by J. M. Lanham
Paul groaned as Morgan and the other agents forced him to his feet, face-to-face with Sturgis. He thought about spitting in his face, but that would be too cliché (and a bit trashy, if not satisfying). Instead, “You think we didn’t see this coming, Georgy? That we could ever trust you? By five o’ clock you’ll be the top-trending headline in the nation.”
“Bullshit,” Sturgis scoffed and looked over to Fenton, hands behind his back, head hanging low. “You’re the hacker, right? The guy who stole our files?” He pointed to Agent Morgan, who was now in possession of the laptop bag. “And you brought your tool kit along? Give me a break, you two. If you’d seen this coming,” he said to Paul, “you never would’ve brought him along in the first place.”
“You willing to bet your freedom on it?”
“I’m willing to bet you’re not as clever as you’d like to think you are.” He waved them away. “Now get them out of my sight.”
Paul pled his case as the agents dragged him and Fenton toward to door. “You think contacting Sarah Fletcher was an accident? She’s been working with Claire for years. And if I don’t update them with a status report every ten minutes, they’re taking copies of Fenton’s files and running them on the five o’clock news.”
“Wait,” Sturgis said, chasing toward the agents and Paul. “Wait, I said STOP!” They obliged, two agents holding each side of the fugitive as Sturgis questioned him. “What do you mean, status report?”
Paul held his leg out and used his eyes to point to the rectangle on his thigh. Sturgis barked at the agents, “You nimrods didn’t think to search him?”
One of the agents pulled the phone from his pocket and forced Paul to unlock it. The agent looked at the screen, then handed it off to Sturgis. One look and he knew his plan wasn’t foolproof:
STATUS? 1:17 A.M.
STATUS, PAUL? 1:21 A.M.
MOVING TO PLAN B. 1:24 A.M.
“Son of a bitch!” Sturgis said. He grabbed Paul by the shirt collar and demanded, “What’s plan B? Plan B, Paul. Answer me!”
Paul smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Chapter 19:
Plan B
It was a quarter to two in the morning when the blacked-out suburban transporting Paul and Fenton to an undisclosed location pulled off the interstate and onto an Atlanta side street leading deeper into the city. The SUV was at full capacity: five FBI agents, two perps. The leader of the group, Agent Morgan, rode shotgun while Paul sat in the middle row, wedged in between two agents. In the back, a solitary agent sat next to Fenton, the reluctant chaperone’s patience wearing thinner every time the teenager asked if they were there yet (wherever “there” happened to be) only to be met with silence.
They turned south on Piedmont when Fenton repeated the question. “Where are we going?”
The agents remained silent.
Again, “Ahem … Hey, meatheads. Can’t you at least tell us where we’re going?”
Finally, Morgan leaned around the front passenger seat. “Atlanta field office. Downtown.”
“They open this late?”
“We never close, Mr. Reed. Especially for questioning.”
“So you’re taking us downtown for questioning?” He laughed. “Damn, you guys are walking, talking clichés aren’t you?”
“Might wanna shut your mouth, kid,” the agent to his right said, “before one of us shuts it for you.”
It was clear the adolescent in the back couldn’t keep quiet in any situation, but Paul’s proclivity to pop off was outweighed by his sense that the agents weren’t joking. He looked through the front windshield as they passed under a brightly lit green sign pointing the way toward downtown. Knots filled his stomach and he swallowed hard as he tried to force down a series of lumps in his throat. Can’t be far now. Dammit all to hell. It was the middle of the night; they were surrounded by five formidable FBI agents; their hands were zip tied behind their backs; and to top it all off, they didn’t have a single course of action they could act on.
They just had to sit and wait.
That was Plan B. It was Claire’s backup plan—the first plan they’d hatched without a Freeman at the helm. Paul took a deep breath, sank back in his seat, and hoped for the best as he tried to accept that his role in the play was over. Nothing he could do now. From this point on, it would all be up to Claire and Sarah.
Paul closed his eyes for a moment, but was interrupted a few seconds in by loud bells outside as the suburban slowed to a stop. He glanced up to see the railroad crossing ahead, the red lights flashing and the crossing bells dinging as the red-and-white-striped crossbucks came down. He looked for the train, first left, then right. The bright headlight at the front of the engine flooded the horizon, but as his eyes adjusted he could tell the oncoming train was a long one, the cars seeming to stream endlessly behind the main locomotive.
“Figures,” the driver huffed. “We’ll be sitting here for ages.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and immediately started scrolling. The agents in the back did the same.
Paul watched the train closing in fast, moving at a speed that was likely pushing the limits of an engine pulling several thousand tons of cargo. In the distance, the whistle blew.
Suddenly, the car jolted as it lurched forward. Startled, Morgan said, “What the hell, Peters?”
“Sorry,” he said as he put his phone away. “Foot must’ve slipped off the brake a bit.”
“Real funny, Peters,” said the agent to Paul’s left.
“I’m serious!”
“Well, don’t let it happen again, asshole.”
“All right, all right.” The SUV had only rolled a foot or two, but the brake-tap was enough to wake everyone out of their cell-phone-induced trance. The agents in the back looked around to confirm they were in fact sitting still, then all breathed a premature sigh of relief before the car lurched forward again. The entire sedan erupted in a chorus of what-the-fucks.
“Oh for God’s sake, Peters!”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me right now.”
“Someone just earned themselves an ass-whoopin’ the moment we get back to the station.”
“It’s not me, I—I swear!”
“You’re the one driving, ain’t ya?”
The driver looked down at the floorboard and winced. Sure enough, it was his two feet he was staring at. Only, one of them seemed to be a little light on the brakes. Strange part was that the more he focused on it, the harder it was to keep his foot still …
Paul leaned in to study the driver. He’d seen that look before. It was a look of conflict, of pure mental anguish, marked by beads of sweat forming across his face and streaming down past distant eyes locked into a thousand-yard stare. It was the same stare Donny Ford had in Savannah the day he almost took a headfirst dive off the Talmadge Bridge. He turned back to Fenton for confirmation, who gave an affirming nod.
The plan. The dream. Jesus, this must be it.
The driver’s foot came off the brake and the car lurched forward again, this time rolling right into the crossbuck and testing its limits. This was no joke, and Paul wasn’t the only one who knew it. Morgan reached for the driver’s dangling key, but was quickly slapped away. Immediately a fight broke out between the two agents up front, prompting the agents in the back to bail out of their respective sides, running south and putting good distance between themselves and the impending railway collision while leaving both doors hanging wide open.
Paul seized the moment and Fenton followed, both stumbling out of the car and moving to the north side of the tracks opposite the agents just as the sedan slowly forced its way through the crossbuck, buckling before busting the painted wooden planks, sending splinters of red and white across the hood and the windshield and the road. The ground was shaking now as shouts from the front seat were drowned out by the roar of the locomotive as brakes squealed and metal hissed, while the ominous blast of the warning whistle continued to fall on the deaf ears of the man in the driver’s seat.<
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Finally, Morgan bailed, leaving the delusional driver to straddle the tracks alone. With a little more time, Paul would have tried to save him regardless of allegiances. But there was no time. He looked back to the three agents now standing a good forty yards away on the south side of the tracks. To the east, an unrelenting train was closing in.
Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack.
To the north lay a commercial intersection the next street up. Gas stations. Restaurants. A strip mall. A bus stop. Dozens of places for Paul and Fenton to get lost in.
This way, Paul.
The voice was crystal clear, like a direct line to his mind, temporarily canceling out all the noise caused by the chaos around him. Paul even glanced back to make sure Fenton wasn’t right behind him and whispering in his ear.
“You hear that?” Paul yelled.
“What?” Fenton asked as if to say, “No shit, I hear that. There’s a train. Right. Fucking. There.”
CLACKETY-CLACK. CLACKETY-CLACK.
Again, You are out of time, Paul. This way. Now.
He wouldn’t hesitate twice. His hands might have been secured behind his back, but he still had two free legs to hightail it the hell out of there with. Plus, from the looks of the dilapidated area, there’d be plenty of busted bottles for him to cut himself free with …
“Fuck!” Fenton yelled. “The laptop!” He instinctively turned back toward the SUV when Paul yelled, “Forget it, man. There’s no time!”
CLACKETY-CLACK. CLACKETY-CLACK.
The voice again. Just run, Paul. Run!
And run they did (even if Fenton did so reluctantly), away from the screaming agents and screeching metal that played soprano to the baritone bawl of an unstoppable metal giant blasting into a four-door sedan made of the lightest, cheapest automotive parts money could buy. Glass shattered and turned to dust as fine particles sparkled in a cloud surrounding an explosion of aluminum and steel, the sedan now wrapped around the front of the train like its own mangled hood ornament as the locomotive shot down the tracks, brakes doing virtually nothing to slow it down; not on such short notice.
They got to a safe distance and stopped, turned, and squinted their eyes, keen to catch a glimpse of the agents between the spaces of the fast-rolling train cars. Sure enough, they could see the men in strobing glances as they blocked a line of headlights now forming on the other side of the tracks, their shadows pacing anxiously back and forth, unable to do a damn thing to get their prisoners back.
For the moment, the escapees seemed to be in the clear. They turned to start the long jog away from the scene of the crash. It’d be another mile or two before the train stopped, Paul figured. And by that time, he and Fenton would be long gone.
Chapter 20:
Dream a Little Dream
It was around 10 a.m. on Friday morning when Margaret Lancaster fell back into her leather chair at Langley, utterly exhausted from the early-morning showdown at Peirce Mill on the outskirts of town. For the last week, Central Intelligence had been on high alert, starting with the disaster at the Skyline facility. Now, a close agency confidant was down, another couldn’t be trusted, and a handful of loose ends were still in the field, any of whom could pose a direct threat to her appointment as the first female director of the CIA—and her freedom.
The outliers weren’t the only threats to Lancaster’s appointment, either. Since its inception, the CIA had traditionally been a boys’ club. Now, a woman was at the helm, and there were more than a few members of the old guard eager to see her fail, eager for that first slipup they could use against her as a means to have her removed from office—pending presidential authorization, of course.
Never oblivious to the naysayers filling the halls at Langley, their hushed conversations and doubtful tones had become her catalyst for success, no matter how difficult it was to keep her head up most days. The historical appointment was too important to allow emotions to get in the way. It was a monumental milestone she couldn’t afford to jeopardize, no matter the cost.
She rubbed her eyes before buzzing in Stephen Cline, who promptly took a seat in front of her, the empty chair to his left now the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. He nodded toward the chair and asked, “We gonna talk about this?”
“We’ll get to Kovic in due time. Right now I want to talk about you. Did you get cleared with medical?”
“Just came from there.”
“Everything check out okay?”
“Of course. Like I said, no whacks over the head or cruel lashings or anything like that. Kovic was a perfect gentleman during the extent of my abduction. A total asshole, but a gentleman of an asshole if there ever was one.”
“Good. Glad to hear you’re all clear for work. Because to tell you the truth, Cline, we’re running short on options here, and we need all the help we can get.” She slid a paper across the desk. “Here. Read this.”
One glance and Cline exhaled a “Fuckin’ A” under his breath. He looked up at Lancaster. “They beat us to it … Your guy with the FBI confirmed this?”
She nodded. “Apparently while we were dealing with our own internal conflicts, George Sturgis contacted the Feds late last night with a tip on the outliers’ whereabouts. And guess where Paul Freeman and Fenton Reed showed up?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I were. They were with Sturgis at his home in North Atlanta when they were apprehended. As for Ms. Connor, she’s still missing in action. Feds showed up and raided Sarah Fletcher’s house last night, too, but no one was home.”
“Sarah Fletcher?”
“One of Connor’s friends. A coworker of hers from her days working the Atlanta beat. And a suspected accomplice in all of this.”
“Need me to start a file?”
“No need. Way ahead of you. I’ve already got a team tracking her known whereabouts and next of kin. But lately, seems we’ve been one step behind at every turn.”
“This is not good,” Cline lamented.
“You’re telling me. I would’ve done anything to keep the FBI out of this. Now we’ve got that to deal with.”
“How’d Sturgis get the feds to his house so fast in the first place?”
“The man’s been around, Stephen. Knows how to dance the DC dance. And he’s got more connections than a telephone switchboard. He probably contacted one of his old golfing buddies and cashed in a favor under the guise of the Donny Ford case. Something of that nature.”
“Makes sense. Ford’s been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for the last six months.” Cline thought on it, then said, “How long you think that narrative will hold up?”
“Not sure,” Lancaster said. “A day. Maybe two. Depends on what Freeman and Reed give them.”
“With any luck, one of them’ll mention a CIA conspiracy first thing. If they go full tinfoil-hat theory the feds will immediately know they’ve got a couple of kooks on their hands. Should buy us some time.”
“Would be a start, but it still doesn’t get us out of the woods yet. This thing has metastasized into a cancer I wanted removed months ago. That means all hands on deck, 24-7, until we see this thing through. Understood?”
“Of course, director,” Cline said, putting a hand up. “But, if I may. When you say ‘see this thing through,’ I’m not exactly clear in regards to where we go from here.”
“And what exactly lacks clarity, Stephen?”
“We’ve got three and a half Freemans in CIA custody, none of whom can be released back into the wild, so to speak. Not to mention an Atlanta detective who’s been uncooperative from the start.”
“They’re in our custody, Stephen. They’re not an immediate risk, and as it stands they’re not going anywhere, so let me worry about the long-term with the outliers in detainment, okay?”
“With all due respect, director, that leads me to my next point. There are currently two outliers who aren’t in custody, along with this Sarah Fletcher person. And at this point there’s no telling who they’ve spoken
to thus far.”
Cline crossed his leg in that comfortable, here’s-my-next-sales-pitch fashion Lancaster had learned to spot the moment they had their first meeting. “Okay, Stephen. I’ll bite. Fill me in on your thinking here.”
“Well, while I’d like to think that our little operation with Alex Freeman left the majority of the outlier threat to decompose in the north Georgia woods somewhere, the reemergence of Paul Freeman means we now know the mission wasn’t a complete success. Hell, for all we know it didn’t work at all. We really can’t assume anything at this point, especially with radio silence from Mercer and Sanders.”
“I hope it’s obvious I wouldn’t assume anything, Stephen.”
“Of course. But not knowing puts us in another undesirable predicament; one where we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
“I’m still waiting for the point to all of this.”
“Project THEIA.”
The words had barely left his mouth when Lancaster tossed her pen across the desk. “Jesus, Stephen. This again?”
“Hear me out, director. I’m not calling for a total reboot of the program. No grand schemes of government espionage or elaborate plans to hijack the minds of high-ranking government officials. Just one last transmission. That’s it.”
“Why one last transmission? What’s the primary objective?”
“That’s just it, director. I wouldn’t call it our primary objective. Maybe secondary. But that’s not to say it’s not just as important. Call it our insurance plan should any one of the remaining outliers turn up on the evening news before we have a chance to get a fix on them.”
“I’m listening.”
Cline stood up and paced the room. “Put yourself in the position of one of the outliers who’s still out there right now.”
“For all we know, that position could be six feet under.”
“Of course, but if it’s not … what would you do in their position? Right now, knowing everything that they know about Ocula? About Project THEIA?”