After the Escape

2. Lance - Runaway

Lance was sitting in front of his computer in his office, pleased that neither he nor his electrical equipment had been hurt in the fire earlier today. He was just about feeling normal again after the stress of the evacuation and the panic of traversing smoke filled corridors that led to outside. He hated any extremes of emotion; he couldn’t bear to feel out of control so the widespread panic across the compound earlier was particularly distressing for him.

His brother was currently standing at his shoulder checking in with him to make sure that he was ok and to bring him news of their parents. Which was nice of him, but what would really be helpful was him going away and allowing Lance to regain his equilibrium before having to speak to anyone else.

“I also wanted to ask if you have seen Rowan? She wasn’t with mum and dad, who want you to call them by the way, and I’m hoping that she found you in the crowd earlier.” Perin, his brother asked.

“No, I didn’t see her outside at all.” Lance told him distractedly. “But it was total chaos until you guys started organising people; it’s likely she found someone else she knew instead.”

“Yes, probably.” Perin agreed, but Lance could tell that his brother was worried about his errant wife. It was still surprising to him that his brother was married at all; Lance had thought him to be an established bachelor, never expressing interest in wanting a wife until he had gone to collect Rowan for an auction.

In fact, it had been Lance who was considering getting a wife, but now that he was seeing the trouble his brother was having he was unsure that it was such a good idea. The problem was that he was so tired of having to go out to feed!

Speaking to people was difficult enough for him as it was, and trying to make conversation with vacuous women in crowded, noisy bars which were his usual hunting grounds was excruciating. He was vaguely aware that other people didn’t find interacting with others as difficult as he did and no doubt found his hang-ups about it baffling, but sometimes people just didn’t make sense to him.

Maybe this was why he was so good with computers; they could only do what they were programed to do. You gave them an input and got a measured, predictable output. There was no emotional element to them; they didn’t act irrationally, which was a relief to Lance when so many things in the world reacted in strange and confusing ways.  

“I’ll text you later,” his brother said, turning to the door in order to continue his search. Lance turned back to the fire suppression system he was checking and re-activating. He thought that he could speed up reaction times by re-writing a small amount of code that controlled when the sprinkler system kicked in, so got to work, immersing himself in lines of numbers and commands.

Lance must have been engrossed for a while, because he didn’t look up until he heard commotion in the main office; had one of the other systems gone down?

“Lance!” his colleague Toby was standing in the doorway.

“What?” asked Lance, not bothering to look round. If it was something pertinent then Toby would get to the point soon enough.

“We’re running some number plates for your brother. Someone has abducted his wife.” Toby said briskly.

What the f**k!? How long had Lance been staring at this screen? Why had no one told him that Rowan was missing? Lance was on his feet and striding through to the other office to see what was being done, and potentially do it faster.

He could see some grainy CCTV paused on one of the screens, and the plates were already being run through the police system. He was unsurprised when it came back as reported stolen, but Johno (their team leader), was calling it up to the warrior station anyway.

Clocking the location and time stamp on the camera, Lance went back through to his computer, thinking about what information would be most helpful to Perin. Never mind that it was illegal, he was going to hack the police and highways camera network and see if he could track where the van went. There was no time to request permission from higher up; he would need to work quickly, else risk losing the trail.

Sitting down, his fingers flew across the keyboard; he would help his brother in the best way he knew how; finding and sharing information.  

About half an hour later, he had tracked the van to an industrial estate some eighty miles away, and as far as he could tell, it was still there. Thinking that this was a viable lead, he called up to the warrior station to get Perin down there and give him the news.

“What have you got?” Perin barked as soon as he got through the office door, using a tone that he rarely used with Lance. Even though Lance was the first person to admit that he wasn’t good at reading people’s emotions, he could clearly see the agony on Perin’s face.

Lance quickly shared all he had found, conveying the information as concisely as possible so they wouldn’t have to waste time asking further questions.

“Where is it?” Perin demanded when he fell silent, obviously eager to get out on the street and searching.

“I’ll send you the address so you can get it up on the Satnav.  It will probably take you an hour and a half to get there, so I will keep watching the entrance to see if the van reappears. If I see it again on route I’ll call and inform you where it’s going. Who’s going with you?” He looked up at the two warriors who had accompanied Perin into the office, wondering why they were exchanging glances with one another; were they going to try and stop Perin going after his wife?

“I’m going,” said Perin’s regular shift partner, Scott. Lance had met him a few times, and he seemed pretty decent. “Asher will stay here to help coordinate any back up we might need and to organise patrols in our absence.”

“Great,” said his brother, leaning over to squeeze Lance’s shoulder in a silent sign of gratitude, before all three men turned and strode from the office.

Lance sat for a moment, feeling sorry for his brother and worried about him doing something foolish in pursuit of his wife. He wanted to do more to help, but knew that his forte’ was computers, not interacting with others or going out and acting the hero. He started going through the CCTV footage he had collected again, trying to see if there was anything else useful on it.

A few scenes in, he realised that there was a clear face shot of the driver of the van as he looked up at one of the traffic cameras. Realising that there was something else he could do, he quickly uploaded a screen shot to the police facial-recognition database. Which was not entirely legal either, but desperate times called for desperate measures, Lance decided.

Whilst he sat there waiting for the database to get any hits, he realised that he was pretty pissed off at what his sister-in-law done; his brother didn’t deserve to be betrayed like this. Perin had been adamant that he was going to trust her; not commanding her and letting her go to work so quickly, and this was how she repaid him? Running off whilst her husband was trying to save people from a burning building!

The compound where they lived was partially underground, which was great for security purposes, but left them particularly vulnerable to fire and other disasters. There was a complicated computerised system that controlled the ventilation systems to ensure that the atmosphere underground stayed healthy for the inhabitants, which he was partly responsible for maintaining.

His office was also responsible for the maintenance of the surveillance system and their online security protocols, so he was often working with the warrior station to ensure that their enclave was safe and free of discovery.

The fire that had happened not only posed a  direct risk to their people, but also meant that they were at greater risk of exposure as they had to evacuate a large number of people into a small area which was likely to draw attention to their existence by the public.

This was another reason why it was imperative to get Perin’s wife back; she could expose them all to the authorities, bringing attention to both what they were and how they got wives to ensure the continuation of their species. He was mulling over the various disastrous scenarios that could occur when his computer “pinged” with a match on the facial-recognition database.

Their guy was named as Francis Boyd. He had suspected connections to drug running and human trafficking, no concrete evidence and no convictions for these offences but was definitely a person of interest to the police. He was suspected of being connected to several organised crime syndicates which operated both in the UK and in Europe, and potentially further afield too.

Shit! This complicated things, thought Lance, reaching for his phone to call through the new information to the warrior station. Wherever Rowan had been taken wouldn’t just have one lone crazy guy defending it, it would likely have several well-armed and experienced criminals on site. Which his brother would no doubt charge straight into in his panicked pursuit of his female.

The warrior station answered, and Lance quickly relayed what he had discovered about the man that his brother was pursuing, emphasising the danger that he thought Perin would be in. Asher thanked him for his call, and then hung up, leaving Lance with nothing to do but watch traffic cams and wait for news.

He was sipping a coffee that Toby had brought him and watching the traffic cams surrounding the industrial estate when his phone rang again. He answered straight away, hoping to hear that Perin had retrieved his wife and was on his way back to the compound.

Instead it was Asher on the line.

“They have already gone!” he barked. “What’ve you got on the surveillance system?”

“Nothing.” Said Lance, his fingers flying to the keyboard to start searching again. “There must have been a way out of the industrial estate that isn’t covered by the highways authority cameras.”

“We think they might be heading for a port…” Asher told him, showing that he had not been the only one researching whilst waiting for news.  

“Alright, on it.” Both men hung up without preamble, which was one of things that Lance liked about Perin’s boss. When something was going on he just cut straight to the pertinent information then let you get on with it, which is how Lance worked best.

It took him an excruciating 40 minutes of trawling through grainy surveillance footage before he found the van once again; Asher was right, it was headed into a port area. Snatching up his phone, Lance relayed his findings then settled in to wait, watching various vehicles leave and enter the port side road.

He was still watching the port entrance when a police car turned up, shortly followed by another one and an ambulance. Lance was relieved to see that the human authorities were on the scene, surely that would mean that Perin didn’t have to get involved and he would just come back once he knew that Rowan had been found.

Would she be vindictive enough to tell the police about the enclave? She had been free for long enough to have gone to the police before she was caught by the traffickers, but it appeared that she hadn’t, so maybe she would just disappear off and let his brother live his life. That was the best case scenario, he mused. He didn’t want to see his brother desperately pandering to a wife who would never love him, who would no doubt try to disappear again the moment she saw opportunity.

Another phone call came, this time to say that Rowan had been found and freed, but that Perin had been arrested in the meantime. Lance couldn’t quite believe it; how and why had Perin been arrested? Did they think he was part of the trafficking group? Had his partner Scott, been arrested too? Lance didn’t understand what could have happened.

When one of the other office workers called out that there was a message asking them to look into the firearms laws of the UK Lance started to feel a cold ball of dread from in his stomach. Surely Perin hadn’t shot someone? He wasn’t that stupid, was he? s**t, s**t, s**t! If he had, and he went to prison, then they would all be exposed! There would be no way for him to hide or satisfy his thirst in prison without people seeing.

Why the hell couldn’t he have just let her go?! Now it seemed that the idea of her telling people was the least of their worries!

Shutting down the program that he had been using to tap into the traffic cameras and local authority CCTV, he then opened up his internet browser, typing the words “firearms in the UK” into his search engine and pressing enter. He watched the pages come up numbering into the thousands, choosing the first one with .gov at the end, he started reading. What had Perin done!?