by John Bromley
When the two men emerged from their motel rooms the next morning, it was clear that neither of them had slept very well. Breakfast was a practically silent affair, as each men thought about what he had heard the night before.
There was, however, one interesting exchange.
“Did you notice, Jim,” Mike asked, “that near the end of that video, the narrator addressed you by name?”
Jim, who had been studying his plate, as though trying by sheer force of will to make his omelet dance, looked up sharply at his fellow officer.
“No, I didn’t. When was that?”
“When he was defining… reproduction,” (this last word just barely above a whisper), “he said, ‘If you remember your basic biology, Colonel Parker, then you know…’”
Jim shuddered. Mike was right.
James R. Parker VII, being a high-ranking military man, was used to being in control of every situation, and being the one to decide what would and wouldn’t happen. Now, as his gut had feared, there was someone out there who could connect him, by name, to a capital crime, and he could think of nothing to do about it, except play along. This had ‘blackmail’ written all over it.
However, there was one bright spot, albeit a small one, but Jim seized it.
“The voice didn’t mention your name, Mike. That means they didn’t expect you to be traveling with me. They might still think I’m by myself. This may be an advantage we can use. Hell, it may be the only advantage we have. Can I count on you to stick with me in this, Captain?”
Mike leveled his gaze at his commanding officer. “Absolutely, sir—to the end.”
“Well, you didn’t have to make it sound so… final,” Jim muttered.
As they were leaving the diner, Mike literally bumped into someone coming through the door. He recognized the man from the previous night.
“Hawke, is it?” he asked.
“Actually, I’m Freeley,” the man replied, shaking Mike’s hand.
“So, where is your buddy?”
“Don’t know,” Freeley said. “I’ve been looking all over town all morning. He just… vanished.”
“What do you mean, ‘vanished’?” Jim asked.
“I went by his house earlier. It’s wide open, his car’s there, but he’s not. Nobody’s seen him since last night.”
“He didn’t run off with your money, did he?” Mike wondered
“No, it’s all still there. He just… disappeared.”
“Ain’t that the damnedest thing?” Jim said to both men, but couldn’t think of anything useful to add. All they could do was wish him luck in his search.
Just before they left town, Jim asked Mike to return to the place where they had found the memory stick. When they got to the stump, they both stopped in surprise.
The red ribbon was gone.
They looked at each other; they fought the urge as long as they could, but finally had to look over their shoulders and into the surrounding trees.
Of course, there was no one to be seen.
“We’re being watched,” Mike observed. “Maybe not continuously; maybe not this very second, but they know…”
“Guaranteed,” Jim agreed.
CHAPTER 6
While Jim and Mike were silently plodding through their breakfast, the President sat at his desk, trying to get his day started. He was working on a batch of very important papers, and having very little success. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
He’d seen it all before. Negotiations, mergers, international crises, labor problems—you name it, and they were there on his desk, waiting for decisive action from him. The problem was that none of this interested him anymore.
Being President could be boring, he told himself, and right now, it was.
One of his assistants came in with another batch of paper, which he deposited on the President’s desk. He then left, closing the door behind him.
The President took a look at the pile and sighed. Today’s inquiries from the “Ask the President” program, all neatly printed out, with the name of the sender printed on a little card, neatly attached to the upper left of the request form itself.
Somebody spent a lot of time organizing this so… neatly, he thought. Print the form, type the name, attach the card to the paper. Print another form, type another name… A mindless activity, almost.
“I could use one of those right about now,” the President said to no one in particular. Then he smiled, remembering that this “Ask the President” thing did involve a mindless activity on his part. At least, the way he did it.
He placed the batch of requests face down on his desk, and began to split it into two piles. He did not separate the forms based on their content; instead, he used his favorite “mindless” approach. Make two stacks; one in front of me, one to the right of me. And now—two forms here, two forms there. Three forms here, three forms there…
While he was thus engaged, his mind, unneeded for this task, drifted aimlessly before inexplicably settling on…
G. Waddington Wellington was lingering over his own breakfast, since his first meeting of the day, which happened to be with the President, was not until eleven. As he often did when he had extra time in the morning, he had prepared a nice, tall stack of pancakes. He had just placed them on the table, along with generous portions of real butter and real Vermont maple syrup, when there was a knock at the door. Fuming that his special treat would no longer be piping hot when he finished with this interruption, he answered the door. A man in a suit stood there, holding a piece of paper in his hand. Wellington recognized him as a co-worker.
“Yes, Agent Hanson—what can I do for you?”
The man read from his form. “Are you G. Waddington Wellington?”
“Of course I am, Hanson. You know that—you’ve worked for me for five years.”
“Just had to be sure, sir,” Hanson replied. “Legal requirements and all, you know.”
He reached into his jacket and removed a pistol. “Come with me, please, sir.”
“Are you out of your mind, Hanson?” Wellington exploded. “What is this nonsense?”
“You are in violation of Section Fifteen of the Penal Code,” Hanson recited.
“I’m in violation…” Wellington blustered. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”
Hanson, nonplussed, continued. “As such, you are required to come with me. Now.”
Wellington knew better than to argue—his subordinate was too well trained.
“Can I at least get dressed, and—”
Hanson shook his head. “You know the rules, sir,” he said, motioning with his gun.
Wellington did know the rules, having written many of them himself. He closed the door but could not lock it, as his house keys were inside, and proceeded out to the waiting car in his pajamas, for the trip to…
It suddenly dawned on him that, for all his importance, he had no idea what happened to “Section Fifteen” people, how they were “dealt with,” or where they ended up. And this, he thought fearfully, was not how he wanted to learn.
Hanson followed him to the car, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was holding a gun on this formerly very important man.
Two forms here, two forms there… When the separation was complete, the President frowned, for he had one form left over. Being something of a perfectionist, he could not place this form on either stack, because that would leave them uneven. So, he did what he always did first—he set it aside. He then summoned the chief of Accounting Services to his office.
“These are the ones whose requests are granted,” he told the man, handing him the pile in front of him, “and these are the ‘Politely Decline’ ones,” he said, pointing to the stack on his right. The man nodded and left with the forms.
“Damn,” he cursed quietly when the door had closed, “today was the day I was going to put the ‘yes’ forms on my right, and the ‘no’ pile in the middle. Oh well—I’ll try to remember for tomorrow.”
Then, he did the other thing he always did with leftover forms. He added it to the only pile remaining on his desk. The one to his left.
CHAPTER 7
“It seems to me,” Mike said as they got into the car, “that we’re not in that bad shape. The trip to our assignment required us to go mostly north and west. We’ve just done a little more of the ‘west’ part first. So now, all we have to do—”
Jim’s cell phone rang. When he opened it, they saw once again a set of coordinates, alternating with a picture of a gilt-edged, hand-tooled, leather-bound Bible.
“I think we’ve just made new travel plans, Mike.”
“This is actually pretty good, Jim. These coordinates are about three hundred miles northwest of here, kind of where we need to be going anyway.”
For the next few hours, the two made small talk and bantered back and forth, as you might expect from two men who had known each other since childhood. The two had always been good friends, despite a four-year age gap and distinctly different family backgrounds. Mike came from “old money,” or so it was said—he himself had seen relatively little of this supposedly “vast hoard.” Yet he was Michael A. Wilkins IX, of the “Chicago Wilkinses,” for what that was worth. Jim, on the other hand, was from a middle-class background; a family not noted for their wealth or glamour or anything, except for…
“…the one or two ancestors of mine who became astronauts,” Jim was saying, “and I always thought that would have been so cool, you know—to fly into outer space like that. For the longest time, I wanted to be one, too.”
“You would have liked it, I’m sure,” Mike agreed. “Me, I don’t know. Too bad they shut down the program about four hundred years ago.”
“Yeah… I wonder why they did that.”
“Couldn’t tell you, Jim.”
By the middle of the afternoon, they were nearing their target area, and the small talk ceased. Once again, they found themselves near a small town, with plenty of possible hiding places for “treasure.” But once again Jim was able, with relative ease, to single out the most likely caching spot. Within an hour of beginning their search, they had come upon a stump marked, as before, with a foot-long piece of red satin ribbon. A short dig revealed another canister containing another computer memory stick, identical to the first one, which they had disposed of in an anonymous lake during the morning’s drive.
“What now, Jim?” Mike asked as they put their tools back in the car. “Find a motel? Fire up the computer?”
“Yes and no.” Seeing the confused look on his partner’s face, Jim elaborated, “Yes to the motel, but no to the computer.”
“But… don’t you want to see what’s on this thing?”
“I do, but there’s something else I want to know even more. This guy hiding these things—he knows who I am, he knows where we are, he even knows when we dig these things up. But I don’t know anything about him. So, I’m going to try something to test his capabilities. I’ll play his little game, but only up to a certain point.”
“So, are you still thinking about calling his bluff?”
“Something like that, Mike. I’ll take his little video stick, but I won’t look at it. I just want him to know that he doesn’t get to call all the shots.”
That evening turned out somewhat less than satisfying, as Jim took the memory device to his room, Mike kept his computer in his room, and they spent many hours scrupulously ensuring that the twain should never meet, despite the intense desire of both of them for that to happen. At the little diner in town where they went for supper, Jim took a phone call from his superior, Chambers, and assured the general that yes, they were still on schedule for their rendezvous with the Fourth, and that yes, he had taken the general’s advice and had done a little geo-caching along the way, but that no, sadly, he had unearthed nothing of interest. Jim hoped this last part was sufficiently convincing.
Next morning found the two men in less than high spirits. A quick check of yesterday’s caching site, from which the red ribbon had again been removed, left neither of them convinced about the effectiveness of Jim’s plan to regain control of their lives.
That feeling got worse quickly.
During breakfast, Jim’s cell phone rang. Fully expecting to see another communication from their unknown travel coordinator, they were surprised when the screen simply said, “Incoming Call.” Jim answered and found himself listening to…
“General Chambers here. I thought it prudent to inform you, Colonel, about a message I had on my phone when I arrived in the office this morning…”
Jim knew that when Chambers started calling him by his rank only, there would be no personal pleasantries, no chatting about hobbies—nothing but business.
“… caller didn’t leave his name, but he said he had, and I quote, ‘information that Colonel Parker—yes, that Colonel James Parker—may have come in contact with un-Treated material.’ What is this about, Colonel? Do you have any idea who this might be?”
“Right now, General,” Parker said, “you know more about this than I do,” while thinking to himself, that’s certainly true enough.
“In addition,” Jim added, “I didn’t know there was such a thing as un-Treated material,” which his mind justified by thinking, that would have been the truth… if I’d said it a week ago.
“Me neither. Just out of curiosity, Parker, what exactly did you find while geo-caching?” the general wanted to know. Despite the probing nature of the question, Jim felt some relief. The offhand delivery, being addressed by name instead of rank—this is good, he thought. He’s too much of a hard-nose to try and trap me with a seemingly innocuous question. He believes me and not the caller. He bought my load of crap.
Now I have to sell him another.
“Nothing interesting, General, just some old… coins.” This should be pretty safe, he thought—the general had never expressed any interest in numismatics.
But just in case, “… hardly worth the bother—there were only a few, and none of them were more than about a hundred years old.”
“Hmmm,” Chambers sounded as unimpressed as Parker had hoped he would be, “hardly worth it indeed. Well, stay on your toes, Parker. It seems there’s at least one person out there who doesn’t think the world of you.”
“Duly noted, sir,” Parker responded as the connection was broken.
Jim relayed the gist of the conversation to Mike, and they both came to the same inescapable conclusion—their unknown geo-caching associate had made the call.
“But why would he do that?” Mike demanded. “He told us where to go, and we went there. He buried his stuff and we found it. And he knows we took it—he could tell that when he went back for his ribbons. We’ve done everything he’s wanted.”
Just then Jim’s cell phone rang again. This time it was indeed the picture of the Bible alternating with…
“Those coordinates seem familiar,” Mike said.
“That’s because they are—they’re the same ones he sent us yesterday. We’re sitting on them right now.”
Mike looked confused. Jim began to feel frustrated.
“He’s telling us that our business at this location isn’t finished. He knows… somehow he knows… that we haven’t looked at yesterday’s find yet. This is just a gentle reminder to us, to tend to that ‘oversight.’”
“And the call to Chambers?”
“It was meant to be a warning shot across the bow, so to speak. He’s letting us know that next time he won’t be so ‘nice’—that he can play hardball, too.”
CHAPTER 8
G. Waddington Wellington had been traveling since being arrested on his doorstep more than a day ago. The plane trip from the Washington area to Winnipeg had been a nightmare, especially for someone who fancies himself an important man. After all, how often does a person board an airplane in his pajamas, handcuffed to a man in a suit who is holding a gun? Not often, and the passengers of this particular flight were letting Wellington know,
by their pointing, jeering and snickering, just how unimportant he looked.
When he reached Winnipeg, he and his gun-toting colleague Hanson transferred to a car, and drove further north than Wellington had ever gone before. Since his wrists and ankles were now shackled and chained together in such a fashion that any attempt at escape would be futile, Wellington decided not to try, for the moment at least. The car radio was tuned to a station playing country music, of which he was not a fan. Having nothing else to do, he found himself listening and idly wondering how many songs there could possibly be about race cars, pickup trucks, hound dogs, or some combination of the three. Judging by the fact that the station did not repeat a song during the entire trip, the answer was, obviously, quite a few. How many of them could be called good songs—now, that was debatable.
Eventually, they reached a nondescript two-story office building, and stopped in the large half-full parking lot in front of it. Hanson removed the cuffs on Wellington's ankles so he could walk and, with Wellington in front, they entered the building calling itself “Government Research Station No. 12.” The front lobby was as unadorned as the building itself, consisting of a small desk with a man standing behind it, and one door leading into the heart of the building. Aside from the purely functional recessed lighting in the ceiling, there was nothing else in the lobby to lend it any kind of “personality,” or extend a welcoming feeling to a visitor.
Apparently Wellington had been expected; when he announced himself to the man at the front desk, his name was found on a list and checked off. He and his escort then opened the door and proceeded down a short hallway which was just like the lobby—purely functional, no decorative touches at all. Also, like the lobby, it offered no choice of direction. No rooms were accessible from the hall; there was just a door at its end. Opening this, Wellington found himself walking down a staircase, apparently toward the structure's basement. After descending about sixty feet, the stairs deposited him at one end of another hallway. The far end of this passage had what appeared to be a pair of sliding doors, which stood open. The corridor was not long, but its narrowness activated Wellington's claustrophobia, and his mind irrationally began to think of the doorway as a great mouth, of a shark perhaps, open and waiting... for him. Agent Hanson had to prod him with the gun to keep him moving toward this menacing entry to the unknown.