Chapter 19

Steve and I, followed by Barrington Hutton in another car, pulled into Sal's drive about the time Sander, Billie and Jenny arrived. Jenny ran to me and asked, "Do we have any news yet?"

"I'm not sure we just got back from getting Mr. Hutton. He saw them outside the house last night about 11PM. We're trying to figure out what could have possibly happened to two girls out here. It doesn't make sense."

We entered Sal's kitchen. Lola was sitting in a chair frozen in fear. The two older girls were passing out coffee and thawing frozen Danish for the workers in the room. Almost everyone else was on a cell or satellite phone or hand held CB unit. Sal was directing Polly and Anna to start driving through a sector shown on the map spread out on the table.

While we had been getting Barrington Hutton, Ginny Valdese and Helen Ortega had arrived for their weekend retreat. They were in the process of putting together an Amber Alert.

Steve, Hutton, and the Saunders moved to one side of the large, but full room. I explained to Sal, "I don't think Hutton was involved in any abduction of the girls. Thomas is delivering breakfast to the hospital and will come here when he's through. Where are we?"

Sal replied, "We have neighbors on horseback searching here, here, and here. The dogs couldn't pick up a scent past the front yard. They did find coyote tracks, but there's no sign of any animal attacks."

She again pointed to the map. "I think we need to get someone in this sector. Barrington, are you in any shape to drive? We could use you in the search."

"Of course," Hutton replied. "I'll do anything I can."

"Good, Helen, would you mind accompanying Barrington to help..."

"Hi Daddy what are you doing here? Is Aunt Sal going to have another party?"

Millie grasped Hillary's hand and added, "Hi, Aunt Sal."

The noise in the room turned into a deafening silence as everyone turned to look at the two missing children. The silence was replaced by a collective sigh.

My cell phone rang. "This is JD Barton ... He did what? ... Is anyone hurt? ... We'll be right there!

"Ginny, can you take over here? There's an emergency at the hospital. Sal and I need to get out of here. Steve, I need your ride."

Steve threw the keys to me as I pulled Sal from the room. As we started the drive to the hospital, I brought Sal up to speed. "That call was from Doc Harry. Mamtha's unharmed and safe, but Thomas Eagle-feather just saved her life again. We're gonna have to buy that guy a set of white knight's armor. We also have a real live assassin in custody this time. SCI is setting on things until we get there, and Thomas is refusing to leave Mamtha's room.

"SCI is sending in two more guards. Jamal is being transferred to Mamtha's room for additional security."

As we pulled into the employee entrance of the hospital, we noticed one of the newest members of the cleaning staff hurriedly exiting the building. When the young woman saw us stop behind a camouflaged SUV in Steve's rig with full SCI markings, her hurry turned into full panic as she sprinted in the direction of the parking deck.

I turned to Sal. "You check on Mamtha, I've got to check this out."

I ran to the deck entrance and proceeded to search for the woman. Suddenly, Pinkie shouted in my mind, "JD, take cover."

A loud blast sounded and the window of the orange minivan I had been standing beside shattered a fraction of a second after I had started my fall to the pavement. I fought to control the combat adrenalin that filled my body. After a deep calming breath, I asked, "Pinkie, where did that come from?"

He replied, "She was getting in an old pickup truck. Looks like she has an old 1911.45 automatic, and it also looks like she knows how to use it. That shot would have been center mass if you hadn't dropped."

"Yeah, thanks for the warning."

We heard an old Ford F100 pickup truck start up and speed to the exit. In the confined space of the garage, the din of the rusted out muffler was almost deafening. I then heard the double tap of another handgun and the screech of twisted metal as the truck slammed into the Lexis parked in the Chief of Staff's reserved spot.

I quietly asked, "Pinkie, you see anyone else out there that I should be worried about?"

"I don't think so, but you draw trouble like shit draws flies. Damned if I know what you did before I came along."

"Thanks, Pinkie, I needed that."

"No problem, Big Guy."

I carefully walked to the main lanes of the deck and looked at the exit. I relaxed as I saw Charlie frisking the woman who shot at me and Gunny covering her with his Glock.

"Hey, guys, what's up?"

Gunny quickly glanced at me and returned his attention to the woman shooter / driver / person of interest. "You okay, JD?"

I looked at the carnage left from the woman's abortive flight. "Yeah, I'm fine, but Doc Harry's gonna be pissed."

"Good point, but it does show you what happens when one of those little foreign tin can cracker boxes runs into some good old fashion American iron. It kind 'a makes me proud to be an American."

"You got a point there, Gunny. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but what are you doing here?"

"We got a call for backup from our security unit here. While we were establishing order, a mother hen, named Sally Johnson paused long enough on her trip to her daughter's side to tell me you might need backup. I ran into Charlie as I was coming out the hospital door. As it turns out, Sal was correct again. You have any clue why was she shooting at you, JD?"

"I don't even have the whiff of a clue. I'm such a lovable guy it just doesn't make any sense."

I turned to the woman to see that Charlie had her trussed up and standing. I asked her, "Okay Sweet Cheeks, I'm really a nice guy. What did I do to piss you off?"

"I will not talk to you, swine."

Charlie smirked, "JD, you can't really hide being a male chauvinist pig. Your reputation does get around, doesn't it?"

I tried to get back to business. "I think we need to get to the bottom of this mess. We may be running out of room down at the Sherriff's office. Let's get everyone locked up and then we can talk about where to go next.

After processing the county's newest guests, Gunny, Charlie and I sat in my normally unused office/ cubical. We sat relaxing over diet Dr. Peppers and tried to decide on a strategy for debriefing the four people we had in lockup. "How long is it until we get Marilyn back? I could use her lie detector mode about now."

"As soon as we resynchronize your communication devices, she'll be back with you. I was bringing her back to you when I got Jamal's call for backup."

"It sure is easy to get dependant of quality equipment. What happened to her, anyway?"

"This may have been my fault. The power supply to her processor was backed up with a new type of very powerful nuclear battery that will carry enough energy to keep her in full operation for thirty years without outside power. The problem was that we were greedy. We wanted to use the excess power from the rig to be the main power for her normal operation so we could extend the thirty year battery life.

"The dedicated system voltage regulator that we installed to do this had an intermittent open in its ground that allowed excess voltage to get to Marilyn's system clock. I selected and installed the grounding system, but apparently the terminal screws vibrated loose. If I had used a couple of drops of Lock Tight this whole thing would have never happened.

Anyway, this loose ground generated random harmonics (Author's note: harmonics are waves of electrical power randomly induced into an electrical system from an asymmetrical power source. While most noticeable in alternating current {AC} systems, they can be found as surges in Direct Current {DC} systems.) that attacked her unprotected personality EEPROM (Author's note: Electronically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory) chips and the subroutines that use them. Everything else was protected by mill-spec surge suppressors and was unaffected.

"I replaced her personality chips this morning with a single new quantum based PROM we were developing for NASA before the government cut the guts out of their budgets. The PROM we used was the proof of concept unit and the only one of its kind in the world. They released the technology back to us in return for a rebate on the developmental costs. Luckily, we had an uncorrupted backup of Marilyn's system with a time stamp of just before she went rogue, and we were able to quickly convert that to the new format and test it for bugs.

"Now here's the cool part. The quantum PROM generates its own power through something called Dark Power. In fact, it generates enough energy to operate the entire AI module and its associated functions.

"Don't ask me how we tapped into Dark Energy. I have no idea what it even is. Paul Brown tried to explain it to me, but it is way over my head. It seems that we can only account for a tiny amount of the matter and energy that should be in the universe. The rest has been described as Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Paul's people have been studying the phenomenon, and recently were able to touch on a way to harvest small, almost insignificant amounts of this energy for practical applications.

"To make a long story short, Marilyn is now a self contained electro-mechanical entity with power to control a significant amount of additional processing capacity. We will be slowly converting existing technology to quantum over the next months. We're looking at an increase of capacity somewhere in the range of over 10,000 Exabyte's {Author's note: 1 Exabyte = 1 million Terabytes} for each of the planed twenty four chip replacement steps.

"There also seems to be a massive reduction in system heat generation. This means we could radically increase clock speeds with no increase in component heat degradation."

I stood there open mouthed. "Good Golly, Miss Molly, that's a lot of zeros and ones."

"It is at that, JD. It is at that."

"Can we sync Sal later? We need to get moving on this thing."

"No need not to do you both at one time if she's still at the hospital. Just call her, make sure she has her com device in her ear, and have her sit down for about ninety seconds."

A few moments later I sat back in my chair. A small buzzing sound caused a dizzy feeling and a touch of disconnect. I heard Marilyn in my ear piece, "Hello, JD. I'm much better now. Sal and I are now in contact with you. Say something, Sal.

"Mamtha is in good shape, and has a severe case of hero worship on Thomas Eagle-feather," responded Sal.

I responded, "From what I can tell, she couldn't have done much better in choosing a protector. I've been out of touch. Where in the world were Hillary and Millie that we couldn't find them?"

"Those little twerps wanted to go swimming last night after Barrington left. When they found Lola asleep on the couch, they made an executive decision not to wake her and just go swimming. They crawled into the pool's grotto and fell asleep."

I laughed. "I have to admit that this is the best Amber Alert that I've ever seen. Let's hope we never get involved in a real one."

"Amen to that, JD."

"Sal, as soon as the Sheriff and DA sign off on this, Charlie and I are going to interview the woman who shot at me this morning. After that we're going to have a little meeting with the guy who tried to kill your daughter. Unless we get a lot of shit from the government alphabet soup, I expect to start on him in about two hours. SCI in Akron is notifying all the sate and federal what ever for us. So far they've been able to keep the inquiries on Smoke off our backs. I'll send Gunny over to get you before we start if you want."

"I'd appreciate that."

I walked into the interview room without a word and sat in the chair on the opposite side of the steel table that was bolted to the floor. I quietly watched the almost tangible waves of hate radiate from the shackled woman that I had never met before. We sat like that for about five minutes until Charlie entered the room and stood in the corner to my left.