Out of Time

What happens when you receive an email meant for someone else? Forward, delete, spam. I was the delete type. Admittedly, this had not always worked out for me, so I turned into a forward type. What if I had not changed? What a different life I’d be living, if I had deleted one email on one particular day.

Monday morning promised to be ordinary. Bored! I swiveled in my office chair, wondering how I was going to make it through the rest of the day. I worked for a graphic design company which was up against a vital deadline. An S&P 500 company needed a facelift after an FBI investigation into their accounting irregularities had uncovered billions in misappropriated funds and led to the indictments of multiple company executives. The company hired us to produce a new graphic and slogan to become their new identity. Close of business was the deadline which had been pushed back twice already. There would be no extension this time. Deliver or refund millions in fees, otherwise wind up in court.

And where do I fit in to all of this? I’m the account executive managing the client. Making promises, smoothing out deadline pushbacks, and acting as a liaison between the two companies when disputes arose. My paycheck generally said, “you’re crushing it,” but my free time was fleeting. Thus, no personal life. No wife, no children, and no real hobbies. But it was better than my former life.

Waiting. Thirty minutes of waiting for an email from a product manager. Waiting normally was not so tedious. Walk around one of our building’s floors, find some talkative coworkers, and plan a Monday night out at a trendy bar somewhere in the city. That was my routine. But life has a way of forcing change upon us in a manner in which we cannot see coming.

A chime! Email arrived. No, this isn’t right. The email was from my client and the subject line read: out of time. What the fu-k?! My mind went straight to fires, alarms, disaster. I am not a miracle worker. Talk can only smooth out a problem so many times. Likelihood of my client accepting another deadline failure. ZERO! I hovered the cursor over the subject line, dreading the content, but did not click the mouse. The email was addressed to William.Gregory@ESOgrafix.com. Right company, wrong recipient. And who the hell was William Gregory? He was not even in our email directory.

Oh, how I wanted to delete it, but I once made the mistake of deleting another employee’s misdirected email and received a written warning. Serious violation. Better pay a visit to Chuck in IT. And here is where I threw myself down the metaphorical rabbit hole. I clicked on the email. What can I say? I was curious.

Body of the email: they know get me out protocol steps mia JKvie c, 7, 3 -*----**-

What? Who gets an email like this? Why did I open it? Yet, part of me was satisfied that I did. Someone was in trouble and trouble was not boring. Print.

I retrieved the printout and looked around for my manager, Sylvia. And there she was, standing near the entrance to the IT wing. Well, I can handle abuse. As I approached, she stopped giving orders to a flustered assistant. “Where are you going David? The restroom is that way and nothing is down here except IT and the side exit.”

“Relax Sylvia. I’m not fleeing the building. I promised you I’d never duck out again on a big deadline day. Going to see Chuck. Email problem. Not with mine. Got one meant for William Gregory.”

Sylvia’s eyes widened just enough for me to notice. “David,” she began, hurrying over to me. I stopped dead in my tracks. “You don’t know?” 

I made a what-are-you-talking-about face. “Sylvia. What’s the mystery?”

“William’s dead.”

I had not expected that. “Old age?” 

“No!” Sylvia looked around and then leaned in a bit too close for my comfort. “He died in an accident. At least that’s what the NYPD reported, at first. In the New York Times this morning, it said the FBI was now investigating it as a murder. Part of an ongoing investigation.”

Nope. Did not like the sound of that. “Then I better go see Chuck about this email.” As I jogged down the IT wing, I tried to reason out William’s death. Maybe he had owed money to the wrong person. You never know.

I knocked on Chuck’s door. “Enter!” As I went in, the sunlight streaming in through the room’s tall windows was half blinding. 

“What is it David? Something important because I don’t have time to bullsh-t. Email server fu-ked up again. Hundreds sent all over the place, some went external.” He followed up that greeting with some techy jargon.

“Great Chuck. I was dying of boredom out there and now you’re going to put me to sleep with that incomprehensible tech talk. I’m here because of one of those misdirected emails.”

He did not look up but offered an “ugh-huh,” while typing.

“It was meant for William Gregory.”

“That guy’s dead!” erupted Chuck, looking up at me.

“Glad I have your attention, and yes, Sylvia just filled me in on that. FBI thinks it may be a murder.”

“No sh-t.” Chuck scratched his balding head. “You still have the email?”

I slapped the hard copy onto his desk. He read it over and shook his head. “Don’t like this. No…this…this is bad. Oh my God, they’re trying to kill me. I can’t take this stress. I’m only human!”

“Who’s trying to kill you, Chuck?” I held back a smile as I went to a window, admiring the city skyline. One day, Chuck had been hit by a bus and miraculously walked away unharmed. Ever since, he had been convinced that whatever deities ran this crazy universe were intent on finishing up the job they had messed up. “It’s payback. I cheated death, and now the carnival overseers are pissed off,” he often said something like this.

“Who do you think’s trying to kill me?! Same malevolent forces as always. I should’ve stayed home. My wife told me to call out sick. She knew. Oh yeah, she knew.”

“What about the email? It’s weird, right? Addressed to a dead guy,” I tried steering him back on track. He re-read the email. “Come on Chuck. What are you thinking?”

“Weird? Is that what you said? It’s a god d-mn nightmare!”

Sylvia’s dramatics led to more work, so they annoyed me. Chuck’s dramatics entertained even when life and death were concerned. He continued, “A young woman, named Mia, worked in my department for a few weeks under special circumstances. She was a government plant. Exposed that guy, Wambach, who was pilfering social security numbers and other data from contractors.”

That statement caught me off guard. “You’ve got to be f-cking kidding me.” I went over to the desk and snatched up the paper, re-reading it. “You’re telling me all of this is real?”

“Time to call the NYPD. Gotta report it.”

“What about all these random letters, numbers, symbols? You’re a crypto genius. What do you make of it?”

“I don’t do cryptography professionally anymore and how the hell am I supposed to know? It could be coded instructions or maybe nothing.” He was getting frantic, rummaging through drawers. “Where’s that blasted number?” He pulled out a yellow sticky note. “Aha, NYPD. I don’t know David. Maybe it’s a verification code so William would know Mia was the authentic sender of the message.”

Boom. And there’s the Chuck genius that everyone knew. If he could eliminate his death paranoia, then he could be back working for the Department of Defense contractor, Xylive, that once hired him to develop and break codes.

“David, back to your desk. Let me make this call.”

Fifteen minutes passed. As I leaned back in my chair, sighing, my phone rang. I flew forward and picked up the receiver. “What happened?”

“Get back in here.” Click. It was Chuck. This time, I ran down the hall.

“How’d it go with the police? They issue a warrant on you yet?”

Chuck considered for a moment. “Probably will. I could be wrongfully accused, convicted, and killed by my cellmate.”

“Too morbid. What did the police say?”

“A detective Lopez with homicide just left. He’s coming to speak to us.”

“Well, that ruins my plans for tonight.”

Just as I turned to leave, Chuck exploded. “I can’t believe I forgot.”

“Whoa! Chuck. Easy.”

“No, no, look.” He fumbled in his pants pocket and produced his cellphone. Going into a desk drawer, he pulled out a USB cord and hooked his cellphone up to a laptop. He rifled through photo folders. “There! That’s the riddle. The code is the key.”

“Chuck, did I graduate from MIT like you? I’ll tell you this. I know that’s a computer,” I said pointing to his laptop.

“Cut the jacka-s routine. It’s all there.” He pointed to the screen which displayed a street map with a grid over it. “See around the grid’s edges. The capital and lower-case letters.” He referenced the email print out. “JK,” he moved his finger down vertically on the screen; “vie,” he moved his finger across. “There’s the correct square. Around each individual square are numbers and lower-case letters. Apply the same method with the “c” and “7” and that’s probably the place. Not sure about the last “3.” Could be the third floor.”

Intriguing. “What was Mia like?”

“Odd. Went out of her way to disappear into the background. William was a systems analyst for me and once I caught them speaking in a confidential manner. When he died, I was obligated to go through his email and ensure nothing was suspicious. Legal wanted to know if he had been threatened or did anything illegal. The only unusual item I found was an email from Mia with this scrollable map of NYC. I’d never seen anything like it, so I saved it onto my phone. I highlighted it when I submitted all of his data to legal but never heard anything.”

“Look at you, master code breaker.”

“Looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon with this detective.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Mia was a government mole who kept to herself but had some kind of contact with William. What if he was one too? There’s a puzzle piecing together and it looks bleak.”

“My whole life is a puzzle that’s falling apart,” Chuck added.

A profound thought awoke within my mind. “I need to make an admission. Before I came to ESO, I was an Army ranger.”

“No kidding. You don’t seem like the take-orders type,” laughed Chuck.

“I’m not. Command had a group of us stationed out in eastern Afghanistan during the latter part of the war. On what turned out to be my final day of patrol, we stumbled upon a tough scene.” I related the rest of the story as though I was reliving it. In a way, that’s how it felt. “Another ranger in my group hears a scream. Five of us, including our translator, go into a house to investigate. During entry, our lead guy shoots two men who are armed with assault weapons, and we secure two others who are unarmed. Second room is locked. We break through and find five women in rough shape. Our translator tells us they were kidnapped. Probably being sold off or who knows what. He tells us that these frantic women are saying there’s a dead body in the last room. Turns out, there is a body, and the woman had screamed just before she was shot. That’s what we had heard. After three brutal months of patrol, I lose it. Go back into the first room and execute one of the kidnappers. Shoot at the second one but miss because the other rangers are already wrestling me to the ground.” I paused. “The rest was a nightmare. Court martial. Pronounced guilty of the military justice equivalent of reckless homicide. A year and a few months in a military prison. Dishonorable discharge. VA, counseling, anger management. Pulled myself together and connected with a veteran friend who knew someone at ESO. And here I am.”

“You have some real resiliency. I wouldn’t have survived all of that,” admitted Chuck. “Now, what’s the connection between your story and this?” He held up the email.

“I couldn’t save that one woman on that one day all those years ago, but I can save this woman. Where is she?”

“You’re not going there?! I gave the NYPD the address. Let them handle it. You won’t even get inside.”

“I have to do something. Trust me.”

 Chuck relented and gave me the address, which was less than a ten-minute walk away. “The police will send a SWAT team and that takes time. I may be too late, but I have to try.”

“Look forward to reading your obituary tomorrow.”

***

Driving past the place, I knew it was a bad situation. The three-story building was set back on a private lot with visible security cameras and no one in sight. At least you came prepared. Dressed in a suit, I wore a bulletproof vest beneath and a modified holster with a handgun, silencer attached. All of this equipment had been secure in my trunk. Call it PTSD or paranoia, but maybe I was more like Chuck than I cared to admit.

After parking out of sight, I walked to the building’s front door and knocked. As soon as the door opened, I pulled my weapon. A teenager had answered the door and he had been holding a piece of pizza but now it lay on the floor. “Don’t shoot me! Mia’s upstairs. She’s been waiting for you.”

I turned him around to face opposite me. “You’re my human shield. Don’t do anything except what I tell you, if you want to make it out of here. Only speak, if I ask you a question or tell you to say something. How many people are in here?”

“Just me and Mia.”

Something about him rang true but I needed proof.

“Take me to her.” My hostage was clenched up and walking stiffly but managed to lead me up two flights of stairs. The place was quiet, possibly abandoned. We arrived at the third floor which had no hallway; the steps ended abruptly at a small landing and then there was nothing but a single door.

“She’s inside.”

“Open it.” He turned the handle and pushed the door open.

No lock? No guards? Why the surveillance cameras? “Move,” I instructed, and we went in. The room’s interior reminded me of Chuck’s home office. Monitors everywhere, on desks, on the walls. Servers in one corner. Wires running like vines. Blinking lights. It was a lot to take in. “Where is she?”

That’s when I felt the point of a gun press into my back.

A soft, dangerous voice spoke, “Let him go and slowly hand me your weapon.”

I obeyed and the teen ran out of my sight. What could I do? Making a move with my back turned to her was a low probability maneuver.

“What do you see in front of you?” she asked.

There was a blank white wall. Great. She’s insane. I’m not going to be able to talk my way out of this. Just need to wait for the right moment and then make a fluid move to disarm her. Need to test her out first. “Where’s William? He’s not really dead, is he?” No response. “Ok. It’s a white wall. That’s what’s in front of me.” Again, she said nothing. We stood there, listening to the symphony of computer sounds and staring at a wall.

Then, something happened that I will never forget. My world changed. No, it altered forever. I felt her breath and her hair against the side of my neck and cheek as she leaned in and whispered. “Look.”

I stopped blinking and stared, mesmerized, at the changing wall before me. No projector screen, no light shining onto it. How is this possible? The image of the wall grew fuzzy, wavy, out of focus. It dimmed and blurred. And then, beyond explanation, there was no wall and there was no room. But I was not outside the building. We stood on a busy sun-drenched sidewalk lined with palm trees and across from a boardwalk. Shirtless men carrying surfboards, women in bikinis, music, cars, kids on bikes. I felt the heat rising off of the asphalt, the sun hitting my exposed skin. I smelled the salty sea air and caught a whiff of coconut lotion. Tears came to my eyes. My legs felt light and I was dizzy. “What are you doing to me?”

“You don’t know what you walked into when you stepped through that door,” said Mia.

“What…I don’t understand. Am I hallucinating?”

“Think. What happened?”

I was in a room and now I’m at the beach. One place and then another. “Are we still in the room?”

“Yes and no.”

“Same place, different time?”

“Still in the present.”

“My God. A wormhole.”

“No, but close enough.”

The gun lowered off of my back, and I felt her hands pulling me back, back into the room. Everything looked the same. Overwhelmed and nauseous, I collapsed to the floor.

Mia stood over me. “You’ll get used to it. There are many places that await us.”

“Us?”

“You proved yourself.”

I simply stared at her.

She spoke, “The email. It wasn’t an accident. William chose you.”

I heard the SWAT team breaking down the building’s front door. But then, I felt the same lurching pull, and we were off again.