We'll Meet Again (Original Book)

|20| Plan

The base was surrounded by an electric fence and the voltage charged throughout the entire establishment was lethal. The Nazis had used similar fences to keep anyone from entering or leaving the concentration camps and Leonard assumed that they had employed the same strategy in a US military base.

Tedric considered going on Nathalie's rescue entirely on his own. They didn't know the exact location of that base, but he couldn't waste time. He could figure out some way to find it. He could handle it. A member of the Garner Family was more than capable of taking on the defences of a base on their own.

Tedric had killed so many people throughout the years. He didn't necessarily feel bad about that. It was all in the name of survival. In all those universes that he had visited, he had been put through countless dangerous and life-threatening circumstances.

The government would probably chase him out of the country. The Garner Family wouldn't bother protecting him. Like Nathalie, Tedric didn't have good relationships with his relatives whatsoever. This operation should be done as quiet as possible. Tedric left it up to the Burgesses to conjure up a plan.

Even Grandfather Gustave joined in. He wasn't surprised that his son, Malcolm, had entirely turned over to immorality. He almost had a heart attack when he considered the possibility that Malcolm had already turned over all advanced Burgess technology to the government. It was a primary rule in the family to keep their technology hidden and it was successfully kept hidden for centuries upon centuries only for Malcolm to ruin it all now.

They had more than one objective for this mission.

Tedric didn't care about that. Whatever they'd do to destroy it, they would still recreate it and this timeline would end up a lot different than the other ones he'd known, but there had been timelines where Burgess technology had been leaked out again and the government had chosen to still keep it a secret from the rest of the world.

If they really did use Burgess technology in that base, then Malcolm would somehow have to access the databases they stored in the central, large storage computer in the Burgess Mansion. No one else in the world right now possessed the technology to access the one and only network that the Burgesses had set up as a means to safely store and share their data of every research amongst themselves.

If they could track the signal of Malcolm's computers, then they could find out the exact location of the base in Richmond. Jocasta was positive that she could hack Malcolm's devices and cause them to self-destruct. The self-destruct protocol was integrated in every computer, every device created by the Burgess Family in case they happened to fall in the wrong hands.

"After some time, the device will present a standard error," Uther explained. "A Burgess should be able to solve that error in less than twenty seconds. When those twenty seconds pass and it hasn't yet been resolved, it will self-destruct."

"There's no way Malcolm hasn't taken that into consideration," Gustave said.

They were all gathered in what looked like a seminar room. The older members of the family would give lectures to the youngest ones in such rooms. There was a large, green board hanging by the wall and there were chairs with tables set perfectly organised. It was Tedric, Jocasta, Uther, Leonard, Gustave, and Albert. Tedric had asked for his help since he wasn't planning to break into the base on his own. If Tedric wanted to make it out alive and not be caught and kept there as Malcolm's newest test subject, it was best that he did not do this alone.

"Even though coding has been around in our family for the last twenty years, I wouldn't underestimate my son," Gustave said. "He has programmed his devices to resist that protocol and he's most probably figured out a way to encrypt his signal, accessing our databases whilst appearing invisible to us."