Two

“The illustrious Lestrade family?” Ryan thought. Whatever could she have against them? After telling Ryan the target of her revenge she parted ways with him after they exchanged contacts. She didn’t tell him when she would make contact again and Ryan didn’t ask. He was more curious about this woman’s past.

So here he was at 11pm tapping away at his keyboard and searching for any digital footprint that linked the Lestrades to any scandal a few years back. Ryan knew that Adrianne could be a false name and the Lestrades coud have covered up the case before it even got public but he still had to try.

An hour later his hard work paid off.  He had been able to compile some data on Adrianne. For his search to be effective, Ryan had managed to take a picture of Adrianne when she wasn’t looking.

Social media info, credit information and various other stuff came out. Adrianne was twenty nine, six years younger than he was. She was…he stopped. A member of the Lestrade family? What the hell was going on? Why had she lied to him? He read further. Her life for five years had been out of sync with the years before.

She’d stopped using social media, and there was barely any data on her. Ryan’s experience told him that at that point she must have been operating under an alias. Ryan sent his alias detector to work. It was software he had developed to help find the aliases or fake ids of people. The program received all the big data on the target and searched for various people with similar traits, then picked those with the most similarities. Ryan remembered Adrianne’s comment,”big data will surpass psychology”.

“You’re right Adrianne”, he said.

In twenty minutes the computer had picked up an alias. Margo. Young newlywed. Ryan rolled his eyes.

He did some more digging and found her address.

He took up his car keys and drove to Metro 22^nd Street. Her house was easy to spot. He parked and knocked on her door.

The door opened and he came face to face with a man in his mid thirties. “Yes? What can I do for you?” he asked. He was physically superior to Ryan in every way. Ryan put himself together. “Um, I’m looking for Margo? I heard she lives here.”

The man looked at him like he was crazy. “You’re looking for Margo at 2 am in the morning?” he asked. “Well, um, there’s been a slight situation.” Ryan’s head was racing. He shouldn’t have hastily left the house without more data. He searched his head for all the data he had seen on Margo.

“You must be Matt”, Ryan said. He stretched his hand. “I’m Ryan, Margo is”-“Expecting you, yes I know. Come in”. Ryan looked slightly confused but entered. The recent chain of events made Ryan feel a bit foolish. It was a reminder that people like him weren’t immune to stupidity.

Margo came out holding a child on her arm, rocking it to sleep. Their eyes met and the confusion on his face must have been obvious because ‘Margo’ (Adrianne) laughed. “Oh, Ryan, I didn’t tell you I was married. But I’m surprised you found my house so quickly and decided to leave your house. I hope it was no trouble for you, especially at this time”.

Ryan realized she was right. When he had left the house for the Luther Company, it had been an internal war. It took him a day and a half to get psyched and two hours to make it out of his door the following morning.

But this time he had barely thought about it.

“Don’t worry Ryan”, Adrianne said. “Here”, she said handing over the baby to Matt. “He’s not my real husband. He’s just a single dad who helps to keep my cover.”

Ryan looked at the two. “Is it okay for you two to be staying together?” he asked. “Oh. We barely meet each other. When his shifts are in the evening, mine are usually in the morning”.

“What job do you do again? I read the one online but that’s not true either, I’m sure”.

Adrianne sighed. “Matt, can you excuse us?” she said. Matt left the hallway. “You’re part of the Lestrade family?” Ryan asked. Adrianne nodded. “But then what happened?”

Adrianne shook her head. “I won’t tell you my story unless you tell me yours”, she said.

Ryan looked at her and then looked away. “I used to be the General Manager of Luther Company. I was twenty five. My vice president at the time Fowler was thirty five. He’d been trying to climb up the ladder since he was my age. I guess it infuriated him that a kid like me had beaten him to it. So he devised a plan to have me removed. I was going home one night when my car was hijacked. Flash bangs were thrown to disorient my guards and myself and before I knew it I had a gun to my head. I must have been knocked out because I woke up tied to a chair. And he was there. Fowler. He gloated for a few minutes and then told them to get rid of me”.

“Didn’t he realize that if you went missing he would be a suspect in your disappearance?” Adrianne asked.

Ryan smiled. “Yeah, but he said he’d taken care of it. And by taken care of it he made it look like a robbery turned kidnapping. The guys he’d hired had robbed a building close by before they kidnapped me. They’d also robbed four other places in the same month. It would look like coincidence that I happened to be there. And once the ransom went wrong and no body was found the case would become a shelf one very soon”.

“How was he planning to make the exchange go wrong?”

“There was a corrupt cop on the inside”, Ryan answered. Adrianne nodded. “So how did you escape?”

“After the ‘failed’ exchange they brought me back to the warehouse and started playing a little game of Russian roulette. Only this time they were trying to see who would kill me. I had to endure four failed attempts.”

“Then?”

“They didn’t get to try a five time. We smelled smoke around the factory we were in. In less than a minute it became a full blown fire. Somehow I managed to disentangle myself and I ran outside. And they were waiting for me”.

“Who?”

Ryan looked at Adrianne getting a little irritated at her one word interruptions. “Three people. One of them was a guy I didn’t know. The other two were Fowler and Eva, my soon to be fiancé”.

Silence. “They shot me. All three of them, and then left me there. I guess they thought that the fire would consume me and that I had taken off my bulletproof vest. The ones who kidnapped me though, failed to do so. So I survived”.

“I see. So what did you do after that?”

“Luckily my home hadn’t been sold. The cops were still searching for me. I packed my things, secured my finances and disappeared.”

“Where did you go?”

“Places. I lost money, more than once. Luckily I still I had more than half of what I had been able to siphon. The only place I could hide out without being noticed where some pretty dangerous neighborhoods. At least until I could make some subtle changes by plastic surgery.”

Adrianne looked at Ryan with pain in her eyes. Then she covered her face, rolled her head back and laughed. Her sudden outburst shocked Ryan. “What’s that about?” he asked. “Good”, she said. “You’re broken, just like me. I can work with someone like you”, she said.

“Everyone’s broken”, Ryan said.

“Not to that degree”, Adrianne countered. “Most people are either, kidnapped, conned or betrayed. It’s not all three in one. Besides we both know that your intellect is one of the reasons why your condition is the way it is.”

“After hearing a depressing story like that…” her voice trailed off and her eyes became distant. She turned to Ryan. “I have the gift of empathy. With just a little info I can understand and experience the emotional state of anyone I meet. It’s a curse and a blessing. A curse for someone who tries to help people, and a blessing for helping to con people.”

Ryan looked out. Then he stared at the clock. It was already quarter to three. “Why don’t you tell me your story then?”

“Oh, you’re going to love my story”, Adrianne said. “But before that, why did your fiancé to be betray you? Did you find out?”

Ryan shook his head. “And you can’t find out because, oh well, she’d try to kill you again?”

At this point Adrianne was being sarcastic. She was simply saying that if he could find out about her than his girlfriend whereabouts shouldn't be much of a challenge.

“She’s…a better programmer than I am. She knows my hacking. If I tried that it would be tipping them off that I’m still alive”.

“Darn it. A depressing story like this makes me feel like smoking again. I guess since we’re all in the sharing mood I better not break it. So here goes”.

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[Nana]

Well, that's a traumatic backstory