Jack Be Quick Ch. 07

If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Oh, you can go ahead and plow on without them, but none of this will make any sense to you and you'll think it's all my fault.

There is no explicit sex in this story. If you need a detailed description so you can learn how to do it, either find a different story or find a girl who's been around a bit.

Hans

*****

We were allowed to go back to our apartment a few days later, and we relished the feeling of being back in our own place, especially with everything freshly checked for cameras, microphones, laptop readers, keystroke recorders, anything at all that could tell somebody that we were there and what we were doing or saying or thinking. We weren't told if they'd found anything, and I wondered sometimes about what spies would think if they had us thoroughly bugged. Think about sex. Sometimes there's an hour of foreplay and five minutes of actual sex, and sometimes it's just the other way around. Then there are the little bits of heated conversation. "You get on top." "Oh, come on, I need you! Now!" "Keep that up, I'm almost there!" And the screams. It makes me wonder if spies ever come in their pants when they eavesdrop on young people in love.

So I had the pleasure of our own bedroom, to balance the awful feeling of not having our own car to drive. We didn't get it back until a month after our "accident" and we made a joke out of the fact that it took twice as long to fix it as it did to build it. When I complained to Jerry about how long it was taking, he told me, "Woody is just being extra careful. The last thing he'd want to do is screw up Red's creation. I went to see what was taking so long, and he had a little thing, I don't know what it was, that he was putting in for the third time. He put it in, adjusted something, then took it out and did it over again just to make sure it was perfect."

Once we had our own wheels again, we felt like taking a trip home to see our folks. The weather was warming up. School would soon let out for the summer, and although the work on the project would go on without a break, Jim and Glenn were very understanding when we wanted a couple of weeks back home. The arrangement we worked out was for me to take off for two weeks, come back for a week of overlap with Jim, and then he'd take off for two weeks.

The obvious way for us to go was to take the Mass Pike to the Berkshire Section of the New York Thruway, and then run the Thruway straight across New York State to Lake Erie. It's a great route, direct and fast, but Jerry didn't want us to go that way again. Whenever I'd complain about some security precaution, he'd fire back with, "Remember Utica!" and that would silence my protests. So I prepared myself mentally for some zigzag route to avoid traveling in a straight line.

A week before we were to leave, Jerry stopped at the lab and gave me a route, all marked out on a map and described in written directions, spelling out every turn and the distance between them to the nearest tenth of a mile. One thing was obvious - it wasn't direct. In round numbers, to travel 600 miles we'd be driving 750. The whole thing was in a big manila envelope with my name on the front and the license number of my car. I was ready to ridicule the stupidity of packaging my secret route in such an obvious fashion when Jerry frowned at me, stopping me cold. Something was up! So I thanked him and he shook my hand and wished us a good trip, right there at my desk, in front of everybody. After he left, I took the map out and looked it over carefully, then put everything away in the big envelope and set it over on a corner of my conference table. The label with my name was facing up, but the top of the envelope, where I had sliced it open neatly, was facing toward my desk, so that somebody sitting across the table from me could read the label easily. If Jerry wanted to be obvious, I could be obvious too.

As the day went on I reviewed work packages with several programmers, giving attention as usual to the way their individual packages stitched together. I praised their work, made suggestions, and directed changes in a few of the packages. It was a day pretty much like all days. Just before lunch I had several people at the table at once, while we discussed ways to eliminate redundant computations by making several of the modules more interdependent, to save processor time. We had printouts spread all over the table, some on chairs, and even one sequence on the floor. When we finally agreed I sketched a flow diagram showing the changes, and I asked Bernie and Doris to gather up the sheets of the diagram and copy them so I could have a copy, as well as each of the people whose work would be affected.

It was a great show, worthy of an Oscar.

Back when the big changes were being made in our workspace, with the new entrance and exit and all that, I had spent time in the wee hours of a couple of mornings with Jerry and two FBI surveillance specialists, explaining what we needed to cover with cameras. Most of the space was watched with area coverage, a camera with a wide angle lens about every sixteen feet. But some critical locations had more detailed coverage. I asked for a clear view of the face and hands of every person at my conference table, and I got exactly what I asked for. In the process, the cameras captured every square inch of my desk and table. Nothing could be set down, picked up, moved, written on, or looked at without leaving a permanent record, and I was assured that there were enough millions of pixels so we could zoom in to read every word on any document.

I left work early that afternoon. Well, a little after five - that was early for me. On the way home I stopped at a Seven-Eleven store and bought a six pack of Coke to give me a plausible excuse for being there. On my way back to the car I stopped at the pay phone to make a call. "Jerry, can you call up the pictures from work cameras onto my laptop?"

"Sure. I can put 'em anywhere in the world. Got something you want to look at?"

"Yeah, well, maybe. If you'll drop over at our apartment there might be something we'd enjoy watching together."

"Tell you what I'll do. I can be there at seven with a pizza for the three of us. Pepperoni all right for you?"

"Absolutely. If it's pepperoni and black olives, that's even better."

Jerry didn't get there till quarter after seven, which had Trudy starting to get anxious. To me, the big attraction was what we'd get to see, or not see, on the video. But for Trudy, who often skipped lunch, the pizza trumped the video. What followed was real teamwork. I took the pizza box, locked the door, and set the pizza box on the bed. Jerry sat down at my desk and got to work on my laptop. Trudy ignored both of us, opened the box, and gobbled down the first slice about as fast as I can type this sentence.

"Okay Jack, what is it you want to see?"

"Can you show us an area view of my workstation, or at least of my conference table?"

"What a question. Does a bear shit in the woods? Oops, sorry Trudy." That prompted some sort of a reply from her that probably started out as sarcasm but came out as a grunt, garbled by competing with a mouthful of pizza. Jerry typed in commands and brought up the overall view of the lab, a panorama made by joining the area cameras the same way that computers can join a dozen views from a mountaintop to make one picture covering 180 degrees of viewing angle. On that picture he moved the cursor to the middle of my conference table and selected that camera. While that was coming up, he asked, "What time do you want to start?"

"You left at what time, maybe ten thirty?"

"Yeah, about that. Let's see what happened then."

There I was, with the map spread out on the table. Then I folded it carefully and slid it into the envelope, with the front of the map toward the front of the envelope and the top fold toward the top edge of the envelope. Just as I remembered, I slid the envelope over to the corner of the table, face up, slit opening toward my desk. Then we fast forwarded to the first meeting, during which the manila envelope was untouched and apparently unnoticed. Next meeting, same thing. Jeremy showed up, same thing. Cal was next, and again the manila envelope stayed put. Then I got to the joint meeting with Bernie and Doris and it got interesting.

Trudy had inhaled two slices of pizza by then, and was recovering from her daylong fast. She put two slices on small plates and passed them to Jerry and me, then looked over my shoulder to see what was so interesting. On the monitor, I was talking to Bernie and Doris, gesturing with my hands as I did so. They replied and we had an animated discussion, as they brought out page after page of printout and I started to diagram the logic in the middle of the table. Nobody had even looked at the envelope. Then the papers started to cover and overflow the tabletop. We had the display speed set at 4X, which makes normal movements look jerky, and watched the ocean of paper expand and flood every horizontal surface within reach. The gestures, the jerky movements, and the tsunami of paper were comical to watch, and had all three of us chuckling and then laughing out loud. There was more discussion, with hands waving and fingers pointing at significant places on the paper, and finally I was finishing the diagram, which itself had expanded from one page to five. Then we all sat back, smiling, and nodding as we expressed final agreement. We watched me get up and leave the scene while Bernie and Doris gathered up their printouts and Bernie took my diagram to make copies. The two of them wrapped up their conversation and turned in opposite directions to leave.

The table was bare!

I reacted first, naturally. "Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Here's what we need: a good closeup view all all four of their hands, their facial expressions, and what they were saying to each other. Can you do that for us, Jerry?"

"The video I can do right away. Different cameras, different display rates, but it's all right here. But to get the audio and sync it with the real time video will take a few minutes because it's in a different server. So let's do the video first and see what we can learn from that, while the server is searching for the audio."

Trudy stepped over to our tiny refrigerator and got out three cans of Coke while Jerry was typing. I watched with interest as he manipulated the video coverage. "Jerry, I didn't know you were this good at juggling computer data. Is this something new, or were you a closet techie all along?"

"It's fairly new. It became obvious that I needed to be handy with the IT stuff, just to ride herd on this program. We had some IT specialists up here from the New York office for another job, and on the side they gave me a crash course in the fundamentals. Then as we got into the high powered surveillance they taught me how to work that. It's all stuff I need to know anyway, so this project is giving me on the job training.

All this time Jerry was picking out the cameras he wanted for our tracking of the envelope, and he brought four on the view simultaneously, in a four window array. As he finished, the monitor displayed the notice that the audio track was available to us, so it was showtime. He backed up the video to where I had just left the scene and then started the show.

As Bernie and Doris gathered up papers, we heard things like "Here are some of yours," and "I'm looking for page 43. Have you seen it?" There was a lot of movement but we didn't see any naked grabs directed toward the corner where the manila envelope was last seen. Nevertheless, when they were all finished there was no envelope on the table. It could easily have been masked by the printout sheets, but we hadn't seen any obvious attempts to scoop it up.

When they straightened up, Doris asked, "Where are the five sheets of the diagram?"

"I've got them here," answered Bernie. "I'll make copies for us and get the originals back to Jack.

I was ready to pronounce a big "Aha!" but before I could say a thing Doris said, "Here, let me have them because I've got some other stuff to copy. Save you a trip."

"Oh, great," answered Bernie, "Here they are."

Jerry and I looked at each other. "Doris?" I asked.

"Looks that way, but let's back up the video and watch everybody's hands in slo mo."

So we watched and backed up and watched some more. The papers that had accumulated near the envelope were scooped up by both Bernie and Doris, but without their hands reaching out far enough to grab the envelope. Finally, on the fourth time through, I saw a slight beige blur out past the end of the table. "Hold it there. I think it fell off onto the floor. Can any of the cameras see the floor?"

Jerry went back to the panorama of the whole lab, selected the area around my workstation, and picked out each camera in turn. He found two that showed the area of the floor in question, and sure enough, one of them showed the manila envelope on the floor after Bernie and Doris left the area.

"So we don't have any reason to suspect either one of them," Jerry said.

"No, and so far we've given a lot of the workforce a glimpse of the trip plan package. I guess I'll have to find the envelope and put it back up on the table."

Trudy chimed in, "I'm glad it's not Doris. She's a nice lady. I got talking with her a few weeks ago when I went over to the lab to see you. She's a working single mother with a three year old daughter."

Jerry looked a little pained. "Sometimes they're the easiest to corrupt because they need the money so badly."

"Yes, but her husband was killed in Iraq, and the way she talked about it struck me as quite patriotic."

"Well, I hope you're right about her. I hate to see single mothers get locked up. It almost always ruins their kids."

* * * * * * * * * *

Jerry left, and although I didn't know about it till later, he went over to the lab. One thing he could do that I couldn't was enter through one of the emergency exits. Four of them had nothing in front of them, so the doors could be seen from anywhere in the lab. The fifth one was around the corner of an air conditioning equipment room, and although the location was clearly marked by lighted signs, the door itself was hidden by the corner until you got right up to it. So that was Jerry's secret entrance. He had personally oiled the hinges and latch and practiced so he could defeat the alarm and enter silently, then look around before stepping out into the open.

He told me the next day that there was nobody there when he went in, and he walked around looking at everything before going over to my workstation. There, on the floor where we had seen it in the video, was the envelope. It was face down, about the way you'd expect if it slid off the table. Inside he found the map, neatly folded, but inserted into the envelope the wrong way. The top fold was put in first, and the face of the map, which gave the description as Northeastern United States, was facing down, not up. So somebody had taken it out and put it back. Jerry put it all back just as he had found it, after photographing the position of the envelope and map with his cell phone, and left the lab. He still had his latex gloves sticking out of his pocket when we met for coffee in the morning.

We had no more episodes that could identify a mole in our lab, and the issue was still up in the air when Trudy and I were leaving for vacation. Jerry had insisted that we stop at Reed's Rides, presumably to let Woody give the car a quick going over before we hit the road. So I was surprised when we pulled into the building and all of our stuff was quickly transferred to another car. From across the bay I could see my car leaving with a man driving and a woman passenger, roughly the size of Trudy and me. I couldn't see their faces but I assumed that they were both FBI agents.

Woody had laid out a breakfast for us in his conference room, and Jerry joined us as we ate and drank coffee and chatted for a half hour. Then, as we drained our cups, Jerry unfolded a new map with a route marked out for us. Like the decoy route, it avoided the interstates, but it was a little more direct. It would take us through some scenic parts of western New York, and could be expected to keep us clear of traffic congestion. So we got into our ride, a new-looking burgundy colored Chevy Monte Carlo, and took off for home.

As we were leaving, Woody asked us to take the car over to Red's shop and let him look it over. If any university ever granted a doctorate in street rods, this car would have been Woody's thesis project. Submitting it to Red to inspect was just like going before the faculty for an oral exam. I clapped Woody on the back and assured him that we would indeed take the car to Red, and that we'd bring it back to him in one piece.

* * * * * * * * * *

The trip was pleasant and uneventful. The Chevy rode like a dream, had very comfortable seats, and had a bigger gas tank than my Ford, so we made it most of the way to Erie, Pennsylvania before we had to fill up. We ran along Lake Erie on the old state highways, which were nearly deserted because everybody uses Interstate 90 now. Surprisingly, the trip took us only about an hour longer than the Interstates would have, and the reduced stress of driving 'the road less traveled' as Robert Frost called it, left us feeling pretty fresh when we arrived.

We called home when we crossed the state line out of New York, and alerted our parents with our ETA. They were all gathered at Trudy's house. When we arrived we found a cookout in progress, with hamburgers, potato salad, and cole slaw, and our choice of steak or hamburgers. In addition to our parents, Trudy's brother Tom and his wife Annette were there. As usual at these occasions, everybody tried to talk at once and we were trying to listen to everybody and eat at the same time.

Grace bent down and whispered in my ear, "Notice anything special about the potato salad? I added a secret ingredient, just for you. I'll tell you about it tomorrow."

We partied until about one in the morning, and then dragged ourselves off to bed. Grace explained with a straight face that Tom and Annette would be sleeping in Tom's old room, the one that had been assigned to me before, and she was sorry to tell me that Trudy and I would have to double up in her old room, and she hoped we wouldn't mind too much. But for the sake of appearances, she'd appreciate it if we would not advertise our sleeping arrangements. I laughed out loud and made her a pinky promise that it'd be our secret. As we turned to go up the stairs, Grace gave me a big hug and said, "I love you, Jack. Everybody in the family says that Trudy caught a good man."

"I love you too, Grace. You and your family have always made made me feel so welcome, like a blood relative. We'll find time to talk tomorrow. I've been looking forward to it."

* * * * * * * * * *

Next morning I woke up early and tried not to disturb Trudy as I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Once I was up and functioning I didn't want to disturb Trudy, so I headed downstairs to see if I could manage to put a cup of coffee together. But when I got to the kitchen, there was Grace, looking every bit the efficient homemaker, straight out of the Donna Reed show. She'd heard me coming and greeted me with a cup of coffee and a kiss on the cheek. "Morning, Jack. I'm glad you're the first one down. Maybe we can chat for a few minutes before everybody else shows up."

"Okay, Grace. I know you want to tell me about your secret ingredient, but there's something more important that we've got to take care of first, isn't there?"

"I wouldn't be a mother if I weren't anxious about my little girl, would I? Tell me about her. How's she doing? Is she fitting in? Is she happy? Is anything bothering her? Is she eating properly? What kind of friends does she have? Is she safe? Should I be doing anything for her? What does she do all day? Is the school work wearing her down? Tell me, Jack."