Chapter 344: The Easiest Way to Get Rich

Friday, April 27, 2007

I thought of one idea while I was making like a submarine up the river: the angel said he'd research the candidate list, so it made sense for him to be in the vicinity of the hilltop house and talking to me ("me" being Ron in this case. I juggle so many hats it's sometimes hard to keep them straight). If the Government questions me when I get home, I could say, "I met the angel. He said not to tell you anything." Ideally (fingers crossed), the Feds would be so scared of the angel they'd apologize to me and let me go. If not - which I had to admit was by far the most likely - I'd repeat, "He said not to tell you anything" as often as necessary. Not the best of plans, but it might confuse them into forgetting to strip search me, ideally for about two or three weeks.

Thinking of my cock, my expectation was that the angel should have no more appearances, so I started wishing VERY HARD that my body was back to Ron's shape. I allocated some of my minds to the job of using my proximity sense to guide those body-changing processes that I could consciously affect. If the angel needed to reappear for some reason, a day or two's changes wouldn't be apparent. It was a hell of a pity I couldn't change my body in just a few minutes. And while I'm wishing: teleportation, invulnerability, time travel and the ability to make girls' tits grow larger would be wonderful too. Unfortunately I just had to make the best of the abilities that I did have.

It'd take too long to get all the way to my car underwater, so when I was about five miles away from my entry point, I emerged. I stayed just above the water in the middle of the channel, with a sheet of water on top of and beside me to block my infrared emissions and make visible light (with a light amplification device) just see water on water. It might look a little strange, but not as strange and dangerous as them seeing me flying along.

With a max-sized infrared-sensing radio blob flying about fifty feet up in the air and two hundred feet ahead of me, I'd get enough warning of anyone on the riverbank so I could dive and submarine my way past them. I also had another radio blob immediately in front of me to steer by. There was no sign of out-of-place military transmissions or anything else alarming. It was a good night for a flight; my current definition of "good" meaning lots of drizzle and low clouds.

When I got within five miles of my car, I submerged and motored toward it as fast as I could without making a wake on the surface. Making like a submarine in a river is much harder than in the big, wide ocean. River travel requires constant attention to what's immediately in front of me (which is often old trees that I need to quickly avoid), and it requires another blob above the water level so I can see where the main channel is, which way the river is turning, etc. I also wanted a third blob roaming around looking for any spies lurking in the area, but I had to stop to enable myself to do that. I wished I had more sight blobs. Even just one more would be VERY useful at such times.

Every quarter mile or so, I stopped for a minute to have a particularly good search around me, especially toward my car, but I never saw anything of concern. One of the nice things about infrared is that it also shows wildlife easily. If there were any humans in the area, chances are that the wildlife would be gone, which meant their presence or absence provided me with a useful indication. I wouldn't rely on that, because a guy could've been lying still so long that the animals returned, but it was still reassuring to see a constant level of wildlife on both sides of the river.

I approached without problem to within two hundred feet of my car, then searched the area VERY carefully. I'd parked next to the water in a small, secluded area, so anyone spying on my car had very few locations they could hide in. It didn't take me long to confirm that there was no one near it, and there weren't any unwelcome transmissions coming from my car either. I looked skyward as intently as I could, trying to see if there was any aerial observation going on. I couldn't see anything worrying; just lots of sky with the usual sources of EM beams.

I couldn't risk simply getting out of the water and walking to my car, because there could be overhead observers and I was still wearing the A-man costume under my black clothes. I motored farther south, passing my car at a fairly slow speed to make sure I didn't leave a wake in the area most likely to be under observation.

One of the scariest high-flying reconnaissance spy planes that I'd read about had three in-built zoom settings, the most detailed covered an area of about 4 square miles. If that was centered on my car, the observation would cover 1 mile in every direction. I was feeling a little paranoid, so I motored 2.5 miles south, found an area where there were trees which overhung the river nicely, and spent a couple of minutes searching the area while I undressed to remove the A-man suit and redressed in my black clothes. I dug a substantial hole in the riverbed, put my A-man suit in a Ziploc bag (I carry a couple in my black pants for situations like this). I put a stone inside the bag too, to make sure it'd never float to the surface, then I buried it under some particularly large rocks in the riverbed.

I emerged from the river under the trees, made my way through them to the road, then jogged back toward my car. I wasn't wearing good jogging clothes, but they were reasonably good at covering my physical attributes, which was important. I kept a radio blob very actively searching around me as I jogged along, but I got to my car without discovering anyone or anything worrying. It was wonderfully anticlimactic, much to my relief. I gave the car a search, looking under its chassis, inside the engine compartment, under the driver's and passenger's seat, inside the ignition housing, inside the seatbelt socket, and everywhere else that I'd ever seen Hollywood put a bomb trigger. That only took a few seconds because sight blobs can move extremely quickly and through metal, and I'd practiced searching our cars several times before so knew what everything should look like.

When I'd done my radar testing with Ava, I'd carried my cellphone and keys, so I was no longer afraid of doing that, but I'd been more cautious this time. I'd left my phone behind rather than have my cellphone carrier record the phone's movements. I'd hidden it and my keys up a tree. I retrieved them and unlocked my car from fifty feet away, without triggering even a small explosion.

I continued to be cautious, but I never detected a single problem.

I drove home slowly. My eyes were open, which meant I had only one radio blob to search with, so it was very busy with having to vigilantly search the sky for helicopters, the insides of the cars on the road around me for any Government agent types, and once I got within a couple of miles of home, the cars parked on the side of the road too. I even thought about checking the stormwater drains, but that was getting silly.

My suspicion was aroused by the white panel van with a laundry service sign on the outside, but containing state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and two guys who were watching video screens of my home and its front gate. It was parked one street off the one we take into town, but it had a good view of our front gate and a segment of the street we take into town. It had poor views of our homes because of intervening trees, but it did have partial lines of sight, especially to the Kids' House. The video screens proved we were being spied on visually. If the spying was audio as well, it would have to be invasive because our homes had random noise generators built into the window frames which continually vibrate the glass enough that it swamps the much smaller vibrations caused by people's voices inside the rooms.

I checked the paperwork they had. There was a clipboard containing a form that had several entries on it, one of which was "2205. Out. Ron Fisher only. Lexus SC430, [the license plate of my car]." It was a log of the vehicular comings and goings for our property. The earliest entry I could see was 1645, but there were a few pages flipped over that I couldn't read. That didn't give me much of a clue about when the surveillance had started, as there's a shift change for our security team at 4pm, so possibly quite a lot of traffic around that time which might have filled up two or three pages.

I had three questions:

1. Why did they need a panel van full of fancy electronics to log cars going in and out of our driveway? A 10-year old kid on a skateboard could write that information down.

2. Were they surveilling just our home, or every one of the twenty four resurrection candidates?

3. What did we want to do with America now that we owned it? I'm exaggerating, but presuming the guys in the van are US Government employees, and assuming they don't have clear proof of a crime that they're legitimately investigating, then the Government was in breach of our last settlement agreement. That would make them immediately liable for the amount the jury awarded in our suit against the named defendants, namely $216 billion. That was probably worth waking my families up to discuss.

#18: <I can't believe we're going to get paid a third time for the same settlement. The easiest way to get rich is to make a contract that requires the Government not to be stupid and then sit back and repeatedly collect.>

#14: <The daily interest on $216 billion is $30 million. Julia will be able to go clothes shopping more often.>

#29: <And Donna will be able to get some more horses. I understand that Penelope, Patch and the rest of the herd are lonely.>

#1: <Maybe we could buy Australia and move the beaches here.>

That suggestion was hard to top - Australian girls have SUPERB bikini tops - so we concentrated our attention on the van. There were two sets of headphones plugged into a pair of similar looking electronic cabinets, but they were both hanging on hooks and the machines they were plugged into were turned off, so maybe there was no audio surveillance involved. The LCD screens were displaying video feeds, all amplified to daytime light levels. One each was:

• Zoomed in to a full frame of our front gate.

• A fairly wide shot showing the street leading up to our gate, the gate, and the driveway into our property.

• Showing the top of our hill, composed so the Adults' House and Kids' House were easily in the frame, obscured by quite a few trees. The framing also included a fair amount of the sky over our home too. The Office wasn't visible from the van.

• One screen had two images displayed on it, one in the top half of the screen, one in the bottom. They were up and down the street from the van itself, to allow the occupants to see any people approaching them. These pictures used wide-angle lenses which wrapped around the sides of the van, but I noticed they didn't wrap perfectly: they had a blind spot immediately to their right because the house they were parked in front of had some thick bushes which grew quite close to the side of the van. The pictures showed that the lenses were mounted on the roof, so by the time someone crawled out from under the property's bushes, they'd be so close to the van that they'd be under the field of view of the camera. There were no windows in the body of the van.

By the time I'd finished finding out the above information, especially checking that the blind spot really was blind, my car had driven into the field of view of the camera which showed the street up to our gates. During the drive to the gate, I wondered whether our phones were tapped, because I imagined that we might want to get advice from our very astute DC lawyer. I thought about calling my home to see if any of the van's equipment gave that information away, but I didn't want to place a call when they could see that I was virtually at home already. I could find out later because although the van was about 1,000 feet from our gate, it was only about 350 feet from the closest part of our wall (it was to the west of the gate and south of where Donna's and her friends' horses are kept). I could easily stand inside our wall at that point and have a sight blob inside the van when someone called out on one of our landlines, and then on a cellphone to test how extensive the phone bugging was.

I didn't discover anything else of significance from the van during the rest of the time I was in range of it.

The good thing about this development - as if $216 billion wasn't good enough - was that exposing the Government to the full glare of publicity and the beginnings of another legal action would surely force them to pull all their surveillance back at the precise time that I most needed it pulled back. The Government was giving us a gift. In some respects I felt sorry for them (not many "respects", just "some"). They could hardly imagine that I'd be able to see inside their van while I was driving down a different street a couple of hundred feet away. I never would've thought to look in their van had I not been so paranoid. For all I knew, the van might've been parked there for the last month, as today was the first time I've been so careful. I should be paranoid more often, as it can be very profitable.

I didn't say anything about the van to our guards, merely waving to them as I drove into the tunnel to park.

I didn't turn any lights on in my home, not wanting to alert the van's occupants that a conference was about to start. I woke up my three bedmates by shaking them and holding their mouths shut, saying quietly, "Don't turn any lights on. Something interesting has happened. We're going to Felicity and Steven's room to discuss it." (I'd long since gotten into the habit of calling Mom and Dad other than that. If I resurrect as Mark, I'll have to get back in the habit of "Mom and Dad" again.)

"What is it?" whispered Julia, while Carol and Ava got out of bed. Julia likes information before action.

"Shh." I like teasing. I won.

Not having any choice, Julia got out of bed too.

While my girls were getting robes on, I used a sight blob to check our Security Center, especially the computer that is monitoring the houses for any emissions. Everything was dull. Then I used a radio blob about 250 feet above me to search around the hilltop and the area around it, again not finding anything untoward such as infrared glows from hidden spies or strange transmissions.

When the girls were decent, we went through the walkway tunnel to the Adults' House, then into Mom and Dad's room.

I woke them in the same way as the girls, with the same message, adding, "I'll get Vanessa and Prof. No lights and no talking."

Julia came with me, probably in case I said something informative to her parents.

All of us except Donna were soon gathered in Mom and Dad's room, Prof using his crutch rather than putting his leg on. [As a complete aside, Prof had bought a spare leg that he put in the Panic Room, so he'll have one to put on in case he ever has to flee there in too much of a hurry to take his usual leg. I find the idea of his having spare legs around the house quite funny, but I suspect I'm being weird.]

I said, "Steven, please put the Faraday cage on."

Dad knew what that was as we take security seriously in this house. Dad even knew who Michael Faraday was, because I'd told him one day. With the room sealed in metal, we could turn the lights on. I allocated one mind the job of searching the room very carefully to make sure there were no breaches in the cage, nor any transmissions from this room or the whole house that there shouldn't be. I could tell that no frequencies were getting into the room, so chances were that none were getting out, but "Better safe than sorry," as Mom always says. Julia and I tend not to, but I've become so worriedly paranoid these days that I'm starting to think the idea has a lot of merit.

Still quietly - better safe than sorry - I said, "Not the main topic, but Mark Anderson is on Jonathon's final list of twenty four. Jonathon gave Mark a million bonus points to jump to the number one position. The score is artificial, as everyone else on the final list got scores in the early thousands. The score just means Jonathon got the angel's hints and made sure Mark got on."

They all quietly congratulated me.

I was feeling REALLY paranoid. As much as I've mentioned that recently, it's worse now because there's a van parked down the hill spying on us, which did a great deal toward increasing my feeling that people TRULY were out to get me. I was almost certain they couldn't bug our house, especially not through a Faraday cage, but that word "almost" isn't a comfortable one for paranoids. The next topic of conversation was the van, and I didn't want to discuss that while the van might be listening.

I said, "I need to go to the bathroom. Can you open the cage, please Steven. Close it after me and talk among yourselves; I'll be back in five minutes."

I got some funny looks. I'd woken them all up a minute ago, and now I was leaving. I gave them a wink. They had no idea what it was about, but they knew to play along.

Dad disengaged the cage. I didn't use Mom and Dad's en-suite (only the core bedroom itself is inside the cage, so opening it gave me access to their bathroom), instead I ran through the house heading for the west wing, then out past the adults' pool and toward the zip-line that runs down to the horses' paddock. Before I'd left Mom and Dad's room I'd known the van hadn't moved as I'd had a radio blob up high looking at it and for anything else interesting. I'd checked our Security Center's radar display too, and that had been empty of planes. As best as I could tell, there was nothing untoward going on, except the van having cameras focused on our gate, but I was very eager to make sure that looking at our gate was the ONLY spying they were doing. Their bosses wouldn't have sent an expensively equipped van if looking at our gate was the limit of their intentions, so had they achieved any of their intentions, or had our house's defenses kept them out?

Nothing secret ever happens at our gate, but we certainly weren't going to let that surveillance continue. It was MUCH better to ensure that the Government's entire surveillance operation was shut down, and collecting another $216 billion would be a nice bonus too.

Not that it was critical, but Donna had left the zip-line ready to use which saved me a minute's running. From where it stopped to the wall nearest the van was only another 1,000 feet (I've gotten very good at estimating those sorts of distances). I sprinted it, keeping one radio blob as close to the van as it could reasonably function, looking for transmissions in either direction. If there was aerial surveillance overhead, my running toward the wall close to the van would be suspicious. I was heading for a shed some of the horses' gear is kept in, but my running still looked unusual, especially if they'd heard my comment about going to the bathroom. If the van suddenly took off in a squeal of rubber, then that'd be interesting too.

As it happened, I was able to reach the van with my radio blob when I got within 150 feet of the wall. A few seconds later I could see clearly enough to see that the guys in the van were watching a very boring gate and nothing else. The headphones were where I'd last seen them with that equipment still turned off. The handwritten log (so much for "state of the art") showed my return a few minutes ago and nothing since.

I ran into the horses' tack room, grabbed a bridle, and then started the run back to the house carrying it. My idea was to give any aerial surveillance the clear impression that I hadn't been running toward the van, but to get some strange leather straps. What could a teenage boy who sleeps with three teenage girls possible want with a strange leather harness? I thought it was a plausible cover story, plus I got to keep the leather harness to see if I could find a use for it later. It'd be more appropriate to use on Donna, and I even felt somewhat aroused by that thought, except I couldn't think of anything I could actually use it for.

#8: <If I remember correctly, because it's been a hell of a long time since I've checked, there might be one or two sites on the internet that deal with such matters. Purely out of scientific curiosity, I could google it for you one day soon.>

#6: <I like the way you worked "purely" into that. It was a nice juxtaposition to the way your mind normally works.>

#17: <You'd better not try to spank Donna with that strap, because she'll punch our lights out.>

#8: <Haha. Yeah, somehow I can't imagine Donna being the passive, submissive type.>

#32: <She's more likely to put that strap on us and ride us into exhaustion.>

I pulled the zip-line back up with me, waving to one of our security patrols across a gully when I was halfway up.

#13: <They're going to wonder about the bridle.>

#11: <Hopefully in a few days Ron will no longer be with us, so they'll think he went out with an imaginative bang.>

#1: <Except we haven't got the imagination to know what to do with it.>

#8: <We don't need imagination. Most of the sites have got pictures. I think that's why the CIA suspects we're the angel: we must be the only teenage boy in the world that doesn't look at online porn.>

#12: <Maybe we can get Logan to write an automated porn browser for us, to save us the trouble of having to do it ourselves.>

#8: <God knows how you guys learned what to do with girls.>

#1: <If I remember correctly, Julia taught us.>

#16: <That's true. We should thank her for that in a week or so.>

#22: <Yeah. I think she's learned her lesson by now. Let's make her day later by telling her that we've started the shrinking.>

#1: <She'll be VERY happy.>

Dad had engaged the Faraday cage again, so I knocked on his door and they let me in. Dad was turning around to press the button again while everyone else was looking at the bridle in my hand, and clearly failing to come up with a sensible theory for my having gone to get it.

I tossed it onto the center of the bed, saying, "I thought you might want this, Felicity. Apparently there are internet sites which have pictures illustrating how it can be used in bedrooms."

^-- I put on a silly, formal voice, "The reason I've called you all here today is to discuss a moneymaking scheme I have recently discovered. How would you all like to be rich?"

Mom looked suspiciously at the bridle. Most of the others looked suspiciously at me.

"There is a new season's range coming out shortly," agreed Julia. Julia and I have a running joke about her clothes spending. She can afford whatever she wants so it is just a joke. No one cares how much Julia spends, except for the store owners, who care very much. Julia and her influence on so many of her peers must have caused a noticeable improvement in the profitability of the local clothing retail businesses.

After a few very confused comments by others, I explained, "In that little street between Goldfinch and Swallow Drives, I don't know what it's called, but parked in that street is a white panel van that's full of electronics and two guys. They're spying on us. They've got cameras focused on our gate, driveway and the houses, and they're manually recording the details of all the cars that come and go through our gate. I'm reasonably sure they can't hear inside our homes, but it'd be best to play safe by not saying anything bad outside of a Faraday cage until we take care of them. I don't know whether they're tapping our phones, but we can check that later..."

"How?" asked Dad.

"I can use my studying vision when one of you places a call. I can't film it for proof or anything like that, but I'll know if they're listening in." Dad was nodding, so I continued, "I don't know whether they're watching us because they're watching everyone on Jonathon's final list or because they suspect something about the angel, but if they're Government people and if they don't have any legitimate crime they're investigating, then they're breaching the last settlement agreement..."

Everyone started laughing. The idea of the Government fucking that up AGAIN was just too stupid of them.

"How much was it?" asked Julia.

"$216 billion. The interest is $30 million per day. I remember the old days when I got very excited at the thought of winning a million from Binion's. Pretty soon it won't be worth bending over to pick up a million dollars."

"Not that it matters," corrected Prof, "but if the Government is forced to pay us that much, they'll have to borrow it. An unexpected cost that high will drive up interest rates significantly, so the interest will be more like thirty five or forty million per day. The question is what we should do now..."

I interrupted, "I've got a strong desire to do something quickly. I'm getting very paranoid about the Government's maybe wanting to crucify the angel's ass. That's especially true if the other names on Jonathon's list aren't being surveilled. I didn't want to ask Jonathon for their addresses and I wouldn't want to fly around checking them out even if I had them, but I'm thinking it doesn't really matter how many people are being surveilled as we should do the same things either way.

^-- "It's looking like Archangel Michael probably won't need to appear ever again, which is great, but I'm still worried about the Government charging in here and accusing me of causing all the damage that the angel did and locking me up forever. All you guys would be up custard creek too. I don't think they've got any proof, but I wouldn't want to bet they haven't managed to catch some radar tracks or maybe even some video, and they might have some circumstantial evidence too, like the places and times the angel and I appear or disappear. One of my biggest fears is that if we don't stop them, they'll keep spying on us and might get lucky one day, if one of us has a slip of the tongue for example. Or even worse, if we don't push them back, they'll get more and more intrusive. Planting bugs in the house or maybe even kidnapping and torturing information out of some of us. Putting that van on primetime news and making it cost the country $216 billion should make the public scream for blood. Heads should roll, and the next batch of heads should be a damn sight more careful not to try to spy on us again."

"You could always set the Guardian Angel on any of them," suggested Dad, not earning brownie points from Mom. He should be careful, because she's got some leather straps now.

Vanessa said, "It isn't meant to be here yet. We could arrange things to explain its presence but then it won't have been introduced in minor ways first, and I think there'd be too much trouble if the Government tried to fight it."

#19: <She seems more concerned about our being troubled than whatever damage the Guardian Angel would be doing to them. I have feeling Dad meant cause something very spectacular, even maybe killing the spies, so I'm surprised by Vanessa's bloodthirstiness.>

#11: <I bet it's because we're more valuable than ordinary humans. That's certainly what Julia would insist on.>.

#13: <And that's even before we've had a chance to tell Julia that our cock is shrinking. That'll raise our value even higher. Maybe Vanessa interpreted Dad's statement differently.>

We discussed the issue some more, but it didn't need much. Everyone agreed that the outrageous invasion of our privacy that we were suffering from - having our gate photographed - had to be stamped on hard and quickly. All joking aside, we cannot let the Government get away with spying on us. It was literally a life-or-death problem, and that's not intended as any sort of joke.

Mom suggested, "I think we should get Donna in on this, so she knows how important it is to keep her mouth shut. What do you think, Ron?"

"Okay."

"I'll get her," offered Carol, getting up as she spoke.

While Dad was letting Carol out, Mom asked me, "Why on Earth did you get this?" nudging the horse's bridle suspiciously.

"The spy van is parked near the tack room. I wanted to get near the van to find out whether they were listening to you talking, so I knew whether it was safe to have the main conversation. I ran down, got that, and ran back, so anyone watching will think I'm kinky rather than checking up on the van..."

Mom relaxed, "Haha. That's a relief. You're too young to be getting into things like that..."

"Are you saying they're for people your age?"

Dad piped up, "We could try." He didn't have any brownie points left, so there was no harm in trying. Not much point in trying either, by the look on Mom's face.

Donna and Carol returned, Dad caging us in again.

Donna asked, "What's happening?"

I explained about the van, how dangerous it could be to us if any of us misspoke, how they might try to grab some of us...