A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  “Not likely, ma’am” Sheriff Gunn shook his head. “They’ll follow you around until they’re sure you’re dead.”

  “Unless, of course, their cars don’t work for some reason,” Amit said. “The bartender guys aren’t actual Circle agents. Hired contractors. Soon as that reception’s over, they’ll be out of town and heading for who knows where. The Circle has a pair of agents – the same ones who spoke with you – staying in the hotel. Their car is outside in the lot. They probably have your phone set to broadcast your location to them, alert them when you start moving. Maybe they’ve got a bug on your car, too.”

  “I get the basics,” the sheriff said. “Now that they think the lady’s been poisoned, we need her to vanish. The ‘lost in the wilds’ idea is sound. We’ll use it. When I spoke with Herr Doktor Krueger, he was a bit put out at the lack of assistance you were receiving.” Was that a hint of guilt on Rob’s face at being called out? The sheriff continued. “He was happy to volunteer his place, but we agreed Robber Dell would be a better choice.” He turned to the professor. “Rob’s place is up in the hills and the next neighbor’s the better part of a mile off. Krueger’s in a subdivision. You’d have to stay inside all the time.”

  “I built a new barn a couple of years back with an apartment – you can stay there until you figure out what you want to do,” Rob explained. “I’ll stay in my old trailer.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Professor Graf agreed.

  “My deputy also agreed to be the decoy,” the sheriff added.

  “I know a few escape and evasion tricks I haven’t taught the kids yet,” Rob confirmed. “The trackers and their bloodhounds will be convinced you wandered off the trail, got lost and blundered around for a day or two. I’ve got a long day ahead of me. Let’s you and me go through that gear you bought. I need you to handle it so I don’t risk leaving fingerprints or DNA on anything.”

  “There’s a military police battalion, should be moving in any time now,” Sheriff Gunn said. “The governor has had a word with their CO. The MPs will help us keep the Circle agents out of our hair. The State Toppers? They’ll be creatively uncooperative if the Circle asks for their assistance. If the Circle agents here or Wilson call in the locals? Well, I’ll be right there and I can take the call.”

  The sheriff took charge and began running down the tasks as Rob and the professor worked on her camping gear. “The Circle and the Albertians may be able to trace the lady’s car, but so long as we can delay them, knowing the car’s location only reinforces the story we’re trying to tell.”

  “The gas station switch-off is a good idea. Then Rob will drive the lady’s car to the trailhead and take off from there with a light pack full of debris from the lady’s equipment for the searchers to find. Should make his weight comparable to what the lady’s would be with a full pack. I’ll take the lady up to Rob’s place in my cruiser.”

  “What about me and Pete?” Amit asked.

  “Peter’s been compromised. These Albertians are the wild card,” the sheriff pointed out. “They’re standing by here to rescue the professor. They kidnapped Peter once, and might not hesitate to do it again. Peter stays with me. I’ll have one of my other deputies drive his car home, tomorrow. Amit, you’ll wait here monitoring the situation until we get the professor safe at Rob’s place. Pete can take over monitoring them from there, and you can drive on home, yourself. Pete, why don’t you make that call to the Albertians? She’s considering their offer and will get back to them in the morning. Better yet, get Professor Graf on the line, and put the call on speaker so we can all listen in.”

  A couple of minutes later, Rob had finished preparing his pack full of debris – mostly soiled clothing to leave a scent and a few recently purchased items that could be traced to her shopping spree. He kept the receipt with the professor’s name on it to make it easy for the searchers to draw the intended conclusions. The team assembled, and I made the call to the Albertians.

  “You failed,” barked Bulldog, “and it’s too late for your professor. We saw what happened.”

  They were watching? They saw Professor Graf drink the “poisoned” beer? They saw me being arrested by the sheriff? They were there? And they were fooled by our little production? Good! I could work with this. I held up a finger for silence.

  “There’s… there’s nothing that can be done?” I asked plaintively, trying to get the right tremble in my voice.

  “Nothing,” replied Bulldog in obvious disgust at my incompetence. “She’s good as dead – just hasn’t finished dying, yet.”

  I heard some commotion on the other end. Then, Brother Francis spoke up. “If we take to anger to intimidate, in time anger will overtake us.” His voice seemed distant – admonishing Bulldog? A moment later he continued, his voice clear through the speakerphone. “I’m sorry, my son. We were too late. Make your professora comfortable, and help her to find her peace with God.”

  He hung up.

  “They’re going to throw away that burner phone and there’ll be no way to contact them.” Amit was perplexed. “You didn’t even try to get another phone number or set up a way to follow up with them.”

  “That was the right call.” Rob acknowledged. “Last thing we need is to risk them trying a rescue or interfering with our plan. It’s going to be challenging enough getting away from the Civic Circle. I think we’ll be hearing from these Albertians again soon enough, once Professor Graf ‘disappears,’ and they begin to realize they’ve been had.”

  We went through the details of the next day’s plan one last time and got to sleep.

  The alarm broke my slumber too soon. Again. Quietly we gathered our things. Amit made a few last minute adjustments to the hotel’s video surveillance computer – it would rerun a ten minute section of video of a side entrance twice for the next twenty minutes to give us a chance to depart unnoticed.

  Sheriff Gunn and I left first, carefully depositing garbage bags of deadly radioactive cargo in the trunk of his cruiser. I watched from the back of his cruiser as he stopped a moment with the MPs who’d taken over security at the transit center. One of the MPs climbed into a Humvee and parked it by the Circle agents’ rental car. The sheriff was back a minute later. “That’ll fix ‘em,” he muttered.

  Rob joined us a few minutes later. “She’s ready. Let’s roll.”

  Sheriff Gunn turned over the engine and the cruiser slowly rumbled out of the parking lot.

  We figured Professor Graf’s phone and laptop had been bugged to alert the Circle agent’s rental car when she awoke, so she’d left them in her microwave until the last minute. From our vantage point across the street and down the block, we saw her emerge from the hotel, start her car, and drive off. The two Circle agents emerged a minute later and ran to their car. One ran over to the MPs. I saw an MP make a show of searching his pockets and shrugging. “That’s our cue,” Rob said. We took off after the professor.

  I fell asleep in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser. When Rob woke me up, a hint of dawn was evident in the sky over the Smoky Mountains to the east. We stopped at the 24-hour gas station we’d designated for the rendezvous, just off US-411. She pulled in a couple of minutes later. I helped Rob with his wig and rubber gloves, as the professor gassed up her car. Then, she parked beside us and went into the convenience store to buy some trail food. Rob hopped out of the cruiser and into the driver’s seat of the professor’s car. When she came out a couple of minutes later, she handed off the purchase to Rob, and got in the back of the cruiser with me. Rob started up the professor’s car and drove off south toward the trailhead. His disguise wouldn’t fool anyone from up close, but in the dawn’s early light and from a distance, the wig and matching shirt sure looked a lot like the professor. We waited a few minutes, and then drove off the other way.

  I began to get that same feeling I had the previous afternoon – that feeling that it was all going too well, too smoothly. I’d begun associating the feeling of impending victory with impending
doom. I mentioned it to the sheriff.

  “Believe it or not,” he grinned, “when the right people execute the right plan, it usually works out. Not that y’all don’t have to stay on the bounce ready for the…” he glanced up at the professor in the rear-view mirror, “…for trouble,” he concluded.

  We drove on up into the hills above Sherman. I unlocked Rob’s gate. The sheriff drove the cruiser through, and I locked it behind us. He drove us under the Robber Dell sign, up the familiar narrow incline, past the ruins of the old farm house, and over to Rob’s barn. I got out again, and opened up the door to the barn.

  We were home.

  Chapter 13: Epilogue

  I spent the day keeping an eye out for any intercepts from the Circle and educating the professor on the Heaviside wave theory and my translations of MacGuffin’s mysticism into electromagnetic physics. Teaching was rewarding. Seeing her face light up as she understood a concept and raced through the implications sent tingles up and down my spine. It took her minutes to grasp what had taken me hours to figure out. I gave her a tour of Rob’s underground refuge. She was suitably impressed, and started sharing her ideas for cleaning up the living quarters and putting together the lab she’d need to start applying the MacGuffin physics.

  Rob had spent the entire the day leaving Graf tracks and spreading pieces of her gear and clothes up and down the trails around the Cove. After dark, he’d removed the improvised sandals with the tread from the boots Professor Graf had just bought. Then he followed one of the main trails through the darkness, out to a trailhead where Sheriff Gunn met him and brought him back home in the early hours of the following morning, waking us up. I scrambled some eggs for him as he recounted the twists and turns of the trail he’d left. “It’ll look like a classic case of disorientation, an attempt to reach the high ground for a better view, then stumbling about in the dark along the path of least resistance,” he explained before we all turned in to get some much-needed rest.

  Professor Graf and I were both up early the next morning. The rate at which she absorbed ideas and information was amazing. Rob woke up just before noon, and came into the study. I’d been bringing Professor Graf up to speed all morning on the implications of MacGuffin’s “Great Circle” and how the normalized Lagrangian was related to the energy velocity.

  “I see you’ve made yourself at home,” Rob said to Professor Graf. “If you’re ready to take a break from all the books, I’d be happy to make you lunch and give you a tour of my place.”

  “You’re a very generous host,” she replied, “and this place is simply amazing, but Peter already gave me the basic tour. I’d just as soon keep working to understand these marvelous concepts.” Her face was radiant with excitement. Ah, the way to this woman’s heart was through physics books. “I’d be delighted if you could provide me with a bite to eat, though.”

  “Peter?” he asked, clearly intending me to help him make lunch. For some reason, I found his attitude annoying. “Yes, I could use a bite to eat, too, thank you.” I chose to interpret his question as extending the same offer to me.

  He looked at me a moment, letting me know that he knew exactly what I was doing. Then, he left, returning a few minutes later with a plate of sandwiches and some chips.

  “How goes the research, Professor?” Rob asked.

  “This is simply amazing,” she said, her face bright with joy and enthusiasm. “That’s exactly the right way to describe it – simple, yet amazing. That Heaviside came up with this… it’s the culmination of the whole Maxwellian paradigm – Faraday’s notion of fields reduced to energy flows in space as waves interact with each other.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it, Professor,” Rob said with a smile.

  “Please,” she said, “you can stop calling me ‘Professor.’ That job is behind me, now. My name is Marlena.” She looked at me. “You, too, Peter,” she added in an afterthought.

  “Well then, Marlena,” Rob took quick advantage of her request, “what I want to know is: can you make us a Nexus Detector?”

  “Not yet,” she acknowledged, “but… I have a sense that… that there’s something there. I know what Majorana knew when he vanished, at least what work of his he published. I have the benefit of decades of mathematical physics techniques, and, thanks to Peter here, MacGuffin’s complete translation where Majorana had only fragments to work from. Yes. I think given time, I can figure it out, too. There may be some implementation and engineering difficulties. If we’re working from the same notes Majorana used, then yes, I probably can. I just wish we had the complete source material that Peter says this MacGuffin hid somewhere before he was killed.”

  “That was sixty-five years ago,” Rob observed. “MacGuffin’s thorny friend has almost certainly long since gone to his reward, apparently without revealing his secrets. Whole neighborhoods in Atlanta have been bulldozed for highways and development. The likelihood we can find MacGuffin’s hidden cache is low to nonexistent.”

  The professor nodded in sad agreement.

  “I’m glad you think you can construct one of these Nexus Detectors without it, though,” Rob added on a more cheerful note. “If we had access to one, it would help us pick the time and place of our battles and counter the Circle’s interventions with some of our own.” They were both smiling at the thought of that particular collaboration – a little too comfortable together for my liking.

  “Aren’t you glad we didn’t abandon Marlena to her fate?” I asked Rob.

  She looked at me and then back to him in shock. “Abandon me?”

  “‘We’re not ready to fight back yet?’” I reminded Rob. “Abandon Professor Chen and Professor Graf, run home and hide out here until it all blows over?” I wasn’t about to let him forget it, particularly in front of Professor Graf.

  Rob had the good graces to look guilty. “I may have underestimated the advantages of bringing Marlena in to our fight,” he turned to face her. “The boy lost his parents last year. His safety is my responsibility, and despite his best efforts, I try to take that charge seriously. He took a mighty big risk to save you and Professor Chen – a risk I didn’t think he was ready to take. It was poorly planned, it was sloppy,” he paused a moment and smiled,” but it was successful. That’s what counts… with a bit of an assist from the grown-ups at the end.”

  “I understand.” She was far less outraged than I thought she should be. “If you gentlemen will excuse me?” She took her leave and headed for the bathroom.

  “Brains and beauty,” Rob said softly to no one in particular after she’d closed the door, “and lots of spunk.” He turned to face me. “I saw that press conference of hers. She’s a real firecracker.”

  I didn’t like his tone, so I changed the subject. “I asked Amit and the sheriff to come on over for dinner. Thought we’d review our plans and maybe have a bonfire to celebrate.”

  “Good thinking,” he agreed. “Let’s head up and get ready. I still don’t want Amit or the sheriff to know about the underground refuge.”

  He looked me in the eye. “We’ll have a chat later about what you did wrong, and how you screwed up. I won’t be sparing your feelings. That was rash, impetuous, and foolish, but you were the man on the spot, and it was your decision to make. Success counts for a lot. Tangling with a tong, saving your professors, contacting some secret order of monks,” he was shaking his head, “I wouldn’t have thought you could have pulled all that off, but you did. Now, well let’s just say I can see you were well-motivated.” He held out a hand. “No hard feelings?”

  “No hard feelings, Rob.” I stood and shook his hand, facing him man-to-man as a peer. Then he ruined my moment of manly independence by engulfing me in a huge bear hug.

  I’d made my point. I’d defied him, and I won. It was time to bury the hatchet and work together. We managed to get Marlena to put the books aside, and we went topside to prepare our celebratory dinner and build the fire.

  * * *

  “Success!” Amit s
howed up with a smile on his face, not long after the sheriff arrived. “The Circle is combing the trails around Cades Cove looking for you under the theory that you may be rendezvousing with the sinister Chinese spy, Professor Wu Chen.”

  The surprised Marlena. “They really think Chen is in the Great Smoky Mountains Park, too?”

  “No,” Amit confirmed, “it an excuse to look for you. I think they’re trying to find your body to forestall any autopsy that might give away the radioactive poisoning. They think they got away clean with your murder, and if they’re careful with the cover up, they may be able to use this ‘polonium’ poison again.”

  “That’s nasty stuff,” Marlena pointed out, thinking through the implications of her narrow escape. “I don’t recall the half-life, but…”

  “It’s 138 days,” Amit said smugly. How did he become such a nuclear physics expert? I stared at him. “I looked it up,” he confessed.

  I felt the hairs rising on my spine. The sooner we got those garbage bags sealed in a 55 gallon drum and buried, the happier I’d be.

  “What do they think happened to Chen?” I asked.

  “The balloon trick of yours has them thinking he took back roads through to South Carolina. They’re convinced he’s in the Charleston area trying to sneak out of the country.”

  “I’m worried about my Mom,” Marlena acknowledged. “I sent her a text that I’d be out of touch a few days, but when I turn up missing…”

  “We can arrange to get a note to her, ma’am,” the sheriff offered. “They’ll be keeping an eye on her, though. Expecting you to contact her, if they think you’re still alive.”

  “My mother is a level-headed woman,” Marlena assured him. “She can be trusted to keep a secret. Sarah is checking in on Tigger and keeping an eye on my apartment, but that was only for the weekend.”

  “I need to get a note to Sarah anyway about borrowing her climbing gear and the balloon,” I explained. “I’m sure she’ll keep an eye on your place for you.”