Decency Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Rex Fuller

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1475123701

  ISBN-13: 9781475123708

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62345-845-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012905923

  CreateSpace, North Charleston, SC

  FOR SALLY

  FIRST, LAST AND

  ALWAYS

  This is a work of fiction. All persons, places, events and other content are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictional way.

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE ACT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART II: THE LAWYER

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART III: THE CASE

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  The United States Intelligence Community enjoys unfettered power to classify people psychologically deficient. United States law, 5 U.S.C. 2302(a)(2)(C)(ii), exempts the intelligence agencies from taking otherwise prohibited personnel actions by definition.

  The system works well enough, UNTIL…

  PART I

  THE ACT

  1

  THE ACT.

  Samantha raised both fists in the air.

  YESSS! Finally got him…greedy traitor son of a bitch.

  She finished typing on her old Toshiba portable computer, the kind that existed before laptops, a $1.00 garage sale special bought for this purpose only. No internet or other connection. Unhackable.

  …hard to believe he’s really falling for this…greed…that’s what made it easy… at the end…

  She ejected the floppy diskette, turned off the machine, took it to the closet, and placed it and the diskette back in the bottom of the box where she kept them. She replaced the old CD’s, then winter clothes, then belts and purses layer by layer on top of the computer and diskettes. She returned to the spare room, and surveyed the results.

  She glanced at the only three photos she displayed, one of Mom, one of Dad, and one of the three of them at her college graduation, one of many happy times. It would be so good, especially for them, to finally get all of this out of the way. She knew they worried, no matter how hard she tried to avoid it.

  …time for bed…big day tomorrow…it’ll all be over…

  She showered, put on her nightgown and robe, and flipped on the TV. CNN, Fox News, ESPN, C-SPAN, The Learning Channel, and several movies trained across the screen from her steady clicker button pushing.

  …surf just long enough to get me sleepy…

  The door bell rang.

  …who on earth…?

  Samantha went to the door and checked the eyepiece.

  …it’s him…he only left an hour ago…forgot something…?

  She opened the door.

  “Did you forget something?”

  “Only this…”

  His arm spiked forward to her face. Pepper spray caught in her nostrils.

  …medical glove… …spray can… …ow-w-w… …stuff really stings… …what’s he doing…?

  She reeled back. He jostled into the apartment, returned the spray can to his coat pocket, grabbed her hair with the same hand and spun her half around. He brought the other hand up and around and clamped a cloth dampened with ether over her mouth and nose.

  …c’mon…fight…hurts…

  …what’s that…gas…

  …what’s…

  Just as she began to relax and stagger from the ether, he replaced the cloth in his other coat pocket, took two pills from that pocket, forced them to the back of her mouth as she slumped, and covered her mouth again. Still feebly fighting the effects of the pepper she alternately swallowed and blew out of her nose.

  He returned the ether cloth to her nose keeping her mouth covered. She sank to the floor. He pulled the cloth away, let her down the floor, and knelt over her to watch. After a minute, she relaxed, asleep.

  He opened her mouth.

  Good, swallowed the pills. …now… …step by step… …no mistakes…

  He placed a prescription bottle of the same medication as one of the pills into the medicine cabinet. The other pill was a gel capsule of liquid 1,1,1-Trichloroethane that metabolized fast and would disappear after it killed her.

  He went to her bedroom, turned down the bedclothes and returned to the sleeping woman. He removed her robe and then fully lifted her and struggled to carry her to the bed.

  …this was easier in years past…

  He placed her in the bed without covering her. Then he went to the small kitchen, dampened a washcloth, and returned. He carefully washed the face to remove the capsaicin from the pepper spray. He placed the washcloth and ether cloth in a plastic bag from the breast pocket of his suit and put them in his coat pocket.

  Returning to the medicine cabinet, he looked in vain.

  …no Q-tips…? …what woman doesn’t have Q-tips…?

  …this will do…

  He took several lengths of toilet paper and dampened them. He returned to the bed and swabbed the insides of her nostrils over and over again.

  …a little spray in the nasal passage…but not enough to worry about…

  He deposited the swabs in the plastic bag with the cloths.

  …cunning little BITCH… …look at you now…

  …fool ME…control ME…I can put anything in that smart mouth now, ANYTHING…

  …stay calm, fool… …step by step…

  In the closet he found the vacuum cleaner. He removed the catchbag, then reached inside his suit, around to his back, and pulled a catchbag from where it was tucked into his trousers and taped it to the machine’s connection, sealing it.

  He vacuumed the woman’s hair, face, and nightclothes. Then the robe and bedclothes he might have brushed against and hung the robe on the hook inside the bathroom door. Next, he vacuumed the routes he followed within the apartment. Then he vacuumed everything a second time.

  He left the sweeper in the bedroom and went to the spare room where her computer, an H-P laptop, was located. The light indicated it was running and he sat down. He looked for the switch to turn on the external monitor, found it on the bottom of the screen, and flipped it on.

  A Windows desktop appeared. He opened a few of the files in “My Documents” to see if any could be records of her suspicions.

  …nothing so far…fine…now to take anything off that might be…

  He took all of her data discs from the tray by the compute and put them in the plastic bag with the swabs and cloths. He exited Windows.

  …very organized woman…no extra discs cluttering her life…

  He then typed the command “Format c:” and insisted “yes” on each of the pop-up windows, as the computer tried to talk him out of forcing it to commit memory suicide.

  While the hard drive formatted, he looked at the few small photos on the shelf nearby.

  Mom and Dad…quaint…pathetic…maybe where she’s from it’s Ma and Pa…

  When the format was complete, he insert
ed a boot disc from his pocket and brought the basic functions back to life. He took the Windows program disks from the box on the shelf above the computer and reinstalled Windows. Finally, he inserted a couple of the data discs, checked the files, and when he found photos, copied those onto the hard drive. He tried another and found copies of Schwab account statements and copied those to the hard drive.

  …nothing but innocent files, some with their old dates attached…Windows installation date is nothing…these computer geeks reinstall everything just for kicks…

  Next he examined desk drawers and bookshelves for diaries, and notebooks. There was nothing but a Day-Timer on the desk by the phone. The Day-Timer entries were all for household activities.

  …terribly organized woman…

  From the prior visit, he knew there were no pets.

  …little miss goody-goody, job, Mommy and Daddy, no man, and that’s it…

  He returned to the bedroom, and removed the glove from his left hand and checked for pulse.

  …been almost an hour…she must have died thirty minutes ago…

  He put the glove back on and wiped the skin he touched. He placed his gloved right hand over the woman’s mouth and nose and held tight. He watched the second hand sweep around the clock face for two full minutes. No twitch or effort to breath.

  …WITCH… …arrogant, controlling WHORE… …who’s in control now…

  He arranged her in a natural sleeping posture. Then he vacuumed her again. He pulled the bedclothes up nearly over her head and vacuumed the bed surface, the route out of the bedroom into the computer room, the chair where he sat, and the route back out to the bookshelves.

  He pulled the makeshift catchbag from the machine, put the old one back on, and then returned the Hoover to the closet. Taking the shortest route to the door, he wiped the surfaces of the door and the jamb that could have caught some pepper spray with the damp cloth, closed the door behind him, checked that it locked, and left.

  The young coroner’s assistant switched off his flashlight, stood up, and sighed.

  The detective glanced at him. Both men returned their gaze to the inert young woman lying in her bed in front of them, from all appearances, just asleep.

  “From what we have here, I say she just stopped living.”

  “That young? She can’t be more than late thirties.”

  “It happens. You guys say there’s nothing out of place and no indications of suicide. I don’t see anything on the outside indicating it. To tell you more we’ll have to autopsy.”

  “So you’re leaving it to me whether we comb the apartment?”

  “Sure am. I can’t say it’s necessary to my jurisdiction.”

  “Well, her employer called it in. Said she hadn’t shown up Monday and Tuesday. First time ever. The landlord let us in. Said she was an ideal tenant. We don’t have any reason to think she didn’t just die - except she was so young.”

  “The only thing I can tell you is from the body temperature she died before Sunday.”

  “Okay. Well I guess we’ll light up the sheets, suck the floors for fiber, check for prints that aren’t hers and leave it at that. Not much else we can do.”

  Both paused. The younger man spoke as he turned to leave. He gestured to the detective’s identification cards slung around his neck.

  “Haven’t seen you before. You just come on?”

  “No, Baltimore sent me down. Odenton needed someone to take a close look. Like you said, she’s so young to just die.”

  The young coroner nodded.

  “She was beautiful wasn’t she?”

  “What a waste.”

  When the detective completed the death scene investigation he took the bags of fibers that the technician vacuumed from the woman and her apartment.

  “I’m gonna’ take these directly to a lab myself and get them started. We either have something with these or nothing.”

  The technician nodded and initialed the chain of custody entries on the bags. The detective scribbled a signature on the receipt for the bags and handed it to him.

  The detective left the scene and drove to his home in Annapolis. Before anything else, he built a fire in the fireplace. He put the vacuum catchbag from the apartment, the toilet paper nostril swabs, and the bags of fibers from the technician in the fire and watched them burn. He turned the remnants occasionally, insuring full combustion. He took the bag containing the ether cloth and washcloth to the kitchen and ran both under the tap water, wrung them out, and put them in the dirty clothes hamper.

  …can’t have ether exploding in my own fireplace…

  He retrieved the bag that held the cloths from the kitchen counter and tossed it into the fire.

  The pepper spray can, he might use again.

  …if only she hadn’t tried too much…and just allowed control…no one escapes

  Harlan and Kathy Pierce opened the door of the apartment with the key the landlord gave them. Nothing was out of place. That’s the way Samantha always was. A quick tour suggested the only things obviously missing were the bedclothes.

  Harlan returned to the car and brought in the boxes. They already decided to bring only her most personal items back with them and deal with the rest later. They boxed the books and pictures from the living room together and labeled it.

  Next they put the books, CD’s, and computer components from the spare room in another box and labeled it. The laptop was not there and they remembered in silence that the police still had it.

  They checked the box in the bottom of the closet and decided to take that because of the CD’s and the old portable computer. They picked a few objects in the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen that connected directly to her or the family, the photos, keepsakes, and a few hand written letters, mostly from them, and placed them in another box. And they were finished.

  Now, the most difficult part of all, taking their daughter’s body back to Nebraska and burying her next to the grave of her sister that she never knew.

  The funeral service was far too large for the tiny church. It was held instead in the gymnasium of the high school whose team she led to the state basketball tournament finals. All of her friends from that time attended, as did a few of her co-workers who traveled all the way from Maryland. All of the people from the surrounding farming community who knew Harlan and Kathy were there. Personal tributes were numerous and heart-felt.

  The cortege encircled the small cemetery several times over. Deputy Sheriff Tom Koonce, who had loved Samantha from high school on, directed traffic with tears in his eyes. The grave-side ceremony was kept short to minimize exposure to the late November winds, already carving winter into the land.

  The reception followed at the Pierce farm house eight miles south of the town. Three of her colleagues, whose plane schedules allowed them to be there, spoke to Harlan and Kathy. Each of them, James Barrington, Christian Mason, and Ted Fitzgerald, expressed their deep respect and affection for her. They left to allow the many to mourn.

  Then, it was over.

  Lieutenant General Chester O. McKenna entered his secure conference room for the meeting with his most essential contractor. A thirty two year veteran of the Air Force, a computer engineer with advanced degrees from both MIT and Cal Tech, McKenna was sent to NSA to restore morale, as best he could.

  “How we coming, Shorty?”

  Herman “Shorty” Waldrop, Chairman and CEO of Technical Dynamics, served with McKenna in Berlin, both of them as intelligence officers.

  Shorty smiled. “Pretty damn well, Kenny.” No one had called McKenna that since the Reagan administration.

  Waldrop reached into his pocket and handed McKenna what appeared to be the works from inside a man’s expensive wristwatch.

  “That small?”

  “Yup.”

  “How?”

  “Sandia Lab’s Micro Electro Mechanical Systems techniques enabled a lot of the miniaturization. Who would have thought nuclear triggers could come into electronics this way?�
�

  “Not me.”

  “We used your guys’ data compression software to reduce power requirements which in turn reduced the battery size.”

  “Does it meet the specs?”

  “Pickup range of fifty feet. Monitoring capacity 50,000 channels. Transmission range is almost there. With a few tweaks we’ll have it fully compliant.”

  “Then we can get the signal to Echelon?”

  “From anywhere in the world with line of sight to the satellite or it can piggyback on cellular wavelengths and go terrestrial for as much as necessary.”

  “How soon before commercial applications catch up?”

  Commercial applications from remote microsurgery to ultra-high speed financial trading would expose much of the technology to open copying. The window before that happened left the intercept technology safe for just that long.

  “I’d say seven years.”

  “How long to manufacturing ramp-up?”

  “From the word ‘go,’ five months.”

  “You just got the word ‘go.’ What are we calling it?”

  “The same thing as your contract did, MIMID, for Mobile Implantable Micro Intercept Device. Nothing we have come up with so far says it any better.”

  “Let’s get going and work it hard. I really want to get these in the field as soon as we can.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  2

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE ACT.

  As usual, in late summer, for maybe two weeks, an implacable sun hunted the Platte River basin near the confluence with the Missouri. The heat shimmered in the streets, skunked water, warped walls, killed cattle, banished birds, pearlized paint, and kissed all, plant or animal, cloth or skin, with clear flame. The hood of your car would blister your palm. Temperature insisted on ninety at night and whatever it wanted in daytime. Heat sucked your energy, sagging your shoulders. You felt like a distance runner all day, your own heart beating in your ears.

  A few feebly hoped - most knew better - that the rising waves of heat would lift the humidity high enough to make clouds, and then rain. Impervious imperturbable grasshoppers, flies, and mosquitoes ranged free. Nothing else wanted to move. Still, most people had to go out, to protect crops or animals, or to fix what was needed and then do it. Some, of course, could work inside, or in a car, in air conditioning. But not forever.