The Winning Element

by Shannon Greenland

  What?! My whole body went numb. My mind blanked. The faint sound of the air-conditioning muted to a faraway hum. I couldn’t move, talk, blink. I felt paralyzed. No thoughts formed in my brain.

  Only the word murdered echoed through my mind.

  Faintly, I registered the spike in my body temperature and then the immediate chill.

  TL’s cell phone buzzed, and I blinked.

  He checked the display. “I’m sorry. This is the head of the IPNC. I have to take this.”

  I felt myself nod, slowly, unconsciously.

  Murdered.

  David took my hand. “Come on.”

  I blindly followed him out of the conference room, shuffling behind him, letting him lead the way.

  Murdered.

  We walked around the underground, high-tech workroom and came to a stop at the elevator. David punched in his personal code and then placed his hand on the fingerprint identification panel. The elevator slid open and he led me inside.

  Murdered.

  I swallowed and shook my head, trying to clear the fog.

  The elevator door slid closed.

  David took my left hand and rubbed it between both of his. “You’re freezing.” He took my right hand and did the same.

  As he continued rubbing my hands, I slowly regained my equilibrium. “Murdered?” I finally spoke.

  He pulled me to him. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on tight. Burying my face in his neck, I breathed deeply his wonderful, comforting scent.

  We stayed in that position for what seemed like forever as David stroked his hand over my back. I replayed TL’s words over and over and over again. I tried to connect with how I felt about this new information, but I couldn’t quite register it all yet.

  My parents had been dead a long time. I’d already dealt with that loss. But murdered? I needed to know more. How? Why?

  I needed my computer.

  Kissing my head, David pulled away. He punched his code on the elevator panel, and it began its ascent.

  Linking fingers with me, he stared at my face, his gaze casually roaming over my features.

  Usually, I got nervous when he did this, but right now, all I could think of was, “What do you see when you look at me that closely?” I hadn’t meant actually to voice the question out loud.

  But I had, and now it hung in the air between us.

  The elevator stopped four floors up at the ranch level. Neither of us moved to punch in our code that would open the door.

  With his brows drawn slightly together, he continued staring at me. And the more he stared, the more I wished I could take the question back.

  He was probably trying to come up with a nice way of saying he saw the biggest, most uncoordinated geek in the world when he looked at me.

  “Never mind,” I mumbled, reaching for the control panel.

  David sighed. “Well, I was going to ask you to go to dinner. But if I know you, you’re anxious to get on your computer and research your parents.”

  One hour ago I would’ve leapt at the offer. Our first date. My first date ever. But there was no way I’d have fun. I’d be preoccupied the whole night with my parents. “Let me figure all this out. And then yes, yes, I want to go to dinner with you.”

  Leaning in, he kissed me softly on the lips. “All right, I’ll hold you to it.” He punched in his code and stepped off the elevator into the hallway of the ranch house, leaving his cologne lingering behind. Before the door closed, he turned and said, “If you want to talk after your research, I’ll be in my room.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He turned again and walked away, and I stood there a minute, not even realizing that I came upstairs for no reason. Shaking my head to clear my brain, I pressed my code and the elevator descended back to Subfloor Four. Quickly, I made my way around the workroom with a wave to Adam, David’s roommate, who sat at one of the black desks typing on a computer.

  I walked back into the conference room, expecting to see TL and wanting to talk to him to find out more, but found Jonathan, our PT instructor, instead.

  “Hi.”

  He glanced up, and his bald head picked up the gleam of the overhead lights. “Hey back to you,” he rasped. Jonathan had a perpetual smoker’s voice even though he didn’t smoke.

  “Seen TL?”

  Jonathan readjusted his eye patch. “He’s been called to Washington. He’ll be back late tomorrow.” He opened a folder on the table and pulled out a picture. “He said to give you this.”

  The picture of David and me. I took it from Jonathan. “Thanks.”

  I left the conference room and walked back around the workroom and down the hallway to the computer lab. I punched in my personal code and stepped inside the warm, coffee-scented room.

  Chapling, my mentor, sat hunched over his station with an oversize coffee mug beside the mouse. His red-haired head bobbed as his stubby fingers raced over the keys. He didn’t acknowledge me, and I didn’t expect him to. Like me, he was lost in his own world pretty much most of the time.

  I rolled out my chair and took a seat. I propped up the picture of David and me on the keyboard and got down to work researching my parents’ plane crash.

  for two solid days, I hid out in the computer lab, investigating my parents’ deaths, comparing all the newspaper articles to the TV and radio manuscripts. All the reporters said the same thing:

  Our plane went down over Lake Michigan because of air in the fuel line. Out of one hundred and twenty passengers on board, only thirty-one survived. All bodies had surfaced but my parents.

  We’d been on our way to Canada for a family vacation.

  Some vacation.

  Not one reporter mentioned anything about its not being an accident. No one thought it was strange my parents were the only bodies that did not surface.

  So I moved on to investigative documents from local and state offices. Take out all the technical jargon and their reports mirrored the media’s. The crash was an accident.

  I went to the national level next, the IPNC, and came up against a firewall. I could’ve hacked through it within seconds, but chose to follow proper procedure instead—permission and a password from TL.

  I knocked on TL’s office door.

  “Enter.”

  Turning the knob, I stepped inside. From behind his desk, TL glanced up and then went back to typing on his computer.

  “Sir, I’d like you to give me access to the IPNC files regarding my parents’ death.”

  He stopped typing, sat back in his chair, and brought his gaze up to meet mine.

  Pulling my shoulders back, I straightened my posture. Not only did it make me feel confident, it showed my seriousness.

  “When was the last time you ate?” he responded instead of addressing my request.

  I thought for a second. “David brought me a sandwich at one o’clock this afternoon.”

  TL glanced at his watch. “It’s twenty-two hundred hours right now. You haven’t eaten in nine. Looking at your bloodshot eyes and the dark circles beneath them, I’d say you haven’t slept much either. And I won’t mention the fact that you’ve skipped out on every single meal, chore, training session, and your university studies.”

  I just looked at him. I didn’t need a lecture right now.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” he asked.

  Although I hadn’t told him what I’d been researching over the past couple days, I knew he knew.

  TL knew everything.

  “Answers. Discrepancies. New knowledge. Old knowledge. An understanding of what exactly happened.” I had been six when that plane crashed. Until this week I’d never bothered reading the reports.

  The social workers, cops, and psychologists had explained to me what had happened. I’d simply accepted it, never questioned it. Frankly, I hadn’t wanted any reminders of that day.

  TL pointed to the metal chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”


  He hadn’t agreed to my request about the file access, but I closed his door and took a seat anyway. I’d take what I could get. “How do you know my parents were murdered?”

  “The IPNC found your dad’s body.”

  I sat very still, absorbing what he said. “What do you mean you ‘found my dad’s body’? All the reports say neither one of my parents surfaced.”

  “They didn’t. The IPNC took your dad.” He paused. “But we couldn’t find your mom.”

  I sighed, exhausted, confused, and rubbed my dry eyes. “Will you please just explain to me what’s going on? I’m too tired to figure it out.”

  After a long pause, he shifted in his seat. “For almost a decade, your parents followed a chemical smuggling ring. The people involved would import illegal substances into the States and resell them to overseas terrorists for manufacturing bombs.”

  In the time I’d been with the Specialists, I’d learned how horrible people could be, and how some would do anything for the right price. I experienced a quick flash of pride that I was a member of an organization that fought those people, the bad guys.

  “The leader of this chemical ring,” TL continued, “was, and still is, Eduardo Villanueva. Your father infiltrated the ring and became a member of Eduardo’s team. He lived and worked with Eduardo for two years, secretly feeding information back to your mother. Eduardo wasn’t just involved in the bomb business. His money filtered into all kinds of other things: drugs, guns, prostitution, gambling, murder.”

  I leaned forward. “So what happened?”

  “Someone on the inside—we’re not sure who and how—discovered your father’s true identity. They found out about your mother, too.”

  My stomach clenched.

  “Eduardo put a price tag on both their heads. Immediately following, your father and mother resigned from the IPNC and ran. They picked you up, got new identities, and moved to a small town in Iowa. They lived there for two years without a single problem.”

  My heart picked up pace.

  “Then the IPNC intercepted a message that Eduardo knew where your parents were. We notified them immediately, and they hopped on a plane to Canada. There was a contact there waiting for the three of you with yet another set of new identities. ”

  “I thought we were going on vacation,” I mumbled.

  TL scooted forward in his chair. “Eduardo rigged that plane to go down. He had divers ready. He wanted to make sure your parents died.”

  TL’s expression softened. “The IPNC responded to the crash before local and state authorities. When we pulled your dad’s body from the water, he had been shot once in the head.”

  I flinched, not expecting those words.

  “We couldn’t find your mother. We don’t know if Eduardo took her body, or if it floated away with the current. But the IPNC couldn’t take the chance that the authorities would discover your dad’s body and the bullet hole. Then the media would’ve known he’d been murdered, and that would’ve started a domino effect the IPNC couldn’t risk. So he was cremated, and, officially, your parents died in a plane crash, their bodies were never found, and they left one surviving daughter, Kelly.”

  Kelly. It seemed like forever since I’d heard my real name. “And Eduardo Villanueva?”

  “Still being pursued by the IPNC. Every time they think they have him, he outsmarts them. He manages to slip through their fingers every time.”

  I sat for a good solid minute, digesting everything. “No one ever found my mom’s body? So . . . she might still be alive?”

  "GiGi,” TL sighed. “Eduardo wanted her dead. She’s dead. You need to accept that.”

  But if no one ever found her body . . . bull crap, I didn’t need to accept anything. “Why didn’t you tell me all this two days ago when you first showed me that picture?”

  “I wanted to see what you’d do with the information you had. Yet another one of the many tests you will go through in your training. ” He paused. “Plus, knowing your personality, I knew you’d do your own research and try to find out the answers yourself.”

  Sometimes I didn’t understand TL’s reasoning. Why put me through all this? For two days I’d been down in my lab, barely eating and sleeping. All for what took him ten minutes to tell me. I closed my eyes, irritated, aggravated, and raw with the truth about my parents. My dad had been murdered. My mom might, might, still be alive.

  I opened my eyes, purposefully showing him all the frustration weighing me down. “Would you have told me this two days ago if I’d asked?”

  “No.”

  My frustration morphed into anger, and I snapped. “I don’t understand you. I know you have a reason behind everything you do. And I’m sure in this instance it was something about me maturing or gaining independence or whatever. But these are my parents, and you had no right to keep that information from me.”

  Without giving him a chance to respond, I shot to my feet, pumped with adrenaline. “You said Eduardo Villanueva is still out there, still at large. Well, I want to go after him.” I jabbed my finger in TL’s direction. “And since I can’t do it alone, you’re going to have to help me.”

  [2]

  TL maintained a dead-pan expression as I stood defiantly in front of him, staring unblinking into his icy eyes.

  Silence stretched between us.

  Long seconds ticked by, and my heartbeat pulsed in my neck, my veins, my temple. In the quiet room I heard only its thumping and my raspy, quick breaths.

  I didn’t resist the anger and sadness fueling me. I allowed it in. It felt good.

  “I want to go after Eduardo Villanueva,” I repeated. “And I want you to help me.”

  “I realize you’re upset, but make no mistake, I give the commands around here. Not you.”

  His intimidating comment made my jaw tighten.

  “I suggest,” he continued in a measured tone, “that you leave my office to cool down and collect your thoughts before you say something you’re going to regret.”

  “How do you expect me to sit back and ignore the fact my parents’ murderer is still out there. What if it were Nalani?” I blurted out. “What if someone murdered your wife? You wouldn’t stand by and calmly accept it. You’d go after them.”

  Every muscle in TL’s face hardened. Slowly, he got to his feet. No one else but David knew TL and Nalani, our pre-op agent, were married. And until this second, TL hadn’t known that I knew.

  Not giving him a chance to answer, I railroaded on. “You have no hold on me. Remember, I’m the only Specialist who didn’t do anything illegal on my own. You tricked me into coming here.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was taking things too far. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “I can walk out right now, and you can’t stop me.”

  “So walk out then.”

  Suddenly, my boiling anger faded to a concentrated focus. He’d once given me an ultimatum; now it was my turn. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, without a doubt in my mind. “You have until tomorrow morning. If you’re not prepared to help me find my parents’ murderer, then I’m leaving.”