Heller and Shannon: Anita Santosa

On Monday, Shannon was cheerful and unfailingly polite to every customer who came to her window. She seemed to be able to “connect” with them without much effort. 

Even Fred noticed. She seemed to be a completely different person.

Shannon had a new passion: Shooting.

And she had a plan.

Heller had three safes in his house and Shannon had been intensely curious about why any normal human would need so many safes.

She asked.

Heller showed her.

One thing led to another and almost before she knew it, Heller had her to an old, abandoned farm dump and he was setting up water-bottles, charcoal briquettes, potatoes and cardboard boxes for targets.

He quickly walked her through Cooper’s Four Rules of Gun Safety. He switched up the order a little bit. In Heller’s version, Rule Number One was “Always point it in a safe direction”

He said “There is a LASER coming out of the muzzle of that gun. The only time that LASER is off is when it is in its holster or when the magazine is removed and the bolt is locked-back.”

“Except for those two conditions, that LASER will slice through any human or house or dog or horse or automobile it points at.”

On Saturday Heller started her with two long-guns and two handguns. All of them were chambered in .22 Long Rifle.

Shannon was enchanted with the handguns but Heller insisted that she start with the two rifles. She was shooting at pennies taped to the box at ten yards and then after she figured out how to hit them...usually...Heller moved her to charcoal briquettes and potatoes. Shannon really liked the way the reactive targets disintegrated when she hit them. The potatoes were especially fun when she used ultra high-velocity hollow-point ammo. It seemed like chunks of potato fell out of the sky for a good ten seconds after she hit one.

After the rifles Heller moved her to the target semi-auto and the revolver handguns at three paces.

Shannon struggled to hit anything.

At the end of the session, Heller asked her which rifle and which handgun she enjoyed most.

Shannon didn’t even need to think. She adored the semi-auto rifle and precision, semi-auto, target handgun.

On Sunday, they made another trip to “the range”.

Heller had her monkey-paw several, full-sized 9mm handguns to find one that fit her hand best. Then she switched off between her favorite from the previous session and the 9mm. While the 9mm was harder to hit with, the effect they had when they hit a water bottle was stunning compared to the .22 

Shannon also learned about the perils of limp-wristing with the 9mm.

Heller had her shoot two rifles as well. He moved the targets out to fifty paces and she shot her favorite .22 semi-auto and a bolt-action with an adjustable stock chambered in .223 Remington. Once again, Shannon noticed that the more powerful gun was more distracting to shoot, primarily because it was so much LOUDER, but the effect of hitting a waterbottle with the .223 was orders of magnitude more dramatic.

Half-way through the range session, Heller walked ten water-bottles out two hundred paces and firing from the prone position hit nine-of-ten with the .223 as Shannon watched through the spotting scope.

“With a little practice, there is no reason you won’t be able to beat that in month” Heller told her.

Hell yeah...she wanted to be able to do that! To her untrained, city eyes, those water bottles looked like they were a half-mile away.
*
After work she swung by the library and signed in to use a computer.

Shannon had decided that the best way to fly underneath the radar with respect to “catfishing” was to use a platform that was not a dating site and to let her targets know that she was not looking for money.

She signed into Pluggedin and looked through her contacts.

Over the five years she had been a member she had collected 79 “connections” but she knew that others had collected more, in some cases many more than that.

One of her connections, Paul Andrews, had a thousand connections. He knew EVERYBODY.

Shannon decided that Paul would be the ideal place to plant the seed, but first she had to create her fictitious character.

The internet was her friend. It took a few minutes but she learned that Santosa was a common Indonesian surname and that Anita was a fairly common name for a woman in Indonesia.

Shannon had chosen Indonesia because it was a strict, Muslim country and she could “market” her character as a certifiable virgin. Furthermore, as a country with strict laws about sexual conduct, at least for women, Shannon didn’t think she would have any difficulties having her character pose as an adventurous, young woman who wanted to taste the forbidden fruits.

As a very conservative country, very few people posted personal details on the internet. It would be difficult for targets to perform cross-checks to verify the details the Shannon created about her cyber-weapon "Anita".

Finally, Indonesia didn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. Should something “happen” to the character once she arrived state-side, then Indonesia was not in a position to apply much pressure to the US to investigate her disappearance.

Sifting through the images, Shannon finally found a vintage picture of a young woman graduating from a private Anglican school in Hong Kong. The woman appeared to have both European and Asian ancestry. Visually, she seemed improbably young. She had a face that would change and take character as she walked across the bridge from childhood to adulthood. And most importantly, the young woman's picture radiated innocence.

Knowing that savvy computer users are very capable of reverse image look-ups, Shannon downloaded the images to take home and massage using Photochop software.

Finally, Shannon created a couple of throw-away email addresses for “Anita” before closing up shop and heading to Heller’s house to make dinner. She was going to need those email addresses to create Anita's Pluggedin account.