This is a continuation of my short story series. If you came here looking for my Sandy Hook story or GC rant, either scroll down or click here and here for the direct links.
Note: I want to give a special thanks to commenter Ed for cleaning up my grammatical mess in Part 5.
J. Allen Timms was the man in charge of the old RVS distribution center, but very few people, including the employees who worked there, realized it. He started his career in Naval Intelligence immediately after graduating college. Through some fortuitous events, as well as his natural ability to diagnose a situation, come up with a solution, and take the right actions, he moved up the officer ranks to Commander at the quickest possible speed the Navy would allow. This, coupled with his natural abilities, got him noticed by the CIA. They recruited him while he was still serving in the Navy and based on the feedback they were receiving from him, they decided to move forward with getting him in a position that better suited his abilities.
The CIA arranged for his very early retirement from the Navy. They then took 18 months to secretly send him through multiple training facilities to hone and better his skills, and get him familiar with the latest state of the art gadgets that would be available to him. After his training was complete, they got him a top position with the newly created Bureau of Domestic Affairs and Crisis Intervention Agency (BDACIA), that dealt specifically with domestic terrorism and extremism, which was a sub agency of the Domestic Homeland Security Agency (DHSA.) Because the CIA could not conduct operations within the borders of the United States, they simply circumvented them by creating sub agencies of domestic agencies that had the power to operate within the US, and they filled positions with their trained operatives that were paid, not by the CIA, but instead by the parent agencies. This made it all legal. It was no coincidence that Timms worked for an agency who’s acronym ended with CIA. The conspiracy theory people ate it up. However, J. Allen Timms was an elaborately created alias. It was so good, that even the DHSA and FBI hadn’t flinched when doing the background check for the high level position at the BDACIA.
Timms had been asked by his country to stop the negative domestic actions against his country, and he had willingly answered the call. He knew it was his patriotic duty to stop the terrorists and extremists operating in the US. He had aggressively studied and excelled during every course the Navy, CIA, and DHSA had laid upon him. During his 18 months of various CIA training, he had mastered martial arts, two foreign languages, the art of covert operations, surveillance (of every type imaginable), coercion, evasion, killing, and healing, among others. He took his job and responsibilities personally. He knew that there were very few people capable of doing the job, so he was very serious about everything he did to make sure the job got done. No terrorists would ever get past him while in his area of operations.
The BDACIA’s publicized function was to deal with the new and emerging development of people who were resisting the new laws and taxes, while its primary unpublicized function was to process persons who had been deemed “domestic extremists and/or terrorists.” The BDACIA operated various processing, holding, and internment facilities throughout the US as well as overseas when necessary. But the position Timms held within the BDACIA was a dual role of interrogations of “interesting” persons being processed, and external intelligence gathering to assist in the capture other extremists. This was a highly classified unrecognized position. Timms’ actual job title was Director of Operations, American Health Authority (AHA) Region 6-2.
External intelligence gathering is where Timms excelled. Though he had become quite good at interrogating people, it was not what he loved. In his back office, he had access to a large array of sophisticated electronic and visual surveillance technologies, many of which ran automatically 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. For his work, the best tools were those he personally manipulated, directed, or controlled in some manner. These sensors worked best when coupled with his innate intuition and gut instincts.
This is how he had found Doreen and Drew, several months earlier. It started with a gut feeling, but the finding of the two anti-government extremists was pure luck. He was monitoring one of his near perimeter sensors (which was not something he normally did) that scanned for anomalous RF transmissions, when he noted a spurious Wi-Fi handshake attempt. It wasn’t the fact that it was Wi-Fi, or that it was attempted, it was that what he witnessed was encrypted and lasted less than two seconds. The encryption itself was not a big deal, as people used encryption all the time (not that it ever mattered, since he could either break it or use the back door accesses to the encryption programs), and the attempted handshake was no big deal either, but the combination of the two that piqued his interest. Had he not been monitoring the receiver at that very moment, he would have received a computer generated report several hours later with the broken handshake, and not given it much thought. He may have given it to a technician to follow-up on, but generally nothing ever came from these anonymous RX/TX hunts.
He quickly turned his chair to the bank of monitors and looked at what the building’s various cameras were seeing. He could detect nothing out of the ordinary, but this did not change his mind about the strangeness of the event. He took a few minutes to look over some of his recorded data and concluded that this event was worth pursuing. Even if it led nowhere, it would be a good exercise. He determined that since the RF monitor had been installed, that it had never recorded any similar events. He also found that the connection attempt was made with the BBQ restaurant across the street from the old RVS facility, which had an upgraded and more powerful business signal that had a significantly longer range than normal private Wi-Fi signals.
These two pieces of information, coupled with the time of occurrence, he hoped would allow him to find out what happened. Since the restaurant had a signal booster he had to do some math, but figured they had a boosted range of somewhere around a three hundred feet radius from the router. This was a fairly significant area to search, but whatever had occurred, he was confident he could figure it out.
He slid over to his review monitors, which allowed him to look over the recorded video and any other data collected on a pair of monitors simultaneously. Normally, he viewed video feeds on one monitor and data from other sources on the companion monitor. Timms pulled up the first eight video feeds and had all of them paused at the exact time of the event. He also pulled up the collected RF data (Wi-Fi, cellular, radio, etc.) streams for the same time period on the other monitor. He would need to correlate each signal with a person or place on the various video feeds. This was something he normally had one or more of the technicians do for him, but on this particular day, he was treating this event as “hot” and wanted to do the exercise himself. He felt it was important that he stayed fresh.
It didn’t take him long to match up various transmissions with their associated sources in the videos. His saving grace was that the restaurant was closed and not full of patrons on cell phones and tablets at the time of the event, otherwise it would be impossible to figure out what happened, but at a little after 9am there were only passing cars and pedestrians to deal with. He was also fortunate that there was only one other business open with an active Wi-Fi signal within the area he was doing his search, and he had direct access to the internal camera feed. After 15 minutes, he had visually correlated all but two RF transmissions - the event, and an encrypted connection that was still ongoing. He did not need to visually correlate the last one since he was able to break the encryption and determine that it was a computer belonging to a family in a nearby apartment surfing the web for how to repair a dryer. He had accounted for every, passing car, person, business, and residence within the range of the Wi-Fi signal. But the event was still associated with someone he had yet to find.
When Timms took over at the old RVS Distribution Center, now dubbed the AHA Distribution Center, they were winding down their actual distribution functions. The facility had been quickly undergoing a conversion from distribution of drugs and medical supplies to use as a temporary internment and interrogation facility for the purposes of processing persons arrested and captured under the new anti-terrorist and extremist laws. The trucks kept coming in those early months, but instead of bringing in new medical supplies they were bringing in fencing, pre-fabricated walls and cells, as well as tons of fancy monitoring equipment. And instead of taking out medical supplies for distribution to stores, they were taking out the old logistics equipment, shelving, and heavy equipment. Because the trucks backed up to the bay doors, what was happening inside was unseen by the outside. It only took four short months to accomplish, and they had created a very useful facility for the purpose of getting the bad guys processed out to where they needed to go, but only after extracting any relevant information first through various interrogation techniques.
During the transformation, all of the external security systems had to be updated. Instead of the normal closed circuit security cameras, the guts of the cameras had been upgraded to the latest technology. Along with camera upgrades, various sensors and other devices had been installed. One of Timms’ favorite pieces of equipment was a very small acoustic listening device that had been installed on an existing antenna on the roof. It was barely bigger than a hand, and was made from a special clear polycarbonate material. The receiver’s electronics were the size of a woman’s pinky finger, and the servo that allowed the device to be actuated to the controller’s desired position was the size of a bottle cap. From fifty feet away, it was almost impossible to see. From one hundred yards away it was completely invisible. In this case, with it position on the roof of the large building, no one even knew it was there.
Timms put on the headset for the Claptrap 2012a, and faced his bank of video monitors. He would listen to normal audio while monitoring the video feeds for correlation. Mostly he listened to people talking on their phones, or cars going by on the street. There was nothing of interest to him. After more than half an hour, he was about to move on to something else, when he spotted a woman on the sidewalk talking on her phone. She stood out to him because of the way she dressed, which was very nice for this area of town. He figured she must work for a bank or some other institution that required a higher standard of dress code. He rotated the acoustic dish to her position on the sidewalk, placing the digital overlay of crosshairs on her, and then began the drama into which Timms was unwittingly pulled.
The entire conversation revolved around a divorce. Though Timms was detached, the whole conversation made him sad for the couple. They had small children together, and he wanted to work things out. She was over him and his antics. As they talked it out for ten minutes, the young lady paced back and forth on the side walk, forcing Timms to constantly keep the dish moving to keep up with her and the conversation. He noted that this falling out had nothing to do with the normal problems that ended relationships - money and infidelity. No, this one had more to do with personal attention. She wanted more than he was giving.
“What?!” Timms jammed the remote toggle for camera 6, instantly forgetting about the lady and her problems. He panned and zoomed the camera onto an older Ford Crown Victoria parked in the lot between two buildings across the street. He continued to zoom in to look into the interior. The windows were tinted very dark and there was a tint strip across the top of the windshield making the dark colored interior of the silver Crown Vic pitch black. The best he could do was to see that there were no occupants in the front seats, but he was certain that he had seen movement inside the vehicle in the background while he was watching and listening in on the lady’s conversation. It had been a small movement, but he knew he saw something. It could have even been a dog for all he knew.
He rotated the Claptrap listening dish and put the crosshairs on the car. The only thing he could hear were some external city noises and rap music. He continued to watch and listen, but he neither saw nor heard anything of interest. He brought camera 5 to bear on the parking lot, and started a methodical search. As he did, it dawned on him that he could not tell where the rap music was coming from. He started rotating the dish around the area of the parking lot and noted that the only place the music seemed to be coming from was within the parking lot, and most specifically the silver Crown Victoria.
‘Were there people smoking dope in the back seat? Did anyone still do that?’ he wondered. He focused his two cameras on the car and then the listening device. He adjusted the sensitivity on the Claptrap to diminish other sounds. Then he tried to cancel out the rap music, but the computer program that did the work was unable to match the notes, even though it had identified the correct song. He zoomed in camera 5 to the corner of the rearview mirror. If he could see it vibrating from the bass, then he would know the music was coming from the Crown Vic. As the zoom hit 122x, he could make out the mirror vibrations. Most people would think it was the camera vibrating in the wind on the roof of the building, but Timms knew better. Besides the fact that the wind was minimal to non-existent, the camera was triple dampened, with a dampener at the base mount, the head mount, and internally on the camera itself. It would stay completely stable up to 25 mph. It was definitely the mirror vibrating.
Now he just needed to hear what was going on inside the car. He needed to know if it was a dope smoker or something else. No amount of adjusting would cancel any of the rap songs that played on the radio for the next ninety minutes of observations. The computer continued to note an anomaly in the sound, that is best described as “incalculable distortion.” He also noted that the volume would increase and decrease from time-to-time, but never saw anyone make an adjustment to the radio. He picked up the phone and punched the number 3:
“Yeah, Boss?” came the answer on the first ring.
“Launch the cloud,” Timms replied.
“What’s the tasking?”
“Don’t know yet. Just get it over us. Call me when you are in the AO.” Timms hung up the phone.
Timms knew that with the SilkCloud IV es (electronic surveillance) drone airborne, he would be able to use its more sophisticated infrared and thermal cameras to see into the car. He didn’t have any on the building. That was something he was going to need to remedy. He figured it would take Jason about 15 minutes to get the bird up and over their area to start the surveillance. He just hoped he wasn’t spending a bunch of money on some damn dope smokers. Of course, he could call the police and have them check out the car, but that would ruin the exercise, and if it were something other than dope smokers, they may get spooked off. Timms was aware that counter surveillance was a better option than to just burn a possible lead with a police check.
Minutes later, he watched as a person exited the rear driver’s side of the vehicle and get into the front seat. The person was wearing a denim jacket and a ball cap. Because the person had short hair, he assumed it was a man. The person kept his head down so his face was not visible, which meant that Timms could not run a facial recognition profile. Timms was unable to tell if the person was a man or a woman. The car backed out and exited the parking lot.
Timms punched the speaker button on his phone and tapped the 3.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“Where’s my bird?”
“Ten minutes.”
Timms hung up without acknowledging. There was really no use at this point. The SilkCloud would not make it in time. He returned to his bank of monitors and pulled up the traffic cameras. As the Crown Victoria passed through a signaled intersection three blocks from the parking lot, he snapped photos of the front and rear of the vehicle. The driver was still obscured by the ball cap, and it was still too dark in the interior to see anything useful. He did get the license plate, which he immediately ran through the police database.
The license plate came back to Jones Sisters Security, L.C. out of Spain. ‘Spain? That didn’t make any sense. The license plates were from this state. What is going on?’ He simultaneously did a check for the company while tracking the vehicle with the city’s traffic cameras. As he was waiting on returns for the security company, he watched the vehicle turn into a large restaurant’s parking lot. The traffic cameras could only see at an extreme distance, and there was almost no detail. Timms immediately picked up the ringing phone.
“Yeah?”
“Three minutes. Tasking yet?”
“Head over to the Greasy Spoon on the west side. You are looking for a mid-nineties silver Crown Victoria. Do you know what those look like?”
“Uh, yeah boss,” Jason retorted in a sarcastic tone.
“Hey, I had to check. Those were a little before your time,” Timms joked with the young flight operator.
“Ok. I will reroute and be there in five.”
“Great.”
Timms turned back to his display to look at the incoming data on the vehicle and the company. He found it odd that there was almost no information. The vehicle had a very short history. It had been owned by a large city’s police department on the other side of the state, then purchased at auction by an individual four years later. Then just less than a year ago it was acquired by Jones Sisters Security, L.C. with an address in the Canary Islands, La Palma (Spain). He could not find any record with the county for such a company. He was almost at a dead end. He knew one thing for certain - these were no pot smokers.
*****
Timms had reflected on that fortuitous day many months since. Had Drew and Doreen not been so poorly trained, he would have never detected them that day in the background of a separate conversation he was watching and listening in on. Even so, he had lost them that first day. The car was a complete dead end, and had been abandoned later that day in the Greasy Spoon parking lot, never to be revisited. The company was finally found to have been created in another state, with no listed members or owners, and the Registered Agent had no information other than a bad address.
It was three weeks later that Timms found the 58-year old Broussard twins again in a mid-nineties Ford F-250 truck in an adjacent parking lot. The only reason he caught them was from the music playing on the radio. It took several more weeks for him to finally get enough of a face shot to identify the pair. They were again driving a vehicle registered to a New Mexico limited liability company with a foreign address on a difficult-to-access island. It cost the government considerable monies to run down the addresses only to find that they ended with a tourist hot dog vendor who moonlighted as a mail forwarder. He would send the mail to another island in another country where the mail may or may not be forwarded again. Eventually, it would dead end somewhere. And why not? No one really needed to be notified that their registration was about to expire. They knew when it happened. Since the limited liability companies were not doing business, the State never needed to contact them for any reason. All very anonymous. All very untraceable.
But your face stayed with you where ever you went. Doreen made the mistake of propping her binoculars on the headrest of the seat in front of her. At one point she moved them and a camera captured enough of her face in the darkened truck to run through the recognition computer. Through Doreen, Timms determined her accomplice was her twin brother Drew. Neither had any criminal history; they both graduated high school and operated the family ranch, which they inherited. Though neither of them were well trained in actual surveillance, they were most certainly being trained and assisted in everything else by professionals. Timms was glad he had not burned them with a police check many months back, but he was still no closer to their handlers than he was that first day.
The twins had a fairly set routine. Early in the morning, one or both of them would go to a local store or shop and purchase some non-essentials with their Homeland Equitable Liberty Pay (H.E.L.P.) card. Timms was grateful for the laws that did away with paper money. Digital money was so much easier to track people down with. He found it very effective to use against people he was interrogating. Timms figured that these purchases gave the twins some form of plausible deniability in the event they were confronted by police. Of course, it would not help them once Timms finally decided to bring them in, since he had video evidence of their activities to confront them with once they started lying.
The other thing they did was play rap music, especially music with long bass hits. Sometimes they would run the engine of the truck in lieu of music. He knew they were doing this to mask their conversations, and it was working well, even against the agency’s most sophisticated equipment. No matter what he tried, the computers could never noise cancel the music or engine. There was some anomalous background interference that the computers were unable to account for. On top of that, the engine would change speed at an irregular interval. Because of this, Timms could never hear or record any part of their conversation in a manner that was useful.
Once the twins completed their surveillance, usually no more than twice a week, they would leave the parking lot and take a circuitous route through the city streets and end up parking the truck in a private parking garage. Even though Timms had had teams covertly enter the vehicle, install trackers, and put 24/7 surveillance on it, they always seemed to get around it. Twice a covert team had entered the vehicle, and it was completely clean. The only worthy intel that gave a piece of the puzzle was to learn that the stereo system had a wireless remote that allowed them to change the volume, station, or CD track from the back seat. Every vehicle tracker had failed to operate when they were in the vehicle, and no one ever got near the truck when surveillance was on it.
Even when the SilkCloud was up, they would either go into an underground structure, parking garage, or operate in places that had dense overhead cover. Even on the days that Drew would spend over thirty minutes to get his snacks at the corner convenience store, he took a route that shielded him from overhead view. Any of the private cameras at various businesses that Timms had access to, either suddenly didn’t work or were of too poor quality to be of any use.
Timms had tried to use the cameras in the parking garage to monitor the truck and the twins, but they always seemed to be broken. Timms had entertained offering the owners of the parking garage an upgrade to their video system, but figured that it may be too suspicious. Regardless, he was still perplexed as to why, with all of the great technology he had, the twins were still able to keep their actions following their surveillance secret. They certainly had professional help.
Timms was contemplating new ways to track the twins as he was driving in to work this morning. He always made it a point to not look in the direction of the parking lots from which they would conduct their surveillance, even though his instincts always told him he should. They had been playing this cat and mouse game for so many months now, and he was enjoying the chase. His only ace was that he knew they were there; otherwise they seemed to be holding most of the cards in this game. He knew they didn’t know what was going on inside the building under his command, and he was sure…
“Is that…?” Timms said aloud to himself. He was only four blocks from his office when he spotted what he thought was Doreen walking down the sidewalk several blocks ahead, likely on her morning illicit caffeine run, later than usual. He slowed down to several miles under the speed limit to observe longer and make sure. The person had all of the right features. In fact, everything was right except for the time. It had to be her. As he was only a hundred yards away, he could tell for sure that it was Doreen.
Timms made his decision instantly. He was going to jump on this rare opportunity to do some field work. He made a left turn into the first parking lot on the same side of the street as Doreen, but still almost one hundred yards away. He took the chance that she saw him when he made the turn, but it was a chance worth taking. She may be doing surveillance on the facility and its employees, but there was no way that she knew who he really was. In fact, Drew and Doreen had come in contact with several agency employees over the months, and they had always acted as if they didn’t know who they were.
He quickly parked and set into a jog towards Doreen. His line of sight to her was blocked by a building, and as he approached the corner of the building, he slowed to a walk and stepped onto the sidewalk. He saw less than the back half of Doreen as she was disappearing into the long pedestrian alleyway between the various businesses. He picked up his pace again to close the distance and get to the alley before she could disappear down one of the many side alleys. He was contemplating his next move. He wanted to subdue her, capture her and get her into an interrogation room. He could have had a team do this months before, but never saw a good opportunity. But today she was out of routine, and out of routine was an opening to be exploited.
As he came to the alleyway, he was becoming excited to be personally responsible for getting a domestic extremist off the street. Drew and Doreen had broken many of the constitutionally upheld laws that he had sworn an Oath to protect and defend. He already had a Constitutional Executive Decree (C.E.D., erroneously pronounced “seed”) for their arrest, search, and detainment back in his office, drafted under provisions of the Agriculture, Livestock, and Paper Products Act (ALPPA). Today was going to be a good day. He could see Doreen just twenty-five yards in front of him. The narrow brick-lined alley with dense foliage trees made the alley a perfect way to prevent a person being seen from overhead. These alleys were strewn throughout several blocks of businesses and residential lofts. It made sense that people used them to conduct illegal business. Yesterday was Doreen’s last day for doing that, and she didn’t even know it.
As he approached her from behind in a fast walk, he was rolling his foot falls in a heel-toe fashion and keeping his weight on the outside edges of his feet. This made his fast walk nearly silent; certainly quiet enough to approach a lady twice his age who had been listening to loud rap music for the past twelve hours. He noted her limp caused by a genetic defect that both her and Drew shared. It didn’t help that she was overweight by seventy pounds.
Timms scanned the area for witnesses. All of the businesses in this area were closed, and there was no one in the alley but Doreen and himself. He reached under his suit jacket and pulled the small 100,000 volt Taser out of its fabric holster. The new technology made these amazingly small. It was no larger than his two battery flashlight, and actually looked very much like it. He was just ten feet away and ready to make his move. He was going to have to go for her neck, as her heavy denim clothing and jacket would likely keep the prongs of the device too far from her skin.
As he raised his hand to deliver the voltage, Doreen delivered a mule kick directly to his abdomen just above his groin, causing the Taser to fly out of his hand and him to collapse to the ground. She had not even turned around, but had waited until he was in range and thrust her leg rearward with immense force on his advancing body. Timms wondered if she had seen his shadow or reflection in some glass. It didn’t matter, he was down, and she was not.
“Blue Jay?!” she said with astonishment as she turned to face her attacker. “Well, I don know wut you wan’ned, but Ima ‘bout ta fuck you up!”
She reached down and grabbed Timms by the hair and stood him up. He was still half folded trying to recover from his abdominal pain. He never saw the powerful punch to his face, followed by a swift kick to his groin as he was falling backwards. He was curled up as sheer pain spiked throughout his body. He was developing a putrid metal taste in his mouth. Then Doreen started to kick him in the spine and ribs. His fetal position was the only thing protecting his vital areas, but he was in so much pain that he figured dying might be the only plausible solution to his current situation; and it sure seemed that Doreen was intent on delivering that solution.
“You’s a dumb bas’derd!” she said between kicks. “You dun taut you’s could take vantage of da ol lady, huh? You piece of….”
Her voice trailed off, and she stopped kicking him, which he was more than grateful for. The pain he felt was worse than any training he had been exposed to. He glanced up and saw Doreen half bent over holding her chest with one hand and the other on her knee. She appeared to have used all of her energy and was suffering from not being able to get enough oxygen into her chest. She was breathing hard and gasping. Timms decided this was the best opportunity for him to get back on the offensive. He tried to push himself back up, but the pain in his abdomen and groin was too much. He just had to lay on the ground and hope Doreen stayed winded for a while.
As he kept watching her, she didn’t seem to be recovering at all. She was wincing and pushing on her chest. She had backed herself up twelve to fifteen feet from him trying to catch her breath. He just kept watching and waiting for his pain to subside. Doreen stood upright, still clutching her chest, but it appeared that she was intent on smashing his bones even more if he didn’t do something to stop her. He started to push himself up again, fighting through the pain in his back and belly. He was unable to stand completely erect. As he looked towards her, a wave of pain went through him and he threw up bile between his spread legs.
“Caint hold da breakfast, huh? Wuss!” Doreen scolded him. She started limping her way towards him, clenching both fists as she approached. He couldn’t let her hit him again. She had already bested him. She was far stronger than he had anticipated, extremely quick, and not at all what he anticipated, especially for a 58-year old disabled, overweight woman. He figured that she could probably take out more than half of his classmates in his hand-to-hand class back at the CIA. If she got another good lick in, he’d be done. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.
As she closed, he braced himself for the blows, hoping to be able to launch an effective counter. Her first swing was a left uppercut intended for his abdomen, but hit his breast plate instead. Even this was considerably more painful than he expected, as it had enough energy behind it to force him into a considerably more erect position. With his peripheral vision he could see a right overhand coming straight for his head. He wasn’t going to have time to dodge it, at least not completely. With considerable effort, he thrust his knee into her ample abdominal region, making contact just below her sternum, as the punch grazed down his face, almost entirely missing him.
Doreen collapsed in a pile at his feet and he folded himself again, putting his hands on his knees. Doreen rolled onto her back, either by her own efforts or by momentum, he didn’t know. She was pale with bulging eyes and obviously in serious distress. She weakly put her right hand on her left shoulder and attempted to squeeze. She was having a heart attack. Timms reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
“Doreen? Doreen? Look at me,” Timms said in a soft, but panting voice. He looked down the alleyway in both directions and saw no one moving about.
“Doreen? You’re having a heart attack.” Timms held up the phone, with its face towards Doreen. “You need an ambulance if you want to live. I just need a little information from you. Doreen? Look at me.”
Doreen rotated her head slightly and looked blankly at Timms.
“Doreen? Did you hear me? You are having a heart attack. An ambulance can be here in two minutes. Just tell me who you work for,” Timms said, still waggling his phone at her.
Timms wasn’t sure what to do. He had never had to interrogate someone who was suddenly dying from natural causes. Maybe she knew she was dying, or maybe she was in denial. Either of those were not good for him being able to extract information from her. A person had to believe they were going to make it, or at least have a chance. He knew she was not going to make it, but what did she know? He had to assume the worst.
“Doreen? Drew’s going to be next unless you tell me who you work for. I am going to go pick him up, and he is going to go to prison for the rest of his life. But if you tell me who you work for, I will leave him alone. He can tend the ranch into old age and live a good life,” he lied to her, still panting. “Who do you work for?”
Timms could see that she was trying to speak, but he couldn’t hear anything. He wasn’t about to get too close. She had proven a significant adversary and could still have a winning card to play in this fight. If she had not had a health problem in the middle of their confrontation, he likely would have died or been captured if that was their prerogative.
“What? I can’t hear you Doreen. You‘re going to have to speak up.”
“Traitor!” She spit out in a gravelly voice, her eyes tightening on him as her grip loosened on her shoulder.
“Traitor? Are you calling me a traitor?” Timms queried, incredulous at the accusation. He was a patriot, and this woman was an extremist, maybe even a terrorist, calling him a traitor, of all things. “You’re the traitor, sweetheart.”
Her eyes relaxed and started to gloss over. Her body was relaxed, and she was still taking short shallow breaths. Timms put the phone back in his pocket and walked in the direction where his Taser flew when he was mule kicked. She was a lost cause if her delirious mind thought he was a traitor. He found the small Taser some thirty feet from where he was initially kicked, between the wall of a building and the base of a tree in the alley. He holstered the device and continued to walk opposite the direction he had entered the pedestrian alleyway. Just as he was turning into a side alley that would take him back in the direction of his truck, he noticed Drug Doug standing in an alcove in the alley. He quickly wondered if Drug Doug had witnessed their altercation. Probably not from where he was standing in the alcove, but Timms couldn’t take the chance.
He retrieved the phone from his pocket and dialed 911.
“911. This call is recorded. Where is your emergency?” came the female voice on the other end.
“There is a lady laying in the pedestrian alley behind the old Johnson’s place. I don’t know if she is breathing or not, and I saw a man dressed in black jeans and a dark plaid shirt walking away from the area to the south.”
Timms disconnected the call and removed the battery from his phone as he came to the street. He could already hear sirens in the distance. He dropped the back of the phone into a trash bin and put the battery in his pocket. He crossed the street and walked the block and a half back to his truck. Once he got there he put the main part of the phone under his front tire and got into the truck. He looked himself over, and noticed that his suit was a bit dirty, so he stepped out of the truck and started dusting himself off. He removed his coat and dusted off the back to make it as presentable as possible. Fortunately, the brick lined alley was swept daily by city workers, and Doreen’s boots had not done any noticeable damage.
He could hear more sirens now. He looked in the mirror to see if any bruising was visible from the punches he had received. He couldn’t see any, but he knew that some might show up later. He was certain that his body would be bruised. He was still suffering from the effects of the beating he took, and would likely suffer for weeks to come. He removed his “company” phone from his other pocket and punched in the speed dial number and hit send.
“We’re secure. What’s the job?” came the familiar voice.
“We need a man at the hospital to get eyes and ears on one fourteen alpha and one fourteen bravo. Alpha may be arriving later, while bravo should be arriving by ambulance in a few minutes. We also need to get the Cloud up ASAP, with tasking to follow. Can you handle that?”
“Will do.”
“I am going to be a little bit late.”
“I’ll pass it on.”
“Thanks.” Timms disconnected the call and put the phone back in his pocket.
He waited a few more minutes in the parking lot, recovering as best he could. As he backed out of the parking space, the tire crushed the phone he had left behind it. As he turned on to Collins Ave, he could see three police cars and one ambulance in the street. He drove slowly past them with the slow moving traffic. He could not see anything down the alley, as the body of the ambulance was blocking his view. He pulled into the parking lot and entered the building, going straight into Jason’s flight control room for the SilkCloud drone.
“Where are we?”
“Hey boss. We’re up and flying. We’ll be in the area in 3 minutes.”
“Good. Your task is to follow one fourteen alpha wherever he goes. He is still in the truck across the street.”
“What about bravo?”
“She is on her way to the hospital. Don’t ask. I think this is going to significantly change their day, and there might be a slip up.”
“OK,” Jason responded dryly.
“Just don’t lose him. Record everything.”
“Just like normal, boss.”
“Yeah. Just like normal, except this won’t be a normal day.”
*****
Everything they had done thus far had not produced any more leads. Today had been no different. Drew had gone through his normal routine to shake tails, and left the truck in its normal parking space in the parking garage. The surveillance team had been delayed in getting into position by a minor traffic accident they had been involved in. The only difference was Drew did everything at an earlier time period than usual. He went to the hospital as expected, and found out his twin sister had died of a heart attack. Drew had not done anything unexpected, except make a strange phone call from a pay-as-you-go phone that had been purchased two years previous and never used until that moment to another pay-as-you-go phone that had been purchased three years before and never before used until that day. Otherwise he drove straight home to his small ranch. Neither of the phones used for that short phone call had ever been found.
Timms had made his way out to the D&D Ranch an hour before Drew arrived. He had parked his truck well down the road beyond a bend where Drew would not see it when he was approaching. Timms had removed the rear wheel and tire and put them in the back of his truck, and installed the spare. He let the air out of the spare and punctured the original. He then made his way to the home of Drew and Doreen by foot. Jason had been keeping him apprised of Drew’s whereabouts. Timms broke into their home by entering through an unlocked window.
Timms knew from the multiple “sneak-&-peeks” his team had done on the ranch, that they left their windows unlocked, so he already knew he could get in without any issues. He situated himself on a nice comfortable recliner in the living room, facing the front door. He would confront Drew the moment he walked in the door, his internally suppressed custom Ruger MK 22/45 resting on the arm of the chair. He would have Drew dead to rights if he tried anything, but he didn’t expect a grieving man to be ready to fight.
Timms heard Drew arrive on the gravel driveway. After a few minutes, Drew had not come in the house. Timms became a bit nervous, wondering if Drew had figured out he was there. No, he couldn’t know. How would he know? Just then he heard the engine of an ATV start up. He slowly got up and moved towards a window that faced Drew’s Man’s Shed. He realized that that is where Drew’s gun safe was, and Drew may be getting ready for a fight. Timms observed the building from back in the room, where Drew would not be able to see him. Just then, he could see Drew drive out of the building on the ATV in the direction of the bulk of the Ranch. Timms reached for the collar of his RealTree camouflage tee-shirt, grabbed the ear bud connected to the phone in his pocket and put it in his ear.
“Talk to me.” Timms said.
“He’s going west on an ATV,” Jason came back, watching the large man riding an ATV with the camera on the SilkCloud IV es drone aircraft that was circling at just 3000 feet.
“OK. I am going to grab the other ATV and follow far behind. You are going to have to keep me in the loop on what he is doing and where he is. Don’t let me get too close.”
“Got it.”
After nearly two hours of tracking Drew driving around in aimless wanderings of his ranch and a part of the neighboring ranch, Jason was finally able to report that Drew had stopped and dismounted. Timms was about 200 yards away on the other side of a small rise, and decided to walk in to keep from giving away his position with the ATV’s engine noise. Jason guided Timms to within 50 yards of Drew’s position just beyond a tree line.
“Jason? You’re off this task now. RTB,” Timms whispered into the microphone.
“Umm…Roger. Returning to Base,” Jason said with disappointment in his voice.
Timms removed the ear bud from his ear and disconnected the call. He drew his Ruger and made sure the safety was off. He moved the last 50 yards in a slow crouch. He paid careful attention to his shadow and any sound he was making. He didn’t know what gave him away to Doreen this morning, but doing the same with Drew would certainly get him killed. Just as he came to the edge of the tree line, Timms could see the ATV and Drew laying behind a scoped rifle. He was just twenty five yards away.
He took a long look at Drew laying behind the rifle. Timms had assumed that Drew was out here to commit suicide, but it appeared he was hunting instead. It didn’t make sense that a guy would go hunting just a few short hours after finding out that his last remaining relative was dead. He surmised that Drew must have been one tough cookie to be able to quickly work through such a trauma. That, or he was just cold hearted. Either way, it spelled trouble for Timms. He really wanted to interrogate Drew. Drew was his last link to the extremist cell in the area. They had no other leads. But dying at the hands of a man who was either amazingly emotionally tough in the face of lost family, or a cold hearted bastard with the same fighting genetic code as his sister who had damn near killed him this morning made his decision a little easier. He also had to consider that Drew had nothing left to live for. Timms no longer had any hook to coerce Drew with - no family, no improprieties, no public embarrassments, no better life, nothing. Prison wouldn’t scare him. Interrogating him would be a completely wasted effort.
Timms pushed the button that turned on the compact red dot mounted on the top of his Ruger. He was not going to take the chance of making noise by closing the distance, only to be mule kicked again then pummeled to death. No, he could easily hit Drew in the skull at 25 yards. He lined up the glowing red dot on the back of Drew’s head. He took a shallow breath as he took up the minimal slack in the trigger and then pressed the trigger back.
The sound of the special subsonic 22LR bullet passing through the suppressor and out of the barrel barely made a sound. In fact, the louder sound was the metal on metal bolt cycling and making contact with the chamber when it loaded the next round. The shot was so quiet that he could even hear the bullet smack the back of Drew’s skull, killing him instantly.
Timms approached the lifeless body. When he was about six feet away, he put two more bullets into the man’s head, just to be sure. Timms took a deep breath, and actually felt a little bad about what he had done. It was such a waste of resources. He really needed Drew and Doreen to get to the real extremists. These two had obviously been pawns, and now they had died for their transgressions. It was also the first time Timms had intentionally killed someone from the Executive Transparent List, which was a list compiled for the President, of terrorists and extremists that could be captured or killed (as required by the situation in the field) at the discretion of field officers. Drew and Doreen had been added to the list by Timms only days after he determined who they were, and they had been approved by higher authority. He didn’t like doing things this way. He felt that most people deserved due process, but not at the expense of him dying to make sure they got it.
Timms looked down at the magnificent rifle Drew had been about to use. It had a long bull barrel, free float railed forearm, an adjustable precision stock, and was sitting on a bipod. He looked out in the direction the barrel was pointing and saw a small movement in the distance. “What the hell…”
Timms rolled the heavy body away from the rifle. There was only some slight blood spatter on the shooting mat, so he didn’t bother to clean it up. He laid down behind the rifle and adjusted his eye to the scope. He rotated the rifle just a little bit to bring the target back into view.
“HOLY SHIT! It can’t be!” Timms was beside himself. He took his face away from the rifle and looked over at the pale lifeless face of Drew, eyes still open. “I’m sorry. That would have been a real trophy around here. Very illegal and immoral, but a back-slapper for sure.” He sincerely meant it when he said it to the dead man.
Timms put his cheek back on the riser and thumbed up the dial to raise it about a quarter of an inch, since his cheeks were not fat like Drew’s. He put the crosshairs of the scope back on the beautiful, and quite large brown bear. Timms was not an avid hunter, but he knew it was very rare for this area, and certainly one this large. It had a light brown, almost tan coat and blackish feet. It had adapted its coloring well to the area. He could see that the bear appeared to be eating something. As he focused in, it appeared to be plastic of some kind.
He started rotating the rifle around to look for where the bear had acquired its gains, and that’s when he saw the man come out of the tree line below. He was one of the Livestock and Agriculture Recovery Department agents. They had sent some eighty plus agents out this morning to a neighboring ranch to do a recovery and collection under the Livestock, Agriculture, and Paper Products Act, for not bringing the livestock to market and paying the required taxes on them. They had used his facility this morning to do the briefing and make the transfers from the buses to the SUVs. The man was obviously deserting his post. He was supposed to be doing the work of the United States, not out here in the wilderness.
This was no good, but it was also excellent, Timms realized. He had the right to kill any deserters on sight. The Desertion Act had been instituted just over a year ago due to far too many police, military, and government employees suddenly not showing up for work. Much of this behavior began after the passage of several new federal laws following the re-election of a contentious president. These desertions were preventing the government from properly functioning, and offering monetary incentives in the face of very high unemployment (officially 21.8%, but realistically 49.2%) did nothing to keep these people on the job. This spawned the one page Desertion Act, which allowed for the immediate death (by any means) of any member of a government office who left their position without due notice and for good reason.
This circumstance certainly qualified as desertion: this man, still dressed in his issued tan uniform was far from his assigned duty. But what was even better was that Timms could use the illegally possessed gun of a known extremist to kill this deserter, and it would be blamed on the grieving domestic extremist Drew Broussard, who took the loss of his sister too hard and killed a federal agent acting in the line of duty. It was genius. It would save his whole day. Hell, it would make his whole year. The government would pour money, manpower, and technology into his office and area. It would give him far more resources to find the extremists and terrorists in Region 6-2.
He put the crosshairs on the man and worked to anticipate each movement. His target was moving and almost 300 yards away he estimated. Drew had a bullet drop compensation chart (BDC) glued to the inside of the eye piece scope cap showing where to place the crosshairs for various distances. Timms lined up the crosshairs according to the BDC and got ready to take the shot. He slowed his breathing and took up the slack on the trigger. He had timed the forward and up and down movement of the man as he walked. Exhale….squeeze….
The clean break of the two-stage trigger sent the titanium firing pin into the primer of the cartridge, igniting the power and propelling the 75 grain round out of the barrel at nearly 3-times the speed of sound. The bullet impacted the man from behind sending him immediately to the ground. Timms fired another round into the body about a second later, just for good measure. He looked through the scope and could see the man’s lifeless body laying half curled on a bag of what appeared to be trash.
“That’s where the bear got the plastic,” he said aloud, followed by, “Oh shit! The bear!” Timms suddenly realized the bear could ruin his plans by eating the man, and with him the evidence of the crime. He quickly swung the rifle back to where the bear had been. It wasn’t there. He looked over the top of the scope to see if he could pick up movement with his wider visual field, and he did. Moving in the opposite direction, he saw the bear enter the tree line at a full run. Even after the bear became invisible in the trees, he could still tell it was running, as he could see the tops of the trees swaying as the bear was crashing into the small trunks.
Timms stood up and surveyed the scene. He grabbed the ear bud hanging on his shirt and put it in his ear and pressed the appropriate speed dial button.
“We’re secure…Ready for orders,” came the reply after one ring.
“Clean up on isle 3. Jason will give you the coordinates. Everything goes back where it belongs as though it never left. Alpha and vehicle disappear along with all coin in the safe. We gotta hurry on this one.”
“Roger. Wilco.”
Timms took a deep breath. The thoughts of half a dozen SilkCloud drones and half a dozen more covert teams brought a thin smile to his face. He was going to root out these extremists and help get America back on its feet. Right now, Timms was on top of the world knowing that a lucrative promotion was going to be in his future. Even when things went wrong, they always turned out right, and today was a perfect example.
The CIA arranged for his very early retirement from the Navy. They then took 18 months to secretly send him through multiple training facilities to hone and better his skills, and get him familiar with the latest state of the art gadgets that would be available to him. After his training was complete, they got him a top position with the newly created Bureau of Domestic Affairs and Crisis Intervention Agency (BDACIA), that dealt specifically with domestic terrorism and extremism, which was a sub agency of the Domestic Homeland Security Agency (DHSA.) Because the CIA could not conduct operations within the borders of the United States, they simply circumvented them by creating sub agencies of domestic agencies that had the power to operate within the US, and they filled positions with their trained operatives that were paid, not by the CIA, but instead by the parent agencies. This made it all legal. It was no coincidence that Timms worked for an agency who’s acronym ended with CIA. The conspiracy theory people ate it up. However, J. Allen Timms was an elaborately created alias. It was so good, that even the DHSA and FBI hadn’t flinched when doing the background check for the high level position at the BDACIA.
Timms had been asked by his country to stop the negative domestic actions against his country, and he had willingly answered the call. He knew it was his patriotic duty to stop the terrorists and extremists operating in the US. He had aggressively studied and excelled during every course the Navy, CIA, and DHSA had laid upon him. During his 18 months of various CIA training, he had mastered martial arts, two foreign languages, the art of covert operations, surveillance (of every type imaginable), coercion, evasion, killing, and healing, among others. He took his job and responsibilities personally. He knew that there were very few people capable of doing the job, so he was very serious about everything he did to make sure the job got done. No terrorists would ever get past him while in his area of operations.
The BDACIA’s publicized function was to deal with the new and emerging development of people who were resisting the new laws and taxes, while its primary unpublicized function was to process persons who had been deemed “domestic extremists and/or terrorists.” The BDACIA operated various processing, holding, and internment facilities throughout the US as well as overseas when necessary. But the position Timms held within the BDACIA was a dual role of interrogations of “interesting” persons being processed, and external intelligence gathering to assist in the capture other extremists. This was a highly classified unrecognized position. Timms’ actual job title was Director of Operations, American Health Authority (AHA) Region 6-2.
External intelligence gathering is where Timms excelled. Though he had become quite good at interrogating people, it was not what he loved. In his back office, he had access to a large array of sophisticated electronic and visual surveillance technologies, many of which ran automatically 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. For his work, the best tools were those he personally manipulated, directed, or controlled in some manner. These sensors worked best when coupled with his innate intuition and gut instincts.
This is how he had found Doreen and Drew, several months earlier. It started with a gut feeling, but the finding of the two anti-government extremists was pure luck. He was monitoring one of his near perimeter sensors (which was not something he normally did) that scanned for anomalous RF transmissions, when he noted a spurious Wi-Fi handshake attempt. It wasn’t the fact that it was Wi-Fi, or that it was attempted, it was that what he witnessed was encrypted and lasted less than two seconds. The encryption itself was not a big deal, as people used encryption all the time (not that it ever mattered, since he could either break it or use the back door accesses to the encryption programs), and the attempted handshake was no big deal either, but the combination of the two that piqued his interest. Had he not been monitoring the receiver at that very moment, he would have received a computer generated report several hours later with the broken handshake, and not given it much thought. He may have given it to a technician to follow-up on, but generally nothing ever came from these anonymous RX/TX hunts.
He quickly turned his chair to the bank of monitors and looked at what the building’s various cameras were seeing. He could detect nothing out of the ordinary, but this did not change his mind about the strangeness of the event. He took a few minutes to look over some of his recorded data and concluded that this event was worth pursuing. Even if it led nowhere, it would be a good exercise. He determined that since the RF monitor had been installed, that it had never recorded any similar events. He also found that the connection attempt was made with the BBQ restaurant across the street from the old RVS facility, which had an upgraded and more powerful business signal that had a significantly longer range than normal private Wi-Fi signals.
These two pieces of information, coupled with the time of occurrence, he hoped would allow him to find out what happened. Since the restaurant had a signal booster he had to do some math, but figured they had a boosted range of somewhere around a three hundred feet radius from the router. This was a fairly significant area to search, but whatever had occurred, he was confident he could figure it out.
He slid over to his review monitors, which allowed him to look over the recorded video and any other data collected on a pair of monitors simultaneously. Normally, he viewed video feeds on one monitor and data from other sources on the companion monitor. Timms pulled up the first eight video feeds and had all of them paused at the exact time of the event. He also pulled up the collected RF data (Wi-Fi, cellular, radio, etc.) streams for the same time period on the other monitor. He would need to correlate each signal with a person or place on the various video feeds. This was something he normally had one or more of the technicians do for him, but on this particular day, he was treating this event as “hot” and wanted to do the exercise himself. He felt it was important that he stayed fresh.
It didn’t take him long to match up various transmissions with their associated sources in the videos. His saving grace was that the restaurant was closed and not full of patrons on cell phones and tablets at the time of the event, otherwise it would be impossible to figure out what happened, but at a little after 9am there were only passing cars and pedestrians to deal with. He was also fortunate that there was only one other business open with an active Wi-Fi signal within the area he was doing his search, and he had direct access to the internal camera feed. After 15 minutes, he had visually correlated all but two RF transmissions - the event, and an encrypted connection that was still ongoing. He did not need to visually correlate the last one since he was able to break the encryption and determine that it was a computer belonging to a family in a nearby apartment surfing the web for how to repair a dryer. He had accounted for every, passing car, person, business, and residence within the range of the Wi-Fi signal. But the event was still associated with someone he had yet to find.
When Timms took over at the old RVS Distribution Center, now dubbed the AHA Distribution Center, they were winding down their actual distribution functions. The facility had been quickly undergoing a conversion from distribution of drugs and medical supplies to use as a temporary internment and interrogation facility for the purposes of processing persons arrested and captured under the new anti-terrorist and extremist laws. The trucks kept coming in those early months, but instead of bringing in new medical supplies they were bringing in fencing, pre-fabricated walls and cells, as well as tons of fancy monitoring equipment. And instead of taking out medical supplies for distribution to stores, they were taking out the old logistics equipment, shelving, and heavy equipment. Because the trucks backed up to the bay doors, what was happening inside was unseen by the outside. It only took four short months to accomplish, and they had created a very useful facility for the purpose of getting the bad guys processed out to where they needed to go, but only after extracting any relevant information first through various interrogation techniques.
During the transformation, all of the external security systems had to be updated. Instead of the normal closed circuit security cameras, the guts of the cameras had been upgraded to the latest technology. Along with camera upgrades, various sensors and other devices had been installed. One of Timms’ favorite pieces of equipment was a very small acoustic listening device that had been installed on an existing antenna on the roof. It was barely bigger than a hand, and was made from a special clear polycarbonate material. The receiver’s electronics were the size of a woman’s pinky finger, and the servo that allowed the device to be actuated to the controller’s desired position was the size of a bottle cap. From fifty feet away, it was almost impossible to see. From one hundred yards away it was completely invisible. In this case, with it position on the roof of the large building, no one even knew it was there.
Timms put on the headset for the Claptrap 2012a, and faced his bank of video monitors. He would listen to normal audio while monitoring the video feeds for correlation. Mostly he listened to people talking on their phones, or cars going by on the street. There was nothing of interest to him. After more than half an hour, he was about to move on to something else, when he spotted a woman on the sidewalk talking on her phone. She stood out to him because of the way she dressed, which was very nice for this area of town. He figured she must work for a bank or some other institution that required a higher standard of dress code. He rotated the acoustic dish to her position on the sidewalk, placing the digital overlay of crosshairs on her, and then began the drama into which Timms was unwittingly pulled.
The entire conversation revolved around a divorce. Though Timms was detached, the whole conversation made him sad for the couple. They had small children together, and he wanted to work things out. She was over him and his antics. As they talked it out for ten minutes, the young lady paced back and forth on the side walk, forcing Timms to constantly keep the dish moving to keep up with her and the conversation. He noted that this falling out had nothing to do with the normal problems that ended relationships - money and infidelity. No, this one had more to do with personal attention. She wanted more than he was giving.
“What?!” Timms jammed the remote toggle for camera 6, instantly forgetting about the lady and her problems. He panned and zoomed the camera onto an older Ford Crown Victoria parked in the lot between two buildings across the street. He continued to zoom in to look into the interior. The windows were tinted very dark and there was a tint strip across the top of the windshield making the dark colored interior of the silver Crown Vic pitch black. The best he could do was to see that there were no occupants in the front seats, but he was certain that he had seen movement inside the vehicle in the background while he was watching and listening in on the lady’s conversation. It had been a small movement, but he knew he saw something. It could have even been a dog for all he knew.
He rotated the Claptrap listening dish and put the crosshairs on the car. The only thing he could hear were some external city noises and rap music. He continued to watch and listen, but he neither saw nor heard anything of interest. He brought camera 5 to bear on the parking lot, and started a methodical search. As he did, it dawned on him that he could not tell where the rap music was coming from. He started rotating the dish around the area of the parking lot and noted that the only place the music seemed to be coming from was within the parking lot, and most specifically the silver Crown Victoria.
‘Were there people smoking dope in the back seat? Did anyone still do that?’ he wondered. He focused his two cameras on the car and then the listening device. He adjusted the sensitivity on the Claptrap to diminish other sounds. Then he tried to cancel out the rap music, but the computer program that did the work was unable to match the notes, even though it had identified the correct song. He zoomed in camera 5 to the corner of the rearview mirror. If he could see it vibrating from the bass, then he would know the music was coming from the Crown Vic. As the zoom hit 122x, he could make out the mirror vibrations. Most people would think it was the camera vibrating in the wind on the roof of the building, but Timms knew better. Besides the fact that the wind was minimal to non-existent, the camera was triple dampened, with a dampener at the base mount, the head mount, and internally on the camera itself. It would stay completely stable up to 25 mph. It was definitely the mirror vibrating.
Now he just needed to hear what was going on inside the car. He needed to know if it was a dope smoker or something else. No amount of adjusting would cancel any of the rap songs that played on the radio for the next ninety minutes of observations. The computer continued to note an anomaly in the sound, that is best described as “incalculable distortion.” He also noted that the volume would increase and decrease from time-to-time, but never saw anyone make an adjustment to the radio. He picked up the phone and punched the number 3:
“Yeah, Boss?” came the answer on the first ring.
“Launch the cloud,” Timms replied.
“What’s the tasking?”
“Don’t know yet. Just get it over us. Call me when you are in the AO.” Timms hung up the phone.
Timms knew that with the SilkCloud IV es (electronic surveillance) drone airborne, he would be able to use its more sophisticated infrared and thermal cameras to see into the car. He didn’t have any on the building. That was something he was going to need to remedy. He figured it would take Jason about 15 minutes to get the bird up and over their area to start the surveillance. He just hoped he wasn’t spending a bunch of money on some damn dope smokers. Of course, he could call the police and have them check out the car, but that would ruin the exercise, and if it were something other than dope smokers, they may get spooked off. Timms was aware that counter surveillance was a better option than to just burn a possible lead with a police check.
Minutes later, he watched as a person exited the rear driver’s side of the vehicle and get into the front seat. The person was wearing a denim jacket and a ball cap. Because the person had short hair, he assumed it was a man. The person kept his head down so his face was not visible, which meant that Timms could not run a facial recognition profile. Timms was unable to tell if the person was a man or a woman. The car backed out and exited the parking lot.
Timms punched the speaker button on his phone and tapped the 3.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“Where’s my bird?”
“Ten minutes.”
Timms hung up without acknowledging. There was really no use at this point. The SilkCloud would not make it in time. He returned to his bank of monitors and pulled up the traffic cameras. As the Crown Victoria passed through a signaled intersection three blocks from the parking lot, he snapped photos of the front and rear of the vehicle. The driver was still obscured by the ball cap, and it was still too dark in the interior to see anything useful. He did get the license plate, which he immediately ran through the police database.
The license plate came back to Jones Sisters Security, L.C. out of Spain. ‘Spain? That didn’t make any sense. The license plates were from this state. What is going on?’ He simultaneously did a check for the company while tracking the vehicle with the city’s traffic cameras. As he was waiting on returns for the security company, he watched the vehicle turn into a large restaurant’s parking lot. The traffic cameras could only see at an extreme distance, and there was almost no detail. Timms immediately picked up the ringing phone.
“Yeah?”
“Three minutes. Tasking yet?”
“Head over to the Greasy Spoon on the west side. You are looking for a mid-nineties silver Crown Victoria. Do you know what those look like?”
“Uh, yeah boss,” Jason retorted in a sarcastic tone.
“Hey, I had to check. Those were a little before your time,” Timms joked with the young flight operator.
“Ok. I will reroute and be there in five.”
“Great.”
Timms turned back to his display to look at the incoming data on the vehicle and the company. He found it odd that there was almost no information. The vehicle had a very short history. It had been owned by a large city’s police department on the other side of the state, then purchased at auction by an individual four years later. Then just less than a year ago it was acquired by Jones Sisters Security, L.C. with an address in the Canary Islands, La Palma (Spain). He could not find any record with the county for such a company. He was almost at a dead end. He knew one thing for certain - these were no pot smokers.
*****
Timms had reflected on that fortuitous day many months since. Had Drew and Doreen not been so poorly trained, he would have never detected them that day in the background of a separate conversation he was watching and listening in on. Even so, he had lost them that first day. The car was a complete dead end, and had been abandoned later that day in the Greasy Spoon parking lot, never to be revisited. The company was finally found to have been created in another state, with no listed members or owners, and the Registered Agent had no information other than a bad address.
It was three weeks later that Timms found the 58-year old Broussard twins again in a mid-nineties Ford F-250 truck in an adjacent parking lot. The only reason he caught them was from the music playing on the radio. It took several more weeks for him to finally get enough of a face shot to identify the pair. They were again driving a vehicle registered to a New Mexico limited liability company with a foreign address on a difficult-to-access island. It cost the government considerable monies to run down the addresses only to find that they ended with a tourist hot dog vendor who moonlighted as a mail forwarder. He would send the mail to another island in another country where the mail may or may not be forwarded again. Eventually, it would dead end somewhere. And why not? No one really needed to be notified that their registration was about to expire. They knew when it happened. Since the limited liability companies were not doing business, the State never needed to contact them for any reason. All very anonymous. All very untraceable.
But your face stayed with you where ever you went. Doreen made the mistake of propping her binoculars on the headrest of the seat in front of her. At one point she moved them and a camera captured enough of her face in the darkened truck to run through the recognition computer. Through Doreen, Timms determined her accomplice was her twin brother Drew. Neither had any criminal history; they both graduated high school and operated the family ranch, which they inherited. Though neither of them were well trained in actual surveillance, they were most certainly being trained and assisted in everything else by professionals. Timms was glad he had not burned them with a police check many months back, but he was still no closer to their handlers than he was that first day.
The twins had a fairly set routine. Early in the morning, one or both of them would go to a local store or shop and purchase some non-essentials with their Homeland Equitable Liberty Pay (H.E.L.P.) card. Timms was grateful for the laws that did away with paper money. Digital money was so much easier to track people down with. He found it very effective to use against people he was interrogating. Timms figured that these purchases gave the twins some form of plausible deniability in the event they were confronted by police. Of course, it would not help them once Timms finally decided to bring them in, since he had video evidence of their activities to confront them with once they started lying.
The other thing they did was play rap music, especially music with long bass hits. Sometimes they would run the engine of the truck in lieu of music. He knew they were doing this to mask their conversations, and it was working well, even against the agency’s most sophisticated equipment. No matter what he tried, the computers could never noise cancel the music or engine. There was some anomalous background interference that the computers were unable to account for. On top of that, the engine would change speed at an irregular interval. Because of this, Timms could never hear or record any part of their conversation in a manner that was useful.
Once the twins completed their surveillance, usually no more than twice a week, they would leave the parking lot and take a circuitous route through the city streets and end up parking the truck in a private parking garage. Even though Timms had had teams covertly enter the vehicle, install trackers, and put 24/7 surveillance on it, they always seemed to get around it. Twice a covert team had entered the vehicle, and it was completely clean. The only worthy intel that gave a piece of the puzzle was to learn that the stereo system had a wireless remote that allowed them to change the volume, station, or CD track from the back seat. Every vehicle tracker had failed to operate when they were in the vehicle, and no one ever got near the truck when surveillance was on it.
Even when the SilkCloud was up, they would either go into an underground structure, parking garage, or operate in places that had dense overhead cover. Even on the days that Drew would spend over thirty minutes to get his snacks at the corner convenience store, he took a route that shielded him from overhead view. Any of the private cameras at various businesses that Timms had access to, either suddenly didn’t work or were of too poor quality to be of any use.
Timms had tried to use the cameras in the parking garage to monitor the truck and the twins, but they always seemed to be broken. Timms had entertained offering the owners of the parking garage an upgrade to their video system, but figured that it may be too suspicious. Regardless, he was still perplexed as to why, with all of the great technology he had, the twins were still able to keep their actions following their surveillance secret. They certainly had professional help.
Timms was contemplating new ways to track the twins as he was driving in to work this morning. He always made it a point to not look in the direction of the parking lots from which they would conduct their surveillance, even though his instincts always told him he should. They had been playing this cat and mouse game for so many months now, and he was enjoying the chase. His only ace was that he knew they were there; otherwise they seemed to be holding most of the cards in this game. He knew they didn’t know what was going on inside the building under his command, and he was sure…
“Is that…?” Timms said aloud to himself. He was only four blocks from his office when he spotted what he thought was Doreen walking down the sidewalk several blocks ahead, likely on her morning illicit caffeine run, later than usual. He slowed down to several miles under the speed limit to observe longer and make sure. The person had all of the right features. In fact, everything was right except for the time. It had to be her. As he was only a hundred yards away, he could tell for sure that it was Doreen.
Timms made his decision instantly. He was going to jump on this rare opportunity to do some field work. He made a left turn into the first parking lot on the same side of the street as Doreen, but still almost one hundred yards away. He took the chance that she saw him when he made the turn, but it was a chance worth taking. She may be doing surveillance on the facility and its employees, but there was no way that she knew who he really was. In fact, Drew and Doreen had come in contact with several agency employees over the months, and they had always acted as if they didn’t know who they were.
He quickly parked and set into a jog towards Doreen. His line of sight to her was blocked by a building, and as he approached the corner of the building, he slowed to a walk and stepped onto the sidewalk. He saw less than the back half of Doreen as she was disappearing into the long pedestrian alleyway between the various businesses. He picked up his pace again to close the distance and get to the alley before she could disappear down one of the many side alleys. He was contemplating his next move. He wanted to subdue her, capture her and get her into an interrogation room. He could have had a team do this months before, but never saw a good opportunity. But today she was out of routine, and out of routine was an opening to be exploited.
As he came to the alleyway, he was becoming excited to be personally responsible for getting a domestic extremist off the street. Drew and Doreen had broken many of the constitutionally upheld laws that he had sworn an Oath to protect and defend. He already had a Constitutional Executive Decree (C.E.D., erroneously pronounced “seed”) for their arrest, search, and detainment back in his office, drafted under provisions of the Agriculture, Livestock, and Paper Products Act (ALPPA). Today was going to be a good day. He could see Doreen just twenty-five yards in front of him. The narrow brick-lined alley with dense foliage trees made the alley a perfect way to prevent a person being seen from overhead. These alleys were strewn throughout several blocks of businesses and residential lofts. It made sense that people used them to conduct illegal business. Yesterday was Doreen’s last day for doing that, and she didn’t even know it.
As he approached her from behind in a fast walk, he was rolling his foot falls in a heel-toe fashion and keeping his weight on the outside edges of his feet. This made his fast walk nearly silent; certainly quiet enough to approach a lady twice his age who had been listening to loud rap music for the past twelve hours. He noted her limp caused by a genetic defect that both her and Drew shared. It didn’t help that she was overweight by seventy pounds.
Timms scanned the area for witnesses. All of the businesses in this area were closed, and there was no one in the alley but Doreen and himself. He reached under his suit jacket and pulled the small 100,000 volt Taser out of its fabric holster. The new technology made these amazingly small. It was no larger than his two battery flashlight, and actually looked very much like it. He was just ten feet away and ready to make his move. He was going to have to go for her neck, as her heavy denim clothing and jacket would likely keep the prongs of the device too far from her skin.
As he raised his hand to deliver the voltage, Doreen delivered a mule kick directly to his abdomen just above his groin, causing the Taser to fly out of his hand and him to collapse to the ground. She had not even turned around, but had waited until he was in range and thrust her leg rearward with immense force on his advancing body. Timms wondered if she had seen his shadow or reflection in some glass. It didn’t matter, he was down, and she was not.
“Blue Jay?!” she said with astonishment as she turned to face her attacker. “Well, I don know wut you wan’ned, but Ima ‘bout ta fuck you up!”
She reached down and grabbed Timms by the hair and stood him up. He was still half folded trying to recover from his abdominal pain. He never saw the powerful punch to his face, followed by a swift kick to his groin as he was falling backwards. He was curled up as sheer pain spiked throughout his body. He was developing a putrid metal taste in his mouth. Then Doreen started to kick him in the spine and ribs. His fetal position was the only thing protecting his vital areas, but he was in so much pain that he figured dying might be the only plausible solution to his current situation; and it sure seemed that Doreen was intent on delivering that solution.
“You’s a dumb bas’derd!” she said between kicks. “You dun taut you’s could take vantage of da ol lady, huh? You piece of….”
Her voice trailed off, and she stopped kicking him, which he was more than grateful for. The pain he felt was worse than any training he had been exposed to. He glanced up and saw Doreen half bent over holding her chest with one hand and the other on her knee. She appeared to have used all of her energy and was suffering from not being able to get enough oxygen into her chest. She was breathing hard and gasping. Timms decided this was the best opportunity for him to get back on the offensive. He tried to push himself back up, but the pain in his abdomen and groin was too much. He just had to lay on the ground and hope Doreen stayed winded for a while.
As he kept watching her, she didn’t seem to be recovering at all. She was wincing and pushing on her chest. She had backed herself up twelve to fifteen feet from him trying to catch her breath. He just kept watching and waiting for his pain to subside. Doreen stood upright, still clutching her chest, but it appeared that she was intent on smashing his bones even more if he didn’t do something to stop her. He started to push himself up again, fighting through the pain in his back and belly. He was unable to stand completely erect. As he looked towards her, a wave of pain went through him and he threw up bile between his spread legs.
“Caint hold da breakfast, huh? Wuss!” Doreen scolded him. She started limping her way towards him, clenching both fists as she approached. He couldn’t let her hit him again. She had already bested him. She was far stronger than he had anticipated, extremely quick, and not at all what he anticipated, especially for a 58-year old disabled, overweight woman. He figured that she could probably take out more than half of his classmates in his hand-to-hand class back at the CIA. If she got another good lick in, he’d be done. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.
As she closed, he braced himself for the blows, hoping to be able to launch an effective counter. Her first swing was a left uppercut intended for his abdomen, but hit his breast plate instead. Even this was considerably more painful than he expected, as it had enough energy behind it to force him into a considerably more erect position. With his peripheral vision he could see a right overhand coming straight for his head. He wasn’t going to have time to dodge it, at least not completely. With considerable effort, he thrust his knee into her ample abdominal region, making contact just below her sternum, as the punch grazed down his face, almost entirely missing him.
Doreen collapsed in a pile at his feet and he folded himself again, putting his hands on his knees. Doreen rolled onto her back, either by her own efforts or by momentum, he didn’t know. She was pale with bulging eyes and obviously in serious distress. She weakly put her right hand on her left shoulder and attempted to squeeze. She was having a heart attack. Timms reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
“Doreen? Doreen? Look at me,” Timms said in a soft, but panting voice. He looked down the alleyway in both directions and saw no one moving about.
“Doreen? You’re having a heart attack.” Timms held up the phone, with its face towards Doreen. “You need an ambulance if you want to live. I just need a little information from you. Doreen? Look at me.”
Doreen rotated her head slightly and looked blankly at Timms.
“Doreen? Did you hear me? You are having a heart attack. An ambulance can be here in two minutes. Just tell me who you work for,” Timms said, still waggling his phone at her.
Timms wasn’t sure what to do. He had never had to interrogate someone who was suddenly dying from natural causes. Maybe she knew she was dying, or maybe she was in denial. Either of those were not good for him being able to extract information from her. A person had to believe they were going to make it, or at least have a chance. He knew she was not going to make it, but what did she know? He had to assume the worst.
“Doreen? Drew’s going to be next unless you tell me who you work for. I am going to go pick him up, and he is going to go to prison for the rest of his life. But if you tell me who you work for, I will leave him alone. He can tend the ranch into old age and live a good life,” he lied to her, still panting. “Who do you work for?”
Timms could see that she was trying to speak, but he couldn’t hear anything. He wasn’t about to get too close. She had proven a significant adversary and could still have a winning card to play in this fight. If she had not had a health problem in the middle of their confrontation, he likely would have died or been captured if that was their prerogative.
“What? I can’t hear you Doreen. You‘re going to have to speak up.”
“Traitor!” She spit out in a gravelly voice, her eyes tightening on him as her grip loosened on her shoulder.
“Traitor? Are you calling me a traitor?” Timms queried, incredulous at the accusation. He was a patriot, and this woman was an extremist, maybe even a terrorist, calling him a traitor, of all things. “You’re the traitor, sweetheart.”
Her eyes relaxed and started to gloss over. Her body was relaxed, and she was still taking short shallow breaths. Timms put the phone back in his pocket and walked in the direction where his Taser flew when he was mule kicked. She was a lost cause if her delirious mind thought he was a traitor. He found the small Taser some thirty feet from where he was initially kicked, between the wall of a building and the base of a tree in the alley. He holstered the device and continued to walk opposite the direction he had entered the pedestrian alleyway. Just as he was turning into a side alley that would take him back in the direction of his truck, he noticed Drug Doug standing in an alcove in the alley. He quickly wondered if Drug Doug had witnessed their altercation. Probably not from where he was standing in the alcove, but Timms couldn’t take the chance.
He retrieved the phone from his pocket and dialed 911.
“911. This call is recorded. Where is your emergency?” came the female voice on the other end.
“There is a lady laying in the pedestrian alley behind the old Johnson’s place. I don’t know if she is breathing or not, and I saw a man dressed in black jeans and a dark plaid shirt walking away from the area to the south.”
Timms disconnected the call and removed the battery from his phone as he came to the street. He could already hear sirens in the distance. He dropped the back of the phone into a trash bin and put the battery in his pocket. He crossed the street and walked the block and a half back to his truck. Once he got there he put the main part of the phone under his front tire and got into the truck. He looked himself over, and noticed that his suit was a bit dirty, so he stepped out of the truck and started dusting himself off. He removed his coat and dusted off the back to make it as presentable as possible. Fortunately, the brick lined alley was swept daily by city workers, and Doreen’s boots had not done any noticeable damage.
He could hear more sirens now. He looked in the mirror to see if any bruising was visible from the punches he had received. He couldn’t see any, but he knew that some might show up later. He was certain that his body would be bruised. He was still suffering from the effects of the beating he took, and would likely suffer for weeks to come. He removed his “company” phone from his other pocket and punched in the speed dial number and hit send.
“We’re secure. What’s the job?” came the familiar voice.
“We need a man at the hospital to get eyes and ears on one fourteen alpha and one fourteen bravo. Alpha may be arriving later, while bravo should be arriving by ambulance in a few minutes. We also need to get the Cloud up ASAP, with tasking to follow. Can you handle that?”
“Will do.”
“I am going to be a little bit late.”
“I’ll pass it on.”
“Thanks.” Timms disconnected the call and put the phone back in his pocket.
He waited a few more minutes in the parking lot, recovering as best he could. As he backed out of the parking space, the tire crushed the phone he had left behind it. As he turned on to Collins Ave, he could see three police cars and one ambulance in the street. He drove slowly past them with the slow moving traffic. He could not see anything down the alley, as the body of the ambulance was blocking his view. He pulled into the parking lot and entered the building, going straight into Jason’s flight control room for the SilkCloud drone.
“Where are we?”
“Hey boss. We’re up and flying. We’ll be in the area in 3 minutes.”
“Good. Your task is to follow one fourteen alpha wherever he goes. He is still in the truck across the street.”
“What about bravo?”
“She is on her way to the hospital. Don’t ask. I think this is going to significantly change their day, and there might be a slip up.”
“OK,” Jason responded dryly.
“Just don’t lose him. Record everything.”
“Just like normal, boss.”
“Yeah. Just like normal, except this won’t be a normal day.”
*****
Everything they had done thus far had not produced any more leads. Today had been no different. Drew had gone through his normal routine to shake tails, and left the truck in its normal parking space in the parking garage. The surveillance team had been delayed in getting into position by a minor traffic accident they had been involved in. The only difference was Drew did everything at an earlier time period than usual. He went to the hospital as expected, and found out his twin sister had died of a heart attack. Drew had not done anything unexpected, except make a strange phone call from a pay-as-you-go phone that had been purchased two years previous and never used until that moment to another pay-as-you-go phone that had been purchased three years before and never before used until that day. Otherwise he drove straight home to his small ranch. Neither of the phones used for that short phone call had ever been found.
Timms had made his way out to the D&D Ranch an hour before Drew arrived. He had parked his truck well down the road beyond a bend where Drew would not see it when he was approaching. Timms had removed the rear wheel and tire and put them in the back of his truck, and installed the spare. He let the air out of the spare and punctured the original. He then made his way to the home of Drew and Doreen by foot. Jason had been keeping him apprised of Drew’s whereabouts. Timms broke into their home by entering through an unlocked window.
Timms knew from the multiple “sneak-&-peeks” his team had done on the ranch, that they left their windows unlocked, so he already knew he could get in without any issues. He situated himself on a nice comfortable recliner in the living room, facing the front door. He would confront Drew the moment he walked in the door, his internally suppressed custom Ruger MK 22/45 resting on the arm of the chair. He would have Drew dead to rights if he tried anything, but he didn’t expect a grieving man to be ready to fight.
Timms heard Drew arrive on the gravel driveway. After a few minutes, Drew had not come in the house. Timms became a bit nervous, wondering if Drew had figured out he was there. No, he couldn’t know. How would he know? Just then he heard the engine of an ATV start up. He slowly got up and moved towards a window that faced Drew’s Man’s Shed. He realized that that is where Drew’s gun safe was, and Drew may be getting ready for a fight. Timms observed the building from back in the room, where Drew would not be able to see him. Just then, he could see Drew drive out of the building on the ATV in the direction of the bulk of the Ranch. Timms reached for the collar of his RealTree camouflage tee-shirt, grabbed the ear bud connected to the phone in his pocket and put it in his ear.
“Talk to me.” Timms said.
“He’s going west on an ATV,” Jason came back, watching the large man riding an ATV with the camera on the SilkCloud IV es drone aircraft that was circling at just 3000 feet.
“OK. I am going to grab the other ATV and follow far behind. You are going to have to keep me in the loop on what he is doing and where he is. Don’t let me get too close.”
“Got it.”
After nearly two hours of tracking Drew driving around in aimless wanderings of his ranch and a part of the neighboring ranch, Jason was finally able to report that Drew had stopped and dismounted. Timms was about 200 yards away on the other side of a small rise, and decided to walk in to keep from giving away his position with the ATV’s engine noise. Jason guided Timms to within 50 yards of Drew’s position just beyond a tree line.
“Jason? You’re off this task now. RTB,” Timms whispered into the microphone.
“Umm…Roger. Returning to Base,” Jason said with disappointment in his voice.
Timms removed the ear bud from his ear and disconnected the call. He drew his Ruger and made sure the safety was off. He moved the last 50 yards in a slow crouch. He paid careful attention to his shadow and any sound he was making. He didn’t know what gave him away to Doreen this morning, but doing the same with Drew would certainly get him killed. Just as he came to the edge of the tree line, Timms could see the ATV and Drew laying behind a scoped rifle. He was just twenty five yards away.
He took a long look at Drew laying behind the rifle. Timms had assumed that Drew was out here to commit suicide, but it appeared he was hunting instead. It didn’t make sense that a guy would go hunting just a few short hours after finding out that his last remaining relative was dead. He surmised that Drew must have been one tough cookie to be able to quickly work through such a trauma. That, or he was just cold hearted. Either way, it spelled trouble for Timms. He really wanted to interrogate Drew. Drew was his last link to the extremist cell in the area. They had no other leads. But dying at the hands of a man who was either amazingly emotionally tough in the face of lost family, or a cold hearted bastard with the same fighting genetic code as his sister who had damn near killed him this morning made his decision a little easier. He also had to consider that Drew had nothing left to live for. Timms no longer had any hook to coerce Drew with - no family, no improprieties, no public embarrassments, no better life, nothing. Prison wouldn’t scare him. Interrogating him would be a completely wasted effort.
Timms pushed the button that turned on the compact red dot mounted on the top of his Ruger. He was not going to take the chance of making noise by closing the distance, only to be mule kicked again then pummeled to death. No, he could easily hit Drew in the skull at 25 yards. He lined up the glowing red dot on the back of Drew’s head. He took a shallow breath as he took up the minimal slack in the trigger and then pressed the trigger back.
The sound of the special subsonic 22LR bullet passing through the suppressor and out of the barrel barely made a sound. In fact, the louder sound was the metal on metal bolt cycling and making contact with the chamber when it loaded the next round. The shot was so quiet that he could even hear the bullet smack the back of Drew’s skull, killing him instantly.
Timms approached the lifeless body. When he was about six feet away, he put two more bullets into the man’s head, just to be sure. Timms took a deep breath, and actually felt a little bad about what he had done. It was such a waste of resources. He really needed Drew and Doreen to get to the real extremists. These two had obviously been pawns, and now they had died for their transgressions. It was also the first time Timms had intentionally killed someone from the Executive Transparent List, which was a list compiled for the President, of terrorists and extremists that could be captured or killed (as required by the situation in the field) at the discretion of field officers. Drew and Doreen had been added to the list by Timms only days after he determined who they were, and they had been approved by higher authority. He didn’t like doing things this way. He felt that most people deserved due process, but not at the expense of him dying to make sure they got it.
Timms looked down at the magnificent rifle Drew had been about to use. It had a long bull barrel, free float railed forearm, an adjustable precision stock, and was sitting on a bipod. He looked out in the direction the barrel was pointing and saw a small movement in the distance. “What the hell…”
Timms rolled the heavy body away from the rifle. There was only some slight blood spatter on the shooting mat, so he didn’t bother to clean it up. He laid down behind the rifle and adjusted his eye to the scope. He rotated the rifle just a little bit to bring the target back into view.
“HOLY SHIT! It can’t be!” Timms was beside himself. He took his face away from the rifle and looked over at the pale lifeless face of Drew, eyes still open. “I’m sorry. That would have been a real trophy around here. Very illegal and immoral, but a back-slapper for sure.” He sincerely meant it when he said it to the dead man.
Timms put his cheek back on the riser and thumbed up the dial to raise it about a quarter of an inch, since his cheeks were not fat like Drew’s. He put the crosshairs of the scope back on the beautiful, and quite large brown bear. Timms was not an avid hunter, but he knew it was very rare for this area, and certainly one this large. It had a light brown, almost tan coat and blackish feet. It had adapted its coloring well to the area. He could see that the bear appeared to be eating something. As he focused in, it appeared to be plastic of some kind.
He started rotating the rifle around to look for where the bear had acquired its gains, and that’s when he saw the man come out of the tree line below. He was one of the Livestock and Agriculture Recovery Department agents. They had sent some eighty plus agents out this morning to a neighboring ranch to do a recovery and collection under the Livestock, Agriculture, and Paper Products Act, for not bringing the livestock to market and paying the required taxes on them. They had used his facility this morning to do the briefing and make the transfers from the buses to the SUVs. The man was obviously deserting his post. He was supposed to be doing the work of the United States, not out here in the wilderness.
This was no good, but it was also excellent, Timms realized. He had the right to kill any deserters on sight. The Desertion Act had been instituted just over a year ago due to far too many police, military, and government employees suddenly not showing up for work. Much of this behavior began after the passage of several new federal laws following the re-election of a contentious president. These desertions were preventing the government from properly functioning, and offering monetary incentives in the face of very high unemployment (officially 21.8%, but realistically 49.2%) did nothing to keep these people on the job. This spawned the one page Desertion Act, which allowed for the immediate death (by any means) of any member of a government office who left their position without due notice and for good reason.
This circumstance certainly qualified as desertion: this man, still dressed in his issued tan uniform was far from his assigned duty. But what was even better was that Timms could use the illegally possessed gun of a known extremist to kill this deserter, and it would be blamed on the grieving domestic extremist Drew Broussard, who took the loss of his sister too hard and killed a federal agent acting in the line of duty. It was genius. It would save his whole day. Hell, it would make his whole year. The government would pour money, manpower, and technology into his office and area. It would give him far more resources to find the extremists and terrorists in Region 6-2.
He put the crosshairs on the man and worked to anticipate each movement. His target was moving and almost 300 yards away he estimated. Drew had a bullet drop compensation chart (BDC) glued to the inside of the eye piece scope cap showing where to place the crosshairs for various distances. Timms lined up the crosshairs according to the BDC and got ready to take the shot. He slowed his breathing and took up the slack on the trigger. He had timed the forward and up and down movement of the man as he walked. Exhale….squeeze….
The clean break of the two-stage trigger sent the titanium firing pin into the primer of the cartridge, igniting the power and propelling the 75 grain round out of the barrel at nearly 3-times the speed of sound. The bullet impacted the man from behind sending him immediately to the ground. Timms fired another round into the body about a second later, just for good measure. He looked through the scope and could see the man’s lifeless body laying half curled on a bag of what appeared to be trash.
“That’s where the bear got the plastic,” he said aloud, followed by, “Oh shit! The bear!” Timms suddenly realized the bear could ruin his plans by eating the man, and with him the evidence of the crime. He quickly swung the rifle back to where the bear had been. It wasn’t there. He looked over the top of the scope to see if he could pick up movement with his wider visual field, and he did. Moving in the opposite direction, he saw the bear enter the tree line at a full run. Even after the bear became invisible in the trees, he could still tell it was running, as he could see the tops of the trees swaying as the bear was crashing into the small trunks.
Timms stood up and surveyed the scene. He grabbed the ear bud hanging on his shirt and put it in his ear and pressed the appropriate speed dial button.
“We’re secure…Ready for orders,” came the reply after one ring.
“Clean up on isle 3. Jason will give you the coordinates. Everything goes back where it belongs as though it never left. Alpha and vehicle disappear along with all coin in the safe. We gotta hurry on this one.”
“Roger. Wilco.”
Timms took a deep breath. The thoughts of half a dozen SilkCloud drones and half a dozen more covert teams brought a thin smile to his face. He was going to root out these extremists and help get America back on its feet. Right now, Timms was on top of the world knowing that a lucrative promotion was going to be in his future. Even when things went wrong, they always turned out right, and today was a perfect example.
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