Kevin hid a smile behind his hand which he quickly killed when Lance’s eye’s turned to him.
“Between Frank, Dan and ADAM I’m pretty sure we can accomplish the same as we did for the Polarus and the Ad Aeternitatem. Plus, we have Michael to do a final.”
“About Michael.” Kevin interrupted, “He says that the Pods are definitely a nice solution, but he would prefer a more personal experience and he requests a stewardess for his next flight.” This time, Kevin didn’t hide his smile when Bethany Anne blushed.
“I’ll give him a ‘stewardess’…”
“I think that’s his idea, sweetie.” Patricia said.
Bethany Anne turned to her, “You too?”
“Me too what? I’m just pointing out the obvious. I’m not sure what happened to cause you be so upset with him.”
Bethany Anne crossed her arms. “Nothing. Happened.”
Patricia looked over to Lance who was watching his daughter and minutely nodded his head up and down. “I see. Well, if you want to have a proper relationship with such a powerful supporter you need to go down there and have a discussion about the ‘nothing’.”
She stared at her dad who stared right back. Finally, she dropped her eyes, “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“No, you will go and do it.” Lance said. Bethany Anne brought her head back up in a flash, but Lance kept going, “You can’t have such a significant opportunity become a potential misunderstanding between you and Michael. Left unresolved it has potential for an enemy to use against you. That is bad leadership just because you’re having a spat about God only knows what, young lady.”
She jerked her head up and down to let him know she got the message.
Lance turned back to Kevin, “What is your concern about security?”
Kevin flipped a page over, “We are implementing a large amount of electronic surveillance devices and triggers across the property, the problem is both the size of the base and how easy small drones can get on the property.”
Bethany Anne asked, “Are we talking quad-copters or what?”
Kevin turned his page one more time, “Those, plus tiny insect devices, bugs on items brought in, long range laser devices against the windows in the R&D area plus the normal people, data transfers and other miscellaneous items.”
Bethany Anne pulled a leg up and put her elbow on her knee putting her chin in her hand.
Kevin looked over to Lance who shrugged his shoulders, out of the corner of his eye, Kevin caught Patricia putting up one finger.
“We need vampires.”
Patricia coughed suddenly and then laughed a little, Kevin going to pound on her back but she noticed and said, “No! It’s nothing. I just wasn’t expecting her to say we needed ‘more’ vampires!”
Bethany Anne was smiling and Kevin noticed that Lance seemed in thought when he asked, “What are you thinking?”
She shrugged, “If we had enough for a night crew, they could easily handle any night-time incursions. I doubt much would cross their sense of smell and we could easily send two out in a Pod anywhere on base property very quickly. If something happens to them, then they have the best chance of surviving…”
“Other than Wechselbalg.” Lance pointed out.
“True.” She stood up and walked a few feet to the left and turned. Talking while she paced. “But the truth is that both Vamps and Weres are just two sides of the same technology. I can get rid of the sun issue, but any Vamps that we recruit would need to be trusted before I offer that solution to them.”
“Why don’t you trust Vamps?” Kevin asked. Lance turned to him and raised an eyebrow. Kevin remembered Lance dressing him down for doing a full background check on a blind date and told him, “I’m just curious.”
Bethany Anne answered, “It’s actually a good question. Ever since I’ve was turned, I’ve been introduced to ass-hats whether they are Vamps or Weres. The truth is that ass-hats are everywhere. When you give them superior skills it can make a tiny ass-hat that is bearable into a significant ass-hat. With Michael, I have a good chance of making sure we get decent people. I don’t have enough of a rep with the Wechselbalg yet to get them here on base with us. Nathan and Ecaterina are handling that issue for me right now.”
“Are you sure you have Michael’s help?”
She turned to her dad, “I heard you the last time you got your ‘dad bat’ out and jumped into my personal life, I’ll go see him, ok?”
Lance put his hands together on his desk, looked above her head for a second then looked her in the eyes, “Yes, I think that will do.”
“Thank you.”
“So long as it’s soon.”
Bethany Anne opened her lips to let her dad see she had her tongue held firmly by her teeth. His grin caused her to smile. “Fine dad, I’ll go see him tonight if he has time.”
“Oh baby,” Patricia said from behind Bethany Anne. “He’ll have time.”
Washington D.C., - USA
Barb carefully reached over to the donut box and pulled a glazed donut from the four that were left. She put a napkin underneath it to keep her desk clean. It was past eight P.M. and everyone else had gone home for the evening.
She had started on her other project promptly at quitting time and dropped three hours on that projects’ research and then came back to this enigma.
She couldn’t help it. The truth is out there, it seemed. But it was damned difficult to find.
She was hooked. She needed to find out what was behind the closet door, even if it was something scary. It was like she was a child again and even though her parents promised her there was nothing under her bed, she still kept a bat she had taken from her brother’s room with her every night.
Now, she was a grown woman and really wished she had that bat again. If she had any nails to bite, they would be gone again.
This time, if the vague puzzle she was putting together could be believed, some monsters had been on a rampage to take out other monsters and were now targeting her terrorists.
With some shady government contact that had to be almost a hundred years old. She felt like was in some sort of Twilight Zone episode. Just what the hell was going on?
She worked to flesh out her earlier report on the missing terrorists and the strike here in Washington D.C. The ex-Army Colonel had a heart attack in prison just two weeks ago, so there wasn’t going to be any way to get any further information from him. While that seemed too tidy, she doubted it had anything to do with her monster squad.
‘Huh’, she thought, that’s a good enough a name to call them. Since they seemed to have no issues going ‘bump in the night’ she rather liked the name and wrote it down. There, at least they had a name.
What she had been able to figure out was that the information about Colonel Nickelson taking money to sandbag his own men was true.
She was able to finally track down the phone records for a cheap throw-away phone that matched a few calls into the German military and then to Nickelson. Once it was used to call Nickelson, it went dark. Whoever used it had pretty good operational security.
Bastard!
Barb liked puzzles, but sometimes she was impatient as hell and it would have been nice if the person who called Nickelson would have been a little less crafty.
She combed the phone records to see if the people in the German military that were contacted had any other throw-away calls, but nothing registered for the last few months. Maybe the person had gone dark.
Or, she considered, maybe the monster squad had gotten to him or her?
She shuddered. Whoever this team was, they were damned efficient at taking out the trash.
Which caused her to wonder, who pulled the strings to get her to find this group? Why did they want her to track them so badly that they pulled a major research asset, focused on high-probability terrorist attacks, to try and find them? As far as Barb could tell, the monster squad never went after innocent targets.
She bit down on her donut, r
ealizing that she had just finished it without tasting it at all. She swallowed a sip of coffee. She was starting to worry about where her thoughts were taking her.
The monster squad was careful to keep themselves off the radar. Yet she had some ghost government contact pulling strings to try to find them. And … there was only one point of convergence between the two groups … her. Shit! Her eyes opened in alarm.
She was the cut-out.
She bent to her left and wiped her hands over her trash can. It was time to start gathering more information on who was directing her research.
She needed insurance and the only way she could do that was to gain information.
She needed to figure out who wanted to know about the monster squad and why.
TQB Base, Colorado – USA
Cheryl Lynn knocked on the door and heard a lady call out ‘come in’. She opened the door and noticed a pretty woman to her left. Her desk had a really old time name holder with ‘Patricia’ on it. Cheryl Lynn wondered if the lady had inherited it from someone who had been here at the base when it was run by the Army.”
The woman stood as Cheryl Lynn closed the door behind her and stepped forward to shake hands. “Hello, I’m Cheryl Lynn. I was told by John Grimes to come see you when I had my children enrolled in the school here.”
Patricia smiled, “Hi Cheryl Lynn, you’re John’s cousin, right?” Cheryl Lynn nodded, “Good, have a seat right there and I will answer some of your questions before Bethany Anne gets back.”
Both women sat, one on each side of the desk. Cheryl Lynn spoke first, thinking of something to cut the ice with. “I noticed you have such a gorgeous old desk holder here, was your mom or grandmother in the service?”
Patricia looked down and noticed that Cheryl Lynn meant her own desk holder. She wasn’t sure if she should be annoyed or humored. She smiled, “That’s going to be an interesting story to share, but I can tell you that I brought it with me to this base from my previous posting.”
“You were in the Army as well?”
“Yes sweetie, I was in the Army.” Cheryl Lynn thought it odd that the lady, who certainly couldn’t be any older than herself was calling her ‘sweetie’.
The door opened behind her and a young looking man stalked into the room without looking at the two ladies. He was obviously annoyed at something and didn’t notice the women staring at him. Cheryl Lynn turned to look at Patricia who smiled and winked at her before she turned back and watched him grab a clipboard with a yellow pad full of notes on it. He then opened the top left drawer on his desk.
Bang! He closed it and opened the next. Bang! went the second drawer and then he opened the third. “Ha!” He reached into the drawer and pulled out an item that made a sound of something wrapped in cellophane when ‘bang’ the third drawer slammed closed.
He stood up, and he bit and held the Honey Roll package with his teeth as he searched his pockets and then opened the pencil drawer of his desk. He reached in and grabbed a pair of keys and stuck them in his pocket.
BANG!
He snagged another pile of paperwork in his right hand and started for the door, never looking in the ladies’ direction. Cheryl Lynn heard a muffled, “Love you, babe” from the man who opened the door and walked out, shutting it behind him without slamming it.
Cheryl Lynn was wearing a look of astonishment on her face as she turned to stare at Patricia.
“That, my dear, is my husband Lance.” Patricia said. “He was the previous General of this base and I have to say having him here on the base tends to bring out the worst aspects of his previous role.”
“General?” Patricia nodded to Cheryl Lynn. “How old is he?”
Patricia was opening her mouth when the door opening interrupted them again. This time Cheryl Lynn heard Bethany Anne from the hallway, “Ashur, sit your ass down right here. No! Here you excuse for a white walking rug. Dad had a hissy fit when you shed all over his floor last time. No, don’t give me that look you miscreant! You know damn well you rolled around behind his desk on purpose. I swear to God I’m going to have the Reprobate & Degenerate group figure out how to communicate with your ass so I can slap you when you give me lip.”
The door finished opening and Bethany Anne stepped in. Cheryl Lynn noticed that Scott was behind her. He saw her in the room and winked, then he turned around and stood guard. John had introduced her to Eric first, then Scott and finally Darryl when Scott and Darryl came back from a short trip down to Texas looking for, of all things, a UFO that had supposedly been spotted.
Patricia stood up again and walked to meet Bethany Anne and give her a hug.
Bethany Anne asked, “Where’s dad?”
Patricia answered, “He just left. He was grumpy without his sugar fix. He grabbed his notepad and has a conference call with the teams on the Polarus at the moment.
“Oh, ok.” Bethany Anne turned to Cheryl Lynn, “Did Toni and Todd get in school ok?” Cheryl Lynn nodded, trying to catch up with everything she thought she just heard. “Good. Did John take them over to the research area?”
Cheryl Lynn thought back to when her daughter Toni and Marcus Cambridge started a discussion when the two met. Marcus apparently knew enough of biology sciences to get into an in-depth discussion with her about genetics of all things. Before Cheryl Lynn had a chance to figure out what was going on with those two, she heard a ‘whoop!’ from Todd and turned to see him talking with two men near a military helicopter. Todd later told her it was a Black Hawk named ‘Shelly’.
John had smiled and told her to stay quiet. He had turned to her and said in a lowered voice, “This is when boys get a chance to find their love. Bobcat and William won’t let him get hurt, trust me.” Cheryl Lynn nodded and turned to see Toni following Mr. Cambridge into a room full of science equipment. By the time she came out, she was talking about black holes and parsecs with the man and had it setup to come see him on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons after school.
All she could do was slug her over-testosteroned cousin in the arm when he smiled at her.
Cheryl Lynn answered Bethany Anne’s question, “Yes. Todd can’t stop talking about Shelly and now Toni won’t stay quiet about planets and outer-space. She speaks about genetics every once in a while as well, but at the moment she acts like visiting Mr. Cambridge is the best gift I can provide her.”
“Mr. Cambridge?” Bethany Anne looked at her.
“The scientist?” She answered.
“No, I know who he is, I’m just surprised you called him by his last name.”
Cheryl Lynn blushed, “Well, he is rather old with that grey hair and stuff so it would feel weird to not show him respect.”
Bethany Anne turned thoughtful for a moment and looked over to Patricia, “Would you mind checking him out?”
Patricia turned back to her desk and asked over her shoulder, “Same kind of ‘check out’ your dad gave me?”
Bethany Anne smiled, “Well, I’m not sure I want to know what he did, but how about you confirm if he is ‘with us’ enough that he warrants a health bump?”
“Got-chya.” Patricia reached for her phone and typed in a reminder.
“Was that man really your father?” Cheryl Lynn asked.
Bethany Anne turned to answer Cheryl Lynn’s question. “Yes.” Then she just watched Cheryl Lynn for a reaction.
Cheryl Lynn considered her next question carefully. She felt like she was being measured for some reason. Cheryl Lynn felt that she got on the base because she was John’s cousin, but she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. All John said was that she was going to work for Bethany Anne in some capacity.
WE WILL BUILD Page 4
