Chapter 5 - Jane

We stayed another night at the hospital before getting up early and making our way back to the house with Gerald in tow. Jackson sat aloof in the back seat with his arms crossed tightly across his chest and staring fixedly out of the tinted and reinforced passenger window. Detective Daniels insisted on coming with us and sat up front in the passenger seat. I’d found out after the accident that Jackson was right.

Daniel’s had become suspicious after our meeting at the police station and made a spur of the moment decision to follow us. He was convinced that we had something to do with mom’s disappearance. He was two cars behind us when he saw the van smash into the passenger side of the Explorer and flip it onto its roof. His side arm was still locked in a biometric safe in the glove box, but his service shotgun was holstered with its butt in the cup in the back seat. He issued the proper warnings to the men and when one reached into his waist band he took the shot. He took a second one into the wind shield when it looked like they were going to try to angle the van at him. At this point, he was fairly convinced that we weren’t in on whatever was going on, but that we were still in the middle of it. Like us, he wanted answers.

A few minutes later we pulled into the driveway in Gerald’s original Hummer H1. As we came up to the house we could see the door was open. The place had been tossed. It was thorough and professional. All of the contents of the cabinets and dressers were set into neat piles on the floor. The love seat was set backside down and the fireplace guard was folded and leaning against the brick off to one side. The whole scene sent the message: This isn’t personal. You’ve got something I need and I have a job to do. It made a chill run up my spine when I weighed that against the other message we’d received from the black Econoline.

“Anyone you know?” I said with an arch look at the detective.

“It’s a professional job alright. But I don’t think it was us. I hope it wasn’t us because I didn’t hear anythin’ about it and that would mean someone’s pullin’ strings in the department. This wasn’t authorized or reported and whatever you might think, I wasn’t keepin’ you guys sittin’ out there as some kinda power play. Crime scenes are a bitch and a half to work through, organize, and make sense of. I needed as much information as I could to ask the right questions, which is the job.”

I held his gaze for a moment longer before nodding. Whether I was agreeing with his statement, accepting his apology, or just acknowledging that I’d heard him, I couldn’t say.

Mom’s ID badge was still sitting on the bar along with more odds and ends stacked up next to it. Jackson had walked over and was holding it by the lanyard in his hand, staring at mom’s picture. He blinked quickly, clearing his throat, and put the badge into his pocket.

Gerald moved to the kitchen and was casually pulling lunch meats and cheeses from the refrigerator and quickly creating a small mountain of sandwiches. “First rule in the army is eat when you can and I know hospitals have jack all for edible food. Eat up.” He pointed the butter knife with mayo at the heaped plate. We didn’t exactly dog pile the plate but we weren’t shy about it either. I sat down on the floor in front of the stairs with a ham sandwich in one hand and a turkey in the other, half gone. I leaned my head back on the wall and my eyes stared, unfocused as I ate.

Every three steps or so on the stairs there was a picture hanging on the wall. The first was of me and Jackson. We were maybe a year old. I was in an awkward downward dog pose with my head touching the ground and looking between my straightened legs back at the camera, my hair was blond and wispy then. Jackson was standing at a sing along play table with a pacifier in his mouth and his distinctive blue helmet on his head with Kansas University Jayhawks stickers on both sides. It made him look like a tiny linebacker. Even in the picture you could tell he had three or four pounds on me. The next were a series of one or both of us celebrating milestones. The time I won a science award from an academic contest sponsored and run by MIT. Jackson’s Akido and Jui Jitsu belt testing and awards and some of the knives and armor he’d made with dad. My 1st place sharpshooter awards in the pistol and distance shooting. I was mediocre at best in tactical gunfu but I was hell on wheels if you gave me a little time and space. There was one with the both of us in it winning an national contest against the top ranked team in raiding a particular dungeon in a popular MMORPG. It was a speed run to see who could complete it in the fastest time and the crowd was simply electric. The last one was Jackson standing in front of the wall of awards for archery. He was a bona fide prodigy with the ranged weapon and it tickled dad to death when he brought him out LARPing with him. Just last month he had qualified for the Youth Olympic Games this Spring. He went for it this year because the games would be held in Los Angeles and he’d be able to afford to go if he qualified.

While we ate, Gerald came to stand in front of us and put his finger to his lips. He went through every room of the house, unplugging everything electronic. He even pulled out the fridge and then went into the garage where I heard the sounds of things moving. He walked outside for a few minutes and came back in. After that he moved to each of us and pulled out his cell phone, miming for us to hand ours to him. We did. You couldn’t remove the batteries, but he pulled out what looked to be a lead bread box and dumped the phones inside before closing the lid. Out of a desert brown backpack he pulled out what looked like a hand radio and turned it on. There was a slight distortion that quickly went out of hearing range.

“Radio jammer.” His voice filled the stillness. Reaching into the bag, he brought out new phones and handed them out. “You know the protocol. Only the names on the contact list, and only if its urgent.” He looked at each of us, even detective Daniels until we nodded. “All right. I’ve gotten wind of some big movers in the wings. I don’t know what’s going on, but for them to be acting this boldly, its a big deal. All of the clues are adding up to a big boy in Prometheus Corporation who’s looking for something and they thought Susan had it.”

“‘Thought Susan had it’?” Daniels murmured around a mouthful of sandwich.

“Yeah. Thought. If she had what they wanted they wouldn’t have needed to lean on the police department to get the family out of the house and then toss the place. Whoever this is they’ve got enough sway to move organizations like puzzle pieces. Whatever it was they were looking for, they didn’t find it here either, unless they’re pro’s.”

“What do you mean?” I asked this time.

“There was never a point where they stopped searching the place. They went over everything. You should see the garage. If they’d found what they were looking for there would’ve been a clear point in time where they packed things up and left.”

“Unless they found what they wanted and kept searching to give the impression that they didn’t find anything.” Detective Daniels pointed out.

“My point exactly. That’s exactly what they would do if they were hard cases. But even still, I don’t think so. Something like this is a delicate job. There are people driving by in the street, mail men, joggers. There’s a lot of opportunity for someone to catch them tossing this house and call it in. Or you guys could have come back early. My gut tells me they didn’t find what they were looking for. Whatever it is, they wanted it bad. They never stopped looking until they’d gone through everything.”

“So. What does that mean for us?” I swallowed my food a little more forcefully than necessary.

“It means we go into bug out mode. We fall back on one of our safe houses and keep our heads down. If they haven’t found what they were looking for, it means we’re all in danger. Jane. I need you to go in there and check those capsules over with a fine toothed comb.”

“What? Why?” I’d filled him in on the lottery and the delivery of the capsules while Jackson was in recovery.

“I’m guessing there’s some nasty programming in the code and it’s probably bugged as well. There aren’t many people with the kind of sway needed to pull all of this off and the top of the list is Prometheus. It’s easily within their power to push these kind of buttons. This just feels too easy. They handed those things over without batting and eye. Won a lottery? None of you knew about it? Give me a break. I’d rather just leave the rigs here, but I think they might be just the key we need to figure out what’s going on and who’s behind it. But, in order for it to work we need to out maneuver the enemy, and that means cleaning up those rigs.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I nodded and went into the room and plugged my laptop into the capsule with a cable. I started running some programs that looked like nothing more than a series of coded lines rapidly flashing across the screen. I could hear them still talking in the living room.

“How are the Immersion Rigs going to help us find who did this to mom?” Jackson had finally finished his sandwiches and I heard him sprawl out on the love seat. He still seemed sullen, but at the mention of mom his voice became more animated.

“We’ll get into that when we’re secure. The jammer should’ve done the trick but we can’t be afford to be sloppy.”

The doorbell rang a few minutes later and I left the programs to run and came out to the living room. I’ll be damned if Gerald didn’t pull a Desert Eagle from the sticky holster at his hip and walk to the door. The man was built like an Olympian which is the only way he was able to hide the thing. If his shirts weren’t fitted, it made him look like a barrel on legs. My heart beat a little faster. He used a mirror to look through the peep hole while standing behind the steel reinforced door he’d installed himself. This was getting so 007. My inner Bond girl squealed. He nodded to himself and put away the gun and the mirror and swung the door open.

A young man and a woman stepped inside. She was wearing a soft vintage long sleeve baseball shirt in white and pink with a camo-pink baseball cap and off white Capri's with thonged sandals. He was casual in boot cut jeans, black T-shirt and a baseball cap with an axe-wielding orc embroidered on the front and worn tennis shoes. They looked like teenagers our age. I looked closer. Past their care-free smiles I saw eyes made from blue diamond and cold gray steel.

“Jackson—Jane. These are a couple of associates of mine. This is Jackson.” He pointed at the young man. “And this is Jane.” He gave us each a pointed look. “They’re going to be staying here in your place while we get to the hard point. Anything happens and these two are going to handle it. They’re trouble shooters. If trouble comes around. They shoot it. Jane. I activated that program you coded for me last year. All records, including driver’s licenses and everything electronic with your information has been updated with their pictures and descriptions. Social media profiles have been scrubbed and the one’s we’ve had simulating activity have been activated in their place.” He turned to the couple. “Did you bring them?”

Jackson—Oh who am I kidding. I can’t call him that. He’s going to be… Krul and she’s going to be Blondie. She had the hair dyed right, but she missed the eyebrows. A little secret here; we always miss the eyebrows. Krul gave Gerald a put upon look.

“Alright. Back it into the garage.”

Krul left and I heard a motor start up as Gerald opened the garage door and hit the opener. He turned to me.

“How’s that debugging coming along?”

“Crap!” I ran back into the room and pulled up the data file. I whistled loudly and I could hear a small crowd gather in the doorway behind me.

“What’s up?” Daniels asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with the coding. I mean. It’s all Greek to me. I’ve never seen anything like this, but I know what virus’s and back doors look like and this thing is clean. Too clean.”

“What do you mean, ‘too clean’”? Gerald came to stand next to me, leaning in. My breathing picked up. Oh, god. He could probably tell. He was like, Jason Borne or something. They had their senses ratcheted up to the nth degree. I turned my attention back to the program.

 “When you code, everyone has their own style—kind of like a signature and you tend to use the same shortcuts and work arounds for complicated maths. This is something altogether different. This thing reads like a Nobel Prize Laurette’s Magnum Opus on coding. There’s stuff in here that would revolutionize algorithms and change the landscape of coding for decades if not centuries.”

“I thought you said it was Greek to you.” Gerald’s brows were lowered.

“I guess it means something a little different coming from me. I actually understand Greek. What I’m saying is. I know what the bad stuff looks like and how to use it to do bad things, and it’s not here. Just because I haven’t seen their scripts for immersion doesn’t mean I don’t know what malicious code looks like. This.” My chest tightened and I shook my head. “This makes me want to cry. It’s beautiful.” I paused. Taking it in. “You were right about one thing on the hardware side though.” I pulled a thin screw driver and applied it to a number of screws and came up with three tiny devices. “Here’s the bugs you were looking for. My computer was able to run a self-diagnostic on the capsule and these things stood out like a sore thumb. After that it was easy to pinpoint them on the actual hardware.”

Gerald took them, dropped them onto the wood floors and crushed them with his booted foot. “Great work Jane. Get the other one cleaned up if you would please while we load this one up.” My heart did a weird twist at his praise.

“Load it where?” Jackson asked.

Gerald just walked around to the far side of the Immersion Rig and pulled the thick pins from the hinges attaching the clamshell lid to the bottom of the capsule. Lifting it up in a smooth motion, he twisted and rested it against the wall behind him and grabbed up the bottom part of the capsule. His muscles bunched and knotted as the walked it through the doorway like a surfer heading to the beach. Oh, wow I thought, taking in the sight.

Fingers snapped in front of my face, breaking me free from my trance with a blush. Jackson shook his head as he left the room, heading for the garage.

 I set the program to scanning again and followed him to the garage. Krul was already there and pulling the tops of two large jet ski’s on a towing trailer off to reveal hidden compartments underneath. The compartments went well below the actual frame of the jet ski’s and into the trailer itself. Krul came over and wrapped the rig up in one of those thick furniture mats you find in the back of U-hauls’. It hid everything and it simply seemed like they were carrying a piece of furniture. Gerald grunted as he set one corner down into the recessed bottom while Krul helped him stabilize it and drop it in.

“One of the backup plans was to use these to smuggle people or goods or whatever we’d need.” Gerald said, wiping his forehead with his arm. “Couldn’t really know what we’d need it for so I made sure to make them big. It’s the six P’s. Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.” He said the last with a smile as he slipped back inside.

The diagnostic finished soon afterward and I grabbed up the screw driver and handed Gerald five more of the little devices which he destroyed in the same way as before. A few minutes later and we had the next capsule loaded up, along with me and Jackson in the back seat of the Avalanche that was towing the jet ski’s. Daniels sat up front in the passenger seat. Gerald threw the keys to the Hummer to Krul and Blondie before giving them a few last orders, including “don’t scratch the paint”, before jumping into the driver seat and pulling out onto the street. I looked back to see the other two smiling and waving. Blondie even bounced like a school kid. I shook my head and turned back to the front.

“So where to, Bond?” I asked with a smirk. “And whats the deal with the rigs?”

“We’re headed to the Bastille.” He tried to keep that hard demeanor but couldn’t stop a half smile from breaking though the granite of his features. “A little bird told me after a friendly conversation that those capsules from the lottery have some special role to play in the grand opening of Infinity Online. Something about special features or bonuses or something. He didn’t know specifics and trust me, he would have been more than happy to shorten our conversation.” Jackson and I both turned to look first at Gerald and then at each other at the words ‘special’ and ‘bonuses’ together in one sentence. Even Jackson broke out into a giddy grin and we high-fived each other. We sobered up quickly when Gerald reminded us about mom. “Whatever is going on. Whatever this is, I found out that it all comes back to this new game from your mom’s work. The headsets are all being delivered today and everyone who’s anyone is going to be logging in to play. The best chance we’re going to have to find answers is inside of that game. And I’m coming with you.”