something of a character

11:30 PM. It’s been six hours on the road, and we’re still an hour out from the place we’re crashing for the night. I get a call on my cell phone. I don’t recognize the number, but it’s starts with (917) … NYC. Nearly midnight is pretty late for a phone call from an unknown number, but I’m sure it has to do with tomorrow’s heist. I pick up.

It’s someone named Myke. He says he’s working with Nisha, and he’s going to meet me and Kiyash at the main entrance to the Coachella Music Festival. He names a 2-hour window of opportunity to find him, tells me what he’ll be wearing and that Nisha will email me a photo to confirm that’s he’s one of the good guys. He gives me a codeword to introduce myself by tomorrow when when we spot him. He’ll hand off a pair of tickets to the festival.

I’ll fill you in on the details of the meet after it goes down. For now, better to keep them to myself. I wouldn’t want to see any other mercenaries intercept this info and pick up the passes on our behalf. Or, make any trouble for Myke.

Once we're in, we’ll spend the afternoon and evening blending in at the shows. We've got a second meet up with the other 4 retrievers, and we'll be making a few other face-to-face connections to set up our local support network. They'll be a handful of good guys on site not officially in on mission, including a couple of really good guys from Melissa’s old crew. We've also got an amazing crew online making sure those of us in the field are up to date on everything going down. They kept me up to speed last night on the road with calls and text messages.

It's good to have allies.

So: We’ll do some scouting on site during the festival performances. Then we wait until the heist goes down… Late. At the afterparty.

Don’t know what our roles will be yet. But you can watch the mission live from a Web cam. 11 PM – 3 AM.

Update: Arrived safely at the hotel. Got the picture of Myke from Nisha. He appears to be something of a character.

He’ll go perfectly with my pink wig.