6-Stuff Happens

6

Stuff Happens

They rode the elevator up together and Josephine could tell that her husband was not happy.  He was scatter brained to the point of absent mindedness, but he was not stupid.  He knew the flash drive she had found in her purse was the flash drive.  Being the righteous hero he was, he had wanted to immediately take it to the D.H.S agents.

Joe had other ideas.

Curiosity had gotten the better of her and she had to know what was on it.  Too much crazy had happened around them to not at least take a peek.  “Come on, don’t be poopy.”

Leonard frowned at her.  “I’m not being ‘poopy’.  That thing is dangerous.”

“It can’t hurt just to look at it.” She countered, not seeing the harm.

“You sure about that?  As is, we are going to have a hard time explaining to the agents why we didn’t give it to them when they asked us about it.  Not to mention two people are dead because of that thing.”  Leonard ranted back towards her and Joe considered it.

He was right.  Two people were dead, and this thing had gotten them killed.  Now, she held it in her hand and wanted to look at the secrets that it held.  Not to mention, government agents rarely accepted the ‘accidental stupidity’ defense, so they might be in some trouble after all.

“Okay,” She gave in.  “You’re right.”

Leo was taken aback by her surrender.  “Yeah… yes I am.”

“It’s dangerous.  Looking at its contents could get us in trouble.”

Leo nodded.  “Right, it’s safer just to hand it in.”

“Right.”  Joe said.

“Right.”  Leo replied.

The elevator dinged to let them know they had arrived on their floor.  After a moment of silence and as the doors slid open, Leo couldn’t resist.  “Maybe just a peek.”

Joe couldn’t help but grin.  “A peek won’t hurt.”

With that, they hurried down the hall towards their room, energized by the decision not only to break the rules, but to unravel another layer of the mystery that had been following them around for the last two days.

Leo caught Joe’s arm as she came to the hotel room door.  The card lock had been drilled out and the door was open, propped on the internal hitch lock.  Joe froze as she noticed it too.  Leo stepped in front and moved, slowly, toward the door.

It was Joe’s turn to grab his arm.  She whispered.  “What are you doing?  Go get security.”

Leo freed his arm from her grip and pressed forward, pushing the door open.  Joe’s stomach clenched as horrifying images of Leo being brutally murdered in front of her played in her mind.  The thought was so horrid, it almost caused her to scream.

She didn’t scream and Leo was not brutally murdered.  Instead, the door just creaked open to reveal their empty suite.

They walked in and realized instantly that someone had been there and tossed the place, looking for something.  Neither of the Deveruaxs had to guess what they had been looking for.

“You think the agents did this?”  Josephine asked in the initial confusion.

Leo shook his head.  “No, I don’t think so.  I think there is someone else after that stupid drive.”

Joe agreed with the theory.  She had suspected as much after she really thought about the events of the day before.

“I’m going to go find those agents.  We need to tell them about this.”  Leo said as he headed for the door.

Joe knew the fun was over.  This had just gotten real.  There were people out there still looking for this thing, willing to kill for it.  The Deveruaxs were not spies.  It was time to turn in the drive and do the right thing.

“Be careful.”  She said as he left.

“Stay in the room and lock the internal lock.  Don’t open the door for anyone but me.” Leonard said as she left, letting the door swing closed behind him.  She went to the lock and flipped it into place.  She then took a deep breath and turned back to the ruined room.

She began to look through the suite, trying to figure out if anything had been taken during the tossing.  It was at that point that she saw the laptop they brought, lying out on the bed.

Like a siren’s call, it beckoned and suddenly she was very aware of the flash drive in her pocket.  A peek couldn’t hurt, right?

She pulled open the laptop and waited for it to boot up before plugging in the drive and waiting for the auto load prompt.  When it popped up, she quickly selected the ‘open folder to view files’ option and a window opened on the screen.  It read;

This drive is password protected.

Then, predictably, it asked for a password.

“Shit.”  She said, cursing her own stupidity.  It was a highly important piece of government hardware, why wouldn’t it have a password?

She shrugged and decided to put in something just on the one and a million chance that it worked.

She hit the buttons, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and grinned to herself at the joke while pressing ‘Enter’.

The window vanished and the folder promptly opened.  “You have to be kidding me!”

Inside was a series of files, all marked with a date and time and the file abbreviation ‘.dce’.

She had never seen that kind of file.  That’s all that was in the folder.  There was close to 200 of them, all dated for two years prior.  She double clicked on one just to see what would happen and she got a message informing her that the computer did not have the software required.

She frowned.  The clearing epiphany she had been hoping for did not come.  The flash drive had no information for her and she felt stupid for even trying to find something.  She should have left it to the professionals; left well enough alone.

She then remembered her husband’s knowledge of all things obscure.  She grabbed her cell phone and texted him;

“What is a .dce file?”

A second later, she got the response;

“It’s a video file.  It can only be played through a Drivecam event player.  Why?”

It took maybe half a second and then it hit her like a ton of bricks.  The flash drive was not an agent list.  It was a-

The crash came a second later, echoing through the room.  It was the sound of a door being kicked in.

Joe’s mind worked fast.  She knew there was no other way out of the room other than a five story drop off the balcony to the pavement.  She also knew that whoever was kicking her door in would be after the drive.  If they were brazen enough to kick the door down in the middle of the day, once they had the drive they would kill her.

She pulled the flash drive and opened the nightstand drawer putting her hand in and dropping the drive behind the drawer before sliding it almost all the way shut.

Just as she finished, she saw the dark eyed man who had stalked her in the hallway appear in the doorway.  This time, he had a mean looking gun strapped over his shoulder and hanging at his side.  She didn’t know what it was called, she was not a gun person, but she knew it shot a lot of bullets when the trigger was pressed.

His eyes were hungry in the wrong way.  He looked at her like a piece of meat and spoke.  “No take back.”

Joe tried to think of the right way to play the situation.

While she was trying to think of the right way, her panic stricken body ran forward and grabbed the laptop, hurling it at the Russian killer in her bedroom doorway and screaming at the top of her lungs.

The laptop struck the man in the head and he stumbled backward into the living room, falling over a recliner.  He yelled something in Russian, which Joe figured was some kind of curse, as he toppled awkwardly to the floor.

Joe sprinted through the doorway and turned the corner to head for the door and bumped directly into another man’s chest.

It was the giant from before, the one who had leashed the hungry man before he could let his dark ambitions loose on Josephine.  His massive hand clamped over her mouth as his giant arm wrapped her waist.  She struggled as hard as she could, but it only seemed to cause him to strengthen his grip.

“Calm yourself.”  He said with a heavy accent.  “I promise, this will be painless.”

****

Leonard frowned at the phone screen as the elevator took him to the ground floor.  She had not texted him back right away and he was struck with the sense that she had decided to look at the flash drive after all.

“Why did you need to know?”

He sent another text into the ether and got no response.

He began to worry and as he reached the bottom floor and the elevators opened, he switched to his contact list and found Joe.  He then moved to the small vending machine area next to the back door of the ground floor.  Not wanting to bother others with a call, he pressed her name and put the phone to his ear.

He heard it ring once before the bag was slipped over his head.

“What the-“ was all the chloroform would allow him to say before the blackness of the bag became the blackness of reality.

TO BE CONTINUED…