CHAPTER 62
NOT THE ONLY ONE GOOD AT KEEPING SECRETS
"I hope you know that, after the stunts you pulled on us, we won't be paying for any of this!" Angie pointed to the table that Amanda and Jack had laid out for them, at the end of a long and very tiring first day of the week.
"Please, it's the least we could do." Amanda smiled brightly.
"So, you're not a bitch?" Angie asked openly, making Jack gasp.
"Seriously? You're still amazed by anything she does or says?" Bryan laughed, standing by Jack's side.
"I can be one." Amanda started off while opening a bottle. "But for the most part, I'm nice to my friends."
"So, we're friends now?" Angie commented, watching Amanda struggle with the bottle.
"Haven't we always been?" Amanda was too smart to give Angie the satisfaction of being upset over her words. She knew they were just a test.
"Good God gracious, woman! Don't you have bottles in Boston?" Angie couldn't stand this any longer, so she grabbed the bottle from Amanda's hands and worked her way with the corkscrew.
"Hey, you've only been legal to drink for two years now. Why are you so good at this?" Jack was impressed.
"Point one person in America that actually waits for their 21st birthday in order to have a drink?" Angie challenged him while pouring the wine in four plastic cups. This felt a lot like a scene from the sports camp dorm room.
"Word." Bryan laughed, remembering his own first drink, back in high-school.
"Was it easy, you know, transitioning from the Academy into the real world of a working Agent?" Angie asked curiously.
"Yeah, what is the world of an Agent like?" Bryan added to her question.
"Well, it wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard either. We were lucky to have Dan's support even after the Academy. He turned from Mentor to Friend and he still is just that, for us. We hang out after work sometimes and when we need advice, we always go to him. But when we graduated, we both moved on to different Units. That kind of sucked, because we thought we wouldn't see each other at all, but that was not the case." Amanda smiled at Jack.
"We were also lucky to be assigned to the Units we wanted. Well, I got my first wish, but Amanda got her second. And she turned out to be fine with her placement. We are both stationed here at Quantico, but since she's an undercover Agent, she travels a lot…" Jack ended off with sadness in his voice.
"How long have you guys been together?" Angie, once again, shot yet another awkward question.
Jack looked at Amanda, as if to get her permission.
"We don't really tell people about that…" Amanda said shyly.
"I'm not people." Angie argued.
"I can see how you will make one excellent behavioral analyst." Amanda smirked, it was her time to toy with Angie.
"I never said what I want to master in." Angie couldn't help but sound a little defensive.
"Come on! I've known this about you since day one. You wouldn't go to bed if you weren't clutching on to that Profiling Violent Crimes book. And you kept reading the behavior chapters over and over again. I wish I could have seen you in those classes later on…" Amanda took a big sip of her wine, loving the taste.
"She crushed it." Jack told her.
"I bet she did." Amanda was fully enjoying both the conversation and the wine.
"Damn, this is an expensive one!" Angie subtly changed the topic when she finally took her first sip.
"Bureau salary, baby!" Amanda smirked. "That's one of the many great things about working for the Government."
"Not with the current budget cuts, I imagine…" Bryan sat back, munching on a few pretzels.
"Yeah, that is unfortunate for some of the Units. We heard that selected ones got huge cuts recently." Jack was cringing, unsure if he would have taken the news well if his own team was among the unfortunate ones.
"Can anything be done about it?" Angie asked curiously.
"Not really. At first, they said it would be temporary. But it's something to do with the government, blah blah politics. I don't know. I just know that we have a lot of amazing Agents out there, suffering the consequences of those cuts." Amanda spoke, while scanning the room with her eyes.
They were all gathered in Angie and Amanda's original dorm, now Angie and Bryan's room.
"Oh, is that…?" Amanda moved a few inches, noticing a huge piece of white paper, rolled by Bryan's bed.
She unrolled it and started to analyze it, with Jack by her side.
"How cute! They even figured out the timing of the flashlights." Amanda squealed a little bit.
It felt just a tiny bit weird to be holding the investigation of her own pseudo-death in her hands, but she was curious to see how much they had figured out on their own.
"Yeah, that was a dumb move." Jack rolled his eyes.
"The bike couldn't be set up in the pitch black. I wasn't even able to figure out where the Hell they had put it, let alone get on it and get the Hell out of there!" Amanda argued.
"Oh, so it was flashlights, not lightnings that we saw?" Bryan asked. "And yes, we figured your escape route was something quick and noiseless. Mountain bike is our best guess."
"Exactly. You guys have no idea the speed with which this whole thing got set up. It had to happen at the end of week two, but my Unit got assigned to a case and they urgently needed my help, which meant that I had to leave the Academy. And since Dan was hellbound on me being the one they use for this stunt, he pulled me out immediately. Like, I got assigned to the case on Sunday morning and this happened that same night. We had zero preparation and no idea what we would be doing. At first, Dan had wanted to take everyone out and have a shooting at some bar. But then we had to be quick, so when I saw the weather forecast for that night, I suggested that hike in the mountains. We basically set it all up right then and there, under your noses. While we were talking and trying to figure out our way through the woods, Dan and one other Agent were pouring the blood down the steep hill and securing my bike. Then you, Angie, had the brilliant idea to go straight in their direction and I knew they weren't done setting it all up, because I haven't had the signal yet, so Jack had to jump in and fake this fight with me, to buy the other guys some time for the set up before I disappeared." Amanda kept laughing as she recalled what had happened that night.
"First of all, you could have used human blood, you know." Angie pointed out. "It was too easy for us to figure out that it came from an animal. Well, not too easy. We only figured that out on the second try, but still."
"I spoke to your DNA analysis teacher. He said you were relentless and that you kept bugging some other guy, who by the way is an actual working lab analyst, to help you out with the analysis. Then you just dropped it and did it yourself. Like, how the heck do you even know how to analyze DNA?" Amanda sounded impressed.
"I'm a nerd. I've read a lot of books. And then you see the machine and you're like "Oh, let's press this and that and then poof, it's done'." Angie shrugged casually. "Plus, I've watched a thousand video tutorials online, as well."
Amanda looked at Angie who was now standing, on her way to crack a window open.
Angela stood tall. She had great posture, her chin was always held high and she carried herself with the poise of a fifty year old Socialite with years of practice in being mature and elegant. And she was only twenty-three. Something wasn't adding up. That bow on her hair was surely there, just to wrap up a whole bunch of qualities that this girl possessed.
Amanda smiled politely, letting Angie think this was just a random glare.
It was not.
"She's a tough cookie." Jack said to Bryan while the girls were not listening.
"Tell me about it." Bryan was now reaching for another handful of pretzels. He loved those so much.
"You know, you're quite the tough guy yourself, bro." Jack added.
He had been watching Bryan since day one. Bryan came in, wrapped in a shell of something that Jack could not figure out. And then there was this cheerful bubbly girl, wrapped in a bow, who kept on cracking little pieces of Bryan's shell. It was hard and at times it did not budge at all, but she did not give in. She kept on hitting that shell and more of Bryan's real personality kept poking through the tiny little holes that she had managed to make. It was progress. And she was stubborn enough to keep going.
"I saw that photo…" Jack mentioned and Bryan tensed up immediately.
While other people had their wall, covered in photos of friends and family, Bryan had only brought one tiny photo to the Academy and he had kept it under key this whole time. Except the first few minutes when he checked in his dorm, before he figured out they had a safety deposit box available.
"I'm sorry for what happened to you, man." Jack pat Bryan's shoulder and watched him re-build some of that shell, the same one that Angela had worked so damn hard to break down so far.
Bryan gulped and looked away. Angela was not the only one good at keeping secrets.
