Exponential

by JM Addison

  Chapter 28

  Mara could hardly believe it. What happened to her was in quite simple terms the actual definition of what you would call ‘dumb luck’.

  The night was awful. She managed to feel her way around the inside of the shed and discover an old piece of farm machinery among the assorted junk. She wormed her way inside the rusted contraption as quietly as possible and waited. She thought again of the experience with the coffin and shuddered. She had to concentrate hard to keep the tremors in her right leg from making any noise as she could hear someone approaching. In fact, there were voices, so there must have been at least two people. They knew she was out here. She knew they were the bad guys. She saw Mike go down and they never identified themselves as police. At least with the police, there would have been some safety – she hoped.

  She stiffly nestled against the cold, aging metal and waited. She could hear them exploring the inside cavern of the shed, probing with their flashlights. After a moment, one said to the other, “Nothing, what about you?”

  “I don’t think she’s here either.”

  “Well, now what?”

  “I don’t know. One thing for sure, we’re not supposed to let her get to the police, so we better keep looking.”

  That was interesting. They certainly weren’t the police and they wanted to prevent her from getting to the police. Perhaps the police was just the place she should go? They may be corrupt or otherwise involved in this thing, but at least she would probably live.

  However, before she did anything like turn herself in, she had to be at Fiddler’s Rock first. She had to see if her brother had indeed sent that message, that he could be alive. She pondered the legitimacy of the message. Her email account was the temporary new one she set up for herself to probe the companies like Sequitus with her appetizing statement about possible data theft. How would Chris know the email address she was using? That made the message highly suspect. Plus, she supposed that anyone could send a message and claimed you were somebody else, like many junk mail messages claim to be from someone they’re not. But the reference to a location that only the two of them would know certainly gave a lot of weight to the idea that he might still be alive, no matter how the message found its way to her. She had to know.

  Eventually she dozed for a while from sheer exhaustion. Even though it was an unusually warm November night, the penetrating cold from the flaking metal woke her. She decided it was time to get out of there. She had no idea how long she might have slept, but she didn’t think anyone was around anymore and she couldn’t stay in there forever.

  She extracted herself from the machinery and made her way back out of the shed. She could discern on her watch in the faint glow of the pre-dawn sky that is was almost 5:30. She must have slept through most of the night. She made her way in the opposite direction from the house in the retreating darkness. Beyond the farm across the field lay the highway. Just down the road a few miles from there was the more congested area where they had found the restaurant earlier that evening.

  She would have to make her way there on foot and then… punt.

  Eventually, after a good couple of hours of walking – some of it through fields, most of it on the roadway, she made it to a fast food restaurant. She entered and made her way straight towards the bathroom.

  The sight of herself in the mirror actually frightened her. She didn’t even recognize the person. She had forgotten her hair was a different color. Now it was still wet and looked rather like a hag. The bruises on her face were still fading and there was a good lot of dirt ground into her clothing from crawling into the machinery.

  Then, fortune changed. A women entered the bathroom, a woman about fifty or so, and saw her standing there, tears streaming down her bruised face, dirt smeared on her clothes looking at her pitiful reflection. The woman looked down at the floor as she walked by and went into one of the stalls.

  Mara tried to clean herself up a little. She was embarrassed to be seen by others and didn’t really want to talk to anybody right now.

  The woman emerged and washed in the sink and dried off with a towel, but instead of leaving like Mara had hoped, the woman said, “Poor dear. You really look like you could use some help.”

  Mara realized the woman probably thought she was the victim of spouse abuse or something. “No, I’m really ok. Thank you…” Mara said meekly.

  The woman kept up the conversation and seemed genuinely interested in helping out. Eventually, Mara agreed to accept a ride to Ashbury from the woman, who identified herself as Anne. It turned out that Anne had a daughter who lived up that way, and that she was making a trip there anyway to visit her daughter and her newborn grand-daughter and it would be no trouble to give Mara a lift.

  It was a good thing Anne had come along. Mara wouldn’t have even been able to find her way from the unfamiliar neighborhood to Ashbury in spite of the fact she was a native of the area. The trip gave her some time to reflect and to relax. Anne chattered about uninteresting family nonsense for a while, a few references to the weather and such, but eventually quieted down when Mara responded with minimal effort.

  Mara still had the evidence – the digital recording of the conversation between Damian and Bob Danvers. She also had an appointment with someone who apparently was her brother or someone who knew an awful lot of intimate details about him to be able to identify a place like Fiddler’s Rock for them to meet. She knew she had to do something about both, but exactly what, she wasn’t quite sure. The evidence would be the only bargaining chip she held and hopefully she could use it to barter for her life, and perhaps her brother’s too – although, her mind still couldn’t accept the fact that it was actually him.

  Keeping the memory media chip on her would be dangerous. She would have to put it in a safe location where no one could find it. That presented a problem though. If no one but she knew where it was and something was to happen to her, then it would stay in its hiding place, forever keeping the ugly secrets of one Robert Edmund Danvers, Candidate for Massachusetts State Governor, safe and sound.

  The real problem was, there was no one that she could trust whom she could leave the evidence with. Besides, if the identity of that person were discovered, then they would be in danger as well. So that left… no one. Perhaps Anne, her present chauffeur? What would be her reaction to Mara’s wild tale of lies, deceit, murder and abduction? Probably to dump her off right here in the middle of nowhere and speed away wondering what she was thinking giving such a person a ride in the first place. She wound up re-considering the police, but again, she wanted to be at the seven o’clock rendezvous to find out about the tempting message from Chris. The police would likely take her into custody and hold onto her until they could straighten the whole thing out. Besides, she had already been a first-hand victim of how Mr. Danvers seemingly had control of even the police if he needed to.

  A simpler plan was forming in her mind: why not just pay someone whose job it was to take care of such things. Lawyers were supposed to be trusted, as long as you paid them. She could pay a lawyer to hold onto the evidence so she could bargain for her release from this hell. She didn’t even care at this point if they were stealing private information, she only wanted to be left alone. Eventually she decided what she must do.

  She asked Anne if she might happen to have a pen and something to write on. Once she retrieved these from a bag in the back of the car, she began to hastily write notes. She wrote down in a loose outline the events of the last week or so. She became a little more descriptive when she got to the last day, but she was explicit in details about her belief that Mr. Danvers was in control. From the beginning, there was the overheard phone conversation where she heard someone talking to “Red”. The death of her mother, again, Red – Mr. Danvers – was ultimately responsible. The systematic rerouting, decrypting and basically auctioning of private data for profit, enormous profit no doubt, and again, Mr. Danvers at the bottom of it. Then the little piece of evidence stored
on the memory media and the fact that hopefully, her story could be corroborated by Mike Ludwik and Annette Armitage of Sequitus Tech.