The two of them took turns ordering. Melina went first and ordered a scoop of black cherry and a scoop of French vanilla. Angela went with a single scoop of butter pecan. After they had been handed their cones, they moved to the cash register so that Angela could pay for them. She took her wallet out of her purse.
“That is the most unusual purse I think I have ever seen,” Melina said.
Angela laughed. “You just now noticed the purse?”
The purse was made of a rich dark brown canvas and was studded with a dozen little pockets on the outside, each one about the size of a small cell phone. All of the pockets were secured with a large ivory button. The purse was topped off with a shoulder strap that was made out of two eight-inch long white bamboo rods with six inches of heavy chain between them.
“Well… in the confusion of coming in here, I wasn’t paying attention to what you were carrying. Where did you get it? It’s kinda weird. Bamboo and canvas?”
“Just a little thing I picked up the last time I was in Thailand,” Angela said.
Melina rolled her eyes. “Rats. I knew there was something I forgot to pick up when I went to Thailand. The weird purse.”
“Funny,” Angela said. “I wouldn’t be so quick to call someone’s purse weird if I were sporting the watch that you’re wearing. They didn’t have watches any uglier at the mall?”
“Hey,” Melina smiled. “I can’t accept credit for this fashion foul. This is my mom’s watch.”
Angela froze. “Let me see that watch.”
Melina raised her arm so that Angela could get a better look at the watch. She took Melina’s hand in hers and studied the watch.
“Your mother showed me this watch once,” Angela said. “Does your father know that you are wearing this?”
Melina looked down and shifted her feet. “No. I wear it to school and around places, and then I hide it when I am around him. It was the watch that Mom was wearing when she had her accident. I found it in one of the pockets of the pair of slacks that she was wearing that night. Dad keeps the clothes she wore on a hanger in the corner of his bedroom. He can’t bear to touch them, so he does not know the watch is gone. Please don’t tell him.”
Angela raised her eyebrows and gave Melina a look that said she might tell her dad and she might not. Then she turned and walked over to one of the tables and sat down. Melina followed her to the table and sat down too.
Angela felt the need to change the subject. “Tell me, dear. Do you have any other hobbies besides reading?”
“Well, up until Mom’s accident, I was taking krav maga classes at the studio run by the company where you and Dad work,” Melina said.
“That’s right. Your father mentioned it to me. He said that you had been studying since elementary school and then you just abruptly quit. What happened? Did you just get tired of it?”
Melina looked in the air and thought about it. “That was part of it. I had been studying martial arts since I was five years old. It’s just… that… oh nothing.”
“Nothing, you say?” Angela asked, prying.
“It’s just that I studied for all those years to learn how to quickly and most efficiently hurt people. I enjoyed it, and I got good at it, but I did not see the point. My dad would only tell me that I was studying so that I could defend myself, but I think that there was more to it. We had a major yelling argument when I decided to quit, but after my mom’s accident, I simply lost the will to hurt anyone.”
“I see,” Angela said. She knew the true intent of Melina’s father. “Would it help if you studied a form of martial arts that was more beautiful and less brutal such as taekwondo? Many people learn more than one form. I can show you some moves.”
“Funny you should mention taekwondo,” Melina said. “That is what I was studying before my dad switched me to krav maga.”
“Is that right?” Angela said.
“Yes,” Melina said. “I was very young, but I remember it as being very graceful.”
Melina thought about Angela’s offer. She missed her martial arts studies and would love to learn some more graceful moves, but she didn’t see how a woman that was her dad’s age could teach her anything.
“Thank you, Angela, but I am just not interested in that anymore.”
“That’s all right. Just let me know if you change your mind. Are you ready to go pick up your brother?”
Melina nodded. They got up, waved goodbye to the boy behind the counter and headed for the door. The bell on the door now announced their departure and they found themselves outside.
As they walked toward the car, they heard a voice behind them. “Did you change your mind about partying with us?”
It was the man with the hoodie from earlier. He and backward baseball cap guy had been waiting just outside the ice cream shop for Melina and Angela to leave.
“I told you before that we are not interested,” Angela said coldly.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” hoodie said as he put his arms around Melina.
“Take. Your. Hands. Off. Her,” Angela said, slowly through clenched teeth.
Hoodie took arms from around Melina, reached down to his side, and produced a knife. “Why don’t you make me?”
Keeping an eye on the knife, Angela stepped back, grabbed a tab on the bottom of her purse, and pulled on it. The canvas part of the purse fell to the ground leaving the bamboo handles in her hand.
She was now holding a set of nunchuks.
“So the ugly lady has some nunchuks,” hoodie said as he moved toward Angela.
Angela began to swing the nunchuks in a pattern that had her grabbing them and letting go with alternating hands with incredible speed. Melina had seen martial arts movies where they did this, and she always thought that it was fake. Apparently not.
Hoodie lunged at Angela and swung the knife at her. There was a loud clang as Angela intercepted the knife with the nunchuk. It flew out of the man’s hand and across the parking lot. Hoodie and his friend looked at the knife on the ground, looked at each other, and then rushed toward Angela at the same time. Angela backpedaled a few steps to match their speed, and then she stepped to one side and launched a spinning back kick at the head of the backward baseball cap guy. Her foot connected with his cheek. This sent him flying several feet backward onto the hood of a nearby car, his cap settling on the roof. Angela landed, quickly crouched down low, and fired a punch up into the crotch of hoodie who moaned loudly and crumpled to a heap on the ground. Neither man made an effort to get up.
Melina stood frozen with her mouth open in disbelief.
Angela stood up, grabbed the rest of her purse and looked at over at Melina. “All right, let’s get going.”
They both hurried to the car and got in. Angela started the car and backed up, making sure to avoid hoodie still clutching his groin area on the ground behind the car. Nothing was said as Angela sped out of the parking lot.
Once they were out on the road, Melina broke the silence. “I take back what I said about the purse.”
Angela looked over at Melina and smiled.
Melina continued. “I’ve thought it over, and I have changed my mind. I want you to show me what you know about taekwondo.”
“Wonderful, Melina,” Angela said. “What made you change your mind?”
………………………….
It was after midnight when Melina’s dad poked his head through the doorway into her room. He had just gotten home. At last. These trips were hard on Evan. The longer he spent away from Melina and Travis, the more it was necessary for him just to see them when he returned home. Whatever time it was. He had already checked on Travis, and now he was waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of Melina’s room so that he could see her.
But Melina was not asleep.
“Welcome home, Daddy,” she said as she sat up.
“Thanks, kiddo,” he said as he walked toward her. “I’m sorry I’m home later than I planned. I ran into some problems on my trip.”
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“That’s okay,” Melina said. “I had a good time with Angela tonight.”
He kissed his finger and touched the top of her head with it. Then he walked back to the doorway and paused, looking back at her. “You have a good sleep.”
Chapter 7
“Let’s try it again,” Angela said as she moved across the workout room.
Long ago Melina’s parents had converted an extra bedroom downstairs into a space for exercising. They were fanatics about staying in shape, especially her dad. The room had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall, and the other walls and floor were padded. Her parents had put the padding on the walls so Melina could practice her krav maga at home. There was a small television in the corner that Melina’s mom had set up to watch workout videos.
Melina was so excited about learning taekwondo techniques from Angela that she asked her if they could start first thing in the morning. Angela insisted from the beginning that they were going to spar for real, so both of them were covered head-to-toe in sparring pads. While Melina still felt unsure about fighting again, she did miss it, and she rarely got to spar with another woman. They had been at it for over an hour so far, and yet nobody else in the house was awake.
“You are doing great,” Angela said. “I can see that you have the raw skills, and your kicks are flawless. But, this time, I want you come at me using the forms that I have shown you, and I want you to consider not just the magnitude and direction but the sequence that you make your attacks.”
“Sequence?”
“Yes. Sequencing is the key to maintaining an offensive. It allows you always to be on the attack without giving your opponent a chance. You have to keep in mind a punch or kick that makes sense following the punch or kick that you are already doing. For example, if I use a kick to the stomach, that will result in my opponent bending over. I would not then use a kick designed to target their face at normal eye level. I would use a low kick or punch instead because that is where their head will be when the effect of the first kick is finished. All right, get into position.”
Melina took her position in front of Angela.
“Kiaaaaah,” Melina yelled as she leaped and sent a foot flying at Angela’s face.
Angela blocked the kick with her hand, but Melina followed the kick with a lunge forward and a rapid punch to the chest. Angela went flying backward into the air and landed on the floor.
Melina rushed to help her up. “I am so sorry, Angela.”
“No, no,” Angela said, smiling as she sat up on the floor. “Your technique was perfect. Well done.”
Angela grabbed Melina’s hand and stood up. “You know, at this point, I think you could handle yourself against anyone.”
Melina looked at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t felt this good in a long time. She looked confident. She felt confident. At that point, she felt as though she could take on anyone.
“You two are up awfully early,” Melina’s dad said from the workout room doorway. “And working on martial arts, I see. I thought you gave that up?”
“I have been teaching Melina some taekwondo,” Angela said. “In the process, I seem to have reawakened the warrior inside of her. Right now, I think she could kick your butt.”
Melina’s dad raised his eyebrows. Melina was unaware of his martial arts abilities, so she did not realize just what a compliment from Angela that was. She felt a taunt was in order.
“Yeah,” Melina said, assuming a fighting stance. “Don’t come in here unless you expect a butt kickin’.”
“No problem there, kiddo,” he said. “I’ve got to go to work this morning.”
Suddenly the smile was gone from her face. Melina glared at her dad with a fierce look.
He understood that expression. “Don’t worry. It is just a brief meeting to recap my trip for the rest of the group. I will be back in a couple of hours. I know today is the day for driving lessons, and Angela told me about your get-together tonight.”
Her dad could not bring himself to use the word ‘date’ yet.
He gave Melina a one-armed hug and a kiss on the top of the head. “See you in a couple of hours.”
Evan looked over at Angela and smiled. He pointed at her and then gave her a thumbs-up.
Angela smiled at him as he turned and walked out of the room.
………………………….
Evan sat in the main video conference room at the agency and went through his mission report on a laptop computer. He was not happy about being at work, especially after he promised Melina that they would start her driver training. But the President had asked for a debriefing on the data gathered during the mission, and it was hard to tell her no. Mission debriefing meetings like this involved just a few people as the agency kept the information about missions to a need-to-know basis. Arthur Glass and William Mason were already seated, but the meeting was running late because David Winfield had not yet arrived. He had been working overnight in the tools lab to analyze the data from the scintillation detector that Evan had carried with him on the mission for signs of radiation.
The President, who took advantage of the delay to make some phone calls, could be seen on the video screen hanging up her phone. “Are we about ready over there?” she said.
“Not quite, Madam President,” William said stiffly. “Just a few more minutes, David is finalizing his report on the data. He was up all night.”
“That’s quite all right, William,” she said. “I know he is working hard on it.”
There followed an uncomfortable silence. Evan was still looking at his notes. William looked at Arthur Glass and shrugged.
Finally, President Stone broke the silence. “Does anybody have anything good planned for this weekend?”
Arthur spoke up, “I am going fishing out on Lake Grapevine tomorrow.”
“Fishing, you say,” President Stone said in a playful, mocking tone. “Getting a head start on retirement, I see. Is anyone else doing anything exciting? How about you, Evan?”
Evan looked up from his notes. “Yes, I have an exciting, white-knuckle afternoon planned. I am going to help my daughter practice her driving.”
More silence. No one wanted to touch a conversation that involved Evan, his family, and driving. Mercifully, the silence was broken this time by David entering the room.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said as he rushed to a chair and sat down. “Bad traffic. A mail cart crashed on the third floor.”
Evan smiled and went back to his notes.
William looked around the room. “Okay, let’s get started. David, go ahead and tell us what you have found.”
David stood up and walked over to the speaker’s area of the room. “First of all I would like to apologize formally to Evan for the glider malfunction. I know we were on a tight schedule, and we had a limited time to check it out, but that failure was unacceptable. I am sorry.”
Evan and David had already spoken about this and Evan had told him that it was okay, but David wanted to acknowledge the failure in front of the President. It was clear the mistake still bothered him.
He continued, “I promise that I will investigate what went wrong and let you know what the reason for the failure.”
“That won’t be necessary,” William said. “You have more important work to do than try to figure out what went wrong with a glider we won’t use again.”
David mustered a half-smile and continued. “If there is a silver lining to the glider malfunction, it is that we got much better data from the scintillation detector than we would have if he just had flown over the base. Evan spent a fair amount of time on the top of the reactor building, so we got extensive data from there. But the real bonus is that while trying to get away, he carried the detector all throughout the base. We got readings for those places as well.”
“I don’t understand,” Arthur said. "How does the detector being carried around help? Doesn’t the detector just give you an indication of how much radiation it has seen in total?”
&n
bsp; “Most detectors work that way, but this one is a little more sophisticated. This detector has a sensor that records maximum radiation levels over time. With Evan’s help, I was able to reconstruct a timeline of his whereabouts on the base for the entire time he was on the Malaz base. Then I was able to correlate that timeline with the time in the detector. From that, we have a picture of the radiation levels wherever he went.”
“How is that going to help?” William said dismissively. “Either the reactor has fuel, or it doesn’t.”
David continued. “If we just had the readings from the top of the reactor building, I would have said that there was no radiation on that base. The readings from the top of the roof read near zero. However, after going over all of the rest of the data from the detector, I found an enormous spike in the radiation levels once Evan got to one key spot on the base. The area around the helicopter pad. It had been exposed to a large amount of radiation.”
“Do you have any theories why the radiation only exists at the helicopter pad?” the President asked.
“My guess is that they must have flown in some uranium via helicopter. Now they would have transported them in radiation-shielded containers, but they may have had to transition them from one set of shielded containers to another set. Perhaps from temporary containers to permanent ones. During this transition, the uranium would be temporarily unshielded and would contaminate any area exposed. It is this radiation that our detectors picked up at the helicopter site.
“So you think that they flew in some uranium and stored it in shielded containers on the base instead of loading it into the reactor?” Arthur asked.
“That is what the data tells me,” David said.
The President shifted in her seat. “Does the radiation level indicate that they would have enough radioactive material to build a weapon?”
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