Authors: Mark Leslie
“Oh my goodness!” the woman yelled, beginning to lose her balance. Scott spotted it happening and was able to pause, take a step back and place a hand on the small of her back to steady her back to her feet.
“Sorry ma’am,” Scott said,
“You young people are always in such a rush,” the woman scolded. “Look what you almost did.”
“So sorry ma’am,” Scott kept his hand on her back and helped her move up the stairs.
“If you gave yourself time and planned ahead, you wouldn’t be late and rushing around to catch your train.”
“Yes ma’am. Sorry ma’am. Goodbye, ma’am.”
Scott then turned, leaped down the stairs, turned right and raced through the tunnel. His footsteps echoed off the tiled walls along with the repeated calls of “Dad!” which he yelled as he ran.
At the base of the stairs going up Scott stepped in a slick puddle of spilled soft drink and slid into the bottom step. His left toe caught on the bottom riser and he tumbled forward, his left shin and left forearm taking most of the brunt of his fall as he came down on the stairs.
“Dammit!” he yelled as intense bursts of pain flashed through his leg and arm. The shin took the worst of the pain and throbbed painfully as he tried to pull himself into a crawling position. He could hear that the train hadn’t yet left; there was a muffled announcement being broadcast about it, but he couldn’t hear it because there was somebody standing over him and talking to him.
“Are you okay, man?” a young man in a rainbow-colored poncho asked, placing a hand on Scott’s shoulder.
“Fine,” Scott said. “I’m fine!” And he groaned as he got to his feet, the shin sending out protesting throbs of pain.
He hobbled up the stairs and slowly managed to push past the pain, to keep walking.
At the top of the stairs, he found it slightly quicker going on flat ground and limped out the entrance, turning right to head back toward the platform, his leg continued to scream in protest as he moved.
He was less than forty feet from the train when he saw the doors closing.
“No!” he screamed.
He raced to the spot on the platform where he had seen his father standing.
His father was not there. Obviously, he was on the train. As Scott got to the spot where his father had been standing just minutes earlier, the train started to pass and he caught his father’s eyes, yet again, through the window of the train, looking right at him.
That same look of recognition mingled with an aura of terror was on the man’s face.
“Dad!” Scott screamed, over and over as the train pulled his father out of his life yet again. “Dad! Dad! Daaaaaaad!”
Today
The last thing Scotty Desmond expected, when standing in the doorway to Herb Canter’s office, was the pistol his boss held pointed at his face.
Scott had been called into Herb’s office just a few minutes earlier; Herb Canter, Digi-Life’s Director of Infrastructure Technology, was, essentially Scott’s boss – or at least as close to a boss as Scott had had in the past half dozen years. Scott Desmond was an independent contractor, an IT consultant who specialized in helping companies find and fix potential security holes in their systems.
Digi-Life was an online insurance company, a start-up self-service provider of various insurance options available, from life insurance to car and home insurance, linking up both small and multinational insurance firms with clients world-wide.
Scotty’s past as a freelance hacker lent him the knowledge, skill, and expertise to be able to find even the most innocuous gaps, holes, and gateways that hackers could use to gain access to a company’s system and critical data. He charged a significant fee for his services and time, and found that, despite his initial reservations about the change in lifestyle – moving from a life of well-paying crime to a life of helping others and
being employed through legal means – the consultant work did bring him a significant income.
He had been working with Digi-Life for the past six months and quite enjoyed the consistency of returning to a regular office. It was satisfying to return to a workplace on such a regular basis that he knew at least a couple of dozen people by name; enough to even enjoy going out for beers with a few of his co-workers.
And, until the morning that he pointed a pistol at Scotty’s head, Herb Canter had been a decent enough boss, someone Scott actually felt comfortable working with and even respected.
Scott had been taking a break from the hack routine he was using to QA test a new security gateway that Digi-Life was hoping to implement, and, taking a short morning coffee-break, was fiddling on the mini laptop he kept in a small backpack near him at all times. Though he had abandoned his previous life of corrupt hacking for nefarious purposes, there was one side-project he kept pecking away at. He was exploring the files and reports associated with his father’s death almost five years earlier.
Requesting official documents from the hospital, the provincial Coroner’s office and even via CSIS had resulted in road-blocks, denied access and subterfuge. The only way Scott had been able to gain any insights was through hacking into the private and locked records that had been kept from his eyes.
It was a painstaking process, but something he was committed to not give up on. He had, after all, seen his father, who had supposedly died on an operating room table, walking around, alive and well at a train station just down the street from where Scott was now working.
There seemed to be deeper layers of conflicting information associated with his father’s supposed death. And the further he dug, the more confused and intrigued he’d become.
Virtually every free moment he was not working was dedicated to this side project, this special investigation that continued to slowly reveal intriguing details. He always conducted that work from his personal mini laptop, the one he had a direct masked Wi-Fi hotspot through, rather than the laptop his employer had assigned him. He kept the mini laptop, the backpack he hauled it and a series of special hacker tools and equipment around in, at all times.
Lately, despite having followed many dead-end paths, Scott seemed to be getting somewhere. Just a couple of weeks earlier he had uncovered a previously unearthed revelation about one of the doctors who had been in his father’s hospital room, and was potentially on his way to figuring out how it might be possible for his father, supposedly dead, to be walking around. Scott felt very close to being able to locate this particular doctor, and knew, that it was just a matter of time before he’d get to him and get an answer.
So when Herb sent Scott a text message on his mobile phone requesting that Scott pop in to see him, Scott immediately snapped shut the laptop and slid it into the backpack before walking down the hall to the man’s office, just as naturally and effortlessly as he would have picked a coffee mug from a kitchen cupboard and poured himself a drink.
Herb was a decent boss and the perfect one in Scott’s opinion. He was smart enough to understand the intricacies of what he was asking Scott to do, and also
knowledgeable enough about what he didn’t understand, and could leave in Scott’s capable hands.
Scott respected that, and the man. Though he worked freelance, Herb Canter was the type of boss Scott could see himself working for full time. He kept just enough distance to allow people to get their jobs done, and seemed to have the special knack for stepping in to assist and support at just the right time.
So when Scott pushed Herb’s office door opened to find the man sitting at his desk, a small black pistol pointed at Scott’s head, he was more than a little surprised.
“Herb, what’s going on?” Scott said, starting down the muzzle of the weapon.
“Step inside and close the door,” Herb said.
“I don’t --”
“Close the door!” Herb repeated.
Scott noticed that the man’s eyes had a unique glazed quality. His eyes were focused and intelligent, just like they had always been, but there was an additional layer of something almost indistinguishable masking his face; something Scott could only think of as a slightly glazed look – almost as if Herb were looking at Scott through an additional think gauze or filter.
“Okay,” Scott said, turning to close the door. “Just give me a second here…”
A small hole punching into the drywall beside Scott’s head startled him; a split second later a sound like a metal ruler slapped down hard onto his desk filled the room. Scott ducked down to the floor, realizing Herb had taken a shot at his head and missed by a mere inch or two.
“Herb? What the fuck?” Scott yelled, scrambling on the floor and out the doorway. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the black handgun with the incredibly long pistol barrel – a silencer? – in Herb’s hand.
“You won’t get away!” Herb yelled after him in a deep monotone voice. “You cannot evade us!”
Scott crab-crawled around the corner of the office entrance before getting to his feet and sprinting toward the exit, his backpack still atop of his left shoulder. Ahead, he spotted one of the company’s security guards walking quickly from the fourth floor stairwell entrance, his eyes fixed on Scott.
“Hurry!” Scott yelled, pointing over his shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Herb has a gun and he’s shooting!”
The guard didn’t say anything, but his eyes remained locked on Scott.
Even from thirty feet away, there was something eerily familiar about the glassy-eyed glaze in the man’s eyes as he reached to his belt to draw a weapon.
“Oh shit,” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.
Scott knew that Digi-Life security guards didn’t carry firearms, but they did carry mag lites, and at least one of them had Tasers. He wasn’t sure what this one was carrying, but, even if he couldn’t clearly read the intent in the man’s glazed eyes, it came through quite distinctly in his words.
“You won’t get away!” The guard said, in the same monotone voice Herb had previously used. “You cannot evade us!”
Four-and-a-half Years Ago
Scotty spent most of the morning that his father died with his nose buried in a book.
The rest of the time, he had mostly been anxious about an appointment that had been scheduled.
He had, of course, driven to Parry Sound to spend the previous day with his parents and be there in the wee morning hours to drive them up in to the city for Lionel Desmond’s early morning surgery, but, at the time he had felt as if he were a mere assistant to the whole procedure.
Sure, the surgery had been a serious one – the removal of a kidney with a potentially malignant cyst on it – but explained by the doctors as routine enough that Lionel Desmond might perhaps be going in for a tonsillectomy rather than a nephrectomy.
It wasn’t quite day surgery, but it was one in which the man would, after being observed overnight in hospital, be allowed to return home the next day.
So, the dutiful son – although he had, at first been reluctant to play that role – Scotty took the trek north from Toronto to his parent’s home. At least, he told himself he was a dutiful son; and his parents fully believed he was being a dutiful son.
What he didn’t tell them was that, conveniently, he had hooked up with a potential client online; and, though Scotty was there to play the role of helpful and dutiful son, it had been the lucrative nature of meeting with the client and taking on a new job that had appealed to him most.
Sure, he loved his father; but this was a potential huge cash windfall that he simply couldn’t ignore.
Scotty was a seasoned and sought-after hacker.
He had been adept with computers since the very first day that his father brought the computer home from the high school where he worked. It had been a Commodore Pet Computer, among the first “home computers” to be wide distributed and used in various mid-northern high schools across the province.
Scotty had relished in seeing that a simple series of words written in a particular order in a certain format – in this case, the programming language being BASIC with each line of code, a logical statement telling the computer an action to perform denoted in numeral order – you could get this machine to do things.
The first program that had sparked Scotty’s imagination was when the teacher had instructed them how to have the computer flash the word “HELLO” to them over and over.
10 PRINT “HELLO!”
20 PAUSE 1
30 CLS
40 PAUSE 1
50 GOTO 10
When you ran the program, it would display the characters “HELLO!” on an otherwise blank screen – a series of green letters on a black screen – then a timer would count out exactly one second, then clear the screen, count out another second, then return to the first line of the program and repeat the process. The result, a flashing “HELLO!” of green letters in the top left hand corner of the otherwise blank black computer screen
The original instructions had been to just type in “HELLO!” but Scotty had figured out he could insert virtually any characters in there, so immediately changed that to “HELLO SCOTTY!”