by Mark Leslie
He pulled over to the side of the road.
This time, instead of calling the Automobile Association, he simply hacked into their servers again, and registered his location, the fact that he needed a tow, and, instead of entering his own Automobile Association number, he entered that of a fellow member whose information he could easily see now that he was hacked in.
The contractor arrived within ten minutes. At that point, as the vehicle was pulling in behind him, Scott went back in and revised the number to his own.
The driver towed him back down to Barrie where, by the time all was said and done, it was morning and the service station was already open.
“We have no idea what happened to your vehicle,” the service manager, obviously confused, said to him after his team had spent about twenty minutes with the car in the shop.
“The entire electrical system is compromised and throwing errors we have never seen before.”
Scott sighed, wondering how he could have such bad luck.
But he knew better.
He was on to something here. And somebody had hacked into the Automobile Association, to prevent him from ever getting his call.
They had, obviously, also hacked into his car’s computer system as well.
Someone was trying to prevent him from heading north to see Nottoff.
Someone was on to him
Because he must have finally been on to something.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Today
Scott watched the brunette bylaw officer stalk toward him from the opposite side. Her eyes met his and he felt a cold dread in the pit of his stomach.
“Shit!” he said again, glancing back at the officer writing the ticket on the connecting car.
The train hadn’t yet stopped at the station yet, and Scott knew there was no way that it would and the doors would be open before she got to him.
“Looks like somebody is going to be paying the piper,” a middle-aged woman with her hair tied up into a little bun at the back of the top of her hair said to him over-top of the paperback she’d been reading.
Scott was prepared and fully expecting to hear her utter You won’t get away. You cannot evade us, in that monotonous drone he had heard all too often that morning, but she just tsked a couple of times and shook her head at him.
That’s when Scott looked past her to the yellow and orange emergency clasp on the GO train window.
“Excuse me,” he said, pushing passed the woman and pulled at the large emergency handle with his right hand while pushing at the bottom of the window with his left.
It was heavy, but, by design, the window tumbled out and smashed onto the tracks and platform below.
If only the other windows I’d gone through earlier today could have been this easy, Scott thought as he stood on the vacant seat beside the bewildered woman who was still shaking her head, as if, instead of vandalizing the train he had just cut a raunchy fart.
Ducking and putting his left foot onto the window ledge, Scott pushed himself through the window and leapt down to the train platform. Even though the train had been moving at a considerably slower speed than just a minute earlier as it continued decelerating into Union Station, it was still high enough and fast enough for the additional forward momentum to pitch Scott off of his feet.
He rolled forward over his shoulder to help break the fall and felt something plastic and metallic crunch under his back as he completed his roll.
My laptop, he thought.
First his cellphone and now his laptop!
Scott, being such a savvy purveyor of technology, thought it was interesting that his great strengths were the things that were compromised; losing these computerized devices might have been the equivalent of Samson losing his hair, Thor losing his hammer, or Iron Man losing the power source in his specially designed suit.
He didn’t have time to worry about that, of course, because he was running for his life. But the computer, the mobile phone, those were the ways Scott had to connect to the internet, to do the research he needed to do, to be able to hack into the systems and find answers.
He knew he was close, really close.
That must be why these people were after him.
The only question was: who were they, and, since that’s the way Scott’s mind worked, how were they able to do this? How were they able to take control of people using that airborne agent?
Without a computer, where and how would he be able to pull this off? His first thought would, of course, have been to contact Mr. Prescott, his trusted computer mentor – certainly the man would have some decent computers and a Wi-Fi connection in his home – but they’d taken over Prescott’s mind and body, so he had to rule that out. The Toronto Public Library, perhaps, with their row after row of free computer and internet access?
Maybe.
But first, he needed to get away from them, get to a safe spot.
All of this went through Scott’s mind in the matter of a couple of seconds. By the end of those thoughts, he was already back on his feet and starting to race down the platform toward the stairs that led down into the depths of Union Station.
The platform was already filled with commuters, several of them standing and looking aghast at the man who had leapt from the window of a moving GO train. He heard a few Are you okay, buddy’s as he got to his feet, heard a few other NSFW exclamations; but nobody, of course, reached out to him.
You simply didn’t reach out like that – not in downtown Toronto, anyway. If this were rural Nova Scotia, or a really small town in Ontario, the inclination would be to see if the stranger needed help. But here, particularly during the morning rush hour, the mentality was more Oh, God, what now? Combined with How is this going to delay me getting to where I need to go? rather than any sort of actual concern for another.
The platform wasn’t as full as Scott had seen it – since the train he had arrived on hadn’t completely arrived, only about half of the station platform was full. On the opposite side of the platform another train sat there with its doors open. Most of the occupants had gotten off and other commuters were now getting on.
There were small groups of people standing on the train platform on the side Scott’s train was coming in, aligned approximately with where they knew the doors on each side of each train car would be at when the train came to a complete stop.
It’s amazing how much people were creatures of habit. Scott imagined that the majority of the people he saw standing in those spots, stood in those exact same spots at the exact same time every single working day that they went to work or school or wherever their daily commute brought them.
Humans were, in many ways, as predictable as computer programs.
That thought made Scott consider something regarding the people who were able to take over his boss and colleagues from work. It could, perhaps, be easily done when you knew a person’s routine – when you knew exactly where they would be.
Of course, tracking people using their unique mobile device was easy enough to do. Entire traffic update apps relied on the constant stream of vehicular commuters who were in traffic; the speed of the highway based on a constant flow of updates about location.
Scott wondered if perhaps the fact that his cell phone had been crushed and broken relatively early in his flight for safety might have actually been beneficial.
Being the hacker that he was, he had provided a mod to his mobile phone that scrambled the signal, sent conflicting reports of GPS location – except at such times when he required accurate GPS location in his phone for particular apps. He thus has built a toggle switch into the program; so that when he required GPS tracking use, he could easily turn it on and off. But, considering that a program is only as good as its’ weakest line of code, it was possible that someone out there could hack into it, and be able to track where he was, even with the GPS scrambled.
Thus, having the phone break might have been a good thing after all. If they had been tracking him based on
the GPS signal from his phone, at least they no longer had that.
As Scott moved down the platform, he found there wasn’t enough space to run. The crowd had come to a funnel section, and, with a mass of bodies all trying to get into the narrow space of the stairway, where there was room for no more than two people side by side descending the stairs together (and good luck to anybody on their way UP that stairwell, because the mass of people moving down would overtake them – they’d be like a stick thrown into a fast moving river), the crowd came to a virtual stop.
The train car Scott had been on passed where he was standing, and he’d briefly spotted the female ticket officer glaring at him through the window; the angry look on her face which was, as Scott knew it would be, layered with that distinctive glaze he had noticed in every single person who had been converted into the single-minded horde.
Scott stood at the back of the crowd and watched, in horror, as the train completed its stop at the station. The car he had been on stopped just on the other side of the stairwell entrance he was trying to get to. He considered bolting backwards and turned, but a throng of people that went on for more than a dozen feet had already moved in behind him, with more people heading his way, and the crowd, still at least twenty feet from the narrow stairwell entrance, was inching its way forward.
He debated whether it would be quicker to get into the stairwell or to fight his way backwards through the crowd, and figured his best move might be to keep going forward, see if he could lose himself in the crowd.
As the group of bodies shifted forward, Scott kept one eye on the train car the officer had been in and continued to glare warily at the people around him.
While most of them had the typical ten-foot commuter stare glaze, none of them appeared to have the zombie-glaze he had already gotten pretty good at identifying.
No, this crowd was tuned-out of most of their immediate surroundings, barely acknowledging the others around them – they were moving with a slow purpose, to their destination, most of them barely in the moment, with ear buds and noise-cancelling headphones on their heads. Several of them had taken up the familiar head down and glancing into their palm stance as they read email, checked the Facebook or Twitter stream, read text messages or were perhaps consulting their GPS to ensure they were heading in the right location.
The crowd poured out of the train Scott had arrived on, and several dozen people from the adjacent train car added to the molasses-like crowd that was slowly moving to the stairs.
About ten feet away, to the left of the stairwell entrance and on the other side of the wall that covered the stairway, Scott spotted the glazed face of the GO train bylaw officer. She was focused on him and moving forward.
A quick calculation of Scott’s speed heading toward the stairway entrance and the distance left to go, compared with her distance from the entrance and the speed the crowd she was in was moving was favorable toward Scott winning. She was, after all, moving through a much narrower area, and the group she was with was merging into the mainstream crowd already there – so, though she was a third closer to the entrance, she was moving at about half the speed Rob was.
He would just make it, so long as things continued to move the way they were.
Scott kept a wary eye on her the whole time, and then noticed her right arm come up and, holding something that he couldn’t see in her hand, reached forward and pushed against the back of the neck of an older gentleman in front of her. It was a syringe, Scott realized, based on the way in which she held her hand.
The old man exclaim in a surprised yelp of pain, and turned his head about, as if to see who had dared do that to him.
But after a couple of seconds, his head swiveled toward Scott.
His face, previously one that had worn the standard zombie commuter look, now bore the distinctive glassy-eyed glaze much like the bylaw officer.
So it wasn’t just an airborne agent. There was a way of injecting the toxin into someone’s bloodstream as well.
Scott continued to inch forward, watching as the bylaw officer deftly handed the syringe to the older man over his shoulder. He didn’t even look back to see where she was handing it – he obviously knew exact where she was handing the syringe and took it in a manner much more smooth than any pair of relay racers handing off a baton.
The older gentleman shifted the syringe from his left hand to his right and then proceeded to inject it into the neck of the woman in front of him.
“Dammit,” Scott said, realizing that, in such a crowd, so long as the fluid in the syringe didn’t run out, this entire mass of people could be converted, and he was in huge trouble.
Scott forced his way ahead of the young woman and the middle-aged man in front of him, rudely pushing them both aside. Then he muscled his way past an older lady. He couldn’t afford anything other than brute force to get through this crowd more quickly.
And he didn’t have time to look back to see who else had been converted.
He just kept shoving and moving forward. People exclaimed and swore at him, but, so far, nobody shoved back or tried to stop him. Best of all, no cold hand of one of the mob that was after him came down on his shoulder announcing that he was caught, announcing in no uncertain terms that he would not get away that he could not evade them.
Within a few more seconds, he was in the stairwell, and continued to shove past people, doing his best to get yet another body between himself and the growing group of people coming after him. The only person on the stairs who shoved back was a white hippy college-aged young man with thick black dreadlocks. “Chill, man!” the young man said, and gave Scott a rough shove back.
Scott moved quickly passed the hippy and heard him continue to curse at him.
When he finally got to the bottom of the stairwell, the crowd fanned out again into the basement hallway and Scott was able to bolt ahead, begin to actually walk with some speed.
He headed off to the left, darting around people, getting past them, and putting more bodies between himself and the pursuing group whose number he couldn’t be sure of now.
As he moved, he glanced back, noticed the distinctive glaze about fifteen feet back of the bylaw officer, the older gentleman, the middle-aged woman and one other person, the white hippy college student with thick black dreadlocks who had shoved back. He now wore the glazed look on his face. The student was at the front of the pack and he was moving more quickly than any of the others.
Scott pushed past a few more people and started to run.
He tore off down a hallway on the right, a direction that most of the crowd was not heading in, and proceeded to a set of double doors that led to a series of underground tunnels that ran under the city – figuring he might stand a better chance if he kept moving through the underground systems, considering the likeliness of security monitoring cameras on the street above.
He raced down several corridors, most of the crowd thinned out behind him. But the bylaw officer, the hippy and the middle-aged woman were all still just a few yards behind him, keeping at the same distance with every corner and short set of stairs that he ran.
The older man was no longer pursuing him – Scott figured he was somewhere behind but just couldn’t keep up with the rest of them.
Not that it mattered. There were already three of them in pursuit. He only hoped he didn’t run into anyone coming back the other way. After all, he had no idea where Herb or the Digi-Life security guard were, nor the man Scott had left behind at Exhibition station.
But there were all somehow connected; they knew what the others knew. It wouldn’t be hard, even if only a single one of them had eyes on Scott, for the others to know, and be able to intercept him.
When he spotted a pair of elevator doors in the basement of the hotel lobby ahead, he ran toward them, seeing that the call button, lit up, had already been pressed, even though nobody was standing there – it had likely been pushed by someone who, impatient, likely went over to the entrance to the stairway just a fe
w feet away. It was likely someone who wanted to move from this pathway and up to the lobby a single floor up. Scott was continually fascinated with just how lazy the average person could be – although, in this case, the frustration with waiting had overtaken the inherit laziness.
But he wasn’t going to complain – because it could just work out for him.
If he could get inside and take it to another floor, he’d be out of eyeshot of them, at least for a few seconds. But that could be enough to finally allow him to slip away, try to prevent someone from intercepting him.
The timing was almost perfect as the elevator pinged that it had arrived at this basement floor just as Scott was running up to it.
He’d be able to slip inside, jab at the DOOR CLOSE button and be hidden.
As the elevator door slid open, Scott was shocked to suddenly be standing face to face with his father.
Standing quietly inside the elevator, Lionel Desmond glared at his son, a serious and stern look on his face, and raised his left arm to point a gun directly at Scott’s head.
Chapter Thirty
Twenty-Seven Years Earlier
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies,” Mr. Prescott said, standing in front of Scott’s desk. “That’s a line from Shakespeare. Hamlet, in fact.”
Scott nodded, looking confusedly at his mentor. The two had been working together for several weeks now. Scott spent many lunch hours in the computer lab, working on various programs and trying to solve particular issues related to running out of memory on the systems he was trying to program.
“It’s not behaving as expected,” Scott said. “It just doesn’t work this way.” Scott had said. “What does that have to do with Hamlet?” Scott had no use for, no time for literature or fictional characters – they had no bearing on what was important to him, no bearing on computer programs.
