Allegiance Burned: A Jackson Quick Adventure Page 10

  I fish out a lone shotgun shell, and sit it upright on the desk. It was my dad’s, and I snuck it from the house when the movers came after they died. It was under his gun safe in his study closet, a lone red shell left behind.

  At the bottom of the box is a small, unlabeled brown leather album, large enough to hold the two dozen 3 ½ x 5 inch photos in its plastic sleeves. I slide it out of the box and flip it open.

  The first photo, my favorite, always punches the air from my lungs. It’s of my mother, my father, and me in Key West, Florida, a large red, black, and yellow marker framed between us and the crystalline water of the Atlantic. The ocean looks as though the varying shades of teal were painted in stripes with a brush, each line lighter than the one above it until they meet the pale horizon.

  Emblazoned with a triangular logo for The Conch Republic at the top, the marker proudly announces that the spot is ninety miles to Cuba and is the southernmost point in the Continental U.S.

  My mom is dressed in a yellow tank top and white shorts, her left arm around my lower back. Her eyes are hidden by her large tortoise shell sunglasses, and her smile is genuine. My father has his right arm draped over my shoulders. He’s wearing reflective aviators, his hair cropped short, a deep tan accentuating the white of his teeth. His other hand is in the pocket of his cargo shorts. His Guy Harvey t-shirt features a marlin on the breast pocket.

  I’m in the middle of them, beaming and clearly content. My arms are around my parents’ backs, my hands wrapped around their hips. My nose and cheeks are pink from too much sun on board a waverunner earlier in the day. I’m standing on my tiptoes, heels off of the backs of my cheap flip-flops. My sun-kissed hair is lighter than usual and unkempt the way Norman Rockwell might paint a young boy after a day at the beach.

  The trip was a quick one, a couple of days together after my dad had finished some business in Miami. We’d crammed a lot into that mini-vacation. I could still taste the coconut oil used to cook the conch fritters we ate at sunset, overlooking the water from our outdoor table.

  I flip past the photo to a handful of my father and mother before they married, while they dated, and then a couple of my mom pregnant with me. Then I get to the reason I opened the box in the first place.

  There’s a photo of my dad’s college rifle team at N.C. State. He’s on the far left of the photograph, his arms behind his back, chest puffed out. The rock solid team member with a mop of curly hair next to him had his elbow leaning on my dad’s shoulder. The photograph looked similar to the iconic U.S. Army platoon photographs from Vietnam or the first Gulf War. I always smile at that picture. On the back of the photograph “Wolfpack Rifle Team” was written in pencil. The year was nineteen eighty something. The last number was faded, as were the names of the team members.

  The next few photos are of my dad on business trips. He didn’t often pose for photographs when he was out of town. He didn’t bring his camera with him, as far as I knew. But every now and then, he’d bring home a snapshot or two that someone else had taken.

  The first is my dad standing with his arms folded in front of his chest, his knuckles behind his biceps to make his muscles appear more impressive. His lips are pursed, his eyes slits against the sunlight hitting his face. Behind him is a large metal statue of a woman with her arms raised, a sword extended from one hand, a shield held by the other. The woman’s expression in the photograph is serious, contemplative, not unlike my father’s. The statue is enormous, at least two hundred feet tall, and it sits atop what looks like a cone shaped visitor’s center with glass windows encircling the bottom.

  She’s wearing a long pleated dress, belted at the waist, and a cloak that drapes down her back. She’s masculine, almost asexual aside from the hints of breasts at her chest. On the shield there is a hammer and sickle, the emblem of the defunct Soviet Union, encircled by ears of wheat and topped with a lone star.

  I flip the photo and look at the back. The ink has faded to gray and pink where my father scribbled “Mother Motherland, Kiev, Ukraine”.

  The next photo is also in Ukraine, but this one is south, along the northern edge of the Black Sea. My father is sitting on a set of steps, flanked by tourists and street vendors, who’ve parked themselves along the wide stone edges of the steps. Behind my father is a woman selling wooden nesting dolls, her head wrapped in a bright yellow floral scarf. She’s photobombing him with her road map of a face, worn by what I imagine were years of street hustling and farming. The folds in her face are as thick as the roll in her midsection. She looks pained, but manages a wide-eyed gap-toothed smile directly into the lens.

  My father has his elbows on his knees and he’s looking past the camera to the sea. He’s sitting on the Potemkin Stairs, a boulevard sized stairway from the Port of Odessa into the city. For more than one hundred and fifty years, they’ve served as the official entrance into Odessa. The photograph is taken from below my father, up the staircase, giving the illusion of endless steps upward.

  I’ve had dreams about those steps, trying to climb them, never reaching the top. In the dream it’s like I’m running up the down escalator. Not a pleasant dream.

  On the back of the photograph my father has scribbled “Potemkin, Odessa, Ukraine”. There’s no date. A third photograph has him raising a glass of what I imagine is vodka in the booth of a restaurant. On a wall behind him is an advertisement for a brand of beer in large green and gold Cyrillic lettering.

  I never knew why he was there other than “business”, why he posed for the photographs, or who took them. It was those photos that made me want to spend time in Ukraine, find some connection with my dad. Now I’m on my way back under much different circumstances, my pack filled with weapons and survival gear instead of socks and underwear.

  Bella rustles in her seat, stretching her arms above her head, and I hurry to stuff my belongings back in the box. She doesn’t notice, yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “Good morning,” I say. “Or good evening. Whatever it is.”

  “Hmmph,” she grunts, “I passed out there for a while. Sorry about that.”

  “Not a problem. Look, we need to check out that hard drive and find out what, if anything, on it is reliable.”

  “Good idea,” she stands up, stretches again, and goes to grab the bag next to her seat toward the rear of the jet. It’s hard not to notice when she bends over in that skirt, but I avert my eyes and shove the lockbox back into my pack.

  She pulls out her laptop and the white hard drive and sets them on the table between us. It takes her a second to power up and connect the drive. She smiles at me over the top of the computer, but the expression on her face quickly changes, her mascara smudged eyes narrow with confusion.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “I don’t get it.”

  “What?”

  She spins the computer around and shows me the contents of the hard drive.

  It’s empty.

  PART TWO: REACTION

  “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

  --Theodore Roosevelt, 26th U.S. President

  CHAPTER 8

  “They’re pretty amazing aren’t they?” my dad asked from the back of an open air Jeep Wagoneer. We were on a guided tour of Custer State Park, the last outing of our vacation cut short by his work. “You don’t get a sense of how big and powerful they are without seeing them this close.”

  “They’re majestic,” my mom added, a bit too enthusiastically, sensing my misery. “I didn’t expect to think that.”

  “Majestic is a really good word for ‘em,” said the tour guide through his headset. “They are truly underappreciated for their beauty. I like that word, majestic.”

  The guide, who was driving, wore a dirt and sweat stained straw cowboy hat and a plaid wool shirt. He probably hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, the rough beard most noticeable on his chin.

  “Their poop is majestic,” I said, my chin resting on the edge o
f the Wagoneer’s interior where the window should be. “And by majestic, I mean huge.”

  “They are buffalo, Jackson,” my dad said, not acknowledging my moping. “If their poop was anything but majestic, wouldn’t you be highly disappointed? Seriously, son, buffalo poop is impressive.”

  He elicited a reluctant giggle from me and took advantage.

  “Did you see that one, Jackson?” He pointed to a large bison flipping its tail against its scarred haunch. “It took a leak that I swear might cause flash flooding in some places.”

  “Okay, Dad, I get it. I should stop feeling sorry for myself and enjoy the time we have together. It’s not like you want to go to work.”

  “Smart boy.” Mom squeezed my shoulder. “Your dad does the best he can, Jackson. But he does have to work. It’s not like we’re rich.”

  “I get that,” I said. “It’s just...”

  “What?” my dad asked, turning around from his seat in the front of the Jeep.

  “I’m gonna turn off this road here,” the tour guide said. “It’s gonna get a little bumpy for a moment. You’ll probably see some varmints out there. Like those pesky prairie dogs.”

  “Sometimes it feels like you pick work over me and Mom,” I said, slumping against the worn vinyl seat back. “You know, when you travel all of the time.”

  “Your dad—” My mom stopped when Dad gave her a look.

  “It’s okay, hon,” he said to her. “I got this.” He turned his body toward the driver/tour guide so he could look me squarely in the face, hold my attention. “Jackson.”

  “Yeah?” I sighed, bouncing against a divot in the dirt road. My head almost touched the sagging lining on the Wagoneer’s ceiling.

  “Sorry about that folks,” the guide apologized. “Got a couple more coming up. Nothing too rough. We may catch some antelope up on the right, catching a nap under that tree.”

  “You know very well that you and your mom are the most important things in the world to me,” my dad said, bracing himself against another bump. “I have a job that pays pretty well, it allows us to do a lot of nice things as a family. But one of the trade-offs is spontaneous travel.”

  “Couldn’t you find another job?”

  “I could,” he glanced at Mom and then back at me. “I guess so. But what I do is very...”

  “Specialized?” my mom suggested, a weak smile on her face.

  “Yes,” Dad agreed. “My work is specialized.”

  “What do you do for a living, the tour guide asked, “if you don’t mind?” He looked at my dad, both of his thick, calloused hands on the wheel, and smiled.

  My dad shifted uncomfortably in his seat, adjusting his seatbelt as we bounced across another divot in the road. He looked back at my mom for her approval, which she tacitly gave.

  “I’m a technology consultant.”

  “What’s that?” the guide asked. “Is it like a computer expert?” He laughed nervously, as though he didn’t want to seem uninformed.

  “Exactly!” my dad grinned. “I make sure the computers and other electronic devices companies utilize work properly and can interface or synchronize without glitches.”

  “Who’s the company?” the guide pressed, jerking the wheel left to avoid a hole in the road. “IBM? GE?”

  “No,” my dad chuckled. “It would be nice to work for one of those companies. Again, I’m a consultant. So I don’t work for the same company for very long. I go where the work is. The group I’m working for right now is a privately-held firm that has some government contracts.”

  “Government stuff,” the tour guide nodded his head up and down, processing it, “you don’t say? Must be good work if you can get it.” He smiles again.

  “It is, even though it sometimes means being away from my family without much notice.”

  “Hey,” the tour guide says, “there’s the antelope I was talking about. That’s the momma. There’s a little baby there too. They’re tucked behind those shrubs underneath the tree.” He stops the Jeep about fifty yards from the lone tree in a vast, rolling prairie. We’re off the road in wheel high grass.

  “Look, Jackson!” My mom scooted over against her window. “Come here, look out this side.” “The antelope is a cousin to the deer,” the tour guide explained. “Unlike the deer, which grows new horns every year, however, the antelope keeps them permanently. It’s their primary form of defense against predators. The momma there, she usually has one baby at a time. Sometimes they’ll have twins, but it’s rare.”

  “They looked scared,” I said.

  “That’s cause they probably are,” said the guide. “Even though they’re used to seeing us around here, the momma is her most vulnerable when she has a baby with her. Remember, they’re a big mammal, so they make a good meal for a predator.”

  My mom was mesmerized. “They look like statues.”

  “They get like that,” the guide said. “That baby calf is gonna stay still. It thinks it’s hiding. Though if we get too close, it’ll run. They do that. They hide until they’re on the verge of being discovered. Then they bolt and hope they can run fast enough to get away.”

  “Do they always get away?” I asked.

  “Nope,” said the guide. “They might get away fifteen times or twenty. But eventually the hunter is gonna get most of them. Luck always runs out, sorry to say.”

  ***

  Bella arms are folded, one hand at her mouth. She’s biting her thumb, pacing back and forth along the aisle of the jet.

  “Ms. Buell,” the flight attendant asks, “is there something I may get you? You seem anxious.”

  “No thank you,” Bella says, walking past her without stopping.

  The slight woman appears to my left. She’s maybe thirty-five or forty. Her years in the air have dried out her skin, and fine lines accentuate the space between her cheeks and lips. Her forehead bears the stress of too many turbulent flights, and her makeup barely conceals deep circles under eyes. She’s past the line of being too thin, her blouse and dark blue skirt swallowing her narrow frame. As she reaches for my glass, I notice faint yellow stains on her index and middle fingers.

  “I’ll be happy to refresh this for you, sir,” she smiles, highlighting what I guess must be the wrinkles of a longtime smoker, the hint of gravel in her voice further confirming the assumption. “Diet Dr. Pepper, right?”

  “Yes please, that would be great.” Diet Dr. Pepper is the crack of all soft drinks.

  She takes the glass, along with the nearly empty snack plate. Bella passes me three more times before the flight attendant returns with a refill. I take a long swig.

  “I don’t get it.” Bella stands in front of me, next to the desk. She’s rubbing her bottom lips with her fingers. “Why would Mack give me a blank drive?”

  “Let’s go over this again,” I say. “Who told you about the hard drives?”

  “I knew that Wolf was storing information on external drives,” she says. “Our information technology group knows that he plugged in multiple external drives and downloaded files that no longer exist on his computer in the lab.”

  “Can they retrieve the files from the computer?”

  “They’ve tried,” she says. “But he went into the master file table and used some sort of third party eraser program. He also used a command prompt and then the S-DELETE function to ensure that everything was gone. All that exists is a series of random number sets. The IT guys are stumped.”

  “And the IT guys know how many different drives Wolf used?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Two drives.”

  “If the data is gone from the computer,” I ask, “then how do you know what is really on those drives? Is it possible that what he put on the drives is not the information you think it is?”

  “The files he dumped were named Neutrino Bid List One and Neutrino Bid List Two. That kinda gives it away.”

  “We’ve established that two external hard drives have information on them, that your scientist was not at all crea
tive with file names, and that each drive likely contains different information, right?”

  “Uh huh,” she mumbles, the tip of her thumb still in her mouth, not reacting to my sarcasm at all.

  “You believe the disks contain lists of names and locations of possible buyers for this underwater walkie talkie stuff, right?”

  “It’s not exactly a walkie talkie,” she corrects. “It’s more like—”

  “I get it,” I interrupt. “My point is, the disks are different.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “IT,” she says. “They told me one of the files was loaded onto one of the drives, and the other file was loaded onto the other drive.”

  “Then, clearly, Bella,” I rationalize, “one of three things happened here.”

  “What?” She says it like she doesn’t really want to hear the answer.

  “The IT guys lied to you. The hard drive got erased. Or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or Mack gave you the wrong drive.” I lean back in my seat and finish what’s left of my third Diet Dr. Pepper.

  “Why would he do that?” Bella sidesteps to the chair facing mine and sits down, crossing her legs and tugging on her skirt to pull it down. “Mack wouldn’t do that.”

  “Are you sure about that? Your head of security wasn’t entirely loyal. Sir Spencer gave him some cash and he rolled.”

  “That’s different,” she said, clearly not liking the implication.

  “How so?”

  “Mack is...” her eyes are searching for the right words, “I don’t know. He wouldn’t betray me like that.”

  “You’d like to think he wouldn’t,” I suggest, “but you’re not sure about it are you?”