Zeus and Io Books 1 and 2Chapter 16
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October 24, 2012
Shortly after Master Chief Martinez made his cataclysmic announcement that his daughter was still subject to a death threat, we formulated a plan. At a moment's notice we were prepared to drop everything, and go to San Diego.
Additionally, the replacement for her cell phone (a Galaxy Android with the newest features) was supplied by the airline from which she had been abducted. The airline was so conciliatory, that the girls' families didn't even have to threaten a lawsuit. They now had unlimited free personal flights, a fully paid scholarship at any university the girls wanted to attend, plus a large cash settlement.
Maria wasted no time downloading several apps into her new mobile device. One of the apps had a small modification, supplied by me. When it wasn't in use as a phone, the device became a passive, voice-activated listening device. When it was in use as a phone, of course, I eavesdropped as well. I devoted a small amount of processing power to listening all the time.
Listening to all the conversations of a fourteen year old girl is mind numbing, or would have been if I'd had a physical mind. She seemed to be either talking on the phone, texting a friend, or on Facebook all the time. I could not imagine a more sterile life.
"Carol, you have to hear what I just heard from Aiesha..."
Via text: Ai ... u wdnt bliv what Carol just said about u..."
"Carol. Aiesha says that..."
Via text: Tommy just fcbkd that he's going 2 party with Sondra ths wkend.
Via text SCREAMS
Screams via phone seem endemic, as well.
It went on and on and on. I offered to let the Master Chief listen to some, but after two minutes, he couldn't take it any more.
All that was going on while the rest of our world continued apace.
President Wentworth decided that his reelection was a very close thing. He quietly bought himself a large measure of goodwill with the Navajo people of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, by ceding all control of the BIA Land Trusts to the Navajo Nation. He could do that by executive order. The Navajo decided to merge all the land trusts into one, to be administered by the duly elected officials of the Navajo Nation. Just like that, one hundred forty-seven years of robbery and misappropriations of funds of the Navajo Nation, at the hands of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, came to a quiet end.
That, in turn, virtually guaranteed that Wentworth would win in New Mexico and Colorado. Arizona was probably going to remain a conservative state, and anti-Wentworth.
Wentworth also sent me an inquiry about the drone's missing missiles. Did I know anything about that?
I answered that my defense of the U.S. Government installations against electronic incursions did not authorize me to listen to military frequencies, so I did not do so. That much was true. I did not listen. I took one over, but I did not listen ... at least, not much. I further told him that it looked like the Chinese or the North Koreans were up to some more electronic mischief, to be activated by them in the months immediately after the election. Should I take preemptive defensive measures?
No, he said. We were the white hats. We'd absorb their first volley. But this time we'd take countermeasures. He wanted to hear my suggestions on that.
No more was said about missiles or an errant drone flight. I monitored the FBI investigation, also. They were not connecting the admittedly disparate dots concerning the flight into El Paso, the missing drone, the attack on J. J. Reodondo's home, and the girls' treatment at the Army Medical Center.
The salt mine site was becoming more and more a fully functioning network node, as the prototype computers were being delivered by Dell and Intel. I was due to 'move in' during the first part of November.
The first wind turbine electricity generators were coming online and some customers actually cut over to Navajo Power, instead of the commercial company that handled Northern Arizona and New Mexico. There was the inevitable wrangling with the commercial companies, who were losing customers. We suggested that we would buy all their power lines on the reservation. Alternatively, when the leases ran out, the Navajo could just condemn the lines, and they would have no income from the facilities. They decided to sell to us at reasonable rates. We agreed that any excess power we generated would be sold to them at market rates. We were now their friends-at-knife-point instead of their enemies ... a fine distinction, that.
Ramon and Midnight were scheduled to move into their new, and quite expansive, home on Halloween. They had invited all their friends from Scottsdale for a party. Sorry to say, I would not be in attendance except, of course, as a passive listener.
The workers would all be transferring over to Arti's and Zeus' home thereafter. The relationship between the two seemed to have settled into normalcy, but without all the loving warmth that had characterized things before the Mexico trip. There was just a chill in the air, and most of it seemed to come from Artemis.
I called a meeting on the morning of October 24 to discuss one item. The four of us 'met' in the camper, though there were only two human bodies in attendance.
"I have some news about Mr. Worth," I said, "He is, as you know, out on bail in New York State, and under Federal and State indictment relating to the sex slaves he kept in his home. The Feds brought separate charges regarding the sale of firearms to the cartels in Mexico, and his gun company has been shut down. They are looking into sale of firearms to organized crime in the U.S. as well. Greed seems to be a built-in weakness in humans.
"Mr. Worth's attorneys have, as of this morning, given him a confidential memo that outlines the steps they have taken to liquidate his offshore holdings, and to concentrate all the money from the Worth Family Trust and Mr. Worth personal holdings in two accounts. Those funds have been moved from their various banks to Bermuda, to the Camayans, to the Republic of Tuva (which is a banking privacy 'independent country' under Russian control) and, finally, on to Belize. Without the kind of reach available to me, it would not be possible for another agency – for example the FBI – to trace the money.
"He has been quietly sending supplies to a yacht owned by his son, which eluded the Feds' seizure," I went on. "The supplies include a fully provisioned emergency life raft for ten, and three explosive devices. He has made arrangements to be picked up off the Turks and Caicos, north of Haiti, on the 10th of November, by a freighter from Belize.
"I think he is planning to sail from Providence, Rhode Island, under cover of the threatening Hurricane Sandy. Logic dictates that he avoid the dangers of the hurricane, and so I assume he will sail out into the Atlantic, coming by a round-about way to the rendezvous point. At that point, he will scuttle his yacht, appear to be dead, and go live in comfort in Belize.
"It seems to me that these series of acts, and the natural deductions that they lead to, justify our decision to take action, as we previously said."
"That sonofabitch," said Zeus. "We need to take that bastard out."
When Zeus disappeared from the GPS track, I wanted to go out to Reedy Lake immediately. Io was the voice of reason. "Going out there two and a half hours early and getting picked up by the police will not help Zeus at all. We should keep to the schedule and rely on Zeus to meet us at the agreed time," she said. "In the meantime, I am starting to pick up some radio calls on police frequencies that are relevant." So we listened as the police went through their painstakingly slow but...
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Whee! This was fun. I was sitting behind Zeus as he took off and landed and took off again in the blue and red Quicksilver GT500. He had 'us' carry some heavy payloads – meaning I had to carry some rocks in a borrowed backpack – to see how it handled. That's about when the fun stopped. The GT500 was a tandem (fore and aft) two-seater with a range of just over 200 miles – if you traveled real slow, like 50 miles per hour. It weighed 1000 pounds and had a maximum payload of 1100 pounds,...
"Well, you've really bought yourself a boat load of trouble, this time," Master Chief Martinez said in my head. I think she'll be fine. You know, I did it on purpose. I think she'll be more effective as a decoy if she's got something to prove. "Maybe. But you might wind up paying more of a price than one little decoy-mission is worth." Done is done. We'll have to see how it works out, I answered back. I easily caught up with Arti, but neither of us said anything. So we...
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Hi, To all Iss reader this is my first story hope U all would like it a complete fiction.my self raj i live in Mumbai this story is about my aunty nandita,let me describe her she is in her 30s,lives with her husband and daughter.She is born beauty with an awesome fig of 36.28.40 ..her assets are her huge melons of 36 d and her ass that will give a hard on to any guy who looks at it So now my story starts this was like 5 years ago when I was appearing for my 12 th HSC examination at that time my...
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"Well, did I check out?" It was Artemis' soft contralto, coming at me from the other side of a large salad bowl. We were sitting in the dining room of her house, finishing the dinner she'd prepared. It was actually pretty good: several types of salad greens, some thinly sliced chicken, all kinds of fresh vegetables, some hard boiled eggs, Chinese noodles, nuts, and all topped off with a sesame vinaigrette. She offered some wine, but I didn't want to even approach the limits that the VA...
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President Thomas Jefferson Wentworth had just taken off his tuxedo jacket after a long State Dinner to honor the Prime Minister of Australia, when his private cell phone buzzed. He had returned to Washington especially for this event, having made a two-day hole in his campaign schedule. "Now what?" he said as he fumbled for the device. "Oh shit!" he exclaimed when he realized that it was not his regular phone, but the special one he had his daughter secretly buy; the phone that only...
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I sat in my room after a shower, the warm sun caressing my skin as I smoothed lotion over my body. It was my day off, so I had the flat to myself. My hands caressed the lotion in long, languorous strokes with intense, massaging pressures over the particularly rough patches, and with a lighter touch over particularly sensitive ones. Perhaps that was why, after I spread my thighs to massage the lotion between them, the glorious heat of the sunlight kindled an answering heat between my legs, and...
I sat in my room after a shower, the warm sun caressing my skin as I smoothed lotion over my body. It was my day off, so I had the flat to myself. My hands caressed the lotion in long, languorous strokes with intense, massaging pressures over the particularly rough patches, and with a lighter touch over particularly sensitive ones. Perhaps that was why, after I spread my thighs to massage the lotion between them, the glorious heat of the sunlight kindled an answering heat between my legs, and...
Fantasy & Sci-FiJanuary 11 Okinawa Island is in the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan and is a small island in the chain of islands that run from the southern tip of Japan to Taiwan. It is in the middle of the sea; officially it is between the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea. Compared to the other islands in the Prefecture, it is very large; compared to the islands in the rest of the world it is pretty small. Although someone will say that it is officially sub-tropical, I'm here to tell you that in January...
I was itchy to do something again. Back in ... that is, when I was ... well, in the days before Arti ... uh, when I was on my own ... I mean, I'm still on my own, because I don't have any sort of caretaker or anything ... but, you know ... before we started doing everything as "us" doing something. Back then, I was busy all the time. I had a string of alternative identities to care for. Go to Comanche, and be Lee Roberts for a few days. Go to Weatherford, Texas, and work on the John...
We flew into our new home later that morning. 'Our new home' was a bit of a stretch. It was a construction site on ten acres of high desert that backed up to a canyon of sorts, at the bottom of which was a dried up creek bed. The canyon wasn't very deep or wide, but it looked like a canyon to me – or at least a decent exit point for an escape tunnel. In addition to the workforce, with their assorted collection of old, dusty pickups, there was Io's H2 with attached camper. The double-wide...
Late January People can be so persistent at times, annoyingly, when I wanted them to give up. Especially when their whole city is blocked off from the internet, as Shanghai was in those initial days when Chiang was loose in Shanghai. They were pulling plugs on mainframes; they were rebooting everything under the sun; they were even replacing mainframes with older, obsolete equipment that wasn't 'corrupted.' I could understand. If people tried to cut me off from the greater part of 'me,...