Sweet & Sassy Anthology: Stormy Kisses

by Rebecca Rode

  “They weren’t afraid of someone finding this stuff. That tells me they’re going to act fast.”

  Chapter 3

  MY ATTENTION WAS DRAWN TO a few cash receipts for burner phones from different stores in Calgary as well as a few small pieces of metal and colorful wire coating in the debris that had been in the small glass garbage can. “Looky here. Burner phones.” I held up an empty box for a cell phone.

  “Either used for communication or detonation.”

  I nodded.

  “These burnt papers are pictures,” Jeremy said, as he carefully looked through them. “I’ve got bits and pieces of them.”

  “What of?” I moved toward him.

  “All sorts of random things.” He held up a partial picture of a bright blue bench with flowers on it. “I think this is one of the benches in downtown Calgary. A few years back some charity organization started leaving these benches in different spots around the city, all different colors and patterns on them—each one unique. They wanted to encourage people to take a seat and enjoy Calgary.”

  “Hmm. Cool idea. Could be a spot for a bomb, I guess. But getting the right person to sit on it at the right time…now that would be a feat.”

  “Yeah, especially because the benches move from time to time—if the business doesn’t want them, they’re supposed to move the bench to a new location. It’s part of the charm of C-Town.”

  I picked up one of the only slightly burned pictures. A dark wooden door. Above it was a golden plaque, but what had been on the plaque had been burned away. “This door look familiar? Something else downtown?” As I showed it to him I noticed a string of letters and numbers on the back of the picture.

  He grimaced. “No idea.” He stood with a stack of pictures and went to the wall. He held up a picture and ran his finger over a pin hole at the top of one. “I’m pretty sure these were on the wall.”

  We both looked at the dust outlines on the walls. Jeremy slid his hands over a couple of them. “There are pin marks on the walls, and that’s dust marking the outline of pictures.” The darkness within the squares and around them varied. Some darker than others. So the pictures weren’t put on the wall at the same time.

  “And judging by the newspapers, they were working here for a little over three weeks.”

  “We better get into town and alert the authorities.”

  I set the one picture down and picked up another one. It also had a combination of letters and numbers on the back. It was a picture of a bench. If they were coded messages, I needed to look at all of them at the same time. I absently started laying the pictures out on a table, upside down, the code showing. “You mean you better.” I gave him an exasperated look and paused what I was doing.

  “What?”

  “I can’t be with you.” I groaned and put my hand on my hip. “And I don’t know how you’ll explain your presence here if Division finds out.”

  He sighed, his breath escaping through his nose. “You’re right.”

  “Looks like this won’t be as relaxing as we’d hoped.” My shoulders slumped in realization. I continued to put the pictures out in rows, creating a grid and trying to figure out what the codes meant. While every picture had a code on it, the three that showed up most often were,

  5102 50.0-1140425.700

  MEL51.0486151-114.070845900EK

  AHM51.0486151-114.070845900ED

  The others were close to those three, but not exactly the same. No codes that I knew followed the same pattern.

  “We’ve got to figure out what these codes mean.”

  “Hold on,” Jeremy interrupted my thoughts. “You know we can’t get involved.” The strong features of his handsome face sharpened. “We’ll give the information to the police and let them take care of it—actually, maybe we ought to give it to the local Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I could slip on a disguise and drop off the information we collected then hope they are able to avert a tragedy.”

  I felt a little sick. “I wish we could involve Division. I’m not super familiar with the CSIS and how effective they are.”

  “The CSIS is very comparable to the FBI. But we can’t involve Division.”

  “I know.” Not unless we wanted to lose our jobs. I flipped the partially burned pictures over to see if there were any patterns in the pictures. One pattern popped out immediately. All the MEL and AHM codes were assigned to benches. The other pictures were of all sorts of things, some completely undistinguishable to me “Anything familiar?”

  “They’re pictures of pretty common things,” he said, pointing to a picture of wide cement stairs. “Take this. They could be stairs from just about anywhere. Not sure. These look like drain covers. Do you know how many drains there are in Calgary proper?”

  The pictures only showed very small sections of what was originally there. Some were burned so badly, that we couldn’t make anything out. If the hit was going down in Calgary and these pictures were of places and things there, Jeremy would be the best person to identify them. Calgary was where he’d grown up. “There are a lot of those bench pictures.”

  He pulled another picture with a bigger portion of a bench out of the stack and put it with the others. “It’s possible there could be benches like this somewhere else and I just don’t know it, but since we’re so close to Calgary, my guess is that they’re all there.”

  “Do you think these are all pictures from Calgary?” I asked, waving my hand over the pictures. “Is this happening in Calgary?”

  “I can’t be sure until I check the pictures against what I think these are, but they could be. It seems the likely place since they were meeting here and traveling into town every day.” He indicated the newspapers I had left stacked on the ground.

  A few of the pictures showed partial faces, some feminine and some masculine—some with brown skin and others white. Unfortunately, the pictures were too burned to make identification easy. “Why would someone be targeting Calgary?”

  He grunted. “I don’t know. It’s strange—almost nothing terrible happens here. It’s a very peaceful city.” He squished up his nose like he’d smelled something bad.

  “That will be a piece of cake for CSIS.”

  Out of habit, I pulled out my phone to surf the internet. I frowned. “We need to get into town so that I can research a bit. No internet.” I held up my phone to him. I was itching to get involved, but one look at Jeremy scanning the room, his soft brown eyes sad and worried, the rounding of his shoulders in defeat, reminded me that his family owned this place. “Sorry about this room.” I pulled him into a hug. “It’s going to need to be completely overhauled. I’m sure having a crime scene at your lodge won’t help when you’re trying to open it back up.”

  “These days it might help—people love sensationalism. But yeah, my brother isn’t going to like it when I tell him. At least it’s localized to this one room. Let’s go into town. I’ll turn the stuff in so we can hopefully stop whatever this is and you can get the supplies we need to rough it out in the lodge. We can’t forget water.” Jeremy grinned.

  It would not be rough. This place was extravagant despite the dust. And with all the supplies we saw downstairs, we’d be able to make quick work of it too. A large part of me couldn’t stand the idea of not getting involved with stopping the bombers. “What if instead of giving the CSIS the information, we go ahead and find the bad guys and take care of them ourselves?” I pumped my eyebrows up and down.

  Jeremy started packing up a bunch of evidence and taking pictures. “Because that worked so well in Florida.” His chin tilted down, and his eyes turned into lasers staring me down.

  I huffed. “Fine, but I hate pretending not to know about it.” The pull to find out exactly what was going down was yanking at my insides.

  “I know,” Jeremy said, gathering up all the photos. “But it has to be this way.”

  “They’re going to want to come out here.” Our prints would lead them nowhere, of course. After Florida, Ace had ri
gged the system to give no results if either of our prints were discovered, and he would get an alert that someone was snooping. The question was, would they send a team today or would they wait until tomorrow? The possibility of a retreat here together was getting slimmer and slimmer.

  Even worse, I imagined CSIS agents crawling all over the building by nightfall while the terrorists carried out their plans forty-five minutes away in Calgary.

  “Maybe we can give them enough evidence to keep them busy in town for today and tomorrow. If we do a good enough job in collecting evidence for them, I might be able to convince them that the threat is imminent and going out to the site would be a waste of time at this point—that they should focus on where the bombers are right now.”

  “That’s what we would do—eliminate the imminent threat, but when government bureaucracy is involved, that never happens. They end up always being too late for the real party because they have to analyze everything.” I knew there was no hope of us being involved, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “You need to have more faith in people. The CSIS are the best ones for the job, trust me.” In quick order, he snapped a bunch of pictures, and I helped him gather the things with the most promise to lead quickly to the perpetrators and left the rest untouched. He found a couple pretty good fingerprints on an empty bottle or two, and I collected them with a small kit from my go bag.

  We scooped everything we could find into the three trash containers in the room to give the CSIS and hurried back out to the helicopter. Once we were inside, Max started the engine and a few minutes later we were up in the sky. To the west, dark clouds seemed to be coming our way. “I thought you guys needed supplies from town,” Max said. “I didn’t realize you would be transporting anything from the lodge.” He laughed.

  “We didn’t know either,” Jeremy said. “I hope it’s okay. It doesn’t weigh much.”

  “It’s no problem. I was surprised, that’s all. This may be a bumpy ride. They upgraded the storm advisory to a watch and there’s chatter that it’s about to turn into a warning. That would mean the threat is imminent.”

  “What exactly is the threat?” Jeremy asked, adjusting his headset.

  “Flash flooding, hail, wind. Your run-of-the-mill summer flash storm here in Calgary.” A strange, high pitched laugh sounded in our ears. Was Max getting a bit hysterical?

  Weather facts for Calgary and all of Canada poured into my mind from websites I’d visited while studying weather patterns of the world in sixth grade. Calgary was known for its crazy weather patterns. These types of flash storms tended to come quick, hit hard, and leave in a flash. The storm certainly wouldn’t be a blizzard or an ice storm. It was too warm, but hail was a possibility, and the idea of flash flooding made me cringe. My one consolation was that if a storm did hit, it would likely help deter any CSIS agents from going to the lodge—if the two of us ever got back there. It was a selfish thought, but one bright spot in this whole thing.

  Jeremy gave the pilot the new coordinates that would take us to the CSIS’s landing pad. “Oh, look down, you’ll be able to see the river and the new bridge.” I looked out over the wide rushing river and the new bridge that would hopefully breathe life into the lodge come fall. The bridge spanned a distance much wider than the flowing river and even the banks, it had been raised up a good fifteen feet off the ground with large cement pillars, making the bridge even longer. They obviously wanted to prevent it from washing out again.

  The dark clouds chased us as we flew, and they seemed to be gaining on us. We rocked to and fro, and my stomach lurched along with the helicopter. The helicopter bumped and bounced and the red light that told us the pilot needed to talk to us blinked. Jeremy flipped the switch to hear what the pilot had to say.

  “Hey guys, I’m really sorry, I know this hasn’t been a smooth ride, but this storm is coming in faster than they anticipated. While it hasn’t hit Calgary yet, this storm is rushing through two of the counties west of it and causing all kinds of havoc. They’ve issued flash flood warnings for those towns. I’m going to try to hit Calgary from the South in hopes of going around and beating the storm. If I were the two of you, I’d get a hotel room and stay in town tonight. I’ve ordered a car service to pick you up. Would you like me to have them meet you outside the CSIS building?”

  “Yes,” Jeremy glanced at me and then added, “Thank you for arranging that for us, Max.”

  “I feel bad that, for obvious reasons, I won’t be able to return you to the lodge.” He laughed his high pitched, strange laugh.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jeremy said. “Nothing you could do about it, Max, unless you somehow have control of the weather.” Jeremy chuckled.

  “I’d be a millionaire if I did. And I’d probably only fly for my own pleasure, ya know?”

  “Is Calgary directly in the storm’s path, then?”

  “It’s looking like it will be a direct hit.”

  Chapter 4

  I SAT STRAIGHT IN MY seat, my hands clenching and unclenching. It would be okay. We would grab our supplies and get out of town. Jeremy had to be right. There was no reason for us to get more involved than we already were. We were taking the local CSIS agents all the information we had. We had no advantage over them. This case deserved more eyes than four. My stomach quivered, but I wasn’t sure if it had to do with the bumpy ride or not getting involved. A dimness had settled over everything, making it look like twilight even though sundown was still hours off.

  Jeremy put a hand on my knee and it heated immediately, the warmth both calming and exciting at the same time. I turned to him, and he gave me that perfect, comforting smile. I couldn’t smile back; I just wanted to land.

  After a short ten minutes, it appeared that Max had made the right choice. The sky was sunny and clear and the brooding storm clouds were left behind as we continued southeast.

  The scraps of photos from the fireplace and the suite itself, in its disarray, rushed through my mind, over and over again as I tried to make connections with the information I’d learned several years ago when studying Canada during my training at the Bresen Spy Academy, my photographic memory earning its keep today. I hadn’t done a lot of research, but enough to have a light grasp of the area and the problems it faced. Really, it was quite pompous to think that without me they would fail. I didn’t know the area, the people, anything very well. Shoot, I couldn’t even identify the burned pictures. It would take a local to stop these guys. Still, my mind wouldn’t settle.

  I flipped the switch that would cut Max out of our communication, so that I could talk directly to Jeremy.

  “You’ve seen the evidence,” I said. “Who are these people? Why did they build a bomb?”

  “That’s the question of the hour.” He furrowed his brow as if that was all he was going to say on the subject, but then he looked at me and must have seen I was still struggling with motion sickness. “This storm bothering you?”

  “Not so much the storm as what it was doing to the helicopter.”

  He looked out the window and then at his watch. It had only been twenty minutes since we took off and we had another thirty at least until we reached CSIS. “Hmm. Well, let’s look at what we know.” He was going to brainstorm with me to help me get my mind off the formerly spastic helicopter. “There were at least six men that worked on the bomb or bombs. They weren’t doing it just for fun. They have a target or targets which are most likely pictured in the burned pile of papers I have in that bag.” He reached down and grabbed the bag, pulling out the stack of pictures and handing me some.

  Jeremy’s bright smiling face transported me somewhere else, away from the violent and scary interior of the helicopter. Ever since I was a little kid, I feared flying in storms. I’d watched a TV show where a group of people were flying in a plane and a terrible storm made them crash, killing half of the people and leaving the other half deserted on an island with very little promise of survival. It hadn’t been filmed well, but to my young mind, it ma
de a lasting impression, one that left me terrified whenever the plane jumped or a storm raged outside.

  I turned my attention back to the pictures. My stomach and mind calmed as I focused on the pictures, looking for any clues.

  I looked closer at the picture of the bench. On one of the front legs, words were written with a tiny tipped marker. I had excused the letters as just imprinting on the bench itself. It read, 3:00. I shuffled through and found all the colorful benches had the same type of writing of them. All had times on them, but no locations. I turned the pictures over and looked at the sequence of numbers and letters again. Was the bench a meeting spot? If Jeremy was right, there were a lot of those benches in Calgary. How would the terrorists know where to find that exact bench? Did they have to run around looking?

  “You said there were a lot of these unique benches in downtown Calgary.”

  “Yes. Many. Unless things have changed.”

  “I found times written on the legs in each picture. I missed it before thinking it was just part of the decoration.” I handed him one of the bright bench pictures. He looked close and nodded.

  “Good catch. Meeting points you think or locations of bombs?” He high-fived me and then kissed me.

  I looked at the stack of bench pictures. “Let’s hope meeting places. That would be a lot of bombs to disarm. It’s weird. This string of numbers and letters on the back are the same on every bench picture. I still can't decipher any type of code.”

  “Could you hand all those to me? I’d like to compare the backgrounds.” I handed them all to him.

  An idea sprang to my mind that was quickly dashed with the rocking and rolling of the chopper. It rolled so hard I thought for sure it would go all the way over, which meant not only a crash but also the loss of our lives.

  My stomach roiled as the helicopter veered right, and I closed my eyes and again tried to focus on the photos captured in my mind, my attention drawn to the pilot who was speaking rapidly into his headset. I looked out the window and saw a city below us. I pulled out my phone to check for internet now that we were getting closer to Calgary. “Maybe something happened two or three weeks ago that made this group want to build this bomb.”