by Mark Leslie
The vent rattled and shook.
Shit! This would definitely bring somebody coming.
He kicked again. And again. Then, on the fourth kick, the vent went flying off, and he shimmied as quickly as he could out of the opening, having to take his backpack off to fit through the opening. But he managed to keep the backpack with him by looping one of the straps from the top around his right hand.
He lowered himself out the shaft opening and dropped to the floor just as a voice outside the door, a new one, called out.
“You won’t get away. You cannot evade us!”
Chapter Eighteen
Three Years Earlier
Despite the long hours spent wandering the Exhibition GO station, where Scott had seen his dead father walking around as live and as real as anyone else, he never spotted him again.
“Of course not,” Scott mumbled to himself on the third day that he had found himself scouring the area of the platform where he had spotted his father and walking, dejected, back down the platform and towards the parking lot adjacent to the ticket booth area under the elevated section of the Gardiner Expressway. “The man knew how to keep secrets from us his whole life. Of course he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go back to the place I had spotted him.”
It had most certainly been his father. Scott had been as sure of that as of anything he saw that he’d known for sure.
Confused and unsure where to turn, who to turn to – Scott didn’t, after all, really have any friends – he looked up somebody whom he hadn’t spoken with in several years. Mr. Prescott. His computer science teacher from high school.
He knew that Prescott lived in Toronto and had moved down there after he’d retired from teaching in order to be closer to his daughter and their family. Scott had seen his computer mentor briefly at his father’s funeral and learned that Prescott had made the long haul from Toronto up to Sudbury to offer his condolences to Scott and his mother.
So, confused and frustrated and needing someone to talk to, Scott looked up Mr. Prescott’s address and phone number. Even if they weren’t listed it wouldn’t have been hard for Scott to find them. And when he found the listing he grinned at the listing of the man’s name.
J. T. Prescott.
He knew that stood for James Timothy Prescott.
He also knew that the man went by “Tim” rather than by his first name. This was because it was a family tradition for every male in the Prescott family to be given the name of James. Thus, to eliminate confusion, those men went by their middle names.
Scott knew quite a bit about Mr. Prescott, because they’d spent so much time together. Prescott became more than just a good teacher, more than just the person who existed as a figurehead at the front of the classroom. Prescott had, unlike most of the other teachers Scott had, transcended that odd barrier in place between most students and most teachers.
Scott recalled that odd feeling, when he had first learned of Mr. Prescott’s first name. It was odd for students, even in high school, back in Scott’s day, at least, to think about their teachers as real people with full names.
For years, the education system had drilled into them that their teachers were Mr. This and Mrs. or Ms. or Madame That.
They never had full names.
They never had lives outside of the classrooms.
To the younger students, the teachers lived only for the classroom and couldn’t possibly have a life outside of that calling. The thought of a teacher being just another human, a person like one of your own parents was almost unthinkable.
Every once in a while, of course, there would be a teacher whose child was in the same class. And that threw the myth for a bit of a loop, because suddenly you’d find yourself imagining the teacher with a life, with a family, getting up in the morning, fixing breakfast, making sure everyone was ready for school.
The same mystique was busted whenever Scott might see a teacher out in “the wild” – out in public in the grocery store or at the mall. It would be an awkward moment, seeing the teacher, not in a position of authority, but rather as a normal adult, wandering about the world just like anybody else.
Even in the relationship that Scott had built up with Mr. Prescott, much of the mystique had been held together. Scott knew the man’s first and middle names.
But he’d never used the first name.
No, despite the fact he knew that Mr. Prescott used his middle name, Tim, He had even heard other teachers call him that. But he still had always thought of him as Mr. Prescott and not James Timothy Prescott or even Tim, as he was known to his friends.
He called Mr. Prescott and they met at a café in downtown Toronto, where Scott told him everything he had seen that morning.
When he’d finished laying out the details of that morning at Exhibition GO station, Scott started to run down the possibilities he had kept only in the back of his head.
“I don’t know what to think, Mr. Prescott. Do you think, perhaps that this could be a long lost twin brother?”
Prescott leaned forward, offered the beaming smile that warmed so many high school students to him within seconds of him entering their first class with him; it was a smile that peeked out playfully from behind the thick Tom Selleck style moustache that would, normally, appear as if his face was meant only for a serious presentation to the world.
“Scott, please, call me Tim. My Dad’s name is Mr. Prescott. Cut this guy a little bit of slack, would you? I already feel over the hill, being retired, having passed sixty a few years back, being a grandfather and all that other ‘old guy’ jazz like seniors discounts, regular prostrate exams and everything.
“If you call me Tim you’ll help me feel younger and better about myself. Deal?”
“Deal.” Scott smiled. The man’s ability to make the person or classroom he was speaking with feel one hundred percent at ease had not been reduced in any way. If anything, it was more refined, stronger, more powerful than before. “So, do you, think, Tim, that the man I saw could be my father’s twin brother?”
“It might be possible,” Prescott said, looking down into his coffee as he worked through the logic. “But you don’t think that the fact he had a twin brother would have come up at all in any conversations or mentioned at any family gatherings over the years?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they had a falling out, my dad and his brother. Maybe something so terrible happened that caused a rift between them. Something big; something major. So big that nobody dared mention dad’s brother to him. One of those: ‘you’re dead to me!’ sentiments you sometimes hear about.”
“That is possible. But what about pictures? You’d mentioned knowing very little about your dad’s childhood. But weren’t there any pictures of your dad that would include his brother? Wouldn’t you have seen any?”
Scott thought back about it. “Well, there weren’t all that many pictures of Dad when he was younger. But, you’re right. None of them include a brother.”
“So the twin brother hypothesis seems unlikely then.”
“I don’t know. What if the falling out was so bad that my dad destroyed all of the pictures, not wanting to have anything there to remind him of the man.”
“Now you’re stretching it, Scott. You need to come back to the simpler solution, don’t you think?”
Scott took a sip of his coffee, and, even though it was fixed exactly the way he liked it he picked up the glass container of sugar from the center of the table and tipped it over the coffee, sprinkling in another large spoonful. It was a gesture designed to stall, to pause. When Scott looked back up at Mr. Prescott he knew the man knew exactly what he was doing. Prescott raised his bushy black eyebrows high onto his forehead and his playful smile peeked out from under the moustache.
“Okay, so maybe he didn’t know his twin brother. Maybe they were separated at birth, and that’s why there are no pictures of him.”
“Sure, it’s a possibility,” Prescott said. “And more likely than a rift between two brothers where
there is absolutely no evidence or any supporting family information that would suggest a brother existed.”
“Okay, so it was a twin brother separated at birth. That could explain what I saw.”
“It is possible that your father has a twin and they were separated at birth. Since you have few ways of establishing the truth about that – birth records, adoption, other secrets like that are virtually impossible to get to the bottom of, even with your hacking skills. The records are, simply most likely not in any database. Your grandparents are both deceased, so you can’t verify or discuss this with them. And your dad doesn’t have any surviving relatives, besides you.”
“Okay,”
Prescott grinned, stared back down at his coffee again. “Except there’s one thing that you’re forgetting. One very simple yet critical fact.”
“What’s that?”
“The limp.”
Prescott looked up, met Scott’s eyes. The limp. Of course. His father’s distinctive walk due to the unique motorcycle accident that had almost taken his life when he was in his early twenties.
“Yeah. There’s the limp. I forgot about that.”
“Do you recall the Sherlock Holmes line? The one that states that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“Yes, I do,”
“So there’s the possibility that your father had a twin and they were separated at birth. And, however unlikely the case might be, the two men might have, due to living a similar lifestyle – such as the desire to drive fast on motorcycles, had very similar accidents and been injured in alarmingly similar ways. Countless case studies have been done suggested the power that “nature” has in blood relatives who lived separate yet startlingly similar lives – following the same professions, falling in love with similar types of mates, pursuing parallel paths and inborn desires. So it is possible both men had injuries so similar that they’d both walk with the same limp.
“But there’s another improbable option that seems far more likely than that.”
“And what’s that?”
“That your father didn’t die on that operating table. That he is still alive. And that the man you saw on the GO station platform was, indeed, your father.”
“Doesn’t that lead to even further extrapolation and extreme speculation?”
“Under normal circumstances, I’d say yes. But there’s something else. Remember, back in high school, you’d relayed to me the fact your mother suspected your father might be having an affair?”
“Yeah, the ‘fishing trips.’”
“What might that lead you to think about?”
“That my Dad was living a double life. That perhaps he had another family out there. That could explain his frequent absences.”
“But he was never really gone for long periods of time, was he? It was usually weekends or extended trips; a pretty much small percentage of his overall time would have to be with this other family.”
“Okay,”
“And, for your father’s death to be faked so elaborately, that would suggest, at least to me, there are larger forces than a man seeking to abandon one family and spend all his time with another.
“So maybe he was living a double life. Maybe there was an aspect of his life that he kept from you and your mother. Do you remember telling me a bit about your suspicions about something you’d found in your Dad’s workshop when you were in University and we used to correspond once in a while? Do you remember telling me about the odd items you’d found in your father’s tackle box? You’d described them to me and wondered what they might be.”
“Yeah, I remember that.”
“Think about the way you’d described those items. What do they make you think of when you’re also considering the idea that your father could have been living a double life?”
Scott sipped at his coffee, put the cup down on the table and pursed his lips together.
“James Bond. Secret agent. Those objects looked very much like spy gear. At least, my impression of what spy gear might be.”
“Exactly,” Prescott said. “It’s improbable, but the most likely of all the things we spoke about.”
“And it would explain so many of those odd moments, conversations and things about my Dad that I simply didn’t understand.”
“Still,” Scott said, shaking his head. “My Dad. A secret agent? A spy?”
Prescott nodded. “Just think about it.”
“But he wasn’t in great shape. He had a beer belly, he walked with a limp.”
“I’m not suggesting that he was ever involved in high speed car chases, skiing down mountainsides firing ski pole machine gun weapons, scaling skyscrapers and performing Jason Bourne style jujitsu moves. Consider your own skills, abilities and aptitude, Scott. Your father might be a valuable asset more because of his brain, his mind, his ability to blend in and seem unobtrusive.”
“Okay,” Scott said. “Okay. I get that. And, when you think about how highly Dad regarded his father and how proud he’d been of the fact that he served his country so well, it might make sense.”
“Sure. Your father could be operating for CSIS or some other secret government agency, working on something important, something critical.”
“Dad did dwell long and hard on the respect for those who put their country’s needs ahead of their personal ones, those service people who served their country first; who put the good of our society ahead of their own needs, their own interests. That makes complete sense to me.”
“So the real question is – what could he have been involved in that was so intense, so top secret, that he had to fake his death and deceive you and your mother in the process?”
Chapter Nineteen
Today
There was, at least according to Scott’s interpretation of what he could hear, a single person on the other side of the locked door, trying, unsuccessfully, to get in.
Scott knew, based on the hive mentality of the others he had encountered, that the rest of them; Herb, the security guard, Gary, if he was again awake, and any other employees who had already showed up, would already be aware, through whatever telepathy they employed, of Scott’s location; and they would descend upon the locked door and either break it down by sheer force, or perhaps unlock it with the security guard’s master key.
So he picked up the metal and plastic chair that was facing the executive desk, and, lifting it over his head, took a deep breath before swinging it in an overhead arc toward the glass.
Geez, he thought as the chair bounced off the glass, leaving a giant spider-web crack on it with a few pieces in the center shattered out completely, leaving a gap in the glass of more than an inch square. I’d never broken a single pane of glass my entire life. Yet this morning, in the span of less than half an hour, I will have smashed through three windows. And, not only that, but I’m getting damn good at this. I almost smashed through in a single try.
He threw the chair against the window, breaking through the glass completely. Then he pulled a framed print off the wall and used it to scrape the broken edges from the bottom of the window pane before climbing up onto the window sill and jumping out.
Outside, he found himself in an ally on the east side of the building that led back toward Fraser Avenue.
He ran down the alley, comforted by the simple fact that nobody had either broken or opened the locked office door yet, so, unless somebody was on an upper floor and looking down into this alley, nobody would be able to see which direction he was heading.
His car was parked in a lot of Exhibition Place, a couple of blocks south of the Digi-Life office. It normally took him less than ten minutes to walk between the parking lot and the office, because he cut through parking lots and alleys on his way there.
At the speed he was running, however, he figured he’d be able to get to his car in less than three minutes.
That way he could be in the car, get onto Lakeshore and the eastbound Gardiner
Expressway and further away from the people who were pursuing him.
There were very few people on the street as he ran down Fraser, cut across the parking lot of the abandoned old Western Bakery building, crossed Mowat Avenue and got onto Dufferin. The few people he had spotted, the closest one walking at least a block away, from their parked cars to a nearby office building, all seemed to be acting normal, as if this were a morning just like any other – and not one in which everybody had designs to kill Scott Desmond.
That made Scott’s theory about the airborne toxin being released inside of Digi-Life’s air system seem to hold a bit more weight and also offered him a sense of relief. Now that he was putting more and more distance between himself and the building he could begin to feel a bit better that he would be safe.
A bus pulled out of the TTC station heading back up Dufferin. The bridge itself was still under construction and closed to vehicular traffic, but there was still a pedestrian path allowing foot traffic to cross. Scott raced down the path, passing a middle-aged male jogger in a red and black skin—tight running outfit wearing ear buds.
The jogger nodded at Scott in a single efficient dip of the head.
Normal behavior, Scott was relieved to see, but he still turned his head to ensure the jogger hadn’t been tricking him and was actually also turned.
It was nice to bump into someone who wasn’t trying to kill him.
Scott was, of course, relieved at the fact the jogger hadn’t been turned, as he highly doubted he’d be able to outrun him if the man came after him.
As he got to the far side of the bridge, he could see his silver Mustang parked near the Medieval Times building, and, standing one car over from his own, a blond man in a grey sport jacket. Scott slowed down to a walk, relieved to be so close to getting to his car, so close to escape, but leery about the man who was just standing there.
Scott patted down his front pocket, ensuring his car keys were there, before reaching in and pulling the keys out. Still one hundred meters away from the car he triggered the door unlock function.
