Monthly Archives: November 2013

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.

Good thing I got out to a quick start and can afford to coast for a day or two. Nothing serious, just a mild bug of some sort, sore throat, headache, tough to focus, just want to sleep a lot. Great, let’s write some more dialogue!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (continued)

 

“OK, let’s start with the least weird stuff. Do you have enough bandwidth there on your phone to pull up graphics and maps, things like Google Earth?”

“Yeah, we’ve got decent civic wi-fi here. What do you want to show me?”

“Load Google Earth and check out the location of that compound.”

“It’s not there. So what? The place looked to be new, this picture must be a year or two old. Please don’t tell me that you’re spooked into becoming the Bonnie and Clyde of conspiracy theorists over that.”

“No, you’re right,it’s an older picture. Look at the date stamp. It’s over twenty years old. Now look at the areas around you. Santa Fe, Durango, even little places right close to you such as Shiprock, Bloomfield, Archuleta, and Rattlesnake. Check out pictures for any random piece of desert or mountains anywhere in the area. What are all of the image date stamps for them? They’re all less than two years old. Why is this area north of Farmington the only one that’s over twenty years old?”

“OK, it’s a glitch, a coincidence. Google Earth has an old photo showing for one grid section. Big deal.”

“But it does have the new picture.” Jason walked her through the procedure to force an update to show the most current picture. “It’s not an accident. And it’s not just Google Earth. Check Yahoo Maps. They have their own database of maps, aerial photos, and satellite images. The compound doesn’t show there either, and there’s no current image, but all of the surrounding areas are current.”

“OK, I’ll give you that someone’s trying to keep this place hidden. Tom had mentioned that there were some powerful forces at work here. That doesn’t mean it’s time to assume the worst.”

“I’m just getting started. I’m sending over a couple of the pictures Tom took yesterday. Oh, well, I guess by now it’s two days ago. Take a look, is that what you saw when you were flying?”

“Yeah, that’s it. And…?”

“Did you see the train tracks?”

“Sure, they’ve been there for years, they’re abandoned.”

“Do you see those tracks marked on any of the online maps? Or on your FAA sectionals? Or visible in any of the online pictures, even the current ones that show part of the compound being built? I can prove that they’ve been digitally erased from all of those pictures, and someone did a world-class job of it. I don’t know how they got into the different mapping databases, but those tracks aren’t shown anywhere. And they’re not abandoned. We can prove that too.”

“Okay, let’s take your assertions as fact. I still don’t see anything that can’t be explained away by a paranoid multi-billionaire who wants to be left alone. Out in these parts some folks still think that Howard Hughes and D.B. Cooper may be hiding out together in some cabin, so you need more. You said you had video of something spooky in Tom’s house that he couldn’t see but his cat could. Do you want to run that by me?”

“I don’t really want to, but I’m uploading it to your phone now anyway.”

Margaret watched the video and then gave an exasperated sigh. She counted backwards from ten before replying.

“Jason, it’s really, really late and this day has well and truly sucked. Either you gave me the wrong file or you and Tom need to get back on your meds and leave nice folk like me alone.”

“I don’t understand. You got the file I sent?”

“Yep, I can see what I’m guessing is Tom’s living room. It looks like a nice place. He’s reading, the cat is in the bay window. That video?”

“Yeah, you don’t think the thing hovering in the air over his head is even a little bit unusual, especially since he can’t see it at all?”

“That would be your problem, Jason. I don’t see anything in this video that’s weird, unusual, wacky, supernatural, bizarre, or other worldly. I see Tom get up and walk around the room like he’s doing some kind of voodoo ritual dance, squatting and staring, then he raises his hands and the cat jumps on him. What part did I miss?”

“Hold on.” Jason was silent for a while before another file showed up on her phone. “Can you look at this for me, please?”

Margaret looked at the pictures in the file. They were fuzzy, but seemed to show a rack of pottery. “What am I looking at here? Vases? Pots?”

“Look at the middle one on the bottom shelf. What do you see?”

“It’s fuzzy,but it looks like a couple of cats staring up at the sky.”

“Do you see anything in the sky that they’re looking at?”

“No, just cats staring into the sky.”

“Fascinating,” said Jason. “This does make it much harder to convince you that we’re not nuts, but in the big picture, this whole puzzle just got a lot more weird. Hold on a second.”

Margaret had gotten as cold as she wanted to get for the night, so she did a 180° turn and headed back for the hanger. She now regretted trying to do the right thing and help Tom, even assuming that Tom needed help. For all she knew this “Ellen” person was the head doctor at some rehab or psych ward and Tom was an escaped patient. That would explain his “kidnapping”.

She would go home, get some sleep, and check out Tom’s hotel and rental car in the morning. If he wasn’t there, she would just go to the sheriff, fill out some reports, then contact the national pilot’s group for some legal help with the lawyers who had shown up yesterday. Oh, and she would have to get some good computer guy to flush out her phone and office computer so that this wacko Jason didn’t have access to them anymore.

Her phone pinged as a file uploaded and Jason came back on the line. “Margaret, are you still there? Please take a look at the picture I just uploaded. Tell me what you see, please.”

Margaret opened the file. “It’s a black oval or circle, with a sawtooth edge around the outside, the teeth blades turning into the center. There are a couple more rows of saw teeth inside of that. It looks kind of like one of those blades they use at the mills to shove logs though to strip off the bark. Is this some kind of Rorschach test or something?”

“No, but it’s interesting that you can see that when you couldn’t see the others. In the video of Jason’s office, a disk like this was hovering in the air about three feet above his head in the middle of the room. Tom’s cat was staring at it the entire time. At first it was smaller and completely black, then it got bigger, about manhole cover sized, and we could see some grey blobs moving around. Then the teeth started coming in from the edges, just as Tom raised his hands
and walked toward it. That’s when the cat jumped and knocked him away.”

“Tom’s an escaped mental patient and you’re some kind of co-dependent, enabler freak, aren’t you?” Margaret didn’t even bother to make it sound like she might be kidding or being sarcastic.

“I wish we were, but I’m not and as far as I know, Tom’s not either. Tom later saw images of those things in the sky being stared at by cats on that funeral urn in a gallery in Santa Fe. When he asked about it, the video ad that was showing them got immediately switched to different ad. And the woman who owns the gallery told Tom that the artist who did the urns was named Dahlia, which is the same name that Ellen knew Tom’s aunt by.”

“Just so we’re on the same page, you might want to listen to yourself. You, Tom, and Tom’s cat can all see this spooky, shark-mouth, invisible thing in the air and on pottery, but no one else can. The rest of us can’t see it even in your supposed picture of it. And you’re going to stick with that story?”

“That’s what we know, cats and spooky disks in the air that the cats can see. Which reminds me, Tom believed there was a similar incident while he was sitting with Ellen and her cat in Ellen’s store in Colorado. Ellen started to… Wait, what did Tom say? They were sitting, Tom saw the cat acting just like his had been, staring up into space and twitching. Ellen started to get up right where Tom thought the thing was, so he grabbed her arm to stop her, and… That’s it, Ellen knew then that there was one of these things. When Tom stopped her, she knew that he knew. That’s why she gave him that song and dance and took off without him!”

“Jason, I’m happy for you. Say hello to the dungeon master for me. I’ve had enough of this. Whatever fantasy role playing game you guys are playing, keep me out of it. Leave me alone.” She hung up. She doubted that she had heard the last of Jason, but she would worry about getting a restraining order later if needed.

By now she was on the block in front of the hanger next to hers. There was no sign of anyone or anything out except for the occasional growl of a car or truck on the highway behind her. She cut off of the sidewalk and started across the parking lot toward her jeep.

It was parked right outside of the hanger door, and the area around the door was illuminated by a high-powered flood light up by the edge of the hanger’s roof. Margaret stopped about ten feet from her car, transfixed by the sight before her.

Sitting on the roof and hood of her jeep were more than a dozen cats. She had never seen any of them before in her life. But all of them were staring up in unison at a spot in the air about ten feet in the air. All of the cats were alert, on guard, wiggling and squirming as if ready to leap upward at something. Margaret looked up but could see nothing there.

Carefully and slowly, Margaret took out her cell phone and hit the redial button. Chills were running up and down her spine and her legs were getting rubbery. On the first ring, Jason answered.

“Jason, quickly please, do you have access to the security camera that looks into the parking lot outside my hanger?”

“Yes, I can pull up that… Jesus!”

Margaret heard a loud train whistle blowing from a few miles away to the southeast, back in the heart of town, probably from a freight train lumbering through. Then, far off to the northeast, she heard another train whistle, this one different, more shrill, higher pitched, almost like the whistle of a calliope.

As the twin train whistles sounded, the cats simultaneously all jumped down from her jeep and scattered into the darkness, leaving Margaret alone in the cold. Despite the late hour and low temperatures, Margaret suddenly found herself covered in sweat.

“Are you okay?” Jason asked. “Did you see any of it?”

“I didn’t see a thing except for the cats, Jason, but that’s got to be the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There was something there, wasn’t there?”

“Just like in Tom’s house, but bigger. I’d guess it was ten feet across.”

“Right.” Margaret tried to slow her breathing and her racing heart. “I’m going to go get some sleep, Jason, if I can drive home without crashing. I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll figure out what we have to do next.”

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.

The number of term papers and academic documents I’ve written over the years has no doubt had a large influence on how I write, if not what I write. In that sense, as I’m writing and researching and getting scenes and events straight in my head, I start building a library of “supporting documents”. These days, with the internet at your fingertips, that’s pretty easy. But while many folks might just look up a fact and then move on, I grab a copy of my data so that I can have it all together in one place.

For this story so far, I’ve got over two dozen maps and Google Earth captures, so that I can make sure I know accurately how to get from place to place, how long it will take, and where it’s low and flat versus where it’s high and mountainous. I’ve got the local tourism brochures downloaded from the various cities. I’ve got aviation charts to make sure Margaret and Tom were really in unrestricted air space. I’ve got airline schedules to make sure that I’ve got the commercial flights right. I have spec sheets, pictures, and price quotes on both the Kawasaki Ninja 650 motorcycle and the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. And so on.

Maybe I’m just anal (well, okay, I am anal, no “maybe” about it) but I find it really useful to have all of that backup at my fingertips, especially later when I’m editing and I want to know, “Why did you do that?” Since it’s fiction and I’m just yanking stuff out of thin air, maybe I won’t have to do an audited fact check for anyone else, but I may have to do one for myself at some point.

(By the way, tonight’s work puts me over the 50,000 word mark to “win” NaNoWriMo, even though the story’s only about half done.)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Hello…” was all that Margaret got out before Jason cut her off.

“Please let me talk first. My location is secure and I know that this connection is secure. However, your location might not be secure, so anything you say could be overheard. Until we establish some physical security protocols at your end, you shouldn’t say anything that you don’t want overheard. Try to stick to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ type answers if you can. Is that clear?”

Margaret was taken aback. After being woken up from a much needed sound sleep, another jolt of adrenaline had her on edge. But as soon as Jason gave her the instructions, she realized that they made sense. “Yes, you’re correct,” she said.

“Good. Let me try to give you some information so that you know that you can trust me. Okay?”

“Yes, please do,” Margaret said.

“I’m a security expert with a lot of connections and access to some top of the line software toys. One of those is what got downloaded to your phone and computer. As long as they’re not physically compromised from this point onward, you should be able to use them without worrying about being spied on. That software also is filtering the video feeds from your building security cameras. I’ll be able to see the real video feed and I’ll set up some bots to monitor it. They’ll watch to make sure that no one gets in to physically bug the place from here forward. Are you okay with all of that?”

“Sure, that sounds okay, but I’ll have questions later.”

“No worries. Now, Tom and I have only known each other for about a week. At that point there was a security issue at Tom’s home and I got the call. Based on the details of that event, Tom went to find his aunt. It seems to have gone down the rabbit hole from there. Is it safe to assume that something’s happened to Tom, yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know if he’s been harmed or killed?”

“No.”

“Has Tom disappeared or been taken?”

“Yes.”

“Was it voluntary?”

“Kind of, but not really.”

“Do you know who did this?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you in danger?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Have you been threatened?”

“Yes”

“I see.” Jason paused for a moment. “You sent that SOS message to me using the GPS. That was very clever by the way, and very gutsy if you’re in danger also. It’s one of the reasons I decided to trust you. Up until now Tom and I were the only ones in on this wild goose chase. But since that message was ‘written’ using the tracker on Ellen’s car, either you’ve got Ellen’s car or else you’ve got that tracker. Right?”

“The second choice is better.”

“Then I see that Tom’s tracker went dead. Do you know about that?”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Okay. I spent last night working with Tom to go over the pictures that he took on the balloon flight with you. I think he told you that he was writing an article for a science magazine and taking pictures of rocks and geology formations. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know yet that it was just a cover story?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what the real target was on that flight?”

“A little.”

“The short version is there’s a compound of buildings out there in the desert we needed to look at. It looks like some kind of self-contained compound. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”

“Yes, I do.”

“We’ve seen some very odd things in trying to track down Tom’s aunt, things which indicate that someone with a lot of money, a lot of expertise, and a lot of very good tech is working to keep that place hidden. It looks like they probably saw you flying over and freaked out.”

“Yes, they did.”

“So you got threatened so that they could find out who Tom was.”

“Right.”

“And that led them to Tom and they grabbed him.”

“Not quite, but close enough.”

“You’re at your office in the hanger, correct?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, but how…”

“You have security cameras there and I’m tapped into them, remember?”

“Oh, right. Okay.”

“I’ve downloaded your security video for the last two days and I see where you got two visitors this morning, dudes in expensive suits. Are those the guys who were threatening you?”

“Yes.”

“At the same time they were inside, another guy was outside and looks like he was messing with your jeep. Did you know about that?”

“No. No I didn’t.”

“It’s possible that your jeep was bugged, and it’s possible that one of the suits put something in your office. We can assume that if they really wanted to, they could have broken into your home, bugged it, and you would never know. Do you have security or video cameras at home?”

“No. It’s New Mexico.”

“Right. Sometimes I forget that not everyone lives in Los Angeles. So for the moment, be very cautious what you say at home, in the office, or in your car. But I doubt that they could have put anything on you personally unless they’ve held you or touched you in some way. Do you remember if they did?”

Margaret thought about it for a minute. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Is there someplace you can go outside, not home, not in your car, so we can talk freely? Anyplace you can walk for coffee or food or something?”

“Yeah, let me get my coat. Hold on.” She muted the phone and put it in her pocket.

Margaret had fallen asleep in her clothes, so she grabbed her coat, hat, and gloves. She locked up as she left. It was crisp and cold outside, hovering around freezing, with a little wind. The sky was crystal clear and the stars were brilliant. Orion was rising high overhead in the east.

As she got to the sidewalk and started walking toward the all-night coffee shop down on the main highway, she took her wireless headset out of the coat pocket and put it on. As the headset activated, she reconnected the call and put the phone back into her pocket.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Loud and clear. You should be okay to talk as long as there’s no one around. So tell me what’s happened and what you need from me first.”

“Okay, first, I didn’t sell out Tom. Those rat bastard lawyers came in and started trying to tell me how they were going to shut me down. That’s bullshit and I know it, so I told them to take a hike and I didn’t tell them who Tom was. Got it?”

“Got it. My apologies if I assumed you did. So how did they find him? What happened?”

Margaret spent a few minutes walking Jason through the events earlier in the day, including her confrontation with Tom, his discovery of the tracker from Ellen’s car on her jeep, the confrontation with Ellen, and her efforts to figure out how to get his attention.

“Now I’ve got a few questions for you,” Margaret said. “What was this ‘security issue’ at Tom’s house that started all of this? A mass murder? Did Tom get caught spying for the Russians or planning some terrorist action?”

“Nothing like that. It’s going to sound really stupid and trivial at first, but you still are only seeing a small piece of the picture, so don’t judge. You might want to really think about how much of the big picture you really want to know, we’re heading into serious Twilight Zone territory. The short version is that Tom was attacked and scratched by his cat. His yelling triggered a security bot, and the security video showed something in his house that was really, really bizarre. But Tom couldn’t see it, only his cat could.”

Margaret walked silently for a while, chewing over this new information. She was trying to avoid losing her temper, but it was getting harder with every step. The more she thought about it, the more furious she got.

“I can hear you breathing and I can see that you’re still walking,” Jason said. “Are you okay?”

“We’ll see. Let me make sure I didn’t hear you incorrectly. Tom’s chased across three or four states for a week trying to find his aunt. No problem, that still makes sense. But you’re telling me that he was sent on this quest because the two of you are chasing ghosts or something? And because of this I’m not being threatened, my son is possibly in danger, my business could be shut down, and Tom might have been kidnapped or killed by some super secret conspiracy cult of some sort? Are your guys out of your freaking minds?” She wasn’t yelling. She didn’t want to attract that kind of attention. But she was sure that her fury came through loud and clear.

“That’s correct, and why I warned you to not over react. You haven’t seen what we have. When this first happened, Tom needed me to send the paramedics to his house, and my reaction was a lot more graphic and loud than yours just was. I’m really hoping that you’ll trust me and hang in there until you see the evidence.”

“Show me this evidence,” Margaret spat.

(Chapter Seventeen to be continued)

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.

Part of the problem, I think, aside from the preponderance of (seemingly legitimate) excuses to spend my limited time doing things other than writing the last few days, is that after days and days of the work just flowing, and two days in particular (the balloon rides) that were a piece of cake, the story has suddenly gotten harder to write. I recognize that this is because all of a sudden the viewpoint has shifted to Margaret. On the one hand, my gut is telling me strongly that it’s the way the story has to go, structurally and thematically. On the other hand, it feels like I’m on thin ice in trying to avoid losing the narrative and making it sound silly or trivial.

Another factor is that I’m getting a much better picture of where I’ve got to go from here to get to where I want to be. While that’s good, it also means that I’m feeling like I have to keep tighter rein on the characters rather than letting them just go off willy-nilly. It sound stupid if you’ve never done it (at least, it sounded stupid to me before I started writing) but it’s really true. Characters will act differently and demand that you let them go off in other directions. They take on a life of their own. I understand that they’re just imaginary constructs in your head — but if you’re writing the true story that needs to come out, you have to listen to them and go where they take you.

Yes, I know how much like pseudoscience psychobabble that can sound. I am and always have been a huge skeptic. But I’ve heard many, many other authors say it, and now that I’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions while I’m doing the typing, I know that it really is part of the process.

For now, I just need to remember this is just a “zeroth” draft and start spewing words again. Maybe tomorrow, if I can get a good night’s sleep. (By the way, the job interview went well, or at least I thought that it did. I’ll know in two or three weeks if I get to move on to the next round of interviews, but at least one of us in the room felt good when we left.)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (continued)

As she drove south, she thought about who might be watching her and how much they might know about her. How would they know what “acting normal” was for her if they didn’t have a baseline to compare it to? How would they have that if they hadn’t been watching her previously? Why would they have been watching her before her flight with Tom? But if she only started showing up on their radar yesterday after they spotted her balloon, could anything she did be considered odd by them? Or was there another way that they could retroactively figure out what she had done in the past, to define a “normal” for her?

That thought led right back to the concept that someone with enough resources or clever enough software could monitor just about anyone in Western society via their cars, their transactions, the Internet, the web of security cameras that were everywhere, and the nearly complete lack of privacy that everyone knew about but no one cared about. Margaret, like many people, had always assumed that it wasn’t as bad as all of that and the few who were up on their soap boxes about it were just extremists and nut jobs. Besides, the common wisdom was that if you didn’t have anything to hide, you didn’t have anything to worry about.

She was finding that piece of wisdom a little less wise when one found oneself watched like a bug under a microscope, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong. Especially when, in order to protect herself and regain some control of the situation, her first acts were deep into the grey area between right and wrong.

In this case, she almost hoped that her shadowy opponents did have a good idea of what were normal activities for her and Neil. If they did, what she was going to do could look like she was blowing off steam, which would be natural. If they didn’t, they were bound to be wondering what she was up to. That might not be good.

About ten miles south of town she passed the last of the giant irrigated crop circles that filled the desert. There she took off from the highway onto a rutted dirt road. The land to her south was not mountainous, but it had been torn up into small hills, gullies, ditches, and mud pits by hundreds of four-wheel off-road drivers. The snow of a couple days ago had melted, leaving behind enough mud to make it interesting, but not enough to make it impossible and impassable. With her jeep, this was a common place for Margaret and Neil to come and see how close they could come to breaking the shock absorbers without actually killing themselves in the process.

At the entrance to the off-road playground, Margaret paused for a minute. She knew this area well but needed to plan just a little bit. Grabbing her knee board and a note pad from her flight bag, she quickly sketched out a rough diagram of the area. In all it was probably over fifty acres, bordered by dirt roads on three sides and the highway on the east. After a couple of false starts, Margaret had a good idea of what to do. Strapping the pad and kneeboard to her leg, she took off in a cloud of dust and mud.

It was both harder than she had thought that it would be and easier than it looked in the end. She had watched from the air as farmers did this in their fields to make corn mazes, but they had the benefit of being able to see exactly where they were and where they had been. They also had the luxury of planning things out and putting out markers where necessary, which she couldn’t do without arousing even more suspicions. So she drove her course blindly, hoping that good enough was good enough.

She drove in long, looping curves across the desert floor, trying to keep on course even when she was cutting across some of the bumps and jumps that had been built up. Skidding to a stop, she reversed her course, back to the beginning, then started two laps in a loop the size of a NASCAR track. Coming out of that it was another series of long curves, then retracing back to the beginning.

Getting back to the entrance, she started over again, this time in shorter sprints, often stopping and reversing her course, trying as best she could to drive back over her tracks from the first pass. Back and forth across the lot, crawling through long curves, backing and filling on straight segments, always trying to keep close to the plan she had put together.

When she finally was done, she exited the lot on the south side, turning back toward the main highway and then back to town. She had done the best she could do under the circumstances.

Not wanting to draw attention to Neil, who might be at home despite her attempt to keep him away, she went back to the office and hanger. She knew that if the bad guys could really do half of what she suspected they could, not going home wasn’t going to keep them from knowing where she lived, and hiding Neil at Bobby’s house wasn’t going to keep them from knowing about him or tracking him down. But she had to do what she could, even if she suspected that it was a feeble and futile attempt. To do otherwise would be to submit to despair.

At the hanger she spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on routine maintenance on her balloon and planes. She hauled the propane tanks from the balloon out to the local dealer and got them refilled. She cleaned the balloon’s basket and double checked all of the rigging lines. She went through the last weeks’ worth of bills, caught up on her accounting, and wrote checks, even though the bookkeeping side of being a small business owner was her least favorite part of the job.

Three calls came in and each time she jumped like a spooked deer when she heard the ringing. One call she let go to voice mail, listening in as Neil left a message confirming that he had gotten her text and was at Bobby’s house. One call was from someone asking about booking a balloon flight for the holiday weekend. She tentatively scheduled it, with a caution that the weather would be getting worse as the season got later. The caller wanted to see the area with snow, and while it might be lovely and the flying could be good, they would have to have some flexibility in scheduling the flight, moving it up a day or back a day or two as the weather required.

The third call was more routine business, an inquiry from someone at the Albuquerque FAA office about some paperwork on one of her planes. Her first thought was that it might be something triggered by the people who had snatched Tom, but after some discussion she found the written inquiry from the FAA that she had ignored so far. It was dated almost a month ago, so Margaret couldn’t see how that could be related to the events of the last two days. She pulled the needed documents, scanned them, and emailed them out in order to keep the FAA bureaucracy happy and off of her case. For now.

By the time it had been dark for a while, Margaret debated whether she should go home or stay at the hanger. If she went home, it was possible that Neil could see the lights on. Whether he came home or stayed at Bobby’s at that point was irrelevant, she would still have a lot of explaining to do. She wanted to avoid that and keep him out of this as much as humanly possible.

Instead, she hunkered down in the office and turned the heat up for all it was worth. As the evening cooled the big, sheet metal hanger started to cool off fast. The heaters were set to keep the interior above forty degrees in order to keep the fluids in the planes from freezing. It also prevented any ice from forming on the wings, which would keep them grounded if she needed to fly somewhere in a hurry. But while it kept the planes functional, it wasn’t comfortable.

The office was contained in a separate suite of rooms in one corner of the hanger. It wasn’t terribly well insulated, but there was a separate heating and cooling system, so it could be made reasonably livable in there. It wouldn’t be the first time that Margaret had spent the night there, since she had clients who occasionally would need her on short notice at unconventional hours. It was a service that paid well, but it had long ago prompted her to put a few living basics into the office. A refrigerator, microwave, convertible couch, game console, and television made it a pilot lounge paradise. The upgrade to add a shower to the bathroom had been worth every penny.

Margaret settled in for the evening and tried not to look at her phone every five minutes. At least there were some college basketball games on the television, and she killed some time playing video games. She also kept an eye on her email, but there was nothing special there either except for the usual.

By 10:30 she was nodding off. There had been far too much adrenaline for one day. She was still jumping at shadows and trying not to let her imagination run away with boogeyman fears about who might be after her and Neil and what they might do. Most of all, she was getting discouraged about the efficacy of her afternoon activities. The longer the night went on, the harder it was to believe that she had been successful.

Just after midnight she was brought awake by a chirping from her phone. She was confused at first, her sleep-clogged brain not registering why she was in the hanger office instead of at home. Memories of the previous day then flooded back to her and she was filled with a second wave of confusion.

Why was her phone making that noise? The “do not disturb” function should keep it quiet at this time of night. In addition, what was the sound it was making? She didn’t recognize it as anything she had ever heard from her phone before.

Fumbling to get the phone out, the noise stopped as soon as she touched the screen. She immediately noticed a new, blinking icon on her screen, labeled “Mayday”.

It was almost too much. Margaret held the phone tightly, closed her eyes, and tried to decide what to do. This could be a trap that would paint a target on her back, or it could be the help she had been asking for. Fly the plane. There was only one way to find out. She tapped the icon.

The app’s window opened up with a logo, a large blue “A” in a circle. Over this a script message began to write out, the letters crude and connected to each other, almost as if they were being drawn by an Etch-A-Sketch connected to a fat tipped, red Sharpie pen.

“Toronto’s football team and their leader welcome you. Do you wish to continue?” Buttons appeared labeled “Exit and delete” and “Continue”.

Margaret was about to cancel whatever she had started and exit the program, when she paused. What was she missing here? Why had the script displayed that way? It was weird, and not too artistic or professional. Who would do that deliberately in a program?

Who in the hell were Toronto’s football team? Did they even play football in Toronto? Afraid to do anything with the phone for fear of messing up the program, she turned on the desk computer and quickly looked for an answer to that question. The answer caused her to sit back with a huge sigh of relief. Now the message format and the Toronto football reference made sense.

She hit the “Continue” button.

The screen cleared, the logo reappeared, and the odd script with the connected letters began writing again. “For access to this site, please enter the first and last name of the person who referred you to us.” Margaret entered, “Tom Tiernan,” and hit enter.

This time the text displayed normally, with the instruction, “Please leave the phone on and set it on the desk. Installation will begin when you hit ‘enter’.”

Margaret put the phone on the desk and hit the “enter” icon on the screen. The phone immediately began to show a progress clock with an estimated install time of twenty minutes, the clock slowly running backward toward zero. At about the twelve-minute mark the desk computer screen went blank and the computer hard disk began ticking furiously, as if the entire disk was being scanned.

As the clock on her phone finally counted down to zero, Margaret watched with growing anticipation. At 0:00, the screen on her desk computer and phone simply went back to their normal displays. Nothing further happened and Margaret realized that she was holding her breath. She let it out and picked up the phone, which suddenly rang. She hit the button to connect and held the phone up to her ear.

“Margaret, I’m Jason. I think we need to bring each other up to speed.”

Next

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.

And on the seventeenth day, God said, “Take a little break, because you’re already at 45,000 words and Real Life is going to continue to kick your ass for the next couple of days”. Who am I to argue with God? (Boy, the discussions we could have on that question! Some other time, perhaps.)

Some of the Conflicting Priorities (aka, “excuses to not write”) were involuntary (the usual Sunday groceries and housework, but more importantly, I have a critical job interview tomorrow and need to be ready for it) while some were completely voluntary (my beloved Chiefs were playing on national television in the “game of the year” and I wasn’t going to miss it). Yeah, no doubt I could have squeezed just a few more minutes to work on this if my life depended on it — but it doesn’t.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It occurred to Margaret that it was her turn for some judicious paranoia. On the one hand, if her opponents in this battle had almost unlimited resources and were acting above and beyond the law, she was screwed and there was nothing she could do that would change the outcome. If that was the case, it didn’t matter if she acted or not. Therefore she should just go ahead and act anyway. Right?

On the other hand, there had to be limitations to what they were capable of, or else they wouldn’t have asked Tom anything and they wouldn’t have ignored her. Both she and Tom would be gone. So it wasn’t like she was taking on the whole US government or some international drug cartel. Therefore she should act because there was a chance that she could prevail. Right?

Her head was spinning. Fly the plane. Okay, assume she was being watched and monitored in some way. Act normal. Find a way to contact Jason without tipping off the bad guys. Which was a great plan, except that she had no way to contact Jason at all, either with or without letting anyone else find out about it.

Act normal. Fly the plane. Getting out of Tom’s hotel room with Tom’s key and backpack would be a great first step. Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Burglary. Theft. Grand theft auto if they wanted since his car keys were in her pocket. She didn’t think the threatening lawyers would have a tough time making her life a living hell if someone walked in her right now.

Don’t draw attention to yourself. Fly the plane. Margaret left all of Tom’s clothes and luggage just as they were, but took his backpack. She went through the room once with a washcloth and tried to wipe off anything that she might have touched so that there weren’t any fingerprints. Isn’t that what they always did in the movies? She checked to make sure the hallway was clear, wiped off the door handle, and then left, acutely conscious of the presence of security cameras in every hallway and stairwell.

Once outside, she made sure that Tom’s rental car was locked before she put the car keys and hotel key back into the backpack, along with the notes and picture of Dahlia. If she was stopped or questioned, she could still at least try to use the story that she was trying to return a customer’s lost belongings. It wasn’t much of a story, but it was at least a little bit true and all she had.

Margaret drove back to her office at the hanger and tried to think. How could she contact this Jason guy? She didn’t have Tom’s phone or pad to use, she didn’t know his last name, where he lived, where he worked, what he did, or anything else.

After an hour of thinking it over she had gotten nowhere. No matter how she went over it, there was only one fact she knew about Jason, his first name. That wasn’t sufficient. Period.

Between this morning’s adrenaline in dealing with the surprise visit by the lawyers, then the confrontation with Tom, then watching him get kidnapped, then dealing with what she had to do, Margaret finally realized that she was starving. It was way past lunch time. If she was going to act normal, she should eat.

Before she left, she took a quick walk around the hanger to make sure that all of the doors were locked. As she got to the exit, she started to key in the arming code on the security system, but stopped halfway through the process as she was hit by a stunning revelation. Her racing thoughts were interrupted only by the alarm’s warning countdown as it reacted to the incomplete arming sequence. Before the alarm could go off, she entered the security code to disarm the system. All she would need right now is a visit from the police over a false alarm.

She now realized that she knew two more key things about Jason. She knew that he had been somehow monitoring Tom’s location as well as the location of Ellen’s car. But now he would have lost Tom’s beacon and he would be monitoring Margaret’s jeep, even though he didn’t know about the switch in cars. Plus, Tom had told her that Jason had been getting updates on what Tom was doing, including information about her and the balloon flight that she had taken Tom on.

She had been looking at it all wrong. She didn’t have to contact Jason. She just had to get his attention in some way and have him contact her. Best of all, she had a good idea how to do that.

But for that to work, lunch was still the first priority for the moment. Margaret locked up the last door and activated the security system, before getting in her jeep. She drove through a fast food place that she frequented often and got lunch to go. Then she hit the road heading south out of town, back toward Santa Fe. Anywhere out of town except back toward that compound out at the bottom of the mesa.

(Chapter Sixteen to be continued)

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.

After yet another day of IRL activities (housework, dog things, a flick with The Long Suffering Wife, etc) it’s again almost 21:00 and here’s that blank screen. Gonna need some help.

I call on the power of Diet Coke! I call on the power of Extra Strength Excedrin!! But most of all, since it’s Saturday, I call on the power of Sirius XM’s “SATURDAY NIGHT SAFETY DANCE“!!! Starting with The Smiths’ “What Difference Does It Make?” Yeah, that’s a good start.

Let the word herding begin! Wait, why won’t half of these windows open at the same time? And the ones that do open are like molasses in January? Ah, yes, streaming audio & hot tunes will eat ALL of the CPU cycles. Kill “SNSD” on the primary system, restart “SNSD” on the alternate system, open writing windows… Success! (“Welcome To Paradise” by Front 242 — still going strong!) I WILL NOT BE DENIED! (Maybe the Diet Coke & Extra Strength Excedrin combo was too much.)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (continued)

She had dispassionately told Tom that he should go home because he was way out of his league. That logical calculation was even truer for her, since she didn’t know what Tom already knew and she didn’t have his friend for high tech backup. But there was no doubt that Tom had been asking for her help with his last comments to her.

She was being handed an emergency situation with limited resources and limited knowledge of the nature of the emergency. She hadn’t decided if she wanted to help Tom, even though she had decided that she had to help him. She had to start taking some action, but her head was spinning trying to think what action to take. Meanwhile the clock was ticking.

It was an emergency. That was the trigger needed to get her pilot training to kick in. Fly the plane. That was always the first thing to do in an emergency, no matter what else was going on. It was a matter of priorities and managing your focus and work flow. Don’t create new Problems B, C, D, & E by obsessing over Problem A. Solving a non-fatal Problem A didn’t help if your loss of focus caused a very fatal Problem B.

Be quick, but don’t hurry. That was something she had learned on her high school basketball team. Her coach had been a devout disciple of John Wooden and his philosophy of the game and life. That particular lesson had also proven invaluable at times while flying.

Now she was on the ground, not in a plane. There were undoubtedly unknown and unseen dangers all around. Something bad was happening and she believed that something worse was coming. She could try to take action to intervene. She would have to figure out what to do. Some luck would help, but the only person she could count on was herself. No time to panic. Be quick, but don’t hurry. Fly the plane.

First priority, she had to make sure that Neil was out of harm’s way as best she could. He should be at school now, but she didn’t want him going home or to the hanger. She picked up her phone and dialed.

“Sarah, it’s Margaret. Can I ask you for a favor? A work thing came up at the last minute. I may have to be gone for a couple of days. Can Neil come and stay with Bobby?” She listened to the answer, not expecting any problem. “Great, I owe you one. I’ll let Neil know. Thanks.”

She sent a text message to Neil. “Got a new work thing, may have to be gone a day or two. Talked to Sarah, please go stay at Bobby’s again until I get back. I’ll lock up the hanger before I go, shouldn’t be any need for you to go over until I get back.”

That done, what did she need to do next? If Tom showed up back here in the afternoon then she could stand down and talk with him. As great as it would be if that happened, she didn’t expect it. If he didn’t come back, she had to do something to find him, help him, and release him.

She couldn’t go charging out to that place in the desert by herself. If Tom was actually in danger and didn’t come back, she wasn’t going to rescue him without help. While she was waiting to see if Tom reappeared later, she should spend her time getting her ducks in a row to move if he didn’t. Easier said than done since she didn’t yet know how much help or what kind of help she would need.

She couldn’t go to the police or FBI. First of all, since Tom had gone “voluntarily” with Ellen, Margaret wasn’t 100% sure there was an actual crime committed yet. Secondly, Tom had been very reluctant to involve the police and not just because he might have been acting in some gray legal areas. He had talked about “bizarre” discoveries and people with tremendous resources and influence, making it sound like there was some sort of conspiracy theorist’s paradise behind all of this. She hadn’t ever given any credence at all to any of those theories, but then again, she hadn’t ever had shadowy lawyers threatening her just before a client got kidnapped in front of her.

Who were those guys? There was a key question.

In the military Margaret had occasionally come in contact with “operatives”, men and women from alphabet soup agencies that she had never heard. Her orders had always been simple and direct. Fly the mission as ordered, don’t ask questions, and forget that the mission existed. There was always an air about these spooks that the regular military quietly despised, an attitude that they didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else, or even by any rules at all if they didn’t wish to.

Ellen and the two gorillas with her had reeked of that attitude. Margaret had never seen any badges or identification. She had assumed that the grunts were armed, but had never seen any guns. The SUV had regular New Mexico license plates, not the special plates issued to government vehicles. Despite all of that, every move they made had oozed that sanctimonious, better-than-thou, above-the-rules attitude. If they weren’t officially in some covert organization now, they had been trained by one.

If she was going to help Tom, she needed to know as much as possible of what he had known. That was the start of a plan. Get information, get help, be ready to take action if Tom wasn’t returned safely. It occurred to her that as spooky, paranoid, and arrogant as the kidnappers had acted, it wouldn’t hurt for her to be very, very cautious.

Margaret got out of the car and went around to the back where Tom and Ellen had been standing. She picked up the crushed electronic fob there and recognized it as being identical to the one they had found on the undercarriage of her jeep. This one wouldn’t be working again, but she took the debris with her. If nothing else it would be one less piece of evidence for the next person on the trail to follow.

Next Margaret rifled through the backpack that Tom had left behind, itemizing the contents. Binoculars, water, snacks, sunscreen, gloves, ski hat, sunglasses, and rain poncho. He had apparently done this before and knew how to take care of himself out in the field for the day. It was too bad that none of that stuff helped her.

There was also another of the GPS tracking fobs in there. She kept it, thinking it could be useful later. The final thing in the side pocket was a folded up sheet of paper which showed a police booking picture of an older woman. The board the woman was holding said “Dahlia”, a date about two years ago, and “Manitou Springs, CO”. There was a phone number and an email address written on the back of the paper. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she had heard Ellen refer to a Dahlia, so Margaret had a pretty good idea who this was. She kept the paper as well.

Looking into the backpack’s side pockets she found a hotel key and a set of car keys. That confused her since she was sure that Tom had had a set of keys with him. She had seen him pull the GPS fob off of them. But these were apparently the keys to the rental car she was parked next to. The hotel key was for the hotel whose parking lot they were in. But what room was he in? Like all of the new credit card style hotel keys, for security purposes it didn’t have a room number on it.

Taking the car keys, she confirmed that they were for Tom’s rental car by simply unlocking the car. There wasn’t anything particularly useful in the car itself, although she did find the rental agreement showing that he had picked it up in Pueblo and a set of receipts for gas purchases from there to Farmington via Santa Fe.

Checking the car’s trunk, she found the telescope and tripod where she had seen Tom stashing it earlier. She was no expert on telescopes so she just left it alone after confirming that there wasn’t anything in the telescope carrying case other than the telescope and various tools and accessories. She locked the car back up and pocketed the keys. She also kept the hotel key.

Picking up Tom’s backpack, Margaret walked around to the hotel’s lobby. She went in and approached the front desk.

“Hi, I’m Margaret Locke, I run the balloon company out at the airport. You’ve probably seen me leaving my flyers here over in that rack. I think you have a guest staying here named Tom Tearman, Tallackson, Thompson, something like that. I picked him up yesterday and we went flying, but I found his backpack in my jeep this morning. I’d like to get it back to him. Can you help me?”

The woman at the front desk looked at her and appeared to recognize her, at least vaguely. “Sure, what was the guest’s name again?”

“His first name is Tom, I think the last name was like ‘Tearman’. He’s a tall guy, about six foot three, skinny, balding.”

The front desk clerk typed on her computer monitor, finding the information that she needed. “We’ve got a Tom Tiernan, that sounds like him.”

“Great, can you tell me what room he’s in?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that for security reasons. But I can connect you to his room to see if he’s there or leave a message for him if he’s not.” She pointed toward the house telephones across the lobby.

Reaching across the counter, Margaret picked up the receiver on the clerk’s phone. “Can’t I just use this one? Why walk over there to call you back right here?” Margaret smiled.

The clerk rolled her eyes a bit, but reached out to the phone and punched in the room number. Margaret watched her dial, then listened to the phone ring the obligatory three times before it went to voice mail.

“Hello, Tom? This is Margaret from the balloon place. You left your backpack in my jeep yesterday. Give me a call at the hanger and we can get arrange for me to give it back to you. Bye.” She handed the phone back to the desk clerk. “Thanks, much appreciated.”

“Can’t you just leave the backpack here?” the desk clerk asked. “I’ll make sure he gets it when he gets back in, saves you the trouble of messing with it anymore.”

Margaret shook her head and smiled, shouldering the backpack. “Sorry, it’s got a lot of very expensive camera gear in it. I’m responsible for it right now, so I’ll have to give it back to him personally. But thanks for the offer. Bye.”

Margaret walked back around the hotel until she got to a side entrance. It was marked “Guests Only – Use Key For Entry”, but Tom’s key worked just fine for her. She took the stairs up to the third floor and then went looking for room 313. Tom’s key worked fine there as well.

Tom’s room yielded nothing extraordinary to help her search. Room service had not yet cleaned it for the day. Margaret quickly went through the drawers and Tom’s suitcases, but found nothing other than clothing and the usual toiletries one would have on a trip.

There were many flyers arranged on the table, including hers. Tom had been researching the area, but there wasn’t anything there that Margaret wasn’t familiar with. She checked all of the flyers to see if any of them had any notes written on them but found nothing.

In the trash can next to the desk she found some crumpled up pages from the note pad next to the phone. Whatever he had been working on last night after their flight, he had a lot of questions.

“How many at compound? Cult? Commune? Ownership? Funding? Construction? Train tracks? Why not on photos? Security? Cats?” There were also doodles and one comment, “Jason will check,” with arrows pointing to several of the questions.

Jason. That’s who Tom had told her to talk to about something to do with a motorcycle. It must be the name of Tom’s tech guy who had been running data searches for him. Margaret realized that she really badly needed to get in touch with Jason, whoever and wherever he was.

But how?