Night Talk (31 page)

“But as you know, Ethan was really immature in his thinking, not just with drugs and society in general, but his attitude toward the world of computing. He was like a kid who couldn't stand to see a puzzle that went unsolved. He had to know what the secret was, what was worth hiding.”

Greg said, “Unfortunately for him, Rohan and us, he hacked into a secret someone is willing to kill for.”

“Greg, don't just think about Ethan's abilities to hack into a system; he also was a master at secret encoding. It goes with the territory. Ethan's mother probably created disappearing ink with lemon juice to write secret messages when she was a kid. Ethan most likely e-mailed a picture of his dog with a message weaved in the hair. They say bin Laden hid secret messages in porn flicks.”

“Steganography.”

“Yes, the art of concealing a message in plain sight or within a message. My favorite is a trick used in ancient times. The king would have a slave's head shaved, have a message tattooed on it and send the slave to deliver the message after his hair had grown back. Things moved a bit slower back then.”

“Sounds like a death sentence for the slave after he delivered the message and had his head shaved to read it. They couldn't have let him wander around loose with an important message on his head. Besides the world moving slower, life was cheaper.”

Greg's favorite secret messages were the ones where American POWs in Vietnam blinked out
T-O-R-T-U-R-E
to let the world know prisoners were being tortured, and the POWs who gave the finger to their unsuspecting North Korean captors while being televised.

“Anyway,” she said, “like all other hackers on the planet, Ethan would be fascinated by the art of secret messages. Unfortunately, he would also be better at it than most of us. He could easily hide a message in just the color spectrum of a picture.”

“But I'd never find it and from what you've said, he could do one that only a few people in the world could decode. So we always go back to the same premise—it's likely Ethan did send a message that I could decipher myself or with little help. Which means the government or whoever would have read it.”

They were silent for a while, each alone with their thoughts before Ali spoke again. “Was there ever a time in the world when there wasn't a great threat to humanity? My father served in the military during the Cold War, when people dug holes in their backyards to protect them from the nuclear fallout they expected; my grandparents fought the Nazis' insane lust to conquer the world and reshape it into their twisted image. Now something—your aliens or government run amuck—is strangling the world with electronics.”

“The troubles all began with the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,” Greg said. “It's back again. The computers, the Internet, the Web, satellites circling around us day and night, cameras photographing our every move—they're hanging over us like a twenty-first-century Tree of Knowledge, wrapping around and strangling us like a giant boa.”

 

58

Leon went quietly down the hallway. He paused by the door that Bob told him the guests were staying in and listened. He could hear the hum of the occupants speaking, but couldn't make out the words. He slipped across the hallway and listened at the door that he was told was unoccupied. Not hearing any sounds he quietly opened the door. The room had neither people nor furniture.

He shut the door and went back to the door to the bedroom that Greg and Ali were in. He removed his shoulder bag, opened it and took out a thin cable and quietly tied the end of it to the door handle. He strung the cable across the hallway to the opposite door and tied it to the handle, pulling it tight.

He put a screwdriver through a loop on the cable halfway between the two doors and began twisting the wire with the screwdriver.

*   *   *

Greg and Ali were lying back, their eyes closed, when Greg suddenly shot up.

“What's the matter?” Ali asked.

“I heard something. From the hallway.” He got off the bed.

“Maybe it's just Bob.”

Greg went to the door and turned the handle to open the door and take a peek out. The door handle turned but he couldn't open the door. He gave it a jerk and pulled hard. It opened just an inch before flying shut, just enough to give him a glimpse of Leon in the hallway twisting the screwdriver in the cable loop, making the line more taut. When he tried to jerk the door open again, it wouldn't budge.

Ali asked, “What's the matter?”

“Someone's out there! We're locked in!”

He tried the door again and she grabbed his arm with both hands and tried to help pull.

He said, “It's no use. He's got us trapped.”

“Bob?”

“No. Some guy in a uniform.”

“Your van driver.” Ali banged on the door. “Open the door. We'll pay you.”

“With what?” Greg muttered.

He went to the only window in the room to check it out. Iron bars. The backyard had tall yellow grass that would act like kindling when sparks hit it. The house next door had appeared empty when they drove by and half of the fence between the properties had fallen down, confirming his suspicion that there was no one nearby to whom to shout for help.

Ali said, “We need to convince him we have the file. If he lets us out, we'd have a chance to escape.”

“I don't know. He'll know we're lying about the file.” Greg pounded on the door. “Hey! Open up. Let us out and we'll talk about the file.”

“What do you think he's going to do?”

He shook his head. They both knew the answer to that one. It didn't matter if Greg had the file and gave it to the man. They would get the same treatment Ethan and Rohan got.

 

59

Leon kept twisting the long screwdriver until the cable was too tight to twist anymore. He aligned the tool with the cable and wrapped strong tape around them so the screwdriver wouldn't release the tension when he let go.

Testing the cable, satisfied it was taut enough to keep the occupants from opening the door, he grinned and patted the cable with his hand as if it were a work of art. He had followed the instructions given to him precisely and felt proud of his accomplishment.

The people inside the room banged on the door and yelled to get his attention.

“You want the file, let's talk about it,” the man inside the room yelled.

Leon knew nothing about a file. It puzzled him that the man thought he wanted a file. He knew better than to deviate from the exact instructions given to him. He had once accepted money from someone he had been sent to terminate. He took the money and still killed the man, but the pain inflicted on him for disobeying orders was horrible.

But they kept shouting about the file and he wondered if he had missed something in his instructions. Had he been told to get a file from the people before he killed them? He didn't think so, but he couldn't remember.

Leon stepped over to the door and knocked on it.

“Let us out,” he heard Ali say from the other side of the door.

“Where's the file?” Leon shouted at the door.

“Let us out and we'll talk about it.”

Leon repeated in his head what the man had said. That they would talk about the file. And he still couldn't remember being told about a file. Confusion and uncertainty made him angry and caused his rage to grow. He didn't know about a file and he sensed the people in the room were lying to him. But he wasn't sure.

Leon said, “Give me the file.” He looked down at the crack at the bottom of the door. “Put it under the door, slip the file under.”

Greg replied, “We don't have it but we know how to get it. Let us out and we'll tell you.”

Leon heard desperation in the man's voice. He shouted at the door, “You're lying to me!”

He left the hallway and went back into the living room, passing Bob's body. The floor beside the body was wet from Saint Leon's work with the blade. He went into the kitchen.

He turned on all four burners on the stove and the oven, blowing out the flames, leaving the gas escaping.

He took a position just around the corner from the hallway. From the work bag he carried he took out an incendiary grenade, pulled the pin and threw it around the corner and down the corridor. The grenade bounced on the wood floor, not exploding with shrapnel but spewing fire and smoke.

Leon left the house walking, not running, proud of himself. Turning on the gas had been his idea. He didn't know how long it would take before the house blew, whether the fire would get them first, but he marveled at his own ingenuity.

 

60

The house shook from the explosion. They stared at the door. And smelled smoke.

“He's blowing up the place,” Ali said.

“Starting a fire.” Greg heard the flames, saw the smoke coming in under the door. It was unbelievable. Bizarre. Impossible. They would be burned alive.

As Ali struggled with trying to open the door, Greg quietly walked back to the barred window, staring at it stupidly. He knew the bars were there before he went to the window, knew they wouldn't be able to open it, had heard many times about the dangers of installing window bars without a release latch inside, but few people bothered with the release because they figured they could leave by the door—or that there would never be a fire.

He realized it wasn't the window that had drawn him away from the door. His mind was telling him something, but what it was didn't come through.

Ali was suddenly at his side. With the heel of her shoe, she broke the window and started yelling for help.

He didn't think the house next door was occupied. It was dark and looked abandoned when they drove by it. The next house was across the street from the abandoned one. It occurred to him the broken window would let in air that could feed the fire.

“What's the matter with you?” she shouted at him. “You're just standing there frozen.”

“I—I got it.” He finally grasped the notion he had been wrestling with. “The house has a pitched roof.”

“Meaning what?”

“There's an attic.”

“What does—”

“I saw a gabled attic window. There'd be one at both ends of the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

He headed for the closet with her behind him. “When I was a kid, we lived in a house like this.” He pointed up to the closet ceiling. To a trapdoor that opened into the attic. “We can break out through an attic window. They have wood slats but we can kick the slats out.”

“Are you sure?”

“I need a chair,” he said.

The room was filling with smoke, which made them go into choking spasms. Greg got a wooden chair and put it under the trapdoor, closing the closet door behind them to hold out some of the smoke. “You ever been in an attic?”

“I don't know. No—never.”

“Boards run across the attic every few feet—there's nothing solid in between. Stay on the beams, the wood joists for support. If you step off, the ceiling can't hold you; you'll fall through into the fire.”

She stood on the chair and he wrapped his arms around her legs and lifted her up, off the chair. He got her up high enough so she could push her way through the trapdoor and get a purchase on the frame. With him pushing her up and her pulling, she wiggled through the opening.

As she disappeared into the attic, he got on the chair and reached up to get a grip on the two-by-fours framing the trapdoor. He hadn't done pull-ups in an eon but a fire below helped motivate him. He pulled himself halfway up but fell back down again. He took a deep breath and choked on smoke, going into a coughing spasm.

Choking on the smoke, he once again got a grip on the wood frame of the trapdoor and pulled until he could get a purchase with the side of one arm and then the other arm. Lifting himself even more with his left arm, he got his right hand on the frame and pushed himself up until he had both hands on it. Pushing up he got his butt on the frame and then fell forward onto his hands and then his knees so he could crawl on the attic supports.

The space was dark and thick with smoke, sending them both gasping for air and into coughing spasms.
Smoke not fire is the real killer
rang in his head, something he'd read or heard.

Ali was gagging badly; he quickly caught up with her and urged her on. “Keep moving. We'll die if we stop.”

She went forward on her knees but missed a cross board and broke through, letting out a scream. He grabbed her by her clothes and pulled her back, putting his arms around her to get her steady on a cross beam.

Unable to see well in the smoke and darkness, they moved forward by touch, crawling along on their knees, keeping on the beams, coughing as smoke from the fire burned their lungs.

When they reached the attic window he'd seen earlier, strength fueled by the fire raging behind them enabled him to yank out a slat and then another until he had all four slats off and the window opening was wide enough for Ali to slip through headfirst.

She went through the window, landing on the single-story roof to the garage, which was lower than the main house.

He pushed in the opening, sure he wasn't going to make it and he was right, he was too wide for it. He backed out and took off his coat. He threw the coat through the opening and went at it again, turning himself almost completely sideways because the window frame was taller than it was wide.

 

61

They slid off the garden shed to the ground on the backyard side because Greg could hear people out on the street. The house was being completely engulfed in flames as they went over the collapsed wood fence, around to the other side of the neighboring house and out through the gate to the street.

There was no sign of the man who had trapped and nearly burned them to death. He might be long gone from the scene, Greg thought, but he wasn't sure. Didn't fire starters love to stay and watch their work? But Greg doubted the arsonist would stay around to marvel over his fiery work. He was most probably an assassin who got in, killed and left before the police arrived.