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.
Today’s example of “Next Time, Do More Outlining” comes from Chapter Nineteen, which I started on Saturday night and finished on Sunday. In the first half, once Tom gets in the car, his camera gets taken away. In the second half, once they’ve been driving for a while with the phone on and transmitting and being tracked and all kinds of other stuff that DIDN’T happen with Margaret and Jason in Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, then his phone gets taken away.
Obviously, he needs to have his phone taken away when the camera gets taken, right at the beginning of the ride. I’m thinking that both devices get put in a Faraday cage in a suitcase so that they can’t be tracked. Then Ellen can bring them into the guest suite with Tom once they get to the compound. But for now, it’s just one more thing that needs to be fixed in the first draft.
On the other hand, with no outlining or plotting at all, I’ve just been “flying blind” as far as the action and point of view shifts. The way it switched from Tom to Margaret and now back to Tom — totally unplanned, it’s not part of a formula that I learned in some workshop. It’s just what felt right at the moment, and it still does. I guess after you’ve read your first five thousand books it starts to sink in. (Speaking of workshops, I would kill for a chance to go to Clarion, but I think I need to hone my craft just a little bit more first.)
CHAPTER TWENTY
After he ate his ice cream, Tom took a quick tour around the suite. The other two bedrooms were identical to the one he had picked. He found the same clothes, same shoes, same underwear, same bed, same furniture, and same security cameras. At least he knew where to get a spare pillow if he needed it.
A quick reconnaissance of the kitchen told him that his “hosts” weren’t worried about being attacked by him. The kitchen utensils and silverware included a full set of steak knives and carving knives. There were canned goods, pasta, pots, pans, dishes, cereal, and a full freezer and refrigerator. There was even an ice maker in the refrigerator door, as well as a coffee maker and a hot air popcorn maker on the kitchen counter. Tom wondered if he had to do his own dishes or if there was maid service.
The computer monitor was high-end. As promised, there were icons on the desktop for books, music, television episodes, and movies. Tom was tempted to see if the movies were edited or uncut, but decided he had better things to worry about. There were no inputs to the computer other than the keyboard and mouse. If he had somehow managed to smuggle in a disk or thumb drive, it would have been useless.
He found the thermostat and kicked it up a notch. He immediately heard something on the roof kick to life. Warm air started blowing through the vents.
Without a coat he wasn’t too interested in testing his freedom to move around the compound. It wasn’t that warm today to begin with and as the afternoon stretched on it was only going to get colder. Looking out of the building’s one window he could see that the sky was still clear. He couldn’t tell if it was windy because there weren’t any flags or trees in sight.
Tom couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he went to the book shelf and found something he could pass the time with. It was a Tom Clancy novel that he had already read, but it would occupy his brain while he waited and thought.
Tom knew that he was being monitored. He had done what they would have expected by checking out the bars on his cage. In retrospect, he should not have explored like that. He should have just sat in the middle of the room, very still, very quiet, just to see if it would freak someone out. It would have been unexpected and rebellious. It also would have put everyone on the other end of the monitors on alert, while leaving him in the dark about his situation. It sounded like a great idea on paper, perhaps not so good in practice.
He spent the wait running through what he knew, what he suspected, what he knew that they knew, what he knew that they might not know, and all of the other permutations and combinations. It was like a multi-dimensional chess game being played while juggling.
Tom also spent some time thinking about what he wanted to accomplish here. He was pissed about being ditched in Colorado, lied to, led on a wild goose chase, and now abducted, All he wanted to do was find his aunt and talk to her!
But that wasn’t the whole story, and he kept forgetting that. The reason he needed to find Auntie Annie was because of that thing in his home. Between the urns in Santa Fe and the thing that had been there in Ellen’s store, it was hard to believe that these guys didn’t know something about them. Add in all of the secrecy and hush-hush activities of this group and it all added up to a can of worms that just kept getting bigger and bigger.
The only way that Tom could see he was simply going to get released would be if they didn’t know that he knew about the disks. The only way that could happen would be if he didn’t talk to Annie and managed to lie and bluff his way to convincing them of his ignorance.
But what if they let him talk to Auntie Annie for a while? Was there any way that they could talk in private? Not that he could see. Any room here where he didn’t see cameras or microphones just meant that they were doing a better job of hiding them. He had to assume that there was absolutely zero privacy here.
So how could he talk to Annie about the invisible disks? He was hoping that talking to her would give him some answers, but he would pay for those answers by letting Ellen know that he was in on the big secret. He didn’t see any circumstances where he got released after that happened.
Tom remained convinced that there had to be an answer that he just wasn’t seeing, but this spy game wasn’t his forte. He had been thrown into it without warning and forced to do it for almost a week now. The stress was unlike anything that he had ever experienced. But he had the tiger by the tail now and couldn’t let go.
The stress and repeated shots of adrenaline were also leaving him tired to the point of exhaustion. One factor was that he had been up late every single night exchanging information with Jason and trying to figure out what it might mean. The second factor was his age – he was too old for this sort of nonsense. This travel was also wearing on him. He really wanted to be back in his own home, in his own bed, and doing his boring daily activities. Finally, there were only so many times that his adrenal gland could be squeezed dry, and he felt near that limit.
The thought occurred to Tom that this pursuit of answers might not be that unlike a tough investigative reporting assignment. If only he had been that type of a reporter. But he had spent more time interviewing researchers and going to seminars and news conferences than he had digging deep for hidden dirt and writing exposes.
In the comfortable chair in the warm room with an exhausted body, it wasn’t long before Tom caught himself drifting off to sleep. He caught himself and tried weakly to fight it, but it was a losing battle from the beginning. He briefly wondered if Ellen might have slipped a mickey into his ice cream, but he couldn’t figure out how she would have known which one to drug. As he finally allowed himself to be sucked under into sleep, he realized she probably had drugged all of them.
(Chapter Twenty to be continued)
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 