A/N1: On the other hand, perhaps ownership of Chuck is in St. Louis. My wife and I had some great steaks at a restaurant in St. Louis near the Gateway Arch a few years ago.
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Casey and Zondra arrived at the address on Crawford's letter in a loaner car from the NSA. Of course, it was a black SUV. The building was a two-story office building in a somewhat less developed part of town. They were hoping to keep a low profile on this part of the investigation and avoid contact with Fulcrum if they could.
They had arrived in St. Louis the prior day, dropped off by Chuck and Sarah in the Citation. They spent the night in a cheap motel and began their investigation first thing that morning. While Chuck and Sarah would have arrived in the Caribbean the prior day, Casey and Zondra were crunching over the light snow cover of the parking lot to the rear of the building.
The back door to the building was unlocked and they made their way into a lobby of sorts. It was just a small vestibule with a directory on the wall. To one side was a flight of stairs and on the other side a small elevator.
Crawford was listed on the lobby directory as being in office 210. Up the stairs they went, looking for security cameras along the way. There were no people around and didn't appear to be much in the way of cameras or other security.
Zondra made short work of the lock on the door and they entered the office quickly and easily. There was a smallish reception area with an empty desk and nothing else, not even a chair. Through a door behind the desk was a small office with a window letting in the morning light.
Casey walked through the door to the farther office while Zondra began to search the front office. There wasn't much to search. There were no pictures on the wall and no furniture other than the single desk. But the search was time consuming anyway. Zondra had to take all the drawers out of the desk to check the insides and bottoms.
Meanwhile, Casey had more to explore in the other room, Crawford's real office. There was no computer, but there was a small filing cabinet and a desk. A few books on top of the filing cabinet. He began to go through them methodically, file by file, drawer by drawer, book by book.
Most of what he found was unrelated to any spy work at all. Seems Crawford had an interest in international shipping and had been assembling information about shipping companies and shipyards. If that had anything to do with Fulcrum, Casey couldn't see it. He and Zondra discussed it and felt that the most likely explanation was that shipping was part of the legend he used when undercover.
From some correspondence in the files, though, he found the address of Crawford's house outside the city.
Soon Zondra joined him in the office and the two of them worked for several hours on their search. Other than the home address, they didn't find anything they thought might be useful in the fight against Fulcrum.
About an hour after leaving the office, they pulled up to the address of Crawford's house. The house was in a rural area and ringed by trees, but with wide fields in front and, from what they could see from the road, in back as well. There was a long winding driveway from the gate at the road.
The house itself was a sprawling one-story ranch house with a front porch. There were no cars or other vehicles outside. It was set back from the road on what appeared to be a large tract of land.
Casey and Zondra pulled over to the side of the road, onto the verge, and walked over to the sturdy-looking gate. It was locked with a padlock and chain connecting the crossbar to a stanchion. Zondra took out a pick to open the padlock, but, before she could do so, Casey said, "Hold on."
"What?" she asked.
"Power connection to the stanchion," he said, pointing out a barely visible electrical wire near the base. It looked like a hard rain had eroded the soil covering it.
"Alarm?" she asked,
"Be my guess," he said.
"The owner is dead. Wonder how much difference an alarm makes?" she asked.
"Crawford was a pretty serious operative. I don't think I want to find out," opined Casey.
"Ok." Together they began to examine the gate and the stanchion. With a flashlight they saw a pressure switch almost completely hidden under the crossbar where it was braced against the hook on the stanchion. Had they removed the chain and lifted the bar, they would have set off the alarm.
Neither of them knew what the results of that might have been, of course, but they thought it was better not to tempt fate.
Now a bit more careful than they had been moments before, they stepped to the gate and ducked under the bar to walk to the house.
They hadn't gone more than a few steps when Casey put a hand to Zondra's shoulder to stop her.
He pointed to the base of a tree to his left. There was a small black box, mostly concealed by underbrush and a light covering of hard crusty snow. Looking across the driveway, he saw another one mirroring the first at the base of a second tree. When Zondra saw them she said, "Infrared trip wire?"
"Yeah," said Casey, stepping over the invisible beam. They continued on their way on foot, but very cautiously. They avoided anything on the driveway that looked at all unusual, worried about pressure plates, for example, and continued to scan the periphery for additional infrared sensors. As the driveway left the woods on either side and continued into the clearing, Casey stopped them for a moment and observed a couple of dozen tree stumps shorn close to the grass on either side of the drive.
He looked at the house and turned around slowly to look at the trees and the gate a bit down the way. Turning back around, he grunted.
"What?" asked Zondra.
"Fields of fire. He took down the trees so he'd have a clear field of fire. He was preparing to defend against an attack," he said.
"Jesus," said Zondra, shaking her head. "Well, I guess even paranoids have enemies."
Casey grunted and said, "Ironic that after all of this he died in a real accident."
They approached the house and Zondra said, "When it's your time..."
"Yeah," replied Casey.
Still taking great care with their environment, expecting alarms or booby traps, they slowly circled the house. They weren't worried about neighbors seeing them and calling the police. They were too concealed from the road by the trees, although they could just see the gate, as the trees had lost their leaves.
The house had an attached garage with a keypad lock. In back was a flagstone patio with some stacked outdoor furniture and a grill covered by a black weather cover. No outbuildings and a clear field in back for a few dozen yards until a tree line.
Coming to the front of the house, there were a few wooden Adirondack chairs on the porch and a normal looking front door. Some brown shrubbery without leaves at this time of year. Where there would be flower beds under the shrubbery, there was a mix of dead leaves.
Nodding his head to the door, Casey said, "Bet you ten that's reinforced."
Zondra shook her head and said, "No bet. How do you want to get in?"
"We can try to pick it, but I'm willing to bet there's an alarm pad on the other side. We won't have the code."
"True," agreed Zondra. "Probably the same with the other doors too. Why don't we try a window? A bathroom window. Sash windows. We lower the upper one in a bathroom. Crawl in that way."
"Ok," said Casey. "Could be alarmed, but the top window on a bathroom is the least likely place. I agree, it's worth a try."
They walked over to the back of the house and the smaller window with curtains pulled closed. They thought it likely that the smaller window would be a bathroom window. He pulled one of the smaller chairs from the pile of outdoor furniture and stood on it. Peeking through the window, he found the lock in the center of the bottom sash. He slipped a knife through and twisted it to widen the gap between the two sashes. Then, using one hand, he jiggled the top sash up and down until the movement of the window eventually disengaged the center lock.
Once that happened the top sash dropped down, opening the window. He stopped for a few moments and looked at Zondra. They heard nothing but the sound of the wind in the bare tree branches. No alarm. Of course, the electronic signal could be on its silent way to the alarm company as he stood there. They might not know until the St. Louis police arrived to investigate. Thinking the same thing, Zondra shrugged and motioned for him to proceed.
He reached through the window and pushed the curtains aside, revealing a shower. He took off his jacket and handed it to Zondra to hold, making himself smaller. He climbed up and through the window, lowering himself down to the bathtub head first. When his legs cleared the window, he tucked them down and stood up.
Zondra was already standing outside the window on the same chair he'd used. He took his jacket and hers and dropped them behind him on the floor of the bathroom. She levered her upper body through the bathroom window and he reached up to take her weight so she wouldn't have to drop headfirst into the tub. In a moment, they were both standing in the tub.
Zondra reached up to close the window they had just entered from.
"One floor," she said. "Hopefully it won't take us too long."
"Yeah. Hopefully," agreed Casey.
Leaving their jackets on the floor near the bathroom, the first thing they did, together and very carefully, was to clear the house room by room to make sure they were alone. They found no one and no obvious booby traps.
That done they began to search the house methodically room by room. For all the time they took, they were disappointed in the results. Although, they noted that the man had followed the thirty-foot rule to the extreme. He seemed to have guns every ten feet or so. They found a gun safe in the garage, cemented into the floor. Given the quantity and variety of guns and ammunition they found throughout the house, though, they couldn't imagine what he deemed dangerous enough to keep in the safe.
It was during a search of the home office/den area that they found a hidden switch along the back wall of a bookcase, hidden by the books. When the switch was triggered, one edge of the bookcase was released from the wall. It swung out without a sound, the hinges obviously well oiled.
Behind the bookcase was a safe, embedded in the wall. It had a keypad on the face, as you'd find in a hotel room. Casey stared at it for a minute and turned to Zondra. "Any brilliant ideas?"
With a wry smile she said, "Call Chuck in Grand Cayman? He's usually my source for brilliant ideas."
Chuckling, Casey said, "Yeah. I hear you. I've learned to live with that."
"How about you? Any brilliant ideas?" she asked.
"Well, not so brilliant, really. Neither subtle nor elegant," he said.
"OK. Brute force then?"
"Well, yeah," he said.
"OK. What do you have in mind?"
It took almost twenty minutes, but with a cold chisel and heavy hammer that they'd found on Crawford's tool bench in the garage they had broken the wall to pieces around the safe. Pulling the safe from the wall they were left holding a metal box with a reinforced locked door along one edge. Casey banged on it a bit with the chisel, but it didn't accomplish much as the tool just skidded off.
"Take it with us?" asked Zondra. It weighed almost fifty pounds, but Casey was moving it around with ease.
"Maybe. One more idea first, though," he said.
He took the safe out to the garage and set up a ladder. Still holding the safe, he climbed the ladder a few steps to put him a few feet in the air. Hoisting the metal safe over his head, he threw it to the concrete floor of the garage as hard as he could.
The safe split along its length. Easily a wide enough gap to lever a crowbar or two inside to pry it open further. Zondra and Casey, flashlights in hand, bent to look into the safe. That was exactly the moment a burst of white power erupted from the crack and covered their faces and upper bodies.
Both agents understood that they were moments away from certain death. Trying not to breath, and not speaking to each other for the same reason, they bolted as fast as they could for the shower they had found when they entered the house. Zondra got there first and cranked the water on.
Fully clothed, they jumped into the cold water and began to wash the white powder off their faces and hands. Then each other's hands and faces and hair. The water was warming. They began to strip out of the contaminated clothing and throw it aside onto the floor of the bathroom into a wet pile. Crawford's soap and shampoo were put to use. More clothes were shed. Their weapons joined the pile.
Eventually they felt safe enough to talk to each other a bit, still freaked out and trying to clean as much of the white powder off as they could.
"You feel ok?" he asked.
"Yeah. I think so. You?"
"Yeah."
"So, not ricin or something like it," she said.
"We're still breathing, so no," he said.
The now warm water and Zondra's near naked presence had an expected effect on Casey. Embarrassed, he turned around putting his back to her and said, "Sorry, Zee."
She barked a quick laugh, despite the tension and fear they both still felt, and said, "Shit, Case. Don't you dare apologize. In fact, if that didn't happen, I'd expect an apology."
Before he could respond, a harsh blaring sound began to echo around the house. Without drying off, they left the bathroom at a run, Zondra grabbing Crawford's bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door. Casey wrapped a bath towel around his waist as they ran.
Running out of the bathroom, they saw red lights flashing from wall sconces and continued to hear the alarm sounding. Looking from the windows in front of the house, they could just see a black SUV crashed into the gate, crumpled and wrecked. Apparently, the gate was sturdier than it had seemed. There were three other similar vehicles parked on the road behind it.
From the front gate, now on foot, were at least two dozen men armed with assault rifles coming up the drive toward the house.
"Fulcrum," said Casey.
"Yeah," agreed Zondra. "Shit."
Casey and Zondra looked at each other grimly and moved to collect some of the weapons they had found in their prior search of the house. Twelve to one odds pretty much sucked. Each of them had grabbed rifles from the umbrella stand by the door.
Casey's eye was caught something red and blinking to his right. There was a heavy side table near one of the front windows. Now that the alarm had sounded, the table, its surface otherwise looking merely like black glass, had lit up. Outlined on the table seemed to be a simple line map of the front of the house and yard. The yard on the screen was divided into sections. The section with the men crossing it was blinking red. Along one edge of the screen was a series of red squares, one of which was blinking. Casey, not entirely sure what to expect, touched the blinking red square.
There was a tremendous series of explosions and the Fulcrum men, mostly pieces of Fulcrum men actually, were launched into the air by buried mines remotely detonated by Crawford's security system. That took out about a dozen of the attackers. Zondra and Casey exchanged a silent glance of satisfaction.
The surviving attackers had hit the ground when the mines had gone off. Once the dust and body parts had settled, the remaining men got to their feet and spread out to press their attack on the house, getting closer with each step. The control panel began to blink once again, but this time the illuminated sections were fan shaped with the smaller end of the fan backing up against the outline of the house. Casey recognized the shape and knew what that meant.
He waited for the Fulcrum men to get inside the area of the fan and then triggered Crawford's next line of defense. A half dozen Claymore mines in the front of the house, the military's M18A1 anti-personnel directional mine, detonated and sprayed several thousand small steel balls at the Fulcrum men. The attackers were shredded.
None remained standing.
With the end of the attack, the alarm quieted and the red lights stopped flashing.
Casey and Zondra stood there looking at each other, barely dressed, taking deep breaths and trying to get their adrenaline back to something approaching a freefall parachute jump.
Finally, Zondra said, "Well, so much for a low profile, I guess."
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A/N2: So...sort of the shower scene you were all expecting from canon. But sort of not, too. No romance. I figure we've got enough going on without starting a romance between Casey and Zondra, or even a hook up. And I didn't want to have to explain whether Eileen and Casey are exclusive with each other. (Although, if I have to think about it, I would say that they are behaving exclusively without having ever discussed it. That sounds like it fits both their personalities.)
A/N3: As usual, I'd love to hear from you guys and gals when you can. It's what makes this thing fun. I can't imagine how lonely it must be for professional authors who spend a year writing something without getting a word of reaction or encouragement. That must be hard, I think. Although I guess getting paid would be cool.