(conclusion)
July 8th, 2001
Manuel came through the door, bouncing off the door jam, and came up behind us quickly. He clipped O'Meara on the back of the head with the butt of his .45 automatic. There was a loud thud of steel on bone, and 200 pounds collapsed on me like a floppy suit of armor. Immediately behind Manuel was Diane. I let go of O'Meara's hand and pulled the knife free as they rolled him off me and on to his back.
"I had everything under control, you know."
"Yeah, sure boss," Manuel winked.
"Really," I insisted.
"With one arm in a sling?"
"Hey. I'm a trained professional."
As I watched, amazed, Diane wound up and kicked O'Meara in the groin. Hard. His limp body jumped a foot.
"What was that for?" I said standing up, brushing myself off.
"That was for Mandy Pattersen. Perhaps it will help reduce his testosterone levels. Permanently."
Manuel winced. "Oh, man. That's for damn sure."
Unlike the round that went off out the RV the evening before, the round that just went off from my gun was the shot heard 'round the world. Pretty soon, the entire hallway was filled with looky-loos of all kinds. I picked up my gun and handed it and the knife to Manuel. Then I walked into the hallway and did my best to calm everyone down. I displayed my empty hands. "Did someone call 911?"
"Yes!" they all said in unison.
"Good. Well, I guess there's nothing to see here," I said in my best west Texas drawl. "We got the bad guy. The police will be here soon. I suggest you all return to your rooms. That is, unless any of you want to hang around, be a witness, talk to the police for a few hours, sign paperwork, go downtown and make a statement." I gave them my best wontcha-hang-around-and-help-me-out-look.
They all scurried back into their rooms. Every damn one of them. I looked at my watch. It was just before 0430. In a few minutes, four Sheriff deputies came running down the hallway.
"Who fired the gun?" The big one said with considerable attitude.
In unison, from many years of practice, we whipped out our badges and permits. We had six hands in his face in two seconds. At this, a puzzled and disappointed look came over his face. He sighed. This started the routine.
Three hours later, a gazillion questions, two additional detectives, lots of yellow cordon tape, a gazillion repetitions of our very short version of the events, a tiresome and cramped visit to the RV to visit the three stooges, and an early morning call to Bryan Whitcomb, we were free to go.
"Anyone for breakfast?" Diane asked. "I'm starved."
It was a beautiful April morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Sixty degrees. We were driving back to the house in the Rover, laughing and joking, when my cell phone rang. It was my old friend from the Pentagon, Colonel Robertson.
"Where are you, Max?" He sounded agitated.
"We're on I-880, headed back to the house?"
"Back to the house?"
"Been a long night."
"I'm sure. Why didn't you answer my phone message yesterday?"
"Like I said. I was a little busy."
"Well, I just landed at the San Jose airport. Terminal C. Why don't you come and get me. We need to talk."
"Sure," I said. "Give us twenty minutes."
We picked of Larry and drove him to the house. He seemed unusually somber, but still managed to produce some small talk. We let him stew after a long flight and let the sunshine warm him up. When we got to the house, it was about 930, and the sun was starting to shine into the patio.
Diane went inside to round up some fresh lemonade while the rest of us settled into the lawn chairs by the pool. Manuel and I filled Larry in on the events of the previous day. After hearing this, he sighed. "Well, you really screwed things up again, didn't you. I wish you'd called me yesterday. I might have been able to prevent all this."
"Sure," I said. "Just send a telegram to mister O'Meara. Please be nice today."
"Listen, you pig headed sonofabitch. This is serious stuff, and you don't know what you've done."
"Why don't you fill us in?" I suggested just as Diane came back. I lifted a tall glass of lemonade off the tray and thanked her. "Help yourself."
Larry took a long sip and squinted at me. Then he turned to Diane and asked her to sit down. "Is this place debugged?"
"Of course," Manuel said.
"Okay. Listen up. I'm not gonna repeat this. About a year ago, we found a trap door into one of the SETI group's servers. We planted a Trojan Horse that we thought would help us keep a head's up on any, um, special developments."
"You guys? I thought it was NSA."
"Nope. DIA. We monitored the situation for about a month when the trap door slammed shut. So we sent one of our people out, posing as a student. She reported that the OS had been modified to bypass our Trojan Horse and send any special events to the OS vendor."
"That much we know, " I said.
"What you don't know, I'm pretty sure, is that our student agent, under orders from us, started feeding fake data through the system almost a year ago. Data that appeared to come from an ET civilization. It was only recently that doctor Pattersen discovered the original software of ours and the library changes in the OS. We were hoping that the threatening e-mail, the one you asked me to trace, would keep him hamstrung. Instead he came to you and spilled the beans.
"He risked his family to insure that data would remain in the right hands," Diane piped in.
"That he did," Robertson continued. "Meanwhile, the FBI got wind of this, don't ask me how, and decided that they needed to get involved based on National Security, illegal wiretapping, and so on. The regional director got a little frisky and decided that you guys needed to be roughed up so good, you couldn't be players."
I smiled. "Didn't work so well, did it?"
"No it didn't. And Washington wasn't real happy with two dead agents and two seriously wounded and nothing to show for it. The regional director was relieved of duty and reassigned to El Paso."
"My home town," I winked.
"Shut up. So now my group is scrambling to keep a lid on this and keep the FBI from filing charges against you. More and more people are finding out about the situation. I had a hell of a time trying to get the FBI calmed down and out of the game. It went all the way to the Secretary of Defense. Finally, when we learned from a tap on O'Meara's phone that he was going after the Pattersens, we decided to let him take them out."
Diane and I looked at each other in stunned silence. His words slowly sunk in. "You didn't tell me your friend was an S.O.B.," she said in obvious disgust. "I want his lemonade back."
"It was the only way to handle it," Robertson continued. "With them out of the game and you guys put under nondisclosure, we figured we'd capped it. Then, you decided to play the heroes and take out O'Meara. How is he, by the way."
"Oh, he'll be just fine," Diane said with a disgusted grunt. "Except for his sex life. It's you I'm not sure about."
Larry didn't know what to make of that, so he continued. "So you see what a fix you've put us in? Tupov probably suspects that something really big is afoot. He'll become a problem. O'Meara is on ice, but only temporarily. The Pattersens are in a police safe house, but they can't stay there forever. They're scared as hell and still likely to do something stupid. We'll probably have to drag them, against their will, into the witness protection program. They won't like that. And you, my friends, you can see now how dangerous this has all become."
"I don't sign nondisclosures," I said bluntly. I was dead serious.
"I haven't even begun to brief you. So shut up. That data we've been feeding to the OS vendor has slowly begun to have a effect on them. We made sure that the data appeared to come from a civilization only slightly more advanced that our own. That way, we didn't have to divulge any really cool technology. But what we did do is give them a thumbnail sketch of the next generation Internet. The result is all that stuff you've been reading about in the computer rags."
I looked at Diane and shrugged. I tend to read gun magazines myself. She turned to Larry. "You mean the colossal network owned by that OS vendor and tied to their OS? Nobody can bank or manage their personal data or read Websites without paying them a tithe?"
"Exactly," Robertson said. "We dreamed that up because we knew, with their sorry track record in network security, that we could seize control or ruin the company any time we need to. People tend to underestimate the software tools we've developed in the government over the last ten years to achieve that."
"So they fell for it," Diane said.
"Hook, line and sinker. If it hadn't been for the fact that they thought an extraterrestrial civilization had pulled it off previously, they never would have even attempted it. So now you know enough to make yourselves really dangerous."
"I write detective novels, you know. Fiction."
"Yeah, I know. We've been thinking about that. So here's what we want you to do. We want you to keep on writing them. All fictional, of course. Spill the beans about this in a very indirect way. Just so a few people find out. We need a segment of the population immune to this company."
"They'll never take it seriously in fiction," I objected.
"That's the only way we want to leak it out. It's either that or nothing." Robertson stared at me with a icy look for a long time. I shrugged.
"Cool," I said. "More lemonade?"
Diane and I lounged in our recliners on the beach at Maui. The sun overhead burned through my sunglasses and warmed my eyes. An umbrella behind us flapped gently in the breeze as I sipped on my Margarita. Diane, who already has a great tan, was in a white string bikini and wrap around sunglasses. She had one delicious leg up and the other long leg stretched out as she soaked up the sun.
I let my left arm out of the sling to get some sun on it and ran my fingers through the warm sand. My shoulder was healing up nicely. All we could hear was the gentle sound of the waves and a ship's horn in the distance. Diane reached out her arm and we held hands. Life has been good. It was a tan and sandy silence.
Copyright 2001 by John Martellaro, All rights reserved. Quantum Threads banner artwork by Tracy Haynes.
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