Waiting for Howie to get the equipment was driving me mad. I wanted to fly out to Wilmington right away and do something. Instead, I had to content myself with planning and practicing. Planning wasn’t easy because there were so many unknowns. Were the victims kept at the Serpentine Logistics warehouse or were they sent elsewhere? How many victims were there? What kind of security was there at Serpentine? How many guards were there? Who was involved? I needed more information and the only way to get it was to go there and see.
In the meantime, all I had was an address. I went on Google Maps and looked at the satellite images of the warehouse and I used street view to study the building. The warehouse was a typical rectangular building with lots of loading docs along one side and two stories of offices along the front. The building had a large area for trucks to maneuver in and out and had enough parking for fifty cars to the side. The entire area was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence with barbed wire running along the top and the entry and exit gates had a manned guard station between them.
I zoomed out from the building and studied the neighbors and the area in general, trying to get a feel for the place. I didn’t want to waste time finding my way around when I got there. I wanted to hit the ground running. I planned my routes from the airport to the warehouse and I learned how far the closest police station was. I also looked up the chief-of-police and his contact information.
Until my equipment came in and I was able to arrange for some time to get to Wilmington, there wasn’t much else I could do. I kept up my hourly shield practice to increase my field strength and continued teaching my brain to understand the information from my field scans. I did that through more visits to the hospital and the Geology center, as well as Home Depot and Lowe’s. Those last two had a surprisingly wide variety of interesting materials.
On days that I didn’t go to Kung Fu, I’d taken to biking in R2 to release some of the tension that I was feeling. Coming back home from one of those rides, I saw that I had a missed call from Mark and I called him back.
“Hi Mark. Sorry I missed your call. What’s up?”
“Hey Abby. Thanks for getting back so quickly. I was just planning our itinerary for Spring Break and I wanted to confirm that everyone was still set on your side.”
“Eva and I are all still on, but James has a wedding that his parents are making him go to up in Montreal.”
“They have weddings in Canada? Who knew?”
“Yeah. It came as a big surprise to him too. He’s not very happy about it. They still have snow up there in March and while we’re nice and toasty on the beach, he’ll be stuck inside some igloo, snuggling up to a pack of sled dogs to keep the hypothermia away.”
“I guess Eva will have to bring him a bottle of sand to make it up to him. Anyways, I’m arranging our flights and I’ll need Eva’s full name to book her ticket.”
“I thought we were driving to Jacksonville. It’s only four hours away.”
“Change of plans. My mom said that it didn’t make sense for me to drive with you guys, spend five days and then fly to Asheville for the gem mining and then fly back to Jacksonville only to have to drive you guys back here, only for me to drive back to Jacksonville for the second week of Spring break. This way we’ll fly there, and once we’re in Ashville, we’ll take the bus back here and I’ll drive back to Jacksonville. We’ll have less time traveling and since the tickets will all be on points, it’ll be cheaper than driving.”
“My head hurts just thinking about what you just tried to explain, but I’m not going to complain about flying instead of driving.”
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“Me neither. I’m really looking forward to the break. The professors have really been piling on the work lately and I wouldn’t mind a rest. Are you excited about the trip?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. Beach and shiny rocks. How can a girl resist that?” Also, Jacksonville is only an hour away from Wilmington and Serpentine Logistics. I had already found a bus that could take me there, and I had a cover story planned out so that no one would question my absence.
True to his word, March first arrived, and Howie called to say that everything was ready. We arranged to meet up again on Saturday afternoon at the soup kitchen, where he’d show me how to work everything and I’d make the final payment. Mary cleared away some space in the storage area and set up a table for us to use.
Howie walked me through the features of my new phone and computer. I didn’t understand most of the technical aspects of it, just that it was designed by the military for incursion into enemy territory and was untraceable. Anyone trying to find out where a call I made was coming from would find that my location changed every 30 seconds. It was like having a very advanced virtual private network.
Besides the software, the phone itself was tied to a private satellite system that wasn’t accessible by any governments. Access to that satellite was where a lot of the money was going to. The company had a yearly membership rate of five thousand dollars and the basic plan was over a thousand dollars a month. What passed for basic with this company was essentially unlimited everything at over twice the speed that I was getting on my phone now and was more than enough for my needs. Their premium plan had more to do with even greater speed and with multiple users.
After that he showed me how to use the dual SIM features of the phone and which button to press to completely wipe the phone’s memory. I hoped to never have to use that. He moved on to the six external drives that would automatically copy everything on a computer or a cell phone when a user logged on or I could activate the drives manually. He’d added some high-tech decryption software, just in case I couldn’t get the passwords that I needed. Each drive was sixteen terabytes, were the size of a thin wallet and weighed almost nothing.
The programs would erase all traces of my logons and email transfers and were loaded onto thumb drives that I could plug into any server that I had administrator access to. He gave me a box of 50 and explained that they could each only be used in one computer system and needed a specific password to active the program. If I needed more, he could get them to me very quickly and a very good price, now that all the programming had been done.
For the voice changer, he gave me two solutions. One was an app on my phone that I could activate at the touch of a button and that would deactivate automatically if one of the numbers on my personal contact list called me. That way I’d never make the mistake of answering to someone I know with the voice changer on. The app let me choose from dozens of different voices, so I wouldn’t sound like one of those creepy serial killers when I called someone. There were even a few celebrities and politicians to choose from and I tried to picture the police’s reaction on getting a call from Barack Obama or Clint Eastwood.
The other solution was a voice changer that was built into a lower face mask. With this on, both my face and my voice would be hard to recognize. This voice changer worked with the phone app to adjust the voice and so I’d have many options for this as well.
Finally, he pulled out a black hoodie and presented it to me.
Eyeing the apparel quizzically, I said, “This wasn’t on my list.”
“Yes, it was. You asked for a Kevlar vest. This is better. You were probably thinking of the old-style vests that the police use, the ones with all that thick padding and that weighed a ton. This is the latest version. I chose a style that was more fitting with your age demographic. It’ll be warm during Spring and Summer, but it will protect your arms and head, if you use the hood. It weighs a fraction of what the older vests use to weigh, but it still weights more than twice what a regular hoodie would weigh. You’ve got to remember that either style of Kevlar will not protect you as much from the larger caliber bullets or from explosive tipped bullets. It’s better not be get shot in the first place.”
“This is amazing! You’ve gone beyond what I asked for on every item. Thank you!”
“I have a feeling that you’re going to put it all to good use. Besides, Mary would have my hide if I gave you anything but the best. She’s a good woman and she’s been a good friend to me when I needed one.”
We said our goodbyes and he was heading out the door when I caught up to him and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can get a small backpack parachute that can hold around 500 pounds do you?”