Night Talk (20 page)

 

39

The front door of Franklin's house was solid enough to keep out a SWAT team with a battering ram doing a drug raid.

Posters created by the IOA, NSA and NRO boasting of their spy-in-the-sky prowess lined the wall of the mudroom. The NSA eagle-and-flag emblem between the agency's proclamation of
DEFENDING OUR NATION, SECURING THE FUTURE
had a picture of Hitler pasted over it.

The NRO boast of
WE OWN THE NIGHT
, depicting a masked entity, was next to the infamous poster of an octopus with long arms wrapped around the world with the proclamation
NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH
.

There was no need for Franklin to explain why the NRO posters were menacing. The images and statements spoke for themselves.

Franklin gestured at the posters. “Not too clever of the NRO to be boasting about how they can spy on all of us from the sky, is it? You'd think they'd be more subtle since the NSA revelations would have shown how much Big Brother is looking over our shoulders.”

“Nobody ever accused a government agency of being real clever,” Greg said. “A caller recently pointed out that the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion during Kennedy's administration went to hell because the CIA identified pictures of coral reefs as beds of seaweed.”

“The reefs keep boats offshore,” Franklin said. “Ancient history, but the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan make that fiasco look like child's play. Look how they let bin Laden get away at Tora Bora.”

Ali chimed in, “Someone told me once we bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia because a CIA analyst thought it was a munitions plant.”

Through another solid door was a living room crowded with computers and electronic equipment. Greg assumed that much of the equipment had to do with Franklin's countersurveillance against the entities he believed were spying on him. Along with the electronics were nautical artifacts that looked like they had drifted in from outside with the tide to settle among the futuristic hardware.

The room looked unmanageable and chaotic to him, but so did the acre of nautical artifacts outside. He was sure Franklin had a handle on it all. No doubt Franklin's equipment in the room could track an astronaut sent to the moon—or an NRO satellite that was spying on him.

Greg told him, “The NRO believes I conspired with a hacker to steal a top secret file. I didn't. There have been two deaths—Ethan Shaw, the hacker who worked at the NRO, and Rohan, a noted writer on the paranormal. Have you heard of them?”

“Neither. How did they die?”

“Supposedly suicide, but I'm sure it was murder.”

“Suicide, accidental deaths, missing and presumed dead, it's all nothing but murder when it comes back to their doorstep.”

Greg had omitted Ethan's dying words and the money transfer, figuring that was too much even for Franklin.

“What's in the NRO file that's important enough to bring in black ops with a license to kill?”

“I don't know. I don't have the file even though the government thinks I do. I know zero about it. Ali worked with the hacker at the NRO and got entangled in the mess. She doesn't know what's in the file, either. She thinks it's called the God Project. Ever heard of it?”

“No, but it's the kind of boast those bastards make. So where's the file this hacker stole?”

“We don't know that, either. But we need to find it before we end up with the others on the obituary page.”

“With two others already down, it sounds like the obituary page is a likely place for your next press release. They want to get rid of you, they know you're dangerous because you seek answers and millions of people listen to your show. They brag that they own the night, meaning that they're keeping us all in the dark, but you shined a light in too many times. Nothing works better than a frame-up followed by what appears to be a guilt-ridden suicide. They said I took secret documents when I blew the whistle on a billion-dollar program where most of the money was going down the drain to contractors who put in padded bills.”

“Can you help us?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I need to first look up an address. Ethan Shaw's mother lives in El Segundo. We want to pay her a visit.”

“You can use that computer you're standing next to, Ali.”

“And we need to go under the radar so we can try to find a way out of the mess. We got rid of our phones. We ditched our car and borrowed the green rocketship outside from a friend who is enjoying a second childhood.”

“Borrowing a car doesn't keep them off your back. They will cross-reference you to everyone you have even breathed close to and get out a list of possible cars you'd be in. They use a program called Hops to do it. Computers can process millions of pieces of information in milliseconds so it's not going to be a long process. On top of that they know you aren't renting a car or flying away because they will automatically check all flights and know instantly the second you use a credit card. You use cash for a plane ticket and the DEA will do a body-cavity search before you step on board. Guess what they'd find? Heroin they planted on you.

“Friends won't be able to hide you at their place because once the cross-checking has revealed them, the searchers can tell if you're still in a building with probes that measure the chemical composition and DNA of the occupants. You can assume they will know about that car soon. Find the address you need on the computer and I'll put you in wheels that not even Jesus H. Christ knows about.”

They followed him out the way they came in and around the corner to the back of the house. A hundred feet to the rear, near where the lake of nautical artifacts ended, was a large shed that wasn't visible from the front of the house.

They waited outside while Franklin went into the shed.

“He's quite a character,” Ali said. “Self-taught at science?”

“MIT followed by years at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A bona fide rocket scientist, not a wannabe.”

Franklin came out of the shed behind the wheel of a silver Honda Civic. It looked in good condition, but struck Greg as probably a 1990s version. Ali shot Greg a look when she saw the car. She wasn't impressed. Greg was. No one would give the car a second look.

Greg said, “I'm sure he chose it because it was the most popular car in the country for a long time and will blend in anywhere.”

Franklin got out of the car. “It's never been licensed or registered anywhere.” Rather than a license plate on the right side of the windshield was the standard card evidencing that the car had been recently purchased used and was waiting for its license plate to arrive.

“No traceable vehicle ID number, either,” Franklin said.

“Bought outside the country?” Greg asked. “Mexico? Cuba?”

“I'll never tell. Once you drive it off the property, as far as I'm concerned it never existed. And officially, it never did. Same goes for the phone inside.”

Greg opened the door of the car and checked out the phone. It looked like a typical cordless landline handset and was the same size. But it had a cord that disappeared under the dash.

“Car phone,” Greg said. “My dad had one like it in the eighties before they came out with cell phones.”

Franklin said, “A dinosaur in the march of electronics, but that's a big plus in screwing up surveillance. Low-tech is much harder for the agencies keeping track of us to follow.”

“It must have a wireless number that can be traced,” Ali said.

Franklin grinned like a shark. “Like hunting for a needle in a haystack. There are thousands, hell, there's tens of thousands of wireless phone lines used in building alarm systems in L.A. alone. Those phone lines just sit there and are rarely used because they only go online to send an alarm when there's been a break-in or fire. The phone is piggybacked onto one of them.”

An untraceable car that would fade into the woodwork once it was on the highway, equipped with a phone impossible to trace.

“This is your escape car?” Greg said.

“You got it. It's been sitting in the barn ready to be used for a good cause. The gas tank's bigger than the one it came with, the trunk's loaded with emergency food supplies so I'd be ready to head out when the time came. Better than a survivalist's big SUV that would stand out like a sore thumb. Like that green thing.” He indicated the Cadillac. “On your way out of here drop that thing off at one of the big parking lots at Pepperdine. The kids will think it dropped down from a starship.”

Franklin gave him a phone number and told Greg to call if he needed more help. “Don't worry about security. The NRO, NSA, CIA, FBI, DIA and the rest of those three-lettered assholes would play hell trying to tap into my obsolete equipment.” He grinned. “Those bastards with their cutting-edge tech just don't know how to deal with stuff that was manufactured years ago.”

Greg led the way out of the nautical jungle in the green Cad. Before pulling away in the Honda, Ali asked Franklin, “Do you really have a bomb on the road?”

“Do chickens have lips?”

She didn't know.

NRO's octopus boasting that nothing is beyond its reach

NRO boasting that it owns the night

IAO boasting in Latin that the government's “knowledge is power” in regard to the massive surveillance of US citizens with the Total Information Awareness program

 

40

Greg deposited the glowing Cad in a parking space at Pepperdine University down the Pacific Coast Highway, getting a “Great wheels, dude” from an admiring student.

He joined Ali in the getaway Honda and said, “Let's go back up the highway and take Sunset to the 405 to El Segundo. I don't want to go through Santa Monica or Venice again.”

“Freeway cameras are easy to monitor because they go into a central terminal that police agencies connect to. We'd be better off taking city streets. Sawtelle goes much of the way and we can move on and off of it.”

Ali drove and neither said much as they took streets that moved them along in the same direction as the freeway.

He tried to visualize how to approach Ethan's mother, wondering what emotional state they were going to find her. She would still be reeling from the loss of her son. The fact she would have been told Ethan committed suicide might aggravate her grief—or create anger toward Greg if she was told by Mond that Greg was connected to Ethan's death.

Ali broke the silence with a question. “Do chickens have lips?”

He thought for a moment. “I don't know. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“I'm wondering about Ethan's mother. For sure she's already been questioned by Mond or his pals. By now they've probably strip-searched her and her place. We don't know anything about her. She might call Mond. Let me correct that—she'll most likely call the cops the minute we give our names.”