Infernal

Time stretched like a rubber band, or the elastic in an old pair of socks. Richard gripped the wheel as slugs tore through windows sending up sprays of glass like rain drops on a pond. He turned to the woman—Sophia, at least I have her name now—and her face expanded, the left eye bulging until her head burst like over-ripened fruit. He could feel her all over him. Taste her in his mouth. An enormous black insect shot past the vehicle, blocked the road in front of him, and hovered ominously. It spat fire and Richard grabbed for something, anything, to hold on to as the world shifted and spun around him, throwing him up. Out. Into a cold white void where he knew no more.

A knock at the door interrupted the dream and Richard lurched erect. The left hip still hurt when he stood suddenly but six months had healed the dislocated shoulder, broken wrist, multiple gunshot wounds, and the burns on his hands and face.

He still went by the name Richard. The document manufacturers in San Francisco’s red light district had assured him it was better to keep his first name: he was unlikely to hesitate or fail to respond to Richard as he might have been to Stan or Ralph. His last name, or so his California driver’s license, his passport, bank accounts and bills all assured him, was McGee. He found the new name amusing. His favorite novels starred a character named McGee.

He’d fallen asleep working at his computer again. The desk was littered with chip bags, candy wrappers, and empty Sobe bottles; the debris of yet another night spent digging through search engine after search engine for any trace of a company called BanaTech. Yanked from slumber by the knock at the door he’d swept the haphazard pile of notes that he would later compile and add to the gigabytes of information that he already had stored in an external terabyte drive to the floor.

What time is it?

He glanced at the gadget bar on his computer desktop. Just after nine a.m., Saturday.

The knock came again. More insistent this time. He reached under the desk and removed a Heckler & Koch P30 9mm from a magnetic mount. It was one of many weapons scattered throughout the Santa Monica bungalow he’d been renting for the last the last three months. There were two .40 caliber Beretta PX4 Storm’s in the bedroom; one on each side of the bed. A 9mm 92FS by the same manufacturer was concealed in a false wall panel just outside the bedroom. The kitchen contained three Smith & Wesson .40 caliber M&P compacts; one in the cutlery drawer, one magnet mounted inside the hutch, and one under the kitchen cabinets.

The living room also afforded three weapons. Aside from the H&K he now held in his hand, the leftmost cushion of the couch concealed a Taurus .454 Casull caliber Raging Bull and a potted Areca palm housed a 9mm Glock 19 in its decorative planter.

The real firepower, however, was concealed in the attic trap door in the front hall. One pull on the cord and the ladder unfolded revealing two .380 ACP caliber Ingram Mac 11A1’s, one clipped to either side of the risers. Each could deliver 1200 rounds per minute at 980 feet per second. In short, controlled bursts it could prove deadlier than all of Richard’s other weapons combined.

Wait, Richard told himself, fingering the slide release on the P30. Just think a minute.

The dream clung like the silken strands of a spider’s web. Awakening in cold, confusion, and pain. Upside down in a snow bank, the strap of his backpack gripped in one hand. Staggering out onto the road to survey the flaming pothole that had been the HumVee.

Charlie, he’d thought miserably. I’m so sorry.

The white Cadillac that had slowed, stopped. And the skinny, twenty something boy with black hair that had emerged, eyes wide and jaw agape.

“Oh, snap!” the boy had said for lack of anything else that would convey his astonishment at the flaming wreckage, Richard’s burned and broken visage, or both.

Richard had pulled an H&K P30, the same one he now held in his hand, from the backpack and pointed it at the boy.

“I need your car.”

“Seriously?” the boy said. His eyes widened even further and Richard wondered crazily if they would fall from their sockets and dangle loosely around his chin.

“Seriously,” Richard answered.

“For real, for real?” the boy asked.

Richard briefly thought he might have to shoot the obviously intoxicated youth in the leg to make his point. Instead he said:

“For real, for real.”

The kid had shrugged, plunged his hands in the pockets of a woefully inadequate windbreaker, and said:

“These things happen.”

Before turning the car in a westerly direction Richard had fished a banded pack of one-hundred dollar bills, one of many, from the backpack and tossed it to the kid standing outside the car.

“It’s cold out here,” he’d told the boy. “Get a heavier coat.”

The last vestiges of the dream/memory slipped away and the present reasserted itself.

The knock at the door came again, this time accompanied by a small, feminine voice:

“Mr. McGee. It’s Samantha. I have your cookies.”

Richard blew out a breath. Of course. This morning was the delivery date for Girl Scout cookies. He’d ordered three boxes of Somoas and a box of Tagalongs from the neighbor’s toe-headed nine year-old daughter last month. It crossed his mind that he almost answered the door with a handgun. His endless hours spent vetting the Internet for information on the incident in Kansas six months ago was crumbling the thin line between vigilance and paranoia.

“Great,” he said to the room. “Now I’m blowing third graders away over caramel and peanut butter cookies.”

Richard bent and replaced the H&K on its mount and dug through the debris on his desk until he came up with his wallet. He padded to the front door and after a cursory look through the peephole, unbolted it. Samantha Peterson, resplendent in her green scout uniform, her shoulder length blonde hair braided into pigtails, grinned up at him.

“Hiya, Sammy,” Richard said.

“Hi there, Mr. McGee,” she answered, reaching into the green shoulder bag she carried in one hand. “I’ve got your cookies.”

“So I heard,” he said, his eyes never leaving her hand as she withdrew it from the bag. Paranoia, he warned himself as she handed over nothing more dangerous than four boxes of cookies. “So what’s the damage?”

“Eighteen dollars,” she said.

“Hmm,” Richard said, digging through his wallet and handing over a bill. “All I have is a twenty. You can have the change. Call it a tip.”

“We’re not allowed to accept tips, Mr. McGee,” she told him solemnly.

“A donation, then,” he said.

“Sorry, Mr. McGee,” she said. “All donations have to be sent directly to the council office. My Daddy will have change, though. Can I bring it right back to you?”

“Sure thing, kiddo,” Richard said. “No hurry.”

“Bet,” she said, and then spun off in the direction of her house, pigtails bouncing off her shoulders as she ran. Her innocence and joie de vivre reminded him of another girl in another place. That child’s life had been stolen from her by a sick and twisted pedophile by the name of Patrick McCormack. Richard had tried, but been unable to save her. He had avenged her, though the decision to do so had cost him ten years of his life.

Richard closed and re-bolted the door swallowing a lump in his throat at the memory. It had been twelve years since the disappearance of Katie Marsh. Her body had never been found.

Back at his desk, Richard began picking up the notes he’d scattered. He had invested hundreds of hours accumulating information on companies researching both biotechnology and physics, specifically one named BanaTech, and anyone named Sophia or Jefferson connected with such an entity. He’d sifted through thousands of companies specializing in either biotech or physics, but had found only a handful that dabbled in both fields. Most of those were owned or controlled by the government; making accessing their personnel records a difficult task.

Having realized the need for stealth in his data mining Richard had turned to the Internet to learn how to use multiple proxies to mask his ISP address and encrypt his files and hard drives. Had he not, his activity might have been discovered and traced back to his location, bringing the very people who had wrought violence and murder in Kansas the previous winter crashing through his windows and knocking down his front door. He’d found he had a knack for writing code and it was a small leap from setting up secure browsing protocols to learning how to find and exploit back doors to servers. It was an even smaller step to learning to install algorithms, or worms, which alerted him to information matching his search criteria.

He’d found little of use with these methods. Of a company called BanaTech, he’d found no trace. There wasn’t, and never had been, any such entity.

There were dozens of employees of various research companies named Sophia and Jefferson. He’d even found two women named Sophia Jefferson working for two separate research firms; one in Ohio, the other in Australia. Neither of them, nor any of the other employees he’d found had matched the description of the woman or the walking juggernaut of destruction he was familiar with.

He’d fared somewhat better with the public search engines like Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. While achieving the same results related to BanaTech, he’d yielded reams of information on Richard Farris. According to public information his former self was dead, the result of bad wiring to a faulty generator that had overheated and exploded. The resulting fire had spread to the house and, encouraged by building material and the lack of response by emergency personnel due to the weather, had burnt it to the ground. One charred body had been pulled from the wreckage. Despite positive identification being impossible due to the condition of the remains it was presumed to be Richard Farris. Who else would have been in his home in the midst of the snowstorm?

There had been no mention of intruders or the resulting firefight.

A curious incident several miles away wherein an intoxicated youth had discovered the burning wreckage of a vehicle containing two unidentified human bodies and one of a dog had not been linked to the fire at the Farris house. There had likewise been no mention of a carjacking—the vehicle had probably been stolen in the first place, Richard surmised—or the banded stack of one-hundred dollar bills Richard had given the youth in compensation.

A soft beep issued from Richard’s computer signaling that one of his search algorithms had returned a new result. The machine had entered sleep mode and was now dark, requiring Richard to enter the sixty-four character password he had set up to access the hard drive. He entered the code carefully. One incorrect character and his hard drive would crash and wipe its contents so thoroughly an electron microscope would not be able to retrieve useful data from it.

“Sonofabitch,” Richard muttered as the screen lit up and he moused over the new data.

It was an article just posted on the Wall Street Journal’s web page. A research firm in the field of biotechnology and physics had incorporated itself and was seeking funding for several projects. The founder, Stephen Bana, had been working privately but since going public had named his venture BanaTech. His Chief Financial officer, the article said, was listed as one Alex Jefferson.

It made sense to Richard that his searches had turned up nothing on Stephen Bana in the past. He’d searched for Bana as a possible name but had come up with tens of thousands of results, none of which corresponded to any of the other keywords in his queries. The man had been working privately and private researchers were rarely noted in the press unless they published articles related to their work. Stephen Bana had obviously not done so.

What didn’t make sense was that this was a fledgling company, only just incorporated. Yet the man Richard had known as Doc had alluded that BanaTech was a huge corporation. And their gear and hardware, much of it military, pointed to a company with vast resources and near infinite power.

Another curiosity was the listing of Alex Jefferson as CFO. Richard had gotten the feeling that Jefferson, if it was the same Jefferson he’d been unfortunate enough to meet last winter, held more of a security position than a corporate title.

Richard was pondering these inconsistencies when there was a knock at the door.

Samantha, no doubt. With his change.

“Coming, Sammy,” he called. He put his computer back to sleep with the tap of a button and reached for the H&K beneath the desk.

Vigilance, he asked himself, or paranoia?

Deciding upon the latter, he padded to the front door empty handed. Semper vigilans be damned, he thought. Nine year-old cookie pushers pose no threat to me whatsoever. So thinking, Richard opened the door with the cheery smile he reserved for children and small animals.

“Hey, Sammy,” he began, and was so stunned when Sophia pushed her way past him and entered the hall that had he brought the weapon with him he’d have forgotten how to use it.

“We have to go, Richard,” she said. She wore khaki BDU’s over a black, long sleeve shirt. A tactical holster housing a Glock 17 rode her right thigh. A M.O.L.L.E. 3 magazine 9mm pouch at her waist completed the ensemble. “Right now. If I can find you, so can they.”

Richard felt his heart skip a beat, a momentary pause, and then thump in his chest like a horse kicking at a stall door.

“Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,” Sophia said sternly. “We have a long way to go and not a lot of time.”

“Let’s go.” She grasped his arm and propelled him into the living room. “Move!”