Category Archives: Science Fiction

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?

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 “finish line” is in sight, at least the one that says to “win” NaNoWriMo you need 50,000+ words. Even if I don’t get a full chapter and 3,000 words in tonight (and I won’t, I’m falling asleep with my eyes open already), I’ll probably pass that line either tomorrow or Sunday.

But that’s not the end of the writing at all. My original goal was to get the whole “zeroth draft” of the novel done in November, and that will probably mean something more like 80,000 to 90,000 words. From there I’ll let it sit for a couple of months and work on other stuff, then come back to it and start some serious cleanup and rewrite work. Even though I’ve never written a full novel before, I’ve written plenty of papers for school programs, written a fanzine for years, and written documents such as user’s manuals for work. I may be doing it “wrong”, but it’ll do until I get told otherwise.

With that first (artificial) “finish line” in sight and plenty of time to go in the month, it’s so, so tempting to slack off. Especially when I’m pretty worn down from the last two weeks. But do you remember near the end of “Star Wars” when the little X-fighters are attacking the Death Star and one of the attacking groups before Luke’s is getting close and the group leader keeps saying, “Stay on target. Stay on target! STAY ON TARGET!”

Yeah, him. If I take a day off now, this close to that milestone or finish line, I’ll be hearing that voice all night long. Sometimes I think I have a rotten brain. Sometimes I’m not best friends with my rotten brain.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

”What a coincidence running into you here, Tom,” Ellen said. “If I were a less trusting person I might think that you were following me.”

“I can see how it might look like that,” Tom replied. “If I were a more trusting person I might have showed up on time to meet you at your store four days ago. Oh, wait, I did, didn’t I?”

“That was unavoidable, but I’m sorry that you couldn’t take a hint. But you are tenacious. I should have expected that. Dahlia said that you would be.”

That got Tom’s full attention. “So, she is around here someplace. Given the way you’ve acted and your current choice of companions here, would it be too much to ask that I could just talk to her for a couple hours?”

“Why, Tom, that’s why we’re here. We’ve been looking for you all morning so that we can take you to her.”

“Right.” Tom weighed his options, which seemed limited. “Is this an official kidnapping or are we using a different euphemism for it these days?”

“It’s not a kidnapping at all, Tom. You’ve misjudged us, and I can see why you might not trust me. But I assure you, you don’t have to come with us. You can stay here, or leave town, or do whatever you want.”

“So even with the dramatic entrance, the blacked out SUV straight from the State Department collection, and the two incredibly large and threatening dudes, you want me to believe that I can just say ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ and we’ll just part friends?”

“That’s exactly what will happen if you want, Tom.” She jerked her head toward the SUV and the two bodyguards turned and got back inside. “Of course, you won’t get to talk to your aunt. I thought that was important to you, but maybe I was wrong. Plus, you never can tell if there might be some legal issues you’ll have to deal with, maybe something with certain electronic equipment that you appear to have misplaced. Who knows? Then, once the police start looking at that, there might be all kinds of things that they could find you connected to. They might get Homeland Security involved. They’re always fun to deal with. Oh, and it really would not be a good idea for you to do any further spying or trespassing out in the desert. It’s dangerous out there, you could get hurt. But it’s your choice. We wouldn’t dream of forcing you to go anywhere you didn’t want to go.”

“I see,” said Tom. He saw only too clearly what was going on. “When we’re done, you’ll just bring me back to town here?”

“When you’re done, sure, we’ll bring you back right here if that’s what you want,” Ellen said. Tom didn’t trust her for a second.

“Should I go up and get some clothes or is this going to be a day trip?”

“You don’t need to bring anything, we’ll take care of anything you need. We’ve wasted enough time, we should go now.”

“Okay, then, let’s go.” He let go of his backpack, which was still sitting on Margaret’s passenger seat, closed the jeep door, and walked toward Ellen.

Ellen held out her hand, palm up. “I believe you have a toy that we would prefer you not bring along?”

Tom realized that denying it would be pointless, so he fished out his keys and pulled the tracking device off of the ring. Ellen took it, dropped it to the pavement, and crushed it under her boot heel.

“Now go get your camera. There really is no need to leave it for this nice lady and get her involved in our discussion for no good reason, correct? Especially since we’re being so nice to you. The least you can do is to share your pictures with us.”

Tom narrowed his eyes, but turned back, opened the car door, and unzipped the backpack. He called out to Ellen, “Do you want the whole backpack with the binoculars and water and snacks and gloves and all of the other gear, or just the camera?”

“Just bring the camera and any memory cards. I simply would like to look at your pictures, if you please.” It sounded like Ellen was getting impatient at last.

Tom dug the camera out from underneath the binoculars and other gear, pausing a half second to slip one of the remaining tracking devices up his sleeve and praying that it wouldn’t fall out. As he stood bent over the backpack and digging through the gear, he talked quietly and quickly to Margaret without ever looking up at her.

“Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. Tell Jason that things have changed and I won’t need that motorcycle after all, but if he hasn’t sold it in a few days he can call me back, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed the camera, closed the door again, and walked away with Ellen. They both got in and the SUV took off onto the highway.

Margaret had no idea what had just happened, but she knew that it wasn’t good. Had Tom really just been forced to go with those people? He had called that woman “Ellen”. Wasn’t that the name of the lady from Colorado he had mentioned? Who was “Jason” and what was the deal with a motorcycle? And was any of this her problem at all?

None of the people in the car had been in the group which had shown up at her office this morning with their threats. By the same token, the people who had taken Tom hadn’t seemed to recognize her at all. For a second she had a brief hope that she had the option of just walking away from this mess.

That hope didn’t last long. She didn’t know which possibility was worse, that the guys threatening her were with the guys who kidnapped Tom, or that they were a different group. If they were part of the same group, sooner or later they would put together the pieces. When that happened, she would not be safe at all, and Neil would probably be in danger also.

If they were a different group, then she still had to deal with someone trying to put her out of business but now she would do it without her star witness. If anything happened to Tom, she would be a key witness to his kidnapping and she would be in danger then as well.

Beyond all of that, she simply wasn’t the sort of person who could watch someone get abducted right in front of her and do nothing about it. All of the choices in front of her seemed to be bad, worse than bad, and a lot worse than bad, but she knew what the correct choice was, even if it might be the hardest. She was going to have to find a way to help Tom.

(At 22:53, Chapter Fifteen 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.

The NaNoWriMo organizers do a good job of keeping us stocked with helpful information and resources, including inspirational pep talks from established authors. Today I got an email with a link to one from a favorite author of mine, Neil Gaiman. (Yeah, I probably borrowed his name to use for Margaret’s son in this story, for no particular reason other than I needed a male name and a couple of Mr. Gaiman’s New Years’ pep talks are plastered to the side of my computer.)

Again it’s almost 21:00 by the time I get going here and I don’t know if I’ll get a full chapter done. On the one hand, I’ve bitched about that several times already, and I’ve often gotten it done, much to my surprise. On the other hand, it feels like being a football team that consistently gets behind by two touchdowns early, but keeps coming back and winning. It seems to be a method that produces results, but you can’t help but feel that you’re playing with fire.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“You’re correct,” Tom admitted, somewhat nervously. “I didn’t give you the whole story when we talked and flew yesterday, and there might have been some small bits of misinformation in there to move the process along. However,  I truly never expected any kind of problem like this. I never would have gotten you involved if I did suspect it. Now, given this complication, may I suggest that we not discuss things here in the parking lot?”

“Are you going to tell me what in the hell is going on or do I need to call the sheriff?” Margaret asked.

“It would be a really bad idea to get law enforcement involved, possibly for them as well as for us. How about this? I promise that I won’t lie to you at all anymore, but I will reserve the right to not answer certain questions. That’s for your protection,” he said as she started to interrupt him, “as well as mine. But we really need to not be out here in the open if someone’s looking for me and following you.”

It was clear that was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. Looking around quickly, there was no one else moving in the parking lot and just a few cars and trucks wandering by on the road, but she realized that he was correct.

“Grab your bag and get into the jeep,” she ordered Tom. “Leave the stuff in the trunk. Let’s go.”

Now it was Tom’s turn to see if he wanted to trust her. He really wanted to go get a closer look at the commune site, but Margaret’s news had changed everything. He didn’t know what dangers were now out there, but he did know that there had to be plenty of money and influence behind getting the compound built and then hiding it. His gut was telling him that he wouldn’t simply be given a scolding and told to stay away. Margaret knew the local area, where he was stumbling around blind.

Tom grabbed his bag, locked his car, and got into the jeep.

Margaret headed out of the parking lot and turned back toward the airport on the main highway. Her face was grim and her jaw set, but she was focused on her driving and not doing anything that might draw attention. She kept checking her mirrors constantly, now alert to the possibility of being followed.

Tom thought that she was going back to her hanger and was going to suggest that she not do so. She must have seen his expression. “I’m not going to the airport, don’t worry.”

“Can you tell me where we are going then?”

“We’re going to drive around and burn gas while I get some answers. Then I’ll get to decide whether to drive you over to the police station, drop you off at that lawyer’s office, or just leave you out somewhere in the desert. Maybe you’ll convince me that I should find a fourth option. That’s up to you.”

Looking at her calm fury, Tom had no doubt that she was not kidding him at all. “What do you need to know?” he asked.

“Is my kid safe or did you drag the both of us into whatever god awful mess this is? Think about your answer carefully, because he and that business are all I’ve got and if you’ve done something to endanger him, we have a serious problem between us.”

Tom thought a few seconds. “I don’t think he’s in any danger or trouble, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure. I can make a good guess about who might be looking for me because of yesterday’s flight, but I don’t know exactly who they are or why they’re reacting this way.”

“What do you mean you can guess who they are but you don’t know who they are? That’s stupid.”

“I mean that I don’t know exactly who these guys are and I don’t know exactly why they’re pissed. There appears to be a group of some sort that wants to stay hidden and I may have stumbled into them by accident. I wish that I could be more specific and less vague about it, but it really is that ambiguous.”

“Why were we flying yesterday and why did you give me that bullshit about how it had to be yesterday, not today?”

“It had to be yesterday because I think that I’ve got very little time and I couldn’t afford to wait another day or maybe even longer. We were up because there’s a group of buildings that we flew over, just at the bottom of one of the canyons coming out of the mesa. I don’t know if you remember seeing it. I needed to get pictures of what was there.”

“Are you a cop or something, a private investigator, or detective? Or are you trying to break in to there for some reason?”

“No, I’m really a science reporter, just like I told you. I’m not a cop and I would really like to not break in there. For now I just need to know what’s there and possibly who’s in there.”

“So, are you really writing a story about erosion like you told me?”

“At this point I might as well. I’ve gotten all of the material I would need for it. But no, that’s just a cover story in case anyone wondered why I was taking so many pictures and what I was asking questions about.”

“What are you looking for? What’s in those buildings? Is it drug manufacturing or something else illegal?” They had now gone past the airport and were headed out of town toward the area where they had set up the balloon and taken off the day before.

“Believe it or not, I’m just looking for my aunt. I need to find her, but she’s been out of contact for years. I found where she had been arrested in Colorado a couple of years ago at a commune, so I went there first. I found a woman who said she had known her years ago. This woman was going to take me to someone who might know where my aunt is now, but she bailed and took off in the middle of the night. I got information that led me here, and once I got here I’ve seen her and her car. The car was out there yesterday, which is why I wanted to look.”

“You’re simply trying to find a long lost aunt and that’s all,” said Margaret, “but now I’ve got lawyers and thugs showing up at my office and trying to put me out of business because of it? That makes no sense at all. There’s got to be something more to it than that.”

“I wish that there were, but it’s really just about me trying to find my aunt. At first I didn’t know if she’s alive or dead. In fact, I still don’t know if she is. But I’ve found several things that pointed to her possibly being in this area. I don’t know exactly where. I don’t know who she’s with, but it might be people from that Colorado commune. I don’t know what she might be doing, but the harder I look, the more folks start acting bizarre. It was shocking enough when Ellen, the lady in Colorado, left me hanging, but from there it’s just gotten weirder and weirder. Honest, I’m just trying to find my lost aunt, but it’s turned into a bad Hitchcock movie.”

“How did you know that the lady’s car would be out there in the desert?” Margaret asked.

“Um…,” Tom stalled. “That would be one of the things that I’ve done which might be somewhat less than completely legal. When I stumbled on the car while checking out another lead that I had, I bugged it with a GPS tracking device.”

“I beg your pardon, you did what?”

“It’s similar to the emergency beacon you have in your plane. I saw a chance and I slipped it up under the fender. Which reminds me, are you still checking to see if we’re being followed?”

“I have been checking and I don’t see anyone. Out here the cars are few and far between, so I would notice.”

“May I ask that you pull off for a minute at the next exit where there’s gas or a restaurant? I want to check something.”

“Sure, we can do that. In the meantime, why didn’t you just drive out to these buildings in the middle of nowhere and knock on the door to see if your aunt is there? If it’s just a commune or if they don’t know her, the worst that could happen is they’ll wave a shotgun and tell you to bugger off. You never did answer my question about what you think is going on out there.”

“There are other factors to this search which I really think you shouldn’t know about,” Tom said, trying not to sound too vague and mysterious about it. “Trust me, all you need to know is that we’ve stumbled on something very bizarre, with someone unknown going to great lengths to keep the whole thing hidden. I don’t have any evidence that they’re doing anything illegal, but they appear to be a little obsessed about their privacy. Obviously they’re even more obsessed that I had guessed.”

“Obviously,” Margaret agreed wryly. “You’ve said that ‘we’ve’ found things on this quest of yours. It didn’t sound like you meant me and you. Who else is involved?”

Again Tom hesitated. “I can tell you there’s one other guy, sort of a tech and logistics support guy. Out here it’s just me. I would prefer not to tell you who he is, if you don’t mind.”

“But he knows who I am, right?”

“Yeah, he does,” Tom answered.

“Then I mind. Who is he?”

“I really can’t tell you. We both sort of stumbled into this thing and I really don’t know him super well. In fact, I’ve only met him in person once. But so far he’s had my back. I’m keeping him up to date on my activities and location and he helps me out by looking for information that I need.”

Margaret let out a frustrated sigh. “Okay, we’ll leave that for the moment. Here’s an exit.” She steered the car off of the highway much faster than Tom would have driven and pulled up into the parking lot at a fast food restaurant.

As soon as she parked, Tom got out and started looking underneath the car. Margaret got out and watched before kneeling down beside him. “Do you want to tell me what you’re doing?” she asked.

“We’re not being followed you said. But I want to know if they’re tracking us the way that I’m tracking Ellen’s car. I’m looking for a tracking beacon.”

“I’ll look over on the other side,” Margaret said.

They each worked their way down the side of the car, until Margaret called out to Tom. “What would this thing look like?”

“I don’t know exactly, this isn’t my field of expertise. I guess it could be anything that’s big enough to contain a battery and some electronics, possibly attached by a magnet or possibly clipped on to something. Why, have you found something?”

“Maybe. Would you like to look at this?”

Tom got up and went over to where Margaret was peering under the car. He bent down beside her and saw a small fob hanging down from a wire near the bottom of the engine. It looked was a bit bigger than his thumb and looked like a small flashlight.

“Oh, shit,” Tom said as he scrambled to his feet. He quickly went around to the passenger side and got in, pulling out his phone. The restaurant they were parked next to had a wi-fi system so in a few seconds he had pulled up the tracking software. The green and the red dots were right on top of each other, and when he tapped the dots, the bread crumb trails showed them to be moving in complete synchronization ever since they had left his hotel.

Margaret was looking over his shoulder at the phone. “What’s that and what’s wrong?”

Tom leaned back and closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took in a big breath to try and calm down. “That thing you found is the tracking beacon that I had put in Ellen’s car. They obviously put it here to throw me off of their track.”

Margaret let that sink in before she walked around and got back into the driver’s seat. Starting the car, she turned back toward the highway and then headed back into town.

“Where are you taking me now?” Tom asked.

“Back to your hotel. If you have any brains at all, you’re going to get your stuff, get out of town, and go home. I don’t know who these guys are, why they don’t want you to bother them, or what they have to do with your aunt. The one thing I do know is that you’re so far out of your league it’s not even funny. So give up and go home.”

“I can’t do that, I have to find my aunt. I have to know what’s going on.”

“No, you don’t. Let it go. If your aunt is with them and she wants to get in touch with you, she will. If she doesn’t want to talk to you, get over it. If she’s not there at all and these guys just have a serious jones about being left alone, leave them alone.”

Tom thought about that for several minutes. He knew that she was right and everything she said made sense. But she was impartial and could be calculating. He was fully involved and still needed answers.

“It doesn’t matter if I go home, they know everything about me by now. You told them who I am.”

“Actually, I never said that. I just said that they came asking.”

Tom was surprised. “You didn’t tell them who I was? Really?”

“I don’t like folks sticking their nose in my business for no damn good reason, and I really don’t like being pushed around. I told them to come back with a court order if they really wanted to know.”

“What about your business? You said that they had filed a complaint and were going to try to shut you down.”

“They did file a complaint and they did threaten that. Any idiot can file a complaint with the FAA and most of them do. Any bully can threaten, but I know that either they’re bluffing or they’re lousy lawyers. Airspace is under federal jurisdiction, not local or state. No one other than the feds have the right to restrict the airspace over their property. I’ve got the records of our flight and we were never below five hundred feet and we never flew directly over them to begin with. Yeah, I remember the buildings you were talking about.”

“You may be right, but you might not win. One of the things we’ve found out is that these guys have a lot of resources. If they’re pissed they can tie you up in court for years and just wait you out.”

They had passed the airport and were now slowing as they came into town. “They can try, but you said that whoever they are, they really like being hidden. If they want to get into that fight, there are general aviation industry groups that will back me up in court. These guys wouldn’t be the first to try to complain about something like this. We can shine a nice, bright spotlight on them in the press and in the courts if they want to play that game. I think if you leave them alone, they’ll leave me alone.”

She pulled into the hotel parking lot and swung into the space next to Tom’s car again. “Go home, Tom. Take a hint from the universe. You know how to contact me if you need to, and I can contact you if anything comes up here. Send me the information about your aunt. If I see her, I’ll call you. But go home.”

Tom grabbed his bag and got out. He was turning back into the jeep to speak to Margaret when a large, black SUV pulled up behind the jeep, the passenger side facing them. As it stopped, two large men wearing mirrored sunglasses popped out of the side doors and proceeded to stand there silently, staring at Tom. He could hear the driver’s door open and the sound of footsteps as a woman walked around to stand between the two thugs. Of course, Tom recognized her.

“Hello, Ellen.”

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?”

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.

Yeah, we’re definitely losing some steam here. All of the NaNoWriMo pep talks are mentioning that it will happen right about now, and I’m right on schedule. Also starting to enter “Phase Three”, i.e., “This story sucks and is worthless!” I know that this is not a good time to be making rational, calculating, unemotional judgments on the topic, so I’ll just ignore those thoughts (“Bad thoughts! Bad, bad thoughts!”) and keep going.

There’s also the real world to deal with. The first ten days you blissfully shove as much of the real world out of your life as you can, because you’re in love with writing and the story consumes you with the wonders of creativity and creation. By the end of the second week, with doubts and the real world banging on the door with both fists  (“Bad thoughts! Bad, bad thoughts!”), you start finding and remembering things in the real world (paying bills, other commitments) that can’t be put off any longer.

So you spend all day with growing dread, knowing that you’re “burning daylight” doing stuff other than writing but stuff that really, REALLY has to get done. You’re feeling really short on sleep and stressed and you know that you can’t really stay up until midnight writing tonight because you’ve got to get up at zero dark thirty to get to the Wednesday writer’s group down in Irvine and that commute’s just going to be a pain. You finally get everything else cleared away and it’s time to write like the wind. That’s when your iPhone does that beep-beepy thing that you have it do at the top of each hour and your brain thinks, “Great, it’s already 19:00, I’ll never get this done tonight,” but your eyes look at the clock and oh CRAP it’s really 21:00, not 19:00, and you just want to cry a little but you can’t because guys don’t cry and it won’t help because you can’t type while crying anyways so…

Again, I find relevant to this situation the exact words I remember telling myself while running down Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Pantages Theater just short of the thirteen-mile marker: “Remember to smile! We’re doing this for fun, right?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN (continued)

As they parked, Margaret did another quick check of the winds and weather reports before giving the go ahead to Neil and Bobby to help her in laying out and assembling the balloon. Tom offered to help where he could and Margaret promised to let him know if there was anything he could do, but it was pretty clear that staying out of the way was his best move.

Soon the balloon envelope was stretched out across the crop stubble and dirt of the field, lying on several large tarps that had been put down first to protect it. The basket was removed from the trailer and attached to the balloon by cables. The propane tanks were hooked up to the two huge burners at the top of the basket and the basket was laid on its side. Several pairs of large sandbags were attached to the basket for ballast.

Tom finally got to help when it came time to inflate the balloon envelope. As the burners were lit, a large, gasoline-powered fan was put between the burners and the opening at the bottom of the balloon. Tom helped Neil and Bobby hold the mouth of the balloon open so that the heated air could start to fill it. Within minutes the large balloon started to become buoyant and inflate on its own.

Throughout this whole process, Margaret had been releasing helium-filled party balloons every few minutes and watching them rise so that she could get a good idea of the prevailing currents aloft. In general it seemed to be calm near the ground, but once up a few hundred feet the balloons were blown toward the northwest.

At last the balloon envelope was inflated enough to lift itself off the ground. As it pulled the basket upright, the burners were now directly below it and the air in the balloon started to heat rapidly. Margaret jumped nimbly into the basket and clipped a radio onto her belt. Tom dropped his backpack of gear into the basket and was helped over the side and in. Neil and Bobby clung to the outside of the basket for additional weight, holding the craft down. After another minute more of heating, the whole aircraft started to bob and rise even with the ballast attached.

Margaret yelled for Neil and Bobby to jump free, and as they did so she released the ropes holding the sandbags to the side. Free of all of that extra weight, the giant rainbow colored balloon started rising gently into the breeze.

CHAPTER TWELVE

As they rose, Tom saw the guys scrambling to pack up the tarps and get all of the other gear back into the trailer. As the ground fell away, the patchwork quilt of fields in the flood plain of the river began to spread out below him. There were still patches of snow in some of the fields and areas that were in shadow most of the day, but in general the ground below was painted in various shades of brown and tan.

To the south, on the other side of the highway, the river wound its way toward the west, where it would join the Colorado River and descend through the Grand Canyon. At this time of year the water level was low and it didn’t look particularly deep in many places where the channel was broad. The steep banks and oxbow curves gave witness to how full, fast, and dangerous the river could be in the spring. The bottom of the river bottom near the channel was filled with small trees and brush, some of them still struggling to stay green this late in the season.

“Where do you want me to try and go?” Margaret yelled over the roar of the burners.

“Do you really have that much control?” Tom asked. “I thought that we just drifted wherever we drifted.”

“We have some control, not a lot. The winds will swirl in different directions at different altitudes, so by going up and down into different currents we can move around a bit. You said that you wanted to see the Hogback?”

“Yes, in particular the area where the river cuts through it. Then if we could look up along the escarpment and the mesa above it to the north, that would be great. It looked from the maps like there are a lot of little stream beds and canyons cut into the mesa north of town, sort of a wrinkled texture in the big picture. If we could get up there it would be fantastic.”

“That is where the prevailing wind is going, so I’ll see what I can do. Before we get up into that, let’s see if we can swing over to the west a little bit.”

Staying below the top of the Hogback, Margaret bobbed the balloon up and down a hundred feet at a time to test various wind gusts. Tom got to work taking lots of pictures of the ridge and escarpment, focusing primarily on where stream beds had carved their way into the bedrock. As long as he was going to use this as his cover story, he might as well make a good show of it.

When Margaret needed them to go up a bit she would light off the burners again, their roar like a small jet engine over their head. When she simply wanted to hold altitude or allow the balloon to descend a bit, she would shut down them down and the silence was hypnotic.

Aside from an occasional squawk from Margaret’s radio, the ticking and pinging of the cooling metal burners above them, and the clicking of Tom’s cameras, it was completely quiet as they drifted along. Six or seven hundred feet below them they could clearly hear cars on the highway and farm animals in the scattered barnyards. One farmer could be seen driving a tractor out in a field, and he looked up and waved as they passed over him.

Margaret was indeed good at what she did and soon they were just a few hundred yards away from the cut in the ridge where the river and highway passed through. Margaret found a calm layer of air just below the top of the ridge. With the burners off they just hovered, Tom shooting picture after picture as well as some video.

“I hope you don’t need to go any further south or west from here,” Margaret said. She pointed up above the gap in the ridge where Tom could see several large birds circling. “There’s a big thermal there where those hawks are riding, and if we get into it we’ll end up going way off to the west and not to the north.”

“No, that’s fine right here,” Tom said, moving around to that side of the basket to shoot pictures toward the south. He could clearly see a large reservoir there with a long, earthen dam blocking off the end of a canyon. The fields there extended for maybe a mile south of the road and the river, then cut off like a knife, leaving nothing but dirt and rocks into the distance.

“Why do the fields stop so suddenly along that road?” he asked.

“That road marks the boundary of the reservation. The ridge is the east-west boundary and you can see that the tribes do a fair amount of farming down in the flood plain to the west. But outside of the flood plain they don’t bother trying to irrigate and grow anything. Maybe they know something that we don’t.”

“Okay. I’ve gotten what I need here,” Tom said. “Can we go up to the north and north east along the ridge and up over the mesa there, toward the foothills of Lone Tree Mountain?”

“Sure, if we pop up over the top of the ridge we should get taken that way. We’ll have to stay up a bit to the north anyway to stay out of the airport’s airspace and the approach paths for runway two-three. If we start to drift that way we’ll either have to go up to get over the airport or put down before we get there. I’ll try to keep it slow so you can take your pictures, but get what you need while you can because we won’t be coming back this way by air.”

Margaret got on the radio and called down to Neil, who was now fully loaded and waiting instructions. She told him where to head for a first approximation of their direction, and then lit off the burners again. The balloon had settled a hundred feet or so and drifted nearer to the cliffs, but now it started to slowly bob upward again.

As the balloon cleared the top of the ridge, the whole perspective changed. Where there had been a wall off to their west, now there was a giant, broken table underneath them, like a slab of concrete that had been cracked with one side dropped down in relation to the other. The top of the ridge was wrinkled and bent, the ground rough and ripped. It looked like challenging terrain to cross on foot.

As they settled at an altitude about six or seven hundred feet over the upper mesa, the winds started to carry them to the northwest. It was not a fast pace but it was definitely steady, and Tom was busy with the camera. He started to recognize certain landscape features from his research earlier in the day and oriented himself to where he thought the commune compound (if that’s what it was) was located.

The upper mesa sloped generally uphill toward the mountains of southern Colorado and the foothills around Lone Tree Mountain. The whole plain was covered with erosion gullies and streambeds. Some were only a few feet deep and wide, while others were deep and wide enough to have dirt roads and buildings tucked away in them.

Almost all of the buildings that Tom saw were ramshackle and dilapidated, weather worn and collapsing. A few looked like they were occasionally occupied and kept in useable shape. Tom was surprised to see railroad tracks running near the base of the Hogback and climbing up onto the mesa before heading off into the distance toward Colorado.

“Those aren’t the tracks for the trains I keep hearing in town, are they?” Margaret turned to look where he was pointing.

“No, the main tracks run along the highway to the east and through town, then pretty much parallel to the highway about ten miles south of it once they get out of town. Those tracks there are some old mining tracks, that haven’t been used in probably close to a hundred years. If you look over there,” she pointed, “and there you can see some spurs that went off to old abandoned strip mines.”

Tom picked up the binoculars and looked down at the tracks. Something was bugging him about the way they looked. He suddenly realized that the reason they stood out so well on the brown and beige landscape was because of the way the rails were glinting in the sunlight. If they hadn’t been used in a decades he would expect them to be dull and rusted, but they seemed to be much brighter and shinier. It was something else that didn’t add up that he would have to check out.

After the Hogback wall had gradually worn down and met the rising ground about ten miles to the northwest of Farmington and the airport, several of the larger gullies and gulches emptied out of box canyons, the streams meandering down toward the river to the south. Right next to the mouth of one of these canyons, near a small ridge to their north and with hills to both the east and west, was the collection of over a dozen non-descript buildings that Tom was looking for.

The wind was carrying them to the north of the compound. Tom might have preferred to be to the south since part of his view would be blocked by the ridge descending down from the mesa, but it would have to do. Making sure that he was taking pictures of the entire area and each erosion gully they passed over, Tom switched to high-definition video and zoomed in when they got near the buildings.

It looked like an industrial compound, a farm without a farmhouse. A gravel driveway led in from off of a dirt road. A tall chain-link fence surrounded everything, with what looked like a remote-controlled gate at the entrance. The south side of the fence where the entrance was ran right next to the “abandoned” rail line.

The buildings loosely surrounded an open courtyard and parking lot. Outside of the buildings but inside the fence at the back were four small plots that looked like gardens. Two of the buildings that faced the gardens had long greenhouses attached to them. An old-fashioned windmill on a tall steel lattice structure sat next to a water tank, and four other three-blade wind turbines rose on poles at the four corners of the compound. They were nowhere near as large as the ones seen in commercial wind farms, but they were all spinning steadily.

The buildings were all single story. They looked like industrial buildings, not residential homes, but they didn’t look cheap or flimsy by any means. The buildings were all arranged with the north walls several feet higher than the south walls, sloping them to keep snow off, but also allowing them to be covered wall-to-wall with solar panels.

From their position several hundred feet above and a half-mile or more to the north, Tom could see far more detail than the grainy online photos had shown, but it wasn’t as good as he would like. He could clearly see six cars in the parking lot, including a familiar white Tahoe, but no movement was visible.

Just as they were starting to drift out of sight of the compound and he was getting ready to shift his attention back to his cover of geologic erosion features, a door opened in one of the buildings and several people came out. From this distance it looked like three men and two women and Tom was certain that the two women were Ellen and the woman that he had seen at the post office two days earlier. He didn’t recognize any of the men. They all seemed to just be talking about something as they walked to two of the parked SUVs.

The balloon had been drifting quietly and sinking ever so slowly, but now Margaret again lit off the noisy burners. Through the long telephoto lens Tom could see all five of the people look up toward the balloon just visible over the ridge from their viewpoint and disappearing to the north. It must not have been that unusual of a sight since they all quickly turned back to the cars.

Just as the compound was disappearing out of sight, Tom saw the doors of the SUVs opened up. Out of the two vehicles came dozens and dozens of cats. They hopped down from the car and began to run all around inside the compound and were then all lost from Tom’s sight.

Tom went back to photographing rocks and gullies for a few minutes before he turned to Margaret. She had been quietly letting him do his work and keeping them as low as was reasonably safe. She had occasionally made calls to Neil and Bobby and they all seemed to have a plan in mind.

“I’ve pretty much got what I need,” Tom said. “This has been great, I really appreciate your help. It’s marvelous being up here and floating along like this. I see why you like it so much. Do you have a particular destination in mind for landing and meeting up with Neil?”

“More or less. We fly up north of here a lot, near the Colorado line on the other side of these mountains.” She pointed toward Lone Tree Mountain and the other peaks around it. “There’s a big river valley where the Animas River goes up into Colorado and the main highway up that way runs through there. In a few miles we’ll be there and the mesa here will fall off with some pretty spectacular cliffs down into the valley. It’s not the widest valley in the world but we should be able to drop down into it pretty quickly and be out of this northward flow. The winds down in there might be swirling around a bit, but we can work with whatever we’ve got and find a flat spot to put down. Neil is heading that way and he’ll scout out someplace in advance and then I’ll see if I can hit it. Simple!”

“If you say so. I’ll just keep taking pictures, you tell me when to hold on.”

In the end it worked pretty much as she had said. The edge of the mesa was sudden and the drop off into the valley was steep, but she had started their descent about a mile out and they dropped down past the edge of the cliff about two hundred yards out from the rocks.

Once down below the edge of the mesa, as predicted, they lost most of their northward momentum and drifted back and forth on some swirling currents in the valley. Below them there was a smaller river, a highway, and a few scattered fields. There were a lot of empty areas with just a few short trees and scrub brush, but Tom was guessing that even a few trees were too many.

Margaret kept up a running conversation with Neil over the radio, and soon Tom saw the bright red SUV and trailer parked just off the highway in a more or less flat area between the river and the road. Tom saw Neil let loose a couple of party balloons again and Margaret watched their paths to get a picture of the winds. They were in a good position so she let them start to cool and descend quickly.

Margaret was very, very good at what she did. They skimmed over a pair of trees on the far side of the highway, almost close enough to touch, before clearing the highway and the parked truck by about ten feet. Drifting at a little better than walking speed, Margaret dropped a pair of ropes which Neil and Bobby grabbed onto.

As they grabbed ahold and started dragging the balloons horizontal momentum to a stop, Margaret reached up and pulled a rope to open a vent in the top of the balloon’s canopy. The release of warm air caused them to settle to the ground with a gentle-ish thump. Neil and Bobby grabbed the basket as Margaret opened two more vents in the canopy. Deflating and pushed by the gentle breeze, the balloon fell to the ground downwind.

From there it was just a matter of disassembling the basket and rig, folding up the balloon envelope, and packing everything into the trailer. Margaret and the guys had done this many times so it went quickly. Tom had the sense to stay out of the way, swapping the normal lens for the telephoto and taking more pictures of the whole process. In twenty minutes they were back on the road.

As promised, Margaret dropped him off at his hotel on the way back into town. It was almost four o’clock by the time they got there. They spent a few minutes doing the paperwork for Tom’s credit card payment for the day’s adventures, then the balloonists were off to their hanger and Tom was off to let Jason in on what he had seen.

Ellen was most certainly out there, as well as the other lady and several others. Since there were at least six cars there, Tom suspected that there were more than just the five people he had seen. And what was going on with all of those cats? And the train tracks that weren’t on any map and were supposed to be abandoned?

The more they learned, the more questions they raised.

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.

Having “tripped” and being “off balance”, there are hazards in getting caught up, as well. Another sports analogy — how many basketball teams do we see come back from ten or twelve point deficits in the last quarter, only to then just completely be out of gas and fall back again once they’ve caught the other team? It’s not enough that you got caught up. You have to stay caught up the next day. And the next.

Or maybe today just wasn’t a good day to write. The lesson being that you have to write even on the bad days. (Duly noted.)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

Despite a late night out with the telescope and camera in a park on the east side of town (including a visit from a curious cop), Tom was up early the next morning in anticipation of the day’s proactive investigatory activities.

First he checked on Ellen’s car. It was still out at the complex in the desert to the west of town, although it had been driven overnight. The bread crumbs and time stamps showed that while he had been out looking at Orion and Jupiter and explaining to the cop what he was doing (and letting him take a look for himself), someone had taken Ellen’s car a couple of exits back toward town, stopped for over an hour, and then gone back. The map showed a steak house at the spot where they had stopped, so Tom didn’t think that there was much to make of it.

Tom looked again at the maps and photos of the area where the car was parked. While he had the online map photos of the site, they really didn’t give him a clear idea of how the terrain was laid out and what the sight lines were. He spent an hour playing with various two-dimensional and three-dimensional mapping programs, checking to see what the landscape looked like and where the roads ran. He made note of several landmarks that he hoped were as prominent when he was standing next to them as they appeared to be on the computer screen.

When he was done, he had some information but he didn’t feel like he that much knowledge. Tom wasn’t sure that he had a real clear plan of attack, but figured instead that he would make it up as he went along. Once on site he would look at the terrain and react accordingly. That bothered him, since he didn’t like going back to being reactive instead of being proactive. There was a nagging feeling that he might be making a bad move by not being more meticulous, but there was also a fear that he might lose Ellen and any advantage he had by being here when she wasn’t expecting him.

The hotel had a decent breakfast buffet set up in the lobby just off from the elevators, so Tom took advantage of it. While he was sitting alone at a table, working his way through a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, he noticed someone at the brochure rack out in the lobby. The woman was stocking the rack with a flyer he hadn’t seen or hadn’t paid attention to before, but now it caught his eye across the lobby.

Abandoning his breakfast, he walked over and looked at the brightly colored flyers that she was putting into the rack. A large, colorful hot air balloon was pictured floating above some mesa or badlands area, apparently locally. Large garish letters invited everyone to “See The National Parks & Monuments From A Hot Air Balloon!”

Tom stepped around to where he was in the woman’s field of view. When she looked up at him, he smiled and asked, “May I have one of those?”

“Of course,” she replied, handing him one. “Have you ever been up in a hot air balloon before?”

“Yes, a couple of times, usually over some sort of wine country or another, but never over the desert. I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. Do you work with this balloon company?”

“You’re looking at the owner and chief pilot, as well as the janitor and bookkeeper. I’m Margaret. Margaret Locke.”

Tom shook the proffered hand and smiled again. “I’m Tom Tiernan. I’m so glad to meet you, Margaret. I’m a photographer and science reporter out of Los Angeles, just passing through the area for a couple of days. I’ve been taking pictures of a lot of the geologic formations out here for an article I’m writing. It occurs to me that getting some pictures from the air might be perfect.”

“I’m sure we could get you to where you need to go, Tom, as long as you don’t need to do anything extreme, like land right on top of Shiprock. We like to stay on good terms with the tribal governments since we’re all sort of in the tourist business together.”

“No, nothing like that,” Tom replied. “I’ve been looking out to the west of the city, I would guess about a third of the way between here and the Arizona border. There’s a spot as you follow the river where there’s a big escarpment that the river cuts through. Just to the south of there is a big reservoir, and there’s a tiny little town there. I can’t remember its name right now.”

“I know where you’re talking about I think,” Margaret said. “The town is Waterflow and that big escarpment is called ‘The Hogback’. Just on the other side of that escarpment is where the reservation starts. Does that sound familiar?”

“Yes, that’s it, ‘Waterflow’. Lots of farm land down in the river valley, lots of rocks and dirt up on the mesas around there, right? I’ve been looking at the way the river cuts through the escarpment, the Hogback.”

“What is your article about?”

“It’s about erosion, aimed at a younger audience, through one of the online education sites for high school students. Is there any problem flying out there? For example, are there any restrictions about going over the reservation?”

“No, like I said, we work together. As far as the FAA goes, it’s all open airspace and as long as we’re above a thousand feet no one really can tell us we can’t be there. But in a balloon you end up landing where you end up landing, so it’s better to be friendly with anyone who might own the field or back yard that you put down in.”

“Great, that sounds like just what I need. Can we go up later today?”

“Whoa, what’s the rush? We usually like to have a little more planning and notice than that. We need to check out the weather and winds and put together a chase team to pick us up at a minimum. In addition, the area you want to look at isn’t a place that we usually fly. We usually take tourists up at one of our more scenic places, somewhere around the parks, up in the mountains toward the Colorado line, or down toward Santa Fe. That’s territory and wind patterns I know already. If we’re going someplace new I would like to do a little scouting.”

“I am pressed for time if I’m going to do this,” Tom said, still smiling. “I’m only supposed to be here another day and this seems like such a perfect fit for the work I’m doing. I know when I took balloon flights before they always wanted to go early in the day because of the calmer winds, right?”

“Yeah, we’re usually trying to get on the road by 6:30 so that we can be in the air by 8:00.”

“It’s not quite 8:00 yet so it’s still pretty early. Since I’ve got a deadline, would it be possible to at least check to see what the weather’s like and if your team is available for a flight this morning? Then if it’s at least possible, we could go out and actually see what conditions were like. I’ll pay for the day even if we don’t fly and if you say that it’s a no-go then we won’t go. But if we get lucky and it can be done, then we get take our flight and I can get my pictures. Could that work?”

Tom could see that Margaret’s first, kneejerk reaction was going to be that it couldn’t be done, just because. However, since he had laid out a reasonable plan with a series of points at which she could abort the flight, and since he had offered to pay if they flew or not, she bit back her initial response and gave it some thought.

“I know that the weather is supposed to stay clear today and I don’t remember anything in the forecast about it getting very windy. I’ll tell you what. Give me about ten minutes to make a couple of calls and I’ll see if I can pull something off. But remember, I’m the pilot in command. If at any point I say that we can’t go, then we don’t go.”

“Agreed, safety first and you’re the boss. Let me go get my camera gear. I’ll meet you back down here.”

Tom went up to his room and pulled together the camera and binoculars, along with spare batteries and memory cards. He grabbed a light jacket in case it turned out warmer than yesterday had, as well as a ski jacket, hat, and gloves in case it turned out colder. Stuffing it all into his new backpack, he paused only to send a quick email to Jason and to double check the location of Ellen’s car. It hadn’t moved and was still out at the compound in the desert.

Back in the lobby, he sat and waited for Margaret to return. Soon he heard her voice. He stood up as she came around the corner, still talking on her phone.

“Double check to make sure that both propane tanks are full, as well as the gas tank on the van. Tell Bobby to meet us there in twenty minutes, we’ll have to hit the road as soon as I get there, okay? I’ll see you in a few.” Margaret hung up and then looked around for Tom.

“It’s your lucky day,” she said, walking over, “at least so far. We’ve got a better than fifty-fifty chance of the winds being within limits, and there’s a friend of a friend who will let us set up and take off from his field down near the river. My normal support crew is at their day jobs, but my son and a friend of his are available. They’ve been training with me and they’ve done a couple of pickups, so we should be good to go. We’ll see when we get out there. Are you still up for trying this, even if we don’t get to fly later?”

“Let’s give it a shot,” Tom said. “Where should I meet you?”

“It will be faster and easier if you just come with me. After we’re done either I’ll bring you back here or my son can drive you back, if that’s okay.”

“That works for me, let’s go.”

Margaret’s car was typical of what Tom had seen in the region, a four-wheel drive Jeep that had been not-so-gently used. He threw his backpack in with an assortment of other junk and tools already in the back seat and they were off, Margaret trying to get the heater to work a little bit better than usual.

Fifteen minutes later they were pulling up at a hanger and office building on the periphery of a mid-sized airport. Tom had seen it on some of the maps, but none of them had indicated its size. Tom had assumed that it was a small, private airport, but in fact it was mid-sized with a couple of runways and a large collection of hangers and buildings surrounding it. As they pulled up, a small regional turbojet took off over them, displaying what looked to be a corporate logo of some sort.

Tom gestured to the plane that was taking off. “Are there commercial flights into here?”

“Yeah, Great Lakes flies in here three or four times a day from Denver, weather permitting. It’s about an hour’s flight but you have to take the B190’s in. A lot of people don’t like being in something that small if they think of a 737 as ‘small’ already, but they seem to be flying full with skiers and tourists, so I guess they can’t be that bad.”

“Another thing she lied about,” Tom muttered under his breath.

“What’s that?” Margaret asked.

“Nothing, I had just gotten some bad information from a friend, that’s all. Is this your place?” He nodded at the sign over the door, “NWNM Aviation”. Back as they had turned off of the main road he had seen a billboard with a hot air balloon on it, but he hadn’t paid any attention to the address.

“This is it. The planes are off that way, but the balloon should be in the garage over here if Neil got everything ready. Grab your gear out of the back and let’s see how he’s doing.”

Tom looked at Margaret out of the corner of his eye as they walked across the parking lot. “I’m curious,” he said, “how you got into this business. Nothing personal, but I don’t imagine there are just a ton of black women with their own aviation companies out there. If I’m sticking my nose where it’s not supposed to be, I’ll respectfully withdraw the question, of course.”

“No worries. You’re correct. I think that there are only about ten aviation companies nationwide that are owned by women of color. I got into flying at an early age because my father flew fighters in Vietnam. I went to the Air Force Academy, got a degree, got my wings, flew transports, did my time, and then got out. We ended up out here because of the climate and because I can’t stand the big cities. I got my balloon license and added that to the business because there’s a lot more money to it in this area, although as you can see, we’re not exactly getting rich. Here we are.”

She opened a door next to the driveway and led him in. It was dim inside, lit mainly by the windows lining the large hanger doors on the opposite side. Inside the hanger were two small planes, one a high-wing craft and the other a low-wing. Near where they had come in was a large SUV with a trailer attached. In the trailer sat the deflated balloon envelope, the six-passenger basket, and various other pieces of equipment.

As they entered, two older teenagers were in the process of tying a tarp over the trailer. One was clearly Margaret’s son, a tall and gangly young man. His friend was shorter, but built like a tank. Tom guessed that if Margaret’s son was a wide receiver on the high school football team, his friend was probably their center or an interior lineman. They both looked like they were going through a checklist carefully, doing tasks that they had done before but couldn’t yet do from memory.

Margaret led Tom over and made introductions. “Tom, this is my son, Neil. Neil, Tom. His friend is Bobby. They’ll be our support and pickup team for the day.” Tom shook hands all around. Margaret started checking their status with Neil. All of the equipment was in place and the chase car was ready to go. Neil had even had Bobby throw together a cooler of drinks and a bag of snacks for later.

“Okay, good job. I think you guys have done it all, let’s hit the road.”

From the airport it was about fifteen miles out to the Waterflow region. Towing the heavily loaded trailer, they kept their speed down. While they drove, Margaret kept listening to a radio tuned to the aviation weather band, checking updates from the Farmington weather station.

In about twenty-five minutes they pulled off onto a side road and rumbled down to a weather-worn farm house. Less than a mile to the west, Tom could see the Hogback rising up and curving off to the north, the river channel carving through it like a breached fortress wall. Margaret got out and left the motor running while she went up to the farmhouse door and knocked. After a brief conversation with someone and some hand waving as she confirmed directions, she was back. They rumbled off onto a gravel road until they came to the open field that they needed.

(At 23:53, Chapter Eleven to be continued…)