Martin"s Secret

Their final tryst at the Hyatt, a post-shower lovemaking, had ramped into a protracted plateau culminating in seismic discharges of pleasure leaving them breathless and perspiring, winded by great sex. It has been years since Jessica had an orgasm outside of an occasional fling. At the same time, Martin couldn’t remember having sex at all; still, their lovemaking was patient, probing and perfectly timed. Making up for lost time, the dynamic passion-play that began in the shower ended on the king-size bed and it was afternoon when they pried themselves apart.

“I’m starved” – she got out of bed and wiggled into a tee shirt - “what a workout, add multiple orgasms.”

“A workout for sure” - Martin stood and pulled on his shorts - “probably the most reps I’ve ever done but then I can’t actually remember.”

“When your memory comes back that’s the first thing you should forget,” said Jessica, playfully tossing her towel at him. She walked over to the dressing room and continued talking between applications of makeup as he got dressed.

“Let’s eat at the restaurant downstairs, maybe we can get a table in a quiet corner,” Martin suggested.

“Bud did that too,” she said.

“What?”

“When he returned from a deployment he always insisted we sit facing the room near a corner when we went out to dinner,” she explained. “Maybe you were once a soldier too.”

“I know a lot about weapons, so that fits,” he accorded. “Nah, couldn’t have been in the military, I’ve got flat feet.”

“My husband had flat feet and he earned the Distinguished Service Cross and four Purple Hearts.”

“Bud was a hero with flat feet. I just have flat feet.”

Jessica knew the self-deprecating comment was Martin’s way of deflecting attention from himself but it had the opposite effect. She knew he was brave, that was the most obvious thing about him. Empathy washed over her. He had lost everyone close to him and all the memories he had shared with them. She regretted telling him about Bud’s heroism because Martin had no story, no personal history to give his life context.

His plight reminded her of an early childhood experience. She was separated from her mother in a crowded festival when time became the idled horror of a child’s worst nightmare. One moment she was standing beside her mother waiting for a candy-apple and the next she was being pushed along inside an endless stream of people laughing and carrying on without regard to her frightful detachment. After an hour of being shuffled around, Jessica wound up sitting in a room with a shrunken old man whose skin drooped severely and that stood less than four-feet tall - a freak-show attraction turned lost-and-found contact. She was terrified until she heard the music that was her mother’s voice calling her name over the sound of fairgoers, carnival hawkers, and the scary little lost-and-found man.

She imagined Martin was experiencing the adult equivalent of her experience. The oblivious faces he did not know or trust - someone who’d lost everything only to become the target of a vicious manhunt. He was like a lost boy searching for something familiar in a world of people pushing and shoving through lives with a beginnings, middles, and ends. Tears welled in her eyes and she spontaneously held out her arms offering her embrace. Martin responded by kissing her cheek and she rested her chin on his shoulder where couldn’t see the tears.

“I’m afraid when your memory returns you’ll go away.”

“It’s hard to lay claim to the future when I don’t remember my past - but I think I’m falling in love with you,” he whispered.

Jessica kissed him, nuzzled his neck and stared with forlorn uncertainty through bleary eyes.

After dining on center-cut sirloin with sauteed vegetables and topping their lunch off with a glass of Italian red and creme brulee cheesecake for dessert, they returned to the room to gather their belongings and plan the day.

“Maybe we should go to Disneyland and unwind, Orlando is only about eighty miles from here,” joshed Jessica as she packed.

Martin did not answer and that’s when she poked her head around the corner and saw him sprawled across the bed, apparently unconscious. After checking his pulse, Jessica retrieved a small cooler of ice from the guest refrigerator, put some cubes in a plastic bag and wrapped a towel around it. She alternately applied the compress to Martin’s cheeks and forehead. She noted that his eyes were moving from side to side under closed lids as though he was in a state of deep REM sleep. After a half hour, she considered calling emergency services, even though he had warned against doing that.

“Martin, can you hear me? Come back to me,” she pleaded.

His cheeks were numb, frozen, and his head was spinning. He reflexively touched his face as though reading braille. When his blurred vision cleared and the room stopped moving he noticed thin stress-lines etched across Jessica’s silky-smooth face and tasted a tear that fell from her cheek. Her warm, sweet breath and soothing voice hastened his return to consciousness.

“How long?” he asked.

“About thirty minutes, I didn’t know what to do,” said Jessica, her words divided by sobs.

“Did you call anyone?”

“No. Despite every rational instinct, I waited like you told me to.”

For a moment Martin was stuck between reality and a dreamy dimension where his suppressed faculties registered an intense affection for the woman leaning over him. As he slowly returned from a cold, distant place, her warmth and scent beckoned him.

Soon, he was cognizant of his surroundings and remembered everything he and Jessica had experienced up until his last blackout. Looked at the plastic bag filled with ice he gazed into her brown eyes.

“Next time, no ice, it freezes my skin” – he took the plastic bag, sat it on a bedside table and kissed her on the lips – “but, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

Even though the last few weeks had returned in vivid detail, Martin’s prior existence remained a mystery stored somewhere he could not reach.

“We should dress casual today, maybe wear those hiking boots you bought. I’ll do the same,” he suggested.

“Is this when the hunted become the hunters?” asked Jessica.

“Yes” - he took two Glocks from his briefcase and loaded a clip in each, handing one to Jessica - “today, we hunt.”

They put their luggage on a baggage cart with the briefcase on top before making their way to the elevator and across the parking lot to the truck.

“We’ll need some tools,” he said as he unlocked the truck with the remote and began storing their gear.

After stopping at a local Ace Hardware to buy various tools and a backpack in which to carry them, Martin turned onto the entrance ramp at Veterans Expressway in route to West Tampa.

“Where are we going? Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” asked Jessica.

“I’m okay to drive, the fainting spells have all occurred at least twenty-four hours apart.”

“Okay, so where are we going?”

I remembered something when I was out, or maybe I dreamed it. Anyway, there’s an old abandoned cigar factory in West Tampa.”

“That’s wonderful, Martin, but there’s probably scores of them” - she tapped an imaginary cigar with her middle finger - “haven’t you ever heard of Hav-A-Tampa cigars? This place was Cigar City a hundred years ago.”

“I think this particular structure is the key to unraveling some mysteries.”

“Then why did we pack our clothes and check out of the hotel?”

“We should keep moving because every time I black out all hell breaks loose.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

Martin told her how he had dreamed of an old, three-story Romanesque Revival-style building located in Tampa somewhere below Interstate 275.

“Did it come with an address?” she jibed.

Martin smiled and returned his gaze to the traffic before speaking.

“I know it sounds crazy, but right now everything is crazy, everything but you.”

“Me and that briefcase,” Jessica shot back. “It’s never more than a couple feet away, which kind of creeps me out.”

“Trust me, it’s keeping us alive right now” – Martin patted the case with his right hand for emphasis –“but I look forward to the day we no longer require its services.”

Jessica liked when he said ‘we’ when talking about the future. It somehow validated all they had been through during their short, whirlwind romance.

“Maybe something inside of the briefcase is helping them target us,” she postulated.

“I scanned it and deactivated a built-in transponder and its GPS transmissions.”

“Deactivated? No wonder the past twenty-four hours have been so calm and uneventful,” she wisecracked.

Martin shrugged and smiled. “I know, right? They’re still tracking me somehow but shutting down the transponder slowed them down.”

It was mid-afternoon and northbound traffic was light about two miles ahead of the junction of Interstate 75 and Interstate 4, a stretch that overlooks downtown Tampa.

“That’s it,” he nearly shouted, pointing a finger to indicate a vintage, three-story red-brick building on the north side of the highway. At once he checked for traffic and veered the truck across the four-lane freeway onto an exit ramp.

After parking in a secure lot on the fringe of downtown, he donned the backpack and grabbed the briefcase and they began the trek north toward an overpass that dissected their route. After hoofing it past several homeless men huddled under the overpass and six blocks through a relatively high-crime neighborhood, they walked three blocks west and stopped in front of an old building. Martin took the device from his case and pointed it at the 100-year-old, 35,000-square-foot former cigar factory and thumbed the instrument’s touch-screen.

“Underneath.”

“Excuse me, underneath the building? I guess we’re done here,” she said, feigning a sigh of relief.

“No, we can enter through the basement below that window,” he said, pointing out an area behind some overgrown shrubs.

Jessica rolled her eyes but resigned herself to helping Martin break into the old cigar factory. She found some comfort in the notion that it was unlikely anyone would report prowlers in a long-deserted building.

Meanwhile, Martin found a loose section in the ten-foot chain-link fence surrounding the abandoned structure. After scouting for prying eyes, he lifted it enough for Jessica to crawl under then shoved his briefcase and backpack through.

“What’s in there, concrete?” piped Jessica after moving the backpack to lift the fence for Martin.

Once they were hidden from the street by an overgrown hedge, they approached one of the tall windows that passed for air conditioning for workers who hand-rolled cigars during sizzling summers a century before. Martin snipped a square hole large enough to crawl through the rusted steel mesh and broke out a section of the brittle opaque glass with tools he had bought at the hardware store and stuck his head through to look around. Satisfied that they were alone, he pulled the remaining shards of glass from the window frame of the basement that was constructed half under and half above ground.

“Face the ground, back in feet first and keep your lovely tush low,” he advised her. “When you’re halfway in, give me one hand at a time and I’ll ease you down.”

“Says the guy who shoved me out of an airplane last night,” joked Jessica as she backed feet-first through the window frame.

“No worries, we’re already on the ground here,” he said and smiled.

Martin locked his legs around a rusted steel vent protruding from the ground several feet outside of the window so that he could support her weight. They locked hands one at a time after she had climbed backward through the broken window. Her five feet six, 130-pound frame was gym-taunt and the distance to the table was minimal after she was fully extended against the brick wall, however, Martin worried that the century-old pine table below her was unstable.

Jessica flexed her knees as nimbly as a panther and the notched soles of her Montara Hiker boots prevented a slip. Standing on the table, she side-slapped dust from her leather denims and eyed the dark cavernous room before giving Martin the thumbs up.

Martin caught up with her standing on the floor in a beacon of dust-filled sunlight that streamed in from the dirty, mullioned window. Already he was manipulating the touch screen on the device as he aimed it at the center of the south wall.

“There is a room or maybe a passageway behind the brick wall,” he declared with a nod in that direction.

“Let me punch the brick wall first and loosen it up for you,” quipped Jessica.

Undeterred, Martin motioned for her to follow as he pointed a small wide-angle LED light at a pallet jack with its forks protruding through a wood pallet supporting a large, rusty generator. Beyond the generator and the stack of empty pallets adjacent to it was the section of gritty brick wall where Martin had pointed the device.

“This is it,” he shouted, lightly pounding the wall.

“This is what?” she questioned with impatience. “We’ve literally hit a brick wall, no pun, literally.”

“Don’t you see? Somehow it emerged from my subconscious; I remembered how to get here. I remembered something.”

Thrilled with his recollection no matter how random it appeared to Jessica, Martin stepped back to survey the ghostly relic of Cigar City that they were trespassing. Suddenly he turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes wide with excitement as the rekindling of memory poured hope like rain on a drought.

“When you lived in Tampa, did you ever read about Santos Trafficante?”

“Are you kidding? I worked at Hillsborough County’s main library on Ashley Drive; I read a lot about Tampa while Bud was deployed.”

She went on to tell how the Trafficante family, notably the father and son of the same name, lorded over Tampa’s mafia syndicates during the heyday of cigar city. She recounted how the family and associates built and operated multiple casinos that mirrored their gambling assets back in homeland Cuba during the Batista era before the revolution.

“Exactly! But what the history books don’t show is the secret network of tunnels and underground facilities used to hustle syndicate bosses safely out of casinos during police raids and to dispose of assassinated rivals or move booze and drugs to and from mafia-controlled casinos and facilities.”

Jessica cast a skeptical eye. “So you’re saying that beyond that wall is a vast trove of heretofore undiscovered artifacts from Tampa’s early Trafficante era of gaming, drug wars and prohibition?”

“No. Sorry to disappoint, but this underground network is about the present and the future, not the past.”

Martin told how he believed the tunnels and underground caverns in some areas were secretly strengthened by government contractors to withstand a nuclear blast and then outfitted with cutting-edge electronics and equipment to support a network of top-secret government laboratories. He told how he might have been involved in an ongoing project that was yet to see the light of day.

“What is this place, Martin? Tell me what we’re getting into or I don’t take another step.”

“I’ve told you everything I know. It’s like déjà vu. Visions come and go, mostly of places and things. The who, why and when are still missing.” He pointing to his head and shrugged. “I still don’t know where I fit in, who I am.”

“So they just bricked over the entrance?” Jessica remained dubious but curiosity slowly leeched into her tone.

“I believe there is at least a foot of hardened steel on the other side of the brick, impenetrable without accessing an encrypted code,” said Martin.

He scanned the wall for electronic components using the ACR hacking device, tapping on the brick here and visually scrutinizing it there. Five minutes later his device made some noise and he thumbed-typed on its screen like a kid with an Xbox Controller on Christmas day.

“The password is stored in these fake bricks,” he concluded, making a circle around six bricks with his free hand.

“I’m not following,” she confessed.

“Okay. If I’m right, these six are not real bricks but sensors that control some kind of entry system.” he explained while numbering the bricks with a felt pen.

“Does Ask Alexa there know how many stormtroopers are on the other side?” queried Jessica, casting a skeptical glance at the ACR device he was holding.

“No, but she might be able to deobfuscate the computer software that controls the video and entry sensors by cracking operator user-names and passwords.”

Martin showed her some complex schematics that were displayed on the device’s screen.

“Alexa could never do this,” he whispered, clearly pleased with the information on the display. “I’ll need a few minutes to disarm the tunnel’s alarm sensors and to prepare the last hour of video for playback.”

“You mean like in Mission Impossible when the security guards thought they were looking at real-time images instead of rewound video?”

“Something like that, only this isn’t Hollywood so I have to actually do it and the guards don’t use blanks.”

“Stop talking, you’re making me more nervous if that’s even possible,” exclaimed Jessica who was as frightened as amazed.

“Don’t worry,” said Martin, immediately regretting his words as she rolled her eyes.

“Okay, press on the numbered bricks as I call them out in order of the numbers I wrote on them,” he said in a confident tone.

When Jessica was in position, he called out the numbers on the bricks, instructing her to touch several of them more than once.

“It’s not working,” she lamented after completing the pattern according to Martin’s direction. “They’re just bricks, just really old bricks.”

Martin pressed a finger against his lips and tilted his head to listen. Suddenly they heard a metallic clang that sounded like the piston-locks of a bank vault’s door retracting. An electrical hum and a series of loud squeaks and scrapes followed. Finally, a section of wall slowly lifted inward from the bottom with a loud creak as hydraulic arms not serviced for many years opened the disguised steel door like a scene out of Tales of the Crypt.

“Oh my God, you were right,” Jessica shouted in a whisper as her eyes widened in a mix of anticipation and trepidation.

Martin imagined she would run for the broken window by which they entered fast enough to shame a hungry cheetah but nonetheless hoped she would stay. Either way, he knew he must search this mysterious labyrinth of passageways under Tampa to reconcile his past if he was to have a future.

“I have to know, and it starts right here,” said Martin, casting a glance at the black hole.

“I’m going with you,” she said. “I need to know too.”

Martin knew at once what she meant. If they were to have a future together, she had to understand his past.