by Celia Crown
Not if I can help it.
“Hey, hey!” Adrian’s voice breaks through my frenzied head.
Thoughts make room for him, but I keep scrolling through days of history searches on my phone. My eyes scan all the headings, and it takes me a while to find it after combing through more than a dozen pages of history searches while fighting the distraction of his big hands holding my shaking arms.
I pull up the page that I had read since I like to keep up with current news and that does not include news that trends with what social media influencers did what and what scandal a Hollywood star has gotten themselves in for more press.
The news stories I read are about actual problems, and the other news is something I despise in this modern time. Their first world problem of not finding the perfect outfit to go to a music festival is not the end of the world, but they are too dramatic when they post a picture of duck lips as a form of pouting to their fans.
I swear I almost vomited the first time I saw someone do the ‘duck lip’, but that is in the past now. The trends these days are asses on the counter and skimpy outfits to show off their hourglass figures while writing an inspirational post with a sponsored advertisement at the end.
I never want to meet anyone who is that narcissistic and shameless, but how they make money is none of my business. My focus is on astrophysics. My taste is so different that I can’t even begin to imagine being friends with them.
I don’t want to either. They would be talking about fashion and makeup while I would be talking about this new substance on Jupiter and how it can be deadly with just one whiff of it.
“Tabby,” Adrian warns into my ears as he bends down to cover the lights from above, and my phone is the only obstruction to having our bodies molding into one.
I ignore him, tuning his breathing out as I reread the article that I have come across a couple of days ago. It isn’t breaking news or recent news, but it is fresh enough that it’s still being investigated with news networks reporting it.
It happened one year ago this month. Some reported that a team of thieves hijacked a truck full of lab equipment while many others wrote about how the contents of the truck wasn’t lab equipment but contained things that the government didn’t want anyone finding out.
It could be drugs, weapons, or money.
No one knows for sure because the company logo on the truck was from a shell company that was under more shell parent companies with their legal names buried under tons of paperwork.
It happened on a remote road just outside a small city where the police force isn’t that active. The stretch of road was so long that it took the police one hour to arrive at the scene because the thieves had taken the driver to zip-tie him to the passenger side door without a way to communicate.
Both his hands were tied so he couldn’t use the radio to report it and his phone was smashed to prevent him from calling the cavalry.
By the time the local police got there, the man was severely dehydrated from the open windows of the truck under the intense heat of Arizona.
He was safe, so that was the good thing that came out of the robbery. The driver gave descriptions of the people that stole everything from the truck, but he couldn’t tell the officials what he was driving because he honestly didn’t know.
He was just a driver given instructions and money to drive from one place to another. The driver said he never looked inside because he had done it before with other products and he had gotten into trouble.
He showed the proof of email exchanges with his employer to the FBI who had shown up to the scene just hours later. No one knew who called them and why they came for a truck robbery, but the FBI refused to comment and swooped the entire truck away.
The truck driver was given a verbal warning that he couldn’t say anything with the non-disclosure agreement he signed when he took the job, or he would be facing legal action.
It was a scare tactic, and the media had jumped right on it because having the FBI involved in a small town would surely have people talking about it for weeks and words travel with gossip.
“We have to get to Arizona!” I shout, eyes bugging out as thoughts start to come to me.
I have half the picture in my head, and I am confident that I can finish the other half when I get all the pieces. It’s going to take time to piece them together, but I know the big picture is going to be fulfilling once I complete it and I can save the civilians living on the Earth.
“You need sleep,” Adrian corrects with a tug on my hair.
I don’t need sleep. I have had enough of it for the past days, and I can’t waste any more time by dwelling in this facility when I could be solving this mystery.
I have two choices; I stay here and work on the equations and figure out the best way to prevent radiation or I can get my butt to Arizona to get to the bottom of the robbery of the truck.
My gut tells me that the meteor has something to do with the thieves.
I don’t know how they are connected just yet, but with time and patience, I can do it to save the world from a disastrous panic.
Once the news begins to leak with more confidential information from sources deep in the government, people will have a full-on panic moment to gather all the supplies that they can in case of an apocalypse and some would be getting materials to build their own bunkers under their home.
“I’ll get a plane, and they can drop us off at Arizona, then we can drive out to the—”
Adrian takes my phone and reads the article that I have up on my screen with quick movements of his dark eyes. He shuts it off and puts it right beside my hot chocolate. The mug has cooled down, and the rim of chocolate stain indicates where the drink originally stayed before I drank half of it.
“Tabby, talk to me,” he cups my cheek with his hands, engulfing more than my whole face as he tilts my head up to meet his eyes.
“Can’t,” I stammer out, my thoughts are too wired up to slow down. “Need to go— quick, we have to be there!”
“Alright,” he says, eyebrows knotting in bewilderment. “I will get you there. Just give me the address you want to go.”
I give him the state and the exact coordinates of where the truck was hijacked. He takes my phone and unlocks it with my passcode that I know I didn’t give to him. That isn’t important. Adrian presses something and puts it at his ear.
Whoever is on the other line picks up, and he is spewing out orders for a helicopter with a full tank of gas once he has determined the distance and decided that a plane would take too long to fuel up.
Then he demanded a car when we land, and for our privacy and safety, he requested that it be GPS disabled and without any electronics. The car can be hacked, and since I’m a high-profile scientist, I have threats coming left and right.
It’s one of the reasons why my supervisors have made it abundantly clear that I must have bodyguards during both the day and night. Not one second of my time goes unguarded, and I’m not the only scientist that has this type of treatment.
Those who work in NASA with this type of clearance level are mandated to have protection. There is no way around it, and it isn’t a choice given to us, although our work helps everyone.
There is a small percentage of people who are just bad seeds and want to watch the Earth go up in flames like the Roman emperor Nero who fiddled while Rome burned.
Adrian and I didn’t pack anything, and I don’t plan on staying too long. I just need the information the state can give me. The connection to Sunny is still a bit cloudy, but for sure the thieves, the contents stolen, and the real company that is hidden underneath all the legal paperwork are all connected.
The time getting to the helicopter and being in the car while Adrian drives down the long road in the dead of the night means little to me. I hardly remember much of it because I was too focused on searching through the government’s database for the unsolicited documents about the truck.
I had gotten through a mountain of legal pa
pers before I found out that I was only six shell companies in and who knows how many more there are.
Then I decided to approach it differently; I searched the database of all companies in the world that are registered with the name Sunny in them and other variations of the word. When that didn’t result in anything useful, I had a bit of frustration in me that I took out by typing angrily on my phone.
Adrian stopped the car at the side of the road and forced me to drink water to calm the fire in the pit of my stomach. It quenched some of the anger, but it still hung over me like the smell of stinky tofu.
I have had the unfortunate experience of meeting a Vietnamese couple that loved to make stinky tofu in their basement, and it stayed on their clothes.
The story is too long to think through, so I refrained from bringing up those memories, and I went back to searching everything I know.
The next approach I did was searching logos that had the sun or any other shapes that have anything to do with the sun, solar system, or brightness. Sunny is an odd word for my brain to pick up in my dream that I had, but I couldn’t remember what it was about.
With luck and persistence, I found a company that had a sun logo on it; it’s a technology firm that supplies the government with many forms of gadgets, and now I know why the FBI was on it so quickly.
It contains government secrets, and if the thieves were to dissect the motherboards of the machines, then they would know the best way to dismantle the government from within.
It makes sense that it would be their goal for the government to fall, but it just doesn’t sit right with me because the technology that was most likely stolen was supposed to be dropped off at a warehouse that the government owns through a shell company for anonymity’s sake, and it is guarded by the military.
Then the military would personally deliver the machines to NASA.
At this point, these are all speculations, and the equipment stolen isn’t sophisticated enough to do any damage.
I just don’t understand why they would steal it and go through the risk of getting caught.
A bigger play is on the table.
Adrian stops the car on the side of the road again, and I get out of the car while tuning out the protests from him. I survey the tall corn crops, the eerie buzzing of the night from around me as the stalks crinkle in that hollow scraping against each other.
I’m neither a professional thief nor am I an escape artist, but I would think that if I were to steal something, I would at least have my exit strategy containing a different route that can make me disappear within the crows.
However, this crew took the contents of the truck, loaded it, and went down the long road while being too open and too vulnerable.
The chances of being seen by a car that would happen to drive by are too monumental; it can only make sense if they didn’t care about getting caught, but it would ruin the entire heist that probably required a lot of planning.
I also understand that the equipment hasn’t turned up in the black market or been sold at some unspeakable sites for bad people. The thieves are either holding it for some unknown reason or they are using it for who knows what.
Those are the questions that bug me with that annoying buzz that demands answers. It’s annoying that I have all the pieces of the puzzle in front of my face and I can’t figure out how the pieces fit.
Some of the pieces are missing, that I am positive of.
I need to find a motive, and I don’t think the motive would be money because they could have sold the machines and gotten a hefty amount in return.
This group is confusing, and the dynamic of this situation is just off.
It doesn’t feel right.
I voice my concerns to Adrian and tell him every detail when he forces me back into the car. He listens carefully as I instruct him to drive to the warehouse guarded by the military. If the company with the sun logo sent out certain types of equipment under strict rules, then it must be someone with insider knowledge to know which path the truck would take.
Finding the company’s records would be quicker if I can get them from the warehouse, and as I explain my train of jumbled thoughts to Adrian, he gives me valid points that maybe it isn’t the machine itself the thieves were after, but something inside of it.
That would make sense because every component of the machine needs to be intact for it to work; any misplacement or missing pieces would render the machine useless.
They must have taken something out of the machines, they became unsellable useless junk, and the only way to destroy them is through a metal scrap yard that decompresses cars.
I calculate the given miles and the fact that they have the FBI on their butt with millions of dollars’ worth of heavy machinery; they must get rid of it soon.
Adrian mentions that there is only one scrapyard in a fifty-mile radius of this small city of Arizona, and it’s worth a try to see if the boss of the yard looked the other way with cash in their hands while the thieves destroyed the evidence. Or, if they broke in and did it in the middle of the night with no one around to hear the loud noises of metal breaking and bending.
“Tabby, stay close to me,” Adrian says as he gets out of the car and moves to the passenger side.
He opens the door and takes my wrist to put me behind his massive back. His muscles ripple and shift as he squares his shoulders; the thickness of his body conceals me from the security cameras looking down on us.
We discover a keypad on a locked door for the employees and a camera aimed right at the door to record who is accessing the warehouse and at what time.
Adrian pulls me up to the door, and the camera moves with us to keep us in the frame. He looks up and stares into the camera.
“What are you doing?” I whisper to him, holding his arm with my other hand.
“Facial recognition,” he grunts, “I have seen this type of technology before when I was in the Navy.”
“Oh,” I breathe, taken back by the coldness in his voice and the glare that he aims at the camera.
I look up to it and watch the lights that automatically turn on when they detect movement. They help me see the lens inside the outer lens zoom in on me.
A second later, the door makes a sound, and it unlocks.
Chapter Eight
Adrian
I don’t let Tabby walk behind me. It’s the best way to prevent her from being harmed with my back turned. I keep her by my side so she is closest to the wall.
We are in a secured military warehouse, but I have learned to take everything at face value. As a Navy SEAL, my perception of danger is a lot more heightened than those who have not experienced the type of danger that I have seen over the years.
Being desensitized is a bad thing; it doesn’t allow me to feel sympathy towards those who end up on the ground lifeless. It is also a good thing because I stop seeing my enemies as humans, killing them in a breeze when I pull the trigger.
I have lost count of how many lives I took, and as cruel as that sounds, it is the truth that is brought upon me the moment I stopped caring for lives that have no meaning to me.
“Doctor Shafer, Doctor Sterling,” the guide that took us into the base leans to the side to let us pass through another door.
The warehouse only looks like a warehouse from the outside, but it has been rebuilt with walls and doors; each massive entrance has a passcode, all of them are different and held by a guard at the entrance.
This prevents an enemy from taking one hostage and having access to the entire warehouse when the designated guards only know the passcode to their stationed entrances.
“Hello, Sterling,” a man with a buzz-cut grins as the final entrance opens.
Looking at him, Tabby shoots back a grin with her pearly white teeth. “What are you doing here, Captain?”
Captain?
My brows furrow, but then I remember that he must be the space shuttle’s designated captain that steers the shuttle to not let it move off course.<
br />
“I transferred here,” the man answers lightly and chuckles when he ruffles Tabby’s brown hair.
A flare of protectiveness his me, and I snatch his hand with a strong grip on his wrist. His movements still as if he is frozen in time, and his eyes widen at me. His pulse jumps under my fingertip. The man tries to take his hand back, but I pin him there with a glare.
I do not want this man to get another chance to touch Tabby. She trusts him, but I don’t, and I have been known to be a solitary man; I rarely trust anyone other than my brothers-in-arm as a team and a tightknit family.
They mean a lot to me, but Tabby means everything and I will kill this man if he brings one hair on Tabby’s head out of place.
This is a warning to him, and he understands when he gulps audibly. This should teach him a lesson to keep his hands to himself.
“Hey, hey, stop it!”
Tabby’s soft hands peel mine away from his bruising wrist; the red welts on his skin are my fingers, and he will remember it for a while.
“Sorry, Captain,” Tabby laughs anxiously, glaring up at me through the corner of her amber eyes with a scowl.
“He’s a bit protective.”
The captain laughs light-heartedly, “A bit?”
“Okay, maybe a lot, but he means good,” Tabby shakes her head with a smile and taps her finger on my wrist that she still has a small grip on.
She’s either holding me back from bashing the man’s head to the wall or she doesn’t feel safe with him. It’s the little nervous tick under her eye and the raised tight pitch of her voice that makes me step closer to her.
“He looks like a scruffy grouch, but he’s really kind. You just have to get to know him and maybe get poked by his prickly exterior.”
I will take that as a compliment and choose to ignore the not-so-subtle way of her saying “Adrian Shafer will kill you if you try”, and it takes me a fraction of a second to catch the glint in his eyes.