Disclaimer: see chapter 1

Chapter 13: Enlightenment

Don and his team, that is with Harvey filling in for David, approached the monkey compound swiftly, yet stealthily. By now, the moon had started to rise, but the darkness was still almost perfect, which gave them a rather important advantage while closing in on their destination. On the other hand, it was also hindering them, and given the fact that they didn't know this territory, Don would have been glad if there had been a little more light to guide them.

Even despite the darkness though, they had managed to find the monkey cage, that was the old one, the one from which Marcy had called them. Since it was no longer being used, that had been more difficult than expected, for while it had been visible from the outside, the way to reach it was overgrown, and from the inside of the zoo, the building was almost completely hidden behind thick bushes and trees. To make matters worse, that flora was creating a rustling sound that was almost drowning and that made Don feel a little ill at ease. Despite what Marcy had told Colby over the phone, it was very well possible that Lee Rivers was still in the area, so they needed to be doubly careful.

"You go right, we'll go left," Don told Colby and Harvey when they'd reached the dark cage.

With a nod that indicated they had understood, Colby and Harvey rounded the cage in a safe distance in order to then get to the building that, according to the map they'd seen earlier, was at the back of the cage. They had deliberated on whether approaching the cage from the front, where they might have spotted Marcy through the bars or maybe even made contact with her, but in the end, they'd decided that it was better to get access first, and that meant they had to find the entrances for the animal attendants.

Apart from the constant rustling of the trees and bushes in their backs, everything remained quiet, and Megan and Don continued their way along the building until they found a door. It was closed, but not locked, so they made sure to be in position in case someone was waiting for them behind on the other side before they tore it open. There was nobody here, though, and they continued edging forward.

Now that they were inside, they dared using their flashlights, but couldn't see anything but gray walls, so they continued down the hallway. There was no sign of Colby and Harvey, so either they were still outside, or they had found another entrance to this building, one that was separated from their side.

Soon, they came into another room, and the shelves indicated that it had been used to store equipment, maybe food. There was another, similarly furnished room after that, only that it had a distinct smell of green, and they realized they had now reached the part of the building that was connected directly to the outside, and this was where the next door led them.

They'd turned the flashlights off again and waited for a minute until their eyes had adjusted to the light conditions. Their surroundings weren't as dark as they had been inside the building, but the wane moonlight hardly managed to find its way through the jungle they now entered. While in the days that the compound had still been in use, it had probably held a number of species-appropriate trees and vines and whatever varieties nature could offer beside those, it now seemed to have transformed even more credibly into a monkey's natural habitat. Whatever man had put up in here had been overgrown by the plants, and the undergrowth was thick enough that, flashlight or not, they probably wouldn't have been able to see the confines of this cage.

Don held up his hand, stopping Megan's movements, and they were listening into the dark jungle. They had to make a decision now: either risk not finding Marcy for another couple of minutes, or make their presence known and maybe thereby endanger her further. In the end, Don decided to keep it stealth for as long as they could. After all, Marcy had seemed to be relatively fine when calling them, in any case not hurt, and Don had to admit, he didn't like the fact that it was so quiet here. Why wouldn't she call out for help? Or at least give an occasional whimper? Granted, she might have fallen asleep, but that seemed rather unlikely. If, on the other hand, Rivers had drugged her –

There! Just as Don was trying to find a reason for the abnormal lack of noise, his surroundings provided him with one, though not with one he liked. It had sounded as though a twig had snapped, and it had come from their left. Maybe that was where Rivers was hiding, where he was waiting for them?

He exchanged a glance with Megan and then, taking as much cover in the plants surrounding them as they could, they drew closer to the noise, until few seconds later, they breathed a small sigh of relief. They'd found Colby and Harvey.

They, in return, had seen them as well and were closing the distance separating them.

"Anything?" Don asked in a whisper even though he could see the answer in their gait and their posture.

He wasn't mistaken. "Nothing," Colby whispered back. "You?"

Don only shook his head. "Let's go along the side on the cage and then make our way to the center," he suggested and the other three nodded. "Listen to anything out of the ordinary, and make sure to be on your guard, I don't like this quiet."

They nodded again and then separated once more, putting Don's plan into practice. Since they were making their way through the darkness rather slowly, it took them another minute before they met again at the front of the cage.

It was then that their eyes were stabbed by a flash of light so sudden and so all-encompassing that for a moment, they completely lost orientation. It was as though they were blind, and in the fracture of a second that it took them to realize that they weren't, that there was another explanation for what they were experiencing, they were assailed by an uncomfortable tingling in their guts that was making them sick, for they knew: this couldn't be good.

"Still no signal?" Charlie asked over the rapid beating of his heart.

David beside him shook his head while he was listening once again to the recorded message telling him his team members couldn't be reached.

"You think someone's jamming it?"

David didn't answer immediately, and when he did, his reply was rather evasive. "Maybe."

Before Charlie could give into his impatience and ask what other probable reasons there were supposed to be, David re-directed his attention to something that, maybe, should be his priority at this point. "Explain this to me once again, I thought you said Lee, Marcy and Pete were somewhere in the middle of your network, but I always thought that Lee was higher up in the hierarchy than the other two, and not the other way round."

Charlie made sure to make his left turn without endangering any other traffic participants, which couldn't be taken for granted at the speed he was going, before he started his explanation. "We've been comparing Life's Matter to a building in which we tried to figure out which group member lived where. But as it turns out now, this image doesn't really fit the structure we're looking at, because what we have here seems to be two distinct houses built into one another."

Even though he was seeing David's face only out of the corners of his eyes, he could tell that his explanation hadn't really cleared things up, so he continued hastily, "You originally assumed that Life's Matter was a terrorist organization, which became a challenged thesis once you couldn't find any proof against most of its members. Figuring that you would have had to find at least some proof if your assumptions had been right, the most natural explanation was that not all members of Life's Matter were involved in the terrorist activities. That, however, would still make the group a terrorist organization, so that in its network, we would expect to find the structure that we find in terrorist networks, and we would expect its leaders to be involved in the terrorist scheme. There was something not right with the structure, though, and now it seems that the reason for that is that Life's Matter itself is not a terrorist organization, so it makes sense that it doesn't show the characteristics of one."

"But then how do you explain the evidence we found?"

"Because even though Life's Matter isn't a terrorist organization, some of its members are terrorists. That wasn't particularly surprising either, but the surprising part was how these terrorists fit into the network of Life's Matter, or rather: don't fit, because they show inconsistencies in their behavior towards other group members and towards the outside. That's what I meant when I said there was a network within the network: we have this terrorist cell within Life's Matter, but it doesn't seem to be a part of their organization, it seems to be infiltrating them. It's a network of its own, with its own structure and agenda and hierarchy, all of which differ from Life's Matter."

Charlie bit his lip and glanced at David, and he wasn't surprised at all to see the deep frown on the agent's forehead. He was always bad at explaining while driving.

"Just imagine Life's Matter as an organism, like a human body, that is structured like any other organism and generally working well," he tried a different approach. "Each cell of the body knows what to do and all cells combined make it possible for the organism to breathe and digest and, in short, to live. Then, however, a sickness takes hold of our organism, like a cancer, one that takes over more and more healthy cells and turns them into corrupted ones. From the outside, those cancer cells, that is our terrorist members, still look like healthy cells, but they don't work anymore the way they used to, they're instead working against all the other cells, against the entire organism. All the while, they try to spread further, to find other cells to convert. It's still a very slow process, and I could only find five members of this terrorist cancer within the organization, but they managed to take over rather crucial positions, like the monitoring of the group's bank accounts. I haven't been able to go through it yet, but from what you found out about these donations, my guess is that Life's Matter was used by the terrorists, among other things, for money laundering."

David was frowning. "So we're talking about a terrorist network of only five people?" he asked doubtfully.

Charlie shook his head. "I don't think so, they seem to be individual members of a much bigger organization. I can't be sure, but judging from their roles within the smaller network, I assume that none of them have any high-ranking positions within that larger terrorist organization they must belong to. I figure they're just pawns implemented in this group to further their goals, like money laundering, like recruiting new members, maybe also as some sort of cover."

"Left turn here. So what's Marcy's role in this scheme?" David wanted to know.

Charlie shrugged as he made the turn, not sure what his meager results could help David now. "She's one of the cancer cells. I'd say that of the five terrorists in Life's Matter, she holds the second-highest position, after Pete. Then, there's Naji Habash, the guy you initially investigated, Lee Rivers and, at the same level, someone called Joey Sidgwick."

"These are all people that according to Megan show radical tendencies, and Joey Sidgwick is one of the guys we suspect of having been involved in the shooting," David shared thoughtfully. Then, he gave a sigh, and his demeanor changed to something more action-oriented. "Alright," he said, apparently trying to take it all in, but there was a new kind of alarm in his posture. "We'll see about that later. For now, you need to listen to me, for we're almost there. Once we arrive at the zoo, you are not going to leave your car. You'll stay inside and you'll keep your eyes and ears open. If anything seems fishy to you, you call Thorndike and explain the situation to him, and if you don't get a hold of him immediately, you call 911, and the same holds if you don't hear back from either of us within half an hour. Got it?"

Charlie's throat was dry, so he nodded and waited until his speech came back. "Got it," he then said.

"Good," David decided. "This is close enough, you can park over there, this way you should be able to see everything that's going on without putting yourself at risk. You see that building over there? That should be the monkey cage."

Charlie followed David's finger with his eyes and nodded again. Before he was truly ready, before he'd even come to a complete stop, David had already opened the car door and left with a 'See you later!' over his shoulder that seemed too tense to Charlie as though he could have found any comfort in it.

"Be careful," he whispered into the abandoned and now eerily silent car.

He tried taking a deep breath and made an attempt to get some relief of the tension filling him by gripping and un-gripping his steering-wheel as he was watching David join the two police officers waiting in front of the entrance before they climbed over the fence and into the zoo. Few moments later, they were gone, swallowed up by the darkness.

Charlie took another shaky breath and turned his gaze towards the building David had indicated and of which he could barely see anything through the bushes and trees that were shielding the interior of the zoo from the street. He quickly glanced at his watch when he realized he needed to keep track of the time, then licked his lips nervously. Half an hour, David had said. He shook his head. He had no idea how he was going to endure this agonizing wait for a full minute, let alone thirty of those endless units of time.

Don, even though he was still squinting against the bright light, had gone for his weapon, feeling that Megan beside him was doing the same, but they were immediately stopped by the cold voice coming from the other side of the bars.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'm afraid to say, my friends are rather trigger-friendly."

"What is this?" Don asked while, with some further blinking, his eyes were adjusting to the light so that he could now see Marcy's figure there before him, flanked by two masked figures pointing shotguns at them. Now, from the way the light was spread, he could tell that there had to be floodlights above them, maybe installed by Marcy and her friends themselves.

"And I thought it was rather obvious," she was now saying, directing Don's attention back towards her. "It's a trap."

"Why," Don asked sharply.

"Why?" she gave back, and even though the volume of her voice had been so low that Don had had to strain his ears to understand her words, the menace in her tone had been so loud that he could have never missed that. "I'll tell you why. I'll tell you everything. But before we'll be able to chat, you'll have to lose your weapons."

"Listen, Marcy –" Megan tried.

"Now!" Marcy interrupted her, shouting. "For I promise you one thing, you make one false move, and they will shoot you."

"Alright," Don said with deliberate calmness, putting up his hands and then slowly retrieving his gun from his holster with only two fingers, careful not to prompt any rash actions from the gunmen. They needed to play this safe. Marcy had obviously planned this, whatever this was, so she had probably taken safety precautions, so in order to get out of this, they needed to figure out what those precautions were and then find a way to go around them. And the thing they needed most for that was time, and that was something they wouldn't have if they made Marcy or her friends lose their temper.

"Good," Marcy said when all four of them had laid down their weapons. "Now come closer to the bars."

While they were following her orders, thereby stepping a little out of the spotlight, Don started to be able to see Marcy's two companions better. He still couldn't identify them though, and he guessed that was by design, in case something went wrong. They were wearing masks above their faces, and dark, ordinary clothing, and until now, they hadn't said a single word.

But unidentified or not, the biggest problem they presented was the weapons in their hands, and try as he might, Don couldn't think of a way to turn the tables, much less now that they were walking away from their own guns. Attempting to use them instead of complying with Marcy's orders hadn't been an option though, not really, not if they wanted to still have a chance of all of them getting out of this alive. True, maybe one or two of them would have had the time to aim and shoot at the gunmen, but in the meanwhile, the terrorists would have opened fire at them – with what seemed to be semi-automatic weapons, from only a couple of yards away, without any cover to be found for the agents. Chances were that it would have been a very short fight.

So they needed to do this differently. They needed to somehow convince Marcy that she needed to let them go, and for that, they needed to start talking.

"Why are you doing this, Marcy?" Megan asked, who'd apparently come to the same conclusion as Don.

Before she answered, Marcy stared at her with a look full of hatred. "Take out your handcuffs and cuff yourselves to the bars. Then we'll talk."

"Why can't you talk now?" Colby inserted himself into the conversation. "Are you so scared of us that it's not enough we're locked in a giant cage?"

"You shut your mouth!" Marcy shouted, and a slightly hysterical tone had entered her voice. "One more word and they'll shoot right through your knee-caps! So go ahead, keep talking! I can't even begin to tell you how much I'd like to see that!"

"Nobody's gonna shoot anybody," Don said calmly before this could go on any further. "We're prepared to listen to whatever you have to say." With that, Don stepped forward, cuffing his wrists to the cage. Harvey followed his example, and eventually, so did Megan and Colby. Don noticed though that Colby kept glancing back towards his gun as though he was about to turn back around any moment and pick it up. He'd certainly be able to do that, he just needed to slide it towards the bars with his feet, bent down and grab it, and Harvey should be able to do that, too, whereas Megan's weapon was one step further away from the bars so that Don doubted she'd be able to reach it, just like he doubted he'd be able to reach his own.

Then again, it was a moot question anyway, since an attempt like that would take too long, for it would take long enough for Marcy's two accomplices to put a bullet in not only each of their knee-caps, but also into their brains.

"Look, until now, the damage that's been done is relatively harmless," Harvey tried his luck while Don was still thinking of a way out of this. "We can still end this peacefully, but you need to let us go."

"The damage is harmless?" Marcy repeated, and Don could tell that, while she was trying to remain firm, her voice was on the brink of breaking. "Did you say harmless?!" she shouted then. "Pete's dead! He's dead because you killed him! And you can be sure, I'm gonna make you pay for that! Joey? You can start now!"

Her last words had been directed to a third accomplice, an unmasked one, who had quietly entered the cage during her words. Don easily recognized him as Joey Sidgwick, one of the men they suspected of having been with the group that had shot at David and Colby. Now, he was walking along the side of the building, amply dispensing the contents of a medium-sized plastic container, and Don would have bet his life that it contained something flammable. As it was, however, his life no longer seemed to be worth much anyway.

"Don't look so alarmed," Marcy said with a sardonic smile that made shudders run down Don's spine. "We'll have another couple of minutes to do that talking that you so desperately asked for. Rest assured, I don't want to see you die too quickly. That would be far too mercifully for you."

With that, she gave Joey a sign, whereupon he retreated into the building again, though not before letting a single burning match fall on the trail of gasoline.