Tag Archives: Helix

Heat Wave: Slow Boil

Posted by natechen on

Helix

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they organize a place. For example, anyone who wandered into Pritchard Mossburger’s new apartment would instantly realize that he had an organized mind. His new furniture, although a mismatched collection of second hand stuff, was still arranged symmetrically in one corner of the room, with a sofa at the center and two chairs flanking it. A long, low table ran down the side wall. It all looked like it had been organized by a T-square. However, before one could start thinking that he was an OCD neat freak you’d notice the cork board in the corner, already collecting newspaper clippings and printed blog articles that both dispelled that illusion and warned you that he might be mentally unstable in an entirely different direction.

All of that wouldn’t mean quite as much to you as the two big guys sprawling on his sofa or the even bigger guy who dwarfed the beaten up recliner he sat in on the right. Even if you never made it past Jack, Bergstrum and Kesselman to Herrera sitting in the other chair or me standing in the middle of the room and staring at them, you’d realize that Mossburger wasn’t your typical conspiracy obsessed genius with schizophrenic tendencies. That’s just one of the reasons we love him.

“Hey, Helix, you with us?” Bergstrum asked, waving his hand lazily across my field of vision. “Meeting’s going to start soon.”

“I hear you,” I mumbled, still staring at the couch he was sharing with Kesselman.

“What he’s trying to say is sit down,” Jack said, leaning forward and scratching his knee absently. “You’re making us all tired just looking at you. If there’s something so special about that couch you should have taken a closer look at it when we were helping the preacher fellow load his truck.”

I snapped my fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen it before.” A moment’s pause as something registered in the back of my mind. “We didn’t load a sofa on Rodriguez’s truck. I would definitely remember moving two sofas in one day.”

“It was on there already, I saw it in the back.” Jack snorted. “You need to work on your-”

“Situational awareness,” I said in unison with him. “I know, I know. You keep telling me that. Along with Sanders, Mona and occasionally Al Massif, Broadband and a bunch of other people I’ve already forgotten.”

“Maybe you’d remember them better if you were paying attention?” Kesselman ignored my scowl and hopped up to poked his head into the apartment’s cramped kitchenette. “Hey, Mossman, you don’t have feed us a four course meal!”

“Good, because I couldn’t make you one.” Mosburger came in carrying a pot of coffee and a pitcher of ice water in one hand and a tray of mugs in the other. “But I thought something to drink would be a step in the right direction. There’s sodas in the fridge, too.”

He put the dishes on the table and left them there as he and Kesselman retrieved a couple of chairs out of the kitchen. I stared at the coffee pot and ice water for a minute, feeling my fingers twitching in annoyance, then gave in and picked up to the ice water and moved it to the other end of the table.

Herrera watched me do it, an amused look on her face. “Something wrong, Helix?”

“It’s distracting. You have no idea how distracting thermodynamics can be.”

Jack laughed. “You think that’s bad? Leave a chunk of dry ice out sometime and watch him squirm.”

I gave him my darkest scowl. “I thought you were one of the good guys.”

“Sure I am.” He laughed again. “It’s not like it’s your secret weakness or something. You never notice these things when you’re focused on something, they just bother you when you’ve got nothing else on your mind.”

Herrera clapped her hands together and said, “In that case we might as well get started so Helix has something to think about besides coffee pot feng shui.”

Mosburger and I took seats in the kitchen chairs, which also looked like well worn second-hand furniture from somewhere, and settled in. We started by retreading over what I’d heard that morning. A break-in at the Project, relocation, a possible lead on the Firestarter. I turned Herrera’s books back over to her at that point and said, “While I’ll admit that these look like they could be the source of the Firestarter’s name for himself, and we should probably talk to Analysis about relabeling him as the Enchanter just for simplicity’s sake, I’m not sure that this really helps us in our primary goal, finding Circuit and throwing him in jail.”

“Except,” Mosburger held up a pile of paper that he had been skimming through, “that Circuit implied in his phone call last night that he was interested in the Firestarter. Or the Enchanter, or whatever you want to call him. He mentions it at least twice in this transcript, and I haven’t even finished it yet.”

“What are the odds it’s just some sort of red herring?” Bergstrum asked. “Circuit does that kind of overcomplicated psychological thing from time to time. Are we sure he wasn’t just trying to distract us from something else he’s up to? Has anyone followed up the theft that put Gearshift and his buddies on him in the first place?”

“Apparently he stole a grad student’s senior thesis project,” Mosburger said. “I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, I haven’t gotten the report on how Clark Movsesian managed to track Circuit from Texas back to his warehouse in the city, but I am fairly certain that it’s not directly related to the Firestarter. There’s no practical use for a miniature hydroelectric turbine around here.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and scratched at his chin absently. “I followed up the phone trace Forensics was running while Helix was chatting with Circuit last night. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to help us any. It was either routed through a labyrinth that puts the Greeks to shame or somewhere along the line Circuit hacked things so he could make it look like the call was coming from wherever he wanted. Forensics says they traced it to the Island of Malta, San Antonio, LA and a couple of other places. It even showed as originating in the building at one point.”

Bergstrum sat up a bit straighter. “Could he have called while he was already inside?”

“Service is spotty through most of the building,” I said. “Shelob keeps it that way to help enforce the no outside networks policy.”

Jack got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Here’s what I don’t understand. Why did Circuit offer to cooperate with us if he was just planning to steal our files on the case and run off with them?”

I turned in my chair so I straddled the back and held out a hand. Jack handed me the coffee and filled another. Herrera waved for a cup too, so he wound up pouring a third. After a fortifying draught of caffeine I said, “Circuit’s the classic chess master. It’s unlikely he’d just ask us for information without planning what to do if we didn’t hand over what he wanted the easy way. What I don’t understand is how he knew where to go in the first place. The office is a secret government installation. It’s not like we’re listed in the yellow pages.”

“I asked Voorman if there were any leads on that.” Herrera paused to sip from her coffee and grimace, I wasn’t sure whether that because she didn’t like the drink or what she was about to say. “Apparently he’s put Agent Sanders on that inquiry, but the exact details, leads, sources, that kind of thing are all hush-hush so far. Officially so as not to compromise the investigation.”

Unofficially so as not to make Voorman or anyone else look bad. “As much as I’d like to follow that up, it’s out of our hands,” she said aloud, handing the much battered and worn books I’d just returned to her on to Mosburger. “Pritchard, take these in to Analysis as soon as you get the chance, see if that gives you getmen any insight into what the Enchanter is going to do next. I talked briefly to Agent Verger this morning, she’s agreed to keep us appraised of the Enchanter investigation in case that turns up something that points us back to Circuit. The rest of us will look into the warehouse Circuit was using, see if we can back-track it to him.”

“Join Project Sumter, see the world’s paperwork,” Jack muttered.

Herrera gave him a sympathetic look and waved a stack of papers she was pulling out of her messenger bag. “I understand where you’re coming from. This is my little piece of paperwork heaven, forms and regulations from one of the countless Federal departments I’ve never heard of that I apparently need to familiarize myself with.”

Jack leaned over a bit so he could see what Herrera was holding, then raised his eyebrows and exchanged a glance with Bergstrum and Kesselman. Either Herrera missed it or wasn’t curious, because she set them aside and kept digging around in her bag until she produced a spiral bound notebook and said, “I have a few leads I want to try and run down today, and I want to hear any ideas from you as well. But,” she gave me a slight smile. “Not all of us were supposed to be in the office today, back when we all expected to have an office to be in. So if they’d rather call it a day…”

I got up out of my chair, saying, “I think that’s my cue to leave. Will our new offices be ready for us by tomorrow?”

“I think so,” Herrera said as Mosburger picked up the papers she had set aside and started flipping through them.

“Then I’ll see you there,” I said, and started towards the door.

“You know, I had to go through this stuff on my first day,” Mosburger said, tapping one finger against the papers. “They make all the analysts muck through it once. If you can’t figure out it’s a prank in less than four hours they figure you’re second rate.”

“What?”

“The Department of NBH isn’t a real place,” he said. “There’s a lot of strange Federal offices out there, I know I dealt with some in my last job, but I don’t honestly think one of them deals in newbie hazing. Whoever put you on this stuff was probably just pulling your leg.”

I quietly latched the door behind me and quickly made my way down the hall to the elevator. Maybe letting Herrera think there was a massive pile of paperwork she needed to read through hadn’t been the nicest thing to do, but honestly, the woman needed to take things a little easier than she had been or she’d burn herself out. And the NBH stuff was pretty funny. If you knew it was a joke.

Or so I told myself. I didn’t have to tell myself much else because, before I could even call for the elevator, my phone rang. Since I was supposed to be out of the office it wasn’t surprising for my phone to go off. But I’d just been in the same room as most of the people who would normally call me on my day off, and I didn’t think Herrera was the type to call just to chew me out for playing a harmless joke on her.

As it turned out, I was right. The number wasn’t familiar to me at first but after a second I realized it was Aluchinskii Massif’s. I unlocked the touch screen and answered, pressing the call button for the elevator with my free hand. The door slid open as I spoke to Massif. We were done before it could close again, but rather than get on I hurried back down the hall and rapped on Mosburger’s door.

After a moment Kesselman opened it. If he was surprised to see me he didn’t show it and let me shove past him and back into the room without resistance. “I just heard from Agent Massif. The Enchanter hit a fire station downtown today. He says if we want to check out the scene now is the time.”

Herrera’s expression morphed from irritated to businesslike in a split second. It was a nifty trick and I needed to learn it one of these days. “How long ago was that?” She asked.

“Two hours or so, from the sound of it.”

“Does it matter?” Jack asked.

“Actually, no, I guess not.” She quickly shoved her papers back into her messenger bag. “Let’s move, people.”

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Heat Wave: Tempering

Posted by natechen on

Helix

Amplifier chewed on her bottom lip, thinking. After a moment she got up out of her chair and paced away, taking a long pull on her bottle of water. Herrera shot me a concerned look, probably wondering why I’d laid it on so thick. Or maybe wondering how much of what I’d said was true. I had no doubt that she’d gotten a similar speech from someone when she signed up, and at least she had spent some time in the HSA, but the fact is, until you’ve actually been in the Project for a year or so you have no idea what the job is really like. But maybe that’s true of every job.

Herrera looked like she was on the verge of saying something but Amplifier beat her to the punch. “Which are you, Helix?” She ran her fingers casually along top of a small chest of drawers that was waiting for it’s second coat of varnish. “My grandma used to say that a person who tries to tell it like it is says more about themself than the way things are. Want to hear what I hear?”

“Sure, why not?” I folded my arms over my chest. “What’s your great insight into my inner workings?”

“One,” she held up a finger to signal the number, then leveled it so it pointed at me. “You love your job, or you wouldn’t put up with all the draw backs that come with it. You could have gone back to carpentry years ago, if that’s what you wanted.”

Amplifier strolled back over to where we were sitting and leaned her arms on the back of her chair. “Two, you’re a sweetheart trying to pretend you’re cynical and you’re bad at it. No one buys the shtick where you try and scare people off by pretending you’ve ruined yourself anymore, it’s overdone. I get that it’s a hard job, but people never got anywhere by running away from challenges. Besides, one of my best friends is a certified genius, and you know it or your people wouldn’t have tried to recruit him already. I think, between the two of us, we can come up with some ways to deal with the worst parts of the job.”

I raised my eyebrows a bit and said, “Anything else you managed to glean from all that?”

“Yeah.” She rested her chin on top of her arms and said, “You really think doing this job for as long as you have has ruined you somehow. Well, I’ve got a newsflash for you, I’m pretty sure every job you can possibly have does that. I worked in a fast food place for two years and it ruined my faith in humanity. I’ve been in a band for three years and it’s ruined my faith in art. I’m not sure you’re a worse person just because you job has ruined your faith in yourself or your talent. There’s plenty of people high on themselves already, anything that keeps you off of that has got to be a plus, right?”

“There’s a delicate balance somewhere in there, Amplifier, and I’m not sure you’re hitting it.”

She laughed and swung herself around the chair and back into the seat. “Well, not everything has to go one way. You mentioned going into research a minute ago. What’s that about?”

“Well there are a few people, most of them with letters after their name but no talents in the Sumter sense, although there are exceptions, who do research on exactly what talents do and how they might be related. For example,” I held up my water bottle and sloshed it back and forth. “What I did to cool this water down from room temperature to cold and refreshing is technically known as ‘cold spiking’ and it was once considered a separate talent from mine. About three decades ago some eggheads on the West Coast got a heat sink and cold spiker together and they managed to duplicate each other’s abilities on a small scale. Now they’re considered the same talent, but they work different sets of muscles, so to speak, so most people figure out how to do one early on and have a hard time working up to the same level of proficiency with the other. Most of that kind of info funnels back to the Project and helps the analysts and field agents out. In your case, there’s even more experiments being run, and if you just wanted to help out from time to time, I’m sure no one would say no…”

Herrera and I spent the next hour and a half explaining the many different possible things a person could do while working directly for the Project and as contractor. In the end Amplifier left not because we were done covering all the possibilities but because she had to get to class. I walked her to the door and was surprised to see that she hadn’t come on a motorcycle, or even a slovenly old junker but rather a sleek new hybrid station wagon. It didn’t do much for her image as a member of a garage band although it was probably pretty useful for hauling all their equipment around.

I shook my head and glanced around the parking lot. It was still early in the day so the only other car, besides mine, was the kind of rust bucket I would have expected from my other guest. I glanced at Herrera. “You two drive over separately?”

“What makes you think I didn’t just ride the subway?” Herrera asked with a raised eyebrow.

“People in our line of work don’t usually enter an enclosed space with a bunch of strangers unless it’s part of our job.” Since Herrera hadn’t made any move to leave I stepped back into the workshop and closed the door behind me. “Was there something else, besides the spontaneous recruiting talk?”

“As a matter of fact, there was.” Herrera strolled over to the chest of drawers Amplifier had been examining earlier and looked it over, as if she could figure out what Amplifier had been thinking while looking at it. “But before we talk about that, what was with that recruitment speech? Not the most encouraging thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Can I be honest?”

“I can’t imagine lying would help.” She shot me an evaluating look, softened with the ghost of a smile. “And I’ve gotten the impression you’re pretty bad at it.”

“You see right through me.” I scooped up the tabletop I’d been working on the night before and moved it to the side of the room, taking the moment to gather my thoughts. Once I had it leaned against the wall I did the same with myself and said, “It’s like this. I’ve had a few different oversight people in my time, but I’ve been with Bob Sanders the longest. We worked out a system for pretty much everything we could expect to do as talent and oversight, and we played to our strengths. For the most part, that means I was the bad cop. Now I gather that you may not like the idea, but the fact is it worked and it worked because we each knew what we were doing. I’m not Sanders’ biggest fan, but he knew what he was doing and he made sure the rest of us were on the same page.”

I held up two fingers. “Twice now you’ve taken us straight into important discussions with a valuable but potentially dangerous individual with little to no warning or time to plan our strategy and which way the conversation is to go. That was sloppy.” I jerked my thumb at my chest. “The first time was my fault. I’m the more experienced agent, I should have said something before we went in to talk to Amplifier yesterday. I definitely should have said something afterwards, and in fact I meant to bring it up tomorrow, because I didn’t think it would be relevant until then. It shouldn’t have been. But in the four days you’ve been my boss you’ve piled in a month’s worth of work.”

“You think I’m moving too fast?” She didn’t sound offended or curious, just a little sad. Not what I had been expecting.

“To use a handy analogy, if you don’t know what kind of wood you’re working with,” I rapped my knuckles against the tabletop, “you won’t know what the right tools for the job are. Or, measure once, cut twice. Or even-”

“All right,” she said, her faint smile coming back. “I get the idea. Two, megalomaniacal ass? Voorman wasn’t very happy with your cursing at a person of interest over the phone yesterday-”

“We monitor all phone calls as a quality assurance measure.”

Her smile twitched but didn’t grow, and she loose her train of thought either. “-and I’m not sure he’ll be any happier after hearing about that.”

“It can hardly be unprofessional to mention a term used on the Federal NBH Employment Termination form.”

Herrera’s expression wavered just a bit, the kind of look people get when they think you’re joking… but they’re not quite sure. “You’re kidding.”

“Look it up. It’s under section four, mental instabilities.” I stood up and started collecting the empty water bottles. “So. Something else besides the recruiting talk?”

Her fingers drifted down the left side if the chest of drawers. “How long have you been selling furniture?”

“I started selling independently instead of through a dealer about a year and a half before my pieces started showing up in Circuit’s instillations. That is what you’re wondering about, isn’t it?”

She turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I was wondering how I missed the fact that your maker’s mark is half a strand of DNA when I saw it in Circuit’s warehouse.”

“Most people think it’s a spiral staircase.” I shrugged. “After all, as Amplifier said, carpentry isn’t very agentish. DNA isn’t very carpenterish, for that matter. I’m not sure how Circuit figured out I was making the stuff, but I’m guessing it had more to do with his hacking skills than the maker’s mark.”

“Has anyone ever followed that up?”

I spread my hands. “How are we supposed to do that? Put a tracer in each piece I sell? Even if we could afford the time and resources to do that and track them all, how are we supposed to tell which pieces Circuit’s bought? And what do we tell the judge when we ask for a warrant?”

“Point taken.” Herrera turned from the chest and folded her arms across her chest. “The Project headquarters was broken into last night.”

I paused, an empty water bottle halfway into the empty paint bucket I kept for recyclables. “What?”

“Someone got into the building, ruined a security camera, broke into the evidence room, tased three agents including Al Massif and stole all the evidence relating to the Firestarter case.” She picked up a messenger bag she had brought with her and fished out a sheet of printer paper. “There’s a video of the pair of them, from the security system of a restaurant down the street, but otherwise no indication of who it might be. Here’s a still frame.”

I snatched the sheet out of her hand and stared at it. It was just a blurry image of two men in street clothes jaywalking. The camera that took the video must have been forty feet away, making it pretty much useless for purposes of identifying who they might be. I looked back at Herrera. “That doesn’t tell us much, but I’m guessing we’re assuming this was Circuit and one of his people?”

“Not officially, but the evidence all points that way. He just expressed an interest in the Firestarter case a few hours before the break-in, and he strikes me as the type to be ready to take what he wants if no one will give it to him nicely.”

“You’re a good judge of character,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth. I try not to take my job personally, but some things really grate on you. “What’s our next move?”

“We move.” Herrera rubbed her arm absently like she felt a draft. “The location of headquarters has been compromised so the whole office is being packed up and moved to the auxiliary location.”

Which had been our primary location until three years ago. It was a decent facility, but farther out than our current location and missing some of the nicer bells and whistles, like a lead lined holding cell, that incorporated the state of the art in talent countermeasures. “Wonderful. I suppose we’ll have to wait a few days until we get settled before we get back to the case.”

“Excuse me?” She glanced over her shoulder as if checking to see if there was anyone else in the room. “Are you still talking to the woman who did a month’s worth of work in four days?” She looked back at me and smiled. “I’ve talked Mossman into putting us up this afternoon. We’re meeting at his place at three this- Helix!”

I jumped a bit then realized she was staring at my hand, which was still holding the sheet of paper she’d given me. Except it was now on fire. “Sorry! Sorry.” I quickly balled the sheet of paper up in my hands and began gently pressing the heat out of it. “That happens sometimes. Just FYI, you probably shouldn’t hand me anything flammable then tell me bad news.”

“Right.” Herrera watched wide eyed as I tossed what was left of the paper in the trash and dusted the ash off my hands. Then she slowly shook her head and said, “I guess hearing about it and seeing it in action are two different things after all.”

“I guess they are.”

“So. Mossburger’s place, three o’clock. You mind showing up on your day off?” She started rummaging through her messenger bag again.

“Normally, yes, but for Circuit I’ll make an exception.”

“Good. Now, you remember how I said I thought I had an idea about the Enchanter when we visited Circuit’s place yesterday?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “You said you needed to look into it.”

“Well, I did. It’s especially relevant after hearing that Circuit thinks the Enchanter and the Firestarter are the same person. I think I know what the source of the name is, and hopefully that will give us some insight into the Firestarter and, by extension, Circuit.” She pulled a pair of thin, well worn books out of her bag and started to hand them to me. Then she paused and gave me a skeptical look. “Are you safe with flammable objects yet?”

I put my hand over my heart. “I promise that they will not catch on fire.”

Apparently satisfied, she gave me the books and a moment to look them over. One was green, the other purple. They had charming watercolors on the front of fraying, well handled dust covers. One had a long rip along the back that had been taped together. They looked more appropriate to a library’s story circle than a criminal investigation. I looked back up at Herrera with a skeptical expression. “Children’s stories?”

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Heat Wave: Pressure Cooker

Posted by natechen on

Helix

I awoke in a familiar way, flat on my back, sore all over and staring up at a featureless ceiling. Now I’ve spent my share of time in a hospital. Pretty much everyone in the Project has, with the exception of Mona, who I don’t think has ever gotten an injury worse than a paper cut. But the fact of the matter is, it’s a dangerous job and we get hurt a lot doing it. On average I’ve probably spent a month out of each year I’ve been with the Project laid up with some sort of injury.

The problem was I couldn’t remember doing anything recently that would get me stuck in one.

What had I been doing yesterday? Hadn’t gotten drunk, hadn’t been in a car chase, hadn’t knocked a military helicopter out of the sky by creating the mother of all updrafts. In fact, other than getting a phone call from Circuit, yesterday was pretty tame.

Right. Phone call from Circuit. I sat up with a groan, awareness slowly filtering back through my groggy mind. With it came the smell of sawdust, which you don’t usually get in hospitals, and the feeling of rough wood under the seat of my pants, definitely nonstandard. It was starting to look a lot more like I’d fallen asleep in my workshop than gotten stuck in the hospital again.

I hefted myself off the half finished tabletop I’d fallen asleep on and tossed the chair cushion I’d used as a pillow back onto the chair it originally came from. According to my watch it was a little after nine in the morning, which meant I’d only been asleep for about four hours. I was frankly surprised I’d been able to get that much rest, as half finished furniture doesn’t make for a comfortable night, but then again, I had been pretty tired. After all, when I’d gotten there the night before that tabletop hadn’t existed yet.

As I smoothed my clothes down I discovered they were covered in small clumps of glue and sawdust. I grimaced, wishing I’d thought to change out of my work clothes before I came. It occurred to me for the hundredth time that it might be a good idea to start keeping a spare set of casual clothes in the workshop. At least this time I had managed not to ruin another pair of pants.

My workbench was fairly typical, consisting of a sturdy board with a number of cups full of nails, screws, pencils and other sundries, slots for larger tools, hooks along the sides for things like clamps and planes, and a pegboard along the back for most of the precision tools. The larger tools, like the circular saw, had their own tables in other places around the workshop. Before staggering over to my makeshift bed and passing out the night before I’d left a couple of newly shaped table legs lying there, intending to sand them down into something usable whenever I next got the chance. I was examining one of them, to determine if I wanted to try the belt sander on it or just finish it by hand, when someone knocked at the door.

Now, you’re not exactly supposed to turn a U-Store It rental space into a carpentry shop, but the manager knows me and is willing to turn a blind eye. It’s still not something I try to just tell anyone about, and most of the people who do know about it know that I go there when I want to be alone and unwind. Getting visitors there is pretty unusual.

So I took the table leg with me when I went to answer the door. Because you never can tell.

The door swung inwards and I kept myself a half step behind it as I opened it, the table leg held behind my leg. I’ve been in the business long enough not to drop my guard just because the person on the other side of the door was blond, female and even shorter than I am. It took a minute for my still groggy brain to work past the half dozen piercings, which she hadn’t had in the first time we met, and the radically different wardrobe.

My eyes narrowed slightly, as much from suspicion as a reaction to the bright sunlight outside. “Amplifier?”

She gave me a slight smile. “Who were you expecting? The President?”

“No.” I leaned my table leg up against the wall as I stepped out of the doorway, letting her in. “We haven’t gotten a visit from one of those since VE Day.”

Instead of her original Biker Girl ensemble Amplifier had shown up in a tightly fighting T-shirt that advertised some band I’d never heard of and a worn pair of cut-off jeans that ended just above her calf. She wore a thin string of chain links, clipped together with a small carabiner clip, in place of a belt. Her piercings were all plain studs. It was a different look, but then again, she was in a band and I hear that’s a job for unusual people.

Even more surprising was her friend, who swept in behind Amplifier just as I was about to close the door. She looked like she’d been attacked by a thrift store, wearing a slightly large pair of cargo shorts and an equally baggy button up shirt on top. A wild mass of curly hair sprouted from underneath a worn, battered San Diego baseball cap. Something clicked in the back of my brain, which had finally resigned itself to being awake and started working again.

“Herrera?” I asked, closing and locking the door behind her.

“Who else?” She asked, turning and giving me a mischievous look from under the cap’s brim. “Didn’t Sanders mention we were stopping by last night?”

“Yeah, he said something about it.” I just hadn’t expected her to be able to find this place. “I just wasn’t expecting you to…” Show up looking like a bum didn’t seem like the right way to finish that sentence. “Show up so early.”

“I have classes from noon until late in the day,” Amplifier said, poking through some of the lumber I kept along the wall. “What do you do in this place?”

“I make furniture,” I replied, waving absently at the half dozen pieces I had in various stages of completion scattered throughout the space. “What does it look like?”

“A place where people make furniture,” She said with a shrug. “It just doesn’t seem very agentish, you know?”

“Neither does rock band singer,” I said, scooping up the table leg and heading back to the work bench to get some sandpaper. “But here we are.”

“Here we are,” Herrera confirmed, tipping a mostly finished chair up on one side and examining the bottom. “Amplifier wanted to hear more about the life, and I suggested she talk to you, since you’re the senior-most talent on active duty in this branch.”

“And I have to do whatever you tell me?”

“And that.”

“Makes sense. Okay, ladies, pull up some chairs. Can I offer you something to drink? I keep some soda and bottled water around here.”

“Water would be great,” Amplifier said. “It’s a scorcher out there and it’s not a whole lot better in here.”

“Sorry, air conditioning isn’t a real priority in places like these.” I fished around in a cooler next to my workbench until I came up with a couple of bottles of water, which I held in one hand and tapped with the knuckles of the other until they started beading with condensation. Satisfied that they were cool enough, I handed one to Amplifier and offered the other to Herrera, who shook her head. I shrugged and kept it for myself.

There were a few chairs in usable condition scattered about, Herrera already had one and it only took a second for Amplifier to grab another. I settled onto the stool I kept at the work bench and took a quick drink of water to clear the cottony feeling out of my mouth. That done, there really wasn’t much to do except dive right in. “Care to guess why I’m a closet carpenter, Amplifier?”

“Um… it’s a hobby?”

“Yes and no.” I set aside the water bottle and began sanding the rough edges off the table leg, letting the rhythm of the work take over my hands as I tried to figure out what way to take the conversation. I’ve done this kind of thing a lot over the years, but that doesn’t mean it’s gotten easy. Usually I have more time to get familiar with the backgrounds of the people I’ll be talking to and to work out where I’m going. “My dad was a carpenter and I’ve helped him since I was six. It’s not exactly what I’d call a hobby, just something I’ve always done. It’s also my retirement plan.”

She blinked. “You what?”

“Retirement plan.” I held the table leg up and examined it for a moment. “Handmade furniture is a small market, but it pays well. I do alright with my salary and housing stipend, but the fact is I’m working an entry level position and, odd as it may sound, there’s little room for advancement for talents in the Project.”

“Wait, what?” Amplifier leaned back slightly and narrowed her eyes. “Entry level? Teresa just said you were the senior-most agent.”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of Lincoln’s Rule.” I went back to work on the table leg. “It’s the first and biggest issue with working in the Project.”

“Lincoln’s Rule?” Amplifier straightened again. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Unfortunately, no.” I paused to brush some sawdust off of the table leg. “As you might guess from the name, Project Sumter began, in a much more limited capacity, during the Civil War. President Lincoln heard about a man at West Point who had superhuman abilities and wanted to find ways to use him in the war effort. But he already had grave misgivings about the South’s ideology and, in particular, their glorification of planters as a kind of American nobility.”

“Wait, when was this?” Amplifier crossed her arms. “I thought the Civil War was started to preserve the Union, and slaveholders only came into it when slavery proved the more palatable justification.”

I shrugged. “You know your history, although really, giving a nation as ornery and stubborn as ours any one motivation for anything is probably stupid. But regardless, Lincoln was just like any other man, he changed with time, and no time changes men like war time. More importantly, Lincoln knew the importance of symbols. The country gentleman was a symbol of the South. Lincoln wanted his army to be an army of the people. He didn’t want a super soldier becoming a war hero, he wanted average men to fill that role.”

Amplifier frowned and pulled her legs up into the chair, which was big enough she could easily sit in it Indian style without discomfort. “So what happened to the guy from West Point?”

“He was taken out of West Point, made an enlisted man and put under the command of an officer President Lincoln trusted. He served throughout the war and did good things, then retired and went home. Not a bad deal, all told, except it’s been the pattern the government defaults to when employing talents ever since. We can have a little bit of authority, serve as an NCO, for example, but we can’t be part of operational decision making, so an officer’s commission is right out. And we still operate with dedicated leash holders.” I nodded at Herrera, who looked a bit hurt.

“Not there’s no good reason for that policy,” I continued. “As you’ve probably heard, with great power comes great responsibility. I know that I’ve needed an oversight agent to real me in on more than one occasion, and the more destructive your talent can be the more important they become. But, unless you want to dedicate yourself to research full time there’s a limit to how far you can go.”

“So you’re planning to make up what you loose in salary through furniture making?” Amplifier looked around at the workshop again, then smiled slightly. “I guess that works out well.”

“Most people don’t stay with the Project for more than five or six years before moving on to something else, though.” I examined the table leg for a moment and set it aside, satisfied with it for the moment. “Having a fallback plan is one of those nagging little realities that most people don’t think of when they’re busy thinking about playing superhero.”

“On the flip side,” Herrera said, “we’re always looking for agents, which means that even if you choose not to join the Project now, there might be a future in it for you.”

“True enough. I know one guy who didn’t join up until he was fifty five, and he’s done a lot of good work for some of our branches over the years.” I dusted my hands off and rested them on my knees. “And that brings me to point number two that you should think about.”

“Health insurance?”

“No, that’s number three though, so keep ahold of that thought. Number two is, while the Project is at the beck and call off all the agencies of the Federal Government, for the most part we do law enforcement work. There’s a lot of running down paper trails, some stakeouts and the occasional bust like the one we found you during. But it’s mostly pretty boring, especially for the first two or three years. That’s time you’re not doing something you might be better at. Now you, you’re part of a band right? Singer?”

She bit her lower lip. “Yeah, that’s right. But anyone can do that, Clark and one of the other girls write all the music and lyrics. It’s not like I’m vital to the band.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I said, leaning back against my workbench. “After all, your talent gives perfect pitch, right? And you probably never miss a note unless you want to.”

For the first time since I’d met her, Amplifier broke eye contact with me and looked down at the ground. “Sure, but that’s not… it’s like cheating, right? I get an edge, so it’s not the same.”

“Nonsense.” I smacked my hand against the work bench for emphasis, startling her back into paying attention. “The fact that you have control over wave frequencies and strength is no more cheating that just being born with perfect pitch. How off key a note can you make sound right?”

“Uh… maybe a quarter step?” She didn’t seem entirely certain that was the answer I was looking for, but that was okay because I had no idea what it meant.

“So you still have to work at getting in the right ballpark?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s not all getting the right notes. There’s tempo and feeling, too. And if I’m using all my concentration on keeping myself in tune that won’t come out right, never mind how tiring it would be.”

“And you’re good at all of it, I’ll bet. And you enjoy it, or you wouldn’t be in a band.”

“Or studying music and recording in school. So what?”

“So, the Project doesn’t need agents with high visibility. It’s the other way around, actually. These,” I waved to the tools on my workbench, “don’t really care what age I am, or when the last time I used them was, so long as I still know what I’m doing. But age and appearance are a big deal for musicians, especially women, and any musician that disappears for a time is bound to be mostly forgotten.”

I held my hands out like the balances on a scale. “So you can shoot for a musical career now, but you may not be ready for the demands of the job afterwards. On the other hand, entering the Project now almost guarantees giving up all the progress you’ve made towards that career goes away, and it’s not a given you’ll get it back.”

“So you’re saying that people should never have to give something up to help others?” Amplifier asked skeptically.

“Just that they should really think about the costs, so there’s no second thoughts later,” I said. “Which brings us to point number three.”

“Health care.”

“Partly. Doing this job hurts, sure, you get knocked around a lot doing it. But Project Sumter appreciates that, and the fact that we have small salaries, and compensates for it accordingly. More than that you’re expected to do a fair bit of knocking about yourself. Did Herrera mention what kind of roles are generally assigned to a wave maker like you?”

“Not exactly.” Amplifier glanced at Herrera, who nodded. It looked like one thing Amplifier had gotten was the need try and share as little about her talent as possible. “She did mention that we’re above average when it comes to potential for collateral damage, so I might not get sent on as many field operations as other agents.”

“True, to an extent,” I said with a nod. “I’m a high collateral damage causer myself, but as time goes on you can expect that your supervisors and the Senior Liaisons will figure out ways to use your talents efficiently. What I don’t think you realize is what kinds of situations you might be asked to deal with.”

Amplifier crossed her arms and dropped her feet back towards the floor. When she realized they wouldn’t quite reach she frowned and braced them on the crosspiece between the chair legs instead. “What kind of things are we talking about?”

“High potential for collateral damage translates into really big hammer.” I hefted a heavy wooden mallet from my workbench for example. “Which means you’ll get situations where hammers are called for. For example, one potential use for your talent is to shatter large objects. Ever wanted to be a one woman demolition team? Because you could probably shake apart most concrete buildings with the right harmonics and enough power.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “How often would that even be necessary?”

“You might be surprised.” I set the hammer back in its place. “The point is, you’re probably going to be doing things that have a high risk of getting someone hurt. This isn’t comic books, this is real life. As you’ve probably already noticed, most talents don’t come with built in indestructibility to help keep you alive. And just because we’re trying to be the good guys doesn’t mean no one will ever get hurt long term by something we do. If you’re not prepared to have one or two people go deaf because of your powers, at the very least, then you’re probably not ready for this job.”

“That seems…”

“Harsh?”

Amplifier jerked back a bit from my challenging tone. “Self-righteous.”

“People get hurt one way or another every day, Amplifier. Our job is to try and keep that to a minimum. And that’s hurdle number four.” I leaned forward like I could press the spirit right out of her through presence alone. “This job tells you to keep the peace and you have incredible abilities to do it with. It also requires that you lie to most everyone you meet and keep them in the dark about what really happens in the world around them. It demands that you make decisions for the greater good without the input or okay from the people who you’re supposed to be helping. Do it for two years and you’ll either become a megalomaniacal ass or curse yourself because you think you are one. If you’re the first they lock you up, if you’re the second they do anything to keep you from leaving. So the real question is, are you ready for it?”

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Fiction Index

Heat Wave: Circuit Breaking

Posted by natechen on

Helix

A law enforcement agency runs on three things – shoe leather, information and caffeine. There’s no particular hierarchy to those, by the way, you need all three in equal amounts. So I knew that, if I wanted to talk to Sanders, all I had to do was loiter around the coffee pot long enough and he’d show up. I wasn’t sure if I’d see Herrera or Mosburger first, and wasn’t quite sure how I’d explain what I was doing if I did, but fortunately that proved to be a moot point.

In fact, I’d only been waiting around for ten minutes or so when Sanders came out of his office and headed my way. There was a spring in his step in spite of the fact that, if they’d stayed on program, he was about to give the run down on one of the more frustrating cases we’d tackled in the last two or three years. It probably had something to do with having an excuse to test the waters with Herrera.

Normally I’d have no problem bursting Sanders’ bubble. The man can hardly keep his feet on the ground as it is, I figure anything I can do to help him keep his wits about him counts as a favor. But the correct way to bust someone’s bubble is to deflate their ego a little, not to drag up serial killers eight years dead. Just thinking about it had me scowling.

Scowling is enough of a typical expression for me that Sanders didn’t comment on it when I slid in next to him while he was filling a trio of disposable coffee cups. He just shot me a big grin and said, “I like her, Helix. She’s pretty, smart and charming. You don’t find all three that much, around here especially.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to strike a casual tone. “For instance, you’re just charming, and only on your good days.”

“Me?” He gestured to himself with the coffee pot, almost sloshing it all over the front of his shirt. Acting careless is one of his tricks to keep people off guard but he’s had way to much practice to actually drop, spill or otherwise loose control of something so easily and I didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m all charm, all the time. And you know there’s no one better looking in this building.”

“The night shift’s come in by now, Sanders, the building’s practically empty.”

He handed me a pair of full coffee cups and scooped up enough creamer and artificial sweetener to qualify most foods as a health hazard. “Speaking of charm,” he said, pouring additives into his own coffee until it was just a pale imitation of its former self, “Voorman’s not going to be happy with what you said on the phone tonight.”

“Which part?” I asked, flipping back through my conversation with Circuit in an attempt to identify something that might qualify as a problem.

The smirk on Sanders’ face hinted that I shouldn’t have bothered. “The way you answered the phone. That kind of language is extremely unprofessional and reflects badly on the Project. You know he’s touchy about those kinds of things.”

“Right,” I said, letting all the sarcasm out for the first time since I’d been reassigned. “I’ll certainly try to keep common courtesy in mind while I’m trying to distract megalomaniacs over the telephone. We certainly wouldn’t want those kinds of people to get the idea that we’re some kind of cut rate private security group instead of a well trained government agency.”

“That’s the idea, Helix. Keep it professional.” Sanders finished with his own coffee and started back towards his office, forcing me to tag along. I kept an eye out for other people as we went but, like I’d said, the place was mostly deserted at night. “What were you doing before the call, anyway? You weren’t at your desk.”

I dropped my voice and tone just a tad, not enough to sound like I was whispering conspiratorially, because that just attracts attention, but enough that it wouldn’t carry as well. “I was asking Cheryl to pull some files related to what you were asking me about at Mona’s party.”

Sanders paused and glanced at his office door. It was about twenty feet away and we could clearly see Herrera and Mosburger in there chatting with each other. There were both facing Sanders’ desk, and so they didn’t have a clear view of the door. Satisfied, Sanders looked back at me and said, “Was it any use?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking.” I fidgeted, suddenly wishing that I didn’t have my hands full. “There wasn’t anything conclusive there, but there is a possibility that Agent Herrera is the relative of a crime victim. One of the one’s we’ve investigated.”

“Well that’s interesting,” Sanders said, absently sipping from his coffee. “But I don’t know if it’s relevant. It’s true that we could just get her removed from the Project if your lead pans out, but it doesn’t really tell us what Senator Dawson’s motive for sending her here was. He’s still got another five or six years in office, assuming he doesn’t get reelected again, so we’re going to have to deal with him for a while yet. Better the devil you know, and all that.”

“All true,” I said. He did have a point there, and one we hadn’t thought of while hacking over the possibilities earlier. “But I thought you should know…” I glanced down at the coffee, then around at the room again. There still wasn’t anyone in sight beyond the two in Sanders’ office. Best get it over with. “We think she might be the daughter of one of Lethal Injection’s victims.”

For a moment Sanders didn’t show any reaction. Then I realized he’d gone pale, not an easy tell to pick up on a guy like him, and his coffee was sloshing in his cup. I started to say something, but Sanders rallied enough to beat me to the punch. “How sure are you?”

“Not entirely,” I admitted. “Injection’s second victim had a daughter named Teresa and there was an EMT, last name Herrera, at the scene.”

“Flimsy,” Sanders said. But it sounded hopeful, rather than dismissive.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” I said. “But I’m not a big believer in coincidence. There’s more going on here than we know yet, and somehow Lethal Injection plays into it. And I’m not just talking about the way Circuit’s connected to both cases.”

“Then find out what it is and bring it to me. Or Voorman,” Sanders said, jabbing at me with his coffee cup. “If it’s not important, I don’t see why you bring it up.”

“No? You’ve clearly never carried a grudge before.” Sanders adjusted his tie impatiently, clearly ready to have this conversation over with. But I didn’t think letting him out of it just yet was a good idea, and I took the opportunity to shove one of the coffee cups I was holding into his free hand. He stared at it as if he’d never seen it before. “Here’s something to think about. If she stays here, sooner or later Herrera is going to start poking around to see what really happened to her father and the man who killed him. That’s going to lead her to Operation East/West and Lethal Injection.”

He looked up from juggling coffee cups and said, “What are you going to tell her?”

“Me? Nothing.” Like most people would, Sanders was holding both cups in front of his chest, not quite touching but close. I stuck the third between them and he fumbled get them arranged into a pyramid that he could hold with only two hands. “I wasn’t on the scene with Lethal Injection was brought down. I’m certainly not the person who shot him.”

Sanders flinched and I folded my arms and looked away, already regretting shooting my mouth off. A classic example of why I tried to let Sanders do the talking most of the time. If only that was always an option this time around.

Still, it was a good thing I did look away just then, because I saw one of the other field agents, probably from Al Massif’s team, threading his way to his desk. I lowered my voice a bit more and said, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.” I looked back in time to see Sanders nod, a perfectly normal expression tacked onto his face. “I’m out tomorrow, I’ll be at my workshop. Let me know if you need anything before I come in again.”

I tried to beat a hasty retreat but before I could get more than a few steps away Sanders said, “Oh, Helix?” I paused to glance back at him, but didn’t turn around. “Herrera said something about a meeting with you tomorrow. Does she know where you’ll be?”

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” I said. “She’s a trained investigator. If she needs me, she can find me.” Sanders just shrugged and we went out separate ways. After debating about it the whole way out of the building I finally decided I was too wound up to sleep. The workshop was closer anyways…

Circuit

“Sidearm?”

I checked the clip on my SIG, then loaded it and racked the slide. “Check.”

“Taser?”

I held up my hands to display the gloves I’d built my upgraded joy buzzer into after the last one proved to be poorly insulated. “We’ll be trying the static charge rig again.”

“Are you sure? You haven’t had a chance to test it out since the last time…”

“I’ll take my chances, Heavy,” I said, connecting the electrodes to the battery lined vest. As I’d hoped, it had proven fairly simple to keep the charge up by syphoning loose static charge, along with other forms of stray current, into the batteries. It wouldn’t last forever, but it did slow down the rate I burned through the reserve.

But Heavy didn’t seem very impressed with it’s performance so far. He just sighed and said, “It’s your funeral.”

“Trust me on this,” I said, checking the connections a second time. The vest supplied power to both the electrodes and the pair of electromagnets coiled around my arms. It was important to make sure they were connected to the right ports. There was a trigger for each one built into my new gloves, and it would be unfortunate if they wound up switched and I accidentally shock Heavy Water when what I really wanted was to extend my talent’s reach with a magnetic field.

Heavy didn’t question my faith in my handiwork, just turned around so his back faced me, not so much a snub as a request that I check his body armor. As I made sure he was firmly enmeshed in his gear Grappler leaned around the side of the driver’s seat and said, “Are you boys sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Yes,” I said, cinching Heavy into his armor a bit tighter. “Breaking and entering is a two person job, the better to avoid detection. We need my talent to bypass security and Heavy has more experience than you. And someone has to stay and drive the getaway car.”

Grappler sighed, doing her best to look both fetching and disappointed, the better to convince us to take her along. As usual, she succeeded admirably. But, while she’s probably the most striking African American woman I’ve ever met, I’ve also built an entire career, on both sides of the law, by ignoring distractions. I wasn’t about to start being swayed by one pretty face. “We’ll be back in an hour, two at most. If you don’t see us by then…”

“I know, go get Simeon and tell him the score.” She turned back towards the front of the van and settled into her seat again. “Get moving, then. I’ll meet you at the pick up point.”

Heavy turned around again and slipped a plain windbreaker over most of his gear. I was doing the same with a sport coat. “First problem is a security camera on the corner of the building,” Heavy said, leaning over one of our computer consoles. “It takes six seconds to sweep from it’s first position to the second, where it remains for four, then sweeps back and watches the other way for the same period of time. Cycle begins… now.”

We stepped out of the van and made our way across the street. I flicked my electromagnets on as I did so, keeping a careful count in my head. Twenty seconds later, as the camera settled into a position facing away from us, I locked the circuit powering its motor open, immobilizing it. Much less obvious than simply disabling it for a number of reasons. Any person in the security center watching it was much less likely to notice a stationary than one taken out by, say, an EMP. It’s also much more likely to be treated as a simple malfunction. And if it does go unnoticed at the time, the camera goes back to normal performance once we’re gone and no one is the wiser.

“Problem two,” Heavy said quietly, once I gave him the all clear signal and started across the street. “Exterior door. Plans show a simple mechanical lock.”

“Unlikely,” I mumured. And as I expected, the lock proved to be a complex mechanical-electronic hybrid. It looked like I’d need to swipe a key card while unlocking it if I wanted to enter the normal way. I’m sure, one of these days, people will realize this really isn’t any more secure than an old fashioned padlock and start throwing bars across the inside of their doors again, but until that happens places like these are my oyster. The building plans didn’t show any other security beyond this point and, aside from cameras, it should be a breeze.

The card scanner was right there in the open so I didn’t even need to use a magnetic field to manipulate it with my talent. I just rested one hand on it and motioned for Heavy to pick the lock. Once he was finished I disabled the sensor that monitored the door. While it blissfully thought the door was closed we slipped through, then I shut down the magnets and everything outside returned to normal. I tapped one thumb into the other palm, letting me check the charge left in my vest. Barely a tenth drained.

Heavy and I produced flashlights and switched them on to augment the dim lighting in the parking garage we found ourselves in. It was hard to see much of anything clearly, but I could tell that there was a row of cars stretching into the dark on our left, giving way to larger vehicles about forty feet away. To the right I could see the basic vehicle care facilities that go with any kind of serious motor pool.

I waved Heavy off to check on the vehicles while I moved into the maintenance bay. Beyond that I found what I really wanted, a door into the rest of the facility. It was closed and locked, but a quick check didn’t reveal anything beyond that. I nodded to myself and doubled back into the work area and started rummaging around. I finally found what I wanted a few minutes later. The motor pool’s collection of spare keys was kept in a lockbox on one wall. It was clearly labeled, which made things easier, but also locked. I could have just forced the lock, or perhaps cut it, with some of the tools on hand but finesse is a virtue in its own right, and so is staying in practice. I pulled out my own lock picks and got into the box in tolerable time.

The keys were all labeled by make and model, and came with remote operated locks, so I just took the first set of sedan keys I came across and hit the unlock and lock buttons. Then I closed up the lockbox and relocked it. A few minutes after I finished Heavy came back and joined me at the door. I raised an eyebrow and asked, “Finished already?”

“If you ever did this for a living you’d know how stupid that question makes you sound,” Heavy said, sliding past me to the hall door and cracking it open in a staggeringly short period of time. I had to admit, when it comes to this kind of thing Heavy Water’s in a league of his own.

You could tell just by the way he moved us from the motor pool down one floor to the basement of the building. Even though he had identified all the places cameras were likely to be installed, and even though it was after midnight and the building was, for the most part, as silent as a tomb, he still moved around ever corner with caution and approached every door with care. In under twenty minutes he had us from the motor pool down to the objective with nothing but a handful of security cameras, handled as easy as those outside, as obstacles.

The door itself was more of a problem. It looked like it was locked physically, with a camera fixed on it and probably someone at a desk with a panic button on the other side. The first thing I did was knock out the camera. Since it didn’t move, it had to be fried. Hopefully the fact that only one camera had gone dead would be enough to keep us from being noticed until after we were out.

On the bright side, it did give me a chance to test out a function of my new gear that I hadn’t had a need for yet. The magnetic coils around my arms were just as capable of creating a weak EMP as they were a more sedate magnetic field, and a brief burst from them left the camera inert. It also drained another twenty percent of my vest’s charge, which was less than satisfactory efficiency. I made a mental note to work on that as I used a more normal magnetic field to check that the camera was indeed out of service. The door would be more of a challenge, but now that we were free to move down the hallway I was confident that Heavy could get through it.

I strode up to the door and waved Heavy back for a moment, so I could check the door for electronic alarms of some sort. I had just leaned forward to touch the frame when the door swung in and revealed a tall, blond man in the process of coming out.

The door would prove to be much more difficult than I had anticipated…

Fiction Index

Heat Wave: Flash Point

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“Ortiz’ daughter was named Teresa?” I leaned back in surprise. “Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What were you expecting then?” Cheryl asked.  “You are the one who wanted to see the file.”

“One of the EMTs who came to the scene was named Herrera.” I tapped the appropriate part of the old draft I had found. Cheryl flipped through the stack of papers to the correct final report. “I talked to him way back when, but I was hoping there might be something more on him in the file. Like whether he had a daughter.”

“But you didn’t realize Ortiz had a daughter, or that her name was Teresa.” Mona didn’t make it a question. “I find it hard to believe both men had daughters named Teresa. But if Ortiz’s daughter is the Teresa here now, under the name Herrera, shouldn’t you recognize her? Eight years is a long time, but you make the case sound like such a big deal…”

“I never met any of the families of the victims.” For which I was privately grateful. “Let’s face it, the Project doesn’t have enough coverage to be an effective first responder and Lethal Injection was spread out across two fairly large states. Mostly, by the time we arrived at the scene the locals had usually taken charge of any family of the victim, and it’s not like we have the extra personnel to assign our own family liaisons with. In fact, we tried not to tell the family anything about our investigations.”

“Which is sad but understandable,” Cheryl said as she ran one finger down the page she was looking at. “Here we are. Javier Herrera, married, three children. Doesn’t look like we dug any deeper than that. We don’t usually look too hard at incidental persons on the scene, so that’s not surprising.” She flipped the papers closed. “Still, Mona’s right, it does seem like a stretch to call it a coincidence that a man with Agent Herrera’s last name was there the day Teresa Ortiz’s father died. Ms. Ortiz would be the right age to be Agent Herrera, too.”

“So, speculation?” I tapped my fingers absently on the tabletop. “Did Javier Herrera take in Teresa Ortiz after her father was murdered? That would explain why Teresa Herrera’s records were sealed.”

“It’s possible, but it would require unusually fast work on the part of the local authorities to get it done before she came of age,” Cheryl said, absently stacking the East/West into a neat pile again. “Unless Mr. Herrera had some kind of pull, which you wouldn’t expect of the typical EMT. If Agent Herrera is Teresa Ortiz, then the sealed records are a real plus for her.”

“How so?” Mona asked.

“In the last year two field agents have turned out to have connections to the past victims of talented criminals,” Cheryl said. “In both cases those agents were immediately taken off of field work due to concerns about their objectivity.”

“But they leave field agents with long working histories with talented criminals on the same case for years,” I muttered.

Mona spared me a sympathetic look. “New question. If Agent Herrera is Teresa Ortiz, why did Senator Dawson spend so much political capitol getting a handpicked agent into the Project when finding out such a simple thing could get her removed from her position?”

That was a great question, and it quickly became apparent that Mona didn’t have the answer. We stared at her for a moment and she blushed a bit. “Maybe there’s just something about her that puts her ahead of the pack?”

“There’s nothing in her HSA record that’s particularly stands out,” Cheryl said. “I mean, she was efficient and had a good record, but nothing that puts her in the top five percent, say.”

“I didn’t realize they ranked people like that,” Mona said.

“I think we’re using the Cheryl O’Hara Snap Judgement ranking system,” I said, reaching over to tug the East/West file away from Cheryl.

She put one hand on top of it to keep it in place. “You haven’t officially signed that out yet. Maybe Herrera came up with a novel approach to catching Circuit?”

“I’ll sign it out as a resource on Open Circuit later, his phone call certainly makes it relevant,” I said. Cheryl’s hand didn’t move so I relented and pulled back. “And Herrera did have the location of Circuit’s warehouse, but I’m not sure that would explain why the Senator pushed so hard to get her into the Project. It was a minor tip, and very recent. This kind of thing has to have been in the works much longer than that tip was around.”

“Maybe the Senator had a new idea to catch Circuit, and he needed someone to help him try it out?” Mona rested her chin in her hand and stared absently at the far wall, sure sign that the wheels were starting to turn at high speed. “But that wouldn’t explain why he’d choose Teresa as his catspaw.”

“No, I think Cheryl was on to something,” I said, slowly cracking my knuckles as I thought about it.

“I was?” Cheryl straightened a bit. “About what? Herrera not being a stand out?”

“Not exactly.” I drummed my fingers again as the idea coalesced. “It’s just that when I first met Agent Herrera she was with Senator Dawson and I wasn’t quite sure how he could stand being around her. She strikes me as a natural born people person, with tons of charisma and presence and she’s better looking to boot. Why would he let himself be overshadowed that way?”

“You’re not really helping us explain why the Senator would want Herrera in the Project,” Mona pointed out.

“That’s just it, what if he didn’t want her in, but she did. What if she was the one looking for any available route into Project Sumter and decided Senator Dawson was the path of least resistance.” I leaned forward and tapped Cheryl’s file. “She’s got a powerful motivation, at the least.”

“So you think she’s here for revenge? A real life Batman, out to fight the talented criminals so they can’t cause other people grief?” Cheryl asked thoughtfully. “It’s possible.”

“But it doesn’t explain how anyone, no matter how motivated, could get Senator Dawson to spend a great deal of political capitol getting them admitted to Project Sumter when the Project is very likely to kick them out as soon as they stumble across the right file. Which we’ve just proved doesn’t take that long.” I opened my mouth to say something but Mona kept going. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the Senator must have thought there was something worthwhile he could get out of the arrangement.”

“I’ve never met Senator Dawson,” Cheryl said. “And I’m not really that familiar with the Senate Committee decisions, since Records only deals with field reports. What does he want to do that having a field agent in the Project could help him accomplish?”

“He could get information that usually isn’t forwarded to the Senate Committee,” I said. “Or keep abreast of developments in cases without being reliant on official Project sources.”

Cheryl’s face made it clear that, whatever she thought of that, it wasn’t very nice. “While I’ll admit that’s something, I’m not sure it’s worth all the effort it took to get Agent Herrera into the Project. Mona makes it sound like it took a lot of work.”

“It did,” Mona said. “I can’t say much beyond that, but it is something Senator Dawson has been working towards for some time. I’ll agree that whatever he might want Herrera in the Project for, it’s probably something more significant than just an inside source.”

Not something I really wanted to think about. The long and the short of it is, a lot of the safeguards that keep talented people like myself safe from persecution and exploitation rely on secrecy. That’s one of the major reasons why, nearly a century and a half after it’s creation, Project Sumter remains a top secret, undisclosed portion of the government. Secrecy is part of our lifeblood and to people like me, who have been raised with the reality of talent since our births, there’s few things more important. Not even our Senate Committee gets to know everything about us. If compromising Project secrecy was just a side benefit of getting Herrera into her current position, how bad was Dawson’s real scheme?

“Maybe we’re thinking of this the wrong way.” Cheryl leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers, tapping her chin with her thumbs. She didn’t have the same level of commitment to secrecy as I did but, as part of the Records department, it was still a major part of her job. While she hadn’t seemed excited about playing politics with the Senator’s hand picked oversight agent when I first asked for the East/West file, now she seemed a little more invested in the idea.

“The Senator’s biggest failed initiative was his proposal to require all talents to register in a database that would list their name, current location and talent.” She glanced at me. “I can mostly guess why you might not like that idea, Helix, but what are the official reasons it got shot down?”

“Budget,” Mona said immediately. “There just aren’t enough resources allocated to the Project to make such a thing feasible, even if it weren’t kept a secret. We barely have the resources to do normal law enforcement and locate and brief new talents that show up. Tracking all the known talents in the country would require us to tripple our staff, at the very least, and there just isn’t enough money for that, never mind enough trained people.”

“There’s also the privacy and other civil rights issues,” I added. “Many members of the Committee were concerned about what might happen to their careers if they were ever associated with a program to monitor people who weren’t guilty of anything more dangerous than being born with unusual potential. Our friends in the Justice department-” Mona suddenly bolted upright and darted out the door. “-had similar concerns.”

There was a brief moment where we just sat there, Cheryl looking stunned while I tried to think of other recent changes in procedure that might be credited to Senator Dawson. “There was a plan a while back to try and get more experienced legal advisors onto the staff, but that failed for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the Senator. In fact, I think that was actually a pretty popular idea with everyone but the lawyers.”

“Right,” Cheryl said, still looking at the conference room’s door. “More importantly, should I be worried about whatever Mona’s up to?”

“Oh, that?” I glanced back in the direction Mona had headed. “Happens all the time.”

“If you say so.” She blew out a breath. “Why didn’t the lawyers like the idea?”

“I think it didn’t pay enough.”

“Naturally.” There was another moment of silence while we contemplated Shakespeare’s famous suggestion to kill all the lawyers, but before I could suggest we look into that as a new policy initiative Mona swept back into the room carrying a small pamphlet that looked vaguely familiar.

“What’s that?” Cheryl asked.

By way of answer Mona spread the pamphlet out on the table. Among other things there was a prominent picture of Senator Dawson smiling at some sort of event and one of those tear-out donation cards. “Senator Dawson brought in a stack of these during his last re-election campaign. There were a bunch of them left in various places around the building, I don’t think anyone took one.”

“He’s from Wisconsin,” I said. “How many people here could even vote for him?”

“I’m not sure that matters to us right now,” Mona replied, skimming over the pamphlet. “I didn’t take one but I did read one, once. Here we are. ‘If elected, the Senator will push for funding to support research into all spheres of medical stem cell treatments, including existing embryonic stem cell lines, adult stem cells and hybridized stem cells.'”

“What’s a hybridized stem cell?” Cheryl and I asked as one.

“It’s a new approach to gene therapy crossed with adult stem cells,” Mona said. “With adult stem cells you grow new organs or some such based on the person’s own genetic code. But if the person you’re treating has some sort of congenital defect, you’re likely to wind up with the same problem all over again. You can’t grow a good heart off bad blueprints, for example. The theory behind hybridization is, you replace whatever the faulty genes are with functional genes from a healthy individual, then grow the new organ.”

“They can’t even get stem cells to grow organs yet, regardless of where they come from,” Cheryl said. “Why push such far flung research?”

“I don’t know.” Mona began folding up the pamphlet again. “But we don’t know much about talents and genetics yet, even after several decades of research. What if all it takes is a hybridized stem cell treatment to create new talents?”

My gut clenched at that idea. “You think the Senator was somehow working towards that?”

“It’s a possibility,” Mona said, putting the pamphlet aside. “But it’s based on a lot of fairly fragile evidences and suppositions. The Senator’s campaign goals. Teresa Ortiz as Agent Herrera. The Project’s current lack of significant data on existing talents, which the Senator has tried to remedy.”

That’s a getman’s life in a nutshell. Make fragile leaps of logic. Astound everyone when you’re right. I knew better than to write her conclusions off, and apparently Cheryl did too, but she also saw something I hadn’t thought of yet. “Why does putting Agent Herrera in the Project help Senator Dawson develop hybridized stem cells?”

“Easy,” Mona said. “We can’t maintain a database on all known talents, but criminal talents are different. They’re imprisoned and monitored just like any other criminal. And one of the things we do is take a DNA sample from each talented criminal we arrest.”

“And then, whenever there’s a crime involving a specific kind of talent you compare forensic evidence found at the scene against known criminal talents of the same type. I’ve seen some of those Forensics reports. Records, remember?” Cheryl pointed at herself in case we weren’t sure what she meant. “I’m not an expert on genetics, but I don’t see how those DNA records might help the Senator with his hybridized stem cell schemes, assuming he even has any. There’s only a few hundred criminal talents on record, and half of them probably don’t have DNA on record, since they’d have been active before the technology for it existed. That leaves maybe two or three examples of any given talent for study. Scientists need hundreds of examples to get an accurate picture of gene structures, don’t they?”

“A ambitious field agent with a chip on her shoulder would push aggressively to arrest more criminals,” Mona said, ticking the points on her fingers. “We’ve already seen that in Agent Herrera’s push to arrest Circuit. More criminal talent records results in a larger statistical sample. It also makes it easier and easier to make the case that a comprehensive talent database would save us effort in investigating and prosecuting talented crime.”

“That’s nonsense. There’s no evidence that Circuit was ever even contacted by-”

“Ladies!” I waved my hands for their attention. “I don’t think we’re going to get any farther on just speculation. It’s time to go out and look for some evidence.”

I started to get up from my chair but Mona waved me back down. “Hold on. Where are you going?”

“Um… to think about how to get some evidence?”

She shook her head sadly. “You know, Sanders may have been the one to recruit you into helping manage Herrera, but he’s not the only one Voorman has working on this.”

“I appreciate that, Mona,” I said. “But if anyone has the connections to run down what happened to Teresa Ortiz after her father died, it’s San-”

“Me,” Cheryl said. When we turned to give her that look surprised people always seem to give, she just shrugged. “If the Senator is trying to pull something weird with the Project records I don’t want to be involved in it. But,” she held up a finger to emphasize her point, “if there is no connection between the two Teresas then your whole line of reasoning goes from sketchy to worthless, and I’m out. You can get Sanders to run down the information you need in the future.”

I glanced at Mona, since I wasn’t part of the inner circle in this whole unofficial probe into Herrera’s past it would be better to let it be her call. She said, “That sounds fair. And with the Firestarter case still open and who knows what else likely to wind up on our plates in the near future, what with Circuit still at large and two new talents in town, who knows how much free time Sanders will have in the near future. If you want to tackle tracking down what happened to Teresa Ortiz I don’t see any reason to say no.”

“Okay, with that settled…” I pointed at Mona. “There is something you could look in to. You majored in Biology in college, right?”

“Yes…” She could clearly see where this was going.

“In your spare time, see if there’s anything to that wild stem cell idea. If someone’s looked into it and proved it can’t be done, then that’s probably not the Senator’s actual goal here. Otherwise, try and figure out what other things he might be doing to push that idea while Herrera’s doing her thing here.” I got to my feet and started towards the door, then paused and glanced back at the two of them. “And no one mention this to Sanders just yet. I’ll break it to him.”

Cheryl raised an eyebrow. “You?”

“Me.” I sighed. “East/West was a nasty case for everyone. But of all of us, here, it was probably worst for him. He should find out it’s coming back to haunt him from someone who was there.”

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Heat Wave: Liquid Fire

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“Circuit?” Nothing but silence met me on the line, and I slammed the handset into it’s cradle. “I’m so glad I could waste ten minutes of my life on that.”

At the next desk over, Sanders hung up another phone, shaking his head in disbelief. “He’s been on the books nine years and we never had a hint he was so… crazy.”

“He’s good, that’s for sure.” I leaned back in my chair and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to gather my thoughts. Just listening to Circuit rave seemed to have driven them all out of my head. “Never shown his hand if he could help it. What scares me is that he apparently found people who agree with him. There ought to be some rule limiting how many cranks of a given type there can be.”

“You can’t legislated what people think, Helix,” Herrera said.

I swiveled in my chair so I could see the desk behind me, where she was sitting. “I’m talking about laws of nature and probability here. I mean really, did you hear that guy? And there are people who are willing to help him out?”

“Doesn’t mean they like the ideology.” Herrera pushed her chair out from the desk and stretched back, then stood up. I blinked and told myself to focus. I took small comfort from seeing several other men in the room do the same thing out of the corner of my eye. “They may think there’s something in it for them, or maybe they’re just natural followers, and an authoritarian personality can naturally dominate them. That is basically what Circuit said he plans to do with the whole nation, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if I like to give credibility to anything Circuit says, but you may have a point.” I rubbed my eyes and stifled a yawn, then shoved myself up out of my chair. “Someone should find our analyst and have him look over Circuit’s activities since he became a known element, look at them from the perspective of an organized anti-government idealist rather than a simple miscreant.”

“In the mean time,” Sanders said with a smile, “it sounds like your team is going to need to get better acquainted with the Firestarter situation. That’s still my case, at least until Agents Verger and Massif can get back from their last assignment. Agent Herrera, would you like me to give you a quick briefing on where that case stands?”

I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. “I was on the Firestarter case not four days ago. I haven’t heard about any big breaks in it, so I think I can get our team up to date.”

“Maybe,” Herrera said. “But I’d like you to focus on trying to figure out what Circuit is likely to do next, assuming he actually does plan to try and stop the Enchanter on his own. I’ll get Pritchard and Agent Sanders can bring us up to date.”

Sanders’ expression slipped just a tad, but he quickly recovered and said, “That sounds like a good idea. Meet me in my office in ten minutes?”

“If I can find my analyst that quickly.” Herrera turned and glanced around the room, which currently included the three of us, half a dozen analysts and one or two people who I’d guess were from Forensics or Records. “Has anyone seen Agent Mosburger recently?”

“The new guy?” One of the analysts asked. “I think I saw him headed towards Darryl’s office half an hour ago.”

Herrera headed off that way while Sanders headed to the elevator, presumably to get back to his office, leaving me at loose ends. It was tempting to go home and get some sleep, leaving the problem of trying to anticipate Circuit for later. But I had plans for the next morning, which was my day off, and I didn’t want to leave too many loose ends lying around the office, so I thought it would be a good idea to go and see if we had ever actually gotten anything on the phone trace we were running on Circuit’s call.

That kind of work is handled by a special part of the forensics team, so I headed towards the elevator. I was waiting for it to arrive when Mona caught up to me.

“Come on,” she said. “You need to see something.”

If it was Sanders or Herrera, or even Jack, I might have questioned that, but Mona was my field analyst for two and a half years and in all that time, when she’s said I should see something, it always proved to be something I needed to see. I didn’t think that had changed in the few days since I’d been reassigned, so I followed her back up the hallway to a small briefing room in the corner of the building. To my surprise Cheryl was already there, seated at the table with a stack of paper, clipped and stapled into about a dozen separate chunks, in front of her.

Mona closed the door behind us as I sat down at the table. “I take it this is about the East/West file?”

“You got me curious so I pulled it up, but I’m not really sure what you wanted it for,” Cheryl said, thumbing the corner of the stack of papers. “I gave it a quick glance over before I signed for it and came down here, but I didn’t see anything that seemed to have bearing on active cases. Unless the fact that it involved Open Circuit is enough to make it relevant.”

“Actually,” I said, “since he just mentioned it to me a few minutes ago, it might.”

“Wait.” Mona held up a hand as she sat down, looking almost as if she was waiting to be called on in class. “Before we go any farther, does anyone want to tell me about the East/West file? Is it an operation file, a research file, a file on a specific talent…?”

“An operation file,” I said. “Operation East/West refers to the manhunt for a talent known as Lethal Injection.”

“And how does Open Circuit come into that?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Darryl never mentioned this case to you at all?”

“Why would Darryl mention a case she’s not cleared for to her?” Cheryl asked, clearly a little scandalized at the idea that someone would break with procedure like that.

I tried not to look impatient. “It was a significant case in recent history, as well as the first case I worked on. It’s when I met Darryl and Sanders, in fact. And as so many people have pointed out recently, I’ve spent a large portion of my time with Project Sumter working on one thing or another that has Circuit as it’s root cause. That might have made East/West relevant to my analysts at some point, don’t you think?”

“If it did, no one ever mentioned it to me around the office,” Mona answered. “And we don’t bring work home. Darryl’s too much of a perfectionist to ever be able to put it down if he did, and you know I’d just feel insecure about whatever calls I’d made on a case during the day and spend all my time on the phone changing my mind. It’s much simpler to just police each other and never let work in the door.”

“Reasonable,” I said. “And East/West isn’t exactly the kind of thing that comes up in casual conversation. It’s the only case in my time with the Project where we actually went to Condition One.”

“I saw that,” Cheryl said, picking up the top stack of paper and flipping a few pages. “In fact, going to Condition One was one of the first actions taken on the case. But there’s no mention in here of what it means, and I didn’t have a time to look it up.”

“Condition One is when the Project goes to battle stations,” Mona explained. “It’s kind of like a state of emergency. I don’t think it’s been used all that often, though you’re in a better position to know that kind of thing than us. Basically, I think the Project only moves to Condition One when they know for a fact that a talent has used their abilities to kill someone.”

Cheryl bit her lip. “Yeah, I can see that being a cause for alarm for a bunch of reasons. It’s tough to keep quiet, it requires particular care in handling arrest and prosecution and then there’s the family of the victim to consider…”

“Victim?” I shook my head. “You misunderstand. Condition One can be called whenever a talent directly causes a fatality, whether they used their ability maliciously or in self defense, accidentally or intentionally. We don’t go to Condition One every time we find an incident like that, but we could.”

“Really?” Cheryl looked a bit surprised. “That seems like awfully vague. Not that vague is anything new for the Project. But, even assuming it’s intended for containment of fatal incidents where talents are involved, what does it actually mean?”

Mona shrugged. “That part is fairly straight forward, really. First off it involves taking all field agents off their current assignments and reassigning them to working on the fatal incident, usually as containment or to follow up leads that would normally be left to local law enforcement or associated federal agencies, to cut down on the bureaucracy involved.”

“I’m not entirely sure it helps there,” I said. “Since the Project is hardly the paragon of red tape cutting.”

“Secondly,” Mona ignored my interruption, “while we’re under condition one the rules about civilian talents staying out of Project business are lifted.”

Cheryl’s eyes widened. “You mean we don’t enforce the anti-vigilantism rules under Condition One?”

“It’s worse,” Mona replied. “Talents with criminal records can also contribute to solving the case, with the possibility of receiving a reduced sentence or even a pardon for previous actions.”

“That’s how Circuit’s name wound up in the East/West file,” I said. “He got wind of what was going down and spent some time looking for Lethal Injection himself. In fact, as he has so recently reminded me, he gave us the tip that actually led us to Injection.”

“I suppose he wasn’t interested in the pardon then?” Cheryl asked.

“No, he obviously wasn’t, although we did hold off on actively trying to chase him down until he did something illegal again.” I shook my head. “Circuit’s involvement with East/West wasn’t what I wanted to look into when I asked about the file, though it’s certainly become more important in the last hour or so.”

Cheryl restacked her papers and said, “Well, if it’s not about Circuit, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Condition One, what were you wanting to know?”

“Actually, it’s about one of Lethal Injection’s victims.” I fished out the handwritten piece of paper I had found while rummaging through my desk. “I don’t have the name, but I do have the date we were on the scene. 30 May.”

“Hm…” Cheryl flipped through the various piles of paper with a practiced eye. “First victim, Nolan Richards, found dead on the third of the month. Second victim, Hernando Ortiz, killed May 30th.” She pulled out the relevant bundle of reports and went through them, then stopped on one page and turned pale.

“Cheryl?” Mona leaned forward, concern evident on her face. “Are you alright?”

She turned the page with a shaking hand and said, “There were pictures, that’s all.”

Which I should have thought of. While there’s probably no such thing as a good first case for someone in law enforcement, Lethal Injection had proven to be a very, very bad one. “Sorry, should have warned you.”

“Warned her of what?”

“How bad it would be.” I rubbed my forehead. Even eight years later, thinking about that time was tough. “Lethal Injection was more than just some guy who caused a fatal accident with his talent, or a crook who let things get out of hand during a job. He was a honest to goodness, talent wielding serial killer.”

“No wonder Darryl never told me about him,” Mona said in a hushed tone. Serial killers are something no one in the Project likes to think about, for all the usual reasons plus the added difficulties of containing and managing the existence of the talents involved in that kind of a mess. “What was his talent?”

“Waterworks,” Cheryl answered. “Manipulation of the viscosity of liquids. Not exactly a dangerous talent.”

“Not on the face of it,” I said. “But when you find ways to get toxins and acids into highly concentrated liquids that you roll up into little beads? That’s what happened to Ortiz. Injection tossed little balls of sulfuric and hydrochloric acids on him until they either caused enough damage to kill him or the shock did him in.”

“Not to mention that blood is a liquid,” Mona added.

“He figured that out, too,” I said bitterly. “Eventually.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence after that. Then Cheryl started skimming the case file again. “Ortiz was a postal worker, doesn’t say what part of the postal service he worked in. Worked for the USPS ten years, nothing remarkable about his record. Thirty-nine years old at time of death. Not in financial trouble. Good looking man, when he was alive.”

I resisted the urge to point out that that wasn’t exactly an appropriate thing to say about a dead man. Cheryl turned over the page and continued reading. “He was a widower, doesn’t say how his wife died. They had one daughter, sixteen years old at the time, who found the body.” Mona made a little pained noise at that, but didn’t say anything. Cheryl paused for a moment, and at first I thought she was just waiting to see if Mona would say anything else. But then she looked up at me and said, “The daughter’s name was Teresa.”

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Heat Wave: Short Fuses

Posted by natechen on

Circuit

A rush of garbled voices on the other end of the line met my announcement. I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone putting his hand over a handset and they became completely unintelligible, but I didn’t really need to hear much of what they were saying to guess the content. It probably boiled down to everyone asking, “How did we manage to miss that?”

“Helix.” I said, in a normal tone. The babble continued, so I raised my voice a bit and repeated myself. I had to repeat the process twice more until the voices quieted down.

A moment later, Helix’s voice came through clearly, saying, “What do you get out of doing our job, Circuit?”

“A lot of things, Helix,” I said, trying, and mostly failing, not to grin at his confusion. Even if he wasn’t there to see it, a sloppy habit is a sloppy habit. “The three most significant benefits are these. I keep the public blissfully ignorant of talents, a situation that benefits me just as much as you. I keep the Enchanter from gathering other people to his cause. And I do a little something to convince you that I’m not the villain you think I am.”

“Not a villain?” Helix scoffed, which is something you don’t hear much any more. “Not a villain? Have you forgotten what happened in Morocco already?”

“Do not-” I slammed the heel of my hand down on the console in frustration. I knew that was going to come up sooner or latter, but somehow it still managed to surprise and irritate me. Heavy Water was staring at me from the next chair over and I waved him back to checking his gear, then turned the motion into a general shaking to get the tingling out of my fingers.

Helix remained silent through the whole process, whether startled by my outburst or stewing as he waited for a real response I couldn’t tell. After a second or two, with my temper mostly under control, I said, with diction as careful and clear as I could make it, “Do not blame me for Morocco. What happened there was in total disregard of my express orders. Yes, the funding came from me but it was not properly used.”

Still irritated, I got up and paced to the back of the van, a journey of about two steps, then back to my seat, and repeated the process, nearly making myself dizzy as I went on. “Morocco was a mistake and I will not repeat it. But I saw what it was and I closed it down. I did, not you. Just like I did with Lethal Injection and like I’m doing right now, with the Enchanter.”

“All you managed to do in those cases was make bigger messes for us to clean up.”

“I stopped what was wrong, Helix. I don’t think even you will argue with that. The fact that my organization does not have the resources yours does in terms of containment and cover up does not change the fact that something needed to be done.”

There was a long pause and I leaned against the back doors of the van, trying to give my simmering annoyance a chance to cool by wondering what Helix was doing. Massaging his temples? Rubbing his forehead? Throwing paperclips at the other members of his team?

Unfortunately, I kept coming back to the little issue of his being completely correct. A couple of years ago I had tried farming money raising activities out to certain elements in Africa. Unfortunately, I hadn’t ever seen any return on that investment and I’d found my name and organizational weight being thrown around ways I never even dreamed of.

I shut that operation down. Permanently. Apparently Helix got stuck cleaning up afterward. I should have expected that, really, because who else would they send?

“I apologize for the inconvenience I’ve caused, Helix, but I do admire your capacity to deal with it. That’s one of the reasons I’m offering you my help this time.”

“Help?” Helix’s voice rose to a shout. “Is that what you call it? Circuit, I don’t care if you were outside of US jurisdiction, you still provided the funding, the training and the organization to let those people do what they did. That makes you responsible for what they did. The fact that you’re sorry about it doesn’t mean you’re not scum.”

“Scum?” My voice dropped down until it was barely a murmur. Heavy glanced up with a worried look and began shutting off the equipment at the work stations, which was probably a smart move.

“Do you know the difference between the two of us and people like the Enchanter, my late, unlamented associates in Morocco or even the Senator who runs your Project?”

Helix matched my icy quiet with an equally dry tone. “Enlighten me.”

“We do something, you and I. By any objective standard, the bandying about of words that passes for modern politics is as superfluous to society as the brutality of a dozen street thugs in the Third World. Enchanter and anarchists like him see the politicians and the thugs and they think they’re the problem, when they’re actually a symptom. The Enchanter wants to burn down modern society and replace it with the basest barbarism because they think that will make them free. What they don’t realize is that all it will do is make the politicians and the thugs swap places. But you and I, we know the real problem, and we’re doing something about it.”

“I have a newsflash for you, Circuit. If you think the problem is that there’s too many thugs out there sucking air, then we definitely aren’t dealing with the same problem. In fact, I’m not sure we’re even in the same zip code.”

Even though I was leaning against the back door of the van, far from most of the electrical wires in the vehicle, I could still feel the current moving through them, balancing potentials. There was a beauty and elegance to the simplistic focus of electrons moving through wires that I have always loved. It’s a trait Helix shares with electricity and, I think, one of the reasons why I’ve never taken his constant interference in my work personally. He can’t not do his job any more than negative charges can seek the positive.

But there’s a rhythm and pattern that even the simplest of computers brings to that single-minded electronic drive. It’s hypnotic, at times, and soothing at others. And it has a simple lesson to teach the attentive. “The key is control.

“In olden times, people had self control. The States never could have united if their leaders didn’t realize that giving up a few of their prerogatives to form mutually binding agreements would result in greater power, a power needed to gain any meaningful freedom from Britain. Back then, in a way, each man was a tyrant in and of himself, ruling his life with an iron fist so that the excesses that would prevent him from living meaningfully would be controlled.”

“So, what? Are you calling yourself a founding father?”

“Hardly.” I was distantly aware that Helix was trying to make fun of me, but I refused to rise to the bait. For one thing, it would do a lot to undermine my point. “The world you and I live in is nothing like theirs. People don’t learn to control themselves anymore, and they don’t believe in building anything. Instead of useful work we get empty protest, noble ideas are replaced with vapid “dialog” and self restraint is belittled while anarchy and indulgence are the height of culture. All the while the handful of people who do anything meaningful are expected to carry the burden of providing for everyone else.”

Helix grunted. “You’re not wrong. But I think a man of your abilities who really wanted to fix those problems would do more good as a teacher than as a… whatever you are.”

“Oh, but I am a teacher,” I said, feeling the electricity in the van begin to pulse in time with my words. “People today expect someone to look after them. They’re not even qualified to eat without a half a dozen rules to help them make the right choices. Well, we live in the information age, where power is in the hands of the one who can master the circuit just as much as the one who masters the gun or the dollar. Who better to run the show than a man even the government recognizes as a master of circuitry?”

“What are you saying, Circuit?” Helix’s voice had gone just as cold and low as my own. “That you’re the new Messiah? A one man army, come to set the world aright? Lots of other people have tried that, none of them have succeeded.”

I snorted and the surge of current shorted out the van’s dome light. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s true that, to a certain degree, it will take a single man with a clear vision and immense power to create and enforce the new rules. But I need other people, just like anyone. I have some allies. I need more. You, and most of Project Sumter, are cut from the right stuff. You can keep secrets and know the importance of law and order. And, whether you like to admit it or not, the slipshod way you go about trying to find and educate talents right now is not going to be enough in the very near future. You can’t keep a lid on talents forever, but once the genie’s out of the bottle the government will never be able to deal with the backlash. You need me.”

“So we should put you in charge?” Helix actually sounded a little thoughtful at that, and I felt a spark of optimism. If he was taking the dangers I foresaw seriously, then implementing a solution in time to save society from total disintegration might not be a pipe dream. “Sorry, Circuit, but no dice. I’ve seen what your problem solving looks like. We don’t need more of that.”

“Let me prove it to you. Share your files on the Enchanter with me and I’ll run him to the ground. I have connections that won’t talk to you, and ways of gathering evidence shortsighted courts might not approve of.”

“How simple can I say this?” Helix bit each word out. “No. We will catch the Firestarter ourselves. And if you come anywhere close to this investigation, I will personally cuff you and throw you into a hole so deep you’ll forget what daylight looks like.”

“Fine.” I felt something in the van’s power locks short out under the force of my reply. “But the change is coming, Helix. It’s necessary and unavoidable. The people of America no longer know enough about governing themselves to ever hope to govern anything else. Once the society collapses it will be a new dark age unless someone does something to stop it. Someone willing to grind common sense back into them no matter how little they want it, who’s willing and able to force them to fight for their independence again. What it amounts to is, if they can’t or won’t rule themselves then they will bow to me.”

The stray charge that had built up in the wires near me as I spoke burst free and flooded the van for a brief second. My headset gave a brief click and then died. I absently pulled it off and threw it to the floor. “Heavy!”

“Van’s locked down, boss,” he called from the front seat. “Grappler got most of it sequestered before you started raving.”

“It’s not raving, Heavy, it’s telling people the truth. They frequently look very similar.” I pulled the disposable phone I’d been using from one pocket, checked to make sure the same pulse that fried my headset also fried it’s memory, then tossed it on the floor. “It seems like Project Sumter is unwilling to cooperate with us.”

Heavy raised one eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“Meaning, we have to do this the hard way.”

He rubbed his hands eagerly. “Boss, that’s just what we’ve been waiting to hear.”

Heat Wave: Crossed Wires

Posted by natechen on

Helix

As the local king of disorganization, I learned pretty much everything you need to know about keeping Cheryl happy by not doing it. At this point, that should come as no surprise. But when I left Herrera’s office I had every intention of practicing what I preached. I spent the next hour and forty-five minutes writing up an after action report on the warehouse raid, and another forty knocking my notes on Amplifier’s debriefing into shape.

Thus armed with fresh computer print-outs, properly sorted, paper clipped and ready for filing, I made my way up to the top floor where the Records department perches over its nest of moldering files like some bizarre sort of carrion fowl.

The Records department is set up like this: You step out of the elevator into what’s probably the least welcoming reception area on earth, or at least the upper Midwest. There’re a door to the stairwell on the left and a desk built into the wall on your right an a whole lot of empty space. They don’t even have potted plants there. In the far wall there’s a secure door that leads into the department proper. Only people who are actually employed by Records can get in or out of that door.

Worse, because of the institutional paranoia that has grown up in the Project since our records were compromised a few years ago, if we want to do a search of files we haven’t contributed to, or files that are now closed, or pretty much anything that isn’t on our desk right that instant, we have to go through Records to do it. As a result, our Records people are the most over worked and underpaid Project employees. It’s not at all surprising that they’re also some of the grumpiest.

When I got there Cheryl was at the desk. No real surprise there, she’s almost always at the desk, on the front lines trying to hold the unwashed masses of clueless field agents and demanding supervisors at bay and let the Records people focus on the important work of trying to figure out bad handwriting and transcribe it into the Project databases.

Actually, we don’t turn in handwritten reports anymore, and haven’t in ages, but you wouldn’t guess that from talking to a Records worker.

As soon as Cheryl saw me coming out of the elevator, reports in hand and on time, a suspicious looked crossed her face. This is not the kind of punctuality I’m known for, and as a rule of thumb if someone’s making life easier for you it means they want a favor in return.

Cheryl probably learned that lesson early in life. She dresses real classy and has a great figure to boot, and when she first started working the Records desk you’d usually find a small crowd of people loitering around trying to make small talk with her whenever you filed a report. That was two years ago, and it’s mostly a thing of the past now. I was the only one there when I arrived.

“Agent Double Helix,” Cheryl said, crossing her arms and sitting back in her chair. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit? You don’t have anything due for another forty-eight hours, I wasn’t expecting to see you for another week.”

“You’re here pretty late, yourself, Cheryl,” I replied. “It’s after eight, I thought you’d be out of here hours ago.”

“Are you kidding?” She shook her head. “With a major raid today, in conjunction with local SWAT, accompanying evidence processing and two new Talent files to open, do you honestly think we have the time to take the evening off?”

I hefted the reports in one hand and set them on her desk. “Speaking of which. Write ups on the raid, after action report, paperwork for opening a file on talent #4322, notes on first debriefing of the same.”

Cheryl gave it a quick once over, then said, “What about #4323? You’re not about to let someone else open a file on a talent you found, are you? It’ll ruin your numbers.”

“Voorman beat me to it,” I said, offering a halfhearted shrug. I really didn’t feel like going over that a second time. “If there’s paperwork to be filed on Gearshift you’ll have to wring it out of him.”

With deft hands Cheryl racked the paperwork and added it to a small stack on her desk. She did it all without looking, instead evaluating me with a scornful glare. “All right, Helix, what is it you want?”

“Is this where I play coy?”

“Most people do,” she said dryly. “It doesn’t make them any more likely to get what they want and it’s not very original, either. Just insults my intelligence.”

I always got the feeling that Cheryl finds most kinds of banter insulting to her intelligence. On the bright side, that’s not problematic for me unless I’m trying to turn in paperwork with Sanders along. “I need access to an old file.”

Cheryl nodded and turned to her keyboard. Apparently this meant I’d passed muster. “What kind of file?”

“Operation East/West.” I leaned on the desk and did my best to look casual. “It’s appended to talent #4085, codewords Lethal Injection, Double Helix and Open Circuit.”

“You’re cleared for all of those,” Cheryl muttered, reading the information she’d pulled up on her screen. “But file #4085 has been closed and sealed. Lethal Injection is marked as dead. Is this relevant to an ongoing case?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “It’s got to do with something I’m looking into for Sanders.”

Cheryl frowned. “He doesn’t even have any cases assigned to him at the moment. You boys aren’t up to some kind of mischief are you?”

“We’re a clandestine government organization, Cheryl. Everything we do counts as mischief by definition. It’s for a worthy cause, though, and we’ve unofficially been formally asked to look into the matter by people high up.”

“Like who? Is this something the Senator put you onto during his visit a few days back?”

There’s a lot of politics in any job, but especially in one where you’re actually working for politicians. In my case, I don’t like it but I deal. It’s not what I’m here for but I don’t believe in letting it get in the way of what I am here for. But some people don’t like politics in any shape or form. With a job and attitude that focused on getting the facts in order, it’s no surprise Cheryl was one of them. Still, I’m sometimes surprised at how much she manages to miss sometimes.

“No, he didn’t.” In this case, I decided flat denial would work best. In fact, I like to go with flat denial whenever I can get away with it.

Unfortunately, Cheryl wasn’t willing to let me remain mysterious. “Well, what do you want it for, then? I can’t just sign out a closed file on a deceased talent on Sanders’ say so, even if both of you were involved in it.”

“It’s kind of-”

The rest of my explanation, which I’m sure would have been stunningly persuasive once I figured out what I was going to say, got lost in the sound of the stair door being shoved open. I turned to see Kesselman, looking more than a little out of breath. He spotted me as son as he came to a stop. “Phone call for you downstairs, big guy.”

Feeling like I must have missed something, I pointed at myself and raised my eyebrows.

“Yeah, you. Downstairs in the analyst offices.” He paused to gasp for breath.

“Well, why didn’t they just take a message?”

“It’s from someone who says he’s Open Circuit.” Kesselman motioned down the stairs. “Says he’s on a secure line, doesn’t want to transfer. He’ll hang up if you’re not there in two minutes, Herrera says hustle.”

When the boss says hustle, you hustle first and question later. As I sprang for the stairs I looked over my shoulder and said, “I need that file, Cheryl.”

Then I proceeded to go down four flights of stairs in under twenty-five seconds, which I don’t recommend for anyone who’s not a Hollywood stuntman, and burst onto the Analysis floor trying to run and keep weight off the ankle I’d just sprained at the same time. Darryl waved to catch my attention, he was standing by a desk with Herrera and Sanders.

Sanders was on the phone and as soon as he saw me come out onto the floor he said, “He’s here now,” and held the phone out for me as I ran over to take it.

The last thirty seconds had left me out of breath and in pain so I just grabbed the phone out of his hand and covered the mouthpiece as I took a second to steady myself. All three of the other people stared at me with naked impatience, which didn’t make gathering my wits any easier.

So I disregarded several Project rules of conduct, not to mention everything my momma ever taught me, and slapped the phone to my ear then said, “What the hell do you want?”

Circuit

“Quite well, thank you.” A moment of silence answered my non sequitur. I shrugged and wound up fiddling with my hands free headset for a moment until I had it properly settled again. There are good reasons for the things, I’m sure, but I’ve never found one that would sit on my head for any length of time unless duct tape was involved. For obvious reasons, I dislike that approach.

Helix still wasn’t saying anything after I got the headset settled again, so I decided I’d just have to keep going. “You know, in all the time we’ve known each other this is the first time we’ve actually spoken beyond the stereotypical police drama stuff. Being cordial would cost you nothing. And it would keep me on the line longer for your phone tracker to do its thing.”

“Sorry, Circuit, but cordial is not my thing.” I knew enough about Helix to know he wasn’t a big man, but he had a surprisingly pleasant baritone voice in spite of his stature. It sounded a bit raspy, though.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I catch you away from your desk? You sound more than a little winded.”

There was a murmur of voices on the other end of the line. “What do you want, Circuit? I don’t honestly believe that talking to you for an extra thirty seconds is going to let us get any closer to tracing your location and I do think hanging up on you before you make your point is going to make you annoyed enough to do something stupid.”

I blinked. As a matter of professional survival I have a healthy respect for Helix’s capabilities. He’s a skilled man, with training from the largest talent watching agency in the nation and a wealth of practical experience. But I hadn’t expected him to be so blunt. “Very well. Did you find what I left for you?”

“The chair? Yeah, it was right where you left it. Wanna tell me what that’s all about?”

“The chair? I sit on it, of course.” I snorted and settled myself into my seat in an attempt to get comfortable, probably just a case of my subconscious acting up. The van I was sitting in was custom built, but not for comfort. “I wasn’t asking about the chair, Helix. Have you read the letter yet? If not, I can always call you later.”

“The letter?” Another murmured aside. “You mean the one from the Enchanter guy? Yeah, we found it, but I don’t have it here. You want me to run at get it from the forensics guys? Though I’m not sure they have it off the truck yet.”

As Helix was talking Heavy Water opened the side door of the van and slipped in, handing me a set of folded blueprints that had come to me through certain channels and that I would be needing in the near future. “Not necessary. Just tell me, what did you think?”

Helix made a funny little exasperated noise and said, “I think you’ve either got some really weird idea of a pen pal or you’ve finally decided to take up the profession of crossword puzzle setter. I have no idea what that was, Circuit. Now why don’t you answer me something.”

“Of course, Helix. We’ve worked together long enough for you to ask me one or two questions on this auspicious day. But before you fire away, I need to make a quick adjustment. You know, one of those things that keeps you frustrated and me from incarceration.”

The van wasn’t laid out in the normal fashion, with two benches in the back capables of holding a total of five people. Instead, the back was entirely open, leaving more space for whatever I might need to pile there, and there were two chairs facing computer consoles across from the sliding door, one of which I was sitting at. I put the blueprints down on my console and said, “This may be a little loud.” There was a sudden burst of static as I tweak electric potentials in various parts of the computer, feeding it various commands. A lot of the noise was purely cosmetic, something built into the repeater built into the van, but as I’ve said before, appearances are important. And, to be fair, I was actually doing something I didn’t want Helix thinking too much about. “There we are. Finished.”

I was answered by the sound of muffled cursing on the other end of the line. It took a second for Helix to wind down, then he said, “What are you doing, playing with Faraday cages?”

“That’s surprisingly astute of you, Helix,” I said. “I had no idea that you knew so much about electronics.”

“Don’t give me that. You handed my team the solution to our first major case, gift wrapped, and then you scoffed at the pardon that came with and proceeded to spend the next eight years wreaking havoc. You really think I don’t read those technical journals you leave sitting around? We’re not stupid, you know. Anything you’re interested in, I am too.”

“Which only serves to reinforce my high opinion of you.” As I spoke I pulled up a simple GPS tracking program, the kind of thing that will find anything, anywhere in the world, and tell you it’s exact latitude,  longitude and height above ground, and set it to work. “I want to try it again.”

“You want to leave me more trade magazines?”

I laughed. “No, not what I was referring to.”

I had intended to say more but a sudden rustle of sound on the other end interrupted. “Well would that tell me how you make a cellphone trace say you’re on the island of Malta? Because I, for one, would like to know how that’s done.”

“Generally, one books a flight to Malta and then places a call from his cellphone.” Heavy was already unfolding the blueprints and consulting them before the computer finnished it’s queries. “But let me restate that what I want is not to give you a new set if ideas to develop countermeasures for. Rather, I want you to consider letting me help with a little problem of yours.”

There was a split second of silence, then, “I’m not sure I follow.”

“It’s like this, Helix,” I said, looking over the places Heavy had marked out as potential entrance zones. I pointed to one and nodded. “You have a problem. You call him Firestarter. He’s both talented and destructive. Perhaps worst of all, he uses his talent to help his baser urges find expression. He’s not just a danger to the general public, he makes it difficult for the Project to maintain that lovely fiction that the world is a sane, predictable place without sudden surges and shifts in the evolutionary status quo.”

“I’m familiar with the Firestarter case,” Helix replied. “I was even on it for a little while.”

“Not at all surprising,” I said. “What’s more so is that you’re not on it now.”

“These things happen. I fail to see how the problems Firestarter is causing us can be any of your business. What’s one miscreant’s arsons to another’s armed robberies, money laundering, extortion, conspiracy, kidnapping and interstate flight?”

“You forgot several varieties of grand theft,” I said. “And surely, with all the crimes the federal government wants me for, the interstate flight warrants can hardly be germane anymore.”

“Of course. How could I forget?” Helix sighed. “I honestly don’t see where you’re going with this, Circuit. Do you think we don’t have the resources to chase both you and Firestarter at the same time? I know you have an incredible information network at your disposal, and if you have a tip on Firestarter that you’d like to share, we’re always willing to act on those. But what’s your angle?”

“You don’t see the difference between me and Firestarter?” I asked, affecting a wounded tone. “Honestly, Helix, I’ve always hoped you gave more credit than that.”

“More credit than what?”

Heavy Water is touchy about his plans, so I didn’t write a big fat X on which room our objective was in, just tapped the correct part of the prints twice, then did the same for places I thought we might want to avoid due to electronic surveillance.  “More credit than you give a two-bit miscreant like him.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s managed to perpetrate a number of arsons without getting caught, and unlike you he’s managed to leave a subtle pattern to annoy us with. You have no pattern at all, and perpetrate crimes strictly for your own gratification.” Helix’s tone was slightly condescending, as if he was unsure I was keeping up.

“Not strictly for my own gratification. And leaving patterns is the work of an amateur, I am a true professional. But most importantly, Firestarter is an example of society’s problems, I represent the solution. Did you read the Enchanter’s note?”

“Yes,” Helix said, dragging out the word in a way that made it clear he was still trying to follow the sudden subject change.

“Did you happen to look at the envelope it came in?”

“No, I didn’t. Should I have?”

“It’s return address was 1457 Ferntress Avenue, the home of Paul Moreau, the Firestarter’s first victim.” I gave that just a moment to sink in. “Sources tell me police Precinct 27 received an identical note returned addressed to the home of Peter Morrison. I wouldn’t be surprised if notes were credited to Amelia Morgan and Pritchard Mosburger as well.”

“You think this Enchanter and Firestarter are the same person.” Helix wasn’t asking a question. “And you plan to help us catch him for reasons of your own.”

“There is that incredibly sharp insight I have come expect.” I leaned back in my seat and laced my fingers behind my head. “We underground talents have our own ways of passing news around, you know. This is not the first I’ve heard of the Enchanter. He’s actually managed to make a name for himself in the last year or so, and not in the quiet, unobtrusive sort of way many of us get our start. No, he is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a real firebrand.”

Helix groaned. “You should get something added to your rap sheet just for that.”

“Do you know why he sent me that letter?”

“Because he can’t stand your puns?”

“That might have been a part of his motivation, but I doubt that was all of it.” Heavy handed me the blueprints, this time with a route from entrance to objective marked on them, and I sat back up and began to study them again. “He’s an anarchist, Helix. Everything there is to love about a structured, organized society, he hates. But in particular, he hates the idea that there’s someone out there who will come down on him like a load of bricks if he ever tries to use his talent for anything beyond boiling water.”

“So you’re saying he doesn’t like the Project much more than he likes you.”

“I imagine he wouldn’t, if he knew it existed,” I said, setting the plans aside for the moment. We were getting to the good part and, without any visual cues to clue me into Helix’s state of mind, I was going to need all my attention on the conversation for the moment. “But so far as the Enchanter is concerned, the person waiting to jump on him is me. I started stymieing his attempts to take his anarchist’s manifestos into public venues two months before his first arson. So in a sense, as far as he’s concerned I am Project Sumter.”

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Fiction Index

Heat Wave: Raking the Coals

Posted by natechen on

Helix

Once we got back to the office there were a million things to do before I went in and talked to Biker Girl and her friends. For one thing, I had to go over to Records and see what they had found out about them. I was sure we’d gotten their legal names by that point, but beyond that making these inquiries takes time, even if you’re connected to the FBI. Especially then. So there wasn’t much to work with there.

Then I had to run over to Analysis and see if they’d attached a code word to Biker Girl’s file yet. As it turned out they had. Talent File #4322 was officially named Amplifier. Charlie, Talent File #4323, was now Gearshift. Fitting but vague. Classic Sumter. There were no indications that Skinny had admitted to talent of any kind, nor had he exhibited any signs of one. That didn’t mean much, but it also meant he didn’t have a Talent File, he’d probably wind up as a person of interest. Talents have to be debriefed by other talents and their supervising agents, persons of interest are usually handled by others. That meant Skinny wasn’t my problem.

I labeled the files Records had given me and went back up the stairs to my desk. Nearby the tac team was working on after action reports. There was no sign of Herrera.

“Where’s Herrera?” I asked Bergstrum as I sat down.

He shrugged. “Haven’t seen her since we checked in our gear. Probably checking on where the kids we picked up are being held.”

“Should have just gone up and asked Cheryl.” I tapped my folder. “They got it in here already.”

Bergstrum shook his head and laughed. “I’ve never seen anyone ride people as hard for their paperwork as she does. Life could get problematic once she’s Records chief.”

“Don’t I know it,” I said, and looked down at my desk. As I’ve said, it’s typically a disaster area, but today that was more useful than problematic. We don’t like a Member of the Public to think we’re understaffed, hampered by red tape or otherwise lacking in the omniscience department, and as such I wasn’t prepared to go in to talk with our freshly minted talents bearing files on them that only had three to five sheets of paper a piece.

So I raided my desk for padding.

There were a half a dozen office memos on fascinating subjects like how to use the new paper shredder or photocopier, rather redundant as they effectively amount to the same thing if you ask me. I shoved them into Amplifier’s file and tossed a stack of pages from last year’s Project employee handbook that would need to go through the shredder or copier later, for disposal. I absently tossed this year’s handbook on top of the other three ring binders at the back of my desk and pulled out the bottom drawer.

There I found the mother load, a two inch stack of rough drafts for after action reports from a forgotten time. I shoved them into Gearshift’s file and compared my stacks. They were about the same size but one was full of typed pages and the other handwritten stuff. That didn’t look good, so I shuffled pages until things were equal.

I really wasn’t paying attention as I did it, so it’s really kind of a miracle that I spotted it. Still, there it was, as I was moving an old action report from Gearshift’s file to Amplifier’s. A familiar name that had no business being in a report I’d written eight years ago. And why did I still have hand written reports from my first case anyway?

The far door banged open and cut off that line of thought. Herrera stalked through on her way to her office. Her expression was impassive but this was the first time in the last three days I’d seen anything like that from her.

I made a mental note to look into the discrepancy in the old file later and shoved everything into the folders, yanked some sticky notes down from the nearest bulletin board and stuck them on pages at random, then closed them up and headed over to Herrera’s office. The door was open so I took that as an invitation to come in.

“Hey, Herrera,” I called. “We got talents down in the tank stewing. If we keep ’em too long they’re gonna have to answer some awkward questions once they’re out. We gotta move.”

She glanced over from the file she was flipping through. I could tell from the looks of it that it didn’t have anything to do with our strays. The label was green, meaning it came from Forensics, not Analysis. “Yeah, just a minute.”

While I hadn’t known her that long I could tell that something had ruffled her usual composure. It was tempting to just chalk it up to stress and lett it go, after all it had been a long day, but at the same time I was technically supposed to be keeping an eye on her. So I asked, “Something wrong?”

Herrera looked at me for a moment then closed the folder and said, “Helix, why do you call everyone by their last names? Jack, Lars and Paul all seem pretty informal, and that doesn’t seem to bother you. But except for Jack, I’ve never heard you call anyone by their first name.”

“Curse of rank, ma’am,” I said with a shrug. “There’s a natural tendency to assume that a better behaved person is a safer person. The more dangerous a talent is, the more people want to know they’re well behaved.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said with a snort. “Formality doesn’t equal safety.”

“No ma’am. But you might be surprised how much of a difference it makes in perceptions.” I smiled slightly. “It can make you seem safe, or at least too stodgy and unimaginative to be a danger. On the other hand, it can encourage the idea that, and I quote, ‘Individuals of talent come from longstanding families who’s conservative ideas often cast them as the new American aristocracy. To allow these people to establish family dynasties that continually influence the course of national policy sets dangerous precedents that could have a long-lasting impact on the course of our society.'”

Herrera raised an eyebrow. “Who said that?”

“Senator Brahms Dawson, when I originally applied to join the Project.” I shrugged. “He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, my point is, while all talents have a lot to juggle, some of us juggle more than others. The last thing I need is some kind of bureaucratic reprimand because somebody thinks I wasn’t respectful enough. Or worse, was sexually harassing someone by being too familiar.”

“What about Jack?” She asked.

I shrugged. “I’ve known Jack since I started here, and I didn’t start the whole formality bit ’til I turned twenty and actually grew a brain. Old habits die hard. Same thing goes for the Templetons, really. Now, that was a nice dodge, but why don’t you tell me what it is about that,” I waved at the folder, “that’s got you so upset. Is it something I need to know about before we go and talk to Biker Girl and Charlie?”

With a sigh she handed me the folder. “It’s not really important. Just notice from Forensics that they’re not going to have time to look at most of what we’ve found for another two days.”

I glanced through the file, which looked like a lot of the kind of delay oriented bureaucrobabble desk jockies use to avoid doing real work. Still, I’ve been here enough to know when they’re really asking for time and when they’re just seeing how much they can get away with. “It looks pretty legit to me. There’s ‘only’ thirty talents that use our forensics office on a regular basis, but that’s enough to make a real backlog.” I closed the folder and handed it back to her. “In fact, the forensics people almost always have the biggest backlog of any department.”

“I know.” She tossed the file down in frustration. “I had just hoped…”

“What?” I asked, when it was clear she wasn’t going to finish the thought. “That somehow Project Sumter was different? We’re not really superheroes, Herrera. Day to day problems don’t magically smooth themselves out of our way so we can get to cracking skulls faster, no matter how much I might wish it were the case.”

“Right.” She picked up the files on our new friends and hefted them in one hand. I noted approvingly that she had packed them to the regulation three quarter inch thickness. “Well, while we wait for the gears of justice to grind onward, let’s go talk to Amplifier, shall we?”

“There’s an idea I can get behind. Put on your scary face, Herrera, we’re gonna nip it in the bud.” I did my best Barney Fife imitation. “When we’re done with those kids they’re not gonna be able to think about vigilante justice without shuddering.”

Herrera laughed and gently turned me around and pointed me out of the office. “Then get going, we’re burning daylight.”

We walked into the holding room where Biker Girl, now Amplifier, was waiting for us before discussing exactly what out tactics would be. As it turned out, that was a major error.

I opened with a classic interrogation gambit, namely slapping down great big honking files and looking at my interrogatee meaningfully. People usually find this a little intimidating and Amplifier looked to be no exception.

In fact, once you stripped her out of the body armor and biker gear what you got was a rather fragile looking girl in a sweat stained red shirt who looked like she’d walked into a classroom on the first day of school and been asked to hand in a report no one told her she had to write. It’s a common reaction most talents have when they find out about us, because conspiracies keeping the nature of the world secret are something that happen to other people, right? I’d like to say you figure out a good way to deal with people feeling like that, but I never have.

Now, normally, Sanders and I have a simple system where in I collect all the biographical data “for the record” and he does all the hard questioning. This tends to net more results than the alternative. Which is anything else. Believe me, we’ve had a lot of time to try other systems.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know Herrera well enough to signal that she needed to do most of the talking, nor did I know how the HSA handles interrogations well enough to seamlessly work my way into her routine. So naturally, I decided to bull ahead and hope that Teresa would realize she needed to take over at some point.

It’s this kind of shrewd conversational decision making that gets me into trouble in the first place.

Things started off well enough, Herrera gave her name to the microphone and I identified myself by codename. Then I said, “Subject is tentatively identified as a Wave Maker, a talent capable of adjusting the frequency and amplitude of most sound waves. Tends to manifest unusually good hearing and the ability to identify and exploit harmonics to destroy objects.”

Biker Girl sat up a bit straighter and said, “How did you know that?”

I glanced at her for a second, then said, “Our subject will now be briefed on the Project’s confidentiality protocols,” and switched off the tape recorder. “You and your friend were both wearing body armor when we met a few hours ago. Why was that?”

“Because we didn’t want to get shot?” She said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. Which really, it was, but you wouldn’t think it with the way some wannabes act.

“Good thinking,” I said. “But you weren’t wearing a helmet like Mr. Movsesian. It would muffle the sounds you hear and interfere with your ability to effectively use your talent. You also removed jewelry from all of your piercings, because hitting the wrong frequency can cause them to vibrate violently enough to hurt yourself, and you could tell the door in the bunker was free of coolant because you didn’t hear any being pumped through, pretty much the only way you could have determined that without learning the pump was missing, like Mosburger did.”

“Huh.” She sat back in her chair, a looking slightly impressed. “Not bad. You’re smarter than you look.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “It’s a requirement to be in this line of work. You want to work with talent, you better get used to thinking that way. You’re a known talent now, and that comes with baggage.”

“I beg you pardon?” Amplifier said.

“You’re now a part of the Project Sumter files,” I said, hefting the file in question for her to see. I opened to the first page, one of only five legitimate pages of data on her. “We’ve assigned you a codename, Amplifier. You’ve been assigned an Temporary Oversight Agent, namely Agent Herrera.”

The two women nodded in acknowledgement of one another while I pressed on. “At all times, when dealing with the Project, you’ll be identified by codename and should identify yourself by codename. Very few people will know your real identity, and it’s in your best interest to keep it that way.”

“Wait, you want me to call myself Amplifier the whole time?” She asked, a little incredulous.

I rubbed my eyes and, in a fit of generosity, said, “Would you like to ask Records if your codename can be changed?”

“It’s not that,” she said, “I just didn’t expect to… you know…”

“Concealing your identity is a fundamental safety measure,” I replied. “Believe me, I know it’s strange and unsettling,” which was true, I understood it but not like a normal person would, “but you need to start partitioning your thoughts now so you’ll make fewer mistakes in the long run. And if you choose to remain a part of civilian life then you probably won’t notice too much difficulty in keeping things distinct.”

“Remain civilian?” Amplifier’s face fell. “You mean I’m not going to join the Project?”

“We don’t force anyone to join,” Herrera said. “We open files on talents as a safety measure, like tracking a gun owner. Some of the abilities out there are very dangerous. There’s also enough people who know about them and would want to extort them for various purposes that we need to keep an eye on that possibility as well.”

“Extort them?” Amplifier looked legitimately alarmed for the first time since I’d met her. “You mean like a slaver ring, or something?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “That kind of thing has never been observed in the US before.”

“Which means you’ve seen someone somewhere else doing it, right?” Amplifier said. “I’ve heard enough doubletalk to know it when I hear it, Agent Double Helix.”

“You can just call me Helix.”

When it was clear that I wasn’t going to say anything beyond that, even if she glared at me, Amplifier asked about Gearshift, except she asked about him by name. Herrera told her his new codename and explained that we’d not spoken to him yet. I had been hoping that this signaled that she was ready to take over, but unfortunately with that said she seemed content to watch a master at work.

For the first time in recent memory I found myself wishing Sanders was here. Amplifier looked like she had something else to say, but I wasn’t about to loose control of the interrogation, they’d run me out of the FBI.

“The facts of the matter are pretty straight forward, Amplifier,” I said. “If you want a job the odds are pretty good that the Project could put you to work, provided you can qualify.”

“Qualify?” She seemed a bit mollified by that. “What do I have to do to qualify?”

“For starters,” Herrera said, “you have to show an ability to pursue investigations and work well in a team setting, something you’ve already done.” I shot her a glare, not at all happy we kept going down this road when I was more interested in how three college aged kids found one of Circuit’s outposts in the first place. Which was, of course, what we should have been asking Amplifier about in the first place.

Herrera ignored my glare and the weight of purpose behind it, opting instead to finish explaining the Project’s hiring standards. “You also have to be able to work with oversight and complete basic field training similar to what the FBI or CIA go through.”

“They’re very big on undergraduate degrees, too.” Grumbling about it probably didn’t reflect well on myself or the Project but whenever the subject came up I couldn’t help but remember all the difficulty I had when I first tried to join the Project. Now Herrera was practically giving a recruiting pitch to Amplifier. It didn’t seem right, but then, talent alone is proof that the world isn’t fair.

I straightened, realizing that both women were looking at me questioningly. I straightened a bit and said, “Can we focus please? This is supposed be a…” I stumbled for a second, thinking that “interrogation” might not be a productive word to use. “A debriefing,” I finally said. “We’ve been sitting here for a good ten minutes without recording any actual testimony.”

“Right,” Herrera straightened up a bit, looking slightly chagrined. “Is there anything else you wanted to ask about the Project with direct bearing on this debriefing?”

“No,” Amplifier said uncertainly after a moment’s thought. “I don’t think so.”

There was a twinge of guilt from the part of me that usually spent its time wondering what life without knowledge of talents or the Project was like. I’d lived knowing about talents since I was four. I really had no idea what kind of adjustment this was for her. I tried to sound sympathetic as I said, “Just try to remember not to give your own name or those of any other talents you know.”

She exhaled slowly. “Right. Code names, protect identity, tell the truth.”

“That’s the idea,” I said, wondering that tell the truth had to be said explicitly.

Now I’d like to say that we wrapped up the debriefing in fairly short order after that, but it actually took us a good two hours. Most of it was fairly boring stuff, with Herrera and I trying to figure out exactly how a bunch of college students managed to run down a warehouse belonging to an international crime lord.

It turns out that you can get really far with just a girl able to make out conversations through two or three walls and a halfway decent analyst to back it all up. Circuit needs hands to help him move things around, just like anyone else, and he hasn’t managed to build robots to replace bodies with yet. His major mistake seems to have been robbing a man Gearshift knew a couple of days ago. While the crime took place in Texas, Clark Movsesian, who I still thought of as Skinny, was somehow able to track Circuit back to a warehouse in the city.

I made a note to recommend Movsesian to Darryl as a potential getman recruit.

Amplifier, Gearshift and Movsesian all belonged to a band, which was how they met each other. I gathered that Amplifier was the singer, Gearshift played guitar, which apparently had something to do with his codename. Movsesian was both the keyboardist and wrote the music. There was a lot of other trivia mixed in there, but the rest of it went in one ear and out the other.

Once the debriefing was done we sent her on her way with another warning to be careful and not talk about this to anyone. Herrera also gave Amplifier the contact information for a person in HR, in case she was still thinking of joining up. Finally we got her out of the tank and headed back into normal society.

I glanced at my watch and tried not to swear. It came out in a muffled grunt, prompting a puzzled look from Herrera.

“We need to go talk to Gearshift,” I said, by way of explanation. “Sanders has probably debriefed Movsesian already, but Gearshift’s been down in the tank for practically four hours already. Even if we get him out in two, it’s gonna look strange to anyone paying attention.”

“Right.” Herrera nodded and headed towards the elevator. “Remind me again why he’s down in the basement?”

“He looked to tanned. I didn’t want to contribute to his developing skin cancer so I had him put out of the sun.”

“How generous.” She hit the elevator call button and gave me a skeptical look.

“Sorry, ma’am,” I said, holding up my hands defensively. “This is one thing I really can’t explain right now.”

“Helix, I know there’s a difference in what you know and what you can tell me. You’ve been doing this longer than me, regardless of who’s in charge, so you’re bound to be cleared on more stuff than I am. But I hope that if there’s something I need to know, you’ll tell me.”

“Believe me, ma’am,” I said, “if there’s something you need to know, I’ll be the first to point it out.”

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Heat Wave: The Wood Pile

Posted by natechen on

Helix

As it turned out, Circuit had actually left is a lot, but not much of it was meaningful.

Perhaps because he didn’t want to draw attention by bringing in a fleet moving vans, Circuit had chosen to leave behind most or all of what passed for furniture inside his little environmentally sealed bunker. Most of it was piles of pallets and crates with boards laid across the top to serve as makeshift tables. There was an empty server rack over in one corner and a serviceable desk nearby. A hand crafted walnut chair sat by the desk. Beyond that there was a map of the city with a bunch of papers tacked around the edges. Here and there a discarded piece of electronic equipment sat, either forgotten or unneeded.

SWAT had declared the room free of danger before letting us in, but I still felt a twinge of caution as I poked through the piles of junk. The whole place was kind of depressing, and not just because there weren’t likely to be any signs of where Circuit was in it. It reminded me of an empty factory, a place that used to have purpose but didn’t any longer.

I shook off the melancholy and walked over to the desk, pulling on a pair of white gloves as I did. Contaminating the crime scene is still a blunder, even if asteroid impacts are more likely than Circuit leaving fingerprints for us. Mosburger trailed along a few steps behind me and Herrera went part of the way with us, but went to look at the map instead. Mosburger started poking through the drawers on the desk, musing to himself, “You have to wonder if it was even Open Circuit who was here. There could be any number of reasons for someone to use this kind of elaborate vacuum set up.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning the chair over and looking at the bottom side of the seat. “But this almost guarantees it.”

“What?” Mosburger asked, looking back at the chair with a confused expression.

I tapped the maker’s mark stamped on the bottom of the chair. “This. Circuit has left at least one piece of furniture of this make at every place of his we’ve raided in the last four years.”

“How many is that total?”

“Counting this, six,” I said, setting the chair back on its legs.

“Is it always his chair?” Mosburger asked, looking at the furniture a little more closely.

I shrugged. “It’s not like he labels them, and not every place we find is his personal laboratory, but yeah, we think so. It would certainly fit what he seems to be doing.”

“What? Is it some kind of message?” He was studying it more closely now, as if a simple wooden chair that consisted of four legs, a seat and a back could tell him something. And he was a getman, maybe it could.

“Personally, I think he’s just making fun of me.”

“You?” That got a raised eyebrow. “What makes you think this is personal?”

I waved my hand at the chair. “This came from the same online store as all the other pieces. It’s a-”

“Hey, Mossman!” Jack waved from over by the server rack. “We got something here that requires your particular talents.”

“Right!” He got up and started away, glancing back long enough to say, “Fill me in later.”

A nod was all he got for confirmation, but I was sure that he’d here about the chairs sooner or later. I went back to the desk, but didn’t really find much there. It was mostly piles of old electronics and computer trade magazines, most with dogeared pages. I left them be.

“You folks think you’ll need anything else before we go?”

I jumped and turned to find the SWAT Lieutenant had snuck up on me. Tunnel vision strikes again. “No Lieutenant, uh… I never got your name.” And suddenly, I felt bad about it. We’d dragged him and his team off their normal beats to help out here and they had found a big fat nothing.

“Don’t feel bad, Agent Helix, I didn’t give it. Harold Duncan.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it. He glanced around and sighed. “I gotta say it doesn’t feel right to just up and walk off with the scene unprocessed like this.”

“What department do you usually work, Lieutenant Duncan?”

“Vice.”

That made sense. He probably went along on a lot of raids like this before he even got anywhere near joining SWAT. Or not, the Project doesn’t really get involved in the drug trade all that often so I wouldn’t know. “Well, when you look at a scene like this what are you thinking about?”

Duncan looked around and shrugged. “Chain of evidence, how many convictions we can get at this level and how far up the food chain we can go.”

“See that’s just it.” I spread my hands. “The only part of that which really concerns us is going up the food chain. The classic motive, means and opportunity trifecta makes our job very easy- there’s only so many people with a given talent in the country, and there’s usually only one per state. It just boils down to proving opportunity, since you can manufacture a motive for just about anything. ”

“That must be nice,” he murmured. “Keeps the suspect pool down.”

“And with Circuit it’s even easier. We’ve got a list of crimes a mile long we can pin on him if we ever find him. But what it means in this case is that we have our own way of dealing with these scenes. Yeah, it’s similar to yours, but we like do have our own guys do it for reasons I’m sure you understand.” The look on his face said he did. We were muscling him out for reasons of secrecy and jurisdiction and expertise and he knew it. I could also tell he didn’t really hold it against us. He was just uncomfortable because of it. Hopefully he’d get over that if we needed to do this again.

“Well, good luck to you, then,” he said finally. “We need to get back to our precincts.”

“Good working with you, Lieutenant Duncan.” I shook his hand and he went on his way, stopping to look over the warehouse one more time before he left. I mused for a moment, wondering if we’d see his name on an application to join anytime soon.

“Helix.” Herrera motioned me over to the map. She was browsing over the various papers stuck up there. Most of them were just notes about road construction or, on occasion, buildings being renovated. There were a few photos mixed in and there didn’t really seem to be any theme to them. Houses, restaurants and office buildings were all there.

I couldn’t tell what she found so fascinating about all that, so I said, “Any idea what this is?”

“None. You know the talents in the Midwest pretty well, right?”

So this wasn’t about the map, apparently. “I’ve probably met half of them personally. Don’t know as I could remember all their names or talents, much less where they were at the time.”

“Is there one called Enchanter?”

“Not that I know of.” I folded my arms and gave her an appraising look. Her attention was still on the map. “Should I heard of him?”

Herrera pointed out a note on the map. “What do you make of that?”

I carefully poked a photo of a narrow, three story row house out of the way to get a better look. It was a printed note on white paper, the kind of thing you might find on photocopiers in any office anywhere in America. It said, “There is no king in America. Death to pretenders.”

It was signed, “Enchanter.”

“How about that,” I said. “Never seen anything like it before. It’s definitely not written by Circuit. He doesn’t strike me as the type to enjoy fanciful names.”

“I agree with you there,” she said. “The message sounds familiar, but I can’t think of where I’ve seen it before.”

I frowned. “Doesn’t sound like song lyrics or something you’d put in advertisements. On TV maybe?”

“No.” She frowned and closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I feel more like seeing them is familiar. I’m more a visual person, anyway.” She closed her eyes, this time covering them with one hand.  “I’m sure I’ve read this before, but I’m not sure where.”

“You giving the new boss headaches already, Helix?” Jack shouldered his way into the conversation, Mosburger by his side.

“Trying to relieve them, actually,” I said. “You remember any talents under the code name Enchanter?”

Jack shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”

“Never mind,” Herrera said, looking up again. “I’ll look into it when we get back to the offices.”

“Then Mossman has something for you to see.” Jack nudged Mosburger in the shoulder and he held up a small gray box in his hands.

It looked like a simple metal case, just big enough to cover both his hands, with one of those little black antenna things and a bunch of wires sticking out of the side. It looked just like a bunch of other, similar boxes scattered about the room. It could be a hard drive, a modem, or any one of those other parts you cram into a computer to make it work. As far as I could see, there was nothing special about it.

Herrera apparently agreed with me, because after staring at it for a minute she said, “So what?”

“This is the only piece of gear in the room that was still hooked up,” Mosburger said. “Agent Howell found it over by the rack. It looks like it was designed to go straight into the wall.”

“What’s it do?” I asked.

“I was kind of hoping to find out, but it doesn’t look like it was intended to open,” he said. “My guess is that it’s some sort of cell phone repeater, so that Circuit could still talk to people while he was in here. Second guess would be that it’s a wireless internet signal repeater, same concept except it gives you the Internet. Jack told me to bring it with me.”

“Right.” I glanced at Herrera. “Do you want me to crack it open?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Do you want me to melt the case?” I rapped my knuckles once on the thingie for emphasis. “I need your okay before I can fire up the ol’ heat sink. That’s what the oversight agent’s for.”

“Can you do that without damaging the contents?” She asked.

“It’s possible,” I said. “The case is metal, which conducts heat better than air, so any heat that leaks from the sink should flow back in faster than it would in open air. Less likely to cause damage.”

“But still possible?”

“Anything’s possible, ma’am. I can’t say how likely it is.”

“Right.” She glanced back at Mosburger. “Is there anything opening this tells us that can’t wait until we can get it back to the offices?”

“We might be able to access a call log from it,” he said dubiously. “But this looks like a custom built model that probably has all kinds of safeguards on it. It might tell us something about how Circuit encrypts or disguises his communications. But no, nothing that would matter right this moment.”

She nodded. “All right then. When the forensics people get to it we’ll have them mark it priority and they’ll rip it apart first thing when we get back. You’re job is to outthink Circuit, not pick apart his gadgets.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” Jack said, “with Circuit it can be one and the same.”

 “Duly noted.” She sighed. “Hopefully it tells us something, or this whole thing was a waste of time. See if forensics wants any help. If not, we’ve got people to debrief back at the office. Let’s get moving.”

Circuit

“No, I do not want you to look into optimizing the design, Davis,” I said with as much patience as I could muster. “Mr. Nayar has already done most of that work for you. What I want you to do is duplicate it, stress test it and then start building more.”

“Look, I’m sure it’s good work. But this,” my supervising engineer gestured at the hydroelectric generator with expression of tolerant disdain, “was built by a grad studen. I’m sure with a few days work we could make it even more efficient.”

“I’ve no doubt you could. But what I want is not a new prototype that requires a new round of testing. I want this prototype functional and mass produced, and I want it yesterday.” Davis opened his mouth to protest but I held up a hand to stop him. “Once you have a proposal for producing more of these, you can look into improving the design.”

I’d hoped that would be enough to mollify him but apparently he was still upset, because he started to say something again. This time he was cut off by Heavy Water, who slid into the room at a half run and grabbed me by the arm. “They just showed up, Circuit!”

“Who?” I wasn’t expecting anyone at this location. At least, no one other than Davis and his perfectionist work crew, who’s enthusiasm I normally appreciate more. Then it clicked. “The Project raided Warehouse Three?”

“We just got the word,” he said. “Delacroix called it in a few minutes ago, said it looks like they bypassed the outside alarms somehow.”

I frowned. The outer alarms consisted of basic temperature and barometric pressure measuring devices attached to equally basic transmitters, the idea being to detect the weather changes created by an active heat sink. If they hadn’t been tripped then the Project had gained entry using conventional means rather than Helix’s talent, or some other talent that I hadn’t anticipated. That was odd.

Usually, the FBI doesn’t give any kind of major ordinance to Helix’s team. They know that if he needs to go through something he can do it himself, so why waste their precious budgetary allotment on joint ops involving him?

It seemed his new oversight agent had more pull or different contacts than Robert Sanders. That could be a problem.

Aloud I said, “Well, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. That’s what the back ups are for. Still, we need to get moving.”

“The van’s ready to go, boss,” Heavy replied. “Say the word.”

“I want that production plan by Tuesday, Davis,” I said, giving the engineer one last stern look. Then I turned and headed out the door with Heavy. “Let’s go say hello to the Feds.”

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