Wonder Guy (25 page)

A street address right there in South Minneapolis. Greg quickly jotted down the info. Professor Stevens’ name was listed as the contact for the IP address. No surprise, given Stevens had been the one to set up the data transfer. The business name attached to the address was Inspired Logic.

“Hey. I’m impressed.” Greg clapped Eric on the shoulder. Maybe he’d skip the mousetrap below the helpful hacker’s drawer. It had turned out to be handy knowing someone with Eric’s special skills. A bit of pilfering from his drawer wouldn’t hurt too much. Not that he wanted to go soft on crime.

“What’s with the blank look?” Eric rolled his chair back to its original workstation and started his login procedure.

“Brain stuck in infinite loop.” Greg gave his forehead a light whack with the palm of his hand. “Better now. Thanks, Eric.”

Eric’s attention had already locked on his own computer and he spoke absently, over his shoulder. “Sure man.”

Greg left the day’s simulations running. He checked out MapQuest for some satellite images of the suspect server address, logged out and gathered his gear. He’d do a round as Wonder Guy, check out this address and see if he might learn anything useful before preparing to confront Professor Stevens.

Chapter 15

Gloria usually only worked until three o’clock on Fridays. Given how many people in her department didn’t work at all, she felt no guilt for any missed calls or emails from sticklers who did stay on the job until four ‘o clock. They’d be answered on Monday. The few urgent projects that might crop up involved people able to reach the decision makers directly.

Sometimes Gloria would stay later because she had a project of her own to work on and liked using the fast internet connections and top grade software applications available at the office. This weekend she’d reserved for wedding planning. She couldn’t wait to get home, lock herself in her room with her laptop and research local sources for flowers and music. She and Pete may not have actually set a date yet, but she liked to be on top of things.

During her last half hour at work, she marked time by getting a head start on her Googling. It proved easy enough to find a few local flower shops with websites, but nothing looked right. She loved roses, but either the arrangements looked too formal–boring–or so creative Pete would balk at using them.

She had no interest in the formal arrangements. Formality was not the word for Gloria Torkenson. Staid, classic styles might suit Pete, but didn’t work for her. She wasn’t into anything too predictable. That struck out country or anything old-fashioned, but she didn’t want anything too innovative, either. Did she have a style of her own?

She appreciated a natural kind of beauty, like butterfly wings and woodland glades. She liked playing with the possibilities of many different styles, the way she did with the Cell Shell designs. She liked to draw elements from every possible source, from oriental arabesques, to expressionist modern art, to Pennsylvania Dutch designs, to African and Amerindian geometrics, but she wouldn’t say any single style represented Gloria Torkenson. Eclectic was the word. She needed eclecticity.

Staring at the array of floral arrangements on screen before her, she found nothing eclectic enough to fit her style. The more inventive arrangements she loved seemed too wild to suit Pete. Several of the beautiful, formal concoctions of roses, orchids, and lilies looked as if they’d be right at home in his wedding, but not at hers. What did that say about them?

Besides, they were so expensive. She didn’t want to spend so much money on a one-time event when it could make day-to-day living so much more manageable. He’d see eye-to-eye with her line of reasoning. Maybe she should talk him into a simple civil ceremony at City Hall. Their closest friends and family would be there, but they wouldn’t need all the expense and foo-foo-raw–one of Aggie’s favorite words–of flowers and music and fancy gowns.

* * * *

Kathleen left the ABM offices earlier than she’d planned. If she were going to set up a meeting with Ms. Ellis, she’d rather do as much as possible by the light of day.

The gnarly man would be easiest to find. If he didn’t actually live in the lot behind the U-Store-It where Inspired Logic had its supposed offices, he at least kept a constant watch on the place and always appeared within minutes of her own arrival there.

At three o’clock the sun still shone high over the half industrial neighborhood, but cast deep shadows between the buildings. Kathleen parked near the end of the row of storage units, at the back of the building, where an alley ran behind the neatly maintained blocky structures, facades blazoned in a broad swath of red and punctuated with rows of garage-style doors.

The breeze struck her as cool for June, but one never knew what to expect in Minnesota. She remembered one May they’d had ninety-degree temperatures one week and snow the next. What on earth possessed her to live in such a place? She should be in New York City. Just a bit more progress on her career plans here and she would be in New York City, leap-frogging Mr. Carlson to move up the ladder at corporate headquarters.

She walked casually to the alley behind the building, as if loitering while waiting for someone who visited a storage unit. Stepping around the end of the building, she found the usual scrubby growth of saplings lining the neglected tract where the alley cut between the storage facility and the grain elevators further on. The breeze clattered through the leaves and long-limbed brush, sending assorted trash, mostly wrappers from the fast food place down the road, along the rutted way.

Kathleen scanned the scrub growth, peering into its shadows. The gnarly man always seemed to emerge from those shadows. He must have made some kind of nest for himself there, of fallen branches and cardboard boxes, most likely. She wrinkled her nose. Why would a woman like Ms. Ellis, who seemed always to be dressed at the height of fashion, impeccable in her appearance, consort with such shabby creatures?

Perhaps for the same reasons she herself had come here to find him. He would do the job she had for him.

A scuffling noise off to the side drew her attention to the very party she’d come to see. No more than four feet in height, as bent and gnarled as an old tree, wrinkled and clad in rags nearly indistinguishable in color from the dusty surface of the alley, he stood completely still. He stared at her with a look as pointed as if he’d actually said, ‘Well, what do you want?’

“I need to speak to Ms. Ellis.” Kathleen put some asperity into her tone. Whatever else he might be, he was an underling and should know his place.

“Wait,” he growled, fading back into the narrow stand of saplings and brush beside the buildings. Maybe he managed to get into the building through some hole hidden behind the unkempt fringe of growth?

She’d been here before and knew better than to complain of the wait. Through whatever means, the gnarly little man could contact Ms. Ellis and set up a meeting. Probably another of those very uncomfortable midnight meetings the woman seemed to prefer.

Kathleen hugged her suit jacket closer. It seemed both colder and darker here in the shadows behind the blank walls of the storage facility.

* * * *

In a fraction of the time it would have taken to bike there as Greg Roberts, Wonder Guy made the flight to the address Eric had helped ferret out. He’d scout out the location, take a look at the place. On the face of it, Professor Stevens had a right to back up student data to a site he deemed secure, but backing it up to an off-campus server smelled fishy. A server registered to a private company? It stank like fish forgotten for weeks in the trunk of the car after summer vacation, as he knew from experience.

Having studied MapQuest’s satellite images, Greg spotted the site from the air, a set of long low storage buildings in a neighborhood near the grain elevators along Hiawatha Avenue. What kind of research company used a storage unit for its business address?

Greg did another, lower pass. A few vehicles sat in the parking lanes between buildings.

He studied the visitors to the storage units as he circled high above. A couple of college-aged guys loaded boxes off the back of a pickup truck into one unit. An older guy sat on a campstool in the opening of another unit, apparently varnishing the hull of a small motorboat. A woman in business dress stood near the back of one building, a phone pressed to her ear. A late model red Audi sat parked not far from her, beside the last unit in the row.

Nobody looked suspicious, but who’d wear ski masks and trench coats to the site of an illicit operation? He focused Wonder Guy’s telescopic vision on the numbers painted above each unit, looking for #248. Bingo, the unit with the Audi parked in front. The woman must have some connection to Professor Stevens. How was she involved?

Greg circled higher lest she glance upward. He wondered how high he’d have to go to be mistaken for some circling bird. Funny how seldom people looked up. Everyone he observed with his super enhanced vision seemed intent on his or her own purposes. Whether they varnished a boat or loaded boxes, drove along the road, stopped at the gas station or McD’s, not a single person tilted a head to look at the great blue hemisphere above. Not that he wasn’t the same way, intent on the ground below him.

Greg executed a slow roll, surveying the sky above him as well as the land below. Above, only shreds of wispy cloud marked the blue sky. What more did he expect? He rolled his shoulders, trying to shake an uncomfortable sensation of being watched. If anyone did have him under satellite or telescopic observation, he’d just have to live with it.

He should concern himself with the woman below him. Her presence at the professor’s storage unit made her a good subject for surveillance. He’d follow her, maybe pick up some clue to her identity and involvement with Professor Stevens’ scheme.

Maybe she had nothing to do with it, though. She made no move toward the storage unit. She went instead to the shadows of the alley behind the facility, lingering there for no apparent reason, where a thin line of saplings and brush grew between the narrow alley and the neighboring grain elevators.

He scanned the area from above, the cool air molding itself around his outstretched limbs as if he swam an insubstantial sea. From the woman’s stance, she might be speaking to someone hidden in the scraggly growth. Yet, not even his enhanced vision revealed anyone present.

* * * *

What now? Gloria wondered, during her evening–if she called three-thirty in the afternoon evening–drive home. She couldn’t marry Pete. They didn’t fit. Or, she might be able to fit him into her admittedly eclectic life-style, but he belonged with someone more his own style. Someone who’d complement his simple (boring), formal (staid) and unadorned (empty) life-style.

He might claim to love her, even with all the arts and crafts adorning her walls: from her historical t-shirt quilt to her macramé pillow hammock, fruit-section clocks, and experiments in Ukrainian egg-dying that resembled works of Mondrian. But face it, after a while, he’d start wincing inside, turning away, looking for his proper match in some quiet woman of simple tastes.

Gloria drove her usual route, focused on the road and responsive to the traffic, but preoccupied with how little she had in common with Pete, which should upset her far more than it did. She and Pete were over. It left her with a sort of melancholy, as if she looked back at a half-remembered dream, but she was letting go of someone whom, yesterday, she would have said she loved. She did love Pete, in a way. He was as dear as any of her friends and coworkers. Only she ought to feel more for someone she meant to marry.

* * * *

Elysha did not sleep as humans did. She let herself slip into a dreamlike state wherein her mind wove itself among the limbs and the roots of the green lives surrounding her to absorb something of the serenity in which they grew. At least, it seemed like serenity to her. Each life ruthlessly striving to extend itself to the heights and depths it could reach, regardless of how one might strangle or overshadow another. All in a season’s work. It soothed her to dwell here where such avid life flourished.

Because she did not sleep, the sylph did not wake her when it approached, but it drew her from a restful state and woke her temper.

“Why do you disturb me?” Elysha stirred from her place in a stand of birches, applying the spell that made her eyes shine hard as green flints.

“With news I come.” The gossamer thing trembled like cobwebs in a stiff breeze. “The Hero pursues your human tool, she who has met with you at midnight times where the water flows from trap to trap.”

“That one.” Kathleen, the human woman who craved power above all. Elysha frowned. The threatened scheme still unfolded. Only one of many, it ran deep enough to strike many lives when it finally blew apart like a ripened seedpod. “You were correct to tell me. I cannot allow his interference in this plan.”