by Loki Renard
So whilst she had been obediently bowing her head and learning the compound’s systems, she’d also been putting little bits and pieces in place, slowly putting together all the elements of a successful unauthorized departure. Today was the day she would make her attempt. Although she’d done her homework, there was still an element of risk in the whole affair. But the groundwork was in place, and she would just have to hope that it was enough.
The plan itself was simple. Missions went out of the compound all the time via the vehicle bay. You couldn’t just wander out of the thing though, it was very long and very windy and equipped with all manner of sensors designed to keep good people in and bad people out. However Zora had identified a possible escape route via the mission vans themselves.
Mission vans weren’t simple affairs, they were highly customized vehicles with multiple storage panels in places you’d not usually expect to find space for storage. On the model that was going out that morning, there was a roof top compartment. Officially it was empty, but unofficially, Zora was going to be secreted away inside it for the duration of the journey to Los Angeles.
Of course the powers that be had thought of the possibility of stowaways before and there were counter measures in place. Every mission was meticulously inventoried before leaving and the van was cleared by weight. If a van was heavier than it should have been in a significant way, a shutdown would be triggered. Zora had discovered that in an incident in which a prankster had filled some of the gear bags with lead shot as a joke. A mission had been delayed for an hour whilst the van was stripped down and the person responsible had never been seen or heard from again. Their loss, probably of life, was her gain in terms of inspiration.
It had not been difficult to change some mission inventory data to suit her own purposes - all she’d done for weeks was scan information and learn systems. They had been foolish to put her to work on sensitive systems so quickly, but it was typical of the arrogance of the place. They assumed they were unbeatable. They were wrong. Very wrong, and Zora intended to show them that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Zora Matthews wasn’t just a mathematical anomaly, she had also been blessed with several rather unique personality traits that helped her resist being programmed by authoritarian regimes. Most people capitulate very quickly when captured by powerful forces who offer rewards for good behavior and harsh punishments for bad. With no outside social forces promoting rebellion, it does not take long to reprogram a person. All it takes it separation from everything they’ve ever known and the consistent message that their new reality will be a persistent one. Humans are group animals and will quickly take on the ideals of a new society simply in order to fit in. Most people fear social isolation more than they fear death. Zora was not one of those people. She had always been a contrary introvert and when they’d told her that attempting to escape was futile, she heard nothing but a challenge.
Her plan came off without a hitch. Stuffing herself into the roof storage compartment was easily done, she’d already gotten clearance into the vehicle bay by offering to swap shifts with one of the lackeys who was all too happy not to load the early morning mission. Her escape was not hinging on being particularly daring or even original, it was hinging on the simple fact that nobody was expecting her to actually make a break for it. The culture of the compound was so strong that breaking out was frowned upon by those who were imprisoned there. The ability the leadership had to convince their captive workers that it was a privilege to be enslaved was impressive. Even Savage appeared to have bought into the whole sick charade, and he was a hell of a smart guy. She would miss him, but there was no way of saying goodbye, he wasn’t even in the country. She wondered what he would do when he discovered she was gone. Try to hunt her down probably. That was okay, she had contingencies in place for that too.
Stuffed in her hiding place, she sat in the darkness, barely daring to breathe as the sounds of masculine voices and heavy footsteps started gathering around the van. The team had arrived and they were in high spirits, like a pack of hounds excited at being unleashed to go hunt a fox. She needn’t have worried about being detected, they weren’t paying any attention to the condition of the van at all. That was programming for you, even the best soldiers in the world were blind to obvious threats when they felt safe on home ground.
It was not precisely pleasant inside the storage compartment, but she couldn’t help grinning with glee when she felt the van start beneath her and carry her up, up and away as it spiraled out of the compound and into the wide expanse of the desert.
It wasn’t until they broke surface and started hurtling along the rust red road towards civilization that she uncovered the first significant flaw in her plan. The storage locker was ventilated, but not by much and she could feel the heat of the desert sun beating down through the black exterior of the door, threatening to cook her alive. She couldn’t exactly open a window, so she was forced to suffer through the dense heat and dust that threatened to make her throat close over.
“Breathe, just breathe,” she whispered to herself, covering her nose with the top of her shirt. She knew the next few hours would not be pleasant, but at that point she would have walked through the fires of hell themselves if it meant freedom.
***
Savage was twenty thousand feet above the Indian ocean when he got a call that made his blood run cold. Brian was on the line, and Brian never called unless something had gone horribly wrong. He steeled himself for very bad news, a missile strike or perhaps a nuclear detonation. What Brian actually said was worse.
“Where is Matthews?”
Savage frowned at the floor of the airplane, slightly irritated by the way his subordinate had entirely dispensed with the formalities of conversation. “What do you mean, where is Matthews?”
“Have you moved her?”
“I’ve been dodging bullets in Kurdistan, how would I have moved her?” Savage’s jaw was tight and he felt the beginnings of a tension headache coming on. “Is this your way of saying that you’ve lost her?”
“She can’t be lost, not here.”
An impatient sigh escaped Savage. The man was wasting his time, beating about the bush with vague statements that didn’t make any sense. “What are you saying, Brian?”
“Sir, I think she’s escaped, sir.”
Savage almost dropped the phone. Escape should have been impossible, no, was impossible from the compound. Unless you were a cross between a camel and a gopher with titanium claws. “That cant be,” he croaked, his throat going suddenly dry.
“It has to be,” Brian said, sounding as perplexed as he did. “She was last recorded as being present last night. This morning she left her cell and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Has someone else moved her perhaps? Kransky?”
“Kransky’s leading the charge looking for her, sir.” Brian lowered his voice as if he didn’t want to be heard, which had the undesirable result of making it difficult for Savage to hear him too. “They’re not happy about this at all. Cancellation is on the table.”
The string of expletives that escaped Savage’s lips were as inventive as they were forceful. Brian waited patiently on the other end of the line until Savage had depleted his vocabulary entirely before asking for further orders. “What do you want me to do, sir?”
But Savage couldn’t think of a single order to give. The matter would probably already be out of his hands. His commanders had been working on driving a wedge between him and Zora for quite some time. Though she was still technically his material, he’d lost the ability to determine her fate in the weeks of constant deployments. “I’ll be there in a few hours. Keep me informed.”
He hung up, swore and punched a strut on the plane. It did not do much in the way of finding Zora, but it did hurt his hand quite a lot. Cradling his sore knuckles, he swore under his breath. One way or another, this stunt was definitely going to get Zora Matthews killed. If they found her, they’d put her down for sure. If they didn’t
find her, well, the chances were high that someone else would.
The next several hours in the plane were some of the most hopeless in his life. In his opinion Zora wasn’t good enough to stay free for long. They would find her, and quickly, probably before his plane landed. They might even kill her before he got the chance to intervene in any way.
How had she done it? Suspicion grew quickly in his mind as he pondered the other possibilities. What if she hadn’t escaped? What if she had just been set up and killed and this was their way of breaking it to him? He shook his head to clear it of the disturbing thoughts. That wasn’t what Brian had reported and he couldn’t go down that road, not yet. Nobody had ever escaped from the compound before, but if there was someone who could, it was probably Zora Matthews. She was just that bloody minded. He knew that they’d been underestimating her from the beginning and he was starting to wonder if he had too.
***
Sunshine beat down on Zora’s face as a sense of pure elation took over. It had been hairy there for a while, and taking a tumble off the top of a moving vehicle had proved to be an unpleasant experience resulting in skinned forearms and road rash, but she had done it! She was free! Blending in with the crowds, she was just another woman on the beach..
Of course there were some practical issues, she had no ID whatsoever and no cash as yet. But the day was still warm and there was no hurry so she reveled in the great outdoors, the pale golden sand and the ocean that seemed to stretch from the shore to infinity. This was life as it should be, a never ending tapestry of pure possibility.
She wandered about on the beach for a time, digging her toes into the sand and letting the waves lap gently about her feet. Then, when she tired of that amusement, she took herself a short way into the city, passing by a bank with gleaming plate glass windows which announced an excellent mortgage rate and urged passers by to open up an account for the purposes of saving for retirement. Zora smiled wryly at the notion of retirement, she was about to go into a form of retirement herself. She kept walking down the street, past high end clothing stores and their molded plastic clientele. The building she eventually entered was another bank, not that one would have known it was a bank to look at it. There were no signs with large numbers and percentage symbols on them, no cute representations of savings accounts fronted by cartoon pigs. There was nothing but a windowless facade and a small silver plaque that read ‘Son and Sons’.
“Can I help you ma’am?” A clean cut, suited banker greeted her as she entered the building. Unlike an ordinary bank there was no line of windows with gum chewing tellers cowering behind bulletproof glass. This was a bank for the richest of the rich only. Saudi Princes, celebrities and other modern royalty kept their assets safe there, far from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi.
“Yes, I have a safety deposit box here,” Zora said, smiling with the charming confidence of a person who knows they have a right to be somewhere even if they do have sand in between their toes and blood drying on their arms.
“Of course Madame,” the banker agreed. “Do you have any ID?”
“It’s a password coded box,” she said sweetly. “No ID required, it’s so odious presenting little slivers of plastic with one’s face stamped on them, don’t you think?”
“Of course Madame,” the banker agreed again. Zora strongly suspected that he would have agreed with almost anything she said. He was a man accustomed to dealing with people who had been warped by their own power to the point of constructing entirely new realities about themselves. It was unlikely that she would be anywhere near the strangest client he would see that week.
She followed the banker back to a barred and locked vault behind which several thousand safety deposit boxes were lodged in the wall. Even the high security area had been nicely appointed, with gilt edging on the bars, comfortable leather seats in which one might sit and peruse the contents of one’s deposit box and even a small bar well stocked with the finest liquors in the land.
“Number 5973,” she prompted the banker. She waited at the lovely oak table in the middle of the room whilst the worthy man retrieved the deposit box in question. In spite of the splendor surrounding it, the box itself was fairly unremarkable, nothing more than a sleek black metallic rectangle with a digital key-code pad mounted atop.
Ordinarily a password would not have been very good security, but the password to the box was no short four digit pin. It was a fifty six digit long string changed daily by an automated evolving algorithm. The only way to access the password was to be given it by the actual owner of the box - unless, of course, you happened to have been privy to one of the most in depth surveillance programs in the world and had once seen both the formula underlying the algorithm and one of the original passwords and you had the ability to do the mental mathematics required to generate several years of iterations to arrive at that day’s password. Handily enough, thanks to her time in the compound, Zora had seen all she needed to and could do all those things and she wasted no time in beginning to key in the number.
Whilst she worked, the banker stayed at a discrete distance. If he was suspicious of the casually dressed woman typing in an extended code apparently from memory, he did not let on. Fifty six digits later, Zora opened the box and retrieved the contents, which were promptly shoved into her pockets. “Thank you kindly,” she said, closing the box once more and handing it back to the banker. “Please return this to its rightful place.”
The banker gave a short bow and replaced the now empty safety deposit box back into the array. It would be quite some time before anyone discovered the theft. Much like those who ran the compound, those who had their valuables stashed away at the most secure and secretive bank you’ve never heard of rarely considered the possibility that they might be robbed.
With a broad smile on her face Zora wandered out of the bank and down the street to one of the best hotels in the city, where she paid for a penthouse suite with cash. The old Zora would never have contemplated outright theft, it had gone against her principles. But what was the point of having principles if they meant you scraped by on the street whilst secret military factions hunted you down? No. If she was going to go on the lam, she was going to do it in style.
***
Meanwhile, not all that far away, Savage’s plane was screeching down out of the sky. Already standing as the plane taxied to its stopping point, he was at the door before it opened. He didn’t wait for the stairs to be wheeled to the plane, instead he simply leaped the distance to the ground. He was more than eager to get on Zora’s tail, he was desperate. Every second wasted fluffing about with stairs and safety regulations was a second in which he could be saving her.
He spotted Brian waiting with a special operations car on the tarmac and ran over to the man. “Do they have her yet?” He asked urgently, his stomach clenching as he braced himself for the worst.
“No sir,” Brian shook his head. “She’s just…” he lifted his arms in the air with a gesture of confused hopelessness. “Disappeared.”
“Really.” Savage’s expression lightened with relief. “I would have thought they would have found her.”
A look of awe had established itself firmly on Brian’s features. “It’s like she’s gone without a trace. One moment she was there, the next moment she wasn’t. The system can’t find her and there are no reports matching her description anywhere.”
“Get in the car,” Savage snapped. “We can talk on the way.” He got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Brian was forced to sprint around to get in the car in time, Savage had the car’s wheels rolling and lights flashing before his 2IC’s rear contacted the passenger seat.
“Nobody just disappears,” Savage pointed out pragmatically as he navigated the labyrinth of the airport with increasing frustration. There were far too many people milling about and getting in the way, and if they weren’t careful, one or more of them was going to end up in the front grille. “She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s not magical. Do
you think they moved her and aren’t telling us?”
“No,” Brian shook his head. “The entire compound is on high alert.” When Savage continued to look suspicious, Brian elaborated further. “They’ve been taking down walls and tearing out wiring looking for her. Her cell looks like a bomb hit it, they’ve stripped it bare and found nothing. They’re worried, real worried. Some are saying she might have been a spy the whole time.”
“Ridiculous,” Savage snorted, slamming the horn on at the car in front of him, which he considered to be taking an unnecessarily long time to pull over. “She’s just a woman, just a civilian. She wasn’t mixed up in anything until we grabbed her.”
“Then how did she escape?” Brian gave voice to the question of the day. “Nobody has ever escaped.”
“Well now they have,” Savage replied, glaring at the traffic that was flowing like thick syrup. God how he hated LAX. “No place is 100% secure, you know that.”
“But the compound… it’s…” Brain shook his head. “It shouldn’t be possible,” he declared. “Anyway,” he said, finally remembering his original orders and his reason for meeting Savage’s plane. “Hurtzwald wants to see you.”
“Oh I bet he does,” Savage said grimly. “I bet he does.”
Chapter Twenty
To have said that Savage was agitated would have been to make the understatement of the century. He was driving like a man possessed, clenching the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white as he navigated heavy city traffic.