As the door to the room was closed and locked, Evan and Melina rushed to the side of the body.
“Turn him over,” Melina cried as she knelt on one side of the body.
Evan, kneeling on the other side, grabbed the person by the shoulders and turned him over in one quick motion.
Evan’s eyes widened as he backed away. He sat on his heels, closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Melina sensed that something was wrong. “Daddy, what is it?”
“This is one of my co-workers. His name is David Winfield. I believe you know his son Alex.”
“This is Alex’s dad?” Melina said, much louder than she expected. “Why would Mom’s old boss want to kidnap him?”
Evan looked over at Melina. “William Mason is David’s boss too. He works in the same group that your mom did, the tools group. We worked together on a recent mission to Malazistan, the country that wants to use us as a bargaining chip. It makes sense that they might want him to come too.”
Melina still had a puzzled look on her face. Evan walked over to the sink at the edge of the room, turned on the faucet, and cupped his hands under the stream until he had a handful of water. Then he walked back over to David, knelt down and poured the water onto his face.
David sat up quickly, spitting out water. He looked around furiously through watery eyes.
Evan crouched down right in front of him. “David! David, wake up.”
David stopped looking around and wiped the water from his eyes as he tried to focus on the face in front of him.
“David, it’s Evan Roberts,” Evan said as he put one hand on David’s shoulder.
David finally was able to focus on Evan and a look of recognition washed over his face.
“Evan?” he said. There was a distinct note of confusion as he took in Evan’s face. Then he leaned back on his hands and looked around.
“Where are we?” he said.
“We are in a building, in the industrial area just east of downtown Dallas,” Evan said.
David was still a little groggy and paused as the information filtered through his head. He looked away from Evan toward Melina. “You must be Melina. I have heard so many nice things about you from my son.”
“Thank you,” Melina said. She wanted to say more, but nothing else came to her.
David looked past Melina and began to scan the room. “Why are we here? And I guess while I am asking… how did I get here?”
“I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do know that your boss used an FCAN on us, kidnapped us, brought us here and locked us in this room.”
“Wait a minute,” David said. “Are you talking about William Mason?”
“Yes. He was here earlier. He said that he was sending us to Malazistan. I guess now that would include you too. Something about us being used as a bargaining chip in order to get the President to lay off their nuclear program. David, he sold some of the agency’s partially enriched uranium to the Malaz. He called them his associates. He must have-”
David stood and held up his hand toward Evan as if he had heard enough. “Hold on a moment.”
He turned away from Evan and Melina and didn’t say anything as he paced across the room, deep in thought.
Finally, David turned around and looked at Evan. “The Malaz government does not care anything about us.”
“Well, duh,” Evan chuckled. “I doubt they give two hoots about our welfare, but they do seem to want us there.”
“No, they don’t,” David said. “In fact, I doubt that they even know we exist.”
“What do you mean?” Evan asked.
David took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I am the reason that we are all here.”
Evan laughed. “You are the reason that your boss kidnapped us? You must have gotten an especially crummy performance review.”
“Cute,” David smiled. “No, seriously, did you get an email with a picture of Laura attached that was taken by a red light camera the night of her accident?”
“Yes!” Melina said as she pointed at David. “We looked at the photo on my dad’s computer! We were headed to the police station when we were kidnapped.”
“I sent that picture to your father,” David said.
“What does that picture have to do with us being here?” Evan asked. “Do you think that William had something to do with Laura’s accident?”
“Yes. I do,” David replied.
“Your boss, I mean Mom’s boss caused her to get into an accident?” Melina asked.
“Let me start from the beginning and tell you what I know,” he said. “Evan, do you remember this morning, after our meeting when I said that I was going back to the lab?”
“Yes. You seemed intent on figuring out what went wrong with the glider.”
“That’s right. But instead of going to the lab, I snuck into the security room next door to the lab. The room is locked, and it’s only supposed to be accessed by personnel from the security department, but the door can be opened if you enter a pushbutton code. They don’t change the code often. Everybody in the tools group knows what it is.”
“That’s a little ironic,” Evan said. “What were you looking for in there?”
“There are cameras all over the building, including the lab, and video from all of the cameras is fed to machines in that room where it is recorded onto a bank of hard drives. They keep a copy of the streaming data of every day for all of the cameras for the previous three months on the drives before the data is written over. I wanted to see the surveillance stream file from the lab for the day that we assembled the glider to see if anyone messed with it after it was completed. There is a computer in the room connected to the disks that I could use to access them.”
“So you found the file and looked at it?” Evan asked.
“No,” David said. “Right after I snuck into the room, I heard voices coming down the hall toward the security room, so I ran to the back of the room, and I hid behind some tall storage racks. After a few moments, the door to the room opened, and two men came in. I recognized both of them as technicians from the tools lab that worked the night shift and often on weekends. I could not figure out why tools lab techs were in the security room.”
“Funny,” Evan said. “Considering you were in there too.”
David smiled and continued. “My ears perked up when they started talking about the circumstances surrounding a car accident that had happened some months before. One of the men said that last Friday morning, William had driven through the intersection where the accident had taken place, and he had noticed that there was a red-light camera at the intersection. After a little investigation on his part, he discovered that the camera had been in place the night of the accident.”
“They were talking about Mom’s accident!” Melina said.
“That’s what I was thinking, so I continued to listen closely. The technician said that William had sent him over to the police station with paperwork that documented a phony story about an accident that involved a foreign agent in order to get the police to release a copy of the picture. My guess it that he wanted to see what was captured on film. The police gave the man a disk with the photo on it, and then he gave the disk to William. But not until he made a copy of the photo. He thought the expression on Laura’s face was funny, and he wanted to show his coworker. Kinda weird.”
“It’s more than weird, it’s sick,” Evan said.
“I got the impression that William did not know that the technician had a copy of the photo, so he had to show his coworker the photo in private. That is why they were in the security room. Nobody ever goes into that room.”
“Except tools group personnel,” Evan said.
“It’s our own private lounge,” David said, smiling. “So they walked over to the security room computer and loaded the disk with the picture into the computer’s disk drive. Then they used a photo editor program to open the picture. I could see the computer screen from where I was hiding, and my eyes almost popped
out of their sockets when I saw the image. It was Laura. You could see into her car and see that she was not awake and slumped over. After a few chuckles about the goofy expression on Laura’s face, they closed the photo editor, took the disk, and left.
“If they took the disk, then how did you get the picture?” Melina asked.
“I waited a few minutes, and after I was sure that they were not coming back, I ran over to the computer and searched through the temporary cache until I found a copy of the photo. I knew that you should see it, so I emailed it to you right from the security room computer. I was so flustered at that point that I forgot about the glider and just went to my office to try to calm down so I could drive home.”
“So, were you able to calm down and go home?” Evan asked.
“Not exactly,” David said. “I was in my office for a few hours when William knocked on the door and came in. He said that I was seen leaving the security room earlier in the day, and he wondered what I was doing in there. Now, I know I was not seen by anyone when I was going in or coming out of that room. I am sure of that. The only way that I could have been seen leaving that room was if they had reviewed the security disks for that hallway. My guess is that the email sent from that computer triggered some security firewall. They were trying to find out who sent it.”
“What did you tell him?” Evan asked.
“I made up some story that I saw the door open, and that I went in to investigate. He seemed to accept that explanation, and then he left. At that point, I wanted out of there, so I headed straight for the elevator. I was riding down in the elevator, texting Alex that I was coming home when I heard this thump and then a hissing sound coming from the floor of the elevator. It took a second to realize that it was an FCAN. It must have come from the ceiling because it was not in there when I got on.”
“This sounds kinda familiar,” Melina said.
“I already had my phone out and was texting so I quickly added the words help fcan elevator and then hit send. I think it went out. That is the last thing that I remember before I woke up here.”
There was quiet as everyone took in all that had been said.
After a few moments, Evan spoke. “The photo tells me, without a doubt that there are some questions about Laura’s accident. The biggest question that I have is why. William’s interest in the photo would tell me that he is involved somehow. But why would he want her to get into an accident?”
“I don’t have an answer to that, Evan,” David said, “but my guess is that he had some reason to want Laura out of the way. And now he wants us out of the way too.”
“Agreed,” Evan replied. “I now question whether what William told us about the Malaz wanting us is true. He may or may not be planning to send us to Malazistan, but I don’t think he plans on us coming back. We know too much about Laura’s accident. Either way we’ve got to get out of here now.”
“You’re the expert,” David said. “What would you suggest?”
“The windows are barred, and there is just the one door. It is solid metal, and there is nothing in this room strong enough to break it down. The door is the way out though. We are going to have to go to war with the people that show up here to get us. We’ve got to make some weapons from whatever we can find in this room.”
David scanned the room from where he was standing. “This is not going to be easy. This room is empty. And how many people do you figure that we are up against?”
“We’ve been visited twice. The first time, William came with two men. All three were armed. The second time, when they brought you, there was no William, and there were two men. And they were different men.”
“That might be because you broke that guy’s arm,” Melina offered.
“That’s right, I forgot about that. And that second guy also took some damage. If William shows up too, I would plan on anywhere from two to four people. With guns.”
“And you can hear people coming through that ceiling vent,” Melina said, pointing to the vent in the ceiling. “It’s so loud, last time we could tell how many people were coming by counting how many sets of footsteps we could hear.”
“That’s right,” Evan said. “We should be able to know their exact strength before they open the door. Okay, start looking through the room for anything that can help us.”
Evan walked over to check around the shelves along the wall again. David headed toward the sink so he could look in the small cabinet below it. Melina followed him and began looking in the tall cabinet next to the sink.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” David said, looking up at Melina. “But it’s safe to say that my son is crazy about you.”
Melina stopped searching the cabinet and looked over at David. Alex is crazy all right, she thought.
“Alex was so nervous about you guys going out tonight that he wasn’t able to eat breakfast,” David continued. “I didn’t think that was possible. His mother finally sent him out to get a sandwich at his favorite sandwich shop.”
“I know the shop,” Melina scowled.
“Apparently, it’s a popular hangout,” David said. “I got a text from Alex while he was still in the shop. He said that some annoying girl from his class had just came over and sat right down at his table. What was her name …?”
“Ellen?” Melina blurted out.
“That’s the one,” David said, pointing to Melina. “Alex was not too happy with her.”
“David, could you come over here and help me with this shelf?” Evan yelled from across the room.
“Excuse me,” David said.
Melina stood there thinking. It had never dawned on her that Ellen had forced herself on Alex. Now she felt terrible about doubting him. And she felt even worse about not being able to talk to him and tell him that it was okay. For the first time since she found herself in that room, she ached to get out. She had to speak with Alex. To tell him that it was all right. To tell him that she understood that it was Ellen's fault. For now, the best she could do was help her dad and David get them out of there.
Melina went back to the cabinet and continued her search. She found nothing on the lower shelves, but she could not see the top shelf, so she climbed up the cabinet using the lower shelves as a ladder. As she reached the top shelf, she could see something all the way in the back. She stretched her arm as far as it could reach, and she pulled it out.
It was a long extension cord.
She jumped down to the floor and looked at it. An extension cord not being much of a weapon, she was about to put it back the cabinet when she paused and looked at it again.
“That’s it,” she said as she grabbed it and carried it over to where her dad and David were.
They were in the process of moving a tall metal shelf unit from the wall to over by the door. As she walked up, Melina could hear the two of them discussing their plan.
“If we move the shelf right here,” Evan said, “Then when they come in, we can push it over on them.”
“Make sure that it’s not too close to the door,” David said. “We don’t want it to hit the wall before it hits anyone.”
Evan looked up and saw Melina standing in front of him holding the extension cord. “I see you found something,” he said. “I’m sure we can find a use for that somehow.”
“I already know how we can use it,” she said.
Evan was intrigued by this, and now David stopped what he was doing to listen.
Melina continued. “First, we need to slice off the tip of one end of the cord. The opposite end of the one that has the plug. We then attach the bare wires to the doorknob. When someone goes to unlock the door, once we see that the deadbolt has been opened, we plug in the other end of the cord into the outlet while the person turns the doorknob. The person turning the knob would receive a massive shock and would be stunned before they even got into the room.”
Evan and David looked at each other, mouths open. Then they looked back at Melina.
“That’s a fantastic idea!” D
avid said.
Evan walked over and put his hand on her shoulder. “Melina, that is really smart. It’s something that your mom would have thought of. I sometimes forget how much of her is in you.”
“Your father is right,” David said. “I’ve never worked directly with your mother, but tools groups around the world use her inventions. Your idea is classic Laura. Way outside the box. Your mother is crazy smart. How she comes up with these ideas for gadgets for the agents, I honestly don’t know.”
“My dad was just telling me about some of them before you got here,” Melina said.
“Let me tell you, my favorite of hers is the LRED,” David said as he looked toward Evan. “I know you’ve used that one a few times.”
“What’s an LRED?” Melina asked.
“The government is big on acronyms,” Evan said. “It stands for long range electrostatic disabler. It is a gun that looks like a shotgun, but it shoots a projectile the size of a shotgun shell that acts like a self-contained electroshock weapon.”
“The principle is the same as the electroshock weapons that the police use to disable crooks,” David said. “You know the ones that shoot sharp pins connected to wires at a perpetrator. In the police version, the wires are connected to a battery in the gun that provides the high voltage to stun and disable the person. An LRED still has sharp pins that are connected by wires to a high voltage source, but the difference is that the wires are connected to a power source contained in the projectile.”
“Mom’s energy technology allowed the projectile to be self-contained and not connected to the gun. This allowed the projectile to be fired at a great distance. The range is about a hundred yards.”
“The best part is the parachute,” David said. “The projectile has to travel at a high velocity in order to reach the target. However, it must be at near zero velocity when the pins come out, so it doesn’t kill the target. There is a sensor in the projectile, and when it detects that it is near the target, a tiny parachute pops out the back that slows it down. At that point, wires pop out the front, and it functions just like a regular electroshock weapon.”
The Agent's Daughter Page 17
