Evasion (19 page)

He figured if he went to sleep for a few hours, slept from midnight until three in the morning he could drive north up Highway 400 to Sudbury and be there by seven Friday morning when Nottoff would be getting off shift, according to the schedule.

The highway would be virtually dead that time of night, so Scott would be able to make good time heading north.

And he’d arrive in time to intercept Nottoff after his shift.

It would all work out well.

And it had been working out well.

Until he got about forty minutes north of Barrie, on a lonely and quiet stretch of Highway 400.

That’s when his front passenger tire blew.

It happened suddenly.

First, the tire gauge on his dashboard lit up, informing him that he had low tire pressure.  He’d seen that before and knew, based on the sensitivity of this alarm, he could drive for several days before having to actually check the tires.

But not this time.

The low tire gauge went on, and then, within seconds, there was a loud thrump-thrump sound coming from under his car, and the vehicle rocked up and down as if it had one of those hydraulic shocks you’d sometimes see on muscle cars.  The car lurched forward and began to slow.

“Holy shit!” Scott muttered, navigating the car over to the side of the road.

He didn’t even need to apply the brakes.  Taking his foot off the gas petal combined with the additional friction of riding right on his right front rim slowed him down quiet enough.

After fiddling with the spare tire from the trunk for about five minutes, Scott knew he wasn’t going to be able to fix the flat himself.

So he called the Automobile Association emergency number, told them of his situation and explained where he was, approximately, on the highway.

The dispatcher informed him that the closest contractor was about forty minutes away, but that they’d be there as quickly as possible, and retrieved his cell phone number so the driver could contact him in case there were any issues with locating him.  Then she gave him her name (Jeanette) and a confirmation of his request number. 3Q547

The highway was pretty desolate and only ran north and south. Scott wondered how it would be possible for anybody driving on this highway
not
to see him.  But he kept that observation and those thoughts to himself.

He needed the service guy to come, fix his flat tire for him, and then get going.

This was going to set back his plans big time.

Fifty minutes later, ten minutes after the time quoted to him, when he tried calling the Automobile Association again, he got stuck in a “we are experiencing a significant volume of calls right now” message reminding him his call was important and he was in a queue, to stay on the line for the next available operator.  The repeated message included the fact that if this were an actual emergency, requiring medical assistance, to hang up and call 9-1-1.

He stayed on hold like that for another half hour, before he thought of pulling out his laptop and seeing if he could locate the contractor vehicle’s location himself.

He used the hotspot option from his mobile device to connect to the internet, and within minutes was inside the Automobile Association’s internal servers, browsing through the calls made within Ontario.

There was nothing in the system indicating that he had called at all.  His Automobile Association customer number showed that the last time Scott had made any sort of service call had been three years earlier, when he needed a battery boost on a cold February morning.  There were no other calls registered since then.

A search of the first name (Jeanette) or the confirmation number for his call 3Q547, revealed nothing either.

It was as if Scott had never called.

Ten minutes later, a trucker pulled over about twenty yards ahead of where Scott was parked.  In the time he’d been sitting there, a little over half a dozen vehicles and two large transport trucks had all shot past him on the highway.  None of them had even slowed down when they passed him, but several had moved over to the far left lane either in order to leave additional space, or perhaps because they were worried about “catching” whatever had caused this poor sucker to have to pull over.

The trucker lurched out of his truck and walked over to see Scott.

“Car trouble?” he asked in a southern drawl that Scott seemed to think might be Louisianan.

“Yeah,” he said. “Flat tire.”

“You got a spare?”

“Yeah. I’m just, ah, not all that good at it.”

“It’ll be my pleasure to help you,” the trucker said. “The name’s Pete.”

“I’m Scott.”

Pete stuck out his hand, shook Scott’s. “Pleased to meet you, Scott.  Now let’s see what we can do to help you out here.”

Scott was back on the road and drove no more than twenty minutes before the “hill assist” light flashed on his dashboard.  The tire pressure gauge went off again, and so did the low fluid indicator.  The dashboard lit up like one of those musically synced Clark Griswold styled houses in those YouTube videos, lights blinking on and off, flashing at different speeds, with beeps and boops and buzzes popping into the night air.

He pulled over to the side of the road.

This time, instead of calling the Automobile Association, he simply hacked into their servers again, and registered his location, the fact that he needed a tow, and, instead of entering his own Automobile Association number, he entered that of a fellow member whose information he could easily see now that he was hacked in.

The contractor arrived within ten minutes.  At that point, as the vehicle was pulling in behind him, Scott went back in and revised the number to his own.

The driver towed him back down to Barrie where, by the time all was said and done, it was morning and the service station was already open.

“We have no idea what happened to your vehicle,” the service manager, obviously confused, said to him after his team had spent about twenty minutes with the car in the shop.

“The entire electrical system is compromised and throwing errors we have never seen before.”

Scott sighed, wondering how he could have such bad luck.

But he knew better.

He was on to something here. And somebody had hacked into the Automobile Association, to prevent him from ever getting his call.

They had, obviously, also hacked into his car’s computer system as well.

Someone was trying to prevent him from heading north to see Nottoff.

Someone was on to him

Because he must have finally been on to something.

Today
 

Scott watched the brunette bylaw officer stalk toward him from the opposite side. Her eyes met his and he felt a cold dread in the pit of his stomach.

“Shit!” he said again, glancing back at the officer writing the ticket on the connecting car.

The train hadn’t yet stopped at the station yet, and Scott knew there was no way that it would and the doors would be open before she got to him.

“Looks like somebody is going to be paying the piper,” a middle-aged woman with her hair tied up into a little bun at the back of the top of her hair said to him over-top of the paperback she’d been reading.

Scott was prepared and fully expecting to hear her utter
You won’t get away. You cannot evade us
, in that monotonous drone he had heard all too often that morning, but she just tsked a couple of times and shook her head at him.

That’s when Scott looked past her to the yellow and orange emergency clasp on the GO train window.

“Excuse me,” he said, pushing passed the woman and pulled at the large emergency handle with his right hand while pushing at the bottom of the window with his left.

It was heavy, but, by design, the window tumbled out and smashed onto the tracks and platform below.

If only the other windows I’d gone through earlier today could have been this easy
, Scott thought as he stood on the vacant seat beside the bewildered woman who was still shaking her head, as if, instead of vandalizing the train he had just cut a raunchy fart.

Ducking and putting his left foot onto the window ledge, Scott pushed himself through the window and leapt down to the train platform.  Even though the train had been moving at a considerably slower speed than just a minute earlier as it continued decelerating into Union Station, it was still high enough and fast enough for the additional forward momentum to pitch Scott off of his feet.

He rolled forward over his shoulder to help break the fall and felt something plastic and metallic crunch under his back as he completed his roll.

My laptop
, he thought.

First his cellphone and now his laptop!

Scott, being such a savvy purveyor of technology, thought it was interesting that his great strengths were the things that were compromised; losing these computerized devices might have been the equivalent of Samson losing his hair, Thor losing his hammer, or Iron Man losing the power source in his specially designed suit.

He didn’t have time to worry about that, of course, because he was running for his life. But the computer, the mobile phone, those were the ways Scott had to connect to the internet, to do the research he needed to do, to be able to hack into the systems and find answers.

He knew he was close, really close.

That must be why these people were after him.

The only question was: who were they, and, since that’s the way Scott’s mind worked, how were they able to do this? How were they able to take control of people using that airborne agent?

Without a computer, where and how would he be able to pull this off?  His first thought would, of course, have been to contact Mr. Prescott, his trusted computer mentor – certainly the man would have some decent computers and a Wi-Fi connection in his home – but they’d taken over Prescott’s mind and body, so he had to rule that out.  The Toronto Public Library, perhaps, with their row after row of free computer and internet access?

Maybe.

But first, he needed to get away from them, get to a safe spot.

All of this went through Scott’s mind in the matter of a couple of seconds. By the end of those thoughts, he was already back on his feet and starting to race down the platform toward the stairs that led down into the depths of Union Station.

The platform was already filled with commuters, several of them standing and looking aghast at the man who had leapt from the window of a moving GO train.  He heard a few
Are you okay, buddy
’s as he got to his feet, heard a few other NSFW exclamations; but nobody, of course, reached out to him.

You simply didn’t reach out like that – not in downtown Toronto, anyway. If this were rural Nova Scotia, or a really small town in Ontario, the inclination would be to see if the stranger needed help. But here, particularly during the morning rush hour, the mentality was more
Oh, God, what now?
Combined with
How is
this going to delay me getting to where I need to go?
rather than any sort of actual concern for another.

The platform wasn’t as full as Scott had seen it – since the train he had arrived on hadn’t completely arrived, only about half of the station platform was full. On the opposite side of the platform another train sat there with its doors open. Most of the occupants had gotten off and other commuters were now getting on.

There were small groups of people standing on the train platform on the side Scott’s train was coming in, aligned approximately with where they knew the doors on each side of each train car would be at when the train came to a complete stop.

It’s amazing how much people were creatures of habit. Scott imagined that the majority of the people he saw standing in those spots, stood in those exact same spots at the exact same time every single working day that they went to work or school or wherever their daily commute brought them.

Humans were, in many ways, as predictable as computer programs.

That thought made Scott consider something regarding the people who were able to take over his boss and colleagues from work.  It could, perhaps, be easily done when you knew a person’s routine – when you knew exactly where they would be.

Of course, tracking people using their unique mobile device was easy enough to do. Entire traffic update apps relied on the constant stream of vehicular commuters who were in traffic; the speed of the highway based on a constant flow of updates about location.

Scott wondered if perhaps the fact that his cell phone had been crushed and broken relatively early in his flight for safety might have actually been beneficial.

Being the hacker that he was, he had provided a mod to his mobile phone that scrambled the signal, sent conflicting reports of GPS location – except at such times when he required accurate GPS location in his phone for particular apps.  He thus has built a toggle switch into the program; so that when he required GPS tracking use, he could easily turn it on and off.  But, considering that a program is only as good as its’ weakest line of code, it was possible that someone out there could hack into it, and be able to track where he was, even with the GPS scrambled.

Thus, having the phone break might have been a good thing after all.  If they had been tracking him based on the GPS signal from his phone, at least they no longer had that.

As Scott moved down the platform, he found there wasn’t enough space to run.  The crowd had come to a funnel section, and, with a mass of bodies all trying to get into the narrow space of the stairway, where there was room for no more than two people side by side descending the stairs together (and good luck to anybody on their way UP that stairwell, because the mass of people moving down would overtake them – they’d be like a stick thrown into a fast moving river), the crowd came to a virtual stop.

The train car Scott had been on passed where he was standing, and he’d briefly spotted the female ticket officer glaring at him through the window; the angry look on her face which was, as Scott knew it would be, layered with that distinctive glaze he had noticed in every single person who had been converted into the single-minded horde.