They are on the Bayshore Freeway, the 101, out of SFO on a clear and sunny day. Gilly is driving Sofie’s beater compact no-name vehicle with Zak and Kim crammed into the backseat, keeping company with their backpacks. Sofie has already asked about Hong Kong, receiving a promise to be filled in later.
“Well, I have to clean my feet as soon as I go through security these days. The floors in these airports are awful. If they know people have to take off their shoes, they could at least have a clean place to do it. The TSA could use a little more people person training.”
“Did you stay overnight at Santos Todos?” Kim asks.
Sophie turns around in her seat.
“Oh no dear. We hitchhiked our way over to the island aboard some rich couple’s yacht. We had to go back when they left or lose our ride!”
“There’s really no place to stay except the light keeper’s house,” chimed in Gilly.
“We stayed in Ensenada and came back the next day. Of course the whole time we were wondering what had happened to you two.”
They are far from the airport and in Redwood City, tall highway sound walls running along both sides of the freeway, turning it into a hot, dusty canyon. Zak notices something through the back window. He isn’t sure what it is, but he turns and tries to bring it into focus. As he does there is a movement at the periphery of his vision. A large SUV with darkened windows swings out into the next lane and around in front of them with a rude swerve. Another similar looking vehicle swoops up behind, taking up a position immediately to their rear.
“Whoa!” exclaims Gilly, eyes flicking between the car in front of them and the other car in the rear view mirror.
Sophie is all over it.
“What did you do, Gil?”
Gilly is too distracted to be drawn into couples bickering.
Zak is beginning to notice that the speck of an image in the rear window is ballooning rapidly into the shape and color of a traffic drone. There is something about it though that is different from the usual traffic drone. He is having trouble figuring out what it is.
He wonders, “Could this drone be armed?”A voice cuts in over the stereo and the volume soars. A commanding voice demands that the driver engage the autopilot, allowing the escort vehicles to take control of their car.
“Oh sure I will,” shouts Gilly excitedly.
Kim, who has been watching Zak watch the drone’s fast appearance, is in sync with Gilly.
“Who the hell did he say they were?” she asks angrily.
“He didn’t, did he?”
“We got a drone,” says Zak calmly, placing his hand on the back of Gilly’s seat.
“We got a what?”
“A traffic drone. It’s got all the markings. It’s on top of us.”
“The hell you say.”
“They’re using it to communicate with us. But they’re not Highway Patrol. If they were, they would have said so right away.”
The big SUVs at their front and rear appear to be drawing, if anything, closer.
“Enough of this crap!”
Gilly pulls quickly out of line with the other vehicles. He accelerates with everything the little compact can give him. They’re pushed back in their seats.
“Floor it Gilly,” rejoins Kim, “You’ve got it baby. Go!”
“They better not be cops,” asserts Sophie, tightening her seat belt.
Zak keeps watching for the drone. At times it is right overhead and he can’t see it. At other moments it falls back a few feet behind them. It maintains the same height at all times, about ten feet over their car, its metal gray ovular shape accented by reflective patches of highway yellow and orange.
Other drivers react warily, moving away from what all of them assume is some kind of traffic enforcement. The traffic on the Bayshore just got busier.
There is room to maneuver and Gilly is not afraid to use it. He shoots the car to the inner lane and advances in between cars, holding them in the middle of a tight formation. They enter Menlo Park where the highway walls are lower and are topped by wire fences to keep pedestrians from getting onto the freeway. The highway walls get taller, creeping vegetation planted on top of them, growing down their sides, reaping the benefits of constant sun. Finally, the walls disappear, the highway becomes more open, and there are large old evergreens standing in places along it.
“Are they gone?” asks Sophie.
“I don’t think so,” replies Zak. “We still have the drone.”
“Can it shoot us?” she asks.
”Good question,” wonders Zak. Maybe that’s what’s unusual about that drone.
“No,” says Kim, “It’s a bad question because there is no way we want to find out. Gilly, how far are we from Stanford? ”
“Close.”
“Then get us off this thing. We’re sitting ducks,” Kim admonishes.
“If we make a break for it, we’ll have company,” Gilly states firmly.
Out of nowhere come the black SUVs.
“I think we already have it,” says Kim, who notices the hulking vehicle pulling up on the passenger side of their car.
“Geezus!”
The vehicle presses, pushing them toward the breakdown lane, threatening to bash into the side of their greatly overmatched car. They can see nothing but dark shapes behind its windows.
“Guys!” yells Gilly, trying manfully not to give way to the relentless pressuring of the hostile SUV, “we’re going in. Hang on.”
The left wheels hit the highway rumble strip and the car begins to rattle with vibration and tire noise. Torsion effectively pulls the car left. Gilly battles the steering wheel for control as the car starts to automatically break.
Zak can just see ahead past Gilly as they begin to decelerate into the breakdown lane, and what he is catching a glimpse of is not good.
Kim notices his expression turn quickly grave.
Zak’s arm swings involuntarily toward her, pressing her back against the seat. She thinks they are almost certainly going to crash but into what she doesn’t know. She starts to bend and raises her arms to her head in order to take the impact.
“Noooooooo!” is all she hears from Sophie.
Then Gilly is abruptly breaking.
Zak sees the other big black SUV parked a ways down the breakdown lane with its occupants in positions behind its open doors, guns raised and pointed toward them. He can glance to his right and still see the SUV planted immediately next to them, apparently maneuvering and trying to force them to stop rather than crash into its companion. It carefully keeps pace with them so that Gilly has no choice but to slow the car.
They are going to be forced to stop. The activity on this stretch of highway by the SUVs has parted the waves of traffic that were immediately near them. The obvious presence of the traffic drone has been noticed far back on the highway, slowing traffic to their rear.
Gilly decides this is not how it’s going down.
He shouts to his friends to brace, guns it, and then clobbers the brakes, throwing everyone forward. Sophie hits her head. The SUV to their side, caught unawares, keeps moving unintentionally ahead, leaving Gilly room to swerve behind it and into the center of the freeway. He weaves the car through traffic and gets them to the other side of highway before the driver of the trapping SUV has time to react. But it isn’t far behind.
Again, he is going to have to give it all it’s got.
“Who are these people?” He says this more by way of complaint, using his rearview mirror to give Zak a quizzical look.
“I’ve got no idea. Seriously man,” Zak holds up his hands helplessly.
Gilly is speeding the car away, looking at the car’s e-map. It shows their position on the freeway and the nearest exit.
“We’ve gotta get away from Dark Vader back there. I’m getting off this suicide highway to hell!”
The next exit is coming up, University Avenue, which takes them into Palo Alto. Gilly would have taken this
exit anyway, but he looks down the road to the massive blue glass, wedge shaped Four Seasons Hotel with its huge rectangular feng shui excision cut from the middle of its architecture. Attached to the Hotel is a parking ramp and he has an idea.
“Zak, are you keeping track of Vader back there?” Gilly asks.
Zak and Kim are watching out the back window for both the trailing car and the drone up above.
“Yeah, but we still have a lead on him.”
“And the drone?”
“Still with us. Not going anywhere,” says Kim.
“Does anybody have a laser?”
Sophie attacks the glove compartment.
The car flies by the hotel’s dense blocking landscaping along the edge of the freeway, under the over pass and onto a tight ramp. Gilly hits the brakes to avoid flying off the ramp but as the car reaches the street, he drives it straight across the multiple lanes of University Avenue and the opening in the median, narrowly avoiding other cars.
“Got one!” exclaims Sophie, proud of actually finding anything in the potpourri of her glove compartment.
Gilly starts running Sophie’s window down.
“Hit that freaking thing up there with it.”
Gilly drives them South on University to the next street, which he turns right onto. It curves them around to the five hundred per night Hotel. Sophie is trying, rather in-artfully, to laze the drone.
“Zak?” yells Gilly.
“Think we lost him for the moment. Haven’t seen Vader since we took the freeway ramp.”
At the end of the street next to the Four Seasons is a multi-level parking structure nestled between the hotel and the 101. Gilly heads them straight for it. Sophie is half standing, bracing herself on the inside of the car, her head and arm on the outside as she tries to focus the laser beam on the seemingly imperturbable drone. They approach the entrance to the parking ramp at speed.
“Sophie get down!” Gilly shouts and then, “sorry about this.”
They run the entrance gate, an insubstantial piece of pine bolted to a steel armature that snaps and flies off on impact with the front of the car. They get a ways inside.
“Where’s the drone, Kim?”
“I think it stopped. It was above us and would have run into the building. So I think it stopped out there.”
“So much for the laser,” says Sophie, disheartened.
Gilly throws the headlights on and careens past shoppers coming back to their hotel, arms loaded with packages. He drives them up and into the heart of the structure, finds a convenient open parking space, and pulls in.
“You don’t happen to have a gun in there?” he kids Sophie, as he turns off the engine. Gilly decides to complement her.
“You gave it a hell of a try,” he tells Sophie admiringly, reaching over to give her a kiss.
“What do we do now?” asks Kim.
“I think we should call Bog. He can help us with the drone,” says Zak. “What do you guys think?”
“It can’t hurt,” responds Gilly.
In seconds Bog is on Zak’s phone.
“Mr. Cerny?”
“Kemosabe? What’s shakin?”
Zak figures they don’t have a lot of time for this.
“We’re being chased by a drone and 2 SUVs and we have no idea who they are.”
Bogan is momentarily perplexed.
“What did you do in China?” he asks with total sincerity.
“You should ask. Seriously though, we ditched the cars but we think the drone is hovering over the parking ramp we’re in here at the Four Seasons.”
“That’s a nice place,” says Bog admiringly.
“We’ll get you a brochure. In the meantime we need to lose the drone.”
“Gotcha. But in this situation there is no good news.”
They hear a loud roar coming their way and everyone’s head turns to the sound. Zak sees a dark but recognizable shape rising from the level below. So does Gilly, who starts the car back up.
“They can go anywhere. They were probably just waiting to find a floor plan,” comments Bog, who can clearly hear the sound and recognizes it.
Gilly is pulling out. The drone is coming straight at them up the center aisle, looking bigger than ever, almost as big as Sophie’s car, but now it looks more like a crustacean festooned with many appendages. There are at least four rotors operating blurring blades, and they are screaming at a very high and deafening pitch.
Gilly is driving the car down the main aisle at breakneck speed, yelling something unintelligible. The drone continues, acclerating up the aisle. The two are clearly going to collide. Everybody in the car is ducking down, figuring the roof of the car is about to come off in a horrific crash unlikely to leave anyone alive.
And then it happens.
At the last instant the traffic drone pulls ninety degrees right, a hand’s breadth from the side of the car, allowing it to pass unharmed.
This event does something weird with Gilly’s ego.
“What a little chicken shit piece of crap drone!”
This makes everyone else in the car look up, disaster just having been averted at the last second.
“What happened?” they all hear Bog’s disembodied voice ask loudly from Zak’s phone.
Gilly keeps driving the car, speeding up, like a bat out of hell, slowing down only long enough to take out another guardrail on their way out of the parking structure. Suddenly everyone in the car is looking up and around at the sky, but they see no sign of anything following them.
“Can you hack this thing?” asks Zak of Bog.
“Yeah, but there is no time for that from here. Look, I think I have an idea. If I’m not mistaken the Four Seasons is one tall building. Why don’t you guys park on the shady side of it. That could work.”
“Gilly?”
They are reaching the entrance of the hotel and Gilly shoots them out toward a driveway running along the North end of the property, past the parking ramp and along the outwardly curved side of the hotel facing the highway. At this time of day the drive is thrown into a deep shadow that stretches right onto the Bayshore Freeway. Gilly brings them to a stop in the heavy landscaping that shields the view of the property from the freeway.
“OK, we’re here in the shade of the building,” says Zak.
“Turn off the car and remove the batteries from every device you have. They’ll be using them to triangulate you,” replies Bog.
Everyone follows Bog’s instructions. Gilly helps Sophie as she has never removed a battery before. The car, quickly warming up without the air conditioning on, gets uneasily humid, tense and quiet all of a sudden.
Chapter 30
On Fire Page 29