by Gray Gardner
She knew he was dead when he radioed her from the rooftop that he’d spotted a caravan and had become an uncle, and after a sickening crack had stopped his report mid-sentence. It came up on her laptop screen in front of her from one of the dozens of cameras they’d set up. She’d killed people before, but when one of her own was killed it never sat well.
She fought to get the sound of his last words out of her head. He was an uncle.
“Ugh, how long has it been since you’ve showered, sweetheart?” a black suited agent asked when she climbed onto the elevator.
She pressed the ground floor button and ignored him. She did keep her arms close to her sides, though. Truthfully? If they would tell her what day it was, she could respond.
“They do have a ladies’ locker room now, you know,” another suit agreed, as they stood behind her. She wasn’t very tall so their voices were coming from above her head.
“Do you speak English?” the first one asked slowly.
She quickly turned and glared up at them with her piercing dark blue eyes. She could tell they were FBI right off the bat, mostly from their arrogance but also from the plastic ID badges clipped to their lapels. “I’ve been dodging bullets and angry Colombians and flying in a large, metal tube with propellers for the past seventy-two hours. What the hell have you been doing?”
“Touchy,” the second one said, glancing over at his friend. “Must be her time of the month.”
She had a flashback to high school, and the football guys, and how they all banded together to make the other students feel defective and ostracized. This wasn’t high school, she reminded herself. She tried to bite back any comments that were on the tip of her tongue.
“I’ll show you where the guy’s locker room is, if you want. I’m headed there myself,” the first one snickered.
“FBI idiots,” she grumbled, watching the numbers descend way too slowly. She was beginning to feel irritated and trapped. The bullet ripping through Diaz’s head replayed over and over in her mind.
“What was that?” they asked.
She turned and folded her dirt smeared arms across her chest. “I called you idiots. You’re irresponsible, careless, and most of the time none of you ever know what you’re talking about!”
The two men glanced at each other.
“You’re going to be real sorry if you don’t apologize for that,” the first one sneered.
“Or what?” she asked, holding out her hands. She was feeling combative all of a sudden. Her partner was dead. Her boss wanted to beat her. She was in desperate need of nice smelling personal hygiene products, and all she’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours were some Saltines.
Just give me a reason, she thought. Just give me one good reason.
The blob of gray and black suits milled about in front of the six elevators on the ground floor, and when the one on the right finally had an up arrow that was lit, they all moved forward to wait for it to open. The pack mentality had them all shuffling right, checking their watches, checking their phones, and commenting on how slow the elevators were.
The doors dinged, parted, and briefcases dropped to the floor as everyone stared in disbelief at the scene revealed before their eyes.
Two agents lay face down, piled on top of one another and totally unconscious, while a little girl in dirty clothes and mud streaked skin sat with a very satisfied look on top of the mound. She stood and dusted her hands off as she exited the ten passenger elevator.
She glanced over her shoulder as the crowd parted and stared back and forth between her and the unconscious men.
“Light weights. Three martini lunches are such a bitch,” she smiled, walking through the crowd and out the glass façade in front of the building.
If there was one imperfection in her life, it was her temper. She could never fully control it.
Which was good and bad at the same time.
New Associations
“There are so many other cool things you could have said at that moment.”
Agent George scowled as her two friends nodded across the table on the old wooden deck of the bar in the middle of Georgetown. The night air was crisp enough for them to be in sweaters and jeans, but warm enough for them to be able to sit outside still.
“Like what?” she asked, tossing her newly returned-to-natural dark red hair over her shoulder as the sun set. Her first priority: turn in mounds of paperwork. Priority number two: get hair back to normal.
“Going down?” Elizabeth Darby offered, giving a sensual wink in her usual fun and youthful way. Wisps of her strawberry blond hair fell over her eyes and made her look pretty sexy. She could make a floor length gray wool skirt sexy, though.
“Ellie,” George groaned, not liking that kind of innuendo.
Darby playfully grinned as she twirled her long hair in her fingers.
“Or, you could have just told the truth,” Baylor Burton offered, leaning forward and setting her beer on the rusted metal Corona table top. “Hey, these two douches tried to take me and didn’t realize that I could destroy them with my pinky finger. Anyone else wanna go?”
“Geez, Baylor,” Darby frowned at her always practical friend.
“Hostile, but true,” George nodded, sipping her beer and appreciating the two points of view from her closest friends. “I think I did what I should have, though. They shouldn’t be taken by surprise like that. I mean, we do work in a building full of Feds. They should expect the unexpected.”
“Officially, we don’t work there,” Burton replied, raising her brow.
She was right. The three girls had met and had instantly liked one another, but their situations were all entirely different. Jane George, the oldest, worked for the DEA, which consequently, under the new presidential administration had merged with the ATF which had caused all sorts of issues. Unofficially, though, she and Director Nelson sometimes took their orders from people much higher up than anyone who actually officed in that particular federal building. Baylor Burton, only a year younger, worked for the CIA, but only on a contract basis. She took her orders from Langley, but only when she really felt like it. She loved the control. The youngest, Elizabeth Darby, who’d had so many aliases that no one was really sure what her real name was, worked for a black ops agency that was privately funded, but still liaised on occasion with certain federal agencies.
They’d met by accident. Actually, it was more like a big disaster. Regardless, they’d become friends instantly, and shared and traded knowledge when they could. Jane George was about to get a knowledge bomb dropped on her in the coming days, though she didn’t know it yet.
Come and Take It
“George, I need you in the office this morning!”
“Director Nelson,” George whispered loudly, covering her mouth as she ducked to the side of the wrought iron table and spoke into the phone. “You gave me the week off.”
And she had. With the investigation into Diaz’s death, the pristine paper work turned in early, and the mounting rivalry with the FBI, Nelson had told George to take a little time. Why would she renege on the suggestion?
“Well I need you back at work!” she barked, obviously pacing her office on speaker phone. This couldn’t be anything good. Nelson was level headed, and never paced. She was the type to stare out of the window with her back to you, bringing you to your knees in anticipation of what sort of expression might be on her face.
George sighed, “But, Director, I’m in Texas.”
“Then get on a plane and get your ass over here!”
“Yes ma’am,” she replied, swiping her phone off and sitting up straight at the table. Her parents smiled across at her. Her sweet, hard working parents who ran a corner café and took pleasure in baking pastries and blending coffee.
She had to admit she felt a little excited to get back to work. Was it sad that she loved work so much?
And what could be so important that she couldn’t even finish a mimosa with her old, retired parents? She went stra
ight to the airport and didn’t even retrieve her bag. She had back up supplies at her apartment for just such an occasion.
“The Director of the local FBI isn’t buying the fact that Diaz screwed up,” Nelson loudly greeted George, not even offering a hello.
George stopped one step inside her boss’s office, the midday sun burning through the windows and illuminating the faces of several dark suited people in the room. She’d come straight from the café in Texas to the airport to the DOJ.
She suddenly wished she’d changed out of her holey True Religion jeans and faded brown t-shirt and matching shoes. She placed her hands behind her back as she stood before them, suddenly cursing herself as she realized her shirt had the Lone Star Beer logo painted across the front and on the back had the Come and Take It revolutionary flag printed just above her butt.
“Um, well, Diaz was compromised when…”
“There’s a log of you accessing the satellite phone only hours before Diaz,” a gray haired man interrupted, looking up from his folder in wire bifocals.
“Yes,” George nodded. “But, as protocol dictates, I did so under the blanket of night. Diaz was making the call mid-morning.”
The three men and one woman sitting in front of the director’s desk all checked their folders and glanced at each other. One brave guy spoke.
“Did you engage two agents in a physical dispute in the lobby?”
“Christ, it was an elevator,” she mumbled, looking down as she dug her toe into the carpet. Pens scribbled as another man spoke.
“Your background is interesting, to say the least.”
Everyone snickered as George pressed her lips together and Nelson scowled behind her desk.
“It says here you’re single. Have been for a while.”
George shook her head and held out her hands. She was afraid if she spoke it would come out a lot louder than it should.
“Agent George, we’re all on the same side here. The truth is what we seek. Were you involved with Agent Diaz?”
Her red head snapped up.
“Excuse me?” she growled, stepping forward.
Director Nelson marched around her desk and intercepted her. Her voice was louder than George’s could ever be. “Agents, I can assure you that nothing inappropriate was going on between Agent Diaz and Agent George. She is a dedicated agent and she is only involved in her work, nothing else!”
“So,” the gray haired man said, holding up a phone transcript. “He never told you that he wanted to ‘hump your brains out and father your children?’”
George gasped as she covered her mouth and scowled at the agents. Diaz was the last person on earth she’d ever have sex with. Had he really said that about her? On a line that he knew was being monitored by her colleagues? She tried to say something, protest or make a comment to rectify the accusation, but nothing came out.
Director Nelson grabbed the door handle and swung the door open.
“This meeting is over. When you have something better than hearsay, let me know. Otherwise, don’t ever come in here accusing my agents of misconduct when you clearly have no control over yours! You fucking idiots.”
The other agents quickly left, terribly insulted as Nelson’s rant continued. Agent George rubbed her head as she stood aside. They all passed by her, looking at her Lone Star logo like it was some kind of scarlet letter. The door slammed as the last one left, leaving her in silence with her boss.
To her surprise, though, Director Nelson was sympathetic.
“George, it wasn’t your fault Diaz was killed. He broke procedure,” Nelson sighed, pressing her hand against the door. “No conjecture. That’s the truth.”
She nodded and looked at her director. It seemed like she had more to say. Well, if she wanted to address whether or not there was any inkling of a relationship involving Diaz, she’d better just go on and ask. “Anything else?”
Nelson walked around her desk and sat in her chair, exhaling and tossing the FBI folder into the garbage. “We’ll get on with business. We have an interesting one here. From pretty high up, a friend of the Chief of Intelligence. It’s local, might take a few months, but you’ll have liberties so that you can see your friends and family once in a while. Pretty easy.”
“That’s a change,” she smiled, sitting in the uncomfortable chair across the desk. She suddenly remembered the investigation and impending hearing on Diaz’s death. Shouldn’t she be on desk duty for a while? “Who else is up for it?”
“Just you,” Nelson stated, turning the open folder around and handing it over to her. “You have knowledge and experience with illicit controlled substances, thanks to your student abroad operation, and everyone else is too… well, old.”
“Too old?” George asked, flipping through the pictures of the colonial brick buildings, embellished arches and flying buttresses of the campus. “What, am I supposed to be some young, hip teacher dealing to the kids?”
“No,” she said, raising her brow. “We need you to find the young hip teacher dealing to the kids, or whoever is dealing, and then find the supplier. There was a death last month of a VIP’s kid and the administration wants answers. Kid was found with enough coke and heroin in his system to kill a rhino.”
“All right,” George said, flipping the pages neatly into a pile. “But you know how kids are in these assignments. They don’t like to talk to teachers unless there’s already a trust established. Can I try and recruit someone there and work him?”
Director Nelson cleared her throat. “No, I know, but no. This is fully covert. And I am aware of the fact that you won’t like doing this but—”
“Wait a minute,” she said, setting the folder down and frowning at her superior. Why was she fumbling with her words? She never did that. “Wait a minute. Now, I’ve told you before—these things never work because your cover always gets blown.”
“George.”
“Always!” she exclaimed, giving a nervous laugh. “My friends who work for agencies that are greatly and extensively better funded than we are always get caught! I’m not saying that this is a bad op. I’m just saying that I’m going to get caught and we are going to fail.”
“That’s the same as saying it’s a bad op.”
“Then you understand why I’m hesitant,” she shrugged, crossing her legs and leaning back, trying to seem calm.
“George,” the director sighed, leaning forward. “We-we really need a victory here. And I know you’re tired and I know what your friends from black ops said, but if I could send someone else I would. There isn’t anyone else!”
George hated seeing her director beg. It’s not that she wasn’t up for the assignment. She just really hated getting caught. It usually led to colossal misunderstandings, then several calls to the higher ups, legal hearings, and a threat to her job and her future. Well, never her personally, but it had happened to both Burton and Darby. She wanted her own record as squeaky clean as it had always been.
“Besides,” Nelson added with a smirk. “You don’t ever get caught.”
“That’s because I evade at all costs,” she sighed, thinking about Diaz. “All costs.”
“Quit thinking about that moron. It wasn’t your fault. You could really use a cushy assignment like this one anyway, George. Private school, all the amenities of the rich, and you’ll be out in three, four months tops. I promise. Just say yes. We really, really need this victory in our pocket. You need a win, and you’ll get to do a little field work.”
She groaned, and exhaled loudly. She had a feeling about this one. It meandered in the pit of her stomach as she stood and closed the folder, tucking it under her arm. “Conditions. I don’t ever have to speak to those FBI thugs again. And I get to take the new black, hybrid Tahoe, or there’s no deal.”
The Hybrid drove like a dream as she made her way across the Virginia highway and turned off at the brick-arched entrance of the school. She was less than an hour away from DC, without traffic, so she hoped she would be meeting wi
th her friends frequently to hang out and get advice. They had warned her as she hinted at the objective of the assignment and they figured it out.
“Dude,” Darby began, holding her friend’s shoulders. “Do not, under any circumstances, disobey the gaw-damned faculty or administration.”
“I’m going to be smoking out a drug dealer and the supplier.” She frowned. “It’ll be nothing but disobeying.”
“Listen to Darby,” Burton agreed, widening her eyes. “Trust us on this one.”
George stared at them as she chewed furiously on her nicotine gum. Had this been a mistake? She hated ops where kids were involved. Kids these days were smarter than a lot of adults she knew. And way less trusting. They’d sniff her out.
“Just do everything you’re told,” Burton nodded.
“I already do that,” George asserted.
“Then you’ll be great!” Darby grinned, slapping her arm. She glanced back at Burton, who relaxed her furrowed brow and gave her friend a smile. They were worried.
“Great,” Burton agreed, trying to be supportive.
“Great,” George muttered, continuing to load her car. For successful clandestine agents she could sure tell when they were lying. She suspected it had something to do with the corporal punishment aspects of all of their war stories from the past. With her luck, probably.
The school looked awfully imposing as she pulled in and parked amongst the Mercedes and Beemers. What was she doing? She’d been to high school once and it was certainly not an experience she’d ever want to repeat. And besides, who in the hell would believe that she was actually sixteen?