Then the man guided them through a maze of temporary walls and curtains accompanied by the noise of various power tools along with the shouts of workers. No one seemed to pay them any attention at all. They approached a work van backed up under one of the tarps. The man opened one of the back doors and beckoned them inside, taking their safety helmets. It was loaded with rolls of carpet and thin foam padding, so they clambered on top. Preston couldn’t resist lying down lengthwise on a fat roll of padding and found it surprisingly comfortable. Angie arranged herself along a roll next to him. They couldn’t see who got into the front seat and started the motor, but decided it was too late to worry about such things any more.
Preston awoke to see Angie leaning back with her rump down between two of the large diameter rolls. He checked his watch; two hours so far and truck kept zooming along at highway speeds. It was a noisy ride, but they were able to talk by putting their faces close together.
She asked, “Why do you suppose he was so adamant about us remaining physically close?”
Preston didn’t hesitate. “Trust. Anyone trying to hurt us would naturally try to use one of us against the other. So long as we are together, we can watch each other and our trust grows. There’s no such thing as absolute trust, because we can’t even trust our selves, in one sense. But once we confide in each other, we become responsible for each other until it’s over with.”
“What did you mean by having a mission in this life?”
He placed one hand over his mouth and rubbed the shortened beard a moment. “It’s not something secret, but I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s simply ... I feel like God has enlisted me in something I don’t exactly understand, only that I have to be ready for just about anything. I don’t doubt He knows, and I sense I’m always working near angels who know, but I’m doing good just to keep up.”
He paused a moment, and then continued. “If you believe in God and angels, there are some things you just take on faith. You have to listen to something stronger and yet quieter than mere intellect. Something in the circumstances told me to trust you, and it appears you trusted me already.”
Angie nodded affirmatively, her eyes bright with attention.
“You can’t always test and analyze things. You can’t always trust the results when you do analyze. You have to learn to choose some things on factors beyond the conscious mind. For every demon there are two angels; when you run toward a clear conscience, things tend to work out in the long run. For now, at least, you and I can trust each other far more than anyone else in this world.”
She took his hand. “Did you mean it literally when you asked if I wanted to marry you?”
He explained he didn’t care about government or church permits, but at that moment he had been ready to make a genuine offer of lifetime commitment, and hadn’t changed his mind. If anything, he was even more sure it was a good idea.
“I think so, too,” she said with a smile. He responded by half rolling over and kissing her lips until she nearly melted.
Chapter 7
It was a honeymoon, indeed.
The truck stopped and a moment later, the driver opened the back door, hiding himself behind it. Clambering out, they stood and gazed around the walled courtyard of a very old rural manor. His voice behind the door said, “Rode deur.” They walked toward the only red door visible in the place. The van hurried out the gate. Turning the long handle, Preston opened it and looked inside. To his eyes it appeared as a nice little townhouse apartment, fully furnished. He turned and found Angie waiting, so he scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside. It was the first time he heard her actually giggling like a girl. It was a good sign.
Preston set her back on her feet and wandered to the back window. The joke was on them. He saw endless rows of apple trees. Off to one side was a large building with what he was sure were large vats, fat plumbing and conveyor belts. “Apple cider mill,” he said out loud. She chuckled.
They eventually met their hosts. The old man was taciturn and they seldom saw him. His wife was quite the social butterfly. She gave them their security briefing, sounding very much like some of the government bureaucrats Preston had encountered in the military, just with a much nicer tone of voice and choice of words. Her English was pure American Midwest.
They shouldn’t leave until further notice, but that meant they had the run of the place as long as they didn’t get in the old man’s way. Preston wasn’t in a hurry to explore. The old lady had some assistant measure them and fetch in local clothing of reasonable quality the next day. They hadn’t been in any particular hurry to get dressed the next morning, but found the clothing laid across the two armchairs downstairs.
For the next couple of days they strolled around the property and simply got to know each other. Both had seen so much trouble that there were no significant conflicts or implacable demands. They were still getting over the shock of their good and bad fortune, deciding it was definitely worth it in the balance of things. Still, the sudden and dramatic changes were mind numbing at first.
At some point, they really needed to let their real world friends know they were okay. Angie had been living in part of the old nun’s quarters at the school where she served as a teacher’s aid. In a quick phone call, she simply told the sister in charge that she had been falsely arrested in an overzealous police sweep during a riot. This was the protest and demonstration season in The Hague. Angie said it would take some time to process her case but she already knew how it would turn out.
Preston had a much trickier problem. Harry would worry but only if Preston never got back to him. However, Harry was notoriously bad about answering any of his phones and Preston didn’t trust anyone else to get him a message. Since Harry was an avid reader of the nautical forums, Preston decided that was the best way to contact him. Once he explained what he planned to do to avoid Harry calling the police or anything, their hostess gave him access to a wired broadband connection. He had never used the ethernet adapter so his MAC address would be unknown on the Net. He immediately connected with Tor and posted a pre-written message where Harry would surely see it:
Been kidnapped by a foxy redhead and have no idea where I am. If I can’t escape I’ll whisper for help next month.
It was true enough and Harry was quite likely to buy it, not to mention have a good laugh.
After a few days Preston had an itch for some photo work. He brought his camera to the breakfast table. Angie looked at him with a faint smile and a raised eyebrow. “Time for your training, apprentice,” he announced.
Preston estimated they were on a high ridge because the wind was more constant and the temperatures marginally cooler than what he expected. They hadn’t crossed any borders because he could see Dutch traffic signs on roads running near the property so there weren’t that many places they could be driven in less than three hours and still be in the Netherlands.
They wandered the property at length as he taught her to think like a photographer. “The lens hardly replaces the eye. They are symbiotic. The lens catches things the eyes cannot see, but it requires the eye to give meaning to any resulting image. Thus, all the details my eyes could not see in that video from the night we met.”
Angie responded, “And all the meaning which gave us so much trouble, but also gave us each other.”
He grinned. “I have no doubt you would have carried through your plot to attach yourself to me one way or another. And I surely would have fallen for you sooner or later. This just hurried things along by stripping our existence down to the bare essentials.”
There were more than just apple trees on the place. The Dutch government keeps a tight regulation over old growth forest, which stands in odd patches all over the country. Preston spotted a very substantial old tree on a faint elevation in the ground. The bark showed signs of wear from previous climbers. “Ah,” he said holding one finger in the air, “time for an elevated viewing angle.” Angie was a more energetic climber than he, but his reach w
as much longer. He managed to get up into the higher branches before he felt the tree waving too much under his weight.
“The problem with trees,” he said panting, “is there aren’t many open angles through the foliage.” He was turning as best he could without losing his grip. Something caught his eye to the north. With great care and shifting around a bit, he caught a glimpse of a white cross atop a round structure. While describing what he saw, he took out his camera. Zooming in the viewer, he saw something move, and then dropping down from the tower at an angle. He watched a little longer and saw it again. He held the camera overhead in a blind estimate and took a short video, panning slowly and as steadily as possible.
He was reminded that coming down was harder than climbing up if you wanted to avoid getting hurt. It gets harder when a man passes forty. At the bottom, they huddled over the back of the camera watching the viewer. They decided it was a spire or tower, but with an open top. After zooming in, Preston recognized the movement he saw earlier. “Slide for life,” he said. People were dropping out of the tower harnessed to a cable.
More importantly, he saw a high hilly background behind and it clicked. “We are in South Limburg, the only part of the Netherlands with any kind of hills. A tall spire with a white cross is common to just about any part of Europe, but one used for recreation like that could only be the Wilhelmina Tower, don’t you think?”
She grinned. “Valkenburg!”
Chapter 8
They did an awful lot of experimental shooting around the place.
To Angie, the camera looked like a fat smart phone. The lens was better than what one found on cellphones, and would telescope outward for most shooting. “It shares much of the same technology with cellphones,” Preston assured her. He pointed out that the only two external controls were a pair of buttons near opposing corners along one side. “Both are double deep. This one, the first click turns it on or wakes it up from sleep mode. Once the camera is activated, it does nothing. Press farther to the second click and it takes a still shot. The other button allows you to view through the lens on the first click to compose your shots, or records the view as video on the second click. Everything else, including power-down, is on the touch screen controls.” The entire back panel was a view screen.
The old man was a little nervous about them poking around the apple cider presses, but when Preston began discussing the various pieces of equipment and maintenance, he relaxed visibly. It was painfully obvious English was not all that easy for him, and he sometimes paused to think of the word for this or that piece of equipment. So while Angie practiced framing shots with high contrast and visually appealing angles, Preston learned about pressing and juicing apples, separating the solids and the fermentation process.
The man stepped away to do something or other while Preston discussed with Angie the results of her efforts. Suddenly, he stopped. One image indicated an anomaly his eyes had missed earlier. Among an array of pipes, one was not quite parallel with the others. He stepped around and took a look. His eyes chased the pipe back to see if this misalignment had any significance. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like a joint was bent back behind one of the vats.
The old man seemed only mildly irritated when Preston interrupted his work to ask about it. Preston showed him the image on the camera viewer, and then pointed out what he saw. The old man looked back and forth between the two, and then became absorbed in walking around the vat in question, back and forth. He went and got a folding ladder from the corner of the building and came back, opening it out near the corner of the pipes. After a bit of shifting it around, he climbed slowly, carefully turning himself for the best view. A bit more shifting and then he froze, starring at the backside of the joint. He touched it with his fingers, rubbing back and forth gently.
He mumbled to himself in Dutch. “Cracked,” he announced in English.
Preston had not forgotten any of his mechanical knowledge, and the old man seemed genuinely grateful for Preston’s help in replacing the joint. When they were through, the old man insisted on a careful inspection of all the rest, even asking Preston to take more pictures. Preston coached Angie through more shooting for the particular purpose of engineering analysis. They found nothing wrong, but a repeat of the earlier shot confirmed things were now neatly lined up.
From then on, the old man seemed to take a good deal more interest in their camera work around his property.
As they sat down to dinner that evening in their apartment, Preston said to Angie, “Tell me about camping in the dunes.”
She grinned and blushed just a bit. “At the orphanage, our presiding priest was old and pretty tame. We loved him. Unfortunately, his bishop was younger and not a nice man at all. Whenever he came to visit, at least one or two students always got raped. The nuns were powerless and didn’t seem to believe us, anyway. Three of us girls didn’t like the risks, so we would hide. There were all kinds of places around the school seldom used. When we got old enough to have our own student rail passes, we would find some excuse, like going to one of the museums or a music recital somewhere, coming back as late as we dared. As we got older, we took greater risks. Once or twice we simply stayed out overnight, coming back and taking our punishment after the bishop left. In our wandering, we discovered that spot. We pooled our money for a tarp and camped out there because no one ever bothered us. Over the years, I replaced the tarp once or twice and used the place just to get away.”
Preston thought for a moment. “Can you picture this? While you were going through that, I was here with the US Army running all over the countryside, completely oblivious to such things.”
The next day began the lessons on photo editing software.
They were interrupted when their hostess came by about mid-morning. She began by expressing gratitude for their help with the equipment. Regardless whatever else she and her husband were doing, they still had to make a living and fixing the cracked joint before the system pressured up and blew apple juice all over the building saved them all kinds of money. Apple season was not that far away.
“It becomes necessary to explain a bit about your staying here and who we are. Naturally, you would expect me to avoid saying more than you really need to hear,” she said.
Preston knew all too well from his days in the service. “I learned to bridle my curiosity a long time ago. It’s harnessed to much more important things.”
She smiled. “Yes, I see that. You’ve been no problem at all for us. We simply told you not to leave because we can’t help you much otherwise, but no one here will physically restrain you. Your measured curiosity has served us quite well up to now and we want to encourage your apparently wise choices.”
Preston turned his head to one side as he looked at the older woman. “How much would you be able to explain about this ‘we’ that Angie and I have stumbled upon?”
Her smile faded somewhat. “That’s what I came to talk about this morning. Hendrik gave you a hint of the complexities and you appeared to accept, even if you didn’t exactly understand. We are nothing like your military, nor anything you might have read about regarding the various clandestine services. We don’t actually serve any particular government or the global banking system. Much more than that I shouldn’t say. Perhaps I could characterize us as people involved in a lot of other things who have agreed together that, once in awhile, someone should do something sane and actually help common people who may never know. We don’t pretend our goals are all that lofty because our decisions and our operations are more instinctive and philosophical than activist and political.”
She waved her hand as if to dismiss a world of things. “It’s almost like a hobby; we all have to pay our own way. We fail more often than we succeed, if you measure things in terms of objectives. Yet, we agree we cannot stop trying to do some things. There is no real structure; we each volunteer for each project. People come and go in our association; it’s been active since World War II. So far, nothing has ever come back to ha
unt us in ways we find unbearable. It could come apart at any moment and we would all go on with our lives still trying to do what we find we must do.”
Angie spoke up. “It sounds like a homily from my favorite old priest. He said the only worthy goal in this life is peace with God at whatever cost in human terms. Even if you don’t believe in God, it’s the optimal life to seek the place where the soul and conscience agree to rest.”
The hostess smiled. “That’s a more familiar way of saying the same thing. What holds our association together is not what we believe, but what we can agree on today as something we simply have to stop or we’ll never be able to live with ourselves. Instead of activists loudly promoting some popular causes, we happen to have stumbled upon an affinity among certain people who have talents and an acquaintance with greater political power and what goes on behind the scenes. We recruit very carefully. Hendrik is not in a position to become your case officer, as it were, but my husband and I are. We think you two would make a marvelous addition, adding capabilities impossible to duplicate without a far higher cost.”
Then she added, “We can’t hire you ourselves, but it so happens an associate of ours is hiring photographers for a legitimate publishing business.”
Chapter 9
Preston’s mind reeled, but some deeper part of him understood all too well that he would have to say “yes.”
His only question was Angie. As he turned to look at her, she blurted out, “Met U al de weg, schatje.” Nobody had to translate that for him: I’m with you all the way, sweetheart.
Their hostess responded, “Goed zo. We want you to continue the training by wandering the countryside here. Feel free to check out the tourist traps in Valkenburg, but I’d like you to focus on being able to use that facial recognition stuff.”