The Dinosaur Heist Read online

  THE DINOSAUR HEIST

  K.B. Spangler

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2019 K.B. Spangler

  The Dinosaur Heist is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com.

  This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com or kbspangler.com to learn more.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  TRANSCRIPT 2 OF 8 FROM THE PERSONAL FILES OF JOSHUA GLASSMAN, FORMER

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR (2006-2016) AND DIRECTOR (2016-2021) OF THE OFFICE OF ADAPTIVE AND COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGIES (OACET).

  RELEASE OF THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CONDUCTED UNDER THE U.S. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT. THIS TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS NO DETAILS RELATED TO ONGOING OR CURRENT THREATS TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES OR ITS ALLIES.

  AS THIS TRANSCRIPT IS A PERSONAL RECORD, ALL INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS DOCUMENT REFLECTS AGENT GLASSMAN’S OPINIONS, PERCEPTIONS, AND MEMORIES OF PAST EVENTS, AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED PART OF THE OFFICIAL OACET RECORD.

  RELEASED JANUARY 18, 2056

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m glad you liked that last story, Mare. Thanks for giving me time to recover. It took a few days to get my voice back.

  And a few more days to relearn how to walk. Damn, Mare! If I had known how much you’d enjoy these stories, I wouldn’t have dragged my heels on recording them for you. I’ll be sure to throw the bedroom details in here this time, too. Just promise you’ll wear that little green number again, okay? The one with the stockings?

  Damn, Mare!

  Okay. Another video for the OACET records.

  This one’s supposed to be the story of how I met Chanda Kelson, my second wife.

  Right. Chanda. I…I guess haven’t thought about Chanda in a long time. We still live in the same city, but we might as well be a million miles apart.

  Chanda Kelson.

  I think you’ve met her, Mare. She’s the one with the short brown hair and that perfect skin. Talked about dinosaurs all of the time, which was a real turnoff at first.

  I know, I know, everybody loves dinosaurs. Not me. Never have. I wasn’t a dinosaur kid. I had nothing but scorn for the dinosaur kids. They ran around the playground, pretending to be some giant dead thing made of teeth. Ugh! Tell me that a Tyrannosaurus rex used to live and breathe where we’re currently standing, and I’ll thank our marmot ancestors or whatever who made the sensible decision to have nothing to do with it.

  Come to think of it, I’ve never liked anything old. The past is reading material. Today, the future… They’re what matters.

  Thank you, marmots.

  Keep the dinosaurs in mind. I’m going to talk about communities for a few minutes, and how I needed one.

  I know that sounds strange. You and me, and everyone else in OACET? That’s… Well, Mare, I don’t have to describe it to you, and I’m glad of that. We haven’t been alone since the day we had the surgery that stuck that tiny piece of hardware into our heads and turned us into cyborgs. You, me, and all the others? We’ve been in each others’ heads for…what? Almost eleven years now?

  Damn, Mare. Time flies.

  With the link, we’re never alone. Any time I want, I can reach out through the link and talk to you, or to Rachel, or to any of the four hundred other members of our collective. But there’s a difference between connection and community. When I left Chicago to relocate to Washington D.C., I also left my synagogue behind. I loved that synagogue. Its community gave my mom some of the only moments of peace she ever got. I can still remember how it felt as a kid, walking through the front doors and my mom just…relaxing. Like she had come home. Like someone else could carry the weight for a little while.

  That sticks with you, Mare. I grew up knowing that I wanted to belong to the kind of community who helped carry the weight. When she died, I promised I’d give back more than I took along the way. So when I got to D.C., I went looking for a specific kind of community. One that wasn’t filled with cyborgs, since OACET’s already capable of carrying its own weight. But there are a lot of people out there who need help, Mare. Maybe they’re too old, or too young, or a little out of place. Or maybe they’re like my mom, capable but always taxed to the point of breaking.

  I started looking for my new community in the synagogues. Let me tell you, there are some wonderful ones in this city! D.C. is known for its churches and cathedrals, but it also has some of the most beautiful synagogues in the country. All different styles, too. Some with stained glass and gorgeous paint jobs, some with stark stripped-bare walls. I never did find the right one for me. Yeah, religion was part of it, but only a small part—there are as many different kinds of service as architecture, and I’m sure the right synagogue is still out there for me. But as I was walking around one Saturday afternoon, I found a community center down near Chinatown that was holding an open house. It was perfect. Not too big, not too small, and a warm, homey feeling when I walked through the front doors. They smiled and welcomed me, and they were happy to let me sit in on a meeting about their local outreach projects.

  It was a nice couple of months.

  Then the conditioning kicked in, and I started to fall apart.

  I guess I hadn’t been there long enough for them to notice the changes. If I was in their shoes, I’d have thought the new guy had decided that he’d overcommitted and was pulling himself out. From my perspective, these things I was doing? Volunteering, organizing, showing up at events with store-bought casseroles? These things…these things stopped having any real meaning. A couple of project managers showed up at my house a few times, and they got me to come back for an event or two, but after a while everybody realized it was wasted effort.

  Yeah.

  You know how that went, Mare. Five years of our lives, gone.

  Well, we’ll never get them back, so we need to make the most of the time we have left.

  Let’s move past those five years, to when everyone in OACET breaks free of the brainwashing. I’m suddenly thirty years old—and how the hell did that happen, anyhow?!—and I’ve got this new body. I mean, it’s the same body I’ve always had, but the changes between your twenties and your thirties are pretty intense. It helped that I had spent a good part of those five years working out, because the time I spent jogging was when I had felt the most like my old self. But when we came out of the brainwashing, it was as if I had magically transformed from a scrawny stick of a kid into…

  Into being me.

  It took a couple of months for me to get my head together, but after that, I started volunteering at that same community center again. Used some story about being caught up in an intense professional assignment to explain my absence. Technically true, and something I planned to fall back on once OACET went public. Almost everyone at the community center had forgotten about me by then. They had assumed I’d gotten bored or moved away and that I had vanished forever, but they were a friendly bunch and w
ere glad to see me again.

  Especially as I had gotten freakishly good at fixing everybody’s computers.

  Old people and technology? All of the stereotypes are true. If you make the mistake of helping them set up a smartphone once, you’re their tech support for life. As OACET hadn’t gone public yet, I spent a couple of long months making house calls and pretending to tinker with devices that I could have programmed without bothering to leave my condo.

  Fortunately, the center’s general manager learned that I was getting service calls at three in the morning. She put a stop to that, and fast. But there was a…hmmm…let’s call it a dustup? The old folks were very unhappy to hear they needed to start going back to the office supply store for their tech support, and they got loud about it.

  We worked out a compromise in the form of a service desk, with regular office hours twice a week. It sounds fancy, but it was really just an old broom closet that they fitted with a Dutch door to give me the illusion of an actual office. There were still brooms in there, and the bucket of sawdust they used when a sick kid barfed, but I stuck shelves on the walls and piled them with spare electronics equipment. The community members would drop off their devices, and I’d usually fix them while they waited. We’d make small talk, I’d pretend to spend a few minutes diagnosing and fixing the problem, and we’d all have a good laugh at how my tech skills were wasted in my dull bureaucrat’s job.

  Then, OACET went public. You and me and everybody else? We tore off the masks and said hi, there are cyborgs among you. We’re harmless. Perfectly harmless. Yes, we have the power to control all of the technology you depend on to make your lives easier, but don’t think about that part, okay? As we said, we’re perfectly harmless.

  (Don’t poke us.)

  All in all, the folks at the community center didn’t make a big deal out of it. A few of them got iffy about me, said I wasn’t to be trusted. The other members rolled their eyes and ignored their complaints. Some said they had known all along, and there’s nothing quite like an old man staring you up and down before saying, “Thought you were a cyborg” in his ain’t-nothin’-left-to-surprise-me voice.

  But.

  Two things.

  First, I was a nice guy of marriageable age, a steady government job, and the ability to tell a damned good story. Before OACET went public, everyone with a single female relative was busy trying to set me up. I didn’t take anyone up on these offers, because I wasn’t looking to get married, just laid, and I didn’t think that’s what any of these well-intentioned relatives had in mind. After we went public, those offers vanished like smoke in a strong breeze.

  And second? I’m…

  Well, Mare, I’m me.

  Once we went public, I went from being Josh Glassman, friendly tech support guy, to Josh Glassman, second-in-command at OACET. Like magic, I turned into that handsome man they saw on talk shows, the tall man with dark hair and dark eyes who appeared on the evening news.

  The man with an endless number of beautiful women on his arm.

  I never brought any of those women to the center, but rumors go where they want.

  There was a sigh of relief when I got married to my first wife. That lasted about as long as the marriage. After the divorce, there were a lot of whispers. I had a couple of very nice conversations with managers and organizers and concerned parents about personal choices and what it means to be a role model—

  Hang on. You know, I think I’m making this sound worse than it was. All of this took place over the better part of a year, and I’m only talking about a small part of my experiences. Mostly, it was fun, and it was work. In short, it was being with people. They cared about me—they still care about me! It’s just that people have so many different ways to show care, and sometimes those can be really annoying.

  I love them for it.

  I think that’s enough scene-setting. Let’s skip ahead to the day I met Chanda. It’s a couple of months after Davie and I separated. Maybe…ten? Eleven months after OACET came out of hiding? Plenty of time for the folks at the community center to get used to me. So, remember, I’m tech support. And remember that I’m also OACET’s public spokesperson. I try to keep these separate, but anyone who wants to talk to me and knows about my volunteer work can track me down during my tech support hours. That was true then, and it’s still true now.

  The first time I met Chanda, I was in my office. I heard her coming from all the way down the hall. Angry women walk with purpose. Doesn’t matter what kind of shoes they wear, or how long their legs are, or anything that mundane. There’s a message in how they walk, and it says: Help me or get out of my way.

  She opened the door to my tiny office without bothering to knock.

  “You,” she said. “Cyborg. Help me find my dinosaurs.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As far as introductions went, I had heard better.

  As far as pickup lines went, I had heard worse.

  The two netted out, so I didn’t bother to look up from the cell phone I was fixing. It had a hardware problem, so I had taken it apart and had spilled its guts across a clean silicon mat. If any one of those tiny screws fell on the floor, the sweet little old lady who had entrusted it to me would shove an orthopedic sneaker straight up my ass. “Hello,” I replied. “Yes, I’m the cyborg. Please take a number.”

  A hand came down on the mat, and a hundred minuscule bits and pieces of circuitry flew off into the void. “I need you,” she hissed, “to help me find my dinosaurs!”

  Now I looked up.

  At first glance, I thought she was a reporter. She fit the mold: gorgeous short-cropped brown hair, fierce brown eyes, curves on top of more curves, lips slightly too full to seem natural. And her skin? Deeply tanned and utterly flawless.

  Then, I took a second look at her hand. She had no manicure. Scratch that: she had no personal hygiene at all, at least where her fingernails were concerned. There was dirt under her nails and embedded in the creases of her knuckles.

  Not a reporter.

  And she was wearing an old sweater over jeans, and a pair of work boots that had been made sometime around the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and resoled at least a half a dozen times since then.

  Definitely not a reporter.

  “Do you know Mrs. Lordes?” I asked her. “Nice woman in her late seventies? Makes sugar cookies for the kids’ classes?”

  The woman blinked. “What?”

  “If you don’t, you will know her. She’ll be back in an hour for her phone.” I pointed at the scattered pieces of hardware that had bounced across the room. “And then she’ll murder us.”

  The woman finally seemed to realize what she had done. “Oh, no,” she said with a gasp, and dropped to her knees. She began to sweep up the pieces with her hands. “I don’t…I can’t…Can you fix this?”

  “Probably not.” I grabbed an old phone from a nearby bin, powered it up, and began to clone Mrs. Lordes’ information onto the device. “But she’ll have a temporary replacement until I can work out something more permanent for her.”

  There was a sniffling sound from somewhere near my feet. I thought the woman was trying to keep herself from crying.

  I know, I know. I’m the world’s biggest sucker for a damsel in distress.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Mrs. Lordes probably won’t realize that it’s not her old phone anyhow. All she wants is something that plays Candy Crush.”

  The sniffling sound turned to a growling one, and the woman lifted her chin.

  I nearly took a step backwards to avoid the fire in her eyes. I was wrong. She hadn’t been crying, she had been trying to keep herself from screaming in frustration.

  “I need you…” she said through clenched teeth, “…to help me find my dinosaurs.”

  “Is that a euphemism?” I asked. “Maybe a role-playing thing?”

  “What?!” The small sparks in the woman’s eyes turned into flamethrowers. “Did you seriously think I came here—”

 
“Apologies.” I held up my hands in surrender. “Let me get us some coffee, and then we can talk.” I left the office before she could argue. When I returned, the woman was sitting in my chair. I noticed she had picked up most of the scattered pieces of the phone and had laid them out on the silicon mat.

  “Drink this,” I said, as I pressed a waxed paper cup into her hand. “Then tell me what’s wrong.”

  She hesitated, then finally relented. “Thanks.”

  “I’m Josh Glassman,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “And this is where you say your name.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes went wide. “Could I be more of a bitch?”

  I grinned at her. “That’s a funny name.”

  She sighed. “Dr. Chanda Kelson.”

  Now my eyes went wide.

  “I see you’ve heard of me,” she said, as she settled back in the chair. “Professionally or personally?”

  There were two ways I could answer that question, and I knew from experience that one of them was not a good way to make a new friend. I went with the second option: I pointed towards an old radio on the shelf, and said, “That’s your mother’s.”

  Now that I knew her name, I could tell she was Mrs. Kelson’s daughter. Her mother had worn the same fierce expression when she had brought in the radio and told me to get it working again…or else!

  Chanda nodded. “Now it is. It started out as my great-grandfather’s, and he brought it over from Poland when he fled the Nazis. How long until you can fix it?”

  “I can’t fix it. I’m a cyborg, not a magician,” I replied. I leaned against the wall and sipped my own cup of coffee. “Almost every piece of it has worn down past its lifespan. It’s not going to work unless I rebuild it, and I honestly don’t have the time or the patience to track down the parts.”

  I settled myself on the floor. The room was small and I have long legs, so I had to fold myself into a ball in the only clear space in the room, my own coffee cup perched on my knees.