Part 21

Author comment: After we were taken into custody, I was separated from Bobby. I learned of what happened to him, later. Of course I know what happened to me. In the interests of fluidity, events after that will be described as if I saw everything. I can’t read minds, either, but I made some assumptions and educated guesses about what the government people were doing and thinking. They are free to correct the record, should they wish to.

I didn’t take anything when we walked across the street and went into Redstone Appliance. I figured it was up to them to prove things. Why give them evidence? It was March, but unseasonably warm, so I didn’t even wear a jacket.

I had seen the guy who worked there. We opened about the same time and parked on the same street. I didn’t know his name. I just waved and said, “We’re with the people upstairs.”

“You are?” He looked confused.

“Yeah. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Of course not,” he said. He’d no doubt been told he was being of great help to the police or some agency by letting them use his storage room. He’d also been told it was of great importance not to tell anyone what a great help he was being.

We caught them off guard and they were not prepared for us. They’d set up a laser microphone with a voice-activated recorder. There was a pair of high power binoculars sitting on a makeshift table. There were two men in the room when I opened the door and we walked in like we belonged there.

“You guys looking for us?” I asked, disarmingly. “Here we are.”

One, whose name I later found out was Fred, said, “Fuck!” and fumbled with his gun. I say fumbled, because when he got it out, he dropped it on the floor. He looked surprised. The other was smarter. He raised his hands.

“I’m Phil,” he said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do we,” I said. “I’m Sister Olivia, a novice from St. [redacted] convent. This is Bobby Wilson. I think there’s been a big misunderstanding about him being dangerous and all that. We’re willing to cooperate if we are treated well. The last time you people talked to us, we were not treated well. So we left. You need to understand that if you fuck with us this time, we’ll just leave again.”

“Fuck!“ said Fred, who kept trying to pick up his gun, and kept failing.

“Um, okay,” said Phil, reluctantly.

“So. I figure you may as well pack up. You won’t need to be here anymore. We’ll wait. I might even help if you ask me nicely.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!“ moaned Fred. “He’s doing something to my hand!”

“We don’t like guns,” I said.

I walked over to Fred, who was still bent over, still scrabbling around trying to pick up his gun. I held up both hands to Phil.

“I’m not a threat,” I said. “If I was a threat, you’d already be dead.”

I leaned down, picked up Fred’s gun with two fingers. He stood up with me, looking furious and scared. I gently pushed his strong hand away from his body and put the gun back in his holster.

“That’s where it needs to stay,” I said, gently.

He started massaging his hand, which now worked perfectly. I walked back to lean against the door jamb beside Bobby.

“This is different,” said Phil.

“We’re different,” I said.

“I guess you are.” He actually grinned. “I mean they said you were, but they wouldn’t go into detail. I assume this has something to do with why Fred dropped his gun?”

I nodded.

“And you’re not going to hurt us?”

“Not if you don’t try to hurt us, first,” I said.

He shook his head.

“This is kind of fucked up.” He darted a glance at me. “No offense intended.”

“None taken,” I said. “Can you hurry? Coming over here was kind of a knee-jerk decision, and I need to pee.”

“I have a feeling I couldn’t stop you from going to do that,” said Phil.

I gave him my brightest smile. Why miss an opportunity to do some psy-ops?

“You’re right!” I chirped. “I’ll be right back.”

Fred had regained his composure, but was surly when I got back from the bathroom. He was on the phone and trying to be quiet, but he was in an argument with whoever he’d called. I could imagine him trying to explain what had happened and it not fitting in with the paradigm they were entrenched in. I suspect they thought he was either drunk or fucking with them. Finally, he said, “Just send a fucking car, goddammit!”

They hadn’t had time to install much, so it took very little time to pack it all up. They kept glancing at us. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Two cars showed up and there was a brief period of turmoil as four guys with guns tried to assault the second floor. They kept dropping their guns, too. I told Phil to come on over to the doorway and see if he could talk to them.

He yelled, but it still took five minutes before order was restored to the point that I could say, “Let’s just go, okay? We can figure it out later!”

I admit I was trying to keep them off balance, and I did, but I also knew it couldn’t last. Not much longer. There were smarter, craftier people up the food chain who would adapt faster. Still, I had to try.

I made sure I was sitting next to Phil when we got in one of the cars. Once we were on the way, I laid some things out for him.

“I know this is happening kind of fast, but you seem to be pretty bright, so here’s the deal. We’re coming in voluntarily. The last time they grabbed us, it wasn’t voluntary and they locked us up. We didn’t like that, so we left. If they try to lock us up this time, we’re going to leave again. So please call ahead and see if you can convince somebody that this isn’t going to be the usual kind of custody situation. No cells. I realize they’re going to interrogate the shit out of us, but that doesn’t mean they have to treat us like criminals. Believe it or not, neither of us has committed a violent crime. Any time you’re on the run, you have to bend the rules a little to survive, but we never hurt anyone. They want him because of what he can do, not what he has done.”

Phil nodded.

“If they get all pushy when we get there, it will be embarrassing for them like it was for Fred. Please see if you can prevent that. We take no joy in making people look foolish.”

“I’ll try,” he said. His attitude was remarkable, considering he was used to calling the shots and pushing people around.

He got on the phone. They had put Bobby in the other car. It’s standard procedure to separate subjects so they can’t collude on a lie to tell. I knew they’d do things the “usual” way. It was the only way they knew. But we were going to bend things around. It wasn’t going to be business as usual. Not with Bobby Wilson.

If you’re rolling your eyes, it means you’re smarter than I was. Or maybe more realistic.

There were men with cuffs waiting for us.

Somehow, they cuffed themselves.

I could see Bobby. He was just standing there, each elbow being held by one of the assault team. They were more polite than the new people. That would become a pattern. Each new person we met figured he was badder and meaner and craftier than the last, and that he (or she, in a few cases) could defeat this freak. Bobby left a trail of bruised egos in his path, but they brought it on themselves.

He didn’t injure anyone. That was a product of their own training. They’d been taught that assaulting a cooperating subject was wrong, and all Bobby did was stand there, so they had no excuse to start pummeling him. That would happen later, but it was very rare.

People milled around, cuffing themselves and uncuffing each other. Phil tried to tell them this was different, but of course nobody listened to him. He finally talked to a man who opened a locked door and Phil beckoned me to follow. Bobby was escorted behind us. We were led to a room that had a steel table in the middle of the floor, and two straight-backed chairs, a typical interrogation room. There was the ubiquitous two way mirror in one wall.

“Wait here,” said Phil. “Somebody needs to figure out what to do.”

“No problem,” I said.

“You can’t leave them together,” rasped somebody in the hallway. There must have been ten or fifteen of them out there by now.

“Yes, we can,” said Phil. He was getting impatient, not with us, but with his own people. I think it was Phil who was the first one in the government who “got it” in terms of this being a very different, never-seen-before kind of situation, which had to be handled in a very different, never-done-before kind of way.

The problem was, Phil was a worker bee.

The NSA hadn’t had time to scramble their heavy hitters, yet, but in the year they’d had the entire federal law enforcement system looking for us, there had been bits and drabs of information that had leaked to said agencies. Fred and Phil worked for the NSA, but there was no local NSA office in [redacted], where we were first taken. There was a local FBI office in [redacted], and it was they who had been providing local law enforcement support to Phil and Fred. If they had known for sure that we were in [redacted] Phil and Fred would have been part of a major task force. But they developed ‘leads’ all the time, analyzing news reports, reviewing hospital records and police reports (which was the lead that led them to us) and so on. They couldn’t send a full task force out on every lead. There weren’t enough people in the entire NSA to do that. So they sent teams like Fred and Phil to see what was what. They got their support from local federal resources.

A moment is needed to reflect on the psyche of a federal criminal investigator, or indeed the psyche of any good detective. They are curious, imaginative, tenacious, and have a strong moral compass. They like solving puzzles. They like outfoxing the fox. To do that, they’re willing to work within the rules established by civilization. They might not like the rules, but the good ones remember that the criminal justice system in the US isn’t there to put people in jail. It’s there to ensure that no innocent person is deprived of his freedom. The unavoidable side effect is that some bad guys will skate.

But bad guys, by their nature, will continue to be bad. That means they’ll eventually screw up and you’ll get them.

That’s how the good guys think.

The problem is that the good guys have bosses who don’t necessarily have the same code of ethics. I’ll call these people middle management. They are usually political appointees, or elected officials, and have neither the background nor training to establish that strong, moral, criminal justice system compass. Nor have they been to classes on the constitution, and the safeguards built into it to avoid tyranny and unjust treatment. There’s another class of these idiots who were promoted beyond their capabilities, because they were causing problems. If you promote them, they become someone else’s problem.

The bosses want to stay bosses, which means they sometimes bow to pressure to “get things done”. I saw it all the time in the military. That’s why units like Delta Force have direct chains of command to people very high up in the scheme of things. That skips the middle management types and limits the number of people who want to get their fingers in the pie ... and can therefore contaminate that pie.

So while the good guys discussed the situation, trying to figure out the best way to proceed, some middle management person up the food chain said, “Get the fuck in there and get control of the situation. Fuck them up if you have to, but get it done!“

We sat there for probably twenty minutes, which is how long it took for that middle manager to affect our situation. If it had been up to the worker bees, they’d have taken their time and strategized. Now they couldn’t do that. Now they had to start an interrogation they weren’t prepared to start.

Did I mention that the NSA wasn’t there yet? Well, Fred and Phil were there, but they’d been pushed aside. We were on FBI turf, now.

Things reverted to “normal” for the boys in blue. Or whatever you call FBI agents.

A man came into the room. He didn’t introduce himself. He looked at me and said, “Come with me.”

“Before we go, may I speak?” I asked.

“No,” he said, curtly.

He reached for my elbow.

Bobby and I had talked about all this long before it happened. I had told him what I just told you, up above. I had told him what would probably happen, and how they would probably react. I had taught him about interrogation techniques, and psychological manipulation and all that, because I was dead sure they’d go with the tools they already had in their normal tool box.

The question was, did we crush them from the get-go, or let them play around a while before we finally established our own rules?

What we decided was to go with the flow, but make things uncomfortable for them. It was supposed to be the other way around. They planned on making us uncomfortable, and frightened, and worried. They planned on us wanting to barter and beg and negotiate for better treatment. They threaten you with the max and then say if you cooperate it will be the minimum.

We planned on it ending up the other way around. We planned on them begging us to let them play, in the end.

I wasn’t sure it would work, but Bobby didn’t want to crush people. He didn’t want anyone to order a sniper to shoot him because he was considered to be a rabid dog.

He wanted to frustrate them, but not make them hate him.

There were lines he wouldn’t let them cross, though. One of them was me. We knew we’d be separated, but he could see my brain from anywhere. If that brain expressed intense pain, or fear, or terror, he’d come for me. If anyone was hurting me, he’d hurt them. The policy he eventually adopted was, “An eye for an eye.” He had no mercy for those who would hurt either him or me. That extended to other people, eventually. Melody was included, and Gator. People tried to guilt him into including other people under his umbrella of safety. “If you love America, you won’t let anyone hurt us,” was one common argument. Bobby ignored that kind of thing.

So we knew there would be an initial period where they tried to do things the way they were used to. Bobby said he looked forward to it, because then he’d get to see what those brains looked like. He liked meeting new people. We had, necessarily, restricted our social register for a year.

I was taken to another interrogation room by my interrogator. I’ll call him Special Agent Fox and he was very professional. His problem was, he didn’t have my file and had no idea what my background was. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to interrogate me about. I helped him out.

I know it was deceitful, but I decided to retain my identification as Novice Sister Olivia, from St. [redacted] convent. Mother Mary knew I didn’t plan on making my vows, but these people didn’t need to. I figured maybe if they thought I was in the novitiate, it might soften their attitude. It did, sometimes, and didn’t at others. You take what you can get.

So I told him who I was, and that I had been given the care of a ward of the convent, one Bobby Wilson, who had, in both self defense and the defense of others, killed one Roger Jacobson. We had then “gone on an educational tour of the country” so Bobby could deal with the trauma of having taken a man’s life.

He listened, and then leaned forward to put his elbows on the table.

“That’s a fascinating story,” he said. “That was the Reader’s Digest description of things, though. I’d like to fill in some details.”

“Are you aware that the NSA held us in captivity for three months last year, after the incident I mentioned took place?” I asked.

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