Tag Archives: Helix

Water Fall: High Resistance

Posted by natechen on

Author’s Note: Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s been pointed out to me that last week’s post was a duplicate of my last post before Christmas break. I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s not what should have been put up last week. Rather than repost I’ve just edited last week’s post with the correct chapter. You may want to read it before reading this. I apologize for the mistake. Now on with this week’s chapter!

Nate Chen

——–

Three Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

“Well?”

Hangman shrugged and shook her head. “There’s nothing for sure here, you understand. Not everything the Project does has to come through the Senator’s office.” She waved at a collection of e-mails and drafts of memos she’d pulled up. “But from the looks of things nothing’s happened.”

I drummed my fingers absently on the back of her chair until she gently put her hand over them to make me stop. “Replacing a regional director-”

“The technical term is Senior Special Liaison.”

“-or whatever they call them has to be something that requires the Senate Committee’s approval.” I snorted. “And I’ve seen Mr. Wells in action before. There must be half a dozen times he could have made a major bust if he’d just asked Helix what he should expect. He’s not going to give up his grudge just because the greater good is at stake. They’re not going for the bait.” I took her hand and raised her out of the chair.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” she said, smoothing down the front of her skirt. “And regardless of whether Helix is down south or at the regional office he’s not going to be in position to respond to our next move.”

“Yes. Our next move.” At some point they’d stopped being my moves. Not for the first time in the last few days I thought back to my conversation with Simeon. Time to take some distance again. “How is the shooting practice coming along?”

She tucked her hands behind her back and did her best to look innocent. “Heavy says I’m qualified to teach a course on handling and maintaining sidearms and I should be competent with submachine guns by the time we leave for Indiana.”

“Really?” I stared at her blankly. “I know that he’s a good teacher but not even I passed muster that fast.”

“You didn’t grow up in Wisconsin as the daughter of an important politician, Circuit.” She shrugged. “I’ve had self defense training since I was ten and, when I turned eighteen, I went through a basic shooting course, too. My father thought it would be good for my self-confidence, even if I never had to use any of it.”

“Have you?”

“Only the part about being aware of your surroundings.” She gave me a knowing smile. “Of course, I’ve always been good at that. As for the gun training, I never bothered to get a license in Wisconsin because I was going to school in California and who knew where after I graduated.”

“Sensible.” I led her out of the server room and into the antechamber outside my office. “Of course, I don’t suppose self defense training includes any lessons on stealth or insertion techniques?”

She shook her head. “Being highly visible is a part of self defense. Assuming, of course, you’re a law abiding citizen.”

“It’s amazing how many different aspects of life take that for granted.” We were back on the landing outside my office now, the locks clicking closed as I pulled the door closed. “How is the Sorting Algorithm of Evil coming?”

“Currently we can run comprehensive background checks on anyone from the lower 48 states and Alaska. Gaining access to Hawaii’s databases comes next, followed by the larger Canadian provinces.” She held up a hand to forestall questions as she thumbed her phone and consulted something there. “We also have access to some other, less official sources of information integrated already – all the contacts you’ve built in the south, north Africa and Europe, plus a few from Hangman’s heyday. I’m working on gaining access to some classified government stuff and maybe a few unsavory sources that won’t know they’re working for us.”

Once she gave me an expectant look I went ahead with my question. “What if we get people from Mexico?”

“Normal citizens with have to clear customs and get this far north, which means we have some time before they get to us and need vetting. If they don’t come through legal channels or they’re not normal citizens then we already have the contacts to vet them via your southern crime rings.” She pocketed her phone and gave me another knowing look. “Or whatever it is you call them.”

“Extralegal resources.” I considered what she’d told me. “Check with Heavy or Grappler about scheduling some basic breaking and entering training. We may need you ready to pick some locks or otherwise help with petty larceny in the near future, provided you intend to continue working in the field.”

She laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, Circuit. Doing data analysis here for you is way more interesting than any college course I ever took, but I wouldn’t miss being in the front seat of history for anything.”

She swept off across the walkway and down the stairs to the ground floor where she would no doubt begin bugging Heavy until he stopped whatever he was doing and showed her some of his very, very wide arsenal of criminal techniques. I felt bad about sending Hangman after him but I thought it best to keep some space between us for a while. It was a delicate time for – well, everything, really.

There was plenty to do for my part, too. New maglev relays to check out, the EMP countermeasures to install and a personal visit to the Chainfall site to schedule. Our last major job before beginning Operation Chainfall was in two days and there were a million details. But before I could loose myself in them first I had to do something I hated. Manage my people.

There was an odd patch of shadow at the top of the wall. I turned to it but purposefully didn’t look up. “You can come down now, Grappler.”

There was a soft whisper of fabric and then she dropped to the ground from about shoulder height, landing with a barely audible thud, the beads in her dreadlocks rattling softly as they swished through the air. She was wearing her typical non-burglary clothes, a variation on pants, blouse and a knee length vest ensemble. This vest was a pale blue, with silvery plant life embroidered in it and she was wearing a matching bracelet.

Her grim expression was a stark contrast.

“That girl’s toying with you, Circuit,” she said with a huff. “You should just tell her to be on her way. Or better yet…” Grappler slid closer and laid an arm on my shoulder, leaning until she was almost brushing against my chest. “Show her you’re already taken.”

Simeon had mentioned that someone suggested the possibility Hangman was sweet on me to him, now I knew who to thank for that. I gently, but deliberately, took her arm and moved it off my shoulder, forcing her to straighten up to maintain her balance. “Grappler, I’m not in the habit of lying to people. When we transform from smalltime crime to serious business we’re going to need her information gathering skills more than ever, she can’t be nearly as effective as she is at that if she’s ‘on her way.’ And I’m not taken.”

Grappler tilted her head to one side and gave me a dazzling smile, the kind she used when she got caught casing a job and needed to talk her way out from security or suspicious property owners. “Not even a little bit taken?”

“If I wasn’t the time you showed up while I was in the bath I’m certainly not going to change my mind just because you flash a smile at me.” I shook my head. “Grappler, I don’t know what your problem with Hangman is.” I was guessing it was jealousy but I didn’t know that for sure. “But you’re not going to change my mind. She stays. She keeps doing what she has been. And that is all she’ll be doing.”

Grappler took a step back and gave me a critical look, as if trying to decide if I was the real Open Circuit. “Please don’t tell me you trust her.”

“Grappler…” I heaved a sigh and glanced around once, just to make sure we were still alone on the walkway. When I was sure we were I went on. “Just because you and your late husband lied to each other for four years doesn’t mean everyone is automatically untrustworthy.”

“I know that, you idiot.” To my surprise she wasn’t angry, but almost laughing. “I trust you, don’t I? And Heavy. Maybe even Simeon, when I understand what he’s saying. Your problem is, you trust too much.”

“Me?” I did a mental inventory of all the paranoid security measures I’d taken in the last twenty-four hours. It was a lengthy list. “Sorry, I’m not sure I follow that one.”

“Well, let’s see. You got four people you really count on right now.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “One is a guy who thinks he’s a butler out of an Agatha Christie movie.”

“Simeon prefers the term ‘office manager.'”

Finger numbers two and three. “Two of us were professional thieves who also managed to somehow miss the serial killer right under our noses.” Finger four. “And one is the daughter of a U.S. Senator who probably learned to lie before she learned what the truth was.”

“Davis will be disappointed to hear he wasn’t on that list.”

“Except you’re not going to tell him, because not even you’re dumb enough to trust that guy.” Grappler planted her hands on her hips. “Sometimes I’m amazed one of us hasn’t just clubbed you with a candlestick and had done with it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why would Simeon do that?”

“He’s a butler.”

“Office manager; and that’s an unfair stereotype.”

She gave me a frank look, her dark eyes boring into mine. “You want to go big time, you need to trust less, Circuit. Everybody’s going to be after you when these gigs are done. I don’t care about your crusade, but at least you pay the bills. So do me a favor and be a little more careful, okay?”

“I never thought I’d hear that advice from you.” I smiled and put one hand over my heart. “But I swear I will take no more risks than are absolutely necessary. Does that satisfy?”

“You swear with your right hand over your heart, Circuit.”

I glanced at my hands in mock surprise. “Is that a fact?”

Grappler watched me in poorly concealed amazement. “There’s something wrong with you lately. You were never like this before. Maybe it’s too late for you already.” She sighed and turned towards the stairs. “Just keep your head, okay, Circuit? All I’m asking.”

“I’ll try.” I watched her until her head disappeared down the stairs, then added, too softly for her to have heard, “But you’re right. It’s already too late for that. Far, far too late.”

——–

Helix

“Please tell me you have something in here.” I poke cautiously at the enormous pile of paper on Teresa’s desk, not entirely sure there wasn’t something alive in there. It certainly seemed to have a mind of it’s own, with files and stacks of paper occasionally rustling or sliding around without apparent cause.

She waved a hand vaguely at the assorted mystery papers on her desk. “I have a lot of somethings. Pretty much anything you could want. Care to be more specific?”

“Something on Circuit would be ideal…”  The labels on the folders mostly faced one way and I browsed over them, just for kicks. Most of them covered parts of the case I was already familiar with, a few of them were flagged from the Southern office and it was probably best for my sanity to ignore them, since Wells wouldn’t me do anything about them anyway. One near the bottom caught my eye and I started carefully fishing it out.

“Your friend has been keeping a low profile for the past week. Aside from the vandalism in Charleston and Atlanta the only peep from him has been that stunt in Phoenix.” Teresa shrugged and closed down whatever she had been doing on her computer so as to give me her full attention. “Of course, Analysis isn’t sure that was Circuit but…”

“But it’s another case of a weird symbol turning up in a place connected with me in a high profile manner. This time as a hacking attack, in the same place Circuit made his first big cyber attack. And Hangman, or someone like him, helped break the story. That can’t all be coincidence” I started browsing through the file, which was a summary of the various leads Pastor Rodriguez – excuse me, Agent Samson – had been following up while trying to locate Senator Dawson’s daughter. There were a lot of false leads and he’d found couple of women with similar appearances, but no sign of Elizabeth Dawson herself. “Are you still working this case?”

“Just keeping tabs on it.” Teresa sighed and leaned back in her chair, staring into the corner of the cramped office. She hadn’t had enough time, either here or in the old building, to accumulate the mountains of assorted crap that supervisors always seem to wind up with. But in it’s own way that just made the office seem more bleak. “After the talk you and Jack had with the Senator it’s pretty clear there’s not much more we can do, for the moment.”

I closed the file and tossed it down. “Sorry about that. We probably should have discussed that ahead of time.”

She waved me off. “There wasn’t time, and you’re points were valid. It would have been different if we knew Brahms was coming ahead of time.”

“If it’s not too much to ask, how do you know the Senator and his family?” I closed the file, since there didn’t seem to be anything important there that I didn’t already know. “Seems a bit odd for a girl from the West Coast to know the family of a Senator from Wisconsin.”

“I met Elizabeth when we were in school. She was on the school paper and interviewed me as part of a series on adopted kids at Berkley.” Teresa smiled and her stare went off into the past. “After that she didn’t leave me alone. I think she knew a little bit about what her dad’s role on our Oversight Committee was about, and realized I’d brushed up against something similar. We talked about it a lot. She brought her dad to meet me when he made a campus visit, and the rest is history.”

“So you’re here to catch the bad guys thanks to a chance meeting in college?”

“Except I can’t quite seem to get the catching bad guys part right.” Teresa picked up the folder and glared at it, like she could somehow make it show her where her friend was through sheer willpower.

I sat down across from her and gently took the folder out of her hands. “Welcome to the real Sumter experience, Teresa. We’re not supermen. We’re just people with weird abilities.” I set the file aside again and said, “Let it bother you. You wouldn’t be human, otherwise. But remember that it’s not your fault. Ultimately, the problem here isn’t that you can’t fix this – it’s that Circuit broke things in the first place.”

Teresa laughed and it was surprisingly giggly. I wondered if she was more tired than she looked. “You make a good point.” Her smile faded almost as quickly as it came. “How did you meet the Templetons?”

“Darryl was my field stress test oversight agent. We worked off and on over the next two years when I was out west; then he agreed to go migratory when I needed a new oversight agent. That’s when he met Mona, she was in the Analysis office here.” I sat down in one of the chairs by the desk and leaned back. “They were a weird couple but it worked out.”

She leaned back in her chair, giving me an evaluating look. “And now they’re both gone. Are you going to be okay?”

“Maybe one day. You can never tell for sure.” I sighed and picked up a huge stack of fliers and promotions for historical sites and events around the nation, leafing through them for a distraction. Everyone had gotten them when Circuit’s pals had hit the historic Fort Sumter in their vandalism campaign. With the Phoenix airport on the hit list, too, historic sites seemed a lot less relevant all of a sudden. “I guess I just wish Darryl hadn’t left on some sort of a vendetta. I would get leaving because the job reminds him of Mona. But he just wanted to hunt Circuit. It’s like something out of a bad movie…”

I trailed off as came to a brochure from the Lincoln Financial Foundation, a finance group that had named itself after the president and started collecting related memorabilia. Since it seemed like I was done Teresa said, “You know, you could take a little of your own advice. Darryl is his own person, and while he’s not in the best place right now he is qualified to make his own-”

“I don’t believe it.” I shoved the rest of the pamphlets and junk onto the desk, jumping out of my chair with the Lincoln Financial brochure clutched in one hand.

Teresa got to her feet a little more slowly, a confused look on her face. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to go,” I said, holding up the colorful, glossy piece of paper for her inspection. “I know where Circuit’s going to be.”

“What?” She snatched the flier out of my hands and glanced it over. “Indianapolis?”

I flipped the paper over and pointed to the right panel. “Right state, wrong place. He’s going to Allen County. He thinks he’s Nicholas Cage.”

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Water Fall: Crumbling Foundations

Posted by natechen on

Three Weeks, Five Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

“You ever done this before?”

Lincoln shook his head, somehow turning the gesture into a sweeping glance around the floor, the big, open section of the office where most of us grunts reside. “Fifth uncle does most of the work with you Project folks,” he said, doing his best to see as much of the office while keeping the conversation going and not letting me get too far ahead. By fifth uncle I knew he meant my sifu. Chinese families have this weird tendency to refer to relatives by number, even in English, something to do with correct forms of address. “I’ve never actually spoken to anyone from your organization besides you. And uncle doesn’t talk much about it. Assume total ignorance.”

“In that case there’s a lot of nondisclosure agreements and such that you’re going to need to sign.” I skirted along the outer edges of the floor, past the coffee station and towards the back hall that led to Records. “Fortunately, the people in charge of handling NDAs are also in charge of the files you’re going to need to look at, so we won’t need to run all over the building.”

“I have to admit,” Lincoln said, “this place wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. I mean, you don’t even have a giant map of the country. Or a giant globe, or whatever.”

“We’re a regional office,” I said with a shrug. “Of course we have a giant U.S. map – we just put it away when we don’t need it.”

“Oh.”

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that from someone new to the Project I’d have a decent start on a retirement fund.  Once we got through the floor Records was only a short hallway away. We had to pass the office of the Records chief but that position was empty at the moment, something to do with seniority requirements. Sooner or later Cheryl O’Hara would be moving in, but it hadn’t happened yet. So Lincoln would get the riot act from Cheryl in the Records department proper. I let us through the door and glanced around.

Unlike in the old building, where the shift supervisors had occupied a sort of reception desk that let them keep an eye on everyone coming and going into the record stacks, here there was just a set of eight desks in front of the aisles of file cabinets that stored the bulk of the information that Records was in charge of. At any given time you could expect half a dozen people to be at those desks and just as many to be circulating through the files proper. Not all of those people were actual members of the Records department, case in point, when we got there I immediately heard Cheryl quietly arguing with someone I tentatively identified as the analyst I’d met from Helix’s team a few days ago.

Normally when Cheryl’s arguing with someone it’s best to just talk to another Records staffer and it looked like we had at least three others to choose from. Problem was, we needed a Records Chief or suitable proxy to sign off on Lincoln’s presence in the department.  Now  under normal circumstances the  Analysis chief could serve as that proxy. But since Darryl Templeton quit and hadn’t been replaced either, Cheryl was the closest thing we had.

So I took a deep breath and braced myself. As an afterthought I warned Lincoln, “This could be a little rough.”

“You’ve never seen fourth aunt when she finds out she’s out of szechuan sauce.”

I tried not to laugh, not so much because it was funny but because I have an aunt who’s the same way, except with lutefisk. And she’s Polish, not Chinese.

“Hi Cheryl, hi Mossman.” I made a point of calling to them from a decent distance away, before I could even see them as more than dull gleams of motion as the gestured to one another, so they had enough time to compose themselves before we got to Cheryl’s desk. “I was hoping-”

“Is this important?” Cheryl cut me off. As the new holder of the “person who is tardiest with paperwork” award, ending Helix’s two year reign, I was not one of Cheryl’s favorite people. The fact that I have a legitimate, untreatable condition that makes paperwork nearly impossible for me to do quickly or neatly isn’t an excuse in her mind. “We’re in the middle of something here.”

“I can see that, and if I could get someone else’s help…” I shrugged. While some people might be worried about offending Cheryl by implying they’d rather not work with her, anyone who’d known her for any length of time accepted that Cheryl wasn’t bothered by things normal people would be bothered by. I turned the shrug into a hand wave in Lincoln’s direction. “This is Lincoln He, one of our contacts in the greater community. We’ve brought him in because one of the people he’s worked with in the past keeps turning up during this investigation. But-”

Lincoln had been peering over my shoulder the whole time I’d been talking. Apparently Cheryl’s brusque demeanor didn’t intimidate him much, and since I’d met some of his aunts and his mother in the past I can’t say I was surprised. In terms of brusqueness they were at least Cheryl’s equals. That didn’t explain why he suddenly leaned forward and reached for Cheryl’s computer monitor.

Now being in the Records department means being a part of Project Sumter, and you get a fair amount of training to go along with that. How to recognize some of the more common talents, legal ins and outs of classified information and some very basic hand to hand combat training. To go with all that, a focus on preserving the secrecy of the records they’re in charge of that borders on a psychological condition – you really shouldn’t touch their computers or files with out written permission in triplicate. When Cheryl grabbed for Lincoln’s hand she wasn’t just trying to bat it away or stop him from touching her computer, she was aiming to put him in a fairly painful wrist lock and pin his arm against her desk.

And if Lincoln hadn’t studied wushu since he was eight it might have worked. Cheryl was surprisingly fast for someone who had spent most of her time at the Project behind a desk but she wasn’t anywhere near on par with sifu. Lincoln caught the movement and spun his arm in a snaking motion that knocked her hands aside just enough to let him recover his arm without ever being in any danger.

Before things could get any worse I moved between the two of them and said, “Whoa! Let’s all take a breather. Agent O’Hara, unless there’s more to you than has ever been officially disclosed, Lincoln could knock you senseless left handed and standing on one foot. Lincoln, try it and I’ll have to lock you in a tiny little room in an undisclosed location and try to get information on Hangman from someone else.”

“He’s not getting cleared for anything if he keeps acting like that,” Cheryl snapped. “In fact, I think he’s going to go in that tiny little room right now.”

“Did he say Hangman?” Mossburger asked.

I planted my feet, a subconscious move bred from long training. There was no way I was getting pushed around. “That is a decision to be made by a field overseer.”

“Not when it happens in my Records office.” Cheryl was looking at Lincoln, not me, so I guessed she was glaring at him.

He was nodding at Mossburger. “When were those pictures posted?”

“Pictures?” I stared hard at Cheryl’s computer screen. Then sighed and squinted, a shortsighted man in a world of corrective lenses.

“The Watch found them a couple of hours ago,” Mossburger said, swiveling the computer monitor so I could see it. I noticed that Cheryl wasn’t trying to stop him, but since I was leaning closer to the screen and squinting hard there may have been some kind of byplay between her and Lincoln that I wasn’t catching. “They went up sometime last night. We’re not sure what they mean.”

“See this?” Lincoln flicked a finger at the bottom corner of one of the pictures, a banner that clung to the side of a building. I couldn’t tell how it was held in place. In the corner Lincoln had pointed out there was the watermark of a gallows, a mostly completed stick figure dangling from the noose. The only thing it was missing was the head. “That’s Hangman’s mark. He attaches it to any kind of general statement he makes to the community at large.”

“This isn’t the reposting of something that he’s done before?” I asked. I’m not a huge Internet buff but I knew that kind of thing could happen.

“No, these are things that just happened recently,” Cheryl said, the edge in her voice suggesting she still didn’t like this but was willing to play along for now. “The Watch has been trying to keep them quiet, but these images went up on a couple of major news networks before we could put the fix in. We’ve got no idea how many people have seen it. I hear Senator Dawson might be on his way to chew us out personally.”

“You?” Lincoln shook his head. “Why?”

“Look at these pictures.” Mossburger pointed to the one Lincoln had used as an example earlier. The banner in it depicted a man wrapped in a rope that looped around him, snake-like. One end of it ended in a grappling hook. Then he gestured to the other picture, which looked like a stone wall with 2H2O written across it in black paint. “Two known associates of a suspect in the cases we’re working are codenamed Grappler and Heavy Water.”

“Oh.” My turn to say it. “Well that explains the first one. But what’s up with the weird chemical formula?”

“2H means deuterium, hydrogen with an extra neutron mixed in,” Lincoln said. “Combine it with oxygen and you get water that’s a little heavier than normal.”

“So it’s called heavy water,” I said with a snort. “Always inventive, those scientists.”

“What’s the deal with this Hangman person?” Cheryl asked. “What does he have to do with Circuit?”

I glanced from the screen to her, then over my shoulder at Lincoln. “That’s what he’s here to help us figure out. So we’d better keep him out of the little rooms and get him cleared for access to this stuff ASAP, don’t you think?”

Cheryl heaved a sigh but didn’t contradict me.

Mossburger checked his watch and said, “Well, I’ll come back when I can, but I think I need to get downstairs and check in with Agent Herrera. She wanted our whole team there when we briefed the Senator.”

“To make sure nothing got overlooked?” Lincoln asked.

“To make sure they all share pain equally,” I said.

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Sounds fair.”

“Thank you, gentlemen. You’re real pals.” Mossburger shook his head and started towards the elevators, leaving us with a still-simmering Cheryl and a lot of records diving to do. All things considered, I think I would actually rather have gone to the briefing.

——–

Helix

“So what brings you here?” I whispered to Amplifier, doing my best to ignore the increasingly bitter argument between Voorman and Senator Dawson.

“Scouting out the Senator.” It may have been my imagination but it sure didn’t look like she moved her lips to say it. I doubted anyone else in the room could hear her, which was just as well since, on top of Voorman, Verger and Teresa were in the room, along with that Movsesian kid we picked up at the same time as Amplifier, Mossburger and Jack Howell, my tactical team leader. I didn’t think anyone there would rat her out if she said something stupid, but it’s best that the opportunity never arises. “Harriet told me he’s the most important vote on the Oversight Committee and I should try and get an idea how to approach him.”

That explained the slacks and wine red blouse she was wearing, as opposed to her usual slacker-punk ensembles. I wondered, not for the first time, what kind of family background had produced her. She seemed just at ease in a stormy conference room as in a warehouse owned by a supervillian.

“I’m guessing screaming like the fat man isn’t the best approach to take.”

At ease, but not necessarily able to survive. “Just keep in mind he’ll be your boss if you make the cut.”

“Which one?”

I smirked. “Both.”

“Do you have something you’d like to add to the discussion?” Brahms Dawson slammed his hands on the table in front of me. “Or do you find this funny?” He’d apparently never figured out that neither his loft position as Senator or any of his physical bluster could intimidate me. My grandfather once flipped a Panzer Mark IV onto it’s back and I lived around him for half my childhood.

On the other hand, his daughter had been missing for close to a month now. He probably deserved some credit for being as restrained as he was. “Senator, with all due respect, all the leads we have right now can only be followed up by going to the Carolinas, Virginia or Georgia. I would love to be able to contribute by working those angles – but for that to happen you’ll have to strike some kind of a deal with Senior Special Liaison Wells, or take him out of the picture. I’d also like to point out that, under normal circumstances, I’d be migrating out west in about two weeks. It’s hardly a time for me to be leading the charge on an investigation.”

Dawson opened his mouth to say something but Voorman jumped in first. “Helix, this wouldn’t be the first time you’ve stayed north during the winter to help track Circuit. And you know changing the leadership of a region will not help the situation any.”

I snapped my fingers. “Exactly, Voorman.”

“Exactly what?” Dawson demanded. “There has to be something you can do. What about that real estate angle you were supposed to be following up on?”

“So far it hasn’t turned anything up, Brahms,” Teresa said, clearly doing her best not to stand up and try calming the man. The Senator was a friend and had gotten her a job with the Project; but Teresa believed in professionalism too much to try a personal approach here. Using his first name was clearly as familiar as she was willing to get while on the job. “We’ve done what we can to smooth the way for Analysis but…”

Jack cleared his throat, shifting his bulk slightly in the chair so he looked a little less like a side of beef waiting to punch something and more like a side of beef discussing strategy. “But with all due respect, Senator, we need to be here, waiting. Not running down leads.”

“What?” Dawson spun to glare at Jack, who was on the opposite side of the big U table. “That makes no sense.”

“It does if you remember that there’s more to this than just a crime spree.” Jack waved his hand in my direction. “This is personal. Circuit doesn’t just want Project Sumter to notice these crimes, he wants Helix to be involved.”

Jack was setting me up and I ran with the cue. “Why else hit the places he did? A banner held to the walls of Fort Sumter by nothing but altered laws of friction? Superviscus ink globbed all over the walls of Peachtree Station in Atlanta? Those aren’t just major Civil War sites, they’re part of my family history.”

“And the talents used to vandalize them are ones he’s deliberately drawn to our attention,” Mossburger pointed out. “He’s been building to this for a while, I think.”

“No thinking needed,” Jack said with a laugh. “I know. Circuit wants Helix running all over the place, trying to work out these petty vandalisms while he gets ready for something serious. If he gets us to change the management structure of a regional office or two, that’s just bonus confusion.”

Dawson narrowed his eyes and drew himself up to his full height. He wasn’t as imposing as my grandfather, or even Jack, but he did radiate a strange kind of menace all the same. Even distracted with worry for his daughter, even angry and, from the bags under his eyes, more than a little tired, he still had impressive charisma. “Those so-called petty vandalisms are on the verge of exposing everything we’ve worked to keep secret.”

“Then tell Wells to put an extra team or two on keeping a lid on it.” I sat forward in my chair, inverting Jack’s earlier move in order to get Dawson’s attention back on me. “That’s his job, and he doesn’t want my help doing it. That’s fine. Because right now my job is to prioritize finding Circuit over everything else, and running down south won’t help with that one bit.”

“They don’t have the experience-”

“So swear in Amplifier here.” I jerked my thumb in her direction and she jerked fully upright in surprise. “She just passed her field stress test with flying colors and she’s already come across Circuit’s operation more than most of Wells’ people. You can send her, if it will make you feel better.”

Verger straightened up, too. “Hold on. She doesn’t have a team ready to move with her. Unless Wells is going to set her up with one.”

“Then she’d wind up in the Southern office’s jurisdiction,” Voorman grumbled. “We’re shorter on agents.”

“Not my point!” I said in exasperation. “I am staying here. I am waiting for Circuit. And the moment he sticks his head out of whatever hole he’s dug for himself, I am going to chop it off. That will be the end of all this fooling about.”

Brahms stared at me for a moment and I crossed my arms, waiting to hear what his new complaint would be. To my surprise, all he said was, “Fine, then. But the next time he shows up in the Midwest I want you there with hell’s bells on, and I want you to sit on him until I get there and can drag some answers out of him.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. “Senator, if that’s what you want I think you’ll have to get in line.”

Water Fall: Frogs in the Pot

Posted by natechen on

Four Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

“Mossburger!” I jumped up from my desk and hurried across the floor towards my analyst, who had just stepped in to the office and was headed towards the Records department. A handful of heads looked up from desks scattered around the room but for the most part this had gotten to be commonplace and I was ignored. Well, Mossburger looked like he wanted to bolt so it’s not like he was ignoring me but it’s not like we were attracting an audience either. “Where are those-”

Pritchard held up his hands to try and hold me off. That never works but he keeps trying. “Look, Helix, I know you’re still waiting on my analysis of the drug cartel-Morocco connection but until Forensics finishes cracking that shell company in Malta there’s not much we can do.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” I threw my hands in the air. “This is supposed to be my case and I’ve been locked out of it just because my grandmother supposedly betrayed the Lost Cause! Every lead we’ve developed so far leads south of the Mason-Dixie line.”

“Of course they do, Helix,” Mossburger said with a sigh. “Circuit set it up that way on purpose, to try and keep you away from his organization, remember?”

I rubbed my hand over my face. “You know, some days I really hate that man. Tell me we have something. Anything.”

“Well…” His voice trailed off and he glanced down at the folders he was holding. “It’s not directly related.”

“What’s not directly related?”

Mossburger sighed and handed me one of the files, which was had the codename “Grappler” and a talent indexing number on it. We number talents as we find them, with the very first being my great-great-grandfather, Corporal Sumter. Codenames are an easy way to refer to them but not easy to keep track of in databases, particularly since they get reassigned on a semiregular basis – there are over four thousand talents on record after all, and many of them never do anything of note with their abilities. Code names, on the other hand, are a limited resource so there’s some recycling that goes on.

But Analysis does like to try and be poetic when handing them out, and Grappler didn’t sound like their style. From the indexing number it looked like Grappler was a recent find, too. I flipped the folder and glanced at it. “How does this tie back to the weapons dealers again? Another associate of theirs?”

“No. Remember last month, when Circuit broke into our old facility and installed a back door into our computer network?”

“Yeah.” I snorted. “That was a mess. Gutsy, unexpected and surprisingly effective. Typical work for him. Did we ever track down what all he did while he was in our systems?”

Mossburger waved the folder he was holding at the one I was looking at. “I think Forensics is still working on it, but they’re sure these two files were part of it. He created them and appended them to his file as known associates. Presumably that’s why there’s so little information on them.”

I studied the file with a great deal more interest and discovered that he was right. All of the biographical information was blank – not redacted, which was to be expected, but entirely blank. If the Records department had returned an entirely blank file to Analysis after the discovery of a new talent I think Cheryl would have personally hunted down whoever was responsible and locked them into the vault for the rest of their life. Other than noting that Grappler was a wall walker, a person who could tweak friction in bizarre ways, and that he or she was a known associate of Circuit, there was nothing in the file.

I closed it and handed it back to Mossburger. “And the other one?”

“For a talent called Heavy Water, a water worker. Analysis thinks he’s the one that came with Circuit the night of the raid. Massif was sure there was a water worker with them, and how many can there be in one group, right?” He took the file and shrugged. “We’re not sure why Circuit wanted them entered into our files under those names but I thought it might be worthwhile to check into old cases involving Circuit and see if I could find evidence of their involvement we might have missed because we were so focused on looking for the work of a fuse box.”

“Right.” I cracked my knuckles. “Well, that’s something, I guess. Did you want a hand?”

“Actually, there was-”

“Helix!” Jack was waving to me from his desk. “Someone calling for you or the boss. You gonna take it or you want I should track down Teresa?”

I sighed. “Nevermind, Mossburger. Let me know if you can turn anything up, though.” He nodded, looking a little relieved, and I headed back towards my desk. “I’ll take it, Jack. Who am I talking to? State police? FBI? Senator’s aide?”

“I don’t think he’s any of the above,” Jack said, handing me his phone rather than bothering to transfer the call to mine. “He said his name was Sykes.”

——–

“Glad to see you again.” Matthew Sykes greeted us from his wheelchair as the secretary ushered us in to the conference room. “I apologize for the poor accommodations, I’m afraid our office here isn’t very large.”

It’s true that it wasn’t a very spacious room, around fifteen feet square, and there weren’t any personal touches to it. But it had a table and chairs, and as far as I’ve always been concerned that’s all you need. It’s not like anyone would want to spend much time in one. I took a seat in one of the two chairs closest to the door and Teresa took the other, putting us directly across from our host. “If you think this is a poor accommodation, Mr. Sykes, you’ve never been to a meeting in a government office.”

He chuckled a little even though my joke was pretty flat. “I have to admit, Mr. Sykes,” I continued, “I’m not quite sure why you’re here. I don’t suppose you’ve spent the last two weeks here in town?”

“No, not at all,” he said, drumming his fingers lightly on the table top. “I’ve been back to Springfield and out at a few other places where we’re – but that’s not important. No, I’m afraid I’ve come back here specifically to speak with you.”

“Then I hope that the trip will prove worth your time,” Teresa said, leaning forward in polite interest. “But I’m afraid I’m just as confused about the nature of your call.”

“Yes, well…” Sykes studied his hands for a minute. That slow, sleepy attitude that had stood out to me when we first me was still there, but where before it had seemed like general good humor now it felt different. More like being watched by a sleepy cat that wasn’t sure if you were a problem yet. “You know, one of the ways we businessmen survive is by talking to each other. Even when it isn’t strictly proper for us to do so.”

I nodded. “What you’re trying to say is that Roger Keller told you why we were visiting him the day we met.”

“And with good reason,” he was quick to add. “You see, I’m an investor in several of the properties you were asking him about. He thought I should know, in case there was anything I thought I should bring to your attention.”

“And it took you two weeks to think of something?” I folded my arms over my chest and leaned back in my chair. “That’s quite a delayed reaction, Mr. Sykes.”

“Only because there wasn’t anything I could think of until the news broke yesterday.” He reached into the inside pocket on his jacket and pulled out a rumpled envelope. “Do you remember those serial arsons that took place a month or so back?”

Teresa and I exchanged a glance. That could only mean the Enchanter case, but I could tell by her expression that she didn’t have any more idea how Sykes had connected our inquiries into Circuit’s real estate to then Enchanter than I did. It had been highly classified stuff – still was, as far as I knew. “We were briefly involved in that case, as a matter of fact,” Teresa said noncommittally. “Why do you ask?”

He slid the envelope across the table and sat back in his wheelchair. “I’m not sure if you would have heard, then, but at least a few places hit received a letter before the arsonist struck.”

With a sneaking suspicion of what I would find, I picked up the envelope and looked inside. Sure enough, there was a typed letter inside that said, “There is no king in America. Death to pretenders.” It was signed by the Enchanter.

I handed the letter to Teresa and asked, “When did you get this?”

“I’m not entirely sure. My secretary is actually the one who handled the letter initially, believe it or not we get all kinds of cryptic or outright threatening letters. It comes with being a successful business.” Sykes shrugged carelessly, he seemed a lot less tense now that he’d handed the letter over and we weren’t yelling at him. He looked less like a watchful cat and more like a man who found life amusing at best and boring most of the time. But as he explained he did seem to grow a little more animated. And why not? Everyone enjoys talking about themselves a bit.

“We keep a file where a lot of the minor stuff goes, while the dangerous stuff like death threats we turn in to the police. That,” he waved at the letter, “went into the file. If you leave me an e-mail address or similar way to contact you I can see that the details get to you.”

“And this was sent to one of the properties you and Mr. Keller are investing in?” Teresa asked, slipping the letter back into its envelope and setting it on the table.

“That’s right. And I’ve contacted Roger about it as well. He’s checking to see if they received anything similar.” Sykes rubbed a hand over his face, for just a moment looking less like a sleepy philosopher and more like a tired, middle-aged man. “He didn’t say why you were looking into the properties, but from the sounds of it the arsons weren’t the reason. I suppose this wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped.”

“No-” I started, but Teresa touched me on the arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said, getting to her feet. “Could I consult with my colleague outside for just a moment?”

Sykes laughed, his expression closer to what I assumed was normal for him. “Sure. Take your time.”

The hallway outside was fairly quiet, the only noise was the bustle of the telecom company’s phone operators a good twenty feet away. Once the door was closed behind us I asked, “What is it? The Enchanter is under wraps now, I tend to think Sykes is right – there isn’t much here that’s useful to us.”

“Except the Enchanter got a lot his information from someone who worked with the underground talent community,” Teresa said, ticking points on her fingers. “That person went by the name Hangman and only worked over the Internet. At some point, Hangman warned the Enchanter that Circuit was on to him and probably going to take steps to stop his arson spree. Later, Massif’s investigation into Hangman dead-ended when it turned out no one had heard from him in a month or two.”

“You think the Enchanter isn’t the only one who got on Circuit’s bad side?”

She nodded. “It’s certainly possible. If nothing else, it might justify putting more resources into finding this Hangman person.”

“True.” I shrugged. “But one letter to one of the owners of a piece of property Circuit might have been interested in isn’t much of a connection.”

“Fair enough.” With that, Teresa stepped back into the conference room and picked up the envelope with the letter in it. “We appreciate your telling us about this, Mr. Sykes. It may lead to a new development in the case. We’ll be sure to contact Mr. Keller and ask him if he or any of his clients might have received similar letters. I trust we can take this with us?”

“Of course.” Sykes grinned again, looking pleased like a child that had just won a footrace. “I’ll be sure to let Roger know. I’m sure he’ll lend a hand – we’re always glad to help out. It’s almost a requirement for people like us, but I’m sure you’d understand that, Agent Herrera.”

——–

Circuit

“Long day?”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight. “I’ve only been awake fifteen hours, Hangman. It doesn’t start being a long day until we roll over thirty. I appreciate your concern but there’s far too much to do today to be wait until tomorrow.”

“Technically speaking it’s tomorrow already,” Hangman pointed out, but not in an argumentative tone.

“You’ve been poking around in East Coast servers too much lately,” I said. “We’re on Central Time here.”

“Of course. It will be tomorrow soon.”

I smiled slightly to myself and said, “Go ahead and ping the servers. I want to get this set up as soon as possible.”

“If you say so.” From my place in the server room it was easy to get a feel for the constantly shifting electrical potential of my outpost. Hangman’s laptop may have been two rooms away in my office but, thanks to the top of the line network that ran through the building I was able to feel the constant, subtle shifts of her typing, the computer’s processors whirring away. As she set up her next hacking maneuver her voice was fed through the intercom, so we could follow what the other was doing. “I’m still not sure why you want to do it this way, instead of just turning the information over to third party reporters like we did with the letter from the Enchanter. It would be safer that way.”

“There’s more to this game than safety, Hangman. They need to know someone other than the usual suspects is behind this. It has to be distinct from the other news from the beginning.” I shifted the balance of my own talent to the handful of routers that actually led to the outside world. “Ping the server.”

“The query is away.”

In less time than it took her to say it a data packet pulsed out of our network, through a barely discernible path to a newscaster’s servers hundreds of miles away. Getting information from that distance was as much art as science, like a spider reading vibrations coming along it’s web. But most firewalls are not subtle things and the denial of access that blocked Hangman’s probe was easy to spot.

“Again,” I said, shifting potentials again to lock down the the code that would deny access. Ninety seconds later, Hangman had convinced the firewall that her presence in the system was legitimate and I no longer had to hold my foot in the door. It had happened three times as fast as using an automated program to accomplish the same work. There certainly were upsides to having someone like Hangman around to make my load lighter.

Since this was the last intrusion we had planned I disconnected from the servers, stripping off the Velcro wristbands that held the electrodes in place against my skin and closing up the specialized router I used for these intrusions. While I can do this kind of work just by touching a keyboard, Davis had put this system together to increase my sensitivity by a considerable amount and I’ll confess I’ve grown fond of it. For my first joint cyber-espionage endeavor with Hangman I thought it prudent to have every advantage and, although we hadn’t needed it, caution pays. Especially in my line of work.

I let myself out of the server room, locked it and joined Hangman in my office. “Progress?”

“All over but the waiting.” She didn’t look up from her computer screen as I glanced over her shoulder. It looked like the software that would let us manipulate the major news network’s content, at least for a short period of time, hadn’t encountered any hangups on instillation so far.

I nodded with satisfaction and dropped into the seat behind my desk, swiveling in it so I could look out into the undisturbed Wisconsin forest outside. “Soon enough we’ll be ready to move out of here. Chainfall’s coming up soon.”

“Are you going to miss it?” Hangman got up and moved around to the side of the desk, looking out into the dark with me. “For all your technological focus you’re surprisingly fond of places like this. The Chainfall site isn’t that different. You even told Grappler to be easy on the Stillwater facilities.”

“That company was owned by a former Project agent, you know.” I leaned back a little in my chair. “In the old days, Project Sumter did more harm than good. They just haven’t reevaluated themselves in the last fifty years. That’s their real failing. People like Chief Stillwater, he was in the Navy during the Second World War, they’ve earned a little respect. They were a force for good, in their time.”

Hangman’s hands slipped over the back of my chair and began massaging my shoulders lightly. “And now it’s your time, I suppose?”

Simeon’s warning came back to me then. The possibility that Hangman had come to me interested in more than a chance to show her skills. That she might have some sort of a romantic interest, childish or otherwise.

That one way or another, she’d have to face the reality of Thunderbird.

I got up from the chair, letting her hands fall away as I stood. “Now it’s time for sleep, I think.”

“Even after just fifteen hours awake?” She asked in a teasing tone.

I gave her an arch look over one shoulder. “An old man needs his rest.”

“Old?” She smiled. It wasn’t a smirk, like she so often used when joking with Simeon or Heavy, nor an attempt to ingratiate herself, like I had seen in pictures I turned up when trying to gather information on her, like she used when dealing with Davis or one of the other men in the installation that seemed to gather around her when she wasn’t locked away with her laptop running some kind of data analysis. There was something genuine there, not a front or a tool for dealing with people. I just wasn’t sure what it was. “The future shouldn’t be calling itself old, Circuit.”

“No?” I put a hand on her shoulder and gently maneuvered her towards the office door, being careful to stay behind her every step of the way. For some reason I was suddenly ashamed to look her in the face. “Well, a word of advice. We’ll all need all the rest we can get in the next few days. Big things are coming.”

Hangman laughed. “Whatever you say. Good night, Circuit.”

“Good night, Elizabeth.”

I don’t think I realized then I’d called her by name. Didn’t notice her staring after me with that strange smile as I walked away. All I really knew was that, for the first time since I’d become Open Circuit, I was on the run from something and I had no plan how to deal with it.

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Water Fall: Shaking Earth

Posted by natechen on

Five Weeks, One Day Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

Jane Hammer certainly lived up to her name. I can process all kinds of movement but, even though I’d been warned, I wasn’t ready for just how fast she moved. It took her all of two seconds from the time she hit the ground to run a loop around me and get to the van, which rolled onto its side to the tune of screaming metal. I cursed and turned to start back towards her but I needn’t have bothered.

She came back my way even faster than she’d left and when we collided the force was more than the ground under my feet could safely handle. The parking lot was fairly worn down concrete and under that there was only gravel fill, I know because a great deal of it sprayed in the air when a chunk of paving about five feet around pulled loose and tilted up, sliding a few feet to the right in the process. It had taken the force of Jane’s hit but ruined my footing in the process.

At least I had known what to expect and managed to keep my balance. Jane, who had used a fairly straightforward shoulder slam that probably would have smashed a normal man’s ribs into kindling, hadn’t expected me to stay standing or for her to wind up stopped, much less for the ground to move under her feet. She slipped and went down on all fours.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t work training prompted me to try and kick her closer hand out from under her. The force from the kick vanished as soon as we made contact and her appearance changed subtly. According to Voorman, vector traps don’t move force, they store it and can release it later, although the amount of force they’re holding drains away over time. So I’d basically just handed her a free kick. She retaliated by punching me in the thigh and letting the extra force spring back out at the same time, which hurt about as much as the evil eye she was giving me as she swung.

Trading punches was going to go nowhere fast, neither one of us could really hurt the other that way. So I grabbed her wrist and shoulder before she could recover from her punch, pulling her off balanced and into a hip throw that dropped her to the ground. When we stayed in direct contact the whole time her talent was basically useless, while mine still ensured that I never lost my footing. I’m not sure why that is but that’s the kind of thing we leave to the scientists. While wushu doesn’t have a whole lot of wrestling in it, it does still include some basic throws and pins to go with all its other moves. Against a complete amateur, which Jane obviously was, that’s more than enough.

Or so the theory went. But I hadn’t even gotten her fully locked into a pin when she started kicking her feet against the ground. To my amazement her appearance started to warp slightly, like it had when she’d absorbed my kick, and even glimmer around the edges. Somehow kicking against the ground was letting her build up force. By the third kick I realized what was going on and shifted to try and pin her feet as well. After fumbling for a couple of seconds I only managed to get one of them.

Jane’s next kick after that hit the ground with enough force to rock the loose pavement we were on. The next after that actually shoved it a half a foot sideways. This was getting bad. If she managed to knock us airborne all my advantages would vanish – in fact, she’d be way ahead of me, since vector traps don’t need their feet on the ground to be quasi-invulnerable.

So I let go, timing it so it happened a split second before her next kick. With nothing to push against Jane wound up flipping herself over and skidding along the ground a good ten feet. I winced. Even if she didn’t feel the impact with the pavement she’d still get scrapes and limbs would still get yanked out of socket. For all that, she still got to her feet before I could get to her. I might have the advantage in durability, since Voorman said traps could only absorb one vector at a time and had to use it before they could grab another, while I could shunt hits into the ground all day. But Jane had far more mobility than I could ever hope for. At least I did have time to get off the broken pavement before Jane came back for more.

In fact, she backed up several steps, moving with a weird rocking motion of the feet and storing up a little more force with each step she took. Now that I had a clear look at it I remembered something Voorman had said about the principle of action producing equal and opposite reaction and Jane’s talent, but I hadn’t really understood it. Looking at it now, it seemed that every time her foot hit the ground she absorbed the impact and released it on her next step, making each step gradually a bit stronger than the last. I wondered absently if that took training or if it was instinctive.

Jane wasn’t distracted by such things. She was focused on taking me down and I was more than happy to let her try. Even with just a few seconds to study her it was clear to me that she had never had any kind of formal hand to hand combat training. All she was doing was building up a head of steam and slamming into her target with all the force she’d accumulated. And the fact is, that would probably be enough for eighty to ninety percent of the people she would fight.

But wushu isn’t just fighting hand to hand, it’s reading the flow and pattern of movement, anticipating it and countering it. While Jane’s movements were bigger and more powerful than anything I’ve seen from something that didn’t have a six cylinder engine in it they were actually very simple and easy to analyze. And while they might be too fast for an untalented man with my level of discipline to follow I could see her coming in ways she probably wasn’t expecting. The files suggested vector shifts and vector traps perceive the world a lot differently, so she probably didn’t realize that the way she manipulated momentum caused her to light up like a Christmas tree.

To my eye the average person is surrounded a dull red haze that gets lost in the gray static of ambient motion once they’re more than twenty feet away from me. A running person may work their way up to yellow and be visible thirty feet away – forty if they’re really fast. But Jane burned white hot and I could probably spot what she was doing from the other end of a football field.

The more force Jane put behind her movements the easier they were to track and anticipate. I almost felt guilty at how easy it was to toss her back to the ground when she came around for another hit. This time instead of letting her go flying I kept ahold of her and bled her momentum out into the ground. I also made it a point to grab her by the leg and wrestler her into a lock that would break it if she tried to power her way out again. “Give it up, Jane!”

“What?” There was a note of confusion in her voice and I belatedly remembered that, unless Project Sumter had actually had her in custody at some point she wouldn’t know what her codename was.

“Never mind.” I sighed in exasperation. At least her friends had stopped shooting at me once she came into the picture. “Are you going to give or not?”

In response she started drumming her hands on the ground. “If you try and move you’re just going to break your leg. Believe me, you won’t be breaking mine.”

She exhaled deeply, a lot like sifu would when “centering the chi”, and there was a confusing flurry of motion. She kicked against my leg lock and I held steady, not moving, but she managed to press herself down into the pavement with enough force to crack it again. For a split second I lost my footing and couldn’t keep her in the join lock; then suddenly Jane was free and bouncing a good ten feet in the air. She didn’t land on her feet but I don’t think that really bothered her much.

And this time she didn’t come back around for another pass, this time she just kept running away. I swore and then yelled, as loud as I could, “Amplifier! Jane’s running for the alley on the east side of the building!”

A second later I heard Amp’s voice, at normal levels, saying, “We’ve got it.”

I suppressed a shudder. If she was still where she started the operation she was a block and a half away, coordinating communications for-

The fast retreating point of light that Jane made as she retreated into the distance suddenly vanished in a weird pulsing of the air. I’m not sure normal people could have spotted it but I sure could.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“Just hit her with a little noise, one of the things I picked up in the past few weeks” Amp replied, still throwing her voice. I knew that she’d been having occasional meetings with another wave maker, who’s codename hadn’t been shared with me, to help them understand how she did her little ventriloquist trick over long distances. Apparently she’d picked up a few new tricks in the process.

“Is she still going to be a problem?”

“Don’t think so.” There was a pause, then, “Yeah, Dominic says they’re spraying her down with some of that riot foam stuff now. Voorman said that would be enough to hold her.”

“Good.” I turned back to the building, dusting myself off as I went. “Let’s see if I’m needed inside.”

——–

As it turned out, I wasn’t. Helix’s team had come through the front door and locked down the concessions part of the office as soon as the shooting started and the rest of the building had been cleared by the state police by the time I could actually get to it and get inside. After about five minutes of fast and furious work the raid was all over but the clean-up and analysis. This after nearly a weak of intensive planning.

My life in a nutshell.

All the work paid off, though, as the police got plenty of charges to press against the arms dealers and we got – well, we didn’t get the van in pristine condition since Jane had it hard enough to completely roll it once, but the body of the vehicle was mostly intact and hopefully analysis could get something out of it. On top of that, no one got seriously hurt other than the officer who was in the van when Jane rolled it. Even he got away with nothing more than a few sprains and a broken leg. Not bad given all the shooting that went on.

After asking around a bit I managed to track down Helix and our analyst team in what appeared to be the office of the accountant in charge of the operation. As with most criminal operations focusing on making money, most of the relevant evidence was probably going to be found there.

The small room was pretty cramped since Helix was there with Agent Herrera, his field analyst, who I’d heard being called Mossman, my field analyst, Auburn Reinke, and a youngish kid who I didn’t recognize but assumed to be Samson’s field analyst.

I’d passed a vending machine in the hallway, presumably one of the cover company’s offerings, and it appeared that Auburn had bought some popcorn out of it, which she was now trying to convince Helix to pop for her.

“It’s important,” she was saying, “to have something that crunches when you’re doing mathmatical analysis.”

“Then you should have bought some potato chips.” Helix put his hands on his hips, an action that would be totally lost on someone like Auburn, who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome and couldn’t process body language much better than I could read facial expressions. “I’m not a microwave.”

“Potato chips are only for decoding messages.” Auburn’s tone suggested that everyone should know that.

“Just pop the popcorn,” I said, sidling up behind the skinny kid, who was shuffling papers back and forth with Mossman so that they made weird patterns. “She’ll never get off your back if you don’t.”

Helix sighed and took the bag of popcorn. Then he pushed past his supervisor and out the door. I glanced at Herrera. “Where’s he going?”

“I think there’s a microwave in the lounge a couple of doors back,” she said with a hint of amusement in her voice. “I don’t know as he can regulate temperatures enough to pop a bag of popcorn without burning through the bag.”

“Auburn, did you look over the records here already?” I asked.

“She glanced at them,” the skinny kid started to say, “but-”

“Yeah, I’ve seen them.” Auburn sat down in the room’s only chair and slouched there. She didn’t understand body language or facial expressions and she didn’t use them, which actually made it easier for me to understand her, since I’ve always been bad at seeing them. “They get guns from drugs and sell them back to drug people. Waste of money for the druggers, but makes these guys money. The van was already theirs.”

There was a moment of silence as the room processed that. While I’m sure Helix and Samson had competent analysts, Auburn was an honest to goodness getman, in the same mold as the original. The Man From Gettysburg had been a single-minded, relentless genius who set out to destroy both sides of a conflict that killed all three of his sons. He nearly killed both Corporal Sumter and Shenandoah more than once and stopping him eventually required the assistance of Fog of War, who supposedly brought a plan crafted by Robert E. Lee himself. Even then the original getman only got caught and hung because he was over seventy. He claimed to have thought of a way out of the trap set for him but lacked the strength to carry it out.

And Auburn? She may have suffered from a weird way of looking at the world, and had an even harder time making herself understood, but she also had a photographic memory and incredible reasoning skills. Sometimes I wonder if she’s not as dangerous as the original getman simply because she hasn’t, or can’t, experience the same kind of traumas as he did.

To avoid thinking about such cheery subjects I asked, “If you had all that figured out, why did you want popcorn?”

“Wanted to double check.”

Of course. Self esteem was not one of her strong points.

“I see,” the skinny kid said. “There’s no record of purchase for the van anywhere in the last month of records. But I don’t know why that makes her say they already had the van…”

“Because all this stuff came up ‘with drugs’, which means from Mexico,” Helix’s analyst replied, the papers in his hands ignored as he stared off into space. “It had to come up through Texas and the south. This place is part of a network based in the south – remember, the write-up on the two talents here came from our southern offices.”

“Yeah, I remember,” the kid said. “What’s significant about that?”

For once, I was following the analyst’s logic. “It’s significant because Circuit always works in such a way as to minimize Helix’s impact on his operations. The South’s Senior Special Liaison hates him, won’t let him operate in his jurisdiction. If Circuit wanted to set up a money-making operation, or just start assembling material for that overthrow of the government he’s supposedly plotting, what better place to do it than the one part of the country his archrival isn’t allowed to work in?”

“Oh…” The sound of the light dawning for the kid. “So when he winds up with a van he can’t or doesn’t want to repair instead of abandoning it he arranges to sell it through a satellite operation.”

I frowned at that. When the kid put it that way, the whole theory suddenly sounded wrong. “Didn’t Voorman or Samson say something about Circuit having enough armor plating to manufacture replacement parts? Why wouldn’t he want to repair the van?”

“Because he didn’t just build one van.” Helix tossed Auburn the popped back of popcorn as he walked back into the room, “He’s got several. There’s this whole story behind it, it’s got to do with auto plant closings in Detroit and one of the most absurd cons I’ve ever heard of, but we’re pretty sure he’s got half a dozen of the things, maybe as many as ten. For that guy, anything worth doing is worth doing on a grand scale. He may not have gotten his hands on enough plating to build all of them and have resources left over for spare parts.”

“You’re sure about that?” The kid asked.

“Reasonably. That’s the conclusion Mona came to. You can ask her-” Helix caught himself and sighed, running a hand over his face. “Never mind. There’s a write up about it somewhere, I’m sure. It was never proved, but it was as likely as not. That’s how we knew what VINs we should look for when checking out the van here.”

“What’s important,” Herrera said, putting a comforting hand on Helix’s shoulder, “is that we have a potential lead into Circuit’s organization on a scale we’ve never had before. I want all this sorted and boxed and back at the offices by this time tomorrow. The more people we have looking at this, the better.”

Helix nudged the skinny kid with his elbow. “Movsesian, I want you and Darryl to sit down and-”

“He resigned,” Auburn said. Helix stared at her silently and for once she took the cue and went on. “The day after you left for Omaha he handed in his resignation and left town. I haven’t heard where he went. Agent Philmore is interim head of Analysis, Clark could talk to him-”

“He’s never worked any of Circuit’s cases,” Helix snapped. There was no doubt he was pissed. Not at the kid, Movsesian, or Auburn but still angry above and beyond his grumpy norm. “Try Lightning Cage’s old field analyst, Williams. Go over all the accounting stuff here, see if it matches what he’s done in the past and if you can trace it back to any of his past operations. I’ll give you the name of a contact in the CIA, tell them to see if they can get it back to Morocco. This time we’re blowing the lid off his whole damn network.”

I reached out to give Helix’s shoulder a squeeze, thought better of it, and settled for saying, “Take it easy, big guy. He’s finally made a serious mistake. We’ve never caught anyone from his organization in a position to talk to us before, never caught any talents that worked for him. Definitely never found this much evidence in one place before. It’s only a matter of time before we get him.”

“Assuming that this organization is actually part of Circuit’s. That’s not proven yet,” Mossman said.

“Duly noted.” Helix sighed and cracked his knuckles, then slumped against the wall and shook his head. “I almost hope it’s not. Circuit wouldn’t be this careless if he didn’t have something big in the works. It’s a race now. If we win, we catch him.”

“And what happens if he wins?” Herrera asked.

“I don’t know,” Helix said. “But it’ll keep me awake at night. That’s for sure.”

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Water Fall: Echoes and Avalanches

Posted by natechen on

Five Weeks, One Day Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

It takes a lot of hard, boring work and careful fact checking before cops can go from getting a tip to getting a warrant. Life for those of us working for Project Sumter is complicated by the fact that we are not technically a law enforcement agency (what we are, technically speaking, is pretty vague). If we want to raid a place or make an arrest we actually have to coordinate the operation with some branch of government that can legally do those things. On my team, most of that work is usually handled by Harriet or Dominic Screeton, my tactical team leader, so I spent the most of the time between getting sifu’s tip and the resulting sting working with Amplifier on various parts of her application process.

Mostly it was the formal address to the Senate Committee, which is one of the two big hurdles every talent joining the Project has to face. But once Dominic started talking about the kind of operation we were looking at I decided I also wanted to bring her along on that. The field stress test is the other big hurdle we all have to go through and the sooner Amp took her first crack at it the better it would be for all of us.

Most of Dominic’s law enforcement contacts are with the state police, which turned out to be fortuitous since they were already aware of the group that had wound up with Circuit’s damaged van. They seemed to be some kind of low grade arms dealers, mostly working with drug dealers and the like. I’m not sure how they planned to market an armored delivery van, other than possibly as a way to ensure drug shipments never got hijacked. Regardless, they apparently couldn’t find a buyer as easily as they thought.

The operation was shaping up to be a kind of sting. We’d give the State Police an excuse to crack down on the operation by suggesting they serve a warrant that accused them of accessory to assault. After all, the van had been last used by Circuit, who had merrily shot at Agent Samson at least eight times in the course of his escape from the Diversy Street incident. Now these guys were trying to sell it rather than turning it in as evidence of a crime. Even if we couldn’t make the original charges stick with what we found when we raided their place the State Police were bound to find something else they could charge the arms dealers with once they’d searched the building. The police could close down the death merchants, we’d get our van. Wins all around.

If this sounds like a lot of carefully cultivated self interest, well, welcome to my world. Helix sometimes wonders if keeping all our secrets is worth the time we waste on this kind of thing. I just try not to worry about it too much.

Especially when I had to worry about getting Amplifier through a crash course in field work, which is what we spent the rest of our time working on. When Helix first stumbled across her, Amp was working with a couple of friends, trying her hand at vigilante work. They’d been smarter than most, investing in body armor and some basic communication gear, but Amp proved to be woefully untrained in the use of firearms and teamwork, and she was still far below the basic conditioning threshold we like our agents to have. On the other hand, we weren’t planning to just throw her on the front lines and by the time we had all our paperwork squared away Harriet and Dominic agreed she was readyish for the field.

I walked into the briefing early that morning with a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the files we had on the arms dealers in the other. It wasn’t a big time operation but there was enough money and people behind it that we could be looking at some serious opposition and I wanted to be sure exactly what we might be dealing with before we went in. While bullets don’t pose much danger to me, just about anything chemical works just fine and I can be stunned by a flash bang same as anyone else.

I was looking over the speculation on whether the folks we were about to tangle with had any – the state police were fairly sure they didn’t – so at first I didn’t notice the slight change in the air when I entered the briefing room. After all  this file wasn’t in Harriet’s special 24-point font, so I had to hold it pretty close just to read it properly. With the paper practically plastered to my face there wasn’t that much of the room around me visible so it took a few seconds for it to register; but the way things are moving around me always clicks sooner or later.

“Helix?” Once the papers were out of the way I could see that yes, he was in fact sitting at the table. Well, not exactly sitting, more like slumped in a chair with his head resting on his arms.

“Hi, Massif,” he said, voice muffled. He lifted one hand and waved it in a vaguely welcoming way. “What brings you here?”

“I have a morning briefing.” I dropped the papers onto the table and took another sip of coffee. “What brings you here?”

Helix raised his head to look at me. Even though his talent being present made it easier to see through the fog of random movement in the air I couldn’t read much in his expression beyond general exhaustion. “I have a morning briefing, too. Someone must have goofed up.” He fumbled in his coat pocket for his phone and eventually found it. “I am not in the mood for this…”

“I would never have guessed. You only look like you’ve been run over by a truck.”

He snorted out something like a laugh as he thumbed buttons on his phone. “Just flew back into town last night. Musta put in a hundred hours in the last five days. Jet lagged, cranky, in the wrong briefing room.”

I shook my head and focused on finishing my coffee. When Helix gets in a mood like that it’s best to stay out of his way. “Wait.” I paused with my coffee halfway to my lips. “You went out of town? Why?”

“Circuit hijacked some army trucks. There’s a write-up about it coming.” He lifted his phone to his ear and waited a second or two. “Teresa? What room is our briefing supposed to be in?” A pause and then, “That’s what I thought.”

He hung up without saying any thing else and looked back at me. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”

“Who?” We both looked over at the door, where a familiar, vertigo inducing knot of impossible was walking in.

“Hey, Sam,” Helix said, putting his head back down on his arms. “Don’t tell me they triple booked this room or something.”

“Not that I’ve heard.” Agent Samson took a seat at the table. He hadn’t brought anything with him but he still seemed to take up half the table. I unconsciously inched a few steps away. “How’s things coming with the van follow-up?”

“Well actually-”

“Helix!” Amplifier practically bounced into the room. Helix jerked upright, sending his own cup of coffee teetering across the table. Samson caught it before tipped over entirely. Sadly he couldn’t also grab Helix before he tipped out of his chair when Amp wrapped him in a bear hug so I had to grab them both before our senior talent got sidelined with broken ribs or something.

Have I ever mentioned that Helix has serious ideas about personal space? I think it has something to do with the way he can only affect temperature in the area immediately around him; and I’m not sure if he just doesn’t like other people’s body heat being there, messing with stuff or if he’s worried about someone getting hurt. Regardless, he wormed out of Amp’s hug in record time. As he started to straighten out his suit he said, “Good morning, Amplifier. What brought that on?”

“You’ve barely said ‘hi’ for the last two weeks!” She protested. “Where have you been?”

“Out of town.” He took his coffee back from Samson and sucked down about half of it. “What is going on here? Don’t tell me there’s supposed to be four meetings in one room.”

“Amp’s getting ready for her field stress test,” I said quickly, trying to get a sense of where all this was going. Helix was right, it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense for us all to be here at the same time. “She’s actually supposed to sit in on my briefing. What are you here for?”

“Dunno.” He tossed off the last of his coffee and looked at the empty cup glumly. “Teresa just called me up this morning and told me we had a meeting here.” He glanced at Samson. “Pastor? What brings you here? Something to do with your media notoriety?”

The big man sighed. I’d heard about his appearance on television and I was still trying to get over the idea of Project Sumter’s personnel being interviewed on the news, but I had to admit it did seem like a good angle for a missing persons case to take. It’s just that we so rarely investigate those and. when we do, there are other considerations to take into account.

Like secrecy.

The two actually don’t work that well together. We’d probably have left the Elizabeth Dawson case alone if it hadn’t been for her father and the fact that pretty much everyone was sure Circuit had something to do with it. But our point agent on that case didn’t really look happy with the notoriety his part had brought him. “We’re probably going to have to pull a team of analysts together to go over all the tips that newscast has provided but no, that’s not why I’m here this morning. We’re here because Massif’s team has finally tracked down one of the leads we handed off to them.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, waving at Amplifier with the files I’d just been reading. “That’s why we’re here. But what about you two?”

“It’s going to be a joint operation,” Voorman announced. We all, except for maybe Samson, turned in surprise. I’d been expecting Harriet to be leading this briefing. Helix had no doubt anticipated having Agent Herrera leading his briefing. But Voorman closed the conference room door behind him and locked it, so he obviously wasn’t expecting anyone else. “In case you are wondering, I’ll be briefing you talented people, Agent Herrera is in charge of field analysts and Agent Verger is going to be coordinating the tactical teams.”

Helix threw me a glance, something I caught more as a quick movement then a meeting of the eyes. He asked, “A joint operation?”

Amplifier cleared her throat. “I take it that doesn’t happen very often?”

“It hasn’t happened in over seventy years,” Helix said. “Not since Project Sumter was part of the war effort. Getting the tactical support and complicating factors of various talents to work together smoothly is very difficult. I’m not sure this is a good idea, Voorman.”

“We’ve been considering some revisions to normal procedures over the last few weeks,” he said. “And by we, I mean certain Senior Liaisons and the Senate committee. They’ve decided this is a good test case.”

That got an inaudible grumble from Helix. At least, I couldn’t make it out and I don’t think Voorman did, but from the way Amp snickered it probably wasn’t very nice. “Sir, with all due respect, why this one?” I asked. “The write up from the state police suggest there’s only twenty or so of these guys, and there’s no reason to expect all of them to be there at any given time. I think between us and the police we can handle this.”

“And I would agree with you. Except we received these from the South two days ago.” He set a pair of files on the desktop and pulled glossies out of them. At first he made to put them up on the whiteboard that dominated one wall in the room then he caught himself and handed them to me, apparently remembering I wouldn’t be able to see them otherwise just in time.

I squinted at the pictures as Voorman went on. “These two people are known criminals with unusual talents. The man is Static Shock, a fuse box, and the woman is Jane Hammer, a vector trap.”

“Vector trap?” Helix sounded as confused as I was. “What’s a vector trap?”

“You don’t know?” Amplifier asked, incredulous.

“There’s sixty-two known talents and some are rarer than others,” Helix said defensively. “I can’t have met or heard stories about them all.”

“I’ve never heard of vector traps either,” I said, passing the photos back to Voorman.

He put them up on the board as he said, “I’ll be covering the capabilities of both of talents, as not everyone here has heard them before.” I knew he was referring to Amplifier there, since I was pretty sure the rest of us were familiar with Circuit’s abilities. “But Agent Massif, I hope you took special note of Jane Hammer. We’re expecting you to act as a counter to her abilities.”

“Right.” Just as soon as I knew what those were I could get started. Unfortunately, Jane had looked pretty unremarkable – a brunette woman in ratty jeans and jacket that were either very old or very expensive. “I don’t suppose we’ve got any kind of way for me to pick her out of the crowd?”

Voorman pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, loosing very little of height in the process. “From what I hear she’ll be almost as distinctive as Agent Samson here, at least in your eyes. Her rap sheet says she’s also six feet tall, so that should help the rest of you identify her out.”

“Lovely,” Helix muttered.

“But all this is just in the event that the situation deteriorates,” Samson added. “I’ll be praying that things don’t go that far. They might choose to simply surrender once we make ourselves known. Assuming these two are even there.”

“How often does that happen?” Amplifier asked.

“Sometimes,” Helix said, voice grim. “But not often enough.”

——–

A weapons ring would be the perfect kind of thing to run out of an abandoned warehouse, or at least that’s what you’d think, right? So of course this particular group decided to hunker down in the back of an office complex. As nearly as we could tell the front half of the building was devoted to a legitimate business that managed vending machines. The constant in and out of concessions served as a cover for moving the other, more exotic wares that were sold out of the back.

The building all this happened in was a large, L-shaped three story structure. From the blueprints on file at city hall, most of the storage space in the structure was on the ground floor in the short part of the L. There was a small loading dock there with enough space to hold a half a dozen regular vehicles or a couple of semis at a time. We figured that was where the van we wanted would be kept.

Now since the van was merchandise the dealers had been looking to sell the state police had decided the easiest way to handle things was to pose as a group of people interested in buying the it. The police had handled that side of things through their own channels but, at our insistence, they’d agreed to pair me with the man that went to check out the vehicle. The rest of the Project people on hand would hang back with the police team and wait for our signal to sweep in and round up anyone we managed to catch on site once we’d confirmed that yes, this was the vehicle we’d come for. If it wasn’t our warrants would start to look a lot flimsier in court.

And yes, if we want to maintain good relations with the police that is something we have to think about.

What really struck me as funny about all this was that buying what was basically a small APC from a back alley arms dealer turned out to be a lot like buying any other used car. The dealer rep who brought the van out to the parking lot for us to look at spent most of his time talking, detailing the van’s gas mileage, it’s good condition, it’s spacious interior (which looked like it had been made that spacious when a cut-rate chop shop ripped all the innards out in one hour’s time) and, of course, the bulletproof plating. In turn, the undercover cop who was handling most of the deal pushed for a lower price and asked to take the van for a test drive, a cover so we could check the VIN. If it wasn’t the right van our warrant wasn’t valid.

And me? I wound up standing around and looking tough, which is fine since I’m a pretty big guy, at least vertically. The important part here was to make sure my temporary partner didn’t get hurt, there were only the two of us and if things got hot it would be a minute or two before the rest of our teams got there. So when he climbed into the van to check the VIN I moved so that my body blocked most of the door.

The rep and his two bodyguards were just starting to get curious about what the cop could be doing when he reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. I nodded back to him and he slammed the van door closed. One of the guards took a step forward to protest but I shoved a palm to his chest and brought him up short. With my other hand I pulled out a badge and said, “Gentlemen, you’re under arrest for accessory to the crime of assault.”

Dealer rep and his other bodyguard exchanged a look and the rep said, “You’re serious?”

“You have the right to remain-”

The bodyguard pulled a pistol of some kind and shot me before I could get any further and I assumed that pretty much ended any possibility of reading them their rights, or their coming peaceably for that matter. The rep had already turned towards the building and started yelling “Five-Oh!” when I took the other bodyguard, who had tried to back away when his partner started shooting, by the wrist and threw him to the ground.

The guy with the gun just stared at me for a second, then fired three more times. He only hit me twice and I felt more than saw the spikes of momentum bleed out of the bullets, through my body and down into the pavement at my feet once they made contact with my skin. Since the guard I had thrown probably had a gun too I kept hold of his wrist and used my position of superior leverage to quickly wrench his arm out of socket with a disturbing popping noise.

With his dominate arm out of service I figured I could focus on the other two, who were now staring at me like I was… well, what I was. Some kind of freak.

They bolted for the building as soon as I took one careful, measured step towards them. Unfortunately, since keeping at least one foot on the ground is a survival skill for me I had to keep that pace and let them get a good ways ahead of me. I’m told the slow, deliberate approach can be very unnerving to watch but I’ll tell you this, it’s frustrating to do. Not only did the other two guys get back to the building way ahead of me, at least two other people started shooting at me from the windows. I knew I couldn’t get hurt by it but they were ruining a perfectly good shirt and it was obnoxious. Plus the bullets were hot and they burned when they got stuck under my clothes.

I did my best to brush them out as I went but quickly wound up with bigger concerns on my hands. I’d covered about half the distance between the van and the building when something dropped off the roof and hit the ground, becoming a very bright knot of momentum that rocketed towards me like a cheetah after it’s prey.

The vector trap had arrived.

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Water Fall: Hot Air

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

I set my keys down on the end table in the hallway and went into the living room, taking a seat in the chair. Darryl shifted a bit on the sofa so we were looking more or less across at one another. Or at least, we could look right at each other if we wanted to, we avoided it at first. I cracked my knuckles, working the joints long past the point where there was any tension left in them, and finally found the courage to ask, “What brings you to my place tonight, Darryl?”

If my showing no surprise at finding him was bothering Darryl, he didn’t show it. Didn’t show much of anything, really, just carefully set his cane on the floor and leaned it against the sofa. Darryl is in charge of the regional Analysis office, and the job was high stress before he lost his wife. After all, it involves managing nearly sixty people with genius level intelligence and an unusually good ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts. They’re smart, they know it and yet sometimes their connections to reality are tenuous at best.

The last time I’d seen him before Mona died, he’d taken to using the cane and his hair and beard were starting to go gray around the edges. He was getting close to fifty, which wasn’t all that old, but if he always looked a little older than he was I chalked that up to the car accident he was in a few years ago and the stress of his job. Now the only color in his hair was gray and it seemed to be loosing the battle against the white rushing in; even sitting I could tell he was developing a stoop.

But the physical changes weren’t what bothered me most. He clearly had no idea what he should say. This is the man who started planning his wife’s birthday party three months in advance, had a gift sign-up sheet and made sure the new lamp and sofa she was getting were color coordinated. Darryl lives to plan things out in advance. But he’d shown up to talk to me with nothing in mind. He was falling apart before my eyes and I hated to see it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t stay longer at the funeral,” I blurted out, trying desperately to fill the silence. “I just spent a lot of time with people who rubbed me the wrong way and after the-”

“It’s all right,” Darryl said, finding his voice at last. “I really wasn’t that excited about talking to most of them, either.”

And that was pretty much all there was to say about that. “How are you do-”

“That’s a stupid question, and you know it.” He had me there. Obviously he wasn’t doing very well, and we were both smart enough to know it. I just couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Helix, I’m not here for platitudes.”

“No?” I had a feeling I knew what he was there for but I didn’t want to ask.

“No.” Darryl pulled his gaze away from his cane so he could look me in the eyes. It was like staring into a blast furnace. Trust me, I’ve done it. “I need you to do me a favor.”

That was what I’d been afraid of. “Darryl…”

“Let me do something, Helix.” There was a weird tone to his voice. It was like conviction, except darker. The only time I’d heard anything remotely like it; it had been coming from Circuit. “Let me help catch him. Let me back in the field!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I saw the indignation building up in his eyes and realized that had been a poor choice of words. I hurried to try and smooth things over. “Look at yourself, Darryl, you’re just not physically fit for that kind of work any more.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Darryl snapped, thumping his cane on the floor. “We’re short on field analysts and most of them are too mentally unstable to cut it out there. Voorman’s willing to give me a chance if we can get the Senate Committee to make an exception and let me into this investigation.”

“Well I’m not!” I slammed a hand down on the armrest of the chair and swore. “You’re in no condition to go out into the field. It doesn’t matter if you’re physically or mentally unable to keep up, you’re a liability either way!”

“Helix, there’s no one in the Project who’s been an analyst for Circuit’s cases longer than I have!”

I sighed. “That’s got nothing to do with it, Darryl. In the field-”

“I need to do something.”Darryl got up with a sudden jerk and I followed as he teetered unsteadily, as if he didn’t know what to do now that he was upright. He got his cane on the floor before I had to catch him, but it was a near thing. “You can’t sideline me on this. It was my wife-”

“Do not use Mona as an excuse,” I snapped. “You just want to get even. We’ve both been in this business long enough to know how that works out.”

For just a second I thought I was about to get hit with Darryl’s cane, and I might even have deserved it, but he managed to stop the motion before it was more than a spasm of his arm. “I am not trying to excuse anything,” he said in a dangerous tone, voice little more than a whisper. “I am going to find that man. And I am going to bring him to justice.”

I ran a hand over my face, wondering when the day would be over. This could have gone a lot better if I wasn’t so tired from the last few days. Weeks. Years, really. “Go home, Darryl. I know that Frostburn and Coldspike came by with a new boss who was offering you a job. If their boss wants to get some fresh faced kids killed working with you, that’s his call. I’m not doing it. If you were half the man I thought you were, you wouldn’t want to do it either.”

 “Fine.” There was an ocean of meaning in that one word. I couldn’t meet his eyes so I stared away and into the kitchen. I heard his cane tapping on the floor, then the sound of the door closing behind him. I glanced at my watch and realized I’d managed to ruin a friendship in less than five minutes.

——–

After Darryl left I found I couldn’t sit still. I tried to cook up some salmon for dinner and wound up fumbling with the vacuum sealed packaging on it for five minutes until I accidentally melted it into a semi-toxic mess in a moment of frustration. After glaring at it for a second like the fish was somehow to blame I tossed the whole mess in the garbage and changed out of my suit and into a comfortable set of sweats, grabbed the key to my workshop off the key rack in the closet and headed downstairs intending to burn off as much frustration as I could with hammer and power tools.

Unfortunately a much more convenient target showed itself before I could get out of the building.

I took the stairs down to the lobby instead of riding the elevator. It was only four flights and driving mad is never a good idea so I figured the exercise could only help. Maybe if I’d taken the elevator I would have missed Teresa on her way up, and maybe that would have been for the better. As it was, I nearly ran her down as I stalked through the small ground floor lobby of my building.

Apparently my mood at the moment was close enough to normal that she didn’t immediately tumble to the fact something was up, because as I stalked past she cheerfully waved at me with the folder she was holding. “Helix! Good timing.”

Now it goes without saying that anyone who deals with criminals and information control on a regular basis develops a certain amount of professional paranoia as a matter of survival. And we at Project Sumter have more than most. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that I felt like I’d walked into a set up. It sure seemed like Teresa was confirming it when she said, “I brought the paperwork for the-”

And I couldn’t stand it anymore. At the word paperwork I grabbed the folder so fast I could still see the afterimage of me grabbing while I was throwing it into the trashcan by the elevator. Yes, it was incredibly therapeutic.

Judging by Teresa’s slack-jawed expression it was also not what she was expecting.

“What is this, Teresa?” There weren’t any other people in the lobby at that exact moment but longstanding force of habit kept me from raising my voice. I settled for crowding her a lot closer than I would usually get to someone who knows what I can do and using the harshest tone I could manage when talking in a whisper. “Darryl makes sense, and even Sanders, but what the hell are you doing sticking your nose in this?”

“What? Sanders wasn’t-”

I lashed out to the side, smashing my fist into the frame of the elevator door and sending a spike of pain lancing up my arm. “Don’t tell me he didn’t put you up to this. Who else-” A new, even worse idea occurred to me. “Is this some kind of stupid political play? Is Dawson trying to get Darryl fired or disgraced or something?”

“Is Brahms-” Teresa shook her head, confusion giving way to frustration. “Look, I don’t know what the deal is between you and Senator Dawson, but he’s not in the business of playing games with what he thinks is important. And that includes Project Sumter.”

“Then tell me what’s going on here!” I jabbed a finger at her accusingly. “What good can it possibly do to drag a grieving man out into the meat grinder? Circuit’s ruined hundreds of people’s lives in his crazy attempt to do whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. Darryl’s got enough to deal with trying to put himself back together he can’t possibly do any good coping with a megalomaniac on top of that.”

Suddenly the whole mess was more than I could take and I found myself walking away, back towards the stairs, without realizing I’d decided to storm out. You’re really not supposed to walk out on your supervisor like that but by the same token once you’re mad enough to actually do it the supervisor is supposed to let you go cool you head for a bit, kind of as a matter of courtesy. It’s an unwritten rule.

Teresa apparently never read the unwritten rulebook, because I’d barely gone five steps when I heard her heels clacking on the floor behind me.

If there’s one downside of being a short guy – okay, one downside of being a short guy that’s particularly important in times like these – it’s that you can’t do a good job of glowering at anyone who’s taller than you. You also can’t really loom over them or do a good job of growling out threats. So when you’re mad and you need to prove it to someone exploding is pretty much the only option you have.

I skidded to a stop and whirled around, shouting, “The answer is no! I don’t care who asks, or why! I’m not going to sign off on Darryl going out in the field again. He’s a wreck and he’s going to get himself killed. Don’t ask me to give the okay on burying him next to his wife! It’s not worth it-”

“Helix, shut up,” Teresa said, grabbing my arms by the elbows as I flailed them aimlessly in the air. “You’re sinking.”

More than the fact that she managed to grab me by my elbows, which can’t have been an easy shot, or what she was saying what really got my attention was her tone of voice. She wasn’t yelling, wasn’t hissing under her breath, wasn’t even using a lecturing tone like I might get in a dressing down from Voorman or Sanders. It was an even, pleasant, almost banal kind of a voice, like you might use when discussing the weather. Or highly classified government secrets while in a very public place. It was out of place enough to get my attention.

And as soon as she had it I realized she was right. The air around my hands was shimmering like a blacktop driveway on a hot day in July. I’d subconsciously formed a small heat sink, not even hot enough to boil water but still enough that someone might notice if I leaned on a wall and made the paint bubble or something. It was also why she’d grabbed me at my elbows, rather than my wrists. I exhaled slowly and did my best to loosen up. The heat around me relaxed and trickled back to its normal placement.

“Helix,” Teresa said, speaking quietly and making sure she had my attention before she went on. “I’m not here to talk to you about Darryl. I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about there, although I can guess.”

“You’re not.” I stared at her for a moment, trying to get a read on her expression and finding I was way too wound up to pull it off. “Why are you here, then?”

She let go of my arms and took a step back, straightening her suit out with quick, practiced gestures that disguised the way she quickly glanced around to make sure we were still alone. Once she was sure we were she said, “Three days ago a military convoy in Nebraska was robbed by a flying man.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, then immediately wanted to kick myself. Most people would say that about heat sinks like me.

“That’s what the Inland West office said, too. But in the process of interviewing the guards it turns out he could also make lightning arc from light fixtures into people.” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s a bit different, but still sounds familiar, am I right?”

It was a bit different from what I’d experienced on Diversy Street a few weeks ago, at least in scale, but she was right. It did sound a lot like Circuit. “When are we going out to look?”

“Hold up.” She put a hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice. “Are you sure you’re ready for this? We can send someone else if we really have to. It’s basically just a postmortem at this point, Circuit’s long gone.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m good, Teresa.”

“Helix.” Her eyes flicked away for a moment and she took a deep breath. “Look, I know a few things about survivor’s guilt. You know about my dad. And he…”

He was her only family, before he ran into a serial killer. I’d always assumed her job was part of a search for closure. Now I wondered if it was something more. “Yeah, I know. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost a fellow agent, Teresa. I was closer to Mona than most. But I’ve dealt with this before.”

She slid her hands down until she was holding mine, a surprisingly trusting gesture given what had just happened, then looked back up at me and I saw a glimpse of raw pain in her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault.”

I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to. For a second we stood there, looking like we were sharing some sort of intimate moment, feeling like a mess. Then I realized something. “Teresa, did I just throw the file on that hijacking into the trash?”

“What? Oh, yeah, you did.”

I stepped away and quickly fished it out after hitting the elevator call button. For some reason I felt too drained to go back up to my apartment by stair. “Okay, let me grab my go bag and I’ll be right back down with you.”

“Helix. You’re sure you’re fine?”

The question was asked with all her usual polite calm. So I nodded and said, “Sure.”

After all, if she could lie about her feelings, so could I.

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Water Fall: Cold Leads

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

After four days we were almost done. Circuit had left information on nearly a hundred different pieces of property among the papers we’d recovered from his warehouse a few weeks ago. But so far digging into the real estate agents and owners of those properties hadn’t turned anything up. The last stop we were making was also the most significant.  Keller Development held almost a third of the properties on Circuit’s list and of those, the firm had acquired more than half in the last six months.  All things considered Analysis felt that they had the best chance of being a front, patsy or even co-conspirator in whatever Circuit was doing.

It had also taken longest to get an appointment with them, although that didn’t mean much either way as they were also the largest firm we’d been dealing with. In addition to it’s multiple commercial and residential real estate holdings, Keller’s also owned a medium sized stretch of waterfront, the marina there was where the firm’s founders had gotten their start. While he had few holdings outside the county the owner, Roger Keller, was still something of a political force in the city. Project Sumter was an agency of the national government but that didn’t mean we didn’t like to maintain good local relations as well, so asking questions without drawing heat was going to be a priority. I was planning on letting Teresa do most of the talking.

Provided, of course, she could stay awake for the interview. She’d slept through almost the entire drive to the Keller offices, and I was hoping the hour of rest would help her keep her mind clear. We had nothing so far and I was hoping that things would be different by the time we were done.

Even so, I hesitated to wake her up after putting the car into park and switching off the engine. She’d proven a remarkably sharp, aggressive and reliable supervisor in the time I’d worked with her but I knew she was what she was because she also came with baggage. While I have something most people would consider a superpower I don’t have much in the way of emotional trauma to go with it. Sure, some people might say I have a chip on my shoulder but I suspect that has more to do with being short and scrawny than anything else.

On the other hand, Teresa had set out to get the job she had in part as a way to cope. Not doing it, or doing it badly, would probably be worse for her in the long run than loosing a little sleep. I nudged her gently. “Teresa. We’re here.”

Asleep she looked remarkably peaceful but as soon as she snapped awake layers of stress started to roll down over her face, followed by the fine tuned professionalism that kept the old troubles in and new ones out.  It was kind of sad to watch, really. “Good. We’re here,” she said, rubbing grit from her eyes. I glanced away, Teresa always stretches after sitting for a while and it’s the kind of thing that leads red blooded guys to stare in ways that would get me smacked by my dad and chewed out by my mom. “Where are we?”

Okay, so there was a crack in the usual professional façade. “Last place on the list of real estate developers.” I grabbed the stack of folders in the back seat and flipped through them until I found the right one. “You feeling okay there, boss?”

“Just tired.” She took the folder from me and got out of the car.

I followed suit after putting the other folders back. “Do you remember which one that is?”

“Uh…”

I stopped, more than a little surprised. This wasn’t just a crack in the façade, this was starting to look like a full blown break. I turned and looked at her over the top of my old, beat up Ford Escort. “Look, Teresa, I know you’re old friends with Senator Dawson and his family. His daughter was your friend, got you this job, helped you live the dream. But if you stay up all night kibitzing on the investigation into her disappearance you’re going to be too tired to learn anything that will help with her case; to say nothing of the one you’re actually assigned to.”

A flicker of irritation passed under her mask of propriety, another troubling crack in her usual aura of competence. “Helix-”

“I’m serious. We need your A game here.” I shrugged. “I’m not going to say no one I’ve known in the Project has ever taken on extra curricular investigations, because that would make me a liar. But you can’t let it interfere with your assignments.”

She sighed. “Okay, fine. Your advice is appreciated.”

“Good.” I pushed off the car and headed for the building, a tall, well built place with a bunch of architectural flourishes like columns and shaped blocks which probably have technical terms of some sort. Me, I didn’t know them but I could tell it was a fancy place.

But local development firms, even fairly prosperous ones, didn’t need an entire building like that for their offices. They did take up the whole top floor, though. As we waited for the elevator in the lobby Teresa said, “So I didn’t read the brief on this place. Bring me up to speed.”

“Sure.” I took the folder and flipped it open to the most relevant statistics as we stepped into the elevator and Teresa punched in our destination. “Keller owns a large number of the properties we’re looking into, most of the commercial buildings and at least half of the smaller rental properties. They don’t deal in private real estate, so none of the houses on the list have-”

“Wait.” I glanced up from the file to find Teresa looking a bit like a deer in the headlights. “These are the Keller Development offices?”

“Yes…” I flipped the folder back closed slowly. “This is probably the most important interview in the batch and anything significant learned here is just going to wind up in our laps anyway. I figured we might as well do the legwork ourselves and kept it for us when handing out assignments.”

Teresa sighed and rubbed a thumb along the bridge of her nose. “Helix, I know you looked into my background when I first joined up.”

I could feel myself blushing a little. “Look, that was-”

“I’m not complaining because it was entirely justified given the circumstances,” she said, ignoring me completely. “But I’m surprised you didn’t come up with the names Keller, Sykes and Oldfather.”

With a sinking feeling I started to suspect where this conversation was going. The elevator opened with a cheerful ding and I instinctively stuck out a hand to keep the door from closing as I said, “I’ve heard of Roger Keller before. Who hasn’t, around here? But Sykes and Oldfather are mysteries to me.”

“You must have done a really roundabout job investigating, then.” She shook her head and stepped out into the lobby. “I can understand not knowing Kevin Oldfather, but Matthew Sykes? You’ve really never heard of him?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Then you are in luck.” I turned and found a middle aged man in a wheel chair making his way across the lobby towards us. While Keller Development’s lobby was full of low benches and potted plants that should have made maneuvering across the floor a challenge for him; he handled the obstacles with something approaching grace and all the while kept his face turned towards the two of us. The face in question had a sleepy, relaxed look. “I’ve heard of Matthew Sykes,” he added, in case we had been wondering. “Few know more about him than me, in fact, seeing as I am him.”

Teresa made a funny squeaking sound that I did my best to cover for. “Quite a coincidence, Mr. Sykes,” I said, nudging Herrera in the hope that she would calm down a bit. “Do you work for Mr. Keller, or are you an associate?”

“Work for-” He laughed, the chair rolling to a stop.

“Mr. Sykes is the owner of Sykes Telecommunications, Hel-” Teresa caught herself before she used my codename in public and smoothly turned it into something else. “He owns one of the largest fiber optic networks in the state, among other things.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard your name before.”

“Not a problem, really,” Sykes said, wheeling himself the last few feet over to us. He was wearing a light gray suit and matching tie that looked expensive enough but, by contrast, his wheelchair was a very basic metal and fabric thing. Not what I would have expected from a well moneyed business man. At the very least I would have expected something self propelled, although from the looks of his hands and upper body Matthew Sykes was benefiting from the exercise. “STC is primarily based in Springfield. We’ve been expanding in this area over the last several years but we’re hardly a household name yet. Which makes me wonder how it is that you’ve heard of me, young lady.”

Teresa glanced down at her hands quickly, composed herself, although I’m not sure Sykes noticed the difference between flustered and normal, and said, “I was sponsored by the Oldfather Fund when I was seventeen. One of the first, actually.”

“I see. That would be what, eight, nine years ago?” Sykes turned thoughtful, his gaze went off into the distance as he absently drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair. “Seventeen is unusually old, even for us. What’s your name, if I could ask?”

“Teresa Herrera.” She hesitated, then added, “Before, it was Ortiz.”

“You forgot ‘Senior Special Agent’,” I said, moving slightly so I could see the two of them at once and displaying my ID. Like most such cards carried by Sumter agents it placed us with the government agency we were currently working with. I’ve had as many as two dozen in a year before. “We’re with the FBI. Care to clue me in to what we’re talking about?”

“Relax.” I caught Teresa giving my ID a quick glance to remember what my current identity was. Hopefully she’d mention it out loud, I wasn’t really sure what it was at the moment either. “It’s most likely not directly relevant to this case.”

Sykes laughed again. “I would hope not. The Oldfather Fund is a charity, Agent…” He squinted at my badge for a second when I didn’t supply my own name. “Agent Hoffman. We help people finance adoptions.”

“There’s… a need for that?”

“It’s very expensive, sometimes.” Sykes shrugged. “Frequently more so than having a child in a state of the art hospital. But we specialize in helping people who are interested in adopting a child with more challenging circumstances.”

“Challenging?” I glanced at Teresa. Her birth father had been killed by a talent codenamed Lethal Injection, a serial killer who used his control over the viscosity of liquids in strange and disturbing ways.

But Teresa seemed to guess what I was thinking and shook her head slightly. “Once children are past the age of five or six their odds of getting adopted drop dramatically. Anyone older than ten is virtually guaranteed to remain in the system until they reach adulthood.”

Which didn’t sound like a great way to grow up but didn’t directly tie the Oldfather Fund back to the case. It also didn’t sound like a the Oldfather fund specifically dealt with children who had had some kind of a brush with talented people. “I see. And Mr. Keller is a member of this fund?”

“Sure.” Sykes leaned back in his wheelchair causing the material to creak slightly. I realized that it wasn’t quite the barebones package I had thought it was – it wasn’t made of metal and canvas it was made of metal and leather. I wondered absently if it was a custom job or if you could just order them out of a magazine somewhere.

Sykes went on, unaware of my moment of distraction. “Kevin Oldfather interviewed Roger and I while writing a book on older children and the foster system. We were two of the rare adoptees over the age of ten.”

“What Matthew forgets to mention is that we were chosen as much to keep the family business in the family as anything.” If Sykes didn’t look much like a high powered business man in his simple suit and wheelchair, the new guy did. His slicked black hair and neatly trimmed goatee clearly said he had enough money not to care what people thought about him, while the suit he wore, which probably cost more than I made in a year, reminded people he could still be in touch with fashion if he wanted to. There was a sort of vague slickness to him that set my teeth on edge. He had a cold look on his face at first, but then he glanced at Sykes and smiled slightly, which helped a little. “Hello Matthew. Legs doing any better?”

“I can’t complain, Roger,” Sykes replied, his own smile transforming him from sleepily interested to fully engaged. I couldn’t tell if it was a practiced skill or just part of who he was. “The doctors tell me there’s another surgery that might give me more mobility back in the knees, probably let me walk again in another couple of years, but I’m not sure I want to go through another recovery right now.”

“Best to take it easy.” The smile, faint though it was, vanished and Roger Keller turned to give Teresa and I his full attention. “Well, to business. My secretary told me my two o’clock and two thirty appointments were out here chatting, so I guess that makes you the two from the FBI.”

“Actually, Mr. Keller, I didn’t realize we’d be interviewing you today,” Teresa said. “As I was just telling Mr. Sykes, I was sponsored by the Oldfather Fund when I was younger and I’m not sure-”

“You must have been one of the very first.” Keller tapped his chin absently. “Is this one of those conflict of interest things? Am I suspected of something?”

“We were just hoping you could help us by providing us with some information about some properties that came up in the course of an investigation,” I said, tapping my folder with one hand.

“Well, that shouldn’t be very difficult then, should it?” Keller asked. “I’ll tell you what I can about properties we’ve developed for ourselves, but our work for other clients will have to remain confidential.”

“It might be better if I came back with another-”

“Look, I’m a busy man.” Keller turned and started across the lobby. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to work you into my schedule again so if you have questions to ask, let’s get to them, shall we?”

I glanced at Teresa, who shrugged and said, “At this point it is mostly just fact finding. It probably can’t hurt anything if I’m there.”

“Well, good luck,” Sykes said, backing his wheelchair up a few paces to give us an unobstructed path. “And don’t mind Roger. He’s all bark and no bite, I’m sure he’ll cooperate as best he can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sykes.” I wondered what had brought him here. It felt like there was something that I wasn’t quite getting but I figured I could always ask Teresa about it later. As we hurried after Keller I quietly asked, “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“You were right. We do need to find out whatever Keller knows, and we don’t have time to wait for whenever we can make another appointment.” She shrugged. “Nothing for it but to see what he can tell us.”

——–

As it turned out, it wasn’t much. The buildings were a mashup of places Keller Development had invested in and places clients had asked them to redevelop on their behalf. In the short half hour we had all we really managed to do was get Keller’s promise to send us the details that had led his people to purchase those properties his firm held independently. He emphatically refused to ask his clients if he could share any of their information with us. In the end, if there was some kind of grand scheme to Keller’s work in the city, we left his office with no clue of what it might be. Analysis could sort out the data he gave us, but Teresa and I were fresh out of angles to follow up on.

So we went back to our office and wrote up the necessary reports, then went our separate ways.

My apartment is not really a place where I get to spend a whole lot of time. Even on my days off I don’t really stay there much, I have a workshop elsewhere in town where I much prefer to be. Basically, I just use it as a place to store changes of clothes. It’s kind of lonely, really.

Even so, when I get back there I take a few basic precautions. For example, before I unlock the door I check to make sure the room is at an even temperature. While I don’t have infrared vision or anything I can “feel” the temperature of my surroundings rising into cold spots or sinking into hot spots. An empty room is on an even level, because the whole place is literally at room temperature. However, today there was a slight depression in one corner of my apartment. Someone had dropped by to pay me a visit.

I checked the lock but it showed no signs of being picked or forced. There are a few people who have spare keys to my place, because being a lone wolf really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At the very least, if I ever locked myself out it was cheaper to drive over to Jack’s place and pick up the spare than pay the fee to have the building supervisor open the door for me. But I had a feeling it wasn’t my tactical team leader that was waiting for me. There were two spare keys and I’d lent the other one out a month ago, to help with the planning for a birthday party.

With a sinking feeling I let myself into the apartment and looked into the small living room. Darryl Templeton was there, sitting on the sofa, turning his cane in his hands slowly. He looked up from his cane when he heard the door open, did his best to force a smile. “Hello, Helix. Looks like you had another long day. Sorry to bother you, but do you have a minute for an old friend?”

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Water Fall: Cold Greetings

Posted by natechen on

Six weeks, Five days before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Helix

We never did go to Condition One.

By all rights the fact that Circuit had killed Mona should have brought the full resources of Project Sumter to bear on the task of finding him and locking him in a fully insulated, nonmagnetic cell lit by candles. At least, such was my first instinct, and probably that of every other field agent we had.

But the reality is never so clear cut. There was just too much going in the nation and the world to take all of our resources and throw them at a single problem. That didn’t mean finding Circuit wasn’t a priority. And for the Midwest Branch, the place where things had gone bad, it was priority one. We didn’t pull every talent we had off their assignments and send them after Circuit. For example, Pastor Manuel Rodriguez, also known as Agent Samson, was looking for Senator Dawson’s daughter, a case we believed was related, but officially had nothing to do with Circuit.

But the other fourteen talents working out of the Midwest office were all called in and given a summary of Circuit’s recent activities, his know goals including those he stated when he contacted us directly a few weeks ago and those we’ve inferred from his activities, and all leads pertaining to his whereabouts, which was a very short list. Then we were all given assignments and sent back out.

Teresa and I, and Massif and Verger, pretty much kept doing the things we’d already been working on. We’d juggled this case back and forth for a few weeks already and the meeting would probably have been a complete waste of time for us if we hadn’t been the ones doing most of the presenting. Everyone else got assigned lower priority legwork to spend time on between other duties.With that thrilling morning out of the way I headed back to my desk to grab some lunch and start putting together a priority list for the various real estate dealers and developers we needed to interview.

Trouble was waiting for me.

It came in the form of two tall, cool blondes who were sitting on my desk and chatting animatedly. Their backs were to me as I approached across the floor so I slapped the presentation notes I was carrying down on my desk to get their attention. They turned inwards and glared back at me, asking in unison, “Yes?”

I ignored their eerily similar faces and said, “Hello, Frostburn. Hello, Coldsnap. Get off my desk.”

The twins looked at each other and shared a secretive smile. Frostburn, the older of the two, said, “He never changes, does he?”

“Every once and a while he gets another gray hair,” Coldsnap said. They looked back at me. “Hello, Helix.”

I crossed my arms and glared at them, which was not as easy as it had been when I was taller than they were. “You two aren’t even cleared to be in here. Thought you’d have headed home after the funeral.”

The girls finally got off my desk and faced me, their matching charcoal slacks and professional blouses making them look a good deal like actual members of the office staff, much like Cheryl O’Hara, our acting Records chief. I could also see that they had guest passes clipped on, like we give out to Senators and their staff on the rare occasions when they come for a visit. Coldsnap folded her arms across her chest, Frostburn rested her palms on the edge of my desk.

I’d known these girls for nearly a decade, ever since I talked Darryl into getting them placed with my grandparents after we rescued them from some sort of demented, Neo-Nazi breeding program. They were digging their heels in, getting ready for an argument. A part of me really, really wished they’d waited until after I got lunch. I slipped into my chair and did my best not to tap my fingers impatiently. “Okay, I get it. This is a big deal. What’s going on? I’m still trying to convince people you’re a trustworthy-”

“It’s not about a job,” Frostburn said, shaking her head.

“We’ve got a job now,” Coldsnap added, running it along just behind her sister’s sentence so it felt like they were talking as a unit, rather than separate people. “And not one in fashion retail, anymore.”

“I thought you liked that job,” I said, raising my eyebrows. It hadn’t really challenged them, but at least they knew the trends and didn’t find it boring. They’d wanted to do more, but their history created even more difficulties with the Oversight Committee than mine did. “Never mind. If it’s not about a job, why are you here?”

“Darryl,” Frostburn said, tilting her chin up and triggering a rapid fire cascaded of talk I knew all to well.

Coldsnap picked up the train of thought immediately. “He needs to do something, anything to keep his mind occupied.”

“There’s only one case of any importance right now, and we both know it,” Frostburn added. “The guy who killed his wife.”

“Hey, now,” I said, trying to stop them before they built up a head of steam. “You’re not supposed to-”

“Besides, Darryl probably isn’t going to want to work anything else,” Coldsnap said, running right over me. I should have known better than to try and interrupt them – if I’d known them as well as I do now when they got their codenames I’d have pushed to lump them together as Avalanche. “He wants to get Circuit.”

“Ask him to be on your team,” Frostburn finished. “He needs it.”

I looked at the two of them for a moment, trying to figure out their angle. They’d known Darryl just as long as they’d known me but we’d both been careful not to talk too much about our work when we’d seen them, which admittedly wasn’t that often in  the last few years. For that matter, even my grandparents, Sergeant Wake and Clear Skies, had shown a little more care in what they told them after the mess my joining the Project had turned into.

So how had they known about Circuit? “You two got a job.” I swiveled in my chair a little as I thought it over, looking at each one out of the corner of my eye. “Who gave you a job?”

They exchanged a guilty glance I’d seen a hundred times before.

“Does it matter?” Coldsnap asked, pouting a little.

“Yes.” I wasn’t buying, even if Coldsnap was really good at selling it.

Frostburn sighed. “You’re not cleared to know that.”

“I’m not cleared to know that.” I stared at first one, then the other until they broke eye contact. “Me. I have clearance up to Top Secret. There are something like a hundred and fifty codewords I’m cleared to pull from Records – including yours – and I’m not cleared to know who your employer is?”

They flinched and Coldsnap nodded. I realized my voice had risen and pulled it down to a more normal level. “Well, after seventy five years dealing talents ourselves I suppose we’re overdue for another government agency sticking it’s fingers in the pie.”

Coldsnap goggled at me. “You missed the fact that my sister had a crush on you for three years but you figured that out five minutes?”

Frostburn’s pale skin lit up like a flare and she slapped her sister’s arm so hard heads turned. “You were not-”

“And now they’re going to try and poach Darryl off of us by offering him a job where he can chase Open Circuit.” I opted to steer well clear of that other can of worms Coldsnap had just opened. “I’m guessing you’re coming here to tell me about this is not part of the recruiting plan?”

“No,” Frostburn mumbled, no longer making eye contact.

“We’re here to prove our group has a different perspective on how to deal with talented problems,” Coldsnap said, rubbing her arm. “To Darryl, not any of your agents. We’re not poaching actual talents. We kind of need experienced supervisors more than talents right now, and Darryl certainly qualifies. But honestly, Frostburn and I would rather Darryl stay here where someone like you, with a level head-” I heard a muffled laugh from the direction of Massif’s desk but we all ignored it, “-and plenty of experience, was with him rather than our team, which is new and… untested.”

“Makes sense.” I sighed and shoved my chair back from the desk, crashing into Bergstrum’s a second later. Sometimes there’s not as much room as I’d like out on the floor. “That was a good thought, girls. I appreciate knowing what you’ve just told me.”

Coldsnap perked up a bit. “Then you’ll do-”

“No.” Shocked them both for the second time in ten minutes, a personal best. “It’s not my decision, it’s Project policy. It’s good sense. And it’s for the best. I’m not pushing against this one. If some other branch of the Government wants to give him a job I’ll do what I can to keep him here. We certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. But that’s all I can do, girls. Sorry.”

A final look passed between them, another one I recognized well. They’d decided to give up on it. “If that’s the way you feel, Helix.” Frostburn put a hand on her sister’s shoulder and pulled her away. “But if you have to mention that there’s a new game in town…”

“I’ve been keeping secrets longer than you two have been alive. Don’t tell me how to do my job.” I spread my hands. “No one asks how I learn these things anymore, anyways.”

The door to the room swung open and an unfamiliar man with dark brown hair and the mother of all scowls on his face came in, a talent known as Lightning Cage following just a step behind. I smiled a little and said, “Tell Grandma and Grandpa hello for me when you get home.”

They nodded gratefully and started across the room to meet up with Cage and his sourfaced companion. They probably weren’t going home, but that was the kind of thing I was going to have to pretend I didn’t know, at least for a little bit.

“Friends of yours?” Massif asked, sliding his chair down a couple of desks to come to a rest behind Teresa’s.

“Old friends of the family,” I said.

He nodded. “Your talent?”

“Something similar.” The twins were cold spikes. While I pushed down and created places where heat could pool, spikes push upwards and heat flows out of the area, creating incredibly cold temperatures. Project Sumter had originally considered them separate abilities but it had been proven that people could do both. Most just had a natural inclination to one or the other. I knew that Massif could see some sign of what I did with his unusual vision, it made sense that he’d see something from Frostburn and Coldsnap, too.

He grunted and looked after the twins as they left. “Trying to get them a job?”

“Why, you interested in them?” I asked, drumming my fingers absently. “Professionally or personally? Neither one has had a date since Grandpa tore the tires straight off-”

“Neither one,” Massif said quickly. “Just curious if that was why I’ve still got your last trainee.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, Amplifier had been assigned to Massif, hadn’t she? “How’s that going?”

He shrugged. “She’s a handful. But in a lot of ways it’s better than field work, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m taking her out to meet with some people in the community tomorrow.”

“Well, if you need any advice with her field stress test…”

“I’m not a natural sadist like you,” Massif said. “But I’ll figure something out. The Watch is trolling for good incidents for me. What about you? They’re enough like you I assume you’ve got a fabulous idea for their stress test already picked out.”

I glanced over to where the twins were chatting with Cage and whoever the dour looking fellow was with him. They really were a lot different from when we’d first found them in a house with the corpse of a man they’d accidentally turned into an ice sculpture. Even if they could be cleared to work with the Project, they’d probably be required to undergo a “real” stress test to measure how much they’d changed. Frankly, that didn’t seem fair. “They’ve had all the testing they need for one lifetime.”

“They pass or fail?” Massif asked.

I shrugged. “Depends on who you ask.”

——–

Massif

I was still thinking about Helix and his strange friends the next day when Harriet and I picked up Amplifier and headed out towards Chinatown. The field stress test is something of a rite of passage and Helix is famous for being tough on the people he runs through it. Of the eleven talents who’ve had the unique pleasure of entering the Project with Helix as their sponsor, ten had to undergo the stress test more than once. Four had to go through it three or more times.

I got it the second time around and frankly I have no idea how anyone finds the courage for a third try.

But it looked like I was going to be sponsoring talent for Amplifier through all the really tricky portions of her application to Project Sumter and that meant, among other things, representing her to the Senate Oversight Committee, vetting her first oversight agent and putting her through a field stress test of my own design, with the decision over whether she passed or failed ultimately falling to me. Helix had been really dodgy about whether he planned to take back over and do the rest the day before, so I was guessing it was all on me. I’d done it once before, but I’ll admit that Amplifier brought a whole different dynamic to things.

“So you actually know a kung fu master?” She asked, doing her best to lean forward and make eye contact from the back seat.

“Not gung fu,” I said. “Wushu. Gung fu is like excellence, or a level of accomplishment. That’s why the old, badly translated movies would give you phrases like, ‘You don’t have enough gung fu.’ They were literally saying, ‘You’re not accomplished enough to take me on.'”

“Whatever.” She shook her head in frustration. “You know a wushu master, then.”

“Giancarlo He-sifu, to be exact,” I said. “He spotted me when I was eight and realized I had a talent. It took him a while to convince my parents studying wushu would help me with the problems that talent gave me, but I wound up learning from him eventually.”

“Giancarlo He?” I could hear disbelief in every syllable. “What kind of a code name is that?”

“It’s not,” Harriet said, whipping the car through traffic with dizzying speed. Even if the Project said she was getting too old for field work I don’t think most drivers in town would agree with them. “To the best of our knowledge, Giancarlo He is not a talent. He can just recognize them when he sees them.”

“What?” Amplifier held her hands up in a horrible imitation of a wushu stance. “Because he has mystic training?”

“That’s entirely possible,” Harriet said with a shrug. “Look at Chinese myths and culture. Superhuman people have been a part of their lore since before the Roman Empire was pulling itself up by the Greeks. Of course there’s going to be more awareness of talents built into their culture, not all those legends can pure fairy tale. And talents like Al’s both lend themselves to martial arts and require unique work arounds for people who want to survive fighting them. Wushu is a combat sport now, but it comes from a long and fairly mystical fighting tradition where talented individuals would be viewed as natural born prodigies and respected, not freaks to be feared. So of course wushu masters can spot talents.”

“That’s not to say there aren’t talents in the He family,” I added. “In fact, I think there’s a couple. But talents are weird – even the most common ones can skip whole generations sometimes. There’s nothing solid proving they’re actually genetic, and not dependent on some sort of weird environmental factor.”

“The evidence is split,” Harriet said. “Helix gets his code name because he comes from a long running family of talents. But the talent on his grandfather’s side only turned up ever other generation, while his grandmother’s side sometimes produced two or three talents a generation. When they married, their kids had no talents, then Helix popped up with his maternal grandmother’s ability. No sign of talent on the father’s side of the family. At the same time, we’ve found a pair of identical twins with the exact same talent, right down to how well they can use it. It’s strange.”

“Maybe the twins just encountered something weird at the same time?” Amplifier asked.

“No.” Harriet shook her head. “These twins were weird. A talented pedigree, just like Helix, and they were kept separate until their talents became clear at the age of six. A lot of questionable stuff went on there, but it’s a powerful argument for talents from genetics. I think it would settle things in most people’s minds if it weren’t for all the contrary cases.”

I glanced at Harriet but she was just a blur, like usual. I was wondering if that thought had been prompted by the twins who visited Helix yesterday, and if they were the same pair. But it didn’t seem like the best time to ask. “Anyway. The point is, you can’t just look at someone’s parents and guess if they’re a talent, any more than you can guess if they’re good at math.”

“It’s a clue but not confirmation,” Amp said.

“Exactly.” Harriet parked the car and we piled out. “There’s a lot of rules in the Project that protect talents, almost as many as there are to protect other people from them. One of the ones for the protection of talents says we can’t investigate people who we think have talents, only public incidents where we think a talent was used.”

“That sounds fair,” Amp replied.

“So if you really don’t want the Project to open a file on you all you have to do is avoid using your talent in public,” I said, leading the way into a small import shop and absently smoothing my shirt as I crossed the threshold, just like I’d been doing since I’d been eight. “But people like He-sifu will still find you, whether because of their training or family or whatever. And some of them act as a support network, helping curious people get answers about their talents without endangering themselves or others, getting new talents up to speed on the rules and generally keeping us all in touch with each other.”

“Little groups like the ones you started in are common enough,” Harriet said. “But knowing Mr. He and the people he can introduce you to will help you a lot more in the long run, if you plan to do this job for any length of time.”

Amplifier smiled, becoming insufferably cute. “I’ll just have to turn on the charm, then.”

“You’ll have an easier time of it than me,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Is that one of my ungrateful students?” The voice came, rich and strong, from the stairs at the back of the store. The old, wooden planks creaked as Sifu made his way down them, saying, “It’s high time you came to see me again. It’s the least you could do, since you will never be bothered to pass on my teachings.”

I heaved a sigh and bowed properly from the waist. “Hello, Sifu.”

Sifu came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. Although he only came up to my collarbone now he still felt like he towered over the whole room. Every movement screamed control and dignity, and his physique made him look much younger than his fifty years. Even with my shortsightedness I still felt like I could see him as clear as day, standing with one arm behind his back and his other hand poised to lecture. “Well. Little Mountain. You have come with more questions I suppose. Not to ask me for students, so you can finally do your duty to your sifu?”

“Just questions, Sifu.”

He studied me for a moment and then turned and started back up the stairs. “Come along then. Let me make the world clearer for you again, Little Mountain.”

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Water Fall: Shaky Evidence

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Six Days before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

Once you dragged him out of his body armor and slapped him in a refrigerated holding room, he didn’t look like much. His codename was The Enchanter and he was a serial arsonist, believed to be responsible for six different fires, plus one more attempted, and we had technically been chasing him when Mona Templeton had gotten killed by Open Circuit. For this reason alone I was not exactly thrilled to find myself dealing with him again.

Unlike the first time we’d done this kind of thing together, I’d worked out a system for this interrogation with my boss. Senior Special Agent Teresa Herrera was about as aggressive an interrogator as I’d ever met, provided she hadn’t taken a liking to her subject, and once we had a routine worked out things went beautifully. I mostly looked intimidating and reminded him that, since we were both heat sinks, there wasn’t much he could do with what little ambient heat was in the room before I’d shut him down. Every once in a while I pressed him extra hard when I thought he wasn’t being entirely honest. Teresa did most of the work requiring patience or credibility.

Of course since the room we were in was about forty degrees Fahrenheit, and she had to wear a heavy jacket and gloves since we were basically just sitting around in it four a few hours, she couldn’t use one of her greatest assets. It’s true that thinking she was just a decorative girl to distract hardened criminals would be a mistake, but since it’s not a bad one to foster in said criminals it’s nice to be able to do that with maximum force. But even if we had gotten The Enchanter to maximum distraction and pressed him with a dozen expert interrogators I don’t think we could have gotten much farther than we had.

He just didn’t seem to know very much.

“Okay, let’s start over again,” Teresa said, standing up from her chair and pacing to the door of the room and back again. Even dressed against the cold she had to be getting stiff and a little chilly. Unlike we heat sinks, she couldn’t force the temperature of the immediate surroundings to stay at a steady, comfortable temperature and, although I was doing what I could to keep things at an even seventy five degrees in a larger area than normal, I was loosing ground steadily. It was already down to something closer to fifty five and sliding fast.

“You decided to commit a string of arsons in order to stick it to us,” she said when she got back to the table. “We are- how did you put it?”

“A symptom of the way The Man seeks to oppress anyone who’s a threat to their system.” The first time The Enchanter had said it he’d practically sprayed spit all over the table. He’d dwindled through angry yelling, snarling and had finally arrived at weary resignation. This is just one of the reasons we rake people over the coals so often, it wears them down until they can’t even remember their prepared lies and the truth slips out by accident.

“So you set a series of fires using your talent in place of normal chemical accelerants.” Teresa placed one gloved finger on an open folder sitting on the table and carefully turned the page. She’d practiced the maneuver for ten minutes beforehand just so she could do it without fumbling. “You thought this would attract our attention.”

“It did, didn’t it?” He sat up a little. “Your spies must be busy, keeping tabs on all the police and fire departments like that.”

“Believe it or not, they cooperate with us voluntarily,” I said, letting a tinge of amusement into my tone. I always think it’s funny when people assume we’re all-knowing and I knew he’d assume I was just gloating. The Enchanter was many things, but he wasn’t very bright. “We are the good guys, after all.”

“You’re a bunch of oppressors, dead set on stopping progress!” A little of the old fire was coming back as he warmed to his subject. “Worse, you’re a turn coat! You’re one of us, man. They’re stomping us down because they can’t let the little man have any power. We got to do something, make a change!”

If he had enough energy to go on another rant he had enough energy to keep lying. I glanced at Teresa and she gave the barest nod, so I goaded him a little more. “So you decided to cause a couple of million dollars of property damage and the death of a firefighter-”

“That was an accident!” He slammed his hands on the table and jumped out of his chair, forcing me to stand up too, in case he was planning on starting something. “He didn’t die in the fire, he fell when he was poking around the building afterwards. It sucks, sure, but that was part of his job, and not my fault.”

I leaned across the table, keeping my voice level with effort, and said, “There wouldn’t have been a burnt out building to investigate if you hadn’t torched it in the first place. That’s involuntary manslaughter, except we charge people with that when doing something legal. You weren’t. So maybe you get criminally negligent manslaughter, instead.”

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Teresa said. “There’s no need for posturing.”

“Posturing?” The Enchanter asked, incredulous. “I’m the one you’re trying to paint as a villain. Don’t you remember having me shot just before I was arrested?”

I laughed, startling him, and sat back in my chair, leaning back and studying him with interest. “Now that was a true villain at work. Open Circuit. What was your beef with him, exactly?”

“I dunno what you’re talking about.” The Enchanter folded his arms across his chest and slumped in his chair.

“Let’s put it another way.” Teresa leaned in a bit with a sympathetic expression, like she was used to my confusing suspects all the time. “How did you know that there was any Project Sumter out there in the first place?”

“Oh, that all?” He waved it off. “Of course the man’s got some kind of invisible hand to keep us down, am I right? But after the first time I figured I’d better get some idea of how you worked. So I got in touch with some people.”

This time, Teresa threw me a look. While she’d mastered turning pages in gloves note taking was still my responsibility. We were being recorded, but Records is notoriously fickle about letting the recordings out into the wild once they’re in storage, so it’s best to take precautions. Information security is a much bigger deal for us than the average police station. So I made a couple of scribbles on my notepad.

“What people?” Teresa asked.

He laughed. “You think you’ve got a good handle on things don’t you? Well there’s lots of people out there who know about you and aren’t afraid to talk. They told me the important stuff. Who you guys are. Basics of not attracting too much attention when you don’t want it. The glass cannon rule. That’s one you broke.”

I grimaced. The glass cannon rule was a sort of rule of thumb most of us live by. It says that since all but a few talents were just as fragile as normal people we should refrain from using our powers to kill each other. Like most unwritten rules, participation is strictly voluntary, which is just one reason I don’t like it. Another was the stupid name, but that was thanks to the Analysis department, who get to name just about everything and has a mixed record at choosing good ones. Just look at me. But mostly, I feel living by it makes a lot of us more careless than we might otherwise be.

And technically Circuit hadn’t broken it, if you were wondering. Using a gun is fair, even if using talent is not.

“Which first time was that?” I glanced through my own files. “The arson back in late June?”

The Enchanter gave me an incredulous look. “What, you don’t remember?”

“Believe it or not, I have other things to do with my time-”

“A lot happens in our line of work,” Teresa said, cutting me off. “We might not have realized that a particular even was associated with you. That happens a lot, especially with talents that don’t have an open file yet.”

“Even the all-seeing eye has blind spots, huh?” He snorted.

“Oh, we could leave it out of your file if you prefer,” I said. “It’ll probably get assigned to one of the other heat sinks that have surfaced in the last month or two.”

“What?” The Enchanter sat up straighter. Ever since we learned he was sending notes before his arsons I’d pegged him as vain enough to want credit for what he did. It was nice to know I was right.

“Records likes that, you know,” Teresa added, seeing where I was going. “The small stuff can get credited to anyone, so long as it winds up somewhere eventually. It’s one of the prices we pay for a functioning bureaucracy.”

“It was a bank job,” The Enchanter said with pride. “It was supposed to be easy in, easy out. Because there’s no door on earth that can stop someone like us.”

He motioned first to me, then to himself. I just rolled my eyes and he took it as an invitation to continue. “Problem was, I never could get close. There was always someone there, you know, watching it. Hangman warned me it was being watched already, but it was crazy. You were there round the clock. Finally you call me and give me the riot act. Hangman tells me it was probably you guys. How did you get my number, anyway?”

“Classified,” I said, writing down the name he’d just mentioned. I wasn’t familiar with the name Hangman, so I’d have to ask an expert to see who it might be. We’d have to check the timing, but I was pretty sure there was a bank job that had Circuit’s fingerprints on it in that time frame somewhere. The man really does not like to share.

Teresa asked a few more questions before wrapping things up, but there wasn’t anything more of value to be had. We were heading back up to our desks when she asked, “How often do they know that much about the Project before we find them?”

“That much?” I thought about it. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knew much about Project Sumter without ever meeting us before. But The Enchanter basically just knew we existed, had some basic rules and are willing to enforce them. I’d say about one out of three talents we find know that much.”

“Really?” Teresa frowned. “How does the word get out? I can’t imagine they just stop in a coffee shop and get the latest gossip.”

“Actually, that might not be that far off.” I held up my notes. “He mentioned someone called Hangman.”

“Familiar name?”

“Never heard it before. But.” I held up a finger. “There are people out there who have seen things, and know enough to give new talents survival tips. Many of them don’t even have talents themselves, although like this Hangman they tend to work with codenames. They’re parents, siblings, spouses or really good friends with talents, or they’ve done a lot of research after witnessing something they shouldn’t.”

She looked a little alarmed at that. “How many people like that are there?”

“Well, we can’t require them to register or anything, so it’s really our best guess. But maybe as much as five percent of the population could fall into the category of aware, but untalented.” I shrugged. “They don’t go around talking when they shouldn’t, so we ignore them. It’s not like we could track them all even if we did have the authority to do something like that.”

“I suppose.” She absently fanned her jacket, sweating now that she was out of The Enchanter’s refrigerated cell. “How do we track down this…”

“Hangman.”

“This Hangman?”

“We don’t. I’ve never really been good at maintaining contacts in the talent community outside of work.” That earned me a bemused smile. “But we do have someone on staff who’s got his finger on the pulse. I’ll kick it over to him, and we can focus on something else.”

“Good.” She took her jacket and gloves off and tossed them into the chair by her desk. “In that case, let me get the real estate records for those buildings we’re investigating. We need to get them broken into chunks before assignments at the meeting tomorrow.”

“Oh goody,” I said, doing my best to ensure my lack of enthusiasm was obvious. “While you’re doing that, I guess I’d better leave him a note.”

“Who is in charge of keeping an eye on the talent community, anyway?”

It was my turn to smile. “Funny you should put it that way…”

——–

Massif

The evidence room is usually one of the neatest rooms in the office but since we’d just moved into this building a couple of weeks ago things hadn’t been sorted out all the way yet. And there had been a major incident not that long ago, so between getting the old stuff filed away and the new stuff logged in and cataloged, the boys down there had been pretty overworked.

Still, with all the random boxes on the floor and the desks, plus the bulky gizmos Circuit had left behind at various places in the last couple weeks and the large pieces of heat warped debris that had been pulled out of the area around the school where he’d gone toe to toe with Helix, it felt a bit like picking our way through a war zone. I passed a chunk of asphalt the size of a small table leaning against the wall. Running my fingers absently along it I could feel the ragged edge left behind by the power saw they’d used to cut it out of the road, but the road’s surface was smooth and rippled like glass. Near the center I felt fabric, stopped and leaned in for a closer look. “Is this somebody’s shoe?”

“Helix’s, yes. Hello Harriet, Agent Massif.” The voice sounded like Michael Voorman, our Senior Special Liaison. I looked about until I caught sight of a short, round fuzzy blur that could only be the man himself. No one else in the Project fidgets as much. He shuffles his feet around so much sometimes it looks almost like he’s dancing. Not that I payed that much attention to it at that moment, because he was standing next to-

“Hello Michael, how have you-”

“Senspec,” I said, sliding quickly forward, no longer caring what kind of crap was on the floor so long as none of it wound up under my feet. “Who is that?”

Voorman glanced over his shoulder, up at the strange vortex of movement that had been squashed into human form. I really can’t describe what he looked like, except to say that he seemed to pulse with pent up energy. It washed out most of his features, all I could really tell was that he was big, maybe even taller than I was, and built even wider. Something about it set my teeth on edge and nothing would have made me happier than tossing him into the special lead-lined cell where we kept the really weird stuff.

Unfortunately, Voorman burst that bubble right away. “This is Agent Samson. I’m sorry, I forgot. The Shenandoah papers suggest your two talents really don’t work well together.”

I came to a stop about four or five steps away, watching the anomaly called Samson warily. Shenandoah was the first vector shift on record, a West Point grad who fought in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, and after the war spent a fair part of his remaining years studying his own talent. His journals were the foundation for most of what we know about my talent. I’d never heard anything about people like this, though. “This is Agent Samson.”

Voorman didn’t seem to notice my repeating it. “He’s been assigned to the Dawson disappearance. But before that, we need to hand this over to someone. Harriet, I’d like you and Agent Massif to take point on it. It’s suited to your team more than anyone else we have available right now.”

“What is it?” Harriet asked, walking over and gingerly taking a seat on a big box. She was getting too old for field work, in fact she was less than six months from mandatory retirement from the field, and it was starting to show in more and more ways. Almost without thinking I slipped between her and Samson.

He knelt down by something on the ground covered by a tarp and, with a twitch of the wrist, yanked the cover away to reveal a sheet of metal that had been bent and twisted like a soda can. “I pulled this off the back of a van belonging to Open Circuit.” Samson picked it up with one hand and turned it so one edge faced towards me. “What do you make of this?”

I glanced at Harriet, who motioned me down. On closer inspection I could tell that I was looking at the rear door of a van, so Samson hadn’t been kidding about where he’d gotten it. The hand he was holding the door with glowed an unsettling white, a steady vector supporting the door’s weight in some way that didn’t really make sense. The frame of the door had split open from the force that had ripped it off the back of the vehicle and there was something inside the paneling that didn’t look right.

I ran a few fingers along the edge of it, feeling the cool, hard surface. “What is this?” I murmured. “Iron plating?”

“Basically,” Samson said. His voice was deep and surprisingly resonate, like a teacher or a politician. He set the door down and pried the crack in the frame a little wider, pointing at something inside. “See that in there?”

“No.”

“Agent Massif’s talent causes a very serious case of nearsightedness,” Harriet said, leaning on my shoulder to get a look as well. “For that matter, my eyes aren’t what they were either. What is it?”

“It’s a serial number,” Voorman said. “It matches a set of armor plates stolen from the Army several years ago.”

“Armor plates?” I looked over at Voorman. “This van was armored like a tank?”

Samson shrugged, setting off a gut-wrenching shift in vectors in the process. The man was a walking mass of momentum just waiting to go somewhere, and it made me nervous. “More like a Humvee, I think. But either way, it’s like no other van on earth.”

“So what does that have to do with us?” I asked. “It’s true that I’m about as sturdy as a tank, too, but I don’t see how that helps.”

“Here’s the thing: The van itself never turned up. That means Circuit still has it, and will probably be trying to fix it.” He rotated the door ninety degrees and pointed to the edge again. “But he’ll have  to find someone who understands damage like that.”

I ran my fingers along the side of the door once more. The edge had a hand print in it. Or more accurately, half a hand print. The other half was probably in the door frame of the van in question. “In other words, he doesn’t just need an auto shop. He needs a talented auto shop.”

“Or at least an auto shop that has dealt with a lot of talents in the past.” Harriet stood up with a grunt. “Fuseboxes could have a lot of problems with cars, I imagine. I’m sure oracles and visionaries could have problems, too. There might even be a specialty market for modifications that make it easier for talents to use cars.”

“I could see that.” Harriet and I chuckled, although the silence from Voorman and Samson suggested they didn’t get it. The way movement affects my vision makes it impossible for me to drive, so my boss gets to chauffeur me pretty much everywhere. It would take more than just custom glasses, or a windshield even, to fix my problems. But it was an interesting thought. I looked over at Voorman. “I suppose you’re saying you want us to check in with my contacts in the community at large, see if we can turn up a place that might do this kind of work?”

“Exactly.” Samson stood up and smoothed the front of his pants. “That should put you a step closer to figuring out where Circuit went after he fled Diversy Street.”

“Why would he keep the van?” I wondered, running my fingers along the surface of the armor plate absently. “Even if he gets it fixed he can’t have a bunch of doors like this just sitting around.”

“If the rest of the van is armored like this it would still be a really nice thing to have around,” Harriet pointed out.

“And he could have a bunch of doors like this just sitting around,” Samson said. “The stockpile that was stolen was enough to fully armor a dozen vehicles of that size, give or take.”

“I see. In that case he might have a mechanic already lined up where he keeps the parts. We’ll want to get our hands on those, too.” I got up and gave him a hard look. “So what’s the catch?”

Samson pulled back a bit. “I beg your pardon?”

“He’s saying, what do you want from us?” Harriet said. “You could have just filed a memo if you wanted to bring this to our attention. The only reason to show it to us yourselves is to ask us for something in return. Presumably off the record.”

“Guilty,” Voorman said with a shrug. He slid around the side of the door and came over to her. “While Elizabeth Dawson’s disappearance is creating headlines right now, and that’s good from the angle of a standard missing persons case, it does make our lives somewhat more difficult. We can’t meddle with this investigation in the same way we do with others. It simply isn’t going to fly. There’s too much scrutiny on the case.”

“No surprise there,” I said. “Pretty young daughter of a powerful man goes missing? It’s sure to be a media circus.”

“We need you to be looking for a connection between Circuit and the Dawson disappearance at the same time you’re running down everything else.” Samson dug into a pocket and pulled out a pair of business cards, handing one to me and one to Harriet. I squinted at mine, more than a little weirded out. Handing out something that had your real name on it, not a codename, just wasn’t done. Samson was a strange agent in more ways than one.

“Anything you find out, pass back to us,” he said, apparently not noticing my discomfort. Or unable to tell it from all the other discomfort he was causing.

“Especially if you can locate the van,” Voorman added. “We want to look for any signs that it was used to abduct Miss Dawson, in addition to being used in the Diversy Street escape.”

“Why aren’t there more agents working this, Michael?” Harriet asked. “It’s been years since you’ve been in the field. Even if you and Sam worked together before, it doesn’t seem like a good bet to leave it to just the two of you.”

“With the level of attention on the case, we don’t want more,” Samson said. “And I’ve been retired for years, giving the Project an added layer of protection of some reporter does start prying into me. We already have a cover story worked out.”

I tucked his business card into my pocket. “Does it have anything to do with your being a priest?”

“Pastor,” he said, the correction sounding like it came from rote practice. “And yes, it does.”

“Okay, Sam,” Harriet said. “I guess you got yourselves a couple more eyes.”

“I’ll try to get a meeting with the people I know in the community,” I said. “But I can’t guarantee I’ll find anything before the meeting tomorrow.”

“If it makes things work out faster, you have permission to skip it,” Voorman said.

I chuckled. “If I pull a stunt like that Helix will be ticked.”

He snorted. “Double Helix will just have to deal.”

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Water Fall: Ashes to Ashes

Posted by natechen on

Seven Weeks, One Day before the Michigan Avenue Proclomation

Helix

Normally I don’t leave funerals too mad to see straight. But burying Mona Templeton, my friend of four years and wife of a man who had been my friend for even longer, after she was killed in the line of duty a week before was not a normal experience. Sometimes life seems monotonous, but death – that’s different every time you see it. The fact that Mona was dead was bad enough, the fact that she had been killed by what is known, in official government circles, as a conspiring traitor but we field agents tend to call a megalomaniacal asshole just made it worse. On top of that, since Mona’s job was as a field analyst for a government agency that doesn’t technically exist, she couldn’t even be given public credit for all the great work she’d done. It’s not just a case of waiting until the files are declassified before the truth is told, the Federal Government’s official stance was that nothing we did would ever be made public. Being an unsung hero may sound romantic, but when one of your friends become one it looses some of that shine.

But the real kicker was the whole Senate Oversight Committee, that nonexistent government body overseeing our nonexistent government office, putting in an appearance. They stood around and looked stricken, shook hands with the family, mouthed platitudes, gave a dozen and one offhand lies to explain their presence. Then they came and shook hands with me. Told me they were sure this tragic situation would be handled soon. They had every confidence in my ability to see things through. As if they had any idea what the real situation was. As if I needed any encouragement to find Open Circuit, who had been slipping away from me for eight years, who had just killed my friend and fellow agent.

It’s not like I didn’t lay them out on the ground because I wasn’t angry. Or because I had a weird sort of mutual respect/dislike society going with their ringleader, Senator Brahms Dawson. Or even because, for all their inability to see the forest for their egos getting in the way, they were still United States Senators and technically due some sort of respect for that.

It was because Mona and Darryl Templeton, and their families, deserved better than that.

I took hold of that reason, simple but sturdy, and wedged it between myself and my temper and somehow made it through the memorial service. But as soon as it was done I stalked out of the funeral home and into the parking lot, where I found the first luxury car around and kicked it’s tires until my foot hurt. Then I sat down on the sidewalk and sulked. Throwing a tantrum wasn’t helping any, but my dad said it never did so maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“You’re lucky all the security guards are inside.”

The voice barged into my thoughts, prompting me to come back to reality. I looked up to find a tall, athletic African American man, my former boss Robert Sanders. We went way back, me and Sanders, and the memories were not exactly fond ones. “What do you want, Sanders?”

“To talk to you,” he said, taking a seat on the curb next to me. “Although I’m regretting it more every second.”

“So make us both happy and go away.”

“You know sidewalks outside funeral homes are built six inches higher than standard?” He fished around in one of his suit’s jacket pockets and pulled out a lighter and a package of cigarettes. “It makes it easier for men to come out and cry on them.”

I snorted. “Really?”

“I just made it up.” He tapped out a cigarette. “You listening now, or you want to go break your foot on another tire? I can wait.”

“Since when did you start smoking again? I thought you gave it up.”

“Since Mona died.” He flicked the lighter and a flame popped into existence.

Unreasonably annoyed by it, I reached out and stuck my finger into the flame, barely hot enough to register as a dip in the flat, low expanse of the surrounding temperature. Thanks to my native gift with heat, instead of getting a nasty burn I forced the temperature of the flame back down to a moderate seventyish degrees, extinguishing it. “Don’t use Mona’s death as an excuse for your bad behavior.”

Sanders shot me a look that was pure venom. I met him with my normal sour face. For a minute, to anyone passing by, we probably looked like we were about to start pounding each other. In fact, for a brief second I thought that’s what it was going to come to, and I was okay with that. At five foot three, one hundred and thirty pounds, I was easily loosing to Sanders in terms of reach, weight, muscle and to be honest, probably skill. However I could also bend a two inch thick bar of iron with my bare hands just by forcing it to melt, and he couldn’t. Being able to push the thermometer around has its perks.

But whether he just wanted to avoid third degree burns, he was still a little more into the spirit of the occasion than I was or he was just too tired for a scrap, after a minute or two of glaring Sanders threw his cigarette on the ground and tucked his lighter away. “You know, I said I wasn’t in the mood for this today.”

“To who?”

“I gave it up for Mona, you know.” I assumed he meant smoking, as the statement didn’t really apply to his mood.

“I didn’t.” I thought about that for a second. “Wait, wasn’t that two years ago? Or have you been on-again-off-again when I wasn’t looking?”

“I didn’t know you cared enough to pay attention, Helix.”

“I don’t.” We were dancing around some issue that Sanders obviously wanted to avoid but I didn’t know enough to guess at what that was, so I played along.

“It was actually almost three and a half years ago.” He fidgeted for a minute. “She said I couldn’t stick with anything and I wanted to prove her wrong.”

“So you quit smoking for three and a half years.” I stared at him for a minute. I knew Sanders had been interested in Mona back when she joined the Project. There wasn’t anything unusual about that, Sanders was interested in just about any woman that joined the Project. But Mona already knew Darryl at the time and most of us considered their marriage just a matter of time. Until that moment I’d never suspected Sanders had been any different. “That’s a little bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I guess.” He forced a weak smile. “But that all’s probably pretty boring to you, isn’t it?”

And now he was concerned about me. I wasn’t sure how many more shocks my system could take, especially since I was pretty worn out as it was. So I got to my feet and motioned for him to do the same. “Come on Sanders, you need to get the heart moving. There’s obviously not enough blood going to the brain right now.”

“Funny.” He slowly climbed to his feet anyway.

“Like you’ve been doing any better.”

“My jokes are usually good. Yours never are.” He was still subdued but some of the usual animation was coming back into his features. “Helix, I need you to back us up on something.”

“Alright.” Sanders wasn’t my boss anymore, but he’s entitled to a certain amount of solidarity just because, like me, he’s been doing this job practically forever. Still, there are certain questions to be asked. “Who’s us?”

“Darryl and I. We need you to help us convince the Senate Committee to-”

“Hold up.” I cut him off with a raised hand. “We are talking about the Committee headed up by Senator Dawson? The man who hates me? Who’s handpicked protégé joined Project Sumter and got me as a watchdog to make sure she wasn’t causing mischief? That Committee?”

“That’s the one,” Sanders said with a grim nod of the head.

I laughed in disbelieve. “Sanders, where in all that did you hear anything that makes you think those people are going to let me convince them of anything?”

“Because you’re the talent with the highest case closure rate and most talents discovered in the Midwest. If we go by talents found, you’re highest in the nation, at least on active duty. Darryl’s head of the Midwest Analysis department. I have the most seniority among field team oversight agents.” I snorted but Sanders pressed on before I could say anything more. “At least as soon as the paperwork goes through and I am officially oversight for Gearshift, that new guy you found a couple of weeks ago. The Committee isn’t a monolithic group, Helix, there’s only one other senator firmly on Dawson’s side. One usually sides with Voorman and two waver back and fourth. Getting Teresa into the Project used up a lot of Dawson’s political capitol, if we push now he’ll have a hard time standing up to three very senior agents if we present a united front.”

That actually sounded legit. Sanders is better at political manipulations than I am, in fact he’s been the point political agent for Michael Voorman, our Senior Special Liaison, since he made Senior Special Agent, so I was willing to take his assessment on faith. Not that I was about to admit that. So I adopted a skeptical tone and said, “Right. What exactly are we convincing them to do?”

“Let Darryl join one of our field teams and participate in the hunt for Open Circuit.”

“What?” 

A note for those thinking of joining Project Sumter or any other secretive branch of the Federal Government’s alphabet soup: No matter how preposterous the things that come up in the course of doing you job, you should not scream when discussing them. Especially in broad daylight while you are standing in a public place.

I grabbed hold of myself and lowered my voice back to a low murmur. “That’s a horrible idea, Sanders! Why would we do that? Why would they let us?”

“Because we’re going to-”

“No, we’re not,” I snapped, grabbing him by the front of his jacket and pulling him down to something a little more like eye level. “Listen, Sanders, they make those rules for a reason. Usually, good reasons, and the rule that an emotionally compromised investigator gets pulled off a case is one of the good ones. Darryl’s wife has been killed. If that’s not emotionally compromised, I don’t know what is.”

Sanders retaliated by grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking, which left me a little woozy since he still definitely had all the reach and mass over me. “I know all that. But don’t you think he deserves a chance to see this to the end?”

“Deserves? Don’t give me deserves, Sanders.” I shoved him back a step, or more likely I pushed and he took a step back to humor me. “Nothing in Project Sumter runs on what people deserve. Talents don’t deserve to hide their whole lives, they don’t deserve to have no future in the ranks than Special Agent just because Abraham Lincoln wanted to make a symbolic point a hundred and fifty years ago. Mona didn’t deserve to get killed in the line of duty. But we’re trying to do things right, and if Darryl goes back out into the field he’s going to miss things, make dumb decisions and possibly even get more people killed. That’s not right, and I’m not going to help you two make it happen.”

“And that’s the end of it?” Sanders shook his head. “Helix, he’s been on your side since the day you joined up.”

“I know. That’s why I’m on his now. Whether he realizes it or not.”

With a sigh, Sanders held up his hands. “I get you, Helix. Really, I wasn’t expecting much different. But I said I’d try.”

A group of four other people were coming out of funeral home, one split off and came our way, the other three went in the other direction. I nodded at them, smoothing my suit out as I did. “We should probably get back in there. People will wonder where we went.”

Sanders nodded, performed a similar check on his own suit and followed me back towards the entrance. As we passed him, the man coming our way reached up, as if to tip a hat he wasn’t wearing, and said in a gruff voice, “My condolences, Mr. Hoffman.”

I wavered a half step, giving the man a closer look. He didn’t seem immediately familiar – I’d remember if I ever met anyone with hair that red. Then he was past me, heading down the sidewalk. The rear door of the car at the end of the street popped open and let him in, then he disappeared from view when it slammed closed.

“Did he think you were someone else?” Sanders asked.

“Daniel Hoffman is the name on this year’s fake driver’s license,” I replied, still staring at the car as it drove off. “But I don’t know why he’d know it.”

“Maybe he knows the Templetons, and they mentioned it?”

“Maybe.” I shook my head and started back towards the funeral home. “Not important right now. Let it go.”

——–

Circuit

I climbed into the back seat of the car, resisting the urge to take my nonexistent hat off. I was heavily disguised with makeup and wig, and that’s pointless if you continue to dress like you always do, so I had given up my hat with reluctance.

“You look strange with red hair.”

I glanced at the young lady who had made the pronouncement. “I would look even more strange if we were pulled over and the police found me with black hair and red eyebrows.” Although I very nearly had to sit on my hands to keep from scratching at the makeup holding the false eyebrows and built-up bridge of my nose in place. Instead, I cleared my throat, trying to get a more normal tone of voice back after the gravelly accent I’d used the few times I’d spoken in the last two hours. “And I’m not sure you’ve really known me long enough to be a reliable judge of whether I look strange or not, Hangman.”

“I’ve been following you a lot longer than you think, Circuit. You look strange.” She absently flipped her hair over one shoulder and began working it into a braid. Even dressed in worn and frankly tacky clothing, the gloss in her brunette hair, manicure on her fingers and general air of good health stood out as hints to her upper middle class upbringing. She was just as out of place in the beat up old car as I was, which worried me as we couldn’t afford any kind of scrutiny from anyone at the moment. There was too much that was too close to completion to deal with complications at the moment.

I leaned forward in my seat to talk to the driver, Heavy Water, a massive African-American man who ran point on most of my field operations. “Heavy, is this car safe?”

“Bought with cash two weeks ago, six states away, boss,” he said without hesitation. “So far as I can tell the closest it’s ever gotten to breaking the law is going a few miles over the speed limit – and I’m not sure it can even do that anymore.”

“That’s fine then.” I sat back in the car seat. “I just wanted to be sure you didn’t use your own unique abilities to find us transportation. Not that I normally object, of course.”

“Sure thing, boss. I know how to lay low.”

Hangman fidgeted for a moment, then said, “So, were you seen?”

“Of course. I could hardly help that.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “But I wasn’t recognized, and I don’t think I will be again.”

“Oh. Good.” She glanced away, but I could see the curiosity eating away at her, so I was prepared for the next question when it came. “What were the loose ends you were taking care of?”

I was prepared for her to ask the question. That didn’t mean I wanted to answer it. For a moment I indulged in cowardice and just stared out the window at the city streets rolling by. Then, finally I said, “I went to pay my respects.”

“To who?”

“A woman who died recently.” The buildings outside were more rundown than when we had started out but as we went along they were slowly improving again. I took a deep breath, reminding myself it was foolish to believe in signs, especially when I only payed attention to those I liked. “She was killed in the line of duty. I didn’t know her personally, but she was a very admirable woman.”

“Oh.” She paused again and I laid my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What killed her?”