Public Enemy Zero

2

At that hour of the night, the lobby and the rest of the building were empty except for Rookman in broadcast booth two. He ran the 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift. His show was a call-in conspiracy program with special guests who used nicknames like Truthseeker, Indian Joe, The Ghost Stalker and Dr. Annihilation.

Mitchell walked by the window and waved. Inside, a man in his late forties wearing a trucker’s hat pointed at his watch and gave Mitchell the finger.

Mitchell gave an apologetic shrug. Rookman grinned and waved him off.

All the station’s broadcast booths were about as big as a bathroom with the exception of the conference room where the morning crew did its show. It was usually filled with silly props and those magazines they give out at strip clubs. One of the hosts was in the middle of trying to avoid time for cocaine possession. The reason that it hadn’t made it into the papers was based in part because he used a fake radio name and the fact that their station was so under-listened to, nobody cared.

Mitch once heard that the advertising manager was talking about leaking the story to help their Arbitron numbers. It was that kind of station and that kind of business.

Mitch reached his booth and opened the door. The smell of bad coffee permeated it.

Oddly, he thought, he kind of missed it. He’d been gone for a week, and as much as he hated his job, it’d been the only connection he’d had with the outside world since Rachel broke up with him.

Granted, getting cursed at by drunks and having teenagers call in to scream obscenities wasn’t an ideal connection, but it was something.

He flipped on the monitor to listen to Rookman’s show while he did his own show prep, which basically consisted of pulling up some of his iTunes Genius lists and thinking of inane questions to ask people to generate some interesting calls.

Rookman was better at that. At that moment, he was talking to a man who claimed that a recent meteor spotted over the skies of Los Angeles that crashed into the ocean was actually a manned Chinese spacecraft on a secret mission.

The caller had a disarmingly calm voice that didn’t sound like a crackpot. He sounded like Kiefer Sutherland to Mitchell.

“You’ve said it over and over again, Rookman. People have to wake up. There’s a new Cold War going on. This fireball that came down wasn’t a meteor. It was a spacecraft. Talk to any scientist and they’ll tell you the re-entry doesn’t make sense for anything else.”

“So what was it?” asked Rookman.

“It goes back three years ago. Remember when the space shuttle made that secret mission to fix a military satellite? They found something. Something that scared the hell out of them. Now we all know that World War III isn’t going to be fought with nukes. It’s going to be with computers and biological warfare and in space.

“It’s not going to be over in years or even months or days. It’s going to be over in minutes. Whoever has the tactical advantage wins. One day, those of us that survived the night are going to flip on the television or go to Google’s homepage and see that someone else is in charge.”

“So what does this have to do with the meteor?”

“Spacecraft, Rookman. We’re talking about a spacecraft. So NASA sends their payload specialists up there. Guys who get their orders from underground in Langley and they see something on the satellite that’s not supposed to be there.”

“Describe for us what they saw,” said Rookman.

“Maybe the size of a cigar. It’s got an antenna, a large battery and piece of plastic explosive the size of your fingernail. When a call comes down and the powers that be decide it’s time to strike, you don’t have time to launch missiles or scramble jets or change satellite orbits. It’s going to happen in seconds. One minute everything is fine, the next minute all those Chinese-made computers that are routing our email and handling our phone calls and store photos of our pet dog are going to run a piece of code written in some university back in Beijing. Guess who’s in charge then?”

“I’m guessing not us,” replied Rookman.

“Well, the only thing stopping them is our military advantage. The problem with that is it’s all controlled by satellites. So the solution there is to take them out. But it’s got to happen quickly. Instantly. So what do you do? You don’t try to shoot them with a laser that may or may not work. You don’t shoot missiles at them. You need something simple. You booby trap them.”

“So that’s what the space shuttle found? A booby trap on one of our satellites?”

“Exactly. Now you’re about to ask me what does that have to do with those Chinese astronauts that burned up over Santa Monica Pier. That was payback. The Chinese launch was a secret mission. They sent a small Soyuz capsule covered in radar-absorbing material into one of the same orbits as one of our birds.

“Only this time we’re ready. We hit them with a blast of microwaves from one of our communications satellites. It’s all it takes. We fry them in their capsule and everything goes haywire. Remember when half the country lost satellite TV four days ago? Guess the real reason why? So the astronauts are dead and the equipment is malfunctioning. The spaceship eventually loses orbit and comes crashing down to earth and lights up the sky over L.A.”

“That’s an incredible story.”

“Of course, the Chinese can’t say what happened and we can’t say anything, either. Neither one of us wants to let on to what we can do or what we know.”

“And that’s why it’s a cold war. Thank you again for calling in. I know I can say for everyone listening that we all appreciate the risk you take in bringing this to us.”

Next came the touch Mitchell loved the most about Rookman’s show when he had callers with government conspiracy stories.

“Now just to make it clear that we’re not asking anyone to violate state secrets and commit what some would call treason in doing their patriotic duty, I have to ask if you’re working for the government.”

At that point the caller hung up. Or at least to the audience it sounded like he hung up. Mitchell suspected that Rookman simply hung up on them to create a dramatic effect.

“Doctor Lovestrange? Doctor Lovestrange? Huh, it appears he hung up on us. Well, we can look forward to his next call.”

When Mitchell first heard Rookman, he thought he was the kind of crank that felt Fox News was too liberal. After listening to the show, he actually looked forward to it. The mix of crazy conspiracies and ghost stories was compelling. After a while, they began to sound plausible, until some guy would call in talking about the orgy he had on a flying saucer at Woodstock.

Mitchell couldn’t figure out where Rookman really stood on all of it. He had to believe some of it. Sitting in the booth in his trucker’s hat and camouflage vest talking about buying up gold coins, he looked the part of the conspiracy nut. To talk to him face to face, he didn’t really seem like the kind of guy that believed a race of lizard people ran the world. But he was the type that would sweep his home for bugs if he heard a click on the line.

The show was actually just a hobby for Rookman. When Mitchell found out that his day job was as a community college guidance counselor, he was strangely not surprised.

Working the late shift for barely above minimum wage on a station nobody listened to, Mitchell wished he could have gone to a guy that kept copies of Guns & Ammo, The Economist and Penthouse on his desk.

The phone in the booth rang. Mitchell picked it up.

“WQXD, this is Mad Mitch speaking.”

“Go fuck yourself, Mitch,” said an adolescent voice followed by giggling in the background.

Mitchell took it as a compliment that the call came in before his show started. That meant they were waiting for him.

Callers like that were never deterred by the fact that all calls were time-delayed and ones like that never made it to the air. For some reason, they thought that they would be the first one to call in and tell him to eat a dick live on the air.

When he first took the job, the station manager told him to expect some abuse and showed him a list of numbers to look for on the caller ID. They were known nut jobs who obsessively called the station.

The morning crew guys would make jokes about them and refer to them by their last four digits of their phone number.

4788 once called the station 320 times in one day. Anytime someone answered, it didn’t matter if it was a man or a woman, a loud, shrill voice would scream “Faggot!” and then hang up. The guy who made parody songs for the station made an auto-tuned version that got 400,000 views on YouTube.

Mitchell thought it ironic that probably more people heard that guy than ever listened to the station.

The phone rang again. Mitchell picked it up.

“Try not to eat too many dicks tonight, Mitchy boy.” Mitch recognized the voice.

“I’m sure you already ate them all, Rookman.”

“I’m a survivor, man. Have a good show.”

“Thanks man. So that Chinese satellite thing. You believe that?” Mitch didn’t want to sound like the gullible fan boy, but he couldn’t help it.

“Nah. It’s horse crap. It was Russians.” Rookman hung up.

Leave it to the Rookman to wrap a mystery in an insult.

Mitchell flipped on his intro music and then gave out the number for requests. Three calls came in. He took line one.

“WQXD, this is Mad Mitch speaking.”

“Fuck you, Mitch.” Click.

Line two.

“WQXD, this is Mad Mitch speaking.”

“Faggot!” Click.

Line three.

“WQXD, this is Mad Mitch speaking.”

“Hi, Mitch. This is Amy,” came a sad voice. “Longtime listener, first-time caller.”

Her words came out hesitantly, like someone holding back tears.

“How you doing tonight, Amy? What can I do for you?”

“It’s been a rough day for me, Mitch. Can you play some Taylor Swift?”

“Sure thing, sweetheart. Want to tell us what happened?” A juicy breakup story always made a good intro to a love song.

“I got into an argument with my boyfriend.”

Please make it about sex, thought Mitchell.

“Then on my way home from work, my car got a flat tire and…” She paused. “Some guy attacked me.” The last part came out in halted breaths.

Mitchell’s body went numb.