by Gabi Moore
I figured that had to indicate that they were going for a capture. If they were simply trying to eliminate the threat, then there were other ways that they could have accomplished that feat. They could have set up snipers in a road block at the end of strategic sections of road. They could have used explosives, or high-powered weaponry to decimate the vehicle or me. They could have done a lot of things, but the fact that they obviously had instructions to take me alive gave me the only other edge in the game that I felt I had left.
Now I had more reasons than ever to play my boldest cards.
The streets were growing more narrow and had begun to transfer back into unpaved roads in some of the neighboring sections. I was growing more and more uncomfortable, as signs of the area being densely populated began to surface. People were hiding, scared in the doorways of their houses, or diving out of the way as the two of us sped down the street. We had attracted the attention of at least one more member of the local law enforcement, but this was some form of strange rural sub-division, and they didn’t have the resources to manage a situation like this.
Sure, they would call in, and more equipped members of nearby municipalities would be en route. Unfortunately, the nearest area that had access to that level of transportation power were likely a solid fifteen minutes away, on the outskirts of South West Rome.
The engine was starting to lose power as the tires were not equipped to ride on the dirt roads. The persistent bumping from behind only made matters worse. I was hardly able to make any headway because I was constantly fending off attacks from behind. They knew what they were doing, and had placed me in a primarily reactive position instead of a position where I could claim a creative advantage. I saw a bridge over a low river coming up in the road and decided to make one more desperate motion toward a non-reactive position.
The ascent of the bridge was met with my pedal fully depressed to the floor. I hadn’t reached maximal acceleration yet, but I was getting there, and whatever I could put together would have to do. At the base of the wooden bridge, I modified my direction a few degrees to the left in a slight skid. I was hoping to make it seem like the dirt road had taken a toll on my ability to remain in control. I wanted to feign failure so they would be overconfident and push to make their final move.
The feint worked, and I heard them rushing in for another hit from behind. I had shown them my ass, and they were eager to fuck; far too eager for their own good. Instead of correcting, which would have been necessary to continue forward on the bridge, and would have slowed me down enough to where they most certainly would have made contact with my tail and pushed me into a roll — I drove straight off the apex of the bridge.
The materials for the bridge were wooden, and I wouldn’t have been able to manage this feat otherwise. The wood snapped and exploded around me, some of it actually came up and broke the windshield of my car. Wood and glass sprayed across my face, though I had the foresight to cover my eyes with the crook of my elbow right before impact. I was being reckless, I know, but I hoped that I might have enough acceleration to stick the landing on the other side of the creek, and move onto the country roads which permitted me to play to my strengths in the chase.
Had I made the same attempt while headed straight, I would have been in the same position my assailants were in at the moment, only with fewer pieces of wood breaking through their windshield. They had been unprepared for my maneuver, and given the momentum they had built before attempting to ram the back of me, they were forced to head straight over to the end of the bridge. While they were wildly skidding on the dirt, attempting to change directions, I was actively testing the tensile strength of the shocks in my little roadster.
I smiled, exhilarated, and feeling a renewed sense of hope. The speed had been enough to propel the vehicle forward over the water. While I had landed on the uneven ground near the edge of the river, I had enough momentum behind me to push the car past the final berm which led down to the shore of the waterway. I too bumped and skidded, though the angle of my trajectory was such that I needed far less correction in order to regain my speed on the road perpendicular to the bridge.
“FUCK YEA!” I screamed, pounding my hand down on the steering wheeling, and jamming my foot onto the floor.
That had worked out better than I expected.
I’d like to pause for a moment here in my reverie, and share with you an object of my most sincere hatred.
If there is one thing that I hope never to see here in the country of Italy — one thing besides the ghost of a dead dictator, or perhaps some kind of demon-spawned straight from the catacombs beneath the Vatican — it would be a goat.
Up until that particular moment, just one or two turns after my landing, I didn’t feel so strongly about goats, and then I did. I have a feeling that sensation is going to stick with me as long as I live, which at this point, I’m not sure is going to be too much farther in the future.
I’d like to introduce this scenic moment to you by playing a bit of an imaginative scene in your mind.
Imagine you are driving down a country road, being chased by bloodthirsty bandits, and you just imagined that you were able to make your escape last a bit longer than you would have otherwise hoped for — Your vehicle is not doing amazingly but is holding out well enough under the circumstances. What’s more, is that you have temporarily felt the soaring heights of elation, as you pulled some particularly clever move out of your ass, and now felt like you had a prayer at moving things in your favor.
Now imagine the eyes of a goat.
In fact, there’s very little reason for you to imagine just one set of eyes because the reality of the situation is that there are at least twenty of those soulless, unholy fuckers staring you down from the center of the road. Their bodies are spread out like a scatterplot diagram, and there is no way for you to maneuver between them. They literally stretch, unapologetically from the river to the prairie just to the north of the river. There is no way around them, and what’s worse is that you have very little time to decide what you want to do about the vehicle you’re in, and how you may or may not protect your body from the impending pain of a direct collision with two or three, three hundred pound animals. To paint this picture just a little more clearly — imagine they have horns, and imagine they are refusing to budge, or get spooked. They have literally frozen in time, right in front of your path.
Now, the reality of the situation is that the moment where they were frozen in time was not terribly long. They eventually did move, but only after I careened off the side of the road and knocked my forehead into the steering wheel.
Right about that point, I imagine the goats were scared shitless and ran away, but in that crucial moment, when I had to decide whether or not I wanted to hit the river, or hit the goats — they remained either frozen in terror or agents of my personal impending apocalypse.
I’m going to bet on the latter, though you’re free to come to your own conclusions.
I recall the pain of being caught outside of the vehicle. Initially, the only pain I felt was gracefully not present in my body. The pain itself had transferred into disturbed visual and aural phenomenon. My head felt injured, and there was blood on my hand when I reached up to touch my forehead. The sounds around me were muted, and strange hallucinatory distortions came into my brain. I thought, for a moment, that I heard someone telling me something, but when I listened closer, the sound ran away from my awareness. The sound was there, but the meaning was absent.
Lights flashed in my vision, and the actual details of the environment around me were lost. I remember the cold feeling of rushing water, and I remember my head going under. By impulse, I pulled myself up once more, though I was only able to bring myself up once before falling back down to the current. The water wasn’t particularly wide, but my strength was failing me. I was certain that I would drown, then and there, somewhere in the Italian countryside — the haunting cause of my undoing, and the final vision in my mind before unconscio
usness:
The haunting, double slits of an animal whose place in society was to indulge human beings in their desire for Ricotta.
Right about then, everything went dark. My body began to grow cold, and I felt a strange sense of peace wash over me.
You did it, I thought. You saved the girl, and didn’t kill anyone — not even a goat.
Some small, non-visible part of myself was proud for a moment, and I allowed myself to think that there might be some hope for me in judgment. I may have been a trained murderer, but at least the cheese supply for the countryside just south of Rome could enjoy a total absence of interruption.
Death smirk.
Then something awful happened, something even more terrifying than the eyes of the goat.
I retched water and began to cough. I tried to look around, but all I found was darkness. I had a sack placed over my head, and my wrists were bound behind my back. The hum of the car was underneath my body, and my face bounced along the bristly fabric of the trunk.
I was alive, that much was evident, but I had no idea at what the cost. All because of a goddamned goat, here I was, being cast into the wilderness for the sins of the people.
It’s only appropriate, I thought, waiting for whatever the hell happened to be in store for me at the end of the trip.
Chapter 23 - Angela
God fucking damn it, this is ridiculous, was a phrase that I found myself repeating over and over that week.
I lost interest in all of my projects at the same time after Piper came over that week. Sure, I fucked the hell out of her, and whenever I start up a sexual relationship like that, my life gets a bit screwy. There is generally a great moment of personal victory — a type of ego boost if you will, knowing that the outside world has validated me in some way, and finds me to be attractive and interesting.
I know very well that this sort of behavior smacks of codependency, and that I shouldn’t validate myself based on the perceptions of others, regardless if they are long time friends or not. Knowing something, and being able to act on it are entirely different things.
In spite of the fact that I have the mind of a genius - or perhaps because of it — I don’t have quite as strongly developed an emotional level of maturity. Strictly speaking, I mean the ability to independently navigate my life, while still being within the context of a relationship and not actually being swallowed whole by the damn thing.
In this particular case, it was better that I was obsessed, because my attention to detail in the most extreme form ended up being a source of salvation for the object of my desire. In my own mind, I ended up avoiding the consequences of behaving like a stalker, because everything ended up being incredibly useful. In effect, I had the same form of confirmation bias as the NSA. I laughed as I reviewed the nearly endless files that may have been tangentially related to Piper’s former boss.
She owes me a fucking orgasm, I swore to myself, trying to make myself feel better about the fact that I had not slept properly in days.
If I had some kind of lab bitch to do this work for me, that would have been preferable, but unfortunately, no such person was around. I suppose that is the whole concept of slavery, and autonomy. I had to be my own lab bitch, for better or worse. The only perky sex treats I would get from my lab bitch were exclusively masturbatory, and unfortunately far too predictable to be of any interest at all. I tried to put all of that behind me, and simply analyze the data.
The most difficult part of the whole thing was the initial finding of Maurice. I literally had to go through the police database, as well as the private cellular database. Piper’s history ended up being the best link I had to the man, but they had been pretty discrete about their relationship, and their methods of communication were mostly clandestine and personal.
The trail went dead cold far too many times for that route to be productive, at which point I was basically trolling for silver fishes in an ocean of data and not getting much of anything that was worth any value. What ended up working out was the cell phone I had given to Piper.
Naturally, I had modified the phone so that tit could be easily used as a tracking device. I wanted it to ping back to me her location, as well as be a potential source for her to call me if need be. I knew that she was an independent type of person, but there was no way for me to know whether or not she was going to be in enough trouble to where she would reach out to me once more. I had to be open to that possibility.
As a precautionary measure, I also had a RFID tag placed in the hairpin I gave her. I was going to tell her about it in a week or so if it turned out that she didn’t need the help any longer. Keeping those things that close to your head can be s somewhat of a problem. I didn’t want her to get cancer, but I needed to have some way of tracking whether or not police signals were active in her area.
By ‘in her area’, I mean literally, about her specifically.
The mechanics of the process are a bit complicated, so let’s just say that the hairpin was my failsafe, and the phone was my primary hardware installation. Like a fucking tool, she hadn’t contacted me until she was in trouble, which meant that her phone hadn’t been turned on the whole time.
This is why I was swimming around in the dark as long as I had been.
Sure, I knew roughly of her location, but there is only so much you can do with a RFID chip of that size, in terms of programming capacity. Also, when I gifted her the piece, I had been in somewhat of a hurry. You can’t really make complex spy equipment like that on the fly. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones that are the most practical — even if they lack in diverse functionality.
I picked up a series of long-standing pings around the RFID about twelve minutes before Piper finally turned on her fucking phone and called me. She’s lucky, that I was around, and not going out for a walk or taking a nap. When you’re stalking someone, apparently, you don’t have time to rest for a minute, otherwise, you might miss out on your crucial opportunity, and then where would you be?
Nowhere. Fucking nowhere, and with nothing to do but acknowledge that you had wasted all of your time and resources only to be jerking off when you needed to be present the most.
I followed the brief flurry of police exchanges and pieced together the chase as thoroughly as possible. It was a bit exciting, but my job was far from over. Even while Piper was talking to me, I was only giving her part of my attention. I had to use the remainder of my attention to focus on where her boyfriend was headed.
You got to hand it to a man who can throw a woman out of a moving car, off of the edge of a cliff in order to save her life. That takes some serious audacity.
Wouldn’t mind sucking that one off, I thought, indulging in the lewd train of thought just long enough to where I could focus back on the task at hand.
As far as I was aware, the chase was over. My project, on the other hand, had seamlessly transferred over into the tracking of a new secondary target — Tyler.
Police activity here in Venice had been up in arms searching for Maurice, and everything I had been made aware of indicated that they had looked far and wide, but had not, in fact, managed to pick up on anything. They had gone through Piper’s apartment, and I spent a solid two days in an anxiety ridden panic, thinking my entire operation would have been compromised in the event that they had found some evidence which linked Piper to myself. I opted not to sleep, and instead, decided to stay up doing surveillance on the local police dept. At all hours of the night. It was pretty ridiculous, but fortunately, nothing turned up yet.
In a stroke of peripheral luck, I managed to track down the cell numbers of a few possible leads that were in the immediate area consistently during the Rome police chase. These numbers crossed reference with at least one consistent number that was currently located in Corsica. I would have bet anything that this was where Maurice was spending his time, but I wanted to know for sure. After running the content retrieval systems, I was able to capture a few glimpses into the transcripts between
the phone numbers around the police chase, and the number in Corsica. The only relevant information I was able to pull was that the number in Corsica, “wanted the soldier alive,” and to know “Where is the girl?”
Apart from those direct comments, the conversation was stilted in mercenary code or unfruitful in general. Tracing the coordinates on the number in Corsica was the easy part. I had the location down from the onset — the real challenge was discovering whether or not it was Maurice. In order to get that up and going, I had to do a bit of backtracking, which ended up taking more time than I would have preferred.
I went into Maurice’s private file on a database where — let’s just say I should have stayed away from.
I managed to find some recorded voice clips from a court case that he had attended when he was a younger, and supposedly less careful man. Locating voice recognition software was a pain in the ass — Not exactly something you can just pirate from the Internet. However, when I got everything up and running, and fed the sample from the phone through with the sample from the court recording, the software came back with an 87% likelihood of identification.
I guess a few years, and a few more cigarettes could have accounted for the difference.
When I felt confident enough in the fact that I had a lock on where Maurice was, I forwarded the information to Piper via text.
“Corsica,” she replied, calling me back to verify.
“Yep,” I said, not really having anything more to share with her on the subject.
My brain was officially fried, and I felt like if I didn’t succumb to a nap sooner than later, I was going to fall asleep right on my basement floor. I had done that before during another manically obsessive episode of surveillance, and I have to say that though my equipment is top notch, the fuck room upstairs is so much more preferable.
