Show: The Agency
Title: The American Family
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1
A/N: As usual, the opening line is: "Sorry for the delay." and I am sorry: I was at my friend's house all week and, while I had written this chapter last week it was on my computer so I couldn't upload. But anyway, thanks for last chapter's comments and keep them coming please.
*~*~*~*~*~*
The next day, a very shell-shocked Terri made her way into work. She mechanically passed her briefcase through the scanner and passed through the metal-detector before taking the items back from the guard without her customary smile of gratitude.
As she shouldered her way out of the elevator onto her floor, her mind was on anything but work as she mechanically moved down the hall to the OTS Department. As usual, at that time in the morning, the office was empty but, when Terri set her briefcase down on the desk and rebooted the computer, she turned around to find she had a visitor: Quinn.
"Jesus!" started Terri. "You scared me, sir."
"That was not my intention, Ms. Lowell," he replied placidly, stepping fully into the room.
"What can I do for you, sir?" she asked. Quinn had a way of intimidating almost everyone, including her.
"I suppose you saw the news last night, Ms. Lowell?"
Terri nodded and exhaled heavily. "Yes, I did." She paused, "Did you know before it hit the news?"
Quinn shook his head. "About ten minutes before the media ran the story, I got a call from Agent O'Connor's handler. He said he got a call from another one of his packages at three a.m. GMT yesterday morning. He's deep in another faction of the Brigade as well and the handler asked him if she was at the scheduled Brigade meeting in South Belfast. Apparently, Agent O'Connor left North Belfast on Wednesday with her faction as scheduled, which was the reason she hadn't called in. The meeting was due to start on Friday at 7:00 p.m. GMT, but neither Agent O'Connor nor her faction leader showed up, but the second-in-command represented that particular faction. When asked about his leader's whereabouts, he smiled and said taking care of business. The faction leader eventually did show up the next day, minus Agent O'Connor."
"Crap!" broke in Terri. "She'd been gone since Friday!"
Quinn nodded thoughtfully. "Her cover had been blown, Ms. Lowell. The question is, how?"
Terri shook her head negatively. "I don't know. Say, Quinn, did O'Connor's handler have the presence of mind to ask his other package about the Sumac Cell."
"That's what I initially came here for, Ms. Lowell. Apparently at the meeting, they discussed possible worst-case scenarios for when the election date was reset. Particularly, how to retaliate against pro-Catholic groups. Naturally, the IRA came up, as well as the Sumac Cell."
"What about them?"
"The CIA aren't the only people who have moles dissolved in terrorist groups, Ms. Lowell. Somehow the Brigade managed to swipe an info-link to a member: Jonathan O'Brien."
Terri's brow wrinkled. "That name sounds familiar."
"He's the only visual link we've ever captured of the Cell."
"Fat lot that did," muttered Terri bitterly. "O'Brien's a master of disguise."
"Exactly. The link they had on O'Brien disappeared for a couple of hours one day, when it started to blink again, the Brigade decided to pay him a little visit. Only when the finally caught up to the source, they found their mole floating face down in Dundee Bog."
"O'Brien disappeared again," Terri surmised. At Quinn's nod, she asked, "Do they have any idea where he might be?"
Quinn frowned. "Yes, as a matter of fact, they do."
"Where is he?" Terri asked.
"Here. Right here in America."
*~*~*~*~*~*
Quinn's announcement hadn't sat well with Terri, and it hadn't gone over well with the rest of the OTS and IRT as well. Joshua and Lex sat at their stations furiously establishing American links for an APB of some sorts on Jonathan O'Brien.
Terri on the other hand, sat at her computer immersed in the Graphics program she had helped Joshua to create and engineer. It was a computer image generator of some sort, but much more realistic and detailed than the ordinary image enhancers employed by other law agencies.
The only photo they'd captured of Jonathan O'Brien lay open in the Image Bank. For several minutes, Terri stared at the photo with the naked eye. If she'd seen this man walking down the street, she wouldn't have batted an eyelid - he looked more like a Wall Street yuppie than a overzealous pro- Catholic terrorist. His dark hair was neatly combed, with a side part. His blue eyes were clear, if a bit frosty; his skin dark and a bit swarthy, lending the air of a man who liked to be outdoors on the weekends; his mouth was beautifully molded, not too thin, nor too thick. He was a handsome man and, if she had seen him on the street and didn't know what a snake he was, Terri would have found herself attracted to him. That was what made him so dangerous - he was so beautiful - but what would make him too easy to remember, which was why he was constantly changing his appearance.
Narrowing her eyes, Terri typed in a series of commands and a neon orange molding grid showed over O'Brien's image. On examining the photo, Terri had come up with a series of discrepancies: his hair was too starkly dark, as well as his skin; any bet the frosty blue eyes were contacts. The photo was a little outdated as well - O'Brien was bound to have aged a little in the past seven years.
Terri felt someone behind someone behind her shoulder, and looked up to see Stiles looking at the screen intently.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Terri indicated he should take a seat beside her. "I'm using the Image Enhancer on Jonathan O'Brien. His photo's a little outdated, but it's all we've got to work with."
Stiles stared at the photo. "What's wrong with it?" he asked. "He looks the regular Joe."
Terri chuckled. "Regular Joe he is not, Stiles, he's too beautiful to ever be considered 'regular'."
Stiles scowled.
"Use those Marine powers of observation, Stiles," she suggested. "Look at the photo carefully. Can't you see the discrepancies in the picture?"
Stiles did as she suggested. Finally after a few seconds of silent observation, they started to seemingly appear before his eyes. "Yeah, look," he said pointing to the image, "his skin's too dark-like he smoothed it on from a bottle."
"What else?"
"His hair? It's too dark as well."
Terri nodded and smiled. "Exactly. This photo was taken in November 2000, right before the Parliament bombing. Back then the Sumac Cell was still a small fish in the sea of pro-Catholic groups. They didn't have the funds or resources that they have now. But they *did* have the uncanny ability to disappear like smoke whenever they needed to. Selection was limited and exclusive. Getting this picture taken was the only mistake Jonathan O'Brien ever made. And he more than made up for it with his recent disguises. Until he disappeared again."
"And decided to resurface here in America."
"Right." Terri's fingers flew across the keyboard again, and the grid image enlarged, filling the screen.
"What are you going to do now?" asked Stiles.
"I'm gonna call up the detector. It can detect inorganic hues on human images-that can tell us if our hunch about his skin colour was correct or not." As she spoke, O'Brien's swarthy skin turned from deep tan to neon green.
"What does that mean?"
"It means we were right," Terri replied with a smile.
"So now what?"
Terri typed in some more commands and the grid image rapidly decolourised from green to the original swarthy colour of the photo before gradually fading to a more normal shade. When the photo stopped decolourising, Jonathan O'Brien was about 6 shades paler.
"What did you do?"
"I simply decolourised his skin colour by the percentage the bottle tan had increased it by. Pretty simple."
Stiles looked thoughtful. "Can you do the same thing for his hair?"
Terri nodded. "Sure can." A few more commands to the computer, and O'Brien's unrealistic mane was highlighted as well. The grid enhanced the image, and a colour sample came up on screen. A series of names flitted across the screen before the correct box stopped in front of them: Ivory Black 604 Just for Men Hair Cream. Terri checked the percentage increase, typed in the appropriate command and O'Brien's hair started to fade again, to a very mousy ginger.
Terri's nose wrinkled at the new image they were confronted with. "Whoa. Who ever knew how much hair-dye could do for a person?"
With the simple loss of the dark hair and swarthy skin, Jonathan O'Brien had been transformed from classically beautiful to the Regular Joe Stiles had accused him of being. He was still handsome, but not in the same arresting manner as before.
"He would have much more easily forgotten if he stayed like that," admitted Stiles. "His skin colour and hair colour just don't mesh with the facial structure, though," he continued thoughtfully.
"What are you saying- because he has mousy ginger hair and pale skin, he can't be handsome?"
"You probably think I'm being prejudiced but can you enhance a 3-D image of him without pixels?" he asked.
Terri frowned but did as he asked, bringing the enhanced image of the new Jonathan O'Brien on screen.
"Profile?" he requested. Terri followed through. "Now there, under his chin, zoom in please."
Terri typed in the magnification command and squinting close at the image, she could see a fine white line of scar tissue. "Scar tissue," she announced.
Stiles sat back pleased with himself. "Surgical enhancement."
"Don't say it!" she commanded, knowing his I-told-you-so smirk very well. Her fingers flew across the keyboard again, and the image retracted to its normal size again, and the orange grid disappeared, replaced with a red grid this time. The layer of the skin disappeared until she and Stiles were faced with a white skeleton with black lines along the bones.
"See those black lines? Those are the possible areas of O'Brien's bone structure before he was sculpted. Tissue and marrow were probably taken from other parts of his body and surgically grafted to his bones. A little tuck here, and a graft here, and voila! You have the bone structure of a God.
"It's sorta like a face lift for men. That's another thing I noticed about O'Brien. His skin's too tightly stretched across the bones." Terri filled in the blank areas and removed some areas until the black lines were all filled in, and once again, she typed in the commands caused Jonathan to fill the screen.
Gone were the high rosy cheeks, hawk nose and cleft chin. Gaunt cheeks with high cheekbones, wide-spaced blue eyes, a slightly Romanesque nose and a chin that jutted forward slightly replaced them, but his mouth remained the same.
Terri typed in the aging command, but nothing changed perceptively.
Stiles' eyes widened. "That is amazing, Terri. Do you think this what he truly looks like?"
Terri nodded. "We had his photo for seven years, Stiles. But we never had the technology to do this. Now we do. I really think this is him. *This* is the *real* Jonathan O'Brien." Terri paused looking at the frosty blue eyes. She had no idea those same eyes watched her at sleep each night.
TBC.
A/N: R&R please, I want to hear from you.
Title: The American Family
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1
A/N: As usual, the opening line is: "Sorry for the delay." and I am sorry: I was at my friend's house all week and, while I had written this chapter last week it was on my computer so I couldn't upload. But anyway, thanks for last chapter's comments and keep them coming please.
*~*~*~*~*~*
The next day, a very shell-shocked Terri made her way into work. She mechanically passed her briefcase through the scanner and passed through the metal-detector before taking the items back from the guard without her customary smile of gratitude.
As she shouldered her way out of the elevator onto her floor, her mind was on anything but work as she mechanically moved down the hall to the OTS Department. As usual, at that time in the morning, the office was empty but, when Terri set her briefcase down on the desk and rebooted the computer, she turned around to find she had a visitor: Quinn.
"Jesus!" started Terri. "You scared me, sir."
"That was not my intention, Ms. Lowell," he replied placidly, stepping fully into the room.
"What can I do for you, sir?" she asked. Quinn had a way of intimidating almost everyone, including her.
"I suppose you saw the news last night, Ms. Lowell?"
Terri nodded and exhaled heavily. "Yes, I did." She paused, "Did you know before it hit the news?"
Quinn shook his head. "About ten minutes before the media ran the story, I got a call from Agent O'Connor's handler. He said he got a call from another one of his packages at three a.m. GMT yesterday morning. He's deep in another faction of the Brigade as well and the handler asked him if she was at the scheduled Brigade meeting in South Belfast. Apparently, Agent O'Connor left North Belfast on Wednesday with her faction as scheduled, which was the reason she hadn't called in. The meeting was due to start on Friday at 7:00 p.m. GMT, but neither Agent O'Connor nor her faction leader showed up, but the second-in-command represented that particular faction. When asked about his leader's whereabouts, he smiled and said taking care of business. The faction leader eventually did show up the next day, minus Agent O'Connor."
"Crap!" broke in Terri. "She'd been gone since Friday!"
Quinn nodded thoughtfully. "Her cover had been blown, Ms. Lowell. The question is, how?"
Terri shook her head negatively. "I don't know. Say, Quinn, did O'Connor's handler have the presence of mind to ask his other package about the Sumac Cell."
"That's what I initially came here for, Ms. Lowell. Apparently at the meeting, they discussed possible worst-case scenarios for when the election date was reset. Particularly, how to retaliate against pro-Catholic groups. Naturally, the IRA came up, as well as the Sumac Cell."
"What about them?"
"The CIA aren't the only people who have moles dissolved in terrorist groups, Ms. Lowell. Somehow the Brigade managed to swipe an info-link to a member: Jonathan O'Brien."
Terri's brow wrinkled. "That name sounds familiar."
"He's the only visual link we've ever captured of the Cell."
"Fat lot that did," muttered Terri bitterly. "O'Brien's a master of disguise."
"Exactly. The link they had on O'Brien disappeared for a couple of hours one day, when it started to blink again, the Brigade decided to pay him a little visit. Only when the finally caught up to the source, they found their mole floating face down in Dundee Bog."
"O'Brien disappeared again," Terri surmised. At Quinn's nod, she asked, "Do they have any idea where he might be?"
Quinn frowned. "Yes, as a matter of fact, they do."
"Where is he?" Terri asked.
"Here. Right here in America."
*~*~*~*~*~*
Quinn's announcement hadn't sat well with Terri, and it hadn't gone over well with the rest of the OTS and IRT as well. Joshua and Lex sat at their stations furiously establishing American links for an APB of some sorts on Jonathan O'Brien.
Terri on the other hand, sat at her computer immersed in the Graphics program she had helped Joshua to create and engineer. It was a computer image generator of some sort, but much more realistic and detailed than the ordinary image enhancers employed by other law agencies.
The only photo they'd captured of Jonathan O'Brien lay open in the Image Bank. For several minutes, Terri stared at the photo with the naked eye. If she'd seen this man walking down the street, she wouldn't have batted an eyelid - he looked more like a Wall Street yuppie than a overzealous pro- Catholic terrorist. His dark hair was neatly combed, with a side part. His blue eyes were clear, if a bit frosty; his skin dark and a bit swarthy, lending the air of a man who liked to be outdoors on the weekends; his mouth was beautifully molded, not too thin, nor too thick. He was a handsome man and, if she had seen him on the street and didn't know what a snake he was, Terri would have found herself attracted to him. That was what made him so dangerous - he was so beautiful - but what would make him too easy to remember, which was why he was constantly changing his appearance.
Narrowing her eyes, Terri typed in a series of commands and a neon orange molding grid showed over O'Brien's image. On examining the photo, Terri had come up with a series of discrepancies: his hair was too starkly dark, as well as his skin; any bet the frosty blue eyes were contacts. The photo was a little outdated as well - O'Brien was bound to have aged a little in the past seven years.
Terri felt someone behind someone behind her shoulder, and looked up to see Stiles looking at the screen intently.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Terri indicated he should take a seat beside her. "I'm using the Image Enhancer on Jonathan O'Brien. His photo's a little outdated, but it's all we've got to work with."
Stiles stared at the photo. "What's wrong with it?" he asked. "He looks the regular Joe."
Terri chuckled. "Regular Joe he is not, Stiles, he's too beautiful to ever be considered 'regular'."
Stiles scowled.
"Use those Marine powers of observation, Stiles," she suggested. "Look at the photo carefully. Can't you see the discrepancies in the picture?"
Stiles did as she suggested. Finally after a few seconds of silent observation, they started to seemingly appear before his eyes. "Yeah, look," he said pointing to the image, "his skin's too dark-like he smoothed it on from a bottle."
"What else?"
"His hair? It's too dark as well."
Terri nodded and smiled. "Exactly. This photo was taken in November 2000, right before the Parliament bombing. Back then the Sumac Cell was still a small fish in the sea of pro-Catholic groups. They didn't have the funds or resources that they have now. But they *did* have the uncanny ability to disappear like smoke whenever they needed to. Selection was limited and exclusive. Getting this picture taken was the only mistake Jonathan O'Brien ever made. And he more than made up for it with his recent disguises. Until he disappeared again."
"And decided to resurface here in America."
"Right." Terri's fingers flew across the keyboard again, and the grid image enlarged, filling the screen.
"What are you going to do now?" asked Stiles.
"I'm gonna call up the detector. It can detect inorganic hues on human images-that can tell us if our hunch about his skin colour was correct or not." As she spoke, O'Brien's swarthy skin turned from deep tan to neon green.
"What does that mean?"
"It means we were right," Terri replied with a smile.
"So now what?"
Terri typed in some more commands and the grid image rapidly decolourised from green to the original swarthy colour of the photo before gradually fading to a more normal shade. When the photo stopped decolourising, Jonathan O'Brien was about 6 shades paler.
"What did you do?"
"I simply decolourised his skin colour by the percentage the bottle tan had increased it by. Pretty simple."
Stiles looked thoughtful. "Can you do the same thing for his hair?"
Terri nodded. "Sure can." A few more commands to the computer, and O'Brien's unrealistic mane was highlighted as well. The grid enhanced the image, and a colour sample came up on screen. A series of names flitted across the screen before the correct box stopped in front of them: Ivory Black 604 Just for Men Hair Cream. Terri checked the percentage increase, typed in the appropriate command and O'Brien's hair started to fade again, to a very mousy ginger.
Terri's nose wrinkled at the new image they were confronted with. "Whoa. Who ever knew how much hair-dye could do for a person?"
With the simple loss of the dark hair and swarthy skin, Jonathan O'Brien had been transformed from classically beautiful to the Regular Joe Stiles had accused him of being. He was still handsome, but not in the same arresting manner as before.
"He would have much more easily forgotten if he stayed like that," admitted Stiles. "His skin colour and hair colour just don't mesh with the facial structure, though," he continued thoughtfully.
"What are you saying- because he has mousy ginger hair and pale skin, he can't be handsome?"
"You probably think I'm being prejudiced but can you enhance a 3-D image of him without pixels?" he asked.
Terri frowned but did as he asked, bringing the enhanced image of the new Jonathan O'Brien on screen.
"Profile?" he requested. Terri followed through. "Now there, under his chin, zoom in please."
Terri typed in the magnification command and squinting close at the image, she could see a fine white line of scar tissue. "Scar tissue," she announced.
Stiles sat back pleased with himself. "Surgical enhancement."
"Don't say it!" she commanded, knowing his I-told-you-so smirk very well. Her fingers flew across the keyboard again, and the image retracted to its normal size again, and the orange grid disappeared, replaced with a red grid this time. The layer of the skin disappeared until she and Stiles were faced with a white skeleton with black lines along the bones.
"See those black lines? Those are the possible areas of O'Brien's bone structure before he was sculpted. Tissue and marrow were probably taken from other parts of his body and surgically grafted to his bones. A little tuck here, and a graft here, and voila! You have the bone structure of a God.
"It's sorta like a face lift for men. That's another thing I noticed about O'Brien. His skin's too tightly stretched across the bones." Terri filled in the blank areas and removed some areas until the black lines were all filled in, and once again, she typed in the commands caused Jonathan to fill the screen.
Gone were the high rosy cheeks, hawk nose and cleft chin. Gaunt cheeks with high cheekbones, wide-spaced blue eyes, a slightly Romanesque nose and a chin that jutted forward slightly replaced them, but his mouth remained the same.
Terri typed in the aging command, but nothing changed perceptively.
Stiles' eyes widened. "That is amazing, Terri. Do you think this what he truly looks like?"
Terri nodded. "We had his photo for seven years, Stiles. But we never had the technology to do this. Now we do. I really think this is him. *This* is the *real* Jonathan O'Brien." Terri paused looking at the frosty blue eyes. She had no idea those same eyes watched her at sleep each night.
TBC.
A/N: R&R please, I want to hear from you.
