Returning to the entryway, Cyrus grabbed the massive duffle and headed for the far hallway, beyond the living room where he knew the bedrooms would be located. Four bedrooms, according to the specs provided by Allan Underwood. More than Walter needed, he had said. But it was likely that Walter entertained guests from time to time. He had no family but he was a good man so, certainly he had friends. Maybe that would explain why he had two of everything; two ATVs and two snowmobiles. Still, it was odd. Meade had never mentioned family, though Cyrus had never asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; it was just a unique attribute of their relationship. They honored each others privacy. Well, at least Cyrus had. Apparently the old man knew all kinds of Cyrus’s secrets.
What he wouldn’t give to have one more conversation with the old guy. There were so many questions he would ask this time around. Questions he felt entitled to ask given all he now knew.
Walking slowly down the hallway, he looked into each of the bedrooms as he passed. Every one was spacious and as equally immaculate as the rest of the house. They were all furnished but devoid of any personal touches. The bedrooms had a feel more like upscale hotel rooms.
At last, he reached the master bedroom, the last door on the left. He set his bag on the floor and took a deep breath. Wow. What have I done to deserve this?
The room was large, easily 20x30 with a king size bed on one wall and a scaled down version of the living rooms fireplace on the opposite side. There were two large dressers matching the style of the massive bed. A large mirror hung over one of the dressers. Several different pieces of modern art hung on the walls. As in the living room, the two sides of this scaled down hearth were floor to ceiling bookcases packed end to end with hardcover novels.
The ceiling was vaulted with a large fan hung in the center. The left wall contained two doorways. One leading to an enormous walk-in closet, the other to a bathroom complete with multi-jet shower and a large Jacuzzi.
Cyrus sat on the side of the bed and considered the circumstances. Meade had clearly done alright for himself. And this was all paid for, free and clear? Plus taxes and utilities would be paid from an escrow account? It was insanity. Was this really Meade’s way of thanking him for saving his life? Or was there more to it? From what he knew of the man, things were never as simple as they first appeared.
He pulled back the zipper on the bag at his feet and removed a file folder. Dropping it on the bed, Cyrus took a deep breath. The folder contained Meade’s autopsy report. It had been on his mind the entire drive west from Chicago. Cyrus had contacted an associate in Miami as soon as Allan Underwood left his apartment. His friend specialized in acquiring different forms of restricted material and information. In this case, Cyrus had requested Walter Meade’s medical files and autopsy report. As always, his friend had come through.
Reviewing the file wasn’t strictly necessary. The entire contents had already been committed to memory. Somehow it seemed more respectful to do it this way. He flipped open the folder and started leafing through the reports again.
The cause of death summary concluded that Meade had suffered myocardial infarction or, a heart attack, in layman’s terms. The report referred to existing heart problems stemming from an issue some years prior. While vague, the report alluded to an earlier heart related trauma. Cyrus knew why the report was ambiguous. The details of the incident were considered a matter of national security. Some time back, a team of foreign nationals attempted to kidnap Meade from a coffee shop in Washington DC. The kidnapping was thwarted, but not before Meade was dosed with a powerful drug. Apparently the dosage was botched. That mistake resulted in permanent damage to the old man’s heart.
According to the report, the medical examiner had concluded that Meade’s heart had been seriously damaged some time in the recent past and the man had simply succumbed to the inevitable. It wasn’t unreasonable. Meade was well into his eightieth year and he was running on a bum ticker. But there were two details in the report that had not been explained to Cyrus’s satisfaction.
Two fingers on Meade’s left hand were broken. The ME had concluded that the fingers were broken prior to the man’s death, likely just before he expired. The ME posited the fingers were broken as the man fell to the ground while suffering his heart attack.
The second issue was the minor bruising at the base of Meade’s skull. The ME had reported the injury as perimortem and also attributed it to the fall. An old man taking a spill that broke two fingers on his left hand and bruised the back of his head seemed something of a paradox…It didn’t add up. It would have to be a complicated tumble.
The big problem was the photo of the broken fingers. Two fingers on the left hand appeared twisted together, side by side and broken at virtually the same place. There were no other broken bones. Not even bruising on the rest of the hand. The report even included an X-ray. In this case, a copy of an X-ray, but the break was clearly visible. Those broken fingers had been on Cyrus’s mind for hundreds of miles. Shortly after crossing the Colorado border he realized what it was that troubled him.
Cyrus met Meade years earlier through an odd twist of fate. But they had grown to become friends. They spent endless long hours discussing many outlandish topics. Often plots from books or movies, even scientific theory. Cyrus found the old man to be an endless fount of knowledge and shockingly well read when it came to the most obscure science and science fiction. For Cyrus the conversations were enjoyable because the old man could always take whatever crazy idea Cyrus had and he could add to it or expound on it in some way. As a writer, these conversations were rocket fuel for Cyrus’s imagination.
Meade had often been a valued resource when Cyrus was working on a new book. It didn’t matter the plot or subject, as soon as there was a draft worth sharing, Meade was the first person Cyrus queried for a critique. Cyrus still had half a dozen works not quite ready for publication. Every one of them had been shared with Meade prior to his passing.
And it was one of those drafts that clicked for Cyrus when he thought of Meade’s two broken fingers. In a mystery novel Cyrus drafted, the victim of the story was attacked by an ex-coworker in the middle of the night. The villain had ambushed him while he slept, injecting him with an overdose of insulin. The victim awoke with a start, feeling the pain of the injection. By then the overdose had been administered and there was nothing he could do.
The antagonist simply sat back and waited for the overdose to take its toll. The victim sensed his faculties failing as he struggled to find a way to leave a clue, some way to let authorities know that his death was no accident. As the man crumpled to the floor in his last moments of life, he found himself in the fetal position. His killer was already paying him little attention, already searching the room for whatever it was he hoped to find. The unfortunate victim did the only thing his failing body would allow. There, on the floor with his knees raised to his chest, he took advantage of his killers lax attention. While the man wasn’t looking, the victim reached up under his night shirt and, using the edge of his finger nail, carved four letters into flesh of his abdomen. He only hoped the two words would bring him the justice in death that he had not found in life. The man had hastily scraped into his own skin the letters N O and O D.
The draft of that book still sat on Cyrus’s hard drive. It was the first novel he had ever written. Cyrus knew the book would never be published, but on a whim he shared the draft with Meade. The idea of leaving a dying note was cliche, Cyrus had said. Meade commented that perhaps the dying man could try something simpler. Perhaps if he intentionally broke a couple of his fingers, it would be enough to cause authorities to take a closer look at the incident. They would suspect the man had been tortured. No solution was discovered, but a decision followed regarding the worst books written by their favorite authors. But now, thinking about Meade’s two broken fingers, Cyrus had the sick feeling his damn book was on the old man’s mind as he lay dying on the floor. Those broken fingers weren’t the result of a fall. The locat
ion of the breaks and the circumstances of the Meade’s death brought Cyrus to a chilling conclusion. Meade had broken his own fingers in a desperate last-ditch effort to leave a message. Meade hadn’t died of natural causes. He’d been helped along.
This also explained the bruising on the back of Meade’s head. The ME didn’t recognize the marks but Cyrus did. He’d seen those marks before. Someone had pressed the barrel of a gun against the base of Meade’s head. That the bruising wasn’t worse indicated it likely happened shortly before his heart failed.
Cyrus couldn’t take the evidence to the police. It would be dismissed as circumstantial—if they took him seriously in the first place. Plus the police wouldn’t be aware of Meade’s attempted kidnapping years earlier. That would put it in the jurisdiction of the FBI. But the FBI would’ve been read in on the autopsy results already. There was no doubt that several government agencies had already reviewed the reports. Cyrus never knew what agency had employed Meade, only that he had clout. If no one was investigating Meade’s death, it wasn’t going to do any good to draw attention to it now.
That was ok. Cyrus had already decided to look into things personally. First he needed to get a better understanding of who Walter Meade really was. They had been friends for years but they had always been friends with great respect for each other’s privacy. As a result, Cyrus knew surprisingly little about the man’s professional life. He knew that Meade headed some kind of think tank or research group somewhere on the west coast but he had no idea what the group studied or specialized in. The entire time, Meade had shown an equal respect for Cyrus’s past. He never asked questions regarding it, not even tangentially. Cyrus always harbored a suspicion that Meade was somehow already aware of his past and it was why he was so careful to avoid referencing it. But if that were the case, it meant that Meade had a rather impressive high-level intelligence clearance. Cyrus had wondered but never inquired. The past was a demilitarized zone in their friendship. Neither ventured there though they both likely knew more than they let on.
Cyrus decided to settle in at Meade’s home before digging into the mystery that was Professor Walter Meade. He respected the man’s privacy in life. But now the man was gone, and if Cyrus was right, the man’s last mortal effort was to leave a message indicating that he had not died of natural causes. And he had left a message that only Cyrus could interpret.
Chapter 6
Berton Springs, Colorado
Wednesday, 1:00 am
The chirping of a distant alarm pulled Cyrus from a deep sleep. He sat up from where he lay sprawled across the bed in the master bedroom. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, it was several seconds before his eyes adjusted and he finally remembered why he wasn’t in his own apartment. Pale moonlight spilled through the pair of bedroom windows making the already unfamiliar room more disorientating. The long cross-country drive had really done him in. Not only was he completely out of sorts, but he had fallen asleep fully dressed.
Blinking slowly once more, he realized an alarm had woken him. Was it the home’s security system? No, that didn’t seem right. The tone wasn’t loud enough and it sounded too distant. Plus the sound didn’t have the urgency he expected from a security system. Something different then, he thought.
Walking carefully across the dark room, he knelt beside his still-packed duffle bag, pulled back the zipper on the end compartment, and retrieved his Springfield. While he was fairly certain the alarm wasn’t security related, it was better safe than sorry. Running a hand across the short stubble of hair on the top of his head, he shook off the last dregs of sleepiness and was ready to go.
Stepping into the pitch dark of the hallway, the alarm’s tone become clearer, though still indistinct and muffled. As he tread carefully down the hall, he was able to better vector in the source of the sound. At the end of the hall, just before reaching the living room, he stopped at a closed door. He hadn’t looked behind this one yet. Whatever was making the sound was somewhere beyond.
Silently, he turned the knob and pulled the door. As he did, he glanced beyond the threshold. He found only darkness. But now, with the door open, there was no question. The tone was coming from somewhere in the distance below. Reaching along the wall beyond the doorframe he found what he expected, a light switch. Flicking the switch with his gun up and at the ready, he kept his torso tucked beyond the jamb. Overreacting? Sure. But there’d been times when listening to that little voice in the back of his mind had saved his skin. So, when in doubt, he always listened to the voice.
In this case the voice was speaking out of turn. An empty stairway was all that greeted him.
Cyrus made his way down the stairs at slow and deliberate pace. He didn’t know what to expect. He wasn’t aware the house had a basement.
His mind was still clouded by exhaustion, and he was struggling to make sense of the unfamiliar surroundings, sights, and sounds. He had driven straight through, out from Chicago, stopping only for gas and a quick bite to eat. No wonder he’d crashed out so hard. He hated to admit it, but he was still drained from the fatigue.
At the bottom of the staircase he reached a platform. The path doglegged to the right before dropping the last four steps. He rounded the platform and finally reaching the bottom but saw little beyond what light spilled out of the stairwell. He found another switch and part of the basement became bathed in light. He realized there were several additional switches beside the first and flipped those as well.
Much like the garage, the basement was well lit by evenly distributed light ballasts that left virtually no corner in shadow. The ceiling was about ten feet high and ribbed with the bare joists from the floor above. Polished and sealed, the concrete floor had a smooth and industrial finish matching what he’d seen in the garage.
The basement was wide open and completely uncluttered. The house’s furnace was situated in a corner along with a water softener and an oversize water heater. There was a large eight foot wide freezer along one wall, and very little else. The source of the chirping alarm was nearby. Still, even in the wide-open space it was difficult to pinpoint the source. The sound was reflecting off of the unadorned concrete walls.
He noticed a small half-height server cabinet suspended from the wall in the far corner. It had steel posts on its four corners but its walls were composed of smoked glass making the cabinet semi-transparent. He could see the dim flicker of lights behind the glass.
The cabinet was bolted to the concrete wall. It was about four feet tall, though suspended up off the floor so the cabinet’s contents sat at eye level. He could see a thick conduit fastened to the wall behind the enclosure. The padded plastic channel ran up to the ceiling before branching off. This would be where the phone and television lines terminated. It would also be where the alarm system’s central processor was housed, he reasoned.
Pulling open the cabinet door, he found a thin rack mounted 1U server. It was an ultra thin, high density server that was only 1 3/4” tall, but wide and deep like a pizza box and positioned on sturdy sliding rails. Mounted above it was a compact monitor in a 2U drawer enclosure. He grabbed the handle on the drawer that housed the computer screen and pulled. When the drawer reached full extension, the flat panel monitor that was folded down inside the drawer flipped up like the screen of a laptop revealing a keyboard and trackpad beneath. The entire assembly was very common in computer data centers where space was at a premium. Cleverly, the screen and keyboard automatically folded themselves away as the drawer slid closed. It was overkill, but absolutely first-class hardware.
After sliding the monitor away, Cyrus examined the rest of the cabinet’s contents. There was a voice-over-IP conversion box wired for three phone lines. Overkill for a home, but certainly fitting given the old man’s propensity for a first-class setup. There was also a wireless access-point. That was a welcomed site. The information Allan Underwood had provided along with the keys and the access code to the house included the password for the home’s wi-fi network.
There was also a 24-port gigabit network switch with half of its ports used. Likely several of those 12 ports were actually used for phone lines—maybe even parts of the security system. He made a mental note to take a closer look at the security system in the morning. Then he leaned closer. There was something unusual here. He would need to figure it out before he accidentally locked himself out.
The last piece of hardware in the cabinet was the network router. He recognized that as an off the shelf Airport Extreme. They were good routers. He used one at home. It had proven more reliable than several of the Linksys routers that had blown out over the years. But there was one component he couldn’t find, something that absolutely should have been there. The network switch was hardwired into the Airport network router. That was correct. But the Airport router needed to uplink to some sort of cable, DSL, or satellite modem. In a worst case, maybe even a cellular modem. So far up in the mountains, it was hard to guess what sort of infrastructure the house might have access to. But there was nothing. The router was the end of the line. There was no uplink of any kind. That would’ve been fine if there was no active internet access. But according to the lights on the front of the router, an uplink was established. The router clearly thought it had access to the Internet. But from what he was seeing in the wiring configuration, it simply wasn’t possible.
At this point Cyrus realized that the alarm tone had stopped. Not just stopped, but stopped as soon as he’d opened the cabinet. He was so interested in the hardware, he hadn’t even noticed. So what had caused the alarm? And why in the middle of the night? He looked through the cabinet again, searching for an error light on one of the components. He found nothing.
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