Chapter 56: Definitely Feeling Aggressive Tendencies

“I want to know how you got into the facility in the first place,” the interrogator demanded. Before Tim could answer, the other man in the interrogation room began pummeling him with combinations of punches across his chin and midsection. Tim was unable to protect himself while tied down to his chair.

The interrogator asked Tim the same question once again. After shifting himself up straight in the chair, looking away and off into space, Tim seemed disinterested and distant to the interrogator. It was a repeat of the same scene for the last few weeks, and the interrogator was beginning to lose hold of his temper.

“I asked you a question.” The interrogator’s anger was now visible as he flexed his fists, waiting for an answer. The prisoner merely glanced at his interrogator, then dismissed his importance by continuing his starry-eyed, non-responsive stare directly forward.

After weeks of no new response to their questioning, the interrogator decided to up the game. He grabbed one of the larger hatchets displayed before the prisoner, pulled the straps holding down the man’s left leg, and sliced off the pinky toe.

“I want you to answer the fucking question, mother fucker!” the interrogator demanded while showing the blood dripping off the hatchet. He pulled his arm back, getting ready for a second swing. This swing had the blade aimed at Tim’s chest.

Several guards from outside burst into the room, raised their guns, and pointed them at the interrogator with the hatchet. Tim did not even react as the hatchet entered his chest.

The sunlight shining through the curtained window finally reached Tim’s closed eyes. The dream was a vivid recollection of a particularly rough day of interrogation while stuck in the basement of the CID-SI headquarters in Ft. Sam Houston. Tim woke with a shock, clutching at his chest, where the hatchet eventually had impaled him while being questioned by the government in his dream. It took a moment for Tim to remember he was no longer a prisoner.

A slight sheen of sweat covered his body despite his calm, air-conditioned bedroom. It took Tim a moment to calm down from his intense nightmare. He’d had more and more detailed dreams that reflected on his interrogations. They were not every day, but they were occurring more often now, averaging nearly once a week. The former prisoner could not figure out why his subconscious was choosing now to force him to relive some of the worst times of his life.

Tim pushed the rest of the sheets off his legs and sat upon the bed’s edge. Looking around the room helped Tim remember he was living in the same house, under the disguise of George Johnson’s distant cousin and occasional house guest. Tim was hiding in plain sight, and he and his friends had not been questioned or harassed by any authorities since the raid on the Bolivar family’s restaurant/night club several months ago.

The Bolivar family, led by sisters Yolanda and Margarita, were also recently-retired intelligence officers from Venezuela. The family used their contacts to come to America and start new lives as restaurant owners, but their nature found them also keeping their fingers in the intelligence world. That was spurred to priority when they discovered, by accident, that their restaurant’s location was near a secret US military base.

After discovering each others’ secret past lives, Yolanda and George entered into a simmering romance. The Bolivars did not know about Tim’s secret or understand what was happening in the base, but they did not want to know. They were supposed to be retired.

Upon learning of the impending raid from George’s mole in the CID-SI, the Bolivars joined George, Tim, Dr. Mike Thompson, and Dr. Mike Jensen at a secure compound in the Texas hill country. Jensen’s Uncle Justin, owner of the compound, earned millions of dollars running anti-establishment websites and selling food and equipment desired by the prepper community. Preppers are people who stock up on items they deem essential for survival, preparing for the fall of society.

Uncle Justin’s secure ranch compound in the Texas hill country, north of San Antonio and west of Austin, featured hundreds of acres of wooded and hill-topped terrain. All of it surrounded a large, man-made lake crowned by the large cabin where he ran his businesses and life. Uncle Justin did know Tim’s secrets and was helping his nephew and his friends whenever possible. The group was using the compound as a place to visit on the occasional weekend as a backdrop to finding out what happened to Tim’s plan after visiting himself in the past.

“Hey, you alright? I heard you scream a second ago,” George asked with concern painted on his face.

“Yeah. I’m good. Just a bad dream.”

As Tim nodded and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, George probed, “Another one? Was it the same dream or what?”

“No. This one was different. Remember the hatchet?”

Now it was George’s turn to nod. George also subconsciously rubbed his chest as he remembered taking Tim back to his cell in the laboratory. The interrogators had bandaged his chest wound but noted that, no matter the injury, Tim was miraculously healing. These were the start of day-after-day of new and ever-increasingly sadistic torture for which George got to see at least the remnants. He admitted to Tim that he occasionally had terrible dreams after seeing the results of some of Tim’s interrogations.

“But you’re okay?” George challenged the concern on his face and in his voice readily apparent. “Then get your lazy ass up outta bed, get a shower and come on down for breakfast. I got an email from Uncle Justin.” George turned back down the hall to the kitchen, giggling to himself. It seemed every one of their friends had come around to claiming Justin as their uncle as well, even the Bolivars.

Freshly showered and ready to see what Uncle Justin had to say, Tim poured himself some coffee and fixed eggs to go along with the newly-cooking bacon George started. Tim finished preparing his meal and joined his friend at the small dining room table to eat. “So, what did Uncle Justin want?” Tim inquired. He quickly followed up with, “Ooh, you think the Hawaiian Tropic girls are in town again?”

George smiled and answered, “Don’t know, and if they were, I wouldn’t go.” In response to Tim bringing his hand up and mimicking snapping a whip in the air, with the accompanying sound effects, “And your point?”

After thinking for a moment, “Yeah, good point. I wouldn’t, either,” Tim answered with a smile. Tim was also a fan of the budding relationship between George and Yolanda Bolivar. “What did Justin want?”

“I haven’t opened the email yet. I was waiting on you,” George said as he spun the laptop on the table to where they both could read the screen at the same time. The older man clicked open the email, and the subject line read, ‘having a great time, wish you were here.’ The two friends glanced at each other and carried their cups of coffee to the garage without a word said.

George turned on the lights as he led Tim into the garage and the small room-sized Faraday cage he had constructed. Since moving into the house with George, Tim had added onto the original creation and beefed up the mini-room’s security, based on techniques from his nanites. The room was now well beyond current military-grade electronics buffering security, yet the construction still looked amateurish, by design. They had discovered a few state-of-the-art electronic listening devices in the garage since Tim had moved in, no doubt placed by the CID-SI, but there was still no sign anyone had been able to gain access to the inner room.

Tim sat down while George opened the secure laptop computer that always stayed in the Faraday Cage room. They fired up the agreed-upon conference program and waited a moment while Uncle Justin and his nephew, Mike Jensen, discussed nothing too significant. “Hey, good morning, sleepyheads,” Uncle Justin greeted the two new members of the high-tech conference call. “It’s about time you two got up this morning,” the older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair joked.

“Yeah. Yeah. What’s got your panties in a bunch to use the secret password,” George asked, getting everyone focused on the point of the meeting.

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s important. My friends online are reporting the CID-SI has now filled all positions. Instead of concentrating on revving up their company, they can work full time hunting you, Tim,” Justin explained.

“Where did you hear this?”

“Well, now I can’t say exactly who gave me the info, but I can tell you I have eyes and ears inside the new CID-SI, and they are willing to give me a heads up whenever needed.”

“Do you trust this person?”

“I trust this person, Tim,” Dr. Jensen spoke up. “That should be enough,” Jensen said, perturbed at Tim’s lack of trust.

Tim quickly realized his mistake. “Oh, no! I’m sorry if it came out like that, guys. I was just wondering out loud if the new information was good, that’s all. If you say you trust this guy, then I trust this guy.”

Uncle Justin visibly sat back in his chair and was silent for a moment before deciding in his mind. “Okay, youngster, we’re all friends again.” Everyone politely giggled at Uncle Justin’s joke. “And you’re right. I got the news, people.” Everyone on the call fixed their attention to Uncle Justin.

“She has been active on my sites for years. She and her late husband were active and known participants in the different meetups within the groups.” Justin took a deep breath and a quick drink from his coffee cup. “We lost Dwight a couple of years ago in a car accident. Anyways, she brought up the CID-SI gearing up offices downtown a couple of months ago. She decided she wanted to help the sites keep an eye on the group from the inside. She got herself a secretarial job, and she has access to almost everywhere but their secure rooms,” Justin explained.

“Damn, Justin, that is way too dangerous. Did you try to discourage her from doing that?” George pleaded, almost appalled at Justin’s cavalier attitude toward this woman putting herself into the lion’s den.

Uncle Justin turned slightly to his right with a small smile, and Jose, his right-hand man, returned the smile and looked back to the meeting. “If you knew this girl, you wouldn’t worry one lick about her.”

“She used to teach hand-to-hand combat when she was in the Marines a lifetime ago. If anyone got in her way, they would know they’d been in a fight ... afterward,” Jose happily offered the group.

“Damn right,” Uncle Justin offered with his smile as he unconsciously rubbed his shoulder and slightly wound his arm. “That lady has skills. I tried to convince her to start a website teaching hand-to-hand combat and protection, but I never got any further than the initial suggestion but, when we’d have our little get-togethers with our fellow preppers, she would always give a quick training session for us all, to help everyone.”

“She’s reliable, and she can take care of herself,” Justin confirmed. “She said the place is now fully staffed and is acting as a private detective agency and paramilitary organization, but the only thing they are doing is looking for our friend there.” Justin took a sip from his mug as everyone contemplated the newly-delivered news.

“Can your friend get a strong outline of the organization and an idea of who is who? Whenever you are going to battle someone, it’s best to know as much about them as possible,” George asked a nodding Uncle Justin.

“Definitely. That is one of the things our undercover friend is setting up. She’s currently planning to come up to the ranch next weekend to give me a report. I figure it would be a nice gesture if you guys come on up and we can all meet each other. Believe me, she’s good people,” Justin concludes.

“I guess we’re coming up next weekend then,” George agreed while faces smiled all around the teleconference.

The teleconference ended, and George and Tim logged off the computer and powered it down. The two returned to the kitchen to refill their cups of coffee.

“You gonna invite Yolanda up for the weekend?” Tim asked his friend.

“Probably not. Don’t want to get Yolanda or her family any further under the government’s scrutiny. Best to leave them as far away from this as possible.” George paused. “But I can tell you one thing.”

Tim blew some steam from his coffee. “Yeah, what’s that?”

“I do miss being able to see her every day when ordering those damn tacos ... fuckers are worse than crack and twice as addictive!”

“Yeah, but at least you can still get some every time you go see her.” Tim patted George on the shoulder and sipped his coffee before thinking of another question. “Do you love her?”

George was taken aback by the question and mulled over his answer for a moment. He filled the time by taking a few more sips of his coffee. “I really don’t know. I mean, I love being with her, and I can easily see spending even more time with her, but seriously, I can’t let her get all caught up in this mess. It wouldn’t be fair to her or for us to have that noose hanging around our neck.”

Sensing the importance of the conversation, Tim put his cup down and looked straight at George. “If you decide you want to take your relationship to a higher level, just let me know, and I’ll move on. I can’t ask you to put a permanent halt to your life by trying to help me. You are my best friend in the world. What kind of friend would I be if I did something like that to you?”

Subconsciously, George scanned the kitchen to see if anyone was listening to their conversation even though they were the only two in the house. “I appreciate your thought, but if I decide to take our relationship to that kind of level,” George whispered and leaned in closer to Tim, “she is going to know about you and about what I have done to help you, and she will know why.” George stepped back and picked up his coffee for another sip. “And besides, if I can explain all of that to her, then maybe I’ll be able to figure out why I almost threw away my entire life to help you.”

“Good day, gentlemen,” Dr. Alan Lipscomb announced while entering the group’s shared conference room.

The others already seated around the table carried themselves in typical former-military fashion: in clean, pressed, new, and basic three-piece suits. They all, in fact, were of the same colors and cuts. To save money, the three men bought all the same outfits, the only difference being slight size alterations to each.

Dr. Lipscomb, however, was in a loud Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans. He wasn’t a slob or anything, but he did change shirts every day. The others in the office had discovered he had a schedule, and for the last couple of weeks, you could tell the day of the week by which Hawaiian shirt the good doctor was wearing. The doctor set his shoulder-satchel down on the table before him. He immediately began retrieving various folders that over-flowed with multi-colored papers and covered them all with an iPad.

“I trust everyone had a delightful weekend,” he proffered to the group and waited for the standard courtesy approvals. “Good to hear, because I think they will be few and far between for a while. We are going to move on the ranch.” He noted the others all sitting up straighter and taking their weekly staff meeting a lot more seriously than previously.

“I’ll explain. Going over the preliminary work you and your compatriots had previously completed, we have enough information to proceed with some clandestine, if limited, surveillance of the property. A few individuals high up in the intelligence communities are keenly interested in the goings-on at that ranch,” Dr. Lipscomb explained.

With that preface, he opened his iPad, and the lights in the room dimmed. A large monitor on the wall turned on, and a satellite photo of buildings surrounding a human-made lake soon appeared with two pictures of people along the right side. “The older fellow there is Justin Jensen. He is a multi-millionaire who made his money running doomsday prepper websites. We have warnings from several different intelligence agency departments to tread lightly when dealing with this man,” Dr. Lipscomb explained. “He is armed and extremely dangerous. And he has a serious dislike of anything related to the government. He has money and knows how to be a serious pain in the ass to anyone caught snooping around him or his people.”

“Why haven’t we heard about this guy before?” asked Eddie Buck, one of the former CID-SI unit members who stayed behind rather than rejoin his military unit.

“He has worked hard in the past to keep himself out of the limelight. He has also kept the existence of his company running those websites as secret as possible. Think hundreds of dummy holding corporations headquartered in the Maldives owning hundreds of other companies from Montenegro that are wholly owned subsidiaries of ... you get the idea,” Dr. Lipscomb answered, getting a nod of understanding in return. “The eggheads estimate Jensen is worth anywhere from one hundred million to three billion dollars.”

“Why can’t they pin down the number a little more? You’ve gotta admit that’s a pretty big difference,” Buck said.

“True, but Jensen plays dirty. Some IRS investigators almost lost their jobs going after this guy a few years ago. The government still has not gotten anywhere near him. It’s become like a pet project over there to try to find any mistakes in this man’s taxes. Years and they are still nowhere.” Lipscomb looked to the others around the table, and each nodded in understanding. “He has enough cash to fight in courts for years upon years. So, if we fuck up and get caught surveilling him or any of his properties, he will cost us a lot of time and effort just to end up apologizing to him.”

Dr. Lipscomb made several motions on his iPad, and a second mugshot appeared. This one is a deeply-tanned man of Mexican descent. A full head of dark, black hair with slightly graying temples are the only thing that stands out from his picture. “This is Jose Hernandez. He is Jensen’s, right-hand man. He is the Executive Vice President of every company we can conclusively tie to Jensen. This Hernandez is his right-hand man and, more than likely, his bodyguard, too.”

“While he may not look like it, Hernandez is a very dangerous fellow. Born in El Paso, he joined the Army at 18, after high school. After his preliminary testing, got assigned to Special Forces. Though he spent twenty years fighting for Uncle Sam, I don’t have the clearance to see what happened to him anytime since six months after he graduated from basic. I did get some unofficial word that, sometime during his Army years, he found himself loaned out to the Agency, and it was some time during then that he met Jensen, and they have been connected at the hip ever since.” Lipscomb took a moment to pause and let the others finish taking their notes before continuing.