Chapter 7

There are a lot of places in the upper left corner of Oregon to live. We had one constraint, school. Mother did the best she could with what we had and checked us into a motel across the river in Vancouver. We stayed there for one day, and then were gone. We moved just long enough to Chehalis to establish a pattern in case someone followed us, and then doubled back to Astoria and a hotel.

People think it's easy to follow someone. Detectives do it all the time on TV, but that's a fantasy. Others, with a bit more knowledge say you just follow the credit card receipts. That works for the FBI, but it's a lot harder for a private citizen to do, even with the internet. If you use cash and have alternate documentation, you can get lost in a hurry. I knew the drill well enough that I could have done it in my sleep.

We bounced around for a few days, but eventually settled in Seaside, in a one-bedroom apartment with a beautiful view of the ocean at sunset. There were plenty of escape routes out the back door, and only one way in. I thought it kind of interesting that we were only 20 minutes from where Cynthia lived. Mother, though, had done that deliberately.

"I'll still drive you to school every day," she told me, "but it'll be that one your friend goes to, not the one in Beaverton."

"They'll want to know what happened to me."

"Family emergency," she said, her lips tight. She stared at the golden sunset and the way it played off the water. "I may have to go back for a day or two," she added. "Unfinished business."

"And nobody'll think to look at a teenage girl living by herself? I can't drive yet."

"Bicycle. I bought it while you were shopping for food."

"Well..." I stared at the traffic on 101 visible below us. "This'll be a little different than before."

"Shannon, I'm sorry that I've dragged you around like this. I really am. I know a girl needs a stable life, and I haven't provided you with one. But there are these reasons..."

"Some things come first," I said.

Her mouth twitched. "They do, and right now I hate them. There are lines I refuse to cross, and I've encountered one."

I wasn't sure if she meant she hated the life we lived, or the people who stayed with us. I guess it didn't really matter.

She wasn't there the next morning, though she'd left me a note. I knew school started at 9:00, so I had a leisurely breakfast and a wild trip down the hill on my new bike. Cynthia was surprised to see me, but seemed mollified by a promise to tell her more later on. We used our key cards to get in, and I had to check in with the Construct people—that caused some confusion and a lot of phone calls—and I barely made it to Home Room.

In one way it was like my old life: I had 30 minutes between each class, more than enough time to sate whatever physical desires I had. But the funny thing was that I wasn't as interested in it as I had been. Don't get me wrong, I was feeling the same urges any 16 year-old girl does, but there were other things going on in my life that came first. That didn't stop me, but I didn't go overboard, either, not like I used to.

"What happened?" Cynthia asked when we settled down for lunch. "Why aren't you in Portland—"

"Beaverton."

"All right, Beaverton. What happened? And how come you're not disappearing between classes?"

"It's my family, sort of," I said. I told her some of what happened, but left out a lot of the politics, which didn't leave much to tell. My family life, I realized, was consumed by politics. Fortunately Cynthia zeroed in on the pedophile.

"I saw something on the news a while back," she said. "I thought I saw a picture of you up in Olympia, but I wasn't sure."

"That was me," I said. "It's part of my family background."

"So your mother moved out because of that ... guy. What's the biggie? Just go to the cops."

"It's not that simple," I said. "There are complications. So we moved out, it's a lot easier than the alternatives, and here I am."

"And she left you alone?"

"Not exactly. The woman we're renting from is to make sure I don't wander off and get into trouble with some boy." We both laughed. "So that means I have to be home by 6, or 7 if she knows the people, and I'm not to go out. She'll cook dinner, which is no big deal because I'm pretty good in the kitchen, and I'm to study where she can monitor what I'm doing."

"No Claiborne computer," Cynthia said. "That's got to cause some problems."

"I checked, and the Claiborne people can set something up for me. No social life, but that's all right. I wonder what my mother's up to, though. Going off like this isn't like her. She's never done that before."

"When's she due back?"

"I really don't know," I said with a shake of my head. "She didn't tell me what it was she was doing." I thought I had a good idea, though, and it worried me.

Cynthia nodded sympathetically. "Okay, that'll get itself straightened out later. What've you been up to? I heard you were working on some project related to ours, but you haven't said word one about what it is?"

I told her, briefly, what I'd been doing. "Why you?" she asked. "Don't they have some big staff of programmers?"

"Mrs. Griffin told me it would be treated as school related," I said. I shrugged. "Whatever."

"We've been asking the same thing," Cynthia said. Her mouth twitched in a smile. "The official answer is to see if we've got the chops to continue as programmer trainees. So far only Irene is interested."

"You don't want to spend the rest of your life writing code?"

Cynthia laughed. "Not hardly. I'm not sure what I want to do, but spending my days in a fabric-covered cubicle and staring at lines of code on a screen is not one of them."

"Me neither. I like making up the idea and letting someone else do the dirty work. I did promise my mother that I'd find some way to change the world. I guess I didn't specify which world I'd change. So far it looks like it'll be The Construct."

"If only life could be that simple."

"So what else is going on with you?" I asked. "Aside from our projects."

"Well..."

The rest of the day was about normal. Class work and boys. I got home—that was a long walk up the hill pushing the bike—and had just settled in to do some reading when I heard a weird beeping like from a cell phone. For obvious reasons, I'd never owned one. They're radios, after all, and people can listen to them without a warrant, and even track you. But that didn't mean I didn't know how to use one.

The thing was lying on the dresser. How, you might ask, could I have ignored it? When you don't use one, when it isn't an extension of your hand, you don't notice such things. But there it was, red, with silver trim just like you see at 7-11, and it was demanding attention.

I picked it up, turned it over a couple of times, and finally opened it. "Hello?" I asked cautiously.

Nothing. Then I heard a faint voice. It was my mother.

"Shannon—no, don't answer. I'm in trouble, and I'm not sure I can get out of it. Run and hide. You know how. There's money in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Get away. You're the only hold they have on me."

"Mother?"

"Don't ... things didn't go as I thought. Get away before they come for you, and they will. You know things and are a threat to them, so get away. And Shannon? I love you. Always remember that. I love you."

The phone went dead.

I stared at it, puzzled. And then it hit me. There'd been an influx of her friends in the last week or so, and some of them were pretty dedicated to the Revolution. She had to be involved with that. And given what I knew about some of those people, that could mean she was in some serious trouble.

I checked the bottom drawer of her dresser. There was $26,000 in neatly wrapped stacks of bills hidden under her clothes. I could do some serious running and hiding with that money. But I was 16 years-old. I only had the ID I was using at the moment. I knew how to vanish, but I wasn't as mobile as Mother thought. A bike just doesn't get you far, and the only alternative was the bus.

Under the money were several additional IDs, but could I be sure the people she knew didn't know about those? That wasn't something I would bet my life on, and that was what was at stake. She'd told me, years before, that there might come a day when I had to run for my life, and if I did, to far and fast.

Most people, when they flee, don't have a plan. When they run, they revert to habits they'd had for years. Mother had taught me that when you did something, you had to think it through first. I wasn't the emotional teenager a lot of people might think, I had had some adult habits drilled into me, partly because my childhood ended sometime when I was 7 or 8.

I was on the coast of Oregon. There were only a few ways out of here: north and south on US 101, and east over the coastal range. I didn't fancy any of that. Then I stood the problem on its head, like they'd taught me at Claiborne. What was I trying to do? What were my goals?

1. Rescue Mother, if I could. They might or might not expect that, and I wasn't sure I knew how. They were probably keeping her in the lower levels of the Annex, and if so, I knew about the secret entrance. The question was, did they? And I didn't mean the secret entrance that was known to everyone who lived there, either, but a different one.

2. Move to some place where my age let me be an adult, and then go to ground where I had protection. The only obvious place that came to mind was in the South. They'd know about that, but would they reason it through? And how would I get there? I wasn't about to pedal 2,000 miles on a bike.

3. Get someone else involved. But who? My upbringing had given me a deep distrust of the authorities. A private citizen wouldn't know how to get involved safely, and I doubted if I could hire someone. There were the Construct people. I was an employee, after all, and they wouldn't be without resources.

In retrospect the third choice reflected my naiveté. I think I subconsciously believed that any large corporation had a secret hit team or something like that just sitting around ready to go somewhere with guns blazing. The only ones like that were governments, but even they had due process and rules hampering them.

Running appeared to be my best option. But I needed some place safe every step of the way. As I packed a few things, the spare IDs and the money went in first, I began to realize that Mother made it look easy. We had moved effortlessly from city to city, and I never saw the preparation she went through to make the move. And I didn't realize until that moment how many complications a young girl could make.

Don't dither. Plan quickly, and execute even faster. I think the average person, if they took the time, would have done a lot of thinking and planning. Mother had taught me well (and so had the others). Ten minutes after her phone call I slipped out the window and walked down to the bus station.

My first stop was going to be Portland. After that I'd see. The trouble was, in the northwest corner of the country there weren't many options. Back east there was a network of roads that I could use. Here you had a north-south corridor, and a few branches going east-west. And a lot of geography in-between. People back east don't realize how much emptiness there is in the West, which means you have only a limited number of places to hide.

A big city is the best place to go to ground. There are a lot more people who can spot you, but if you change your appearance and clothes, you can get lost in a hurry. And there's more help, too. There are eyes everywhere, and that can help you.

I spent a few hours in Astoria doing some late-night shopping. I had to change my appearance, but do so in unexpected ways. The dark hair was out, and Goth highlights were in. Leather, fake studs on my lips, patterned nylons and a miniskirt (I felt more exposed in that thing than if I'd been naked), and so on. In two hours I was a completely different person, and I used some of the photos I took to alter my ID even further.

You can hide right out in the open if you do it right, and 'becoming' a Goth was the perfect way to do it. People see the clothes, the hair and the make-up, and they don't peer beyond it.

That lasted as long as Portland. I stayed away from the University area where we'd lived and that I knew like the back of my hand, and changed again. Now it was a perm and a tint, and a business suit complete with a fancy purse. I looked like an urban professional, and was now invisible in this urban environment. And I got a small apartment that I secured with a pre-loaded credit card that had been with the fake IDs. Now I could plan Step Two.

My mistake was in going to the Construct offices, though not for school. Somebody must have been watching the place. I was on my way out the door when I spotted one of the people who'd hung around the house. I'm very sure he didn't see me, as I did a quick fade back into the lobby. I was trapped here. If they had one door watched, they'd have the others, too.

I sat in the employee cafeteria, drank tea, and did some serious head-scratching. I needed help, and no matter how I worked it, I needed someone with enough oomph to ignore a bunch of rabid lefties. That meant either someone connected—and I wasn't about to go that route, Jimmy Hoffa did, and look what happened to him—or someone official.

I got out of there by mentioning to the receptionist that I saw someone who'd harassed me and felt uncomfortable going outside. That helped. One of the 'alert' words in our society is when a woman, preferably a young one, feels uncomfortable about attention from a guy. Within two minutes I had an escort to a taxi. And four minutes after that I was on the light rail system in Portland.

That was predictable, but it let me clear the area. I caught yet another cab, and walked the last few blocks. In the rain. I was thoroughly soaked by the time I got back to my apartment, but I was pretty sure nobody had been able to follow me.

While I walked I weighed my options, and made the call I should have earlier to Oregon's Child Protective Services. Then I dressed down to teenager again, and took a taxi to their offices.

Why did I involve the government? I'd been brought up to mistrust them. But an enemy of my enemy ... Besides, I needed somebody who had the kind of clout that could overwhelm a bunch of professional revolutionaries who ate law-enforcement for breakfast, had judges on a string, and would always get sympathetic coverage and a free pass from the press. The two alternatives were organized crime, and I had no idea how to contact them—besides, I didn't want to be indebted to them at all—and Child Protective Services. People will cut a lot of slack for their ideological comrades, except where children are concerned. And they could bring out the muscle that all of the connections in the world couldn't overcome, at least at first. I needed speed, and Oregon CPS could provide it.

After a tale of, well, not abuse, but sexual predation, things began to happen. There are many things wrong with The System, but if you know what buttons to push, you can make it do things for you. The trouble with most of Mother's friends is that while they knew the buttons, they hated the idea because it would bring them too much official attention.

The CPS people bought my story, especially the part that Mother had sent me to them while she (stupidly) confronted the abusers so I could get away. It took until the next morning (they put me in a shelter), but they descended on the house with the Oregon State Patrol, Multnomah Sheriff's Department, and Beaverton Police. A police sergeant listened to a worried 16 year-old girl, and he posted a couple of people at the secret entrance.

As the morning wore on the cops got interested in three things: how everyone seemed to have numerous IDs; how six of the people they fingerprinted that morning appeared on the FBI's Most Wanted List for domestic terrorism and had tried to get out through the secret entrance; and Mother's body lying in a bare room in the lowest level of the Annex.

She'd been shot in the back of the head.

I was told later that she'd been dead for several hours. I'd been in the shelter when she died. I'd been late, but I couldn't help it. The cowards hadn't even had the balls to face her when they pulled the trigger.

The ME didn't tell me, but I heard it from someone else: she'd been tortured, too. Now what was the point? Revolutionary Justice—that's what they'd call it—would account for the bullet. But to do those other things to her? That smacked of sadism, inflicting pain just for the sake of the infliction. But she knew too much, knew too many secrets, and maybe they wanted to make an example of her to deter others. People were afraid of pain, they weren't quite that way with the risk of death.

I don't know what I felt about what had happened. Empty, I guess. I stared at the wall, trying to come to grips with no Mother. They would have called it Revolutionary Justice (which is a euphemism for killing people you don't like—look at the stories of how kill-crazy Che Guevara was for an example). I called it cold-blooded murder, and so did the District Attorney.

It was hours later before I came to my senses. I was sitting in a room in downtown Portland, my cheeks were wet, and I had that awful yucky feeling that told me I'd been crying too much. I knew they weren't going to get away with this. I could stop them, and I knew how. I knew too much, and I had to convert that knowledge into a bargaining chip before something happened to me. I knew the FBI would go after them, but there were attorneys at the Department of Justice, and more than a few judges, who would be lenient because they sympathized with the goals of these people. But if I spilled what I had, the Feds could nail this down solid despite the political pressure that would be put on them. I made the other phone call I'd rejected when I was in Seaside. An enemy of my enemy...