“We have the north staircase, we have the second floor,” another one updated.
Damn how many people do they have on this girl? West stairs it is then.
Catherine’s steps increased as she was able to slowly carry her own weight. They entered the west staircase and headed down toward the ground floor. Xander heard a door open at the bottom of the staircase.
“West staircase approaching third floor,” the voice updated in his ear. Xander was descending toward the second floor, when immediately he turned around and silently climbed back up the stairs with Catherine. He was calm and direct in his movement, able to picture the entire US Marshal force throughout the layout of the hospital grounds. His internal radar, alerted him as the steps from below grew closer. The agents climbed each flight quicker than they could. After reaching the third floor they rushed to the stairwell leading to the fourth floor and turned the corner just in time. He dropped flat on his back with Catherine against the stairs for cover, his hand covering her mouth. Footsteps approached but then ducked into the third-floor hallway.
“Let’s go!” he whispered to her.
As he descended to the second floor, he heard another update from the comm channel.
“Second floor clear, heading up east staircase.” Xander turned into the second-floor ward and walked the hall to the other side of the building. Having been cleared, he knew there were no marshals there and he could cross the building unseen. The hospital staff was alarmed but more so confused as to why a doctor was helping a patient walk through the hallways. After reaching the east stairwell, he descended to the ground floor, exiting through the side door.
There, Mickey’s A/C Repair Van was waiting. They hopped in and the Spartans sped up 24th St NW toward Tobias’s warehouse. Seamus radioed back to home base.
“Extraction complete”
Chapter 14
Broadcast News Association
Washington, DC
3:30AM
Porter Nash paced through the sparce bullpen of the Broadcast News Association with a pile of notes shoved under his arm. His other hand steadied the bicycle that served as his only mode of transit. A five o’clock shadow had budded up and down his neck. His pants were wrinkled – his shirt stained. A lose tie hung low from his unbuttoned collar and his tweed jacket’s lapel was folded under. At first sight, anyone could tell he was in the middle of another late night of investigative journalism
BNA was a cable news network that once held a command of the ratings charts, but in recent years their ratings had tail-spun. A Canadian-born entrepreneur named Lukas Zucker had resurrected the news station from its ashes. Known for his ever-present management, his office stood atop a flight of stairs looking down on the bullpen. He rarely spoke to anyone but delegated through his close assistants and kept the pressure on the producers necessary to create ratings-worthy TV. Zucker had taken measures to ensure it leaned left and kept the attention of its viewers. He loosened the fact checking procedures of the station, once arrogantly stating ‘It’s true if we say it is’. He dedicated four hours of programming a week to hot button social debates. BNA had become a regime for ratings and Zucker cared far less for news journalism as he did news entertainment.
The news agency never slept, but at this hour there were few souls apart from the cleaning crew roaming the office. Porter Nash noticed the glob of ketchup on his lapel from his usual late-night diner snack from which he was just returning. He wiped the dollop off and then lifted his tired eyes to a beautiful professional woman, leaning on her office doorframe.
“Hey Rachel.” Porter pushed his bicycle past his producer.
“Porter, step into my office when you get a minute,” she ordered casually, looking her most struggling journalist up and down. His features had aged quickly – there was a slight sag to his skin off his high cheekbones and an ever-present exhaustion behind his hazel eyes. After years of struggling with thinning hair through college, he eventually shaved his head bald, surrendering to his premature aging.
Porter nodded and continued through the bullpen until he arrived at his cluttered desk. Crumbled pieces of notebook paper littered the space beneath it, while random notes, scrawled out on post-its stuck to every surface before him. He leaned his bicycle up against his file cabinet and flopped the stack of files under his arm down on the only clear spot on his desk. After looking over his workstation he saw one foreign object – a note left for him on his chair. Raising the note to the light, he made out its words.
The Four Missing Scientists All Attended a Conference at The WHO Called: “Biological Advancements in the Field of Infectious Disease.” Two Months Prior To Their Disappearance.
Porter had known this already, but welcomed the thought that his assistant was digging for information to help him out. He balled up the note and shot it like a basketball over to the trashcan, full of all the other trashed ideas on the subject.
He sighed deeply and trudged toward his producer’s office. Before he reached the office, his colleague in the neighboring cubicle stumbled up to him, collecting his laptop from his desk.
“Why coooo…dn’t you meettttt… Usssss for drinks! McFadden’s was soooo fun.” Porter feigned a grin at his colleague’s apparent drunkenness.
“Working…” Porter responded short.
“Oh, I seeeee h…how it isssss…” His buddy’s drunken antics motivated him to seek solitude.
“It’s nothing personal, I’m just stuck on this story,” Porter commiserated.
“Welcome to journalism!” His colleague had said it so much that it came out slur-free. He stumbled away, leaving Porter to his desk of crumbled papers. After glancing over everything, he walked on from the desk and turned the corner to enter his producer, Rachel Norton’s, office. She looked up from a first draft of a story and pulled her reading glasses down and off the tip of her nose.
“Porter, come in…” He obliged and plopped down in a seat in the office.
“What can I do for you, Rachel?” He asked with as much charm as he could muster. Despite being his boss, they were only a couple of years apart. Rachel knew that Porter wanted a shot at being in front of the camera rather than behind, but his hunt for the story was better than anyone else’s. He had broken story after story and was well respected by both Rachel and Zucker, but his current story had stalled out for too long.
“You could start by giving me the story on the missing scientists. Something… anything,” she responded curtly, cutting through the crap.
“I have nothing,” he responded, defeated.
“You’re an investigative journalist – your job is to find something,” she reminded him.
“Every lead has been a dead end. I’ve tapped all my contacts – even my contacts in the intelligence communities. They said the agencies have no idea where the scientists are. They vanished without a trace. I’ve been working non-stop on this story for the last 3 months and I have nothing to show for it.” Porter’s head bowed in his own disappointment. His producer’s hardened cadence softened back to its normal warmth as if a surge of empathy had spread through her.
“Porter, listen to me…” Porter lifted his eyes up to her. “You are the best journalist BNA’s got!”
“Has…” Porter corrected with a small smile.
“My point exactly! You know that I will always be in your corner. But you also know that Zucker is breathing down my neck, because of one core competency that is lacking here,” she imitated her bosses lecture.
“Ratings,” Porter finished her thought.
“I think this story could be the story of the year. Something bigger is going on… I can sense it. Every time I get close something odd happens to curtail my efforts. If I could just get one break… I could crank out an editorial you wouldn’t believe. This could be the story that puts BNA back on the map. I’m talking Pulitzer here, Rachel” he argued.
“I’m not doubting that or you. But what does every Pulitzer start with?” She repeated her typical line
of questioning to her staff.
“Letters, spaces and punctuation…” Porter reluctantly recited on command.
“You have till the end of the day to find me something. Then I’m pulling you off the story.” Porter exhaled the mounting stress and stared wide-eyed at the floor of the office. He nodded distantly and ascended to his feet.
“I understand…” Porter responded, disarmed and vulnerable.
“You can find something. Take a fresh look at your leads, something is there I assure you. You just have to see it.” Porter offered another nod and turned on his heel and left the office in pursuit of hope and four missing scientists.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Marty Jacobs lived in a spacious apartment that mostly remained empty. Living the life of his career, he was consumed in work fulltime with no time for home décor, hobbies or even relationships. Despite his loneliness he slept on the right side of his king mattress, reserving the spot next to him for someone special one day. The only decoration in his bedroom was a photo of the President and him back at the DNC many years ago, but the picture was now flipped onto its face, no longer facing his bed.
On the same bedside table was his cell phone, charging via the plug in the wall. It began rattling atop his oak bedside table. Jacobs rolled over for another late-night phone call. His groggy voice answered, while his hand rubbed his face awake.
“Hello?”
“Sir, we have some bad news…” It was the US Marshals.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fiona sat before the dimly lit glass cell, staring at their prisoner. Ezra remained silent, as if deep in contemplation. A deafening silence consumed the Compound, the only audible sound was the distant hum of the computer servers. Fiona knew that if they were playing a game, it was Ezra’s turn and she would have to await his move.
Fiona’s mind wandered through the memories of the Compound. She remembered the snowball fights, the training, her instructors and of course, Xander. She could almost see the jean jacketed blonde boy, jogging around the Compound as was his nightly routine. Her eyes followed the faint memory around the track as it led to the row of houses at the Compound’s north side. There, she found her two story white cottage, where she had lived during the year of training of Project Sparta. Then her eyes found a break in the line of houses, where a cottage used to stand. Her eyes closed as they focused in on the memory of the night Ezra had supposedly committed suicide – his house engulfed in flames to every recruit’s shock and horror. She could hear the cries from the recruits and smell the burning flesh of the planted body within its embers. Then her memory conjured another image – the lone standing bookshelf, the one that led to an underground network of tunnels and ultimately Ezra’s extraction from the program, as well as her own.
The memory faded from her recollection as Ezra adjusted himself for the first time before her. It was as if he was slowly awakening from a deep meditation. Fiona checked the clock on the Compound wall – it read 4AM. She sat up in her chair and hastened to notify him of the time, expecting the first clue, but before she could do so, Ezra’s lips parted and formed words.
Let Us Begin, Make Your Hypothesis
Twenty-One Steps Before Anonymous
Follow the Dial at Apollo’s Rise
To Discover Where Your First Patient Lies
The game had now begun.
Chapter 15
Tobias’s Laboratory
Northeast Washington, DC
4:15 AM
Xander repeated the riddle over the phone to Fiona to ensure every word was accurate. He jotted it down on an old receipt plucked off the top of a cluttered lab table. The Spartans gathered, waiting for the word.
“Any ideas?” he asked his wife.
“I don’t think there is much there other than the ‘Before Anonymous’. Who could that be?” she pondered on the other end of the line.
“Maybe someone in Sparta or the CIA or something marked by a number?”
“Henry Bosco, Caroline Keener?” She reminded him of the loose end from Geneva. They were the two anonymous people left in the equation. Mac had run multiple searches with no hits. It had been eating at Xander, because he knew they were connected somehow, whoever they were.
“Maybe… but that still doesn’t get us anywhere…” He counted throughout the quatrain. “10 syllables per line, it’s a couplet with an AABB rhyme scheme…” Xander’s mind probed the cryptic lines scrawled down on the receipt.
“Is he referring to a person or a place or what?!” Seamus interjected.
“Keep working on it,” he directed to Seamus. Xander then turned his attention back to Fiona. “Is he talking to you at all?”
“No, not a word until 4AM. Why do you think he wanted me, if he isn’t even talking to me?” Fiona pondered aloud.
“He’s playing games, probably wants the team to not trust me anymore. Exposing my lie... Keep your head, Fiona. Don’t let him in there,” Xander cautioned again.
“I’ll be alright, how are you doing?” her tone dropped from business to a personal angle.
“We are okay, we retrieved the only pathologist to see it under a microscope. It was strange her room was guarded by US Marshals. Someone high up obviously wanted her isolated.”
“So, by retrieve you mean you broke her out of federal custody?” Fiona asked.
“I’d call it a rescue…” he tried his best to spin the situation.
“And this poor scientist that you rescued, where is he?”
“She, actually,” Xander turned to the van. “She’s in the back of the van, unconscious right now.”
“You have an unconscious woman in the back of your van?”
“...yes.”
“And you are calling that a rescue? It sounds like an abduction to me!” Fiona couldn’t help but start laughing over the phone at her husband.
“Well, whatever it is, whenever she wakes up we will hopefully be able to get vital intel on the bacteria we are dealing with.”
“Justify it however you want, babe. Just let me know when you get something.”
“Likewise. We’ll be in touch.” Xander smiled and shook his head as he clicked the phone dead. His wife’s charm cut the tension and put him at ease. A breath of fresh air swept through him and he exhaled it along with the nerves bottled-up in him. Then, he turned back to the riddle.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Lieutenant Dan Walker of the Third US Infantry Regiment opened his eyes from his pillow in his dormitory at Fort Meyers. Inhaling the cool morning air, he choked on it and raged into a fit of hacking coughs. He coughed hard and violently, trying to get behind the knot in his throat but to no avail. His eyes lowered to the chill that numbed his lower half. His sheets were crumbled in a ball off the side of the bed. Walker thought it was odd that his sheets didn’t stay on him throughout the night.
His mind flashed fuzzy images from the night before.
Walking alone to the convenient store across from base.
A blue marlin logo on a truck.
Then, darkness.
His head ached as his reflection came into view. He looked different in the mirror. He wasn’t sure exactly how, but there was an oddity to his appearance, like a stranger was looking back at him. He attempted to shake the look off his face but was unsuccessful. Chalking up the vagaries of the prior evening to a bender at the Four Courts pub, shame began to creep in as he faced the duty before him.
“I look like shit”, he said to himself in the mirror. He knew that the oath he had taken a short three months prior included a promise to never curse in public, but this did not apply in the privacy of his small college-like dormitory barracks at Fort Meyers Henderson Hall. Upon getting dressed, he eyed the clock and knew he was running late. He exited his dorm and walked a mile across the dark base. Walker began another coughing fit as he found the preparation facility.
Walker entered and immediately found a quick sip of water, soothing his dry throat of sandpaper. He found his locker and consulted the fine pressed w
oolen military formals hanging on it. His hands began stroking the gold buttons sewn to the navy-blue fabric. Bringing a ruler up to one of his medals, he noticed it was a few centimeters off line. After fixing it, he moved to the Old Guard emblem patch, which showed the Washington Monument, crossed by a sword. Worried that major deficiencies may be present, he surveyed every thread detail of his uniform.
After approving his changing blouse, he moved on to his shoes. For thirty minutes, he sanded down and shined them. During his preparation his steady hand loosely jerked, making such an exact science a difficult task. After his shoes glowed in reflective light, the lieutenant cleaned the common-area. His trembling hands knocked a drink over in the process, but he was able to clean it quickly and ready himself for dressing.
A personal tradition of his was that the last duty of his detailed routine was to inspect the flag patch on his uniform. His eyes settled on the stars and stripes, branding his uniform. Transfixed for a moment, a sense of pride filled him. The countless hours of training before a mirror, memorization of facts and credos, and, of course, shining his shoes were necessary for his symbolic role of sentinel.
His white gloves quickly came up to his mouth as he choked on another violent cough. Upon bringing his hand down, he noticed his gloves were stained with blood from his cough. His first thought was not his own health, but rather the unacceptable uniform deficiency before him.
What the hell?
He quickly found a reserve pair and shook off his own deteriorating health, determined to man his post. His gaze returned to his reflection, but quickly snapped from it by a neck twitch.
How am I going to stand guard like this?
The twitching did not cease. His memory visualized the crumbled ball of sheets off his bed.
Did I twitch my bed sheets off me last night?
Perplexed by the abnormalities of the morning, he dressed with great difficulty and performed the final checks of his uniform before the large mirror, checked his watch and then headed outside for the changing of the guard.
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