Chapter 394: Worrying News in Noumea

Saturday, September 8 to Sunday, September 16, 2007

The trip to Noumea was one I was looking forward to very much. A week on a tropical island with sun, sand, sea, sex and scuba; and sadly, some shopping, sigh.

Donna was very eager too, probably for the same six reasons, although hopefully not too much because of sex. Her sex education was progressing slowly, exactly how Mom and Dad - and me to a lesser extent - wanted it to progress. It was a safe bet that Donna wouldn't misbehave with any guy during the trip. Mom warned her though, and I promised I'd do my best to make some good quality boinking times for her. It'd be easy to book a nice boat for an afternoon 'family trip', as Carol should get some time with me too.

We had an early flight time, to maximize the vacation time. Going were:

• Eight guys and their dates, including David and his. He'd been the lucky guy that didn't have a girlfriend when my school exam study notes were delivered. I wrote "lucky" because Julia released the hordes of avaricious girls on him, and he was nearly eaten alive by several girls wanting to be picked to go to Noumea with him, so they could worm their way into our social circle.

• Me and nine of my best girlfriends: Julia, Carol, Ava, Donna, Alexis, Pat, Carina, Diana and Claire Norris (there's an explanatory comment about the Norris girls' inclusion just below).

• Violet and Samantha, two friends of Donna's. Violet was a horsy friend, Samantha a friend who was an exceptionally good swimmer from Donna's old swimming club.

• Two very lucky male guards.

The Norris parents had been worked on, softened up and lied to extensively to convince them to give permission for their younger daughters to go. You may recall that post-resurrection they initially refused to allow me contact with their daughters, and then we shamed them into relaxing. By this far through summer, they'd been pretty well bamboozled by the several tactics we'd used. In addition to those already mentioned, after the weeklong Italy trip there was a long article about it in the local newspaper that emphasized how safe and well behaved it'd been (I wanted to encourage parents to believe it was okay for their daughters to go on such trips, not all of which would be for shopping). One of the girls who had gone on the trip had a younger sister who was friendly enough with Diana to be able to visit Diana's home one evening, bringing photos and some of her elder sister's clothing purchases. The girls had raved about the trip, repeatedly emphasizing how morally acceptable it'd been. Carol and Donna had enthusiastically wanted their very good friends, Diana and Claire, to come, convincing the Norris parents. As I was the sort of guy who even left the Aquatic Center when Diana arrived in the spirit of her parents' disapproval of my associating with Diana, they trusted that I wouldn't misbehave. Carol stressed that I did, after all, have God looking over my shoulder. How much avarice was in the Norris parents' decision I neither knew nor cared.

The hotel was four rather than five star. Maybe five star by local standards, but not compared to any of the mainland five-star hotels we'd stayed in. But the somewhat reduced quality of the hotel as a whole didn't matter much as our suite was very nice. It was located at the end of a wing so had great views in several directions, and was very close to the lovely hotel pool and the ocean.

The hotel had delivered on their promise that the main bedroom in my suite would have two king-sized beds pushed together with double-king-sized bed linen for 'friendly' sleeping. There was also another king-sized bed in the suite's other bedroom for Carol, Donna and whoever else wanted to, so sleeping ten in my suite would be easy. The main problem was an appalling lack of closet space. The girls were quite upset at the terrible oversight and the hotel had to supply some emergency mobile racks that could be set up in the second bedroom.

The eight boy-girl couples, plus the fake "couples" for accommodation purposes, of Violet and Samantha and the two guards, each had their own rooms, which they were very happy with until Julia showed them our room. The two Norris girls were supposed to have their own room too - so their parents understood - but somehow the hotel seemed to have lost that booking, so they were forced to sleep in the only room which had space in a bed for them. Oh well.

Ava's gunshot injury was three months ago and she'd healed very quickly thanks to a lot of kiatsu, so she was in good health now. The metal was out of her arm and the only long-term effect was some surgery scars on her upper-arm. Kiatsu had helped minimize those, and I was giving her heaps of it whenever she was near me to make the scars fade as quickly as possible. She had full use of her arm and was eager to learn how to scuba dive. Learning with her would be Donna, Samantha, Alexis, Claire, three of the guys and one of their dates. None of these had done any scuba diving before and would be learning from scratch. (Financially, the deal for these trips is that we pay for the travel and accommodation, and usually most of the dinner meals too. I usually pay all the non-shopping costs of my dates, so Alexis' and Claire's scuba courses would be free to them. Otherwise people pay their own way. So the three guys, for example, would by paying for their own scuba courses. Donna was paying for Samantha's.)

I was the only vacationing person who was a certified diver - although both guards were chosen from the list of guards who were certified - so I wouldn't dive for the first few days. We'd be dividing into two groups for a couple of hours each day: Scuba Divers and Sightseers. While the novice divers were doing their initial training in the dive center's swimming pool, I'd be with the sightseers. Once the novices progressed to doing ocean dives, I'd dive with them. The dives would be tamer than I could've done with more experienced divers, but they'd be with my friends which would much more than make up for it. In the afternoons and evenings we'd all do whatever appealed. Hanging around the pool or beach sounded pretty good to me, as I hadn't forgotten about the topless bikinis.

That was the plan, and it got off to a great start. No one recognized me because my features and skin had changed significantly since the last time I had been on TV. My body was now very close to being Mark's, so I looked almost nothing like Ron. Mark's photos had been publicized somewhat, but not much, and not for quite a while. [The THOUSANDS of international media representatives, self-important politicians, dignitaries from all over the world, self-appointed international religious investigative groups, university and other research organizations, and all sorts of other people who wanted to meet/interview/test/worship/suck-up-to me (excluding Jessica Alba unfortunately), had given up by now. I was still filming my body's slow transformation most mornings, but hadn't handed over the tape for several weeks. I'd had a haircut too. My slow transformation required far too much attention span for the media.]

The weather and sea were beautiful and all nine of my dates were being very considerate in their choice of beachwear, which quickly shamed most of the other girls into removing their tops too, especially the ones that were trying to flirt with me. They had no chance of success as all their dates had worriedly asked me to leave their girls alone, which I'd promised to do. I didn't tell the girls that though, because I enjoyed ogling their attention-seeking method. I was having a great time, as were the other ten voyeurs: my eight male guests and our two guards. My largest concern was in warning the Norris girls not to let their breasts get too suntanned in case their mother got suspicious. Obviously I told them to prevent this by using lots of strong sunblock on the important areas, which I volunteered to apply for them because that's the sort of guy that I am.

In the middle of the second day, I had a déjà vu. Nothing unusual about that as they happen every seventeen hours or so. It was the content that was unusual. Once the introductions were over, which didn't take long, the following happened. (Normally I paraphrase my internal conversations to make them more intelligible to you, because we use some very strange shortcuts. Just to give you a slightly better understanding of how we talked, in the following I've written "I" or "me" when the action was performed by the body, and "we" or "us" when the action was mental. It reads awkwardly, especially as "we" sometimes refer to the cross-dimensional collective of Marks, but you might enjoy a small extract with that strangeness. It'd be even stranger if "you" wasn't both singular and plural.)

One Of Them: <Have you spotted any surveillance on you?>

One Of Us: <No. Why should there be any surveillance?>

One Of Them: <Did you spot the X-ray trucks before leaving Corvallis?>

One Of Us: <No. This doesn't sound good?>

One Of Them: <Counting this one, I've had four déjà vu's since we spotted the trucks and only the first Mark knew about them. Do you remember this {a memory-image of a couple of long trucks parked on both sides of a street near a stop sign going into town}.>

One Of Us: <Yeah. That was Friday. I remember thinking the driver was asking for a ticket by parking on the sidewalk like that.>

One Of Them: <We thought so too. While I was waiting for a gap in the traffic, we got mildly curious and sent a sight blob to check. The body of the truck held a complex looking machine that we found out later was an X-ray machine. It had a large aperture mounted down low and pointing straight at me. There was no one in the truck so it wasn't immediately alarming, as it just seemed to be parked there. We looked some more and saw that it was powered on, which was damned weird. We searched the cab but couldn't find anything useful as it was spotlessly clean and empty. As I was pulling away we thought about the other truck, and saw it contained a receiving plate - the film they take X-rays on. It was only about 4-foot square, which wasn't a big target. It was on rails that ran the length of the truck. The X-ray machine had also been on rails, but we'd thought that they were just to load and unload it, but now it seemed too good at getting me lined up. We found a video camera mounted under one of the trucks, pointed at the street between the trucks. It was connected to a transmitter but it wasn't functioning.>

One Of Us: <That's some serious hardware.>

One Of Them: <Yeah. We assumed I was the target, rather than it being for an innocent application like X-raying bridge supports to check for internal damage, because the signage on the outside of the trucks was for Coca-Cola and Nationwide Movers. That smacks of something covert.>

One Of Us: <Yeah it does. By some serious players too.>

One Of Them: <I parked a couple of hundred feet down the street out of sight of the trucks and called up Julia for a conversation about what I was getting for her, but that was just an excuse for being parked. We searched the trucks carefully. They were both soft-sided to let the X-rays through, and the rails in both trucks were driven by an electric motor, the control box for which had something attached to it which had an antenna, so it looked like remote-controlled operation, especially as there was no one in or near the trucks. We can't think of a legitimate reason for a setup like that.>

One Of Us: <No, nothing springs to mind, that's for sure. You don't actually know for sure that it took an X-ray of you, do you?>

One Of Them: <No. There was plenty of time for it to do so before we got curious, and it might not have been possible to tell even if we were watching at the time, as nothing might've been visible, not even on the operator's screen. To continue the story, we searched the trucks carefully and found nothing useful, not even ownership manuals or registration papers. We searched around the area too, all the nearby houses and cars, but didn't find anything relevant. Julia started getting suspicious and we didn't want to alert them to the call being unnecessary in case they were tapping us, so I ended it. I made a few more phone calls but no one came to the trucks. After a while we gave up and drove to the stores for Julia. We kept a sight blob up high, and about a minute after arriving at the store a car drove up to the trucks, two fit-looking young guys got out, got in the trucks, and the three vehicles drove away together. I followed them, but from as far away as I could using a high sight blob. The trucks headed for the highway but the car peeled off and went east across town. I followed the car because we thought it was probably going to their local base.>

One Of Us: <Keeping way off to the side I hope, because it sounds like they had you under observation too.>

One Of Them: <Yep. I was several streets over and didn't keep an even pace compared to them. They wouldn't have connected our journey to theirs even if I was being tracked. The car pulled into a house, but I was about a mile away and didn't want to get any closer so we didn't see what was in the house. The address was [a location in the southeast of Corvallis, well away from our home], and their place looked like this {an image from what the other Mark's high sight blob saw}. I went to a store to make it look like I had a legitimate reason for going that way. Later that night, I took extreme measures to sneak out unobserved and then went to check the house. There were only a couple of guys in it, but they were typical agent types, even with shoulder holsters. They were playing cards. We found one wallet and it had no ID whatsoever in it, just cash; and there was nothing else in the place either. No paperwork, no computers, no nothing. Just the cellphones on their belts, but we couldn't get to those. I had to return home and didn't have time to do much else before this trip. We did search our houses and cars very carefully for bugs, but didn't find any. So far we haven't seen anything suspicious in Noumea, but if they did bother to come, they seem so cautious that it'd be very hard for us to spot them.>

A note on the mention of "extreme measures to sneak out unobserved". That was a lot easier these days as our secret tunnel had been completed a couple of weeks previously. I could take the elevator from my home down to the main tunnel, drop down through the cupboard's false floor to enter the tunnel's under-road area. A quick subterranean flight would take me to the very end of the main tunnel, where the short side tunnel connected to the end of the shooting range. From there to the still mostly empty Second Staff Quarter's underground parking garage. Either a motorcycle with a helmet or the trunk of someone's car made for easy exits.

One Of Us: <It sounds like a VERY cautious, well-equipped operation.>

One Of Them: <Yeah. X-raying my head through the car windows wouldn't have detected anything, but it tells us they're interested in gathering information and we guess that I'm the subject. That has worrying implications for when they decide they can't learn any more without getting hands-on, or they might bug our homes and hear or see something terrible.>