A three and a half hour drive goes a lot quicker, when you're not the one who's driving.
During the trip Gary started reading up about the city of Terre Haute, and the things that went on there. The other three hours were spent watching Anime. About Cat-Girls. Echii.
He just couldn't find anything interesting going on in that city, at least nothing worth getting worried about. The crime statistics were boring. They showed lower than average violent crime, but higher property crime. The only property Gary was taking was the van, which held all his equipment, and the fan could look after itself, more or less.
The Wikipedia page showed some very bland statistics, and lists and facts and figures, but nothing that might indicate why Raul might have been there. Well, other than the school, but Gary couldn't see anything that might tell him what was so interesting there.
So he started a web-crawler, and told it to search for things relating to "magic," "computer code," "computer language," "Raul Muyres," and a few other terms, and set it to give him an alarm if it found something interesting.
But of course there were no alarms until the car warned him that they were getting near to their destination. He didn't want to freak anyone out, so he up straight in the seat, and gave every appearance of driving, other than actually putting his hands on the wheel. His score versus the self drive program was 3 accidents to zero.
He went through the usual routine when coming into a new town, watching as the computer noted every wifi hotspot he went past, (a dismally low number compared to Chicago,) and logged them, taking special note of the ones with no passwords, and the public ones from fast food places, book stores, libraries, grocery stores, cafes, etc.
His system also tracked Bluetooth signals, making note of different cell phones, and vehicles, headsets, mouse and keyboard sets, and so on. Nobody ever thought about that nowadays. Why would you ever need a keylogger if you had a device capable of intercepting bluetooth signals from a BT keyboard? But he didn't care about any of that really, he just made sure he was ready for contingencies. You never knew when an open internet connection might save your life... figuratively speaking of course. It was hard to imagine a situation it would be literally true. Nonetheless everything was shared to his phone as a precaution.
He also had unlimited mobile data on his smartphone for free of course (which he had set up for free in exchange for fixing some data glitches and patching some security holes,) but when traveling it wasn't always 100% reliable, and in a city like this there would be tons of possible places with corrugated metal, or concrete walls where service wouldn't be available, or weak. Not to mention the high powered radios around police stations, fire stations, and hospitals.
It was better to have options. Things happened.
He decided to check out "Sonka" before heading over to Heavenly Ham, but he didn't want to expose himself in case there was some kind of trap or whatever. Jackie had seemed paranoid. Investing in that paranoia seemed a little over the top, but on the other hand, like the old saying went, better safe than sorry.
There was a building across the street from the pub, which had white vans parked out back with a logo for "Traveling Pizzaria." That was perfect. He changed the panels on his van to match, and parked next to one of them.
Then he pulled out the quad-copter drone, reached out the window and set it on the roof of the van. He pulled what looked like a set of opaque goggles down over his eyes, and took up the controller, which in this case was a PS3 controller. That controller went into the van's computer system, which relayed commands to the drone via an external antenna. The two cameras on the front of the drone allowed him to see what the drone saw.
He flew it over the building where he was parked and landed it on the lip of the roof. He could still move and zoom the cameras. He expected things to be slow there, since it was still fairly early in the morning. But the camera show several heavy "chopper" type motorcycles, and men in leather outfits bearing a picture of a goat's skull with long curling horns.
There was one just inside the pub, looking agitated, and shouting people around the place. He was wearing sunglasses, and had long black hair that was growing out grey from the roots.
He watched them for a few moments more, about to call the drone back, when he suddenly heard a rapping on his window. It was fine, the window was darkened, so Gary pulled off the VR goggles, and rolled down the window to a frantic looking young lady.
"Okay," she panted. "Wabash and Vinecoast, grey house on the corner, number 817." She was pushing a pair of boxes, in a thermal bag over at him. Then she took a moment to relax, and looked at him, as he stared dumbly at the pizzas he was holding. "New guy?"
He glanced back at her, thinking fast. "Yeah, but I've done this kind of delivery before. How long have you been here?"
She smiled through her exhaustion. "Oh, only a couple weeks. Don't worry, Glenda's not nearly as bad as she acts."
He smiled back at her, thinking, 'Of course not, she just gave me lunch.'
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