One day, Merritt went to the small restaurant where the old man had left him a note, with the alternative DC newspaper. He went to the bathroom and when he came back, his newspaper, that had been flat on the table was now folded in half. He picked it up carefully. A note on a 3"x5" piece of paper fell out.
SORRY ABOUT THE DELAY. WILL CONTACT YOU SOON ABOUT CARRUTHERS ET AL.
Merritt looked around the restaurant. The old man wasn't there. There was no on to ask all his questions to. How soon? Contact me how?
Should I come here every day? And who else would we go after besides Carruthers? How deep was the corruption at the NSA? Not as bad as the hopeless CIA or the nearly hopeless FBI, right?
Merritt finished his meal and left a big tip. He was ecstatic. At last, something would be happening. But he didn't just want to wait. He wanted to take action. So, after 4 o'clock, he waited in the parking lot of the office park down the street and watched for Carruthers' BMW. He jumped into the flow of traffic and followed him a mile. Then he turned off. The next day he waited in a strip mall parking lot near that spot and followed Carruthers another mile. It took him several days before, not a mile into tailing him he followed 50 yards behind him into an upscale condo development and watched Carruthers go in a particular building entrance and saw lights turn on in a particular unit.
The next day, late morning, while Carruthers was gone, Merritt brought the Chronivac in the car to the parking lot and , left the window down and turned himself into a crow. He flew around the building several times, both intensely focused on finding a way into the condo and enjoying his new body's power of flight. There weren't any good openings no gaps in window screens or windows left open.
Merritt formulated another plan. He put hours of thought into it. He went through the Chronivac manual and the menus in the program. It was definitely an option. Multiple transformations in sequence. That's what he'd do. He planned it out carefully, how much time to give to each.
Late morning the next day he parked in the lot of the church on the other side of the street. He set the Chronivac up, ready to go under the passenger seat, put the keys beside it, also out of sight, and pressed START. After the usual prompt, he felt the usual electromagnetic wave pass through him and felt himself change in two seconds into a blue jay. He hopped about on the driver's seat a few times then flew up out of the 2 inch gap in the passenger's side window and made a beeline for the complex across the street.
As he did so, he was focused on his mission and was counting. "One thousand one, one thousand two . . . " He'd given himself three minutes in this new blue jay form. He made it to the door outside Carruthers' building much quicker than that. He was ready to change into a fly to get inside but from a branch on the nearest tree he saw someone looking down at his phone and holding the door open. Merritt the blue jay went for it and flew inside the door at the top of the opening. The guy didn't even seem to notice.
But there was another door to get past now. The guy dallied picking up his mail and, in midair, Merritt felt himself changing. In just two seconds, Merritt shrank, lost his feathers, gained four more legs and became a fly. He couldn't see with his new multi-lensed eyes yet but flapped his wings hard because he could hear the guy opening the door. He flew hard into the back of the guy's shirt but his resilient insect body could bear it and by the time he had bounced off he could see through his bug eyes.
The guy went down the hall to the left but Merritt the housefly flew up the stairs and then to the left where he thought Carruthers had gone. He headed for one particular door. The hallway was carpeted but each unit had relatively new hardwood floors. This left a gap at the bottom of the door. Merritt flew down and squeezed his coarse hair covered black insect body under the door.
He flew around the condo unit. On one shelf he saw a picture of a younger Carruthers with what must have been his parents. Bingo.
From there, Merritt the fly flew around the apartment. He was pretty sure he had another minute. He had found a laptop and was happy to see that there was a piece of tape over the camera. Good.
Merritt thought he had another 40 seconds but right after landing his housefly self on the table beside the laptop, he grew. His body completely changed into human form, better still, his slender trackstar ballet dude body but now only 12 inches tall. He patted his own extra robust hip. It felt good to be human.
"Half hour like this," he reminded himself and started in on the laptop right away. Using a pencil, he typed away by jabbing the big eraser end at a key for each keystroke. He got better and better at it till he was typing almost as fast as he could at full size. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. He found cryptic calendar reminders for meetings with parties only identified by one initial, J or M or T. But the times and places of these meetings were explicit. He went back to the day he was let go from the NSA and found a notation the day before about a meeting with no parties or location identified but a description, "What to do about Boyscout"
Merritt gritted his tiny teeth. A couple times Carruthers had, derisively, referred to him in conversation with others as "Boyscout".
Merritt dug deeper. Carruthers had been relatively careful about erasing the history of his internet browsing but Merritt was able to restore some of it anyway. It was not pretty. There were several dark web sites. And several of those were all about boys.
Underage boys.
While Merritt was committing to memory the list of sites Carruthers had frequented, the screen background changed. It went to a new picture every few minutes. The rightmost quarter of the background was still visible. Merritt glanced up and saw . . . himself. It was 12 year old Merritt when he'd been taking ballet classes. He wore light gray tights and a white t-shirt. He was even more slender than now but perfect to be wearing tights.
Merritt puzzled. He moved the other items on the screen to the side. He was grinning at the ballet school teacher, obviously enjoying ballet and being in tights. He'd never seen that photo before. He scoured his memory but he was sure of it. He didn't want there to be pictures out there of his little bubble butt in tights. He didn't want all the kids at school to see him that way even if he did enjoy it. Where the hell had Carruthers gotten that picture of him as a 12 year old in ballet class?
In another minute, it changed to a photo of a handsome blond boy about the same age bent over a low ballet barre getting banged by an older man.
"Holy shit. Just right there. Holy shit."
Merritt looked around some more and realized that Carruthers seemed to below to some kind of club of shocking pervs who got off on the rape of 10-12 year old boys. He remembered the transformation where he'd turned himself gay and had gotten drafted to be a living, gold paint covered statue outside some kind of Eyes Wide Shut party at a mansion outside DC. What might have gone on there? Did they have sex slave boys for use by some of the people at parties like that? Did Carruthers go to parties like that?
Even if he didn't, this made him completely controllable, completely blackmailable. Corrupt people would infinitely prefer a Carruthers, jonesing to bang 11 year old boys, in a position of power than someone like himself. They could make Carruthers do anything when it came down to it. They guy had a fiancee, some ivy league girl that others had joked had him pussywhipped. But really he wanted to bang underage boys. And he'd hated him because he couldn't get up his spectacular ass and missed sodomizing him when he was too small to protect himself.
Merritt made note of Carruthers' upcoming meeting schedule and his IP address. He put the laptop back into sleep mode.
Just as he finished this, he turned back into a fly. He buzzed around the condo for a minute, just looking around, and then went under the door and down the hall and down the stairs. He followed an elderly woman talking on the phone back outside and a minute later turned into a blue jay. He flapped his wing hard for his car on the other side of the street. Once inside, he repeated the IP address to himself over and over. A minute later he turned back into his full sized trackstar self and furiously wrote down everything he could remember.