Until she wished she wasn’t so plain.
Her soft, brown hair hung a bit beyond her shoulders, but was always too thin to hold a curl or even a volume adding wave. She had tried adding highlights before, but according to her stylist she “didn’t have the right type of hair for color to latch on to.” Her attempts to add volume via a bevy of creams, gels and handheld appliances only resulted in hair styles that lasted no longer than two hours, burnt hair and a layer of chemicals across her scalp that caused an eruption of scalp acne the next morning.
Her hair would always be her hair.
So, too would be her body, she had come to accept. A bit too wide in the hips and too thin in the thighs and calves. Her neck was just an inch too long and her shoulders much too narrow, or at least she had been told. She felt that her breasts were fine, though a bit on the small side if her asshole ex-boyfriend was giving the assessment. And despite her impressive dedication to a full hour of cross-fit training, yoga and light weight lifting four times per week, the slight jiggle in her belly seemed intent to accompany her the rest of her life. She had accepted that jiggle, imperceptible to anyone else because of how baggy she wore her clothes, was there to remind her to be grateful that she was blessed to have been born in a country, and to a family, that would never know true hunger.
She was a five, pushing towards a six on her scale. Normal. Plain. Not commanding or rejecting attention. Someone you see everyday. Someone you pass by everyday and Never. Even. Notice.
Unless you saw her eyes and the gentle turn of her face. Her eyes were brilliant green with an undeniable energy burning behind them. Her friends, envious of nothing else about her, wished their eyes could hold a fraction of the beauty and mystery Jen’s held captive. Her face seemed to have been designed by a master artist in order to showcase those eyes. Flawlessly smooth skin, far from being too pale or too filled with color, her face was a delicate balance of pallor, simplicity of form and an unspoken beauty.
As Jen moved towards her destination, she waffled between thoughts of wishing others would notice her the way so many of her friends were noticed, and wishing her clothing was a bit baggier or that her coat was cut a few inches longer. She settled her thoughts, not on herself, but on the position she found herself in: Working for a freshman member of Congress, who had already displayed an unpredictable nature and a possible penchant for secretive and perhaps illegal activities. She shivered with wonderment at what she had signed on to when agreeing to terms of the position of congressional assistant. She pulled the lapel of her coat up, bracing her face from the slight breeze and welcomed the comfort of the unintended added inconspicuousness.
She arrived at The Round Table, with its swanky, hand-carved wooden sign swinging gently in the breeze above the doorway, exactly twenty minutes after she sent the invite to Lisa. As she walked into the cafe, Jen spotted Lisa at a two person table towards the far left wall.
Lisa held herself with a confidence that so often came with recognized and appreciated beauty. Her long, dark hair, and bright blue eyes topped off her body that most men appreciated and desired. If Jen’s beauty was plain, Lisa’s was boldly stated, unable to be concealed and impossible to overlook.
“You got here quick,” she said as she sat down and immediately took a long draw from the iced water Lisa had ordered for her.
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “I left as soon as I emailed you. Couldn’t stand staying in that office for another minute. This fucking freshman class is killing me. It’s like most of them have absolutely no idea how anything works in government. They think they can just snap their fingers and everything and everyone will jump on their bandwagon.”
“They probably have a whole litany of campaign promises to fulfill,” Jen said.
“And in two more weeks,” Lisa quipped, “they’ll realize that despite their making those promises with the best intentions, the gears of government aren’t greased by campaign promises and rookie lawmakers.”
The two chatted for a few minutes, catching up and discussing each other’s plans for the upcoming weekend. Though they had been friends since their freshman years at Georgetown, both felt the other was still largely a stranger; neither of them were fully comfortable with engaging in any deep discussions until the dust and clouds caused by the time since their last get together was cleaned up and cleared away.
“So tell me,” Jennifer said, once the comforting and familiar feelings of their shared friendship returned, “what dirt you have on my wonderful new boss.”
Lisa leaned in closer to Jen, an indication that Jen should do the same. “You know that candidates get vetted, right? I mean, they get checked out by whatever local party they belong to when they first get into politics, then by the Secret Service and maybe the CIA if they end up in Washington. You know that, right?”
“Sure,” Jen whispered. “I mean, I didn’t know who checks out their past but I figured some organization ran a pretty deep dive into their histories.”
“Well,” Lisa continued, “your new boss has a rather difficult history to trace.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I know is that my office was asked to run a three generation search into Congresswoman Stacy Flannigan. That’s not unusual. Those requests come from the CIA when they’re too busy or too disinterested in doing the work themselves.”
“So you did the research?” Jen assumed.
“My team did,” Lisa said. “We did the three generation search on all the freshman Congress members. There are eleven freshman members of Congress this year and six in the Senate. Most of the projects went smoothly. Nothing flagged and nothing that couldn’t be explained away by a quick email. But,” Lisa said as she checked over her shoulder to make sure no one was close enough (or interested enough) to hear what she was about to say, “your new boss has a time gap that no one can explain.”
“A what?” Jen asked. “A time gap?”
“That’s what we call an extended period of time where we can’t find any information about a subject. No address, no phone number, no job, no nothing. And your new boss has a time gap of nearly eleven months.”
“That’s strange,” Jen said, not fully understanding the significance.
“Strange is an understatement,” Lisa replied. “I have a friend in DHS, sort of like a co-worker with benefits.”
“Sounds interesting. Do tell,” Jen said through a delicate smile.
“Not as interesting as I’d like it to be. We’re friends and maybe a little bit more than friends, but he’s not the committing type of guy I wish he was. Anyway, I was stuck with Congresswoman Flannigan’s time gap and I knew I had to come up with something or I’d be expected to do whatever was necessary to fill the gap. That’s the line of horse shit my director gives me whenever I hit a dead end. Essentially it means that I should be more than willing to drop everything, including my personal life, and finish whatever project I was stuck on.
“So, I met him for a few drinks after work last week and asked for his help. Yesterday, he called me to tell me that DHS, the fucking Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t account for Stacy Flannigan’s whereabouts for eleven straight months. Not one clue could be found about where she was or what she was doing for nearly a year of her life.”
“How long ago was this time gap?” Jen asked.
“Her last political position was as a State Senator for Ohio in twenty-eleven. She had only been in politics for a year before that, so kudos to her for getting elected to the state senate so quickly. Anyway, her term was supposed to be a two year hitch but she vacated her position in November of twenty-twelve, claiming that personal reasons were preventing her from serving her constituents as bravely and as honestly as they deserved, or some bullshit political crap talk. We know she stayed in her hometown till around the holidays of twenty-thirteen, then, poof! Gone like a ghost.
“Next time she hit the radar was November of twenty-fourteen when she announced her candidacy for Congress. And despite her qui
tting her state senate job, Stacy Maria Flannigan got elected in a landslide and took office a few months later.”
“Won’t anyone ask her about her time gap?” Jen asked.
“Probably not at this point. She’s already taken office and the last thing DHS wants is for the Congressional Intelligence Committee finding out that one of their freshman class of Congress was AWOL for nearly a year and no one in DHS found out about it till after she took office.”
Jen took a long drink of her iced water, unsure of what to make of her boss’s time gap. “I guess I understand that being AWOL from life for eleven months is weird,” she said, “but I’m not sure that it’s really important.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lisa snapped back. “With all the shit going on in the world today, you don’t see why a member of Congress disappearing for a year is concerning? What if it turns out she was vacationing in lovely Syria during those months, or having tea with the Director of the Iranian Republican Guard?”
“Or maybe she just needed to get away from it all and took a long vacation to some family cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Just being gone for a year doesn’t mean she was doing something horrible.”
Lisa sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest and checked the room one more time, ensuring that no one was listening to their conversation. “Something like a time gap gets the CIA, FBI and other creepy members of our lovely government all twisted up inside, especially when the ‘time-gapper’ is a member of Congress. I don’t know for sure but I have it on good authority that any communication coming into or out of Stacy Flannigan’s office is closely monitored. My friend at DHS called me on my personal cell this morning. He told me that he was instructed to do a background check on three people and that he was told to drop everything and to get on the new project ASAP. Want to take a guess who those three people were?”
“I’m afraid to ask,” Jen said.
“Cardinal Jeffrey O’Keefe, Ronald Novak and Mr. Badr Irani. And unless I’m losing my cookies, those are the same three people your boss asked you to get contact information on. Am I right?”
“Holy shit,” Jen said. “You think someone scanned the email I sent you and it set off another investigation?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Lisa said, now moving her body closer to the table. “And you know what else my friend with benefits told me this morning?”
“Now I’m really getting nervous,” Jen said.
“Cardinal Jeffery O’Keefe was on an extended sabbatical from his duties during the same eleven months Stacy Flannigan did her disappearing act. As far as anyone can tell, he just fell off the face of the Earth for eleven months. And,” Lisa said, moving her face even closer to Jen’s, “Badr Irani also has a time gap. Care to guess when he was doing whatever he was doing without leaving a single trace?”
“All three were gone during the same eleven months?” Jen asked.
“All three.”
A cold chill raced up Jen’s spine, demanding the hairs on her neck stand erect. Though the late February weather was unusually warm for DC, Jen never felt colder in her life. “What about the last one?” she asked through shivering lips. “What about Ronald Novak?”
“Career criminal living in Upstate New York, somewhere east of Syracuse. He has a record going back to the mid 1980s when he was a teenager. Mostly petty crimes but he did do a three year ride for aggravated assault in two thousand seven. As you could imagine, the local cops keep a pretty close eye on Mr. Novak. He was released from MidState Correctional Facility in early twenty-eleven after his assault charge and was put on a five year probation. But guess what?”
“He didn’t report in with his probation officer for eleven months?” Jen said, the chill leaving her body but leaving behind a memory she would never forget.
“You better believe it. Same time frame and same time gap as the others.” Lisa sat back against the chair, frowned, then said, “There’s one other thing about your new boss that is even more concerning than her eleven month absence, but, if I tell you, you need to swear you won’t breath a word of it to anyone. Not even to your boyfriend. Swear?”
Jen, eyes widened, said, “I don’t have a boyfriend and I swear I won’t say anything to anyone else.”
“Flannigan has a brother, I can’t remember his name, who lives in Kentucky. He’s married with three kids. About a week before Flannigan started her new job, her brother and his entire family went missing. Gone. All without a trace.”
Jen furrowed her brow, and said, “What’s that all about?”
“No idea. The strange thing is that Flannigan must know about her brother and his family being missing. Hell, I heard that Dateline may do a story on the missing family from Kentucky soon. But she’s made no public comments, no pleas for help, she hasn’t organized search parties or even hired a private eye. She’s done nothing.”
<<<<>>>>
Jen was speechless. Her mind was racing a thousand different directions, each direction leading nowhere. From the moment she had first met Congresswoman Stacy Flannigan, Jen felt there was something odd about her. Something strange that she couldn’t quite identify but certainly couldn’t dismiss. Her thoughts raced back to the tasks that Stacy Flannigan had assigned to her and, specifically, the third task.
The paralyzing chill returned.
“What’s wrong?” Lisa said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
Jen paused, desperate to keep any rogue tears from spilling from her eyes. “Stacy, I mean, Congresswoman Flannigan asked me to do three things for her the first day I met her. The first was to get the contact information for those three people. The second, was to find out the state of disaster preparedness for every major city east of Chicago.”
“And the third?” Lisa asked, now feeling the chill clawing its way up her spine. “What was the third request?”
“Oh my God, Lisa,” Jen whispered through a crackling voice. “She asked me for information about a World War Two era Japanese covert operation named ‘Unit 731.’ ”
“I have no idea what the hell Unit 731 is but it doesn’t sound good.”
“I found out it was a combination of grotesque and horrible human experimentations and trying to weaponize the plague.”
“You mean plague as in the ‘bubonic plague?’ ”
“They say that up to two hundred and fifty-thousand people were killed during the Unit 731 experiments but no one knows exactly how many for sure. One thing the Japanese were trying to figure out how to do was to drop billions of bubonic infected fleas over major US cities. They knew that Americans loved their pets and that if the fleas could find their way onto a pet dog, then the pet owners would be at risk of contacting the plague.”
“That’s horrible,” Lisa said.
“What Flannigan asked me to do is to find out about the Unit 731 experiments with the fleas, how effective their trials were and whether or not the Center for Disease Control has any vaccines for, what she called, the ‘Unit 731 modified’ bacteria.”
“The bubonic plague was modified by the Japanese?”
“They found a way to alter the bacteria to make it more resistant to known antibiotics. But Nazi Germany picked up on the Unit 731 experiments and took it to a whole new level. They modified the bacteria in a way that it could be weaponized and condensed. Instead of having to drop billions of fleas over a city, the Nazis figured out a way to concentrate the bacterium into a liquid form that could be sprayed over an area.”
“Like crop dusting?”
“I guess. Only difference was the Nazis were able to concentrate the bacterium at a five hundred thousand to one ratio. One vial of this concentration would have the same infection power as over sixty-thousand gallons of the normal bacteria-laden liquid.”
“Jesus, Jen. What the hell did she want with that information? You didn’t give it to her, did you?”
“I have no idea why she asked for it and no, I didn’t give her anything. I can’t find anyth
ing about the CDC having vaccinations against a genetically altered and weaponized bubonic plague causing bacteria.” Jen’s words were a sharp staccato as she spit them out, seemingly wishing the words and the potential knowledge the words connoted were never invented. “She asks for disaster preparedness for major cities and she asks for information on the CDC supply of bubonic plague antibiotics and she doesn’t think I would end up putting two and two together? What am I missing?”
“How the other three are involved. That’s what you and I are missing. My God, Jen, is she planning an attack?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
The air in The Round Table seemed to take on a sudden staleness. A chilled breeze moved its way through the place, causing the few remaining patrons to glance towards the air conditioning unit, wondering if it had malfunctioned and turned itself on. Before the sole remaining waitress on duty could investigate the potential malfunction, the cool, wafting air diminished and the stale air was replaced by the somewhat clean and fresh air of the February afternoon.
“I don’t know what you should do,” Lisa said. “But I think you should tell someone. We should tell someone. Whatever you got yourself into, I’m right beside you. Okay?”
“That makes me feel a lot better, Lisa. Thanks.” Jen paused to finish the last swallow of her iced water. “But who do we tell? Christ’s sake Lisa, what the hell do we say?”
“We start with my friend in DHS. He’s not very high up in the agency but he knows people. I’ll wait till I’m home, call him on his personal cell and ask him to meet us tonight. You free after work tonight?”
“Yes,” Jen said. “Of course, and thank you for doing this.”
“I’ll ask him to meet us at his apartment in Alexandria. If he’s open to it, I’ll call your cell with his address. Sound okay?”
The Demon Senders Page 12
