Lynx
Thursday, Iniquus Barracks, Washington DC
“You’re out of your mind. Say what?” Lynx adjusted the screen on her computer to better see the guys’ faces. She was on a secure video conference with Gator and Blaze, sitting at the marble kitchen bar in Striker’s apartment. It was a better place for her to wait – wait for Striker to get in from Africa, wait for an update on their teammate Randy. Being here in the men’s barracks on Iniquus’s campus made her feel closer to the action. At least she could reach out and help Blaze and Gator if need be.
“Yeah,” Gator’s full-on grin lit up his face. “We got hired to have this fake fight, see? The goal was to save our mark from the fake kidnappers who were really the good guys.” Gator pantomimed the story, smacking his fist into his hand, making the air crack with the sound of impacts. “And this guy’s just whaling on me. I thought he’d got pissed because I ducked under the chair he done flung and caught his buddy, knocking him out cold. Turns out the guy with the chair was trying to take me down for the count. He must have thought I was Davidson’s security detail.”
“Because he was an actual bad guy?” Lynx gasped. “That’s crazy!”
“Actual bad guy. An actual kidnapping we thwarted,” Blaze said.
There was a knock on the door and both men swung their attention around.
“Hang on two secs. Gator ordered room service.” Blaze moved out of the picture.
“Of course, he did,” Lynx said. “How’s the food there?”
“It don’t fill me up for long.” Gator rubbed his hands over his washer board abs.
“It never does. You guys have been non-stop since you left the US. Are you holding up?”
“We’re good to go,” Gator said, turning his attention toward Blaze.
“Lucky for us we’re in an English-speaking hotel right now, and they have some food with some staying power.”
Gator the gladiator was all muscle and power and not an ounce of fat on his body. But that body needed constant fueling. Once when he was staying at her house, he’d bought a whole turkey for dinner with all the fixings. Lynx got a leg, and he got the rest of the twenty-pound bird. It didn’t even put him into a turkey coma, like she’d warned would happen. Nope, Gator was an eating machine. It was good to know some things didn’t change.
Blaze moved back into the line of view with a laden trolley. He settled back in his chair and Gator shifted the computer out of the way.
“You don’t mind, do you Lynx? We’re nigh on starved.”
“No, please. Eat.”
Blaze lifted the domed lid on his steak and egg breakfast, leaned over with his eyes closed, and breathed in the aroma. “This is so much better than the last seventy-some-odd hours on mostly MREs. You have no idea how much I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Go on and eat, no need for it to get cold.” Lynx pulled her foot up onto the stool and wrapped her arms around her leg, resting her chin on the top of her knee. “There you were. You thought you were dancing with our client to dupe a mark, instead you thwarted Davison’s kidnapping. What happened to the bad guys?”
“We still thought they were the good guys, so we helped them escape.”
Lynx’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “No, you did not.”
Gator raised his right hand in the air. “Swear to god. We got them all over the ledge and down to their car then went to tend to Davidson and let his security through the door.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “I love it.”
“Davidson was shaking our hands, asking what we did for a living, asking what we were doing in Tanzania, exactly like the plan said.” Blaze was sawing a hunk off his steak. "We were completely in the dark.”
“Then we get the phone call,” Gator said. “This guy on the phone was, Whooo-e! some kinda pissed off.” Gator shook his head. “Not at us but at Davidson. He was supposed to go for cocktails where our client had planned the fake attack, but instead he’d stayed at the hotel and cancelled all his plans for the day. The family was back in the hotel with their security teams. They were supposed to take off for their next destination, and Blaze and me were supposed to be on that plane, the guy was ranting. He says we needed to hang tight while they came up with Plan B.”
Lynx’s face hurt she was grinning so hard. “And that’s when you told them what went down?”
Blaze and Gator folded over laughing so hard that tears slid down their faces.
Gator dropped his fork back on the plate and rubbed a napkin over his face.
“We had had no idea,” Blaze said. “I mean, get this, Lynx. This guy Gator was fighting was so out of control, Gator decides to put him to sleep for a little bit and as he’s crunching down on the guy’s neck, he’s whispering in the guy’s ear, counseling him against wearing blue slacks because of the tsetse flies.”
Lynx turned her head and sprayed out the water she’d just chugged. Choking, sputtering, she pounded her fist against her chest, trying to recover. “You’re killing me.” She coughed. “The bad guys must have been so confused. They must have thought you guys were insane. Or thought you were some kind of badass.”
“Badass? Not the way I was punching they didn’t. I barely tapped the guys.” Gator said. “Besides, I’m not sure they could understand English. I heard them yelling to each other in a foreign language. I thought it were Russian. Blaze, though, says he’d didn’t recognize any of the words.”
“But they were returning full blows? Were you hurt?”
“Eh, Blaze got him some bruised ribs. I’ve got this one on my cheek.” He turned and pointed at the purple smudge under his left eye.
“And that didn’t cue you in these were real bad guys?”
“Testosterone,” Blaze said. “It can warp the mind.”
“Sorry,” Lynx said and tried again for a sip of water. “I can’t relate. But I’ll take your word for it. So where does that leave you with this mission?”
“Our client knows we were successful in our part. We saved Davidson and proved our metal, Davidson took our business cards, and we waited for stage two, which was the daughter and her friends calling to say they were joining us. Davidson hired us, then moved the groups flight up a day so we’d beat them to the city. We’re in our new destination, waiting on their plane to touch down.”
“And now that we’re here,” Blaze said “We wanted to talk to you about the text message you sent us. ‘This is the house that Jack built.’”
“Yeah, funny how many nursery rhymes there are that have to do with Jack. Not our Jack, just the name in general,” Lynx gathered her hair into a pony tail to get it out of her face so she could think. She used the elastic she kept on her wrist to twist the strands into a make-do bun.
“You sent the one ‘Jack be quick, Jack jump’ last time. Do you think it’s tied to that mission we were running? Because Jack didn’t build that house, Jack was there when the house–well, building—exploded.” Blaze said while Gator chewed a bite of toast.
“The unique thing about that knowing was that when I sent the text to Jack, he was on a roof and jumped. The building exploded, and he was saved. I thought that was the perfect outcome.”
“But it wasn’t?” Gator swiped his thumb over his lips as he focused on her.
“It was. He lived. But then I got the same knowing again, when Jack was in the hospital after his surgery, getting his knee repaired.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that – wait, I’m confused.” Blaze said. “Normally when you have a knowing once the issue is resolved, like Jack surviving the building being bombed, it’s over. Isn’t that right?”
“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t over. He had to jump again. This time jumping meant he had to go save Suz. And when he took off after her, flying down to Brazil, that first knowing was finally resolved and was replaced with another nursery rhyme. “Jack fell down and broke his crown.’”
“How’d that one play out?” Gator asked.
“Jack fell down and broke his crown – well some guy with a rock bashed it into his head a bunch of times until he passed out.”
“Shit,” Blaze said.
“Exactly.” Lynx’s lips pulled thin.
“And now you have another Jack rhyme?” Gator said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with us.”
“It most certainly does have to do with you. I got sucked into whatever vortex was swirling around Gator.”
Blaze turned sharp eyes on Gator.
Gator returned Blaze’s gaze with a nonchalant shrug. “We were in the room waiting for General Elliot to tell us about Randy, and I was riled up pretty good.”
Blaze nodded. “I was too. It was claustrophobic, tension can do that. So Lynx, you were in Gator’s energetic field, and you had a knowing ‘This is the house that Jack built.’ Not about Jack but about something that he had set in motion. Am I understanding that right?”
“Yup, And I got the distinct impression it had to do with you and Gator. I sent the text out, right away. Now you’re telling me that when you two got the texts, you had both just raised your hands for an assignment. You two and only you two.”
“I guess that’s an affirmation of some kind.” Blaze said. “I think it would help to figure out what this is about in advance. We have two different assignments to consider. Jack’s work on that assignment for Iniquus and his search for Suz in Paraguay. This being the third connection.”
“That was my takeaway impression Something started by Jack—well—no not started by Jack but maybe shifted by Jack? No…Maybe something Jack set in motion? Yeah – that last one feels better...When I had the first ‘Jack jump’ message, you were on a classified mission. Could you tell me a story that would help me hone in. I don’t have any clue what part of the world you were in when Jack jumped from the building, let alone what you were doing.”
Both men fell silent and Lynx gave them a moment to figure out a strategy that would let them pass her information without breaking the rules about classified information. She got up from her stool and gathered her lap top. Lynx wandered into the living area with its floor to ceiling glass wall overlooking the Potomac and the city of DC beyond, and moved toward the couch.
“I’m not sure where to start,” Gator said as Lynx settle onto the cool leather surface and lay back with her head resting on the arm. The computer balanced on her stomach.
“We were out on our mission,” he said. “I was lying in the ditch, hands over my head, debris falling all around us. Striker comes up on his knees, and he’s shaking the chunks off, coughing into his elbow, he says he thought he saw something flying off the roof just before the building blew. We made it to the side of the building and sure enough Jack had jumped. Blaze was on that side and got over to him first. We found Jack rolling on the ground. He crushed the car roof in. His phone was on the road. Your text still on the screen.”
“Good thing it was a newer model car and was made for absorbing impact,” Blaze said. “It saved his life.”
“Amen,” Lynx breathed out. It had been that close. Shit. Even though she knew Jack was fine, the number of close shaves their team had survived over the last year was crazy. She was hoping against hope they could figure out what was going on so she could give these two the edge as they took off on their new mission.
“Alright, I got it.” Gator said. “I can tell you this. I was reading an article just the other day, that might interest you, Lynx. It said that ISIS looks likes it might be defeated in Syria and Iraq but the military is waiting for the next extremist groups to pop up.”
“Terror?” Hmm. This knowing didn’t feel like a terror plot. “That doesn’t sit right with me. But keep going with the article.”
“You know about what went down here in Tanzania with the scientist group getting kidnapped, and the hotel being exploded out in Ngorongoro, but have you heard that things like that are popping up in southern India and the Philippines?”
Lynx let the two regions rumble through her system. Had they been in India? No. She came to a sitting position. “The Philippines? I haven’t heard about this. What’s happening there?”
“If you were following international news, you might have heard about Mindanao in the Southern Philippines,” Gator let his vowels play on his tongue and added a little Cajun seasoning to his pronunciations. He spoke in a cadence that conjured starry nights and the lapping of water against the wharf. It had a warm sing-songy quality that made Lynx want to hunker down for a good tale. But this subject had nothing to do with Gator’s gentle tone. She razor focused on the details he was offering her. “Right, yes, they say that was an extremist attack.”
“They don’t want you to know what was going on. A group seized the city with two-hundred thousand people in it.”
“Al Qaeda?”
“No, it was a new group and the name ain’t important. What’s important is that the fightin’ was under the black flags that represent the Islamic extremists, but we don’t know who or what riled ‘em up. This shift in tactics – of smaller bands of extremists using terrorist tactics—is a big problem that US special operations forces have been actively fighting. And that’s what this article was talking about.”
Lynx closed her eyes. Were the guys headed to the Philippines? That felt like the right basic geographical direction… “What did the article conclude?”
“Special Operations Forces are going to have to change their strategies. Right now, the SOF deploy for six-ish months at a time, but command thinks it’s gonna go in a different direction. They say the teams are turning over so fast means they can’t develop good relationships in the area, they cain’t understand the cultures they’re working in – languages and nuance and all. It might be that when people sign up to be on special forces, their careers are gonna look real different from now on, that they’re gonna be moving to a country and staying there for the long haul—like the diplomatic corps—to knock down the small fires before they become an inferno.”
She tipped her head. “And all that’s to say…”
“That the article was talking about special operations in the Philippines and that terror was picking up in small unexpected pockets, spreading themselves out for impact like the school attack in Bethesda and the kids that were kidnapped from there and taken down to Paraguay and the Ngorongoro attack on the scientists.”
“Got it. And interestingly, it seemed that the terror flag was flown over both events, but it was a false flag – terror was being blamed for what seemed to be some other underlying crime. Focusing on the terror act created a mask of sorts. At least that’s how I’m interpreting the data that’s crossed my desk. It’s still all under investigation.” Okay. They had been doing special work in the Philippines when Jack jumped. She tapped her fingers on her knee. “I thought you said surfing. Is there good surfing over there in the Philippines?
“Dunno. We haven’t been told anything – where we’re headed from here, I know we’re only staying one night in this hotel. Our Iniquus client hasn’t even let us know what the job entails beyond getting on this fellow Davidson’s security detail.”
Lynx’s mind was searching around seeing which words struck a chord. Thinking about why they’d need operators who could surf. Suddenly, Lynx’s vision went dark. She felt like she was tumbling down with great velocity. Down she went down, down. Her eyes popped open to swirls of grey and green. As she spun, she turned her head this way and that, trying to keep the ground in her visual field, working to make her body fold and bend and reconfigure. She stopped abruptly. Something tugged on her arm, and she floated upward. A sense of relief tingled from head to toe. What was this feeling? Exhilaration? It felt something like joy but if it were joy, it was a muddled confused guilty kind of joy. Lynx expelled the air she’d trapped in her lungs in one big burst then flung her hands over her head and gasped in fresh air.
“What the heck are you doing. Lynx!” Gator’s face filled the screen as he yelled at her. “What are you doing? Lynx! Stop.”
Lynx was so confused. This wasn’t anything she’d experienced before. This wasn’t a knowing. This wasn’t even an out of body experience. It was more like a memory or maybe a precognitive something or other. She lowered her hands and effected a smile to let them know she was okay, but also to give herself a moment to understand what she’d experienced. She was thinking about the guys. Thought about them surfing. Was this the future? That wasn’t something she could really do with her sixth sense. Her skills came in gathering real-time information from a distance, and weird cryptic words—knowings—that gave her cautionary information for what lay ahead, like the yellow diamonds on the side of road that warned that it was slippery when wet.
In that brief moment, she’d been a puppet. It didn’t feel like real time, though. It felt like she was reading a book and flipped forward a few chapters to check on the trajectory of the story.
This was centered on Gator. Blaze wasn’t in that energetic field. But someone else was. A woman. And when she reached toward that energetic field for some kind of understanding, Lynx felt lives at risk.
Wow.
Lynx stared at the floor between her feet.
Wow.
It was the only thought she could conjure as she was swept up in waves of terror. And then it was gone. Poof. Leaving behind a wake of exhaustion and grief.
She could still hear Gator calling to her. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I was…huh I don’t know what I was, that was weird.”
What was that? Who was that?
It had something to do with…Nope. Gone. The sensation was gone.
Lynx couldn’t tell Gator what she’d experienced. Whatever that was about, it had to do with an ebbing of power and ability, the fading will to fight. Like being caught in a riptide and slowly exhausting…
She couldn’t plant that seed. A seed of doubt bloomed and grew with deep roots, almost impossible to completely destroy. That, and that alone, could be the difference between surviving a situation and death.
Death. Huh.
Whew!
Death.
No. She couldn’t say a word about this to the guys.