by Guy Riessen
Derrick strode past the Ready Room door his cane clicking in time. He continued past another door on the right that led into Mary’s lab rooms. At the end of the hall was Sarah’s office. He thumb-printed the door and entered the code. The lock beeped, and the door clicked open. He walked into Sarah’s office, pushing his hair back from his forehead.
“You know, I don’t know why we have thumbprints and retina scanners,” Derrick said. “If anyone is capable of accurately faking one, they can fake the other without a problem. And it’s not like it’s an unexpected scanning type. I mean everyone has thumbprints and retina scans, right? Now you do something like an ear scan, or, or even better, what about a butt scan ... man, then you’re talking! I mean no one in their right mind would think to themselves, ‘OK, boys, we’re gonna break their biometrics ... so I lifted their butt prints from our specially designed memory foam seat cushions down at Denny’s.’ I mean, it’d never happen. Amirite? Yeah, I am right. No one would think of that in a million years. Butt scans. Wave of the future, man!”
Sarah watched Derrick as he paced back and forth across the front of the office, alternating between lifting his cane-hand to push at the hair that kept flopping over his left eye and gesticulating with his tablet in the other hand.
“Brilliant idea really. Butt prints. They’re unique, like fingerprints. No one would expect them. Hmmm. Though they do change with weight-gain and -loss. Umm, but not outside parametric variables which could be figured, no doubt. Oh, and maybe with a weight-based mass estimation correlation. There could be a weight sensor placed under the butt scanner itself. Match that with print biometrics and oh man ...”
What the heck am I doing? Derrick thought
He looked up, blushing as he realized that Sarah was watching him pace. She was sitting behind her desk. “Uhm,” he said, clearing his throat. It suddenly felt about ten degrees warmer than when he came in. The thought of asking her out to dinner flashed through his mind, but instead he said, “What do you think?”
Sarah smiled and bounced her stylus on the fake eraser end a couple times before leaning back slightly in her chair. “Hey, Derrick, how’s it going?” She said.
“Oh uh, hey. Good, good. Yeah ...” Derrick’s voice sort of trailed off. The devil Howard was nodding. The angel Howard didn’t seem to be on his shoulder anymore.
Sarah continued smiling and said, “When you called, you said you had something big. So, now you’re here ... whatcha got?”
Derrick sighed softly, just to himself, and he flipped open the cover on his tablet and typed in some brief notes about the butt-scanner idea. “One sec, Sarah.” He tapped the screen a few more times and said, “OK. Uh, oh yeah! This is great stuff! Totally R A D. You know how, when we were fighting the Black Djinn in Howard’s office, I dropped my scanner attachments into the portal gate, right? Well I pulled a freakin’ slew of readings until the gate snapped shut with my sensors on the other side.”
Sarah said, “Yep. That was some quick thinking ... not to mention the watch is a cool little gadget.”
“Yeah, man, Casio Calculator Watch, you know?”
“You’ve mentioned that before, yes.”
“Anyway, if I could’ve left the sensors in there for fifteen minutes, I could’ve gotten a very accurate location. See, I was pulling temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, light intensity, and spectrum. The light measurements would only really be a help if the other side of the gate was outside. But whatevs ... the spectrum clearly indicated an indoor location. Fluorescent lighting, in fact.” Derrick nodded.
“Well, I’ll take whatever we can get. So ... I can tell you’ve got something more exciting than just knowing our gate-caster is sitting around under fluorescent lighting ...” Sarah rolled her stylus between her hands.
“Uhm yeah, like I said, I’ve got temp, humidity, and barometric pressure. Unfortunately, just a few minutes’ worth. If we had a full fifteen, we could track changes using historical data points from several home weather stations on weatherunderground.com. See the cheaper home-use weather stations update readings about every fifteen minutes, and those home-stations are, like, all over the place, man!”
“Makes sense ... and this means?” Sarah knew Derrick would get to the point eventually. Sometimes talking to him was like landing a big fish—you had to know when to let him run the line out.
“Well, it means that by matching my data with the ‘big data’ constantly pouring through the internet, I can identify where the other side of the gate was. Or I should say, I can identify several potential locations. I’ve got a ‘bot’ harvesting all the weather data as it comes in.”
“All the weather data?”
“Yeah. Every bit.” Derrick laughed, his chuckles slowly drifting off as he realized Sarah was just staring at him.
“Get it? Every bit?” Derrick asked. She just stared.
“Anyway,” he continued, drawling out the word. “Check it out, man.” He tapped on his tablet and the screen and projector descended from the ceiling. He tapped some more, and a North American map appeared, with a lot of numerical data on the right-hand side. Seven red circles pulsed in different locations across the US, with one in Canada and two in Mexico.
“What about the rest of the world?” Sarah asked as she stood and stepped closer to the screen.
“Hmm. Yes, well, that’s a bit of a limitation with the system since it relies on networked home weather stations ... there are a fair few feeding data from around the world of course, but the majority of the readings are coming from the US. And even among those, most are in California.”
She nodded, then her focus snapped over to the left side of the map.
“Ah-ha,” Derrick said, noting where her eyes had landed. “You’ve noticed the matching readings from the Trinity Alps in California.”
“Indeed, I have.” Sarah flipped her stylus around and pressed a rocker switch to activate the laser pointer. She pointed directly at the red circle labeled ‘7.’
Derrick nodded, saying, “There were three weather stations in relatively close proximity with similar readings. One was at a CDF, uhm, California Fire Department, fire station, one was at the sheriff department, and one at what might be a private residence or something.”
“This isn’t the same location as the Haunt, though, is it?”
“Nope. Not quite, although I would say, they’re close enough that I doubt it’s a coincidence,” Derrick said.
“How close is it?”
“Well,” Derrick said, tapping on his tablet again. The map zoomed in to border an area entirely within the Trinity Alps. “These are the GPS coordinates for the Haunt.” The numbers appeared to the right of the map and a blue 3D pin with a triangular flag dropped on to the map. “And these are the three weather stations near to our potential target.” Three red pins with flags appeared on the map at the far border edge.
Derrick continued, “Looks to be about eighty klicks, give-or-take depending on the gate location relative to the weather stations. There’s no way to tell exactly how close the gate is to our three stations, only that it’s close because the weather data is the same. I’ve ruled out the Haunt location specifically because the Sweeps have a monitor there that reads temperature ... and the temp was off by five degrees at the time my sensors went through the gate.”
“Wow! That’s great work, Derrick! I’ve spent the last couple days trying to resolve the GPS location of the Haunt with potential lines of Veil stress. Trying to figure why that was the location the Frenchman used. Was it Veil weakness? Some type of power source?” Sarah stood and reached over to her desk, picking up her tablet.
“There must be some reason why he wanted the team to go out there,” Derrick leaned back against the edge of Sarah’s desk as they both studied the map on the screen, “otherwise, why not create the bone golem close to MU and just have it drag me off during the night.”
Sarah walked over and stood in front of the projection screen, as if by standing closer sh
e could tease out the secret. “Well, let’s suppose François didn’t know any specifics about MU or our staff. Perhaps he knew of us, but not about us, if you catch my drift. If he needed to be in California for some other reason, then it’d be easier to fool us into sending a team out there, drop a bug in one of the team members, then track our movements. Eventually it would likely yield the locations of whichever artifacts he’s truly after.”
“Perhaps some kind of critical timing for a rite that had to take place in California? That would make sense.”
“Precisely. So, what I’ve been up to the last couple days is tracing out potential ley lines based on known lines of telluric energy. And there’s a massive power source right near the Trinity Alps. We’re talking Bermuda Triangle massive.”
“Really? Where?”
Sarah pinched her fingers on her tablet screen and the projected map zoomed out slightly. She pointed her laser pointer at the top. “Right there.”
“Mount Shasta! Of course. Crystal-power, multiple reported UFO activity, and let’s not forget the cryptozoological investigations for Sasquatch.”
“Yeah, using the volcano cone itself as the center point, tracing ley lines out from there,” Sarah slid her finger across her tablet and an overlay appeared on the map. “The lines are along cardinal points, but see, if I rotate the lines so we’ve got a major intersection here, at Devil’s Tower, and here at the Chicxulub Crater just off the Yucatán Peninsula, then this line here,” Sarah rotated the ley lines overlay and traced her laser pointer along one saying, “was definitely hitting the Trinity Alps.”
Derrick looked closely at the map, “Right. But it misses the Haunt site by a nontrivial margin.” Derrick stepped closer to the screen and traced his finger along its surface. “Oh, but look, it passes near this area bounded by the three weather stations I found that matched the gate data when Howard’s office was raided. Let’s see ...” Derrick slid images around on his tablet then tapped a key and the Google Maps data from weatherunderground.com overlaid the map that Sarah had, and sure enough, one of the ley lines passed through a circle bounded by the three weather stations.
Sarah said, “I kept trying to rotate the lines, or discount either Devils Tower or Chicxulub, to make the line match with the Haunt location. I triple-checked the GPS location data for the Haunt. But it just wasn’t lining up. I couldn’t justify the Shasta power source being so close to the event without being involved, though. Those kinds of coincidences just don’t happen, there had to be logic behind it ... and there it is.”
Sarah was standing very close to Derrick now. Her logical leaps were stunningly brilliant. It was like standing next to Einstein ... only much better smelling. Or was it? Derrick rubbed his chin, distracted momentarily wondering what Einstein smelled like, you know, on an average day.
Derrick cleared his throat. “Yeah, uhm” he said, “The GPS coordinates weren’t off for the Haunt. The Haunt coordinates were the wrong ones for the ley lines. The Haunt was just a trap for our team and one that we fell into. The actual target was very real and very close, hiding in plain sight. Only thing was, we didn’t know where to look”
“Oh my god!” Sarah said, throwing one arm around his shoulders. Derrick was so tall that Sarah was standing on her toes, and her weight was pressed against him. She jabbed her stylus toward the screen. “That’s our real target!”
Derrick was almost too stunned by the suddenness of her reaction to respond, but he said, “So, uhm. We still don’t know why they stole the artifacts from Howard’s office, well except for you know, nefarious reasons. That means we should probably move fast.” It felt almost like electric currents were running through his limbs.
Sarah leaned back and lowered herself back onto her heels. She gave Derrick’s shoulder a squeeze then a punch. She looked back at the tablet in her other hand. “Yeah,” she said. She typed using the soft end of her stylus. “I just pinged Howard and Mary. We’ll meet in the Ready Room in thirty.”
She turned and headed for the door. “We’ve got to get ahead of the curve, and this looks like it might be our chance.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WHEN DERRICK WALKED into the Ready Room, Howard half-turned in his chair and craned his neck to look at him. Howard exhaled loudly and rolled his eyes. “Oh my god, you’re wearing it again.”
Derrick feigned a hurt look, then grinned. “Had a few minutes before the meeting so I wanted to see if I couldn’t solder a link on for a chin strap. Maybe it won’t bobble around as much?” Settling the FBN ball cap, Derrick nodded his head then shook it, testing how the camera stayed in place on top of his head.
Howard said, “I thought that camera was lost back at the Haunt.”
“Oh, it was. This is a new one. Even has upgraded frames-per-second, so we can get even clearer slow motion.”
Mary laughed and said, “loooook oooooout aaaaa gooooooleeeeeem iiiiisssss coooooomiiiiiiing.” She waved her arms back and forth in front of herself in slow motion.
“Man, tough audience,” Derrick said.
“No worries, Derrick, as I’ve said before, it’s a great idea, and it gave us a substantial amount of intel on the golem and the Haunt in general.” Sarah pointed to Mary and Howard in turn and added, “So you, and you, can shut it until you’ve got a better idea.”
Sarah looked down at her tablet and mumbled into her closed fist as she cleared her throat, “Even though it looks fucking ridiculous.”
Derrick pulled his chair out and sat, holding his cane up, slumping his head down to his chest and saying, “Et tu, Brute?”
The camera strap slipped, and the camera pulled the hat off Derrick’s head and tumbled to the table top. Everyone laughed, Derrick the hardest of all, as he slid the camera and strap aside.
“Alright, boys and girls.” Sarah bounced her stylus on the table. “Derrick and I made some big discoveries in the last few hours. I believe we’ve pinpointed the location of the source of the Black Djinn—the other end of the portal used to take the artifacts from Howard’s office.”
Sarah flipped open her tablet, lowered the light level in the room and called the maps up onto the screen.
“Woah, no way!” Howard said. “The Trinity Alps? So, the Haunt is related to the artifact thefts!”
“Well, no, not in a direct fashion. I believe the Haunt was related only in that it was a relatively convenient method to get a DCV team out near this ley line.” Sarah tapped her tablet to zoom the map out slightly and overlay red ley lines.”
“All the reports were faked, but originated from within the National Forest’s system. Someone was working from the inside to falsify enough reports that it triggered MARC to launch an investigation,” Derrick said.
“The non-corporeal component of the Haunt was completely falsified. The location of the Haunt was chosen simply because it was a building near the actual conjunction of ley lines—probably near where the focus of Veil-related activity is for the Frenchman. The pot growers were unlucky enough to be using the building prior to François, and ended up donating their lives, and bones, to the Frenchman’s cause. The bone golem, was summoned to capture a member of the team so the Frenchman could implant the tracker device—the death scarab,” Sarah said. “Our current assumption is that the end goal was to acquire one or more of the artifacts which have now been stolen from Howard’s office.” Sarah turned to look at Derrick. “What is the status of the scarab, Derrick?”
“Well, it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s Monster right now. Mary and I removed it from Petey, but it is alive and hooked up to some freakin’ sweet electronics ... if I do say so.” Derrick looked at Howard and said, “And I do.”
“Of course,” said Howard.
“Anyway,” Derrick waggled his fingers, “You’ll notice I’m phoneless. Right now, the scarab is being fed a loop of GPS signals which make it appear that I am in my office until five p.m. then in the university cafeteria, then driving ... well, being driven ... to Howard’s. Every hour or so, my ph
one checks the weather app, and the info gets sent off ... undoubtedly to that location in the Trinity Alps, there.” Derrick used the laser pointer in his stylus to highlight the map location. “Because some of the scarab’s interface is magic rather than technological, I’m not entirely sure what other information is being sent, so I have my computer connected to the scarab and spoofing several scarab nerve bundles,” Derrick tipped an invisible hat to Mary, “Thanks to Mary’s brilliant bio-feeds, the spoofing makes the scarab think it’s still physically moving around in my heel, and encountering my falsified temperature changes. The whole shebang, man.” Derrick drumrolled his hands on the meeting table.
“Hmm. Can y’all fake a new location? Maybe we should see if we can set a trap and capture a Black Djinn, or attack back through a gate when they open one?” Mary asked.
Howard nodded, “Sure, we could potentially even drop a gas or flash-bang grenade through the gate. Disable whoever is on the other side. Go through ourselves and take them out.” He punched his fist into his open hand.
Derrick’s face went slack, and he felt his stomach flip. “No, man ...” He paused for a moment. “We don’t know if humans can travel the portal, H. Could be only these Black Djinn can.”
“Point taken, Derrick.” Sarah nodded. “The other problem is we don’t know what else the Frenchman may be looking for, so I think our best bet may be to strike fast at the location we think is valid, and hope they haven’t bugged out of there with the artifacts.” Sarah held up her open hands. “How many more pieces does he need to collect? We just don’t know. So, to that end, I’ve sent an emergency request to ...”
Derrick scrubbed at his face and suddenly sat up straighter, “You requisitioned the Raven, yeah?”
“Yes, Derrick, I requisitioned the helicopter. Well sort of. We’ll take the Raven to Logan Airport. Then we’ve got a flight on the DCV Citation X to Redding Municipal Airport, in California. The Los Angeles Sweep team’s ‘copter will be there for us and take us on the final leg.”