5 comments/ 11210 views/ 10 favorites Jack Be Quick Ch. 01 By: HansTrimble It's interesting to look back at some of the Mother Goose Rhymes we learned as kids. Like "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick." That sounds like an interesting game, but if Jack isn't nimble and quick, he's about to get his balls burned. What an incentive! The twenty-first century equivalent of candle jumping is international intrigue, with shadowy participants who play for keeps. Excel or die - the ultimate incentive. But games are made to be played by young people, and here we have a young couple who get drawn into a dangerous game. They don't really want to be players. They want to be left alone so they can get on with their education. You'll come across a little sex, a little violence, and a little suspense, but these kids are no superheroes. The boy isn't six foot five and hung like a horse, and the girl doesn't need a bra with DD cups. What you might think about as you read on, is that one of these kids could be your son or daughter, and I leave it to you to decide if they would, or could, behave the way my characters do. The boy, old enough for sex but too young to vote, tells their story. There's a reason he doesn't tell us about their sex life in minute detail - that's not how he was brought up. Even though he has decided to tell us a lot about their lives, he's aware of a fine line that a gentleman won't cross. The story has come together over the past two years. It has been set aside, then picked up again, over and over. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it. I enjoyed writing it, and rewriting it, but my feeling has always been that it was nearly ready to post, but not quite. Well, enough procrastinating - two years is the gestation period of an elephant. So ready or not, here it is! My guess is that you'll either love or hate the story, with few lukewarm reactions. I'll be interested to read your comments. Hans * * * * * * * * * * Jack Be Quick Ch. 01 YOU TAKE THE HIGH ROAD, I'LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD "Hey Jack, how'd you get all the way up to level seven? We've been playing that thing since last month and nobody's got up to five. You got a secret move?" "No, I've never even seen this game before. Seems pretty cool, but those zombies are hard to kill so they'll stay dead. I've been playing for over an hour. My thumbs are getting tired and my left hand's starting to cramp. Guess I'm done for today." "An hour? Stu and I played it for about five hours straight the first day. He was ready to throw the control through the wall. I laughed at him, figured it couldn't be that hard. Boy, did I get a surprise!" "Well, I guess I was just lucky. If I started again, I'd probably bomb out at level three. Here, why don't you take over for me? I've gotta be goin' anyway." I handed the control to Lance and gave a wave to the guys as I let myself out the side door. My car was at the curb and I was careful to leave without any commotion, like squealing the tires or blowing the horn. The last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself and start a fuss over how well I could play a computer game. I didn't want any hard feelings with the guys. I had few enough friends as it was, and I was silently scolding myself for letting them see that I was so much better at it than they were. All you had to be was quick, and that was really my thing. But they didn't need to know that. Look, I'll let you in on a secret - I'm sort of a nerd with an odd twist. When most people see a guy who's into science and math and computers, they jump to the conclusion that he's not going to be any good at sports, and he probably thinks very deliberately, slowly turning over every possibility in his mind before making a decision. I was just the opposite. Quick. From very early childhood I played on GameBoy and Xbox, and I've been quick enough to beat every computer game that I ever played. I started with Pac-Man. When I was a little kid, way before Kindergarten, we had a little game table with Pac-Man built into it. It was just gathering dust in a corner of the family room by my toy box, and nobody messed with it. Well, nobody but me. I don't know how I got started on it, but I must've fooled around with it till I stumbled onto the way to make the moves. I was an only child, and had a lot of time to mess around with my toys by myself, so I guess I spent a lot of time on Pac-Man. My mother was the one who discovered me playing it, and watched the way I could manipulate the little yellow guy. One of my earliest memories is of my father standing behind my mother, watching me play. She made him be quiet while they watched, but I still remember him gasping when I'd make some super move, and at other times he'd make sort of choking noise. What they were discovering was how quick I really was. Later - I think I was in fourth grade - Mom took me to be tested by a psychologist, over at the behavioral science lab at the university. We got to put a rough number on it. Everybody reacts differently to different sorts of stimuli, and I reacted quicker to visual stimuli than to things I heard or felt, but when all my reaction times were averaged out I was at least twenty times as quick as anybody they'd ever tested. Maybe even faster - they couldn't be exact because I was so far outside the range of their test validation. Why so fast? Nobody knows why our brains develop as they do, but mine just happened to be turbocharged. Apparently I was perfectly normal in every other way, and I had a pretty normal childhood. I wasn't into sports much, but I did find out how much fun I could have with a bat. I was nine or ten years old when I went with Dad to a batting cage that had a computer controlled pitching machine. He set it to feed me the mixture of pitches that you'd get from a human pitcher, and gradually increased the speed. I'd just hold the bat up where the ball would hit it. I was too little to swing the bat very well, but I could hold it steady, sort of like bunting. I bunted fast balls, curves, sinkers, sliders, knucklers, everything the machine knew how to pitch. I was fascinated watching the ball come at me. I could watch it and tell if it was going to cross the plate in the strike zone, and I could follow its path as it curved and twisted and rotated between the pitching machine and home plate. By the time the ball got to me I had the bat right in front of it, and the solid thump of the ball hitting the bat was my reward for reading the pitch and making the correct adjustment before it got to me. I remember laughing as I did it. Think of a fastball going 95 miles an hour. That's about 140 feet per second. So to go from the pitcher to the batter takes just a little under half a second. It takes most batters about a third of that time to read the ball so they know what kind of a pitch it is, and another third to figure where it's going to be when it crosses home plate. This is a critical period, because it involves reasoning and decision making, so a whole lot of your brain has to get involved, and poor hitters just can't do all that critical thinking that fast, so they guess instead of figuring it out. Then the last third of the time, about a sixth of a second, is spent aiming the bat and swinging it at that spot. One reason good hitters miss so often is that it's hard to adjust your swing and get the bat moving that quickly. But it seemed to me that I had all the time in the world. It was easy. And the proof was that I never missed! Later, Dad got an old shotgun and had the stock shortened up and padded to fit my arm. Then he taught me to shoot skeet, and it was just the same as with the baseballs. I figured the clay pigeon could have been moving a whole lot faster and I'd still have plenty of time to nail it. In Phys Ed I found I could do all right in the hundred meter dash, because I was so good at getting off the blocks the instant the gun was fired. I couldn't run any faster than the average runner, so in a longer race my starting advantage didn't mean much. But Mom and Dad persuaded me not to go out for any varsity sport where my quick responses would make me stand out, because I would just end up being labeled as a freak and it would be hard for me to have any close friends. So I tried to keep it all to myself. It was hard sometimes. Like sitting around, trying not to act bored, after finishing an hour long test in five minutes. Or remembering to get hit once in a while when we played dodgeball in the gym, even though I had plenty of time to avoid every ball that came my way. My unusual talent had its good and bad points in dealing with other kids. In every relationship there's an element of suspense, waiting to see how the other person will react to a situation or a remark. And while we rarely admit it, we go through life manipulating others and being manipulated by them. We usually call it 'tact' or 'careful choice of words.' Now suppose that you could assemble the clues and analyze what's going to be said, way before you really hear the words, just the way I analyzed the flight of the baseballs. That takes away the suspense, and when you can tell what your friends or even enemies are going to do or say, you have a lot of time to select your reply. So just by being quick, I was able to avoid being surprised or blindsided and I got kind of a Teflon reputation. That is, everything rolled right off me, just because I was prepared for whatever was coming. Again, I tried to play it down, and I'd pretend to be surprised once in a while, just to act normal. That's why I managed to have a few friends at school, which is more than Clark Kent could say. * * * * * * * * * * In my junior year in high school I struck up a friendship with Trudy. She was really cute, about five foot three, slender with a well rounded butt and medium sized breasts that were perfectly shaped and perfectly proportioned to the rest of her. Her dark hair was worn fairly short, framing her face but not coming down to her shoulders. She was an honor student, maybe I should say she was the honor student, good at every subject and interested in everything in the world. We made a good couple in many ways. We looked good together, we laughed at each other's jokes, we liked the same people, and as the year went on we spent more and more of our free time together. By the start of summer vacation there was a little hula dancer bobble doll stuck onto the dashboard of my Ford where Trudy sat, and the ribbons from a box of candy I'd given her for Valentine's Day were dangling from my rear view mirror. From then on, all through that summer and our senior year, it was clear to everybody who knew us that we were an exclusive couple. Of course, as we got closer in every way, we were eager to express our love for each other in sexual intimacy. She's a little younger than I am, so I was getting pretty antsy waiting for her to turn eighteen. It was the first weekend after her birthday when she let me take her cherry, and although sex causes problems for a lot of teenage couples, our lovemaking has drawn us closer together, right from the beginning. It turned out that just as in everything else, we both liked the same things. Holy cow, was she hot! Who'd have guessed that this sweet, brainy girl would be the world's greatest lover! I found out that it's easy to feel like a super stud when you've got a super partner, and Trudy made me feel like one of those porn stars. Because of that and a thousand other reasons, I wanted nothing more than to have her at my side, 24/7, for the rest of my life. Trudy's grades singled her out for success at any college, and she was recruited by schools I'd never even heard of, plus a bunch that are world famous. By Christmas vacation in our senior year, she had narrowed the field down to Harvard and Princeton, with Stanford bringing up a distant third. As happy as I was for her, the thought of losing her to some guy hundreds of miles away had me terrified. It even affected my appetite, which up to then had been voracious. "Don't worry about losing me," she said one day after a workout in the back seat of the Ford. "I'll always be there for you. Remember, I need you as much as you need me. Separately, we're like lost souls, but as long as I know you're waiting for me, my world is still complete. I know you feel the same way. Hold me close. Feel my heart beat? Well, I can feel yours, too. That's how it'll always be for us, and being miles and miles apart won't stop the way we feel for each other." Comforting words, but still the thought of being separated left me feeling empty inside. By spring break our decisions had been made. Trudy was headed to Harvard, 600 miles away. I'd be living at home and attending the Honors College at our state university, just three miles from my front door. We were excited but we gradually got more depressed as we thought of being apart. Could Trudy be that faithful? Could I? Were we really ready to face the world all alone? Romeo and Juliet couldn't do it, so what made us think we could? To get Trudy moved to Cambridge, across the Charles River from downtown Boston, meant hauling her and her stuff a long way. Her father rented the biggest, longest Suburban I'd ever seen and jammed the interior and roof rack full, leaving just enough space for four people. I traveled with them and shared the driving. We stayed overnight outside Albany, and were unloading and toting stuff up to her apartment the next afternoon. Trudy and three other girls had a four bedroom apartment on the second floor of a big, old house, just a couple of blocks from the campus. When we all said goodbye she was very composed and confident in front of her parents. When she turned to me they tactfully excused themselves and walked to the car, giving us a few minutes of privacy. That's when she fell apart. She was crying so hard that her words were just garbled sounds, but I understood. At the end she held me at arm's length and simply said, "Miss me, Jack. Promise you'll miss me as much as I'll miss you!" "Trudy, I'll always love you and I won't have a minute of happiness until you're in my arms again!" After one more hug and kiss I turned away to leave and she turned away to bury her face in her hands. * * * * * * * * * * The trip home was uncomfortable. I got along with Trudy's folks all right, but all three of us were choked up over leaving her in a strange place. She wouldn't have us to buoy her up, and we wouldn't have her either. You'd think that all the air had been sucked out of our lives and left back there by the Charles River. There wasn't much conversation. I felt bewildered, wondering how I could live without the constant company of my love. On top of that I felt angry at her for picking a university so far from home, and angry at myself for walking away and leaving her there all alone. When I got home I had very little to say to my parents. I went upstairs to flop down on my bed, and I wished I could cry to get rid of those awful feelings. School started up two days later, and I quickly found out how state universities deal with the enormous crowd of incoming freshmen, and in the process I learned a little about how governments work. Most high school seniors have two parents and they're both old enough to vote. To keep on the good side of those voters, legislators make it clear to state university administrators that they expect every high school graduate who can read and write to be admitted, even if they're dumb as a stump. It's then up to the faculty to separate the scholars from the wannabes, so they load everybody down with an impossible burden of schoolwork and let the students sort themselves out. Some flee in panic, some change majors, some transfer to community colleges, and the ones with intelligence and good work habits stay the course. I was a little shocked by the workload at first, but I soon found it a blessing. I bored into it like a hardrock miner hot after the mother lode, as I tunneled into a mountain of books to escape my loneliness. I discovered that a lot of college textbooks are written to show off the brilliance of the authors, not to teach students anything useful. But my quickness extended to reading and comprehension, and I could cram a lot more studying than the average student into the meager 168 hours of every week. I found time to go to the library to see how other authors had covered the ideas that were being thrown at me. I found out about other ways to handle a tricky problem, and I'd also read on ahead to see what was coming next, treating the course work like an interesting magazine article. With all that studying and with zero social life to compete for my attention, I soon percolated up to the top of the freshman Comp Sci majors. But there was always time for an email to Trudy, every night just before my head hit the pillow. Meanwhile, Trudy had dug in just as hard as I had, but for a slightly different reason. She was a scholar in the truest meaning of the word. The whole idea of a university is to assemble the wisdom of the ages and pass it on from generation to generation. Universities in general - and Harvard is a great example - were intended for people with Trudy's broad love of learning. She missed me, but she had found her niche in the Ivy League. The Charles River basin, with Harvard and MIT on the north bank and Boston University on the south, plus a smattering of smaller specialized schools, is a haven for intellectuals, and although Trudy was lonely and homesick she found comfort in being among her kind of people. I was at the airport to greet Trudy on her return home for Christmas. Her parents were content to stay warm and snug at home while I provided the taxi service. The flight came in an hour late in the evening of a cold, blustery day, with dry snow blowing across roads and runways alike. I was standing back from the choke point of the passenger exit, where I'd been pacing anxiously for hours. She spotted me and jumped up and down as she waved. When she got to me I wrapped her up in a hug that she snuggled into. We went down the escalator to baggage claim, holding onto each other. We didn't talk much, just let our body language say it all. My car was colder than a refrigerator. I got the engine running to warm up, and pulled Trudy to me for a kiss that lasted either two years or two minutes, but who's counting? I can tell you definitely that it was below freezing in the car when our lips met, and warm enough to so we couldn't see our breath when we broke apart. Then the words came tumbling out, both of us wanting to blurt out the thoughts and feelings we'd been holding in for months. Personal thoughts, novel experiences in school, interesting people we'd met, what Boston was like, what was going on back home with our families and friends, which ones we wanted to get together with, until we arrived at a red light and stopped babbling to share a quick kiss. As we broke apart to watch for the green light, Trudy said, "Now Jack, just listen for a minute because I think this might be important. You know I don't understand all the technical stuff you do, but I've heard talk about a new research program at MIT. It seems to be about computer security, protecting important information against hackers and spies and all that. It's got government money behind it, and people have been talking about it all semester, but like whispering or looking around to see if anybody can hear. I think they're trying to find people from all over to recruit for it, and they're trying to keep it hushed up, kind of like the Manhattan Project in World War Two. At least that's what I think is happening. Nobody has really told me anything, but I've been trying to piece all this together from bits of gossip and stuff I've overheard. I know you're good at hacking and encryption and cleaning up viruses and programming, and I wonder if you'd be able to get into it. The Comp Sci people are buzzing about it because they think whoever works on it will be in big demand after graduation." Jack Be Quick Ch. 01 "Have you heard any names, like faculty members who are involved? Or project names, goofy sounding things that don't seem to mean anything?" "The only name I heard more than once is Carlson. That mean anything to you?" "No, but I bet I know a guy who might know something. He's an associate professor in Comp Sci, Jim Mangrum, and we've become friends. He keeps his ear to the ground. Some days he shows up looking as if he didn't get any sleep because he was up most of the night on his computer, either programming or chatting with people all over the world. Not much gets past him. I'll give him a call and see if we could meet him for lunch or whatever." "The light turned green, Jack." "Oh, yeah. Here, take my cell phone and see if you can find Jim Mangrum in the contact list. Got it? Would you call him and hand me the phone, please." It sounded like a call that wouldn't be answered and I was just thinking how odd it was that a nerd like Jim wouldn't have an answering machine, when suddenly there was the sound of a voice starting to say "Hello" and the phone falling on the floor. After some scrapes and thumps, Jim's voice came back. "Sorry about that. What's up, Jack?" "I just picked up Trudy at the airport and I'm taking her home. She's been hearing rumors in Cambridge that I'd like to ask you about, and I was wondering if we could get together and pick your brain. It's about security. Maybe lunch tomorrow?" "Sure. How about Freddie's at noon? Shouldn't be crowded now that school's out. If you get there before me, try to grab a booth in the back so we'll have some privacy." * * * * * * * * * * Jim was right, Freddie's Burger Shack was nearly deserted when we got there. Jim was already in a back booth with a cup of coffee. I could tell that he'd gone all out to make a good impression on Trudy. His hair was combed, his shirt wasn't wrinkled, his slacks had a crease, he was wearing socks, and they matched! "Trudy, I'm so glad to meet you. Jack talks about you all the time, and I had you pictured about nine feet tall with librarian glasses. He must have told me a dozen times how much smarter you are than he is, and that must make you very special. But you don't look at all intimidating." "I think Jack's a little prejudiced, Jim. Hope so, anyway. I've missed him so, and everything and everybody here at home." She was looking around. "I've eaten here a few times, and I see the place hasn't changed. How's the coffee?" Before Jim could answer, Janice, my favorite waitress, materialized. "Are you Trudy? As soon as Jack came in the door I told Bernice that I'd take this table, because I wanted to meet the wonderful girl he's been telling us about." "Oh, you're making me feel embarrassed. I'm glad Jack thinks I'm special, because I think he is, too. Does he come in here often?" "Only for breakfast and lunch every day, and supper sometimes, when he remembers to eat. Bernice and I try to make sure he gets a balanced diet, because he's always so wrapped up in his work that he hardly knows what's on his plate. This is the first time I've seen him at lunchtime without his laptop, so I guess you really are special." After we ordered, Trudy explained to Jim how and where and what she had heard about the new concentration on information system security at MIT. "So what do you make of all that, Jim? Is it really something big or just talk?" "Trudy, it's remarkable how you assembled all those little scraps into a pretty complete picture. Especially considering that you're not a techie. And you sure have captured it. The CIA could use spies like you." Jim turned to aim his remarks at me. "This really is something big. I was planning to tell you about it, because you could be just what they're looking for. If you were to get involved you'd have to move, and I know you've been living at home so that might be a tough decision. But in any technical field you have to go where the cutting edge work is being done or spend the rest of your life reading about it in trade magazines. And by the time they get it, all the fun is over." He added, with a sly grin, "Do you happen to know anybody in Cambridge, maybe somebody you could bunk with to save on rent?" I was trying to contain myself. "You mean you really think I could get in on this? I'm only a kid, a freshman, and they probably want grad students." "What they're looking for is ability - brains and talent and related experience. They don't care if you're old enough to drink. They don't even care if you're old enough to drive. You match their needs perfectly. Look, I know some people there, and I'll get on the phone tonight with a couple of friends and pick their brains. I can't guarantee anything, but I think you've got a good chance of getting in on it. A very good chance!" As insightful as ever, Trudy asked a question that was on my mind. "What about you, Jim? You must have all the qualifications. Aren't you interested in this program?" "If I were actively recruited, meaning if they really needed me there to save the world, I'd go in a heartbeat. But these things have a life cycle. Jack could go there, do a lot of really ground breaking work and establish a reputation in the industry. Along the way he could get a free ride at MIT and pick up credentials that'll be valuable in the future. But after four or five years the head count on this will shrink, and later on it'll spin off some sort of a private company or government funded think tank or university laboratory, with a staff of regulars who'll probably stay with it till they retire. The guys who peel off will be grabbed up by headhunters for leading companies and government agencies, and never look back. But I'm an academic, and I think like one and I act like one. I like the life, the teaching, the people I get to know as they travel through the university, the sponsored research and development, all of it. So for me it'd be more of a career detour than an important stepping stone. "Remember, every project, every research thrust, every product, has a lifetime. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or in human terms, birth, development, maturity, slowdown, and death. That's nature. Nothing to be afraid of or ashamed of, but something you always have to be aware of." Janice came then with our food, and the conversation tapered off to small talk, short comments amid appreciative chewing and swallowing. Freddie's food was always good no matter how crowded the restaurant was, but with school out and only a few lunches to fix he could really demonstrate his talents, and he'd hit this one right out of the park for us. As we relaxed and let the food settle, I asked, "How does this opportunity compare with my future prospects if I just stay here and go on through the program at State?" "Jack, let me explain something to you. I teach a few courses and direct some research projects, but a very important function for all of us in the department is job placement. If we can get our grads into companies that are growing, then it's easier to place the next crop. The university has ongoing relationships with a lot of companies. They keep us up to date on what they're working on and what kinds of people they need, and we're constantly watching for rising stars. I know what the industry needs, what it can offer, and what the future holds - here, there, everywhere. If you continue your studies here you have a good future ahead of you, and I think you can expect good pay, interesting work, and reasonable job security. But this thing at MIT is the sort of thrust that comes along maybe once in a decade, and provided they get the right people working on it, the real contributors can expect opportunities that are out of sight. My advice, just my personal opinion, is that if you get a chance at this and turn it down, you'll be kicking yourself the rest of your life." Jack Be Quick Ch. 02 If you haven't read Chapter 01 you really ought to go back and read it now. Otherwise it's going to be like coming into a theater after the movie started. In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story. Hans ***** Christmas vacation wasn't much like what we'd expected. I made a quick trip to Cambridge for an interview, and then I had to do a whole lot of scurrying to withdraw from the life I knew and enter a whole new world. I'd compare it to surgery without an anesthetic - it was painful, but I was carried along by the thought of how much better everything would be after it was over. Winter weather gave the scalpel a special twist. Carrying boxes and luggage isn't any big deal in the other seasons, but with snow and ice underfoot, every step was an adventure. I wound up falling into a snow pile with a big box that came open and spilled books all over, and I came close to an encore performance a few times. You'd probably expect that leaving home would be the occasion of tearful farewells, and you'd be right. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. I'd been living in the same bedroom since I learned to walk. As I matured from a little kid into a computer guy I transformed a normal bedroom into a high tech laboratory, and I had a mountain of books and tools and equipment to move. Everything had to be disconnected here and there, and I had a couple of boxes just for cables and wires. Fortunately, George, the lab supervisor in Cambridge, had a space in one corner that somebody had recently vacated, where I could set up my stuff. It wasn't like a private office, but with a desk, table, and bookcase to work with, one long day saw the essentials installed, connected, and tested. The easy part was moving into Trudy's apartment. The girl who had been there the longest, had moved out at the end of the fall semester, which opened up her space. We moved into the largest bedroom, which must have been the master bedroom before this big old house was made into apartments. The closet was a walk-in with plenty of room for the two of us, and we had a private bathroom, which is practically unheard of in a college town. The bed was queen size, plenty big enough for the two of us, and we had two small desks and a bookcase. The rent was more than the other rooms, but I was making pretty good money from the security project so that wasn't a problem. All the tenants on the floor shared a living room, with two sofas, three overstuffed chairs, and various small side tables. Some folding chairs were stacked in a corner for overflow crowds. I was sitting in the living room catching my breath, and Trudy came in and plopped down in my lap. "I've got all my clothes hung up," she said, "Is there anything I can help you with?" "No, thanks. I think I've got everything put away. This is all new to me, and there's a lot more room than I expected. More than I had at home, in fact. Real nice place. "What I was just thinking about was the two of us sharing a room. My friends have told me what a lot of drama there usually is when a guy and girl move in together, but we just hustled into it like the most normal thing in the world. I never asked you if it was all right with you, and I'm sorry if I took that for granted. I think I'm so relieved to be here with you that my feelings got in the way of my manners. "When I left you here in August I was so worried about losing you that I was miserable. This project is a huge career boost for me, but the best part is that we're together again. And living together absolutely frosts the cake. Last night we went to sleep all wrapped up together, and we were still tight together when I woke up this morning." "I know just what you mean. This is such a relief for me, too. I was getting soooo homesick. Spending Thanksgiving away from home was awful. I cried myself to sleep a couple of nights that weekend. Now, with us together again, I feel that a huge weight's been lifted off my shoulders. I just hope we'll never be apart again." Her words were punctuated by a kiss. "Being in love is funny. It makes me feel so complete, to be in love with you and have you close. But when I think of all the years ahead of us, sometimes I worry about the possibility of something coming between us in all that time, and that makes me sick to my stomach." "Then let's just agree right now that we're together forever. We're a good pair, both smart but with different talents. As long as we're together we can face up to any obstacle, and we've had a semester apart to show us how awful that can be. So wanting to be together isn't just hormones or emotions. We're both smart enough to know a good thing when we've got it, and it's just up to us to make sure nothing ever splits us up. I feel as if I'm proposing to you and you're accepting, just like getting engaged. Maybe we are." Again, the flow of words was interrupted by two soft lips that got in the way. "Hey, I'll tell you what we oughta do. Some time, whenever I can get a few bucks ahead, let's buy an engagement ring to show the world that we've selected each other as our partner for life. Then out in the future we can get married, but it'll just be a formality. If you're looking for me to promise my life to you forever, this is it, right here, right now. We don't need to be in a church to make a binding promise. Agreed?" "I never thought about it that way. You're right. When we say we're in it for the long haul it's just like getting married. I won't have to be homesick any more, because from now on my home is wherever we're together. It'll be so much easier to live here now. I bet we'll both be able to concentrate on school a lot better, now that we're together again. We'll seem smarter than we were when we were separated." She sat up straight and put her hand up by her mouth. "Hey, you people out there in the academic world! We're about to run over all of you like a steamroller!" We dissolved into giggles, and it occurred to me that this was the best laugh we'd had together in a long time. It felt great! * * * * * * * * * * Dr. Glenn Carlson was the head of our project. We didn't see a whole lot of him because he was always flitting off to Washington or Quantico or New York or Pasadena or Seattle, wherever he was needed to meet with government people and bankers and industrialists who would use our systems once we had them together. Our product was not exactly an operating system or application software, but a little of each combined with customized hardware, and elaborate protocols for stitching us into users' normal businesses. We were laying the foundation for everybody who handled sensitive information so they could do it a new way, with new controls in place to allow the intended users to do their thing but keep everybody else out. It was expected that we'd never be finished. Everything we put together would be constantly evolving and improving, to keep a few steps ahead of all sort of enemies who were trying to steal secrets or disable our government and derail our economy. Glenn was sort of like the head coach on a football team, providing direction for the rest of us but relying on his subordinates to keep everybody moving in that direction, without stumbling over our feet. Glenn set up meetings with MIT faculty members to customize a curriculum for me, and insisted on a very flexible schedule so that I could complete my courses with a minimum of time away from our project. Virtually every exam was conducted as an in depth conversation with a faculty member, and my grades were entered into my record as a succession of 4's, to signify that I had fully met the course requirements. My quickness in acquiring and assimilating new information helped me to get through my directed studies in record time, so I could spend most of my time and energy on my work in the lab. It was was really fun to be with people who were at the very cutting edge of information technology and talk about things that lay ahead, passing ideas and suggestions back and forth. Occasionally what they were doing reminded me of subroutines I'd developed for tackling specific recurring problems, starting back when I was in junior high. I had a library of these little specialized programs that saved me from having to rediscover the wheel, some just macros consisting of a couple of lines of code, and some rather involved routines that ran a hundred lines or more. I freely shared anything I had that could save work for my friends, whether they were coworkers or fellow students or even faculty members. Gradually I became known as a guy who would make the time to listen to a person with a problem and help map out an approach to solving it. Even George, my supervisor, used me as a sounding board occasionally, and he often sent people to me for help. By the time I'd been there three months, he'd shifted my work station around to add a conference table and chairs, and I had more floor space in my corner than he had in his office. I was really surprised that none of this caused a ripple among my coworkers, even though I was the youngest member of the team. I was finding that when all of us were working as hard as we could to solve complicated problems and push the state of the art ahead by leaps and bounds, there was no room in anybody's mind for envy or conflict. The few people who couldn't fit into a team had been weeded out before I got there. Everybody had an important job to do, and all of the system had to be in place and tested before any of us could rest. Nobody would finish first. This was a team effort, not a horse race. * * * * * * * * * * After I got settled in at work and handled a few small tasks, the first big job I was given was a complicated problem that had been hanging around for months. The written description of it covered six pages, single spaced. The best analogy I can think of is that it was like solving about forty simultaneous equations, but there were more unknowns than equations and not all of the functional relations were continuous. What I didn't know was that everybody had taken a shot at it, and nobody had come up with a completely satisfactory solution. It's a good thing nobody told me it was impossible, because that might have inhibited me from taking the bold step of breaking out some of the functions into separate subsystems, and if I hadn't done that I'd still be wandering around groping for a right direction. It took me nearly a month to master it completely and demonstrate to my satisfaction that my package would work all the time. I went to George's office to arrange some time to show him what I'd come up with. It took him a couple of minutes to understand what I wanted, because when he saw me coming he was sure I was going to whine about not being able to solve the problem, just like everybody else. After his initial surprise, he asked me to stay late that night so we'd have privacy to go over what I'd done. We sat down at my work station after everybody had left, and I went through the whole demonstration for him. He asked a lot of questions and suggested some combinations of inputs that had sunk other attempted solutions. No matter what we fed in, we got sensible responses, mostly with less than two seconds of processing time. By midnight we'd run out of ways to try to defeat my package, and we sat back and relaxed. George said, "Jack, that's a great way to wrap up the worst problem we've come across so far. I don't know exactly what I'm going to hand you next, but rest assured that if I find another mess like that one, it'll have your name on it. So now I want you to do two things. First, take tomorrow off. Second, figure out what you'd like to buy Trudy that you couldn't afford up to now, because you'll have a little more money in your paycheck from now on." Trudy was delighted to know that I'd succeeded in doing what couldn't be done, and told me I was like Alexander the Great, slicing through the Gordian Knot. I told her that this knot was George's, not Gordy's. I avoided mentioning to Trudy that I got a token raise as a result. I knew from my reading that most raises range from one to five per cent, and that a manager will often have only one or two per cent of his payroll to distribute as raises. So when I opened my next paycheck envelope and found that I'd been given a ten per cent raise, I was flabbergasted! The next night I took Trudy out to a table cloth restaurant, and for dessert I did the whole proposal thing, getting down on a knee and finishing up by slipping a ring onto her finger. "Jack, I had no idea! Oh, it's going to be so late when we get home, but I have to call Mom before we go to bed. When the phone rings this late she'll be scared, thinking something awful has happened. But I have to tell her now, I can't help it." "Tru, this is big deal for us. This ring will mean different things to different people. To your mother it will mean that she can stop worrying about what kind of a man you'll spend the rest of your life with. To other men our age it will mean that you're no longer available. To your girl friends it will mean that there's no use asking you to go out on the town with them. To your older friends it will mean that you're a grownup now, taking a long view of life, not a little girl living for the moment. "But the most important thing is that to you and me, it's a visible symbol of our promise to each other, to stick together forever, come what may. I know it's natural for girls to worry about their future, so the next hundred times you wonder if you can bet your life on that promise, all you have to do is look down at your hand. Even in the dark, you can slip your right hand over your left and feel the hard evidence of my promise to love you and stand by you, forever. "Come on, let's get out of here. You can call your mom from the car. Tell her I expect an extra big hug next time I see her. And then let's have some alone time together." * * * * * * * * * * The project shut down for Spring Break, and we went home. It was great to see our parents, and I could feel how much I'd grown up in the short time I'd been away. We had a cookout at my house. Grace, Trudy's mom, brought the cole slaw and potato salad. Both were excellent, and my mom shared a private smile with me because I love potato salad, and had learned how to make it by helping her. From the time I was fourteen, any time we had a cookout I made the potato salad. And mine was good. Not better than what Grace made, but different, and in its own way just as good. She used a different kind of mustard in hers, and I made a mental note to incorporate that change in my recipe. And the cole slaw! Best I'd ever tasted. The cabbage provides the setting for the dressing, and making it taste just right is a fine art. It has to have just the right amount of mayo in it and the right balance of vinegar and sugar, and she had it worked out perfectly. Also, she added a little crushed pineapple. That's a great touch, but you need to have confidence in your recipe to toss in something so sweet. I pulled her off to the side to talk about all this and compliment her cole slaw. She was stunned. "Jack, I never dreamed that you'd understand about these side dishes. They're absolutely necessary for a good cookout. You know, ever since my mother died I haven't had anybody I could talk with about these things. You're a wonderful addition to the family, Jack. No matter what Trudy says, you're good to have around." Later in the afternoon Grace and I got talking about Swedish meatballs. We'd had a next door neighbor who made wonderful Swedish meatballs, and she moved away before I found out how she did it. Grace said she knew the secret. "The coffee controls the flavor, but you never notice it's there." "Coffee! What's that got to do with it?" I asked. "You have to put coffee in the meatballs. Real Swedes from the old country insist that the coffee has to be left over from the day before. That and the nutmeg are what set them apart from all other meatballs. Then they have to be kept small, and rolled up very loosely. If you hold one up and drop it onto your plate it should break all apart, kind of like glass shattering. Tomorrow let's let Trudy get with her friends and gossip about their classmates or whatever girl talk they want to do. You and I can have lunch together and then we'll spend the afternoon on Swedish meatballs. I'll show you all the tricks. By five o'clock the world will think you came from Stockholm." Wow, what a mother I was getting! We were staying at Trudy's parents' home because it had two empty bedrooms, not just one as at my house. We all had a great afternoon and evening of cooking, eating, talking, and a little card playing. When Grace said good night to everybody she pulled me aside. "Look, Jack, we know you and Trudy have been sleeping together. We understand, but it's different from the way we were brought up and it'd be uncomfortable for us to come right out and endorse it. That's why your mother and I insist that you have two separate bedrooms. But think of us as sound sleepers. The patter of little feet at night won't bother us, but try to keep the screams muffled. By the way, we never had this conversation." Then she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. * * * * * * * * * * Jim Mangrum asked me to join him at Freddie's for lunch one day. I found him at the same table we'd used before, and a scruffy looking guy was with him. He was a little older than Jim, had sort of long, unruly hair and the start of a beard, and was dressed in wrinkled clothes that might have looked good if they were cleaned and pressed. He was wearing scuffed hiking boots with cuffed pants. His shirt was worn out of his pants, but it had a button down collar. The whole picture just didn't look right to me, not exactly a nerd or a jock or scholar or laborer or businessman or bum, and whatever he was, I wondered what he was doing there with Jim. As I sat down Jim introduced the man as Jerry Cartwright. As we shook hands, Jerry's left hand flipped open an ID wallet that had an FBI card and a badge. Jim asked Jerry, "Do you want me to leave, to give you two some privacy?" "No, no, that's not necessary. Let's order our food and then we can talk for a minute, so by the time it gets here we can relax and enjoy a nice lunch." That said, Jerry turned to me. "Jack, I'll explain all this in a few minutes, but I want you to know that I'm an undercover investigator. And I can see in your face the question that's bothering you, so I'll answer it now. No, you're not in any kind of trouble." Janice came and took our order, and she and I chatted for a minute. She had seen the notice of our engagement in the paper and said she'd be putting the clipping up on their bulletin board. After she left, Jerry said, "Jack, you've been singled out as a reliable person, and we've investigated your background very carefully. Minutely. Microscopically. The reason is that we need a friend in your project, someone in the trenches who can verify things we need to make sure of. For example, if some guy says he was in the project area from early morning till past suppertime, we might need to ask if you happened to see him during that time. I need a friend who will tell me the absolute truth, even if it's 'I don't know.' In doing so, you can either confirm that we have an answer or let us know that we need to dig deeper to find one. Now that, in a nutshell, is what this is all about. Would you be willing to do that for us?" "Well, it seems sort of odd, but I can't see any reason not to help you. Is this all related to national security?" "Yes, exactly. You've already been briefed on how important and how secret your project is. Here's what we haven't told you or anybody else. We're keeping every detail of the work on the project very secret, but we are deliberately letting the existence and overall purpose of the project leak out here and there. It'll attract some people that we want to learn more about, maybe arrest. It's simply impossible to get them on a hook without bait, so your project is a tasty morsel that we're trolling with to see what we can haul in." Jack Be Quick Ch. 02 "Seems to me like a good plan. Am I in any danger?" "Not that I know of, but as this project goes on, it's bound to attract more attention, and you and your co-workers might be. Have you had any strange things happen? Anybody following you, anything like that?" "No. Well, maybe. A couple of times I've wondered if I was being followed. I dismissed the idea, because I didn't think anybody would want to follow me, and there wasn't much I could do about it anyway." "Well look, Jack, it could happen. There are a couple of things I can do to make you a little safer. Oh, here's our food." We ate, exchanging small talk in tiny bursts of words between bites. I found out that Jerry was from Nebraska, and that he had just lived through his second winter in Boston. "How does the New England weather compare to the Midwest?" "Actually a little milder. When the winter wind whips across the prairie there's not much to slow it down, and it can get bitter cold in a big hurry. When it's twenty or thirty below there's no place to hide from it. Boston can get pretty nippy, but there's always something to break the wind or a lobby to duck into to warm up. But we change assignments every three or four years, and I don't know one of the guys who wouldn't like to be sent to Miami or San Diego next." Jim chuckled. "How do you hide a pistol in a pair of swim trunks?" "I don't know, but I'm willing to learn." After the dishes were taken away and we were enjoying a cup of coffee, Jerry looked around and then slid a business card across the table to me. "Tomorrow, take your car to this address and tell Red that I sent you. He'll have another car for you to drive until yours is ready. When you go to pick it up, he'll tell you everything you need to know. Okay?" "Sure. As long as I have some wheels, that's fine with me. But will this delay our trip back to Cambridge?" "Yes, possibly by four or five days. Don't worry about it, I'll take care of it for both of you." While he was saying that, Jerry slid another card across to me. When I picked it up, there were actually two cards, both alike, one on top of the other. "Give one of these to Trudy and you keep the other one. If anything strange or unusual happens, or if you're in doubt about anything, call me at that number. Another thing, call to let me know if you're going anywhere, say, more than ten miles away from where you are. I'm not saying don't go, but just let me know so I can anticipate your travels. If somebody else answers, just leave a message." "What's all that for?" "We'll want to know where you're going so we can detect any unplanned movements. Suppose somebody wants to take you somewhere and you don't want to go. We want to know about it so we can go and bring you back." "Yeah, I understand. You really do think I'm in danger, don't you? And you think they might try to take Trudy as a hostage. This is getting kind of creepy." "Don't let it get to you. This is just a precaution, that's all. Do you keep an umbrella in your car?" "Sure. Never know when it might rain." "Okay. What about a shovel or a bag of kitty litter in the wintertime?" "Yeah, I've got both of those." "So you take normal precautions against extremes of weather, but you don't feel paranoid about it, do you? These simple precautions I'm giving you are the same way. They're not signs that something awful's going to happen, just ways to keep you safe if it does. So don't let any of this freak you out." Jerry looked at his watch. "Sorry, gotta go. I'll pay for your lunch on my way out. Wait five minutes, then leave." And with a little wave, he was gone. His abrupt departure reminded me of Saint Nicholas in Clement Clark Moore's poem, ". . . and giving a nod, up the chimney he rose." Jack Be Quick Ch. 03 If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Otherwise it's going to be like coming into a theater after the movie started. In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story. Hans ***** DO WE HAVE ANY FRIENDS IN UTICA? The next morning was my time to see Red. No, I don't mean I was angry. I went to exchange cars with Jerry's friend whose name was Red. The loaner was a small Pontiac four door sedan, dark blue, a couple of years old. It had to be one of the smoothest driving cars I'd ever used, although the suspension was a little stiff. Red cautioned me against giving it too much gas in a turn, but otherwise it seemed pretty ordinary. I did notice that it went through a quarter tank of gas in a hurry, but I wasn't going on any long drives so that didn't make much difference. Red had said that when I came back for my Ford it would handle differently from what I was used to, and I should allow a day or more for him to get me familiarized with it. When I went back to pick it up I took Trudy along so we could both get clued in together. I honked the horn as I stopped at Red's overhead door and it went up to admit us. I got out of the car and Red was shaking my hand when Trudy stepped out on the far side. Red's head moved a bit as he saw that there was somebody with me, and then he did a double take that would make a TV comedian proud. "Trudy!" he shouted. "Uncle Red!" She rushed around the front of the car and almost leaped into his arms. For five whole minutes I was forgotten. Then Trudy reached out for me and explained. "Uncle Red lived next door to us for years. He gave me driving lessons on the sly when I was twelve years old. He used to be a race car driver and he knew all about how to fix everything, and in his free time he was at our house more than his own and we all loved him. I never even knew that we weren't related until after he moved away. Uncle Red, will it be all right for me to tell my mom and dad that I've seen you? I won't get you in any trouble, will I?" "By all means, tell 'em I said hello. I've only been back here since Labor Day, and I've been busy getting the shop and test area set up. I'll have to get over to see your folks when I get a little free time." "What are you doing? What sort of a business is this?" "I call it 'Drive and Survive.' I have a few clients from the private sector, but my bread and butter work is government contracts. I equip and maintain cars that have to keep people out of trouble, and I teach people how to make 'em work. Then there are some sidelines that we can talk about later. My goodness, look at you. I always knew you'd grow up to be gorgeous. Jerry, the FBI guy, told me that Jack had a girlfriend and that you were both going to school in Boston, but I never had a clue that the girlfriend would be my little Trudy." Red called to a man who was halfway under a Chevy Lumina. He wheeled out and Red had us give him our cell phones, without any explanation. Then we were off in my Ford with Red driving, out of the city to what looked like a rundown, abandoned farm. He drove past it and turned in on a dusty crossroad, then off at an angle on a dirt lane that snaked around onto the farm, ending behind the old barn. A man stepped out, holding a shotgun. Red waved and yelled, "Hey, Kelly." The man returned the wave and stepped back into the shadow of the barn. We drove between two huge, bushy cedar trees that brushed lightly against the car, and emerged into an open space that I'd estimate at twenty acres. In the foreground was a blacktop track that looked like part of a formula one racecourse. It had one long straightaway and curves this way and that, including a couple of right angle corners. Beyond all that was a huge area of blacktop that looked like a parking lot without lines. Orange cones were placed to mark out some sort of a pattern, but I wasn't up high enough to make out its shape. Way off in the far corner of the field I could see a small oval dirt track, with the turns at the far end banked steeply while the nearby end was flat. Red parked and turned in the driver's seat to face both of us, me in the front passenger seat and Trudy in back. "When you came to drop off this car, it had a six cylinder engine, standard automatic transmission, and front wheel drive. It weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds. In the speed range that the engine operated in, it could put out about a hundred and twenty horsepower. "That was then. This is now. It has an eight cylinder engine with variable valve timing, a whole lot of special stuff on each cylinder head, a computer driven fuel injection system, and selective cylinder operation. There are two spark plugs and four valves for each cylinder. A mechanical blower provides instant supercharging when it's needed for quick acceleration at low speed, and a turbocharger takes over as the engine revs up. The drive train is all new, with a four speed automatic transmission that can be shifted manually with paddles above the steering wheel. It drives with the rear wheels, giving it a whole different way of handling in curves and sharp turns, more like a light truck or a NASCAR race car. You've got to learn how to do the turns safely or you'll spin out and lose control. "Trudy, your legs must feel cramped in the back seat. To get the big engine in, going fore and aft instead of side to side, we had to move the front seats back. Even at that it was a tight fit. If anything has to be done to the engine, even a routine oil change, call Jerry's number and somebody will get it done for you. "Don't ever let anybody look under the hood. "You with me so far?" Trudy asked, "How much power does this engine put out?" "In its normal operating range, somewhere north of four hundred horses. That's based on dynamometer tests of similar engines. At max horsepower, probably close to eight hundred, but at such a high shaft speed that you'd never be able to use it except maybe in a racing hydroplane. The mechanical blower gives it a lot of low speed torque, and you won't find an engine that will give a car this much snap, short of a racetrack. But what's different about this engine is that it will operate smoothly, just like a regular car, when it's running on four cylinders. That'll give you pretty good gas mileage. The high performance options are all turned on and off with this one little switch on the steering wheel. We put that and the switches for cruise control, plus a panic button, on the steering wheel and took away the radio controls, so you'll have to select radio stations and adjust volume on the front panel of the radio, like most of the other people in the civilized world." "Are you going to teach us to drive this thing?" I asked, thinking that learning by trying this and that might get us into some real trouble. "Suppose you smoked cigars, and I took away your lighter and gave you a dynamite stick in its place. You'd still have a usable device, but if you didn't get detailed instruction you could blow your head off. That's just what we have here. I'll be here with you until you can almost do everything with your eyes shut, not only knowing what to do but being so practiced at it that it becomes second nature. And it's not just because I've loved this little girl of yours since she was a toddler. The FBI is paying for all this, and you, as a taxpayer, have a right to get the full value of this training. "Now try hard to pretend that you've never driven a car before, and just pay attention to what I'm going to teach you. You both ready to do that?" For the next four hours, nearly without a break, we learned to drive. For every maneuver and every trick, Red taught us when to do it, why, and how; it was demonstrated until we really caught on to what it felt like, what to use as our cues to know when to punch the gas or back off or hit the brake or spin the wheel; and what could go wrong and how to correct the problems. Then we'd take a turn at the wheel and learn by doing. First Trudy and then I executed the moves over and over until we could have done it all in our sleep. And then on to the next thing. After four hours were up, Red announced that we were about halfway there. Rather than go on we should call it a day and come back in the morning, when we'd be fresh. By the time we took a lunch break the next day, we were pretty good at defensive driving. I was a little better than Trudy at most of the stuff on the regular track, including the J turns, but she was a little better on the skid pad. Anything that required split second timing I could do better, but anything that depended on the feel of the car she had me by a hair. She whispered to me that the difference was that her butt was more tender than mine, and I couldn't argue with that. Red gave us each two cards to carry in our wallets with our licenses, one that said we had completed the course, and another so that any time we did something that would normally get us in trouble, like driving on the sidewalk or hitting garbage cans with the bumper to send them flying like hockey pucks, we could show the card to the police and they'd let the FBI take care of it. We had lunch at a little diner that normally we'd never have set foot into. The place looked like a dump, but the food was great. Red got a smile and a hello from everybody, including the guy in the kitchen, and going there for lunch was more like visiting his friends than going to a restaurant. I thought we were all finished with our training, but instead Red told us that the afternoon would be spent on firearms training with Kirk. Kirk was tall, with wavy gray hair and a little pencil mustache. He started us off with how to hold a handgun. "This is a forty caliber semi automatic pistol. You may hear people say that it kicks hard when you fire it. That's nonsense. There's always some recoil any time you send a bullet downrange, but compared to most, this is a low recoil handgun. Notice the word, handgun. Let that word remind you always that to make it work for you the hand and the gun must come together just right. Let's do it very slowly. Hold your hand out palm up and spread your fingers. Now I'm going to lay the gun in your hand. To hold it, wrap these three fingers up and around the grip. That's right. Now bring your thumb down over the top fingernail, like this. Notice how firmly you can hold it? Press the thumb hard onto that finger. That tightens your grip. Now place the other hand over the three fingers that are wrapped around the grip. Finally, put the thumb of the outside hand down over the first thumb. Notice that both thumbs are pointed at the target. That's it. That's all there is to it. Later, I'll teach you some ways to handle emergencies, but just remember that any time you can, you'll use both hands, and this is how you'll do it. You'll find that the gun's recoil won't be a problem, because you know the right way to marry your hands to the gun." From there, we went into progressively more complicated things to do with a handgun, including making it go bang and making holes in things. We spent five hours with Kirk, and then he pronounced us competent to carry. He told us to come back the next morning and bring our laptop computers with us. That day we got more instruction, and more firing practice. But first he called in his assistant, who looked over our laptops and fixed us up with briefcases that would each carry a laptop and a pistol. They were leather, and had that brand new look and smell and feel. Then he took them into another room. When he brought them back a half hour later, they looked like some old things we'd been carrying all over a college campus for years. While he was aging the briefcases, we helped fit shoulder harnesses on each other. A shoulder holster is a good way to conceal a pistol if you're wearing a jacket, but unless each strap is adjusted exactly right they can be very uncomfortable. When we had them right we knew it, because we could move, bend, stretch, and reach, and they moved with us like part of our bodies. Then there were gunbelts and tricky belt holsters that could be worn outside or inside the waistband. They were a lot easier to adjust but harder to get comfortable with. After we were all equipped and our last minute questions had been answered we were given a metal box, like a small footlocker, that had a combination lock. The bottom of the box was lined with boxes of ammunition. Then there was a gun cleaning kit, over on one side. The pistols were slipped into holsters and laid in carefully, and the rest of the holsters, shoulder harnesses, and belts topped it off. The box, which was pretty heavy with all that stuff in it, was secured in a recess on the floor behind the passenger seat, and an old blanket was tossed casually over it. When I drove out onto the street that afternoon, I felt nervous, as if everybody could tell that we were not really just a couple of college kids on vacation. But the reality was that the car looked the same as always. The mud that had sprayed all over it on the skid pad had effectively camouflaged the new wheels, and everything else was the same as it had been, so after the first mile I started to calm down. The payoff was when Trudy turned to me with a dreamy look and asked, "Jack, did all that really happen? This wasn't all a dream, was it?" "Just reach your hand around back of your seat. Feel the box?" She nodded. "Then it's all real. I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger and you're Jamie Lee Curtis. I guess that means Jerry is Tom Arnold. But the most real part of all is that I love you. That never changes." * * * * * * * * * * The New York Thruway is a wonderful way to get from one end of the state to the other. Truckers love it because it avoids some of the hilliest country east of the Mississippi. But because it's so easy to drive it's been called the most boring of the eastern interstates, and I found myself doing all sorts of stuff to keep from getting hypnotized by the road. I made a ritual of checking all three of my mirrors in sequence. I varied my speed. I drove for a while in the left lane, then switched to the right. I passed trucks. I followed trucks. And I wasn't the only one who was bored. The driver of the big, black Lincoln behind us was doing all the same things I was. "Holy shit!" I sat up straight and gripped the wheel so hard that my wrists hurt. "Trudy! Get on the phone to that FBI number, quick!" She scrambled to get her phone and made the call. While it was ringing she asked, "What's wrong?" "We've got a tail!" As I said that, the phone was answered by a voice we'd never heard before. Trudy did the FBI verification routine and held the phone so I could talk into it. "We're being followed. A big black Lincoln sedan. We got gas west of Syracuse, and he's been with us ever since. Might have been on us before that, too." The agent didn't seem overly excited by my news, but he wasn't the one being followed by a big, scary looking car. "Travel at exactly eighty-eight miles an hour so I can track you. In about thirty miles you'll come to an exit for Utica. The ramp is long, almost like a separate highway. Take that exit and gradually slow down. Keep the phone on so we can talk." Trudy clipped the phone to the dash and plugged in the connection to our car's sound system. I asked her, "Can you climb into the back and get out our Saint Christopher medals?" referring to our pistols by the pet name we used for them. She scrambled back there, nimble as a twelve year old. I heard the combination dial spinning, followed by little clicks that told me she was getting her shoulder harness on. Then she asked, "Can you lean forward a little so I can get your straps clipped to your belt?" It took some twisting and squirming, but in about a minute she had me all hooked up. Then I heard her drop the magazine out of a pistol, rack the slide, squeeze off a dry fire, click the safety on, and slam a magazine into place. She handed the gun to me, and while I was slipping it into the holster I heard her going through the same sequence with hers. The phone clicked and the agent came on the line. "I heard you getting your hardware on. Having it in plain sight invites people, anybody really, to get alarmed and call the police on a regular phone connection. The ones you really have to watch out for are the toll collectors, who are trained to be the eyes of the state police. If you have a vest that you can slip on without wrecking the car, this would be a good time to do it." A few minutes later he was back. "Your exit's coming up. Once you're on the ramp, do exactly the speed limit for two miles and then start gradually slowing down." As I turned off from the main roadway, the Lincoln followed as if we were towing it on a long rope. When we slowed down, so did the Lincoln. The agent came back on. "Turn your power switch on now." I did. "Up ahead there's a curve, and then you'll see a dump truck in the median. As soon as you see it, switch your emergency flashers on and floor the gas pedal. As you pass by the truck, let up on the gas and slow down to the speed limit." The truck came into view, a huge dump truck heaped up with sand or dirt or something. On the front it had a V-shaped snowplow blade about as big as a small house. The driver started it forward to block off the ramp, and we just got by as he was bringing the plow blade onto the pavement. I was watching the roadway ahead, but flicking my eyes to the mirrors to keep aware of everything happening around us. I didn't need to look at Trudy because she was behind me, clutching onto my bucket seat to keep from being tossed around in the back. Her breath on the back of my neck felt scorching hot. The Lincoln was about a hundred yards behind us. Our Ford was still accelerating, and we were doing well over a hundred miles an hour. The Lincoln was probably doing ninety by then, too slow to catch us but too fast to swerve and avoid a collision with the truck. It struck the huge snowplow blade, which acted like a ski jump. With a sound like an explosion, the Lincoln shot up in the air, twisting as it went, and crashed down twenty yards away in a cloud of dust and flying parts. Two state police cars appeared with lights and sirens on, headed for the crash site. As we approached the toll booth, the agent on the phone said, "Good job. Turn your flashers off. Enter the small parking lot on your right. Park there, headed out toward the ramp. Keep the engine idling, but you can lean back and catch your breath for a half hour or so. Keep the windows up and the doors locked, and don't do anything without checking with me first." He sounded as calm as if he were reading us a bedtime story. Our bucket seats didn't recline the way the bench type seats with separate back cushions do, but the whole seat could tilt back about halfway, like a reclining chair without a footrest. I tilted back a bit and let my muscles relax. My leg muscles loosened up first, but even after my hands were loose my arms were still tense, and it took a while to get back to normal. My shoulders hurt. Across my back I was still tight, ready for a fight. As Trudy climbed back into the shotgun seat she grunted with the effort to get her muscles to cooperate, so I knew it wasn't just me. Gradually the adrenaline drained away, leaving us feeling lethargic. I asked, "How did you know you could get my shoulder harness on me while I was driving?" "I just thought we should have our guns on us, and I could see all the moves in my mind to get you hooked up without getting out of your seat. I don't know if I could do it now, but at the time it seemed as clear as if I had printed instructions. You were doing such a great job of staying in control and I wanted to help, be part of the team. How did you feel while all that was going on?" Jack Be Quick Ch. 03 "Better than I'd expect. I'm not used to life or death situations, but while it was happening my mind was operating the way it did in that batting cage years ago. All the things that I thought might be just a blur were clear and sharp, just like those baseballs coming at me. I had plenty of time to check on everything and prepare for what was coming next. I had the Lincoln in the mirrors as if my eyes never left it, even though I snatching quick glances so I could keep watching the road. I even had time to check the gauges to see what the engine temperature was, while we were going maybe a hundred and twenty. And I'm just now realizing something else, sort of a neat surprise. It felt good!" Trudy didn't feel quite as elated over the adventure as I did, but she had gotten into it and as long as we were safe, she was okay with it. We gradually relaxed as we talked about this and that, until the agent got on the phone again. "As far as we can see there aren't any more hostiles in your area. We've studied the surroundings very thoroughly and everything looks okay. So you're good to go as soon as you feel like it. When you leave, just go right out onto the on ramp and continue your trip. But don't stop and don't get out of the car. You should have enough gas to make it all the way. If traffic stops on the interstate call me immediately. We'll be tracking you all the way. Any questions?" Trudy spoke up. "We haven't had any lunch, and we had almost no breakfast. How can we get something to eat? And some coffee?" "I'll have something brought to you. Just sit tight." About twenty minutes later the phone crackled again. "A blue Chevy pickup will be there in a minute. The driver will show FBI ID. After he does, open your window and he'll hand you your lunch. Also, he'll give you a box that contains what we call a stakeout kit. It's so you can take a pee or whatever without getting out of the car. You'll need that, I'm sure. Have a good trip." Sure enough, an agent pulled up in a two tone blue Silverado. He handed the packages through the window, and he was gone. Trudy cracked up. "We need that guy at home. Just call and we get our meals delivered, and we don't even have to pay. I could get used to this. What's your choice, pastrami or ham and cheese?" The rest of the trip went well except for the stakeout kit, which was a real nuisance to use. Trudy was especially unkind in her comments about it. A strange thing happened in the Albany area. Sort of funny, now that I reflect on it. I have a pretty strong case of acrophobia, the irrational fear of high places. When we cross the Hudson River, the simplest way to do it is on the Berkshire Section of the Thruway, a few miles south of Albany. The highway crosses a deep canyon where in my judgment, the river is about five miles down below long twin spans that look as substantial as strands of spiderweb. I don't drive over the river that way. Either Trudy can drive over that bridge, with me cowering in the passenger seat looking down at my feet, or I take the main stem of Interstate 90 that goes through the middle of Albany and crosses the river down low, on a wide, substantial bridge with lots of concrete. But after our adventure at Utica, I wasn't even thinking about the spider web bridge. I just turned onto the Berkshire Section as if I drove that way every day. Trudy asked, "Want me to drive here?" For some reason the terrifying bridge was of no importance to me right then. "Thanks, but I'll do it. It's no worse than the Utica offramp, I guess. I probably won't feel this way about it next time we're here, but today it's just no biggie." We were almost home when we got a phone call and Jerry's voice spoke to us. "Welcome home, kids. Your house has been checked out and it's okay. Just make sure you do the whole security routine with the car, and then you can go in and say hi to your apartment mates and get a good night's sleep. If anybody asks, nothing unusual happened on your way across New York State. Tomorrow I'll call you at work, Jack, and answer whatever questions you'll have thought up by then. Good night." * * * * * * * * * * Jerry was as good as his word. I had lots of questions and he patiently answered every one. I learned that when we were in danger the FBI orchestrated a team effort to rescue us. FBI agents, Federal Marshals, New York State Troopers, New York State Department of Public Works, Sheriff's Deputies, and the armed forces all played roles in it, and that was the real lesson to be learned from the episode. There is no such thing as a nationwide crime prevention network. It doesn't exist in the executive branch, it's not mentioned in the Constitution, it doesn't have a website or a phone number. But it does exist, lots of good people out there who cooperate to do the right thing, and they don't hesitate about it. When you're in trouble, if you have the right friends who can call in favors on the spot, you'll be taken care of. That big dump truck belonged to NYSDPW, but the driver was FBI. After the Lincoln crashed, the network grew even larger. To check out the route we'd be taking to get home, Air Force F-16s with millions of dollars worth of cameras and communication gear were flown over it at near sonic speed. The photos were interpreted by intelligence specialists from the Army National Guard who were already familiar with every blade of grass in the area. To get a closer look in questionable spots, Army National Guard helicopters were called in. After the wreck cooled down the FBI identified the remains of the two bad guys who had been in the Lincoln and passed the information on to an Interpol office in Belgium to get their opinion on what they were doing here. And finally, the stakeout kit was a product that had been developed by the French Army. When I explained all this to Trudy that evening, she was as amazed as I was. We can't escape the fact that national and state boundaries and bureaucratic organization charts are losing their meaning. Lots of folks are out there to help you get through the toughest scrape, if you're on their side. Without them we'd have been just plain screwed. We thought it over and agreed that we'd do our best to pull our weight as part of this extended family of good guys. A week later a strange thing happened. Trudy, who was a whiz with finances, balanced our checking account every month, always right to the penny. Even though we weren't married we had a joint account, which in itself said something about the way we viewed our relationship. But that month, the numbers just wouldn't come out right. Finally she asked me to look it over, and it was obvious that we had two thousand dollars that we couldn't account for. Next day she took the figures to the bank, where an assistant vice president tracked down the source of the problem. Two deposits, one in her name and one in mine, had been made from a source identified as Gregory Bates. That night I called Jerry, who explained that Gregory Bates was a name used as cover for special expenditures, including paying 'confidential consultants.' "Look, is that all right with you two? We never negotiated a figure so I just put down what came to my mind first, but if it's not enough I can . . ." "No, no, Jerry, that's not it at all. We didn't even know we were being paid. We're not in this to get rich. It's nice to have extra cash, but we're comfortable. We're students, for gosh sakes, and we don't need a whole lot of cash. If we should feel a pinch I'll tell you, but for now we're just fine with this. And thank you very much." "Well, here's what I can do. That car can drink up a lot of gas, and we ought to help you out there. I'm going to mail you credit cards, one for each of you, that you can use for various expenses at your discretion. Filling the gas tank? With the card you can pay right at the pump. Too busy to cook? Eat out and put it on the card. Need vests or jackets to conceal your defensive hardware? Use the card. Whatever. That should simplify your accounting a little. The government's still getting a bargain on you two, so don't worry about the details." * * * * * * * * * * I worked late the next few nights. I was part of a four-man team working on a computer routine called a six-way interpreter and we were having trouble getting it to work in time to be assembled to a larger module. We finally got it right and I got home at midnight, to find Trudy waiting up for me. I was afraid there was something wrong but it turned out she was just lonesome for me, and she searched for creative ways to express her joy at having me home. Her creativity was so good that we didn't get to the part when we lie quietly in bed beside each other, until almost dawn. She kissed me good night, or good morning or whatever, and my head hit the pillow just in time to hear the phone ring. Jerry's voice sounded sleepy, but I'm sure mine was a match for it. "What's up?" "We have a slight puzzle, and we need help figuring it out. Step out of the lab at ten and walk toward the admin building. I'll find you and we'll take a ride and talk." It wasn't unusual for me to come and go during the day, since I had occasional lectures and meetings with faculty members to attend, as part of my progress toward a degree, So nobody raised an eyebrow when I left in the morning to meet with Jerry. Driving along Storrow Parkway, which skirts the Charles river, Jerry explained his problem. "We keep track of what's going on at your lab by measuring and counting the things that we can measure and count. Headcount is up, higher than it's ever been. That's consistent with the progress reports, which indicate that the groundwork has been laid for the system, and the various bits and pieces are now being developed in parallel. All along we've kept track of the number of times the door opens and closes, and we've related that to headcount. The relationship looks pretty ragged at first, but by plotting a three day average of the door against heads, we've got a pretty decent curve so we figure we know what it ought to look like. But in the past week it's gone all to hell. Somebody's doing a whole lot of coming and going, and oddly enough, more going than coming, so much that it must be pretty obvious from the inside what's going on. I need to know what you can find out or figure out, or even a decent hunch we can pursue further. Give it some study and let me know what you think, but don't call me about it from the lab." "All right. Can you get me a list of our people? I don't want a special request made for the information, but you must have it in some form or other from the regular reports you get every month." "Okay, I see where you're going with this. I'll have it by tonight. How about dinner tonight, you and Trudy and me at the Green Goose. Okay?" "I think so. We were up late last night. Trudy's going back at eleven to catch a nap. Unless you hear otherwise, figure on us at seven." I could have used a nap myself right about then, but I went back to work and tried to look nonchalant. I think I did pretty well, but as tired as I was, I probably looked a little chalant around the edges. It didn't matter because everybody was hard at work, and if I'd set off a firecracker in the place they wouldn't have noticed. The lab was a big, open space with George's office along the back wall, along with a store room and a couple of equipment rooms. There were five emergency exits, and they were all alarmed. If anybody opened one of those doors a signal went off to several places including the FBI office, and it sounded a loud horn at the same time. It was really loud, impossible to ignore. All coming and going was done at a single point. To get out, you went through a turnstile to a door that opened with a panic bar on the inside. The outside of that door was one smooth surface, with no handles or doorknobs. To get in, you had to put your badge into a card reader, which unlocked a turnstile to let one person to the door, which would open once for the person who just come through the turnstile. Then the card reader wouldn't read another badge until the door had clicked shut. If we'd all been working the same hours we would have made quite a queue at the entry point, but we all came and went at different times so the inherent delay in entry wasn't a problem. I sat at my desk, doodling on a scratch pad while I thought about people going in and out. My first thought was that there couldn't be a problem. Suppose we had forty people, which was about the size of the work force. Each person comes to work, goes out to lunch and returns, and leaves at the end of the day. But suppose that person has a class in the middle of the workday. That could cause another entry, making three. Then par would be 120 entries per day, and the exits should match the entries. I pulled out a box of assorted gadgets that I'd accumulated over the years, and dug around till I found a digital listening device about the size of a golf ball, hooked up to a little counter. In seventh grade I had used the combination to count bird calls for a science project. By adjusting the frequency sensitivity and the threshold level on the listener I could select one specific kind of bird call that would make it send a one to the counter, while ignoring all the other sounds. The problem with doing that sort of adjustment is that you can't get a red wing blackbird to call, or a door to bang shut, on demand. So just as in the seventh grade, I had to make adjustments, go back to what I was working on, make a few more, work some more, and so on. It took a while, but by suppertime I had a pretty good way to count all the times the exit door closed, while ignoring all the other noises in the lab. Most of the employees left for home between 4:30 and 6:00 pm, which gave me an excellent chance to verify the operation of my door counter. The next morning I'd examine the data carefully and see what I could learn about what the door was doing, and by mid afternoon I'd have a full day of data to use as a basis for future comparisons. Trudy really would have preferred to go right to bed at six that night, but there was no way that she would give in and miss all the excitement of a clandestine conspirators' meeting. So off we went to meet Jerry. He came into the Green Goose just as we were sitting down at a back table, and he looked as weary as we felt. Working for Jerry was good for us in that he always seemed so happy to see us. Immersed in a world of make believe, in a business where nobody takes anybody's word for anything, Jerry seemed to regard us as his normal friends. He had personally selected us to be on his team, after checking us so thoroughly that he knew we were squeaky clean. We'd never even got a parking ticket. "Oh, God, I'm beat. When we leave here I'm going straight to bed. Jack, what do you know about the door counts?" "At first glance the system that you've got on the entry door seems infallible, provided that the wiring is all intact and protected. You can record every time a person operates the door, and if he or she doesn't go on in, there's nothing else they can do. On the other hand, the space is so tight that I think it would take some real acrobatics to get two people in on one cycle of operation. The antics they'd have to go through would be so obvious to any passerby that it'd be very risky. I recommend that you get a team of techs in there on a weekend, tear out the old wiring, and do it over with extra heavy steel conduit, out in the open. I 'd also recommend a security camera overhead to record what goes on there, 24-7. "You don't have a meaningful count on the exit door. It opens and latches mechanically, and leaves a count that's not tied to anything else, even the clock. I've rigged up a quick and dirty acoustic counter setup to get me a record of when and how often the exit door closes. I'm wondering if somebody stood at that door late at night and opened and closed it a bunch of times, just to confuse you. It might have just been a way that somebody could blow off steam, without any serious implications. Remember you're dealing with dedicated techies, and they're not wired the same as people you're used to. "It is possible for somebody to open the exit door from inside and let somebody sneak in, but they'd have to deal with the exit turnstile. But that's inside, so at night nobody'd see a guy climbing over it. "The entry and exit turnstiles are your weakest spots. I'm surprised that you don't have the kind they have at ports of entry and some of the ultra secure courthouses, full height, with the rotating bars combing the spaces between stationary ones. "Now about data and what they mean. Every time the card reader scans a badge it counts one. That same pulse is what unlocks the entry door. Your system assumes that there is an exact match between reads and unlocks, so you don't collect any data from the door itself. The unlocks are what allow the door to be opened, as long as it was locked after the last guy went through it. We need to collect data on the door opening, door closing, and door locking, not just unlocking and definitely not just badge reading. A heavy duty mechanical door closer would be a sensible addition, too. "We can suppose that any time a person walks in the door he enters the lab. That's because it's so obvious that nobody has ever questioned it, or tried to find a place somebody could slip into and stay there until the lab is empty. There's nobody working over by the entry and exit doors, and some sort of strange stuff could go on over there and you'd never know it. Even more basic, you need to know if people are carrying anything out with them, and you have no way at all to monitor that. "So my first guess is that somebody is fooling around with your exit counting, just to jiggle your chain. Maybe it's deliberate misdirection. But you don't know because in real terms, your in and out security is so porous as to be meaningless." Jerry looked hurt by that remark. I probably would have worded it more tactfully if I weren't dead tired. "Sorry, Jer. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but just think about it and I'm sure you'll agree with me. Human surveillance has apparently been ruled out since the beginning of the project. That decision must have been made when there was nothing inside to protect. Now that there's meaningful stuff in there, that decision needs to be reviewed. Cameras are easier to fool than well trained security agents. With a hundred thousand servicemen and women coming back from Afghanistan and needing jobs, it shouldn't be all that hard to keep an eye on who's coming and going, or what they're doing while they're there. "I've heard people compare this operation to the Manhattan Project, but they're totally different. The Army managed the Manhattan Project. At its peak it employed way over a hundred thousand people, and we'll probably never have over a hundred. They had millions of people in the Army that they could draw from to keep everything secret. The very existence of the project was a secret. Now look at what we've got here at MIT. This is a project that employs only about forty people, and is on its way to a hundred. But instead of keeping its existence a secret, you've deliberately advertised it to all the world's spy networks. So the game's not the same. We need to use all the security technology that's available, and add the human element too. Even if you need to hire two hundred security agents to watch over a hundred workers, it's a bargain." Jerry listened to every word. He'd been recording it all on a pocket recorder and I knew he'd play it back to people up the line. I stopped and he said a few words to sum up. "What you're saying is that our data on coming and going have questionable validity and significance. They could mean something, or they could mean nothing. They could even be a red herring to confuse us and get us looking the wrong way. I'll be interested in seeing what your acoustic counter comes up with, particularly because it's independent of anything else we've got. But no matter what it shows, we've got a lot of tightening up to do. Thanks, Jack. Keep your ear to the ground." Jack Be Quick Ch. 03 The seed I planted with Jerry bore fruit. I think "eventually" would be a good adverb - after all, this was a government operation. He made a nuisance of himself for a month, hounding the chain of command to set up a real security operation. Then there were studies to be made, drawings to prepare, specifications to be written, and the project advertised for bids. Contractors were given a month to bid on the work, and it took a month to analyze their bids and award the contract. So the work didn't start until six months after we had our meeting with Jerry, which was funny because doing the work, as extensive as it was, took only a month, from knocking down the first concrete block to sweeping up the last of the dust. During that month we had armed security guards inside and outside the work zone, and at the temporary entry and exit doors. One whole wall of our project area was demolished, in two installments. First the eastern half was demolished and rebuilt with new in and out doors, and all kinds of improved security stuff incorporated from the get-go, not hung on later. Then the western half, where the old doors were located, was demolished and rebuilt with a safe room in the corner for the security computers. While the demolition was happening they hung plastic sheet from floor to ceiling to protect our working space from the dust and debris, but it was impossible to catch it all and the place was pretty dusty by the time the work was finished. One interesting and lasting result was that my pay from Gregory Bates suddenly increased from a thousand to two thousand dollars a month. Good old Gregory. I had to laugh, because what I was being rewarded for was real consulting. After being a consultant since Spring Break, I'd finally had my first consultation. Jack Be Quick Ch. 04 If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Otherwise you'll feel like the only guy in the conference room who doesn't know what the meeting's about. In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story. Hans ***** NO GOOD DEED SHOULD GO UNPUNISHED In the wake of the great entry and exit overhaul, morale seemed to pick up a notch. The place looked a lot more professional, less half-assed and temporary. It was like moving into a real house after having camped out in the backyard. The neat, finished appearance said that somebody cared about us, that we mattered, and what we were doing was really important. But just as we were feeling so good about our project, we experienced a catastrophe that cast a pall over the whole lab, and the abrupt change from glee to gloom almost crippled us. We lost our leader. George had been the lab supervisor from day one, and was simply the perfect man to get the geeks and nerds herded together and keep them marching in the same direction. He was patient and consistent, and he had earned a unique position in our minds, not quite as our father, but more like everybody's supporter and protector. A brief memo was distributed to all of us, saying that he had died in an automobile accident. We later learned that a Dodge sedan had lost control and collided with George's Chevy, which then went off the road and hit a tree. The Dodge had been stolen. After the accident it was abandoned and its driver was never found. The confusion and pain that George's loss caused in our project was intensified by the way we were working. Our system was ultimately to be adaptable to a wide variety of users, including federal government agencies, banks, insurance companies, local governments, virtually any place that terrorists might want to infiltrate and disrupt. The whole system consisted of building blocks that we called modules. To equip a given user, we would take the core modules and adapt them to the user's needs, first by picking and choosing from dozens of accessory modules and attaching them to the core, and then making user-specific modifications to special skeleton modules that were mostly input and output functions. When George's accident happened, we were working long hours to get three of the core modules ready to demonstrate to our advisory committee. But on hearing the news, our productivity came crashing down to the ground. Our team resembled a bunch of private subcontractors. Everybody began with the specification for a piece of module and supplemented that with his own notes, which usually were so sketchy that they'd be meaningless to anybody else. Then they headed off into the wild blue yonder, writing code while carrying some of the key information in their heads and nowhere else. If that sounds like a haphazard way to work, you're missing two key points. Truly creative people work in flashes of inspiration, building a structure of logical transactions that don't mean much until they are all linked together at the end. And to make it more confusing, every one of these near geniuses marched to the beat of his own drummer, had since early childhood, and had a unique way of organizing his creative work that was incompatible with regimentation. For a day, not much got accomplished. I talked with a lot of my friends, and they all complained of feeling tired, not being able to solve simple problems quickly, making mistakes and having to go back and do large amounts of code over again, and not being able to remember where they had parked important variables. Things began to pick up on the day after that, but nothing like the blinding pace we'd all been working at before the accident. Glenn Carlson came and used George's office to interview several of our key people, and I was the last one he talked with. As I walked into the office, he gestured to a chair and sat for a minute with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Then he sat up straight and faced me, looking grim. "Jack, you knew George as well as anybody here. He talked about you so often, and he told me that you're the youngest man on the team but the one he depended on the most. So I need your inputs. How do we get back on track? How can we get over this awful loss?" How do you answer a question like that? How do you tell the Captain of the Titanic that he doesn't have enough lifeboats? I took a deep breath. "Dr. Carlson, this project will live or die on the quantity and quality of work the programmers do, and their productivity depends mostly on how they feel about the project and about themselves. So I'd like you to try to see this from where we all sit. I'm young, but in a lot of ways I feel more mature than most of the people here. We were all hired because of our ability to create, and that's what we do, starting with nothing and then piling one brick on another, with no regard for the rest of the world. Growing up, we depended on our mothers and fathers and siblings to handle the rest of the world for us, and when we came here we saw George as a surrogate for them. He was older and wiser and he'd let us come in here, close the door to shut the world out, and do what we do best, what we love to do. With George to watch over us and protect us we could work miracles, and the working environment he created and maintained was exactly what it took to make us happy to work here. "Now we need a new George. Not a professional manager, full of business school vocabulary and pie charts and clever stunts to manipulate us. But not exactly a nerd, focusing on the flyspecks. And he can't try to micromanage us. That would spell the end of any useful output. We need somebody who can see the big picture without losing sight of the details. He needs to respect the nerds and geeks, to encourage and guide them without stifling their creativity. He needs to give us direction, the way a father does for his family, and then let us take the job in our teeth and run with it. And he needs to understand and appreciate and protect his flock of brilliant children, the way a mother does. I haven't any idea where you can find somebody like that. But until you do, I'm afraid that very little of value will be produced. And unless you do, I'm afraid that you're going to lose a lot of your best workers, and possibly your whole program. Glenn looked astonished, as if I'd just slapped him in the face. He said nothing, and I felt as if I'd dumped this all in his lap too abruptly. "Look, Dr. Carlson, I didn't mean to shock you. I'm sorry if I hit you too hard with this. I never meant to . . ." "No! No! Jack, you just told me exactly what I came here to find out. You've shown me what I need if I'm to find my way out of this problem. All the people I've talked with so far have told me exactly nothing. They're very sorry to lose George. Holy Mother of God, I didn't need to come here to find that out. I'm sorrier to lose him than anybody! But you've just made sense out of what it takes to run this lab, and why George was so good at it. You've given this problem some definition, added new dimensions. What you've said doesn't make my problem seem easy, but you've given me a yardstick to measure possible solutions against. This is the first light I've seen at the end of this tunnel! I could hug you." I didn't know what to say or do, so I sat still and kept my mouth shut. Glenn stood up so I figured maybe the interview was over, and I stood up too. "I've been in here long enough," he said as he flexed his arms and legs. "It's about lunchtime. Let's go find a quiet place to grab a bite. Any suggestions?" "How about the Green Goose? It looks terrible but the food's good, and I'm pretty sure that the FBI has it swept clear of bugs." "Green Goose it is!" He led the way out of the lab to where he had a parking space with his name on it. When we got to the Green Goose I was chuckling as I got out and closed the passenger door. Glenn asked me what was so funny, and I replied that this was probably the first Lexus ever to be parked in their lot. The proprietor called out to me from the kitchen. "Hey there, Jack. Jerry coming?" "Not that I know of. Got a minute?" "Sure." He came out, wiping his hands on his apron. "Roger, I'd like you to meet Dr. Glenn Carlson. He's a very big man at MIT, and he's been a tremendous help to me ever since I got here." They exchanged a few words and I led the way to the back table where I usually met with Jerry. Roger followed us to the table. "Special today is pastrami on rye, with Swiss cheese and spicy mustard, cole slaw on the side. Interested?" "Sounds great to me," said Glenn. "Same here," I said. "Got any fresh coffee?" "Just dripping down right now." "Make that two." said Glenn. Our table sat at a 45 degree angle to the front of the building, and Glenn was facing toward the door, while across from him, I had my back toward it. I heard the door open, but was surprised to hear Jerry's voice call out, "Hey, Glenn. I was planning to call you this afternoon." "Hi, Jerry. C'mon back. We've got room for one more." Jerry shook Glenn's hand. "Awful about George. Must leave you in a huge hole. He was a great guy." Then as he turned to pull out a chair, he saw me for the first time. "Hi Jack. Oh wait, you guys must be having a big discussion. I'd better not interrupt you." Glenn shook his head. "Jerry, I hardly know what I'm doing. Right now, I'm just having lunch with a young man who's trying to keep me from taking a bad problem and making it worse. Please sit down and join us. Sadness is easier when you can share it with friends." Jerry pulled out a chair and yelled to Roger, "Special for me, please, Rog." Jerry said to me, "This is the first time I've ever been able to have lunch with Glenn. Showing up at his office or one of the better restaurants together wouldn't be good for his reputation or for my cover, either." "I figured you two knew each other well, but I wasn't sure whether Dr. Carlson was supposed to know that you and I are friends," I explained. "That's why I didn't turn around when you walked in." "Oh, we know each other, all right. This project is sponsored by one of those federal offices that aren't supposed to exist, so the bureau was tapped to monitor it. But our project office has delegated its security coverage back to the bureau, so I just about wind up answering my own mail. The real way that things get done is like this, friends talking to friends. Friendship trumps org charts any day. Just like Utica." I smiled but kept quiet about the incident that officially didn't happen. "Look," Jerry said, "there's something that's going to come out sooner or later but it's best if you hear it from me. George's accident wasn't an accident. There, you know that now but I never said it, all right?" Glenn looked shocked. "Do you know any more?" "No. I suppose something will crop up. I hope so, because the only way we can make any progress is if some fresh information comes to light. We've wrung all the meaning we can get from the evidence at hand, and it's nothing. Could have been my grandmother. You know how some of these knowitalls like to say there's no such thing as a perfect crime? Well this one looks as perfect as you can get. No witnesses, no prints, no DNA, no clothing left behind, no clear footprints, no carpet fibers, not a thing." "Then how do you know it wasn't accidental?" I asked. "The way it was done, more than anything else. It was done professionally, all the earmarks they teach us to watch out for at the academy. The missing driver didn't get hurt, for another. The fact that the Dodge was wiped down, not a single print anywhere. The location, running into the only big tree near the road for five miles or more in either direction. The fact that George was applying full power to try to force the Dodge back, but he couldn't make it veer off to the left at all. The state police don't know where else to look, and neither do I." "You probably know what I'd do," I mumbled, almost without thinking. "What?" asked Jerry and Glenn in unison. "Get Red out here. If it was done with a car, he's the guy I'd ask." "It's not that simple. Good idea, but not that simple. Red is retained by the FBI office in your home town. If I want that sort of expertise I have to call in the guy who's retained here, and while he's good, he's young and he's never been through a murder investigation." "That's the biggest load of shit I've ever heard," I spat out. I was mad. Furious. I pulled out my phone and called Trudy. "Trudy, very important. Drop everything important! Call your Uncle Red and ask him to call me immediately. Please." "Great. Thanks, Babe." "Trudy's Uncle?" asked Jerry. "Where'd that come from? I checked her background myself." "Long story," I answered. I sat there, smoke probably coming out my ears but trying to get control of myself, when my phone rang. "Red, I need a favor. A big one. We've lost a key man in a fatal incident involving two cars and a tree. Everybody's wringing their hands but nobody can get a handle on it. Can you come here and give your professional opinion?" "Yeah, bring everything you need. Don't assume that anybody here has a thing." "Well, it gets complicated because we're out of your area, but if you can provide any useful information I'm sure we can work that out. For right now put down that your official contact is Gregory Bates." "Okay. Call me when you get over the state line into Massachusetts. I put the phone away and looked at Jerry. "There, I did that. If the bureau doesn't like it, send me to Leavenworth. But we need to know who killed George, and I'm in no mood for stupid excuses. I'll probably apologize to you for being rude, maybe tomorrow. Right now I don't feel like it. This crime may seem inscrutable, but the big picture is very simple. One, they tried to get me. Two, they got George. Three, the next victim will be one of the three of us at this table. I may be just a dumb kid who doesn't understand how the government works, but I'm not dumb enough to sit still with a target on my back, waiting for my number to be called." * * * * * * * * * * As Glenn parked his Lexus back at MIT, I told him, "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you by my outburst. I can't do any more talking today. Tomorrow morning, that's different, but for now I'm going home. I'll try to rest and clear my head tonight so I can be more help to you tomorrow." He understood, and we parted in the parking lot. Trudy had an early day, and would probably go to the library for a few hours. I called and told her I was headed home. She knew something was up, so she grabbed up her books and came home to be with me. "Honey, why don't you sit down and stretch your legs out and tell me all about it from the beginning. All I know is that George is dead. Take it from there and fill me in." "Okay. Here are the pieces that I know about. George was killed in a car crash. He was driving on a divided highway, two lanes in each direction. Another car came up to pass him, and seemed to lose control as it got alongside. It veered to the right, forcing George's car off the road and smack into a big tree. George was killed instantly. The other car went a little way beyond George's, and came to rest in a grassy patch alongside the highway. The driver of that car abandoned it there and left the scene, and nobody knows who he or she was. "The car that forced George off the road was stolen. There are no fingerprints on it that anybody can find. The driver didn't leave anything behind. The FBI thinks this was a murder, not an accident. The investigation goes on, but it's just wheel spinning for now. They're trying to find somebody who knows something, but if they exist, they're not saying anything. "I got pissed and asked Red to come here and help investigate the cars. He'll be here tomorrow some time. I don't know whether he can come up with anything, but I do know that if nobody tries, nothing will happen. It's like those TV commercials for the lottery, 'You can't win if you don't play.' "Meanwhile Glenn Carlson is trying to figure out what to do to resurrect our project. We talked, and I told him what kind of a new supervisor he's got to find for us. So now he's got to find somebody, and I hope he does it soon because all our people are falling apart. "Oh, one other thing. The FBI is mad at me because I asked Red to come here and help. This is a different district or region or whatever and they're supposed to use the experts they have here. I guess I made some sort of a mess for the bureau that will have to be straightened out in the near future. I was so disgusted with the way they were accepting the idea that they couldn't do a thing, that I yelled at Jerry. I'm sure that I'll get kicked off the Gregory Bates team, but I doubt that I'll be fired from the lab. If I'm fired from Bates, you probably will be too. That'll reduce our income by three grand a month. Back to hot dogs, I guess. But I like hot dogs. "The tradeoff was get Red here and maybe find out something to catch a murderer, while giving up a nice paycheck, versus sitting on my hands waiting for the next murder to happen, with the understanding that it could be mine and maybe even yours. "So there you have it. The lab is in a mess, there's a murderer running around loose, Glenn Carlson has a personnel problem on his hands, Red is coming to help but may not find any clues, and the FBI is mad at me. Aside from that, everything is peachy." Trudy turned and gave me a kiss. "Go stretch out on the bed. I'll get out of my school clothes and join you." All was quiet for a minute, and then Trudy said from the bathroom, "I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to see you when you blew up at Jerry. I bet that took him by surprise." "Yeah, I guess so. He wanted to say, 'You can't do that,' about calling Red, but I'd already done it. Oh, this bed feels great. Just what I . . ." Long pause, as some wheels started to turn in my head. "Hey Tru! Quick! Call Red. Right now!" She came out of the bathroom in her panties and bra, trailing a sweatsuit behind her. She grabbed her phone and made the call, then turned to look at me, but I was already on my phone, making another call. I heard her say, "Uncle Red? Whatever you're doing, can you stop for a minute and talk with Jack? Hold on." I wound up with two phones, one in each hand. Into Trudy's I said, "Red, have you left yet?" "When will you be ready to hit the road?" "Go ahead and get ready, but call me before you start out. I hope to have a passenger for you to bring along. Got room for him?" "Okay. I'll expect a call from you in half an hour. Thanks." By then the other phone was making noises. "Hello, Jim? We've got a situation here that I can't talk about on the phone. Can you pack some clothes in a bag and be ready to be picked up in forty minutes?" "Yeah, tell them that you've been called out of town because of a death in the family, which is pretty much true. I can have you picked up by a friend who's coming here to help me out. He'll call you in thirty minutes or so and you can tell him where to meet you. His name's Red. You'll like him. Incidentally, better not tell anybody where you're going. Could be dangerous." Then I hung up and made one more call. "Dr. Carlson? Jack here." "As soon as I cooled down I knew one person who's made to order to replace George. Name's Jim Mangrum. He'll be here tomorrow morning so you can talk with him. Please keep the job open till then." "Okay, see you tomorrow." * * * * * * * * * * * * Red called in the morning to say he'd just crossed into Massachusetts. Three hours later he and I were meeting with Jerry, while Jim was in conference with Glenn. Red went off with Jerry to visit the crash site and then inspect the two cars, and I went to the lab. Jack Be Quick Ch. 04 The lab was quiet. I could see that not a single line of code was being written. Instead, people were talking in small groups, while others were proofreading their updated resumes. It looked as if everybody was there so I began to shepherd them into the big conference room over beyond George's office. When they were all gathered, some seated, some standing, all of their eyes turned toward me. There was a small boxlike riser for raising an easel so everybody could see flip charts on it, so I moved the easel out of the way and stepped up there so I could see all the faces. I had no idea what to say to them, but they had no firm expectations so I figured just about anything would be okay. "Guys, this is a critical time for our project. We have suffered a very great loss, but George wouldn't want us to cave in now. This is the time when we have to show that we learned something from his leadership. He's gone, but we're still here. The code won't write itself. It's time for us to roll up our sleeves and work extra hard to produce something that will be a tribute to George. "There's one thing that will be different. You all know who's working on the segments and modules that interface with your own. Normally we'd each do our own thing, and then George would work the interfaces with us. In his absence, we've got to do that ourselves. So as you go on with your work, keep in touch with each other so the final product will hang together. You can do that. It's simple. When I walked in just now, there were little bunches of you talking together. That's the key to success, talking to each other, working as a team. The best part is that as we get back to work on our project, you'll have something definite to talk about. "Here's something to keep in the back of your mind: This project will go on. The government needs it more than ever. You can tear up those resumes because you won't need to look for work. There's only one thing that would torpedo this project, and that's if the government decides we're not productive enough and they pull it out of MIT and send it to Cal Tech. If that happens, they'll hire a whole new crew of west coast people and we will be unemployed, maybe even unemployable. "The way we'll keep our jobs is by being productive!" Somebody in the back said, "If we've got a question, who do we go to for an answer?" I forced a smile and answered, "You know you can always come over to my work station and we'll work it out together. Remember, the most comfortable chairs in the whole lab are around my conference table. Anything else?" "Will we still get paid the same as always?" You might think the guy who asked that had to be some sort of a moron, but you'd be wrong. He's a genius who had just peeked out from under his own personal rock and had no idea which way the sun comes up. There was a childlike simplicity in the question. He got a paycheck twice a month, and it had always been handed to him by George. He had no concept of a huge government with congressional approval of a budget, or even of the program management office or the MIT payroll accounting department. His paycheck came from George, and George wasn't here any more. I had to take a deep breath to keep from laughing out loud. "I'm glad you asked. When the paycheck envelopes come over from the front office, I'll hand them out personally to make sure you get the one with your name on it. Okay, let's all go and get busy, to preserve our national security, preserve George's memory, and preserve our jobs!" * * * * * * * * * * Jerry called me around six from Reed's Rides, the auto shop that the bureau had a contract with in the Boston area. "Red's up to his armpits in the stolen car. You wouldn't believe the things he's discovered. We'll break it off in a couple of hours. How about having supper with us at the Green Goose at nine?" "Sounds good to me. I'll bring Trudy." "Okay, but why?" "Because while you and Red and I are focusing on flyspecks, Trudy maintains a world view. We risk missing something important, while she can sometimes see where detail guys like us have overlooked it. She's too important a resource to ignore at a time like this." "Makes sense to me." "One other thing. The Utica exercise was a threat to her life, just as much as mine. She's paid her admission." We got to the Goose before Jerry and Red, and in the back of the dining room I shoved two tables together. I had brought my trusty clipboard and extra pens and paper. Trudy set her laptop up and got connected to Roger's wi-fi, just in case it would be needed. I wasn't surprised to see Glenn and Jim Mangrum walk in, right at nine. Roger walked over behind them. "Jerry called. I'm going to close up at nine thirty, meaning I'll turn off the sign and lock the door. But I'll be here, and I'll keep the coffee coming as long as you guys want to stay. I understand the bind you're in, and I'm glad to do whatever I can for to help. Take your time figuring out what you want to eat. Tonight's on me." Jerry and Red walked in at ten after nine. Jerry looked the same as usual, while Red was clearly tired but excited. Jerry walked over behind me and gave my shoulders a big squeeze. "You were right, Jack." That seemed cryptic, and nobody spoke, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He walked over to the kitchen, looking all around, and spoke with Roger. Then he came back, sat down, and smiled broadly. "I'll lay two facts before you all. One, Red's a genius. Two, we've been looking at the wrong car." "All right," said Glenn. "Now it's my turn to lay out two facts. One, George's vacancy has been filled. Meet the new lab supervisor, Jim Mangrum. Two, we now have a new position, reporting to Jim. Meet Jack Allen, our new programming coordinator. Oh, that's if you accept the promotion, Jack." I couldn't answer because Trudy had me smothered with a big kiss. When the high fives and backslapping had died down, Glenn suggested that we order. Roger came over and we introduced Jim and explained what was going on. Jerry asked Roger what he'd recommend. Glenn jumped into the conversation with, "Roger, why don't you fix us something good. We're all too tired and worked up to make decisions right now." Everybody agreed and Roger went off to be creative. Jerry looked around and saw that we were primed for some details. "Red went over the Dodge, looking at everything without taking anything apart. Then he did the same thing to George's Chevy. When he started to scrape off paint samples, I knew he had some kind of an idea, but he wouldn't tell me anything until after he had looked at them under a microscope. Tell 'em, Red." "The Chevy is black. I went down to the bare metal. The steel had a protective coating, zinc with some additives. Then came the primer, which was a medium gray. It was hard to tell the primer from the zinc coating at first. Then came the body paint, black as I said. Once I had that all figured out from looking at undamaged places, I concentrated on two areas where the body had been scraped hard by the other car. That's where the truth started to come out. The Monte Carlo had been sideswiped hard by something painted blue, and the FBI lab guys figured out that it was a Ford F Series truck, painted with Ford's blue enamel, not over five years old. Over the top of the blue paint there was a lot of red, which was from the stolen Dodge sedan. "Right now the state police and FBI are going over the tire tracks in the dirt and other things at the crash scene to get a handle on what really happened, not what somebody wanted us to think happened. The way it looks is that George's car was run off the road into that tree by a truck, maybe with four wheel drive. The weight of the truck made it impossible for George to fight it off him, and that's why he got killed. Then the truck was backed out carefully along the tracks its wheels had made going in, and the Dodge was brought in and swiped along the side of George's Monte Carlo, then run on past the tree and abandoned. Now that scenario is partly speculation until additional evidence can be collected, but with the small army of detectives and technicians looking around out there right now, if there's anything there I'm sure they'll find it." This time it was Red's turn to get a kiss from Trudy. Jerry broke in to ask, "All right. Now for the important stuff. What's this business about Red being your uncle, Trudy?" That broke the tension, and Trudy told the story, including the driving lessons at age twelve and all the other ways that her indulgent neighbor had pampered her. She finished up with, "Every little girl needs to have an Uncle Red living next door." Then she turned to Jerry and asked, "So now is Jack out of the FBI's doghouse?" "Big time. I put in my report that Jack suggested that we call in Red to consult, and I directed him to go ahead and make the call. So no weenie accountant can give him a harsh word or even a dirty look. My boss knows that Jack took the bull by the horns, and he told me off very thoroughly for needing a kid to do my thinking for me. He's very glad that Jack stepped in, and he's of the opinion that I deserved the scolding I got from Jack. Just as Jack told Red over the phone, Gregory Bates will pick up Red's tab." Jack Be Quick Ch. 05 If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. If you don't, you'll be guessing how it started, when you ought to be guessing how it will end. In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story. Hans ***** The investigation went on, and meanwhile things got busy again at the lab. It takes a nerd to spot a nerd, and our nerds knew right off that down deep, Jim was one of them. They got going again, grinding out line after line of good code. My coordinator role meant that they came to me with their stuff so I could keep it harmonized with what the other nerds had turned out, which also meant that I looked at everybody's work sooner or later. I helped them over rough spots and gently advised them, always praising and finding more good things than bad things to comment on, and making sure that the new work they were assigned was something they could handle, and sometimes that it was something they'd learn from. I was assembling a book on the workforce, and after a few days I set up their personal characteristics, strong points, weak points, and blind spots on a spreadsheet. Then every new assignment was characterized on a somewhat similar spreadsheet, and the computer would spit out a list of names showing who could do it well. Naturally, I shared all this with Jim, who was delighted to have his workforce charted out for him. He picked a few rising stars to give a little private instruction to, and I could tell that even though our project was just emerging from its infancy, he was starting to identify people who would be able to carry it all the way. No doubt about it, this thing was coming together. Over in a corner we had our cryptographic team, two men and a woman who knew more about encrypting and decrypting than all the rest of us put together. Earlier, they had little to encrypt, so they helped out with some of the more straightforward programming. But as the core modules took shape the cryptography workload built up rapidly, and they had plenty of their own work to keep them busy. I have very little experience with their sort of work, but I had been told by George that they were three of the very best cryptographers in the country. We'd need an extra good job of encrypting, because the spies who would try to attack our system would include the best decrypters from every country in Europe, where nobody had trusted anybody since the fall of the Roman Empire. Our three crypto specialists represented a security risk for us. All three of them were the kind of dedicated nerds who might go along thinking their deep thoughts and walk smack into a utility pole in broad daylight. One guy went to the men's room one morning and didn't come back. I found him hours later, sitting on a toilet, humming contentedly to himself while he jotted notes on a hundred feet of toilet paper. I was sort of glad that I knew very little about their specialty, and left it to Jim to figure out how to handle them. But their preoccupation bothered me, because their strange, semiconscious behavior was simply an extreme version of the way many of our workers acted. If somebody wanted to kidnap one of them, it would be easier than hauling off a kindergarten kid. I brought the problem up at one of our weekly staff meetings and asked how other projects had handled similar one dimensional geniuses. A week later, a psychologist from Quantico came to our meeting and discussed the subject at length with us, starting with the World War Two research into explosives that eventually resulted in RDX, the predecessor to C4. I judged him to be long on history and short on useful suggestions. I excused myself for an hour, and when I returned I found I hadn't missed a thing. "Please excuse my interruption, Doctor Winstead. May I ask a question?" That turned out to be a novel experience for the good doctor, but the break in his monologue seemed welcome to my associates, so I pushed on. "Has anyone ever tried buying an apartment house and moving all of their extreme nerds into it, so they could be looked after and safeguarded without having five hundred security guards for a dozen people?" "I can see your logic there, but I don't believe that approach has ever been tried. A similar thing was tried with unmarried graduate students at a midwestern university, and I guess it worked out all right. It seemed at first like a coercive measure, but then the university cut the room rent in half and the dissent dissipated. "If you put all of your nerds in one house, it's like putting all of your eggs in one basket. One assault and they could all be kidnapped. You might achieve roughly the same results if you commingle your programmers with regular graduate students. Who can tell one nerd from another? A mixed dozen of your programmers and cryptographers would be practically undetectable amid a hundred physicists and mathematicians, for example. It would be like the letter that was hidden in plain sight among other papers in The Purloined Letter, for example." That told me all that I wanted to know, so I said, "Thank you very much, Doctor," and left the room again, leaving Jim and Glenn to figure out how to shut this guy up so they could go to lunch. * * * * * * * * * * One of the things that my promotion entitled me to is an office, over along the wall beside Jim's office, which of course had been George's. But the last thing I wanted was to be separated from the rest of the programmers, so I kept the workstation in the corner where George had put me on day one, with my desk, bookcase, pile of boxes, and conference table. I got a file cabinet along with the office, so I put my private papers in there. My little joke on the world was that the top drawer was marked Personal and the second drawer was Personnel. Since no Comp Sci expert can spell, that distinction would go right over their heads. I tried out my cell phone in the office and found it had good signal strength, so I had a place to make private phone calls. Then I locked the door and went back to work. I called a general meeting for ten the next morning. "We all need to be going the same direction, and I'm hoping that we can agree on some ground rules so we won't get into any misunderstandings. I know you like to work flexible hours, and I have no wish to change that, but it's nice to have a time when everybody is here, so we can all share important ideas and everybody will hear the same words from the same people. I'd like to have a ten minute standup meeting every morning that we will all attend. How did this ten o'clock meeting time work out for everybody today? Could this be the time we get together every day, without causing a hardship for anybody?" Everybody looked at everybody else, obviously hating to be the first one to speak up. "Okay. That's what we'll have, ten minutes at ten o'clock. At the meeting I'll let you know about anything that's come up, and you'll have a chance to bring up anything that you need to get out into the open. I didn't like the conference room very much. Too crowded. Let's meet right out here, standing up, every morning, Monday through Friday at ten o'clock. Ten at ten. "Now one thing we've got to pay attention to is security. The more we get written the more we've got to protect. So don't take any of your work home with you. If there's some little wrinkle you want to fool around with at home, tell me and we'll think it through together. I know you have laptops, and you might want to mess around with a few lines of code on them, but the critical problem is that if your laptop gets stolen or lost, a piece of your work can fall into the wrong hands. If that happens, it falls within the definition of treason. Does everybody know what treason is? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of treason, and they were executed. But if they found you guilty of it, even if you weren't executed, you could get a long sentence in a federal prison, and we don't want that to happen. So we have to get serious about protecting our work product and our personal freedom, and we'll be talking about that again, I'm sure. "Any questions?" Not a hand was raised or a word spoken. "Okay, let's get back to work." * * * * * * * * * * * Because the nerds were gaining in proficiency as the project went along, I was enjoying the luxury of handing out more and more of the work assignments almost arbitrarily. More and more, I was freed from having to give this sort of stuff to Miles and that sort of stuff to Wendy. That made it easier to level the workload, but more importantly, it reduced our vulnerability. If all of the B7 module had been programmed by Wilbert, then all that a spy would have to do is kidnap Wilbert and milk his brain for the whole thing. But if Wilbert did only an eighth of it, they'd need to grab seven other nerds as well, which would be extremely hard to pull off. And unless they could kidnap all eight, there was no benefit for the bad guys to mess around with Wilbert. The next time that Glenn, Jim, and I had dinner together, I briefed them on how I was handing out the assignments. The best payoff from it, at least in my mind, was that it made the nerds less attractive as kidnap targets. They were my friends, and I didn't want anything to happen to them. On the other hand, it made me a more attractive target, so we had to do something to remedy that. "If only there were somebody we didn't like, we could put out the word that he was the only guy who knew the whole thing," mused Jim as he stirred his coffee. It was one of those magic moments when I wished I had a video camera going. Glenn almost leaped out of this chair, and I caught it at the same instant. He and I looked at each other, and I gestured for him to say it. "All we need to do is invent some imaginary super nerd. Quick, let's think of a name." "Bruce," I said. "I like Clarence," said Jim. "Maybe his last name could be Wilson," I suggested, "like the volleyball that Tom Hanks had for company on the desert island." Now Glenn was into the name game, too. "I knew a guy in the Navy named Hubie. Hubie Wilson, how's that?" "Can we get him an employee number and the whole works?" asked Jim. "If it helps us keep this project at MIT, we can get him anything he wants," said Glenn. "What if we get names painted onto our office doors. We could put Hubie's name on Jack's office. He's almost never in there, anyway." I turned to Glenn. "Let's tell Jerry we need a concealed security camera in Hubie's office. We can take my file cabinet over to my workstation, and get another one for the office. We'll need to stuff it with misleading paperwork. Do you have any superseded plans for the architecture, and maybe some old module specifications we never used?" And so started the misinformation campaign we referred to among ourselves as Operation Office. The desk came along quite nicely, with a letter opener and a few golf tees in the middle drawer, plus some old ball point pens, half a package of Juicy Fruit gum, and who knows what else. Jerry took care of having everything handled by somebody whose prints were not on file. The crowning touch was a picture of a woman with two teenage girls. I never did find out who they were, but to us they were the Wilson family. The whole thing ceased to be amusing one morning when I came in early and found the fancy new entrance and exit doors taped off, and people being admitted by a campus cop through an emergency exit. Jerry was sitting at my desk, and a strip of crime scene tape was draped across the whole length of Hubie's office. "We have video of somebody rifling Hubie's office around two this morning. The only thing I can be sure of is that it wasn't Hubie. I was impressed by the care the guy took to put everything back exactly as he found it. Very professional. Our evidence specialists will be in at nine, and they'll take the place apart. There's no indication that anything else in the lab was touched, so I guess they were just after Hubie's stuff. We'd better find them real quick or they'll go the next step and grab somebody. You and Trudy better start wearing your Saint Chris medals again." I called Trudy and she stopped over at the lab after her next class. I took her out for a walk in the fresh air and we discussed what changes we should make in our lifestyle. We both agreed with Jerry about carrying Saint Chris. Time to trot out the jackets and sweaters and vests. Trudy, ever the perfectionist, decided to go to the firing range on Wednesday afternoons, when she didn't have classes. I told her I'd join her whenever I could break away, and suggested that we also try to get there one evening a week. In the afternoons we could go through all the positions that Kirk had taught us, and in the evenings we could work on speed and accuracy in our prime position, right and left handed. She said that Monday evening might be good, with not many people going out that night as they rested up from the weekend. She had a good point, of course. After a weekend of college-level partying, who would want to spend the next evening with something that keeps going bang? I sensed that we were belaboring minor points, to avoid talking about what we were really thinking about. We sat down on a bench on the river bank and I put my arm around her. That did it. She started crying and clutching me and talking, all at once. "Jack, I'm scared. What if they decide that it's too hard to grab you, so they come after me? I can kick and shoot and run and scream, but if they want me bad enough I don't know if I can fight them off. I'm afraid you'd be safer without me." "Oh no, if I didn't have you I don't think I could do anything. The project is my reason for working, but you're my reason for living. If we're vulnerable, then we've got to do something about it. Fear is good, up to a point, but let's not get paralyzed by it. What we're talking about here is the possibility of being attacked by people, and they're no smarter than we are. If we can't outnumber them, or outrun them, or outfight them, then we've gotta outsmart them. Let's talk with Jerry about this. Dealing with bad guys is his line of work, so let's see what he says." As usual, we wound up at our favorite conference location, the Green Goose, after the lunch crowd had left. Jerry strolled in, unhurried, the very picture of a man without a care in the world. I remember wondering if the FBI gave their agents acting lessons. Roger came over and poured three cups of fresh coffee, said a few words of welcome, and left us alone. Trudy got right to the point. "Jerry, we need help. We don't know what's going to happen next, who's doing all this stuff, how many of them there are, what they want, how far they're willing to go to get it, anything. I have a feeling we ought to be living in a bombproof bunker, have bodyguards everywhere we go, travel in bulletproof armored cars, have somebody taste our food, maybe wear suits of armor. How are we supposed to deal with all this, Jerry? I can just picture somebody kidnapping me to make Jack do something, and he gets stubborn and tries to be a hero to save me and we both wind up dead, our blood smeared from the Charles River to the Cape Cod Canal. I know I'm babbling and I'm sorry to sound like a scared little girl, but I am a scared little girl. Can't you do something?" "What do you want me to do? How can I help you be less scared? Want me to have agents shadow you wherever you go, constantly in touch with our office, ready to send police and federal agents to your aid? Maybe you'd like me to get twenty of our best detectives and have them comb the lab for clues, so we can figure out who's trying to do terrible things to scare you. Or maybe you'd like me to assign you an identifying code and tag your phone and laptop and purse with it so that everywhere you go we can track your movements. If I do all those things, do you think you'd feel a little safer?" "Yes, but you can't do all those things, so why bother to talk about them?" "Yes I can, and I already have. All we need to do is insert the code chips into your laptop and your purse. There's already one in your phone. It's usually assumed that we can't do a lot of the things that the Secret Service can, but as far as I can see, you're protected right now about as well as the President. Now what do you think of that?" "I think I ought to give you a kiss. What about Jack? Is he as safe as I am?" "Exactly. But I don't want him to kiss me. There's no difference in your levels of protection. As we have the situation analyzed you're both at the top of the list, and we won't let up on taking care of you." I thought about it and decided that it felt good to be as important as the President. So I took a long sip of coffee and smiled, possibly for the first time since coming to work that morning. "Jerry, as long as we've got you here alone with us, how about bringing us up to speed on the investigation into George's death. Any new developments?" "Well, we're still looking for the truck. It's slow because we don't want to reveal to the bad guys that we even know there was a truck. One thing this has forced us to do is go outside and come in the back door, taking a hard look at everybody who might be interested in the project and building a good file on them. And that means looking at nearly every gang of spies for hire in the world. "As we figure out what spy outfits would be best suited to what kind of work, we're building the kind of data base that you put together on your nerds, and we can look at their past jobs and match them up to our situation, just the way you hand out your work assignments. It gets kind of delicate because this is the sort of thing the CIA does so well overseas, but they're not supposed to get involved in this country. So it's back to the old boy network that's worked so well in the past. But even though it's effective, it still gets cumbersome at times. It's not like Utica, where there were specific actions we needed people to do right away. Here we're talking about picking their brains, accumulating information in wholesale lots that they're not sure they ought to share. So we've brought some of their people on board, simply by transferring them from one agency to another. The whole thing wasn't handled by wondering whether we could do this or that, but rather by assuming we'd do whatever we need and coming up with ways to make it legal. But you didn't hear that from me, of course. "As I mentioned, we're prowling body shops to see if anybody's brought in the truck. In the next few days we ought to have it if it hasn't been crushed for scrap metal. But whether we find it or not, we're looking hard at people who could have done the driving. It was a slick job, and there aren't all that many guys who could handle it. Then we've got a team investigating George's private life, trying to see who's been building a dossier on his habits. That's not coming along so well." "What will you do when you eventually figure out who done it?" "Jack, don't ask me questions that you know I can't answer." "Can't or won't?" "Same thing." * * * * * * * * * * In the lab, there was an air of accomplishment. You don't often see one nerd congratulating another, with his arm around the guy's shoulders, but I saw it happen twice in one day. People would come to me looking for their next assignments, and they'd look eager. Guys who had once come to my desk, shuffling along and looking down at their toes, were now walking over with brisk steps, smiling. Gerard was a case in point. He came over and plopped down at my conference table, and smirked when he said, "That package wasn't all that hard. You said to come to you for help if I got bogged down, but I figured it out by myself. Then when I got it working I went back and reordered some of the steps to cut the processor time in half. How about something that's a real challenge this time? I'm planning to go home this weekend and I want to face my parents feeling that I'm the world's greatest programmer, let them know that I'm a success." Jack Be Quick Ch. 05 "What do you need to get that idea across, a crown? Maybe a badge that says, 'The Nerd King' to pin on your chest? How about a sash to drape over one shoulder with the message in big red letters?" "No, if I feel it, they'll know it just from my body language. You're an all-round guy, Jack, but for a brainy kid who's weak and clumsy, growing up is a parade of small disasters. I could fix anything that broke, and I built television sets in my spare time. But I never once managed to hit a baseball. I'd like my father to shake my hand in a firm grip and say that he's proud of me. I'd like my mom to get that look in her eye that says, 'At last I can stop worrying about Gerard.' So if I feel that I've made the grade, I know they'll get the message, by their weird parental radar." And so it went, small successes breeding bigger ones, success breeding confidence, confidence breeding momentum. This was the first time I'd ever been part of such a large group activity, and I was fascinated by the way the team had shaped up. The noise level was a giveaway, too. Instead of keystrokes clicking away in deathly quiet, I could now hear a buzz of conversation and occasional bursts of laughter. The seats were filling up earlier, and there were people already working when I got there in the morning. I talked with Trudy one night about this very thing, in the quiet of the lounge at our apartment. Here we are, a group of carefully screened, capable techies, with access to all the latest in IT to help us build a cathedral of technology, a dazzling display of data and logic. We had a whole lab full of near geniuses, working to defeat all the rest of the world's near geniuses who want to knock down our doors and steal what we'd produced. But the strange part is that the productivity of the entire group was brought nearly to zero when we lost one man who was our friend. And to top it off, the productivity was turned back on just by letting them know in various ways that we still think highly of them and will continue to value their contributions. Brilliant creativity can be turned off and on again by pure emotion! I'd never have guessed that. Trudy, the brilliant generalist, just smiled and put her hand over mine. "Haven't you been listening to the lyrics of all the hit songs? They've been telling us forever that all we need is love. Just because they can't prove it mathematically doesn't mean the songwriters are wrong. Look at us. Both smarter than the average bear, but our love for each other is the strongest feeling we've got. Motivation works like that. Psychologists would like to convince us that everybody's different, and that it takes a trained professional to figure out what makes us tick. Of course that's their meal ticket so they'd say that, especially because they don't know how to do anything useful to make a living. But no matter what they say, love is so basic that it motivates everybody." To illustrate her point, she leaned over and gave me a kiss as she started to unbutton my shirt. It was a classical teaching moment, explaining a principle and then doing a practical demonstration. I decided that the ideal laboratory would be our bedroom, and we moved the demonstration in there and locked the door. * * * * * * * * * * Woody, the car guy who did business as Reed's Rides, was the FBI's contractor in Boston for all things automotive. He had become a friend of our little clique as he tagged along on Red's heels during the investigation of George's fatal crash. Privately he admitted that he learned so much from Red that it was like going to grad school. So when Red decided that he'd wrung as much evidence from the cars and crash scene as he could, Woody announced that he would host a big "Farewell Red" dinner for the bunch of us. We were assembled at the back table in the Green Goose talking about it, and Jim Mangrum asked Roger if he could recommend a good restaurant where we could get a fancy meal in a private dining room. Roger smiled and pulled up a chair backward, to sit with his arms folded over the back of it. "Now I know you'd never think it from the looks of this place and the limited menu, but I'm really a Cordon Bleu chef. When I sold off my big restaurant I kept all my good stuff from the kitchen, and although the kitchen here is small I can fix anything you could get at any other restaurant. Just tell me when you want to do it. I'll close early with a Private Party sign on the door, and you'll have the works. You know I'm interested in your project, and sometimes I feel almost like part of your team. I have a personal interest because you're my friends, and also because I'm patriotic. It's the way I felt in Nam, fighting to protect my country, and always looking out for my buddies." And so it came about that we gathered at the Goose on Friday night for a banquet. Red sat at one end of the table and Glenn Carlson sat at the other. Trudy sat next to Red, and I was next to her. Jerry was next, and Woody and Jim were across the table from us. Glenn started things off with a prayer of thanks for bringing us all together safely, and a moment of silence to remember our fallen friend, George. Then the mood brightened as we talked, joked, and munched our way through an elaborate meal. A round of champagne toasts was followed by the first course of poached salmon and a salad. The food was superb, and elegantly served by Roger's wife Sally, who wore a severe black and white uniform for the occasion. We sat for a while and then had some little medallions of chicken with mango chutney, that were to die for. After that there was a tiny cup of lemon sherbet to cleanse our palates, so we could really appreciate the Chateaubriand, served in the middle of a bouquet of steamed veggies and sliced at our table by Roger, in his tall white chef's hat. It occurred to me during the meal to wonder why I didn't feel out of place in this group. Trudy and I were just kids. She was a few months younger than I was. I was ten years younger than Jim, the next youngest. Woody and Jerry came next. Glenn and Red were the age of our parents. But instead of feeling out of place, I felt comfortable in the presence of our elders, each accomplished in his own specialty. Maybe some of their cumulative brilliance could soak into me by osmosis. Glenn spoke up during a lull in the conversation. "This group is probably the most responsive that I've ever been part of. Think for a minute of why each of us is here. We got going on a project that had special needs, and it hit some bumps along the way. Everybody here did something above and beyond to get us out of trouble, responding immediately to the needs of the group. I'm going to share something with you that's not common knowledge. When I was a young man I was interested in boxing, and in the Navy I coached the ship's boxing team. Counter punching effectively is a thing I've always placed a lot of importance on, and I've seen it in every one here. I've coached some good teams, but this one is the best!" I looked around at all the faces at the table and realized that he was exactly right, and that Trudy and I had stepped up ourselves when we had to face problems. Trudy had an additional talent. She could get people to calm down and refocus when the going got tough, as she had demonstrated on me in Utica and dozens of times since. We were all enjoying a cup of coffee before the dessert course, and Glenn asked Roger and Sally to come out and sit with us. For the first time, Trudy wasn't the only woman at the table. Woody asked if we would all join hands for a minute, to think about George and the events that had brought us together, bonded almost like a family. I wasn't sure what the silent meditation would feel like to me, and I was surprised at the upsurge of strength and confidence I could feel, as for a few seconds I stopped being Jack the young kid and transformed into Jack the teammate, a vital part part of a truly awesome team. We had proven the basic premise of synergism - the whole really can be greater than the sum of its parts. Jack Be Quick Ch. 06 If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Without them you're going to be completely lost. In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story. Even if you didn't miss my earlier warnings, there's no explicit sex in this story. Look, there are a lot of gifted writers on Lit, writing about juicy, quivering sex. What are you hanging around here for? Hans ***** It's never easy to predict how long it will take to go from blank monitor screens to finished computer code, but we had a plan of sorts, with not just one deadline but dozens of them. Not surprisingly, the actual accomplishments had lagged behind the plan in a lot of areas. Problems were uncovered that had not been anticipated. To make it worse, the architecture had been tweaked here and there, in some cases making hundreds of lines of code useless, and in a couple of cases making a small task into a much larger one. Some things just took longer than we expected them to, and some of the programmers simply didn't work as fast as we had expected. That's a common problem, but to people who live in a digital world, it's easy to lose sight of it. Not every pitcher in a bullpen can throw a 95 mph fastball, and not every running back can go 40 yards in four seconds. But with Jim at the helm, and with me pitching in everywhere I could to assign tasks, help, organize, and encourage, we were able to pay attention to personal quirks and work around them, and the payoff was that we were gradually catching up. Overall, we had been at least three months behind when Jim came on board. I was tracking our performance in great detail, and probably had too much information to make a blanket statement, but I judged that we had pulled ahead by a month or so, and that we'd be on schedule by the end of the year. Equally important, if we could finalize some pending decisions on the next two major parts of the system, Jim and I could plan the work on the new modules, and get a head start on them as people became available. So I was getting antsy for the big picture of the next year's work to be presented to our advisory committee, and get their blessing so we could go ahead. A few of the modules were so basic that no committee decisions could change them, and I had worked on the planning for them whenever I had a few minutes. Others were more iffy, but I was thinking about them, too. In general things were going well, but I was feeling the pressure that came from a dozen different directions. One morning I was sitting down to a cup of coffee and Trudy asked, "What's retromerge?" I tried not to look as if I'd just been hit in the face with a baseball bat, and replied, "What? Where'd you get that word? What does it mean to you?" "Nothing. That's why I asked you. You were talking about it in your sleep, around two in the morning." "Oh, shit! Do I do that often?" "No, and usually when you do it's just a mumble. But this time you were talking pretty clearly. It sounded like an argument with somebody who thought you were making a mistake and should go another way." "Oh, boy! This stuff is supposed to be kept in the lab, with no mention of any of it outside the buzzer door. You see what can happen? Look, there's nobody around here almost all day. Everybody's in class or at the library or wherever, and anybody could just walk in here and bug the place, and then record every word that's said while we sleep." "But Jack, you can't predict what you might say when you're dreaming. Nobody can. But I can understand how somebody can pick up a word like that and wait till they hear it again, and eventually they can figure out what's going on. Sounds like a problem to me." "I've gotta call Jerry right away. And Jim. This could be big. I could get thrown off the team." An hour later, Jim and I were at our back table at the Goose telling Jerry about our dilemma. "So you dropped a loaded word in your sleep," Jerry said with a chuckle. "Happens to all of us, some time or other. Guess you'd better sit up all night and give up sleeping, Jack." Jim looked grim. "What do we do, Jerry? I can see how this could happen to any of us. You're the expert. What's the answer?" "Let's learn from history. When the atomic bomb project was going on during World War Two, this sort of problem was worried over at very high levels of our government. And we weren't the only ones who worried about this. The Brits and the Germans had their own concerns about loyal people accidentally leaking secrets. They all settled on a simple solution, one that can have variations and versions to suit the project, the threat, and the personalities. Everything was coded. There was no atomic bomb, there was The Manhattan Project. The thing that devastated Hiroshima was Little Boy. Then they dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, and the war was over. "Actually this code word business goes back at least to World War One. The British were working on a new type of vehicle to use against an entrenched enemy. It had big tracks that made it able to climb out of holes, go over logs, and take the battle to the enemy no matter what he was hiding behind. But they couldn't call it a tractor or a truck without giving away the secret, so they told everybody they were working on big tanks, but they didn't say tanks of what. The new secret weapons needed massive amounts of steel plate, and the German spies bought into the idea that the Brits were building big steel tanks, for some kind of liquid. The idea of the tanks themselves didn't excite them, because they thought the real secret was what they were going to fill them with, so their spies spent their time and energy looking for the wrong thing. There was even a rumor that the tanks would be full of molasses, which would flood the trenches and get everybody bogged down. It was a brilliant job of misdirection. When the new secret weapons were turned loose in France, the German troops panicked at the thought of being crushed in their trenches by these giant machines, and the high command was just as panicked because they hadn't prepared any defensive measures to stop them. So the things called tanks were such a huge success that the name has stuck for almost a hundred years. "Now how can you take that approach and adapt it to your project?" Jim and I looked at each other, each of us hoping the other had an idea, but our faces were blank. I spoke up first. "Jerry, I think that train has already left the station, because you've let everybody know we're working on a new counter-espionage system. We've been the bait for your spy fishing game, so we've lost our chance to act as if this is something different, like a new approach to inventory control or production scheduling or whatever. I like the idea of code words, but they're going to know right off that they're code words and they won't misdirect anybody unless we can think of something very clever. We could name all of our modules after cities, for example, like Tulsa and Seattle and Topeka and Austin, but if I start talking in my sleep about having trouble mating Cleveland with Omaha, pretty soon the spy who's listening is going to catch on." I could tell from Jim's frown that he was digging deep for inspiration. Then his face brightened and he laid the cornerstone of our solution. "Look, everybody has to go grocery shopping from time to time. Let's name everything we have for an item in a supermarket. The one around the corner from my apartment has a big book behind the customer service counter that they look stuff up in if I want to know whether they carry it or where they hid it. It's a huge computer printout, the size of a big city phone book. Can you get us one of those books so we have all the names? That way, a programmer can be mumbling about carrots or toothpaste, and it won't give away anything. The sheer variety of the code names ought to make it hard to figure out what's going on, with produce and canned goods and light bulbs and toilet paper all mixed in together." Jerry jumped right in. "I bet I can get you one of those lists, say from WalMart or Costco or some other big store that handles everything from tomato soup to car batteries. I'll get on it today. You guys brief Glenn for me, and I'll get back to you as soon as I have my hands on a list." * * * * * * * * * * The very next afternoon Jerry showed up with our list. I used an ordinary utility program to seed random number generation from the time, and assigned a long, unique ID number to every module we were working on, to be buried deep within the module. Anybody on the outside who had one of the ID numbers would have no way to associate it to a programming task. Then the random ID numbers were broken apart to represent page numbers in our commodity list and locations on the page. I recruited Trudy to come in at night and look up the name of the commodity corresponding to each number and write it down in the margin of the printout. Two nights later, we had all of our code names, plus the methodology to assign new ones as the project grew. Then came the challenge: inducing a roomful of nerds to shuck loose of sensible labels that they knew and learn to use names of groceries for their work assignments. Jim handled the motivation step, and he did a good job of warming up our audience. Then I explained that the names would sound silly, and they could have some fun with them. It's hard to get angry or resentful over something absurd or amusing, and once they smiled I knew I had them. I knew that Bruno and Helen were working on modules that connected, and I had met with them a couple of times, going over how their outputs played together. So I broke the news that Bruno's assignment was named Crookneck Squash. "Now suppose we call Helen's job Zucchini. Anybody at all can tell that they go together somehow, can't they? So that's not a good idea. But the way we've named the jobs, only Bruno and Helen would know why there's a tricky compatibility between Crookneck Squash and Phillips Screwdriver." Helen looked shocked. "You mean I'm working on Phillips Screwdriver?" "Yes, and you're the only person who is. It's an honor to be assigned to something as complex as Phillips Screwdriver, so carry that name with pride. It's every bit as complicated as Concord Grape Juice, that Ames is working on." By this time the absurdity of the names had hit home and everybody was laughing. I had them all get in line and come up to me so I could give them their code names. Connor read his and let out a whoop. "Hey, mine's Oreo! I love it!" he yelled, waving his slip of paper over his head. Everybody had a few chuckles and went back to work, smiling over their grocery names and not thinking about the fact that a dedicated spy would have to try to extract secrets from our programmers directly if he wanted to get any information about our project. That would have to be Jerry's next headache. * * * * * * * * * * The worst problem with depending on a gun for protection is that you have to carry it. If you're in a stall in the men's room and the gun is locked in your desk drawer, you're defenseless. Furthermore, anybody who knows you carry a gun will try to figure out when you won't have it within arm's reach, and that's when you'll be attacked. This had all been drummed into our heads by Kirk, back at Red's security shop. So Trudy and I had worked out all sorts of arrangements to keep our protection within reach or else cover for each other. Remember in Marathon Man, when the spies go after the hero while he's in the bathtub? Or in that western where the bad guy goes after Clint Eastwood's buddy when he's taking a bath, only to get shot by a revolver that he's taken into the tub with him? Trudy and I weren't movie stars or quickdraw experts, but we took our security seriously, and thought our problems through and planned for the worst. I recall a one line gag that Richard Armour wrote for the old Saturday Evening Post, "Your chance of being eaten alive by a leopard on main street is only one in a million, but once is enough." So we practiced at the range, kept our guns clean and oiled and loaded with fresh ammunition, and planned carefully for every situation when a bad guy might assume that we'd be vulnerable. In our bathroom we had a hook in the shower stall on the side opposite to the shower head, and we made a thing we named 'the bee's nest' that we'd hang on the hook with a pistol inside of it, completely protected from the water but easy to draw by reaching up from the bottom, even if we had soap in our eyes. At night, we both took our guns to bed with us, but you'd never be able to tell that by looking. If one of us got up during the night, we woke the other one first, so we'd be covered. During the day, each of us knew where the other one was at all times, thanks to text messages on our cell phones. The point is that we knew this wasn't a game - our visit to Utica had demonstrated that - and we had resolved never to let our guard down. In case we needed to be reminded, on the top of our tall chest of drawers in the bedroom Trudy had placed a little plaque, bearing the words "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!" I dropped Trudy off at the library one Thursday morning, as I usually did. She gave me a kiss, picked up the backpack that held her books and personal stuff and swung out of the car, being careful to keep her vest from flying open because it hid the shoulder rig that carried her loaded pistol plus two spare magazines. She was as professional about it as a seasoned detective, and I watched her walk away from the car for a few seconds, admiring her and thinking what a lucky man I am. Then I headed for the lab, where I planned on reviewing the progress of about a quarter of the staff, leaving the afternoon free to concentrate on whatever problems the morning's conversations might have revealed. Traffic was just what it always was at that hour, and I eased along with the flow, trying not to waste a lot of energy fighting the tide of vehicles. A traffic light turned red when I was in the middle of a block, in bumper to bumper traffic. When it changed to green the cars were starting to move forward when a guy with a scraggly beard jumped up and landed with a belly flop on the hood of my car. I immediately jerked the wheel to the left and hit the brakes hard, which threw him off on the left side of the car. While he was sliding across the hood, I wrenched the wheel to the right and slammed the accelerator down to mount the curb at a point where there weren't any pedestrians. At the same time I pushed the panic button in the cross spoke of the steering wheel, to signal the FBI that I was in trouble. A blue Toyota swung in from the next lane to cut me off, but I was already on my way to the sidewalk and leaning on the horn to clear a path ahead. Then the Toyota reversed suddenly, curving around to back to nail my left rear wheel, but I was able to avoid contact by inches and get fully up over the curb. Then I drove around a streetlight pole and onto the next cross street, which went at ninety degrees to my original path. The last car on that street that had made it through the intersection as the light changed, was thirty yards ahead. I had a clear path, so I kept the horn blaring and laid some rubber. One of the things we had done when we became consultants was to go over every foot of pavement in our part of Cambridge, over and over, in the wee hours of many mornings. So I knew just where to find a police station, and what the sidewalks looked like, as well as the streets. We'd committed to memory the arrangement of the traffic lanes, where there were extra lanes and where the pavement narrowed by dropping off a lane at the curb. I glanced at the mirror and saw that the blue Toyota had made it around the corner and the driver was hard on the gas pedal, twenty yards back. I slowed down, watching the oncoming traffic and moving to the middle of the street. The Toyota's driver decided to pass me on the right, so that when he pulled up alongside he could shove me over into a head-on collision. His front bumper was just pulling even with my rear one when I stomped the brake and shifted into reverse. Then I let that big engine squeal the tires as the car stopped and flew back two car lengths. I immediately shifted back to drive and cut to the right behind the Toyota, and down a small side street that I knew led to the back of a police station. That was where the squad cars parked, nosed in to the curb. I spotted two adjacent empty parking spaces, slid to a stop, and backed in. That left me headed out and facing any possible threat. Then I pushed the FBI panic button again and again, to signal the urgency of the situation and make it easy for them to find me on their computer screen. A uniformed policeman who had just come out of the door looked at me and drew his gun as he hustled over to my car. By the time he got there I had my window down and was holding my FBI card up as I screamed, "Call for help, quick. And watch for a blue Toyota!" Then it all happened at once. The Toyota came up the street going the opposite direction from the way I had come, crossing in front of my car from left to right. A man was leaning out of the front passenger window with a funny-looking pistol in his hand. I ducked, unlatched the door with my left hand, and gave it a shove with my shoulder, just as he started to spray bullets in a diagonal line from my right front fender to the top of the windshield on the left side. So much glass was flying inside the car that it seemed the air was full of little chunks of it. My dive for safety took me out onto the pavement. I was on the ground, clutching my pistol, wondering what would happen next, when I heard tires screech and the Toyota came backing up for a return engagement. I lay flat on the ground and looked under my front bumper, holding my pistol tight with both hands. Mentally, I was back in the batting cage with my father. The guy with the funny looking gun was obviously looking for me in the driver's seat, looking through and around the remains of my windshield. That kept him from seeing me down on the ground. He held his gun out straight, ready to blow my head off as soon as I looked up over the steering wheel. He was not quite directly ahead of my car when my line of sight gave me a pretty good view of his head, and I fired at his right temple. The angle was tricky and I was far from comfortable down under my car, but the range was only about ten feet so I had no trouble making the shot. His body straightened up a bit on the impact, and I got off a shot at his neck, just above the top of his breastbone. Then, as he lifted a little more and twisted to his right, he was facing straight toward me and I shot at the middle of his chest. By that time I was really exposed to him, and if he'd still been able to pull the trigger I'd have been just a blob on the pavement. But as his body was straightening up, his arms were relaxing and the gun in his hands was moving downward, so by the time I shot him in his chest the muzzle was already pointing down at the ground. As the Toyota continued to back up he slumped right down over the windowsill and his gun fell to the pavement. One of my bullets, I think it was the second one, had gone through the gunman and shattered the windshield in front of the driver. He jerked, glanced quickly at his partner, and lurched into drive and laid some more rubber getting out of there. The sound of sirens was filling the air by then, and one sounded very close. Off to my right, where I couldn't see it, the Toyota ran head-on into a police car that was rounding a corner, and parts of cars flew everywhere, bouncing off buildings and clattering onto the street. I made myself as small as I could, looking around under the car and hoping there weren't any more bad guys coming to get me. Jack Be Quick Ch. 06 A plain black Dodge sedan squealed to a stop in front of my car and the driver stretched out across the seat to get the passenger door open. He waved an FBI identification wallet in his left hand and yelled for me to get in. I rolled on the ground to get clear of my car and made a running dive for the front seat, still holding my pistol. The Dodge accelerated forward and the door's inertia slammed it shut. I was in the most awkward position I could imagine, my knees on the seat, my elbows resting on the floor, and my feet about where my head ought to be. But I was all in one piece! I took a deep breath, maybe the first full breath I'd taken since I parked at the police station. Then I pulled my knees up close to my chest and somehow wiggled into a normal sitting position with my left hand on the dashboard and my right hand still holding my pistol. I gulped another deep breath and rasped out the emergency code word, and added, "I'm Jack. Who are you?" The driver gave the correct reply and said, "Hi, Jack. I'm Pete. Jerry's boss." "Any more of your cars coming?" "Two. One's just coming up behind us now." I lowered my head to look in the side mirror, and saw a gray Dodge with flashing red and blue lights in the grill. Pete pushed a button and a siren started to wail. Boy, could he make that Dodge fly! We roared through intersections, drove on every lane there was on the street, even the curb lane on the left side, and wove our way out of the business section and into a residential neighborhood. Pete shut off the siren then and I could see the flashing lights go out on the car behind us. We slowed down to the speed limit, stopped for stop signs, and finally parked in front of a regular-looking house. The front door of the house opened, and when I looked up I recognized Jerry. I slid my pistol into its holster and threw the car door open. My right foot hit the ground a foot from the curb, and the left must have landed five feet beyond, as I raced up to the open door and ducked inside. Jerry was laughing at me. "How's the old adrenalin pump working, Jack?" * * * * * * * * * * Pete came up onto the porch, strolling as if nothing had happened, and stepped through the open doorway. I could feel the tension in my body easing off, and my knees started to shake. I flopped down on a sofa and looked from Pete to Jerry to another agent who was just coming into the living room, wearing a white shirt and tie with a shoulder harness neatly displayed where his suitcoat would cover it when he went out. I saw that he had a towel in his hand, and he came over to me and asked, "Where are you hurt?" "Hurt! Am I hurt?" I asked. "Just hold still." He held the towel up to my right ear while he looking me over. "I think you got a cut on your ear and that's all. You hold this towel up to your ear and we'll get you patched up right away." As he stood up another man, older than the rest, came into the room with a big, and I mean really big, first aid kit. He fooled around with my ear and a few minutes later I was wearing a big bandage that covered the whole right side of my head. My ear was getting numb underneath it. Pretty soon I could hardly feel a thing there, and the only discomfort was from adhesive tape pulling on my cheek and neck. Jerry pulled up a dining room chair and turned it around so he was riding it like a snowmobile. Pete sat in an upholstered chair across the room from me. Jerry began the conversation. "How did this thing start?" "Some guy jumped onto the hood of my car. He probably wanted to make me think I'd hit him, so I'd stop." "Could you recognize him if you saw him again?" "I think so. Trouble is, the most obvious thing was a scraggly beard, and if he shaved I might not remember the rest of his looks. Wait. There was a scar that started in his forehead and ran down into his left eyebrow. If that's still there I'd know him." "Okay. We've got him. He got hurt a little when you threw him off your car, and then his friends in the Toyota bumped into him as he stood up, and that's when he really got hurt. He's in the hospital under guard. What about the guys in the Toyota?" "They were a blur. The guy with the gun, the one I shot, I know he had dark hair and bushy eyebrows, but that's all I remember. The driver I didn't get a good look at. Well, just his profile. Had a curved beak of a nose, like Barbra Streisand. That's all I saw." "Well, that's pretty good, considering what was going on. How do you feel?" "Pretty washed out now. Can I call Trudy?" "Let it go till you feel a little stronger. Right now you'd sound shaky and scare her. I already told her what was happening and that you got out of it okay. She'll be here soon." "Gee, thanks Jerry. Nice of you." "We try to take care of our friends." "Look, Jerry, the last I saw of that Toyota it was scattered all over the street in pieces. What happened to the guys in it?" "Driver's in the hospital, may or may not make it. The shooter is dead. Somebody sprayed his brains across the car, put a bullet through an artery in his neck, and blew one side of his heart away. Had to be somebody who practices marksmanship and has ice water in his veins. If there's ever a rematch I want him on my side!" Pete chimed in. "Jack, we have some of the coolest, best trained agents in the world on our payroll, but there aren't many who could do what you did today. You're quick and steady when you react to trouble. Any time you get tired of working for MIT, let me know. We're always looking for computer wizards but we can't find any who can drive and shoot like that." Jerry wrapped it up. "The two guys we pulled out of the Toyota tally with your descriptions, so we can prove we have the right guys. The one who jumped on your car has a scraggly beard, but nobody mentioned the scar in his eyebrow to me. I'll check further. But we're sure there were three men involved, and between the hospital and the morgue we've got all three. These guys are no amateurs to pull a stunt like that, so I'm sure we'll find connections from them to others, maybe even some higher ups. We'll see where the facts take us. "And thanks, Jack. What you did means a lot to us." * * * * * * * * * * Fifteen minutes later I was lying on the sofa in the FBI's house, propped up with some pillows, resting. A doctor had come in and checked me all over. He had just left when the front door opened again and Trudy came in. When she saw me lying there with the big bandage on my head she let out a squeak and ran over to me. "Oh, baby, you're hurt! How bad is it?" "Just a little cut from flying glass. I guess it bled a lot but it's nothing serious. The car got shot up, but I didn't get hit at all. "Oh my God! Who was shooting at you? Will he come back and try again?" "No. That's one thing we can be sure of." "What do you mean? Did the police get him? Is he locked up?" "No, it wasn't like that at all. He got shot. Killed. He won't bother anybody again." "Oh, that's good. I'm so glad they got him. Did you see it happen?" "Yeah, I had a good view. Perfect." I paused and remembered what it looked like. "Right past my front sight." "What do you mean?" "I'm sorry I said that. It just slipped out. I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you. I was the one who killed him. Three shots, three hits." "Oh! Wow! But Jack, how did that make you feel? I mean, did it shake you up?" "Well, it all happened fast. It was him or me. I think I handled it pretty well, and I feel good about the whole thing. He was trying to shoot me with some sort of a machine gun. If I hadn't got him, you'd be at the morgue looking at my remains right now. So I think it turned out just great. Maybe later on I'll pray for his soul, but right now I'm not in the mood. He wasn't a nice man and he got what he deserved." Jerry walked back into the room right then. "Kids, I've gotta go down to the hospital for a while. You stay right here. Trudy, one of the guys from our office will come by to take you to your apartment so you can pack up enough stuff for you and Jack for a few days. Then he'll bring you to a safe house. Jack will already be there. You'll both stay there, probably till next Monday or Tuesday." I got thinking about work. "Should I call Jim to tell him what happened?" "I've already talked with him and Glenn. Don't say anything to anybody about what happened, either one of you. Jack, you'll have a small bandage on your ear, nothing like what you've got now, and your story could be that you banged your ear into a door frame while you were rearranging some furniture. Somebody will be listening to phone calls at your parents' house, so just make your regular weekly call and don't mention anything about this episode, anything at all." "What do you mean, somebody will be listening? Who?" "Whoever is responsible for this attack, plus the one in Utica, George's death, going through Hubie's office, and a few other things you don't need to know about." "Do you know who it is?" "Somebody does. There are a lot of us working on this project, and we all have different assignments. I do my thing, they do theirs, it all gets reported up the line, and analysts at desks figure it all out. One thing that happens is that once we have a good idea what happened and why, it goes into the daily report for the President. In a much condensed form, of course." "So the President will know somebody tried to kidnap me or murder me, is that it?" "He'll know it happened and that the assailants are all dead or captured. I doubt that he'll know your name, but he will know that it was all about this project. You're a hero but nobody will ever know about it. Welcome to the club, Jack." * * * * * * * * * * At the back of the kitchen, right by the door to the backyard, was the stairway down into the cellar. An agent named Abe led me down to the cellar floor, then around and down another flight. He flicked on a light switch and I was looking down a nice, neat tunnel. The floor and walls were concrete. The ceiling was about seven feet high, and looked like plywood with exposed two by fours every two feet, and a light fixture every eight feet or so. I was a little fuzzy on the directions, and asked, "This goes out back, doesn't it?" "Yeah, out under the backyard and the back fence, sort of diagonally, to a house on the next street." At the house on the next street we climbed two flights of stairs into a kitchen, went into the living room and up another flight to the second floor. "Here's your room. Your wife will be here soon with clothes. You can use this dresser and the closet over there. That door goes to a private bath. Should be everything you'll need." I noticed his assumption that we were married and let it go. We might as well be, with the way we felt about each other and the way we lived. "Are any other guests staying here, Abe?" "Not right now, but I never know what'll happen till the phone rings. There's one more suite just like this one. Meals are served downstairs. Either of you allergic to any kinds of food?" "No. We usually eat at slightly irregular hours, and our standard diet is heavy on cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizza, with a salad when we can get it. We're college kids." "You like Chinese?" "Only to prevent starvation if the dog food's all gone. Rather have Wendy's or Burger King. Subway's good too. We don't like Domino's pizza since they re-invented their sauce. Pizza Hut's all right, but Trudy doesn't like anchovies. We wash it all down with a Coke or Seven-up." "Just you wait. Get to be my age and all that's going to catch up to you. You can eat anything now, but get into your thirties and forties and you'll learn about balanced diets." "Right now our problem is making it to our thirties and forties. Seem to be worse obstacles than junk food. We've got people taking a serious interest in us, but they're not all trying to keep us healthy." "Yeah, that happens. Nothing to get upset about, though. If you're here recalling it, that means they missed, so just put it behind you. It's too much to wish for that there'll never be any bad guys after you, so just pray that they keep missing. Fact is nobody out there is better at their job than the guys you're working with from this Boston office. Jerry says you're pretty quick yourself. Just stay alert and you won't get hurt." I washed up and sat down in the chair by the foot of the queen size bed. I wanted to go back over the morning's activities in my mind, to see if there was anything I'd missed in the excitement. Shouldn't there be something I could learn from it to help avoid a rerun? Had I done anything to make it easy for them? Well, first off, I followed a routine. Every Thursday morning I drove Trudy to school at the same time, following the same route, dropped her off in front of the library, then took the most direct route to work. That was all a glaring mistake, one that almost cost me my life. The streets I used were heavily traveled. Lots of cars, lots of pedestrians. There was no way that I could see the guy coming who jumped on the hood, or the Toyota that cut me off from the left. I'd have to find other ways to get around, where I wouldn't be so vulnerable. Now wait, there was something about the Toyota. The driver was trying to pin me to the curb. But there was nothing to keep me from jumping the curb, and in fact that's what I did. I sat and moved my hands around in the air just above my lap to simulate the movements of the cars. None of it made a whole lot of sense unless there was another car involved, and I didn't see one. But there were cars all over the place, and any one of them could have been part of the plot. I whipped out my cell phone and called Jerry. "Jerry, we've gotta talk. Soon. I just realized something and I've gotta tell you." "Okay. Just sit tight and I'll be there in twenty minutes." By the time Jerry arrived, Trudy had shown up with a suitcase full of clothes and toilet articles. I was using the top of the dresser for the street and rolled up socks for cars. Jerry hollered as he came through the front door and I yelled for him to come on up. "You're just in time, Jerry. Watch the socks to see how it all happened. I was in the middle of the block like this." I put the white socks along the back edge of the dresser, midway between the left and right sides. "I started to move as the light changed and the guy with the beard jumped aboard, right here. I still was a long way from the corner. So I shook him off and mounted the curb, here. "Now the street is made slightly higher in the middle of the block than at the corners, so water will run to catch basins for the storm sewer near the corners, almost at the crosswalk. I was at the high point in the street pavement. But the sidewalk is level, which makes the curb level. We'd noticed that when we did our looking around at night, but it didn't seem important then. The bad guys must have figured the height of the curb was the same all along, and assumed it would be high enough to trap me up against it. That was their mistake. They had it figured that the guy with the beard would stop me, and the Toyota angling in would keep me from moving ahead or to the left. I surprised them by going to the right, jumping the curb, and driving on the sidewalk, and that screwed up their plan. "But think about it. I might have wanted to back up and escape that way. They had to block that escape route, which means they had to have another car, right behind me . There had to be two cars. So there were the two guys in the Toyota, plus the jumper with the beard, plus at least one more bad guy in the car behind me. Who was he, and where'd he go to?" Jerry looked, and then moved in and ran the socks through the drill by himself. "You're right. We never looked for another car, really wouldn't have had any way to get it unless it surfaced later, the way the blue Toyota did. So you're telling me there must be another car. We've got some video from a security camera across the street and traffic light cameras at the corners. I'll tell the guys to look for a car right behind yours." Jerry looked around. "Everything all right with your love nest?" Trudy answered, "As long as I've got Jack here with me, safe and sound, no bullet holes, everything is just perfect." * * * * * * * * * * Jerry had left, we had no idea what Abe was doing, nobody was upstairs but us, and as far as I could see we'd blundered into Paradise. Trudy said nothing but walked over and locked our door and turned to me with a smirk. I think she was about to say, "Get undressed," but I was way ahead of her. My shirt was off, so were my shoes and socks, and I was working on my jeans. By the time she made it over to the bed, I was down to my underwear. I pulled the top sheet and blankets back and perched on the bed. Looking at Trudy, I asked, "Need help with anything?" "Sure. I like it when you undress me." So I did, and she did like it. She liked it so well that it earned me a big, wet, deep kiss. And more. I was holding her tight up against me and she said, "Jack, Hon, just this once let the foreplay go. I need you inside me. When Jerry called me and said there'd been a problem but you were all right, I wondered if he was giving me the whole story. My mind was whirling, wondering if I'd ever have you with me, and if we'd ever get to make love again. Now my mind has accepted the fact that you're okay, but my bod needs to know for sure. So go ahead and take me, reassure all of me that you're still here for me." We made love, slowly and gently, but firmly. Every stroke was smooth and deliberate, to assure Trudy's bod that I was still a force to be reckoned with. When we climaxed, it wasn't the loudest or wildest orgasm that I've ridden through with her, but it was far and away the longest. I was right there on the launch pad with her when she zoomed off to fly among the stars, and then I just hung on. As she came back to earth I pulled her tight up against me. Her legs were wrapped around me and my arms were wrapped around her, and that's how we fell asleep. I think she was worn out from worrying and I was worn out from my adrenalin rush, so right there in the middle of the day we drifted off to dreamland together. We woke up together a couple hours later, lay there for a while snuggling and talking, and then took a shower together. Trudy managed to keep the bandage on my head dry by concentrating on things farther down on my body. Oh, yeah! After we pulled clothes out of the suitcase to put on, we took a few minutes to hang things up in the closet and fold things into drawers. By supper time we were all moved in and completely relaxed. Jerry ate supper with us and filled us in on what the agents had found out so far. "We have names for the three known bad guys. They're just hired guns, career criminals who got paid by the job. We have two camera images of a gray or silver Audi that was right behind you. It slowed almost to a stop when you were messing around with the guy on your hood, and then when you took off over the sidewalk it swung to the left and went around the Toyota. At the next corner we lost it, but we do have a picture of you going down the cross street and the Toyota chasing you, but no Audi in sight." "What does that mean? Why would the Audi driver run away from the action? If he'd stuck it out he might've helped the other guys catch me." "My own theory is that he wasn't a hired gun. I think he was part of the organization that put out the contract, and he was there mainly to oversee the operation. Once he saw it going sour he wanted nothing to do with it. He fled the scene to protect his anonymity, and let the hired help finish the job if they could, or take their lumps if they couldn't. The two guys we've got in the hospital may not even know the name of the guy who hired them. We'll see what comes out when they've recovered enough to be interviewed, but the Audi driver may go on being a mystery." Jack Be Quick Ch. 06 "What effect did all this have on the project?" "Everybody was told that you had a minor accident and were lucky enough to come away with just a cut on your ear. No details beyond that. I think you'd better scrap that furniture moving story. You'll have to use a loaner car while yours is being fixed, so I suggest that you blame it on a traffic accident. Whatever you feel comfortable with. Your crew told Jim they want to get a big card for you and all sign it, which says to me that this hasn't killed their morale. Jim says they're working all right, just bringing the problems to him that you'd normally handle." We ate in silence for a minute, and then Jerry said, "Speaking of your car, Woody told me that before he did a single thing to it he called Red to get his permission. Here's Woody, a top mechanic in anybody's league, and to him that car is a masterpiece and Red is the master. Of course, Red told him to go right ahead, and to call him if he runs into any problems." I thought about that for a couple of chews. "You know, common sense tells me it's only a car. It'll do things I never thought a street legal car could do, but even so it's just a machine. I've sure become attached to it, though. When I'm in a regular car it feels like walking around in public in my underwear. So I can understand how Woody must feel when he's allowed to work on it. He's like an artist who's been called in to repair the Mona Lisa." Something was bothering me, something that Jerry had said before. I must have been frowning as I tried to get back to it, and Jerry picked up on that. "What's the matter, Jack? Spit it out." "Something, wait. Yeah, I've got it. The guy who left the scene was driving an Audi. Funny, but I haven't seen any Audis around here, that I can remember. Some dealers handle Audi and Porsche, and they may push the Porsche line harder because it's more profitable. Any chance you can get a line on this guy just from the make of his car?" "That's one of the things the analysts should be working on. I'll ask them how they're doing on it. But it seems improbable that the guy holding the reins of an espionage ring would be from around here. Maybe the Audi guy is just their local rep, keeping an eye on what's happening in the universities. Between Cambridge and Boston there sure are a lot of colleges and universities and specialty schools, so they might find it useful to keep a guy here. "All this espionage stuff is new to me. I know how to do the usual things, kidnaps, all sorts of financial scams, bank robberies, but I never dealt with spies before. They've brought in some experts to back me up, so I'm not worried about handling it. But it's completely different from everything we usually do. When the bad guys try to pull off something violent my heart starts racing, because I know all about that world. I suppose the people upstairs in the Bureau, the ones we agents never see, are trying to get me some spy experience to make me well rounded. This stuff is going to fill out my resume, I guess." Jerry relaxed a bit and seemed to be mentally reliving some of his involvement in the project. He seemed to wax philosophical for a minute. "The Bureau wanted me to broaden my scope when we decided together that they wanted to keep me and I wanted to stay. I'd simply reached the point where it's either up or out, and I'm glad we agreed it'd be up. The woods are full of former agents. Go to any decent size company and they'll have a loss prevention department with a former agent running it. Loss prevention is modern slang for security or investigation. But there are so many former agents from all the different federal branches that snoop all over the world, and of course on each other, that they're no big deal. So as a career move, the 'out' option didn't look attractive to me. The Bureau is a strange outfit to work for, but the work is usually interesting and it's hard to beat the combination of pay, benefits, and retirement. There's a lot of prestige that goes with staying the course, too. Big difference between 'retired agent' and 'former agent.' 'Former' can be read as 'not worth promoting' or 'doesn't play well with others' while 'Retired' usually means 'able to handle more responsibility' or 'a real keeper' to anybody who knows the Bureau. "The way the world is headed, everybody is instantly in touch with everybody else. Moscow and Berlin and Paris are as close as Plymouth. What happens anywhere seems to affect people everywhere. I guess the spy business must be a growth industry, on both sides of the street." I nodded as if I were about to turn equally serious. "I guess I'm lucky to have a friend with his finger on the pulse of the world." "Who's that?" "Why, you, of course." "What you're lucky to have is a friend who'll pay for your coffee and burgers at the Goose. As for my finger, I'll let that go without the obvious comeback, as a courtesy to Trudy. I'll just have to take my finger off that pulse and poke it around and finger the guys that want you dead or alive. I guess I'm lucky to have a friend who's as popular as you are. Folks are just dying to meet you." Jack Be Quick Ch. 07 If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Oh, you can go ahead and plow on without them, but none of this will make any sense to you and you'll think it's all my fault. There is no explicit sex in this story. If you need a detailed description so you can learn how to do it, either find a different story or find a girl who's been around a bit. Hans ***** We were allowed to go back to our apartment a few days later, and we relished the feeling of being back in our own place, especially with everything freshly checked for cameras, microphones, laptop readers, keystroke recorders, anything at all that could tell somebody that we were there and what we were doing or saying or thinking. We weren't told if they'd found anything, and I wondered sometimes about what spies would think if they had us thoroughly bugged. Think about sex. Sometimes there's an hour of foreplay and five minutes of actual sex, and sometimes it's just the other way around. Then there are the little bits of heated conversation. "You get on top." "Oh, come on, I need you! Now!" "Keep that up, I'm almost there!" And the screams. It makes me wonder if spies ever come in their pants when they eavesdrop on young people in love. So I had the pleasure of our own bedroom, to balance the awful feeling of not having our own car to drive. We didn't get it back until a month after our "accident" and we made a joke out of the fact that it took twice as long to fix it as it did to build it. When I complained to Jerry about how long it was taking, he told me, "Woody is just being extra careful. The last thing he'd want to do is screw up Red's creation. I went to see what was taking so long, and he had a little thing, I don't know what it was, that he was putting in for the third time. He put it in, adjusted something, then took it out and did it over again just to make sure it was perfect." Once we had our own wheels again, we felt like taking a trip home to see our folks. The weather was warming up. School would soon let out for the summer, and although the work on the project would go on without a break, Jim and Glenn were very understanding when we wanted a couple of weeks back home. The arrangement we worked out was for me to take off for two weeks, come back for a week of overlap with Jim, and then he'd take off for two weeks. The obvious way for us to go was to take the Mass Pike to the Berkshire Section of the New York Thruway, and then run the Thruway straight across New York State to Lake Erie. It's a great route, direct and fast, but Jerry didn't want us to go that way again. Whenever I'd complain about some security precaution, he'd fire back with, "Remember Utica!" and that would silence my protests. So I prepared myself mentally for some zigzag route to avoid traveling in a straight line. A week before we were to leave, Jerry stopped at the lab and gave me a route, all marked out on a map and described in written directions, spelling out every turn and the distance between them to the nearest tenth of a mile. One thing was obvious - it wasn't direct. In round numbers, to travel 600 miles we'd be driving 750. The whole thing was in a big manila envelope with my name on the front and the license number of my car. I was ready to ridicule the stupidity of packaging my secret route in such an obvious fashion when Jerry frowned at me, stopping me cold. Something was up! So I thanked him and he shook my hand and wished us a good trip, right there at my desk, in front of everybody. After he left, I took the map out and looked it over carefully, then put everything away in the big envelope and set it over on a corner of my conference table. The label with my name was facing up, but the top of the envelope, where I had sliced it open neatly, was facing toward my desk, so that somebody sitting across the table from me could read the label easily. If Jerry wanted to be obvious, I could be obvious too. As the day went on I reviewed work packages with several programmers, giving attention as usual to the way their individual packages stitched together. I praised their work, made suggestions, and directed changes in a few of the packages. It was a day pretty much like all days. Just before lunch I had several people at the table at once, while we discussed ways to eliminate redundant computations by making several of the modules more interdependent, to save processor time. We had printouts spread all over the table, some on chairs, and even one sequence on the floor. When we finally agreed I sketched a flow diagram showing the changes, and I asked Bernie and Doris to gather up the sheets of the diagram and copy them so I could have a copy, as well as each of the people whose work would be affected. It was a great show, worthy of an Oscar. Back when the big changes were being made in our workspace, with the new entrance and exit and all that, I had spent time in the wee hours of a couple of mornings with Jerry and two FBI surveillance specialists, explaining what we needed to cover with cameras. Most of the space was watched with area coverage, a camera with a wide angle lens about every sixteen feet. But some critical locations had more detailed coverage. I asked for a clear view of the face and hands of every person at my conference table, and I got exactly what I asked for. In the process, the cameras captured every square inch of my desk and table. Nothing could be set down, picked up, moved, written on, or looked at without leaving a permanent record, and I was assured that there were enough millions of pixels so we could zoom in to read every word on any document. I left work early that afternoon. Well, a little after five - that was early for me. On the way home I stopped at a Seven-Eleven store and bought a six pack of Coke to give me a plausible excuse for being there. On my way back to the car I stopped at the pay phone to make a call. "Jerry, can you call up the pictures from work cameras onto my laptop?" "Sure. I can put 'em anywhere in the world. Got something you want to look at?" "Yeah, well, maybe. If you'll drop over at our apartment there might be something we'd enjoy watching together." "Tell you what I'll do. I can be there at seven with a pizza for the three of us. Pepperoni all right for you?" "Absolutely. If it's pepperoni and black olives, that's even better." Jerry didn't get there till quarter after seven, which had Trudy starting to get anxious. To me, the big attraction was what we'd get to see, or not see, on the video. But for Trudy, who often skipped lunch, the pizza trumped the video. What followed was real teamwork. I took the pizza box, locked the door, and set the pizza box on the bed. Jerry sat down at my desk and got to work on my laptop. Trudy ignored both of us, opened the box, and gobbled down the first slice about as fast as I can type this sentence. "Okay Jack, what is it you want to see?" "Can you show us an area view of my workstation, or at least of my conference table?" "What a question. Does a bear shit in the woods? Oops, sorry Trudy." That prompted some sort of a reply from her that probably started out as sarcasm but came out as a grunt, garbled by competing with a mouthful of pizza. Jerry typed in commands and brought up the overall view of the lab, a panorama made by joining the area cameras the same way that computers can join a dozen views from a mountaintop to make one picture covering 180 degrees of viewing angle. On that picture he moved the cursor to the middle of my conference table and selected that camera. While that was coming up, he asked, "What time do you want to start?" "You left at what time, maybe ten thirty?" "Yeah, about that. Let's see what happened then." There I was, with the map spread out on the table. Then I folded it carefully and slid it into the envelope, with the front of the map toward the front of the envelope and the top fold toward the top edge of the envelope. Just as I remembered, I slid the envelope over to the corner of the table, face up, slit opening toward my desk. Then we fast forwarded to the first meeting, during which the manila envelope was untouched and apparently unnoticed. Next meeting, same thing. Jeremy showed up, same thing. Cal was next, and again the manila envelope stayed put. Then I got to the joint meeting with Bernie and Doris and it got interesting. Trudy had inhaled two slices of pizza by then, and was recovering from her daylong fast. She put two slices on small plates and passed them to Jerry and me, then looked over my shoulder to see what was so interesting. On the monitor, I was talking to Bernie and Doris, gesturing with my hands as I did so. They replied and we had an animated discussion, as they brought out page after page of printout and I started to diagram the logic in the middle of the table. Nobody had even looked at the envelope. Then the papers started to cover and overflow the tabletop. We had the display speed set at 4X, which makes normal movements look jerky, and watched the ocean of paper expand and flood every horizontal surface within reach. The gestures, the jerky movements, and the tsunami of paper were comical to watch, and had all three of us chuckling and then laughing out loud. There was more discussion, with hands waving and fingers pointing at significant places on the paper, and finally I was finishing the diagram, which itself had expanded from one page to five. Then we all sat back, smiling, and nodding as we expressed final agreement. We watched me get up and leave the scene while Bernie and Doris gathered up their printouts and Bernie took my diagram to make copies. The two of them wrapped up their conversation and turned in opposite directions to leave. The table was bare! I reacted first, naturally. "Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Here's what we need: a good closeup view all all four of their hands, their facial expressions, and what they were saying to each other. Can you do that for us, Jerry?" "The video I can do right away. Different cameras, different display rates, but it's all right here. But to get the audio and sync it with the real time video will take a few minutes because it's in a different server. So let's do the video first and see what we can learn from that, while the server is searching for the audio." Trudy stepped over to our tiny refrigerator and got out three cans of Coke while Jerry was typing. I watched with interest as he manipulated the video coverage. "Jerry, I didn't know you were this good at juggling computer data. Is this something new, or were you a closet techie all along?" "It's fairly new. It became obvious that I needed to be handy with the IT stuff, just to ride herd on this program. We had some IT specialists up here from the New York office for another job, and on the side they gave me a crash course in the fundamentals. Then as we got into the high powered surveillance they taught me how to work that. It's all stuff I need to know anyway, so this project is giving me on the job training. All this time Jerry was picking out the cameras he wanted for our tracking of the envelope, and he brought four on the view simultaneously, in a four window array. As he finished, the monitor displayed the notice that the audio track was available to us, so it was showtime. He backed up the video to where I had just left the scene and then started the show. As Bernie and Doris gathered up papers, we heard things like "Here are some of yours," and "I'm looking for page 43. Have you seen it?" There was a lot of movement but we didn't see any naked grabs directed toward the corner where the manila envelope was last seen. Nevertheless, when they were all finished there was no envelope on the table. It could easily have been masked by the printout sheets, but we hadn't seen any obvious attempts to scoop it up. When they straightened up, Doris asked, "Where are the five sheets of the diagram?" "I've got them here," answered Bernie. "I'll make copies for us and get the originals back to Jack. I was ready to pronounce a big "Aha!" but before I could say a thing Doris said, "Here, let me have them because I've got some other stuff to copy. Save you a trip." "Oh, great," answered Bernie, "Here they are." Jerry and I looked at each other. "Doris?" I asked. "Looks that way, but let's back up the video and watch everybody's hands in slo mo." So we watched and backed up and watched some more. The papers that had accumulated near the envelope were scooped up by both Bernie and Doris, but without their hands reaching out far enough to grab the envelope. Finally, on the fourth time through, I saw a slight beige blur out past the end of the table. "Hold it there. I think it fell off onto the floor. Can any of the cameras see the floor?" Jerry went back to the panorama of the whole lab, selected the area around my workstation, and picked out each camera in turn. He found two that showed the area of the floor in question, and sure enough, one of them showed the manila envelope on the floor after Bernie and Doris left the area. "So we don't have any reason to suspect either one of them," Jerry said. "No, and so far we've given a lot of the workforce a glimpse of the trip plan package. I guess I'll have to find the envelope and put it back up on the table." Trudy chimed in, "I'm glad it's not Doris. She's a nice lady. I got talking with her a few weeks ago when I went over to the lab to see you. She's a working single mother with a three year old daughter." Jerry looked a little pained. "Sometimes they're the easiest to corrupt because they need the money so badly." "Yes, but her husband was killed in Iraq, and the way she talked about it struck me as quite patriotic." "Well, I hope you're right about her. I hate to see single mothers get locked up. It almost always ruins their kids." * * * * * * * * * * Jerry left, and although I didn't know about it till later, he went over to the lab. One thing he could do that I couldn't was enter through one of the emergency exits. Four of them had nothing in front of them, so the doors could be seen from anywhere in the lab. The fifth one was around the corner of an air conditioning equipment room, and although the location was clearly marked by lighted signs, the door itself was hidden by the corner until you got right up to it. So that was Jerry's secret entrance. He had personally oiled the hinges and latch and practiced so he could defeat the alarm and enter silently, then look around before stepping out into the open. He told me the next day that there was nobody there when he went in, and he walked around looking at everything before going over to my workstation. There, on the floor where we had seen it in the video, was the envelope. It was face down, about the way you'd expect if it slid off the table. Inside he found the map, neatly folded, but inserted into the envelope the wrong way. The top fold was put in first, and the face of the map, which gave the description as Northeastern United States, was facing down, not up. So somebody had taken it out and put it back. Jerry put it all back just as he had found it, after photographing the position of the envelope and map with his cell phone, and left the lab. He still had his latex gloves sticking out of his pocket when we met for coffee in the morning. We had no more episodes that could identify a mole in our lab, and the issue was still up in the air when Trudy and I were leaving for vacation. Jerry had insisted that we stop at Reed's Rides, presumably to let Woody give the car a quick going over before we hit the road. So I was surprised when we pulled into the building and all of our stuff was quickly transferred to another car. From across the bay I could see my car leaving with a man driving and a woman passenger, roughly the size of Trudy and me. I couldn't see their faces but I assumed that they were both FBI agents. Woody had laid out a breakfast for us in his conference room, and Jerry joined us as we ate and drank coffee and chatted for a half hour. Then, as we drained our cups, Jerry unfolded a new map with a route marked out for us. Like the decoy route, it avoided the interstates, but it was a little more direct. It would take us through some scenic parts of western New York, and could be expected to keep us clear of traffic congestion. So we got into our ride, a new-looking burgundy colored Chevy Monte Carlo, and took off for home. As we were leaving, Woody asked us to take the car over to Red's shop and let him look it over. If any university ever granted a doctorate in street rods, this car would have been Woody's thesis project. Submitting it to Red to inspect was just like going before the faculty for an oral exam. I clapped Woody on the back and assured him that we would indeed take the car to Red, and that we'd bring it back to him in one piece. * * * * * * * * * * The trip was pleasant and uneventful. The Chevy rode like a dream, had very comfortable seats, and had a bigger gas tank than my Ford, so we made it most of the way to Erie, Pennsylvania before we had to fill up. We ran along Lake Erie on the old state highways, which were nearly deserted because everybody uses Interstate 90 now. Surprisingly, the trip took us only about an hour longer than the Interstates would have, and the reduced stress of driving 'the road less traveled' as Robert Frost called it, left us feeling pretty fresh when we arrived. We called home when we crossed the state line out of New York, and alerted our parents with our ETA. They were all gathered at Trudy's house. When we arrived we found a cookout in progress, with hamburgers, potato salad, and cole slaw, and our choice of steak or hamburgers. In addition to our parents, Trudy's brother Tom and his wife Annette were there. As usual at these occasions, everybody tried to talk at once and we were trying to listen to everybody and eat at the same time. Grace bent down and whispered in my ear, "Notice anything special about the potato salad? I added a secret ingredient, just for you. I'll tell you about it tomorrow." We partied until about one in the morning, and then dragged ourselves off to bed. Grace explained with a straight face that Tom and Annette would be sleeping in Tom's old room, the one that had been assigned to me before, and she was sorry to tell me that Trudy and I would have to double up in her old room, and she hoped we wouldn't mind too much. But for the sake of appearances, she'd appreciate it if we would not advertise our sleeping arrangements. I laughed out loud and made her a pinky promise that it'd be our secret. As we turned to go up the stairs, Grace gave me a big hug and said, "I love you, Jack. Everybody in the family says that Trudy caught a good man." "I love you too, Grace. You and your family have always made made me feel so welcome, like a blood relative. We'll find time to talk tomorrow. I've been looking forward to it." * * * * * * * * * * Next morning I woke up early and tried not to disturb Trudy as I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Once I was up and functioning I didn't want to disturb Trudy, so I headed downstairs to see if I could manage to put a cup of coffee together. But when I got to the kitchen, there was Grace, looking every bit the efficient homemaker, straight out of the Donna Reed show. She'd heard me coming and greeted me with a cup of coffee and a kiss on the cheek. "Morning, Jack. I'm glad you're the first one down. Maybe we can chat for a few minutes before everybody else shows up." "Okay, Grace. I know you want to tell me about your secret ingredient, but there's something more important that we've got to take care of first, isn't there?" "I wouldn't be a mother if I weren't anxious about my little girl, would I? Tell me about her. How's she doing? Is she fitting in? Is she happy? Is anything bothering her? Is she eating properly? What kind of friends does she have? Is she safe? Should I be doing anything for her? What does she do all day? Is the school work wearing her down? Tell me, Jack." Jack Be Quick Ch. 07 "Grace, I couldn't answer that many questions if we had all month to talk. Let's start with the essentials. First off, I love Trudy more than ever, and she feels the same about me. Our relationship is as solid as anybody's on the planet. We're close. When I get away from work I run to her. When she gets out of class and has a few spare minutes, she calls me. We fulfill each other, round out each other's world. "Next point, you can ask her whatever you want. There'll be no holding back there. She's not going to say, 'Oh, Mom!' and push you away. She misses you and she loves you more than ever, and being so far away there's been no feeling of smothered by an anxious family. Knowing that you're back here thinking about her makes her feel safe, and she's able to love me fully because you and Frank have always been so loving and supportive of her. "To you she's still a little girl in pigtails, isn't she? Well, get over it because she isn't. You know she was always an outstanding student, anxious to learn everything that anybody was willing to teach her. Not only has that not changed, but the university environment seems to stimulate her, and she loves it. If this job at MIT hadn't come along, I'd have had to go there, even work as a ditch digger to be near her, because she picked just the right place to go to college. It might not be the best place for everybody, but it's the best place for her. "She's made friends with everybody she meets - all her classmates, teachers, the girl behind the coffee counter - and she's created her own little world of people she's comfortable with. I've met some of her best friends and they're a lot like her. They're all serious students. No drugs, no booze, no risky behavior of any sort. Trudy's like a magnet that attracts good people. "Okay, that's what I think is most important. Now I've forgotten all the rest of your questions so lay a few on me again." "You aren't just telling me what you think I want to hear, are you? You're not hiding anything from me?" "Yes and no. You know I'll always tell you the truth. But here's the thing. The project I'm working on is very important, very far reaching, and very, very secret. I've got the kind of job that there's no end to. It's demanding and satisfying, all at the same time. And it's part of Trudy's world, too. She knows what I do, she's friends with the people I'm closest to, she's included in some of our discussions in a way that no other outsider could ever be. But because our personal lives and my working life are so closely connected, I have to be very careful not to let anything slip that could endanger the project or get either of us in trouble. If you get the feeling that I'm holding back, not telling you everything, you may be right because I have to keep thinking about every word I'm about to say, and be careful not to say too much. Do you understand?" "Of course. It must be hard to walk that fine line. But there's nothing personal about Trudy that you're keeping from me?" "No. Absolutely not. Grace, she's my whole world, and I could talk about her all day long. You have every right to be proud of her, and you have nothing to worry about. Oh, you asked about how she's eating. She burns up a lot of energy, walking miles every day around the campus, and studying, and taking care of me. So she has to eat, and I mean eat good food, not junk, just to keep up her routine. We do eat a lot of cheeseburgers, but they're good cheeseburgers, and we eat a lot of salads too. She's careful about getting a balanced diet, and the best way I can prove that is the way she looks and acts, and the way her weight doesn't go up or down. She doesn't always eat three regular meals, it might be two meals one day and four another, but she's eating well and she's not run down. She's full of energy and cheerful. She's my little ray of sunshine." "What about life outside of work and classes? What about getting out for entertainment or relaxation?" "We both like stage plays, and there's always some group putting one on, so we get out to see a few. We've been to a couple of concerts. We have television. She doesn't go out clubbing with other girls, because she doesn't approve of what goes on in that world. She's gone to an opera with some of her friends, and a ballet, too." "I'll have to talk with her. Now that you've put my mind at ease, I won't be overloading her with my worries and I think we can have a nice talk. I know we can. Now on to some serious Mom stuff. Does she have enough money?" "Yes. She manages our finances, does a great job of it. Our joint checking account has grown to the point where we had to open a savings account for the overflow, and now that account's growing, too. It doesn't cost us a lot to live, and I've had some very nice raises since I've been there. When you consider that neither of us is old enough to buy a drink, I think there's hardly a couple our age that's as well provided for as we are. Incidentally - now don't ask for details because I can't tell you any - but she's on a retainer from the people I work with, so she's bringing in some income of her own while she goes to class full time. But we're not materialistic or money hungry. What we need we can buy, without settling for cheap junk. But we don't need all that much, so we don't buy all that much. We live a simple life. We don't have any car expense because that's covered by my employer, even gas and tires and wiper blades. And we don't feel that we have to run out and buy the latest model." "But what about that new Chevy that you drove here in? That's a far cry from your old Ford. That must have cost a bundle." "That's just a loaner, while they're doing some work on mine. But that's not costing us anything, either. You can relax about money. We're not starving students. Trudy thinks that by the time we get married we'll have a nice little bundle to put down on a house or condo or whatever, and you can be sure that whatever sort of housing she picks out, it'll be a sound investment, not a money pit." "Well, since you brought it up, what about marriage? Should I be going out to shop for a mother of the bride dress?" "Not just yet. You know we decided to get our bachelors' degrees first. Then we'll get married, and what happens next I have no idea. Trudy really ought to go on and get her master's and doctorate. She's that brilliant. I think her future might be in education, teaching at a university. I'm pretty sure that my future will be an extension of what I'm doing now, which doesn't say much because I can't tell you what I do. We'll probably wind up in or around a university. And that's a nice environment, rubbing elbows with people who are a lot like us. "I know you're wondering about grandchildren. Well, there aren't any on the horizon yet. When she feels comfortable with raising kids we'll have some, but not a big family. We're thinking probably two, same as your family. While she's doing graduate study she might feel that she could handle a baby, I don't know. Talk with her about all that. That's a good mommy conversation. All I can tell you is that whatever feels right, we'll do, and I'm as eager as you are to see it happen. But there's no hurry, no body clock ticking in her ear. At the age when most girls are getting ready to look for a husband and settle down, she'll probably become Doctor Trudy, and she'll still be in her twenties. There'll be plenty of time for a family. I think you and Frank and my mom and dad will all be wonderful grandparents. "Now let's talk potato salad." * * * * * * * * * * I didn't hear Trudy come downstairs while Grace and I were talking. She was wearing pajamas, stretching and yawning. She came over to me and put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. "I heard you talking as I came down the stairs. You were talking about me, weren't you? Did you tell Mom how awful I treat you, and how you can't stand to be around me?" "Don't say that, even to make a joke. Come sit on my lap and tell your mother all about our world." "Mom, I can sum it up in one sentence. There isn't a girl anywhere who's as happy as I am. How's that? I do wish we lived closer together, and I miss you and Dad, but I have Jack and he works hard to be just what I need in every way. We both do. I was thinking about it when we were driving here, and I believe that our happiness, the way we live for each other, comes from having the kind of family life growing up that had lots of love and caring, really paying attention to each other. "I've made some friends who come from dysfunctional families, and they have to work so hard to make sense out of their lives. Some of them get it right once in a while and are happy, and then they feel guilty about being happy so they have to look around for something to feel bad about. They're nice people but they seem doomed by their childhoods. Does that make sense to you?" "Honey, the sad truth is that they're all over. Millions of them. I'm so glad that you kids appreciate what we tried to do as parents. Nothing was as important to us, and I'm including your folks in this too, Jack, nothing was as important as our kids. You kids are our gift to the world. Including Tommy, too, of course. "How do you feel when you're with your classmates? You must be about the youngest in your classes. Does that create a barrier?" "No, it never really comes up. If I were hanging around with a bunch of losers who go out to bars and night clubs to pick up other losers, then I suppose I might feel uncomfortable. But I'm with people who are studying as hard as I am, and I manage to keep right up there with the best of them, so there's a mutual acceptance that comes with being good at what we do. We all respect each other for our ability and our hard work. It's as if we're all the same age, in spite of the fact that some of my friends are ten years older than I am. "Two of my friends have babies. One is in a stable relationship, but the other one is on her own. Life is hard for them, juggling classwork and sitters and all the needs of little kids. It makes me realize that there's a time for everything, and I'm glad that I didn't start a family first and then try to get my education later. "Jack and I are different in some ways, but we're alike in being cautious and analytical. We think things through before we jump into anything. 'Look before you leap,' that sort of thing. We try to let our brains rule our behavior, not our hormones and especially not our peers. Actually, we're pretty much alike in the most important ways. I think that even Jack's gift for computers and the things he can make them do, is similar to the way I get excited about learning new things, and try to grasp the tiniest details. So from day to day, we're always on the same page. Aren't we, Baby?" and she gave me a big sloppy kiss. "Look at the two of you. You had plenty of time to get that out of your system in high school, and then there's all this time you've been living together. I guess if you haven't got tired of each other by now, you never will. Am I right?" "Grace, she's the air that I breathe. How could I get tired of that?" Just then Tom and Annette, Trudy's brother and sister, strolled into the kitchen. They were all dressed and looking wide awake and cheerful. I turned around on my stool and greeted them. "You guys make us look lazy." Tom laughed and gave Annette a squeeze across the shoulders. "Don't forget, we didn't drive all day yesterday. We've been vacationing for a week already, and we got here two days ago. So I think you guys are entitled to look as if you put in a hard day." A voice approached from the hallway. "Well, if that's your criterion, I must be the laziest slob in town. I didn't have to drive at all, not even across town, with the cookout being in my own backyard. But let's stop talking nonsense and get down to something serious. Like coffee!" Frank walked over to the table and turned a chair around to face us. "Everything else in the world can wait till I've had my first cup." Grace walked over and gave him a kiss on the forehead. "That's your payment in advance for being patient as you wait for it. I just put a fresh pot together and it's dripping down now. About two minutes and it'll be ready to pour." "Okay, I'll forgive you. Hey, Jack, I was so busy slaving over a hot barbecue grill last night that I hardly got a word out of you. How's everything going? What's happening in Boston?" "Everything's going well. I got a promotion and a pretty good raise to go with it since I saw you last." Tom smiled. "Hey, that's great. Does that mean that your project is going well?" "Sure does. We fell behind schedule but we're catching up, and the quality of our product is looking excellent." Frank looked concerned. "Hey, there was something on the news about a shootout in Cambridge. Was that anywhere near you?" "Well, sort of. Not right in our neighborhood, but only a couple of miles from the lab." That seemed to trigger something in Tom's memory. "I read about that in the newspaper. They said right at the end that the investigation is being headed up by the FBI. That seems pretty unusual. Do you know anything about that?" "There's nothing being released about the investigation, but I heard two rumors. One was that it was somehow connected to a terrorist plot, and of course that makes everybody in the area think of the bombs at the marathon. The other one was that national security was involved somehow. So I guess you can take your choice, or if you don't like those rumors, make up one of your own. Everything's been pretty quiet since then, though. That's how we like it." Annette looked at me as if she were giving me a visual inspection. "How are you doing since your accident? We didn't know whether you got a scratch or lost an ear. But you look okay now. All healed up?" "Yeah. I wasn't hurt very seriously, but it was scary. Two cars collided headon. Pieces of metal went flying all over, and a few plowed right through my windshield. I never saw anything coming toward me, and suddenly the whole inside of my car was full of flying pieces of glass, and one bounced off my ear and sliced it open. But it bled like crazy, and they put a huge bandage on me that covered the whole right side of my head. Whoever it was that called Trudy told her I came through all right, but when she got there and saw the bandage she about freaked out." "He looked as if the side of his head was gone. Next day, when we got it looked at again, they put a small bandage just on the ear, and then it looked more like a small cut. It left a scar, but it won't mar his good looks. I don't want anybody but me getting up close and friendly with his ears, anyhow." Frank was quietly sipping his coffee while all this conversation was going on. "So what's on the agenda for you kids today?" Trudy replied, "I'd better make some phone calls this morning. We'd like to get together with some of our friends from school some time, and of course I want to do a little shopping. The stores in Boston are always so crowded! We need to spend some time with all of you and with Jack's family. So I've got to play social secretary and figure out when we'll do all these things. But mostly we need some unstructured time to relax, maybe do some tourist stuff. "But that's all about us. What are your plans, Annette? And Mom, how about you?" I sat on my stool and chuckled. "Hey, Frank, I notice that our movements are always choreographed by the women. Is that how my life's going to be from now on?" "Get used to it, Jack. That's how it's been for thirty-some years that we've been married, and that's what you and Tom and every other guy on the planet are in for, too." Tom took up the refrain. "Once you notice that your life is all planned for you, it's really not so bad. Takes a load off my shoulders. I just have to get my marching orders and get in step. But there are things you have to say. In the Army it was 'Yes, sir,' but in married life it's 'Of course, dear' and 'Oh, that's a good idea' and 'Hey, that sounds like fun.' You'll get used to it after a while. Think of your job as a place where you make decisions and your home as a place where they're all made for you." Annette was quick with the comeback. "All right you guys. This is just one more of the many services we provide. You'd be lost without us, sorry souls wandering around aimlessly, bumping into things." * * * * * * * * * * After I'd dried off from my shower and was selecting a shirt to put on, my phone rang. "Jack, this is Pete." The FBI identification protocol followed. "I need to see you this morning. How about Red's place at eleven?" After all we'd been through, Trudy was as relaxed as I'd seen her. She'd sort of pulled her old home, room, bed, and family up around her like a warm, comfortable cocoon and I hated the thought of doing anything to spoil the mood. So I answered, "Sure, Beth. I think that's a good idea. Let's go with that, and you can tell Jim that I approved it." Trudy had been in the bathroom and came out. "Call from work?" "Yeah. As long as it's something as simple as that I don't mind, but if they try to pull me in any deeper, I'll tell Jim to put a plug in it." "I'll be on the phone a lot for a while. Can you stay out of trouble for a couple of hours?" "Sure. When you're doing up our social calendar don't forget to have Red over here some evening. Maybe share a hot dog in the backyard. I'm thinking about going out there to see him for a few minutes. I promised Woody that I'd show Red the Chevy, and I'd hate to keep letting that slide and not get it done. Woody's a good guy and I don't want to let him down. Red can't look its over anywhere but at his shop because just opening the hood would draw every guy in the neighborhood and cause a lot of problems." "Thinking about having lunch with him?" "Yeah, probably. I'll be back after lunch some time." By this time I was all dressed, looking casual but respectable, and I grabbed up the car keys off the dresser. "Think I'll need Saint Chris?" "If you feel the need to ask, then the answer is yes." So I slipped on the harness, and Trudy clipped it to my belt in back for me. I wiggled my shoulders to get it settled in place and took my automatic out of the lockbox and checked it. Then I put on a light jacket and gave her a kiss. "I love you, Sweetness." "Love you, too," she answered, "Stay safe. And give my love to Uncle Red." * * * * * * * * * * Red looked the same as always. I saw three cars in the big assembly bay, in various stages of completion. In the machine shop two machinists were busy, and over on the side two mechanics were working, one on an engine and the other on a rear end. "Business must be good. Where'd all this work come from?" I asked Red. "These are government, and that one's privately owned, just came in by word of mouth." "I'm glad to see that your reputation is getting around. Say, are there any visitors from Boston here?" "Yeah, Pete and a girl named Julie are in my office. You can go into the classroom and lock the door. It's secure." Pete smiled and said, "Glad to see you when you're not bleeding, Jack. This is Julie, who's on temporary loan to our office from Chicago." Julie reached over and shook my hand, which made her shirt shift just enough for me to see that she had a bandage on her left shoulder. Pete saw me looking at it, and said, "Before we sit down to talk, come with us for a minute." We walked out to a small assembly bay that was just big enough to work on one car or light truck. There sat my Ford, or what used to be my Ford. From the looks of the body it had rolled over, and the amount of scraping on the roof made me think it had been going pretty fast. Pete gestured to the back, and when I walked around there I could count eight bullet holes. Jack Be Quick Ch. 07 "Pete, what'd you do to my car? We just got it fixed up, and now it looks ready for the scrap heap." The door opened behind us and Red came in. "There's so much body damage that we're thinking about pulling the whole body off and sticking another one on." "Much damage to the stuff that makes it go?" "Some. You didn't see the driver's side, did you?" We walked around there and I was looking at maybe a dozen more holes, all in a line the way a machine gun would rake the car as the shooter went by fast in the passing lane. "Who was driving?" "I was," said Pete, "and if Red hadn't told Woody to put some armor in the doors, I wouldn't be here." Red nodded. "Too bad I didn't tell him to put in hardback seats. Could have saved poor Julie a lot of grief." Pete nodded. "When we stopped rolling and sliding, Julie was covered in blood. So much that it was hard to see where it was coming from. I was afraid she was done for. What a mess." We walked back to the classroom, shaking our heads. With the door locked, I asked Pete, "So what do we do now? The whole world knew where Trudy and I were going. I can't draw fire to my family or Trudy's. Do you have a plan?" "The only sure way to put a stop to this is to catch the people that're paying for it. Getting the shooters doesn't stop anything. This whole deal must be a lot bigger than we thought, for them to keep on trying like this. The paid guns are keeping their mouths shut so we can't get a single clue from them. I'm starting to believe them when they say they don't know who's paying them." "It sounds as if there are more of them, and more incidents, than I know about. Is this really that big?" "More complex than you need to know. But you and Trudy were the first targets, and I think it got personal. Whoever the prime contractor is, he can't stand the thought of failing. Think for a minute. If you're being paid top dollar by European politicians to obstruct an American project, you must be someone with an international reputation, a really elite operator. Then your guys can't even knock off two kids? It's very damaging to your reputation, and every time you fail it makes you look like more of a fool. So if he has to hire a whole army division, he's determined to get you and Trudy once and for all, just to stay in business." "Yeah, I can see that. Pete, could you fill me in real quick on what you've found out about George's murder?" "We couldn't find the truck, but we found the shop that cut it up into small pieces. Didn't get a lot of info out of that, though. We got the name of the guy who paid for it, but it was just a name, and we haven't tied it to anybody yet. The whole stunt out in the field was pulled off by three guys, and we have one of them. The other two suffered accidental deaths." "Like acute lead poisoning, you mean?" "Yeah, you could say that. And as I said, we don't know much more than we did before." "Okay, go on with what you were saying." "Jack, my top priority right now is to keep you and Trudy safe. We've got the CIA intercepting phone calls and emails, working this from the other end. They've put out the word through spy channels that whatever governments are behind this, when we find them blood will be shed. Not military action or diplomatic action, I mean important people will leave home in the morning and not come back at night. What we expect is that they'll stop funding this thing, but the contractor who's running it will keep it up out of his own pocket, just to protect his reputation so he can stay in business. "We've established some idea of what's going on, just by going over the people who are capable of organizing something this big. We're not stupid and we have connections you can't even imagine, so I know we'll get this problem solved. But I can't guarantee when." "So what happens now? I mean now like today, and now like the next two weeks, and now like when we go back to Boston if we live that long." "We're going to move you to a place where you'll be safe." "What's that mean? Where? When?" For the first time since I got there, Pete smiled. "Let's go get some lunch." Jack Be Quick Ch. 08 Don't start reading here, without reading the other seven chapters. Reading the last chapter before you start at the beginning, just isn't right, somehow. Stand up for truth, justice, and the American way, like Superman. Be a hero. Do the right thing. You'll feel better for it. Besides, if you think this will tell you who the bad guy is so you can spoil the story for your friends, I've got a surprise for you. ***** There wasn't a lot to tell Trudy when I got back to her house. She was bubbling over with plans she'd made, scheduling everything so carefully, and including all her friends who would be home from college. When I'd called her on my way to lunch, she said that tonight we were going on a double date with Tom and Annette. She was really looking forward to it, because she had hardly seen her brother during the past four years. She met Annette when Tom started to date her, and I knew that she liked her from the things she'd said about her, but back then Trudy was barely into her teens and the age difference meant that they didn't have a lot in common. So this was her chance to get to know them all over again, hear about what they'd been doing, how their jobs were going, their plans, their dreams, everything. I had a hunch that she might get to know Tom and Annette very, very well. We had dinner at a restaurant where Tom and Annette used to eat when they were dating, and then headed out to a night club across town. Tom was driving. At the night club he started to get out of the car so the valet could park it, but the valet asked if we would please stay in the car and drive it where the men in white coveralls would direct him. "What's going on? Why aren't you parking our car?" "I'm sorry, sir. A guest collapsed just inside the main entrance, and we've got to keep this area clear for the ambulance. If you'll just let them direct you, you can park and then a van will take your party around the back way, to the private party entrance. I'm sure it will take you only a minute, and of course we appreciate your cooperation during this emergency. Your cover charge will be waived and your party's first round of drinks will be on the house, as a token of our appreciation." We were directed to a back parking lot. Sure enough, as soon as the car was parked, a dark colored van pulled up and we were assisted into it. Then it started moving, but it didn't go to a back entrance at all. Instead it headed out to a street in back of the parking lot, and then by a series of right and left turns to an old state highway that headed due west. I was pretty nervous and I knew that the others were starting to get suspicious. As I tried to speak to the driver, a man materialized from behind us. He'd been lying down in the cargo space behind the passenger seats, and he was holding a gun near Trudy's head. He calmly ordered me to hand over my gun, and while he held his gun on us, another man sat up back there and made his way around the end of the short passenger seat to frisk all four of us. Trudy hadn't brought her gun, and Tom and Annette never had any guns, so the search didn't produce anything except cell phones, which he put into a bag. Then the first man man put his gun away and said, "In case it's not clear to you yet, you have been abducted. There's not much you can do about it. The window and door handles have all been removed, so you can't get out and you can't call for help. We have no plans to hurt any of you, so please just sit back and try to relax. I know this is a tense time for you and I apologize for spoiling your plans, but we'll try to make you as comfortable as we can." "Where are you taking us?" asked Trudy. "I can't tell you that, but I can assure you that you are perfectly safe and you will not be harmed in any way. But please don't try to resist because that might result in personal injury to one or more of you." The van turned left, heading south of the highway over a narrow paved road that went past darkened farmland, from what little I could see in the side illumination from the headlights. There were no lights, no traffic, and no buildings that I could see. Suddenly the van turned right and went along an unpaved driveway, then bumped up onto some pavement. It was so pitch black out that there was nothing we could see until the van slowed to a stop alongside a set of steps that led up into an airplane. The right side door of the van was slid open and two men assisted us all up the steps into what turned out to be a lavishly appointed executive transport. A man and a woman showed us to seats that were arranged in sort of a conversation group, and helped us get the seat belts fastened. I heard the hollow 'bonk' that meant the entrance door was closed, and by that time we were moving. We taxied maybe a half mile and turned onto a runway, paused briefly and then took off with a 'whoosh.' But I heard other aircraft taking off nearby, and then I could see the glowing blowtorch effect of fighter jets firing their afterburners, one on our left and another on our right. With a loud howl they pulled up sharply and climbed almost vertically until we couldn't see them any more. Our plane climbed for a long while and then leveled off, and a man wearing a dark suit strolled forward from a compartment aft of the main salon where we were seated. He walked straight ahead and then turned and sat down in a seat that faced aft, and as he turned to face us I could see who it was. "Good evening, and welcome to an adventure that you can tell your grandkids about. You are guests of the United States Government, Executive Branch, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are traveling in one of several airplanes that are specially equipped for carrying cabinet officers and bureau chiefs. For national security reasons it's important to take high level government officials where they are going as fast as practical, to minimize their vulnerability to attack. I assure you that the CEO's of the world's largest corporations can't get their hands on anything that compares to this plane, either in comfort or in performance. "Some of you have never met me before, so let me introduce myself. My name is Pete, and I am a Deputy to the Special Agent in Charge of the Boston regional FBI office. What you are going through right now is a bogus kidnapping that we concocted for your personal protection. Let me stress that. We are doing this to keep you four people safe. We'll have about three hours to talk en route, and I'm free to explain things to you that we couldn't discuss anyplace less secure than an isolated airplane cruising at 40,000 feet. By the time we land, you will understand more about some matters relating to our national security than any diplomats, including our own, or any news organizations. So sit back and relax in outrageous comfort while the cabin crew takes your orders for drinks and snacks. I'm going to have a quick word with the pilot. Then I'll be back and we'll have a conversation that will answer all of the questions you have, plus some that you never even thought of." Pete got up and walked forward as our host and hostess came in and took drink orders. The hostess, Jill, encouraged us to try any wayout drinks that we'd never get to order in an ordinary bar. "I've worked some really posh places, and none of them had a bar as well supplied as the one on this plane. High level meetings don't always go well, and we try to help disgruntled officials to decompress on their way home so they won't take out their frustrations on their families. So if you want to try something you've only heard the name of, I'll mix it for you. And Jack and Trudy, we're flying so fast that time is accelerated, so you're both old enough to drink until we let down to land." We had to laugh at that. Trudy ordered a Virgin's Prayer, but I played it safe with a Bud Light. Tom ordered a Jack and soda, and Annette said she'd always wanted to try a Grasshopper. As we all relaxed and realized that we'd probably never travel in such luxury again, all the shock and fear that the kidnap had generated just disappeared and left us in a slightly silly mood. I looked at Trudy and she smiled at me. "Were you in on this scam?" she asked. "Sort of, but it hasn't been all fun and games. We really were in danger, so much so that it was embarrassing to the FBI. They've pulled out all the stops to keep us safe while they take care of the problem. I'm sure Pete will explain it all." As I said those words, Pete came back from the cockpit and resumed his seat. "Now for your benefit, Tom and Annette, let me give you some background. Tom, I'm sure you knew that your sister started dating Jack in high school, and by graduation day they were deeply in love. One thing that we in the FBI have found is that almost every extraordinary act, good or bad, has its origin in some strong emotion, and we have a special respect for lovers because they'll do anything at all for love, whether it's the love of a fiancée or a spouse or a child, or even more abstract entities like God and country. "About that same time a very secret project was in its conceptual stage. All that I can tell you about it is that its central objective is a totally new approach to national security, meaning not only governmental activities but also our economic system and businesses, large and small. The project would keep a lot of computer scientists busy, and we quietly evaluated several hundred candidates for the kind of jobs that IT people dream of. From those, a starting force of twenty was selected, and more were designated for the second wave, to be hired as the work got going hot and heavy. Qualities that were highly valued in the selection process were patriotism, ability to keep secrets, ability to get along with coworkers, and of course, extreme technical competence. Nobody cared how old they were, what they looked like, how they dressed, any of the things that interviewers usually look hard at. Of all the candidates, the youngest who made the cut for the first wave was Jack. I know you never worked with him, but take it from me that he's good at what he does! "Then we, meaning the FBI, looked for an insider to be our eyes and ears in the labor pool, so we selected Jack. He was just out of high school, so we could easily do a thorough investigation of him. He had all the attributes we were looking for. And no one would suspect that the youngest guy in the room was our man. To investigate Jack we had to investigate Trudy, so she came along with the deal, and they were both put under contract to the FBI as consultants. We like that title, consultant. It can mean anything we want it to mean. "What we hadn't expected was how quickly Jack made a name for himself. George, the lab supervisor, spotted his ability right away and gradually groomed him for promotion. Jack is now the coordinator of all the specialists working on the program, assigning their work, reviewing their progress, dealing with their problems, and making sure that the end product will be a wall to wall success, not a lumpy patchwork quilt. "Okay, that's what happened to get this all going. Now for the exciting stuff. Believe me, we don't like excitement on a project as important as this one. Boredom is beautiful, but we haven't had much of it. Shortly after they became consultants, the first attempt was made to murder Jack and Trudy. We quickly pulled together a defensive plan, and in the course of executing it, Jack and Trudy came away unharmed and two very bad guys were killed. Our plan was good but it could work only if these two stayed calm and acted just right during this emergency, and they did their part to perfection." Tom cut in, "Wait a minute. You're telling us that somebody actually tried to kill MY baby sister and her boyfriend? Really KILL them? This isn't just some worst case scenario? It really happened? "You bet. They were real professional assassins, too. To our surprise and relief, these two young people distinguished themselves. The best of my agents couldn't do it any better. But nobody knew about it because we had to keep it secret. Any other questions?" Nobody spoke up, so Pete continued. "Now about the attack and the people involved in it - let's start with Europe. The nations there are small but their nationalism is strong. Think of a tiny peapatch of worn out farmland, say, the size of Massachusetts, whose people think they're smarter and better than all their neighbors, and they can't wait to prove it. There's always turmoil there, because their two bit politicians make their living by keeping the pot boiling. It follows that there's never a shortage of spies over there. And where there are spies there are always guns for hire, trained killers who aren't loyal to any one nation. They compete for contracts from all the little countries. "We expected that as the word spread through Europe about this new national security project, many of the European nations would want to disrupt it, or at least circumvent it, to help them get a leg up on the American market. So they might hire some expensive top guns to come here and attack key people working on the project. But making their first target Jack and Trudy came as a surprise. After the attack on Jack and Trudy failed, they scored their first successful disruption when George, our lab supervisor, was murdered." "I thought he was killed in an auto accident," said Tom. "So did we, at first. But it turned out to be a skillfully executed murder. The way it was done and covered up was a sign that the killers were absolutely world class. The big countries, like France, Spain, and Germany have their own secret organizations, but they have enough economic clout to deal openly with our government, and they never posed a threat to this project. But some of the smaller countries try to improve their positions by clandestine maneuvers, and getting top experts, like the people who killed George, is a problem for them. So we think that several small nations may have pooled their resources to hire one of the top contract outfits. "If that shocks you, then maybe you'll be absolutely terrified about what happened next. One morning Jack dropped Trudy off at Harvard and was threading his way through morning traffic when a gang of hit men came after him. They tried to trap his car in traffic and then shoot him, and when he wriggled out of their trap they chased him and tried to machine gun him, right in the backyard of a police station." Annette looked aghast. "They tried to murder Jack? Am I hearing you right?" "You heard right. One man faked an injury to stop Jack, and two more, a driver and a machine gunner, tried to kill him." "What happened?" "Jack got out of the way of the machine gun bullets, and when they came back to finish him off, he shot and killed the gunner. The driver tried to get away but ran headon into a police car, and died later in the hospital." "But what did Jack use to shoot him with? And what would Jack know about how to do that?" "We trained him and Trudy. Look at them. Think of all the kids their age who have no idea which way is up. But Jack and Trudy are both brilliant, highly motivated young people who are deadly fast and accurate with their weapons. Jack's faster, Trudy's a little more accurate." Annette looked as if she would explode before she could get the words out. "Trudy, you can't know how to shoot. He must be talking about somebody else! Tell him he's wrong!" Trudy laughed out loud. "Oh, no, that's all true. I can shoot the bullseye out of a target anywhere, any time. On a good day at the range, I don't leave any individual bullet holes, just one ragged hole that all the bullets went through. And that's with a full magazine of eleven rounds." Tom was obviously thinking about all this. "Was that when you got the cut on your ear, Jack?" "Yeah. I'm sorry I had to cover that up, but I didn't want to alarm the whole family. I tried to be as truthful as I could. Remember I said some metal from another car came through my windshield. The metal was a bunch of machine gun bullets. And I did get cut by flying glass. So now you know the rest of the story." My revelation had left Tom looking ready to pop. "Wait, Jack! How could that happen? I mean, how does somebody kill a guy who's got a submachine gun? This sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel." "Yeah, it kind of felt that way, too. But Tom Clancy was nowhere in sight, so it was up to me. I'll tell you exactly how it happened so you'll see that it's not made up and it's not magic. I was in my car, backed up against a wall, facing out. I saw the bad guys' car coming from my left. I already had my gun in my right hand. I unlatched the door and gave it a shove. Right then the bad guys came up in front of me and the one in the passenger seat started shooting at my car. I was diving headfirst out of the driver's seat as his bullets took out the windshield. If I'd stayed sitting in the driver's seat, he would have got me right in the head, but I wasn't there any more. We're talking milliseconds here. I hit the pavement with my left shoulder and rolled to avoid breaking every bone in my body, and I wound up flat on my stomach. I squirmed around so I could see under my front bumper. "The hit men went on past and then backed up to make sure they got me, and I could see the shooter looking for me. I waited till I had a clear shot and put one into his head. He was leaning out of the window to get a good look, and that meant his back muscles were supporting his weight, the same muscles that keep you upright when you're standing. They were controlled by a part of the brain that's way at the back of the head, part of the system that keeps you standing and walking upright. The muscles in the front of his upper body were in opposition, positioning him and moving him under the control of conscious thought processes, located farther forward in his brain. My bullet wiped out the whole front of his brain, so muscles in the front of his body that were making him crouch forward let go first and that made him straighten up. As he did, I got a clear shot at his neck, and then as he went higher I shot him in the chest. I watched the whole thing over the slide of my pistol, and it was like watching a slow motion replay in a football game. "I suppose you think a dumb kid couldn't do all that. Well, first of all I was determined not to let him kill me. I didn't care whether I killed the guy or not, as long as he couldn't kill me. Second, I'm quick. I know that. Always have been. Born that way, I guess. Third, I have first class equipment, courtesy of the FBI. Car, gun, ammo, the whole works. And finally, they taught us how to use what they've given us, and we practice and practice and practice. I've gotta admit, if Trudy'd been doing the shooting, she would have placed that head shot exactly midway between his eyes. She's that kind of a perfectionist. I settled for a diagonal shot. Not as pretty, but I was in a hurry and I took the first clear shot I could get." Trudy nodded. "Tom, remember Uncle Red, next door to us? He builds up special cars for the government, and he has survival specialists on his staff. Our car looks like Tom's old Ford, and in a way it is, except that it's all high performance stuff inside, sort of like NASCAR. We learned all about defensive driving, and how to handle a high performance car. I'm really good at it. Maybe when this is all over I can take you to Uncle Red's driving track and show you what I can do. Probably scare the crap out of you." Pete spoke up. "I've got bad news for you, Trudy. If you go there it won't be in the old Ford. I totaled it yesterday. Oh, what time is it? Day before yesterday, now. You two had the Chevy that Woody built up for us. That's supposed to be my car. You came a different way, but I followed the decoy route that was planned out and documented, in your car. Around Elmira we were attacked by a guy with a machine gun, riding in a car that came up beside us in the other lane. We took a lot of bullets. My partner took one in the shoulder but she'll be all right. I needed to get separated from the other car in a hurry, so I jammed on the brakes and it went on by, doing about ninety. Then the only thing I could do to stay clear was slide our car off the road and roll it down a small bank. I'm sure that was discussed in your training. So now your car looks like a pile of scrap. It's at Red's shop now, and he's trying to see what he can salvage from it. But my partner and I are still alive, by the grace of God." Jack Be Quick Ch. 08 "And the bad guys got away without a scratch?" asked Tom. "Yeah, they did. Too bad I didn't have Jack with me. Or Trudy. Or both." It was Annette's turn to ask a question. "You mentioned a decoy route? Can you tell us about that?" "I think Jack can explain that better than I can." "A while ago we tried to take some of the heat off Trudy and me by spreading the rumor that the only guy who knew our project inside and out was Hubie Wilson. He was totally fictional, invented by us. We gave him his own office, a cluttered desk, a file cabinet full of obsolete plans, even a photo of his family. Then we waited. Somebody got in there late one night and photocopied every bit of paper in the office. But we still don't know who it was. We got some pictures, but all we could see was somebody in a black hoodie. What that told us was that somebody was able to get in there at night and look at things he, or she, wasn't supposed to see. "The FBI guys figured that we had a mole, either in their office or in our project team, so we needed some sort of a sting that would expose him or her. Pete's people planned a route for our trip home, avoiding Interstate 90 and using alternate routes. Sure enough, when I had the map and directions planted, somebody looked it over and tried to put everything back the way it was, but didn't get it quite right. Again no useful answers from our security cameras, which was a real shock to us. Total mystery. "So Pete took my place and an agent named Julie took Trudy's. They were the decoy, driving our route in our car, and they nearly got killed doing it. Now, knowing about all these episodes, you can see why the only sensible thing was to get us out of harm's way while a small army of FBI and CIA people comb the western hemisphere for answers. "But what's going to happen to us?" asked Tom. "Our jobs? Our house? And what about my parents? And Jack's parent's, and Annette's?" Pete looked a little pained. "Look, Tom, if I can take care of a ninety mile an hour driveby starring a hit man with a machinegun, I think you can trust me to take care of the things you're worried about. Your parents are as safe as the President. The administrative details you're asking about will be taken care of tomorrow. Well, it's today now. Remember the old Greyhound commercials? Just sit back and leave the driving to us." While Pete was saying all this, Jill and her partner Zack were bringing out some bulky jackets, quilted but obviously very light. Zack said, "We thought you might find these comfortable when we get off the plane." Then, with no further explanation, Zack and Jill went back toward the tail of the plane, and we were left staring at each other without a clue. I turned to ask Pete where we were going, and he was gone too. Trudy pitched her voice very low, almost like a growl, and in her best Arte Johnson imitation said, "Verrry mysterious." * * * * * * * * * * I could see dawn brightening the eastern sky while we were at our cruising altitude, and then the sky darkened as we descended toward our destination, down where the sun wasn't shining yet. Zack and Jill came back to our cabin and made sure everybody's seat belt was securely fastened. Annette asked where we were landing. Jill started to give us clues. "We're arriving in a small country that has the happiest population in the world," she said. Tom picked up on that right away. "You mean we're going to Disneyland?" Zack answered that one directly. "No. Disneyland uses a tremendous amount of electric power. This is a place where they generate all the electric power they need without burning a bit of oil or coal." I said, "That should mean that the air is clean. They ought to be healthy, then." "They must be, because their life expectancy is well over 80 years. But if they get sick, their government provides totally free medical care." Trudy looked puzzled, but then she flashed a big smile. "Oh, I know! How wonderful!" I asked, "Will the people speak English?" "Oh, yes," said Jill. Everybody has to learn English in school. It's not their national language, but everybody will understand you. They're very proud of their little homeland and anxious to explain it to you, and for you to enjoy your visit." I was stumped, and looking at Tom and Annette I could see that they were, too. But before we could talk about it any more, the wheels touched down on the runway and we glided to a perfect landing, without a jolt or a jiggle. As we taxied toward the terminal building, Pete materialized and said, "Welcome to Keflavik International Airport, in the Republic of Iceland. I've been trying to get passports arranged for you, but I couldn't quite get all the strings pulled in time for our arrival. We'll take a ride in a State Department van to the American Embassy in Reykjavik, and they'll issue your passports there." "Will it take long to get there?" asked Tom. "Oh, maybe 40 minutes. But if you want to use a rest room first, there's one just inside the terminal, on this side of the customs checkpoint." I could tell that Trudy was happy about visiting Iceland, just by looking at her face. She was positively radiant. "Pete, do you know how long we'll be here? I want to see everything there is to see, but we've had a long day. If this is a quick turnaround, I'll stay up and look around. But if we've got a few days here, I'm going to crash on the first bed I see." "No telling how long this will take. If you'll pardon the pun, we're trying to keep you folks on ice till we can eliminate the threat. But we're still working on that, so you'll have plenty of time to sleep first and tour later." * * * * * * * * * * The embassy people were friendly and welcoming. I wondered if they got many customers in such an out of the way place. Pete signed some sort of authorizing document, and he commented that with one stroke of his pen he had saved us each $95 and a wait of at least a month for passports. While we were waiting, a man took Tom and Annette into a room to discuss their situation. They went in, moderately annoyed and worried. Ten minutes later they came out, practically skipping, and all smiles. I was glad to see the improvement, and Tom explained, "Mr. Brown is the cultural attache, but I'm guessing he's also involved with the FBI. He already had all sorts of info on us, and we verified it and gave him a couple of names that he didn't have. He'll tell our families, the bank that holds our mortgage, our employers, the pastor of our church, and the police department that we've been unavoidably detained overseas by the government, through no fault of ours, but are in no danger. "The FBI is picking up our mortgage payment and utility bills while we're away, and he signed us both up as confidential consultants for a month. Then he gave us each a voucher for a thousand dollars that we can go and cash at the bank, as our payment in advance so we'll have some spending money while we're here. He said some law forbids our employers to take our jobs away from us while we're here on government business, so now we can go off and enjoy our vacation with not a worry in the world. He said some lady will talk to us about our hotel and local tourist information. Uh, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the lady coming in now with all those little colored pamphlets." The pamphlet lady turned out to be a petite blonde, who could have passed for a college girl. She was pretty enough to be a cheerleader, but she wasn't haughty, acted more like the girl next door. "Hi. I'm Priscilla, and I hope you can spare me a few minutes to explain a little about Reykjavik and where you'll be staying. If you'll sit over here, Tom and Annette, and you over here, Jack and Trudy, you'll be able to see what I'm talking about." She set a pile of colored brochures in front of Annette, and another pile in front of Trudy. "This is a map of the immediate area." She took the top one off our pile and flattened it out on the coffee table. "This is where most of the people in Iceland live. Here is the embassy. Over here is your hotel, where we'll be going as soon as your passports are ready. Right across the street from the hotel is a wonderful restaurant, not terribly expensive, where you can get local cuisine and also American food. Keep in mind that there's no place on this island where big animals with immense appetites, like beef cattle and large hogs, can be grazed. So the local diet is big on mutton, which you may not have eaten back home. Also, fish is plentiful, and if you like seafood almost any restaurant you find will be a good choice. But that restaurant across from the hotel also gets beef and pork flown in for American tourists. I find that about once a week I want a good hamburger or a steak or ham and eggs, so if you're like me, remember that place. "Now here are brochures about an assortment of things that tourists seem to like. You'll find more in the lobby of the hotel. They're all in English, and everybody understands English here, although some of them speak it with an accent that takes some getting used to. "This one is special, and I put two in each of your piles so you could each have one in your pocket. If you are lost or in any kind of danger, this tells you how to contact the police and what to tell them. But keep in mind that you are guests of the United States Government, and for any problem you can call the American embassy. So I've put my card inside all four of these, and you need to slip it into your wallet and don't hesitate to pull it out and call me." She sort of looked around to see who might be listening. "We don't have many tourists right now. If you call it'll give me something to do. I can give you a frank opinion about every place you might be thinking of going. Just like tourist attractions everywhere, they all look nice in their brochures, but it may be worthwhile to get a second opinion. The ones I've put in this collection you can trust, and they'll give you a start. Now, any questions?" Mr. Brown came in just then with our passports. "Excuse me, Priscilla. Are you finished?" "Yes, if there are no questions. No? All right, here's what you've all been waiting for." As Mr. Brown started talking about passports, my mind was whirling and I couldn't keep up with what he was saying. There we were, in Iceland, of all places. Just a few hours ago we were at home, and it all happened like a trip on a magic carpet, right out of a fairy tale. But Mr. Brown opened the top passport on the stack, and there was my face smiling at me. He pointed to this and that, explaining what a passport is all about, but he might as well have been talking about the price of soy beans because I was preoccupied. That was my passport, with my picture, and my name, John Henry Allen! This was all real! I was actually in Iceland! Wow! At the same time, another part of my brain was absorbing the wonder, the majesty of this little document. It's like a key that unlocks the door to let us back into the USA, which is very comforting when you're far from home. There was a receipt that each of us had to sign to confirm that we'd received our passport and inspected it to see that it was ours and not somebody else's. Then we were on our way to the hotel with Priscilla driving us in a small SUV. * * * * * * * * * * If you've never been to Iceland, and hardly anybody has, I recommend that you go there and check it out. It never gets real hot or real cold. It's about as safe as you can get during hurricane season. It's not crowded. The island has as much land as Kentucky, but only as many people as a medium sized American city. Most of them are concentrated in the southwest corner, in and around Reykjavik. The remainder live around the perimeter, where they farm and fish. That leaves the middle part, where the volcanoes and glaciers are, pretty much unpopulated and therefore almost all natural. One of the first things we did was rent an SUV and drive about 60 miles north, roughly along the west coast. The scenery was interesting and we took some pictures, but the lack of towns and scarcity of overnight accommodations kept us from venturing farther. The driving was easy, and in Iceland they drive on the right side of the road, the same as we do. The highway is called The Ring Road, because it completely encircles the island. Just in case somebody might mistake it for some other road, and they don't have many, it is officially Route 1. Highway signs along the way show directions to farms, just the way our road signs direct us to towns and villages. If you see a sign that directs you down a side road to 'Jorgensson' that doesn't mean there's a town by that name down that road. It means that there's a man whose father's name was Jorgen, and he and his family have a farm down that road, very likely raising sheep. The most spectacular scenery is where there aren't any roads, so later we made a connection with an aerial touring outfit, and flew in a small plane over and around mountains and ice fields. The terrain looks about as forbidding as any I've ever seen, although I haven't been to the Rocky Mountain states or Alaska. Lots of pictures. Some day we'll show our snapshots to our grandkids. But the funny thing is that by that time kids will be traveling all over the world and think nothing of it. When we talk about Iceland they might answer, "Oh, yeah, we went there last weekend for a fish fry." Because the developed part of the island is down near the water's edge, we naturally got thinking about fish. Fishing, done with big ships and big nets that bring in fish by the ton, is a major industry. But we had in mind the kind of fishing where you hold onto a rod with a reel on it, and develop a personal relationship with a fish. We inquired and were put in touch with a strapping fishing guide whose name none of us could pronounce, so he said to call him Gus. We went in a four door pickup to a river not far from Reykjavik. I'd tell you its name but I can't pronounce it or spell it. To me it's just Gus's River. There was a lodge where we were fitted out with waders, jackets, gloves, and hats. Then we were off with Gus to his favorite spot on the river, to fish for salmon. They weren't running at the time the way they do in their mating season, but there were still a few of them messing around, looking for a meal. Everybody caught one except me, and you can imagine the ribbing I took about that. We released the smallest of the three, which was caught by Tom. Then we took the other two back to the lodge, where in late afternoon we enjoyed a tasty meal of our fresh caught salmon, amid reminders from the girls about who caught them. Let me add a word or more about salmon. To many seafood lovers, including me, salmon is about at the top of the list. That's if you buy it at a fish market. The salmon you get at a supermarket has been hanging around for a few more days, and while it's still good it's lost a lot of its flavor. But when it's fresh caught, meaning within a couple of hours, it has so much flavor you might think it's some other kind of fish. It's so good that for me, it beats out any other entrée except a really tender filet mignon. If you ever get a chance to go to a place where they serve wild salmon that's just come out of the water, just try it and you'll see what I mean. Another day we went hiking. There's a trail that runs thirty miles over hill and dale, and we hiked a very small portion of it. Gorgeous scenery. Lots of hills, some green and some bare rock, but the kind of wild beauty that takes you away from the world of everyday concerns and allows you to look at a real pristine wilderness. Back when the earth was young, maybe it all looked like that. We got back to our hotel that afternoon, after all that exertion in the fresh air, with our minds relaxed and our bodies tired enough for a nap. Trudy and I slept for two hours and woke up feeling great. Later, when we went to dinner we were in the mood to cross the street and sample the local cuisine with good appetites and open minds, and we tasted flavor combinations that we'd never experienced before. When we got back to the hotel there was a message waiting for me, to call Priscilla at the embassy. I didn't know her business hours, but I gave it a try and she answered on the second ring. "Jack, we have some news from your friends in the Boston office of the FBI. It's like good news and bad news. Which do you want first?" "Start with the bad news, please, so I can get it over with." "All right. They still haven't caught the man they want most, the top man in the criminal ring that's behind the attacks on you." "Well, that's disappointing, but it's no worse than it was when we left. Will the good news make me feel any better?" "Yes, I'm sure it will. I kind of understand this, but I'm sure it'll mean more to you than it did to me. I'll read it just as it came to me by secure email. 'Regarding the recent attacks on you and your associates: two second tier managers of the international criminal organization have been arrested in France. Interpol analysts think the whole gang has now been put out of business. The top man has been identified and is the subject of a manhunt in Europe and South America. His assets are frozen, and he is on the run. CIA analysts conclude that he is too preoccupied with his own survival to organize any more attacks. The European officials who financed the operation have been identified, and will definitely not cause any more trouble.' Does all that make sense to you?" "Yes, Priscilla, and if you were here I'd give you a big kiss for that information. I was getting tired of being spied on, plotted against, and shot at. Oh, you can't believe what a relief this is. Thank you. If you can send a reply from me without too much trouble, please tell them I said, 'Whoopee!' Have you got that? Do I need to spell it?" When Priscilla stopped laughing she said, "Okay, Jack. Your message is understood and I'll send it off right away. I suppose they'll be coming soon to bring you home, so expect to hear from me again before long. Bye." * * * * * * * * * * The next day we were told to be ready to travel within 24 hours. When the time came we were pleased to see that we were going back in the same plane we came in. Zack and Jill were in the doorway to welcome us. A big difference from the way we arrived, though. Then we just had the clothes on our backs, not even a toothbrush. This time we had luggage, full of new clothes and everything else we'd bought. Eight suitcases in all, for just four people! Another difference was the way we felt. Arriving we were apprehensive, but departing we were relaxed and rested, just the way you hope you'll feel after a good vacation. I felt light as a feather. Here's my recipe for how to greet the day with a smile - make love with the most beautiful girl in the world, who then reminds you that nobody will try to murder you all day long. We'd packed the night before, so after breakfast we had very little to do but wait for Priscilla and her SUV to take us to the airport. Trudy was making some last minute phone calls, and I had a chance to sit quietly and reflect on all that had happened to us. I had no interruptions as I replayed my memories, good and bad. One thing I wanted to get a handle on was how I had handled it all. I was surprised to realize that in the scary parts, I wasn't all that scared. Some, of course, but nowhere near as frightened out of my wits as I had good reason to be. And as I picked apart the details, minute by minute and second by second, I found a remarkable thread running through the thoughts and feelings I had when the going got really tough - I was thinking of Trudy all the time. I wanted to protect her, or I wanted to survive so I could give her the kind of life she deserved, or I was mentally holding my breath until I could hold her and tell her it was going to be all right. Jack Be Quick Ch. 08 I kept at it, trying to analyze every little piece of my experiences, afraid I'd miss some lesson that I ought to have learned, until I gave it up. There was only one lesson in the whole bundle - that the most important things in my life, the things that made it all have meaning, that made it all bearable, were Trudy's love for me and my love for her. At times when I could have folded up under the stress, I stood tall for Trudy and told myself that I could fall apart later when nothing important was going on. When things were good, the outstanding memory was of Trudy's sweet face, with her radiant smile and the pure love that she projected. I did everything because of Trudy and for Trudy and to make things better for Trudy. Then when I needed to be stood back up on my feet, Trudy was right there to help me through it. I don't think I said ten words all the way to the airport. I remember thanking Priscilla as I started up the steps into the plane, and greeting Zack and Jill as we entered. Trudy knew that I had enjoyed Iceland, and I suppose she thought I was silent because I was sorry to leave. Once we got seated in the cabin, I turned to her and took both her hands in mine, so I would have her full attention as I thanked her. The auxiliary power unit was running to keep the cabin air and lights going, and its drone in the background masked the sound of my voice, as I talked very softly to her, saying things that were meant for her ears only. I wrapped it all up at the end with, "Sweetness, you are a very brave woman. I was going to say 'a very brave girl' but you're way past that. You kept going no matter what happened, you managed to stay cheerful, and you supported me and calmed me and nurtured me. Make no mistake, I could never have gone on without you. I can do the defensive driving and shooting and all that, when I know that at the end of it you'll be right there with me. But with all this terror and danger, I don't think I could've even got out of bed if I didn't have you by my side. Of course I love you, you've known that forever. But I need you to know how much I admire you, how much you inspire me. You may not have magic gold bracelets to bounce bullets off, but you're my Wonder Woman and you always will be. If we live to be a hundred, I'll still be trying to improve, because you deserve the very best." Epilogue We got back home, into the arms of our loving families, and then back to work. The familiar routines of our lives felt comfortable as we slipped back into them. As the weeks passed, the memory of the bad times we'd lived through gradually dimmed, almost like the recollection of a dream. Gregory Bates kept Trudy and me on as confidential consultants, and we each got a thousand dollar a month raise. Pete let us keep his burgundy Chevy and he drove a fleet car, which should have told me that something big was afoot. When Red finished totally rebuilding my old car it went to Jerry. This time the body was a Dodge Charger, which wasn't as crowded by the big engine and transmission going fore and aft, the way Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet and the Dodge brothers and Walter Chrysler and Almighty God intended. It was a real masterpiece, and Jerry was elated to have it. At work, we rolled out our first complete information security package the following spring, to the sound of champagne corks popping and high fives slapping all over the lab. Now there's a strange sight, grown men and women, some of whom have never even seen a high five, trying to act like sports fans without hurting each other. I taught them all sorts of skills to help them deal with problems. I should have held another in-service class to help them deal with success. Jim Mangrum had signed on at MIT with the understanding that once this goal had been reached, he was going back to his old associate professor job at the state university. But burned into Glenn Carlson's memory was the helpless, hopeless feeling he had after George's death, and the way Jim stepped in and saved the day. Saved the whole project for Glenn, for MIT, and for the United States, in fact. Glenn understood why Jim wanted to get back to the academic world, but he was afraid that without Jim our project would slide right back into deep shit. Leave it to Glenn to figure out how to fit the pieces of that puzzle together. Like an old riverboat gambler pulling an ace out of each sleeve, he first offered Jim a doctorate based on his technical contributions to the project, and then he capped that with an appointment to a full professorship. Maybe you don't realize it, but there's not a techie in the whole world who wouldn't sell his grandmother to become a professor at MIT. It took Jim about thirteen microseconds to accept the title of Professor of Information Technology, and reach for his phone to cancel the moving van! Glenn didn't stop there, either. He called a meeting, and Trudy and I met with Glenn, Jim, and Jerry at the Goose. Glenn pulled a chair over next to his, where he could set his attache case and open it up. He handed me a fat manila envelope, and I pulled out a diploma granting me a bachelor's degree. I was just about overcome with surprise and Trudy grabbed me and kissed some life back into me. And then she got up and grabbed Glenn in a big hug and gave him a kiss, too. Glenn was speechless, and I was still fumbling for the right words, but Trudy took over. "Dr. Carlson, this means a lot more to us than you might realize. Not long ago we were just a couple of kids, stepping out of high school and blinking in the glare of the real world. We were determined to get an education but we were terrified of being separated by hundreds of miles to do it. This job, and being in MIT, meant Jack could be with me, and being together meant that we could completely immerse ourselves in our work. This degree tells us and the world that we made the right decisions. Our hopes and dreams are coming true, and we're not just a couple of confused kids any more, we've stepped up to being responsible adults. Thank you so much. This is absolutely marvelous!" "All right, Trudy. Since you are the spokesperson for the Jack and Trudy team, let me dangle a carrot out ahead of you. A year from now we hope to have the next major package ready to go. If that works out, meaning if it does what it's supposed to and it's reasonably close to budget and schedule, I'll add a master's degree diploma to go on Jack's wall right below that one. I've learned a lot in the years that I've been here at MIT, and I know what a complicated business this is. Nobody does it alone. So I watch out for people who are willing to stretch and struggle to help us reach our goals. I know I said this before, but I repeat that this is the best team I've ever coached." About that time, Pete walked into the restaurant and came on back to our table. "I called your office, Glenn, and when I heard you were in a meeting I thought I'd find you here," he said. We all greeted him and I slid my chair over to make room between Jerry and me. Everybody talked at once, and I showed him my bright, shiny new diploma. Pete clapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me. Then he looked over the whole bunch of us. "I think of you all as The Dream Team," he said. "It happens I have some news of my own. First of all, Jerry, you can get a shave and haircut and go back to dressing like a real FBI Special Agent. You are now a Deputy to the Special Agent in Charge of the Boston office. You now have my job, and you'll still oversee this project. You'll get enough of a raise to pay for your haircuts and dry cleaning. I want to explain to all of you that a whole lot has gone on that you couldn't see, and Jerry has been right in the middle of it all, right around the clock when he had to be. That's all I'm allowed to say about it. Along with the promotion and raise, there's a letter waiting for him at the office, a special commendation signed by the Director himself. We don't get to see those every day. "Now that Jerry's promotion is official, I'm free to be reassigned. I'm leaving next week for Kansas City, to fill in for one of our people there who's on medical leave. From there I'll be moving on to a job as Special Agent in Charge of some regional office, but I won't know where for a month or so." * * * * * * * * * * You must think that's the end, but in a way it was only the beginning for us. Glenn Carlson has been like a father to all of us, and he's good at it. He has a couple of grownup sons, whom I'd never met. But a dad is a dad is a dad, and I'd known for a long time that he regarded Trudy as somebody special, almost like the bright, gifted daughter that he'd never had. So I wasn't totally surprised when he showed up with some good news for her, too. I'm sorry that I have to keep interrupting my narrative to explain something, but if you don't live in Cambridge you might not understand the way things are with those two famous neighbors, Harvard and MIT. On the surface they maintain an arm's length relationship. I guess they'd like everybody to think that Harvard is all humanities and MIT is all hard science, and never the twain shall meet. But how does that explain Paul Samuelson, who was not an engineer but an economist, of all things? He took his degrees at MIT and became the first American ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. He has been regarded as the father of scientific Economics. He became head of the MIT Econ Department. Under his leadership, the department became a powerful force that attracted the best and brightest, including five (Wow! Count 'em, five!) more Nobel Prize winners! That's just one example of how these big, important schools operate in a world of ideas, and the influence of their brilliant people extends well beyond their campuses. True to that tradition, Glenn had friends all over and was very highly regarded at Harvard, even among people who couldn't even spell hexadecimal. He persuaded one of their deans to examine Trudy's record and interview her, which led to Harvard giving her the same kind of directed studies deal that MIT had given me. So she no longer has to spend her days in rigidly scheduled classes, and instead has meaningful discussions with professors, which lead to fresh ideas, which lead to independent study and research, which lead to learned papers. If she ever bundles all her term papers together she'll have nearly enough material for a doctoral thesis. So now she's sailing through the undergrad curriculum like a Hobie Cat darting down the Charles River on a breezy day, and she's already started to squeeze in some studies that will apply toward her master's degree. Back when we were high school seniors, we set the goal of first getting our bachelor's degrees and then getting married. I'm pleased to say that we're still committed to that plan. But the time frame has changed, now that we're not talking about four years of undergraduate study any more. We expected that we'd be 22 when we'd get our degrees, and that we'd marry in June of the following year, when we'd be 23. But now, with my bachelor's degree in hand and Trudy's not far off, we've already started to plan our wedding. Ever since Iceland we've kept in close touch with Tom and Annette, and they'll be our best man and matron of honor. That's all, just the four of us in the wedding party. Keeping it simple. But the reception, now that's another story. The guest list keeps growing, and I think it'll be a huge fiesta. We're very happy, and we want to have a big bash to share our happiness with our friends. But single or married, the essence of our life is very simple - two people deeply in love, our bond tested by all we've been through together, and still holding strong. We're far from the first couple to have proven the truth of the old saying, "All's well that ends well." We probably haven't even made it into the first billion. Then there's that other platitude, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I had some doubts there, but I guess that one worked for us, too. We're more mature, wiser, stronger, more confident. In a world full of angry young people, we're the exceptions - totally contented, grateful for our many blessings, and not mad at anybody. I sincerely hope that I'll never look into the muzzle of another machine gun, but even if we had to go back and live our lives over, all things considered, I wouldn't change a thing!