Wanted

by Laurence E. Dahners

  “Intelligent?”

  “Yeah…” she said, then, “You know, with sensors. When I’m bending my elbow, my AI deflates the ones on the front and inflates the ones in the back—which there’ll have to be more of to allow flexion. When I extend the elbow, it inflates the ones in the front and bends the ones in the back.” She tilted her head consideringly, “With some work, we might be able to make space suits that way too. You know, because joint motion has been a big problem out in space?”

  Gary’s mind boggled at the complexity of such a setup, though he knew that for a good AI it wouldn’t be that difficult to do once it had been programmed. Instead he said, “What did you mean about the prisons?”

  Still, as if she were mostly thinking about something else, she said, “You know, you could make the prisoners a graphene exoskeleton that they had to wear everywhere except the shower. Much simpler than this thing I’ve got on, just cuffs at the wrists, elbows, thorax, waist, knees and ankles with connecting tubes. If they gave a guard trouble the guard’s AI just inflates the exoskeleton and immobilizes the prisoner with his main joints locked out straight.” She turned and winked at Gary, “Inmates would have a hell of a time breaking out of graphene!”

  He pondered that for a moment, then shook his head. He turned and said, “You going to tell me what the thing that looks like a big nozzle with huge handles on it is for?”

  “Putting out fires.” Ell grinned at him. “Deflated, every firefighter could carry a couple of them in his pocket. Inflate the nozzle and open the port at the back. The other end of the port is deep in a lake so it has a head of pressure behind it. You’d instantly get a huge volume of water flow. You need the big handles to grip so you’d be able to resist the back pressure. Kind of like having a fire truck in your pocket.”

  Gary blinked, “It would be a lot easier than toting a big brass fire hose nozzle and a long hose, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah. And they could get fresh air without carrying a tank, and they could have cool water constantly pouring over the outside of their uniforms… Hey, Gar’?”

  “Mm hmm,” he said, obviously thinking about something else.

  “Remember that Viveka comes from a very paternalistic society. Help her come out of her shell and I think she’ll really be able to contribute.”

  Gary, at first startled by the non-sequitur, glanced at Ell, then aside and blushed a little, “Yeah, I really think she’s terrific,” he said, ducking his head a little.

  Ell thought musingly, the way he’s talking about her, I’ll bet he won’t be available as my backup plan for all that much longer.

  ***

  Raul Stenner stepped into the Oval Office feeling somewhat like he should have wiped his shoes on the way over. He’d been slogging through so much legal manure that it was hard to feel clean. “Hello, Madam President,” he said dourly.

  “Raul! I suppose as usual, you’ve got nothing but bad news to bring me?” she said with a broad smile.

  What’s gotten her in such a good mood? Stenner wondered. “I’m afraid that’s so Ma’am? Those lawyers someone’s hired on Donsaii’s behalf are simply burying my office in pleas, demands, requests, writs. Paper is arriving by the truckload and my people can hardly do anything else for trying to deal with it.”

  “Well, it turns out that the girl’s richer than anyone would have thought, so she’s probably throwing her own money at it.” Stockton’s eyebrows bounced up and down, “So, all you have to do is figure out how to confiscate her money, and your paperwork issue will take care of itself. Besides we should have her back in custody pretty soon, which should help too.”

  “Really?” Stenner lowered his voice, “When?”

  Stockton smiled shrewdly, “Can’t tell you yet. But I’ll let you know as soon as the good news comes down.”

  Chapter Five

  Ell got out of the shower, having washed away her bronzers. She blinked at the mirror, she hadn’t appeared as Ell for quite some time and wasn’t used to her own appearance. She put on her graphene underwear, a lifting harness that already had a clip for the D-ring on the graphene cable of her hoverbike and some loose black exercise pants. A black scarf went around her neck. She slipped into an oversized exercise jacket with a hoodie and felt inside the big pockets for the ports they had in them. The ports in the pockets were two way and at four inches, substantially larger than her umbilical port. Thus, Allan could instantly deliver a number of devices to her that were much too big to fit through the 1.5 centimeter port on her abdomen. She covered her short hair with one of the graphene skullcaps. It had a wig of long strawberry blond hair that was a good match for her own hair, even if she hadn’t ever grown her hair that long. She pondered applying a little makeup but settled for lipstick alone.

  Ell peered out the window of the cheap little motel she had rented the room in and saw that dusk was beginning to settle across the landscape outside. She turned to look at the big screen on the wall that showed the small farm a mile farther down the road. The video came from a camera sitting on the roof of one of the homes across the road from the farm and farmhouse that would serve as the “safe house” for her meeting with Hoyt tonight.

  Suspiciously, one of Hoyt’s staffers had called two days ago and tried to set up Ell’s meeting with the Congresswoman for that very afternoon. Concerned that someone might be trying to keep Ell from evaluating the location before she arrived, she had claimed to be unable to make it on such short notice. She had insisted on this evening instead.

  As soon as they’d agreed to the date, Ell had driven to Roanoke and parked at the airport. Using one of her “throwaway” IDs she’d rented a car and had it take her to a cheap hotel in the DC area.

  Meanwhile, she’d had her hoverbikes fly themselves up to the DC area. They’d arrived long before Ell and used their cameras to examine the location she’d been given for the meet. Allan had pulled every scrap of public information about the chosen location off the net as well. In the early morning hours of that night she’d carefully looked it over with some drones dropped off of the hoverbikes.

  The drones she’d brought along weren’t quadcopters like most people used for surveillance. Instead Ell had taken some of Gary’s half meter graphene balloons and attached small ports for AV recording and a set of quiet, low velocity, port driven air jets for maneuvering. Filled with helium, they were almost silent as they moved around from place to place. Even in daylight the semitransparent gray balloons could be hard to see in the distance and their radar cross section was microscopic.

  Although Ell had spent hours evaluating the original meet location, she’d still had to smile when a staffer had called this afternoon to change the location, “because they were concerned that the first meet site might have been compromised.” Now it would be at a safe house on a farm near Centreville.

  Ell suspected that they just didn’t want Ell herself to have enough time to learn very much about the location. However, she hadn’t demurred. She simply had the translucent hoverbike move immediately to hold at 12,000 feet above the new location and begin examining it. She’d had the drones begin examining it as well, though in daytime she didn’t have them fly very close. In fact, the camera on the roof across the road was on a deflated drone. Allan had already downloaded the public information about the farm and its house and he’d found Ell this cheap motel down the road from the farm. By the time she’d checked in, the AV record from the hoverbike had shown her nearly a hundred people bustling about the little farm, going in and out of the outbuildings and through the surrounding fields.

  That seemed like a lot more than they should need just to make the meet safe.

  Special Agent in Charge Douglas York grimaced. This assignment looked easy, but it would also be very easy for him to step deeply into a huge pile of shit. Over the past week since he’d been tasked with Donsaii’s arrest, his emotions had taken a roller coaster. First over how easy it looked—simply “snatch a girl when she showed up for a meeting.” Then th
ey’d started assigning him resources. A lot of resources.

  So he’d stepped back and reevaluated. Somebody thought this would be hard or they wouldn’t be throwing so many assets at it. He’d reviewed Donsaii’s history. What she’d done at the Olympics nine years ago seemed almost impossible to believe. Not what she’d done in gymnastics, though that looked incredible too, but what she’d done to those terrorists. That was just holy crap amazing.

  Then last year’s Olympics had proved her to be faster than anyone else on the planet. Of course, that brought to mind the old saw about “no one can outrun a bullet.” But the word was that Director Phillips wanted Donsaii without any bullets in her. That directive had been so emphatic that York had considered having all the agents on this assignment turn in their weapons. Instead, he’d settled for issuing them all Tasers and telling them that if they did use their weapons, they’d lose their jobs.

  After watching video of Donsaii performing some of her feats, he’d come up with the current plan. York did not want her getting loose outside, where her speed might let her run circles around his people. So he’d had his team send her instructions to park, disembark her vehicle and enter the house. Then “climb the stairs to the first room on the right.”

  Because there was only one staircase, having her go upstairs made the plan almost foolproof. Once she was up there, agents hidden in the kitchen and living room would enter the foyer and surround the bottom of the staircase to prevent egress there. The first bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs didn’t have a window. Once Donsaii entered the room, agents in the other upstairs rooms would enter the hallway to prevent her leaving the room. Inside the room a female agent similar in appearance to Hoyt should fool Donsaii long enough for the other four agents in the room to take her down, make the arrest and cuff her.

  The team had been provided titanium carbide hand and ankle cuffs so that Donsaii wouldn’t be able to cut her way free like she’d done at Guantanamo. They had a high security armored prison truck standing by in a motel parking lot about a mile away.

  Supposing Donsaii should escape the room, or fail to go into it; by then the house would have been surrounded with a layered arrangement of his agents. They would move in from the outbuildings and surrounding fields as soon as Donsaii entered the house. Even if she managed to jump out a window and tried to flee, someone would get a Taser dart in her.

  Hoyt remained the biggest joker in the deck. York had considered sending her to a different safe house and then just telling her that Donsaii never showed up. In their strategy sessions someone had pointed out that Donsaii might watch the road for Hoyt’s vehicle to arrive and because she had Hoyt’s comm, she could even contact Hoyt to ask if that was indeed her arriving at the farm house. They had decided that the safest strategy would be to have Hoyt arrive and go to the master bedroom, upstairs on the back side of the house. That way Hoyt, if Donsaii asked her, would honestly answer that she was in the house.

  If some complication arose, as a plan B they could actually direct Donsaii to the room Hoyt was actually in and the “protective detail” agents waiting with Hoyt in that room could arrest Donsaii. As there was only the one room with no windows, the master bedroom they would have Hoyt in would have a window. However, they’d chosen it because its window over the high back side of the house had a twenty foot drop. No one could jump from that high without getting hurt.

  York had wanted to do the meet under the cover of darkness and had been dismayed when Hoyt had asked that the meet be held in the late afternoon. To York’s delight, Donsaii had insisted she couldn’t make it until 9:15 PM, which would be well into dusk. He’d had all his agents bring night vision goggles which would give them a huge advantage over Donsaii in the dark.

  She might be really fast, but Donsaii was just one girl, after all.

  At nine PM, Ell watched on her large screen as a black government car arrived at the farm house and pulled up the driveway to the small parking area off the porch. A woman matching Mary Hoyt’s appearance got out with a man in a gray suit. They went inside and a few minutes later the lights went on in one of the rooms on the back side of the house upstairs. Other than the living room, no other lights were visible.

  Ell’s eyes narrowed. According to the floor plans Allan had downloaded off the web, the first room on the right at the top of the stairs was at the northeast corner of the house. Though the floor plan showed a window, it had either never been built, or had been subsequently closed off. The light that had come on, had come on in a room at the southwest corner of the house.

  Ell sent one of her drone balloons toward that window to have a look. Meanwhile, she stepped outside and walked to her rental car. Leaning in, she unfolded the dummy that was lying on the floor boards, placed a wig on it and sat it up on the driver’s side. She strapped it in with the shoulder harness, then took a moment to study the large heavy looking square truck parked several spaces away. “BOP” was printed large on its side, but beneath that in smaller print it said, “Federal Bureau of Prisons.” Several men sat in the front and Ell had a feeling she knew exactly what they were waiting for.

  She got out of the car. As she walked to the alley behind the motel, her car started up and pulled out of its parking space, then headed out onto the street. In the alley, she picked up the D-ring that had flashed its LEDs at her. She snapped her lifting harness onto it and moments later her hoverbike lifted her into the sky on a slender thread of graphene. She pulled her scarf up over her lower face and lifted the hoodie on her jacket over her head. She cinched the opening of the hoodie around her face leaving only her eyes not covered by black cloth. She felt pretty stuffy all covered up on a summer evening but she turned on the ports and cool air began to blow out of thousands of tiny vents inside the clothing. As she swung through the sky toward the farm she looked up at her HUD. As her drone’s cameras approached, the view displayed in Ell’s HUD zoomed slowly in on the window at the back of the farm house. It confirmed the floor plans Allan had downloaded. The room was the largest one upstairs and had been designated the master bedroom on the plans. It had a little stub hallway extension to a door that connected to the main upstairs hallway. A woman stepped in front of the window, arms behind her back, looking out at the countryside. Ell had the drone fly higher so Hoyt would be less likely to notice it. As the drone approached, Ell could see that the woman was indeed Hoyt.

  Or someone very carefully made up to look like her.

  As Ell herself dropped down out of the sky toward the farmhouse she turned the cooling in her clothing way up to shut down her IR signature. She said, “Congresswoman Hoyt?”

  Hoyt’s voice came back almost immediately, “Yes?”

  “Are you aware that there are nearly a hundred people surrounding or inside the farmhouse where we’re supposed to meet?”

  “No, no.” Hoyt laughed, “There’s only me, my aide downstairs and five agents from the FBI that are providing security.”

  “Hmm,” Ell said as she touched gently down on the roof of the farmhouse. She had Allan maintain tension on the graphene cable so that she’d be light and not thumping about on the roof. Continuing her conversation with Hoyt, she said, “Before you respond to me, I suggest that you ask the two agents in the room with you to step out into the hall to give you privacy for a personal conversation.” Allan passed Ell her five centimeter hand held single port through the two way port in her jacket pocket. To Hoyt Ell said, “I’m sending you a ‘fast motion’ video clip of the people surrounding the house as they set up this afternoon.”

  As Hoyt watched the twenty second quick motion clip showing the people arriving and scattering all around the farm as well as into the farm house, Ell used the single port to pop a set of camera ports into the location where the floor plan said the hallway of the second floor in the farmhouse should be. The AV ports were imbedded in the surface of a one inch graphene balloon which she inflated with helium as soon as it popped through. The balloon fell slowly to the floor, pulled
downward and kept upright by the weight of the port in its bottom. Through the AV ports Ell’s HUD showed her several views of the hallway which was indeed empty. To Hoyt Ell continued, “Next you’ll see realtime infrared video of the farm from above. All the ‘hot spots’ you see around the farmhouse are agents.” Ell sighed, “I would submit to you that, whether or not you are aware of it, someone intends to use this meeting you set up to try to capture me.” Watching the cameras in the hallway below, Ell adjusted the location of the flashing end of her one ended port and popped through a deflated 2.5 meter graphene balloon that she left lying on the floor of the hall at the top of the staircase. The thinness of the graphene meant the deflated balloons were only about three fluid ounces in volume.

  Hoyt looked down from her HUD and glanced at the two agents in the room with her. She wondered how Donsaii knew how many agents there were in the room. Assuming what she thought of as her ‘stuffy’ air, she said, “Gentlemen, could you step outside the door? I need privacy for this conversation.”

  The two agents protested, citing their complete confidentiality, but upon Hoyt’s insistence, reluctantly stepped out into the hall.

  Hoyt began her response to Ell, “If those images…”

  Ell interrupted, “Please whisper. They have AV pickups in the room with you.”

  Hoyt’s eyes widened but she did continue in a whisper, “If those images are real, the FBI has completely misrepresented themselves to me. Do you want to reschedule the meeting?”

  Donsaii chuckled, “They’d just do the same thing next time.” Behind Hoyt, another 2.5 meter balloon dropped unnoticed to the floor in the stub of hallway that led to the door out of the master bedroom. Ell passed the hand held port back to safety through the port in her pocket.