Laura looked up from a door she had just locked.
"What is it Agent Nielsen?" she asked.
Agent Nielsen was catching his breath from running to her.
"Agent Olsen...found a...tracker...on her jacket...she has no...idea...how long... it's been there, " he wheezed out between breaths. Laura groaned. The agent caught his breath, the asked, "What should I tell Agent Olsen to do?"
"Don't destroy the tracker. We need to lure them away from the base immediately. Send Agent Svensen and Agent Madsen to me here in the hallway. I also need you to tell Imraan that I need to borrow his disk. Tell the engineers working on the door to find a way to finish fixing faster and to find a way to avoid the base being detected by the enemy. The technology I have labeled for the engineers should help. Got all that?"
"Don't destroy tracker. Send Agent Svensen and Madsen to you, tell Imraan to give you his disk, fix door faster along with a way to avoid detection, along with the helpful tech for the engineers," the agent drilled back to Laura.
"Good."
He sped off, leaving Laura to finish checking the last few rooms.
A few minutes later, just when Laura had closed the last door in the hallway, Agent Svensen and Agent Madsen ran up to her. Agent Svensen was an elderly man, almost 70, but was in very good shape. Agent Madsen was a middle-aged woman who was also fit, but had an aura of mystery around her.
"In case you haven't heard, we're being tracked. I'm going to throw the trackers off trail. Agent Svensen, I need you to lead the group," Laura handed the ring of keys to him.
"Understood."
"I'm leaving the two rookies I brought with you. Your first priority is to ensure the group's safety-"
"Excuse me, Agent Pang, but I know how to be a commander. I was second to Agent Olsen before he was killed."
"Right. I'm sorry."
"We all feel losses, " Agent Madsen comforted. She nodded to Agent Svensen, who gazed on the floor, then turned around and ran back to the main hanger.
"Agent Madsen, I need you to start training the group in your area of expertise. The weapons in this have to be, I mean, the must be used now. They will be needed soon."
"Laura, are you all right?" Agent Madsen inquired.
"I'll be fine."
Agent Madsen paused, then ran back to the main hanger.
When she was gone, Laura backed up to a wall, slid down to the ground, curled up in a ball, and began to cry.
****************
"What? Is she nuts? We're already working as fast as we can! We don't have time to find some way of shielding this base!"
Imraan couldn't help but overhear one of the engineers shouting. He walked up to the agent and said, " May I be of some service to you?"
"No!"
"I know technology and engineering quite well."
"You're not even a man yet."
"You recall that airplane that got us here?"
"Yes, that plane is astounding-"
"I helped invent it."
There was a collective shock amongst the DANEs.
"I can design a shield for the base while you finish fixing the door."
The agent paused, then said,
"Fine. But it needs to be top-notch and finished by the end of today."
The agent turned around and walked away while Imraan did a little dance, then found some paper and a pencil and began to work.
"What are you doing?"
Imraan jumped, saw Laura, felt his cheeks go red, then said,
"I'm designing a shield for the base."
"Good. I'm glad the DANEs are finally trusting you," Laura replied while putting on white gloves.
"Why did it take so long?"
"Danes are friendly but not willing to trust strangers, as in foreigners, by nature. Especially when those Danes are agents that have gone through a lot." Laura studied the design that Imraan had created. "That's a good shield if we had a week to build it. Have you gone through the technology in those boxes over there?"
Imraan looked in the direction that she had pointed to.
"Yes," he answered. "But all of that technology is ancient."
"No it's not, " Laura handed him a pamphlet. "This tells you how to use the objects in there and what those objects do. Have fun, but stay focused." She then pulled Imraan's disk out of his front pocket (his secret front pocket, Imraan was rather frustrated that Laura knew about the pocket) and walked to the radio room.
A few minutes later, Imraan, along with everyone else in the base, heard Laura's voice echo through the loudspeakers.
"This is Agent Pang. As you know, we've been tracked. I'm leaving Agent Svensen and Agent Madsen in charge while I lead the enemies away. Farewell."
That was the last time anyone heard from Laura for a long time.
**************
The tower overlooked a stormy sea that was framed by the near-white sand and jagged gray rocks of the beach on one side, and the horizon lined with darkened clouds foreshadowing a coming storm on the other. Daniel rested his arms on the polished, wooden railing on the balcony and traced the cobblestone path that led from the tower to the forest with his eyes. The beach faded into short green grass on one side to meet the path, but on the other side the fields were yellow with long, dry grass that stretched in the opposite direction for as far as he could see, companion to the forest that began a while back and followed it into the edge of that horizon.
In his peripheral vision, Daniel caught sight of a light in the forest. As he stared at the spot, the light gradually dimmed. He blinked and it was there again. It dimmed again until he blinked, but this time the light was much closer to him, only a few yards away. He felt the ground to be uneven under his feet and looked down. His shoes were soft and he could feel the small bumps in the cobblestone path that led into the forest. He looked up and took a few steps forward, following the path into the forest.
Everything was silent except for a slight hum. The light was dimmed and on the verge of disappearing until he blinked again. He realized that he had to control his blinking and continue to do so to be able to see the light. He blinked rapidly and ran towards the light in the forest, but it didn’t seem to get any closer. He kept running, this time concentrating on his speed and his breath. He loosened his hands and swung his arms by his chest, locking himself in a steady rhythm. The light still seemed just as far away as before. Then suddenly, he tripped, but as soon as he was caught off balance, the world slowed. Feeling as if he was sinking through mud, he felt his body turn sideways until he was looking up through the trees, and there was the light again. It was the sun.
He heard a faint whisper echo through his mind and drift with the shadows of the forest as he continued to fall. The voice was unintelligible at first, but finally he could pick out one word. “Sir…” came the voice. “Sirrrr………” Then suddenly he felt the impact of his back on the ground and shut his eyes.
The light was bright above him, and he blinked, realizing that his eyes had been open, not closed. “Sir,” came a stern voice above him, and a hand moved away from his shoulder. Daniel closed his eyes tightly, and the light from the ceiling slowly faded in the darkness. There was a sharp pain in his side as someone kicked him.
“Ow!” Daniel shouted, shaking off the dream. He squinted at the circular ceiling light above him and sat up slowly, feeling the soreness of the muscles in his back.
“Sir, you cannot sleep here,” an Asian man in a red vest said haltingly. “Hallway for walk, not for sleep. Must sleep in rooms.”
Daniel squinted up at him, raising an eyebrow. For a second, he almost imagined the short Asian man as a tiny wizard. Then he realized that he was a hotel worker. He looked down at the carpet and ran one hand across it. “You should think about getting more comfortable carpets,” he answered before he stood. He turned away and ran straight into a door. He backed up a little, holding his head and waving his hands in front of his face, trying to push the sparks out of the way of his vision. He stared hard at the number on the wall. “What number does that say?”
“Number 439,” the worker said, pronouncing his words slowly, with odd vowel sounds and too much diction on some consonants. “Is this your room, sir?”
“I think so,” Daniel said, sticking his hands in his pockets and feeling for a key. When he didn’t find one, he twisted the handle on the door and it opened. He stepped inside, feeling a little off-balance, and shut the door behind him. He moved over to his space on the floor. Daniel had the faintest idea of seeing Hayden laying on the bed and hearing muffled sounds coming from the floor on the other side of the bed before plopping down on his spot on the floor, laying his head on the pillow, and falling asleep immediately.
***************
Laura pinpointed the old building on the plane’s infrared imaging GPS scanner. She uploaded the blueprints from the flash drive onto a side screen, giving a half-smile at the advanced technology she held in her hands. Then her smile fell as she realized where it had come from. Where did Imraan get such high-quality mechanized equipment? Had the GCA taken hints from the Agency for Specialized Intelligence of Associated Weaponry? Very few people knew about this undercurrent extension of the ASW, especially since they only supplied the Federal Bureau of Investigation for Teens, the Guerilla Band Army Agency, and some agency called STARS that the HIA had mysteriously allied with but had nothing else to do with. Laura only knew this because she had dug into some research at the HIA over recent files and saw the consideration of Agent Bowers’ suspension from duty, which had caught her eye. She didn’t know what STARS stood for, but she had heard the name somewhere before. Then she had remembered the symbol that was etched into every new piece of hardware given to her in the FBIT. The symbol looked like a star, but the lines that came together at the top in a point were thicker than the others and continued a little further at the ends as if trying to form an A.
(see image at bottom of text)
She saw the symbol on a letter that was supposed to be delivered to the Administrator and by putting two and two together figured out that the symbol stood for STARS, and that somehow the ASIAW and the STARS were closely related. But it didn’t make sense now that Imraan would have a piece of their hardware. Laura would have to look around for the symbol, but if she couldn’t find it, there was one other way to tell.
Laura flew past the building purposefully, realizing that if anyone was tracking her, it wouldn’t be a good idea to land right on top of where she needed to be. She would land away from the building, leave the tracker there, then head back to the building and wait for the SSAWPS to follow the tracker. They would fall into a trap, and she would catch them off-guard in her attack. She landed the plane carefully in a small clearing just big enough for the plane to land with the shifting engines in vertical structure, which meant she had to use the hover-landing technique (no runways). She was glad she had done this once before, or she might have hit something. As soon as she landed, she shut off the engines, pulled out the flash drive, grabbed her bag, and exited the thin black jet. She scanned the outside of the plane but didn’t see the symbol. So she tapped the wing and watched as it compressed into a disk in her hand. She pressed her palms on the edges of the disk and pushed it in towards itself. It folded nicely into a small, black cube.
“Imraan…” Laura snarled. “Where the heck did you get this?” She unzipped her bag angrily and threw the cube inside. She took the tiny tracker out of her pocket and through it on the ground. Then she realized that if she destroyed it, the SSAWPS might not even be able to find her. But then she countered that the DANEs had been in one spot for so long that if the SSAWPS couldn’t find her, they might just retrace the tracking patterns and find the others. So instead she decided to leave it on the grass for them to find. She glanced around at the clearing as she shouldered her bag, took a deep breath, and headed in the direction of where the building would be.
*****************
“Really, we shouldn’t be here this long,” Jake West said, then winced as the pipe came down again. He and Caitlin lay on the cement of the roof of the hotel, arms outstretched and wrists as far apart as possible as Erica tried to break the short chain connecting them together by hitting it numerous times with a short piece of a pole she had found near the edge of the roof. Jake was glad that Erica was such a good aim because he was a little too fond of his hand to be losing it because of some stupid handcuff. Still, he was terrified every time the pipe came down.
“Weren’t we supposed to meet someone somewhere, or something?” Tyler asked. He’d been trying to sleep in the plane on the way here and had been interrupted by Jake talking to Caitlin about the mission. He hadn’t quite gotten everything, but he was pretty sure that they were on a time frame and couldn’t be spending too much time on this.
“Guys, I have something that might help,” Halee said.
“Hey, so are we going through the hotel to get down, or are we planning on jumping?” Jacob Johnson asked, looking over the edge. “Because I don’t know about you, but I didn’t bring a parachute.” He had woken up while the others were trying to get the handcuffs off and sat back helplessly with nothing to do.
“Through the hotel,” Caitlin said through her teeth as the pipe came down again.
“Seriously, I think it would be faster…” Halee began.
“Does anyone even know what this mission is about?” Jacob questioned, looking at Tyler.
Tyler shrugged. “Something about meeting someone and receiving a message for the GC—hey, wait. Why are we going all the way to Miami for some stupid GCA thing?”
Shink!
Everyone looked in the direction of the metallic sound. Halee stood near Jake and Caitlin with a katana in her hand. It hummed softly and slowly the markings and edge of the blade turned red. “I could have solved this issue much earlier if you had just listened to me,” Halee huffed. She swung the blade downwards and both Jake and Caitlin screamed in terror, rolling away from each other. Then they stopped, realizing they wouldn’t be able to roll away if they were still handcuffed together. Everyone looked at Halee.
“Well, that worked,” Erica said flatly, throwing the pipe away. It clanged at is bounced a couple times, then rolled to a stop. “Let’s go, then,” Erica added, raising her eyebrows at the others and gesturing towards the small box on top of the roof that held a door leading down to the top floor of the hotel.
Halee squeezed the silver handle on her katana, and it faded back to silver as it compressed into a small chamber with a metallic, sliding sound until she was holding a short, silver cylinder. “Where’d you get that?” Tyler asked in wonderment as he walked with her towards the door.
She shrugged. “Katie Hill gave it to me as a birthday gift after one of her missions, somewhere in Japan I think,” Halee responded. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Ya, I better let her know when my birthday is coming up,” Tyler joked.
Jake led them to the door and pulled a key from his pocket, using it to open the door. The others followed him down some stairs to another door, which he also opened. This time they walked out into a hallway, passing by a couple rooms, a closet, and a door labeled as “Stairs”. They came to an elevator, and Jake pushed the button to go down. The elevator took a while to rise to the top before it opened, revealing a man standing in the corner. Jake climbed into the elevator, and the others followed, riding with the strange man all the way down to floor 13.
********************