Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist (24 page)

Jonathan shrugged his shoulders and then hesitated before saying, “We did whatever we had to do to defend this country. Listen to me Mary, right now it doesn’t really matter. We’re going to have a lot of time for me to fill in the details.”

“Well, it matters to me! And I need to know. I feel like I never knew you. Jonathan you owe this to me.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“You didn’t answer my last question, so, I’m taking your refusal to answer me as a yes, I mean that you did kill people. Jonathan, I need to know how you felt afterwards.”

“Mary, will you please let this go.”

“Not until you answer me. I believe that’s the least you can do after all you’ve put me and Carly through. So, I’ll ask you again, how did you feel when you killed someone?”

Jonathan looked deeply bothered by the question but then answered, “Relieved at first, you know, that it was over and I had fulfilled my mission, but horrible after that. It just never seems to leave you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see them, dream about them, wonder what God is thinking of me, not sure if it will cause eternal damnation, that kind of stuff.”

“Have you ever killed someone who you knew, someone that you loved?”

He hesitated, trying to sense whether she was implying that he had killed Matthew. But he could tell by her focus, she was asking about others who might have died directly by his hand.

“No, fortunately I was never put in that position.”

“Would you have killed them, if they had asked you?”

“I don’t know, Mary. Can we talk about something else?”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

Jonathan nodded.

“What if they told you to kill me, you know, a direct order, would you do it?”

“Mary, you’re starting to freak me out with these questions. Why would you ask such a thing?”

“But would you? I just want to see how passionate you were for what you believed.”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Just say yes or no.”

“I would say no.”

“I don’t believe you, I think you would.”

“Mary, knock off the hypotheticals, okay? I’m tired and I’ve had a miserable day….can we please talk about something else?”

“I’m curious, would you ask them to have someone else do it, or would you quit the agency and try to save me?”

“Mary, this conversation is going nowhere. The agency would never ask me to kill you, so it’s not fair for you to ask me these questions.”

“I didn’t think the word
fair
existed in their vocabulary. Was it fair what they did to you, pouring acid or whatever the hell it was in your eyes? Was it fair that they put a clandestine group of agents above my babies? You want to know what I think; I think they could have just as easily asked you to kill me as anyone else. They would just need a reason, and it wouldn’t have to be a good one, just one that served their purposes.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” said Jonathan.

“And what else did they teach you in there?” asked Mary.

“Mary, you’re not listening to me,” replied Jonathan. “We don’t have time for this. We need to move forward. I’m trying to tell you that we are going to have to escape from the smartest people in this country who have unlimited access to everything we do and more importantly I am going to have to try to find the murderers who killed Matthew.”

“Remember our deal, you’re not doing it without me.”

Jonathan dropped his head into his hands. “You don’t understand Mary; this is going to be extremely dangerous. I’ve been professionally trained with firearms, plastic explosives, sophisticated computer programs, disguises and every other secret procedure that you’ve only seen in the movies, but with me it has been real life. The only difference now is that in this movie people really die. You will just slow me down and make me more vulnerable.”

Mary was hurt by his words. She shook them off, “Then I will slow you down, because you are not going alone! I’ll help! Consider me to be your assistant.”

“Mary, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but the people on the inside are savages, maybe worse than the terrorists. I’m just hoping that they’re not one and the same.”

Mary was stunned. “You don’t think….”

“I don’t know what to think,” answered Jonathan. “There was someone on the inside, maybe more than one. No one can do the things that happened without access to all of our systems and free access to the building.”

“Do you have any idea who?” asked Mary.

“We’ll put together a list of potentials and go through it.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Let me fix you something to eat.”

After dinner, Mary jumped from the table as if a light had gone off inside her head. “By the way you received a package yesterday. She got up and returned with a small box and an exacto knife.”

“Can I open it?” asked Carly

“No, sweetie, Daddy will open it.”

Jonathan picked up the box and looked at it from every angle to see if there was anything suspicious, who had sent it and where it was sent from. It was sent UPS ground from Albuquerque, New Mexico, from a Helicopter company called MSI, from a Mr. Garth Sonnenberg. He had never heard of the company or the man. He got out of his chair and set the box on the dining room table. Mary and Carly sat on either side of him as he sliced through the tape and fumbled through the packing until he came to the first item, six 1 gigobyte memory sticks wrapped together with a couple of strands of Scotch tape. He set them on the table. He continued digging until he found a metal base holding 3 pens, all with the MSI logo on them. He rolled one of the memory sticks around in his hand and then picked up the base to the pen stand and studied it. Carly pulled one of the pens from the base and tried to write with it on a piece of paper.

“Daddy, it doesn’t work.”

“Be careful with that sweetie,” he said taking it away from her.

“Why would someone send you a pen set?” asked Mary.

“It’s not what you think it is. It’s memory, and a whole lot more. It looks like a QX-4.”

“What’s a QX-4?” asked Mary.

“Watch this,” answered Jonathan.

Jonathan handed her the pen that Carly had been playing with. “Look close. It has a hidden camera.” He pulled the other pens from the base and laid them on the table. They all had small tripod extensions that appeared at the flick of a button which allowed them to stand. Each pen had a different function. He positioned them and then flipped a switch in the base of the stand. A green light flickered and then the light from the end of a pen projected against the wall and started the Microsoft professional setup. Another pen projected downward and displayed a keyboard. The third pen had a microphone that extended from its top. “The latest the agency has developed. It’s almost as powerful as the supercomputer they were building at Tech when we were there.”

Mary was dazed at the technology and didn’t answer. Finally she mumbled remembering the Virginia Tech crew, “Yeah, you, me, Bob and a whole lot of people, but that was a different generation, a whole different league, it was nothing like this.”

“Cool,” said Carly.” Can I play insane aquarium?”

“What is insane aquarium?”

“It’s an online game she plays all the time,” answered Mary.

“Not just yet sweetie.” He continued to explain to Mary. “It’s all wireless, you can use any keyboard or mouse, once it’s synchronized.” He plugged the memory into the port in the base and projected the directory on the wall. “Holy Crap! It’s all the code for the programs we were working on at Blue Herron and all my hologram programs from the agency. This stuff is a gift from God! Someone seems to know exactly what I was working on and exactly what I need to operate.”

“Who would send you this?” asked Mary.

“There’s someone who knows what’s going on here and is trying to help us and I’m guessing it’s not Garth Sonnenberg.”

Carly interrupted, “Daddy, Bruiser has a tummy ache, he hasn’t been feeling good all day, listen.” She handed her bear over to her father. Playfully, he put the bear’s belly to his ear.

Jonathan’s face flushed. He found a pad and a pencil and wrote. “We’re screwed! And I’m an idiot! They’re listening and watching us.”

Mary shrugged her shoulders as if she didn’t understand.

“Is Bruiser going to be okay?” asked Carly.

“He’s going to be fine. Daddy’s going to fix him. He just needs a very minor operation.”

Carly stuck her thumb in her mouth and watched intently as Jonathan unzipped the back of Bruiser and felt around the stuffing until he retrieved a small silver device that looked like a watch battery and placed it gently on the coffee table.

“Did Bruiser eat that?” asked Carly.

Jonathan smiled and held his finger to his mouth and gave her a gentle shhh and then whispered, “You know bears, they’ll eat about anything.”

Carly giggled.

“Now that he’s all better, take this crazy bear and go play.”

Carly grabbed Bruiser, gave him a big hug and disappeared into her room.

Mary grabbed the pen and wrote, “What is it?”

Jonathan answered in script, “It’s a listening device, they’ve bugged us.”

Mary grabbed the pad and wrote in all caps, “THOSE FUCKERS! I HATE THEM. A CHILD’S TEDDY BEAR FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! How in the world did they get a bug in Carly’s bear? She never lets go of it.”

“They’re very good. I’m guessing that they put it in there when she was sleeping. How well do you know the new nanny?”

“I guess not well enough.”

Jonathan moved through the house with cat-like precision. He combed the room until he found a camera, hidden inside a picture frame on the shelving. He turned it slightly so that it would continue to broadcast, but pointed it toward an obscure portion of the room. He emptied the dried flowers from their vase, stuck his index finger inside and pulled out another one. Everything they had been saying was going directly back to the agency. He placed it next to the other one on the coffee table and both he and Mary studied them. Mary took the pad and wrote, “How many more?” to which Jonathan wrote, “I would guess 4 or 5 in each room and there’s probably something embedded in me.”

He quickly found 2 more listening devices, one in the fax machine and another on the inside of a vent.

Mary shivered as if she were crawling with insects. “How did they get in here?”

Jonathan wrote, “They know your schedule and were probably in and out in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately they’ve heard everything we’ve said and now know I have the programs and computer and that we are planning to leave. I am so stupid!”

“Do you think you have them all?” wrote Mary.

“No, I’m sure I don’t and I don’t want to have them all. But we’re going to have to leave here now and check into a hotel and get organized if we ever hope to lose these bastards. You know when we go, we’re going to have to leave everything?” Jonathan scribbled.

“Leave everything?”

“Everything.”

“What about your car?”

“Bugged and Lojacked.”

“Your brand new Corvette?”

“We have to leave it.” “Where will we go?”

“Where have you never been and always dreamed of going?”

“Hawaii.”

Jonathan chuckled.

“Everything stays in the house. We’ll take a cab and check into a hotel. Mary, do you know where Carly’s transistor radio is?”

“It’s in a box upstairs.”

“Please get it and the sharpest knife we have in the house and a book of matches.”

Mary returned with a small plastic radio, a sharp knife and the matches.

Jonathan grabbed the radio and turned to the AM band, and then moved the dial until there was no channel and turned up the volume. He peeled off his shirt and pants.

“Move this up and down my body,” he wrote. “When you hear the static increase and then a steady beep, stop and tell me if you can see a small incision.”

Mary did as he asked. When she moved the radio up his back, the radio started to pick up a transmission and began to beep.

“There it is,” she blurted out.

Jonathan “shhh’d” her.

“Do you see an incision?” he wrote.

She shook her head no.

“Go and get a magnifying glass, it’s going to be real small.”

Mary returned with the magnifying glass and once again got very excited when she found it.

“Sterilize the knife with the matches and cut it out.”

Mary touched the incision with the hot knife and Jonathan seethed and tightened. She starting digging below the skin and he started to bleed. “This isn’t working,” she said and received another “shhh” from her husband. “Keep digging,” he wrote. “It’s going to be real small.” She found the device buried neatly, just above the right shoulder blade. She marveled at how thin it was. It was much thinner than the others, like a miniature pace maker.

“It’s a transponder. It broadcasts a beep to someone’s computer screen,” Jonathan explained. “It’s so that they will always know exactly where I am. Scan my body again, there may be another one.”

Mary did, but there was only one.

Jonathan wrote, “We need to be careful with this, because as long as it’s transmitting, they will follow the signal. I’m guessing that with this device and all the bugs there’s no one outside watching.”

“What about all the reporters? They’re still out there.”

“We’ll leave out the back, through the woods.”

How much cash do you have?”

“I have a bunch, because I just cashed your relocation allowance check. Let’s see, there’s about $12,000.”

“That’s perfect.”

“Now leave your wallet, but grab your driver’s license, passport, ATM card and give me your Master Card.”

“No cell phone?”

“Absolutely, no cell phone.”

“I’m afraid,” scribbled Mary.

“I’m pissed,” replied Jonathan.

Harry Davidson knocked on William Reed’s office door. It was 7 p.m. and all the executive assistants had gone home, so the office and phones were quiet. Bill Reed sat in his office watching the end of the evening news, drinking a large goblet of Scotch smoking a Cuban cigar.

“Sir, sorry to bother you, but I thought you would want to know that the Andersons are about to bolt.”