DAMAGED - A Bad Boy Romance (62 page)

Angela clearly just had a lot she had to get off her chest.

“Nobody’s come by in a while, to be perfectly honest with you, so I’m glad to see you,” she said, talking a mile a minute.

“You’re pretty chatty today, are you on uppers or something?” I asked, casually, the herbs working their magic on my state of mind.

“Naw, I gave those up months ago. Couldn’t fucking handle the comedown. The problem is that they really help you out for about eight to twelve hours, and then they leave you nothing more than a burnt out husk for the entire rest of the day.”

She shook her head, just recalling the pattern.

“Naw,” she continued, “this is just my regular energy level these days. I’m working on a new project, and you know how I get when I’m onto something that I can give my complete focus toward.”

Indeed, I did.

“You going to show me?” I asked, knowing that there was no way she could refuse, and in fact, it was likely the very thing she wanted to do most at that moment.

“Hell yeah,” she said, and then she paused for a moment in reflection. “Actually, this is the sort of thing that you’d really be into right about now, we might actually be able to use it to help you out some.”

“No shit?”

“You know I’ve got better things to do with my time than lie to you.” She gave me a hug and smiled like a manic pixie.

I followed her through her living room toward the basement.

Angela was a regular mad scientist, with a bit of a paranoid schizophrenic streak. The weird way her brain was wired only made her more interesting in my opinion, though for sure it put some people off.

The moment I entered her flat, I was assaulted on all sides by things. The strangest part about the whole experience was that she wasn’t a border so much as she knew exactly what she needed, and she happened to need a lot of things in order to get her projects off the ground. She also operated on a budget, which usually meant that she had to acquire her equipment second hand, and then make modifications as necessary. Sometimes, when she was able to manage it, she would get some top of the line piece of tech that would be the pinnacle of whatever she was focused on at the time. Usually, she didn’t splurge on something that was fancy and new, simply for the sake of it; she was a pragmatic woman, in that way.

“Everything has a function,” she said “and if it doesn’t, then it’s just taking up space. I’ve got no use for things that just take up space unless of course they provide conversation or rent money.”

She turned around and gave me a wink while she lead the way downstairs.

All the way down the stairs, I was surrounded by strange, archaic radio equipment. There were meters behind small glass portals that offered information that I’m sure Angela knew how to read, but I had no idea how, or why they operated. To me, her environment looked more like a classic science fiction fairy tale. I realized that because I didn’t understand how these things operated, I had imparted a type of reverence to Angela that may have been beyond her station. In all reality, she may not have been a wizard, but she never ceased to amaze me.

The lab itself was a room densely populated by all manner of electronic devices. It seemed as though one might dissect them into segments, according to project. The largest project took center stage and had a gigantic mainframe structure.

Angela saw me looking at the structure and began to elucidate.

"What you're seeing there is a data storage mainframe. Essentially, this is something that's very similar to the types of storage facilities that the national security agency uses for mass data collection, in their civilian spy program. There are lots of different varieties of information which can be collected, and most facilities are massive in scale, much larger than anything you see here."

The two of us walked together toward the gigantic storage mainframe, and I noticed the bundle of cables that was coming out from the back of the data storage locker. The circumference of the bundle was about the size of my thigh and stretched into a hole that had been bored into the ceiling just below ground level.

"I don't think I'll be getting my deposit back," she said, her eyes trailing my own vision. "The cables go through an underground tunnel which I had to specifically dig in the front yard. There was no other way to get around it. It was quite the Mission Impossible experience, installing something like this while maintaining a covert status. I had to plant a series of shrubs, which meant I had to take a break from my normal routines and learn a thing or two about planting drought tolerant, self-maintaining perennials."

I looked at Angela incredulously.

She demonstrated such attention to detail which she invested in her plans. Without my understanding what it was that she was collecting data from, the conversation had already transitioned into supplemental materials that she felt the need to research in order to adequately complete the task of setting up the thing.

"How many other non-related tasks do you have to get a basic understanding of just to achieve the thing you're trying to do?" I asked.

Usually, thoughts like that stay inside of my head, but I was in good company. Angela and I made it a point to not censor ourselves well in front of one another. This didn’t mean that we were unaware of when to have conversations, and when to not have conversations; it only meant that the conversations that we did have tended to be very straightforward. Neither of us enjoyed dealing with the emotional friction that one tends to find in conversations with people who are less honest.

“You don't even know the start of it," she said, proudly.

"I'm basically operating a microcosm of ‘Big Brother’, except I'm focusing on law-enforcement and government officials in the area."

It took me a minute to understand exactly what it was she saying, and how it related to my previously described predicament.

"So, what kind of information are you gathering?" I asked, with no small amount of curiosity.

"All kinds. Government email servers were the first because I didn't need particularly strong reception equipment in order to secure them. All I really had to have was this mainframe set up, and that was less of an initial investment and more hardware tinkering to get that to work."

She walked around the back of the box, and I followed.

The mainframe itself was the size of the chest freezer stood on its side, and reached up toward the ceiling. If I had to guess dimensions, I would say 12 feet high by 16 ft.² at the base. Like all of Angela’s equipment, it didn't look new. In fact, it looked a bit beat up. However, there were signs of care in the reassembly of the thing. The wires were all neatly bound together. The input-output jacks were also cleaned off, so it was clear which components were linked together.

"Can't you get in trouble for this kind of thing?"

"Only if you get caught," she replied. "The way I see it, I didn't personally offer the government any permission to conduct mass surveillance on my life, and our government is primarily based on a social contract system. The social contract is that I give up some of my rights so that the whole can be more collectively operated. If I don't consent to give up these rights, then all I see going on here is the collection of information, which might be used to benefit myself or others."

I smiled at the obvious rationalization for a dubiously criminal act. The real beautiful thing was that the legalities for mass surveillance were gray while operating on a national level. Angela had not differentiated herself much in the end result of her plan. Naturally, if she were caught, her entire operation would be seized. If she was lucky, they would realize her genius and then hire her, but for Angela's sake, I hoped that would never happen.

"The cables,” she continued, “are what really transforms this whole thing from low-level hacking into a formidable tool against the surveillance state. I mentioned to you that the cables go out at the ceiling level, and into the underground current located just outside of the building. If I had to pay for the amount of power this sucker produced… well, let's just say the city is helping me out.”

I had to laugh, but she continued uninterrupted.

“Anyways, the cables also go up to a satellite dish which I have installed on the roof. The satellite dish has been modified so that I can pick up local signals. The combination of the satellite dish as well as classic CB radio tools essentially enable me to get free access to phone records police scanners emergency radio systems, and patrol car radios."

"You're amazing," I said, totally in awe of the type of brain necessary to come up with this kind of system and make it work.

"I know," she said dismissively. "As our government has already demonstrated, the primary issue with scraping this much information on a regular basis is not only storage, but also organization. Without organization, the data tends to appear like a cluttered, undifferentiated mass. Fortunately, I was able to mitigate this problem slightly by ensuring that different sources were automatically routed to specific servers. Even after the bulk of the sorting has been done, in order to sift through this data, you have to have either something that you're specifically looking for or you need a national security budget."

“I need a minute,” I said, leaning up against a dusty tower of electronics.

This whole thing was way too intense for me to piece together all at once. It seemed to me that what she was proposing was impossible, but if there was enough data here, and we were able to search through police radio logs…

“This might just work,” I muttered. “Can you use time stamps as search criteria?”

Angela flipped open a laptop that was stationed next to the mainframe stack and loaded a custom designed search tool for the data she had collected.

“Not a problem. I had a friend design this search interface for me so I would be able to locate specific items. I can search by address, time stamps, badge numbers, and the like. Pretty much any specific information you could want, I can form a query around those terms. The only thing I can’t do is track the specific content of all of this data at once.”

“Did you program this as well?” I asked, looking at her in admiration.

She smiled a me.

“Of course not. You can’t do everything by yourself. I had a close friend of mine take care of the software element. Told him that I wanted to geek out on some database work, and he helped me out. Favor for a friend stuff.”

I gave her a nudge in the side, followed by a wink.

“Favors for Favors?”

“Fond, but not in love,” she replied, indicating that it wasn’t exactly going to work out like she had hoped, but that things had worked out as well as could be expected for that particular experience.

“Should I start with your address?” she asked. “I assume you are going to want to look through the police radio records.”

I nodded.

“That, and you can use the time stamp feature. Just to be safe, go ahead and use about 3 PM to now.”

“You got it,” she said, and before I could blink, her fingers were working their magic on the keyboard.

The screen became a flurry of activity while I watched the database program begin to sift through literally hundreds of thousands of folders, each one with what seemed like just as many sub-folders.

“This thing is top of the line,” she informed me, resting her finger on the side of the laptop. “If I wanted to make this work any faster, I’d literally have to invest thousands of dollars in order to get a computer system that was hot enough to manage all of this data. Since the search parameters are relatively small, and we’re only going through one database, the results should be in within about four hours.”

My hopes for an immediate solution were dashed, but then I realized that even four hours of hanging out with Angela would be much better than any alternative I could think of at the moment. There was really nothing more that I could do.

“Thirty minutes ago,” I reasoned out loud, “I had no idea how I was going to move forward, so a few hours of processing time seems like a small price to bay for the ability to get a hint as to where I’m headed next.”

“Yea. Hopefully, this guy you’re looking for has enough of a survival instinct to stay out of police custody or hasn’t been caught already. Of course, if he has been caught, or he ditched this bag you’re after, then none of this really matters anyway.”

I blinked, taking in the sober realization that Angela was one hundred percent correct.

I hadn’t even thought about what would happen if the man I was after had been apprehended, or ditched the bag. Any self-respecting criminal would probably do everything possible to avoid getting caught. However, if he was caught, I’m absolutely certain that he wouldn’t want to get caught carrying those goods. He seemed like he was already on the run from something, but tacking on the weight of baggage like that was sure to land him a place in hell.

“You want to take a nap,” Angela yawned and looked over at me with hopeful eyes.

I smiled, and nodded, realizing that at this point, there was nothing more that could be done, except wait.

“That would be nice. I could use a bit of recovery time.”

We walked upstairs to her crash room.

Angela was the type of person who had a nearly unlimited capacity for projects, and the majority of her house reflected that fact. In addition to her excessive penchant for electronic equipment, her kitchen was full of fermentation experiments, and her bathroom was full of plants. The only room in the house that had minimalistic sensibilities was her bedroom.

“I keep this area clear,” she had explained to me once, “so my mind has a place to relax in the face of all of these other distractions.”

Her flat only had a living room, a basement, a kitchen, a bathroom, and the crash room. Really, the place was relatively lavish, given that she was the only one that lived there. Rent was her biggest expense, but she never had any difficulty coming up with the money. One of the reasons that she was able to afford to live in a place like that was because it was on the outside of the slums.

Where Angela lived, things got a bit less grimy, in terms of the petty criminal activity and trash that was typical of the inner slums. The outer sector of this area led to an extensive network of warehouses until the island hit the water.

There were other, more prosperous areas of Venice. Areas where tourists longed to visit, and where businessmen decided to spend much of their time. For the moment, this area was safe, and I was safe as well. I allowed my guard to relax.

Some friends are worth all the gold in the world.