Chapter 3

Bob checked his new Colorado interest every time he was on the 0800 - 1600 shift. He knew it was silly, but the night after he'd seen the girl, he'd dreamed about her. In his dream she was standing behind her house, looking up and waving at him with a smile on her face. The angle was wrong, so he couldn't see if she'd taken her top off or not and in the dream, of course, his controls didn't work. The last part of that dream he could remember was him, screaming for someone to come fix his console so he could see all of her.

The first four times he checked, and there was nothing at all to see. The car was there three of those times, and missing once. He had already decided that whoever worked in the family did so at night, because the car was there in daylight hours too often. He worked at night, but his job sheet when the United States was in darkness was always longer and more involved. People watched for danger in the daytime, but his birds were the only things that could see large areas at night.

Then, as if by magic, she was there again, lying out in exactly the same place, on the same chaise lounge, wearing the same bikini. He panned in close. Man! She was good looking. He felt perverted for staring at her like this. His view was as if he were standing on a ladder ten feet above her. He thought about going closer, but the protocols for using really high magnifications were different. When he went closer than ten feet, the computer automatically recorded what was on the screen. And those recordings automatically went to his supervisor for a determination of whether or not an analyst needed to study them further.

He knew what would happen if his supervisor saw that kind of tape, and it wouldn't be a happy reaction.

He wondered for an instant if she'd received his message. He panned out. The sheet was still there, unchanged. He counted in his mind. She'd gotten it. Maybe she was simply a lady. Or married, and her husband would freak out if she went outside topless. There could be a hundred reasons why she would ignore a crass note like that. He suddenly felt guilty. He'd probably creeped her out.

An hour later, he sent her another note. This one said:

"I saw you sunbathing again today. I apologize for making that crass suggestion. It was all in fun, I promise. I just saw your sign and, because you were teasing me, I thought it might be fun to tease you back. I won't bother you any more. I hope I didn't creep you out too badly. I promise you have nothing to fear from me."

It wasn't until he was in bed, after his shift, that he realized he'd actually signed his message at the bottom with the word "Bob." He sat bolt upright. What if she made a complaint? What if she took the notes to the police, and they gave it to the FBI and they recognized it for what it was? He'd just given them a confession!

When Riley opened her mailbox and saw the envelope, she knew instantly who it was from. She never got mail that lacked a return address. Except for this guy. She wondered how that worked. She peered at the cancellation stamp. It was from Skowhegan, Maine. The first one had been from somewhere in Nebraska.

She went inside. Curtis followed, asking if there was any mail for him. They had been to get pizza and he was full of energy.

"Maybe," she said, thinking of giving him the strange mail. He'd never know the difference, and since he couldn't read, she could say anything when she read it to him. She went to the big, scuffed up sideboard she'd gotten at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. At just ten dollars, it had been cheaper than a bookcase. She opened the drawer she'd tossed the original letter into. On impulse, she had kept it. Who knew? It might make a good story someday, maybe at a party. If she ever got invited to one. Or hosted one.

She looked at the postmark on that one. Broken Bow, Nebraska. Who came up with these names? Skowhegan? Broken Bow? Then again, she had left her mother in Borger, Texas, and that was a strange name too.

She tore open the new mail, and read the message with eyes that widened. It was no fluke. The guy really could see her. And apparently on a regular basis. This was no helicopter pilot.

Again she went out back, and stood to stare up at the mountains behind her house. There was nobody living there. She knew that. There were four named mountains behind her, and they might have hiking trails through them, but there were few roads that went into them. Maybe there was a fire watch tower or something like that, where some lonely forest ranger with powerful binoculars had nothing better to do than look for women sunbathing.

She laughed. She had an image of the forest ranger from the Red Green Show, on PBS. What was his name? She couldn't remember now. The reason she laughed was because she thought of the cartoon version of him, rather than the actual actor.

Forest rangers were good guys ... right?

And they'd never meet anyway.

Why not give the poor guy a little treat?

She gave the envelope to Curtis, with the letter tucked inside, and told him it was from Santa, reminding him to keep a Christmas list all year, and send it in when the time came. Curtis was thrilled.

Then they went for a hike in the woods. She made Curtis walk for as long as he could, and then carried him back to the house. She put him down for a nap, and had a glass of orange juice.

Then she went out to lay out in the sun ... topless.

Riley Franklin learned something very interesting the first day she lay out in the sun with her breasts bared to the world at large and to a stranger named "Bob" in particular.

It was wonderful!

She had been nervous about it at first. She had misgivings as soon as she stepped out of the house. She had left her top on the bed, and walking out of her house topless was very strange. But she knew there was no one near, so she steeled her mind and set up the chaise lounge.

She had waited to put lotion on, thinking she might be so uncomfortable that she'd go back in and get her top. But within ten minutes, she was amazed at how good the sun felt on her breasts, and she reached for the lotion that would protect her from burning.

When she rubbed it over her breasts, she got horny.

That was normal, in the sense that she loved to have her nipples played with. They were very sensitive, and spiked all the time, seemingly on their own. They got erect the instant she decided to use her vibrator, for instance, before she even got the thing out of her nightstand drawer. All she had to do was think about masturbating, and her nipples stood up and said, "Don't forget us!" As a result, they got pinched a lot.

They ended up getting pinched now too. As she rubbed the oil all over her belly, shoulders and arms, her hands kept going back to her breasts, molding them and teasing her nipples. She sat up to do her legs, and thought about taking her bottoms off too. That shocked her, though. Letting some forest ranger see her boobs was one thing. She didn't want to give him the entirely wrong idea by doing too much. If he could see her through binoculars, he could probably figure out how to find her house, and she didn't want to motivate him to do that. Her imagination provided the cartoon character with just enough motive to keep looking at her back yard, in anticipation of seeing her like she was now ... not to seek her out for more. That could be a problem.

Then again, she did miss having a nice stiff one deep inside her, stretching her delightfully and rubbing all those spots with warm flesh, instead of cold plastic.

Ten minutes later the urge to slide her hand into her bottoms was too hard to resist. He probably wasn't watching right now anyway. What were the odds that, at the exact moment she decided to lay out, he was looking her way? Astronomically low ... right?

Five minutes and one soothing orgasm later, she lay limp, and dozed off.

There was no forest ranger, of course. And the odds that anyone might be looking her way from a satellite at that specific moment were, in fact, astronomically low.

In fact, nobody watched as Riley Franklin found out how much fun it was to sunbathe naked.

Or at least almost naked.

And part of her mind knew that the odds were in her favor, so to speak. Whoever was peeking at her couldn't be doing it very often. So that part of her brain told her how low the odds were that Ranger Bob would actually see her on a given day.

Which is why she continued to sunbathe that way ... and the odds got a heck of a lot higher.

Though neither of them knew it, when Bob did let his cursor wander over to Colorado, just to look at the cabin again, Riley was laying out topless for the fifth time. It was late July by then, and the weather was glorious. The first time she'd bared her breasts to "her forest ranger," had been two weeks earlier. She hadn't received anything in the mail, and what astonished her was that she was a little disappointed. Something in her wanted her secret admirer to react to what she'd begun doing. Another part of her, however, was glad he hadn't. She really liked sunbathing that way now, and she didn't want to have to stop because she got another letter and got shy because of it.

To illustrate this war within herself, the second time she'd laid out she remembered her sign on the roof, and had climbed up to get it. She'd used the other side and written "Hey NSA! Is this better, Bob?" But she hadn't tacked it to the roof. She'd had a wave of ... something ... that had, in fact, made her shy. And yet, she'd gone outside and laid out half nude that day, anyway.

The third time she laid out, she did put the sign back on her roof. Her shyness had abated. Laying out this way felt normal, now.

Both times Bob had seen the sunbathing woman, it had been around noon. Depending on the time his seventy-two hour shift started, he was on duty at that time of day a maximum of two times, and sometimes it was only once. Whenever he got the chance, though, he clicked on that part of Colorado only to see if she might be in sight. He didn't expect anything, really. It was more like he was just hopeful he'd be able to see her, and how she was dressed didn't matter. Like Riley had fantasies about Ranger Gord (she had finally looked it up online), Bob had his own fantasy about the bikini clad beauty who he'd seen twice. He knew he'd never meet her, and she'd rebuffed his "suggestion" but that didn't keep him from dreaming a little. She lived in a beautiful place, and he could easily fantasize about her being his girlfriend.

It was hard to have a romance when you worked the kind of hours he did, and couldn't tell your girlfriend what you did during those hours. Most of the analysts who weren't married lacked the regular company of a girl. Some of them patronized hookers, but that was dangerous, because if you went to a hooker and anyone found out, it would affect your security clearance. For some reason, everybody in Washington believed that if you fucked a prostitute, you also told her everything there was to know about your life, including the secrets. He didn't know how many times that had actually happened, as some person in an important and sensitive position, tried to impress a call girl he might never see again. And he didn't know that, to those call girls, personal information was easily traded for money or favors.

But Bob didn't go to hookers. He didn't understand people who were willing to get naked with a stranger and then pay them to have sex. There was no romance in that. Besides, he wasn't that hard up. His hand worked just fine, and it was right there whenever he needed it, night or day.

It was the change in the sign that caught his attention first. He could tell it had changed long before he had zoomed in enough to read it. Again, it was canted strangely, but he could read his name even in that position.

His heart seized, and then pounded. She'd put his fucking name on her roof! He pushed the button to reorient the image, and stared, unbelieving at the new message. He looked immediately to the back yard, and almost fell out of his chair when he saw only one black stripe across her otherwise white body.

He zoomed, and his jaw dropped as his eyes took in the twin dark spots of her nipples. The urge to go reportably close was almost too much to resist. But he did resist, pulling back, in fact, to see her whole body. Her head was turned, and her arms lay, palms up, suggesting they were limp. She might be sleeping.

He couldn't believe it. She'd actually done it!

He was conflicted. Elation filled him, naturally. A woman had taken off her top for him. A guy just couldn't help but feel great about that. But putting his name on her roof could be disastrous if another analyst saw it. Technically, he didn't work for NSA per se, but it would be child's play for any analyst who used the same satellites to figure out what Bob she was referring to. He was the only "Bob" he knew who worked at the agency, and even if there were others who worked for different agencies, the records of what he'd accessed would make it clear he was the Bob she was "talking" to. And that would open a great big fucking can of worms. How innocent it was wouldn't matter. He'd already broken a dozen rules, and that was all they'd think about.

He couldn't afford to wait for the mail. That would take days. And, in any case, somebody might start asking questions about why multiple blind mail messages were being sent to a private address in Colorado.

He'd have to risk it and use email.

Assuming she had an email account.

He shook his head. Everybody had email. And in any case, finding out was as simple as falling out of his chair.

He already had her name and address, but for the program he wanted to use, that wasn't enough. He centered the cursor on the cabin and hit a button on his console. The latitude and longitude came up in a box in the lower right corner of his screen. 38° 51' 7.1064'' North, and 104° 57' 4.2336'' West. He punched another button that converted that GPS setting to the kind of digital address used by phone companies and internet providers. He had to enter his password, but then all kinds of information about Riley Franklin popped up on his screen. The IP address assigned to her computer was there, along with the most frequently used IP addresses of other computers she accessed. Such as her bank, and her internet provider.

This was the dangerous part. The fact that he accessed such information with his password was noted on some spreadsheet somewhere. Unless he actually mined data from this screen, that was all that was recorded. If he actually clicked on any field of data, and retrieved personal information, that was noted somewhere too. He knew that because, in his routine duties, he had accessed the personal data of a banker, and three days later his supervisor had asked him about it. He had the record of what he'd done, and who he'd sent the information to, and that was all legit, so his supervisor had said, "Okay," and left. If anybody came and asked him why he'd done what he was doing, he'd have to have some kind of answer.