CHAPTER 21
Tess

Who knew that surveillance could be this boring?

Tess fast forwarded again, yawning with her heavy head supported in her hand. Or maybe it wasn't surveillance that was boring. Maybe it was Maxwell Evans that was boring.

Tess had watched him arrive at his apartment late on Saturday night and aimlessly walk around the apartment for about ten minutes, before taking a seat on the couch and clicking through one TV-channel after the other. If Tess had known Max, she would have easily picked up on the patterns of distress, the restlessness in his desultory actions and how he was generally beating himself up about something.

But Tess didn't know Max. Tess had never met Max. She was not even afflicted with strong empathic abilities. So how could she possible tell, from the slightly pixelated black and white aerial recording of an apartment, that Max was having a really bad night?

She pressed fast forward again, watching Max make small movements occasionally, slightly jarred due to the increased pace of the playback, and then he disappeared into the bathroom (Tess didn't have any camera there) to reappear a couple of minutes later and head for his bedroom.

Even though Max, so far, seemed to be a total bore, he sure was easy on the eyes. It was not only his face (which stared up at her from the photo in the open manila folder next to her on the bed where she sat with the laptop heating her thighs) that was very attractive. Walking topless into his bedroom, Max was no stranger to upper body exercises, that was for sure.

She skipped the night (exceptionally boring to watch someone sleep) and rolled into Sunday morning, when Max seemed to receive a couple of phone calls that he ignored to answer in favor of spending the majority of the hours of the morning in bed, hiding his head under a pillow. The small digital clock at the bottom of her screen told her that it was little after noon when Max was forced out of bed by an insistent knocking on the front door. Max opened the door to Michael.

Of course it was Michael Guerin, Tess noted. Who else would be so annoyingly persistent? She reached forward to turn on the sound she had muted earlier. Maybe something was finally about to happen.

"Above answering your phone, your Highness?" was Michael's tensed greeting.

"Sorry," Max mumbled and brushed a hand down his face. He did that a lot, Tess observed.

"What if I had something important to say, huh?"

"I always answer, Michael, you know that. I just…couldn't yesterday."

"What's up with you? You look like shit."

"Long story," Max grumbled and stepped aside to gesture for Michael to come inside.

"I got one for you too."

"Isabel told me. That you went to Roswell."

Roswell? Why would Michael go to Roswell? Did he keep in contact with his foster father?

Michael walked straight into the kitchen and retrieved a Snapple from the refrigerator; making himself right at home. "I went to the cave."

Tess straightened up against the pillows propped up against her back.

Max echoed Tess' internal question, "Why?"

"How many chambers were there in the cave?"

Max followed Michael with his eyes as he slumped down in an armchair, opening the Snapple. Tess suddenly struggled to remember how to breathe in the comfort of her bed that Monday night.

Chambers. She had thought of them as pods, but there was no question that they were talking about the same thing.

"It is you," Tess whispered to the screen. "You were in that cave with me…"

She'd always had a suspicion about Michael, since they met at the orphanage, and the information the PI had dug out seemed to have grounded her suspicions further. But this… It must be them.

The conversation continued in the apartment.

"Three," Max replied. "One for each of us."

Tess narrowed her eyes. Three? They don't know that you exist. They don't know that there's four pods.

Michael shook his head in negative. "No."

"No?"

"I had this dream about the cave. There were four chambers."

Well, fuck me backwards. Michael Guerin has the answers.

"It was just a dream, right?"

"So you're the only one with 'truth'-dreams? That's why I wanted to check. I had to see if there were really just three compartments."

Max sank down on the edge of the couch, staring at Michael, his voice barely a whisper, "And?"

"There's four," Michael said evenly. "And they're all broken. I mean, opened. Which means that fourindividuals left the cave."

"Who's the fourth?"

"That, my dear Maximilian, is the 64 million dollar question."

Max stared off into the distance, pondering this. Michael was taking slow sips from his Snapple. Tess was biting the nail polish off her nails.

"Maybe it's Liz," Max said quietly.

"Vision-girl?"

Vision-girl?

"Because of the dreams-"

Who the hell was Vision-girl?

Michael shook his head. "Nah, it doesn't make sense. She had real parents, she wasn't adopted, right?"

"Yeah," Max agreed. A bit reluctantly, Tess noted.

Then Tess came to think of the one Liz she had met not too long ago, who happened to be friends with Isabel. Coincidence? Probably not.

"That mousy, boring girl has some kind of connection to Max Evans?" Tess mumbled and then cursed herself as she talked over Michael, having to reverse the recording some.

"…she wasn't adopted, right?" Michael repeated as Tess pressed 'play'.

"Yeah."

"What about the blonde girl?"

Tess moved the laptop off her lap and put it in front of her, bending her knees up to her chin and increased the volume. The blonde.

Max didn't seem too convinced about Michael's suggestion as he remained silent, so Michael pressed on. "She's been in your dreams too, so maybe she also has a connection but a different one. Like the one you and Isabel felt with me when we met. Because there's no one else you've saved, right? Like you did with Liz."

What was this whole 'saving'-crap they kept mentioning?

"Possibly," Max nodded. "But I know nothing about her. It was pure luck that I stumbled upon Liz - or that Isabel did. It might take years to find the blonde, if she even exists, if she's still alive, if she's the fourth one."

"A lot of ifs," Michael agreed, nodding.

"What else did you see in the cave?"

"For starters, it almost killed Maria."

Max jumped up from the couch. "What?!"

This Maria-girl must mean a lot to Max, Tess mused. She could see that Max had a lot more to say, but seemed to swallow it back in favor of, "What happened?"

"She's fine," Michael assured and he had tensed up, possibly expecting to be yelled at. "There seems to be a barrier surrounding the cave. I felt it as a small current going through my body, but it made Maria have a seizure. She didn't come out of it until I moved her away from there."

Interesting, Tess thought. She had only taken a chance about putting in surveillance, on the off-chance that they actually knew something. She hadn't been too hopeful that they would actually provide her with something she didn't know. This was good. This was really good.

"Also, when I got inside and touched the front chambers, yours and Isabel's, the broken front kinda wanted to crumble so I stopped touching them. But when I reached mine it held its shape, as if it recognized me."

Max seemed stunned into silence, so Michael continued, "There's like this red dome thing at the top of each chamber and when I touched it, it came to life. But nothing happened. I didn't get any visions or flashes or anything, so that was a bust. Here, I took a photo."

Michael whipped out his smart phone and pulled out the photo album, stumbling upon another photo first, which Tess of course couldn't see from her vantage point.

"Oh, wait. This was on the wall running into my area of the cave. Can you read it?"

He handed the phone to Max and Max used his fingers to zoom in and zoom out the photo while moving it back and forth. He did that for about a minute (It must be some kind of text, Tess guessed) before handing the phone back to Michael.

"I recognize it and it feels very familiar. We should print it out and maybe if I look at it long enough I'll find a pattern."

"Sure," Michael nodded and pulled out the photo he had previously looked for. "This is the dome."

"It looks organic," Max noted, looking at the photo. "So you think this is some kind of…heart?"

"More like the brain or power supply. It felt as if it had been the one in charge of the oven cooking us, you know."

Max nodded. "Sounds about right."

Tess noticed a clear exhilaration in Michael's body language and speech. Finding this much information probably didn't belong to the ordinary of these people's lives.

"And the fourth chamber was even further in?" Max questioned.

"Yeah, a bit more difficult to find."

"But someone found their way out… This is great, Mike. We should try and see if we can find something about a fourth person with a similar background as us."

Crap, Tess thought. Now they'll come looking for me. Time for some damage control.

Special agent Joel Martin

Joel Martin was one of the younger FBI agents at the local field office of Albuquerque. His speciality was computer science, which made him very good at acquiring information for his colleagues. He was also something of a genius in mathematics, which certainly assisted his gambling addiction in the illegal activity mostly known as 'counting cards'. Still, his 'luck' had a tendency to not help him the whole way, putting him in constant debt. That's where being an expert at gathering information had a advantageous side. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of people willing to pay good money for information. Especially highly classified information.

Sure, sometimes his conscience glared at him (he had after all became an FBI agent because he wanted to uphold the law and protect his country), but it was a moral detail that he was willing to overlook in the threatening light of owing people money. His little gaming problem was not known to the Bureau (not yet); they probably wouldn't let him handle confidential information in that case. He might even be suspended from his work.

Especially considering that he had caught glimpses into a highly secretive branch that was specific to his field office. The division went under the name of Mogul, which had been a top secret project operated by the US Army Air Force in the 1940's.

A TV-show had in the 90's put a different name to that very same division; 'The X-files'.

But even though Joel was certain the hype about that TV-show had made his superiors a bit anxious, the Mogul project had remained. To the general public, the Mogul project was discontinued in 1949 and was blamed by the government to having launched the air balloon that later came to be the explanation of the presumed alien crash in 1947. Although, the division hadn't been able to hide the fact that their records showed that the army hadn't had an air balloon in the air at the time of the crash.

So the question still remained; if it had not been an air balloon that fell that night, what had it been?

Apparently, there had been a lot of activity around this theory in 1994 (before Joel's time at the Bureau), but since then the division appeared to have been heavily downsized. Just like some parts of the US government monitored the internet for specific keywords to monitor terrorism (assassination, homeland security, anthrax, to name a few), the Mogul division monitored the internet for keywords like Roswell incident, conspiracy, air balloon and of course, aliens. This kept the majority of the division in work full-time thanks to the general public's heightened interest in science fiction and the occult. Separating facts from fiction became an annoying but very real problem.

Which is why Joel was personally intrigued when he was approached by a private investigator, asking for possible information on three individuals in their mid-twenties. Since most of the information gathered could be explained to be bogus in this vampire- and alien-loving nation, it was rare that someone actually ended up in the records. Hence, Joel hadn't anticipated to find anything when carrying out the PI's request.

Imagine his surprise when he had found three comprehensive files on three kids leading, seemingly innocent, lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Undeterred by the fact that the information had been compiled in the boring, fact-based manner of a instruction manual, Joel was captivated by the stories.

Even though he had gotten well paid for handing over copies of the highly classified material to that private investigator, Joel couldn't help but seeing the larger picture. How could he make more money out of this? Was there more information to be found that he, the mathematical genius, would be able to acquire?

And so he had found Theresa Harding, whose background check matched that of Michael Guerin, on of the Boston-kids.

And while Ms. Harding had taken it upon herself to watch Maxwell Evans, Theresa Harding was now being watched by FBI-agent Joel Martin. With highly advanced FBI surveillance equipment.