The late-summer humidity of early-September should have been oppressive for a pregnant woman of 48 years, but Joan felt wonderful. She was just starting to show and she glowed. Her work was picking up as well. She sat musing over their latest findings as she stood patiently above the sundial in the common area at the Universities at Shady Grove. Her team had brought her to interview an off duty PG County cop who ran security for events at this community college campus. While she considered the helical nature of the sundial with the science-haunted eye of a witness to a ‘paranormal event,’ namely time-travel, she ordered the paranormal chronology in her mind once again.
As a CIA operative and now lead Investigator for Project WF7, Joan had long-ago trained herself to order massive amounts of intelligence without recourse to documentation, using only her 170 IQ and an iron discipline, both of which clearly intimidated 99% of men, every bit as much as her fit Nordic figure attracted the same percentage like doomed gnats to a heat-lamp. She continually updated and memorized the full chronology of events which only she knew completely.
Yes, Joan, that which only you know, which is yet only the tip of an unthinkably complex iceberg of a mystery.
That fool-genius—and would-be Doctor Frankenstein—Doctor Wong, who was her irritating lab counterpart, had managed to gather atmospheric evidence for what had been described as magnetic pulses—similar to those Joan had dealt with on assignment in Istanbul back in 2012. The thought of Istanbul and that meeting with the mysterious, bi-sexual, beauty Tina, and Joan’s resulting seduction, always made her lose concentration for a moment. So she put Istanbul from her mind and focused on the most recent known ‘magnetic pulse events’ in the Washington D.C. area:
There was Hunt Valley, Maryland on Christmas Eve, 2011. The responding officer vaguely remembers a naked man claiming to be a doctor and a mysterious man in a suit who incapacitated him with his own mace.
The day before was an incident in which Baltimore City police officers apprehending a man that fit Jay Bracken’s description in an Eastside graveyard and were blinded by a red light that sounded a lot like her visual imprint of Jay’s disappearance before her eyes in the black-ops lab. The incident resulted in the cops losing the suspect and their sense of time. Only the helicopter pilot gave a coherent account, indicating that two FBI agents had been on hand and that a freak wind-shear and lightning strike had nearly wrecked his chopper. However, no such record of FBI activity involving this arrest existed.
Also, on Christmas Eve, was a disturbance in the Richmond Virginia suburb of Ashland, which they were headed to investigate, as soon as she was done with this moonlighting cop.
Yes, here is the goon now, looking every-bit like the flunky college line-backer that ended up as a county cop.
The man approached nervously with Dentin and Morse on either side of him. Dentin was a hulking man brought over from the ATF—nut-job-ville—and Morse was a petite FBI profiler—from the babbling wimp factory at Quantico—for whom this was her first field assignment. Joan involuntarily smiled whenever she saw her bone-crushing gun-nut in his ill-fitted suit standing next to the 85-pound prissy girl from Virginia Tech in her ridiculously well-fitted suit. The big cop looked like a boy next to Dentin, and was obviously nervous when Joan flashed her credentials. “How can I help you Ms. Henderson—really, I just do this about once a month. There have been armed robberies at these conventions. My captain…”
Hell, this Homeland Security badge has got him more freaked than if he knew I was with The Agency.
Just stop his blubbering.
“Officer Pyle, we are not investigating you, and are not invoking the Patriot Act. You can relax about your side-job. Look, we need your help identifying some men who are believed to be nation security risks. In fact, it was your response to our bulletin concerning this man that brought us here.
Every time I look at his picture I get wet. What perfect—get back on track girl…
“Officer Pyle, you were unclear as to your involvement with this person in the statement you gave to our investigator. If you did not arrest this man or otherwise have contact with him during the course of your police work, how exactly is it that you came to identify him as being at large in PG County in January of Two-thousand-twelve?”
This cop is sweating it. Did he screw up and let Jay go after a traffic stop? What could it be?
The man’s voice cracked like he was a teenager trying out for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, “Ms. Henderson, ma’am—Ma’am? Are my tits starting to sag? Really, I thought they were starting to puff up nice and high?—it was really just something stupid that happened off-duty…”
Purse your lips and he will loosen up.
Yes, it still works. The brain is effectively bypassed and the dick is about to spill the beans.
“Okay, we go out to a bar to watch a post-season college game—forget who—but really to meet these chicks—good girls, cops en Feds. Anyways, we’re chatting up these chicks—five of us, en buyin’ them drinks, and these four dudes walk in—a major cock-block—I apologize Ma’am.”
“No offense taken, Officer Pyle, I’ve blocked a few in my time. Continue please.”
“So, we decide to play a football game. You know shirts and skins, winners walk off with the ladies—who came out to the field to watch.”
What a pack of meatheads.
Sounds like my man-eating lover-boy.
“So it was basically a gang fight between you five morons and these four criminal-type cock-blockers, right.”
“Yes ma’am, the ball was just an excuse. Anyways, it only lasted one play. These guys must have been high-end military or something—Navy SEALS or some shit! They laid us out. That dude—the little stupid one with all the scars—was the worst. He broke Jackson’s leg and knocked out half of Epperson’s teeth while he was running an inside route!”
This is too much. I wonder how much this one play cost PG County taxpayers?
Officer Pyle began to get concerned. “They weren’t wanted were they?”
“Well, he was not wanted—at the time. Since your little game he has injured, maimed, raped, killed and eaten a number of law enforcement and correctional personnel.”
That hurt ‘I’m not going to make it to the pros after all’ look on his face is precious.
Joan forged on right over the man’s shocked sensibilities. “What about this guy?”
She held up Brucasio’s Turkish Prison mug shot and the officer wrinkled his nose, “The nose-guard. He broke all of my fingers on the left hand and cracked Terry’s sternum with a forehead spear—doesn’t speak English—other than bellowing ‘Unleash Hell’.”
She then held up Randy Bracken’s mug shot, and the cop had a visceral reaction, “Fuckin’ Skelator—stoner, Nazi piece-of-shit! That was the stupid one’s older brother, the quarterback, a real psycho! He did a quarterback sneak and eye-gouged Torres en cackled like the Wicked Witch of the West while he ran it in.”
At least he has some friends and family.
Just stop the misty prison-groupie line-of-thought, Joan. He is the enemy.
“Officer Pyle, could you describe the fourth person?”
He answered while looking at Morse apologetically, as if equating her starched geek appearance with the description he reeled off. “Sure, he was a light-skinned black dude, tall and skinny, a geek, really out-of-place—the designated driver, stood with the girls on the side-line.”
Don’t look so hurt, Morse. Yes, your square-frame glasses beg to be taped above the nose.
“Thank you, Officer. That will be all. Oh, lay off the pickup football games, okay sweetie.”
She turned to her big ATF heavy. “Dentin, get me to Ashland while I debrief Morse. Saddle up kids. It’s just getting interesting!”
