Posted by Derby on July 24, 2000 at 23:14:22:
In Reply to: Operation New Prometheus, cont'd posted by Derby on July 24, 2000 at 23:04:46:
The first thing Gina did the next morning was to go shopping for new clothes and a suitcase to carry them in. Before noon she was turned out in a wide-brim hat, velvety blue miniskirt, and sandals, with a shopping bag full of other clothes and accessories. She also picked up some fresh ammunition for the Glock. She piled everything on the Tammy card.
She bought a copy of a Tacoma newspaper and read the headlines and police reports over lunch at a fast food joint. The Ainsworths' murder had been discovered, courtesy of an "anonymous informant." Curiously, there was no mention of a fourth body at the scene. The bodies of Carl Manning and Tess Donnelly had been recovered from the scene of an accident near the outskirts of Tacoma; authorities were investigating it as a double homicide and possible carjacking. Carl Manning's Bronco had been discovered abandoned by a stream a few miles down the road.
After eating, Gina called Information from a pay phone and got the number of AC's, the lesbian diner where Deirdre liked to spend her lunch break. She dialed the number and asked the bartender if Deirdre Sims were there. After a brief delay, Deirdre picked up the phone.
"Hello," she heard Deirdre say, "this isn't Deirdre Sims and I'm not here."
"Hey, girlfriend, this is Gina."
"Well hello! Where are you, girl? Wait, don't answer that."
"Can you talk in private where you are?"
"Um, no. And Ms. Goony Bird wants her phone back."
"OK. Just find a phone that's not too popular and call me back. Can you do that in, um, fifteen minutes?"
"Sure thing, honey."
Gina gave Deirdre the pay phone's number and hung up. The phone rang ten minutes later.
"Gina? Deirdre again. God I love this James Bond stuff. This is going to be the most fun I've ever had getting fired."
"You're incorrigible, girlfriend. What have you got for me?"
"Oh, nothing but Mary Ellen Nespory's lair, telephone number, and e-addy ." She gave Gina an address and number in Eugene, Oregon. Gina copied it down eagerly.
"Deirdre, you're a genius. Got a pen? See if you can find anything on these for me." Gina read off the other names Anne Kaufman had given her. "Also, get me the medical examiner reports and accident or crime scene evidence for the deaths of Rosie Bickford . . . John Simmons . . . and Tracy Skerritt."
Deirdre repeated back the names. "Sure thing, girlfriend. Are you gonna tell me what this is all about?"
Gina sighed. "I don't know myself. Look, I don't want to try to explain on the telephone. When I have a chance, I'll e-mail you. You have PGP encryption, don't you?"
"Correct-a-mundo."
"Good. Just send me your public key when I e-mail you and I'll explain everything I can. OK, girlfriend? I gotta make some tracks. And like I said, you be very careful. Bye now."
Using the Tammy Coburn card to fill the Stratus' tank, Gina set out for Eugene, Oregon.
* * *
Gina arrived in Eugene about five hours later and headed for the late Mary Ellen Nespory's house. It was a large white duplex outside of town, with a separate stairway leading to the upper story. Nespory's home had been on the lower story. From the absence of a name on the mailbox next to Nespory's, the absence of a car in the driveway, and the shadeless, curtainless, dusty appearance of the upper story, Gina surmised that the other unit of the duplex was uninhabited. Two newspapers lay uncollected on the front lawn.
Gina parked close to the duplex and approached the side door cautiously, hand in her purse, fingers wrapped around the handgrip of the Glock. The side door was locked. She went around to the back door; it, too, was locked by a deadbolt. Gina took a short length of clothes hanger wire from her purse, picked the lock with about five minutes' work, and carefully walked through the back door of the Nespory house.
It was dim inside; Gina left the lights off. She found herself in a kitchen with an open door ahead of her leading into the dining room, and a swinging door to her left. One thing was for certain; this place was not being treated as a crime scene. As far as the authorities were concerned, Mary Ellen Nespory wasn't dead. What if Nespory is still alive?Gina suddenly thought. What if that MEN tattoo was just a coincidence?
Well, a little late to worry about that now..
Gina traveled carefully from room to room. Through the swinging door to the pantry: empty. Through another swinging door to the dining room: empty. Through an open door to the foyer and its locked front door: empty. Through an archway to the living room: empty. Through another archway to the sitting room and its side door: empty. Through an open door into the bedroom: empty. The bathroom adjoining was also unoccupied.
On the bedtable lay a telephone. The answering machine was not blinking, but Gina pushed the button anyway.
"BEEP!" A female voice spoke. "Hi, Mary, this is Debbie. When you get back from Tacoma, page me."
"BEEP!" A male voice. "Hi, honey, I gotta cancel tonight. Can we do it tomorrow at Ken's? Gimme a call."
"BEEP!" A telemarketer explained the benefits of MCI.
"BEEP!" A male voice. "Mary Ellen, this is Joe. You gonna be at the poker game tonight? Black queens are wild. Call me back and confirm."
"BEEP!" A male voice. "Nespory, contact me at HQ Beta immediately." The man's rumbling basso tone reverberated with menace. Gina shivered.
Upstairs, the floorboards suddenly creaked. Voices spoke from above.
"What's that noise?" said a woman.
"Sounded like somebody called and left a message." Another woman.
The first woman spoke again. "I didn't hear the phone ring. Parker, Hunt: go downstairs and check it out." Footsteps thudded against the floorboards overhead.
Gina was already moving; she made for the back door with the best speed and silence she could muster, relying on the noise the people upstairs were making to mask her own footfalls. The answering machine continued to drone away.
Gina turned as she emerged from the back door and ran around the opposite side of the house. She reached the exterior staircase and crouched under it, drawing her Glock and thumbing off the safety. She heard "Parker" and "Hunt" hurrying down the steps. Someone racked a round into the chamber of an automatic with an ominous metallic snap. Gina stayed hunched down, gun ready. One person passed by her and turned right, away from Gina, to go to the front door. Another passed, and Gina sprang up behind her as she began to turn right to follow her comrade. Gina grabbed the woman in a chokehold from behind and slammed the barrel of the Glock into the knuckles of the woman's gun hand. The automatic plopped to the grass in front of the staircase, and Gina pointed the Glock at her prisoner's head.
Parker and Hunt were both women. The woman Gina held couldn't have been much over twenty, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her eyes concealed by dark sunglasses. She wore a very brief black miniskirt, black flats, and a blue satin blouse with a plunging neckline. The other woman, also blonde and sporting sunglasses, was about thirty. Her hair fell straight to her shoulders; black leather pants and boots hugged her curvaceous legs, and a midriff T-shirt bared pale, succulent flesh. More to the point, she held a black, snub-nosed .25 caliber revolver.
"Freeze!" Gina said to the woman with the revolver. "I just want to talk. Put the gun down, and I won't hurt your friend."
The woman in leather pants calmly raised her pistol and fired it right into her comrade's chest. A crimson well appeared in the bare skin between the ponytailed girl's breasts, spilling a little blood down into the satin blouse. The heart-shot young woman gave a shuddering gasp - "Ungghh-unggghh" - and fell limp in Gina's arms.
Fortunately for Gina, the .25 caliber bullet did not have enough energy to penetrate both breastbone and spine. Gina leveled her gun at her opponent hurriedly and shot her in the guts. Blood bloomed from the black leather a few inches below the woman's belly button and a bit to the right of her midline. She doubled over with a throaty "Ugh!" sound, falling to her knees, and as her head went down Gina put another bullet through the back of her neck. The CRACK! of the woman's neck breaking could be heard even over the explosion of the pistol, and she collapsed inertly on her face.
Dropping the dead girl, Gina whirled to face the top of the stairs, in time to see another enemy emerge from the door, a woman with short black hair, dressed in a slinky dress of silvery satin, gripping a large black automatic. Gina fired four times; one slug caught the woman dead center in the belly, about three inches below the sternum, while another smashed through her ribs just under her left breast. Dropping the gun, the satin-dressed woman pitched forward and rolled down the stairs, and Gina had to sidestep her as she crashed to a stop on her back at the foot of the staircase. The dying woman's dress was pushed up almost to her shoulders to reveal her lithe body and firm bosom, dime-sized bullet holes bleeding abundantly. Her eyes were shut, and her lips parted; a thick rivulet of blood had streamed from the corner of her mouth. The woman swallowed, moaned sensuously, and her tongue licked eagerly at the blood trail on her cheek. Then she expired with a guttural sigh.
Gina carefully walked up the staircase, eyes and gun both trained on the open door at the top. She stopped when she reached the landing. Framing herself in that doorway would be foolhardy. Holding her gun in her left hand, she dug in her purse for her compact, flipped it open, and held it carefully out toward the door, angling the mirror back and forth to reveal the room beyond. The reflection revealed only a bare, desolate room, unfurnished except for a dusty brown carpet. She put the compact back and carefully walked to the far edge of the landing, exactly opposite the open door. She saw no one, heard nothing except her own breathing.
Gina crouched and ran as hard as she could through the open doorway.
She tucked her head and rolled as she crossed the threshold, hearing the deafening "BANGBANG" as the woman waiting in ambush next to the door fired two shots too high. Gina came up in a crouch, whirling like a cat, and started firing. The woman at the door, a pretty bespectacled brunette in a sleeveless sweater and slacks, was swinging her pistol to track Gina; she fired again, wildly, as Gina's first bullet smashed into her thigh. Before she could even cry out, the second shot hit just under her ribs and pulped her liver, while a third round took her high in her chest, just below her throat. Gina's hammer snapped twice on an empty chamber. The woman's gun crashed to the floor and she crumpled slowly onto her face, her hands shaking violently like a drug addict going through withdrawal as she groped at the holes in her tender flesh. Soft whimpers escaped her lips as she stared at Gina, then she dropped her face to the floor and her consciousness flickered out. The back of her sweater glistened wetly where the bullets had come out.
Gina hurriedly pulled a fresh clip from her purse and reloaded. She grabbed the dead woman's gun and stuck it in her purse, then walked up to the doorway across from the entrance. She repeated her use of the mirror, seeing only an empty hall, then fired through the flimsy wall on both sides of the door. Nothing happened. Gina's ears were ringing from the intense gunfire. She stepped through the door into the hallway. Going slowly from room to room, rolling or firing through the wall each time she passed through a door, she verified that there was nobody else in the upper story. None of the rooms contained any furniture, wallpaper, or other sign of habitation, except for one. A windowless room on the side of the hallway opposite the door had a fully furnished computer desk and a single chair. The monitor and CPU were on.
Gina went back downstairs and dragged the three dead women over behind the staircase. The foliage probably could have hidden the corpses from passing drivers, but anyone coming up the path to the front door could have seen them. Then Gina returned upstairs to look at the computer. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves from her handbag.
The monitor displayed a web browser, open to a search engine. The "Forward" and "Back" buttons were not lit. Gina clicked on them anyway; the browser remained stubbornly immobile. She clicked on "History." Nothing.
She minimized the browser. A standard Windows suite was on the virtual desktop; nothing was obviously out of place. A WordPerfect icon was minimized at the lower left next to the browser and modem icons. Gina clicked on the WordPerfect icon to bring it up to full size. It was blank; the banner read "Document1." She clicked on "File," and saw documents in the pull-down menu's History section labeled "Schedule," "Targets," "Fund," and "Story." She clicked on "Schedule." The program demanded a password. Gina typed Control-V, hoping the password might be on the clipboard. No dice. She clicked on the other three files in the History section. They all wanted passwords. Gina minimized Document1, hoping that there might be a "Document2" hidden behind it. There wasn't.
If the Web browser was open, Gina reasoned, but there were no significant pages there, maybe they were checking her e-mail. She opened the browser again and clicked on "Mail." A dialog box opened demanding a username and password. The username was filled in; it said "EmmaPeel." The password box was blank. Gina tried to open it without entering a password, but the computer was rude to her.
She chewed her lip, minimized the browser again, and brought upWordPerfect. The same blank screen stared at her. She clicked "Edit" and "Undelete." The highlighted letters "NwPrmths" suddenly sprang into being on the screen. Gina smiled broadly and whispered, "Gotchh-aaa!" She returned to the mail program and entered "NwPrmths" in the password box. Lo and behold, the e-mail program opened.
The outbox, sent items, and deleted items folders were empty. There was an e-mail dated the previous day in the inbox. Gina clicked it open and began to read. It said:
To: Mary Ellen Nespory From:HQ Beta
Subject: New Prometheus; change in target priorities Date: 05/01/08.
Nespory:
Cancel scheduled rendezvous with Benning. All efforts are now to be concentrated on
eliminating subject Lt. Jefferson. Your contact will identify himself with the phrase "black
queens are wild." Subject is now evaluated as armed and extremely dangerous. Subject
has already neutralized one New Prometheus operative. In no event will you attempt to
eliminate subject alone. You will take a minimum of a two-person team, plus as many
additional personnel as can be secured before subject attempts to flee. Our local and state
police agents are also attempting to apprehend subject, but are not believed likely to
succeed.
New Prometheus Phase 1-C has been rescheduled for 0000 05/15/08. Subject must be
eliminated before said deadline. Report to me promptly by secure telephone upon
elimination of subject; do not respond to this e-mail. I will be at HQ Beta until
commencement of Phase 1-C; thereafter I will be at HQ Omicron. Failure in this mission
will be dealt with appropriately.
Elimination of Daniel O'Dell has been deferred until after Phase 1-C is completed. In the
interim, surveillance of his activities must be intensified to Level 2. You may delegate this
task to other personnel while you pursue the Jefferson assignment. Note that O'Dell's interrogation and re-education services are extremely valuable to the operation, and your surveillance must be accordingly planned so as not to interfere with these services. Be certain to inform your operatives that O'Dell has moved his primary base of operations
to 38º40'27"N by 121º14'51"W.
In light of Ainsworth's behavior, it has been decided that no further efforts will be made to
return escapees to confinement; such persons will instead be eliminated as expeditiously as possible. You are authorized to delegate such tasks to less experienced personnel while you are in pursuit of Jefferson.
Good hunting.
Sargon.