Chapter 4 - Memory

After another hour of driving, they found the motel off a service road close to the interchange. It w

as the sort of place where cash transactions were still more common than electronic. Sometimes, it seemed like she’d spent more of her life holed up in disgusting crapholes than living in normal houses. So much of the job had been waiting, and despite what movies showed, it was rarely in five star hotels, dressed in evening gowns. It was way more likely to be in places on the edges of society.

She didn’t know how Cooper always managed to find the scummiest places on the planet for them to hide out in, but he had a knack. It was twenty twenty-five, how did he find a place that still had a cigarette machine but no working air conditioning? The place was a parking lot motel, L-shaped and single story. The room contained two double beds with a nightstand between, a dresser with a broken TV on it and a small table in the corner. Everything felt like it was covered in a thin layer of scum and she was glad Cooper was the one braving the bed. She’d gotten enough sleep in the car.

“There’s a real possibility this pillow gives me a staph infection,” Cooper grunted as he peeled off his top.

“At least it’s not as bad as Cuba,” she teased.

He grinned and threw his shirt over the pillow. Sounds of snoring came from the cramped double almost as soon as his head touched the mattress. Poor thing was exhausted. She didn’t need to worry about making noise, Cooper slept like a rock when she was around.

Realistically, there wasn’t much chance anyone could find them here, but she wasn’t going to leave their safety to chance. There wasn’t much she could do to secure the room, but anything was better than nothing. One of the neat gadgets in her go bag was a camera the size of a watch battery that could stick to just about any surface. She placed one outside the door near the top of the frame and another at the top of the two-pane window that looked into their room from the parking lot. There was still five left, so she went for a walk and placed them at various locations around the motel. At this time of night, no one was up and she was able to work uninterrupted. It wouldn’t give her a perfect three-sixty view, but it would do.

When she got back to the room, she grabbed her ‘work’ laptop and set it up at the stained circular table pushed up against the wall. It audibly hummed when she fired it up. The laptop contained a quantum processor, meagre by the standards of AI computing, but that still happened to have more processing power than a dozen laptops combined. The only challenge was the cooling requirements were nuts, which meant the laptop sat on a thick chassis that made the whole thing weigh ten pounds. But there wasn’t a single problem she could throw at this computer that it wouldn’t be able to handle, and she liked to multitask.

Getting to work, she connected to the cameras and put the display in the upper left of the screen with the view directly outside their room as the main image. She zipped through all the cameras to make sure they were working, and once she was satisfied, set up the images to rotate every five seconds. Looking at the grainy images reminded her that she and Cooper had wired their whole house with a system that continuously uploaded footage to an encrypted cloud server.

It was possible that her and Cooper were paranoid to an intense degree. But they both firmly believed the only thing that separated them from everyone else in the profession who hadn’t made it was planning and information. That’s all this game was. Think of the outcomes, plan for them and gather as much intel about the situation as you could.

This entire insane night, for instance. What information did she have? The clothes he duplicates were wearing were plain and unremarkable. The only thing that stood out was the stun baton, a model neither her nor Cooper recognized. That in itself didn’t mean much; humans were so preoccupied with finding new ways to kill each other that it would take a lifetime to become conversant with every weapon created. Her brain went in circles, thinking about the central problem of why they were attacked, so she turned her focus to other elements.

On a whim, she logged into the system where they stored their surveillance videos and pulled up the footage from the backyard. Unlike the makeshift camera she’d put outside the motel, these images were artificially brightened and color corrected using top of the line cameras. They’d both learned the lesson the hard way that crappy-quality footage was basically the same thing as no footage.

It only took her a moment to find the video of Cooper being attacked. She rewound to a few minutes before and, sure enough, there was the bastard, coming over the fence and hiding in the thick tangle of bushes at the back of shed.

Why though? Why would anyone hide there? Why not position yourself around side of the house so you can get Cooper from the back? Those bushes were thick and the branches would crack with the slightest movement. Cooper must have had at least a full two seconds of warning.

Sure enough, when she got to the part where the attack actually happened, it was laughable how easily Cooper saw it coming. After he dropped the garbage bags, he noticed the disturbance behind the shed. She watched him almost subconsciously drop into a ready stance, with legs wider apart and knees slightly bent.

While it was always a pleasure to watch Cooper work, she didn’t need to see this fight. Instead, she switched to the camera at the front of the house and sped the part where she was attacked. Nothing really new to see, except for how clumsy it was. Jane was very close to convinced that whoever these people were, they weren’t professionals.

What even the fuck?

She resisted the urge to pound the table and took a breath through her nose. Frustration wouldn’t help anything, so instead she switched to the wide lens they’d put on top of the house to get better situational views.

Her mind wandered as she skimmed the footage. Maybe their paranoia wasn’t that unusual given the circumstances. Maybe their behavior was more a reaction to how weird their retirement had been.

It always came back to that missing month.

The event happened around six months ago. Her and Cooper had been between assignments, just enjoying the time off. They were already at the point where they could be picky about the jobs they accepted and tried to work only a few times a year.

She still felt sick remembering that moment waking up in a hotel bed in Piran, Slovenia. One moment, she’d been crossing the room to put a book away and then, boom, in a strange bed wearing clothes she’d never seen before. The panic she’d felt in that moment was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She’d been shot at, punched, threatened – she’d actually fought three terrorists, by hand, on top of a cargo freighter, at night, during a storm – nothing was close to this. The unreality of it. The... offence. The sheer, sickening realization that your brain just glitched. The thing that is you... wasn’t working.

They still had no idea how they got there or what happened. They suspected something happened to them on a mission, but they couldn’t figure out what the mission had been as neither had any memory of accepting anything. No record of anything coming in from any of their usual channels and it got even stranger the more they dug. All of their emails from a day two weeks into the blackout were gone. Not gone – deleted. Someone had gone in and cleaned up the records, it was like that whole day was wiped out. And because her and Cooper were so god damn paranoid, bank records didn’t tell them anything because they almost exclusively bought everything with cash. Cooper had a near-eidetic memory and swore up and down that the mileage on their truck was up by five thousand miles. Meaning they’d gone somewhere, although there was no evidence of where. They simply woke up with wiped memories in a seaside hotel in Slovenia under fake names, with fake passports and enough cash to get home.

They’d retired almost immediately after that.

The job they did carried risks and they both understood those risks. They were independent contractors doing incredibly specific and dangerous jobs for oftentimes incredibly dangerous and powerful people. Both of them knew they could be killed on any job. But this? Taking their memories? Their sense of selves? Both felt grotesquely violated by the experience and decided they needed a permanent break.

Money was never going to be an issue for them. While not tech-bro wealthy, they both had enough that it would take several lifetimes to get through it. Whatever they got grew lightning fast, thanks to a handy little program she wrote. All US senators were required, by law, to disclose any stock purchases. It was easy enough to create a script that would scrape the data and return the most-often purchased stock for that day. She had bots put money on whatever was the top five and automatically sell when they grew by 10%. Repeat. In three months they had more money than they knew what to do with. When politicians bought stock, it wasn’t a bet, it was a guarantee.

They knew lots of people who had left the business and were familiar with the steps. Because of how unsettled they both were at what had happened, they decided to go pretty deep into hiding. Neither of them believed in coincidence and neither believed it was simply random happenstance that they’d had their memories wiped. Whoever had done this to them, they were bound to show again at some point.

She wondered if they had.

Before she could chase that thought down, something on the screen caught her eye. She was still looking at the zoomed-out, street view from the top of her house. There was Cooper from earlier, getting the car packed. In about a minute, Jane would be attacked. But what was that on the other side of the road, a house or two down? She zoomed in to get a better look.

It was a tall man, thin, wearing what appeared to be a seersucker suit, although it was tough to tell at this resolution. She thought he was wearing glasses, but without a closer image she couldn’t be sure.

She didn’t recognize him from the neighborhood, although she obviously didn’t know everyone. It was possible he was simply a random guy, walking around at ten at night in a neighborhood where nobody ever did that, wearing a suit that was popular about eighty years earlier, watching them from a distance.

Sure.

All her instincts were firing warning bells as she fiddled with the image, trying to make it clearer. This guy was part of it. He had to be. Her eyes narrowed as she leaned forward, burning the image into her memory.

Finally. The enemy had a face.

On to chapter 5

***

Well, well, well. This is certainly an interesting turn. What in the heck could it all mean? What happened during that missing month? Who is the strange man? Will Cooper actually get sepsis from a disgusting motel pillow?

As always, I live for your comments and thank you to everyone who has reached out and encouraged me to keep going. You're the best. Keep your guesses and ideas coming. I'm up to about chapter 7!

See you next week when Jane and Cooper finally go to see Richards!