Part 23

While the attorney general of the United States unhappily tried to subvert constitutional law in the courtroom, there was another member of the U.S. government who wasn’t happy, either. Her name was Jane Addison and she was the deputy director of operations of an agency that shall obviously remain unidentified. Jane was fifty-eight and had been in government service for almost forty years. Her career had started, delivering coffee and Danish to self-absorbed, important men in meetings and filing what felt like millions of pieces of paper in thousands of drawers in hundreds of metal filing cabinets.

Her ticket out of the mail room had been when the computers the agency used shrank from four ton behemoths full of glowing tubes and chattering card readers to forty pound collections of electronics that now sat on hundreds of desks. These mysterious lumps of silent magic required wizards to make them work when, without warning or apparent cause, they stopped working. She became one of those wizards, because she already had a security clearance. It didn’t hurt that she was slim and cute as well.

Her life improved, except that it was always an emergency of the highest magnitude when a computer silently died. Almost nobody who worked there stayed even one minute past quitting time, except her. When a computer broke overseas one day, she was sent to sort it out. Her boss was happy because that meant he didn’t have to go to some God-forsaken backwater shithole and duck bullets. It was the first time she’d been out of the country, and no bullets came anywhere near her. An operator watched her do her job and liked what he saw. She was transferred to operations.

Ten years later she’d dodged lots of bullets, and killed three people with an ease that astonished her. People died so easily. She almost died on several occasions, and scars decorated her body like medals of valor. Fifteen more years flew by, during which time her body slowly betrayed her and aged to the point that she wasn’t quick enough to dodge one particular bullet, which broke her shoulder.

She flew a desk after that. Shoulder replacements were not yet a routine kind of thing. Her body was no longer that of a field agent, but there was nothing wrong with her mind or experience. She knew politics and she knew people and giving the order to take another fragile human life didn’t make her sad any longer. There were three classes of people in the world, as far as Jane was concerned. There were people who deserved her protection, people who were wasting perfectly good air by breathing it ... and her people.

By the time her boss called her into his office and told her he wanted her to handle one particular case herself, her reputation in the agency caused people to move to the other side of the hall when she walked down one. She was a legend.

“I don’t work in the field,” she told him.

“This is right here.”

“I don’t have to tell you our mandate is to handle things external to the country,” she said.

“I meant in this building,” he added.

“We have a mole?” Suddenly she was interested.

“It might be worse than that,” he said.

“What could be worse than a mole?” she asked.

Then she learned about a young man named Bobby Wilson ... and found out.

Jane didn’t hurry. She spent a week studying her new assignment, gathering all the intel she could find and examining it. She was aware that some legal gymnastics were going on in an attempt to get Wilson and his keeper free, but from what she’d learned, that would never happen.

Jane wasn’t going to be the first one to interrogate him. They’d run their best against him already. The fact was, however, she wasn’t there to interrogate him. She was there to find out what he wanted, and if the United States could afford to give it to him.

And, of course, she was there to find out what he could give the United States.

His file was entertaining. He and a woman in her mid twenties had been captured and then, somehow, escaped from the most secure location in the country. How that was done was not clear. A lot of important people had been embarrassed by that, and had tried to shift blame elsewhere. There was a report of incident in the file which would have been a laughable description of their escape, except she’d watched the video herself. It was obvious people had just let them go. The blood tests on his personal guards had shown nothing in their systems that could account for their bizarre behavior.

She’d been frustrated that the investigation seemed to just stop, once things were in her agency’s hands. One glance at the signature on the few further documents generated after that made her snort. He was an asshole, with his head in his asshole. His superiors knew this. No one must have thought this was an important situation. Those were the kinds of things thrown his way.

Her initial reaction when she started reading the file was to wonder why they got involved at all? Never mind that it was domestic. Neither of these two had done anything even worth talking about, before they sauntered out of Cheyenne Mountain and disappeared.

The fact that they had disappeared was interesting. The fact that multiple federal agencies couldn’t find them for thirteen months was very interesting. That was almost impossible in this day and age.

Then she got to the muddled accounts of people who claimed their muscles didn’t work because of the boy. Guns became too slippery to hold. Handcuffs ended up on the jailers, instead of the detainee. An entire raid team had been rendered unconscious, without a mark on them.

Her analytical mind, once it got past the impossibility of it all, noted three major things. First, he had surrendered by walking into one of the NSA’s surveillance nests like he was going to Starbucks to get a latte. He was still here, in this building, behind a locked door. This building wasn’t made of Kryptonite, so that meant he was here voluntarily. Second, he hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t even injured anybody seriously. A thought made her go back to the first page in the file. He had killed someone. The police report was scanty, but made clear that the dead man had been an air-waster. Wilson had killed him, but with good cause. There was no arrest or arrest warrant in the file but the report also didn’t classify it as a justifiable homicide.

She leafed through the report on the nun. A nun?! What was the world coming to? Then again, the nun had been an operator in Delta Force. That said something. Still, she was just a worker bee. That made the whole ‘evade the entire fucking government’ part of this more understandable. The next time she saw the Secretary of Defense she’d have to mention that whatever they were teaching their special operators, it was quality training.

The nun wasn’t interesting, except that they seemed to come as a pair. That was understandable. The kid was still wet behind the ears. She, no doubt, represented wisdom and safety to him. And, at eighteen, the hormones no doubt rushing through his body wouldn’t care if she was a nun or not. She was female. That’s all they cared about, at that age.

Her mind wandered for fifteen seconds, trying to remember what it had been like when she was eighteen. There had been a boy, back then, not like Bobby Wilson, a normal boy who made her blood sing. How long had it been since her blood had sung that song?

She shook her head, banishing the question. She needed to see this phenom, this undefined entity who had so upset the apple cart. None of the interrogators had gotten squat from him.

Now it was her turn.

Jane’s attitude when she entered Bobby’s “room” was markedly different than that of his previous visitors. None of his previous interrogators had read his psych eval. Their bosses had, but they hadn’t. It was fairly typical in a bureaucracy for bosses to withhold information from those under them. Even in this organization. It made the boss feel special, to know something his underlings didn’t. The interrogators had been told what tactic to use based on the subject’s profile, but that was all.

Jane knew he was in this room because he consented to be there. Always before, the interrogator had wanted something from the subject. Nobody thought to ask the subject what he wanted.

He looked up. He looked as normal as pie. He wasn’t even very buff. He looked like the kid who bagged her groceries at the commissary. If anyone knew appearances meant very little, it was Jane Addison.

“Hi,” she said. “May I come in?”

“Sure,” he said. His head tilted. He peered at her with a gaze much more direct than the average person.

“My name is Jane Addison,” she said. Cards on the table. “I’m the deputy director for operations.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“I’m sort of the boss,” she said.

“Like Mother Superior?”

“Exactly like that,” she said, capitalizing on his background. At least she hoped she was capitalizing. If “Mother Superior” wielded a ruler for small infractions, his memory of her might not be rosy.

“Is there a priest here?” he asked.

“A Priest?”

“I haven’t been to confession in a long time,” he said.

“I’ll get you a priest,” she said. What she’d get him was a young man who needed more sun, and a priest’s collar. She knew just the agent to task.

“Thank you.”

“I’m here to ask you some questions.”

“I know. That’s all anybody comes here for.”

“I think I have a different question,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“You do?”

“You’re different from all the others.”

“I am?”

“You’re not afraid of me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t imagine why anyone is afraid of you.”

He shrugged.

“I can do things,” he said. “It bothers people.”

“What kind of things can you do?” she asked.

“Lots of different things,” he said.

“Can you show me something you can do?”

“No, not yet,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“Because Tiffany said to wait until you’re being reasonable.”

“We’re not being reasonable?”

“You shouldn’t lock us up,” he said.

She remembered the psych eval and tried to reinforce it.

“You killed a man. There are legal protocols that must be followed because of that.” His request for a priest produced her next comment. “There are moral protocols. In civilized society, when you kill a man, you have to be separated from everyone else until the matter is resolved. I know you’re staying here voluntarily. You could leave here just like you left the other place they detained you, right?”

He nodded.

“By abiding by the law, you are showing them you’re not a threat. You need to continue proving that you can be trusted and aren’t dangerous.”

“It’s taking a long time,” he said.

“Be patient. I’ve read the report. I think what you did was self defense. I think you’ll be exonerated. Once things do get resolved, we can move forward. Let’s talk about that ... about moving forward. When you can be set free, what would you like to do?”

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