It was at that moment that Philipe arrived. Resplendent in an expensively tailored suit, his hair neatly trimmed, he looked almost presidential, the model of a modern leader, and he strode across the parking lot with the air and authority of one used to being in charge.
The rest of us grew quiet as he approached. I felt a strange excited shiver pass through me as Philipe stepped confidently up the curb. It was the type of moment I’d experienced before only as an observer, not as a participant. I felt the way I had in movies when the music swelled and the hero performed heroically. For the first time, I think, I realized that we were part of something big, something important.
Terrorists for the Common Man.
It was more than just a concept to me now. I finally understood what Philipe had been trying so hard to explain.
He looked at me and smiled, and it was as if he knew what I was thinking. Taking out his key and security card, he inserted both into the electronic slot on the wall next to the door, and the door clicked. He pushed it open.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
We followed him inside the building. He paused, closed and locked the door behind us, and we proceeded down a darkened corridor to an elevator. Philipe pushed the Up button, and the metal doors instantly slid open, the light inside the elevator cubicle seeming harsh and far too bright after the darkness.
“Second floor,” Philipe announced, pushing the button.
The second floor was even darker than the first, but Philipe forged ahead and turned on a bank of lights and a series of recessed fluorescents winked on, illuminating a huge room fronted by a built-in counter and partitioned off into smaller sections by modular wall segments.
“This way!” he said.
He led us behind the counter, through the modular maze of workstations, to a closed wooden door in the far wall. He opened the door, turned on the lights.
I had a queasy momentary sense of déjà vu. We were in a conference room, bare save for a long table with a television and VCR on a metal stand at its head. It looked almost exactly like the room in which I’d been introduced to Automated Interface.
“This looks just like the conference room at my old firm,” Don said.
“It looks like the training room at Ward’s.” Tommy.
“It looks like the county’s multipurpose room.” Bill.
Philipe held up his hands. “I know,” he said. He paused, looked around the room at the rest of us. “We are Ignored,” he said. He looked around the table. His gaze landed on Junior, and though he said nothing, he smiled, silently welcoming the old man to the fold. Then he continued, “We are of a kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths.
“There is a reason for this. It is not by chance or accident that our experiences echo each other’s, and it is not by chance or accident that we met and joined together. It is by design. We have been chosen for a special purpose, and we have been given this talent to use.
“Most of you did not realize at first that it was a talent. You thought it was a curse. But you’ve seen what we can do together. You’ve seen the places we can go, the actions we can perform. You’ve seen the opportunities available to us.” He paused. “We are not the only people who are Ignored. There are other Ignoreds whom we don’t know and may never know, living out their lives of quiet desperation, and it is for those people, as much as for ourselves, that we must fight. For we have the opportunity, the ability, and the obligation to claim rights for a minority that the rest of the world does not even know exists. We are here tonight not only because of what we are, but because of what we have chosen to be: Terrorists for the Common Man!”
Again, a tingle of excitement ran through me. I almost felt like cheering, and I knew the others did, too. Yes, I thought. Yes!
“What does that mean? Terrorists for the Common Man? It means that it is our responsibility to act on behalf of the forgotten and the disregarded, the unknown and the unappreciated. We will give a voice to the people who have no voice. We will bring recognition to the people who aren’t recognized. We have been ignored all our lives, but we will be ignored no more! We will make the world sit up and take notice and we will shout to anyone who will listen, ‘We are here! We are here! We are here!’”
Steve pumped his fist in the air. “Yeah!”
I felt like doing the same.
Philipe smiled. “How do we accomplish this? How do we grab the attention of a society that has so far paid no attention to us at all? Violence. Creative, constructive violence. We kidnap and take hostages, we blow up buildings, we do anything we have to do to get our point across and make Middle America sit up and take notice. Playtime’s over, kiddies. We’re in the big leagues now. And it’s time for us to get to work.”
From the inside of his expensive suit, Philipe withdrew a hammer. Calmly, coolly, he turned around and smashed the screen on the TV. There was a loud pop, and glass shattered outward, accompanied by a small shower of sparks.
He used the hammer to smash the VCR as well.
“This will get in the Orange City News,” he said. “There will be a short blurb of an article stating that a person or persons unknown broke into City Hall and destroyed audiovisual equipment. That’s it.” He knocked the TV onto the floor. “All of our previous attempts have been amateurish and unfocused. We have not gotten the attention we deserve because we did not choose our targets wisely and did not properly identify ourselves.” Once again, he reached into his jacket. “I have had cards made up. Professionally typeset business cards that list the name of our organization. We’ll leave these at the scenes of our crimes so they’ll know who we are.”
He passed the cards around, and we all got a look at them. White with red lettering, they said:
THIS IS A BLOW FOR THE IGNORED
TERRORISTS FOR THE COMMON MAN
“Yes!” Steve said. “Yes!”
“Now the more damage we do, of course, the bigger the articles about us will be, the more attention our acts will get.” He walked around the table, past us. “Come on.”
We followed him out to the room with the workstations. He bent down to turn on a computer terminal that was sitting atop a desk. “They forgot about me,” he said. “They didn’t think to change my password. Their mistake.” He pulled up an initial security screen, typed in an ID and password, and a list of property records appeared on the screen. In one column were the names of the parcel owners, in another the assessed valuation of each property.
Philipe pressed two keys.
The records were deleted.
“Gone,” he said. “Now we’ll be portrayed as expert computer hackers who deleted hundreds of important government records. It’ll probably make the Register. Maybe the Orange County edition of the Times.”
He straightened up, pulling the terminal onto the floor, where it fell with a crash. He kicked in the screen, then used his arm to clear the top of the desk, sweeping everything onto the floor.
“We can do anything we want,” he said, “and they’ll never be able to catch us!” He jumped on top of the desk, held his hammer high. “Let’s tear this fucking place apart!”
Like Willard’s rats, we set about following his order. I tipped over one of the modular walls, smashed a terminal myself. I pulled open file drawers, yanking out anything I could lay my hands on. It felt good, this destruction, invigorating, and we spread out, taking out our aggression and frustrations on the anonymous inanimate objects of Orange City Hall.
We trashed the entire floor.