At the taxi stand, Alex didn’t have to wait long for a black and yellow taxi to show up. Climbing in, Alex told the driver “Garden City Shipping Terminal” as he set his backpack onto the seat next to him. The driver, a bald white man with a short goatee, looked back at him with a slightly puzzled frown. “You mean the container port?” he said in a slight southern drawl, “Why the hell you want to go there? Ain’t nothing there but those boxes and ships.” Alex nodded his head. “I know. I’m meeting a man there. It’s sort of a job interview.” The driver shrugged his shoulders, then pulled out onto the road. “Whatever you say. Ain’t none of my business, but I hear that the port is filled with nothing but criminals, you know? You look like a nice enough kid, you sure you want to be working there?”
Alex sighed at this; he had never been fond of people second-guessing him, especially a stranger. Not to mention he hated it when people called him a kid. “I’m 24,” he grumbled in his head, “Besides, I’ve seen and done things most people will never get even a taste of, although I suppose that it’s better for them that way.” Out loud, he looked in the driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror and told him in an even, slightly forceful tone, “You’re right, it ain’t your business. Isn’t. Isn’t your business.”
Slumping down in his seat, Alex could hear his mother scolding him for actually using ain’t. “You’ve been in Georgia for all of an hour and already you are forgetting how to use proper English,” she told him in his head in a slight English accent. She didn’t actually have an English accent, but then again he hadn’t heard her voice since he was 10, so maybe she did and he had just forgotten. Looking out the window, Alex placed a hand on his backpack, thinking that he was glad she wasn’t around to see what he was about to get himself into.
“Here ok?” the driver asked a little over twenty minutes later. The taxi had pulled up to a small office just outside the shipping terminal. Semi-trucks pulled past them, leaving the port with newly loaded containers, and empty trucks came into the port, waiting to pick up their load. Even inside the taxi, Alex could hear the sound of the giant cranes as they unloaded the cargo off the large container ships. He nodded and paid the driver in cash. Cash was always better, it is much harder to trace cash. As he opened the door, the driver turned to him and said, “Hey, don’t forget your backpack, I ain’t doing lost and found returns.”
It was a needless comment, as Alex had already grabbed his backpack. Still, there was no need to be rude. Rude people stuck out in people's minds, and Alex wanted to be forgotten. “Thanks. It would kill me to lose my laptop.” As he closed the door and the taxi drove off, Alex double-checked that everything was still in his backpack. Unzipping it, the first thing he saw was indeed his laptop, but that was hardly what was so valuable in there. No, in truth what Alex was double-checking, the reason he was so anxious today, were the other things in the backpack.
Firstly, there was his set of playing cards, bound together with a rubber band. 52 normal cards, hiding a small, thin plastic card. A key card meant to be read by a specific key card reader. A casual observer wouldn’t find a key card reader in the backpack. What they would find was an electric pencil sharpener, the bottom of which had been hollowed out. Alex opened the battery compartment of the pencil sharpener, and slid out a key card reader, before carefully replacing it. Finally, there was the keystone to the whole enterprise, an external hard drive, opened only by a specific key card that could only be read by a specific key card reader. “For a small black square of plastic” Alex mused, “this thing sure is valuable.” All of these things had come straight from the FBI headquarters in D.C., and possession of them was highly illegal and downright treasonous. That was why they were so valuable.
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