by Brian Parker
Out of habit, he walked over to check for a pulse. Nothing. Given the condition of the body, he hadn’t expected there to be one, but it was still his responsibility to check. Sirens blared from both directions as his fellow officers sped toward one of their own in trouble and he walked stiffly back towards his car for a sheet to cover the driver’s body.
One by one the stopped cars moved towards the side of the road to let other emergency vehicles through to the scene of the accident. It would be a nightmare trying to get the traffic sorted out once they finally got the semi moved. Before long, ten police cars were blocking both north- and southbound traffic on either side of the concrete barriers.
An officer that he didn’t recognize from far away came running towards him. “Jason, are you okay?”
His vision began to blur but he recognized the new guy’s stride as he got closer… What was his name? he asked himself through the fog that descended upon his vision. “Yeah, kid. I’m…”
The officer didn’t finish his sentence. None of the officers standing around the scene said anything after Jason collapsed. As one they pulled their service revolvers and began shooting into the vehicles of the bystanders who couldn’t escape from the carnage.
TWENTY-FOUR
The group was met by a man in an old-school four wheel drive Jeep Wagoneer that had at least a four-inch lift above its huge tires. “How are you guys doing?” he asked enthusiastically as he pulled up.
“We’re doing well, Greg. How was the trip?” Dave answered for everyone.
“The roads are only partially covered, so it’s okay,” the driver answered back as he stepped down from the vehicle to greet everyone. He was a typical everyman. His features were forgettable and his voice was even and boring. He’d have blended into any setting, but behind his well-trimmed beard he seemed especially suited for the cold Canadian environment.
After he shook everyone’s hand Greg said, “Okay, so which one of you is the one who’s going to save America?”
Juan pointed at Reagan and she blanched. It was a good thing that she wore a facemask, otherwise everyone would have seen her for the fraud that she felt like she was. Greg walked back to her and looked her up and down in the frumpy ski clothing. “Are you ready for this?” he asked as he leaned in close to her ear.
“I… I’m just going to talk to my sister. I’m going to make her stop doing all these terrible things.”
“Sister, eh? Must have made for one hell of family vacation every year.”
“I didn’t grow up with her. I haven’t ever even met her before,” she answered truthfully.
“Great, so you won’t have any problems when I kill her then.”
Jimmie stepped over and said, “I’m sorry, Greg. Who are you exactly?”
“I’m Greg, your friendly wilderness guide!” he replied with wide outstretched arms indicating the forest around them.
Juan slid between the two men and said, “Thank you for meeting us out here, Greg. It was getting cold. We’re ready to move on to the second stage.”
“We don’t need the second stage,” the newcomer answered. “We figured out where she either lives or works, probably both. I can pull up right to the front door and let you out.”
“That’s awesome! What changed between last night and today?” Jimmie asked.
He regarded the younger man for a moment and replied, “Her habits have changed over the past week. Prior to Christmas she had a fairly set pattern, but any time any of our guys got close to her she made them somehow and always gave us the slip, oftentimes the officer would call from miles outside of the city with no recollection of how they got there. Happened to me before, it’s pretty freaky.
“After Christmas she disappeared for six days, but when she turned back up, she started going to different cafes and using the city’s light rail system, something we’ve never seen her do before. I even sat next to her yesterday on the train and she had no clue that I was an American. Frankly, we’re puzzled about what it means, but it has made our job easier.”
“I was sick as hell between Christmas and New Year’s,” Reagan muttered.
“Huh? What was that?” Greg asked.
“I was sick at the same time she disappeared.”
He placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head. “Big deal. People get sick all the time.”
“Paige Greene is my twin sister,” Reagan rebutted.
“Oh, now this just got interesting!” Greg said as he clapped his hands closed and began rubbing them together.
*****
The group squeezed into Greg’s Jeep for the journey northward towards Calgary. Less than an hour from the city Agent Quintana got a phone call. Reagan thought it was funny that he straightened up and sat bolt upright in the passenger seat while he talked. She nudged Jimmie to share in the fun.
“He must be talking to his boss or something,” she whispered.
“Yes, I’m with her, sir,” he said a little louder than he’d been speaking a moment before. “Of course, sir.”
He tapped the face of his cell phone a few times and then said loudly, “You’re on speaker now, Mr. President.”
“Miss Lockhart, can you hear me?” a southern drawl asked through the phone’s miniscule speakers.
Reagan sat up so quickly that her head actually hit the Jeep’s low ceiling. “Ow! I mean, yes Mr. President, I can hear you, sir.”
“How are you this lovely morning?”
She considered saying that her feet hurt, her legs ached, that she still hadn’t fully recovered from the headaches and that she’d had her first real kiss last night so she also felt amazing, but she settled for, “I’m good, Mr. President… sir.”
“Calm down a little bit, darlin’! You don’t have to say ‘sir’ after every sentence.”
“Okay…”
“Miss Lockhart, I want you to know that what you’re doing is a selfless thing. Your sister has to be stopped. I… I don’t want to alarm you about what’s happened here in the U.S. today, but you need to know what kind of person that you’re dealing with up there.”
Her mind flashed towards Washington, D.C. and somehow she saw Detective Simms shooting at a schoolyard. Officer Steve, the man who’d dutifully followed her for an entire week, lay dead in an alley with his head bashed in, all around him residents of the city cried and held loved ones that he’d shot. Innocent civilians battled for their lives against police officers all across her hometown.
She panicked and her vision shot her to the hotel where her family still stayed since her episode had put her mother’s plan to return home on hold. Heather and Ansley Lockhart lay huddled together on the floor between the beds in the dark. They were alright for now.
“I think I already know, Mr. President,” Reagan replied.
“What do you know?” Greg asked.
“Who was that? Who else is on the line?” the president demanded.
“Greg Gibson, sir. I’m with the Agency, responsible for getting Miss Lockhart to the target.”
“Sir, we’ve got a few others in the vehicle,” Juan said. “Jimmie Rollins, the cop I briefed you about earlier, and two other federal agents from the Bureau.”
“Rollins. How are you feeling, son?”
“I’m okay, sir.”
“Jimmie, do you love your country?”
“More than life itself, sir.”
“Then I need you to hand over any weapons that you may have to the agents in the car. All weapons, do I make myself clear?”
“Uh… Yes, sir,” he replied and handed the pistol over to Janice and his asp baton to Dave. “All done, sir. I don’t have any weapons.”
“Okay, that may seem like a strange request, but there’s a reason for it. Miss Lockhart, you said that you knew the latest event that started this morning. Can you please tell everyone what you think is happening in America right now?”
“The police are murdering innocent civilians,” she replied distantly.
“That’s right
. It’s not just one or two cities affected like before. It’s happening in almost every major U.S. city. The police are going crazy and we don’t even have the military forces to deploy in order to help stop them. Some states have National Guard units who are fighting with the police forces, but in most cases it’s the average civilians who are trying to put a stop to their rampage. It’s total war and the death toll is horrendous. Miss Lockhart… Reagan, you have to stop your sister. If you don’t, this will be the end of our country.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. President.”
“I need you to do better than that, Reagan. You must stop her and put an end to the… the spells or whatever they are,” the president replied firmly.
“Yes, sir. I’ll stop her,” Reagan answered.
“Good. Godspeed, and good luck. We’re all counting on you.”
The phone line clicked off and everyone sat in silence until Greg finally spoke up. “That’s a green light from the President of the United States to go ahead with the mission.”
Reagan stared hard at the agent’s profile. He must have felt the piercing daggers of her gaze because he adjusted the rearview mirror to stare right back at her. “You don’t like me, do you?” he asked.
She thought about it for a moment. All her life she’d taken the easy way, tried to get along with everyone and appease those who were bigger and stronger than she was. She was done with that way of living. “No, Greg. I don’t like you at all,” she hissed. “The first words you spoke to me were to ask me if I was cool with you killing my twin sister.”
“Alright, we got us a hellcat in the car. Bet that fires you up, don’t it, Jimmie-boy?”
The ex-cop started to say something and Reagan slapped a hand across his chest. “Let me tell you something,” she replied. “I’m going to take care of Paige. I’ll put a stop to all of this, one way or another, but you need to stay the hell away from her. Do you hear me?”
Greg shrugged and said, “Look, we’re all in this together. We’re on the same side. You have your methods and I have mine. If I get the chance, I’m ending this once and for all.”
Reagan started to say something else but Jimmie’s restraining hand on her leg kept her in check. She’d have to deal with the man from the Agency when the time came. For now, the group needed him to get to Calgary and since he hadn’t actually told anyone where Paige was located, they’d need him in the city as well.
She couldn’t quite restrain herself so she said, “I’ll be watching my back around you.”
“Oh, believe me. I’ve seen the video of what you did at the Thai restaurant. I’ll keep an extra-close eye on you as well.”
Reagan waved off Jimmie’s questioning glance. He didn’t know about what she’d done and she couldn’t deal with it right now. They were ten minutes away from the city and she had to figure out a way to stop her sister that didn’t involve killing her.
TWENTY-FIVE
“You think that you can use that voice of yours to turn us invisible?” Greg asked as they drove slowly by the 25-story skyscraper along 6th Street Southeast. The only marking on the entire building was a simple sign painted on the glass doors that said, “CORPORATE OFFICES, THE COLLECTIVE PROTOCOL.”
“It’s not my voice. It’s my mind,” Reagan answered the driver.
“Sorry, I don’t have time to explain,” she told Jimmie with a quick sidelong glance. “I can do things with my mind. I don’t know what’s happening, but I can feel my powers getting stronger, like they finally woke up and now they’re ready to flex their muscles.”
“I wondered why Juan decided to bring you along,” Jimmie responded.
“Okay, enough background info. Can you do it or not?” Greg demanded from the driver’s seat.
She searched her feelings and dissected her thoughts to lay open the truth about her broadening powers until she found her answer. The truth hit her like a punch in the gut, hard and fast. She didn’t know how she knew the answers, but she did. “Yes, I can hide us from the eyes of the guards. If there are security cameras, I can’t do anything about those.”
“Fair enough,” Greg replied. “That’s the same as your sister—and that’s how we found her.”
“So, what is this ‘Collective Protocol’?” Janice asked.
“What you see right there is all we can find,” Greg answered. “If I was to guess, I’d say that they needed a name to keep the public mollified and they made something up.”
“I don’t think so,” Reagan answered.
“Surprise, surprise. You disagree with me yet again,” the agent snapped.
“Think about it. They’ve chosen the words carefully. We believe that Paige is using her powers to control the minds of American citizens. The word ‘collective’ means a group that is working for a common goal. ‘Protocol’ is a procedure or a set way of doing things. I think that this group is following a pre-established set of rules or a timeline to systematically collapse the American society.”
“I’m with Reagan,” Jimmie added. “If they’d tried to do all of these things at once, the international community would likely have stepped in to help; but this has been a series of problems that have built upon one another until we don’t trust anyone anymore because they could flip out and begin killing those around them at any moment. This has been carefully planned and thought through.”
Greg scratched his neck where his beard comingled with the hair sprouting from his chest. “Hmpf. Maybe you’re on to something,” he admitted. “Do you think they started the war between Russia and China?”
“I don’t know that she has that kind of reach, but—”
“That’s where the transmitter pod comes in I bet. It extends her range somehow,” Agent Quintana cut in.
“I think you’re right, Juan,” Reagan nodded. “It has to be some type of signal booster or a repeater, like a cell phone tower or something.”
“That’s what we think; we just can’t figure it out. The technology is similar to things that we have, but different enough that we can’t really discern its use,” Juan stated. Then he turned towards the driver and asked, “Do we have blueprints for the building?”
“Nope. We searched everything; public, private and secure networks. There’s no mention of this building at all. The only thing we can say for sure is that the Canadian government has owned the land since the mid-1800s. Before this building popped up last year there was a bus station on this block, but they tore it down and moved it further south.”
“What about satellite imagery of the site throughout construction?” Dave asked. Reagan nodded her head; that was a good question.
“We don’t usually spy on our neighbors to the north, Dave,” he replied curtly.
“Bullshit. I know we do,” Dave countered. “My field site is a perfect example of an undercover response team right near the border. The Agency missed it, didn’t they?”
“Okay, we missed it,” Greg admitted once again. “The imagery that we have shows giant construction sheeting over the top of the structure after the frame was erected. Analysts didn’t think anything of it because construction sites routinely use the sheeting like a giant umbrella so they can work through in all types of weather. And, it’s the Canadians… Until all of this, we thought they were probably our closest or second-closest allies immediately behind the Brits.”
“We still don’t know if the Canadian government is behind this,” Juan cautioned once more. “They could be pawns for Reagan’s sister, just like everyone else has been. Our main goal is to neutralize Paige Greene and put a stop to the events happening in the U.S. We’ll let the diplomats and the president decide if their government is at fault.”
The group rode in silence towards a parking lot a few blocks away. They pulled up beside a van and four rough-looking men got out. It didn’t look like any of them had any weapons, but Reagan suspected that each of them could do enough damage with their bare hands to not need one.
“Ladies and gentlemen, these men are o
ur support team,” Greg said and indicated each man as he named them off. “This is Scott, Joe, Ryan and the team’s intelligence agent, Thom. Are we set to go?”
“Yessir,” Thom answered. “Hold on one second while I set up the sound distortion shield.” The agent reached inside the van and pressed a small button beside the door. A low humming noise emanated from the van, indicating that the contraption was working.
“There,” Thom said. “All of this conversation will be unintelligible beyond ten feet from the van.”
Reagan placed her hand hesitantly against the vehicle’s body, expecting the entire thing to be shaking, but besides the humming noise, there was no indication that anything was out of the ordinary.
She refocused on the conversation. Thom was speaking, “Besides internal security that has never left the facility and that we’ve never seen, we believe there are only fifteen people that work in the building.”
“Wait. What?” Juan asked incredulously. “That building is massive, it’s gotta be over twenty floors.”
“Twenty-five,” Thom stated. “Plus, we know that they built at least one level below ground because of all the covered dump-trucks that went in and out of the parking structure after the building was covered from satellite view.”
Juan looked over to Greg who stared towards the river. “We don’t spy on our allies, huh?”
“Eh…” Greg replied as he wobbled his outstretched hand, palm down and fingers splayed. “The covered facility on government land without any paperwork piqued our interest.”
“You’ve got to be honest with us,” Juan fumed. “What else do we know about this facility or the people inside?”
Greg sighed and said, “They’ve got some heavy-hitters in the Canadian government that come and go about every two weeks, plus the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is here often—like once a week. He’s either got a mistress or he’s working on something very important inside that building. Maybe both.”