Off The Grid (14 page)

Chapter 27

Seattle, Washington

Warren Evans sat in his kitchen, receiving guests from
StuTech. The parade of employees had been going on all morning. He could usually dispatch each of them in just a few minutes, their simple minds jumping at the chance to please him. He loved the control he had over their actions, but not the idiotic interactions they required for the simplest task. No doubt each of them would come calling again next week with even more mundane matters that they should be dealing with themselves.

The last employee had finally left, but Evans was still at the table waiting for one more. Steve Lunsford was running late. Evans was growing increasingly impatient with his old friend and not just because he was now 12 minutes behind schedule. For years, Lunsford had assured him that the money he funneled into “strategic initiatives” with him was worth it.

“My job is to protect this company at all costs,” Lunsford had told him. “I need the capital to do it. Spying on the competition and protecting our assets isn’t cheap.”

But in reality, he didn’t need all that much money, so he never got it. His job wasn’t that
hard, Evans knew that for a fact. Lunsford was a simple man with a simple mind and his tricks weren’t all that complicated. If not for their friendship, all of Lunsford’s extra-curricular activities would have come to an end long ago. But he needed Lunsford, although he’d never tell him that. He just wished that the man would focus more attention on where the company was truly vulnerable and less on his pet projects.

Corporate spies. What a waste of time. What have they ever actually given us? It was a good place to dump that gold digger, Luke Kincaid though. Besides, the competition was clueless.
StuTech had the market cornered. There was nothing to uncover that they didn’t already know.

Now 17 minutes late, Lunsford finally showed up.

“I’d appreciate it if you could manage to make it to our meetings on time,” he said.

“If you didn’t insist on meeting in person, we could have had this conversation already,” Lunsford said.

“You are going to lecture me about being paranoid? That’s new.”

“We have methods for secure communications.”

“Not reassuring to me. I know my home is safe from any ears to the ground,” he said. “Now, what have you got for me?”

“There’s been some movement on the
Kirkhorn widow,” Lunsford said.

“If I recall, she wasn’t very helpful the last time we dealt with her.”

“No, she wasn’t. And now she has the onset of dementia. I went to see her a few days ago and she didn’t even know her name. Had no idea who I was, even though we’ve met previously.”

“So, what’s the movement?”

“One of our teams has latched on to her as a link to Blaine Kirkhorn.”

“Him again? I thought we were through with that. If she’s a dead end, why are you wasting time with it?”

“I just want to see how it plays out. It could be important.”

“You need to learn to prioritize your resources Steve. You’ve got bigger problems than some incoherent widow. Now, lets talk about our $10 million donation to the University of Munich for that archeological dig.”

“I had the situation taken care of quietly,” Lunsford said.

“No red tape?”

“I put my two best men on it,” Lunsford said. “They are very good at what they do.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear.”

Chapter 28

Tucson, Arizona

Sunset Ridge had a deal with a local mini-storage company. Once the residents moved in, they very rarely ever moved out, but that meant that the bulk of their belongings collected over a lifetime had to go somewhere. Alberto’s Storage gave residents 10 percent off each month to store their old junk. Alberto’s recouped their money every few months when the residents died and stopped paying their bills. State law allowed them to auction off the contents of the units blind to the highest bidder. But Loretta was a good paying customer and her unit had only been opened once. The moving company loaded the items in and locked the door behind them when they left.

“I know it sounds silly, but I didn’t want to just give away his things,” she said as Luke wheeled her down the rows of sheet metal storage units. “Since they couldn’t sell it all, I asked that everything be boxed up and shipped out here. I honestly have no idea what’s in there.”

The hot Arizona sun beat down on the black asphalt as Luke procured a key from his pocket and inserted it into the padlock. He rolled the door up, giving Loretta the first look at what she’d been paying to store for the past year. The unit was 20 feet deep and just 10 feet wide. Cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes were stacked 15 high, nearly touching the ceiling in teetering towers. Bags of clothes and shoes were spilled out onto the floor. A bowling trophy sat atop a piano bench. It hadn’t been packed with a great deal of care.

Luke took the first tenuous steps inside the place. There was a narrow walkway that led to the back of the space. The first thing to catch his eye was a large rusty whisky still used in the distillation process for liquor. The bent metal cylinder was heaped into the corner, partially covered by a white bed sheet. He walked on and disappeared from view behind a wall of boxes, investigating the contents with a flashlight.

Kathryn remained outside with Loretta. They both marveled at how much was stuffed inside the space.

“How much of his estate did they sell?” Kathryn asked, wiping sweat from her brow.

“They told me there wasn’t much left, but from the looks of this place, I don’t know, they must have sold a lot - if this was their idea of a little leftover.”

“It’ll take us weeks to go through this stuff.”

“Needle in a hay stack. I guess.”

“Loretta, I appreciate you doing this, but I’m not sure why you’re opening up to us,” Kathryn said. “You don’t know us at all. Why are you letting us snoop through your ex-husband’s belongings – which by the way, are yours now, not his.”

“Oh, I know dear. Blaine made some mistakes in his life, but he was a good man. At least I thought so. He wanted to see the best in people and he wanted to help when he could. If you two tell me he was on to something great – or even something halfway good, then I hope you can continue what he started.”

“But why us?”

“Sweetheart, no offense, but it’s Luke that I’m looking to here, not you. Blaine didn’t have many confidants in his life and if he trusted Luke to work so closely with him, then there’s got to be a reason. And what am I going to do with all this stuff? I’d never have even seen it if you two hadn’t showed up today. It’s nice to have visitors.”

“The receptionist told us that you had a visitor yesterday too.”

“Yes and no. He was looking for someone else. I wasn’t much help to him.”

Luke appeared from the darkness of the storage unit carrying a box of files.

“The shed isn’t organized at all, which isn’t a big surprise because the movers didn’t know his filing system.”

“And you do?”

“Four years of being told that I put stuff in the wrong place makes you remember. From what I can tell from the labels on the boxes he sorted his files by year, but some of the years have several boxes.”

“But we’re only looking at specific years, right?” Kathryn asked.

“Technically, yes, but he often built on ideas that he started researching years prior, so if we want to know what he was working on from the time he hired me to the time he died, we’re going to need to look through everything, from the beginning.”

“But there are hundreds of boxes in there,” Loretta said. “You’ll die of heatstroke after an hour inside that shed.”

“We’ll be OK, just need to hydrate,” he said, turning to go back in.

“Oh, don’t be such a hero,” Loretta said. “I’ve got a much better idea that will get all of us out of this horrendous sun.”

Chapter 29

For the next two days Luke, Kathryn and a few able-bodied residents of Sunset Ridge worked in the relative cool of the community recreation room. A seldom-used
ping-pong table became headquarters for reviewing the contents of the boxes. Elvin, a friend of Loretta’s was the first to volunteer to help the cause. They had been sorting out the plan of attack when he arrived to watch television. The activity in the room was enough to snag a few more helpful residents who readily admitted they had nothing better to do.

Elvin recruited some of the staff to bring in extra tables so they could better organize the belongings.

“At our age, we’ve all been placed in the position of having to go through another’s belongings,” Elvin said. “You want someone who will respect your personal life. Respect your things. There’s a reason people keep things. Even if they don’t know it.”

“I think that’s a great attitude, Elvin,” Kathryn said. “Sounds like you’ve done this before.”

“I was a garbage man before my hip gave out.”

“I see.”

By the end of the first day the collection of 54 boxes was sorted on four different tables that Elvin organized. The ping-pong table held personal effects such as photographs, postcards, letters and things you could stack. A round reception table near the window held clothing and housewares that spilled out onto the surrounding floor space. A long banquet table held odds and ends - things that didn’t fit anywhere on the other two tables.

The last table was simply
Kirkhorn’s research, which had been mixed into 26 of the 54 boxes in no particular order. Luke’s hope that the records were ordered chronologically was quickly dashed.

“It seems like at some point the records were in order, but in the process of packing up his belongings to sell, the moving company just stuffed files into the nearest boxes or combined them into less boxes,” Luke said.

“At least we’ve got them separated from the other junk,” Kathryn said.

“Hey, this isn’t junk, young lady,” Elvin said from the other side of the room. He’d taken a particular interest in Kathryn throughout the day. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you Elvin?”

He flashed her a smile.

Luke pulled a stack of boxes to the side to clear more room for sorting the piles. When he stacked them together he noticed something that he hadn’t seen before. There were series of six letters and numbers on the labels. He piled them three high with the labels facing the same direction. The months May, June and July and their corresponding year were lined up.

“You see how the markings on the box are in order by month?” Luke asked.

“Yes, all of the boxes are labeled with a month and year, what’s your point?” Kathryn asked.

“They are all labeled, but they aren’t all here, according to the pattern.”

He grabbed another set of empty boxes and piled on October, November and December of the same year.

“You see? Where are the rest of the boxes for this year?”

“Maybe he didn’t have a new box for every month,” Kathryn said. “Or maybe the movers just tossed them.”

“OK, but when you stack the boxes in order by date – which is how most people would, you’d never see it.”

“See what?”

“The series of letters and numbers in the corner of the box label,” Luke said. “They’d mean nothing. But if you order the boxes by the pattern, it’s obvious. The months and years don’t mean anything. He added them later. That’s why they are all in the same black marker, but the rest of the markings are multiple colors.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kathryn.

“It’s a hexadecimal code. It uses a base 16,” Luke said. “Meaning, 16 distinct symbols including zero to nine. The letters A, B, C, D, E and F are used to represent ten through fifteen.”

Luke lined up three boxes by the code. The months and years were all out of order. The box labels read from top to bottom: CCFF66, CCFF33, CCFF00.

“I’m not sure why he did it, but it looks like he used color shades to organize his research. If he did this back at Stanford I never noticed it before.”

“Colors? I thought you said it was a code,” Kathryn said.

“The most common use for these numbers today is to represent colors in the HTML language used to build websites. The pile of boxes here represents bright shades of neon green. It’s a mathematical pattern that tells your web browser what color to show you.”

Luke lined all the boxes up by the hexadecimal pattern. The months and years were random. There were also four boxes missing from the patterns, if they were indeed complete sets.

***

They stayed late into the night, after all the residents had gone to bed, reading through the files Kirkhorn saved, trying to find some clue to what he was working on in the years after he split with Loretta. The man took meticulous notes, but they were much like the hexadecimal code - he used his own shorthand. He wrote everything down. Nothing was recorded on video or audio, at least nothing that was left in the files, which was probably a factor in why he wrote in a coded language. Luke figured if Kirkhorn had put his thoughts on video, his research would be more easily decipherable. And for some reason he didn’t want to make it easy.

The boxes contained receipts for office supplies and items from dozens of health food stores. Copies of Scientific America magazine, junk mail and other random things
that were easy to separate from Kirkhorn’s research notes. The text was simply infuriating - a foreign language.

“I think the Sunset Ridge manager is considering charging us rent,” Kathryn said, pouring another cup of coffee from the recreation room’s pot.

She yawned and rubbed her eyes.

“We might have to take up residence here to get to the bottom of this mess,” Luke said.

“You didn’t really believe this was going to be simple, right? Just waltz in here ask a few questions and by some miracle, we walk away with all the answers we need. Maybe uncover the man’s secret diary that tells us he knew all about ARC? Maybe he wrote some plans for a homemade wireless tower in his backyard?”

“No, it’s just that I’ve been looking at these files for hours now and even if I knew what sort of shorthand he was using, I have absolutely no faith that I’d be able to understand it. The equations he listed aren’t something that I’ve ever seen before. It’s some sort of advanced quantum mechanics that are way over my head.”

“We can always take what we find back to MassEnergy and get one of the pods to work on it.”

“I know, I just feel some sort of responsibility to figure this out. If it was happening right under my nose at Stanford – for God’s sake I helped him do some of the research . . . I should have known what I was working on.”

“You expect some drunken frat boy to remember everything he did in college?”

“OK, first, I wasn’t a drunken frat boy and second, yes, I think you should remember the important stuff.”

He was getting increasingly tired and irritable as the hours dragged on.

“But that’s just it, you didn’t know it was important at the time. But you’re here now. That’s how we’re going to make a difference,” Kathryn said, taking another sip of coffee.

She poured him a cup and put her hands on his shoulders from behind, rubbing the tired muscles. Luke stiffened and she stopped.

“I guess.”

“Tell you what,” she said, sitting back down at the table. “Lets keep digging, if something pops, then we can run with it, otherwise I’m pretty sure Loretta would be happy to lend us the files and we can have a pod team take it on.”

“Fair enough. Oh, and there’s something I need to tell you that I’ve actually been dreading all night.”

“That sounds sort of serious.”

“It is. So, here goes – that coffee is decaf.”

“That’s explains it,” Kathryn said with a yawn, then stretched out on the recreation room sofa, her midriff exposed as she laid down. She closed her eyes and Luke diverted his and went back to work.