From 13fc8ec671863ef865693f0c88541826b0cf0ac9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2011 15:27:54 -0400 Subject: changed file names to make more sense --- AZ-2.txt | 68 ---------------------------- AZ-3.txt | 78 --------------------------------- AZ-4.txt | 63 -------------------------- AZ-5.txt | 118 ------------------------------------------------- AZ-Cuts.txt | 18 -------- AZ-Intro.txt | 124 ---------------------------------------------------- AZ-plot outline.txt | 17 ------- CH-1.txt | 124 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CH-2.txt | 68 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CH-3.txt | 78 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CH-4.txt | 63 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CH-5.txt | 118 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _Cuts.txt | 18 ++++++++ _Outline.txt | 17 +++++++ 14 files changed, 486 insertions(+), 486 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 AZ-2.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-3.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-4.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-5.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-Cuts.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-Intro.txt delete mode 100644 AZ-plot outline.txt create mode 100644 CH-1.txt create mode 100644 CH-2.txt create mode 100644 CH-3.txt create mode 100644 CH-4.txt create mode 100644 CH-5.txt create mode 100644 _Cuts.txt create mode 100644 _Outline.txt diff --git a/AZ-2.txt b/AZ-2.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 789e1db..0000000 --- a/AZ-2.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ -Chase killed the headlights in the driveway and sat in the car for a minute, watching the rain lash against the windshield in pelting gusts. The sky in the rearview mirror was nearly black, though the sun would not set for at least another hour. Nera the horizon to the west, where the storm did not reach there was still a faint glow that cast an eerie orange glow on windshield making the beads of rain look like orange soda. She watched the house turning orange and noticed that the paint was peeling along the front, chips of it flaking from the window trim and the stubby pillars still holding up the porch. She watched as rain broke off bits of it and, craning forward she could see the watch pooling on the steps, a miniature see of white paint chips collecting. She made a mental note to call her mother about it. Though she had no immediate plans to do so Chase had always assumed she would end up out here, just like everyone else in her family had. She didn't like the peeling paint, it didn't bode well for her future or her past, both which were likely tied up in this house. - -She sat in the car waiting for a lull in the rain, but none came. At least this time there were no donuts to worry about. She grabbed her bags off the passenger seat, slung them over her shoulder and leap out of the car. She cross the drive in two quick strides and darted up to the side of the house where she could keep the house between her and the nearly horizontal rain. From there it was a easy stroll to the side door with hardly another drop of water hitting her. - -The house smelled stagnant and stale. She set her things on the kitchen counter and made her rounds, checking the windows upstairs and down. Back downstairs on the coffee table Chase found a bill, along with a note from Duncan explaining that he had hired two kids down the way and that Chase's mother could pay them when she returned. Chase laugh loud enough that she startled herself in the silence of the house. - -She considered pulling down the boards on the front windows to let a little air in, perhaps watch the storm, but she didn't. She went to the back door and propped it ajar with a broom handle. She sat down on the floor, marveling at the utterly wildness outside. The dark swirling center of the storm still lurked off on the horizon, but already waves from the bay were beginning to break over the old wooden dock that stretched out across the marsh and reeds behind the house. She could see the cattails the wind had strewn across the small plot of grass just past the back deck. She stuck her head out and looked around the side to see the rusting swing set still crumbled behind the flat cement slab where the shed had once stood, it too a victim of a storm. The air smelled of the sea, clean, not like the air that hung around the marsh on quite evenings. The sea smelled of something far away, something unknown. - -Hurricanes were really more her grandfather's kind of weather. He'd loved them back when they rarely, if ever, came up the Chesapeake. Her grandfather had never followed evacuation orders. If her mother was with them he would pack her and Chase in the car and send them back off to hotel room in Annapolis. But when he was alone and later when it was just he and Chase they would board the upstairs windows, buy a few days worth of food and supplies and ride out the storms in the basement. Her grandfather seems to light up at those times, become considerably younger all of the sudden. They would sit in the sun room at the back of the house, she drinking ice cold tea, he sipping a perspiring bottle of beer. They would watch as the storm rolled up the Atlantic shore toward the mouth the bay, and the barometer that hung by the door of the porch began to fall dramatically. He would tell her about movements of air, the way the clouds circled around a singular point as the storm spun over the ocean. He could spend hours talking about clouds, about the massive movements of air that, for all the technology of the age, remained more than a little mysterious to both of them. Her grandfather had never come right out with it, but she came to understand after years of listening to him that he accorded the storms some kind of consciousness. There's something in them he said, something old, something we have forgotten. Later they would go inside and eat dinner by the light of a hurricane lamp, that's what it's for, he'd say with a grin. Afterward he would pour another beer and they would, if the storm were bad enough, head down to the basement where there were two cots, a couple of chairs and an old folding table where they could sit and play cards or a board game and listen to the rain lashing against the house. Few of the storms ever came up the bay back then, at most they would drop two days the wind and rain, clouds spun out from the arms of the hurricane, and then continue north, bouncing merrily up the coast, not making landfall until well past New York. The warming ocean had changed that. - -Chase had watched it change, spending her summers at the little house on the bay ever since she was a little girl. Back then she sometimes wondered if her mother was trying to get rid of her. It was only later, after her grandfather died and her mother moved out to the house that she realized what a lonely place the bay could be. She realized then that her mother wasn't getting rid of her, her mother was trying to keep her grandfather company. - -Not that Chase had minded of course. For her the marshes and beaches of the bay were a never-ending playground far greater than any amusement park she had ever heard her friends back in Massachusetts describe. But then she didn't have many friends back in Massachusetts. She was an only child and for the most part kept to herself even from a very young age. She had never particularly liked school and was known to throw tantrums every September when her mother flew down and collected her up for the beginning of the new school year. She tolerated school, but ultimately saw it as something that kept her from being at her Grandfather's house. Even later in high school she never missed a summer on the bay. Boyfriends and college prep class all had to wait, sidelined and insignificant next to Chase's world on the Chesapeake. - -Most of the old houses on the bay like her mother's, though Chase still thought of it as her grandfather's, had long since been torn down and replaced with massive mansions that no one called home, save perhaps whatever support staff were always on hand to keep it spic and span for the absentee owners who might, at most, show up once or twice a season to host some gala affair. "The rich on terrible holidays," her grandfather would say, shaking his head and smiling. Chase was perhaps ten. She had been unable to sleep, the noise from parties across the channel would bounce off the water and into her second story window. Her grandfather brought her outside to look at the stars. To listen to the party. He knelt beside her and pointed out across the bay to a light warbling on the choppy water. "That's where Daisy lives Chase." - -"Who's Daisy?" - -"That's the question isn't it?" He gestured out again and Chase followed his finger up to the wooden light post at the end of the dock, the source of the warbling light. "See that, see how beautiful that warbling light is Chase? It's like it's dancing for us." - -She nodded and look up at her grandfather's face but he was lost somewhere out there, somewhere in the water. "it doesn't take anything really," he mumbled, "just a bit of water and the ordinary looks extraordinary... of course it always is. It always is." - -Chase remembered sitting up with her grandfather on many nights, listening to the distant laughter and music. If they spoke it was to decided whether it were family party or a butter-up party as her grandfather called the other type of party on the bay. The latter tended to be louder, less inviting and went much later, often into the dawn. Sometimes, once she was older and the rich high school boys started to spread rumors about the cute, but possibly crazy, girl down at the end of the road, from time to time an invitation would arrive. Several times Chase went, every now and then showing up with her grandfather in tow, her date for the night. Then he became to sick to go to the parties. Then he was too sick to leave the house. Then he had waited, holding out against the cancer until the the first hurricane drifted up the coast. The first night it was visible from the bay, still far out over the Atlantic, he somehow pulled himself outside, revolver in hand, and shot himself in the chest. The storm had rolled by without dropping so much as a shower. Duncan had found her grandfather on the dock by the marsh the next morning. - -Chase had not entirely inherited her grandfather's love of hurricanes, or if she had it had been tempered over the years by the increasing ferociousness with which they wrecked havoc on the east coast. - -Tonight there was no light across the bay. The old dock had long ago been washed away in a storm and no one had bothered to rebuild it. Chase contented herself with the far less impressive dock at the back of her house, which somehow managed to remain. There was nothing Gatsby-like about it though, just a simple wooden platform that was now so overgrown with reeds and grasses that it had become part of the marsh, which held it in place year after year until it was really more marsh than dock. Eventually her view of the dock and the marsh and the rain faded into darkness. The horizon disappeared and the rain began to change direction, beating against the back of the house. - -Chase closed the door and dug around the kitchen until she found a bottle of wine. She poured a glass and turned on her laptop to check the news. The weathermen droned on, projecting several paths for the storm, two of which hit D.C. proper, two which did not. All four of plowed straight through the Chesapeake. She flipped over to a more general news stream and listened to clip about a new longevity drug already on the market in Asia. Then there was a clip of the millionaire senator Bradford, the Democratic front runner of the moment, who, despite already being fantastically wealthy had for some reason decided to run for president. Chase shook her head wondering why anyone would want to do that. He was handsome though, in fact probably too good looking to be president she thought. She tapped a video note from her mother who said she was just checking in, making sure that Chase and house were together, in one piece. She decided not to respond. Instead, she poured a second glass of wine and pulled out the files she had brought along to keep herself company. There were two that intrigued her. One was an airman shot down over Guadalcanal at the beginning of the war, registered in a Japanese POW camp by the Red Cross, but unaccounted for after the Japanese surrender. Most likely it would require a trip to Japan, which she was told still did not much like anyone digging too deep into its recent past. - -But the POW case wasn't what she wanted to pursue. - -She pulled out the slip of paper that the prostitute in the impossibly short skirt had given her and stared at the name, Lt. Reese Lawrence. She smiled thinking about Steven's crack that perhaps it was simply the woman's pimp and he wanted Chase to sign up. Chase had frowned enough to make Steven feel uncomfortable and then said, "for that you get to do the research. Feed that name in your database and tell me what you get." - -Steven had managed to find the name in the database, but there was little more than an enlistment number, and a few orders that told of an assignment to flight training in San Diego and then a squadron assignment shortly thereafter. The squadron was shipped out to defend the Panama canal in January of 1942. That was it. Chase pulled a paper file upstairs, that basis for the data in Steven's database and found nothing more, save a hand written note clipped the back of the very thin file that said the airman was listed Missing in Action. That gave Chase her first feeling that something might be wrong with the Lawrence file. The handwritten note implied someone had worked the file, but there was hardly anything in it, more specifically, there was nothing in it that lent any credence to the notion that Lawrence was MIA. Either whoever had taken the case before her not worked very hard, which was possible. She mulled over the apathy of her coworkers as she slipped her wine, but lazy though they may have been it would be unusual not to at least sign the file and even more unusual to leave a hand written note. Chase had a hunch that something about Lawrence's disappearance made someone look bad. Someone with enough pull that the case had been shelved and the paperwork lost. Something like Steven's missing sniper where the bosses realized they were about to get a nice bucket of mud dropped on their faces and hurriedly made the whole thing go away. There had not been a lot of combat in the Canal area. In fact none that Chase was aware of, but of course almost half of the aircrew deaths in World War II were not combat related so the lack of Messerschmitts and Zeros in the area certainly didn't mean Lt. Lawrence hadn't gone down. In fact, with the primitive navigation tools they had used back then an alarming percentage of deaths could be attributed to pilots and navigators getting lost. The plane flew into a cloud bank and was never seen again. Just like Whitmore and Hume. Except that it was worse for pilots over the sea. It was, as the head of the coast guard search and rescue archive liked to tell her, a very big ocean out there and it was all one big hole waiting to swallow you up. Once the wreckage sank into the ocean, once the sharks got done with the survivors, there was nothing and no one left to tell the story. - -That was precisely why Chase was intrigued. Our stories are the only record of our passing and Chase hated it when she had the beginning of a story, and even the unfortunate end, but not the meat of it, not the middle where everything happened. - -Two things kept Chase awake at night. One was the thought that most stories were simply gone. The staggering number of lives that had been lived and yet left no trace overwhelmed her and left her feeling dizzy. The second was the thought that there were people out there that did not know the story of their husbands, their sons, their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, and, more recently, wives, mothers, aunts and sisters. The stories that had simply faded out. You waved goodbye full of fear and trepidation and then, that was it. There was no ending, no closure. If she had any guiding force behind her, and she was never quite sure if she did, it was this; to give the stories back, to record as many as she could so that everyone would know them, so that every life lived with leave some mark. - -Chase had loved history ever since she was a little girl. It had been part of her from a very early age. Her dolls did not have tea parties, they explored the Oregon Trail, clamored through the pine needle forests of the Sierra Nevada in search of the Donner pass and took the air with Amelia Earhart in a quest to be first around the world. Even the far end of the bathtub was nothing short of the Northwest Passage, or the Cape of Good Hope, depending on which books her grandfather had been reading to her at the time. - -She was told she had an active imagination. She had heard her mother say as much many times, but Chase never saw it that way, even when she was older and knew what her mother had meant. For her it was never really imagination, it was retelling. It was reliving, finding herself inside the story. For Chase it was a chance to become a part of something much larger than the here and now, something bigger. - -It surprised no one that she majored in history. It was even less surprising that she stuck with it all the way to a PhD. What had surprised everyone, except perhaps her grandfather, though he had been dead some time by then, was that she had turned her back on what her professors assured her would be a promising academic career to work at a small, overlooked government bureau with little funding and no real career path to offer. - -But it was a chance to reclaim stories. And for Chase it was always about the stories. Without the stories there was no point to history. Only statisticians cared who fought whom where and when. Only hindsight ever found a pattern to history, the truth was that history made no more linear sense than the present. Eliminate the illusions and misconceptions about what history is and eventually you discover the kernel of truth that Chase had always known: it is nothing but stories. Lose track of them and you lose everything. - -Chase set down the pink slip of paper pulled up a search window on her laptop. She hesitated, staring at the screen. She had been putting off a web search all day because she didn't want to know, she didn't want to lose the mystery. At the same time she had vague sense of unease about the whole thing. The strange encounter with the prostitute had left her feeling strangely exposed. Anyone could walk into the DPMO and ask for her, but whomever had sent the note did not. Yet whomever had sent her the piece of paper obviously knew who she was. What creeped her out more than a little bit was that this person seemed to not only knew the what DPMO was, but apparently had the free time to followed her around. Or perhaps he had only followed her that day. Perhaps, thought Chase, suddenly feeling little sheepish for being paranoid, perhaps this person had in fact gone looking for her at her office and, discovering that she was playing hooky, had simply been pointed in her direction as she walked out of the building. But then why not approach her directly? And even if it wasn't direct for some reason, why employ an outlandish prostitute to deliver your rather simple message. That of couse assumed the woman who handed her the paper was telling the truth. Chase considered for a moment that perhaps the story of the man was simply a ruse, something along the lines of I have this friend... But that seemed preposterous given the circumstances. - -She went through her memory, trying to see the people on the street when they had walked out of the building, when they had been talking on their way to the dinner, was their anyone familiar? Anyone that had been there more than once, anyone that was familiar because they were following her? She simply didn't see the world in those terms so there was nothing. She closed her eyes and went through her morning in her mind as though she might suddenly notice lurking in the shadows someone she had never noticed before. Nothing came. You can't will yourself to notice things that you have already not noticed she thought. Or maybe you could, but she was pretty sure you would need a hypnotist. - -She sighed and poured another glass of wine. Did it really matter? She was interested in the name, not he reasoning behind whomever gave her the name. If she just wanted the story it didn't matter who give her the name or why. The story was there to be found either way, the why didn't really matter. - -She shoved the thoughts from her head and focused on the far more interesting question, what did this person expect Chase to do with the name? After turning it over in her head for a while, she decided she would do whatever she would have done if the name had come from her boss rather than some cloak and dagger obsessed individual. She plugged Lt. Otto Lawrence into the search box and hit return. Two dozen hits blinked up instantly. She narrowed the search by date, wrapping it around the years of the war and found almost nothing, which was odd. There should have been an official notice, something posted in the papers by the family. And of course the old War Department's records were also available online, to say nothing of WWII memoires, the sheer volume of which generally meant that almost everyone had been mentioned at some point. In every case Chase had worked so far there had always been an MIA notice or a KIA notice somewhere on the web. She expanded the search to pull in a few years after the war, since she realized that the MIA notice in Lt. Lawrence's file didn't actually have a date. Perhaps Lt. Lawrence had survived World War II and disappeared later in Korea or Vietnam. She added in enough time to cover everything up through the first Gulf War and found a few hits on Lawrence, including a Lawrence foundation, but most of it seemed unrelated. She finished her glass of wine and sat down on the sofa. - -With little to add to her notes on Lt. Reese Lawrence her mind swung back around to the question of who wanted her to find him. She tried to distract herself. She logged into her news stream, checked the latest weather, and replied to a message from her mother and wondered absently if whomever was, apparently, stalking her--the word made her glance up suddenly and look around the room as if an ax murderer might have suddenly slipped in--was also watching her public news feed. Her profile listed her job for all the world to see and she wasn't shy about posting questions when she needed outside help. If whomever it was knew enough about the DPMO to ask for her they must have also known that she didn't have the rank to charge off on her own whim, pursuing whatever she wanted. Her bosses, on the other hand, had that luxury, so why not ask them? Unless of course there was something about this Lt. Otto Lawrence or something about the nature of his disappearance that the mystery man didn't want revealed to higher ups. So, if the person wanted to know about Lt. Lawrence, but didn't want the military to know about him then why not go to an outsider? - -She dug around the web, looking for freelancers that specialized in veteran affairs. The sort of investigators rich families used when they wanted to solve something quietly. Something off the books. There were a few, but judging by the client lists they were allowed to divulge most would have no trouble accessing the same records Chase could, and probably a lot more. No real reason to not use an outsider. But this person had not. This person was trying to use Chase Kovele. When she phrased it in those terms the whole affair suddenly sounded entirely crazy. Why in the world would anyone want Chase specifically? Chase wrote why at the bottom of an already full sheet of questions and notes about Lt. Lawrence. She drew a box around the question and stared at it while she listened to the rain lashing against the house. The wind was rattling the window boards, but so far everything had held just fine. - - - ------------------------- -This needs to go, but there needs to be some good reason why this person, whoever it might turn out to be, has decided to pursue this via Chase................... - -Athother problem, though not necessarily with the section below is that the name is too common, there would be millions of Google hits, so either I need to rewrite the above slightly and make her process of narrowing it down a bit more believable, or I make the name something less common. - -Then it hit her. You use Chase Kevele to send a message to the people above her. This person had known that Chase would walk into the DPMO and start asking questions. And of course she already had. Or at least had sent Steven to do it for her. They wanted to get someone's attention and they were using her to do it. The thought made her angry. You logged into her site and posted a message to the web. "I am not your errand girl, Mr. Paper. Find someone else" A couple of her friends popped in to ask what they hell she was talking about. Her college roommate took it as an anti-media rant, but as the stream of the web rushed past it was quickly lost without further comment. She closed the laptop and poured another class of wine. She was sure whomever it was would be watching. Your move Mr. Paper. diff --git a/AZ-3.txt b/AZ-3.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4ca2daa..0000000 --- a/AZ-3.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,78 +0,0 @@ -Norm Canton retired from the Navy as a Commander to undertake a distinguished career as an occasional pinochle player, sometime golfer and frequent partaker in the 'leaven at lenny's breakfast group, a gang of retirees that frequented the Denny's down that street from his new condo on the golf course. Despite the, by many standards quite busy, retirement schedule, Norm could never shake the uncomfortable feeling that he was forgetting something, or that there was something he needed to do, somewhere to be. He had never had much practice in the art of loafing and, after years of it dangling carrot-like in front of him he found, regrettably, that it did not suit him. - -He was a stout man, barrel chested and square jawed in a way that suited a career Navy man. He kept his gray hair cropped short, they way it had been ever since the war, the way it would always be. He had developed a habit of rubbing his chin while thinking, something he willed himself to do early on in his career because he found it gave his men some extra measure of confidence in what he was about to say. The habit stuck and though it had been years since Norm sent men off carrier decks to die in the air over foreign countries, he had never stopped rubbing his chin when he got lost in some train of thought. - -He found himself doing it now more than ever. Since Evelyn, his wife of forty years, had passed on his loafing retirement days had grown even more irritating to him. He tried to do like she said, keep yourself busy Norm. He got more serious about the model airplanes he had always built in his spare time. Serious enough to enter his intricately detailed creations in contests around the country. He found, on attending a few scale modeler conventions, that he was not the only ex-Navy man with the large rough hands who nevertheless spent hours on end pinning delicately etched plastic and thin decal insignia to tiny scale models of the planes he had once called home. It was better than watching television, but it wasn't quite what he was looking for. For that he had to run into Ed Wald. Or rather Wald had run into him. Both men still attended the annual reunions for pilots and crew of the 234 bomber group, but they rarely talked otherwise until Norm had moved down to Annapolis. It was at the meeting two years ago that Wald, whom Norm knew had left the service shortly after the war and, from what Norm heard, had done quite well for himself in the stock market, approached him about organizing the archive. In the end it proved to be the thing that had, prior to that day, been missing from retirement. It wasn't quite a good as looking after a carrier air group at sea, but it had been a long time since he'd done that anyway. Now he got to look after the memory of a carrier air group at sea. - -The archive, such as it was, was really just the storeroom in the back of Ed Wald's local VFW. For reasons Norm could never track down, Wald had become the de facto keeper of the squadron's memorabilia and non-essential records ever since the 234th had been official retired at the end of the Vietnam War. In typical military fashion papers and photos had simply been thrown into boxes and unceremoniously dumped in Wald's lap. Busy with his day trading at the time, Wald had simply dumped them on to the store room. It was just a makeshift solution with a more long term plan to be forthcoming. But of course that plan never came forth and eventually the task seems too monumental to even discuss, let alone do anything about. Until that is, Wald had met Norm at the reunion. What Norm discovered, after he had already agreed to the task, was a singularly massive mountain of paper and files that stretched from floor to ceiling and spanned nearly 40 years of flying history. Paper and boxes completely consumed a desk that Norm didn't unearth until his third or fourth day of excavations. The first day Wald was trying to point out a stack of boxes near the back when Norm made the mistake of turning around too fast only to collide with a stack of paper that crashed to the floor and blocked his escape. "Well, see, there you go, somewhere to start," said Wald as he gingerly retreated out the the room. - -It had been a monumental task, one that had kept him occupied for the better part of a year now and he still wasn't completely finished. But Norm had managed to dig up and digitally restore a series of the old photos from his own beginnings as navigator flying out of Panama. Norm had the photos framed and hung in a ramshackle, but Norm thought pleasingly so, manner behind the VFW bar. - -Norm was studying a photo of Wald's old plane, the Tigress, contemplating the scripted lettering that ran across the flared exhaust cowling and sloped back down under the nose art, a long thin-legged nurse straddling a bomb. Norm was wondering for the five hundredth time why the hell a nurse would straddle a bomb when he heard the screen door behind him slam shut. He slowly spun around on the barstool and was about to tell whomever it was to go away when he saw that there was a far more real long legged, though clearly not a nurse, woman silhouetted in the darkness of the VFW. - -Norm studied her in silence before he said, "may I help you?" - -"I'm looking for Norman Canton." - -He couldn't see much of her with the light behind her, but she looked young, not much over thirty. "Hmm. What do you need that old fart for?" He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at her. - -"I heard he's organizing the squadron photos and was hoping he could help me find some information." - -Norm chuckled, "who told you that?" - -She sat down on the bar stool next to him and smiled. She was young, probably not a day over thirty he decided, with black hair that was cut short, just above her shoulders, like a military woman he thought. When she smiled her dark eyes relaxed and took on a good humored appearance that Norm found trustworthy, though he noticed that when she stopped smiling they had a very driven look. - -"I can't really say who told me that Mr Canton was organizing photos." - -Norm smiled "MmmHmm, I can't really tell you where Mr. Canton is..." - -"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound rude there Mr. Canton, I just really don't know who told me that. I got an anonymous message that I should talk to you." - -"If you knew who I was why did you ask for me?" Norm eyed her suspiciously. - -She gave him her best disarming smile, "it seemed the polite way to begin. But yes, the man sweeping outside told me you were in here 'studying the photos again' as he put it." - -Norm snorted and turned back around. - -She spun her barstool around and followed his gaze, taking in the jumble of photos, mean and airplanes, tents, racks of bombs. She caught the name Tigress on one of the planes. "Panama, right?" - -He was startled and made no effort to hide it. "You seem to know an awful lot about me." - -"Not you. The 234th carrier squadron." She extended her hand, "Chase Kevele, I work at the Defense POW Missing Persons Office." - -Chase noticed him hesitate an instant and then he took her hand and smiled. "The POW office huh? You people do good work." - -She smiled. "We try." - -"What can I do for you?" - -"Well, it's a bit strange. To tell you the honest truth Mr. Canton, we're not looking so good on this one." - -"Call me Norm." - -"Okay Norm, here's the thing. My bosses gave me a case, gave me a name that I'm supposed to track down, locate, recover and file away right?" She watched him nod politely and decided he wasn't buying her simpleton act, but she was too far in to stop now, she plowed ahead. "Well, I went to find the file that would give me a starting point and it turns out the be a very incomplete file. There's only some enlistment papers, an order sending the cadet to flight school and then a transfer notice to the 234th. Somewhere along the way he was apparently even promoted all the way to lieutenant, but there's no record of that at all in the main archive. Well I was working the case as best I could." She leaned in conspiratorially, "by which I mean I moved on to something that had papers." - -Norm raised he eyebrows, but did not return her smile. "It's been several months, I'd put it out of my mind by this point, I mean, what could I do? Then, out of nowhere, just after that storm last week actually, I get a message to my inbox saying that I should come talk to you. Weird right?" - -"That is odd," said Norm though his voice said something else, more like that's irritating or that's boring, Chase wasn't entirely sure which. "What'd you say his name was?" Norm heaved himself off the stool and walked around behind the bar. He poured another bit of whiskey in his glass and then pulled up another and set it in front of Chase. She shrugged and he filled it for her. - -"I'm looking for a Lt. Reese Lawrence who, last thing I know, was assigned to the 234th, which then shipped out to Panama." - -Norm stared down at her glass. Chase wanted to pick it up and drink it down to help ease her nerves but she didn't want to break his lost in space spell in case he was tracking down the name somewhere deep the recess of memory. Finally he looked up, met her gaze for a moment and walked back around the bar, calling from near the end, "that name doesn't ring a bell." He sat down beside her and raised his glass, "to the fighting '34th." They toasted and she slugged back the whiskey in a single shot. She noticed Norm just sipped at his. "I was in Panama. I was there when we shipped out, flew down in a Dauntless, Blue Bessy was the nose art. Did fourteen months in that godforsaken jungle and then I got malaria and rotated back stateside. I was stateside for most of '43, training navigators at Crissy Field in San Francisco. Then they decided malaria or no they needed people in the Pacific. So off I went. Anyway, I don't remember anyone named Lawrence. Don't think I met anyone by that name in the whole war actually." - -Chase nodded and was about to press her case when Norm got up off the stool. "Of course it's been a long time," he gestured toward the closet, "all the records we have are over are over here if you want to look." He walked over to the back room and unlocked the door. "Can't imagine this stuff will be too helpful though, none of it's official. Mostly just photos and old plaques and the like." Canton stood by the door looking inside as Chase made her way over. - -"Photos are exactly what I'm after Mr. Canton, thank you." - -Chase spent over an hour digging through the files, most of which were letters and photos to and from home, along with a few post flight reports and other paper work that would, were it not she guessed for the nostalgia of the men who lived through it, have long since been sent to a pulping mill by now. - -From time to time Norm poked his head in the door to see how she was doing, or answer a question, but mainly he let her have the run of the place, which struck her as odd because she had a nagging feeling there was something he wasn't telling her. After a while he retreated back out to his whiskey and photos and Chase started using her phone to scan some of the photographs still in the archive. Pictures of the planes and their crews, hardly more than boys, posing against a backdrop of palms and canvas tents. It looked hot, nearly everyone's t-shirts were ringed in sweat. - -Sometimes she went back out to the bar and Norm pointed out the faces he remembered. Then she would go back into the archive and login into the DPMO site, uploading photos and tagging them with names, which could be used to find service numbers. For every man he pointed out, Norm had a story; Dory the mechanic who had dropped a thousand pound bomb on the runway causing the entire airfield to evacuate or the time Ed Wald, who figure prominently into a number of the tales, had snuck into the base hospital and made off with two tanks of nitrous oxide to liven up the new years party. Chase tagged Wald in a photo and made a note that she would interview him at some point. The most useful thing she found in the still quite disorganized closet was a pair of squadron christmas photos, one take in 1941 in San Diego and another from 1942 in Panama. It would be hard work, boring work she knew, but she had done it before and she knew she could go through and match service record photos with the faces in the christmas images and perhaps, by process of elimination, at least find out what Reese Lawrence had looked like. A picture was, after all, worth a thousand words. Especially when it came to jogging the world's memory about things it seemed to want to forget. - -The sun was setting by the time Norm walked her to her car. She thanked him, left a copy of her card and promised she'd let him know if she ever found her mystery man. She watched him in the rearview mirror, standing there in the parking lot, waving as she pulled out into the street. - - - -After she left Norm went back inside. No one would come tonight. It was Tuesday night, everyone went to Walt's house for poker on Tuesdays. Norm went inside and locked the door behind him. He went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of Dewers and set it on the bar. He pulled the phone over from the wall and sat down. He poured himself a shot and slugged it back. He poured another and drank it. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd been thinking about all day. The connection was bad, the line warbled like it was underwater, but he recognized the voice. "We need to talk." - diff --git a/AZ-4.txt b/AZ-4.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ac9fa9e..0000000 --- a/AZ-4.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -"That's no reason not to vote his way." Charley looked completely serious. For a split second Reese considered launching himself over the massive desk between them and trying to strange Charley for being so pragmatic. It was like the man had no idea what principles were. But then that was part of why Reese depended on him. - -Reese always knew what he should do. - -Charley always knew what Reese needed to do. - -"Charley, there are half a dozen reasons," Reese stood up wearily and walked around the front of the desk, slide an ornate fountain pen holder out of the way and sat down on the edge. "My personal favorite though is that Bill Tyson is an asshole. The biggest asshole in the party if you ask me." Resse crossed his arms and leaned back. His office was bigger than what most junior senators were afforded. Reese knew his father was behind that somehow, though he had never been able to figure out precisely how. In the end he had given up and moved in. But he had insisted on bringing his own desk, his own bookshelves, his own chairs, all from the governors mansion back in TK. The bookshelves were even filled with his own books, most of which Reese had actually read, something that never ceased to amaze reporters who would notice the spine of some poetry volume or a novel and, thinking that Reese wouldn't pick up on a quote, would drop one in casual conversation when they could, to try to trip him up and at a little humor to their otherwise doomed for the back pages pieces. But Reese rarely missed the allusions and never the quotes. His sister was a poet, he read what she sent him. Eventually word got around that TK had a literate junior senator and, at least for now, the press had been almost universally kind. It had even started to move from the back pages. Of course it didn't hurt that he was the same age as John F Kennedy had been at his prime or that he looked the part as well, slightly wavy dark hair that framed a face that had attracted no shortage of dates, though thus far no Mrs. Bradford. - -"I could find you plenty of people with reason to say Reese Bradford is an asshole." Charley chuckled. His chair creaked as he leaned back and grinned up at Reese. "Shit, I meet people who think you're an asshole just because of your name." - -Reese cringed, but he knew Charley was right. As usual. It wasn't Reese, or at least it was rarely Reese. Few people who had ever met him had, to the best of his knowledge, ever called him an asshole. Some people didn't like the color of his skin, which was too white to be from Maryland and definitely too white to be running against an incumbent black president. But the reason most people didn't like Reese was because his father was rich, and by extension, in most people's minds, so was he. In truth he was rich. And in truth he had not earned any of the money. In a way I am an asshole, he thought. I should just give it away, give everything away and join a monastery and then after a while come back and say hey everyone, here I am, I have no money, I am poorer than you, will you have me now? But Reese knew they would not. The only thing more offensive to someone struggling to get by than being rich is to be rich and renounce your riches. Fuck you and, oh fuck you again. - -Reese sighed. "Goddamn name." - -Charley groaned. "Please. Spare me the hardships of being a Bradford." - -The smile had left his face and Reese realized that on the family score, even Charley had lost faith in him. - -"Look, just give the asshole your vote. Get his pork bill that no one cares about through the committee no one really cares about and we can nudge someone else to shoot down later if it really bothers you that much. Or you can get over it by then and focus on getting some face time in New Hampshire. Either way, we win and no one really loses." Charley smiled again. "But if you really want to fuck Bill Tyson," Charley raised his hands and sighed, "you can. I mean, don't let me stand in your way. But do recognize that you won't be fucking him very hard or very well. And he will come back on you. He'll turn around in fuck you like sailor on shore leave when we head up to New Hampshire. Shit, you won't even been able to get your face on a milk carton, let alone in the debates." - -"All right, fine. I'll let it go... what else is there today?" - -Charley pulled up his tablet and skimmed down the list. "A few signatures Ev will bring by when we're finished, a couple meetings this afternoon and, oh, your father called." - - - ------- - - -"Let me get this straight, you think you can go through the service records and match the enlistment photos, or whatever photos you have against the guys " Steven was talking with his mouth full again. Chase cringed and wondered how he could fail to realize he was doing it. She had tried to tell herself that maybe the sight of partially dissicated hambuger was art. Living art. She had failed. Now she just insisted they sit side by side at a counter whenever they went out for lunch. - -"That's the plan yes." She sipped her coffee, felt the acid rumbling in her stomach. - -"Well, okay, if you help me with this Parsons case then I'll help you pull these files." Steven pushed back the plate of fries and twisted on his stool to face Chase. "Have you told Littrell what's going on?" - -"Of course not." Chase liked her boss. Littrell shared her genuine enthusasim for the work. She had actually spent most of the morning debating whether or not to tell him about her freelance case as she had come to think of it. But she couldn't shake the feeling that that was exactly what her anonymous tipster -- her employer she thought suddenly -- wanted her to do. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction until she had the satisfaction of knowing who they were. "Besides I've already run his name through everything we have. I know as much as you do. Those files you found in the main library are still all I have." Chase turned all the way around and looked out at the street. It was finally Autumn. People had on overcoats, the northern winds were starting to blow. - -"That's not true. There was a handwritten note in the file right?" - -Chase nodded. - -"That means someone else looked into the case at some point... What sort of paper was it?" - -"What?" Chase had only been half listening, watching a man parked across the street, sitting in a green Jaguar, reading a newspaper. "What sort of paper? I don't know, paper." - -Steven turned around again. "Pull the file again, figure out what kind of paper it is." - -"Why the hell do I care?" - -"Because it might give you some clue as to when the person looked into it. Figure out when and you might be able to get Littrell to pull the assignments log and find our who looked into it. Then you can find out what they know." Steven smiled, clearly proud of this leap of logic, which, Chase had to admit, was pretty good. - -"All right. I'll do that tomorrow, this afternoon I'm dedicating to your Sgt. Parsons." - - - -Even with Steven's help it took them the rest of the week to match the service photos to the men in Norm Canton's squadron christmas photo. Int he end they came up to two short. One was a short stocky dark haired man sitting on the wing of a P29, legs dangling in the air above the others in the photo. He was one of five that had climbed on the plane which led Chase to think perhaps he was her man, since she considered it unlikely that enlisted men, squardon mechanics would be climbing on the wings of the plane, but she couldn't be sure since most of the men were not in uniform and those that were, she still couldn't make out their ranks. She'd tried putting the image under a microscope, but it hadn't help. She'd scanned it and sent the file to the tech departmnet but they just looked at her like she was insane when she asked if they would enhance the photo. She heard them laughing as she walked down the half to the elevator. ' - -The other unknown man in the image was squatting down in the very front, sandy hair swept back with pomade. His smile leaped out of the photo and Chase seriously doubted that he was the sort of man anyon would forget. There did seem to be something mischeivus in his eyes though, or perhaps, she thought, I've been spending way to much time staring at this photo. She flung the image across the table and closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. "Damnit" Her voice startled her in the quiet of her apartment. She got up and opened the fridge looking for something to eat. There was some week old chinese and half a bottle of Rose. She grabbed the wine and flopped down on the couch. She pulled out the cork with her teeth and drank from the bottle. The only way to drink Rose she thought with a giggle. - -The note inside the file proved to be from a medium size legal pad varieties of which had, according to Steven's extensive searching, been manufactured for over thirty years. At first she considered this no help at all, but Steven pointed out that while it was unlikely she'd ever know who had put it there she did know that apparently the DPMO had at most started looking into Lt. Lawrence in the early to mid 1970s. In other words it was unlikely any family had been pestering the department after the war. It was unlikely that anyone had missed Lt. Lawrence. - -Chase was restless. She opened the back door and went out to the balcony. It was a lovely night, crisp and clear. She stared up at Big Dipper, followed Orion's belt down the horizon were the faint purple of the distant sunset still lingered. She drank more of the wine, sat down in the white pastic chair left by the previous tenant. She could smell the Potomac, she thought about the river, running by somewhere down the hill, running down to the Cheasepeake, join the bay anbd heading out the sea. All that water disappearing into so much more water. All those people disappearing somewhere, disappearing into so much water, so much time. - -The chime of her phone broke the peaceful still of the night. She shivered and went inside. It was a number she didn't know. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/AZ-5.txt b/AZ-5.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 07efe46..0000000 --- a/AZ-5.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,118 +0,0 @@ - - -After she left Norm went back inside. No one would come tonight. It was Tuesday night, everyone went to Walt's house for poker on Tuesdays. Norm went inside and locked the door behind him. He went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of Dewers and set it on the bar. He pulled the phone over from the wall and sat down. He poured himself a shot and slugged it back. He poured another and drank it. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd been thinking about all day. The connection was bad, the line warbled like it was underwater, but he recognized the voice. "We need to talk." - - ------ - - - - -It took her four days in the DoD archives but she managed to match nearly everyone in the photo to their service records. In the end she came up two short. The photo Norm Canton had given her either included two men that were not part of the squadron or its auxiliary crews, or she had found her mystery man. Twice. - -She was back in Annapolis by the end of the week. - -This time Norm Canton wasn't around, but another former '34er by the name of Ed Wald let her in the office and, for what it's worth he said, after staring for a while at the photo said he did not recall either of her mystery men. - -She spent half of the night poring over more photos, trying to find the men in any other photos, but there was nothing. By the time she gave up the bar out front was in full swing with Ed and several other men shooting pool and playing old Merle Haggart and Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox. Chase let them buy her a couple of drinks and listened to a few stories about Norm's efforts in organizing the archive. Eventually hunger persuaded her to leave and she followed their advice to an all-night diner down by the wharf. It was starting to rained when she pulled in and gathered up her things for an all-night retracing of her steps. - -She found a empty booth by the window and watched the rivulets of rain run down the window while she waited on a patty melt and fries. She was just finishing the food when a man approached her booth and sat down without saying anything. It took her a minute, but she recognized him form the VFW. She was startled enough by his strange entrance that she didn't say anything, she just stared stupidly at him. he seemed nervous, as though he were in hurry, but unsure how to begin. - -"Ms. Chase..." - -"Just Chase." - -"Sorry. Chase. This man you're looking for, is it all the same to you if you find him or you don't?" - -Chase was taken aback, it wasn't a question she had been expecting. She thought about saying something about the family's right to know, but sensed that the man, Shummaker, she remembered Wald calling him, though she had never caught a first name, wasn't going to buy the family angle. "I guess it might be, but I like to think that everyone's story is worth being told, that we all live on a little bit as long as someone knows our story, knows something of us." - -Shummaker nodded, rubbed his chin and said nothing for a moment. "Some stories have a lot of pain in them..." - -"Almost all of them do." - -"So why tell them?" - -Chase sighed, she had thought that Shummaker might have some helpful tidbit to pass along, but she was beginning to doubt that. "Avoiding the pain doesn't make it go away. You can't just bury it and hope that somehow no one will ever find it." - -"Hmph. I think you might be able to do just that actually. A lot of things happened in the war, a lot of things that each of us who is there will take to the grave and story will be gone, the pain will be gone." - -Chase didn't say anything. - -He nodded some more, picked up the salt shaker and rolled it between his hands. "I'm dying." - -It caught her off guard and before she could say anything he went on. - -"I have cancer and it's going to kill me. The closer I get to the end the more I think that all those little lies we've all told over the years, even the very innocent lies, they all add up to something bad, something very bad that we have to drag around with us everyday..." - -"Lies?" - -He waved his hand. "Nothing specific to do with your man, I mean all our lies, the lies you tell yourself at night when you look int he mirror before you go to bed, the lies you whisper in the children's ears to help them sleep at night. All of it builds up, it grows, it becomes a thing inside you that you have to carry around. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to unburden myself just because I know I'm dying. I don't care about me at all, it's them I want to help..." he trailed off and fell silent. - -Chase pulled out the photo. She pointed to the man she thought was Lt. Lawrence. "That's Lawrence isn't it?" - -Shummaker looked down at the image. He nodded. - -"Why were they lying to me then? What happened?" - -Shummaker smiled at her. "I don't know. I assume that's what you're going to find out. I just know that one day he was gone and no one ever told me anything. In fact Wald and TK would never talk about it. I spent three years during the war with those two, we had no secrets. Except for that one." - -She nodded. "So, when you say he left, what... he went AWOL?" - -Shummaker look uncomfortable. "Something like that." - -Then it clicked and her eyebrows shot up. "He deserted?" - -Shummaker looked down at his coffee. "I really don't know." - -"I'm looking for a deserter?" - -"You're looking for someone who doesn't want to be found." - -Chase's heart was beating so hard she was sure Shummaker could here. She said nothing and he eased out of the booth without looking at her again. She watched him walk out of the diner and amble across the parking lot to a '70s Impala. She couldn't get the idea out of her head, I could be looking for someone who's still alive. - - - - ------------------------- - - - -"Let me get this straight, you think this Lt. Lawrence was a deserter?" Steven was chewing with his mouth open again. Chase cringed. He did it whenever he was distracted by conversation he considered more interesting than whatever he was eating. It was part of the reason Chase almost always insisted they sit side by side at a counter whenever they went out for lunch. She kept her head down, sipped her coffee. - -"I don't know." She spun the cup in her hands. "It's a possibility." - -"You know what that means right? This guy could still be alive." Steven pushed back the plate of fries and twisted his tool to face Chase. "Holy shit. I mean holy shit. Have you thought this through?" - -"I check the records he'd be 93 if he were..." - -"Have you told Tk bassman what's going on?" - -"Of course not. This has already gone too far to bring it to TK bossman now." She had actually been considering doing just that all day, but she wasn't about to admit it to Steven. And she couldn't shake the feeling that that was exactly what her anonymous tipster wanted her to do. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction until she had the satisfaction of knowing who they were. "Besides I've already run the name through everything we have and there's nothing much there. Certainly no mention of desertion. There was even a note saying he was MIA, so I'm not the first person to look into this one." Chase shook her head. "Part of the problem is that record keeping in the Caribbean Theater was apparently some sort of a joke during the war. Or at least early on in the war." - -"I didn't even know there was a Caribbean theater..." Steven stuff the last of the chicken sandwich in this mouth and wipe the crumbs from his lips. - -"I didn't either," admitted Chase. "But I do now and by all accounts it was a fucked up command." - -"How do you mean?" - -Chase shrugged. "Usual power struggles, Navy not wanting to be under the Army, Army appointed to the top position by someone in Washington... the thing is Washington cared enough to keep an eye on the top guys. The canal was down there you know, they considered that a prime target from both sides. There were U-Boats all over the Caribbean as early as 1938. So Washington was always watching closely enough that the infighting stayed mostly out of sight. But the top guys didn't care enough to pay attention to much that was going on below them it seems. And the bases were so spread out, no one was really watching what happened. Well. Except for the Canal, they were watching the Canal. I've found records for nearly every ship that went through it from 1939 until the end of the war." - -"Hmm, I thought the Canal was all we had. Guantanmo I guess. I didn't know we had any other bases down there." Steven waved for the bill. - -"We didn't and we don't really anymore. But when the Germans invaded Belgium and then France we took over a lot of their bases. Except for some French commander who decided to throw in his lot with the Vichy government." - -"Fucking French." Steven laughed. - - -They were headed back to the office when Chase spotted a familiar looking dark green Jaguar in her rearview mirror. She had already seen twice in as many days, but had dismissed it both times. I'm getting paranoid she thought. This time she wasn't so sure. She made a few deliberate but unnecessary turns and the car stuck with them. Steven asked where she was going, but she didn't say anything and he fell silent as she zigzagged her way toward the mall. She waited until they were on Peensyvania avenue and she put a large SUV between them. - -"Take the wheel." - -"What?" - -"Take the wheel dammit." Steven reached over and helf the wheel as Chase climbed into the backseat. "Now slide over." Steven did as he was told. - -"Where do you want me to go?" - -"Get in the right lane, I'm getting out at the light. She glanced behind them and sure enoug, it was still there, changing lanes, but Steven darted over faster and car was still int he lane next to them and five cars back when they stopped at the light. Claire ducked down in the seat and opened the door. "Just drive straight, I'll call you," She said and ducked out the door, keeping low to the ground. She crusched behind a set of newspaper racks and ignored the two mean who stopped to stare. She waited until the light turned green and then carefully moved forward the racks until the Jaguar passed and she stood up, pen in hand and wrote downt he license plate with shaking hands. As soon aas she had it she turned down a side street and walked as fast as she could toward the crowd of people exiting a long row of buses parked between the Washington and Lincoln monuments. She fumbled through her purse and pulled out her phone. It took her several fumbling tries to find Stevens name on her phone. Get ahold of yourself she kept repeating. Breathe. She calmed down a little talking to Steven. She told him to go back to work without her, she would take the metro back later. She needed to be outside, to walk off her nervous energy and to be lost in the crowds for a while. She walked the entire length of the Mall. - -A couple of kids sat on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Somebody out on the quad was flying a kite. The leaves had already started to turn orangish, bits of yellow. It was just and another ordinary Tuesday afternoon in Washington D.C. But someone was obviously keeping tabs on her. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/AZ-Cuts.txt b/AZ-Cuts.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e1c9b2f..0000000 --- a/AZ-Cuts.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ - - -When she got home everyone at the office treated her like a pariah. The crazy girl that had bolted off to Europe to chase the Whitmore file. The girl that didn't know when to stop. Chase had been the one to suggest she take a day in the weekly coffee and donuts rotation, it might, he told her, help them feel a bit more like you're a human. In his typically sly manner, he had neglected to mention that it would also get him off the hook for Wednesdays. - - - -Chase watched her staring out the windows the break room, wondering what she was thinking, he could see from his desk, even through the blinds, the furrowed browser and he could imagine the hard green of her eyes, the way they really did seem to glint when she narrowed them. - - -She was still thinking about, anticipating it even, when she stopped for donuts and coffee She knew the rest of the office was uncomfortable around her. - - - -I have seven open cases at the moment. I'm about to close one that is yes, a bit old and was fun to track down. But as for what I get next, you know that's up to Peters, not me. So go back out there, tell them that I have no desire to make them look bad, I just happen to really like this job. Tell them they need to fucking relax. Maybe get a life, garden, carve miniatures, golf, something, I don't know, live while you can, indulge yourself, do something you love, that sort of stuff. I mean, if most of them don't like this job, and I have gathered that impression in my brief time here, why the hell do they do it? And even more to the point, why do you do it Chase? - - - Unlike most, it did not break her, it did not produce the mild sense of hopelessness the cut through the rest of Skull and Bones like a current of quiet despair. - diff --git a/AZ-Intro.txt b/AZ-Intro.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c1f4e46..0000000 --- a/AZ-Intro.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,124 +0,0 @@ -The storm came on fast. Trees were already bending like dancers in the wind. She pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. The middle of September was too late for a hurricane. It should have been the start of Autumn, a day when the air suddenly turns cool and crisp. The end of summer was the only season that offered that singularity, that one day when everything was suddenly different. The humidity gone; the air lighter, cleaner. The rest of the seasons merely flowed into a one another like a giant river of time running right through you. But when summer ended it did it all at once, in one day, and everyone all over Washington DC knew it, together, all at once. Provided they paid attention. - -Chase Kevale paid attention. Except that Autumn was late this year. *Nowhere to be found* the man on the radio had said earlier as she stood in line at Dunkin' Donuts. It was her turn. She never ate the donuts or drank the coffee, but that reasoning had fallen on deaf ears. Fair is fair her boss said when she complained. Fair is fair. Fair is nowhere. - -*Nowhere to be found*. Instead the city could look forward to Emily, which, if she did not deviate from her current course and speed would hit the city tomorrow night as a category 4. So far it was only wind, only gusts really, but more than enough to upset a tray of coffee or launch a flimsy box of donuts into the sky. She was already not the most popular employee at the office and losing the Friday donuts to the wind wasn't going to do her any favors. She was the new girl. The new girl everyone disliked because they were no longer new, were years away from new, so far in fact that new felt threatening she supposed. Or perhaps it was simply that they had forgotten how to interact with people that were not as thoroughly jaded as themselves. And despite the cynical atmosphere, the jadedness that practically permeated the air at the office, she had not given in yet. Chase knew she worked too hard, knew she asked too many questions, read too much into the files and was not in any tangible way a part of office life, the life that had certain rules and routines, an order that was, to her fellow employees, as unquestionable and immutable as the laws of gravity or motion. Not that they had much of either Chase thought, no gravity, no motion, no thought of motion even. They were simply government employees punching the clock, gossiping about their pay grade, their years to retirement. The enormity of the job did not occur to them, or perhaps they just didn't care, Chase hadn't yet sorted that one out, she was, after all, just the new girl. Getting coffee and donuts. - -She fumbled for her keys balancing the two trays of small coffee cups and the donuts precariously in one hand as she turned the key and threw her shoulder into the heavy metal of the door, but she made it coffee and donuts fully intact. Everyone was already assembled in the break room, waiting. - -"Sorry, I'm late you guys." She set the coffee and donuts down in the middle of the table and moved back, dropping her bag in an empty chair as the rest tore into the stack of coffee. "There was an unbelievable line at Dunkin Donuts." - -Steven smiled and bit into a bearclaw. "DC loves its donuts." - -While most of her coworkers filled her with a kind of dread she had previously only felt when she stood in line at the DMV, she had come to like Steven. He wasn't cynical, didn't seem to care about punching clocks and in certain lights he was not unpleasant to look at. He had longish hair that made him seem perhaps younger than he was and though she still thought men with hair down to their shoulders generally looked ridiculous, Steven managed to pull it off somehow. She watched him now as a strand of the hair escaped from behind his ear and fell in front of his face becoming entangled with a bit of glaze from his bearclaw. He kept eating, seemingly unaware that the hair was now in danger of disappearing into his mouth. It wasn't in fact until an inch or two was in his mouth that he realized what had happened and leaned forward to deftly sweep the hair away as he swallowed the rest of the donut. She watched him, fascinated by the complexities of donut eating that she had not previously considered. - -"Any luck with Sgt. Reese?" Steven used a napkin to pull a few bits of donut glaze out of his hair and tucked it back behind his ear. - -Chase turned around and pulled out a small basket of blueberries she kept in the break fridge. "I'm still waiting on the records from Annapolis to make sure it is in fact that my Sgt. Reese." - -"Why don't you just hop a jet out to Annapolis?" sneered Dennis Burch he slid past her, out of the break room and back, she assumed, to the small, hellish hole in which Chase was sure he lived out his days. Chase glared at his back and watched Steven stifle a smile out of the corner of her eye. "Anyway, if the field tests in Hawaii match then I'm all set because the paperwork puts him there at the time." - -"Wow, so you're going to have the oldest closed case this year then." Steven raised his eyebrows at her. "Setting the bar kind of high for yourself aren't you? I mean, what are you going to do next year? Tackle Whitmore again?" Steven giggled and walked out of the break room. - -Assholes. All of them. Chase picked through the moldy blueberries to find the dozen or so ripe ones which she picked out and piled on a napkin. The rest of her fellow employees began to file out, heading off to start whatever it was they did all day. Chase dumped the moldy blueberries in the trash and threw the rest on her mouth. She leaned against the table and stared out over the low ceiling, florescent lighted basement room where she spent her days. - -The Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office was ostensibly charged with identifying and recovering the remains of United States personnel lost in foreign wars and other actions abroad. It was the sort of agency that brought a misty tear to many a Senators' eye and many a snapped salute from Presidents, but very little in the way of funding. So little in fact that its predecessor had been disbanded entirely from 1951 to 1976, during which time missing soldiers effectively became persona non grata in the eyes of the government. Even now the diggers, as one of Chase's exes had called the agency, a name that, at least in Chase's mind, had stuck, consisted of fewer than sixty people. And that included the maids and janitors who cleaned the buildings at night. When Chase had arrived nearly a year ago the DPMO was backlogged with some 230,000 MIA cases, some dating from as far back as World War II, some newer, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Darfur. Just about any hell hole the United States had ever sent its soldiers into, a few had failed to come home. By the time the files reached this basement the MIA solider was dead. The same was likely true of most POWs. In the twenty years her boss had been working here, he told her, he had never once heard of anyone being found alive. Not even MIA/POW reports from more recent wars. If soldiers were alive their comrades rescued them. If there was no rescue then the paper work became part of a Kafkaian labyrinth that eventually led here, to a filing cabinet, somewhere in the long wall of metal filing cabinets that lined the entire bottom floor of the building -- case records, field reports, eyewitness testimonies and countless other pieces of paper that formed the story, from enlistment to disappearance, all packed into the cold metal cabinets surrounded all of them as they worked every day. Around the turn of the century the overlords at the DoD had seen fit to launch a plan to index the files into a database, something searchable, something they might be able to share with outside agencies. The effort had gotten as far the some 74,000 soldiers still missing from World War II. Thanks to budget shortfalls under the Bush administration there were currently only two temps entering data and only one programmer, Steven, trying the wrangle it all into something organized. -Despite a promising career as an academic historian, Chase had shunned the cushy university posts offered to her by well wishing professors and administrations, opting instead to, as she blithely told Dr. Rosenbaum the morning she accepted the position at the DoD, "do some research that actually affects peoples lives." Rosenbaum had just shrugged, rubbed the white stubble of his sagging chin and hrumphed quietly, as was his nature. She knew that he, and rest of her professors thought she was crazy, that they all, like her mother, thought she was throwing something away, but she didn't care. She didn't want to spend her life just talking about the past, she wanted to touch it. She wanted to see it in front of her, to feel it between her fingers, to dig in the soil, to make it part of the present, the way it had always been to her, as far back as she could remember. - -So she shoved her PhD in a box, filled up the back of her old Volvo station wagon and drove from Massachusetts down to Washington DC where she had accepted a job as junior research fellow at the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office. With Dr. Rosenbaum's half-hearted help she managed to get herself assigned to what everyone referred to as the skull and bones department, which specialized in field work and connecting, as the joke went, the skull with the bones. But despite a reputation for fieldwork, Chase had only, thus far, been out of the office once and that had been her own doing, not the DoD. - -As the new girl Chase had been handed the worst job in skull and bones, trying to find Whitmore and Hume. It was a ritual, a kind of hazing for history nerds. The case had been handed, amid chuckles and snickers from old timers, to every new Skull and Bones employee for the last twenty years, none of whom had ever managed to find the skull, bones or even vague whereabouts of Lt. Whitmore or his gunner, Sgt. Hume. The two had simply disappeared into a cloud. Like most newcomers Chase had accepted the file as her first challenge, her opportunity to prove herself. She heard the snickers. She heard the chuckles. She knew the case was a dog even before Steven took pity on her and pulled her aside one day at lunch to say, "You know you can't solve Whitmore and Hume, right?" He lowered his voice to a whisper, "We've all had to dog it for a while. I had it three years ago when I started, before they found out I could write code. Fuckers think it's funny." He grimaced. "Just thought you should know." - -Thank you Steven," Chase was twirling a pen through her fingers wondering if perhaps the case were solvable despite years of failure. She knew of half a dozen mathematical proofs that for years had been considered unsolvable and then one day, damn it all, someone solves it. And she wasn't even a mathematician, probably there were far more examples. Still, history was trickier, Amelia Earhart was still unsolved, Jesse James' gold was still missing, DB Cooper was never heard from again. - -Whitmore and Hume had disappeared over present day Slovenia on April 19, 1917. - -Officially the DPMO did not investigate missing persons from WWI. At first Chase had found that disconcerting, surely the United States did not just give up on people? But the deeper she dug into the case, the more she understood why everyone had given up. She wasn't about to. - -At first her fellow employees would smile behind her back as she walked by carting yet another load of files back from the archives up on the fifth floor. After a while she started smiling back at them, or rather smiling preemptively as Chase thought of it. Broad, fake smiles that said *I am having so much faun at this job, you have no fucking idea*. It was childish she knew, but eventually the smiles were no longer fake because she could see how much it really was messing with their heads, and that really did make her smile. She was careful to make sure she never gave up the game, never let them know she knew she had been had. Instead Chase threw herself deeper into the case. - -She spent more time upstairs in the archives than anyone else ever had. She did something no one at Skull and Bones had ever really bothered to do; she got to know the archivists. They were a different bunch, the sort of nerds that had actually understood the statistics class she had barely managed to pass as an undergrad, but, despite a love of organization and raw data that she couldn't relate to, she got along well with Jim Dimperryll, the head of the archive department and he helped her piece together the trail of Whitmore and Hume in far more detail than anyone else has ever done. Chase packed so much data into both Whitmore and Hume's file that she convinced herself no one was ever going to be tricked into this case again. She started spending her lunches with Dimperryll in the upstairs cafeteria, which required a different keycard pass, one the Dimperryll had, but Chase and the rest of her Skull and Bones workers did not. Not only did it get her out of lunch with her co-workers, it got her a much better selection of fresh fruit, which Chase had something of a fetish for. It was around then that the people in her own department began to drop their snickers, stop smiling at all, even behind her back and give her a wider berth in the halls. Some even looking down when they passed, avoiding even eye contact. - -"They think you're trying to make them look bad," Steven informed her one day. He had developed a habit of stopping by her desk in the mornings, before she left to go to the archives. He liked, she could tell, to feel as though her were passing on his wisdom to someone else, which, she figured was really just a cover for the fact that he was ecstatically excited to no longer be the new guy. And she realized much later, he was also thankful to finally have someone closer to his own age to talk to. She didn't mind it either. Steven came to serve as kind of anchor for the tether she was developing, one that would take her further and further away from the frustration and that her boss had expected her to find in the Whitmore and Hume file. - -Whitmore started in Georgia. He was then shipped out west to California for flight training and then back east again before shipping out to France in April of 1917. Chase had spent the better part of two weeks down at the Army Archives tracing the movements of the airman's unit. Hume did not come into the picture until much later. Whitmore's unit suffered heavy loses above the battlefields of eastern france, but somehow Lt. Charles Whitmore had survived. The unit was then moved north, to Belgium to drop mustard gas canisters on enemy lines. Whitmore had been shot down over Belgium and was picked up by the Germans. He apparently spent time in a POW camp before being swapped out for some Germans captured during a rare allied push into Axis territory. In his absence Whitmore's unit had been wiped out. Unlike today, when the time as a POW alone would likely have earned him a trip home, Lt. Whitmore was given a new plane, assigned a new rear gunner, one Steven Hume formerly of the 212 Squadron, and the two were sent merrily on their way to join a new unit in sunny, warm Italy. Except that for Whitmore and his fellow airmen, Italy was not warm. Or it was, but they were still cold, flying high into the Dolomites and Slovenian Alps to support the war happening on the mountain slopes. One day Whitmore and Hume, along with three other planes were sent to bomb an area near Bled, in present day Slovenia. The squadron flew in bad weather, but made it to the target, dropped their bombs and turned around to fly home. Somewhere along the way, Whitmore and Hume flew into a cloud and were simply never seen again. Whitmore and Hume had not returned. That was all the paperwork said, missing in action. Full stop. - -Everyone from their unit was long since deceased. Even if she could have tracked down their families, any stories would be second, perhaps third hand at this point. Sometime in the late 1940s, when an agency similar to the DPMO had existed, someone had interviewed the Colonel in charge of the unit, but the written report that Chase found stapled to the back of the folder in the Army archives offered no real insight. One minute they were there, the next they were not the Colonel said. - -She knew that was when she was supposed to give up. She knew she was supposed to learn the lesson, to humbly accept that she wouldn't solve everything. She was supposed to given in. Chase had never given in. Instead she filed a travel form, called an old boyfriend who had landed at the State Department and managed to get on a diplomatic flight to Germany. She landed in Berlin one cold and raining December morning and realized that she didn't speak a word of German. She spent two days tracking down a translator and then several more tracking down the records she wanted. Finally she found herself, translator in tow, in a dusty, forgotten room in the basement of building that housed what passed for Germany's WWI records. The place wasn't much, but the records were, in typical German style, fastidiously neat and thorough. With the help of her interpreter and a very put out looking woman the German archive she managed to tracing the movements of German and Prussian forces that might have been in the general vicinity of Whitmore and Hume's flight path. She was looking for reports of shooting down an airplane or coming across Allied bodies, parachutes anything. There was nothing. So she had ponied up for a train to Ljubljana. Again she spent several days looking for a translator and then, with the help of Tomaz, a sympathetic old man who had listened to her frustration over a cup of coffee and eventually agreed to help her, she dug through local news archives, papers and radio transcripts from the war, looking for any report of American pilots. There were in fact several, but most were well after Whitmore and Hume disappeared. One could possibly had been them, but neither solider in question claimed to be a pilot and both were, according to the postwar reporting in the local paper, sent back to the Allied forces before the end of the war. One day, after she had finally decided it was time to give up for real, She agreed to let Tomaz drive her up to Bled, into the mountains that had claimed Whitmore and Hume and countless others. "Hemingway fought in these mountains," Tomaz told her as they drove up through thickets of pine and fir trees and hillsides strew with bluebells and heather. They stopped at the top of a pass, far above Bled, and got out to admire the views further up into the mountains. It was hard to imagine anyone fighting a war here, thought Chase, it was simply too peaceful, too quiet. Tomaz brought a thermos and poured them cups of coffee. Chase stood in the snow, her hands wrapped around the cup, staring up at the white alpine world beyond the pass. Tomaz seemed amused when Chase told him that she was supposed to fail, not supposed to ever know what became of Whitmore, that she even knew all that and still didn't care, still didn't want to give up. Tomaz chuckled and asked if she thought she had learned more of a lesson by continuing on or less. I'm not sure she had said, watching the clouds pour down from the peaks and cover the pass in fog. The bright green tips of fir trees dripped water on the gravel edges of the parking lot. Tomaz climbed back in the car. The next day Chase flew home. - -Sometimes the past is truly gone, swallowed up by time. Other times it just looks that way. - - - ----- - - -Chase had just finished typing up the last of her report on Sgt. Reese when Steven wandered into her office and sat down on the edge of her desk, one leg on the floor, one draped over a stack of files Chase need to send back to the Archives. - -"Steven," she said without glancing up from her laptop screen. "Something on your mind?" - -"Mmmm. Just wondering who you're going to do next?" - -Chase smiled, but kept her head down. "A lady never tells Steven." She could see him blush out of the corner of her eye. - -"Sorry, that didn't come out right did it?" He picked up the cheap nameplate from her desk and toyed with the edge where the fake gold laminate was already peeling after barely a year. At least they weren't wasting money on frivolous stuff he thought to himself. "It's just that, well... there are rumors see, rumors you're going to go back to the Whitmore case or something crazy like that." - -She said nothing while she finished entering the last of the Reese report and then clicked save and closed the laptop. "Steven, you know as well as I do that Whitmore is unsolvable." - -"Actually, I would've thought that you knew that even better than I do." Steven had set down the nameplate and pulled out a small package of nutter butters which he proceeded to eat, distractedly. "Chase, listen, you know how everyone here thinks that you're trying to make them look bad?" - -"That is what you tell me." - -"Well, see, the thing is, I'm starting to think that maybe they're right. You've been here just over a year, so this is technically your second year, but I'm going to keep calling it your first year, since it's your first full year, your first year in which anyone can really judge your case work and quite frankly it's really good. You didn't solve Whitmore. So far that's you're only smudge, if it can be called that. So that means you cleared what? fifteen cases? - -"Reese makes eighteen actually." Chase leaned back in her chair. "What's your point Steven, just spit it out." - -He stared at his shoes. "I don't know. It's just that, if the rumors are true they're going to start giving you even more old cases, cases they think the rest of us can't do. I mean, here's the thing, you know how I told you I ended up getting moved over to the tech department because I knew Python? Yeah, well, that's true, but it's also true that my last case was for a missing snipers in Afghanistan that turn out to be on loan to the CIA for things that are way the hell over my pay grade and quite frankly terrify me. In other words, I got fucked, a snafu that turned out to embarrass half a dozen very high ranking military officers, not to mention my own bosses who have to admit they assigned it to me.... But you, you just keep solving things. I used to be you, but ever since that stupid case I've been writing code, which is fine, but then you came along and it reminds me of how I fucked up, or how I got fucked." - -Chase laughed. "Steven, I would have thought you'd be glad to not be the new kid anymore." - -He stood up, nodded and shrugged. "I'll let you get back to work." - -"Wait." She dropped her feet to the ground and stood up, pulling her coat off the chair. "Technically I just closed one case and haven't be assigned anything new yet. So... let's play a little hooky and get a real breakfast." - -Steven lit up. "Really? Okay. Wait. What's my excuse?" - -"Oh who cares, come on, let's go." - -They ducked out of Chases office and headed toward the back wall where a row of file cabinets would shield them from the view of those already straggling into the meeting room for the weekly status meeting. Outside the wind was getting stronger, but the city did not seem to care, as if weather were simply not a significant enough event to interrupt a city like DC. Chase was surprised to find that not only were they not the only ones on the street, but there were lines outside the first two diners they passed, people huddled against the walls of the building ducked out of the wind. It made Chase laugh. Whole town is full of diners dear her grandfather had told her when she moved down to DC. It's a town of dirty deeds over breakfast, you won't like it. He had winked at her and smiled. He was right she knew, it was a town of breakfast, a town of deals and negotiations in diners, a town of crowded lunch counters. But he was wrong that she hated it. She had never felt so at home before in her life. Eventually they found a diner, a Greek diner, one that was no longer serving breakfast, which explained why there were a couple empty seats at the counter. Chase and Steven were hardly in the door when Chase's phone began to ring. Steven turned around with a panicked look on his face. - -"Relax," Chase look down at the screen, "it's just my mom. Give me five." She headed back outside. "Hi mom, what's up." - -"What's up? How is that any way to greet your mother?" - -"Sorry Mom, but I'm sorta busy. Morning meeting, work." - -"Then you aren't leaving for the storm?" - -"Wasn't planning on it, why? Should I?" - -"Oh who knows dear. The news is all panic all the time, probably it's nothing, but I was wondering if you would mind going out to the house, you now, just give it a look over, back sure Duncan got the boards on the windows, that sort of thing." - -Chase knew Duncan was her mother's neighbor, but last time she had checked he was bit old to put up starboards. "Duncan put up your windows? Jeez mom, he's like 80." - -"What choice did I have? I'm all the way out here in Vegas, the storm grounded all the flights. And I know you're not going to do it." Her mother paused a half beat, but Chase did not rise to the bait. "Anyway, that's why I'm calling you now dear. You'll have a look won't you? Unless it's too dangerous I mean. Use your judgment Chase." - -Chase nodded. "Sure mom, I'll have a look. But listen, I really half to go right now. I'll call you later okay?" Chase hung up before her mother could respond. Something was happening down the street, at the corner where tk and tk formed a rather massive intersection. Chase glanced inside, but Steven looked well occupied with his menu so she walked down toward the corner to see what the commotion was. People on the corner were transfixed by a woman darting through the intersection, skipping crosswalks and running diagonally through eight lanes of honking cars and screaming cabbies. She was wearing what might have been skirt, had someone added another inch or two of fabric, which, as Chase slowly realized, would need to be vinyl or perhaps rubber, it was hard to tell given that there was so little of it. Similarly her top might have been a shirt if the wind, or scissors or something had not made off with everything but the bare essentials necessary to keep the police from becoming too actively involved in her attire. She was teetering on the biggest pair of platform heels Chase had ever seen, also red and wildly inappropriate for walking, let along the crooked zig-zagging run they were currently engaged in. - -It wasn't everyday, even in D.C., that you saw a hooker in a red vinyl skirt try to cross an intersection full of traffic on the diagonal. Half a dozen people had stopped what they were doing to watch the spectacle, some with their mouths hanging open, gawking as the woman made it to middle, where there was no traffic. She started yelling, *wait up now sugar*, and waving her arms toward the corner where Chase and the other's stood. People near her seemed to tense up at the realization that the ongoing spectacle might involve them in some way, might ruin the fun by turning them into more than spectators. The couple next to her held each other tight, shifting their arms to get a better grip and Chase realized she had been holding her breath. The woman took off her spiked, long heels and made a second dash, this time headed for the curb just down the way from Chase. Chase decided she could not watch, didn't want to see the woman's body splattered all over tk so she turned around. But then she found it impossible not to know what was happening so she turned around again just in time to see the woman scamper to the curb just ahead of a honking bus, which she didn't seem to even notice. The woman said nothing, she bent down and put back on her shoes. There was a collective exhale and the spectators turned away, continuing on to wherever they had been headed. Chase walked back to the diner, still shaking her head to herself, wondering if the woman was certifiable. She heard someone behind her and held the door open, but no one took it from her. She glanced behind her and was surprised to see the woman from the intersection standing there. Chase raised her eyebrows at her. - -"Hey sugar." She smiled, but made no effort to take the open door from Chase. - -She's definitely crazy thought Chase, "can I help you?" - -"I know this is weird for you, talking to black people I mean," The woman smiled, but Chase felt herself blush. "Thing is honey, your name is Chase right?" - -Chase considered saying no, but she was curious. She glanced back inside. Steven's head was buried in the newspaper. Chase stepped back out to the street and let the door close behind here. "How do you know my name?" - -"Well, there you go. I thought he might be crazy." She laughed nervously. "Man asked me to give you something. Actually," She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and grinned at Chase, "he promised me five hundred dollars if I gave you this." She reached into her purse and retrieved a small slip of pink paper folded in half. She thrust it out to Chase who took it from her fingers and without looking at it said, "Okay. Thank you," as if it were perfectly normal for a stranger to be handing her a slip of paper on behalf of another stranger. - -The woman seemed to accept that it was in fact normal. She nodded. "Well, anyway. Have a good day." And she turned and walked back toward the corner. - -Chase stood there, watching the woman walk away, wondering if she was going to cross the intersection the same way again, but at the last minute she made a right disappeared around the corner. - -Chase went back inside the diner and let the door close behind her. She pulled out the slip of paper. Written in pencil, just along the bottom edge, were small block letters that spelled out a name: Reese Lawrence. She looked up and saw Steven looking quizzically over at her. She glanced down again at the sheet of paper and this time noticed that part of the pencil had been smeared, she brought it closer to her face and felt a chill run down her spin, it read *Lt.* Reese Lawrence. diff --git a/AZ-plot outline.txt b/AZ-plot outline.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d1a6499..0000000 --- a/AZ-plot outline.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,17 +0,0 @@ -So Chase is somewhat established as stubborn. Now we just need to show her finding the next case, the case that will have her trailing an MIA pilot in Panama. The pilot bombed and eventually took over a submarine carrying nazi gold to argentina at the end of the war, the pilot flew a floatplane with depth charges and was looking for targets of opportunity when he see the the Uboot and attacks, he blows a hole in the uboat and it raises the white flag and contacts him on shortwave asking him to land and the rescue the crew, he does and makes a deal with the commander to help him move the gold and hide it somewhere. They move it to the corn islands and bury it. The pilot disappears a month later along with the co-pilot and gunner. She tracks them all the way through their early training and then down to panama to guard the canal. Then she goes down to Panama on tip from the pilots daughter that her father never died in action, was never in fact missing as far as she knows, he simply moved to panama after the war,brought his wife down and so on. Nicole meets up with Sil hawkard, sailor extrodinare whom she hires as a translator and to take her out to dive the wreck of the uboat. or to scan the seafloor with radar looking for the sub. She calls up her old friend from germany and he traces the details of the uboat and tell her that there is in fact a missing uboat and that's when she goes to panama. - -The man who sets the whole thing in motion, the one who gives her that piece of paper with the name on it is acting on behalf of someone who doesn't have the resurces to move the gold, but wants the americans, a senator or someone to know that they have it? ala cryptonomincon perhaps? - -Pilot: Otto Lawrence. - - - -The other mystery man is the senator's father who financed his early business with the nazi gold taken from the Uboat, - - -Okay so the men were based in the Carribean, the official details of what happened are languishing on Puerto Rico, the naval base at San Juan. That's where she meets Sil, they go looking for the wreck. Also note that there was 250 million in gold brought from france before the fall in 1941. It was sent to Admiral Georges Robert who then affirmed his allegiance to the Vichy regile and became custodian of the gold. So perhaps the men never see a uboat or anything else of the sort, they just hear about the gold and know that one of the transport boats it torpedoed? But it takes Chase quite a while to figure that out. - -This isn't Nazi gold buried the basement of some bank or wherever vandamere bush put his gold. This was money stolen from the french government by a us navy officer who them had himself surgically altered and returned home under a false name. - - -They talk about why Chase does it, establish him as a nerdy guy in wool sweater vest maybe, based on the character from Rubicon. They go to lunch and then a man gives Nicole a name, she goes back and runs it through the WWII database, it isn't there. She goes to the files and finds the man's file, but there's nothing in it. She meets with the mysterious stranger again (the first time they meet he gives her a piece of chalk and tells her to mark a bench and he will be in touch with her), he gives her some more to go on and she goes to the Archives where she finds enlistment papers, enough to know that he was a soldier. Then she goes to his squadron headquarters in Annapolis and finds more record, though not much, just that he was shipped to Panama in 1941 to protect the canal and the gulf. Also search and rescue for the marines that were training on the beaches there in preparation for action in the south pacific. She goes back to her boss and tell him the story, he says she can work the case, but that she had to take on the other new case as well, so she does and they end up being connected maybe? Maybe not, maybe she just ignores that case and everyone int he office starts liking her more because the boss is getting more and more pissed at her because she's.. or even better the boss says no to her request, gives her the file she's supposed to be assigned to and then she goes back to the mystery man and he does something such that her boss comes back to her and says, okay, you can work that case, though he obviously doesn't want her to do it all so then everyone starts to like her because the boss no longer does, though he can't do anything about it. Then she works it some more, uncovers a bit more but hits another wall and goes back to the mystery man to tell him there's just nothing on the guy. He's the one who says she needs to go to Panama, give her Sil Hawkard's name and number, she flies down and meets up with Sil on his boat. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/CH-1.txt b/CH-1.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c1f4e46 --- /dev/null +++ b/CH-1.txt @@ -0,0 +1,124 @@ +The storm came on fast. Trees were already bending like dancers in the wind. She pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. The middle of September was too late for a hurricane. It should have been the start of Autumn, a day when the air suddenly turns cool and crisp. The end of summer was the only season that offered that singularity, that one day when everything was suddenly different. The humidity gone; the air lighter, cleaner. The rest of the seasons merely flowed into a one another like a giant river of time running right through you. But when summer ended it did it all at once, in one day, and everyone all over Washington DC knew it, together, all at once. Provided they paid attention. + +Chase Kevale paid attention. Except that Autumn was late this year. *Nowhere to be found* the man on the radio had said earlier as she stood in line at Dunkin' Donuts. It was her turn. She never ate the donuts or drank the coffee, but that reasoning had fallen on deaf ears. Fair is fair her boss said when she complained. Fair is fair. Fair is nowhere. + +*Nowhere to be found*. Instead the city could look forward to Emily, which, if she did not deviate from her current course and speed would hit the city tomorrow night as a category 4. So far it was only wind, only gusts really, but more than enough to upset a tray of coffee or launch a flimsy box of donuts into the sky. She was already not the most popular employee at the office and losing the Friday donuts to the wind wasn't going to do her any favors. She was the new girl. The new girl everyone disliked because they were no longer new, were years away from new, so far in fact that new felt threatening she supposed. Or perhaps it was simply that they had forgotten how to interact with people that were not as thoroughly jaded as themselves. And despite the cynical atmosphere, the jadedness that practically permeated the air at the office, she had not given in yet. Chase knew she worked too hard, knew she asked too many questions, read too much into the files and was not in any tangible way a part of office life, the life that had certain rules and routines, an order that was, to her fellow employees, as unquestionable and immutable as the laws of gravity or motion. Not that they had much of either Chase thought, no gravity, no motion, no thought of motion even. They were simply government employees punching the clock, gossiping about their pay grade, their years to retirement. The enormity of the job did not occur to them, or perhaps they just didn't care, Chase hadn't yet sorted that one out, she was, after all, just the new girl. Getting coffee and donuts. + +She fumbled for her keys balancing the two trays of small coffee cups and the donuts precariously in one hand as she turned the key and threw her shoulder into the heavy metal of the door, but she made it coffee and donuts fully intact. Everyone was already assembled in the break room, waiting. + +"Sorry, I'm late you guys." She set the coffee and donuts down in the middle of the table and moved back, dropping her bag in an empty chair as the rest tore into the stack of coffee. "There was an unbelievable line at Dunkin Donuts." + +Steven smiled and bit into a bearclaw. "DC loves its donuts." + +While most of her coworkers filled her with a kind of dread she had previously only felt when she stood in line at the DMV, she had come to like Steven. He wasn't cynical, didn't seem to care about punching clocks and in certain lights he was not unpleasant to look at. He had longish hair that made him seem perhaps younger than he was and though she still thought men with hair down to their shoulders generally looked ridiculous, Steven managed to pull it off somehow. She watched him now as a strand of the hair escaped from behind his ear and fell in front of his face becoming entangled with a bit of glaze from his bearclaw. He kept eating, seemingly unaware that the hair was now in danger of disappearing into his mouth. It wasn't in fact until an inch or two was in his mouth that he realized what had happened and leaned forward to deftly sweep the hair away as he swallowed the rest of the donut. She watched him, fascinated by the complexities of donut eating that she had not previously considered. + +"Any luck with Sgt. Reese?" Steven used a napkin to pull a few bits of donut glaze out of his hair and tucked it back behind his ear. + +Chase turned around and pulled out a small basket of blueberries she kept in the break fridge. "I'm still waiting on the records from Annapolis to make sure it is in fact that my Sgt. Reese." + +"Why don't you just hop a jet out to Annapolis?" sneered Dennis Burch he slid past her, out of the break room and back, she assumed, to the small, hellish hole in which Chase was sure he lived out his days. Chase glared at his back and watched Steven stifle a smile out of the corner of her eye. "Anyway, if the field tests in Hawaii match then I'm all set because the paperwork puts him there at the time." + +"Wow, so you're going to have the oldest closed case this year then." Steven raised his eyebrows at her. "Setting the bar kind of high for yourself aren't you? I mean, what are you going to do next year? Tackle Whitmore again?" Steven giggled and walked out of the break room. + +Assholes. All of them. Chase picked through the moldy blueberries to find the dozen or so ripe ones which she picked out and piled on a napkin. The rest of her fellow employees began to file out, heading off to start whatever it was they did all day. Chase dumped the moldy blueberries in the trash and threw the rest on her mouth. She leaned against the table and stared out over the low ceiling, florescent lighted basement room where she spent her days. + +The Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office was ostensibly charged with identifying and recovering the remains of United States personnel lost in foreign wars and other actions abroad. It was the sort of agency that brought a misty tear to many a Senators' eye and many a snapped salute from Presidents, but very little in the way of funding. So little in fact that its predecessor had been disbanded entirely from 1951 to 1976, during which time missing soldiers effectively became persona non grata in the eyes of the government. Even now the diggers, as one of Chase's exes had called the agency, a name that, at least in Chase's mind, had stuck, consisted of fewer than sixty people. And that included the maids and janitors who cleaned the buildings at night. When Chase had arrived nearly a year ago the DPMO was backlogged with some 230,000 MIA cases, some dating from as far back as World War II, some newer, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Darfur. Just about any hell hole the United States had ever sent its soldiers into, a few had failed to come home. By the time the files reached this basement the MIA solider was dead. The same was likely true of most POWs. In the twenty years her boss had been working here, he told her, he had never once heard of anyone being found alive. Not even MIA/POW reports from more recent wars. If soldiers were alive their comrades rescued them. If there was no rescue then the paper work became part of a Kafkaian labyrinth that eventually led here, to a filing cabinet, somewhere in the long wall of metal filing cabinets that lined the entire bottom floor of the building -- case records, field reports, eyewitness testimonies and countless other pieces of paper that formed the story, from enlistment to disappearance, all packed into the cold metal cabinets surrounded all of them as they worked every day. Around the turn of the century the overlords at the DoD had seen fit to launch a plan to index the files into a database, something searchable, something they might be able to share with outside agencies. The effort had gotten as far the some 74,000 soldiers still missing from World War II. Thanks to budget shortfalls under the Bush administration there were currently only two temps entering data and only one programmer, Steven, trying the wrangle it all into something organized. +Despite a promising career as an academic historian, Chase had shunned the cushy university posts offered to her by well wishing professors and administrations, opting instead to, as she blithely told Dr. Rosenbaum the morning she accepted the position at the DoD, "do some research that actually affects peoples lives." Rosenbaum had just shrugged, rubbed the white stubble of his sagging chin and hrumphed quietly, as was his nature. She knew that he, and rest of her professors thought she was crazy, that they all, like her mother, thought she was throwing something away, but she didn't care. She didn't want to spend her life just talking about the past, she wanted to touch it. She wanted to see it in front of her, to feel it between her fingers, to dig in the soil, to make it part of the present, the way it had always been to her, as far back as she could remember. + +So she shoved her PhD in a box, filled up the back of her old Volvo station wagon and drove from Massachusetts down to Washington DC where she had accepted a job as junior research fellow at the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office. With Dr. Rosenbaum's half-hearted help she managed to get herself assigned to what everyone referred to as the skull and bones department, which specialized in field work and connecting, as the joke went, the skull with the bones. But despite a reputation for fieldwork, Chase had only, thus far, been out of the office once and that had been her own doing, not the DoD. + +As the new girl Chase had been handed the worst job in skull and bones, trying to find Whitmore and Hume. It was a ritual, a kind of hazing for history nerds. The case had been handed, amid chuckles and snickers from old timers, to every new Skull and Bones employee for the last twenty years, none of whom had ever managed to find the skull, bones or even vague whereabouts of Lt. Whitmore or his gunner, Sgt. Hume. The two had simply disappeared into a cloud. Like most newcomers Chase had accepted the file as her first challenge, her opportunity to prove herself. She heard the snickers. She heard the chuckles. She knew the case was a dog even before Steven took pity on her and pulled her aside one day at lunch to say, "You know you can't solve Whitmore and Hume, right?" He lowered his voice to a whisper, "We've all had to dog it for a while. I had it three years ago when I started, before they found out I could write code. Fuckers think it's funny." He grimaced. "Just thought you should know." + +Thank you Steven," Chase was twirling a pen through her fingers wondering if perhaps the case were solvable despite years of failure. She knew of half a dozen mathematical proofs that for years had been considered unsolvable and then one day, damn it all, someone solves it. And she wasn't even a mathematician, probably there were far more examples. Still, history was trickier, Amelia Earhart was still unsolved, Jesse James' gold was still missing, DB Cooper was never heard from again. + +Whitmore and Hume had disappeared over present day Slovenia on April 19, 1917. + +Officially the DPMO did not investigate missing persons from WWI. At first Chase had found that disconcerting, surely the United States did not just give up on people? But the deeper she dug into the case, the more she understood why everyone had given up. She wasn't about to. + +At first her fellow employees would smile behind her back as she walked by carting yet another load of files back from the archives up on the fifth floor. After a while she started smiling back at them, or rather smiling preemptively as Chase thought of it. Broad, fake smiles that said *I am having so much faun at this job, you have no fucking idea*. It was childish she knew, but eventually the smiles were no longer fake because she could see how much it really was messing with their heads, and that really did make her smile. She was careful to make sure she never gave up the game, never let them know she knew she had been had. Instead Chase threw herself deeper into the case. + +She spent more time upstairs in the archives than anyone else ever had. She did something no one at Skull and Bones had ever really bothered to do; she got to know the archivists. They were a different bunch, the sort of nerds that had actually understood the statistics class she had barely managed to pass as an undergrad, but, despite a love of organization and raw data that she couldn't relate to, she got along well with Jim Dimperryll, the head of the archive department and he helped her piece together the trail of Whitmore and Hume in far more detail than anyone else has ever done. Chase packed so much data into both Whitmore and Hume's file that she convinced herself no one was ever going to be tricked into this case again. She started spending her lunches with Dimperryll in the upstairs cafeteria, which required a different keycard pass, one the Dimperryll had, but Chase and the rest of her Skull and Bones workers did not. Not only did it get her out of lunch with her co-workers, it got her a much better selection of fresh fruit, which Chase had something of a fetish for. It was around then that the people in her own department began to drop their snickers, stop smiling at all, even behind her back and give her a wider berth in the halls. Some even looking down when they passed, avoiding even eye contact. + +"They think you're trying to make them look bad," Steven informed her one day. He had developed a habit of stopping by her desk in the mornings, before she left to go to the archives. He liked, she could tell, to feel as though her were passing on his wisdom to someone else, which, she figured was really just a cover for the fact that he was ecstatically excited to no longer be the new guy. And she realized much later, he was also thankful to finally have someone closer to his own age to talk to. She didn't mind it either. Steven came to serve as kind of anchor for the tether she was developing, one that would take her further and further away from the frustration and that her boss had expected her to find in the Whitmore and Hume file. + +Whitmore started in Georgia. He was then shipped out west to California for flight training and then back east again before shipping out to France in April of 1917. Chase had spent the better part of two weeks down at the Army Archives tracing the movements of the airman's unit. Hume did not come into the picture until much later. Whitmore's unit suffered heavy loses above the battlefields of eastern france, but somehow Lt. Charles Whitmore had survived. The unit was then moved north, to Belgium to drop mustard gas canisters on enemy lines. Whitmore had been shot down over Belgium and was picked up by the Germans. He apparently spent time in a POW camp before being swapped out for some Germans captured during a rare allied push into Axis territory. In his absence Whitmore's unit had been wiped out. Unlike today, when the time as a POW alone would likely have earned him a trip home, Lt. Whitmore was given a new plane, assigned a new rear gunner, one Steven Hume formerly of the 212 Squadron, and the two were sent merrily on their way to join a new unit in sunny, warm Italy. Except that for Whitmore and his fellow airmen, Italy was not warm. Or it was, but they were still cold, flying high into the Dolomites and Slovenian Alps to support the war happening on the mountain slopes. One day Whitmore and Hume, along with three other planes were sent to bomb an area near Bled, in present day Slovenia. The squadron flew in bad weather, but made it to the target, dropped their bombs and turned around to fly home. Somewhere along the way, Whitmore and Hume flew into a cloud and were simply never seen again. Whitmore and Hume had not returned. That was all the paperwork said, missing in action. Full stop. + +Everyone from their unit was long since deceased. Even if she could have tracked down their families, any stories would be second, perhaps third hand at this point. Sometime in the late 1940s, when an agency similar to the DPMO had existed, someone had interviewed the Colonel in charge of the unit, but the written report that Chase found stapled to the back of the folder in the Army archives offered no real insight. One minute they were there, the next they were not the Colonel said. + +She knew that was when she was supposed to give up. She knew she was supposed to learn the lesson, to humbly accept that she wouldn't solve everything. She was supposed to given in. Chase had never given in. Instead she filed a travel form, called an old boyfriend who had landed at the State Department and managed to get on a diplomatic flight to Germany. She landed in Berlin one cold and raining December morning and realized that she didn't speak a word of German. She spent two days tracking down a translator and then several more tracking down the records she wanted. Finally she found herself, translator in tow, in a dusty, forgotten room in the basement of building that housed what passed for Germany's WWI records. The place wasn't much, but the records were, in typical German style, fastidiously neat and thorough. With the help of her interpreter and a very put out looking woman the German archive she managed to tracing the movements of German and Prussian forces that might have been in the general vicinity of Whitmore and Hume's flight path. She was looking for reports of shooting down an airplane or coming across Allied bodies, parachutes anything. There was nothing. So she had ponied up for a train to Ljubljana. Again she spent several days looking for a translator and then, with the help of Tomaz, a sympathetic old man who had listened to her frustration over a cup of coffee and eventually agreed to help her, she dug through local news archives, papers and radio transcripts from the war, looking for any report of American pilots. There were in fact several, but most were well after Whitmore and Hume disappeared. One could possibly had been them, but neither solider in question claimed to be a pilot and both were, according to the postwar reporting in the local paper, sent back to the Allied forces before the end of the war. One day, after she had finally decided it was time to give up for real, She agreed to let Tomaz drive her up to Bled, into the mountains that had claimed Whitmore and Hume and countless others. "Hemingway fought in these mountains," Tomaz told her as they drove up through thickets of pine and fir trees and hillsides strew with bluebells and heather. They stopped at the top of a pass, far above Bled, and got out to admire the views further up into the mountains. It was hard to imagine anyone fighting a war here, thought Chase, it was simply too peaceful, too quiet. Tomaz brought a thermos and poured them cups of coffee. Chase stood in the snow, her hands wrapped around the cup, staring up at the white alpine world beyond the pass. Tomaz seemed amused when Chase told him that she was supposed to fail, not supposed to ever know what became of Whitmore, that she even knew all that and still didn't care, still didn't want to give up. Tomaz chuckled and asked if she thought she had learned more of a lesson by continuing on or less. I'm not sure she had said, watching the clouds pour down from the peaks and cover the pass in fog. The bright green tips of fir trees dripped water on the gravel edges of the parking lot. Tomaz climbed back in the car. The next day Chase flew home. + +Sometimes the past is truly gone, swallowed up by time. Other times it just looks that way. + + + ----- + + +Chase had just finished typing up the last of her report on Sgt. Reese when Steven wandered into her office and sat down on the edge of her desk, one leg on the floor, one draped over a stack of files Chase need to send back to the Archives. + +"Steven," she said without glancing up from her laptop screen. "Something on your mind?" + +"Mmmm. Just wondering who you're going to do next?" + +Chase smiled, but kept her head down. "A lady never tells Steven." She could see him blush out of the corner of her eye. + +"Sorry, that didn't come out right did it?" He picked up the cheap nameplate from her desk and toyed with the edge where the fake gold laminate was already peeling after barely a year. At least they weren't wasting money on frivolous stuff he thought to himself. "It's just that, well... there are rumors see, rumors you're going to go back to the Whitmore case or something crazy like that." + +She said nothing while she finished entering the last of the Reese report and then clicked save and closed the laptop. "Steven, you know as well as I do that Whitmore is unsolvable." + +"Actually, I would've thought that you knew that even better than I do." Steven had set down the nameplate and pulled out a small package of nutter butters which he proceeded to eat, distractedly. "Chase, listen, you know how everyone here thinks that you're trying to make them look bad?" + +"That is what you tell me." + +"Well, see, the thing is, I'm starting to think that maybe they're right. You've been here just over a year, so this is technically your second year, but I'm going to keep calling it your first year, since it's your first full year, your first year in which anyone can really judge your case work and quite frankly it's really good. You didn't solve Whitmore. So far that's you're only smudge, if it can be called that. So that means you cleared what? fifteen cases? + +"Reese makes eighteen actually." Chase leaned back in her chair. "What's your point Steven, just spit it out." + +He stared at his shoes. "I don't know. It's just that, if the rumors are true they're going to start giving you even more old cases, cases they think the rest of us can't do. I mean, here's the thing, you know how I told you I ended up getting moved over to the tech department because I knew Python? Yeah, well, that's true, but it's also true that my last case was for a missing snipers in Afghanistan that turn out to be on loan to the CIA for things that are way the hell over my pay grade and quite frankly terrify me. In other words, I got fucked, a snafu that turned out to embarrass half a dozen very high ranking military officers, not to mention my own bosses who have to admit they assigned it to me.... But you, you just keep solving things. I used to be you, but ever since that stupid case I've been writing code, which is fine, but then you came along and it reminds me of how I fucked up, or how I got fucked." + +Chase laughed. "Steven, I would have thought you'd be glad to not be the new kid anymore." + +He stood up, nodded and shrugged. "I'll let you get back to work." + +"Wait." She dropped her feet to the ground and stood up, pulling her coat off the chair. "Technically I just closed one case and haven't be assigned anything new yet. So... let's play a little hooky and get a real breakfast." + +Steven lit up. "Really? Okay. Wait. What's my excuse?" + +"Oh who cares, come on, let's go." + +They ducked out of Chases office and headed toward the back wall where a row of file cabinets would shield them from the view of those already straggling into the meeting room for the weekly status meeting. Outside the wind was getting stronger, but the city did not seem to care, as if weather were simply not a significant enough event to interrupt a city like DC. Chase was surprised to find that not only were they not the only ones on the street, but there were lines outside the first two diners they passed, people huddled against the walls of the building ducked out of the wind. It made Chase laugh. Whole town is full of diners dear her grandfather had told her when she moved down to DC. It's a town of dirty deeds over breakfast, you won't like it. He had winked at her and smiled. He was right she knew, it was a town of breakfast, a town of deals and negotiations in diners, a town of crowded lunch counters. But he was wrong that she hated it. She had never felt so at home before in her life. Eventually they found a diner, a Greek diner, one that was no longer serving breakfast, which explained why there were a couple empty seats at the counter. Chase and Steven were hardly in the door when Chase's phone began to ring. Steven turned around with a panicked look on his face. + +"Relax," Chase look down at the screen, "it's just my mom. Give me five." She headed back outside. "Hi mom, what's up." + +"What's up? How is that any way to greet your mother?" + +"Sorry Mom, but I'm sorta busy. Morning meeting, work." + +"Then you aren't leaving for the storm?" + +"Wasn't planning on it, why? Should I?" + +"Oh who knows dear. The news is all panic all the time, probably it's nothing, but I was wondering if you would mind going out to the house, you now, just give it a look over, back sure Duncan got the boards on the windows, that sort of thing." + +Chase knew Duncan was her mother's neighbor, but last time she had checked he was bit old to put up starboards. "Duncan put up your windows? Jeez mom, he's like 80." + +"What choice did I have? I'm all the way out here in Vegas, the storm grounded all the flights. And I know you're not going to do it." Her mother paused a half beat, but Chase did not rise to the bait. "Anyway, that's why I'm calling you now dear. You'll have a look won't you? Unless it's too dangerous I mean. Use your judgment Chase." + +Chase nodded. "Sure mom, I'll have a look. But listen, I really half to go right now. I'll call you later okay?" Chase hung up before her mother could respond. Something was happening down the street, at the corner where tk and tk formed a rather massive intersection. Chase glanced inside, but Steven looked well occupied with his menu so she walked down toward the corner to see what the commotion was. People on the corner were transfixed by a woman darting through the intersection, skipping crosswalks and running diagonally through eight lanes of honking cars and screaming cabbies. She was wearing what might have been skirt, had someone added another inch or two of fabric, which, as Chase slowly realized, would need to be vinyl or perhaps rubber, it was hard to tell given that there was so little of it. Similarly her top might have been a shirt if the wind, or scissors or something had not made off with everything but the bare essentials necessary to keep the police from becoming too actively involved in her attire. She was teetering on the biggest pair of platform heels Chase had ever seen, also red and wildly inappropriate for walking, let along the crooked zig-zagging run they were currently engaged in. + +It wasn't everyday, even in D.C., that you saw a hooker in a red vinyl skirt try to cross an intersection full of traffic on the diagonal. Half a dozen people had stopped what they were doing to watch the spectacle, some with their mouths hanging open, gawking as the woman made it to middle, where there was no traffic. She started yelling, *wait up now sugar*, and waving her arms toward the corner where Chase and the other's stood. People near her seemed to tense up at the realization that the ongoing spectacle might involve them in some way, might ruin the fun by turning them into more than spectators. The couple next to her held each other tight, shifting their arms to get a better grip and Chase realized she had been holding her breath. The woman took off her spiked, long heels and made a second dash, this time headed for the curb just down the way from Chase. Chase decided she could not watch, didn't want to see the woman's body splattered all over tk so she turned around. But then she found it impossible not to know what was happening so she turned around again just in time to see the woman scamper to the curb just ahead of a honking bus, which she didn't seem to even notice. The woman said nothing, she bent down and put back on her shoes. There was a collective exhale and the spectators turned away, continuing on to wherever they had been headed. Chase walked back to the diner, still shaking her head to herself, wondering if the woman was certifiable. She heard someone behind her and held the door open, but no one took it from her. She glanced behind her and was surprised to see the woman from the intersection standing there. Chase raised her eyebrows at her. + +"Hey sugar." She smiled, but made no effort to take the open door from Chase. + +She's definitely crazy thought Chase, "can I help you?" + +"I know this is weird for you, talking to black people I mean," The woman smiled, but Chase felt herself blush. "Thing is honey, your name is Chase right?" + +Chase considered saying no, but she was curious. She glanced back inside. Steven's head was buried in the newspaper. Chase stepped back out to the street and let the door close behind here. "How do you know my name?" + +"Well, there you go. I thought he might be crazy." She laughed nervously. "Man asked me to give you something. Actually," She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and grinned at Chase, "he promised me five hundred dollars if I gave you this." She reached into her purse and retrieved a small slip of pink paper folded in half. She thrust it out to Chase who took it from her fingers and without looking at it said, "Okay. Thank you," as if it were perfectly normal for a stranger to be handing her a slip of paper on behalf of another stranger. + +The woman seemed to accept that it was in fact normal. She nodded. "Well, anyway. Have a good day." And she turned and walked back toward the corner. + +Chase stood there, watching the woman walk away, wondering if she was going to cross the intersection the same way again, but at the last minute she made a right disappeared around the corner. + +Chase went back inside the diner and let the door close behind her. She pulled out the slip of paper. Written in pencil, just along the bottom edge, were small block letters that spelled out a name: Reese Lawrence. She looked up and saw Steven looking quizzically over at her. She glanced down again at the sheet of paper and this time noticed that part of the pencil had been smeared, she brought it closer to her face and felt a chill run down her spin, it read *Lt.* Reese Lawrence. diff --git a/CH-2.txt b/CH-2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..789e1db --- /dev/null +++ b/CH-2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +Chase killed the headlights in the driveway and sat in the car for a minute, watching the rain lash against the windshield in pelting gusts. The sky in the rearview mirror was nearly black, though the sun would not set for at least another hour. Nera the horizon to the west, where the storm did not reach there was still a faint glow that cast an eerie orange glow on windshield making the beads of rain look like orange soda. She watched the house turning orange and noticed that the paint was peeling along the front, chips of it flaking from the window trim and the stubby pillars still holding up the porch. She watched as rain broke off bits of it and, craning forward she could see the watch pooling on the steps, a miniature see of white paint chips collecting. She made a mental note to call her mother about it. Though she had no immediate plans to do so Chase had always assumed she would end up out here, just like everyone else in her family had. She didn't like the peeling paint, it didn't bode well for her future or her past, both which were likely tied up in this house. + +She sat in the car waiting for a lull in the rain, but none came. At least this time there were no donuts to worry about. She grabbed her bags off the passenger seat, slung them over her shoulder and leap out of the car. She cross the drive in two quick strides and darted up to the side of the house where she could keep the house between her and the nearly horizontal rain. From there it was a easy stroll to the side door with hardly another drop of water hitting her. + +The house smelled stagnant and stale. She set her things on the kitchen counter and made her rounds, checking the windows upstairs and down. Back downstairs on the coffee table Chase found a bill, along with a note from Duncan explaining that he had hired two kids down the way and that Chase's mother could pay them when she returned. Chase laugh loud enough that she startled herself in the silence of the house. + +She considered pulling down the boards on the front windows to let a little air in, perhaps watch the storm, but she didn't. She went to the back door and propped it ajar with a broom handle. She sat down on the floor, marveling at the utterly wildness outside. The dark swirling center of the storm still lurked off on the horizon, but already waves from the bay were beginning to break over the old wooden dock that stretched out across the marsh and reeds behind the house. She could see the cattails the wind had strewn across the small plot of grass just past the back deck. She stuck her head out and looked around the side to see the rusting swing set still crumbled behind the flat cement slab where the shed had once stood, it too a victim of a storm. The air smelled of the sea, clean, not like the air that hung around the marsh on quite evenings. The sea smelled of something far away, something unknown. + +Hurricanes were really more her grandfather's kind of weather. He'd loved them back when they rarely, if ever, came up the Chesapeake. Her grandfather had never followed evacuation orders. If her mother was with them he would pack her and Chase in the car and send them back off to hotel room in Annapolis. But when he was alone and later when it was just he and Chase they would board the upstairs windows, buy a few days worth of food and supplies and ride out the storms in the basement. Her grandfather seems to light up at those times, become considerably younger all of the sudden. They would sit in the sun room at the back of the house, she drinking ice cold tea, he sipping a perspiring bottle of beer. They would watch as the storm rolled up the Atlantic shore toward the mouth the bay, and the barometer that hung by the door of the porch began to fall dramatically. He would tell her about movements of air, the way the clouds circled around a singular point as the storm spun over the ocean. He could spend hours talking about clouds, about the massive movements of air that, for all the technology of the age, remained more than a little mysterious to both of them. Her grandfather had never come right out with it, but she came to understand after years of listening to him that he accorded the storms some kind of consciousness. There's something in them he said, something old, something we have forgotten. Later they would go inside and eat dinner by the light of a hurricane lamp, that's what it's for, he'd say with a grin. Afterward he would pour another beer and they would, if the storm were bad enough, head down to the basement where there were two cots, a couple of chairs and an old folding table where they could sit and play cards or a board game and listen to the rain lashing against the house. Few of the storms ever came up the bay back then, at most they would drop two days the wind and rain, clouds spun out from the arms of the hurricane, and then continue north, bouncing merrily up the coast, not making landfall until well past New York. The warming ocean had changed that. + +Chase had watched it change, spending her summers at the little house on the bay ever since she was a little girl. Back then she sometimes wondered if her mother was trying to get rid of her. It was only later, after her grandfather died and her mother moved out to the house that she realized what a lonely place the bay could be. She realized then that her mother wasn't getting rid of her, her mother was trying to keep her grandfather company. + +Not that Chase had minded of course. For her the marshes and beaches of the bay were a never-ending playground far greater than any amusement park she had ever heard her friends back in Massachusetts describe. But then she didn't have many friends back in Massachusetts. She was an only child and for the most part kept to herself even from a very young age. She had never particularly liked school and was known to throw tantrums every September when her mother flew down and collected her up for the beginning of the new school year. She tolerated school, but ultimately saw it as something that kept her from being at her Grandfather's house. Even later in high school she never missed a summer on the bay. Boyfriends and college prep class all had to wait, sidelined and insignificant next to Chase's world on the Chesapeake. + +Most of the old houses on the bay like her mother's, though Chase still thought of it as her grandfather's, had long since been torn down and replaced with massive mansions that no one called home, save perhaps whatever support staff were always on hand to keep it spic and span for the absentee owners who might, at most, show up once or twice a season to host some gala affair. "The rich on terrible holidays," her grandfather would say, shaking his head and smiling. Chase was perhaps ten. She had been unable to sleep, the noise from parties across the channel would bounce off the water and into her second story window. Her grandfather brought her outside to look at the stars. To listen to the party. He knelt beside her and pointed out across the bay to a light warbling on the choppy water. "That's where Daisy lives Chase." + +"Who's Daisy?" + +"That's the question isn't it?" He gestured out again and Chase followed his finger up to the wooden light post at the end of the dock, the source of the warbling light. "See that, see how beautiful that warbling light is Chase? It's like it's dancing for us." + +She nodded and look up at her grandfather's face but he was lost somewhere out there, somewhere in the water. "it doesn't take anything really," he mumbled, "just a bit of water and the ordinary looks extraordinary... of course it always is. It always is." + +Chase remembered sitting up with her grandfather on many nights, listening to the distant laughter and music. If they spoke it was to decided whether it were family party or a butter-up party as her grandfather called the other type of party on the bay. The latter tended to be louder, less inviting and went much later, often into the dawn. Sometimes, once she was older and the rich high school boys started to spread rumors about the cute, but possibly crazy, girl down at the end of the road, from time to time an invitation would arrive. Several times Chase went, every now and then showing up with her grandfather in tow, her date for the night. Then he became to sick to go to the parties. Then he was too sick to leave the house. Then he had waited, holding out against the cancer until the the first hurricane drifted up the coast. The first night it was visible from the bay, still far out over the Atlantic, he somehow pulled himself outside, revolver in hand, and shot himself in the chest. The storm had rolled by without dropping so much as a shower. Duncan had found her grandfather on the dock by the marsh the next morning. + +Chase had not entirely inherited her grandfather's love of hurricanes, or if she had it had been tempered over the years by the increasing ferociousness with which they wrecked havoc on the east coast. + +Tonight there was no light across the bay. The old dock had long ago been washed away in a storm and no one had bothered to rebuild it. Chase contented herself with the far less impressive dock at the back of her house, which somehow managed to remain. There was nothing Gatsby-like about it though, just a simple wooden platform that was now so overgrown with reeds and grasses that it had become part of the marsh, which held it in place year after year until it was really more marsh than dock. Eventually her view of the dock and the marsh and the rain faded into darkness. The horizon disappeared and the rain began to change direction, beating against the back of the house. + +Chase closed the door and dug around the kitchen until she found a bottle of wine. She poured a glass and turned on her laptop to check the news. The weathermen droned on, projecting several paths for the storm, two of which hit D.C. proper, two which did not. All four of plowed straight through the Chesapeake. She flipped over to a more general news stream and listened to clip about a new longevity drug already on the market in Asia. Then there was a clip of the millionaire senator Bradford, the Democratic front runner of the moment, who, despite already being fantastically wealthy had for some reason decided to run for president. Chase shook her head wondering why anyone would want to do that. He was handsome though, in fact probably too good looking to be president she thought. She tapped a video note from her mother who said she was just checking in, making sure that Chase and house were together, in one piece. She decided not to respond. Instead, she poured a second glass of wine and pulled out the files she had brought along to keep herself company. There were two that intrigued her. One was an airman shot down over Guadalcanal at the beginning of the war, registered in a Japanese POW camp by the Red Cross, but unaccounted for after the Japanese surrender. Most likely it would require a trip to Japan, which she was told still did not much like anyone digging too deep into its recent past. + +But the POW case wasn't what she wanted to pursue. + +She pulled out the slip of paper that the prostitute in the impossibly short skirt had given her and stared at the name, Lt. Reese Lawrence. She smiled thinking about Steven's crack that perhaps it was simply the woman's pimp and he wanted Chase to sign up. Chase had frowned enough to make Steven feel uncomfortable and then said, "for that you get to do the research. Feed that name in your database and tell me what you get." + +Steven had managed to find the name in the database, but there was little more than an enlistment number, and a few orders that told of an assignment to flight training in San Diego and then a squadron assignment shortly thereafter. The squadron was shipped out to defend the Panama canal in January of 1942. That was it. Chase pulled a paper file upstairs, that basis for the data in Steven's database and found nothing more, save a hand written note clipped the back of the very thin file that said the airman was listed Missing in Action. That gave Chase her first feeling that something might be wrong with the Lawrence file. The handwritten note implied someone had worked the file, but there was hardly anything in it, more specifically, there was nothing in it that lent any credence to the notion that Lawrence was MIA. Either whoever had taken the case before her not worked very hard, which was possible. She mulled over the apathy of her coworkers as she slipped her wine, but lazy though they may have been it would be unusual not to at least sign the file and even more unusual to leave a hand written note. Chase had a hunch that something about Lawrence's disappearance made someone look bad. Someone with enough pull that the case had been shelved and the paperwork lost. Something like Steven's missing sniper where the bosses realized they were about to get a nice bucket of mud dropped on their faces and hurriedly made the whole thing go away. There had not been a lot of combat in the Canal area. In fact none that Chase was aware of, but of course almost half of the aircrew deaths in World War II were not combat related so the lack of Messerschmitts and Zeros in the area certainly didn't mean Lt. Lawrence hadn't gone down. In fact, with the primitive navigation tools they had used back then an alarming percentage of deaths could be attributed to pilots and navigators getting lost. The plane flew into a cloud bank and was never seen again. Just like Whitmore and Hume. Except that it was worse for pilots over the sea. It was, as the head of the coast guard search and rescue archive liked to tell her, a very big ocean out there and it was all one big hole waiting to swallow you up. Once the wreckage sank into the ocean, once the sharks got done with the survivors, there was nothing and no one left to tell the story. + +That was precisely why Chase was intrigued. Our stories are the only record of our passing and Chase hated it when she had the beginning of a story, and even the unfortunate end, but not the meat of it, not the middle where everything happened. + +Two things kept Chase awake at night. One was the thought that most stories were simply gone. The staggering number of lives that had been lived and yet left no trace overwhelmed her and left her feeling dizzy. The second was the thought that there were people out there that did not know the story of their husbands, their sons, their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, and, more recently, wives, mothers, aunts and sisters. The stories that had simply faded out. You waved goodbye full of fear and trepidation and then, that was it. There was no ending, no closure. If she had any guiding force behind her, and she was never quite sure if she did, it was this; to give the stories back, to record as many as she could so that everyone would know them, so that every life lived with leave some mark. + +Chase had loved history ever since she was a little girl. It had been part of her from a very early age. Her dolls did not have tea parties, they explored the Oregon Trail, clamored through the pine needle forests of the Sierra Nevada in search of the Donner pass and took the air with Amelia Earhart in a quest to be first around the world. Even the far end of the bathtub was nothing short of the Northwest Passage, or the Cape of Good Hope, depending on which books her grandfather had been reading to her at the time. + +She was told she had an active imagination. She had heard her mother say as much many times, but Chase never saw it that way, even when she was older and knew what her mother had meant. For her it was never really imagination, it was retelling. It was reliving, finding herself inside the story. For Chase it was a chance to become a part of something much larger than the here and now, something bigger. + +It surprised no one that she majored in history. It was even less surprising that she stuck with it all the way to a PhD. What had surprised everyone, except perhaps her grandfather, though he had been dead some time by then, was that she had turned her back on what her professors assured her would be a promising academic career to work at a small, overlooked government bureau with little funding and no real career path to offer. + +But it was a chance to reclaim stories. And for Chase it was always about the stories. Without the stories there was no point to history. Only statisticians cared who fought whom where and when. Only hindsight ever found a pattern to history, the truth was that history made no more linear sense than the present. Eliminate the illusions and misconceptions about what history is and eventually you discover the kernel of truth that Chase had always known: it is nothing but stories. Lose track of them and you lose everything. + +Chase set down the pink slip of paper pulled up a search window on her laptop. She hesitated, staring at the screen. She had been putting off a web search all day because she didn't want to know, she didn't want to lose the mystery. At the same time she had vague sense of unease about the whole thing. The strange encounter with the prostitute had left her feeling strangely exposed. Anyone could walk into the DPMO and ask for her, but whomever had sent the note did not. Yet whomever had sent her the piece of paper obviously knew who she was. What creeped her out more than a little bit was that this person seemed to not only knew the what DPMO was, but apparently had the free time to followed her around. Or perhaps he had only followed her that day. Perhaps, thought Chase, suddenly feeling little sheepish for being paranoid, perhaps this person had in fact gone looking for her at her office and, discovering that she was playing hooky, had simply been pointed in her direction as she walked out of the building. But then why not approach her directly? And even if it wasn't direct for some reason, why employ an outlandish prostitute to deliver your rather simple message. That of couse assumed the woman who handed her the paper was telling the truth. Chase considered for a moment that perhaps the story of the man was simply a ruse, something along the lines of I have this friend... But that seemed preposterous given the circumstances. + +She went through her memory, trying to see the people on the street when they had walked out of the building, when they had been talking on their way to the dinner, was their anyone familiar? Anyone that had been there more than once, anyone that was familiar because they were following her? She simply didn't see the world in those terms so there was nothing. She closed her eyes and went through her morning in her mind as though she might suddenly notice lurking in the shadows someone she had never noticed before. Nothing came. You can't will yourself to notice things that you have already not noticed she thought. Or maybe you could, but she was pretty sure you would need a hypnotist. + +She sighed and poured another glass of wine. Did it really matter? She was interested in the name, not he reasoning behind whomever gave her the name. If she just wanted the story it didn't matter who give her the name or why. The story was there to be found either way, the why didn't really matter. + +She shoved the thoughts from her head and focused on the far more interesting question, what did this person expect Chase to do with the name? After turning it over in her head for a while, she decided she would do whatever she would have done if the name had come from her boss rather than some cloak and dagger obsessed individual. She plugged Lt. Otto Lawrence into the search box and hit return. Two dozen hits blinked up instantly. She narrowed the search by date, wrapping it around the years of the war and found almost nothing, which was odd. There should have been an official notice, something posted in the papers by the family. And of course the old War Department's records were also available online, to say nothing of WWII memoires, the sheer volume of which generally meant that almost everyone had been mentioned at some point. In every case Chase had worked so far there had always been an MIA notice or a KIA notice somewhere on the web. She expanded the search to pull in a few years after the war, since she realized that the MIA notice in Lt. Lawrence's file didn't actually have a date. Perhaps Lt. Lawrence had survived World War II and disappeared later in Korea or Vietnam. She added in enough time to cover everything up through the first Gulf War and found a few hits on Lawrence, including a Lawrence foundation, but most of it seemed unrelated. She finished her glass of wine and sat down on the sofa. + +With little to add to her notes on Lt. Reese Lawrence her mind swung back around to the question of who wanted her to find him. She tried to distract herself. She logged into her news stream, checked the latest weather, and replied to a message from her mother and wondered absently if whomever was, apparently, stalking her--the word made her glance up suddenly and look around the room as if an ax murderer might have suddenly slipped in--was also watching her public news feed. Her profile listed her job for all the world to see and she wasn't shy about posting questions when she needed outside help. If whomever it was knew enough about the DPMO to ask for her they must have also known that she didn't have the rank to charge off on her own whim, pursuing whatever she wanted. Her bosses, on the other hand, had that luxury, so why not ask them? Unless of course there was something about this Lt. Otto Lawrence or something about the nature of his disappearance that the mystery man didn't want revealed to higher ups. So, if the person wanted to know about Lt. Lawrence, but didn't want the military to know about him then why not go to an outsider? + +She dug around the web, looking for freelancers that specialized in veteran affairs. The sort of investigators rich families used when they wanted to solve something quietly. Something off the books. There were a few, but judging by the client lists they were allowed to divulge most would have no trouble accessing the same records Chase could, and probably a lot more. No real reason to not use an outsider. But this person had not. This person was trying to use Chase Kovele. When she phrased it in those terms the whole affair suddenly sounded entirely crazy. Why in the world would anyone want Chase specifically? Chase wrote why at the bottom of an already full sheet of questions and notes about Lt. Lawrence. She drew a box around the question and stared at it while she listened to the rain lashing against the house. The wind was rattling the window boards, but so far everything had held just fine. + + + +------------------------ +This needs to go, but there needs to be some good reason why this person, whoever it might turn out to be, has decided to pursue this via Chase................... + +Athother problem, though not necessarily with the section below is that the name is too common, there would be millions of Google hits, so either I need to rewrite the above slightly and make her process of narrowing it down a bit more believable, or I make the name something less common. + +Then it hit her. You use Chase Kevele to send a message to the people above her. This person had known that Chase would walk into the DPMO and start asking questions. And of course she already had. Or at least had sent Steven to do it for her. They wanted to get someone's attention and they were using her to do it. The thought made her angry. You logged into her site and posted a message to the web. "I am not your errand girl, Mr. Paper. Find someone else" A couple of her friends popped in to ask what they hell she was talking about. Her college roommate took it as an anti-media rant, but as the stream of the web rushed past it was quickly lost without further comment. She closed the laptop and poured another class of wine. She was sure whomever it was would be watching. Your move Mr. Paper. diff --git a/CH-3.txt b/CH-3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4ca2daa --- /dev/null +++ b/CH-3.txt @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +Norm Canton retired from the Navy as a Commander to undertake a distinguished career as an occasional pinochle player, sometime golfer and frequent partaker in the 'leaven at lenny's breakfast group, a gang of retirees that frequented the Denny's down that street from his new condo on the golf course. Despite the, by many standards quite busy, retirement schedule, Norm could never shake the uncomfortable feeling that he was forgetting something, or that there was something he needed to do, somewhere to be. He had never had much practice in the art of loafing and, after years of it dangling carrot-like in front of him he found, regrettably, that it did not suit him. + +He was a stout man, barrel chested and square jawed in a way that suited a career Navy man. He kept his gray hair cropped short, they way it had been ever since the war, the way it would always be. He had developed a habit of rubbing his chin while thinking, something he willed himself to do early on in his career because he found it gave his men some extra measure of confidence in what he was about to say. The habit stuck and though it had been years since Norm sent men off carrier decks to die in the air over foreign countries, he had never stopped rubbing his chin when he got lost in some train of thought. + +He found himself doing it now more than ever. Since Evelyn, his wife of forty years, had passed on his loafing retirement days had grown even more irritating to him. He tried to do like she said, keep yourself busy Norm. He got more serious about the model airplanes he had always built in his spare time. Serious enough to enter his intricately detailed creations in contests around the country. He found, on attending a few scale modeler conventions, that he was not the only ex-Navy man with the large rough hands who nevertheless spent hours on end pinning delicately etched plastic and thin decal insignia to tiny scale models of the planes he had once called home. It was better than watching television, but it wasn't quite what he was looking for. For that he had to run into Ed Wald. Or rather Wald had run into him. Both men still attended the annual reunions for pilots and crew of the 234 bomber group, but they rarely talked otherwise until Norm had moved down to Annapolis. It was at the meeting two years ago that Wald, whom Norm knew had left the service shortly after the war and, from what Norm heard, had done quite well for himself in the stock market, approached him about organizing the archive. In the end it proved to be the thing that had, prior to that day, been missing from retirement. It wasn't quite a good as looking after a carrier air group at sea, but it had been a long time since he'd done that anyway. Now he got to look after the memory of a carrier air group at sea. + +The archive, such as it was, was really just the storeroom in the back of Ed Wald's local VFW. For reasons Norm could never track down, Wald had become the de facto keeper of the squadron's memorabilia and non-essential records ever since the 234th had been official retired at the end of the Vietnam War. In typical military fashion papers and photos had simply been thrown into boxes and unceremoniously dumped in Wald's lap. Busy with his day trading at the time, Wald had simply dumped them on to the store room. It was just a makeshift solution with a more long term plan to be forthcoming. But of course that plan never came forth and eventually the task seems too monumental to even discuss, let alone do anything about. Until that is, Wald had met Norm at the reunion. What Norm discovered, after he had already agreed to the task, was a singularly massive mountain of paper and files that stretched from floor to ceiling and spanned nearly 40 years of flying history. Paper and boxes completely consumed a desk that Norm didn't unearth until his third or fourth day of excavations. The first day Wald was trying to point out a stack of boxes near the back when Norm made the mistake of turning around too fast only to collide with a stack of paper that crashed to the floor and blocked his escape. "Well, see, there you go, somewhere to start," said Wald as he gingerly retreated out the the room. + +It had been a monumental task, one that had kept him occupied for the better part of a year now and he still wasn't completely finished. But Norm had managed to dig up and digitally restore a series of the old photos from his own beginnings as navigator flying out of Panama. Norm had the photos framed and hung in a ramshackle, but Norm thought pleasingly so, manner behind the VFW bar. + +Norm was studying a photo of Wald's old plane, the Tigress, contemplating the scripted lettering that ran across the flared exhaust cowling and sloped back down under the nose art, a long thin-legged nurse straddling a bomb. Norm was wondering for the five hundredth time why the hell a nurse would straddle a bomb when he heard the screen door behind him slam shut. He slowly spun around on the barstool and was about to tell whomever it was to go away when he saw that there was a far more real long legged, though clearly not a nurse, woman silhouetted in the darkness of the VFW. + +Norm studied her in silence before he said, "may I help you?" + +"I'm looking for Norman Canton." + +He couldn't see much of her with the light behind her, but she looked young, not much over thirty. "Hmm. What do you need that old fart for?" He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at her. + +"I heard he's organizing the squadron photos and was hoping he could help me find some information." + +Norm chuckled, "who told you that?" + +She sat down on the bar stool next to him and smiled. She was young, probably not a day over thirty he decided, with black hair that was cut short, just above her shoulders, like a military woman he thought. When she smiled her dark eyes relaxed and took on a good humored appearance that Norm found trustworthy, though he noticed that when she stopped smiling they had a very driven look. + +"I can't really say who told me that Mr Canton was organizing photos." + +Norm smiled "MmmHmm, I can't really tell you where Mr. Canton is..." + +"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound rude there Mr. Canton, I just really don't know who told me that. I got an anonymous message that I should talk to you." + +"If you knew who I was why did you ask for me?" Norm eyed her suspiciously. + +She gave him her best disarming smile, "it seemed the polite way to begin. But yes, the man sweeping outside told me you were in here 'studying the photos again' as he put it." + +Norm snorted and turned back around. + +She spun her barstool around and followed his gaze, taking in the jumble of photos, mean and airplanes, tents, racks of bombs. She caught the name Tigress on one of the planes. "Panama, right?" + +He was startled and made no effort to hide it. "You seem to know an awful lot about me." + +"Not you. The 234th carrier squadron." She extended her hand, "Chase Kevele, I work at the Defense POW Missing Persons Office." + +Chase noticed him hesitate an instant and then he took her hand and smiled. "The POW office huh? You people do good work." + +She smiled. "We try." + +"What can I do for you?" + +"Well, it's a bit strange. To tell you the honest truth Mr. Canton, we're not looking so good on this one." + +"Call me Norm." + +"Okay Norm, here's the thing. My bosses gave me a case, gave me a name that I'm supposed to track down, locate, recover and file away right?" She watched him nod politely and decided he wasn't buying her simpleton act, but she was too far in to stop now, she plowed ahead. "Well, I went to find the file that would give me a starting point and it turns out the be a very incomplete file. There's only some enlistment papers, an order sending the cadet to flight school and then a transfer notice to the 234th. Somewhere along the way he was apparently even promoted all the way to lieutenant, but there's no record of that at all in the main archive. Well I was working the case as best I could." She leaned in conspiratorially, "by which I mean I moved on to something that had papers." + +Norm raised he eyebrows, but did not return her smile. "It's been several months, I'd put it out of my mind by this point, I mean, what could I do? Then, out of nowhere, just after that storm last week actually, I get a message to my inbox saying that I should come talk to you. Weird right?" + +"That is odd," said Norm though his voice said something else, more like that's irritating or that's boring, Chase wasn't entirely sure which. "What'd you say his name was?" Norm heaved himself off the stool and walked around behind the bar. He poured another bit of whiskey in his glass and then pulled up another and set it in front of Chase. She shrugged and he filled it for her. + +"I'm looking for a Lt. Reese Lawrence who, last thing I know, was assigned to the 234th, which then shipped out to Panama." + +Norm stared down at her glass. Chase wanted to pick it up and drink it down to help ease her nerves but she didn't want to break his lost in space spell in case he was tracking down the name somewhere deep the recess of memory. Finally he looked up, met her gaze for a moment and walked back around the bar, calling from near the end, "that name doesn't ring a bell." He sat down beside her and raised his glass, "to the fighting '34th." They toasted and she slugged back the whiskey in a single shot. She noticed Norm just sipped at his. "I was in Panama. I was there when we shipped out, flew down in a Dauntless, Blue Bessy was the nose art. Did fourteen months in that godforsaken jungle and then I got malaria and rotated back stateside. I was stateside for most of '43, training navigators at Crissy Field in San Francisco. Then they decided malaria or no they needed people in the Pacific. So off I went. Anyway, I don't remember anyone named Lawrence. Don't think I met anyone by that name in the whole war actually." + +Chase nodded and was about to press her case when Norm got up off the stool. "Of course it's been a long time," he gestured toward the closet, "all the records we have are over are over here if you want to look." He walked over to the back room and unlocked the door. "Can't imagine this stuff will be too helpful though, none of it's official. Mostly just photos and old plaques and the like." Canton stood by the door looking inside as Chase made her way over. + +"Photos are exactly what I'm after Mr. Canton, thank you." + +Chase spent over an hour digging through the files, most of which were letters and photos to and from home, along with a few post flight reports and other paper work that would, were it not she guessed for the nostalgia of the men who lived through it, have long since been sent to a pulping mill by now. + +From time to time Norm poked his head in the door to see how she was doing, or answer a question, but mainly he let her have the run of the place, which struck her as odd because she had a nagging feeling there was something he wasn't telling her. After a while he retreated back out to his whiskey and photos and Chase started using her phone to scan some of the photographs still in the archive. Pictures of the planes and their crews, hardly more than boys, posing against a backdrop of palms and canvas tents. It looked hot, nearly everyone's t-shirts were ringed in sweat. + +Sometimes she went back out to the bar and Norm pointed out the faces he remembered. Then she would go back into the archive and login into the DPMO site, uploading photos and tagging them with names, which could be used to find service numbers. For every man he pointed out, Norm had a story; Dory the mechanic who had dropped a thousand pound bomb on the runway causing the entire airfield to evacuate or the time Ed Wald, who figure prominently into a number of the tales, had snuck into the base hospital and made off with two tanks of nitrous oxide to liven up the new years party. Chase tagged Wald in a photo and made a note that she would interview him at some point. The most useful thing she found in the still quite disorganized closet was a pair of squadron christmas photos, one take in 1941 in San Diego and another from 1942 in Panama. It would be hard work, boring work she knew, but she had done it before and she knew she could go through and match service record photos with the faces in the christmas images and perhaps, by process of elimination, at least find out what Reese Lawrence had looked like. A picture was, after all, worth a thousand words. Especially when it came to jogging the world's memory about things it seemed to want to forget. + +The sun was setting by the time Norm walked her to her car. She thanked him, left a copy of her card and promised she'd let him know if she ever found her mystery man. She watched him in the rearview mirror, standing there in the parking lot, waving as she pulled out into the street. + + + +After she left Norm went back inside. No one would come tonight. It was Tuesday night, everyone went to Walt's house for poker on Tuesdays. Norm went inside and locked the door behind him. He went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of Dewers and set it on the bar. He pulled the phone over from the wall and sat down. He poured himself a shot and slugged it back. He poured another and drank it. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd been thinking about all day. The connection was bad, the line warbled like it was underwater, but he recognized the voice. "We need to talk." + diff --git a/CH-4.txt b/CH-4.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ac9fa9e --- /dev/null +++ b/CH-4.txt @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +"That's no reason not to vote his way." Charley looked completely serious. For a split second Reese considered launching himself over the massive desk between them and trying to strange Charley for being so pragmatic. It was like the man had no idea what principles were. But then that was part of why Reese depended on him. + +Reese always knew what he should do. + +Charley always knew what Reese needed to do. + +"Charley, there are half a dozen reasons," Reese stood up wearily and walked around the front of the desk, slide an ornate fountain pen holder out of the way and sat down on the edge. "My personal favorite though is that Bill Tyson is an asshole. The biggest asshole in the party if you ask me." Resse crossed his arms and leaned back. His office was bigger than what most junior senators were afforded. Reese knew his father was behind that somehow, though he had never been able to figure out precisely how. In the end he had given up and moved in. But he had insisted on bringing his own desk, his own bookshelves, his own chairs, all from the governors mansion back in TK. The bookshelves were even filled with his own books, most of which Reese had actually read, something that never ceased to amaze reporters who would notice the spine of some poetry volume or a novel and, thinking that Reese wouldn't pick up on a quote, would drop one in casual conversation when they could, to try to trip him up and at a little humor to their otherwise doomed for the back pages pieces. But Reese rarely missed the allusions and never the quotes. His sister was a poet, he read what she sent him. Eventually word got around that TK had a literate junior senator and, at least for now, the press had been almost universally kind. It had even started to move from the back pages. Of course it didn't hurt that he was the same age as John F Kennedy had been at his prime or that he looked the part as well, slightly wavy dark hair that framed a face that had attracted no shortage of dates, though thus far no Mrs. Bradford. + +"I could find you plenty of people with reason to say Reese Bradford is an asshole." Charley chuckled. His chair creaked as he leaned back and grinned up at Reese. "Shit, I meet people who think you're an asshole just because of your name." + +Reese cringed, but he knew Charley was right. As usual. It wasn't Reese, or at least it was rarely Reese. Few people who had ever met him had, to the best of his knowledge, ever called him an asshole. Some people didn't like the color of his skin, which was too white to be from Maryland and definitely too white to be running against an incumbent black president. But the reason most people didn't like Reese was because his father was rich, and by extension, in most people's minds, so was he. In truth he was rich. And in truth he had not earned any of the money. In a way I am an asshole, he thought. I should just give it away, give everything away and join a monastery and then after a while come back and say hey everyone, here I am, I have no money, I am poorer than you, will you have me now? But Reese knew they would not. The only thing more offensive to someone struggling to get by than being rich is to be rich and renounce your riches. Fuck you and, oh fuck you again. + +Reese sighed. "Goddamn name." + +Charley groaned. "Please. Spare me the hardships of being a Bradford." + +The smile had left his face and Reese realized that on the family score, even Charley had lost faith in him. + +"Look, just give the asshole your vote. Get his pork bill that no one cares about through the committee no one really cares about and we can nudge someone else to shoot down later if it really bothers you that much. Or you can get over it by then and focus on getting some face time in New Hampshire. Either way, we win and no one really loses." Charley smiled again. "But if you really want to fuck Bill Tyson," Charley raised his hands and sighed, "you can. I mean, don't let me stand in your way. But do recognize that you won't be fucking him very hard or very well. And he will come back on you. He'll turn around in fuck you like sailor on shore leave when we head up to New Hampshire. Shit, you won't even been able to get your face on a milk carton, let alone in the debates." + +"All right, fine. I'll let it go... what else is there today?" + +Charley pulled up his tablet and skimmed down the list. "A few signatures Ev will bring by when we're finished, a couple meetings this afternoon and, oh, your father called." + + + ------- + + +"Let me get this straight, you think you can go through the service records and match the enlistment photos, or whatever photos you have against the guys " Steven was talking with his mouth full again. Chase cringed and wondered how he could fail to realize he was doing it. She had tried to tell herself that maybe the sight of partially dissicated hambuger was art. Living art. She had failed. Now she just insisted they sit side by side at a counter whenever they went out for lunch. + +"That's the plan yes." She sipped her coffee, felt the acid rumbling in her stomach. + +"Well, okay, if you help me with this Parsons case then I'll help you pull these files." Steven pushed back the plate of fries and twisted on his stool to face Chase. "Have you told Littrell what's going on?" + +"Of course not." Chase liked her boss. Littrell shared her genuine enthusasim for the work. She had actually spent most of the morning debating whether or not to tell him about her freelance case as she had come to think of it. But she couldn't shake the feeling that that was exactly what her anonymous tipster -- her employer she thought suddenly -- wanted her to do. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction until she had the satisfaction of knowing who they were. "Besides I've already run his name through everything we have. I know as much as you do. Those files you found in the main library are still all I have." Chase turned all the way around and looked out at the street. It was finally Autumn. People had on overcoats, the northern winds were starting to blow. + +"That's not true. There was a handwritten note in the file right?" + +Chase nodded. + +"That means someone else looked into the case at some point... What sort of paper was it?" + +"What?" Chase had only been half listening, watching a man parked across the street, sitting in a green Jaguar, reading a newspaper. "What sort of paper? I don't know, paper." + +Steven turned around again. "Pull the file again, figure out what kind of paper it is." + +"Why the hell do I care?" + +"Because it might give you some clue as to when the person looked into it. Figure out when and you might be able to get Littrell to pull the assignments log and find our who looked into it. Then you can find out what they know." Steven smiled, clearly proud of this leap of logic, which, Chase had to admit, was pretty good. + +"All right. I'll do that tomorrow, this afternoon I'm dedicating to your Sgt. Parsons." + + + +Even with Steven's help it took them the rest of the week to match the service photos to the men in Norm Canton's squadron christmas photo. Int he end they came up to two short. One was a short stocky dark haired man sitting on the wing of a P29, legs dangling in the air above the others in the photo. He was one of five that had climbed on the plane which led Chase to think perhaps he was her man, since she considered it unlikely that enlisted men, squardon mechanics would be climbing on the wings of the plane, but she couldn't be sure since most of the men were not in uniform and those that were, she still couldn't make out their ranks. She'd tried putting the image under a microscope, but it hadn't help. She'd scanned it and sent the file to the tech departmnet but they just looked at her like she was insane when she asked if they would enhance the photo. She heard them laughing as she walked down the half to the elevator. ' + +The other unknown man in the image was squatting down in the very front, sandy hair swept back with pomade. His smile leaped out of the photo and Chase seriously doubted that he was the sort of man anyon would forget. There did seem to be something mischeivus in his eyes though, or perhaps, she thought, I've been spending way to much time staring at this photo. She flung the image across the table and closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. "Damnit" Her voice startled her in the quiet of her apartment. She got up and opened the fridge looking for something to eat. There was some week old chinese and half a bottle of Rose. She grabbed the wine and flopped down on the couch. She pulled out the cork with her teeth and drank from the bottle. The only way to drink Rose she thought with a giggle. + +The note inside the file proved to be from a medium size legal pad varieties of which had, according to Steven's extensive searching, been manufactured for over thirty years. At first she considered this no help at all, but Steven pointed out that while it was unlikely she'd ever know who had put it there she did know that apparently the DPMO had at most started looking into Lt. Lawrence in the early to mid 1970s. In other words it was unlikely any family had been pestering the department after the war. It was unlikely that anyone had missed Lt. Lawrence. + +Chase was restless. She opened the back door and went out to the balcony. It was a lovely night, crisp and clear. She stared up at Big Dipper, followed Orion's belt down the horizon were the faint purple of the distant sunset still lingered. She drank more of the wine, sat down in the white pastic chair left by the previous tenant. She could smell the Potomac, she thought about the river, running by somewhere down the hill, running down to the Cheasepeake, join the bay anbd heading out the sea. All that water disappearing into so much more water. All those people disappearing somewhere, disappearing into so much water, so much time. + +The chime of her phone broke the peaceful still of the night. She shivered and went inside. It was a number she didn't know. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/CH-5.txt b/CH-5.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07efe46 --- /dev/null +++ b/CH-5.txt @@ -0,0 +1,118 @@ + + +After she left Norm went back inside. No one would come tonight. It was Tuesday night, everyone went to Walt's house for poker on Tuesdays. Norm went inside and locked the door behind him. He went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of Dewers and set it on the bar. He pulled the phone over from the wall and sat down. He poured himself a shot and slugged it back. He poured another and drank it. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd been thinking about all day. The connection was bad, the line warbled like it was underwater, but he recognized the voice. "We need to talk." + + ------ + + + + +It took her four days in the DoD archives but she managed to match nearly everyone in the photo to their service records. In the end she came up two short. The photo Norm Canton had given her either included two men that were not part of the squadron or its auxiliary crews, or she had found her mystery man. Twice. + +She was back in Annapolis by the end of the week. + +This time Norm Canton wasn't around, but another former '34er by the name of Ed Wald let her in the office and, for what it's worth he said, after staring for a while at the photo said he did not recall either of her mystery men. + +She spent half of the night poring over more photos, trying to find the men in any other photos, but there was nothing. By the time she gave up the bar out front was in full swing with Ed and several other men shooting pool and playing old Merle Haggart and Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox. Chase let them buy her a couple of drinks and listened to a few stories about Norm's efforts in organizing the archive. Eventually hunger persuaded her to leave and she followed their advice to an all-night diner down by the wharf. It was starting to rained when she pulled in and gathered up her things for an all-night retracing of her steps. + +She found a empty booth by the window and watched the rivulets of rain run down the window while she waited on a patty melt and fries. She was just finishing the food when a man approached her booth and sat down without saying anything. It took her a minute, but she recognized him form the VFW. She was startled enough by his strange entrance that she didn't say anything, she just stared stupidly at him. he seemed nervous, as though he were in hurry, but unsure how to begin. + +"Ms. Chase..." + +"Just Chase." + +"Sorry. Chase. This man you're looking for, is it all the same to you if you find him or you don't?" + +Chase was taken aback, it wasn't a question she had been expecting. She thought about saying something about the family's right to know, but sensed that the man, Shummaker, she remembered Wald calling him, though she had never caught a first name, wasn't going to buy the family angle. "I guess it might be, but I like to think that everyone's story is worth being told, that we all live on a little bit as long as someone knows our story, knows something of us." + +Shummaker nodded, rubbed his chin and said nothing for a moment. "Some stories have a lot of pain in them..." + +"Almost all of them do." + +"So why tell them?" + +Chase sighed, she had thought that Shummaker might have some helpful tidbit to pass along, but she was beginning to doubt that. "Avoiding the pain doesn't make it go away. You can't just bury it and hope that somehow no one will ever find it." + +"Hmph. I think you might be able to do just that actually. A lot of things happened in the war, a lot of things that each of us who is there will take to the grave and story will be gone, the pain will be gone." + +Chase didn't say anything. + +He nodded some more, picked up the salt shaker and rolled it between his hands. "I'm dying." + +It caught her off guard and before she could say anything he went on. + +"I have cancer and it's going to kill me. The closer I get to the end the more I think that all those little lies we've all told over the years, even the very innocent lies, they all add up to something bad, something very bad that we have to drag around with us everyday..." + +"Lies?" + +He waved his hand. "Nothing specific to do with your man, I mean all our lies, the lies you tell yourself at night when you look int he mirror before you go to bed, the lies you whisper in the children's ears to help them sleep at night. All of it builds up, it grows, it becomes a thing inside you that you have to carry around. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to unburden myself just because I know I'm dying. I don't care about me at all, it's them I want to help..." he trailed off and fell silent. + +Chase pulled out the photo. She pointed to the man she thought was Lt. Lawrence. "That's Lawrence isn't it?" + +Shummaker looked down at the image. He nodded. + +"Why were they lying to me then? What happened?" + +Shummaker smiled at her. "I don't know. I assume that's what you're going to find out. I just know that one day he was gone and no one ever told me anything. In fact Wald and TK would never talk about it. I spent three years during the war with those two, we had no secrets. Except for that one." + +She nodded. "So, when you say he left, what... he went AWOL?" + +Shummaker look uncomfortable. "Something like that." + +Then it clicked and her eyebrows shot up. "He deserted?" + +Shummaker looked down at his coffee. "I really don't know." + +"I'm looking for a deserter?" + +"You're looking for someone who doesn't want to be found." + +Chase's heart was beating so hard she was sure Shummaker could here. She said nothing and he eased out of the booth without looking at her again. She watched him walk out of the diner and amble across the parking lot to a '70s Impala. She couldn't get the idea out of her head, I could be looking for someone who's still alive. + + + + +------------------------ + + + +"Let me get this straight, you think this Lt. Lawrence was a deserter?" Steven was chewing with his mouth open again. Chase cringed. He did it whenever he was distracted by conversation he considered more interesting than whatever he was eating. It was part of the reason Chase almost always insisted they sit side by side at a counter whenever they went out for lunch. She kept her head down, sipped her coffee. + +"I don't know." She spun the cup in her hands. "It's a possibility." + +"You know what that means right? This guy could still be alive." Steven pushed back the plate of fries and twisted his tool to face Chase. "Holy shit. I mean holy shit. Have you thought this through?" + +"I check the records he'd be 93 if he were..." + +"Have you told Tk bassman what's going on?" + +"Of course not. This has already gone too far to bring it to TK bossman now." She had actually been considering doing just that all day, but she wasn't about to admit it to Steven. And she couldn't shake the feeling that that was exactly what her anonymous tipster wanted her to do. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction until she had the satisfaction of knowing who they were. "Besides I've already run the name through everything we have and there's nothing much there. Certainly no mention of desertion. There was even a note saying he was MIA, so I'm not the first person to look into this one." Chase shook her head. "Part of the problem is that record keeping in the Caribbean Theater was apparently some sort of a joke during the war. Or at least early on in the war." + +"I didn't even know there was a Caribbean theater..." Steven stuff the last of the chicken sandwich in this mouth and wipe the crumbs from his lips. + +"I didn't either," admitted Chase. "But I do now and by all accounts it was a fucked up command." + +"How do you mean?" + +Chase shrugged. "Usual power struggles, Navy not wanting to be under the Army, Army appointed to the top position by someone in Washington... the thing is Washington cared enough to keep an eye on the top guys. The canal was down there you know, they considered that a prime target from both sides. There were U-Boats all over the Caribbean as early as 1938. So Washington was always watching closely enough that the infighting stayed mostly out of sight. But the top guys didn't care enough to pay attention to much that was going on below them it seems. And the bases were so spread out, no one was really watching what happened. Well. Except for the Canal, they were watching the Canal. I've found records for nearly every ship that went through it from 1939 until the end of the war." + +"Hmm, I thought the Canal was all we had. Guantanmo I guess. I didn't know we had any other bases down there." Steven waved for the bill. + +"We didn't and we don't really anymore. But when the Germans invaded Belgium and then France we took over a lot of their bases. Except for some French commander who decided to throw in his lot with the Vichy government." + +"Fucking French." Steven laughed. + + +They were headed back to the office when Chase spotted a familiar looking dark green Jaguar in her rearview mirror. She had already seen twice in as many days, but had dismissed it both times. I'm getting paranoid she thought. This time she wasn't so sure. She made a few deliberate but unnecessary turns and the car stuck with them. Steven asked where she was going, but she didn't say anything and he fell silent as she zigzagged her way toward the mall. She waited until they were on Peensyvania avenue and she put a large SUV between them. + +"Take the wheel." + +"What?" + +"Take the wheel dammit." Steven reached over and helf the wheel as Chase climbed into the backseat. "Now slide over." Steven did as he was told. + +"Where do you want me to go?" + +"Get in the right lane, I'm getting out at the light. She glanced behind them and sure enoug, it was still there, changing lanes, but Steven darted over faster and car was still int he lane next to them and five cars back when they stopped at the light. Claire ducked down in the seat and opened the door. "Just drive straight, I'll call you," She said and ducked out the door, keeping low to the ground. She crusched behind a set of newspaper racks and ignored the two mean who stopped to stare. She waited until the light turned green and then carefully moved forward the racks until the Jaguar passed and she stood up, pen in hand and wrote downt he license plate with shaking hands. As soon aas she had it she turned down a side street and walked as fast as she could toward the crowd of people exiting a long row of buses parked between the Washington and Lincoln monuments. She fumbled through her purse and pulled out her phone. It took her several fumbling tries to find Stevens name on her phone. Get ahold of yourself she kept repeating. Breathe. She calmed down a little talking to Steven. She told him to go back to work without her, she would take the metro back later. She needed to be outside, to walk off her nervous energy and to be lost in the crowds for a while. She walked the entire length of the Mall. + +A couple of kids sat on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Somebody out on the quad was flying a kite. The leaves had already started to turn orangish, bits of yellow. It was just and another ordinary Tuesday afternoon in Washington D.C. But someone was obviously keeping tabs on her. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_Cuts.txt b/_Cuts.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e1c9b2f --- /dev/null +++ b/_Cuts.txt @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ + + +When she got home everyone at the office treated her like a pariah. The crazy girl that had bolted off to Europe to chase the Whitmore file. The girl that didn't know when to stop. Chase had been the one to suggest she take a day in the weekly coffee and donuts rotation, it might, he told her, help them feel a bit more like you're a human. In his typically sly manner, he had neglected to mention that it would also get him off the hook for Wednesdays. + + + +Chase watched her staring out the windows the break room, wondering what she was thinking, he could see from his desk, even through the blinds, the furrowed browser and he could imagine the hard green of her eyes, the way they really did seem to glint when she narrowed them. + + +She was still thinking about, anticipating it even, when she stopped for donuts and coffee She knew the rest of the office was uncomfortable around her. + + + +I have seven open cases at the moment. I'm about to close one that is yes, a bit old and was fun to track down. But as for what I get next, you know that's up to Peters, not me. So go back out there, tell them that I have no desire to make them look bad, I just happen to really like this job. Tell them they need to fucking relax. Maybe get a life, garden, carve miniatures, golf, something, I don't know, live while you can, indulge yourself, do something you love, that sort of stuff. I mean, if most of them don't like this job, and I have gathered that impression in my brief time here, why the hell do they do it? And even more to the point, why do you do it Chase? + + + Unlike most, it did not break her, it did not produce the mild sense of hopelessness the cut through the rest of Skull and Bones like a current of quiet despair. + diff --git a/_Outline.txt b/_Outline.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d1a6499 --- /dev/null +++ b/_Outline.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +So Chase is somewhat established as stubborn. Now we just need to show her finding the next case, the case that will have her trailing an MIA pilot in Panama. The pilot bombed and eventually took over a submarine carrying nazi gold to argentina at the end of the war, the pilot flew a floatplane with depth charges and was looking for targets of opportunity when he see the the Uboot and attacks, he blows a hole in the uboat and it raises the white flag and contacts him on shortwave asking him to land and the rescue the crew, he does and makes a deal with the commander to help him move the gold and hide it somewhere. They move it to the corn islands and bury it. The pilot disappears a month later along with the co-pilot and gunner. She tracks them all the way through their early training and then down to panama to guard the canal. Then she goes down to Panama on tip from the pilots daughter that her father never died in action, was never in fact missing as far as she knows, he simply moved to panama after the war,brought his wife down and so on. Nicole meets up with Sil hawkard, sailor extrodinare whom she hires as a translator and to take her out to dive the wreck of the uboat. or to scan the seafloor with radar looking for the sub. She calls up her old friend from germany and he traces the details of the uboat and tell her that there is in fact a missing uboat and that's when she goes to panama. + +The man who sets the whole thing in motion, the one who gives her that piece of paper with the name on it is acting on behalf of someone who doesn't have the resurces to move the gold, but wants the americans, a senator or someone to know that they have it? ala cryptonomincon perhaps? + +Pilot: Otto Lawrence. + + + +The other mystery man is the senator's father who financed his early business with the nazi gold taken from the Uboat, + + +Okay so the men were based in the Carribean, the official details of what happened are languishing on Puerto Rico, the naval base at San Juan. That's where she meets Sil, they go looking for the wreck. Also note that there was 250 million in gold brought from france before the fall in 1941. It was sent to Admiral Georges Robert who then affirmed his allegiance to the Vichy regile and became custodian of the gold. So perhaps the men never see a uboat or anything else of the sort, they just hear about the gold and know that one of the transport boats it torpedoed? But it takes Chase quite a while to figure that out. + +This isn't Nazi gold buried the basement of some bank or wherever vandamere bush put his gold. This was money stolen from the french government by a us navy officer who them had himself surgically altered and returned home under a false name. + + +They talk about why Chase does it, establish him as a nerdy guy in wool sweater vest maybe, based on the character from Rubicon. They go to lunch and then a man gives Nicole a name, she goes back and runs it through the WWII database, it isn't there. She goes to the files and finds the man's file, but there's nothing in it. She meets with the mysterious stranger again (the first time they meet he gives her a piece of chalk and tells her to mark a bench and he will be in touch with her), he gives her some more to go on and she goes to the Archives where she finds enlistment papers, enough to know that he was a soldier. Then she goes to his squadron headquarters in Annapolis and finds more record, though not much, just that he was shipped to Panama in 1941 to protect the canal and the gulf. Also search and rescue for the marines that were training on the beaches there in preparation for action in the south pacific. She goes back to her boss and tell him the story, he says she can work the case, but that she had to take on the other new case as well, so she does and they end up being connected maybe? Maybe not, maybe she just ignores that case and everyone int he office starts liking her more because the boss is getting more and more pissed at her because she's.. or even better the boss says no to her request, gives her the file she's supposed to be assigned to and then she goes back to the mystery man and he does something such that her boss comes back to her and says, okay, you can work that case, though he obviously doesn't want her to do it all so then everyone starts to like her because the boss no longer does, though he can't do anything about it. Then she works it some more, uncovers a bit more but hits another wall and goes back to the mystery man to tell him there's just nothing on the guy. He's the one who says she needs to go to Panama, give her Sil Hawkard's name and number, she flies down and meets up with Sil on his boat. \ No newline at end of file -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2