Chapter 8 – Ahead of the Game

If this is your first visit, this is a bad place to start. Start with Chapter 1 - Baby Bird. If you like it, get Chapters 1 - 7 from the preceding post, then come back here. This is the shortest chapter in a book of short chapters, and you will spoil some of the earlier story if you jump ahead. I'm writing chapter 12, but still editing 9. Nine is a good one plotwise. Ten is more character study, but we'll talk about that when we get there. Eleven is long and freshly typed, which means it has a bit more editing to firm it up.

This is also likely the only chapter I'll post this week. Since it's the end of the month, I've got projects due for paying clients, plus I'm playing Flute/Thisby in A Midsummer Night's Dream opening at Barrington Hall on Friday. Busy, Busy, Busy as Bokonon might say.

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Chapter 8 – Ahead of the Game

There was no one left to turn off the lights in the data center at the end of the workday. The police hadn't bothered. The FBI had disabled the security keypad and taken a cursory glance up and down the aisles between the server cabinets, seen no signs of life or evidence that the chaos had spread to this rarefied room, and left. Automation would keep clients from realizing that there was no one at the helm, at least until they tuned in to the cable news shows that would be covering the story twenty four hours a day until the next sexy tragedy took its place. The media wouldn't be swarming the building until morning at earliest – most likely they were all camped out in Terry Owens' front yard tonight, hoping to interview neighbors who would helpfully point out what a quiet man Terry had been, how he had kept to himself most of the time, and what an exceptional child his sweet little girl had been. They would swear they never would have believed he could have done such horrible things, and yet believe it they would.

The systems had been designed to back themselves up in the middle of the night during the period of least activity. When Allen heard the tape drives start to spin he knew it was as quiet as it was likely to get. He cautiously wriggled out from under the cable harness and slowly pushed the floor panel above him out of the way, emerging like a poisonous butterfly from his substrata cocoon. He crept to the end of the row and peeked carefully around the last cabinet – seeing through the glass wall that the lights were out in the main offices, he stood up, relaxed, moved more quickly now.

He pulled up another floor panel and retrieved his supplies – a briefcase full of cash and an oversize laptop case. The MacBook was so thin it fit in an envelope in the outside zippered pocket, leaving plenty of room in the carrying case for spare clips of ammunition, a water bottle, a radio, a portable GPS and a few other sundries. Allen expected that his car would still be in the parking garage and that his knapsack would still be in the trunk but he wasn't taking chances. Things he could not do without stayed with him.

He stripped off his blood speckled clothes and wrapped them in his engineer's raincoat along with an empty water bottle and a few unused shells from the discarded shotgun, stuffed the bundle back under the floor and replaced the panels. By the time anyone found them, everyone would already know who he was.

There was a clean change of clothes in his office, and a shower in Jack's. By the time he stepped onto the street he was dressed in crisp dockers, a collared pullover and a casual jacket, a laptop slung over one shoulder and a briefcase in the other hand. Anyone seeing him walk to his Porsche and drive away would take him for just another successful businessman, burning the midnight oil to keep ahead of the game.