The Motel 6 didn’t leave the light on for us but it did have our rooms ready. We pulled into the tree-shaded parking lot around 2 a.m. and Robin woke the desk clerk from his nap so he could sign in. He signed the register with the name on his new enhanced driver’s license and was handed both room keys. All the chain hotels had gone to them rather than metal keys which too often were lost and never returned with God knows how many of them floating out in the world. The desk clerk didn’t say anything about his leather cycle outfit but just where the ice machine was located. And that the pool was still closed for the season. Robin rolled his eyes.
“Ya think?” The temperature was still in the 40’s and anyone brave enough to go swimming must have been part polar bear.
“Check out is 12 noon.”
Robin took the keycards and exited where he met us at the corner out of the camera’s sight. Entering the room at the end of the building, we waited for him to give us the all-clear. Once he was satisfied that it was safe, we repeated the process with our room. Both looked the same---a bedroom with bath/shower, mirror, sink and toilet in pale yellow tile. The two queen sized beds were covered with an emerald and bronze coverlet, the walls papered in dark green to match the bedspreads. On the back wall was a row of sliding windows and a wall register that was putting out moist heat. We had a Formica-topped desk opposite the head of the beds, an overstuffed recliner and one of those luggage stands for our non-existent suitcases. A clothes bar hung behind the double-locked door with hangers that could not be removed from the bars. The lights were overhead fluorescents except for the two small hanging lamps over the beds.
Mairy lay on the one nearest the window and I pulled off her boots before I sat on the edge looking down at her. “You go first,” her tired voice said. “Shower. I’m so tired, I’ll do it later.”
“Hungry? Thirsty? I can get you a cold Coke from the machines,” I offered but she was already asleep.
Robin stood in the doorway. “Beer?”
“Bars close at 2,” I reminded him. “There’s a Seven-Eleven down the street, we passed it on the way in.” He nodded. “You okay to drive?”
“Yeah. I’m tired but I can stay awake for that. Sam Adams?”
“Cold Snap if they have it.” He walked out of sight and I stood in the doorway watching until I heard the fading growl of the BMW. He didn't go long. I watched him come up the drive, round the corner of the hotel with his hands full of dark brown six packs. He raised both packs as he saw me, followed me into the room and eyed his sleeping sister.
“She asleep?”
“Knocked out,” I agreed.
“Want to come over to my room? I bought some peanuts, pretzels, and sandwiches. I don’t want to wake her.”
“I don’t think a brass band could wake her,” I laughed. “But I’m headed over anyway.” I closed the door behind me and made sure it was double locked before I followed behind Robin into his room. When I opened his door, he was sprawled on his bed face down and sound asleep. Not even a shove on his shoulder woke him. The beers were sitting on the nightstand, condensation dripping onto the fake wood tops.
I pulled off his shoes and threw the comforter from the extra bed on top of him, made sure that the key was on the counter and locked up behind me. I stood outside both rooms and drank one of the still cold beers, my eyes on the brilliant array of stars that could only be seen in the clear skies of the mountains and not the cities.
The air was still, cool enough to warrant a coat and quiet enough that I could hear the sound of traffic and TV sets that other motel guests had turned on. What I overheard sent me scurrying inside and turning on my own set to watch the cable news channel. And there it was. Pictures of me, Robin, Mairy, Leon and Mike as well as the rest of the people who had helped me including Roan Horse, the nurse. Luckily, all but George and Leon were out of the country and reach of Chase and company. Worse yet, President Houston was spearheading the effort to track me down; I saw him at the news conference with Chase prominently in the background. He was espousing how dangerous it was for me to remain at large and that I should turn myself in, that I could not hide in a city, town or village nor would the forests conceal my presence anymore. A phone number and a web address crawled across the screen denoting a special task force set up simply for sightings of me and for my capture. This picture faded out with the reward money and the annoying buzz of the EBS, Emergency Broadcast System. He might as well have put out a death notice on me.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I hissed and looked at Mairy. She was dead asleep, curled in a ball under the covers, her body rising and falling gently as she breathed. She slept like a child, emotionally and physically exhausted and I didn’t have the heart to wake her.
Grabbing the blanket off the other bed, I slipped out of the door making sure that it was double-locked before I went up the stairs to the roof. The fire stairs were locked but the quipp deactivated the alarm and opened the lock for me so that I could slip through onto the flat roof of the motel. That it was flat surprised me, this area received a good portion of heavy snows and 6/12 pitched roofs were more common because of the snow loads. Maybe because of the massive heating and AC units on the roof, it necessitated a flat roof. This provided enough light and coverage for me plus the blanket broke up more of my human-shaped profile.
The sky was enormous, a cereal bowl of twinkling rainbow colored stars and diamonds. There were no clouds and it was cold enough to make my breath visible; as if the cold jinn of winter had reached down my throat and pulled forth my very soul. I was grateful for the blanket and huddled underneath its cocoon of trapped body warmth.
I could see for miles. The town wasn’t large enough for skyscrapers and like Phoenix, had spread out rather than up. There wasn’t much going on this early in the morning; it was just barely three a.m. but a few tractor trailers were pulling into the truck stop on the Interstate. Some early morning deliveries were unloading. Bread company vans, newspaper trucks, and the Walmart was open 24/7. There were only six cars in their parking lot. Nowhere did I see unmarked vans loitering, blacked out SUVs or stealth helicopters descending on the town. No suspicious groups of casual shoppers talking into their hands or wearing extra-large hearing aids that snaked under their collars. In fact, it looked damned normal and that worried me.
My quipp vibrated and nearly made me piss my pants. By the time I had fumbled through the folds of the blanket and into my jeans pocket, it had fallen silent but I could read the text in the glow from the screen. From George Little Bear. It read, RUN. He’s coming for you.
George knew where we were or would be. He was expecting us to meet him in Bismarck and I hadn’t yet told him we’d been too tired to go on or that we’d stopped in Sturgis. Still, I knew Chase could easily pull up all hotel and motel reservations in the surrounding areas and although three people wouldn’t necessarily seem odd, the NSA would definitely have someone checking out any new arrivals.
I ran down the stairs and back to the rooms, waking Robin first, letting Mairy have that extra few minutes of sleep. Robin and I wiped down the room for fingerprints and then I raised the air temp inside hot enough to destroy any DNA evidence yet not harm any of the rugs, walls or furniture. Next, I went to my room and Mairy.
She was already awake, washing her face in cold water, pulling on clean clothes and packing the little we’d pulled out of our backpacks. I kissed her.
“You’re a marvel. Did you see the news?”
“No. Something in my dreams warned me to run. What is it?”
“Chase found George. Sent me a message on my quipp.”
“Just what is that thing, anyway?” She took it from my hand and studied what had once been a lowly cell phone.
“You know that this has more memory and computing capacity than all the computers used by NASA to put men on the moon? Yeah, well, I re-programmed it to tap into and use the satellite coding systems and piggyback my programs. I can go anywhere, get into anything and override whatever I need to for that particular instance or situation. It doesn’t actually scan but uses the US, Russian, Chinese and European Union SATS to scan for me in real time. It does emit an electronic pulse that interferes with brainwaves and lets me orchestrate your thoughts. Consider it a ‘remote control’ for the entire world’s Satellite Security System.”
“But why ‘quipp’?”
“E-Quip-ment Unit Impersonating Program Protocols,” I quoted.
“If someone else gets a hold of it?”
I handed it to her and the quipp quivered in her palm, blinked and went dark. No matter how she poked and prodded or shook it, the unit did not turn back on.
“It’s broken?”
Reaching over, I plucked it from her and the unit powered up, beeped almost too fast for her to distinguish individual tones yet she heard and translated it.
“Morse code. It says, DAD. Is it coded to your DNA? How is that possible?”
“Coded to the electrical signature of my brain, not my DNA. DNA can be faked, my brain has to be awake, un-coerced and in a particular state that only I know or it won’t work,” I explained. “So George’s only works when he’s holding it and not forced to use it. He had time to warn me before it was taken from him.”
She shook her head. “No wonder the US Government is after us. Can they track you through George’s unit to yours?”
I hesitated. “I’m not sure. If they reverse engineer it, they might be able to.”
She grabbed both of our packs and headed out the door. I did the same temperature burst thing with any evidence left in the room leaving it cleaner than before we’d entered.
Robin had the bikes readied for us; he’d checked the fluid levels and the gas tanks. Laughingly, I realized he’d packed the beer in the saddlebags along with the snacks neither of us had opened.
Mairy snatched the sourdough pretzels and opened them. “Great. I’m starving.” She tucked the bag on the seat and pushed her bike out of the parking lot and down the street. We followed and only started them when we were out of earshot and camera range of the desk clerk.
Anyway, I used the quipp to point the cameras away from us so there wasn’t anything to record. We rode up the street with the lights off until we reached the on-ramp to the Interstate. Once our wheels hit the concrete, we increased our speed to 90 mph. I set the quipp to scan for radar and police presence but we didn’t see anything until we were 75 miles away from Sturgis. The traffic was light on the highway; mostly 18 wheelers and the three of us back-doored a convoy of Walmart trucks---riding their slipstreams and using the trailers for camouflage. We didn’t drive towards Bismarck yet there was a major increase in police activity and helicopters traveling in that direction.
We decided to stop at the next truck stop for breakfast; all of us so hungry that I swore my stomach was eating its way up to my throat. We’d polished off all the snacks but had left the beers alone.
We ate the biggest breakfast we could chow down. Here, it wasn’t called the Lumberjack Special but the Trucker’s with gallons of coffee just the way I liked it. We kept our chatter down to a minimum; that was to say nothing until Mairy cleaned her plate.
“We’re going after George?”
I sighed and put my hands on the tabletop, thumbing the text on the quipp. I scrolled through the police computer banks and when I found nothing there, I went diving into NSA files and even the White House Situation room’s notes. Press files and the Internet and nowhere did I find any mention of George, the accident in Red Lodge or me. There was a total news and information blackout going on which meant it went as high as the President and was coordinated to every level.
“There’s nothing,” I said frustrated. “Not even any cell phone traffic between Chase and Cameron. They must be relaying orders by landlines and memos. Using couriers which will slow them down.”
“Do they even have typewriters anymore?” Robin asked.
“I have a few other tricks I can try,” I muttered and typed furiously. The signal went out to the CCTV cameras at Langley and NSA HQ turning on in the Director’s office, his personal assistant and Cameron’s home and office. All four places showed on the small screen one at a time because all at once the images were too small for details.
No one was in Chase’s office, the PA’s or Cameron’s but the doctor was sitting at his desk at home dictating on an old recorder. I could have hacked into his cell phone or PC and eavesdropped if either had been on but both were conspicuously unplugged and the SIM card removed. An old fashioned Princess phone sat incongruously next to his PC but even that was unplugged from the phone jack. I was able to see him only because I had bugged his home immediately after my first escape.
Reading his lips wasn’t easy but I managed to catch enough to know that they had both George and Leon in custody. Mike Faraday had eluded them with his father’s help, escaping on the senior Faraday’s Lear jet overseas.