by Dale Mayer
“Locate Milo and Levi.”
A weird robotic voice said, “Levi and Milo are not on the premises.”
Dani gasped. How? When? “Where are they?”
Silence. “Oh come on, you must track them,” Dani snapped.
“Stealth is on.”
“On their personal coms?” She doubted that.
“No.”
“Then send a message and ask them where they are.” She added as an afterthought, “Please.”
Charmin made an odd sound.
She turned to look at him. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just good to see you learning how this system works.”
“I wish,” she said. “Then I’d be able to contact Levi.”
Like magic, Levi’s voice whispered from somewhere in the ceiling, “Dani, we’re in Johan’s place. He sent out a call for help.”
“I was just worried. I couldn’t find you,” she admitted.
“We’ll be home short—”
And his voice disappeared.
Dani stood beside the bed and called up at the ceiling. “Levi? Levi!”
No answer. “Contact Milo,” Charmin instructed the house computer.
“Communication has been disrupted.”
“Ya think.”
Dani turned around in a slow circle, staring up the open beam construction as if it would magically answer. “What can we do?”
The house system said, “We must wait for communication to be reestablished.”
“Can you tell me if their vitals are okay?”
“Their vitals are fine.”
Walking toward the kitchen, she breathed a sigh of relief and raised a trembling hand to her temple. “Good, then they aren’t in any danger.”
“I did not say that.”
“No. You didn’t.” She frowned, her heart sinking. “Are they in danger?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Of course you don’t. Then who does?”
“This might help.” Dani turned around, surprised to see Charmin on the kitchen counter. “What are you doing up there? No cats on the kitchen counters, remember?”
His ‘get real’ look left her gasping. “I’m trying to open the 3D computer. We can track them visually up in Johan’s apartment this way. See if they’re in trouble. Also see if they’re alone up there.”
She watched him study the granite-looking counter top. “The problem there is we need a scan of Johan’s place with that heat seeker scan thing on.”
She looked surprised at the words that came out of her mouth. Then again, so did Charmin. With an odd look her way, he turned and clicked one slightly larger white spot, and damned if the 3D computer didn’t form above the counter, with Charmin in the middle of it. His fur filled with static charge and he immediately looked like an orange cotton ball – mega sized.
She laughed. “Get out of the monitor, idiot,” she said affectionately.
“Hey, how was I to know it would appear instantly? There should be a 3 second time delay for me to shift position.”
“Well, be sure and tell Milo that. He can program that in for you.”
“Ha, I’ll do it myself.”
“Ah Charmin, that might not be a good idea.”
“Too late,” he groused. “Besides, we live here now. Everything needs to be adjusted for us, too.”
“Right.” Fascinated, she watched as he closed the system, then tapped the same white dot and moved off to the side.
He beamed at her, marble eyes glinting through the fluff. “See. Not so hard after all.”
“Wow. I look forward to seeing Milo’s reaction to you tinkering with his computer.”
“He’ll be fine with it.”
She doubted it, but that was Charmin’s headache, not hers. Besides, Milo gave the brains to Charmin. If she had received them, she’d have respect and common sense to go with it…she hoped.
Charmin studied the multilayered holographic images in front of him. “Do you know how to find the building?” she asked.
“It is the building.”
“Oh,” She knew that. So not. Now that he’d pointed it out to her, she could see the different floors. Shifting her gaze to the top floor, she saw a myriad of yellow, orange, and red glowing in places. “What are those?”
“I think those are the brothers.”
“Maybe two of them are, but then who are the other two?”
*
Levi checked his comp. The house comp was listening in, but he’d gone into silent mode. Undetectable even by the house comp. That meant Dani wouldn’t be able to contact him, but any calls from her right now could get them killed. He lifted a finger to Milo and pointed to the right. Milo turned his head and frowned.
Crap, Milo didn’t understand. Levi looked around Johan’s lavish apartment. They’d found Johan on his bed, hurt and apparently worse than he’d been earlier. As they’d walked across the apartment to him, they’d heard someone approach from the other side.
They’d been in hiding ever since.
“Damn it, Johan, I asked you where it is. If you don’t tell me, I’m going to have to hurt you for real.”
A weird mechanical voice with a feminine tone. Levi shook his head. How was that possible?
Johan groaned in response.
“If you hadn’t set your pod to self-destruct, you could be in there healing by now.”
“So you can torture me more?”
“Sure. That works.”
Levi couldn’t see the speaker, and the voice, although familiar, sounded odd.
Milo whispered in his ear, “Voice mask.”
Levi considered that. Did that mean they were dealing with a man after all? That was the more likely answer.
“What do you want to do?”
Damned if he knew. He had to help Johan. He could identify his attacker and maybe they’d finally get to the bottom of this mess. That thought alone propelled him down to the room beside Johan’s bedroom. He glanced inside. It was a spare bedroom. Odd that Johan had left it that way. In today’s world, he could have turned it into so much more with just a flip of a button, so why hadn’t he? Milo joined him, glanced inside, and winced. “Boring.”
“And that’s what’s wrong here. Johan’s lifestyle was anything but boring.”
“So why this?”
Levi nodded.
Milo lifted the bug detector that he’d grabbed on the way out of their place and turned it on. He ran a sweep, but nothing stood out.
Levi stared at the space and wondered. Then realized it was a holograph like he’d done for Dani’s private island. Johan had deliberately made it to look like a dull boring bedroom. So what was underneath? He slipped inside, motioning for Milo to join him. He closed the door slightly so that the flash of the house comp wouldn’t alert anyone, then with a half an eye on the hallway, he quickly stopped the cloaking program. Milo gasped. Levi turned to see an incredibly high tech computer layout. He spun around and turned the cloaking program back on. This was what the intruder was after. And if he was willing to kill Johan for it, Levi wanted to make sure he didn’t get his hands on it.
A scream split the air. Johan. Levi, knowing it was the wrong thing to do, but couldn’t help himself, raced to his friend’s aid. He tripped around a corner and dashed into the bedroom where Johan had collapsed. There was a sound of running feet as the intruder bolted outside. Levi ran to Johan’s side, but Johan waved a hand at him. “Get him.”
And he collapsed again.
Levi followed the sounds of running feet. Time was of the essence. If the person managed to get to the port before Levi… “Milo,” he screamed, “shut down the port.”
For a small apartment, it seemed to take forever to make it to the front door.
Just as the port vanished.
“Shit.” He circled the port area, hoping that the attacker might have left a clue.
“Sorry bro. There’s some kind of fail-safe set. I didn’t have enough time,” Milo’s aggrieved tone brought Levi
back to his senses.
“Not your fault.”
He walked back to Johan. His friend looked bad. Like seriously bad. “Call for a Medivac. He needs more help than a pod.”
“He’s past it, bro. Look at him, he’s not breathing.”
“Damn it.” Levi checked Johan’s vitals. “Come on, Johan, stay alive. Please.”
He lifted one of Johan’s eyelids, but there was no response. No pulse. No breathing.
Milo stepped up and pressed his comp to Johan’s tags. There was no responding beep, only a hum that sounded fainter and fainter…before completely dying away.
“Sorry, Levi, he’s gone.”
As the words left his mouth, the apartment doors slid closed and a steel cover came down, sealing them both inside.
“What’s happening?”
“The system just registered Johan’s death. It’s gone into a complete lockdown.”
Chapter 6
Watching the orange dots on the big monitor was like watching a horror movie, knowing that something bad was going to happen but being unable to stop it. She watched the heat blobs move, crouch, and run. One appeared to be lying down and another one stormed around.
“Can we identify who these people are?”
“Not everyone.” He pointed a claw at the two crouching. “I’m thinking those are the brothers. The one lying down will be Johan and the other one…yeah, that’s going to be whoever Johan was calling for help about.”
“You think he’s a bad guy.”
Charmin shot her a curious look. “Is there anything in this picture that makes you think this is a good scenario?”
She studied it. “No. It looks creepy as hell.”
“That’s because…” He paused mid-sentence and leaned closer, his whiskers quivering. “Oh, what’s going on?”
She leaned forward. “That doesn’t look good.” The two men who crept further away had gone down one side of the apartment away from the other two and had stopped inside a room of some kind. She could see a change in the energy field, but then it switched again. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know, but Johan is in bad shape and deteriorating rapidly.”
She switched her attention to the prone figure and realized the heat signature, the bright orange and red colors of the others, were muted in his case. Almost faded. Something happened suddenly and all three mobile orange dots were running in a straight line. She gasped as the first man was almost caught, but dove into…something…and disappeared off her screen. “Where did he go?”
“I’m trying to track him, but I’m afraid that might be hard to do.”
“And look at Johan. His color, it’s almost gone.”
“The color itself will last a little while. It will take hours for his body temperature to drop so low that no color will show up.”
“I’m presuming that the other two left are Milo and Levi?” At least she hoped so. She watched them go to Johan. Suddenly, as if someone flicked a switch, the entire floor of the building disappeared. It was still there, but now it only showed as a solid black bar. As if the entire floor had disappeared.
“What did you do?” she cried. “Bring it back.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Charmin tapped the console several times, only nothing changed. That floor existed, but only as a black bar. Charmin sat back, stumped. “There has to be something going on up there that the room is no longer visible.”
“That’s not good. Johan is in really bad shape, he needs help.”
“He’s actually past needing anyone’s help. He’s dead.”
She gasped. “Are you sure?” she cried. “Maybe he can still be saved. They have wonderful medical advancements here. Maybe it isn’t too late.”
“Oh, he’s dead all right. That’s also likely what triggered this blackout. Consider the type of business that Johan was in. If anything happened to him, especially on his premises, there has to be some kind of fail-safe to protect the contents. Or…to catch the killer.”
“But the men are stuck inside.” With a dead body, and boy did that part creep her out. “Can they get out?”
“Nah, I doubt it. It’s probably locked down until someone, a prearranged someone, comes to remove information from the premises.”
She stared at him. “Like more bad guys coming to make sure sensitive information isn’t recovered by the wrong people?”
“Something like that.” He wandered over the counter and sniffed toward the wall. “Is there food in here?”
“Somewhere.” She barely listened. Who could think of food at a time like this? “We have to help them. They’re innocent, but whoever comes to deal with this situation is going to suspect that Levi killed Johan.”
Charmin looked at her. “True, Milo doesn’t look like he could kill a bug. Now Levi, that’s a different story. That man looks like he could kill.”
She shook her head. “What are you talking about? Levi isn’t dangerous.”
“Nah, of course he isn’t.” He snorted. “Unless his family or business are being threatened.” He motioned with a pudgy paw at the monitor, “If I hadn’t seen for myself that Johan was already in trouble and that there was a fourth person there, I’d be wondering if Levi hadn’t taken care of Johan himself.”
“There’s no way he’d do something like that,” she cried out. “Where are you getting that from?”
“Uh, maybe from that can-do-what-needs-to-be-done attitude he gives off without even trying.” Charmin sat his paunchy bottom down and glared back at the monitor. “I like him just fine, and the fact that he likes you is helpful, but it doesn’t change the fact that when threatened, Levi will do what needs to be done.”
“That’s a good thing,” she said gently. “That’s something to admire.”
“So is killing when killing needs to be done.” And he slid down to lie on one side where he proceeded to clean his paw.
She stared at him, his words rippling through her mind. There were times when killing was a good thing, and if Levi was capable of protecting her from the kidnappers, well, it was a really good thing for her. Although she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Even if Charmin didn’t think so. “He’s a good man.”
“Yep, he appears to be.”
“It’s not like you wouldn’t kill for food.”
He pinned his beady eyes on her. “I have killed for food. Why do you think I catch mice – to keep them as pets?”
She grinned. “You could go back to that. It would be good for you. A form of exercise and, just think, you wouldn’t need to wait on other people to feed you. You could feed yourself.”
He made a strangled sound that came from deep within his throat. “If there were mice in this day and age, I’d consider it. However, what I won’t consider is exchanging my killer skills for the food that they serve me on a regular basis. Where’s the sense in that? I’d do both. Not the one that takes effort at the expense of the one that is easy.”
With a shake of his head, he went back to cleaning.
She went back to staring at the blacked-out apartment on the top of the monitor. “We have to help them.”
“I agree. Do you have any idea how?”
She winced. “We could go up there and try to open the door.”
He hooted. “Really? That’s the best you’ve got? Knowing a little about this system, chances are good you won’t even find the place. It’s going to be on stealth mode under heavy lockdown.”
“There has to be something we can do. They’d help us.” She thought about it. “Maybe we could call whatever lawyers are left at John’s company.”
“They’re not going to want to come here after two of the lawyers were killed, one on our doorstep.”
“Then we have to go and help them ourselves.”
*
Levi had already done a second search for a way out that they might have missed. No such luck. From the furious pounding Milo was doing on his comp and the wall computers, he wasn’t having any better luck
. “This is not good,” Levi said under his breath. “Johan’s computer system is our best bet. Plus, I want to see what he was hiding.”
“I’m coming,” Milo said. “There’s got to be an override for this system.”
“Yes, but it’s likely to be controlled by someone elsewhere. When Johan’s tag said he was deceased, this lockdown was instant.”
“There has to be something important here, otherwise there’d be no need for all this security.”
“Information and possibly items.” Leading the way, Levi tossed back, “Let’s keep an open mind.”
“Right.” Milo reached a hand past him and clicked off the mask hiding the room’s interior. Instantly, the high tech computer room showed up. Milo whistled. “Like there is some seriously good stuff here.”
“Sure, but what was he into? Was it legal? Was he working for himself or for someone else? And if it’s someone else, then we need to know who.”
“The system might not load with this lockdown happening.” Milo had the system booting up, when he said, “Or it might send a signal to someone that we are here.”
“I don’t want to hear that. We need in. And fast.”
“I’m working on it. You take point.”
Levi stepped closer to the secondary system, surprised to find it similar to what he had in his place. Johan had to be into something secretive. Had that been what got him killed?
“Hmmm.”
“What did you find?”
“This system is connected to another system. It’s trying to boot me out.”
Levi waited. His brother wouldn’t take that kindly. He’d be working his ass off to beat this asshole at his own game. It would also increase the danger of staying here. The need for the other party to secure the place and retrieve or destroy what they needed was now paramount. And…he glanced over at Milo. “Careful in case of a self-destruct order.”
“Oh, there will be one, but there’s a reason it hasn’t gone off yet. The assholes monitoring this place need something from here first.”
“Right.” That made sense. It also guaranteed that a retrieval team was on its way.
And they were stuck inside.
Chapter 7