Page 51 of Running Scared
“So encrypted I haven’t seen spam in years,” Reg said, matter-of-fact like.“My parents have no idea how many protections they’ve got on their laptops.”
Bailey ran his fingers through his drying, tangled hair.“Does your family haveanyidea how much you know or how terrifying you are?”
Reg gave one of those now-frightening “quiet” smiles.“Nope.Please don’t tell them.It will only freak them out.”
“Sure,” Bailey said.And part of him knewheshould be more freaked out.But part of him was thinkingfinallythey could check in to see how Dean was doing.
Hereallyneeded to see how Dean was doing.
“After lunch,” Reg repeated.He grabbed another curried chicken sandwich.“My mom made these for me special.I really don’t want to waste them.”
“GOING TOuse the office, Mom!”Reg called casually as he and Bailey entered the house.Bailey had excused himself to put on his other pair of cargo shorts and to hang up the pair he’d worn in the pool, and the result was his skin was pleasantly cool and more susceptible to the eightyish air-conditioning in the house.Over dinner the night before, Prock, the “dead center” sibling, had assured him that the AC was perfectly capable of offering subarctic temperatures, even in the overwhelmingly dry heat of a central California summer, but that his parents didn’t like to tax the unit too much, because once in a while 105 degree temperatures gave way to 115 degree temperatures, and they didn’t want to burn out the unit.
It felt exactly like his own father’s house, Bailey had told him, and he and Prock had bonded over parents and their foibles.
But now, following Reg into the small den, thefirstthing Bailey noticed was the temp was a cool and glorious 72 degrees.Glancing around, he realized that the out-of-date paneling and wallpaper that marked the rest of the house was missing in the small, plain room.The walls were thickly plastered and not just dry-walled, Bailey saw, and painted a peaceful pale yellow with pale green accents on the doorframe and the electrical outlets.The desk was modern, spacious, and comfortable, and the chair ergonomically superior to pretty much any other piece of furniture in the home.
And the place where the window should have been had been plastered and sealed over—if Bailey could recall, the stucco on the other side had been patched and painted as well.
And the small game closet had the door removed, and all of the shelves were full of advanced electronic equipment that would rival the NSA.
Bailey glanced around the room again and realized that the place was probably as hack-proof and surveillance-proof as a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility—in the Pentagon, and he found himself staring at the quietest Royal.
“Do your parents know what this room is?”he asked, wondering at how much damage somebody with an unwholesome intention could do from a room like this.
“Oh hell no,” Reg said absently.“I asked Dad if I could redo the den, and then I rewired the Wi-Fi, and then I thickened the walls and specially funneled all the power to a different transformer.I had a friend from high school help, and we put the AC unit on the same transformer so we wouldn’t tax my parents’ electric bill, but since they’reinsaneand apparentlylikesweat in their armpits I also gave it its own separate thermostat so the server towers wouldn’t overheat the place.”He paused.“And there’s special foil insulation under the plaster to make it fireproof.And there’s a trapdoor under the desk that leads to a crawlspace under the house that comes out in the mother-in-law cottage.Which reminds me, I need to make sure my dad doesn’t plaster or paint that over, so thank you, I’ll go out there tonight.”
Bailey couldn’t help staring.“You… you did all this without your parents’ knowledge?”
Reg gave him a mild look.“I’ll tell them if they need to know.”
“But why the secret tunnel?Who are you working for that you need a secret tunnel?”
Reg laughed.“No, no.Nothing like that.See, my folks went on a trip right after Chance graduated from school, and I asked if I could redo the den since my job needed more computing power and memory space—particularly when I’m doing design and coding and stuff.They said yeah, I could do it then, as long as I didn’t let any of the cats escape, and I got some of my friends and some of Dad’s friends to help me.And because of all the computer specs—and the fact that I wanted it subarctic in here when I was working—everybody started to joke that it was like a secret spy room.The tunnel to the mother-in-law cottage was a joke, really, but we realized that if the place was ever on fire, there was enough fresh air blowing up from there to make it a safe place to get out if the other ways were blocked.And since I’d blocked up the window….”
Bailey nodded helplessly.“Wow,” he said.“Just… damn, son.Does Anthony have any idea about this?”
Reg frowned a little.“Why would Anthony know about the secret passage to the mother-in-law cottage?”
Bailey shook his head.“So I could tell him?”he asked.
“Oh, well, sure,” Reg said.“It was mostly a lark, you know?”
“Sure,” Bailey said.He was going to tell Dean about it too.But all that depended on whether or not they could get Dean the hell out of Mexico with his skin intact.“But about Dean….”
“Okay, then,” Reg said, and with that he opened his laptop and did shit that Bailey didn’t even recognize.He assumed he was logging into a special server, but given the setup he saw in the erstwhile closet, he could have arranged hisownserver, one completely clear of any pesky entanglements like, say, the websites belonging to the DOJ, who were apparently blissfully unaware of this unassuming kid who’d been tracking one of their own for nigh on three years because he’d been worried about his sibling.
“So,” Reg was murmuring, obviously oblivious to the boggling Bailey was doing in his own head, “here’s where Dean was three days ago, about an hour after he left you.He’s about a hundred miles away from where Val picked you up.I’m going to assume the plane landed about forty-five minutes after you got pushed out of it, because the distance tracks.Mostly.”Reg frowned, and Bailey was afraid to ask him what he suspected.“Okay, either way the phone needed to be charged between then and now, so we’re going to assume Dean’s alive to have done that.”
“He’s got sixty-zillion phone batteries on and around his person and stuff,” Bailey said, remembering Marcus remarking on it.“It’s sort of a glitch for him.”
Reg made a happy little wiggle with his shoulders.“I taught him that,” he said proudly.
Bailey wanted to ask this kid what happened to him to make him so damned careful, but now was not the time.
“So how long did he stay there?”he asked, and Reg tapped a menu by the little red dot Bailey assumed was Dean, and got a readout of movement by hour.
“Well, they landed and then took off again,” Reg said carefully.“They’re going around thirty, forty miles per hour, and they’re riding on old roads—the sort that aren’t nice to vehicle suspensions or chassis—I’m going to assume they’re on motorcycles or in a Jeep, but probably motorcycles.They’re going faster than a Jeep.”Reg frowned.“Maybe a bike with a trailer?Their speed isn’t… usual.It should be twenty to twenty-five in a Jeep or forty to fifty on a motorcycle, but it’s thirty to forty—”
