Split second, p.3
Split Second, page 3
After five minutes of racing down the slope she arrived at the road, having traveled from one of its corkscrew turns to a lower one. Bats were darting about everywhere, their hidden lives revealed to her night vision equipment. Normally this would have freaked her out beyond measure, but after what she had just gone through she could spare no adrenaline or fear for these nocturnal animals, who were no doubt feasting on insects and were careful to avoid humans. At least she hoped.
After she had walked along the pavement for twenty minutes headlights suddenly emerged from a higher elevation. Without thinking she closed her eyes and rushed to the middle of the road, parking herself there with her right arm fully extended in front of her face, her palm facing the oncoming vehicle. If the driver was paying any kind of attention, he or she would stop. If not, she would be road kill.
Sure enough, the driver saw her with plenty of room to spare and brought the car to an abrupt halt in front of her.
She pulled off the night vision apparatus and ran to the driver’s side of the car. The driver was a chubby man in his early thirties, already going bald. She raised her automatic weapon and pointed it at him, pushing away all feelings of guilt. “Get out!” she demanded, loudly enough to be heard clearly through the closed window.
The driver looked at her in horror and disbelief, but there was no denying the reality of the submachine gun in her hands, nor the cuts and blood spatter that adorned her body.
“Now!” screamed Jenna as the driver continued to hesitate, paralyzed by fear. One part of her mind remained purely clinical, taking note of how quickly the survival instinct could turn an otherwise civilized scientist like her into a barbarian. It was remarkable, and horrifying.
The man stumbled out of the car with his hands up.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “But I do need to borrow your car. It’s a matter of life and death. Believe it or not, I’m a victim, not a perpetrator.”
The man appeared to not believe this for a moment, but remained silent. He was likely praying for his life, she guessed, even if he had been an atheist moments before.
“Give me your phone,” said Jenna.
He handed it to her and she shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans.
“I can’t have you calling the cops just yet,” she explained. “But I promise you you’ll be okay. I’ll call one of your close contacts in three or four hours and tell them where to find you, and where I’ve left your car. Like I said, I just need to borrow it.”
She handed him the night vision goggles. “Here,” she said. “Use these until sunrise.”
She was happy that she didn’t have to leave this poor guy stranded in total darkness. At least that was something.
She wondered if any more cars would be passing by at this time of the morning, and if so, if the displaced driver would try to copy her gambit and flag one of them down. She doubted it. Right now he would want to lie low until the morning light and then assess his situation. He wasn’t nearly as desperate as she was. Staring into approaching headlights to stop an oncoming car wasn’t for the faint of heart.
She made the balding man walk ten feet away with the goggles in his hand before she entered his car and adjusted the seat and mirrors. She lowered the window a few inches. “I am really, really sorry about this,” she said. “But I promise you, you’ll get your car back soon.”
And with that, Jenna Morrison powered the window fully closed again, stepped on the gas, and shot off into the darkness.
5
Jenna focused on hurtling down the mountain as quickly as the laws of physics and the narrow, twisty roads would allow, which at least demanded her rapt attention, leaving her less time to dwell on her predicament or dredge up horrifying images of Nathan with his legs ruined and his head all but torn from his shoulders.
She had been exposed to the aftermath of endless gun battles in movies, of course—who hadn’t?—but she was surprised to learn that movie gore didn’t even come close to the utter devastation of the real thing. The caliber and power of modern weapons all but disintegrated the target, something movies didn’t properly convey. Thankfully.
Even though she needed to marshal all of her concentration to keep from flying off the road for the second time in under an hour, she still burst into tears several times before she reached the bottom.
Finally, using the last remaining vestiges of a powerful will that had been tested beyond its breaking point, she managed to push Nathan from her mind and find a way to begin to concentrate on the problem at hand.
Who were the men who had ambushed the Hostess truck? Were they trying to rescue her and Nathan?
On the surface, it would appear that way. Simkin had not shot wildly, but with hideous purpose. Andy Cavnar, on the other hand, had tried to protect her. Had paused in a gun battle to make sure she ran to safety.
So what now? Go to the police? Homeland security? The press?
All of these places?
Maybe. But first things first. She needed to return home. Because there was only one thing of which she was certain. This all had been triggered by Nathan’s discovery. Simkin had destroyed the data on Nathan’s computers rather than let someone else have it. And then he had destroyed the creator of this data as well, just as completely.
Prior to this they had sucked out every file Nathan had stored in his cloud account, and then annihilated this account as well.
They had been very thorough. But what they didn’t know was that Nathan would never store something this important in the cloud. It was one of his quirks. He was a bit paranoid. He was thought of as the up-and-coming whiz kid. A brash boy genius. And while, at twenty-nine, he was hardly a boy, he was also far more accomplished than this age would suggest, and there were many who resented his success. And most of the scientists in his line of work were brilliant hackers. So he refused to take any chances with the cloud. He did back up his most important files every night—just not to cyberspace like most people.
Jenna had thought this precaution was just one of his quirks, but perhaps this behavior was more prudent than she had realized.
Any work Nathan thought was original, and especially work he thought was groundbreaking, was stored locally and password protected. He routinely saved a copy to the hard drive of his desktop, and a backup to one other location, to a flash drive hidden inside the house. An expensive model, capable of wireless downloads, so Nathan wouldn’t have to shove it into a computer port. The flash drive served as a sort of private cloud storage outside of the cloud. Convenient, but not requiring him to dip even a toe into cyberspace.
He had programmed the drive so that if three incorrect passwords were entered in a row, all data would be wiped clean. Even Jenna didn’t know the password. Unfortunately, she suspected that someone with financial resources and determination could eventually find a way to circumvent Nathan’s safeguards.
She wasn’t about to take this chance. Not given what had happened. So her first order of business was to retrieve the drive. She could turn it over later to experts, who could also find a way to get at the data, and she would discover what had been so important—what had ended Nathan’s life and destroyed her own. She wouldn’t rest until she knew.
California was still bathed in blackness when she arrived at her house—their house—the location of a joyous reunion just hours before, but now a painful reminder of all she had lost.
She entered the master bedroom, fighting back tears once again. Resting on Nathan’s dresser was a toy commonly called Newton's cradle. Named after the peerless physicist, this device consisted of five gleaming silver balls, hanging down in a line between two suspending bars. The device was a favorite of physicists, demonstrating conservation of momentum and energy. When the ball at one end was lifted and released, it would strike the stationary spheres with a distinctive clicking sound, transmitting a force through them that would push the last one upward, which would then pendulum down again, repeating this action in the opposite direction. This would continue through multiple cycles until heat and friction had bled the system of energy.
But Nathan had modified this apparatus, incorporating a flash drive into its base. Jenna carefully removed the tiny stick, roughly the size of her thumb, not surprisingly, since these storage units were also commonly referred to as thumb drives. These devices could have been downsized further, but the tinier an object the easier it was to lose, so this size had become fairly standard.
Jenna rushed out of the bedroom, lost in thought, trying to determine her next move. But after taking two steps into her living room she stopped abruptly, gasping in horror.
An intruder was standing inside the front door, patiently waiting for her to return from the bedroom. Not a cop. Like the others that night, he was lean and gave off an aura of deadly professionalism.
Either their original abductors had left one man behind to watch the house, and he had seen her arrive, or one of the two sides in this clash had had the presence of mind to rush someone here after learning she had escaped, just in case she returned.
Unlike the initial group of three intruders, this man wasted no time in raising a gun and pointing it at her with a menacing intensity. His eyes widened in excitement when he spied the flash drive in her hand.
“Bingo!” he said happily. “Who says long shots don’t pay off?”
“What do you want with me?” screamed Jenna at the top of her lungs, as the calm rationality to which she had been trying to cling shattered. “Leave me alone!”
“All I want is that thumb drive. Give it to me. Once I verify I can open it, you’re free to go. Is it password protected?”
Jenna nodded yes, taking deep breaths as she fought off alternating emotions of fury and loss that threatened to cause a total meltdown.
“Do you know the password?”
Jenna blinked rapidly, as if she didn’t comprehend the question.
“Do you know the password?” the intruder barked impatiently.
“Of course,” she lied as her mind began functioning properly once again, not a moment too soon.
He held out his hand. “Give me the stick. And the password. And I promise you’ll be left alone. Forever.”
She didn’t reply for several seconds as she searched frantically for a way out.
“This is the best deal you’re going to get, believe me.”
In a burst of inspiration, Jenna seized on a plan. It was desperate, for sure, but no more so than she was, and it was likely the only chance she had.
“Why on earth would I ever trust you?” she asked, buying a few seconds of distraction while she moved two steps closer to a nearby end table.
Before the intruder could answer she arrived at the table and quickly snatched up the large goblet of wine she had set there hours earlier, just before Nathan had playfully triggered a drum roll, her last positive memory before she was dragged through all nine circles of hell.
“Back off!” she screamed, extending the flash drive over the pool of red liquid so it was all but touching it. “I drop this in and the data is gone forever. It’s the last copy, and the only man who knows what’s on here is dead.”
The intruder couldn’t keep the panic from his face as his prize hung precariously above the elegant crystal glass.
Jenna could read the recognition of the situation in his eyes. He had been badly outmaneuvered. He had decided to try to get the password from her, to simplify his life, rather than shoot her and take the drive. But now he was screwed. She had created her very own dead-man’s switch. If he shot her now the memory stick would fall into the wine and be destroyed.
The truth was she wasn’t certain about this. For all she knew the drive was waterproof. But even if this was the case, would it be able to survive alcohol as well? She didn’t know, and fortunately, the intruder seemed to have accepted her semi-bluff without question.
“Toss your gun and car keys over to me,” she demanded, pressing her advantage. “Now! Or I’ll drop it in,” she finished, nodding toward the tiny stick in her right hand. Her left hand, which held the large crystal wineglass, had a slight tremor as it was, and the man had to fear the wine might splash upwards and ruin the drive by accident.
“I’ll do it,” she warned again.
“Look, give me the drive,” said the intruder as calmly as he could. “If you destroy it,” he added, his upper lip curling into a snarl, “I will kill you. Guaranteed.”
He raised the gun higher and extended it toward her head to emphasize the point.
“But if you give it to me,” he continued as pleasantly as he could, “I’ll let you go. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
“A promise from you means nothing to me!” spat Jenna through clenched teeth. “After what I’ve seen tonight, I think you’ll kill me the second you get this. So I have absolutely nothing to lose.” She raised her eyebrows. “Can you say the same?”
The man looked uncertain.
Jenna’s expression hardened even further. “You have thirty seconds to toss your keys and gun over here. If you don’t, I’ll destroy your prize, and you can explain what happened to your boss.”
She could tell from his sick expression that she had him. And he never took his eyes off her hands, which were still shaking enough to make him fear that an accident might occur at any time.
“You’re down to twenty seconds,” said Jenna. “I will do it, even knowing you’ll kill me. You think that scares me? The love of my life was just murdered in front of my eyes. I’ve lost everything tonight! At this point, I don’t have much reason to live. I almost hope you don’t do what I ask, so I can destroy this drive and have you put me out of my misery.”
Jenna said these words so convincingly that even she wasn’t sure how much of this was a bluff and how much was reality.
She paused for a few more seconds. “Ten,” she said simply. “Nine. Eight. Seven—”
“Wait!” said the man facing her, panic sweeping over his features. “Say I let you go. How do I know you won’t destroy the drive the second you’re gone?”
“You don’t,” said Jenna. “You’ll have to take my word for it.”
“Do I have your word?”
Jenna nodded. “You do. I’m as interested in knowing what’s on it as you are. So you lose this round. You give up your gun and keys and let me leave. But the information you’re after lives. And given how resourceful you and your gang of thugs seem to be, I’m sure you can still catch me and retrieve it, right?”
“You make an interesting proposition. But if I’m going to let you leave here, I need your word on one more thing. I need you to keep whatever you find on that drive privileged information. You can’t let it become widely known.”
“Why not?”
“Think whatever you’d like about me, but trust me on this. It would be bad for everyone. My guess is that only a few people in the world are capable of understanding what’s on there anyway. But treat the information with total respect, even if you have no idea what it means. Like it was a simple recipe for a hydrogen bomb.”
Jenna’s eyes widened. “Is it a catastrophic explosive?”
He shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. But trust me, it would be bad if it got out. Do you believe me?”
She stared deeply into his eyes, and for some reason she did. Perhaps the picture was getting a tiny bit clearer. Both groups wanted Nathan’s discovery for themselves, but would do anything to make sure no one else got it.
“Tell me what’s on the drive,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I’m not supposed to give you any information. Not even what I’ve already told you. I only did because you’ve put me in an impossible bind here, and I’m forced to make decisions on the fly. So promise me you won’t destroy the drive, and you’ll keep its contents privileged, and I’ll let you go. Push me any further and I’ll destroy it myself.”
“Okay. I believe you. Whatever is on here is dangerous, and I’ll take precautions. I’ll treat it like the recipe for the bomb. What you said.”
And she would, she realized. At least until she achieved a full understanding of the situation. Then she would make her own assessment of whether this discovery warranted absolute darkness or the brightest of sunshine.
Jenna was fifteen feet away from him. Without saying a word or coming any closer, he tossed his gun and keys gently toward her. They landed on her soft beige carpet a few steps away.
“Now your phone,” she said, realizing she couldn’t leave him the ability to make calls.
Anger spread over his face, but he tossed his phone at her feet as well.
“Now get in the coat closet and shut the door while I gather all this up,” she demanded, not about to lower her guard while in his view and take the chance he might rush her.
He shook his head in disbelief and shot her a look that could have melted lead. He obviously wasn’t used to being ordered around in this way by someone who should be helpless against him. It was a ridiculous situation, but she didn’t have time to contemplate the utterly surreal nature of holding off a ruthless assassin, and turning him into her slave, armed only with a glass of wine.
“Closet!” she repeated, and after glaring at her for another moment he finally did as she asked.
Jenna gathered up the gun, phone, and keys and shoved them into her pockets.
“There’s a door to the garage through the kitchen,” she shouted so he could hear her inside the closet. “Meet me in the garage in one minute. If you don’t show in two, I’m going to destroy the data and drive out of here.”
She found her purse and grabbed her wallet. She rushed to the garage and popped open the empty trunk of their white four-door sedan, a 2001 Acura Integra that Nathan had driven just hours earlier to return her from the airport. It might have been ancient, but it had a refurbished engine, had been well maintained, and they had bought it for a song. Best of all, it was built before internal trunk release levers had become a standard feature, so it would be perfect for her needs.
