Chapter Ten
Thunder
Gibbs doesn't hate when a case seems devoid of useful clues - he detests it.
The fact that his team is enhanced by three additional agents, Hollis Mann from Army CID, Abigail (not Abby) Borin from CGIS and Frank Oswald from Air Force OSI accents the lack of progress.
They know from Abby, the only one who has not left the building today, that Jackson McGillicuddy of the coterie of McGillicuddy-Crocetti-Morrison (are there replacements for the captured pair or is McGillicuddy running the show alone?) is responsible for the Phobos drug, as Abby has named it, that took out Captain Thomas Benes, the former head of Project Life Source. It had also taken out Sammy Sky and Jimmy Palmer in a failed attempt to get to Abby Sciuto, but how he did it and why remains unanswered. There are theories, he needs facts.
That M-C-M was behind the Murder / Suicide disks, the Phobos drug and Life Source had surprised no one. In mid-July in California, through the late Grekor Kanyicska, McGillicuddy had concluded a massive deal to buy a vast amount of heavy weaponry, smart guns and bullets, mortars, missiles, bombs, armor piercing shells, perhaps even tanks, the most Kanyicska has sold at any one time. This was before Richard Burgoyne had moved against the Arms Dealer and every Agency is on High Alert to find out about these weapons in addition to all that had been done before
But how does this tie into a comprehensive plan, or set of plans?
The Phobos drug had worked, but aside from taking out one man, and moving two up the chain of command, both of whom are being re-vetted, what more is there to the plot?
If anyone else has run screaming into the night, none of the four Investigative branches of the Military has heard anything about it.
At least there is nothing known that has passed that damned Need-to-Know wall that has been erected against solving this case by the very people who need it solved.
x
Life Source, an over-sized, probably over funded, device for detecting and locking on, for better or worst, to any living being, has a high opinion of, or affinity for as Hollis had said, Palmer. Why? Out of an entire room, and then of anyone in a ten mile diameter, what makes her special? Pregnancy? How many women in a ten mile range are pregnant?
Her witchcraft? Nonsense. There's no machine that detects belief, whether real or imagined. PC rules (which he never cares about but which NCIS follows - their mistake) say he can't set her straight. If she wants to imagine witches that's her business, and if she wants to worship a 'goddess' that's none of his.
Murder / Suicide disks, Phobos drug, Life Source, more heavy weaponry than anyone deserves, and Lamb's shrunken team is investigating the disappearance of scientists in Norfolk which, until proven otherwise, he'll watch as a PDC/9 rerun. How does that abomination fit in? Does that case fit in? If so, then how?
ooo
Interlude
I drag myself back to consciousness and light to a hand on my forehead and another on the middle of my chest and I lift my eyelids - not my first or preferred idea - to find mom seated in a chair beside me and I'm upturned to the white ceiling of my office.
I feel like I'm bouncing between a five hundred volt charge running through me and having run flat out straight into a brick wall. I shift my eyeballs left, can't bring myself to move any other body part. I remember stepping through the Scrying mirror, getting my feet under me and immediately being slammed by a hundred sledge hammers. That it's the second time in a row I got hit by a mega-Transition Vertigo doesn't make me feel better at all. I've now survived my second double slam, not just spatial but massively temporal, and I swear I will never, ever, ever do it again.
"Mom?"
"Welcome back. I was watching. A good job."
"Thanks." I look more closely at her. She was so young – so was dad – and now she's, well, mature. No gray, of course. No lines. Just… mature.
"Are you okay?"
"Peachy keen." It comes out in a groan and I can't help it, but what I do know is that "Next time, you're going."
"There's not going to be a next time." She doesn't have to remind me. Can't have two of the same soul and ego in two places at the same moment. I got away with it because I wasn't a separate individual back then, but my stomach had been doing Olympic Gymnastics the whole time I and cell colony with my soul me were a few feet apart. After birth no Way will I do that to myself.
I sit up on the day bed, or try to, and catch the briefest glimpse of Tina standing beside my desk three milliseconds before another Transition Vertigo slams me flat on my back.
x
The padding still isn't soft enough as my head bounces off it. "Oh Goddess," I force the whisper out while my office does a wonderful imitation of a contested soccer ball at double sudden death overtime. "What's this?" Every time the room shoots northwest my body's insides slam southeast and half the time they shoot off in a totally nonexistent direction at an impossible spin. I don't know how long I was unconscious in the past before mom and dad came home but "How long was I out?"
"Five minutes."
I sit up, the room kicks at me and I slam at it. It spins and I grab it by the throat and force it to stop. I yank Healing and Stabilizing energy from the cosmos, fight the room into stability not with a draw of power but a violent yank so I can sit up, gape at mom and put every bit of outrage into "Five Freaking MINUTES?"
Body and soul need time to integrate, minutes at least, and I should have had hours. "You yanked me up after Five MIN-!"
I look into her eyes, turn to see Tina's and a bucket of ice water deluges me. "Ohhh…." My heart kicks up to two hundred BPM. "My…." I feel my soul drop out through the day bed to fall 21 stories and crash into the sub-level garage hard enough to shatter the cement. "GODDESS!"
"What?" mom asks.
I get my feet onto the carpet, shove up and of course my head keeps on going through the ceiling but I no longer care. I drag it back onto my shoulders, step toward the desk and stagger toward the floor. If not for Tina in front and mom behind I'd've fractured my rib on the huge desk but they catch me, Tina's arms tight about my torso to keep what's left of me on my feet.
x
"Su Lin," mom says from behind me, releases my shoulders but I fight my way out of Tina's grip and to my desk. "What are you doing? Take it easy."
Easier advice to take had she let me sleep until morning but she didn't and there's only one conceivable reason why. Still, good thing Tina caught me because beyond the desk is the south wall and that's glass from top to bottom, side to side and I have to wonder if I'd prefer the trip.
"Su, what are you doing?" she asks, concern a counterpoint to my utter panic.
"What's wrong with you?" mom demands in that tone of hers that says to me as much as it would to her MCR team that 'you had better focus and answer me intelligently right now'. I'm told she learned it early on from my late uncle LeeJay, as all his team's kids called him, but I'm not quite up to managing logic or coherence.
"Thunder, mom!" We discussed it before my transition. "What's Changed?"
Nearly a century ago a famous writer had written a short story called 'The Sound of Thunder'. It featured a Time Traveler who failed to follow safety provisions while in the past and a seemingly insignificant act caused massive changes in the present.
"Nothing. I told you, I monitored you. Nothing you, your father or I did changed anything."
x
Okay, sometimes it can take a whip-snap to cut through a Transition Vertigo Panic Cocktail, but mom has always been good for that.
I look around the office and, in fact, nothing has changed. Three walls and one ultra window beside my desk with a spectacular - and suitably expensive - view of DC. Door to the outer office opposite the window so DC is often the first thing clients see, that Scrying mirror I've decided not to like for the rest of the day at the wall that backs my desk. Day bed at the opposite wall set there because sometimes Transition Vertigo knocks me senseless. Extra extra extra large photograph of a green irised eye on the wall behind my rightward facing desk. It's a super extreme close up of dad's left eye and is the logo of Otherworld Investigations. I forever feel like dad's watching over me every minute I'm here.
I go around the desk to the south window wall and from K Street looking south along 16th past Lafayette Square and the White House and past the Ellipse and all of DC that I can see from up here is the same as it was this morning. Even that tasteless billboard facing north on I street and five stories lower where no billboard should be to be seen from the sidewalk is still there: a virtually topless blonde photographed from the bare back as she sits before her boudoir mirror in the ad for a backless, strapless bra that's cut my view of lovely DC for more than three years. Backless and strapless means it uses two separate cups with cellular adhesive at top, sides and bottom, up top to lift and below to stick to ribs to lock it in place. No woman I know would wear it. Were I to I'd probably rush out for a case or to meet with a client with a unbalanced combo and that'd be the end of my credibility. It was a stupid idea when it went up three years ago, though with its back to the tourists, it was stupid before I transitioned and it's stupid now.
Nice to know stupid persists.
x
"Convinced?"
I turn to admit defeat (how could one conversation change anything?) and my gaze falls upon my desktop.
"No," I tell them as I sit down. Mom brought me out of the fugue of T.V. rather than allow me to integrate naturally and a conversation about change is exactly what she and I had had a quarter century ago.
The big desk's middle is bare, everything is on the left and right sides and I touch the upper left and right corners of the clear space at the same time so the computer can read my index fingerprints. The ring fingers are for the closer corners and the desktop comes to life.
Seventy five years ago people talked about desktop computers. They had no idea.
Mom stands before me, the picture of exhausting patience but I don't care. She scared the He – Hades out of me and she's neither capricious nor sadistic. In fact, she always has a reason for whatever she does, even if she does have the frustrating habit of making me work out those reasons for myself.
I call up my month's Calendar. I'm juggling five cases at different stages of completion and all the boxes are where they're supposed to be and the colors are what they're supposed to be. I could touch any of them and the files will open but I won't. Yet.
The issue was Project: Life Source and General Castagna and Roe v. Wade and the Pentacle Plan and the potential World War Three so I open the Historical records I studied, not like I had to, before I left and speed read.
If anything is different, it's not in these files.
x
I turn off the computer and look up. "Okay. I'll bite." I glance at Tina to my right with a look meant to tell her I may well find out what she tastes like too. "What's the situation?"
"I told you, there is no situation. You did a good job."
"Then WHY–" I have to pull myself short, "did you pull me out five minutes into coming back when you know what aborting a decent reintegration will do?"
"Because Jimmy was here when you came back."
"He was?" It's hardly necessary but I look at the wall to the reception area. It's automatic so sue me. It's also Tuesday and looks to be still early afternoon, not that much later than it was when I left, maybe three hours or so. Why would dad come all the way up here from the Navy Yard in the middle of the day?
"And he absolutely had a fit when you came out of the mirror and crashed into our arms, dead to this and several other worlds."
"That's it?"
"That's it. I decided the only way to calm him down was to put him out and bring you around so you could show him you're okay."
"Yeah," Tina says, "you know how Jay Jay gets."
x
This stops me, but I don't give her more than a 'what was that?' look. Tina and I are friends more than we are employer and employee but this sounded a bit too familiar from her, family-familiar, as though bordering on being disparaging of dad. She wouldn't dare.
Not in front of them, but she and I are going to have a conversation after they go.
Right now I just want to see dad. It's been three weeks not counting ten minutes ago, so I cross the room to the outer office, holding his young image from the trip in my mind so I can have fun comparing.
I pull the door in. "Da–?"
He's not there. In fact, the only person there, sitting on one of the cushioned chairs where clients wait with Tina is a black haired man, a young man, fifteen maybe? A client? Too young by far but Tina left someone unattended to be in with us? Yes, we are definitely going to talk.
He looks up and practically jumps out of the chair. "Su Lin, you're okay? I was so scared," is all said while he crosses the room to me. He's three inches taller so I have to look up, rail thin the way teens get before they fill out, anxious face–.
"Jimmy," mom says behind my left shoulder, her admonishment voice, "I told you your sister is fine."
I ca - can't - can't ge - breath! My h - heart - What - No - Ji - Jimmy? The room - swaying. I can't - gasp - fast enough - nothing's - in fo - cus - Jay Jay? No - JJ - James - Junior? Bu - bu - buuuuu….
The world turns black but I barely feel hands grab….
ooo
"Bachelorette chic," is how Lisa DuBois, pulling on latex gloves, characterizes Rita Fischer's three room apartment to her partner. The white doily centered upon the dark brown table in the middle of the living room, the one whose right side is misaligned three feet into the room and whose feet had mussed the carpet, the drinks cart in the corner stocked with mixers in plunger top bottles, in the bedroom the over comfy single bed covered by a double thick comforter in the middle third of August, the shelves covered by cloths whose decorative fringes hang off the edges….
When they'd arrived at Rita Fischer's the accumulation of local eatery menus on the floor outside the apartment door, three at various levels duplicates of earlier hawkings, had been a major tip-off to everyone but the menu guys.
The door had yielded to Lisa's skills. If ever Probable Cause could be invoked, this is it.
They'd set the too large stack upon a bureau inside the living room in what each admitted was a useless attempt to keep from spreading the word that no one was home.
x
"What does bachelorette chic mean?" Kevin Lamb asks, not altogether sure he wants it defined.
"Professional, together woman who will still bring a date home and would love to get laid, provided it's his idea."
"His idea?" he asks, taking in a dozen homey, frilly accessories.
"Of course his idea. It's always his idea. All she does is suggest it."
"Now you know why I quit the dating scene. Too complicated."
"Not complicated. The woman's always right. Haven't Jan and I taught you anything by now?"
He closes his eyes, counts slowly, then says with no inflection "This is a Crime Scene, not an article in Modern Bride. Get to work."
"Yes, Master."
By the time he reopens his eyes, the sassy wench still hasn't wiped off that smile.
x
But the banter is calculated rather than flippant, for it is too obvious that this is not going to be the simple question-and-answer session they'd hoped it would be, and disappointment vies with concern and both of these must be cut down.
When they'd arrived at that second floor apartment, those hopes had been well and truly dashed.
He's glad that Cintron is something of a traditionalist, given the somewhat wilted condition of the roses laying on the floor ten feet in from the door. It and the misaligned table and chairs are enough to tell them that a date had been the reason why Fischer and Cintron had gotten together and that it had not ended well.
Perhaps it hadn't even begun well.
x
Opening drawers and doors in the living room, Kevin finds everything neat, organized by function and utterly mundane. There are no military secrets, no file folders with 'Confidential', 'Top Secret' or 'Eyes Only' stamped on them, not that he'd expected any. This is the girlfriend of a scientist, by their research she's in Advertising, yet when Lisa turns to him from the other side of the room she wants to know "Ever have the feeling you're being watched?"
"I'm a guy," he says, sorting through unrevealing papers in a cabinet. "Guys don't get watched. That's your and Jan's lives."
Her serious "Kev" pulls him around and there's no humor in her eyes. "We're being watched."
x
His first glance is to the curtained window but the blank wall of the next building twelve feet away proves no one spies from there. The building they're in has three apartments on each floor, which explains the two rooms plus kitchenette and bath, this last only deep enough to accommodate a shower rather than a tub.
The bedroom window faces the same blank wall. Kevin feels nothing but trusts his partner enough to continue the search, suspecting he knows now what they seek.
It's Lisa who finds it.
On the shelf over the television is a set of hardcover books of varying size and color, yet only one book stands between two four inch lion statuettes which hold it steady. Not touching it, he gets close enough to find the pin sized hole aimed across the room to the door.
Lisa hadn't sensed a human's stare, but likely her subconscious had picked up the seen but not consciously perceived anomaly of the book placements and had alerted her to it.
"A Nanny Cam," Lisa says. He turns to her. "Well, that's what I call it."
"No kid, no nanny."
"So what's so interesting that she monitors this room instead of the bedroom?" Her question is a challenge, an offer to speculation he's not going to take.
"Let's find out," he says instead. "If I'm right, we just hit the mother load. I want to see this film asap."
"There goes my beauty sleep," she says with faux wistfulness.
"Wouldn't help anyway."
"Oooooh, that's mean."
But despite the banter, neither is interested in sleep. If this camera recorded what happened, they want to see it immediately.
Kevin carefully removes the fake book from the shelf, cautious of any wires, but nothing trails from the rectangular unit. They'd prefer to review the record here if a laptop can be found, but that's not procedure. Cyber Crime or perhaps Abby, if she's still in when they get back to HQ, will download the files onto a clean system and the originals: camera, computer and all else, will be secured in Evidence Holding.
Lisa holds a clear plastic Evidence bag for him.
Examining it through the bag they find the small port on the bottom that would link it to a computer such as the laptop in the bedroom.
They now have two computers whose files and programs have to be inspected in the morning. Sunday morning. Start of a new week. Abby will be so thrilled.
x
However, other than these discoveries, the rest of their search yields nothing else of immediate interest. Certainly there's no such surveillance found in the bedroom, though that may yield to a more intensive search in the morning. It may require them to pull apart molding or do more deconstruction unless Abby finds something really significant on the one (and perhaps only?) camera. Including the large trash can of shredded pages, they now have three distinct sets of evidence / clues to examine in the light of a Sunday - oh joy - morning.
Twenty minutes later they descend the stairs with the three bags, the last containing computer wires, exit the building and turn left toward their car at the end of the street.
The sun has set, by his watch it's 2148, the end of a too long day –
The collision from behind and hard impact to his head stagger him forward. He goes fifteen feet before he forces a stop and whirls.
Two men, big and dark. One has his arms about Lisa's throat. Choke hold. Pulls her backward, bent deep. Her Sig on the sidewalk! Silent. Strangled. He goes for his weapon.
Time turns on.
x
"Hold it!" the other one, on his right, commands. His gun punctuates the order. Lisa is bent too far back, no leverage, face reddening, mouth open, straining for air, right guy's gun is on him.
Kevin's Sig is half out. Half out is as good as locked in his desk.
"Toss it down."
Fifteen feet. Lisa strangling. Faces in shadow of the street light behind them. He's illuminated.
"Toss it."
He draws the Sig, carefully tosses it. It clatters midway between them.
"Let her go." He tries not to make it an appeal. Bastard's arm crushes her throat, other arm pushes hard. Strangling. Bent far back, pulled down. Off balance. Too far back to fight his strength. She kicks at him, pulls to ease pressure on her throat. Can't. Silent. Face deepening red. Struggles useless.
"You've got us. Let her go."
Fast right turn. Gun down to her abdomen. Bang! Bang! Bang!
x
Leap. Roll. Hands close around the Sig. Out of roll. Aim right. BangBangBang! Left, sight over Lisa. Blood a fountain. BangBangBangBang!
Men down. Lisa Down. Blood spurting from below her stomach. Hands in the blood, flat. Find the holes. Blood slick. Fountain. Men down. One breathing. One not. Ignore.
"Lisa, Hang On!" Bloody hands slick. Stop three holes with two hands. "Hang on!"
Right hand to belt. Phone. Hold 9. Speaker. Emergency Signal button too. Drop it.
"Don't let go!" Hands back. Too much blood. She's whispering something. Can't understand. "Stay with me, hon!"
/911 Operator. What is your emergency?/
"Code 10:33, Code 10:33! Federal Agent Down! Spring Valley, Tilden St between 48 & 49!"
She's still.
"Hold on, honey." Too much blood. Not a fountain. A pool. She's too still. "Stay with me, Lisa. Stay With Me!"
.
.
To Be Continued.
.
.
Next Episode: 'The New Mark Affair'. As Season 4 closes Jackson McGillicuddy's scheme approaches fruition, the search for the Bachman and Esposito families, Jeremy Cintron and Rita Fisher continues as the team races to prevent the unleashing of a most deadly weapon.