Indigo Man

by M. J. Carlson

  Sara hit the second-floor landing and stopped.

  “Lobby?” Zach said, two steps behind her.

  “No. They’ll come in through the lobby. They’ll have someone behind the hotel, in the alley.” She put a restraining palm on his chest and peered over the railing. She leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “Come on, but be quiet.”

  Sara led the way across the second floor landing. Fluorescent lights on the stairs and landings cast harsh shadows on the beige cement block walls and bare concrete floors. She stopped Zach with a touch of her hand on his arm. In front of them stood a red steel door with a large, white number two stenciled on it. She thumbed the aluminum release lever and pulled the door open.

  A maid’s cart stood halfway down the hall. Large, fluffy towels sat piled on top. A mop and a broom protruded up from a bucket at the front, but the maid was nowhere to be seen.

  “Stay here,” she whispered to Zach.

  He held the door open a crack and watched from the stairs as she strolled up to the cart. Sara knocked gently on an open door frame.

  “Excuse me, Miss?” she said in a quiet tone, “I locked my key card in my room. Could you please open it for me?”

  A young woman’s voice trickled from the room. “Si, which room, please?”

  “Dos un cinco, por favor,” Sara answered.

  Zach let the stairwell door close until he could peer through the crack with one eye.

  The maid, who barely topped five-foot-three and a hundred pounds, followed Sara out. The young woman turned and strode in the direction of the room Sara indicated, walking ahead of Sara, who worked to keep up with the smaller woman’s short, quick, gait. The maid reached into a pocket of her black pants and produced a small plastic card. When they were about four doors from the stairs where Zach waited, they stopped. The maid slipped the key card in and touched a finger to the bioreader. The door opened.

  “Gracias,” Sara said again, as the young woman returned to work, her thick, black ponytail splayed out behind her and bounced with each step. Sara entered the room and closed the door behind her.

  Zach stayed where he was. Muffled sounds from other parts of the hotel filtered through the quiet. Movement vibrated into his fingertips as the elevators’ electric motors started and stopped. Distant background noises from the street in front of the building reached him.

  Sara cracked the door and gestured to Zach.

  He slipped into the hall and trotted toward her. She pulled it open and stepped back. Before she closed the door, Zach lifted the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from the handle and tucked it into the key slot.

  “How did you know this one was empty?” he asked.

  “Lucky guess.” She said, unclipping the small comm unit from her belt.

  Zach stepped further in, past the large bathroom to the left, and took in the room. Upscale art hung on the muted pastel green walls. A large, blank monitor screen hung suspended a few inches above a polished, dark wood dresser. A king-sized bed filled a portion of the large room, several rows of pillows of various sizes and shapes were lined up along its headboard. Beyond the bed, a round table with two antique chairs stood in front of a large window. Sara’s shoulder holster hung next to where her suit jacket lay draped over the back of one chair. A bowl of fresh fruit sat on a crisp, white linen tablecloth covering the table.

  Zach stepped past Sara to the window. The man’s silhouette still searched traffic moving on the street below with what appeared to be binoculars. Zach stepped back from the window. “I don’t think he saw us.”

  Sara sat on the edge of the bed and adjusted a knob on the miniature transceiver. “Damn. I knew I should’ve been scanning channels. It only makes sense they’re using a different band. Damn.”

  “What now?” he asked, returning his attention to the roofline.

  She held up a finger. “Ha, I got you, now, bastard. There’s just the two of them. The guy on the roof is Newman. He’s surveying the street and Murphy is watching the alley. If Newman spots you, Murphy’ll go in from the rear exit. They think you’re going to walk right into their hands.” She smirked. “Guess that won’t be working out so well for them.”

  “How’d they find out?”

  “Murphy must’ve called in to Quantico for a ’link scan and had them listen for your name or some other word you used. It’s fairly easy to do with the NSA computers monitoring all iLink calls. I didn’t think he had enough time.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, technology’s a bitch when it’s being used against you.”

  “How did they get here so fast?”

  “Do you know how fast those tanks we drive will go when you floor the accelerator?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “Now you have an idea. That’s why we spend four weeks in driving school learning how to push them to the limit. I’m surprised they’re here, though.”

  “Why?”

  “After last night, I’d have expected Johnson to tighten the leash on both of them. They’re not at their posts. Johnson’ll blow a gasket if he finds out.”

  Zach focused on the dark monitor screen, thinking. He snapped his fingers and turned to her. “We can call DeWitt. Tell him Murphy and Newman are outside. He can walk out and see Newman on the roof.”

  “And do what exactly? Walk up to Murphy and ask him whether he’s a hit man assigned to assassinate the evil Dr. Marshall? Wave to Newman?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, shaking his head. “He probably called them.” He dropped onto the bed next to her.

  “Or he called the police, who called them. Or, he’s clueless about them. Same thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re telling the truth or not. He gets a story either way. Even if he didn’t ’link you out and they plucked your call off the satellite, they’ll pick it up again when you call DeWitt. They’ll know you’re close by, if not where you are in the building.”

  He stared at the iLink unit wrapped around his wrist. “Traitor.”

  “It’s…” She stopped and listened to the earpiece. “Murphy’s going into the restaurant. Probably going to check inside for you.”

  “I am so screwed,” he said, and lay back on the slick bedspread. He covered his eyes with an arm. “He’s either going into the restaurant to keep an eye on DeWitt, or meet him. Either way leads to a bad end if I show up downstairs.”

  She patted his forearm. “We’ll wait here for an hour or so, till they get tired and leave. We need a new plan.”

  “Okay. I have an idea. We just need to get out of here.” He smiled.

  “Let’s hear it,” Sara said.

  “Murphy and Newman are tied up watching DeWitt. We leave them to it while we drive to the nearest copy center, make a dozen copies of everything we have, and mail packages to multiple news outlets at the same time. Someone will break the story. All we have to do is find a place to lay low for a few days until things really heat up for Stiles.”

  “We use DeWitt as a decoy. I like it. It’s simple enough. It might work,” Sara said. “We can even get a courier service to deliver his package to his office—with apologies for running him around.”

  Zach considered the money in his pocket. “I’m pretty sure I don’t have the funds on me to pay a messenger service, especially if I can’t use a credit card.”

  “I think I can get it,” she said. “After all, they haven’t tagged me yet as near as I can tell, and the sooner we get this over with, the quicker we can get back to real life.”

  Zach considered the possible implications of her statement for a long moment, both for himself and Sara. He knew it had to end, but the thought of turning himself in to the authorities sent his stomach into free fall.

  “It’s time we got a couple of steps ahead of these assholes,” she said. “Leave them standing around looking stupid while we drive away.”

  “We should go now. We’ll need to put some space between us and them.”

  “Let me try to find out what they’re plan is, first.�
�� Sara lay back on the bed next to him, and touched her earpiece. “Murphy just told Newman to keep a close watch on the street for you.”

  “I need to say something.”

  “Sure. What?” She rolled her head toward him.

  Zach shifted onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “I wanted to thank you. At first, I couldn’t figure out why you were risking your life, why you were tossing your career into the trashcan to help a nobody. I even wondered for a while if you were playing me to find out if there were any more backups before turning me in.”

  Sara rolled onto her side, facing him. She propped her head up to match his.

  “I didn’t trust you,” he continued, “because, well, because I don’t trust people easily. I don’t know if it’s the genetics, or learned behavior, but either way, I’m sorry I doubted you. You’ve been injured, and you exposed yourself and your family to danger to keep me safe. I just hope you let me find a way to show you how much you, I mean, all this, means to me.”

  When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. “Stay alive until this is over and then tell me.”

  He wanted to stay there forever. “We should go.”

  “Yeah, it should be safe now.” She rolled to the edge of the bed and stood in a fluid movement.

  He followed her example, grunting once at his uncooperative chest. They smoothed the bedspread.

  He pulled a data crystal out of his pocket, handing it to her. “Here.”

  She held the tiny drive between her thumb and index finger. “What is it?”

  “An operating system. It runs entirely off the data crystal. It’s for use in hostile situations where the Net connections are under surveillance. Everything it sends can be encrypted and disguised and buried in other files if needed. All anyone watching would see is the occasional extra pixel lines in a photo of a street, or a page of benign text.”

  She narrowed an eye at him. “What about the browser and url?”

  He shook his head. “The browser is set up to hide the url. It’s completely anonymous.”

  “It’s a stealth system.” She shifted toward him. “And since it runs from the DCD, it doesn’t leave a footprint on the computer. What about sudden increases in the sheer amount of traffic from a location?”

  “In a public location, there’s enough general bandwidth use that the signal just gets lost.”

  “Public, like a library or Net cafe?”

  “Exactly. It’s not perfect, and the NSA computers are quite a bit more powerful than the ones in China or the Middle East this was designed to circumvent, but it should give us enough time to send the files to all the media outlets with time to get away.”

  “Is this thing legal?”

  He nodded and grinned at her.

  “And you downloaded this thing from a government website?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “The Air Force developed it for the OCIS, but they released the core system under Freedom of Information. A bunch of computer nerds picked it up, polished it and distribute it for free under the name Paranoid OS. You pop it into the drive port, reset the bios to boot from the DCD, boot the computer, and keep hitting enter till you get a home screen.”

  “How does the receiving party unencrypt the message?”

  “The program sends an instruction to unzip the message. Then it shows a pop-up window asking if they want to read a message from the sender and a space to type in a private key. We’ll have to call them or send a hard copy with the password.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “A backup to the backup plan. Hoped we could hand the information to DeWitt, he would see it as credible, coming from me, and we wouldn’t need it.” He chuckled once, without mirth. “That’s me. Always thinking in terms of lost information and backups.”

  She shifted her eyes from the tiny drive to him. “Zach—”

  He folded his hand around hers and closed it on the data crystal. “You hang onto it, just in case… you know. Promise me if anything happens to me, you’ll get the data on Stiles out.”

  Sara slipped the crystal into her jacket pocket. “I promise.” She checked her earpiece one more time. “It’s as good as it’s going to get, unless you want to rent the room,” she said, and shrugged into her shoulder holster and jacket, stopping at the mirror to adjust the fit.

  The thought brought a tight smile to his face. He almost laced his fingers with hers, but thought better of it. He turned the knob and pulled the door open.

  The sound of an explosion rumbled through the floor.

  They both froze. Zach inhaled a sharp breath as alarms sounded throughout the building. They stuck their heads into the hall. A faint rain of fine dust floated down. “No,” he gasped. “Have they blown up the building?”

  Sara pulled him back from the door as several others opened. Worried faces poked into the hall. She tugged him further into the room, taking his place at the doorway.

  “What the hell did that maniac do?” Zach asked in a whisper as shock and dust from the ceiling settled on him.

  She eyed the hallway. “It wasn’t this building.”

  “You’re right.” He gestured at the ceiling. “If it had been, the fire sprinklers would be going off,” he said.

  “Uh huh.” She shook her head, her disbelief clear on her face. “It must’ve been the restaurant. That’s why Murphy went in, not just to look for you, but to plant a charge.”

  Zach paced the length of the room trying unsuccessfully to burn off his adrenaline overload. “Unbelievable,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “They blew the god damn restaurant up.” He ran his hands along his scalp until his fingers laced behind his head. “DeWitt was in there. Now he’ll think I tried to blow him up, too.”

  “Calm down,” Sara said. “You have nothing to gain by it. He’s your lifeline, but this screws our plan B. We have to get out of here, now. The building is bound to be evacuated.”

  “If we go out the front door with Newman on the roof, he’ll be able to pick us out like we’re wearing signs.”

  Sara nodded in agreement. “And if he sees me with you, any advantage we have will be gone.”

  “Upstairs. We can take the skywalk on the fourth floor. The way we came in. It’s at the rear of the hotel. Newman won’t be able to see us.”

  “The elevators will be locked,” she said. “And everyone will be coming down the stairs.”

  “Follow me.” He grabbed her hand and led her into the confusion.

  Around them, guests milled through the screeching wail of the fire alarm to the stairs, where a bottleneck had formed. “My turn,” she said, slipping between him and the wall. She pulled her ID out of her pocket, and held it high. “Federal agent. Let us by.” When no one moved, she said it louder. “Federal agent. Move!”

  A path cleared for Sara, who put her ID away, grabbed Zach’s hand, and pushed forward. They entered the stairwell and, hugging the wall, climbed the stairs against the crowd.

  By the third floor, the stairs were empty. They ascended the steps at a run, and stopped at the door to the fourth floor. Zach leaned against the wall, eyes closed, gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest, trying to catch his breath. Sara stood propped against the wall next to the door with her head resting on her forearm for a moment. Zach grabbed the handle and opened it a crack. Seeing no one, he pulled the door open and pushed through. “Come on.” They ran onto the glassed-in walkway leading to the hotel’s parking garage.

  Sara grabbed his arm. “Stay down. It’ll be harder to see us from the alley if we aren’t standing.”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” Zach said, and dropped into a crouch.

  Halfway to the parking garage, Zach stopped. Smoke billowed out of the rear of the Indian restaurant. He inched closer to the edge of the walkway. Several people sat or lay in the alley below. The left side of one man’s shirt was ripped. The shirt, the exposed skin underneath, and the side of his face were black. A few feet away, a woman knelt, coverin
g another man’s face and torso with a jacket where he lay in a spreading pool of crimson. Many of the people in the alley milled around, while others helped the injured move away from the fire.

  “Christ,” Sara whispered, her voice full of disgust.

  Zach shook his head in disbelief. “Is that guy just plain nuts?”

  She duck-walked back, clasped his hand, and dragged him toward the parking garage. “Yes, he is. He’s also getting desperate.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  They trotted to their car. Its lights flashed as Sara approached. She leaned against the rear fender and gestured, waiting for Zach, who clutched his chest as he caught up.

  “We have to get out of here. Right now,” she said. Meanwhile, shouts filtered up from the alley. A woman began wailing, masking some of the other noises.

  Zach bent at the waist to catch his breath past the biting ache in his chest. “No argument from me there.” He surveyed their surroundings. “There’s no one else here. Wonder why?”

  “Most people are conditioned to the idea of moving down the stairs to the lower levels in a fire drill. The average person wouldn’t think of exiting to the parking garage.”

  “Makes sense, I guess.” Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder by the minute. Acrid smoke from below was beginning to filter into the parking garage.

  She stepped around to the rear of the small sedan. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do.” She stopped and nodded her head toward the trunk lid. “You’re going to jump into the trunk and ride in there until we put some distance between us and this mess.”

  “I’m going to do what?” He stared at her in disbelief.

  “Jump into the trunk while I drive us away from here.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not getting into the trunk of this thing. Are you crazy?”

  A small group of two men and three women dressed in business casual wear scurried out of the walkway and split up. Each made for what were probably their cars at just short of a run.

  She walked around and stood, facing him. “Zach,” she said, her tone hushed. She touched his upper arm again. This time her fingers worked their way around and gripped it. “Be reasonable.”