Chapter 13
August 21st, 2012
1342 hours
Ellie still sat hunched against the door. Her makeup smeared from her tears. She finally worked up the strength to go back to her workstation. The TV was still on, but she heard nothing. She sat at her desk, but did nothing but stare at her screen. Suddenly, she heard something that piqued her attention.
“The man that warned the security guards of the bombing yesterday is Stanford Leigh. A known member of ‘The Defenders of Freedom’. We recommend that people with any information contact the FBI by calling…’
“No!”
Ellie stood wild-eyed and furious as the TV rained down a shower of sparks. She had hefted a heavy stapler through the glass screen. She frankly wished it was the news reporter themselves instead of an image of them. Before she knew it, she was running down the halls of the facility, towards the parking lot. She had to get out of there. It didn’t make sense. Why would they say he was part of that terrorist group? Was he? No. Not Stanford. Someone else, maybe. Stanford? She was sure there was no way he could have been involved.
She grabbed the door of her car and jerked it open. It slammed to the end of its range, nearly slamming it back on her. She stopped it, got in, slammed it shut and started the engine. Her body was acting on instinct. Albeit, an instinct fueled by rage and adrenaline. Her foot found the accelerator, and slammed it down to the floor. Her tires squealing, and her six cylinder engine whining in protest as it got up to speed. She sped through the gate that guarded the entrance. A flimsy piece of wood that seemed all the more insignificant as it bounced off the hood of her car. She heard alarms start ringing, but she was out of earshot before she had a chance to care.
She looked down at the speedometer. 95 miles per hour, and climbing. Without a thought to caution, her foot pressed down harder on the accelerator, causing her car to speed up again. She felt as if she were watching a movie. It was surreal. She knew the area surrounding the facility. It was seemingly desolate. Cars rarely traveled down these roads. As she passed a car going the opposite direction, she saw it swing around, and red and blue lights start flashing. Every neuron in her brain told her to stop and pull over, but her body refused to cooperate.
Her car whined past 110 miles per hour. She felt like she should be scared, but she wasn’t. She was eerily calm. The police car was close behind her, matching her speed. She heard the cop shout something over the loudspeaker, but she couldn’t hear what. She didn’t care either. She actually started laughing, for a reason her mind couldn’t fathom, but not much mattered anymore. Stanford was dead. She opened her mouth to speak. To say the words she knew were true. Stanford is dead. Stanford is dead. The words wouldn’t form in her mouth. Her body swerved off onto a dirt road. Her foot finally releasing the accelerator. The police car missed the turn. Her car started to slow. The dirt road was relatively straight. She let go of the wheel and started to cry. Stanford is dead. Her car dropped to 80. Stanford is dead. 65. Stanford is dead. 40. Stanford is dead. 30. Stanford is dead. 15. Stanford is dead. 10. Stanford is dead. 5.
“Stanford is dead.”
Her car bumped into a tree softly, and she fell against the steering column, sobbing hysterically. She didn’t know if the cop was going to find her. She didn’t care. She didn’t care at all.
Chapter 14
August 21st, 2011
1600 hours
Tampa Bay is a nice place. Warm sun. Palm trees. The smell of the ocean. It’s a lot nicer if you’re not stuck in the Tampa Bay Correctional Facility. Any way you put it, correctional facility, jail, prison, it’s just a room with concrete on three sides, and steel bars on one. Ellie sat on the cot in her room, or cell rather. There wasn’t much to do. Her neighbor, Lisa Jackson, had gone on to central booking for assaulting her boyfriend. For the fourth time. The system was still figuring out what to do with Ellie though. She went over the charges in her head. Reckless driving, evading arrest, and a speeding ticket to boot. A metallic rumbling brought her attention to the door. A uniformed officer was waiting for her.
“Your lawyer’s here.”
“I didn’t call a lawyer.”
“I can always tell him to take a hike.”
Ellie could feel the guard’s eyes wandering up and down her figure.
“No, I’ll see them.”
She stepped out into the corridor, and allowed the officer to handcuff her wrists. They rubbed uncomfortably against her skin.
“You know, you don’t have to put these on me.”
“I don’t doubt that, but everyone says that. Plus, it’s protocol.”
Ellie shrugged and followed the officer to a concrete room, where a suited man awaited her. He nodded to the officer and the officer walked out of the room.
“Hello, my name is Henry Chan. I’m part of ‘The Defenders of Freedom’”
Ellie’s heart sank. The very organization that took Stanford away from her. The very organization that fought against what held this country together.
“You probably think we’re terrorists.”
“Think? I know.”
“You know because you hear it on the news. Do you believe everything you see or hear?”
“Of course not, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything,” Henry’s voice was getting stressed, his anxiousness palpable in the air, “We’re being framed.”
“That doesn’t even make sense! How can you frame a terrorist organization?”
“You’re making the assumption that we’re terrorists.”
Ellie was at a loss for words. This didn’t make sense. Terrorists, blowing up buildings, Stanford. Stanford.
“You probably think we killed him. Stanford”
This put Ellie on edge.
“You don’t talk to me about Stanford!”
Officers started to close on her, to restrain her, but Henry waved them off. He dropped his voice.
“The fact that you haven’t called the dogs on me tells me that you believe that I’m at least partly telling the truth. I’ll tell you what. If you want, I’ll take you to meet our organization.”
This pissed Ellie off even further.
“What are you going to do? Kill them? Kill them like you killed Stanford?”
Henry nodded to the guards. Ellie was sure they were going to throw her back in the cell. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself down. Maybe she could talk her way into staying. Instead, something strange happened. She felt the handcuffs around her wrists vanish. She opened her eyes and Henry was standing before her.
“Care to take a ride, Miss Joiner?”
“Only if you promise to explain what the fuck is going on.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
With that, Ellie was walking out towards the parking lot, Henry ahead of her, and his two “guards” on either side of her. Minutes later, she was in a black sedan on her way to places unknown.
Chapter 15
August 21st, 2012
1712 hours
“Arrested?” Henry Taylor chuckled, “I always knew her temper would get her in trouble.”
“I don’t care what you thought of her Taylor, she was one of us. Not to mention, if this gets out, it’ll be a shitstorm from above, and I’ll make sure you don’t have an umbrella.” Erin Livingston was a middle aged woman with greying blonde hair. She was well liked by everyone at the agency, but was known for having a hair trigger temper, so everyone tried to avoid pissing her off, if they could. Everyone, except Taylor. The first time Taylor jerked her chain, she tried to get him fired. He never did anything anyways. However, when the request reached the higher-ups, they made it clear Taylor was not to be considered for termination, no matter what he did. This pissed her off more than Taylor, but she decided to take a more passive approach, by forcing him to do the work of about five different people and yet it didn’t to seem to dampen Taylor’s urge to piss her off incessantly.
“Whatever you say boss.”
While Henry Taylor seemed like a general asshole on the outside, what happened in his head was ten times worse. He was frequently hired by the government to do the dirty work when it came down to it. His latest assignment came from above the president. Above the entire cabinet. Sure, people think the president is in charge, but in reality, he was just a face. Some of those activists actually had it right. Of course the government wouldn’t admit to it. They didn’t know. At least, the government that the people actually see. In a way, the government was just as naïve as the people it supposedly had power over. Just to remind himself why he does what he does, he told himself Empathy bars progress. Lack of progress causes fear. Fear breeds unrest.
His current assignment stuck him at the NSA, and this made him more angry than usual. He was fine with a dirty motel room in the Pacific-Northwest, hell, even a shithole in Pakistan. Just as long as he had solitude, or something close to it. People. They made him shudder. They were so… naïve. They bordered on plain idiocy. They needed to be controlled. Hell, he thought the leash was to long even with the new communications monitoring policy. Every email, phone call, every written communication, Morse code, radio waves, all were collected, processed for suspicious words, phrases, and a whole laundry list of other criteria through the top secret computer they had running in a room filled with liquid nitrogen somewhere deep underground in Colorado with one thousand and twenty four, one hundred and twenty eight core, two thousand and twenty eight gigahertz processors, and 1024 yottabytes of RAM, not to mention some other power of two hard drive. All he remembered is there was a hell of a lot of zeroes after those first eighteen numbers. He never understood those computers, and why they used powers of two. It made no sense to him, so he left it to the techies. After they were all processed, they were all dumped in the NSA. Analysts were told that these were all from phone taps, emails, etc. from ‘known terrorist organizations’. It was more or less true in his mind.
Stanford had to go. He was a problem. His ideas about what the government was were too close to the truth. However, Ellie, that was different. He almost liked her. Almost. When Stanford started to share his ideals after that Hayward incident, it couldn’t be risked to keep her on. She had to go. They borrowed a police car, hired a hitman, and the rest should have been clockwork. They would have found her in her car on the side of the road, with a gun in her hand, and a hole in her head. But not everything went as planned. She ran. Why, he couldn’t fathom, but that wasn’t his job. It was his job to make sure everything went smoothly. He left the NSA building, and walked to his car, he knew where he was going. He was going to jail. With that thought in his head, a smile crossed his face. He was going to enjoy killing her. The unintentional treachery she committed would make it all the more fun for him.