“Confessions” Serial, Tech Wars 4
Zoltan was a wealthy man. He had made a fortune from various criminal activities, and the thing that made him so successful was that he never ever gave up. Had he turned to more honest work, he would doubtless still have succeeded. Unfortunately, some little gremlin in his psyche had him accept the challenge of succeeding against the odds, even though one slip-up may mean many years locked away. So far that slip had not occurred, but right now he was as frustrated as he had ever been. Those goddam nerds had made him look foolish and he didn’t like that at all.
He sent Zjolt instructions in New York. The following day The New York Times published a photo of Brett on the second page, culled from the Namibian drone video, accompanied by a heartbreaking story saying how he had been injured in Africa and had completely lost his memory. He had been treated in a tiny hospital in Angola, but after a few weeks of treatment he had disappeared. Meanwhile, because of his distinctive American accent, his photo had been circulated with the authorities in the United States. His wife, who had been searching for him, saw his photo and arranged to fly to Luanda, the capital of Angola. Sadly, he had completely disappeared just days before his wife could get to the hospital.
A year had gone by before a family friend had excitedly contacted his wife and said that she was certain that she had seen Brett get on a subway in New York, so the paper was printing the story in the hope that someone would know where Brett was living and contact his wife. It was a cleverly written article and even a couple of the TV networks had picked it up. Dozens of sightings were reported, mostly mistaken, but after three days the woman hired to play Brett’s wife was given a real lead.
An elderly man called the “wife” to say that he was certain that her missing husband was living in a low-rise apartment in the Treadwell District of New York on 62nd Street, between Second and Third Avenue. He had recognized the man from the published photo and had seen him leave a specific building a few times, cross the road to his coffee and donut stall and eat a hurried breakfast before heading downtown.
• • •
Arthur waded into the Russian River on the edge of his favorite pool. The red salmon should be running now. He expertly cast his line into the deepest point near the far edge of the pool and let the fly drift on the surface. It had been an intense few days with the tech team, and he was confident the glitch had been resolved. Now he could set up the launch over the next few weeks. He was still anxious about the Hungarian group and their obvious determination to steal his new development if they could. The fact that they had been prepared to use guns in Namibia meant that they were way beyond any form of negotiation.
He and Brett had discussed the situation in great detail when they met in Venice Beach. It was decided that the actual venue of the launch would remain a secret until the last possible moment. It could be built up to create maximum intrigue and excitement in the Supply Chain industry. Brett would hire a strong team of security guards. Ideally, if Brett could locate and nail the bad guys before then, the situation would be more easily resolved.
There was something else that worried Arthur. Over the many years he had been involved in the computer industry, he had constantly come up against barriers which he felt should never have been there in the first place. Many of the computer techies regarded these problems as a challenge and enjoyed finding their way around them. Few if any thought about resolving the problems; they just fought their way through or around them. Arthur had tried to simplify the major problem which was the massive programming required to make even the smallest changes. This had grown steadily worse over the years and Arthur sometimes wondered if computing would finally become self-defeating.’
Suddenly, all thoughts of computing disappeared, as a large salmon took the fly. His line dipped under the surface of the pool, and he felt the fish on the other end. The game was on!
Amanda approached her boss carrying a picnic hamper and smiled as she watched him jousting with the fish. She had worked for Arthur for more than three years, and he was more like a father than a boss. She was relieved that he had his fishing to take his attention off the stresses of the computing industry once in a while. Arthur was approaching seventy years old. She feared that he too often pushed himself too hard. She paused some yards away from the pool and waited until Arthur had neatly scooped the beautiful fish into his net. He turned to greet his assistant.
“Guess what we’re having for supper!”’
• • •
Zjolt had set up a surveillance team to watch the building. For a few days nothing happened, as at the time Brett was meeting with the Professor in Venice Beach on the other side of the country. It finally paid off when Brett returned home and entered the building. He arrived as the sun was setting and punched the code on the front door. One of Zjolt’s team members had set up a tiny camera on the back of a light stand which protruded from the side of the front door. When Brett entered his code, the camera had captured the numbers. After Brett left the following morning, three men had used the code and entered the building. They still didn’t know the number of his apartment, but they were enabled to set up more cameras in the elevator as well as on each of the three floors of the low-rise. These would record Brett as he reached the front door of his apartment. They left the building and waited for Brett to return.
He returned just after 10:00 p.m. that night. Zjolt and his team watched the cameras as he left the elevator on the second floor and walked halfway down the corridor before inserting an electronic card into the door of his apartment 212. He held his cell phone in his other hand and glanced at it before entering for the night. Zjolt had his men take turns all night and into mid-morning, watching the building before Brett reappeared and left in a cab. Across the road, the old man at his coffee and donut stall wondered if the wife had already made contact with him. He was a romantic at heart and hoped it had worked out all right.
Zjolt and his men quietly entered the building and went to apartment 212 where Igor, their electronics techie, quickly disabled the door’s card holder and entered. The apartment was sparsely but expensively furnished with modern furniture. They settled in to wait for Brett’s return. The techie had enabled the door card again and, as far as he could see, Brett would not find anything wrong when he came back.
The former Navy SEAL returned in the middle of the afternoon, took the elevator to the second floor and inserted his door card in his door to 212. Once again, he held his phone in his other hand. Glancing at it, he grimaced and pressed one of the keys. Instead of entering immediately, he reached into a satchel slung over his shoulder and withdrew a gas mask. Putting the mask over his nose and mouth, he then withdrew a Glock pistol from his satchel and entered the apartment rapidly. The gun was unnecessary. The three men were unconscious, lying on the floor, their bodies twisted in a variety of positions where they had fallen as the gas Brett had released with an instruction from an app on his phone had taken immediate effect.
He moved forward rapidly, removing guns from the outstretched hands of two of them. Zjolt was unarmed. He then zip-tied their hands and feet behind their backs and went to switch on the coffee machine in the corner of the sitting room. After that he opened all the windows and, taking a small but powerful fan from a cupboard, he spent the time blowing the gas out of the apartment while waiting for the coffee to percolate.
Brett was halfway through his coffee and bagel with cream cheese when Zjolt was the first man to regain consciousness. The Hungarian groaned and looked up from the floor at Brett, who smiled at him.
“The cops’ll be here to collect you shortly. Please tell your boss, if he bothers to bail you out, I don’t appreciate my daily routine being interrupted. I won’t be so gentle next time.”
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.