by Rob Horner
He’d used his phone as a flashlight twice in the past hour or so.
Here he was, digging through his barracks room, crawling around under his car, and completely ignoring the one thing anyone with basic hacking knowledge could track, and might even be able to tap. His in-dash clock showed 6:15. Before he headed back to base, he needed one more thing from Wal-Mart.
4
Breakfast at the galley was a time-killer for Travis, just a way to put fuel in the tank and pass the last twenty minutes until he could head to AIMD. He had nothing against the galley food; breakfast was, as always, the best meal of the day, with an omelet-to-order station, bacon, sausage, French toast…a full buffet.
He didn’t remember a thing he’d eaten as 7:00 am finally arrived. Putting his plate and utensils on the dirty dish conveyor belt, he hurriedly exited the galley and got back into his car.
The Saturday Duty Section workers were just arriving as Travis pulled into the front parking lot of the AIMD building. He parked directly across from the front entrance, then headed into the shop. AT3 Kale looked surprised at seeing Travis, most likely because of the civilian clothes, but the junior petty officer didn’t question his presence. There were no rules against personnel showing up in their off time—if anything, such actions were praised, though rarely rewarded.
“Duty swap?” Kale asked.
“No,” Travis replied, “just need a phone number.”
“Maybe I know it?” Kale offered. Petty Officer Third Class Kale was a good worker—he hadn’t let Travis down yet—but he was notoriously curious.
“That’s okay,” Travis replied, moving to the file cabinet by the Leading Petty Officer’s desk. Inside the top drawer was a small wooden box, an anachronism in today’s age of digital records, a way of storing index cards that predated the Rolodex. Each card contained the home address and recall phone numbers of one of the sailors assigned to the work center.
Kale moved off, muttering, “All right, be that way, then.”
Travis smiled as he pulled Sherry’s card from the box. Hurrying to one of the two large office all-in-one Hewlett-Packard printers, he scanned and copied the card. If he couldn’t get her on the phone well…he’d worry about that later. Replacing the card in the box and the box in the cabinet, he waved good-bye to the air—in case anyone was watching—and hurried back out to his car.
If there was a legitimate reason for his phone to be tapped, then it stood to reason hers would be as well.
It certainly fit into the chain of events he’d uncovered, however tenuous some of the links in that chain might be. He’d have to direct her to a different phone. Opening the last item he’d purchased from Wal-Mart, Travis removed the AT&T Go Phone from its plastic shell and plugged its charging cable into the USB port on his stereo. He scanned the instructions for activation and, once the phone had enough juice to turn on, went through the activation steps.
What if she didn’t believe him?
He’d worry about that if it happened.
He stopped himself from using his new phone to call her. If their phones were tapped, he’d be giving his new number to their watchers.
Smiling grimly, Travis headed back into AIMD to place the call from the work center phone.
5
Travis’s first two attempts earned him the familiar tones of an incorrect number. What if her phone had been disconnected? What if she’d given a wrong number intentionally?
What if he’d misread the number?
Looking more closely at the copy, he could see where a number on the original card had been partially erased and written over, so a 6 looked like an 8. Changing the number, he dialed again.
As soon as it was answered, Travis knew he had Sherry on the other end. It was the same feeling from when their eyes met, though a little weaker, like their connection was attenuated by distance.
His first words came out as no more than a soft croak.
God, what was wrong with him? Why was he so nervous about talking with this woman?
Still, he managed to get his point across, warning her early-on not to say his name. She knew who he was, and that amazed him. They’d never so much as said “hello” to each other.
Travis gave Sherry his smartphone number and instructions to call it from a prepaid phone and let it ring twice, which should give him a callback number. He’d call her back from his prepaid phone. He was breathing hard again by the time he finished speaking, and he didn’t know why.
As he got back into his car and headed off base, he realized he was looking forward to her return call, was anticipating talking to her more than anything in recent memory.
6
At a few minutes after 8 am, outside of a small building tucked away at the edge of an airfield in the northeast corner of NAS Oceana, Lieutenant Barnes used a special passkey to enter the surveillance building nicknamed Watchtower. Three years before, this building was a warehouse holding spare electronic components for the decommissioned F-14 Tomcat. It was emptied and renovated prior to X-22 coming onto the base. Lieutenant Barnes hadn’t been a part of the renovations; he’d come on board as base liaison to Captain Ortega, Naval Intelligence Services, the same day X-22 reported for duty. His sole mission at the time was to collate reports from the Watchtower personnel chief, Greg Davis, and whomever was currently functioning as X-22’s work center chief, most recently David Crane. He was also supposed to maintain a loose communication with the agents brought in to interact with the subjects. There had been several assigned to X-22 over the years, but only Agent Bassett had been able to establish a relationship. Agent Frazier was a new addition, though his relationship had seemed more secure and established before X-104 arrived.
Loose communication, indeed! They would be introduced to him, then sent off to do…whatever. They filed reports on some asinine schedule that could only have been concocted by a civilian. Secure reports! To their field supervisors! After the reports had been reviewed and—most likely—scrubbed, Lieutenant Barnes would get a summary, which he dutifully reported up the chain.
It was a joke of a system. He was the proverbial Eyes on the Ground, and he didn’t know what he was looking for. Neither did the agents assigned to the principals, which made even less sense. If you don’t know what constitutes aberrant behavior, you end up having to report everything, which makes for a lot of busy work, a lot of feeling like you’re contributing to some grand project, but no real sense of accomplishment. Just like every other government bureaucracy; pay a lot of people to do very little, just so you could have more people to blame when the shit hit the fan.
And who do you think would catch the brunt of that rolling-crashing turd-boulder when it started to fall?
The guy in the middle, that’s who.
Lieutenant Barnes had every intention of avoiding that outcome.
And the best place to start was here at Watchtower. He’d begun the process a few days before by having a dedicated audio transmitter installed. He’d visited Watchtower several times over the years, getting to know the personnel under his command, establishing a rapport that would make the personnel comfortable in answering direct questions without worrying about stepping outside the chain of command.
On a Saturday, only Lisa Pearson would be in the building. Barnes wasn’t sure who the nighttime person would be.
Entering the Watchtower was like entering an empty—albeit clean—warehouse. Except for a small office turned break room, the downstairs was deserted. The upper floor was a catwalk ringing the large open area that constituted most of the downstairs, with several small rooms opening off the catwalk. A single metal-girder staircase led up to the catwalk from outside the break room.
Lisa would already be aware of his entrance, courtesy of the video camera showing the building’s exterior, the parking lot, and the door. As the lieutenant mounted the metal staircase, she emerged from the monitoring room, what Harry liked to call the Nerve Center. The moniker Watchtower was another of his verbal brain shits.
Lisa was a pretty woman in her thirties, from the neck up. Tall with long, brown hair, she probably had great success on the varying dating sites she used. Her attractiveness ended once you could see the rest of her, as far as Lieutenant Barnes was concerned. A self-professed “Foodie” who saw no benefit in a healthy body weight, Lisa represented every gluttonous, selfish, undisciplined trait that he detested about many Americans these days. Still, she was an extremely capable monitoring technician with an eye for detail that surpassed anyone else on the team; he never had cause to doubt her reports.
“What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Barnes,” she said as he reached the top of the stairs. Like her face, her voice was also striking, soft and husky, with a languid Southern drawl. “What fortunate wind blew you to my office today?”
“I received a report of some dreams the subjects had last night,” he said, smiling slightly. Her personality never failed to draw a smile out of him, regardless of what he thought of her physical condition.
“Oh yes, Harry recorded it in the log. Passing strange it was. I haven’t had time to queue it up yet to see for myself. Y’all want to go downstairs for a cup o’ Joe? It’s fresh-brewed, and I can have that tape ready by the time you get back.”
Having reached the top of the stairs and in no mood for any more acid in his stomach, Lieutenant Barnes declined. “I’ll just wait in the room while you get it ready,” he said, walking past her and taking the second chair, set slightly away from the main monitoring controls. Lisa bustled in after him, shutting the door, and squeezed herself into the primary chair before the main board controls. As she got settled, Barnes reached under the desk behind his chair and deactivated his special recorder.
While Lisa toggled switches, raised and lowered potentiometers, and alternately clacked keys on the keyboard and dragged and dropped video files with the mouse, Lieutenant Barnes looked at the various video monitors. None of the live feeds appeared to show anything happening—an empty barracks room with beds made, an empty bedroom, sheets in disarray, an empty bathroom, an empty kitchen, and an empty living room. On a separate monitor, a topographic map in the style of Garmin or TomTom showed two red dots moving in different directions away from the base. Lieutenant Barnes understood that at any time, the tracking program could be changed to a top down real-time feed courtesy of Google Earth, but that hogged processing power so was only used when necessary. On a final monitor to the right of the GPS system was a white screen showing lines of text, which tracked other important data like phone calls and Internet searches. Looking more closely at the screen, he noticed that the most recent entries appeared to be from that morning. He leaned in to look more closely.
“Et voila!” Lisa said, drawing his attention back to the big monitor on the left side of the control desk. There, as Harry had described it, were the two segments of video, one above the other. “Now let’s see what got Harry so excited,” she said, starting a synchronized playback of the two video streams.
Two minutes later, as the segment ended and Lisa enthused with commentary about how amazing it was that both X-22 and X-104 would wake at the same time, Lieutenant Barnes thought back to his earlier conversations with both Chief Davis and Harry the technician. Both had been accurate. The chief was more succinct but hadn’t left out any pertinent details. Being a man of few words himself, the lieutenant favored brevity. However, the chief’s report ended with a recitation of the awakening. Harry’s report continued, describing a period of frenzied cleaning.
What could that mean?
Since the other monitors continued to show empty rooms, Lieutenant Barnes asked, “Can you pull up the feeds from just after they awoke, and run them forward? I want to see if anything else happened.”
“Sure can, Mr. Barnes. Harry said something about the guy cleaning and the girl going back to bed but didn’t say anything else. You sure you don’t want some coffee while I get this ready? It’s this really strong blend I picked up from Starbucks, named after some country in Africa, I think. Sumatra?”
“Sumatra is in Indonesia,” Barnes said.
“Right, from over there near Africa, like I said,” Lisa prattled on. Lieutenant Barnes didn’t bother correcting her again.
On the far-right monitor, he noticed several new timestamps with data. Most of the lines were in all black text, such as 08122017 0700 RCTCHECK PASS, while others had blue text intermingled, so they almost resembled a browser hyperlink. 08122017 0748 7573401653 OUT 00:32.
“What’s the difference between these lines with blue and black?” Lieutenant Barnes asked.
“Oh, that monitors their cell phones, sir. It’s currently showing the girl’s phone. She’s such a pretty thing, reminds me of me when I was a bit younger. Most of the time, it’s just logging a silent ping, where the recording service connects with the phone for a split second and acknowledges a good connection.” She looked over at the screen for a second. “Blue numbers indicate a recorded phone call we can listen to. It highlights the number she connected with, followed by whether she called out or a call was received, and how long the call lasted.”
Lieutenant Barnes counted several lines with recorded calls between 0747 and 0810. “Looks like she’s been busy this morning,” he said.
“Sure does. I’ve got this video up and ready, so we can look at this first, or check out the calls. Up to you.”
“Let’s do the video first,” he said. He was intrigued and suspicious about the calls, but he had always lived by a code of working through things in order. The video came first.
Lisa turned back to her controls, and Lieutenant Barnes noted two monitors, each showing one of the principals, frozen in time at the moment they woke. He nodded, and time resumed. After only a few minutes, he asked Lisa to increase the speed of playback, so that ten seconds passed as one. As reported, both got out of bed and went to bathe. X-104’s video changed from bedroom, to bathroom, to kitchen as the time moved closer to 3:00am. X-22 returned to his room and tried to go back to sleep, though it was obvious from his restless movements that sleep wasn’t coming. At 3:05, X-104 climbed back into bed, where she remained motionless, while X-22 tossed and turned. At a few minutes past 4, X-22 rose from his bed and began the cleaning period Harry mentioned. At 10X speed, it truly was frenzied.
Small movements were unnoticeable in favor of large body-position changes. At one point, near 4:20, he paused for a moment beside his bureau, then got up, and left the room. He returned a few seconds later, though only the top of his head was visible, sliding across the bottom of the screen. The monitor filled with a flash of white light, only to be replaced a second later with a view of an unoccupied room. The time stamp showed 4:25. X-22 would be leaving the base at this time, heading to a donut franchise.
Something about the flash of light troubled Barnes. “Rewind to 4:23 and resume normal speed,” he said. Be ready to pause it.”
“You worried about that light, too?” Lisa asked as her fingers flew over the keyboard. “We get flashes like that if a car pulls up to park outside the room at night. Headlights, you know.”
At 4:23, X-22 walked from the far wall by the window toward the wall where the camera was situated, then left the room. Time eased forward perhaps thirty seconds before the edge of the door came into view again. Then came the seconds where the only part of the subject visible was the top of his head as he worked close to the wall. There was a brightening nimbus of light in the lower portion of the screen, very obviously not coming from the window. The light brightened, filling the monitor. A wave of something dark passed between the light source and the camera, then the light returned, receded, and was gone. The camera again looked out on an empty room. In real time, there was no way of knowing what had happened.
“Back up to where the light begins to get brighter, then advance at one-quarter time.”
“Yes, sir.”
At this slower speed, it was easy to see what happened. X-22 had used the light of his smart phone to look into the vent.
/> He knew they were watching him.
Chapter 9
Sherry
1
It took Sherry almost forty-five minutes to drive to Target, purchase a Verizon Samsung pre-paid phone, get a cup of coffee from Starbucks, and activate the device. Now, sitting outside the department store in her Nissan Sentra, pre-paid phone in hand, she felt nervous all over again. She fished in the pockets of her jeans for the notepad with Travis’ number on it and suffered a moment of panic when she couldn’t find it. Remembering her purse, she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the pad just under the snap closure.
The pre-paid phone was a flip model, a style she hadn’t used in several years. For some reason, it felt like she was betraying her iPhone to flip the thing open. It wouldn’t turn on.
Of course not.
Unlike an iPhone, these things didn’t come with a partial charge. Thankful her newer model Nissan had a USB port, she plugged the phone in, nervously drumming her fingers on the charcoal-leather steering wheel. Five minutes, she told herself. She’d give the phone five minutes to charge, then would try powering it on again. She turned on the radio, catching the tail end of what sounded like a five-person argument on Fox News. Even on a Saturday morning, they were debating something the President had done or not done, said or not said, tweeted or not tweeted. Stan listened to nothing else.
Pushing buttons, she turned to the 80’s channel, where Tears for Fears’ 1985 hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World was in mid-chorus. She reclined in the seat, forcing herself to relax.
Thoughts of Stan came with anger, now. When had that happened?
He’d left the house sometime last night and not come back, but she was all right with that, wasn’t she? She no longer believed they were married. Sherry had always been intuitive, which, contrary to popular belief, complimented logical thinking quite well, as long as you didn’t mind being asked to work backward to show how you arrived at an answer—thank you very much, Mr. Bland, Algebra teacher from hell.