Chapter 5

In the next 6 months, until school ended for Charlie and me, our lives changed dramatically in some ways but in others, life got into a rut.

Billy was committed to a mental institution to live out his remaining years, a certified nut case. The hospital told the local news reporters that when he learned of the tragic deaths of his 'family, ' he completely and irreversibly snapped. The fact that his change in behavior preceded their deaths by a few hours was a small detail conveniently left out of their report.

Investigators going through the rubble of the Jones' residence began finding strange and dangerous debris and quickly cordoned off the area. A US Army bomb disposal team was brought in to clean up the area. The civilian police units had no knowledge or experience of how to handle some of the high explosive ordinance they had discovered unexploded in the basement of the Jones' house. Not to mention they had found evidence of several fully automatic — and highly illegal military grade weapons.

Mr. Griggs officially retired from teaching to recover from his injuries. He never went back to the school to teach. Instead, he purchased an abandoned and isolated farm just outside the city. The farm had been there for almost two hundred years with many of the buildings from that era. Bill refurbished one of the old barns on the property for his 'therapy' sessions. In reality, the barn was now our Headquarters building and had every security measure known to modern man incorporated into the upgrades he made to the barn.

Mr. Griggs continued to 'date' Ms. Brisard, though she was talking about leaving teaching. It just wasn't rewarding for her anymore. Everything the lady said or did seemed to almost incriminate her, yet there was never absolute proof of her involvement. Everything we knew was circumstantial or third hand. On the bright side she was putting out for him now that they were no longer colleagues, so Bill was more relaxed than we had ever seen him. Charlie thought he really liked Ms. Brisard, but wasn't sure. I didn't give a crap, but the more I knew about her, the more I liked her as a person. I was also beginning to think it was possible that someone very clever was setting her up.

Ms. Brisard, whose first name we learned was Lisette, was the occasional visitor to the farm the day after spending the night before. No restrictions were placed on her and she was in the 'public' side of the new barn a couple of times. We studied those films intensely and she had shown no obvious interest in looking around. It was those visits that convinced Charlie that she was only after Bill, as she only had eyes for him.

Charlie and I stayed out of sight. In fact, we never went outside at the farm. Bill had constructed tunnels from building to building, so you could get from place to place without being seen. In actuality, Charlie and I rarely used the tunnels. We just teleported from place to place and Bill never got over his fascination with the ride. But when he was by himself, he would use the tunnels.

We had teleported the spheres out of the lab and into the barn as soon as the space was available. We had spent hours trying to decide how to get them out of the lab. Would they have to be dismantled, how could we get possession of them, would anyone notice they were gone? The biggest problem was their size and weight. It had taken a special moving company to get them into the school in the first place and that company was no longer active in our city.

Bill said it was too bad we couldn't just teleport them somewhere and Charlie and I just sat there and looked dumb. Duh! It was so simple. If it worked, that is. We had never tried to teleport something so massive, but in theory it should work. We disconnected the electrical connections and I grabbed hold of one of the rings of the sphere. I focused on the platform we had prepared for it in the center of the basement of the barn. And then the sphere was there.

As soon as I had blinked out with the sphere, Charlie followed with the HV generator. We both went back for the wires and other items that we thought we would need. Mr. Griggs, as part of a retirement gift to the school, donated a huge chunk of money to the school to cover the 'purchases' we had made, although said purchases were never itemized anywhere. I doubt anyone but a handful of people even knew that the rings had been there in the first place.

I also included in those items we purchased a lot of the spare parts for the high powered laser. I included enough to build two complete lasers with all of the parts I had taken. I assembled one of them on a work table in the basement of our house. When we needed to run the process, I could teleport the work table with the laser into the basement of the barn and then back again. Charlie and I made doubly sure there were no prying eyes or ears in the basement. We checked constantly and it became kind of a game to catch the devices the Major would hide in that room.

It was good practice for us, too, as he used all kinds of devices, from simple microphones and cameras to the most sophisticated digital burst transmitters currently being used by the agencies in that business. He even got a hold of some of the newest ones that were in development by the government. He was very interested in learning how we had defeated some of those, as knowing how to beat them helped the government develop defenses against them as well has designing newer and better snooping devices.

We generated a lot of interest from agencies the Major didn't want prying into our business as we were defeating the bugs so easily and consistently. Inquiring minds want to know and bureaucratic minds want to control. These assholes were bureaucrats, so the 'game' came to a sudden halt. Bill flat out told us he was going to stop prying. Too many other people were getting accidently involved in our business.

Bill didn't like that we were holding back on the details of the process, but he understood; kind of. I really think he wanted to go through it himself. I was still afraid the process would get sold or stolen, so for the time being, Charlie and I played it close to the vest. We also kept up the same level of vigilance we had when the Major was spying on us. Now it was even more important, as any breach of security would be from an outside group, not from Bill.

Charlie and I had been working on improving our skills with our abilities and we were both able to blink into and out of reality faster than a person could see an image. The hand is faster than the eye, so to speak. It got so we could appear and disappear at the speed of thought. We had several 'games' we played to challenge each other. We were both very competitive and surprisingly evenly matched. Charlie was a superb athlete and very coordinated. I was OK, but most of the time I was no match physically for her coordination. I made up for that in two ways; first, I would play with no fear. Pain was my friend. If there were pipes or furniture on the other side of the wall, I would dive through it, blinking out of reality at the last second. Charlie always wanted to know what was on the far side of an obstacle before going through. Second, I tried to use my brain to gain any advantage I could. Trouble was, Charlie seemed to be getting smarter. She hadn't said anything about it, but I think she was developing a photographic memory — or was learning how to use my recall ability. I had 'caught' her several times remembering things in exact detail that she had only read once. If this was yet another ability as a result of the process, it would not have been that noticeable with me. Regardless, Charlie was getting smarter and I had to really struggle to keep up with her, much less beat her.

One afternoon we had a rare free period from our training. Bill was out somewhere, probably with Lisette, our schoolwork was done and our training was ahead of schedule — if there is such a thing. So Charlie and I went exploring, something we could do without getting into too much trouble. One of the games we had designed to work on our reflexes involved running at full speed at objects and see how close we could come to them before we stopped ourselves. OK, it was mostly to improve my reflexes as I was pretty clumsy on my feet. They generally did what I wanted them to, but sometimes not exactly when I needed them to do it.

We had taken one of the tunnels from our main building to another of the older barns on Bill's farm. We were in the cellar looking around at all the old and mostly broken chairs and wagons and stuff. Charlie pointed at the far wall and said 'Dare ya'.'

I took off at a dead run towards the old stone wall and just before applying my feet to stop they got tangled up in each other and I headed for the wall head first. This wasn't the first time this had happened and normally I would blink out, get a good look at some dirt and debris on the far side and then step back into the room, none the worse for the wear. Of course, if that happened, Charlie would 'win' the dare.

This time I blinked out, but I didn't stop at the wall. There was a huge open space on the far side of the wall. I walked back through the wall and called Charlie to come and see.

We walked through the wall and got our flashlights out of our processed backpacks. We flicked on the flashlights and stared at a scene that no one had viewed since the days of the Underground Railroad. We saw where the secret entry to the space had been and where it had been bricked over sometime during an earlier renovation. We were staring at history, a time capsule back to a barbaric time in our country's past.

As we looked around, I started to calculate where the room was at on the property. Apparently it had been a basement for a building that had never been built. If I remembered correctly — and I always did — there was a mound of dirt above this building. The mound was between two of the older barns and the building, had it been built, would have connected these two into an 'H'-shaped structure.

Most of the historical artifacts were along one side of the room. There were a couple fragments of cloth, dishes, large tables and chairs and eating utensils. The rest of the room was bare. More important, the space was dry.

I looked at Charlie and asked her if she thought we could use this 'Railroad Station' to store our processed items and even the laser. We had notice that Mom was getting curious about us of late and had once actually come upstairs to look in on us after we had gone to bed. We had also found evidence that she had been down in the basement where we kept the laser. Mom was well meaning and harmless for the most part, but Charlie and I both realized the importance of keeping her out of this. If she said anything to any of her drinking buddies, who knew where it would end up?

Getting electricity into the space was simple, as the older barn we had been exploring had just been wired. I ran a conduit down into the ground that looked like a ground wire for the lightning rods on the roof. I added a circuit breaker to the box, buried the wire in among the many others running to and from the breaker box and we had power for lights.

By the end of the day we had teleported all of our processed items, including the laser, to the Station, as we referred to it. It became our sanctuary, but, as I was not sure how much air we had to breathe in that space, we limited ourselves to the amount of time we spent there.

One of the most exciting discoveries we had made was that electronics could go through the process. Whatever the materials were that the various metals turned into, they still conducted electricity and, for the most part, they had the same physical characteristics after being processed. For example, most transistors still functioned in the same way after the processing as before, so simple electronics like radios and communications headsets would still work. Batteries, on the other hand, would not keep a charge. In fact, the batteries we tried to process were the only explosive episodes we had. It didn't matter if they were lithium, dry cells or car batteries, they could not be processed. It wasn't that much of a problem since, as most batteries were enclosed or encased inside the devices they powered, they were still invisible when we needed them to be.

We did need to make some adjustments to the equipment, however, to overcome the inability of sound waves and electromagnetic waves from crossing the dimensional barrier. The first was that radio waves could not leave the other dimension to reality. If we needed to speak to Bill over the headsets we were beginning to train with and use, we had to turn visible. I overcame this problem by attaching a retractable antenna to the headsets. The antenna was made from unprocessed metal. Whenever we needed to transmit, the antenna would expose itself briefly and then retract. I also modified it so that the antenna was fully automated and was only visible when we transmitted. This was after several headsets were ruined walking through walls with the antenna wire exposed.

The second major adjustment was a bit more disconcerting. The processed electronics operated at efficiencies several magnitudes higher than the original unprocessed equipment. Where an unprocessed headset had a range of several hundred yards, a processed headset was fully functional over several miles. In addition I had to step down the power out of the batteries from milliamps to microamps. Of course, at that level the batteries would last just about forever.

Flashlights were also interesting. The process would change the tungsten in the filament, but when current was run through the wire, it did not produce light in a wavelength we could detect. I had a suspicion that something was being generated, I just did not have any instruments to detect it. The newer type digital LED flashlights, however, performed like HID headlights in imported sports car. They were really bright and intense. As a test we left a digital flashlight burning in the Station and it was still bright after three months of constant use.

I had told Bill about the video spy cameras in the two labs and that these and the computers were used by Billy's group. After we discussed what to do, we decided to leave the camera in his lab running. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose if we disabled it and raised suspicions. He wasn't doing anything in the lab anyway. We did disable the one in my lab once more just before we teleported the sphere. I fixed it so that the batteries went dead again. It must have been a faulty camera, right? He was going to have someone somewhere try to back trace the downloads from the hidden computers, but now that the Jones' residence was destroyed, it was pretty pointless.

I also mentioned the mis-wired smoke alarms to Bill. He told me there weren't any smoke alarms in the science building and that the HVAC system had internal sensors to detect smoke that were much better than the models for homes. Charlie and I teleported him to my lab and showed him the smoke detector on the ceiling. I took a small camera and photographed the wiring, then re-did it the way it had been originally, so that it was set to activate only when the lights were turned on. I took a picture of that wiring as well.

Bill studied the photos of the smoke detectors and the wiring for a long time. I think he recognized the devices, and they were not smoke detectors. I could tell he was angry, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He also seemed to sag emotionally after that, as if he had been let down by someone or something he had once trusted. His eyes were sad for weeks, but one day he seemed to have come to a resolution of sorts and threw himself with renewed energy into Charlie's and my training.

His contacts had also traced the source of the funds Billy had been able to requisition and that information caused some additional excitement. In a strange turn, the money had come from a US intelligence agency account, but it had been 'stolen.' No one really believed the official story, of course, as government controllers typically released dollar bills like they had to pull them out of their asses one at a time — in other words, very reluctantly. Losing $20 million that way just wasn't a believable story.

The Major's super secret agency dug deeper into the 'theft' and discovered that a computer programmer had placed certain over-rides and backdoors in certain routines hidden deep in the machine language of the computer. Of course, that programmer was now talking only with God or the Devil, so asking him or her questions was out of the question. Someone, however, was still using the commands to release funds without the normal authorization. Because the commands were buried so deeply in the machine, it was difficult, if not impossible to determine the person or persons releasing the funds.

I decided to 'help' the investigation and sent another request for more funds from Billy, using his codes. The response that request got was like licking your finger and sticking it in an electrical outlet; immediate, exciting and shocking to see who and what agencies were involved. While everyone else was trying to find out how Billy was getting out communications from the loony bin, I back-tracked my second message to a small anonymous government office in Alexandria, VA. Knowing their location, I tapped into the mainframe computer via another route — they had shut down the secure website, finally — and browsed for a while. I found out what they had in their bank accounts and emptied them. Then I wiped out their mainframe by overloading the circuits and shutting down their cooling system one night. To say their system was fried would be an understatement. Of course, the loss of their data was assumed to be a result of that incident and not because a hacker (me!) had copied and then wiped their discs clean.

I gave a copy of the purloined data to the Major, minus the fiduciary information, of course. I also informed him that our 'investments' were doing very well and had, in fact, quadrupled in value almost overnight. We now had over $100 million in funding and hadn't even really started operations. Bill looked at me strangely for a long minute, but never asked about the 'missing' funds on the disc or the coincidental windfall in our own accounts.

Charlie and I were allowed to be home schooled for the remainder of our senior year. Of course, Mom didn't have a clue that was happening. She thought we were still attending school. Charlie and I left every morning at the same time and as soon as we were out the door, we would teleport to the barn. We spend hours each day in physical exercise, martial arts, endurance training, swimming (yes, there was a long and narrow pool designed for laps), learning a bunch of stuff Bill called 'tradecraft' and a number of other things. We learned how to disable people without killing them or disrupting their ability to talk. Bill also taught us how to kill efficiently with almost anything at hand. He couldn't teach us how to deal with it emotionally, though. Charlie had more difficulty with that part of the training than I did. I had been beat up and tormented all my life. Getting mine back was not going to cause me to lose any sleep.