Chapter 23

The next few days were spent at Rosen’s desk. He had a nice desk: it was traditional black walnut; and had a surface that was big enough to land our Dassault. There were three telephones. I wondered what he did when he was on phone #1 and the others rang. There was a connection on the desk where you could plug in a computer. The original ‘puter, of course, was in Ms Horvath’s hands. I called Squeeky, or Sparky, or Swifty, or something, and arranged for another. I gotta admit, she was efficient. A man from the IT department rolled a cart into my office within a half hour, and hooked me up.

Now that I had one, I spent most of the day prowling around Exxon’s internal database.

[Lexi, you’re not going to find the ‘climate memo’ just poking here and there. I found it in an archive. There were several other memos on the same topic. And of course, a ream of papers on the subject of ‘why hydrocarbons are perfectly fine for the atmosphere.’]

How come you found it when I couldn’t get close?

I admit that I was a little huffy at the ease of Red’s invasion of the Exxon archive compared to my failure.

[There were several methods I used that were not available to you. First of all, I am a computer, you are a human. Second, you had to move behind the publicly available pages. Third, you’d have had to try several thousand passwords when you got to the archive site itself. And fourth, and most importantly, you’d have had to find a backdoor into the secret part of the data base.]

Pick, pick, pick. Can you at least set me up to get them to my computer?

[Not advisable, Lexi. The ever-so-helpful Mr. Zoot has one of his best IT snoops assigned to watching every thing that pops up on your – or Rock’s or Bear’s – screens.]

Grrrr. Sometimes I wish I could reveal your existence.

[You mean, you want to give the government another excuse to snatch you off the streets?]

I hadn’t thought of that aspect ... Can you download the main parts of the memos?

My brain was instantly filled with 108 pages of dense text. I read the executive summary on the first two pages. Okay. Now we just had to have a plan to get this out.

[Who do you think would actually spread the news? The oil companies have lots of money to spread around.]

Everybody from The Altoona (PA) Gazette to the ... uh.

[If I may ... to the Zumbro Falls (Minnesota) Weekly Messenger. But you don’t want to limit this to the USA do you? We want to tell the world, yes?]

Let’s blanket the world. From Stockholm to Singapore to South Africa.

[I’m greedy, Lexi. Let’s take our time and draft a cover letter. If we take a week until next Tuesday, Exxon stock will have recovered almost a whole dollar. I can liquidate all our overseas Exxon and other oil and gas producers holdings, and lay on a whole bunch of options to bet the stock goes down. As it is, Tuesday will be the highest price Exxon will see for several weeks. Naturally, the ‘future news’ doesn’t take account of any unpublished memoranda.]

Okay. Another week or so won’t matter.

... ...

On Thursday morning, I got a mental call from Jim. ’Just thought you ought to know, Mom. We’re going to the North Texas University Library, to see what online courses they might have for the computer. It’s just me and Alex and Elieta. No other bodyguards. I thought that was a little unusual.’

I broke up and Bear stuck he head around the open door, when he heard me laughing. ’It’s our almost-thirty-eight year-old son. Cracked me up,’ I told Bear.

I dialed in to David’s mind. He was borrowing a pickup from our in-house car dealership – the caballero’s used-pickup loaner-car store. He had Fingers with him, and they were planning on heading out the back door and going to kill Unthib Nu’ngabe. It seems Fingers had been tracking him. He got a package at a dry stop – or a clean drop – or something. Anyway, Fingers had an image of the drop. It seemed that Nu’ngabe went to the park and picked up a plastic bag from a trash can after work yesterday.

So they figured they’d just follow him to wherever the plastic bag said to go. Maybe there’d be an ‘X’ on the pavement.

They found their way to the interstate and they did an SDR – whatever THAT was. I poked a bit through D2’s memory. It was a Surveillance Detection Run. Apparently a way to detect if you were being surveilled, obviously. In a pickup, it involved making a series of right and left turns to increasingly unpopulated roads.

The SDR was successful, it seemed. Or UNsuccessful, if that was the appropriate result when no one is following you.

I decided to check in with them later. I zoomed in on Tommy Sussex instead. He was all decked out in his work clothes. His gig with the US Department of the Interior, Public Works Division, was painting in the underground parking garages. He was in a white painter’s shirt and pants; he was driving a USG truck with several drums of paint. And, when his trial period was up, he’d be taking down $3,327 per month. That should keep him out of trouble.

He didn’t seem to have figured out that I meddled with his mind to get him to take the job. It had taken many night visits of planting a vision of a grown up me – Mistress Angela, actually – in full dominatrix get-up. It seemed that Mistress Angela really wanted him to paint the cement in underground garages.

When he was having his lunch, I’d visit him again, and give him an x-rated visit from Mistress Angela – as a thank you for being such a good boy, sort of.