A rattle echoed through the area as their pursuer struggled with the rear entrance. If they couldn’t find a way out they were trapped, and Steven resolved himself to a possible fight with adversaries of unknown competence, who could very well be armed.
“Be as quiet as possible. We need to find a way out the front,” Steven whispered.
They crept past a tall ladder and a rotary table-saw on a makeshift stand. Footsteps pounded from a distance. Natalie glanced at Steven’s profile — jaw set, eyes narrowed to slits as he focused on finding an exit.
An explosion of feathers startled them both as a sparrow sought escape, hurling itself against the tarps before disappearing into the cavernous darkened space above. Dim light from the waning dusk filtered through the broken windows, providing scant visibility. The footsteps slowed to a more cautious cadence, drawing closer.
Steven gestured to a spot ahead that was brighter, and the sound of cars grew louder as they made their approach. The footsteps behind them ceased. Steven cautiously picked up a three foot section of wood beam and motioned for Natalie to continue towards the opening. He remained behind, sliding his body into a recess in the wall, waiting for his stalkers to show themselves, his improvised club at the ready. After what seemed like an eternity, the crunching of plaster underfoot sounded from a few yards down the hall, and then a silhouette materialized in front of him.
The pursuer didn’t register the movement in time, and by the point he did, it was too late. The wood beam landed squarely on his head, dropping him instantly. Steven listened for evidence of another assailant but heard nothing. The other man must have stayed in place outside the café or had gone into another building.
Steven crouched and felt the man’s pulse, barely making out his shape in the darkness. The beat was weak and fluttering, but there. He’d live, although he’d feel like a piano had landed on him when he regained consciousness — Steven could just make out blood streaming down the side of the man’s head. He surveyed the surrounding floor and spotted two weapons his assailant had dropped — a square box and a pistol. He scooped them both up and soundlessly eased himself to where Natalie would be waiting.
When he arrived at the front entrance, also secured haphazardly with some wood and a cursory length of chain, she was nowhere to be found. Natalie had disappeared. He glanced down at the white plaster dust that coated everything and saw the distinctive outline of her boots leading out onto the street, beyond the barrier. He wondered whether he’d be able to make it through the space and then heard noise from somewhere in the building’s depths and resolved to try. It didn’t sound like he had a lot of time.
Steven barely squeezed through, emerging onto a busy sidewalk with pedestrians hurrying along, anxious to get home. He scanned the sidewalk but didn’t see Natalie.
Great.
A horn honked, and Frederick slid to the curb next to him, the rear door swinging open before the car had completely stopped. Natalie’s distinctive aroma floated into his awareness even before he’d made it to the car, drawing him like a bear to honey.
He climbed in, pulling the pistol from where he’d concealed it under his shirt, and examined it.
“An air gun.” He cracked the breach and extracted a small, blue-feathered dart filled with a dark amber fluid. “Want to bet that’s knockout juice?”
She hefted the box he’d set on the seat. “This is a stun gun. Which makes sense — they want you alive so they can interrogate you. They’ll only kill you once they understand what you know,” Natalie reassured him.
Steven absorbed that. “What do we do now?”
“I think it’s safe to say that they’re on to you. Your home and office are off-limits. They must have made the car, so we’ll need to ditch it and get another one. Frederick can handle that. My vote is we go back to the villa, make dinner, and rinse the construction dust off while he deals with it. How long will it take for your office to run the decryption analysis?” Natalie asked.
“Should be done by morning, with any luck. But are you sure that these people can’t find you tonight?”
“You’re the one who picked up the tail, not me. The trip to the flat was a bad idea. I understand you needed to get the software, but everything in life has a risk, and the risk there was of you being followed. We knew that. And now we dealt with it, so other than the problem of us being confirmed together on a visual by our pursuers, we’re clean. But you can’t go anywhere near your usual haunts. Hopefully this was a wake-up call for you, and you realize I haven’t been overstating the danger.”
Steven listened to her calm, measured cadence, absent any trace of emotion, and nodded.
“I believe you.”
In the tranquility of the now deserted office, Sophie’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she set up the encryption software to perform the analysis on the file Dr. Cross had sent. She’d been a programmer for close to a decade, having been somewhat of a child prodigy, which had earned her a full scholarship to Stanford. Those had been heady times and had validated the many hours of sacrifice her mother had invested so she could pursue her interest in technology. A scholarship had been the crowning achievement of her life, and she’d graduated with a 4.0 average before going to work for Microsoft.
When she’d been recruited to work for Cross’s group it had been a no-brainer. Live in Florence, a location redolent of the exotic in a country she’d always dreamed of visiting, for the same salary as being another faceless cog in a corporate machine in Washington, where it rained constantly and costs were through the roof? No contest. Of course, there had been logistical issues to deal with, not the least of which was her mother, who had been fighting cancer for the last two years. She’d gone into remission after an aggressive course of chemotherapy, but her health had been precarious ever since, and Sophie was her sole means of support other than disability income and a meager Social Security allotment. They’d quickly burned through her mom’s savings over the course of the health battle, and Sophie had stepped in and bridged the shortfalls. But that had cost her dearly, and the expenses were still piling up, even with the health insurance. Her mother was now living with her in a two bedroom apartment, and Sophie’s life revolved around work and attending to her needs.
The screen indicated that the software had begun the comparisons as it studied for pattern recognition and tried countless possible substitution cyphers in myriad languages. It was a processing-intensive program that Steven had written in his clumsy, amateurish manner, which could only be sped up by distributing the various computing tasks across the three most powerful systems they had. Steven might have been a visionary in some respects, but a coder he wasn’t, and the program was one that would take a week of full time operation for a single CPU.
Sophie gazed at the screen in dismay and made a silent resolution to herself. She would approach him whenever he got back, casually, and see if he was interested in having her optimize the program at an equitable hourly rate. It might take up all her nights for the next few weeks, but she was willing to make the sacrifice. She had to generate money somehow. It had affected her sleep for the past month, as she plotted the course of her savings versus her expenses — it was grim picture that would see her underwater within a few more weeks.