Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

I drove back to my house just so I could get some kind of credentials to at least insinuate that I had some kind of business being in Quantico. My dad always had an identification card he clipped on the front of his shirt, but I hadn’t seen it since he died. Since he was at work when he died, it is obviously still there. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of security there would be to get into the city. It wasn’t like I was trying to sneak into the Corps base and take pictures of their command center; I just wanted to go visit the university where my dad worked. Most universities enjoy visitors.

Regardless, I grabbed an expired driver’s license and his death certificate from the top drawer of the desk in my parent’s bedroom. If I had to, I could at least attempt to prove that my dad was my dad.

The Trans Am took well to the open road. Highway driving with my old car was occasionally a bit of a negotiation, but in this car I could actually feel the engine pulling me. Amy agreed.

Quantico was half an hour north on 95, or halfway to Lorton, the town where I bought a gun and killed a man. I hoped today’s road trip would be less eventful, but I supposed that would be up to the United States Marine Corps.

I couldn’t imagine how my dad made this drive twice each day, it’s so very boring. Trees on both sides, a lot of the road unlit; maybe it would have been relaxing to someone in another mindset. Me, I was a bit nervous, and the monotony of the travel allowed the anxiety to reverberate inside my body.

Amy directed me off the highway and onto Russell Road. For a while it looked like I was cutting through uncharted wilderness, then on my left I passed a giant foreboding building that I couldn’t read the sign for, then more trees, then a giant parking lot, then more trees, then a giant foreboding building with a giant parking lot, then more trees, then I came upon a guard station. Both lanes of the road were blocked and between them was a small booth manned by two Corpsmen. They were both dressed in olive pants and khaki shirts with soft garrison caps. In the other lane was a stopped car, one of the guardsmen spoke through the car’s window. The other man motioned for me to stop at the gate, walked around the back of my car (probably looking for clearance stickers) then around to my window. He seemed surprised at my age when he saw me, though not unusually so.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said in a quick tenor, “may I ask your business here?” He looked to be 25 years old, had a flat face. The tag on his chest said his name was Meyers.

“I’m wanted at the Marine Corps University,” I said. “My father’s car is parked and I’m to remove it.”

He looked at me, then at Amy. I expected pepper spray any minute. “Do you have a visitor request on file with the OCS?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “We were called at home to pick the car up, I came to pick it up.”

“Something should have been set up in advance,” the guard said. “Visitors aren’t allowed on-site without pre-approval. I can call the office of where the car is parked and ask that the car be brought here if you’d like.”

That wouldn’t work for me. I tried to think of something else to say. I pulled the two driver’s licenses from my pocket and said, “There are also some personal effects I am to collect. I believe I was supposed to be granted a visitor’s clearance to the University; I didn’t realize it had to be set up first. I thought my name would just be put on a list.” I handed him the licenses. “This one is me,” I said pointing at the top one, “The other is my father. Could you check his clearance and contact whoever his superior is and ask if I may be allowed in?”

The guard made a face and said he would contact the security office, and then stepped away.

“I don’t think this will work,” Amy said. “Security seems to be ramped up since 9/11. I don’t even remember there being a guard station here.”

“Well I don’t know what else to do,” I said, more to myself. “I believe they make military bases so that you can’t talk your way onto them.”

The guard had been inside the booth for a few minutes; I could see him talking into a phone through the glass. He eventually hung up, and stepped out carrying something small and orange in his hand. This time, he walked around the front.

“All right Mr. Baker, you’re clear for entry to the base. You can pull forward through the gate and turn into the parking lot just to the left. A private will come around to transport you to the MC University. At that time, the young lady may leave in this car or she may wait in the parking lot for you to return, but she or this vehicle aren’t permitted past the parking area.”

I looked at Amy. She shrugged. “Okay,” I said.

The guard gave me the items in his hand, an orange laminated visitor’s pass with a metal clip to affix it to my shirt and the two driver’s licenses. He stepped back into the booth and the gate before my car lifted. It seemed I was in.

I pulled into a small parking area as instructed and shut off my engine. I asked Amy if she wanted to wait here or just take my car home. She said she’d wait and make sure I wasn’t taken into a basement and set on fire.

Five minutes later, a small green Jeep pulled in and idled next to my car. I got out and asked the driver, “This for me?”

“I’m to take you to the MC University,” he said, as if saying anything more would get him court marshaled. I nodded then hopped into the passenger seat, I started to look for the seat belt but the vehicle lurched forward before I could bother. It took a few minutes of driving through the woods before it seemed like we were actually in a city. Old, New England style buildings were all around. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought I was in Cambridge, not a city dedicated to training young men and women to kill. The driver said nothing, so I sat in silence as well, idly fidgeting with the USB drive in my pocket.

At school, I once heard Dale Carpenter talking about his foolproof idea for getting anything he wanted off of somebody’s computer without touching the keyboard and using only a USB memory stick, the small portable hard drives that most people use for moving documents or files between computers. He said something about making the USB drive trick the computer into copying files from the computer to the memory stick, but I didn’t really pay attention at the time because I assumed he was just talking to hear his own voice. While I was at his house, though, when I went back a second time, I asked him about it.

“This genius plan you have for taking files from a computer with a USB drive, what was it?” I asked, returning unexpectedly to his room.

He smiled proudly, and said, “It’s simple. I can partition a USB stick and format it to CDFS, so when you plug it into a computer, Windows thinks it’s a CD, not a memory stick. If Auto-run is enabled, which it always is because people are idiots, it will run whatever program on the USB drive I want. I can put a shell script on there that will run in the background and search the computer’s hard drive for files matching any keywords I set, and then copy them onto the USB drive. Other than that ‘do-dun’ file the computer makes when you stick the drive in, someone using the computer would have no idea what was going on. You just plug in the drive, the drive finds the files you want and copies them, and then you take the drive out and walk away.”

I nodded and tried to process the words I understood.

“So you first program the type of files to look for?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “just edit a text file with the keywords you want, then when it runs on someone’s computer it searches for any files matching your keywords.”

“You’re sure this works?”

“Yes it works,” he said, defensively, “I’ve tried it a few times. Thought about making it search for .doc files so I could get teachers’ tests or answer keys by sticking the drive in a school computer while the teacher is logged in, but I realized they’re all so lazy they never make the tests until the night before.”

“So you have one… that works?”

“Yeah, a one gigabyte stick. Why? You want one?”

“I’ll buy that one,” I said.

“If you just bring me whatever memory stick you want I’ll set it up for you.”

“I need it today. I’ll give you however much it costs to buy a new one for yourself. One gig, those are like fifty bucks now, right?”

“Was seventy when I bought it, but they’ve gone down.”

I pulled the rest of the cash from my wallet. I need to go to the bank again, I thought. He dug through desk drawers until he found a small, silver USB memory stick about the length of half a stick of gum. He looked it over, and then plugged it into a free USB port on the front of his computer’s tower.

“Yeah,” he said, “this is it.”

I stepped forward and looked at the screen; there were a few files on the drive. He opened one called kw.txt and said, “This is the