The Fourteenth Protocol_A Thriller

by Nathan Goodman

  “Never heard a guy sing this song before,” said a soft voice as a hand touched his shoulder. He was startled out of his fog as he looked down at the cute girl in glasses whose hand was withdrawing now. Her face was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place her. She smiled and his mind raced, trying to place her before the embarrassment set in that he didn’t know her name.

  She grinned. “You always talk to yourself?”

  “What? Oh, that . . .”

  “Don’t you work at Thoughtstorm?” she said. “You look so familiar.” Relief washed over him. She didn’t know his name either.

  “Yeah. Yeah, hey, ah, I’m Cade, Cade Williams.”

  “I’m Alyssa, Alyssa McTee. I work down on six.”

  “Wow, how cool. What are you doing all the way up here?”

  “Oh, I’m taking some time off.” Alyssa beamed. It was like she was looking at an old friend she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “You have family up here? I mean, you’re on vacation. You didn’t want to head down to the beach or something? Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean this wouldn’t be a good place to vacation or anything . . .” Cade backtracked.

  “Oh no, no, it’s okay. No, I’m not exactly vacationing here. I’m cruising all over the place. I’m just out seeing the country. I move from place to place each day.” Alyssa oozed a newly found confidence. “The truth is, I took a leave of absence from work.”

  “Really? A leave of absence? And you’re cruising around and just seeing the sights? And you’re alone?” Cade secretly prayed that she was alone. “Hey, you want to join me?” he said as the bisque and coffee were handed through the window. “I was going to hang out for a little while with two things that go great together, bisque and coffee.” He hoped his attempt at humor would come out sounding funnier than it was. He really sucked at talking to girls.

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t want to join you,” she said with a straight face.

  Cade was a little taken aback. She looked at him, trying to stifle an outburst of laughter. “Why don’t you join me instead,” she said, pointing to her table, grinning ear to ear. Alyssa was rather pleased with herself next to Cade who looked like a lost pup.

  “Oh,” he laughed, “yeah, good one. Sure, I’ll join you.” Cade slid into the sturdy oak chair. His sleeve stuck to the stapled vinyl tablecloth that had played host to thousands of locals over the years.

  Alyssa slid her wax-paper-lined plastic basket aside. “So how about you? What are you doing up here? You’re not down at the beach or something?” she said, mocking through a toothy smile. “Is that where all the cool people go?”

  “Okay, all right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. No, I’m not at the beach or something either. I’m just off for a long weekend. A friend of mine is graduating from the FBI Academy up here. It was something I couldn’t miss.”

  “Very cool,” said Alyssa, looking genuinely impressed. “Man, I bet he’s excited. Or, well, or she’s excited. Which is it?”

  “No, it’s a he. He and I went to undergrad together. He’s a great guy.” Cade glanced out the window but saw nothing. “It’s kind of funny thinking about it actually. I mean, he and I were in this fraternity together. He was kind of like a big brother to me. We had some fun times. And to think about him in the FBI . . .” There was something about Alyssa that was disarming. Cade was carrying on a perfectly normal conversation. And she was a girl. He wasn’t stuttering and hadn’t even knocked his drink over or anything. It was like she was just one of the guys. Not that she looked like a guy. No, she was pretty, and Cade knew it. But still, something about the way she carried herself. It made him feel like he’d known her for years.

  The two talked and talked. The conversation went from Cade’s time in college with Kyle to Alyssa talking about all the places she had been on this trip, the things she’d seen, the people she’d met.

  “Okay,” she said, “tell me the funniest story about you and Kyle in college.” She nearly burst a blood vessel laughing at him, knowing she was putting him on the spot.

  Cade laughed at her and thought about it for a second. He closed his eyes and then started laughing himself.

  “Well, okay. I had this roommate that loved to play practical jokes on me. He was pretty good at it, I have to admit. So anyway, he’d brought these old inversion boots to school.” Her head cocked to the side in confusion.

  “Oh, you know, those kind of boots that lock around your ankle, and you use them to hang upside down from a bar or something,” said Cade. “People use them to do hard-core sit-ups or to help stretch out their back and stuff like that.”

  Alyssa’s giggle was infectious.

  “Anyway,” he smirked back at her, “so he brings these inversion boots to school so he could do sit-ups. See, the closets in the dorm just had a curtain across them, and the curtain rods were these heavy steel bars. So Jim, my roommate, hung upside down from his closet curtain rod bar thing and did all these sit-ups. So then, he convinces me to do a few sets.” Cade paused, trying not to laugh as he told the story. “Anyway, I’m hanging there like an idiot doing these sit-ups. And the whole time, Jim is yelling, ‘Come on, man, you can do it. Oh come on, is that all you got, you can do better than that!’ and I’m doing all these sit-ups and it’s starting to get impossible to do any more and I’m starting to laugh because Jim is yelling at me to keep going, and I can’t even lift my own body weight up to reach the bar anymore.”

  Alyssa wiped tears from her eyes as she laughed.

  “I mean, I can’t even lift myself to get my feet off of the bar at this point. So Jim starts yelling, ‘Is that it? Is that all you got? Come on, you can’t even get yourself off of there?’” Cade stopped for a second. “So I’m laughing, I can’t raise myself up, and Jim just walks out of the room.”

  “He walked out and left you there? Hanging upside down,” she said, fingers to her eyes and laughing.

  “Yeah, so then, a minute later, the door swings open and in walks Kyle with this straight face. He walks over to me and leans down and says, ‘Ah, what seems to be the problem?’ and I’m hanging there upside down and laughing and I can’t get myself up. So then, from behind his back, Kyle pulls out this can of shaving cream. And sure enough, he starts hosing me down with the thing. By the time it was over, Kyle had emptied the shaving cream can all over me and was walking up and down the halls getting guys to come out and take a look.”

  Alyssa’s deep laughter rocked her body, but not a sound escaped. “Oh my God. Guys are so mean to each other,” she said. The two sat for a minute and let the laughter subside.

  “And that was Kyle,” Cade said, shaking his head back and forth.

  Alyssa felt for the first time in her life that she was her own person. The two were confiding in each other like old friends, yet they were nearly total strangers. An hour later, Cade noticed that the sun was dropping on the horizon. “Oh man, what time is it?” he said, still laughing.

  “Why, you have an important date?” she jabbed.

  “No. Not exactly. Not with a girl anyway. I’ve got to go over and meet Kyle. Um, I was thinking . . .” Cade’s confidence faded for a millisecond, then he got up the nerve and said, “Can I call you? I mean, I was thinking we could go do something.” He tried to avoid the word date; it sounded so serious, like it was a commitment on her part or something.

  “You mean we’d go out somewhere and have coffee and bisque?” Alyssa said, enjoying Cade’s squirming.

  “Yeah, coffee and bisque . . . when will you be back in town?”

  “Yes, I’d love to. I have to be honest though, I don’t know yet when I’ll be back.” She wasn’t ready to stop torturing him yet. Her grin, however, betrayed her. She pulled out her phone, and the two exchanged numbers.

  Cade left the place with a feeling that hadn’t been with him in a long, long time. He had talked to Alyssa for over an hour. Both of them worked at the same office, yet not one word was spoken about work. Neither of them knew what the other eve
n did for a living. The lighter-than-air feeling didn’t stay with him long though as the thought of working up on seventeen soured his stomach. He shook his head. Still, as bad as that sounded, he could put up with anything if he could look forward to a date with Alyssa. Even if he didn’t call it a date.

  15

  The entrance to the FBI Academy wasn’t as daunting looking as he imagined. Still, there were lots of reinforced concrete barricades, and the Marine guards at the gate didn’t help to diffuse the ominousness of the place. Automatic weapons clung to the soldiers’ chests. Cade pulled up to the guard station and lowered the window.

  “Yes, sir, how can I help you?”

  Cade held out his driver’s license. “My name’s Cade Williams. I’m here for graduation at the Academy. I should be on the list.” The guard glanced across the interior of the car, then at the driver’s license. He handed the license to another guard who disappeared into the guard shack.

  “Would you mind popping the trunk please, sir?” It was more of a command than a question. Once in the trunk, the guard waved a digital device around while another guard searched the underside of the car with a long mirrored pole. The guard came out of the guard house and handed Cade back his license.

  “You’re all clear, sir. If you proceed to the left up through the quad, sir, and follow the signs to the dormitories, you’ll find the parking area.”

  Cade pulled away and called Kyle.

  “Hey, man! I’m pulling away from the front gate.”

  “You’re here? I’m just about back at the dorm now. I’ll see you out front. You know where to go?”

  Their reunion was prototypically male. The big high five and a quick hug as both men slapped each other on the back. They hadn’t seen each other in months.

  “Damn, man. You look lean!” said Cade. “Lean” was guy code for “muscular.”

  “Well, they run us pretty hard up here. I’m just glad it’s over. Come on inside, I’ll show you what your government dollars are paying for.”

  “They run you hard? Oh come on, what the hell is this?” said Cade, pounding Kyle on the bicep.

  “Oh,” said Kyle, “that’s man, that’s what that is.”

  They went up to the fourth floor and down the long corridor to Kyle’s room. The dorms were a little more like hotel rooms than the dormitories he had pictured. The rooms were small, and there was no kitchen, but the carpeting and furniture had a distinctive Comfort Suites feel to it.

  “Hey, nice hotel, man. You gonna take this furniture with you when you leave tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, they’d love that. A trainee makes it into the FBI, all the way through training, then steals seventy-five dollars’ worth of government furniture thereby creating the shortest FBI career in history.”

  “All right, so show me the campus. I want to see anywhere Jodie Foster ever walked. I want the behind-the-scenes tour, where only people with top secret security clearances can see, I want . . .”

  “You want a good swift kick in the pants is what you want,” said Kyle. “Come on, let’s go have a look. I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of their Jodie Foster worshiping.”

  The campus wasn’t all that different from a typical college campus. Several buildings scattered about, shaded by pine trees. There was a lot of open space and greenery, islands of pine straw, but overall, the place was immaculate. Not a fleck of paper or a cigarette butt anywhere.

  “This place is clean enough to be a dang military base,” said Cade.

  “It is a military base, you nimrod.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. So where’s the jogging trail through the woods where young agent trainee Starling flipped over that ropes course thing?”

  “You are so sad. It’s up here,” said Kyle heading into the woods to the running trail where he had spent so much time. “Cade, now just so you understand a few things, Jodie Foster isn’t actually in the FBI. You understand that, right? And you also understand that just because you’re infatuated with her, doesn’t mean she feels the same way. And you get the fact that she’s gay, right? I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “Oh shut up, she might like me. If she ever met me. And the whole ‘gay’ thing. I don’t know about that. I think she’s still making up her mind. Give her a chance, you’ll see. She’ll come around.”

  The two came across the wooded hilltop to the ropes course. Kyle said, “Okay, so there it is, the ropes course. Give me your phone; I’ll video you flipping over that thing.”

  The short amount of daylight gave them just enough time to see a few sights and catch up with each other. Cade told Kyle about meeting a great new girl, but he didn’t talk about what was really bothering him—the whole scene that unfolded this week at work, the panic, the firearm, none of it. It was like Cade didn’t want to spoil a good time with his sob story. He decided not to mention it. They walked through several enclosed bridges that ran between buildings, what the bureau called “the habitrail” and saw Hogan’s Alley, a small makeshift town where trainees practiced car chases and arrest procedures.

  In a large open breezeway room there were couches scattered about. A number of photos and award plaques hung on the wall, and Kyle stopped at one in particular. It was a plaque that listed agents who had been killed while serving their country. He looked at it. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said. The two men knew what Kyle being in the FBI could mean, but they didn’t want to acknowledge it. Kyle looked at Cade and said, “Man, we’ve known each other a long time. We’ve had a lot of good times together. I’ve known you since you were just a little punk. But we’ve also been though our share of stuff together.” Stuff was the operative guy term for tough times. “So what is it you’re not telling me?”

  Cade looked a little surprised; his glance down at the floor didn’t help much. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Sit down, tell me what’s going on,” Kyle’s duty as a big brother was not over.

  “Something happened at work . . .”

  The two sat for several minutes as Cade retold the story. When he got to the part about the guys in suits, Kyle stopped him.

  “Wait, these guys are dressed in business suits, up on a server floor? You’re sure the guy had a weapon on his belt?”

  “Yeah, well, pretty sure, yeah. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. I have no idea who these guys are,” he said, thinking about what he was going to say next. Cade looked at his friend. “Kyle, there’s something else. When I first walked onto the server floor, those guys were arguing, and I distinctly heard them mention a word that scared the shit out of me. It was the word ‘Tucson.’ They were arguing about Tucson. I know it sounds crazy, but they were arguing about it on the morning of the bombing at that Little League field.”

  Kyle’s stern look would serve him well in the FBI. “Tucson? We’ve been studying the bombings. At first they didn’t share all the info with us, but in the last couple of weeks, our security clearances came through, and they told us everything. I can’t talk about much of it.”

  Cade slumped back on the couch. He could tell there was a lot more Kyle knew about the Tucson bombings that he wanted to say.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” said Kyle. “You work for an e‑mail service provider. There should never be a time when sirens sound and men concealing firearms pour onto the server room floor. But based on how you describe those guys, it would seem like government men of some type. Nothing else makes sense. I have no idea which agency it would be, but I don’t like the sound of it. And you say that on another occasion you put masking tape across the camera lens on the webcam on your laptop,” Kyle spoke as if assembling a puzzle, “and the next day, the tape was gone? The two might not be connected, but it certainly sounds like someone in that company is watching you, or maybe watching everybody, I don’t know.” After a few moments of protracted silence, Kyle said, “I know you, Cade, I know you. You don’t look good. Tell me what you’re thinking.” Kyle’s newly acquired interview tec
hniques had gone into full swing.

  Cade glanced down again and leaned his elbows on his knees.

  “What if my company is doing something wrong? I mean really wrong. What if they’re involved in something really illegal, and I get caught up in the middle of it?”

  “You think there’s some connection between these guys and the bombing in Tucson? Cade, look at me”—he was serious now—“I don’t know what the hell is going on at your office, but one thing they’ve taught us here is to go with our instincts. I don’t care how farfetched it sounds. If your gut tells you something is wrong, don’t ignore it. You’re going to have to find out though. Before you get caught in the middle of something bad, you’re going to have to find out.”

  Cade stared straight ahead, like he was looking right through the wall to the other side. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  16

  In the morning sun, nothing seemed as bleak as it had the previous night talking with Kyle. Good old Cool Mac. With Kyle busying for the morning’s graduation ceremony, Cade drove back by the Bella Café only to find they weren’t open for breakfast. He grabbed a bite to eat at a little place at the corner of Potomac and Broadway and then headed over to the FBI auditorium. Parking was tight, but once inside the auditorium, Cade had no trouble finding a seat. The auditorium held exactly one thousand and one people. Apparently, J. Edgar Hoover had specified when it was built that it was to accommodate “over one thousand people.”

  Cade sat as close to the front as he could get. Not only did he want to see Kyle walk across the stage to receive his badge and credentials, but the stage of the auditorium itself had also been graced by Jodie Foster.

  Graduating from undergrad was a great thing, but this was on a whole different scale. It was a huge accomplishment. Less than 1 percent of applicants are accepted into the FBI. And some of those don’t make it through training. He was really excited for Kyle. Cade glanced around at all the families finding their way to seats. For the first time it occurred to him that he was the only person here who came to see Kyle. Kyle’s mom had passed during childbirth. Kyle’s dad had been a firefighter. Being a single parent working as a firefighter had not been easy for John MacKerron. The work schedule was brutal. He’d work a twenty-four-hour shift and then have the next two to three days off. That meant Kyle’s aunt had to step up to be mom-for-a-day, as she called it.