“So you are saying that I have this man running loose on my base right now and not one of my security people are going to catch him?”
“Sir, I imagine he is going to come into this room and when he shows up, that door will never open.”
“Bullshit.”
“No bullshit.”
The General stabbed the button on his phone again, “Patricia, have Kevin come in here.” He let up on the button.
With a short knock, the Sergeant came in. “Sir?”
“Kevin, lock the door and go stand by the window facing outside. I want you to see if you find anything or anyone who looks like they might be trying to get in this office.”
“Yes, sir.” The Sergeant turned around, locked the door and walked across the office to stand at parade rest looking outside to see if anyone might be trying to enter the office.
Carl just looked back at the General, nonplussed while the General squinted his eyes.
“It isn’t going to matter, is it?”
Carl just shook his head silently back and forth.
The General got a vacant stare, looking over Carl’s head for a few seconds before suddenly asking.
“How long?”
Lance watched as Carl got a rather vacant look in his eyes for a fleeting second. Blinking, he could have missed it.
Carl stood up and moved beside the chair as if he was waiting for another to take his place.
“General, he is here.”
—
Michael made it to the General’s office and was going to myst under the door when the intercom squawked and heard the General request for the Sergeant to come inside. He went in, solidified in a corner staying outside of their realm of awareness and watched as the Sergeant locked the door and went to stand at the window.
Michael watched the General, looking at his spirit, his demeanor and how he talked with his subordinate. He could tell from his heartbeat and breathing that he was stressed, but was handling it very well.
He obviously hadn’t been a paper pusher his whole career.
Good.
Michael could see that the General was still pretty upset, but trying to gather enough information to make a decision. He wasn’t just going to follow orders blindly.
While it could make this difficult, Michael respected his decisions. He wouldn’t agree to ordering someone to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself. Since the General couldn’t know what he was going to order someone to do, how could he feel comfortable with it?
However, Michael didn’t have too much time and he needed to get the measure of this man and make a decision.
Work with him, or start the cleaning at the top?
Michael went in front of the General’s desk and caught his eyes in his own. It only took a couple of heartbeats to read him.
This man was honorable. Michael would work with him.
“How long?” came from the General.
Michael spoke to Carl directly, telling him to stand up and move to the side. When he was out of the way, Michael sat down and when Carl told the General that ‘he was here’, he spoke into the Sergeant’s mind to lock him out, and ordered him to continue just staring out of the window and then materialized in front of the General.
The General’s mouth hung open long enough for the cigar to fall into his lap. Good thing it wasn’t lit; the General didn’t get his mouth to close for a little while. He suddenly looked down and grabbed the cigar.
—
OK, Lance thought, the suddenly appearing trick was a little disconcerting. If he had wanted to kill him, Lance realized he would be dead. He wasn’t sure about this person or his family having the ability to kill 3,000, However, he felt positive the headcount would be pretty high. Too high to feel comfortable with.
Lance used the cigar he had picked back up off of his lap and used it to stab in Michael’s direction. “How the hell did you just get in here?” Lance may have been astonished, but this was his office, dammit.
If Lance thought that Carl was composed, this guy sent Lance’s ‘sixth sense’ into serious overdrive. He didn’t look threatening in his nice suit and silver cufflinks, but he just accomplished a spooky trick to appear in his office and his eyes spoke of age, wisdom and a complete lack of humor at the moment.
And maybe a hint of compassion?
Lance spoke up, “Kevin, turn around already, he’s here.” When Kevin didn’t turn around, Lance looked over and spoke to him louder this time.
The older man spoke up, “He won’t hear you, Lance. When we are finished, he won’t remember this meeting between us even took place.”
For a couple of seconds, Lance looked at Kevin, then back at the older man, then back and forth again. He sat the cigar down on his desk.
Carl spoke up, “General, we have to leave shortly. However, we will be back tomorrow at 18:00 sharp. I will join you downstairs at the vault. My boss won’t be showing up after this meeting, I suggest you never mention this meeting unless you are talking to Frank, the gentleman on the phone this afternoon.”
That seemed like a different day at this point.
Lance got his thoughts back in line and looked at the man in the chair. “Why do you need my men?”
The older man stood up easily, quickly, and fixed a cufflink, pausing as if in consideration to what the General had asked, and what he really wanted to understand.
He looked into the General’s eyes. “There are battles which you understand. The enemy who stands on a ship, they sit in tanks, they use planes or hit and run tactics. They use terrorist attacks and dishonorably target women and children. These fights you understand, this kind of enemy you can fight.
“How do you fight those that you cannot see? Those that suborn the good and command them to do evil? When those who are the protectors need to be protected, we are the ones who do that.
“We don’t give birth to children, we are not blessed that way. We have to be birthed through unimaginable pain and suffering. One must stand at life’s precipice and decide if one would rather sleep forever, or become protectors and watch over as others live their lives.
“The enemy, your enemy, that you cannot see and cannot defend against has killed one of my children. He sleeps now. I do not have the time to seek and find a qualified candidate from the world and teach them everything they need, so I call my debt of honor due from your military, your country’s protectors. From your ranks, I seek to bring another into the family.
“Will they join? I do not know, that is for them to decide. It is not an easy decision. Either way, Lance, they would not be with you long. Should they come into the family, they will be the ones protecting the innocent, those you cannot fight.
“What does a monster look like, to those who are good?
Like you and me, with evil intent?
What about the monsters themselves?
What do they fear in the dark of the night?
“The answer to that, General Reynolds, is my family.”
With that, Carl stepped back and unlocked the door and Kevin started to turn around, Lance caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye, looking back from Kevin the only person Lance saw leaving the room was Carl.
The other man was nowhere to be seen.
Lance noticed Bethany Anne coming into Patricia’s office as Carl held the door open for her. Carl stepped out and closed the door behind him.
He motioned for Bethany Anne to wait a minute and quizzed Kevin on what he just witnessed.
Kevin remembered standing guard over the window while the other two talked about something, he couldn’t remember the words exactly. Then he had turned around when he heard the door unlock.
Lance released him to any other duties he had and told him to have a good night.
Now, he had to figure out why his daughter was here. Her agency rarely if ever came to the Base in their investigations. And right now was a particularly bad time to have any additional headaches.
CHAPTER SIX
Military Base, Colorado Mountains
Michael could feel the spirit coming his way, this was fire, this was an honorable person, this was someone to know. This was the woman?
While his powers pushed everyone to ignore him, he was still physically in the room.
Michael stared as the door opened and Bethany Anne entered the outer office. Carl held the door for her and then let himself out.
She smelt a little different than most humans. Not bad, and while he read the file and knew the blood inside her was quickly killing her, he could feel its song, its fire, what coursed through her veins was as exciting to him as it was unexpected.
As she entered the office, Michael stepped out after Carl, unseen.
—
Bethany Anne opened the door to her father’s outer office. There was a nice looking man exiting who held the door for her to enter.
He looked like he recognized her before stepping out and closing the door behind himself. She couldn’t place ever having seen him. Maybe he saw one of her dad’s pictures of them in his office.
She noticed her dad motioning to her to give him a minute through the open door and then he continued talking with someone he had in his office.
“How are you doing, dear?” Patricia was smiling from her chair behind her desk and Sergeant Kevin McCoullagh was also leaving her dad’s office.
She shared small talk with Patricia for a minute and stepped into her dad’s office as he came around the desk and gave her a big hug.
“Good to see you again, Bethany Anne.” Lance sized up his daughter pretty quickly. She wasn’t happy to be here, he figured. Since he hadn’t sent for her, he wasn’t sure where to go next with this conversation.
“Thank you, sir.”
Yup, she was still a little frosty. Time to get back into his comfort zone and went back to sit behind his desk.
He leaned back in his chair. “Take a seat and tell me why you are here, we don’t normally get many from your group to this Base.”
She sat in the same chair that the older guy had just vacated, reached into her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“I’m here because I was directed to meet with you today at 15:30. I figured something happened and strings were pulled. I was yanked off of my case, stuffed in a bird and sent here first class. I figured you were behind this.” Sitting up on the front of the chair, Bethany didn’t relax her posture at all.
Leaning forward in his chair Lance reached out his hand over the desk for the letter. “I didn’t request you to come here, Bethany. In fact, this timing is pretty bad. Let’s see what your orders are and if we can, I’ll send you back after we at least have dinner together tonight.”
Her father never lied to her. If he didn’t know anything about her orders, this was getting either stranger by the minute, or there was a colossal screw up in paperwork somewhere. She handed the paper over to her dad. “I thought you had to know about it, all it says is to arrive here at the Base, present myself to you and that I would learn more from a letter which only says ‘Our Debt of Honor’.” She looked up at the General.
Bethany Anne knew that her father hadn’t been giving this meeting his full attention. She had many experiences growing up when she realized that while her father was with her physically, his mind was back at the base.
However, when she had just finished speaking his face changed to a look she wasn’t ever used to seeing.
His face went totally white, ashen, he looked afraid. The only other time that she had seen this look was when her mom died.
He opened the letter, quickly glanced at the content. There wasn’t much there, it wasn’t as if her father could misinterpret anything so she wasn’t sure why it seemed he kept staring at it.
His eyes looked like they just went looking somewhere else, maybe into his past.
—
Lance took the letter from Bethany Anne, but he had a hard time concentrating. His heart wanted to beat too loud right now.
This couldn’t be right.
He felt hollow. If Bethany Anne was the interview, then he was going to lose her. Just like Meredith, her mother.
Lance had always held a room of bitterness and anger inside his heart. He knew that he had in some way been responsible and killed his wife. She was too young. He always believed that if he had focused on her more, that he could have seen something early enough to get help. Somehow, there had to have been a cure for whatever had killed his wife. Medicine had advanced and there should have been something she could have taken.
But no, he focused on his job, his career. He knew his career and he felt comfortable there. He loved his wife. Her smile never failed to bring a smile to his own face. But he had been on the career track with the military to be promoted quickly and he figured he had plenty of time when he would be in his thirties and forties.
He wasn’t going to wait until retirement.
Their daughter was born when Meredith was twenty-four and he was twenty-six. With Bethany Anne, his wife Meredith focused so much attention on her that he felt justified focusing fully on his job.
He never saw the signs that she was any sicker than maybe a cold or flu until one Sunday morning he rolled over and she was gone. Her body was there, but her soul had left during the night, and he hadn’t noticed that happening, either.
Bethany was too young to understand, but he had sought help for himself. He was able to work his way through part of the grieving process, but when it came time to forgive himself, he took part of the crushing blame and packed it into a part of his heart.
For what he had done, he deserved to pay penance for the rest of his life and he was going to. It didn’t matter what the psychologist told him.
Lance deserved it, so he would take it. Staring down at the paper in his hands. Apparently his penance wasn’t enough. Lance might not have been a perfect father, but he had tried to make up for his mistakes. He cared deeply for his daughter and brought her up the only way he knew how. So he had made sure she could stand on her own two feet both intellectually and physically. His daughter had graduated summa cum laude and went to a very expensive private school.
She had been chased, some might say harassed, by the best universities in the nation. Major corporations had also chased her with their open checkbooks but all she asked for was a chance to serve.
The CIA had grabbed her in a second, only to lose her in two years after her basic courses were finished and she went into the black agency hole of no return. Even he didn’t have security clearances to know everything that went on in her group. Different agency as it was. He had been both happy she wanted to serve, but feeling that she would be wasted in his branch.
While he felt the CIA was going to be a little stressful for him, she would do fine. When he found out she had been recruited for other duties, which had pissed off her CIA bosses at the time, he was careful not to let her see it concerned him that she might go into black ops. While she was certainly mentally and physically fit enough, she hadn’t had that certain something that some of the spooks and black ops seemed to have to do the darker deeds.
When she told him she had been put on research projects and cold cases, he had been relieved. He had heard the disappointment in her voice and knew she wanted something ‘in the action’.
He just told her that she needed a little seasoning, apparently.
When she had closed a couple of major and politically sensitive cases, one involving a spy deep in their own agency and another with a high ranking senator, she seemed pleased with her actions and her role. He hadn’t heard about her wanting more ‘action oriented’ roles for a little while.
He knew that her boss Martin had been incredibly pleased with his recruit. While Lance didn’t bend any rules, he had checked up on her a couple of times surreptitiously, in case she found out. General or not, she would come down on him like a ton of bricks if she felt he was helping her out in any way. She stood on her own two feet and made things happen b
ecause of who she was, not who he was.
Just like he taught her.
So, he never made any special calls on her behalf, ever.
But now? Now he wanted to in the worst way possible. He wanted to stab his phone and tell Patricia to get that spook up in Washington on the phone to tell him to shove offering his daughter as an honor sacrifice up his ass.
Spook or not, Carl’s boss could have his daughter when he pried his arms from around her shoulders. He lost his wife because he wasn’t there for her when she was sick, he wouldn't fail his daughter.
And now he had to face something he feared as Bethany Anne grew older.
Death Becomes Her Page 6
