"Excuse me?" I hadn't noticed but the young lady had stopped for a breather right in front of me and she must've thought I was talking to her.
"Uh, oh I'm sorry. Your dog, uh, reminds me of mine back home. He's in a kennel 'til tomorrow and I just miss him is all," I said sheepishly.
"Hey, that's kinda sweet. What kind is he?" she asked.
"Oh, he's a one hundred percent purebred mutt," I laughed.
She led the leash over in my direction and her pup sniffed my leg. I held the back of my hand down for him to lick. Once he realized I was no threat he let me pet him and tug his ears.
"You get along with dogs pretty well it appears. Reagan seems to like you." She smiled and stood straight, stretching her neck and arms. "Well, it was nice meeting you. I'm going to finish my run now."
"Oh, sorry to interrupt, bye Reagan," I called to her as she and Reagan trotted off. "That tears it. Damn it all to hell." I stood up, ready to go pack and head to the airport. I walked about five steps and then stopped. "Damn, what should I do?" I decided to call and see if there were any flights back to Dayton, so I found the nearest pay phone. One of these days I've got to get a cell. Fortunately, I had been using my itinerary for a bookmark and the travel agent one-eight-hundred number was on there. It turned out that I couldn't get back to the airport in Dayton until five-thirty, which was about the same time the kennel closed. No way I would make it to Laz tonight. "So that solves that," I told myself.
A post-Rain storm came through about one p.m., so I took in the Smithsonian Museums along the Mall and then went to the Spy Museum. I also hailed a cab and rode up Capitol Hill to the backside of the Capitol building and saw the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Then I had the cabby drop me at the closest Metro and I went back to King Street and the hotel.
Later that evening Larry and I had the free beer and then walked down King Street all the way to the river. We stopped and ate dinner at one of the seafood shops along the way. I asked Larry about the meetings and my status and so on. He just told me not to ask. Then we talked about the sights that I had seen. The Library of Congress specifically intrigued Larry. He said he had never been there before.
I finished Glory Road on the plane back to Dayton and went from the airport straight to the kennel. I'm not sure who was happiest to see whom, but Laz and I hugged each other dearly. He licked my face and whimpered at me a time or two.
"Good boy!" I told him. "I missed you, buddy, d'you miss me?" I tugged at his ears and stroked his back. "Sit fella, sit." He sat and allowed me to put his leash on. Then we loaded up in the SUV and were off to the apartment.
I didn't bother to unpack and we went for a long walk first thing. We stopped in the park by the local high school and played Frisbee some, and then we went back to the apartment and sprawled out on the couch together. Laz laid his chin on my lap and I stroked his fur between his ears, gently, until we went to sleep. I belonged there, I missed Laz, and he missed me; my only real connection to the entire damned planet. Oh, sure I had grown a little closer to Larry Waterford, but it was in an employer to employee relationship. That just isn't the same. I couldn't cry on Larry's shoulder and hug him for reassurance that things would be okay. Laz didn't mind at all, and I loved him for it.
CHAPTER 10
When I went back to the office the next day Larry gave me a new task that was completely unrelated to the quantum connected computer project. He gave me a Chinese rocket computer operating system and wanted me to learn how to talk to it. It was boring, hum-drum stuff. It wasn't much harder than Sequencing that old video game that I did for Larry so long ago. I would ask Larry about the project on a daily basis and it seemed to annoy him a bit. He would always tell me that I couldn't be told anything and that I shouldn't think about it anymore until the clearance comes through. So, of course, then I would ask, "Well, when will my clearance come through?"
"When it comes, Steven. That's all I can tell you."
"Well, I thought they needed my help with the SuperAgent code?" I would ask.
"I don't know any more than you do." He would fiddle with his tie and then change the subject. He would always seem irked that I wasn't focused on the current busywork project he had given me.
So, I worked on reverse engineering some of the most benign devices you could imagine by day and then went home and sat with Lazarus by night. The drugs had begun to diminish in effect against the depression again and occasionally I would wake up and not realize hours had passed. But good ol' Lazarus would always be there to help me through it. I would hug him and sob some and tell him that he was my buddy. That seemed to help almost as much as the drugs did.
Then, in a morning-depressed haze, I would go into work for more run-of-the mill reverse engineering busywork. I reverse engineered a tank turret control computer, ejection code for a French fighter plane, the reaction control system of a recovered satellite (although I never figured out how the satellite had been recovered), and I was working on a radio jamming device found in North Korea nearly six months later. Don't get me wrong; some of the work was challenging, but nothing like the reverse engineering of that magical green and orange quantum cube device. The biggest depressing fact was that after more than six months, there was still no clearance.
One day I was so bored I thought I would go further out of my mind, so I sloughed off work and I went surfing on the Framework instead. My office hook-up wasn't as fast as at home but I didn't feel like measuring voltages on a Russian computer motherboard. So I logged on and started to look up that Dr. Who fellow. It didn't take long for me to figure out the reason that Dr. Daniels had brought him up. That guy was some very old British television character who apparently lives in a phone booth, or whatever the British call it. On the outside it looks like a regular phone booth, but on the inside it is large enough for a very comfortable apartment. It is explained as some sort of space warp or something. Just like the "warped" RAM chips Dr. Daniels's wife had theorized.
I was still on the Framework when the phone rang. Finally, Larry called me into his office for a chat; I hoped every time the phone rang that it was about my clearance. This time it was.
"Steve, we need to talk."
"Yeah, what about?" I hoped this was it. After all, it had been nearly seven months since we had been to Washington, D.C.
"Sorry, Steve, but your advanced clearance has been declined," he said and looked down at his feet for second. My heart fell to my shoes.
"Why? I mean, I told the truth about everything. I . . . I . . . don't understand, I'm a good American, aren't I?"
"Son, nobody really believes otherwise." He paused. "Except that . . ." He stopped again.
"Except what?"
"Well, son, as far as your background investigation is concerned, you just suddenly appeared in Dayton, Ohio, at about the age of eighteen. There is no proof that you ever existed before that. No hospital records, not any living witnesses that can say you are the same kid that came out of your mother's birth canal, nothing. In fact, the only proof to corroborate your life is that your parents' tax records can be found and that they paid taxes on a dependent."
"So, there you go; I was their dependent," I argued.
"No, son, there is no evidence that it was you. Oh sure, they filed a social security number for you when you were nine, but there are no pictures, no birth certificates, no DNA samples, nothing."
"But . . . but I can't help that. The Rain killed them! The Rain killed them all! Don't you understand? There is nothing I can do about that!" I was frantic.
"Calm down, Steven! I understand. But you have to understand that this is the perfect approach for a mole or a spy to infiltrate our nation's security. Conveniently, all the records were erased and some guy moves in and becomes Steven Montana. How do we know that you were not killed during the meteors? People don't realize this, because on the surface and in public, the world looks as though it is getting along famously and friendly now. We are all banding together after the disaster and gelling as one race. It looks that way on television, but in the real world espionage and counterespionage are at an all-time high. The FBI, CIA, and Homeland Defense agents have caught literally hundreds of moles trying to take identities of victims from the meteor disaster."