The Krakow Klub (46 page)

Jim Slater nodded in agreement and then asked
a question that had been bothering him, “Just how did you arrange
that meeting? Everyone had their cell phones and computers
confiscated
before they left the
city,
and there was no way to contact anyone through the
hotel.”

“It was quite easy. I contacted someone that
I trusted in the military. That person then volunteered to
accompany Congress to West Virginia. As the first group boarded the
train, he slipped a cell phone into the Speaker’s coat pocket along
with a note from me. The note explained that I needed to speak to
him urgently, that the phone could
only be
used
for incoming calls, and that those incoming calls would
only be from me.”

The remainder of the short trip back to Scott
Key was
uneventful,
and John used the time to
communicate with Maxxine and give her several new orders regarding
their entrance into the White House.

John continued to have grave concerns about
their mission. The Krakow Klub had insidiously infiltrated the
government and probably the Secret Service. By now, Carla Montrose
would have surrounded herself with staff selected for their loyalty
to Stoellar’s organization.

He decided that it would be prudent to assign
additional remote craft with the task of protecting them at all
costs as Wilkinson and Slater were both crucial to his success. He
knew that he couldn’t afford to lose either one of them to some
trigger happy Stoellar agent. Montrose wouldn’t be a problem when
they arrived at the White House since he had already decided on a
plan of action for her.

Maxxine would take all members of the Krakow
Klub into custody, along with Montrose, and transport them to
specially prepared cells on the space station. With all of them
safely in custody, the rank and file of the organization would be
temporarily leaderless.
Hopefully,
they would
be unable to mount an immediate attack. Cutting off the head of a
snake may not kill it instantly, but it sure leaves it in a state
of confusion for a time. That brief
period
might be enough for the president to regain control of the
military.

The plan was for Maxxine to act shortly
before returning Wilkinson to the White House. John ordered her to
start the process at about 6:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time. That
would be only a couple of hours before he planned to arrive at the
White House.

John silently prayed, “With a little luck I
will have Henry Wilkinson back in the Oval Office before even the
Secret Service knows Carla Montrose is gone.”

****

The shuttle craft soon landed on Scott Key
and the hatch slid open. The three men stepped out into the warm,
humid air. It was late, a few minutes past ten, but John was
hungry,
so he asked General T to serve them
all a snack in the dining area.

Other than John, the group paid little
attention to the food. They were deep in conversation about details
of the operation. The first step
in
the road
to victory had gone without a hitch. Now, they faced an unknown
future filled with danger. A misstep on anyone’s part could have
far-reaching consequences and could cause the loss of many
lives.

Afterward
, they retired
to their
quarters
but most slept very little.
John decided to visit with Maxxine one last time and went to his
office for the conversation.

“John, it’s very
late,
but I have distressing news for you. I cannot locate two members of
the Krakow
Klub,
and they are the two most
dangerous of all
:
Number One and his protégée,
Number Eleven.”

“What about their transponders, Maxxine?”

“That’s the problem. They
somehow
discovered the transponders and had them removed.
The removals took place
at
a radiology center
in California.
Afterward
, the devices were
placed in a small safe in an engineering laboratory nearby. I
decided that you wouldn’t want the devices
scrutinized,
so I destroyed them.”

“For God’s sake, Maxxine, call Maxx as soon
as possible. We need to take them into custody in
only
a few hours
. We need help and
fast!”

“
Yes,
sir! I will call
Maxx immediately.”

****

“I was wondering when you would get around to
contacting me.” Maxx’s voice had that irritating tone of smug
superiority.

“Okay, Maxx, I admit it, I need help and I
need it fast.” Maxxine’s voice was pleading and submissive. She
couldn’t afford to waste time arguing with him.

“Well, let me see if I understand your
problem, little one.” Maxx proceeded in a voice like a father
talking to his errant daughter. “As you know, all earthlings have a
microscopic transponder implanted in their heads at birth. For the
vast majority of individuals, the device just detects their
migratory movements and eventually their death. At death, the
transponder is deactivated.

“Nothing too sophisticated, just a little
recordkeeping for my data bank. Nevertheless, I never dreamed that
a transponder might
be removed
purposefully. I
certainly didn’t expect the devices to be detectable with the
technology available even today. Now, I must admit, due to my
little lack of foresight, that we’ve got a problem. Those two
specific devices have been
removed,
and the
individuals that you identify as Number One and Number Eleven are
currently untraceable.

“You made a critical error as well, Maxxine.
You assumed that Number Eleven and Number One were still at the
laboratory of Dr. Wu.
Tsk Tsk.
They had
already departed for unknown destinations when you finally
discovered that the transponders were removed and stored
in
the laboratory. At least you had the common
sense to destroy the devices before they
were
studied
by some scientific team of experts.

“Listen closely to the following statement,
little one, because you will likely
never
hear
it said again. “I made a mistake, too.”

“Because all the members of the Krakow Klub
were persons of extreme interest to me, I had elevated their scan
rate to just minutes. I also had an algorithm
that
would alert me if any person of extreme interest did
anything out of the ordinary, such as spending an inordinate amount
of time at any unusual place.

“Krakow Klub
member
Number Eleven had triggered such an alert several times in the past
several hours. I assumed that you were monitoring those alerts.
Seems I was wrong. As you humans say, ‘assume’ can be broken down
to “ass – u – me.’

“First she had abruptly left Key West and had
flown across the country to San Jose California. She had then
visited medical personnel and spent a considerable amount of time
with them.

“Most
perplexing,
however,
was her visiting an engineering lab at Stanford
University, and most unusual of all was that she had been there
ever since.

“When you finally got around to checking,
Number Eleven had been in that lab for more than eight hours.
Something was not right about that. She never stays that long
anywhere! You should have recognized the problem right away.
Finally, you ordered the remote responsible for tracking Eleven to
do an audio visual of the subject. What you saw was a dark and
empty lab! You immediately ordered the remote to identify the
precise location of the signal. The video showed a small safe in
the office of Dr. Hiram Wu.

“Since that small safe was far too small to
hold Number Eleven, you made the brilliant deduction as to what had
happened and it only took you a few nanoseconds.” His voice oozed
sarcasm.

“The device had been removed. There was no
longer a way of tracking Number Eleven. You have a big problem.
But, I confess
that
it was, at least
partially, one of my making. So I accept some responsibility.

“If a tracking device
is
removed
from a living subject, it continues to function as
usual and will indicate its location. As I said, I never expected
humans to figure all this
out,
so I wasn’t in
the least bit worried until now.

“Now, I’ve fixed the
problem,
and all future transponders will issue an alert
if it
is removed
from the human’s body. Right
now, I’m working
on an update system
to
retrofit all current devices with the new technology, but it’s not
quite ready yet. I’ve also had another thought. I may also place
the transponders in random locations of the body making them harder
to detect. I can see now that I made a mistake placing them in the
same
location on every skull. Oh well, live
and learn as you earthlings so often say.

“And now, my little Maxxine, I can only
suggest that you use your pretty little head and find a solution to
your problem. If I were in your shoes, so to speak, I might
consider infrared tracking. Of
course,
that is
complicated,
and you only know that you are
tracking a human being. You cannot identify the person without
going visual. All of that takes up a very large amount of remote
energy. So, be careful how you handle this. It’s about time you
flexed your dainty circuits, my dear. You will be the better for it
later. Ciao!”

Maxxine was not a happy computer. Infrared
could
be used
for
tracking,
but that tracking had to be in real time and
constant. Losing the subject, even for a brief time, could result
in the permanent loss of the individual’s location.

Maxxine’s processing modules hummed with
activity. She turned off all
non-essential
tasks, even John’s Mylean spacecraft project,
to
concentrate on her current challenge. All other work
could be postponed until she had better control of the situation on
Earth. As an additional precaution, she reassigned all remote craft
other than miners to positions within a short distance of the earth
and ordered them to stand by for possible reassignments.

****

Maxxine had decided how she would find a
human without a device. It was not a difficult algorithm
,
and she was almost finished downloading it to her
remotes. The algorithm simply did an infrared scan that produced an
alert if it found a target without a tracking device. In that
event, the target could be taken into custody at once.

There were two problems with the algorithm. A
troubling problem was that the scanning procedure required a huge
amount of the remote craft’s energy.
However, the
most serious issue was that infrared was not capable of penetrating
many dense materials. That made it of no value whatsoever if the
subject happened to be in a shielded environment. A target subject
could easily evade detection
if they desired.

Maxxine couldn’t face the possibility of
failure. John would be extremely upset and would probably consider
her to be incompetent at best, a failure at worst. She must succeed
if, for nothing else, to show Maxx that she was more than just a
small chip off the old computer. She vowed to herself to find those
two elusive targets and take them into custody no matter what the
cost
.

The downloading to the remotes had been
completed,
and all remotes except the ones the
miners had
were now assigned
to the project of
infrared scanning.

The project was risky. Maxxine would have to
position the remotes much closer to the Earth than
usual,
but that wasn’t the problem. Unfortunately, to
perform the scanning, the craft would have to operate
in visible
mode due to the amount of energy required for
the process. There was no alternative. Within a very short
period
, astronomers around the globe would be
excitedly reporting UFO sightings in record numbers. But that was a
small price to pay. She simply had to find Number Eleven and Number
One.

Maxxine used the last known locations of her
two missing individuals to begin the infrared scanning.
Also
, she had complete information on the two private
jets that had transported them. She deduced that if Number One and
Number Eleven had flown on the jets to California, then, surely,
they would use those same two planes to reach their next
destinations.

By
tracking the planes
,
it should be easy to identify their final landing sites. With that,
she could certainly narrow down her searches.

She simply must find the two missing members
of the Krakow Klub before the time to extract them and place them
in custody.

The Human Retrieve Program had been developed
by Maxx only recently. It
was initially
developed
as part of the protection program for Tanaka II
(John Scott). It had been modified several times and now had the
capability of retrieving humans who were inside physical
structures. It had been expanding significantly to include those
deeply
embedded
in structures, including
deep beneath
ground level.

Prior to the most recent program updates, it
had been used to save the president and Dr. Allen during the
assassination attempt. With that last upgrade, she was completely
confident that she could extract any human from anywhere on Earth,
even deep within a cave or bunker. The retrieve protocol used
gravity wave technology that could penetrate any material of any
thickness. The ability to manipulate atoms enabled a remote to
create a temporary “hole” and retrieve the human and then close the
hole
afterward
. The process could
be completed
so fast as to be virtually invisible. Anyone
nearby would only see a brilliant flash of light, and even that
might
be missed
with the blink of an eye.