Chapter 8 Fireworks

Francine watched as the countryside passed them by. "I feel like I'm stepping back into time. Can you believe that many of these villages are still standing considering the history of this region?"

"Time has basically stood still here. The region itself is fascinating."

"It's rather…gothic. I feel I should be looking over my shoulder or wearing a garlic necklace or some other such nonsense."

"Actually Francine, that is all legend built from Stoker's novel. Well, the myth of the vampire has been around for quite some time and Stoker certainly used it to good effect in his novel. The people of Romania never considered Tepes to be a vampire, but Stoker certainly used the accounts of Vlad Tepes and his cruelty to good effect."

"I don't care if it's myth or not, Efraim. This place feels spooky. But, it's beautiful too, isn't it?"

"Yes." Efraim smiled at Francine and reached over to pinch her cheek. She laughed at him.

"I'm talking about the scenery, Efraim."

"That too."

She laughed again. He's something else, she thought as she watched him drive. His hands were relaxed on the steering wheel and he looked confident.

"Talking to yourself?" Efraim glanced over at her, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. But the tiny smile told her he knew she had been watching him.

"Have you always been confident, Efraim?"

"Of what?"

"Everything, anything, nothing in particular."

He shrugged. "Yes and no."

"Well that certainly answers my question!" She laughed, turning in her seat to see him better.

"I've always been confident of what I know. Who I am, well, that's another matter altogether. I used to feel out of place, like I didn't belong anywhere. That changed when I came to the Agency."

"As long as you weren't dealing with me?" Francine's laugh was rueful; she knew how hard she had been on Efraim in the past.

"As long as I wasn't chasing you with mistletoe, we were fine."

"Or cornering me in the elevators..."

"…or propositioning you in the Q Bureau. Though you always made some comment to egg me on."

"True."

"I think you liked the teasing and the attention."

"I think I may have. You always made me feel…"

"…as if your skin was crawling?" It was Efraim's turn to sound apologetic.

"Only if you had mistletoe and a cup of eggnog, in either order! No, you made me feel...confused. But I always looked forward to our next encounter. Even though you were teasing me, I've always known I could depend on you. Not that I've said it, but I've always known it. Like after Jonathan left? It was you who sent the flowers and the notes."

"I didn't think you knew about that."

"I didn't, not until now," she grinned at the look he gave her. "I'm good at what I do as well, B!" She teased and then turned serious. "I used to wonder who sent those notes. I would take them home and read and re-read them. I wondered who the man was who looked into my heart and brought some light to it once more. And slowly, I realized I was happy again. I woke up one day and I knew I was over Jonathan."

"I'm glad I was able to help." He reached over and squeezed her hand.

"There's something else." He looked over at her and nodded, encouraging her to continue. "I finally knew I was over Jonathan because one day I thought to myself that I could fall in love with the man whose notes spoke to my heart."

"Francine, you didn't know who it was writing those notes to you."

"I know. But I knew that it was a man I could love. I'm glad you're here now, Efraim."

"I'm never going to understand you, am I?" He glanced at her, she was relaxed, her face was calm, she was happy. "Nothing you said makes any logical sense to me, but I don't care. And I'm glad I'm here now too, Francine."

The 80 kilometers to Curtea de Arges flew by. Set in the windswept foothills leading to the Carpathian Range, the town was itself interesting for the fortifications that dated back to the 13th century and the founding prince of Wallachia, Radu Negru who became known as Basarab the First. They stopped for an early lunch at a small restaurant in Curtea de Arges. After, they walked in the chilled air along the cobbled streets, caught up in the beauty of the ancient town.

Amanda and Francine stopped to admire the sandstone monastery that stood in the town. Every inch carved with intricate, Moorish designs; each of its multiple rotundas reaching into the thin sunshine of the afternoon. Efraim pointed out that it had been built in the early 16th Century on the site of an earlier church acknowledged by the Archbishopric of Constantinople in 1359. Amanda was amazed at the amount of knowledge Efraim knew about the area until Francine reminded her that his first doctorate was in Russian and Eastern European Affairs.

Lee was more interested in the approach to Curtea Poenari. "These roads are pretty narrow, and there is only one way in and out. Anyone looking for us is going to see us coming miles away."

"Exactly the reason Vlad Tepes chose that spot, he could see an advancing army miles away. Plus there was the added advantage of being on top of cliffs with sheer drops on three sides of the fortress."

"How do we get there without being seen?" Geiger asked.

Amanda and Francine pulled pamphlets that they had picked up in the restaurant from their pockets. The two women looked at one another and smiled.

"I think we may have found a way," Francine said.

"How?" Lee asked as he kept a visual vigil on the nearly deserted village square.

Amanda held out the brochure. "There is a daily bus tour that goes to the base of Curtea Poenari, right to the steps that still lead to the ruins, less than 100 yards away from the power house of the Vidraru Power Plant."

Everyone leaned over to look at the brochure.

"We haven't missed it. The time table says it leaves at 1:00 PM. We have twenty minutes." Francine shoved the pamphlet at Efraim who jumped up and ran back to the restaurant, Lee and Geiger following behind him. Amanda and Francine went to their vehicles and packed up what they would need. Geiger had insisted that everyone carry a backpack and both Amanda and Francine were now thankful for it. Amanda grabbed several blankets out of the back of each of the Suburban's, telling Francine they may come in handy if they got stuck out in the night. Francine's eyes had widened at the thought of a night spent in the frigid Romanian mountains and had insisted that they take the heavy coats they had brought as well.

Brilliant sunshine broke through the drab sky, mocking the chill the two women felt as they lugged their equipment back to where they had eaten lunch. Geiger came out a raised an eyebrow at the heavy coats Amanda and Francine wore, took his pack and coat, slinging it over his arm. Lee and Efraim came out with tickets for the bus tour for each of them. Lee glared at Amanda, not liking the fact that there would be no car for her to be told to stay in. Amanda reached up and ran her hand on his cheek, telling him not to worry.

The bus, when it came, had definitely seen better days. The engine idled roughly and the plumes of black smoke coughing from the exhaust pipe caused the agents to quickly back away from the soot. The engine gave a loud bang as the entire bus shuddered before going dead, the final rattle causing the front bumper to fall off. The driver struggled to move the handle that operated the doors, which when they finally opened, one side of the door sagged drastically close to the ground. The driver, a man who had obviously seen many years, climbed out of the bus and lifted the door back into position while he pulled several long pieces of rope from his pockets.

Efraim and Geiger moved to help, lifting the bumper back into place while the old man tied the rope to the bus frame. Lee took some of the rope tying it further along the bumper. The old man thanked them in Romanian, and waved his arms for them to get on the bus.

Amanda and Francine had backed away from the bus, shocked looks on both of their faces. The old man walked over to them and bowed, offering Amanda his arm to escort her to the bus. Amanda looked at Francine, obviously for a way out of the looming bus trip, but Francine looked like she was in as much shock as Amanda was.

"Pe aici, va rog." He motioned toward the bus, taking small steps, waiting for Amanda to walk with him.

Amanda turned to Francine, her look questioning. "He said 'this way, please'. He wants you to go with him."

"Francine, I don't want to get on that bus."

"I'm right behind you, Amanda."

"No you're not! Lee?" Lee was watching, an amused look on his face. He grinned at Amanda, nodding for her to get on the bus. Amanda pulled herself to her full height, took the man's arm, and while patting it, she walked toward the bus. The old man helped her up the steps and turned back to Francine.

Francine took several steps backwards all the while watching the smirks on Efraim, Lee and Geiger's faces. The driver bowed again to her and offered her his arm. Francine licked her lips, tossed her head, sending her hair in all directions as she took his arm. "Buna!" Hello. "Dragut autobuz. A apartine tu?" Nice bus, does it belong to you?

"A vorbi Roman? Bravo! Minunut discutie, draguta doamna! Lo unde se afla cineva?" The old man gestured wildly at Francine, taking her hand and patting it.

"Educate. Universitate, licenta. In plus varsta zile in urma." Francine smiled as she answered.

"Cultivat minunut! A intra autobuz al meu. Haide!" The old man helped Francine up the steps, bringing his fingers to his lips and making the universal gesture for appreciation of a lovely woman.

Lee looked at Efraim. "What are they saying?"

"Francine told him 'nice bus'. He's thrilled she speaks Romanian; he enjoys a lively conversation with a lovely lady, the old flatterer. He wanted to know where she learned to speak the language. She told him at university, many years ago. He obviously likes educated women and he is telling her to come with him to his bus; more or less."

Efraim walked over to the bus, bowed his head quickly and thanked the man for bringing his bus out that day. "Logodnica al meu." She is my fiance.

The old man clapped Efraim on the back. "Bravo, bravo! Ea femela magnific!"

"Da!" Efraim agreed with the old man, Francine certainly was beautiful!

Lee and Geiger climbed on the bus and took seats, Lee sitting with Amanda, Geiger up in the front. The old man had decided that they all must speak Romanian, so he started his tour of the area, leaving Efraim and Francine to translate.

They passed through several very small villages, the bus creaking as it rocked on the narrow, winding roads. The mountains loomed in the distance as they traveled closer to Poenari through the Arges valley. The bus came to a stop at the base of a group of heavily wooded, very high peaks.

"Cetatea Poenari." The old man pointed to the primeval fortress. The driver struggled with the door mechanism once again, the doors finally responding and opening on a gust of frigid air. Climbing off of the bus, the agents stood staring at the ruins set upon one of the peaks.

The old man explained how Vlad Dracula got the name Tepes which means Impaler. He relished his description of how the prince had re-built the fortress of whose base they stood, using the slave labor of defeated Turks whom he killed when they finished the structure. Francine winced several times at his explicit tale. Efraim was fascinated and asked him several questions which the man happily answered.

Efraim inquired if they could walk around the area. The bus driver said he would go back to town and come again at night fall. He kissed Amanda and Francine's hands with great ceremony, heartily shook the men's hands and climbed back on board the bus and issued a warning about the steps to Poenari as well as a madman who had been shooting lights at strangers in the area. They watched as the bus vanished down the road, black clouds from the exhaust and the reverberations of a back fire lingering in its wake.

The five walked to the base of the steps and stopped.

"I really don't like this place, Lee. It's pretty spooky." Amanda finally broke the silence between them. The others came out of their thoughts and began to look around. Efraim and Geiger headed straight over to the roof of the maintenance house for the Vidraru Power Plant.

"Looks like someone was here; recently too. Look at all these burn marks, will ya?" Geiger pointed out burn holes on the roof and surrounding area.

"Damn, it looks like he really has the laser!" Efraim added. "Will you look at the trees? Those are laser grazes if I've ever seen them." The group looked at the trees closest to the maintenance house.

"I've got worse news. Look at those trees on that peak over there." Lee was pointing to a distant peak across from Poenari. "That tree line is not natural; you don't get trees that are even all the way across the horizon." The distant trees looked as if a giant pair of shears had clipped them all neatly to the exact same size.

"The shooting lights the old man spoke of," Francine said. "That must have scared any of the locals away."

"I can see why." Amanda added. "I'm scared and I haven't seen any lights!"

"This place is pretty creepy, Amanda. It just feels …evil. It gives me the chills."

"I wish you hadn't used the 'E' word, Francine."

Amanda and Francine watched as Efraim, Lee and Geiger scouted out the hillside by the dam. Francine headed for the steps and started up them. Amanda ran to keep up.

"How many steps did Efraim say?" Francine asked as she surveyed the fallen tree limbs lodged into the hillside substituting for steps.

"A little over fourteen hundred."

Francine gave a very un-lady like grunt as she continued to climb. They were quickly out of sight of the road below, enveloped in a thick forest of trees in various stages of shedding their leaves. They reached a landing that was on the break of a cliff, and were able to look out over the landscape below them. Their view of the river basin below was unobstructed; patches of sunlight broke through the gathering clouds to cast dappled shadows on the windswept water below.

They continued to climb, stopping now and again to admire the view. They found several empty bags of snack food that had been tossed aside. Amanda pointed out the sell by dates, leading them to believe that the bags had been tossed recently. They stopped; Amanda pulled water out of her backpack, tossing a small bottle to Francine when Francine's cell phone rang.

"Hello, Francine Desmond."

"Where are you," Efraim was angry, his voice tight and controlled.

"About five hundred steps straight up. You don't sound good, B." She figured he was angry; they hadn't said they were going to climb the stairs.

"Francine, we spoke about this. Please come down, I'll meet you on the way up."

"Efraim, we found food wrappers with dates on them, someone has been up this way recently."

"That's what I'm afraid of. I don't need to tell you Lee is pretty angry right now."

"I'll pass that along." Francine rolled her eyes at Amanda who grinned and then sighed. She closed her cell phone and placed it in her jacket. "Efraim is on his way up, he's not happy and Lee's upset."

"What else is new?" The two women laughed and sat down, looking at the scenery below them. Amanda stood up, moving a short way off the trail, and called out to Francine. "Look! I can see the road from here and there's Lee and Dave! They're on that ledge down there."

"Efraim must be on his way up. You've never seen him angry, have you?"

"Once or twice."

Francine smiled at the tone of Amanda's voice, knowing that Efraim had been upset with her when Amanda had seen him angry. "Amanda, how do you do it? Handle Lee wanting to protect you and your desire to be the best agent you can be? I know they conflict, but you and Lee are able to work around it and still keep your relationship strong. How do you do it?"

Amanda sighed and sat down next to Francine. "It's not easy Francine; I won't lie to you. Lee can be very annoying and we have had our share of arguments about it. And he's right; it does seem that I find some very interesting situations to stumble upon. I frankly wonder how I managed to survive up until I met him, or so he tries to convince me. But I try to understand that he's trying to protect me because he loves me. And we have to work on it daily."

"You came in to your relationship as a civilian. I actually helped to recruit Efraim."

"I never knew that, neither of you have ever mentioned that!" Amanda dusted off dead leaves and made herself comfortable on a fallen log while she waited for Francine to continue.

"We were getting interesting data with analysis from Naval Intelligence about various Soviet deployments. I was struck by the detail that the analyst was able to glean from a few grainy photos and bits and pieces of telephone conversations. So I did some research on the analyst."

"Efraim."

"Lieutenant J. E. Beaman, Jr., as everything was signed. So I looked up his track record. He was 94 correct in his assessments. 94 percent, can you imagine that? I found that his enlistment was coming up, and I forwarded the information I had on him to recruitment. And the rest is, shall we say, history?" She smiled, thinking that her curiosity about a NIS analyst had provided her with the man who would soon be her husband.

"Does he know?"

Francine shook her head. "I don't know, we've never talked about it. But, I guess my point is that I was already in the field when he came in, and I already had quite a few accomplishments under my belt. I find his concern for me charming, most of the time. I certainly don't like making him worry about me, but I have to be able to do my work." Amanda nodded her understanding.

"If you communicated a little more with me, Francine, I would not worry about you as much as I do." Efraim leaned on the old handrail by the trail, his breathing heavy and sweat dampening his forehead and the front of his chest. Francine held out her water, which he took and swallowed several gulps of before handing it back to her.

"Did you run all the way up those steps, Efraim?" Amanda asked, trying to head off the argument brewing between these two.

"Yeah, hell of a climb," he sat in the leaves at Francine's feet and leaned his head back on her legs while he caught his breath. Francine scooted her legs so he was able to rest his back and she leaned forward, wrapping her arms loosely about his shoulders.

"I'm sorry Efraim. You're right; I'll work on that, I promise."

"Thank you. So, you find me charming, do you?"

Francine laughed; leave it to him to hear only what he wanted to hear. "Most of the time," she told him, giving him only half of her answer.

"Have I been stepping on your toes, Francine? Trying to keep you in the background?"

Amanda put her head on her hands and watched. She figured she owed Francine back for years of interruptions. Not that she really wanted to see the two of them argue it out, but, she wasn't going down those steps by herself.

"Efraim, do we have to discuss this now?" Francine rolled her eyes in Amanda's direction and flung her arms out to encompass their surroundings.

"I'm not going back down those steps until my head stops buzzing and here is as good as anywhere, since here is where I'm mad as hell! I know you've been an agent longer than I have. I know that you're capable of handling yourself out in the field. But we're partners and that makes us responsible for the safety of one another. And we are getting married so I think that gives each of us more than a passing interest in the well being of the person they will be swearing to honor with their lives." His voice got louder with each point he made, until he was at a near shout.

Francine yelled back at him, surprised because he rarely raised his voice. "You don't always tell me what you're up to; sitting in your chair with your feet on a desk and your head in the clouds!"

"That's not the same thing as taking off in the field in unknown territory with an unknown enemy at large Francine and you know that. That is the way I think. It's not something I do to pull away from you. And I always tell you what I've been thinking about. But this isn't about how I think things through or the fact that you feel left out of my thoughts. This is about how we deal together in the field as partners. Can you learn to work with a partner? Do you even want a partner in the field? But right now, right here, I'm your partner and we are responsible to one another. And we're equal partners, Francine. You have skills in the field that I don't have, but I also have skills that you don't. If we can meld those skills together, we'll be as great a team together at work as we are together in our personal lives."

Efraim laid his head back on her thigh. He closed his eyes and waited. Efraim knew that Francine had never worked well with partners in the past, mostly because of her caustic tongue and mercurial temperament. He knew she was very good at what she did and he knew she could be better. But she would have to be willing to compromise, and Francine didn't like to give in.

Francine watched Efraim as he closed his eyes. She glanced at Amanda who was watching her with interest. She reached down and combed his hair with her fingers where he had pushed it back in frustration. Why did he have to make so much sense? He was right, and she knew it. She hated that.

"I really hate it when you're right, Efraim."

"I know you do, but can be right next time, I promise. Okay, show me what you have." He sat up and took the snack wrappers from Amanda. "You're right, these were dropped here recently, but anyone could have dropped them."

Both Francine and Amanda shook their heads. "No Efraim, the man at the restaurant said it has been very quiet since Halloween when the big groups gathered here for the Dracula Festival."

"Amanda's right, besides, do you really think it's some stray tourist? These people in the area would notice anyone out of the ordinary. Think about what the bus driver said, a madman shooting lights at people."

Efraim leaned forward and listened. He heard a distinct change in the tone of the power plant below them. He hadn't noticed it before, but the wind had changed, and with it came the sound of the plant. "Do you hear that?" He asked.

Both Francine and Amanda stopped and listened. "It sounds like something is really straining the turbines," Francine said.

Efraim jumped, grabbed Francine's hand and pulled her down as he wrapped his other arm around Amanda as they rolled past her. They hit the ground several feet below where they had been sitting when they heard a sizzling in the air and the unmistakable sound of trees exploding.