by Alec Peche
Damian chuckled at the image of the parent being pleased with their child being caught up in a tree net for a few hours. “Maybe we overreacted, but it’s better than being dead.”
“I don’t think we overreacted. We all especially appreciate the bullet proof fabric. I checked in with Andy and Sherman and they thought we did the right thing, so don’t worry about it. Damian, thanks for your help with both the cold case and my own protection and I’ll drop you a text if I hear anything new.”
They ended the call and he wondered how Hannah and Ariana were doing with their shopping trip. What a complete flip of his life that he was suddenly worrying about people after spending nearly seven years in isolation not giving a rat’s ass about anything or anyone. He laughed at himself and the stress he was feeling for Natalie and her family, and Hannah.
He moved into another area of his workshop containing lots of weird toys. He owned a forward looking infrared sensor. He used it to understand this rock of an island and the water flow around it. Tonight he was going to use it to see if there were any heat sources near Hannah’s family home. He could sit several blocks away and yet still see any heat sources at her house. He would modify the technology so he could spot cameras that were connected to somewhere, be it the family’s hidey holes or to the bad guys that took Hannah’s parents. He had another device with him that would scramble all cameras while he was near or in the house.
This was all assuming that the coast was clear and the house empty. If he found heat sources, then he planned to wear a gas mask and fire a Halothane bomb at the heat source. Halothane was cheap and still in use in developing countries and veterinary practices as a quick acting sedative. The heat source should hit the ground in about fifteen seconds after breathing the stuff and stay down while Damian retrieved what he needed from the house. He wanted Hannah’s stuff, any records or computer drives and any recording devices. He’d have his water gun as a weapon, but hopefully just be able to knock out the heat source, and scramble any security devices before his heat source notified anyone of Damian’s intrusion.
Ariana dropped him a text with Hannah’s new mobile number and just said the day was going well, and what time should they come tomorrow to work on Hannah’s school records? Damian thought Trevor and Haley would be gone by three and so he had her plan for a four o’clock arrival. She knew he was having guests and if they wanted to keep Hannah’s presence hidden until they had a good story in place, then it was better not to introduce her to anyone either of them knew closely. Fortunately Ariana’s family and that of her dead husband’s were all on the east coast.
He had an early dinner with the cats, sharing his chicken. They also were going to have their lives disrupted whenever Hannah stayed with them. The days were numbered as loners for all three of them. He cleaned the kitchen up and got ready to meet Mike down on the beach. He hoped to be back tonight, but he’d made no arrangement with Mike. Once at the harbor, he made plans with the harbormaster to borrow his boat. He’d leave it parked overnight at his lower level dock and take it back in the morning to do some grocery shopping then meet Trevor and Haley for his trip back home.
Plans in place, he turned his truck toward the creek where Hannah had dropped her phone. He had a fish net and some wellingtons to wade in, but he wasn’t sure what kind of water he’d meet up with. Closer to the time that Hannah had crossed the creek, it might have been raging from a recent rain storm, or maybe she was wet and cold and the battery was dead anyway. Maybe she’d crossed in the dark and couldn’t see anything in the water. Regardless, he’d do his best to find it. He parked in a county park and got out of his truck to begin walking the creek. How terrifying it had to be for a girl who had thought her parents were dead. Using the metal detector he began walking along the creek. Fortunately, no one seemed to be patronizing the park at this time of day to wonder what he was up to. After searching about three hundred yards of creek bed, his detector went off for the thirtieth time and there was Hannah’s phone. It was a droid in a case of bright green, exactly as she described it. He picked it up took a picture and texted it to her new mobile phone for confirmation and Hannah confirmed that it appeared to be her phone. Great now all he had to do was try to save components that had been in the water for several days. He’d brought a bag of rice with him to start the drying process. After drying off the phone, he opened the inside and planned to toss the sections into the rice, but he stared at the extra piece inside. It was a tracker bug and he dropped it into a metal lined film pouch. He didn’t know if it was working or who had put it there, Hannah’s parents or the bad guys.
Now it was time to move on to the far more dangerous job of getting inside Hannah’s home. He had the key and the code to shut the alarm off, but that was after he surveyed the property with an infrared scan. It was still daylight, so he couldn’t try to get into the house yet, but he did do a drive-by to see what the neighborhood situation was. While all of his technology would work for a daytime invasion, he was hoping if there was an intruder in the house, he would have a harder time staying awake after dark. He’d checked the statistics on burglaries and most occurred in the daytime while the homeowner was at work, but as a novice he just felt better under cover of darkness.
His impression was one of million dollars and up homes on a quiet tree lined street. There were no cars in the driveway of Hannah’s home. There was a mailbox close to the street end of the driveway. Elsewhere, there were no kids playing in the street. He pulled the truck underneath some trees along the front of a property upon which no house was built. He set up his scanner to look at heat sources in the house.
Chapter Twenty-One
There was one source inside the house and it was in motion in what was probably the kitchen. Hannah had drawn a floor plan of the house for him with directions of where he would find the pictures that she wanted. Since most security cameras worked by the concept of infrared waves, he had a different scanner that showed where all the active cameras in the house were located. There were a lot, and Damian wondered how men had ever creeped into the house without advance warning to Hannah parents. They must have used a blocking device that also cut off the alarm or maybe there was a ten to twenty second delay to account for power failures that would be supplemented by a back-up generator after a short time. That short time would be enough for fast moving men to get into the house and up to the bedroom to take on the parents. Hannah had been awake and reading not awakened by a house alarm. She would have the added seconds to make it into her safe room and she was the secondary target after her parents. So what tools should he use to enter the home now?
He’d wait until complete darkness betting that the lights would be out in the rooms on the street side of the house. He’d take another drive through the neighborhood to see how illuminated it was, then he’d return and park his truck where it was, gathering his supplies to safely enter Hannah’s house. He still wasn’t sure what he would do with the man in the house. He had the means to incapacitate him, but how did he cut the alarms off?
Dah! He’d just use the code Hannah had given him and turn off the cameras that way. Sometimes he tried to over solve a problem by using technology when the answer was right there in front of his face. He watched the guy for a while longer and then drove away to a large retail store to use their restroom. It wouldn’t do for him to pee his pants when he got surprised or scared during this operation. It was interesting acknowledging that he was going to be scared. Perhaps that would sharpen his senses or reflexes; he hoped so.
He drove past Hannah’s house, this time in the dark of night. As he thought, the front was dark, he’d have little trouble being invisible in the darkness when he was ready to go in. He parked again on the empty block and gathered his stuff. He wanted to avoid dropping any DNA in the house, so he’d brought paper booties for his shoes, a balaclava for his face and a knitted beanie cap for his head, long pants and a turtleneck, and latex gloves. All items recently purchased at the department store, that way
his DNA had less time to get on the clothing and he had no residue from his cats or the island. Over all that he put on a black cloth disposable suit. Thankfully, the temperature dropped into the fifties at night in this part of California or he’d drop his sweat all over the house. Someday, some police force would collect evidence at the crime scene of Hannah’s house, and he wanted to be damn sure that his DNA wasn’t there. He’d debated sealing up his clothing with clear spray shellac or flat paint, but he might die from the fumes before the night was out.
He brought a huge bag to collect anything for Hannah that he thought she might want beyond the family photos. He had his cell phone jammer, the infrared heat sensor, his water gun with special pepper spray, and the halothane home bomb to put whomever was in the kitchen asleep. The gas was odorless and colorless and he just needed to put the container near the heat source that he had viewed on his infrared detector. He hoped there were no squeaky boards that would give his presence away to the heat source. After gingerly moving through front yards in all black with the bulletproof fabric around him, he was soon on Hannah’s doorstep disabling the alarm system. He also jammed cell phone reception to block the intruder from calling for help. He unscrewed the lightbulb illuminating the front porch and soon entered the house.
This was the first time in his life that he’d acted like a cat-burglar, and he could tell he wasn’t cut out for this occupation as it felt wrong to break in and his heart was pounding and his body sweating with anxiety that the heat source might kill him before Damian was able to release the gas and make him go to sleep. It was why he carried the water gun in his hand and he knew he would be trigger-happy if anything didn’t go as planned.
It was surprisingly easy to reach the kitchen. He heard no alarm bells go off anywhere in the house. The heat source hadn’t moved but seemed to be sitting at a table and either asleep or doing something with a cell phone in front of his face. The stupid man was sitting with his back to the door and so Damian slipped on a gas mask, while he let the halothane disperse into the room. The man was soon snoring with his chin nearly resting on his chest. Damian bent down and picked up the homemade bomb and set it on the kitchen island next to the man. The substance might kill him if he had a heart arrhythmia or liver failure, but otherwise with any luck Damian would be well gone by the time he woke up from his evening nap. Damian moved quickly through the house grabbing pictures that Hannah had specified. He also opened her closets and chest of drawers and dumped as many items as he could into trash bags. Rather than carry three large bags back to his truck through the community, he would put the items at the curb and quickly fetch his truck and come back and load the items in the bed. He went into Hannah’s safe room which appeared to be untouched and retrieved a hard drive that he hoped would have the footage of her parents attack. Fifteen minutes later he had all that he thought was important in the bags. Putting his gas mask back on, he closed up the halothane smoke bomb and put it in to one of the bags and quickly departed the house. He put the bags at the curb and nearly sprinted for his truck. There’d been no action on the street during this entire entry into Hannah’s house. Less than five minutes later, he discarded everything but the turtleneck and slacks into his truck and he was tossing the bags in the back and heading down the street without anyone noticing his movement. For the job he’d rented a dark blue truck and taken the plates off before he parked this last time. That way if anyone caught sight of the truck disappearing down the street, there were no identifying marks about the truck. He returned to the retail center parking lot and took another look at his infrared scanner. His heat source in the kitchen was likely starting to wake up since he could see the head bobbing on occasion, while the body was still seated. He changed back into his own clothing and parked the rental truck in the hotel parking lot next to the car rental agency and his own truck. He moved over his equipment and the bags of stuff he’d retrieved from the house. He would let Hannah go through her bags when she visited the next day. He’d been faster than he thought and could likely get a ride from Mike back to his island.
An hour later, he examined the tracker bug out of the phone having made sure that he drained the battery of the device back in the retail center parking lot. Last thing he wanted to do was give anyone a path to his island. He decided to start by asking Hannah if her parents ever mentioned that they had a tracking bug in her phone. A few texts later after he explained, she replied not to her knowledge. So either her parents had done it and not told her or someone else had got to her phone and planted the device. It wasn’t that important at the moment and he might question her further later.
He moved on to the technology that he had pulled out of Hannah’s safe room. Surely these criminals were not dumb enough to let themselves be photographed on camera? But that was assuming they knew of the second safe room or that they knew that any motion inside the house was recorded. He wouldn’t know until he looked at what was stored on the tape. Looking at the tape he determined that it was only for the past thirty days. Even though the system only recorded motion, it ended up with a lot of data from security cameras. He checked the hard drive for software for the tracker bug but didn’t find any. That didn’t necessarily indicate that her parents hadn’t put the tracker there, it just meant that the software wasn’t on Hannah’s unit.
Looking at the clock, he debated what to do next. He was very curious to look at the video, but he was tired and afraid that he lacked the focus to look at a lot of dull footage. He also wanted to know the date of her parent’s abduction and it was too late to text the child at this hour. So he packed it in and started upstairs to his bedroom, then he thought of one more thing. He better do a quick search of all of the stuff that he’d brought from Hannah’s house, he needed to make sure there were no other trackers in any of that stuff. If there was, he had to get his jet ski out and take the item s over to the Berkeley marina and drop them on a boat there. He hated to do that to some poor bloke that owned the boat, but he needed it off his island. Most cheap trackers just emitted a signal, but they didn’t record where they’d been just where they were in real time unless they were being actively watched. He was an hour later getting to bed after he found a tracker in each purse of Hannah’s, a hoodie that said UC Berkeley, and in the drive that he brought over. He gathered them up and took them over to the marina in his little dinghy. It was quieter than the jet ski and would take longer, but this was about stealth. He found the perfect vessel, a large fishing boat that advertised Salmon fishing in the ocean on its side and would surely be out on the water the next day, since it would be Saturday. He could have sent the devices to the bottom of the bay, but they might have mercury or lead in them which was bad for the bay’s fish. So he brought duck-tape and taped them underneath a large pile of ropes and nets. Once he’d returned and had his island locked up tight he dropped into bed exhausted by the amount of adrenaline that he’d used up that day.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Damian awoke a little later than usual when Bailey and Bella pounced on his bed. It was their stares that brought him to wakefulness.
“Okay guys you want some scratch time and then some of my breakfast, I suppose,” and although they didn’t understand humans they acknowledged his words by each coming closer to a hand. Three minutes of ear scratching and they had their fill for the time and released him to shower. Normally he’d get some exercise in the morning, but his schedule was so full with Trevor and Haley arriving in three hours and then Ariana and Hannah after that and he still had a hard drive to decode.
He was showered and shaved and dressed in blue jeans and a Golden State Warriors Black polo shirt with their logo on it. Haley and Trevor were going to watch the game with him later as it was game two of the best of seven against the Portland Trailblazers and the Dubs were up by one game. He’d invited Natalie and Eddie, but they declined. He fixed eggs and bacon for himself and sardines for the cats. He was amazed they still wanted human food after all the other fish they caught, but then t
his was no work for them and it had a little seasoning. The island had no snakes or mice as neither could swim across the bay, but there were lots of birds which were off limits to the cats, and fish and crabs. So far the crabs were winning against the cats, as they spent so much time dancing away from the crab’s claws that they couldn’t kill or even harm them, but it was fun to watch.
With the kitchen and the rest of the house cleaned, supplies ready for snacks for his guests as well as beer and wine that he picked up yesterday along with his spy clothing, he finally went down to his lab setting his alarm as he went. He knew that he would forget about the time and leave Trevor and Haley to get blasted by the water spray alarm when he forgot to turn it off in anticipation of their visit. After spending years alone, he wasn’t used to scheduling his day around other people and all of a sudden since the seventh anniversary of his family’s death, his schedule was bustling such that he would have to plan an entire Saturday around other people’s schedules.
Before he went down to his lab, he called Hannah to ask her more questions. While the phone rang, he tried to think of a polite way to converse with the teenager before getting to his questions. He’d have to ask Ariana how she communicated with her teenage niece; maybe you could get right to the heart of the question with this texting generation.