Operation Rock of Ages: Triumphant Illumination

ORA: TI Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Greg lost Jayson and he knew that Mariam was gonna kill him. Technically, he wasn't lost, Greg just couldn't get to him...yet. The last meeting went terribly, terribly wrong. Jayson told the person he was meeting with that Greg was a hired driver, not a friend or business associate as he was supposed to, for precisely the reason that happened. It was a way to see if Jayson was in trouble should they get separated, like they did.

Greg was glad his plan worked and totally upset it was needed. Greg yelled at Jayson, like a taxi driver, that he would be back in one hour to pick him up, Jayson waved and Greg pulled away from dropping Jayson off at his last meeting. When Greg parked around the corner, he turned on the bug that he had planted on Jayson to listen in. He couldn't get a signal. Not a thing. Greg started to panic but stuck to the plan, he pulled up an hour later and a guard came out the greet him.

"Hey, bud. Your guy left about fifteen minutes ago. Said he got a call and had to run. Said to go ahead and charge his card for both sides of the trip. If I was you, I would add a nice tip to it," the guard said.

Greg acted bored with the whole thing and slightly put out that he had come all the way back and told the guard he might accidently charge him double. They both laughed and Greg left. Unsure if Jayson was still inside or not, he drove around to think of what he was going to do next. The tracker that Greg had also put on Jayson, without him knowing, pinged faintly, coming from another direction altogether. Jayson followed the signal, relieved that Jayson was taken somewhere, until he saw where he had been taken. Jayson was locked down in the VA hospital, which meant real trained security...with guns and they knew how to use them.

Greg was not happy with this situation. He made a call to his contact at the hospital he had already made arrangements with to put her on alert. He had a feeling that they were not playing patty-cake with Greg in there. She said she did rounds there every other day as a volunteer. She said would be able to see where he was so Greg could plan on how to bust him out. He was grateful for that little boon and surveilled the place like he was lost for about twenty minutes. He was just one of many cars moving about the parking lot aimlessly looking for a good parking spot.

He got his bearings and left. There were woods between the hospital and the next set of buildings, he planned to spend the night watching the patrols and see if he could pinpoint where Jayson was being kept. The signal was stronger here, so he knew Jayson was here but he needed to walk around the building to see where the signal got the strongest. Maybe he would get lucky and Jayson would be in a room with a window. He wasn't counting on it, but he could hope.

He watched the patrols for several hours. There seemed to be three outside patrols in teams of two. They were bored, completely not alert for trouble. Which was very good for Greg, he needed lax security to sneak around. Quickly Greg learned their patrol system. Each team left and started their round, the next team was one hour behind them and the third team left an hour after that. Completely uninventive but somewhat effective. You had a small window in which you could get between the teams but then only about fifty minutes to get back out before the next team would be on top of you.

Knowing that, he got in the middle of two sets of guards and kept their pace around the building. He went between the walls and the bushes and shrubs decorating the building to make it seem friendlier and less institutional. The greenery helped with that very little but Greg was grateful for the cover nonetheless.

He managed to locate Jayson in a back corner of the hospital, thankfully on the ground floor. It seemed his luck was turning around. He tried to look in the window but it had been blacked out. Not good. Since he didn't know if it was just one-way tinting and people could look out the window and see him, he kept low and inconspicuous in his attempts to look in. In his attempt to look in, he noticed a wire. "Uh-oh," Greg thought, "they have sensors on the windows. This must be the psych ward." Greg checked his watch, "Time to bug out." The next set of security guards would be right on top of him in less than ten minutes.