by George Noory
It is also a good place to stay below the radar.
Ali asked about Franklin, the man they were going to ask for help.
“Is Franklin his first name or last?”
“I don’t think it’s either. He called himself simply Franklin when he came on the show. Some people don’t like to use their real names. If she thinks they’ll be interesting and don’t sound like they’re going to be trouble, my producer lets them stay anonymous. I met Franklin in person because he has a large stock of used nautical artifacts at his place—anchors, portholes, that sort of thing. I bought something for my beach house from him.”
“What did you mean when you said he dropped below the radar? Dodging creditors, that sort of thing?”
“More like being left alone to live his life without the government, businesses and neighbors constantly watching him. We leave a public footprint when we get a phone, a job, a house, a computer, credit card, passport, see a doctor, surf the Internet, whatever. Hell, we do it not just going to an ATM but driving down the street. Franklin’s one of those people who has set out to erase his tracks. He says it’s like being an outlaw on the run rubbing out the hoof prints of his horse to trick a posse.”
“He’s been abducted by aliens?”
“Not that I know of. This may come as a surprise to you, but not many of the millions of people who listen to my show say they’ve been abducted. However, like me, he has a heightened sense of awareness of the intrusions of privacy that governments at all levels practice.”
“He’s paranoid.”
“Most realists are. Like you and me.”
She ignored the jab. “What’s our story with him? The jealous husband you used with the cowboy?”
“Wouldn’t work. He’ll need the truth—paranoid people see through BS. The truth or as much of it as we can give him without compromising him or us. It wouldn’t be fair to ask for help and not tell him the last person I spoke to is dead.”
The road off Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Franklin’s house was on the ocean side of the mountains. It was paved with dirt and deep ruts, not the kind of road anyone would tackle for just for the hell of it. Which was one reason Franklin had his place at the end of it and made sure the road was never smoothed out.
The house and barn were hidden in a pine forest hundreds of feet from the boulevard. So was the clutter that surrounded the house and barn like a lake of castoffs from the sea—the anchors and portholes Greg mentioned, rusty old cannons removed from Davy Jones’s locker, the helm to steer an ocean liner or a day fisher, propellers to drive a ship, winches to raise the sails on a ten-meter sloop, lifeboats and dinghies, oars, lines, masts, booms, buoys, engines, figureheads from the bows of sailing ships, bowsprits, galley stoves on gimbals to rock with the sea and a host of other salty artifacts, nautical treasures or junk, depending on your perspective.
Greg found the collection both peculiar and special, like a nautical museum of shipwrecks. “You don’t get much of a chance to see the guts and bottoms of boats.”
“He sells this stuff?” Ali asked.
“Mostly he collects and hoards it. He wouldn’t take the money I offered for a porthole.”
“Probably professional courtesy. You’re both paranoid. Kindred spirits.”
“You keep walking into it—tossed any phone cards lately because you’re afraid the government is spying on you?”
“I’m beginning to think paranoia is a virus.”
Franklin came out of the barn to greet them. Fiftyish, wearing work clothes and a big leather apron, with gray-streaked black hair and a beard that was white at the chin, he was carrying a hammer he’d been using at a blacksmith’s forge that was smoldering in the barn.
He gave the glowing car a good look-over. “Lucky you came in something no federal agent would have had the guts or imagination to drive. I turned off the IED before you triggered it by running over it.”
“Roadside bomb,” Greg told Ali. “He’s telling us he’s annoyed we didn’t call ahead. But he doesn’t have a phone that anyone knows the number to.”
Nodding his head as if he understood their situation, Franklin gave Ali and Greg the same thorough look he had given the car. “Radio personality, attractive professional woman, should be out together on business or pleasure, but you both look grim. What’s the matter? Husband or wife trouble?”
Greg shook his head. “That was the line we used on the poor bastard who loaned us this Cad that looks like it’s ready to blast off on a mission to Mars. The truth is that we’re in trouble, big-time. With the government—the one we all know operates in secret. We didn’t want to leave tracks coming here even if we’d had your phone number.”
“What kind of government trouble?”
“Two people are dead,” Greg said. “We’re on the run. Some really crazy stuff is going on with the NRO. A secret file is missing. They think I have it. I don’t have it and the two men involved in stealing it are both dead.”
Franklin nodded repeatedly. “The NRO, yeah, that makes sense. Know what their motto is? ‘Vigilance from above.’ It’s really control from above. The NSA can’t get to you unless you go on the Internet, use a phone or do something to get into their purview, but the NRO has satellites up there every second of every day ready to spy down anywhere in the world.
“Those bastards have been after me for years. You would think people would have gotten wise to the NRO when they pulled off 9/11 but most of the people on the planet are cattle for slaughter.”
Ali looked from Franklin to Greg. “Pulled off 9/11? The NRO?”
“Conspiracy theory,” Greg said.
Franklin scoffed. “Conspiracy, hell, the damn truth and nothing but.”
Greg told her, “The NRO had scheduled for the morning of September 11, 2001, what they called a safety exercise for their headquarters building. An alarm was to go off and the employees would be told a plane was about to hit it and to abandon the building.”
“You have to be kidding me,” Ali said.
“It gets worse,” Greg said. “The NRO exercise was planned to go off at about the same time that 9/11 actually came off, both the NRO and the Pentagon are in Virginia, the Pentagon did get hit by one of the planes and there was a second plane that went down in a battle with passengers—”
“That would have hit the NRO,” Franklin said. “We know that was the actual target for the second plane because the building drill was for a real attack, not the excuse they gave. And the plane that hit the Pentagon took off from Dulles airport, which was what the NRO plan called for.”
“Why would they warn people about the attack?” Ali asked Franklin.
“They didn’t want their whole operation shut down because vital people got killed.”
“How did the NRO explain this?” she asked.
“They call it a bizarre coincidence,” Greg said.
“Called it that because they had to come up with some excuse after the shit hit the fan,” Franklin said.
Ali shook her head. “Wow. When it comes to conspiracy theories, I feel like I’ve led a sheltered life.”
As they followed Franklin inside, Ali nudged Greg and gestured at her own head, signaling that Franklin had aluminum foil sticking out from under his cap.
Greg nodded up at the roof of the house. It was metal. So was the roof of the barn.
“Metal’s the only thing that blocks the satellites,” Franklin said. He glanced back at them. “And yes, I do have eyes in the back of my head.”
39
The front door of Franklin’s house was solid enough to keep out a SWAT team with a battering ram doing a drug raid.
Posters created by the IOA, NSA and NRO boasting of their spy-in-the-sky prowess lined the wall of the mudroom. The NSA eagle-and-flag emblem between the agency’s proclamation of DEFENDING OUR NATION, SECURING THE FUTURE had a picture of Hitler pasted over it.
The NRO boast of WE OWN THE NIGHT, depicting a masked entity, was next to the infamous poster of an oct
opus with long arms wrapped around the world with the proclamation NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH.
There was no need for Franklin to explain why the NRO posters were menacing. The images and statements spoke for themselves.
Franklin gestured at the posters. “Not too clever of the NRO to be boasting about how they can spy on all of us from the sky, is it? You’d think they’d be more subtle since the NSA revelations would have shown how much Big Brother is looking over our shoulders.”
“Nobody ever accused a government agency of being real clever,” Greg said. “A caller recently pointed out that the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion during Kennedy’s administration went to hell because the CIA identified pictures of coral reefs as beds of seaweed.”
“The reefs keep boats offshore,” Franklin said. “Ancient history, but the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan make that fiasco look like child’s play. Look how they let bin Laden get away at Tora Bora.”
Ali chimed in, “Someone told me once we bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia because a CIA analyst thought it was a munitions plant.”
Through another solid door was a living room crowded with computers and electronic equipment. Greg assumed that much of the equipment had to do with Franklin’s countersurveillance against the entities he believed were spying on him. Along with the electronics were nautical artifacts that looked like they had drifted in from outside with the tide to settle among the futuristic hardware.
The room looked unmanageable and chaotic to him, but so did the acre of nautical artifacts outside. He was sure Franklin had a handle on it all. No doubt Franklin’s equipment in the room could track an astronaut sent to the moon—or an NRO satellite that was spying on him.
Greg told him, “The NRO believes I conspired with a hacker to steal a top secret file. I didn’t. There have been two deaths—Ethan Shaw, the hacker who worked at the NRO, and Rohan, a noted writer on the paranormal. Have you heard of them?”
“Neither. How did they die?”
“Supposedly suicide, but I’m sure it was murder.”
“Suicide, accidental deaths, missing and presumed dead, it’s all nothing but murder when it comes back to their doorstep.”
Greg had omitted Ethan’s dying words and the money transfer, figuring that was too much even for Franklin.
“What’s in the NRO file that’s important enough to bring in black ops with a license to kill?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have the file even though the government thinks I do. I know zero about it. Ali worked with the hacker at the NRO and got entangled in the mess. She doesn’t know what’s in the file, either. She thinks it’s called the God Project. Ever heard of it?”
“No, but it’s the kind of boast those bastards make. So where’s the file this hacker stole?”
“We don’t know that, either. But we need to find it before we end up with the others on the obituary page.”
“With two others already down, it sounds like the obituary page is a likely place for your next press release. They want to get rid of you, they know you’re dangerous because you seek answers and millions of people listen to your show. They brag that they own the night, meaning that they’re keeping us all in the dark, but you shined a light in too many times. Nothing works better than a frame-up followed by what appears to be a guilt-ridden suicide. They said I took secret documents when I blew the whistle on a billion-dollar program where most of the money was going down the drain to contractors who put in padded bills.”
“Can you help us?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need to first look up an address. Ethan Shaw’s mother lives in El Segundo. We want to pay her a visit.”
“You can use that computer you’re standing next to, Ali.”
“And we need to go under the radar so we can try to find a way out of the mess. We got rid of our phones. We ditched our car and borrowed the green rocketship outside from a friend who is enjoying a second childhood.”
“Borrowing a car doesn’t keep them off your back. They will cross-reference you to everyone you have even breathed close to and get out a list of possible cars you’d be in. They use a program called Hops to do it. Computers can process millions of pieces of information in milliseconds so it’s not going to be a long process. On top of that they know you aren’t renting a car or flying away because they will automatically check all flights and know instantly the second you use a credit card. You use cash for a plane ticket and the DEA will do a body-cavity search before you step on board. Guess what they’d find? Heroin they planted on you.
“Friends won’t be able to hide you at their place because once the cross-checking has revealed them, the searchers can tell if you’re still in a building with probes that measure the chemical composition and DNA of the occupants. You can assume they will know about that car soon. Find the address you need on the computer and I’ll put you in wheels that not even Jesus H. Christ knows about.”
They followed him out the way they came in and around the corner to the back of the house. A hundred feet to the rear, near where the lake of nautical artifacts ended, was a large shed that wasn’t visible from the front of the house.
They waited outside while Franklin went into the shed.
“He’s quite a character,” Ali said. “Self-taught at science?”
“MIT followed by years at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A bona fide rocket scientist, not a wannabe.”
Franklin came out of the shed behind the wheel of a silver Honda Civic. It looked in good condition, but struck Greg as probably a 1990s version. Ali shot Greg a look when she saw the car. She wasn’t impressed. Greg was. No one would give the car a second look.
Greg said, “I’m sure he chose it because it was the most popular car in the country for a long time and will blend in anywhere.”
Franklin got out of the car. “It’s never been licensed or registered anywhere.” Rather than a license plate on the right side of the windshield was the standard card evidencing that the car had been recently purchased used and was waiting for its license plate to arrive.
“No traceable vehicle ID number, either,” Franklin said.
“Bought outside the country?” Greg asked. “Mexico? Cuba?”
“I’ll never tell. Once you drive it off the property, as far as I’m concerned it never existed. And officially, it never did. Same goes for the phone inside.”
Greg opened the door of the car and checked out the phone. It looked like a typical cordless landline handset and was the same size. But it had a cord that disappeared under the dash.
“Car phone,” Greg said. “My dad had one like it in the eighties before they came out with cell phones.”
Franklin said, “A dinosaur in the march of electronics, but that’s a big plus in screwing up surveillance. Low-tech is much harder for the agencies keeping track of us to follow.”
“It must have a wireless number that can be traced,” Ali said.
Franklin grinned like a shark. “Like hunting for a needle in a haystack. There are thousands, hell, there’s tens of thousands of wireless phone lines used in building alarm systems in L.A. alone. Those phone lines just sit there and are rarely used because they only go online to send an alarm when there’s been a break-in or fire. The phone is piggybacked onto one of them.”
An untraceable car that would fade into the woodwork once it was on the highway, equipped with a phone impossible to trace.
“This is your escape car?” Greg said.
“You got it. It’s been sitting in the barn ready to be used for a good cause. The gas tank’s bigger than the one it came with, the trunk’s loaded with emergency food supplies so I’d be ready to head out when the time came. Better than a survivalist’s big SUV that would stand out like a sore thumb. Like that green thing.” He indicated the Cadillac. “On your way out of here drop that thing off at one of the big parking lots at Pepperdine. The kids will think it dropped down from a starship.”
Fra
nklin gave him a phone number and told Greg to call if he needed more help. “Don’t worry about security. The NRO, NSA, CIA, FBI, DIA and the rest of those three-lettered assholes would play hell trying to tap into my obsolete equipment.” He grinned. “Those bastards with their cutting-edge tech just don’t know how to deal with stuff that was manufactured years ago.”
Greg led the way out of the nautical jungle in the green Cad. Before pulling away in the Honda, Ali asked Franklin, “Do you really have a bomb on the road?”
“Do chickens have lips?”
She didn’t know.
NRO’s octopus boasting that nothing is beyond its reach
NRO boasting that it owns the night
IAO boasting in Latin that the government’s “knowledge is power” in regard to the massive surveillance of US citizens with the Total Information Awareness program
40
Greg deposited the glowing Cad in a parking space at Pepperdine University down the Pacific Coast Highway, getting a “Great wheels, dude” from an admiring student.
He joined Ali in the getaway Honda and said, “Let’s go back up the highway and take Sunset to the 405 to El Segundo. I don’t want to go through Santa Monica or Venice again.”
“Freeway cameras are easy to monitor because they go into a central terminal that police agencies connect to. We’d be better off taking city streets. Sawtelle goes much of the way and we can move on and off of it.”
Ali drove and neither said much as they took streets that moved them along in the same direction as the freeway.
He tried to visualize how to approach Ethan’s mother, wondering what emotional state they were going to find her. She would still be reeling from the loss of her son. The fact she would have been told Ethan committed suicide might aggravate her grief—or create anger toward Greg if she was told by Mond that Greg was connected to Ethan’s death.