April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  "Wow." Chen sat, thinking in horror what it would mean, if his own agency offices in Beijing had been penetrated and cataloged to this extent.

  "What do you want done to them?" Chen cut to the heart of the matter.

  "They tried to arrange our deaths. I want them snatched and disappeared, so that there is no clue how it happened. Not a scratch on the lock, or a heel scuff on the floor, or a report of something odd from a neighbor or passing motorist, unless we want it left as a message. Just poof – gone," he said, dramatically.

  "Now, if they can be stuffed in a brain scanning helmet and questioned who gave them the task of targeting us, that is a bonus, but if it is not possible to work up the chain of command, then I'll have to be satisfied with these two."

  "Let me work up a proposal. I'll get back to you."

  * * *

  The young man had a faint smile and wore fine checked brown wool trousers, with double pleats in the front and cuffs. A thin belt held them up. His pocketless dress shirt was French cuffed and had small pearl buttons spaced closely up the front. The collar was short and button down, with the top button designed to be closed. It didn't look like a clerical collar at all, just very neat. He had a coffee cup from Zack at the Chandlery in his hand to fill and of course spex on his face. He had hair short enough for a space suit, modest hoop earrings and just the hint of a five o'clock shadow, which lent a hint of masculinity to his otherwise young face.

  The young woman he was giving his full attention had spex too and was holding her full cup in both hands. She had short hair too and simple pearl earrings. She had on flare legged pants with a wedge of embroidery running up the outside seam to the knee, black on grey and very small pockets toward the front more than the sides. They were beltless with an oval metallic closure. Her blouse was puffy sleeved, with long tight cuffs and the collar laid flat on her shoulders with a hidden closure down the center and pleats laid away from that on each side stitched down. It was a subtle pale yellow.

  She was looking down, a little coyly and enjoying the young man's attention. The finishing detail was Ruby behind the counter, observing the high voltage tension between the couple and lifting one eyebrow slightly with an amused expression.

  "My God, you got the mood just perfect. He looks like he is ready to have her for dessert. and the coffee dispenser behind them. I don't think anybody on Home wouldn't know where they are standing to the centimeter. But the counter behind him is just a line and some shading, just a suggestion and behind Ruby just a few smears of color and nothing detailed to distract the eye. I love it," Cindy said without reservation.

  "I couldn't decide which outfit to do so I did both of them."

  "Oh, this is much more effective than either alone," Cindy assured her. "Run this down to Janet and have her run off a copy a meter high and we'll put it in the right window."

  * * *

  "Four guys, in two teams, twenty-thousand a day each, on the ground in the USNA. Five thousand a day while in transportation, and expenses. We figure three days on the ground. We have all our own hardware and don't anticipate much expenditure of perishables. We also need the support of your on site Frisbees and mini-drones. But we'd like to know what kind of orbital support you can offer?"

  "That sounds reasonable," Jeff agreed. Very expensive, but given the risks they were taking, reasonable. "I used up all my rods on China. I only have thirty replenished by the shops so far. I can hit a vehicle or building, but that's not enough to overwhelm and break a well defended target with major ballistic defenses. On the extreme end, I can drop a few kiloton range weapons, but again not at hard targets and of course, you know I can drop weapons in excess of two-hundred Megaton, but I hope things don't go that badly."

  "How many of those?" Chen asked boldly.

  "More than I intend to disclose to anyone," Jeff said, not looking happy at the question.

  "OK, it doesn't hurt to ask."

  * * *

  "Mr. Singh I was able to deposit five-hundred dollars to your account at the Private Bank for your loan of the Solar to me. That is interest, not principal. I want to think you again for letting me try this. I'm learning a lot about business and a lot about people in general, from buying and selling spex and com pads. I'm having a lot of fun too." Sincerely, Eric.

  Jeff smiled at the text message. The kid must be doing OK then. Good.

  * * *

  "No, I didn't assign them to anything. They should both be in the office today," Head of Station Zeff looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. 1100? They waited to tell him until almost lunch?

  "I assume you called them?" he inquired, quite irritated at the delay.

  "Yes, neither answered and I sent teams to their homes," Ron, his security head, assured him. "There was a little delay because I had to pull one team off another mission. The first team had not even reported back, but after the second absence I bumped its priority. The first team reported Jim left for work as usual after they contacted his wife. She said that he did drive away for sure. His car was gone when she left. She also claimed the home number we called first, did not forward the call to her phone like it was supposed to, we had to call directly, so we went on to the house. Nothing seems out of sorts, but she arrived after us. The only thing she saw odd was there was some sort of tube with a pointed end and a mirror down inside, laying on the dining room table. She claims she has never seen it before."

  "Does it have a colored anti-reflective coating on the mirror?" Zeff asked, with a sudden sick feeling. "How big?"

  "Yeah, it's gold colored and maybe thirty millimeters in diameter. You know what it is then?" he asked.

  "Probably. Treat it like evidence and bag it."

  "I did, but his wife picked it up when she came in, so it will have her prints."

  "That's OK, we have family prints on record to eliminate them. Call the other team and tell them when they enter Gary's apartment to treat it as a crime scene from the start. Since he's single, chances are it's a cleaner scene too. "

  "OK, I'll call you with more soon."

  Zeff disconnected and sat, mind racing. There were some records and hardware at home that needed to disappear as soon as possible. "I'm going out to Agent Whitworth's house and will grab some lunch on the way," he informed his secretary. Lunch would be half a submarine he had left in the refrigerator at home and a trip to a dumpster with some things.

  He was upset, which was a bad state in which to drive, so he just set the car on auto for home and sat trying to consider every possibility in his mind. It wasn't until he was well past the usual turn east, that he noticed the car was not following the proper route home. He looked to the screen immediately, to see if it was a traffic net mandated detour, but the screen was dark. Shit.

  He tried to revert to manual, but as he expected it wouldn't accept the command. A pair of tiny insect like drones had cut the computer cable under his hood and connected a new chip to the end. That also ended the tracking functions on the vehicle. His car was lightly armored, but if he fired his weapon into the dash and engine compartment from inside, perhaps he could disable it. Even if the doors wouldn't open after disabling it, somebody should see the car sitting dead and call for a rescue.

  Weapon in hand, he hesitated, three things holding him back. He would still have incriminating items at home, he might start a fire in the engine compartment and not be able to get out and the neighborhood the car was taking him into was not the sort where a fancy disabled car necessarily resulted in a call to the police. More likely the inhabitants would look at it like a otter looks at a particularly heavy, fresh, clam. To be cracked and the contents enjoyed with relish.

  He hesitated too long and an overhead door ahead raised with that steady rate that said it was motorized and his car rolled in. There was plywood and timber bracing tapered in from each side, with only a hand's breadth clearance. He couldn't open the doors, or crawl out a window, even if control was restored.

  He wondered how they intended to wo
rk at opening the car with all that in place. It wouldn't be an easy car to crack. Now that the door was down he turned on his headlights, surprised they still worked. Just then the engine stumbled and quit. He had no idea why, but then he couldn't see that the room had been flooded with argon and it died for lack of oxygen. The car was still sucking in air and filtering it on battery power for the passenger compartment however. He had just a few seconds to feel odd, before he lost consciousness.

  The bracing was designed to knock down quickly and hydraulic cutters opened the armored door pillar like sniping a rose stem. Zeff had an oxygen mask on and was getting chest compressions in two minutes, even before his heart stopped. He would not wake up immediately though, because of the syringe being emptied into his neck.

  The car was eventually going to be found. It broke Jeff's mandate to leave no trace. Chen estimated it would cost another half million USNA dollars to cut up and disappear the car, so he took it upon himself to leave it. The rent was paid up and it might not be discovered for a year. In this neighborhood it might even get chopped up and disappeared for the parts without him arranging it. He also suspected everyone would have fresh concerns, by a year from now.

  The underlings had been snatched on their way to work. One where he stopped every morning for a bagel and coffee and one where he parked and transferred to light rail. Their cars would be found quickly, but not altered like this one.

  He did go to the trouble to remove the bugs that cut the control cable and the chip that took over the vehicle. A quarter kilo block of thermite ignited on top of the car's computer made sure there was no black box record of the movements and timing after the takeover, or physical evidence of how it was hijacked.

  Certainly, the wealth of information they extracted from Zeff should make Jeff willing to ignore the matter of the car. They ran almost three thousand word association tests on Zeff with the helmet on, well into the next day. Far more than they had bothered to do with the senior agent Jim, because it was yielding so much. The last couple hundred were particularly fertile as they built on the earlier ones. They only asked a few dozen full sentence questions, but they were damning and Jeff was going to be very upset and very happy to have the information. Some of the information Chen could sell on the side. Jeff had neglected to say he wanted an exclusive. But then if he had, Chen would have needed to charge him a great deal more.

  Chapter 32

  Lindsy was so stunned she was just sitting, ignoring the mug Cindy sat in front of her. Frank wondered if her mom would be upset if he put a little brandy in her tea. She certainly looked like she could use a drink. It was Friday, when the auction was set to end and her ad for the week come down.

  The final bid for her drawing, when they closed the shop for the day, was three thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. He still hoped to have her do a new drawing tomorrow and post it in the window Sunday morning. If she wasn't too shook up to draw it. The people who stopped and looked at the poster sized ad in their window all week reacted visibly, there was a lot of smiling and discussion if they were with friends.

  No few of them pulled out their com and decided right then and there to bid on the pic. Enough came inside to talk or buy, that it was a success for the store too. He just hoped Lindsy didn't decide to quit and draw full time just yet. Not just for them, but he thought she needed to keep using this venue to establish herself and mature a bit. But it was obvious what her real talent was.

  * * *

  "I can't prove anything, but I have a gut feeling it is the same Home organization that intervened for you in California," Mel Wainwright told President Wiggen.

  "But they seemed so friendly to our party, or at least me and this is so hostile. Why the sudden change? I went to a great deal of trouble to straighten out that lunar mess for them. Where's the gratitude for that? Why would these two low level agents be targeted?"

  Wainwright looked embarrassed. "There's more. After the two agents went missing, their supervisor, the Head of Station for the region, said he was going out to lunch and then to one of the two investigation sites. He put his car on auto, the traffic computer reported he set it to take him home, not to any restaurant or either investigation site. The car followed the route it normally followed. Traffic was not particularly heavy or anything. His home was very much out of the way as he had a long commute. About half way there it simply stopped reporting to the system, while going sixty kilometers an hour on a main road. It did not ask the system for a lane change and a normal hand-off back to manual control."

  "Wouldn't it just crash?"

  "Not if an outside controller took over and drove it out of the auto lane. However that supposes the vehicle was altered. You'd have to get under the hood and plug your own computer into the wiring harness. That seems a rather audacious thing to do to an agency vehicle. I don't know of any other way you could do it, without taking over the traffic control system and nothing indicates that was interfered with at all."

  "Are you sure he didn't just disappear himself? Perhaps he had a bypass put on his own vehicle to drop out of the system and run," Wiggen theorized.

  "No, I thought of that at first too. But he almost certainly did want to go home to recover some incriminating items and dispose of them, but never made it."

  "Ah, you searched his house then. What did you find?"

  Mel got in his case and got a plastic evidence bag. Laid on the table between them it had a pointed cylinder with an open end opposite. "There is a special mirror hanging in the tube, so it is free to point exactly straight up. It's designed to return a laser pulse to allow you to pinpoint its location. They use them for survey to measure glacier movement and ground movement around active volcanoes, so it's a common technology. The usual way to track them is with a high altitude aerostat or drone checking them every minute or so. It's accurate to the millimeter. It would also be an effective way to gather targeting data, or if it remained in place, a missile or gravity bomb could home directly on it."

  "That seems an odd thing for him to have."

  "He had thirty of them, new, in factory packaging, sitting in a case that held fifty."

  "And the other twenty?"

  "They don't have serial numbers. But there was one of each left out in plain sight in the two agents homes. With the married fellow it had to be positioned on his dining room table the morning he disappeared, after his wife went to work and before his absence was noted. There were no signs of entry and their alarm system was activated. The critical difference is the two left behind had been used. Both had abrasions to indicate they had been pushed into the ground. Under the microscope there were loose particles attached inside by electrostatic attraction and very minute grains embedded in the outside surface. It was regolith."

  "Moon soil?"

  "Yes, very uncommon and distinctive thing to find. We also found a prepaid cell phone and other materials at the supervisor's home that are a dead end. The numbers on the cell phone log were listed to people killed in the Patriot Party attempt on you."

  "Why would the Patriot Party involve themselves with planting these, uh, reflectors on the moon?" Wiggen asked.

  "I'd say they wanted to be able to make good on their promises to act against Home without delay, once they seized power. The Central people with who you have had so much trouble are all Home citizens, are they not?" Mel inquired.

  "Yes, yes it makes a sort of sense that way. But does this mean the Home folks think I'm planting targeting devices, might as well call them bulls eyes, on their moon colony?"

  "I sincerely doubt that, President Wiggen," Wainwright said, shaking his head - no. "They went directly for the persons responsible. I'm sure they have interrogated them and by now know it was a Patriot Party connection, just like we do. Our head of the CIA swears he had no idea that station and its head, was Patriot Party infiltrated. Leaving the devices behind was a message. It crossed a big line for them to take direct action. I'm just dismayed again what capable assets they have. If they thou
ght you were responsible for them, I think we'd have found them pushed in the White House lawn – which would have been a very different message."

  * * *

  "That's it?" Tara asked. "It doesn't look like much. We can pick it up between us."

  "Look at the size of the output connections. Those are meant to handle some serious current," Lin told Tara.

  "Hmm. Does this mean you are going to scrap out the Diesels and put in electric motors?"

  "Not at all. Do we want to come gliding up to a dock, obviously under power and no Diesel thumping away? No, that leads to too many questions. We'll keep those as an in-harbor and backup system," Lin assured him. "Nor do I wish to change the balance of the boat that much."

  "What then? Can you pass the screw shaft through the electrics?"

  "We could, but I intend to put a couple jet drives at the rear, to the outside corners and a couple smaller maneuvering thrusters at the front, for pushing the nose around."

  "Hmm, I'll probably forget how to handle her with just sail, if we have such luxury."

  "I'll make sure everybody has plenty of practice under sail," Lin promised. "We don't want to look lazy to our guests. They might get the idea anybody can sail her."