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.

7. Chapter 7

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 } - { WARNINGS & NOTES } - { SQ }

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

For this chapter, time stamps will have America's West & East coast hours.

Because the locale will be used a lot in the rest of the story, I have spent over 20 hours creating a blueprint for the Deeks house in Open Office Drawing to know where things are and how they are placed. It was a fun process, but not something to do with every bit of real estate given how time consuming it is.

This is a very long chapter, over 55,000 words or around 84 pages; have a coffee and snacks on hand while reading if you do it in one sitting.

WHAT IF LUCAS SAID 'NO'?

SEVENTH CHAPTER; Kill! Maim! Kill! Rape! Kill!

Teenagers are not patient by nature

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 14:42pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 11:42am

Daleminton Hotel, suite #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Special Supervisory Agent (SSA) Albert Isaacs of the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) was not in a good mood anymore. It was bad enough that he had to work on a Saturday morning, but that it was the last Saturday before Christmas annoyed him even more. But that was the life; when you work in policing and counter-terrorism, you learn the very first week that criminals and foreign enemies don't take holidays, especially not those in your culture. On the other hand, he couldn't blame the little guy he was meeting with. The international mess in progress wasn't his fault, and this meeting had been planned over 30 hours ago, when he first set foot in the country.

Isaacs' superiors at the CSIS regional office had decided that a mid-level SSA was sufficient to connect with the teenager, shake his hand, offer their services for protection, and make certain that The World Bank's darling cyberneticist doesn't get kidnapped or attacked and damaged beyond capacity to work his virtual miracles. Quite honestly, Albert didn't think that his bosses had taken seriously the status or importance the kid had in the eyes of many people, especially his medical capacities after the way he woke up a coma patient in Stanford a month ago. Nor had the high bosses understood just what the rich, well equipped teenager could do in his own defense, despite the fact that 'Wise Apothecary & Chemists' had been on several watch-lists for almost 9 decades due to its innumerable suspicious movements of medical equipments, exotic chemicals and live biological reagents. Then too, his own creation 'Wolenbahn Electronics' had raised urgent red flags with the cyber-crimes divisions of CSIS, the RCMP and the Canadian Military's cyberwar division in the last two years, since his father almost crippled him.

Coughing nervously to hide the true depth of his discomfort from the people in the dining room around him, SSA Isaacs leafed through the printed pages of the police report and the matching paramedic report. The images printed out from the Daleminton's security cameras in the lobby showed a clear case of self-defense so that was 'case closed' as a recommendation from everybody who looked at it. The case of the 'fake cop' who came afterward was even cleaner since the crud was still alive and breathing, already in the depths of RCMP custody downtown. With a live perp in hand, nobody was going to press charges against a fully licensed pharmacologist / psychiatrist for having sedatives on his person to help get somebody in crisis back under control, thus making it also a dead-end. All that was left was the interrogation of the criminal, but they already had the answers, so it didn't matter anymore.

Soft noises came from the end of the glass table near the cheerfully blazing wood stove as the adolescent prodigy shifted his weight in his chair as he tried to make the pain in his legs subside without recourse to more chemical medications before dinner. The boy had just sat himself sideways, facing towards the asian man besides him, and elongated his legs to rub his thighs and calves to massage the cramping muscles. Mister Ken Izu Tah had arrived at 11:15am with his colleague Mister Joseph Mercy Aylmer, attorneys at law, and taken over the proceedings with the alacrity of their profession. Not that much was happening besides teenaged grumblings and a thick, tall wall being raised, stone by bloody stone, around the clearly upset, defensive boy's mind and secrets. Albert had arrived at 10:20am and been very successfully blockaded by the kid himself, unlike most adult criminals who tried all the time but couldn't actually manage it. Whoever thought teaching psychiatry and psychology to this kid was a good idea needed their head examined, fast! And not by the boy, since he wasn't normal to begin with! Also, where in tarnation did the brat find the time to learn about laws and police procedures, anyways?

Was he addicted to bloody 'Law & Order', 'Crossing Jordan' or 'Rizzoli & Isles' or something...?

Well, no matter. Now that the lawyers - because yes, there were several! - were involved, any chance to get an easy, clear answer went out the door. And the kid had both a criminalist and a contract experts on retainer, as well as the entire legal team of WAC's back in Buffalo in New York State. He had received an email on his cellphone a few minutes ago, to warn him of just how big and well financed the young male's defense team was. His mother's law firm in Buffalo was only one third the size of Wise Apothecary's litigation department, and had less than one twelfth of the financial assets. Taking Lucas face-on in an open court battle was not something his supervisors wanted; the tribunal fees alone could drain their budget enough to jeopardize several investigations scheduled for 2021. The best bet they had was the long-shot play; try to be polite and tolerant enough with the kid's very understandable anger and lack of patience in such a way that it made him feel like opening up a bit.

Yeah... When all else fails, pray real hard...

Albert was a father; his two sons were both 13 & 16 years old, so he could tell you from personal experience that teenagers were not made of pure patience and wholesome understanding, not all the time by any means. However, this boy was breaking all the typical molds that kids were based on. He was above and beyond intelligent, more educated than three college professors rolled into one, and had enough creativity to make any sane human of any age afraid of the results should something bad enough trigger him into a state of burn-it-all rage. Canada, the North American Confederation, and the UEO at large were all lucky that the youth's usual motus operandi was to fold back into his own self, retreating to his own plot of land behind high walls, instead of attacking relentlessly with all the methods he could whelm into bloody warfare. There were rumors the kid had paid mercenaries to clean up problems since he had bought his big homestead in Buffalo, and symptoms of Dark Web manipulations since he reached Stanford have run rampant.

The dead body in the forensics van and the menial crud in RCMP custody both reminded him clearly that his unwilling host had little reason to collaborate, let alone give up secrets and personal thoughts.

Sigh! Well, he had to try something.

Faced with the stormy flint-blue gaze of the mysterious Doctor Wolenczak, the SSA was again taken aback by the intensity of the deep visceral rage he could see brewing inside the young man. When exactly will he have suffered so much that he no longer considered himself bound by the laws and morality of human society? Isaacs prayed silently that it didn't happen while he was in the same town to witness the event. Biochemists made frighteningly cruel opponents, with all the mutative reagents they tended to spray around. After another deep sigh, Albert set aside the paper reports from the police and ambulance drivers as they didn't say anything different than the CCTV recordings had shown.

"Doctor Wolenczak, thank you for welcoming me in your home." Albert started as he pointed at the empty coffee cup on the table besides the pile of reports. He had rarely had good coffee like this, even during meetings with the bigwigs at the British Columbia Parliament, when the ministers in charge of security and civil defense needed to be briefed. "I won't waste your time by reviewing the events of this morning. The municipal cops and RCMP have done their jobs admirably, and the CCTV systems have recorded everything that CSIS might need for its own archives. We will transmit the afferent reports to your lawyers here, in San Francisco and Buffalo by the end of Monday evening. Now though, if you don't mind, I have a few questions that I need to ask so that my agency can decide how to best protect you during your stay in our country."

"Is that necessary? I did not believe that Doctor Wolenczak was under imminent or systematic threat from anyone on this territory. Have you received any indications or intel chatter to the contrary?" Asked Mister Aylmer in his usual bland tone, accompanied by an equally bland smile.

"Humph!" Lucas gestured vaguely with his right hand dismissively. "He must mean what I sent their border guards and police agencies about the Khunestade Church in Tampa and the quatuor of mercenaries they were paid to send after my pasty white hide. Lawrence never did have any taste in what low-lives he hired." The boy took up his own coffee for a sip, since his brunch had been set back well beyond any reasonable delay. A gut full of pills did not in any ways constitute nourishment.

Isaacs made a vague gesture with his right hand, neither dismissive nor affirmative, before giving the standard non-answer in the domain of activity he worked in. "There is always chatter and rumors on the wires, and human intel coming out of DC these days is weird, like it's scrambled in a food processor before reaching us. We know that a lot of references to Doctor Wolenczak are concerning the case against his father and mother who were both arrested deep in the past night, and are on their ways to UEO territory, at New Cape Quest in Florida. We also know that some rumors coming out of the White House are making less and less sense, as if the people inside the 'box' have all been gagged, but not enough to keep the occasional grunt, or scream, from passing outwards through the filters. We have had confirmed that the entire policing & military apparatus of the USA has scaled up to full civilian defense standing and several terrorist attacks have happened on the eastern coast already. The american public news channels had them on display this morning for all to see. Beyond that, we have not seen targeted chatter about your client. But, given that he was on CNN International News yesterday evening and that was seen by a few BILLION people since, well, there's a lot of mentions about him suffusing the context of many conversations that we are following avidly."

An amused – "snort!" – emanated from the teenager as he stood from his chair to walk in circles between his seat and the bathroom door to try altering the blood flow in his legs to stop the cramps. Damned temperature was getting colder of late, and he just couldn't seem to get his lower limbs to stop aching or seizing hard on him at the worst moments. "You sound like a bunch of old grannies listening to their soap operas all day. I wonder if the taxpaying public knows just how much fun your job is?" The adolescent asked, truly amused despite his acerbic tones that hid his real feelings quite well.

"Well, it's a bit more involved than that. We do have operatives in the field risking their lives to get this intel; it's not just wiretaps and channel surfing from a plush office." The CSIS agent countered mildly, only getting a small, tight smirk in return from the adolescent 'person of interest'.

"I am well aware of what wired intel and human intel require and implicate, Agent Isaacs. I wouldn't have gotten so high in the hierarchy of suppliers for The World Bank or the UEO Fleet if I was just as blessedly ignorant of 'real world' necessities like the average civilian in the streets. I didn't manage to sell so many programs and computers to those kinds of people just because I'm cute and have dimples when I smile." the boy said while sending his way a radiant megawatt smile that shone like pure innocence made flesh.

Albert Isaacs had interrogated many dozens of people in his career, and he could tell by now that the kid's external façade would rarely show what was really inside of him at the time. The separation between his inner thoughts and outer shell was almost total; a terrifying skill to have as an adult, but to have developed it at such a young age... If the kid went into the intel community or organized crime, the country he lived in would go down the pipes fast. And God have mercy on them if he went into elected politics; he could lie in front of the cameras and never get caught just because of his plastic-faced demeanor and utterly logical manipulation of facts and causal chains. Not to mention that the ability to smile so well that it transformed his whole face and even reached his eyes like that, like he really was honest and earnest in his expression... Yeah, this kid in politics... Or as a preacher in a church... No! Not good ideas! Keep the runt away from them!

"Regardless of your – awareness – of how the intel and policing communities work, I do believe that CSIS will be keeping somewhat closer tabs on you in the coming days. Just to be certain any other accidents like this morning don't happen anymore. We wouldn't want your refugee claims or investor immigrant processes to hit hurdles along the ways, would we? You have my card and the list of coordinates in case you need to speak with our regional office in Vancouver; make certain to call and ask for help, instead of plunging head-first into trouble. What you did today was on the outer limits of justifiable, and only then because nobody is particularly interested in asking questions, or having this aired out in public. The next guy you cut may have family or friends that disagree and won't let go of the case that easily." the spy said in serious warning tones.

The bland pseudo-innocent look he got in return made his blood run cold as he wondered how many men had given this kid warnings that they should have heeded themselves. If the police reports and NSA surveillance files on the kid were to be believed, he had personally killed over a dozen times and ordered / paid for close to a hundred deaths in the last six to seven years. Not that 99% of those were any more than Dark Web rumors; people who disappeared around the Wise Apothecary installations didn't tend to reappear later on, and the Wolenbahn workshops had rapidly acquired a similar reputation amongst the criminalized elements of society.

Mister Mercy asked in his urbane, cultivated tone "And what of our fake cop from earlier? What was his story? We weren't told yet. If you have that information already, I would appreciate being able to close the file before dinner."

Shrugging, the CSIS agent answered dismissively. "It was a case of bad timing on our good Doctor's part. The hotel foreman he had just knifed was a small time hoodlum who used vacant rooms in the hotel to hold illegal gambling games, sell drugs or small arms and pimp out anybody in the biz. The young policeman who terrorized the hotel lobby was his partner-in-crime since high school. He had tried to attend the local police academy but was kicked out for psychological issues so he went through a private security guard training course but never actually worked in that. Since he still had all his police class books and references, he read and learned to walk & talk like a beat cop to intimidate perps into leaving the hotel complex as the reserved territory of the dead guy. He had the real uniform because he bought a couple of them before the academy kicked him out and revoked his student ID card & equipment permits. He was paid by the ex-foreman to patrol full-time as if he were a genuine cop to lend his muscles to any situation that may need it. When he heard his friend/boss got gutted, he came in ASAP and... Well, he lost it, panicked, and the rest is history."

Lucas waved a negligent hand at the spook, declaring, quite sure of himself, "He had an app on his smartphone to watch the hotel CCTV and comms real-time so he could come in at the right time without his top-dog having to make an actual call, because that just looks weak in front of the people you're trying to intimidate. That's how he saw me get into a meeting with his buddy then leave without any warning. He couldn't have come in just seconds after I knifed the bastard on a coincidence. He was coming in to 'muscle' me to submission because that's what cock-shakers like that do. Like damned dogs in heat, they always have to get others on their knees to smell at their ass to feel powerful. My father is the same way. So is my mother, come to think of it. So, the faux-cop was on standby, probably in a car outside that's kitted out to look like one of the phantom police cruisers that patrol highways to catch speeders and distracted drivers. He came into the hotel at need or patrolled around, bullying guests to keep himself occupied. Easy con job to figure out. I'm surprised the hotel management, or the real VPD, never got any complaints over the time this has been happening."

"They did get complaints, but the guy was always gone when the investigators came and the dead perp switched the tapes out for ones of activity that didn't show the faker on the prowl. With an inside man rigging the CCTV and the physical proof, the town cops had a hard time getting their heads around the situation. They would have gotten them, eventually, just not that fast."

Mister Aylmer clarified "So, he was never an active duty policeman at all? He never served one single day in uniform with a badge? All he did was dress up to BS people into being afraid so they would leave in peace his 'capo' to sell his merchandise unchallenged?"

Albert nodded slowly, fiddling with his empty cup on the table. "Yeppp... Just an idiotic wannabe that got flushed out of the system before he could make a mess, but kept on going to make said mess anyways. He was never under the badge, so don't worry. The municipal cops won't want your client's head on a pike, and no charges of assaulting, or drugging, an officer or some such will be coming your way. None that could stick in court passed the most basic evidenciary proofing anyways."

"Why do I not feel any safer, despite all your assurances?" Lucas asked tartly. "Oh, yeah, it's because bitter painful experience from this morning and other times has taught me that shit always comes to my life in large batches, not small doses. Has the druggy bum's crew gotten arrested? Because if the other muscle and street sellers are still running around, then I will be needing police protection for several days."

Albert replied tonelessly "The beat cops and detectives are on it. With the head of the crew dead and his favorite minion behind bars, it won't take them long. Besides, the little stain-on-the-floor was already singing like a canary the moment his mouth unfroze. It seems that you managed to scare what few wits he was born with straight out through his pants when he pissed himself the moment he realized you could disembowel him too. You do seem to have a polarizing effect on people." the spy added with a smirk directed at the glaring teenager.

Mister Aylmer steepled his fingers in front of his chest, assuming a thoughtful pose, before saying in his bland tone; "If that is all, SSA Isaacs, I'm certain my client has other matters to arrange, like some shopping and tourism, as were his primary plans for the day before all this happened. Please don't feel as if we are keeping you here. I'm confident that any further reports or paperwork can be handled remotely through our respective secretaries and emails."

The juvenile medic snorted in amusement before tapping his cane on the carpeted section of floor where he stood. "Go ahead, be dismissive of the man more openly, Joseph. I don't think he got your subtle hint the first time around." Snort! "Lawyers! They think everything they say is so high class and subtle and full of nuances..."

Agent Isaacs agreed with the sentiment but prudently kept his peace on the subject. He did have another target in mind, though. Sitting back into his chair comfortably, he took the time to look over the principal subject of the moment. Lucas Wolenczak had changed out of his soiled brown clothes as they were now in VPD evidence bags with his boots, but not any of the accessories as those had been deemed 'necessary for self defense – as shown' and thus his lawyers got the cops to back off. The VPD chief was sure to give them a call about that, so would the RCMP, but that wasn't his problem. The boy was now showered clean, wearing dark purple jeans, a dark blue turtleneck T-shirt and checkered flannel shirt over that with black sneakers that obviously weren't winterized. Those were probably his in-house clothing that he fell-back on when the city police pressured him into changing. It was visible by the bracers on his forearms and the sheaths at his waist that he had kept all his tools and weapons at hand, regardless of whatever the beat cops had said.

Being aware that Wolenczak was a tough nut to crack alone, and incredibly refractive when lawyered up, agent Isaacs decided to take a chance anyways. Maybe by fishing a bit, he could get some informations that CSIS otherwise couldn't lay hands on. "If you have a moment, my good doctor, I do have a few separate questions that my agency would like to see cleared out before we can give a formal recommendation to Ottawa on your migratory process." He then gave his most shark-like smile he could, since he was certain that politeness and the gentle approach wouldn't get him any further, not in the subjects he would broach next.

The teenager gave a one-shouldered shrug of disinterest. "Talk to my lawyers. They're big enough and well paid enough that you shouldn't be able to bypass them." the boy answered in neutral tones as he leaned on the pommel of his cane with both hands, affecting an air of someone well above the common man's concerns. Albert could see this was a manufactured façade, but so well crafted, and so experienced in its usage, that if he hadn't spent close to 25 years in the field for CSIS as a hum-int contact, he would have probably missed it.

"Thank you for your time then, doctor." the spy replied while totally ignoring the lawyers all the same. "I have a tablet here, if you could look at the short video playing on it?" SSA Isaacs set the film to play then turned the tablet the other way so that the two adults and their client could watch easily.

The film was taken by a mobile camera that was hovering on the side of a large roadway between trees at a weird angle: drone surveillance records. It showed a big, very long, dark shiny black tractor-trailer semi-truck composed of 3 wheeled modules and 2 motorized box-backed drive cabins, one drive at each end, with all five segments attached by accordion joints. The scene was happening on a stretch of paved road with snow and pine trees around it, in early morning light. The 'convoy' vehicle passed under a green overhead traffic board that said clearly "Columbia Avenue junction; Crowsnest Highway / BC Highway 3; west direction/Vancouver; east direction/Alberta". Not only was a 'road train' like this extremely rare on canadian streets, it was even more rare in the mountainous roads and cliffs of British Columbia where even a regular tractor-trailer truck would need a very good driver to operate. This beast was nowhere near an amateur toy; the sheer wheelbase width & height showed it was built to haul bulk cargo over severely accidented terrain, and the size of the three cargo boxes, plus the fact even the drive cabins had boxed backs instead of just the small driver's bunk housing...

The two lawyers exchanged looks for a second and pushed the tablet back towards the secret agent with matching discrete smirks. "There are no visual indicators of either manufacturing nor ownership on that vehicle. Why exactly did you ask OUR client about it? He's an expert at cybernetics and medical devices and drugs, not automotive conception." spoke Mister Tah in his usual clear clipped words.

The CSIS agent tapped the tablet to switch videos and showed it to the three on the other side of the table. "Maybe because of this? Isn't this an exactly similar vehicle leaving the railroad triage yard of the Wise Apothecary and Chemists production facility at Sault-Sainte-Marie in Ontario just four weeks ago? And by the license plate number, linking it to a 'dummy' shell corporation founded and operated out of the Canadian Maritime Provinces in Nova Scotia, itself a division of another shell based in Germany... Well, it does seem to be the same 'phantom' vehicle that has traveled all the way around the Great Lakes' northern shorelines, made a pit stop in Thunderbay where another WAC's complex is located, and now it seems to be rolling its way towards its owner at 45 miles an hour on our scenic back-country roads. Would you care to comment, my dear doctor Wolenczak?"

Lucas replied sarcastically "Was there a question in there? And why are you addressing me when my lawyers are in the room? Especially when I distinctly remember having formally directed you to speak with them, instead of bothering me?"

Other than that short, deadpan reply, the young man seemed completely unmoved by CSIS having filmed his convoy moving about. Albert wondered if maybe the next tidbit would get a reaction?

"So, I gather then that these three other similar vehicles, with different license plates, presently driving around randomly in New Brunswick near Moncton on the sea coast, Quebec's Laval Island area, and the last in the outer perimeter of Winnipeg in Manitoba, are not any business of yours? So you won't mind if we arrest, search and impound them?"

The teen smiled widely as he replied "Arrest, search and impound on what grounds, I would reply quite happily, if my lawyers weren't in the room to do it for me."

Mister Tah sneered at the CSI agent before killing his inquiry harshly; "If your employers had bothered to supply you with information that was either validated or the least little bit researched before it was used, you would already know that these vehicles are road-legal since 2016 and have been rolling around the USA, Canada, Mexico and even New Cape Quest since then. The paperwork for the DMV vetting of the mechanics involved is on record at that 'dummy shell corporation' you spoke of earlier and would answer your questions clearly, if you only bothered to read the forms. Is there anything else that we can disabuse you of, before your departure?"

Albert frowned at getting shot down so hard by a kid, but he couldn't gainsay him without looking like an idiot. Yes, the forms were on record and he already saw them, thank you very much. He was an experienced pro, he did his due diligence before questioning the persons involved. This had only been a fishing expedition anyways; the huge trucks were listed as specialty climate-controlled haulers of medical drugs and tools optimized for serving remote, off-roads communities. They did do that, visit remote less urbanized regions, occasionally, but their traveling patterns had them sticking close to heavy population centers, not handing out drugs in the back-country farming villages. The people at the regional office wanted an answer, but the normal method of stopping the truck for a search would get this little ragamuffin upset, which in turn would anger The World Bank, ergo, no stop-&-frisk for these roadway behemoths.

Later, maybe, if the USA did catch fire...

Standing up as he recovered his tablet and paper files into his briefcase, the agent nodded at them and left the suite without further comments. He had a lengthy report to write and a hidden body cam's recordings to dump in the server for his bosses to view.

{ SQ } - { Meh! What a day! } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 15:30pm)

(Western America; 12:30pm - noon)

Sigh! Finally alone!

Lucas was in a piss-poor mood by now.

The damned lawyers had left to go at the Vancouver Police Department central station to pursue the case and make sure it was completely closed, regardless of the many irregularities some of the uniformed men had done to Lucas during the preliminary investigation in the lobby. Then they would go to the RCMP city offices for the same reason. The CSIS could not be helped at this time by anybody, unless they themselves decided to court Lucas more openly by offering 'little gifts' that just might be worth accepting in exchange for his freedom and peace of mind from the vindictive bastards at the VPD.

Atop everything else, he had lost his one set of good, presentable business clothes he had brought with him on the train along his trench coat, gloves, scarf and fedora all in one fell swoop. He was also quite certain it hadn't been necessary, but the big fat smirks on some of the town cops' faces told a story all of their own. He may have been 'in the right' BUT he had just blown wide open, and in full view of dozens of smartphones that were recording, a story about how they had failed for several years to spot a fake cop preying around their city despite several complaints being filed. He was thusly by default 'in the wrong' no matter what the other facts of the case were.

He dodged criminal charges and a court case because of his political connections and future usefulness to the Canadian Government, not because it was legitimate self-defense. The types of weapons he had used essentially precluded that justification under current laws if he was brought to a judge. It would take an intervention from the Minister of Justice, at either provincial or federal levels, to stop that from happening next time around, no matter if his life had been in danger. Unfortunately, Canada's weapons laws were far more restrictive than the USA and they favored the police and prosecutors at every turn unless you had special dispensations already in hand before the mess occurred.

Then the damned VPD cops pretty much said he should have let himself get beat up "like a good little kid" and THEN called for help after the facts. Since he had a body camera active at the time, one VPD lieutenant, rather eager to shut down any questions about the paralyzed faker on the floor, had tried to push for arrest & charges under the claim that Lucas had in fact 'alternative' methods to violence, and thus was in truth guilty of premeditated murder and ambushing the false policeman. It was only the groans of stupor from the RCMP officers standing around them, and the fact that he was told anew that his idiotic attempts were being filmed straight to Facebook by several dozen cellphones, that he relented this tactic. But he didn't let go; he instead switched over to insisting on ripping all the bloodied clothes off the teenager then-and-there. He clearly wanted to try to at least shame him publicly with enforced nudity, and maybe manage to steal his possessions like his keys and wallet, to make things all around worse for the boy any ways he could.

The ploy was so damned transparent that many people, including hotel manager Lucarno, called him out on it, forcing the RCMP and other VPD officers to step in to limit the aggressive bully's depredations on Lucas. They did not however step in all the way, miserable losers and cowards that they were.

Yes, the bastard managed to have Lucas undress completely right in the hotel lobby, but with hotel employees holding some beach towels to form a screen around him, all so the mulish VPD lieutenant could collect his 'evidence' before Lucas went and destroyed or modified it. The middle-aged crud had the audacity to try to make Lucas change clothes without any shielding whatsoever supposedly to "inspect & control the evidenciary process". In reality, it was to truly expose the teen to public ridicule as much as possible. Lucas knew that all these scenes had been filmed by many civilian smartphones plus the hotel CCTV; he already got those, plus the film of his own camera, into the hands of his attorneys to lay charges against each of the deviant bastards who did this to him.

Then the dumb VPD brute had the gall to start a pissing match with the ranking RCMP team leader when the older man called him out on his depraved twisting of police procedures. Although, he seemed more peeved that the lout had done so in public, where everybody now had proof that it did happen to those the beat cops didn't like all that much. In point of fact, the bloody RCMP sergeant then made it clear openly to Lucas that he would have just loooved to get the teenager into a dark dank cell over the weekend, just to show him that the Mounties weren't afraid of planetary politics or The World Bank's associated partners. The two rutting bulls with badges then got so deep into their own shite that the whole manly-man contest of ballsiness was stopped only by the simultaneous arrivals of the CBC news crew and the CSIS agent whose badge outranked them all.

And wasn't that a damned fine mess in and of itself! The bloody fucking canadian secret services were after his pasty hide now! The worse part in all this was that his only real lucky break today was CSIS getting involved so soon at the start of the problem.

Sitting to rub his temples, Lucas realized he couldn't really go out to shop since he would probably have a plain-clothes police tail following him all over the place, waiting for a situation to commit a brutal arrest of him, even if he were 'in the right' again. The VPD had egg on their face and they thought they had the guilty party on the radar. The fact it was all their fault to begin with was never taken into consideration, not when they could instead blame the foreign kid who was all alone against the world, and nobody would come to help.

Even his lawyers seemed to be rethinking taking on his business. The conclusion he was fast coming to wasn't reassuring, but it was the only logical one he had. He had to leave Vancouver fast, and Canada as a whole if he could manage it. That unexplored manor at Shell Creek, in Edmonds near Seattle, seemed a much better option now, especially given just how permissive the self-defense laws in the USA were compared to Canada.

The adolescent's stomach chose that moment to growl angrily at the fact it was empty and unsustained since 08:00am this morning. That small muffin he had eaten with his pills was a long way back and he was in danger of both acid reflux and a malnourishment migraine if he didn't eat fast. Just as he was about to take the wired tablet from the middle of the dining room table to call in a meal, somebody knocked on his suite door loudly. Swiping the room service menu aside in favor of the security app, he checked the person in front of his door. It was manager Lucarno and the elderly asian manager Ohyun so he decided to buzz them in to listen to what they had to say.

{ SQ } - { True northern hospitality } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 15:37pm)

(Western America; 12:47pm)

The two elderly female managers were soon sitting at the dining room table as Lucas brought over a freshly brewed carafe of coffee and a plate of small muffins, cupcakes and cookies, to place in the middle of the table for all to serve themselves. He may not receive people often but he had hosted business meetings in the past, and he did have good manners when he wasn't being attacked. This would also give him an excuse to put some solid stuff in his stomach to sponge off the acid thus allowing him to set back his real meal by another two hours if necessary.

The women stayed silent as the young man moved painfully on stiff legs to place the necessities of hospitality on the table for them. His insistence on good manners and comportment despite the fact he had been the main victim, and lived a terrible ordeal at the hands of the police on top of things, just made it even more vital for them to act properly towards him. He hadn't deserved any of what happened this morning and it was all worsening the situation that had forced him to move out of the USA and his real home. The two managers exchanged a look, renewing their commitment to do right by this young man.

Madam Ohyun having been his primary contact in the hotel, she started the conversation to establish a more normalized tone and, hopefully, open a way for Madam Lucarno to speak her offer to set things right with their most important client of the 2020 season.

"Thank you, doctor Wolenczak for receiving us in your home." Madam Ohyun began in her normal soft tones. "We wish to express our deepest sympathies for the trauma and inconveniences you suffered this morning inside our establishment. We give you our utmost assurances that this is not the way that Daleminton conducts business on a regular day. Severe changes have been carried out to guarantee it does not happen again. Senior manager Leland Lambert has been given extended medical leave to tend his family during their mourning, but, we are taking the period to conduct an internal review of his activities to make certain he was not complicit of his son's actions."

The adolescent was busy swallowing a bite of oatmeal muffin so he nodded at her, gesturing with the left hand that held the metal thermal mug to continue without waiting for a verbal response. The woman understood the situation, smiling at him to signify she wasn't insulted by his prioritizing his food over words.

"Now, we have some concerns about the events we saw this morning, therefore we have directed the hotel lawyers to contact yours to assist in your complaints against the acts of police brutality we witnessed. You can rest assured we will be writing up our testimonies and forwarding them to the appropriate authorities to make sure this does not happen again. Please do note however, that corruption and ill-management in the Vancouver Police Department is somewhat removed from our chain of management; there is only so much we can actually do."

The answering snort and smirk from the teenager reassured them he understood that situation perfectly and didn't hold it against them in any ways. Madam Lucarno took the moment to step into the flow of conversation. It wouldn't get any better anyways, might as well take a chance.

"For my part, as the general manager of the complex, I am appalled at the clear lack of respect and solicitude that were shown to you by members of our staff. Then you were forced to disrobe in public and practically molested by the VPD officers right in front of me... Well, I can't change the past, but I can help the future a bit. At 13:00pm a service cart filled a buffet of dinner items will be delivered so you can enjoy a filling, relaxing meal in private without being exposed to public scrutiny any further for the day. I remembered that when we planned the meeting, you had wanted to sign the papers for the other two suites then go for brunch at the local shopping mall, to walk around a bit. I thought that bringing the hot food to you would be a good alternative at present."

The young medical specialist was looking at both women with wide eyes and tightly closed mouth, hands firmly holding onto his mug and cane pommel to keep them from shaking, as if he wasn't used to getting any sorts of apologies, let alone compensation or help, when things got bad. Given what had been said in the news channels about his parents and childhood since yesterday, the women were pretty certain they were part of the limited select group of people who actually did right by him when he was the aggrieved party.

"Also, I have heard what you said to the policemen who were taking your clothes as evidence, that you don't have any winter gear left, as you were traveling light with a plan of buying locally what was needed. I have spoken with the foreman of our general store, here inside the complex, to set up an emergency loan of boots, trench coat and accessories to kit you while you go out to buy your own choice of traveling clothes and snow gear." Making a vague gesture with her hand, Madam Lucarno added dismissively "And don't you worry about dry cleaning them when you're finished; we'll take care of that in our laundry service ourselves. For that matter, I have arranged that one of our courtesy cars and drivers be available to escort and assist you during your trip to the stores, when you are ready."

Lucas was keeping his mouth firmly shut. The mix of emotions churning away wildly inside of him was not something he was used to. Anger, rage, hate, shame, embarrassment, vengefulness and other negative or violent feelings he could handle instinctively as he had dealt with them since being born and known little else in his life. Positive feelings were almost always accidental and limited to internalized stuff like peace, contentment, restfulness or just plain old satisfaction with a project finally finished and functional. Experiencing positive feelings because people were doing nice things for him out of a sense of 'Justice' or 'Altruism' was just not something he lived or expected, not for him, not after a decade and a half of being the piss-pot of his parents and their ilk. Choked up on too many feelings conflicting with his thoughts, the youth adopted the neutral façade that was his default setting when dealing with stressful situations, nodding at the women in silence as he didn't trust his voice or his choice of words.

As if they understood what he was living through, both women made sad small smiles to encourage him to answer, but to no avail. Lucas was bunkering down inside his mind, deeply behind thick walls, and would probably take all night to come out of his emotional seclusion. The two managers decided to leave the young man to his peaceful retreat for the day, simply giving him the written letters for the clerks in the hotel's store, and the call card for the car & driver when he felt like moving around again. They got up to leave just as the tone for the door signified somebody at the door. A quick check on the monitor showed it was the buffet cart, arriving at 12:58pm sharp as expected. Manager Lucarno opened the door, guided the young server to place the cart properly then shooed herself and the other two out the door to allow their guest to recover in peace.

(Eastern America; 16:03pm)

(Western America; 13:03pm)

Now finally alone with his own thoughts and needs, the boy collapsed on the straight backed dining chair, bending forward to set his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He stayed that way for several minutes, trying to regulate his breathing, trying to order the painful maelstrom inside his mind before giving it up as a bad job scrapped. His stomach growled again at the odors wafting gently from the buffet platters, reminding him of the most penultimately important task of all teenagers: feeding the Beast within.

Getting up on stiff legs, he hobbled over to the cart to inspect the platters, finding potatoes in fries, mashed and scalloped styles, pilaf rice, beef in London cut, small Greek kebabs, sliced pastrami and hamburger patties, chicken breasts in lemon & pepper sauce, spicy Italian sausages, fried bacon strips, several fillets of sole pan seared with butter, olive oil & herbs, a platter of meat raviolis with pots of bolognese and alfredo sauces, platters of hot steamed & cold pickled vegetables, and multiple salad greens to mix & match at his taste with four vinaigrettes and assorted toppings to choose from. Also included were metal pots of french canadian pea soup and minestrone soup, sliced white and rye breads, diverse cheeses, and pots of condiments to garnish what he prepared for himself. The cart's cold compartment held a few little niceties for dessert; three ice cream flavors, an orange curd & meringue pie, a tiramisu cake and a large Canadian style mocha, caramel & maple syrup deluxe yule log cake.

Smiling widely, the teenager decided that maybe, just maybe, the afternoon wouldn't end up being the total loss that the morning had been. "Alexa!" he called out, "Activate the dining room TV, set channel for CNN, the USA West Coast station." he asked as he set his cane against the cart to pick up a tray to load with warm, soothing food. A starter of pea soup and a small salad would be a good beginning, followed by a hearty mixed plate of chicken, fish and kebab with trimmings. Much later after that, he would cut himself a good sized piece of that yule log with a new mug of coffee to whittle away the afternoon with his computers. It was high time he unpacked the last two modules of the Cyberghast Hub to complete his networking capacity.

As the boy stacked his first course on his tray, the Internex screen activated, tuning to the CNN station he asked for. As he was mixing his diminutive appetizer salad, the channel broadcast a public announcement that a mandatory interruption of regular programming would occur at 17:00pm Washington DC time to give way to a public message from the US President himself. The message would be obligatorily broadcast on all television and radio channels, as well as several hundred websites. Auditors were then incited to either watch or record the program as it had been advertised by the White House as 'writing history in the making' by the office of communications.

The adolescent shrugged it off, thinking that he would be sitting with his main course at that time and watching TV anyways, so why not? Seated at his favorite chair right next to the cheerily blazing wood stove, he twirled his soup slowly as he tapped the touchscreen to send the hotel porters an order to bring the remaining four wheeled modules of equipment to his suite within the hour. He would eat peacefully then take the rest of the day to set up for prolonged remote warfare against the mongrels in the Vancouver Police Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and CSIS who thought they could piss all over his life unpunished.

Lucas was not above hiring mercenaries and 'wanted men', so long as they were kept away from him physically and didn't have a clue who paid them through a chain of anonymous accounts or Western Union moneygrams taken from same-said accounts. It was time to arrange for some of these people of dubious livelihood to be brought into service to the Wise/Wolenczak powerbase.

During a joint mission, the NCIS and FBI in New Orleans had arrested a young black man, about 20 months back, a competent hacker who used the name 'Jackal' who had managed to evade law enforcement for close to 7 years before being caught. His vast experience of spywares, cryptolockers and ransom-wares would be useful in the short-term plans.

The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) team had participated in arresting, jointly with an anti-terrorism task force in Hawaii, called 5-0 Brigade, another hacker but a middle-aged white male this time. Code-named 'Dermiculus', he specialized in stealing the identities of the people he murdered, then impersonated them to destroy the organizations they worked for, from the inside, with conventional non-electronic sabotages. For the mid-term and long-term plans against several churches linked together in promoting Trumpism, and maybe even a conservative think-tank or three, this type of slow tactic could work.

Those were just the two he could remember off the top of his head. There were of course the 'crazies', those who plied their craft for reasons that were too personal and emotional to be deemed 'sane', let alone 'reliable', to do business with. Money was not their motivator, so trying to pass a contract and hold them to it was an idiot's dream. If you empowered these guys, you had to clear the zone of all friendlies and leave it fallow for a decade afterwards to decontaminate the ground.

If the fucktards in DC wanted to go that way and push him to his last bastion, Lucas knew about the super-secret Glazia Krypta cryogenic prison in the high Arctic, under Canada's ice shelves, that the NAC had hidden there at the inception of the confederation. Maybe the prisoners would like to be released from their ice cells to see the sunlight again? Depending on what happened, it could be a logical option to make the USA waste their resources and attention on 'something' else than him.

Our ship is sinking

(NCIS - LA – opening theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 15:30pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 12:30pm

NCIS west coast - Office of Special Projects

Los Angeles, California, USA

Marty Deeks was in a mood to break bones and enjoy doing it. The entire night since the declaration of the 'Noah's Ark' protocol had been one shitty mess after another bloody mess which had been preceded by a long list of similarly bloody shites dropping on them from the sky, like a macabre parody of Heaven's manna in a 'Bizarro World' type of story.

Leaning backwards heavily into the backrest of his seat, the shaggy-haired blond male frowned angrily as he watched the streets, damaged cars, vandalized homes and burglarized shops pass by, with a dead body rotting in the sunny afternoon light occasionally dotting the riot-torn cityscape as the convoy drove by at the highest – safest – speed the narrow roadway allowed them to roll. Several cars were dumped hastily, and therefore not completely straight in their parking spaces, thus meaning they had about ¾ of a real traffic lane to roll in. Given the sizes of the pickups, SUV's and the armored 10-wheel box truck at the rear, they had to be careful not to scrape vehicles as they drove by or else they could cause a jam. At least, the armored convoy had little chance of stopping for a mechanical trouble or losing a part due to bumping a badly parked sedan. They were all too armored and solidly built to be bothered by something menial like that.

Sitting in the shotgun seat of the first pickup in front, Deeks looked around, watching the street sides, balconies, windows and roof line on the right flank of their procession. Kensi was sitting on his left, driving the vehicle and checking the left flank of their road as she rolled. The two women in the back banquette with duffel bags and M16's were picked up at an emergency retrieval of several NCIS personnel that had been under cover inside the navy's active ranks to investigate drug smuggling, data theft, sexual harassment of subordinates and several officers who had been using their position to inflict racial or religious diatribes unto their sailors. Their exfiltration had not been peaceful, as indicated by the cuts, bruises and bloody stains on the clothes of all agents. They left two dozen dead white-christian fanatics in their wake as they evacuated the retrieval point, with the fallen enemies' weapons, comms, and other gear the criminals had stolen from the navy yard getting stashed in their box truck for recycling into their own arsenal the moment they reached home base.

Each vehicle in the convoy had two to six such agents recovered at diverse emplacements along a lengthy, circuitous drive dedicated to alternatively picking up people and solid goods. They were now somewhat safe, heading back for debriefing at OSP and, maybe, a chance to reconnect with their family if they still lived. The two women behind him were hindi and asian; prime targets in this age when laws and decency were flushed down the crapper by white-power militias. Deeks reflexively tightened his grip on his M16 as he gazed balefully at the passing buildings, his acute blue eyes seeing subtle movements in the windows of residences. Sporadically, clearly perceptible shoppers could be seen moving fearfully around the crowded aisles of small neighborhood stores, some now with armed security guards at the doors. Many homes and shops they passed had put in place or were in the process of installing plywood sheets and pieces of scrap metal across their windows and doors to reinforce them against looters and lynch mobs.

Have a bloody merry fucking Christmas you too, USA!

No, Marty wasn't in a good mood. The night had been rough all around, with several armed excursions to run after and arrest white mongrels who deserted their posts with stolen weapons and classified data. Like the coast guard patrol routes for the LA commercial harbor. Or the transponder codes for several of the private passenger airports around the greater LA metro area. Or the whack-job who tried to run over Callen and Sam with the phat-assed piece of obsolete shit he stole from the motorpool at the navy base. A bloody Bradley fighting troop carrier! All 8 wheels, 75mm cannon turret, and hydraulic bulldozer blade of it, had rammed into the 2-door sports car Sam favored on mission, rolling over the low, crushed civilian car, and trying to run for it out of the base compound. It was the seamen on guard duty at the gates that used a 3" recoilless rifle to slam a shell right in the driver's cupola that stopped the tank from driving on a rampage through town. That mission report call to Hetty hadn't gone nearly as well, but not as bad either, as it had been expected. She sent an already moving team to pick them up before they returned to base for their end-of-shift and sleep cycle; that was certainly better than trying a taxi in the kind of societal climate they had. Chances were, the cabbie would take them somewhere lonely to have waiting friends kill the passengers for their wallets and cellphones. Or maybe gang-rape them first.

That was the sort of days they were facing now, and for a long time to come.

The despondent 35 year old looked sideways at his 32 year old fiancé, admiring her long black hair and tanned fair skin as she concentrated on driving them to the next mission point. He sighed deeply in relief as he thought of her and their family-to-be, feeling grateful that at least his mother Roberta Deeks, and Kensi's mom, Julia Feldman, had managed to reach their home last night without getting attacked. Now sheltered safely inside their house with a fortified basement and plentiful reserves, the two older women could endure quite a lot without need to get exposed outside the building. Except that beneficial situation would last only so long, without functioning stores to buy goods from, or contacts to farmsteads for renewable supplies. Plus, even if you could purchase anything, the transport/delivery would still be problematic at the end of it. Did you risk yourself to got fetch, or do you stay home and open the door to strangers?

He really hoped the unrest wouldn't last that long, but his gut was telling another story.

The comms system in the center console sounded off and a yellow light flashed, telling them it was the CB frequency receiving something. Hetty had used the combined knowledge of Eric Beale, Nell Jones and a handful of amateur radio buffs in the OSP to configure and install customized gear in all dedicated mission vehicles like this one over the passed 6 years. These comms sets could pick up old school CB, HAM-radio & short waves, along cell signals & satellite signals. Plus, they had programs in them to automatically decode/convert speech & text to Morse code or other ciphers. A flashing green light meant it was a message for one specific person, yellow was for the entire mission convoy and red would be an emergency all-call to everything under Hetty's jurisdiction. Since the coming message was for the entire convoy, it was probably a detour to pick up more people or extra stuff like food, fuel or tools...

Marty upped the sound on the comms as he picked up the wired handset to click the button on it to signal that he had an open line, that way Eric at OPS would get their 'okay' beep and check them as 'alive and working' on his master list of "all things going wrong today" as he called it. The message coming for the team was simple and direct; Operations had monitored LAPD chatter indicating that a pawn shop on the boulevard they were going to travel, on their return to OSP, had just been burglarized. According to unidentified civilians that fled the scene then called 9-1-1, the owners were reported killed in action, and two of the five perps had died as well. Nell had data-mined the Internex to get the low-down on the building and goods inside, thus the change of mission plans.

NCIS mission during an insurrection; "loot anything usable for immediate survival or barter".

He certainly wasn't acting under LAPD protocols, that was sure!

Then, of course, they still had to bring everything back to the compound. Apparently, their paychecks weren't gonna be checks for much longer. Rumor was the US Federal government was on the verge of being declared an 'illegal entity' by several banks, added to which the bozos in DC only wanted to pay the white crusaders who sucked off their dicks in public, ergo, they were about to be paid in food, tools, munitions and maybe a bit of raw metals or jewelry... That would be just like Hetty to go back to medieval management methods at the blink of an eye.

She was that old after all...

Upon hearing the orders, Kensi rolled her eyes, set her mouth into a tight, unforgiving line, then flashed both turn signal lights on their pickup to show the others she had the mission orders and would guide them there. Seconds later they received similar flashes down the convoy and changed speed to clear this meandering neighborhood faster. An empty pawn shop was like a free-serve buffet at a church bingo game; everybody would want some, including the guys who never attended mass. They had to get there before anybody else to pick it clean, especially the weapons lockers that these stores inevitably had, plus any food, tools, clothing and money, gems, metals and such that could be loaded into, or packed atop, the convoy's four vehicles.

{ SQ } - { This country is sick } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 15:39pm)

(Western America; 12:39pm)

Marty knew the job would go badly the moment he heard Eric's strained, worried voice in the team's earbuds telling them that all the cameras in the entire city block were dead because somebody had the genial idea to destroy the transformers mounted on the utilities poles in the alley behind the shops and residential buildings. Their comms worked because of the military-grade signal repeaters & boosters in their vehicles in a manner completely independent from municipal power and utilities. The fact that most cell towers around metro LA still worked was miraculous, and the fact the Pentagon had not shut down the GPS network access to those 'not faithful enough to the New Order' was even more odd, and not to be relied upon. That meant of course they had no eyes inside the shops or nearby, no lights, no air conditioners, and probably no phones either, since most stores used complicated computerized telephony systems with wireless handsets so they could move around to verify inventory or watch suspicious clients. Not that cameras and phones would do you any good in the current conditions that were swamping Los Angeles.

Kensi shut down the engine then got out with her rifle, motioning the two women out of the pickup's cabin to task them properly. One would sit at the wheel, ready to drive off urgently, the other would stand guard with her rifle so they had better chances to react properly if they were attacked. Sending the truck on the run would hurt, but not anywhere near as much as getting the entire team completely stuck here and losing that many people all at once. Three agents they knew in a friendly way, if not closely, had died during the first night of civil unrest to sweep the city. Two more were abed in the OSP compound's infirmary with minor injuries, just needing a day or two for the stitches to close correctly and insure no infection set in. If that was the rate at which they lost people, their little family wouldn't make it to New Year's Eve alive.

Marty got out on his side of the truck, assault rifle in hands, as he swept with his eyes the bay windows of the buildings lining both sides of the formerly peaceful neighborhood's short commercial boulevard then turned towards the convoy to make certain they were also affecting men defensively. Once all the crew delegated to the in-store job were assembled on the sidewalk with their weapons ready, he made hand codes that had them all activate the flashlights mounted under the barrels of their rifles and then those set on either side of the tactical goggles they all wore as part of their body armor kit. Now having reliable lights, Deeks went into the store's damaged open doors, starting the process of clearing out any remaining hostiles so they could loot the place dry to insure a measure of longevity to their own families and law-keeping operations during the clearly happening civil war.

The first few feet inside weren't that bad given the sunlight streaming in by the large bay windows at the front of the shop's showroom. Marty quickly spotted the cadavers of the two owners and their adult daughter clustered at the foot of the glass counter with the old National mechanical cash register from the 1920's, right at the front of the store. They were all placed in a way that suggested they had been put on their knees before being shot in the head with a shotgun. From the front. With their eyes opened. The backs of their heads had exploded, scattering soppy wet red goo all over the floor and furniture, shattering the counter and sullying the contents within with shrapnel of lead and ruined flesh.

They were knocked around, beaten mercilessly to submission.

They were bound with duct tape.

They were forced to kneel like slaves inside their own home and livelihood.

They each saw the blast coming at their forehead.

And why? Because they were immigrants come to America thirty years ago when they fled the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, trying to find peace away from communist rule. They had. For a while, they had found that precious peace. But now, someone had judged them unworthy to be complete citizens with full rights just because of their skin color, then unworthy to live because of their religion.

Marty felt sick to his stomach at the sight, and comprehension of its meaning, but clamped his mouth shut tighter than a mausoleum vault, desperate to hold in the acidic vomit that would spew forth if he let out the scream of all-burning rage that wanted to escape from deep in his gut. Closing his eyes for a few seconds, he heard his colleagues enter and spread around the ground floor of the building, gladly leaving to him the grim task of investigating the grisly killings up front. Kensi came to stand besides him, closing her eyes in a silent prayer of her own for a few seconds too, before they exchanged a glance filled with meanings and emotions they both understood full well.

They needed to talk about their future when they reached OSP after this.

The men from the box truck came towards them, pushing a flatbed 4-wheeled dolly stacked with some metal wire hand-baskets they had found in the back-store. Placing that kit ten feet from the front entry, they started to look at what could be recovered according to the priority list of survival.

Firstly; foodstuffs; with specific attention to perishables as the stores in town were quickly running out as the supply chain broke down. Besides that, all canned, pickled or dehydrated goods were to be taken.

Secondly; firearms and munitions; regardless of epoch or condition. A crossbow or flintlock musket could be used by an insurgent to kill their people just as much as an AR-15. That meant all swords, maces, halberds, daggers, hunter's knives and weird fantasy blades too. Even if they didn't use them, it was important to deny potential rebels or militias their use. If necessary, they could use the tools in the compound to melt the metals and forge new, more adapted tools or weapons as needed.

Thirdly, Hetty asked for solar panels; any sun-powered devices they could find and also all batteries of any kind, shape or size, especially the rechargeable sorts. The goal was to create a system of solar collection on the roofs of the OSP building and all over the internal enclosed courtyard to power their comms, climate control and laboratory equipments, especially the infirmary.

Fourthly; steam powered engines; these would be antique industrial machines but there was a very profitable collector's market for them. Several of these devices could generate mechanical movement, or pressurize air or water, and so could be connected to the same tools as those of a garage or Dremmel style rotary devices. Also, they might even be able to take such a steam engine to create an electrical generator to run at night when the solar array would be useless.

Fifthly; all medical supplies; brand new if possible, but even a domestic kit that was open and partially used is better than nothing, or worse, leaving it to rot in a ruined building.

Sixthly; purpose-built camping or survival items, including sleeping bags, tents, hammocks, emergency backpack stoves, walking sticks, bad weather ponchos and coats, road flares, glowsticks, candles and any combustible fuel, etc...

And after that, anything that they thought could be useful like bolts of cloth or leather; ropes, twine and thread; chains, hooks, pulleys and hoists; lumber or workable wood pieces; manual tools sets to bolster their production of general items and renovations to the compound and car repair capacity, etc...

Recovering the money and trade valuables was on Kensi's shoulders since she was the senior full-time NCIS agent in the convoy. Marty was still the LAPD liaison officer, and therefore he was practically never considered in hierarchy questions. Unless like a few minutes ago, when they breached the building. For cases like that, he was the best choice to go first, as Kensi was a much better shot at long range, so making her watch the street then come in last was clearly logical. Marty stood guard, actively looking around for booby traps or dangerous items lying around as Kensi walked around the damaged glass counter to see what was left of the store owners' money.

The young woman cursed foully under her breath as she saw that the ancient mechanical cash register had been bashed in, jamming the drawer closed, during a patently amateurish try at a bash-&-grab. Pulling the small crow bar out of the loops on her backpack straps, she rudely stuck the straight claw into the ajar space between the drawer and the machine, giving the bar's curved side a few whacks to push it in enough to then use her shoulder to slam forward against the lever, popping the drawer open without further effort. Carefully, she set the crowbar back in its loops securely, since losing it in these conditions was just asking for an enemy to grab it and bash her head with it. With a self-loathing sigh of despair, she motioned one of the NCIS agents to bring her all the aluminum briefcases on the display set that locked with keys instead of a combination system. She explained that she wanted all the collectible money bills, stamps, coins and every piece of jewelry packed into the briefcases then put in the box truck under armed guard. Accepting the first briefcase from the male coworker, she turned to the despicable task of emptying the cash register, then kneeling on the bloodied sickening floor, to search inside the counters and shelves for more currency, jewelry, and tradable wealth.

(Eastern America; 15:48pm)

(Western America; 12:48pm)

Marty put his hand to his earbud as he listened to the report of the two-man team that went at the back to check out the enclosed 2-car garage and delivery bay, then down the secondary staircase to the basement warehouse. Moving around the wrecked showroom, he looked towards the open doorway that accessed the main staircase. There were supposed to be two apartments used by the owners. Nell's briefing said there was an office / workshop on the first floor, the actual living space on the second floor with a flat rooftop terrace. Squinting his eyes, Deeks thought he saw some shadows moving at a weird angle in the stairs, so he stepped forward to shine his rifle's light towards it, thus getting a clear view.

What he saw was the dull glint off a small metal object followed by a single loud popping noise, a red flash and the scream of pain from the guy piling up jewelry in the briefcases besides Kensi. Acting on raw combat instinct and adrenaline, the detective knelt behind the nearest shelving unit on his left side, and let loose a short salvo of 5 shells at about the height of the enemy muzzle flash, but he aimed right through the thin gypsum drywall panels to make certain he was shooting in the perp's line of retreat. Marty was rewarded by a loud scream of pain and a slight weight tumbling down the stairs back towards the ground floor landing.

Giving himself a boost with his back foot, he sprinted towards the open staircase doorway to shine his light in the face of his opponent, only to freeze hard at the sight of the atrocity in front of him.

It was a small, very young girl.

Prepubescent girl.

Like, between 7 and 9 years old, little baby girl. She had lily white skin, green eyes and light brown hair in a messy, partly undone braid coming down her back to her shoulders. She wore blue jeans that had been good and clean, sometime ago, and a button down shirt in a tone of clear green that matched her eyes. The childish flower print on her jeans and bow at the end of her braid contrasted badly with the bloodied soles under her small canvas shoes and the small 2-shot Derringer pistol still smoking in her right hand, showing clearly who the ambush shooter had been.

The little child looked at Martin Deeks right in the eyes, as she lay dying from 3 gun shot wounds to the abdomen. "Nigger lover!" She spat as venomously as her fading body allowed her to. "I see'ed you's with 'em brown cows outside! You won't get me! I won't be made to serve slaves! I was born'ed to lead! My pa said so! In Jesus my Lord, I believe and pray!" She finished feebly as the catastrophic gut injury bled her to death under 30 seconds.

Deeks didn't know how long he stood there, watching the cooling corpse of the small, racist, religiously brain-washed baby, as she lay in the pool of her own blood, with the soles of her shoes pointed towards him. Soles stained with the blood of the people her parents had killed right in front of her childish eyes, in a xenophobic rampage that caused their own deaths too, and orphaned their baby just long enough for her to cause evil and be killed in her turn. Marty didn't even realize he'd begun crying until Kensi put a supporting hand on his shoulder to help anchor him back to reality. He felt the wet tear tracks on his face at the same moment he saw those running down his fiancé's own face, her features mirroring the same horror he knew now dwelt in his.

Looking around, he saw that their wounded man had been taken out to the convoy for medical assistance. At first look, it was just a muscle wound on the inside of the left forearm. The girl had aimed at his chest but he was moving too much, she was too much of a novice with the pistol and, really, it was a Derringer like Hetty carried around everyday on a wrist-rig. Those things were never meant to have any punching power or precision passed 10 feet in a straight line; the kid shot at an angle, in bad light, at a moving target. It was more of a miracle she had managed to hit the man than seeing the injury was mostly skin, flesh and a bit of meat. He would have a scar on that arm for the rest of his life, but no real consequences to his health beyond the cosmetic.

Now shaken badly by events, Deeks told the sweep team in the basement to go up the floors with their guns at the ready and not hesitate to shoot at ANYTHING that showed up if it was pointing a weapon towards them. The clipped "Roger that, leader 2" without requests for justifications confirmed to him that the whole convoy was aware and understood they were no longer playing by the rules of polite society anymore. This was now like the Middle-East, in the towns scrapped and burned by ISIS as they were taken out and removed; anything that moved was either one of your men or a hostile, no in-between anymore.

The return to NCIS compound was dreary and silent. Nobody said anything that wasn't in strictest necessity for survival or choosing what to take. A quick search of the dead bodies had showed clear evidence that the child Deeks killed was the daughter of the two racist adults who died during the burglary. The other two suspects were in the wind, and they had no clues as to who they were, or what kinship to the fanatic family they may have had. What was clear though, was that both parents had been shot in the back at kidney height with a shotgun, similar to what had killed the shopkeepers. Given how often religious fanatics and racist militiamen beat their kids, the NCIS agents came to the conclusion that the adults' other children, teenagers maybe, had seen how easy it was to kill and taken a chance at freedom from parental and cult violence when it was presented to them. The fact the smallest of the family was abandoned wasn't all that surprising. In cases of familial implosion, it was normally everybody for themselves, and each child went their own way, never looking back.

In an act that all the convoy agents thought was as calamitous as depraved, the NCIS team had cut short its mission after that. They did end up taking the store's Ford Econoline that had been used for deliveries to augment their overall mobility and cargo capacity, then packed roughly anything of interest at first or second glance. They precipitously left the derelict shop, not bothering with placing the bodies in the basement or any rites, words, or anything. In one last act of inhumane disregard forced on them by civil war and time constraints, the poor innocent family would lay and rot on the open floor, with the corpses of their murderers around them, sharing the wide grungy smear of drying blood for eternity.

After 40 minutes of rough driving, they entered the heavily guarded underground parking structure, under the baleful gaze of the new soldiers that had joined their ranks. These volunteers, mostly men of races other than white and plenty of women from all ranks and jobs, abandoned their postings as they knew they were now at the mercy of bigots, sexual predators, or Trump's crusaders. Once in their assigned parking spaces, including the new van, they all marched into the building's main center space to see the show.

{ SQ } - { I don't fight for this bastard } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 16:47pm)

(Western America; 13:47pm)

Hetty had insisted on planning all outings and errands to stop in time to bring all her operatives inside the walls by the time it would be 10 minutes to 5 on Washington DC's clock. It had been announced rather forcibly by the White House that the president would make a public statement about the week's judicial events that would be mandatorily broadcast on all channels just before dinner.

And so here they were, almost 300 people, packed all over the complex, with every Internex screen or computer monitor available tuned into CNN to receive the much anticipated message. This would determine for real what the state of the country was; in recovery or heading for open warfare in the streets. Not that it would change much from what had happened the last two days.

(US National Anthem)

At exactly 17:00pm, the last commercial ended and was replaced by a weird film of a white wooden cross with an even odder sort of flag under its right arm.

*** REPLAY - Chapter 6; Cross-burner in chief ***

Donald Trump's speech made a shiver of disgusted fear run down the spines of every woman and man inside the NCIS - OSP complex as it unfolded. The racist, bigoted, inhuman diatribe of hate and contempt for ANYTHING than wasn't a geriatric white christian male of English, German or American descent was so thoroughly impregnated into every aspect of law, politics, governance and national defense put forward by the old man that nobody could by-pass his mental defectiveness anymore.

When he gave himself the accolades as "Papal Lord Amerikus" and new "Christian King of a world full of heathens to purify by crusade", they all knew he'd lost the plot. Then the twelve lick-spittle's had come to kneel at his foot, kissing his sigil ring like the apostles did with Jesus. In truth, it just seemed like a cheap parody of a mafia film from the 1970's. Or maybe a really bad fan-made reenactment of an episode of the History Channel's medieval series Knightfall.

After the presidential message ended, they saw several minutes of drone footage showing the severed heads of political, legal, religious and personal opponents to Trump's desires and grandiose delirium topping the fence points around the White House perimeter. Then the channel switched to commercials until it was 18:00pm and time for the normal CNN news programs which were, bloody obviously enough, ALL about the insanities and changes in the US Federal Government. With so many dead politicians and judges, along with millions of white supremacists backing him, it was now the Truth of the Day that D. would change America forever. What those changes were and how deep they would go... Time only would tell that, now.

Hetty took off her glasses and covered her eyes in a vain attempt to un-see the images, or at least dull them from her senses. She wasn't the only one to do so, as Eric and others did the same, each at their assigned stations. Minutes later, all over the compound, bottles of alcohol were opened and passed around liberally until the order came through; one drink of 1 ounce maximum per person, then stash the bottles and keep them safe for a bad day. They would have more of those coming soon, better not drink everything in one single night, especially with no possibilities for resupply in sight.

After that, Hetty and Mosley convoked the senior agents in the large conference room next to OPS so they could plan the joint NCIS – DXS mission that left tomorrow for Vancouver, out of the John Wayne Airport in Orange County. They had a flight plan for 11:00am, but with what just happened now, and what could still happen tomorrow morning since it was a Sunday... There was now an expectation that Trump would use that morning of prayers to send out another message of hate that would necessitate changes to the plans on the fly.

"Oh, bugger it all!" Hetty swore nastily under her breath as she laced her tea with hard bourbon. Couldn't the idiots in DC leave her to run her patch of sand in peace, anymore?

{ SQ } - { Team building exercise } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 18:21pm)

(Western America; 15:21pm)

Callen and Hanna exchanged a charged look as they surveyed the people assembled in the room for the pre-flight briefing to prepare the long protection mission coming up. They rarely used this conference room unless they had visiting big-wigs from DC or other agencies, as normally the huge monitors in the Operations Rooms made for a better visual aid when explaining city-wide threats. Showing regional maps on a tabletop screen just didn't have the effect or ease of use that the massive plasma screen in OPS had. The other reason was that normally, their meetings rarely involved more people than the OPS staff and the 4 members of the field team, so they could all fit in OPS without crowding the place.

The black skinned ex-SEAL observed the participants gathered and he could tell this would end up getting weird fast. Deeks and Kensi weren't acting themselves since they came back from their recovery run. Eric and Nell were pale faced and tight lipped, like they had lived through a nightmare and still not waken from it yet, just as they were swiping and tapping away at their tablets like there was no tomorrow in view. Anna Kolcheck was pale and silent as usual, but she seemed to stand much closer to Callen than normal, as if seeking support or reassurance from his presence. Hidoko was standing near Mosley who was seated at the very head of the table with a pile of paperwork and two laptops opened in front of her, discussing Pacific Region trends of violence and unrest that had them both making faces like they were preparing a dumpster dive for organic evidence. Then there was Hetty, sitting near him, at the foot of the table with her English fine bone china cup of tea that smelled far stronger than any tea she had ever drank in this room before. And wasn't that a kick in the teeth! Sharing another look with G, Sam sat on Hetty's right with Callen and Anna after him. Eric, Nell and Hidoko were on Hetty's left. Strangely enough though, Deeks and Blye were still standing near the door to the conference room despite the fact the table could seat 16 people easily.

Shay Mosley looked up to take stock of her meeting crew and the atmosphere, hiding a wince at what she saw; the fracture lines that had appeared in the last year were now glaring at her face. They were losing Deeks and Blye at high speed, she could just feel it. Callen and Hanna stayed because of Hetty, same as Kolcheck. Beale and Jones were on the fence, but they would move as a unit as their relationship was now complete and they were no longer being discrete about it. She had Hidoko's trust and support, but that didn't make a full department and she couldn't place half of the Pacific seaboard on the woman's shoulders anymore than she could carry it all alone herself. This team was sick, and she was clueless as to how to heal it.

The doors slid open to admit the team's operational psychologist, sporadically when he was in town, Nate Getz who had a thick paper file covered in red 'Top Secret' and 'Classified' sticky patches all over it, that he was reading as he walked. Giving the room a quick once-over, he walked all the way to sit on Mosley's left hand, placing his folders on the table, and an active tablet next to that.

"I have revised the person's file as requested, Director Mosley, and I'm ready to make the recommendations you asked." Nate spoke softly as he usually did. Even the chaos in the streets wouldn't change that part of his character; soft words, slow gestures, gentle smiles, all designed to be non-aggressive to put the auditors at ease and more receptive to his interventions.

The black skinned woman at the head of the table nodded once then gazed probingly at Henrietta Lange across the length of the wooden table. The OSP manager made a vague gesture with the hand that held the cup of suspicious tea, making it clear she thought the senior-ranked woman should have the pole on this. Well, far from Mosley the idea she needed permission from her underling to do her job, but this particular underling had even Leon Vance dancing to her tune, when she really took out the violin for a jig.

"Agent Blye, detective Deeks, if you could join us?" Shay asked sarcastically when she realized uncomfortably that the pair was likely to spend the meeting standing by the doors if she didn't reel them in. Yep, they were losing them... "Thank you all for being present here promptly as you were asked when we drew the activity schedules yesterday evening." she said slowly in soft but firm tones once Marty and Kensi were seated next to Nell, leaving plenty of space between them and herself. A move that she wasn't blind to, as she only had Hidoko and Getz by her side of the table, everybody else having clustered around their nominal boss (and friend) at the other end.

"I have asked our psychologist, doctor Getz, to analyze the situation we face in report to doctor Lucas Wolenczak and the types of responses he could put out, especially in light of the speech we just heard the newly self-minted 'Papal Lord Amerikus' deliver unto us. His conclusions will guide us in creating the NCIS team that will go to Vancouver to meet the young scientist to take his affidavit, compile the lists of charges and, hopefully, make pressing enough an argument that he will accept to return inside US borders so we can resolve this in-house. Doctor Getz, you have the table."

Nate smiled disarmingly at the woman who outranked them all before tapping his tablet to activate a set of images on the computers around the room. "This is Lucas Andrew Wise Holtzenstein Wolenczak, doctor of pharmacology, neurology and psychiatry as well as 'professor-level' expert of utilities, infrastructures, cybernetics and creator of the only functional neural interface to date. He is presently 15 years old, with his birthday on 24th December making him 16, if he lives that long..."

"Whoa! Are you telling me that kid is 3 times a bloody doctor? At his age? And all in medicine? How did that happen?" Sam asked, completely taken by surprise, and a bit scared too. Medics made for damnable enemies when they went off the deep end.

Nate shrugged, indicating the file on the computer. "You have a timeline of his life and activities since he was born included in the briefing notes. The kid was educated almost exclusively from his residence or from his office when he moved to Stanford, so he wasn't held back by the slowest student in class and could pack his days any ways he liked. He's reputed as a chronic workaholic and insomniac who routinely works 20 to 26 hours then sleeps 9 to 14 hours to do it all over again. With a routine like that, and a complete absence of any social life that we could determine, he packed about three times more work hours per week in his lifetime than anybody else. And he has been doing that since he was 4 years old, when his grand-parents died and he was left pretty much to his own self. Except, of course, for the abusive, violent tutors forced unto him by mother between ages 4 and 10, when he left for Stanford."

Marty gripped the table edge with white knuckled hands as he asked tersely "What about that? What was said on the TV news yesterday evening? Was it as bad? Cuz I remember some cases back when I was LAPD full time, and kids who suffer that much for so many years... It never ends well... And with his credentials and all he studied and did... What are we looking at, Nate? What's the damage gonna be when this kid blows his top at our guys?"

"Well, he has superb qualifications in everything necessary for becoming a doctorate of pharmacology; chemistry, biochemistry, biogenics, genetics, molecular engineering and extended material sciences. He has created and patented several new medical molecules to be used as drugs or parts of the alloys that compose medical implants. Plus the fact that as a research pharmacologist, he has to be intimately acquainted with immunology, toxicology, epidemiology, community medicine and everything associated to evaluate what medications should be created and how to dispense them..."

Deeks sneered at the table at large as he snarked out "Sooo, Apocalypse bad! Just like every other time we faced a bastard with bio-weapons, except this little kiddie wouldn't be limited to what's in his canister, he could make more or change sorts on the way, just cuz he feels like it! Why didn't you lead with that, Nate? Why didn't you tell us just how fuckingly screwed the country is, from the start? Because after what Trump and his coterie of ring-kissers just did a half hour ago, I can tell you this kid won't take it sitting down; he'll be on the warpath, and already shooting as we speak. So, Nate, how do you think your dear colleague will react when he sees that presidential address?" Marty growled, full of undirected anger, just begging for a target to lash out at.

Nate sighed, passing a hand through his short brown hair as he did. "Not well. He won't take it well at all. And the reaction will be bad, like guns blazing, bombs blowing up, entire towns on fire bad... This young man has, besides his magnificent medical education, several equally superb qualifications in civil engineering, electronics, cybernetics, programming and higher mathematics. In fact, he is so good in math that he is rumored to have developed a proprietary mathematical system that he has based his computer programs and circuits on, thus making them almost un-hackable because people just don't understand the underlying concepts and architecture they are built on. Consequently, this boy can hack his way through almost any system the USA, the North American Confederation or the UEO have in place without too much trouble. That is one of the reasons The World Bank has had him as a 'Preferred Supplier' for cybernetic security & services for the last four years, and they accepted to lease him office space in their San Francisco complex. They made a friend of him, and have stayed friendly since. The completely insane clusterfuck coming out of Washington DC could change that on a pinhead, before we can even realize there has been a change."

Hetty was holding her cup of adulterated tea with both hands, gazing deeply into its ethylic depths like a seer contemplating The Great Beyond as she asked firmly "Who do you recommend we send for the team, mister Getz? This needs careful consideration, if this young man is as important, yet as volatile and dangerous, as you explained to us."

Mosley interrupted tersely "He's no more dangerous or volatile than the people around this table. I would remind you that the 'Papal Lord' wants to exterminate half the people in this room; Hetty is clearly biologically defective, Callen has gypsy blood, Hanna, Hidoko and myself are slave-stock that has rebelled and there is a chance that Kensi could be euthanized because that little birth mark in her eye could also label her as defective. That would leave Deeks, Beale, Jones and Getz alive, if they proved loyal. Kolcheck would be declared as a russian spy and probably interrogated before trying to sell her back to Russia, or a public execution, depending on which way the Big Man's cock was shaking at that moment. Since doctor Wolenczak qualifies as jewish, a rebellious child who then fled his parents and the country thus committing heresy, sedition and treason, I really don't think he's acting out of madness or insanity. More like, justifiable self-defense against a group of mad cultists called 'NAZI' that we all thought we put down 7 decades back. Obviously, the job was never finished properly, as they are haunting us still."

Deeks' mouth was moving silently in a good imitation of a goldfish when Kensi tapped his forearm to 'reboot' him. Thanking his fiancé with a smile, he took a deep calming breath and nodded his acceptance of her judgment at Mosley, getting a surprised expression on her face for a fraction of a second. Nate took the chance he had to spell out his recommendations.

"NCIS needs to take the legal and medical pole position in this; the DXS team will be heavy hitters for protection tasks but light on anything else, especially any capacity to process federal documents and law enforcement perspective questions. They operate in the shadows, but we need this to live in the light so it can tolerate media scrutiny better than what Trump and acolytes are doing. That means that my recommendations are; from us, detective Deeks and director Mosley; from NCIS - NOLA, agent Grigorio; and from FBI - DC, doctor Temperance Brennan to commit a medical evaluation of the teenager's health status."

The blank looks around the table were not encouraging. Nate sighed tiredly then proceeded to explain why he proposed the people he did. "Deeks was a lawyer, then a cop, and now NCIS liaison so he has the clear and needed legal expertise. So does agent Grigorio who used to be a lawyer before she joined the FBI, and then NCIS about a year ago. Director Mosley gives the entire thing both the legal kudos needed to convince the teenager that it's all above board and legit, and it has the benefit of moving the EAD – PAC out of the reach of Trumpists and white-power militias. Besides, you control all of the Pacific Ocean region for NCIS, where your laptop and files are located is pretty much irrelevant to the actual job so, might as well make you safe by taking you off the game board. And doctor Brennan is one of the few forensic anthropologists alive, is a genius in several medical fields, and has compiled hundreds of successful criminal cases in the decade she has worked with the Bureau. Since she is a skeletal specialist, she could also give us an accurate layout of the young man's health prognosis, and serve as treating physician during the protection detail and the eventual trip back here."

"That sounds nice, doctor Getz" Mosley replied with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, "but there are two impossibilities in your list. Doctor Brennan is on the list of priority medical personnel to evacuate from the DC metro area in case of insurrection, and therefore is no longer available as her and her family were already relocated by the FBI yesterday evening when the 'Noah's Ark' was declared. Then there is me; I will not leave US territorial borders, no matter what. Further more, as a black woman descended from slaves who were beaten, raped, and broken, on a cotton plantation in Carolina, you can be certain that I will fight for this country, not leave it for the safety of the neighbor's backyard."

Hetty set her cup in its saucer, on the table, and pushed it away from herself. Making a face as if she had sucked a lemon, the elderly spymaster asked tartly; "And who do you propose then, director?"

Mosley looked around the room before answering "Deeks and Blye from us since they make an incredibly functional team. From NOLA, Grigorio and their forensic tech, who successfully passed FLETC training and became a field agent, Sebastian Lundt. He has the qualifications to handle all the samples and medical filing to back up the case and forms compiled by Deeks and Grigorio in the name of US courts. Blye can fill in the slot let loose by the DXS having a tech on their usual field team so that brings us to 4 fighters and 4 less-fighter but still capable to defend themselves. Manager Dwayne Pride's reports on both Grigorio and Lundt are quite telling."

Hetty pursed her lips in thought, then asked the crucial question: "I don't see a problem with that layout, but will the NOLA agents be able to reach us in time to board the DXS jet at JWA?"

Shay sat back into her chair, letting the backrest take her weight for a moment before she answered "If we send the order right away inside the coming hours, they can be in a chartered jet or US Navy plane in about 2 hours then reach us in LA in time to drive across town and berth directly at the airport in Orange County, to take off with the combined team at the appointed time. It will be a bit tight, but manageable on both ends. Besides; Pride will want a part of this, if only to have a part in kicking the idjiot rednecks in DC in the teeth."

OSP manager Lange smiled an unkind smile as she agreed to that sentiment. Looking around at her operatives, she asked for objections or comments. Seeing none, even from the two who would leave, the meeting was adjourned so the pair could make their final preparations for a lengthy stay on foreign soil while on active duty.

Hometown hurt

(MacGyver 1985 – opening theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 16:55pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 13:55pm

MacGyver's house

Los Angeles, California, USA

The three 'young adults' sat around the table in the dining room, eating slowly their meals while Jack was conscientiously wiping clean his plate of any remaining sauce with a piece of bread since he had been a mite peckish this morning. Their very early breakfast had been short and far too easy for his Texan tastes, and short on meat too. A bloody European style frozen egg & cheese croissant with coffee and hop! Off to work for the day! You don't feed grown men like that and expect them to work all day. Then again, the sorts of provisions they kept on the DXS MD-11C plane were rather basic, and chosen for the surety of storing them for prolonged periods, not taste or fanciness.

Thankfully, after finishing up at Phoenix HQ and driving across the remake of Mad Max that the town was becoming, lunch had been far better than expected. Bozer had wanted to show off his traditional 'Christmas Brisket' given how they were likely to be up in Canada for several weeks, if not months, on this protection gig. Better eat most of the big perishables now than waste them, and they couldn't be taken across the border, so they were emptying the refrigerator by either making preserves or eating it.

Jack looked over at the other 'real adult' in the house, wondering what she thought of all this. Snorting in humor, the Delta-Forces specialist had – again – to remind himself that none of them were kids, even though Riley had almost become his daughter and Angus and Bozer were the same age as her. Calling the three 27 year olds 'kids' would see him pranked to Hells and back with three different vengeances and no peace in sight. Better keep his paternal instincts on the hand brakes for now. Still, the other person from the same generation as him that resided in the house presently was worrying him, and for good cause.

Riley's mother, Diane Hessop. She dropped 'Davis' when her ex-husband Elwood, Riley's father, had disappeared into oblivion without warning the last time. That was almost six years before Riley was sent to jail for 3 years for hacking the NSA, a task she had willingly botched to get caught, thus thwarting the terrorists who were forcing her by threatening to kill off her mother. Diane had been able to leave her undercover life & job in Vancouver after the hacktivist group 'The Collective' which threatened Riley had finally been disbanded by Phoenix a year ago.

Now that Diane was back in Los Angeles, to be close to her daughter, the town was on fire. Literally. Like fire in the streets burning. First it was massive forest fires that turned west on the winds to sweep into the outer suburbs and all the way to the ocean shores. After that it was repetitive mud slides since there was now flooding at every rainstorm that came. And now, it was fire again as all the nutcases were coming out to play in open daylight. White-power militias, sects and cults of all sorts, and the collapse of law enforcement inside of 24 hours, all together meant even the run-of-the-mill criminals were turning dangerous and mindless, too.

First they had traveled by jet in the dead hours of night and dawn, followed by a Hell of a rough ride through town from John Wayne Airport across most of LA to reach the Foundation building, with burned or burning houses and cars along the way, and scared, panicked civilians all over. Shoppers were trying to hug the walls as they jogged between stores and houses, just like you see in old films about World War I & II where people are afraid of air raids and snipers. Then they waited for hours for the vid-meet with Matty, after which he had chosen to wait for Riley while she taught the other tech-heads how to detect the type of hack the Wolenczak kid had tagged them with. At mid-morning when they left Phoenix HQ, Jack had a gut feeling and insisted on a long detour specifically to pass through the neighborhood where Diane had decided to set up this time around. It was a rather lower middle-class area with several small independent stores and a lot of newer families from recent immigrants. The shape of the place was BAD, and Jack's gut was churning something fierce, until they reached the small four storey building where Diane lived.

There was a bunch of thugs wearing hoodies and balaclavas grouped around the base of the edifice, bashing in the main door with crowbars and fire-axes, destroying the bank of mail boxes inside the vestibule and starting their way up the stairs to loot or wreck the apartments. Then one turned around and Jack saw the two red & black Nazi flags printed on each side of the torso on the guy's leather jacket. The Delta-Forces specialist didn't need anything more to jump out of his SUV with a pistol in each hand, whistling loudly to get the attention of as many perps as he could. When about half the group turned towards him and he saw they all had Nazi insignias, SS badges or Germanic runes on their clothes, Jack didn't hesitate anymore.

The history he had learned in high school and his training for DF showed clearly that you don't negotiate with Nazis or skinheads; they only talk when they're out of ammo and knives, and tied to a table unable to move anymore. He lined up his shots, not even using the laser pointers on the pistols to bring down six thugs in 4 seconds before concentrating on the cluster packed inside the vestibule that were now orienting towards him, trying desperately to come out and bullrush him before he could finish the job. At that point, another gun resounded as Riley had lowered her window on the SUV's shotgun side and let loose with her own pistol, cutting down perps as they tried to run out of the building. Jack finished off the three last skinheads in view then took a run inside the edifice, jumping over corpses and men writhing in pain on the ground, to climb up the stairs three at a time. Behind him, he heard the report of a pistol shooting again and again, telling him that Riley had left the truck to finish off the men who had just endangered her mother. It wasn't like the LAPD would intervene, not in this neighborhood, not when the nice rich locales in Hollywood, Malibu, Beverly Hills or Long Beach were soooo much more important that there weren't any police cruisers available to respond around here.

Jack had killed the last perp on the doorstep of an elderly latino grand-mother who was blind since birth and never hurt anybody. The 79 year old lady walked around with a white cane to tap her path around and a stout wooden stick to lean her ample girth on so she could still be mobile. Why in bloody blue blazes had that skinhead wanted in there was beyond Dalton's comprehension, and well beyond the Nazi as well, on account of taking a double-tap to the heart from behind without any warning.

After reassuring the old woman that she would be safe until her sons came to get her, and dumping the dead body down the well in the middle of the stairs, he finally reached Diane's flat and banged on the door to see if she was home. She was, as she worked from home for the job she had taken until she could find something better adapted to her wants. Recognizing Jack's voice immediately, she had let him in, heard his explanation and accepted his help to pack her valuables and necessities back in her set of luggage so she could move her life yet again.

After a teary reunion with Riley, who had come up to back-up Jack if he needed it, the three worked to pack the small flat right back into the same suitcases Diane had used to come from Vancouver, which had been the same she had used when leaving LA, years ago. Then they had rolled quickly to Riley's apartment building, in a slightly better sector but also seeing civil unrest and signs of violence in the streets. Jack had not taken 'no' for an answer; him and Diane made quick work of invading the young woman's dwelling to 'force' her to pack, leaving only the useless or unwanted stuff behind.

The drive through town to Jack's own flat had been miserable and fraught with fear as they now had two vehicles, since Riley had argued they would need to put her stuff in her own car to leave place for Jack's possessions in his SUV. With Diane's luggage already taking up a lot of space, they could not afford to have just one transport to reach his apartment or he would leave with a pair of duffel bags, no more. The excursion over at his building was short and straight, as he had several emergency go-bags packed at all times and stashing the rest of the few valuables could be done while the two women lugged his prepared sacks down to the cars. It took less than 10 minutes to pick apart and shutter his place, compared to almost 30 for each of the women. Then they faced another high speed drive through a city at war with itself.

And now, here they were, at MacGyver & Bozer's house.

They had arrived at 13:30pm and Jack had demolished the plate of food put in front of him like he hadn't eaten solid matter in a month. Riley and Diane had picked at their meals, eating a bit less than half. The real kicker though, had been Bozer and Mac. The two young men weren't growing teenagers anymore but they still needed to eat, especially since everything indicated that there would be a bloody lot of trouble all night long. At 5 minutes to 14:00pm, Angus stood to clear their plates in the sink's trash grinder while Wilt grabbed the remote to activate the Internex monitor mounted on the living room wall, dialing it to CNN by force of habit. A habit Mac had for years, but Bozer had understood it only since he started working at Phoenix, in the field missions team.

Jack almost drew his weapon on Angus to ask security identification questions when he saw the holster with the Sig Sauer P320 pistol on his right hip, extra magazines and kit sheaths hung on his belt, as if he were ready for a war. Then Jack realized that he was. Angus Timothy MacGyver had somehow broken through the mental blockage that made him almost allergic to firearms enough to pull out his old EOD service sidearm. Somehow, Dalton couldn't help but feel the world had just lost something precious, when that green-eyed boy had decided to pick up hard steel in his hands in anger again.

"Hey, people! The dumb-ass who started all this is about to talk! Get in front of the TV!" Bozer shouted from his new location on the living room couch, on the left side, with Riley in the middle and Diane on the right side. The other two men walked over to see the tail-end of the channel's blurb about the coming presidential address. Angus and Jack sat in individual sofas to watch the coming program with apprehension, as the video briefing with Matty Webber this morning hadn't been anything reassuring, and there weren't any news from Lake Barcroft since.

*** REPLAY - Chapter 6; Cross-burner in chief ***

(Eastern America; 18:05pm)

(Western America; 15:05pm)

"This isn't good. Please Mac, tell me I'm not imagining just how not good this is!" Bozer asked in a weak voice, looking at the man who was essentially his brother from different parents.

"It isn't simply not good, Bose, it's bad beyond anything America has ever lived, even back in the MacCarthy era. This is Nazism back in action at full force. The old bastard just didn't name it aloud, but that's what it is."

Dalton snorted at that, interjecting "No, it's worse. The Nazis at least didn't treat their women and children worse than diseased cattle the way this guy wants to do. And they certainly didn't authorize people to go around the streets beating, raping, maiming, and killing, anybody they wanted under the vague pretexts of 'keeping slaves and kids docile' and that sort of tripe. This is completely made-up shit coming out of his backside like a gushing river, and I have no idea where he took his ideas from. This certainly ain't no God from no Bible that I learned about in grade school back in Texas, I can tell you that!" the middle-aged soldier exclaimed angrily at the deplorable spectacle of inhumanity they had just witnessed.

In a clear show of just how affected he was, Angus stood up to march over to the small bar that was built on the side of the living room to hold the few liquor and beer bottles they kept in the house. Finding the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey, he took it up and grabbed enough tumblers for everybody in the room. He handed the glasses out with shaking hands, then filled them slowly to avoid spilling any liquid on the floor. Given how everybody was out of their minds right now, it was wise to not waste anything they had, as they had no idea when commerce and supplies would be regularized again to restock once they were out of stuff.

The young man was completely unaware of what feelings the holstered pistol at his right hip evoked in his three friends when they saw it so clearly, the matte black plastic sheath contrasting menacingly against the light brown of his pants and pale beige of his long sleeved T-shirt. The persons in question would have been relieved to know that wearing the pistol again after four years wasn't doing any wonders for his digestion or equilibrium either. If anything Mac was having second, third, and fourth thoughts about the sanity of him carrying a loaded gun for any reason other than serving as caddie for teammates during a mission.

After a bracing mouthful of hard bitter liquor, all five people looked at each other in the eyes and talked about what happens next. Nobody wanted to leave Diane alone in the house for weeks or months, but they couldn't bring her to the Foundation building either; that place was a bigger and worse target for Trump supporters and God-nuts than the anonymous house in the LA suburbs would ever be. While Bozer's family would happily receive her for a few weeks, they were all blacks (well duh!) and therefore no longer had any rights or capacities under the new Pure Christian America Laws that had just been proclaimed. Even if Diane could travel down to where the Bozer family lived, she would not be safe, simply because the militias would come to harm them, sooner and harder than they wanted to think about it. And the fact they were powerless to physically help the Bozer clan was eating away at their gut something fierce.

Riley asked aloud "Why doesn't she just come with us to Canada? There's place in the jet and the NCIS people won't be bringing anybody else, they would have to tell us in advance so we can vet them during the background checks."

Jack answered without any real hope "We can call Matty to ask, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. This is way against procedures, Ri, and even I have a hard time justifying asking for it, no matter how much I care for both of you."

Angus commented "Why don't we ask the NCIS people? They have a large compound in LA too, and they seemed to have better, more extensive organizational preparations for the 'Noah's Ark' protocols than we do. Maybe they can take her in, or offer a bunk in some agent's family during the period of unrest."

Riley smiled tiredly at her blond friend, answering him "Yeah, I'll call them straight away. We need to decide tonight what happens so we can make it real. Why don't you three guys finish prepping the house a bit before taking a couple hours' nap before dinner and the night watch. I don't think this neighborhood will see trouble before dark. Here, the cops might actually spare a car or two if an alarm goes off. Wealthy upper middle-class white folks and all that shite..." The young woman griped as she marched from the couch to the small side table where her laptop and field gear had been dumped upon entering the house. She was going to set up for the long watch anyways, so she might as well do it now and contact the NCIS mission team to get their roster, personnel files and schedule early while she was asking her pressing question.

{ SQ } - { Helping each other } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 18:51pm)

(Western America; 15:51pm)

After a half hour of unpacking, plugging, booting and configuring hardware to run with anonymity & counter-hack apps constantly wiping the traces behind everything she did, Riley finally managed to contact the NCIS – OSP in Los Angeles to get a sit-rep. The young hacker was lucky that they were just finished setting up their own team roster and travel plans, with confirmation from their New Orleans division that the agents requested would be at John Wayne Airport for their common ride ahead of time. The mission team's lead agent was Senior Special Agent Kensington (Kensi) Blye, and she had just come out of the planning session, therefore they could speak with her. A few minutes of wait saw Riley and Kensi talking about their problems and necessities.

Jack Dalton, passing behind Riley with a rather large armload of supplies that he was bringing to the cars outside for their trip, heard the two women trying to come to an arrangement as amicably as they could since Ms Blye understood Riley's predicament real well. Dumping the stuff on the couch for a tick, Jack walked to the women huddled around the computer screen and introduced himself kindly to the people onscreen. "Hey there, Navy cops! I'm Jack Dalton, ex-Delta-Forces, now at DXS, and gun-toter for this here group. I hear you could have a place for my good friend Diane here, but you're afraid you could be short on food and goods rather than space to share, is that correct, Ma'am?"

Kensi valiantly ignored Eric and Nell snickering at her side while she tried not to blush, or be insulted, at being called 'Ma'am' since the guy meant it as a politeness. She was 32 years old, not 75! She was no 'Ma'am' material yet! But she'd worked with Texans before, and those who were genuine in their culture were pretty damned fierce about being truly respectful to people around them at all times. Southern Hospitality and manners were taught young over there, and nobody laughed at uncouth or crass behavior when it came to helping neighbors in bad community situations like here now.

Putting on her best smile despite the loaded gun aimed at them all, and the burning city around the building, Kensi spoke to him. "Yes, that's the situation, agent Dalton. My fiancé and I are lucky enough that we already share a large house with a large fully integrated garage and large backyard, all fenced in and tightly secured. We even have a concrete bunker in the basement and steel sheltering closets at each level in case the worse happens without warning. Now, we have put both of our mothers in that house, so they would be safer than their individual apartments during our prolonged absence. Just like you want to do with Diane. The problem now becomes this; how do they get resupplied? With two women over 50 years old in the same house, the food will last only so long, with 3, it would be shorter. I don't deny that they would be safer inside the walls being 3 to watch the cameras and fences, but the restocking situation becomes more pressing, and more recurring. Not to mention, how do they find the food and pay or trade for it? Because we all know this is going to end up a situation without electronics, bank accounts, checks or money. People will want solids on the table like guns, munitions, alcohol, drugs, medicines, raw metal to work, etc..."

Jack frowned in thought as he listened to the NCIS agent explain her dilemma and found he couldn't fault her, nor scoff at her fears. Diane was no fighter and had never served in an armed job in her entire life. If she had fled the USA on an official 'witness protection' deal between governments, maybe she could have asked to be taught to shoot a pistol or shotgun, but she had run under dark, pushed by Riley after the NSA Hack incident. By what he heard though, the other two older ladies weren't any more militarized than Diane.

"The only thing I can say, Ma'am," Jack put out, "Is that the situation you describe will be the new normal for Los Angeles in about two to three weeks, and the entire USA in about six to eight weeks at the latest. DXS has already heard intel chatter about several banking groups declaring the new Papal Lord Amerikus and his shindig-buddies as 'illegal entities'. Those banks plan to block the new government system from using the USA's treasury, and they already said they won't execute court warrants to block or seize the assets of the supposed 'under-beings' that Trump wants to kill or enslave. No matter which way you look at this, either you leave the USA the same way people have been leaving the Middle-East for almost a century now, because of the ceaseless civil and religious wars, or you stay and try to make a life. There ain't no two ways about it, but those."

Kensi Blye looked at the small family assembled before the monitor, worrying her lips as she gazed at them thoughtfully. Finally, she told them "Let me talk to Marty about this, cuz his mom's involved in it too. Since you need a few minutes to geek out with Eric and Nell to exchange all the mission comms protocols and coordinates and stuff... You do that and I'll go talk with my man. We'll have an answer by the time I get back in about ten minutes or so. Thank you guys, for calling and talking to us, we needed it."

Riley swallowed passed the lump of uncertainty in her throat as she began the protocol exchanges with the NCIS operations analysts on screen while Diane and Jack tried to be unobtrusive besides her. About ten minutes later as they were finishing the tech talk, agent Blye came back with a young man dressed in the same tactical clothing as the rest of the people on screen but with a messy mop of shaggy blond hair and deep blue eyes. Her fiancé had black circles under his eyes and a haunted look to his face, as if he hadn't been sleeping enough or had seen horror recently. Jack could sympathize with him. Riley could see the appeal right away, and so could her mother. The guy had 'hug me' written all over him.

Kensi smiled as best she could, then presented her fiancé. "Hey guys, this here is my fiancé Martin Deeks, detective from the LA police department. He is the official liaison officer between our two forces to help coordinate investigations into organized crime's infiltration and smuggling through navy channels."

"Ma'am Hessop, Miss Davis, tall guy with the guns on him," Deeks started with a tired but friendly, playful smirk as his fiancé raised her eyes to Heaven in frustration while elbowing him in the side. The amused snort coming in stereo from Jack and Riley while Diane smiled wistfully at their playful love, set the mood at ease for the conversation. "Look, you guys, I understand your situation, cuz we're in the same with our moms too. Neither ever held a gun in their lives until we decided to start living together for real. Then we realized the sorts of trouble we got in regularly, so we pushed them both to learn some basic beginner's self defense and how to shoot at least a small pistol and a shotgun for household protection. Even then, they still need to sleep at some point, and they could get sick, injured, you know the hazards of ordinary life... So yeah... We called them during your little geek-out and asked them. They would be ecstatic to welcome Diane for a coupe of weeks, or more, depending on what happens to the country."

Kensi jumped in; "But we would have a small favor to ask your team if it's at all possible? We at NCIS have organized through our OPS room an emergency overwatch of all the residences, vehicles, civilian jobs and communications of our families and dependents so they could get help if we aren't home or ever get injured or killed. Do you have something similar for DXS, and will you link our house and mothers to your side of things too if you do? We would like to make the security and support network as tight as we can, considering neither of them is a combatant by any stretch f the imagination..."

Jack smiled widely at the four people on the screen, their request being the very basics of civility and neighborliness in his books. "Of course we have something like that! We had to prepare for the 'Noah's Ark' too! Riley, why don't you transfer them the coordinates and security layouts with the access codes to all our homes and cars to begin with, then take theirs, then you can make a vid-meet with the tech-heads back at Phoenix to set up the mutual support system. That'll give us a way to check out each other's digs while we're away in Canada. In fact, why don't you contact your people from New Orleans that are supposed to come over and offer them the same setup? I know DXS doesn't have that many facilities, and none in NOLA, but if we at least hear the call for help, we can plan contingencies or send help over to them late rather than never."

With a flow of easy conversation and willingness to help and support each other against the coming tides of darkness and desolation, the basis for a New America were being laid on secret back-channels, between people who had never met or heard of each other, but now realized just how vital they were to each other's families and livelihood. It is a truism that adversity burns away idiocy and uselessness, forcing what is left to adapt, evolve and make itself better. For the DXS and NCIS agents, who were already amongst the best that America and humanity had to offer, they would now get to see how much better and adaptable they could get, in order to survive and drag their families through the conflagration.

Not a world fit for children anymore

(Funeral March – Frederic Chopin)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 17:00pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 14:00pm

Daleminton Hotel; suite #204

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Lucas closed and locked the office doors before walking back to the dining room table. He had just finished guiding the hotel servers to place the two materials crates and the two last modules of the Cyberghast Hub properly in the workroom but hadn't bothered to connect them yet. He was still eating his only true solid meal of the day, and had only managed the soup and appetizer salad to date. He had barely managed to prepare a mixed plate of chicken, London steak and grilled sole with scalloped potatoes, rice and hot grilled vegetables, that the entry door had buzzed with his delivery. When the UPS Overland Services truck had delivered his equipment two days ago, only the two most important modules had been brought up, the remaining 4 pieces had been put in storage in the leasable lockers in the basement of the Daleminton. It was now time to assemble the entire system, but later. Food first.

Lucas sat back in front of his warm food and turned the TV sound back up to a level audible even without paying serious attention to the program. There was a presidential address coming up, and he wanted to see just what the dumb, criminal retard would say to hang himself with. At 17:00pm on Washington DC's clock, all television and radio channels were co-opted by the US Department of Communications to broadcast the message in such a way that nobody could miss it anywhere on Earth.

*** REPLAY - Chapter 6; Cross-burner in chief ***

(Eastern America; 18:10pm)

(Western America; 15:10pm)

The television was now dark, turned off after the Papal Lord Amerikus had finished disbursing his poison upon reality. The teenager sat in his chair, his plate of succulent, fresh cooked food completely untouched before him on the table, just as he placed himself a little over an hour ago. Looking far away into empty space, arms wrapped around himself in a self-protective hug, the boy began to sway on his chair, a low soul-warping keen emitting from deep inside his belly to come out his lips without any conscious decision on his part.

After a good 15 minutes of psychological trauma and mental collapse during which the shocked, terrorized, adolescent could not perceive reality nor connect with anything outside his mind, the wailing stopped completely. Setting his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, Lucas let out the tears of despair, depression and despondency that were the only sane way he could express himself anymore. Unseen and forsaken, Lucas sobbed his heart out, thinking of his grand-parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and in-laws, imagining what they would say if they saw that this world still had not learned the lessons of Nazism, Hitlerianism, sectarianism and religious drift into pure fabulation.

History had tried to teach them, fools that they all were, but they spat upon both education and teacher alike. They, worshipers, militias and street gangs alike, would be made to learn and remember the One Truth of Human Misery, regardless of what they felt or thought. The alternative method of teaching to be employed was unconventional/experimental wide-area armaments against population centers and tactical geographic landmarks that would come in due time, when Lucas was good and ready for it.

Standing up on wobbly legs, the youth needed to lean on his cane, furniture or walls, to make his way to the serving cart where he placed his prepared, but untouched, plate in the warming compartment, in the side of the vehicle. In a half-hour or so it would get back to edible warmth without nuking it; a much preferable method as microwave ovens tended to scrap the taste of what they reheated.

Walking to the bathroom, Lucas hobbled as fast as he could safely move, to the shower for a long session of emergency hydrotherapy to warm his body and stabilize his aching legs. As he marched, the boy could see his arms still shaking hard and felt more shivers sliding down his spinal column, with being woozy and having troubles with his eyes and ears. All of these together were symptoms of going into a state of shock. That meant he needed urgently to raise his core temperature quickly or he could fall unconscious; then things would get worse fast from there on, if was alone without any help.

The boy started up the shower then made certain to place his cellphone in close proximity in case he had graver health problems that required him to call for an ambulance. He quickly got undressed, dumping everything in a pile on the floor without a care; he planned to wear it all again when he finished his unforeseen shower, unless it all smelled. Right now, he wasn't even sure he was breathing, let alone what smelt what, so he would wait until he had been brought back from the brink to make decisions. Looking at the time on the wall mounted clock, he gave himself 10 minutes to warm up his core back to normal, then an extra 15 to 20 minutes just to relax under the spray. If he couldn't warm up and stop the shakes inside that first 10 minutes, he needed to call that ambulance and hotel security fast before he blacked out and injured himself even worse.

Fumbling badly with the emergency med-kit normally at the small of his back to yank it off the belt and put it on the washroom counter, the teen was getting desperate as his shivers became worse and affected his entire body. He needed imperatively to find this damned syringe NOW if he wanted to pass through this. Finally setting down the small kit, he got the snaps and zipper opened, searching roughly through the contents until he found what he wanted: a spring-loaded syringe built like an Epipen but holding a very different chemical.

This little device contained something that Lucas had been designing for almost four years now, to be used in the context of clinical psychiatry or prison infirmaries, but also to resolve shell-shock & PTSD symptoms or post-fight combativeness. The compound he had called 'Equilibrium I-a' served to react with and dissolve adrenaline molecules down to harmless basal elements before they reached the brain, affecting cognitive functions towards aggressivity and violent reactions. This could easily counter the symptoms of shock, as he was now beginning to experience, or take a violent perpetrator and forcibly revoke the fuel for his rage-driven rampage.

Lucas grabbed the sky-blue colored spring-pen, tore off the cap, twisted harshly the actuator knob, then jabbed down on the middle of his thin meatless left forearm, in the thickest and most muscular part he could see, not that there was a whole lot more meat there than any other place on him. It took barely 40 seconds for the first effects of the serum to be felt as his eyes burned less and his inner ears stopped the infernal ringing he hadn't even been aware of until it ceased. He left the wasted spring-pen, parts and torn plastic sterility wrapper on the counter, walking to the shower as soon as he could in his state.

"Alexa!" he croaked out in hoarse tones as his scratchy throat pained to work properly. "Set the hotel's emergency services alarm to call medical help in 10 minutes, prompt me to ask if I cancel or prolong."

"Yes Doctor Wolenczak. 10 minutes delay until EMT's are called. Request confirmation before action." the domotics server answered in its unflappable North-American female tone.

Pulling down the steel washing table for children and sick adults, Lucas adjusted the four individual shower heads; three to splash from his clavicles down to his toes with hot water, while the fourth was aimed only above his forehead to deliver chilled water to cool down the impending shock-induced migraine, fever spike and disorientation. With all the preparations as done as could be with full-body shakes and troubled vision, the adolescent dropped his weight to the low perforated steel washing table and lay himself naked, fully on his back, under the luxurious combined sonic/ionic/water jets.

{ SQ } - { Lucas has triggered } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 18:50pm)

(Western America; 15:50pm)

After close to a half-hour of self regulated emergency hydrotherapy deluxe with the only illumination in the room provided by the wall inset fireplace that blazed cheerily, the teenager could finally begin to feel a modicum of health and stability return to his slight, scarred frame. Emotional equilibrium and sanity would probably never return to him, not even with all the chemicals in his arsenal. Not with the decisions he had come to during his episode of shocky distress whence he fugued from reality as his physical body recovered heat, senses and orientation under the cascading healing waters.

Sitting up on the steel wash-plate, with his feet on the warm wet granite floor of the shower stall, the teen leaned backwards against the wall like a backrest. Eyes closed to keep out reality, he grabbed blindly for the wired remote control system, taking it off the wall peg and bringing it to lay on his lap where his fingers palpated around the dials and knobs, adjusting the temperature, elevation and angle of projection of each shower head to cover him fully while sitting, except the head which he now wanted to keep isolated to let his face dry out.

Another fifteen minutes later and he was calm enough, his breathing regulated enough, to open his eyes and face the dreary, violent new world that awaited him outside the enclosed washroom. Shutting down all the showers functions, the boy used his cane's pommel to hook the large fluffy towel on the heated rack to pull it off and toward him so he could dry himself before dressing again. Taking an experimental sniff at his clothing, he decided that while the smell of sweat wasn't that much, he had suffered enough adrenaline surges, stress and violent attacks in one day to consider that at least his underwear could use a change. Since he needed to access his wheeled suitcase in the bedroom anyways, why not change into something new at the same time? No sense in wasting the feel of cleanliness from his impromptu shower by wearing what he had changed into after the morning's altercations.

Clothes which had been completely clean, right out of the suitcase back then...

Already drenched through with sweat from shocked panic...

At least his body hadn't lost autonomous control to the point he vomited or voided his wastes like an infant or senile asylum patient. Calling the hotel personnel to clean up after an accident like that would have been the death of what little ego and pride he had left in him.

Wiping the persisting wetness off his lean sickly pale face again, the boy ignored studiously the fact it was tears of misery and shock rather than remaining shower water. He wasn't capable anymore of absorbing and tolerating emotional blows the way he just suffered almost an hour ago. Getting up on very shaky legs, swaying a lot more than was safe when you live alone, Lucas donned a bathrobe then used his cane and the walls as support to hobble towards the master bedroom. He needed to find clean clothes and his larger traveling kit of medical supplies to grab something to stabilize his mind for the next 9 to 12 hours while he ate and worked on countermeasures to the depravities he had just witnessed.

Somebody would suffer for this.

Trump and his 'kind' wanted a war... He would give them one!

But it wouldn't be free of charge; conflict was never free of cost.

Finally arriving to his bed, the adolescent gratefully sank on the small wooden straight backed chair next to the bed, to rest his legs and back. Using his cane's pommel to hook its handle, he brought close the large suitcase to take what he needed then closed the lid securely. Now holding his much larger base-camp medical kit, he rifled through for the long-term anti-shock medication he knew was in there, as well as a clinical-grade mood stabilizer to dampen his emotional reactions. He also needed to take an antacid and some Gravol to steady his stomach enough to eat solid food or he would become too weak and possibly develop a migraine on top of everything else. Working while drugged was never his first, second, or even third, choice, but in this case, he needed the clarity of mind to focus on the tasks in order to come out alive. He couldn't intellectualize the minute subtleties of the facts and make long-term plans if he had a blizzard storming between his ears.

Glaring at the meds bottles in the clear box, Lucas needed to make a very demanding effort to read the labels to pick what he wanted. It angered him that simply finding pills in a kit he had packed himself took so much concentration; he was a damned psychiatrist and pharmacologist, for pity's sake! It shouldn't be this much of a chore to find some bloody pills in a pack smaller than a shoebox! It would be faster to find the pills in his belt-kit, but it was safer strategically and logistically to deplete the stocks inside this large camp-stock pack than the smaller one he belted on for personal emergencies.

Angry, stressed and self loathing, Lucas roughly manhandled the plastic container that kept the kit's meds dry and separated in clearly identified bottles to avoid fatal mix-ups. He finally found and took the four different pills with a mouthful of chilled water from the thermal carafe set on the nightstand for just such necessities. Sitting still for several minutes to let the pills settle in his stomach, the adolescent kept his eyes closed and both hands clamped firmly to his cane as he concentrated on repressing the shakes that still occasionally wracked his entire body. It would take almost a half hour sitting alone, illuminated only by the pale waning sunlight through the patio doors, naked except for the green terrycloth bathrobe he had wrapped about his thin frame when he left the shower.

The teen lit the lamp on the nightstand to have some light to work by. Finally physically and mentally stable to function, he looked at the closed wheeled suitcase and had a flash of genius that would help keep him mobile safely for a while. The case was horizontal with 4 stout straight wheels and a long handle to drag it like a medium sized garden wagon. It was also very solid as the company that manufactured them said you could use it as a stepping stool to reach your other stuff in the overhead bins of trains or airplanes and it could take the weight of other cargo stacked atop it up to 1,000 pounds without problems in the axles or main body.

With a lopsided smile, Lucas grabbed a plump pillow from the bed to place it on the flat top of the aluminum case then sat his thin bony frame on the impromptu vehicle, giving an experimental wiggle to see if it was stable. Wearing a smug smirk of satisfaction at his own brainpower, the teen carefully set the wheel brakes on the trunk before using the furniture to hoist himself to a standing position to dress for the rest of the evening. With every layer of clothing on him now completely fresh and unused up to date, he finally felt human again. Sitting back on the improvised 'medical mobility assistance device' he had rigged, he unlocked the wheels, put the bundled wet bath towel and bathrobe on his lap for the trip, then used a combination of his legs, cane and grabbing walls or furniture to slowly drag his conveyance forward through the bedroom door and into the bathroom. Back in the bath, he dumped everything soiled in the hamper and collected his belts, sheaths and tools. He bundled his dark purple jeans to bring back to his room, later in the day. He put his thin summer sneakers on, appreciating having the warmth around his feet once again. He needed the shoes since that was his only pair of footwear left and the jeans would just get aired out a bit so he could wear them tomorrow. The matte black jeans he wore presently were old and worn, but still fit because his growth and weight gain had been stunted so badly over the last two years of health problems.

With his feet now clad safely, and warmly, with all tools in place, Lucas rolled himself back to the dining room where he set the humid pants on the cast iron rack near the gentle warmth of the wood stove so they could dry out and be usable later. Wearing on his features a small discrete, but genuine, smile that he kept for only himself when things were finally going his way, Lucas banked the embers in the stove, adding a few logs to keep the flames alive into the evening.

Now having a pleasing source of warmth in the room, he wheeled his still shaky self over to the buffet cart to recover his plate to finally eat one solid meal at long last. Instead of coffee, he started by eating another small bowl of the excellent french canadian pea soup to obtain instant warmth, then recovered his already prepared plate from the heating compartment. Thankfully, it had indeed warmed up as planned over the almost 2 hours since, and even stayed both edible and savory, as he had hoped. Setting himself up to the dining table, he tapped the wired touch tablet to order up something from Netflix on the TV while he ate his meal. No more news until at least 23:00pm on Vancouver's clock; everything would just be pundits, ecclesiastes and foreign diplomats trying to manufacture people's opinions for them. If he wanted to see the real effects of what had happened, he needed to wait at least until noon tomorrow before any real activity occurred.

Inhaling deeply the odors of his warm succulent food, the young male decided to leave it in the warmer a few more minutes as he brewed himself some strong fruity spiced tea for a change, to accompany the excellent meal waiting for him. He felt like he would need something soothing for the evening, so he took the old cast iron kettle from the cupboards near the wood pile, rinsed it in the kitchen sink before filling it and adding the yule season blend he had learned to do when he was a child. Two teaspoons of loose leaf black tea, some ground ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg, half pinch of shredded mint leaves and a handful of mixed small berries from a bag in the freezer completed by some honey.

He wheeled his liquid cargo to the wood stove, where he set it to brew to a perfect, odoriferous therapy for the soul and taste buds. The tea set had a cast iron base with an alcohol burner that Lucas wasted no time to place on the table and light, taking up a matching cast iron goblet. The entire set was decorated with canadian forest scenes, including beavers, elk, owls, rivers, plenty of trees and other things; it would make for an amusing setting to his meal. Besides, he was alone; who the Hell would care or be bothered by it?

After lighting the tea warmer with wooden matches, he recovered his plate to finally begin the solid portion of his meal. His soothing tea would be ready once he had eaten through about half his plate, so he wasn't missing out on anything. Eating his food and letting his mind wander aimlessly as he watched the uninteresting movie on the wall mounted screen, the teen eventually felt the shock and stress evacuate from his person enough to become fully rational again. As he decided to help himself to some ice cream to end his meal, he realized his legs no longer ached and his hands were steady again.

Taking those pills had been the good choice after all.

Making an experimental attempt, he grabbed the side of the dining room table to hoist himself to his feet and managed to stand up easily enough. He was no longer unbalanced or swaying like a tree in a hurricane. Taking a few weary steps around the table and wheeled suitcase that had served him so faithfully, the boy came to the conclusion that he had in fact recovered from his episode of anxiety (mental collapse) and could function normally again (as if!).

Deciding to set off his dessert completely to avoid getting so full he would end up sick, the adolescent told himself he might as well go connect the last elements of the Cyberghast Hub and prepare for a protracted virtual-world conflict that would have direct incidences on reality. He had companies to scuttle, banks to drain, classified systems to bust and several thousand characters to assassinate via social media falsehoods and wiping out their personal data from any subscription sites they ever touched.

Yes, the night was young, and it would bear ill tidings, grim news and fell pronouncements upon those white fools that claimed this stupid 'peasant superstition' of a resurrected rebel convict for their Law.

Grandma's going for a ride

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 18:50pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 15:50pm

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

New Cape Quest, Florida, USA

"Olford! Olford! Where in the bloody blue blazes is that boy? Jamieson Robert Olford! Get back in here, you mannerless cad! Leaving an old woman of my age with a bad back and poor eyesight! Oh, the nerve of the child! Wait till I tell Billy about this!"

The silver haired woman's wrinkled skin was fast becoming pink from her rising blood pressure as she ran around in circles, trying to find everything and pack her numerous suitcases for her trip to the much vaunted Los Angeles. She had an old CIA friend to visit (and poison) before the whole blasted cesspit caught fire without her having been involved in the pyre.

The nerve of them! Didn't they know you wait for the Lady to arrive?

What was it with this generation? They had all left their manners in the trashcan when they graduated from diapers to pull-ups pants? It certainly seemed like it to her venerable eyes, no matter how bad the retinas got; that's why she got glasses two decades ago!

She was answered by a young white man, thirtyish, six feet tall with clear brown eyes, short brown hair and dressed in in the classic dark blue three-piece suit that seemed to be the standard uniform of every governmental bodyguard or 'federal' in service. The badge on his left jacket pocket showed the gold rings & trident over a blue & green field that were the chosen sigil of the United Earths and Oceans Organization. He stood at attention behind the dining room table, well away from her reach as he had learned early on to not let the aged poison-spitting viper lay hands on him.

"I am here, Ma'am. I was on the phone to coordinate your motorcade to the UEO's secured VIP airfield where our transport is being prepared. Your family's 1957 Beech Twin 18 (Hamilton Westwind II STD) turbo propeller floatplane is getting pulled out of the hangar for supplying. It will be at the VIP's secured terminal when we get there in an hour. If you can pack everything on time. The porters are on their way up from the lobby as we speak."

The elderly woman frowned most mightily at the agent, scowling even worse when he failed to react at her obvious displeasure. Whelming her plump five foot three inches of toxic self to stand right in the guy's face, she let loose her verbose vitriol. "And how in tarnation do you suppose that I take all of my confections to that yonder plane when they aren't packed properly for traveling around? You do know that cake icing spoils in the heat and sunlight, don't you? Do you want me to be peddling inedibles to the people we meet on the road? Just how ill-raised are you, boy?" she tried to boss him into giving her more time to box and crate all the (poisoned) food she had spent the last 48 hours cooking.

Unimpressed by his 'principal' and being guaranteed by Admiral Noyce himself that nothing untoward would happen to him, the man gave the grand-mother his blandest smile as he shrugged helplessly to signify he couldn't change things. "It's the schedule we have, Ma'am. We have to depart from the VIP runway on time or we might get stuck on the tarmac for up to seven hours until the next slot opens. We are not rated as emergency rescue nor active-operation military aircraft therefore the tower controllers will set us back several times before we get our turn on the lane. We get there for a 20:00pm liftoff, or we may as well stay here and re-book our flight plan for tomorrow morning."

Throwing her hands up in the air, the matronly woman swore roundly in french, german and italian as she went to her bedroom to bring her large wheeled suitcase and go-bag to the vestibule. The food would just have to be thrown out by the cleaning staff when they came Monday morning. Oh, what a waste! And she had used the last of her marzipan in two of those scrumptious pastries! What a truly deplorable state of affairs! Well, no; that wouldn't do! Janet sat herself at the dining table with paper and pen to write instructions for the maid to pack her goods and send them to 'un-deserving' people in need of 'dis-comfort' food in their misspent lives. Starting with Trump, his kin and kith...

After finishing her impromptu list of orders, she jogged to her room to finish packing her carry-on bag and the large macrame purse that had made nations quiver in fear for decades. Nobody but the most highly placed spies in Europe or the CIA would ever have the security clearance to know why she carried a set of wooden kitchen implements in her purse, nor what inhumanities she had perpetrated with them in forty years of service. She was called 'The Devil's Baker' for a reason and nobody who knew ever doubted the validity of that appellation. The last person to doubt had been some thirty years ago; he died wrapped in strudel pastry dough filled with strawberry and cranberry coulis after baking inside a low-flamed charcoal furnace for close to two hours. She then promptly fed the whole thing to Billy's pigs. US Naval Intel had owned a convenient 'exfiltration, succor & disposal' site in Luxembourg that was rather well placed right next to the French and German borders. It had been incredibly useful throughout the post-Reich denazification and the following Cold War with the communists from Russia. Ah, Luxembourg! She had been so young, vibrant and svelte back then.

Not like these days; she had more in common with her husband's sows than with humanity anymore.

Chuckling at her own self-deprecating humor, Janet quickly finished off her list of 'gifts' to the supposed friends and colleagues of her husband. She folded the paper on the tabletop and wrote the maid's name on it. The young woman was an amicable, assiduous type; she would do this little something for Janet and the old grand-mother would help her out with her own little something in return, when needed. Her last boyfriend had been a rich daddy's boy with an uncle in the US senate who thought that gave him the right to smack the girl when he was drunk. He was presently fertilizing her herb garden by the roots after a trip through a truck-trailed diesel powered mulcher. It was these small exchanges of favors that made their little circle of community and friends stronger together.

The matronly woman left the dining table to enter the bedroom she shared with her husband. Quickly she assembled all her travel necessities, most of which were always prepacked in small voyager's cases that only needed to be stashed in her carry-on bag with the shoulder strap and she would be set for her overnight trip. Taking a few seconds in front of the tall dressing mirror to set her hair a bit better, she took a few long hair pins made out of hand-carved teak wood in Thailand some 35 years ago. With a removable 9 inch long steel pin similar to a knitting needle but infinitely pointier. And freshly basted in vegetal poison from her herbal garden. Several little items of variable shapes with cleverly hidden hinged blades, compartments for powders or pills and the large set of christian beads with a kitsch-sized metal crucifix on it that was actually a fragmentation & thermite grenade all found their ways to her large carpetbag.

One last pursing of the lips to insure that her gloss colors were still fresh, and Janet was out in the vestibule, haranguing the poor porters to get a move on or it would be their hides if she missed her lift-off time at the airport. Taking the four large suitcases, carry-on and burdened old lady down to the car and out on the street took only six minutes because the elevator was a mite slow. The blue 4-door sedan was a private family car with driver and security compliment of the UEO because of who her husband was. Or maybe they didn't want to see an old CIA weapon loose in the streets; that had never really been clear in the chatter the office reported back to her.

It took a bit under 40 minutes in the early evening traffic of New Cape Quest to reach the military alliance's secured airfield, right on the oceanic beachline. The car drove all the way through the checkpoint then to the two storey terminal to stop directly under the car port for VIP passengers. The old lady got out of the car followed by the two men in dark blue suits that would be accompanying her on her trip to Los Angeles. They piled up the entire mass of luggage on a convenient flatbed dolly to wheel everything into the terminal then onto the plane itself. Since this flight was an internal trip using a private plane, they didn't have to go through customs nor wait in line with others. The team breezed through at high speed, forcing people to move out of their way as they marched.

Once out of the terminal on the tarmac side of the building, they only had about 20 feet to walk to reach the old gray hulled propeller plane. The vehicle was an old airframe from 1957 that had been renovated extensively, including a wet bath stall, mini-kitchenette and four fold-down bunks that could be closed up to leave the lower bunks as a pair of 3-seat couches. Aside the 2 piloting chairs in front, there were still eight of the original seventeen passenger seats and two slots for large wheelchairs in case sick or elderly people were to be flown somewhere. All the luggage would go into the cargo hold at the very tail-end of the plane, which was accessible from the inside of the vehicle, by the door in the walking space between the washroom and galley kitchen counter.

(Eastern America; 19:48pm)

(Western America; 16:48pm)

Janet marched straight to her usual seat, the very first one on the left side so she could either read, talk on the phone or sleep without the pilots' chatter bothering her. She liked the plane as a conveyance but wasn't an engineering buff like her husband who insisted on talking to the pilots for a long stretch of each flight they took. She loved the man, but God could he be a motormouth when he got rolling! The two security men from the UEO finished storing all cargo in the hold and pulled up the boarding ramp that closed up tightly as part of the fuselage once locked.

The pilots were already on comms with the tower, confirming they were ready to taxi to the runway and leave for their planned trip westward. They received instructions to wait for ten minutes more until a large UEO jet-copter that had landed was tractored to a side hangar for repairs as the pilot had reported mechanical problems and didn't want to fly his bird with those indicators flashing the sorts of troubles he had. After around 9 minutes, the tower contacted them to allow taxiing to the end of the tarmac where powerful colored lights mounted atop slim steel poles glowed yellow to indicate the runway was reserved but aircraft were not in movement yet. As they arrived in place, the tower informed them they had the following ten minutes flat to take off or signal a failure so they could get towed away to clear the strip for the next departure.

At exactly 20:15pm the plane began rolling along the takeoff runway, then seconds later was airborne, heading due west towards Los Angeles and a long overdue meeting with an old friend that had an affinity for secrets, intrigue and betrayals. It would be good to see Henrietta after so many months apart. She was her best client after all, buying so many poisons every year that she practically kept her in business all by herself.

Well no, not really, but it's the thought that counts.

Still, it would be good to be back in the field, slitting throats and stabbing backs, instead of rotting away in the depths of Langley's basements. Her cases were cold, yes, but not her corpse! She wasn't dead yet, thank you so very much for asking! Anyways, with the 'Noah's Ark' protocol in play, even the director of the CIA would be happy to see her at large, making a mess of Trump's plans like a wild dog in a bowling alley. Now, if she could help Hetty to get her old Vietnam days gang back together, they'd really be in business! Speaking of business...

"Ooooh, boys!" the elderly woman shouted over the noise of the twin engines, "I have a few pastries I packed for the trip... Would any of you like a small mocha cake? They go down real well with a good spot of tea." she simpered at the hired help, trying to foist her toxic produce on them.

Receiving four flat stares in response, the grand-mother shrugged, waving a negligent hand towards them. "You wouldn't be worth keeping around if you let yourselves be had by such a basic trick." Janet spoke authoritatively, then added under her breath "I'll just have to sweeten the deal a mite..."

The two security guards exchanged looks with the two flight crew silently then each went back to his personal business of studiously ignoring the 'Typhoid Mary' in the back lest she actually manage to tempt them with her indigestible baked 'not goods'. Now, if they could just figure out a way to occupy the woman until LA, they'd be golden.

The outsiders who care

(NCIS - LA – opening theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 19:29pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 16:29pm

NCIS west coast - Office of Special Projects

Los Angeles, California, USA

LAPD liaison officer Martin Deeks was looking for someone particular as he prowled the central square of the Office of Special Projects' secret compound. Given the woman's status and physique, you'd think finding their erstwhile boss would be easier than that, especially since normally she was always in the way when you wanted privacy to run your op. Most of what they did worked better in the cool, unseen shadows under the radar of human senses, not under the glaring lights of public institutions and state management. They were called 'black ops' for a reason, dammit!

"Hidoko! Harley, my dear..." Deeks began with his best roguish smile that was unfortunately offset by the fatigue circles under his eyes and the tense, stressed set of his shoulders. All of which were too subtle for the average civilian, but an experienced field agent like Harley Hidoko could spot it a mile away, and know the cause too. She sympathized with Deeks and his fiancé Kensi, but not enough to put her head on the block unless it helped the extended NCIS group's long term missions; survival and maintaining of society's laws.

"Why if it isn't the blond wonder himself... How did you slip your leash this time? I though that with Hetty back in the complex for a few months, you'd be more, what's the word...? 'regulated', I believe is the term?" she snarked at him playfully as she actually liked the amicable man. He was good company for an after-work drink and a serious, steady partner in the field, plus he had a decent enough personality, when you got passed the quirks. Strangely enough, he was male but more quirky than Kensi; go figure?

"Well my dear, if you must insist on wounding me to the quick so, I am actually trying to do things by the book, this time around. It's just that the persons whose book I'm trying to follow aren't here to be warned, let alone have their opinions asked. Would you by any chance have seen our dear beloved Lider Minimo? And the bigger boss? I need to speak with Hetty and Mosley before we leave for the evening, since we aren't coming back."

Suddenly, Deeks made a face as he winced at his own choice of words. "Ouch! That did not come out right... We are coming back, just so you know, but the mission could take weeks or months, and force us to travel beyond Vancouver or even to other countries. That's what I meant by not coming back, that once were packed and ready, we'll go straight to the airfield, not... come back... here... to the office..."

Smiling wickedly at her male colleague's unease, Hidoko answered gibly "I'm pretty sure you weren't warning me that you are both eloping, deserting, passing to the enemy or planning a coup d'état to kill off Hetty to take her 'throne' from her."

The face Marty made at THAT thought made Harley laugh out loud; the young man's features had gone so pale that the bags under his eyes stood out in stark contrast to his usually tanned fair skin, and even his blond shaggy hair seemed to have gone dead and inert around his head. With vacant eyes that seemed to look at the very source of all horrors known to Mankind, the police detective whispered in dread "If ever Hetty thinks that of me, please kill me right away; the alternatives she would come up with don't bear considering. Like, never, ever, consider them. Please! Say you will!" he begged comically with his hands joined in front of him while the black-skinned female agent was leaning on the desk next to her to steady herself as she shook with laughter at his antics.

'Gods, but this boy was good for a healing laugh or a smile', Hidoko thought to herself. No wonder Kensi had grabbed him when he was available; she would have too, if she'd known him earlier.

Finally straightening from her bout of hilarity, Harley chuckled as she tried to answer the initial question he had asked. "You know you could have asked Eric or Nell? They would find the bosses faster than me. Anyways, you are in luck, my friend! I just left them in the armory, where Shay was arguing with Hetty about all the extremely sharp, and odd, weaponry she has accumulated in there over the years. Apparently, Shay's not convinced that there is such a need for that many sharp hard steel implements of that many varieties. And of course, she thinks the display cases are more than a mite 'ostentatious' to have in place like that."

The mien the LAPD detective made was a mixture of intrigue, fear and resignation as he palmed his face, shaking his head in the process. "Will they never learn?" he asked in strained tones, "Any time you question Hetty about her weapons, she tests them out on you to prove 'the point' of just how useful they are." he told Hidoko with a teasing smirk as he made air quotes around 'the point'.

The female agent tried to swat the man's biceps with a slow backhand, just because that was the appropriate answer to that kind of bad, worn out military pun, then made shooing gestures with both hands, telling him to hustle away before the bosses moved around the building again. As if summoned by a spell, Mosley walked out of the narrow corridor leading to the washrooms and rear staircase from the basement armory, on her way up to her office on the mezzanine.

Seeing together the two agents least likely to conspire a common plot against her, she walked over to them curiously, especially when Deeks' only reaction to her presence was to set his hands in his pockets, some stress bleeding out of his posture as she neared them. Looking to her longtime subordinate and friend Hidoko with an open, inviting face, Shay asked simply "Is everything alright? There is a big job coming up later tonight, when we move some of our agents' families to safer, less isolated locales. I do hope there isn't a sudden problem..." she left off, hoping that Harley would fill her in.

To her surprise, it was Deeks who answered. "Actually, I was asking Hidoko here if she had seen our dear beloved mini and big bosses, and there you are, just like she said she saw you. If you have five minutes, there is a collateral situation that you need to be briefed about, Kensi will talk about it with Hetty later on." The male detective spoke in clearly tired, softer tones than he normally did; his body had begun to show signs of persistent fatigue and lack of recuperation. It was a good thing the couple would be going home for the night then go to the airport directly in the early morning before rush hour. If any such period existed anymore, after the so-called 'presidential address' they had all been subjected to.

Gazing deeply into the man's blue eyes, she saw a guarded, injured soul, but no adversity or dishonesty, so she nodded at him openly, putting on her 'professional smile #3' while pointing up at her glass-walled office. "Will upstairs be good enough? It's a bit small and feels like a fish tank, but it's homey in its own way." she teased him cordially, knowing that Deeks was always more consciously careful of her rank and position in NCIS than the actual agents. In a way, it felt good, and flattered her, that he was so clearly deferential in publicly acknowledging she was actually Henrietta Lange's superior officer, but on the other it also felt painfully weird that an outsider, a local cop liaison at that, was more polite and respectful towards her than her own agents. Swallowing her renewed bile at that thought, she smiled a bit more at his agreeing nod that he emphasized by gesturing that he would follow her up.

After both giving Hidoko a little farewell, the two agents climbed the decorative main stairs up to the mezzanine and the glass enclosure that had become so important in the last year. Mosley walked around the desk to sit in her own chair comfortably but didn't bat an eye when Deeks chose to remain standing, hands still in his pants pockets as if nothing important was happening. The detective was neutral faced as he looked around the small room with mild passive interest at the sparse furnishings she kept in the cubic compartment. She had little emotional attachment to the office as she moved around the Pacific theater at least once a month to visit some of the NCIS facilities under her jurisdiction and she had a reserved room in each. Although, this was the only building she had to commit actual construction to establish herself. The old structure was a bit tighter than she liked her facilities to be and everything was already crammed with everybody else's stuff.

"So, detective Deeks, what was it you wanted to speak with me about? Do I need to close the security shutters for this?" she queried mildly, almost certain the subject wasn't life altering.

Shaking his head negatively as he concentrated on her, Deeks replied aloud "Nahn, it's just mostly personal stuff, no nut'tin to use the SCIF lockdown for. We had a situation about a half hour ago, in OPS, when the people from DXS that are going on mission with us tomorrow called to ask for a favor. One of them has a civilian dependent just like Kensi and I do; her 50-something mother, and she needed to find a safe place to stash her during our out-of-country duty. So, we invited her to bunk with Roberta and Julia over at our house. After that, we set up some inter-agency cooperation to remotely monitor each other's houses, vehicles and day jobs, that way if there's an emergency we got two armed options to help instead of just one."

Shay leaned backwards into her chair, steepling her fingers in front of herself, looking at Deeks' face, trying to decipher his motivations through his body language. Except she was getting nothing other than the stress he felt when mentioning their mothers being left alone during what was essentially the onset of a civil war. Since that stress was like background noise on an old analog TV set, it created 'snow' that hid the real program behind it, blocking her reading of him. That, plus the fact detective Deeks was normally very good at keeping up a fake smile through adversity and putting out false signals to hide his true state from hostiles. He was one of the few 'better' undercover operatives she had seen outside of federal agencies during her career in the intelligence apparatus.

"Well, that's interesting to know, that there are still people in this town who believe in the virtues of human decency and community without first looking at your skin color, gender, age or religion. We seem to be in short supply of that, recently." she quipped in dark humor. "However, I fail to see how this concerns NCIS - Pacific or myself. Am I missing something, detective Deeks?" she probed more directly to get at the bottom of this.

Martin sighed deeply as he ran a hand wearily through his long blond hair, giving the top of his head a vigorous scratch at the same time. Leaning over, he placed both hands on the front of Mosley's desk to support his weight while he spoke with the woman that nobody in the building really knew anything about. She was an outsider; just like he still was after all these years and being engaged to Kensi.

"Look, Director Mosley, I know I am just a low-tier LAPD detective who was assigned as the NCIS liaison agent because the guys at the precinct were sick of my face and, for some unholy reason of her own nefarious designs, Hetty actually wanted to keep me around. Like a tagless lost puppy she dragged in the house. To run inhumane, illegal biological experiments on it away from prying eyes. But you didn't hear that from me, no sirree! Ya did'na hear ta'at un from me!" he joked to set the other person at ease with him. He didn't want an adversarial or suspicious relationship with this woman, he simply didn't know how to say it aloud. Yet. The inspiration would come.

Trying to hide a widening of her smile, Mosley moved her fingers from steepled to interlaced and set her elbows on the chair's armrests, a bit more at ease since Deeks was cracking his infamous off colored humor with her. He tended to do that either to cover the fact he was more nervous than his auditor or because... Well, he was a guy... Did men really need an excuse to be weird or crass in their jokes at the expense of people?

"They will trust you. Not now, probably not soon, but they will trust you. Eventually. It's just you're a distant figure to them; the 'regional' manager, not the person whose gonna sit by their bed in the hospital if they get banged up bad enough to be crippled or maimed for life, like Hetty has done, and will do again, as long as she leads OSP. Give them, and especially yourself, the time to do this right. You deserve their trust, I know you do, but you also deserve to earn it the hard, solid way, so they can't doubt you anymore. They'll second guess you, they do that to everybody as that's a basic survival necessity of undercover life, to never accept materials, events, or people, at first contact, but they will eventually doubt you no more than the other people in the compound."

Shay' face had turned to stone at his words. She had no idea where he came off saying things like that to her, even if he weren't condescending or sucking up, because these were her deepest thoughts, the most recurrent fears and limitations in her daily life; the systematic distrust and passive-aggressive resistance of Callen, Hanna, Kolcheck, Beal, Jones and even several of the lower tier employees of the building. Hidoko had even gotten caught up in the movement a few times in the several months they had been based out of Los Angeles to oversee the situation with Hetty's disappearance in Vietnam and subsequent return. That this simple beat cop could read her thoughts and raw emotions set her on edge and she now wondered what his angle or game were.

Deeks shook his head negatively, his face showing tiredness and weariness that few people ever saw as he usually kept it far more wrapped-up. Straightening his stance and taking his hands out of their pockets, he stood there for a few seconds, contemplating the older woman before nodding firmly once as he came to a decision. Surprising the regional manager with his action, Marty slowly walked around the desk to stand besides Shay then leaned back until his thighs touched the desk's rim and he settled his butt down on the edge carefully, making certain the glass plate could actually hold his weight. The thick tempered glass didn't so much as make a noise as he sat, so he relaxed and gifted the black skinned female a short lived boyish grin before his face became worn and tired again. Mosley had unlaced her hands to grip the armrests of her chair, preparing to defend herself. Deeks had never been disrespectful towards her, nor aggressive, but after Trump's heinous speech and the law changes he was advocating to get done, no black person, nor any woman, could simply let down their guard around a white man anymore.

Marty saw the tension and defensive posture in the person he was speaking with and sighed despondently; he understood all too well her reasoning and didn't blame her, but it hurt anyways that somebody could think of him that way. At least it wasn't Sam. That would hurt a lot more than he was ready to admit, even to himself, after all the years they had worked together. Inhaling a deep, steadying breath, Deeks looked straight into Shay's eyes and said:

"I am an outsider, just like you. That's who I am to speak to you like that, about those things. Because they keep me up at night too, just like you. Because after almost 9 years of working together, of stress, of bleeding, getting shot, getting tortured and losing people together, they still see me as just the bothersome lightweight LAPD tag-along. I was kidnapped and tortured besides them, but I was alone in my side, separate from them even when we were in the same room. We faced biological weapons together, but I was alone when came time to clean up and write the reports cuz they had 'classified navy stuff' to do about what we just lived. Even the mission to Vietnam to rescue Hetty was a pain in my firmly toned ass cuz Sam, G and even Kensi kept talking about navy intel and CIA secrets so dark they felt the need to shove me to the other side of the room, or send me to bother the pilots of the plane, so they could talk between them without 'breaking protocol'. Even under enemy fire, even in the depth of enemy territory with the same risks and the same goals at stake, with my fiancé being one of 'them' from the start, I am still an outsider to them. That is why I can speak about those things that hurt you so deep, when you think nobody is watching you."

Director Mosley's face had turned as immobile as sculpted onyx at his words, but softened as she heard the words and the genuine emotional conflicts and suffering they revealed. The young man had expressed to her things than she realized he could never reveal to anybody, not even Kensi Blye, because then any chance he had to somehow become 'one of them' for real would be shot for good. Closing her deep black eyes for a few seconds, Shay wondered how, after nine years, could this kind, caring man still be caring and straining so much to help a group of people so hermetically tight together that even the repeated trauma of sustained street fights, shootings, bombings and torture at enemy hands couldn't make them more trusting, more open to him. 'I am an outsider' he said, so honestly, and so clearly hurt by it. That even his fiancée treated him that way instinctively, without realizing the hurt she inflicted upon him... What kind of cult was this team, that they could hold ranks so brutally against a person who was well and truly 'one of them' by any definition she could come up with?

"I am sorry for your pain. I didn't know they were that way with others, especially not in their own team. I honestly thought they were better people than to be so segregated like this." Mosley spoke softly, her level tone of voice soothing the man's frayed nerves in such a way that it was visible in how his posture seemed to sag and a certain tension left his shoulders. He was now looking down at his hands, laying open on his lap; big, strong, calloused from hard work and shooting a pistol so often... And trembling from the repressed anger, shame, fury, despair and fears... God Above, so many fears...

Shay could now read the young detective like an open book and wished dearly that she couldn't. After so many times where he had come out of firefights swinging with a cheesy quip or deleterious pun, she had lost track of the fact he was simply human, like them all, and had limits too, no matter how far or strong they were compared to the average person. It seemed that they had finally managed to find those limits after all, and she wasn't happy to be the one to do so. This man had given too much already for the cause and the country; he deserved better than what he received in return. She deserved better too, in point of fact, and that was what he was trying to tell her; that he knew, he understood, and while he couldn't change the others, he would help her in the small ways that he could.

Marty huffed an annoyed sigh, making a face so weird for a second that she was unable to name the emotions displayed, so many they had been. Passing a shaking hand over his drawn features, the blond cop exchanged a weak smile with his 'nominal' superior while on NCIS missions and territory, understanding her incomprehension all too much, and needing her supporting words far more than he wanted to admit.

Swallowing passed the lump in his throat, Marty spoke out in hushed tones. "Don't hate them. Life has hurt them often, from a very young age, leaving deep scars and precious few people who can actually honestly understand what they did or endured to stay alive this long. To them, it's a deeply ingrained instinct that only someone with a similar past and life can possibly relate and judge them fairly. And you would be surprised to know just how afraid of being judged 'abnormal', 'incomplete', 'substandard', 'human waste' or 'monstrous' they all are. They all have blood and misery on their hands... Far more than I have, even with some stuff I did undercover for LAPD. I didn't know for real what human depravity was until I started working alongside NCIS, and I only understood its depth since two years ago, when a man put a power drill in my mouth to core out my molar. We've seen biological weapons, humans trafficked and enslaved, ritual murders, mass shootings every other week and so on. They have the worse, crappiest job there is in law enforcement; the last thing they deserve is to have their own colleagues judging them harshly."

Gazing deeply in the eyes of her coworker, Shay answered in measured words: "They certainly don't make things easy for anyone trying to get close to them. I have been here almost a year and they have spent more time trying to convert Hidoko, who is officially my personal adjutant, to their little clique than putting in any effort to accept me. It's actually been worse since Hetty's return. There were a few times when I though Callen was going to come out and say to my face to leave 'Her territory' or I would disappear down the sewer line with a second smile under my chin. He has such a way of brightening a woman's day, that one. I can see why you keep him around; for lifting the mood on dreary days." She smiled a bit herself when Deeks began to huff out a low chuckle at her jest.

Wiping a tear of laughter from his left eye, Marty chuffed out "Really, woman? Callen as comedy relief with this outfit? In what reality do you see that? Cuz even with a Jamaican joint and a bottle of Jack in me, I can't see that happening. Maybe I need glasses... for some different sort of booze! Eh eh eh!" The male was laughing softly now, a crooked half-smile on his scruffy bearded face. After a few minutes to get his breath back, Marty gave her a more genuine smile, but still had that feel of tiredness and depression to him that had haunted him since his return from the afternoon recovery run.

Looking down at his hands, the policeman asked in a gentle tone "When will you tell them about all the square footage you've been buying around town over the last couple of years? Those big old decrepit warehouses and factories along the rail tracks just before the triage yards at the container docks cost you a pretty penny. It would be a shame to let it all waste away cuz of a 'misunderstanding' between good people."

Making a face of disappointment at herself, Shay asked aloud "Just how in God's name did you become aware of my little real estate ventures, Deeks? I don't recall taking out an advertisement in the papers, not that anybody reads those anymore. I made all the purchases before I had an office in LA, through an anonymous shell corporation, and used an agent who was a Secret Service agent alongside of me when we were based at the USSS offices in San Francisco. He retired from the service after an injury in the field, two years before I transferred to NCIS, so I know it wasn't him that blabbed. Where did you find the informations about the buildings I was buying?"

Deeks gave his normal smirk that showed he was happy he'd broken open the case for the team. It had been a big gamble for him to broach the touchy secretive subject, but her response both confirmed everything he found out, and lacked any aggressivity towards him, which was always a good thing.

"I have been a Los Angeles police detective for 10 years, since I was 25 years old; they don't hand out these badges in cereal boxes, you know. Plus, I have been a lawyer, public defender, between ages 22 to 25, and I keep abreast of legal changes every year to help the team with judicial and political problems. I even have my Bar Association membership card validated every year, even though I haven't pleaded in court in a decade. That is in fact the biggest reason I'm being sent up to Canada to fetch our runaway scientist. I still have a whole lot of friends and contacts from my law years around City Hall, and a few people may have mentioned to me that my new Big Boss was seen in the real estate permits bureau carrying out certain very large yet secretive land grabs in the previous years. Since these never got leaked to the media, and no apparent development or renewal has been spotted on those lots, well, some people have asked me questions about what was happening. Thusly, I was made aware and did my own discrete investigation into what you bought, and how, and especially why."

Mosley leaned back in her chair, tilting her head to the ceiling with her eyes closed as a groan of deep annoyance escaped from her. Passing a tired hand over her face, she shook her head in admission of defeat, conceding that there were some damned good reasons WHY this man had been chosen by Hetty Lange as the liaison officer with LAPD. The fact he could be aware of her secret land grab years before he even knew of her or had any direct interactions with her was exactly the sort of foresight and planning abilities that her regional management team needed desperately. If Deeks weren't so badly necessary on this mission, she wouldn't let him go. Unfortunately, they didn't have any other person in hand that combined legal expertise, law enforcement and enough field combat training to make an effective bodyguard at the same time. This young man really was a rarity, and a precious commodity for her department; not one that NCIS director Leon Vance would thank her for losing, if he ever decided to take a hike to another job.

Opening one eye to glare at Marty who still had his grin firmly plastered on his face, she asked in sudden concern: "Have you told anybody about this? I was never asked about it, and I would have expected Hetty or Nell, at least, to come interrogate me."

Marty's face became sober again, taking on a neutral reflexive mask that Shay knew so well for having looked at it many times when dealing with politicians in every town hall or state capital she visited during her tenure. Taking a few seconds to form an answer, Deeks sighed before speaking.

"It was about four years ago that I first got wind of some unnamed 'heavy hitter' buying out large abandoned, and flat-out condemned, industrial property in the very critical sector just abutting the shipping container transfer docks in the sea port district. They were using a shell corporation, which is legal, but got my attention on a gut feeling. On top of being clustered right next to each other like eggs in a dozen, every lot bought had railway spurs or loading quays along the tracks for direct use of the cargo & passenger trains that pass there several times daily. There was another peculiar thing that grabbed my gut too; these warehouses and manufacturing buildings were all old, too obsolete to use for the purpose of safely mass producing goods anymore, not without rebuilding the things from the ground up. Plus, several of the old carcasses had been used by street gangs to produce or distribute drugs and explosives for their street vendors, so they were contaminated so bad that many were actually seized by the city, and under a warrant of obligatory demolition and decontamination before the land got sold back to the public."

Looking Shay in the eye, Deeks continued "The intriguing thing though, was that even those dangerous structures weren't taken down; instead, great pains were taken inside of just one year to decontaminate all of them from the inside out, rebuild the strength and solidity in the walls and floors, armor the doors and windows with bars and storm shutters tighter than a bank vault. In the last three years, almost every building had tool trucks and workers buzzing around like bees making a hive, but no news in the papers or social medias, the chamber of commerce, the industrial associations, the landowner's association, or the California Registrar of Corporations. You don't put in army-grade ventilation, electrical, plumbing and create an inner lining of steel plates held upright by steel 'I' beams just for the trip of it. Somebody was building a series of war shelters in town since Trump got elected, and then you get dropped on us like a carpet bombing from a B52. And about as subtle, too."

Making a face of utter disgust, Director Mosley gestured vaguely with her left hand, "Okay, what else did you find out? And how, if you please? And why aren't you panicking about all this, anyways?"

Marty snorted amused, directing a genuine smile towards the older woman. "The 'Noah's Ark' protocol was started when I was already working with NCIS for a year. It didn't take me long to trace the source of the dummy corp's cashflow back to slush-funds in Singapore that were receiving the profits from judicial seizures of drug smugglers' assets by NCIS – PAC. From that, to the types of people involved in the reconstruction and the types of renovations... Everything said 'government war shelter' if you knew what to look for."

Shay stood up from her chair, crossing her arms over her chest, and gave the man an appreciative eye for his incredible piece of investigative work at her expense. Just as she was about to compliment him for a job truly well done, and correct conclusions to boot, her office door was rudely opened without anybody knocking first.

"Agent Blye." Mosley said frostily as she turned a gimlet eye toward the two women in her door. "This isn't the parish church; you knock and wait for permission before coming in. Is that clear?" she ordered in frigid tones that jolted the female agent into stopping her actions dead in her tracks.

Hetty Lange however was not so concerned; her face was completely neutral and her words carefully measured as she walked into the square glass-walled office to stand by the outer wall that overlooked the open central area of the main floor below. Joining her hands behind her back as she faced towards Mosley and Deeks, she queried: "Is there something amiss, officer Deeks? You have seemed somewhat out of sorts, since returning from the recovery mission this afternoon."

As Kensi frowned interrogatively, trying to figure out what this aside was about while imagining how to answer Mosley without tanking her job in the drain, Marty and Shay exchanged a look and understood full well what the Mini Boss was doing. She was coming in from the left field to catch either Deeks or Mosley unawares so she could fish around for information. Well, not this time. Marty wasn't in the mood to play charades with his Lider Minimo today, not with the day he had, or the mission coming up.

Still sitting calmly on Mosley's desk, Marty casually asked back "Hum? Have I? I don't feel weird or out of sorts. Do I look out of sorts to you, Director Mosley? I mean, we seemed to be having a pretty calm, ordinary conversation about containers and rail freight services just now. I didn't sense anything going 'amiss' here; did you?" He asked the black skinned woman in friendly tones while winking at her with his right eye which neither of the others were positioned to see move.

Shay sat back comfortably in her chair, swiveling a bit to the right to face toward Kensi, thus committing a symbolic snub against Hetty who was higher ranking, and already standing behind Marty in line with his left side elbow, putting her in Shay's established line of sight if she hadn't moved. Making a smile similar to a cat that got the canary and dipped it in cream before eating it, the NCIS Pacific Region Director commented airily: "Agent Blye. I understand from detective Deeks that you have established a new arrangement for your mothers at home. Good. I hope for you that it works out well. In light of this, it won't be necessary for you to return here at OSP. You can spend the night at home with your parents then go to John Wayne Airport with the DXS team to settle in the plane and keep it safe until your take off. I would appreciate that you log a call-in with Operations at each major step of the road to make certain your are all safe and progressing according to plan."

Marty stood from his relaxed sitting position on the edge of the desk, putting his hands in his pockets as he moved to his feet. Giving the mature woman a roguish smirk he nodded at her. "Thanks a bundle for your understanding Director. We'll be getting on the road now, have a few pit stops to do before we can crash for the night."

The detective gently took his fiancée by the arm, guiding her away from the glassed office as they heard the voice of Shay Mosley telling Hetty to sit as she had to update her on the preparedness level of her agency in Los Angeles.

Unwanted guests

(JAG – opening theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 19:50pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 16:50pm

SeaQuest DSV 6000; Deck-C; Parking silo #3

Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, near Florida

Nathan Hale Bridger still wore his day uniform as he stood at parade attention with his hands loosely joined behind his back. The passive uncaring expression on his face belied the unmitigated scorn he felt for what was on the other side of the metal valve.

Coming back from the UEO destroyer Everglades SFA-3094 (Surface Fleet Asset) was their very own MR-class shuttle #3, carrying personnel than he would never of his own free will accept aboard his boat, if it were just his choice. Ship captains were judged quite harshly by what cargo and passengers they ferried, not just how they handled their crewmen. And the people coming would not help his reputation in any way, especially with what they had tried to use the SeaQuest to commit. They were the cause of all this mess, and Nathan would quite happily see them thrown kicking and screaming in the plasma furnace like debris, if only he could get it done legally. Giving a cursory look at the four armed security sailors arrayed around him and Manilow Crocker near the blast-door controls, he didn't see anything out of order so he gave the command to process the airlock open.

Chief of security Crocker activated the airlock to permit entry inside the actual living space of the ship. The hydraulic hatch that gave access to shuttle parking silo #3 on the other side of the thick armored bulkhead unlocked and opened, the two layers of the protective valve sliding away from each other, recessing into the walls on each side of the door frame.

Coming in from the dried out silo was a pair of security sailors wearing body armor, helmets with cameras and lights, and each had a belt full of weapons to complement the pulse rifle in their hands. Following them were two bedraggled humans dressed in orange jumpsuits restrained by a complex system of 6-point shackles that forced them to walk slowly, with precarious steps, like elderly people suffering from very bad arthritis in their legs. Behind them were another pair of armored sailors and at the very back was the senior officer in charge of the transfer.

Nathan looked over the two prisoners as they were placed side-by-side in front of him for inspection; he wasn't anymore pleased now than back a few hours ago, when he was told of his first official critical-level mission since returning to active duty.

Lawrence Wolenczak and Cynthia Holtzenstein.

The depraved defective retards who had tried to illegally and immorally use the UEO's flagship as a private juvenile jail for their own criminal deeds against their already victimized son. Nathan could only imagine what his wife Carol would have done to them, if she were still alive to witness this. God knew that if Nathan was ever blessed with caring for a child again, he certainly wouldn't beat, maim, and try to murder him like these two did.

Walking around the stationary prisoners and escorts came general Sarah Mackenzie, head of the UEO's military police for the African Continent and surrounding waters. She was dressed in the usual beige uniform that looked like a 2-piece business suit that had been standardized by the higher brass across all services. Opening the slim briefcase she carried, she took out and passed over a trio of paper files to Bridger for his evaluation. It was noted by all sailors present that the file jackets were black with white lettering on them.

Black Ops mission warrants.

Exchanging looks between themselves discretely, the junior sailors understood clearly that the two prisoners would not be leaving the ship alive. Although, at the end, they would probably be very happy to not keep on living anymore; not with what they would suffer in the coming days.

"Alright, general Mackenzie. We have them. Is there anything else we can do for you?" asked Bridger in curt tones as what he anticipated the black files to contain was turning his stomach.

"Not really captain Bridger. But, I would appreciate a private cabin for the rest of the day, to have a rest and an early dinner before my return transport arrives, later this evening. We will be meeting with another of the fleet's surface combatants that is bringing you somebody eager to finally meet these two reprobates face-to-face. Until then, I will simply stand aside quietly, or maybe tour the boat a bit out of curiosity." the female general answered pleasantly. She didn't see Nathan and his crew as enemies, only as tools unwittingly used by others without their consent. She would not make the mistake of antagonizing them or lobbing them in the same basket as these errors of nature.

"Well then; we have a free VIP cabin on deck-A for such occasions. I'm sure you will find it far more accommodating than where this pair will be lodging soon." Nathan replied glibly as he gestured Crocker to have everything squared away promptly. He now needed to go to his cabin to read through these three files to decide the best course of action not only for his crew, but for the UEO and USA as well. Why did he take up this job again? He was so peaceful on his island...

State of the Dis-Union

(Lord of the Rings – Uruk Hai theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 21:43pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 18:43pm

United States of America; All over the country

The large black SUV was rolling quickly enough to clear out of any scuffles they might encounter; the mission was recon & delivery, not search & destroy to steal enemy secrets. Causing their genuine desire to avoid confrontation unless they were attacked, the SUV containing Jack Dalton, Angus MacGyver and Wilt Bozer was being followed closely by the very vulnerable small brown hatchback coupe ridden by Riley Davis and Diane Hessop. With their forces and fighting capacities split asymmetrically between two purely 'civilian' vehicles, meaning they weren't mission-rated in any ways, all five persons felt a sense that things could go really bad in a blink, if they stopped movement long enough for an armed event to happen. They could NOT allow themselves to get bogged down in a firefight with anything, not with Riley and her mom obliged to ride in a separate vehicle due to all the food, valuables and personal necessities that were stored in each transport for what was essentially a 're-homing' of the older woman for the foreseeable term.

After rolling for a very stressful hour and a half from MacGyver's house, the DXS convoy arrived in the neighborhood they desired. By common accord established before they had left, the two cars did a drive-by of a perimeter two city blocks wide all around of their destination house, so they could see with their own eyes the situation. It was imperative they know what kind of unrest and criminality had encroached in the sector to prepare their families to fight it on their own, once the active agents were away for their out-of-country mission. Given the sociopolitical situation in the USA, it wasn't like they could put it off in hopes that everything calmed down on its own without external intervention anymore.

After doing the perimeter safety survey, they slowed down to approach the target house. The front lawn was the full width of the property, but only about a dozen feet deep from the sidewalk. The front of the house was composed of the main home, which was a 30 foot x 90 foot rectangle, with the thinner side oriented towards the street. It was two storeys high plus a gambrel roof that looked bulky enough to have another full second floor under the dormers and rafters. In fact, there was a cement cavity with a wrought iron banister in the front yard that indicated a staircase towards a sizable basement, a 20' wide by 5' deep balcony on the first floor with straight stairs coming down to the ground, and another 10' by 5' deep balcony at the second floor, for a total of 4 usable levels.

The large garage was attached directly to the house but set back about 20 feet from the façade, thus leaving enough driveway for 4 outside parking slots on top of the 4 internal slots. The garage had two visible storeys, indicated by the two wide vehicle doors on the ground level, and regular household windows with a 20' wide by 5' deep balcony on the first floor. The garage rooftop seemed to be flat, with decorated french doors allowing passage between it and the level under the roof of the main house edifice. There was also a few pieces of upholstered wood and metal items jutting above the solid concrete wall that wrapped around the garage's rooftop, serving as a banister, indicating that the large flat space had been furnished as a functional terrace.

The entire ensemble was wide enough to leave just 10 feet of walkable safety pathway between the main structures and the 12 foot tall decorative wooden fence that made a 'U' shape around the property line. The open side faced towards the street and reached the sidewalk to fully separate from the neighbors, and wooden panels mounted on hinges served as locking doors to separate the publicly accessible front yard from the secluded private backyard.

As the DXS team gazed over the home, they could see that all the ground level windows had been shuttered solidly. Also, there were small plastic balls hanging under the top roof's soffits and all balconies, containing combinations of camera, lights and motion detectors. The shutters in the windows and doors were thick steel plates covered with small inch tall conical points to deter criminals from trying to shoulder-bash through the panels. The windows and balcony doors on the first floor and attic had decorative steel grills to keep out animals or thieves.

There were three distinct chimneys raising from the main roof and two from the garage. The topmost roof had six large arrays of specialty solar panels that produced electricity but also had built-in metal water pipes for a cheap, efficient, system to run hot water throughout the building. On the end of the roof towards the backyard rose a cluster of long thin metallic antennas while two different parabolic dishes had been affixed one to each chimney. Atop the tallest and thickest antenna pole in back, there was even a 5 feet wide complex rotating device that looked like a horizontal '+', with small oval parabolic receptors at each end, and thin tall vertical flanges inside the angles of the arms.

The DXS crew contemplated the heavy security and impressive comms 'noise' being generated by the house that were being picked up by their own vehicle comms and portable scanners. They knew from having gotten pictures of the neighborhood through the Internex Mappe Mundia surveys that all the lots on the street were double-length, but the home itself was far bigger than expected for the pay grade both agents reported, which caused some questions. Both feds supposedly made roughly 65,000$ a year but the property was evaluated at close to 2,000,000$ (unfurnished) located in a 'bourgeois' neighborhood at least four social classes above where Angus and Wilt shared the house Mac had inherited from his grand-father. There was literally no comparing with the apartments Riley and Jack lived in, even if they weren't cheap.

As he gazed curiously over the face of the tall impressive residence, Mac dialed his cellphone to call agent Deeks to confirm he was present and ready to receive them. He got his answer both by the phone and the house's right-hand garage door flipping upwards into 'awning' position to let them roll into the enclosed structure. The 4-car garage was configured in 2 wide / 2 deep square plan with the two left-hand spots taken already, so Jack rolled his SUV forward a bit to let Riley drive her car into safety first, then he maneuvered behind her. The positions would allow their convoy to leave quickly later on without having to move the vehicles of the people staying in the house. This was important not only for efficiency, but for safety as well: less activity visible around the home made it less interesting for potential thieves or violent fanatics.

Several can lights built into the ceiling had automatically lit up as the motion detectors inside the mechanics bay reacted to ANY activity, and was also heard a soft beeping throughout the property to warn inhabitants that there was something going on inside the parking structure's ground level. From where he was, Jack could see three doors around the garage, located in the middle of each other side that wasn't the front. As the black SUV came to a stop, the engine finally quieting down, the thick wooden door, reinforced with a steel plate on the inside, swiveled downwards to close the garage against the increasingly hostile external world. Once the heavy panel was closed, it locked tightly by rows of mechanical pins that latched to the steel frame posts on each side. Now that they were shut in safely, Marty Deeks opened the house door that permitted passage between the car park and the main house; this one had a spiked plate on top similar to the shutters outside.

Upon seeing the LAPD detective, the DXS crew were surprised to see he was still wearing the same NCIS flak jacket and dark blue BDU's as he had in their communications earlier in the day. Seen from up close, there was now lots of grime and dull brown stains visible on the pant's legs and the cuffs of the shirt sleeves. The next thing they noticed were the two Beretta 92FS pistols with extended 30 shell mags, Modular Optical System atop the slide plus LED flashlight integrated to the casing under the muzzle, clenched tightly in his hands, aimed at the ground but ready for action nonetheless. As the young man walked slowly into the garage between the two cars belonging to his own group, he was carefully followed by agent Blye, also still dressed in stained dark blue BDU's and flak jacket, but holding at forward-low an Heckler & Koch HK416 – D10RS sub-compact assault rifle with silencer, red dot sight, 6 inch bayonet, 100 shell drum magazine and M203 grenade launcher attached under the barrel. She also had a SIG-Sauer P229 E2 pistol on each hip and several knives with multiple 40mm genades in a bandoleer. While neither was openly aggressive, the heavy ordnance, heightened level of alertness and anxiety was palpable to all five visitors.

Then again, the DXS team wasn't composed of innocent civilians going out for a family stroll either; they had arrived with all four team members heavily armed. Jack and Angus each had a Sig Sauer P320 pistol with red dot sight, integrated flashlight and extended 30 shell mags holstered on their hip with many extra mags, and several combat knives. Both had their rifle of choice for the trip, the US Army's standard Colt M4-A1 assault rifle, fully kitted with ACOG sight, clipped flashlight, 6 inch bayonet and M203 grenade launcher. However, their long guns were left inside the SUV as they stepped out. Wilt and Riley each had a Glock 17 pistol with red dot sight, integrated flashlight, and extra regular 15 shell mags holstered under their left shoulder, and several combat knives. Both had brought a Mossberg 930 Tactical semi-auto shotgun with tri-rails, Ghost Ring sight, laser pointer and fixed flashlight, also left in the cars. Diane was, for the first time of her life, carrying a swiss army knife gifted by MacGyver, a can of police-grade pepper spray from her daughter, and a Police Force 9,000,000* Tactical Stun Baton Flashlight gifted by Jack just today, all in her large purse.

The two teams took a long uneasy minute to look over each other before Marty secured the pistols in the holsters on his hips, which in turn had Kensi move to set her rifle on it's bandoleer across her back in carrying position. As the tension left the four expert combatants, Wilt, Riley and Diane breathed out a sigh of relief, while also internalizing just how on edge the NCIS people were. This was not just normal weariness towards newcomers, nor the result of stressing out for the current civil unrest in progress. They had gone through something harsh recently, to still be keyed-up so much.

Rubbing at the back of his neck with his left hand in embarrassment, Marty Deeks explained vaguely: "Sorry about the welcoming committee, people. We had a shit mission all morning, then we got to HQ just in time to hear that DC had taken leave of what little senses they had left, after voting for the fuhrer wannabee a second time. Honestly guys, the only piece of good news we got today was your proposal to have our three mothers share housing until we come back. Otherwise, this out-of-country mission would have been a nightmare for both of us. Kensi and I would like to thank you, for calling us with this offer, and for helping to organize it on your end."

Deeks finished his little speech by extending a welcoming hand to the closest person, which happened to be Bozer. The young black male gratefully accepted the hand of friendship, giving a strong honest grip in return that caused a spontaneous happy smile to appear on the detective's tired scruffy face for a few seconds.

"Don't sweat it, man," the younger man expressed with many guilty feelings showing, "I can't go over to my family to help them ride out this shit-storm, so anything I can do to help Diane or any other of our friends here is welcome. Being useless sucks, and our team doesn't do it well."

Kensi Blye rapped her knuckles on the hood of her dark blue SUV as she passed by it, a lot of the stress bleeding out of her face and posture as she extended her hand to Diane Hessop in welcome. After all the reassurances had been done, Roberta and Julia were called into the garage for short introductions before they got to the immediate work. The three mothers were sent inside the house proper to receive the storage stuff, while the two teams of pros worked quickly to pull from their vehicles whatever would stay in the house, then repacked all the mission necessities into Jack's black SUV for later when they would leave for the airfield.

They used the small mud room, located just inside the house through the connection door, as temporary buffer to quicken the unloading process, then began sorting where in the home to forward the varying bags and luggage. Diane's personal belongings were set apart as they discussed where she would bunk, since Roberta Deeks and Julia Feldman had spent last night in the two bedrooms next to the master suite on the first floor. That left available the in-law suite above the garage and the three guest bedrooms on the second floor available, if the teams decided to spend the night at home. Unless the DXS people preferred to bunk together, in which case there were hide-a-bed couches in the basement's game room.

The mature woman was a bit put-out to see all the perturbations her presence caused, especially when the couple's mothers were in the house as well. Diane claimed the other women had more right than her to the prime location that was the in-law suite but calmed down rapidly as she spoke with them. Roberta and Julia both wanted to be as close as possible to their adult children to compensate for many lost years that were filled with many hardships for all of them. Even before they had been approached by DXS, their plan as a family had been to stay inside the main structure of the house to avoid isolating someone, even just by accident.

Trying to put Diane at ease about the situation, Roberta joked "Diane dear, if you insist we all be equals, maybe we should all move our stuff to the second storey then segregate it as 'mothers' floor'. We could even forbid access to any 'non-mothers' from then on."

Julia quipped playfully "As an extra incentive for such a move, don't forget about the large private terrace at that level, or how much more peaceful being away from the kids' noise will be."

It was a pair of very amused fiancés that leaned on each other as they laughed at the scene, while the disgruntled Jack Dalton was summarily drafted as a mule to take all of Diane's luggage up two flights of stairs by the main forward stairwell. Then the poor man had to do it twice again to help the 'poor old women' do the same afterwards, leaving the chuckling Angus, Wilt and Riley to move the long-term storage stuffs down to the basement lockers. Being the good caring people that they were, Kensi and Marty waited until much later, after their laughter had subsided, to tell their guests about the elevator at the back of the house near the kitchen.

{ SQ } - { Home base } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 22:20pm)

(Western America; 19:20pm)

With all the edible provisions they brought to help sustain the three mothers for a prolonged stay finally squared away, the weary warriors took some time to wash up before having a hot meal. The two NCIS agents changed out of their bloodied tactical clothes, opting for casual jeans and T-shirts with sneakers, but kept their sidearms belted on their hips visibly. Marty and Kensi were stressed out, tired from the long hellish day, almost ready to crash and wink out. The DXS team had taken a load off, splitting between the two newly vacated bedrooms on the first floor, in case they spent the night in place, but everyone really expected just a short nap of one or two hours before they traveled at night to the airport, as planned.

Inside the master bedroom, Marty hugged Kensi to his chest, putting his lips to her forehead in a gentle kiss, as he rested his arms around her loosely in a warm caring embrace. He breathed in deeply the smell of her shampoo, smiling as he remembered all the times they had shared the shower stall or the large soaker tub that were in their luxurious private en-suite. The young woman leaned forward into her lover's chest, nuzzling her face in the crook of his neck, trying to absorb as much of his loving warmth as she could in the brief moment of peace they could steal from the brutal day. After spending a few short minutes in silent emotional support to each other, they broke off to complete their tasks. When she finished, Kensi would go help the three fighters with any moving of cargo left to be done, while Marty accompanied the hacker to their office on the ground floor, where all their base-camp radio set-up to monitor the property was installed.

Walking just a few dozen feet past the elevator and rear stairs to reach the entry of the middle bedroom, Marty knocked on the door to get the attention of the occupants. The door was opened by Jack who was grinning ear-to-ear as he dried his wet hands with a thick brown towel. He hadn't changed out of his clothes since they were new from this afternoon and still clean, but splashing some water on his face had done wonders to ease some stress out of him.

"Howdie, man! I tell you, I have to thank you for lending us the room, even for just a few hours before we leave. This place sure is better than our plane's bunks, and it beats out all the cheap motels we have to crash at during missions. And that bed is so damned big! I could fit three of me in it!" exclaimed the happy texan as he threw the towel over his shoulder to free his hands.

Deeks smiled more freely, his face losing a bit more of its weariness as he listened amusedly to the older man's excited babble. Slipping his hands in his jeans pockets, he shrugged nonchalantly as he answered: "Most of the furniture in the house was sold with it. The owners had it for close to thirty years but couldn't bring it with them when they moved out, so we haggled a deal. We got cheap stuff and they saved on storage fees, as well as getting a bit more than what a garage sale would have brought in. They were especially happy to avoid that hassle, I can tell you that."

The detective heard the sound of the bathroom shared with the second bedroom open and close, with the soft footsteps of Riley Davis coming towards them, muffled by the thick carpet. The young woman had also done a minimal wash-up, mostly to her face, hands and combing her hair. Her clear brown eyes zoomed in on the figure of the man in the doorframe the moment she was in line to see him, so she walked over to stand besides Jack.

Addressing the only female on the DXS team, Marty asked "Are you going to call-in to your base now or before we leave for the airport? We have a comms room set up to monitor around the house and neighborhood, to spot trouble before it reaches us. Maybe you'd like to connect with our gear to boost your signal for your call?"

Smiling at the generous offer, Riley nodded then quickly turned towards her side of the bedroom to fetch her work satchel and cellphone. "Yeah, thanks! That would be appreciated, especially since I don't know if our boss will be easily available, after what happened last evening in DC. She's supposed to be at some secret facility, but it's in spitting distance of the Capitol. Nobody knows what's happening inside the capital's perimeter anymore."

"They're flushing their marbles down the Potomac, is what they're doing, in case you were wondering..." quipped Deeks while flashing a bratty smirk at Jack who suddenly had a bad case of cough as he tried to suppress the bout of intense laughter that threatened to erupt.

"Ah ah ah," fake-laughed Riley sarcastically, even though her smirk was quite genuine. "I can see that childish humor and cheap-shot jokes is a common affliction of all blondies the world over. I'll have to confirm this for Matty, so she stops trying to have MacGyver see a shrink for his 'little problem'." she snarked at the detective as she walked back to the bedroom doorway.

Jack lost his battle of self-restraint, exploding in garrulous laughter as the door at the end of the corridor opened to let Angus and Wilt out of the front bedroom. While the middle room was smaller and had an eccentric shape, the front one had a large balcony with a wrought iron staircase down to the ground to escape from a fire. As such, with both Mac and Bozer having more combat training than Riley, it was decided to place the 'quasi-familial' pair in the middle and the more balanced defensive team next to the accessible point.

"What's crawled up Jack's boots to tickle his toes this time?" asked an amused MacGyver as the duo of young men neared the others. This of course had Riley smirking even more as Jack took one look at his younger friend's face (and shiny short blond hair) and erupted in laughter again, holding his ribs as he leaned forward, so much his chest hurt from the effort.

Not getting any answers, the two men decided to stay with Jack in the corridor to wait for Kensi while Deeks showed their tech specialist the home-base setup. Marty led the hacker forward to the decorated half-circle main staircase, indicating the door to the in-law suite as they walked by, then down to the ground floor. He turned left as they exited the stairs, pointing to a thick wooden door that was directly next to the stairs, right in front of the mudroom and the connection door to the garage they had entered the house by.

"That's it." he explained as he took out a metallic card-key which he slotted in the complex mechanical lock above the handle. The device combined a punched-card with teeth on the sides for a reliable physical locking system and a numbered keypad to type in a code to disarm the electronic alarms.

"The place is shaped like like a cube of 20x20 feet, but it has that spot here, on the left, of about 5x10 feet for the stairwell. As you can see, there is a small iron wood stove as backup heat and light for power outages, the two big blue steel caissons on each side of the stove are gun vaults, that's an armored door to the outside, and this is our work space."

Riley couldn't help a gleeful smile at the sight. The tech setup was 15 feet wide by 10 feet deep, composed of a large wooden bench arranged in a 'U', with 2 levels of open wooden shelves underneath, and 6 tall steel & glass cabinets on top placed by pairs at each side. The systems were separated by logical group; all radios & telephones, all cameras and surveillance, Internex access servers with cable and satellite & household computing management. It was all very well set up, all military grade equipment & software, and the young female hacker was certain the policeman besides her couldn't understand, let alone use, a fraction of everything she saw.

As if reading her thoughts in her eyes, Deeks waved a hand vaguely, as he explained it away; "We had some help by our OPS people from HQ to build the system. Well, not exactly... They explained, we nodded, they built it, and now we try not to break anything when we turn on the lights to fetch our gear in the gun vaults. If it works, we don't touch it. Except for the radio & telephone console; that was made specifically on interdepartmental standards so Kensi and I could use it without causing a network-wide cascade failure... Or something similar... You know how hard it is to pay attention to technobabble when geeks go at it..." the policeman joked at her with a wide grin.

Davis gave Deeks a mock scowl as she unpacked her laptop, adapter cables, and analytics box, then sat down in one of the two plush wheeled wooden chairs to concentrate on the very sophisticated server stacks in front of her. These were not household systems, not by a long shot! Whoever had 'helped' them to assemble this wanted the couple to have military-level encrypted capacities coupled to an industrial strength telecom hub. Considering they were operating under the 'Noah's Ark' protocol, and that that particular piece of crapulence had taken over eight years to put in place the way it was at present, it didn't take Riley a whole lot of brain power to figure out these people had received some 'official' help so as to have a backup comms node & supply bunker to fall-back on in case the worse happened.

Like it so happened to have done just yesterday.

As she opened the curved glass panels to access the sockets and control keyboards, Deeks pulled out the other wheeled chair to sit besides her, watching silently as she worked her mojo on the high-caliber consoles. Five minutes of intense concentration were needed to decipher all the miniature icons on the electronics panels to identify correctly the sockets she was looking for, then she plugged her gear to obtain a secured anonimized vid-link with Matty's mobile workstation. She engaged the comms app on her laptop, entering the passwords needed to start the encryption routines and real-time analytics, then dialed into director Webber's personal VPN. It took almost a minute before an answering signal came back, the monitor turning from the Pheonix Foundation logo to an image of a person.

On the screen, agent Samantha Cage looked unkempt, her clothes rumpled from sleeping in them the last two days. The large dark bags under her eyes spoke volumes of her tiredness, and the weary closed-off set to her features told them that her days had not been any more pleasant than those of the teammates remaining in LA. The stains all over her shirt were clearly dried blood, and the discoloration of large bruising was visible at her throat. Riley was too new to the secret agent business so she couldn't identify the cause of the injury, but Deeks had seen the results of manual strangulation many times in domestic situations during his LAPD years.

"How did anybody get close enough to put their hands around your throat? Are you alright? Is your situation secure? How fast can you exfil?" asked Marty roughly in quick sequence as he punched a small red button that was isolated in the middle of the work area's wooden top, surprising Riley by the sudden change in behavior and hard voice tone.

Agent Cage didn't even try for an actual smile, even though she was grateful for the man's kind interest in her welfare. "Listen carefully, there is little time before I have to close the laptop and change locations. The Lake Barcroft bunker was breached by almost 200 Trump fanatics around 01:00am last night. It was a mixed group of marines, rangers, corps of engineers and EOD. Because there were so few attackers, and they took such heavy losses just trying to breach the above-ground perimeter, there was never any ways for them to commit a complete functional takeover of such a large facility already housing so many armed people. However, they still tried to swarm through the breaches to kill as many of us as they could, but luckily, their bomb-holes were only big enough to allow single-file movement. We were able to shoot most right the moment they climbed down out of the cracks they sapped in the ceilings. Unfortunately, a few got wise and dumped demolition charges the size of car batteries into the breaches before coming down; that killed, injured, and stunned many of our defenders badly enough that some fanatics were able to come inside the bunker to shoot at us directly. Still, they had too many disadvantages to win anything durable. That's why we managed to fight them off long enough to break-off their attack altogether, allowing us enough time to patch up the survivors, regroup, and use the secret escape routes."

The woman on screen pushed her long blond hair out of her face tiredly as she spoke of the harrowing events. "We cleared out through specially installed extra-large concrete pipes under the lake and municipality to reach the evacuation hangars, then we boarded unmarked longhaul buses prepared for this scenario, to roll out of the extended DC metropolitan area. We spent almost 6 hours on the roads nonstop. We are presently in Charleston, West Virginia, at the Yeager Airport, near the Executive Terminal. Because we carry many injured and the weather is worsening, we had to stop in what looks like a public roadworks depot to set camp for the night. In reality, the edifice has massive underground parking lots and bunkers prepared and stocked for just this sort of thing. It was some of our NSA escapees who guided us here. Matty is only slightly injured, but she's sleeping off the sedatives from the surgeries she had to undergo to remove cement and rebar shrapnel that hit her when the ceilings were breached. We are heading due west back to LA per our best means, but the weather is execrable all over the east coast. A strong nor'easter is passing through for the next 48 hours, and they're forecasting a second one in the 3 to 5 days after that."

Riley swallowed passed the hard lump in her throat, trying to organize her thoughts to ask the right questions fast, before Cage hung up on them. "Sam," she asked hoarsely, "Is the mission up north still on? Do we still go to Vancouver for the techhead? What do we do about this mess? How does DXS react from now on?" the young woman spat out as fast as she could think the words. Obviously, at this point, speed and alacrity were of the essence.

A harsh 'ping' tonality rent the air in the shielded office, startling Riley badly into scowling at the speakers built into the wooden table around her, while Deeks put his hand under the lip of the workbench to push a green button that unlocked the internal door. Kensi came in followed by the DXS men to stand behind the two seated persons, letting the door close and lock again.

Seeing everybody assembled, Samantha took 15 seconds to repeat her warning and confirm that their northward mission was continuing regardless of circumstances.

"What the hells?" exclaimed Jack, incredulous at the turn of events. "We all saw with our own peepers that the top dog lost the plot on national TV last night, right people? And they attacked and killed some of the good guys too!" Looking around the small room, the Delta-Forces specialist demanded "Why exactly is it in any ways logical to leave the country, and our colleagues, at a time like this? We need to stay here to help stabilize the mess!"

Agent Cage shook her head negatively; "No, Jack, it's not the best plan. Finding Lucas Wolenczak and questioning him officially for the record is the basic necessity here. As idiotic as it might sound to do this when the bullets are flying around our heads, we need his testimony to impeach Trump and destitute the entire White House staff legally. Only after that will we be able to take the moral high-ground and motivate the population into taking sides actively for more than just self-defense."

Angus ran both hands though his hair in frustration at the entire bordello around him. "Are you really saying to us that the law enforcement agencies can't take out this bastard and his religious mercenaries unless a stupid piece of paper is put on the news?" The green eyed male's entire face was congested by anger and disbelief. "How the heck does that work when all the different parts of the country are on fire already? Can't they just use an Apache helicopter to drop a few rockets on him and be done? Just how hard can it be to hard-stop a small bunch of defective religious nutcases all concentrated inside the limits of one single town?" the 27 year old griped nastily at his fellow agent.

MacGyver's choleric outburst was so out of character for him that his entire team looked at him as if he had grown an extra head all of a sudden. Kensi and Deeks, who didn't know them at all, stayed silent while waiting for the follow-up response from one of his own friends before they spoke their piece.

Eventually, it was actually Marty who answered when a minute of absolute silence had elapsed. "Okay, you need to take a breath buddy, and back away from the DXS method of 'hostile operations on foreign territory'; that won't work here." Deeks spoke with firm deliberate words at the younger man. "One, it's not foreign soil, it's the USA homeland, so the full set of rules applies, no excuses or bypasses. Secondly, the people around Trump may be sectarian nutcases but they are, unless proven otherwise, the legally and legitimately elected/nominated officials of the country, not hostile foreign agents. Thirdly, there's a crapton more than just 'a few fanatics limited to one town' for ANY president to get elected, let alone have practical control of the military and policing apparatus across the 50 states."

Turning his chair around to look at MacGyver in the eyes, Deeks continued to answer his question. "And fourthly, as a citizen, a lawyer and a cop, I agree with you; they are stupid papers. But, these papers aren't for us, inside what's left of the country when the dust settles. They're for everybody else, out there, in the other countries all around us, especially at the UEO Council and the World Bank. The genius kid's testimony will establish the legal basis needed to impeach Trump and his minions by proving beyond all doubts that they are depraved, delirious, sectarian crusaders who have made a clear, profit-centered, decision to bypass all laws, morality and customs. We need to show the other governments that all the religious fantasmagoria that the top dog surrounds himself with is just for show and tell. The real driving force is money, power, and setting himself above the capacity of any special prosecutor or tribunal to arrest, judge, and jail him for his multiple crimes."

"Detective Deeks is correct, Mac." agent Cage confirmed in soft tones. "We can break the crusade, defeat the white ecclesiastes, and even create a central registry of willing followers for later punishments or social exclusion, if we want to spend the efforts to make the list. But that won't convince the other countries that the arrests and trials were legal or fair. And it won't convince the UEO or the WB that the replacement government is actually legitimate, let alone legally authorized to use the public ressources and tax money for anything."

Deeks took over the explanation; "And that is the crux of the problem. Without international recognition for the legality of whatever is done to dethrone Trump's Papal Lordship, we could end up freeing the country only to realize our coffers are empty and the personal bank accounts of millions of citizens have been frozen for fear the new admin would seize/steal them to finance their revolt. And that would have one simple result : the USA would end up like like Ethiopia, Libya, Iraq or any of a bevvy of collapsed nations that turned into hellpits not even worth being called 'banana republics'."

Jack Dalton swore viciously, surprising his friends with his crass language. "Of course! It's conquest 101, just like the Romans showed the world how to do. A population will tolerate a regime change, even a tyranny, as long as the government makes their lives simpler by assuring the proximity services the right way. The Roman emperors were a bunch of incestuous, murderous, warmongering crazies, but when they conquered they used their army to cull criminals, clear and settle new farmland, paid local merchands for products in hard coins, build roads, bridges, baths, and so on... If the USA kicks out the madman's circus troop but has empty pockets... No roads, no police, no mail deliveries, no clinics, no schools, etc... Then the entire social tissue would quickly gangrene and deteriorate just like friggin Somalia. They're right, dammit! We got to get this kid's testimony to convince the bankers we're legit, otherwise, we might as well make ourselves comfortable right here for a very long period of revolutionary war."

With a face of disgust, Riley added aloud; "Let's not forget this kid's the darling pet supplier of cyber products for the World Bank. They're bloody well pissed at the fact he was basically run out of his own home and company by religious criminals. Because he has such a direct, personal, connection to WB governor Desdensky, he could actually save our economic stability all by himself. Or tank it in a pit, if he gets scared enough to react violently."

Mac made a face as he realized the truth of her words. "Blergh! I hadn't thought of that... This kid is gonna be a lot more central to this whole mess than any of us thought... Damn! If ever there was a time to talk with Matty about stuff..."

Agent Cage answered sympathically "No can do, Mac. She's asleep until we move the buses to our next camp stop, and we should be leaving at midnight, in less than an hour. We don't want to give the fanatics enough time to group together a genuine hunting party. Already getting hit by a few hundred bastards that fast and hard was a bad surprise, but these mongrels had four years to organize their coup d'état, and they were probably placing people in the armed services and police forces for decades before the 2016 elections. We escaped mostly by luck and tenacity; but in reality, the numbers don't favor anybody having any quick decise victory in this fight. There are simply too many groups that are too small, and spread out too far from each other to really compensate by uniting into a movement. Matty told me before her surgery that she thought this would degenerate into a full-blown civil war for at least a year before any sort of resolution was in sight."

Jack exchanged looks with his team then told Samantha "If there's nothing else to report on either end, I suggest we cut this pity party and grab some food and shut-eye. We all have some traveling to do in a few hours."

The female agent nodded at him and shut her comms, leaving dead silence in her wake.

{ SQ } - { Hospitality for pilgrims } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 23:35pm)

(Western America; 20:35pm)

After Kensi called the New Orleans team office to confirm the travel schedule for the other two agents, the entire group relocated to the large dining room in the center of the level, between the office and kitchen. All 6 persons went to join the three mothers who were conversing around a warm teapot, filling up a good portion of the 12 seat table. Marty walked to the outside wall to open the accordion doors to allow for the fresh night air to circulate through the house while they ate one last home cooked meal with their moms.

Jack, Mac and Riley looked around the room as they chose chairs at the massive wooden table, all on the same side as Diane, with their back to the set of glassed accordion doors leading to the right flank of the house. Roberta and Julia sat on the side in the middle of the floor-plan side by side. On the forward wall was located a glass fronted wood stove big enough to sit three kettles on top that served as heat and light during outages. It was bracketed by two heavy wooden buffets holding the tableware and necessities for receptions. There were four steel & glass cabinets spread around the room to display small decorative items, family pictures, and one was dedicated to NCIS team mementos. Against the thick rear wall that led to the kitchen was an impressive 10 foot wide wet bar & buffet that held back-lit liquor bottles, crystal glasses of all shapes, and a small Keurig K-cup brewer. The three DXS crewmen saw a narrow staircase with the upwards section completely open but a door closed the downwards to the basement. There was a wide door next to these stairs, but no identifier as to its purpose.

Bozer, impressive amateur cook that he was, sniffed loudly as he walked passed the table all the way, instinctively following the scent towards the thick masonry wall that separated the kitchen from the dining area. The stacked stone construction held an old fashion wood-burning cooking stove with central glass-fronted firebox, an enclosed baking oven on each side, an enlarged cooking surface and a hinged plate in the middle to uncover a grill directly over the flames. It also had a large metal water heating tank on the back with the copper pipe and spigot passing by the left side until it emerged in font of the stove for easier use. There were two levels of elevated warming trays built-in to the back-splash of the massive cast-iron structure, allowing to cook food long in advance then let it simmer slowly, whether in individual plates or communal pots. The pile of 3" wide x 12" long logs was situated at the right hand of the stove, in a shallow alcove built directly in the masonry column to keep it safe and dry.

Wilt inhaled noisily the savory smells emanating from the pots and compartments, obviously wanting whatever was offered quite eagerly. Someone had decided to light up the old vintage stove to slow-cook some prime turkey breasts in one oven and four berries & rhubarb pies in the other, while pots of mashed potatoes, steamed veggies and red wine reduction sauce were simmering on top.

After casing out the old stove and food, he gave a superficial look around the large kitchen, 20 x 30 feet of space wit 10 feet stainless steel butcher's island bolted to the floor in the middle of the space. Against the far wall away from the wood stove were two massive commercial stainless steel fridges followed leftwards by a sector with double sinks linked to a garbage grinder and mechanical trash compactor underneath. Following that was a massive commercial microwave oven on the counter top and the built-in dishwasher under. Then the ultra-modern hybrid range/oven using gas, incandescence and induction systems together for usual daily cooking. At Bozer's right were decorative french doors leading outside to an open patio some 10 x 20 feet. Wilt came back to the dining table, to sit besides his friends, commenting happily about the good hot food on its way to them.

Roberta shrugged carelessly, smiling as she pointed at Julia and herself; "It was the least we could do for Marty and Kensi after they welcomed us to live permanently in their home, to pass through this nightmare. Since we had already begun prepping when your call came in, making more portions was easy. The nicely banked wood fire did the rest, until everybody was de-stressed enough to eat without chocking mid-meal. And it feels more homey, more peaceful, than the bloody electric range or, God forbid, the micro-wave oven."

Julia joked amusedly "For the first time in my life, I had less chance of burning down the house while cooking than ever before, despite it being a live-flame stove, because I wasn't alone during my efforts."

This led Marty to admit playfully "My beloved fiancée, unfortunately, can't cook or bake without damaging the appliances or rendering the food inedible, thus the idea to invite the maternal units to live with us. So we won't starve or live on call-in restaurant meals all the time. Strangely enough, the only thing Kensi can bake without catastrophe are the Pillsbury type pre-made dough thingies that you slice and lay on a baking sheet in the oven. Those she always does just fine, if you don't look too closely at the icing or fruit filling splashed all over during the preparation."

Moving out of his chair to avoid a bean on the shoulder from his pouting lover, the laughing man pulled Bozer and Mac with him to start spreading the invitingly warm food around the starving colleagues. They weren't friends yet, that would take time and effort, but they were already at ease with each other enough to no longer be on active look-out for betrayal or attack from the other team. As the 9 people set up for the long relaxing meal, the DXS team were told about the elevator next to the rear stairs, the large rear porch behind the garage that was screened-in, and the fact the porch was solid steel beams covered to serve as balcony for the in-law suite and main bedrooms above. Looking through the large rear windows as he took the communal platters of turkey and gravy, Bozer saw at the back of the lot a large in-ground swimming pool and cement pool cabin 15 x 15 feet wide.

Kensi activated the metal chandelier suspended high over the dining table, using the rotary dimmer to set it at 40%, giving their eyes a chance to rest a bit while making the atmosphere more relaxing. The dancing motion of the live flames in the iron stove made a gentle game of nuances and highlights in the illumination around the eating area that soothed nerves, allowing all the agents to unwind from the damnable day in the streets. Even though there was a ceiling mounted fold-down Internex monitor in the dining room, nobody even thought of activating it; everyone in the room was just fed up with bad news, warnings of impending social collapse and the repeated bombastic explosions of madness coming from DC at all hours.

Kensi explained between bites of turkey and sips of her chilled cola: "The promoter who built the initial housing development had planned to make big mansions for the Internet-Age nouveau riche of the 1990's so they had begun by creating quadruple lots to fit the immense footprint of the homes they had conceived. Then the electronics economy 'bubble' had collapsed, killing the demand for millionaire mansions, forcing the company to look for other clienteles to survive. Their solution was to split the properties into the much more common double lots, then offer house designs aimed at large middle-class families. They had far more success; houses such as this one had sold off like pancakes right off the griddle. The models offered had been popular for their incredibly safe design of concrete & steel frame covered by faux-wood synthetic stone sidings for aesthetics, 6 large bedrooms & 5 full bathrooms, an in-law suite with separate entry atop the garage, and a fully finished basement throughout the entire house, even under the garage. The sub-level has two doors directly up to avoid passing through the house or garage, especially in case of escaping fire, or if you wanted to convert it to independent living space for your kids when they reached adulthood."

Marty continued "We got the property last year, when we officially got engaged. The owners who had bought it brand new, some 28 years ago, decided to downsize for a retirement condo closer to the ocean beaches. They moved to San Francisco, to be near their grand-kids. They sold us the house at a fairly low price, for the market of the time, and even left plenty of appliances and small items in the deal, as they would have only a 1/6 of this house to live in at their new place. We're incredibly happy with our purchase, even if the damned hour-long commute morning & evening is long and annoying, especially in LA traffic which never stops for anything."

{ SQ } - { Incivilities, unrest and social collapse } - { SQ }

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 24:54am - midnight)

(Western America; 21:54pm)

It was nearing 22:00pm when the meal wound down enough for the persons to clear up the table, pass around a few digestive liquors, and start talking about the travel plans for the flight up north. In travel time, it wouldn't be all that long, at about 5 hours in the air, but the possible delays on departure, and then again with possible hiccups at arrival in a foreign country, could turn an easy hop-over into a logistics and legal nightmare. Riley insisted they turn on the local LA news, to see the current state of the town, while she booted her laptop on the dining table besides them to get their emails and scan online chatter for their estimated ground route to the airport.

The young hacker had been right to insist on watching the news. The extended Los Angeles metropolitan area was quickly turning into a dangerous quagmire of low-level criminality let loose, and everyday citizens with petty grudges exploited shamelessly the civil unrest to settle scores or worsen domestic violence situations. All these deplorable elements of society were betting on the reality that the LAPD, being already stretched to the max by all the usual daily crap and its own internal problems that never really got solved, wouldn't interfere in most of what got called-in, let alone investigate after the cadavers had cooled. The city was fast becoming a haven for the dregs of south California to congregate in, like a corpse being assaulted by maggots. The news programs reported that rich families who owned secondary houses anywhere away from LA had begun leaving the area in droves. This left thousands of homes empty and un-watched for squatters to invade and occupy without fear of retaliation by the owners or the cops. This willful blindness from the squatters would eventually lead to even worse rioting whenever happened the inevitable reaction of the legal owners to have the cops or private security push out these unlawful home wreckers out of their dwellings to live in them again.

Marty Deeks winced as he saw images of a partially finished apartment building that had just completed dry-closing the structure, but not set any infrastructures or services inside yet, become occupied forcibly by destitute homeless people. These poor decrepit souls were all smiles, letting out shouts of happiness or laughing aloud that they could at long last sleep indoors, out of the cold, away from animals and violent cops looking to beat hobos just for shits and giggles. The building didn't have any running water, toilets or even sewage lines in place. You could live without electricity well enough if you had wood to burn safely, but metro LA without active plumbing wouldn't be livable for long. These people would soon be emptying chamber pots out of the windows and using the garden hoses of the neighboring buildings to run water lines into their own unfinished shanty structure. Marty didn't want to make any bets on how long it would last before it burned down, or got taken over by a violent gang as a base for prostitution, selling drugs, and gun-running. They had two weeks, tops, before the nearest crew got ambitious, or desperate, depending on overall events in the borough.

Jack Dalton sipped his quarter-ounce brandy with slow deliberation as he watched the news broadcasts. He would be the lead driver and needed to be as sober as possible, in case they decided on traveling by night. When he saw the video of a pair of fire trucks getting shot at while they tried to position to help extinguish a burning house in a poor sector plagued by gang violence, he realized they were already losing the fight against the clock. No matter what hour they left at, night or morning, the streets would again be filled with various debris, broken cars, pieces of exploded houses, and more dead bodies while those from the day before wouldn't have been moved. Nothing was going to make this departure any better anymore.

Wilt Bozer glared angrily at the monitor, as he saw again and again the scenes that had plagued american history for the last 200 years repeat as if the World Wars and Modernity had never come to the country. Ever since the 1800's, there had always been a strong silent undercurrent of racism and religious delirium operating underground, well away from news cameras and public scrutiny. These had given birth to the infamous Ku-Klux-Klan but rapidly followed with a plethora of christian sects based solely on racial separation and white-power domination. In the early 1900's a slew of germanic organizations started to rise from obscurity to take a spot in the sunlight; the German Bundt, the American Nazi Party, the Silver Shirts, the Aryan Brotherhood, and hundreds more since. From the 1990's on were added several more sects with viking or Odinite cult themes that saw themselves as race-brothers to the nazi sects, wanting white-power as well. And now, in the year 2020, they saw the culmination of that simmering kettle explode in the open; religious madness ran rampant in the higher social strata while the poor warred against each other in the streets like rabid animals. There was no way this was going to end fast or well; all the lessons of history showed it.

Angus MacGyver turned towards Kensi Blye, purposefully ignoring another news segment about gang violence that degenerated when the people in the affected neighborhood started shooting at the gangsters from the windows of their homes, hoping to cull the problem once and for all. It wouldn't work. The gangs would come back with more thugs and set fire to the houses indiscriminately to punish them for daring to resist the 'bosses' of the groups. Mac had seen the same thing happen again, and again, and again, in poor countries where the cops only patrolled the rich areas or the business districts to keep the beggars and hobos away. Since the LAPD was now clearly out of its wits, and out of resources to react with, every gang, sect, cult, and militia in town or the nearby country-side would move in to claim territory, buildings, and resources while the authorities were too busy with their own survival to care for others anymore.

Getting the female marine's attention, Mac asked "Were you planning on reaching the airfield tonight or in the morning? Cuz at this rate, I don't think it will make much of a difference anymore. We might reach the airport to find the plane safe and ready, but no traffic controllers present to manage the flight operations. If that's the case, we'll have to plan an overland trip that doesn't rely on commercial transports or infrastructures to reach Vancouver."

Kensi was miffed at the situation too. "Damn," she swore softly, "Going by car takes at least two days if the weather cooperates, but it's the depth of winter season so it won't, and the roads won't all be cleared properly all the way. We could be looking at three days of road, IF we have a big enough RV that's livable with bunks and full facilities aboard, and we switch drivers en-route to avoid stopping. There's no way to know anymore if the trains or Greyhound buses will be rolling in these lawless conditions. A lot of drivers will refuse to leave their families alone and defenseless, let alone their town, for fear that their vehicles will get hijacked in some isolated spot, far away from help."

Marty spoke in neutral tones "The sea route could be an option if we get desperate enough, but it wouldn't be easy. With an average speed of 30mph in clear weather, that 1,200 mile journey should normally take only two days, but could presently take a full week to accomplish because of the way the winter winds are sweeping hard from the Pacific into British Columbia, Washington State and Oregon again. Besides the weather, any boat large enough to hold safely 10-12 people on choppy seas would need to be over 150 feet long and fully furnished with multiple bunk cabins. Motorized cabin cruisers like that aren't common to begin with since its luxury for the rich. Now, it would be near impossible to find one in port since anybody with a yacht that big and costly would take it out at sea, to keep it safe or take their family away from the civil unrest exploding around us."

The female marine put the last nail in the coffin of their travel plans. "Let's not forget; we still have our two agents from New Orleans coming in to serve as extra legal and scientific muscle. We can't really leave without them, especially since they confirmed they had managed to hitch a ride on a military C-130 emergency flight from NOLA to LA that was bringing troops in to help re-establish social peace in town."

Julia spoke up in fearful tones "Yeah... Today the radio shows were saying it seemed like the national guards are too few to make a real difference around LA by themselves. That forced the army to grab troops from places that have less problems, for now, to bus them here to quell the mess. Somehow, I really don't think it will do that much good. Not in the long run."

Roberta snorted sarcastically "When the junkies are carjacking ambulances right out of hospital parking lots to steal the Oxycontin and morphine in the surgery kits, even with an LAPD squad car or rent-a-cops parked next to it, you know it will take more than boys with green clothes and guns to repair what's broken. Our country needs a new soul, not more shooting matches between dopeys and brutes."

Making at face at the thought of all that was going bad this night, Kensi decided to focus on what they could, and should, affect by themselves. "Riley? Do you think you could contact the airport to ask about your plane? We need to know if it's still viable and the airport still functions, otherwise we won't be going anywhere tonight."

Nodding positively, the young hacker affirmed "If you lend me your tech hub for a half-hour, I should be able to reach them to get confirmation on their status pretty quickly. I could also try to scan the airfield's control tower to see what the crews are doing about maintaining services. You're right, we need to decide fast how we move out, before we're out of options or under enemy fire."

{ SQ } - { Travel plans, redux } - { SQ }

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 01:24am)

(Western America; 22:24pm)

Piled up in the office again, the 6 members of the mission group were waiting on Riley to establish contact with the DXS plane. The line rang a few times before the principal pilot answered. As soon as the vid-phone turned from the Phoenix logo to the face of a human being, they knew they had a problem to deal with.

"Agent Davis, this is agent Sampson. I'm glad you called ahead of time cuz I didn't know how to reach you. The twits at HQ forgot to give me your current call signs and VPN key so we had to sit on our hands until you called. I can see six people in the room, is that all of you?"

"No," Riley answered, "We have two more coming by USAF transit from New Orleans, necessary for the mission. In fact, they are already on a C-130 heading straight for your airfield, we were planning to reach you at about the same time, later in the wee hours."

The pilot grunted, unamused. "Well, the fly-boys had better have some good instruments on their bird cuz the tower's been taken over by the national guard and they've turned around plenty of legitimate inbound flights without justifying themselves to date, even when some of them had filed flight plans weeks ago. If you plan to come over, you might want to stop over at the control complex to straighten things out before the USAF transport gets here."

Jack snorted in dark humor, saying "Well, it looks like that little nap we wanted just got pushed back to tomorrow morning after all."

Deeks told the pilot on screen "We're gearing up and leaving inside 15 minutes. It will still take us between one and two hours to reach you, the way the streets are. Over."

The line was closed then Riley started hacking her way through the airfield systems to look inside the control tower to find what was going on. Minutes later, she had the internal security cameras relaying images that explained everything. The two air traffic controllers were lying on the floor in pools of blood while a cheap tabletop computer & tripod antenna had been jacked into the servers to give somebody remote access to the programs so they could effectuate the air traffic management from elsewhere without being exposed or identified. A quick sift through the flight plans registry showed clearly that the flights were all turned away without any discrimination or logic, other than to interdict access to this particular airfield.

Wilt rubbed a weary hand down his face, commenting sarcastically "Well, that job's done easily. Go in, unplug, leave. It'll be faster than waiting in line at McDonald's in rush hour for my Big Mac – fries – latte trio."

"Yeah, man," griped Angus as he crossed his arms to keep from fidgeting nervously. "It's not like hiring replacement air traffic controllers is our job, is it?"

Riley made an understanding noise from her seat, typing away on her laptop without paying real attention to the emoting going on around her. "And there!" she said, closing off her program with a flourish of the hand. "The local national guard are now aware of the problems inside the tower at John Wayne Airport, and I linked them into the security camera feeds to prove the situation to them. The dispatcher at their answering center is now on line with his colonel about it as we speak. They'll handle this hack-job and rectify the mess, but I do suggest we get there pronto, just in case they drag their feet too much. We may have to put MacGyver on the horn to guide the C-130 down to the tarmac safely if the guards aren't present to do it."

"Whaaat?" whined Angus, much to amusement of the others. "Why the hell would I be the air traffic boss all of a sudden? I've never done that before! I don't even have a piloting license! How do you think I could direct airplane traffic anywhere?" he asked grumpily, put-off by the laughter of his teammates.

"Well, baby Einstein" answered Riley while using Matty's nickname for him to everybody's amusement, "We only have one genius on hand, so 'tag!' you're it!" she told him with a shit-eating grin on her face as she laughed along with the others.

Crossing his arms over his chest as he scuffed his boot on the tiled floor in frustration, the young man griped "Why does that sound like what my recruiter for the EOD training course said, back when I was joining the army?"

Nobody answered him; they were too busy laughing.

More gifts for Christmas

(Funeral March – Frederic Chopin)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 22:13pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 19:13pm

Daleminton Hotel; suite #204

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Walking purposefully on legs that were pain-free for the first time in almost three weeks, Lucas processed the opening of the work room's doors then brought in all that he would need for the evening of arduous labor to come. He collected his portable workstation and several paper copy files from the bedroom where they were locked in one of the large drawers under the bed that were normally reserved for sheets, pillows and other bed wares. After setting those items down on the counter near the inert fireplace, he brought in the tea warmer, kettle and goblet to help stay warm in the cold room, which reminded him to go collect a fleece vest in his closet for the same purpose, after he had verified the contents of the mini fridge in case he craved a snack during his work.

Once everything he thought he could need was inside the office, the teenager closed and locked the doors to avoid being bothered by anybody during the activation of the two last modules of his remote management hub. The technology was too proprietary to be compatible with other systems easily, but it was also too powerful to be left out in the open where an idiot could try to use it without any understanding of the devices and energies at stake.

Looking at the setup of the room, Lucas saw module #1 admin & sys-op at the left hand's far back near the counter and inert fireplace, with module #2 Echo-Cloaking Broadcaster in the left hand's forward sector near the doors.

On the right hand, the full-wall built-in closet had been completely opened up with all doors and shelves removed as he asked. Inside the ex-closet's space were parked the two materials crates; square armored boxes with a wheel base equal to a standard pallet, but six feet tall, containing stores of basal elements and molecules in liquid, powder and gaseous forms. Each of the materials containers were armored and hermetically sealed under vacuum, with a locking valve that responded only to the equipments in module #3 so that his valuable, sometimes rare to the point of being militarily classified, building blocks wouldn't get stolen or contaminated.

Placed in the right-hand's far back was module #3 design & auto-crafting. The D&AC caisson was built with a similar rectangular wheelbase to #1 and #2 but topped 6 feet in height to house the multi-dimensional printer, press, welder and acid bath/etcher plus many more equipments. Each machine-tool was both proprietary and secret, ultra-compact custom built versions designed and assembled by Lucas himself so that he could have mobile production capacity if he had to visit a client's locale. Now, it would help to create his capacity for defense and survival.

In the right hand's forward sector was module #4 Neuroplexic Thought-Web Weaver. The NTWW shared the same type of mobile box as module #3. It was a complex set of main-boards, power regulators, crystal wire antennae and crystal pipes that worked like a Tesla coil, in that it spread an electromagnetic wave in concentric spherical patterns around itself or through physical electric & network cables and water pipes connected to it. This wave was attuned to the neural frequencies specifically so that it connected to the small synthetic crystal implants in Lucas' head and body to interlink him with his devices without solid wires or physical contact.

Now, the teenager walked into the closet, to the two materials vaults. The cargo chests were promptly connected to preexisting electricity sockets in the closet's back wall, then electricity and network ports in the admin & sys-op module to interlink with the Cyberghast Hub's anti-theft and remote surveillance protocols.

After that, the D&AC was opened, hydraulically jacked to level, gyro-stabilized, and connected electrically and cybernetically to the admin console to receive directly the construction blueprints and programming instructions that would result in the physical manifestation of Lucas' intensely creative mind.

Then the NTWW was opened, hydraulically jacked to level, and connected to the ECB by 110 and 220 volts electricity, RJ45 and fiber optics cables, telephone wires and a pair of special dedicated transparent hoses that would circulate fluid between the two wheeled contraptions. This custom made fluid was one of Lucas' creations; a biochemical compound that contained live human neuron cells suspended in electromagnetic catalyst solution based on synthetic blood. The liquid served to augment and exponentialize the interlink between the Neural Interface, the ECB, and through the NTWW, the rest of the 'phantom' neuroplexic network that precious few people knew about to date.

Once all the cables, wires and pipes were in place, Lucas slotted his portable workstation and cellphone in their docking ports, activated them, then triggered the secured ciphered boot-up routine to let the new modules activate automatically, which would take about ten more minutes until everything was fully ready to serve. Sitting in his plush director's chair, he turned on the warming and massaging systems then fixed himself a goblet of spiced tea. Taking a sip of warm liquid courage, he hummed an old Russian-Jew folk song in Yiddish as he waited.

{ SQ } - { Push-button warfare; redux } - { SQ }

(Eastern America; 22:46pm)

(Western America; 19:46pm)

Once the Cyberghast Hub was fully awakened, the teenager's proprietary communications management suite appeared on the left screen, running down the list of what he had received during the night, morning and afternoon, then processed the synchronization routines of all his personal devices so he had multiple backups of critical data or paperwork. There was some paperwork from the Vancouver Police Department, the RCMP and even a letter from CSIS requesting a formal meeting at their building in Vancouver's downtown. The boy set all this correspondence for later, after all the important survival and warfare adjustments had been done. Besides, immigration, customs & taxes, and police formularies could be ignored if the countries concerned were burning to ash, or soon to be.

Lucas activated on the main screen the application he had custom built to manage the status of his ever-growing phantom botnet. He was up to 2,207,693 attack bots; 3,739 overwatch nodes; 1,907 remote management bots; 721 data-vault bots; 286 dead-drop reception bots and 372 query processing bots. He had now co-opted to his service 627 phantom Internex nodes that could broadcast messages under false identities or emulate public services to manipulate the responses of police, firefighters, ambulances and others in any given zone of North America. He had yet to touch the other continents as they were still planned for the following weeks. He did update his orders for all dormant bots located in machines inside the borders of the UEO Treaty's territories, military bases and dependent ships to fully activate, then start co-opting machines and networks, instead of being stalled as he had done for several months now.

With basic housekeeping chores out of the way, the teenager concentrated on his two main companies that allowed him to walk around high society openly with his head held high. Roughly an hour of administrative duties was sufficient to move assets, then order all the workers to bring their families into the protective shelters built inside the Wise Apothecary or Wolenbahn workshops specifically for long-term situations of this sort. Lucas' ancestors had begun the tradition since their very roots in war torn Europe of the 1400's to build bunkers, or at least emergency dormitories, in their factories because the countries were so often at war with neighbors, experienced riots and unrest, or faced the draconian whims of Nature with harsh winters, torrential rains and floods. Since many of the workers were somehow related to the company owners, it had made sense, in a spirit of community, to set aside some space in the cellars or attics to prepare sheltered lodgings for refugees. The tradition had been maintained for over 600 years, and even Franklin Henry Wise had included them in the designs of his many manorial estates or industrial expansions. The adolescent issued to all WAC and WEI employees the signal for emergency recovery, ordering his private corporate security guards to step up to full combat status, in both USA and Canada, until told otherwise.

I crave your pain

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 23:07pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 20:07pm

SeaQuest DSV 6000; Deck-D; brig complex

Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, near Florida

Lawrence Wolenczak was roughly manhandled out of his small cramped cell and into the large interrogation room while Cynthia watched on impassively from behind the thick bars of her own confinement. Sitting silently on the cot with her hands folded on her lap, she only moved her eyes to follow the two burly sailors garbed in body armor that had rudely extracted the unathletic and not the least bit combat-enabled engineer, try to resist being frog-marched relentlessly to his doom.

Two minutes and several muffled shouts of protest later, the two soldiers came out without their unwilling tag-along. They tramped down the corridor between the two rows of tight barely-lit cells, never paying her any attention on their way out of the detention area. It was almost 15 minutes later that the entry airlock was opened and a tall rotund mass of angry flab trod noisily down the passage.

Walking in a slightly hunched way, almost like a gorilla, that made his beige button shirt stretch and strain against his barrel torso, showing that there was as much muscle as fat on his heavy frame, the scant light reflecting off his bald pate, admiral William Allard Boyd Noyce had come bearing violence and misery to all peoples he would encounter. His long feet clad in heavy armored boots pounded the metal deck grates as he advanced, unerringly aiming his Wrath towards the room at the end of the corridor, passing by the only occupied cell without so much as a side glance at the occupant.

Noyce slammed the interrogation door open with a thick fist and barely two seconds later, a loud meaty 'twack' sound was heard, followed by a bellow of disbelieving pain and pleading for mercy from a desperate Lawrence who now understood just how deep a cesspit he was drowning in. Two more such whacks sounded off before other people passed by.

Now coming slowly down the corridor were captain Bridger in his dark blue jumpsuit uniform and an unidentified young black male of nondescript features, dressed in an odd all-black uniform that Cynthia had never seen. The young soldier carried two medium sized briefcases with an air of detachment that made her gut twist in knots as yet another meaty smack sounded out of the open room as her ex-husband shouted anew pleas for a mercy that they all knew would never be granted in this life.

The door to the interrogation room closed as Lawrence saw the uniform of the third man. He must have known what part of the UEO he was from, as his howl of despair reverberated around the entire detention block for several seconds after the airtight valve had shut and locked. The middle-aged woman didn't know what foul creatures her ex had been consorting with in the last two decades, but it was now obvious that they had come calling for their payment.

And the currency they traded in were sweat, blood and tears. Nothing else would do.

Lucas wages shadow-war

(Funeral March – Frederic Chopin)

Eastern America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 23:49pm

Western America; Saturday 19th of December, 2020; 20:49pm

Daleminton Hotel; suite #204

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The young male stood from his chair and walked around the office, enjoying this rare period of painless mobility as he inspected the insides of the separate modules of his precious instrument. After concluding that everything was purring along as expected, the young man recovered and rewired his smartphone to his person then left the office, being careful to lock and test the doors. With the full neural interface glasses on his head, he could easily work the virtual world and guide his hands at the same time as he had practiced this for two years already.

He walked to the kitchen, to the still present service cart, and created himself a small plate of solid food because he had eaten only once during the entire day and the meal he did eat about two hours ago seemed far away. As he was cybernetically verifying his monetary assets and moving them to banks outside the USA and NAC altogether, he took up a ladle of meat raviolis with some of the nice warm meat sauce, some fried bacon strips, a pan seared fillet of sole, some mashed potatoes and hot grilled veggies. This would simply keep him from having a bad migraine headache resulting from lack of nourishment during the day; the bevvy of pills he had taken DID NOT in any way shape or form feed a growing boy properly. He didn't need his three medical doctorates to tell him that!

"Alexa! Close all the lights in the suite." he ordered the domotics system.

Sitting at the table in his favorite position, with the blazing hearth at his back as his sole source of light, he took the meta-glasses off his face and closed his eyes to rest them as he ate through his meal. With the Neuroplexic Thought-Web Weaver active at long last, he could be connected to his private neural web without external devices to boost the signal up to a distance of 10 kilometers (6 miles). This allowed him to bypass his laptop and smartphone for all the work he needed done tonight, freeing his hands, eyes, and entire body in fact, to assemble and test a few little gimmicks that the Design & Auto-Crafting module was hard at work producing for him. Things that would not have passed the borderlines under any circumstances if already assembled and usable.

Putting that out of his mind until after he ate, Lucas concentrated on finding and cyber-raping remorselessly the back-door emergency codes that were built into the servers of America's Internal Revenue Services (IRS) who were in charge of tax collection so that Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) could see and track the flows of money in & out of the country. The goal was to see which foreign agents were paying american businesses or officials for state secrets and access to critical restricted technologies under the table. A less well known provision was that it could be used by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to verify if people tried to import/export tech that was on the federal 'do not sell' list which stated which countries could buy what in the USA by checking on their yearly taxes during an investigation.

In fact, along with Social Security, DMV and Gun Permit Registry, the IRS was in the top bracket of most hacked federal systems each year, unlike NASA or the CIA. The reason was simple; there were two handfuls of countries with hackers good enough to hack into and recover data from those places without being traced back to their point of origin. By comparison, there were several tens of thousands of people each year who wanted to know if a spouse was hiding revenue or assets in case of divorce, or wanted to make sure they got their fare share during an inheritance dispute, or wanted to make certain their business partner wasn't laundering money overseas or doing bad stuff with the joined company accounts, etc... In the ordinary life of ordinary people far removed from spying and diplomats, paying a mid-level hacker to snoop around the IRS was less expensive than filing in court for a legal search warrant, and it couldn't backfire in your face if the person investigated was in fact innocent. This systematic repetitive hacking and splicing created unstable, but findable, holes in the firewalls and cyclic scans which, coupled to the permanent back-doors, made for a bloody Swiss cheese that held little integrity anymore.

This structural weakness allowed Lucas to probe, scan, sweep and find quickly weak spots in the defensive array, penetrate and set into the user control matrix the access codes he had stolen from the CIA's moribund old back-up server. This in turn allowed him to search and triage all the data stored directly inside the IRS master file servers in Washington DC and download only the results that he needed to proceed to the next phase of action. The adolescent set the data report queries he wanted to employ in his cybernetic war then retracted his contact to target instead the administrative & management apps used by the IRS high brass. Once he found the menus, he entered the special CIA access codes to engage the small invisible app that created a 'CIA ghost' user with permanent codes that would allow him to come back by the main front door of the server without worrying about being discovered or back-traced.

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 24:22am - midnight)

(Western America; 21:22pm)

As he worked on the IRS data and access, Lucas ate slowly and pondered on the subject of money, investments, companies and the political influence derived from such. Being a young child or adolescent in a society that was both gerontocratic and plutocratic at its core was not easy, even before Trump came to power. Being a young boy with an overflowing imagination, a get-go attitude and the autonomy to do things without being hand-held all day long was never going to be acceptable by the adults around, no matter how modern and liberal they claimed to be; not when so much money was at stake in the situation. Most of the adults he had seen in his life to date would have gladly taken his money and locked it away from him, leaving him a bare pittance of an allowance, which they would tell him how to spend to boot.

It had never been the money that kept him from running away from his family's nefarious grasp.

Lucas could have easily slipped away from his parents years ago, many opportunities having presented themselves at key points of life. Besides, by age 7 he was basically fully autonomous in his capacity to tend his body, feed himself, and wash his person and his clothes. Yes, that meant using a microwave oven or a washing machine, but as long as the machines were at hand, he could do it. His meals would have been unimaginative for sure, at first at least, but it would have gotten better with time. In fact, by age 11 he could have disappeared off the maps to live all alone by using only the money he garnered through Dark Web activities and the routine programming contracts from private companies, but he was capable of more, and he wanted to be better than just some invisible parasite, sucking on society's underbelly. Plus, the Wise Heritage of his ancestors he had found about at age 9 made him realize that he really was due for a much greater, more public profile than that of a nationless, homeless, petty criminal who was perpetually on the run from every bank and government in existence. Such people never lived well or very long. And Lucas had wanted a long happy life, in the far past, long ago, when he was still young and full of dreams.

Dreams that were replaced by fear, violence and WRATH.

The religiously empowered, racist, misogynist, ageist, plutocratic defective retards in Washington DC had no idea of what kind of savage monster they had just caused to awaken. For years now, Lucas had been fighting with the amorphous cloud of coldly contemptuous Darkness that dwelt inside his damaged, sickened soul, oozing from the cracks in his mind like puss out of gangrenous injuries. The depressive, forlorn adolescent had almost managed to control it for good a couple of months ago, but then the news of his dear father's latest bastardy was unveiled unto him. Then the passed week of travels, changes, fleeing for his life, stress, anxieties, uncertainties, open threats, violence and seeing with his own eyes the mercenaries that Lawrence had tried to pay to beat, rape, maim and kill him...

And now, today, the American government finally showed to the entire multiverse exactly what it had been preparing for the last 4 years.

You don't rebuild the Oval Office in a few hours, and you can't make high quality artisanal furniture like the throne, desk, couches and firepot overnight. Even the clothing sets and metal jewelry needed several weeks to be properly crafted and fitted to their wearers. No, Trump had been preparing this little show for a long time already; he was probably just forced into revealing it faster than had been planned. His writing out those two presidential decrees had the feel of amateur impulsive tail-wagging doggishness that had suffused his entire term in office, and most of his life to date as well. There was probably a plan to unveil everything AFTER the inauguration in January 2021, once he was legally (technically) unmovable from the office.

But, as usual with charismatic preachers and populist tyrants, Trump must have wanted to do the typical surprise "Gotcha!" moment specifically to stun not only the infidel heathens, but his own troops too, to remind them HE was in charge, nobody else. Plus, there was certainly the ubiquitous victory cry of "In ya'll's faces, biiitches!" that so pervaded all sports competitions and the corporate environment in America for the last two decades, that the man would never have passed on it for anything in the world. Winning was good, but never if you couldn't see the shame and angst of defeat on the faces of the people you had just beaten at the game.

And so here they were, with the new Apostle of primitivism, the Papal Lord Amerikus having declared war on Jews, children, and doctors of all sorts, especially those in the mental health professions, as if he were casting the widest net possible to make certain his goons caught Lucas at some point or other, from one reason or another. Even if one were to think the teen was paranoid, it wasn't a situation that left the boy with many ways to believe that the entire thing wasn't orchestrated specifically just to steal his companies and fortune, strip his licenses, deny his diplomas, and justify imprisoning or killing him without a trial... After all, the geriatric bastard hadn't given the unrestricted right to kill anybody you liked, did he?

Oh, yeah, he did! He said specifically that "Any act made with the intent to keep slave-stock, women and children submissive to adult white men, including beatings, rape, mutilation and murder was LEGAL and not to be interfered with by police or the courts."

Yeah, that wasn't a blank check to come after his pasty white hide, wasn't it...

No, Lucas wasn't controlling the Darkness in his soul anymore; the Tenebrous Cloud was loose, oozing its oily way all around his poor, shattered mind, tainting the warped pieces as it passed them, corroding them to decayed ash when it actually touched... Yes, Lucas was aware he was now fully unbalanced and in dire need of solitude and support, preferably as in-patient lodged in a psychiatric facility, to help stabilize and rectify his mental situation before he harmed others on a titanesque scale. It was just too bad nobody wanted to leave him alone long enough to spend a few years in a Swiss sanatorium, with only the glacier-clad Alps as neighbors. The hordes of mentally and socially 'limited' imbeciles who aggrieved him would regret this lack of common sense and judgment errors...

Soon...

Like, right away, soon.

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 01:17am)

(Western America; 22:17pm)

Having finished his plate of hot food and washing it down with a nice goblet of spiced tea, the teen eyed the buffet cart and decided to try to stand on his legs, to see if they still worked well. They did, in fact, still work without cramps or shakes so the boy brought his soiled tableware to the kitchen to set it in the plastic rack so that room service could change them for clean ones in the morning. If there had been a dishwasher, he would have taken care of it himself. He wasn't lazy or incapable, but the hotel claimed 5-star service and that meant that guests did as little housekeeping themselves as possible while respecting their privacy in the suite.

After dumping his wastes and rinsing the tableware in the sink so that the garbage disposal unit could flush it all away, Lucas pulled out of the cupboards several sets of reusable plastic containers to do the same thing as he had with the brunch cart Friday evening. Before going to sleep yesterday, he had stored away in his kitchen freezer and fridge as well as the two mini fridges in the bedrooms several of the food items so they wouldn't be wasted and thrown out as garbage when they were in fact still quite good. Items like bread, bagels and muffins would simply be put back in the hotel pantries for the restaurants or room service to distribute as they were still fresh and untouched, but the cooked items like meats, eggs, crepes, waffles and potatoes would be considered 'waste' when it wasn't the case for real. Well, the restaurant & hotel sanitation laws said they couldn't be kept, but nothing said Lucas himself couldn't hoard them for when he craved an urgent midnight snack or needed to fill his stomach to avoid acid reflux due to his pills or stress.

So, the young man whistled softly a old Irish Celt song from before the British Dominion of the Emerald Isle as he slowly placed the hamburger patties, London steak and beef cube skewers in the same container. Then the sole was in its own, the chicken in another, the raviolis and all the meat sauce in a fourth. It took three large tall containers with special screw-on tops to empty out each pot of soup as there was no way the adolescent would let waste such good, easy to digest food. If anything in the world came out of the microwave oven as good as it did from the regular stove top, it was soup and it was also the prime choice for a snack on chilly evenings sitting in front of a movie or computer game. The grilled vegetables were packed away but all the salad greens and cold pickled veggies were left in the cart as those were all separate and would simply be put back in the restaurant kitchen to be used in the coming day. Pickled stuff in particular was usually just put back in the large pail it was taken from and set in the fridge again until it was needed so the teen had no fear of waste for that item. A few smaller plastic containers with screw-top were employed to keep a bit of of the excellent rich brown mushroom and peppercorn gravy that was supposed to accompany the meat servings. Unlike mustard, relish, ketchup and other generic condiments that were in retail brand bottles, and therefore perfectly safe for reuse, the gravy was made to order in the hotel restaurant and much higher quality too.

Having carefully packed everything and written on the small whiteboard rectangle inset in the lid of each container the item and date it was preserved, Lucas turned his attention to the desserts. The ice cream would go back as it was safely in the same sort of plastic retail gallon tuns that were used in the buffet so it wouldn't be wasted. The orange curd pie was far too tempting to let go, as it was both comfort food by excellence and coffee 'à côté' by definition. Since the pie came in a solid steel baking mold with a clear plastic cover fitted over, placing the thing in the freezer was as easy as choosing which of the three fridges would hold it. He might have hoarded a bit much and was running out of cold storage space. Thankfully, the large yule log was set on a thick rectangular glass serving plate and was covered by a glass cloche to keep it protected from the air. Set up this way, the masterfully decorated cake could sit on the kitchen counter or even the dining table for several days and still be perfectly edible at each piece he took.

Lucas felt that his enjoyment of his simple peaceful vacations had been hampered enough as it was, he wouldn't let anybody or anything keep him from enjoying at least the fine exquisite food that the hotel complex had promised him when he reserved. And given how much he paid them, he was bloody well gonna enjoy stuffing his face like a regular carefree teenaged boy on winter holidays, even if it made him sick to his stomach to eat so much. Holiday excesses were supposed to be normal too, and he wanted normality in his damned life, for once in a decade! It wasn't so much to ask for, was it?

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 01:59am)

(Western America; 22:59pm)

Having finished his most pressing chores, the refugee decided to got sit in the living room to enjoy the massive sectional couch as he watched the late evening news. "Alexa! Activate living room TV, set on Vancouver's CBC channel." he told the domotics system as he walked carefully across the length of the suite, firmly gripping his cane in his right hand regardless of the fact his legs seemed to be cooperating for the moment. Bitter experience had taught him that such periods of painlessness did not last long.

Once sitting with his legs spread out in front of him, he allowed himself to relax into the deep plush cushions as the commercials ended and the news program began. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reporters certainly had a take on events in the USA that was – very – different from what the reporters back in DC would be saying. Their analysis of the situation and the actors involved, including Lucas himself much to his dumbfounded surprise, were more aligned with the European position than with the American declarations.

The one thing that Lucas had not seen coming though, was that the executive cabinet of the North-American Confederacy had just declared publicly that the military alliance of the three great countries of Canada, USA and Mexico had been utterly terminated by joined accord of Mexico and Canada. The reaction to that from Washington had been quite negative. Apparently, the US government had tried to threaten the two other countries into submitting to America's 'Christian Authority' and both had answered that such threats were tantamount to an act of war, thus promptly disbanding the NAC treaty and begun to rebuild their border defenses along the USA-facing lines. To say that Trump was angry would be to misunderstand the 'idiot'. The dumb blond moppet had gone on TV to say that his campaign promise was being done exactly as he had promised; "There was a Great Big Beautiful Wall being built along the southern border and Mexico was paying for it's construction".

Did he really believe his own spiel at this point, or was he still lying his face off to his voting base? It was an interesting conundrum to examine, especially since, from a certain skewed perspective, he was actually right about the bloody wall and Mexico deciding to pay for it. Trump had just glossed over grossly the factoid that it would be built by Mexico, on Mexican soil and be controlled by them too, therefore it could not be called an 'American Border Wall' for real, but that didn't seem to stop him saying it was, nor his followers from accepting it with a victorious smile.

Apparently, moronism was now a virtue in Trump's America, just like dishonesty and travesty had become such, four years ago at his election. Who knew the man was so 'virtuous'?

Lucas decided to try something new; he closed his eyes and concentrated on the neural interface signal that he was receiving from the NTWW antenna to find the Daleminton's domotics menu and take mental control of the suite's utilities and appliances. A few quick thoughts later and the TV was closed, as surely as if he had tapped the remote keys or told the Alexa module to do it. The smile the teenager made, alone in the twilight of the shadowy room, could be interpreted as either peacefully satisfied or creepily evocative of bad things to come. Since he was alone and nobody saw...

With nothing more to be done in the open portion of the suite, the young man walked over to the dining table to pick up the lit tea set with a newly filled kettle to bring it into the office for a long night of hacking, splicing and cybernetic warfare against the religious tyranny that kicked him out of his own home. He made short work of opening the doors to enter, then locked them tightly before setting his burden on the low counter besides the inert fireplace.

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 02:30am)

(Western America; 23:30pm)

Taking advantage of his comfortable, and safe, position on the enhanced director's chair, the adolescent kept his eyes closed and his body relaxed as he mentally delved into his private neural network to accomplish the harder, harsher tasks he needed done tonight.

The keys to success as a hacker were; basic competence in a wide skill set covering not only programming but also hardware and public utilities, talents in maths (algorithms, statistics, probabilities), multiple languages and ciphering, and of course, a solid grasp of bureautics to keep your entire system ordered. However, all of that would be for absolutely nothing if you didn't have the two most fundamental capacities for success at anything in life: self-control (patience) and self-regulation (logistics & planning).

Lucas Wolenczak was born a naturally quite patient child, and then had even more self-control beaten and drugged into him during the first 9 years of his life. He had also been naturally inclined to self-regulation from the start and spent the 16 years of his existence to date perfecting the arts of bureautics, management, administration and planning. The fact he was an avid watcher of the 'American Heroes Channel' and supped up everything they showed about World Wars I & II, and all other military actions of importance on the planet, was a determining factor in how he planned his life, his business, and his hacking.

Strategy, Tactics, Logistics, Home-Front and External Supports; the five pillars of military might.

The teenager had learned very young to integrate this method of thinking to all aspects of his life and activities, something which paid off in spades along the years. It kept him alive when Lawrence tried to attack and kill him at his 10th birthday, and again 2 years ago. If he had done like all other kids with violent parents and run away blindly in panic, he would have 'ended' himself by sheer stupidity. Instead, he had looked at his Logistics, thus understanding what Tactics were feasible with his limited body and established a Strategy. But, upon seeing in his Logistics the amount of corporate resources, personnel and money he had, he was able to engage the fourth pillar, home-front, in the form of guards hired by Wise Apothecary's security division, that his father never saw coming, and never thought his son would know how to wield.

An ordinary hacker was limited to his keyboard and a few books or classes he took.

A splicer was better, but still limited to his keyboard and the data feeds from his victims to create and backstop the false reality he wanted to make people believe in.

Compared to the average hackers and splicers, Lucas was so clearly over advantaged with his engineer's knowledge of hardware and utilities from the atoms up, his instinctual grasp of chemical and energetic reactions in the parts, his preternatural ability for perceiving patterns in Nature or man-made synthetics, and the 30-odd languages he spoke or used in life and programming... To add all his experiences as a Baron of Industry in both medical products and industrial electronics that he had acquired on top of it all...

No, he wasn't just an ordinary hacker who wanted to steal a few grand to shop on Amazon for free.

Sitting in his heated massaging chair restively, the teen exploited the Neural Interface to its fullest capacity. Besides him, the D&AC module activated; a large floating bubble of gas lit up with images and crackling neural energy fields, bringing to life the much better and more powerful holoviewer that Lucas had built. It was his personal version of what he had evolved out of his collaboration with Ms Angela Montenegro, of the Jeffersonian Museum, when he helped her redesign and upgrade her 'Angelator' holographic display table. This large ball of bluish energy had the ability to interface with the nerves and mind of anybody who placed a hand (or head) inside the gas bubble for a few seconds, thus allowing the system to work on them in a non-invasive manner. It had been the primary version of his neural interface, before he developed the non-Newtonian crystalline fluid necessary to craft the permanent implants now set in his head and body.

The console holoviewer allowed for a larger image, better resolution, more 3D depth and far more powerful neural connection than the simple meta-glasses did. This made creating large scale organigrams of the cascade reactions he could/would cause much easier as he could see the entire thing when it was done. The strategizing session lasted almost three hours, taking him into the night's depths. Once he had made his plan, he simply had to carry it out; a rather simple thing really, just a whole lot of grunt work.

Lucas planned a long list of churches, faith-based organizations and religious representatives, lawyers and lobbyists to destroy in the first wave of reprisals he would unleash. It had taken him a long time to compile the list by trawling through the web, letting his custom data mining app find raw subjects so that he could then evaluate and triage them into categories. Presently, he wanted to prioritize those with clearly expressed white-power creed, followed by all other anti-semitic cults, followed by misogynist cults, followed by sects that prone violence or rape against children, closing the lengthy target list with those sects that encouraged people to distrust medicine and use only faith healing in their lives.

It was close to 02:00am when Lucas finally triggered his massive wave of electronic warfare against the apostolates of fascistic christian whiteness. Using his intimate knowledge of banks and the Web Tier-2 interlinks between the planet's great institutions, the teenager had programmed his devastating malware to virulate the entire banking system of the world. The goal was to find, isolate, then fully exterminate all public and private records of property titles, deeds to land, mining claims, taxation forms, revenue logs, bank accounts, investment portfolios, etc... The first wave would target the church/sect organizations themselves; the second wave would eradicate the same files and traces but for the ecclesiastes, their families and their hired personnel, including passports, driving licenses, gun permits, marriage certificates, citizenship or foreign worker visas, etc...

Lucas was going to erase the churches and their bought or defrauded – "rights" – right out of the hands of the governments who were being paid to maintain those powers and continue to blindly ignore the murders, tortures, rapes and frauds they did. If the community was too paralyzed, or dumb, or bought off like a cheap whore, then the teenager would act from the shadowy depths of the Dark Web he knew so well to reach out and hurt several millions of worshipers, all at the same time.

If the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the States and municipal equivalents, had managed to keep their taxation records truly safe and confidential, Lucas wouldn't have been able to use the government's own work product to correctly identify, triage then target all the thousands upon thousands of faith-based 'depravities' he had spotted. Then again, the IRS and the local assessor branches had never before in their existences faced-off against an adversary of his caliber unless they were located in a state-sponsored hacking farm like the Russians have been using for almost 2 decades now.

Trump's white-christian Crusade against the World would get one hell of a Sunday morning gift to inaugurate their first new mass and rites. You can't make war without money to pay the soldiers and equipment, and Lucas planned to bleed then starve the damned wells of poisonous philosophy until even the worst sluts-of-the-pews wouldn't want to participate anymore.

"I accept your declaration of war, Lord Trump; here is my answer, right in your face." the depressed, angry adolescent whispered to the empty room as he set the virus' clock to synchronize the cascading tsunami of electronic wide-area 'logic bombing'.

{ SQ } - { The Rod of Authority is Mine } - { SQ }

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 05:07am)

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Western America; 02:07am)

The teenager disconnected partially from the neural network to give his mind some rest after so many hours of intense virtual world work. Getting up from his chair, he took the time the stretch out his arms and legs, joint by joint to restore proper blood flow and sensitivity. After a few minutes of exercise, he took his goblet for some spiced fruit tea only to remember he had extinguished the alcohol burner an hour ago when he emptied the pot.

"Oh, well..." he sighed, resigned. He would wait to drink with his night snack later on.

Since he had no tea, he turned his attention to the last thing he wanted to do in the office room before leaving it for some sleep. The Design & Auto-Crafting module had finished all the parts it had been tasked with printing, milling or extruding during his foray into cybernetic reality. Using an anti-static padded plastic tray and latex gloves, items he took from the sys-op module's lower storage drawer, he gathered the parts to assemble his first real weapon of this entire damnable voyage. Remaining standing to get the minimum of physical effort needed to keep healthy (yeah right!) the adolescent took a set of professional tools from a drawer in the D&AC module then set to work. He used the granite surface of the low service counter next to the inert fireplace as a good flat work area to assemble sensible electronics without creating a short circuit; stone is non-conductive and noncorroding, therefore a perfect workbench for this type of job.

He quickly wiped clean of all milling oil the tempered steel pistol-grip cane pommel which also had an elongated, curved, hatchet blade and a small hammer-like striking face on the knob side, just like his original walking stick. The entire metallic structure composed of synthesis Damascus alloy had been molded and shaped in a liquid bath to avoid impurities and imperfections. The only 'strange' thing was the tiny glowing blue veins made by the inlaying of psychotronic crystal wires throughout the pommel to create a wireless link between the internal devices and Lucas's mind for a tactical advantage during a fight.

The important electronics went inside and connected to 8 small emitters located around the hammer face but one inch back from the flat striking surface; another 18 emitters in 2 rows of 9 set back from the cutting edge of the hatchet; a single large emitter in the flat top of the joint between hammer and ax. When the contents was finished placing, welding and gluing, he put in the 4 small isotopic batteries and the 2 high-charge capacitors then set the internal sealing plate and washer with some glue and screws.

The adolescent had just assembled an energy weapon that shot invisible beams up to 100 meters, all from the schematics of the UEO's prototype pulse pistols that he had obtained from them last year.

He was, when pushed to it, a tech thief; so what?

It was all in the name of survival, not for sale to mercenaries. For now anyways.

With the pommel complete, Lucas went to the Neuroplexic Thought-Web Weaver module and fished around the tall cabinet until he found what he wanted; two pieces of tempered Damascus steel alloy that he had milled back in Stanford several months ago, just after he was able to stop using the wheelchair to move around. He had used this particular model of armament-cane in San Francisco but guessed it wouldn't pass into Canada without a fuss, so he had hidden the less critical parts inside the module in prevision of it passing the borderline undetected, camouflaged amongst the mess of pipes and hoses of the NMWW array. The important, and 'unlawful', parts were stored only as schematics in his database on the Internex cloud, accessible through either his neural net or his regular Virtual Private Network, with all the tools and materials needed to craft them already inside the D&AC.

Taking the 3½ foot long barrel and 3 foot long blade of the cane to the bench, he went back to the NMWW to fish out the 6 inch long pike blade, the molded armored rubber sleeve for the barrel, the mechanism parts for the quillons that extended from the pike when it opened and finally the internal spacers and seal plates for inside the barrel. A few other accessory parts had been milled during the evening and were already on the tray for assembly inside the metal pipe.

With everything in hand, Lucas slotted the two-edged long-sword blade to the pommel, aligning the blade so that its edges were facing the same axis as the hatchet's edge; this would allow to try a follow-up strike with a bladed fist if the initial sword strike was deflected upwards during a fight. Once the tang was inserted, screwed and glued to the pommel's frame, the adolescent had the minutious task of welding connections between the crystal wires in the pommel and those in the blade so that the psychotronic signal flowed through the entire weapon. The goal was to use the sword-cane like an antenna to boost his signal with his neural network when he was away from the building. Then he connected the power system to the blade to electrify it to inflict a stunning shock at each stroke. Once that done, the also precise job of connecting the pulse weapon circuits to 2 medium emitters, one on each side of the blade and aiming along the length, needed several minutes of effort. Once everything was in place, he closed the juncture of blade and pommel with a rubber washer, a two-part seal plate, glue and a screwed retention ring, to make certain the entire weapon was watertight, even at great depths.

The teenager then took up the two-part skeleton of the inner spacing assembly that would fill the inside of the cane barrel; this had a long flat slot to house the main sword and a shorter flat slot for the retractable jack-pike in the lower end. Taking the purely mechanical spring-loaded gears and levers for the pike blade slider, he set them carefully in their planned positions then slid from the top of the spacer array the long round trigger rod for the actuator switch. Once screwed in place, the rod was then linked and screwed to the trigger bascule that would extend or retract the pike blade. After the basic sliding action was done, he set the two quillons on either side of the blade and screwed them to their jointing holes in the tang of the 6 inch double edged spear. That then got slotted inside the slider and screwed tightly to the ejector which was tested a dozen times before anything else was added to the spacer construct.

After the pike mechanism, there were a series of power conduits, amplifiers, isotopic batteries and capacitors that would take the pulse beams from the long-sword's pulse emitters and channel them, as well as boost them, all the way to the lower end of the cane barrel to come out of a circle of 12 medium strength emitters for a punching power similar to a small 3 inch howitzer with a limited 100 meter range. These same electronic systems would also accomplish two other vital jobs. They electrified the retractable spear and the assembly of eight sharpened steel flanges that would be screwed at the foot of the barrel thus making it into a small edged mace to pound through hardened enemies. They also allowed Lucas to connect external systems through a pair of physical sockets, a standard earphone jack and a USB-4 port, plus a miniature optical/infrared lens made out of his personal blue psychotronic crystal. This connectivity would allow him to use the cane as an antenna to boost his communications devices or his link to the neural network without drawing the long blade.

With the internal systems fully built, it was time to set the two-part rubber coated steel sealing rings at regular intervals. The seals were in halves to make them easier to install or remove during construction and maintenance. He screwed them tightly with a line of glue to make it all air and watertight. Then a series of thin shock absorbing jelly pads were glued along the length between the sealing rings to isolate the electronics from vibrations during combat. After all the contents was finalized, the adolescent slid it slowly into the waiting tube.

The barrel's main body was a metal pipe completely smooth in and out, made of synthesis Damascus steel alloy inlaid with glowing blue veins of psychotronic crystal wire throughout just like the pommel and all blades. The inside was coated with a thin thermoplastic barrier to avoid electrical shocks or static discharges from all the current and magnetism going around, especially during pulse shots. It also allowed to slide in the spacer assembly quite easily and align it with the two little notches at the bottom of the barrel where the flanged head would be screwed and glued after the electrical connections were securely welded to the conductive pins.

With the internal works in place, Lucas slid the barrel's outer sleeve over the steel tube; it was actually a molded layer of thermoplastic covered on the outside with a thick coat of rubber to add insulation against heat, electricity and magnetism to protect the fragile systems inside the cane. It was this milled, heat pressed, plastic & rubber sandwich that created the decorative ribbed handle by which the barrel was held like a mace when using the long-sword. After the external sleeve was set with glued sealing rings, he screwed the flanged mace head at the foot of the rod and capped the top with the receiver that locked the pommel in place when the cane was not used for fighting.

With all the construction finished at last after an hour, the young man plugged the cane to the Cyberghast Hub with a USB cable to configure the last settings for the frequencies, polarity, strength and visual wavelength of the pulse beam emitters. He tested the main power up then, using only 1% of the true power capacity, aimed the pommel's hammer side towards a small portable device that measured the energies employed by tools or weapons. After testing each pulse emitter on the cane, he then extended the spear and pulled the long-sword out to test the stunning system's strength. With all the laboratory tests done, there was only one thing left to do.

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Eastern America; 06:23am)

(Sunday 20th December 2020; Western America; 03:23am)

Lucas put on his meta-glasses for a full test that demanded he leave the room to go outside on the balcony overlooking the forested backside of the hotel. Walking out of the office, he closed the room's doors but left them unlocked for the few minutes the test required as with this powerful weapon in hand, he felt safe enough to not be worried anymore. He walked to the living room, then out to the large patio, without a winter jacket and completely careless of the light snowfall that was drifting down lazily towards the already white-cloaked floor. He upped the connection strength with the neural network and polarized the lenses in his meta-glasses to see the effects of the beams when he shot.

He aimed the long-sword's triangular point towards the trees and pulled the trigger; the effect was like a 2-barreled shotgun that was loaded with single-slug shells in both bores. The two condensed beam of invisible energy lanced down the length of the blade then out a full 100 meters to punch right through the high branch of a fir tree, exploding the limb in a shower of vegetal shrapnel, making the severed branch fall noisily to the snowy forest ground below.

The tree limb had been a full 7 inches in diameter.

Turning the hammer head toward the trees he pulled the trigger and a much smaller pulse lanced out, at 100 meters as well, blowing off a 4 inch thick branch from the tree he had targeted. A small smile graced his face as he contemplated another proof of his genius falling to the ground in ruins.

Lucas then held the weapon in front of him with the ax blade aiming to the wooden depths while pressing the hidden trigger. The resulting wide crescent of energy fanned outwards to 100 meters, barely ½ inch thick throughout but 10 feet high at the end of its range shearing off cleanly and silently through hundreds of vegetal limbs along the way. The widespread devastation was pleasing to him, as the severed branches, twigs and pine cones glided down on the wind.

After that wide zone test was successful, there was only one left; he set the long-sword back in the barrel and aimed the lower end at the forest. The blast that resulted when he pulled the trigger was astounding as he had almost no experience with weapons of this sort; all he had planned to date had been theoretical since the first version of the armament cane had been far less powerful. The single concentrated pulse that burst from the combined parts was a full 1½ inch thick continuous beam of raw power that blasted through the main trunk of a tree 13 inches in diameter with enough force to punch clear to the other side with a resounding crack like thunder, shattering the vegetal, instantly making trauma shock reverberation cracks appear along its length, from down in the roots up to the very top of the tall tree. The poor pine looked like it had been hit by lightning from above, not a thin condensed beam from the side.

The teenager had a wide nasty smile plastered on his thin pale features. "Now, this is a weapon that you can plan a strategy with!" he whispered happily to himself, feeling true pride at his accomplishment.

Tactically, it may have a shorter range than a regular pistol which could reach 150 meters in clear climates, but the isotopic batteries would allow for several hundred shots per day, all invisible without flash, smoke, or recoil, with the only limitation being how fast the capacitor banks could charge between each pulse. Compared to physical bullets in magazines that needed to be switched out, this system would truly advantage him for close range combat, with the electrified blades as back-up on top of things.

Pleasantly surprised at how productive the entire afternoon and evening had turned out despite all the depravities of the morning, the teenager decided to allow himself a little celebration before going to bed at long last. He would make himself a meal from the provisions he had stocked then finally take a piece of that decorative mocha-caramel-maple yule log cake. It was high time for some positive events and happiness in his life at long last. With his new – powerful – armament cane clipped to the left side of his tool belt like a sword in a scabbard, the boy extended out his arm, palm up, to let the clear, pure, white snow fall into his hand. The cold wet flakes tickled him, an amusing feeling he hadn't felt in close to two whole years since his very severely limited health and mobility had kept him from traveling anywhere until about five months ago, when he finally left the wheelchair and crutches for good after so many torturous months of physical re-adaptation. Now in a good mood for the first time in several weeks, Lucas closed the patio doors, going in to find his meal so he could have a full warm stomach to make his sleep afterwards truly enjoyable.

{ SQ } - { PREVIEW ch.8 } - { SQ }

The Papal Lord Amerikus tries to motivate support and approval by celebrating the first Low Mass in the newly renovated Rose Garden at the White House. His depraved barbaric ceremonies are interrupted violently when the power, authority, and riches, of his highest bishops and crusaders is broken before the entire world in a manner that can't be hidden from allies or enemies alike.

All around the USA, society continues to sink into a flaming pit of its own making, to the chanting of fanatical white christian crusaders who will soon find out they are not alone in their desires for theocracy to replace the Land of the Free. They really should have been weary of asking for things they had no rights to have; the other guys might want some too, and be just as armed as they are.

The damages done on the Sunday morning are too great, the loss of power, prestige, panache, money and allies is too all-encompassing and critical to be survived. The Flagged Crucifer is thrown down, the American Eagle falls from its high perch, and the churches of the gods that don't exist are burning. The population wants freedom from fanatics, crusaders and maniacs, the revolution begins.

The combined DXS and NCIS team go through a hard morning traveling to the airfield to meet their incoming partners and get off the ground at long last. They arrive in Vancouver where they finally meet with Lucas Wolenczak at his hotel to begin their actual mission.