Off The Grid (6 page)

“The dorms are first-come first-served and all employees are welcome to take a room to get some shut-eye if they are working late hours. Many find it easier to grab a few hours of sleep rather than commute home to do the same thing and waste time.”

“Isn’t sleeping at work a little unhealthy?” Luke asked. “What about work-life balance?”

“It’s all a choice. If you need a life, you might find it at the on-site gym or nurse’s station, the cafeteria or maybe even at your desk. Need something more? You’re out of luck, that’s what we offer.”

“No, I mean work-life balance, like families and stuff.”

“Unattached employees are better employees,” she said. “It’s not company policy or anything official, but you won’t find many people ducking out early to catch junior’s tennis match.”

“Good to know,” Luke said.

“Why, are you pregnant or something? Planning on popping out a few kids, are you?” Kathryn asked.

“Not that I know of,” Luke said, without cracking a smile, “but maybe I should visit the nurse, just in case.” 

“I’ll get you an appointment.”

They exited the dorm and were back on the intersecting paths of the courtyard.

“Beckman mentioned the ‘Dev Floor’ what is that?” Luke asked.

“That’s what we call the Development Floor,” she said. “It’s the Research and Development laboratory. Unfortunately newbie’s like you don’t have security clearance to access it, so you won’t be seeing that today. We keep it locked down pretty tight. Don’t want any prying eyes.”

“Sounds like Beckman wanted me there now.”

“Play your cards right and you probably will be there, but for now, play the game like everyone else. I’m confident you’ll find your purpose here. Can you find your way back to the pod? Just use your thumbprint to access the outer doors.”

“I think I can manage.”

“Enjoy your weekend, you need to be on your game come Monday. And get that pregnancy thing looked at too.”

“Sure thing.”

She turned and headed back toward the administration building. He spun on his heel when he caught himself watching her slowly walk away.

Chapter 9

Eastern France

The two armed mercenaries sat on a dusty ridge overlooking a archeological dig conducted by the University of Munich. Their two hours of evening surveillance told them that no more than 10 individuals were currently occupying the makeshift encampment. A cluster of trailers and tents were positioned behind a large shallow hole in the ground, covered with tarps and illuminated with bright halogen lights. After a long day of digging for buried artifacts from WWI, the group of students and instructors were understandably exhausted.

The men watching from the darkness were only told that the camp’s current occupants needed to be eliminated. They didn’t ask questions. They were unaware that the students were weekend history buffs, thrilled with the chance to sit in a foxhole and relive stories from the Great War. Some of the students had already found bullet casings. One uncovered a helmet. Orders are orders to these hardened men and the reasons for killing didn’t matter.

It was nearly 3 a.m. when Greta and Hans – the names the men gave them - stopped kissing by the fire and decided to call it a night.

Time to move.

Silently the smaller of the two men climbed down the ridge, being careful not to alert anyone of his presence, at least not yet. He crept behind the trailers and removed his semiautomatic 9mm handgun from his waistband. With his free hand, he blinked a pen light back toward the ridge, giving his partner a 30-second countdown. He assumed the man on the ridge, whom he had only met hours prior, was a decent shot. He’d have to be quick too.

He was counting down now.
Five, four, three, two, one.

The sniper rif
le let out a loud pop that echoed through the camp. It’s likely the sound would have been ignored had it not been followed immediately by Greta’s scream after seeing Hans shredded by the bullet of a high-powered riffle that had tore through the side of the tent and directly through her lover’s midsection.

The half-naked Greta emerged from the tent screaming in German. Good, the man thought from behind the trailer. That’ll do just fine.

Her fellow campers slipped out of their warm beds and sleeping bags to see what Greta was so worked up over. The sniper on the ridge picked off those who ran to Greta, while the man behind the trailer eliminated anyone who attempted to run away. The shots rang out for less than 20 seconds.

When the camp was silent again, the gunmen abandoned their weapons on the ground and went their separate ways. One man headed back toward the United States, the other just a few hundred miles away. Mission accomplished. It’s unlikely they would ever work together again.

Chapter 10

Portland, Oregon

For Luke the next several weeks were filled with mathematical equations, tests of skill, a little snooping and a few firings. Kathryn Tate didn’t take long to leave her mark on the Orange pod. Meredith, who had repeatedly squared off with anyone who would listen to her, lasted four days. Not that anyone would miss her. She repeatedly squawked about poorly defined work and that she wasn’t finding her place.

To a point she was correct. Most of the candidates felt that they were simply completing busy work that was beneath their skills. Day after day they would be given a theorem or physics equation to complete, then asked to do the same work the following day, but in a different way.

“I hope they are storing this information someplace where we can see it some day,” William Yong told his fellow pod members. “I imagine it might tell us an interesting story if we put it together.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the idea,” Luke said. “I spent some time yesterday analyzing the equations they have given me. They only differ by one or two variables at a time, but the answers they seek are already determined.”

“Right,” Amir said. “Since they are looking for us to provide the different variables, it stands to reason that those variables are ones they are having difficulty with in lab tests.”

“True, but if you aggregate all the trouble variables together, you can get a clearer picture of what larger issue they are attempting to solve,” Luke said.

“So what did you find?” Amir asked.

“That’s the problem, I can only see what they have given me. I can’t create an accurate picture without seeing all the pieces. The other pods are probably dealing with the same issue. Until we see the inside, we can’t determine what piece of research we are actually working on.”

Luke had quickly become the voice of reason in the pod. The work was frustrating and despite their orders to keep their findings to themselves, they were holding daily meetings on their work, trying to find commonalities that would assist them. Luke and Amir had orchestrated the informal meetings and they all agreed that it was best to keep the discussions to themselves and if they needed to report up something significant – which thus far no one had – they would do it through Kathryn.

Amir had to attend to a family matter during the first week on the job and was away from the office for a few days. During that week, Luke had done background searches on everyone in the pod, including Amir. Social networks provided a wealth of information. He was a second-generation American with an Iranian father and German mother. He was honorably discharged from the United States Army several years earlier, after serving in the Middle East and Asia for extended periods of time. Luke couldn’t find any records of his activities overseas, but that wasn’t a surprise. Military records weren’t public. He received a Mechanical Engineering degree while he was in the Army and was married with a young daughter.

The two men had started spending a significant amount of time together, first because of their work proximity, but their interests converged around athletics and family. Luke talked about his sister and niece, while Amir went on and on about his wife and daughter. They also formed a healthy rivalry concerning mechanical and electrical engineering, which Amir’s wife Lela found insufferably boring.

“Can’t you two just give it a rest?” she pleaded, over dinner one weekend. “Seriously, nobody cares, at least not in this house.”

“But dear,” Amir said. “I won’t feel comfortable until I have shown our guest how inferior his talents truly are.”

“You must be have mistaken me for someone else,” Luke said. “Last time I checked, I can spin circles around you with a keyboard and on the soccer field.”

“A truly pointless discussion, if I ever heard one,” Lela said.

Lela was the polar opposite of Amir. Calm and meticulous, where Amir would jump from one subject to another with no regard for outside input. Luke had also seen him lose his temper several times at the office, flying off the handle when debating a point of some design. Luke had actually had to discuss Amir’s temper with him several times for fear that
MassEnergy would let him go. Yet, he seemed to be a different person at home, relaxed and happy.

Amir didn’t find it hard to make friends though. He even organized a weekend soccer match with some of the guys at work. Amir thought it was good to get some of that desk-energy out and encouraged anyone he met to come over to the park that Saturday.

***

The game was a friendly one. Fourteen men and one woman showed up to participate. Kathryn drew several double takes in a white tank top and gym shorts when she arrived at mid-field.

“What, you’ve never seen a girl before?” she asked, walking up to the men. A rumbling of consent made it apparent that they hadn’t expected her – or any woman to show up. 

Amir picked the teams based on the player’s self-reported skill level. Luke was obviously the best athlete on the field, given his collegiate career, but he hadn’t played competitively in years, not that he was going to use that as an excuse.

Kathryn and Amir were on one team, Luke on the other. To allow for substitutions they played four on four with a goalie. The nets were positioned to shorten the field in half. No reason to make anyone’s lungs explode. The strategy was basic, get the ball to Luke and let him run with it. On the other side, the idea was to keep him out of the play.

“Let me cover him,” Kathryn said.

She looked so determined that Amir readily consented. For most of the game Luke held back to about half speed, knowing that the desk jockeys were not the most fleet of foot and this was supposed to be fun.

Kathryn saw it differently.

Luke received the ball and dribbled up the far side of the field, looking to pass the ball inside to an uncovered teammate just outside the goalie box. Kathryn rushed him full force and slid to steal the ball when he held up to avoid a collision. With the short field, she quickly punched a pass to Amir that he knocked in the goal easily. Luke stood, motionless with a look of shock on his face as one of his teammates yelled, “head in the game, man!”

She repeatedly slammed herself into Luke when he received the ball, trying to steal it. His athleticism allowed him to avoid several, but not all of the intentionally ferocious hits.

On one particular play Kathryn trailed Luke, who was without the ball. She ran even with him on his left side, then positioned herself on his right and launched her hip into his right knee, forcing both of them to the ground. Luke grabbed his knee – the same knee that had kept him out of most of the games his sophomore year at Stanford. He walked it off, but it hurt like hell. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she meant to go for his knee.

They were playing until one team scored four goals. It was 3-1, before Luke decided to play to his full potential, and quickly tied the score up, drawing some sneers from his co-workers. He made it a point to pass to open teammates and not make a break for the goal every time it was available to him. He scored once, but assisted on the other goals.

Amir found the net on a long pass from Kathryn to win the game 4-3. The team celebrated as if they had just won the World Cup.

“Tough game out there Kincaid,” Kathryn said, barely even breathing hard as they walked off the field. “I thought you were some hot-shot soccer player.”

“And I thought you were some stuffy executive.”

“I am, but with a mean streak,” she took a gulp of a sports drink. “I played lacrosse at Vanderbilt. It translates.”

“That explains it,” Luke said rubbing his knee.

“You’ve got to play to win, or don’t play at all. I know you were pulling your punches out there,” she said. “What, afraid to upset your buddies?”

“Just kicking around the ball on a Saturday.”

“Like I said, play to win or not at all.”

***

The break from the humdrum of work was a welcome one for Luke, who had been spending 65-80 hours a week on
MassEnergy’s campus. His assignments were rather trivial and he routinely completed them in less than half the time he was allotted. The remainder of his time was spent in the cafeteria, courtyard and common rooms in the dorms, attempting to elicit information from his fellow employees. The most significant obstacle in his attempts was the lanyard he and all Engineering Class candidates were required to wear. The large orange tag signaled that he was an outsider.

The exception to this was in the dorms, where
overly-tired employees went to crash after a long shift. Most considered the time in between shifts as personal time and didn’t wear their campus identification. He’d had several lengthy conversations with female lab techs, but even then, they were guarded about their work, like good little employees.

Even after a few drinks, they were tightlipped – at least about work.

Kathryn was fundamentally wrong about employee fraternization. He’d stayed the night in the dorms a few times a week probing employees for information. The dorm rooms resembled college campuses not only in architecture, but also activity. He’d been awakened more than once by amorous co-workers who didn’t know or didn’t care that everyone in the building could hear their late night exploits.

He had twice been invited back to a woman’s room, but he politely declined each time, thinking of Rachel. He was still in a committed relationship. He wasn’t yet so desperate for information that he’d break that trust to get it.

***

MassEnergy’s
security was understandably tight. No items that would hold data were allowed in or out of the campus. Biometric body scans were completed on entry and exit. Which meant even if he found something that he wanted to get to Lunsford, he could only memorize what he saw and attempt to draw or write it from memory. His work consisted of common mathematical equations and physics principals – nothing groundbreaking about that.

Luke had yet to wear one of the dozen data watches that Lunsford had given him. The devices were supposed to copy data from a hard drive to the watch, but
MassEnergy had worked around that too. The hard drives that ran the computers in the pods weren’t local. The machines were all in a server storage room somewhere on campus. The wires that connected the monitors and touch screens dropped through the subfloor and into the abyss, so even if he had the watch, he had nothing to copy from.

Lunsford had seemed to know what he was doing, but his methods were archaic. Luke had a hard time believing the watch could go undetected during the entry and exit scans, assuming he found a location to turn the device on and copy a drive. For that reason, he kept the watches in a shoebox in the closet.

Once a week Luke would type up his findings for Lunsford – although he found no real value in the information he was sharing. He’d leave the window shades on the North side of his apartment open for a day, the signal Lunsford had told him to make. Then he’d enclose an encrypted thumb drive in a plastic bag and drop it in the trashcan by the Mainfair Park playground at 10:30 p.m. the next night. If Lunsford or even the city garbage man was collecting the drives, he had no idea, but each week the can was empty.

It seemed as though his covert work was heading the same direction – right into the trashcan.