Where Did the Time Go? : Part XXXIII

Bonnie watched from her window as Connie got into her boyfriend's car. She waited until the car was out of sight before she returned to her bed. With what she was going to attempt, she didn't want anyone in the house who could potentially spoil it.

Her father worked with contractors, so when she saw a set of contracts sitting in his briefcase, she instantly had an idea. One of the date leapt right out at her, eliciting a narrow eyed grin. Copies of those contracts were sitting on her bed, just in case she needed to reference them.

She set a small tape recorder on her nightstand and pushed play. Generic office sounds came from the speaker, something she recorded earlier in the day while in the administrative offices of the high school.

Satisfied, she started the tape over and picked up her phone, dialing one of the numbers on the contract.

"Good afternoon." Her voice was half an octave higher than normal and she was doing her best to add a little southern twang to it. "I'm Rachael Dunforth with Middleburg County Schools. I'm Superintendent Marster's administrative assistant. I needed to speak with somebody concerning the planned floor resurfacing schedule…oh good…yes, this concerns two of our schools in Middleton…no, there's no problem except we need to switch a couple of the dates…I'm sure I don't know…I'm showing East Side scheduled to be done on May nineteenth and Middleton on June fourth…yes…well, if it's not a problem we need to simply switch the two dates…oh great, I'll let the superintendent know, thanks so much, bye."

Grinning from ear to ear, she glanced at her date book. Turning to may her eyes narrowed even more.

May nineteenth was circled heavily in pink marker.

A female figure clad entirely in black stood in the shadows on top of a building in downtown Middleton, surveying the darkened city. With a touch of a control on her wrist the stripes of her outfit glowed softly for a moment before going completely black. Carefully she pulled her hood up, making sure it covered her face completely. With another touch of the controls the hood extended over her eyes, changing into dark lenses that completely obscured her features.

As she looked over the ledge there were two bright flashes in the windows of one of the storefronts. She put one foot up on the edge, ready to jump down onto an awning directly below her, then thought the better of it.

Stepping back into the shelter of the shadows, she touched the control pad on her wrist again. The material seemed to stretch until it formed a small screen about four inches across. It lit up faintly, showing an overhead diagram of the street. Right in the middle of the building where the store was located a small red light blinked. If her eyes had not been obscured an observer would have seen them narrow. She glanced back at the street and melted deeper into the shadows.

Kim read the chronometer built into her new black super-suit one more time. She was hunched down behind the counter of the jewelry store they had staked out.

"Maybe she wasn't around tonight after all." Ron said, fiddling with the controls of his own suit. It was his first chance to wear it in the field and he still wasn't quite satisfied with it. He had been trying to make the sleeves retract to three-quarters length but so far the only thing he managed to do was drop his cargo pants. At least he wasn't wearing boxers between the suit and his pants.

"Quit fooling around, Ron. This was supposed to be too good a target for her to pass up." Kim reached into the pouch on her hip and pulled out her royal blue Mark II Kimmunicator. "Wade, are you sure you put the rumor out?"

"I did as much as I could, Kim. There's only so much rumor I can spread in the criminal underworld, but it should have looked like somebody was planning a heist there tonight."

She frowned as she looked at the screen. She checked the unit when they suited up for the mission and again when they set up their little sting. It was fully charged both times, yet as she turned the screen on to talk to Wade the meter suddenly dropped from full to three quarters then to half before stabilizing.

"Wade, I thought you fixed this thing." She griped, popping it against her palm with no effect.

"I couldn't find anything wrong with it. Is the charge dropping again?"

"Yeah, it suddenly dropped by half, right while I was talking to you."

The twelve year-old genius shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. Just to be sure I replaced all the internals, then let it sit on my desk powered up. It took a whole week before it even dropped one bar."

"I just took it off the charging dock before I left the house. It should have had a full charge."

"Kim, I'm sorry, but I'm just completely stumped by it. Like I said, I replaced everything inside it. The only thing I reused was the casing itself, and it's just high-impact plastic. There's literally nothing inside there that could be causing a power drain and that's the third set of batteries I've put in it. I've got the other two sets right here and they're still reading perfect."

"Grrrr. We're missing something."

Ron leaned back against the wall. "Kim, it's been an hour. If she was going show I think she would have done it when we set the flash-bangs off."

"Yeah. Give it five more minutes and we'll call this off and hit BN for a midnight snack Baby."

"Badical." He grinned. Kim was absolutely sure she heard Rufus squeak 'Naco' from his vantage point at the front window.

"Well, I'm glad the owners of this place were willing to help us anyway." She said, turning her Kimmunicator off before the batteries could die completely.

"They were just happy you helped them when that guy ran off with that forty-five thousand dollar necklace."

Kim shrugged. "It was no big. Anybody could have tripped him as he ran down the sidewalk."

Ron's facial features scrunched up like he was deep in thought. After a couple minutes he pulled his own Kimmunicator out and punched send. "Wade, there's never been in problem with mine has there?"

Wade shrugged. "No. That's what's bothering me. If there was something fundamentally wrong with the design it should have shown up in yours and mine as well."

"So there's no difference except mine's silver?"

"None whatsoever. The only functional difference is when I key in the specific transponder so I can tell the units apart, but that's just a tiny toggle switch on the circuit board. It's a standard component that's been used for years with no problem."

"The paint?" Ron asked.

Wade shook his head. "If I was going to blame something like that, I'd look at yours first since there's a metallic component to the finish."

Kim frowned, her own forehead scrunching up in thought. "What if it's not the hardware?"

"I don't see how the software could do anything. You've got the same stuff running on it that you've used since I gave you the Mark IIs. Even that's fundamentally the same as you had on the Mark I, with just a couple bios changes for the newer hardware. If that was the problem it should still be showing up on Ron's since the only real difference there are the extra ring-tones I downloaded for him."

"Waitaminute Wade. The last time you sent it back to me, my homework was still in the memory."

"Sure. I uploaded the whole thing into a virtual Kimmunicator in my mainframe so you wouldn't lose any important data."

"So everything that was in it before was put right back into it." Ron cut in.

"Right. Phone numbers, personal notes, Kim's online diary…I swear, Kim, I haven't even peeked since you caught me when I was ten." His eyes suddenly got wide. "Kim, turn yours back on."

"Okay." She hit the power button. The charge was still reading half, but after a moment it dropped one more bar.

"Just hope it holds out for another few seconds…there, I've got a clone of it's entire memory running in the virtual Kimmunicator."

Kim shut her unit back off and scooted close to Ron. Wade was working furiously at his keyboard, more so than usual.

"Wow." He said, leaning away from a keyboard that by all rights should have had smoke coming from it.

"What wow?" They both chorused back at him, neither of them even thinking about calling jinx.

"Whoever wrote this virus is a near master. If they hadn't made a couple mistakes we'd have never found it."

"What, Wade?" Kim asked, her full attention rooted to the tiny screen.

"I still haven't figured out how this got in there, but there is a hidden shell program designed to make the Kimmunicator broadcast a low-yield signal even when it's turned off. I'd have a hard time detecting the signal unless I was actually looking for it and then it only broadcasts about five feet in radius."

"Low-yield signal, got that part." She glanced at Ron, who nodded as well.

"That's where they goofed. There's a glitch in their code that's causing a huge power drain on the batteries. It's a good thing I switched to Quadra-lithium batteries in this model. The old tri-lithium ones would have overheated to the point they would have burned right through the casing. One or two lines of code and the battery drain would have been so negligible we'd have never known to look for it."

"You're still not telling us what it did." Kim fussed.

"Here's the scary part. Remember when I gave you two the new locator chips?"

"Yeah."

"They work on a passive signal system. They don't actively broadcast constantly like the originals. I was afraid somebody would stumble onto the signal and learn how to track you without you even knowing it."

"Go on." Kim prompted.

"The new ones only broadcast your locator signal when they are charged by a certain energy frequency. That's the signal your Kimmunicator has been giving off."

"So somebody besides you has been tracking me." Kim's features were etched with concern.

"Looks that way." He touched a control on one of his auxiliary keyboards. "Okay, I just killed your tracking chips. They're completely deactivated and by morning your bodies will have absorbed them. I'll get to work on some new ones on another frequency and I should have them to you by tomorrow. I still want you to drop your unit off with me so I can completely blank the memory. I'll isolate the virtual one until I can figure out how it got into it." He paused for a moment. "Ron, that was a good call, thinking about what made the two units different."

He half-smiled. "That was nothing. It was you and Kim who figured out it was the program thingy."

"No Ron." Kim said, laying a hand on his arm. "It was all three of us working as a team. One idea led to the other but it was your idea that put us on the trail."

"I'm going to get to work. You two have a good night, what's left of it." Wade said as he signed off.

"You too, Wade. You rock." Kim reached across and turned it off. "I don't know about you, Ronnie, but I've so got a craving for some Mucho Caliente Cheesidillas."

Rufus hopped onto the counter above them. "Uh huh." He squeaked.

"Sounds badical to me, KP." He held out his hand and she hauled him up. "Aw, man, now I've got flat-butt." He rubbed his behind after sitting on the hard floor for so long.

"Let me see." She made a show of manually inspecting the aforementioned body part. "Nope, feels fine to me." She gave him a light pat as they headed for the door.

"I dunno, KP, still feels might flat, maybe you need to check again." He leered at her. "I'll buy you a Grande-sized cheesidilla."

Kim grinned at him, putting her hand on her hip. "Very funny. You don't have to pay for anything at BN."

He held up his palms. "Can't blame a guy for trying?"

She finished locking the door and reset the alarm, then gave him a little pinch on his behind. "There, re-inspection done."

"Hmmm. I think you got a little flat-butt sitting on that floor too." He gave her a pinch right back, which was more effective since literally all she had on was the super-suit itself.

She turned around and pinched him right back, which was followed by him trying to pinch her again. Kim laughed out loud, skipping ahead of him while he made little crab pinchers with his fingers, chasing her the rest of the block. She finally let him catch up to him, wrapping an arm around his lower back.

"I'm so not going in dressed like this." She said. "Maybe I should wear my cargos over it too."

"Nah, that'd spoil the scenery." He craned his neck back to look at her 'scenery.'

"Eyes front, soldier. We're still using the drive-thru."

"Cool. I…" He stopped and looked around.

"What is it, Ron?"

"What if the suit-thief was tapping into the tracking chip signal?"

She let out a little gasp. "Then she knew I was in there waiting for her. Ron, you are a genius. That's why this went bust tonight." She started walking, taking big strides this time toward the nearby lot where his car was parked. "Come on, I've got an idea."

He followed, hoping that idea wasn't going to sidetrack their planned stop at Bueno Nacho.

Kim Possible and all related characters © Disney