Ex-Patriots

Chapter 26 - Influence Peddler THEN

There’s no such thing as a smart criminal. It’s a complete myth. You know why? Because if there was such a thing, you’d never know about it. Criminals people hear about get caught. Every bank robbery or liquor store hold-up, those were all morons. And think about it—someone would have to be a complete idiot to put on an eye-catching costume and draw attention to himself and what he can do.

No, the smart ones would go out of their way not to be seen or heard. They’d hide in plain sight. They’d be that person barely anyone acknowledges is in the room. The real supervillains wear business suits and paisley ties with full-Windsor knots.

When we first got the news some of the superheroes were alive in Los Angeles—well, superheroes or Bruce Springsteen, take your pick—I don’t think the airman who brought the news even saw me. Freedom didn’t. He doesn’t register half the civilians he meets. He and Shelly had been talking with a few of the officers for five minutes before the colonel and I locked eyes. It always made him angry when he forgot I was there.

Especially when I made him forget.

I never got noticed, though. The middle child who didn’t need much attention. The quiet kid in class who wasn’t so quiet the teachers worried about him. Just the average guy with the average name, sitting there in plain sight.

I still don’t know if this was something I was born with or something that was done to me. I remember the first time I did it, though. Well, it might not have been the actual first time, but it was when I knew for a fact I’d made someone do something they didn’t want to do. Sophomore year of high school. I spent a week working up my nerve to ask Phoebe Bradshaw out on a date and she shot me down in front of her friends before I even got it all out. I tried to save face while they were all giggling and asked if I could get a blowjob instead. I’d heard the line in a movie and it seemed appropriate.

Three minutes later we were in an empty classroom and Phoebe was unzipping my jeans.

It has something to do with questions. It took a while, and I got slapped and punched more than a few times because of it, but I figured that out. The way your brain receives and processes a question is different from how it hears statements or instructions or music or whatever. I can’t order people to do things, but I can ask them and they give me the answer I want. And they believe that answer.

The rest of high school went very well for me. I got excellent grades, great recommendations from every teacher, and slept with every cheerleader from every sports team. When I started applying to colleges, I got a full scholarship offer from anywhere that would give me an interview. College was a lot like high school, in pretty much every respect.

It was also where I learned I could push people too far. Or for too long. I mean, I’d figured out the nosebleeds, but college was the Christy incident. She was a minister’s daughter who said her prayers each night and was saving herself for marriage. Until she met me, anyway. After a month or so of using her every way I could think of, I decided to have a threesome with her and her roommate. The sex was great, but the next morning Christy was dead and her brains were leaking out on her roommate’s pillow. Turns out five weeks of making her mind do a complete moral one-eighty had all piled up, triple-sinful sex was the breaking point, and she had five or six aneurisms all at once. On the plus side, I guess, she never felt any pain.

It is true, by the way. Some schools give students straight A’s if their roommate dies. And if I’d known what an animal her roommate would be during grief sex, Christy would’ve died a few weeks sooner.

Anyway, it was after the Christy incident that I started thinking a lot more about what I did and what I could do with it besides getting good grades and porn star-level sex every weekend. College wasn’t going to last forever, after all. I needed a post-graduation plan. Something more than the grad school and grades of my choice. Summa cum laude would attract too much attention, but a solid cum laude would make my resume believable without being noteworthy, wherever I ended up.

It’s amazing how many people in the world make a living by backstabbing or blackmailing or screwing their way into a position of almost-power, and it’s amazing how many people let them. All those clingers and hangers-on who get maximum benefits for minimum effort. The trick is just to find the most powerful people you can and latch on. In that sense, I wasn’t doing anything any different than thousands of other people.

And the thing is, most people are easy-to-manipulate idiots anyway. They want someone to tell them what to do, no matter how much they say otherwise. Just pay attention to any election and see how often morons get convinced to vote against their own best interests. Heck, they’ll cheer and sing as they screw themselves over and make someone else rich and powerful.

The White House was the obvious first choice. Too high-profile, though. Plus, at best you’ve got eight years before someone new comes in and cleans house. These days most politicians are way too partisan to hang onto someone from the last administration’s staff, even if they’re doing a good job. I could make them keep me, sure, but then I’d stick out like a sore thumb. And the goal, as Monty Python says, is not to be seen.

Then there was a month checking out Fortune 500 businesses. It’d be easy to have some CEO hire me on as a personal consultant or something. Thing is, most of those guys are rich, but their power’s limited to one little sphere of influence. Think about it. How many high-end movie studio executives can you name? None, right? They step outside of Hollywood and they’re just another schmuck in a town car.

So what did that leave me?

I was getting a guy to write a biochem paper for me senior year when I had my epiphany. I was wasting my time trying to find someone with all the right qualifications. I didn’t need to find powerful people.

I needed to make powerful people.

One college job fair later I was recruited for the Department of Homeland Security, complete with a generous signing bonus. DHS was pretty much custom made for me. What better place for an influential guy than a whole government agency created to lean over everyone’s shoulders?

I got assigned a nice office and spent six months trying to find what I wanted. The Cerberus Battle Armor System seemed like the best place to start. I could get the project greenlit, into production, and then have a whole platoon of armored bodyguards throwing themselves in front of the guy I was already standing behind.

Plus, to be honest, I hadn’t nailed a redhead in a while. Doctor Danielle Morris was rude and talked to me like I was an idiot. Her whole superior attitude made it even more fun later when she was on all fours in bed.

Of course, three months after I got myself assigned to the Cerberus project the superheroes showed up. Honest-to-God superheroes flying around, fighting crime, shooting ray beams, and all that stuff.

I admit, there was a week or two when the thought of a costume ran through my mind. I pictured myself squaring off against the Mighty Dragon or the Awesome Ape and getting them under my control. Blockbuster and Cairax both seemed pretty powerful, too. It’d be like collecting action figures or something.

Then I came to my senses. No masks. No capes. Nothing that involved revealing myself. Everybody goes after the guy they see. Nobody goes after the man behind the throne.

Maybe a month later I heard rumors about some Reagan-era program, Project Krypton. It was like the Star Wars defense system—no one expected it to work. It was just something else the Soviets would need to match our research on and drive themselves deeper into bankruptcy doing it. Except Project Krypton worked. They got some serious results before the project was mothballed at the end of the Cold War.

When all those superheroes started showing up, though, it got people thinking. Especially me. They reactivated the program. I got transferred to it.

I mean, the battlesuit is a great idea, but it’s a thing . Things can break down. They can run out of bullets or batteries. And your power runs out with them. But if the power’s something inherent, something the soldier is , not something they’re wearing, then it can’t go away.

Besides, the military was a great place for me. After knowing a few over-eager ROTC students in college, I almost didn’t need any power to manipulate them. Say terrorism and patriotism in the right order and half the soldiers I met would shoot their own mother without asking why. The other half…well, they’d do it if I asked them.

Granted, when the exes showed it up it was a big wrench in my plans. Now nobody else could wash out of the program. I was still weeding through candidates, figuring which ones were easiest to influence without risking their brains bursting. Too many people die of multiple aneurisms and it starts to look suspicious. It starts to draw attention.

So I had to put a bit more thought into getting rid of the troublesome super-soldiers. The ones whose morals or sense of duty were too strong. But it wasn’t that hard. After all, they’ll do or believe anything I tell them. I can make them think their vehicle’s going to run out of gas. Or they should run full-speed into a mob of exes when the smart thing to do is to sit tight. Or that they should put a gun in their mouth.

Now, though, it looks like I might get the best of both worlds. The heroes are alive out in Los Angeles, and they’ve got a pile of civilians with them. Hell, the Cerberus suit might even still be out there somewhere. At first Shelly was all for letting them stay self-governed and alone, but a quick Q and A changed his mind for him. So now a team’s heading out to welcome them back to the United States of America. I’ll ask if I can tag along, too. In an advisory position, of course.

After all, what do you get when you’re the ultimate power behind the throne?

You get ultimate power.