This time, Stockton had a pleasant smile. Even a smile didn’t mean things were going to go well but Mason smiled in return and said, “Good afternoon Madam President.”
“Hi Mason, sit down.” Stockton heaved herself up and came around to sit across from him. This was a good sign, usually when she was angry she stayed behind the Resolute desk. “Any issues I should be aware of before we start talking about Donsaii?”
Phillips took that question as a “good news—bad news” proposition. Glad that Stockton was interested in important, non-Donsaii issues; annoyed that Donsaii would still be the major topic of discussion. Taking the attitude that the best defense is a good offense, he brought her up to date on the status of a number of issues that he felt were far more important than whether or not they’d tracked Donsaii down. These ranged from organized crime, to drug running, to terrorists but about the time he felt like he was getting his stride, Stockton put up a hand. “It sounds like you have those well in hand. My compliments on a well laid out strategy for finding those terrorists in South Carolina.”
“Well, they’re more in the nature of crazy red-neck survivalists than true terrorists, but they do pose a threat.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s move on to Donsaii. What have you learned there?”
Internally, Phillips sighed. He didn’t let it show through to the outside though. “Well, you’re aware that neither the military, nor the CIA have been able to track any egress from Cuba?”
“I thought some kind of aircraft crashed the night of her escape?”
And what a tragedy it would be if Donsaii had been on board, Phillips thought to himself. Aloud, he said, “Well, they did track an intermittent radar return that might have come from Cuba. Unfortunately, of the aircraft sent to investigate, the only one to get ‘eyes on’ reported ‘flying saucers.’ Then the craft disappeared, perhaps crashed into the waves, but a search of the site didn’t turn up any wreckage.”
“You sent down subs?”
“The wreck happened over the ‘Cayman Trough’ a part of the Caribbean that’s over 4 miles deep. Only research subs, which have a very limited field of view, can get down that deep, so the chances of finding anything would be extremely remote.”
“So you think she’s a goner?” Stockton asked, barely concealing her relish of the possibility.
What could make her hate Donsaii so much? Phillips wondered, but he responded, “No, I think that the radar return they got so excited about was some kind of spurious signal. The ‘flying saucer’ report calls everything they saw into doubt.”
“Well, if she’s not at the bottom of that trench, where is she?”
“Most likely? She’s still on Cuba. They’d be happy to have her and certainly wouldn’t tell us about it. Alternatively? She got off the island somehow. We should have picked her up if she came back to the States. It’s really hard to fake an identity nowadays without the help of the Witness Protection people, and doing anything without ID is almost impossible in the States. So, I suspect she’s in some other country.”
“You’ve tapped the phones of all her relatives and associates?”
Trying not to roll his eyes, Phillips said, “Nobody has phones anymore. Tapping into their AI communications is pretty much impossible if they’re using PGR chips.”
“Oh, come on. I know you guys can tap in at the PGR Comm switching stations. Besides, surely you guys have built some kind of bugs based on that same PGR? Something you can install in their houses and on their AI headpieces that can send you untraceable intelligence about what’s going on?”
Phillips nodded. “We do, but we still need the court’s permission to do that kind of monitoring. We’ve asked but been denied.”
“Permission for tapping terrorists isn’t supposed to be a problem!”
“The court didn’t agree that Donsaii met the definition of a terrorist.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit! She’s holding the entire country hostage to her control of these ‘one ended ports.’”
“The court took the stance that she has not engaged in violence or the threat of violence and that, in fact, her suppression of dangerous port technology represents an ‘anti-terrorist’ position.”
“Find a different judge!”
Phillips shrugged, “We’ll try, but that’s gonna be a hard row to hoe.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll guarantee she’s not as squeaky clean as she acts. Start investigating her personal life and finances. I’ll bet you find plenty of indiscretions that we can nail her to the wall with.”
“We can’t ‘nail her’ if we can’t find her. And, aren’t you at all worried that if we continue to treat her in such a hostile fashion, we’ll drive her into the arms of another country? She may already be in such a country, Cuba for instance.”
Stockton waved dismissively, “We don’t need to nail her in person if we just make everyone hate her. You seem to think we need Donsaii more than she needs her country, but that’s a load of crap. She’s just a spoiled little girl, admittedly good at sports, who made a lucky physics discovery. Undoubtedly, the grown-ups at her company are the ones that produced the value from that discovery. Whether she’s already at the bottom of that Caribbean trench or she leaves our country, the country’ll be the better for it. Once you figure out just what kind of indiscretions she’s committed, we’ll smear her in the press and all her so called fans will disappear. As soon as the public starts treating her as a pariah, we’ll nationalize her company and start selling its products to the rest of the world at a premium. Trust me, we’re going to turn this negative into a positive.”
Phillips stared at his President. She’s either bat-shit crazy or completely out of touch with reality! Briefly he wondered whether he should try to stand up to her. After a moment he decided she’d just fire him and put a complete incompetent in his place. Look at the people she’s got on that Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs! And her Science Advisor’s a real piece of work too. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly. At least from the inside I can try to minimize the damage, he thought to himself.
***
Hiking up the hill behind the lodge, the Kinrais family was in good spirits. Ell brought up the rear with Lane. “How are you doing?” she asked quietly.
“Fine,” Lane said, looking at Ell with a musing look on her face.
“You aren’t feeling stressed? Reliving the attack?”
“No. I appreciate your concern, but not every assault victim gets PTSD you know?”
Ell looked at her appraisingly, then shrugged, “Some of them are in denial though.” She smiled, “You aren’t one of those, are you? If you are, counseling is supposed to help.”
Lane grinned at her. “Well if I’m really in denial maybe I wouldn’t know it. I promise that if I start having trouble I’ll get help, OK?”
Ell nodded, “I just want to make sure you’re not pretending you’re fine but actually about to have a crisis. I don’t want us to bury our heads in the sand.”
“OK, OK, enough,” Lane said. “I am curious about one thing though.”
“What’s that?”
“How’d you get there so fast?” Lane tilted her head curiously, “It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes between when I called, and when you showed up. I don’t understand how you even knew where I was? They took the chip out of my headband as soon as I called out for help and my AI doesn’t have permission to give my ‘last location’ to anyone but the police.”
Ell stopped, looking ashen. “I’m so sorry Lane. That biker guy worried me, so when I said goodbye to you at the bar, I put a tracker on you.”
“A what?”
“Well, it was actually just a port that I could put a GPS antenna through to find you.”
Lane stared at her, “How did you know I was in trouble? Were you listening in on me?”
“Uh, no,” Ell said, blushing, “I had my AI listen for stress in your voice. So I have no idea what happened or what you said, up ‘til the point where you
yelled ‘No, dammit! Let go of me!’ and my AI decided you were stressed.”
Lane looked doubtful, “Your AI can recognize stress in someone’s voice?”
“Um, yeah, I have a pretty high end AI. It downloaded algorithms for that.”
“Hey,” Shan called from a ways up the trail. The rest of the group had stopped and were looking back at Lane and Ell. “You guys hikin’ or gossipin’?”
Lane grimaced, “We’d better start on up the trail. Years of experience tells me your new hubby won’t let up ‘til we do.” Ell and Lane started hiking up towards the rest of the group. Lane glanced at Ell out of the corner of her eye, “It’s pretty hard to be pissed at you for putting this… tracker thing on me, considering that it saved my butt. But still, you got there awfully fast. What were you doing, hanging around nearby ‘cause you were that sure those guys were bad actors?”
“Uh, no, but I have a way to get around pretty fast.”
“A way to get around pretty fast?”
Ell shrugged, “I’d rather not say how. It’s a big part of my plan for staying out of Stockton’s clutches. I wouldn’t want you to accidentally get trapped into saying something about it…”
At the top of the hill behind the lodge the Wildberry had built a small tower that let folks see out over the surrounding forests. The Kinrais climbed up and crowded into the little viewing platform at the top. They gazed in wonder at the view of the mountains and valleys they could take in from there. Though they knew that people lived in the surrounding area, the dense trees kept almost all signs of civilization hidden away.
After oohing and aahing for a while they started climbing down. As Ell started to get on the ladder though, Shan touched her arm. “Hey, how about if we stay here and talk a bit?”
Ell grinned slyly at him, “That’d be fun.”
He snorted, “I meant actually talk.” He turned and yelled down to his family, “Hey, Raquel and I are gonna stay up here and enjoy the view for a bit.” He turned back to Ell who crossed her arms and gave him a disappointed look. “Really. We haven’t had much time to talk. What have you been doing in the couple months between your escape in February and our little vacation here in April?”
Ell sat down on the bench, stretched out her legs and put her arms behind her head, staring consideringly out at the horizon. “I don’t know…” she said hesitantly, “whether I should tell you all of it, because it isn’t all legal and that might make you complicit for not turning me in.” She turned and grinned up at him, “Assuming you didn’t just turn me in for the reward, that is.”
Shan sat down beside her on the little bench, putting his arm around her shoulders. He sighed, “I imagine I’m complicit already, for loving you and being married to you and not turning you in as a simple prison escapee. I’d just as well dig in a little deeper ‘cause I want to be able to help.”
“So, Dr. Kinrais,” she intoned, “you were not only aware of your wife’s nefarious deeds, you also helped in their perpetration?”
Shan grinned at her and gave her a peck on the cheek, “Something like that.”
“OK, “Ell slipped her arm around his waist and her head onto his shoulder. “First, when I got into Texas with the other illegals, we all went to see a guy about ID. I let all of them go first because all they wanted were ID chips.”
Shan frowned, “So, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to make up a chip, but the chip can’t be any good if it doesn’t tie into a verifiable identity on the various governmental records.”
“Yeah, that’s what this guy does. I didn’t want an ID chip, I wanted to know how he did what you just outlined. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want to sell.”
“Well, yeah. He would have thought you wanted to go into business as a competitor.”
Ell nodded. “I had to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Shan’s eyes widened, “You threatened to kill him?”
Ell looked startled, “Is that what that means? I thought it meant you offered so much money they couldn’t turn you down.”
Shan snorted, “In the movie The Godfather, it meant ‘do as I say or I’ll kill you.’”
“Oh, well, what I did was offer him five kilos of gold.”
“Jeez, how much is that worth?”
“About $320,000.”
Shan grinned, “That would be hard to refuse. So how does he do it?”
“He’s got backdoors into several large governmental data repositories. You’re right, making the chips is simple but inserting supporting data into the records repositories is the real hassle.”
“How much data does he put in?”
“Well, he’s pretty lazy. He’s got a few basic data sets that his AI just inserts the person’s characteristics into. So, height, weight, eye, hair and skin color get filled into a boilerplate identity with the individual’s name and picture and fingerprints.”
Shan laughed, “But your history looks just like a lot of other individuals?”
“No, I suspect the government has AI’s looking for histories that are exactly alike. His boilerplate mixes a lot of possible histories up and prints out a history that the individual is supposed to memorize. I suspect that most of them can’t really remember their supposed history very well and that the police use a few questions based on their supposed history to catch them.”
“So,” Shan squinted out at the horizon, “did you have him mix you up an identity like that?”
“No, I bought his backdoors. For some of the past two months I’ve been working on making up identities with complex histories. I used his backdoors to get from one government system to another and then out into the private sector. So my new identities aren’t just evident in a few databases like the Social Security, Driver’s License and IRS computers; they’re everywhere. These IDs have birth records at hospitals, school records back to age two, bank accounts that go back to age eighteen and so on.”
“Holy crap! I’ve gone from wondering what you’ve done with all your time to wondering how you managed to do all that in just two months? Was it just one or two identities?”
“Oh, no, lots of IDs. But, once I understood how to do it and set up a framework for it, Allan did all the work. In fact, he could make me another ID in about five minutes now.”
“But… you’ve memorized the details for all those IDs?”
“Well, no. When I actually need the details, Allan can feed them to me through the ports in my ears.”
“So, now I’m back to wondering what you’ve been doing with all your time?” He winked, “Why haven’t you been making conjugal visits to your poor husband?”
“Well, I’ve been spending money. Lots of money.”
Shan arched an eyebrow interrogatively.
“Maybe ‘investing’ is a better term. I’ve been buying real estate all over the world. I’ve bought a few companies and a lot of international stock.”
Shan frowned, “What kind of real estate?”
“Well, there’s fifty three acres on the other side of that little peak you see to the west there, and a 944 acre plot over on the east side of Asheville. Undeveloped raw land, here, there and everywhere, owned under all kinds of different identities. Bought a few hotels and resorts too, ones that needed some investment to freshen them back up and make them competitive again. I’m trying to make sure that if Stockton shuts me down as ‘Ell,’ that I’ll be able to go to one of my other identities, cash out some of the holdings in that name and get back to doing research.”
“That reminds me. How is it that the FBI isn’t all over your Raquel identity and me? I mean, the government set up your identities, how is it that they don’t know about them?”
“I think you’re making the same mistake a lot of people do in treating the ‘government’ as a single entity with full knowledge of what all its parts are doing. It isn’t a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, it’s more like you not knowing what your distant cousin’s hand is doing. I have been meani
ng to ask the lady in the Marshall’s office who set up my old identities about it though.”
Shan shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of confusion. “Wait, back to your new identities. What if someone checks your fingerprints, figures out they’re the same as Ell Donsaii’s?”
“I’ve got prosthetic fingerprints I can pop out of my umbilical port and put on my fingers in a just a few seconds.”
Shan frowned, “And people won’t see them on your fingers?”
Ell shook her head, “They’re transparent. Here, look.” She spoke to Allan a moment and held her cupped hand just below her umbilicus. Something fluttered into her hand. She said, “Now, watch this.” She pulled a little tab off of it, stuck it to her index finger, pulled off another tab, like on a band aid, and rubbed it down onto the finger. She held it up, wiggled it around and said, “See.”
Shan stared. He couldn’t actually see the membrane she’d just glued on her finger. He reached out and touched her index and long fingers, rubbing his finger over them. He couldn’t feel a difference either. “That’s amazing!”
Ell giggled, “You ain’t seen nothing yet buster. Watch this!” Ell spoke to Allan again and her face suddenly changed shape.
“What the Hell!” Shan said, leaning back to get a broader view. “What just happened?”
“Well, I don’t think you ever saw me done up as ‘Belle,’ but for that disguise I had these little silicone prostheses I tucked into my cheeks, kind of like the lumps of cotton wool Marlon Brando wore in The Godfather, but not so over the top.”
Shan nodded dubiously to show he understood.
“So, I molded some prostheses out of silicone to go between my upper gums and cheeks and different ones to go between my lower gums and my cheeks. I even have ones to go between my front gums and my lips. They aren’t all that big, they just make subtle changes.”
“But, you didn’t put any silicone in your mouth a second ago.”
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