Station Breaker

21 Paranoia

I drive another mile in the general direction of the stadium then turn into a small alley so I can take a look at what I stole from the teenagers on the moped.

Both phones are crappy generics and have screen locks in place. I should have beaten their pin codes out of them. Next time. Still, on one I can spot two thick ketchup stains over the virtual buttons for 5 and 9.

When a company like iCosmos hires you to take a billion-dollar piece of technology into space, they make damn sure you’re not going to screw things up by using dumb passwords or malware infected thumb drives that let the competition know vital secrets. You’re forced to endure endless seminars on security from in-house specialists and researchers they bring in. Sometimes I listened.

I remember a woman explaining that 20 % of four-digit pin codes were couplets — two digits that repeated. Like, 1212 or 3030.

I’m going to hazard a guess that the genius who decided to throw a rock at me immediately before coming to a stop at a busy intersection probably slept through all the security seminars they sent him to at asshole school.

5959

Nothing.

Three more attempts before lock out….

9595

Click. I’m in.

Yikes. There’s a photo on his home screen that could be considered another layer of security. I can’t tell if it’s his mother or his girlfriend. No wonder he’s throwing rocks at strangers.

Focus, David. Now that we have a working phone, what are we going to do with it?

Capricorn said something about Twitter…

Check @CapricornZero.

I manage to make my way through the Portuguese menus and pull up a browser and direct it at Twitter.com/CapricornZero.

There is one and only one tweet there:

Thanks for that wonderful bit of helpful advice. Nothing about enemies trying to kill me. No mention of who the hell I’m supposed to look for.

More importantly, there’s nothing telling me if I can trust this mysterious voice.

Out of curiosity, I go to CNN.com to see if this made the news.

Uh, yeah.

Jesus Christ! How can things possibly get any worse? And the page just refreshed…

That was minutes ago.

I’m so screwed.

Oh lord.

I feel my stomach tightening into a knot that’s about to condense into a neutron star. I want to throw up.

None of my training prepared me for this kind of crisis.

My instinct is to call a lawyer. That would be great advice if I just walked into the kitchen and saw a pool of blood and my wife was missing.

That’s probably a horrible idea if Russian kill squads are out to get you and there’s supposed to be some highly-placed mole in the US government that will rendition you to oblivion.

Lawyers are great for figuring out legal maneuverings. My primary concern is predator drones and snipers.

I look up at the sound of rotors and see a white helicopter flying overhead towards where I’d just came from. It’s a Eurocopter EC 155 — the same make and model I saw right after I landed.

It’s got to be the same one. That’s not good. It means somebody is really interested in the neighborhood I just came from. I need to get going.

I do a quick count of the cash in the wallets. There’s a few hundred Reals. I have no idea what that will buy me here. There’s also two credit cards with different names. If they’re still valid, that might be helpful.

I take the moped out of the alley and head towards the highway that will get me to the stadium as quickly as possible.

But before I get there, I need some kind of plan. Capricorn could just be waiting for me to show up with the black square and then murder me on the spot.

As much as I want to believe I’ll be met with open arms and told everything is going to be okay a few minutes after the truth of the matter is told to the world, I have no reason to believe that.

I’m skeptical that Capricorn’s contact is even going to let me survive the encounter. Whoever went through this much shady shit to pull this off might want to keep their tracks covered.

If this McGuffin is as important as they say it is, and could cost thousands of lives because, um, because, then maybe I need to be very careful who I hand it over to.

More important, is protecting this life. I have to ensure that David Dixon, most wanted man in the world and in space, doesn’t meet a quick death in the parking lot of a soccer stadium.

I’m a guy that goes fast and lets people do stupid things to my body. I’m not a spy. I’m not a cop. All I know is from watching movies and I’m pretty sure if my life depends on doing parkour across rooftops, I’ll be a bloodstain on a sidewalk before the bad guys even have to draw a weapon.

What I do know is fear and how to manage it. I know how to think on my feet and not do something stupid.

Walking into a dangerous situation, not knowing what’s in store for me, is the height of stupidity.