“Sure.”
James gave the shop assistant a small smile as he walked out of the shop. Maybe they were considering checking his pockets because of his nervous disposition.
The door gave them a departing buzz.
James took a deep breath. They sat down. The bench was cold. She was staring at him. Hypnotic eyes. Mesmerising. No blinking, just staring at him. Hard.
“Did you get the device?” She smiled.
Lucas said she was behind it all. Was he wrong? If she was behind it all, wouldn’t she have the device and have no need to be here? “We had an incident.”
“An incident?”
“Some people stole the device.”
“Oh no. This could be very bad for me.” She stood up and started looking around and then returned her gaze to James. “This is a complex situation, James, and I’m sorry you’ve been caught up in it. All is not what it seems. Do you know who they were?”
“No, we were ‘put to sleep’.”
“What? Sleeping gas or something? And both of you, you and the other man?”
How did she know about the other man? He let that thought slip away.
“Yep.” He wanted her so much to give him a hug.
“James, it’s all to do with the girl.” She looked around. “I shouldn’t tell you this . . . national security stuff. People aren’t being honest with you. Do you know where the girl is?”
James shook his head. Those eyes it’s like he was locked into them. This was all getting too hard. He wanted to float away.
She placed her hand on his lap. “The girl, James, do you know where she is?”
“No, I don’t. They took her away in a helicopter.”
50 – Snooping
AARON MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO PROTECT ISABELLA as much as he could. He was now at his desk exploring the connections between the Professor and Isabella’s mother. He didn’t have the physical transporting device but hoped there was a blueprint hiding away somewhere, and he wanted to know what the motives of this Perdu lady were. So he explored.
He started with the Perdus. He found an article in an online scientific journal regarding the effects of psychotropic medicines on humans. His interest was due to the author: Anthony Perdu.
The article was more marketing than scientific research. There were seven comments attached to the article. Aaron also studied these. Most supported the conclusions of the article.
One did not. An anonymous reader. Interesting. Some sites banned anonymous entries, while some would adjudicate and delete if not suitable. How had this comment survived the adjudication process? And why be anonymous? Either scared or being protective of others.
Aaron’s technical support team soon located the IP address of the anonymous comment. The Rose property. This presented an opportunity to explore what was stored on Mrs Rose’s computers. Now to get the authority to confiscate the computers.
<°)))><
He told Mackenzie he’d be home late as he needed to make a quick trip out of the city.
Mrs Rose’s computers were packed away with the other housing furnishings in a self-storage unit not far from their home. The manager unlocked the roller door of the Rose’s storage unit and pulled it up. “I’ll let you go about your business. For protocol, we need to record anything you confiscate. You can do this when you leave,” the manager said.
“No problems and thanks for your help.” There was a funny smell, like vinegar. He went back to his car and got out his personal protective equipment, namely his facemask and gloves.
Aaron stood and looked into the storage unit. There was a bundle of old notebook computers and tablet devices sitting on top of a large filing cabinet, along with a newer desktop computer. They must have been into games or heavy number crunching—maybe, the dad was an engineer. He’d need the power cords for all those devices and imagined a tangled mess of black cords sitting in a box somewhere. He’d leave that to the technicians back in the office. He carried the notebooks and tablet devices out and loaded them into the boot of the car.
Power cords hung loosely from the desktop computer and monitor. He looked around and saw there was a power point in the storage unit. He decided to power up the computer and see if there were any files of interest—it could take days for the technicians to fit this into their schedule, and Aaron did not have days to spare.
Once powered up he was greeted with a message advising that the last backup to the ‘Bunker’ was successful. The computer wasn’t password protected. He took off his gloves so he could use the keyboard and mouse. He clicked to find out more details about the backup. There was a ‘General’ tab. He clicked it and discovered that the files were backed up to a remote disk in the bunker each week. This family preferred to backup their data underground as opposed to in the cloud. Good. That meant a backup was done before the computer was mothballed.
He located some file notes and draft documents. His attention was drawn to a document named ‘Thoughts Aloud’. It was a personal journal covering Mrs Rose’s gradual realisation of the real business she was in—although she believed she was working for a company that researched and developed new drugs to help people, some drugs did the opposite and her company wasn’t overly concerned about this. It appears the bottom line—money—was more important.
She was seeing more and more proof that the side effects of the psychotropic medicines were becoming frightening—murders, suicides, with comments along the lines of ‘she wasn’t herself’, ‘he was in a dark place’, ‘demon chatter’, ‘the demons had control’. Why was the world so blind to this? She had to do something.
One journal entry spoke of a batch of pills going missing during the trial period. Mrs Rose confronted the Perdus and was told to do what she was paid to do and leave the trials to them. Not long after, her daughter, Isabella, told her she saw the Perdu’s daughter taking a pink pill at school. Isabella asked her school friend what she was taking them for. The daughter, Madeleine, said it was a new wonder drug that would help her. Help her with what? Her dad believed she had an attention disorder problem or something similar.
In another journal entry she wrote about Isabella’s concern for Madeleine. Isabella said Madeleine’s behaviour had changed. She was having mood swings and even said she was hearing voices in her head. This was when the teasing started. They called her the ‘Demented One’. Mrs Rose was greatly saddened by this and believed the Perdus were feeding their daughter an untested and unapproved drug. This is what killed her.
That was her last journal entry.
There was a folder labelled ‘For Dad’. Aaron started reading some of the documents in this folder. It was like this woman was expecting something to happen to her and was giving instructions to her father regarding the protection of Isabella and a plant. Aaron decided it would be good to copy them, but they wouldn’t copy. He tried a few things, but they still wouldn’t copy, and now other icons were changing shape and colour, resembling a fire. He’d triggered a virus. He pulled out his USB flash drive so it wasn’t affected.
There was little he could do. He stared at the screen and watched the virus devour all the files and folders. He looked at the back of the computer and saw a small device lodged in one of the spare ports. Someone had already been here and elected to set a virus instead of deleting the files themselves. The former being the most efficient for not missing hidden files.
He turned off the computer, opened up the computer case, and removed the hard disc. He would take this back to see if the technicians could recover any data. He doubted it—whoever did these things knew what they were doing, professional. The virus used probably overwrote all the files with blank data. He thought about the notebooks and tablet devices—did she do something to them as well? Why not just set fire to the place? He looked up at the ceiling. Sprinklers. A fire would be extinguished quickly.
But the data had been backed up. They didn’t know this and would most probably assume that the cloud wasn’t used for backup as the media attention given to cloud security breaches by hackers had been epidemic. Perhaps the backed-up data was stored on the missing storage device.
The filing cabinet wasn’t secured. The smell of vinegar was at its strongest around the cabinet. He put his gloves back on and slid out the top drawer. He was glad he had his facemask on, as streams of vapour escaped from the cabinet. The documents in the cabinet had been sprayed with some kind of acid. He stood back and waited for the vapour clouds to disperse. He looked in the drawer—the documents were in different phases of dissolving.
