The Skill Conspiracy Page 17

  “Sorry?” I said out loud. “Why is he sorry?” I asked the man on the floor in front of me.

  “Chin guh tay means fuck you, you moron!” he spat back.

  Oh. Great. So now I’d shot this guy, broken his wrist, and said “fuck you” to him.

  “Alden!” Annie yelled, snapping me out of whatever moral dilemma loop I’d just gotten myself stuck in.

  “You guys have any scissors or anything?” I asked the guy on the floor.

  “Chin guh tay!” he yelled.

  “Right. Chin guh tay,” I replied.

  The guy actually tried to get up, which I had to give him credit for, but his knee was a gross mess, and he fell right back down again. As he did, I noticed a small satchel that was on the floor near the rear of the truck. As I stepped to reach for it, the man on the floor reached for my ankle and tried to grab hold, but I instinctively pulled my leg back and then stomped on his hand as if it were a cockroach in my Hoboken apartment. He yelped in pain . . . and I apologized again, in English.

  “Stop fighting,” I said to him as he tried reaching for me yet again. “I don’t wanna”—I paused to stomp on his other hand—“do this.”

  This sucked.

  I was finally able to grab the little satchel and found within it two PCDs, which I assumed were mine and Annie’s, a plastic sleeve full of zip ties, about a half dozen gold ingots, and a little cutter tool.

  “Great,” I said out loud.

  I stepped back over the first man on the ground, checked to make sure that the man in front of Annie was still in so much pain that he was half blind with the agony, then reached behind Annie with the little cutter tool and freed her arms from the hook on the wall of the truck.

  Only then did I realize that the truck was stopped, and men were yelling at us from outside.

  How long had that been going on?

  Quickly, I pulled a long zip tie out of the satchel and used it to bind the wrists of the man on the floor behind his back. He struggled, but not as much as before. I stepped over to the other guy, whose wrist I’d broken, and while I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, I was pretty sure he was begging me not to zip tie his busted wrist.

  “I’m sorry, man,” I said to him. “I really am.” As I said this, I zipped his wrists together amidst much screaming, then zipped his ankles together with another tie and attached his wrist to his ankles with a third tie.

  “What are we gonna do?” Annie asked as the second man was secured.

  “I- I, uh . . . I’m working on it,” was all I could say.

  I picked the first man up off the floor, then walked him to the back of the truck.

  “Hey! Hey!” I yelled through the metal doors to the voices I was hearing outside. “Hola!” All I could hear in reply was nonsensical yelling, and they sounded pissed. I turned to the man in front of me and said, “You need to tell them we’re going to come out, but if they try anything, I’m going to have to shoot you.”

  I wouldn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.

  He gave me the dirtiest look I’d ever seen one man give another, then proceeded to shout back and forth through the door to the men outside. When he was done, the corner of one of his lips rose ever so slightly.

  “You didn’t tell them what I asked, did you?” I inquired.

  “Nope,” he replied, the tiny hint of a grin turning to a full-on smile. “I told them that Alejandro and I were both shot, injured, and zip tied, and that the moment you come out that they should start shooting. I asked them not to hit me if they could avoid it, but if not, I’m willing to die to see you burn, puta!”

  “Great,” I said flatly. “Thanks.”

  “Alden,” Annie said to me in a desperately pleading tone.

  “I’m thinking,” I replied.

  I grabbed the satchel again and pulled out one of the PCDs. I put my thumb on the reader, and it activated.

  “Good,” I said out loud. This one was mine, and I had an idea.

  I began running through the series of commands needed to adopt a false identity. On try number one I became Abraham Gonzalez.

  “Nope,” I said out loud.

  Next, I spoofed the ID of Matias Lopez.

  “Nope.”

  Then, Alejandro Hernandez.

  The first name was right. I just needed to check the rest.

  “Hey, Mr. Hernandez,” I said to the man hog-tied near Annie, checking to see if this was indeed the Alejandro I was looking for. He looked at me, recognition of his own name written plain on his face.

  “Got it,” I said out loud.

  “What are you doing?” Annie asked me.

  “I just assumed the identity of our buddy Alejandro here,” I said, as I scrolled to his list of “registered vehicles” on my PCD. “And since Alejandro is a police officer and this is apparently an official police vehicle, I now have access to the controls.”

  “So?” Annie asked.

  Alejandro was still writhing in pain, but I had to move him to the back of the truck, where his other buddy was lying on the floor and cursing me out. The benches now cleared out, I told Annie to get down on the floor of the truck between them.

  “Why?” she asked. Then, more sternly, “Alden, what are you doing?”

  “I’m not really sure, Annie,” I said with all honesty. “I’m just kinda winging it here.”

  I located the vehicle we were in on my PCD and navigated to the “vehicle controls.” From here, I would be able to unlock the back door of the truck, which was something I’d need to do in order to get out, since it apparently only unlocked from the outside or via PCD remote control. After that, though, I needed to try to find a way of actually stepping through that door without the two men who had been in the cab of the truck when this whole thing began shooting me dead on the spot. The truck apparently didn’t have an auto-drive feature, nor did it have a remote control option, which would have been perfect for me to just drive us out of here from my spot in the back of vehicle, but it did have Bluetooth connectivity.

  “Alden,” Annie said again, this time almost desperately.

  “When I open this door,” I said to her, “I need you to get as small as possible. Just curl up into a little ball and stay as low as you can.”

  I think she was about to ask me what I was going to do for a third time, but I didn’t give her the chance.

  I linked my PCD to the stereo of the truck, turned up the volume to maximum, and hit play on the first music playlist that showed up in my library.

  “You are now about to witness the power of street knowledge,” the speakers in the cab of the truck blared at full volume.

  The info that scrolled across the screen of my PCD said, “Classical Gangsta Rap – NWA - Straight Outta Compton.”

  “Perfect,” I said out loud, just as I heard the two men outside the truck start yelling in response to the voice coming from the cab of their truck. As the two of them rushed along the side of the truck, making their way forward, I unlocked the back door from my PCD, put the little device in my pocket, and jumped out the back door just as the overly loud drumbeat of the song started pounding.

  Gun in hand, I reversed the grip on the pistol as I landed on the ground and ran full speed around the passenger side of the truck, where I quickly came up on one of the men, who until recently had been barring our exit. The music was so loud that he didn’t hear me coming, and I had the opportunity to pistol-whip him right in the back of the head. He fell like a sack of rocks to the ground. One down, one to go, but I didn’t think I’d be able to pull off that same move twice. The first man had just reached the cab of the truck when I’d gotten to him. By now, the second man would have already had a chance to look into the cab and, seeing no one there, would be turning back around.

  Without thinking, I dropped to the ground and looked across the bottom of the truck. Sure enough, I could see the feet of the second man making his way back toward the rear of the truck. I drew the gun, took aim, and shot his left ankle just
as he got to the rear edge of the truck.

  This vehicle had a lot of clearance to it, so instead of getting up and running around it, I just barrel rolled beneath it, coming out right behind the man I’d just downed. He had dropped his pistol either the moment I’d shot him or the instant he’d hit the ground, but was just now reaching for the gun, which was only a foot or so away from his hand. I popped to my feet just in time to close the short distance between us and boot the gun away like an awkward metal soccer ball.

  “Chin guh tay!” I yelled to him over the blaring music. “No wait, I mean, I’m sorry!”

  “Chin guh tay!” he screamed back at me from the ground.

  I went to step around him to go to the back of the truck, but he rose and looked like he was going to make a dash for the gun I’d kicked away. I fired my gun once into the air to get his attention, and in the split moment he hesitated, I reversed the grip of the gun and hit him on the back side of the head. He was down, but not out like the first man I’d tried this on.

  Quickly, I ran to the back of the truck, where both Alejandro and the man who had originally been sitting across from me when I’d woken up were both writhing on the ground and screaming. I reached past both of them, grabbed the little satchel, fished out a couple of zip ties, then ran over to secure the man I’d just hit in the head before he could come back to his senses. I did my best to pull Alejandro and the other man out of the truck as gently as I could, but, let’s face it, gently moving a two-hundred-pound man who doesn’t want to cooperate isn’t very easy, so I basically just ended up dragging them out the back and depositing them on the ground roughly. I grabbed a couple more zip ties out of the bag to secure the first man I’d knocked out, then grabbed my PCD and hit “stop” on the music.

  “You okay, Annie?” I called into the truck as I was coming back around to the rear door.

  “Yeah,” came her reply, though it sounded a bit more like a question than a statement.

  26

  Annie was indeed just fine. I, however, well, I was feeling like shit. And yes, I was swearing now. I mean, why not? I just shot three guys, broke one of their wrists, and gave two of them pretty serious concussions. Not like the occasional F bomb or S word is gonna be the thing that’ll prevent me from getting a halo at this point.

  “We can’t just keep driving this police truck,” Annie said from the passenger seat as we rumbled down a mostly paved road.

  “I know,” I said. I had disabled the GPS on the truck so that when the authorities realized that they needed to start tracking it, they wouldn’t be able to find it too easily. However, driving around in the equivalent of a stolen New York City Paddy Wagon isn’t exactly what one might call inconspicuous. With no GPS on board the truck and no GPS capabilities on our PCDs, I had no idea where we were, so my only plan for right now was to drive to some place with some signs of life and hopefully buy ourselves a new car. That vehicle would, of course, need to have GPS on board, so we could get ourselves pointed in the right direction toward Bogota.

  “How do you feel?” Annie asked me, ever the psychologist.

  “Shitty,” I said, trying out my first S bomb on her.

  She actually laughed.

  I smiled but remained silent for a little while after that, and Annie let the silence stand. After almost a minute, I just blurted out, “I’ve never gotten so much as a ticket for jaywalking. Never been late paying a bill. I pay my taxes, obey the law, and . . . and—”

  “And now you’re wanted in three different countries for crimes ranging from murder to smuggling to assault?” Annie finished the thought for me.

  “Yeah!” I replied, exasperated and staying just this side of whining about it. Then, something she said hit me, “Wait, three?”

  “Yeah. The US, Cuba, and Colombia,” she replied.

  “I didn’t do anything in Cuba.”

  “Well, you did smuggle all of those ingots from Cuba to Colombia so, I don’t know. I’m not sure how that works,” she said. “Maybe you’re just a two-country criminal.”

  I laughed, which is exactly what she was trying to make me do. God, she was good. I love her so much.

  We continued on the same road for a while, until it ended at the intersection of another road that seemed to be much better paved. I only had one decision to make at this point: go left, or go right. At first, I figured that one direction was just as good as another, until it occurred to me that our eventual destination of Bogota was inland, which meant that we’d need to travel west. I looked around at some shadows being cast by nearby trees and, knowing it was still morning, determined that the road ran east to west, and west was left. I knew it wouldn’t take us all the way there, but any bit of ground we could cover in the right direction seemed good to me.

  We traveled on the new road for about fifteen minutes, for the first time since we’d been in this country enjoying a road that didn’t make you bounce in your seat as you traveled it. Eventually, we saw a couple of signs on the side of the road, followed shortly by signs of a little town up ahead. Knowing we couldn’t very well just roll on up to the new town in our stolen Police Truck, I took the first opportunity to pull the vehicle off the road and onto a narrow field with a thicket of trees that I was hoping might be a full-blown forest on the far side of it.

  “We need to ditch the truck,” I said to Annie once she looked over at me as I began to drive off the road.

  We bumped our way across the field, giving me bad flashbacks to about forty minutes ago, when this truck was last making its way over a field, and slowly approached the tree line. The spacing of the trees was almost perfect for our purpose. Close to the field, the trees were spaced pretty far apart, which allowed me to drive the truck into the arboreal area with very little difficulty. About fifty yards in, the trees became more densely packed, which made it a little tougher for me to maneuver, but would also make it harder for anyone to see the truck if they happened to be driving by on the road we’d just come from. A couple three-point turns and one nine-point turn later, I’d wedged the big gray truck in between a thicket of tall, dark trees, and we both hopped out and started to make our way back to the field.

  “Looks good,” Annie acknowledged as she looked back into the woods, trying to see if the truck was at all visible from where we were now.

  Only if you were really looking for it would you be able to see even the faintest sign of the truck. As for the fact that I’d left two somewhat obvious tire tracks across the field on my way to the woods, well, the only thing we could do about that was walk the same tracks back out to the road, doing our best to kick the trampled grass back up to a standing position. It wasn’t going to be perfect, but I was hoping it would do the trick just long enough for us to make our way into and out of town.

  “Nothing suspicious about two Gringos walking into a random Colombian town with no possessions except their PCDs and . . .” Annie paused as she looked to be checking out my butt. “Did you keep one of the guns?”

  “Yeah,” I replied guiltily. “I’m not exactly a fan of the things, but as you’ve seen, they have come in kind of handy lately.”

  “Well, fine, but, maybe you should try to stick it into your waistband or something so it’s not sticking out of your back pocket for the whole world to see.”

  “Oh. Good idea,” I replied, doing my best to shove the thing down the back of my pants like I’d seen done on TV. It was highly uncomfortable.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping dead in my tracks. “I need to switch our identities again.”

  “Oh, right,” Annie said, her eyes widening.

  Her identity of Lindsay King had been logged by the Colombian police while we were still on board The Runner, so we’d need to ditch that immediately. I’d ditched the identity of Michael Tully in favor of Alejandro Hernandez, the police officer I’d shot in the knee and broken his wrist.

  My experience in cloning Alejandro’s identity while we were in the back of the truck had confirmed some of my earlier guess
es about how this identity spoofing thing worked. I’d only been guessing about the range at which it would work, and it seemed that since the Colombian police had driven us to such a remote area, that the only identities that were coming up for me at that point were the identities of the police officers nearby. That still didn’t let me know the exact range for this protocol to work, but I knew it was pretty short, and that made me slightly nervous about spoofing two identities right now, knowing that they would very likely be coming from two people who lived in the little town we were about to enter. We’d have to be very careful about making any purchases that would reveal our new names during the transaction. It would be kind of awkward to be paying for breakfast and have the waiter notice that you were him, or that he was you, or . . . it would just be awkward.

  I grabbed Annie’s PCD first and, after following the now very familiar sequence, informed her that she was now Marianna Ortiz.

  “Best I could do,” I said sheepishly. I’d actually tried seven other identities before settling on that one, and they all sounded very Spanish. Annie didn’t really look like an Ortiz . . . at all, but, you know what they say about beggars slash identity thieves.

  A moment later, I went to work on my own PCD and said, “And you can now address me as Sebastian Rojas.”

  Again, it was the best I could find.

  “Call me Bash,” I said. “I’ll call you Mary.”

  She just shook her head and started walking. “Okay, Bash,” she called back over her shoulder, making the name sound even sillier than I thought possible.

  “And put your hands in your pockets,” she said as we approached the first house at the edge of the town.

  I did, but it hurt. My wrists were all cut to hell from breaking out of the zip ties. I probably looked a little weird walking with both of my hands buried in both of my front pockets, but I’m guessing it was better than looking like I’d just come down from the cross. That said, I’d be looking to pick up a nice, loose, long-sleeved shirt the first chance I got.