“Confessions” Serial, Tech Wars 7
Sandy rushed through her work in the office and was ready to leave by 3:00 p.m. She called Brett and told him to drive around the back of the building. She would be ready for him at exactly 3:10 and would dash out, even if he had to double-park for a moment. After leaving her office, she quickly took an elevator to the basement where she knew the cleaners had a room for storing their equipment. The cleaners would have left already. She stopped outside their door and listened. There was no sign of life. She turned the handle. The room was locked. She took out a credit card and inserted it into the crack between the door and the door frame. It was a Yale-type lock and she found that she could slide the mechanism back quite easily. She had seen it on TV and decided that desperate times called for desperate measures.
She switched on the light and was delighted to see that overalls were hanging from hooks on the far wall. She grabbed one of the overalls that seemed to be about her size, put it on and then saw a baseball cap lying on a chair. She crammed her long hair inside the cap and put on her sunglasses. She looked at her watch. It was 3:09. She dashed up the stairs to the ground level and tried the back door to the street. It was locked from the outside but opened easily from the inside. She stared out and saw Brett’s car double-parked right next to the entrance. As she dashed for the vehicle, traffic behind Brett started hooting furiously. Sandy leapt into the vehicle and Brett took off as the notoriously impatient New York drivers raised a deafening chorus of horns.
Brett looked at her quizzically. “You mean to tell me that you’re being tailed simply because you have a beef with a few injustices?”
“Er … not exactly.”
Brett expertly steered around a slow-moving van and digested her response. “So, there’s more?”
Sandy looked at him apologetically. “I have a feeling I’m in really deep shit here.”
“So, what haven’t you told me?”
“Look, as you know, this all started with my fury over my dad’s harassment that drove him to his death …. I guess I should’ve left it at that.”
Brett nodded grimly as he negotiated the heavy traffic. “You should … but being a compulsive do-gooder, you launched out into a whole spectrum of injustices. You even roped me into it. Now you’re saying there’s more. Have you uncovered an elite group of serial rapists or what?”
“Nooo … but it could be on a par …”
“My God, woman, now you’re really scaring me.”
Sandy’s shoulders began to shake as she was overcome by the enormity of what she had stepped into. She had always been a cheerful, fun-loving kind of person, living a fairly normal life, albeit as a high-achiever – first as a top athlete at college and later in her IT work.
It seemed she had unwittingly delved into the murky depths of a world she had sometimes wondered about but had mostly chosen to ignore. In addition to her achievements, she had dreams of a good marriage, children and ideally a return one day to the countryside where she had grown up. Now it seemed that she had found the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her days, only to put them both into some hidden danger, the extent of which was fast becoming a reality. She had no choice but to lay it all out on the table for Brett. If he wanted to walk away, she wouldn’t stop him – but she desperately hoped he wouldn’t.
“OK … let’s get back to our flashy new apartment first.”
Brett grunted. “We’re not going home. From what you’ve just said, there’s something we need to do before anything else.”
“What?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Brett abruptly made a left, forcing Sandy to hang on to the handle above the passenger door. Brett drove as fast as he could in the steady stream of traffic. Sandy knew better than to question him. She would find out what the “something” was soon enough, she figured.
A few minutes later Brett entered a parking garage, drove up to the fifth floor before he could find a space, parked the vehicle and grinned at her. “Let’s go. It’s only a short walk.”
“OK, mystery man.”
Sandy could see that despite their overall anxiety about the situation, Brett was actually enjoying himself. She decided to remain silent until they reached whatever destination he had in mind. Five minutes later they were approaching Grand Central Station. Sandy glanced at Brett. “We catching a train?” Brett simply smiled. They entered the vast station concourse. Sandy had been there several times. Its opulence and Victorian elegance never ceased to fascinate her. She followed Brett as he glanced at the departure board and headed for platform 12 but gave no sign of buying a ticket.
“I need your cell phone.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew his own cell. Sandy began to get the idea and wondered just how he proposed to get rid of them. She soon found out. He approached the platform for the Bridgeport train and hovered near the entrance to the platform until he saw a couple of young male students approaching. He stepped over to them and smiled. “Hi there. How’d you guys like to make a quick hundred bucks. Nothing criminal I promise?”
The youths stared at him suspiciously. Brett held out one of the cell phones.
“It’s like a game really. I bet some friends that I’d be able to disappear with my friend here …,” he took Sandy’s arm,“… and they’d never find us before Monday. Cell phones’re a dead giveaway; so, all you have to do is to take it to Bridgeport or wherever you’re headed and dump it somewhere.”
The youngsters looked at them. Neither he nor the woman looked like baddies. Both were well dressed, and both wore honest, disarming smiles. A hundred bucks for a student was like gold. They looked at each other and nodded.
Brett took out a hundred-dollar bill and wrapped it around the phone. “Deal?”
The larger and probably older of the two boys shrugged, reached out his hand, took the phone and the money. “Sure, no biggie.”
They scuttled away as though fearful that Brett would call them back and tell them it was April Fool’s even though it was July. Five minutes later, Brett had offloaded the other cell on a shifty-looking character entering another platform for the Hartford train. This time the man didn’t hesitate for a second as he greedily eyed the hundred bucks.
As they headed back to the car, Brett chuckled. “The kids’ll probably dump the phone as agreed. The second guy’ll keep it until our mystery team catches up with him.”
They returned to the car and set off on their journey once again. Sandy felt as though she was participating in some spy movie but with the unfortunate consequence that the fun part of evading their pursuers could get really nasty in real life. She looked at Brett. This was another side of him she had not seen before. The gentle fun-loving and humorous person she knew had suddenly become a serious man of action. It was quite attractive really, the archetypical strong, silent type. But overall, she would prefer to see the laughing old Brett back at some point.
“So, what now?” she asked.
“Until we know what’s going on, I’ve booked us into a hotel outta town. I can handle my curiosity about your situation until then. Hopefully, you can contain your questions about this new side of me. You’ve been through a scary time. Try to sleep.”
Sandy laughed. “What, with you driving?”
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.