Class Fives: Origins

by Jon H. Thompson

“Dr. Montgomery? It’s Vernon.”

  “Ah, yes,” Montgomery said pleasantly, “I apologize for taking so long to answer, I was momentarily indisposed.”

  “That’s okay, Doctor. Listen I just heard about something and wanted to make sure you knew as soon as possible.”

  “Heard about what, dear boy?”

  “Well, Doctor…” Vernon sighed, then steeled himself and plunged in.

  It took no more than a minute to disclose everything he and Marvin had discussed. The Deep Look probe, what it had discovered, and the consequences of Karillan’s initial failure.

  “So that’s it,” he concluded. “I think we should back off for a while, until we can rerun the calculations and make sure we’re not going to blow up the whole world or something.”

  There was an icy pause on the line.

  “Doctor?” Vernon ventured cautiously.

  “Yes,” the voice said simply, thoughtfully. “I’m here.”

  Vernon hesitated.

  “Did you understand what I said, Doctor? “

  “Yes,” Montgomery replied, coolly. “I understand.”

  “So we can’t proceed, then, right? We have to at least find some way to control all the variables first. And that’s going to take a while.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Montgomery mused quietly. “All right. Why don’t you come see me? We can go over it together.”

  Vernon felt a wave of relief.

  “Okay,” he said, sighing, “And it’ll be nice to finally meet you. So, where are you?”

  He heard Montgomery chuckle.

  “Believe it or not, I’m currently residing in a genuine piece of human history.”

  White sat behind the wheel, his gaze fixed down the street toward the plain, unassuming little house in the middle of the quiet suburban neighborhood.

  Jones, beside him in the passenger’s seat, also stared the twenty or so yards toward the cozy little building.

  “How long?” White asked, flatly.

  Jones did not respond, which itself told White there would be no deadline to this surveillance. They would remain here, observing the structure and making note of any movement they happened to observe for the balance of the day, and perhaps tomorrow. Unless some additional information arose that necessitated their presence elsewhere, or they learned that the subject, one Roger Malloy, freelance web page designer and computer programmer, needed to be confronted directly, they might be here the rest of the week. Only if they managed to actually observe some behavior that verified their suspicions would they consider directly approaching him.

  Neither bothered to engage in any small talk. Such was unnecessary to their fulfillment of their jobs, which, for the first time, might at last bear fruit.

  Both men had been recruited into the clandestine organization they now worked for from other jobs related to the security of the United States. White had come over from the Operations Directorate of Central Intelligence, where he had managed to accomplish a number of covert successes so adroitly that almost no one beside his former supervisor was even aware of his involvement in them. A few had been terminations done so quietly that only one was even suspected of involving foul play, the others recorded as unusual fatal accidents. Jones had transferred from another department of Homeland Security where he had functioned as an analyst, poring over the mountains of seemingly disconnected and meaningless incoming data pulled from phone lines and computer servers across the globe, and had pieced out several potential threats long before they had reached a point where they might pose a genuine risk to the safety and security of the nation.

  Combined, their individual talents made them a formidable, independent unit, able to discover, investigate and respond to any sort of threat that might rear its head. Their current assignment, on which the pair had been working for almost a year now, was nothing short of finding potential dangers that no one else in the vast machinery of government would even be allowed to treat as remotely possible. Dangers that sprang from the rapid leaps and bounds current scientific research had been making in the past few decades.

  There had been a time, they both had been told, when a single, major discovery of some new principle of nature took decades of research, collaboration with dozens, if not hundreds, of peers, and endless hours of discussion, exploration, argument and, finally, the perfection of some equation to capture the hidden essence of what had been sought. Then there had to be experimentation, the gathering or manufacturing of resources, involving large numbers of additional people. All of this left a long, thick trail that could, with the least effort, lead back to the origin of the threat.

  Now, with the vast advancements in communications and the unregulated flow of information between scientific minds all over the world, one dedicated researcher with an internet connection could pull whatever background data he required and remain almost totally anonymous. Combined with the incredible leaps of understanding that were recently spewing from the disciplines of physics, biology and the other sciences, it was now possible for some lone individual to make a major breakthrough without anyone else being aware of it, and even to advance to the experimental stage without having to deal with any of the large collection of checks and controls that had once reined them in when such advances required grants and other funding. A single scientific mind with independent means could quite easily create something that might pose a deadly threat, and spring it upon the world without the hint of a whisper before it literally blew up in their face, perhaps taking part of the planet with them.

  White's and Jones’s jobs were to simply be aware that such was now, for the first time in human history, possible, and to actively seek the faintest whiff that it might be out in the world somewhere. This current assignment had sprung up as a possibility related to something partway down the long list of things they were dedicated to watch for – human anomalies. In a world where gene splicing, artificial insemination, stem cell cloning and dozens of other new biological sciences were so commonplace as to occur well beneath anyone’s notice, it was now possible to generate human beings capable of many things nature had never intended for them. The data recently recorded covertly from Los Angeles police department computer servers about that unusual highway accident had raised a screaming red flag when they had noticed it. It contained too much that was unexplained, too much that stuck out as puzzling. It had drawn their attention.

  And, for the first time since they had begun working together, it was not falling neatly into a perfectly mundane explanation that had merely been overlooked by sloppy investigation, or someone’s attempt to manipulate facts for some other personal agenda. This time it remained unaccounted for, and thus required even closer examination. Perhaps even action. They were, they both were aware, authorized for that as well, up to and including the complete and permanent disappearance of someone, as if they had never even existed.

  For the moment they merely sat, side by side in the front seat of the long, black car, silently watching the house down the block, and waiting for anything unusual to reveal itself.

  Roger stood back from the large bay window, certain he was deep enough in the shadows of the darkened living room that he couldn’t be clearly seen from beyond the glass, and stared, unblinking, at the long black car parked partway down the block. He’d noticed it earlier in the day, and then again over an hour later, and once more just now. Of course this was a normally quiet, residential street where people tended to park their vehicles along the curb, leaving them unmoved for days on end. He wouldn’t have even thought about it if he hadn’t noticed the two figures seated in it the first time he spotted it. And the second. And again just now.

  He could only think of one reason a pair of people would spend hours sitting in a car parked on a street where they normally didn’t belong; and he was deliberately taking long, slow, deep breaths to keep from letting his anger build to a point where bad things would surely happen, whether he wanted them to or not.

  Someone on the
block was under surveillance, and he was certain there was no one else within the sightlines of the car that would warrant such attention. He’d been very careful about learning whatever he could that concerned the neighborhood and his potential neighbors before he’d even bought the house. He’d picked it deliberately because it was a quiet, peaceful place where everyone seemed to mind their own business, respected each other’s privacy. His neighbors were bland, ordinary people, middle class and self-reliant. None of them, that he could find, would even come under the notice of the authorities. It was the kind of street where trouble-seekers would die of boredom before anything so much as tickled their awareness as being out of place.

  And yet there they sat, two men, he was virtually certain, in dark suits in a dark car, watching.

  He suddenly realized his right hand, down at his side, was unconsciously curling into a tight fist and slowly opening, as if it might be building itself up to something. That was all he needed right now, he told himself: a distraction that might easily wind up with him thoughtlessly reaching for a glass in the kitchen and accidentally tearing the cabinet out of the wall.

  Enough, he told himself, turning from the window and moving to pick up the phone.

  The cell in his shirt pocket emitted a sharp, electronic noise and Dan dug it out, flipping it open and raising it to his ear.

  “Sinski,” he said, his attention still directed to where Jim was standing on the other side of the small sports car they’d pulled over, leaning down to explain to the agitated driver why he would soon have to write a rather large check to the Superior Court of the county of Los Angeles, and maybe even take a series of rather dull safe driving classes.

  “Are you having me watched?” the voice on the other end said flatly, as if struggling to stay low and even.

  “What?” Dan said, confused. “Watch who? Who is this?”

  “Roger. Roger Malloy,” the voice responded, the tension burning off it through the phone.

  “Roger?”

  Dan was stunned. He hadn’t expected Roger would actually ever call him. And as much as Dan had wanted to see him again, he couldn’t come up with a logical excuse that wouldn’t have caused the other man to become suspicious about his motives.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Roger,” he said honestly. “In fact, I’ve never mentioned your name to anyone. As far as they know you were just some anonymous witness who managed to get away from me after another highway wreck, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t drop my name with your superior, anything like that?”

  “No,” Dan responded, emphatically, “Never. Hell, I never even wrote it down anywhere.”

  “So who would be sitting in a car outside, staring at my house all damn day?”

  Dan paused, considering this.

  “What do they look like?” he finally said, dropping instinctively into that place where his mind set itself to take disconnected bits and pieces of information and try to cram them all together into some halfway sensible whole.

  “I don’t know,” Roger replied, now feeling a tiny bit mollified. “I can’t make out any detail. Just two guys, one looks taller and older, the other shorter and younger, wearing dark suits, sitting in a big, black car and staring at my house.”

  “Can you get me the license number of the car?”

  “No, I can’t see it from here.”

  Like a bolt, his own words caused Dan’s mind to shoot up a glowing, angry red alert. License number. The one he wrote down after his talk with this now highly displeased man on the other end of the phone. He’d run the plate. Nothing unusual. Just a standard address and owner name check. But that had required giving the number to one of the information support people to pull what he wanted out of the computer systems. Someone who had access to those systems, or the log that recorded every transaction they performed, including the name of the requesting officer.

  “Ok,” he said crisply, “Stay put. Don’t move. Don’t go out. I’m on my way over.”

  “I can go introduce myself to them,” he heard Roger reply and there was a very disturbing sense of a dark, threatening smile on the lips that said the words.

  “No,” Dan interrupted quickly, “Please, don’t do anything. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

  Roger didn’t respond for a long moment, then simply muttered, “Okay,” and the line clicked off.

  Dan flipped the phone closed and stepped around the rear of the sports car, catching Jim’s attention.

  “Forget it,” he said sharply, already digging the keys out of his pocket. “Make it a warning and let’s get moving.”

  Jim raised his head from the window and stared at him, his expression surprised and perplexed.

  “What?”

  “Something’s up,” Dan snapped back, yanking open the driver’s door to the cruiser parked behind the sports car and dropping into the seat.

  Jim hesitated, then flipped his ticket book closed sharply and bent to say a few more words to the now-confused driver of the sports car.

  He straightened and stepped closer to the door of the tiny car, allowing Dan to ease the cruiser away from the curb and stop right beside where Jim now stood. Jim pulled open the door and dropped into the passenger’s seat.

  The cruiser’s lights snapped to life and a moment later Dan pulled into the flow of now stopped traffic, gunning the engine and picking up speed.

  “What the Hell is going on?” Jim asked, sliding his ticket book into the flat pocket on the door.

  “Remember our guy? ‘Mr. I-Crush-Handcuffs-Like-They-Were-Made-of-Cotton’?”

  “Yeah,” Jim replied slowly, feeling a faint itch begin at the back of his neck.

  “Somebody’s got a stake-out on him.”

  “What the Hell for?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s pissed.”

  Jim’s face screwed up, sourly.

  “So what?”

  Dan shot him a bemused, annoyed look.

  “So what? A guy who tosses around tanker trucks, and carries around SUV’s, and can squash a pair of handcuffs like nothing, and on top of which may be completely invulnerable… So what if that guy is pissed? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Jim stared at him dumbly, then his mind instinctively summoned up the proper procedures governing the application of force for any predictable circumstances, and he quickly realized how totally meaningless they would be for this.

  “Oh,” he said, finally.

  “Yeah,” Dan responded and eased his foot down on the accelerator.

  After a moment Jim leaned down and flipped on the siren.

  Fifteen minutes later Dan killed the siren as he turned into the neighborhood, and shut down the lights before he swung onto the street where Roger lived.

  Both officers scanned the vehicles that lined both sides of the quiet roadway.

  “There,” Jim said, pointing toward where the long, black car was nestled against the curb some distance ahead.

  Dan merely nodded and eased on the brake, pulling the forward progress of the cruiser down to a cautious crawl.

  “How do you want to handle it?” Jim asked, feeling the edges of that tension he always got when they approached a potentially hazardous situation.

  “Let me talk to them. Stay in the car.”

  Jim responded with a nod, his hand sliding down to hook his thumb onto the butt of the pistol clipped to his belt.

  Dan eased the cruiser toward the curb and came to a stop opposite an open driveway a few yards back from where the rear of the black car was jutting.

  He shut down the engine and opened the door, sliding out and pushing it closed, then stepped away, taking even, measured steps toward the other vehicle.

  As he reached it and approached the driver’s door the smoky glass of the window slid down.

  Dan stepped up and peered inside.

  “Good afternoon,” he began, then stopped suddenly as he recognized the driver. It was that guy, White, from the other day at
the precinct.

  White didn’t bother to pull his gaze away from where Roger’s house sat a little way up the block.

  “Good afternoon, Officer Sinski”, he said flatly.

  Dan stared at him for a long moment, confused.

  “You’re… White, aren’t you? And you,” he added, bending down to glance at the passenger, “Are Jones.”

  Neither man bothered to respond or give him the least portion of their attention.

  “Can I ask what you gentlemen are doing here?” Dan said, reasonably.

  “Surveillance.”

  “Okay,” Dan responded cautiously. “And what are you surveilling?”

  For the first time White’s head turned and he looked up at where Dan stood beside the car, regarding him.

  “Roger Malloy,” he said, almost mechanically.

  “What for?”

  White turned his attention back to the house.

  “You did an ownership search on his vehicle the same day as the traffic incident, but never reported it. The timing of the search request in relation to the incident tended to indicate a connection, which you were reluctant to reveal for reasons unknown. That was against your departmental policy and may even constitute a felony withholding of evidence. It was determined further information was required.”

  Dan felt a creeping uneasiness flicker around him and he tossed a quick glance to where Jim remained seated in the cruiser, but now leaning forward, as if ready to move quickly if needed.

  “I see,” Dan said with a sigh, turning his attention back to White. “Well, if you’re curious, why don’t you ask me what you think I’m withholding from you and maybe we can settle this quietly?”

  “Not necessary,” White responded, his eyes still riveted on the house.

  Dan waited for some kind of clarification, but none came.

  “Look, fellas,” he said at last, hoping he sounded reasonable, “Unless you have reason to believe that Mr. Malloy is engaging in some questionable activity, then I don’t see any probable cause for you to even be here. So, do you have any probable cause?”

  White turned to regard him again.