NaNoWriMo, Day Thirteen

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

Then, just about as you’re ready to cut your losses and live to fight another day (i.e, accept that yesterday you just had to get some of that other crap done and as a result you were going to fall about 3,000 words off of your month-to-date pace because you’re freakin’ exhausted, so let it go, try to get maybe 1,000 words done by ten-ish, then go to bed, get a halfway decent night’s sleep, probably fall even more behind tomorrow because you’ll spend almost all day in Irvine but that’s worth it because it’s such a great group) when the “You Deserve A Break, Besides, You’ve Been Writing This Whole Scene In Your Head For Two Days So Now All You Have To Do Is Type It” fairy bashes you in the face with her wand (think Carol Kane chewing up the scenery in “Scrooged”) and all of a sudden you’re at 23:58 and 3,377 words and desperately trying to cut & paste it into WordPress, do the little scoreboard thingie, hit “Publish” and then get PO’d ’cause it’s 00:01 (but close enough for government work), WHOO-HOO!!

(Damn, that is a long sentence!)

The thrill of victory is fleeting. Today I am really paying for only getting about five hours of sleep and then doing the Irvine thing and there’s now another 3,000 words to crank out.

Time for some tunes. I’m thinking “Chicago Transit Authority”, “Chicago II”, and “Chicago III”. I’m feeling the need for a “late 60’s/early 70’s ‘Let’s Put it to The Man’ anger with a horn section for backup” vibe. Hit it!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The evening was spent swapping information with Jason. For his part, Jason had found out very little regarding “Dahlia” the artist, but he hadn’t ruled out that it was actually Auntie Annie either. Nothing in any of the art magazines, journals, or websites mentioned anyone working under that name. That would be one thing if she was an amateur or just selling a few cheap pieces. Since she was apparently selling a steady stream of pieces at five thousand dollars a pop, she should have been mentioned somewhere.

Jason was impressed with the way Tom had taken the initiative in booking and taking the balloon ride. Jason would have never done it himself since he suffered from a serious fear of flying and heights, but he gave Tom an “A+” for his effort. Tom sent copies of all of the photos of the compound for Jason to review.

Once they had done a cursory review of the photos, Tom spent almost two hours debriefing by narrating notes on every detail he could recall. Jason asked questions where the order of events or details weren’t clear to him. Jason also made sure that the home systems were capturing a transcript of Tom’s narrative for the record. Their advances in getting some bits of intelligence hadn’t made him feel any less paranoid.

After letting the new data sink in, the thing that bothered Jason the most was the set of train tracks running along the base of the Hogback escarpment and up onto the mesa. They should have been visible in the online aerial photos, but there was no trace of them anywhere there. While the big mapping photo databases typically didn’t have the same resolution and details for photos of small towns and rural areas as they did for the big cities’ photos, something as big as a railroad line should be visible there. It simply wasn’t.

The maps also had no trace of them. Once the appropriate layers were toggled on, all the big online map services showed the main rail line that ran through town and then toward the west parallel to the highway. But none of them showed any of the old spur lines. That could be because the mapping databases were originally designed for automobile navigation systems which might ignore something like abandoned railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere. However, the databases had all been updated to facilitate use in aviation systems, and it seemed that a rail line would make an excellent landmark from the air, abandoned or not.

To Jason, who knew quite a bit about how big corporate data worked, it was like a devoted little kid finding out that Santa Claus didn’t exist. It shook his faith and rattled his world view down to its roots. Things that he had routinely accepted as gospel and indisputable had now been demonstrated to be at least a tiny little bit fraudulent. Data was a sacred currency to people like Jason who dealt in it every day, so it was a big deal when counterfeits and corruptions appeared in that currency. There were now grey areas where before all had been black and white.

Jason first turned his attention to determining the extent of the inaccurate data in the aerial photo data. The trick he had shown to Tom still brought up a newer photo which showed the compound, apparently under construction at that time, but that photo still showed no railroad tracks. Jason set up the programs he had used to analyze the video images from Tom’s house and set them loose on the current online photo data as well as the historical images available.

Tom went over his thoughts about the train tracks being in use and not really abandoned, as evidenced by the way the rails reflected the sunlight. Jason agreed with that assessment, but suggested that the theory could be checked without going near the compound. If the tracks a few miles away were also polished and shiny, they could be examined without wandering around outside the front gate of the compound.

While discussing the train tracks, Tom remembered something from one of the brochures he had picked up in the lobby the first day. Flipping through them, he found a flyer for a historical railroad that ran some short routes in southwestern Colorado. He passed the website information on to Jason for further exploration. There might be some connection between those tracks and these mystery tracks.

Tom wanted information that he would need to move forward with more “aggressive” surveillance. Now that they had accurate information on the compound, he wanted to know what the property records showed about the land that it sat on. Who owned it, when did they buy it, who designed it, who built it, and how much land around the compound itself was actually theirs? If he was going to go trespassing, he wanted to know when he was actually over the line in enemy territory.

Jason suggested that Tom not start checking on the property information from his end. If the same folks who had modified the photo data were involved with ownership of the compound, a reasonable assumption, then they would probably have also gotten into the public records database. Access to those records would no doubt set off an alert if Tom were to try to get at them from his end. Jason’s software was stealthier. They could both only hope that it was stealthier than the software used by whoever was busy erasing the existence of the railroad track from the digital demesne.

While those searches and analyses were being done, Jason and Tom went over the pictures in detail. While Tom and Margaret hadn’t flown directly over the compound, Tom had still gotten a lot of good pictures, as well as brief bits of video. What the pictures showed was a complex much larger and more complex than shown in the “hidden” picture they had found online.

Jason noted that the fence, while about ten feet tall, didn’t necessarily appear to be designed to keep people out. There wasn’t any concertina wire on top, for example. Since they had seen a large number of cats running around inside the fence, Jason suspected that it was designed to keep domestic animals in and wild animals out.

The presence of so many independent power generation sources fit in with the idea that there could be some kind of commune there. Out in the desert where there was almost always some wind, the windmills could be counted on to provide a baseline power supply more than 90% of the time, even at night. There were more than enough solar power panels on all of those roofs to provide power for a mid-sized commercial and residential site. There were probably banks of some kind of batteries in one of the buildings to provide backup for cloudy days and additional capacity at night.

With a windmill, a well, and a large water tank it looked like they had their water supply covered as well. Tom figured that there must be at least one septic tank buried on the property, maybe more, but they really couldn’t tell where they might be since the entire property had been torn up and graded during construction.

The four open garden plots and greenhouses at the back could provide enough food for at least a dozen people, maybe more. Jason would have to check to see what kind of acreage was necessary per person to be fully independent and self-contained.

The final count was fifteen buildings. Some of them were small, almost work sheds, while about half of them were large, at least five thousand square feet each. The largest building occupied almost one whole side of the compound and was easily over ten thousand square feet. All of the building roofs were covered with solar panels, even the small sheds. Some of the mid-sized buildings had chimneys sticking up off of the sides.

One building appeared to be a garage. The side where the doors would have to be was around on the side opposite Tom’s viewpoint, but it seemed a safe bet. On top of that building were several antennas, indicating that they had radio communications across the area, presumably with the fleet of autos. There were also several antennas on the main building for commercial satellite television reception and high-speed internet connections. Whatever else the residents were doing, missing their favorite shows didn’t look like an option.

If the main building was for living quarters, dining, common rooms, and so on, they could easily have forty or fifty people living there. There was no way to tell from the outside.

All of which led to the central questions. Who were the people who had built this and were living there? If it was a commune in the traditional sense of the 1960’s, it was the fanciest and best built commune ever. The self-sufficient aspect of the complex fit in with the hippie commune lifestyle, but the high-tech connections didn’t. Nor did the array of newer model, upper end, four wheel drive SUVs.

Where had the money come for that kind of setup? It hadn’t come from recycling or selling tie-dyed clothing. Was it a setup for some illegal activity, such as drug manufacturing or growing marijuana? Or could it be some sort of cult, a commune gone out of control, funded by the life savings of those seeking some sort of salvation or enlightenment.

Jason wondered about all of the cats that he had briefly seen pouring out of the SUV. Why in the world did anyone need that many cats unless they had some sort of massive vermin infestation? Tom suggested that perhaps the cats tied in with the cult theory. Perhaps there was a group here that was obsessed with rescuing cats from shelters for some reason only they knew.

Looking at the people that Tom had briefly glimpsed, he positively identified Ellen, as well as the woman who had been driving Ellen’s car at the post office when Tom had put the tracking device on it. His view of her in these long distance photos wasn’t much better than it had been in the dark parking lot, but he was reasonably sure that he didn’t recognize her.

Tom and Jason finally agreed that whatever was going on here, it could be dangerous to get caught snooping around the area. Someone had obviously gone to great lengths with some very advanced and very expensive technology to bury even the existence of the complex. Where there was smoke there was bound to be fire. If this much work was being done to hide this site, this site must have something worth hiding.

Late in the evening, one of Jason’s search bots checked in with the results of its search for public data regarding the commune property. Or rather, it had reported in with almost a complete lack of results. The property in question was outside of the nearby reservations, but there was no mention of it anywhere other than in some grant deeds from the Mexican Cession of 1848.

Most of the land in the area had either gone to the native tribes or had been held by the United States government. Tracts near the rivers had been sold privately as ranches and farms, but the areas in question out in the badlands were never mentioned again.

Jason and Tom both found that result very hard to believe. In this day and age, every inch of land must have some kind of paper trail behind it. The first thought that both of them had was that these records had been altered in some way, just as the aerial photo data had been. Jason said he would investigate further.

By the time they were done, Tom and Jason had a list of key questions to be explored. How many people were out there? How many cars? Any way to identify both or either? If Tom could get some better photos, then Jason might be able to use his sources to fill in the blanks.

What were the individual buildings for? Were there any utility links between the compound and the local public facilities, or was the compound completely independent and off the grid? Did the compound have any security of its own in place? The pictures didn’t show any security cameras, but they would probably be small enough to not be visible at this range. It was hard to believe that the owners of a place that worked this hard to be hidden wouldn’t want to know if they had been found.

What was going on with those train tracks? Were they really dilapidated and abandoned or were they still in use? If they were in use, who was using them, and where were the trains? Even if the tracks were being used by just a single engine, which was unlikely, where was the engine stored? Even more likely was that the train in use had at least two or three cars in addition to an engine, the other cars designed to carry freight or passengers. If you didn’t have those, why bother having a train at all?

With the growing cloud of unanswered questions buzzing around in his head, Tom had a restless night. Again he had dreams of howling cats and trains noisily coming and going, although at least there were no more invisible hovering disks filled with teeth in the dreams this time.

The next morning, Tom took his time getting his equipment ready. Today he included the telescope and tripod as well as the other camera gear. It was time to try to get close enough to engage in some more detailed surveillance.

Jason had sent information to Tom about his analysis of the aerial photo data being used online by the two major providers. Both sets of data had been edited. It was a very sophisticated job and Jason doubted that they would have ever spotted it if they hadn’t known where to start looking.

Given that first clue, the software had been able to match patterns of pixels that now covered up the railroad tracks with other areas nearby. Some very fancy software had looked at tiny segments along the tracks, determined background colors and lighting conditions, found tiny segments of the surrounding picture with similar colors and lighting but showing tiny segments of empty desert instead, and then painted over the bits of the tracks with the bits of brush and sand.

Now that Jason’s software knew what to look for, it had started analyzing the online data for tiny segments that were duplicated by nearby segments. Blocking out the segments that were found to have been manipulated, they outlined a reasonably straight line across the mesa to a spot where the records showed the southern Colorado antique train tracks ending.

Tom wasn’t surprised to find that the match between the route shown in the manipulated photos and the actual train tracks he had photographed was over 99% in sync. Jason hadn’t been surprised either. His note said, “Be careful. This is non-trivial work, these guys are pros.”

Next, Tom checked on the location of Ellen’s car. Right now it was back at the compound, but it had been moved from last night. The overnight records showed that about midnight it had been driven to a spot about ten miles away, out on the mesa to the northeast. The map showed nothing there and Tom’s photos from the previous day hadn’t covered that area, but the spot was right on the track hidden by the digital shenanigans Jason had found. The car had lingered there for about fifteen minutes before driving back to the compound.

His head buzzing, Tom headed out to the parking lot. He put his backpack in the passenger seat of the car before opening the trunk to put the telescope in. As he lifted the collapsed tripod and leaned into the trunk to fit it in, a beat up Jeep pulled quickly into the parking spot next to him. Startled, Tom jumped back to avoid being hit, before he realized who the driver was.

Margaret killed the engine and got out of the car. She was looking at Tom as well as the gear in the trunk and the car. She crossed her arms across her chest and squinted at him, biting her lip.

“Don’t most folks have suitcases when they check out?” she asked.

Tom was caught off guard. “What? I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”

“Your suitcases. You don’t have any here, just more camera gear. Aren’t you checking out?”

“No, I’m not checking out. I’ve got work to do. Why are you here?”

Margaret took a small step forward. “Yesterday you told me you had to go flying immediately. We busted our butts and dropped everything because you told me you were leaving town first thing this morning. Okay, now it’s first thing this morning and you’re not leaving except to take more pictures. Why is that?”

“I’m sorry, what? I appreciate the help you gave me yesterday, but that was a simple business deal. You got paid and that was the end of our transactions. I’m pretty sure that any change in my plans is none of your business, actually. What’s going on here, Margaret?”

“It became my business when two lawyers showed up this morning asking lots of questions about yesterday’s flight.” As she spoke, Margaret unfolded her arms and started to lean toward Tom. He noticed that her hands were balling into fists as her voice rose. “They wanted to know who you are why we were over some private property of theirs. Then they served me with a complaint to the FAA. They’re going to try to shut my service down.”

Margaret was now right in Tom’s face and she was biting off every word. “Naturally, I come out here to get some answers from you, but I find that yesterday you might have lied to me about your plans. Naturally, now I’m wondering what else you might have lied about. Would you care to discuss any of those details, this time with the truth?”