SECRET SALVATION

by Chad Josey

  Damn, I must be like Rip Van Winkle as long as I slept… Jeez, one-hundred-plus emails.

  The Monitor reviewed Joe’s emails as they opened on the right side of her screen. Most Joe opened were from financial companies and school.

  Here’s one from the credit card company… guess, I don’t have to worry ‘bout paying that son-of-a-bitch, ever again?

  Joe read his emails deleting those obvious as spam. Make your penis two inches larger? Delete. For God’s sake, we better not have spam where I’m going? Ah, here’s one... find singles in your area. Delete… Looks like no emails from Charlie, yet.

  The Monitor recorded her log entry. Subject reading emails and finished eating.

  Joe scrolled to the bottom of his inbox. I get all this spam email and I never look at it?

  He paused at the last email in his inbox. His cursor moved over the ‘X’ to delete it, but a mouse click never occurred.

  Another spam… let’s see what it says.

  Joe clicked on the email with its listed subject: IMPORTANT INFO.

  Ooh, it must be real important… it’s in all caps. Joe’s well-rested thoughts remained sarcastic.

  The email opened. Pictures appeared on the screen. Joe scrolled down. Several pictures were in the email: President John F. Kennedy, Princess Diana, and the Murrah Building after it was bombed in Oklahoma City.

  What the heck?

  Joe was about to close the email, but the urge to continue scrolling tempted him. The images continued. Scenes came of riots in Los Angeles, groups of starving children in Africa, a screenshot of the Dow Jones ticker from the 2007 market collapse, and the Waco, Texas complex fire.

  This is a strange grouping of pictures?

  Pictures continued of a hypodermic needle with the letters AIDS across the top of it followed by another needle with H1N1.

  The last image was one of a shadowy plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Joe stopped scrolling. The hair on his neck stood straight up as he and Mary always believed it could have been them on that plane.

  Joe continued scrolling. No new pictures were present. As he was about to close the email, the top of a row of numbers appeared. He scrolled down further. A string of numbers came into view: 5.1 3.5 2.5 5.2 3.5 1.4 2.4 3.1 1.2.

  Huh? Um… okay?

  His right index finger spasmed as he scrolled the cursor back to the top.

  Who sent this email? Who is friend@xmail.com? ... Delete.

  The split screen on the Monitor’s computer still showed Joe sitting at the desk. On the right side was Joe's email program closing in real-time. Joe’s desktop image appeared on her screen as his computer shutdown.

  The Monitor typed her last entry into her log: @12:56 a.m. — email received with pictures and a row of numbers from friend@xmail.com.

  As Joe’s computer closed, the Monitor’s split screen resumed to a full screen. The video feed showed Joe walk out of his home office turning out the lights.

  She watched him enter the living-room and sit on the sofa. Subject is watching television. Nothing new to report. Send alert about receiving email from friend@xmail to Command.

  9:35 a.m.

  INSIDE HIS OFFICE at Stonehaven, Joe sat in darkness with his blinds drawn shut. Peeks of morning sunlight poked through the metal, horizontal blades of the blinds.

  Stacked boxes full of years’ worth of work sat high on his desk, on the floor, and on the small black sofa in his office. His desk chair creaked as he reclined back and placed his feet on top of his desk. A cascade of papers fell to the floor when his black sneakers hit the side of a box.

  “Shit!”

  He placed his feet on the floor. His desk chair released a loud creak as it straightened itself when he bent forward to pick up the fallen papers.

  “Jeez, a brother leaves for a week and you’re leaving? That must have been one hell of a conference you went to?”

  Charlie's familiar voice came booming into his office. Joe lifted his head from the side of the desk. The sight of his best friend brought Joe relief.

  “Charlie, how the hell was your trip to Myrtle Beach?”

  “Man, it was great. Becky and the twins had a wonderful time.” Charlie stepped through the obstacle course to sit on Joe's sofa. “Uh, seriously, Man. You going somewhere?”

  “Uh… um… uh, no. I just got tired of looking at all this stuff in here, you know?”

  “Dude, it looks like you’re getting rid of everything?”

  Joe looked around his office in agreement. “I am sending all these to my house. That way my office will be empty and I can have it cleaned.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you it smells like shit in here.” Charlie released a laugh, which bellowed down the hallway matching his deep voice. “Why not just move this stuff into the empty office next door and then clean your office?”

  “Ah, see, Charlie. That’s why I missed ya, Pal. Nah, I thought about that, but this will let me spend a little more time at home working instead of all my time, here.”

  “Don’t say no more. Mary’s giving you a hard time about working too much, again.”

  “Uh, no… uh,” he paused realizing this sounded like a better reason, “yeah, she’s been bustin’ my balls lately.”

  Charlie stood and walked into their shared lab across the hall. “What you guys need is to go on a vacation.” He returned into Joe's doorway, again. “You two need to get away and spend quality time together… our vacation was just what we needed.”

  Dude, you don't even know what kind of trip we are getting ready to go on.

  “Um… yeah, a trip… we’ll look into that.”

  Charlie smiled as he turned to go back to the lab. He yelled from across the hall. “Hey, I can’t wait to hear about your trip to Colorado and your presentation. Maybe you can catch me up over lunch, today?”

  “Sure thing,” Joe yelled back.

  Joe’s words held hostage his recent sense of happiness seeing his friend again. An overpowering feeling of guilt had returned.

  For a moment, Joe had forgotten everything about Colorado. Charlie’s reminder caused all his thoughts to flood back at once. Guilt balanced sadness as Joe bent down again to finish picking up the papers.

  “Hey, some guys may come here in a few days to pick up my stuff.”

  Joe looked up expecting to hear a response from Charlie from the lab. Instead, Charlie stood in the doorway looking back at Joe with a phone stuck between his shoulder and his ear.

  Charlie mouthed the word, Okay.

  Joe felt bad for disturbing him and mouthed back, I’m sorry, as Charlie closed Joe’s office door. The light from the hallway disappeared. The boxes on the floor looked like stalactites in the caves of the east-Texas hills Joe remembered from a school field trip.

  To awaken the darkness, Joe pulled down on a faded-yellow string hanging from the top of the window. A tidal wave of light rushed into his office as the blinds raced upward.

  Damn, that’s bright.

  Joe shielded his eyes from the flowing sunshine filling his office. Dust particles from the paper-filled boxes danced in the air. The sunrays made it appear as though he stood inside a mad hatter’s dusty snow globe.

  His eyes followed in amusement one rather large dust particle seeming to hang in the air. As his eyes focused beyond the dust particle, it became blurry.

  A sheet of paper hanging onto the edge of a box sitting on the floor next to him caught his attention. He bent over to push it back into the box, but he stopped. The contents of the paper captured his gaze like the beautiful artwork in the Louvre Museum.

  VLOOKUP formulas in Excel? Hmm…

  Joe snatched the paper before it fell and walked back to his desk chair. The piercing creak occurred as he sat studying the various Excel formulas he had used in his research.

  This formula returns a value of the cell in a column of data.

  He ran his right hand through his hair.

  Okay, say Grandma's letter matrix is the data
set. If someone wanted to communicate something, they could send something like a VLOOKUP formula.

  An audible laugh echoed through his office.

  Yeah, like Grandma knows anything about Excel?

  His head was full of mixed emotions. Frustration overcame him. He was reaching for any answer.

  Why did Grandma tape the matrix inside a hidden drawer with my graduation picture?

  The determination to solve this mystery stole Joe’s thoughts away from the mind-numbing information he had learned in Colorado.

  To release his frustration, Joe balled up the paper with its equations and shot it toward a lone empty box in the corner of the room. The paper ball floated through the air slashing through the glowing dust particles. He missed the top of stacked boxes in the middle of the floor as the ball arched its way down into the box.

  “Yes, swish… two points.”

  Silence returned once the paper ball stopped rattling inside the box.

  Two points? If someone wanted to use that letter matrix as a code key, then you could send two points to tell the coordinates on the matrix to select a letter.

  Dust no longer floated in the air as enough time had passed to allow them to settle. “That’s it,” Joe yelled. The particles of dust jumped into the air as if he had frightened them. He ran to his door with his keys in hand.

  When the office door closed behind him, a small stack of boxes tipped over beside the doorway. He stuck his head into the lab across the hall.

  “Charlie, I’m going home now… rain check on lunch ’till tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing, Boss… Go enjoy your afternoon delight,” Charlie said with a grin.

  Joe rolled his eyes as he left the lab. He ran down the hallway slamming the door against the wall.

  I only need to find two points...

  11:15 a.m.

  JOE STOOD WINDED in the front doorway of their home after running from the train station. His heavy breathing drowned out the jumbling keys left swinging in the door.

  He made a beeline for his antique desk. A heavy, loud sigh rushed from his lungs as Joe waited for his computer to start.

  Joe grabbed his mouse and double-clicked the Internet browser to open his email program. His eyes darted around the screen.

  That’s right… I deleted that email.

  He clicked on the trash folder scrolling through its emails.

  I deleted it. It was just after the penis enlargement emails.

  He kept scrolling.

  Not here?

  He clicked on his inbox again and scrolled.

  Not here, either?

  He clicked in his draft folder and scrolled.

  Maybe it got saved, here?

  After ten minutes of searching, he pushed himself away from the computer with a blank stare.

  I know for sure I saw an email last night with all those random pictures in it.

  He raked his hands through his hair.

  At the bottom was a row of numbers… that’s it... I’m losing my mind. Hell, I am making things up, now?

  Joe stood to walk out of the office. He froze in the doorway.

  Wait, I remember some of them…

  He sat and pulled out a sheet of paper from the trash can beside his desk. With a pencil, he wrote out the numbers he tried to remember.

  I’m sure the first number was 5.1… then 3.5… and I think 2.5 was next.

  He placed dashes for the remaining ones he could not recall.

  I can’t remember how many numbers there were?

  Joe reached into his pocket pulling out his black wallet to retrieve the small paper with his earlier solution.

  Okay, the first number... 5.1… If I look at the fifth column and then the first row, the matching letter is W.

  He wrote the letter W on his paper.

  So, 3.5 is the third column, fifth row… that would be the letter Y. And, 2.5 is the second column, fifth row… V.

  Wrinkles creased along his forehead. The letters made no sense.

  W Y V… uh… what the hell is that… maybe it’s the row first, then the column?

  He put his pencil to the paper again.

  Okay, so 5.1 is the fifth row, then the first column... the letter S. And, 3.5 is the third row, fifth column... the letter A. Then, 2.5 is the second row, fifth column... the letter L.

  His eyes grew closer together. The letters S A L - - - - taunted him.

  Who the hell is SAL - - - -?

  He replayed the pictures from the missing email in his memory.

  One of those must be related somehow to a name starting with SAL.

  Joe has a talent for recalling images and lists. If he would have studied the pictures last night or had a normal sleeping pattern, he could have recalled everything. Unfortunately, this email was fading from his memory.

  I can remember the Oklahoma City Building and the Twin Towers. I’m pretty sure there were even pictures of JFK and Princess Diana.

  He stared at his graduation picture on the desk leaning in his chair.

  I remember something about AIDS and the stock crash…. and the Waco fire.

  His lack of sleep and with all his stress from the past week, his frustration grew too much to take. Joe folded the small, thin paper and placed it back into his wallet.

  Maybe, I’m just making everything up? I mean, where the hell is the email? It could not have just disappeared.

  Air escaped his pursed lips. His mind froze. The lower part of his mouth opened. This same expression came to him one other time in recent memory, several days earlier in Colorado.

  Maybe it’s not a name… maybe it’s… Salvation?

  Joe sat in front of his computer screen. His emails taunted him. He laughed as he slipped his wallet back into his pants.

  A new Monitor had taken his shift watching Joe, today. On his observation screen were the split images of Joe on the left and his opened email program on the right.

  The Monitor typed in the ongoing log:

  Subject came home in a hurry and looked through his email. He appeared to be looking for something. No voices were heard. He took something from his wallet, but I am unable to see what it is. After a few minutes, Subject is staring at his computer.

  The Monitor pressed enter to record the log. In Colorado, the Eden Foundation received the entry recorded into a database. The entry was for Subject 147889.

  Deep in the recesses of the Command Center was the mainframe room. Since the 1970s, Eden had recorded countless records for other Subjects, here.

  The room’s dimensions are large, some six hundred-feet-square. With today's modern advances in computer systems, gone are the large mainframes. Much smaller equipment servers store records for all the Subjects watched by Eden.

  A computer terminal connected to the server enables a technician to perform diagnostics. The screen illuminates with sets of numbers scrolling upward. Each number belongs to a watched Subject.

  Subject 147889 appeared at the bottom of the screen immediately upon entry by the Monitor in New York City. Within a few seconds, it scrolled upward as a new record for Subject 189125 appeared. A new record for Subject 101112 followed. After twenty seconds and one hundred entries, the record for Joe had disappeared off the top of the terminal.

  Gabriel sat at his office desk on the ground floor. He had established an alert on his smartphone when a new record was submitted for Joe, or Subject 147889. An alert appeared on his phone.

  “Joe... Joe... Joe... Forget about it and stay with our mission at hand,” Gabriel said as he glanced over at his laptop. On his screen, he read the deleted email Joe had attempted to locate.

  Gabriel clicked his videoconference icon on his screen. After a few moments, a live image of an older woman appeared. She wore black-rimmed glasses and a black microphone from her left ear to her mouth.

  “Have we made any progress in finding the source of the email to Subject 147889?” Gabriel asked.

  The woman responded through the video screen, “Unfortunatel
y, not. Whoever sent it, sent it through an encrypted email server with a temporary IP address. I cannot identify the location of the address."

  "Does it match the IP address of the other emails?"

  "They all have different addresses. The last one was registered in the Philippines and bounces around the world on hundreds of servers before ending up on the inbox of Subject 147889.”

  “That’s disappointing… keep working on it and let me know immediately if you identify the exact location from where it was sent.”

  “Yes, Sir,” the woman said before ending the video call.

  Gabriel scrolled to the top of the email and looked at the sender’s information.

  “Okay, ‘Friend’ who and where are you?”

  17-Singles Cruise

  Thanksgiving Day, 2003

  Pasadena, Texas

  THE SIXTH THANKSGIVING alone for Liz meant volunteering again to serve dinner at the homeless shelter. Liz loved her new annual tradition. It kept her mind off the anniversary of Eli’s death, and it became such a rewarding experience for her.

  As Liz closed the front door of her home to leave, the phone rang in the kitchen. She opened the door and ran inside. Her decoration style was trapped in the ‘70s. Dark, shag carpeting in the living room lead to bright, yellow-painted kitchen cabinets in the kitchen. Another remnant from the past was the lime-green phone hanging in the kitchen. Its extension cord was long enough to reach all the way into the living room.

  “Hello,” Liz said in a rushed breath as she darted into the kitchen grabbing the phone on its fifth ring.

  “Hey, Grandma, it’s Joseph. Everything, okay? You sound outta breath?”

  “Oh, hey Joseph… Oh, you know me, I’m runnin’ ‘round here like a chicken with my head cut off fixin’ to get ready to go somewhere.” Liz giggled as she calmed down.

  “That’s right... the homeless shelter is today. I wanted to call and wish you a happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving to you and Mary, too. I saw where they’re calling for snow, there.”

  “Yeah, only a few inches. We’ve lived here long enough now where that seems normal.”