The DX Chronicles (Book 1): Not Against Flesh and Blood

by Brian Cody

  “O-kay”, David muttered as he turned back. “Shawn, since you’re the muscles of the group, I’m putting you on guard duty. Let us know if any cops show up, or if we’re sighted.”

  “I’m your guy!” Shawn exclaimed as he clapped his hands, stepped back, spun, and, with fists squeezed, stood in front of the doorframe.

  “Shawn’s our guy”, David repeated as he turned to the two remaining. “B-money, Klinge, you’re with me on hacker duty. If Arthur Grant has any computers, you’re going to help me get into them.”

  “And you assume Arthur Grant has a computer here, because…why?” Nate asked.

  “Because he’s American, Klinge!” David replied.

  “If he was up to as much as the government suspects, he’d have been smart enough not to leave a vapor trail back to his primary domicile. It’s time-consuming, but most proxies or other attempts at disguising internet history can be retraced with enough resources, and, as we’ve come to understand, the United States government has enough resources. He could have another place under an alias where he does his computer work, or keep it restricted to something portable like a laptop which he wipes once a week.”

  “So…your point is?” David murmured.

  “My point is, if Arthur Grant is cunning (which we know to be true), he’ll have nothing of value, as far as this investigation is concerned, at this place”, Nate finished while crossing his arms.

  “Hey, Piekarsky”, Turrisi called as he turned into the main hall, “I found an office space with a computer towards the back of the house.” Turrisi spun and pointed down the hall, “take the branching hallway on the far right, and it leads straight to his study—it’s unlocked and not wired or anything.”

  “Shut up, Klinge!” David roared as he poked Nate’s right shoulder.

  “Doesn’t hurt anymore”, Nate replied as he sauntered past David.

  “I’ll make it hurt!” David growled as he started after Nate, while Bryen followed. They walked for thirty feet, passing Turrisi who jogged by and turned down that designated corridor, with the stomps of Turrisi ascending a stairwell occurring behind them. They continued for twenty feet, passing an open, half-bathroom to their left and a connecting hall to their right which led to the front of the house. At the back-left corner of the hall sat a glass door outlined by wood and leading to a pentagonal home-office with an uncovered window.

  Perpendicular to the window and eclipsing the wall across from the doorway was a bookcase three yards in span with three shelves filled with tomes of varying size and width; some had papers jutting from their interiors, others bore torn covers, and some jabbed out of the collection. Perpendicular to the bookshelf and circling the concave which marked the junction of the room’s fourth and fifth walls was a glass desk shaped as a semicircle, with a large, flat-screen monitor. Placed along the room’s right side and alongside of the desk was a computer tower, and sandwiched between the desk and the wall was a brown executive chair.

  Nate opened the door and stepped in and across the afghan rug in the middle of the office, with David and Bryen following. Nate then circled the desk’s curving exterior and looked behind the inactive monitor, where he found a rectangular keyboard and a wireless mouse beside it. He dropped into the leather chair, while Bryen stopped in front of the bookshelf, and while David stood alongside of the computer tower. Nate pressed his right against the desktop and slid it across a layer of dust. Nate then reared up as he removed his hand from the clear pane.

  “Is something wrong?” David asked as he leaned over the desk.

  “Just dusty”, Nate replied. “I don’t think this computer was used very often. Even while taking into account the number of months this place hasn’t been visited, it shouldn’t be this dirty.” He knelt, felt his hand along the tower, and jabbed. A short click followed, and a flash succeeded it as the monitor was illuminated in a burst of pale, blue light, before a welcome screen appeared with the word ‘ARTHUR’ above an empty textbox. “Password”, Nate called as he reared up and motioned the cursor.

  “Do you think he’d have it written down in the drawers?” David asked.

  Nate glanced to the desk’s sides and looked through the surface to the bottoms of the two drawers. “They’re empty”, Nate replied.

  “B, anything on the shelves that could help us?” David asked as he looked to Bryen nudging a book into its shelf in order for it to rest along the wall.

  “Nineteenth century philosophy, books on World War Two, the American Civil War…the English Civil War…and autobiographies”, Bryen replied as he looked to David. “What does the hint say?”

  “There is no hint”, Nate replied as he clicked the miniature question mark alongside of the textbox. “After you guys got back from New York and while you were talking with Lamback and Erik about their attack, I borrowed Shawn’s computer and looked up Arthur Grant’s CORGI page.”

  “He has a CORGI page?” Bryen asked.

  “Yeah”, Nate replied as he cracked his knuckles. “I guessed that since he’s been working with gifteds (same with Turrisi) he must’ve been important enough to be listed in there. He was only a one-point-five out of six. Anyway, I remember some of his personal information, so I figure the password could be a combination.” Nate reached for the keyboard, but David caught his hands.

  “Not yet”, David replied as he let go. “I have a better idea”, he began. “B-money, you said you could make yourself invisible with your shadow, right?”

  “Yeah”, Bryen replied, “but I have to be in the presence of another shadow, or it has to be nighttime; why?”

  “Since you can make things invisible, can you make invisible things visible?” David asked.

  “Maybe”, Bryen replied with a shrug.

  “‘Maybe’—what does ‘maybe’ mean?” David asked.

  “I’ve never dealt with anyone who could cloak themselves, but I’ve used my shadow to alter the light spectrum in order to track paw prints”, Bryen explained.

  “Paw prints?” Nate repeated.

  “Sometimes, at home, my cats figure out a way to escape my backyard, and I have to go after them before they cause trouble”, Bryen explained.

  “Sweet”, David called. “I need you to do that with the keyboard. If possible, we might be able to locate his oft-used keys by finding his ‘human–paw-prints’.”

  “You mean…fingerprints?” Nate asked as he shook his head.

  “I was putting it in a way that B-money would understand”, David replied.

  “Strange, none of what you said mentioned a general disdain for law enforcement”, Nate remarked.

  “Standing right here”, Bryen remarked as he stood on the right side of the desk with his right arm outstretched towards the keyboard, and while an ink-like strand of his shadow crawled up the desk and slithered along its surface.

  “Your mom’s standing…right…somewhere”, David stammered before rubbing his chin.

  “It’s after midnight”, Bryen replied as he bent his finger partway to cause the shadow line, an inch from the keyboard, to concentrate into an orb and then to balloon into an inching vesicle. “She’s probably asleep”, he explained as that black orb, thin enough to be transparent, surrounded the keyboard.

  “Oh, well…okay”, David replied as he watched Bryen tense and loosen his fingers, his shadow following suit, and, by the slight alterations of density, taking on different tinges and reflecting the varying degrees of the light spectrum, “I’ll accept that answer.”

  “Your face will accept that answer”, Bryen replied, his eyes glued to the keyboard as he slowed the motions of his hand.

  “Huh!?” David gasped with head tilted.

  “Keys”, Nate interjected. David looked to the keyboard, then eclipsed in a cerulean glow that magnified the overlapping fingerprints. Amidst those keys and the off-white pressings littering them, six buttons appeared to have been nigh-soaked in a light-grey due to continuous usage. “E, R, T, B, A, M”, Nate read off.

 
; “Wait”, Bryen muttered as he knelt to reexamine those keys with his arm outstretched.

  “Nice; let’s get to work figuring out that password”, David stated.

  “No, wait”, Bryen called. “That’s not right; that shouldn’t be like that. Those keys shouldn’t be that noticeable. The other keys look like (in comparison to those six) they’ve barely been touched. If he used it often enough, the gap in appearance should be slighter, or at least slight enough for us to find it harder to figure anything out.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily have to have been used regularly”, Nate replied. “If anything, this computer was probably a temporary holding place. He’d download files or information onto it and then copy it onto an external hard drive. If his system has drag-and-drop capabilities, he wouldn’t have needed anything more than his mouse.”

  “We’ll figure out what he used the computer for once we can access the desktop”, David finished, “for now, let’s focus on that password.”

  “Sure”, Nate replied as he scanned the desk, “I need a piece of_”

  “Letter, legal, or executive size?” Shawn asked as he stood at the office’s entrance.

  “Whatever’s fine”, Nate replied as he shrugged, “B-money, can I use your pen?” he asked as David spun to Shawn.

  “You get…a notecard”, Shawn replied as he flicked his right wrist to cause a three-by-five card to slide partway from his right sleeve. “Hold up”, he replied as he yanked the document from between his armor and his wrist, and lobbed it. The sheet glided across the room before Nate snatched it with his left while receiving Bryen’s pen with his right.

  “No, wait!” David barked. “Albert, I said guard the door!”

  “I figured no one was coming, so we’d be fine”, Shawn replied with a shrug. “I just wanted to peruse and see what you guys were doing.”

  “Shawn, I swear, if we’re bombed or something”, David replied as he turned to Nate leaning over the desk with the letters written at the top of the notecard, and an increasing list of combinations on the lines below.

  “Don’t you worry”, Shawn replied. “No one even knows we’re here; we’ll be fine.”

  “‘Mebrat’?” Nate asked as he looked up.

  “I don’t know about that”, Bryen replied.

  “What about ‘Breamt’?” Nate asked.

  “Keep going”, David stated.

  “‘Team-r-b’?” Nate continued.

  “That sounds like it could maybe mean something, like a code”, David suggested to Bryen. “What about_?” he let his jaw hang while glancing to the keyboard, “Team Robot!” he exclaimed as he pumped his fist.

  “Team…Robot?” Nate repeated while squinting.

  “Team Rubidium?” Bryen suggested.

  “Team…what?” Nate continued.

  “Team Red Sox Baseball!” Shawn exclaimed as he flung his arms. “Son of a mother!” he wailed while stomping. “He must be a Red Sox fan too!”

  “One more thing that’s wrong with him”, David remarked as he looked to the notecard.

  “Shawn, I’m curious; where does the ‘S’ for ‘Sox’ come from?” Nate asked as he pointed at Shawn.

  “I don’t know, Nate”, Shawn groaned, “maybe it’s an assumed ‘S’.”

  “Shawn, what?” David chuckled.

  “Bertram”, Bryen grunted as he retracted his shadow from the keyboard.

  “What?” Nate asked as he looked down to the keyboard and spun to Bryen.

  “Bertram”, Bryen replied as the line of his shadow retracted to his silhouette. “He’s the main character from Shakespeare’s play: ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. I heard Director…I heard Arthur Grant say the catchphrase a couple times, and knew I had heard it from somewhere else. A few weeks back, I was skimming through my Shakespeare anthology and found the title. I then glanced through the first act of the play; then I got distracted by Facebook.”

  “It’s worth a shot”, Nate replied as he placed his fingers over the QWERTY formation.

  “For all we know, though”, Bryen began, while Nate pressed each letter, “it could be more than one word, with the letters repeating_”

  “In”, Nate stated as ‘Welcome’ flashed in front of him, followed by a loading icon and the desktop—a generic field for a background image.

  “Okay, B!” David exclaimed as he reached past Nate and slapped Bryen’s back to send him over the desk and to the floor. “That’s for the ‘your face’ remark”, David proclaimed.

  “This desktop is empty”, Nate remarked, “except for the browser link”, he then said as he swirled the cursor around the icon, “which leads”, Nate clicked, with the icon enveloping the entire window, “to an email account.”

  “It could just be his government address, and the CIA would have access to that if it was”, Shawn remarked as he stepped over Bryen and stood beside Nate.

  “Nope, it isn’t his government account”, Nate replied as he motioned the cursor and selected the inbox.

  “How can you tell?” Shawn asked.

  “It doesn’t end in ‘.gov’, or ‘.us’”, Nate replied.

  “There’s also ‘.mil’”, Bryen noted as he stood and turned to the door a second before Erik stepped in with his hands in his pockets and his goggles on his forehead.

  “What-up, Garcia?” David asked.

  “There’s nothing here”, Erik replied.

  “Wait, really?” David asked. “Nothing? No documents or anything?”

  “At least with all of the areas I’ve scoured on all three floors, I’ve found the place completely empty, like he rarely spent time here. No legal documents, no safes, and no signs of previously burned items. This place more resembles a safe-house or a temporary base, and it might be a dead-end.”

  “I wouldn’t say that”, Shawn muttered as he leaned towards the screen.

  “You’ve got something?” David asked as he looked to the desktop.

  “Oh, we’ve got something, all right”, Shawn replied as he looked up and grinned. As David rested on his elbows, Bryen and Erik congregated on the desk’s opposite end, while Nate motioned the cursor past an empty inbox and towards the ‘sent folder’. Nate selected that folder, and came upon a list of seven emails, organized from oldest to youngest, and all of them marked with the words ‘To: UNKNOWN RECIPIENT’. Then, Nate motioned the mouse over the oldest of the sent emails, and, with chest tightening, selected it and leaned as it expanded into a second window:

  Just received package. Wary about attacking Erik after his performance against the guys you set up with Suits in August. Considering sending a decoy first.

  “Whoa”, David gasped as he looked to Erik, “this is new.”

  “This is legitimate evidence—incriminating, but not just that, it solves two or three unanswered questions”, Erik muttered as he dragged himself towards the screen. “Nate, when was this sent?”

  “September the Twelfth of last year”, Nate replied as he closed that page, and selected the next email, a response message:

  There will be a group of them. I’ll send you a list of their names and their locations.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa”, Shawn fired off. “Is that us?” he asked as he looked around. “Is that email about us? Did he give our information out?”

  “We don’t know that for sure”, David replied. “Klinge, if this is a reply, can you view the original email?”

  “Hold on”, Nate spoke as he motioned the cursor for the banner atop the message which read ‘View Previous Message in Thread’. He clicked it, and a third window appeared, but then came an error: ‘The Message no Longer Exists’. “Nope”, Nate muttered as he closed that window, re-examined the reply, and then said, “That one was sent on December the Eighteenth, last year.” He closed the window and selected the next.

  Sterling’s body was confirmed. I don’t know how, but you pulled it off; now I’m impressed. Unfortunately, the government was able to spin it as a meteor shower. No mass hysteria.

  “Jan
uary Sixteenth, this year”, Nate remarked. “Day after the bridge collapsed, and…the reply has been deleted”, he finished as he closed that window.

  Decoy was defeated; I’m assuming you detonated him? Good. It causes for his tracks not to lead back to us.

  “February Twentieth; I’m guessing this was just after you were attacked, Erik.” Nate then closed that window, “and, no reply still. This next one looks like it was from the same day.”

  Sterling’s house was just destroyed. I hear three of them were involved. There’s a chance that they might catch on if they got to his information. What am I supposed to do?

  “Eight hours after the previous email, and no reply”, Nate stated as he closed the window and selected the following.

  I’ve received your second package and the information about David’s knee. I’ll make use of it. He’s my primary concern. I haven’t tested the suit enough to ensure that I can defeat him. There will be a slight chance of one or more escaping. I need a failsafe in case your plans are flawed.

  “He seemed confident about winning”, Shawn noted.

  “Not confident enough to not require a failsafe, though”, Bryen added.

  “No reply”, Nate muttered. “And, here’s the last email.” Nate clicked on the most recent email, dated February 21st and sent, perhaps, minutes before their arrival at Arthur Grant’s office.

  And when will this ‘game’ take place?

  “That brings up more questions”, David remarked. “But even more than that, it worries me. This is getting weird. The level of detail he put into his plans and how pre-planned he’s had this thing… I think Arthur Grant knows what Sterling Blue was talking about.”