Arnesto Modesto Page 9

  “You’re not driving into the city, are you?” the female cashier asked.

  “No, I’m heading north.”

  “Well, you picked a good time to get out of town. Sounds like there’s trouble down there. Some nasty fires, too.”

  “Is that right?” It’s going to get a whole lot worse, lady. Businesses are going to burn to the ground, people are going to die, and I couldn’t save them. I could have prevented this, all of it.

  Arnesto Modesto, the world’s most ineffectual time traveler.

  He had no way of knowing many of the flyers had gone unnoticed. Many had gone straight into the garbage, both read and unread. Of those that were read, many were immediately forgotten. But there were some, not many, but some that weren’t ignored. Some businesses closed early, losing less merchandise to looters. Fire extinguisher sales in the area were about the same, except that the sales came a little earlier in the day and were used to slightly greater effect. He had saved no lives, but in the end, he had saved a few businesses. Not that he would ever know.

  It was getting late by the time he returned home, but not too late for a debrief.

  “Why focus solely on Koreatown?” Pete asked from the other end of the phone line. “It seems like a huge chunk of LA is burning to the ground. Do you… hate blacks?”

  “No! I couldn’t remember where all the incidents happened. I only remembered finding it odd that four white cops beat a black man and a bunch of Koreans lost their businesses.”

  “That is odd. So what was on the tape?”

  “Part of the riot scene from Police Academy.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Pete said. “What was your plan there?”

  “I thought if they heard riot sounds and machine gun fire, the police would react a little quicker.”

  “I… don’t even know how to respond to that. Anyway, don’t beat yourself up over this. You had no time to prepare. We’ll catch the next one.”

  Compounding the Problem

  Arnesto's Home

  Silicon Valley, California

  Saturday, April 3, 1993

  Evening

  “This Waco standoff seems like it’s going to last forever,” Pete said over the phone.

  “No, only another couple weeks,” Arnesto said.

  “It’s not going to end well, is it?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Is there something you can do?” Pete asked.

  “Like what? Call up Janet Reno and tell her that a siege is going to leave scores dead, including the children, as they burn the place down from the inside?”

  “Jesus. It’s been almost a year since the LA riots. You must have picked up some tricks since then. What if you tip off the FBI or a news station or something? At least try to warn them.”

  Arnesto closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I suppose I should.”

  “Why are you not gung-ho on this?”

  “Waco’s not the end of it.” Arnesto chose his words carefully so as not to prematurely announce a major event to his friend. “I know it sounds terrible, but when it ends, I will know exactly when to prevent a future act of retaliation that kills twice as many people — people that didn’t willingly join a dangerous cult.”

  “No, it doesn’t sound terrible. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. Most people in your circumstance wouldn’t lift a finger to help those people — in either scenario.” Pete heard Arnesto sigh. “Then again, you’re not most people. Do you know who will retaliate?”

  “Yeah, a psycho named… just some psycho.”

  “Couldn’t you watch this guy? Hire a private investigator to keep an eye on him or something? That way, you could try to warn folks in Waco, but still prevent the retaliation?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Let me sleep on it. One thing’s for certain — I am not going to Texas. Too far to drive to mess with a bunch of gun-totin’ cowboys,” Arnesto said.

  “You could fly there then rent a car.”

  “I just turned twenty-one. You have to be twenty-five to rent a car.”

  “No, there’s a lot of places that will rent a car to twenty-one-year-olds. You’d just have to pay a fee,” Pete said.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Look,” Pete said, “I’m not telling you to go. But if you do and get into trouble, act like you love gun racks or hate abortions or something. Good luck, pardner.”

  A few days later, Arnesto drove a rented sedan that smelled like cigarettes from Austin to the compound in Waco. Knowing he wouldn’t be able (and had no desire) to get past the ATF checkpoint, he instead chose a spot behind a bunch of other cars on the side of the road with a view of the area.

  He surveyed the scene. There were cars, pickup trucks, press vans, and military vehicles. Locals and looky-loos, members of the press, and more agents than one could count. Then there was the compound itself which, from three miles away, appeared quiet.

  Arnesto spent his time ambling about aimlessly, avoiding conversations while eavesdropping on others, and watching the press for any signs of action. Once the sun started to set, he noticed people leaving and decided to follow suit. As he was walking back to his rental, one pickup slowed down as it passed him.

  “Best get the lead out, boy! The feds’ll start their concert any minute!” the driver said, then rolled up his window as he drove off. Arnesto sped up his walk, not sure what the man was talking about. He wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

  As Arnesto came within thirty feet of the car, the FBI started blaring music at the compound. Though Arnesto could barely make it out from that distance, he could tell the FBI had chosen the most annoying music possible: Christmas carols. Arnesto got in his car and cranked up the radio. Even country music was preferable to Christmas carols.

  The next day was like the first: not much in the way of progress.

  It wasn’t until the third day that Arnesto finally caught something of a break. He was walking up the dusty hill by the compound again when he spied a man in his mid-twenties with a short, military haircut sitting on the hood of his car. The young man looked familiar.

  “Want to buy a bumper sticker?” he asked.

  Arnesto looked at the stickers, which all had pro-gun and/or anti-government sayings like, “Ban Guns, Make the Streets Safe for a Government Takeover.”

  “The government sure messed up this situation, didn’t they?” Arnesto asked. Why does he look so familiar?

  “ATF had no business being here in the first place, and they have made nothing but mistakes since they arrived. The government wants to control everything. They want to take away all our guns and turn us all into socialists. I’m sorry some of them got killed, but they should have had the sheriff go in with a warrant.”

  “I hear that. I’ll take these two,” Arnesto said, picking up two bumper stickers off the hood. He held out his hand. “Name’s Bob.”

  “Nice to meet you, Bob. I’m Tim,” said the man, shaking Arnesto’s hand. Until that moment, Arnesto wasn’t one hundred percent sure who he was talking to. Now he was. It was Timothy McVeigh, the future bomber of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City which left 168 people dead, including nineteen children.

  Arnesto paid and then they chatted a bit more, with McVeigh doing most of the talking. Finally, Arnesto’s nerves got the better of him and he excused himself. Once a respectable distance away, he looked back and with McVeigh looking the other way, jotted down his license plate number.

  Back at the hotel, Arnesto quickly called Katrina to let her know how the “game conference” was going. They had a nice chat, then they hung up and he dialed Pete.

  “I met him!” Arnesto said.

  “Who, David Koresh? How the hell did you do that? And why?”

  “No, the other guy, the one who retaliates if Mount Carmel burns down.”

  “What… he was there?!” Pete asked.

  “Yeah, selling bumper stickers that say things like, ‘A Man With a Gun is a Cit
izen, A Man Without a Gun is a Subject.’ I bought a couple. Didn’t want to do anything to anger the man. He really hates the government,” Arnesto said.

  “Wow, could’ve used him in our gun control debate. For fuck’s sake! You were supposed to gather intel, not start hanging out with these guys. Next thing you know you’ll be playing poker over steaks and whiskey with him, Koresh, and the Unabomber. Did you make any progress with Koresh?”

  “Not really, but — holy shit, I know who the Unabomber is — anyway, check this out. Koresh not only convinced the other men he should sleep with their wives; he convinced them they couldn’t.”

  “You wish you had that power, don’t you?” Pete said.

  “No,” Arnesto said. “I don’t want to go around stealing other dudes’ wives, but if I’m ever single again, it would be nice to have a fraction of that guy’s charisma.”

  “David Koresh is a megalomaniac. He loves the sound of his own voice. They keep playing some of his recordings on one of the stations here. I’m watching one now.”

  “What channel?” Arnesto picked up the remote and went through every channel on the bolted-down television. “They don’t seem to have it here. Listen, can you record it for me? I have an idea, finally. Record as much as you can, then send me the tapes by the fastest delivery possible.”

  “You got it,” Pete said.

  Over the next week, Arnesto remained in his hotel room glued to the TV. After many painstaking hours of listening, transcribing, recording, and editing, he felt like he had what he needed. He rewound and played the cassette tape for what seemed like the thousandth time. It was David Koresh saying a bunch of words that Arnesto had spliced together. It didn’t exactly flow, but the multiple layers of recording obscured the choppiness.

  “If they come in here,” the tape said, “we will burn this place. Everyone will burn. The children must die before God.” The recording gave him chills. He made a few copies to mail to the local news stations but wasn’t sure if he should give one to the FBI. It wasn’t out of disrespect. He simply feared the FBI would recognize a fake and stomp it out before it could do any good.

  He mailed two of the tapes then drove a short ways north toward Dallas to discard the now-broken VCR and a few other items before heading back to Austin. But once on the highway, he had this nagging suspicion that kept growing larger. What if the news stations didn’t do anything with the tape? He simply couldn’t depend on them like that. It would be a huge risk, but he had to call the FBI.

  First, Arnesto drove back into Waco where he made a brief stop. Then, he continued to Austin and found a payphone near the airport. He called the diner in Waco where in the past week he had witnessed no small number of agents. He didn’t want to call 911 or the FBI’s hotline which may have been recording their calls. The confused server who answered brought one of the agents to the phone.

  “Agent Whiteside,” a voice said. Arnesto had second thoughts. Talking to the feds suddenly seemed like a decision that could haunt him the rest of his life. And what was with that name - Whiteside? It sounded evil. “Is there someone there?” Whiteside asked.

  Then again, who was Arnesto to judge someone else’s name? He had to warn him. It was the right thing to do. “They’ll burn it down,” Arnesto finally said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you try to enter the compound, they will set the place on fire. They’re not planning to surrender. Ever.”

  Whiteside glanced over at his fellow agents. “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry, I mailed the other tapes to the media. I left yours at the Dr Pepper Museum, first floor, hidden behind the soda fountain on the right side. He’s going to kill them all. Listen. To. The tape.”

  “Look, why don’t you come in and we’ll… hello?”

  It was actually the FBI who decided to play the tape — doctored to a more professional level — on their loudspeakers. They targeted the women in the compound, incorrectly believing their motherly instincts would kick in at the last moment, sparing the children.

  Instead, according to the FBI’s final report, it was Steve Schneider, Koresh's right-hand man, whose growing suspicions about his leader were confirmed by the tape. He shot Koresh dead before turning the gun on himself. As the FBI’s final assault had not yet begun, nobody inside the compound had any reason to start the fire. With their fearless leader gone, a few of the confused followers decided it was time to leave. This gave the other followers someone else to follow, and most of them left en masse. Even the most stalwart of the men, initially prepare to fight until the bitter end, realized the awkwardness of being the only ones left and they, too, surrendered.

  The Waco Siege was over. The day was April 16, 1993, three days earlier than the last time and far fewer dead.

  Piling It On

  FBI Field Office

  San Antonio, Texas

  Friday, April 23, 1993 (One Week Later)

  11:20 a.m.

  Agent Whiteside was glad to be out of Waco, but not thrilled to be back at the office. He still had a mountain of paperwork to complete. And now the phone was ringing again. He picked it up. “Agent Whiteside.”

  “You used the tape,” said a synthetic computer voice from the other end of the line.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In Waco, the tape I left you at—”

  “I’m sorry, is there something wrong with your voice?” Whiteside asked. He could make out the sounds of a keyboard clicking and clacking away.

  “Acute pharyngitis. Am I in trouble?” the computer voice asked.

  “I could charge you with obstructing a federal investigation.” Whiteside held his hand high and snapped his fingers urgently to get the attention of another agent to run a trace. “Two people may have died because of you.”

  “More than seventy people are alive because of me,” came the computer voice after more clicking and clacking. “Leave me alone and I can save more. Many more.”

  “Sir, you pull a stunt like that again and I can guarantee you prison time. You have information, you call the hotline, you do not—”

  -click-clack-click-click-clack- “I promise no more interference, just hot tips.” Even the pleasant computer voice no longer sounded sincere. “Do we have a deal?”

  “I can’t—”-clack-click- There were only a couple keys pressed this time. Whiteside could tell the caller’s next words had already been recorded or copied and pasted into some text-to-speech program.

  “There was a man selling anti-government bumper stickers at Waco named Timothy McVeigh. He is extremely dangerous and openly vowed revenge for what happened at the compound. You need to watch him.”

  “Alright, thank you for that. We will look into it. Anything else?”

  -clack- “The Unabomber is Dr. Ted Kaczynski. He lives off the grid in a cabin in Montana.” Before waiting for a reply, Arnesto hung up the pay phone, shut his laptop, and nonchalantly hustled away.

  Whiteside hung up the receiver and wrote down the names the mysterious caller had given him. Computer voice or not, there was something haunting about the finality of the informant’s words. He debated adding the caller to the notes but decided against it. It wasn’t the tips that dissuaded him. For all he knew, they were bogus. It was the fact that they had found stockpiles of lighter fluid and other fire accelerants at three different locations within the compound. It appeared that while the tape was phony, its message had been genuine. A rumor had formed within the Bureau that the tape had prevented a far worse outcome. Perhaps fueled by the Christmas music they had blasted, a few agents had even called it, “a gift from Santa.”

  A fellow agent walked up to Whiteside’s desk. “Payphone in San Francisco. Want me to look into it?”

  Whiteside looked up at the agent. “No, but I have something else for you to look into.”

  The Chase

  Smiling Axolotl Games

  Silicon Valley, California

  Friday, June 17, 1994

  5:57 p.m.

 
Arnesto smiled as he logged out of his work computer. It was the end of the workweek, and the project he was working on was between crunches. He was going to leave at a decent hour for once. But first, it was time to check in with QA. He was approaching his original hire date, so it was time to get reacquainted with his old friends.

  That included Hiromi, who Arnesto nearly bumped into as he was leaving his office. “Pardon me, sir. Thank you very much,” Hiromi said in a deep southern drawl as he sauntered by in a jumpsuit and pompadour. Hiromi did a couple hip gyrations, then danced down the hall, stopping in each doorway to do a quick impression.

  Arnesto was thrilled. In his past life, this moment had occurred before Arnesto had been hired, but Hiromi’s impersonation was almost as famous as the company screen saver was infamous. He watched until Hiromi disappeared around a corner, then made his way into the test pit.

  “Guys, you’re not going to believe this. Elvis is alive and he works here.” There was a muffled reaction from the five testers remaining.

  Kabir spoke first. “Hiromi did that to lighten the mood. Today was Brenton’s last day.”

  A tester named Chad said, “He was fired for breaking the new art scanner with pictures of a certain Star Trek counselor that were ‘inappropriate for a professional work environment.’”

  Kabir shook his head. “Thanks for the discretion, Chad.”

  “They weren’t even real,” Chad chimed in, looking up from his workstation. Kabir shot him a look, causing Chad to put his arms up to indicate he was done talking, while adding, “I’m just saying, the pictures were clearly fake. Give me Photoshop, I could do better in five minutes. Five minutes.”

  “Can we help you with something?” Kabir asked Arnesto.

  Arnesto pointed at himself with his thumbs and said, “I came here to see if any of you whiny, little amateurs want to take on the greatest Squid Wars player who ever lived.”