Our Only Hope - S01 E23

Story 10 months ago

Our Only Hope - S01 E23

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 23

With my Davenport identity safely locked up for possible future use, I was ready to go. I had stopped at a long-term storage place out by the air base and put any un-needed equipment and armaments into storage. What I needed, I could carry with me in my suitcase and not draw attention to myself.

From the motel, I took an Uber to the Strip. From there, I caught a cab to the Boulder Station Casino, and finally a Lyft to a friend’s business on the edge of town.

Bernard was a special friend who– for an appropriate amount of money– would use his special talents and connections to arrange a different vehicle... and a different identity... for me to use while I was in LA. He was not cheap. It was going to take a significant bite out of the eighty-thousand in expense money in addition to several large, behind-the-scenes money transfers, but the vehicle was impressive and the ID was Witness Protection quality. It would stand up to any background check I might run into, up to and including Homeland Security. Two hours later, I finally checked in at my hotel.

I used my encrypted virtual private network to check for messages. There were at least a dozen of them... all from Boris and all marked extremely urgent. I opened the first one and it said, “Stop the Jeep. Get out! Run!”

A quick check through the remaining messages showed them getting more and more urgent finally switching over to “W? Are you there? Are you still alive?”

I replied to the last message with “What the hell is going on?”

“Someone hacked your Jeep,” Boris replied. “I got a burst from my safety program that tipped me that someone was trying to take over control of your brakes. Then I got booted off the system as they took over everything. I was able to reconnect about an hour ago, for just an instant but then everything switched off... and I mean everything! When I heard the news stories, I thought I’d killed you.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“Turn on your TV,” was the response.

I turned on the set in the room and the first local station that came up was doing a live feed from a familiar-looking run-down Motel Six. The anchorette was standing with the police cars and fire trucks in the background and saying, “It would appear that the owner had just gotten into the vehicle...” She looked at her watch. “... thirty-four minutes ago, when the explosion occurred. He was killed instantly by the force of the explosion which was powerful enough to blow windows out of most of the rooms in the motel, injuring twenty-three others.”

“We knew the identity I used to get Wyatt was probably compromised,” I typed, “and they probably had the Jeep on surveillance videos. Sounds like the bomb installer did something wrong.”

“No,” Boris said, “I did. I forced a reset to regain access to the Jeep’s computer. That must have over-ridden whatever it was that they were using as a detonator. I killed a man.”

“Are you sure what you did was an hour ago?” I asked.

“Of course,” Boris replied. Even texting back and forth, I could sense that he was insulted that I had questioned his time line.

“According to the TV, the explosion occurred only a little over one half-hour ago,” I said. “You didn’t do it. They probably knew you were connected in some fashion and shut it all down an hour ago to keep you from discovering anything when they planted the bomb.”

I paused for a long moment as I raced through the events of the afternoon in my mind. “I left the keys in the room safe,” I typed. “Those safes have a master key that overrides the combination. Someone was probably working with the motel cleaning staff boosting cars from unsuspecting tourists or construction workers in town to work on the stadium. They just picked the wrong damn car to boost.”

A new person entered the conversation. The identifier said “NAT:” so I assumed it was Natasha. She said, “They’ve identified the body from your Davenport IDs. They think you’re dead. We need to make the most of that.”

“Work behind the scenes,” I typed, “and make sure that the body is buried locally. After the dust settles we can reach out to the family so they know what happened. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

I found myself shaking in anger. Collateral damage sometimes happens. I try to avoid it if at all possible, but my anger wasn’t because of the accidental death of a bystander in my truck. For that matter, the dead man wasn’t exactly a bystander. He died in my place because he was trying to steal my truck. I didn’t like that it had happened, but in a way, it was a risk of his occupation. His death bothered me, but it was the blast itself that angered me. It was a much larger explosion than was needed just to kill me. Either they were very incompetent or they didn’t care who else got hurt. If they were able to override Boris and keep him shut out, they were not incompetent. So they just didn’t care. And that made me very, very angry with them.

“New video,” Boris typed and a video appeared on my screen. The video contained the familiar baseball-looking scoreboard at the bottom. It was still beneath Mistress Tenesha, Master Tyrone’s wife and a member of the inner circle, but her torment had changed. She was now strung up tightly in a naked ‘X’ in the middle of what looked like a nightmarish modern art sculpture intended to depict the earth or some other planet. The globe seemed to have been sliced into a dozen or so flat sections which, overall, formed a sphere around her body with at least a hundred jagged slices of metal aimed toward her like inverted mountain peaks pointing toward the middle of the giant globe.

The individual slices of the globe must have been charged with high voltage, because every few moments as the globe rotated, a blue arc would jump from one of the peaks to her skin. When that happened, the blue-white flash of light would reflect off the sheen of perspiration covering her black skin. From the tension in her body between strikes, it appeared that she thought she could keep from being shocked by holding her body totally tight and as far away from all of the peaks as possible.