Chapter 62
Chapter 62
T he flight from Georgia to Virginia was short. When we landed, Clay bought an old Suburban. Four-wheel drive. Lifted a foot. Ginormous tires. Steel bumpers fore and aft. Somebody had gotten ahold of the engine and made a few modifications to the horsepower. Not to mention the muffler. If we wanted to announce our arrival, we were doing a pretty good job. Think the General Lee meets monster trucks.
While we were still a mile out, the first drone locked on to our approach. Eddie was speaking into our ears. “Second drone locked on.”
“Check.”
Clay drove erratically. Swerving. Trying his best to appear inebriated. Unintelligible rap music blared through the speakers. When he crashed through the gate, even I was convinced he’d been drinking. The gate wasn’t so much a deterrent to keep people out as something to set off alarm bells for whoever was watching it electronically. And based on the addition of two more drones, it did.
At a rather rapid yet erratic rate of speed, we drove the half mile to the house, winding a circuitous and serpentine path through the woods. Approaching the home, Clay floored the accelerator, and the monster truck ran up the front steps and through the front door. Our lame attempt at shock and awe. But the smile on Clay’s face told me it was worth it. Maynard had two backup power systems. One diesel, one solar. Which meant we couldn’t just cut the city power to the security system and sneak in through a back door while he panicked trying to get power turned back on. Maynard had been in the game a long time. No one accused him of being born yesterday. Hence, Eddie suggested the drive-through-the-front-door technique. He said if we could distract some unsuspecting person watching some computer terminal, who was not expecting a truck to drive through the front door, he maybe could catch them napping, electronically speaking, and then quickly program some code that might give us five minutes of blackout before they knew what hit them. The trick would be getting us out of the house and Eddie out of the mainframe without them ever knowing Eddie was there.
The Suburban came to rest in what looked like a living room. While Waylon had beefed up his intel and security protocols, he’d done very little to the house. Which meant old wood gave way quickly to steel bumpers and 600-plus horsepower. Clay played the drunk, unable to shift gears, all while berating me and Camp as we spilled out of the truck, along with a case of empty Pbr cans, and began pushing on the front of the truck—as if we could extract the nearly two-ton vehicle from the house. Camp then walked into the kitchen and appeared to relieve himself in the sink. Genius really. We looked like a couple of drunk thugs looking for a concert. Jess had added one addition to our Trojan Horse that helped as much as any: a fog machine. Like those things used at concerts by rock stars. We had placed the outlet of the tube near the muffler, making it look like smoke from the engine. To the natural eye watching this scene unfold on some terminal, no one could tell the difference. To us, the benefit was enormous. It helped mask us. A camouflage of sorts.
True to his word, Eddie, with help from Jess and BP, managed a backdoor end-around of Maynard’s system. Total blackout. T-minus five and counting. I could only imagine that got someone’s attention at a terminal somewhere. With the clock ticking, Camp quickly began placing cameras. With a few minutes to myself, I did what I was so good at doing. I snooped around.
The bedroom was plain, sparsely decorated, and seemed staged. As if not actually lived in. Same with almost every other room. I felt like I was looking at a childhood time warp from the fifties. There was nothing modern. Nothing electronic. No color pictures. Even the sinks and toilets were from the fifties. Yet nothing seemed original to the house. Everything was too perfect. Like a movie set. Or like someone had brought in a designer and retro-fit the entire interior to make it look like a memory.
Sixty seconds in, I cracked a doorway to find a stairwell leading down. Most homes like this had cellars, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary. But what I found was. I descended the steps, cognizant that the last time I did that somebody tried to blow me up, and landed in what looked like a normal farmhouse basement. Again, nothing strange. Save one thing.
Carpet. Who carpeted the floor of a cellar? Cement walls, cement floor, shelves for canned vegetables. Usually, an underground room like this had the feel of moisture. I doubted it would flood, but we were belowground. The air down here was New Mexico dry. As if someone had sucked it out.
The carpet was pseudo-shag. Dark brown. And it had been thrown down. Not fixed. I pulled up a corner and smiled. A circular groove. A perfect arc. Half-inch deep. Leading from the wall to the floor beneath me.
Before me stood a plain concrete wall. Four feet wide, eight feet tall. But judging from the groove beneath my feet, that wall wasn’t a wall. It was a door. So, because there was no handle, I pushed on it. To my surprise, it clicked. And swung open. Thinking he was busy upstairs, I spoke into my comms. “Camp?”
He tapped me on the shoulder. I studied him. He must be half cat. I never heard him.
We clicked on headlamps and began walking the corridor. Twenty-three steps to a right turn. Then fourteen to a left. Finally, twelve more to another door. This one steel. I turned the knob and pushed it open.
What I found did not please me.
The room was paneled. Airtight. Servers stacked along one wall. Housed in neat racks, which produced substantial heat counteracted by the HVAC currently circulating. A desk of sorts sat along one wall. A dozen screens. A keyboard. And something else. I pointed. Camp shrugged. It looked like a joystick, but what did it control?
The room held no decoration. No paper. No pens. No other chairs. No nothing. The singular item sat on a shelf just above the computers. Worn. Tattered. It, too, looked straight out of the fifties. It sat limp, one leg folded beneath the other, one eye having come unsewn. Strings dangling.
It took me a minute. Then I saw it for what it was. A puppet.
A marionette.
Camp busied himself with planting cameras in what we knew was the mother lode for sick and sadistic activity for whoever sat in that chair and manipulated that controller. This room was an epicenter for evil.
Eddie crackled. “Thirty seconds.”
If we took anything, like say a drive, he’d know it. And we didn’t have time to copy any data. We had to leave it.
So we backed out, shut the door, and retraced our steps, climbing out of the basement and then sprawling ourselves back across the foyer floor in front of the Suburban just as Eddie reported, “You’re live.” Camp and I did our best to stumble and laugh and act too drunk to walk, finally making our way back to the Suburban where a belligerent Clay sat waiting, revving the engine. Which I thought was a nice touch. Not to mention, the fog machine had been set on max and had filled the entire house with enough smoke to bring visibility to zero.
We backed out and drove six miles down the road. Then, having exited the Suburban and removed the fog machine, we dropped the stick into Drive and allowed the truck to drive itself off the side of the road, where it tumbled down a hillside and into the base of some trees. Totaling the old Chevrolet but not mangling it so bad that its drunk passengers couldn’t rally, climb out, and stumble toward whatever concert they’d been searching for.
Ruse complete, we drove an hour to an airfield and were airborne seventy-two minutes after leaving Maynard’s den of iniquity. In flight, Camp began populating his screen with the twenty-seven cameras he’d planted in the house while Clay sat smiling like a Cheshire cat and sipped orange juice.
One image stuck with me. One image I couldn’t shake. The marionette. And when the pieces came together, Camp must have seen the horror on my face. “What?”
“Maynard.”
“What about him?”
“He’s the puppeteer.”