Mike pulled his chair over from the table and sat down. He looked at the screen, looked closer, and then said, "Well whaddaya know. She did it!"
On the screen in front of them, a computer dialogue box had appeared. It read "Why are you looking for me?"
There was also a space for a reply, and a button marked "Send."
"Is this who I think it is?" Kathy asked.
"Sure looks like it to me," the Congressman replied.
"Well, what do I do?"
"Looks like we're supposed to talk to him," Mike replied, adding, "I sure wish Colleen hadn't left. Glad she left the computer connected, though."
Kathy hunted and pecked her way across the keyboard. "It was actually my roommate, not me," she wrote. "She stepped out." She clicked the send button.
After a moment, a new dialogue box swam up on the screen. "I see. Tell her she missed her chance."
Quick as she could, Kathy typed out, "Wait!"
The reply came back, "Only for a moment. I don't like to stay connected to an unknown computer for too long."
"Let me, Kathy," Michael said, pulling the laptop over to face him.
At a speed much better than Kathy's, he typed out, "We came looking for you because we have something that might belong to you."
"Oh? What might that be? Since I don't know you it's hard to believe I loaned you a book or something."
Fingers clacking on keys, Mike replied, "It's a flash drive. Looking for one?"
"Sure. Everyone can always use more storage. But if you think I'm giving you my location so you can bring it over, they’re hiring really stupid people at Fort Meade these days."
Mike and Kathy looked at each other. Kathy shrugged, and Michael said, "Well, it’s a military base, but also the NSA headquarters."
He typed "What do you mean?" and clicked the send button.
"Don't trifle with me, fed. This has got to be your most pathetic attempt yet."
Michael started typing a denial, but before he even got one word out the dialogue box was gone. Frantically he clicked on random icons, looking for one that would bring the little message box back. None of them worked.
CHAPTER 8
Colleen returned to the room, fully expecting that Kathy and Mike would be gone to his room for privacy. She knew Kathy, so at least she wasn’t worried about finding them entwined on the bed. Instead they were sitting at the table, Mike with his head propped morosely on his hands and Kathy resting hers on crossed arms.
"Um, try to stop having so much fun, guys," she quipped. "You're making me jealous."
"We blew it, Colleen," Mike said, not lifting his face from his hands.
"Blew what?"
Kathy rolled her head over to face her roommate without lifting it off her hands. "Jakarta tried to contact you on the computer, and we scared him off."
"You have got to be kidding me!"
Mike lifted his chin off his hands and shook his head. "Nope. It's all too true, I'm afraid."
Colleen flopped down onto the double bed, arms thrown wide, and expelled a gigantic sigh. "The most incredible hacker in the world calls, and who gets to talk to him? My computer-illiterate roommate! I can't even believe this!"
"He thought we were with the government," Kathy said.
"Yeah, I can see that happening," Colleen muttered. "Do you have any idea how cool it would be to meet him? Most of my friends would give their right arm to have the experience you guys just had."
"Jeez," Mike said. "I don't get this excited about the President, and I've actually met him, not just exchanged text on a computer screen."
"Yeah, but I'll bet you used to when you were just starting," Colleen replied. "Don't forget you're a lot further along in your field than I am in mine."
"And anyway," Mike went on, "It's not just about talking to him, it's about finding out whether he can help us with the drive."
Kathy got up to move to the bed and sit beside her roommate. "I'm sure we can find him again, Colleen."
"Yeah, right. It's a miracle I pulled it off once."
Mike spoke up from the table. "We don't have much choice, Colleen. Either we find this guy, or we wait for someone to kidnap Kathy again – or worse."
"I know, I know," Colleen said. "I'll try again tomorrow. He'll need that much time to calm down after his 'federal agent' encounter with you guys, anyway. In the meantime, I need sleep. You two should either break it off for the night or try the other room."
Mike and Kathy both blushed and looked anywhere but at each other. The Congressman recovered and cast a hopeful glance at Kathy, but she didn't even acknowledge it.
Without looking at him she said, "I'll just get some sleep too."
Mike nodded. "No problem. I'll just be in my room then. You two call me if there's any trouble at all. Otherwise I'll come get you for breakfast tomorrow."
He stood and left. Once outside the girls’ door Mike sighed quietly and walked down the hall.
***
"Colleen, that was kind of lame to put us on the spot like that."
"I know, I'm sorry Kathy. It’s just uncomfortable being the third wheel and all."
Kathy lay down in the other bed. "It's OK. It's not like he's going to run away or anything."
"Well, if you keep stringing him along you never know."
"You know how I feel about this. It’s not worth doing if I don’t do it right."
Colleen nodded. "I do know how you feel. I think this guy might be ‘doing it right,’ though."
Kathy sighed and closed her eyes. "Lord, please help Mike get to know you. I’m starting to really like him." And with that she was asleep before Colleen could reply.
***
Alicia Dugan – chief hardware engineer on EG’s GigaStar project – eased her foot onto the accelerator pedal in her Mercedes, and savored the immediate response. She loved this car – loved the way it responded, loved the way it handled, and loved the way it made driving into a transcendent experience. In the few months she'd owned it, it had become her prize possession. She loved it as much as she loved the work she’d done on the GigaStar project at Electron Guidewire.
She was an engineer, and a good one. Her career consisted mainly of a long trail of successes. When she took a job with EG, many of her friends looked at it as a step down. But only because they didn’t know the work she was doing. Alicia Dugan designed the technical specifications of the GigaStar wireless eavesdropping device. And she was the last member of the project team who hadn’t died or disappeared.
Alicia's life stayed mostly empty of luxuries. Her professional reluctance to waste resources on sheer comfort colored her personal life too. Function was king, form and comfort were something you put into the project if the client insisted, but only after lecturing them on how much more expensive it made the job.
But after two years working for Electron Guidewire, when it became obvious that her pie-in-the-sky project not only could work but would, she'd been swept by such a feeling of pride that her normal reservations crumbled. And she bought herself the Mercedes to celebrate.
She'd earned her Ph.D. in applied physics totally expecting to work in a university environment for the rest of her life. But just before she signed a contract to work at MIT, D.W. Tilman had come calling, offering her the opportunity to work on something no one believed could be done for a decade or more.
She'd told him it was impossible. She told him he was investing billions in something that – if he was lucky – would bear fruit in twenty years at best. She'd told him to talk about serious projects, not daydreams. And he'd offered her three times what MIT was offering, with a big fat bonus if she made it work in two years instead of two decades.
In a year, she'd had to eat all her tirades about impossibility. In a year and a half, she'd produced a functional prototype. In less than two years, she had her bonus, and one of the things she'd spent it on was the Mercedes.
Now she was wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, and on the cutting edge of her pr
ofession. The only drawback was that no one else knew it. The project was a government contract, Tilman had told her, and highly classified. She couldn't even talk about it, let alone publish it, and that rankled. Like any good scientist, what she craved was not money, but the respect of her peers. That goal still eluded her, but she tried to take solace in the knowledge that it couldn't stay that way forever. Eventually her work would have to be declassified, and she could enjoy the resounding awe of others in her profession.
If she lived that long.
Alicia was a smart woman, she was paid to be. And it had not escaped her notice that the other two employees at EG who had worked on the GigaStar project were now either dead or missing.
She scoffed. Eliza Jackson resigned? No chance, she thought. Eliza was as wedded to the success of GigaStar as she was. Both of them knew their careers would take a tenfold leap forward as a result of what they had done at Electron Guidewire.
Alicia wasn't a conspiracy nut, by any means. But when two of four people – she counted Tilman in the total – who knew the details of a project were suddenly gone in mysterious circumstances, the remaining two were smart to keep a lookout.
Alicia planned to do more than look out. She planned to get out of town. She'd let EG know somehow – they certainly could do without her for a while, since GigaStar was basically through.
Her part had been through for some time. She'd been responsible for the receiver end of the unit. It was like a tiny wifi radio, only so much more. She had designed the device that made the code work. The production crew didn't do anything more than follow instructions. They didn't even know what they were building, just that it fit the design specs.
But she knew. Oh, yes, she knew. And apparently someone didn't like the fact that she knew. That someone had killed Krupotnik, and probably killed Jackson as well.
Her mind churned through possibilities. GigaStar was a government contract, so perhaps foreign agents had gotten wind of it. She wasn't sure whose foreign agents those would be, but it was one possibility. So were terrorists or something like them.
But Alicia didn't buy that. If she had wanted to stop the U.S. from developing this technology, she'd have killed Krupotnik before he'd actually written the code. Killing him after it was done didn’t accomplish anything.
Except to keep him quiet.
Alicia had never considered herself unpatriotic, but neither did she think of her government as beyond reproach. What she had done on GigaStar was revolutionary work – a full generation ahead of the pack in eavesdropping technology. Two generations. She could easily see the government wanting to make sure that no one else could get hold of the same capability. If the Feds wanted to keep the GigaStar's technology all to themselves, the surest way was to kill anyone who could spread the word. Now Krupotnik was dead, Jackson was missing and probably dead, and she and D.W. Tilman were the only ones left. Obviously, they'd want to keep Tilman alive until he'd completed the sale. But she had no such security. And so she would run away. She'd take a nice little vacation in the mountains until this had all blown over. Maybe she'd publish the work she'd done on the Internet – let the whole world know, so no purpose could be served by killing her. After all, if everyone already knew, there was no point in keeping her quiet.
Alicia merged into the George Washington Parkway in Northern Virginia. She dodged a few slower-moving vehicles and accelerated to a comfortable 65 miles per hour.
Under the hood of her car, a few small, non-standard devices clicked into action.
Upon attaining her cruising speed, Alicia took her foot off the gas. But the car continued accelerating – seventy, eighty, ninety-five miles per hour. The big German engine demonstrated its power as Alicia tried helplessly to slow it down. She tromped on the brake pedal, but the same sabotage that had disabled the accelerator pedal also disabled the brakes - both the normal and the emergency brakes.
She hauled desperately on the steering wheel, zooming around a minivan full of kids. She wasn't the type to panic, but Alicia realized her options were running out. If only her gas tank would fall to empty…
No such luck. She'd filled up before starting. White knuckled, she tugged the wheel to the right, squeaking around a clutch of commuters by taking advantage of the shoulder. The scenery blurred in her windows as her speed passed through one hundred miles an hour. Horns blared around her, and she began to consider the unthinkable - trying to bail out of her car while it still moved.
But there would be no time for that. Ahead she saw flashing red and blue lights and an obstacle she couldn’t dodge - a traffic accident. The whole road was blocked. Alicia had time to scream as her prize German car raced toward the mass of vehicles blocking the road. She saw police officers scattering, trying to get out of her path.
Her last thought was that she'd been too late after all. They'd gotten to her, and only Tilman remained of the GigaStar team.
***
A deluge of cold water woke him. John sputtered his way to full consciousness, cursing and trying to bring his hands up to wipe his eyes. But his hands, of course, were tied.
When the water had fully dripped off them, he opened his eyes and looked. Already he remembered getting hit on the head while eavesdropping, so he had some idea of what to expect. And when he finally peered around himself, he wasn't disappointed.
The man with the ratty untrimmed beard stood before him, cracking his knuckles and flexing his fingers. Behind him stood a man whose name he didn't know, but who he knew was a frequent customer at the Neon.
He sputtered out some very profane language and finished with, "I'll kill you both."
The bearded man laughed. "Big words from a man who can't move," he said. And indeed, John was so securely tied that none of his limbs could so much as twitch. He took a moment to look down at the wooden chair to which he was secured, and his eyes confirmed it, taking in the ropes around his wrists, elbows, legs, and ankles. He also examined the rest of the room. It was small – so small it wouldn't be big enough to meet federal standards for the size of prison cells, as John knew from one or two past experiences he was reluctant to admit. The walls and ceiling were bare white, the floor bare cement. A single, unadorned bulb hung from the ceiling on a short cord and provided the only light.
John spat out a curse, and the bearded man just laughed. Thinking back to the Georgetown Inn, John remembered his name – Carlos. He longed for some kind of credible threat, something he could say that might give him the upper hand. But he knew just how long the odds were on Mike and Kathy being able to handle these two alone. If he couldn’t do it, what chance did a dancer and a soft desk jockey have? And frankly, his own chances looked pretty small just then.
"My employer and I have a problem," Carlos said, nodding at the other man in the room. John wished he knew his name. This guy spent more on table service at the Neon than John made in a month, and he figured he ought to have learned his name.
"We're pretty sure your little waitress friend has no idea what's on that flash drive she has," Carlos continued. "Which is just the way we like it. But we're not one hundred percent sure, and that bothers us.
"So we thought, John's been with her, he'll know whether they've learned anything from it. Let's ask him," he concluded.
"How many times do we have to tell you, we don't know what's on it!" John growled.
Carlos nodded. "Yes, as I said we're pretty sure that's correct. But you could be lying, couldn't you, John?"
"You want a liar, look at him," John retorted, nodding at the other man. He simply stared at John and made no reply.
Carlos smiled. "Ah, but no one knows that we've kept a few of our own facts private, just like we don't know for sure that you're telling the truth. But the difference is, we need to know for sure whether you're lying, but no one else needs to know the one or two incidental little facts we keep to ourselves."
John set his jaw. He knew what was coming, and he also knew, from flexing his arms and feeling the rope around them
, that there was nothing he could do about it. All he could hope for was to give them as little satisfaction as possible. He resolved not to scream.
"I have an associate," Carlos said, "who is an expert at making certain men tell the truth. A former corpsman in the Navy, he's quite well trained in the application of certain sedatives and anesthetics. It's pretty well known, John, that when a man's doped up enough, his brain doesn't retain enough functionality to lie. Of course," he stopped and shrugged, "it's always uncertain just how much brain functionality the drug will leave behind at all. If you're pleasant enough, perhaps we'll simply kill you afterwards, so you won't have to find out for yourself whether you're brain damaged."
John's wrists were securely fastened, so he couldn't move his hands. But he could still move his fingers. He pulled three of them back to meet the palm of his hand, until he was giving Carlos the bird.
His tormentor laughed. "I've always respected spirit," he said.
The other man grunted. "I don't want to just stand around while we wait for your man to show up," he said. "Call me when you know."
Carlos nodded, and turned to watch the man leave through the room's lone metal door. John tried one last time to think if he'd ever heard the man's name. Kathy would know. Or Mike.
Carlos turned back to John when the man was gone. "There's not much point in guarding you," he said. "I tied those myself, and I'm quite sure you won't get out. But to be honest, I've got a bit of a grudge," he said.
"Oh, yes, I have my petty side. Life can't all be about grandiose schemes and intricate plans. One has to nourish one's baser instincts as well. And to be honest, you've caused me a lot of pain!"
John paid too much attention to his words, thinking the man might actually be talking to him instead of just making random noise. So he wasn't prepared at all when the lightning right hook caught him in the jaw.
Pain shot through him like a hot poker, and he saw the proverbial stars before his eyes. Before he'd even thought through the fact that he'd been punched, the fist landed again. And again. And the other fist too. The man's right hit him so hard his chair fell over on its side, whacking John's head against the solid cement floor.
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