Chapter 370: Returning Home; Part Two: It Gets Harder

Saturday, June 9, 2007 (Continued)

At 9:30pm I put on some dark clothes, my crash helmet and my dark sheet, and hit the skies. My families and I had agreed that I had to be very cautious about being detected because if the Governments agencies or armed forces were going to do anything, our reappearing at midnight would be the perfect opportunity to grab us, or whatever it was they had planned. If they were crazy enough to piss off something as seemingly powerful as the angel, there might be a great deal of Government power focused on our home, and we didn't want it all focused on me when they spotted me flying around. Cautious reconnaissance was definitely advised

My first reconnaissance was at a VERY high altitude, looking for things like squadrons of B-52s, UAVs, or anything else unwelcome. I couldn't tell my exact height without my watch, but it was something like sixty thousand feet, roughly the ceiling of most modern aircraft. I crisscrossed over our home for many miles in all directions. I saw nothing untoward, and continued to see more of the same while I progressively decreased my altitude while making more passes over the area. I hadn't expected to see anything up here, but it was worth checking just in case the Air Force was REALLY angry.

Once I was low enough, I could see that Corvallis still had too many people in it, as there were RVs, tents and cars in many locations in and around town, but not near our home thanks to the half-mile police and army cordon that was still being maintained around it. I guessed that the number of religious pilgrims had maybe halved from its peak. Corvallis had faded in importance since the Guardian Angel had started attacking air bases three nights ago. My families and I had left town, so hopefully a lot of the Idiots had too. I smiled over the cordon's still being in place pissing off the Galloping Ninnies again in a few hours.

I was happy to see that there weren't any strange transmission coming out of my home, or anything else wrong that I could see, which wasn't much as I was still several thousand feet up. The Government passed the first test.

It didn't pass the second test though: several people were behaving strangely around our gates. Achieving two sensible behaviors in a row was beyond the Government's ability.

I continued to descend cautiously, searching widely for anything, and especially for infrared sensors being used to spot me. I'd spot humans using them easily enough, by the humans' heat, but standalone instruments were a worry, especially because they could be mounted on the nearby hills and other distant locations. It would be very bad to have my presence reported to the baddies' boss, who could order some of his men to equip themselves with rifles and night-vision goggles - they could easily have both handy - jump out of a room then open up at me. I had arranged the large sheet in a tube around me so it would do a great job of obscuring my infrared emissions, but it'd do a very poor job of protecting me from incoming bullets, so I was very cautious and thorough in checking a very wide area around home. Fortunately not finding anything worrisome.

During that slowly descending search, I repeatedly passed over our gates for looks at the activity there. There was a small group of guys doing some work on both pillars of the gate, with a cordon of guards in a wide half-circle on the public side of the gate, presumably to stop any member of the public getting close enough to see what was happening. I saw them do something in the grating between the gates, the one from which very strong spikes can pop up to block access by impaling incoming vehicles. They had also drilled a wide hole down from the top of both gateposts, the holes close to the inside edge of the posts. Into the holes they'd inserted long poles which seemed to contain many repeats of some sort of sensor aimed inward at the gateway. I was reminded of the security systems a lot of stores have to stop people shoplifting, or the metal detectors at airports. If they were hoping to detect metal, they weren't going to pick up our SUV because that was going to come in over the wall because we wanted to be unpredictable. The gate itself totaled a substantial amount of metal and it was mounted on the inside faces of the posts only a few inches away from the sensors, so I doubted the sensor array was for detecting metal.

When I was quite low, I could see that near the base of one of the posts, on the street side of it, they'd dug a small hole in the grass and there was already a box of electronics in it. There was a cable running in a tiny channel from the box into a hole drilled into the underground base of the nearest post, where the cable plugged into the sensor-pole. There was no such box for the other post, but I assumed that was because the two posts were connected together by the cable that ran between them under the grating and spikes.

A few minutes later the work halted. A guy got a small metal box out of the trunk of his nearby car and carried it through the gate, paused, then walked back in again. Apparently a successful test, because the workers immediately started hiding evidence of their activities - filling in the holes in the ground, putting the sods of grass back, cementing over the tops of our gateposts and sweeping up the cement fragments from the drilling.

A few more tests were done during the tidy up, all apparently successful, then the box of what I guessed to be radioactive material was returned to the trunk. The bombs had already been recovered so I didn't understand what the sensors were for. Did they think the angel would be radioactive? That'd be a good trick for something that didn't have body. And why on Earth would the angel need to use a gate when it could pass through or over the wall just as easily? Also, if they were going to install such a device, why not do it days ago? Those questions were enough to make me think the device wasn't for detecting radiation but for some other more nefarious purpose, but that didn't make much sense either because of their using the box to test it.

#13: <We're not worried about going through the gateway, are we?>

#18: <Not if it's just a nuclear detector. It's detecting particles with enough energy to zip through a couple of inches of concrete before they get to the sensors. There won't be anything like that still being emitted from our body, if there ever was. Maybe they think the angel will steal some more nukes and drive them through the gates in a car. They're stupid if they think that.>

That job had taken long enough that I'd done other things while watching them work. I'd confirmed that the Fibbies were Fibbies by searching their vehicles. As well as several cars, they had two big RVs. One was packed with bunks, making it a mobile dormitory. Currently vacant, but hopefully its presence meant they'd kept their grubby bodies out of our beds. I didn't know the FBI had mobile dormitories, but my ignorance just meant I'd never seen one on TV. Hardly surprising, because they weren't exactly glamorous.

The other RV was an office, although they doubtless called it something more impressive sounding, like "Mobile Command Center". It had a couple of satellite dishes on the roof, quite a lot of electronics inside, a couple of small tables, some filing cabinets, etc. just the usual office stuff. A couple of boss-types were in it, with a couple of flunky Fibbies. They weren't doing anything productive, just drinking coffee (the bosses), and tidying up (the flunkies). It looked like they were getting ready to move it, which was wise of them because if it was on our property after midnight it'd need a lot more than a little tidying up. Because of the presence of the four Fibbies I couldn't read files, use the computers, etc.

I also had my eyes and radio blobs open for any strange transmissions. If there were any bugs in any of our buildings I wanted to know about them! There were several sources of transmissions that I investigated, but they were all non-Fibbie. The most numerous source was several abandoned cellphones in the Staff's Quarters and the FBI's own radios, plus there were a few other miscellaneous but acceptable sources of transmission, such as our still-functioning radar.

I hadn't seen a single one of our staff. They certainly weren't in any of our surface level buildings, as those were empty of people. I hadn't gotten within five hundred feet of the subterranean rooms yet.

The Staff's Quarters building looked lived in, but it always looks that way so that didn't mean anything. There were no signs of violence: no corpses, bloodstains, smashed furniture, bullet holes, etc. Whether or not the Fibbies had a warrant, our security staff wouldn't have resisted with violence. That'd been included in Prof's instructions to Paul before we left; unnecessarily because Paul wouldn't have permitted it anyway. Everyone on our property seemed to be baddies: the workers at the gates, the cordon to keep the public away (strictly speaking they were currently off our property), the inhabitants of the mobile office, and four pairs of Fibbie guards strolling around our property's grounds.

Mom and Dad's bedroom was still missing all its windows so was open to the elements, and all three of its doors (to the en-suite, closet and hallway) were open. I'd deliberately closed them when I floated everyone out, but the media had been all over the room since then. I couldn't imagine that our guards would have left the doors open after the media left, so it appeared that the Fibbies had been deliberate assholes. I could see that leaves and other trash had blown through the open doorways, but it'd take a personal inspection to find out whether anything more damaging than littering had occurred.

Even more annoying was that the fourth half-door - the cat flap covering the chute down to the emergency tunnel - was 'open' too. The security panel had been unscrewed from the wall and the internal electronics were now dangling loose. The flap covering the chute was still in place, but it swung freely when I NP-pushed it slightly. It should have been very strongly immobile, so they'd totally disabled it.

The only work going on around our property was at the gate, and when that was finished and passed inspection by the boss, all the Fibbies were recalled. The strolling patrollers headed toward the front gate, and two guys I hadn't known about walked out of our main tunnel. Given the timing of their appearance, I guessed they'd been in our Security Control Room.

While the distant patrollers were still returning, the boss addressed the nearby agents. I really wanted to hear it, but it was too dangerous for me to creep that close and I unfortunately can't make sound blobs.

After the little speech finished, a few of them got into a couple of cars and drove away. Some of the rest got into the remaining vehicles, drove them out the gate, and parked them on the side of the street immediately outside our gate. Everyone, including the patrollers when they returned, wandered through the gate and joined the line for the coffees that the lone female agent and one male agent were handing out from the dormitory RV. The female was the one who'd been trying to talk with Ava, which doesn't matter at all. I only mention it because she had nice tits and I couldn't help having the momentary thought of finding a pretext to strip them all if they were still here when we returned at midnight. I'd like to think that she was serving coffee because sexism was rife in the FBI, but it was probably ageism because she and her co-coffee-server seemed younger than most of the other agents.

The boss sent one guy from the last pair of patrollers back inside to close the gate. I watched while the Fibbie did so, demonstrating complete knowledge of our gate control's location and use (not that they're complicated). I was annoyed by how familiar they were with our home.

Having all the Fibbies outside the front gate meant I could now get close enough to search the property thoroughly. I circled around the back of the hill and checked out the tunnels.

Both panic rooms had their vault doors ruined by having been drilled into. Getting them replaced would be a major expense so I made a mental note to get the cost added to our $216 billion bill. Both rooms were strewn with the cans of food and other materials we'd had on shelves on the walls, and several of those shelves were now pulled loose. The door into my secret study had a hole where the lock used to be, and you probably won't be surprised to learn that the mouse and computer cabinets had been moved. I was actually surprised that they were still there, although I'd never be able to use them again out of fear that the assholes had put spy software or hardware bugs in them.

The two vault doors leading out of the emergency tunnel weren't ruined. They hadn't needed to be because they could be opened from the inside, but I was surprised the Fibbies hadn't destroyed them just to be assholes. The inside one was wide open and the outside one partially so. I hadn't noticed that from the outside because the exit is camouflaged with a net strung with material that makes it look like the surrounding earth and foliage.

The elevators and elevator shafts looked fine. The main tunnel and all the rooms off it appeared undamaged. The big garage door was open but not visibly wrecked. The security room was operating normally, and our radar wasn't detecting any planes. [In case you think of them, the secret escape tunnel under the main tunnel's floor and out through the shooting range hadn't been built yet.]

All of our staff were still missing.

Some of the staff, especially the Office staff and the older gardeners, lived offsite. I knew where a couple of the gardeners' homes were and made a mental note to check on them and Ava on my way back to the barn.

That was my quick-and-dirty initial search of home finished, so now it was time for a VERY thorough one, to look for anything small that shouldn't be there. The software program we had that reported EM radiation in our home was running and not reporting anything untoward in its current display, but the Fibbies could've fudged it so its current silence meant nothing.

I was near the Kids' House, so I started with our bedroom. Searching for bugs in a room with a Faraday cage is easier than other rooms because there are only three possibilities:

1. Tape recorder type bugs.

2. Bugs with wires that run to a transmitter through one of the very few holes in the metal shielding.

3. Bugs with wires that ran to a transmitter through a new hole in the metal shielding.

Any transmitter really has to be outside of the room. If inside the room its signal would be cut off whenever we activated the Faraday cage, which is when the conversations would be the most interesting. Theoretically the bug could have its transmitter in the room and store what it hears until the cage is opened again, but I didn't think there was much chance of the Fibbies installing a system with that restriction. They'd want live feeds, and for all they knew, we might keep the cages closed all day long. There's also the problem that there's so much metal in the walls and ceiling that too much of the signal could be blocked even with the cage open. That's why we can't walk around the house while using a cordless phone; it has to be used in the same room as its base station.

I knew there were no bugs currently transmitting because my radio blob would see them if that was happening, but there are many types of bug that can be ordered not to transmit for as long as the owner wants, so I needed to do a laborious search.

I wasn't going to worry about the first of the above possibilities for now as they'd be hard to find and I doubted the Fibbies would settle for non-live transmissions and bugs that require visits to collect the results of.

For the second possibility, there were only three types of entrances into a Faraday cage room: doors (there are three of them into our bedroom), AC ducts (one in and one out) and the under-floor cabling duct that all intentional wiring snaked through (there's one of those). It was a simple matter to inspect all four sides of each doorway, including rubbing an NP-fingertip along them to see if it snagged on a thin wire. They were clear. The AC duct I did similarly, both inside and outside of the duct itself, running my vision and fingertips all through the flexible cross-sectional area where the Faraday panels would pinch it. The S-bend under-floor duct was more difficult to search, but wasn't too hard: I picked the bottom of the S-bend, looked and felt around all the cables. I had previously searched this, so I knew how many and what types of cables there should be, and there were no extra ones. Hardly surprising as it would've been damned-near impossible to thread a new cable through the S-bend and along the pipe laid under the floor.

I guessed it might be possible for a bug to be attached to an existing wire, such as a power cable, with the microphone inside the room and the transmitter outside, using the existing cable to connect them. That seemed very high-tech to me and I'd never heard of something like that, but I searched along all the cables that ran into the room. I could make an NP-clamp by using two C-shaped fingertips facing each other. If I made it fractionally wider than the cable, I could quickly slide it along to feel for anything suspicious. Sometimes I hit real obstacles and needed to check each obstruction with a sight blob, but the process was still pretty fast and it came up clean on all the cables.

The third of the above bullet-point possibilities was also quite easy to check for. I remember the HOURS I spent searching for bugs in Peoria Road, but I'm better at using sight blobs now. I created a large, mostly flat, sight blob, and moved it so it was inside the ceiling's concrete slab. It would need to radiate light so I could see with it, and I didn't want any video-bugs to see anything weird, so I adjusted the blob's shape so no part of it protruded from the slab. Then I made it radiate and I moved it horizontally. Steel is very dense and thick, while a hole in the steel is not. Because I can see with all of a sight blob's volume, a hole drilled through the steel plate would be a sudden bright spot and immediately noticeable.

A few seconds later, I found a small hole in the ceiling's 'solid' metal plate! Moving a second sight blob to look very closely at the ceiling directly below the bright spot revealed a very well hidden, very tiny bug. Long story short: the Kids' and Adults' Houses were RIDDLED with bugs. EVERY room - even the bathrooms - had at least one bug, with large rooms having two or three of them. Each bug was installed in the same way, whether the room was a Faraday cage-equipped room or not. A hole had been drilled down from above, through the ceiling's concrete slab, and necessarily through the metal sheet core if the ceiling had one. The drilling had generally stopped about a quarter of an inch before breaking through, except for a very thin, central point which had been allowed to penetrate. From the top, an impressively small bug was lowered on a wire and positioned so the microphone covered the small hole. They were all audio-bugs, which will please users of the bathrooms.

Concrete not being very attractive for us to look up at, all of our rooms had their ceilings covered with something or other (it was either a decorating or a furnishing issue so I won't describe it in any detail). Thus the FBI buggers had done different things in each room to ensure the bugs' invisibility but good sound reception. In all cases, even knowing exactly where to look, it was damned hard to spot a blemish. The guys who'd wired our place had done a SUPERB job.

In the roof-space, on the top of the ceilings' slabs, channels had been cut by what was almost certainly a concrete-cutting skill saw judging by how it overlapped the holes, cut straight lines and couldn't handle corners. Each bug had two wires running from it. The wires were placed in the channels that had been filled in with something that looked like concrete so the channels could no longer be seen by anyone in the roof-space. The filler material wasn't concrete, as it felt like firm putty.

The wires in each house ran to a single point, where they plugged into the back of a box that looked like an internet router but with far more sockets. That was wrapped in a fine meshed metallic 'fabric' - presumably to dampen its incidental EM transmissions - and also buried in an excavated hole in the concrete slab and covered in the concrete-looking putty (I knew what it looked like because my sight blob had overlapped it). In the Kids' House, it was right at the western edge of the roof-space and had three power cable-sized wires coming out of the other side of it. One was actually a power-input cable judging by its connecting a short distance away to one of our existing wires. The other two cables ran through a hole drilled in the exterior wall of our home immediately behind a gutter's downpipe, then continued through another drilled hole into the downpipe itself.

Below the downpipe, an inch underground in the stormwater drain, the cables ran out through yet another hole and into a slit that'd been cut in our ground. The west side of the ridge that the Kids' House is on is quite steep and covered in scrub and small bushes, so it's essentially impassable. (It's the same cliff face that the Emergency Tunnel's camouflaged exit uses.) They'd dug a little cave for a small parabolic dish, pointed toward some houses on a ridge to the west of Corvallis, and had shielded the dish from sight with vegetation. From this end I couldn't tell exactly which house it was aimed at, but I knew the general area and it'd be extremely easy to tell from the other end - it'd be the house with a dish aimed at my home and a room full of audio equipment and goons in suits. Not that I'd have any trouble finding it, but if I did, I could wait until the dish started transmitting and follow the beam (it wasn't transmitting now).

The Adults' House had its satellite dish hidden under the Activity Level and pointing north, but was otherwise the same. I checked, and the Office was also bugged, its dish pointing to the same place as the Adults' House's dish. The Staff Quarters and other minor buildings were not wired.

#28: <I'm STUNNED that they're STILL trying this shit! No wonder they didn't care about the risk of losing $216 billion; they're willing to risk losing all of fucking Washington so they can keep playing their stupid spy games.>

#1: <I think they believe they won't get caught. These bugs are far smaller than the samples Prof's debuggers showed us and there are no transmissions to show up on a sweep. They've each got their own power supply so I bet the Fibbies can turn individual bugs on and off. Not standby mode, but totally off so there'd be absolutely no current flow to be detected. The Fibbies could easily keep track of what rooms debuggers are in and switch off the bugs in those rooms.>

#4: <Presumably they've screwed with the software program.>

#12: <If it's even capable of detecting these. The software came from the Government in the first place so I'm sure they could make it do whatever they wanted. I'm like #28 though, I can't believe they're willing to take ANY risk when nuking Washington is the penalty. Archangel Michael and the Guardian Angel have proved to be able to detect things in ways they don't understand, so taking any risk at all doesn't make sense.>

There was no time like the present, so I went house-hunting.

I was disappointed. The two FBI-infested houses each contained one weenie guy who was babysitting the local dish (or two dishes for the northern house) and the satellite uplink it (they) was plugged into. I'd been hoping for a dozen goons as so many bugs must've needed a lot of listeners. That would've enabled me to give a VERY bloody demonstration of the penalty of disobeying a Guardian Angel.

The weenies had binoculars but no night-vision equipment or anything else that mattered. They were soldering iron and pocket protector-types, not field agents.

^

[[This operation had come about in response to the Guardian Angel's Freedom Plaza revelation that it had four more W80s. The Government HAD to get those back! The FBI had been put in charge of finding them. One of the many actions the FBI had taken to achieve that was to set up this operation at our home.

This will sound REALLY stupid, but it was still going because of bureaucratic inertia: no one gave these agents permission to stop! By the time the Government got its W80s back there was no one who: (1) knew about this operation, and (2) had the authority to cancel it, and (3) still had a head on his shoulders. Of course the Agent In Charge of this operation queried his boss when the W80s were recovered, but one of the stated objectives for this operation was to find out as much as possible about the Guardian Angel, so canceling the operation didn't automatically follow from the W80s being recovered. The Agent In Charge's query got passed up the chain, where it dead-ended for a while.

If I'd just killed the FBI's Director, then the Deputy Director probably would've taken up the slack and this operation would have been canceled, but my killing the D and DD resulted in a two-level power vacuum, and that caused a messy transition for the replacements. The new Acting-D and Acting-DD had been frantically trying to get up to speed on all the stuff that'd been going on that they'd previously known nothing about. It took them another day or two yet before one of them got around to looking at a query that had no apparent urgency. Even if he wasn't as institutionally arrogant as his predecessor and had realized that this operation was too risky, it was too late to fix the problem easily by then because the bugs were already installed and we were back in residence, making removing them impossible without telling us that they were there. That might anger the angel into nuking DC, so it was a very dangerous risk that needed to be passed further up the chain, which took more time... ]]

^

During my house-hunting, I enjoyed myself thinking of ways of using the information I'd discovered to screw the Government. Ideas ranging from:

• Trying to get two payments of $216 billion out of them: first for the surveillance up to and including the UAV because that breached our second settlement contract. After we got that payment, we'd 'discover' the bugs in our home and send the Government another bill.

• Cutting off more heads in ways that made the Government seem appallingly dishonest, e.g., get the Director of the FBI to personally and on-camera promise there was no more surveillance on us, then have the Guardian Angel poke a hole in our ceiling to show him a bug, show him photos of the bugs' wiring in the ceiling, then the parabolic dishes, then the FBI-receiving houses, including the FBI badges of the weenies. Then cut his head off. Or possibly, in my fantasy, do that to the President. That'd please Dad, but I somehow doubted the President had the balls to face up to us, let alone make a promise that he'd be accountable for.

After identifying the second FBI-infested house, I was about to head to where the nearest gardener lived, when, #15: <We should check home for booby-traps first.>

#12: <You're right. I forgot about those. It seems unlikely they'd go to such an effort to disguise their bugs if they were going to blow us up, but we'd better check to make sure.>

#All: <Agreed.>

We thought it fairly unlikely that bombs would be hidden under our floor, because it'd be damned hard to get a bomb under it, and our floors were very thick so would deflect much of the blast sideways. Anyone standing on top of such a bomb would be screwed, but unless it was a phenomenally huge bomb, people in another room would likely be safe. I already knew there were no bombs in the ceilings because I'd had sight blobs go all over those. Bombs were much more likely to be in the rooms themselves, I thought, based on all my Hollywood-provided bomb training. Plus it made sense that they'd be in rooms where we tended to congregate, so I started by searching the dining room carefully. Finding nothing suspicious, I checked out other rooms.

There were no bombs hidden under the dining room table, in or under our beds, inside our TVs, or anywhere else that I could see - and there wasn't anywhere that I couldn't see. My search included looking for suspicious cavities in our floor, in the earth under our floor, and for any signs of digging around the exteriors of our houses' foundations.

I'd already searched the walls when I was looking for bugs. They'd only been in the ceilings, but I can search through solid matter quickly so I'd done all the walls anyway, even though it was obviously unnecessary as EVERY ceiling was bugged, sometimes even two or three times.

#5: <No bombs then. Not inside the house anyway; they could always drop some on us.>

#30: <I think they're more likely to do something quiet that won't alert the public. Like poison gas rather than a bomb.>