by G M Eppers
“What can I do about that?” My mind was swirling with questions. I wanted to understand it fully and instantly. I was too impatient to wait for words. “This is big. It’s huge.” My eyes kept going over the map, trying to anticipate where the next red sticker might go. Switzerland? Austria? Poland? I had no illusions that whoever was behind it was finished. There was a path being made. Like Sherman’s march through Georgia, someone was scorching their way through Europe. But to what end? Did they mean to open up all of Europe or was there a destination? “It was a mistake to keep this out of the public eye, Miss Chiff, with all due respect. What was the thinking on that?”
Miss Chiff had taken her seat again, leaving the map open behind her. “You may be right. The Netherlands incident was never defined as a bombing. It was inconclusively ruled a gas leak. Belgium found it to be arson, and I believe they have someone in custody. The three in Germany were the hardest to contain. They were ruled terrorist acts, but the German Chancellor actually requested she handle it herself. I don’t believe their independent investigation has uncovered a guilty party as yet. I certainly haven’t heard anything to that effect. And Luxembourg. Well, it’s Luxembourg. An entire country under the world’s radar. Someone is clearly trying to open up Europe to Uber,” she said, just to make sure I understood the implication. “Someone with a LOT of money. Now, who do we know of that has recently come into seemingly unlimited funds?” She paused, and the silence was palpable. I couldn’t bear it.
“Oh. No, Ma’am. You can’t possibly –“ She was implying that WHEY was behind it. My ex-husband, Butte, was virtually the spokesperson for WHEY. He’d done protests. He’d done demonstrations. But wanton destruction and now murder? No. I couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. “It can’t be WHEY behind all this.”
“That’s what we want you to find out.”
“Right. I’ll just call him and ask.” I didn’t suggest she give me back my phone now. The sarcasm was going to get me in enough trouble.
Or so I thought. She moved on. “WHEY has put out a press release denouncing this attack, and given no indication they are aware of the others. But that’s hardly proof of innocence.” That much was true. It was like the first time the murderer is brought in for questioning and professes complete ignorance on an episode of CSI. We’d watched enough episodes to figure that out, which is precisely two. “The media circus is already beginning. This will easily ride a week’s worth of news cycles. If we can provide proof that WHEY is involved, we can discredit them and wipe out their influence virtually overnight.”
I took another drink from the water bottle. It was still icy cold. I almost felt like dumping it over my head. “You talk like we’re at war.”
“We are.”
“WHEY is just a lousy protest group!” I argued. There was a time when I wouldn’t have considered arguing with Miss Chiff. When I first joined CURDS, I found her very intimidating. She handed me my diploma, shook my hand, and sent me on a mission into Egypt where I ended up hiding in a sarcophagus with a 4000 year old mummy and a nest of scorpions. I was only a lowly member of C Team then and my coordinator was a man named Henry Fling. While I was in there with the mummy, trying to fight off scorpions, I accidentally discovered that under the wrappings were about a hundred kilos of Uber, an Egyptian cheese called Roumy. It was the perfect hiding place because Roumy is, uh, rather aromatic, and people would assume the smell was coming from the corpse. It had been hidden there by the museum curator who was trying to raise funds to retire to the Caribbean. Fling was so impressed by my fortitude while trapped in the sarcophagus on my maiden mission that he gave me a commendation. About a year later I got promoted to A Team and given the coordinator position. After a couple of missions like that, though, I wasn’t so afraid of Miss Chiff. I think most people in CURDS had similar experiences. Once you’d escaped death a few times, the prospect of getting fired for insubordination was almost appealing.
Miss Chiff paged through one of the folders on her desk. “Correction: they WERE a protest group. WHEY has been evolving for some time now and your ex is hip deep in it. He’s our way in. We need someone on the inside, at least temporarily, to determine their scope. We want you to infiltrate their organization. And your team must not know anything about it. There’s too great a risk of one of them, in particular your son, compromising your cover.”
My stomach knotted up. She was asking me to lie to my team. “I beg you, Miss Chiff. Don’t make me do this. I’ve just reached a new level of trust with them that I never thought was possible. If I do this, they’ll lose all respect for me. It would jeopardize my leadership.”
“I can’t MAKE you do this,” she said. “Putting someone undercover who doesn’t want to be there is like putting a climate change denier on the environmental committee.” I relaxed a bit. I wouldn’t do it. She could get some other patsy. “But I cannot stress enough the importance of getting accurate information on the internal workings of the organization. They’ve changed so much so quickly that it’s vital we learn more about them. Even our best researchers have been unable to so much as diagram their chain of command. And I personally find it very alarming that they’ve now gotten tentacles into every level of media. Their Facebook page has more than a million followers and #WHEYMORECHEESE has been trending on Twitter for weeks now. Then there’s their television network, targeting a very young demographic that has severe implications for future generations. There’s very little doubt in my mind that they COULD be behind this series of bombings.”
I suddenly saw the little girl on the corner again, all excited about Whey cartoons. The young are very susceptible to suggestion. They haven’t learned to distrust what they see or hear. If we could discredit WHEY, it could shut down the entire network. Not all the little girls watching WHEY TV would have mothers who were chickenshit.
“I’ll grant you,” Miss Chiff continued, “your team will probably have some initial difficulties. But when your mission is over, you’ll be able to tell them the entire plan. Once they hear the details, any rift that forms will heal.”
“I’m not so sure,” I admitted. Especially Billings. What I’d have to do to him would be worse than fighting the nest of scorpions. Part of me was already in mourning for the friendships I’d have to throw away. I hadn’t committed to it yet, but I knew then that she was going to get me there. The little girl on the corner would get me there.
Miss Chiff closed the file. I think the files were only there to give her hands something to do. She never showed me what was in them. “You are uniquely qualified for this mission, Helena. I’m sure you can see that. Anyone else we send would have a much more difficult time achieving the rapport you already have with Butte, or for that matter, anyone else in the organization. Suppose the higher echelons in WHEY are more violent than you think. Butte will shield you from that. He’ll protect you. Anyone else would be put at great personal risk.”
“You have more confidence in his feelings for me than I do,” I told her. I felt sick to my stomach, but I asked, “What exactly do you want me to do?” And I saw my credibility grow little white wings and fly away.
Miss Chiff gave me a few more details, explaining what they had decided I should tell my team and how to separate from them so I could pursue a new relationship with Butte. But I still wasn’t ready to commit to it. I made her give me a few hours to consider it, even though we both knew it was nothing more than a formality, a tiny little power play of my tiny little power. Basically, I wanted an out after I got a sense of how my team might take the separation. “Very well,” she conceded. “Call me at this number,” she slid a folded piece of paper toward me and I took it without looking at it. “The NSA monitors my usual number. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’ve decided against it. As I said, I can’t force you to do this. It’s business as usual if you choose.” She rose, saluted me, thanked me for my service, and left the room. The whole thing made me very uncomfortable. This wasn’t going to be easy. First
off, I had to allow myself to be knocked out again because she didn’t want me to learn the location of this secret office. I came to on the floor in the same room where I’d been captured. Pushing myself up, I leaned against the wall for a few minutes, waiting for the effects of the Xenon to wear off.
“Helena!” Shouted my walkie, “Where are you??” It was Nitro calling. My walkie and cell phone were back in place. My phone was saying I had 28 missed calls.
I pulled out the walkie and pushed the button. “I’m okay. I’m still on the 3rd floor. Where are you?”
“Thank God! We’ve been calling for fifteen minutes! What the heck happened up there? We’re all in the storage area. Get yourself down here. There’s news.”
I had news, too. “On my way,” I said, rising carefully. By the time I got downstairs I was steady on my feet, but thankful of the bannister all the way down. Before I opened the door into the ex-crematory lobby I took a deep breath of clean air and reminded myself of what I had to do. As soon as I opened the door, they were all right in front of me with Billings front and foremost, shouting at me in various levels of concern and outrage. “I’m sorry,” I yelled as loud as I could, waiting for them to quiet down. “I can explain, but I want to hear your news first. Badger, did you finish recording the tags? Did anyone find a ledger?” I moved through them into the open space of the storage area, feeling a bit claustrophobic.
Badger held up his phone and nodded. “It’s all here. And Sir Haughty found three volumes of records in an upstairs office.” Sir Haughty, Sylvia and Roxy were each holding a large blue binder with a year marked on the spine. They hefted them to make sure I saw. “But that’s not the news. After I finished recording, I checked on the local news reports and found a story on the Chembassy investigation. Helena, they opened the freezer.”
“And?” It was clear that everyone else already knew. They urged him on as well anyway.
“Sylvia’s theory of the assistant chef is dead in the water, because he was dead in the freezer,” Badger said. “It looked like he’d gone in for a package of meatballs. It was on the floor beside him, but he was frozen solid. In the middle of a blazing fire, he froze to death. How weird is that?”
While I absorbed this new information, I led them back outside. “Let’s get back to the hotel and start looking through this stuff,” I said. I was still uncomfortable with the lack of staff on duty at the warehouse, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. They were too excited about their findings. Perhaps the staff had been recruited into one of Miss Chiff’s extraction teams, or simply furloughed so she could carry out her plan. I really wanted to stick around and figure out this bomber situation. It was like one of those jigsaw puzzles with the same picture on both sides but with one side turned 90 degrees, or one where the picture on the box wasn’t what the puzzle actually was. I know, what kind of idiot would sign up to work on something like that? An idiot like me, that’s who.
In less than ten minutes, we were back in the Marx Brothers film, crammed into the middle hotel room. In a few minutes, they spread out to the adjoining rooms, each on their own portion of research. Badger, with his inimitable technical expertise, hooked up his phone to the flat screen TV in 627 so everyone could see the labels he had scanned. Nitro and the twins took the beds in that room with pens and hotel notepads in hand to jot down ideas. Sylvia, Sir Haughty and Roxy moved backwards into 631 and began paging through the binders, which left Billings and I in 629. They seemed to be in control and independent, but I still had niggling doubts about the idea of leaving them on their own. I sprawled on one of the beds and turned on the TV. A quick perusal of the channel guide led me quickly to my goal: WHEYTV.
There was a short, heavy-set man in white makeup, red nose, and bright yellow wig flopping around in huge shoes. A sign behind him identified him as WheyMo the clown. I kept the sound down so as not to disturb my researchers, but I could still hear most of what he said. Between ridiculous guffaws, he implored the children watching to send in their cereal boxtops to earn WheyMo money, which they could use to buy WheyMo t-shirts, yo-yos, WHEY clay and other licensed, blatant rip-offs of modern popular toys. I’d expected Billings to join Badger’s group in 627, since that’s where the twins had gone, but my choice of viewing matter roused his curiosity. He sank down on the other double bed. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“Research,” I told him. “Ssshhh.”
After a few minutes, WheyMo introduced a cartoon feature called Uncle Uber and Friends. His friends included Wendy Wedge, Swiss Cheese Sally, Charlie Cheddar, and Mario Mozzarella. Together they fought the evil forces of Princess Camilla Curd, who evidently put the ‘cess’ in princess. I was going to have to make sure Roxy saw this so she could get the CURDS legal team involved. I could hear her in my head already. “It’s tacky and tasteless, but not illegal,” she would say. No, not illegal. But beyond disturbing. My spirits fell. I had to fight this. CURDS management was obviously aware of this. For now, it would appear that their response was a closed circuit network, but they wanted more. They just had to know what they were fighting. I listened to Badger, Nitro, Agnes and Avis competing to find patterns in the scanned labels, and Sylvia, Sir Haughty and Roxy competing in the other direction to make headway in the binders. Then I looked at Billings on the other bed, watching me listening, trying to figure out what was going through my head. “You okay, Mom?”
I shook off whatever must have been showing on my face. “Yeah, fine. Just tired, I guess. I need to make a phone call. I’ll be right back.” I got up and ducked into the hallway. I waited until I was outside before I pulled out the paper Miss Chiff had given me. There wasn’t a phone number on it at all. It simply said “Good Luck!” “Damn you,” I whispered, and used my keycard to go back into the room.
I went to the closet and got my go bag.
“Mom, what are you doing?” asked Billings with concern. “Wait, you never told us your news. What the hell happened on the third floor, Mom?” He planted himself in front of the door to prevent me from leaving.
Activity stopped and all the rooms got deadly quiet. “I have to go,” I said, ducking into the restroom to retrieve a few personal items I had left there.
Everyone flooded back into 629. “What do you mean, you have to go? Go where?” I wasn’t even sure who said what. If there had been enough room, they would have been following me into the restroom like newly hatched ducklings. As it was, I was still pushing past people with every move I made.
I came back out quickly, stuffing things into the go bag. It was time to tear the Band-Aid off. If this took too long, it would become too painful to bear. I prepared to lie to my team with a not entirely fake quivering breath. “I got a call from Miss Chiff while I was looking at the interrogation rooms,” I said. “Those budget cuts they talked about went into effect last night.”
“We still get that new TV, don’t we?” Everyone glared at Badger, who looked sheepish. “Just trying to lighten the mood,” he muttered.
Billings backed up against the door, showing he wasn’t willing to let me leave. “They can’t fire you.”
Sylvia, sitting at the worktable with a binder, had turned sideways in her chair. “I’m low man on the seniority totem pole,” she said. “I’ll leave.”
She started to get up, but I took a step forward and pushed her back down. “No, Sylvia. You’re too valuable.” I looked up, finally able to say something that was the God’s honest truth. “You’re all too valuable. I’m the expendable one. I have been for a long time. Sylvia, even with one eye you see way more than most of us do with two. Do I really have to go through one by one and tell each of you what your strengths are?
“What about your strengths?” asked Billings.
“Yeah, what about my strengths? I’d say I was a glorified babysitter but none of you are babies. I’m nothing more than a sounding board. You don’t need me anymore. Any one of you could do what I do.”
“No,” Billings said. He couldn’t say more.
/> “Yes,” I replied. “Coordinator is just a word for unnecessary administrative expense.”
Sir Haughty cleared his throat. “We won’t let them fire you. We’ll boycott.”
“You’d boycott a murder investigation? That would do wonders for our public image. Besides, they aren’t firing me. I fired myself.” In response to the round of questioning looks, I added, “Miss Chiff said we had to lose someone and let me choose. I chose me and that’s that.” I faced Billings. “You’ve been my shadow for three years, Billings. I could designate you as my successor, but I don’t think you even need to pick someone.” I turned again and looked at all of them. “You guys work together better than any group I’ve ever known. You can do this. Tell me. What’s the next step?”
They all looked back at me blankly. Granted, I caught them off guard with the question. The investigation had been banished from their minds by my resignation and I had to get them back on it before I could leave. “Come on, people. You can do this. What’s next?” My go bag, held loosely in one hand, swung every time I turned.
The twins had tears flowing down their identical faces. “We don’t know.”
Nitro, ever the sensible head, said, “Decipher the log books. Find an Uber confiscation that might justify this kind of reaction.”
“That’s one theory. You have new information now. What do you do with it?”
Sylvia, still sitting sidesaddle, said, “The new information disproves my theory that the assistant chef set the fire. That’s as far as it goes.”
“Really?” I reminded myself that they didn’t know about the series of bombings Miss Chiff had revealed to me. There’s no reason they would make the connection that I had made when they told me about what was found in the freezer. But this was already taking too long. Or it was possible they did know the answer to my question, but were not willing to speak it. No one wanted to prove how expendable I actually was. I couldn’t afford the luxury of making suggestions. I had to get out of here before I cracked. My heart was pounding, my throat felt as thick as a 4 X 4 piece of lumber, and I would gladly have pulled out my nose hairs one by one to be allowed to stay. But the little girl on the corner kept whispering in my ear, “We watch WHEY TV every day. They have WHEYToons!”