Chapter 6

Life went on as normally as it could in the world I was constructing for myself. For almost a year, I continued accumulating wealth, wealthy friends, and politicians. The latter part of my plan - accumulating political connections - was accelerated somewhat by Sarah Pasternak's concentration on political connections. If it came to a power-play between us, I wanted to be at least as well connected as she. This was not a divergence from my plan, however, merely an acceleration of one aspect thereof.

While this was going on, I set Ana a new task.

"What do you know about real estate, my dear?" I asked her one day at lunch. She looked stunning in the low-cut sundress that accented her best physical features to great advantage. Anyone looking at her would have thought her the epitome of the bimbo-trophy wife. Everyone who thought that grossly underestimated her.

"Only a little," she answered honestly, "but I am a quick study. Shall I learn about real estate?"

"Please do," I told her. "But concentrate on oil leases, please."

"Oil leases?" she seemed surprised. "I have observed the trades you make, insofar as I am allowed, and the purchase of oil leases seems - anomalous."

"Does it, Ana?" I smiled at her. Her observation pleased me. She would get this, too, if she thought about it.

Ana knew me well enough by that point to know that I was pushing her to learn by analysis.

She ate in silence for a few moments, pausing now and then to gaze intently at my face. Suddenly, her cutlery rattled on her plate as she released it, and a slow smile crept across her beautiful features.

'I take it you want undeveloped leases," she said.

"Of course," I smiled back.

'You are a strange and devious person, Nils," she fairly glowed with what she had deduced. "When are you going to tell me this plan of yours?"

"When are you going to finish figuring it out, Ana?"

She stared at me for a long moment before answering, "The picture that forms in my mind," she said, something akin to dread creeping into her voice, "is too grandiose and complex to be credible."

"Don't let that get in the way of your thinking, dear," I encouraged. "Be objective."

"I can see only one end result of the things you have set in motion," she said, a growing wonder on her features, "and if I am right, and you succeed, it will be nothing short of miraculous!"

"Success is not a foregone conclusion," I told her. "There are many things, big and small, that can impede our progress, and one person who could throw a monkey wrench in the works. She's been busy with the troubles your uncle caused for her, but she's almost free of those and unless I do something, she will soon be after me again."

"Do you want my uncle to plant some more evidence and have her arrested again?"

"No," I shook my head, "if she is the sort of person I think she is, she will not be taken that way again. Perhaps it is time I had a little personal chat with her."

"Are you sure you want her to know that you know about her?"

"She's known since she was first arrested, Ana," I told her.

"How could she?" my wife asked. "As far as the world knew, you were marooned on a desert island."

"You've seen the pictures, Ana," I told her. "It is highly unlikely that she looks like that without having the same origins that I had. Believe me when I tell you that she knows."

"Then why go through that whole charade of being marooned and rescued?"

"That was to make it difficult for her to retaliate legally," I said. "She would have difficulty convincing any authority that I had anything to do with her legal troubles. Also, since she has political connections, it would be politically damaging for them to take action against me, since I was the poor, starving victim. None of that will keep her from taking other action against me, however. I can either wait for her to come after me, or I can go to her and try to head off whatever she might try to do next. In the process, I might just learn why she has set herself against me."

"Why now?" Ana asked, though from the tone of her voice, I thought she suspected the reason.

"Until now, she has been very much in the public eye as she fought the legal battles your uncle and I set for her. That attention is winding down. This makes it more likely that she will act soon. It also makes it less likely that I will be noticed if I meet with her. If I have to kill her, that lack of attention would be a good thing."

"Come home safely, Nils," Ana said softly. "I know that I will be financially secure if anything happens to you, but I'm no longer certain that that is so important to me."

"It is to me, Anastasia dear," I told her. "But I will do my best to return safely. This is a very high-stakes game we play, however, and sometimes I must risk more than money."

The flight to Seattle was uneventful. I rented a nondescript sedan and paid extra for a GPS Navigation system, even though I usually didn't have any trouble finding my way around most cities. Sarah Pasternak lived in an upscale suburb which the navigation system found with ease. It was mid-morning when I parked the rental car on the next street over and slipped through the yard of the house behind Sarah's. This time of day, in this sort of neighborhood, the only people around were usually service types - remodelers, landscape maintenance, pool cleaners, and so forth. The wives of the married men in a neighborhood like this would either be at the gym or visiting with each other. Smaller kids would be in daycare and bigger ones in school.

Still, it never paid to be too careful so I first walked up to the front door of the house in front of which I parked, and rang the bell. As I predicted, there was no answer. Pretending frustration, I glanced impatiently at my watch, then pulled out my cell phone and had an imaginary conversation. Anyone observing my actions would assume I was talking to the homeowner. Reluctantly nodding my head, I went around the side of the house to gate that led into the backyard. It was unlocked, so I boldly opened it and closed it behind me.

Behind the fence, I dropped the charade and headed for the back of the lot, where this yard shared a fence with Sarah Pasternak's. To my utter delight, Sarah's yard and most of her house were shielded from the prying eyes of neighbors by a twenty foot high solid wall of Photinia bushes. I found a place where they didn't crowd the fence too closely and slipped over.

To my further delight, I found that the Photinia hedge extended around the sides of the back yard, as well. The alarm system was modern and fairly standard. This meant that the sensors were wireless. I used a cheap compass to find the location of the magnet on the frame of the sliding patio door. I stuck a stronger one to the outside of the door so that when I slipped the latch, my magnet would keep the reed switch in the sensor closed and not set off the alarm.

I opened the door slowly and looked around the breakfast nook and kitchen area onto which it opened. I spotted the control panel on the wall, but no motion sensors, so I walked in and entered the code that Yvgeny's men had convinced the alarm company's technician to give them.

With the alarm turned off, I did a little exploring. I found a desktop computer and planted a virus in it through one of its USB ports. I also bugged the phone's base station. Gone are the days when you could just unscrew the mouthpiece and earpiece from one of Ma Bell's clunky old phones and insert a bug in the handset. Modern handsets are compact and generally filled so tightly with electronics that there's very little room inside them for anything extra. Most people these days like the convenience of multiple wireless handsets talking to a single base station, and whether for aesthetics or to make room for all the controls that have to protrude through the case, the base station has plenty of room for modern bugs and I had some that could tie into the phone wire and record both sides of numerous conversations, then transmit them to my remote recorder on command, using the same carrier that communicated with the wireless handsets.

With this done, I turned the alarm back on with just the door and window sensors active, and sat down to read while I waited for my prey. It was a little after six p.m. when I heard the key in the door to the garage. Since this wasn't a movie, and I was pretty sure that Sarah would react violently, I concealed myself by the door to the kitchen. Sarah had to come through that door to disable the alarm, and since she was intent on getting it turned off before it notified the alarm company that there was a break-in, she didn't notice me in the doorway. A relatively light tap to the head stunned her long enough for me to get the cuffs on her then use my own code to shut off the alarm.

"You!" she said venomously when she saw my face. Like me, she was very pragmatic and did not try anything theatrical as I walked her into the living room and sat her down. "You know I'm not going to miss next time."

"What makes you think there will be a next time?" I asked.

"Because you cuffed me instead of killing me," she replied. It was a good point, but not a valid one. I just wanted some information.

I didn't see any point in disabusing her of the notion that she was going to live. First, I wasn't sure, yet, whether I would leave her alive or not. Second, she was much less likely to talk if she thought she had nothing to lose.

"Okay," I said, shrugging, "tell me why you tried to have me killed."

"Because you're a rogue," she said. "We were supposed to be working together, but your mother went and disappeared before you were born. Now you're working against the Plan."

"Well, maybe I can be persuaded," I answered. "Tell me about the Plan."

Her face went blank for a moment as she thought about that. Certainly, having me on her side would be better than having me against her, but could she take the chance of revealing this Plan to someone who was already working against it? A sly look crossed her features and I knew she wasn't going to tell me anything intentionally, but there were other ways of getting information...

"Release me, and I'll tell you all about it," she tried.

"I'm not persuaded yet, Sarah," I told her, without rancor, "and you've already tried to kill me once. Tell me about the Plan. Why does it hinge on having this civilization self-destruct?"

That yielded the barest widening of her eyes. Apparently she hadn't expected me to have deduced that much. Time to try on one or two of my other deductions.

"Come on, Sarah," I told her watching her expression carefully. "If your masters were working with the backing of their people, they would just bring in a space fleet and destroy humanity..." her eyes widened even more. I must have been on a roll. " ... but they've created at least two of us to act as their agents from within. That means that what they are doing is not approved by whatever governing body they answer to."

Sarah was on the verge of panic now, so I continued.

"They want something from Earth, but they aren't allowed to get it as long as there's a viable civilization here, so they have to destroy us, first."

Her head was shaking in denial, but her eyes confirmed my suspicions.

"Tell me something, Sarah," I said, changing tactics a bit. "What happens to you when you've done your job and destroyed human civilization on Earth?"

This time, she had an answer. "They'll take me to Sha ... where they're from."

"Really?" I let my eyebrows rise to show my skepticism. "They'll keep the evidence of their crime, and a potential witness against them alive? You say they'll take you to a place where others can get to you and ask you questions about what happened on Earth?"

"It's not ... They're not murderers!"

I let my facial expression answer that one. She knew as well as I how weak it was in the face of their plan to have Earth destroy itself.

I found a hand-mirror in her purse and held it so she could see herself.

"Take a good look, Sarah," I told her. "Do you look like them?"

The growing fear in her eyes told me that she didn't. Another bit of information, as well as a telling argument.

"You're ninety-nine percent human, Sarah," I continued. "Instead of making you blend in with whatever race your masters are from, that one percent difference makes you a liability, because that's the smoking gun. That's the evidence that will condemn them if whoever they answer to finds out about their Plan."

I let her chew on that one for a while, then took out the keys to handcuffs. I showed it to her, saying, "I'm not going to kill you this time, Sarah, because I think you're starting to realize that you've signed on with the wrong team. If you ever come after me again, though, I won't waste time on questions. You know how to contact me if you want to talk."

I dropped the key in her palm and walked out the front door. It would take her a while to get loose from the cuffs, and by then, I would be long gone. Whatever the outcome, she knew where to find me. This time, though, if she came after me, she might be having doubts about her purpose, and that might give me an advantage. It was just barely possible that I had placed enough doubt in her head to get her thinking about switching sides, too.

Of course, it didn't hurt that when I had hit her on the head, I embedded a microscopic transmitter in her scalp. There was another transmitter in my pocket that, once activated, would send out a signal every few seconds. If Sarah's transmitter ever got within five hundred feet of mine, that signal would cause hers to answer back and mine would beep and vibrate, alerting me to her proximity. It could also estimate distance and tell me from which direction she was coming.

That was nice, but it wasn't all I was depending on for my own safety. Some of the bugs I planted while waiting for her, she would find. Not all, I hoped. Bugs, though, can have a way of backfiring. If she was smart enough, anything I got off those bugs would be false information, designed to mislead me. The cameras would make it easier for me to tell if she was acting for the bugs. They were tiny things - the same kind of chip that made a digital camera work, but without all the surrounding hardware, but what would make them difficult to find was the fact that the tiny lens was fused to the end of a fiber optic cable that fed the image to the recording chip several feet away.

Of course, Sarah could hire others, as she had done with the pirates, to do her dirty work, and I had to be prepared for that, as well.