Agent Out

by Francine Pascal

  “Anybody home?” Gaia called out.

  No answer. As her eyes continued to adjust, Gaia could see a calendar tacked to the peeling wallpaper above the filthy old-fashioned sink. It was a wildlife calendar. It showed a dark green photograph of a wooded glade, where a single yellow-eyed owl gazed out at the camera. Gala flicked her head back and forth, checking the room’s entrances. There was a narrow, closed door that was probably a broom closet. Moving cat-like toward it, Gala leveled the gun at the door, took a deep breath, and kicked it open. Two long-handled mops leaned on a wall in the gloom within.

  To Gaia’s left, a doorway led into another room. Now she could hear the murky voices more clearly, but it was still impossible to make out what they were saying.

  “Hello?” Gaia called out. “FBI,” she added—more to herself than to anyone else.

  If there was anyone else. Pivoting through the kitchen door, gun raised, Gaia entered a narrow living room with a low ceiling and shag carpeting. A weak light shone through the blinds to the left and right—the blinds she’d been unable to peer through moments before. More cardboard pizza boxes littered the floor. Gaia kicked them out of the way as she walked.

  The smell was worse. Somebody has been here, Gaia realized. Recently—that’s what the smell means. Pizza and dirty dishes from a week ago at most; probably more recent.

  She suddenly noticed the name on the delivery bills that were taped to the pizza boxes. JAMES ROSSITER.

  Suddenly a muffled male voice called out, “Time to bet it all!”

  The voice had her raising the gun and whipping her head back and forth, her blond hair flying as she tried to localize its source. “Join host Bobby Shoshone and twelve thousand dollars in cash prizes on everybody’s favorite steeplechase game after these messages!”

  A television. Gaia winced, trying to restrain a sneeze caused by the dust. The voices had been coming from a TV. But now, from inside the house, Gaia finally realized the sound was coming from beneath her—from underground.

  Finally she noticed the detail she’d missed. In front of her, between two fraying fabric wall coverings, was another closed door—and down at its extreme bottom edge she could see a thread of bright yellow light. There was no question—the television sound had come from there.

  Basement, Gaia realized. Someone’s in the basement. Rossiter or someone else.

  Catherine.

  Gaia knew how to walk silently. She moved toward the door, gun held to one side, staring at the thin line of light along the filthy shag carpeting. In her mind, Gaia was already calculating her move—how to open the door and get through it.

  Going through a door is maybe the most important skill an FBI agent has to possess, Special Agent Jennifer Bishop had lectured the trainees. It can literally mean life or death. Bishop knew what she was talking about. She went on in graphic detail that day, telling scare stories of top-notch agents who’d been cut down in their prime because they didn’t know how to get through a door or had done it wrong just once and gotten a bullet in the face. Gaia had concentrated very hard on those training exercises. All the martial arts skills in the world couldn’t save you from the gun you couldn’t see.

  Jake, Gaia thought sadly. Jake found that out.

  She angrily shook the image from her head—which, she was realizing, was becoming easier to do as the months and years went by. She stopped thinking about her dead boyfriend and the bullets in his chest and reached forward to open the door, swinging it open and diving through it. She swung her body back and forth to cover all the angles and crouched at the head of the stairs, the gun held straight out in front of her.

  She was in a small, sooty alleyway looking down a flight of narrow wooden stairs. The stairs led down into the darkness, and the television sound was much louder. She could hear the frenzied applause of the studio audience, no doubt welcoming Bobby Shoshone and his twelve thousand dollars in cash prizes.

  “Catherine?” Gaia called out. Her voice echoed in the stale air. Her shoes creaked on the wooden steps as she descended. The gun didn’t waver—she could hold its muzzle steady, like Bishop had taught them. She glanced quickly backward as she moved.

  “Whoever’s down there,” Gaia called out, reaching the doorway at the foot of the basement stairs, “this is the FBI. Throw down your weapons and put your hands up.”

  All according to the book, but there was no response. The shouting of the television crowd continued.

  Either nobody’s there, Gaia thought, or I’m going to get a big surprise when I turn the corner.

  Being fearless was often synonymous with a lack of good judgment, so Gaia brazenly turned the corner without a second thought. She covered the room with the gun, left, right, center, before she even recognized what she was seeing. She knew some trainees who couldn’t manage to keep their eyes open when they did this—the fear made them wince and shut their eyes, and, as Bishop told them, they were as good as dead. But not Gaia. Her eyes were wide open now.

  THIS TWILIGHT LONE HOUSE

  The basement was dark, wide, and badly lit. The ceiling was obscured by hanging pipes. Some of them were leaking. The floor was dark gray cement, covered in dust. The dust revealed several sets of footprints, and Gaia forced herself to stay in one place, midway through the doorway, so she wouldn’t smudge the footprints before she could read them.

  A large worktable stood near the center of the cluttered room. A large, humming fluorescent light hung above it from a pair of new-looking chains. The table, Gaia realized, was made from an old Ping-Pong table whose net had been removed. The table was swept clean, its pale green surface reflecting the harsh light. A small portable television stood in the corner of the table, showing a flickering, blurry image of the famous Mr. Shoshone, holding a microphone and joking with his studio audience. As she came into the room, Gaia reached over, covering her fingers with her sleeve, and flicked off the TV.

  The silence was shocking. Now she could hear the clicks and hums of the house’s heating pipes and the ticking of a small digital clock on the worktable. She couldn’t hear anything else. She kept the gun drawn.

  Opposite the worktable was an old-fashioned wooden desk. It was covered in papers and loose-leaf binders. A large, fairly new computer monitor stood in the center of the desk behind a computer keyboard and a mouse.

  The computer, Gaia saw, was connected to a phone line that looked recently installed. A fresh new phone cable ran up the wall, stapled every two feet, and disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. Gaia knew the procedure to test the line for a phone number ID, but she already knew what the number was. This was the computer that had accessed Catherine’s program. There was no doubt about it.

  At that moment, however, the computer was turned off. Its screen was dead black, a dark glass eye.

  Gaia looked at the worktable. Her eyes grazed along its smooth hardboard surface. There was nothing to see but little snips of wire, each about an inch long, in different colors. No big deal—but there was something about the image that nagged at her: those snips and that digital clock near the stained cement wall somehow looked familiar.

  “Whatever you see, file it away,” Agent Crane had lectured back in Quantico. “It doesn’t have to make sense or be important. If you don’t understand what it means, just file it away in your mind—and keep those mental files organized because you never know what you’ll need to know later on. It’s impossible to predict which detail will crack the case.”

  Gaia doggedly filed away the multicolored wire snips—and suddenly she forgot all about the worktable and its contents. Now that she had moved near the center of the room, she saw something she’d missed before.

  Behind the desk, in the shadows against the wall, was a cot—a low-slung, canvas-and-steel camp cot, the kind you’d find at an army/navy surplus store. The cot was covered in a dark, plaid wool blanket that didn’t look particularly clean. As she got closer to the cot, she saw that the blanket was turned down, revealing surprisingly clean-looking whit
e sheets and a white cotton pillow.

  Carefully, making sure not to touch anything, Gaia leaned her face close to the pillow and took a deep breath. She wrinkled her nose in advance at the rank smell of the room, which seemed to penetrate everywhere. But through the stale air and the decaying aromas of pine cleanser and old food, there was another smell.

  Shampoo, Gaia realized. Suddenly her eyes were nearly watering. It wasn’t just the pungent, citrus aroma of the Neutrogena hair care product. It was the fact that it was so familiar. It was a smell she’d know anywhere. That was the thing about smells—she never forgot them, even years later, even if she thought she had. Her mother’s spicy lilac perfume or the faint smell of Tide and ivory soap on Ed Fargo’s shirt collars—when she smelled them again, the years melted away like fog and she was back in time, just like that. And, this was a much more vivid and recent smell. It wasn—t hard for her to remember her roommate—s shampoo—she had smelled it every day.

  Snap out of it, Gaia told herself angrily. Don’t cry.

  But it was a near thing. She could feel her eyes stinging as her face moved toward the Neutrogena-scented bed—and she saw, distinctly, two short black hairs on the pillow.

  Catherine.

  It was all true then. She had been here—in this filthy basement, in this twilight zone house on this random Baltimore street, miles from Quantico or anything else.

  When? When were you here, Catherine? And where the hell did you go?

  Gaia forced herself to blink back the tears as she stood up, brushing her hair from her face. Had James Rossiter held her here, terrified, screaming fruitlessly in this dark basement? Had Catherine awakened in the middle of the night, blind with fear as she remembered where she was? Did she cry into this white pillow, wondering what would happen to her?

  And what did happen to her?

  Come on, come on, Gaia told herself impatiently. Be professional. You’re FBI—don’t forget it.

  But she didn’t feel professional right then. Her throat was aching and her eyes were stinging with the lingering smell of the shampoo. How many times had she lounged on her dorm bed on a Sunday morning, the one day they could relax and not worry about calisthenics and training drills, flipping through a magazine while Catherine sailed into the room in a towel, her face looking naked without its tortoiseshell glasses, her wet hair brushed back in black rivulets from her pretty face, filling the room with that Neutrogena smell? Come on, Moore, she’d say, her toothbrush dangling from her mouth and distorting her voice. I think it’s pancakes today. You’re coming with me. A twenty-year-old girl cannot live on Froot Loops alone.

  Gaia stood motionless in the center of the basement, her hand gripping the Waither automatic, gazing down at the cheap, narrow cot, holding back tears. If she had been in a better mood, she might have allowed herself a moment of pride at successfully getting this far into the investigation. But she felt too helpless. What investigation? Gaia told herself angrily. The duffel bag with the blood, Lyle’s phone trace, this address—she had no idea what it all meant.

  I may not be able to save her, Gaia realized. She may already be dead.

  No. Gaia firmly shook her head. She was going to find Catherine, and she was going to save her. There was absolutely no question about it. She just had to pull herself together and start thinking like a field agent.

  Tearing her eyes away from the cot, Gaia stared at the desk. She wondered if she should risk turning on the computer. Some machines had passwords or detectors that protected them from prying eyes—Gaia had heard stories from her instructors about criminal data that were lost forever because some overzealous agent had flipped computers on, causing them to self-erase. If this was a legitimate investigation, Gaia would already be on a police radio, demanding that an electronics team come recover the computer and bring it to the crime lab’s digital investigation center. But she couldn’t do anything like that now. She was on her own.

  Gaia wasn’t sure what to do about the computer—it was the strongest link to Catherine and, maybe, the key to what she had been brought here for.

  her vision was now totally black, flooding with iridescent shooting stars

  RECEDING AWAY LIKE A DREAM

  Later, Gaia tried to forgive herself for the mistake she made in that moment. After all, she was confused and distracted. She was staring at the bed, focusing on the two black hairs, trying to get all her thoughts in order. And to be fair, all her “crime scene” rhythms were thrown off. In all the crime scenes she’d visited (in her short career with the FBI), she’d known what to do. You got the forensic machinery moving. You cleared the area, you canvassed the witnesses, you collected the evidence. You contacted the crime lab, you began profiling, you put out descriptions and APBs if you needed to. But all of that involved having the force of the bureau behind you. And Gaia was completely on her own. She didn’t even have envelopes to collect the hairs and fingerprints she could see in front of her.

  So, maybe Gaia could be forgiven for letting her guard down—for facing away from an open door, for missing footsteps on the living room floor over her head, for not catching the careful, silent tread on the wooden steps behind her. It was precisely the sort of lapse she’d been trained not to make, and afterward Gaia had plenty of opportunities to curse herself for getting caught up in her thoughts.

  The blow crashed into her lower back with such sheer brute force that Gaia lost her balance completely as well as losing her grip on the Walther. Her breath was driven completely out of her body as the gun twirled neatly from her fingers and dropped to the cement floor like a stone. She lost her footing, her shoes slipping in the dust. She toppled to the floor like a fallen statue, a searing pain spreading through her back like fire. “Oompf” she grunted as her face smashed into the edge of the cot, which flipped over. Her ears rang as a tremendous weight landed on top of her. With her head pressed to the floor, she could see a sudden kicking movement to one side and heard the unmistakable thump of her gun being kicked across the floor and out of view. As the weight on her back increased, a stinking, fetid smell washed over her head.

  “Well, hi there,” a rasping male voice whispered in her ear. “Welcome. Won’t you come in?”

  Gaia gasped for air. She couldn’t breathe—the weight on her back was tremendous. The man—James Rossiter, she had to assume—had to be lying full on top of her, with his hands now wrapped around her neck. She could feel his whiskers scraping against her cheek as he leaned closer. “By all means, jus’ walk right in and make yourself at home.”

  With a tremendous effort Gaia strained her back muscles, her hair tossing as she bucked and twisted, trying to get free. It was no use. She might as well have been bolted to the floor. Now her vision was filling with spots. Her need for oxygen was becoming more and more urgent with every passing second.

  “Who are you?” Rossiter—if it was he—screamed in her ear. “What the hell are you doing in my house? I told you to get out of here and take your stupid questions with you, but you didn’t listen.”

  The diner across the street, Gaia realized weakly, remembering the scruffy-looking man who’d given her attitude a half hour before. That was Rossiter. She could finally put a face to the voice in her ear. She remembered the sneer with which the man had regarded her badge and the enormous bulk he carried that had seemed to spill off the edges of the diner stool he’d occupied.

  Gaia was losing consciousness. There was no question about it. Her vision was now totally black, flooding with iridescent shooting stars—she was trying to will it all away like she’d been able to do when the exhaustion from the fighting wasn’t that severe. Rossiter’s heavy breathing, the pain in her back, and the feel of the man’s overwhelming weight holding her down against the cold cement—all these sensations were receding away like a dream. She was blacking out.

  Sorry, Catherine, she thought weakly. Some rescue—I didn’t get very far, did I?

  The pinpoints of light kept swirling against the darkness—and suddenly
Gaia felt a surge and a thump, and she could breathe.

  What the hell?

  The weight was off her. Faintly, as if it was all happening far in the distance, Gaia heard another thump. Her head still felt light. She was drinking in great gulps of oxygen. Her strength and her vision were returning, but slowly. She felt another surge of spinal pain as she tried to roll over onto her back. She couldn’t make it—she was still too weak. Now her head was clearing, and there was a ringing in her ears, but she could begin to make sense of what she was hearing. Behind and above her, the sounds were unmistakable: an intense fistfight.

  “Get up!” an unfamiliar male voice was yelling at her. The voice was interrupted by more scuffling and punching sounds—and Gaia felt another sharp pain, this time in her lower leg, as a foot in a heavy work boot slammed into her shin. “Get up! Quick!”

  Talking to me, she realized. Her strength was returning. Wincing against the spasm of pain in her back, Gaia turned herself over.

  Two men were fighting. They were right there—nearly on top of her. It was like watching a boxing match from beneath the ring. Their movements were silhouetted by the blinding fluorescent lamp that hung over the worktable.

  Gaia recognized James Rossiter—he was the burly, unshaven hulk on the right, his sweatshirted arms pinwheeling through the air as he tried to fight off the other man.

  And to her surprise, Gaia realized that she recognized the other man, too.

  It was the thin, older man in the neat black suit, from the diner. The one who had reminded her, for a moment, of her father. His face was pulled into a tight grimace as he jabbed a series of karate kicks on Rossiter’s shoulders and arms. His necktie was swinging in circles as he bobbed and weaved. His black leather dress shoes squeaked on the dusty floor.

  There was no question about it—the newcomer had been trained to fight. As she weakly pulled herself up off the floor, bracing herself on the cot, Gaia watched as the man in the black suit began to win the fight. It was impressive—from the floor Rossiter seemed as big as a truck—and he was barely pulling it off. The man in the suit ducked his head, and Gaia heard the swoosh of air as James Rossiter’s beefy fist swung over the suited man’s head, clanging into the hanging lamp and causing it to swing crazily on its chains.