies ever again. I love all of you,”
“Ditto,” a few of the ladies chimed in. Someone muttered, “I need a burger,” and the crew instantly agreed.
Less than an hour later, the five of them were comfortably seated at a circular table in an old school diner that sat six people. As they chowed down on their delicious American beef, a tall slender man wearing a long black leather trench coat and a black fedora that covered his eyes walked up unnoticed and sat down in the empty chair. McVandalay was the first to notice him. “Nice surprise, Slim!”
“Slim? For real?” the man said in his gravelly voice. “What if I was sensitive about my weight, Bradley?”
Blacktide was seated next to the man and it startled her. “Jesus, Speck. I didn’t see you sit down.”
“Well here I am. Let’s cut to the chase.” He turned to Yen Roar and extended his hand. “I’m Speck Arnold, and clearly you’ve met half of my team.”
Roar didn’t know what to make of the man. He smelled faintly of smoked meat with a hint of peaches. His smooth face was pasty white and his skin looked like it clung loosely to his jaw bones. “Hi,” she replied simply.
Blacktide had half a burger left and set it down. “Speck is gonna tell you that his name is short for Spectacular, and then who knows what the fuck he wants. Speck, I haven’t seen you for six years. What in the hell are you up to?” Without waiting for an answer, she ripped another bite off of her delicious dinner.
Speck laughed. “Alexi is right, Yen, I am indeed named for the word that describes me best. Spectacular. And what am I up to? Well I’ll tell you. I’m doing my job.”
The cryptic bullshit that just spewed from the mouth of this stranger didn’t answer shit for Roar as she processed his words. “What exactly is your job then?”
“I observe people’s skills from afar and when the time is right, I offer them employment with my team.” He pulled a thick envelope out of an interior chest pocket from his trench coat and sat it in front of Roar. “You’ll have to go through basic training as well as advanced espionage training, but Team Whiskey needs a member like you. The magic you pulled off today was sensational, and it’s nice to see my team work with someone as competent as you and Boohausen here.”
The whole ordeal was too bizarre for Roar to absorb. Boothausen was curious and asked, “Wait, you hired everyone on this team?”
“Everyone but you. You’re a sneaky one and I never caught up to you, even after you snagged the Golden Gun in Riyadh back in Saudi. Owens had the skills to actually catch up to you, and I’m grateful he recruited you.” Boothausen couldn’t see Speck’s eyes because of how low he wore his fedora hat, but she could see his lips perfectly. “You’re fucking amazing, and when you and Owens do a job together, I don’t see how anyone can catch you two, ever. Even me.”
Roar opened the envelope and saw that it had a stack of fresh, clean one hundred dollar bills. Speck turned back to her and said, “Be in D.C. in one week. Details are in the envelope. Until then, downsize your life as much as possible. These fools here will tell you what to expect.”
Without hesitation, Blitz joked, “I’m glad you think so highly of us, Speck.”
“Good to see you, Emerald. You’d have made a good journalist if you’d have chosen that route, you know.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get to shoot bad guys, so that career path doesn’t appeal to me.”
Speck Arnold muttered, “Shoot man, hell,” as he half giggled. He got up from his chair. “Remind me not to piss you off in a deep dark alley, Emerald.” He tipped his hat to Roar and Boothausen, then said to his friends, “Good to see you all again. Stay out of trouble, will you?”
“We’re professionals, Speck,” McVandalay joked.
With that, the slender man nodded to the table, then walked out the front door and slipped into the evening.
As the waitress came up to ask if she could get anything more for the table, Blacktide said, “Only the check, please.”
The waitress was very polite and bubbly. “Oh! Your tab was paid by some folks already. They said for me to tell you that Bird and Stills say hello and hope you liked your burgers!”
Owens and Boothausen looked at each other and grinned. Blacktide smiled at the waitress and said, “Well ain’t that something. Thank you for great service tonight. We needed a good meal.” The compliment made the waitress feel good as the crew enjoyed finishing their food.
In the distance, two newly freed Master Thieves left a red Toyota Corolla in the parking lot of the Kolar Mall shopping complex and walked hand in hand off into the night.
