by Mark Leslie
He had work, he had his skills, and he had money.
But that was it.
Like Citino, that was pretty much all he had.
He spiraled into a deep depression for several days, continually speculating about what his own obituary might say about him. Would anyone even write one for him?
He doubted it.
Then then thought back to all of the times his father had reflected on Scott’s grandfather’s life.
Sure, the man had died quite young. But he had been a war hero; he had brought his family something to be proud of. His life, though short-lived, had served a greater purpose.
Scott’s father had never gone anywhere without carrying around a picture of his father. He even kept those secret photos of his Dad locked away in his tackle box.
Lionel Desmond carried the legacy, the memory of his father everywhere he went.
He had, it seemed, made much of his life based on the message, the legacy, the example his father had set for him.
Scott reflected back on the words his father had spoken to him once about his grandfather.
“I never really knew him all that well,” Lionel Desmond had said as they sat by the campfire one quiet evening after a marathon day of fishing. He’d had one too many beer and was a bit chattier than he normally would be. Scott had sat quietly as his father had been reflecting about his old man “But it feels as if he is always with me, you know? I keep that picture of him in my wallet and I look at it at least once every day.
“And every decision I make, every choice about the things that I do, I look at his picture, I look at this distinctive eyes, and I wonder: What would you say to me about this, Dad? What would you do in my position? And then I know what to do, I know what my next step is.
“I never really knew him, but his memory, his legacy guides me every single day.”
Scott pulled himself out of the deep dark funk, out of the terrible depression he had found himself spiraled down into, when he realized that, like his father, he could do the same thing.
Scott’s grandfather had served his country, had dedicated his life to a greater cause. Heck, he had given his life for a greater cause. That example had been a guiding principle for Scott’s father.
And it could be a guiding principle for Scott.
He decided, then and there, to stop using his computer and hacking skills for his personal gain, in the quest for money or for hacking just for hacking’s sake, for the joy of being able to break or crack a system.
He could put his powers to good use. He could serve a greater good.
From that point on, Scott stopped accepting hacking work. Instead, he embraced the knowledge that all of the things he had learned, all of the skills he had accumulated, all of the systems he had been able to hack, could be put to great use.
He could use those powers for good.
People could benefit from the things Scott knew, the systems he understood, the loopholes he had been able to find and exploit.
From that day on, Scott turned his life around.
All thanks to that quiet and mysterious death of the surgeon who had killed his father.
Within a few weeks, he had started to contract himself out as a security expert, a firewall inspection coordinator, an internet security consultant.
He didn’t make nearly as much money as the illegal activities had netted him.
But it felt good.
He ended up keeping the same photo his father had carried around in his wallet, the picture of his grandfather in his army uniform, in his own wallet.
And, while doing the good work, working the type of role that his father and his grandfather would be proud, something that would ensure Scott would leave this world a better place than it had been when he started, he continued to use those hacking skills for one selfish purpose – although it was not nefarious in any way.
On the contrary.
He still didn’t believe or understand the circumstances leading to his father’s death.
He simply couldn’t accept the situation the way it had occurred.
He knew, and his gut told him this in no uncertain terms, that there was something more to his father’s death; there was something deeper than could be seen on the surface, something Scott knew he could uncover if he just kept at it.
And that became his hobby, his passion, his pursuit – the thing he did every single day when he wasn’t working, wasn’t dedicating his work time to helping companies protect himself from the type of hacker he used to be.
And it felt good.
Really good.
Chapter Seventeen
Today
Scott laid inside the air vent for what felt like at least one full minute before he was able to properly catch his breath. The heat blowing through the ventilation shaft didn’t help matters. It filled his throat, making the air he was trying to swallow seem thick and dry. But he did his best to take deep gulps of air.
The throbbing burning sensation in Scott’s leg where he’d been shot intensified. It had all but disappeared during the time he’d been plummeting to his imminent death.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Scott bemused. Who would be worried about a gunshot wound when there was a more immediate life-preserving concern at hand?
He wondered, like he had back before he’d climbed into the vent, if there was something circulating through the air vent that might account for the behavior of Herb, the security guard and Gary.
Given the manner by which Gary had rerouted the air vent near his work area, it did seem to make some sort of sense. After all, it hadn’t been until shortly after Gary had left the cocooned area of his workspace that he had morphed into the hive-mind mentality that had taken over Herb and the guard.
“This is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Scott mused aloud, imagining that wonderfully horrific scene from the 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland where Sutherland’s character appears in front of the heroine who momentarily believes all will be okay, before Sutherland stops, raises an arm and thrusts a finger at her and lets out a high pitched scream – the surest indication that this is not the man she knew, but, rather, an alien imposter in his guise.
Only, Scott figured, this wasn’t an alien pod invasion. This was something that affected people, took them over, controlled their behavior. He had witnesses the sudden and disturbing change in Gary right before his eyes.
And the only thing that Scott could figure would have caused the change was some sort of airborne matter.
It was the one decent control Scott could figure.
Gary had been the only normally behaving person Scott had seen. Everyone else that morning, well, all two of them at least, had been out to kill Scott. The only other person he’d seen had been the person coming up to the second floor from the first floor, likely a new arrival. He hadn’t been sure who that was, just that it was a male and he was wearing blue jeans.
Blue Jeans seemed to be walking normally, not at all behaving like Herb or the guard, or the way Gary had once he had been outside the controlled air vent area, at least.
Perhaps that was because Blue Jeans had just entered the building and perhaps it took the airborne virus or whatever it was, a few minutes to get into a person’s airway and “take them over.”
It all fell into place, and made sense – not that Scott understand any of the hows or the whys or the whos as in who was behind this – except for one small matter.
Why had Scott not been affected by the airborne infecting agent?
It was almost as if everybody was working against Scott, simultaneously working from the same playbook.
He recalled that when Herb and the guard were searching outside the door, they hadn’t even spoken a single word to one another. It was as if they were in contact with one another’s mind – like there was some sort of telepathic connection between the two of them.
Not to mention the fact that they spoke in unison.
You won’t get away. You cannot evade us!
Gary, too, had been following that exact same script.
So, what, then, was different about Scott?
Why had he not been affected?
It only stood to reason that the reason he wasn’t affected might just be because he was the intended target. Yes, maybe that was it. Perhaps he – Scott – was the reason why these people were turned into some sort of mind-controlled zombies and had come after him.
But why?
And who was behind it?
It’s not as if Scott had been involved in anything illegal. It had been almost five years since he had done any contract work for people whose purposes had been nefarious and whose activities had been, if not outright illegal, then at least on the periphery of the law. But perhaps it had taken this amount of time to find Scott. It’s not as if he left any sort of easy to track digital trail behind wherever he went. And, when he had turned his life around, he had completely abandoned the false name and hacker identity that he used for his work.
It would have taken a significant investment of time and the right people – i.e., whose skill at least matched if not superseded Scott’s own hacker ability – in order to trace Scott down. Not that it would be impossible, but he failed to understand just how and why, and who would not only be capable of that, but would even bother.
Besides, it would be one thing to track Scott down, show up at his apartment in the middle of the night to break his legs or put a bullet in his head while he was sleeping. It was quite another to introduce an airborne virus capable of controlling people and turning them into homicidal robots.
Who wanted Scott Desmond dead not only that badly, but in such a way that the death would be difficult to explain or trace back to the originator?
And, almost as importantly, why?
What the hell had Scott done to warrant such a bold and unique attack?
He started crawling away from the vertical shaft, towards a spot about ten feet away where the light shone in from the open vent grate below, the questions rotating through his mind without any sort of answer coming to him.
Scott needed to get to an area with more light, so he could inspect where he’d been shot in the leg, see how bad the damage actually was. Sure, it burned, and he knew it was bleeding. He could feel where the blood had seeped into his jeans, where it had dripped up his legs while he’d been hanging upside down.
But he couldn’t feel the bullet inside him.
Is that because there’s no bullet there, and the bullet had grazed him? Or was it because one didn’t feel a bullet, that it entered with a white hot intensity of a hot knife cutting through butter. Or maybe because it exited the other side of his leg.
No, he thought. I’d feel burning on the other side, where it exited. Or, more likely, it would have struck or shattered the bone. And that would have hurt more than a simple burning.
It’s most likely, he figured, that the bullet was either lodged in a somewhat superficial manner in the meat of his leg, or perhaps it did just graze him, causing some fleshy damage, but not nearly as bad as actually being shot.
Not that he would know, of course. It’s not as if a person got shot every day.
Heck, it’s not as if most people had ever been shot at.
And, until this morning, Scott had been a gunfire recipient virgin.
Footsteps could be heard on the concrete floor below, so he stopped just shy of the edge and peered over carefully.
There was nobody within sight of the grate from the angle he was looking down. He could make out the first floor photocopier, which was at the midway point in the large mostly open office space. Unlike the second floor, which had a series of offices running in two spots in the center of the room, the first floor had a few offices along both walls and an open central area where row after row of simple Ikea-style rectangular desks were aligned for the call agents who worked on the first floor.
The large open office area had somewhat reminded Scott of the photos of a large city’s newsroom, a sea of desks as far as the eye could see, and swarms of people sitting at them, leaning over to converse with their neighbors, a phone in one hand, some sort of printed documentation in the other.
It had been a collaborative work area – something Digi-Life used in their marketing campaign, offering the fact that while their systems operated 24/7 and the advanced program algorithms worked tirelessly to find their clients the best of all possible deals, Digi-Life wasn’t just about a digital life – it was about real people, helping other real people, to save money and save time. Agents were on call 24/7 to take their call.
Of course, there was never more than perhaps a single agent here after standard work-day hours. The front-line agents Digi-Life hired were a massive team of third-party call center agents from India; all fully trained to speak in Canadian and American accents and ready to take your Digi-Life call day and night.
The first floor of the Toronto office was where the Tier 2 Digi-Life agents worked, and most of them during a standard nine to five shift. While the outsourced team in India handled the majority of calls, perhaps eighty-five to ninety percent of the incoming queries and calls that could easily be responded to with a series of basic scripts all designed to seem like natural and knowledgeable sales people, these agents handled the customers who needed additional follow-up, whose questions and concerns and needs went beyond what could sate the majority.
Thank goodness for those outsourced agents in India, Scott thought. Because if this floor had been filled with a roomful of agents, they likely all would have been taken over by the airborne virus that had infected Herb, the security guard and Gary. And Scott would never be able to get out.
The footsteps were coming from somewhere to the left, out of earshot.
It sounded to Scott less as if somebody was going about a normal morning routine – dropping stuff off at their desk, turning on their computer, heading over to the kitchen at the back of the first floor in order to get a coffee from the coffee dispenser that ground the coffee fresh for every new serving – and more like they were pacing.
But he knew better.
They weren’t pacing.
They were searching.
For him.
He reached into his pocket for his mobile phone in order to check the time. It had been several years since he had worn a watch. Almost ten years, in fact. His parents had bought him one when he graduated from high school, and he had worn it for a few years, but soon fell out of the habit, only wearing it to a few formal occasions, like his University graduation, charity dinners and other corporate events that he had started attending when he took on the more serious consulting role that had led to this gig at Digi-Life. He’d stopped wearing a wristwatch at about the same time he started to carry a mobile phone on him.
It kept the time perfectly, and in sync with a standard time through the mobile company carrier’s live connection.
Scott had long bemused the fact that the gesture of checking one’s wrist to indicate that something was taking a long time or that you were expected or needed elsewhere soon was soon becoming something that might characterize people from his father’s generation; with Scott’s generation and, more likely, the one after his, it might just be reaching into one’s pocket to pull out a smartphone and glancing at the screen.
He lifted his phone out of his pocket and thumbed the button on the top right to turn it on – he didn’t need to unlock it – that simple gesture would trigger the screen saver to pop up, complete with the time, in digital format, to flash near the top of the screen.
Only, when Scott thumbed the button, the screen remained dark. Nothing came on.
He thumbed it again.
Still nothing.
He held the button down, expecting the little fruit icon to appear like it did whenever the device was being powered on or powered down.
Nothing.
He lifted the phone closer to the light coming in from the vent grate, and once the front of the screen caught the shaft of lig
ht, Scott could see the hairline crack running down the middle of the screen.
It must have broken in the fall.
Damn!
Funny how not having access to a simple thing like a mobile phone could cause this type of angst – and not merely because of the denied access to email or checking a Twitter or Facebook feed, or even the score of the basketball game; just something as simple as time.
Excuse me, mister. But do you have the time?
Thinking back to what time it had been when Herb called him in to his office, Scott figured it couldn’t be more than 7:45 AM. He knew he had less than half an hour before the first floor began to fill with employees, adding to the army of robotic assassins who were after Scott.
Scott listened to the footsteps as they receded towards the back of the office, Scott started crawling toward the front of the office, trying to figure out how he was going to get out of the air vent. With the limited space he had, there was no way he’d be able to kick the vent grate off.
A few feet ahead, the air shaft forked off to the left and the right. At both ends a larger vertical vent grate was visible, but the shaft narrowed down from the rectangular shape he’d been moving through, which was perhaps three feet across and two and a half feet wide and funneled down to a narrower section of rounded pipe, maybe two feet in diameter.
If he hoped to kick the grate off, he’d have to back into that section.
He turned, twisted and shift in the air vent, managing to tuck and pull and twist himself so that his feet were pointed towards the grate opening, and then slowly pushed himself towards it.
It took almost twice as long to move the same distance.
But when he got to the grate, almost eight feet away, he realized he was inside one of the VP’s offices. He recognized one of the prints of elk on the wall.
Good, he figured. Those offices were kept locked. Meaning, when someone heard him kicking and rushed over, there’d be a delay in getting inside.
Not that Scott knew what he’d do once he got out of the air vent. Just that he had to get out of it and get out of the building.
He braced himself and kicked hard with both feet.
