The Time of The Cat 11
ELEVEN
THE SYSTEM IS CORRUPT
We went to a parking garage near my main downtown apartment. This was not the apartment that my current employers had set up, but one that I had owned for several years. I hadn’t used it in six months.
We left the car on the top floor of the parking garage and then boosted a second car on the next floor down. We left it on the street a couple of blocks away from my apartment and then walked, carrying the cased weapons. The cat walked beside us with somewhat of a proprietary air. He’d definitely adopted us and, by default, our cause.
Several tourists stopped to look him over and made comments, but he paid no attention to them and simply paced onward between the two of us.
When we reached my building, he looked at me and said, “Meep?”
I looked at him and nodded. I don’t know what he was asking, but he seemed to think the building was fine, so we all walked in and headed up to the suite.
I was relatively confident that we hadn’t been followed, but, if we have drones and high-resolution satellite-borne cameras that we can use for military and civilian surveillance (and we do), then the Pugs might have something equally as troublesome or worse. The current generation of our sat-cams can resolve things down to somewhat less than a meter and advances are happening rapidly, given the government’s apparent desire to keep track of everyone, everywhere, all of the time.
Personally, I learned early in my career that too much data is worse than not enough. With too much, one tends to become paralyzed by trying to keep up with it all. If you use computer analysis to flag only suspicious events, it tends to make you complacent. I’d rather be alert and worrying about what the other guy is going to do that will impact me directly and in the immediately foreseeable future. I have a basic reluctance to rely on anything other than my own judgment.
As it turned out later, the Pugs had access to several human surveillance data streams. They’d been able to crack through NSA’s security and simply tapped into the data flow in a number of ways. However, that was quite bad enough since it allowed them to keep tabs on individuals that were of interest.
Their problem was they didn’t know me. By now, they must have realized that someone had done some major damage to a number of their personnel. So far, none of them had survived an encounter with me,
I spent some time wondering if they had been foresighted enough to place a camera in the transporter booths. That would have given them my picture and advanced facial recognition software would easily generate my particulars. I decided that I couldn’t do anything about this potential problem except to try and stay ahead of them. Speed was our helper. That and not returning to any location that might be associated with me.
I was relatively secure in my various “offices” since they were all carefully located in buildings without surveillance (except for the pervasive New York street camera system – also easily hacked). In addition, I had arranged the rent for each location through a series of shell corporations and other entities that created a complex chain that was almost impossible to untangle and trace back. I’d encountered many such chains while tracing bad guys in my work, and I knew how they worked. I also knew how to crack them and where they usually failed. I made sure that mine didn’t have any such weaknesses. I set up the computer to tap into the Mayor’s expensive downtown surveillance-camera network and then linked that feed up to an A.I. program which would set off an alarm if anything looked odd. This was exactly what I feared the Pugs would think of, but as long as it was working for us, I couldn’t complain.
Once that was done, I switched in some sensors of my own that were located in and around the office building. The monitor program wasn’t perfect. In my experience, it sometimes gave a false positive, but I wasn’t going to stay up all night watching it, and I trusted it to not miss any enemy activity, even if it did sometimes go off when it recognized police or parades of Shriners.
The cat had appropriated the most comfortable chair in the place, located in a convenient corner near a window, and was napping. He seemed to be a remarkably calm yet competent individual, and I supposed that I’d have to decide to like him. It wasn’t too hard, given how he’d jumped that Pug and nearly clawed its eyes out.
It was getting on towards suppertime, and we decided we’d better eat while we had the chance.
Liz went into the tiny kitchen that I kept stocked with easily stored food. We didn’t have any cat food that not being covered in my standard operations manual, but she did manage to find some frozen chicken pieces that the cat approved of. She saved some of them back and made a meal that I approved also.
The cat finished eating and then looked wildly around, and I realized that he was going to need a litter box. He dashed out of the kitchen, and I followed him to the bathroom. The toilet was a commercial toilet with a seat but no lid. By the time I’d gotten there, he was perched on the seat.
He looked at me with an expression of pained disgust as if to say, “Can’t a guy get any privacy around here?”
I apologized and backed out, so I didn’t see what happened next, but as I walked down the hall, I heard the flush activate. That was one smart cat! Someone had spent a long time training him, or he was really good at learning.
The cat and I arrived back in the computer area at about the same time. He ran past me with his tail held straight up with a little crook in the very end so it looked like a flag.
Liz was already there checking on the Internet connection with her command. It seemed to be down, and there was nothing she could do to contact anyone. She was trying to get through to the New York office where we’d been ambushed when suddenly the video window opened, and she got a picture of a wild-eyed man in a black suit.
“Liz? Is that you? Oh, God! They’re all dead! The whole building is full of corpses!”
“Calm down, Alf!” she ordered. He took a breath and visibly got control of himself. My opinion of their training went up a notch as I watched. He was obviously in a tight place, and his self-control was impressive.
“I just got back from Boca,” he said. “They’re all gone down there. No bodies, no nothing. The place is totally empty. What’s going on? How did these people here die? They all look as if some kind of poison killed them. Are there terrorists active in New York? I’ve tried to reach the boss on his cell, but he won’t answer. I don’t know if it’s safe in here.” He looked apprehensive.
“Worse,” she said sadly. “We’ve got a real problem, and I’m afraid that the boss has been taken out or captured along with the rest of the HQ staff. I’m currently in a safe place, and I suggest that you locate one also and hole up.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” she said, exasperated.
At that moment, Alf looked over his shoulder and jumped up with his pistol blazing towards the side of the room. He paused, looked, and shot again, but a patch of blood erupted on his throat, and he staggered, gasped, and then began to shake violently. He’d been hit with a splinter, and the toxin acted quickly. He had only enough time to turn towards us and reach out for the computer. He wasn’t able to complete the motion. He slumped onto the desk and then rolled off onto the floor.
I switched the room light off, so the only light was from the computer screen. Liz placed her hand over the video camera lens and motioned me towards her.
A partial view of a Pug appeared. He was apparently looking down at the man. Then he turned swiftly towards the screen, and his features enlarged as he leaned towards the camera.
“Who’s there?” he said in slurred but recognizable English. We were quiet. Her boss came into sight, and the Pug straightened and began to speak to him.
They definitely weren’t speaking English this time. The sound was somewhat like two snakes hissing combined with cricket chirps and odd clicks. Whatever was said, her boss leaned over the computer and started typing on the keys.
I reached over Liz and pressed the disconnect switch. This wasn’t part of the computer itself. I’d installed it myself, and it had the effect of disconnecting the network instantly.
“Well, that tears it!” she said with a depressed sound in her voice. Her eyes were wide and distressed. “I can’t believe that my boss is one of them! I’ve known him too long, and I just can’t figure it out. We’re not going to get any help from my people. For all I know, I don’t have any people left.”
Thinking rapidly, I asked, “Was there any time in the recent past that he seemed to be not himself? Perhaps he was out of the office for a few days or something.”
She thought about it. “Let’s see. I know! I heard that he called in sick for a week. That was last month. I met with him a little over a week ago, and I didn’t notice anything, but I wasn’t really looking closely. Then I went back out in the field and was captured.”
She finished with a tremor in her voice, “They must have co-opted him somehow. I wonder how they did it?”
“Best not to think about it now,” I reassured her. “Let’s go into the kitchen and have a drink and then get some rest.”
I’d made sure that the kitchen was remarkably well stocked and even had a small selection of wines. We opened a bottle of Rioja, which proved to be excellent.
After some conversation about ourselves, which led to some flirting, which led to some slightly more intimate activity, we ended up in the bedroom. The cat had already staked out a top bunk and was lying in complete comfort, curled on his side.
The bunks weren’t made for two, but we did our best to get comfortable.
Sometime around two in the morning, the monitor program let out a beep and got us out of bed. We hovered over the screen and watched a group of Pugs work their way down the street outside the building. They were checking on some kind of device one of them was carrying. If it was some kind of locator, it apparently couldn’t find us because they continued on down and out of sight.
The Pugs looked somewhat human at first glance, especially with their masks, and as long as they kept their sinuous motions slowed down to roughly human speed, city dwellers weren’t likely to pay much attention to them, especially since they were dressed conservatively. I’ve noticed that most people in cities don’t actually look at the people that they encounter on the street. It’s normal for them to glance down or look away as they pass. It’s a defense mechanism, of course. There are far too many people gathered too close to deal with, so everyone simply tries to ignore everyone else.
The local residents were out clubbing, even though it was pretty late and they were much more likely to gather attention. Quite a few of them looked more alien than the actual aliens, in my opinion. In fact, if the aliens had a problem with blending in, it was that they looked more conservatively dressed than most of the humans on the street.
About five, we tried to contact Liz’s national headquarters in DC. For some reason, a lot of the Internet was down. I could reach some nodes, but any that led to DC were down. It was a really strange breakdown of the system. I reasoned that one of the main things that would happen in any sort of invasion was that the invading force would make every effort to disrupt our communications. We’ve reached the point at which the Internet is the primary mode of mass communication, and disabling it would paralyze much of our society.
About six, we got ready, had some breakfast, and then slipped out. The cat followed us closely. He wasn’t going to let us leave him there. If there was going to be some action, he wanted in.
There had been several groups of Pugs on the street in the intervening hours, and I figured that they’d somehow managed to get a fix on our general location. However, they hadn’t found us and probably didn’t know what I looked like. We were sure that they knew Liz since she’d been a prisoner twice.
We decided that it might be a good idea if she wore her hair differently. To this point, she’d worn it hanging loose, but she took a moment and put it into French braids. We really couldn’t do anything about her facial structure, but she changed her makeup slightly and highlighted her cheekbones so that she actually did look a little different.
She stepped into a drug store, holding my bag with the cat inside, and watched out the window as I went around a corner. It wasn’t long before I came back in a new Mercedes M Class. The driver had actually left it running as he went into a doughnut shop to get some coffee. What an idiot! I was sure that he was on his phone with the cops at this moment, so I got out and openly changed the license plates with another car parked in front of the drugstore. No one seemed to notice.
Liz got in with the cat and the weapons packages. We hit the road and were heading off the island within a few minutes.
“You know, Liz, we’ve really got to name this cat pretty soon.” I was scratching around his ears with my right hand while I drove with my left. My scratching efforts resulted in a steady low purr of contentment.
“That’s not necessary. I’ve already got it covered. He told me his name was ‘Jefferson’ last night.”
I goggled at her for a moment and then turned my attention back to the street in front of us. “Now, exactly how did he manage to do that?”
“I tried several names, and he made it clear he disapproved of them. ‘Jefferson’ was the one he answered to.” Jefferson was watching her closely, and he started to purr again when she said his name.
Obviously, that was settled. I knew that cats were kind of picky and seem to have distinct preferences of their own. I also knew that they had about one billion more neurons in their brains than dogs. I had previously figured that they used those neurons to keep a superior attitude. Now I was beginning to wonder if that was true for all cats. Jefferson appeared to be far more intelligent than the average cat, at least to a non-cat lover like me.