Stealth Power

by Vikki Kestell

“This place is a deathtrap.”

  I didn’t like that idea one bit. I needed to get two steps ahead of Cushing. Three or four, if I could visualize and plan for it.

  “Nano.”

  Yes, Gemma Keyes?

  I slipped into the warehouse and queried the nanomites. “What strategies can you recommend to help me stay ahead of Cushing? Please explore other avenues, alternatives. Escape plans.”

  A diagram, a schematic appeared in my hands.

  “What is this?” The diagram was a house plan, and it looked familiar. It seemed to be an ordinary, run-of-the-mill three-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style house.

  Just like this one.

  “Wait. Is this Dr. Bickel’s house? This house?”

  Yes, Gemma Keyes. Please notice the addition to the original floorplan.

  As I perused the floorplan, I realized they had said, ‘please.’

  The mites were picking up on social niceties? Interesting.

  Interesting? So was the blueprint in my hand—and the extra room that appeared off to the side of the main floor. A note indicated that the added room was below ground—a room I knew nothing about. A few glances were sufficient for me to memorize the blueprint’s details.

  A hidden room? Like a “bolt-hole”?

  “Where . . . how do I get into this place, Nano?”

  The mites directed me into the smallest of the bedrooms, into its empty closet. One end of the closet had shelves built across it.

  Look for a button under the bottom shelf, Gemma Keyes. Press the button and push the shelves up.

  I fumbled for and found a button the size of a nickel under the bottom shelf. I pressed it, held it, and pushed up on the shelves. They collapsed. The individual shelves and a section of the floor lifted and folded back on unseen hinges; the entire shelving structure flattened itself against the end of the closet and revealed a dark, square hole in the floor.

  Dr. Bickel had left this room unfurnished and unused—and I had paid it no mind at all.

  A glow emanated from my hands—the nanomites providing enough light for me to see a ladder leading down into the dark.

  The beckoning hole couldn’t begin to compete with my maiden journey into the tunnels; this hole wasn’t anywhere close to being as scary as the black, squeezy voids I’d crammed myself into, the narrow cavities and cracks I’d followed that grew narrower and sank deeper into the mountain long before they got wider.

  I sat on the edge and swung my feet onto the ladder—

  Gemma Keyes.

  “What, Nano?”

  You must disarm the intruder defense mechanisms first.

  “Nice, Nano. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Yeah, nice of you to warn me. Have you learned to recognize scathing sarcasm yet?

  I pulled my feet out of the hole. “How do I disarm the, um, intruder defense mechanisms?”

  Feel for a switch under the lip of the entrance.

  Not much to go on, but I got on my knees and felt around the underside of the hole’s edge. Found the switch. Flipped it.

  “Okay. Did that.”

  You may proceed, Gemma Keyes.

  “Yeah, and you may—”

  I swung my legs over the edge and started down the ladder, counting rungs as I went. When I got to ten, my feet hit a floor.

  The nanomites were still providing light, so I scanned around and found a light switch. I flipped it up. A soft light filled the room. The nanomites discontinued their illumination while I took stock.

  “Stock” is the right descriptor. Remember me bemoaning the fact that Dr. Bickel had left no food in the kitchen or TP in the bathroom? Not a problem here. The room was stocked, all right. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined two walls of the room. The shelves were burgeoning with canned and dried foodstuffs. I cast my eyes over the shelves, counting and calculating the amounts in a glance: Enough food to keep a family of six for that many months—or one man for three years. The bottom shelf along both walls held nothing but five-gallon bottles of water stacked two deep.

  The room also contained a cot, sleeping bag, and a pillow swathed in plastic, a toilet, a tiny kitchenette—and, in the last corner, what looked like a communications hub complete with top-of-the-line workstation and a semicircle of wide-screen monitors.

  The computer’s green light glowed, so I touched the mouse. The monitors, four of them, woke up and sprang into focus. I stared at four approaches to the safe house. While I watched, dumbfounded, the views on each monitor began to cycle, changing to a different camera every five seconds.

  Another monitor, off to the side, showed a timeline with alarm icons. I clicked on one of the icons. A video of the back door popped up. The door opened and closed. It was me, entering the house!

  I blinked. “A security system. A freaking, state-of-the-art security system.”

  He had never intended to live in the safe house. Turning in a circle, I started to catalogue the preparations Dr. Bickel had made to hole up in this secret room and monitor the house above him.

  “Except . . . he would never have allowed himself to be trapped down here. I know him better than that. So, how did he plan to escape from down here if the house were breached and his hiding place discovered?”

  If Dr. Bickel was smart enough to build this hidden room, he also wouldn’t paint himself into a corner, of that I was certain.

  The mites popped another diagram into my head. This blueprint laid out the hidden room in detail—and indicated something behind the tiny kitchenette. I memorized the details, opened my eyes, and took four steps to the other side of the room.

  I studied the little sink, a short counter top holding an itsy-bitsy microwave and toaster oven, cupboards above, and a narrow, half-height refrigerator under the counter. Every piece was cute but efficient. All were mounted on a four-foot-long Formica wall.

  I grasped the edge of the Formica and pulled. In its entirety, the kitchenette swung out from the wall and exposed a steel hatch. The hatch was about three feet in diameter and recessed into the concrete wall behind the kitchenette.

  The hatch had a wheel on its face. I spun the wheel, and the hatch swung open, revealing a concrete pipe, like a water main. The inside face of the hatch had a manual locking mechanism. I swung the lock’s handle over and thick bolts emerged from the hatch’s edges. I examined the pipe and saw that when the hatch was closed, those bolts would shoot into holes bored in the pipe’s walls in three places.

  Once inside the pipe, Dr. Bickel would close and lock the hatch behind him. It would take explosives to break through that locked hatch—enough explosive to bring down the house above.

  I didn’t know where the pipe led, but I would bet the bank on two things: that the pipe led to an above-ground hatch somewhere nearby and that the nanomites had a diagram showing me exactly where that hatch was located.

  All these preparations had been made months before. No, it had to be longer. A year?

  I shut my eyes and entered the warehouse. “Dr. Bickel built a secret room under this house? And he added this handy-dandy escape tunnel?”

  The mites said nothing, so I answered my own question: “Well, of course he did!”

  But I was livid.

  I was furious!

  I’d trusted myself to the nanomites only to discover that they had withheld important—no, vital—information from me.

  Again!

  And maybe, just maybe, they sensed how angry, how very angry I was, for they had gone quiet. Much too quiet.

  “Nano! You knew about this hiding place all along? You knew about the escape route? You knew and you didn’t think to tell me? Didn’t think I needed to know? Do you know how vulnerable I am? Do you realize what could have happened? What about all that ‘We are six’ crap?”

  I was so furious that I couldn’t talk to them anymore. I punched out of the warehouse and stormed up the ladder and out of the closet. I could feel the mites reaching out to me, but I was in no fit state to respond, so I ignored them. Shut them out.


  It was still the middle of the night, but I was wide awake, wired, and fuming. I poured a cup of coffee and sat down in the living room, rejecting the mites’ every overture.

  I spoke aloud to myself. “All right. I need plans and alternatives, because it’s only a matter of time before Cushing finds this place. I need contingencies! I need to think ahead. I need to be smarter than Shark Face!” I was berating myself, beating myself up, but it was all true: I did need to be smarter than Cushing.

  Gemm—

  “Shut up.”

  I was busy planning my move downstairs. I would take with me everything and anything that could compromise Kathy Sawyer.

  Gemma Keyes—

  “I said, SHUT UP!”

  They did shut up—for a few minutes. Then they tried to tug me into the warehouse, but I refused to go. Perhaps they were working on the question I’d put to them when I first woke up, the question that started all of this: “Nano, what can you recommend to help me plan ahead of Cushing?” and working on my request of, “Please explore other avenues, alternatives. Escape plans.”

  I. Did. Not. Care.

  Since I refused to go into the warehouse to look at what they proposed, they put the data in front of my face. My laptop lit up and browser windows began popping up, scads of them. I caught the phrase “Defense in Depth” as window overlaid window.

  “Defense in depth?” I toggled through the windows until I found the heading again. I started reading. “ . . . it is more difficult for an enemy to defeat a complex and multilayered defense system than to penetrate a single barrier.”

  “Right.” That made sense. I started my own search using that phrase. Most of the articles were written from a cyber security perspective, but I began finding the same phrase as it applied to physical security. Some called it “the onion approach”—protecting the heart of an onion with multiple layers of delaying and deterring tactics wrapped about the heart.

  “Dr. Bickel kind of used these principles when he booby-trapped the main route into his lab under the mountain. And he prepared this secret safe house, but he also built the hidden room downstairs where he could monitor the house’s exterior—and he made an escape tunnel if both of those failed. He built contingencies into his safe house.”

  I had, intuitively, prepared to leave my house in the cul-de-sac, prepping bug-out bags and hiding cash in several places, but those were all escape plans. “Defense in depth” implied more. It also meant delay and/or deter.

  “Plans inside of plans, plans for emergencies and unforeseen events, plans to impede and/or repulse an enemy. I need to take this principle and build on it. I’ll get to “delay and deter,” but my first step—now that I have a means of escaping should Cushing come calling—is to move myself to a deeper position. Out of the first layer of the onion and into the second layer.”

  I devoted an hour to moving stuff into the downstairs bolt-hole, including the cash I’d stacked in the wall behind the stove. Then I inspected the first floor, room by room, to ensure that I’d removed every vestige of Kathy Sawyer’s presence and consolidated it into one place in the basement. I didn’t care if Cushing saw that someone had been living in the house; I didn’t care if she knew it was me. I only cared that Kathy Sawyer’s identity was protected.

  I prepped a new bug-out bag—a single backpack. Into that backpack went stacks of cash and the things that could identify me as Kathy. If I had to leave in a hurry, only that backpack would go with me. Everything else was expendable.

  I spent a few hours learning, then mastering, the basement security system. I set up audible alarms should the safe house perimeter be breached while I slept.

  Turns out Dr. Bickel had left a small tablet computer, too. He’d left the electronic device connected to the security system’s tower. When I swiped across the tablet’s face, a matrix of four views appeared on its screen—not the exterior views of the safe house that were rotating on the security system’s monitors, but images from hidden cameras positioned inside the house.

  You are as clever as you had always bragged that you were, Dr. Bickel.

  I touched an icon at the bottom of the tablet screen. The four interior views toggled to a complex control panel—a dashboard integrated with the security system.

  “If Cushing breached the house, Dr. Bickel could watch and listen on this tablet. He would know if it were time to leave through the hatch.”

  Something in the tablet’s dashboard caught my eye. “Hmm. What are these?”

  I toggled every button on the dashboard and read a bunch of pop-up notations before it hit me: I was looking at the “deter” portion of Dr. Bickel’s defense-in-depth strategy, his intruder defense mechanisms. If Cushing’s agents entered the house, Dr. Bickel had a few surprises in store for them!

  I grinned as I studied the configuration of all the deterrents and their timers. I went through them twice and committed them to memory.

  “I’m going to assume that if Dr. Bickel had to leave through this passage, he also intended to take the tablet with him and trigger the surprises behind him.”

  I grinned wider.

  ***

  I attended my training as scheduled that night, but my attitude stank. I was taciturn and aloof toward the mites. I couldn’t get past my anger, couldn’t forgive them for withholding information that could mean the difference between freedom or capture, life or death.

  I dogged my way through Gus-Gus’ regimen, ate, and crashed. My sleep was better that night, tucked up as I was into the cot down in the basement bolt-hole. I felt confident about my preparations, too, confident that I could escape an attack from Cushing unscathed, Kathy Sawyer’s identity intact.

  My next task was to answer the question, “Where do I go if I have to flee this place?”

  I had a few ideas, but I also had a task for the nanomites—when and if I could get past my disgust to ask them. I wanted the mites to hack in and haunt Cushing’s office, wanted them to devise an electronic means of monitoring her phone calls and emails, doing the same with her team.

  I needed advance warning should Cushing’s forensic accountants sniff out the purchase and maintenance of this house. Dr. Bickel had been adamant, insisting that he had so distanced himself from the company that owned this house that his connection would never be found out.

  But I knew better than to trust in the word, “never.”

  ~~**~~

  Chapter 17

  With my initial “defense in depth” plans in place and functioning, I set off for the hospital to visit Abe and Zander again. I drove and parked the Escape a block from the hospital—and this time I walked into the complex confident of my surroundings and my ability to do what I needed to do.

  However, when I arrived at Zander’s room, he was gone. Without my asking them, the nanomites hacked the hospital’s directory and reported that Zander had been discharged. Next, I checked on Abe. He had been moved to the same wing and floor where Zander had been.

  “What about John Galvez, Nano?”

  John’s medical records appeared before me. He, like Zander, had been discharged, but John had been sent to a rehabilitation facility where he was undergoing physical therapy to treat minor motor skill deficiencies.

  The leftover effects of the tumor, I thought. I shook my head, glad that the mites had saved this man’s life—had saved his son from growing up without a father.

  I felt good about that—despite my recent antipathy toward the mites.

  I went in search of Abe’s room. His bed was the second of two in the room; his was closer to the window. A curtain separated the two patients. I paused at the first bed to give his roommate a nap so that Abe and I could talk.

  When I rounded the curtain, I found Abe sitting up! He had a newspaper on the rolling table across his bed and was working the crossword puzzle.

  The terrible skin tones that had terrified me were completely gone, replaced by Abe’s healthy, warm hues. Although Abe normally wore his hair short, the h
ospital had shaved around the gash in his head that had caused so much damage. I was glad to see that the wound looked less intimidating, not as horrifying as it had seemed the last time I’d seen it.

  Abe hummed a snatch of an old hymn, and I sighed with relief. He was going to be all right.

  I was grinning like mad when he glanced up, stole a glance in his roommate’s direction, and whispered, “Gemma? That you?”

  “Hi, Abe. Don’t worry about Mr. Newcomb. We gave him a much-needed nap.”

  Abe guffawed at that. “Mighty convenient! Well, I thought I sensed someone. You sure can steal up on me, though.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting better at the sneaky part, I think.”

  Yes, I was. I moved without fear now, going wherever I liked with impunity, operating in my invisible state as though I’d always been concealed. I was comfortable in my skin, perhaps starting to like it . . . and starting to like other changes . . . such as sleeping less each night because I didn’t need an entire night of rest. Like the hours I spent training. When I wasn’t working with Gus-Gus, I read voraciously, and whatever I read I retained. And the videos I watched online? I was training myself in other areas, learning new skills that might, someday, save my life.

  That awareness of . . . power and the mindfulness that the merge was still changing me, continued to build within me. Even now, while I was trying to move beyond my anger at the nanomites, I sensed that we were growing together. Our “bond” was tightening.

  But I was uncertain of what exactly comprised the “together” part. You see, I couldn’t decide if the nanomites had given Abe’s roommate a nap—or if I had. The line between the mites and me was blurring. Either the mites intuited my commands at virtually the moment I thought them, or I was, somehow, tapping into the mites’ abilities and appropriating them for my own use.

  Regardless? The merge and its effects were ongoing, and I could not predict where they would lead.

  ***

  After leaving the hospital, I set out for Zander’s house. I hadn’t been there before and found that his place was a simple duplex north of I-40 and Rio Grande Avenue. I parked down the street and walked the rest of the way. Two cars were in the driveway.