Human (25 page)

As he pulled his motorcycle into the driveway, he could tell immediately that something was wrong.  There were too many lights on in the house. His mother sometimes waited for him to come home, but she was always careful to turn out the lights that she wasn't using. It wasn't like her to forget things like that. He opened the door a little apprehensively and everything appeared to be in order but for the fact that his mother didn't ask, "Sako, is that you?"

"Mom?" He asked quietly into the empty house. Not hearing any response or any noise at all for that matter, sent a chill down his spine. "Mom?" He asked again a little louder as he crept further into the house. She still didn't answer and he started to grow more and more agitated. As he ran through the house looking for his mother and calling out, "Mom!", "Mom!", his mind ran through different possible scenarios, each one worse than the last. After he was satisfied that she wasn't in the house. He sat and tried to calm himself down. Upon resting, he decided that maybe she was confused about the time and went out of the house for some reason. Maybe a neighbor had called and needed help. He called her cell phone.

Her phone rang twice before it was answered. "Ah, Mr. Sharky," Vakhrusheva said, "I've been expecting your call."

"Who is this?" Sharky demanded to know.

"I don't think you are presently in a position to ask questions, Mr. Sharky," Vakhrusheva answered in the most menacing tone he could muster, "but what is important for you to know is that your mother is fine. She is with my colleague and she is very worried about you."

"Where is she!"  Sharky demanded again.

"Apparently I haven't made the rules clear and I do not intend to stay on the phone very long. So please take note of the fact that for security reasons I will have to abandon this phone quickly so that it cannot be tracked. After I abandon this phone you will have no way to contact me so this may be the last conversation we ever have. Seeing as how you have no choice but to trust me as a man of my word, you must believe that I will return your mother to you unharmed and well fed provided you do something for me. Otherwise, I will kill her one piece at a time. Do you know what that means Mr. Sharky?"  Vakhrusheva did not wait for Sharky to answer. "It means that first I will cut off her feet, then her hands, then her legs, then her arms. Please, picture this in your mind as you conduct yourself over the next few hours."  Vakhrusheva paused to let Sharky envision this torture. "Now, what I want you to do, is to find a little black notebook that belongs to Dr. Bayron. I trust you know what I am talking about, no?"

"Yeah," said Sharky.

"Well I think you know exactly where it is and I am gambling your mother's life on that suspicion. If you find it and give it to me she lives. If you don't, she dies. Understood?"

"Yeah," Sharky said with burning anger.

"If you tell anyone about this call, she dies. If anyone follows you when you deliver the book, she dies. Your mother will be released exactly 24 hours after you give me the book, provided of course that no one has interfered. This is clear?"

"Yes."  Sharky said.

"Great. Be at the Schenectady Amtrack station tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. and bring your phone. I will give you further instructions from there."  Vakhrusheva immediately hung up the phone.

The SmithCorp Building was deserted except for the security guards and cleaning crews. And of course, Smith himself, who had been wiling away the hours listening in on cell conversations and watching the world through security cameras as he had demonstrated during the day. Not only had he heard the entire conversation between Sharky and Vakhrusheva  but, because of the unique technological nature of his mind, he actually had it in code just like a digital recording. Shit, he thought in his lifelike mind. He embraced the warm feeling of a distinctly human emotion even if he could not understand precisely what it was. "Shit," he said again when he realized that he knew exactly the notebook that was being discussed. "Shit," he said for a third time, though he could not deny that he was mildly pleased to have a mission.

He opened a spreadsheet and began breaking his new project into its component parts.

Early the next morning, Gonzales awoke to the ringing of his secure, red phone. He creaked a little as he climbed out of bed and was disappointed to see that he had slept until five thirty in the morning. There would be no jog today. He answered the phone, "Gonzales."

"Cruz."  Cruz responded in hushed tones. He was whispering.

"What do you have?" Gonzales asked.

Cruz answered, still whispering, "I got a call last night from the guy we put on Bayron. He's out of SmithCorp and back at his own apartment. Hermelinda is with him. I think this may be our only opportunity to confront him."

"Okay. Meet me in front of his apartment at 9:00. Let me know if anything changes."

"Will do, boss," Cruz responded almost inaudibly.

"By the way, Mr. Cruz, I cannot help but notice that you are speaking very quietly. I am assuming that you do not need to be reminded of the special risks that accompany becoming romantically involved with a person of interest in an investigation. I will, however, give you the same advice my father gave me:  ‘if you can't be good, at least be careful.'  Have I made myself clear?"

"Yes sir," Cruz answered, eager to crawl back into Kitty's comfortable Queen sized bed for the few hours he had left before meeting Gonzales.

CHAPTER XX.

Sharky stood in the lobby of the Amtrack station in downtown Schenectady staring at his cell phone and waiting for something to happen. What if my cell phone dies?  What if I lose the signal and don't get the instructions?  What if I have to go to the bathroom?  There is too much that can go wrong, he thought. He walked around the station trying to make sure that he positioned himself where he got the strongest signal. At 6:05 his phone beeped receipt of a text message from a number which was clearly out of the country based on the number of digits on it. "Take the 6:22 to Penn Station."

He went to the ticket counter and asked for a ticket. "Name?"  The ticket agent asked.

He told her his name. As he reached for his wallet.

"Okay," the ticket agent said. "This ticket's already been paid for. I just need to see your ID."

He drew his license out of his wallet and handed it to the agent who glanced at it for a mere moment before handing it back to him with his ticket. "Have a nice trip," she said.

"Who paid for my ticket?"  Sharky asked.

The ticket agent raised her shoulders and said, "I wouldn't know that, sir. Your train's on Platform 1, up the escalator to the right."

Smith had been monitoring Sharky's phone all morning. ‘6:22 to Penn Station' processed through Smith's mind and he accessed the timetable for that train. Sharky would arrive in three and a half hours. That gave him dread little time to get to the bottom of things. He wanted to call Dr. Bayron but he knew that Bayron had not been carrying a cell phone and had no home phone, or computer, or any other connection to the outside world from his apartment. He geolocated Hermelinda's phone to Bayron's apartment and called it, but she had it set to silent and the vibrating did not wake her.

What woke her was the sound of the front door intercom buzzing in the living room. This woke Bayron too and he was momentarily startled to see that Hermelinda had slept with him through the night without his having known. Or maybe he did know as his dreams had been unusually pleasant. He smiled uncomfortably at her and left to answer the intercom. He pressed the button and said, "hello?"

"Dr. Douglas Bayron?"  Josey asked adopting a commanding voice.

"Yes?"  Dr. Bayron answered.

"This is special agent Josey Cruz of the CIA and my colleague Marco Gonzales. It is imperative that we speak to you right away. We believe you may be in danger."

"Okay," Bayron said and buzzed them through the front door. Moments later there was a knock on his apartment door. He opened it without undoing the chain lock.

"Dr. Bayron?"  Cruz asked again.

"May I see some badges?"  Bayron demanded.

Cruz took out his shield and showed it to Bayron through the chain locked door.

"And you?"  Bayron asked looking at Gonzales.

"I'm field ops, sir. I don't carry a badge."  Gonzales replied politely.

Bayron nodded as if that answer made sense and opened the door.

Cruz and Gonzales entered the apartment and immediately realized that there would be no place for all three of them to sit down together. Bayron directed them to the kitchen table and motioned for them to sit as he himself began to prepare to brew some coffee.

"We're going to have to ask Mrs. Smith to leave. What we have to say is strictly need-to-know."

Bayron was surprised that they knew Hermelinda was in the apartment, but then again, he thought, the CIA should know things like that. Bayron did not answer the request, Hermelinda had emerged from the bedroom and answered the two agents directly.

"First of all, gentlemen," she said, displaying some unexpected courage, "if Dr. Bayron's life is in danger then it stands to follow that my life is in danger too since I am here with him. Secondly, Dr. Bayron is presently a ward of the State of New York, who has been legally released to my care and custody. I thus have a higher responsibility than either of you to ensure his safety. Third, Dr. Bayron has been declared temporarily incompetent and delusional and may or may not understand what you are going to tell him so if you want him to stay alive, you will want me to know. Fourth," Hermelinda's speech was cut off by the vibrating of her phone and she was glad because she really didn't have a fourth point. In fact she didn't even have a third point. She had made that one up on the spot. "Excuse me," she said, looking at her phone. "It's Elly," she said looking at Dr. Bayron. She then addressed the two strangers, "I have to take this."  Hermelinda walked out of the room.

When she was gone, Cruz began to bring Dr. Bayron up to speed on what had brought them to his doorstep and why they felt he was in danger. They disclosed the fact that they suspected that he had held back some information from his collaborator in Russia when Hermelinda walked back into the room white as a ghost.

"Doug, it's Sharky. His mother's been Kidnaped. The kidnappers want him to turnover a black notebook. Your black notebook for sure. He's on a train right now to bring it to them. They said they are going to kill his mother."

Cruz immediately pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and speed dialed his office. "Geolocate Sarkis Ohangangian stat. I need his 10-20 immediately."  A moment later, he turned to the other people in the room, "He's just south of Albany and moving fast."

"How did he know?" Gonzales said with a fire in his eyes that made it clear to everybody in the room, including Cruz that it would not be wise to pussyfoot around the answer.

"He's on the internet. He can access phones and security cameras at will. He can see and decode billions of bits of data at once. Its how he amuses himself. I'm sorry, I …"  Bayron blurted out.

"What is in that notebook?"  Gonzales interrupted knowing full well that time had just become a valuable and shrinking commodity.

"My personal notes. You were right. I wasn't ready to give up all my secrets. Sharky hid the book for me."

"Who else knew?" Gonzales demanded.

"No one. I swear it. No one."

"Okay, look. I'm not going to mince words here. Dr. Petrovsky is working for some very, very dangerous men who are trying to extract a code which unlocks a huge nuclear arsenal which they will sell to the highest bidder. The only man who knew that launch code is dead and I intend to keep him that way. They are trying to use your technology to make him alive again. If they get that book, will they be able to do it?"

"I've seen their model. I have a copy of it. I used some of it in Smith."

"With that notebook, will they be able to bring that man back to life?"  Gonzales asked again, this time gruffly, as he was not satisfied with Bayron's answer.

"Yes."  Bayron said.

Gonzales turned his attention back to Cruz. "You get someone on that train right now."

"I've got a guy in Poughkeepsie heading to the station right now." Cruz answered.

"Get a tracker in that book before it leaves the train."  Gonzales barked.

"I'm a full step ahead of you," Cruz stated.

Hermelinda still had Smith on the phone and had explained to him what was happening. She chimed in, "he has a recording. Smith got all the calls recorded."

"Put it on speaker," Gonzales commanded.

Hermelinda engaged the speaker and placed the phone down on the table.

"Can you hear me?"  Smith's tinny electronic voice asked. Upon hearing enough assents he continued, "I started listening somewhere in the middle of the conversation, but I don't think I missed much."  The voice on the speakerphone changed abruptly and the four people in Bayron's kitchen listened intently:

             
"Where is she!" They heard Sharky yell.

They all winced when the heard the panic in their friend's voice.

             
"Apparently I haven't made the rules clear and I do not intend to stay on the phone very long. So please take note of the fact that for security reasons I will have to abandon this phone quickly so that it cannot be tracked. After I abandon this phone you will have no way to contact me so this may be the last conversation we ever have. Seeing as how you have no choice but to trust me as a man of my word, you must believe that I will return your mother to you unharmed and well fed provided you do something for me. Otherwise, I will kill her one piece at a time. Do you know what that means Mr. Sharky?"

"That's Vladimir Vakhrusheva,"  Gonzales said matter-of-factly. "He's here."

They listened to the rest of the recording in disgust. Dr. Bayron felt a nausea rise in his stomach. Hermelinda could not hold back tears.

"Can we get a track on that cellphone?" Gonzales asked Cruz.

Smith had already done so and reported his findings:  "its laying in a field off of I-90 near Wolf Road. The number on it matched a record for Sarkis Ohangangian. That's Sharky."

"Confirm that Mr. Cruz."  Gonzales said, unwilling to put complete trust in Smith. Cruz made another call.

A moment later he addressed the others in the room, "There are two cell phone numbers associated with a Sarkis Ohangangian," Cruz reported. "One is moving quickly south along the Hudson and the other is laying in a field off of I-90 near the Wolf Road exit."

On a Southbound train headed for Penn Station in New York, a very nervous Sarkis Ohangangian sat with his eyes transfixed on his cell phone's screen watching the bars. On his lap was a little knapsack which had just two items in it, a small, black notebook and a large lantern battery. During the night Sharky had been busy. He had carefully removed the metal spiral binding on the notebook and replaced it with carefully coiled iron-cobalt wire. The battery was connected to the new iron-cobalt binding with copper wires and the iron-cobalt was building up an immense magnetic charge as it sat in the bag on Sharky's lap.

As the train approached the Rhinecliff station, Sharky's phone beeped that it had received a text message. He had been listening for it so intently that the beep was as loud as a gunshot. Get off at Rhinecliff, the message said, and leave your cell phone on the train. As soon as he read the message on his phone the speaker system announced, "Now arriving, Rhinecliff."  Sharky had to think fast. He quickly detached the battery from the notebook and took the notebook out of the knapsack. He typed a quick message onto his phone but did not send it. He placed his phone into the knapsack and stowed it under the seat just as the train doors opened.

He dashed out of the train and a few passengers boarded. The train took off behind him and he was left alone on the platform. He looked around and didn't see anyone so he headed down the escalator to the lobby. The lobby was also empty but for the ticket agents. He sat down on one of the seats and waited. An hour passed and he started to get very, very nervous. Had something gone wrong?  Had he misunderstood an instruction?  His stomach hurt and he wanted to cry. Then he started to pray. And then, cutting through the silence he heard a page, "Sarkis Ohangangian to the ticket counter please. Sarkis Ohangangian to the ticket counter please."

He approached the ticket counter and said to the agent, "I'm Sarkis Ohangangian." She handed him her telephone handset. "Hello?"  He said.

"Walk out of the station and take a right. You will see a coffee shop."

"Okay," Sarkis replied.

"Good. Sit at the counter and order a cup of coffee and leave the notebook on the chair next to you. Then excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and stay in there until someone knocks on the door. Then you are free to go and if you have followed my instructions, your mother will be returned to you safe and sound tomorrow."

Sharky complied to the letter. He walked to the coffee shop and took a seat at the counter. He left the notebook on the seat and went to the bathroom. He sat there, sweating, in the bathroom waiting for a knock. About half an hour later the knock came. It was the cook. "Hey buddy, you okay in there?  Its been like half an hour."

Sharky opened the door and looked around. He saw immediately that the notebook was gone. He returned to the counter and finished his coffee in silence before heading back to the train station.

The 6:22 to Penn Station pulled into the Poughkeepsie station right on time and Special Agent John Hobbes stepped on nonchalantly. He walked down the aisle until the train started to move and then he grabbed the first open seat. As the train began to roll on towards Croton, Special Agent Hobbes walked the length of the train looking for Sharky to no avail. He sent a text message to Cruz to that effect. Cruz told Hobbes to listen for a phone and he dialed Sharky's cell phone number. He heard the ringing and quickly located the pack with the cell phone in it.

Agent Hobbes called Cruz from his own phone and reported, "Josey, the kid's not here. I found his phone in a knapsack under one of the seats. There was nothing else in there except for a lantern battery."

"Anything else?" Cruz asked.

"Well, this could be something. There was an unsent message on his phone, just four letters like this: capital ‘F', small ‘E', dash, capital ‘C', small ‘O' . Could be a code or something."  Hughes said.

"Thanks Johnny."  Cruz said. "Leave everything as you found it in case someone else is also tracking that phone, okay?"