Take the Fourth (20 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
S
till a bit startled from what he thought was a close encounter with Ripley, he made his way back to the kitchen and sat at the table for a few minutes to calm himself down. He almost nodded off. He was extremely tired. He had a long day. All the driving, the watching, the working—it was a very long day. He glanced at the clock on the microwave; it read 4:32 a.m. He muscled up the energy to lift his tired body out of the chair and walked to the appliance white refrigerator. He grabbed some orange juice and decided to call it a night. He then climbed the stairs and entered his room. It wasn’t the biggest bedroom in the house but this was where he was most comfortable. He flipped on the light, stripped to his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, folded his dirty clothes, and walked across the hall to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He reentered his room, turned off the light and climbed into bed. He turned on his alarm and his head hit the pillow with heavy eyes. He knew that his little girl would be wide awake before him, so he mumbled a little prayer to keep her safe in the meantime, he mumbled a few words of thanks, and blessed himself just before he rolled over and fell asleep.
A few hours had elapsed and he awoke from a dream, the same bad dream he always dreamt. He was crying in his sleep. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. His hands were sweaty and his body was shaking. Each and every night his ghosts had come back and haunted him but this time they were much worse than he had remembered in a long time. Somehow, someway, they should have subsided; the monsters should have been gone now that his little girl was in his life but they were still there, plain as the sun shining from behind the dark shades of his room. He couldn’t understand it. He was happy; at least he felt happy, like a weight had been lifted, yet his confusion angered him. “Why have this dream again? Why now? Why can’t it end? Why did this have to happen? Why?” He glanced at the clock and this angered him even more. It was only ten after eight. He was still tired, very tired, and on top of it he was in pain from a headache. He clenched his fist and his teeth. The more he remembered about his dream the more ill-tempered he became. Between his anger, his pain, his tiredness, his confusion, he couldn’t hold a clear thought in his head. He was practically seething. He rose out of bed, scuffled across the hall, and entered the bathroom. He turned on the light and winced from the pain the light had caused him. He looked for aspirin, found them, and the bottle slipped out of his still trembling hands and onto the floor—aspirin everywhere. They were scattered across the black, gray, and pink tile floor. The bottle rolled behind the porcelain bowl. He needed the aspirin more than ever now. He fell to his hands and knees and started picking them up one by one. Then he suddenly stopped. He glanced at the dirt and hair on the floor, he glanced at the few pills in his hands, and they too were covered in dirt and hair. He didn’t know what to do, where to turn. His anger grew. Then he remembered his little girl. “Maybe she wasn’t the one after all. That had to be it, yes it had to be it” and in a flash he flew down the stairs and was in the basement in no time. It was like a light switch—he flipped with rage as he stared at the solid steel door to her room. “How could she?” He let out sounds of his rage and a tapestry of vulgar words through clenched teeth but on the other side of the door they went unnoticed for they were muffled. He became enraged much like a caged animal being provoked with a stick. He sputtered nonsense aloud “How could she not take this away, why did she, that little bitch, why?” He ran towards the door, his forehead scrunched, his fist ready to pound, he seemed ready for battle but turned away as if it were the aggressor wielding a weapon. He backed away. He turned towards the door again. He stood. He stared. He moved a foot closer. A foot more. A foot more. He stared at the beast. He raised his hand. He unlocked one dead bolt. Then another. By the time he turned the third lock, unlike Dr. Bruce Banner, his episode had receded before turning into any kind of monster.
He was totally calm now. He gathered his thoughts and bowed his head seemingly asking for forgiveness. He counted to ten and walked over to his watching room. He entered. He looked through the mirror and saw an empty room. He expected to see Ripley either in bed or playing on the floor. He saw neither. He was perplexed, thinking his mind was playing tricks with him for he was still a bit groggy and still in much pain. So he studied the room for he knew she was hiding but where? He noticed two more of the bananas were gone and so were the cookies. There was an apple juice bottle on the nightstand and the small ice chest was open but still no sign of his little girl. He squatted on the floor and peered out the one-way mirror to get a better look under the bed. The duvet cover barely touched the bottom of the bed so he had a clear view. Nothing. He then stood on his chair to get a better peek of the only hiding place he thought she could be and that was lying in the bathtub. Nothing. Now he was getting worried. He exited the room and checked the steel door to see if it was locked. It was. Back to the watching room. Nothing. He pressed his cheek against the mirror to try to see to the far right of the room. Nothing. He did the same with the left. Nothing. He was growing even more worried—almost to the point of panic. He felt his blood pressure start to rise again. He felt the pressure of his headache even more. He felt his tiredness taking control. He was just about to lose it again when he spotted the only place she could be… . the closet. “Yes, such a clever girl,” he said to himself. He felt so smart for thinking of it, then felt like an idiot. “Why did I put a door on the closet? Why did I even build a closet in the first place?” Quickly he tried to gather his thoughts again, thinking if he should remove the closet door or not, then came to the conclusion, “No, everybody needs a little privacy from time to time; even my little girl needs some privacy.” He thought of his next move, “Yes today is the day, today is the day I welcome her into my life. It is time.” He so wanted to walk right in there and open the closet door and and… . and he stopped his brain from processing. “She is safe now and I’m still tired,” and with that he headed back upstairs for some aspirin and a little more rest. When he reached his bathroom, he saw once again the pills on the floor. He ignored them and opened the medicine cabinet and elected for something a little stronger. He glanced at his watch; he had another four hours before he was supposed to take his prescription but since he completely ignored that rule the day before, he open the childproof bottle with ease and popped two gel tablets down his throat. He never needed any water; to him it was like swallowing a piece of meat. He shut the light off, crossed the hall, and entered his still very dark room, crawled into bed and closed his eyes hoping the headache would soon dissipate.
He was in total blackness and his eyes focused on the back of his eyelids as though he was still able to see clearly. Sparkles, wavy lines, and spots, all green, against a black canvas, his eyes seemed to be still transmitting signals to the brain and he was trying to make sense of it all. After a few minutes his body relaxed and he was back in the realm of his unconscious self. His dreams were muted in colors; boundaries of objects seemed to blend into the background, and his surroundings were not very detailed. Images and visions floated by like clouds of a fast moving storm. They were almost hallucinogenic to a degree, and then a form of reality crept in. There were soda bottles filled with orange syrup on a shelf at a grocery store next to a few boxes of cereal and soap. He reached for a bottle and it slipped from his hands, then he glided his cart around the corner and studied the very goth-like wallpaper that appeared out of nowhere. It was velvet gold and red with bats with red eyes. There were people talking around the corner and he went to investigate. He didn’t recognize a single soul yet they all seemed very familiar—like old friends. They appeared to be waiting for an argument to be settled that was taking place in the basement. He chose to walk towards the basement door and open it. There was a child that was holding a toy gun. The child walked into a waiting area and shot a woman. He thought long and hard before deciding it was the parent’s fault for allowing the child to find a real gun in the house and went to find the father. He found the father and starting yelling then turned his head and in a calm tone he told a nurse to send an ambulance to Kirbyville. He looked down in his hand expecting to find a bloody gun yet it was a wilted daisy from his back yard. His brain was trying to create some sort of story line from the visions but soon gave up and lapsed into stage four of the sleep cycle, also known as deep sleep.
. . .
T
heir job was no longer the number one priority but they still had to maintain the façade until they could come to grasp with their new found intelligence. Their main concern now was that of survival. They didn’t know who to trust so they trusted each other, they had no other choice. They had to find out all the main players and the depth of this, for lack of a better word, conspiracy. Greg and Jorja knew they had a few holes to plug—like the person or persons that had access to create and maintain the machine with all the information—they had to be within the very walls of the Intelligence Community and most probably at the top of the food chain. They already knew President Jonathan Whitaker and Scott Norwood were deep in this shit and through a ton more research they came up with another name that didn’t smell like roses, that belonging to Frank Simoski, CEO of Etimiz. He was the other user in the box ending in 12.168 whose username was CEOFS01. Greg was the one who tied him to a college acquaintance of the President. He found the connection between Simoski and Whitaker with the help of an online yearbook at their alma mater and a causal picture of the two of them talking outside the Sciences Library; there was no caption. He recognized the President since he was structurally the same—his Jay Leno like chin gave him away. Frank’s name was found perusing through the rest of the pictures that were online. These two people had no other common connections besides this photograph. It just caught Greg as odd, the way these two seemed locked in deep conversation yet not once did they ever share a class or even the same professor. He found out Frank was big, strike that, huge in the field of nanotechnology, graduated the very same year as Whitaker, and had a few grants thrown his way by the former representative, former senator and now president. There was a picture clearly forming. Greg surmised that there might be a few more key individuals whose college motto was “In deo speramus” (In God we hope). College is just the kind of place where half-baked ideas derived mainly from a few bong hits becomes an obsession to a brilliant yet borderline psychopath. Then like the Order of the Skulls and Bones, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or even Microsoft or Google, select individuals are drawn and allied into the inner circle with the illusions of greater power and fortitude… in this case they may be right.
Greg ran a quick check of any CIA employees that graduated within four years of the President. He found none. He then did a search through congress and found two other alumni—both senators now, a republican from Illinois, the other a democrat from California; both sides of the fence were covered in the political arena so it seemed. Jorja ran with the names while Greg concentrated his sights based on the source of the incoming data stream. Jorja uncovered some interesting facts. The back then Illinois representative was the one who brought to light the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act along with support from the California representative. This act brought together the lot numbers of vaccines and social security numbers of the injected, a seemingly harmless trait, in order to provide compensation for individuals injured in an event of a vaccine failure. Jorja quickly recalled the term steganography—the art of hiding or embedding hidden messages in plain view. Here a simple addition to the NCVI Act provided a piece of the hidden agenda. It was in plain sight, yet no one ever questioned the true reason it was there. How convenient it must have been to place something like this in a bill where there was a greater scope involved. She searched for more bills sponsored by this duo and learned quite a lot. She learned they helped passed federal spending on satellites for the NSA, they voted for cell phone regulations in regarding nine one one calls, they provided grants to scientists, they even helped to elect Frank Simoski to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and not to mention they were strong supporters of inner workings of Homeland Security and the relatively new DNI. Piece by piece they helped assemble the underlying structure for the network. It took years to plan and build but with the help of congress and the tax payers’ money it became a reality in about fifteen years.
Over the course of several months the big picture was certainly clear—a network of friends in high places all stemming from college. It was Greg who found the connections again using the online yearbook. A common thread was woven between the pictures of some senators and the would-be-president of the United States—they each wore a ring; it was hard to make out in the pictures but after the pictures were digitally enhanced the insignia became crystal clear. It bore just two simple letters “PS”. Through further investigation it was uncovered that in 1821, the university had a secret society that was once called the Franklin Society and was created to pursue the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, and conduct. That struck a chord with Greg as he thought to himself “yeah the pursuit of truths, knowledge, all being taken to the extreme.” During its initial gathering it was simply known as the Philosophical Society, hence the “PS”. It was disbanded in the early 1900’s but looked as though it was resurrected by none other than Whitaker himself with only a few members, maybe six or seven in all. Most of whom now work in or with the government in one way shape or form. There was Frank Simoski, biology whiz, two senators, a security expert in the NSA, and the lead chair in Homeland Security. Scott Norwood didn’t fit the mold. He was fifteen years younger than the President and went to Georgetown. He seemingly had no other connection to Whitaker before the plan started to formalize. He didn’t have special skills in one area or the other but boy was he smart. His analytical skills were top notch. It wasn’t until after Jorja pulled his college thesis that the bells of Saint Mary’s started ringing. His two hundred page thesis was simply entitled DATA. After reading it Jorja had a better understanding of what the powers to be were capable of doing to this country.
Over that same period of time, both Jorja and Greg had dissipating fears of being caught. They theorized that maybe either A) no one knew that the secret was out or B) that maybe they were watching for reactions and if proven favorable, bring them into the inner sanctum, into god’s realm. It didn’t matter to either of them for they still could only trust one another and they had to play the waiting game.
And wait they did. In the meantime Jorja’s bloodline was starting to show. She was part of the world’s biggest spy organization and slowly she was being drawn into the seductive powers that God himself held. Greg was learning about the day to day operations—the how’s. He found the data stream supporting the location data. That was a difficult task because it didn’t come through the normal channels. It was backdoored by the NSA from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado and hardwired directly into the database. Schriever AFB is known for its men and women of the 2
nd
Space Operations Squadron who operate the world’s only global utility simply referred to as GPS. Here coordinates obtained from Schiever AFB were downloaded into the database along with a series of digits. Greg’s initial conclusion was spot on; that these sets of digits were the serial numbers of whatever was within the body. These serial numbers were cross referenced with the Immune Information Systems with lot numbers of the vaccines and tax ID’s, then placed into the file Jorja and Greg first stumbled upon. He also found a replicating database, mirroring any data within seconds of the original entries but one of his more important finds was a GUI—a graphical user interface into the system. It was written so any internet browser could connect to this database in a point and click fashion. It was pretty slick even by Greg’s standards. One could prompt for a tax ID and a satellite image appeared on the screen or one could click on a location and find all the tax ID’s within a certain radius and this could be done for both date and time. Clicking on a tax ID linked directly to any data known to be stored for that person, almost to the “t” of what Scott Norwood’s thesis envisioned. This program was powerful yet simple in form thus leading Greg to wonder who the programmer of this functionality might be; yet another missing piece to the puzzle.
Certain experiments were done by the duo. They wandered in the streets to look for blind spots. They rode subway cars, entered various building including the CIA headquarters, and in all but a very few, they were tracked and recorded, and yes, even underground. The signals were being broadcasted to anything that listened… and it seem almost everything listened from cell phones to radios and everything in between, all thanks to a few bills brought to the floor and passed based on the emergency broadcast system and some little known FCC regulations. Looking within the FCC two more PS members were identified—in the yearbook their hands were behind their backs so no rings were spotted—they were both electrical engineers who furthered their careers at MIT and are now big-wigs within this governmental establishment.
It seemed there were many players but only a select few had keys to the car and were able to take it out for a joy ride. The car itself had low miles on it. It seemed only every now and then was it being used and it was used to further the career of the big man himself, like in the case of the Holiday Mall Massacre, oh, how the President was praised by his swift actions that day. So the big mystery was exactly when was this thing going to become fully operational and to what extent was it going to play in everybody’s life?
Jorja and Greg’s most difficult task at hand was not putting up the façade of their daily grind, no, actually it was the task of not becoming drawn to the dark side. They had this power at their finger tips, they despised it, hated it, yet were intrigued and fascinated, they could very well see the benefit, the greater good of the people. Criminals squelched almost where they stood, no more lying about your whereabouts on such and such a date; tap in the name, social security, and date and presto, scene of the crime. But all-in-all they promised each other they’d never use it… . except in the back of each of their minds they said only if they needed it.
Their next difficult task was to look for the so-called mole within the very walls of their place of business. They tried to find a past connection between Whitaker and the Director of the CIA, nothing was found. The director was a goody-two-shoe who worked his way up the ranks quite honestly. They tried the same thing with the next in line and nothing, yet someone had to prerequisite that machine and it should have been Jorja
“So what are we going to do Jorja?”
“Nothing we can do until we expose the person within the Intelligence Community.”
“What if there is no one to expose.”
“Impossible, it’s not like the president walks into the Virginia site and says, please hook this up.”
“True but it could just as well be you.”
“Me? I was the one who found it.”
“Exactly, you are the one who found it because you knew right where it was, you also have the authority to order the machine and get it connected to our network, plus you had that handy dandy little program, and then there is the fact we are both still alive.”
“You have a point but why would I want you to get involved?”
“Trust, face it Jorja, you trust me.”
“Yes I do but trust is a two way street and right now it seems you don’t trust me… I too can point the finger at you, you found plenty of hacks to get us into the system, you have the expertise to hide a server on our network, your skills are just as plausible as mine.”
“Damn it Jorja, I trust you… in fact I… . I…”
“I what?”
“Well… . I care about you,” he very much wanted to say that he loved her, “and I have to trust you. I know you are not involved… really I do… I’m just fucking paranoid anymore… these past few months have been driving me insane, they have me second guessing everything I do, where I go, who I see… every part of my life has changed… and not for the better I can assure you that.”
“Whether you trust me or not we are in this together.”
“I know, I know… but… . but… . let me ask you this… . then how the hell do you act so calmly knowing these people, whoever the fuck they are, know your every move?”
“Because I know their every move as well… . and so do you… . so far all the players we have uncovered are in this system, probably because of their first experiments, anyway… . for the most part I tend to believe at this stage of the game we know more about them than they do about us… assuming you played your cards right and covered our tracks… we have the upper hand and I intend to keep it that way.”
“Okay my dear… I will never second guess you again… so we go back to the cat and mouse game… we need some cheese.”
“A big piece.”
. . .