Creativity Palette

Ian and I have started geocaching, and it’s a lot of fun! It’s basically using a GPS unit to find a ‘cache’, a little box of trinkets someone has hidden. You get coordinates and clues on a website. When you find it, you log your success in a little journal then go back to the site and log it there as well. There are even ‘travel bugs’ that have instructions to go from one place to the next (i.e. Texas, then Florida, etc.)

I think it’d be a fun premise in an action novel. Someone (I think he’ll be a good guy) is running through the forest from the feds. He hides the item he’s smuggled out of the lab in a geocache with a note, then runs. They catch him and he dies accidentally in a shoot out, but the missing X is nowhere to be found. Bad weather blows in so they have to bring the dogs out the next day. They finally track down the geocache but the informal travel bug the man has hidden is gone.

So, we’ve got a good hook. Someone out geocaching found the cache, the item, and the cryptic note. Intrigued, they take it and log their find on the journal and the website. The feds quickly track this info down and are starting to identify the person but he remembers an old cache and hides the item. After questioning, saying he just dropped it off somewhere but doesn’t remember where, he leaves a cryptic SMS message on a message board referring to an old cache. Shortly after, he is killed (not by the feds but the people who want the item back).

A journalist doing a story on geocaching finds the odd post and does some more research, intrigued by what is happening. Using a network of geocachers he starts to put the story together. Simultaneously a young female FBI/CIA official is piecing together things as well and the chase is on.

The item gets re-cached several times, sometimes changing its ‘wrapper’: different instructions and geocache bug ID on it. The journalist and FBI investigator have to go through the various levels of redirection, geocachers, geocache web sites/message boards, and the geocaches themselves to find the item. All the while the ‘enemy’ is tracking it down as well, relying more on following the journalist and the FBI official to see where it is all headed. (One of the geocachers helping the journalist is a plant by the enemy, but when he betrays the journalist he has figured out by then that he’s fake).

The journalist is a bit of a one hit wonder, his fame, fortune and work have faded since his biggest story, he’s rather bored by this story at first but gets intrigued. He got in trouble before for reading too much conspiracy into stories before, and so now his editor doubts him. Through the story the journalist has to reclaim his self confidence (and break his drinking habit).

The FBI official is young, energetic, and overconfident. She gets in over her head. She and the journalist meet up at one point and hash things out. The government wanted to get the item before the enemy did, the journalist wants to expose it. They agree to work together to get it, then they’ll figure out what to do with it. Soon, the enemy has them captured and she realizes how deep in trouble she is. She has to learn/grow through the story by relying on someone else (the journalist) and taking her ego down a notch.

The enemy is a terrorist organization that wants the item. The item…not sure yet. I’m thinking it’s a capsule with an SD card containing the research data, and a small vial of a chemical. With the right 3d modelling of a subject, and enough of the chemical in the vial ‘molded’ over a person, the nano-organic substrate can be agitated by a coded laser frequency to take any shape, down to smallest detail, even growing small protrusions like bumps and hairs or wires. With color contacts, vocal cord surgery and a good ability to act, a person of very similar build could look like an exact copy of a person. The organization is planning to take out the president and put in a dupe who will look just like him.

The pieces fall together at the end when they are close to the hospital where the president is undergoing a routine operation and CAT scan (where the operatives in the hospital will scan him, take him elsewhere, and plant the copy). The operation is that night but a call to her (the agent’s) superior is shot down because of the problems she’s caused with her wild goose chase (when actually he’s been paid off to blow off her concerns). They track down the last nearby cache where an operative of the terrorist group has moved it. The terrorist found it at the last one first, but couldn’t sneak it safely into the hospital. They still use the geocaches (not just because it’s part of the story ;-), because they’re so out in the open they’re hidden, the oldest spy trick of them all. The pickup and drop off are separate, and there’s no hidden exchange of information to indicate where, just a public web site. The drop off person makes a coded remark on the site, the other, scanning the site, identifies it and picks it up.

But, our heroes will make it there just in time and destroy the vial and chip.

The scientist at the beginning had discovered a few secret things at work and overheard conversations to understand what was happening. He ran from the feds because he knew, unlike the girl, that someone on the govt. side was in on the deal. Maybe there’s a cryptic reference to it, like in the report on his death he managed to whisper, ‘couldn’t trust them either’ or something.