Evasion

Chapter One

Today

The last thing Scotty Desmond expected, when standing in the doorway to Herb Canter’s office, was the pistol his boss held pointed at his face.

Scott had been called into Herb’s office just a few minutes earlier; Herb Canter, Digi-Life’s Director of Infrastructure Technology, was, essentially Scott’s boss – or at least as close to a boss as Scott had had in the past half dozen years. Scott Desmond was an independent contractor, an IT consultant who specialized in helping companies find and fix potential security holes in their systems.

Digi-Life was an online insurance company, a start-up self-service provider of various insurance options available, from life insurance to car and home insurance, linking up both small and multinational insurance firms with clients world-wide.

Scotty’s past as a freelance hacker lent him the knowledge, skill, and expertise to be able to find even the most innocuous gaps, holes, and gateways that hackers could use to gain access to a company’s system and critical data. He charged a significant fee for his services and time, and found that, despite his initial reservations about the change in lifestyle – moving from a life of well-paying crime to a life of helping others and being employed through legal means – the consultant work did bring him a significant income.

He had been working with Digi-Life for the past six months and quite enjoyed the consistency of returning to a regular office. It was satisfying to return to a workplace on such a regular basis that he knew at least a couple of dozen people by name; enough to even enjoy going out for beers with a few of his co-workers.

And, until the morning that he pointed a pistol at Scotty’s head, Herb Canter had been a decent enough boss, someone Scott actually felt comfortable working with and even respected.

Scott had been taking a break from the hack routine he was using to QA test a new security gateway that Digi-Life was hoping to implement, and, taking a short morning coffee-break, was fiddling on the mini laptop he kept in a small backpack near him at all times.  Though he had abandoned his previous life of corrupt hacking for nefarious purposes, there was one side-project he kept pecking away at.  He was exploring the files and reports associated with his father’s death almost five years earlier.

Requesting official documents from the hospital, the provincial Coroner’s office and even via CSIS had resulted in road-blocks, denied access and subterfuge. The only way Scott had been able to gain any insights was through hacking into the private and locked records that had been kept from his eyes.

It was a painstaking process, but something he was committed to not give up on. He had, after all, seen his father, who had supposedly died on an operating room table, walking around, alive and well at a train station just down the street from where Scott was now working. There seemed to be deeper layers of conflicting information associated with his father’s supposed death.  And the further he dug, the more confused and intrigued he’d become.

Virtually every free moment he was not working was dedicated to this side project, this special investigation that continued to slowly reveal intriguing details. He always conducted that work from his personal mini laptop, the one he had a direct masked Wi-Fi hotspot through, rather than the laptop his employer had assigned him. He kept the mini laptop, the backpack he hauled it and a series of special hacker tools and equipment around in, at all times.

Lately, despite having followed many dead-end paths, Scott seemed to be getting somewhere. Just a couple of weeks earlier he had uncovered a previously unearthed revelation about one of the doctors who had been in his father’s hospital room, and was potentially on his way to figuring out how it might be possible for his father, supposedly dead, to be walking around. Scott felt very close to being able to locate this particular doctor, and knew, that it was just a matter of time before he’d get to him and get an answer.

So when Herb sent Scott a text message on his mobile phone requesting that Scott pop in to see him, Scott immediately snapped shut the laptop and slid it into the backpack before walking down the hall to the man’s office, just as naturally and effortlessly as he would have picked a coffee mug from a kitchen cupboard and poured himself a drink.

Herb was a decent boss and the perfect one in Scott’s opinion. He was smart enough to understand the intricacies of what he was asking Scott to do, and also knowledgeable enough about what he didn’t understand, and could leave in Scott’s capable hands.

Scott respected that, and the man. Though he worked freelance, Herb Canter was the type of boss Scott could see himself working for full time. He kept just enough distance to allow people to get their jobs done, and seemed to have the special knack for stepping in to assist and support at just the right time.

So when Scott pushed Herb’s office door opened to find the man sitting at his desk, a small black pistol pointed at Scott’s head, he was more than a little surprised.

“Herb, what’s going on?” Scott said, starting down the muzzle of the weapon.

“Step inside and close the door,” Herb said.

“I don’t --”

“Close the door!” Herb repeated.

Scott noticed that the man’s eyes had a unique glazed quality. His eyes were focused and intelligent, just like they had always been, but there was an additional layer of something almost indistinguishable masking his face; something Scott could only think of as a slightly glazed look – almost as if Herb were looking at Scott through an additional think gauze or filter.

“Okay,” Scott said, turning to close the door. “Just give me a second here…”

A small hole punching into the drywall beside Scott’s head startled him; a split second later a sound like a metal ruler slapped down hard onto his desk filled the room. Scott ducked down to the floor, realizing Herb had taken a shot at his head and missed by a mere inch or two.

“Herb? What the fuck?” Scott yelled, scrambling on the floor and out the doorway.  Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the black handgun with the incredibly long pistol barrel – a silencer? – in Herb’s hand.

“You won’t get away!” Herb yelled after him in a deep monotone voice. “You cannot evade us!”

Scott crab-crawled around the corner of the office entrance before getting to his feet and sprinting toward the exit, his backpack still atop of his left shoulder. Ahead, he spotted one of the company’s security guards walking quickly from the fourth floor stairwell entrance, his eyes fixed on Scott.

“Hurry!” Scott yelled, pointing over his shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Herb has a gun and he’s shooting!”

The guard didn’t say anything, but his eyes remained locked on Scott.

Even from thirty feet away, there was something eerily familiar about the glassy-eyed glaze in the man’s eyes as he reached to his belt to draw a weapon.

“Oh shit,” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.

Scott knew that Digi-Life security guards didn’t carry firearms, but they did carry mag lites, and at least one of them had Tasers. He wasn’t sure what this one was carrying, but, even if he couldn’t clearly read the intent in the man’s glazed eyes, it came through quite distinctly in his words.

"You won't get away!" The guard said, in the same monotone voice Herb had previously used. "You cannot evade us!"