“Let me guess,” Phil said, filling in the blanks. “Uh … let’s see. A house is about to land on the Wicked Witch of the West …”
After chuckling at Phil’s quick pickup, Cal said, “Yeah, something like that.” He began to stroll in the direction of the pilot and Abigail.
“Makes me think,” Phil said in a voice that was now changing tone, “that God might be moving the chess pieces in a huge way. This is all child’s play for the Lord, of course. I was in the book of Haggai recently. Not where I usually spend my Bible-reading time. I’m kind of a New Testament guy. But it pays to keep one foot on each side of Malachi, I think. Anyway, I ran across a verse in chapter two. Just a few words, but it struck me in a powerful way in light of what’s going on in America. The dark days we’re in. The election. And the tidal wave of change around the world … It said, ‘I will overthrow the thrones of Kingdoms and destroy the power of Kingdoms and nations …’”
“I need that reminder,” Cal said, “about who’s really in control. Especially now, in the middle of this chaos. And listen, Phil, Mom and I need prayer. Like right now. I’ll fill you in later.”
Cal clicked off his Allfone, greeted their longtime family pilot, and climbed into the Citation X.
When he and Abigail were buckled in, he turned to her. “Did our backpacks get loaded?”
“Check,” she said, nodding. “Did you contact Phil?”
“Yes. He’s going to line up some medical experts with steel in their spines.”
“By the way,” she said with a smile, “nice of you to finally fill in your mother with the news story of the century you’ve dug up — ‘Vice President Poisons President and Steps into Oval Office.’”
Suddenly hearing it phrased like that, the full weight of the revelation bore down on Cal. “Almost sounds like a Shakespearean tragedy, doesn’t it?”
As the jet slowly turned toward the runway, Cal glanced back and caught a glimpse of the tiny green light of the surveillance camera mounted on the top of the hangar. He said aloud, “I wonder who’s watching us now.”
THIRTY-THREE
Through the jet’s windows, Abigail and Cal could only see the pitch black of evening. The pilot clicked on the intercom, “Jackson Hole, Wyoming, folks, straight ahead.”
Down at the airport, just out of sight, an SIA field agent sat in one vehicle, and four local police officers were in two squad cars, all poised in the shadows to rush toward the incoming jet. The plan was to wait until the plane had taxied to a stop, and then to roar up to it from three directions, pinning it in, so the jet couldn’t attempt a turnaround and a quick takeoff.
“Remember,” the SIA agent said to the two squads, as he leaned toward his dashboard audiofone, “I take Mrs. Jordan into custody. You four take the pilot and her son. Keep your subjects in custody in separate squads for interrogation. I’ll take Mrs. Jordan to the plane that I’ve chartered and have standing by. Remember, I won’t be able to hang around your lovely city. I’ll have my charter take off immediately for Washington — just me and my subject in cuffs.”
“Anything else we ought to know?” one of the local deputies asked.
The SIA agent flicked on his dash light and glanced at his digital data pad. He tapped on the little window of his screen that said Extrinsic Data Field and answered, “It says here the subject may have picked Wyoming to land because she is believed to have personal contacts here, maybe people who will aid and abet her. This is Senator Hewbright’s home state, and she’s a supporter. Extrinsic database says she gave money to his campaign and has met with him personally. She and her husband have visited here three times in the last five years for recreational purposes.”
The SIA agent clicked off his dash light and radio, then said to himself, “Looks like we’ve got you figured out, Mrs. Jordan.”
The pilot started the descent.
“Citation X,” the tower called in, “you’re cleared to land.”
“Roger,” the pilot responded. Then he brought the private jet perfectly in line with the airstrip ahead and continued to drop.
Ten seconds later the pilot clicked on his transmitter again. “Stand by.”
“Tower standing by.”
“Okay …” was all the pilot said at first. Then, a few seconds later, he said, “Landing gear …”
“Sorry, Citation, didn’t catch that. Say again …” Silence. The tower radioed again. “Say again, Citation. We’re tracking you, and you’re cleared for landing.”
“I said, landing gear.”
“Oh, okay. Landing gear,” the man in the tower responded with a lighthearted laugh. “That’s always a good idea.”
“No,” said the pilot, “landing gear light … not up yet …”
Down below, just off the tarmac, the SIA agent who was looped into the tower’s conversation was staring at the little audio screen on his dashboard.
“Clear to land, Citation,” the tower barked again.
“My landing gear light isn’t lighting up,” the pilot explained.
“Toggle it,” came the sharp reply from the tower.
“Did that.”
“Do a flyover,” the tower responded. “With our big spots we’ll give you a visual of your underside, to make sure your landing gear is completely down and in place.”
The pilot of the Citation X clicked off his external radio control and calmly announced over the intercom, “Abigail, Cal, hold on tight now …”
Suddenly, the Citation jolted upward at forty degrees. The jet soared off in a westerly direction, over the mountain range that ringed Jackson Hole.
“Citation, this is tower. Please make a flyover immediately! This is the tower. Bring your jet …”
But the pilot was no longer listening. “Folks, we’ll be getting some slight turbulence over the mountains,” he said to his two passengers. “You can sit back and relax. Next stop, Washington State.”
SIA Headquarters
The sun had not yet risen in Maryland, but it would be up in another twenty minutes. An early-shift Tag Enforcement officer was standing over Jeremy’s screen, drinking from a large paper cup of coffee. He was looking at the big red box with two Xs in it in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor.
“Hey,” he said to Jeremy, who was hunched over the screen, “I see you got a big fat double-failed notice on your locator status window …”
“Gee, thanks,” Jeremy grunted. “‘Cuz until you mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed the huge red Xs staring me right in the face …”
“Maybe you need Sheila to come down here.”
“Negative. I can handle this,” Jeremy snapped back.
Fifteen minutes later, the director strode in with a Red Notice Status Memo in his hand. He usually didn’t arrive until well after dawn. Jeremy had been frantically swishing his hand across the screen, moving from menu to menu to try to insure the location of his subject. But when he saw the director, his hand froze.
The other Tag Enforcement officer slinked out and down the hall to his cubicle, clutching his mocha latte.
The director approached Jeremy, holding a crumpled email in his fist, his face radiant with flushed heat. He stood directly over Jeremy.
“This is a major malfunction, Jeremy,” he growled.
“Yes, sir.”
“You will consummate positive location and apprehension of the subject Abigail Jordan — and I mean in a hurry. You understand?”
“Absolutely.”
“Which is why I’ve instructed Sheila to come down from master control and make sure it happens. The efficacy of our BIDTag protocol is on the line. The White House is watching me, and I am watching you. And you know what else?”
Jeremy shook his head.
“I’m watching your descending career path. I’ll make sure the odds of your holding onto this or any other meaningful job for the rest of your life will be about the same as a porpoise playing first base for the Nationals if this snafu doesn’t get turned around.”
; The director stormed out.
Five minutes later, a woman with stringy, slightly disheveled hair, came strolling into Jeremy’s room while munching a candy bar.
When Jeremy spotted Sheila he was about to make a crack about her eating a Snickers bar before six in the morning but decided against it.
Without expression, Sheila shooed Jeremy out of his swivel chair by wagging the fingers of both hands like the maître d’ in an expensive restaurant might do to a homeless visitor.
Once planted in the chair, which she first adjusted to her taller height, Sheila proceeded to display programs on Jeremy’s screen with lightening speed.
“I’ve never seen those properties before,” Jeremy muttered as he watched the master at work.
After another fifteen minutes or so, Sheila tapped a lower quadrant of the screen that read, “All National Systems Synced.”
Then the red X box in the upper right section of the screen disappeared. It was replaced by a display that said, “Reboot Completed — Advanced Search Commencing.”
“You know,” Sheila said with mild irritation, “I told the guys here at SIA I didn’t have time to train you humanoids on the second floor.” Then she sighed and got up from the chair.
Jeremy pointed to his computer. “What did you do?”
“It’s what you didn’t do,” she said with a lilting whine, “like integrating all the systems. What good does it do for us to spend billions on all this stuff — voice- and facial-recognition monitors, BIDTag scanners, the Personal Profiler EX-3, All Extrinsic Database and Likely Route Estimator programs, and all those cameras and mics planted in every corner of the country — when morons like you forget to synchronize them during your subject location search?”
When Sheila reached the door she tossed one last comment over her shoulder. “Now hit Start,” she said. “Your Red Notice subject, whoever she is, won’t have a chance.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Olympia Airport, Washington State
As the Citation X rolled to a stop on the tarmac, Abigail and Cal had already unbuckled themselves and were reaching for their backpacks. Abigail tucked her legal file in the center zip pocket.
“You didn’t catch any Zs on the flight over, did you?” Cal said.
She shook her head. “I had to go over my notes, getting ready to argue your father’s case.” Then she looked down at the atomic-clock function of her Allfone. “Which is now less than forty-eight hours away.” She closed her eyes, contemplating the enormity of the mission ahead of her. She muttered something aloud — a prayer, mixed with exasperation — “Dear Lord, all things are possible with You. But this is really coming right down to the wire …”
As they deplaned, the pilot shook their hands. “I’ll take care of the FAA and SIA inquiries. But just remember — there are four webcams here on the tarmac. So you’ve already been logged into the system. The clock is ticking. It won’t be long before SIA catches up to your location here. A personal car, not a rental, is waiting for you in the parking lot,” he added, “courtesy of your friends at the Roundtable.” He handed Cal a piece of paper with the parking-lot location and the make and model. “The car’s unlocked. The keys are wedged between the retractable headrest and the top of the passenger-side front seat.” The last thing their pilot said before disappearing into the hangar, was, “Godspeed, Mrs. Jordan. And you too, Cal.”
Abigail and Cal lugged their backpacks through the small regional airport, leaving through the security exit doors. They knew the cameras up at the ceiling were catching them from several angles. All they could do was to hope and pray that they would be able to arrive at their destination before the SIA agents tracked them down. The blessing was that the little airport was not close to any major federal law enforcement offices.
While the element of time was not on their side, something else was — the primeval kind of environment ahead of them. The long arm of government scanner surveillance had not yet reached the remote wilderness area they were about to enter.
In the parking lot they located the green Land Rover. As planned, the car was unlocked, and the keys were under the passenger headrest.
Cal jumped behind the wheel, and Abigail sat in the passenger seat with Cal’s micro laptop open. They headed north on the 101, toward Skokomish. After forty minutes, they were surrounded by dense forest and mountains. While Cal pushed the Land Rover as fast as they could afford to go, Abigail opened the extensive trail of emails between Cal and the clandestine group they hoped to meet.
“Cal, you’ve been connecting with them for five months. No,” she corrected herself, paging down more emails, “almost six months.”
“Ever since you started talking about not getting BIDTagged,” Cal replied.
“And you did all that for me?”
“I had a feeling you were going to need something like this. Without your BIDTag, I knew this was your only chance.”
“Thank you,” she said, reaching over and squeezing his arm. Suddenly she was aware of the strength in his arms. He hadn’t shaved, and his face had the same kind of dense bristles that Joshua would get. And there was a rugged maturity now to his profile, no longer the baby-faced teenager.
“Your dad would be so proud of the man you’ve become,” she said. “He is so proud, Cal.”
Cal tightened his face and didn’t respond. After a while he said, “I miss him. We have to get his case turned around so we can all be together again.” Then he added, “For however long we’ve got down here.”
That took Abigail by surprise. She and Joshua were the ones who had been talking about the approaching apocalypse. They never hid their strong belief that Jesus Christ was poised, any minute now, to enter human history once again — to whisk his believing flock off the face of the planet, just before the beginning of the end.
But now, hearing Cal open up about that same thing — about the imminent return of Christ — it brought home what she had always believed in her heart, that the truth that had so spiritually revolutionized the lives of the parents had been quietly observed and absorbed by their son and their daughter. She silently spoke it in her mind. Your word never returns void, O Lord. It always bears fruit in the right season.
Then she went back to the email trail on the screen.
“Who is this Chiro Hashimoto they’re talking about?”
“A software technology genius,” Cal said. “I’ve read about him over the years. He was hired by Introtonics in Seattle when he was only a sophomore at Stanford, put in charge of high-tech research for the corporation. According to one article, he was developing a really advanced laser process for encoding and storing information when he left Introtonics.”
“Why did he leave?”
“He found out that the White House had cut a deal with Introtonics to use his laser process to create the human BIDTag process. He’s a privacy freak, totally against information systems collecting data about people. So one day he packed up his personal stuff from his impressive glass office on the floor just below the corporate president’s suite, grabbed his little sculpture of Rodin’s The Thinker, and walked out. Totally disappeared. Like vapor.”
“And you know for a fact he’s up here in the Olympic National Forest?”
“Not in the forest. Right on the edge. In a private compound.”
“And you tracked him down?”
“Took several months. I had to send some fishing bait out. Posted some things on obscure, hi-tech computer networking sites. The kind of ultra-advanced technology blogs I figured that a guy like Chiro Hashimoto might be reading from his hideout, wherever that was. A lot of rumors about him — some said that he was dead. Others said he had been hired by China to hack into American security systems. Another said he brought down Wall Street’s digital trading system a few years ago.”
“He sounds like an anarchist,” Abigail said.
“I don’t believe all the rumors, but one thing’s clear — he’s not your average computer geek.”
??
?Why does he trust you?”
“I’m not sure he does.”
Abigail had a stunned look on her face. “Wait. I don’t understand.”
“I’ve only communicated with his group — they call themselves the Underground. A super-secret group that protests the BIDTag program — and they don’t use the new international currency — the CReDO — either. But I haven’t connected directly with Hashimoto.”
“Why would they trust you? How do you know they’re not just taking you for a ride?”
“I told them my father developed the RTS system and that my mother was the ringleader of the group that singlehandedly tried to stop the terror plot to detonate a nuke inside New York City.”
“Ringleader? You called your mother a ‘ringleader’?”
“Hey, Mom, don’t be such a … a mom. I had to make you sound exotic. You know, rebellious.”
“I consider myself a patriot — not a rebel. There’s a difference.”
Cal laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Abigail said. “What kind of impression do they have of me anyway?”
Cal laughed louder. “I love the way you are always Miss Manners, Mom — except when you’re on the other side of a legal argument, and then you really go for the kill. You forget, I’ve seen you in action.”
They fell into a comfortable silence.
Two hours later they saw a sign: “Skokomish 10 Miles.” Cal checked his odometer and turned it to zero. Two and a third miles later, he saw a fire trail cut into the deep forest on the left.
“That’s it,” he said.
“You sure? It looks like it leads up the foothills and into a dead-end.”
“This is exactly what they told me.”
Cal checked his rearview mirror to make sure no other cars were around. Then he wheeled the Land Rover across the highway and onto the rough fire trail.
They began to bump their way up the path, jiggling the car so violently that their voices quivered when they spoke.
“I was just thinking about Dad,” Cal said, “wondering how he’s doing, whether he’s safe.”