by Eden Sharp
The door opened by an unseen hand and I marched myself toward it. A non-descript guy with spectacles handed me my jacket.
From the weight of it I could feel its inner pocket still contained my phone. I bunched it in my left hand, not prepared to slow my forward momentum to put it on, and bowled down the corridor toward an exit with the spectacle guy alongside me for the ride.
He pointed to a door and I went through into a hallway with a bank of elevators. He pressed the up button and a pair of doors slid open to reveal an empty steel box. I stepped inside with him close behind.
He hit a button which said one and after an interminable time which would have amounted to no more than seconds, the doors opened into a corridor of what appeared to be a normal office building with people bustling around with paperwork and files. He finally pointed at glass doors past a reception desk which looked like they exited onto the street.
I mustered as much dignity as I could manage in my dishevelled and dirty state and marched toward them. Clean, fragrant, ordinary looking office workers looked up as I passed by and stared. As I was almost there, a very young guy stopped me in my tracks as he cut across me armed with a sheaf of papers which he extended toward the reception area, intended for the woman sitting behind the desk.
I brought up my free hand and punched a swathe through the pile, showering the stack onto the floor behind me which made me feel somewhat better and I stomped out into the street.
33
I darted across the road and dodged the relentless traffic, still feeling a sense of eyes on me. I scanned the buildings ahead. As much as I was desperate to go home and check to see if my computers had been compromised as well as getting the stench of incarceration off me, I needed to find some temporary vantage point to hole up and note down properly where I’d just been released from. My brain made out a large building with many windows across the street, with large signage and a revolving door and came up with hotel.
I propelled myself through the door, my body an irresistible force, aware that anyone taking too close a look at me would not hesitate to have me ejected. I pulled on my jacket and shimmied through a small group of people taking up maximum space in a lobby and flung myself through a rapidly closing elevator door so as not to trigger the sensor and have it slide back open again.
An elderly well-dressed woman in a gold buttoned wool suit and carrying a leather tote looked horrified and stiffly stabbed at a button without taking her eyes off me. As I reached over she shrunk backwards.
I hit three and felt in my inside pocket for my cell, pulled it out and registered the time and date. Saturday 13th. It took a moment to compute. I’d been taken on Thursday. I turned my attention to my companion unaware of which floor she had requested. Whether or not she’d previously intended to, she moved forward to exit on two. As soon as she had her back to me I slid my specially encrypted NSA phone into her purse.
On three I made for the front facing windows, pushed aside the voile curtains and checked the name of the street and the number of the innocuous looking office building I’d been kept in for who knew how long?
I recognized where I was in downtown San Francisco then ran for the stairs, taking them two and three at a time until I found myself on the same floor as the kitchens from the contrasting grimy corridors and food prep smells. I pushed through several white-outfitted bodies from cooking to wash up areas until I found the door to the street where I took off running. I felt like I’d never be able to stop.
I headed for the heart of the Tenderloin and some of the more notorious streets which divided the area up and acted like a menu for narcotics. On Eddy and Larkin, the teens parked on corners, sold prescription pills. The favorites were Oxycodone, a synthetic analgesic similar to morphine, for pain and Benzodiazepines, psychoactive drugs for anxiety.
The area was well equipped with cheap lodgings making for a convenience where you could hobble down the block from your room to score. If Oxy and Benzos weren’t your thing, at Turk and Leavenworth, they sold heroin to addicts who came up from San Mateo County or Marin. Near UN Plaza they sold crack. Everywhere in between, they sold meth.
Anything more pedestrian like marijuana stayed down on Market Street which had more foot traffic from tourists venturing out into the outskirts of the badlands to semi-experience a walk on the wild side. I headed for UN Plaza.
Nearby some homeless people congregated as a group from a Catholic church gave away hot meals. Some of them ironically made a few dollars from the various food trucks around the city. I had seen a homeless person stand near a food truck and ask someone to buy them a meal only to give it straight back to the food truck owner in return for half the cost before the owner sold the same meal to their next customer. San Francisco was a place of sharp inequalities.
Down a back street, I spotted a kid, leaning on the handlebars of a good-looking mountain bike, feet on the floor waiting to sell his next rock. I hustled over, looking and smelling the part of someone down on their luck without even trying. I nodded to him and carried on by a distance drawing him into the shadows on the far side of the street, something which should have been working the other way round. Except he wasn’t smart enough to realize that. He looked back over his shoulder to check for cops then cycled over to me, standing up on the pedals, before coming to a stop with a half-hearted sideways skid.
He managed to get one foot down on the ground. Before he could plant the other and achieve balance, I shot out an arm, grabbed him by the throat, dragged him off the bike, bounced his head off the wall behind me and punched him in his solar plexus to take the wind out of him. He collapsed in a heap at my feet. I rifled through his pockets checking for weapons, ignoring baggies and found his cell and a wedge of bills. I pocketed both, hauled him up, holding him in a wrist lock with one hand, and pinned my forearm across his throat with the other. He looked Honduran and around twelve-years-old although he was probably just small for his age and around fifteen at least.
‘Let me tell you something,’ I said. ‘Today’s a good day to get out. Go do something else with your life before it’s too late.’
I hit him again to knock the wind out which gave me a moment in the clear to pick up his bike and gain enough momentum to pedal back towards Market.
On the way I spotted one of the blue vans belonging to the street outreach services. A middle-aged woman sat behind the wheel while two of her co-workers went from one street person to the next dispensing basic healthcare. I separated two twenties from the roll so I could get a cab and gave the rest along with the bike to one of the medics as a donation.
I had the cab driver drop me a block back from my building like I always did. As an investigator I was always conscious of keeping my address private but I realized that up until now my paranoia probably hadn’t been as warranted as it was currently. I was nervous enough as I approached the entrance. I couldn’t imagine what I’d feel like going into my apartment.
I knew all of the concierge staff on the reception and George was a favorite. I tried to forget what I looked like and asked him I had any mail and if anyone had called to see me. Negative on both counts. My mind went back to the removal trucks from a few days earlier. The perfect cover for some kind of mobile command post. I asked him if any residents were moving in or out. He told me that a couple of floors below me a property was being vacated as its current owners were emigrating. One less thing to worry about.
The elevator began its journey to my apartment. Another thought struck me. The unidentified guys claiming to be DoD were most likely CIA. They must have provided the additional information about me. I needed to find out how cozy they were with the Feds. The question also arose whether Paul knew and had kept it from me. I felt very alone again.
At six hundred feet above the city I had always felt like I was in a bubble at the top of the world and safe. Not anymore. I could feel my heart rate pick up exponentially as I entered my apartment as though I expected my interrogator to be sitting on my couch.
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I turned right off the hall and into what should have been the living room but which I used as a bedroom and switched on every light as I went even though the wall to wall glass provided plenty of light. Nothing looked out of place. I walked through to the room beyond which the architect had intended to be the master bedroom. The desk and chair were in position and the assorted boxes of stored items appeared to be unopened and unmoved.
I walked into my closet. Everything was how I’d left it. Or maybe someone had been here and they were that good. It occurred to be that the place could be rigged with cameras. I shook it off and pushed a row of clothes aside, felt for the release of the magnetic catch, stepped under the rail and walked through into the space behind to check out my machines.
The icy cold air-conditioning made me shiver but by then I was already shaking. I hit up the machines lining the back wall one by one in quick succession with a totally alien set of start-up commands to which they were programmed to have a set response to. They started to nuke themselves, deleting files and corrupting drives. Any identifying components had already been disabled. My high-performance parallel computing cluster was now lost to me forever.
I left them, showered quickly and grabbed a gym bag in my closet and started stuffing clothes into it. I couldn’t risk taking my new laptop in case it had been compromised. The same went for my collection of burner phones. I accessed the hidden compartment underneath my underwear drawer and took cash, a nylon holster, two spare mags of 9mm parabellums and my SIG. I felt better for having it in my hand but had to force myself to holster it at the small of my back while I quickly changed into some clean clothes.
I went back through to check on my machines. The carnage was done. I began ripping out cables and stacking up CPUs and monitors to carry out to the door. I left them stacked by the entrance of my apartment and opened up the front door half expecting to see a bunch of guys in suits ready to take me away.
I hit the elevator button and descended a couple of floors. The removal guys were still working, on a weekend and after arriving at the start of the week. They were using the freight elevator to transport boxes down to the lot. Each crate had Bay Self-Store printed on the side with the tagline, Storage solutions that work for you. I typed it into my new drug dealer phone and read through their website.
The company had more than thirty-five years of experience in the self-storage industry, headquarters in San Jose and I noted a line about its offices being near the facilities they managed. Another boasted that most of their clients had been with them for over ten years because they offered a high quality service with real value on price.
Two guys in green overalls with the firm’s name on, had been employed on the move. A stack of flat cartons rested along the wall in various sizes. One guy was in the hall assembling them for another guy who was packing inside. Filled boxes were then brought out and taped up by the first. The size of each, around two feet cubed, indicated smaller items. The boxes were stacked on a trolley and presumably put into the elevator when full.
‘Hi guys I’m from the concierge service and just wondered how things were coming along. I need to schedule maintenance for the freight elevator and need to estimate some downtime.’
‘This is the last of it,’ he said. ‘Another hour.’
I got close enough to a clipboard with paperwork on it resting on one of the boxes to read the names of the client, Jill and Sandy Hicks. Three-year contract. They were going to be away for a while at least.
‘Listen how much for another ten boxes, similarly sized? I got some extras I need storage for to make way for new stuff incoming.’
‘You’d have to call the office about that.’
I looked at his footwear. He was wearing cheap work boots, no steel caps. I wondered how much they got paid. Probably not a lot.
‘Listen, the Hicks they’ll be gone a few years. People forget what they have in storage when they move abroad. Get new items. Lose interest in the old stuff they had before. It just becomes junk to them. I’ve got to move out some old office stuff today. Would a couple of hundred bucks cover it? Cash? I won’t need to retrieve it and I’m against the clock.’
He stared at me and I thought he was going to refuse point blank.
‘Make it two hundred each, for me and my buddy, and you’ve got yourself a deal.’
‘Okay then.’
I’d started low, figuring he’d gouge me if it sounded like a plan. For all I knew, with no paperwork, they’d just dump the boxes anyhow or more likely open them up and sell on the contents. It didn’t matter to me and at least I knew there were only two of them.
‘I’ll pack them myself and send them down. Save you a job while you’re finishing up here.’
I grabbed an armful of flatpack crates and some tape and headed back upstairs. When I was done I watched him pocket the cash then stack my boxes with the remaining few onto the trolley. His buddy was still inside. Maybe cut out of the deal.
I took the passenger elevator down a couple more floors and used my bag to keep the door from closing and prevent anyone calling the car. I checked to see the hallways were empty in both directions which probably gave me a few minutes. I stripped off my boots, jacket and jeans, stashing them in my bag and changed into a too short, acid yellow, hoochie dress, a cropped denim jacket, reasonably-heeled stripper shoes and a blond wig.
At the desk, I asked George for a taxi and noticed the double take, despite an attempt at subtlety.
‘Costume party,’ I said.
I directed my driver to take me to the Tenderloin’s Marie hotel, a low-end dive for budget tourists or local hourly renters. I’d left my car behind because even if it wasn’t tracked, the neighborhood parking was insecure and still cost nearly fifty bucks a night.
It was apparent the management had never considered slapping a new coat of paint on the walls or replacing the sagging beds. Inside my new home I took out the stolen cell and checked its contents. Only a minimal amount of numbers stored. As much as I wanted to make contact with Charlie to ask him about the files I didn’t want some dealer higher up the chain tracking the GPS so I disassembled the battery and chip. For now, I couldn’t go on without a good night’s sleep. At least the sheets looked clean.
34
Sunday May 14th
There was nothing like waking up on a Sunday morning with the sounds of a pimp beating the hell of out of some guy while one of his girls looked on. Maybe she hadn’t been paid or the guy had requested something off-plan. Even this early and on the Sabbath, commerce didn’t stop.
I made my way past a fast-moving pair of shell-shocked out-of-towners now savvy to the type of establishment afforded to those on a budget in this city. They shrunk back a little as I passed. I was wearing the same outfit as the day before to fit in and hopefully go unnoticed in this part of town, which apparently explained their caution.
The newspaper stands were full of Ellis. Headlines promised naming and shaming, and corruption all the way to City Hall. The Chronicle was running a series of stories from various families. They had set up a hotline to direct people to those who might help.
I should have been happy people were uniting in support of one another but I was still shaken. I changed into my normal clothes in a McDonald’s bathroom and headed over to Charlie’s place.
He opened the door and I watched his face go from pained to surprised.
‘Everything okay with you?’ Charlie asked.
I nodded as a reflex but I knew he didn’t buy it. I needed to find out what I could about the files. I stepped inside.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ he asked.
I nodded and he disappeared into the kitchen. It was just the kind of welcome I was looking for.
Up on the roof it was a nice morning and with the mellow tunes and the view, the only things missing were my intact nerves.
‘How are you holding up?’ I asked, as an opening to a conversation I wasn’t sure I wanted to have.
‘Th
ere’s something I need to talk to you about,’ he said. ‘It’s not good news.’
I was becoming accustomed to anything but.
‘I bugged Guzek from the off. He’s been talking to someone about how he’s modified the code on the software. He’s shipping it to the government with malware already in it. It’s going to be accessible remotely so it can be jacked.’
Jesus. How much worse could this thing get? This changed everything. My mind raced.
‘You think he found your back door?’
‘No I checked. But he’s written in one of his own. It was one thing that the government might try to use the tech illegally but he now has a plan to sell access to the highest bidder. That could be a foreign national, terrorist organization, anyone. You can just imagine the scenario, a false US strike on a sovereign territory and the kickstart to another major war.’
I needed to bring in Paul on this and fast.
‘I’m going to have to call this in,’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ Charlie said softly. ‘He’s setting me up. He’s all about the money and there’s no way he’d jeopardize that. He’ll make a killing on both the shares and selling the access. He’s going to make this look like my signature. They’d only find out when it was too late and even off-grid there’d be no holds barred in their attempt to find me. I’d forever be looking over my shoulder expecting an assassin and, in the event of our plans going south, any deal would be long gone. They’d end me if they thought I was capable of this. I need you to trust me.’
