He noticed a small stone at the base of the first one. “One of the two assistant administrators must have kicked it when they came through the door,” he surmised. He stood up to go back and lock the door and then looked carefully around the hallway. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but before he went in to Mr. Graham’s office he did a thorough search of the building. He also checked all the camera records to see if they had recorded anyone else in the building. Once he satisfied himself that no one else was there he went to see Mr. Graham. He found Mr. Graham and his two assistants heatedly discussing the missing test booklet. He took a seat in a student’s desk and listened in. He glanced up at the pictures on the wall and thought, “Boy, the guy this school is named for sure looks freaky with that weird hair.”
“You couldn’t have collected it or it would be in the folder,” Mr. Graham said.
“Sir, we were very careful about that. I took the test booklet from each student, placed it in a folder, took the student’s thumbprint in the appropriate square, then handed the folder to my associate here who did the same thing with the answer sheets. He wouldn’t have put the answer sheets in the folder if the test booklet was not in the folder first.”
“I agree with Adam,” the second assistant said. “That is exactly what we did, except that after getting the thumbprint for the test materials, I placed them in the lockbox until all of them were collected, then closed it and locked it. We both then walked the lockbox to your office and placed it in your safe.”
“Well it’s not here!” shouted Mr. Graham. “What do you two think happened to it?”
The assistant administrators looked at each other, and one said, “I don’t know.”
Sergeant Garcia interrupted and said, “It’s obvious that something happened, and either someone in this room is being less than honest or someone outside this room did something to cause this. I want the three of you to be available in the morning to meet with the chief investigator to go over your stories. I also want the student whose test booklet is missing to be made available to determine what they remember about turning in their test materials. I have to tell you that this may seem like something small, but we will get to the bottom of what happened. This is not something that security will take lightly. These placement tests are the backbone of our structure in placing the right person in the right position. If someone has tampered with the system, we will find out.”
Mr. Graham and the two assistants looked at each other and knew that tomorrow morning they would probably be questioned in a truth field. It was not going to be a pleasant day. They knew that the three of them were the most likely suspects and that the investigators would keep digging, even if they were truthful in their denials. Sergeant Garcia said to the two assistant test administrators, “The two of you go home and get some rest. We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
Mr. Graham completed entering the tests for the remaining students while Sergeant Garcia watched. “Bert, why don’t you go home and get some rest,” Sergeant Garcia said. “I believe you when you say that you had nothing to do with this. After all, you’re the one that reported it. I also sense that those two assistants are also being honest, so that means something impossible happened here. The department of security may let little things slide, but not impossible ones. This could get messy. Advanced placement tests are taken very seriously, and this irregularity must be investigated.”
Mr. Graham nodded and remembered how bored he was with his job when he started that evening. Well, he certainly was not going to be bored now. He even wished for that boredom to return. What he suspected was that he would not make thirty-three years as a test administrator if, as Sergeant Garcia suspected, this was going to be a mess.
Chapter 4
T ag began working his way back home, making sure he avoided all the cameras and people he encountered. In the parks he moved through, he could smell the grass that the auto mowers had trimmed. The trees moving in the gentle breeze and the insects flying through the night lights made the night feel peaceful and calmed him after the stress of taking Leila’s test. He decided that the city at street level, which he seldom saw from his floater, had its own beauty. The parks that lined the thoroughfares and the buildings with their crystal windows reflecting light in all directions added to the serenity of the street-level sidewalks. The streetlights cast eerie shadows as they shone through the trees. It was slow going because most of the cameras overlapped their coverage, and he had to move during the time that one swung away while the other was moving toward him. He would occasionally walk beside another person because the shadow was there. This gave him time to enjoy the walk back to his home. As time passed, there were fewer people out. It was completely dark now and most people did not walk the streets at night. He was making good time, and if things continued moving smoothly he should make it home by daylight. He had already passed the spot where he had exited the floater and only had another six miles to go. It was eerily quiet at street level, and though he could see thousands of floaters flying far overhead their drone could barely be heard. Their lights made the sky look like thousands of swarming fireflies. He had passed several of the giant buildings a few blocks back and saw hundreds of floaters lifting off the top floors. “Must be a shift change,” he thought.
“I hope my luck holds out. I’m not familiar with this area,” he worried. The first four miles had been easy because he had walked it going to his school, but he was unfamiliar with the route he was taking now, and it made him nervous and he wasn’t sure why. He normally flew high over this area on a public floater so the details at ground level just weren’t familiar. He moved through a small park, stepped around a swing set, and then moved to the sidewalk that ran along the wall of another building. Then he felt it. Someone was watching him, and they were not alone. There were five of them. He looked out from the wall into the park parallel to the sidewalk, but it was too dark to see very far into it. He couldn’t see them but he knew that they were there, and they were moving quickly to surround him. “This gift is strange,” he thought. “I can still see the shadows and avoid the surveillance cameras but I know that I’m being watched, and with that many watching me there’s no way for me to escape them undetected.” He thought about running, but then the cameras would see him. He had to decide quickly; the camera covering the sidewalk was swinging back.
He had entered a part of the city that was dangerous. Though the Directorate kept tight controls over Earth’s population, some people living in poverty resorted to crime to support themselves. He passed one of the tall buildings in which a large percentage of its occupants were on government assistance and low income. He suspected that one person watching him would not be very unusual, but five had to mean trouble. If they were coming after him he couldn’t expect any help. With the advent of floaters there was very little surface traffic at night anymore, and this late there was none. The moon had not risen high, so the only light came from the lamps scattered along the sidewalk. He sensed that other than those five there was no one else close by, and the five were completing their plan to smoothly surround him. It surprised him that anyone would even attempt to commit a crime with all the surveillance cameras, but he suspected that it would be over and done before anyone monitoring the cameras could react. His thought about running away from the building he had been walking next to was now unrealistic, and he knew that if he did the cameras would see him. If he didn’t run and he was stopped by these five following him, then the cameras would see him. He was going to be seen; there was no avoiding it, and he decided that he would rather be in a lighted area and have the building at his back than be totally surrounded on all sides in the dark. So he stopped, sat down, placed his back against the crystal glass of the building behind him, and lowered his head so the cameras couldn’t see his face. The shadows disappeared, so he knew the camera was now recording him. That’s when he saw them approaching.
They were moving as a unit and he could see that they had done this sort of thing before. One of them went to the left and one went to the right about ten feet on either side of him. They pulled out guns and held them against their legs so they wouldn’t be easily seen by the camera; then they faced away from him. The other three moved towards him from the front, and they were holding knives. Fear coursed through his body and he could feel his heart rate go up. He knew that the cameras recording this would take another nine seconds before he was in a blank space in their coverage. He had to wait until that moment to try and escape. “I can’t let them record my face,” he thought.
“What do you want?” Tag asked. “I’m not carrying any credits or anything else of value you would want.” He kept his head down, looking at the pavement in front of him. He watched them move closer and spread out to block any escape.
