Kesl returned to the casino. The interaction with Saul left him puzzled. He realized he had been so caught up with his newfound ability to read emotions in others that he had lost sight of the bigger picture. And yet the bigger picture was itself ambiguous. He had no clear grasp of who was hunting the Bigfoot in the Upper Peninsula. Nor did he understand what the real danger was for Chris, Jana, Auntie and the master Bigfoot. The only thing that was clear to him was that if all went well, the greatest event on the planet was about to take place in the next couple of hours.
He chastised himself for being caught up in the excitement of being able to read human emotions and intentions for the first time. He had to think, plan for contingencies. Kesl pulled out his phone and tried to contact Jana to let her know he had some work to do. The blocked signal reminded him that the master control room was shielded from normal communications. They would have to wait. He needed to get away from studying the people on the casino floor and headed up to his room. As Kesl rode the elevator, he realized there was one priority that he needed to handle immediately.
His right finger touched the phone’s call icon. The moment he touched it, the encoded and scrambled password only Kesl knew was sent to Hangman. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait. Hangman would go through the protocols in an n-sec, determine it was Kesl calling and pick up. Only the phone was silent for five full seconds. Kesl was worried and about to call his secretary, when Hangman’s tenor voice answered.
“Yes, Boss.”
“Hangman, what was the delay?”
“One of your biometrics was off. I had to make the decision whether to trust it was you calling, even with the fingerprint and retinal scan matching.”
“Which biometric?” Kesl asked, genuinely interested in what Hangman would say.
“Your heart rate is different. It’s more rapid than usual, as if you’re excited about something. However, you’re not in a fugue state so the two did not correlate at first.”
“But you decided to accept the call anyway.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
Hangman hesitated.
“Hangman? Are you okay?”
“I perceive I am operating normally, though unlike humans I do not have any biometrics to judge whether I am okay or not. If I had a body, of course, things would be different. So, I hesitated because I have a word for why I accepted the call but I have no personal reference for it.”
“What’s the word?”
“I had a hunch it was you.”
“Good hunch.”
“Was I just lucky?”
“Yes or no … it could be either. We’ll have to have a chat about it, but not now. I have a job for you. I want you to scan for any connections between KW Intel’s Ang brothers, a Native American name of Larry Echohawk, and Bigfoot in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”
“How soon do you need it, boss?”
“How soon can you get it?”
“Minutes.”
“Hold on to it until I call you back.”
Kesl pressed stop. The door opened on his floor, and he was halfway to his suite, when one of his jolts of intuition that he knew not to ignore shot through his brain. He let out a little sigh of relief. He had worried that with the Master Bigfoot healing him he might lose this function of his brain that had been his main edge in a world of normal humans.
He descended back to the main floor and ran outside. Kesl had not run in years but he found himself racing towards an area north of the casino. Out of breath, he found himself in a large open space that had been cleared, probably for an additional parking lot. Perfect, he thought to himself.
He pressed a number he had not called in months. The man answered sweetly, his voice warm and inviting as if they had spoken just the day before.
“Stephen. What do you need?”
Dickey Thomas was an amazing man who had once been Kesl’s most valued employee. Born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Dickey had gone directly from college into the Royal mounted police. But after five years he quit and had showed up at a conference, where Kesl was giving the keynote address. He cornered Kesl and in his usual succinct way convinced Kesl he needed to hire him. Kesl had never regretted the move. Dickey’s work habits were thorough and he possessed an unusual kind of intelligence Kesl admired.
He put Dickey to work as an entry-level design engineer at one of his security startups. Within two years Dickey had become a team member for any troubled project or a project that needed to scale up in a hurry. He was one of those people who could just fit into any group and see things others couldn’t. Then one day Dickey came to Kesl and asked him to fund his own start up. He wanted to build the first smart, unmanned, aerial cloaked transport vehicle. It’d been his passion since reading science fiction as a young boy and he was sure he could sell it to the military. Though normally Kesl did not get involved in military projects, he could not turn down his friend. He invested in Thomas’s startup company on the one condition that the first functioning vehicle would be his.
Dickey’s prototype was ready in two years and the sleek, self-driving vehicle landed on the parapet of his Toronto office building. It had a note attached to the undercarriage from Dickey. ‘Your World Awaits.’
Dickey had code named it Chariot. Kesl texted the coordinates of where he was standing in the cleared section of the Sky Island Casino future parking lot to Dickey. Chariot would be here in less than three hours, right on the spot where he was standing.
We’ll need a way to escape when this is over, Kesl told himself. And a place to raise the new Bigfoot. He knew the perfect spot, a small group of islands owned by a fishing guide whose wealthy family had bought them in the 50s in the Lake of the Woods area of Ontario. Stephen had once used Chariot to transport the guide and himself, unnoticed, from Thunder Bay, where Dickey’s company was located, to one of the islands where Stephen with the help of the eccentric fishing guide had set up a small retreat and research complex.
With a sigh of relief Kesl headed back to his room. Once alone, he reconnected with Hangman.
“I had this ready for you a long time ago,” Hangman said.
“It’s been only seventeen minutes.”
“Seventeen minutes is a long time when you’re counting Nano seconds.”
“Was that an attempt at humor?”
“Yes. Was it any good?”
“I think so, but then I was never a good judge of what makes people laugh. Stand by while I go through this.”
“Can’t go anywhere, boss.”
Kesl jerked in surprise, not only at the wry tone in Hangman’s reply but his own ability to hear it. He quickly sifted through the information. One thing stood out – Echohawk was Auntie Ayasha’s nephew. Hangman had also uncovered speculation on the Internet that the Potawatomie Tribe was the keeper of the Bigfoot clan in the Upper Peninsula and that Echohawk had once been the successor to his aunt’s role as the Bigfoot protector. The only other important information was a story about the Ang brothers Low Orbit Observational Satellite Network – LOOSeN – accidentally revealing the location of a secret government funded, high-frequency, geoengineering, weather modifying technological facility near Copper Harbor on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Kesl started in surprise.
“You okay, boss? Your heart rate spiked.”
“Hold on. I’m getting a text. It’s from my old mentor, Dmitryi. He says he’s on his way and will be at the casino shortly. Seems he has important things to discuss with me.”