Brett Battles - Exit 9

Where is this guy, dammit?

It wasn’t that big of a place. Ash doubted there were even one hundred buildings in the whole area. He was also confident the man couldn’t have gone into any of the buildings unseen.

Stopping in front of the church, he looked around.

Nothing. Just night and snow and frigid cold. He was the only one-

Wait. Something had moved behind a large storage tank to his right.

He ran toward it, stumbling once but managing to remain on his feet. As he neared the tank, he saw another behind it, and there, outlined against the side of the second tank, was the intruder.

Breathing hard, the best Ash could muster was a quick walk, but it was faster than the other man, who could do no better than to shuffle around the tank. Soon, Ash could hear the man breathing.

“Stop!” he yelled when only fifteen feet separated them.

The intruder looked back, but kept moving.

Ash raised the gun. “I will shoot you.”

The threat did nothing to stop the other man.

On willpower alone, Ash increased his speed until he caught up to the man. He reached out and grabbed the back of the guy’s jacket. The intruder tried to pull away, but Ash held tight.

In a desperate move, the guy spun around and threw himself at Ash. Ash’s feet slipped on the icy snow, and they both slammed to the ground. The man grabbed the barrel of the gun and twisted the weapon, popping it free. Ash tried to snatch it back, but the man pushed away, creating a few feet of distance between them.

Ash scrambled to his right, wanting to get behind the cover of the tank, but knowing he wouldn’t make it in time. When the gun went off, he tensed, waiting for the bullet to hit.

It never did.

He looked back.

The man was sprawled on the ground, a hole in his head.

Chloe was about thirty feet away, her pistol in her hand. “You all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ash huffed, climbing to his feet. “Thanks.”

She shrugged. “That’s like a dozen you owe me now.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I’m rounding up.”

They hid the two bodies under the CF Guest Quarters. Come summer, if it warmed up enough, the smell of the thawing corpses would signal their location. Hopefully, there would still be someone alive in Grise Fiord to notice.

“You’ll want to see this,” Jordan said.

Billy came around the table, and leaned over Jordan’s shoulder so he could look at the computer screen. The two had been holed away in one of the small meeting rooms in the Bunker since Billy’s return to the Ranch from Chicago. Though it was well after midnight, going to bed had not even crossed Billy’s mind.

“What am I looking at?” he asked. On the screen was what appeared to be a night-vision video of a street.

“Just watch.”

Jordan tapped one of the arrows, speeding up the image for several seconds, then hit the space bar. The video ramped down to normal speed.

On the right side of the frame was the edge of an industrial-type building, and on the left, the road the business was located on. Most of the shot, though, was focused on a chain-link gate fastened to the building. It was an obvious security shot meant to monitor who went in and out. At the moment, the gate was closed and no one was around.

“Where is this?”

“Give it a second, okay?”

Billy watched the screen, unsure of what he was supposed to focus on. He was about to say as much when two headlights appeared in the upper left corner, coming out of a driveway a block down on the other side of the street. When the lights turned onto the road in the direction of the camera, Billy could see that it wasn’t a car, but a semitruck. It continued toward the camera for several seconds, then passed out of sight.

Jordan stopped the playback, and looked triumphantly at Billy.

“So what? A truck on a street.”

Jordan dipped his head in disappointment. He pointed at the screen. “Look again. That’s not just any street. You’ve been there. That’s the one where the Hidde-Kel building is. And this truck…” He backed the video up and paused on the frame right before the semi moved out of view. “Just came out of Hidde-Kel’s lot.”

Billy studied the picture. “You’re sure?”

“Positive. It took a little finagling, but I was able to hack into the security system of a company just down the road. They keep two months’ worth of footage on their backup drives. Just had to hunt around until I found this.”

Billy moved his finger toward the screen, hovering it just over the load on the back of the truck. “And is that…?”

“Yes. It is.”

A shipping container. An identical match, as a matter of fact, to the shipping containers in the footage their inside person had sent them.

__________

MATT AND RACHEL arrived within seconds of each other, both responding to urgent phone calls from Billy.

“I need to go back out,” Billy told them.

“Why?” Matt said, surprised.

Billy nodded to Jordan. “Show them.”

Jordan turned his laptop so the others could see the screen, and hit the space bar. While the video of the truck played, he and Billy took turns filling in the details.

“But that’s not even the best part,” Billy said as the video finished.

It sounded pretty damn good to Matt. Knowing the public face of the Project had been an elusive goal to this point, but now, with the discovery of Hidde-Kel, they had a name. It meant they might be able to stop just reacting and go on the offensive. They might not be able to kill the Project’s plan completely, but they might be able to create some big problems.

“So what’s the best part?”

Billy smiled. “Jordan was the one who figured it out.”

Jordan shrugged. “All I did was enhance the video enough to get an ID number off the truck.”

“And?” Billy urged.

“Well, from that I found the company who owned it. These days, nearly every truck on the road has a transponder so that its owners can track them. I, um, was able to get the truck’s transponder ID and tap into it.”

Matt was not surprised. Jordan was a tech expert who routinely hacked into satellites and computer systems for the cause. “I take it you found something.”

Jordan minimized the video and brought up a static image of a map. Superimposed on it were several bright yellow lines, each overlaying existing roads and creating loops that seemed to always start in Chicago before going somewhere else in a two-state radius.

“The lines represent routes the truck traveled in a two-week period surrounding the time the video was shot.” He clicked a button and all but one of the loops disappeared. “And this is the trip he started that night.”

The line went southeast into Indiana, then almost due east across the state and into Ohio, where it terminated in Cleveland. From there it looped back, following basically the same route home.

Jordan clicked on Cleveland, and the map zoomed in. He didn’t stop until the image area was filled with a roughly four-square-block section of the map. The yellow line stopped right in the middle.

“This is where they dropped off the container,” Billy explained.

“Where you guys think they dropped it off,” Rachel corrected him.

“No. Jordan, show them.”

Jordan brought up a satellite image.

“The angle’s a little skewed,” he said. “The closest satellite I could get access to wasn’t directly overhead, but you can still see it.”

The focus area of the shot appeared to be part of an industrial zone. In the center was a large open lot behind a warehouse-type building. Even from the slightly angled view, it was apparent the lot was not seeing much use. There were several abandoned cars along one fence, and a couple of semitruck trailers in the middle. Sitting right next to the trailers was what looked like a brown shipping container.