The Wary Stepson

They drive on the right side of the road in Austria. And by right, I mean left. I thought it was all inversed in Europe.

Riding in a cab to my hotel, I wondered what the border crossings were like between two countries that drove on different sides of the road.There'd have to be a sign, but in what languages? The language of each country involved? Some countries have two languages. Maybe this is why everybody takes a train.

Your mind goes weird places when you're tired.

My vacation package included two nights at the Vienna Marriott which, once inside, looked like every other Marriott on Earth. I checked in and went up to my room, a surprisingly large affair for a non-suite. I dumped my bags on the bed and spent a few minutes getting my computer set up and connected to theinternet . It was harder finding local stores and businesses I wanted than it would have been in the states. I eventually got some addresses, particularly the one for the Ambassador Hotel, and then changed into my tourist teenager costume.

Since I was a teenager already and not far removed from an actual tourist, it wasn't a very long road to transformation. I put on a denim jacket and flipped the collar up like all the jackasses in school wore their collars, and put on a Yankees cap that I couldn't remember getting or ever wearing. I just needed to partially obscure my face, and this was as good as I figured I'd get. I then took most of the clothes from my suitcase so it'd be lighter, zipped it up, and took it out of the room and out of the hotel.

Outside, waiting for a taxi, I spotted what looked like a drug store across the street that was still open. I crossed the street and went in, struggled to get over how everything was slightly different than it should be, and eventually found the reading glasses. I tried a few pairs on, checking myself out in a small mirror affixed to the top of the shelf through obscured vision. I bought the only pair that didn't look like grandpa glasses, and a bottle of Coke, then grabbed a cab over to the Ambassador Hotel.

If I got the timing right, I'd get there about 20 minutes before Nathan Comstock would. I couldn't be sure how long it would take him to go through customs or to leave the airport, but I figured the variable only spanned about 40 minutes either way. He most likely had more than 25 certified checks on him, knowing that if they were in his baggage and were found by customs he'd be in a bit of trouble. He'd be nervous and a bit jumpy, probably wanting to get out of the airport as soon as possible, not stopping at the Duty Free to get some low-price Vodka or waxy chocolates. Amy had wanted chocolates, where was I going to find good ones? Was she even serious? Seems like if I'm in Austria I should come back with something, though I shouldn't get a giant "I was in Austria" poster in case I decide not to tell my mother about all this. Last time I talked to my mom on the phone, she said she'd probably be home on Saturday. That gave me tonight, Thursday, and Friday to sort all this out and have everything back to normal or else deal with the notion that I'm not actually dreaming all this and this is actually my life.

When I was dropped off at the hotel, I slipped on my new glasses, made sure my collar was correct (and by correct I mean wrong), and got out of the car playing the part. I looked all around through the near-midnight darkness at the darkened shadows of buildings in a stupid bewilderment. After I got over my pretend awe, I rolled my suitcase into the hotel lobby and thought to myself how much nicer this seemed than the Marriott. The floors were black marble and gold-appointed columns supported 30 foot ceiling. There was a regal-looking bar at one end, a few sauced-up patrons enjoying their imbibements. I was quick-checking my sight lines, making sure Comstock, the one person in this whole continent who would recognize me, wasn't here. Confident that he wasn't around, I made my way to the check-in desk where a singular young blond woman was manning the station.

I knew she'd speak English, but I asked her anyway.

"Yes," she said in a lightly absurd accent, "Welcome to the Ambassador, how may I help you?"
I was bending my knees slightly so I'd look shorter, widened my eyes and tried to retract my cheek bones to look younger. This lady had to empathize with me or this would all fail miserably.
"Um, yeah," I said, keeping my vocal cords relaxed to raise the pitch of my voice, "is my step-dad here yet? We took separate cabs from the airport and I don't think our cell phones work here so I cant get a hold of him, so can you see if he checked in or whatever?"
The woman pursed her lips for a moment, then asked if the name was in his name and what the name was.
"Comstock," I said, "Nathan Comstock."
Her fingers danced across a keyboard while her eyes scanned the computer monitor sunken into her side of the desk.
"I'm sorry, no," she said, "he hasn't checked in yet."
"Oh," I said, sadly. "They were asking him some questions at customs, I guess it's taking longer than I thought. Can I go up to the room and wait there?"
"Not until the person the room is reserved for is here to check in and confirm payment details, I'm afraid."
I tried to look passively annoyed, and said, "Oh, I guess I'll wait for him, then."

I crossed the lobby and sat down in a marigold sofa, making sure I was visible to the woman at the desk and that I could see the entrance. I sat, visibly impatient for half an hour. On a table next to the seat was an emptied highball glass with a few ice cubes on a cocktail napkin, a stirring straw laying beside it, and a discarded plastic card room key. I swallowed hard, not believing my luck, then discretely slid the card from the table and pocketed it. For a few more minutes I sat in boredom, poking through my pockets and playing a Snake game on my cell phone until I saw him.

Nathan Comstock, my school principal, the man who was somehow connected to me and the guy who killed a cop in order to get to me, walked through the front door of the hotel. He looked defeated and deadly tired. After twelve hours and two layovers in two continents, he probably wasn't in too good a mood. He had on a gray suit and a long overcoat and dragged his small, carry-on size suitcase toward the desk.

When I saw him, I made a face that said, "finally" that the woman at the desk saw, then followed my eyes to Comstock.

Comstock went to the desk and began checking in. I slowly got up and, making sure there was never a direct line of sight between him and my face, stood slightly to his right a few feet behind him and watched him go through the routines.

My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. I was standing three feet from the only man for a thousand miles who knew who I was, and I couldn't let him know I was in the country, but I had to stand right here so the lady would buy that I was this guy's kid or else there was no way I could get into his room later. I drew my hat lower and bent the brim slightly to hide my eyes, but if he turned and looked at me outright, there'd be no disguising myself.

He's just gotten his credit card back and the woman at the desk slid him a pair of room keys in a paper folder. I heard her say, "elevator" and "fourth floor," then as he turned right to head toward the hallway with the elevators I walked past him on his left. I made a stupid grin at the woman at the desk, then fell into step behind Comstock once he was a few feet ahead. He turned into a hallway and stopped at a bank of elevators and hit a button, I walked past him on down the hall, stopping after the hallway turned again. I felt Comstock glance at me as I passed behind him, but he didn't seem to think anything of it. Around the corner I heard the elevator chime, doors open, then close. I waited two minutes, then left my suitcase there in the hall and walked back to the lobby, past the elevators, and pulled the useless room key from my pocket and held it in my hand as I brought it up to the same woman at the front desk.

"This one doesn't work," I said.

The woman frowned slightly and took the card, set it aside on the desk and drew a new blank card from a stack near the keyboard. She swiped it through a small device and punched four numbers on a keypad atop the device. She did it so fast I couldn't track her fingers. She handed me the fresh card and said, "Sorry about that, sir. This one should work."

"Thanks," I said, taking a step back, then forward again. "What was it..." I said, visibly trying to summon something from my memory, "Fourty-twenty....?"
"Fourty-seventeen" she said with a glance at her screen.
"Ah, I was thinking twenty-seven," I said with a chuckle and shaking my head in disapproval of my brain's capacity.

I said thanks and goodbye and went back to the hallway, past the elevators, around the corner, and grabbed my bag. I found a side exit near a closed restaurant and hailed another cab, and returned to my own hotel, pinching between my thumb and right index finger a working key to Comstock's room. Room 4017.

I slipped the glasses off and let my eyes adjust to being able to see things clearly again, and rubbed the bridge of my nose just as I had noticed Comstock doing almost a week ago. I smiled in satisfaction, reflecting that I'd now managed to con my way into Comstock's bank account, home address, email account, and now a hotel room. I'd done all of it with minimal planning, coming up with most of it -- save for the email thing -- as I was doing it. I wondered, if it was this easy, why weren't more people doing it? Con artists go on and on about skills and tradecraft, but I was just a seventeen-year-old and it was coming to me like second nature. I suppose we all have our aptitudes.

Jet Lag

"I am a huge idiot," I said after slapping my forehead with my open palm.

I'd just booked a vacation package to Vienna on another travel website, with a flight that left a few hours after Nathan Comstock's but arrived a few hours before. In his rush to get "the first flight out," he neglected to check if there were any direct flights that would get you there in eight hours instead of 13. I was looking over the website of the hotel I was practically stuck with when it hit me.

"What?" Amy asked. She was also seated at the kitchen table, most of her obstructed from my view by the screen of my laptop.

"The last four digits of Comstock's Social Security number," I said with a groan, "we have it. When you were the bank lady on the phone, you asked him what it was to 'verify' his identity, and I told you to write it down."

"Oh yeah," she said, "it's in my notebook, where ever that is."
"So we didn't have to do that whole p.h.-fishing thing to get his email password when we had the answer to his security question," the oversight had practically ground my brain to a halt.
Amy shrugged, "I guess next time we do this, we'll be able to skip that step."
"Next time," I said.

I was trying not to let the enormity of the fact that I was going to Austria seep into my mind. I'd never been out of the country before; in fact, the only reason I happened to have a passport was that a few years ago the family was planning a trip to Italy during my summer break. I was stoked about the vacation, had everything planned and had applied for my passport, but at the last minute the trip was canceled for some reason -- my dad couldn't take the time off work, or something. If Amy had a passport, I'd have gotten her a flight too. I thought for a moment I could be like one of those guys who flies to Europe just to go to a restaurant he likes, but this airfare would eat my money away in no time. I'd always wanted to fly someplace in First Class, and I'd looked into it for my flight the next morning, but it was $10,000 more than the coach seat. That seemed a bit much.

The working theory was that Comstock was taking all of his money to Vienna (which is illegal, if you don't claim the money at customs) to put it away in some kind of non-traceable Austrian bank account. Why would someone do this? Surely interest rates would be better in the US; he must be doing it to hide the money, but why? The only reason I could think of was the same reason I'd considered moving all my money to a Swiss bank account a few days earlier, when I thought people wanted to kill me for it.

Was Comstock afraid of something now? Amy said that he was acting nervous in school earlier today, that he was asking about me and suddenly clammed up. This whole thing was started when I overheard a phone call and thought that he was talking to somebody about me. "It might be expensive," he'd said, right after saying he wasn't sure if he could "make it float" and right before doling out no punishment for putting a few kids in the hospital and nearly punching a police officer. Whoever he was talking to on the phone, he was talking about me. Could they now be angry at him? So he'd have to flee the country and hide away all the money they've been paying him?

And who could it have been? Was he talking to the John Doe who pepper-sprayed my face and shot at me? Were they arranging some plot to get to my money? Have they been doing this for years, finding students or parents with lots of money and stealing it? Could he now be nervous because I ran a car into his partner-in-crime? Or could they just be pawns, working for someone else; someone from whom Comstock slyly asked for more money by saying "it might be expensive"? If that were the case, maybe that little act of rebellion made them unhappy. Maybe they wanted to know why I was now crashing cars into their guys and making scenes in grocery stores. Maybe Nathan Comstock is afraid for his life, so he's getting himself and his money out of the country.

This is why everybody around here says Don't Ask Questions.

It was late, and Amy left for home so I could pack and get some sleep before I had to be in D.C. by 6AM. I told her I'd write when I got there, if they had theinternet yet in Austria.

I was only going to be there for two nights, until Friday, so I didn't need many clothes, but I had to pack a lot to make the knife in the suitcase stand out less.

Once I had everything set to go, I had a hard time sleeping. After an hour of rolling around my bed, I gave up and decided I'd sleep on the plane instead, which would help pass the time and might prevent the jet lag associated with an eight hour flight into a time zone six hours ahead of mine. I spent the night in bed, with the laptop positioned awkwardly across my stomach, reading anything I could about Austria or international travel tips. Nothing was very interesting.

And then it was time. The sun wasn't even up, but I was out the door. I was wearing the most comfortable clothes I owned, had a small suitcase in one hand and my backpack (with laptop inside) in my other. Dulles airport was an hour's drive, which seems like much longer when you're pathetically tired and the sky is a dreary dark blue. I just kept running all of my possessions through my mind, trying to think of whether I needed it and, if I did, did I bring it. It was a short trip, I could have made it with the clothes on my back and just bought anything I happened to need, but I still wanted to be prepared.

The roads were all dead, but when I got to the airport there was a flurry of activity. I parked my car in an $8-per-day lot and was bussed to the terminal. I retrieved my ticket and checked my luggage at the counter without any problems. After a half-hour in the security checkpoint line, I was through there without any problems. Somehow, it seemed like I should have been coming up against more obstacles. It was rather fortunate that I wasn't, because I was so tired that my brain was working on backup power and it felt like I was wading through a thick soup with every step. There was an hour before I had to be on the plane, so I wandered around the terminal for a while. I got some overpriced breakfast from the food court, a little wrapped-up egg thing that I knew would probably throw a pretty rowdy party once it hit my stomach. I browsed through a Borders book store and got a small textbook on foreign banking, and after much deliberation settled on a novel that looked interesting enough. On my way to the gate, I found an ATM that seemed to have no withdrawal limit so I took out a thousand dollars in cash from my savings account and walked it over to a currency exchange and turned it all into Euros. A few years ago, advice would say to stick with American dollars overseas, but the Euro seemed to have changed that from what I'd read.

I'm just a dude with 700-so Euros in his pocket. Nothing unusual about that.

But there was something unusual, I knew. I was flying to Austria on a whim, to try and find out what kinds of sordid business my school principal was conducting. I had a knife, and seedy plans for how to get him to talk. This wasn't normal at all. I was beginning to wonder if this was my life now, if everything would be following shaky leads, snooping into bank and email accounts, buying cars and crashing them into weirdhitmen. God, the fact that I'd driven my car into a person had still not seeped through my skull into the reality center of my brain. Here I was again, moving without thinking, going from impulse to impulse, reacting on-the-fly. This had to stop, I knew, and I hoped it would stop in Austria.

After the tedious process of gate-waiting and boarding, I was sitting in an uncomfortable seat somewhere in the middle of an Austrian Airjetplane . My tiredness was useful in keeping me from freaking out about how cool-yet-unusual this all was. The flight crew ran through the safety demonstration in English, then German, but it all sounded muffled and distant to me. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself sink into slumber.

I woke up to the feel of G-forces tugging on my skin, hoped we were landing, but knew we were just taking off.

If you ever have the opportunity to sit in the same place for eight hours straight, I suggest you decline. I tried to tell myself it was just like school, but at school I at least could walk from place to place and feel like a real human with motor function. Just sitting there, reading or trying to watch a DVD on the laptop, it felt like some kind of torture nuevo. I started with the international banking book for research, but my immune system seemed to reject it as foreign, so I switched to the novel which was pretty good; about a professional bodyguard who protects an abortion doctor. I liked the pacing, and the first-person narrative. I knew it was fiction, but it made me think maybe I should tell my story some day, although I knew it would have to have an ending first. Things had only been interesting for six days so far, I didn't think I could stretch six days for very many chapters.

Flight attendants came around once in a while, bringing drinks and pitiful sandwiches. I went to the bathroom twice, just to feel my legs work for the trips back and forth.

When the gods of time passage saw fit to declare that my eight hours were up, I waited in line to get off the plane, waited in line for baggage claim, waited for my baggage, then waited in line to get into the customs line, then waited in the customs line, all doing so while being bombarded with foreign languages and odd-looking things that were poking at all my senses from all directions. I had been a bit worried about customs, so I'd prepared a whole long story to explain why I was seventeen and flying to Austria alone. My dad was a charter pilot for a wealthy businessman, I'd say, and he had a long stay in Vienna while his client had business, and my dad knew I'd always wanted to see Austria, so he paid for a ticket for me to fly out and stay here with him for a few days until he had to fly his client on to London. I figured that story had just the right amount of rich-people-suck, families-are-great, Austria-is-wonderful, and travel shop talk to keep any customs officer entertained but not too curious.

It didn't matter, as all I had to do was say "pleasure" and have my passport stamped. They didn't even look through my suitcase, so I didn't have to explain that the pocketknife was my dad's but he never used it anymore because it was dull, and I wanted to surprise him with it because I'd had it professionally sharpened.

A few minutes later, I was finally able to walk through some doors and be outside for the first time in over nine hours. I was in Vienna. Vienna, Austria. The air smelled different, the people looked different, cars were different, but I felt the same: tired and grouchy.

It was after 9PM local time. By my count, Comstock wouldn't be landing until around midnight. That meant I had probably four hours until he would be trying to check into his hotel room, which would give me just a few hours to enjoy the city before I had to start breaking any laws.

Chicken

It was after dark when we got back to my place, me in my dad's car and Amy in mine. My dad's car had a garage door opener, so I parked it inside the garage and Amy parked my car behind it outside.

The drive from Quantico gave me plenty of quiet time to think. I realized that I hadn't stopped to think since any of this had started on Thursday, I just kept bouncing forward from situation to situation and reacting on-the-fly. Everything seems much more important in the heat of the moment, and the last six days had been like one long, heated moment for me. Now, with nobody to chase and nothing to run from, it all seemed pointless. I collapsed asomeone's larynx, snuck into someone's office to snoop around their bank records, rented and bought a gun while underage, was assaulted with pepper spray and nearly shot by some guy who'd already killed a cop, the police wanted my hide, the FBI knew who I was, I've attempted to surreptitiously interceptsomeone's emails, and I'd possibly made illegal copies of military files.

And for what? All I had was more unanswered questions. I was grasping at straws, and driving myself crazy doing so. I had nothing more than what I started with. I was in the red.

At least it was interesting to Amy, I realized. She seemed to live a pretty hallow life, with a mother who's run off and a father who couldn't care less about anything Amy did. This must be a fantastic diversion for her.

I hadn't told Amy about the rigged USB memory stick or my plans to sneak files out of a Marine base. Maybe she wouldn't have to know. Maybe I could just put the USB drive in the microwave and fry it. They'd never be able to prove that I'd done anything, and if I didn't look at the files I'd have nothing to lie about. Nothing was going to bring my father back, and thrusting myself into dangerous situations was just going to make me end up dead too.

We went inside my house, I emptied my pockets on the kitchen table like always. USB memory stick, pocket knife, wallet; all piled on the table just a few feet from that gun. God, why did I own a gun? And why was it still sitting on the kitchen table? I grabbed the gun, its box, the ammo, and the spare magazines I'd bought and trucked them up to my room. I hadn't said a word out loud since I was in Quantico. The last thing I'd said to Amy was "honk".

Up in my bedroom's smallish walk-in closet, I safetied the gun and put it back in its Styrofoam package, and then put the package in an upper shelf between two sweaters. I set most of the the boxes of ammo on another shelf then sat down in my desk chair and begun slipping .45 cartridges into the metal gun magazines, one at a time, by the dim light spilling out of my closet. My hands weren't shaking this time.

I looked up to see Amy standing in my doorway. Her arms hung down and she toyed with the cuffs of her jacket with her fingers. It made her look even younger. She'd never been up to my room, I realized, but she wasn't looking around like most people do when they enter a new room. She was just looking at me. I looked back down at the bullets and magazines.

"What happened?" she asked.
I held my hands still, a single bullet pinched between my thumb and index finger. It was shiny and golden, smooth like a copper banister.
"There was an accident, at the lab where my dad worked. It was unfortunate, and Daniel Baker was a good man doing good things for the good of the good country," I said.
"You know that for certain now?" she said quietly.
I slid the bullet into the magazine, feeling the resistance of the spring.
"No I don't," I said, grabbing another bullet and spinning it in my fingers like all the others. "I don't know that. I don't know much of anything, really. I don't know where my old car is, I don't know why the FBI is toying around with me, I don't know why I spin every bullet around in my fingers before I slide it in... I don't even know why I'm loading these magazines. And I definitely don't know why you're still here, when you you should be as far away from me as possible or at least wearing body armor."

She stood still a while longer, then stepped in and sat down on my bed across the room. I set a filled magazine on my desk and grabbed an empty one, glancing at her as I reached.

"There's a lot of things I don't know either," she said, her voice wandering. She was looking at her hands cupped together in her lap, best I could tell. "We both grew up surrounded by secrets," she went on, "I never knew what my dad did either, I never asked. All I know is that now he's a drunk. My mom, I don't know for sure if she's even in the same state anymore. This is a fucked up town."

I don't think I'd heard her swear before. It didn't suit her; but she went on, "Everybody's parents do something in secret, and the kids have to deal with it. Never knowing. But you can't let those mysteries pull you down. A few years ago, I just had enough of all the lies and unanswered questions. I started streaking my hair red or green or orange or whatever sounded good, laid on the eyeliner real thick, put on as many bracelets as I could, and went out with any guy who asked me knowing full well why they did. I didn't care, they got what they wanted, and it made me feel good. For a while at least. It never amounted to anything, though. It just put me deeper in the hole."

She stopped talking again. I set another filled magazine down next to the first.

"So I'm not going to get sucked down a hole," I said, spinning my chair to look at her over the desk. "I'm done with this, all of it. No more mysteries, no more spying or FBI or pepper spray."
"That's not what I meant," she said, "I don't think think you can just drop this. If you don't do whatever those FBI guys want, they might let the cops come in and put you away for the thing in Lorton."
"The FBI is just having a good time with me, they must know that the fake cop guy was trying to shoot me. They wouldn't let hang for that, if the police even have any real evidence besides the fact that it was my car. I'm done, I'm out. I'm just a regular teenager now with a dead dad and too much bloody money."
The left side of Amy's mouth tightened to a frown. "So why are you loading your gun?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said.

I sighed, and spun around again to face my desktop computer. I turned the monitor on and looked at the viewing window for the remote camera in front of NathanComstock's house. The feed was still running, but it wasn't much good with the night darkness. I stopped recording, and opened the video of the last few hours I'd had it recording. I sped through the video, the tree branches danced around and a few cars zoomed through thecul-de-sac at lightning speed, then Comstock's car pulled into the garage, then the garage door closed, then nothing happened until it got too dark to see anything.

"There's nothing," I said, "no nuclear arsenal stored in the garage, nobody coming to the door to buy pirated DVDs. More dead ends."
"But he's home now?" Amy said, leaning over on the bed and crooking her neck to try and see the screen.
"Yeah, unless he snuck out the back wearing black."
"So maybe he did the email thing," she said, sounding a bit eager.

I really didn't want to get sucked into more spy capers, but having full access to someone's email did sound nice.

"My laptop's in my car," I said.
"No, it's downstairs. I brought it in," she said, getting up and disappearing out of my door.

She came up a few seconds later, dropping the bag on my bed and saying, "You can deal with that madness, and I'll go try to cook that chicken you bought. We can compare our progress in 20 minutes."

I went over to my bed and pulled the laptop and its cord out, found the wall outlet behind my bed, and turned the computer back on.

If I were still saying "bingo", I would have done so right then. As soon as I opened the status page Dale had set up, it said that thephishing email had been opened a few hours ago, and that Comstock's password (old and "new") had been submitted a few minutes later. I used the password to try to log into the email account online, and I was instantly in. This stuff works far too well.

I spent a few minutes looking through the archive of emails in the inbox. Nothing stood out very far, a few receipts from online stores for purchases he'd made a few weeks prior; kitchen appliances, mostly. I decided I'd take a closer look at these emails later, and I went to the settings to change the account's password to the new one Comstock had submitted so the ruse would be complete. That taken care of, I logged out and back in with the new password just to make sure it had worked.

When I logged back in, there was one new email. It was from Expedia, an online travel booking service. It was a trip summary for reservations he had just booked, probably only seconds ago. I opened the email, and to my surprise I found an itinerary for a flight to Vienna, Austria leaving the next morning (Wednesday) from Dulles Airport. He also booked a regular room at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Vienna through Friday, when his return flight was. The last-minute booking cost a small fortune, and hisKLM flight had a layover in Newark and Amsterdam for a total travel time of 13 hours.

It didn't make any sense. Why go to Austria? Why go last-minute? He'd be missing a few days of work, it seemed. What could he have to do in Vienna that was so important? I thought about the question for a few minutes before I realized that I finally had a concrete question; not something silly like "Why is Nathan Comstock acting suspicious?" or "Why can I shoot guns so well?"

I went downstairs and grabbed my wallet from the kitchen table. Amy was standing over a frying pan on the stove, I could hear sizzling and it smelled like pepper and olive oil. I smiled at her, then returned upstairs with my wallet. I pulled the two FBI business cards from one of the pockets and looked them over. Special Agent Bremer, Special Agent Rubino. Each had a different cell phone number listed. I decided that Rubino seemed more friendly, since he was younger, and dialed his number from my cell phone.

After three rings, "Rubino." Jumbled background voices made it sound like he was still in the office.
"Why is Nathan Comstock flying to Vienna tomorrow morning?" I asked without introducing myself.
There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then Rubino said, "Chris?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I gotta say, that's not exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, but it's a good question still. I'll look into it and call you back in half an hour," then he hung up.

I went downstairs to find Amy plating up the two pieces of chicken breast with some of the microwave rice. We ate at the counter, and she indeed had used olive oil and pepper. She asked if I had any luck with the emails, and I told her I found one lead but I was waiting to hear more about it. She asked what I meant right as my cell phone rang. The caller ID listed the same number I'd dialed before.

"Yeah?"
"So I looked into it, and it turns out that Comstock cleared out all of his bank accounts this afternoon," Rubino said.
That was odd, "You mean the two accounts at New England Federated?"
"How did you--"
"I have super powers," I said, cutting him off.
"Right, well he has more accounts than those two. A lot more actually. All of them pretty much emptied as of this afternoon, right before three when transaction posting is cut off."
"So he's taking all of his money to Austria? Or he's making a very large purchase and then fleeing to Austria?" Amy looked up at me from the sink, giving me a curious glare.
"The interesting thing is," Rubino continued, "he withdrew all of the money in a series of certified checks, each for $7,500. That's a lot of checks, the tellers must have been pretty annoyed."
"$7,500? Why would he do that? Some kind of payroll?"
"Well, it occurs to me... by today's rate, $7,500 is just under 6,000 Euros."
"So, what does that mean?" I asked.
Rubino sighed into his phone, and said, "In Austria, 6,000 Euros is the maximum deposit without reporting the transaction. Like how any deposit over $10,000 in the US gets reported to the IRS."
"So people deposit $5,000 twice," I said.
"Yeah, or $9,500 and $500. Or anything so long as the deposit is below the line."
"But why Austria?" I asked, "Isn't Switzerland the place to launder or hide your money?"
"It is in the movies," Rubino said, "but these days Europe's anti-laundering laws are so tight that anonymous bank accounts are impossible to open. Austria's banking system is actually older than the Swiss, and has a lot more loopholes for getting around the laws. The only reason Swiss Banking is so well-known is because it was all started with Nazi gold. Austria's was started with the gold that the Nazis later stole."
"Huh. Well, do you think Comstock already has accounts in Austria?" I asked.
"If he did, it would be specifically so we couldn't find out. So, I don't know."
"So what now?"
"What now? Well, I--what's that?--oh," he chuckled, "Bremer says to use your imagination." He hung up.

I flipped my phone closed and set it on the counter, zoning out for a minute. Amy was looking at me from the other side of the counter.

"So... what's going on?" she asked.

I pulled myself down to Earth and told her, "I'm going to Vienna tomorrow."
"Which one?" she asked. There was a Vienna in Virginia and one in Maryland, within an hour of each other.
"The one in Austria," I said, "it's the capital."

She looked at me flatly for half a minute, then said, "Oh, well see if you can bring me back some chocolates," before she walked out of the kitchen.
--------

This is the end of Part 1 (of 2) of Mind + Body.
The story will continue again on Monday, February 26th so the author can take a break and try to make some money off this thing.

Love and Genes

"You don't think he should at least try?"
"He doesn't like baseball, he doesn't like any sports."

My mom was upset, I remember. I was up in my room, writing an essay about a book I had to read; something about some teenagers who go exploring a gold mine and have some sort of adventures. My door was open, and I heard them downstairs arguing in the kitchen, so I crept out of my room and listened from the stairwell. I was ten.

"Because he's never tried them. He could like it; he could be good. Take him to a batting cage, he could like it," my mom said.
"Hon, he just isn't into sports," my dad said, "I know what that's like, being the one kid on Earth who doesn't care about sports."
"You were all-state in high school!" my mom wasn't yelling, just excited.
"Yes, but I didn't like it. I just played baseball because my parents forced me to, I don't want to force him."
"You don't have to force him, just ask him if he wants to try out. It says here, 'beginners are welcome'."
"If I ask him, he'll think I'm pressuring. And they put that there just so they have someone to reject. It's a school team, not a community league. They want good players."
"He might be good!"
"He could get hurt."
"Are you kidding me?"

I can't remember how I felt. I can't remember if I wanted to try baseball. I probably didn't; I wouldn't now.

My freshman year of high school, I came home from school one day and collapsed on the couch with a groan.

"Tough day?" It was my dad.
I pulled myself up to see over the couch to find the voice; he was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. "What are you doing home?" I asked.
"I made it an early day," he said.
"Tough day?" I asked, dropping again and laid flat.
"Not for me," my dad said, "Why for you?"
"Valentine's Day," I mumbled.
"What? Nobody wanted to be your Valentine?"
I sighed in teenage disgust, "It doesn't work like that, nobody says 'Be my valentine.' It's not the fifties anymore."
My dad paused, then said thoughtfully, "I don't think it ever worked like that, come to think of it. So what's the problem, then?"
"It just drives me crazy," I said, "all the guys and girls pairing up and trying to be romantic or clever, when all they're doing is falling into stereotypes."
I heard the newspaper being folded and set down. "What do you mean?" my dad asked.
"I don't know," I started, "it's just, 'ooh, you gave some girl some red crap today so she's your true love, you're real original'. When in every high school in every city in the country, every brainless idiot is doing the same thing for some girl. How can people like that? How is it romantic to do the same thing everybody does? Why do people get so excited about doing something a fake holiday tells them to?"

My dad stood up and walked into the TV room, he sat in the sofa opposite mine. "This frustrates you?"
I scoffed, "You're not a psychologist." I rolled around so I was facing him and not the back of the couch.
"No, but what I am gives me a few unique insights into this field," he said, crossing his legs.
I tried to put how I was feeling into words. "It's just," I started, "what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to ask a girl out, or flirt, or whatever when I know I'm just playing a role? A guy asks a girl out, it's clear what his intentions are. But he can't say them, he has to say the right thing, when everybody knows he's just saying what she wants to hear. It's all just a routine set up so young people can try to slam their body parts together. How can I ever join that world when I know it's not real?"
"You know, despite what people like to think, humans aren't terribly clever or original creatures," my dad said. "Everything we do or think is wired either by our psychology or our genetics. The only thing that adds any variance to human behavior is personality."

I didn't say anything, so he went on.

"Like you said, any male is motivated by the need to pass on his genes, whether he knows it or not. Our whole culture is based on males' need to have sex, but the entire motivation is based solely on our genes. As a species, we need to create offspring and repopulate the planet so our species can keep winning."
I spent a while trying to get over the fact that my dad had said the word "sex" and again said nothing.
"While guys are wired to just want to perform 'the act', girls are programmed to actually want babies and to be selective. A guy can impregnate a different woman every fifteen minutes if he wanted to, but a woman can only be pregnant once at a time, and about once per year; so, she has to be choosy. Whether people realize it or not, the entire female side of attraction is based on paternal candidacy, and the male side is all based on fertility."
"Gross. What?"

"What do guys like? Mostly thin girls with good color, round butt, big breasts? Those are all things that tell our brains that she's prime for baby-making and raising. What do girls like? Physically, it varies, but most of it is based on whether or not they have specific muscles used for the -- um, you know. But attraction for females is more based on traits. They want someone that can protect them and provide for them. They want someone who isn't going to 'fertilize' them and run off. For them, it's all about someone who will give them a healthy baby and will be able to provide for it."
"Are you sure this subject matter is appropriate for a 14 year old?" I asked.

He laughed, and then said, "You're the one who brought it up, I'm just giving a definition to the discovery you've already made. Anyway, the guy just wants to do it, the girl wants a healthy baby. So, for the guy to have any chance, he has to do the right things and say the right things so the girl will think he's suitable. Some psychologists I talk to say that it's speculated that 'love' is just a euphoric type of ignorance that makes us overlook any fertility flaws based on overpowering positive features. This is the problem you mentioned. The species is hard-wired to keep making babies, but male-female dynamics require all kinds of rituals and routines of saying things when everybody knows you mean something else. So, these routines become part of our culture, and most people don't even recognize them. Understand?"

I nodded, or did the closest thing I could to a nod while laying sideways on a couch.

"This system works perfectly because people don't recognize it," my dad continued. "For people whose jobs it is to examine these subjects, like psychologists and geneticists -- and for people like you who are just perceptive enough to recognize them on your own -- life sucks. It's like Descartes or The Matrix: Can you live in an artificial system if you know it's artificial?"
"So what's the answer? How do people who know that dating and mating are just tricks of the brain deal with dating and mating?"
"The answer is a particularly interesting recent discovery in genetics," he said. "That no matter how intelligent we may be in recognizing our genetic programming, our genetic programming is always more powerful."
"Huh?"
"Our brains say, 'Hey, genes. You can't trick me into falling for a girl when I know it's just your way of getting me to repopulate the planet,' but your genes say, 'Screw you, buddy. See that girl over there, you are absolutely in love with her.' Your genes win."
"You genes are more in control of you than your brain?" I asked, shocked.

An epic battle between mind and body, I thought.

"Well, I shouldn't be using the word 'brain' really, it's more your consciousness, because your genes use your brain via your subconscious. So it's your subconscious telling you to procreate and your conscious realizing that it's all a system. This is where psychology and genetics really meet."
"So what you're saying is, even though we realize that it's all a bunch of silly routines and stereotypical behaviors, our genes overpower that realization and will eventually make us fall in love or want to mate?"
"Yes," he said plainly. "Love conquers all."
"This is your fatherly advice?" I asked.
"No," he said, "that was the preface. This is the part where I tell you about STDs and condoms."

And then the awkwardness began.

The trees and pavement on the road from Quantico faded into a single dull background of reality as memories of my father strung back in unison like a reel of film. After he died, it seemed for a while that I'd completely forgotten he ever existed. Now, having seen the town of secrets where he spent his whole life working, the walls of self-protection seemed to crumble. I wrote my dad off as a secret himself when he died, and somehow I was trying to find the answers that would make him real again.

Instead, I only found more secrets and more questions. My dad was dead, I finally realized with the appreciation of its full weight.

My dad was dead.

And I could finally cry for him.

Quantico

I drove back to my house just so I could get some kind of credentials to at least insinuate that I had some kind of business being in Quantico. My dad always had a identification card he clipped on the front of his shirt, but I hadn't seen that since he died. Since he was at work when he died, it would obviously still be there. I wasn't exactly sure what kind of security there was to get into the city, it wasn't like I was trying to sneak into the Corps base and take pictures of their command center; I just wanted to go visit the University where my dad worked. Most universities enjoy visitors.

Regardless, I grabbed an expired driver's license and his death certificate from the top drawer of the desk in my parent's bedroom. If I had to, I could at least attempt to prove that my dad was my dad. Somehow I was still predicting a rifle butt to the forehead.

The Trans Am took well to the open road. Highway driving with my old car was occasionally a bit of a negotiation, but in this car I could actually feel the engine pulling me. Amy agreed.

Quantico was half an hour north on 95, or halfway to Lorton, the town where I bought a gun and killed a man. I hoped today's road trip would be less traumatic, but I supposed that would all be up to the United States Marine Corps.

I couldn't imagine how my dad made this drive twice each day, it's just so boring. Trees on all sides, a lot of the road unlit; maybe it would have been relaxing. Me, I was rather nervous, and the monotony of the travel just allowed the anxiety to reverberate inside my body.

Amy directed me off the highway and onto Russell Road. For a while it looked like I was cutting through uncharted wilderness, then on my left I passed a giant foreboding building that I couldn't read the sign for, then more trees, then a giant parking lot, then more trees, then a giant foreboding building with a giant parking lot, then more trees, then I came upon a guard station. Both lanes of the road were blocked and between them was a small booth manned by two Corps men. They were both dressed in olive pants and khaki shirts with soft garrison caps. In the other lane there was a car stopped, one of the guardsmen was speaking through the car's window. The other man motioned for me to stop at the gate, walked around the back of my car (probably looking for clearance stickers) then around to my window. He seemed a bit surprised at my age when he saw me, though not unusually so.

"Good afternoon, Sir," he said in a quick tenner, "may I ask your business here?" He looked to be 25 years old, had a flat face. The tag on his chest said his name was Meyers.
"I'm wanted at the Marine Corps University," I said. "My father's car is parked and I'm to remove it."
He looked at me, then at Amy. I was expecting the pepper spray any minute. "Do you have a visitor request on file with the OCS?" he asked.
"No, I don't think so," I said, "we were called at home to pick the car up, I came to pick it up."
"Something should have been set up in advance," the guard said, "visitors aren't allowed on-site without pre-approval. I could call the office of where the car is parked and ask that the car be brought here if you'd like."
That wouldn't work for me. I tried to think of something else to say. I pulled the two driver's licenses from my pocket and said, "There was also some personal effects I was to collect. I believe I was supposed to be granted a visitor's clearance to the University, I just didn't realize it had to be set up first. I thought my name would just be put on a list," I handed him the licenses. "This one is me," I said pointing at the top one, "the other is my father. Could you check his clearance and contact whoever his superior is and ask if I may be allowed in."

The guard made a face, said he would contact the security office, then stepped away.
"Don't think this will work," Amy said. "Security seems to be amped up since 9/11. I don't even remember there being a guard station here."
"Well I don't know what else to do," I said, more to myself, "I believe they make military bases so that you can't talk your way onto them."

The guard had been inside the booth for a few minutes, through the glass I could see him talking into a phone. He eventually hung up, and stepped out carrying something small and orange in his hand. This time, he walked around the front.

"Alright Mr. Baker, you're clear for entry to the base. You can pull forward through the gate and turn into the parking lot just to the left. A private will come around to transport you to the MC University. At that time, the young lady may leave in this car or she may wait in the parking lot for you to return, but she or this vehicle aren't permitted past the parking area."
I looked at Amy, she shrugged. "Ok," I said.

The guard gave me the items in his hand, an orange laminated visitor's pass with a metal clip to affix it to my shirt and the two driver's licenses. He stepped back into the booth and the gate before my car lifted. It seemed I was in.

I pulled into a small parking area as instructed and shut off my engine. I asked Amy if she wanted to wait here or just take my car home. She said she'd wait and make sure I wasn't taken into a basement and set on fire.

Five minutes later, a small green Jeep pulled in and idled next to my car. I got out and asked the driver, "This for me?"
"I'm to take you to the MC University," he said, as if saying anything more would get him shot. I nodded then hopped into the passenger seat, I started to look for the seat belt but the vehicle lurched forward before I could bother. It took a few minutes of driving through the woods before it seemed like we were actually in a city. Old, new-england style buildings were all around. If I didn't know better I'd have thought I was in Cambridge, not a city dedicated to training young men and women to kill. The driver said nothing, so I sat in silence as well, idly fidgeting with the USB drive in my pocket.

At school, I once heard Dale Carpenter talking about his fool-proof idea for getting anything he wanted off of somebody's computer without ever touching the keyboard and using only a USB memory stick, the small portable hard drives that most people use for moving documents or files between computers. He'd said something about making the USB drive trick the computer into copying files from the computer to the memory stick, but I didn't really pay attention at the time because I assumed he was just talking to hear his own voice. While I was at his house, though, when I went back a second time, I asked him about it.

"This genius plan you have for taking files from a computer with a USB drive, what was it?" I asked, returning unexpectedly to his room.
He smiled proudly, and said, "It's simple. I can make a partition on a USB stick and format it to CDFS, so when you plug it into a computer, Windows will think it's a CD, not a memory stick. If Auto-run is enabled, which it always is because people are idiots, it will run whatever program on the USB drive I want. I can put a shell script on there that will run in the background and search the computer's hard drive for files matching any keywords I set, then copy them onto the USB drive. Other than that 'do-dun' file the computer makes when you stick the drive in, someone using the computer would have no idea what was going on. You just plug in the drive, the drive finds the files you want and copies them, then you take the drive out and walk away."
I nodded and tried to process the words that I'd understand.
"So you first program the type of files to look for?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "just edit a text file with whatever keywords you want, then when it runs on someone's computer it searches for any files matching your keywords."
"And you're sure this works?"
"Yes it works," he said, defensively, "I've tried it a few times. Was thinking about making it search for doc files so I could get teacher's tests by sticking the drive in a school computer while the teacher is logged in, but I realized they're all so lazy they never make the tests until the day before."
"So you have one, that works?"
"Yeah, a 1 gigabyte stick. Why? You want one?"
"I'll buy that one," I said.
"If you just bring me whatever memory stick you want I'll set it up for you."
"I need it today. I'll give you however much it costs to buy a new one for yourself. One gig, those are like fifty bucks now, right?"
"Was seventy when I bought it, but they've gone down."

I pulled the rest of the cash from my wallet. I'd need to go to the bank again, I thought. He dug through desk drawers until he found a small, silver USB memory stick about the length of half a stick of gum. He looked it over, then plugged it into a free USB port on the front of his computer's tower.

"Yeah," he said, "this is it."
I stepped forward and looked at the screen, there were a few files on the drive. He opened one called kw.txt and said, "This is the keyword file you set. You just enter whatever you want the filenames to match, and anything on the computer that matches will be copied."
"What if you take the drive out before it's done copying?" I asked.
"Then only whatever there was time for will be copied," he said, "and if it's in the middle of copying a single file when you remove it, only part of the file will be copied."
I leaned in to type my keyword. "It uses wildcards?" I asked.
"Yeah, asterisk."
So on the first line, I typed '*baker*.*'. That would match any file with baker in the name, no matter what type of file it was. I saved that, and pulled the drive out.

"This isn't about dirty pictures, is it?" Dale asked as I walked away.

My plan was to use this USB drive on a computer where my dad worked. I hoped someone would be nice enough to give me a tour of where he worked, and I could plug it into the workstation of someone nearby. He must have co-workers, people doing the same stuff as him or working on the same projects. If they were logged in, I could stick this thing in any USB drive and hopefully get a copy of anything with his name on it. I just wanted some idea of what he spent his whole life doing.

I was dropped off in front of a long, narrow building. A half dozen other buildings of equal size were scattered throughout the area. When the driver put the Jeep into park, he said, "Someone will meet you inside."
I got out, looked at the building before me. "This is the Marine Corps University?" I asked.
The driver silently looked at the identical buildings all around, smiled at me, then pulled the Jeep away.

This is it, I told myself. This is what I wanted for so long, this was the place I was never allowed to see. How terribly disappointing.

I walked through the entrance of the building and found myself in a large lobby. I stopped to take it all in, but was interrupted by my name.
"Chris," called a man who was leaning against a long desk parked along the right wall. He stood up straight and walked toward me. He was old, older than my father was, anyway; maybe early sixties. He was in full officer's uniform, with a series of multicolored ribbons decorating his chest. When he got to me, he extended his right hand.

"Lieutenant Colonel Schumer," he said as I took his hand. "I worked with your dad."
"Really?" I said, a bit shocked. "My dad was a researcher, I didn't think he'd be working with a Lt. Colonel."
Schumer chuckled and released my hand. "It's a Marine city and a Marine base," he said. "Everything's run by some kind of officer. The cafeteria's run by a Mess General, even."
I forced a laugh, then stood in silence.
"Come on," he said, "I have your dad's keys and his personal items in my office." He turned and walked to the end of the lobby and turned left into a long, narrow hallway. It seemed like an office building more than a school.
"Is this where he worked?" I asked, trying to read the names on the doors as I passed them.
"Your father worked downstairs," he said, opening a door and stepping inside.

Lt. Colonel Schumer's office was small and kind of cramped. The books lining the back wall and drab shades covering the windows made it feel even smaller. Besides some filing cabinets and a wide oak desk positioned in the middle of the room, there was little appointment or decoration to the room. I sat down in a wooden chair with leather lining opposite the desk while Schumer sat behind the desk. On top of the desk was a healthy scatter of papers, a small wooden clock, and a beige computer sitting horizontally on the desk with a small monitor perched on top of it. The back of the computer was exposed, only a few feet from me. I could see an open USB port among the mess of keyboard, mouse, monitor, power, and speaker cables. The computer was turned off.

Schumer slid a thick yellow envelope across the desk to me. In it was a set of keys to my dad's car, a wrist watch, and a few mildly-expensive looking pens. "These are the things your father left here," he said.
"There isn't more? Books or pictures? Journals? Anything?"
Schumer folded his hands on the desk. "These are the sort of things one keeps at a desk, but your dad didn't really have a desk. He did lap work, mostly, and he used various workstations. People here tend to keep personal effects to a minimum because they never know where they're going to be moving next."

I took another look inside the envelope, then closed it and set it down on the floor.

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" Schumer asked.
"Can you tell me anything about what he did here? How he died?"
He looked down at his hands, and said, "As I said, mostly lab work. There was an unfortunate accident with some equipment, this is how he was injured."
"Lab work. Ok, but that's the weird thing," I said, "As far as anybody knows, this place is just a school for teaching about military history and Marine Corps fundamentals. The web site makes this place sound like the most boring place on Earth. I don't understand why, then, there would be any lab work going on."
Schumer's jaw tightened, then he sighed and his body loosened. "Obviously, Chris," he started, "you know that the work we do here-- not just here, but all over Washington and in any military base -- requires a certain element of secrecy. You should know from the fact that your father never talked about what he did here, that he couldn't talk about it. Now, we're not all out here experimenting on extra terrestrials or assassinating foreign ambassadors, but from a strategic and conventional perspective, some doors we have to keep shut."
I frowned. "So you can't tell me anything?"
"I told you he does lab work, which is more than some people would have me say. Some would have me say that a ceiling tile came loose and fell on your dad's head while he was sitting quietly in a chair performing no activities, but I'm not that cold. My advice is to take what you have, hold on to it, and don't worry about what you don't have. He was a good person, doing good things. That's the best I can do."

The paper bag over my head wasn't getting any lighter, I was still scratching at something I couldn't see or feel. All this secrecy was driving me nuts, when my dad was probably just doing menial work that he never even knew the scope of.

"Tell me something," I said, "if my dad was actually bringing US-made weapons to Uzbekistan to support anti-communist rebels, and he was killed by a stinger missile fired by the man who actually killed JFK, how would you tell me and my family he died?"
Schumer half-smirked, then leaned back in his chair. "I'd probably say that he died in an accident here at the office, that he was a good man and was doing good things."
I folded my arms and said, "So you can see the position this puts me in."
"Clearly," he said. "But this is something many people in this town have to deal with. You might feel cheated or used, but you can't let the unknown take over. It won't bring him back, and it'll only bring you down." He looked at his watch, then compared it to the clock on his desk. "I had to interrupt an appointment to see to your unexpected visit," he said, "and let me tell you, most people who show up at the front gate unexpected don't get the same treatment you've gotten, but Daniel truly was appreciated around here and will be missed. I want you to understand that."

I nodded, he looked again at his watch then pushed the power button on the front of his computer. A quick beep came from inside, then the soft hum of fans spinning began.

"And just to demonstrate that, I want you to come back here and see me if you have any new concerns or questions since I had to cut this short," he said, looking at the computer screen and watching it boot up. "I'll give you a conditional entrance pass and add your name to a clearance list, so you'll be able to get through the gate and be escorted back here if you need me."

The computer was up and running, he typed in a password to log in. I slowly pulled the USB drive from my pocket and held it under my palm. The Lt. Colonel clicked the mouse a few times, then typed a few keys, and said, "There, you're on security's list. If you come to the gate and show them this -- where are those passes?" He turned around the the filing cabinet behind him and opened a drawer. This was my chance. I leaned in toward the desk, and with my right hand I unplugged the green speaker cable from the back of the computer and plugged the USB drive into the open port. My heart stopped beating for a moment, I prayed that the computer had Auto-run enabled and that a big message hadn't jumped on screen saying "Hey, someone stuck a USB memory stick into the computer and is probably trying to steal files." After a few seconds, I could hear the hard drive inside the computer begin spinning and clicking as files were being accessed.

Schumer pulled a plastic folder from the drawer and pulled out a laminated card that looked like my visitor's pass but was white instead of orange, and explained that the bearer was granted conditional entrance by Lt. Colonel Schumer. There was also a magnetic strip, a bar code, and a few series of digits. "Right," he said. "Show them that at the gate, then your photo I.D. and they'll look you up, and let you in here."
"Thanks," I said, though I couldn't really figure out why he was giving me this. If there was nothing he could tell me, why bother letting me come back whenever I want?

Schumer stood up and walked around the desk. I stood up to block his view of the computer's rear. The USB drive had only been plugged in a few seconds, it would need more time to copy any files. Schumer opened the door and held it open for me, repeating that he had an appointment to get to. To buy time, I pretended to look over the desk for where I'd put that envelope, then eventually "found" it there on the floor. I backed up to the computer and pulled the USB drive out behind my back, then bent down to grab the envelope.

"His car is in the back of the lot just outside," he said as I went out the office door, "can you find your way back to the gate or do you need someone to lead you?"
It was a single road, no turns, so I told him I could make it. In the hall outside his office, a man wearing civilian clothes walked by and looked at me like I had a badger clinging to my face. It was probably the youngest person he'd ever seen in this den of secrets. Schumer walked me back to the front door of the building, said goodbye, then walked back to the hall toward where his office was.

I found my dad's Cadillac in the rear of the parking lot like he'd said. The car was about five years old and dark green. I'd driven it twice that I could remember, and wasn't too impressed with it. I unlocked the door with the remote on the keychain, got in, and dropped the envelope in the passenger seat. I hadn't learned nearly as much as I'd hoped to. I hadn't seen exactly where my dad worked, and I'd only met one person he worked with. The USB drive had been plugged in for no more than 30 seconds, so I wasn't sure if I was going to find anything useful on there either. I guessed I'd have to come up with some other reason to come back, and use my suspicious clearance to get back in.

I made my way back to the small parking lot just inside the gate, honked at my own car, and Amy pulled it out and followed me. At the gate, the same guy was there to wave me through.

So this is Quantico, I thought. I wondered why I had always been so afraid of it.

Fishing

"If I do this I want to see that picture," Dale said with a smirk cut through his thin lips.
"Don't be gross," I said.

Dale shrugged, and spun his chair around and faced his computer screen. Amy walked over to the bed and sat down on the end of it, straightening the green, denim-looking bedspread around her with one hand. She bounced slightly on the mattress a few times then said, "Maybe we could just give him a private show."

Dale looked sideways at her, then craned his neck to look over his shoulder at me. "I like her, Chris," he said. I just grinned weakly.

Amy seemed to be enjoying her new role, I hadn't seen her this happy to be someone else since she was Sarah from Fraud Prevention atComstock's bank. Maybe she could be an actress, I though. Most of them come from broken homes; perhaps there's a reason for that. Me, on the other hand, when I thought up this ruse I overlooked the fact that it would also require me to have no sense of personal shame. This bucked against my typical, "reserved" mindset.

"Reserved" means "prude".

"What's the email address?" Dale asked, staring at his computer monitor. I walked forward and stood over his shoulder, then repeated the email address from memory.
"Alright, lets try the obvious route," he said. At the Hotmail homepage, he clicked "Forgot your password" and entered the address I gave him. To restore access to your account, the website asks you to verify your state and zip code, then asks you a custom question that you set up when you open the account. Dale explained that most people, thinking they'll never forget their password, make the question something easy like "What's your name?" not knowing that anybody who can answer that question can get your password. Other people, also feeling they'll never forget their password, make the security question something silly with a dumb answer that they forget.

After telling him Mr. Comstock's zip code, the security question came up.

"Damn it," Dale whispered. The question on the screen was "What's the last 4 digits of my ssn?" I definitely didn't know his Social Security number; though ideas started racing through my brain as to how to obtain it. Credit card applications, employee records, Selective Service listing, student loans, medical records, invoices from insurance companies... I wasn't exactly sure how I came up with all of those, but they rattled through my brain as if rote; like the list of U.S. Presidents. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison... Nothing I could think of would be easy to come by, though.

"Don't fret, young Padawan," Dale said, reading my frustration. "That was just the obvious route. There are still more routes."
"Like what?" Amy asked, still sitting on the edge of the bed.
"Like... phishing," Dale said; then, almost to himself, he continued, "though I don't think it's technically phishing if you're only targeting one person. Then it's phish in a barrel," he laughed.
"Fishing?" I asked, deciding my character wouldn't know what he was talking about.
"Phishing. With a 'ph', where you pretend to be someone official to get a mark to reveal personal or secure information."
"Huh. Stuff like that actually works?" Amy asked. She was grinning at me.
Dale ignored her. "I can make a fake web form," he said toward me, "make it look like it's a Hotmail page. Then send him an email, make it look like it's from Hotmail itself, saying he needs to go to this page to verify his password or something. When he 'verifies' his password, it sends it to me. Or you."

I scratched at the back of my neck. The idea was pretty much the same thing I'd been doing over the phone, just having a web page do the lying instead of me or Amy.

"Why would he have to verify his password? When would that occur in real life?" I asked.
Dale thought for a moment, then said, "If his account was going to expire, or something. Or it could say he won some stupid contest, and he just needs to log in to claim his prize."
"Would anybody buy that?"
"Probably not," Dale said with a frown.
"It should be something that would get his attention, something that would scare him or make him think it was urgent that he type his password--" I trailed off for a while, then had an idea. "What if he didn't have to verify his password, but change it? Like, the email could say that someone tried to access his account, tried to hack it or something, so he should change his password. That would take him to a form where he'd enter his 'old' password then pick a new one. We'd get both, then we could change the password ourselves so he'd never realize anything had happened."
Dale made a circle with his eyeballs, thinking. "That's good," he said.
"And you can make the email so it looks like it's a notice from Hotmail itself?"
"I can make it look like it's from Shirley Temple."
"Ok," I said, "how fast can you do that and make the form?"
"The form I can do right now, just copy something from Hotmail's site and just change where the form submits to; and the email I can send as soon as I can find a mail server that's still open. The longest part will be writing the email and the page text."
"I can write that while you do the rest," I said, pulling the laptop from my backpack and taking a seat next to Amy on the bed.
"Is that new?" Dale asked, looking at the computer as I opened the lid.
"No," I said, hesitating. "It was my dad's."
He didn't say anything, just turned back to his screen and started copying source code from Hotmail pages.

I began typing up an email that explained that some nasty person had tried to force his way into this email account, and that as a security precaution you should click here to change your password to something more secure. I then started writing body text for a web page that would explain pretty-much the same thing. Amy said something about being the only one without a computer to stroke, then got up and started picking through the book shelf again.

After a half hour we had a fake form and a fake email ready to send from a fake email address. Dale said he put a tracking image inside the email so that when the email was opened and the image was viewed, the time and IP address would be recorded on a server. Then, when/if something was submitted on the form, it would be saved on the server. He gave me the URL of a page I could view to check the status of the form and the tracking image, then went to send the email.

"Wait," I said, "won't he notice that the form he goes to isn't on hotmail.com if he looks at the address bar?"
Dale scoffed, "People are stupid. Most people don't even know that the address bar is there. They just type whatever they want in the first box they see, which is usually the search bar on MSN or AOL or whatever their homepage is. There are people who think 'go to whatever-dot-com' means type 'whatever.com' into a search box and click the first thing that comes up."
"Not everybody is that dumb," I said.
"True, which is why I changed the window settings in the HTML so the address bar and toolbar will be hidden. As long as he uses IE, at least, and he probably does."
"Alright," I said.

He tested the form one more time for fool-proofing, then sent the email out. He refreshed the status page a few times, hoping to see it updated with Comstock's password. It was silly to hope for any results this soon, but it was worth a shot. After five minutes and no dice, Dale said, "It might even take a few days, most people don't sit around their computers all day with email clients to check for new mail every 60 seconds."
"Alright," I said, making sure I'd saved the URL for the status page on my own computer. "We'll go, then. Thanks for the help."
"What about my private show?" Dale asked, standing for the first time since we'd got there.
"We're leaving!" I said, as Amy walked out the door and down the hall.

As I slipped the laptop into my backpack and stood to leave, Dale checked the doorway and asked, "Where'd you find an exhibitionist-minx-nympho like that?" He had a grin from ear to ear.
"Oh, you know," I said, backing toward the door, "just gotta keep your eyes open."

I unlocked my car and Amy hopped in. I set my bag in the back seat, then got into the car slowly. I sat in silence for a moment, trying to let the "character" slip off me. In the past few days, it seemed like I hadn't said an honest word to anybody. Anybody but Amy, at least. I thought all the lies would be weighing more on my mind, but really the only problem was keeping the lines of deception straight. If it weren't for the fact that I could be mostly honest with Amy, my brain would probably be about to pop. I thought about how lucky I was to know her, to have her. I looked over at her; the colored highlights had mostly washed out of her hair, leaving it all dirty blond with a few dashes of red at the tips. God, was she pretty.

She looked back at me with soft eyes, curious. "What?" she asked.

I thought about it, but the talk from yesterday kept creeping back into my head. About Quantico, about my dad's work, about how Amy grew up in a town I was always locked out of.

"Do you have anything to do today?" I asked.
Amy looked down, then out the front windshield. "No, I don't think so," she said.
"Feel like visiting your old town?"
She looked back at me, stiffled a low chuckle, and said, "Sure."
"I need to get something first, wait here a few minutes." I handed Amy the keys then got out of my car and went back inside Dale Carpenter's house.

Fifteen minutes later, and fifty dollars lighter, I came back outside. Tucked in my pocket was an innocent-looking device that, hopefully, would allow me to commit several counts of high treason which were probably punishable by years in prison.

"Alright," I said, pulling the car into gear, "lets go see daddy's office."

Pranks and Sandwiches

Amy wasn't at my place yet when I got home. I double-checked my phone to see if she'd called, nothing, so I brought my stuff inside and set up my new laptop at the kitchen table. I went upstairs and got some software CDs from my room so I could start making this computer my own. I cracked open a can of Coke from the fridge and sat back down at the computer. After I'd set it up with my home's (secured) network, I went online and checked the remote camera I'd set up just minutes before.

The feed was laggy, coming now remotely over the internet rather than on a local connection, but it worked. The tree branches were annoying, still, but there was still a clear view of both entrances to the house. I sat for a few minutes, staring at the small video window and wondering what I was looking for.

Amy came through the front door, without knocking, and threw her messenger bag on the couch as she walked toward the kitchen. It was about 1pm now.

"What's the big thing?" I asked as she tumbled into the chair opposite me at the table. She looked frazzled yet distant, resting her chin on her open palm and tapping at her teeth with her fingernail.
"I was keeping an eye on Comstock, like you said," she began. "Between every class I was looking for him or trying to follow him. I went into the admin office three times pretending I needed different forms and made a copy of a blank piece of paper just to see if he was back in his office or not."
"Ok..."
"The last time I went in there, during lunch, he was just leaving his office and he saw me in the front over where the forms are and he started talking to me."
"Talking to you about what?" I was watching the wind blow the branches of a tree on a street in a neighborhood twelve miles away.
"About you," she said.

I looked up from the computer, "About me?"
"Yes. You. He was saying that you hadn't been in school lately and if I'd talked to you or knew why. I told him I didn't know you that well and only saw you a few times during the day, but that I thought it might be something about your dad dying."
"Why would he talk to you? He's got no reason to think we even know each other."
"I don't know. He started mentioning our 4th hour study hall, he knows we have that together, but as soon as he brought it up he clammed up and walked away."
"Ok. That's weird."
"Is that a new laptop?" she asked, now noticing the thing I've been looking at this whole time.
"It's... a laptop, that is new," I said.
"You trying to see how fast you can spend all your money?"
"Hey, I got it used. And I bought it for remote spying on Comstock's house."
"What do you mean?"

I showed her the video feed and explained about the wireless camera I'd attached to a tree, and how you could connect to from any computer and watch it remotely.

"Any computer?" she asked.
"Any computer with internet," I said.
"So why did you have to buy a laptop?"
I sighed.

Amy got up and went around the counter and looked in the fridge. "Haven't gotten any food yet?" she said, her body blocked by the open door.
"I went to the store last night, got some sandwich stuff," I said.
She opened the deli food drawer and said, "Ah." She brought out the bag of sliced turkey and some lettuce, started looking for mayo, I'd guess.
"Didn't you eat at school?" I asked over the lid of the computer. I was trying to fix the user account and set up my email.
"No, I was in the office during lunch and after Mr. Comstock talked to me I left."

She began untwisting the tie from the bag of bread on the counter. Help yourself to some food, I thought.

On the computer screen, in the feed from the webcam, I saw a white mail truck go around the cul-de-sac and out of view.

Amy had two pieces of bread on a paper plate and was opening the jar of mayo.

"Put those away," I said, standing up. "We're going out."
She frowned and tossed the slices of bread back in the bag with the loaf from which they were born and returned everything else to the fridge.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"To break some more laws," I said, putting my jacket on.
"Bringing the gun then, are we?" she was joking.

I looked at the gun sitting there on the kitchen table next to the salt shaker. I told myself I needed to find a place to put that. For now, I set it on top of the box it came in and covered them both up with a kitchen towel.

"Perfect," Amy said over my shoulder. "Nobody ever looks beneath the tea towel."

* * * *

We got in my car and I returned to Nathan Comstock's neighborhood, parking on the street again where I had before. I got out and casually walked over to the mailbox in front of Comstock's house and flipped through the envelopes. Amy got out and went over to the median in the middle of the street loop and tried to find the camera I'd told her about. I saw her spot the plug, then follow the wire to the tree, then move some branches until she saw the camera. It took her about 15 seconds total, but she was looking for it. I hoped it would be harder to otherwise detect.

I took the one item from the mailbox that looked promising and went back to my car. Amy returned a few moments later.

"What'd you get?" she asked.
"I was hoping for a bank statement; or a membership card from the Criminal Suspect Discount Club. All I got was this." I held up an envelope from Dell Financial Services.
"Computer bill?"
"Better than nothing, I guess." I opened the envelope, inside was indeed a statement from a Dell credit account. The balance was only a few hundred, not enough to buy a network of supercomputers for taking down the IRS database or anything. As far as stereotypical super-villain behavior to look for, I was running on empty.

The statement listed his contact information. The address I knew, the phone number was the one I already had, but it did list his email address. That, I did not have. It was a freeHotmail address. If I could get access to his email, I'd know what he was buying, who he was talking to, what websites he was registering for. The possibilities were enormous, as far as I could see it. But how to get in?

I pulled my laptop from the bag in the back seat and connected to the "default" wireless network. I tried logging into Hotmail with his address and a few obvious passwords. The password wasn't "password" or "comstock". I couldn't think of anyway to get in without lying into a telephone, and that one only works so many times.

I knew people con their way into email accounts all the time, but I didn't have the resources for all of that. I'd need some help, I knew, but I didn't really want to bring someone else into this. I tried to think of a way to do so without explaining the whole situation, but realized I shouldn't be just sitting there in my car when I've probably maxed out my suspicious-behavior quota for the day. Besides, I promised Amy food.

We stopped at a sandwich shop about ten minutes away that advertised free wireless internet, something a lot of small businesses were doing back then because some article in Forbes said it would make you rich. We sat in wooden chairs and ate subs at a table with a red checkered picnic-style tablecloth. I tried to keep the crumbs away from the computer while I tried to look up the address of the only person I could think of from school who could help me with my email problem. We waited out the time until school was formally released in the restaurant, trying to talk about anything but myself and taking turns checking our own email accounts.

"How are you going to convince him to help you get into a principal's personal email account?" Amy asked, after we'd worn out all other topics.
"I don't know. He's not exactly mister school-spirit, he might just do it for the fun of it," I said, closing the computer's lid to spare its battery.
"Yeah, but it's be weird to just show up and and say, 'Hey, I had a cool idea for a prank. How about you help me get into Mr. Comstock, who probably isn't even your assigned principal, get into his email for no reason? And then you don't ask me any more questions.' Doesn't seem likethat'd float."
I nodded and said, "True. A prank, though, maybe that's a viable angle. Say we're planning a Senior prank for some reason."
"What Senior prank would require access to his email? Those kind of pranks are supposed to be like some kind of social rebellion, not targeted at one person. They fill the swimming pool with Jello or let a bunch of chickens loose in the hallways. They don't spy on principals."

I started tracing the pattern on the tablecloth with my finger in silence. It was weird, how we were trying to figure a way to get a "normal" person to help us. Just another kid my age, a loner dork with too much free time; a person I was exactly like just a few weeks ago before people started trying to kill me. If I was going to help someone break laws back then, it would have been because I got some kind of benefit from it. I can't offer to pay without seeming more suspicious, I had to make it so having this kid help me accesssomeone's email was good for him and me. Like it would get him access to privileged information. Social outcasts love to feel included in anything, a clique of friends, a small bit of gossip, anything to make them feel connected.

Just then I had an idea, and a smile grew across my face.

"What?" Amy asked, "You think of something?"
"Possibly," I responded wryly, "but it would require you to have a limited sense of personal shame."
"Done," she said.

* * * *

Dale Carpenter's house was in a neighborhood of smaller houses that probably cost just as much as the bigger ones because they were on old land and not part of a modern development. The house wasn't maintained very well, and the lawn could use a mow. Amy and I stood at the front door, me wearing my backpack with the laptop, Amy with her messenger bag. I hung my thumbs from the hoops on my bag's straps, trying to look like a kid who still went to school. Amy rang the doorbell.

A woman came to the door and answered it. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt advertising a store that I believed wasn't in business anymore. I smiled like an idiot, and Amy spoke, "Hi, we're here to work on a project with Dale?" She said it as a question like I noticed a lot of annoying girls spoke most sentences at school, and I mentally patted her on the back for her acting, though I didn't know why either of us weren't just being ourselves. Perhaps we thought that, just because we had been the target of a possible hit and were in thecrosshairs of the FBI and state police, we were more important than everybody else.

Dale's mom stepped back and pointed down a hallway toward his room. I said thanks and we both walked down the hall and through the open door to his room and immediately felt a gust of heat.

Dale was the hardest-core geek I knew. He was in every computer class I ever took and frequently engaged in inside jokes with the teachers. While most of the classes were a way for me to learn new things about computer hardware or programming, they were just an exercise in repeating that which he already knew, kind of like how English classes were for me. Dale usually ended up sitting near me in classes so I spoke to him a bit, but that was the extent of our relationship.

His room was small, but practically filled with computers. Four or five were lined up under his desk, most with their cases open and insides exposed. At the other side of the room there were two computer cases on their sides, cases also open. IDE and power cables spewed from inside the two metal cases like entrails protruding from a grenade victim. Only one computer had to distinction of sitting on the desk, it had a silver case and blue neon light spilled from the clear window cut into the side of its case. All the computers' fans made it rather loud in the room, the air a bit dry, and everything very hot.

"Baker? What are you doing here?" Dale was sitting at the computer desk in a high-topped leather rolling chair. The big CRT monitor on his desk was about the size of my old car's engine, and from the looks of it the computer was just now being booted up.

"Hey Carpenter," I said, moving to let Amy through the door. "This is Amy," I said when she did.
Dale turned his chair a degree to look at her, then said, "What? Girlfriend?"

Amy raised her eyebrows at him and grinned.

"That's kind of why we're here," I said.
"I thought you might want the homework from the last week or so of A-plus class you've skipped," Dale said, still sitting, "everyone thinks you split your wig about your dad or something."
"Hey," I said, "when they say 'take as much time off as you want,' I'm taking as much time off as I want."
Dale smiled, then looked at Amy, then back to me. "So. What?"
"We've got a bit of a problem," I said, gesturing to Amy with my elbow. She was looking at a series of books on a shelf just by the door.
"Ok...?" Dale said.

"About a week ago," I started, "Amy and I skipped out of our classes and met up in one of the empty classrooms down in the 'dungeon' to engage in some... activities. Well, someone saw us sneak back in there and came and snapped a picture with his cell phone--"
"Wait," Dale cut in. He looked at Amy, "You --" then back at me, " -- and you?"
I just looked at him flatly, he took the hint. "Humans," he said to himself, then shook his head and laughed.

"Anyway," I continued, "someone took a picture of us in 'the act'. I didn't know about it, but he just showed me today and had a good laugh. He says he might send the photo to Mr. Comstock just to be a dick."
"Who is it?" Dale asked.
I tried to think of someone idiotic enough to do something like that, "Tim Isham," I said.
"He should," Dale said.
Amy looked up, surprised, and said, "He what?"
"He should send them. You guys are both under 18, right?"
I nodded slowly, realizing a slight flaw in my lie.
"Then he's got child pornography," Dale said in a laugh, "he sends that out and he's screwed, could probably get Comstock in trouble, too. Cops don't know what's what. Sending, receiving, they don't know the difference."
"All the same," I said after a second, "I want to get into Comstock's email so that if Tim does send it, I can delete it before Comstock gets it. I have his address, it's a hotmail account, but I don't have his password."

Dale leaned back in his chair, enjoying his position of power.

"We could pay you, if that's what you want," Amy said. I looked at her.

"Nah," Dale said. "If I do it for the fun of it, it's a prank. If I take money for it, it's like a crime or something."

"Yeah," I said, looking again at Amy, "a prank."

Hot Webcam Action

I had an address and a phone number; more than enough to begin a practical snooping exercise. I looked up the address online and found out it was on the other side of the city, but not too far. I ran a search for the phone number to see if it had been posted on any websites for some reason, and found nothing. I thought about heading over there right then just for a look, but decided it would be better to do during the school day when he wouldn't be home. Skulking aroundsomeone's house at night is entirely too suspicious. I remembered that you can get satellite aerial views of any address these days, and looked it up. It looked like a nicer neighborhood, lots of trees between each house; but who can ever be certain with these satellite things?

I turned off the computer monitor and began idly milling about my house, trying to think of some kind of plan. The working assumption was that Nate Comstock, my school administrator, was doing something illegal; something illegal enough to catch theFBI's attention and make me so vital that they'd keep me immune from consequence for killing someone who was trying to kill me. Someone tried to kill me, I kept repeating in my head -- but the words had no weight. I couldn't get myself to react to them, the same way my father's death didn't seem to faze me. I must be one big fat sack of denial, I figured. I get in a fight at school, Comstock gets me off the hook for it. I get blasted with pepper spray, run down, shot at, then kill a guy; FBI gets me off the hook for it. What the hell is so special about me?

If I want answers, I need to ask question -- according to the FBI -- and none of my currently-existing questions seem to be doing the job. I have to find something out about Comstock, and then ask Special Agents Bremer or Rubino about it. It's the only thing I could decipher from that conversation.

So what's so special about Comstock, then? Besides the fact that his principal job accounts for less than half of his income, the only stand-out thing is that he was so shady about not reporting the fight to anybody. It was a tiring circle of questions, before I could make any progress on one mystery it would loop back to a previous one. Something was just universally amiss with Comstock, and I had to find out what it was, while the FBI may or may not already know about it. I sighed, and sat in the first chair I could find. I was in my kitchen now, sitting at the counter in the same seat Special Agent Bremer sat in the morning prior.

I was hungry again, I realized. Chinese food does that, and since it was before 4 when we got to the restaurant we only got the lunch portions anyway. I hoped some food would help clear my head for a bit, so I got up and went around to the refrigerator to see what I could find.

Nothing. I couldn't find anything to eat, not even a frozen pizza or other last-ditch resort. I was tired of going out to eat, so I decided to make a quick trip to the grocery store. Perhaps I could see how the trunk of my new car would handle groceries.

The store was less than a mile from my house, just at the end of the subdivision. I didn't want to be there long, so I just grabbed some bread and sliced turkey and ham for some sandwiches, some juice and sodas, chips, and decided I could try to be civilized and cook an honest meal so I got some chicken breast and backtracked to find some rice. They'd just come out with these plastic bags of rice that you could cook in the microwave, I reflected on how awesome that was for a while, and grabbed a few bags of white and wild rice. I doubted there was such a thing as wild rice. Rice farming was a pretty deliberate activity, I didn't think they would bother if you could stroll through a meadow and find wild rice.

I turned a corner to head toward the checkout when I found myself in the dairy section. I stopped in front of the milk case and tried to get myself to look at it. Rows and rows of clear bottles, filed to the brim with watery-white liquid. My mind made it curdle and seep out, crawl across the floor and chase me. I frowned, looking again at the innocent jugs. I always used to love milk, it would be a shame if I was going to be sickened by it forever, now. Two days ago I ran my car through a person, and it's the milk I can't take now. I don't need a trauma counselor after having my dad die and nearly getting killed myself, I need help getting over my phobia of milk. I amended my mental long-term agenda to include getting back on the milk train, then headed to the checkout and paid for my food.

I rolled my cart outside to the parking lot and toward my car when I glanced at a security camera perched on one of the light poles and aimed at the store's front door. It was an innocent concept, but it gave me the seed of an idea, and later my plan was formed.

The next day came and Amy never called or wrote to see if she needed to do anything; I hoped she'd remember to start watching Mr. Comstock's behavior. I left the house after ten and drove to his house. It was indeed a nicer neighborhood, but nothing amazing. His house wasn't very big but had a cleaner look to it. The house was on a small roundcul-de-sac with three other houses at the end of a road. The middle of the cul-de -sac, rather than being just an empty circle of pavement, had a small round grassy median that had a wooden park bench, two street lamps, and three small pine trees. It was all probably just decoration, I cant imagine someone getting out of their house to go sit on a bench on an island in the middle of the road, but it looked nice either way.Comstock's house was clearly visible from the street, which was good for me. From the "island" in the middle of the road, there were five houses within 500 feet of me; this was also good for me, if I was lucky at least.

I got back in my car and drove around until I found a store that would have computers. The first thing I found was an Office Depot, and right in front by the registers they had a open box laptop computer with a decent spec sheet for $800. It was probably a returned Christmas present, and these stores' liberal return policies mean they have to take back a computer like this for full price and sell it for whatever they can get. I made sure the thing had wireless networking, then stood around waiting for someone to help me.

While I waited, I tried to give the cost some attention in my head. Since Saturday I'd bought a gun, a knife, and a car. If I kept this up, I'd be broke by June. I had to keep my spending in check, I decided, though I had to give myself points for being this frugal. The gun I'd sort of haggled down, the car I bought used and definitely haggled. I could have gotten a platinum-finished gun with my name engraved in diamonds, and I could have bought a Lamborghini with upholstery made from bald eagle scalps. I could be buying a five-ounce Sony laptop that could render the surface area of the entire planet in real time and burn a CD at the same time, but I wasn't. I had to guess that was something. I wasn't being foolhardy. Besides, it's not like I'm going to need another car or computer for a while.

I started to think that maybe my dad got that insane life insurance policy as some kind of apology. He didn't spend enough time with me when he was alive, so when he dies he'll leave me a small fortune. It seemed morbid, and a store associate had come over before I could give it any more thought. I bought the used computer and a power inverter so I could power the computer from inside my car, then drove back to thecul-de-sac.

If my plan didn't work, I wouldn't really need the computer. But, unlike a gun, I actually could use a new computer. My desktop at home was a few years old and on its downward slope. Plus, it wasn't a laptop. I pulled over on the side of the street and powered up the computer and spent a few minutes getting a feel for it. It had a fifteen inch screen and felt light enough. The store hadn't bothered to re-install Windows, so it was already set up for "Wendy", previous owner. Wendy seemed to like puppies, as the only change she made to the computer was installing a puppy desktop image.

home over the The idea was to find an open wireless network in the area and have the laptop connected to it and broadcasting a webcam feed of Comstock'sinternet, plug the computer in somehow, and then hide it so I could then view the camera feed from home or any other computer without having to sit there in my car. The key to surveillance is to watch someone long enough so you can learn their routines: when they leave the house and when they come back, who comes to visit and when, whether they use the front door or the side, etc. Wireless networks were just becoming popular at this time, but most people weren't smart enough to enable any kind of security on them so they were left wide open. I was hoping that one of the five houses within range would be broadcasting an open network signal.

I had to walk around with the laptop awkwardly balanced on my arm and clicking the "refresh" button with the other, but I found a network called "default" that was obviously unsecured. I could connect to it and get on theinternet without a problem, and could even get a decent signal from the island where the bench was. That was a load off my mind, I hadn't just wasted my money on a final-sale computer. The light poles in the median had outdoor power outlets at the base, perhaps for Christmas lights or something. I figured I could wrap the computer in plastic or something and hide it under one of the pine trees and keep a webcam running and pointed at the house. I packed the computer up and got back in my car and returned to the store to get a webcam then find a hardware store to find some plastic sheeting to waterproof the computer.

Back at the Office Depot, I was looking at the webcams and found something that would work even better. There was a camera that would connect to a wireless network by itself, that you could then log into remotely to view or record the video. It even had mounts on the back so you could attach it to a wall with screws. This would mean I could just set the camera up and have the laptop for myself. Three cheers for technological innovation.

I bought the camera, then found a nearby hardware store and got a hammer and an assortment of nail sizes, then returned yet again to the cul-de-sac. In my car, I set up the camera with my new computer, telling it what network to connect to and at what quality to capture video. There was even an option in the settings for the camera to email me every time its IP address changed so I'd always know how to connect to it. Then I went back to the median, sat on the bench and plugged the camera's power cable into the outlet at the base of the nearer lamp post and waited for the status lights to cycle. The green light eventually came on to indicate that the camera had connected to the open wireless network, so I started looking for where to mount it. If I mounted the camera on the back of the bench, it'd have a clear view of Comstock's house, but it would be pretty obvious. I decided instead to affix it to the trunk of one of the pine trees and move some branches so there'd be a decent view. The tree would hide the camera from casual observation, and if anybody did actually spot the thing they wouldn't be too concerned because it was a consumer-model camera and didn't look too threatening. I thought about putting a sign on it saying it was for bird-watching it, but decided that would be silly.

Back in my car, I connected to the camera's interface and looked at its video feed. Some pine needles and branches were invading the frame, but there was still a fine view of the street, the garage, and the front door.

I'm too smart for my own good, I thought.

Content with my improvised digital surveillance, I got started on some analogue surveillance. I walked around Comstock's house, casually looking through the windows to see if I could spot anything. Most of the blinds were closed, and the windows I could see through didn't show anything interesting. There were no mountains of heroin or bomb-making equipment as far as I could tell. No child slaves handcuffed to radiators or stockpiles of smuggled Russian assault weapons. Whatever he was doing, it was probably white-collar and somehow peripherally involved hitmen. If that guy was a hitman. Still could have just been trying to kidnap me to extort my money from me.

All the doors were locked. I didn't doubt that I could get in anyway, but saw no need to get myself in that deep just yet. There was no mail in his mailbox yet; so, out of ideas, I returned home.

My cellphone beeped in my jacket pocket as I was on the freeway. I tried not to kill myself digging it out, and looked at the screen. New text message. It wasn't time for Amy to be out of school yet, unless she was skipping more classes than usual now. I pressed the button to read the message, it said "big thing. im comingover". She was usually pretty meticulous with her spelling, even in text messages. I dropped the phone on the passenger seat and got to, at last, find out what this car could do.