“Where do we have to go again?” The Italian pretty-boy whispered into the ear of his co-conspirator.
“The head office, any others we think are important.” The light from the cafeteria ceiling reflected off of Dex’s glasses. Shakira was out that night, so she gave him and Lawrence instructions on obtaining more information of whatever was going on. Assassination plans, propaganda agendas, the numbers she found, anything was helpful at this point. Farrah was too terrified of capture to assist her doctors, which was reasonable because this was mostly about her. Suddenly thinking of her, Lawrence suggested, “The oncology department? I don’t look out of place there.”
“And it’s safer…..they probably have the head office booby-trapped now…hehe boobies.”
“You have to be childish when we’re doing something dangerous”, Lawrence said, rolling his eyes.
“You don’t think I’m scared? I overheard their plans to finish off Michael Jackson; they don’t leave any opportunities for failure, not anymore at least.”
“Come on, we’re going to oncology and there’s a mastectomy patient who’s making you fit right in.” The two men quietly proceeded to the oncology department, first needing to take the elevator.
“Farrah’s file?” Dex half-whispered.
“Yeah, seeing as I don’t ‘need’ it anymore”, Lawrence answered. Once they arrived, they kept a low profile, not looking anyone in the eye. “It’s in my office”, he added. Opening the door, he paused to look around for assassins, traps and so on, before sliding up to the filing cabinet and shoving his hand into the section labelled “F”. Eventually, his fingers walked themselves to ‘Fawcett, Farrah’, and he pulled this folder out from among the others it was sandwiched between.
“Anything different?” Dex whispered, his eyes darting around to check for any intruders.
“Her records haven’t been changed, except for…..Oh GREAT! They added the original scan to the altered ones from her false diagnosis!” Pissed off, Lawrence held up the originals so Dex could see them.
His eyes jumped out of his head, then he asked, “Were the sticky notes there before?”, pointing to a couple of notes with their yellow corners poking out of the file. Lawrence opened to the page that one was stuck to, and read out “5821435. Huh? What does that even mean? Wait, Shakira told me about a similar number that fell out of assassination plans!”
“Phone numbers? No, they are only seven numbers, could they be a code?”
“I have no idea…what’s this?” He pulled off another note, adhered directly behind the note with the number. “Atyrau. Find and destroy all information? This just keeps getting worse!”
“So….the numbers are connected to a place called Atyrau?” Dex was equally confused. It *was* getting worse, first Farrah was diagnosed with cancer, then her latest diagnosis turned out to be faked, then her doctors, including him to a lesser extent, became assassination targets so she would lose all protection and actual care. And now wherever the fuck Atyrau is has become the latest potential target of the pharmaceutical industry’s goons because of information that didn’t even make sense to doctors!
“Snap out of it”, Lawrence hissed, clicking his fingers in front of Dex’s face, as thinking about these things caused him to space out completely. “There’s another note with what the room number of a storage closet would be.”
The two men then cautiously took the elevator down to the hospital’s lowest level where Farrah had her last MRI. Next to that room was the storage closet mentioned on the note. Lawrence opened the door by a crack to check for more traps, and when he was satisfied with what safety he had, fully opened the closet door. Inside were a mop, extra spill kits and various cleaning products. They split the containers between themselves, searching for any more files; Dex even searched the mop and the insides of the spill kits. It was also Dex who rummaged through the last container, but the only writings of any kind was something scrawled onto the bottom in black marker. It read “SURPRISE!” with a cheeky smiley face next to it.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH!” Both men screamed, fearing that this meant ‘Surprise! There’s a bomb in here, or possibly assassins waiting for you, since we knew you’d find this, now you’re going to die!’ They bolted for the fire stairs, as usual, and raced for the exit of the hospital. Their hearts stopped as they noticed a car parked on the grass………and realised that it was Ursula’s time-spaceship, which took the form of a blue Chevrolet, and unlike Shakira’s TARDIS, was not bigger on the inside. Now, they ran towards her car, as they could see Ursula sitting inside it, reading something.
“Guten abend!” she cheerfully called out. “What are you doing here?”
“We were looking for more information but all we found were these”, Lawrence said, producing the sticky notes he stashed away.
“That’s more than what I found”, she admitted. “All I have in here are newspaper clippings and a very unclear set of directions. What is Atyrau? Do you know? It sounds like somewhere Shakira said she went on a trip to in her sponsored student days.”
“I don’t remember that from any of her stories, but one of the notes we found mentions it too….something about destroying information there?”
“What are the newspaper clippings?” Dex asked.
“Some are of Farrah from these last few years, some are of alternative doctors in South America and the Central Asia, a few are of Michael Jackson in East Europe”, she answered. “I don’t know if they mean anything or are trying to waste our time…but who knows then?”
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