Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
It's in the Water
There was certainly something to be said for the citizenry of Washington DC and its surroundings: when a madman turned their water green, they jumped into action and turned in their neighbors with alacrity. Exactly what that said about them was less certain.
The water hadn't been green for ten minutes before she had fifty leads to follow up on. It seemed that every suburb and subdivision had its own long-haired blond nuisance, and law abiding folks were eager to turn them in.
Twenty minutes, and she had three hundred decent leads and forty-six duplicate leads. An hour, and she had sixteen hundred.
Of course it was Amanda the Well-Connected who came up with tip one thousand six hundred and one.
At least it saved her some time and sanity, even if it was a hard pill to swallow that Amanda could show up late to work and miss the morning meeting, and still make a full positive identification while the Metropolitan PD could not. She sighed heavily at Billy's retreating back, then turned on her heel to go follow up on tip #1,601.
She put together a sting to go to Carmine Davis' house, which occupied a quiet little corner of a quiet little suburb — if you didn't count the twenty agency cars, the forty agents, and the helicopters. Also, Amanda King was part of the sting, and that had never been one of the hallmarks of peace and tranquility.
She herself remained at the agency, feeling something like a circus acrobat juggling burning torches while unicycling across an electrified cable 20 stories in the air. She lectured airport security. She monitored the droves of cables that kept the printers busy as their undercover operatives reported in. She handed missives to messengers and codebreakers and received unscrambled missives herself.
"Francine," Billy said, slowly and calmly, as if by walking up beside her without any sudden movements he might avoid getting his head chewed off, "the White House is barking at me for an update on that terrorist angle."
"Well, fine," she replied with more than a touch of asperity, "we'll tell them anybody with teeth is hungry for Carmine."
"I think the president would like something a little bit more specific." Still calm, still quiet, but with a ring of urgency.
"All right. Well, here is the latest profile." She pointed at her screen, reading off the names of the countries who had most recently joined the ranks of those trying to find Carmine. "Syria, Germany, Libya…every terrorist organization is making noises."
The phone rang, and even as Billy answered it the irrational thought came to her that somewhere out there some bureaucrat with a bone to pick was trying to make her life more difficult — she just knew it.
Her suspicions were confirmed when Billy passed the message along.
"The Cubans have boats in the water. Let's send a unit over to help the Coast Guard, please."
Help the Coast Guard! Weren't they the ones who were supposed to come to the rescue when someone was drowning?
Her voice was much less shrill than she had expected it to be, even as she pleaded with Billy for just a bit of consideration for the limited resources she had at her disposal. She had sixty-seven and a half agents out in the field looking for Carmine — she'd gotten Fred Fielder out there too, and maybe she was hoping that he'd get run over by a tank or something — and even with sixty-seven agents and Fred Fielder their search for Carmine Davis had been fruitless so far. Not even Amanda, their unofficial agency wild card, had been able to track him down.
Billy turned away, then turned back just as she thought that her interrogation was over.
"Do you have anything good I could tell the President?" he asked, in a tone that said he knew there wasn't.
"Do you want an honest answer?" she retorted.
"I don't think so."
She looked back hopelessly at her endless and growing list of things to do and terrorist organizations to investigate, and she sighed.
Heavily.
It was the one thing she hated most: being powerless.
Drugged.
Useless.
Being told to stay in bed.
Actually, it turned out there was one thing she hated worse than all those things: being ordered to "get back in here, pronto" while wanting nothing more than to stay in bed after being drugged by an international hitman.
Her head felt like a drum.
Her mouth felt fuzzy.
Her forearms felt too heavy for her elbows, oddly enough.
Well, she'd better go and get back in there. Pronto.
Before Amanda went and suggested some sort of wacky idea like turning the water back on.
In the end it was Amanda who found Carmine, as anyone could have predicted.
Francine's net hadn't done any good; he'd slipped through it just like his green water had slipped through the purification system. Francine's protests at Billy's enthusiastic adoption of Amanda's plan hadn't done any good either. Nor had her system of agents surrounding the water purification plant.
No, in the end it came down to Lee with a gun and Ananda with a station wagon going up against a bunch of water balloons and a nutcase in a pickup truck, and Francine in her dress and nylons standing ankle deep in sand at the edge of the Potomac.
A normal day's work.