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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Audrik" data-source="post: 7335347" data-attributes="member: 73653">The Bedford Project - Session 2bThe laser tripwire on the window bothered Atwood. Almost everything in this town bothered him, but the tripwire was too much. He decided not to leave the room until dark. While he waited, he dismantled the phone in his room and looked it over. He wasn’t sure what a bug would look like, but he wanted to check just to be sure. As far as he could tell, everything appeared right, so he put the phone back together.He had been periodically peeking outside through a small space between the curtains, and this time, he saw something. A brand new, red Lexus RC Coupe pulled into a parking space a couple spots down from his rental car. The man who stepped out was big. He was one of the darkest-skinned black men Atwood had ever seen, and the FBI man estimated he was about 6’3” and maybe 240 pounds. The man wore a finely-tailored black suit and carried a briefcase.The behavioral analyst guessed from the way the man dressed and carried himself, he was probably a highly-paid bodyguard. The man hit a button on his key, and the car doors locked with a beep. Atwood watched as he walked up the stairs and entered the room two doors down from his. The agent didn’t want to step outside his room just yet, so he got his binoculars to see if he could get a read on the license plate. Apparently, the guy was from Maryland. Well, at least he wasn’t the only out-of-towner here.If he was going to be stuck in his room until nightfall, he might as well make some use of his time. What was the name of the woman the Marine recruiter supposedly had a relationship with? Cherry? That was it. Allison Cherry. Atwood opened the phonebook and flipped to C. There was only one Cherry, and it was the right one. He had her number and address. As he was dialing the number on the motel phone, he thought to himself how interesting it was that with all this technology in town, they still bothered to put names and addresses in a phonebook.Ring … ring … ring … ring … Early afternoon on a Saturday, and he got Ms. Cherry’s answering machine.He left a message telling her his name was C.H. Brown. He was in charge of administering Captain Rush’s will, and she had been named as a beneficiary. He was in town for a few days and staying at the Skylark Motel, and he’d like to get together with her to discuss the specifics. He left the number for his room phone in case she’d like to get back to him.While he left the message, he continued to watch outside. At one point near the end of his call, he spotted a charcoal gray Chevrolet Camaro pull up. There was a man in the driver’s seat, a blonde girl in the passenger’s seat, and a brunette girl in the back. He recognized the girls from the diner. The brunette – what was her name? Ashley? – got out and looked around. She looked at the windows of the rooms like she was either making sure she wasn’t being watched or was trying to determine who might be in the rooms. She bounced over to Atwood’s rental car and looked inside before running her hand along the fender. The girl took one more look around before bouncing back over to the Camaro and getting in.As the car drove away, Atwood put his binoculars to use once more. Most of the Iowa plates he’d seen were white and blue and numbered in black in the format ABC 123, but the Camaro’s plate was white with red lettering and numbered F1403. It also had the firefighter’s insignia on the far left and said ‘FIREFIGHTER’ in place of the county name. Whatever just happened, he didn’t like it. Were the girls stalking him? Did one of them get her father to help?He didn’t trust the motel Wi-Fi, so he turned his cell phone into a mobile hotspot and connected his laptop to the internet through it. He sent SSAC Gomez an email with a request to trace the two plates. It took about an hour before he got the response:A Taylor in the Camaro. No surprise there. But what the hell was an assistant director of DARPA doing in a town like this? Nothing good, for sure. Plus, DARPA meant federal, and that meant this Dunn guy was either a likely candidate to add to the list with Heathcliff, Emmett, Rush, and Badagian, or he was responsible for the list. He sent another text to Porter and Dempsey. Why the hell weren’t they responding? It only added to his feeling of isolation.While he waited, he decided to look up DARPA and the Information Innovation Office. According to what he could piece together from their website and Wikipedia, this Mr. Dunn was in charge of or related to various projects in the interests of national security, but the projects were wide-ranging, and in a few cases, he questioned their ethics. There was a social engineering project aimed at correcting and directing the behavior of large groups of people with the express purpose (supposedly) of increasing the security of any cyber-networks they might have access to. There was a project for neural implants on soldiers, one for remote-controlled insects, and another for using plant physiology to detect chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.Damn. All of that was apparently real. And that’s just what made it to the internet. Wait … there was one more that caught his eye, and it sent a shiver down his spine. Combat Zones That See. The project’s goal was evidently to track everything that moves in an area by setting up a massive network of surveillance cameras to a centralized computer system and using artificial intelligence software to identify and track all movement. All movement. Seriously? Sure, DARPA claimed it was for battlefield use, but that could be abused. And if it were abused in the United States, he thought, it would look a lot like Bedford, Iowa.</blockquote>

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