Chapter 317: The OSU Browsing Trap is Sprung

Friday, September 1 to Thursday, September 7, 2006

It seemed natural to wait to start the OSU browsing early Monday morning, on September 4, and continue it every morning thereafter. That seemed more orderly and work-like. Plus we wanted the Government's decision makers to be available to act quickly rather than their being away for the weekend. If the Government did act, the quicker the better, because it'd make the coincidence of the browsing starting just before they inquired about Mark Anderson harder for them to deny, and when they did, I'd hopefully be able to get Majestic Countdown to show them to be liars, or even easier but perhaps riskier, I might be able to find useful evidence in the car they drove to our place in. If so, I might be able to borrow it, photocopy it, then put it back. Or maybe just memorize it to have Majestic Countdown quote it in one of his email a few days later (Maj' had a LOT of credibility by now, so if he did that, he'd be believed).

There were several things we did to prepare. My study got extremely thoroughly vacuumed, ideally to pick up all my stray hairs and any other discarded body parts. After as much of my DNA as possible had been removed, everyone else in the family spent time in the study, shaking out their clothes, brushing their hair, and generally spreading lots of hair strands around. Then the study door was closed and I stayed well away from it. We weren't expecting the baddies to search the study that thoroughly, but we might as well make it hard for them if we could.

Prof called all the local reporters who would be suitable for breaking this story - all two of them as Corvallis isn't exactly a hive of intrepid journalistic activity. Most local stories are about as urgent as a city council meeting to discuss the merits of installing some parking meters outside the Public Library, but a couple of guys might have the gumption to jump out of bed and come running with a camera and plenty of film if Prof called them in the middle of the night. I had a cellphone now, picked up on one of our recent shopping trips, but I was reluctant to fly around with anything metal. The plan was that I'd use NP to alert the parents, and Prof would alert the press.

I moved some of my stuff to The Boys' home. I'd be living there for the next week or so, to make sure I wasn't caught up in any Government swoop. It had the additional benefit of reinforcing our trick because Ron's moving out of the house might look like a good indication that Mark had just arrived back, if the Government were tracking our movements that closely. I'll hardly get a chance to miss having female company at night because I'll be spending every night on patrol over the mansion.

While I remember, with all the drama over my being kidnapped and then the settlement negotiation, The Boys had decided to hang around Corvallis. They'd taken their time with their dissertations, doing a thorough job of them. They'd both finally completed their PhDs a few months ago and were now doctors, but they hadn't looked for jobs away from Corvallis yet. They were doing odd jobs (lecturing, some field work, etc.), mostly for OSU. They'd made $125 million each out of the settlement, so getting a real job wasn't a high priority for them. So far their little sister's choice of first boyfriend was working out pretty well for Andrew and Robert.

The basic plan was that I'd be on airborne patrol every night, so I'd see the baddies congregate near the house (they'd be "baddies" no matter what agency they were with, and it'd be at night because that's when 'Mark' would apparently be studying). I'd see them before they came charging in the front gate, in time to alert the parents to call the press.

We figured they'd probably swoop, rather than enter the premises politely, but we had a plan for "politely". If they buzzed at the front gate and politely asked to be let in, the parents would let them. Once in, everyone would chat away happily. If the polite baddies asked about Mark, the parents would take it as a bad joke. If they asked about the computer, Prof would explain the program that was running to trap them into coming. Meanwhile, I'd be snooping their cars hoping to find incriminating evidence that they'd been surveilling us. If I couldn't find that, I'd try to at least get what agency they were with and which office they operated out of, so I could snoop that place very thoroughly.

If they were impolite, the plan would be much the same, just having to be done quicker. Our closed gate and guards wouldn't slow them down by much, as it seemed likely the Government had the technology to open a domestic gate if they wanted to, and our hired guards would doubtless back down from a warrant or a badge.

I'd grip the parents' arms to signal my judgment about the degree of impoliteness that was heading their way. Light grips meant meet them at the front door and put the coffee on; hard grips meant head to the basement and hide in the tunnel (Mom and Dad would have to pause to collect Donna because I couldn't warn her with NP). My girls would move through the tunnel and join the parents, wherever they were (depending on the visitors' politeness level). If in doubt, the default plan was for everyone to head for the games room.

When the baddies were on the property, I'd trigger our alarm, which would let loose with a loud siren, turn on the exterior lights to illuminate the entire property (we'd had big lights properly installed for security reasons), and set an alarm off at the Corvallis Police Station too. With lots of illumination and with quick arrival of reporters, neighbors and cops, there'd be plenty of witnesses to the baddies' presence.

We'd also bought some Dictaphones like lawyers use. We had them hidden by the front door, in the games room, the kitchen, near the front door of Mark's Wing and in my study. I'd turn them on right after I'd triggered the alarm, so they'd capture whatever the visitors said near them, which might prove very useful, especially if they were impolite and lied about it afterward. In my study, I also installed a webcam on my machine, to capture the image of the baddies storming into the room. The media would love that picture, especially if the baddies had guns drawn and foolish expressions on their faces when they saw the room was unoccupied. I couldn't redirect the webcam's feed anywhere else, such as to The Boys computer, because the whole trap was based on our internet usage being monitored, so the file had to be saved locally. That meant that if the baddies seized the computer they could erase the file, but that could be used against them too.

If nothing had happened after a week or two, then I'd stop my air patrols over the house, and instead use the nights to start snooping our ISP, the Portland DHS, and everywhere else I could think of, to see if any of those turned up anything. If there were any signs of our being surveilled, I'd probably do my Majestic Countdown thing and send those "signs" to the media, although I'd discuss it with the parents first as there'd be no hurry.

As I'd done in Dad's workshop when I'd first arrived as Ron, I'd leave telltales so I'd know if anyone had sneaked in: carefully placed hairs (segments of Carol's blond, hard-to-spot hairs), dust in the computers' USB ports which would be dislodged if anyone plugged something in, memorizing where the mouses were placed on their mousepads, etc. My study deliberately had no windows so it'd be very hard to baddies to get access to it. We'd check for bugs periodically though, both by my searching for them visually and Prof contacting his debugging company to sweep the place.

If there'd been no development after several weeks, and a careful search of my study didn't show any bugs then we'd conclude that the Government were abiding by the contract and I'd start studying.

^

Julia and I had dinner with The Boys, Ashley and Sophia on Sunday evening. There was no hurry to start my patrol because I hadn't started Logan's program yet, which meant Ashley and Sophia had time for lots of questions. Mostly addressed to me, because they'd already had opportunities to question Julia. I had a simple role to play, and I wasn't supposed to know much about what was going on, so I didn't have any difficulties. They thought it was amazing that a guy could so quickly go from being a "total loser" (my words), to being worth 125 million and 7 dollars.

"It sure is! But I think Vanessa's trying to get the money's worth out of me. She keeps me too busy to think what to do wit' it; except Julia made me buy more clothes than I've ever had in my life."

Ashley and Sophia knew no more than the general public did, with the sole exception of my staying here for the next week or so because Prof had something going on that required Ron to sleep elsewhere. The Boys had been told more, including that I'd be coming and going at odd hours. They'd put me in Julia's room, which amused me. It was almost like old times again, not that I'd missed the pink.

Later that evening, after Julia had left and everyone had gone to bed, I got dressed in my black flying clothes then did a quick sight blob check of the two other occupied bedrooms (VERY quick, in case there was any action going on). All was quiet, so I quietly slipped downstairs. With NP supporting 99% of my weight and pushing gently from behind, I can sneak very quietly.

I paused just inside the front door to check the area outside for any sign of surveillance. There was none that I could see, so I slipped out the door and starting jogging down the street. I got to a nicely treed area faster than anyone could've relocated to follow me, then I pulled my ski mask down, stood on the rear of a sled and took off.

Starting in wide circles well away from my home, narrowing the radius as I saw that all was innocent, I was eventually directly over home. The study hadn't been touched since I'd last meticulously searched it for bugs, according to the little telltales I'd left. All was good, so I used NP to fire up Logan's program, watching as empty browser windows appeared on all the screens. The program would run by itself now: every night at a random time between 1am and 3am, the browser windows would access OSU lectures and start scrolling down and up through them, going on to the next one when the bottom was reached. All browsing would stop at about breakfast time. The process would automatically repeat night after night until stopped.

When my attention returned to the outside world, there weren't agents running out from behind every bush, so I went into my usual patrol mode. I was at about eight hundred feet AGL, doing a wide circle about eight hundred feet outside the property's boundary. With a very large sight blob going, I was able to cover quite a wide area. Every fifth circuit or so, I'd zip up and down the roads around us for about a mile, to check there wasn't a dozen black SUVs parked together.

The first night passed without incident.

Meanwhile, way upstream in AT&T's network, their fiber optic cable split just after it entered one of their largest switch rooms; most of the light carrying on through AT&T's normal network, but some of it was channeled through the wall into the room next door. The room that none of AT&T's staff were allowed into, which was strange because this was taking place inside a building owned by AT&T. Only NSA employees were allowed into that room.

The copied signals were reconstituted, the traffic was semantically analyzed, found to match source, destination and content data that someone in the NSA had added to the database of internet activities they were interested in, and another hit was recorded for this night's live review of all the internet traffic passing through this particular AT&T hub.

[[There was no longer any need for the NSA to tap signals in the usual sense. They'd set things up with the major ISP carriers so that the NSA sees virtually everything live. Everything caught by NSA's semantic filters was stored, the rest was forgotten.]]

^

The next night - actually, early Tuesday morning - was similarly uneventful for me. A similar note was made inside NSA's operation within that AT&T office.

Someone in the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade picked up his phone and placed a call to someone in the CIA headquarters at Langley, confirming that it'd happened again, resulting in an eventful day for several people.

^

Early Wednesday morning was very different than the previous mornings. Even before I'd spiraled in close enough to be able to see inside my home, I spotted something more than a little suspicious: a camouflage-wearing guy hiding behind a low bush. Unfortunately for his covertness, that's a tactic that doesn't provide good cover from directly above when the observer can see as if it was daylight. The guy was north of our property, across the road from our gate and several yards into a thickly treed area in our northern neighbors' property. The confusing thing was that he was looking NORTH from behind a bush, toward that property's house, almost directly away from my home. In other words, he was spying on the wrong home. He was either a local burglar or he worked for the DHS.

I dropped lower by a couple of hundred feet to get my sight blob closer, to see how well he was equipped. The answer was, "Too damned well!" Night-vision goggles and an earpiece cord leading to one ear. The guy looked young and fit too.

As I understood it, there are two technological ways night-vision works: amplifying existing light, or looking for infrared. Looking for infrared scared me, because if he looked up he'd see a man-sized, shining heat source floating five hundred feet above his head. Whereas amplifying existing light might not see me because I was totally covered in black clothes, so if zero light bounced off me, it wouldn't matter how much it was amplified. I'd reflect some light, but it'd be very little, and it'd be far less than all the infrared heat I was radiating.

I lowered myself and the blob enough to look into his goggles. Fortunately they were of the amplifying variety. I hoped he didn't look up, but if he did I had a reasonable chance of not standing out (cross fingers).

It seemed a reasonable bet that he wouldn't need an earpiece unless he had someone else out with him tonight, so I started looking. I searched all around the property he was on, into the neighboring properties, and pretty much everywhere that gave a view of the house he was so intent on, but I couldn't find anyone else.

#4: <Maybe inside the house?>

The house only contained people in their PJs, which I thought was taking camouflage clothing too far. Besides, I knew them all because neighbors are friendly in Corvallis, especially after you make them $125,000 richer.

It was while I was returning my sight blob to my sole guy that I spotted a second guy. He was several yards past the first guy (coming from the house under observation), high in a tree, looking at my property though a BIG pair of binoculars. Now I understood! The guy on the ground was guarding the main observer's rear in case someone came out of the house whose property they were trespassing on. The location they were using suffered from being on someone's private property, but it offered very good cover and mature trees large enough to support a man's weight and high enough to see over our wall.

Having wasted fifteen minutes checking around this house, I thought I'd better check around my own. I raised my height immediately, hoping that no observer on the other side of my property had gotten me in his field of view when I dropped down. I shouldn't think so, as the guys beneath me hadn't reacted, but it'd be best to get out of the way quickly.

To the west of our house was a fully developed home and property, not dissimilar to ours except that their home wasn't on a mound and their garden was fully planted. Although the had quite a few trees, they were mostly ornamental and unusable as spying platforms. To our east was an empty field that Donna was busy growing grass on, so it was useless for the baddies. There was a row of smallish trees very near to our wall (they'd been a windbreak before we'd built the wall), which offered possibilities. I flew slowly south down the center of our property, with two sight blobs going, searching the east and west properties as I went, finding nothing of interest. My Visual Centers A and B were easily up to that task by now.

South of our property was a farmer's field, with a heavier line of trees near our wall. I quickly found another pair of baddies among those trees. The observer had climbed a tree significantly taller than our wall, but far enough away from it that we hadn't needed to cut it down. His guard was at ground level looking around.

I hadn't seen weapons on any of the four. They could've had pistols, but I wasn't worried about that. What I cared about was that they didn't have great big rifles with sniper scopes. The absence of rifles indicated they weren't intending to start something violent with my families, and they probably couldn't shoot me out of the air either, which was good to know.

I hadn't thought to check the other observer carefully, but I did for this guy. I lost enough height to be able to determine that this guy was staring at the middle of Mark's Wing, about where my study was. The back door and the hallway that runs to the doors that lead to the garage and tunnel entrance have windows, so he could see those, but not into the study itself. He'd be just looking for movement, hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I went to get a snack or to the toilet, or something.

Presuming they were both looking toward my study, then the two observation teams were about thirty degrees away from being in a direct line with each other. Because they were using such big binoculars I could get close to one team without descending into the other observer's field of view. I had no intention of getting close; it was just nice to know I could do so fairly safely if something made me want to.

I flew up to about five hundred feet, moving horizontally so I was midway between the two teams but eastward, so about 45 degrees horizontally off their line of sight, and about 60 degrees upward. In this position I could observe both pairs, although the two guards were obscured by foliage. I watched them for five minutes, but neither moved. I started off using two sight blobs so I could watch them both simultaneously, but as the minutes went by and nothing happened, I dropped back to one blob alternating from one team to the other while I either:

• I had my eyes open because I had to be careful where my body was. There was some wind blowing and I didn't want to blindly drift into trouble.

• Used the second blob to search around the wider area, in case more baddies arrived, and to be doubly sure I hadn't missed anyone or anything, such as unmanned cameras, on my first search.

Lots of nothing was happening. The two teams were virtually motionless, making them seem very well trained and professional, so almost certainly not DHS. I found no one and nothing else.

I didn't forget to search inside our property. There aren't many places baddies could hide in it: behind or inside Penelope and Patch's storage shed, behind some piles of earth, among some bushes I'd planted, and in the wonderfully landscaped mountainous-looking area in front of the Lower Wing. Most of those locations are exposed to top-down view anyway, and all were very quickly searched and confirmed as empty of baddies. I searched inside homes as well, finding nothing unwelcome. Our security guards patrol around the walls on the inside, with three teams of two doing circuits next to the walls, and we have motion sensors connected to big lights closer in to the house, so the inside of the property was fairly inaccessible. I was pretty sure this was just the two observation teams, placed north and south of our home to make sure they could see as much as possible.

I decided to go hunting for the observers' vehicle(s), to see if it/they contained anything interesting.

This was my third night of patrolling, so I knew most of the vehicles the locals routinely parked outside overnight. There were three strange cars, none of which was a black SUV. Judging by the contents of two of them, they were obviously private vehicles. The third vehicle was pulled suspiciously far off the road, and suspicious neat and tidy. It was a Hertz rental, so maybe our settlement agreement had caused the Government to run low on SUVs.

What I thought was their vehicle contained absolutely nothing of interest. No IDs, no written orders which happened to mention what organization these guys worked for. I had been particularly hopeful that I'd find something with a file number on it as that'd make it easy for me to locate the full file at their base, but there wasn't even any paper. Everything they had, they had with them, except for four pairs of dress shoes they'd left in the trunk.

I went back to check on the two teams, making the effort to confirm that their rearguards were still with them (yep), that the observers were still mostly watching the front of my study (yep again, although they panned across both buildings from time to time, then returned to study the study). I confirmed my memory that they'd been wearing boots (yep).

I'd hoped to find orders in their car that said, "Observe until the 4am attempted arrest of Mark Anderson," or something else that told me what was happening, but no such luck. Observation could change to action very quickly, so it would've been nice to get advanced information about that, but they hadn't left any sort of information in their car.

Each team had a small backpack kept near the guard. It would've been very nice to steal one, but its flying away would've been noticed! Even if I used NP to make a noise near them, and took the bag while they were looking the wrong way, it'd only take a second for them to notice that it was missing. Its miraculous disappearance wouldn't be a good idea.

I shrunk the sight blob and moved it into a bag, getting it to radiate a little bit of light. The bag was mostly empty, containing food, drink, trash, and replacement batteries. There was still no paperwork, unfortunately. I'd have to be patient.

I checked the road from time to time, especially if I saw car lights in the distance which seemed to disappear unaccountably, but that never came to anything (there are enough turnoffs for that to happen innocently).

The guard/observer roles alternated every hour, one team on the hour and the other on the half hour, and always carefully to minimize the lost observation time. The observers were lying on a thin mat placed on the branch, which would've reduced the discomfort considerably. They had food and drink in their bags, and the trash was kept. They appeared to be four very capable professionals. I was surprised when they didn't piss into a bottle. Apparently pissing into the woods was professionally acceptable. I could've gotten a sample from each of them (cupping a few drops with an NP-bowl, putting a lid on it, then flying it rapidly away), and I could even have fetched some bottles out of the house to store the samples in, but I had no hopes that we could get access to the DNA database of our country's professional spies, or whatever these guys were.

Their clothes had no names or serial numbers on them, so the only ways I could think of getting information from them were:

• Violence. Knock them out and search them, like I had the two reporters.

• Surreptitious pilfering. Picking their pockets, somehow.

• Following them to wherever they went after they left here, which would be difficult if they waited until daylight.

The first two weren't worth the risk. I didn't NEED the information, and I definitely didn't need for them and their bosses to think something very strange had happened, because that had also happened inside the CIA's lab. Following them if they left while it was still dark might be useful. I might be able to discover something when they get back to their car, or get to wherever they drive it.

If there was going to be a raid on the house, I would've expected it sometime around 2 or 3am, but those times passed without incident. And time kept passing. Eventually it was getting worryingly close to daylight. I didn't want to be hovering five hundred feet over my house when that happened. At this time of year, it'd get daylight before Logan's program stopped studying, so I couldn't wait for that. I had to land soon, or leave. To be any good at spying on the spies, I'd have to land somewhere close, which risked me being spotted. If I was seen hiding near these guys, that would make them VERY interested in me; the last thing I wanted to happen. It didn't look like an arrest raid was going to happen tonight, so I could probably fly back to Julia's old house. I couldn't call to warn the parents because the phones could easily be tapped, but I had another method.

I moved the sight blob into Mom and Dad's room, then used NP to wake them up gently. I held their lips closed and pushed them back onto the bed, because both of them tried to leap out of bed as that'd been the plan if I woke them.

After holding them flat for a few seconds while they relaxed and woke properly, I raised the covers in the air slightly, as if one of them was doing it from underneath, then I pushed them down the bed. A bit more prodding and they got the idea, sliding under the covers for me.

I moved their heads together, then did some light blob message writing. Even while floating in the air, I can make over nine hundred light blobs at a time, so I can make very small, easy to read letters. I wrote: "2 pairs professional watchers all night. Still there, 1 pair N, 1 pair S. Nearly daylight so I have to go soon. I guess they're looking for visual confirmation Mark is here, so nothing dramatic happening yet. As I come back to work I'll check to see if they still here. # of head taps = how many, circle rub = they gone. I tell Prof + Van now. Okay?"

They thought for a few seconds, then whispered quietly to each other (I hoped it was "quietly". Without sound blobs - dammit - it's hard for me to tell). They could've written letters on their legs, or something, but Dad just gave me a thumbs-up sign.

I checked the two observation teams hadn't moved, then repeated nearly all the message with Prof and Vanessa. Then I headed back to Julia's bedroom.

^

At the normal getting up time, or maybe just a few minutes early in the excitement of the situation, the four parents got up and had a little conference. Under the cover of a loud radio, Prof suggested, "Felicity, you carry a breakfast to Mark's study, immediately bringing back the girls for their breakfasts, then ten minutes later, go back for the empty bowl. Walk in the open so they see you. Use Mark's big bowl, in case they know about that. Dump the food in Mark's wastepaper basket and leave it there so we can point out later that it was a trick. If everyone agrees, we should do that quickly so they'll see it and it'll seem less suspicious while it's still dark."

The other three parents liked it. Mom rushed downstairs, found my big bowl, filled it with dry cereal (it'd create less mess later), put a spoon in it, filled a glass with milk, then walked out the front door and along the top of the mound to the top door of Mark's Wing. There was a small hitch there, as all the exterior doors were locked, so Mom had to knock and call loud enough to get the girls moving.

From the girls' point of view, this was a very unexpected development, and their immediate reaction was the fear something bad was happening. But Mom's voice was calling for them to hurry up opening the door for her, so Julia did.

Mom gave Julia a big wink while saying, "Hurry up girls. Breakfast in the main house right now."

Mom pushed into the house, taking the breakfast downstairs while Carol and Ava were asking Julia what was going on.

"We have to get ready for breakfast QUICKLY. Oh dear; I haven't had time to think about what to wear today."

While the girls were trying to respond to Mom's entirely unreasonable demand, Mom entered my study, tipped the plate of cereal into the wastepaper can, drank half the milk quickly, put the bowl and glass on my desk, wiped her mouth, then headed straight back upstairs.

The girls couldn't have been expected to get dressed without understanding the nature of Mom's sudden urgency. If it was good news, then the girls could wear happy, bright clothes, but that'd be very inappropriate if Mom was panicking and needed calming down. In which case they should wear somber colors, but probably very nice cuts so Mom could be cheered up by the quality of their clothes. On the other hand, if trouble was about to start, then a whole different set of priorities would come into play. If the emergency was going to last a long time, then it'd be best to wear fabrics that breathed well, for personal hygiene reasons...

Mom arrived while Ava and Carol were trying to get Julia to explain whether Mom had looked hurried or flustered. Because if Mom was hurried, then what they need to wear was...