Chapter 12

When I woke up on the third Monday in November, I altered my morning routine. After I had finished getting dressed, I started doing pushups. I kept doing them until I had worked up a good sweat. A quick glance in the bedroom mirror confirmed that I was rather flushed; I then headed to the kitchen.

"Morning, Rose," I greeted her, rather weakly.

Rose was bringing a skillet of eggs and hash to the table in the breakfast nook, when she saw me. The skillet hit the table with a very solid thump as she hurried over to me to ask, "Chad, are you okay? You look awful."

I replied, "Not feeling so well. I got a little peckish last night so I had some curry and rice for a midnight snack."

Rose frowned. "It's been over three weeks since we had curry. I could have sworn we had eaten it all."

Sheepishly, I admitted, "I had put some of the leftover in an empty yogurt container and I hid it towards the back of the fridge. I kinda forgot about it until I stumbled across it during my raid."

I sat down at the table and started to eat breakfast. As I ate, I noticed Rose steal glances at me. I had half my plate cleared when I suddenly stood up and bolted from the table. Since the half-bath next to the laundry room was closest to the kitchen, I ran in there. I kept the door open, and an eye towards the doorway, when I stuck my finger down my throat. After I had regurgitated my breakfast, I wiped down the toilet with some tissue paper and flushed. By the time I was finished, Rose was in the doorway.

"You're not going to be going to school, are ya?" asked Rose.

"I don't think so, at least, not for the morning classes. Maybe if I took a nap, I might feel better."

"Maybe I should stay home and look after you."

I shook my head and told her, "No. I'll be fine. Anyhow, part of the condition of you living here was that you attend school unless it was an emergency. I doubt me having a stomach virus constitutes as one. Tell Lori and Traci that I'm just feeling a little under the weather, and tell Traci if she tries to stay home to look after me, I'll spank her. Then tell Lori that does not apply to her, because I know she would enjoy it too much."

Rose smiled at what I said, but I could see a look of concern in her eyes. After reassuring her that I would be fine, she left the house -- but only after I promised to call her cell phone if I started to feel worse. I headed to the living room, laid down on the sofa, and watched some of the stuff that the DVR had recorded for me while I waited. It was a quarter past nine when the doorbell rang.

Ayako was just about to set down a wrapped box when I opened the front door. She stood up and, with a look of surprise, said, "Chad! I thought for sure I had missed you."

Feigning surprise myself, I replied, "Ayako! What the heck are you doing here? You're a long way from San Jose. Oh, I wasn't feeling too hot this morning. Food poisoning, I think. Come on in."

"Well, if it is only a stomach bug, I think you can hug your old neighbor."

I gave her a warm hug, and as Ayako walked in, her cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID, rolled her eyes, and answered it.

"Hi, mom. Yeah, I finally made it to Chad's. I thought for sure, because of the traffic jam that I hit, I would miss him, but he was home sick from school. Oh? Sure, I have my schedule on my PDA. I know that the casting call is at one o'clock. Let me hook up my hands-free."

Ayako asked me to give her a tour of the place while she went over her schedule with her mom. After she had the hands-free hooked up to the cell phone, she whipped out her PDA from her purse and started going through appointments that she had. She insisted on seeing every room, and I felt slightly guilty when we went into Rose's room. It was odd, since privacy was never an issue at the Compound, because we had grown up with none. It was only after I left that I finally understood how important it was to people.

After looking at all of the rooms, she reminded me that she had not seen the basement yet. She warned her mom that she might lose the signal so they had better end the call. She asked her mom to check with the casting director if it would be possible to show up by two o'clock, and just to leave it on her voicemail if she was unable to answer the phone. Ayako kept the PDA out when we descended down into the basement.

"Whoa! It is cooler than what you described in your e-mails. I didn't think they made homes in California with basements. I can totally see this place being a dungeon."

Ayako walked around the room, looking at some of the stuff I had started collecting for my dungeon. Her phone rang, and it was her mom saying that two o'clock was fine. She ended the call and removed the hands-free.

Ayako announced, "The house is clean. No sign of bugs. The basement's feed is cut for the next fifteen minutes just in case somebody is tapping into our monitoring."

"What? Clandestine Youth Agency is monitoring little old me?"

Ayako snorted. She knew that I knew that THEY knew that I knew that the monitoring was being sent back to the Compound. She walked over to the weight bench in the corner of the basement and sat down on it.

"Hell, I'm one of the ones who has to review the feeds. Mind you, it's 'Must See TV'," she grinned as she said it.

I rolled my eyes and replied, "I'm glad that you find my life entertaining."

"Actually, it is a good case-study. You're the first to leave and be on your own. Ben and I will have to make a decision in a couple of years if we want to leave, as well. I'm leaning towards moving to the CIA, while he is thinking of FBI."

"Where is Ben?" I asked, knowing that Ayako hardly went into the field without her partner. Ben and Ayako were the first set of 2's.

"He's driving around the neighborhood, checking for microwaves or other suspicious signals."

The windows on the house were treated with a special film that prevented microwave receivers from listening in. The problem with the spy game was that as soon as you come up with something to counter something, a counter-counter something appears. The basement was still the safest place in the house to be having the conversation.

"Well, I hope he doesn't get a DWB."

Ayako gave me a puzzled look, so I explained the 'Driving While Black' joke that Chuck had told me.

"Ah, he must have told you that outside of the house. We are only monitoring the house feeds."

Ayako's statement did not reassure me that I was not being watched outside of the house. If they were, of course, they would say that they were not.

Ayako, who had the same training as me, could tell what I was thinking. "Baka yaro, think about it. You think the CYA would spend that many man-hours, and risk so much possible exposure, on active surveillance of a single agent? Hell, think about it from a financial standpoint. They would have to buy another safe house, and have it manned for at least the next three years until you graduated high school. That's best-case scenario, since they told you that you could use this house until you completed your twenty years. It would have to be done in-house; we can't farm it out to the FBI, because the more people that knows about the CYA, the greater the chance of being discovered."

I took her me calling an idiot bastard in Japanese in stride and asked, "Any concern for the full sweep?"

Ayako shook her head. "We lost the feed for a couple of times last week for three minutes and two minutes. Both times, you were in the house, so we doubted there would have been a chance for somebody to insert a monitoring device."

I nodded. There had been a heavy rainstorm last week, and I am sure the cloud cover must have interrupted the satellite signal. It was during my third week living there that I figured out my cable modem was just for show, and that the internet connection was actually via satellite. While the satellite dishes that were on the house appeared to be facing the correct satellites, I figured they were actually pointed at one of the many spy satellites that were in orbit. The government had forbidden it's spy agencies to use orbital photographic reconnaissance on the United States, but there was nothing that stated that communication satellites could not be used to transmit more ground-based video signals. It was during a think-tank session at the CYA that the idea of intercepting one of the commercial DBS feeds, and then rebroadcasting it using a spy orbiter, came up. All an agent would have to do would be jam the target's dish, intercept the repair call, alter the direction the dish was facing, and then plant an audio/video transmission device inside the satellite receiver, and nobody would be the wiser that they were connected to a government spy satellite. The dish would broadcast a feed to the satellite, which it would send back down to headquarters. The FBI had been doing a similar project with cable boxes for the past ten years. The drawback to satellite, though, was that the signal had to be rather tight and encrypted to prevent it from being intercepted and, if there was heavy cloud cover, it would cause havoc to the signal. I did not know when it had moved from conception phase to actual field use.

"How's my 'sister'?"

"Well, there are two candidates that could fill the role of your sister: Claudia or Candice. Claudia thinks she can put in another two years, at which time she can retire. Candice is part of an ABC group, and she has been able to utilize them for support. Both of them are getting counseling, and the CYA is hopeful that they won't choose to leave early. Anyway, how is being on the outside like?"