Lethal Whispers (ML, MATURE) 10/29/15 COMPLETE

[begonia9508]

Wow! Michael is the most adventurer of the three of them... Let see how Max and Isabel will react, espcially that the danger Tess is still around...

Looking for more and thanks! EVE

[keepsmiling7]

lol........Maria thought Michael had been replaced in the cave........
Thanks,
Carolyn

[max and liz believer]

Roswelllostcause - You are very correct Thanks for the fb!
clueless - Thank you And I'll use more of the recaps, if it's helpful
Natalie (natalie36) - She's a character Thanks!
Eve (begonia9508) - Yep, Michael is on a quest - for more answers. Thank you!
Carolyn (keepsmiling7) - (thank you for the feedback! )

So, last time Michael went cave diving, finding both questions and answers about his origins, while Max continued to have visions (and seizures) of an attack on Liz. We'll now return to Max and Liz.

CHAPTER 20
Max

They needed someone to watch Liz tonight. Isabel had managed to stay around Liz for the majority of the ‘outside of work’-time, rendering it impossible for Liz to end up in any danger. But Isabel had a feeling that Liz might find her a bit clingy if Liz’s new friend continued to invite herself over to Liz’s place to ‘hang out’.

So Max’s sister had suggested that Max ask Liz out for a date. That would mean that, at least for that evening, Liz would be safe. And hopefully Max would make such a good impression that Liz would be up to meeting up again. And again.

What Max didn’t like about the whole thing was that it had become a project. Instead of him liking Liz and wanting to ask her out, the reason for him to ask her out was just to create a repertoire so that he could more easily watch over her.

Seen from another perspective, this could also be called ‘stalking’.

The truth was, Max really liked Liz and he really wanted to take her out on a date and get to know her better, which made this whole arrangement even harder. He was afraid that, when he finally told Liz about him and Isabel following her (which he had firmly informed Isabel that he would), it would sound as if he had only dated her to save her life.

The best thing would have been to tell her the truth from the start. Max scrubbed his hands down his face. Right. And how would that conversation go?

Hey Liz, I’ve been having visions of you getting raped and murdered so now I just want to stalk you for awhile to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The risk of her taking that the wrong way (well, several wrong ways) was pretty big.

Which was why he found himself standing outside of Liz’s apartment door building up the courage to ring the bell. He raised his hand to press the door bell and was interrupted by his phone, vibrating in his back pocket. Fishing it out and glancing at the caller id, he pressed ‘Deny’ and put the phone back.

“Sorry, Michael,” he murmured. “Not a good time.”

He took a deep breath and rang the bell. His hands felt clammy and he was nervous. Really nervous. He brushed his palms against his jeans, trying to make them less sweaty.

Then the door opened and there she was. In a simple yellow dress (like the sun) and her dark hair in a pony tail with lose tendrils framing her face.

“Hi,” she smiled and her whole face lit up.

Her beauty caused his heart to miss a beat. It wasn’t just her outward appearance, there was something honest and open in her face, brightening her eyes, that made his whole body burn. Hence, his reply was more of a croak than a greeting, but Max hoped that she had gotten the general idea anyway.

“Let me just get a jacket,” she said and he nodded mutely.

She was back before he’d had time to recuperate. There had been something missing about her the first time he had met her at that office party. He had noticed it then in the translucency of her skin, in the circles under her eyes. But today was different. Her cheeks were rosy, there was life in her chocolate brown eyes and there was a confident straightening of her spine, of her body.

She was in a word: exquisite.

“You look beautiful,” Max said softly in the quiet moment as Liz pushed the key into the key-hole to lock her front door. She was very close to him then, standing just a feet away, her back to him, and he could smell strawberries around her.

He imagined that he could feel the heat rise on her cheeks as well as see it, as she answered, her eyes on the key, “Thank you,” equally softly.

They were the only words to be exchanged in the total 6 minutes and 42 seconds it took for them to get out of the building and into Max’s car. But somehow words weren’t needed. This was not the interaction of awkward silences or embarrassing second-guessing. This was similar to the synergy of two individuals who had known each other for years, where words no longer were needed. And in a way they had known each other for years. In a way they even shared the same life force. But Max had only started to suspect this, whereas Liz was still unaware.

Liz had no idea that the man driving her to a restaurant in downtown Boston right now was the same person that had brought her back to life on a February morning about twenty years prior. Liz didn’t even know that she had been dead once and brought back by the will of a 5-year-old boy.

“So where are you taking me?” Liz asked as she fastened her seatbelt.

“‘Meritage’,” Max replied, giving the name of a popular restaurant overlooking Boston inner harbor.

“Nice,” Liz approved.

Max could feel her eyes watching him as he drove. After awhile, his curiosity took the best of him and he glanced over at her with a smile, “What?”

He could feel her body temperature rise again (or so he envisioned) as she dropped her gaze guiltily. Her voice was soft as she said, “I’m just happy to be here.”

Max had a feeling that it wasn’t the whole truth, but was flattered nonetheless. Especially since, “The night hasn’t even started yet.”

She shook her head, looking over at him through those long dark lashes. “I just have a good feeling about this one.”

He laughed. “Fair enough.”

*****

He took her hand as they walked up to the entrance, the same pleasant thrill moving through him as when they had first shook hands. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if she could feel it too. Wondering if she also believed that this was the start of something big.

He marveled at the smallness of her hand, which had him thinking of her slight figure and her small height. He hadn’t thought about it before, that she was more than a head smaller than him, but it was something in how she carried herself that made him forget. Forget how vulnerable she looked in her yellow dress and low-heeled shoes.

His breath caught as she rearranged her grip on his fingers (his heart faltering some in disappointment, thinking that she wanted to let go of his hand) to interlace their fingers instead. A lovers’ hold. When he turned expectant and surprised eyes on her profile, she bit her bottom lip in a small smile instead of meeting his eyes. He pulled on her hand so that her body got closer to his, hip to hip.

And so they flowed through the movements, like dancers doing a well-known dance, taking their seats with the view of the boats in the harbor, ordering wine, sharing small secretive glances between topics and ever so subtly letting their fingers brush against each other above the surface of the table. The conversation ranged from ‘What did you want to be when you were little?’ (Liz: a dancer, Max: an astronaut) to ‘What’s your deepest fear?’ (Liz: losing her father, Max: being exposed) as the small lights outside in the harbor grew stronger in the darkening evening sky.

It was over a piece of chocolate cake that Liz, with a small spoon of cake poised in front of her mouth, said, “I feel like I’ve met you before.”

Placing the spoon with cake in her mouth and feeling the taste ignite her taste buds, Liz missed Max’s initial paleness. But as he remained silent, the cake was left to melt on its own in her mouth as she placed her hand over his. “Are you okay?”

“Um,” Max tried and cleared his throat. “Yeah, um. Yeah, it does feel like that, doesn’t it?”

Max felt his heart beat hard in his chest, trying to get out (Liz was feeling it too, but couldn’t understand why) and balled his hand into a fist beneath Liz’s, before pulling it away. He used it to thread fingers through his hair. Why was he reacting like this? He was usually the master of avoiding questions, of sidestepping suspicions. His whole survival relied on it. But Liz put him off balance. He would say that it was generally a good thing, but not when it came to protecting his past.

“Yeah,” Liz said quietly and Max felt her eyes follow his every movement with a furrow between her beautiful eyes. She knew something was off.

“Liz,” Max said and inhaled, bracing himself. “Isabel told me that you lost your mother.”

Max felt a piece of himself die as Liz pulled her own hand back, which had been left waiting in the center of the table as Max had withdrawn, and lowered her eyes to the table. He knew it was a low blow, but he needed something to really distract her from her previous statement and his behavior.

Maybe it had only been a rhetorical question; people often said that it had felt like they had met before to innocently point out that they felt an instant kinship to someone. But his over-the-top reaction had messed it up and Liz was an intelligent woman; she could easily figure out that there was something in that presumed honest statement that had made Max nervous.

Very nervous.

“I’m sorry,” Max said softly. Both to offer his condolence, but mostly to apologize for bringing it up.

“It was a car accident,” Liz supplied, fingering the napkin across her knee. “She was killed instantaneously.”

“You were there?”

Liz nodded. “I was thrown out of the car. Apparently, that saved me.”

Or not, Max thought, knowing another truth.

“That’s horrible,” Max said, his feelings matching his words. It had been horrible. “What happened?”

“It was a truck that was loaded with some industrial metal pipes. I don’t know if he lost control of the truck or the cargo wasn’t properly fastened… There was a big investigation about it. Insurance companies and the truck company, for instance, needed proper answers. One of the metal pipes went…” Liz shivered “…straight through my mom.”

Max did of course already know this, but it was a completely different experience to hear about it in Liz’s shaken voice. “I can’t even imagine…” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry for bringing it up.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled at him faintly. “I would’ve told you eventually. And since Isabel already knew…”

As her voice trailed off, Max asked softly, “Do you remember your mom?”

Liz shook her head slowly. “You know, I have an almost photographic memory, but no, I can’t remember her. There are faint memory glimpses whenever I see a photo of her, but I can’t remember what she smelled like, what her laughter sounded like…”

“We don’t have to talk about this,” Max mumbled.

Tears were shimmering in her eyes, she looked as if she was barely hanging on.

“Yeah,” she nodded, looking down at the napkin she was fiddling with in her lap. “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

“Like, what’s your favorite ice-cream flavor?”

That pulled at the corners of her mouth and she shot him a grateful look (a look Max didn’t feel that he deserved after having pulled up the your-mother-died-in-a-horrific-car-accident topic), before answering, “Strawberry.”

“You know,” Max said, “I thought you would say that.”

“How come?” she asked lightly, looking forward to hearing his answer.

“Because you smell like strawberries,” Max answered and watched Liz blush.

“I do not.”

He laughed lightly. “Yeah, you do. It’s a very pleasant smell. Very sweet, very you.”

She bit her bottom lip. “That’s odd, since I don’t really use any strawberry products. Except consume massive amounts of strawberry ice-cream of course.”

“Maybe that’s it then,” Max said, picking up a spoonful of his own piece of chocolate cake. “There’s strawberries coming out through your pores because of that ice-cream.”

Having regained some of her appetite, Liz mimicked his motion and put another piece of cake in her mouth. In response to his reply, she just angled her face and gave him a secretive smile.

Max could feel himself falling for her. With every gesture, every laugh, every smile, he found himself getting deeper and deeper.

Oh, I’m in trouble.

*****

Liz

There was something that Max Evans wasn’t telling her. She was sure of it.

It was in how he elaborately avoided some questions, like the most skilled politician, and how she would at times catch him looking at her with a knowing look. As if he knew something about her that she didn’t.

Which is why she had brought up the fact that it felt as if they had met before. Even though he had been good at sidestepping her other questions, this one had fallen flat. This one had made him act a bit out of character.

It was not until they were seated in his car, on the way back to her apartment, that she realized that he had never given her a proper answer to that statement. Instead, he had (seemingly out of the blue) brought up her mother’s death.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. It always had a way of sneaking its way into the conversation, especially on dates, because at some point the guy would usually ask about your parents, your childhood or siblings or something similar.

But Max had jumped straight from her statement about them possibly having met before to the death of her mother.

For some reason, she didn’t think that was a coincidence. Liz Parker had a feeling that it was an easy connection for Max Evans to make, further confirming her inexplicable feelings for this person that she was not supposed to know too well. At least not after having met twice.

She wanted to confront him, but should that be sooner rather than later? Would it be better to do it early so that they had a chance to pull out of this thing they were starting without causing too much havoc to their lives? Or would it be better to wait, letting the information seep out on its own while they got to know each other better?

Liz’s nature was too curious to wait, so in the end, “When was the first time you met me?”

He did a pretty good job at hiding his surprise, but Liz felt the car slightly drift to the side before he steered it back on track.

“Um… Is this a trick question?” He smiled cautiously, keeping his eyes on the road.

“Maybe,” Liz answered.

She watched his profile turn hard, saw the muscles around his jaw ripple as he clenched his teeth together. His voice was as tight as his stance as he replied, “My sister’s office party, last weekend.”

“Is that the truth?” Liz questioned, barely blinking, not wanting to miss a second of his reaction. Because his body language was not as good at lying as his spoken language was. He seemed to be holding his breath, his hands tight on the steering wheel, as if debating with himself.

“Max,” Liz said slowly, her voice devoid of any accusations. She just wanted to know. “When did you first meet me?”

“1996.”

Liz’s forgot to breathe, her thoughts running wild in her mind. It didn’t have to mean anything. He could have met her at a birthday party or through his parents.

My mother died in 1996.

“How?” she whispered and Max glanced at her white face before switching on the indicator and pulling to a stop at the side of the road. He turned off the ignition and grew still, his hands still on the steering wheel, looking blankly out on the road in front of him.

“Max?” Liz whispered, scared.

It probably doesn’t mean anything, why are you making such a big deal out of this? But why could she feel his nervousness right now, amplifying her own? Why could she feel the hard pressure of the steering wheel against the palms of her hands which were folded in her lap?

“I was there,” Max said softly, still not looking at her. “At the night of the accident.”

“When my mom…”

Max nodded and turned slightly, connecting his glistening sad eyes with hers. “My family… My mom, my dad, Isabel and I were in the car behind yours.”

Liz breathed deeply, purposefully. Don’t pass out. Don’t pass out. “What else?”

He hesitated before continuing, his voice haunted, “My parents didn’t know about you at first. They only saw your mom because she was still in the car. I was sitting in the front seat so I saw you.”

“Okay…” she whispered.

Max shifted restlessly in his seat, “I thought you were clothes or a bag or something at first, so I left the car to see and discovered that you were a person. You were bleeding-“

Liz nodded. “My mom’s blood…”

He hesitated again and his voice was unconvincing as he agreed, “Yeah, your mom’s blood was all over you.”

A clear picture of a blonde woman with a worried and kind face flashed in front of Liz’s eyes. “Your mom…”

Max nodded. “My mom joined us not too long after and she was the one holding you when you woke up.”

“I remember your mom,” Liz said and the first tears of many rolled down her cheek. “I remember your mom, but I don’t remember my mom.” A sob broke through her and she could see Max’s lost expression through the sheen of her tears. “But you were there too.”

“My mom told me to get a blanket as you woke up. You must’ve seen me when I returned. I saw you watching me.”

She wiped at the tears with the back of her hand. “But how… How do you remember me?”

He shook his head sadly. “It’s not a thing you forget. That day…”

“No,” she whispered. “No, I mean. How do you remember me? You recognized me that night at the party, but how would you know what I looked like as an adult?”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”

She felt as if his reply was partly true, but there was something in it that didn’t make sense. “If it was a simple case of just recognizing me, then why didn’t you tell me?”

He looked at her incredulously. “Would you have believed me? If I told you that I thought you were the girl at this car accident I had witnessed when I was just five years old and that I now recognized you as an adult?”

She frowned. “But I can feel it too. The recognition. Like I know you. This is not normal. This is something else. There’s something more to this.”

“Maybe,” he said weakly, looking away. A telltale sign of a lie, by the book.

Liz appraised the stiffness of his profile, felt the distance between them, and swallowed back a sob. “Sometimes I even imagine that I can feel what you’re feeling.” She felt herself grow cold as he grew stiff. “Just like I can feel you closing off right now.”

He shook his head, not meeting her eyes, and she bit her bottom lip, hard.

“I…I’m sorry, Liz,” he said weakly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There were suddenly too many emotions inside of her chest, pushing to break out. She knew that she sounded ridiculous, a bit nuts even, by suggesting that they had some telepathic bond. But his dismissive reaction to her vulnerable submission had crushed her heart with betrayal. She felt hurt and exposed. A freezing cold emotion was chilling her inside and out.

She let her eyes drop to her lap as she mumbled, “Would you take me home now?”, tears still running down her face.

“Yes,” he said solemnly, started the car and drove Liz to her apartment in silence.


TBC...

[Roswelllostcause]

Max just tell her the truth!

[Natalie36]

oh boy

[keepsmiling7]

of course Max will make sure Liz is safe.......it's a shame he can't tell her the truth.
Max is definitely falling for Liz, and she is feeling something between them.......
She is remembering and it is so difficult for her.
What will Max do next?
Thanks,
Carolyn

[saori_1902]

great part

[max and liz believer]

Roswelllostcause - If only...
Natalie36 - Thanks!
Carolyn (keepsmiling7) - Max has a lot of decisions to make... Thank you for the feedback!
saori_1902 - Thanks!

So, Max just took Liz on their first date, which ended on something of a disastrous note, Michael has been (unsuccessfully) trying to get a hold of Max to tell him about his discoveries in the cave and Tess has put surveillance in Max's apartment. That's about where we left of...


CHAPTER 21
Tess

Who knew that surveillance could be this boring?

Tess fast forwarded again, yawning with her heavy head supported in her hand. Or maybe it wasn’t surveillance that was boring. Maybe it was Maxwell Evans that was boring.

Tess had watched him arrive at his apartment late on Saturday night and aimlessly walk around the apartment for about ten minutes, before taking a seat on the couch and clicking through one TV-channel after the other. If Tess had known Max, she would have easily picked up on the patterns of distress, the restlessness in his desultory actions and how he was generally beating himself up about something.

But Tess didn’t know Max. Tess had never met Max. She was not even afflicted with strong empathic abilities. So how could she possible tell, from the slightly pixelated black and white aerial recording of an apartment, that Max was having a really bad night?

She pressed fast forward again, watching Max make small movements occasionally, slightly jarred due to the increased pace of the playback, and then he disappeared into the bathroom (Tess didn’t have any camera there) to reappear a couple of minutes later and head for his bedroom.

Even though Max, so far, seemed to be a total bore, he sure was easy on the eyes. It was not only his face (which stared up at her from the photo in the open manila folder next to her on the bed where she sat with the laptop heating her thighs) that was very attractive. Walking topless into his bedroom, Max was no stranger to upper body exercises, that was for sure.

She skipped the night (exceptionally boring to watch someone sleep) and rolled into Sunday morning, when Max seemed to receive a couple of phone calls that he ignored to answer in favor of spending the majority of the hours of the morning in bed, hiding his head under a pillow. The small digital clock at the bottom of her screen told her that it was little after noon when Max was forced out of bed by an insistent knocking on the front door. Max opened the door to Michael.

Of course it was Michael Guerin, Tess noted. Who else would be so annoyingly persistent? She reached forward to turn on the sound she had muted earlier. Maybe something was finally about to happen.

“Above answering your phone, your Highness?” was Michael’s tensed greeting.

“Sorry,” Max mumbled and brushed a hand down his face. He did that a lot, Tess observed.

“What if I had something important to say, huh?”

“I always answer, Michael, you know that. I just…couldn’t yesterday.”

“What’s up with you? You look like shit.”

“Long story,” Max grumbled and stepped aside to gesture for Michael to come inside.

“I got one for you too.”

“Isabel told me. That you went to Roswell.”

Roswell? Why would Michael go to Roswell? Did he keep in contact with his foster father?

Michael walked straight into the kitchen and retrieved a Snapple from the refrigerator; making himself right at home. “I went to the cave.”

Tess straightened up against the pillows propped up against her back.

Max echoed Tess’ internal question, “Why?”

“How many chambers were there in the cave?”

Max followed Michael with his eyes as he slumped down in an armchair, opening the Snapple. Tess suddenly struggled to remember how to breathe in the comfort of her bed that Monday night.

Chambers. She had thought of them as pods, but there was no question that they were talking about the same thing.

“It is you,” Tess whispered to the screen. “You were in that cave with me…”

She’d always had a suspicion about Michael, since they met at the orphanage, and the information the PI had dug out seemed to have grounded her suspicions further. But this… It must be them.

The conversation continued in the apartment.

“Three,” Max replied. “One for each of us.”

Tess narrowed her eyes. Three? They don’t know that you exist. They don’t know that there’s four pods.

Michael shook his head in negative. “No.”

“No?”

“I had this dream about the cave. There were four chambers.”

Well, fuck me backwards. Michael Guerin has the answers.

“It was just a dream, right?”

“So you’re the only one with ‘truth’-dreams? That’s why I wanted to check. I had to see if there were really just three compartments.”

Max sank down on the edge of the couch, staring at Michael, his voice barely a whisper, “And?”

“There’s four,” Michael said evenly. “And they’re all broken. I mean, opened. Which means that four individuals left the cave.”

“Who’s the fourth?”

“That, my dear Maximilian, is the 64 million dollar question.”

Max stared off into the distance, pondering this. Michael was taking slow sips from his Snapple. Tess was biting the nail polish off her nails.

“Maybe it’s Liz,” Max said quietly.

“Vision-girl?”

Vision-girl?

“Because of the dreams-“

Who the hell was Vision-girl?

Michael shook his head. “Nah, it doesn’t make sense. She had real parents, she wasn’t adopted, right?”

“Yeah,” Max agreed. A bit reluctantly, Tess noted.

Then Tess came to think of the one Liz she had met not too long ago, who happened to be friends with Isabel. Coincidence? Probably not.

“That mousy, boring girl has some kind of connection to Max Evans?” Tess mumbled and then cursed herself as she talked over Michael, having to reverse the recording some.

“…she wasn’t adopted, right?” Michael repeated as Tess pressed ‘play’.

“Yeah.”

“What about the blonde girl?”

Tess moved the laptop off her lap and put it in front of her, bending her knees up to her chin and increased the volume. The blonde.

Max didn’t seem too convinced about Michael’s suggestion as he remained silent, so Michael pressed on. “She’s been in your dreams too, so maybe she also has a connection but a different one. Like the one you and Isabel felt with me when we met. Because there’s no one else you’ve saved, right? Like you did with Liz.”

What was this whole ‘saving’-crap they kept mentioning?

“Possibly,” Max nodded. “But I know nothing about her. It was pure luck that I stumbled upon Liz - or that Isabel did. It might take years to find the blonde, if she even exists, if she’s still alive, if she’s the fourth one.”

“A lot of ifs,” Michael agreed, nodding.

“What else did you see in the cave?”

“For starters, it almost killed Maria.”

Max jumped up from the couch. “What?!”

This Maria-girl must mean a lot to Max, Tess mused. She could see that Max had a lot more to say, but seemed to swallow it back in favor of, “What happened?”

“She’s fine,” Michael assured and he had tensed up, possibly expecting to be yelled at. “There seems to be a barrier surrounding the cave. I felt it as a small current going through my body, but it made Maria have a seizure. She didn’t come out of it until I moved her away from there.”

Interesting, Tess thought. She had only taken a chance about putting in surveillance, on the off-chance that they actually knew something. She hadn’t been too hopeful that they would actually provide her with something she didn’t know. This was good. This was really good.

“Also, when I got inside and touched the front chambers, yours and Isabel’s, the broken front kinda wanted to crumble so I stopped touching them. But when I reached mine it held its shape, as if it recognized me.”

Max seemed stunned into silence, so Michael continued, “There’s like this red dome thing at the top of each chamber and when I touched it, it came to life. But nothing happened. I didn’t get any visions or flashes or anything, so that was a bust. Here, I took a photo.”

Michael whipped out his smart phone and pulled out the photo album, stumbling upon another photo first, which Tess of course couldn’t see from her vantage point.

“Oh, wait. This was on the wall running into my area of the cave. Can you read it?”

He handed the phone to Max and Max used his fingers to zoom in and zoom out the photo while moving it back and forth. He did that for about a minute (It must be some kind of text, Tess guessed) before handing the phone back to Michael.

“I recognize it and it feels very familiar. We should print it out and maybe if I look at it long enough I’ll find a pattern.”

“Sure,” Michael nodded and pulled out the photo he had previously looked for. “This is the dome.”

“It looks organic,” Max noted, looking at the photo. “So you think this is some kind of…heart?”

“More like the brain or power supply. It felt as if it had been the one in charge of the oven cooking us, you know.”

Max nodded. “Sounds about right.”

Tess noticed a clear exhilaration in Michael’s body language and speech. Finding this much information probably didn’t belong to the ordinary of these people’s lives.

“And the fourth chamber was even further in?” Max questioned.

“Yeah, a bit more difficult to find.”

“But someone found their way out… This is great, Mike. We should try and see if we can find something about a fourth person with a similar background as us.”

Crap, Tess thought. Now they’ll come looking for me. Time for some damage control.

*****

Special agent Joel Martin

Joel Martin was one of the younger FBI agents at the local field office of Albuquerque. His speciality was computer science, which made him very good at acquiring information for his colleagues. He was also something of a genius in mathematics, which certainly assisted his gambling addiction in the illegal activity mostly known as ‘counting cards’. Still, his ‘luck’ had a tendency to not help him the whole way, putting him in constant debt. That’s where being an expert at gathering information had a advantageous side. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of people willing to pay good money for information. Especially highly classified information.

Sure, sometimes his conscience glared at him (he had after all became an FBI agent because he wanted to uphold the law and protect his country), but it was a moral detail that he was willing to overlook in the threatening light of owing people money. His little gaming problem was not known to the Bureau (not yet); they probably wouldn’t let him handle confidential information in that case. He might even be suspended from his work.

Especially considering that he had caught glimpses into a highly secretive branch that was specific to his field office. The division went under the name of Mogul, which had been a top secret project operated by the US Army Air Force in the 1940’s.

A TV-show had in the 90’s put a different name to that very same division; ‘The X-files’.

But even though Joel was certain the hype about that TV-show had made his superiors a bit anxious, the Mogul project had remained. To the general public, the Mogul project was discontinued in 1949 and was blamed by the government to having launched the air balloon that later came to be the explanation of the presumed alien crash in 1947. Although, the division hadn't been able to hide the fact that their records showed that the army hadn’t had an air balloon in the air at the time of the crash.

So the question still remained; if it had not been an air balloon that fell that night, what had it been?

Apparently, there had been a lot of activity around this theory in 1994 (before Joel’s time at the Bureau), but since then the division appeared to have been heavily downsized. Just like some parts of the US government monitored the internet for specific keywords to monitor terrorism (assassination, homeland security, anthrax, to name a few), the Mogul division monitored the internet for keywords like Roswell incident, conspiracy, air balloon and of course, aliens. This kept the majority of the division in work full-time thanks to the general public’s heightened interest in science fiction and the occult. Separating facts from fiction became an annoying but very real problem.

Which is why Joel was personally intrigued when he was approached by a private investigator, asking for possible information on three individuals in their mid-twenties. Since most of the information gathered could be explained to be bogus in this vampire- and alien-loving nation, it was rare that someone actually ended up in the records. Hence, Joel hadn’t anticipated to find anything when carrying out the PI’s request.

Imagine his surprise when he had found three comprehensive files on three kids leading, seemingly innocent, lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Undeterred by the fact that the information had been compiled in the boring, fact-based manner of a instruction manual, Joel was captivated by the stories.

Even though he had gotten well paid for handing over copies of the highly classified material to that private investigator, Joel couldn’t help but seeing the larger picture. How could he make more money out of this? Was there more information to be found that he, the mathematical genius, would be able to acquire?

And so he had found Theresa Harding, whose background check matched that of Michael Guerin, on of the Boston-kids.

And while Ms. Harding had taken it upon herself to watch Maxwell Evans, Theresa Harding was now being watched by FBI-agent Joel Martin. With highly advanced FBI surveillance equipment.

TBC...

[Roswelllostcause]

Oh hell! They are in big trouble now! Not only is Tess spying on them but the FBI is spying on her!

[keepsmiling7]

Oh boy......Tess on the scene.....
And now damage control.
Can't wait to see what happens next.
Thanks,
Carolyn