by Matt Lincoln
Diane sighed again and shook her head.
“I know my agents well enough by now to know what makes them tick,” she explained with a wave of her hand. “And with Marston, it’s all this old pirate stuff. He’s good at compartmentalizing, but I don’t think even he could’ve focused on the task at hand when he got so close to taking this trip he’s been talking about so long just to have me pull it out from under him. He needs this right now, and we need him, so he gets to go. Besides, you all never put in for time off. Even if it’s not technically a vacation, I couldn’t refuse him. And maybe he’ll get a little rest while he’s at it.”
“Do you know Marston?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
“Yeah, yeah, I can dream,” she said, rolling her eyes again and turning to leave.
But just as she was about to re-enter her office, cold coffee in hand, there was a knock on the front door.
We both just stayed still for a moment, staring at each other in surprise. It wasn’t exactly often that we got visitors. Usually, we were the ones doing the visiting.
Diane finally shook her head to clear it and set her coffee down on the corner of my desk before crossing over to open the door.
I craned my neck to see past her, but there was no one there.
“What’s that about?” I asked, scratching the back of my head.
“Whoever it was left a box,” Diane said, bending down to pick something up.
I got up and crossed over to her until we were both standing in the doorway, the door swiveled open to our side.
She handed it to me to examine for myself, and I turned the box over in my hands.
It wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small either. Brown and taped together with ordinary packing tape. There was no writing on it to speak of.
“Should we open it?” I asked.
Diane gave the box a wary look.
“I don’t know…” she said. “It’s not very heavy. I doubt it could be a bomb or anything like that.”
I held the box up to my ear and shook it. She was right. I might as well be holding a pillow. Something small rustled inside, like someone thumbing through the pages of a book.
My curiosity was piqued, and I held the box against my stomach and ripped it open before Diane had a chance to protest.
There was just a single piece of paper sitting inside, and it wasn’t even a full piece of paper, either. My first thought was that whoever left it could’ve used a much smaller box. Or just an envelope.
I reached inside and pulled out the piece of paper, letting the box fall to the floor between Diane and me.
“What does it say?” she asked eagerly, peering over my shoulder. Then, in a darker tone, “There’s not any weird powder or sticky stuff on there, is there?”
“No,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “No poison today.”
Then I peered down at the handwritten note. There was just one sentence, and a two-word sentence to boot, written in a sloppy scrawl that I didn’t recognize, in black ink.
“It says ‘watch out,’” I said, narrowing my eyes at the paper. “That’s it, that’s all it says.”
I looked over at Diane, and she blinked back at me.
“Let me see that,” she said finally, snatching the note from me and pressing it right up to her face as if that would help her to read it better. “You can’t be serious.”
“I know, right, what is this, some dumb cop show?” I laughed, shaking my head. “I’m surprised they didn’t cut all the letters out of old magazines and paste them on there.”
I joked, but a sense of foreboding was building in my stomach. This was unusual, that was for sure.
I stepped past Diane and peered out into the hallway, but all I saw was the elevator and the door leading to the staircase. Nothing else was there.
“I don’t recognize this handwriting,” Diane said, and I looked back to see her still examining the note closely. “We have samples of the Hollands’ handwriting, right? Both of them? And this isn’t it.”
I crossed back over to her and looked at the note again, gently touching her wrist so she would lower it down to where we both could see.
“No, that’s not either of their handwriting,” I said after a moment, shaking my head. “I’ve been looking at that file all day, so I would recognize it for sure. They wrote lots of stuff, notes on their real estate deals and stuff like that.”
Both of us had our backs to the door by then, and I heard a dull banging sound ring out from behind me. I whirled around to find a shadowy figure standing in the dark hallway leading to the elevator from our office door.
The sound must’ve been the door to the stairwell closing behind him, and I cursed myself for not looking in there sooner.
“Who are…?” I started to ask, instinctively pulling out my gun at my side, though I didn’t raise it. Then I saw the outline of a gun pointing out in front of the man’s figure.
I couldn’t see him very well. The only light was coming from the lamp on my desk and the dull beams above the elevator. He was wearing all black and had a ski mask over his face. I could tell that he was a man, though, around medium height with a good build, broad shoulders but not quite stocky.
“Hold up!” Diane screamed, and I glanced over without moving my head that she had her own weapon drawn and trained on the dark figure. “Don’t make a single move!”
The man appeared frozen, unsure of what to do next. He kept his gun trained on me, as I still had mine at my side, and I didn’t dare raise it for fear that he would shoot me. But at the same time, he didn’t dare shoot me for fear that Diane would shoot him. In short, we were at a standstill.
“You’d better not move,” Diane said quietly, though her tone emanated authority. “We already have people on the way. This is a federal agency office, and if you so much as lay a finger on a federal agent, you’ll get the book thrown at you, or worse.”
The ski-masked head swiveled between Diane and me subtly, as if the man was trying to make a decision.
“Who hired you?” I asked. “You left this box?”
I nodded down at the empty box that was still at my feet. But the man didn’t answer. He just continued to stand there, pointing his gun at me.
I squinted at him. I couldn’t see his hands shaking, so I doubted he was just some scared dumb kid. And he hadn’t exactly played this well, either.
He hadn’t expected both of us to be there, I realized. He’d expected it to just be Diane, and then he would shoot her when she went for the box, leaving the warning message behind for the rest of us to find in the morning. But I had stayed late, and now the three of us were in a quagmire where no one could shoot, but no one could lower their weapons, either.
“Look, man, if this isn’t going according to plan, it’s better to get out now before anyone gets hurt,” I warned him. “I don’t know who hired you or why you’re here, but it can’t be worth dying over, can it?”
The man looked back at the door as if he wanted to make a run for it.
“Oh, you’re not going anywhere, my friend,” Diane assured him. “We have a whole host of questions for you.”
Realizing once more that he was stuck, the man froze in place again and stopped looking around the area. This whole time, not once did he move the barrel of his gun from being trained right at my chest.
I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck and hear my heart pounding in my ears. No matter how many missions I’d been on over the years, no matter how many sticky situations I managed to get myself into, it was never fun being shot at. Especially in slow motion like this, when you didn’t know what was going to happen if anything.
I saw his hand flinch as if he was going to pull the trigger, and I instinctively ducked down behind the box, not that it would help me much, flimsy as it was.
A shot did ring out, and I covered my ears with my free arm, ducking my face into the crook of my elbow to try to shield myself from a painful noise.
Another shot rang, then a th
ird, and I stayed put, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire in such a small space. Then I heard a ding, maybe, but I couldn’t be sure with all the ringing in my ears.
“What happened?” I gasped as I peered over the box to see Diane, who was looming angrily near the elevator.
“He slipped by me,” she said angrily. “He shot in the other direction to divert my attention, and now he’s on his way down.”
“Well, come on,” I said, waving her forward with me.
Together, we ran downstairs. But there was no one out front. There was no one in the basement lab, either, or on any of the other floors.
“I should call the police,” Diane murmured when we’d surveyed the place, pulling out her phone.
“But who was that?” I asked, dropping my hands in defeat. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know,” Diane said, pursing her lips. “But we’re going to find out. This is definitely our case now.”
10
Ethan
Tessa and I rented a car at the airport and drove to Walldale, Virginia, a small city sticking out along the coast, outside Newport News, where the museum used to be. The museum moved to be in a more quiet area closer to the ocean landmarks they studied there.
It was the perfect location for a maritime museum, I thought, as we drove into town along a bridge and saw the ocean pressing along out of Tessa’s window.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she gushed, following my gaze, and she smiled, her eyes gleaming at me. “Do you think we could stop by the museum tonight? Just to take a peak.”
“I don’t know…” I said carefully, as this had not been the plan. If I were honest, the museum manager’s behavior had managed to get to me, and I didn’t want to walk Tessa into anything dangerous, especially at night.
Oh, come on, it’ll be fine,” she pressed, rolling her eyes at my hesitance as I took my exit onto one of the main roads of the city. “And it’ll be good to scope out the place before we go back in the morning.”
Well, I couldn’t exactly argue with that now, could I?
“Alright, then, we’ll see what we can find,” I relented, turning on my turn signal and moving into the right lane to head down to the shore where I knew the museum was located. “I doubt they’re still open, though. It’s getting up there.”
I nodded to the rental car’s clock, which said it was getting close to eight in the evening.
“But someone might still be there,” Tessa pointed out excitedly. “And it might be even better to catch them at night when the manager might be gone and less able to look over their shoulders while we talk.”
Well, I couldn’t exactly argue with that, either. It was good reasoning.
“Maybe you should be the MBLIS agent,” I chuckled, and she laughed and shook her head.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But my job does call for a fair amount of investigating itself, albeit of a different kind.”
I thought that we did have a fair amount in common and realized that I was glad that she was there, even if I did have an uneasy feeling about this whole thing.
The museum didn’t have a parking lot of its own as it was in a downtown area, so we had to park in a tourist lot down the street from there.
We could see the ocean from the area, and when I climbed out of our rental car, I could smell the crisp scent of saltwater in the air. I grinned despite myself. This was where I was most at home: right by the water.
Tessa was grinning right back at me when she climbed out of the car.
“Man is it good to be here,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and staring out at the whole area.
The downtown area was on a downward slope toward the ocean, and we could see a smattering of people hanging out around the water on the small beachfront area at the end of the slope.
It was a nice, sleepy little area. The museum was by far the largest attraction on the street, stretching along at the length of several normal shops, and we could see it from the parking lot for this reason. There were a few other places, however, including a coffee shop, what looked like a closed taco stand in front of the museum, a pizza place, and a bookshop that sported numerous nautical titles in the front window. Almost everything was closed already.
“See?” Tessa asked me, pointing to the selection on display at the bookshop. “I told you you should write a book. You might even get it on display in places like this.”
“I don’t know about that,” I chuckled, shaking my head and rejecting the idea once again. I could only imagine Diane’s horror if she found out I was spilling MBLIS’s secrets to the masses, even if I did take care to edit out any classified information. Even so, I had to laugh internally at the thought. Diane’s reaction might make the whole thing worth it in a twisted way. I knew that Holm and the other agents would probably pay to see her have a go at me in that scenario.
“Come on,” Tessa said, motioning for me to follow her. “Let’s check the place out.”
I followed her down the sloping street and toward the museum, which was in the middle left-hand side of the downtown area.
The sun was setting over the ocean down in front of us, and it was a sight to behold. The sky was various shades of red, purple, and black, overlooking the calm water as waves came in gently along the shore. The sounds of children laughing echoed up from the area.
The museum itself was a long, two-story building sitting between the pizzeria and a bait and tackle place at the very end of the shopping area. There were numerous fliers in the windows advertising all kinds of events at the museum: readings, discussion groups, new exhibits, and even a community theater production of the maritime musical South Pacific.
I chuckled as I read the fliers.
“Seems like a normal place to me,” I remarked. “Very boring.”
“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” Tessa repeated.
“I don’t know…” I said cautiously, glancing at the predicted Closed sign hanging on the door. “Sometimes, it’s the most unassuming places that are fronts for the strangest stuff.”
“Noted,” Tessa laughed, placing her hand above her eyes and pressing her forehead to the glass between some fliers to try to peer inside. I quickly followed her to do the same a couple of feet to her left.
It was dark inside, just as it was outside, and I could barely see anything except the outline of a front desk close to the door. It didn’t look to me like there was much else in the immediate area, just an enclosed area for visitors to purchase their tickets.
Tessa moved back from the window and strolled past me to try the door, to no avail. I gave her a puzzled look, and she shrugged.
“I figured it was worth a shot,” she reasoned. “When I was in college, I worked in this lazy little shop, and some nights the manager forgot to lock it. You know how it is sometimes in small towns.”
“I guess so,” I laughed. “Though this isn’t exactly small. Technically, I think it’s a small city.”
“Same difference,” she chuckled with a second shrug. “Less than two-hundred-thousand people live here? That’s a small town to me.”
“I guess everything is small compared to New York City,” I mused.
“Exactly my point,” Tessa quipped, grinning at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back.
Together, we walked up and down the length of the museum, peering inside and trying to make out anything we could see through the darkness.
In addition to the main front desk area, we looked at a cafeteria area with large menus hanging on the wall and a small built-in food court, an exhibit that looked to be about the city’s history with the shipping industry, an atrium area with benches around an indoor tree, and an area full of art prints related to the ocean and the ships that have sailed it throughout history.
We were able to make out vague outlines of these things, but very few specifics. After seeing the outlines, I was honestly excited to see inside out of more than just concern for Grendel’s journal.
The museum looked like a fun place to visit, independent of all that.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s inside,” Tessa remarked when we had both scoped out everything that was on the outward-facing ground floor of this side of the museum. “I don’t see any lights or anything.”
I looked both ways on the quiet little street and took several steps out away from the sidewalk. Then, I peered up at the second floor of the building, hoping to get a hint of any lights on there.
But there was nothing to be seen. Just dark windows like the ones on the ground floor, albeit a little smaller since there was no one to advertise to who would be walking past the second-floor windows to catch fliers.
“No, I don’t see anything, either,” I sighed, shaking my head.
“Come on,” Tessa said, beckoning for me to follow her again as she made her way back up the slope and toward the parking lot. “I think if we walk around, we’ll be able to look at it from the other side. Maybe we’ll come across something there.”
“I guess it couldn’t hurt to check,” I agreed, though I regretted saying the words the moment they came out of my mouth. If there was anything I had learned over my years with the Navy SEALS and with MBLIS, it was that it could always hurt.
I rushed to catch up with her since she was already several paces in front of me. Together, we made our way past the parking lot and around to the next block of downtown area stores one street over.
Here there was a donut shop, a gift shop, what looked to be a pottery store, and an art gallery. And in addition, on the right-hand side, just as Tessa had predicted, the other side of the nautical museum.
“Told ya,” she said, flashing me a grin and jogging down the sidewalk to get to the museum again.
I rushed to catch up with her for the second time—she was surprisingly fast, I had learned over my time of knowing her—until we were both standing in front of the museum once again.
There were no wall-to-wall windows here, however, just a concrete door that was no doubt an employee entrance. This was much to Tessa’s distaste, and she scowled.