Twist and Turn

by Tim Tigner

That frightful notion vanished a second later when the glow in the windshield became discernible. It was an Uber, an Uber Black most likely, given that the vehicle was a new Audi. Much better than a cop, but still an unwelcome intrusion. A dilemma to deal with.

  The A7 pulled around the circular drive and came to a stop before the restaurant’s front door. In a second the driver would alert his fare to his arrival. He would, of course, receive no reply. His customer was unconscious. The associated cell phone powered off with its battery removed.

  Bruce hit the push-to-talk switch on the bone induction mic in his ear. “Seb, Webb, we need to knock this guy out immediately.”

  “Roger that,” they replied in unison.

  Knocking someone out with AcotocA was as simple as slipping an active system over their ears. The effect was as immediate as firing a gun because it completely disrupted brain function. The trick was accessing the ears without interference from the fists.

  With the diners, they had solved the problem by having them face the wall. While Seb moved their hands from the back of their heads to the small of their backs, Webb slipped AcotocA over their ears.

  With the Uber driver, it wouldn’t be so easy. For starters, they’d have to get him out of the car.

  “We could just let him go,” Danica said. “He’ll likely drive off if his fare doesn’t show. With Uber, he still gets paid.”

  Bruce looked over at his wife, pleased that she’d voiced her concern directly rather than over the mic so all could hear. “We can’t risk it now that he’s seen two guys on Segways. It’s unusual enough that he might report it—especially if he’s the suspicious type or has a friend or relative in law enforcement. And he’s not likely to drive off without investigating. Uber drivers rely on high customer ratings. A single one-star review can crush their average.”

  Before Danica could respond, the driver ended the debate by exiting his vehicle.

  Seb and Webb meanwhile had abandoned their Segways at the edge of the drive and were also walking toward the restaurant door.

  Reminding himself that the driver had no reason to be suspicious, that he probably waited for his fares to show as often as not, Bruce attempted to remain calm. He watched the engineers time their approach to coincide with the driver’s. Seb was out in front, walking a few paces faster. A man in a hurry. As he passed the driver, he looked over, smiled, nodded and tripped. He went down with a thud on the flagstone path, directly in front of the driver.

  The man couldn’t ignore him. To do so, he would literally have to step over Seb’s fallen body.

  Seb propped himself up on an elbow and began shaking his head.

  The man stooped over and extended a hand.

  Webb slipped an AcotocA headset from his backpack and attempted to clap it over the man’s ears, but the driver sensed the aggression and swatted the system away. “What the hell is going on here?! What is that thing?”

  Seb rolled onto his feet, pinning the man between them.

  “Help!” the man shouted toward the door.

  “It’s for your own good,” Webb said.

  “Bullshit,” the man said, dropping into a combat stance. Right leg back, right arm cocked, weight evenly distributed between two flat feet.

  Seb pulled an MP7 from his backpack and leveled it at the driver. “The choice is yours. His—” he nodded toward the headset in Webb’s hand, “or mine.” He moved the selector on his submachine gun from safety to single shot. “Choose now.”

  The man glanced back and forth, unable to believe what was happening.

  “Now!” Seb repeated, raising the barrel to heart level.

  The man raised his hands.

  Webb acted quickly, scooting in and slipping the headset over the man’s ears, then catching him as he dropped.

  Bruce and Danica emerged from the shadows to join them.

  “What do we do now?” Danica asked. “Do we leave him with the restaurant staff or take him with the diners?”

  Seb returned the MP7 to his backpack. “No sense mixing an Uber driver in with the diners, not with what we have planned.”

  Bruce turned to Danica. “What’s your best guess on how much memory this guy will lose?”

  “Looking at his unconscious body, the only thing I have to go on is age. Three to five minutes is my best guess, but it could be as little as one.”

  “So he might remember what Seb and Webb look like?” Bruce pressed.

  “That’s a distinct possibility.”

  Bruce turned to Webb, the hardware engineer. “Can you crank up the power on his system? Here and now?”

  “Best to do it on a system that’s not on his head. Given the tools at my disposal, I’ll have to physically crack the case open and bypass a regulator.”

  “Get to it,” Bruce commanded before turning back to Danica. “If we double the amperage, what will that buy us?”

  “At least two minutes—but the shock might kill him.”

  Bruce knew death was a distinct possibility with AcotocA, as with most surgical systems, if it was misused. That was the stated reason for the FDA’s denial of their application. “We don’t have a choice. He’s seen two of our faces.”

  The diners had also seen the engineers, but Seb and Webb were disguised and presented as fellow patrons. Furthermore, given the way AcotocA prevented active memory from being stored, none of the captives would remember anything that happened after they were summoned to leave the room. Not the two additional masked men. Not turning to face the wall. And certainly not the application of the AcotocA system.

  “I’m going to put his car in the employee lot,” Seb said. “Help add to the confusion.”

  “How much longer?” Bruce asked Webb.

  Webb didn’t answer. He was fully focused on the circuitboard laid bare beneath his fingertips. After a few seconds, he said, “Done.”

  He handed the headset to Bruce, who held it open around the driver’s head. As Webb slid the functioning pair off, Bruce slapped the modified pair on. Given the stakes, he was surprised when nothing happened.

  “Help me move him into the kitchen with the staff,” he said to Webb.

  “Hold on a sec!” Danica interrupted. She crouched down to check the driver’s carotid pulse and breathing. When she looked up, her ashen face told Bruce everything he needed to know. The words merely confirmed. “He’s dead.”

  11

  Descent

  Northern California

  SEB WAS GLAD to have a job that kept him busy while he and his AcotocA colleagues drove to their destination. Sitting in the back of one of the two U-Hauls, where he could ensure that none of the diners dislodged their headphones and woke up prematurely, Seb pitied Bruce and Danica. Since they were driving the trucks, they had no distractions to keep their minds off the fact that they’d just committed murder.

  Back in Bruce’s office, when he’d proposed his outlandish idea, the first thing they’d agreed to was Nobody gets hurt. Of course the plan required them to threaten violence, but that was an entirely different affair—legally, morally and spiritually. They hadn’t even bought bullets for their guns. Just blanks. Enough to make noise if need be.

  With a shake of his head, Seb forced his mind back to his job, which included more than observation. He was also tasked with obfuscation.

  Beside him at the back of the trailer were the twenty-four bags matching the twenty-four diners who lay sedated at his feet. His half of the forty-eight. One by one, he was matching phones with bodies using driver’s licenses, then unlocking the phones with biometrics. Fingerprints or face scans. These tech titans all had the latest gadgets.

  Seb was going through texts and emails, first identifying anyone who looked like a secretary or significant other, and then sending them a variant of a simple message, tailored to the tone of their chat history. “Something BIG has come up. Very exciting. But it’s going to keep me off the grid for a few days. Wish me luck.”

  Of course, that particular ploy was unlikely to work w
ith the governor of Florida. Someone with a schedule-keeper on staff. But what else could they do? Governor Rickman’s presence added a new dimension to their security concerns, and made the need to execute a clean escape all the more critical.

  Webb was performing the same texting task in the back of the second truck—undoubtedly equally happy to have the distraction. They were working quickly in order to limit cell tower usage to those between Napa and Sacramento, which was a highway hub for Northern California. Leaving no electronic indication of which way they turned when leaving the capital would make it much more difficult to track them. The tactic was far from foolproof, but it would buy time.

  Time was what they needed.

  Once Seb finished with the cell phones, exhaustion overtook him and he nodded off. He jolted back to consciousness sometime later when the gradient beneath the truck’s tires changed from up to down. Nervous about his dereliction of duty, he glanced around to confirm that all his prisoners still had their earphones in place.

  They did.

  No harm, no foul.

  He checked his watch and saw that they had indeed been driving for three hours. That fit with the change in gradient. They were nearing their destination.

  He found it interesting that all four team members had stayed silent during the drive rather than chat away nervous energy. Seb was certain Webb wanted to talk about what happened. His buddy would want to explore their new status like a tongue probing the socket of a freshly pulled tooth. But the bone mics that connected them would bring everyone into the conversation, and no one would want to endure that emotional burden at the moment. So everyone remained silent, each in the solitude of his or her own hell.

  The truck slowed, then the surface beneath the tires switched from asphalt to crushed stone. Soon they swung around, stopped and reversed. A minute later, Seb heard Bruce’s voice through the cargo door. “Everything okay in there?”

  Seb wouldn’t characterize things that way, but he knew what Bruce meant. “Yes.”

  The door rolled up and Seb found himself looking at an exquisite cabin. Even though it was lit only by the moon, the stars and the few lights Bruce had left burning, the hideout still reeked of money. It was a log cabin, if you could call it that.

  From there in the driveway, Seb estimated the size to be six thousand square feet. The logs that formed the main walls must have been entire treetrunks, each long and straight and somehow preserved in a light pine color. The floorpan was no Lincoln-style box either. It featured a wraparound porch, big balconies and bumped-out suites, all protected from the mountain weather by interlocking sections of steep brick-red roof.

  “No problems?” Bruce asked, grabbing the two stretchers he’d hidden beside the porch.

  “None.”

  “How about the messages?”

  “One hundred percent success.”

  Bruce raised his eyebrows. “I’d expected a few misses, but I guess these guys keep up with the latest toys. Let’s get moving.”

  They grabbed the person closest to the door, lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him into the house. “I left it unlocked with the heat on and the elevator open.”

  Seb wasn’t sure what Bruce meant by the last bit, but he saw soon enough. Bruce led him into the library located just off the atrium. It was classic in style, with floor-to-high-ceiling bookshelves lining two of the walls, complete with rolling ladders. One huge section of shelving had been pivoted aside like a gigantic door to reveal a large elevator, a small elevator and a nook.

  “The nook was a gun room,” Bruce clarified. “But I moved all the weapons to the garage along with the electronics from below as a safety precaution.”

  “Safety precaution?”

  “Our prisoners will be passing through here on their way in and their way out. Figured it was best not to tempt fate.” Bruce hit the DOWN button with his elbow and the doors opened, revealing a freight elevator roughly six feet square. Pressed against the back wall and spanning every inch of the width was a card table. The big makeshift shelf held nothing but a small Wi-Fi repeater, which was wired to the elevator control box. “The table lets us take two more people per trip,” Bruce said, in answer to an unasked question. “Six instead of four.”

  Seb snagged for a second on the fact that fifty wasn’t evenly divisible by six, but then remembered that he and Webb were two of the diners. He was thrilled that his boss had bothered to analyze elevator operations. If Bruce had devoted attention to the little details, then the big ones were surely covered. “And the Wi-Fi repeater?”

  “You’ll figure it out. Let’s grab five more guests.”

  Leading answers like “You’ll figure it out” were very Bruce. The man’s brain was so big as to be a burden. Seb had come to that conclusion one evening while reflecting on another odd comment. Bruce was so smart as to make interactions with normal folk analogous to what the rest of us went through when working with dogs. It had to be frustrating and isolating.

  Oddly enough, Bruce had only earned one degree. A Bachelor of Science in physics from Cornell. But he could talk medicine on par with his Johns Hopkins M.D. wife. Material science, electrical engineering and systems design on equal footing with the Stanford engineers in his employ. Seb had also seen Bruce go toe-to-toe with billionaire bankers discussing derivative operations at cocktail parties, and hold his own debating Shakespeare with a prominent theater critic.

  His only meaningful weakness was politics.

  Bruce had such a strong understanding of fundamental truths that he found it uncomfortable to lie. He just wasn’t wired for deception. It was his Achilles’ heel. At least, that was Seb’s conclusion.

  Fortunately, there was nothing deceptive about this operation. It was straightforward diabolical genius.

  Danica and Webb had their truck backed into place by the time Bruce and Seb returned for the third body. After a bit of cold, confirmatory discussion, the four of them made two quick trips and then wedged themselves into the freight elevator with their cargo.

  “Here we go,” Bruce said, hitting the down button.

  12

  Changing Sides

  Western Nevada

  THE ELEVATOR hummed away, drawing them ever deeper beneath the Nevada bedrock while Seb steeled himself for what was to come. To say that he’d be standing on unfamiliar ground would be an understatement on multiple levels. Looking down, he cringed at his own unfortunate pun. The floor at his feet was literally strewn with bodies. Adding to the irony was the fact that he and Webb would soon be among them, albeit voluntarily, for they too had been diners.

  The costumes they were wearing—the stylish suits, short hair, matching glasses and temporary tattoos—would both shield them from any future efforts to identify them and help keep them in character. But Seb found that they made him more uncomfortable. Particularly the glasses, as he wasn’t used to wearing them.

  As the surreal scene sunk in, Seb mused that he wouldn’t need to work at appearing despondent when he woke up. The unfortunate incident with the Uber driver had taken care of that.

  To cover and conceal the unusual murder, Danica used a very fine-gauge needle to inject ketamine directly into the driver’s femoral vein. She also stuck a regular syringe in his arm and left it there. Then he and Webb drove car and driver into Napa where they staged the suicide scene at a picturesque overlook.

  Although the four conspirators vowed to never speak of their vile accident again, Seb knew the shock would take days to wear off, and the images would forever haunt his dreams.

  Bruce interrupted Seb’s reflections by pressing a pair of surgical gloves into his hands. “The bunker is sixty-four feet down. It’s constructed inside a natural cavern.”

  Seb accepted the gloves and voiced the question he’d been itching to explore ever since Bruce had unveiled his plan. “Why would anyone lay out the kind of money a project like this requires? It had to cost more than the mansion above, but can’t be anywhere near as pleasant.”

&nb
sp; Danica and Webb perked up as well. Apparently, they too had the same question.

  The elevator doors interrupted the reply by opening to reveal a large, luxurious living space served by a full kitchen and filled with quality furnishings. “The main room is backed by two floors of smaller rooms half its height,” Bruce said as they lugged the first set of bodies inside. “There are four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a den and a workout room. At the left end of the bunker, there’s a storage area, which runs long and deep. The right end is divided into a utility room, containing the power and filtration systems, and a greenhouse.”

  Bruce released the ankles of the diner he was carrying when they reached the far end of the room. “To answer your earlier question about why this is here, the owner is a prepper.”

  “What’s a prepper?” Webb asked as they continued unloading. “The term rings a bell, but isn’t in my active vocabulary.”

  “In general, a prepper is a person who believes a catastrophic disaster is imminent and prepares for it by creating a refuge which he stockpiles with supplies. In this case, the prepper is convinced that the United States will face a nuclear or biological war. He built this bunker to allow his family to survive in style.

  “And since survival includes dealing with refugees in the apocalyptic aftermath, he hid it.”

  “This is where you got our submachine guns,” Webb said.

  “That’s right. In preparation for tonight, I had to haul all the electronics and weaponry up and out. Did have to buy the blanks though. Our benefactor didn’t stockpile those.”

  “Are you ever going to tell us who that benefactor is?” Danica asked. “And how you knew the access and alarm codes?”

  Seb knew Bruce loved his secrets, so he hadn’t pressed, although of course he too was curious.

  “You’ll know soon enough,” Bruce said, and left it at that.

  They completed another seven round trips with the freight elevator until all forty-eight diners were laid out on the living room floor. Aside from the suits and headsets, they looked like fraternity boys after a wild party.