Edited previous chapter for a name problem, then hammered out another. Thanks, as ever, for reading and reviewing. Means a lot.
25: Outside Chance
Wichita, Kansas, at the Bide-a-Wee Inn-
No… not a taxi at all, but an unmarked patrol car; sleek navy blue, with all of its sirens and lights tucked inside. A late-model Ford Interceptor, Alan decided. It purred up to the kerb as he sat there struggling to master a rebellious stomach, weak with relief and departing tension.
He was perched on a lower, rust-eaten step of the motel stairway, watching a distant storm pound the eastern horizon. Above him a neon sign flickered and spat, attended by hovering bugs. A gusty wind stirred up the paper and dust all around him, mussing his hair and the moths. He'd just been shot at, Al realized woodenly. Shot at and missed… but only just barely.
The prowl-car rolled to a stop as close as its driver could bring it. With a sharp clicking sound that made Alan jump, its doors unlocked. Probably, he should have run, or at least stood up, but right then he hadn't the strength. It was a weird feeling, just only not being dead. Especially as there was something about the hard face that he'd glimpsed in the muzzle flash. Something familiar.
A window sighed down on the driver's side, jarring Alan out of his scab-plucking thoughts.
"Get in the car, Tracy," ordered a harsh and very sharp voice. Detective Bowdrie, Alan guessed, though faint thunder, traffic noise and the Ford's engine combined to disguise it a bit. "Hurry up. Meter's running, and God knows who else is planning to take a crack at you."
Rubber-legged, Alan got to his feet. He felt lurchingly sick, and wished now that he'd bought some mints instead of those M&Ms. This was no chocolate-and-peanut dilemma. This was a cold-beer-and-pizza, circle-the-wagons emergency.
Because he didn't know what else to do, Alan wobbled his way down the last few hollowly-ringing steps, across the sidewalk and parking lot to the waiting police car. The door handle clicked solidly in his grip, and the door itself swung open with mass and authority. Nice "feel", that Interceptor. Well designed and constructed.
Nodding to himself, Alan half swung, half collapsed onto the rear bench seat. Air conditioning, coffee fumes and muted radio chatter greeted him, as did Lieutenant Branson's impassive face. The man was craned around sideways in the forward passenger seat, but Detective Bowdrie was only a pair of suspicious dark eyes in the rear-view mirror.
Alan scooted further within, shut the door and then fastened his seat belt, not feeling much love. Didn't seem very much safer in here than it had out in the motel parking lot, but some sort of polite response was probably called for, even so.
"Uh… thanks. For chasing that guy away, I mean. I appreciate it."
"No problem. We hate like hell to lose a perfectly good suspect. Besides, the captain's gonna want a statement. Lord knows nobody around here'll have seen nuthin'. They never do."
The car reversed, and then did a slick three-point turn, while moth-spattered lights and blank, curtained windows reeled all about them. Alan shut his eyes, but that only brought the face back. The face… and a sudden lightning-flash of memory.
"That's him!" Alan cried urgently. "The driver of the grey Caddie that almost ran me into the side of a truck! I could swear it's the same guy!"
"Yeah. About that," said Bowdrie, glancing at Alan's reflection in the rear-view. "Belk Street got tore up pretty bad, and we got positive ID on a vehicle that drove onto the sidewalk, wrecking half a block of meters and road signs. Ford Mustang, rented out to you, later found abandoned outside of town. Any comments?"
Alan felt nervous laughter welling up inside of him. With considerable force, he replied,
"Not without a lawyer, I don't! Think I'm stupid, or something? Geeze-louise, you guys don't give up!"
Branson just sat there, quietly staring, and that made Alan uneasy, as did the holstered gun visible just inside the man's unbuttoned suit jacket. Bowdrie meditatively shifted an unlit cigarette around his mouth. Signaling a right turn, he pulled into traffic.
"Yeah," he said. "We're kinda stubborn, all right. Comes with being a cop. Don't think you're stupid, though. No stupid guy gets this much upheaval accomplished so quick, family elimination-wise. Greedy and impatient… hell, yeah. Stupid, no. Come to find out, you got another relative dropped off the map kinda sudden-like," Bowdrie mused, taking a red light with a single, bored flash of his siren and flashers.
"That astronaut feller, John. The observatory number I got from the International Astronomical Society's a wash. No answer… and he ain't taking calls on the internet, neither. Feel talkative, yet? I'm divorced. I got all night."
"How about you just take me back to the hospital, Bowdrie. I don't have to sit here and take this, and I'm not making any statements without a lawyer present!"
The events of the last few days were starting to peck and circle like buzzards, leaving Alan pretty well heated. His angry words didn't affect Bowdrie much, though. Instead of being mad, the detective's voice got that nasty smirk back in it.
"Nah… I guess you don't have to take my questions, come down to the station… or get safe conduct back to the hospital. And I could always cancel the APB we put out on that gunman… unless you want to tell us what went wrong with your sweet little plan, and who's trying to kill you. Think it over, Tracy. All I want is some answers."
"I don't have any!" Alan shouted, ready to leap right out of another slow-moving car. "People are shot up and missing, my dad's had a stroke, and someone keeps trying to finish me off, but instead of helping out, all you can think of to do is try backing me into a cell? I didn't do anything wrong, Bowdrie! Someone's probably having a real good laugh watching you make an idiot out of yourself accusing me, while they keep on picking off Tracys! Way to go, jacktard! Real professional!"
In the rear-view mirror, Detective Bowdrie's dark eyes narrowed, while strips of head-light glow drifted across his face.
"Got a name for that someone, or is all this talk just a smoke-screen? Me, I say you wanted dad's money, quicker than the old man felt like doling it out. So you hired some people to make things happen; only they got out of control. Started to blackmail you, maybe. You got worried and tried to back out… threatened to come clean and bring in the cops, and now your former associates are gunning for you."
He checked, from time to time, to see the effect his story was having on Alan. Quite a trick, while weaving through late-night traffic.
"Can't say I blame you for being worried. Some of them abandoned grain elevators are pretty old and forgotten. You could hide a body right nicely, down in the corn a ways. Wouldn't even have to kill 'em first. Just let 'em suffocate. Who's gonna notice?"
Alan's blue eyes widened to take up most of his pale, battered face.
"What're you, like… a True Crime Network addict? For real, do you guys stay awake all night, thinking up murder plots and then figuring out who to pin them on? Dudes: seek… help! Meds and assistance are available, 24/7!"
"We didn't think up a thing," said Branson, speaking for the first time that night. By this time, they'd reached the hospital's brightly-lit emergency entrance and ambulance dock.
"But if the shoe fits, Mr. Tracy, we're going to plant you under the jail, so deep the Chinese'll be digging you up. This is Kansas, Mr. Tracy. Cops in this town don't play, and we don't bow and scrape to names or big money. Keep that in mind, while you're figuring out what to do next."
Right. Alan got out of the car so hurriedly that he almost fell down again. He was nauseous and shaking, but too empty of stomach to spew. Almost as an afterthought, he realized that he hadn't brought Gordon back any food.
Well… there was always the hospital snack-bar, unlucky or not, and maybe he could find a way to hide the wrappers and sack. One thing was for certain, though; Alan Tracy had no intention of setting foot outside the confines of Wichita General Hospital. Gordon could dang well fend for himself.
XXX
Broken Bow, Nebraska, at a small Tracy Aerospace branch office-
In the first few minutes after Peyton's retreat, John immersed himself deep in his bootlegged dark-net. Using trace route programs and packet-sniffers along with hundreds of cell phone wiretaps, he mapped out an extensive 4-D network of contacts; finding evidence of hacking from within the company and… most concerning of all… a quietly propagating countdown.
See, conspirators had to talk to each other in real-time. That was a given. Mostly, they called each other using disposable pre-paid cell phones, or tweeted and texted through "encrypted" PDAs. Not hard to trace, once you'd teased out a strand of the web. But they'd managed to do the same thing, it looked like; sinking deep and dangerous roots into Tracy Aerospace, threatening business and financial networks worldwide, if Burning River got loose.
This took about thirty seconds to work out. Then, John began looking into that bothersome countdown. As near as he could figure, upon diminishing to zero, the program was set to dial a butt-load of phone numbers; calling Al Jenkins, Gordon Tracy, Cindy Taylor, the Manhattan corporate office, Wichita General ICU, the farmhouse up in Kansas, and an unregistered cell phone which had been mailed to Tracy Island.
His first thought, on learning all this, was: bombs. His second, after a quick, blinking reassess, was: Oh, shit.
John was not very close to his emotions; they tended to register, if at all, as physical symptoms. Right now, he was experiencing a cold tightening of the gut that somebody else would have called fear. He was afraid. Not for himself, though his situation was certainly dangerous. No… he'd paid his money and climbed right onto the ride; he'd take whatever was coming. It was the rest of the folks he was worried about. Almost frantically so, to judge from a surprisingly elevated pulse rate.
Okay. John took several very deep breaths and shoved all those meat-space sensations away. Too distracting. Take away faces. Erase names and associations, even. See them as nodes to be walled off and defended. Just like a game, really. He liked games very much. Played them all day, when not helping direct missions.
Call this one Blockade, and assign each enemy-tagged node a separate, random color. Then begin strategizing.
The countdown might be choked off, but the other player could still call through, triggering long-distance death of the contacted node. That would be bad. Better to get in there, somehow, figure out which frequency the tag-bombs operated on, and then either block their reception or upload Ice-9. Send it out through the tags and then back to whoever had called each node, shutting his opponent down.
Of course, that sort of assault went both ways. If the other player was any good, he'd figure out where the trouble had originated. Might already have done so, in fact, given player 2's depth of presence in the corporate system. If he did know, he'd launch a counterattack, no doubt before John had a chance to pull the plug or reach the damn door. But that's what made the game interesting, right?
"Okay, mister," John murmured, hitting a key. "Let's see how good you are."
XXX
Elsewhere-
The sort-of voice held a whisper of familiarity, although it contained neither timbre nor accent. Still, all of a sudden, Jeff knew whom he'd sensed.
'Penny?' he yearned in the other's direction. 'It's Jeff. Are you all right? Where are you? What's happened? I'm at the hospital, still… I think.'
Came the far-away response,
'I'm… not certain, Jeff. I believe that I was returning from an operation in Whitehall… motoring along a little-used side street, when something exploded beneath the vehicle. Since then, I have been trapped and unable to waken, though at times I've heard others.'
'Was Parker with you?' Jeff probed. He was almost too worried to wait for her answer, concerned that someone would sense their connection and shatter it.
'In the motorcar, yes. Now, I do not know. You are the first friend I have encountered in this place, Jeffery. What shall we do to escape it?'
Out in the real world, blessed with his own physical body and confronted with hers, Jeff would have placed an arm about Lady Penelope's shoulders and told her a gallant, comforting lie. Now, though… under these circumstances… he could not hide his own worry. Emotion and thought were all of him, now. He could conceal nothing, and neither could she.
'I'm not sure, Penny… unless we can somehow fight back against whatever's got us locked up.'
Sounded good, anyway. The question was: how to go about it? And when would their captor's attention shift back?
XXX
Princeton, New Jersey, in a triple-locked basement lair-
Fielding wasn't much to look at on the outside. Just a pudgy, hoodie-and-jeans-wearing ex convict who sometimes delivered pizzas for a shot at receipts and credit card numbers.
People who knew him would have shrugged if you asked them about the reclusive hacker, saying, "Ah, he's okay. Kinda weird… but who isn't? Live and let live, y'know?"
…Mostly because he was quite clever at hiding the extra charges on all of their credit accounts. All that was exterior, though. Unimportant. Inside, he seethed with hatred, contempt and resentment. Loved nothing except his hand-built computer; often going without sleep for so long that he began to hallucinate wildly.
In particular, he hated John Tracy, a privileged golden boy hacker who never got caught, never faltered and always detected Fielding's little inroads into the Tracy Aerospace intranet. Till now, that is.
It made Shr3ddr (his preferred, often tinkered-with handle) almost dizzy with glee to think that he had that rich, pampered jackass right in the palm of his hand. That, finally, he'd run John Tracy to ground.
Fielding leaned back from his long, curving bank of computer screens. Putting a sandaled foot out, he kicked the cement floor several times, setting his workstation chair to rocking and spinning. Felt like that chick in the Sound of Music; in love with the whole frickin' world.
"Question," he called aloud, to the stacked, moldy pizza boxes and their scuttling arthropod occupants.
"Why did the big, mean cracker-guy cross the road to Nebraska and kill him a slimy blond worm? Answer," he giggled, rubbing at sleepless red eyes and his moist, greasy face,
"For the lulz!"