Viveka’s knees buckled and she slowly slid to the floor. “In America please,” she whispered…
Chapter Three
Carlsbad New Mexico—A fight broke out at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. A Holly Clouse who claims her husband developed cancer working at the WIPP has been leading protestors who have been complaining of the dangers of the radioactive materials being interred there. A number of employees staged a counter protest, concerned over the loss of their jobs. William Thyrgeson said, “This is a good job. I drive one of those new waldoes. I never even get close to the radioactive waste. It couldn’t be safer. Idiots like them there are going to close WIPP down and our jobs will go somewhere else.”
Of note, France is said to be negotiating with ET Resources to dispose of its radioactive waste to an undisclosed location somewhere out in space. People have begun to ask why we’re continuing to invest in the disposal of such materials here on earth…
US Marshall Gloria Sanchez walked out of the Federal building on New Bern Avenue at seven PM. When she got home, a young woman stepped around the corner of her house and said, “Hey Gloria.”
In the dim light Gloria studied her a moment, then recognized Ell Donsaii, done up in one of the disguises Gloria had helped her set up years ago. “Hey yourself.”
“I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions?”
“Shoot.”
“How come the FBI hasn’t found me? Or, I mean, at least figured out that I have aliases. Are you covering for me?”
Gloria shrugged. “We do keep close track of the criminals in Witness Protection. They have to report in every so often, some of them slip back into a criminal lifestyle and so we watch them. Since you weren’t a criminal, we treated it as a favor we were doing you and your police chief friend in Dallas. We haven’t tried to track you. Even for the criminals in the WP, we hold their identities to just a few people. About fifteen years ago one of them got sold out to the Mafia by a secretary in the Marshall’s office who was desperate for money. Information about our witnesses isn’t available to other government agencies without specific court orders, which would mean someone would have to actually know you’d been given an identity. In your case, I’m the only one who actually knows what identities I set up for you. My boss only knows that I was asked to create an identity for you. He doesn’t know there were more than one or what they were. We haven’t talked about it, but I suspect that neither of us think you deserve this witch hunt you’ve been subjected to. The FBI hasn’t asked us about it so I haven’t told them and I suspect he’s doing the same.” She sighed, “However, if they do come ask, I don’t think either of us will go to jail to protect you. If you want my advice, I’d move to a different country ‘til this all blows over.”
Ell said, “Thanks Gloria, from the bottom of my heart. For setting up my disguises and for keeping them quiet. Someday I hope to repay you. Don’t get yourself in trouble for me though.”
“You take care of yourself.” Gloria said and turned her head away to wipe at the corner of her eye. “Don’t get yourself in trouble for me,” was just the kind of thing you might expect that someone with Donsaii’s class would say. Gloria turned back to say good bye but Donsaii was gone. Gloria stepped over to look around the corner but there was no sign of the young woman. Even if Gloria had thought to look up, Ell would have been far too high in the air by then to be seen in the dimming light.
***
Dressed as “Belle” for the first time in a long time, Ell entered Vic’s. Having decided that Shan should practice with his disguises, Belle was accompanied by “Stan Kenner.”
A respectable crowd graced the bar for a Tuesday night. Not so much because of the nearly unknown act, but because tickets were so hard to come by at Vic’s that almost every night sold out. The fact that occasionally some very big names appeared under an unknown alias just for fun and to get a nice recording contributed to high ticket sales for unknown acts.
Belle spoke to Vic for a moment. “I hope they can recreate the magic you recorded up there in Asheville,” he said, before begging off to finish preparing for the show.
A gentle strumming on the mandolin opened the show. Then the guitar came in and finally the bass box. The lights slowly faded up on the young man and the older woman.
They didn’t sing at all on the first piece but did display their surprising virtuosity on the mandolin and guitar. The crowd cheered lustily when they’d finished. With the crowd in a good mood, they launched “Forgiveness,” the song that had so impressed Ell in Asheville. She looked around eagerly for the young girl but didn’t see her. She hoped they hadn’t left her home because of its being a school night, but could understand why they might have.
Then, when the second chorus came around, just like in Asheville the crowd quietly hummed or sang along. The guitarist played a lick and leaned to the mike, “Now, we have a treat for you,” and he started the chorus again, this time with the bell pure tones of the young girl taking the lead. Other than the music, the room sank into silence as a spotlight slowly faded in on the little platinum blond girl standing out in the middle of the crowd. Dressed in a white dress with a tiny flowered headband on her head, she looked beautiful. If Ell hadn’t known, she’d have thought that the girl only had her eyes closed.
From there, the girl sang the lead on both verses and choruses. When she sang the bridge it seemed almost heartbreaking. When the last notes faded away there was a moment of silence, then a pandemonium of applause.
Ell leaned against Shan, “Even more amazing than they were in Asheville, huh?”
Shan could only nod.
***
Phillips entered the Oval office with his usual mild apprehension. “Hello Madam President.”
“Hey Mason,” Stockton said almost eagerly. “What’cha got for me on Donsaii?”
It’s back to her thinking that Donsaii is the most important thing the FBI is doing! I’d have so much more respect for her if she cared about our other missions! He pasted on a smile, “Well the NSA has pretty good access to Cuba’s internal communications because they have only limited incorporation of PGR chips into their comm systems so far. They report that there is very little mention of Donsaii in searches of their datanet communications. Because it would be unlikely that they could keep all their discussion of something as big as Donsaii’s capture limited to their fledgling PGR network, NSA doesn’t think Donsaii ever made it into Cuban hands. She’s either still hiding on Guantanamo somehow, or she’s out in the world somewhere.”
“Could she be back in the States?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but you’d think someone would have seen her and rumors should have surfaced.” He shrugged, “Well rumors have surfaced but they’ve all been due to her fans dressing and doing their hair to look like her. I can’t believe that the real Donsaii would run around looking like herself, but even if she’s in disguise, you can’t do anything in this country without ID and you can’t just print yourself a fake ID like you used to be able to.” He shrugged, “So, I don’t think she’s here in the States. Unfortunately, she could hide pretty easily in a lot of the less developed foreign countries and finding her in one of them will be very difficult.”
“The CIA and NSA are still looking though, right?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“OK, what deep dark secrets have you discovered sifting through her personal life and finances?”
Phillips shook his head. “Essentially she’s only dated three men that we’ve been able to find out about. A Phillip Zabrisk who was a cadet with her at the Air Force Academy, a Roger Emmerit who works at her company, and she had essentially one date with Gordon Speight, the lead singer of Velos, the rock band. We’ve managed to get agents to speak with all three of them, bringing her up in casual conversation, not formal questioning. They all essentially idolize her. As opposed to most exes, they couldn’t say enough good things about her. So, no kinky sex, no bad breakups.’
H
e took a breath, “You truly don’t want to piss her off in person, we did find out that the terrorists at the Olympics weren’t the first targets of her wrath. When she was just eleven, some guy attacked her mother, evidently a rape attempt. Donsaii poked him in the eyes and blinded him. It took some serious digging to find out about this. Because she was a minor and her attacking the guy was considered to be justified, the records were sealed and essentially no one knows about it.”
“Blinded a guy, huh?” Stockton unconsciously rubbed her hands together. “That sounds like something that would tarnish her lily white reputation.”
“Blinded a guy who was trying to rape her mother. While she was a child. A guy who was threatening to hurt her as well. And she didn’t expect it to blind him—just thought it would hurt him and might make him stop.” Phillips shrugged, “A lot of people would just respect her even more. The guy was subsequently DNA linked to several other rapes. He needed to be taken off the streets by someone.”
Stockton sighed disappointedly, “OK, what about her finances? She should make a good target for an IRS audit and I personally will be astonished if you didn’t find some other transgressions, eh?”
Phillips looked Stockton in the eye. “She’s your biggest individual taxpayer Ma’am.”
Stockton leaned back, disbelief written all over her face. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that, dollar for dollar, the IRS says she paid more taxes than any other individual in the United States last year.”
“But… but, how can that be?”
“You mean, why didn’t she cheat? Or how did she have so much money? Or why didn’t other rich people pay their taxes?”
Stockton gave a little confused head shake, “Where would she get so much money?”
“Well, you know how everyone in the world uses PGR chips based on her paper about quantum mechanics?”
Stockton nodded.
“She didn’t just write the paper, she invented the chips and holds the patent. This isn’t a secret, just nobody seems to pay any attention to it. Certainly, she never mentions it and it isn’t on any of her personal public information or the website of her company D5R. That patent pays her 12% which this last year added up to fourteen billion dollars!”
“She gets 12% of fourteen billion dollars?”
Phillips shook his head, “Her 12% is fourteen billion.”
“No shit!” Stockton breathed. “The government could use that money, I’ll have to ask Raul to start figuring out how to confiscate it.”
Phillips said, “That isn’t all. It turns out she almost wholly owns D5R and its subsidiaries. Most people are under the impression that it’s owned by a group of private investors, a fiction that Donsaii apparently helps promulgate. That means that the majority of the profits from those subdivisions go to her as well, way more than 12%. There’s a medical arm Quantum Biomed that’ll soon be paying her a few million for those new prosthetic arms they’re going to be licensing. They’re making some kind of heart assist pump, not profitable yet, but probably will be very profitable in the near future. They’re thought to have other things in the pipeline, but are mostly reinvesting profits in the medical arena. There’s another subsidiary named Allosci, making graphene out in space at one of their habitats. There’s huge demand for graphene and therefore a willingness to pay a premium. They’re churning it out with profits in the hundreds of millions. The ET Resources subsidiary is reinvesting almost all of its income in growth so only paying Donsaii a small amount. Still, that gave her another billion or so of income.”
He looked back down from his HUD where he’d been getting his figures, “All those are small potatoes compared to the income from the ports made by the Portal Tech subsidiary. Portal Tech doesn’t need to reinvest because they’re limiting their expansion according to deals made with the government to diminish their disturbance of the economy. Last year her income from the ports totaled,” Phillips paused and raised an eyebrow, “forty three billion dollars.”
“Jesus!” Stockton said, “What’s the total of all those?”
“Over fifty eight billion dollars income. And get this! As opposed to the rest of the ultra-rich, who find all kinds of ways to dodge their taxes, she doesn’t claim any deductions, use any shelters or invest in fake charities. Nope, she just paid a full 45% or over twenty six billion in Federal income tax. She paid another 4.6 billion in North Carolina State income tax—heck that’s almost 20% of the state’s budget? She has more income from some turnover in her investments, but admittedly she does only pay the standard 20% capital gains tax on that money.”
“In any case, no one would accuse her of cheating on her taxes. In fact if anyone were to accuse her of anything, it would be a tax accountant accusing her of being foolish for not protecting her income from taxes like everyone else does. You’d certainly have a hard time making her out to be a bad guy. Most people would think she’s either incredibly naive or unbelievably righteous.”
Stockton swallowed. After a pause to think she developed a small sneer, “Someone that rich, and she doesn’t even donate to charity?”
“Yes she does. We’ve found 1.4 billion donated to higher education in North Carolina. Donated anonymously and just not claimed as a tax deduction. The agent investigating believes she’s donated hundreds of millions to other charities, all anonymously, but, since she isn’t claiming it on her taxes, it’s almost impossible to track.”
Stockton narrowed her eyes at Phillips, “So… to listen to you, Donsaii’s some kind of saint, huh?”
Inside Phillips grimaced because he could feel what was about to come. “Yes Ma’am, I think she’s as close as ordinary humans ever come to sainthood. The agents I’ve had ‘digging for dirt’ have simply returned with more and more respect for that young woman. If there’s anything she’s doing that’s not aboveboard, our guys have no inkling what it would be.”
“Mr. Phillips, if that’s the case, then your men need to get their asses in gear. There’s no such thing as a human being as pure as they seem to think that young twit is. The mere fact that she has that much money by the age of twenty five tells me something stinks under the floorboards. You and they need to figure out what smells!”
As Phillips left the White House he thought to himself, the fact that she made that much money by the age of twenty five tells me she’s a freaking genius!
***
Ell and Shan drove into their neighborhood shortly after dusk on Sunday evening. Shan had returned after the end of Spring Break and resumed teaching, but Ell had stayed away, worrying that a return to the Chapel Hill area would tempt the fates.
They’d decided that they either needed to give up on Ell’s Raquel identity, or they had to try having Raquel return to the house they shared. Shan had finished teaching his class for the semester, so if this blew their cover he wouldn’t have really let down his students.
Ell turned to him and said, “Shan?”
He turned to her, “Mmm?”
“I’m worried about this.”
“Still can’t believe that the boogey men haven’t actually figured out your Raquel alias?”
Ell gave a wry smile, “Nope. They’ve had months. Even though Gloria says she hasn’t given me away, I just can’t believe—with all their resources—they haven’t figured it out. What if they’ve just been sitting around waiting for Raquel to reappear?”
“You want to turn back? Go somewhere else?”
“No,” she grinned, “if they really haven’t figured it out, I’d like to let you get back to your life as a stuffy academic.”
Shan raised an eyebrow, “Oh, you’re askin’ for it now!”
“But I do think we should be prepared.” She turned and reached into her bag in the backseat. “Here put this on.” She handed him a set of straps.
Taking them, Shan frowned. “What’s this?”
“It’s a simple lifting harness,” she said, sliding her legs into the thigh straps and passing a belt behind he
r back.
As he did the same, Shan asked, “What’s the plan?”
“The hoverbike is already holding 12,000 feet above our back yard. Snap-on “D” rings attached to graphene cables are lying on our patio. We walk in the house and directly through to the back door. If the G-men show up, we step out the door and snap on the D rings. Allan reels us in and takes us away.”
“Whoa, you’ve given this some serious thought. What if we can’t find the D rings in the dark?”
“They have LEDs on them. Allan will flash them, blue for you, red for me.”
Shan frowned, “Sounds kinda sexist.”
Ell patted him on the shoulder. “As long as we get it right when we’re in a hurry, I don’t care how sexist it is.”
The car pulled into their driveway. They casually got out, retrieved their bags from the back of Shan’s car and walked to the front door. The door AI recognized them and threw the bolt, welcoming them into the house. They walked into the house, setting down their suitcases and proceeding directly to the back door. There they stood, following the feed from the cameras under the eaves of the house on their HUDs. For a couple of minutes tension was high while they waited for men in dark suits to approach at any moment.
After about ten minutes of watching, Ell choked back a giggle. “Looks like they haven’t been just hanging around waiting for me to…” she broke out in a full throated laugh that went on and on. Wiping an eye she finally sputtered out, “show. Well, that was anticlimactic. The FBI’s not hot on our trail after all!”
Shan grinned at her a moment, then drew her into an embrace. “May all our fears be unrealized, eh?”
“Sure.” Ell giggled again. “I think I’ll still have Allan keep the D rings on the patio the rest of tonight, OK? Maybe they’ve just got cameras watching the place.”
Shan raised an eyebrow, “Are you expecting me to wear this harness all night?”
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