by Harper Lin
“Shall I shoot them?”
“A tempting prospect, but it might attract unwanted attention.”
“Let’s search the rest of the house.”
The kitchen had nothing of note, and so we crept upstairs to the sound of continued honking. We were now all but certain we were alone in the house. The way these guys acted, one of them would have burst outside with a hammer and smashed the cars into scrap metal.
Upstairs we found two bedrooms and a bathroom. The bathroom had nothing of note except the wastebasket, which had the wrappers for a few bandages. That made me smile. At least we left our mark on them. The bedrooms had very little. Each had one small suitcase in the closet and a few unremarkable clothes. On the top shelf were their ski masks and other black clothing. Wherever they were at the moment, they weren’t going to make a hit on anyone.
We began to search more thoroughly, rifling through drawers and peeking under mattresses. Learning how to search a room while leaving it precisely as you found it is a skill that has to be learned, and Liz had learned it. We each took a bedroom and went through the place with quick efficiency. Time was ticking, and we had no idea when those two thugs would get back.
“Bingo,” Liz called from the other room.
I hurried over. Tucked under the bottom of a lamp was a piece of notepaper with a typed series of letters. They were bunched into groups from three to eight letters, but were gibberish. Obviously a code.
“I know someone who can crack this,” I said. I still had lots of contacts at the CIA. The folks at the Decryption Department would be happy to help.
“Good.” Liz pulled out her phone and took a photo of the page. “Maybe we can finally learn what’s going on.”
We searched for a few minutes more as the honking continued outside and found nothing else of note.
That was significant, actually. We found no weapons, no receipts or store bags showing where they might have come from, no labels that might have told us their names. Nothing.
We also didn’t find the fertilizer bomb.
“Time to go,” I said.
Liz looked around uncertainly. “Maybe we should we wait here and ambush them?”
“We could, but I’d like to find out where they took that bomb. It could already be set up, and if we ambush them, we might end up having to kill them. Even if we capture them, they might not tell us. They’re erratic but seem determined.”
“How quickly can your friends decode that message?” Liz asked.
“Depends on how elaborate a code it is. I’ll get them right on it once we get to safety.”
I peeked out the window. Those two fools were still in the middle of the road, honking at each other. Several people had come out of their houses to stare.
“They’re drawing too much attention,” I said. “Let’s sneak out the back.”
“All right.”
We headed downstairs. I relocked the front door locks so our mysterious friends wouldn’t know we’d been there and moved to the kitchen, where a back door led to a small backyard of grass with a heart-shaped flower bed in the center.
The fence wasn’t too high and led to the backyard of an identical home that faced the next street. Nobody seemed to be home, but we couldn’t be sure. We’d just have to take that chance.
Liz helped me over the fence, my back giving me a twinge of protest, then hopped over it herself. I winced as the top of the board snapped under her weight.
We stared at the board missing a good eight inches off its top.
“They’re going to notice that,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“If you hadn’t been bearing most of my weight when I climbed over, I would have been the one to snap it.”
We tried to fit the broken piece back on the top, giving me a recollection of my grandson trying the same thing when he smashed his skateboard into his parents’ fence. We got equally unconvincing results.
“Nothing we can do,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We hurried across the backyard, passing its own heart-shaped flower bed. In satellite imagery, this neighborhood must have looked like an organ donor bank.
Our luck held, and we passed out the garden gate without anyone screaming at us like we were the burglars we technically were.
After that, we walked quickly down the street back to the car, the sound of persistent honking fading in the background behind us.
Roaring down the highway at one hundred ten miles per hour, we discussed our next move.
“I’ll send this photo of the code to my friends. I’ll need to get home and use my computer, though,” I said.
“Why not use your phone?”
“It isn’t secure.”
“Neither is your home.”
“Good point. No other options, though. Unless you want to let me use your secure computer.” I gave her a sly smile.
She avoided my gaze and looked out the window. “Can’t.”
“That’s what I thought.”
As I hoped, there was no sign of the intruders when we returned to my house. We passed it twice and didn’t spot anyone, then parked the Lamborghini down the street so no one would associate us with it.
We burst into my home like the intruders had earlier that day, although with more professionalism and better weaponry. Other than scaring Dandelion from her spot on the armchair to bolt back under the sofa, it accomplished nothing. They weren’t here.
A quick check of my house revealed they hadn’t been back to search it. Good. If they found out too much about me, that might lead them to my son, Frederick, and his family.
With Liz standing guard in the other room, I accessed the private CIA server, sort of like the untraceable Tor network but with even more robust security. You could see all sorts of dark corners of the Internet via this server with complete safety. More importantly, you could send emails to your colleagues in the CIA without any foreign agencies hacking them or being able to trace you. I looked up the Decryption Department and sent them an urgent request. Yes, despite being retired I could still send urgent requests to the CIA. James and I did a lot for them back in the day, and the organization has a long memory.
Just as I finished sending the email, a volcanic rumbling emerged from my laptop, increasing in strength so much that I had to turn the volume down. Martin was making a video call.
Martin had made me install an app called BOOM. (“Tired of boring old video chat apps? Tired of looking at your friends in the same old rectangles? Get some BOOM into your life!”) It was a video chat app with a teenage twist.
I opened the dialog box, and my screen was filled with a video of a nuclear explosion. The giant mushroom cloud filled the screen in brilliant color as a guitar played a blaring heavy metal riff. As the guitar reached a crescendo, backed by thudding drums, the video switched to trees waving in a red hurricane, buses being knocked over by the blast front, and a long shot of the mushroom cloud rising high into the sky.
I recognized the footage. It was from a 1953 test at the Nevada Test Site of the atomic cannon. It was a giant artillery piece with a two-hundred-eighty-millimeter bore, capable of launching a fifteen-kiloton shell a distance of seven miles.
Yeah, I know my retro atomic weapons. I’m a geek that way.
And yes, they really developed an atomic cannon. Cold War thinking at its dumbest. Hey, at least they didn’t invent an atomic hand grenade.
As the picture zoomed in on the fallout, the music suddenly cut out, and the picture was replaced by the face of my teenaged grandson, all buckteeth, blond hair, and smiles.
“Hey, Grandma! What do you think of the new intro?”
“Very old school. I didn’t think kids listened to metal anymore.”
“Only goths and emos. It makes good theme music for gaming and video calls, though.”
“You are a constant educational experience for me.”
“So am I really going to this wedding?” he asked as his image disappeared and our avatars
starting running through a desert landscape. I hurried to put my fingers to the keyboard so I could shoot the terrorists about to pop up.
“Only if you want to. Liz says there will be other kids there.”
“Oh, okay,” he shouted over the sound of his M16 blasting apart a terrorist. I chucked a grenade at an approaching enemy Hummer and blew it into a flaming wreck.
“Do you have some nice clothes to wear? INCOMING!”
We ducked as an enemy RPG flew right above us and blew a hole in a nearby wall. My health bar went down to thirty percent, thanks to the shrapnel.
“Wow, Grandma, you really get into this game. You shouted that like a real soldier.”
“Force of habit,” I mumbled.
“What?” my grandson asked over the sound of gunfire.
“So do you have a suit or something?”
“Grandpa Octavian says I should wear a tux.”
I froze. Grandpa Octavian? When did he become Grandpa Octavian?
I knew Octavian had been spending a bit of time with Martin, taking him to ball games and that sort of thing. The poor little guy was growing up with only one grandparent—my daughter-in-law’s people lived on the other side of the country—and so he loved having another older adult to spoil him.
You might think that Octavian was doing this to get in good with me, but he didn’t have to, and he knew it. No, he was trying to get in good with my son Frederick, who was not at all happy to see his dear departed father getting replaced. Frederick had never been rude to Octavian—he is a difficult man to dislike—but their interactions had always been awkward.
Frederick hadn’t minded Octavian spending time with Martin, however. My son knew that Martin needed some older people in his life. It’s only natural. An “Uncle Octavian” would have been welcome.
But a “Grandpa Octavian”? I doubted Martin called him that within earshot of my son.
For the first time, I realized what this increasing friendship between Octavian and Martin meant. If he was “Grandpa” and I was “Grandma” then…
“Whoa! Got you!”
Martin’s words snapped me out of my thoughts. My avatar lay dead.
“You have to pay attention to what’s going on around you, Grandma,” Martin chided.
Yes, it’s called situational awareness. I’m good at that in the field. Not so much in my personal life.
“Oh dear. Terrorists are such a bother.”
“I’ll put it on an easier mode.” Suddenly we were in a bunker in the middle of the woods as zombies shuffled toward our position. I started blasting them apart with a pump-action shotgun.
“Whoa, headshot! Nice one, Grandma.”
“I never feel guilty about killing dead people.”
“Like you ever killed anyone! So are you asking Grandpa Octavian?”
“We’ll see.”
“Mom and Dad are too busy. Who else are you going to ask?”
“I do have friends, you know. Liz is a friend.”
Martin gave me a cheeky grin. “Isn’t she already going to the wedding?”
“I certainly hope so. Look, Grandma is a bit busy right now. How about I call you tomorrow?”
“Come on, let’s kill more zombies.”
“I really need to go.”
“Okay, only fifty more zombies.”
“Ten.”
“Twenty.”
“All right.”
Parenting is all about bargaining. I’ve learned that grandparenting is much the same.
We killed the zombies, and I said goodbye. Then I hurried around the house, filling Dandelion’s bowl and packing an overnight bag. Neither of our houses were safe. Just as I finished packing, a ping from my computer brought me back to the screen.
It was an email from the Decryption Department, saying it looked like a pretty simple code they should be able to break within twelve hours.
Well, that was a relief.
I cleared the cache on my hard drive, turned off the computer, and stood. As I lifted up my bag, my back gave another twinge.
Great. Some bad news to follow the good. It was just like being back in the field. Good news never lasted long without something coming along and ruining it.
I hoped my back could hold out until all this was over.
TEN
Liz said she knew a good hotel on the Interstate, so I followed her directions just past the city limits, where we took an off-ramp.
“I didn’t see a sign for a hotel.”
“It’s the kind of hotel you only find on the Internet.”
“Um…”
We shot down a narrow county road with nothing but forest on either side. Then the land to the right cleared, and past an open field I saw a neon sign announcing the Assignation Inn. The sign was of a woman’s face that flickered between a smile and a wink then a hushing finger to the lips.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Liz?”
“It’s not what you think.” She snickered.
“I can’t imagine how it could be anything but what I think.”
The building appeared ahead. It was a one-story structure built like a motel, where you park right in front of your room. The only lights were at the front, where a sign said Reception.
“Well, they certainly won’t think to look for us here,” I said.
I’m not a prude. I think I’ve mentioned that before. Perhaps I’ve mentioned it too often and come off as prudish. But I’m not prudish. Really.
It’s just that I felt very, very uncomfortable driving up to reception in this sort of place.
The reception desk was actually a drive-through window like you get in fast food restaurants. I drove up, noticing there were no security cameras like in every other hotel I’ve ever been to. In fact, there was a little sign under the window saying, “There are no cameras on the premises. This is a surveillance-free zone. Long live privacy!”
I was surprised every burglar in the state wasn’t here breaking into the rooms.
The man behind the window was an older fellow with an unconvincing comb-over. Of course, all comb-overs are unconvincing—balding men should simply embrace this particular sign of aging and cut their hair short—but his comb-over was especially so. He had a massive bald spot running from where his hairline must have been when Nixon was president to well behind his ears. Only a narrow fringe remained, which he had grown to Rastafarian length in order to sweep across his shiny pate, where it made a U-turn and came back for another pass. He must have spent a fortune on hairspray.
“Good evening. Welcome to the Assignation Inn. What kind of room would you like?”
He didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“One with two beds, please.”
Surprisingly, this request didn’t surprise him, but his response surprised me.
“There’s a surcharge for more than five people in a room.”
I blushed then said, “It will only be the two of us.”
That got me blushing even more.
“By the hour or for the full night?”
More blushing. “The full night.”
He still wasn’t looking at me. Then it struck me—he was blind. So literally no one was going to see us coming into this place. It was a cheater’s heaven.
“What kind of beds do you want? We have waterbeds, Magic Fingers beds, beds with mirrors on the cei—”
“Normal beds. Beds to sleep in. Oh, wait. You have Magic Fingers?”
The man smiled. “Just like the good old days.”
“We’ll take those.”
“Jacuzzi?”
“No.”
“Steam room?”
“No.”
“Video studio?”
“No!”
“That will be seventy-five dollars, please. Checkout is at 11 a.m.”
I paid in cash. He put the money through a counting machine.
He passed a room key and two towels through the window.
“Room six. Have a nice time.”
I drove around the hotel until I found room six, Liz snickering all the way. I have to admit I was cross with her. We had had a conversation about her nudism, and I had made it clear that I didn’t want her baring all around me. She had accepted that. Now she led me to this place, which I felt was a breach of our agreement.
On our side of the motel, only two other cars were parked. As we pulled up in front of our room, a middle-aged couple came out of their room, looking ashamed, got in their car, and quickly drove away.
Shaking my head, I went up to our door. The doormat said Home Sweet Home. An odd choice.
The room was even odder. It was a midsized room with two twin beds, a large television, and red plush carpet. The walls were adorned with paintings of churches, weddings, and men holding babies. Yes, men holding babies. Remember those pictures that were really popular in the nineties of hunks holding infants? Ever wonder where they all went? The Assignation Inn is your answer.
“I don’t think these people thought through their target audience when picking the décor,” I said.
“Oh, yes they did,” Liz said, putting down her bag, locking the door, and checking her gun.
“At least there’s a good bed,” I said, checking the mattress. It was clean, thankfully, and nice and firm. No creaking. Thank God for small miracles.
Speaking of God, the Gideon’s Bible on the bedside table sat on top of the table instead of in the drawer where it usually goes. The same with Liz’s bedside table. There were also several pamphlets on relationship counseling. The previous tenant had a weird sense of humor.
I examined the room. I’m not picky about rooms. Hiding out for three weeks in the slums of San Salvador got me accustomed to less than one-star accommodations, but I didn’t want to touch anything nasty left over from the previous occupants.
To my surprise, everything looked immaculately clean. Too bad I didn’t have a black light. Or perhaps that was a good thing. I read an article on a travel blog once where a young man, braver than I, had gone into a cheap motel with a handheld black light. The stains from certain, um, substances that are invisible to the naked eye will show up under a black light. What that poor travel writer discovered was more horrifying than the slasher movies Martin thinks I don’t know he downloads.
