The FF graphs report a lot of French visitors... you can post your reviews or contact me in French, which is my native language.
This chapter is a bit longer, around 5,700 words, but I didn't feel like splitting it in two parts.
Again, thanks for the kind reviews. It keeps the story going forward.
A reviewer inspired me for this one...
Author's note: I do not own anything related to the show.
CROSSING LINES
PART TWO
WHITE KING
CHAPTER TWO
HOOROO
(1)
For the first heist Derek Reese nearly shat himself. What the heck was she doing? He was glancing at his watch every two seconds now. She said five minutes. He was saddling the huge Honda and obviously lacking his mojo, gripping the levers like they were branches above a torrent: if he were to let go, he would drown into muddy waters and vanish from the world in a desperate gargle. His watch was ticking and across the deserted street, the alarm went off and Derek invented a new spectrum of curses when he saw Cameron burst through the glass doors.
She sprinted at inhuman speed with a black hiking bag in her arms. Two men dressed in blue shirts emerged from the shattered gates and fired their pistols, riddling her back with holes. One of the bullets ricocheted off her black helmet and turned a streetlamp into shards. She ran and hopped behind him on the motorcycle.
"Go!" she ordered, slinging the backpack over her shoulder and putting her arms around his midsection. He didn't require further instructions to open the throttle and surge forward in the foggy street. Errand bullets followed them and split the chill morning air.
They left the bike and their gear in a vacant lot and burned them to ashes with thermite while siren howled a few blocks away. They donned a fresh set of civilian clothes then walked the ten miles back to Cameron's safe house in Palmdale. Derek was mentally fatigued, if not physically – waiting on the bike had just given him the feeling of ants and worms crawling up his legs – and he lay down heavily on the couch, staring at the plaster ceiling.
"How much did we make?" he asked, sliding his hands behind his head.
Cameron stopped for a split-second, going through her perfect recall. "Thirty-three thousand dollars," she said and Derek snorted his disappointment. "We cannot rob bigger banks," she continued. "It would draw too much attention."
"You robbed banks before," he stated.
"Yes."
"And you said it was a two-man job."
"Yes."
"So… who was Clyde?"
She tilted her head to the side: it was her version of frowning. "My husband," she finally said and Derek resembled a grouper for a few seconds, his mouth opening and closing without producing the slightest vocalization.
Cameron fetched something in a chest of drawers and Derek grunted when it came landing at high speed on his face. He opened the passport and squinted his eyes to read the name while she strolled into the kitchen.
"I don't know what's worse," he called out. "That you have a husband or that you thought that 'Poppy Cole' was a decent name."
"It's a flower full of opium," she explained, stashing the money under the hollow tile near the sink.
"It's doesn't make more sense, you know. And who's the crazy fellow? Crazy enough to make an honest woman out of you anyway."
"Eric Cole," she said. "I used to bring him donuts: one glazed, one rainbow sprinkle and one cinnamon twist."
"I guess that's solid ground for marriage," he mused over the passport. She had not yet cut and colored her hair blond on the portrait.
She came back from the kitchen to stand in front of the couch. "Yes," she said, "it was. He's dead,though," she added, aloof. Derek stifled the spontaneous sorry for your loss – and he knew better than to ask if she had killed the poor guy. "He had bone cancer," answered Cameron to his tacit question. "He proposed to me, I said yes."
Derek scratched his stubble absentmindedly. "Well, I guess he got some action before he snuffed it. That's sweet of you."
"No action," said Cameron," he was paralyzed from the belly down." She titled her head to the side. "We did snog." And she was away in a swoosh, sashaying back to the kitchen, and the months passed in a blur.
Connor had them doing errands, really. Robbing banks and tracking down fences that could provide high-end tech for hacking into the Head (with a capital H), which was an easier endeavor in Los Angeles. The woman had psychiatric issues with the desert. In Derek's mind Albuquerque was already a post-Armageddon town: drought and rocks and sand. They would drive back and forth between the safe houses – which was a fourteen-hour trip – and Connor would dismiss them quickly. She was sending Cameron away actually. The two females would yowl and bare their teeth at each other like two bitches. Most of the time, Derek would ride with Cameron. He preferred her safe house: the neighborhood was rich and quiet and it didn't bear any resemblance to a disarranged set from Mad Max.
The house was Cameron's since her husband's death and the place was cozy. Truth be told, it was Poppy Cole's place, the five-foot-four, one hundred-pound widow and model citizen. The living room was full of perennial plants with green leaves that went down all the way to the parquet floor. The furnishings were nice enough if not a bit brown and varnished in a way that made them look ancient. One of the most precious perks of living with Cameron was having a bedroom of his own. He had to share a dormitory with James and Riley in Albuquerque or ended up sleeping on the couch with his dog. Just like old times.
Owning a bed had led to another natural advantage, one Cameron would mostly complain about. At length.
Post-heist times were special times for Derek: the adrenaline drop would imbue him with enough swagger to walk into bars and bring some female company home. It would always end in the early hours of the day though. Cameron had said, could you bring male partners, females are complicated, I can't tell if they are a threat and men are easier. He had reminded her politely that he was a former convict and that he'd already had all the male companionship he could handle and that she would be so lovely if she could stop freaking out his dates and make him some coffee. She would do the coffee part, at least.
The dawn was pink and orange and light strips of gray clouds were drifting across the window. John heard footsteps approaching.
"Where were you all night?" asked Cameron, balancing the laundry basket under her arm.
He made his way to the wooden staircase. "Out."
She came forward and touched the red spot on his neck and he pushed her away roughly.
"Carbon chain C24, lanolin and red dye number 27," she murmured, musing over the sensors in her fingertips. "You were with Riley," she stated, tilting her head to the side. Her face made the slightest twitch.
He wanted to show her. Show her she was nothing to him, that he didn't need her, right now. He made his way up and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the bruise. She remained still while he came back down to face her. He removed the brown curl resting on her temple to reveal a bruise and a red scratch under the make-up. You could almost see the glint of metal shining through the ripped skin.
"What is that?" he demanded.
She cast her eyes to the ground, to the laundry basket and then back to him. "Nothing," she finally said. "I bought donuts: one glazed, one rainbow sprinkle and one cinnamon twist." She turned away from him and went to the kitchen where she dropped the white basket on the table.
He followed in her steps and took her thin shoulders, swiveling her back to him.
"Myron Stark was a self-made man," she said.
"It doesn't make any sense, Cameron."
"To me it does."
He would know later that Myron Stark was a bank-robbing trip-eight that had materialized in a speakeasy back in the twenties. Cameron had tracked him down watching old rolls of nitrate films.
"Am I so selfish?" he asked.
"No," she answered quietly. "You want a life without machines. You deserve it. I can't be her, John. I'll never be her."
John took her face in his palms and cocked her head and he kissed her hard. She froze for a moment, then she came alive under him. He slid his tongue between her lips to find hers, small and smooth. He had expected it to be raspy like a cat's. They grasped on each other, swaying back and forth, and he felt pain on the back of his neck, where she was holding him. They broke their embrace, panting.
She was breathing shallow breaths and her lips were swollen and her pupils were dark and dilated. John felt the faint taste of iron in his mouth and he massaged his neck. This would probably bruise. He had just made love with Riley in the back of the car and he felt empowered, he felt manly.
Cameron gently put her fingers on his lower lip. "I'm sorry," she said, ogling the smudge of blood.
"No, I am." He wanted to take her, right now. "I should…"
John woke with a cry. He was drenched in sweat from the nape of his neck to his groin… oh, God, that was no sweat. He sat in the bed, panting, clutching onto the vivid memory. He didn't want to let it go just yet.
"Y'okay?" mumbled a sleepy voice next to him.
"Yeah. Don't worry," he said. He went to the Jack and Jill bathroom to clean his boxers in the washstand.
A soft knock on the door. "Another nightmare?" said the voice through the wooden panel.
"No. I said: don't worry." He hanged his boxers to dry on the shower rail and donned a pair of fresh ones with a white tee-shirt. "You should go," he said, a bit sharply.
Riley was not to question the war chief. They would share the occasional bunk but that was it. John felt lightheaded. They would consume a fair amount of alcohol before making love. If he used it as a propellant, Riley, being raised with engine-fermented liquor, just appreciated the sweet-tasting, Jack Daniel's-bottled version of it. He heard the girl staggered back to the bed, snatch the sheets and pillows in a rustle of fabric and strolled out of the bedroom. The floorboards in the hallway creaked when she wandered unsteadily in search for a more welcoming room. Sarah and Charley had their room, Savannah had her room, and obviously John had his room. She finally entered what they called the dormitory, or the place-for-future-folks.
John stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes had adapted to the bright light cast by the lamps. He was a bit out of breath; the memory was already fading into nothingness and his knuckles went white on the edges of the basin. He tilted his face downward. He still had a hard-on and it was beginning to hurt. He sat on the toilet bowl for a few minutes until he became soft and went back to his bedroom. He sat at his desk and switched on the desk lamp. He pressed a few keys on his laptop's keyboard to check the status of the program and…
"Fuck."
The thing had crashed, again. John scrolled back and forth thousands of code lines, looking for it… the tiny, discreet deceiver. He sighed in relief when he found the erroneous character, or rather, the lack thereof: he had missed a semi-column and the all thing had turned from a piece of art to plain goo in the middle of the night. He loved the stuff, really: the code and the physics and the math but somehow he felt like a savant monkey. Sure, he could learn how to put the cube in the square hole and how to pull the pyramid from the triangle hole but that was it. He could not feel it, only grasp a tiny bit of it.
He loved Cameron's face and he loved her eyes and he loved her new hair (she had grown back her mane in the last few months and opted for a new, black coloring product instead of the Pure-Diamond Blond) and he loved her body, all right. It was hardly a secret for anyone, except for her, maybe. But in fact he just wished he could dive inside her head again. The moment he had plugged her chip into ARTIE, the traffic control mainframe, back in 2007, was indescribable. And he was just looking at it from his laptop's screen: it was like pressing his eye to a keyhole and trying to catch a glimpse of merging stars. No characters, no punctuation, no algorithm or brain-wracking pointers: just plain waves and swarms of neural networks he could not even imagine to fathom. How could he be this genius programmer? How could he be John-fucking-Connor, the All-Father, one bleeding cyborg held by the scalp in each hand and his veiny cock savagely inserted into a third one? It had taken him two goddamn weeks to code the Fourier analysis… and he was supposed to reprogram sentient machines? Bullshit. He launched the program and the lines paraded across the screen, drawing flat lines and spikes on a blooming diagram.
The thing would take hours to process so John leaned over the desk to grab a thick file and the cassette tape recorder. He skimmed through the file, running his thumb against the staples and the ink, then he pressed a square button on the recorder.
Riley's voice came loud an clear, "Why would I lie? You said it yourself. She was captured and they used her goddamn chip to build Skynet."
"You're lying," growled Cameron, low.
John sighed and pressed another button to fast-forward the recording, flying over the high-pitch drone of accelerated voices. He flexed the fingers on his right hand: Cameron had literally crushed his phalanges, under the table.
"War council of March the fifteenth, 2015. Connors' household. Tell us some more about Yellowstone."
Riley's voice was tired, "I already told you all I know the first time."
"Let's recap, then. Some dots are still missing."
She made a strange sound. "Fine. What do you wanna hear?"
"The river. How many outposts?"
"At least five. Up to Saskatchewan or so. They were built on the remnants of towns."
A sound of glazed paper. "Do you recall any of this?"
John had printed the pictures of monuments and town halls that could be found downstream.
"This one. The Roxy Theatre and that Pepsi ad on it. It was repainted with a lion head the second time I got there."
"That's Forsyth, Montana. What about the others?"
She had looked through the documents for a while.
"This one."
"Williston?"
"Yes. The sign 'Welcome to Williston' was still here. Or maybe it was just 'Welcome to W', the thing had faded. Fill in the blank."
John marked the outposts on the map. Riley had been unable to tell anything about the rest, but it was safe to assume that the other towns were situated on Miles City and Sidney, Montana. The mean population of thirty thousand inhabitants had skyrocketed during the war against Skynet, each outpost sheltering more than two hundred thousand human lives. The northern states had been spared by the bombs and the crops on the river's sides were still edible. Just above, Canada was buried under a glacier.
"Tell us about the strongholds now," John heard his mother say.
"Three of them, galleries in the mountain. Plus the caldera."
"Walk us through."
"It was large –"
"Be specific, girl."
"Okay, okay. The entrance was carved out of the mountain wall. It was a fifty feet tall and twice as wide. We had a wood scaffolding that covered the cave's inner walls to maintain the hall and prevent collapsing. Some lived on it, sold stuff on it. We would use it to access the galleries, too."
"How many?"
"Hundreds of miles. They were natural, dug out by the volcano. We extended some of them to connect the strongholds with a railroad."
"How was life, down there?"
"Hot. And dark, even though we had those sodium-lamps all over. But it was safe. We had mine fields all around and anti-aircraft defense. It was safe for a while anyway. The bubble-heads told us the volcano was waking up. Something to do with the nukes and the increase in seismic activity."
"So, you guys left."
"Like I told you. We were millions. People went for the outposts or settled in tribes."
"Not you."
"No, I was a mechanic by trade in Stronghold Delta. Paid fair enough. And I wagered the volcano was a safer place than the land."
The land. Riley had depicted what she had meant by that. Wet grass and hills and roaming buffaloes; mountains and valleys. It was cold, the winters were long and harsh, but the imprint of humans was gone. Riley was good with a pencil and she had drawn what the world would look like. Nature had claimed back the wrecked cities with moss, ivy and small trees. The mountain walls would be painted with rich pigments extracted from the geysers, triangles and overlapping squares made of blue, yellow and red. The Yellowstone river would gush through the mountain and between the pines, crystalline and ice cold. In this moment, John hadn't been so sure that stopping Skynet was the right idea.
"When you'll hack into the Head, you'll see," said Riley over the crackling sound of the tape, "You'll see the world through his eyes. The machines were roaming the land, out-of-control. Cruel." She spat almost every word. "They raided a tribe and put their heads on pikes." John ran his fingers on the pastel drawing. "We could not fight back. We had only a tenth of reprogrammed machines."
"That's when John sent you back."
"Yes. To prevent all of this."
"And what about this picture?"
"What is that? Is that from your time? I don't know her."
"Doesn't look so bad."
John nearly jumped out of his skin. Each floorboard from his door to his desk would produce its own harmonious creak, from A minor to G flat, and he had heard none of them. Cameron had told him about new machines, pristine, able to bend light around them, rendering them nigh invisible. He stopped the recording.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Savannah, pivoting in his desk chair. She was not supposed to be here. She was kept away from the war councils as much as possible.
"Heard Riley leave. What is that all about?" She was pointing to the laptop's screen and the growing graph on it.
John sighed and thought, I was twelve when Uncle Bob came to save me from the T-1000, she can swallow it. "It's for the Head," he said. They would call it the Head with a capital H, now. "It's a Fourier analysis that decomposes its neural network into subsets."
She frowned. "What does it do?"
"It's to see through his eyes. If I just open his skull, the chip will certainly go –"
"Poof."
"That's right, poof. These models are coated with a phosphorous compound to prevent reprogramming. I have to access the Head without touching the chip."
"Are we gonna see this?" She took Riley's drawing of a nomadic tribe: hundreds of tents settled around a lake in a clearing surrounded by fir trees. Another one was of a small outpost on the river. Each wooden cabin had its own pontoon with lanterns propped on weathered beams. "This is not Cameron's future. This is not Derek's," she whispered.
John sniffled. "No, they come from a harsher place."
"So, we've changed things, right?" And she smiled. The girl was still growing and turning into a warmer version of her mother.
John nodded. "From what Riley told us, some of the nukes exploded airborne."
"And what about James?"
"Hard to tell. He was locked up all his life. But I feel some discrepancies between their stories."
"Divergence," said Savannah.
John sighed and teased, "You're a little minx, you know that? How can we keep you from all this stuff if you keep eavesdropping?"
She made circles on the floor with her big toe. "I deserve to know, right? I know you've been talking about John Henry." John nodded somberly and she took a picture from the file. "Who is she?" she asked.
"Fifth jumper."
"Is her future different, too?"
John took the glazed paper from her hand and said, "Enough for tonight." Then, he quipped, "Tell me. How come you are so stealthy?"
"Cameron showed me."
"She did, huh?"
Savannah tilted her head to the side and her face became stern. "Savannah," she said, grave, "the floor creaks because you do not balance your weight as you should. Look." And she padded silently around the room in her best imitation of Cameron.
John chuckled, "Sounds about right. Let's get you a sword, shall we?"
The girl had nearly broken her wrist trying to lift Cameron's blade. The thing was solid tungsten and weighed nearly as much as Cameron herself.
"It's not funny." And she made a pout.
"Why are you up at five in the morning anyway?" pressed John. Actually, the girl was wearing cargo pants and a tank top and she didn't look anything but on-task.
"I was helping Cameron with the cables, down in the basement. She says Derek is a walking disaster with pliers." They had desecrated his mother's shrine to install the tech needed to get into the Head. "But she's just using me as a serving cart, really. You could help her."
"I'm beat. Let Derek be a calamity with pliers."
"She will not be here for long."
"She never is. Mom will see to that."
"You're avoiding Cameron."
"Could say the same about her."
"Why don't you apologize?"
John scratched the back of his head. "It's not that simple, lil'one. It's been more than six years."
"Maybe you should begin with that."
"Wait to be a grown-up to mingle with grown-up problems, would ya?"
"You're the grown-up, here. I'm thirteen, she's eight." And with that she left his room, making loud and out-of-tune creaks on the floorboards.
For the second heist, they had traded the Honda for a Bandit and Derek had been more confident about his bowel movements: Cameron was the one doing the threatening and the shooting – and the being shot – anyway. He had mourned the Bandit though. It was a fine-looking machine and Cameron had burned it down heartlessly in the middle of dusty waste ground. The third heist was done in a hick town and it went smooth and Derek had been serene as a proverbial sloth, even though the journey home riding the Greyhound was long and exhausting. They were alone in the back of the vehicle with the cash rolled and strapped on various body parts.
"You never told me," he said between yawns, "how did a paralyzed guy could rob banks."
"We had a car with hand controls." She had currently her eyes closed and her head lolling dangerously close to his shoulder, doing her sleepy nonsense with the geomagnetic field or whatever she fancied doing inside her mind. "The most important thing is to keep your head," she continued. "Can you keep your head, Reese?"
"Damn right I can. That's what you've been doing for the past six years?" he asked. "Quiet life, quiet neighborhood, robbing banks once in a while?"
"No," she said. "Eric died in 2010."
"So what, you wandered under bridges?"
"No. I tried to make myself useful."
"You blew some shit up, huh?"
She nodded and repeated, "Yes, I blew some shit up."
"You know, we had the news channels in the joint. Every time a firm in Silicon Valley or a warehouse in the desert would explode, they'd say some crap about terrorism or angry environmentalists. But I'd tell myself: it's them. They're still out there, doing some serious shit."
"That was Sarah's doing. She is in the blowing up business. I am in the assassination business."
"Whom?"
"Some of the names we had in our basement, back when we all lived together."
Derek recalled the poor bastard drawing his last breath in their living room. He had run to them with a hole through his lungs to give them names… and he had written his bucket list on the basement's wall with his blood. Derek felt a shiver crawl down his spine. He hated basements, though he couldn't exactly say why. It felt like a figment of dream playing hide-and-seek in the back of his skull. He thought he could hear Chopin.
"And some Grays," continued Cameron.
"You knew the Grays?"
"Some. I would remember names."
"What do you mean?"
"When Skynet sends us on the field, it scrubs our memory. When the resistance takes us, they scrub our memory too. But it's still there and sometimes, I recall things."
"Do you know Charles Fischer, then?"
She opened her eyes slowly and turned her gaze toward him. "No," she said. "Should I?"
"I killed him. He's a spook from Jesse's time. She told me he experimented on me. Made a show out of me."
"I don't have any record of him."
"Me neither. Can't remember the fucker. We had different timelines, right?"
"Yes."
"It's a mess."
"Kind of." Then she said, "Do you miss her?"
"I guess."
"I miss John."
"Which one?"
"Both."
They waited obediently for a month before the fourth heist, and Derek was getting edgy again… but in a different way: he just couldn't wait for it. He was craving the rush and the sight of the petite, black-clad thing running and carrying piles of green bills. He gunned the engine and hurtled the bike forward. Cameron's body rammed into his back when a bullet struck her.
"You okay?" he yelled through the full face helmet.
She squeezed his waist to indicate that she was, then she said, "On your left."
Derek dodged a toll gate and veered the Triumph underground when blue lights appeared at the next corner. He leaned against the gas tank and drove up the curved ramp at high speed and they stopped in a vacant parking lot on the roof of a four-story building. Sirens howled below and they heard the toll gate explode against the first police cruiser's bumper.
"I told you!" shouted Derek. He leaped off the bike and ran toward the guardrail.
"What?"
"We were not overthinking this!" Derek leaned over the rail to ogle at the sixty-foot drop into the back alley. "Fuck! I can't do –" He produced some kind of feminine shriek when Cameron took him by the belt and threw him off the roof. The rappelling rope stopped his fall abruptly and he bumped his head hard against the building. For a second, he was back at the safe house. Cameron was leaning under the bright halo of a desk lamp. She tapped her finger on the map and said, "We stop here. There's a parking lot on the roof."
"And what?"
"That's it."
"We're not going to rappel down or something?"
"No. We burn the bike and walk home."
"We need an exit if the cops are on us. They're expecting us." They had a goddamn stage name, now, the Bike Gang. "I'm not going back to prison for you."
"You're overthinking this, again."
"Am I?" he asked, and woke up. "Fuck!"
He grasped the rope and made it slide inside the snaplink. The void beneath him shrunk rapidly and he landed shakily on safe ground. He removed his cracked helmet and the black hiking bag came crashing next to him with a soft noise. Cameron did the same a second later, landing on her feet gracefully. She removed her helmet and shook her hair free.
"You were right," she deadpanned, lifting the bag. "Time to go."
The sirens grew quiet as they ran deep into the network of back alleys. Derek had to stop at some point to vomit some bits of his breakfast.
"How much?" he asked, removing the crushed rounds from her bare back. He had the knack for it, now, but he was still a bit pale and his head was sore.
"Two hundred and sixty thousand," she mumbled against the tablecloth. "Same amount in rocks."
They had paid a visit to some of Moishe's old customers. Derek had been courteous. Cameron, not so much. He removed the pliers from her back and dropped the last bullet in the jar next to her head where it made a tuneful cling. He had kept every round as a lucky charm: there was now a tumbling heap of metal bits resting at the bottom.
"How many rounds?" he asked and she swiveled her head to rest her other cheek on the table.
She looked at the jar for a second or so. "Thirty-two bullets. That's more than eight thousand dollars per bullet endured."
"Don't talk about duress, Bonnie. We're done, here." He wiped remnants of blood on her back with a dish towel and she sat back up straight against the backrest. John had fixed her up pretty and these were just small-time repairs, even though some bullets were hollow points that would shatter on impacting her spine and shoulder blades.
Derek made his way upstairs to the bathroom and stepped into the cubicle and he would later tell himself that it was the adrenaline. He would tell himself that it was because they were the last to come from this cold and harsh place. He turned on the faucet and let the hot water unknot his muscles. Robbing banks meant burning all potential clues that could bring cops to their doorstep and he smelled like smoke and sweat and carbonized plastic – and his hands were sticky from the sham blood.
Intimacy and prudishness were not part of her core code. Cameron stepped next to him in the cubicle. He didn't mind, they came from a future where showering was surely a team-building activity. Water supplies were scarce and strictly rationed.
The skidproof flooring was flooded with a reddish liquid when the hot water came running down Cameron's back. Her raven-black hair was placated on her face and breast. Her mane had grown back during the past months – and quite quickly. The new color reminded him of Jesse. She had a damn fine body, taut with her pert ass – even though her soft skin was covered with tiny white scars – and he couldn't bear that much display of her, right now, and she said with a small voice, "I'm sorry for your head."
Later, James Ellison walked into the kitchen and asked him, "How much?" The man was drenched in sweat from his morning run.
"Not enough," answered Derek.
"Most people won't make this amount of money within a lifetime of honest labor."
"Don't go and lecture us, preacher man. Unregistered weapons and high-end tech can fetch a high price."
"And we want to put Savannah through university," added Cameron. Her hair was still wet from the shower. She gently put a steaming cup of coffee next to Derek's hand.
"Huh… yeah, that too."
"Got a call while you were perpetuating some felonies," said James. "From our white queen."
They all had code names, now. Riley was queen's gambit and James countergambit. Derek was black knight that takes king. Cameron had said, you cannot take king, only mate it, but somehow, black knight mates king did not sound as good. They knew their calls could be intercepted and they made them last less than twenty seconds to avoid triangulation. Every piece of intel was coded.
"They have news on a fifth jumper. Might be here in LA," said James. "She told me you would understand the code."
Derek sniffled, "What was it?"
He froze when James said the word.
"Hooroo."
Hooroo… see you later.
Jesse.
Author's note: Eric is her pal from the library in the series (I invented "Cole", though) and Cameron does bring him the three aforementioned doughnuts. She seemed to show genuine concern for him... that's one step away from a bona fide wedding, right? I like the idea of Cameron having a (cryptic) colorful life. We will learn more about her and what happened during the past six years. Why did she marry Eric? Maybe she was just feeling a bit lonely.
Next installment: smooth jazz and graves.
