Showdown, Chapter 6 by patricia51

(New Friends, Part 2)

(LOL, Yes to a couple of my dear friends. Emily IS Emily Prentiss from "Criminal Minds". The pair of Texas Rangers are from another movie as well. Nope. Not telling. Not yet anyway.)

(Present)

"I regained consciousness in the hospital several days later. I was lucky, or at least that's what they told me. I had a nasty gash on my head from flying debris which apparently had proven harder than my thick skull."

"Emily?" asked Carlos although the look on the former Border Patrol agent's face already had answered his question.

Jennie shook her head. "There was barely enough left of the entry team to provide positive identification. Emily's funeral was a closed casket affair. The pall bearers were members of her old Behavioral Analysis Unit, one that specialized in profiling and analyzing serial killers and other hard to catch deadly criminals. They were all grief stricken by her loss."

"One of them, a tall handsome black guy whose name I can't remember right now, mentioned quietly to the team's techno expert that the explosion must have been awful as the casket weighed practically nothing at all. I don't think I was supposed to hear that or her reply."

"What was the reply?" inquired Alice. "And why did you think you weren't supposed to hear it?"

"It was one of those little asides between close friends and there just seemed to be overtones of some knowledge they shared that outsiders, namely me, weren't privy to. She said 'you don't suppose...' and she hesitated for a moment and then added one word 'again?' He looked thoughtful but then they saw me standing there and came over to offer their condolences again. Nothing more was said later that I heard that could have explained it." private

"They knew you were friends." commented Sam.

Jennie might have blushed but if she did the recovery was so quick the embarrassment came and went in a flash. "Emily had stayed in touch with them. They were aware that we were much more than friends and treated me accordingly even though our relationship was non-official and low-key."

The other members of the sextet were quiet for a while. All had lost friends and loved ones before; during the collapse of civilization and even before then but that didn't lessen the pain they all knew Jennie was feeling. After a while Alice spoke up.

"Obviously you were set up. Did you ever find out by whom? And exactly why?"

"The official position was that it was a trap set by the Mexican drug cartels."

"But you don't seem to believe it."

"I might have but there were too many inconsistencies. The cartels, as bloody as they were, kept those activities on below the border. As damaging as our raid might have been it seemed unlikely it would have been so strong a blow that it was worth seriously raising the stakes, especially as they simply could have moved the meeting. After all, they HAD been tipped off."

"By...?" Carlos raised an eyebrow.

"Never proved. But one of the FBI agents who was on the support staff left government employment not long after the raid for a lucrative position in private industry. Care to guess what corporation he went to work for, conveniently located in a country overseas wit5h no extradition treaty with the US?"

"Umbrella DOES have a reputation for hiring government employees," Alice admitted. "Both Carlos and I were lured away by offers of a LOT more money; him from the Air Force and me from the Treasury Department."

"But you weren t under suspicion of being involved in the deaths of five Federal officers at the time," pointed out Jennie.

"No."

"It was moot anyway," Jennie shrugged. "By the time I got out of the hospital the strike force had been disbanded. Disbanded? I had been vaporized. The offices had been stripped to the walls and everyone reassigned to places like Guam with no one within a thousand miles of anyone else. Files? Evidence? Records? Disappeared as though they had never existed. The apartment that Emily and I shared had been ransacked. Notes and copies of files had been taken and our computers wiped clean. Even our private vehicles had been searched."

"With the team scattered there was only Roland, Maggie and I left in Texas. Roland was a bulldog on a case and wanted to stay on it but he had recently got married to a very nice and very lovely professor at a college where he had been working undercover. Not only that but the same college had offered him a job and his daughter, whom he had reestablished a relationship with after a long estrangement, was attending there as well. Maggie and I both wore him down. So he retired and we pursued what leads we could. He did turn over his case notes and whoever was cleaning up had been reluctant to try for Ranger Headquarters so Maggie still had hers as well."

"We did begin to discover some things. And they all pointed towards Umbrella. At first, even with what took place with the suspected informer we just couldn't understand it. Why would such a huge, multi-national corporation be mixed up in this? Just for the money? Sure it was considerable but compared to what they turned on a daily basis it was chicken feed. But still we looked and the more we found the more we were sure they were not only involved but possibly the driving force."

"The money sure," Alice said thoughtfully. "Umbrella never missed an opportunity to make an extra buck or two. Plus back in those days they were a little bit more circumspect about their illegal activities; not just those with what you were investigating but others. It would have been nice to have the drug cartels to take the blame for their actions. But I suspect that the main reason for their involvement brings us right back to where we all are today. Illegal bio research and the need for experimental test subjects. Illegal immigrants are perfect; they can vanish and no one even knows about it. Plus hell, they probably had a piece of the action with those whorehouses."

Alice returned her attention to Jennie. "I am assuming that you weren't able to get anything done, since nothing of this ever reached the press, the courts or heck even people like me inside Umbrella."

"No," the woman sighed. "Maggie's house was set on fire and she barely escaped a drive by shooting that was, of course, attributed to the cartels or brushed off as 'random'. And then a try was made for me.

(Flashback)

Most people when awakened in the middle of the night have the same reaction. They wonder what woke them. They lie there and strain their ears and peer into the darkness. When nothing happens; when they hear nothing and see nothing they mentally shrug, roll over and go back to sleep.

When Border Patrol Agent Jennie Gartman found her eyes suddenly open she did the same thing at first. She listened, her mind sorting out the noises that filled the night. After all, one could not expect an apartment in the heart of the city to be completely still. But one by one she recognized each sound and discarded it. All of them were familiar; none of them should have woken her. So what did?

One action she had automatically taken was definitely different from the run-of-the-mill. Upon wakening her right hand slipped down the side of the mattress to find the holster fastened there, concealed by the bedcovers. That hand settled on the non-slip grips of her first service weapon, bought when she was a young rookie city officer just starting out in a small Texas college town. She had kept it through during all the intervening years as she progressed from small town to big city to state and finally Federal law enforcement.

She didn't draw the Smith and Wesson Model 686 stainless steel .357 magnum yet. But she gently released the thumb break catch that would allow her to do just that in an instant. She listened and she listened much more intently than an average citizen would have listened. After all, none of them had had their partner, a partner both at work and in life, murdered. None of them had their best friend and fellow investigator attacked twice, once by gunfire and once by arson. So she didn't go back to sleep. Instead she waited. And her watchfulness was rewarded when the faintest creak of the hardwood floor in the living room came to her ears.

Now she slid the S&W free. And she admitted to herself what her old firearms instructor at the academy had proclaimed long ago.

"Certainly you get a lot more firepower from a high capacity auto loader although personally I would go with the forty five over the nine millimeter any day. But when it's dark and you're scared and your hands are sweaty and slippery it's nice not to have to wonder if there's a round in the chamber or if the safety is on or off. With a double-action revolver you just point and shoot."

She slipped from the bed, keeping low as she shifted to a two handed grip on her weapon. Her bare feet moved silently on the carpeted floor. An observer might have thought she had practiced her movements as she avoided the furniture. That observer would be right.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean little green men from Mars aren't out to eat your brains," an instructor had once told the class she was attending on Officer Survival. "Practice reacting to situations where you spend the most time; at home, at the office, in your car. Most especially at home." Jennie blessed that trainer's words as she crept towards the bedroom door. She was confident that no matter what she had the situation under control.

How wrong she was about that came home about ten seconds later when her bedroom door was eased open and a black cylinder was tossed in.

"Shit!" she thought as she hit the floor, rolling towards the wall and burying her face in a handy pair of discarded jeans. She screwed her eyes tightly closed.

The flash-bang grenade detonated with the might roar and blinding light that was its signature. Because of her actions Jennie came out of her roll still able to see although she wouldn't get the ringing out of her ears for an hour or so. SO when the black clad figure sprang through the door and emptied what seemed like a fifty round magazine of suppressed nine millimeter bullets into her bed she was able to take action, although not in time to save her mattress and bed frame.

"Federal Officer," she shouted, almost loud enough to hear it herself. "Drop the weapon!"

The figure didn't rather hosing bullets around the room as it spun towards her. She fired twice; the hollow point bullets smashing the attacker back. He fell to the floor and didn't get up. Keeping him covered she crawled to the switch and flipped on the light, remembering to close one eye before she did so. Then she crossed to the figure, pushed the weapon away with one bare foot, nearly burning herself on the barrel as she did. Leaning over she pulled the black ski mask from the figure. She had never seen the no-longer breathing man before in her life.

Wearily she surveyed her bedroom. She sure hoped her insurance company would cover this. Crossing to the phone she picked it up and tapped two numbers before reconsidering. She cut the connection and called Maggie and told her what had happened before going back and finishing calling 911. She figured she better have a friendly familiar face here.

(The Present)

"Interestingly the weapon, the recovered spent shells and bullets, the pictures and all the reports vanished from police custody and there was an attempt to press charges on me for excessive use of force. Fortunately I had copies of everything including two bullets dug out of my wall safely stored away and that was dropped."

"Even then we might have carried on. We took what we had to a senior FBI Inspector with Ethical Affairs. Want to guess who else went suddenly to work for Umbrella at an incredible pay scale?" Heads shook. "Thought not. After that they had us beaten. We had nothing." The attractive woman's face turned hard. "They took something precious from me though and I welcome the chance to pay them back."

Jennie held up her hand just as Carlos, Alice and Stan all started to speak. "But rest assured that I am a professional and I will act like one. I will NOT jeopardize others by going off on some wild rampage. I'm a team player.

The others exchanged glances. Satisfied Alice nodded. "Okay, I, we, believe you."

Attention was turned to the other new person in the group. She grinned when she saw their attention, a cocky grin that promised she could live up to the attitude it promised.

"I'm Christina Selena Marie Sanchez Street, former Police Officer Third Grade, D Platoon LAPD SWAT," she began. The grin faded. "And I have cause to hate Umbrella as much as anyone else."

(To be continued)

(Golly I didn't expect to spend so much time with Jennie before getting to Chris. But sometimes the story takes the lead and all I can do is follow where it leads me.)

sp1695