Chapter 4
August 19th, 2012
0935 hours
“Dammit! How could this happen!?”
Major Kent Turnbull was a balding man in his fifties. He furiously chewed on a Cuban cigar while he prowled back and forth through his Pentagon office. Dammit! This wasn’t supposed to happen! They weren’t supposed to hear about Project Eagle! He stared into the interview room where there was a person, tied to a chair with a black bag over their head. He shook his head.
“Sir!” A wily young lieutenant entered the room, somewhat out of breath. “We managed to keep the feed from broadcasting.”
“You better have; otherwise, you’d be out of a job.”
The lieutenant swallowed hard and mumbled out a “Yessir”. Major Turnbull scared the crap out of him. He knew the phrase “out of a job” in this business was synonymous with “erased from the face of the earth”.
Turnbull kept a close eye on the interview room. There has to be a leak, but from whom? We’ve sealed off the department. Everyone is searched upon leaving; they are subjected to random polygraph tests. What went wrong? Who went wrong? He was done waiting. He grabbed the door to the interview room and slammed it open, leaving a crack in the concrete wall. Despite his age, he was in no way out of shape. A vigorous workout regimen kept him looking as menacing as ever. That’s why he’d been able to claw his way up from private to major in less than three years. That, and a healthy dose of charisma, blackmail, and when it was necessary, breaking a few necks.
The prisoner’s breathing was heavy through the bag. They were obviously nervous. Turnbull chuckled to himself. They very well should be. Turnbull furiously kicked the front of the chair, knocking it onto the hard concrete with a resounding thud. The prisoner started to whimper. Turnbull ripped off the black bag and stared down into the face of his captive.
“Chantal Williams, you’ve caused me a great deal of grief.”
Chantal was breathing hard, absolutely scared out of her mind. She didn’t know what to do.
“Please, just let me go!”
Turnbull laughed out loud.
“What makes you think I’d do that? You damn near blew my operation’s cover. I doubt you’ll be leaving here any time soon. If ever.”
Tears formed in Chantal’s eyes. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for. She wanted to be a news anchor for the chance to get that one breaking news story. To be that one public figure that everyone looked to for advice. She closed her eyes and looked away.
“You can pretend that this is a nightmare all you want, but I’ll be right here, every second, every day, for the rest of your miserable life.”
Chantal couldn’t hold back any more. The tears started streaming down her face. There was nothing she could do but sob. Sob, and hope that this nightmare would end soon.
Chapter 5
August 19th, 2012
1350 hours
“The Fire Department finally got those flames extinguished, you can take a look around now, but I doubt you’ll like what you see.”
The police captain nodded to the fire marshal and walked towards the smoldering remains of the news studio. As he got close, a horrible stench assaulted his nostrils. The smell of charred human flesh. About a dozen bodies lay around the studio, all of them charred, almost beyond recognition as human forms. Only two had been identified. Ray Williams, a producer, had been crushed by a falling stage light, but the hefty metal object had protected his body from most of the fire, and Henry Lichen, a cameraman, who was burnt as badly as the other bodies, but a dental implant had allowed authorities to identify him.
Despite the carnage around him, Jeffery LaCrosse felt at home when he was investigating deaths. As sick and twisted as that sounds, it filled in the one thing he couldn’t piece together. The murders of his parents and brother. That gap had driven him to become a police officer. He cherished his badge as if it were a child. He kept it with him even when he was off duty. However, his drive had gotten him in trouble more than once before. He thought back to that night. The man that had claimed to have killed his parents. He was on his knees, hands behind his head. And he’d shot him. Shot him while he’d kneeled on the ground, expecting to be arrested, not shot. He did recover, but that nearly got him retired. He ended up on crap-detail for months. The kicker was the guy wasn’t even the killer. He was an escaped mental patient who had been obsessed with the guy since he heard about the murders.
He walked across the ashes, surveying the destruction, when he heard the sound of metal clinking across something hard. He looked down and saw a slightly warped shell casing rolling across a blackened section of concrete, the grinding sound of it against the concrete sending shivers up his spine. He tensed as it bumped into a body. A body with a bullet hole in its skull.
He shouted out to the captain “Cordon this off as a crime scene. We’ve got a victim.”
“We’ve got over a dozen victims, this doesn’t mean it’s a crime scene. It was probably an electrical fire or something.”
“Well last I checked, fire doesn’t cause lead poisoning. We’ve got rifle shells Cap.”
The captain looked in disbelief for a second, and then he barked orders at some crime scene techs to cordon off the area.
“You better be right about this, or I will have your ass behind bars faster than you care to blink.”
“I understand Sir.”
Chapter 6
August 19th, 2012
2227 hours
Stanford was sitting at his house, watching TV. Cryptographic Wonders of Human History was on. For the tenth time this week. Yet, he still watched it. The spirit of human ingenuity never ceased to amaze him, but he was amazed that this was the only documentary out on cryptography. He took another sip of his beer. Suddenly, his phone lit up on his desk. Ellie.
“Hello?"
“Hey, Stanford. How are you?”
Ellie’s angelic voice came floating over the line. Stanford’s heart rate picked up as he breathed out a reply.
“Hey Ellie. I’m… Fine.”
“Look, I know I was short with you back at work the other day, but I haven’t even had a guy try and hit on me for… Well, a long time. What do you say we hit the bar sometime. Just talk?”
Stanford couldn’t believe his ears. He felt like he was back in high school again, his crush asking him out to the sophomore dance. Of course, this was all before he met Ellie.
“Hello? Stanford?”
Stanford snapped back to reality.
“I’d love to Ellie!”
Stanford cleared his throat and composed himself.
“I mean, I would love to Ellie. Tomorrow at seven?”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you then!”
Stanford hung up the phone, feeling positively ecstatic inside. Ellie Joiner, the woman he’d been chasing after since he saw her for that first time at his high school, was finally giving him a chance.
As he walked back towards his bedroom, he noticed a reflection in a mirror out of the corner of his eye. A masked man holding a cloth was slowly moving up behind him. Stanford paused for a fraction of a second. Enough to put the man on edge. He watched him tense up as he stopped, but then he kept walking. Taking a few slow, even breaths to calm himself. When he saw the man was close enough to grab him, he took a breath in and held it. Suddenly, the damp cloth was pressed over his face. Despite his efforts to keep the man from subduing him, the cloth’s vapors, which Stanford could only guess were from chloroform, hit him hard, making him nearly instantaneously fall unconscious.
Stanford struggled against the darkness induced by the chloroform. He had to fight. He had to stay alive for Ellie.
Oh God. Ellie.
Stanford lashed out with a ferocity he didn’t know he had. He struck his intruder in the chest, knocking him backwards into a wall. He ran up and kicked him again. Hard. Suddenly, a searing pain arced across his neck. He started convulsing. One of his spasms landed him on his back, staring up at yet another masked man, this man was instead carrying a Taser. He stared lifelessly up at the ceiling as the man delivered another white hot arc to his neck, only easing up as he faded into oblivion.