The Agent's Daughter (4 page)

Melina’s dad couldn’t sit anymore, so he got
up and stood in front of Melina. “It’s just that it’s been six
months since Mom’s accident. You haven’t had a serious grief
breakdown like me and Travis have.”

“
Grief breakdown?” Melina
asked as she stood.

“
That’s what the
psychologist that I went to called it,” he said. “At some point,
the gravity of the situation hits you and becomes immediately and
totally overwhelming. It becomes difficult to breathe and hard to
stand up. It may be a week after the event or months later, but it
comes out of nowhere, wherever you are.”

“
You’re worried that, out
of the blue, I might snap because Mom is in the hospital?” Melina
asked. She was starting to get agitated.

Her dad reached out and hugged Melina.
“Don’t get mad at me, but yes, I am worried that there is some
overwhelming feeling that you cannot control just lurking within
your head.”

“
Mom is just in the
hospital!” Melina cried, tears running down her cheeks. “She is
going to get better. I tell her that every week when I see
her.”

“
You’re right, kiddo,” her
dad said as he held her tighter. “There is no need for
grief.”

He was lying of course. He did not share her
optimism, but he was not going to destroy hers.

“
Is something the matter,
child,” a voice from behind Melina said. It was the principal, Mrs.
Kalis.

“
No, ma’am,” Melina said
as she discreetly wiped the tears from her face. “We were just
talking about my mom.”

‘
Oh,” Mrs. Kalis said,
pausing as she remembered the accident. “Laura was … uh… I mean is
a good friend of mine. She has always been a tremendous volunteer.”
Mrs. Kalis struggled to think of something further to say, but
nothing came to her. Melina bailed her out.

“
Mrs. Kalis, this is my
dad,” Melina said as she pointed toward him with one of her hands.
“Dad, this is Mrs. Kalis, our principal.”

“
Pleased to meet you,” he
said as he shook her hand.

“
Nice to meet you too, Mr.
Roberts,” she said in return.

“
My dad is Mr. Roberts,”
Melina’s dad said, smiling. “Please call me Evan.”

“
Okay, Evan,” Mrs. Kalis
said as she turned to Melina. “How about we go unlock the building
and start a new school day.”

Melina smiled at Mrs. Kalis, and then she
looked at her dad. “I’m going to be okay, Dad. Don’t worry. Now
skedaddle, you have a meeting to go to.”

Evan smiled. “All right, kiddo,” he said as
he gave Melina a kiss on the top of the head and headed for his
car.

…………………………
.

As Evan made the long drive in to work, he
thought about what Melina had said. She was right. Laura wasn’t
dead. While the doctors were baffled by her condition, they also
said that there was no physical reason why she should not just wake
up. She had normal brain waves, but they were less intense than
they should be. The doctors said that it was as if the volume on
her brain were turned way down.

Both he and Melina went to the hospital
every weekend to visit Laura, but he could not get past the lobby.
Melina pleaded for him to accompany her to the room her mom was in,
but he would not come with her. And he would not tell her why.

The silence of his thoughts was pierced by
the ringing of his cell phone. He reached for it on the passenger
seat. “Hello, this is Evan,” he said.

“
Where are you?” said the
voice at the other end.

“
I will be there in a few
minutes,” he said. “Tell them that they can start without me if
they want.” He hung up and threw the phone back on the
seat.

Hadron Systems is located in a ten-story
glass tower on the edge of downtown Dallas. It moved to that
location forty years earlier from Washington D.C. when the company
won a substantial contract to provide satellite terminals to the
U.S. Air Force. Satellite communications were in their infancy
then, and the chair of the Senate Armed Services committee was from
Texas. He wanted that money spent in his state.

Evan and Laura used to live in an apartment
down the street from the company, but when Melina was born, they
migrated to one of the many suburban bedroom communities north of
town. It was a long drive, but his hours were irregular, so the
traffic wasn’t too bad.

Evan pulled into a parking structure, parked
his car, and walked into the main lobby of the Hadron Systems
building. He had an office on the seventh floor, but that is not
where he was headed.

That is because he did not technically work
for Hadron Systems.

He strode through the lobby, past the
security desk and the elevators and then ducked into a short
hallway. At the end of the hallway was an unmarked black glass
panel the size of a door, but without a knob. He pulled a magnetic
card from his pocket and waved it in front of a small black box
mounted adjacent to the panel. There was a beep, and the panel
opened inward. Evan stepped inside.

“
Good morning, Mark,” Evan
said to a man in a dark suit seated at a small black desk. The desk
was in the middle of a room the size of a small living room, and
the room was empty except for the desk. There was nothing hanging
on the light gray walls.

“
Morning to you, Evan,”
the man answered back.

Behind the desk was a larger version of the
earlier black glass panel, again with no markings and no knobs.
Evan walked past the guard and up to the panel.

“
Name?” a synthesized
voice bellowed from a speaker above the panel.

“
Evan Roberts,” Evan said
as he stared at the panel.

Five seconds passed. “Voice pattern
confirmed,” the synthesized voice said.

The black panel slid to the side to reveal
another smaller room, about the size of a bathroom. Evan entered,
and the panel closed behind him. The room was brightly lit, but it
was empty and three of the walls were bare finished wood. On the
fourth wall, there was a small two-foot square metal panel. In
front of the panel, on the floor were the outlines of feet.

Evan stood on the feet outlines and faced
the metal panel. “Authorization sequence,” he said.

The panel extended out from the wall and
lowered to become a small shelf. Embedded on it were two small
black cylinder eyepieces like the kind used to see through a
telescope. On either side of the two eyepieces, there were the
outlines of hands. Evan placed his hands within the outlines and
looked into the eyepieces. A synthesized voice spoke to him from
the ceiling.

“
Fingerprints.
Confirmed.”

“
Bone geometry.
Confirmed.”

“
Iris scan.
Confirmed.”

“
Weight.
Confirmed.”

“
Identity Verified. Access
granted.”

Evan straightened up and stepped back, and
the metal panel moved back into its position on the wall. The
lights dimmed, and he could feel the room begin to move. The room
was an elevator, and it moved downward at a rapid pace. So much so,
that there was a slight sense of weightlessness as the elevator
plunged. There was no sound in the room except the loud, muffled
sounds of gears and pulleys doing their job. After a short time,
the sound lessened, and Evan could feel the elevator begin to slow.
The gears and pulleys made less and less noise until the only sound
was the click of the latches securing the elevator in place.

The friendly synthesized voice announced the
arrival, “Basement level. Stand clear of the door.”

The black panel slid to the side, and Evan
stepped out of the elevator into a vast open space filled with the
pandemonium of hundreds of people working at computer terminals.
Most of them were talking on their phones, so the air was thick
with the sound of jumbled conversation. The room itself was two
stories tall and was as long as a football field. One of the walls
of the room was dominated by a gigantic map of the world with each
country outlined in a different color. On either side of the map,
there was a large projection screen with each screen displaying a
view of the earth from space from a different angle. The screen on
the left was zoomed in on the tip of South Africa, and the other
showed a view of most of the mountains across central Asia. The
remaining walls of the room were covered with dozens of smaller
screens that showed local scenes and news reports from around the
world. The room had the appearance of a command center NASA would
build if it had a much larger budget.

This was the headquarters for the Executive
Reconnaissance Agency.

Founded during the Cold War, the agency was
set up within the Executive branch to give the President of the
United States direct tactical control over a foreign intelligence
gathering organization. This allowed a more nuanced approach to
intelligence gathering and gave the President instant access to the
exact information required based on the circumstances of the day.
Sometimes that information could be gathered with satellites or
other remote electronic means, but often that meant dispatching a
field agent directly into an area of interest to blend in and
report to the President what was going on.

Evan was one of those field agents.

As he made his way across the large room, a
man from the information security department approached him. The
man was carrying a sealed red folder.

“
There you are,” the man
said anxiously as Evan approached. “They’ve been
waiting.”

“
Good morning to you too,
Jim,” Evan said smiling.

Jim smiled at Evan and then took a deep
breath.

“
Okay, here are your
briefing notes,” Jim said. “The meeting is in the main video
conference room. Good luck”

“
Thanks,” Evan said as he
took the folder.

He sliced open the folder with his finger,
and glanced at the briefing notes as he walked toward the
conference room. He could tell it was not going to be a pleasant
meeting. When he got to the conference room, he paused, took one
more look at the notes, and then went inside.

“
Glad to see you could
join us, Mr. Roberts,” said a man at the head of the large
conference table. He was the head of the agency, Arthur
Glass.

“
My apologies, sir,” Evan
said.

Evan then half-smiled to the man sitting
next to Arthur, William Mason. “Nice to see you again William.”

Not that he meant it.

William was the head of Hardware Support for
the agency. They were responsible for coming up with fancy gadgets
and weapons to be used by the agents in the field. They were
informally known throughout the agency as the ‘tools’ group.
William had a well-known dislike of the field agents. He considered
them simpletons and brutes, and he referred to them as “trained
monkeys” even though all of them had college degrees. The field
agents had a few names for William, as well.

“
Evan,” William said.
“This is a new member of my group David Winfield. He just moved
here from our Seattle office. He will be your new contact within
the Hardware Support department.”

Each agent was given a single contact within
the tools group. This streamlined the process of providing weapons
and other items to the agent as they only had to interact with one
person.

Evan held out his hand to shake. “Evan
Roberts. Pleased to meet you, David... Seattle, huh? Did they tell
you that it gets hot here?”

“
It can’t be that
unbearable,” David said. “It will be a delightful change from all
that rain. Did you say Roberts? Do you have a daughter named
Melina?”

“
Yes I do,” Evan said,
giving David a strange look. “Why do you ask?”

“
My son Alex spoke
yesterday of a Melina Roberts that is in some of his classes. She
told him that her father worked here.”

Evan laughed. “I don’t get those sorts of
updates. Melina could have someone from another planet in her
class, and she wouldn’t tell me. That’s her mother’s domain.”

There was a silence in the room. The
reference to Laura left everyone unsure what to say.

Evan didn’t notice and sat down next to
David. He looked over at Arthur and then at the giant projection
screen on the wall of the conference room. The image on the screen
was of the Oval Office in the White House, but the President was
not there.

“
Where is the old gal?”
Evan said to Arthur as he pointed at the screen.

“
You were late, so she
took a phone call,” Arthur said.

Evan stood up and talked in the direction of
the screen. “Hey lady! Get off the phone and let’s start this
meeting.”

“
Evan!” Arthur said. “She
is talking to the Russian Prime Minister!”

A moment later, an image filled the video
screen. It was President Elizabeth Stone, still on the phone. She
lowered the phone from her ear. “Evan, dear. Don’t make me fly down
to Texas and kick your butt.” Then she winked.

Evan smiled and sat back down. The agency
was a small operation, and there were only twenty field agents, but
he was her favorite. The President knew he would go to the ends of
the Earth and put himself in harm’s way on her orders without
question. In fact, he had. But what she appreciated the most was
his candor. As President, she encountered so many people that told
her only what she wanted to hear because they feared her. She found
it refreshing to talk with someone that just didn’t seem to have
any fear.