“Did I do something wrong? Did I go too fast? We can sit for a while if you’d like. We don’t have to do this at all; we can just sit and talk.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“No, no,” Emily replied, shaking her head, “you have been sweet and wonderful. Better than I deserved. Thank you for a really super evening, but I need to go to bed alone and get some sleep.”
“Sure,” Jones said, moving toward the door, and then he paused, “If I can ask, where’d I get my signals mixed up?”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I thought I was ready, and I’m just not. You’ve been super sweet. Thanks for understanding.”
“Emily,” he said, turning as he reached for the door handle, “I do think you are really special. Tonight was not about anything other than that.”
“I know,” she said. “I believe you, which makes asking you to leave even that much more difficult.”
“Also, I know you don’t go around doing this with a lot of guys - I mean, any other guys, but I would feel better if you were warned. Most men up here would not have stopped. I do respect you for calling it quits if you weren’t sure, but most guys would not. Please keep it in mind. You’re beautiful. You attract a lot of attention, and this is not a nice place.”
“Thank you,” she said tilting her head to one side. She was grateful for the gesture.
“Finally, I guess I need to be sure you understand,” he said, “I’m not going to stop trying. You are special and you deserve someone to treat you as special. Anyone who does not, doesn’t deserve you.”
She thought this last line a shot at Joniver, but she said, “Thank you Jones.”
Still gripping her top, she walked over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He no longer had a chance with her, but he had been so sweet and kind. He deserved better than she had been to him tonight.
After Jones left, Emily locked the door, bolted to her bed and lay down. She rolled on her side, pulling her sweater tightly around her. She cried.
She cried a lot.
Emily cried about tonight and her aunt and what had happened to get her here. She cried for reasons she was not even sure of. She had used Jones, and she was ashamed of it. She had wanted Joniver to be jealous and to feel some pain for not paying attention to her the way she felt he should have. Joniver had been acting like a doofus. She was wrong, however to use Jones - or anyone else for that matter, and she knew it.
Above all else, Emily cried because she knew she had almost made a very serious mistake tonight. She did not want her first time to be like tonight would have been - a flop after beer and dancing. She wanted it to be special and try as he might, Jones was never going to make her feel the special way she wanted to feel. She only knew of one man who had been able to make her feel the kind of special she wanted to feel, and only one man who would be able to do it again. Emily wanted Joniver tonight, and she tried to make Jones a substitute, which was not fair to anyone, least of all, Jones.
There was now no doubt in her mind. She was in love with that dork, Joniver. For a second, she stopped crying and chuckled through her sobs.
“Big, dumb dork,” she snuffled out. “I can’t help loving you. I knew you would break my heart!”
She was not sure what she would do now except cry. She really wanted some chocolate, but even more, she hoped the young man whom she loved so recklessly would somehow see in himself what she already did.
***
Safa grabbed her energy drink and gulped half the can down. “These things don’t have enough,” she said, shaking the can from side to side.
She pecked on an old fashioned keyboard because she preferred the tactile feel instead of the gestures and touch points of a heads-up display.
“Where is the After Action Report?” she said aloud to no one. Safa was brilliant, but she talked to herself when she worked. Her coworkers found this, as well as her other habits annoying. Her social ineptness also explained why, although attractive and young, she was spending a Saturday night alone working in the lab. “OK, Dunston doesn’t like something about what you guys are saying, but he doesn’t know what. What are you telling me? We both know I’m smarter than him…or anyone else for that matter!”
Safa meticulously went through the reports one by one, the lines of text and charts reflecting off her large horn-rimmed glasses.
“No way! You did not just get in there and do that!” she shouted. “Although I guess the Joniver kid did read it pretty fast - unless he knew where it was. I hear he and his brother are both cute, but he’s called for - or something. He’s got the chick in Signals, but maybe the brother’s available.
“Anyway, so the plane’s going down, the Reading-Freak finds the bad code and Jones changes it. I don’t think I’d want to date a Reading-Freak like that."
Safa popped an energy bar in her mouth, grabbed a can of carbonated beverage with gooey fingers and took a long gulp. She let out a loud belch, which resonated off the lab walls, followed by flatulence, the like of which would be expected from boys in a locker room - or cows in stock yard.
“Safa, Safa, Safa, this smells of a rat. So I’m guessing Reading-Freak knew where it was or Jones knew where it was already and so one of them was ready with a fix. What was that? What was that? Dunston said something about Joniver saying something. Where did you put those notes? Ah, here they are!
“Joniver said Jones pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and made the change. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Jones! He was carrying in his pocket a piece of paper with the exact change that needed to be made? And you guys needed me to figure this out?
“Jones is a plant - a mole - a spy - a turncoat - a Benedict Arnold, whatever!”
In her mind, Safa had not reached a conclusion, she just loved hearing herself talk. She might throw out three or four different explanations on any given problem just to hear herself go through them.
She liked the Jones is a mole solution, however because it had been four months and twenty-three days since she had used the word turncoat. She decided she liked the word.
“Jones is a turncoat. Jones is a turncoat. Jones is turncoat, turncoat, turncoat. Hum-hum-hum-ha-ha-ha… Let’s look at the controller source code prior to take off and compare it with...hmmm. No differences. Jones didn’t make changes in the controller, unless he changed it and changed it back during the crisis.
“Let’s look at the activity log; and I see no changes. Hmm…Wait, if he did it remotely the activity log could be bypassed, but he would have to have opened a hole in the communication grid controller, then patched it with a predetermined sequence…”
She looked again at the AAR’s.
“Joniver knew what to look for because Jones told him. Dunston told me Joniver told him the line of code was at 20,423, but that line has nothing to do with the controller proper. That part of the code is a subroutine for communication error checking. Nothing in the area has anything to do with causing the plane to lose altitude. So what did he change?”
Safa spent the better part of the evening checking through activity logs and cross-checking them with maintenance schedules and flight records, syncing all the information with the plane’s black box. She chatted the entire time, both encouraging and cajoling herself in the process.
“That’s it!” she said after a thorough search. “He changed the communication grid protocol, which he would be able to do without detection, since he runs signals for the team. There had to have been a remote somewhere, and the pilot got control back when Jones closed the grid. He had the paper in his pocket because he was the one who opened the hole, and he needed the proper sequence and the sequence would’ve been a bitch to memorize!
“There may be another explanation, but Jones closed a hole in the communication grid. No doubt about it!” Safa skipped around the lab, snapping her fingers in rhythm to her skips for about a minute and a half when it occurred to her, Dunston had asked her to do this.
“I need to call him!” she said. She was so winded, she could b
arely talk.
“Batman’s gonna kill the Robin!” She licked her sticky fingers and snatched up her communications pad.
***
Joniver watched himself in the mirror as he lifted the weights.
Form, he told himself. Form and repetition. Repetition over time with the correct form. Do the little things. Jacob taught him.
“Keep going,” Joniver said aloud to the mirror, “two more.”
“There are no shortcuts,” Jacob told Joniver. “If you want to get better, you’ve got to do the little things the right way over time.”
Jacob was right. Joniver could now bench press double his body weight, and he ran a consistent 5 minute mile. Jacob told him he was getting ripped, whatever that meant. He knew it was good, so he took the compliment.
Joniver was prepared. His range work and classroom training were going just as well as his physical preparation. He wanted to go on the mission to get Olinar, and Jacob assured him he could get him ready.
He did.
As motivation, whenever he wanted to quit, Joniver would call Jacob’s words to mind, “Do the little things, the right way, over time, and you will grow.”
Do the little things the right way over time, he kept thinking. The little things, the right way over time.
Joniver didn’t know how much more he could grow tonight, however. This was Friday and he had promised Emily they could go to the party tomorrow night…
Then it hit him. This was not Friday, it was Saturday and the party was tonight. The party is where Jacob was going!
Joniver hung his head. Emily was very upset with him of late, and the reality of tonight cleared his mind to see why.
He knew he needed to go apologize, and he needed to go right now. He would say he was sorry, but he was trying to get ready to rescue Olinar. She would understand, she always does. Always.
Then an even truer reality struck him, and it struck him both mentally and physically. Jacob could not have hit him harder with an upper cut. He had used this same excuse with her for weeks.
Repetition, he thought. But this repetition was not good.
Like a bright light suddenly turned on in a dark room, he realized he had spent his time in repetition to improve physically, but he had done little to improve with Emily. His repetition caused him to stop seeing her, not physically seeing her, but understanding her.
Another of Jacob’s training instructions came to mind, “It’s not what you intend to do, Joniver. It’s what you actually do."
He saw himself through her eyes, and he felt a-wash in shame.
“I’ll make it up to her,” Joniver said. Then, he remembered another of Jacob’s idioms, “There are no shortcuts,” and he hung his head.
Joniver tried to take shortcuts with Emily. There is no making it up; trying to make it up is a shortcut, he thought.
“I’ve done exactly what Nana told me not to do; I’ve thrown something precious to the pigs.” The face of Jones came to his mind.
Joniver leaned on an outstretched arm against a wall, covering his eyes with his other hand. Getting Olinar was important, but Emily was more important. She meant more to him than anyone in the world, and he had pushed her to the margins. He expected her to wait and be patient until he decided she was important again.
“I’m a jerk! What have I been thinking? What have I been doing?” he said aloud. “If Emily kicks me to the curb, it’s no better than I deserve.”
She is everything important to me, he thought.
He ran toward her room. He would tell her tonight. Tell her how sorry he was - not for simply forgetting the party - but for everything. For not doing the little things the right way over time. He would tell her he wanted to become the man she deserved. Please be patient with me, and help me.
I’ll tell her I love her more than life, and - he paused - I want to marry her.
“Oh, wait...hang on there, Dude,” he said aloud as he paused in the hallway, “Do I want to marry her?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said to himself in a whisper, “but this may not be the best time to bring it up.” He picked up his pace again, remembering when he first lifted weights with Jacob. He wanted to lift the most he could as many times as he could. Jacob told him it was too soon.
“If you do too much too fast,” Jacob said, “you’ll not only injure yourself, you’ll delay your progress. Do the little things, the right way, over time.”
Hold the marriage proposal until later, he concluded. Start by doing the little things the right way over time and work into it.
Excitement grew in him as he thought about his talk with Emily. It would be difficult at first, but he wanted her to know, to hear from his own lips what he was thinking and feeling.
“A new chapter’s about to unfold,” he said. He felt renewed, and with his new insights, the anticipation burst inside him.
His heart pounded as he approached Emily’s room. He could not wait to knock on her door.
***
Emily woke in a start. I was dreaming, she thought as she put her hand over her face. Emily cried herself to sleep while still in the clothes she had worn to the party.
“What was that noise?” she asked, pulling her long beautiful hair up out of her eyes.
There was a knock at the door. “Emily, I need to tell you something. Can you open the door?"
The disorientation from first awakening still hung on her. Emily sat up and buttoned her sweater. She glanced at herself in the mirror as she walked past, and just threw her hand at it. She looked as much a wreck as she felt. She would see who was at the door, and then get a shower before bed.
“Emily!”
“I’m coming! Just a minute!”
“Is that Joniver?” She felt a bubble of hope.
“Who is it?” Emily said at the door.
“Emily, I need to talk to you!”
She opened the door. As she did so, Emily saw Jones and said, “What’s the ma-”
But she did not get another word out. Jones jumped towards her and clamped his hand over her mouth.
Emily screamed, but only muffled echoes came out. Her eyes went wide, and she stretched a hand to claw at Jones’ face or put her thumb in his eye.
Two men came from the hallway. Emily kicked and caught one man in the groin, and he crunched over in pain. Jones balled his fist and landed a blow to her jaw. Emily jerked back and she fell, slamming her head against the edge of the night stand. Her body went limp and slumped to the floor like a marionette without its master. A wide, thick streak of blood stained the night stand as her head slid down its side.
“The boss wanted her alive,” one of the men said.
“Shut-up dammit! Just get that damn bag over her head!” Jones commanded. “I know what the boss wants!”
The End of Book 2
Book 3
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things."
Leonardo Da Vinci
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
Barak Obama
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
William Faulkner
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
Maya Angelou
Chapter 24
Running. Why can’t I get there?
Running…
Looking…
Turning…
Searching…
Where is she?
Where’s Emily?
Running…
Out of breath…
Joniver stumbled and fell hard against the hallway floor. He pushed up and jumped into a sprint.
“Emily!" She
’s gone, and I can’t find her!
Joniver couldn’t find Emily and this time it was not a dream. When he entered her room a few minutes ago, he saw the blood on her night stand and the mess in her room. There was a fight, and as a result the evidence said Emily was bleeding. There was a lot of blood in her room and down the hallway. Joniver was not sure how they got out, but they - whoever they were - took her and escaped.
Emily was kidnapped and it is my fault, Joniver told himself. She might be de… No, I won’t say it - I won’t even think it. She’s alive and I’m going to get her back.
But other troubles awaited him first.
***
Joniver rushed into the room, breathless from his sprint to the medical center. Jacob and Elizabeth stood by Nana’s bed. Both looked up when Joniver burst through the doorway, but no one said a word. The scene spoke for itself.
Joniver brushed past Elizabeth and took Nana’s hand. He looked around, staring at the machines that had been so active just days earlier but today sat silent. He wanted to do something to say something, but there was nothing to say or do. He wanted to shake Nana and watch her wake up and smile the way she always did. He wanted one more time to hear her call his name. He wanted her to scold the way she always did; she could make him feel good although what he had done wasn’t. He wanted one more meal with her, one more word with her, one more hour with her, but it was not to be.
Nana was gone.
Joniver cried. He cried like he had never cried before and maybe for the first time. He had cried as a baby and cried as a little boy when he skinned a knee, but that was not crying. That was complaining. He had never cried, boiling up emotion from the deep place inside himself. The place where everything is stored, like a box hidden in a protected place. When life is thrown into a jumble, the box spills out, and it doesn’t matter that anyone can see.
He cried and he felt so alone. Nana had been both father and mother to him. She had taught him how to walk, she cleaned his diapers, she walked him to school and she taught him to read. She had helped him navigate those early school disagreements, and she continued helping until Joniver felt he didn’t need her help. Today he realized how much he still did.
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