Chapter 303: The Painters' Union has a Leak Problem

Saturday, May 6, 2006

One of the advantages I hoped a small video camera had was in not appearing on radar, as I didn't want the Air Force to think San Francisco had fired a missile across the country at Washington DC. Its being detected would be particularly possible when I neared my destination, because the address I'd obtained for the Eclipse Project was VERY close to the White House. I kept my sight blob looking all around for trouble and I flew fairly low - about five hundred feet above the ground - so I could get out of the sky quickly if it became overly crowded with SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles) or fighter aircraft eager to get into a dogfight with my video camera. That was in a black bag bravely flying close to ground level to reduce the chance of it appearing on radar.

By the way, my flying "five hundred feet above the ground" was mostly by my own estimate since my watch measured height above sea level by the change in atmospheric pressure. Flying through different kinds of weather across undulating country made it give incorrect values for the height above the ground. That didn't worry me. The compass and rate-of-change-of-altitude were the two instruments I wanted the most, and they did the job I needed wonderfully. I wasn't flying through bad weather, so there was no risk that my watch's altitude reading being wrong would cause me to fly into a mountain.

I didn't want to fly anywhere near the White House because that would certainly have the best defenses available, including highly trained snipers with night-vision scopes, so I landed several blocks west of it and walked to my destination with my head down the whole time. The previous afternoon I'd visited the well-stocked Kmart to buy a big coat, gloves, scarf and a hat that covered most of my head (ears, neck, etc.). With those plus my ski mask on and looking down, I was able to walk around DC with no worries about being later recognized from the very many surveillance cameras aimed at the streets and sidewalks. Such a full disguise would become suspicious in daylight because the temperature wouldn't justify it, but I intended to be long gone by then.

The building I wanted was the "International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Building" (IUPAT), only two blocks west from the White House itself, so one block to the west of the Old Executive Office Building. The distance from the center of the trade union building to the Oval Office was an eighth of a mile, which was ridiculously close for something as mundane as a trade union building when all the other buildings around the White House were things like the FBI head office, the World Bank head office, several prestigious museums and art galleries.

I approached from farther to the west to avoid the White House. Rawlins Park was immediately southwest of the IUPAT building. It was a tiny park shoehorned onto a plot of land that was probably too small for anything else, but it let me pretend to shelter under some trees. Washington was well planted with trees and would even be pretty in daylight - not as pretty as Corvallis, but still much more than I'd expected - which was handy for me as the trees provided good cover. I started sight blob searching the building for its big offices, and the big offices for things associated with killing millions of people.

Everything I found was more related to how to make sure millions of people's homes were painted by unionized painters. More accurately, several different companies had offices here, but they all appeared innocuous.

The IUPAT building (actually a complex of six buildings on the block) was far too large for me to reach all of it from where I was sheltering. The complex was six hundred feet from corner to corner and I was sitting two hundred feet away from the nearest part of it, so much of it was outside my range. To be able to search all of it, I walked along New York Ave, stopping a couple of times to scan new parts of the building as they came within useful range.

I discovered that a substantial area of a subsidiary building on the block's northeast corner was set up as an emergency hospital, as indicated by the "Emergency Hospital" sign and lots of unused beds and equipment. The Hospital area was surprisingly well guarded by security guards, so either they had an EXTREMELY bad problem with people breaking in to steal drugs, or there was something else going on. I found an "Eclipse Medical Office" sign, which confirmed my second hypothesis.

Access to the Eclipse area was guarded, which didn't slow my sight blob down at all. Inside the secured area looked like a small business: a couple of partitioned offices and half a dozen desks in an open-plan area. It wasn't large enough, and definitely not secure enough considering it was on the ground level and had windows, so I searched around. Against a wall of the open-plan area was a large cupboard labeled "Office Supplies". Through those doors was a small elevator foyer. The shaft went down, so my video camera and memory stick were almost certainly not going to be of use. It'd have to be email or nothing.

I moved closer to get a better quality view. The first floor down was an underground parking garage, a surprisingly small one. Beneath that were only two levels of offices. They were empty of people (hardly surprising in the wee small hours of Saturday morning). There were security access controls at the top level (inside the stationery cupboard's doors) to call the single elevator, another access control inside the elevator, and again to get into and out of the three subterranean elevator foyers. There were surveillance cameras on all the access routes, in the elevator, and the hallways. Looking around the parking level, I saw that it was divided in half. It required a card to get into it from the street, then another security control to get through to the half where the elevator foyer was.

I wasn't going to touch a computer after what had happened in the CIA lab, so I made do with searching the offices for paperwork. As usual, I started with the largest office (status symbols make my snooping job SO much easier), and quickly confirmed that I had the right place when I looked inside the boss's safe. It contained several biochem warfare-related folders. Nothing Mark Anderson-related though.

I didn't find anything useful among his paperwork, but did find plenty of large scale, amusing stuff. The lab's destruction was causing huge problems, but that wasn't ANYWHERE near the worst of it. The major problem was that the culprits had conducted an unbelievably murderous and effective raid deep inside American territory, had escaped without a trace, with all the disk drives of data, and presumably with as many samples as they'd wanted to take. The hunt for the enemy agents was international and massive. The Chinese Government seemed to be the leading suspect, but there was a very long list of possible suspects. Particularly amusing was seeing several of America's allies on the list, Israel being prominently positioned close to the top.

The CIA and feds were shit-scared of the unknown assailants now having all that information and the samples. There were many documents discussing what to do if this-or-that biochem agent was released here-or-there by various groups, with or without various possible pre- or post-release demands. The Government was in a panic about the massive casualties and political fallout that would result. It was very amusing. Hopefully the Government would know better than to work on such things in the future, although I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

I'd destroyed the live data and immediate duplicates, but I found paperwork that told me that there had been another data repository somewhere farther off site, which had been updated weekly. I couldn't tell from the references to it whether it held any information about me, but the Eclipse bosses had largely reconstructed what the lab had been working on and where they'd been with it from that backup data plus reports from the surviving off-shift workers.

I particularly enjoyed the irony of it being the CIA - the agency whose job it is to see foreign intelligence operations coming - that had been completely blindsided by an operation against its own facility. Reading between the lines, they appeared to be very angry and terribly embarrassed by that. Certainly the memos from the President hadn't pulled any punches when describing the CIA's incompetence. Suspecting that it might be useful to do so, or at least amusing to repeat them to my families, I memorized those memos.

The paperwork in the biggest office exhausted, I searched others. In one of the middle-level manager's offices I was unsurprised to find a large amount of paperwork dealing with transferring most of the surviving staff to their new workplaces. There wasn't another place they could be moved into en masse, so they were being scattered around various other institutions. This administrative function had apparently always been active, for when staff were transferred around, but it'd become far busier right after my escape. There was paperwork dealing with all sorts of mundane details: selling their Fort Dodge houses, finding temporary accommodation wherever they were moving to, and schooling for their kids (I couldn't understand why people would want to bring weapons as evil as these into the same world they were having kids in. On the other hand, being evil means being selfish, by definition). What I thought was interesting was that the new arrangements were all temporary, no matter where in American the person was being sent. That implied a new facility was being planned. There'd been nothing about it in the boss's office though. [[Because the CIA wasn't involved, not after their last monumental fuck up.]]

I found "Anderson, Mark Steven, civilian, child, male" among documents dealing with the identification of remains. No remains had been identified as mine yet, but that was also the case for five dozen other people, about 30% of the total who'd been in the building at the time and a pleasingly large number. My being missing certainly wouldn't stand out unless they managed to check off a lot more boxes on that list, something that had to be unlikely after this long, I thought.

There was a column headed, "How to be matched" which had an entry of "DNA" next to my name (and most others). I'd already known that the CIA had my DNA profile as my sight blob had seen that in my file when I'd read it over the lab scientists' shoulders. I would've preferred otherwise, but there'd been a huge number of different samples taken from me, so they had a surfeit of my cells to analyze.

Some of the paperwork was interesting, but none of it was a big deal. Even if it had been, I couldn't get any of it out as I wasn't willing to fly it to a fax machine, so I decided I should go for a walk rather than hang around the building suspiciously. I wanted to make sure I caught the passwords of anyone logging in, so I'd arrive back around 6am. The Fort Dodge lab's penetration, burglary, and destruction had been such a disaster that I expected several of the Eclipse head office staff would have to come to work on a Saturday.

I returned to the IUPAT building from the southeast at 6am, walking through the grounds around the Eisenhower Building. I sat in the northwest corner under the last couple of trees and sent a sight blob into the Emergency Hospital, down the shaft, and to the boss's office. It was empty, as were the other offices. No one was at work yet.

The boss's office was over three hundred feet away from me, with some of the other offices even farther away. The range was causing a small amount of visual degradation. Only a small amount, but I needed to be able to catch passwords as they were typed in and I didn't expect to get many chances at it, so I decided to relocate somewhere closer.

I walked north, until I was at the bottom of the wheelchair access to the Old Executive Office Building. That put me directly across the six-lane 17th St NW from where the Eclipse office was. Their placement within the building made them about 175 feet horizontally away from me, and not enough feet vertically to matter, so my vision was perfect at this range. I searched the offices quickly to make sure they were still empty. They were, so I settled down and did my best to look inconspicuous while I kept a sight blob in the elevator car, waiting for anyone to arrive.

They started pouring in at about 7am. There weren't that many of them, as government bureaucracies go, but their culture of early-bird diligence couldn't be faulted. Although of all the people I'd like to be diligent, my first pick wouldn't be those in charge of developing biochem weapons capable of killing millions of people. My sight blob had to rush around to make sure I could grab as many usernames and passwords as possible, especially those of the senior bosses. At times like this, I really wished that I could successfully operate multiple sight blobs.

Everyone's procedure was much the same: Arrive, drop bags/briefcases, grab a cup of coffee freshly made by the extra-early secretaries, log into their computer, check for emails, then do whatever the emails prompted. Which in Ernesto Elliott's case (the big boss, a CIA Associate Director), included getting up and going to talk with the guy in the next office.

This was too good an opportunity for me to let pass, so I crossed my newly grown finger (choosing to use it because it hadn't had its luck used up yet) and started using EE's computer. I nudged the mouse, then quickly looked into the next office to see if people were reacting to sirens going off. No reaction, so presumably no sirens.

I zipped the sight blob back to EE's computer and opened a new window. I checked for reactions to a siren again, seeing the same delightfully indifference. Back on the computer, I did a search for "Anderson, Mark". Several matches listed, but "Subject File" was on the top of the list with the most occurrences of the text I'd searched for. I clicked it, and quickly saw from the table of contents that I'd hit the mother lode: all the DHS information, my transfer to Eclipse's lab at Fort Dodge, and the results of all the experiments that'd been performed on me in Fort Dodge. I had the mouse pointer hovering over the big red "X" (the "Close" button), ready to click it the moment I saw EE reappear in the doorway. I moved the mouse away briefly only when I needed to navigate with it, then immediately moved it back to the "X".

I expected to have to close this file at any moment, so I didn't want to waste time reading now. Just like Microsoft's Word program, the CIA software's File menu had a Send To submenu, which listed an impressive number of high-tech options, one of which was "Email". That sounded good to me, so I clicked it.

The screen displayed, "Nothing Selected."

I groaned, clicked the "OK" button to clear the message, then found the "Select" menu. Under that were several options, including "Current File", which I chose. I would've liked to leave out some of the experimentation notes, but I didn't want to take the time to find out how or to read them to find out which to omit. Then back to "Send To > Email". I typed in the random jumble of letters I'd chosen for the email address (ljesjtc321@gmail.com) when I'd set it up at the Water Board's office, plus, "URGENT" for the subject line. I hit "Send."

The screen told me, "Address not on Authorized List", offering buttons for "Cancel", "Add to List", and "Request Authorization Number".

I was getting panicky now, because if the big boss came back into the room it'd probably take me too long to clear everything before he saw something was happening. I hit "Add to List".

"Adding ljesjtc321@gmail.com to Authorized Email List for Elliott, Ernesto. Enter Authorization Number:"

#11: <Argh! Where the hell to we get an Authorization Number from now?> (There was no "Go Back" option.)

It took two minutes of frantic searching to find a program under the email system that was called, "Create Authorization Numbers". I selected it quickly.

"Authorization Number's recipient?"

I typed in "Elliott, Ernesto".

"To Authorize email address?"

I entered "ljesjtc321@gmail.com".

"Authorizer's username and password?"

I typed in EE's username and password.

"Invalid: Not recognized as superior to recipient."

#4: <A person can't authorize themselves to add a new email address; it has to be done by a superior. The bastards aren't making this easy. Let's authorize all the other office dwellers as recipients of our email address, so whichever one gives us a chance first, we'll use his computer to email our file from.>

#16: <Provided he can access it.>

#4: <Yeah, unfortunately.>

The guy EE was talking to now was Zachary Cole, so we changed the recipient on the screen to "Cole, Zachary", had to reenter 'our' (i.e., EE's) username and password, which produced, "Accepted. Authorization Number: 2006/454sbhyQW8643Q82. Email Authorization Number to recipient, Yes/No?"

I selected "No" because I did not need Zachary Cole to get an email from EE while EE was standing right in front of him. I repeated the process for the half dozen occupants of the offices around EE's for which I had login details. Every Authorization Number was sixteen random characters, which would have been a bastard to memorize except that thirty two minds gave me a big advantage. I could allocate four or five minds to each code, so they only had to remember one code, and they focused on remembering just the first or last eight characters.

Then I canceled out of the email-sending part of the program, and spent my time skipping through my file (with the mouse point poised over the "X"). I wasn't reading it; merely skimming to see what was in it. Which was EVERYTHING:

• All the DHS records, before AND after they were sanitized, for both the Portland and DC's S&T offices.

• What Wright had emailed Phillips when he'd called to unload me on the CIA, and Phillip's notes of their conversations.

• How I'd been transported. For the trip to Fort Dodge, S&T had drugged me and the CIA had picked me up. For that transfer, there were details right down to the plane number, flight takeoff and landing times, and accompanying agents.

• What room of the lab I'd been put in (I already knew that, I've mentioned it only to illustrate that the file was painstaking about every little step).

• MANY detailed experimental notes, up until four days before my breakout. The details ceased then, replaced by recollections, presumably because the hard data ended as at the time of their last truly off-site backup, and the last notes were added by interviewing the staff that'd dealt with me after the lab's disaster.

My alleged mind control was discussed repeatedly in the S&T information, and was also discussed a great deal early in the CIA testing, but the CIA's scientists had quickly lost interest in the mind control fantasy as there was absolutely no evidence of it. The closest thing to proof was my very abnormally high brain activity, which proved something, but there was no telling what. Instead the CIA's scientists had become increasingly excited by many of the other results they'd been getting, about 5% of which I was able to glean a small amount of meaning from, because they were so impenetrably scientific. For example, from the scoop of my brain matter they'd taken, they'd learned that my brain "averages 244 voltage-gated sodium channels in unmyelinated axons." I don't know about you, but I'm impressed. No wonder I'd been so successful with girls before my abduction; it hadn't been my sense of humor after all.

I was pleased to see that the mind control theory had been dismissed. Both because when this went public, it'd make the DHS look even stupider, and because without believing it, the CIA should be less likely to look for magical explanations for the disaster or for someone with magical abilities around my family. I had no idea what 95% of the scientific mumbo-jumbo meant, but the file seemed to be a wonderful thing to go public with.

I got to the end of my skimming, decided not to read any part of it in depth, so exited out of my stuff entirely, leaving the computer exactly as EE had left it.

It was only a matter of waiting for one of the other office occupants to take a walk. As it turned out, it was Zachary Cole in the next office, as he and EE went to talk with a third person.

Using Zachary Cole's computer, I searched for "Anderson, Mark", crossed my new finger (it was doing a good job supplying luck so far), then clicked on "Subject File". The file opened and a quick look outside showed no sign of sirens going off. I selected the "Current File", then "Send To > Email", typed in "ljesjtc321@gmail.com" and "URGENT" for the subject line, then hit "Send".

The screen told me, "Address not on Authorized List", again offering buttons for "Cancel", "Add to List", and "Request Authorization Number".

#19: <Why doesn't the superior's authorizing it automatically put it on the list?>