Fuck. He had been concerned that Madeline’s dropping off the radar might spark suspicion, but it had been an even greater risk for her to be seen flying back and forth to North Dakota regularly, so they had gone with this lesser of two evils with the assumption that John could warn her if the Council’s suspicions became aroused. As his avatar remained outwardly calm, the real Agent Hunt was already sending a coded message to her via the agreed upon channels. If Madeline reacted immediately, she might be able to stave off further investigation.
But when Lana had the scent of something she pursued it with singular purpose, saying, “Are you telling this Council that this woman has stayed indoors for the last six months?” said Lana indignantly, “That is ridiculous. You must be mistaken. I have spent enough time with these people to know that they could no more remain in one building for that long than I could. She must have left without you knowing, you must have missed her. She could be anywhere right now.”
Lana was incensed, like a dog on the trail, “Unless she knew we were watching her!”
John went to respond but the AI’s reply was almost instantaneous,
Despite the AI’s restrained tones, Agent Lana Wilson took the statement as more than enough rope to run with and said in an authoritative tone, “It is clear that we must confirm the location of this Madeline Cavanagh immediately, and it is also blatantly clear that we must find out what is going on in Neal Danielson’s basement. Agent Shahim, I order you to apprehend Neal Danielson and investigate his house.”
Luckily for John, the AI reacted immediately, saying in markedly more diplomatic tones what he and several others thought about Princess Lamati’s ‘orders.’
It was lucky that the AI had no avatar of its own, or it would have felt the full brunt of Princess Lamati’s regal stare at this impudence. Instead, she turned her wrath on the pathetic Nomadi’s representative, Agent John Hunt, using him as the proxy for the source of her impotence.
“What is the meaning of this? We had a clear vote back when these two humans came to our attention that if there was
any
further evidence of malfeasance on their part, they would be eliminated. I initiated the vote myself and it was unanimous.”
Shahim, through a combination of wanting to disassociate himself from Lana’s attempted steam rolling and an equally powerful desire not to be seen as her proverbial bitch, spoke up, “In fairness, Agent Lana, we do not have anything that could be considered ‘evidence of malfeasance.’ Merely some conjecture supplemented by mildly suspicious behavior.”
Both Lana and Shahim were silent for a moment, their avatars gazing at each other with equal but opposing intensity, and Agent Mikhail Kovalenko made the mistake of putting his opinion forward into the proverbial fire, “Maybe we should investigate the two of them more discreetly for now, and if there is cause I am sure we will all support further punitive action …”
“Obviously there is cause, you fool,” said Lana with venom, “six months! She has not been seen for six months! What more do you need?”
John tried to play the reconciler, hoping to curry some favor with the group while also trying stave off a closer investigation of Neal’s house, something that could only have truly disastrous consequences, “Clearly we need to investigate this further, we can all see that Agent Lana has more than ample reason for suspicion. But at the same time I think it is clear to the Council that we do not have enough information to warrant an attack on the more prominent of the two parties at this time. So may I suggest that we start by confirming the location of this Madeline Cavanagh? Lana, Shahim, would it be possible for either of you go to her location in Florida and confirm her whereabouts?”
Lana looked at him. Was she being dispatched on some errand now? She was about to nominate Shahim for the job, as John had hoped she would, when Mikhail spoke up. He was still justifiably annoyed at being called a fool and he decided to exact a little revenge, “I propose we vote on sending Agent Lana Wilson to investigate this Madeline Cavanagh’s last confirmed location in Florida.”
Shit, thought John, that leaves Shahim in Washington. John had hoped to get him out of there at least until he could get a message to Neal to cleanse the site.
“Seconded.” said Shahim. Lana was shocked. This was the first time she had been ordered to do something in her life. But the orders of the Treaty that her father had signed were abundantly clear. If she refused a direct order of the Council, it would appreciably affect the Empire’s holdings on the soon-to-be conquered Earth. The consequences of such an action on her part were too grave to think of. Even a princess would find herself in dire circumstances if she cost her empire such an exaction.
The ensuing vote went as she feared, with only two dissenters, and the moment the last vote was cast, she felt the AI download the address of the nursing home into her memory along with the personal details of one Madeline Cavanagh.
But Agent Lana Wilson was not done yet and John listened resignedly as she directed her indignation at the one thing he had hoped against hope to avoid. Despite several further objections on his part, she quickly cajoled the group into a vote for Shahim take further steps to find out what Neal was up to. It was a somewhat diminished version of the action she had originally suggested, but while the Agent would not actually abduct the suspect, he was still ordered to enter Neal’s house as soon as possible and investigate what activities were consuming so much of the human’s time. As the conversation continued, John’s mind raced. He must react, and he must do so immediately. In the end, it was decided that Shahim would enter the house the next morning after Neal had left for work.
John could risk a direct message to Madeline’s secondary e-mail in North Dakota to warn her of the coming investigation, but with Neal under a renewed microscope, the chance of any message being sent to that house, or its neighbor, being traced back to anywhere near the HMS
Dauntless
was too high.
John had fourteen hours to warn Neal. He was already moving when the AI closed the meeting, setting off at a run down the corridor outside his quarters.
Like everyone else, Admiral Hamilton had taken the news of their predicament badly at first. His incredulity had soon turned to outrage as the mountain of proof they had amassed swayed him to the same inevitable conclusion they had all come to.
But unlike the rest of the team, the admiral was in a position of incredible power and influence. Here was a man who had personal experience ordering large scale attacks with potentially massive consequences. Here was a man who had commanded a carrier fleet during the first Gulf War and the first two years of the US invasion of Iraq. A fleet with three times the combined firepower of the entire Allied force that had landed at Normandy on D-day. Perhaps most importantly, here was a man who had both the authority and the necessary strategic experience to command the vast swath of the US military under his command. He was their greatest ally to date, but because of his political and military might he was also, by default, now their leader. His power and influence was simply so much larger than anyone else’s on the team.
To have approached him before they had a complete plan in place would have been to give control of the entire enterprise to him. Now that they had a clear set of tasks that that required his assistance, they had at least been able to have some influence over the direction that he took. But from here on it was a ride they could not stop. Now they had him involved they were not driving the car anymore, Admiral Hamilton had the wheel, and they had to hope he liked the route they had laid out for him.
After their initial meeting with the man, the admiral had convened a council of some key military leaders for the afternoon, including General Pickler, telling Neal and the colonel that he planned to present a carefully edited version of their plan to them. It would include details of a missile threat, and a plan to counter it. But the proposed threat would be from China, not space, and the counter would include no details of the alien-materials they would use to defend themselves against it.
Martin Sobleski would be there, as would Colonel Milton, who the admiral would suggest as an excellent candidate to be put in charge of the counterplot they were proposing. They were hoping that this would have the double benefit of getting their man in place to pursue their goals while also appeasing General Pickler by giving the colonel, and thus the air force, proxy control of the project. That was the plan.
Neal would also be in attendance at the meeting and would support the various aspects of the plan as a seemingly disinterested third party, with the additional role of offering up some seemingly innocuous suggestions that would help them achieve some of their other goals.
Standing in the foyer of his Georgetown home, Neal grabbed his portfolio of documents, which was carefully filtered to include only that information that might support their case, and stepped out of his front door to catch the bus across town.
He locked the door behind, activated the alarm system, and went through his checklist in his mind: keys, standard cell phone, the correct ID and cards. No additional IDs or cards, and no gun, he was, after all, going to the Pentagon. After a moment’s reflection, he decided he was ready and set off down the street.
Shahim was crouched amongst the branches of a small bush in the front garden of the building across the street. He had been there, perfectly still, for the past eight hours. In Shahim’s mind, he used the satellites bird’s eye to watch Neal walk down the street, waiting in perfect silence until the human had boarded his bus and it had moved off from the stop. Shahim’s legs then smoothly extended, his joints not showing the slightest fatigue at being bent for so long, and he emerged from the bush and walked slowly and deliberately up to Neal’s front door.
His unnaturally capable eyes told him there was an electrical circuit inside the door wired to the lock, possibly some kind of alarm system. He could not just break the lock, he needed to circumvent the alarm as well. With his back to the street, his left eye rolled down and he deployed his laser system, setting it to a low power. Then he placed his fingers around the outside of the small pane of glass in the window to one side of the door and held them there. Directing his gaze at the caulking that held it in place, he focused his laser array on it. As he applied extraordinarily precise pressure with his hands to all four corners of the glass pane, his laser started to slowly heat the caulk. After a moment of this combined pressure, the pane of glass started to slide inward, the suddenly more malleable caulk bonds no longer keeping it fixed in place. With even the slightest variance in pressure, the glass would have shattered, but Shahim’s control was perfect to within a fraction of an ounce of torque, and the glass evenly strained against the softening sealant until it slowly, inextricably pushed free.
As it came loose, it started to fall inward, and in the blink of an eye Shahim had whipped his hand through the gap where the pane had stood to catch it before it had fallen even an inch. He then twisted it and pulled it back though the hole and reached his left hand back in through the gap. A fine tendril on his finger extended and projected a beam of ultraviolet at the keypad on the inside of the door frame, highlighting the still warm fingerprints Neal had left there when he activated it not ten minutes beforehand. Sensing the necessary keys and seeing from the angle of the fingerprints the order they had been pressed in, he tapped the keys without ever even looking at the pad with his actual eyes. A moment later he sensed the alarm deactivating and he withdrew his hand so that he could use another of the tendrils that ran inside his fingers to open the lock and enter.
Within a minute he was inside the house, replacing the windowpane against the still soft caulk to reseal it in place. After all looked well once more, he retracted his weapons system back into its socket and his left eye slid up and back into place. He was inside and there was no sign of a forced entry. Neal had been on the bus for only a few minutes.
Shahim quickly found the entrance to the basement but was surprised to see very little of interest down there. After briefly scanning its empty boxes and other sundry junk, he decided to check the rest of the house, parts of which were not visible from across the street. For the next twenty minutes, he carefully searched the house, focusing on specific parts of rooms that he could not see from outside. He found Neal’s laptop and downloaded its hard drive just in case, his machine mind analyzing it as it was parsed into his mind and telling him that there was nothing of interest there.
After twenty-three minutes, he had completed a thorough sweep of the entire house, every drawer had been opened, every closet explored in every room on both floors, and he had found nothing of interest. If Shahim had not had specific reason to be suspicious, he would have been forced to assume that Neal was not a threat. But the fact remained that he had not found any viable explanation for why Neal had been out of sight for such long periods of time.