Brigits_Flame August Entry 02 - Brave and Crazy
Night falls on Honolulu: a woman in a hotel room binds her hair into a bun and smears dark paint under her eyes. She is nearly ready.
The device at her hip buzzes. She answers.
“Yes.”
“I’m just calling one more time, honey -” Her husband.
“Yosef! Nothing you say will stop me from doing this.”
“I’m just saying we’re worried. I mean, the boys and I are behind you.”
“I know.”
“But I have to say, Or sheli, this is pretty goddamn crazy.”
“Yeah, crazy brilliant, Yossele. Crazy knighthood. Crazy Congressional Medal of Valor.”
“I don’t think they’ll knight you for this, sweetheart.”
“Well, they won’t, but the subsequent administration will. Just you watch. We’ll be heroes.”
She hangs up. Her phone buzzes again, and she curls her lip in irritation. But it’s just a text message, from Yosef:
“Good luck, babe.”
Orly slides the machete into her back-scabbard. She’ll need all the luck she can get, she thinks.
It’s 11:45 PM, and the team is in position. Glenn’s got the area covered with radio sweeps, Michelle is in on top of a skyscraper directing drones, and Orly’s at the gates of the State Capitol with the bulletproof vest and the garden gloves wrapped in electrical tape. Oh, and that machete.
It is go time.
Orly signals her crew with a text and prepares to head in. She crouches in a stand of purple bougainvillea until the stupid wasteful rent-a-pig blowhard security guard (who is talking on a cell phone!) walks past, and then she vaults the fence.
On her headset she hears Glenn.
“It’s gotta be in there, Orl. It’s just gotta! My research indicates that the certificate is in the vault below the main rotunda. All you have to do is spit on the state seal and - ”
“I know, Glenn,” she whispers. “And twist the Speaker’s lectern 45 degrees. Michelle, gimme the scoop!”
“The Bug reports nothing! We’re clear to proceed.”
Orly leaps the reflecting pool, her platinum-blonde hair catching the moonlight. She rounds the statue of Queen Liliuokalani, and with a running start, she manages to fling herself, like a cat, up over a palm-tree-looking column and atop the Bauhaus roof of the Capitol.
“Soon, soon, the American people will know the truth about Barry Soetoro, the man who would be President,” she mutters. She creeps delicately towards the skylight above the rotunda.
Pulling a tube of toothpaste from her hip pouch, she gently spreads a thin layer around the edge of the skylight, unlocks the thing and pulls; the fluoride in flux with the hydrogen peroxide shorts the alarm circuit and the whole thing goes off silently.
She’s in. She’s in like Flynn. Orly drops to the ground, again like a cat.
The Rotunda of the Hawaiian State Capitol is a beautiful place, Orly thinks, even in the dark. Carved palm trees and dolphins made of koa wood surround the chamber, and the lectern looms before her like a great pineapple. She approaches it, knowing the work ahead of her: book tours! Lecture circuits! Heavens, even… even a run for office.
The lectern turns on its axis, and a panel opens behind Orly in the floor. A panel with a hydraulic trap-door. A trap door with someone on it, rising from the deep.
“Taitz,” he hisses. The faint but unmistakable ring of drawn steel gently resonates against the koa paneling.
She turns, unsheathing her machete. “Biden.”
“I knew you’d be here.”
“Then why mince words?”
Their blades meet like colliding arguments.
TO BE CONTINUED.