Monday, June 11th,
2012
Keira Swain sits
in unusually bad traffic behind the wheel of her RAV4. Her fingers curl in to choke the steering
wheel, then unclench. She’s going to be
late.
She looks around
to take stock: she’s on Las Vegas
Boulevard, staring right at the Stratosphere, some two and a half miles from the
Paris, where she keeps the books. Three
and a half, after she doubles back along the divided highway at Veer
Towers. If traffic is this bad all the way along the strip, she thinks, I’ll probably be better off jogging East at
Sahara and then turning South on Paradise.
The more she thinks it over, the more the plan makes sense. The light traffic along Sahara, coming into
view now, gives her hope.
Time to be a rock star accountant, she
thinks with a grin as she flips her blinker to change lanes. Edward had called her that – “You must be the
rock star of accountants,” he’d said.
Those agents last night had asked an awful lot of questions about
him. She checks her mirror, and a black
sedan jumps out at her from the receding traffic.
Probably just my imagination.
She looks
again. Still there. She can’t see the driver, though.
Probably just a coincidence.
As she approaches
the light at Sahara Avenue, she sees the sedan flip its own blinker and queue
up behind her some four cars back.
We’ve probably just got the same idea.
Nevertheless, as
she stares down the traffic light, she forms a plan.
It doesn’t
matter. She lost ‘em.
Keira flips her
blinker as she approaches Paradise Road and slips into the turn lane. Glancing in her rear-view mirror, she sees no
cars behind her; she looks left, sees no oncoming traffic. As she turns right, she glances into her
mirror again and sees a black sedan pull out from a parking space and activate
its right turn signal.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
She looks ahead,
tries to analyze the traffic pattern ahead from her higher vantage point, and
slams her accelerator pedal. She slaloms
through the first few sparse cars ahead of her, brakes to re-assess, then
weaves through a couple more knots a bit more cautiously. She hits a light, and checks her mirror
again. She sees the black sedan merge a
few cars back as the traffic condenses behind her.
Looking at the
light ahead, she wills it to turn green; mercifully, it does. Keira has only two cars ahead of her, but the
one in front of her doesn’t seem to be in all that much of a hurry for the
morning rush hour. And it’s boxing her
in with the car to her – the car to her left is another black sedan.
Son of a bitch!
The road winds on
and on, twisting this way and that.
Keira tries to dodge her pursuers, but they keep coming out of the
woodwork. She’s not quite sure where to
turn, she hasn’t come by this way very often.
She knows she’s looking for Harmon Avenue, but other than that, she’s
genuinely unfamiliar with this stretch of road, just one major intersection
East of the building where she’s put in upwards of forty hours a week for the
last decade.
The black sedans
have her boxed in, the men in black fixing her with their foreboding
stares. The sky grows dark. She feels inexorable doom closing in around
her. Della’s gone, and soon they’ll get
Virgil – Virgil!
Did he even get to school?
Wait…
Keira thinks hard
for a second – she doesn’t remember seeing Virgil off to school this
morning. He only had a few blocks to
walk, and had walked himself since the fourth grade. And if she hadn’t seen him off this morning –
was he sick? Was she going in
early? Was –
The world tumbles
away from Keira’s RAV4, and soon her vehicle itself fades into blackness.
Keira Swain awakes
in bed with a start.
The clutch of her
fingernails wakes Jerry with a gasp.
They regard each
other for a moment in the pre-dawn gloom.
Keira looks over his shoulder at their alarm clock. Eight minutes to six. Eight minutes of blessed slumber, forever
lost to her. She sighs.
“Are you all
right,” Jerry asks after gaining his composure.
“Yeah, I just had
a bad dream.”
“Mmm. C’mere.”
He wraps his arms around her, she nuzzles her head into the crook of his
neck. Eight minutes lost of blessed
slumber, eight minutes gained of sleepy embrace.
Eight minutes
pass.
The shrill alarm
jolts Keira and Jerry into conditioned alertness. They go about their morning routines. Fasts are broken, teeth are brushed, Virgil
is seen off to school. Della is mourned,
briefly; a little less than yesterday, a little more than tomorrow.
Keira Swain sits
in unusually bad traffic behind the wheel of her RAV4. Her fingers curl in to choke the steering
wheel, then unclench. She’s going to be
late.
Déjà vu overpowers her – she’s seen this
before. She looks to her right: the Stratosphere. She checks her mirrors: no black sedans in sight. Keira breathes a sigh of relief.
Traffic
lightens. No black sedans in sight. She slips a few spots ahead to try and make
up for lost time. Not ten minutes early,
like normal, but perhaps only five.
Maybe right on time. No matter.
She arrives at the
Paris, heads to the accounting floors, and fires up the workstation in her
office to begin her day. Before getting
her morning coffee, she fishes her headset out of her purse, plugs it into her
smartphone, and looks up the directory number for the Department of Homeland
Security. She had been spooked by the
suits on Friday, but they eventually put her at her ease. After considering the matter over the
weekend, she decided that following up wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do, and
this morning’s dream clinched it for her.
“Homeland
Security, this is Shirley, how can I help you?”
“Umm, hi,” Keira
stammers. She expected at least a ring,
maybe a voice system, definitely not the perky young live voice she heard in
her ear almost without pause. “My name
is Keira Swain.” She gets to her feet –
time to multitask. “I was contacted Friday
night by two men claiming to be from your agency.” She heads to her coffee maker to brew herself
a cup. “I just wanted to make sure
everything’s on the up-and-up.”
“All right,”
Shirley says, “Do you have the case number they gave you?”
“I’m sorry, they
didn’t give us a case number.”
“Oh, no.” Shirley’s voice is imperturbably cheerful. “I can understand your frustration. What state are you located in?”
“Nevada. We live in North Las Vegas,” Keira says,
sliding her mug into place.
“Thank you,”
Shirley replies. Keira punches the
single-serving coffee packet into the machine and sets her cup a-brewing. “And what did you say your name was?”
“My
name is Keira Swain, umm, née
Darwall. My husband’s name is
Jerry Swain. You might have it under his
birth certificate name, Jericho Swain.”
“Thank
you for your information, Mrs. Swain.
Just one moment, please.”
Keira’s
coffeemaker bubbles away.
“Thank
you for waiting, Mrs. Swain. I have your
information pulled up. How may I direct
your call?”
“Umm,”
Keira winces at the thought that the DHS could pull up “her information” on a
whim, but not track the conversation they were having at the moment. “I just wanted to make sure that the two guys
I talked to on Friday night were actually DHS agents, and not, I don’t know,
anyone else.”
“I
understand your concern, Mrs. Swain. Let
me check your files here. May I put you
on hold?”
“Sure.” Like I
have a choice, she thinks.
The
line goes silent. Keira’s mug fills. She moves it to her desk, logs into her workstation,
and puts her feet up as she waits for her various multitaskings to catch up to
her. On a whim, she opens her
bottom-left drawer and pulls out a bon-bon – her teachers had, absurdly, all
used the same figure of speech while she was growing up: “Now, I know you all think we sit at our
desks all day, feet propped up, eating bon-bons.” It gave her an ironic thrill to eat a
bon-bon, feet up on her desk, during the odd moment of genuine downtime. She chews, swallows, takes a sip of
coffee. Her workstation is now ready to
rock: she starts up her regular applications
and listens to the fan wind up.
“Mrs.
Swain,” came Shirley’s timid answer.
“Yes,
I’m still here,” Keira replies.
“Now,
you said you were contacted by two persons on Friday?”
“Yes. They claimed to be DHS agents. They showed me badges and IDs.”
“I
see. And what was this regarding?”
“Shouldn’t…”
Keira trails off. A cold tendril of
horror reaches up her spine. “Shouldn’t you know that?”
“I’m
sorry for your frustration, ma’am.
Please hold while I transfer you to my supervisor.”
Keira
holds her coffee mug firmly in her hand.
No need to become a cliché, now.
A
bit of silence, a barely-there scratch of static, and another voice comes on:
“Billings.”
“Um,
yes, my name is Keira Swain.”
“Mrs.
Swain, yes, I see. I’m pulling up your
file now.” The man’s voice is detached,
almost bored. “And what can we help you
with today?”
“Well,”
Keira takes a breath as she defuses her temper and organizes her thoughts. “Friday night, two men came to my house
claiming to be DHS agents. Your
secretary seems to think we should have been given a case number, but we were
not. I have badge numbers, which she
never asked for. I just want to make
sure that we were actually contacted
by some government spooks, and not some creeps pretending to be government spooks.
Can you answer that question for me, Mister Billings?”
“I
can,” Billings replies without pause, “But I’ll need a moment to review your
file.”
“Ugh,
you’re not putting me on hold again, are you?”
“No,”
Billings says with inscrutable calm.
“Why would I need to do that?”
Keira is taken aback. “All
right,” he says, before Keira has had time to recompose herself. “You say that two agents contacted you on
Friday?”
“Yes,”
Keira says.
“And
you have their badge numbers?”
“Yes.”
“Please
give them to me.”
Keira
pulls up her call log and delivers the two four-digit badge numbers she had
stored there the night before.
“One
moment, please,” Billings says, and then he proceeds to type up quite a
storm. Keira has three or four guesses
as to what he might be doing, but precisely zero of them involve typing in a
mere eight keystrokes. “Mrs. Swain,” he
asks at last.
“Yes?”
“I’m
afraid I don’t have any investigation on record matching those badge numbers to
your name, or your husband’s name.”
“OK,
so that means,” Keira trails off.
“It
means you’ll want to contact the local police.
Give them this case number.”
Keira takes it down on her notepad, then exchanges pleasantries with
Agent Billings and immediately phones the Las Vegas Police Department
non-emergency number.
Down
in the parking lot, two men in a silver Dodge Caliber exchange meaningful
glances after listening to an audio stream from their laptop.
“Well,”
the white man says, “I guess the gig is up.”
“Yep,”
the black man says, after clicking his teeth.
“So. What’s our next move?” He unplugs the laptop from the car’s DC
socket and disconnects the smartphone and another device. “I mean, we can’t exactly use the same cover,
if we expect to recruit them.”
The
white man starts up the Caliber and backs out of their parking space. He waits until they’re in traffic before
speaking.
“I
guess we’ll just have to play it straight,” he says after some thinking. “Let the heat die down, then slip in. Just like we did last time.”
The black man nods. They drive on through the streets.
Part two was moved to Chapter Seven.
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