Free Blinding Fear by Bruce Roland Page B

your entire hard-drive being immediately erased.
    Additionally, all of your cell and landline calls will be monitored to ensure compliance.
    That was it. No closing, no signature, no nothing at the end. After another moments thought he came to the only obvious conclusion. The whole thing was a preposterous hoax! Had to be! All whoever sent the thing wanted was to “steal” his comet and then stop him from trying again. The portion of the letter that talked about uploading his images somewhere else, then deleting them, proved it.
    Ever since he had become involved in the amateur astronomical community he’d heard of other individuals’ occasionally ludicrous attempts to pilfer the cometary discoveries of their peers. Yes, this letter or directive or whatever it was, went multiple steps beyond the craziest of any he’d heard about, but theft of his data was the only logical answer.
    He looked up to the top of the document at the precise moment the timer reached 0:00. Instantly the entire page disappeared. Quickly he jumped over in his hard drive to try to find the documents folder where he’d placed his star field images. The folder was missing and the hundreds of images it had contained.
    “No!” he groaned, slumping back in his chair, closing his eyes, massaging his temples, agonizing at the thought of the hundreds of hours he’d spent taking those pictures going down the drain.
    For the next fifteen minutes he performed various systems checks to see if the other applications and programs in his laptop were working. Everything else seemed to be in normal working order except for some holes in his e-mail contact list and astronomically related correspondence. Luckily, most of those things could be replaced or reworked without too much effort. He wouldn’t have to start from scratch with his sky search.
    For a moment he considered searching for any other software that might have been downloaded to monitor him in the future. After some careful consideration, however, he decided that portion of the letter, like the rest of it, was probably false and simply designed to further intimidate him and shut down new search efforts.
    But he was still conflicted. He was 100% sure the e-mail was a fake right up to the moment all his images of his comet disappeared. Now he wasn’t so sure—maybe 80%. Then there was the threat of his hard drive being erased. Maybe whoever had stolen his pictures could take out the hard drive. He also wondered about the monitoring of calls the letter mentioned. Just to be safe he decided to be very careful about who he talked to and what he said. He’d also try to avoid forums and chat rooms.
    Whoever it was had gone to great lengths to steal his stuff and then scare him off. But he could remember the celestial coordinates where Whalen’s Comet was located. There was no way they could find out he was using his telescope unless he told someone.
    This elaborate thievery was not going to deter him from claiming what was rightfully his!

Chapter 10

    The music of mariachi-legend Vicente Fernandez, with his unique mix of vocals, trumpets, violins and bass guitars, played softly through the Dodge Ram Van’s sound system. Adelmo Garza took one final slug of the last Cucapa beer that his good friend and co-conspirator Paul had given him. The brand was considered by beer aficionados to be the best Mexico had to offer. For Paul to have gone to such great lengths to track it down in the Boston area proved how much he liked Adelmo, appreciated his student’s mastering of the mission and how much confidence he had in him.
    It was just after 2:00 a.m.. Adelmo sat alone in his delivery van, in the darkened, empty parking lot of a small market and cafe on the corner of Huron Street and Concord Avenue in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    He and his employer had shared a 12-pack not long before in celebratory anticipation of Adelmo successfully completing the mission. The empties littered the passenger foot