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Got a book out and settled down with the cats, one each on the sides of my legs, and one on my shoulders.
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How do you do that? Same as when you train a kid. Discipline. And lots of kitty lovings when they do what you want. With dogs you might only need to use food as a reward. They're simpler beings.
Besides, if you have to get up really fast, a cat on the lap is a hazard, especially for men. Just saying.>>
Eventually Jane came home, and, as usual she was carrying in incredible amount of equipment with her. (She's quite the scavenger. Her workshop is crammed nearly full of stuff that she says she'll make something out of eventually. Who knows, maybe she will someday.)
Not as usual, she'd come in through the front door. She put everything down on the floor, right by the door, came into the living room and sat down on the edge of the chair across from me.
"Mama, we have to talk."
"What? No welcome home or anything?"
"Mama, we have to talk."
Uh-oh. I knew that I wasn't going to like this.
"Mama, there's been a security leak, and it's you."
"WTF! ME! What the flying HELL are you talking about?" Majorly freaking out here. Do you blame me?
"Jane, you know my security measures. How could I be a leak?"
"OK, maybe I said that a bit wrong. Not you, but your contact. The man who sets up all your courier runs and your 'retrieval' jobs."
"Huh?! I've been working with him for years and....ah......SHIT!"
"That's right Mama. He's the only person in the world who knows how to contact you directly and approximately where in the world you are at any given time."
"You met him before you found me. Simple deduction alone would tell me that he's not exactly what you'd ordinarily call a 'law-abiding citizen'. Is he?"
"Well, no, I suppose not. But he knows that I won't do any jobs that are illegal. I can't afford to considering my clients."
"Mama, Mama, Mama. You can be so naive sometimes."
(Jane calling ME naive. I think that the Earth may have just reversed its rotation!)
"How do you know that all your jobs were legal? You trust him implicitly. If he told you that they were straight, how'd you know any better?
"He gets a percentage of everything you do. He's not going to kill the golden goose by dumping you because of your ethics, but I'll bet anything that he's not always been straight with you when the fee was large enough."
Damn. Jane's logic is as precise as a cutting laser. When she turns her attention to something, she never flinches -- no matter how unpleasant the results.
"OK Honey, so what did you do about it?"
She put on her most innocent face and said, "Whatever do you mean Mama?"
"Don't give me that. You wouldn't have told me about this unless you've already gone into every single detail and ramification thereof. It's not in your character. You're terribly OCD that way. Fortunately, that's a good thing for us."
"Ah, well, yes... I have sorta been ah...."
"Snooping. The word is snooping."
"But Mama, that's such an inelegant word. Can't you say 'scrutinizing the data' or something like that?"
Well, that got a bit of a tiny laugh from me. I could certainly use something to get me out of my depression.
"All right Janie, what did you find? Tell me. All of it And tell me what you did about it too."
"Sure Mama."
She took a deep breath. "I want you to understand that I was very, very thorough with this. I didn't want even a hint of a loose end left."
I grabbed the arms of the chair and dug in. The cats flew off in all directions, they were, unfortunately, quite accustomed to me at my worst.
My knuckles were WAY beyond white. A totally thorough Jane was worse than any force of nature. It's as if she transcends nature somehow.
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"I tapped into his phone records. Well, Homeland Security did it for me. They just got a secret court order. Then it was my turn.
"No, all that crap you see on that NCIS TV program with McGuff, McGreavy, oh heck, whatever his name is, tapping into phone records in a few seconds is total garbage. If I had to hack into Homeland Security's system it would take several hours. And they'd probably find out that they'd been hacked -- eventually. They have some good people working for them now, so I had to do it properly through their regular channels.
"Once I got the phone records it wasn't hard to figure out where his base of operations was. Then a couple of more days to find and tap his computer. Would you believe how pitiful his security was? His password was 123654 for crying out loud. What an idiot!
"Anyway, I found a lot. Maybe too much.
"As it turns out, he kept fairly meticulous records of all his transactions. A bit too meticulous for him, given how the situation evolved.
"It seems that you're two different people Mama. For your commercial endeavors you're a business called Acme Inc. Your reputation for safe, efficient, and totally surreptitious deliveries is unparalleled.
"He underpaid you by an average of 47% for the jobs he set up by the way.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Moving right along, before you can explode, let's get to the other side of the business. The records of your regular 'retrieval' jobs, like the one where the FBI agent spotted you, were part of Acme's files.
"Your other persona is El Gatito. Not very original, but it gets the point across I guess. You wear a pendant of a cat head with green eyes, on a silver chain no less. You can get anything out of anywhere. No questions asked.
"And that's the problem. ALL of those jobs were outright thefts."
Jane nodded at me and whispered, "That's probably for the best Mama. You just sit there and be shocked and quiet while I finish."
I'd probably have a shrieking fit later, but for now I thought that I'd just do what Jane said and sit here and let the feeling of total betrayal wash over me. It's not every day that you find out that someone you've trusted for 17 years has been playing you.
"Oh, and when you get to the yelling and destroying things part, please remember not to break any of the heavy equipment Mama. It cost over four thousand dollars to replace what you broke last time.
"Well then, as I was saying... I think I was quite as mad at him as you are now when I found out, so I investigated him a bit more thoroughly than I'd intended at first. It seems that he had another sideline that was not so very nice.
"He was working with Coyotes -- you know -- the people who smuggle humans across the borders. Some of the people they smuggled in were planning not so nice things.
"They're not planning them anymore. I sent ALL his records on that part of his work to Homeland Security. They've been watching the Coyote operations for years, waiting for a break. Well, I gave it to them.
"They finished the arrests, him included, yesterday afternoon. They're all at Guantanamo Bay right now. They'll probably get around to admitting that they have them and arrange for trials some time in the next 10 years or so.
"Somehow all of his records showing that you were El Gatito disappeared. I can't imagine how though. There's no record anywhere in the world now of that part of your life at all.
"Nobody, nobody -- now or ever -- is going to betray you and get away with it."
Such simple words. Words of only 1 to 3 syllables. Words, spoken so very, very softly by a beautiful and very young girl. And they terrified me to the depths of my soul because I felt them with my whole being, as if the entire universe were reverberating in response to them.
Jane looked at me piercingly, and her gorgeous, lavender eyes truly glowed. "I WILL protect you Mama. Just as you protected me for all these years. We're together now and I WILL NOT EVER let us be separated again."
She closed her eyes for a few seconds and the earth resumed rotating. When she opened them again Jane was back to her normal, calm, logical self.
"The FBI found a body for me. One of those, sad, desperate young men who died in the Arizona desert trying to get from Mexico to California to get work. He was about 29 or so, no ID. Nothing in his pocket but a rosary.
"KCRA in Fresno reported yesterday on the death, from apparent heat stroke, of an Hispanic male, about 5' 2" tall. The only identifying possessions he had were a cheap rosary and a silver chain with a pendant of a cat's head with green eyes. The people who needed to hear that will assume that their favorite go-to thief was murdered by someone and dumped in the desert and that the FBI is covering it up by reporting it as heat stroke so they can conduct a quiet investigation."
She dropped her voice back to her normal, almost clinical tones. "I had to make a deal though. Even though there's no record of you being involved in any criminal activities, there's a certain, um, suspicion, that you may have been used by him anyway."
"A deal? What did you get me, us, into?"
"I had to agree that we'd work for them full time. You don't work for the business sector any more Mama, you work for the Feds. I have to shut down all of my operations except those that connect with Interpol and other police agencies.
"My employees will continue with the security work -- it's still a good cover, but 90% of my time belongs to the agencies."
I started a weak protest, but she cut me off with a wave.
"It's either that or you're off to Gitmo as a possible accomplice. I know it's totally unfair, and that they really ARE seeing conspiracies where they don't exist, but it's the best I could do. They still see me as a kid and are afraid that if I don't have 'proper supervision' I'll turn into some sort of Super-Villain! The idiots!"
She threw her hands into the air and started bouncing in her chair. There was a very good reason why her friends tended to tease her by calling her "Tigger".
That habit was something that I'd never been able to completely break her of. Thank God she almost never did it in public any more. While she was bouncing, I was thinking that these bureaucrats, whomever they were, had indeed bumbled their way to a bit of the truth. Not THE truth, but a tiny truth. The thing is, they were thinking way too small. If Jane had somehow been bent by what she'd been through, she wouldn't be a super-villain, she'd be the dictator who controlled the entire planet before she was 40.
While I was thinking, Jane picked up again, "Mr. Forsythe and the others I work with regularly know that it's total hogwash, but they have no say in the matter either. The intelligence community is like any other bureaucracy. The political types float at the top, just like pond scum, and give all kinds of idiotic orders that the field agents pretty much ignore or find some way to work around when they can't completely ignore them."
I didn't raise her to be so cynical, but I AM inordinately proud her insight.
"BUT, you still have to observe the proper forms, so we're both now on the books as full time FBI personnel, provisionally, with 'tight' supervision. Said supervisors will be sending back increasingly glowing reports detailing our dedication and hard work, and eventually, when the current bureaucracy changes -- probably at the next election, the incoming people will have never heard of us, and they never will. That has already been arranged."
"Well SHIT!" That was about all I could manage coherently. I must have been more calm than I thought, because the cats were back and demanding attention. I pulled Kataryna into my lap and calmed her with some intensive petting while she helped me calm down by purring quite loudly. A good trade from both our points of view.
Jane always was good at assessing my moods, so she stuck her hand in her pocket, walked over to me, and pulled out another wallet ID.
I opened it up and, sure enough, it was another Internal Affairs, Special Agent badge, this time for the FBI.
You'd think that the various government branches would be more creative. It seems that almost all of them had some sort of "Special Agent" classification. Well, at least I wouldn't have to remember which agency I was which kind of agent for. And, yes, as you'd imagine, I got that special 'tingle' from this one too. But this time it was coming from the seal on the ID card side. At least the photo sort of looked like me this time.
"So Jane, what are we going to be doing?"
"I'm going to be doing pretty much what I already do. Arrange things so that the operations of certain 'bad people' somehow fall apart on them in such a way that the police can legally arrest them. Naturally none of what happens will ever be traceable back to the government. We can't have murderers, pushers, and slave trader's rights being violated, can we?"
No, of course I didn't bother to answer. Obviously a rhetorical question anyway.
"No change in our covers either. We're only the NSA Intern and the CIA Internal Affairs agent. Naturally we could never have anything to do with actual field operations. Heaven forbid! I'm much too green to be trusted with anything of any real importance, and you're never in one place long enough to be involved with any significant operations.
"You just happen to be two different people now, one FBI and the other CIA -- and that's nothing new for you. Heck, you can be three different people before breakfast!"
Only Jane laughed, and it had almost no trace of amusement. As for me, I was still too shocked to find much of anything funny.
"If you happen to show up at an active investigation site, you're just an extra body dragged in to help with the gofer work because they're short-handed. The real investigative work will be handled by the regular field agents.
"Same with me. I'll be the apprentice geek who was drafted to set up a satellite link or whatever. I'll be a bit on the slow side, befitting my lowly status and inexperience, but, since nobody else there will know how to do the job, they'll put up with me. Besides, most of the guys will be too busy staring at my chest to think about complaining, and the women will be too busy making sure that someone gets the work done to pay any attention to me.
"If certain things such as flash drives with incriminating evidence on them are found on the floor, or the paper records of their deals should just happen to be stuck to the bottom of a drawer, well, that'll just be due to sloppy housekeeping on the part of the bad guys.
"And if there's highly incriminating data on a hard drive the criminal forgot to encrypt, well, what a lucky thing for the district attorney!
"If you can be such a sneaky thief, I'm sure that you can be just as sneaky at planting evidence."
Jane got her musing face on. "Though I expect that this may be the first time in history that the planted evidence will be true."
Good, she had a bit of her usual mischievous smile back and she was thinking clearly and calmly. I needed her calm. It wouldn't be good for both of us to go ballistic at the same time. Too dangerous for the neighborhood, or maybe the city. I still had a training room to wreck later, and I didn't want to be late for my appointment just because I had to calm Jane down first.