When we’re safely in the cargo tube car, I review the video with Cindi and Martha to explain the personal message that was hidden there for me.
“Look on the desk, just behind her right hand, as she leans back.”
I freeze the video in the right spot.
“What’s that on the desk?” Martha asks. “A piece of paper? Why would an atheist have paper?”
“It’s not just any piece of paper. It’s a piece of slightly greenish, lined paper that’s ten centimeters by fifteen centimeters. They want me to think it’s the missing page from Dad’s notebook. It’s a fake, but it does tell us that they’re sure we don’t have it.”
“It’s another trap,” Cindi says.
Yes. That was fast, I only provided the bait two hours ago…
“You’re not going to just walk up to your aunt’s house and ask for the paper are you?” Martha asks.
“Not a chance,” I reply. “Kenilworth, Illinois is virtually an armed stronghold of the atheist elite. There are patrol drones, checkpoints, cameras, and identity scanners everywhere. We need to test her and see if she sticks to the story that she has the paper.”
“How do we do that?” Cindi asks.
“We’re going to raid another house she owns … the house where I grew up in Sheridan, Illinois.”
“Did you say Sheridan?” Cindi and Martha ask almost simultaneously.
“Yes, Sheridan. My hometown is the site of one of Four’s original - and still largest - safe houses: Gethsemane House. It seems like more than a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Are there really any coincidences in God’s plan?
“Gethsemane House voted in Zip’s camp from the beginning,” I say; “but not that Zip’s campaign in McIntosh falling apart, I hope they’ll help us.”
“Help us?” Cindi asks.
“Jennifer won’t make the same mistake she made with my house in Colorado Springs,” I say. “The house in Sheridan will have some sort of trap waiting for us. It would be nice to have more backup this time.”
“You’re assuming they’re even still there,” Cindi says. “For all we know, they all went to McIntosh to help Zip.”
“Besides - getting them to help us is the easy part,” Martha says. “First we have to find them. Until The Corps did it by tracing power usage, no Four house had ever been found. Even then, most of them went undetected - including Gethsemane.”
“She’s right,” Cindi says. “Normally, arrangements are made in advance and you’re escorted to a safe house the first time you visit … sometimes blindfolded. It could be any building in town.”
I cock my head to one side with a practiced look I used as The Cult Hunter; then smile.
“Are you ladies presenting me with a puzzle?”
“You never found a Four house when you worked for The Corps,” Martha says.
Did she just bat her eyelashes at me?
“I never looked,” I say.
How could I go so many years without learning to flirt? I love flirting with Martha.
*****
We sneak out of the cargo area of the tube station and onto the streets of Sheridan.
“Okay, puzzle master. Find one of Four’s best-hidden houses for us,” Martha teases.
I turn a full circle, while scanning and thinking. Some parts of the town have grown in the seven years since I lived here, while others have been left to rot or have been knocked down entirely.
“Tell me anything you know about Gethsemane House,” I say to Martha and Cindi.
“All I know is that, unlike most Four houses, Gethsemane isn’t in the middle of nowhere. It’s in town - or at least on the edge of it,” Cindi says.
Gethsemane House is over ten years old; so I can eliminate all of the buildings built since then.
“We know they never shut down their power, and they claim to be the biggest house,” Martha says.
Drawing large amounts of power legitimately from the grid implies it’s hidden in, or under a business, rather than a house … maybe even a warehouse. The only big warehouses are south of town, near the old prison.
As I think, I continue to study the buildings of Sheridan.
They’d need a way to come and go unseen to avoid attracting attention. Where would escape tunnels come up in the middle of a warehouse district? It needs to be somewhere near trees or other natural cover to hide the entries.
“Is that a stumped look on your face, Cuz?” Cindi joins Martha’s challenge.
The only heavily wooded areas are near the river on the west side of town. Everything to the east is either newer buildings or farmland.
“I think his brain is starting to overheat,” Martha says, and laughs.
Are there any large old, buildings near the edge of the woods?
A childhood memory flashes into my head.
When I was young, I got sick from a vaccine that was given to me in a creepy old warehouse. I don’t believe it! They must have given me the Four vaccine in Gethsemane House.
“I’m sorry to break Four’s perfect record, but I know where Gethsemane House is,” I say.
I enjoy watching their jaws drop.
“On the north side of the tube line, near the river, the government built a warehouse to store materials way back when the tube and hover lines were being constructed in this area. The tube line is built along an old railroad grade because it was easier to use an existing right-of-way than to knock down buildings. Those old railway grades were also the easiest place to run superconducting power lines, which would give Four an easy place to tap in.”
“What happened to the warehouse when the government was done with it?” Cindi asks.
“They sold it. I think it was used as a vehicle repair yard of some sort for a while, and it may have sat empty too; but at some point, a courier business moved in.”
Knowing that the building houses a courier business convinces them that I’m correct.
“What do you remember about the terrain?” Cindi asks.
“Nothing. I lived south of the tube line when I was a kid; so I never went up there.”
“You never explored in the woods when you were a kid?” Martha asks.
“Why would I? You could do it virtually, at home, with the right electronics, just like you can go to the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower. Besides, just south of the tube line is the old sewage treatment plant. It was abandoned before I was born, but it still smelled.”
“How close is it to your parents’ house?” Cindi asks.
“Not far. Our house was on the north end of Hickory Street. When my parents died, my Aunt Jennifer moved in and we lived there until I turned ten and went off to college.”
“Your Aunt lived here when you were a kid?”
“Actually, Sheridan is her hometown too. My grandparents had a house on Park Street and Aunt Jennifer always said she hated everything about the town. Apparently from the time she was able to talk, she moaned that she would leave Sheridan and never come back. If this town is such a torture, I don’t know why she moved here rather than moving me somewhere else. According to public records, she still owns the house on Hickory Street.”
“Let’s go look at the old warehouse tonight,” Cindi says.
*****
Sheridan only has two hotels, and both are near the tube station; so we check in and rest until the sun goes down. There’s a hover line that runs down Johnson Avenue, but it’s only a few kilometers; so we decide to walk to the warehouse. I take them down Church Street, which will dead-end into the woods along the river.
“They actually kept the name ‘Church Street’,” Cindi says. “I thought names with any religious meaning had been purged a hundred years ago.”
“Apparently they voted on it a dozen times over the years, and every time the people decided to leave the name as it was. Here’s one of the reasons it was named Church Street in the first place.”
I point out an old white building. It’s barely bigger than the houses in the area, but is clearly an old church, including a steeple.
“Amazing. Most old churches had the steeples torn off, but this one survived,” Cindi says.
“This church was built around 2030, during the Equalization. The town used it as a library for a while, after the congregation abandoned it; but by the time I was a kid, it was owned by an older lady named Mrs. Pierce, who was often my babysitter. She turned it into the Sheridan Museum and Historical Society, and absolutely refused to remove the steeple. After my parents died, I spent a lot of time in that old church, and Mrs. Pierce took it upon herself to become my surrogate grandmother. I didn’t think about it at the time, but a lot of what Mrs. Pierce talked about contained biblical messages.”
“What did your Aunt Jennifer think of that?” Martha asks.
“Aunt Jennifer and Mrs. Pierce hated each other, but Jennifer put up with her - if only because it meant less work for her to have me out of the house. I never mentioned to Jennifer what Mrs. Pierce and I talked about. I guess I just instinctively knew that Aunt Jennifer would have put an end to my visits.”
We reach the end of the street and enter the woods, which are a mix of older stands that have not been touched by man for a century, and newer areas that were once cleared as farmland, but have been reclaimed by nature. We pass south of the abandoned sewage treatment plant, which doesn’t smell nearly as bad as I remember, and walk towards the river. The safest route is to pass under the tube line where it’s raised to cross the river, and then cut back to the old building.
There’s a narrow walking path along the river. If you looked at it casually, you might think that it was made by animals as they pass under the tube line; but Martha has trained me too well to be fooled. It’s purposefully wide in places, as the human makers tried to disperse their footfalls, and the side trails do not display the randomness you would expect in a path created by animals. Martha and Cindi see it too, but don’t say anything.
We choose a side trail that’ll take us towards the old warehouse. The south side of the building is only thirty meters north of the tube line; so we skirt around to the north side and find that the trees grow to within twenty meters of the building except in the vicinity of a loading dock area that has both a hover line and a tube line.
“This is the place,” I say.
“What do you see now?” Cindi asks.
“Look at the old loading bays.”
There are six old loading bays, each with a two meter tall number painted on it. The other five numbers are painted in white, but the number Four is painted in blue.
“Okay, so assuming they left some staff, how do we tell them we’re here?” Cindi asks.
“They’re in there, and they already know we’re here. The question is how do we tell them who we are?” I reply.
“How could they possibly know we’re here?” Cindi asks.
“One meter below the roofline, spaced twenty meters apart, there are cameras that …”
“I don’t see them,” Cindi says.
“That’s because we’re not moving right now. If we move, the cameras will follow us and you’ll see a tiny red light flash every ten seconds as they do,” I finish.
Cindi gives Martha her best “Is he for real?” look.
“It can be annoying, but you get used to it,” Martha says in response. “You can even come to love it.”
“The cameras must be infrared to be able to see us. How about if we each hold up four fingers and approach?”
“How about if you all hold up both hands before you get shot?” says a man’s voice from only about five meters behind us.
These guys are good. I didn’t hear a sound as they approached.
“Let’s go with his plan,” I say.