Chapter Four
Erin gave Tim an abbreviated version of what had happened as she dialed the cell number of her neighbor, Robin. Robin was a police officer in town and was on duty that day. She answered after one ring.
“Robin, I need to ask you a favor,” Erin said. “I need you to find out about a car. There was a man just here, trespassing and threatening me.” She gave Robin the license number of his car along with the make and model.
Robin told Erin she should call 9-1-1. She assured Robin that it would take at least a half-hour to get anyone out to the house and there was nothing anyone could do when they got there. The situation was over. At least Erin was hoping it was over.
Erin got on the back of the ATV and rode to the house with Tim. They went inside to catch their breath from this surreal experience. Erin told Tim she needed to find out more about the book she bought at the barn sale.
Erin rummaged around the bookshelf and found what she was looking for lying innocently among the other old books in her collection. She sat in her chair then opened the snap and cover. What was so special about this book? What was so special that a person would come way out here and demand, with threats of violence, that he get the book back? And, he never did say how he knew Erin had bought the book.
She read the title page. King Solomon and His Followers, A Valuable Aid to the Memory. Published in New York. There was an index written in plain English, referring to page numbers. Looks innocent so far. Page 6 shows Order of Business—again in English.
1. Opening the Lodge.
2. Calling the roll of officers.
3. Reading minutes of last communication.
4. Sickness and distress; report of visiting committee.
5. Reports on petitions previously referred.
6. Balloting on petitions.
7. New Petitions for membership.
8. Reports of committees, regular and special. Annual Election of Officers.
9. Unfinished business.
10. New business, communications, etc.
11. Work--Conferring degrees.
12. Reading minutes of present communication.
13. Closing.
All that seemed pretty innocent. What was the big deal? It looked like some club book that showed the order of business for a lodge meeting. Then starting on page seven and continuing through the above listed agenda, comes the weird part. The rest of the book is done in some kind of hieroglyphics and code. What in the heck was this? Why the code?
Erin could make out some of the words that seem abbreviated, but many were just garbled, signs, and symbols. What was this all about? She showed Tim a sample page and they both tried to decipher the words, with little success. Then the last two pages gave them a clue.
King Solomon
This is the general title of a series of complete Instructors for Blue Lodges, for the use of officers and all who are ambitious to become bright workers. They contain the Opening, Work, Lectures and Closing, in the degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Mason, and Master Mason; thus embracing everything in its regular order as worked in each degree except the essential secrets the whole given by a system intelligible only to the initiated, but easily understood by them. Carefully edited and printed from new type.
Having recently been critically revised by competent authorities in the different Grand Jurisdictions, their accuracy may be relied upon and being bound in pocket size (3 1/2x 51/4), with complete index, are very convenient for ready reference, enabling one to refresh his memory during his spare moments.
No practical member will be without one after he has examined it. The book shall never change hands among the brethren and only intelligible to that of apprentice and mason masters.
The book is firmly bound in emblematic colored leather, making them attractive, nearly indestructible and at the same time flexible for pocket use.
Erin turned to Tim, “This is a book from some cult or something, isn’t it?”
He replied, “I think you are making a big deal about something very innocent. Why didn’t you just give the book to him?”
“No way. This is a very curious situation I’m in, and I intend to find out why I’m not supposed to possess it. We have this stranger coming here, scaring the crap out of me demanding that I give him this book back. This is getting a little bizarre, don’t you think?” Erin closed the booklet and returned it back to the bookshelf. “I’m going on the Internet and see what I can find out about this ‘Masonic’ group.”
Erin spent the rest of the afternoon online searching out websites, printing off reams of pages about Masons. That night, as they lay in bed reading, Erin showed Tim all the information she had obtained about this secret society.
“It will take me awhile to get through all this, but it looks very much like we have some sort of forbidden object of a ritual from this cult. Something we are not supposed to have, just like that creep told me this morning.”
Tim pulled his reading glasses off and said, “Robin called this afternoon, while you had your nose in your computer. The car that guy was driving was a rental. Fake driver’s license and credit card. They found the car abandoned on a side road about 5 miles from here. Robin filed an incident report on what you told her and the relationship to the abandoned car.”
“The more I delve into this, the more spooked I get.” Erin said. “I think I’ll drop that booklet into the safe. I don’t trust having it just lying around.” She got up, retrieved the booklet from her collection shelf, opened the floor safe, and dropped it atop their wills, stocks, bonds, and other valuables.
“I need you to rub my back so I can get to sleep. I am higher than a kite right now.” Erin kissed Tim goodnight, and turned off the lamp beside her bed. He rubbed her back then leaned forward and kissed her shoulder.
“You know the Glock?” he whispered. “It wasn’t loaded.”
“I was afraid of that,” Erin muffled into her pillow as she drifted off into a restless sleep, dreaming of witches, caldrons, and cults.
Chapter Five
According to the Encyclopedia, Mason refers to the principles and practices of the fraternal order of the Free and Accepted Masons. This is an organization for men only, meeting all over the world, all believing in a Supreme Being and immortality of the soul. It seeks to make men better through belief in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the immortality of the soul.
There are various degrees of membership. The first three degrees are Apprentice, Fellow Mason, and Master Mason. The more advanced degrees, up to 33, the more outstanding your work has been in the fields of religion and politics. All meet in Masonic Lodges and their origins date back to 1700.
Masons are involved in every walk of life. The roster of membership reads like a Who’s Who of modern America. Many of the signers of our Constitution were Master Masons. Many musicians, authors, and past presidents were Masons.
Masons refer to the Bible as the “Volume of the Sacred Law” (V.S.L.) but only in Christian lodges. Hebrew Lodges have the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Koran in a Mohammedan Lodge, and so forth. The Mystical and Philosophical degrees of Masons are found in the Kabala, a medieval book of magic. But when it comes down to where their loyalty is, it is not to God, but to the Lodge. The actual name God has been lost in the cult. The “G” in the Mason ring may refer to God, but may also refer to geometry.
Geometry plays an important part in the ancient cult. Circles and triangles, as geometrical symbols, plumbs and levels as tools.
Erin rubbed her eyes and stretched. She had read and tried to absorb all she could about the Masons, but found herself on information overload. She could read no more that day. There was so much more information, but Erin needed to go slowly and understand fully what they were dealing with.
The next day, after lunch, she realized it was the end of the month and she needed to attend to some bill paying instead of reading. Some day they were going to be able to go on extended vacations so Erin was in the process of getting all their monthly bills, utility, mortgage, phone, gas, etc., paid electronically.
When Erin was online reading about the Masons (she couldn’t seem to help herself) she logged on to their bank account. She finished setting up the last two electronic withdrawals with the bank and logged off. With her task complete, she then logged off the Internet.
“OK, Tim,” Erin shouted. “We are all electronically wired and we can start our long vacations anytime now.”
“Good,” he shouted from the kitchen. “Do you want a cup of coffee while we plan our first trip?”
“Coffee?” she asked. “That will keep me up all night, how about a glass of wine to celebrate?”
He rounded the corner with a freshly opened bottle of Merlot and two glasses. “I was just kidding,” he laughed. “I knew better than to give you caffeine this late in the day. You would be prowling around all night long.”
Tim poured their glasses full and they gave the obligatory clink, testing the quality of their fine wine glasses. As the warmth of the wine drifted through Erin’s body, she felt relaxed for the first time that day.
“It will be weird to just take off for months at a time and not worry about paying our bills. I do want to wait through about four billing cycles before we consider our bill paying carefree. Not that I don’t trust the bank, you understand,” she winked. “I am just very cautious about this entire online, electronically controlled world.”
Tim agreed. “It would be good to have a momentum going to make sure everything is taken out of our account at the appropriate time. We don’t need a lot of extra charges because we weren’t paying attention to our finances.”
“I have access to all the information about debits and credits online,” she answered. “I can track every payment and credit to our accounts where ever we are as long as I have access to a phone line or a wireless internet.”
“Sounds pretty cool,” he smiled. “You did a good job getting all those items lined up. Now, where should we go first?”
Erin closed her eyes. “I want to see white sands and crystal blue water. I want warm, not hot, sun. I want a cabana room overlooking the beach with access to coconuts filled with margaritas. I want room service meals and I want to go nowhere that requires shoes. Where would that be?” Erin asked her eyes now opened looking at Tim.
“H,m,m,m,” Tim pondered. “Sounds like Caribbean to me.”
“Or Fiji Islands,” Erin added. “But the Caribbean is closer to us and probably a good way to ease into all this world-traveling stuff. We can’t go too fast, you know. We have all the time in the world. And who knows, we might be able to find out about voodoo and cults while down there, too. Something to do with this World Mason thing.”
“Just forget about all that secret society stuff,” Tim said. “If it is not for you to know about, you profane person, then let’s not get involved. In fact, if I could get that book back to that barn sale myself, I would.”
“Over my dead body,” she snapped. “That little book is part of my collection and I will never let it go. Never.”
They finished their wine while scanning the World Atlas. They talked and dreamed about the beautiful, blue ocean and white sands of the Caribbean.
Chapter Six
Erin took great pride in knowing a lot about running a computer. She thought she knew a lot about the Internet. Who wouldn’t? You just click on to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), your computer automatically connects you to your home page, and from there you can go anywhere on the worldwide network—pretty awesome. It is just that naiveté that unscrupulous people around the world are counting on so they can spy and cheat you out of your privacy, property, and peace of mind.
Everyone knows what a hacker is. A hacker is someone who breaks a password or code and gets into the computer systems of IBM, the IRS, the FBI, school records, and so forth. Erin had personally never thought she would ever be “hacked” into, as she really didn’t have anything exciting on her computer. No state secrets, no grades to report, at least not now. But something she had never heard, or thought of, was that someone would “spy” on her. She never realized that someone could watch over her shoulder while she browsed the World Wide Web, watch and analyze every mouse click, and send all that information back to another computer. It was called spyware.
Spyware is any program that installs software in a computer, without the owner’s consent, to gather information about them. How could that be? How could something get in your computer without you being aware of it?
As one downloads anything from the Web, spyware can ride along and plant itself into a hard drive, without the person’s knowledge, and send back information to the originator. Some spyware can get deep into the computer’s operating system. When it does that, even anti-virus software won’t be alerted, because it looks like something that is supposed to be there, it looks like something that has been legally installed.
Companies have been caught red-handed such as RealJukebox multimedia player. This software, that anyone could download for free, was scouring their hard drive for personal data stored there, and sending it back to its home base, or anywhere else it wished to send it.
Nortel, a famous telecommunications company, was caught allowing companies to track users without their knowledge. Nortel enabled ISPs to distribute content by monitoring customer’s preferences and locations and then sell that information to companies so they could send the computer all those “pop-up ads” that annoyingly interrupt a person’s web browsing.
One group likened that intrusion into a person’s private domain like the post office looking inside the envelopes you mail, cataloging your interests, age, and other personal information to decide where to send junk mail.
And if it isn’t bad enough that companies are downloading spyware into computer hard drives, the government has the capability of wiretapping your Internet connection with a device called Carnivore. The FBI explains its Carnivore as a computer-based system that is designed to allow the FBI, in cooperation with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), to comply with a court order requiring the collection of certain information about emails or other electronic communications to or from a specific user targeted in an investigation.
The Carnivore acts like a “packet sniffer.” Internet traffic is broken down into bundles called “packets.” The Carnivore eavesdrops on these packets, saving a copy of ones that are of interest to the FBI. The problem with Carnivore or any other “packet sniffer” is the recipient, or someone else, can reconfigure your email system to fraudulently forge an email, thus impersonating someone when sending out emails. Terrorists or other criminals could use this forged email to send messages to their cohorts. An innocent Internet user could be easily framed if the FBI was monitoring the email with the forged name.
And if Internet snoops, such as Carnavore, aren’t bad enough, along comes ECHELON, a name given to the global electronic surveillance system reportedly run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
NSA’s mission is electronic surveillance. NSA is forbidden by law from surveillance within the United States or U.S. citizens abroad. However, NSA has extensive exchange agreements with intelligence organizations of other countries. So, in theory, an agreement with English speaking countries will allow other countries to spy on the United States then share with the NSA information it gathers.
NSA also operates surveillance satellites. These satellites monitor earth-based microwave transceivers and cell phone traffic. NSA also has numerous ground-based stations spread throughout the world for the purpose of monitoring other countries’ activities.
American submarines have reportedly tapped undersea telephone cables. They then monitor telephone activity from the United States to Russia, China, and other foreign countries.
So with all this sophisticated surveillance equipment watching over her shoulder without her knowledge, Erin was still shocked when she was surfing the Web one night and received an error message that her “cache had been corrupted.” What in the heck was a “cache” and how could it be corrupted? Her ignorance was beginning to show.
Chapter Seven
A “cache,” pronounced cash, is a special high-speed storage mechanism. It memories, among other things, places a web surfer frequents on the Internet. The system can recognize certain types of frequently used data from sites that a person visits most often and get that data thousands of times faster than accessing the data from their hard drive.
This “caching” can dramatically improve the performance of applications. For example, let’s say the surfer goes to a certain online game everyday. Their cache will hold that data from that website in the computer’s cache store or memory cache. They are able to fly around that familiar website due in part to the memory cache accessing the same data or instructions over and over.
So that explained her cache, but how could it be corrupted? Erin was reading her computer screen on instructions to clear the corrupted cache. She followed the instructions and was still getting an error.
The last instruction said, “You may have a caching proxy server between you and our web server.” OK, now what is a caching proxy server?
She found out, simply put, a proxy server is anything standing between a computer’s service provider and the Internet. It may be a legal or illegal diversion of the computer’s Internet travels. Every keystroke made, every website visited, is routed through this proxy server.
Tim came in with an armful of mail, catalogs, and magazines. He dumped his load on the dining table, separating out “his” pile, “her” pile, and “whoever” pile. The “her” pile consisted mainly of monthly bills, bank correspondence, and other financial considerations.
The “his” pile was farming supply catalogs, fishing and hunting newspapers, and hunting club newsletters. It was quite obvious from their personal piles of mail only one of them had truly “retired.” Tim was no longer a police officer and pursing his hobbies. Erin was no longer a teacher but still pursuing the same things she did when she worked full time. Erin had only given up her day job—no time for hobbies.
As Erin’s computer repeatedly refused to connect to the Internet so she could finish her research on the Masons, Tim laid a pile of envelopes beside her on the computer desk. “Here are your statements. I guess you can see how well the online billing procedure is working. And here,” he continued, “is a thank you letter from the bank for not writing so many checks.”
“The bank?” She questioned. “I wonder what they want. They never send us regular correspondence.” Erin opened the bank envelope first, as somehow she had a gut feeling that something was wrong. As she unfolded the single page letter, the subject line of their correspondence jumped out at her. Balance Overdrawn: $1,548.43.
As Erin stared at the page with disbelief, the blood drained out of her face and she felt lightheaded. Tim was standing by and came over to her, “Are you OK? What is wrong?”
He shook Erin by the shoulders and looked her in the eye, “Breathe, Erin, breathe.”
She couldn’t talk. She finally got hold of herself long enough to take in a gulp of air. Erin still couldn’t come to say what the letter was telling her so she just handed it to Tim. No explanation was necessary. Someone, probably her, screwed up. Erin was in charge of making sure the bills are paid and paid on time. It was her big idea to get modern and pay their bills online. Now she had really screwed up, big time.
“What the. . .” he stammered. “There’s got to be some mistake. We have plenty of money to cover our bills plus several thousand in our savings, don’t we?”
“We did,” she answered.
“Well, where is it? How can we be overdrawn?”
“Good question.” Erin was getting angry now. Of course she had plenty of money to cover overdrafts. “Someone at the bank must have screwed up. I am going back online and get to our accounts. It has to be a screw up at the bank. It just has to be.”
Tim pulled up a chair beside Erin as she logged on to the Internet. “OK, this is our bank website. I’ll log into our accounts. I just click right here and it should take us to our checking account. There,” she gasped at the screen. “This can’t be right. It can’t be right. Look, it says we are now $1,732.78 overdrawn. It’s getting worse every minute. According to this screen, we have no money in the bank and have a big overdraft. I know your disability check is deposited automatically, yet it doesn’t show any deposits this month. That must be it, Tim. Your check was not deposited this month. That has to be it.
“What’s really strange about this situation is we have an agreement with the bank they will transfer money from our savings account if we ever overdraw our checking account. But it doesn’t look like any transfers happened. Let’s go see what is going on in our savings account.”
She clicked around the website and loaded their savings account page. “Oh, my God,” was all that could come out of her mouth. “Oh, my God.”
Tim leaned into see the computer screen. She couldn’t talk. She sat in front of the screen tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Please, Erin, talk to me. What are you seeing?”
Erin pointed to the balance in their checking account. “We should have over $20,000 in this account. It says here we have zero balance. ZERO balance! We have to go to the bank.”
“Can’t we just call them?” Tim asked.
“No, something is terribly wrong. I need to talk to someone face to face.”
Erin grabbed her purse, the car keys, and the letter from the bank. She turned to Tim, “Are you coming?”
“Not only am I coming with you, I'm driving. You’re too upset to be behind the wheel. I know this is quite a shock to you, but I have faith that it’s just what you said—a screw up, a mistake. It will be all right when we can have the bank explain to us exactly what happened.”
Tim locked Rocky in his dog kennel. He went to the barn and got a handful of doggie bones and Rocky was suddenly very happy. Rocky loved to eat and he loved his dog biscuits.
“You keep the place safe for us while we are gone, buddy. Give me a kiss,” Tim said as he slipped his pursed lips through the chain link fence. Rocky dutifully licked Tim’s face. Tim laid the biscuits inside the fenced area.
“We’ll go for a big hunt this afternoon when we get back from town.” Rocky cocked his head and lifted one ear. That was his way of saying he could hear his master, but really couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Tim explained, “We will go get the rooster.” No other explanation was necessary. Rocky did understand “going to get the rooster.” Rocky loved to hunt and was tireless in putting up the birds for his beloved friend, Tim. Erin sometimes felt Tim loved that dog more than he loved her. She smiled. They were quite a twosome. She loved both of them very much.
Tim climbed into the drivers seat, “Can we stop and get mochas on the way into the bank?”
“Tim,” she answered sternly. “We have a major problem here. I can’t think about mocha and espresso right now. We need to get to the bank as soon as possible. Drive please.”
