Chapter 14 – You Shall Not Pass! (Part I)

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“I think that her friends are onto me,” Agent Warren said aloud as he leaned back from the computer and stretched. Never before had he spent so much time staring at a computer screen in his whole career—or at least, he reminded himself, when he did so it wasn’t in a dark hotel room. As he strained the stretch he tried to recall the training course he’d taken in office ergonomics. Something about looking away from the screen every ten to twenty minutes and getting up and walking around every two hours came to mind.

When Toller didn’t reply, Warren tiptoed the swivel chair around so that he could get a bead on her.

She’d engrossed herself in a cheap paperback book purchased at the supermarket during the last nighttime grocery raid—after all, she argued, they couldn’t subsist entirely on Chinese takeout and Jimmy Johns sub sandwiches. He cursed his luck. Of course she’d chosen a Tom Clancy novel, no doubt depicting an acrobatic, heavily armed government agent doing his duty for President and country against all odds. What do government agents read to escape from reality: stories about government agents with actual funding and exciting jobs.

“Did you hear me?” he said much louder than last time.

Toller jumped, her eyes snapping up from the page of her book. “I– Oh, did you need me to take point?” she said as she placed a bookmark and slid the book closed. “Or are the scriptkiddies getting on your nerves again?”

“Neither,” Warren said. Although, now that she mentioned it, he did feel like the chair was beginning to fuse with his spine. He stood up and suppressed a grimace as a particularly vicious tingle ran from the tip of his skull to his toes. “Urgh. Tell me that you got some Tylenol that last run.”

“Still have a headache?” She slipped the Clancy novel onto the nightstand next to the bed and lobbed him a small white pill bottle.

He caught it deftly with one hand. “Not this time,” he said. “My back is killing me. And this isn’t getting any easier. You don’t think that Rockefeller could be convinced to allocate us more geeks from the hive to help handle the social networks? For someone with an antisocial profile she’s strangely the social butterfly. Although, I suspect that someone else is playing her persona time to time. It’s hard to follow.” He didn’t wait for Toller’s reply. “No, of course not.”

After following the red van that had appeared to abduct the Dean of Engineering the day before, Agent Ellis Warren had come to a different conclusion entirely about their investigation. The van—a 2000 Ford E150—led them on a merry chase around the residential roads of Tempe. The pursuit took every ounce of skill he had in discreet vehicular surveillance, although it seemed to him that the driver wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going (or even who followed them.) He decided not to risk trying to get close enough to get a good look at the driver and the occupants remained invisible the entire time.

Calling in the plates didn’t lead back to anything but a rental agency and the “chase,” if it could be called that, ended before agents back home could run down the rental information.

Instead of leading anywhere in particular, after twenty minutes of driving, the van circled back and returned to ASU. There Dean Harwood disembarked right next to his own car, no worse for wear, and the van fled. At the time Toller joked about which to follow—the van or the dean—and Agent Warren opted for the former. Now he wondered if that was the right decision.

The occupants of the van, possibly more through luck than prowess, managed to evade him when they returned the vehicle to one of the many rental lots across Phoenix. Agent Toller kindly didn’t tease him about how he got stuck on the wrong side of the tracks just in time to catch a reasonably long train. He eventually managed to catch up with them again using her skills with the city map and their most likely destination to discover that driver and occupants had already abandoned it.

Agent Toller yawned and cast him a momentary rueful smile.

“Rockefeller gave me an earful this morning about your report from last night,” she said. “He thinks you’re going mushy in the head from playing on the computer. ‘That boy doesn’t have enough legwork to stand on to come to that conclusion, agent. Don’t follow in his footsteps. Get me results!’” She tried to mimic their supervisor’s eyebrow twitch as well as she lowered her voice to match his gruff speech pattern. “What did you tell him anyway? Are you still ringing your hands over that theory that the phones have nothing to do with anything? You do know that’s why we’re looking into Mercer and Harwood.”

“That’s it exactly,” Special Agent Warren said. “I don’t think the phones have anything do with anything. In fact, our little escapades last night have convinced me that we’re barking up the wrong tree at a cat that isn’t there. You’d understand if you took computer duty once and a whi—.”

The computer chimed, drawing Warren’s attention back to it. An e-mail he’d been waiting for had arrived from home base. He slouched into the chair once again while Toller stood up and strolled into the washroom area and he heard her open the fridge and grab one of the energy drinks. A smile crept onto his lips as he pressed the key combination to print the e-mail and waited for the tiny printer to finish whrring.

“As I said earlier,” Warren went on, “I think that the people that Mercer hangs out with are starting to catch onto me. Except they’re not what you’d expect. Mostly these people aren’t hackers, not in the traditional sense; they’re computer programmers and mathematicians. She’s been building a case involving some extremely complex statistics and college grades.

“In fact, if I were going to make a guess, I’d say that she seems to be investigating some sort of cheating ring. Probably one right here at ASU.”

Toller popped the tab on her energy drink and started pouring it into a cheap plastic cup. “Or perpetrating one,” she said from the other room.

“Perhaps,” Warren replied, “except she just doesn’t seem the type. In fact, none of this has anything to do with a giant lot order of burner cellphones. No connection whatsoever. It does connect directly to Harwood and now it ties to other ASU staff in Harwood’s department. Now tell me that a bunch of college professors turned administrators are planning some sort of terrorism using cellphones.”

He threw the papers on the bed and went to grab his coat from the hook next to the door.

“What’s this?” Toller asked as she picked the pages and scanned them.

“Vindication,” Warren said. He checked his shoulder holster and withdrew the keys to the Prius from his pocket.

“So maybe there’s more people in on this than just a student and a dean.” Toller shrugged and finished pouring her energy drink. The carbonation hissed from a drink that looked like frothy pink-bubblegum; as much as Warren watched her drink the stuff, he just couldn’t bring himself to ask her why she found it palatable.

Toller sighed. “I’m going to have to get my gun aren’t I?”

“Depends,” Warren said. “Do you expect to shoot me or possibly catch a bad guy?”

Toller frowned and looked at her drink with an air of melancholy.

“I’m still deciding.”

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