CHAPTER TEN.
Daily Planet Offices – Early Afternoon:
Clark sat hunched over a screen, checking through the microfilm of old newspaper reports to see if he could learn something about the government men who had been involved with the original Roswell investigations. It was a long shot; most of them would be old men by now if they weren't already dead. But if the folder had been started then, it followed that at some point over the decades there might be a link with other UFO investigations.
Checking over his shoulder, he sped it up – the images moving at a speed indecipherable to the human eye. And then he got lucky. Stopping the film and tracking back a few pages he closely examined a photo of a group of men under a headline about UFO sightings in Nebraska, looking around surreptitiously again before lowering his glasses and zooming in on the one in the middle. He was identified beneath the photograph as Jason Trask, and Clark was sure it was the leader of the raid on the Daily Planet; years younger, but the same man. He'd bet his cape on it if he was a betting man….
"Feeling better?" Lois asked, surprising him as she sat down on the chair next to him.
He pushed his glasses back in place, "Better? Yeah. You find anything new while I was gone?"
"Well, I tailed our man Thompson to –"
"You did what?" He frowned at her, turning his chair so he could search her eyes, "Lois –"
She grinned at him, "You think I don't do this every day of every week?"
"I don't doubt it for a second but –"
The green in her brown eyes softened a little, "Still here, aren't I?"
"That's not the point, you -"
"Can take care of myself. Do you want to know what I found out or not?"
He shook his head, "Go on."
"He went to a furniture warehouse on Bessolo Boulevard. Didn't come out so –"
"Tell me you didn't go in."
She folded her arms across her chest and blinked at him, "You know if this trial period at being partners is gonna stand any chance of lasting past today you're really gonna have to learn to trust I know what I'm doing. I have a sliding scale for danger."
"And where did this one fall on the scale?" He could feel a smile building in his chest. But if he smiled she'd think she'd gained something and it was fine to go running into warehouses after people while he wasn't there. As fast as he was, he couldn't be in two places at once, could he?
"At; go back at night."
The smile worked its way onto his mouth, "You have night vision goggles don't you?"
When she grinned again, he chuckled. And in reward she wheeled her chair a little closer, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone, "So, anyway, the guy was definitely weird... but he probably works for some covert ops end of the government so that's kinda a pre-requisite. I say we go back there after dark and see what we can find and if there's a link to Mr. Charming from the other day," She glanced sideways at the screen, "What'd you dig up?"
"Mr. Charming," When her eyes widened, his smile grew. She didn't think he could do this job, did she? She should remember that he'd been in the 'newspaper' business for a long time before she took it up.
Lois looked at the screen with a frown. "Smallville, the Air Force got out of the UFO business a long time ago. The government will never admit there's still any investigation going on - it's all sci-fi geeks and internet gossip now according to them. And the last time I tried pitching a UFO story to the Planet my editor turned it down."
"And yet we have an alien flying all over the city… might prove a little embarrassing for them don't you think?"
She mumbled under her breath, "He prefers the term 'celestial visitor'…"
Clark smiled as he allowed his gaze to slide over her profile before following the path of a strand of shining hair that had worked free from the knot at the nape of her neck to whisper against her cheek. No matter what she did to tame her hair, a strand always managed to break free. It was almost an indication of her personality. After all her father had tried to pin her down for years. And she'd always managed to find her own ways of rebelling against it…
For a brief moment of insanity he considered tucking the strand behind her ear.
"The flyboy in the middle of the group shot?" She turned and looked up at him.
So Clark turned to look at the screen, "I thought so. We might need to get it enlarged to know for certain."
"Well unlike those of us in need of glasses - I have perfect vision. Mr. Charming is Jason Trask," When he looked at her, she nodded, "Not bad rookie,"
She even punched his upper arm before she rolled her chair back.
"We know Trask was Air Force, right?" Perry asked when they briefed him.
Clark filled him in on what they'd found out, "No military service record, he disappeared into thin air six years ago."
"All right, keep looking."
"We've got just the place," Lois announced. "The other guy in the photo - General Burton Newcombe - he's retired; lives in Metropolis."
Jimmy burst in through the open doorway, gasping for breath, "Your government guy – Thompson?"
"The guy who couldn't tell you anything?" Perry asked.
"They just found him," Jimmy paused for dramatic effect, "Metropolis Harbor. Coroner's got him; got a call from a friend there."
Home of Burton Newcombe – Late afternoon:
Retired General Burton Newcombe cracked walnuts and munched on them as Lois and Clark sat down on the other side of his desk. Taking out her voice recorder again and setting it on the desk, Lois began the interview. "A man named George Thompson came to Metropolis. Now he's dead. Mincemeat as it happens. Care to comment?"
"That's regrettable," Newcombe said gruffly, his sharp eyes showing no reaction. "But what does that have to do with me?"
Lois pulled out the picture, "Well he was investigating your old friend, Jason Trask."
She then lifted her chin and started a staring contest. Four star generals didn't faze her – she'd been dealing with the military before she made it out of nappies.
Eventually he looked at the photo, his face carefully blank. He glanced up at them, and then took a breath, his voice lowering, and; "Have either of you ever had to keep a secret"?
"Yes," Clark responded with a single nod.
Lois did a double take, turning her head to stage whisper, "Like what? Cos I don't think having an Elmer Fudd night light into your twenties counts…"
"I'm a reporter," He smirked, "You know - protecting sources and all that stuff?"
She rolled her eyes.
"Keeping a secret eats away at you, just a nibble at a time, but it adds up." Newcombe picked up Lois's small recorder, turning it over in his hands. Lois opened her mouth to intervene, but Clark cautioned her with a hand to keep quiet and hear the man out.
He'd just shushed her?! Did the man have a death wish? But he didn't turn to look at the glare of warning she aimed his way, his gaze intensely focused on the older man.
"And one day you wake up and you realize that it has consumed everything inside you." He slowly hit the off button, before continuing, "See, we were just a small group when we started, but we all took a very special oath."
With a quick movement, he used the nutcracker on the recorder, destroying it.
Lois grimaced. But it wasn't like she wasn't going to remember everything he said, was it? And she was too intrigued by where the general was headed to interrupt him…
"I was just about your age," He added, as though marveling at the thought.
"You didn't take an oath to protect people like Trask, did you?" Lois challenged.
"You don't need me to find Trask. He's probably hiding in plain sight. It's how we work."
"In plain sight like in a furniture warehouse on Bessolo Boulevard, maybe?" She prodded.
There was a long silence while the man regarded her, sizing her up and seeming to make a decision in the blink of an eye, "Getting to him, though, that's another matter," He suddenly continued, as though she hadn't spoken at all, taking out a set of keys and unlocking a desk drawer to search inside. "A man like Trask would no doubt be protected by some impenetrable security system."
He took out a gold and black key card with "3-9" on it.
"Every system has a flaw," Lois said confidently. She had gotten very good at breaking and entering over the years.
"Not this one Miss Lane. I designed it myself." He turned the card over in his hands as if still debating his course of action, torn between upholding an oath and doing what he had to know in his heart was the right thing, "You'd need someone on the inside, or someone who'd been on the inside, to help you out. Assuming you found such a person, you could only hope that that person found a man like Trask to be so repugnant, his methods so un-American, that he would in fact choose to help you."
He set the card on the edge of the desk before them. "That's a tall order." He turned away, opened a cabinet, and took out a handgun. "I'm going to count to three, and when I turn around I expect you to be gone. One..."
Lois and Clark wasted precious time staring at each other in disbelief.
"Two..."
Lois hurriedly snatched up the key card and what was left of her voice recorder.
"Three."
They fled the office and the house.
Abandoned furniture warehouse – Docklands Area, Metropolis – Night:
Lois ran the key card through the slot of the alarm system outside the furniture warehouse she had followed George Thompson to, and it obligingly disengaged.
"Well that was hard," She said with a triumphant grin as they entered.
The heavy door clanged shut behind them. Lois tried to open it, but it had locked. On the opposite side of the room a combination-style alarm system began to beep, with a timer counting down from thirty-nine seconds.
"I guess they've added this since the general's day, hmm?" Clark said as he crossed over to it. He put his ear against it and began turning the dial; his enhanced hearing easily detecting the clicking of the tumblers.
"This is no time to get smug," She responded grumpily before adding sarcasm, "Don't tell me - safe cracker right?"
He ignored her, listening carefully as he turned the dial. Turning his back to her he then super-sped his way through every numerical combination on the keypad until the beeping stopped with seven seconds remaining.
"The Roswell date and the last four digits of the general's service number," He explained quickly as he turned to look at the questions written all over her face, hoping she would buy that explanation and adding something that would bug her to distract her just in case, "Research – you should try it some time."
"That's two Smallville. We still need to talk about the 'you-shushing-me' incident," She walked past him, "Shush me again and the hand that did the shushing will be in plaster for weeks."
She led the way into the interior of the warehouse, which was crowded with filing cabinets, high shelves filled with assorted items, and a variety of large tarps covering who knew what. Something crackled beneath her feet,
"Is that glass?"
"It's everywhere," He looked up, "All the windows are out."
"Blown inwards? That's a new one." She walked further into the darkened room.
Clark frowned as he followed her, dropping his glasses to scan the adjoining rooms, "I don't know about this, Lois, where is everybody? Why no guards?"
"The thing about luck is you don't question it," she told him. Opening a filing cabinet drawer, she picked out something at random. It was apparently a picture of a UFO – but a bad one, and she laughed derisively. "Give me a break; I could have made this on my laptop!" She put it away.
Clark was looking at some more pictures of spacecraft – some of them a little too close in shape to the ones he knew for comfort, "Look at the dates though – and the differences in quality. They've been compiling this collection for a while."
"I'm not buying it Mulder," She said cynically, "Don't get me wrong; since I went to visit your little corner of the universe I've seen more than my share of the weird and the freakily weirder than that. But we're not seriously suggesting there's some kind of shadow group inside the government monitoring it all are we? If your theory is right then it started decades before Smallville got its entry in Ripley's. And how does the super secret bit compute with the very public Superman questionnaire with Mr. Charming? Why would Superman fly about all over the place doing good if he was part of some great alien invasion? Wouldn't it make more sense to just zap us with his ray gun and co-ordinate all his invading Super-space-ships with a signal through our own satellites? I loved Will Smith in that movie by the way… "
"Well maybe you really did fall back through a time vortex and you're at The Inquisitor. If you are you could get months worth of front page bylines out of all this...'" His voice trailed off as he found a cabinet of folders, one of them labeled "Smallville, Kansas, Meteor Showers"
"Don't quote me back to me," She shuddered, "The thought of ever working for that rag again…" She frowned over at him, "How did you know that I said that, anyway?"
He quickly put the folder back and slammed the cabinet drawer shut as she came over to join him, and rather abruptly escorted her away from the drawer, not wanting her to see the folder until he'd read the contents himself.
"What're you doing?"
"Well, you don't like their pictures. Let's see what else they have."
"I suppose you think I'm going to lift up one of these tarps and find a UFO just sitting there," She mocked, pulling her elbow out of his hand.
"I don't know what we're going to find," He answered seriously. And he wasn't kidding about that either…
Lois sighed and selected a tarp by a tried-and-true method; ""Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." She took a peek underneath a bit hesitantly, and then rolled her eyes. "Oh good, this is just an unidentified salvage yard. Thank god I didn't wear my goggles – I'd have looked like a member of Ghostbusters about now…"
She wandered off, poking around.
But Clark wasn't paying attention to Lois; he was drawn to one of the tarps - or more specifically, something glinting on the ground below it. Bending down, he lifted it between his thumb and forefinger, flipping it into his palm as he stood upright again. It was a coin of some kind. An old coin…
"Clark!" Lois hissed urgently, "Somebody's coming!"
He quickly slipped the coin into his pocket. But before they could move, the doors opened and the lights came on.
"Now how did you two manage to get in here?" Jason Trask asked coolly as he and his men, machine guns held ready, approached the two.
"You must have left the door open," Lois told him, undaunted.
"It doesn't matter how you did it. Getting out is going to be your problem." Trask was obviously enjoying his position, his smile cool.
"People know we're here," Clark warned, hoping to keep things from getting out of hand. He moved protectively to stand in front of Lois, just in case.
"Like, Superman!" Lois suggested, as she moved in front of Clark. "He's going to come looking for us you know."
"Oh I do hope so," Trask said pleasantly, "In fact, I'm counting on it."