The Chilcoat Project by Jeff Bailey

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The Chilcoat Project, Chapter One:        The pine forest covered hills overlooking the Puget Sound was a tranquil and stunningly beautiful setting for the Marie Curie National Laboratory outside Seattle, Washington. To fit into the wooded setting without disturbing any of the trees, the MCN (everyone called the Madam Curie National Laboratory the MCN) occupied thirty-four randomly located buildings loosely bound together into a ‘research campus.’ The campus looked more like a scattering of unrelated electronics businesses than one of the nation’s premier laser and nuclear research facilities. The surrounding residents were unaware how much DOD (Department of Defense) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Program Administration) research was being conducted in these inconspicuous campus buildings.

There didn’t seem to be any security surrounding the campus. There was no perimeter fence and no hundred yards of flat, rocky, vegetation-free, no-mans-land surrounding the fence. In fact, any local resident could park in any of the Campus parking lots, use the outdoor picnic areas (which they do), or walk up to the outside doors of any of the lab buildings without being challenged.

The Spectroscopy Laser Lab, SLL, was a sprawling one story building on the northern outskirts of the campus. Camera security for the SLL was excellent. Camera surveillance covered the whole roof and the outside grounds. Cameras on the outer most parking lot light poles and by smaller cameras mounted on the extreme corners of the building covered the outsides covered every inch of the back door and the loading bay of the SSL. The parking lot had no less than six cameras focused on it at all times. However, there was one small area at the corner of the parking lot that didn’t receive as much coverage as it should have. The three or four parking places against the building, closest to the loading bay were only scanned by one panning camera. In addition, this panning camera could only scan the back half of these parking places at the extreme limit of the panning cycle. Part of the buildings structure blocked the total view. Even then, the panning camera only focused on these parking places for one second out of every thirty. Then, the panning camera panned away to the rest of the parking lot. Even the loading dock cameras were around the corner from these parking places. Beyond the un-monitored parking places was a small, secondary driveway that exited into the residential housing area behind the SLL. This drive way was also virtually un-monitored.

At 5:50 a.m. on a Friday morning in May, an unmarked, unremarkable white service van drove out of the residential area behind the SLL and turned into the small service drive way. In an easy, unhurried way, the driver parked in the last parking place closest to the loading bay. The driver got into the back where he had a good perspective of the parking lot through the tinted windows. The passenger got out of the van and dropped a bundle of twenty-dollar bills held together by a paper clip on the ground next to the vans sliding door. Then, he stepped around to the front of the van to wait. There was no noticeable traffic in this area of the SSL’s parking lot. It was Friday and half of the lab personnel are on their alternating Friday off. It was also before 6:00 a.m., and few of the staff, engineers or scientist started work that early.

At 6:00 a.m. sharp, senior scientist Moses Chilcoat drove into the SSL parking lot in his rundown little twenty-year-old BMW. It had rained the night before, and the freshly washed air smelled crisp, clean, and refreshing, with a slight aftertaste of wet garden. Moses’ always arrived at work by 6:00 a.m. and always parked in the last parking place by the loading bay.

Even though it wasn’t quite daylight, yet, Moses could see the problem ahead of him. A white van was parked in his parking place. Moses looked at the white van in amazement. Most people don’t park that far from the front entrance, especially at this time in the morning. What, once or twice a year, someone was parked in his private parking place. Moses decided that the three extra steps wouldn’t hurt him so he parked next to the van. He stepped out of his car and took a deep breath. He loved the cool, musty mountain air in the morning. As he closed his car door, a man stepped from in front of the van, smiled, and whispered, ‘Excuse me, Sir. You dropped something.’ He gestured to the ground at Moses’ feet. Lying on the wet asphalt at his feet was a bundle of twenty-dollar bills.

As Moses started to bend down to retrieve his good fortune, the man stepped in closer and grabbed Moses’ forearm in a steel grip. Moses’s first thought was that the man was trying to punch him in the gut and Moses grunted a little as he tried to turn away. Behind Moses, the vans side door slid open and the second man pulled a mesh-cloth hood over Moses’s head and cinched it tight around his neck. Moses lurched back against his assailant. It wasn’t a defensive move, as much as Moses simply slipped on the wet pavement. Moses started to bring his free arm up in front of him to try to keep from falling.

The assailant in front of Moses held a stun gun in his right hand. He had been trying to stun Moses, not punch him and had been only partially successful. Moses had been stunned enough to make him uncoordinated but not enough to incapacitate him. When Moses raised his arm, the assailant thought that Moses was fighting back, and this perceived resistance angered the man. The man had been admonished many times in the past to curb his anger. Today, he decided not to comply. He kneed Moses in the groin with as much viciousness and power as he could muster. The force almost lifted Moses off the ground, and the pain erased all remaining thoughts of resistance from Moses’s mind. When Moses came down, he crumpled to the ground like a limp, wet newspaper and felt the puddled rainwater from the parking lot seep through his hood and onto his face.

Two pairs of hands snatched Moses from the ground and tossed him in the cargo area of the van. One of his assailants followed him in while the other closed the sliding door, picked up the money, and returned to the driver’s door. Moses landed on the van’s bare metal cargo floor, face down, hard. The assailant pressed an elbow across his neck and in a voice that was no more than a whisper, said, ‘Make a sound, and I’ll kill you.’ The assailant’s choice of words encouraged the clueless Moses because it implied that if Moses cooperated, he might live. The assailant sucker punched Moses in the kidneys, for emphasis.

Whether from exhaustion (lab rats weren’t known to be in the greatest physical shape), abject fear, or debilitating pain, Moses couldn’t make enough sound to answer the threat. Moses assumed that these men were professionals. He remembered from MCN security training videos on executive abduction that whispered voices can’t be identified. Whispered voices are anonymous. Moses stayed quiet and didn’t try to move. If these men were whispering, he reassured himself that they must be planning to let him go after they got what they wanted. They didn’t want to be identified. Moses didn’t register the slight pinch as his assailant injected him in the butt cheek with a sedative.

Once everyone was settled, the driver calmly started the van and carefully backed out of the parking place. He drove out of the parking lot at no more than 25 miles per hour and turned to the right into the residential neighborhood behind the SLL. A block away, the driver parked and put two magnetic signs advertising a carpet cleaning service on the sides of the van. Peace and quiet had returned to the SLL parking lot. After fifty-four seconds of frantic violence against Moses, everything was calm again. Mountain tranquility had returned. No one in the building had seen anything. There was no one else in the parking lot. No camera had recorded the assault. Even the ever-present raucous birds in the canopy of trees hadn’t been disturbed. Fifty-four seconds had passed since Moses had closed his car door. Moses Chilcoat, the super-educated fair-haired prodigy of the MCN, was gone.