Girl Punches Out

by Jacques Antoine

  “Sorry about the sparse furnishings. Dojos are like that. But the carpet is soft.”

  She sat next to her on the floor. It was a relief to see her alive.

  “I’m so frightened. I didn’t know where to go. Then for some reason I thought of you.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I’ve been driving around for hours. I’m afraid to go home. Then I saw the sign for the dojo and, well, here I am.”

  “I saw the fire, Doctor…”

  “Jan,” she interrupted. “Just call me Jan. Please.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “Natalie, she’s my assistant, she called when a couple of men came by yesterday. Mondays are slow. We don’t open until one. But they were waiting for her when she got there. Claimed they were FBI. They wanted to see some patient records.”

  “Whose records?”

  “They had a list of six names, and you were on it,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.

  “I guess she didn’t believe them.”

  “Of course not. The FBI would never ask for stuff like that. It’s confidential. She called to warn me about it and then the line went dead.”

  “You know, there was a woman’s body in the fire,” Emily offered as delicately as she could.

  “Oh, Natalie,” she sobbed. “She knew there was something wrong about those men.”

  “It’s okay, Jan,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “You’re okay now. There’s nothing you can do for Natalie.”

  “What should I do? I don’t know where to go, what’s safe.”

  She had been wary of Emily’s physical presence when she came to her office. She seemed more like a weapon than a girl then. But now those same intimations were reassuring. Just sitting next to her for a few minutes was helping her calm down.

  “Did they get the records?”

  “No. We do all digital records, and the server’s not at the office.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Right now it’s in the trunk of my car, along with my backup drives. I didn’t want to leave ‘em in my house.”

  “You can’t go home, obviously. They’ll be looking for you there, if they haven’t torched it already.” Jan gasped.

  “But all my stuff is there. My clothes, shoes, photos, all my books, everything. What am I gonna do?” she groaned.

  “Well, first of all, you’re spending the night with me.”

  She held both sides of her face and looked directly into her eyes as she said this. Her gaze had a powerful soothing effect on the doctor.

  “I’m sorry to dump my mess on you like this. I’m acting like a little kid.”

  “No. You’re in danger. You shouldn’t try to face this alone.”

  To Emily, she was exactly what she appeared to be, a helpless innocent caught up in a conflict beyond her ability to cope. But she had misread Miss Park completely. She couldn’t help having the slightest qualm about trusting this woman now. She had been so good at reading people before. “I guess that’s just the cost of turning to stone. It harder to get a feel for people,” she thought to herself, with just a hint of bitterness. In the end, she decided to take her as she found her. What else was there to go on?

  “What about the tests you ordered for me?” Emily asked. “Do you have the results?”

  This was a fair question given her anxieties, as well as her suspicion that the fire was all about her.

  “Your tests? Oh, yeah. There’s nothing critical in them. But the hormone levels were a bit off.”

  “What does that mean? Off how?”

  “Well, that’s the puzzle. They don’t quite make sense. It’s like some of your glands are working over time, even when you’re resting. Those levels would make more sense if you’d just finished a triathlon or something.”

  Emily wasn’t surprised. She’d half expected something like this. Not the details, of course. But the abnormality. She didn’t need to know what the particulars meant to begin drawing her own conclusions.

  “What causes something like that, do you know?”

  “I have no idea. I tried to research it over the weekend. But I couldn’t find anything. We could do more tests if you like. But it may take a DNA study to really figure it out.”

  Emily’s first thought was to destroy every trace of those tests. If she was right, and they meant what she feared, she couldn’t let anyone else find out about them. Her mother would know how to read them. She was sure of it.

  “I can keep you safe tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go see some friends who can hide you until this all blows over.”

  In fact, she wasn’t completely sure she knew how to protect her. Was her apartment still safe? Surely they knew her truck and the doctor’s car. Were there tracking devices on them? It was probably too dark to do a thorough check on them now.

  The class was winding down. Kids were packing up and milling by the door. Emily went out to put a word in Sensei’s ear. It took a few minutes for the dojo to thin out until only her friends were left.

  “Who’s that in the office,” Wendy asked.

  “She’s my doctor.”

  “The one whose office was torched yesterday?” Danny said, putting some of the pieces together. “How is she?”

  “She’s okay. A bit shaken. Danny, can you take my truck home? I’m gonna keep an eye on her. Is there a flashlight in the office?”

  When Sensei came back with the light, she asked him to pull the doctor’s car around back and look it over for tracking devices. It wasn’t a perfect solution to her worries, but it would have to do.

  “You know, focus on the bumpers and wheel wells.”

  While he was gone she turned to the rest of them with a darkly focused look.

  “You can’t talk about this to anyone.” Wendy rolled her eyes. “I’m serious. Her assistant was killed in that fire. She may be in danger. Just keep your mouths shut. Okay?”

  “What’s this all about, Em,” Danny asked.

  “The less any of us knows, the better. Melanie, can I count on you? Not a word to anyone.”

  “Not a word,” she replied, with a puzzled look on her face. But there was just enough fear mixed in to let Emily rest easy.

  “I won’t be in school tomorrow. And if anyone asks about me, you don’t know anything.”

  “That’ll be easy, since we don’t,” Wendy snarked back at her.

  “Look, don’t even act like you know anything, especially around Miss Park, in case she’s there. Wendy, I’m not kidding.”

  “Okay, okay. I get it. Too dangerous. I know nothing.”

  Sensei didn’t find anything, which was not finally very reassuring. Though finding a tracking device might have been unsettling in a different way. Emily took the keys and then had a private word for him.

  “I’m gonna have to stop coming to class for a little while. And you may need to close the dojo for a few weeks, too. It might not be safe for any of us to congregate.”

  He was very visibly unhappy with this suggestion. But even he had to concede that the dojo might become a target, and his students could get hurt.

  They went back to Emily’s place to collect clothing and other necessities. She parked a couple of blocks away, slipped through a neighbor’s backyard and scrambled over a fence as a precaution. In the end she thought better of spending the night there. After the mortification of having to be hoisted over the fence, Jan was content to do whatever Emily said.

  Her plan was to meet up with Ethan and Jesse the next day in Charlottesville. That meant heading in the other direction for tonight. She drove as fast as she dared down the 220 to Covington, then cut across on Interstate 84 to Clifton Forge. The final leg was down the 220 again to Roanoke. She preferred to take smaller roads wherever possible to make it easier to spot a tail. They stayed in a downtown motel where she paid in cash. Roanoke was a big town, but still small enough to make it difficult for foreign agents to conceal themselves easily.

  The next morning, they ate at a nearb
y diner next to a discount electronics store. Emily used the occasion to pick up a handful of flash drives, a generic prepaid cell phone and a powerful electromagnet. Over breakfast she needed to get more information out of the doctor.

  “What about the other six people on that list? Was there anything distinctive about them?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it,” she replied coolly.

  “Then why did you come to me?”

  “I don’t really know. Sorry I’m not more helpful. There’s just something about you, I don’t know what it is, but…”

  “Look, I need you to think hard about that list. Who was on it?”

  “I can’t reveal patient information, even to you.”

  “I don’t want to know who they are. But you need to figure out if the other names were there because of something we all have in common. That list is the only clue we have about their intentions.”

  Emily already suspected that the list had no meaning. The other names were just there to conceal their interest in her. But if there was anything she had in common with anyone else, she needed to know. Were there any others like her?

  “I can’t think of anything. Three of them are older, in their seventies. One suffers from severe asthma. One has a thyroid condition. And then you. You’re the only person under forty, the only one who is healthy and fit, other than the hormone levels. And that doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy. If anything you’re super-healthy.”

  “That’s kinda what I expected to hear. How much data do you have on your drives?”

  “Not that much. It’s a new practice. Maybe a few gigabytes. I’m not really good with the tech stuff.”

  “That’s okay. We’re gonna have to wipe the drives. You can back it all up to these flash drives. They ought to be big enough. And they’ll be much easier to hide.”

  Doctor Tarleton looked horrified. This might require a bit of finesse to get her to go along. If only they had the time for finesse.

  Back at the motel room Emily booted up the doctor’s laptop and hooked up the server and the drives. A bit of cajoling got her to enter a password.

  “Show me the file with my data,” Emily said.

  “It’s right here under Tenno. All the files are listed by last names.”

  Emily had her copy it to the smallest of the flash drives. She put that one in her pocket. Then she leaned over and highlighted the entire folder and deleted it.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” she howled. “I need that.”

  “Trust me, Jan. That information is too dangerous. You’re better off without it.”

  Emily could see she was hardly mollified. But what choice did she have? She had to control all information about her, especially whatever a doctor’s files might contain.

  “What’s in this folder labeled ‘Testing’?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s just routing numbers for the various labs we send stuff to.”

  “Delete it.” She complied wordlessly, now utterly cowed by Emily. “Are there any other folders that could contain a trace of my data? Like this one with the jumble of letters on the label, what’s that?”

  When she clicked on it she found only a secure link and an executable file labeled ‘Tracking.’

  “I’ve never seen that before. But like I said, I’m not tech savvy.”

  “I think it’s some sort of snooping program. It looks like your server’s been compromised. Delete the whole folder. Is this everything on the server and drives? There aren’t any hidden folders?”

  “Not that I know of?”

  “Copy everything to these,” she said, handing her a few more flash drives.

  Once she was done, Emily plugged in the electromagnet and rubbed it all over the server and the drives. After a few seconds a command error appeared on the screen. She pulled the individual disks out of the server and smashed each one over the magnet. She did the same with the laptop itself, over the doctor’s loud protests. She gathered up the remains of Doctor Tarleton’s equipment and threw it into the dumpster behind the motel. When she got back her new friend was sitting on the edge of one of the beds, weeping.

  “Jan, I’m sorry about the laptop. But it was probably time to get a new one anyway. That one looked a little long in the tooth.”

  After a moment, she laughed, lifted up her face and wiped away her tears.

  “We’ve got one last thing to do before we get out of here.”

  They loaded the car with what little remained of her belongings and pulled around to the back of the motel.

  “What exactly am I looking for?”

  “It could look like almost anything, though most likely a small plastic box. But it’ll probably have a little wire antenna. You check inside, you know under the seats, in the trunk. I’ll check under the hood.”

  Emily found what she was looking for almost right away, a black box about the size of a match book attached by a magnetic clip to the top of a reinforcing bar on the underside of the hood itself. It was partially covered by insulation. No one not already looking for it would ever notice it. With no indicator light on the casing, she couldn’t tell if it was operating. She put it in her pocket and didn’t mention it to Jan.

  “I think we’re clean,” she said with a smile. “Let’s hit the road.”

  She pulled into a diner a mile or so down the road with a police cruiser parked out front and sent Jan in to get coffee. She attached the tracker to the underside of the rear bumper of the police car.

  -back to top-

  Chapter 13

  Home at Last

  They arrived in Charlottesville in the middle of the afternoon. Emily hadn’t been in any particular hurry to get there since she wasn’t sure when Ethan and Jesse would arrive. They had an early dinner at a sushi bar near the university: a grilled salmon plate, a nigiri sushi assortment and vegetable yakitori.

  “See, doc, I eat well enough. Not just vegetarian.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” she giggled. “But you may be suffering from a dessert deficiency.”

  “What would you prescribe?”

  “Were those creampuffs I saw on the dessert cart?”

  “Think again, Jan. Japanese pastries are usually filled with soy products. They can be pretty weighty.”

  An ice cream stand around the corner provided a lighter alternative. They got a couple of cones and walked over to the campus, where they found themselves strolling around the Lawn in front of the Rotunda. It’s a tree lined avenue about a quarter mile long with various pavilions along either side. Students milled about in the grass, or walked to and from classes. The pastoral scene was a relief to both of them, so far from the dangers they had been fleeing. Emily dialed the number Michael had given her. Two rings and she heard Jesse’s sunny voice.

  “You’re here,” she said merrily.

  He recognized her voice immediately. Better not to say names over the phone.

  “We got in late last night. Everything is just about ready. The place is as secure as we can make it. Where are you?”

  “We’re in town.”

  He gave her directions to a large house in the hills near the reservoir just west of town. They were there in less than fifteen minutes. It was a secluded spot with no lines of sight from any other structures. There were no walls or hedges. Just deep woods on all sides. Security would be primarily electronic. Emily wondered if she would be able to spot the cameras. Her father had a sense for that sort of thing, always knowing where they were before they picked him up.

  The compound consisted of a large two story main house, a separate structure for the garage with what looked like at least one upstairs apartment and two small cabins on either side of the pond about a hundred yards down the main slope. There were no substantial lawns. Just a few enclosed patios and a rustic garden. The pond looked clear enough to be swimmable, and large enough for a floating dock in the center. It looked like a suitable substitute for a swimming pool.

  The only approach took
one down several winding lanes. It would be impossible for a car not to be heard several minutes before it arrived. A clearing on the side opposite the pond was large enough for a helicopter to land. But no lights or other preparations to support a landing could be seen. An adventurous pilot would have to know how to find it on his own. No underground bunkers or tunnels were in evidence. But if they weren’t already in place, Michael would probably put them in soon. He was a burrower.

  They pulled down the long drive that ultimately circled in front of the main house. Ethan came out to meet them, waving off a security team approaching from an unseen guardhouse. When Emily got out of the car he picked her up at the waist and hoisted her over his head.

  “Emily! It’s so good to see you again, finally. Jesse’s been chattering about you for the last few days non-stop.”

  “The feeling is definitely mutual, big guy. I’m afraid we’re coming in a bit hot, if you know what I mean.”

  “Michael warned us you were beginning to attract some unwanted attention.”

  “Well, things have gotten even hotter since we last spoke.”

  Just then Jesse came running up yelling her name. Hugs and many kisses on the cheek in the Israeli fashion were exchanged.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is my doctor, Janice Tarleton. Her office was burned down by agents after some medical records. Her nurse was killed in the fire. I need you to keep her safe for a while. I’m sure Michael will understand.”

  “Was it your records they wanted?” Ethan asked.

  “That’s my guess. North Koreans are somehow involved. But there’s at least one other team, and they may be American. It’s getting kinda crowded for my taste in Virginia.”

  ~~~~~~~

  Jan listened to all of this in astonishment. These were obviously professional soldiers Emily was… well, briefing seemed to be the only way to describe it. And the estate was huge. What sort of friends does this girl have? She certainly felt safer now than she did a day ago. But what exactly had she stepped into the middle of?

  Her initial impression of Emily seemed to fit in with these guys almost too well. They all looked like soldiers at the peak of physical training. Jesse was lithe and strong, like a coiled snake, and Ethan was tall and thickly built. He looked like he could crash through a brick wall with just his shoulder. And who knew how many other security people were secreted around this place.