Escape The Grid: Volume 1

by Patrick F. Kelly

  “Good luck.”

  They hung up and Stephanie was standing next to her. “You have to tell me what she said? How many people?”

  Susan looked at her with near rage, but composed herself. “I have to make a confidential call now. Please go in the other room. When I finish my call, we’ll go take care of this.”

  “Just tell me if anyone survived.”

  Susan yelled at her, “Go to the other room NOW! You want to know who survived? You’ll see it soon enough.”

  Stephanie started to respond but then changed her mind. She turned and walked to the other room. Susan called Margaret, who answered immediately.

  “Success?” Margaret asked.

  “Not yet,” Susan replied. “We have some big problems. Two people escaped. I’ll send you their pictures once I have them. The rest of the UR site was destroyed. 94 people are confirmed dead.”

  “I can handle the two people. But it will take you a while to clean up 94, right? Anything else I need to know?”

  “Stephanie is not stable. I don’t know how helpful she will be. She assumed that there would be only one or two casualties.”

  “How unstable? Whistle-blower unstable?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We need her for any cover story. If she can’t handle this, she can take us all down.”

  “I know.”

  “Ninety-four is a lot. Do you have enough time to clean this up?”

  “There are multiple houses and so many bodies. I’m not sure any of our cover stories will add up. It will be hard to say they all escaped to South America when the houses are bloody and filled with bullet holes. I don’t know if I can clean everything up by myself.”

  “It’s also going to be hard to pin it on Nashville PD if Stephanie rats us out.”

  Susan paused. She was pretty sure where Margaret was going with this line of thought. “What are you thinking?” Susan asked.

  You’re thinking that I have to do your fucking dirty work again.

  “Maybe we need a new cover story. Maybe Stephanie was going to check out the UR site herself and backed up by drones when the people there attacked her.”

  “A rogue cop trying to make the state safer,” Susan said.

  Margaret finished the idea: “She was researching UR sites and went on a vigilante mission, and the criminals attacked her.”

  “I understand,” Susan said.

  “Leave the bodies and leave the drones at the site. Is she traveling in a Nashville PD vehicle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leave that at the site too. The whole thing will get pinned on her. Just make sure you get out of there. You can chase down the two that escaped.”

  Anything else, Puppet Master?

  “I need to know where they went.”

  “Let me worry about that. Just send me whatever info you have on them.”

  “Done.”

  “Be careful,” Margaret said and disconnected.

  Susan walked back into the living room. Stephanie was sitting on a leather chair in the corner and stood up as soon as Susan walked in.

  “We’re going now,” Susan said. “We need to take both vans. Everyone is dead. It will be a long night, but I’ll take care of all the dirty work.”

  Stephanie shook her head in agreement. She looked distraught but accepting of her fate, submissive even. Maybe Susan could trust her with this mission. The two women walked out the door.

  “We’ll drive first to the priest’s house,” Susan said as they got outside. “The drones are there. You can put them in your van.”

  Stephanie nodded again and both women got into their vans. It was a five minute drive to Debbie’s house. As Susan entered the van, she received the pictures from Emily. She looked them over and noticed that Thomas was one of the two escapees. She forwarded the message to Margaret’s secure line with the comment “Thomas escaped”.

  Susan spent the drive planning how she might take care of her new task. In many ways, the new plan was easier than what she had prepared to do. She had put bodies into acid before and heard them decompose. It was the worst imaginable sound. The slime left over after multiple bodies are consumed by the acid, the horrific smells when you close the HazMat containers.

  At least I don’t have to live through that again.

  They arrived at the house and Stephanie got out first. She walked to the front door, opened it, and walked in. Susan could see her through the blown out window. She watched her scream as she walked through the house and into the basement. Susan took one of the clean guns that Harriet had supplied with the van. She then walked in the front door, following Stephanie down into the basement.

  Walking down the stairs behind Stephanie, she heard her frightened mumbles.

  “Susan, I can’t do this,” she said, walking down the stairs.

  They both got to the bottom of the stairs and saw dead bodies everywhere. A massive hole had been blown in the ceiling above them. Broken tiles were sprawled out on the floor.

  Stephanie began crying. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know that this was what I was signing up for. Your secret is safe with me, but I can’t be a part of this.”

  “Stephanie, I understand how hard it is,” Susan replied. “I see the bodies. They’re terrible. Look at that couple there.”

  Stephanie turned to look. Susan raised her gun and pointed it at Stephanie’s head.

  Click.

  BOOM.

  Susan walked to where the body had fallen and unloaded the gun into Stephanie’s face and chest. It was all instinct, years of training and shooting ranges rolled into a fifteen-second moment.

  “Oh, Stephanie, what a fucking waste,” Susan said outloud. “Why did you agree to this mission and then put me in this situation?”

  When it was done, she took the net from Stephanie’s hair and took the gloves from her hands. She turned and walked up the stairs. For a brief moment, she marveled at how big the basement was. At the top of the stairs, she found the body of Debbie and slipped the gun into her dead hands.

  “You built an amazing basement,” Susan said. “Sorry it came to this.”

  She walked outside and got back in the van. Her body started to shake ever so slightly. As the van drove back to the safehouse, she called Margaret. “It’s done.”

  “I’m still working on tracking these two. It’s harder than I thought. The town is small and doesn’t have much surveillance equipment. And I can’t justify using the satellite.”

  “I know.”

  “Why don’t you call our media contact and give them the news story while you wait for me? And ditch the safehouse. Have Harriet get it all cleaned up. You have a rented car, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Take it to the airport. Wait for my call. Don’t be anywhere near that town when the media gets there.”

  “Agreed.”

  60

  JULIA AND THOMAS were riding in the car on back roads from Jasper into a town called South Pittsburg, which bordered the state of Alabama. They were taking a route provided to them by Elizabeth.

  “I think we should follow the plan and stop at the barn,” Thomas said.

  “But surely they are following us,” Julia replied. “They must have satellites on us. If we go to the barn, we’ll put more people in danger.”

  “They killed all of them already. Nobody lives at the barn. It is just a place where we can modify the car without being seen. If there aren’t any satellites on us now, then we still have a chance if we change the car. But if we don’t change it, they have video details of us.”

  Julia knew he was right.

  “OK, but I’d like to get a hold of Tito first. He’s not answering.”

  “It’s two AM his time.”

  “Yes, but this is his emergency line. I’m sure he’ll answer soon,” she glanced again at the phone. “Come on, Tito.”

  “Arriving at destination,” the car said, and Thomas took control of the car. They drove onto a gravel road and up t
o a dilapidated old barn. Thomas stopped the car, ran outside with his wig flapping behind him and opened the large barn door. Julia commanded the car to drive inside while Thomas closed the door behind them.

  “We have to be fast,” he said. “Where’s the paint?”

  “It’s in the trunk,” Julia replied. “I’ll switch the license plate and codes.” She pulled up the computer screen on the car as Linda had showed her and punched a series of buttons. The license plate on the back and front of the car then changed to another visible code, and the RF transmitters on the car were reprogrammed to use the new numbers when driving by scanners.

  Thomas was opening the paint cans that Debbie had bought for them from a car service store. The paint used nanotechnology to adhere to the outside of the car in the appropriate areas. Joey had given them the specifications for which paint style would work best.

  “The license plate is changed,” Julia said. “I’ll work on the decals.”

  Thomas poured the navy blue paint over the white areas on the outside of the car. As advertised, the blue adhered to all white areas and fell off anything else like water. When the paint touched a window, tire, metal or interior, it simply rolled off. Thomas walked around the car using his hands to move the paint to white spaces. The paint didn’t stick to his hand, and it would only adhere to a precise depth on the white paint. It felt like rolling a bunch of tiny golf balls into matching grooves.

  “This is pretty cool,” Thomas said.

  Julia was swapping the Ford logos on the car with BMW decals. Linda had provided her with four different options for brands and four different validated license plates. They had driven into the barn in a white Ford and would drive out in a blue beamer. The license plates were registered to match the decals, so they should be safe, as long as they aren’t currently under satellite surveillance.

  They both finished around the same time, and Thomas ran to open the barn door and then got back in the car. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Julia got in and said, “I’m going to try Vanessa. I should have thought of this before.”

  “Probably better since you are on a cellular network, right?” Thomas asked. “Didn’t Debbie say that they listen for men’s voices on phone calls?”

  The car was back on a paved road and driving through the town of South Pittsburg toward the Alabama border.

  “You’re right, if its a normal phone,” Julia said. “I’m calling Tito with a level of encryption that would be hard to crack.”

  Suddenly she got excited. “Vanessa? Ay, Dios mio,” she talked quickly in Spanish, telling Vanessa what had happened at the UR site. “They have killed everyone. We assume they are searching for us. Please find Tito as soon as you can. You can reach me on this line. We are desperate.”

  She hung up. The entire call had taken five minutes as the car drove by houses, small stores and a high school.

  “Should we go to the UR site Debbie told us about in northern Georgia?” Julia asked Thomas.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s the middle of the night. It is a great time to drive as far from here as we can.”

  “We don’t have anywhere else to stay when the morning comes. It will take us days to get to Miami on these old roads. Plus, the cameras on those drones have seen us. They probably know who I am now, which will make it hard for me to buy anything in a normal store.”

  “I thought you had digital gold. Can’t you use that everywhere? Isn’t it untraceable?”

  “The money isn’t the issue. I have plenty of money. The problem is retina scanners. All the stores in the US are required to use them. If I try to buy anything, there’s a near certainty that I’ll get flagged. Charging stations will require a retina scan too. In a few hours, when the car battery is about to run out, we won’t be able to recharge.”

  “We’re screwed,” Thomas said.

  “We’ve gotten this far.”

  “What do you think we should do next?”

  “I think we should try the UR site in Georgia that Debbie told us about. Maybe there is someone there who wants to go to Florida or Cuba? Maybe a man and woman?”

  “A woman that can buy stuff?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll go,” he said and punched in the address on the car.

  61

  JOEY WAS DREAMING of a grand ballroom. A famous piano player was entertaining the crowd. It was a very large crowd and everyone was elegantly dressed. Joey was wearing a tuxedo and was dancing with Linda. There were other men dancing on the floor. Famous men from the past. Politicians.

  “The inaugural ball,” Linda said. “Who would have ever believed that we would be here dancing and invited by the President herself?”

  Joey took it all in, but an annoying beeping sound began to replace the soft chords of the piano. Linda looked at him but her body became like a table cloth being quickly pulled into the air and disappearing, taking the whole ball room with her. All that was left was a blackness and a terrible beeping.

  “What is that beeping? Can somebody shut it off, for Christ’s sake?”

  Joey woke up in his bed and saw his room. His emergency line was ringing. He glanced at his clock.

  “Who is calling me at two in the mornin’?” he thought and picked up the phone.

  “This better be good,” he said.

  “It’s good,” was the reply.

  That voice. A woman. It was familiar.

  Who was it? Who would be calling now? He started to say something nasty and then realized who it was.

  Margaret Lane.

  “Secretary Lane,” he said, sitting up in bed and trying to organize his thoughts. “It is an honor to speak with you in person.”

  “Spare the formalities, Joey. I need something from you, and I’m prepared to help you get something you really want.”

  “I’ll help you any way I can,” he said.

  “Good. I believe that you would like some help from Congress, perhaps with a bill that would allow men to come out of the shadows. Men of respect, like yourself, who are productive citizens. I’m inclined to work with some like-minded representives on a bill like that. I would make sure that the bill was supported by the Vice President and that it had criteria in it which would include you, Joey.”

  “That sounds wonderful, Madame Secretary.”

  “What I need, in order to make this happen, and let’s be clear. You only get what you want if I get what I want. What I need is to find a man and woman. The man, it seems, escaped at the same time as Maxime. The man had some high-tech help on his side. I’m hoping that you can help me find this man and the woman he is traveling with.”

  Joey ran his hands through his hair. How much did she know? If he pretended not to know anything, would she know he was lying? If he ratted out the Cubans, there would be a backlash. At a minimum, he would lose business from Tito’s group and everyone Tito knew. Worst case scenario, they would hunt him down. But they weren’t likely to do that, and their best form of payment right now was help in Rome, which Joey wouldn’t need if Margaret came through.

  On the flip side, if he went against Margaret, she had the power to take down everything he had spent his life building. And she was exactly the kind of person who would go after revenge. Whether she knew now or found out later that he withheld info from her, she would exact a terrible payback. The choice was an easy one.

  But maybe I buy some time. Maybe I can play both sides.

  “I think I can help you, Madame Secretary,” he said.

  “Good. I thought that you might. It appears that these two have escaped our surveillance, but I’m guessing that you may have some alternative ways to find them.”

  “I’ll begin looking right now. Can you send me any helpful information on them? Also, how can I contact you?”

  “I’ll send you the last surveillance video we took. You can call me back on this number. There isn’t much time, so please work quickly and call me as soon as you have anything inter
esting. I’ll be up all night.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Joey said and he heard the line go silent.

  He smoothed out his pajamas and put on a tee-shirt from the floor. He walked over to his grid equipment and slipped the goggles over his eyes.

  “Let’s see where these two are,” he said, moving his hands in a variety of gestures that first found his small fleet of cars and then selected the one they had sold Tito. He picked the car and a dashboard came up.

  Multiple screens were in front of him. One screen showed their GPS coordinates, which had the car in northern Alabama. Another screen showed the car conditions. The battery was half full, the car was emulating a BMW, and all other conditions were stable. A third screen showed the interior of the car, where he could see both Julia and Thomas. She was looking through the scope of the anti-drone weapon and he was looking at the map on the navigation system. A fourth screen showed the exterior of the car, with multiple views of what the autonomous system of sensors was perceiving. They were traveling on small back roads, one lane in each direction. There was no one on the road since it was the middle of the night, but the car sensors could detect raccoons in trees and various small lifeforms on the side of the road.

  What to do, what to do…

  Joey considered his options. He could give Margaret the license plate number and GPS coordinates. Local police would probably pick them up within a half hour, and they would also get the car. The most likely scenario then would be turning the car over to experts for analysis. This would be really bad for Joey and his fleet of cars, since the authorities would update their security measures based on what they found in the car. Worst case, they might be able to track the car back to Joey. All of Margaret’s promises might disappear if he ended up in police custody.

  Giving her the license ain’t an option.

  The second and most viable option was to remotely detonate the car. But the question was: should he warn the two people inside? The car itself would warn them, so they would certainly get out unharmed. And he could give Margaret their location at that time. But if he warned Tito before doing it, he might be able to salvage the relationship. He just needed the right story.