Questions for Answers

Chapter Eighteen

Two months later...

It had been two months since we traveled to Italy and I was already feeling homesick. Of course, I still wanted to finish this and find out the truth, but I also wanted nothing more than to just go back home with Tristen and get back to our regular lives. Since we ended up staying way longer than we thought, Tristen had to call his job and tell them that he was stuck in another country and couldn't leave so they wouldn't fire him. We also ended up having to drop the rest of our classes for the school year. That was the most upsetting part for me.

Also, staying with Natalia just put a damper on our relationship as well. We didn't have any alone time to spend together and since we all had a mission to accomplish in separate areas, we rarely saw each other. Tristen landed a construction job two weeks after Natalia told him to. As for Natalia, she started volunteering at the church and even did routine maintenance, so she was tasked with learning the schedules of all the security there. My only job was to worry about getting into the archive room, so I stayed home planning while they did their own things.

Because of the nature of the mission and not knowing for certain how much longer we'd be in Italy, Tristen and I took it upon ourselves to start learning some Italian. We weren't fluent or anything, but we knew more than we did before. Plus, Natalia kind of forced us to learn since she said she may not always be around to translate for us and told us not to assume that anyone else would speak English for us either.

With me being at the house by myself most of the time, I had time to plan exactly what to do when I got inside the archive room. The main problem in our plan was dealing with the backup generator when that time came. If I truly only had thirty seconds to get what I needed to, then it was going to be an issue; because I still didn't know what I was supposed to be getting from there. I re-read the poem a million times to see if Natalia had missed anything when she deciphered it, but I found nothing new. There were the letters E.B. on the back in this weird font, but I couldn't figure out what it meant or if it even meant anything.

Natalia and Tristen were constantly arguing because their plans had to correlate with each other. Natalia said she'd be able to get the guards away from the room, but Tristen would have to make the power go out at that time. Tristen argued that he couldn't set a specific time to make the power go out and that she'd have to follow his schedule for whenever he would be able to make it happen. Natalia always tried to include me in their discussions and ask whose job I thought was more important. It didn't matter. But if I absolutely had to answer...it'd be Tristen for sure.

It wouldn't have mattered if Natalia somehow found a way to get security away from guarding the room, and it wouldn't have mattered if I had a rock-solid plan to get the files and slip out without being seen, because if Tristen couldn't make the power outage happen for us, the plan would be a bust! There was no other way to get past that retina scanner.

As I contemplated the plan, the front door unlocked, and in came Tristen and Natalia. She shut the door behind her, "And like I already told you, I can only do so much!"

He took off his work gloves and placed them on the kitchen counter, "And you can stop yelling, I heard you already. I'm saying that we need another plan."

"Guys, what's going on?" I asked interrupting them.

She pointed at Tristen, "Your man here says he can't cut the power."

"I didn't say that! I said that it'd be extremely difficult for me to do it with the little time I had, that's why I was saying that we needed another distraction of some kind", he said.

I sighed, "What's the problem, babe?"

He sat down and sighed, "I used the official computer in the office to type up a request to work on the city power lines in the area and signed it with my boss' name. The request should either be approved or denied in about a day or two. But the thing is, they have to see that something is already wrong with it or they won't send us out on the project. So I have to mess with it tonight before they come and look at it. The problem is, the streets are always busy so I won't have a window to do it."