If Lucas said NO!

by Pascal in Quebec

Lucas knew full well that being sent out of the country on a military boat would only end up with him injured or dead, no matter what lies Lawrence spread around. So Lucas did the logical thing: he packed up and left in the dead of night, leaving behind in public forums incriminating evidence against his bastard father to keep him too busy to hunt him down. Arc-1 of the story.

5. Chapter 5

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

Disclaimer: I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

SeaQuest

Abstract

Lucas knew full well that being sent out of the country on a military boat would only end up with him injured or dead, no matter what lies Lawrence spread around. So Lucas did the logical thing: he packed up and left in the dead of night, leaving behind in public forums incriminating evidence against his bastard father to keep him too busy to hunt him down.

This story takes place before season 1, in the months before the SeaQuest is commissioned out to sea in the period when Lucas was ordered by his father to join the ship without any care for his opinion or general welfare.

This story is Alternate Universe, most characters are OOC and there are several mini-crossovers in the form of cameos and snapshots with the maritime-inspired series NCIS and JAG who are the most relevant to the situations facing Lucas and the casts of MacGyver (2016), NCIS and Bones will make large appearances. There is a lot of CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, Canadian Mounties and Coast Guard and other multi-varied organizations mentioned along the way. As such, given so many crossovers of equal proportions, I am again placing this in the general SeaQuest section of the fandom since it would not fit in a single sub-genre. My thanks for your tolerance of the situation.

Unlike my other story, "Justice for Lucas", this has absolutely no psionics, magicks or time engines involved even if such things were part & parcel of the SeaQuest canon in all three seasons.

PS; I like flames, they're fun to read so don't hesitate to write them.

{ SQ } - { WARNING } - { SQ }

All warnings at the beginning of Chapter 3 are repeated verbatim.

From now on, time stamps will have America's West & East coast hours as well as Western Africa.

WHAT IF LUCAS SAID 'NO'?

FIFTH CHAPTER; SpIES, TRADECRAFT & Antechambers

Cynthia and Lawrence; blame game

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Western Africa; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 00:27am (midnight)

Eastern America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 17:27pm

Western America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 14:27pm

Law offices of Holtzenstein, Damritov, Zunnherz & Molinari

Buffalo, New York, USA

The young male secretary swallowed hard as he marched rapidly from the staff break-room towards the office of the founding partner of the firm. The 'Lady' Cynthia Lydia Wise Holtzenstein, Esq., specialist of criminal law, criminology and especially mafia and organized crime. As in, she had a slew of friends and 'contacts' in the mafia and the underworld all around the states of New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine. The woman was well known inside the walls of the company as being not that stable, and honestly, not all 'there' in the head, even though she was a brilliant attorney.

Given the relationships she had in the seedy lower classes of society, being a capable pleader was pretty much a necessity of her life. Unfortunately, it also meant she had a notable tendency to bullshit people all day long and punctually threaten them with bodily harm... Just because... It was even more unfortunate that the young man had friends in those very same 'less rich' layers of Buffalo since he went to Law School and his personal contacts had confirmed to him that this woman had a nasty temper and she did in fact hire out arm-twisters to cause damage when challenged.

Pausing in front of the desk of the senior secretary that acted as gatekeeper for the founding boss, he nodded politely at the older, mature woman and told her quietly that he had an emergency that concerned the 'Lady' personally therefore needed to meet her immediately, regardless of her schedule or the fact she was actually packing her office for a month long vacation. It was well known their employer had planned to go to her horse farm in Vermont from tomorrow morning until mid-January and she would not appreciate being delayed right on the cusp of her departure.

The office manager touched a key on her telephone to beep her boss and ask for the audience. Getting a prompt answer, she gestured at the young adult to send him in quickly. Whelming his courage, the junior secretary walked in and closed the door behind him, going so far as to engage the lock to insure privacy. It would not help the health of anybody to walk in during this conversation.

The woman in question was standing near the built-in units on the office's outer wall, a new cup of piping hot coffee in hand whilst she was rapidly swiping and tapping at her tablet that lay flat on the counter near the coffee maker and condiment basket. She was standing in front of the large picture window that dominated that part of the office, giving light over the counters, built-ins and small meeting table with four chairs and low coffee table. Raising her head to gaze predatorily at her young subordinate, she exposed fully her face, showing off the ivory-white skin, ice-blue eyes and spun-gold hair that made many people think of her as a young north-European princess from the Baltic countries rather than the 47 year old mature jewish-born dame from Buffalo. A misconception she had always actively encouraged in everyone that met her, regardless of the reason for the encounter. Cynthia was vain, prideful, mercurial and very much despised being associated with anything other than the 'winning' race and culture of present-day American society and politics.

"Yes, Francis, what is it that you risk your position in the firm for it by coming to interrupt my last hours of solace in the seclusion of my demesne?" She queried, with the specific mixture of threats, rare words and snobbish sneering tone she used to impress on people just how inferior and menial they were when in her august presence. That such presence was both a blessing and a boon on their dismal lives was also strongly suggested, to the point she took offense quite easily if you didn't respond adequately with submissiveness and solicitude towards her personal needs, unless of course if you were a Don or 'Lord' of the underground. Big OLD Name, Power and Money, in that order; those were the only things that Cynthia considered or craved, because she could wield them to obtain the respect and social status she thought she deserved.

The 22 year old didn't even try to make the usual fake-charming smile and pretty-boy routine that insured he was at least tolerated in the founding partner's presence. Her habit of judging young men as much on their appearance and servileness as by their competences and utility was an established fact in the entire company, even though she never made a single move to 'claim' them as playthings. Smoothing down the front and lower hem of his waistcoat, the male justified himself quickly, knowing his lack of reason could mean a dismissal notice on his desk before the end of the day. That was not the Yuletide gift he wanted to get.

"My apologies for bothering you, madam. Taking the precious time of a founding partner is not something that I attempt just for chumming up to the higher-ups, Ma'am. I finish work tonight at 20:00pm because I want to close the research for the Lascow case before I go on vacation. So, I was in the break-room having my dinner early while looking at the TV when CNN's preview of their 6 o'clock news passed, forcing me to pay attention and then come warn you in earnest. Ma'am, they're going to run a story about your son and ex-husband on national prime-time news. With films, Ma'am, many films, mostly about the attack and injuries that Mr Lawrence inflicted on the boy, back two years ago."

Walking briskly to the wall that was the farthest away from her majestic mahogany desk and the meeting quad, the woman stood before the 3 feet tall by 6 feet wide Internex-enabled conference grade monitor and called out loud for the device to activate. The vocal processor triggered the screen to light up, going to the local Buffalo station until she asked specifically for "CNN channel, New York city time zone." and the device complied.

After watching a few minutes of the current program, the channel cycled through another bevvy of ads, then showed the preview of its 6 o'clock lead stories again. The woman saw the thirty seconds of film and verbal commentary to explain to viewers what the story was about and she almost dropped her cup of coffee to the expensive imported carpet. As it was, the mature woman backed away from the screen to sit in one of the closest sofas in the conversation space and found she needed the warmth of that coffee to steady her nerves and restore heat to her shaking limbs. Her bastard child had escaped up north to Vancouver in Canada while dropping several tons of files and films on dozens of governmental agencies and child-protection groups.

"Get out and lock the door on the way. Tell Juntha to cancel anything left on my schedule for the evening and call the limousine driver to come up to the break-room. He is to stay there until I call for him to drive me home later after I'm done here. Go. Now!"

Not waiting for anything else in case it could cause his dismissal or demotion, the young man speed-walked out of the richly appointed office, locking the door upon passing it. He gave the instructions to Juntha Merghest, the office manager, and quickly retreated back to the break-room to finish his meal and stay away from angry employers on the warpath. He really wasn't high enough on the totem pole to survive this kind of shitstorm if the rabid woman decided to vent her spleen on his poor hide. And the worst thing of the whole situation was that the TV's in the break-room would all be on CNN and within an hour, the entire firm would be aware. When he had left the room before, several other people were calling or texting their friends to warn them to watch the story. Nothing would stop this anymore.

{ SQ } - { Conjugal communications } - { SQ }

(Western Africa 00:46am)

(Eastern America 17:46pm)

"Alexa! Dial the vidphone; Lawrence Wolenczak, emergency line." Cynthia called out to empty air as she raised to walk before the large wall-mounted monitor again. It was passed midnight over on the west coast of Africa near Cape Town where the World Power Project was located but her ex-husband would want to hear of this. Of course she knew what he had been plotting in that disjointed, amateurish way of his, but for once he had involved enough external people that it should have balanced out his natural ineptitude at criminal endeavors to make it work.

The monitor was presently showing a green & blue world map with the time zones inscribed in glowing golden lines, the locations of herself and her destination party highlighted in red with the hour, coordinates, building address and name of auditor next to the dots. After barely two rings sounding out from the speakers, the image switched over as the line was accepted to live contact. Lawrence was seated in his office, at his large desk, an ugly steel contraption of the post-industrial chic style that made Cynthia want to vomit every time she saw it.

The appearance of his face, destroyed by Lucas during their fight 2 years ago then rebuilt by expensive plastic surgeries since, also made her sick. The doctors at the private hospital in the Swiss Alps had been top notch but they couldn't truly rebuild the features completely as they were. Lucas had put in his acids and poisons a 'marking agent' that discolored the skin while preventing clean manageable scarring in such a way that there were several thick long scars running all over the man's head, shoulders, left arm and torso like the crudely stitched seams of a Frankenstein-type monster from a B-series horror movie. The left eye was brown but not the exact shade as the right one since the 'donor' didn't have the same coloration, nor a healthy life. Her contacts told her it came from a drunken russian sailor who was forced to give it up in payment for his debts to the Bratva, the russian mafia. Her contacts would know, since it was by them, and through her passing orders along, that Lawrence purchased the replacement eye and the sections of clear caucasian white skin that were grafted onto the acid-burned, necrotic areas of his person.

He was a fully functional male, but looked only passable, not aesthetically pleasing as he had when they were young and fooled themselves into thinking they could have a paper wedding to boost their careers without bothering or becoming injurious to each other. What fools they had been, at that age. Foolish, and imbued of their own self-righteous importance, too. Cynthia could only breathe in relief that Lucas was no longer in her life. Unlike his father, the boy was frightfully intelligent, monstrously competent and had a cruel streak that even Lawrence could not even dream about whelming in this lifetime.

After some ten seconds of mutual observation to subliminally gauge and intimidate each other, the damaged, depraved man spoke out in a clear albeit rasping voice. "What do you want, woman?" He droned out with a sneer in his voice that wasn't visible on his face as he maintained the usual unmoving façade he adopted when dealing with his family and relatives. "It's passed midnight in WPP. I know that I regularly retire passed 02:00am because of the constant flow of communications that NCQ asks to be on their clock, despite the damnable time zones, but it's not an excuse for YOU."

"Shut your trap for a few seconds, eunuch! Then I will tell you what happened to make me scupper the beginnings of my Christmas vacations by suffering your displeasing countenance." His ex-wife replied in her expected venomous, snobby accent and words. "Your damnable procreate has gone and put himself on CNN's national broadcast! HE is their 6 o'clock lead story! With films about the hotel fight at Stanford, 2 years ago! If you value your intricately patterned hide, you will make time to set your mismatched dichotomic gaze upon this conflagration and resolve it before it destroys BOTH of us. That you march to your demise is neither surprising nor disappointing, Lawrence, as it has become the expected standard of your total capabilities. That the catastrophic results of your ineptness should be allowed to stain my reputation and drag MY name and firm into this miasma will not be permitted."

After taking a pull on her coffee cup long enough to drain it, she set cup, saucer and napkin on the low cupboard counter that ran beneath the monitor to free her hands. She was always more expressive and therefore more effective as an orator with her hands mobile. Looking into the heinous muddy-brown eyes of her divorced partner, Cynthia pointed with an accusatory index finger right between the cold calculating eyes that followed her every movement as their owner prepared to verbally attack.

"Don't, Lawrence. Don't even try, or think of trying. You know full well the extensive ramifications of my international webs of contacts and contractors, as you benefited from them for your 'rejuvenation cure' in the last two years. You know that my words and orders carry a weight of authority that you are not even capable of comprehending, let alone mobilizing on your end. Threaten ME, little man, and you will know the cold kiss of steel at your neck before our son's next anniversary rings in the rebirth of that idiotic divinity that you supposedly 'converted' to last year. Imbeciles like Trump may buy your serpent oil, but I know better, darling; I know you. Settle your situation with Lucas WITHOUT involving my name, firm or reputation, or I will remove you from the gameboard and negotiate lasting peace with the REAL power behind the Wolenczak name and estates."

Ignoring the congested look and grinding teeth that Lawrence displayed as the childish lack of control it was, Cynthia spoke out to empty air. "Alexa! Disconnect call." Turning her back on the blanked out monitor that was immediately back to sleep mode, the 47 year old woman marched to her desk to call in a meal from the private kitchen they had in-house to supply buffet-style service during long conferences and all-nighters on big cases. The cooks were busy as tonight was supposed to be the last work day before Christmas with only two days for junior researchers and assistants in between Yule and New Year's Day just to come in to deal with calls and mail. Many people in the company were doing long hours tonight to clear out their in-box or finish grave dossiers so they could go to their winter pause with their minds at peace. The cooks would therefore have a large selection already done and warm, ready to garnish the break-room buffet counters or send to the executive offices like hers.

Her meal ordered, Cynthia palmed her face for a few seconds to steady herself then quickly walked back to the monitor to pick up her empty cup so she could refill and set herself at her desk, taking great pains to look unruffled and unimpressed by whatever CNN would spew out about her son and his father. Her total disconnection from Lawrence several years ago was public knowledge, as was the fact she had dumped Lucas on him and reneged the little sewer-dwelling rodent six years ago. While her experience told her she was un-attackable on the legal side, she knew all too well the way that character assassination and the politics of personal destruction worked in Washington DC and on the international level. She was lucky that Lawrence was a rank amateur at such mind games, but bitched mentally at the reality of just how truly capable her adolescent son was in that arena. That, his personal affinity for social medias, communications by remote devices, and the fact that his companies shared a litigation department that was well staffed, bigger than her firm (curses!) and better financed because he had so many different revenue streams to bring in money to constantly replenish his war chest.

No, Cynthia wasn't dumb enough to get caught in a conflagration between Lucas and his father.

Tapping a finger to the pull-out touchscreen set in the thickness of her desk in front of her, she caused a 24 inch wide flat-screen to raise from the far rim of the furniture, giving her a beautiful working monitor with touchscreen and voice command abilities. It allowed her to work, call someone or watch TV as she did her papers or ate a meal. An instinct deep in her gut told her she wouldn't be leaving her plush, heated, massaging chair all evening unless it was to use her private en-suite bathroom. She needed to see first hand what CNN would report then write the first rebuttals and appropriately 'teary' commentaries about how the men in her family have always been angry, violent and out of control, thus why she abandoned them to each other.

Lawrence and his base-born, low-browed minions could sweep the rest of the mess under his own rug after she was done clearing out the biggest, worse, legal and ethical pieces of rubble from the scene of the bungling idiot's crime.

{ SQ } - { Paternal power denied } - { SQ }

(Western Africa 01:00am)

(Eastern America 18:00pm)

Lawrence Albert Wise Wolenczak sat at his steel and glass desk in his official work room in the underwater sector of the World Power Project with the rest of today's load of blueprints to correct and contractor forms to amend. No matter how many hirelings he took on, it seemed that they were all made in the same school of 'methodic ineptness' that meant he had to hold their hand all day long through each and every task they had or calamities would befall his project. As it was, several contractors had AGAIN tried to bill WPP for services not done and parts that had not been delivered to the work site.

It wasn't that Lawrence was adverse to defrauding the project's purse; it was that said waylaid monies were routed to coffers not his own. As the Project Head and work site General Manager, the only frauds, bribes, kickbacks and thefts of time and parts that he tolerated were his own or those that he allowed after being rightfully compensated for such by the people committing the acts. If his reputation was going to get dinged by idiotic bureaucrats in NCQ or DC because of a few missing trinkets or accounting 'irregularities' then he had better have been 'satisfied' with the situation beforehand.

As he sat in his thickly padded swivel chair, the 'Master' of WPP watched the opening credits of the CNN 6 o'clock prime time news program with a feeling of detachment, disinterest even. Yes, this would probably do some damage to his reputation and cost him further gifts and bribes to stay in place but he could easily afford it. It wasn't as if he was paying with his own money after all. He hadn't paid out of his own pockets anything for over 18 years now, he wasn't going to go stupid and start emptying his personal reserves in the middle of a highly publicized familial war.

Lawrence may be vile, debased, depraved, and brutally violent as his usual everyday disposition towards every person and object he encountered, but he wasn't stupid. Nor was he inept, contrary to what his ex-wife systematically accused him of. Even Lucas who hated his guts with multiple virulent passions thought that his father's intellect and expertise at causing destruction were underestimated. Given their relationship all of his life, you just knew that for the teenager to actually say anything 'complimentary' about his male parent, he had to mean it.

The CNN program began with the presenter standing in front of the large view-screen with two massive images side by side; Lucas in the Stanford Hospital during his a public presentation and the UEO flagship as it sat in the New Cape Quest military drydock. After about five minutes of spiel and fore-story, an abridged version of the fight from 2 years ago was played, followed by short excerpts of video testimony from several doctors and police officers concerning the injuries that Lucas had received and how many surgeries, drugs and physiotherapy he had to undergo. This served as the basis for the lengthy detailed story that would follow.

After a commercial pause, the presenter exposed how Lawrence had 'supposedly' made a deal with the UEO Fleet Assets Head then gotten that backed legally and politically by the White House and the Dept of Defense by obtaining a written 'Presidential Decree' that was signed sealed and numbered to validate its 'binding' nature. The presenter exhibited photographs of both the presidential papers and then the written 'orders to educate my son in a Godly Christian Way' that Lawrence had sent to the ship's personnel.

"Well, that's gonna stink up the whole country, right then and there." Lawrence mumbled. "Especially since I did actually bypass Noyce, the secretaries of Defense, Navy, Justice, Education and Health to get this done the way I wanted." Shrugging it off, the middle-aged man sniffed disdainfully. "Bof. Trump is good as a decoy; he'll monopolize their time and efforts so much they won't have any energy left for me. That will give me time to escape to a bolt hole, discretely and promptly, until events with his child calmed down."

After a second pause, the presenter exposed the life of Lucas since birth, starting with how whorish a self-pimping slut Cynthia had been all her life, never once stopping for either her marriage nor her pregnancy. The difficult birth, his being dumped at the common penthouse of the four elderly, ailing grand-parents and the private tutors' systematic, continuous 'cramming' of the baby boy's head with facts, know-how, techniques and sciences was detailed at length until age 4.

After a third advertising break, the presenter took up the story with the events of the idiotic, incompetent old brit tutor that Lawrence had had to rescue from his own lack of common sense. They made great case of the fact Lawrence had saved the man from 'active prosecution' by hijacking him and removing him from the country but he never so much as gave the time of day to his injured, traumatized baby son. It was one of Cynthia's clients, her male plaything of the day, that had accepted to do the surgeries and supervise the convalescence of the child 'pro bono' because otherwise no one was going to pay for it, despite the two large trust funds left by the grand-parents for exactly such uses.

Lawrence quietly processed a few papers during the break. Everything said was ugly but factual, and the blame was shared equally by both parents, so he didn't care that much. It would just help him twist Cynthia's arm into pulling her weight and mount the defense effort on her own coin and workforce. Besides, the important, and truly dangerous, parts of the story would come later.

After the fourth commercials, the presenter did a detailed overview of Lucas' studies during ages 5 to 10 with a graphic timeline now appearing on the screen besides him to serve as visual reminder of just how densely packed the small innocent boy's schedule was. The column had the dates on the far left, the age in the second column and the main event in the right-side column, complete with colored annotations to further explain the marking event. When exposed in imaged format like this, the type of lifestyle, accidents, victimizations and periods of convalescences seemed a lot more grave than when simply spoken out in bare words.

Lawrence himself could see that his only son had suffered quite a lot in his young life, and if HE could understand THIS, so could the tens of millions of viewers who would watch the story in the coming days. The fact the presenter had started this segment with a detailed explanation of WHY he had been revoked as parent and barred from ever having custody of the child by a tribunal in Buffalo was going to stay in the minds of the listeners quite clearly, too. This particular piece of trouble would come back to haunt him, no matter what Cynthia said about passing the blame onto the local DCFS or some other faceless bureaucratic drone hidden in an unidentified office, somewhere...

During that same pass, the presenter exposed the period of life Lucas lead with his cruel, violent tutors who kept him prisoner inside Cynthia's house and beat him systematically at each lesson on the orders of his mother who had claimed agreement with her ex-husband about how to handle the child to insure silent docility. The slow, methodical physical torments and psychological warfare sustained against the small boy were truly sickening to listen to. For the majority of humanity, that is. Lawrence didn't give a whizz what the miserable misbegotten sewer-rat had endured, only that he yet lived to burden him again and again with his presence.

During this segment it was revealed how Lucas used managed to intimidate his felonious mother into using the money from his trust funds to purchase for him the Ramshackle Manor in northern New York city at age 8 and then the venerable Old Glory in Buffalo city, the Wise Manor, at age 9. It was further revealed that it was at age 9 that Lucas founded and established the structures and first workshop for his most influential company; the renowned Wolenbahn Electronics International.

Lawrence took a sheet of paper to take notes on the multiple accomplishments and items of power or influence that the teenager had garnered in his short 16 years of life. Some had him blink interrogatively as the two large estates were clear money pits that should have burdened the boy's company so badly that it ended broke the very first year. Instead, there seemed to be something unsaid or still unknown by the news organization that they hadn't put in the report.

After the fifth commercials, the events of what happened on the Christmas week when Lucas turned ten and Cynthia sold custody over to Lawrence were exposed, along with the covert displacement towards Stanford to hide the injuries he had suffered at the hands of the depraved father and his two mercenaries. Several films from multiple security cameras around Wise Manor were shown, completely unedited, showing every last lurid, turpid detail from the moment Lawrence arrived in his luxurious Mercedes-Benz that he rarely drove since it was stored at his Buffalo house when he was away at WPP and elsewhere for lobbying efforts.

The raw films even showed how little 'innocent' Lucas had to attack defensively his father's minions with poison grenades to get them out of the way then rush at the violent rabid adult with a cast iron fire poker and start the fight of his young life. The recordings then showed the panting combatants sitting well apart, arguing angrily until the 10 year old child took the poker again to whack to death the two mercenaries before sitting again do engage in 'aggressive negotiations' with the rabid, fearful adult. The 40 year old male's grave injuries forced him to agree to the terms stated and sign some contracts very quickly so he could reach medical help lest he die at the hands of his son. The panicked father was shown stumbling out of the house and driving away in a panic, badly impaired, leaving the bodies of his hired men on his estranged child's floor without a care in the world. Then, the presenter took great pains to say and confirm with copies of Buffalo city's 911 logs that neither ambulance, police or DCFS had been called to the scene and the dead men had been made to disappear, never to be heard from again and nobody knew how or by the hands of whom.

Lawrence sat back into his chair, using both shaking hands to pick up his steaming mug of lemongrass tea to sip some calming brew as he used the sixth advertising break to contemplate the full ramifications of the events he had just seen on the monitor. Besides the resounding wallop to his public persona and reputation, the fact he had come to Lucas' home with mercs and weapons to inflict shame and pain unto the child would never pass muster, especially since it had been explained beforehand that he had permanently lost custodial authority over the boy six year prior at age 4. He was inside that house, trying to impose his views, morality, religiosity and parental power quite illegitimately and definitely ILLEGALLY, thus Lucas could plead 'self defense' and no jury or judge in the USA would think it a dishonest position.

After the return from the ads, the presenter exposed the boy's travels to Stanford, the time he spent in the University's private hospital being healed and tutored simultaneously, thus explaining his licenses as paramedic, nurse and orderly since he had maximized his hospital stay to benefit from the teaching staff while using his own body to learn these very useful skills and careers to help himself speed up his recovery. After that, the visual graphic of the boy's timeline began showing the lengthy list of yearly events and advanced graduate diplomas he acquired, mostly through studying from his apartment supplied by the campus just as he had been home-schooled in the past.

The announcer now explained the Christmas party when the boy was ambushed, attacked and almost raped by an adult-age student. He used the same films as were shown in the trials of the juvenile thugs and their pedophile accomplice, backed by police reports, hospital files and testimonials of other innocent bystander students. Then the series of surveillance tapes from the Stanford Police Station showed clearly the young officer in conversation with Lawrence in a closed interrogation room, discussing religion, conversion, and the 'christian paternal authority' the criminal parent wanted to inflict unto his boy to insure he grew up in 'disciplined godly boyhood' unlike the liberal crapulence he was wallowing in at Stanford at the moment. The young agent had taken a small red book from his jacket and caressed it in a manner that wasn't quite 'all there' as he spoke with Lawrence about the "Beauty of submitting boys to Men of Moral Standing under Jesus his God Christ and how government shouldn't interfere with Men of Faith and their Holy Works." The debased cop then accepted a check for 20,000$ from Lawrence in exchange for putting a clinical-grade drug in Lucas' coffee to knock out his sense of self-protection so Lawrence could hijack him to 'discipline him' sufficiently to make him accept Jesus as his Savior and 'convert' him once and for all.

After that, the channel played the films that showed clearly the adult grab and forcibly remove the drugged, spaced-out 14 year old, go to his car and drive back to the hotel. Then the presenter warned the audience of the utter violence and inhumanity of the coming scenes; that small children and people with weak hearts should not watch. After a few seconds of delay, the announcer explained that several of the scenes to come had been filmed secretly by a system of recording devices that Lucas always wore in case he was attacked or defrauded by a client so he had proofs to show in court. The man explained, with schematics on the monitor behind him, the array of meta-glasses, button camera, smartphone, hidden recorder and laptop comm-suite that the teenager had elaborated to protect his person and interests versus the criminal behavior of the people he encountered.

After these 2 minutes of explanations, the films from the hotel were played, from when Lawrence dragged the boy into the elevator in the underground parking level, to the suite, the adult's rabid ranting and initial 'jumping' attack on the boy, the phases of the fight, the child again using homemade acid grenades to defend his very life. Then Lawrence's second rant, fearful retreat, Lucas crawling out on the corridor floor to beg for help and Lawrence's cowardly last hits as he ran out to seek yet again medical attention for his injuries. The segment closed on the hospital ICU ward photos and traumatology schematics showing the damages suffered by the teen and how many surgeries he underwent to survive and save his legs.

Lawrence passed the seventh commercial break sitting back into his chair, leaning heavily into the backrest, his entire body shaking with shivers of dread. He hadn't realized just how insane he had sounded during that rant, nor how violently he had jumped unto the small, lightweight teen. As he replayed the video in his mind, he simply couldn't think of anything that Cynthia and her cohorts of lawyers could do to save him from a jail cell, especially with the fact he had already been barred from contacting or controlling the child.

Added to this the fraudulent stories he told president Trump, the illegal decrees and the hot radioactive mess the Oval Office had to clean up, and nobody would try to help him. Snorting in contempt, he rectified his thoughts as he realized that there was at least one unrepentantly defective moron who would try something. Donald Trump would probably grant 'Presidential Clemency' and save him from a prison term if only because it would motivate his grassroots religious followers into a frenzy.

The announcer came back on to conclude the story. He explained that Lucas had fled to Canada in the night of Tuesday December 15th after setting up a series of postal and email deliveries of all the films, formularies, police files and medical dossiers to have a plethora of agencies initiate investigations. It was these files and films that made the Secret Service, FBI and NCIS commit an emergency Search & Seizure at the White House, targeting the Oval Office, The Presidential Archive, The Presidential Apartment and the offices of Trump's personal lawyers. It took barely an hour of speaking with the man himself for him to admit quite openly to what he had participated in while handing over the original papers without any fuss. He was stupendously proud of making this deal with Lawrence. It was then that the recordings of the investigators' body cams were played and sealed the case for writing Articles of Impeachment against the blond moppet of the ultra-right wing.

Before completely mesmerized global audiences, the commander-in-chief explained in quite ordinary words WHY he thought he had the right to do this and WHY he believed that "Loyal Faithful Christian Men shouldn't see their manners of educating and disciplining boys into the Godly Light of Redemption be subjected to ANY scrutiny at all, not even DCFS or the police." Trump even went further by stating "Kids should NEVER have any right to express opinions different than their preachers, tutors or parents under ANY circumstances and childish complaints about being abused, especially by priests or 'devout' worshipers, should always be disbelieved and NEVER be investigated."

It further appeared that Trump didn't think the SCOTUS judgments about such subjects had any value, at least not towards his 'Authority of Presidential Decree', and therefore the 1979 ruling that forbids the use of any US military base or ship as a 'juvenile prison or reformatory' doesn't apply to this "Smart, well timed deal to support the religious rights of someone important that just converted unto Jesus our Lord, the God of the Bible, and help his dispirited son follow the same Righteous Path."

The news program announcer appeared again, informing the audience that given the extremely grave nature of the situation and the accusations that could emerge from the ongoing investigation, the regular programming was set aside to allow for a prolonged news brief on the Child Genius who, despite being a national treasure, was forced to flee to Canada, his criminal parents, the President's peddling of influence and using the Oval Office to preach, predicate and enforce theocratic creed, dogma, and illegal church-rule over citizens of his choice.

As the clock showed 18:58pm in the New York time zone and yet another batch of ads ran their course, the erstwhile 'Master' of WPP sat in his chair, turned around to look through the large picture window out at the oceanic depths that surrounded him. Even though he was completely dry, he just couldn't shake the feeling he was drowning and nobody would extend him a pole to bring him out of the water.

{ SQ } - { Cocktail hour at long last } - { SQ }

(Western Africa 02:00am)

(Eastern America 19:00pm)

Cynthia sat before he screen, mesmerized by what she had witnessed broadcast on a public channel that any cable subscriber, Internex client or even just an old AM/FM radio set could listen to without any censorship or government control over the delicate, socially and politically explosive information.

Truly the congenital idiocy endemic to American society knew no bounds.

The mature woman fidgeted quite ill-mannerly with her partially eaten dinner as it lay cold in her porcelain plate. The scraping noise of the fork against the dish's flat bottom was grating on her nerves but helped her to focus on the immediate problem.

Survival.

As it stood, her firm was dead. She could see her founding partners call her in the deep evening to ask for an emergency meeting at sunrise tomorrow to dissolve the company and go their separate ways, as far away from her radioactive atomic-explosion-in-progress of a family situation as they could manage before the 7:00am news briefs on Monday morning. She wouldn't have a corporate name to wield nor any money to keep herself lodged and fed during a protracted series of investigations, police interventions and eventual court hearings, DCFS hearings and so forth

And that was all before she had to consider her multiple properties, all of them bought on mortgages so as to maintain the biggest amount of cash-on-hand in case Lawrence or one of her seedier clients had gone truly insane. She had foreseen the possibility she may have to run and go underground for a while, at least until she could find a new situation safe enough to stay in it as she wielded her many contacts and contractors to resolve and clean up the mess. As it was, she could predict that she would need to willingly default on her outstanding loans to keep her money and find a way to cash it out of the bank accounts before they were frozen for investigative purposes.

Given that she had paid hirelings to systematically demean, degrade, harm and injure her son, she could see a prosecutor asking a judge to either freeze or even seize into an escrow account all of her liquidities to avoid that she pay someone to intimidate Lucas into silence or death. Since it would also dangerously limit her potential to whelm a legal defense, it would almost guarantee that prosecutor's victory and a serious public opinion push towards whatever elected position the man may want to present himself for in the years after she had been destroyed.

Cynthia could see much farther into the future than Lawrence ever believed; she could see that as of now, there was no longer any positive, constructive future for her in America, Canada, or even most of Europe. Not as Cynthia Lydia Wise Holtzenstein, not ever again. She would need to change her identity which included modifying her appearance permanently through severely invasive plastic surgery. She had the contacts, of course. She had helped Lawrence procure the parts and skilled medics to reconstruct what Lucas had destroyed or damaged on his body. She most certainly could do the same for herself, even on such a short notice.

Opening a secret compartment under the left armrest of her chair, she took out a small brown felt pouch from which she pulled a dozen pristine, clear diamonds, cut and polished to an iridescent shine. At an average 2 carats and valued at 75,000$ each, the unmarked stones she had procured through her mafia clients a few years ago were solid universal currency anywhere on Earth. Even if she took a small loss on the resale, she would still have around 750,000$ to float on, giving her a few decades of living in very limited housing but above poverty, and certainly not misery. Besides, as soon as she was housed and safe, she would call in favors and liquidate a few hidden assets that she bought under anonymous shell companies in foreign countries and then find a truly permanent remote locality to restart her life as a woman of wealth and leisure.

If it cost her a new face and name, so be it. She wasn't especially attached to the ones she had.

As the second hour of the CNN 'emergency special broadcast' program came on, she lowered the sound and pulled out the keyboard to start accessing her many bank accounts, savings, investments and other 'legal' money placements so she could use the completely dehumanized remote banking apps to pull out and move her cash to countries where Trump's vagaries and US law enforcement didn't mean much when compared to cold hard currency. After that, she would go home to her penthouse condo and take the necessities to move out to the farm in Vermont from where she would plan her next move.

She had acquired and warehoused a small vintage propeller airplane about four years ago. It was stashed on the farm, in an old barn at the edge of the property and the private gravel roadway leading from the building to the main homestead had been widened and the greenery trimmed to allow usage as a private year-round runway. The moment she was in the penthouse, she would call the farmhand that served as the occasional pilot so he could pack his bags and prepare the plane for immediate departure the very moment she came unto the property. Thanks to her illicit contacts, the airplane was registered to a shell corporation in Brazil and the vehicle had two transponders; the real one and the alternate pirate signal to switch identity to look like a small chartered courier plane doing an expensive priority UPS air-mail delivery. She could thusly leave US air space unchallenged and unseen.

Lawrence and the runt could clean up the mess by themselves. She was done for it.

"Rio de Janeiro, her I come!" she whispered happily as she moved money from her official personal accounts over to a general anonymous 'buffer' account she created for that purpose. "I may be forced into exile the rest of my life, but at least I won't see anymore snow unless I visit Switzerland for an Alps' chalet vacation at some point. Humph! Who would have guessed that their would be a silver lining to this debacle?" The felonious mother snickered as she typed her fortune into a phantom bank in the depths of the Dark Web.

Billy Piggy-Boy Noyce

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Western Africa; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 00:31am (midnight)

East America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 17:31pm

West America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 14:31pm

UEO district; apartment of Adm. Noyce (location classified)

New Cape Quest, Florida, USA

Somewhere in the low-lying tourist sector of the city, less than five minutes of walking distance from the beige sand beaches, was located a small 6 storey apartment complex dedicated to a very classy and illusive clientele. The edifice was unmarked except for a small name plate in the foyer that read something only the manager of many, many public domain assets could possibly think was a decent name for a building. "Longitude; Latitude; Altitude; orientation; property ##" just didn't mean anything to anybody except those few people charged with the physical security of the UEO's topmost public servants and assets. If you dug deep enough in the UEO's procedure manuals, you could find that these were the coordinates programmed in a battery of plasma warhead tipped hypersonic missiles placed about 250 kilometers away on an elevated concrete pier surrounded by salt water, sharp rocky shoals and automated pulse rifle CIWS turrets.

The secrets inside that building would STAY secret and the inhabitants would not be taken hostage for any reason at any cost. If the entire city block had to be leveled down into a depression that reached below the sewer lines to insure this, going so far as to cremating the other high-value, secure edifices in the blast zone around the targeted block, then so be it. Each and every resident of these small luxurious apartment towers knew of the safety measures and 'scorched earth' protocols in place when they signed the leases that came with the function, position or rank offered by the UEO Council cabinet.

William Allard Boyd Noyce, 63 years old, caucasian white, rotund, bald, 6 feet tall and all of it filled with malice and gleeful malevolence, had helped to create and enshrine into UEO procedural books the protocols and he was quite happy at how they turned out. Their application in 'material reality' as some would say, was not badly done either. For once, the gear-heads had been able to take the paper blueprints and built up something with a passable resemblance of what he expected to have.

Since the good admiral (yeah, we'll get back to you on that...) had planned all this setup specifically because he could see where the Trump people were going with their amateurish manipulations of the UEO Cabinet and the nomination process around the top jobs in the departments and services of the Alliance, well, he wanted his protection and overwatch to be a certain way. After spending four decades in the US Navy Intelligence division from the moment he got out of the Navy Academy at age 21 till barely 4 years ago, Billy had played the 'spy game' far too long and accumulated far too many enemies to leave the safety of his family in the hands of low-ranked beginners chosen for how close to the boss's children they were. He had far too many secrets of national security from way too many countries swishing around his mind to allow anybody but himself access to those. Even the current occupant of the White House was aware of only about 1% of what Noyce knew or could find out about, and it would stay that way.

"No reason to give the nincompoop any more ways to damage the country than he already had over the last 4 years." His dear beloved wife (that depends on the day she had, really...) Janet would tell him periodically. Then again, she'd been saying that about everybody elected or nominated to public office so unfortunate to cross her path since the early eighties when he met her and married her. Billy hadn't regretted that lightning-strike romance one bit, even if he hadn't really slept all that deeply or had to test his food periodically for poisons since getting into to bed with her.

Damned CIA bitch... Backstabbers the lot of them...

Not that he complained, of course, but whence took her the 'womanly moods' once in a while, it was better for a certain sailor to find a different port to lay in harbor whilst the storm at the home port spent itself out on something else. At least when those mood swings struck her, his pigs were well fed for the week after. Poor widdle baby wiggly pigglies... All pink and fat and weighed down by all that solid, hearty meat... Hhhhmmm... Bacon...

Getting up from the desk inside his completely enclosed, secured office room, the veteran admiral tapped a code on the wall-inset keypad to release the door so he could leave for dinner and watch the evening news to see what new calamity the DC crowd had birthed on the last week-end before the Christmas celebrations. Eating at his desk was something he used to do back at the Pentagon when he was younger and climbing the ladder was important. Now that he had reached the topmost echelon of said ladder and nothing but empty air awaited the step above, he wasn't moving anymore unless he decided to make the plunge into elected politics and tried out as US representative on either the UEO council or the North American Confederation Council. Since neither interested him that much, he favored holding on to his new posting with all his might then go into retirement for good when it was done.

If his wife didn't poison him before then. He really did know far too much.

Janet was semi-retired for a couple of years already; she no longer did any field work (officially), not that she would tell him for real, conniving bitch that she was, but at least she didn't get odd phone calls at Gawd-awful in the morning to hitch a flight to Belgrade or Istanbul or London or another remote place of power of such level any longer. From the setup inside her own enclosed secured office right next to his, Billy could deduce that she had scaled-down to deciphering coded messages from very old moles, deeply embedded in sleeper mode inside the enemy's bosom. She sometimes wrote threat assessments for the CIA or DXS directors about the European Confederation's member states and she had been keynote speaker last year at a conference about the formation of the Montagnard Confederation with all of south-Asia's countries allying around the reunited Korea's.

And yes, she still sent out her poisoned pen letters or indigestible baked goods from time to time.

William valued his sanity, and his fingers, so he didn't pry in her business. In return, she didn't get involved in Navy affairs and all went well in their married life. Besides, the guys who listened to the bugs and wiretaps around the apartment would have warned him if anything truly momentously weird was happening in the CIA's patch and his dear wife had her mitts in it. The Company's own overwatch team would probably give the old gal a similar head's up if things got fugly on his side of the fence, too.

{ SQ } - { House call } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 00:40am (midnight)

East America; 17:40pm

West America; 14:40pm

Finally making it to his open-plan kitchen, dining & living room, the venerable old admiral was able to see that a veritable storm of cooking, grilling, baking and packaging had taken place today. That was a sure sign that the family was coming over for the holidays this year instead of them going over at the Pig Farm in Alabama as had been their custom for the last twenty years. The youngest grand-kids were old enough to be left alone without fearing a mess or egregious breach of operational security anymore so they could even be let out to roam the tourist district whilst the old foggies would gab about the old days. It certainly wasn't the familial atmosphere that him and Janet wanted to maintain but try having anything familial inside a damned condo and see what you got.

Blah! - The demands of the job, indeed!

Writing off that line of thoughts as a bad job done, Billy got himself situated at the breakfast bar so he could look into the actual kitchen to behold what level of mess his beautiful, delectful wife had contrived on this fine December eve. And - hot damn! - the woman been cook'n up a storm!

"Janet, dearie; you do know that you don't have to cook for the high school football team's victory party anymore since we officially moved out of town four years ago, don't ya?" Asked the sailor as he beheld the complete mess that had every counter and appliance buried under foodstuffs, sundries, condiments and cooking utensils in various states of uncleanliness. Yeeeppp... His dear wife was in 'The Womanly Moods' again and it was probably his poor hide that would pay for it. Again.

"Oh, shut yer yapp, you great big coward!" answered an irate voice coming from the depths of the two-door refrigerator where Janet was trying to figure out how to stack everything she made to avoid losing any until she could 'gift' them unto 'undeserving' souls. Her caucasian-white skin was sprinkled with flour, sugar and cake icing in comical splotches whilst her silvery hair was falling loose from its bun atop her head, glittering with sugar and icing too.

Clenching fists that had broken men and countries alike, the determined woman griped at her piss-poor storage space. Damn condo! Why did she leave her nice large house of three decades in DC to come here? Blast it all! There was no ways in bloody blue tarnation that her famous 'crushed glass powder glitter-icing rhum-sponge cake' was going to the bin, no sirree! At least, the 'mint liquor and digitalis chocolate bonbons' could fit in the egg holders in the door itself thus freeing some space in the main shelves...

Pulling out of the fridge, Janet wagged a warning finger at her husband of forty years and griped amusedly "All you do in this here kitchen is sit there like a fat old harbor buoy beached at low tide, wait'n for a tug to haul your ample posterior back out'ta sea! When you do mor'an fill your gullet with my precious productions, then I'll reckon you a word about how I organize things in here!"

William, well aware of the value of a timely strategic retreat during border skirmishes of the domestic life sort was about to give up the fight with good graces when the doorbell rang. Immediately he had a derringer 4-shot pistol in the left hand and a large 12 inch long combat knife in the right that sported an odd shine to its wet blade, his movements flowing fluidly with getting up from the stool and relocating behind the massive dining table. The thing looked like mahogany but it was actually inch-thick tempered steel veneered in faux-wood to serve as defensible shelter in case of home invasion.

Janet pulled a uzi machine-pistol with silencer and laser pointer from the hidden slot between the side of the dishwasher and the counter's storage drawers. She added a butcher's knife held in her mouth by the teeth and a fragmentation grenade in the left hand, ready to throw since she pulled the pin the moment she wrapped her fingers around the false can of sweet peas.

All the cabinetry in the kitchen was built like the dining table and chairs, with the appliances armored and reinforced to survive multiple concussive or shrapnel blasts. The fridge could even be emptied and used as a panic shelter for 15 minutes to survive grenades and gunfire until building security came up, if nothing else was accessible.

Bill and Janet had not only survived the cold war, the collapse of the UN and the creation of the new confederations and the UEO, they had THRIVED in the chaotic primordial soup of blood, guts and floating corpses that defined the Post-UN Oceanic Colonization Era. There wasn't a Betrayal they hadn't lived or inflicted, there wasn't a Death they hadn't witnessed or committed in turn, and they both had tortured and Broken enough people, organizations and small countries in their careers to have a clear honest view of what awaited them at the End of Time.

People like them never slept at peace; not in this world, nor in the next.

As the bell rang a second time, Bill asked his wife in low growling tones "Are the kids early? Why didn't they call to have me confirm with the security desk downstairs? And how in bloody Hell's Bells did they make it up to this level without gun fire sounding out?"

Janet was busy using her grenade-holding hand to lower the temperature on the oven and range so she grumbled something truly unhelpful as her husband moved to pull out a small touchscreen from the thickness of the tabletop near him. It immediately activated to show him the main entry and their undesired guest.

"Fuck me hard with a phone pole, why don't you!" cursed the admiral as he saw the face. "It's a bloody ass-kisser from DC!"

Rolling her eyes at her man's lack of precision, Janet mumbled around the knife blade in her mouth "Which one, you twit? You know how many butt-huggers they be up north?"

Snorting a contemptuous response, the sailor replied "It's the darned feds, dearie! The DHS came a-callin' on our festivities, it seems like."

As another ring sounded through the condominium, the matronly dame spat out her knife, dropping it back into its drawer before setting the uzi and grenade in their holding caches too. "Well, you larded lout! Don't just wait there for me to ring 'em in! I'm busy cookin' & packin'! Make a man o' yourself for a change, lazybones, and get the empty suit in here. Wonder whad'de want on a 18th o' December like that, I do!"

Grumbling about bossy CIA ex-operatives and slave-driving wives, the overweight male pushed the door opening button on the finger-print sensitive screen while juggling with his hardware to conceal it back in its proper places before the suit-clad twit walked in on him 'au naturel' so to speak. He barely had the time to shove the pistol and knife back in their hidden sleeves of is pale beige UEO day uniform that the unnamed DHS delegate marched in to sit himself at the dining table without being given leave to do so as good manners dictate.

Now, if it were anybody else Janet would have cussed a storm and told the ill-mannered little twit what she thought of his uneducated entry to her house while Bill would have verbally reamed him several new orifices and put a nasty letter in his file for reading when promotion time came around. As it was, they knew the man quite well as they worked with him for several years already. They tolerated his mannerisms because they were 'amusing' or like Janet said "A proof he wan'nt cast from a mold". Their impromptu visitor was no less than the Assistant Director of the US Department of Homeland Security in charge of "Canadian borderline and joined bi-national police actions", Captain Iain O'Callahan, that transferred from NCIS to DHS about seven years ago.

The six foot, three inches, heavy white male had blond hair in a buzzcut, ice blue eyes that seemed unfeeling at first glance and a mouth downturned in a constant frown. He had a temperament that was well matched to the Noyce's and his methodology for handling situations wasn't very far from theirs, if usually less subtle and far more publicly carried out. He had been formed in a police academy then decided to join the Navy for a short career amongst the Military Police before getting grabbed by the NCIS office in Seattle where he worked for several years. The harsh man had a lot of experience with the canucks, still had some family over there and a hunting lodge in northern Manitoba that he went to for 2 weeks vacation every summer to catch some nice caribou red meat fresh out of the bush.

{ SQ } - { Trump's religious idiocy at work } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 00:45am (midnight)

East America; 17:45pm

West America; 14:45pm

Captain O'Callahan sat at the dining table as if he owned the place, aware but unimpressed by the fact the two paranoid warmongers had probably been stashing sharp steel and guns back into hidey-holes just before he set foot in the open-plan area. It wouldn't surprise him if there were a multi-trigger bomb under the chair, just in case of uninvited guests like him making themselves too much at ease for the tastes of the proprietors. He was, however, not daft enough to ask confirmation; they'd explode his stinking arse out the patio doors in lieu of answer just because that's how they were.

Not much on civility or manners, them Noyce's.

On the other hand, they were loyal to the United States of America, its creed and founding principles like few people alive today had ever been. And they were efficient at keeping traitors, sell-outs and foreign agents in their proper place; outside the borders or in shallow unmarked graves. That there usually was a lengthy interrogation of the inhumane kind before the disposal of fleshly remains was not his concern, so long as they were above 99% certain of the person having turned traitor or being a foreign spy. That was the sine qua non condition under which all of them studiously disregarded the less savory activities of each other's agencies and minions. Should a genuine american citizen be subjected to such methods whilst being 'truly innocent', there would be a cascade-effect of heads rolling and several changes of policy and office-holders in the deficient structure.

One does not torture real honest Americans for just simple peccadilloes like diverging political opinions, religious inclinations or personal and familial dislikes. If ever O'Callahan heard of an agency going fully rogue like the CIA's Afghanistan Cell had done with the NCIS-OSP over the last two years, then he'd have all of DHS after their heads. As it was, only his personal connections with the agency directors Raymond Uthenberg at CIA, Horatio Derrel at NSA, Mathilda Webber at DXS, Armand Klepp at FBI, and Leon Vance at NCIS had stayed his hand.

This time.

There wouldn't be a 'next time' for the Company, nor any other agency of the USA.

Besides, Henrietta Lange had asked him personally the favor of being allowed to handle things discretely, under the public's radar, or else ALL the country's defensive and counter-terrorism institutions would lose any credibility they still had. After 4 years of Trump and his state-destroying cultists, assuming they had ANY such credibility left was an act of optimism such as only the operations manager of NCIS-OSP could ever demonstrate. Then again, after what she had lived through in her 70+ years of life, she would have a different perspective than most.

Bleh! The situation facing them all would change the face, workings and very nature of America in such a way that menial territorial feuds like had happened before between agencies would no longer be tolerated. The ceaseless multiplications of these redundant agencies would be curbed and the agents would be reassigned to one of the two or three services that would remain from the reorganization.

And the primary purpose of the clean-up would be to keep a mess like today from ever again occurring.

"What happened?" Janet asked as she brought over a pot of coffee on a silver tray with all the cups, spoons and condiments. "I've been cooking all day and Billy was in his office all the time."

Ian grumbled as he fixed himself a cup before answering "Trump just sank his chances of escaping impeachment by committing a series of crimes that are already on CNN as we speak. If you open the 6 O'clock news, you'll know it all. I was given the scripts that CNN is using for its news briefs tonight at around 14:00pm earlier today by an 'implanted' agent, so I already know all of it well enough to give you both the Cliff notes for now, then we can watch the 18:00pm newscast."

The DHS man swallowed some coffee before he detailed the mess they faced. "There is this violent little bastard of a man called Lawrence Wolenczak who runs the World Power Project. I do believe you both know him? Because he certainly drops your name, Billy, in every conversation he has with anybody in DC or the US navy. Well, this vile little stain has tried repeatedly to kill off his only child and failed miserably. So he tried to have others do it for him, this time around."

William shook his head in disbelief. "Please tell me he didn't..."

Ian shrugged in sympathy. "Yes, he did. Since he thought himself so high and mighty in The Order Of Things, the defective bastard called people around the Pentagon until he somehow managed to secure a 'punitive placement' for his 16 year old son aboard the least accessible, most invisible ship in the entire UEO Fleet – The SeaQuest. The goal was to have the sailors manage the 'disciplinary redressment' of the young man by beating, raping and breaking him until he stayed submissive to his father for the rest of his miserable broken life. In case there were any questions or doubts about the process to be done or the rights and duties of the sailors involved, dear Lawrence wrote out at extensive length the details of what he wanted and that he was extending his 'christian paternal authority' unto the duly contractually hired 'disciplinary surveillants & spiritual tutors' of his only child for the duration of his reeducation into an obedient, loyal, faithful christian child."

William exploded immediately: "HOW the fucking Hells does this fool think he has access to the flagship of the UEO Fleet? It hasn't even been in the US Navy for over 4 tears already! WHO was it that allowed this depravity to happen? Just HOW did that meaningless bastard come to think he could use any ship of the international fleet as a private penitentiary for his son? And where did he even get the idea of doing this?"

O'Callahan continued "I haven't a clue from what Hell-pit he took the idea; I just see the result. The facts that are established are these: Lawrence wrote actual orders that transformed every adult aboard SeaQuest into a jailer – cum – Church Inquisitor with the express purpose of breaking the body and soul of his teenaged son while using the thin excuse of wanting him devoted to white christian dominance. When several admirals in the US Navy told him they could not or would not sign off on the 'supposed legality' of his depraved orders, he went above all the service heads and talked to president Trump directly."

Ian gestured with his cup pointedly at Billy and said "That's where the shit hits the fan at supersonic speeds. The dumb blond bimbo in the Oval Office had gone to a military academy in his teen years and thought the idea Lawrence was selling him was a great one. The fact Lawrence explicitly wrote he wanted to forcibly convert his son to white supremacy and conservative christian messianism made Trump almost wet himself at the principles he was discussing with Lawrence. So the imbecile manually wrote out a damned 'Presidential Decree' and then signed and sealed the stupid paper before ordering the Oval Office's secretary to scan and email the papers. Those stinking pieces of turd were sent to everybody on the SeaQuest's list of crew and civilian attachés, along with hundreds of people in the Pentagon, the Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Justice, and the Dept. of Human Services in charge of fostering children to make them validate the whole gimmick."

Janet was wearing an expression of utter disbelief as she asked "Didn't Wolenczak's requests and method of petitioning for it raise any flags in his mind? Didn't Trump see the entire scheme for the criminal conspiracy it was?"

The DHS AD shook his head negatively. "President Trump thought it was, for him and the USA, a good little deal to make on the side and didn't think it was illegal, either. The man genuinely thought that since the departments were subordinated to the president in the executive chart, that he could just 'make the decision' and then force the directors sign off on it like in a private company. No questions would be asked and there would be no 'details' to explain to DCFS or some other 'child protection' agency. And THAT is important here; Trump, like several hundreds of thousands of christian worshipers, hates and reviles all the 'educational standards' and the many 'child protection' laws and agencies of the USA. Like his grassroots followers, he believes that 'God gave ownership of the children' to their parents and no human government should ever interfere in this 'sacredly-bound duty'."

"During the FBI / NCIS search that happened at the White House early this morning, president Trump told the agents everything that happened quite openly, right into the lenses of their body cams. He didn't hide anything and was truly surprised that the Presidential Office did not in fact have the authority to decide 'executively' where, why or whom to place children with in order to insure their 'morally faithful christian upbringing' to make them the next generation of 'Great Americans' that would Rule The World in God's name."

The two Noyce's were quite literally flabbergasted. It was one thing to know that the geriatric crud who led the White House was a regressist bastard and religious fool who used 'Prosperity Gospel' as a childish excuse to justify his personal profiteering, nepotism and many public explosions of bombastic distemper. It was quite an other thing to be proven publicly on film just how religiously backwards, racially bigoted and socially disjuncted the man actually was. There was NO WAY that the population of America would accept this, let alone permit that it becomes the 'Settled Law' of the country.

Not only would the atheists and humanists raise a stink, but even a large number of religiously faithful people understood the fundamental need for DCFS, public schools and the state-mandated care and protection of children. What Trump had done was nothing less than the backdoor re-legalization of child enslavement, forcible religious conversion under beatings and transforming kids into child-aged soldiers but without any salaries or rights like those of adult soldiers. Basically, Trump tried to take America back legally and socially to the 1700's when the British Crown sent 'press gangs' into the poor areas of its towns to forcibly draft boys aged 10 to 16 to serve on the warships at rigging repairs, sweeping decks and dumping the offal buckets overboard.

As things were, the sitting US president had just declared publicly that it was "OK to beat, break, rape and torture any children under your care if you had a written Declaration of Christian Creed to show the police". By his words and the felonious documents he had signed, as long as your violence and depravity served the purpose of 'converting' the poor 'dispirited' kids back unto the path of 'morality' then it should be seen as legal, legitimate, moral and also be exempt from government oversight.

Janet asked in a low, sickly voice "And this is on CNN already? And there were agents from the FBI, NCIS and Secret Service present when the idjiot redneck spilled the beans?"

O'Callahan simply nodded his head positively as he sipped his coffee.

William stood from his chair and threw his cup against the far wall where it exploded in thin porcelain shards and a cloud of coffee. "Janet! Turn on the TV! Watch the damned thing, then call at the Company to get some ground-floor intel! I'm calling the directors on vid-meet and we'll watch it together to decide what the group's answer will be. This needs to happen now, Jeanie!" He bellowed as he trotted his ample girth to his office post haste. Going without any further explanations, he marched to his office where he locked himself in so he could have emergency contact with several people and groups. They all needed to watch this and plan their responses to the fallout because this could spell the End of America as they knew it.

Janet pursed her lips before she queried "What will DHS do about this?" as she fiddled with the pull-out tablet on her side of the table to activate the TV set mounted on the far wall, just between the living and eating areas. The CNN logo and newscast opening credits scrolling on the screen told her they hadn't missed anything yet as the 18:00pm National Evening News program was just starting.

Ian replied indolently as he watched the TV; "It isn't our jurisdiction right now. It stinks of corruption, peddling of influence, attempt at forcible religious conversion of soldiers & civilians, attempt at legalizing the torture of children, and a whole lot more. But none of it concerns DHS other than the attempt to illegally place a child aboard an active service warship carrying nuclear engines and ordinance. Unfortunately, that one hits right at the top of the ladder, on the bozo sitting at the Resolute Desk. The rest of all charges could, in all honesty, be handled by the DOJ through either the FBI or the Secret Service. As such, what I heard from the director of DHS is that we will keep a 'scrutinize but hands-off' approach to the situation and advise as it develops."

Janet refilled their cups before she asked "What about that zealy bitch, Andrea Dre? She's Trump's slut in the UEO council; everybody knows that since it was never really hidden. What did the woman say about all this?"

O'Callahan shrugged carelessly. "Nothing yet. She went to her family estate in New Zealand back on Monday so she won't hear of this until it's passed a certain time on her island. Time zones and regional broadcasting zones, and all that... But she will react, I can tell you that much. She considers SeaQuest as the single-most important part of the UEO Fleet and she almost oversaw the entire refit and conversion of the ship from her office atop the UEO building. Why do you think that she insisted the ship be brought to the drydocks in New Cape Quest instead of back at her official port-of-call in Pearl Harbor?"

Janet hadn't known that bit of gossip, so she had no comment. As it was, both old friends got comfortable on the couch in the living area with the wall-mounted TV well in view. They could watch this in style while Billy sat on his cheap hard pike in his study with a bunch of wrinkled old men from DC to keep him company over the vidphone. She was done with that period of her life and she would not be going back to it for anything.

{ SQ } - { Exalted meeting } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 01:05am

East America; 18:05pm

West America; 15:05pm

Will Noyce sat at his desk, glaring at the TV on the left side that showed the CNN newscast starting up, as the military-grade encrypted Internex monitor was dialing several numbers together to start an emergency video conference. Will would be the head of the meeting and needed a few moments to straighten out his thoughts. What he had just learned moments ago went beyond the Pale of anything he had expected the dumb-ass in the White House to try now that he had a second mandate and was essentially no longer attackable on the 'public vote' side of things.

The monitor lit up, showing the faces of the American Senior Officers and Agency Directors whom were all presently in emergency transit to reach the highly classified, secret underground Convention Bunker located at Lake Barcroft in Fairfax County, in Virginia, not far from Washington DC.

* The US Secretary of the Department of Defense – DOD (Robert E. Reagan)

* The US Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency – DIA (Laurent Yves)

* The Director of the Presidential Secret Service – USSS (Roland Toopin)

* The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff – JCS (Gen. Allen D. Wauchsaw)

* The Chief of the National Guard Bureau – NGB (Gen. Walter Venice)

* The US Secretary of the Navy – USN (Adm. Flinn T. Woodhall)

* The US Secretary of the Army – USA (Gen. Jebediah S. Scornhill)

* The US Secretary of the Air Force – USAF (Gen. Amato Maria de San Coronado)

* The US Secretary of the Orbital Defense – USOD (Mary-Anise Beudoin, PhD)

* The Judge Advocate General of the Navy (Vice-ADM Leonora Harrigan)

* The Naval Criminal Investigations Services Director – NCIS –(Leon Vance)

* The US Navy Intelligence Director – USNI – (Adm. Randy Elms)

* The Director of the Department of External Services – DXS – (Mathilda Webber)

* The Federal Bureau of Investigation Director – FBI – (Armand Klepp)

* The National Security Agency Director – NSA – (Horatio Derrel)

* The Central Intelligence Agency Director – CIA – (Raymond Uthenberg)

* The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA (Anette Sorensen, PhD)

* FBI Head of National Capital Defensive Policing Protocols ( SSA Seely Booth)

* The chief of the Washington DC National Guard & Militia ( Mario Boudreau)

The UEO officials online were mostly in their homes in New Cape Quest in Florida, except for the chief of military police who was at a delegation office in south London, England.

* The UEO secretary for Military Affairs (Lloyd Handower, Britannic)

* The UEO secretary for Borders, Customs and Migration (Hubert Frelat, French)

* The UEO Military Intelligence Analysis Director (Vincenzo Delarosa, Italian)

* The UEO Military Police Director (Joseph Michaels, canadian)

* The UEO Judge Advocate General (Admiral Gunther Garver, German)

* The Chief Judge of the International Penal Tribunal (Mariska Lourt, Polish)

* The Governor of The World Bank (Iegor Desdensky, russian)

* The commanding officer of the SeaQuest (commander Jonathan D. Ford, American)

Joining them was also the venerable, and well retired, US Navy captain Nathan Hale Bridger, designer of the SeaQuest, who was on his private tropical island near south Florida.

Bill told them all to get themselves in position to watch the CNN broadcast with him and be ready to take notes and phone people on the go. Things were getting HOT in DC and they needed to be able to react to this as he meltdown happened. As soon as everybody confirmed they had the news opened and currently passing some commercials, he told them briefly:

"All right, people, I just got briefed by one of Homeland Security's assistant-directors about the clusterfuck happening in DC. I want to tell you all right now what the REAL Law & Rule of the UEO Fleet are." Bill declared firmly.

"Firstly, it's always been illegal for the UEO to employ slaves and forced labor of any sorts, PERIOD. And that includes buying products from factories that use slaves or prison labor, even just as subcontractors or secondary suppliers in the fabrication chain. Any employee or citizen of the UEO Alliance that breaks these laws and rules will find himself in front of the International Penal Tribunal fighting for his life as the Alliance does have the power of capital execution for High Felonies and Treason-class crimes."

"Secondly, in the UEO Alliance, the age of majority is 18 years old. It's the minimal age at which the Alliance recognizes those legal contracts deemed 'of vital importance' like marriage, adoption, divorce, emigration, citizenship, life-changing medical procedures and such. Any such contracts signed before age 18 are subject to automatic review by the IPT's Youth & Family Division under the suspicion that the young person was entered into the decision or process against their own self-protection. Such documents become binding through the rest of the Alliance Members only after the IPT has validated them. Business, commerce, employment and education are considered 'menial dealings' subject only to the local authorities of the territory where they happen, thus explaining why millions of teenagers can legally hold jobs, be contractors and even own a company without adult oversight."

"Thirdly, the UEO does not in any way, shape or form, participate in the religious conversion, free or forced, of anybody, especially children. That is the policy through the Fleet, Military Police, or any other agency that was created as part of the Treaty in 2017 when Trump forced the dissolving of the UN and its many agencies that helped to regulate and protect humanity as well as the planet."

"Fourthly, the UEO is a military alliance for the defense of the FREE NATIONS of the planet against terrorists, cartels, pirates, smugglers, and organized crime of any origin or goal. We handle the 'international' territories for apprehension only, then we hand the culprits over to the member country closest to the place of the crime, unless outstanding warrants from other members exist. We DO NOT enter our member nations to commit policing actions on 'sovereign land'. Ever!"

"Fifthly, we do not enter the 'internal processes, legislation or jurisdiction' of our member nations under any situation less than enemy invasion in progress that needs to be repelled. That means we do not in any way, shape or form tell them how to manage their country or people, ever."

"To close with a separate but vital Sixth Point; the USA does not own the SeaQuest. They haven't owned the boat since the foundation of the North-American Confederation in late 2012 after the disbanding of NATO for its inefficiencies. At that point, the USA was short on cash and couldn't pay a large enough amount to insure its dominant position in the new Confederation, so they gave the ownership title for the boat to the NAC in lieu of cash-down. When the North-American Confederation joined the UEO at its foundation in 2017, the USA government, meaning Trump, was again strapped for cash. The White House thought they could hoodwink the members states of the new Treaty by putting up the SeaQuest as cash-down for NAC membership all the while passing it as USA property that was being generously 'loaned' for the duration of the treaty. However, it was the NAC that was the title-holder and the Confederation Cabinet, even more short on money than the USA, agreed to commit the actual sale of the ship to the UEO Council. All this to say; Trump never had the right to just pick up the phone and send you orders, especially not about crew placements, maneuvers or classified work. Those are the jobs of UEO accredited personnel like ME, not the damned ass-kissers in DC."

Commander Ford nodded with visible relief. "The commander of the UEO flagship acknowledges and understands your explanations, sir. We will file as illegal the orders received from Washington DC and disregard them. I will brief the military staff and civilians aboard to that effect. But, sir, that still leaves us short of several key personnel that are critical to run the ship with any efficiency. At this point, I would hesitate to take her out of drydock, let alone into a dangerous storm or a firefight."

William Noyce pointed at Bridger and declared "That's where this wrinkled old lout comes in. I had wanted to take a few weeks to sweet talk you into coming out of retirement willingly, old bean, but needs must! Captain Bridger, by the authority invested in me as Head of UEO Fleet Assets, I hereby make a formal request of the US Dept. of Defense to reactivate your commission at the rank and position of captain so as to answer the imminent political and social crisis in two of our member states. Should he accept, you would immediately be transferred from US-N to UEO-N and elevated to the captaincy of the SeaQuest with the task of keeping the ship out of the hands of manipulative politos and religious fanatics. Further orders and supplementary protocols would be forwarded by UEO Fleet as needed."

The US Secretary of Defense affirmed "I so order. The written version will be sent by email and the official document carrying the seals of office will be waiting for you aboard the ship when you rendez-vous with her. The details of the meeting date and zone can be arranged between you and the boat."

Bridger passed a weary hand down his face as he sighed tiredly. "That wasn't the Christmas present I expected from you, Bill. A lemon & mint cake from Janet, yes, but not a new job from you. Especially a damned job that I thought I had put behind me and wouldn't be bothered with anymore. Do you know just how much bloody politics and diplomacy that ship implicates daily?"

Billy replied without a shred of pity "Yeeeepppp, I sure do! That's why I went up in the chain of command and left the patsy of the day handle her, with all her pleasures and cheap thrills."

"I should feed you to your own pigs, Billy!" Nathan replied, momentarily forgetting the group of people they were online with. "But then, you'd probably infect the poor animal and I'd be stuck with a mutated Noyce-pig zombie that would haunt me for the rest of my days!" Shaking his head in misery, Nathan groaned "My wife Carol had warned me about staying friends with you! I should have listened to her when I still could!"

{ SQ } - { Sailing orders } - { SQ }

The eruptions of laughter from the other participants showed they sympathized with the veteran sailor but not so much as to liberate him from his relationship with the admiral. As the advertisements were winding down, the admiral pointed an angry finger at the TV and told the people to watch and jack-up the sound so they didn't miss anything. The next minutes could be critical for the country's future.

They were. America was heading down the pipes.

Even with just the basic outline of the case explained at the beginning of the program, the woman and men on the vid-meet could see clearly that the President had just committed flat out conspiracy, High Felony and the purchase of a child-slave for the purpose of religious indenture. As the program went on, the boy's inhumane life of constant beatings, torments, debasement, degradations and multiple attempts by drugs, weapons and mercenaries to kill him once and for all. On the side, the newscast also showed just how violent and stubborn the child had become from his fourth year of live and on.

Poison grenades.

The kid had built his first lethal weapons at age 4; he always favored acid since.

The highly ranked, militarily experienced adults could only watch in powerless despair at how a gentle, caring innocent child had seen his mind broken and the pieces twisted, his soul warped until it was questionable if he was still human anymore. The superb heights of medicine and cybernetics he reached would have made any of them proud to claim him as their son, but the underlying capacities of the chemicals, medical drugs, implants and computers he created were sending waves of worry and doubts through the conference attendees.

In particular, the conception of a proprietary mathematical system no one else used, the creation of synthetic crystals to use as chips and boards in computers and the new servers he had crafted all gave them pause. Anyone with that much raw computing power was automatically suspect in the eyes of all the many agencies that kept any country safe and stable. The fact the machines were designed and optimized for using the same neural energies & frequencies as the human brain so as to awaken comatose patients or heal significant cerebral injuries was an entire other basket of crabs.

As the story developed, another large doubt emerged; money.

The young man had accumulated a personal fortune that passed the hundred million dollars just with Wolenbahn Electronics but the CNN reporters had unearthed the clear link between Lucas and Wise Apothecary & Chemists, starting from his owning Wise Manor in Buffalo. The fact that the medication & surgical tools company took its orders from the teenager for six years already was demonstrated positively with multiple formularies from diverse government levels and services across the states of New York, Massachusetts, and many others, including canadian provinces where WAC had production and distribution facilities.

Then the familial link to the Wise Bloodline.

The generational chart was shown, publicly proving the cosanguine and borderline incestuous situation between all the generations in the clan. Any doubts that Lucas could legally claim the company and properties were put to rest when the announcer explained that the boy had actually used his trust fund money to purchase Ramshackle Manor at age 8, followed by Wise Manor at age 9 and THAT was the event that gave him ownership and authority over the entirety of the Wise Heritage and its medication producer.

The teen's total number of buildings and employees was mindboggling.

The full list of his clients for WEI was a red flag of important names and companies that none of the agency directors wanted to call an enemy. The damned World Bank certainly wouldn't give them any favors if they tried to damage or put out of commission their favorite service provider. And the dollar amount he had billed them over the last five years was even more worrisome as it meant that he was deeply embedded into the structure and decisional offices of the institution. That his San Francisco offices for WEI were located inside a WB building was a publicly visible proof of favor from the highest levels of the Bank. The rental agents for those properties could never sign an agreement with a new client unless the head office had given the permission for it, and that meant a chain of face-to-face contacts, handshakes and getting invited to the backyard barbecues of some seriously exalted people.

As the clock marked 18:58pm and the first hour of the special broadcast wound down, the members of the conference muted their TV's to concentrate on their meeting. Several had pale sickly features and were fighting internally against the upsurge of bile that wanted to come out.

Agent Booth spoke first, giving them a critical piece of information that surprised them. "In the spirit of open cooperation between us, I have to tell you that Lucas Wolenczak is not unknown to my partners at the Jeffersonian Museum. Misses Angela Montenegro uses a holographic projector to recreate the bodies and faces of deceased victims whose cases are referred by my office to the museum's department of Forensic Anthropology for resolution. The 'Angelator' is actually based upon a prototype designed and built by Ms Montenegro a decade ago but WEI has, since year 2016, collaborated to the development and upgrading of the system. This was possible because WEI actually purchased a large percentage of the rights on the device and they act as sales agent to propagate the technology. As such, the FBI in Washington DC has bought about a dozen of these to place them in the civil defense bunkers that would command the city's reactions in case of area emergencies or invasion."

Commander Ford jumped in after that. "Aboard SeaQuest we have five, maybe six, of these consoles and they are hard-linked directly to the server backbone and also serve to manage the ship's internal reactions to emergencies or invasion. One console is in the captain's quarters, the other is in the med-bay's conference room. I don't remember where the others are, or what they are dedicated to. As far as I was aware, they were just glorified Internex monitors."

The CIA director piped in "We bought some of those consoles through our civilian investment and support company In-Q-Tel, about three years ago. We took them apart and were impressed by the hardware and software alike. We have actually been buying some to equip CIA field offices and local command bunkers in the hot zones of active conflicts. I know that here in Langley we have about two dozen installed, especially in the design and crafting departments where they make the tradecraft tools to assist our agents on missions. We haven't seen anything to make us doubt the value or safety of these devices. They certainly have shown their usefulness to everyone who employed them."

Since nobody else had anything to add, admiral Noyce moved the meeting to the critical subjects. "What are your thoughts on the stability of the president at the moment? And the stability of the office itself?"

The secretary of defense passed a weary hand over the lower part of his face as he sighed deeply, afraid of what he was about to say out loud. "I don't think we have a president at this time. We don't have anybody from Justice on the line, but I have had contacts earlier today just after the search & seizure warrants were executed. The consensus in the DOJ is that Trump has shot himself in the face and will not be sworn in come January. In fact, he could get booted before Christmas, the way things are moving so fast & hard in the media and corridors of the Capitol. I have received confirmation from the leaders of both the Senate and House that they are emitting a recall of all members for an emergency session of the full Congress and the diverse Justice and Ethics committees have scheduled emergency sessions as well, but for later after the Congress muster. At this point, people, I think we should assume that even the Republicans will not save this asinine fool from the consequences of his madness, and we are headed into choppy waters, in the most optimistic of circumstances."

The secretary of the Navy asked the 'unholy' question that no one in active office dared to put out for public consideration. "Are we going to talk about the storm clouds looming over us all, or are we going to gleefully ignore them like just another winter dusting of white snot? If the bloody fool in the Oval Office gets kicked out of the Chair, you all know what the private polls and tactical surveys say will happen to his fanatical grassroots followers across the Nation! How bad will this devolve to? Because at this point, based on the intel supplied inside the Navy's branches, I have to recommend we enact the protocol 'Noah's Ark' at the close of this meeting and tell our people to bunker their offices, homes and gather relatives at defensible positions to weather out the civil unrest that is sure to happen."

The Director of the UEO's Military Police Joseph Michaels rose a finger to get attention."What are you people talking about? I come from Canada, not the US federal apparatus. I was never briefed about local internal mechanisms concerning possible civil unrest inside the member states, especially since I'm in charge of the MP's, it wasn't my bailiwick anyways. I'm sure the other UEO delegates would like to know as well."

It was Leon Vance, Director of NCIS, who answered the other man's question. "The protocol 'Noah's Ark" refers to the christian bible's retelling of Noah's legend. He is supposed to have built the biggest wooden boat in history to gather a mated pair of each animal alive to save their species from the planet spanning storms, floods and earthquakes that were prophesized to happen in his lifetime. Ever since the election of president Obama in 2008, the multiple service branches of the US military and federal agencies have kept a gimlet eye on the moods and actions of several subsets of the internal population of the USA. In the last 12 years, we have seen a dramatic, catastrophic really, increase in the levels of interpersonal violence, destructive crimes against the community and what can only be qualified as 'domestic terrorism' by ultra-nationalist cultists and militias. As such, from 2012 onwards, the US military has, in conjunction with all its partners under the Homeland Security banner and the CIA's network, established protocols to help all of our servicemen secure and protect their families in case of American society and government falling into irreversible anarchy. This includes a set of automated encrypted messages, recall dates and points of contacts to reestablish the chain of command in each service or agency. It also includes using the money from the seizure of assets of smugglers and terror cells to finance defensive upgrades, bunkers and supply caches in certain key buildings where the workers and families of these services and agencies could fall back to obtain assistance and survive in a protected communal enclave of people they know and trust already. In some select cases, funds were allocated to design and build civil protection shelters in less visited areas of existing military bases to help gather and shelter the families against unrest and rioting. In other cases, some of those old navy bases that were shut down over budgeting issues in the last 30 years were analyzed and put through a highly secretive project to completely reorganize them as hidden defensive enclaves to be un-shuttered when the country came apart."

Michaels nodded his head in thanks, saying "Okay, I can see the logic behind this, especially given the way millions of people reacted to Obama's first election in 2008 and the second time in 2012. We get to Trump's first term in 2016 and the white supremacists going nuts in public, with all the blow-back that caused... And now the reelection vote that a lot of people, some of them in your own intelligence community, say was rigged remotely by Russia's hacker farm in Saint Petersburg... Yeah... I can see how you all thought you would need to secure your workforce and their dependents to keep the most minimal level of policing and border defense going. It just says a lot about your country's politics and government that you had to do this in secret behind the president, Congress and everybody."

Several snorts and sneers were his answer. Most of the people on the screen were hard working, honest men who had served under the flag in the trenches and they had not time to waste on Washington's brand of circus sideshows that stood in lieu of actual governance and management. They had done what they could to mitigate the damages to their own crews, servicemen and dependents because that's what they were limited to. Even by grabbing the cash-flow smuggled into the USA by criminals and augmenting the fines and penalties for frauds, especially the Internex sales scammers going around, it just wasn't enough money, manpower and time to do it all, especially since it was done secretly and there was a lot of written laws that declared what they were doing illegal or treasonous. It was the lot they had been dealt in life, and they were dealing with it as best any of them could.

The secretary of Defense proclaimed "We are presently, by my authority and call, under 'Noah's Ark' protocol, to be initiated at the close of this conference. May whichever god you believe in have mercy on your souls and those of your servicemen and their families. Noyce, continue the briefing."

The venerable admiral took a deep breath to steady himself before he issued orders couched as polite suggestions. Since most of these people did not in fact work for him nor under his chain of command, he had to tread carefully. "Directors Vance and Webber, I need you to cooperate on finding Lucas Wolenczak and setting a bodyguard detail on him. You can take the opportunity to take his official deposition while you cover him against attacks and intimidation, which we know there will be plenty of in the coming days and weeks. His being in Canada for now will protect him only so long. The actual investigation, especially the president's part, I gladly leave to all of you."

Turning his eyes to face his old friend and the man besides him in the monitor, he was short and clear about what he needed done. "Captain Bridger, commander Ford, I want the SeaQuest commissioned, supplied and out in blue waters by the end of next week, on Wednesday at the very latest. You will patrol the Gulf of Mexico until told otherwise. The moment the DXS or NCIS agents contact us with positive results on their mission to find and cover the kid, I want him moved to the ship and into international waters, away from potential fanatics and mercenaries that Lawrence could have hired."

Giving the NSA Director Horatio Derrel the gimlet eye, William said "We need better intel on the entire family's dynamics and just how far off the beaten roads each living member is willing to go. We need to find out all the contacts that Lawrence and Cynthia have in the criminal underbelly of America and elsewhere and then backtrack it to their purses and hands giving out the orders. At that point, we nab them and pile up as many charges as we can apply to each. A public, lengthy and detailed trial for each will shore up our legal and moral position when dealing with the Trumpist zealots and the church-whores in DC. Does anyone else have anything to add or propose before we close?"

FBI Director Armand Klepp asked "Are we extending 'whistle-blower' status and protections to this young man if he collaborates with us or are we taking a harder stance that since he fled the scene of the crime, we owe him nothing? As it stands, some of the more right-wing prosecutors will be debating this and I know several state's attorneys that are close to the white nationalist movance that will want him actively prosecuted under the claim that his public declarations and leaving the country have hindered the course of an investigation thus deserving jail time or at least momentously severe fines."

Noyce sneered in contempt at the thought of those depraved sluts-of-the-pews and what they would try to do or commit to derail any investigations into cultist activity and Trump's idiotic traitorous gestures against the established Law of the Land. Such sub-human debris were the best feed for his pigs and he had a foresight that they would be well fed indeed in the coming months. Addressing Klepp's question, he answered tartly "Lucas Wolenczak was victimized on the entire line for his entire life. We are treating him as a minor-aged child who ran away from his home to avoid being killed, maimed or sold off to slavery by his felonious parents. Any White House involvement in the story is secondary to the principal facts; any attempts by cultists, worshipers and Trumpists to focalize the story and the court cases upon – only – the moment of the presidential intervention will find themselves subject to investigation and anything we find will be used to destroy them in public. Anything they say will be checked against the Law and Jurisprudence and you will be charging them with perverting justice, corrupting an active investigation or attempting to pass false laws as real, etc... Do what you have to in order to silence and destroy these bastards, as long as it's based on the Truth and real Law. Does everybody understand the gameboard we're playing on?"

CIA Director Raymond Uthenberg closed the meeting with a blood chilling remark: "And those who think they have the right to operate outside of America's established and settled laws will be accommodated by our good services, just not how they expected nor with the self-aggrandizing results they desired."

All the service and agency director closed their line to turn towards their own people. They had a country defining epoch to manage, and not nearly enough money, men and time to do it right.

Old warhorse saddling up

(NCIS-LA – opening theme)

Western Africa; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 03:12am

East America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 20:12pm

West America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 17:12pm

NCIS west coast - Office of Special Projects

Los Angeles, California, USA

A resounding screech was heard in the underground parking level as the silver Mercedes-Benz 2-door convertible raced into its designated spot, barely managing to stop before colliding with the cement wall at the front of the stall. The door flew open, disgorging the diminutive but firm, athletic shape of Henrietta Lange, Operations Manager, who wasted no time in slamming the door shut so she could run at full tilt through corridors and stairs up to the operations room.

The emergency call had come in as she was sitting in her main living room in her principal Los Angeles residence, called 'Dovecote', and it had scared the bejeezus out of her. Her entire team, minus Mr Callen, had been given several days off to recover from an encounter with a would-be ISIS sympathizer who managed to convince an arabic student at UCLA's biogenics laboratory to take out biologically active reagents to be forwarded to the fighting front in Iraq. The cheap plastic carrying case had been accidentally damaged by gun fire during the take-down and so the agents present had been on medical leave in the hospital for six days of quarantine, following which Hetty had ordered at least 7 days of rest. She had expected them to return on Monday morning, healthy and rested, and eager for some action. She herself had taken the Friday at home to process some of her accumulated paperwork for NCIS central office in quieter surroundings, feeling that Mosley could handle the OSP building just fine by herself.

Then her private emergency line had rung, just before her first sip of the magnificient cocktail she had crafted for herself. Damn! Such a waste of good spirits!

There were no polite phrases exchanged nor any formal platitudes of rank as such video conferences are wont of getting mired in. No; Leon Vance and the secretary of the Navy had both been in attendance and the message was as clear as it was dire.

Civil unrest with potential to devolve into civil war.

The United States of America were heading for a period of major constitutional and political crisis that would result in sustained, most probably violent, manifestations, rioting, civil unrest and maybe even civil war if it lasted long enough to gather momentum that the police forces and national guard units could not contain locally.

Pounding her way up the stairs of the almost empty building in the early evening was not a common sight and the watchman ogled her weirdly as she breezed by him. Or maybe it was the openly worn flak jacket with bandoleer of knives, guns and grenades with plenty of spare clips worn over her usual high class steel gray suit and jewelry. It's not because society was going back to a wilder era of animalesque behavior that she was obliged to let herself get carried along. She had standing in the government and standards need, must, be met at all times. She had even taken the time to put on her matching ivory topped cameo rings that were miniature cavities to hold poison or micro-transmitters in case of 'last call' situations. The broach on her lapel was also ivory and held the multi-switch detonator for all her properties and vehicles, just in case she had been compromised terminally. The necklace of two lines of cultivation pearls dangling from her neck was actually several hundred little balls of liquid explosive sensitive to electricity only, in case she needed to make an exit.

Making sure she was perfectly coiffed and well presented by glancing at her rushing reflection in the mirror that was placed strategically just before entering the Ops Room by her own good care for such cases, she dialed in her PIN and marched into her fiefdom unchallenged. Of course, at this hour, only the night shift surveillance was present and Mosley was in the armory, dealing with a technical issue but she would be coming up fast enough. The nightwatch female tech overlooked the main office, the floating boat shed and several safe-houses around the extended LA metropolitan zone, ready to call alarm in case of breach.

Stunned at seeing her Big Boss (ironic isn't it?) marching in arms with clear intent to cause severe lasting harm unto her opponents, Madeleine Nitter was quickly reminded that Hetty Lange was an old warhorse who'd lived through the Cold War and thrived in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and even done incursions in China's southern regions to destabilize communist efforts to build the rail network needed to support the Viet-Cong. Her exploits in Eastern Europe were legendary because they were so damned heavily classified that it was close to High Treason to even dare ask about it. The elderly woman had been called 'The Duchess of Deception' for her uncanny ability to lie to your face while seemingly innocent like an angel straight out of Heaven's Pearly Gates. More likely they kicked the sawn-off devil out in fright at what she could do... Suffice it to say, Ops Manager Lange was legendary and ruthlessly efficient in ferreting out traitors, moles, rats and all sorts of foreign agitators. Her network of foreign contacts made her even more worrisome since you couldn't really know from where her retaliation or support would arrive.

Madeleine swallowed hard as the woman-in-charge passed by her as if she didn't exist and marched herself over to a cabinet made of black solid tempered steel the thickness of armored personnel carrier hull plates. She took an old black steel key from under her cravat and leaned forward to set it in the lock besides the handle. After turning the key both sides, left while turning the handle together and then right just the key, the heavy cabinet opened. Inside was a set of steel shelves holding pistols and clips, grenades, knives, sheaths and straps, walkie-talkies, smartphones, tins of bulk dehydrated vegetable soup mix, tins of coffee, bottles of powdered milk, bags of sugar and old WWII survival crackers that seemed to be in the original tin box. Featuring prominently in the cabinet was the internal side of the door: it was composed of three touchscreen tablets linked to an independent smartphone and from that a solid coaxial cable ran back to the cabinet and into the concrete wall, to a hub that sent the signal to antennas on the roof or down to the web servers in the basement. Besides the smartphone was a simple small device that seemed like just a rectangle of plastic that didn't do anything but hold the network cables and power cords in order.

Henrietta took the ivory earring off her left ear lobe and touched it to the small, menial plastic cable holder and all Hell broke loose immediately. Red strobe lights began to flash around the inside of the building while blue floodlights suddenly illuminated the entire outside perimeter and underground parking of the compound. The three tablets inset in the cabinet door lit up, flashing columns of numbers and emails at high speed as the emergency router was warming up to do its fatidic job.

Hetty took a deep breath then spoke out loud in her clear, commanding voice. "This is Special Supervisory Agent Henrietta Lange, Operations Manager for the NCIS Office of Special Projects in Los Angeles. To all NCIS agents located in the greater LA zone, on land, on the sea or in the air, this is a priority message under the protocol 'Noah's Ark'. I repeat, this is Henrietta Lange of NCIS-OSP in LA; the central office in Washington DC has decreed the activation of protocol 'Noah's Ark'. All hands on deck, people! We have a storm brewing and we need all personnel, even the retired, the sick or the physically immobilized but still awake! We have need of you all! Call in on the established channels and bunker down in your houses until you are contacted back with assignments. All agents undercover are to scrap their ops and burn their covers! I repeat, 'hot exfil' for all undercover ops in progress, no exceptions! Everybody in deep cover is to regroup at the central compound within 48 hours or be declared as compromised and be treated as enemy agents! That is all. God Bless You and may he have mercy on our nation in its time of turmoil."

Pulling her earring away from the magnetic reader, Hetty waited until a loud beep sounded from the emergency server to tap one tablet to set the message to repeat every 15 minutes for the next 6 hours and then every hour after that for 48 hours.

Turning to Madeleine who was now shaking like a leaf, she told the middle-aged female "Would you be a dear and run to the armory to gear up? We are now in 'Noah's Ark', sweetie. We need to dress the part and act like it actually matters, don't we now? We wouldn't want the office drones in DC to think we don't take their institutional criminality and its deleterious effects on american society lightly. We'd never hear the end of it." she explained in her most urbane tones of voice, as if she was discussing evening gowns for the Navy officer's yearly ball at the DC Naval Yard.

Poor Agent Nitter could only nod her head vigorously like a bobble head doll before running out of ops to fly down the stairs, all the way to the basement armory. She would stop by the changing rooms to switch from her loose fitted dress into her spare jeans, though. Wearing a flack vest and hanging weapons all over a skirt and blouse just wasn't practical, even though Nell Jones did it often enough to have developed some interesting skills at it. Madeleine would also stop by the toilet as she was very near to pissing herself in raw unfettered fright about what was happening outside their walls. She dearly hoped she could reach the washroom before her mind caught up to events and her body's autonomous reactions kicked in.

{ SQ } - { Ah, fuck me! } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 03:23am

East America; 20:23pm

West America; 17:23pm

Grisha Aleksandrovich Nikolaev Callen ('G' for everybody), special agent of NCIS for Los Angeles OSP, expert infiltrator, armsman and driver was most decidedly brassed off like a brand new staircase banister. Two whole months of work undercover, and deep cover with barely any contacts home at that, had just been thrown down the toilet because the idiotic moron-in-charge in DC had yet again suffered another fit of Power-Grab-Mania in full view of the public.

Enslaving children!

On the US Government's orders and paying with bloody tax-payers' money to boot!

Zzzzzzzzzing! Crash!

"Ah, fuck me with a damned phone pole, why don't you!" Grisha screamed out loud as the car he was driving at break-neck speed did a wide side-slide from the asphalt into the grassy band that separates the sidewalk from the street. It wasn't the skidding vehicle though that had him screaming at the top of his lungs. No; that he had in perfect control as he was driving said car with expert skills and long, hard earned experience at 'defensive' driving through Los Angeles traffic. The cause of his screams was the fact his right-side window and windshield had exploded into sharp flying glass bits in his face courtesy of the 'métèque' in the car chasing him at similar speeds but with far less skills and grace.

The fat italiano stereotype-of-the-day was driving a severely modified version of a low class Honda jeep from the 1990's that must have a Hemi 350 under the hood to reach that speed while carrying some inch thick steel armor plates all around that certainly weren't factory default. And who the FUCK ever heard of installing twin Browning M2HB cal.50 machine guns on a redneck turret on top of a damned Honda? Didn't people have any sense of decency in organized crime anymore? Couldn't they steal a pickup like a Ford or Chevy somewhere and keep it Kosher like normal people?

Zzzzzzzzzing!

Suffice it to say that two full sized machine guns spitting each upwards of 550 rounds a minute at his getaway car wasn't doing any good for the resale value of it. At least, it was a cheap corvette taken from the police impound lot from a bunch of stuff a Colombian drug dealer had when he was arrested for trafficking coke and peddling human flesh to brothels. Callen would cry for the car's fate but it was now the third spray & pray of hot molten steel shells that passed in front of his nose and he was getting pissed. Bad enough the gino at the wheel had no taste in rides, but letting the girl G had been romancing as his 'in-track' to the fatso's inner circle wield the guns against him was pushing the limits a whole damned lot! The bitch was vengeful like Kensi on a sugar crave!

Zzzzzzzzzing!

Came the fourth salvo of cal.50 shells, chewing through the rear right wing, rear bumper and parts of the trunk. And she was shooting tracers, of all things! In broad daylight! Tracers! Who in this country showed that woman to shoot tracing shots like that in mother-bleepin' daylight? If Sam Hanna were here to see this, he'd probably try to add charges of 'criminal incompetence in the use and discharge of military weapons' on top of everything they were gonna get. Then he would force them to go through boot camp for real so they learned what to shoot and how. G shook his head as he skidded on a red light towards the left, sending the car's ass going rightwards and up so he could speed his way along the boulevard they had come to.

Callen floored the gas pedal, trying to get some headway on the straight line sprint since the cursed Japanese trash-on-wheels behind him was almost as fast and maneuverable in between the industrial buildings and alleyways where the firefight had started. The weight added by the armor plates should slow them just enough for the agent to make his escape and, if he timed this right, get some help too.

Zzzzzzzzzing!

As both cars sped down the boulevard, other cars were pushed around or willingly moved out of the street altogether when the fifth salvo of heavy ordinance was heard to lash forward at the fleeing federal agent. With the sound and muzzle flash telling the crowd what was happening clearly enough, everybody was trying to dodge out of the way thus clearing the way for Callen to gas-up and quicken his pace. That last batch had chewed through the trunk, exploded the rear window completely, and parts of the rear bench. A few shells had even punched through the front passenger seat and floor with a great shower of cushion foam and sparks.

Ah, fuck! The bench and passenger seat were now on fire and belching brackish smoke!

"Who the damned Hells shoots tracers in damned daylight!" G exploded verbally as he tried to push the car faster to escape his foes.

Zzzzzzzzzing! Clink! Clink!

Luckily for Callen, the Browning guns were voracious and the space to store ammunition inside the small Honda jeep's home built turret was very limited. After shooting close to 3,000 shells on each gun, the woman wound up with empty boxes and nothing left to fire at her 'estranged boyfriend' to punish him for his treachery against her dreams of a big Italian wedding and six kids before she was in her forties. Now, the damned male puta de via (street whore) was getting away and she couldn't stop him anymore. Despite her screams of anger and her fists pounding on the roof of the jeep above the driver's seat, her fat slob of a brother slowed down then turned the car back towards the fisheries' docks district to escape the incoming cop cars. They would find a way to catch up to this cum-stain in the motel bed sheets at some future point. He lived in LA and there were enough criminals, poor, destitute and desperate people in this crap-hole town that somebody would accept some petty cash in exchange for giving up the dead man's address. It was just a question of patience, nothing more.

G was breathing easier as he realized that his pursuer had abandoned the hunt. He swerved into the parking lot of a strip mall to ditch the clearly burning car and all the unwanted attention it was garnering at high speed. Since he had no bags other than his smartphone and the contents of his pockets to worry about, the middle-aged man jumped out of the flaming wreck when it was down to 10mph and stepped right into a long paced jog to reach the boulevard sidewalk and the streetlamp with the metal square attached to it. Barely seconds later, the municipal bus came to a stop and he climbed in, flashed his badge to the driver and ordered the man "Drive in a straight line until I tell you. Call your dispatch to tell them you're skipping about two dozen stops by order of federal law enforcement and they need an extra bus on the line to cover it. I'll give you the number for my agency to contact them for the payments."

Just as he was sitting in the bus, his phone went off. Checking the number, he saw it was Sam calling him to get news. After a very short, terse chat, he hung up and began counting the street corners and bus stops to not miss his junction. After just 20 minutes in the bus, Callen dropped off and hailed a cab that he had seen was parked nearby as it dropped off a client. The NCIS agent gave the driver an address that would bring him to a small strip mall near where he passed in the morning on his way to work at the OSP compound, when he had office days, that was. He would wait there for Sam to pick him up while calling around to see if his other friends were gearing up in response to the 'Noah's Ark' protocol being deployed.

{ SQ } - { Hot Damn! } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 03:28am

East America; 20:28pm

West America; 17:28pm

Samuel 'Sam' Hanna, US Marine Corps, SEAL Team, expert marksman and demolitions buff, was in a right proper snit, to say it honestly. He had barely put his new ocean-faring boat 'The Clambake' back to order after three long days of doing a binge of Do-It-Yourself cleaning and renovations just to keep himself busy and away from the bottles when the whole bloody mudball went up in flames all around him. Hearing Hetty's voice coming out of the ship's comm gear as well as his cellphone and the public address system he had rigged around the boat to hear when a call came in or he wanted to listen to some radio music during his work had almost given him a coronary.

At his age! A bloody heart attack!

Then again, if you knew who his Boss was, you'd understand that hearing her 'dulcet tones' come out of thin air when you're sitting on the common man's throne in deep communion with your 'gut feelings' about what restaurant to call for your late supper could cause an infarction in the strongest of men.

Sam Hanna would admit honestly that he wasn't THAT strong or durable.

His wife's death a few months back had proven that to him. As had the repeated benders and sleepless nights looking over the ocean as he sat in the boat's wheelhouse, with a bottle of booze in hand, thinking about sailing out into the night and never coming back.

Now this.

He had never been a drunkard before Michelle was murdered. Now, his kids didn't recognize their father anymore. Neither did he. The man in the mirror had become a stranger to him. If it weren't for G sticking around so much to hold his hand, helping him through the grief and changes, he might have already cast off and disappeared in the sunset, abandoning his kids and relatives without looking back.

And now this shit dropped on them, at the worse time in his life.

The 'Noah's Ark' protocol.

The 'America is flushing itself down the toilet at flanking speed' survival procedures that were put in place by the central administrators in Washington DC in late 2008 when president Obama had been lawfully elected. Back then, many federal agencies had polled their own workforce and seen truly worrisome results involving raw backwards racism and flat-out contempt driven by the most base and regressist religious fanatics coming out of all sorts of churches. The directors had secretly assembled in a conference and ordered a series of national public surveys, done extensively in each state. The results of those systematic polls done in May 2009 were worrying so they started planning. After the Obama reelection of 2012, a new set of national surveys were done and those were beyond frightful. The country was about to tear itself apart into blocks determined by race, religion and, in some sectors, by private territories declaring independence on the basis of money and having more hired guns than what local police and the national guard could fight against.

Then, after 8 years of progressive liberal democrats in power, the tides of rage, fear, racism, religiosity and contempt for all things Washington DC coming from the farms and forests of the deep south and heartland of America allowed Donald J. Trump to surf through the other republican contestants. The ill-run democratic campaign, rather complacent with Hillary Clinton as its candidate, never saw the Trump effect tidal-wave coming and got blindsided across most of the country. At that point, the population was teetering on the edge of an abyss that they seemed to welcome with open arms.

In late 2016, just before the elections, a private polling firm did a survey of the USA that revealed the startling reality that would make a Trump victory happen. Some 49% of the general population aged 18 years and more thought seriously that it would take a genuine 'civil war' fought with guns against the US Federal Government, the US Army and the 'godless, un-patriotic drones in bureaucracy' to reclaim their country for the 'True People' of America. The crushing majority of those polled thought this civil war would happen in their lifetime and destroy the so-called 'modern state' thus returning the country back to a mode of 'Pure' christian faith based governance with priests being elected to high offices to insure this purity would never deviate again.

Trump, that counter-fucked amateurish church-despot wannabe, had been elected by a lot less than a quarter of the popular vote. And then he got reelected again just weeks ago, despite higher turnouts and several states going 'full blue' this time. Could they not see the electronic voting machines had been hacked by the Russians who wanted to keep their patsy in place? Idiots!

And now, because the geriatric bastard thought he could make deals about peddling human lives and flesh simply because 'the kid's father wanted it so I said yes' the entire country was gonna burn.

Oh joy!

Sam finished his commiserations on the toilet before washing his hands and walking up to the wheelhouse to grab the wired phone from the dashboard next to the wooden steering wheel. Punching the keys to a number he knew by heart for many years now, he linked up to an automated telephony server that had a message pre-recorded for him in case such events happened. The message, in Eric Beale's voice, told him what to do, who to contact and when to present himself at OSP compound to get his marching orders in person from whoever would be the Ops Manager at that time.

After writing down all the necessities of his recall procedure, Sam punched in the number for G's phone, even though he was in deep cover at this time. His personal phone would have carried the OSP emergency message with a specific ringtone to warn him it was a catastrophic situation so his cover would be blown and he'd be on the run. The black skinned, bald man took out a spare Glock pistol from the cupboard under the ship's dashboard and checked the slide action as the line picked up and a slightly out of breath Callen answered live.

"Where do you want me to pick you up from?" Sam asked without preambles or letting his friend any time for the usual banter when they talked out of work. Given the abbreviated answer and prompt hangup he received, he figured that Callen's exfiltration was indeed the 'hot' variety. Damn! Why did the guy have all the fun when Sam was rotting away in his boat? He'd have to talk to Hetty about that.

Picking up his emergency go-bag, a few more knives, pistols, a shotgun, several boxes of munitions and the extra bag of edibles, the ex-marine toured the boat to lock and secure everything, lower the blinds and then stuffed everything in his car for the long arduous road ahead. This night was just beginning and it would get nasty before dawn, he could just feel it.

{ SQ } - { Tears } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 03:28am

East America; 20:28pm

West America; 17:28pm

Kensington Blye sighed softly in soul deep satisfaction as she lay besides her friend, brother, lover and fiancé Martin Deeks after a very soft, languorous bout of lovemaking. Placing a hand over Marty's hand, she caressed his right forearm that he had draped over her as he spooned her. His breath on her nape warmed her entire soul and his left arm was under her head, serving as her muscular pillow. The thumb of his right hand was gently, playfully, moving up and down on her left breast, sending quite exquisite sensations into her whole body. Her partner was silent, thoughtful despite the pleasing situation.

She could understand his mindset all too well.

While they did have some very athletic muscular bodies and enjoyed the more physically styled versions of sexual play, an occasional night of extra-vanilla softness like this one really helped to recharge their emotional batteries even more than it was organically pleasant. As they were both NCIS special agents, both 'feds' in an epoch where law enforcement at the national level was either adulated or reviled as servants of 'The Beast' in DC without any sorts of middle ground, their days were incredibly strenuous psychologically and they needed all the comfort they could find. More and more, the ordinary public was less polite, less civil and far less inclined to help police or tell on criminals, often seeing anything that defies federal agents as a good thing for the common man's overall life.

Since the death of Michelle Hanna, Sam's wife of two decades, a few months back, things at work had begun to fall apart around her. In truth though, it had started collapsing to pieces a lot longer back than that for Marty and his stress levels were just not coming down anymore. Whether they were eating his favorite food, watching his favorite movie or making love in the more playful, physically demanding ways that he normally preferred, he couldn't unwind his tensions and fears anymore.

Behind her closed eyes, Kensi could see exactly what would have happened to her beloved other half if she had died from her spine injury almost a year ago. He would have gone the same way Sam did, but with weed rather than alcohol given his surfer passions, and would have eventually gone surfing so stoned out that he would have willingly drowned himself in the waves to join her. Then she almost died again at the hands of rogue CIA agent Ferris and his multiple mercenaries. Getting kidnapped then threatened with having her leg cut off still haunted her when she fell asleep alone, without Marty to keep her warm and safe, to fight off the demons that lay in wait inside her soul for when she was defenseless. Add to that the fallacious inquests into Hetty's management, the OSP itself and NCIS at large that had resulted in her old mentor's temporary resignation, mysterious disappearance and similarly mysterious return that was still unexplained.

No, the last year hadn't been good to her, and Marty had it worse.

Even her full recovery from her spinal cord injury and physiotherapy had only put a cork into one hole in a dam full of large yawning gashes. Unless they had a whole construction crew and a cement factory, patching that dike to close off the flow of crud and misery would not happen. Not with just them, not the way their lives, emotions and work environment were being managed. At this point, even the comic relief of their two mothers fussing over them buying a house together and living as an officially engaged couple no longer distracted them from the hardships and dangers anymore.

Just after they had become aware of how deep a pit of depression Sam had fallen in, Marty had confessed to her his fears and his utter despair at the fact they were now essentially directionless, their compass broken with the needles used to impale them right in the heart. Marty had asked out loud the fatidic question; could they still work in ANY law enforcement agency at all given the sorts of dangers going around the streets that they already faced every day. NCIS faced the sorts of threats that would make people dig bunkers under their basements and sequester themselves for centuries rather than face the atrocious monstrosities she, Deeks and the OSP team had to deal with as their daily fare.

What they faced two weeks ago with that bio-terrorist was exactly the type of nightmare she meant.

Speaking of Deeks, she really needed to find some time to go buy him a nice little something made out of red meat and bourbon BBQ sauce. That idea he just had of playfully nibbling on her nape was quite inspired and she just had to encourage that with as much vigor as he was showing her. THAT wouldn't be happening if she tried to cook it herself; the team had faced gas less toxic than her cooking so call-in delivery or take-out ready meals from the grocery shop it was. Not that she complained since those made 'washing' the dishes so much easier, too. After all, Styrofoam was made to be junked and wiping down the table afterwards was no biggie, even for a domestically challenged girl like her.

What? Those few years she had lived on the streets in adolescence, homeless and surviving on a slew of petty crimes to stay fed and out of prostitution rings did not conduce to having a good set of domestic manners. Later as a young adult she became a US Marine trained for harsh environments, driving multiple vehicles, sniping and planting bombs, not playing housewife. You can bet the FLETC training obligatory for NCIS employment certainly didn't include household skills or familial life skits. Not that it mattered. Marty wasn't the type to be upset by this part of her personality, especially since he could turn into a right slob himself when his mood took a darker turn, like during the harder parts of her return home.

Ah! The joys of conjugal bliss...

Kensi was just in the midst of truly enjoying the buccal ministrations of her lover as he kissed his way down her spine as a perfectly recognizable manner to ask for a do-over when cataclysm struck their unstable household. All of their home's wired phones, smartphones, burn cellphones and the emergency short wave radio base-camp station in the office on the ground floor started ringing together with a very specific ringtone that was not to be used for anything else.

NCIS had activated the 'Noah's Ark' protocol. America was collapsing.

Marty made Kensi turn around towards him as he pulled himself up to look deeply into her eyes and say aloud what they were both thinking in synchronous realization.

"It's too late" Marty whispered softly as tears began sliding down his face, despair and resignation written all over his features and posture. "They won't let anybody quit while that's going on. And after, they'll put in stop-gap measures and departure delay clauses to keep up the troop strengths to en-dike the troubles. We might even see a conscription for the regular troops or at least the national guard." Weeping without shame as he had always been open about his emotions, the man wrapped his arms around the woman he loved enough to be married with her and let loose the body shaking sobs that showed he knew they would most likely not make it out of this mess alive and whole.

After a half hour during which they both cried themselves out, they wiped their faces and climbed into the shower together to get cleaned up for a long night of dodging harm and shooting back at shadows that even Hetty wouldn't be able to see coming. After they had dried off, they dressed in the most sturdy combat clothes they had and put on the plethora of knives, guns, grenades and flak armor they could while still being mobile. Once fully prepared, they picked up their phones and each listened to the customized messages they had received. Recorded by Eric Beale a while back, the messages told them how to call-in to OSP for the recovery meeting date when they would get their orders.

After logging on to the NCIS-OSP server to confirm they had gotten the 'Noah's Ark' recall message, they took the time to recover and pile up everything that could help long term survival in a lawless country and brought it down to their professionally built wartime shelter in the basement, under the 4-car garage that was attached to the house. After they did two passes around their home to make sure all the usable stuff was in the bunker, they brought down their tradable valuables to the storage lockers in the normal part of the basement. As they were more free with their hands now, they called their mothers, warning them to pack to come live here, all four together for the foreseeable future. After giving the most minimal explanations, the couple walked the house one last time to lock down the window shutters and doors, upped the security system to almost-lethal level then exited through the inner door that accessed the enclosed secure garage. They took both cars in case they got orders that would separate them later on or, more probably, one car got damaged so badly they would need the spare at hand to escape with their lives and supplies.

About three hours later in the mid-evening, both older women would arrive with packed cars and use a set of special keys with microchips and radio frequency tags to unlock the heavy-duty locks on the garage's single panel up-swing door to have access to the secured emplacement. They would use the night to watch the news for signs of what triggered the national melt-down as they took their emergency packs to make themselves a semi-permanent lodging. As the scribbled note on the fridge door had said, "The entire country was flushing itself down the crapper at F-1 race car speeds; keep the house locked down, have a gun & knife on your belt and NEVER answer the door to someone you don't personally know." The two scared, anxious parents would follow the instructions from their children and hope they were contacted before dawn to at least know they lived and on the way back.

{ SQ } - { This can't end well } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 03:28am

East America; 20:28pm

West America; 17:28pm

Eric Beale was having an out-of-body experience. Not in a spiritual way, not from getting drunk, stoned or sedated for surgery. No, he was hearing his own accursed voice coming out of his cellphone with a string of code, a time and authorization password to log into the NCIS-OSP telephony server to confirm he had been made aware of the activation of THE worse protocol in the arsenal of NCIS. Well, the worse that they could emit while still having a semblance of a country or some small measure of society to save and protect. If multiple nuclear strikes or a pandemic-grade bio-strike happened, nothing they had would recover from that type of a mess anyways so no protocols had been established for them. It would be survival of the fittest followed by survival of the most cohesive groups. Good organization and plentiful supplies didn't give you diddly-squat when there was no loyalty, reliability or trust to be had inside a community. So it was those groups held by family loyalty, religious creed or just a strong-man or charismatic type of leader that would do well and pick up the well tended supplies that teams without cohesion or stability had hoarded then fought over until they self-destructed.

Although, in the current situation, they weren't all that far from dog-eat-dog anyways.

Raising his eyes to watch his girlfriend of almost a year, Nell Jones, seated across the table from him, he wondered what her reaction would be. She was NCIS but still had many contacts in the NSA and there was a chance that this specific agency would try to strong-arm her back into their service if the situation was grave enough over several months. Passed an entire year and Eric would bet that they would try to have sister agencies like NCIS closed and folded into either them or Homeland Security to cut down the administrative levels and have less directors redundantly deciding the same decisions about the same stuff as was the case presently. The kind of separate jurisdictions and virtual legality fences that were endemic of the Washingtonian way of management would never survive against prolonged hostile action directly inside US territory. Especially with the government's own bureaucracy already viewed as the cause of the problems as so many millions of citizens thought.

Eric and Nell knew the classified surveys very well. They had to refer to them when preparing the monthly threat assessment cartography for Hetty upon which they indicated all the hate groups, criminal gangs and foreign agitators. The number of white supremacists, fanatical religious cults and heavily armed, bunkered 'sovereign citizen' militias had exponentialized since Eric had begun working for NCIS in LA almost a decade ago.

Nell often told him and Hetty, in the privacy of the armory when it was empty, that her NSA contacts had also never thought such a radical increase in the domestic levels of hate-mongering, nation dismantling rhetoric and weapons trafficking would occur anytime before the 2050's. They were seeing stats that resembled the numbers in poor African and Arabic nations far too closely for comfort at any level of either agencies. It was at the point that even the damned CIA was having to resort to open bribery and threats of black helicopters paying people a visit at night to get information out of some sectors of the actual USA itself! In their own backyard!

Nell looked up from her phone into the worried green eyes of her best male friend and tried to effect a smile to comfort him. It came out as more of a grimace, which he nodded at, acknowledging that there was no making this situation better.

They were both at Nell's apartment, in a rather ordinary district of LA since she wasn't a superstar and couldn't afford luxury. Thankfully, the devastating wildfires of late 2017 had caused so much damages that several large tracts of Los Angeles had to be leveled and then rebuilt, thus creating a lot of new housing that wasn't mega-mansions or shuttered luxury condo towers. Nell's building was only a year old and not completely rented out yet, so it was rather quiet and private. They could have a barbecue on the patio and be the only tenants active on the face of the edifice at this point of the day.

The two friends had been given the Friday off by Hetty so they came here last evening to spent a cozy, intimate, long 3 day weekend before going back to OSP on Monday morning. While they hadn't been in the field to suffer the gas attack like Sam, Marty, Kensi and Anna, they had seen it first hand then served as their virtual lifelines while they recovered in the hospital's quarantine chambers. Eric and Nell might have been physically safe and fine, their minds and emotions were anything but. Even Mosley had been worried about them all week, and that was saying something as the woman wasn't exactly close to either of them like Hetty was. Still, the Assistant-Director had not only agreed to their furloughs, she had seemed satisfied about it too.

Anyways, the two friends had thought they would have a quiet period to decompress and purge the buffers of all the crapulence they had witnessed in the last few months and now...

No such luck.

Giving the flat a cursory look, the friends convened that since they both lived in rather ordinary apartments without much clutter, it would be easy to set up Nell's flat in lock-down then go over to Eric's place to do the same before heading out to OSP office right away. Even though their call-to-muster was set for somewhere 48 hours later, they would be needed much before that. They were part of the planning group and, despite nobody knowing it except a few high-level directors and AD's, they also held the keys and codes to several caches of supplies, weapons and data vaults scattered around the greater Los Angeles area so as to decentralize NCIS operatives and make the system harder to take out. Having multiple targets to attack was a pain, and each location could field mobile units to support or succor the others at need since each bunkered building had a large garage with a full mechanic station and fuel depot to feed 8 cars for a month. Instinctively, Eric and Nell both knew that the bolt-holes were gonna get un-shuttered tonight and probably never close down again.

Riley's evening gets really bad

(Alice Cooper – Poison)

Western Africa; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 05:15am

East America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 22:15pm

West America; Friday 18th of December, 2020; 19:15pm

Stanford township, cheap 2-star motel

Silicon Valley, California, USA

After taking a long slow time to eat their food and watch the news stories unfolding about their erstwhile mark and the web of corruption radiating out of the World Power Project (WPP), the team had wound down for the evening. Since their person of interest was out of the country and he wasn't a criminal or terrorist, there were no plans to follow him up north. It wasn't as if he were an urgent target to be neutralized at all costs like Murdoch, for example.

Jack was out for a walk in the chilly evening air and possibly a beer at a student bar just to pass some of their useless down time until they had linkup tonight. Bozer was out shopping for some travel snacks, a few miscellany they needed for the trip and Mac's bottle of ibuprofen was running empty so he would get a new one too. Angus had already clocked-out and should stay asleep until around 22:30pm when he would wake up to eat his dinner and participate in the call to HQ. If he were out sick, Matty would probably insist he get to their usual hospital the moment he got back to LA. Not that Riley thought that idea was all bad. She liked Mac, he was a good steady friend to her and his recurring brain issues were becoming worrisome for all of them.

Riley frowned as she set her two laptops and three cellphones, two of which were burners, on the rickety table with a wired networking hub, a signal blocker/scrambler, a solid mini parabolic antenna the size of a dinner plate and finally a custom-built device created by one of her tech-head buddies per her exacting specifications.

Riley grit her teeth in frustration at the one big limitation she had; parts. She could program the hell out of anything as long as the physical device existed already but she could not build it from scratch. Assemble chips on a motherboard yes, when the proper slots were already present on the circuit panel to be fitted with the necessary parts, but she couldn't mix metals, plastics and crystals to create her own chips or circuits. She had studied, by herself mostly, a lot of mathematics and some basic electronics and electrical systems but she was above all a coder, a software geek, not a hardware builder like some of her friends could do. If she had a catalog of parts, devices and apps, she could build a custom system from that but not go any deeper. It wasn't usually a limitation on her job or a problem during Phoenix missions, but today she felt as if she was playing catch-up.

The research Bozer and her had done during the last three days had come back to haunt her in a bad way. She was now certain she knew who had hacked her, and if she was right, she was in hot water.

Lucas Andrew Wolenczak.

The little 16 year old guy they were trying to contact. At first, she had made the same mistake that everybody did when they encountered the name and face of the teenaged genius; she put him in a category and subliminally ignored the rest of what he was. She first saw his exceptional medical qualifications and blinded herself to his cybernetics and programming abilities. And those were damned good, too! The number of mathematics, programming and hardware building diplomas at his name were almost scary, but when you added the chemistry, pharmacology, neurology and psychiatry training on top of it all...

Well, lets just say it painted a portrait of somebody she didn't really want to mess with if her team could avoid it. Riley herself always preferred working in the shadows, hidden deep in the anonymity of the Dark Web and shielded by her bot-net. Against this guy, those tactics would only work so long before he caught up to her and her tricks.

Why?

Because the teen understood the circuits, chip-sets and wires at a fundamental level from the atoms up in a manner that the vast majority of coders and hackers like herself were never trained to do. With limited money, not much space and having a rocky-road relationship with her mother in the years after Jack had left them because of that misunderstanding... Well, she just didn't have the opportunities or chance to go deep into the hardware part of the systems she used to hack and splice her way through to her goals and even working with Phoenix hadn't really changed that. Sure, she understood the principal concepts and she had increased her technical knowledge of the physical components, but the 3 years she spent in super-max jail in isolation cells hadn't helped to keep her edge anywhere what it should be today.

Pursing her lips in concentration, the 27 year old woman began to connect all the devices to the wired hub, then the scrambler and then the secret device with the antenna connecting to that little toy but not the hub itself to complete her private network. It was time to test her theory to confirm that she understood what the blasted little bugger at the other end had done to her team's gear. She booted all the devices, starting with her official laptop and phone, then the second CPU followed by the two burn phones. As the machines did their boot-up routines, her 'autonomous analytics' box perceived, scanned, and decoded the signals going through the wires and airwaves between the connected items. After that, the analysis & decryption software inside said box sent the report by airwaves, through the antenna, to the Internex where it would lodge in a phantom dead-drop bot until she recovered it for usage.

Picking up the cardboard box on the floor, she opened it and pulled out the cheap Best Buy family grade laptop she had Bozer buy for her an hour ago and booted it with just the firmware OS. The next ten minutes were spent waiting as the ordinary device loaded everything. She was humming a tune in her head, looking in the far away city lights through the window near the front door as she patiently took the time to mentally organize her response if this proved to be what she thought it was. When the Microsoft Surface CPU made a cheesy 'ding' sound to warn it had finished its initialization, she configured the web browser and email account then went to the Dark Web, to a personal 'unlogged' site, to access her kit of hacking tools so she could download them and finish prepping the machine to her tastes.

After an entire hour of preparation, she could finally access the report the analytics box had prepared as it scanned her other gear. And – Hot Damn! – they were screwed so hard it wasn't funny! When she reported this tonight, Matty would want her head on a pike!

Western Africa; 06:48am

East America; 23:48pm

West America; 20:48pm

"That bad, eh?" asked a soft voice from afar, startling her out of her funk. Swiveling her head around in a panic at the surprising sounds, she finally found the source of her interruption. Aiming narrowed brown eyes full of fury at the smirking blond brat sitting in her blind angle on the thickly cushioned wingback chair near the room's bathroom door, she made a vaguely threatening obscene gesture at his grinning face.

Not impressed by her fiery temper he knew so well, MacGyver wore an even bigger smirk as he stood up to come near the table and look over the assembled devices, wires and paper printouts that were spitting out of the compact traveling laser printer stashed out of the way on one of the unused chairs. Standing well out of reach from his vengeful colleague lest she swat him a good one, the young man was looking around the setup with a frown, trying to comprehend the reality that his addled, recovering brain didn't want to engage with.

Riley was now the one with a wide appreciative smirk as her friend made a nice figure, clad as he was, only in his thin dark blue plaid lounge pants, shirtless, barefoot and all mussy-haired from sleep, his green eyes still glassy from the brain-searing migraine he had suffered. She made a show of ogling his chest as he stood there and it took him almost a whole minute to realize what was going on. Blushing and smirking at the same time, the young man flexed his arms comically to get his female friend a chance to laugh and de-stress from the coming teleconference with HQ later that evening.

Riley had a predatory grin as she bent down to pick up the piled up printouts. Straightening up again, she asked her friend "Are you recovered from your migraine? You seem better than earlier when we returned from the University Hospital. Maybe you could even help with my little problem, eh?" she asked while trying to discretely push a pile of sheets on the tabletop towards him.

Angus sat on one of the dingy unpadded chairs near the table, shrugging as he did. Laying his crossed arms on the tabletop, he answered "I woke up to use the toilet and realized that I didn't feel the whole world spinning around me, so I tried to eat a bit. I warmed up the beef soup in the microwave on my side of the moving partition and it stayed down easy enough, so I was wondering about eating the rest of my food when I remembered you had a problem on your hands. I came to see but you were deep in the reports so I just sat aside and kinda spaced-out in the chair by the bathroom until I heard your 'expressions' of dismay." Smirking brattily, he quipped "Do you know how cute you are, when you try to incinerate stuff with your eyes?"

The young woman snorted and shot back "Try keeping it cool when it's your ass on the line! I can feel my butt warming up just at the thought of the thrashing Matty's gonna give me for letting us all get hacked like we did. It's not like she can blame Jack or Wilt for this!"

Laughing out softly, Mac reached out to put a supportive hand on the girl's shoulder and give her a gentle squeeze. "Don't worry, Ri, Matty won't tan your butt; she'll tell Jack to do it. He's your 'daddy' isn't he, since he dated your mom way back when? Should be 'bout time he took his job seriously!" he finished as he quickly got off the chair, racing back to his side of the suite, slamming the sliding wall shut to protect himself.

Blinking in surprise, Riley had a two second lag to hear and understand the guy's joke at her expense before she jumped up in hot pursuit. "Get back here, Mac! I'll show you who YOUR daddy is! And it ain't bloody Jack 'I be macho-man' Dalton, I can promise you that!" Punching lightly the cheap plywood panel that refused to move, she grumped aloud some nasty stuff then turned around to concentrate again on her impending date with an irate boss. Hearing the blond buffoon clowning around on the other side of the wall wasn't helping her concentration but it did raise her spirits a bit because it meant that he really was feeling better. Now, if only she could find a way to spin this situation so that she walked out of it alive and healthy... With Matty-the-Hun, you rarely knew in advance how things would turn out, even though she had proven to be decent enough.

{ SQ } - { Friendly gathering } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 07:37am

East America; 00:37am (midnight)

West America; 21:37pm

Wilt Bozer came into the rooms by the side Jack and Riley used as he thought Mac was still asleep and he didn't want to wake him up rudely. Although he had given the other man plenty of hard wake-ups over the years as part of pranks, this time, with his friend's health not being at its best, it wouldn't be funny. Entering the shared room, he saw the mess of electronics, cables and reams of paper covered in Riley's untidy red & blue scribbles. The young woman herself was standing up sideways at the back of the room, leaning her hip against the small kitchenette counter as she sipped some cheap motel coffee while the microwave buzzed lazily as it warmed its contents.

The girl must have been far gone into her virtual world since she didn't react to Bozer coming into the room with his arms loaded in purchases, quite a few for her, in fact. Hackers have this habit of snacking on stuff to keep their hands and thoughts working in synch and Riley was no exception to this unwritten rule of the profession. Deciding to make some noise while he was out of the danger zone in case she reacted badly, Bozer dropped the bags on the end of Jack's bed carelessly so as to bring his friend out of her dreams. It worked as planned; blinking owlishly, Ri turned around towards the noise with a frown on her face and acerbic comment ready to zing out at need.

"Oh! Bose. Sorry for welcoming you back with that face." She opened with a smirk. "I thought you were Mac. The green-eyed wunderkind got out of bed feeling better and decided to spread the feeling to anybody in range. Made me want to punt him right back to La-La-Land."

Laughing in honest amusement, Wilt nodded vigorously as he separated the items into four neat piles to be recovered by their eventual owners. "Yup, that's my friend Mac! He such a sweet, caring dude! And then he opens his trap and you wanna sock him one!" Snickering through his task, the black male asked out for the gory details of her encounter with their sickened teammate.

Groaning in dismay, Riley shook her head. "Nothing worth repeating. I was just stressing out because of our call-in later and the big lug razzed me for it. I will, however, be getting back at him. I just wouldn't be a good caring friend if I didn't." she told with a playful smirk that promised retaliation.

Wilt was all for it; MacGyver was like his brother from different parents but the guy could use a little tough love from time to time. For his own good, of course. Nothing like a little 'natural consequences' to complete the sorely lacking education of a young man in this day and age! Eh eh eh!

As Riley took out the remains of her evening meal from the radioactive death-trap on the counter and Bozer was ordering the many different bills on which he had written the names of the people for whom the stuff was bought, the partition wall opened fully to let Angus walk through, fully dressed again with his hair less messy (nice try) and a more healthy complexion to his features. Smiling gamely at his two friends, the SIE (Survivational Improvisation Expert, ©Wilt Bozer 2016) walked into the shared space with more assurance and steadiness than earlier. Sitting on the bed next to Wilt, he began to collect and organize his part of the supplies.

Taking his receipts from his childhood friend, Mac was itemizing the collection of thingies he had asked for when the door clinked open to let in their team's oldest member. Wearing a large grin and plastic bag filled with extra goodies for the evening and road ahead tomorrow, the Delta Force soldier walked straight to the service counter where he began to put away breakfast food for their early rise and departure the next day. Jack had always had a weird instinct of when things on a mission were gonna start moving quickly and his gut feelings on this were simply not ignored. On just his gut feeling and opinion when he told them, all four adults would have their gear stowed and mobile before going under the sheets in foresight of a cold-start at dawn.

Riley was chewing through the remains of her chicken, salad, rice and potatoes plate with alacrity as Mac went to his side of the suite to fetch the solid part of his dinner so he could eat and dodge getting a resurgence of his migraine from malnourishment. The easy to reheat and consume flatbread pork souvlaki sandwiches with some fries and salad were exactly what he needed to fill both his growling stomach and the empty time before call-in to Phoenix HQ.

Everybody sat themselves on the same side of the table, side-by-side so they could see the monitor and be in the camera's field of scan as well. Matty had told them to all be in the picture when they called her unless they were separated, in which case she expected them to have their own smartphone set to video conference so they could be visible as extra mortises in her own giant monitor. Also, she wanted to be able to convey non-audible, body language signs in case they knew they were being wiretapped or the room was bugged for sound. Her ideas were good so the team had developed a manner to do so without getting tangled up in protocols and regulations while in the field like tonight.

{ SQ } - { Things get worse for everybody } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 08:01am

East America; 01:01am

West America; 22:01pm

The beep from Riley's base-camp setup startled them as it was supposed to be them that called in, not the other way around. This was especially true since one of the jobs Jack had done while walking around was to use a public payphone to call-in at Phoenix to speak with Matty's secretary to give her the code-phrase to signify their comms were compromised and they would need to be careful during their vid-con later. Exchanging looks all around, they made food crumbs and empty containers disappear, as the young woman typed in the codes to decrypt then accept the incoming line.

The image of Mathilda Webber appeared but she wasn't in the usual command room at the Phoenix Foundation HQ. Instead, she seemed to be in the cylindrical, elongated space common to small jet planes for chartered flights. The background noises still coming through the filtration software to clean out the ambiance for the conference quickly confirmed it, especially when the engines revved up to begin pushing the plane on the taxi-way towards the lift-off runway.

Gazing at the four teammates with her deep black eyes that had seen so much death, depravity and betrayals during her duties in the CIA's counter-espionage division, the short middle-aged woman gave all of them a glare that sent cold dread crawling down their backs.

She was nicknamed 'Matty-the-Hun' by a lot more people than just Jack Dalton. And if THOSE kinds of people thought fitting to call her like that, then they better listen 'or else' would happen to them.

"Alright, settle down kids! I'll make this easy to understand for everybody, even you Jack." She began with her common biting sarcasm towards her well known co-worker. "Our mission briefing has just taken a nosedive down the crapper and come out the pipe worse than raw tepid sewage. I was part of an emergency vid-con with several of the Directors in the Alphabet-Soup in the early evening. The so-called 'leaders' in Washington DC are all a-quiver with fear and panic at the idea that the US president could literally buy and sell – people – at his convenience without any bother for little things like, let's say, Human Law, Morality, Decency, Good Taste and such."

Taking a deep breath to steady herself while Agent Cage came into the picture from the Jet's rear cargo bay, Matty focused on the gist of her message. "Basically, this situation with Lucas Wolenczak has managed to do what the four previous years or debauchery, calumny and peddling the influence and authority of the Office of the US President to the Russians had not. The Democrats in the Capitol have acquired the smoking gun by which they can now lay official charges of 'felony', 'conspiracy' and 'active complicity' against D. to depose articles of impeachment against him and actually have enough Republicans to support the process actively until it succeeds. The Secretary of Justice has publicly separated himself and his entire department from the Trump Camp and already appointed a Federal Special Prosecutor to work on the case that is emerging. This could create an actual, genuine constitutional crisis in American society and cause the re-thinking of several hundred laws and customs that have accrued over the last two centuries of legislative activity."

Matty paused for a few seconds before continuing "What you need to understand is that the 'timing' of events is what makes it so critical and likely to go down the path of Capharnaum. Trump is the incumbent president; he was elected in 2016 and has won in November 2020 with, again, a very specifically geographically situated minority of the electorate. He got in by the way electoral college voices are counted, not the popular vote. HOWEVER, at this point of December, he is ONLY president-elect, he is not sworn in, that would normally happen in January. Therefore, even amongst the republican party's higher members, there is a thought current that says this is the ideal moment to kick him out, since it wouldn't be an actual 'sitting' president getting arrested by the FBI. Ergo, the reason all DC is twittering with both worry and excitement."

After giving a minute for the gravity of her words to sink in, Matty explained the impact on Phoenix and its ongoing missions. "Given that Trump will most certainly get destituted before he is sworn anew, the DXS (Department of External Services) is now on full lockdown in anticipation of social unrest and possibly the onset of civil war. By joint consensus with the directors of the agencies in charge of managing secret and compartmented intelligence, black ops and anti-terrorism efforts, the Secretary of the Department of Defense has invoked the activation of the 'Noah's Ark' protocol."

Matty's statement was welcome with utter silence like the mental nuclear explosion it was

"I remind you that several thousand Trump allies and observers have predicted all along that if the Big Man was ever toppled by judges or taken out of office by Congress, his base, the grassroots followers in the hotbeds of white supremacy, right-wing ultra-nationalism and christian dominance would rise up and tear apart the entire system. More specifically, they would revolt and wage armed warfare against the hated 'modern leftist liberal values' and all government or cultural institutions that incarnate them. Alongside of this, the country would experience a flareup of separatist movements that seek to split apart the USA to make certain regions, mostly in southern and central states, independent from any control not their own. It is important to note clearly that practically ALL of these movements are motivated by racial and religious dogma as the foundation of their publicly declared 'patriotic' creed."

Agent Samantha Cage added spontaneously "Don't forget that with American culture the way it is, 'patriotism' rhymes with 'guns' and 'violent defense of...' All of these militias and sects fully endorse that method by pushing their members to have guns, bombs, armored trucks and bunkers. None of these groups, even the smallest, will let this situation with Trump getting investigated publicly then destituted and eventually jailed for crimes be resolved in DC, let alone by the courts."

Matty Webber picked up the line "And that is the cause of this problem. I sent out an order for all Phoenix personnel to activate their home security on its highest non-lethal settings and pack any supplies, tools and weaponry they can grab or buy before this hits the fan on Monday morning when people's minds will be back on business rather than the holidays. We got lucky that this broke on a Friday evening so late. At this time, almost nobody of importance will be available to make rash decisions or inflame the masses from a mediatic pulpit. Come Monday at 7:00am, that's gonna change in a bad way. We need all of you to be on war-footing and ready to sail through the storm that's brewing on the horizon."

A voice in the airplane public-address system called out "Director Webber, we have been cleared for take-off and our flight plan to Washington DC was approved with changes from the National Guard. That's a new development, Ma'am. The Guards have issued a general muster and are moving out of their barracks. They are assuming positions around the National Capital and initiating a defensive regulation of the airspace and boating on the Potomac river. The control tower has relayed that DC's police chief has just released a message through the public alert channel that they are putting in place the civil emergency barricades and uniformed officers to re-direct traffic away from the White House, Capitol, Pentagon and about two dozen federal government buildings. The FBI has released a communique by SSA Seely Booth whose head of the Bureau's task force of defensive policing actions around DC in case of insurgency. The FBI has gone to 'Red Alert' standing and is in the process of pooling its people with the Secret Service to insure the safety and serenity of personnel inside federal government buildings so they can process the investigations and legislative meetings without threats."

The pilot paused, the stress and anxiety audible in his voice even to those hearing through the remote linkup. The man wasn't finished with his report. "Madam Director, we have received answers to our flight plan requests from the USAF tower in charge DC's airspace. We have obtained clearance to travel into the National Capital but ONLY because you are DXS Director, and even then, just barely. The National Guard have decided to run interdiction maneuvers around the DC extended perimeter. They want to have us land the jet in Joint Base Anacostia – Bolling under F-15E fighter escort then you will travel through the town's outer districts to the Lake Barcroft facilities via a military motorcade which the Anacostia quarter-master will provide."

Mathilda looked perplexed for a second then asked aloud for the intercom to pick up "What do you mean, Bolling? That place stopped receiving fixed-wing traffic in the early 2000's!"

The pilot responded "It's by command of the DOD ma'am; it comes with the protocols that were activated earlier today. All military command officers and high-ranking agency executives are to be using the Bolling airfield until the National Guard, Secret Service and FBI all concur that the state of civil unrest has abated sufficiently to return to normal functions. As of now, all decisions for the extended DC Metro zone are done by the Capital Alert Status Committee operating out of Bolling, therefore explaining why all the big wigs are supposed to transit by them now, in case they need to meet face-to-face or something like that."

Looking straight into the eyes of the agents assembled on her monitor, Webber answered tersely to the empty air around her so the cabin microphones could pick up her words. "I get the message, pilot. Get us up ASAP, the country's falling apart around us and we don't have time to waste!" Crossing her arms over the top of the table before her, Matty spoke her orders. "You four will get your scrawny asses back to Los Angeles and bunker your houses down for a long winter storm. Pool everything at MacGyver's house and help him and Bozer barricade the place to hold out until you come back from several weeks of mission. The wolves are coming out of their dens, gathering in packs and the Hunt will start in earnest come Monday, maybe even sooner."

Passing a weary hand over her forehead, the black haired woman told them "As soon as all your lodgings and personal belongings are secured enough to survive the imminent societal clusterfuck, I want all four of you to take the same reinforced DXS jet you're already using. Head up north to Vancouver to track down our wayward genius in whatever hole he's dug himself. Your roles will be as bodyguards and survival insurance for him. I can foresee that the new DOJ special counsel will want to debrief him, possibly have him testify before Congress and the senate committees. He needs to stay alive and coherent to do that."

Matty and Samantha sat in the chairs in front of the monitor and tied her seat belt as the warning lights came on to warn them they were going to lift off in less than 60 seconds. After a five minute long pause while the plane shot off the runway, Matty continued issuing orders. "You will be going to Vancouver just the four of you. I need Cage as my own body guard and the rest of Phoenix is in the process of recalling all foreign territory operatives back into US lands so they can be brought home to solidify and defend DXS buildings while covering our critical assets. For the next week at least, that's the lay of the land."

The DXS director made a face before she finished the bad news on her end; "However, you won't be completely alone to protect Lucas Wolenczak. The NCIS is the only agency with manpower to spare for 'external' missions, so they are sending you 4 people to complete an 8 man team so the escort detail can cover all shifts around the clock. The NCIS manager for the Pacific Region has already transferred the files of her chosen agents to us and they will be waiting for you at HQ. You are to be concentrating on the protective aspects of the job while NCIS will focus on the testimony and deposition. It is possible that either the Secret Service or FBI will also send extra manpower to bolster and reinforce your position for a long term duration. At this point, nobody knows what's going to happen or how long it will take."

{ SQ } - { Things get worse for Riley and everybody } - { SQ }

Western Africa; 08:29am

East America; 01:29am

West America; 22:29pm

Not getting any questions from anyone to date, Matty asked "Riley! I need to know just how your team's gear got hacked during the mission so we can avoid it happening again. Skip the technical crap and get to the nuts & bolts of it, we don't have the luxury of time anymore!"

Swallowing passed the lump in her throat, the younger woman tried to smile to hide her anxiety but it came out as a grimace of uncertainty that did nothing to settle the nerves of her director. The explanation that came afterwards did not help calm her either.

"Well, you see, the good news is that I know who hacked us and how, and maybe even why." Riley started hesitantly. "I'm convinced that it happened yesterday in San Francisco when we tried to approach the Wolenbahn office & workshop that is inside the World Bank's Regional Management building. I think we got hit with some automated 'probe, identify & repel' firewalls from the Bank, but also we then got hit by 'ping, track & spoof' spyware from the WEI signal routers when I tried to do a cursory scan to see if I could get info on where the kid was. One thing I found was that WEI has the equivalent of a tel-co's city switchboard center, with enough power pumping through the antennas and wires to blast through anything trying to overpower their broadcasts. Fortunately, the Bank identified us as harmless and ignored us because I didn't scan them actively but the Wolenbahn, however, detected my scans and identified us as hostiles attempting to penetrate their firewalls. That was the moment we got well and truly 'spliced'."

Taking a sip of coffee to steel her nerves, the hacker composed in her head the short & sweet version to pass on to her boss without going geek on her. "Look, the nitty-gritty is this; once WEI's electronics warfare servers, and yes, I would bet my bag of tricks that it's how they're set up, once those machines identified us as enemies, they started pumping a 3-way attack at us. 1- they dumped several thousand virus, malware, junk email and SMS with hostile attachments to monopolize our in/out services. 2- they swept the airwaves to get our cellphone numbers and the mobile IP addresses of any laptops or tablets we had so they could backtrack our origin to hack our home-bases, which they did."

Matty raised a hand imperiously as she barked "Whoa, there girl! Are you telling me that the guy you were sent to find is the one who found you instead? And he knows where you work, and potentially where you live? How the bloody blue blazes did this happen?"

Wincing in misery, Riley replied as politely as she could. "Matty! You have to understand, when I say that office has the equivalent of a telephone company's municipal switching servers, I wasn't kidding or exaggerating! Trying to ping the place was like going against a Rogers Tel-co service hub in LA; the output pouring from the place is scary, even for me! The only other place I ever saw signal strength and multi-channel defenses like that were at the NSA when I hacked them four years ago. I have no idea what WEI is doing in there, but they have juice passing on both directions across several thousand channels like they're running a public smartphone & satellite communications subscription system the way Rogers or Bell do. In fact, that office is like a land-bound Aegis Destroyer, constantly and systematically pinging, tagging, identifying and back-tracking EVERYTHING that comes in its reach. And in the middle of San Fran's financial market, that's a fucking whole lot of crap!"

Bozer placed a hand on Riley's forearm in support,giving her a friendly squeeze to show he was with her. The woman roughly passed a hand through her hair, undoing the complicated style she usually wore. "Sorry about that. It's just... This guy... He's a kid, okay... He's a decade younger than me and he's light years ahead in everything he touches or thinks about! I mean, he's like a 'MacGyver' of material sciences, mathematics, medicine and cybernetics all rolled into another damned blond brat. He's gonna see what we're doing from a thousand miles away and laugh at it right to our faces! Look, Boss, I'm good; you know I am! But not against this kid. He's better, and at a lot more stuff, and unlike a lot of weirdos and psychos we usually go against, he's also incredibly rich, has a couple thousand highly technically competent employees that work for him and about a hundred buildings he can hide stuff and people in. I'm just clueless as to what me, alone, can do against all of Wolenbahn or Wise Apothecary to solve this mess."

Matty's features softened greatly as she understood all too well the feeling Riley was drowning in right now. She felt this way practically every day she worked at the CIA and it had gotten worse when she ascended to lead the Department of External Services. The types of planet-endangering crises she was aware of but couldn't do anything about because of damned budgetary limits or lacking manpower with the required brain-capacity... Yeah, she understood what kind of breakdown Ri was having and she didn't blame her any. The summary files she had read on Wolenczak before making the call showed her clearly just what kind of 'major-league heavy-weight' she was telling her team to rub against. She had expected something like this reaction and wasn't angry or disappointed by it. God knew, she'd panicked the first time she saw the kid genius's actual 'classified' files from the Secret Service.

Speaking in a gentler tone than her normally nasal, aggressive voice, Mathilda told her employee, and friend as well: "Calm yourself Riley, and drink your coffee while it's hot. It'll settle your nerves. Take your time, girl. We'll all be there when your ready."

The team's professional hacker nodded thankfully and took the following minutes to stabilize her thoughts, trying to recover from the mini break-down she had. She was stressed, tired, frustrated at her own limitations and then getting 'Noah's Ark' dumped on her when she wasn't in her own town was pretty much too-freaking-much for her to handle alone anymore. Thankfully, she realized she wasn't alone anymore; Jack was back in her life, as were her mother and biological father. Bozer and Mac weren't bad friends either, and certainly useful in a crunch. Now, all she had to do was finish this briefing and sleep all through the nigh time plane ride to Los Angeles.

"Sorry, about that, Matty." Riley apologized tiredly as she rubbed both hands over her face in a gesture that spoke volumes about her frustrations. "Is I told you, there are 3 things that went wrong when we got hacked. 1- we got a multi-channel service denial attack. 2- we got our mobile comms ID'd and tracked back home. Now we get to number 3. That's what MacGyver saw when he thought I had hacked his phone and told it to synch with his laptop back at home. The little bastard Wolenczak has managed to take the original service packs from the factories that make the phones, tablets and laptops and open the source code. He then placed 'spywares' and remote controlled 'bot modules' in the packs before recompiling and setting them in outgoing servers connected to his WiFi, Blue Tooth, cell signal, wired signals and the firewalls in his defensive arrays."

Riley sounded defeated as she confirmed their fears. "What it means is that the moment you get into contact with a Wolenbahn controlled network, you get a 'spoofed' signal telling you that your device's firmware, the OS, has new emergency updates to fix critical flaws and so the 'service pack' will come in and install itself silently, without ever asking for permission because the original manufacturer's priority override codes are in it. Once in place, the 'spliced' pack will take over all of your comms management and Personal Identification Numbers, turning the machine into an autonomous spy. At that point, the pirated modules will activate your synchronization function, if you set it up already, to link with your other devices and spread itself to the rest of your devices. If you have a VPN encryption or any ciphering keys or log-in management apps, they will get logged, tagged and copied then sent back to the WEI central for analysis and exploitation so they can sweep, scan and copy all of your encrypted data traffic without you ever finding out you've been wiretapped."

Ri added blithely in a dead voice "The very worse thing though, is that the firmware module Wolenczak downloads into your devices actually employs your own auto-update, synch and automated virus-scan apps to camouflage its activity as being normally scheduled benign activity. The pirated OS packs even have the gall to overwrite your Internex or telephony access provider's logs to hide all the bandwidth used so you don't have a ginormous bill because of the spliced mods. In fact, the damned spyware even has the ability to remotely access and control each and every function to such a level that it would be more accurate to describe it as being a complete replacement OS than just a limited service-pack with a few 'extras' in it."

MacGyver asked the poignant question that was on everybody's mind at this point: "How the Hell did this little guy do this at his age? And how do we fix it?"

Taking a deep breath, the young woman answered blithely "I can only guess at 'HOW' he did it. But for the removal, you need to process the devices in a clean room barricaded inside layered Faraday cages and use solid-state archives supplied by the manufacturer directly. It has to be a 'scrapping' low-level format with a clean install of the genuine legitimate Operating System, without any add-on's. Any attempt to use the web by airwaves or landlines will see a small virus integrated to the BIOS, clock and GPS chip of the infected device hijack your request for an emergency reboot with full wipe of the machine and direct the signal to a dummy switching server instead of your official ISP or manufacturer. Basically, every time you ask the device for something, it will do it, but through a pirate version of the apps and will send a record of it back to its 'master' hub somewhere in the depths of the Dark Web, on an 'un-logged' site that we won't be able to access, identify or even just track."

Their female techie finished despondently "Honestly people, against this kind of tech capacity, if you really want to take on Lucas Wolenczak as an enemy, you might as well ask Jack to take over as the mission leader and do this completely off-grid. It's pretty much the only way to accomplish something against WEI without being spotted and betrayed by your own tech from a thousand miles before you reach the teenaged blond runt's position. And then you have to deal with the poisons, acids and explosives he'll have made to welcome you with."

Bozer chimed in before the director could, saying glibly "Well, then! It's a good thing we ain't going in there as his enemies, isn't it?"

Samantha Gage replied to his comment "Yeah, for him it's good. But does he know we don't want to be his enemies, and will he believe us when we tell him?"

Matty Webber's cellphone rang with a ringtone she had never programmed in it. Looking at the device as if it had betrayed her Bloodline, she read the small TXT message that came in. It said simply:

"You would be surprised, dear Ms Webber, what I can believe, when truthful proof is presented to me honestly and openly. L. , PhD, MD, DP."

Raising her eyes to her team on the monitor, she deadpanned "Well, people, we're fucked not just a small bit. Our dear Doctor Wolenczak is quite obviously on the line with us. He has just 'texted' me a little love note. He's aware of our attempts to contacts him and willing to receive our proposal. I'll write something formal and send it to all of you in CC when I reply to him. Until then, you have your marching orders under 'Noah's Ark' protocol and they haven't changed."

She closed the line, leaving quite perplexed teammates to figure out what came next.

{ SQ } - { PREVIEW ch.6 } - { SQ }

In the next chapter We will see further preparations across the USA for the coming upheavals of society and government. The Agencies and Military branches roll out their men while trying to protect their families and homes from the unrest that is already starting to hit some cities in the Deep South.

Nathan Bridger and the SeaQuest rendez-vous to begin service as they wait to be called for their true mission when the UEO Fleet Assets Command calls on them. The ship gets an emergency influx of extra crew and supplemental equipments that had not been expected, bringing her to a capable warfare standing despite all the negative budgetary previsions since her entry into drydock 2 years ago.

Lucas Wolenczak will re-order his many plans for his necessary medical treatments for his legs and continuing health problems, taking new 'allied' external players and their resources into account.

President Trump, from the Oval Office inside a bunkered White House, will publicly light a Fire that will never be extinguished. His speech will empower his grassroots supporters, pushing them into starting a Christian Holy War for carrying out a New Inquisition against all Heathens and Non-Believers that will scourge the Land of the Free. That appeal to the rawest tenets of American Exceptionalism, to the basest arguments of white supremacy and the worst prejudices of religious domination in the Name of God will work to erase any and all Freedom for generations and cover more countries too, if the worshipers can manage it.