A/N: Ownership of...yeah...fine...whatever... You know.
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Emma O'Donnell looked at the packed bags and stacks of baby equipment near the front door and ran through her mental checklist one more time. The pile looked like something an army would assemble to invade a country, but it was merely what was necessary to travel with a small child.
Molly was asleep on the couch on her belly. She would probably wake up as Emma moved her into the car and buckled her into her car seat, but for the moment, she was peaceful. She looked so beautiful. With her blonde hair and rosy cheeks, she could have been Sam all those years ago. As it was, the two of them could be sisters. Well, decades apart sisters, anyway.
She was a bit nervous, but the note had been reassuring. She had waited patiently and, eventually, the call had come. The most confusing part was that she didn't know how long she and Molly would be away.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the ring of the doorbell, right on time. She opened it to a nice young man in a suit who began to take the luggage and baby accoutrements to the trunk of the black car at the curb.
Emma went to the couch and picked up Molly. "Come on, sweet pea. We're taking a trip." Molly mumbled some nonsense noises and snuggled tightly into her chest, still asleep. Emma walked out of the house and locked her front door, not knowing when she would be back.
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They killed Pete, threw a grenade at Sarah Walker and her husband (or fake husband), and threw him into the back of an SUV on the beach. As the truck moved away from the rented mansion, Ralph Simonson found himself in a state of profound shock. His stunned mind was trying to catch up to what had just happened to him in the last few minutes.
The woman he now knew as Sarah had warned him that these people were very, very dangerous and very bad. 'Yeah,' he thought, 'no shit.' She had tried to stop them from taking him and he was grateful for that. He sincerely hoped that she had survived the grenade blast. He couldn't bear the thought of losing another old friend in one night.
From the conversation in the truck, he could conclude that Sarah's team was pretty dangerous itself. Two members of these people's team had been gunned down by the government agents. Fully half the team in the mansion.
He was stunned not only by the events of the last few minutes, but also by the enormity of the problem he now faced. These people were taking on the entire government and were prepared to kill wantonly in pursuit of whatever crazy agenda they might have. They had killed Peter without a second thought. God knows how many had died from the grenade. They would snuff out his life without the slightest hesitation if he were no longer useful.
Useful. That was the crux of the matter. He had to be useful to them to continue breathing, and he had become quite used to breathing. He could not actually be useful to them, of course. He didn't know the first thing about decrypting encrypted computer files. Sure, he knew his way around computers, but not enough to be a superstar encryption expert. But he had to pretend to be until...well, as long as possible. Maybe he'd be rescued. Maybe they would make a mistake and he could escape. Maybe the people holding him would get bored and let him go. Maybe, maybe, maybe. In the meantime, he had to keep playing the part of Von Hayes.
"Listen," he spoke for the first time. "I have millions. I'm very rich. We can pay the ransom. It's not a problem. Whatever you need."
The woman sitting next to him with her gun pointed at his middle said, "Shut up. We don't want your money."
"But I'm..."
"Shut your mouth," she snarled and poked him in the side with the barrel of the gun.
He shut his mouth.
The SUV came off the beach after about a mile or two. Juliette, as he'd learned was her name, and her two men hustled him out of the SUV and into the back of a panel van. The van drove for an hour and fifteen minutes and entered a building of some kind.
He was taken from the van inside a garage and made to climb into the trunk of a sedan. He wasn't sure where they were, but he guessed somewhere in Queens. There were no destinations to the east of South Hampton that were that far away.
Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness he looked for the safety pull tab to open the trunk, but he couldn't find it. He felt around for a tool to use to open the trunk or, in the last resort, to use as a weapon. He found nothing.
They left him there for a long time and he dozed off. When he heard and felt the car start, he looked at his watch. It was almost 3:30 in the morning. The morning of the day after he had been taken.
The car began to move through the streets. He heard the sound of the tires change and knew there was a different road surface. 'Where are they taking me?" he thought. There was nothing to be seen inside the trunk, so he used his fingers to pry one of the taillights off and put his eyes to the hole.
He was in the Bronx on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Given the hour, traffic was very light. He considered trying to signal somehow, waving his hand out the hole, but the cars were too far away to see him.
The car kept going on the other side of the Bronx to cross the George Washington Bridge. Maybe he could signal for help at the toll booth, he thought. But then he remembered there was no toll heading west. Fuck.
He was on I-80. An hour passed on the highway and he kept watching. Another hour and he saw a sign in the other direction welcoming drivers to New Jersey. A moment later, they crossed the Delaware Water Gap. So, he was in Pennsylvania.
Almost immediately, they got off the highway and turned right, to the north. They entered a wooded area and he could see no street signs or landmarks. The people in the front of the car hadn't spoken much but he heard one of them say to the other. "Here, here. Number 37."
The car turned off the road and into a gravel driveway. One of the people in the car opened a garage door. Ralph put the taillight back into place.
The trunk popped open and Ralph squinted at the sudden light. There were two tough looking men standing there with guns pointed at him.
"I can pay you," he said, desperately. He didn't think it stood a chance of working, but it kept up the façade that he was Von Hayes, millionaire software developer.
"Shut up," one of them growled.
He did.
They took him from the garage to the basement of the house and shoved him into a room. It had a single lightbulb, recessed behind hard mesh, a bed, and a desk and chair. There was a door to one side with a toilet and sink beyond it.
The man said "Sleep." It wasn't a suggestion. Then he locked the door and left Ralph to his own devices.
He fell asleep crying for young Pete Miner. The boy was only playing a bodyguard for the con. In reality he was the gentlest man Ralph could imagine. The kind of person who would carry a spider out of his house on a slip of paper. Who would play with his young niece and nephew long past the patience of any other adult. And these motherfuckers had gunned him down without a thought.
His watch told him he'd been asleep for five hours when they woke him up.
They roughly took him upstairs to the main room of the house, a living room of sorts with a high vaulted ceiling. To one side were stairs leading up to a second floor. There were couches and easy chairs, but the only other people in the room were sitting at what appeared to be a large dining room table. Neither got up when he entered. One was the woman Juliette and the other was a swarthy man with black hair.
"You are a decryption specialist, Von Hayes." She slid a computer chip across the table at him. "Decrypt this and you get to go home to your mansion in the Hamptons. Refuse and we will begin to cut off parts of your body until you no longer refuse."
Ralph wasn't acting in the slightest when he appeared terrified. Fuck. This totally sucked.
"My dear, I have no intention of refusing. This is exactly what I do and I do it exceedingly well. You could just have hired me for a suitable fee and I would have been happy to handle this little matter for you. All these theatrics and melodrama is just not necessary."
"Necessary or not, Von Hayes, we want the chip decrypted. The sooner you can get to it, the sooner you get to walk."
"I understand," he said and stood there looking at the chip on the table. Juliette and her companion watched him. He looked back at them. Finally, he said, "I've never been kidnapped before and I'm not sure how this is supposed to go. What happens now?"
"You decrypt the chip, idiot," growled the man.
"Right. Ok. Am I supposed to do it psychically or will you give me a computer?" He turned back to Juliette and said, "Is this man the brains of the operation? Because, just my opinion, but I think you and your friends need an upgrade."
The man started to get up but Juliette put a hand on his arm to stop him. "Get him the laptop," she said to one of the men behind him, who had brought him up from the basement.
A man came over with a laptop and handed it to him. He looked at it with unconcealed disdain and said, "What's this?"
"It's your computer, asshole," said the man at the table.
Ralph threw it roughly onto the table so it bounced towards the man, "It's a piece of garbage. Why don't you just give me a piece of paper and a dull pencil. I can't do shit with something like that. I need something much, much faster. As it is this may take days to get finished. If I get something that slow we'll be buying each other Christmas presents before your precious chip is decrypted."
"Days? But at your press conference you were able to do it in a matter of minutes," she said in surprise.
"Yes, of course I was. And damn lucky that was too. Those samples had weak security and I had a very fast computer. If you and your idiot friend here are asking for my help it means you've tried all the normal decryption programs and need something special. So, give me a fast computer...really fast...then stand back. In the meantime, give me something to eat."
The man at the table stood up and pointed a gun at Ralph. He said, "Don't test me, you limey bastard. I'll be just as happy to kill you and go to the decryption specialist who was number two on the list."
"And who was that?" asked Ralph.
"Wang," said the man.
Ralph laughed. "Oh, for God's sake. Sure, use him. You'll end up with the chip even more encrypted than when you started. Just let that Neanderthal have a go."
Juliette held up a hand to stop them. "Tony, stop. Let's get him a faster computer. Where should we get one, Von Hayes? Your place by the beach? Apartment in the city? Office?"
Simonson thought of the people he had at each of those places. Friends. His girlfriend, Lise, at his apartment. The employees at the fake office. No way he was letting these trigger-happy assholes head to those places.
"Not at all necessary. Save time just by going to the nearest Buy More and picking up their top of the line fastest computer. Wherever the hell we are, there has to be a Buy More within fifty miles, I'll bet."
Juliette looked at the men standing behind Simonson and said, "Take him back downstairs to his cell and give him some food."
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It was the afternoon of the next day by the time they took him out of his cell again. There was a new man with Juliette and Tony this time around, smaller and wearing glasses. He had a computer out on the table, the packaging spread out behind it. Simonson noticed the man's own computer bag off to the side, open and with his computer gear neatly arranged.
The man turned to him. "Von Hayes, right? Ok. Here you go. This baby has an Intel QX9560 Core 2 Extreme. A quad-core processor with a clock speed of 3GHz. This sucker has an 64-bit OS architecture, which, as you know, is hard to find. It handle's a DDR3 memory up to 16GB. You're going to have to charge it. Came dead out of the box. Just so you know, obviously, no connection to the outside world. No internet."
Simonson leaned over the table and the man's shoulder studying the computer. His right hand made a sweeping dramatic gesture as he said, "Yes. This should work just fine. Might take a few days to crack it, but it will work." They didn't notice his left hand.
"So, how do you go about decrypting it? What are your first steps to get a handle on the algorithm?" asked the computer guy.
"Well, obviously, the first thing we'll have to do is establish inverse reactive current for use in the phase encabulator. Once that's done it can automatically synchronize the cardinal granmeters. By that time, I ought to have the retro-encabulator humming along nicely. Once the capacitive deractance kicks in, the modial amulite should do the trick. And then we just wait. Got it?"
The computer guy was nodding his head along with the explanation and said, "Ok. That makes sense." Simonson smiled at the man's understanding and gave him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder.
"Terrific. Alright," said Simonson. "Give me the chip. Let's get this over with. The food here is terrible. You know, the least you could do is give me a good bottle of scotch."
Juliette said, "Take him back to his cell. And give him a bottle of scotch."
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The door to his cell closed. Simonson put down the computer on the desk and plugged it in. He wasn't sure how much time he had, so he had to act fast. As the computer powered up, he inserted the PC card modem he had palmed from the computer guy's bag. Turning the otherwise airgapped computer into a connected computer was his only way to get a message out.
When he got to the internet, he went immediately to his personal email account and pulled up Sid Gold's email address.
Sid,
Get this message to Sarah Walker asap. My life depends on it. Tell her I'm being held in a private house in PA just north of I-80 just past the Delaware Water Gap. House number 37. Chip is here.
He thought about what she and her team might need to know, and continued his message.
At least 5 armed, four men and a woman. I'm in a basement cell. Gravel driveway. Attached garage. At least two stories plus the basement. I can see trees out the windows when I'm upstairs. The bastards killed Petey Miner, Sid.
Ralph
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The next morning the door burst open and the angry captor named Tony burst inside. He pulled Ralph off the bed and threw him to the floor. "WHERE IS IT?" he screamed.
Ralph said, "Where you left it, asshole." Which earned him a kick in the side.
"Where's the PC card you stole yesterday?"
"I didn't steal shit. I have no idea what you are talking about," Simonson yelled right back at him.
As Tony pulled Simonson off the floor, Simonson dropped the PC card into Tony's jacket pocket. Tony quickly frisked Simonson and found nothing.
"Search the room," said Tony, pushing Simonson against the wall and keeping him pinned there with one hand.
Simonson said, "Don't disturb the computer, guys. It's running the decryption program." The computer was on and did seem to be running a program of some sort. Of course, the fact that it was continually calculating prime numbers wouldn't be known for quite some time. And certainly not to these bozos.
The two men searched the small cell and found nothing. Tony glared at the man he knew as Von Hayes. "I don't trust you, Von Hayes."
Simonson grabbed at the man and scuffled with him for a moment or two, only to be punched twice hard in the stomach. He collapsed to the floor, retching.
The men left the room and locked the door behind them.
On the floor, Simonson's grimace of pain turned into a grin as he moved the PC card up to his face and looked at it. He gave it a soft kiss and put it back into his pocket.
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A/N2: Since September 2001, new cars are required to have a glow in the dark pull tab to open the trunk from the inside for exactly Ralph's situation. The Fulcrum agents, being experienced at kidnapping, removed the cable before putting Ralph in the trunk.
A/N3: We all know that in the fictional world of Chuck, Mr. Bartowski is the tech-whisperer. Give him a techie question and wait for brilliance to be on display. In the real world, we have an equivalent. Steelejay. He is the man I turn to to help me have my characters make smart techie things happen. Thank you again my friend. Without you I'd be reduced to describing things as magic and that's simply the wrong fandom.
A/N4: What do you guys think?