Set Me Alight (9 page)

“Well, Pim, at least you’ve done one thing right during all of this. You kept this moron out of the loop as much as possible. If Christine is really here to steal some information from us, she doesn’t know enough to completely do away with us.”

“What are you suggesting we do now, Pete?”

“I’m not sure. We still need information on her before we act. My instincts are telling me she’s just after Paul’s stuff, probably hired by the mining companies, but I can’t say for certain right now. Do you happen to know where she’s staying while she’s in town?”

“No, I don’t. She never mentioned it.”

“Well, she drove a car down here, so I’m guessing she can afford to stay in a hotel. That doesn’t leave many options. Let’s start looking around to see what we can find out. Just you though, Pim. Kevin can stay here before he decides to compromise this any more than he already has.”

There were only a few hotels left in town that were still in operation, and her car was going to stick out like a sore thumb. It couldn’t be that difficult to find out where she was. If my suspicions were correct, she won’t be slumming it at some tent camp like the rest of us would have. No one looked and acted the way she did by sleeping on the dirt night after night.

Along with Pim, we approached the nearest hotel. I saw her car in the lot – the only one. We were on our way toward it, when I noticed her standing in the lobby talking to the guy at the desk. I grabbed Pim and ducked off behind some bushes. We just sat there and watched until we saw her get in her car and leave. Where she was going, I had no idea, but it gave us a chance to snoop around her room and try and find out whatever we could about her. I could only hope she left something useful behind.

It wasn’t difficult to locate her room. There was only one that was occupied, and she didn’t bother closing the blinds on her windows. Getting into the room was going to be a different problem.

“Do you know anything about picking locks, Pim?”

“No.”

“Well, how the hell are we going to get into her room then?”

“We could always just break the window and climb in.”

“Great plan, Pim. Why don't you run over to the guy at the desk and ask him to call 9-1-1 on us while you're at it?”

“Then what the hell do you suggest we do, Pete?”

“Ok, ok, I think I’ve got something. This hotel can’t afford to keep to many people on staff, right? And they have to keep all of the spare keys somewhere, probably behind the front desk. So, if we just wait it out until the guy at the desk has to go to the bathroom or something, we can just sneak behind, grab the key we need, and then use it to get into the room. Should be simple enough, right?”

“Sure, but what if the guy doesn’t leave the desk before Christine gets back?”

“Well then we’re fucked, Pim, so you better hope that doesn’t happen.”

Doing our best spy impressions we snuck on over to the lobby door to peer in on the guy by the desk. It looked like it was our lucky night, the guy was sound asleep at his chair. Christine looked like she was talking to the guy before she left no more than five minutes ago, and he had already nodded off. That was the kind work ethic I could respect in a man. Since it was my idea, I was the one to try and find the key. There was a drawer by the guy’s knee marked ‘Room Keys’. I couldn’t have hoped for anything easier. There was one problem though, I couldn’t open the drawer without bumping his knee. With the soft touch one normally reserved for caressing the soft malleable head of a new born child, I moved his knee, and prayed that he wasn’t too light of a sleeper. As soon as I could open the drawer enough to grab the room key, I dashed out of there as fast I could manage while still trying to remain silent.

“I’ve got the key, Pim. Now, let’s head around to the back entrance so we don't risk waking the guy at the desk any further. I can’t imagine they keep the back locked. Once we’re in we should be able to get into Christine’s room.”

The back door was unlocked, and there wasn’t a soul in the hallway for us to avoid. The key worked on her door, and we were in. Everything seemed to be coming together easier than I anticipated. I could only hope finding what we need proves to be as easy.

“There’s nothing in here, Pete. It’s just a bed and a dresser. Doesn’t look like she brought anything with her. There are a few changes of clothes she left laying out, but that's it.”

“Keep looking. There has to be something in here we can use.” We scoured the room, not finding much of anything. I went over to the bed and threw the bedding off, hoping something would be stuffed under the sheets. Finally, I had found something. “Wait, here, under the pillow. I think it’s a laptop.”

“Give it here, Pete. Let me take a look at it. Dammit, she has a password on it. I can’t get in.”

“Well, let’s hope she is as uncreative in password creation as you are, Pim. Do we know her birthday, her address, or anything about her?”

“No, not that I can think of. Let me think for a second. Her last name, Fougue, do you know what that means?”

“Not a clue, Pim.”

“It’s French, it means passion. Let me try something like that. PassionGirl. HotPassion. PassionateMissy. OnFireWithPassion. Dammit, nothing is working.”

“Give it to me. I’ll show you how a real hacker works.”

Pim handed the laptop to me. I proceeded to throw the laptop to the floor. Pim gasped and yelled out, “You fucking moron! That’s the only thing we have on her and you’re trying to destroy it!”

When the laptop hit the ground, the battery popped out. I went to pick up the laptop and battery to reassemble it, when I noticed a folded up piece of paper tapped underneath the laptop in the battery compartment. I removed it and held it up to Pim.

“You can apologize for calling me a moron.”

He snatched the paper from my hands and unfolded it. To reassert my dominance, I snatched it back. I looked the paper over. It looked like this:

From G’s

7/4: Gen:1:15 Eze:5:6 Ps:80:15 Lev:19:3

And it continued like that down the paper. I couldn’t make head or tail of anything. I gave up after only a few moments. My alcohol raddled mind had already proven its lack of worth.

“It’s a bunch of nonsense. Here, take a look.”

I threw the paper back at Pim. He looked to be much more successful in reading the cipher than I was. He stared down and didn’t let anything break his attention. I tried to ask him a question, and he held up one finger to me to cut me off. The gall.

He sprinted over to the bedside stand. He opened the drawer, and pulled out a book.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to break the code. See at the top where it says ‘From G’s’? I’m betting that means ‘From Gideons Bible’. Then there are dates down the side of the paper. For each date, there are some letters, followed by two numbers. I’m guessing the letters are the name of the book in the bible, and the two numbers are the chapter and the verse. My best guess is to use the first letter of each verse for the password. It would work perfectly for passwords they want to change every few days, especially for someone who would be spending time in hotels.”

“How did you figure all that out so quickly?”

“You know, this used to be a great Christian nation.”

I thought it was best not to respond to that.

“Here, take back the paper and read off the verses for today’s date. I’ll look them up and copy down the letters for the password.”

“Ok. Rom:10:17. Ps:39:4. Ge:3:16. Le:2:16. Deu:1:11. Ps:118:19. Rom:15:13. Deu:5:12. Pro:30:5. Ps:2:6.”

“Uh, ok, I guess this is it.”

Pim handed me what he had written down. It said:

SLUTMONKEY

“Looks like I should give the bible a second chance.”

Pim glowered at me. I laughed as I walked back to the laptop. I put the battery back in, and thankfully, it booted up when I pressed the power button. I entered the provocative password at the login screen.

“We’re in.”

Pim rushed over to me and grabbed the pulled the laptop away from me. This time I did not protest, as I hadn’t used a computer in almost a decade. It was much better off in his hands than my own.

“Have you found anything on the computer? Anything useful? Anything to let us know what she’s doing here? What the hell she's doing hounding us for Paul's documents?”

“Yeah, Pete, look at all this. It was sitting on her desktop.”

“Jesus, Pim. She has profiles on all of us. Photos, life biographies, place of birth, everything. How the hell does she know I worked at Authentic Tony’s? That was over ten years ago, and I was working under the table as it was. Where is all this information coming from?”

“I don’t know, Pete, I don’t know. Here, look at this document. It looks like a memo of some sort. ‘Use whatever means necessary to obtain the leaked corporate documents. By force, if needed’. It’s signed off by ‘Megalomerate MGMT’. What the hell is Megalomerate?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Pim. We’ve got what we need though. Grab the pen and paper by the phone and leave a note for Christine. We’re going to have a little chat with her tomorrow. Don’t forget to take the laptop with us when we go. We'll need it as a bargaining chip.”

Chapter 8

I think it’s safe to say at that point that Christine didn’t want to set up a connection between the Montana and Minnesota conspiracy cults. What the hell was Megalomerate? The name sounded too ridiculous to be something real. The memo referenced the ‘leaked corporate documents’, but Paul’s documents came from the different mining companies in the area. The memo made it sound like it was all from one source, not the four or five or however many mining companies there were in town. I could never keep track of them all. Maybe they weren’t different companies, but just different divisions of the same mining company. Was there something else to Paul’s documents that we were missing? I had just been working off the information in the notes Paul left. I never put forth any critical analysis of my own. That wasn’t what my role in the operation. My role was to be the whiny sidekick who accomplished nothing, got in the way, and the fans all hated.

Now about all of the profiles we found on her machine. After we left the hotel room Pim poked around the laptop a bit more and found even more disturbing information. Not only were there complete biographies on the entire group, there were precise schedules of our daily activities for the previous few months. It turned out Paul’s and Pim’s extreme paranoia wasn’t unfounded after all. There really was some sort of shadow organization out there following them around. Whatever they were paying those guys, I hope it was a lot. I don’t think I could survive following around my boring ass all day long and taking meticulous notes of every little detail without a steady flow of designer drugs and alcohol. I wonder how Christine felt about being assigned to assassinate us. After years of training by the CIA or NSA or whatever the government’s assassin wing was, half of the training spent in some undercover infiltration of a terrorist cell network, where she was probably identified and imprisoned, tortured for months before she escaped and then strangled her target with her bare hands while he sat on the toilet, and then forced to make a getaway from their mountain hideaway hundreds of miles from any sort of human civilization. After all that they send her after a slobbering drunk and an idealistic hippie teenager. What a fulfilling use of her talents and expertise. Though, maybe she was just a poor desperate person like the rest of us, and ran across some sweet speaking old man in a bar offering steady work and good pay. Then once she realized what she would be doing, extinguishing human life, it was too late to run away. Take the work, or watch everything in your life be burned away. Or, perhaps she isn’t here to assassinate us or do any sort of harm, and this was all just a result of my half destroyed mind trying to make connections out of nothing. It didn’t help that the only other person involved in this with me was a conspiracy theory nutjob.

I sat in The Sink Hole, waiting for Christine to show up like Pim wrote in the note we left back in her hotel room. I wasn’t why she would bother showing up. If she was what we thought she was, she would be better off just leaving and letting the next guy in line take over the job where she left off. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones ‘Megalomerate’ wanted to see snuffed. There were a few homeless guys I’m sure they’d like to see dead just for the fun of it.

To my surprise, Christine had walked into the bar, looking as perfect and calm as ever. Looking at her you couldn’t tell that two degenerates broke into her hotel room last night, stole her only valuable possession, and then left a somewhat threatening note on the side table. She walked over and sat down in front of me with nothing but a blank stare.

“So, uh, you got our note?”

“Yes, Pete, now what is it you want from me?”

“What do we want from you? I think the more important question is: What is it that you want from us? What’s with that memo from ‘Megalomerate’, whatever that is, and what are all those profiles on us about?”

“Look, Pete, I didn’t come here to set up some hippie circle of trust between Pim’s group and some made up group of crazies in Minnesota.”

“Thanks for the clarification. I never would have been able to piece that together on my own.”

“I was sent here to get the documents that Pim told me about. I wasn’t told anything else.”

“By the way, that wasn’t Pim who gave up all the information about the documents and myself. It was the desperate lover boy Kevin. And how the hell were you planning on getting the documents from us? That memo says ‘by any means necessary.’ Were you going to start waterboarding us or whatever other tactics the CIA taught you?”

“No, I mean, I don’t know. I’m not some sort of shadow agent recruit. I’ve never done something like this before. This is all happening because my father fell into debt with the wrong people. There wasn’t any way he could pay them back, and this was one of his options. He’s not even fit enough to roll out of bed, so I was going to do it for him. I didn’t know what it was I was getting myself into. I thought I was just going to be a glorified courier. I had no idea they wanted me to sneak my way into some underground radical group.”

“You flatter us.”

“Everything escalated so quickly. Once it started there wasn’t any way for me to back out. At least, not without them hurting my father, so I had to go through with it.”

“I figured something similar might be the case. My intuition amazes me sometimes. Anyway, what are you going to do now? I’m sorry to say but I’m not just going to hand everything we have over to you now that you've told me your little sob story. Not because I think what we have is ‘big’ and ‘important’ and can’t fall into the wrong hands – I just simply don’t like you.”

“That’s great, Pete, but now you have a much bigger problem than me. I was just their first plan of action, the cheap one that didn’t really matter if it succeeded or not. When you and Pim stole my laptop, they already knew I failed to do what I was assigned. Every time someone logs into that laptop, it takes a picture of who’s using it, and it audits every action taken. They know you two accessed the memo and are aware of what’s happening. Now, they aren’t going to take any chances.”

“Who is this ‘they’? Megalomerate? I have no idea who or what that is.”

“I’m not sure, either. I just know they’re powerful, rich, and have the means to do whatever they like. You have to trust me, you aren’t safe here anymore. They’ve already sent someone to finish what I’ve started, except they aren’t going to be as nice about it as I have been. You aren’t going to get a chance to ‘uncover’ them like you did with me.”

“What do you suggest we do then? And why are you even telling me all this? What do you have to gain?”

“I have nothing to gain, but since I failed I’m in the same boat as you. Whoever they send after you, I can only assume will be after me next. The worst thing the two of us can do is stay here. We have to start moving, make it harder for them to find us.”

“To do what, delay the inevitable? Maybe when whoever they send gets here they’ll be polite and just ask for the documents. I can hand them over without fuss, and they can be on their merry way.”

“I doubt that, Pete. Whatever you’ve done, it’s pissed these guys off. Before you didn’t know enough to force their hand to violence, but now that you know what you do about me, they’ll be convinced to really go after you.”

“You seem to know a lot about this organization when you claim to have never done this before.”

“It’s not that hard to pick up on some things, Pete, not when they send you an appendage of your father in the mail for failing to do something as simple as not posting enough on an internet message board.”

“Where would we go?”

“Anywhere, just as long as we aren’t still here when their man arrives. We need to leave now.”

“Hold on, I still have a few more questions for you. How did they get so much information about us in those profiles that were on your laptop?”

“I don’t know exactly. I know for the schedules, they’d just pay off some of the locals to keep a watch on you. The bartender here, for instance, is being paid by them. Some of your old coworkers, even people within Pim’s group, but I don’t know who. None of them are aware it’s for anything malicious, all they care about is getting paid to do basically nothing. Take a few notes on people they regularly spend time with, and get some cash for it. Not a hard offer for them to say 'yes' to.”

“So someone Pim and I have been speaking with is informing them?”

“Yes, which is why it’s important you leave now. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just leave town, now.”

“Christine, I’m not doing anything until I have some idea of a plan of action. What’s the point in just running? I’m not that smart or crafty, and if these people are everything you say they are it won’t be that long before they find me. I don’t have any friends or associates outside of this town that could help me hide out and lay low. I have no cash, nothing of value to my name. Being a man on the run doesn’t seem like it will be a cheap lifestyle.”

“Don’t worry about that, Pete. I have a decent amount of cash on me. Megalomerate gave me a significant amount of money for expenses to complete this mission of theirs. It won’t last forever, but it will be enough to get away for a while. Enough to allow us to come up with a better plan while on the run.”

“You know, we’ve been talking about how this is a ‘we’ thing, how we’re now in this together or something. Why should I do anything with you? Why should I trust anything you’re telling me? The only thing I know about you, is that you were sent here to try and con me, to steal from me, and if necessary, ‘take me out’, or whatever.”

“You don’t have many other options at the moment, Pete. You either don’t believe anything I’m saying to you, stay here and risk all this coming true, or believe me and try and be proactive for once in your life.”

“Well, Christine, I can’t say I have much going on here to be of any reason for me to stay. I’ll go with you, but don’t take this as a sign of trust. I’ve been meaning to get out of this place since my friend died, and if you’re going to bankroll it and drive me out, I’ll take it. First, I have to take care of some things. Make sure my affairs are in order and all that.”

“We need to hurry, Pete. There’s no telling how much time we have left.”

“I know, I know, someone’s coming for us and blah blah blah. You’ve mentioned that a few times already. I just need to take care of some things on my own, and then we can head out, ok? I’ll meet you at the rundown 7-11 at dusk.”

I didn’t like of the shit Christine was throwing on me, I didn’t like this one bit. What the hell was going on? Shit had completely hit the fan, and I was standing right in front of it taking the shit shower in the face. God dammit Christine, why couldn’t you have met me at The Sink Hole and confirmed that all of my suspicions were the result of a lifetime of too many drinks and seeing too many bad action movies when I was younger? Now I was about to became a man on the run. Could I call myself a fugitive? Did I need to be on the run from the law to be a fugitive? Maybe this ‘Megalomerate’ organization was a law unit, a special law unit meant to find and eliminate pathetic sacks of crap like myself.

Now, I had to ‘get my affairs in order’. Not sure what I meant when I said that to Christine, but it seemed to have worked in buying myself a little bit of time before I headed off into the great unknown with someone I knew nothing about. This was all a result of her father’s bad debts? Who was he doing business with? For some reason I didn’t think this was the kind of debt collection most banks utilized. Was there some sort of connection between myself and her father? I didn’t know anyone from Minnesota, though for all I knew Christine wasn’t actually from Minnesota. I never bothered to ask. Not that I could trust her answer if I did. For all I knew, she didn’t even have a father. Well, everyone has to have a father to some extent, even if it’s just some guy who donated his sperm looking for some easy cash, but whatever that’s beside the point. I guess it didn’t really matter if I trusted her or not. I had already made up my mind to hit the road and get the hell out of there with her. At the very least I could use her for the car and the cash to put some distance between this crap town and myself. When my bowels finally settled from taking in all the shit I could then decide if I should ditch her or not.

Back to my ‘affairs.’ I thought of two things I should take care of before I left. First, even though Christine told me not to tell anyone about the bombshells she just dropped on me, I couldn’t just leave Pim completely out of the loop. I hated that little guy, but he was in this as much as I was, and I would hate to let him face the grisly fate Christine was predicting for us without any sort of warning. I decided to write a brief note and leave it on my door. He would come around eventually after I was gone and find it. It wouldn’t need to say much, or anything specific about what I was doing. It just said ‘leave town’, or something to that effect. He may not have been the smartest kid in the world but he should be able to pick up on that, or God help him. God help us all if Christine was right.

Next, I had to take care of Paul’s documents. That was what really started the whole mess. Whoever Megalomerate was, they were after what Paul, and his brother before him, discovered. They didn’t really care about me or Pim or anyone else involved, they just wanted to make sure Paul’s discovery didn’t see the light of day. Sure, Pim had already posted some of it online, but if it ever made it to anywhere that mattered, then the mining companies were going to have a real problem on their hands. Megalomerate must have been associated with the mining companies in some way. Maybe it was some sort of umbrella organization? A union of corporations to protect their interests. That made sense, somewhat. As long as Paul’s documents were still around, they were still at risk of this thing blowing up in their face. But what to do with them? Taking them with me just put the documents in Christine’s possession, which is exactly what she was after to begin with. Her whole escape plan might just be a con to get me to bring the documents to her. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring them to Pim, either. Someone in his group was informing on us, and I couldn’t imagine it would take much more for Megalomerate to get them to turn even further against us to try and steal the documents or find out where they were hidden from Pim. No, I would have to take care of it all on my own. What if I buried it somewhere? Like some sort of pirate’s secret treasure – but where? It couldn’t be obvious enough for someone else to stitch together the location, but still had to be easy enough for me to remember so I could still use it as a viable threat. I also didn’t have much time to take care of it before I needed to meet Christine. There were only a few hours of daylight left. Where to then? I decided, the area Paul brought me to when he was training me. It was only a three mile hike from town. I would be able to make it there and back in time to meet up with Christine. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to distinguish it from any other random stretch of forest that surrounded this town to anyone but myself. It was as good a place to hid the documents as any.