As his inquiries widened, he began to exercise extreme caution. He had seen the ruthless manner in which the secret service acted with him, and he had no doubts that they were capable of more. What he didn’t realize was that a group outside the federal agencies had carefully monitored the progress of his investigation.
The group monitoring Dr. Eison decided to take a chance that he was on the level, since he was checking on the whereabouts of some colleagues who were missing. It was clear he was not conducting a formal investigation.
Bill Eison was tired and frightened about what he had discovered. He did not fear for himself; he was long past worrying about his own safety, but Karen . . . that was another matter. One evening he entered his motel room in Washington where he was attending a meeting on Star Cluster and as soon as he opened the door, he saw the outline of someone in the room shadowed against the dim light of the setting sun.
“Who’s there?” Eison demanded as he reached for the light switch.
“Please don’t turn on the lights, Doctor,” the shadowy figure asked politely. “I would prefer that you didn’t see my face just yet.”
Eison complied and sat down in his big easy chair. “What do you want?” he asked. He was surprised to discover that he was unafraid. The events of the last several months seemed to have drained him of all emotions. Or maybe I’m just too angry to care, he thought.
“Doctor, I know you have been making inquiries about some colleagues of yours. I have information that may be helpful. Do you know a Dr. Epps?”
“Paul Epps? Sure. He’s an old friend from the space program. Why?”
“I have a letter from Dr. Epps. He said you would know that he wrote it.”With that he handed Eison a handwritten note.
Dear Bill:
Just so you’ll know it is really me writing this, I wanted to remind you of our camping trip in 1960. Remember when we decided to catch the friend who had wandered into the camp—the perfumed friend?
Eison smiled at the memory. He and three other students had been camping out in Yosemite when a skunk, drawn by the smell of food, had wandered into camp. Paul Epps told the others that, being a farm boy, he knew if you caught a skunk by its tail and held it up high, it couldn’t spray you. Eison, being young and gullible, grabbed the creature by its tail and hoisted it off the ground. The skunk, who was unaware of Paul’s theory, promptly sprayed them all with its pungent odor—dead center. They missed several days of classes as overly sensitive professors commanded the stinking students to depart their classrooms. Even with tomato juice baths, the odor lingered for more than a week.
Eison read on. He had no doubt the letter was authentic.
Because they are Jewish, some of my family have been detained in a camp outside of Phoenix. Bill, these are fine people whose only crime is that they are Jews.
I fear that we’re seeing a repeat of what happened in Germany during World War II. If you can help the man who brings this letter, I encourage you to do so. It is possible that I will be arrested myself.
Eison put the letter down. He was visibly shaken.
“Do you believe the letter, Doctor?” the visitor asked.
“Yes, I do. I knew Paul well. It’s just hard to believe this is really happening. We are not Germany. We don’t detain innocent citizens.”
“I’m sure many people in Germany said the same thing, Doctor. But they waited until it was too late to do anything.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I believe you know Jeff Wells?”
“Yes, I worked with him on the earthquake program. My daughter is working as his assistant now.”
“I understand he is the designer of the system known as Data-Net. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Eison replied. He knew that if the man were a government agent, he had just signed a long prison sentence.
“Our sources tell us that Mr. Wells attempted to contact you when he began to have doubts about the use of his work. We also believe that he is the key to helping a lot of innocent people get their freedom back.”
“What can I do?” Eison repeated as he thought about the horror of Nazi Germany being replayed in the United States. There will be no one to come to our rescue, he thought grimly, not like the U.S. did for Europe.
“We need someone whom Wells will trust to contact him. He is in grave danger and, as soon as Data-Net is fully operational, he and your daughter will be eliminated. Once that happens, the process cannot be reversed.”
“Why would they do that?” Eison said, visibly shaken again. He had assumed Jeff was too valuable to risk harming him.
“He’s a threat because he is the one man who can wreck their system. I assure you, Doctor, our sources confirm that Wells will be eliminated as soon as Dr. Loo can run the system.”
“Dr. Loo?” Eison asked. “Do you mean Kim Loo?”
“Yes. He has been brought in to take over management of the system as soon as it is operational.”
Eison knew Kim Loo well. He was a brilliant scientist but politically committed to a one-world government. He had heard Loo discuss the philosophy too many times. Even liberal Berkeley had ousted Loo because of the trouble he stirred up among the students there.
“I’ll help. Tell me how.”
“Can you contact Wells so that no one, and I mean no one, will know?”
Eison thought for a moment. Then he answered, “I think so. But what should I tell him?”
“The truth, Doctor. The absolute and dirty truth. His system is being used to control millions of American citizens. If the laser identification system becomes operational, your daughter and Wells will live or die at the government’s whim. Right now it’s the Christians and Jews. Who knows who will be the next targets?”
That had been two weeks earlier. In the intervening time, Bill Eison had worked feverishly, trying to reopen the channel he and Jeff had used when Data-Net was in the early stages of development. Finally, earlier that day, he had discovered Jeff’s password to restart the secret message compiler. It was “Karen.” He immediately sent the coded message Karen had seen on her terminal.
Jeff could scarcely believe what he was reading on the computer screen. Dr. Eison laid out the whole plan, as it had been explained to him. Jeff had guessed parts of the plan, but his mind would not let him believe that the United States government would be rounding up citizens for extermination.
“My God!” Karen exclaimed as she read what her father transmitted. “Is this possible, Jeff?”
“You know your father, Karen. Do you think he could be duped into believing it if it weren’t true?”
As she thought about it, she knew he could not. Her father was an absolutist about scientific evidence; he would have verified every detail before telling anyone else.“No, it’s true,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes once more.
After a few seconds’ pause, Jeff typed in: “What should I do?”
The terminal responded: “Keep options open, and get out of there. Group will contact you with best means of escape.”
“What does that mean?” Karen asked as she saw the final entry.
“It means he wants me to keep the link to terminal two open so we can get into the compiler again later.”
“Can you do it?”Karen asked as Jeff closed the channel to the compiler.
“I honestly don’t know. I put every protection I could think of in the main program. It regularly sweeps its files, looking for unauthorized entries. I don’t know if it can be defeated. It’s like trying to beat yourself at chess.”
“You’re the only one who can defeat you at chess,” Karen said admiringly as she put her arm around his waist. “I love you, Jeff Wells.”
Jeff was startled and pleased at the same time. “You do? So do I.”
“You can’t love yourself, silly,” Karen teased.
“No . . .” he stammered. “I meant, I love you, too.”
“I know,” Karen whispered. “I was just waiting until you were sure y
ou knew.”
22
THE TRAP
“There is no way the message could have been faked, is there?” Karen asked Jeff after the terminal had been shut down.
“No. Only your father knew about the channel. It would be impossible for anyone else to know about it.”
“But what if they forced him to reveal the codes?” she asked, not really wanting to know if they had. She shook off a mental image of her father being drugged—or worse.
“They might have,” Jeff replied as he thought about it. “But what would they have to gain by warning us? Besides, what he said corroborates what we already knew to a large extent.”
“What are we going to do?” Karen whispered. She was nearly paralyzed with fear. The country was in chaos, her father was a virtual prisoner in his own lab, and now they were also in danger. It looked hopeless.
“We’ll get out of this,” Jeff said, with a lot more confidence than he actually felt right then. “But we’ve got to be extremely careful. If anyone suspects we know what they’re doing, we’ll be locked up tighter than a sealed drum.
“They still need me right now, and as long as I can stall Dr. Loo and keep the Data-Net glitching a little bit, we’ll be okay. In the meantime I’m going to do a little checking inside the system.”
“Can you do that without arousing suspicion?” Karen asked as she once again became the professional systems analyst. “I thought Data-Net kept a record of everything that goes on.”
“True.At least to some extent. But when I designed the system I built in some internal diagnostics that are not documented and are accessible only by my personal codes. I didn’t want a system that was too autonomous. If indeed there are masses of people being transported and confined, there has to be a record of it in the network,” Jeff said, more to himself than Karen. He began typing in special codes to activate the internal diagnostics. “If there were meetings attended by several key players, I want to know if the new attorney general is one of them.”
With that, Jeff called up the file for Fred Lively, U.S. attorney general. The official file showed only the normal activities Lively had while head of the NCLU but, looking into the storage files, Jeff noted several additional charges to locations that were deleted from the official file. One entry was a telephone call to his headquarters from the conference center at Jekyll Island, Georgia.
“Mission accomplished!” Wells said as he spooled further into the files. “Old Fred is one of the Society’s upper crust too. Now let’s see what he’s been up to lately . . . ”
“Karen, look at this!” Jeff said excitedly. “There has been a whole raft of calls to various locations since Lively became attorney general. Here are the calls to Livermore when we were picked up.”
The files showed calls to Sacramento, Livermore, and Los Angeles, all during the time when Jeff and Karen were en route to California.
“Hello . . .What’s this?” Jeff asked out loud. “I’m going to run a trace on this number.”
Within seconds, Data-Net responded with correlation between the number in L.A. and the secret number of the CIA in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a link with the CIA,” Jeff said jubilantly. He was really beginning to get into the game. Spooling though the internal CIA files, he found the number listed. The caption read: “Headquarters—suspected terrorist, Juan Marques.”
“Lively was in constant contact with known terrorists,” Jeff said as he spooled further into the file. “And the CIA had a tap on the line all the time. Now why do you suppose they didn’t tell the president? Could it be the president knew all along?”
“Wow, look at this,” he exclaimed as the next file came up. “It’s an internal authorization to reroute nearly a hundred trains for official government use. I wonder who authorized it . . . and why?”
His fingers literally flew across the keyboard as he instructed the search routine to respond. Almost instantaneously the screen displayed the startling truth: “Authorization KAPUS.”
“KAPUS? What is that?” Karen asked as she stood mesmerized in front of the display.
“KAPUS is Kathy Alton, President, United States. Her code will access any appropriation within Data-Net. It’s a change I saw the other day from one of Dr. Loo’s new subroutines. It means she has a blank checkbook within the system.” Jeff then typed in, “Access authorized terminal.”
The computer responded: “Sub: 4.”
“Sub: 4,” Karen whispered as she watched the screen, “but that’s . . .”
“That’s Cal Rutland’s terminal,” Jeff finished before she could. “He’s been given the keys to the government.”
Jeff noticed an internal memo that had been rerouted and then the transfer deleted from the official file. Because Jeff had been storing all data in his diagnostic file as a cross check against the main operating system, the transfer was still noted.
“Dr. Loo is further along than I thought,” he said. “He has apparently found a way to delete permanent data from Data-Net, except that he didn’t know about my backup storage.”
Jeff typed in a request to trace the transfer, and the computer responded: “Sub: 2.”
“Why, that’s the president’s terminal,” Karen said as she glanced down at the index of assigned terminals.
“Correction,” Jeff said quickly. “That was the previous president’s terminal. President Alton had it removed from her office. She said she didn’t need a terminal. Besides, look at the date.”
Karen gasped. “It’s the day President Hunt was assassinated. Why would Cal Rutland move a memo from his terminal to President Hunt’s on that day?”
“Not just from his terminal,” Jeff said scanning the data. “He also moved one from Hunt’s to his file . . . I know!”he exclaimed as the revelation hit him.“He changed a file from his terminal to the president’s and transferred the president’s file to his. Let’s see . . .”
“Jeff, it’s a speech written by President Hunt. But it’s not the speech supplied by Cal Rutland to the press. Look, the president is exonerating the Christians from any complicity with the terrorists’ attacks.”
“Yes, and I’ll just bet the speech Rutland released is stored in the president’s file for anyone who would care to check.”
With that, Jeff copied a hard copy of the memo to be sent to his DVD-II drive. Moments later it was sent and recorded.
“We need to get this information out,” Jeff said as he instructed Data-Net to print out a copy of all the locations to which the trains had been diverted. “I suspect these represent the camps where Americans are being held illegally. Now if we can just find a way to get this information public.”
Jeff sent a command to the compiler to reopen the channel to Livermore. A few seconds later the linkup was made. Once again Jeff communicated with Dr. Eison.
“I hate doing this,” he told Karen as he typed in his message. “When I designed this system we were still in the early stages of Data-Net so I didn’t bother to build in any cloaking routines.”
“But I thought you said no one could tell that you were communicating through the central compiler,” Karen said apprehensively.
“True,” Jeff said as he continued to input data, “but any time the system is online, it stores the available access time. What it would show, if anyone chose to check, is that central processor time was being used without being logged to any particular user. That’s impossible.”
“Oh, you worry too much about your machine,” Karen teased. She was feeling more lighthearted than she had in several weeks because now at least they had some hard evidence; all they had to do was get it out.
If Karen had known that in the central processor room Dr. Loo was busily engaged in trying to track down the mystery he had discovered, she would not have felt so lighthearted.
“Can you trace the source of the user?” Loo asked the programmer.
“No sir. It’s the weirdest thing. It’s like the CPU has slowed down by itself. I’d swear there was
a program being compiled, except that we shut the compiler down.”
“You’re sure there is nothing we have online using the machine time?” Loo asked as he was sorting through the possibilities in his mind.
“Positive, sir. We’ve even shut down the outside users. I’ll bet the trouble line is ringing off the hook by now.” Just as I suspected, Kim Loo thought to himself.Wells is the only person capable of bypassing the monitoring system and my traps. Somehow he has direct access to the compiler. I wonder what he’s doing? He dialed Cal Rutland’s number.
“Yes,” Rutland answered. “What is it?”
“Mr. Rutland, we have a problem,” Loo said without emotion. “I believe Wells has a program running that can bypass the traps I have set. It is entirely possible that he is transmitting to someone outside the system.”
“What?” Rutland shouted over the phone. “Doctor, you keep monitoring. I’ll check out Wells.”
“Very well,” Loo replied as he hung up. This Wells is the best I’ve ever met, he thought admiringly. It is too bad he can’t be recruited.
Rutland hung up the phone and made his way directly to the lab in the basement, where Wells had set up his office. As he reached the door, he carefully turned the handle. “Locked,” he swore under his breath. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sneak up on Wells.
Inside Jeff heard the click of the handle as it hit the lock. Immediately he punched the “clear” key on his console, and the program closed the channel and resumed normal operation.
Outside, Rutland knew he might as well play it cool. Wells was nobody’s fool. He knocked on the door.
Karen opened the door and said calmly, “Oh, Mr. Rutland, it’s you.
Please come in.”
The Illuminati Page 26
