But this story is just my cover, my headliner, my Clark Kent.
I down a couple of quick cyanide tabs—I know, I know: I’m working on it—and brace myself for what I say next.
“I am a pulse.”
The Life
As soon as I utter that word I gasp and reflexively hold my breath. At ninety it tickles. At one-eighty it pinches. After four minutes2 my lungs go taut and my eyes feel stretched out like an overtuned guitar string and I have to let it go. Coast still clear. No sign of Herk. Schermer and his asshole friends aren’t doing rounds. I can still hear the dieseling groan of the roof-top AC unit four floors away and if I concentrate I can hear one of the stoolies riffling the pages of his girlie magazine. He’s got the radio on low but I can make out a staticky ad for that new Covet perfume.3 I even detect the electricity crackling in the walls. All normal sounds. No one has heard me.
So I screw up the guts and say it again. Out loud.
“I am a pulse.”
I am sure Charlie won’t have heard about pulses. Most law-abiding people haven’t. Being an art historian, she may have heard another term for us floating around. There are a million names, and you hear them all on the job. Pulse, body, mack, Johnny, pinker, voice, vox, squealer, Jagger, spoiler, eyeball, sitter, squatter, asstimer, watcher, fido, spook, caspar. Different names for the same thing. If you are a national government who wants to hang on to your military secrets, if you are a plutocrat with an extensive personal collection of bronze Shang-dynasty water-buffalo-themed kuangs, if you are a multinational corporation who wants to keep what is yours yours, then you need to put a pulse in the room—a human guard with a finger on the button when the high-tech talent disables your safeguards and penetrates your compound. To say that we are elite security guards doesn’t quite cover it. We are the reason why the Crown Jewels still belong to Great Britain and why warheads haven’t shown up in Iran. We are also the reason why every crime story you’ve ever seen or read is either hilarious or just plain stupid.
Herk and I have a few favorites:
Mission: Impossible. It’s cool, all right, when Tom Cruise and his badass crew infiltrate the government complex as firemen on a call. But when they crawl through the air shafts and Tom gets lowered on a trapeze from the ceiling vent so as not to set off the sensors in the floor and then sets about “hacking into the system” it’s hard not to snicker. Do you think that if the US government is going to pay millions of dollars on a custom system of thermosensitive receivers, pressure-sensing floor plates, and multiple retinal-scanning hydraulic-sealing door locks, they are not going to hire a pulse? I’m not kidding—one mediocre pulse in that room with his finger on the button and Tom Cruise and his Supercuts hairdo are history.