Pursuits Unknown

by Ellen Clary

  They had figured out the area where the suspect phone calls were coming from and had narrowed it down to the poor guy sweating and fidgeting in the interrogation room. He was on the stocky side, which might explain the sweating, but his demeanor was that of a kid in the principal’s office.

  Beth and Gimli walked into the room. Beth had Gimli sit off to the side where he could see both of them, and then she walked to the table to sit on the other side of the man.

  She looked at her tablet. “Al Beyer, the Director of New Technology and Planning.”

  Al took in a breath and made a very short nod.

  “I’m Detective Beth Hanscom, and,” she motioned towards Gimli, “this is LAI Canine Agent Gimli.”

  Al looked quite askance at the elaborate title. “Looks like a dog to me.”

  “He is, and he is also my assistant.”

  Yolanda had to stifle a laugh. She thought, Beth enjoys this entirely too much.

  Beth said to Al, “As you no doubt know, you have been recorded arranging for the transport of stolen goods. You have waived your right to have an attorney present for this meeting because (a) you are not yet under arrest and (b) you have information that you think would be helpful to us. This meeting is being recorded for review by any legal or other personnel. Do you understand this so far?”

  Al nodded.

  Beth asked, “Okay, Al, who were you talking to, and was it your client for the stolen data units?”

  Al’s eyes shifted and he licked his lips. Yolanda could see his regret at agreeing to this, but he had the air of someone who thought there was no other choice. He said, “I don’t know, they don’t give me real names.”

  Yolanda quietly asked Gimli, “What do you smell about him?” She tended to talk aloud unless it was necessary for silence. Over time, she had been teaching Gimli to smell the stress hormone cortisol, and also to notice sweat and agitation.

  /He scared. Stressed./

  Yolanda said into her connection to Beth, who was wearing an earpiece, “Gimli says he’s stressed and frightened.”

  Beth looked at Al. “My dog here is a lie detector and he doesn’t believe you, Al. What am I going to do about that?”

  Yolanda chortled. Beth had no idea what Gimli the corgi was saying, yet she was learning some neat tactics when a dog was willing to sit beside her.

  “Who cares about what some dog thinks?”

  “He can smell your fear. Why are you so terrified?”

  “You can’t get that from a dog.”

  “He can smell fear, and I can see it, too. There’s a light bit of sweat on your forehead.”

  “It’s hot in here,” he said.

  “Your breathing is different, you can’t sit still. What has you so spooked? What’s with these people?”

  “You don’t know what they can do,” he said.

  “I have an idea, but tell me more.”

  “No.”

  Beth leaned forward across the desk. “Don’t take the fall for this, Al. You’re in a heap of trouble, and you have the opportunity to make it better.” She paused. “Or worse.”

  He put his head in his hands, with one hand on each temple. To the floor he said, “We just build labs.”

  “What did they have you build?”

  “A sort of elaborate setup in two converted storage containers, including DNA sequencers, a semi-large electron microscope—lots of computers.”

  “What are they doing with it?”

  “Something to do with nanobot research, but they wouldn’t talk about it much, which makes our job harder.”

  “What was unusual about it?”

  “They wanted lots of hospital equipment that is usually used to monitor people.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like blood pressure and respiration, but also heart rate and brain waves.”

  Beth leaned back slightly and said levelly. “They want to test nanobots on humans.”

  “I guess,” he said. “But that’s not that weird these days.”

  Thinking back to Herman and Lincoln and what started all this, Beth said, “It’s not weird unless it’s used to hurt them.”

  Al looked up quickly, looking shocked. White was showing all around his pupils. “They wouldn’t do that, would they?”

  “They already have. You already have.”

  “WHAT?” He tried to stand up and Beth put a hand on his shoulder, guiding him back to the chair.

  “Those nanobots raised their heart rates to nearly past their hearts’ ability. They were remotely controlled, by you and your people, and stayed that way until we shielded them from the outside world after we got you to turn the nanobot attack off.”

  Al, looking at the table, said, “But that’s not possib—”

  “Al, your people activated the nanobots and made threatening phone calls demanding the decryption codes.”

  “How do you know it was nanobots and not a poison?”

  “Because your person told us over the phone and it stopped once they were shielded.”

  “They were just following instructions from the client. Stand here and press this button.”

  Beth crossed her arms, looking straight at him. “You expect me to believe that? We have your delivery person who made the phone call in custody and we’re not letting him go. He’s blaming this whole thing on you.”

  Al was now very pale, and he was looking intently at the floor. Shaking his head, he said, “Oh, no. No. You can have antennas on nanobots, but it’s a close-range antenna. We didn’t know.” He paused again, looking very hard at a point in space in the room.

  “But you chose to use the nanobots to demand the decryption key. That’s assault with a deadly weapon at a minimum.”

  Yolanda thought he was going to cry.

  Al said, “This is terrible—a weapon.”

  Beth was angry now and Yolanda had to reassure Gimli not to run. “How naive can you possibly be? What the hell were you thinking? What did they tell you would happen?”

  “They said it might make them uncomfortable, but they didn’t say anything else.”

  “Oh sure, of course they didn’t.” Yolanda thought she was going to hit him. Beth got right in his face. “Do not lie to me.”

  “I don’t even know how the nanobots got into them. They just told me they were.”

  Yolanda asked Gimli, “How stressed is he?”

  /Stressed./

  Yolanda said to Beth, “Al is very stressed, but you knew that.” Yolanda could see the ghost of a smile on Beth’s face.

  “Who are these people, Al?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking truly miserable.

  “How did they hire you?”

  “Through a third party. One of those anonymizer services where they don’t know who their clients are.”

  “Oh, we just love those,” Beth said sarcastically. “But you have a deliverable.”

  “They had us build it into two shipping containers that can be joined together at their site. A different company will then put it together onsite, is our understanding. We had to create elaborate instructions and even a video on the assembly and on packing it to be shipped, which was an enormous pain.”

  “That’s actually useful to know, as they no doubt had to pull permits to transport something like that. Was it on trucks?”

  Al looked relieved; he appeared to be thinking that he might not have to contact the other company. “Yes, they will robo-truck it north and from there, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Perfect, and we will need to know the other company, though we might not need to contact them if we can find other documentation. What day is it supposed to move?”

  “Tomorrow, actually.”

  Beth went on, “Please give us the container numbers, so we can track them through the system. You are under arrest, but we’re going to let you continue working while the District Attorney decides what your charges will be. The more normal you can make your business look, the easier it will be for us, and
that might help you to climb out of this hole you’ve dug yourself into. On the same note, don’t tip them off.”

  Al’s eyebrows went up, and inhaling, he said, “I think I’m pretty done with them. They were bugging me for other things, but I think I’m going to say no.”

  “We will still be monitoring things and we’d like it if we could get a decrypted monitoring line for your phone in case they call back.”

  Al looked resigned and said, “Okay, but I’ll have to tell the owners.”

  “Oh, rest assured we’ll be talking to them as well. And practice your acting. Everything is normal.”

  Al looked both relieved and worried.

  Beth reached down to pet Gimli.

  Yolanda, still in the other room, told him, “Nice job Gim, burger later.”

  He looked up at Beth with a doggy grin on his face. /Burger. Burger./

  Yolanda, smiling to herself, decided not to tell Beth that Gimli’s happiness had a lot more to do with food than petting.

  CHAPTER 28:

  Shipping Containers

  DURING THE staff meeting, Catherine read from her tablet. “Okay, the Anderson kids have been returned to their parents after their ‘let’s take the wrong subway train and take a long walk into the wetlands paths’ adventure. Now, on to the stolen data unit issue. I’m going to hand it off to Beth.”

  Beth stood up. “We’ve made arrests at Applied Sciences. We’re now tracking a couple of shipping containers going north to an unknown destination, and we’ll find them. I want to thank you all for all the hard work chasing this down. We’ll continue things on our end, but I think you all should take a break and do what you enjoy the most, as you’re the best at it.”

  Harris said, “If you’ve lost someone—”

  They all said, “Call Locate and Investigate.”

  “Hear, hear,” Beth said and raised a mimed glass. “And best to all the wonderful dogs, too.”

  Harris asked, “Before they leave, could we get a look at the containers, just to see how they’re put together?”

  Beth said, “Sure. I’ll let Al know and he can help you figure out how to get through security without leaving a record.”

  “Geek,” Amy said to Harris, smiling.

  “For that, you get to come with me,” Harris said.

  Amy gave him a cautious look. “I feel a teaching moment coming on.”

  LATER, HARRIS and Amy pulled up to what appeared to be a staging site next to Applied Sciences. Just before he lowered the window to speak to the guard, he turned his face to Amy and said conspiratorially, “By the way, we’re Bob and Cathy.”

  Amy, stuck for a reply, said, “Er, okay.”

  But Harris had already reached down on the floor and recovered a clipboard, which Amy thought was a nice, very old-school touch. He lowered the window, lifted a page on the clipboard, and said to the guard, “Could you contact Al and tell him that Bob and Cathy, from A-1 Deliverables, would like to take some last-minute measurements?”

  Amy was surprised that the guard immediately nodded and started talking on his handheld. After a moment, the guard nodded, opened the gate, told Harris a couple of long numbers that Harris wrote down, and waved them through.

  Once out of earshot of the guard, Amy said, “I do not effing believe this. You just crashed a gate, without even crashing it, and what the hell is A-1 Deliverables?”

  Harris handed her a business card that said exactly that, with a phone number on it and no name. Harris, answering her just-about-to-ask question, said, “The number goes to a generic voicemail that just repeats the phone number.”

  Amy shook her head. “My secret agent boy.”

  They pulled up to what had to be the Applied Sciences shipping containers in question.

  “And why are we here?” Amy asked.

  “I wanted to see how they put the lab-in-a-container together. The containers are going to be joined up along the long side,” he said pointing at the edge, “but see, you can’t take away the whole side of the container or it compromises the structural integrity and you have to add more reinforcements. Instead, they’ve just taken out a third of each one and replaced it with a roll up door. What’s weird is that while there are some smaller added outside doors, there aren’t any added windows, which is a common alteration. Someone must be really paranoid about security.”

  Amy said, “Well the paranoid forgot about someone just letting anyone in to take a look around.”

  Looking at the door he said, “We can’t really see much inside because it’s packed for transport, but they tell me it’s pretty standard-issue lab fare, save for the human monitoring equipment that’s over here.” He pointed to one side of one of the containers furthest from the door co-joining door.

  Walking to the end of the containers, he took photos of the numbers on the end, which started with four letters and eight numbers plus another number set off at the end.

  Pointing at the end number, he said, “See this number?”

  “How could I not?” Amy said.

  “The first letters are who it belongs to, in this case Minuteman Transport, MMT, and the U means General cargo, then a unique number and a check digit. The check digit is a check to make sure that the number was recorded correctly.”

  “U because there’s no U in General.”

  “Exactly,” he said, smiling and waving a pointed finger in the air.

  Amy couldn’t resist asking, “Why can’t they just put up a giant bar code?”

  “Because humans still like to look and see a number. Do you know how the check digit is computed?”

  Uh-oh, Amy realized that the teaching moment had arrived.

  “Each letter is given a value for its position in the alphabet. A is 10, B is 11, J is 20. Get it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then each letter is multiplied by 2 to the power of its position in the number.”

  “You lost me.”

  “It’s not too bad.”

  “So you say.”

  “2 to the 0th power is 1, 2 to the 1st is 2, 2 to the 2nd is 4. So just remember 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on.”

  Amy looked at him with eyebrows raised. “I assure you, I’m not going to remember any of this.”

  “But wait, it gets better.” Harris was becoming more intense.

  “You add all those multiplied numbers up and divide by 11 and make it an integer.”

  “This is getting way complicated.”

  “Now multiply it by 11.”

  “Harris, you need to stop.”

  “Almost done.”

  Amy tried to catch his eye, saying, “Hello? Anyone in there?”

  “And the last step is to subtract your final result from adding all the numbers up.”

  “Harris.” Amy tried to put her hands on his shoulders, but he was gesticulating too much.

  “AND,” he said with a flourish, “that is your check digit.”

  Pointing at the container on the left, Amy said, “So, you just calculated that check digit?”

  “Naw, I just have my handheld optically scan it and do the math.”

  Looking around for Harris’s dog, Amy said, “Boomer, would you bite Harris please?”

  “He’s used to this.”

  Looking right at the water dog, Amy asked, “For me please? Pretty please with a cookie on top?”

  Both Boomer and Lars started to bounce at the mention of “cookie.”

  “Now, you’ve done it,” Harris said.

  “And,” poking him in the chest, “you have to pay up.”

  Harris reached in his pocket and gave each dog a treat.

  Then he reached into his backpack, pulled out a small disc, and looked around. “Do you see something I could stand on? It only needs to help me reach up high and this particular container is eight feet high, so it doesn’t have to be huge.”

  “I see a bucket over there. Will that work?”

  “As long as I don’t fall through it.”

 
Amy went and got it. “Okay, fess up, what are you up to?”

  He sighed and said, “This is such bullshit.”

  “Please feel free to explain,” she said.

  He showed her a small disk. “This is a GPS tracking device that I’m going to attach up high on both containers. It’s completely silly that I should have to do this at all. All containers should already have GPS tracking built in. I should be able to find out where any container is in the world within a few seconds.”

  “Well, there have been a lot of privacy concerns about them.”

  “This is a box, this isn’t someone’s car. If I were a container shipping company, I’d want to know where all my boxes were at any instant. The only reason it shouldn’t be contactable for an extended period of time is if it’s inside a building or at the bottom of the ocean.”

  Harris stood on the bucket and affixed the coin-like device to a place a few inches below the top, using a little of that super glue that he carried around with him.

  Hopping off the bucket, he again dug into his backpack and removed a jar about the size of the palm of his head. He opened it and instantly the air smelled of fish. Both dogs spun around and Amy took a step back.

  “I’m sure you’re going to explain that one too.”

  “This is a solution of Mulgoo, which is a fish that is only down here and not up north.” He started to paint it along the bottom of each container on the end, below the numbers. Both dogs were trying to inhale it, but Harris held them back. “Let it dry, then it won’t come off even under a power washer.”

  Amy was giving him that “Why?” look.

  “I just thought a little low-tech backup tracking device might be helpful.”

  Amy shook her head. “Sure, if you want to attract every animal in the area. With any luck, we’ll never see these boxes again.”

  “Hopefully.”

  “I think I’ve had enough education for one day,” she added as they headed off.

  CHAPTER 29: