Toward the crowd.
William’s head fell and, with no clear ally around him, he slowly turned away from the villagers and climbed back on to the mare. For just a moment, he looked down once more and surveyed the broken eggs still seeping into the mud, the shells trampled like the fragile feelings of the girl who had come to collect them. It was clear that Rachael had not been seen since the incident and he had no idea what state of mind or body she might now find herself in. Having not passed her on his route here, he must now seek to extend his range and his thinking and do all he could to find her. Swiftly, he kicked his heels into Bewt’s side.
Without movement or voice, the whole crowd now raised their eyes to watch him leave.
To a man, woman and even child, dark expressions bid him good riddance.
TWENTY
Friday, August 20, 2043.
West of Bull Run Peak, California.
Grainger, the glass tablet resting on his knee in the passenger seat of the lead Land Rover, checked the dot on his screen one more time. He had calculated the cabin to be about four miles from the lake, as the crow flies. But they weren’t crows; any of them. As such, they had needed to take a route suitable for vehicles and, in a god-forsaken place such as this only ever used for scenic purposes, that was the only vehicular route there was: the scenic one. In total, it had been a ten mile round trip.
Fortunately for his now-aching ass, there was less than half a mile to go.
That said it was, by far, the toughest half mile. Having left the main ‘road’, if one could call it that, they were now driving along what was little more than a pair of desperately underused tyre ruts carved through once-sodden soil, the tyres slewing and sliding at every turn and every jolt was firing pins into his old bones. He wasn't really cut out for this shit. To make it worse, there were numerous points along the way where the ravine located dangerously close to their right was of an inclination suited only to abseilers and, on those stretches, his heart and stomach had lurched every time the vehicle had. Still, he was becoming increasingly certain that Strauss would indeed be found holed up in that cabin, feeling and that was good because then he could get this damn thing put to bed and get back home to his own. He wasn’t as young as he once was by any stretch and sleepless nights, dangerous drives and cleaning up messes himself really weren’t sitting well with him.
The driver, a bull of a former marine with cast iron biceps and constitution to match, took one look at him and smiled at how green Grainger looked. “We’ll be hitting the clearing soon, Sir,” he said. The car lurched again and Grainger nearly threw his breakfast up into the door well.
“Is this glass bullet-proof?” he asked. The man nodded. “Good.” Grainger then pressed a button on the touch screen computer on the dash, connecting him to the Land Rover behind, then spoke loud enough for everyone in both vehicles to hear, his words being jarred by the terrain and roughened by his desire to puke. “We drive straight in,” he said. “No need to tiptoe. Stay in your vehicles. We sit for a while and look for movement. Whoever is in that cabin will have seen us approach and that will make them show their hand first, one way or the other. If it seems quiet then I want Team Two out. Secure the area and enter the cabin. Don’t kill him if you don’t have to but don’t be losing sleep over it if you do. Let’s just get in and get this over with.”
A ouse and then the message came back from Team Two’s vehicle. “Roger that.”
* * * * *
“You have a petrol vehicle?” I asked, astonished. “Seriously? Petrol?”
Victoria turned the key again. The key, mind you. Nothing. Just some weird grinding noise I hadn’t heard for over ten years then some spluttering, like an old smoker coughing his last.
“Out here gas stations outnumber charging stations ‘one’ to approximately ‘what the hell is a charging station’,” she said, with little emotion. “You ain’t in Kansas now, Dorothy.”
It was more like Kansas than it was L.A., that was for damn sure.
She hopped out of the pickup for a second time. Of the three trucks that seemed to have come here to die, this was the middle one; the rustiest of the bunch. I think it was once blue. Or brown. It was hard to tell. The hood was already popped from the first time, but that didn't stop her sticking her head back under there and fiddling with yet more bits I couldn't even begin to comprehend. I just stayed in the passenger seat, my nerves itching to go and my index fingers itching because I'd just had them burnt off and then reapplied by a low-depth industrial strength laser. One after another I rubbed them with the other hand, gritting my teeth and wincing as I did.
She gestured me by sticking half an arm around the hood and I think she said something, but I wasn't sure what. I looked on the dash for a window button and found, well, no buttons at all. What I did find, with a little more looking, was a rotating handle attached to the door. How extraordinarily quaint. I wound it down.
“What?”
“Turn the key and push the gas,” she said.
I gritted my teeth again, different reasons, and sighed. As best I could I slid over to the driver’s side and did as she asked. Same noise. It sounded exactly like my impatience did, and both seemed ready to explode.
“Again,” she shouted. I did as she asked. Same deal.
We had to go. I had no idea how or when they would find us but find us they would. That just had to be a given. Every second we wasted trying to get this heap of junk on the road was a second chance slipping away.
“Again,” she shouted. In fact, she shouted that same word eight times, each with no discernible change in tone or pitch. She simply sounded like a corrupt audio file, a director persistently unhappy with a take or a child persistently enthralled by a lame trick you were wishing you'd never even bothered to show them once.
“We need to go!” I shouted back. My impatience was losing any camouflage it may once have had. This had taken over twenty minutes already. To start a car. Once they have the parts, I don't think it even takes that long these days to build a car.
“Again,” she shouted. Same tone. And another two times. Eleven times in total.
Then it caught.
It was nothing at first, just a maybe. But the maybe rolled into a perhaps and that, in turn, flowed into a probably. Eventually the whole engine burst into life as though cheering its own success. Victoria dropped the hood, wiped her hands on a rag and headed back to the driver’s side as I slid over.
“We need to go,” she said, sliding it into what I assume was reverse.
I looked at her, gob-smacked. “You think?”
* * * * *
With the land having levelled a little near the top of the hill, both vehicles arrived in the clearing with some degree of speed and skidded to a halt. Grainger narrowed his eyes and then, despite his earlier instructions, pressed a button on the Land Rover’s door. It opened with a long, slow hum and slowly he stepped out, the tablet still clasped in his hand.
He looked around. Puzzled. There had been no need to wait to see if it was safe. None whatsoever. And no need to see if anyone in the cabin showed their hand by twitching a curtain or trying to make a run for it either. Why? Because there was no-one here. And he knew that because, for reasons he could not yet fully explain, there was no god-damned cabin.
The other men, seeing exactly the same thing that he saw, all around them, also stepped out of their respective vehicles. They all gathered together, looking at the open space before them. One or two glanced toward Grainger's screen as well, just to be sure.
The high resolution satellite imagery clearly showed an aerial of a cabin surrounded by junk and the red spot indicating their own location was sitting directly next to it. Christ, it was almost on top of it. So where the fuck was the cabin? He looked at the data contained at the base of the on-screen grid reference. The image which made up this block was updated less than two hours ago, presumably having come fresh from the satellite’s latest track. It was about as up-to-date an image as
one could ever hope for. So, again, where the fuck was the cabin? He looked around, almost instinctively, just as one does when their car has been stolen. The owner (or former owner) knows damn well it’s not there, just as Grainger knew his cabin wasn’t there, but still he looked around as though he might actually have had a mental block and forgotten that he’s actually parked the cabin somewhere else.
Third time, he said it out loud. “Where the fuck is it..?”
Everyone else just looked as bemused as he did.
It had been silent before they arrived and it fell silent again.
There was no cabin.
One of the guys to his left, the cast-iron driver who had been checking out his own older-model tab-phone suddenly held it up, the screen turned toward him. Same image, same location and even the same locational spot. In fact, almost everything was the same except for the service provider, the fact that his locational spot was green and the fact that so was everything around it. Because his image had no cabin on it. At all. Just grass.
There wasn’t a cabin here. There never had been.
“Oh, you are shitting me!” Grainger said.
He closed his eyes, breathed deep through gritted teeth and tipped his head backward toward the morning sky.
“Fuckkkkk!”
* * * * *
All senior personnel at KRT have full clearance to all databases. Why? Because it saves us having to prat about asking for clearance when there is a job to be done and, if you don’t trust your senior guys then why the hell are they your senior guys? Right? As for me, I am - OK was, I guess - a ‘senior guy’. I wasn’t so much, prior to Charlie the mouse deciding to pack his trunk and take a little vacation in or around the First Declaration of Independence, but I was soon after. I couldn’t have been allocated anywhere near Sequence otherwise. Consequently, these days, I could pretty much access anything I needed, within reason. Historical archives, genome databases, legal precedents, stolen competitor data, a wealth of research studies and their findings, lab records, files on KRT personnel, files on you which you didn’t even know KRT had. You name it, I could get it.
In fact, give me a computer with online capabilities and I could probably even access the ultra-high resolution images that make up KRT’s proprietary mapping system, all filed by grid reference. Not the ones you see as a consumer, which have all been reduced in file size you understand, but the ultra-high resolution originals from which it generates the lower resolution files you get to see. The ones that we get access to and you don’t. Then, if you were to give me an online image editor, I could very probably even lift the section of image that showed the precise position of Victoria’s cabin and move it to another suitable clearing elsewhere on the screen. Let’s say a location that was about four miles south of the lake instead of four miles north. Of course, I would then need to lift the texture of that clearing and patch it over the part of the image which still showed the original cabin to hide the fact that it was ever there. If that happened, then anyone using KRT’s mapping software to track me would be fed a doctored image. I mean, in those circumstances, they’d probably look at the map, see a cabin they thought was worth checking out and end up heading south. If anyone thought to use another system then, of course, none of this would happen but I kind of figured that anyone hunting for me was on KRT’s payroll so yeah, they’d be using a KRT system.
I say ‘I could probably do this’ when in fact what I mean to say is ‘I can do this’. I know that because I did it. About two hours before we finally got that damn car started and got the hell out of there. And I like to think, given the fact that I had stupidly managed to overlook Milton’s little tidbit about how neutrinos will pass through anything, that if anyone did try to track me to some location close to where the car and the cPad were ditched, that my little bit of online trickery might just have bought us the time we needed. Time to change our I.D.s, time to pack the car and time to get the damn thing to actually fricking start.
And I guess it did. Because our cabin, four miles to the north of the lake, was fast becoming nothing more than a high resolution image in a very, very dusty rear view mirror.
TWENTY-ONE
Friday, August 20, 2043.
West of Bull Run Peak, California.
Having used Iron Man’s tab-phone for guidance instead and ultimately reached Victoria’s cabin, in the precise location it had actually managed to be in all along, Grainger was already fairly convinced that it would be empty. Wherever Strauss was now, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be here. Somehow, he’d undoubtedly had a hand in them going the wrong way and, given that there was no mini-mart for miles, that could only have bought him one thing: time.
They pulled up in facing the cabin itself, though still a reasonably safe distance from the ‘door’, and just waited. As expected: nothing. No sound and no movement. The place looked like a real shit-hole, Grainger thought. For anyone to truly consider living here for any period of time it really needed destroying and rebuilding from the ground up.
As had previously been arranged, he sent Team Two in first and, given that they had found the door completely unlocked, that hadn’t proved to be too much of an issue. After a few minutes inside, one had emerged and given the all-clear, leaving Grainger himself to enter. He requested that Team One step of out his vehicle and patrol the perimeter, just in case.
If it were possible, the inside of the cabin was an even bigger shit-hole than outside. Papers and files were strewn all over, a litany of cuttings and photos were taped randomly across all the walls and there was barely an inch of available floor space on which to walk without obstacle. In a suburban location it might even look as though the place had been ransacked. Out here, unfortunately, it just looked abandoned. Whilst the three members of Team Two looked around, picking up random items and mulling over them, Grainger just stood in the doorway and eyed the entire space. Somebody had been living here, and quite recently it seemed. There was food on the kitchen side but it was not rotten. He walked over to the stove, almost make by junk, and carefully placed the back of his fingers against the kettle. It wasn’t hot but it was slightly warm, certainly a little warmer than the room surrounding it. It had definitely been boiled at some point in the last few hours. To the right, surrounded by small boxes of paper, he noticed a carton of milk. He reached in, lifted it and sniffed. Something was off here, but it wasn’t the milk.
“He was here,” he said under his breath. “Today.”
Turning around and scanning the room once more, something caught his eye at the furthest side of the room and he found a path over. When he reached it he crouched down and smiled gently in quite distinct admiration of what he saw.
“He’s got a god-damned A/LAIS,” he said, as though to himself. “Clever, clever boy.” He ran his fingers over the surface. He too had never actually seen one up close.
Standing once more, he started to look through the myriad pictures and papers pinned to the wall. Whilst the other men picked things up and dropped them with clear derision, treating them as junk, Grainger was beginning to see the inherent value of this little collection and he narrowed his eyes and scrutinised every last image he saw. It was starting to seem that Strauss might just have been underestimated. By all of them. He might actually have accumulated more information on this whole sorry mess than even Scalise had. If so, and this is what worried him most, then he had clearly been doing it for a very long time. Long before he had been in their crosshairs. Turning, he caught sight of the archaic computer at the far end of the room and pondered for a moment. “You,” he said eventually, gesturing toward one of the team. “Check that. See if he’s booked any tickets recently.” He went back to studying the pictures, looking for anything that might prove useful.
The man at the computer lifted his visor, removed a single glove and ran his finger along the trackpad. The screen awoke with the message: >SYSTEM SECURED. ENTER PASSWORD.<
“It’s asking for a password,” he said.
G
rainger thought, still pondering all he could see around him. As he looked, more and more, one word seemed to leap out at him, over and over again. On clippings, on notes and even written on some of the photographs. It’s excessive use might just prove to be the key he was looking for…
“Try ‘sequence’,” he said.
The man keyed it in and the screen immediately. It now read: >SEQUENCE INITIATED. 5.<
Except that the ‘5.’ swiftly became a ‘4.’ and then a ‘3’, all in perfect one second intervals.
Grainger, noticing this, stepped over the mess and looked more closely at the screen. He curled his face.
“Oh, fu…”
Too late.
Archaic though it might have been, the computer was still extremely competent, especially when it came to the most basic of commands. Having received an incorrect password and then absolutely no cancel request whatsoever within the five seconds which followed, it had activated a small piece of coding which sent a swift pulse of electricity along a very crudely rigged cable. The cable ran from the back of the computer, through the walls and to the outside of the cabin. Then, using an old-style junction box held together with gaffer tape, it split into two and ran around the outer wall in opposing directions. Each time it passed one of the oil drums, it fed that same pulse to a small detonator located within each. Some were filled primarily with good old fashioned gunpowder and others with gasoline. Each and every one, however, also contained as many loose bearings, pieces of scrap metal and heavy parts as Victoria had managed to get her hands on. Many of the larger, heavier pieces were simply removed from the engines of the junk cars or had been picked up from one of the tracks as another tourist car had discarded a piece of itself in disgust. Unbeknown to Grainger, the drums were also double-reinforced on the side which faced away from the cabin and fixed into the ground with rusty steel struts which had been salvaged from an old trailer and welded on. Each strut ran a full six feet into the ground. This would not only keep the drums very firmly in place if and when they exploded, but also ensure that they would not swivel. In this way, the full force of the blast produced by each and every one of the twelve scrap-filled bombs would be channeled by the curved rear reinforcement directly through the flimsiest of walls and into the cabin itself.
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