Texas

The pilot was short. He had light brown hair and dark brown eyes, not bad looking, but snotty and a little conceited. He loved talking about art history and high end Scotch. He wore a shield of pretense to cover up his insecurities. He was a man who came from nothing, and he wanted the world to know he was finally somebody.

He saw Taylor, and he could not look away. She was perfect, about 5'6, medium length blonde hair, blue eyes, still had muscular legs and a behind to kill for from playing soccer at Yale, even though those years were long behind her. She had an average sized chest, but it was in a push up bra to get all the cleavage she could.

She didn't have to say a word. All she needed was a smile and the right look with her eyes, like she was imagining him naked. The easiest way to get to a man with an ego was to let him think you turned him on. He quickly bought her a drink, eager to show off his platinum credit card. He didn't know that she was born into money, and it did not impress her.

They talked for a bit, well he mostly talked about himself, and she listened, periodically sending "I'm so into you" signals. He took her home and fell asleep after their dalliance, which was not very eventful, and she stole the magnetic strip from his work id. She replaced the strip with one from a library card, so he wouldn't be suspicious. She also got a picture of his uniform, so it could be copied. She copied the contents of his laptop onto a flash drive and stole a glass for his fingerprints, in case she needed them.

Taylor wrote until we meet again on his mirror with lipstick.

Nevada

The silence was getting to Brenda. She had always been a bit of a loner, always eager to get her head wrapped up in some job or project, but even she needed some type of noise, Joel, the tv, a person. She had gotten past thinking about Fritz constantly. She missed him like crazy, but if she thought about him too much, she would cry her eyes out. In this desert, she couldn't afford the tears, and her heart couldn't take the stress, so she did her best to keep her head vacant.

That only worked for so long. She searched around the basement for something to do. She found a biography on Virginia Woolf. "Ugh!" Brenda said aloud as she looked at it. She knocked off the dust. It was either this or a playboy that was definitely too nasty to touch.

She started to read. Virginia came from a British family well-connected in the Victorian literary society. Her fondest childhood memory was at the Godrevy lighthouse. It was near her family's summer home, where unsurprisingly, she spent her summers. Brenda spent her summers driving to Mississippi to visit her redneck cousins. They loved making muskrat stew nasty.

Brenda made it through the book, surprised at how much she and Virginia had in common. Virginia was very talented but not very social, seldom taking breaks through out her career. Her troubled past caused her to bury herself in the work, sometimes causing breaking points from all of the stress on top of her. Her peculiarities had a way of masking her inner strength which functioned like a stream of consciousness, and she used that strength to delve into the emotions and psychology of her characters just as Brenda saw through people who came into her interrogation room. Virginia's husband was her better half, and the best feeling she every felt was being wanted by him.

I think I would have been friends with her, Brenda thought as she closed her eyes to rest.

Los Angeles

Fritz woke up to the smell of pancakes. This mystery man could cook?

"About time you woke up. We got a lot of work to do today, and by we, I mean you."

"What are you talking about?" Fritz stumbled into the kitchen.

"I need you to check out some leads for me. There's a folder on the table for you."

Fritz flipped through it. "Who are these people?"

"I suspect they're connected to Potovsky. One of them runs an outfit that charters planes in Austin. Another owns a hotel chain across the US. The third one works for the State Department."

Fritz was impressed. This guy could work. It all made sense. Potovsky needed a way of getting in the country without going through TSA, and his men needed documents. The only thing they were missing was guns. "Do you know how they got their guns?"

"My guess, the gun shop that was robbed last week. There was a similar heist in Virginia the week before. I think he has at least two teams, maybe more, but we don't need to worry about them, yet."

"We don't."

"No. First we need to find his resources and starve him off. Now eat up. This'll be a long day." The pancakes came with hot italian sausage and scrambled eggs. It was quite a feast.

Fritz fed Joel, washed his hands and set the table. He went to brew some coffee, but it was already there. This guy would have made a great housewife.

They didn't talk much. Fritz did the dishes and then headed out to work. Jack went back to work, making phone calls, digging through files, looking through photographs and reading charts. He mostly worked on paper. He stayed off the grid.

Major Crimes

Tao tore through the remnants of the burnt out car. He found the butt of a cigarette that wasn't sold in the US. It was an expensive, and only sold in Russia, likely belonging to one of the robbers. The DNA on it was likely destroyed, but they ran the test anyway.

He also pulled a bunch of prints from the mirrors on the car. He ran them all through the system, getting a match one of them. The file was locked down by the State Department. How odd?

He called Agent Howard and sent him the information. Maybe he could figure out who this guy really was.

Texas

They took surveillance photos of the charter company from across the street. There was a guard on the inside that would screen for customers and an employee entrance on the side that required a card swipe. They didn't see any indication of an iris or a fingerprint scan. They really needed access to the security footage.

DC

Griffin had decrypted contents on the laptop. He was filtering through the information, looking for jobs, who commissioned them, payouts, routes, anything that would lead to Potovsky or his men. Unfortunately, the laptop only had the jobs of this pilot. Griffin needed access into the whole company.

He was in the process of reverse engineering the pilot's login and password, so he could build a similar one to hack into the system. He needed to figure out how the system worked, so he could build a login with top-level security clearance. He could have done this faster by just sending a spam bot and sneaking in, but he didn't want to leave any trace. He wanted the system to think that only authorized people were there.

It was going to be a while. While Griffin was waiting for the login to finish, he could start on a basic sweeper program, a program to follow his fake login and erase the signs that it had ever entered the system. It's like having someone close doors for you after you walk through them. He would have to modify it once he knew what type of system he was entering, but the basic code for every sweeper program was the same.

Griffin gulped his coffee as he worked. He needed as much energy as he could get.