[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  Then the recording ended.

  I couldn't tell if Innerva had chosen that moment to end the call, or if the man who'd bagged the phone had ended the call. I guessed that if he'd noticed the phone was live he wouldn't have ended the call. Or, at least, he would have discussed ending it with the people in the room before doing so. I also guessed that Innerva wouldn't have ended the call. She was all about transparency, about data becoming public. There's no way she would have wanted to end a call that had a chance to give her more data to work with. I figured the man must have pressed "end" by accident while bagging the phone.

  There was a bang on the bathroom door and I sat up, frozen. "Alex, are you okay?"

  It was Quinn's voice. She needed to use the bathroom.

  Back in the garage, I continued walking laps around the worktables, and noticed something I hadn't seen earlier. Above the garage door we'd come through, there was a little loft. I'd missed it before because the wall, the door, and the loft itself were all painted white, and a white cloth hung down, blocking the view into the loft. There was a wooden ladder leaning on the wall next to it.

  "What's that?" I called to Tudayapi, who was feeding more paper into the Telex machine.

  "A loft," she said, looking up briefly.

  I walked across the garage and stood next to her. Quinn was cutting the pages with a large pair of scissors and placing them in what I hoped was the correct order. I could tell how hard it was for her to resist the urge to sit down and read them.

  "What's up there?" I asked Tudayapi.

  "Nothing."

  "Really?"

  "Well, nothing that would interest you, anyway."

  Quinn said, "Give it a rest, Alex, we're almost done here."

  "Should just be a few more minutes," Tudayapi said. "We're on the last disc."

  "We really can't thank you enough," Quinn said. "Alex, get her some more iced tea."

  I did, and, by the time I got back, the Telex was quiet. Quinn was cutting and stacking the final pages. "Any chance you have an old binder or something?" she asked.

  "Probably," Tudayapi said. She checked a few shelves in the garage, then went into the main house.

  By the time the door closed, Quinn was standing under the loft, waving for me to follow her.

  "Boost me up," she called out.

  I really hadn't cared about what was in the loft. More computer parts, I figured, but of a slightly fancier variety than the ones down below.

  "Boost me," she said again, as I walked over.

  Reluctantly, I made my hands into a cup and Quinn stepped up, her grimy boot slippery on my palms. She wasn't small, but she was strong, and, after boosting her a foot or so, she was able to grab onto the ledge of the loft and pull herself up so her neck was at the bottom of the cloth. "Push."

  I gave her a big push just as she swung one arm off the ledge of the loft and swiped at the cloth, ducking her head under it. "Higher."

  I pushed again, to the point where her boots were resting on my shoulders, her head almost to the height of the ceiling. Just as I noticed the tracks on the bottom of her boots digging into my shoulder, she said. "Okay, lemme down."

  With that, she pulled her head out from behind the cloth and slid down through my arms and onto the floor. A moment later she was back across the garage, fiddling with the stack of papers again. I brushed the dirt off my shoulders and wiped my hands on my jeans, a little out of breath.

  Quinn seemed unfazed.

  "What was up there?" I asked.

  "Nothing you'd understand."

  Now I wanted to know, but it wasn't worth the fight. Especially since Tudayapi was back, carrying an extra-wide 3-ring binder and a hole punch.

  The instant we finished arranging the binder, Quinn bolted for the car. I thanked Tudayapi and jogged to the car, worried that Quinn might be trying to ditch me.

  When I got there, Quinn was already in the passenger seat, thumbing through the pages. I hopped in the driver seat and, without looking up, Quinn handed me the keys. "Drive."

  "Where?"

  "I don't know, but the goal now is to get somewhere safe and figure out what's in this binder."

  Chapter 18

  Minutes after leaving Owyhee, we passed a "Welcome to Idaho" sign, and the landscape began changing. The rock formations we'd passed on the way into Owyhee gave way to long stretches of two-lane highway with flat, treeless land on either side. We passed a sign that read: NEXT REST AREA: 31 MILES

  "The rest area," I said. "We'll stop there."

  Quinn nodded without looking up from the binder.

  A series of low hills appeared in the distance and I caught myself hoping that the rest area would be nestled between them. I knew it was silly, but I felt less safe with the binder. Somehow the thought of reading it nestled between hills calmed me.

  But Quinn wasn't waiting until we got to the rest area. She was flipping through the pages erratically, stopping occasionally to glance at her passenger-side mirror. A couple times, I took my eyes off the road to look down at the pages, trying to get a hint of what we had.

  I'd never seen anything like it. Whatever sorts of files had been on the drive had been sloppily converted into an unreadable mess of garbage characters, files without headers, headers without files, and segmented texts with the segments in the wrong order. Every once in a while, I'd see a word or a series of numbers that seemed to have meaning, but without context, and looking for only a second at a time, I was lost.

  After about five minutes, Quinn started swearing under her breath. After seven, she closed the binder violently. We were passing into a beautiful valley with a large lake, surrounded by low brown hills, but she didn't seem like the kind of person who'd be admiring the scenery. Her eyes were trained on her side mirror and, after a moment, she tilted the rearview mirror to her side.

  "Hey, I need that to drive," I said, but she ignored me and turned back to the binder.

  A minute later, she was swearing under her breath again. Slamming the binder again.

  "Find anything useful yet?" I asked.

  "It's a mess," she said. "Worthless."

  "Any way you could discuss things without judging them?"

  Quinn ignored me, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.

  I figured I'd try again because, even though I was attempting to conceal my excitement, I needed to know what was in that binder. "Do me a favor," I said, "Just read me a few random sections."

  "Oh, read to you, why, that would be lovely." She said it so quickly I figured she'd had her sarcasm program loading before I opened my mouth. "Here, I'll skip to the good part. The essential clue that will tell us why we're being hunted by a couple murderous CIA thugs."

  She flipped open the binder. "Slash slash slash, pound sign, pound sign, pound sign. Half a page of blank space. Is it okay if I don't read you the blank space, but just summarize it? Good? Okay then. Slash, slash, pound sign, ampersand—"

  "Quinn."

  "No, don't interrupt. We're getting to the good part: three straight pages of numbers." She cleared her throat. "Seven one two six nine four eight one one one zero zero four three eight—"

  "I get the point."

  She slammed the binder again, shifted her eyes back to the mirrors.

  I said, "Maybe scanning the folder would be a more efficient way to go. Look for anything useable, anything recognizable, rather than reading the gibberish?" She didn't respond, and I started looking for the rest area exit. "The way I'd handle it is to make my eyes go soft, start on page one and go page-by-page, spending no more than five seconds on each page, looking for names or words or sentence fragments that seem familiar. I know I saw a few things that looked like names back at Tudayapi's. Just try it."

  Quinn opened the binder again and spent the next five minutes trying what I suggested. It was actually a pretty big deal. She didn't grunt, she didn't say something sarcastic. I know it went against her nature—both using my method and the method itself, but she tried it. Every on
ce in a while, she'd read something out loud. Some names I didn't recognize. The word "file" over and over. Some dates, mostly from the forties and fifties.

  The she closed the binder. "Operation Mockingbird," she said.

  "Operation what?"

  "Holy hell," she said quietly. "Operation Mockingbird."

  I glanced down at the binder, but Quinn's arm was covering the page. She was studying the mirrors again.

  We passed a sign that read: REST AREA 5 MILES

  "Quinn, what are you talking about, what's Operation Mockingbird?"

  "Quiet," she said, and I followed her eyes back and forth between her mirror and the rearview mirror.

  "Quinn!"

  "So, okay," she said at last, "we're being followed."

  She said it kind of casually, without looking at me, and I thought she meant in general. As in, somewhere out there, people are following us.

  Then she said, "The same gray car's been behind us since we left Owyhee."

  "I'm sure it has. There are almost no exits on this road. Besides," I said, checking my mirror, "the car behind us is blue."

  "I mean the one behind that. The gray car two cars back has been two cars back since we left Owyhee."

  I'd gained some trust in Quinn over the last twenty-four hours, but I wasn't buying it. "Isn't it more likely that if there is a gray car behind us, which I can't see right now, it's just heading the same general direction we are on a road with, again, almost no exits?"

  "I'm sure they are headed the same direction we are. Because they're following us."

  "C'mon, Quinn. I'm just saying that it's more likely—"

  "And I'm just saying, please name one thing that's happened recently that was likely."

  I sighed, then checked the mirror again. We'd left the clouds behind in Owyhee, and the late afternoon sun was reflecting off the light blue Prius behind us. Behind the Prius, there was definitely a gray sedan of some sort, but not following closely enough to see who was in it. "Are you sure you're not just…imagining it. You've seemed kinda all over the place for the last half hour."

  Her eyes were darting back and forth between the mirrors and the road ahead, but she was speaking calmly, like she was barely connected to what she was saying.

  "I recognize patterns. It's what I do. It's why I'm good with hardware and codes, it's why I see through the official versions of stories. I've been looking at the cars behind us on this road. Not that there are a lot of exits, but there are some, and people pass each other or get passed, so there's been a kind of rotation in this mirror. A big semi, a blue minivan, a red sports car. The vehicle behind us varies. But the vehicle behind that one doesn't. The gray car stays a constant distance away. It never gets close enough that I can make out more than its color. It never drops far enough back that I can't see it. It's just there, a little gray blur two cars back, with eroded white letters at the bottom of the rearview reminding me that, however distant and half-visible it may look, objects in mirror are closer than they appear."

  "If they're following us, why didn't they come at us at Tudayapi's? If they're following us and they're the badass killers you think they are, why are they just following us instead of forcing us to turn down some deserted dirt road, burying us in the desert?" I was growing irritated, and the contents of that binder were nagging at me like a new text message I couldn't check because I was in the other room. Plus, I was exhausted. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just tired."

  "You've barely slept. Sleep deprivation is torture. It weakens your mind. Here, look, pull over for a second, let me drive."

  "But on the tiny possibility that they are following us—"

  "Nah, you're probably right that they're not. Just do me a favor. Pull over."

  "Why?"

  "I want to drive."

  "We're almost at the rest area."

  "Just do this for me, please. There, next to that sign." She pointed at a large green sign with white lettering: REST AREA 2 MILES (FREE WI-FI)

  I shot Quinn a dubious look, but I'd learned to pick my battles with her, so I slowed the car. The rumble strips let out a slow thrum under the tires as I eased onto the shoulder, just past the sign. When I opened the door, the heat hit me like a blow. It was four in the afternoon, but it must have been ninety degrees still.

  "That sun would kill us if it had a chance," Quinn said.

  "Thank God for air conditioning."

  Quinn slid into the driver's seat, moved the seat up a couple inches, then started the car.

  "Okay, let's go," I said, shutting my door.

  The AC kicked back in, but it was weak and would take minutes to re-cool the car. But Quinn didn't pull out right away. Instead, she stared into the rearview mirror, which she'd adjusted back to her side. I turned around and looked out the back, and I was starting to get worried about what she was going to do.

  The blue car that had been behind us was now passing us, and the gray car was only a hundred yards back. Quinn was mumbling under her breath.

  Fifty yards away.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  Then the gray car sped by us. Didn't slow down, didn't do anything out of the ordinary. There were two people in the car, but they passed us going seventy-five or so, and I couldn't make them out.

  "I told you they weren't following us," I said, feeling more relieved than I'd expected.

  Quinn eased onto the highway. "That doesn't mean they weren't following us."

  I wanted to disagree, but I remembered the way Holly and Kenny had chased us through the Fremont Street Experience. Tailing us, but never getting too close.

  Quinn took the exit to the rest area and idled about fifty feet from the parking area, studying every car. The gray sedan wasn't there. She parked by a fenced-in dog park, where two or three people were watching five or six dogs. Off to the left, a small bathroom building was surrounded by dry grass and a few wooden picnic tables.

  "What was it you said before?" I asked. "The thing in the binder. Operation Mockingbird?"

  Chapter 19

  "You haven't heard of it?" she asked as she turned off the car.

  It did ring a bell, but I couldn't place it. "I…I might have."

  "Pathetic."

  "Quinn, I know this might be news to you, but most people have not heard of most of the things you spend your time thinking about. And what happened to no judgement?"

  She grunted dismissively. "What the hell do they do with their time, then?"

  I ignored her and asked, "What is it? And—please, oh please—give me the short, unbiased version."

  "Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program designed to influence media coverage. It was elaborate, international, and wildly illegal. I—"

  "I can tell you want to go on," I said, grabbing my laptop bag from the back seat, "but I want to check it out for myself."

  Quinn might have been the world's leading expert on Operation Mockingbird, but I didn't want her opinion on anything that involved the CIA. She was sure to filter any facts through seven layers of paranoia. "I'll read and tell you everything I find out."

  "Find out from where? Huffington Post, The New York Times, Propaganda dot com?"

  I got out of the car and stepped around to the driver-side window. Quinn didn't move. She was kind of bent over, arms wrapped around her chest, clutching at the binder. I tapped on her window three times. When she finally raised her head, I offered up my cheesiest grin. I knew that would piss her off. She frowned and turned her head towards the empty passenger seat.

  Then I panicked.

  The car was off, but the keys were still in the ignition, and, for a moment, I was sure she was going to ditch me. She could lock the car and peel out from the rest stop in seconds.

  I tapped on the window again. She didn't turn to look at me, but after a long pause, she got out, slammed the binder on top of the car, made me promise to use the encrypted browser she'd downloaded for me, and walked slowly to the dog park, cursing under her breath the whole way.


  I grabbed the binder and took a seat at a rickety picnic table near the bathrooms. The hot wind blasted my face, carrying with it the smell of stale urine. Occasionally the wind shifted and I got a hit of the mesquite trees that surrounded the dog park. Quinn seemed occupied with a friendly brown dog with a wrinkly face, and I cracked the binder and found the page she had been on. The paper had that slick, oily feel, an unpleasant glossiness.

  I figured out quickly that there weren't actually any details about Operation Mockingbird in the binder. Just a one page list of names with some slightly scrambled text at the top: "MocHingb1rd Level 1 Assets." I scanned the list and thought I recognized a few of the names, but I wasn't sure. I flipped through the binder a bit, but gave up after twenty straight pages of unreadable gibberish. I was sure there was more useful information in the binder, but I decided to focus on Google instead.

  Like any self-respecting Internet searcher, I started with the Wikipedia entry. It confirmed my basic understanding of Operation Mockingbird: the CIA had a controversial relationship with the press, the details and extent of which were murky.

  After Wikipedia, I found what seemed to be the definitive expose on Operation Mockingbird, a cover story from Rolling Stone published in October of 1977 and now posted on the personal website of Carl Bernstein. I hadn't ever read the piece, but of course I knew of Carl Bernstein. You probably do, too. He's the Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein, the guys who broke the Watergate story. Maybe you read All the President's Men, or at least saw the movie. Bernstein was the guy played by Dustin Hoffman. Anyway, he's the real deal. One of the great investigative journalists on Earth, at least when it comes to political stuff. If I'm the McDonald's of journalism, he's got three Michelin stars.

  The piece was long and dense, and I read through it slowly while glancing occasionally at Quinn, who seemed to have made a new friend. Every time I looked up, she was petting, or chasing, or being chased by the dog.

  The Bernstein story opened with a series of bullet points, which can be summarized as follows: The CIA's involvement with the American press began during the early stages of the Cold War and continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception. Nothing especially earth-shattering. But as I read on, I saw that Bernstein had uncovered all sorts of details no one else had.