by McLay, Craig
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Max said, looking up at the ceiling for any sign of the sentry drones he now no doubt believed were hovering overhead, recording his every word.
“Your name is Violet, right?” I said, trying not to jump as I watched Max drop an entire box of electronic fuses on the blackened concrete floor.
She nodded. “What do you guys call yourselves?”
“I’m Mark and this is my fellow revolutionary, Max,” I said. “He’s not usually this hysterical.” I have to say, I thought I was being pretty cool and suave at this point. Compared to Max, of course, anyone not experiencing a heart attack or an explosive bout of gastroenteritis would have looked suave. Did I feel slightly guilty about potentially betraying the cause to impress a girl?
Slightly.
“No. Your group. Your organization. What’s it called?”
“Oh.” Did I tell her? Why not? She seemed to already know just about everything else. “BO-two-two-four.”
She looked at me in disbelief. “BO-two-two-four? Is that seriously your name?”
I smiled awkwardly. “Er, yes.”
“BO as in body odour?”
“No!” Max protested. “As in Black Ops!”
“It sounds like some patented chemical compound,” she said. “Like an experimental type of chicken feed. Or an additive they put in deodorant to keep you from sweating.”
“It sounds mysterious!” Max countered.
“What’s the two-two-four?”
“Never mind!” Max said, cutting me off before I could reveal that the number was derived from my partner’s February 24 birthday.
“Well, the name sucks,” she said. “But that’s okay. I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with something better.”
“We?” Max said. “What exactly do you think you mean by ‘we’?”
“You say you want a revolution. Well, you know, you’re going to need more than two people.”
“But…” Max sputtered.
“I’m saying that whatever you guys are planning, I want in,” she said. “And I can get us transportation.”
I pursed my lips and tried to look thoughtful. “Transport would certainly be useful. Our initial attempts to secure it were…less than one hundred per cent successful.”
“They were a fucking disaster is what they were,” she said. “Sorry, but that’s just my empirical analysis of the operation.”
“If we’re such a pair of fuckups, then why would you ever want to join up with us?” I asked. I was desperately trying to figure out where she was from. The Middle East, maybe? Unfortunately, I’m lousy as far as ethnicities go.
For the first time since arriving, she smiled in a way that was not contemptuous. “Because I’m mad and I think you’re on to something.”
Max and I looked at each other. He clearly seemed to have lingering doubts, but I thought it was an excellent idea. “Why don’t you let us discuss the possibility for a mo–”
“You’re going after the Weather Station, aren’t you?” she said, cutting me off.
“How did –” I started and stopped. She knew everything else. It made sense that she knew what we were planning, too.
“Maybe,” Max said. “What do you know about it?”
“Simple,” she said. “I know how to take it out.”
-8-
The most important thing about going after the Weather Station, she said, was that we couldn’t go after it directly.
“Why not?” Max demanded to know. “I think it’s extremely vulnerable to a full frontal assault!”
Violet shook her head. “I’ve reconned the place. It’s got heavy security. It’s not obvious security, though. The cameras are all designed to look like meteorological equipment. That fencing is electrified. They even have special harmonic repulsors that induce arrhythmia in anyone who gets past the fence line that isn’t wearing a custom biometric transponder. If, somehow, you managed to get past that, the windows are all blast-proof and the door would require a two megaton detonation to open. Once you got past all that, you’d have about thirty seconds before a GDI security team arrived on site and asked you to stop. Which they will do by putting approximately thirty-two thousand holes in whatever you’re wearing while you’re still wearing it.”
“No way,” I said. “You’re making this up.”
“Am not.”
“Still think it’s just a weather monitoring station?” Max asked, giving me a satisfied look. “How did you find this out?”
“Online,” Violet said ambiguously. “You aren’t the first people in the world to have this idea.”
“What happened to the others?” I asked, trying not to sound as suddenly keen to bail on this idea as I was starting to feel.
Violet shrugged, which was not the response I was looking for. “No idea. Somebody took a station down in Veracruz in September last year. Company blamed it on a power failure caused by a bunch of local communist guerrillas. News was blacked out in the region for forty-eight hours. Everything went dead. No phone, internet, cable, nothing. Dark territory. When it came back up, it was like the whole thing never happened.”
“You’re making this up,” I said.
“Check it yourself,” she said. “Provided you know how to get into the GDI network with a phantom IP, of course.”
“Can you get us into the station?” Max asked, excited. “Or even shut it down remotely?”
Violet shook her head. “Not a chance.”
“But you said you knew how to get it,” Max said.
“You also called us idiots,” I pointed out. “If you’re so smart, what are you doing here?”
“You are idiots,” Violet said. “That truck episode was a fiasco. I almost peed my pants watching you two.”
“We needed transport,” Max said, a little peevishly. “How would you go about getting it?”
Violet pulled a key ring out of her pocket. It had what looked like a couple of house keys, a smaller key for a bike or a locker, and a larger double-sided key that was clearly for a car. “I copied my Mom’s key,” she said matter-of-factly. “She works a lot of shifts. Rest of the time, she’s either asleep or about to be. It’s a nine-year-old Corolla, but it still runs.”
“You must be pretty good with a computer to be able to find all of that out,” I said. “I never really see you using the computers much at school.”
“Some things I’m just naturally good at,” she said. “The computers at school are shit. I built my own. Well, mostly.”
“So how do we get them?” Max said, clearly impatient to get back to the question at hand. “You said we couldn’t do it directly.”
“That’s right,” she said. “If you try just walking in the front door, you’ll have about as much success as you did trying to steal that truck. The security can’t be beaten. All the software is on a closed network, so you can’t just hack in and get it to turn itself off. You can, however, trick it into thinking that it needs a hardware upgrade. And that still has to be done manually. Which means that someone has to go in there and fix whatever needs to be fixed or replaced. Which means that they’d have to deactivate all the security systems while that’s happening.”
“And how do we do that?” Max asked.
She smiled and looked around. “Probably not a good idea to talk about it here. They might not have eyes on you yet, but they will.”
“You still didn’t answer my question,” I said. “If you think we’re idiots, then why do you want to join up with us?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’m offering you the chance to join up with me.”
“With you?” Max said.
“Think about it,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.” She turned and started to jog away.
“Wait!” I said, running to catch up with her. She stopped, but she didn’t look like she wanted to. “Why are you doing this?” I figured that if she had a good reason, it might give me a good reason, which was something I was struggling with.
“Think about it,” she said. “Everybody in our class. Everybody you know. They all end up working for the same company and they don’t even know it. Wouldn’t you rather do your own thing? And don’t you want to find out what that company is really up to?”
Then she smiled, turned and ran off.
“I don’t know, man,” I said to Max the next day in the cafeteria as we were finishing up lunch. “Either she’s crazy or she’s right and either option isn’t exactly doing wonders for my confidence on this one. I think I’d prefer it if she was just crazy.” I had not seen any sign of Violet in school that day, but we didn’t have history or biology on Tuesdays. I had no idea where her locker was or who else she might hang out with.
“I don’t think we can ignore the possibility that she may be some sort of plant or double agent,” Max said, chewing on his gluten-free fruit bar (if cancer wasn’t bad enough, he also had celiac disease). “But I’m inclined to believe that’s not the case, considering the amount of potentially classified information she gave us.”
“She did seem to know an awful lot,” I agreed. “You think she was really watching us?”
“She knew too many details to think otherwise,” Max said. “For example, she knew that your driving through the front window of the convenience store was not an attempt to foil a robbery in progress, but your own foiling of an attempted vehicle theft.”
“People do that all the time under far less stressful circumstances!” I pointed out.
“True,” Max said. “Seniors with dementia. Or otherwise ordinary people with brain disease. Every once in a while you’ll hear about one of them driving through the front window of a dry cleaners’ or a doughnut shop. Have you had a CAT scan since then?”
“No.”
“Just sayin’,” he said, tapping his forehead. “No judgments or anything. Especially not from me, of all people.”
“I wonder how long she’s been watching us?” I said. “Do you think she’s watching us at home?” I ducked down in my seat and peered over my shoulder. “Right now, even?”
“I think we have to assume she is and act accordingly,” Max said.
“According to what?”
“As if we’re being watched.”
“And how are you supposed to act when you’re being watched?”
“I think, in your case, it will mean a lot less masturbation.”
“Fuck you, Commander.”
“Or, possibly, a lot more. Some people like that voyeuristic vibe.”
“Ibid,” I said, ripping open a bag of chips.
“The only thing for us to decide,” Max said, taking a theatrical breath, “is whether or not to include her in our plans.”
“If what she’s said is true, you still want to go ahead with this idea?” I said. “Maybe we should start with something smaller.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” I mumbled, chewing. “GDI did pay for that sculpture in the city hall fountain that looks like a crashed helicopter. It probably doesn’t have any security on it. We could blow it up or at least vandalize it.”
“I thought about that,” Max said. “But that artist is famous for destroying his own works. People would just think it was another one of his publicity stunts. Plus, it’s been vandalized a bunch of times already by university students on their way home from the bar. I don’t think one more hastily spray-painted penis is going to send the kind of message we want to send or move us any closer to our ultimate goal.”
“Doesn’t have to be a penis,” I said. “I’m sure we could come up with something of a more revolutionary bent.”
“Forget it,” Max said. “People would just assume it was crackheads or drunks. We need to aim higher than that.”
I tried to think of a better target, but the truth of the matter was I was thinking more about Violet. I liked the way her curly black hair hung down from her high forehead, framing her eyes. She also moved with a great deal of economy and confidence. I admire people who can do that, because I am not one of them. I tend to move like a partially anesthetized lobster in work boots, which is to say that I scuttle and thump from place to place. I am the opposite of balletic grace.
Was it my imagination, or did I catch her looking at me an unusual number of times during that first meeting? She said she’d been watching us for a while. Maybe she’d formed some sort of emotional attachment, like a sniper forced to look at the same target through a scope for days on end who is then unable to shoot when the order comes down. Did revolutionaries attract a lot of women? I couldn’t think of a single example of one who did. Castro and Guevara both spent all their time hanging out with dirty bearded guys wearing baggy green uniforms in the jungle. That didn’t appeal to me a whole lot. What did Simon Bolivar look like? Every time I tried to conjure up an image, my brain returned a picture of Speedy Gonzales, the cartoon mouse. Historical ignorance aside, neither of those appealed much, either.
Shameful as it was to admit, I was not a die-hard revolutionary. I was not a true believer in the cause. I was mostly along for the ride. If that ride happened to include an attractive woman who might possibly be interested in me, so much the better. She seemed pretty committed, though. I decided that I would up my game in terms of at least pretending to be firmly committed until I was able to get a better read on whether or not the chances were good vis-à-vis seeing this woman naked.
I was picturing this in my mind when I was interrupted by Max, who had been speaking for five minutes and only just realized that I wasn’t listening.
“Shit, man! Pay attention. Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Of course. Nothing escapes me.”
Max sighed. “Try to find out as much as you can about this Violet Haze. My instincts say we should trust her, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a little more information.”
I smiled. “On it, Commander.”
Indeed, this was an assignment I was more than up for.
-9-
My first few attempts to track down the elusive Violet Haze were not trumpet-blaring successes.
A Google search pulled up: thirteen exotic dancers; a porn actress (I guess they have a union that prevents more than one person using the same professional pseudonym); a brand of energy drink not legal for sale in North America because of 32 suspicious deaths in Mexico (including the entire offensive line of the Michigan State varsity football team, who all apparently drank a case of the stuff and tried to paraglide off a cliff in Puerto Vallarta without the glider); a Jimi Hendrix cover band from the Czech Republic with an album illustration that featured a man who appeared to be the lead singer setting his testicles on fire overtop of what looked like a wax statue of Vladimir Putin; a chain of hair and nail salons serving the greater Miami-Dade County area; and a nightclub in Dusseldorf advertising introductory classes in autoerotic asphyxiation for seniors.
None of these seemed a likely match. Clearly, I was going to have to go deeper.
There was no one with the last name of “Haze” listed in the phone book. Short of hiring a private investigator, my investigative abilities were pretty much tapped out. What was I going to do? Call the school office and pretend to be a member of the Haze family, tell them I had dementia and ask if they could give me my own address? Chances were good that such a strategy was not going to work.
She didn’t have any friends that I was aware of. Not having a lot of friends of my own other than Max, I wasn’t in the best position to tap into the underground information economy. I asked a couple of the girls in my history class, but they had no idea. She didn’t appear to eat lunch in the cafeteria and was rarely seen in the library or any other common area. Apart from the fact that she was seen attending class, she was otherwise a ghost.
I decided that I was going to need to use more of a stealth approach. Instead of trailing back to my own locker after biology class, I followed Violet back to hers. I allowed her a five-second head start and then stepped out into the crowded hall. I kept about
thirty feet back. I couldn’t help but admire the way she moved through the chaos, stepping easily past play-fighting jocks, real-fighting skeezoids and other obstructions as if she could sense them before they were even there. She made a quick left and went up the stairs at the end of Hall 5. I stepped on an athletic bag (earning me a warning to watch where I was fucking going and an accusation of being a dickhead from its owner, who had more or less tossed it out into the middle of the hall without looking and was, in fact, the real dickhead as far as I was concerned), pushed open the door and followed.
The junction of the stairs would be tricky. When she made the 180-degree turn and started up the second flight, there would be a chance that she might glance down and see me coming up the first flight behind her. I hung back for a second and tried to hide behind a couple of girls with hair extensions who were having a loud conversation about whether or not somebody named Matt G had given his phone number to somebody else named Jenn R despite the fact that everybody assumed he was actually going out with an unnamed third party simply referred to as “that slut.”
Making it to the top of the stairs undetected, I spotted Violet making her way down Hall 2-5 (so named because it runs directly over top of Hall 5 but is on the second floor). This hall was not as crowded as the ones downstairs and I was forced to allow more space between me and my quarry. She reached the end of 2-5 and turned right into 2-6. I made it to the corner just as she disappeared into the girls’ washroom.
The hallway was almost deserted now as students began making their way to last period class. I leaned against the wall and waited, trying to look like I was waiting for a friend. I even glanced impatiently at my watch a couple of times for good measure.
The bell rang and she had still not come out. Shit. I was supposed to be in Ancient Civilizations right now. It was presentation week. Pete Fife was going to give what would no doubt be an incredibly dull, historically inaccurate and hastily assembled overview of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire based largely on his multiple viewings of the movie 300. I was supposed to be there as one of the three student evaluators, which meant I would have to sit through his travesty, ask a few penetrating questions (“You’re aware of the fact that Xerxes looked nothing like that, right?”) and then provide some sort of a mark out of 50 that would be factored into the teacher’s own evaluation. If I didn’t get moving right now, I was going to miss all that.