Lieutenant

by Laurence Dahners

  Lieutenant

  An Ell Donsaii story #3

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2012 Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  Though this book can “stand alone” it will be much easier to understand if read as part of the series including “Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)” and “Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2).” I have minimized repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the first two books in order to provide a better reading experience for those who are reading the series.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Preprologue

  Allan Donsaii was an unusually gifted quarterback. He was widely recognized to be startling strong and was a phenomenally accurate passer. During his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, he was never drafted because the pro teams felt he was too small.

  Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and was extraordinarily quick. She rarely played a game without a “steal” and usually had many.

  Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously throughout college and married at the end of their senior year. Their friends kidded them that they were only marrying so that they could start their own sports dynasty.

  Their daughter Ell did have Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s strength and accuracy. The child also had a new mutation affecting the myelin sheaths surrounding her nerves. This mutation produced nerve transmission speeds that were nearly double those of normal neurons. Nerve impulse transmissions being faster, she had much quicker reflexes. Yet the new myelin sheath was also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors resulted in a brain which had more neurons, though it wasn’t larger and a more rapid processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller scale CPU architecture that enables faster processor speeds.

  Most importantly, under the influence of adrenalin in a “fight or flight” situation, her nerves would transmit even more rapidly than their normally phenomenal speed.

  Much more rapidly…

  Prologue

  Steve dropped down from the pull up bar and picked up his jump rope. As a new techno beat thundered through his earphones, the rope began to whirr but his mind wouldn’t focus. As always, money issues were plaguing him. He liked running security; it fit with his talents as a former Navy Seal. He loved being his own boss too, but work could be… irregular. Not just the fact that sometimes he had three offers to work on the same day and then none for a week, although that could make it hard to make ends meet. But, some of the jobs…

  Sure, he’d been hired to protect celebrities as he’d expected when he went into the security business. But he’d also been hired to intimidate ex-boyfriends. On one occasion, he felt pretty sure he’d been hired as a boyfriend by a woman so irritatingly neurotic it was no wonder she didn’t have one of her own. Dismayingly, he’d been hired to “protect shipments” of material from one location in Boston to another and worried that the “material” wasn’t exactly legal. However, his standard promise of complete confidentiality made it hard to ask or check. What he’d like would be to hire on as full time security for one celebrity, but there weren’t many such here in Boston. He wondered once again if he should move to New York or LA? Or look for another line of work?

  The music paused and his AI (Artificial Intelligence) spoke in his earphone, “Call for you regarding employment.” There was a static in the audio.

  Steve dropped the rope and, taking a couple of deep breaths, pulled the belt pack of his AI around front to wiggle the wire that went from the AI up to the headband mounting his earphones. Speaking to his AI he said, “Sound check?”

  His AI said, “Check, one, two, three…”

  The sound was clear again, “OK, it’s good, Put them on.”

  An alto voice came in his ear, “Mr. Jacobs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have been recommended to me as someone who can be completely discrete and provide excellent security and protection.”

  Steve said, “Thank you.” while worrying once again, just what he might need to be “discrete” about.

  “I am looking for someone to train me in self defense and to lead a protection detail that would assist me if I were to be attacked. If you were to take the job it almost certainly would require that you move with me to a location away from the Boston area but that location is undetermined at present. Would you be interested in such a job?”

  “Uh, that could be pretty expensive?”

  “I would pay substantially more than your going rate.”

  He found his eyebrows were up, “OK, then, sure, I’m interested.”

  “Before we go into details I would like to meet and have you give me a self defense session. I will pay $500 for a one hour session whether or not I decide to hire you and whether or not you decide to come into my employ. Is that agreeable?”

  “Sure!”

  They agreed to meet in two hours at the gym where Steve usually trained.

  “How will I know who you are?”

  “Five foot eight. Dark brown hair. Thin.”

  “OK.”

  ***

  Amy buried her face in her hands, “Damn it John. They’re your kids too!”

  In her earphones John’s voice said, “Maybe.”

  “Oh, come on! Do you want a DNA test?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t have the money.”

  “What? Did you lose your job?”

  “I’ve… had expenses.”

  “Oh God, John, are you gambling again?”

  Silence greeted Amy’s question. Then her AI said, “Mr. Reston has disconnected.”

  Amy sobbed a few minutes longer, then got up to go and tell the apartment complex super that she couldn’t make the rent… again. She would ask him for another extension but she didn’t expect that such a request would be well received. He’d already given her several extensions and the last time she’d asked, he’d told her that there would be no further extensions.

  She, Mikey and Janey would soon be homeless. If she wanted to keep them off the streets she’d have to try to get a second job working evenings at another casino and the kids would have to mind themselves. She hated the thought of leaving them unsupervised for hours on end, but it would be several steps up the ladder from “homeless.”

  ***

  Steve looked up as the gym door opened. A young brunette woman stood in the door. She was a little on the tall side, probably five eight. Wearing baggy sweats it was a little hard to tell how “thin” she was, but she wasn’t fat by any means. She was looking curiously around the gym and he glanced around himself, suddenly realizing how shabby it probably looked to the kind of “rich girl” who could afford his services.

  He wouldn’t apologize, it was a working gym, not an effete “health club.” He got up and walked over. “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m Steve Jacobs.” He got a better look at her up close, My God, she’s just a kid! Sixteen to twenty at most. And “wow” pretty, finely shaped pixie features, perfect skin with a slight sprinkle of freckles and brilliant green eyes. Probably a spoiled little rich kid, he thought, though she looks vaguely familiar, maybe she’s one of the new movie stars?

  The young woman looked his muscular six foot two frame up and down, making him feel like a piece of meat on display. She stuck out her hand and said, “Hi.”

  Steve shook her hand, frustrated because she hadn’t given her name. “Sorry, I don’t recognize you?”

  “Great! Please call me Anne for now. I’ll hold my real name until we decide if we can work together.”

  Steve
shrugged, thinking that was a silly request, since she must be well known if even he recognized her. He didn’t follow the celebrities at all. But he could just have his AI identify her. Well there was no need to point this out. “I’ve reserved this mat over here for us to go over self defense like you asked. Have you had any training before?” He walked out onto the mat.

  She put her bag down and followed him. “A little… actually, just one session on how to respond to an attacker. A lot of it was on thought processes, like ‘Scream—give them your money,’ and, ‘don’t go with them to other locations.’”

  “OK, do you feel you have any strengths or weaknesses?”

  She tilted her head, “I’m very quick but have terrible endurance.”

  Steve grinned internally. Everybody thinks they’re fast – until they meet someone who really is. He took justifiable pride in being faster than anyone he knew. He said, “For me to know where to begin, I should evaluate your current ability to resist an attack. Is it OK if I try to simply capture you and wrestle you to the mat? I promise to be careful to avoid hurting you. I will not strike you, only try to capture you.”

  She shrugged and said, “OK.”

  Steve turned suddenly, throwing his arms around her. But before his arms could close, she had simply danced out of reach! Holy crap! How did she do that? Embarrassed, but thinking that her escape had been some kind of weird accident, he lunged out in a dive for her waist, arms spread wide. To his utter astonishment she leapt into the air over his right arm, slapping her hand down on his shoulder as she went over him, then bouncing down behind him as he skidded face first into the mat. Red faced with embarrassment, he lunged back to his feet, turning back to go after her, desperately wanting to show her that he could capture her. But then he stopped, shrugged, took a deep breath and said, “You are correct. You are very quick. I’m fast… and you are much faster.” I’m the fastest I’ve ever met and you just smoked me, so calling you “quick” is a major understatement he thought to himself. “Your best and almost certainly successful strategy is simply to avoid being captured. I doubt I can do anything to improve your skill there, though I might be able to show you some moves. What kind of situations do you imagine that you could not avoid?”

  She looked at him intently, then sighed, “I don’t have to ‘imagine,’ in the past year I’ve been kidnapped twice. Once with drugs and once with a Taser. For certain reasons I’ve become an even more attractive target recently. I would like to learn some strategies to avoid capture, and tactics I might use to disable my captors if I am captured. I would also like to have a security team available nearby at all time to rescue me if they successfully capture me.”

  Steve’s brows rose. “OK. But that’ll be very expensive.”

  She shrugged.

  Rich bitch, he thought to himself. “Well, let me show you some disabling moves.”

  “Preferably ones that don’t do permanent injury.”

  He grunted. “Pretty hard to ‘disable’ someone without some risk of permanent injury. But let’s have you try this.” He demonstrated an open hand strike to the mid-face and nose that, properly executed, would set the nose on fire and water up the eyes.

  She danced to his right and, before he could even start to put his guard up, she slapped him lightly in the mid-face, “Like this?”

  Holy crap! Even though she had barely struck him, his nose stung and his eyes watered and she had done it so quickly that he knew with absolute certainty that he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. He grimaced, “Yeah, like that.” He “snorked” his suddenly running nose. Embarrassed, he said, “I can teach you more things but I’m ashamed to say that, with that much speed, you can probably protect yourself better than I can.” He snorked again.

  She put her hand over her mouth, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I hit too hard didn’t I? I thought I ‘pulled’ it enough to barely touch. I really, really apologize. I’ll double your fee to $1000?”

  Steve blinked, grinned at her and said, “I’m not really hurt. Pretty embarrassed though. ‘Security experts’ aren’t supposed to get beaten by young girls. How old are you anyway?” Suddenly it clicked, “Oh Hell! You’re Ell Donsaii aren’t you?”

  She nodded, an almost guilty look on her face. “Eighteen. I knew this wig wasn’t a strong enough disguise by itself.”

  “I’d sure like to have you tell me how you escaped those terrorists at the Olympics sometime. But, having seen you move in gymnastic events, I guess it’s no wonder you can defend yourself.”

  She shrugged again. “Can you show me some more moves? I promise not to actually hit you again.”

  Amazed to be teaching physical skills to an Olympic caliber gymnast like Ell Donsaii, Steve spent a half hour going over a variety of strikes and break-holds in slow motion. She replicated each at near full speed and precisely pulled every strike so that it didn’t actually touch.

  Steve cocked his head, “I should also advise you on how to avoid being a target. I notice that your AI headband is wirelessly communicating with your belt pack. You need to be aware that wireless headbands like that constantly emit radio signals in order to carry the video from the headband’s cameras and the audio from your headband’s microphones. Kidnappers can use those signals to track you if you escape a situation, so I would suggest you use a wired headband,” Steve lifted the wire that went from his headband to his own AI belt pack, “even if they are kind of a pain.”

  Ell gave him a lopsided little grin as if she were in on some kind of joke that he didn’t understand. “OK, I think I’d like to hire you to lead a security detail for me. Let me tell you what I want and you can think about whether you can provide it?” So they sat on the mat and spoke quietly about how he might provide protection. She didn’t want visible bodyguards, on the assumption that she could protect herself from “head on” attacks. She wanted him to hire a team that would have members constantly nearby to rescue her if she were to be successfully captured. The team would take turns training with her, teaching her what each of them knew about self defense. She said, “I’m in the Air Force and I expect to be assigned somewhere very soon. It could be anywhere in the world. I think I’d be pretty safe while on a military base but would want your team standing by, just off base and following me any time that I left base.”

  Steve cocked his head at her, “Are you sure you understand how expensive this will be? You’re talking salaries for 5-10 expensive people, plus travel and accommodation expenses. I’m sure you have some endorsement money from winning the Olympics, but we’re talking around 1-2 million dollars a year if I hire really good people.”

  Ell gazed coolly at him a moment, “Hire really good people. My life is very important to me.”

  Steve thought he remembered seeing a news story about Ell Donsaii’s poor childhood on the news feeds. Much as he respected her and as much as he’d like to work for her he couldn’t afford to end up holding an empty bag financially. “I’d… need some assurances on the financial aspects…”

  “Sure, my AI’s just sent you a contract my lawyer drew up for me, or you can use one of your own, similar in substance. As you’ll see it’s backed with an escrow account holding a million dollars that you can spend from if you agree to the job.”

  Steve’s eyes widened at the casual way she could drop that kind of money into escrow, “Um, do you mind if I ask where the money came from? Stories about you from the Olympics implied you came from a modest background and I haven’t actually seen an advertisement capitalizing on your gymnastic fame.”

  She laughed, “Less than modest background, I think. More like, ‘on the edge of poverty.’ But sure, here, look at my back,” she said lifting the back of her sweatshirt up, “no AI beltpack.”

  She looked at him with a question in her eyes.

  Steve raised his eyebrows, “I don’t understand, going without an AI is crazy. The first thing that I or the police would want to do if kidnappers did take you, is to download the audio, video and GPS record tha
t your AI had stored on the net right before your capture. That way we could find out exactly where you’d been, who you’d been with and what had been happening right before you were taken. You really should stay connected to the net through an AI at all times.”

  “Yes, well that’s where the money came from. I invented a communications device a few months ago. My headband is connected to an AI with one of my new communication devices but since the communication device works great even over large distances I’m actually running my AI on a supercomputer back home in North Carolina instead of on a small belt pack CPU like everyone else.”

  “But that’s just as big a problem. If that’s the case, your headband is punching out a radio signal to reach the net for transmission to the Carolinas and the constant signal that it’s using to transmit audio and video to the net is even more powerful and easier to track than one that just ‘sends’ to your beltpack CPU for compression and intermittent transmission to the net.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t explain that very well. The communication device I invented doesn’t depend on radio. Please trust me when I say that I am emitting no radio signals whatsoever. Well perhaps a little leakage from the electronics of the video cameras on my headband.”

  Steve looked at her dubiously, “OK, if you say so.”

  Ell could tell from his tone that he didn’t believe it at all. “Well, you’ll have an opportunity to check it out for yourself if you hire on. I’ll be wanting to fit you with PGR communications too.”

  “PGR?”

  “Photon-gluon resonance. It’s the basis of the communication device… Instead of radio.”

  “Okaaay,” Steve said, wondering to himself if she might be delusional. But if she had enough money to put a million in escrow, did it matter?

  Chapter One

  The knob jiggled and the door began to open. Janey immediately began to yell, “MOM! Mikey won’t let me use the big screen for my homework!”

  Mikey leapt up from the couch and, pointing back at his little sister said, “She hasn’t…” His voice stumbled to a stop when he saw his mother’s tear streaked face. “What’s the matter?” he said in a small voice. His mother had been upset a lot the past few weeks but he hadn’t seen her crying before.