Flightsuit Page 3

  A bright white flash reflected off the truck in front of him and he felt a hard slap of a bullet on his forearm. The sound of the shot registered as he cradled his arm. Broken, he thought dully, feeling the sharp broken edge of bone with his working fingers. There was a tearing sensation and a sharp sting in his elbow as a partially-severed tendon snapped. The fingers holding the trigger opened. He pulled the trigger in closer to his body to maintain pressure without the fingers and worked his right hand around the open useless fingers of his left. He squeezed his right fingers tight around the unfeeling left fingers and the trigger underneath and held on. Hack rolled to his side, and pressed his legs until he'd scooted up against two of the barrels. He closed his eyes and tried to think only about keeping his fingers closed.

  Other shots cracked around him with agents crawling through the grass, relying on darkness for concealment more than hard cover. There was just grass and an occasional stump in the clearing.

  The last two surviving members of the group were in a small camper. They conserved ammunition, firing when they spotted muzzle flash. The agents wanted to be sure there were no children in the camper before they moved in on the holdouts. At this point, they felt time was on their side.

  The rain felt colder as Hack huddled against the explosive tanks. He focused on his fingers. As he tried to flex the fingers of his left hand, they didn't respond at all. In the darkness, gripping the trigger, drained of his last reserves and bleeding out, Hack kept thinking that his grip might be gradually releasing. Unable to see, he flexed and very slightly released his grip every few seconds to be sure he was still holding the trigger. The more he concentrated on it, the less natural the control of his hand felt. He lost track of the sounds around him in the squeeze-relax repetition.

  The last terrorist surrendered. The past weeks had diminished all of them and they had little fight left.

  When a flashlight waved across him, Hack saw his fingers around the trigger covered with dark mud red with his blood. More flashlights came, dancing all around him and then settling on his hand and his face. "It's him," the closest agent told the others turning slightly so they could hear through the downpour. "It's Agent Samuels and he's still alive! Get the medics over here and call in the copter for evac." The agent looked at the trigger held in the bloody hand and moved the light up the sides of the chemical drums. "And get the bomb squad over here too. ASAP!" He bent down carefully, closer to Hack. "Hack. Hack, can you hear me?" Hack's head nodded twice. "Ok. That's great. You did great Hack. You're going to be fine," the agent told him. "I'm going to put my hand around your fingers, so you will be able to turn loose, ok?" Hack turned his eyes up to see the agent and mouthed "ok".

  7

  The hospital room was dim when Hack awoke. A clock on the wall beneath the television showed 2:30, and a groggy glance to the window suggested it was early morning rather than afternoon.

  His left arm was in a cast. Lifting it up he could see four fingers, all strapped to the cast with rubber bands to keep tension off tendons as they healed. He knew this from past experience. Months of rehab ahead. Great.

  Scanning the room, he saw a mirror over the sink. From the bed, it faced the wrong direction. Nothing else reflected back at him so he lifted his right fingers to his face to assess the damage by touch. There was tenderness, but no wires or patches. Ok, that's good, he thought, surprised. He pressed carefully on sore cheekbones gauging damage. Surprised there's not more swelling. His face was sore, but he was relieved there seemed to be no serious damage.

  After a few minutes, he felt a little more awake. He patted around in the sheets for a remote control, and finding it, turned on the television. The banner at the bottom was a week after the date Rudolfo planned to blow up the school. Hack anticipated it for months. It was burned indelibly into memory. Seeing it was a week in the past washed ice water through him. He worked to sort out his jumbled memories. No, he thought, we got him. He hoped Rudolfo was in a hospital room close by. Maybe I'll visit him in the morning. He aborted the grin too late to avoid the sharp pain it sent to both cheek bones. He decided grinning wouldn't be a good idea for several days yet.

  The banner changed to "Cane Creek Plot Thwarted". Hack turned up the sound.

  "…twenty three members of the terrorist group killed in the raid on Thursday," the newscaster read from her teleprompter. She'd quickly become serious in the transition from the previous report. Rudolfo's mug shot flipped onto the screen with her. Hack almost smiled again at the sight of Rudolfo's gigantically swollen jaw and the purple-and-yellow bruises covering the right side of his face. Ouch. "Representatives of the NSA say the scale of the explosion would have been devastating." A video of the School Superintendent replaced the anchor. "I'm told their plan was to park the truck in the space closest to the gym overnight. In the mornings, we collect all the children in the gym as the buses arrive in order to give teachers time to get their rooms ready," he said. "There would have been 600 students in there. These are very young children. It would have been beyond imagining."

  The anchor returned, adding "NSA representatives report that the explosion would have completely demolished the gym, likely killing everyone inside." She continued, "Three federal agents were wounded in the attack, one fatally." Hack swallowed, recognizing the agents. "Hospital representatives indicate that Agent Henry "Hack" Samuels is expected to regain consciousness today." Hack's eyes went wide as he looked at his own face on the newscast. "Agent Samuels infiltrated the group for months and fought terrorist leader Eduardo Rudolfo during the raid, single-handedly wrestling the detonation device from him in the firefight."

  The mug shot returned as she concluded, "Rudolfo is under heavy security and expected to be moved this week into the prison infirmary at Louisiana State Penitentiary." Have fun at "The Farm", Hack thought smiling in spite of the pain it caused. Going to be a lot harder to work under cover with this going on. Who gave them my name and how did they get details about the raid? Somebody screwed up big time. Hopefully, it'll just blow over.

  Unfortunately, the Agency needed a political diversion from recent fraud and waste scandals. Hack was more valuable as a hero than as a terrorist infiltrator so they continued trickling additional details to the press, keeping the story alive while they waited on Hack to recover adequately for a full press conference.

  He'd hoped to be released quietly in the night, but they went out the front door of the hospital at 10 AM to give the media setup and coffee time. They led him through questions while an Agency media rep stood alongside for "no comment" replies for ones he wasn't permitted to answer. He rode home in a limo the Governor's office provided.

  The week he was in the hospital, reporters interviewed all of his neighbors. All three local channels had satellite trucks at his apartment. Once inside, he ignored the knocking and stayed locked inside until they moved on. Over the next six months, he was recognized everywhere he went. He started wearing hats and dark glasses as if he were dodging paparazzi. He felt exposed. Watched. There were a lot of other domestic terror groups besides Rudolfo's. Any of them would achieve instant notoriety if they could kill, or worse, capture him. He put in for a transfer. As it turned out, that worked right into the Agency's plans.

  They staged him in a DC office for six months, monitoring him. He dyed his hair and grew a short beard. They had a new assignment for him. He met with twenty Representatives and five Senators over the next four months. He knew he was being interviewed for a highly secret assignment, but no one told him what it was.

  Hack picked up pieces of information from the questions. He learned enough to guess that the Agency wanted to leverage their high-profile hero to pull a project away from the FBI. The project had something to do with an alien artifact that someone found in Tennessee.

  8

  It was time for a catalyst.

  After eighteen months, Hack's superiors at the NSA were losing confidence and this was a last, or possibly, if he were lucky, a near-last-ditch effort bef
ore the artifact and his leadership of the project were taken away.

  The NSA assembled some of the nation's leading experts in metallurgy, chemistry, electronics and energy to review the plate-sized artifact discovered in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. The team's initial excitement and enthusiasm dissipated with the increasing frustrations and pressures of what was proving to be an inscrutable puzzle.

  The researchers initially welcomed the Agency and the hero of Cane Creek. Like the rest of the country, they'd read of his previous missions like novels serialized in papers and news reports. In the battle to acquire choice projects from a beleaguered FBI, the Agency made Hack into a larger than life, modern-day Davy Crockett, adventurous, brave, determined and humble. The humility angle covered Hack's repeated insistence that his involvement in several of the previous missions was being exaggerated with other agents playing a larger role in some than his own.

  He repeatedly downplayed his role and emphasized other's efforts, but the Agency refused to declassify anyone else's involvement. They declassified information supporting their narratives and prevented Hack from disclosing anything that countered. Hack didn't see the process as building up his reputation, but as destroying it. The Agency strip-mined what they needed from his life, and destroyed everything that mattered to him.

  He lost long-term relationships with agents he'd known for years. Embedded in terrorist groups, with dozens of irrational and highly unpredictable violent people, the other agents became his surrogate family. They held close ranks as actors hiding themselves amidst plans of psychotic madmen. Living lies, and pretending for weeks at a time, they relied on each other. Hack thought those friendships would last forever, but there was no way to convince any of them that he'd fought against the Agency's efforts to transfer their achievements to him. One-by-one he lost touch with each of them.

  As his public personae increased, Hack felt diminished. He had done great things. He had saved lives, not just on the Cane Creek infiltration but on other missions. He'd once been proud of his accomplishments. But now, his actual accomplishments were so overwhelmed by the Agency's mythology, that the reality was less than the fiction. As a field agent, pretending was his job. Now, the Agency made his whole life a pretense. He avoided talking about himself, which everyone attributed to his heroic humility.

  Everything he did reinforced the mythology. He'd cut his finger cleaning the garage the weekend before his introduction to the research team. It wasn't anything serious. He was always cutting or snagging himself on something. For some reason, he was prone to accidents with anything sharp, just a little bit careless. The most dangerous time was usually during the first few minutes of some outdoor project, before he'd settled in to work. He'd be adjusting a saw blade, or using his hands to ram a post into the ground, opening packages or the like. He had a knack for accidentally finding sharp edges.

  When he was ten, his parents bought him a replica sword. The first days after Christmas, rain preventing him from giving the sword a good swing. He'd waited anxiously to play with it. The first sunny day after Christmas, he'd rushed outside to battle the tall weeds beyond the yard. He'd chopped weeds for less than a minute before he executed a spinning slice down at a stubborn stalk. He'd misjudged the stalk's resistance and sliced through it with too much extra force. The blade creased the back of his calf as it swung full around. They'd all made a trip to the emergency room. He remembered his mother standing in the doorway as the nurse came in to scrub the cut. She wore a robe over her pajamas. She told the nurse, she was going to start calling him "Hack" instead of Henry. They continued to laugh about it over the next week, calling him "Hack" as both tease and unsubtle reminder. After a while, the name stuck.

  The news reporters heard this story from his mother while he was in the hospital. Every time people saw a bandage on him, they laughed in reference to the story. It reinforced their belief that they knew him from the articles.

  The researchers chuckled and clapped him on the back in a friendly and familiar way when they saw the bandaged finger. They felt comfortable with the Hack they knew from the papers and TV stories.

  The public's knowledge of him through the media was almost a disguise in itself. People felt they knew him from the stories and were slow to notice differences in the real man. They'd ignore or rationalize any behavior that didn't mesh with their preconceptions.

  For Hack, this aspect was comfortable and familiar. He was still the infiltrator, standing apart from the others and looking in from the outside.

  9

  He'd seen the cracks forming in the research team from the outset. Each of them was an expert in their respective field. Determined and serious-minded people with focus ingrained from childhood by parents, teachers, professors and peers. They'd learned to avoid distraction and were impatient with time spent outside their own hypotheses and conclusions.

  For the first few weeks, working for the NSA on a Top Secret project with expansive equipment budgets and new offices was novelty enough. As they settled in and became comfortable, pleasantries fell away in the rush to be the first to discover the strange artifact's properties and origin.

  Hack saw them as exceptional individuals with no concept of collaboration. The initial excitement dragged into months with few conclusive findings. After eighteen months, Hack decided the logjam was too tight to break on its own.

  Timeshare Counsel, Inc. was going to break it for him.

  10

  Timeshare Counsel, Inc. rose to prominence as one of the government's pet think tanks. In the past four years the company developed a reputation for creative insights, problem solving and confidentiality. Where other organizations developed success by going deep in a specific area, like military nanotech, infiltration techniques, or dozens of other specialties government bureaucrats needed, Timeshare's specialty was its expansive scope. They chose projects in healthcare, data mining, manufacturing, transportation, city design and a wide array of military interests.

  The research team arrived minutes before and had already been escorted into Timeshare's conference rooms by the time Hack stepped out of his own black Suburban. He carried the artifact in a black backpack. His security team was stationed all around Timeshare's brownstone building, including Richards on the rooftop with a sniper rifle. He passed Walker on the sidewalk, ambitious and talented, she was his second-in-command.

  "Squared away, Major," Walker said as he passed, watching both ends of the street for activity. There was no sign that anyone outside the Agency was were aware of the artifact, but no one wanted to risk its loss. It was, to anyone's knowledge, one of a kind.

  Hack had been to Timeshare twice before, once for the initial meeting with Taylor and once with his team as they planned this excursion. It was well-secured, for a non-military operation, to comply with prospective client's confidentiality needs. Agent Sowyer sat behind three computer monitors, reviewing feeds from deployed drop cameras. There were six additional security monitors on the desk to his left. These were monitored by Timeshare's own security staff.

  "Building is secure, Major," said Sowyer, without looking up.

  The research team was already seated when Hack entered the conference room. There were two seats left. Taylor would sit at the head. Three touchscreen monitors were recessed into the table for him there. Hack stepped in front of the remaining seat beside Taylor's empty chair.

  Hack didn't want to sit and then bounce back up to meet Taylor so he stood beside the chair and looked to the door. In his earpiece, Sowyer told him Taylor was en route.

  11

  Theodore, "Ted" Taylor was Timeshare's President and Founder. He'd spun Timeshare off from Berc, Inc. almost seven years earlier. Berc was one of the big six consulting firms in the country. Timeshare quickly developed a reputation for solving deadlocked challenges. Taylor employed a dozen other executive-level consultants with just under a hundred support staff. His personal participation in most sessions declined over the years. Now he usually sat in only
for introductions and left session leadership to his execs.

  He chose only a few projects each year to participate in himself. Those clients paid substantially larger rates for his involvement.

  Taylor dressed expensively. He entered the conference room with a placid, self-assured smile. He shook hands with Hack and motioned they sit down.

  During introductions, Taylor smiled and congratulated each of the researchers on some aspect of their work, a paper they'd written, a theory they'd proposed, patiently working his way around the table.

  "Clarity and insight are found in disagreement," started Taylor. "When everyone is in agreement, little of import is actually decided. You are on the verge of discovery, requiring only an external catalyst," Taylor looked at Hack as he said this, "to break disagreement into agreement. I am glad to assist you."

  "But first," Taylor dropped his eyes to the black backpack, "please show me your artifact."

  12

  Hack unzipped the backpack, and pulled out a heavy strongbox. He pushed the backpack further down the table. He then placed his hand over the white palm outline on top of the box. Red illuminated fingerprints remained on the cover after Hack removed his hand. The box clicked.

  Hack lifted the lid and Taylor saw the artifact for the first time.

  It looked like a piece of a cracked soup bowl. Taylor looked to Hack for approval before reaching for the artifact.

  "It's ok, we've scanned it carefully over the past year – there's no danger to you, and of course, nothing you could do would harm it," Hack told him.

  Taylor picked the artifact up, holding it with both hands. It appeared to be a white ceramic material, a half-inch thick. The white was clean and bright, with a subtle blue tint. Like everyone who picked the artifact up, Taylor was surprised by its weight. It looked like ceramic or heavy, leaded glass but weighed almost nothing.