Sneak Peek
“Adam?” called Jesse as he sat at the computer.
“Yeah, Jesse, find something?” the older man responded as he looked up from the tangle of machines that filled the main room in Sanctuary.
“Maybe,” he called back. “I was just reviewing all of the internal memos that we retrieved before they shut down the Genomex computers. There is a memo from US Customs about a shipment being released to Eckhart in exchange for the, quote, services of the previously discussed new mutant, unquote. I’m trying to see if there are any other memos related to it.”
Adam finished entering the final command that started the machine running tests on his latest stabilization technique and then headed up the side stairs to where the young molecular was sitting. As he approached, he put a hand on the back of the chair, looking over Jesse’s shoulder at a series of memos flashing across the screen when they stopped and Jesse glared up at his mentor.
“Sorry,” Adam replied with a guilty shrug as he stood back and stopped reading over the other man’s shoulder.
“I can’t find anything before this, so their previous discussion may have been verbal. The response to the memo was just a date and a time. I’m cross-referencing that information with…there it is!” Jesse said with a satisfied nod. Adam started to lean forward, but caught himself. “Two GSA goons were assigned to deliver Elise Erickson to the US Customs office.”
“Elise Erickson…” Adam repeated as his mind consulted its own internal file, “molecular, I believe.”
“And he wins again!” Jesse said with a smile, “According to her GSA file, she is a molecular with the ability to see through objects.”
“Like x-ray vision?” asked Emma as she and Shalimar joined them.
“Not exactly,” Jesse answered, “more like, if you were to put something into a solid steel box, she could tell you what was inside.”
“And Eckhart sold her as a slave to work for the government, how nice!” said Shalimar in a frigidly sarcastic tone that made Emma move to the other side of Adam from her.
Adam smiled at Emma’s retreat and then looked back at Jesse, “Can you tell if she’s still there?”
“I’m way ahead of you, assuming that they are using her real name…yes, there is an Elise Erickson on their payroll. It looks like she works at the main port in Miami.” He replied.
“So, Emma? Jesse? You two care to join me for a quick trip to Miami?” Adam asked with a smile.
“Miami!?” exclaimed Brennan as he joined the group, his hair still damp from his shower. “hmm, bikinis, beaches, sounds nice.”
Adam replied, “I thought you were anxious to get that new carburetor into your Camero.”
Indecision shadowed Brennan’s face until Shalimar spoke up, “Adam, that’s cruel, asking a guy like Brennan to choose between cars and girls in bikinis, you’ll make his poor little head explode.”
Brennan simply smiled at Shalimar and mouthed the words, “you’ll pay for that one!”
As Adam joined Emma and Jesse in the Double Helix, he noticed the discrete little pile of towels and swimsuits. Smiling, he noted, “This is a business trip, you realize?”
Emma and Jesse looked at each other for a moment before Jesse finally reasoned, “True, but what if we get all sweaty on this business trip? Obviously you’d want us to take a nice dip in the ocean before being stuck in the Double Helix for two whole hours on the way back!”
“Obviously,” Adam replied with a smile, tossing his own towel and swimming trunks onto the pile.
***
Having activated the Double Helix’s stealth mode and landed on one of the many warehouse roofs, the three team members proceeded to sneak down the stairwell on the side of the building. “The main office should be in that building,” Jesse said, pointing to a small 3-story building near the entry gate.
“Great,” replied Adam, “let’s see if this Richard Tong is available for a little meeting.
At the reception desk, the attractive young woman asked if they had an appointment. Jesse leaned over and smiled at here, “Of course we do, he just doesn’t know about it yet.” The woman looked a little confused but, before she had a chance to realize what Jesse meant and call security, she was hit from the side by one of Emma’s psionic blasts.
She shook her head, trying to clear the confusion and said, “I’m sorry, who were you looking for?”
“Richard Tong,” Jesse answered with all the charm he could muster.
“Oh, that’s right, he’s on the third floor, at the end of the hallway, The elevator is right there,” the woman replied as she pointed.
“Thanks!” Jesse said with a smile as the three of them headed to the elevator. Then, turning to Emma he continued in a quiet voice, “You know, you frighten me at times!”
At the end of the hall, large double doors opened to a corner office with windows overlooking the loading docks. Behind the large mahogany desk, a tall Asian man in his mid 50’s looked up at the three unexpected visitors. After a moment he spoke, “Adam Kane? Mr. Eckhart warned me that you might show up at some point.”
Adam smiled congenially, “Well, Mason isn’t around anymore and we need to talk.”
“About what?” asked the man behind the desk with a look that would cause envy in the poker champions of the world.
“Not ‘what’, who,” Adam replied.
“Miss Erickson is one of my most valuable employees, and she has another three and a half years on her employment contract,” Richard replied, deciding not to pretend that he didn’t know who Adam was referring to.
“Employment contract?” asked Emma, “that’s an interesting term for it.”
“Regardless of the terminology, we’d like to speak with her, privately.” Adam said as he sat confidently in the leather chair in front of the desk, leaning back and steepling his fingers.
Richard locked eyes with Adam for a moment, sizing up his opponent, before sighing and picking up the intercom system. “Elise Erickson, please call Mr. Tong,” he spoke into the phone. The echo of the message could be heard throughout the vast warehouses.
The office was filled with a silence that was as thick and heavy as the humid Miami heat until it was finally broken by a small ‘beep’ of the phone. Richard pressed the intercom button so that his ‘visitors’ could hear the conversation.
“Mr. Tong? This is Elise,” came the soft voice over the speaker.
“Elise, there are some…people in my office who would like to speak to you about your employment arrangements.” Richard said, maintaining the steely air about him.
“Can they wait for about 5-10 minutes?” The woman asked, “I’m just about finished with that large shipment from Brazil and then it can be released, it’s holding up the whole system.”
Richard looked up at Adam, who nodded his acceptance, and then replied, “That would be fine. I’ll see you in a few minutes.
After what seemed like an eternity of silence, as Richard and Adam appeared to be challenging each other in a staring contest and Emma and Jesse tried to just stand there without fidgeting, they all jumped a little when the door opened. A slightly heavyset woman with short, curly hair stepped into the office, looking suspiciously at the visitors.
Adam stood up and said, “Elise?” as he held out his hand in greeting.
Elise looked at the hand and stepped around him to the side of Richard’s desk. “What’s this about?” She asked her boss.
Richard gave her a reassuring look as he explained, “This is Adam Kane, and I suspect the other two are members of his ‘Mutant team’, they would like to talk with you.”
At the mention of his name, Elise looked at Adam with a mix of curiosity and disgust. Adam wasn’t surprised as he realized that her only knowledge of him was filtered through Mason Eckhart’s twisted vision. “This is Emma, she’s a psionic and this is Jesse, he’s also a molecular, and yes, they are members of Mutant X,” Adam said, indicating his two companions. “Would you care to join us for lunch?”
Emma noticed how dramatically Adam had changed the tone of his voice, obviously mindful of the young woman’s hesitancy. Richard nodded to her saying, “It’ll be fine, why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off.”
Trying to lighten the atmosphere, Emma smiled at Elise saying, “Follow me, I’ll show you were we…uh, parked. Do you know any nice restaurants around here?” After a moment of hesitation, she followed the cheery redhead out the door, with Jesse and Adam sharing a glance before following them. Neither of them made any further eye contact with the man glaring from behind the desk.
The four of them walked in silence across the lot and up the side stairs to the roof where the Double Helix was parked. When Elise hesitated at the entrance, Emma jokingly said, “don’t worry, Jesse’s a good pilot – once he’s had his morning cup of coffee.”
“Hey,” Jesse responded in imitation shock as everyone took their seats in the small craft. “So, where to?” he added, looking at Elise.
“El Kapitan is nice, it’s just up the coast about 25 miles,” she said in a near whisper. With that, the craft lifted off the roof and started up the coast.
As they arrived at the restaurant, having parked on the beach, Adam nodded his approval. El Kapitan was a quiet, classy little seafood restaurant with a covered, open air eating area, which was pleasantly cooled by the ocean breezes. From the waiter’s smile, it was obvious that Elise was a bit of a ‘regular’ here and they were quickly seated at a corner table, near the water.
“Nice!” Jesse commented to Elise.
Elise nodded and smiled shyly. “A bunch of us come up here every other Friday after work, kind of a payday celebration.” Emma smiled as she notice the woman relaxing a little now that she was on familiar ground.
After ordering, Adam gently broached the subject, “So, how about you tell us how a small-town Midwestern girl ended up working for US Customs.”
“It was a small town, with a large UPS transfer station where most of the people worked.” Elise began. “I’d known for years about my ability to see inside of things – really spoiled the surprise at Christmas time. So, when I started working at the transfer station, I would scan the packages, just for fun, you wouldn’t believe some of the things that people ship!
I also noticed a lot of contraband, ya know, stuff that people aren’t legally allowed to ship: guns, drugs, alcohol, etc. and I started to get an idea of how I could make enough money to leave that boring little town. So I visited a friend in the city and hooked up with a fence who worked one of the pawnshops. The deal was, I would locate packages with illegal stuff in them and re-route them to his business address. Then I would delete the tracking information and he would sell the items and send me 50% of the take. In a couple years, I’d made over a million dollars.”
“Wow,” Jesse said, sounding obviously impressed, “and here I was always told that crime didn’t pay!”
“Only if you don’t get caught,” Elise replied. “The only reason that I got away with it for as long as I did was because most people wouldn’t follow up on the packages. They were usually afraid that the stuff had been found and they would be arrested if they tried to find the package.”
Smiling, Adam noted, “I take it you got caught?”
“Yeah,” Elise continued, “I noticed several guns in a package, but I failed to notice the little tracking device. Apparently it was an ATF sting operation that was out to catch some arms dealers. The police ended up raiding the pawnshop where my fence worked and arrested him for some other stolen property that he had there and then they tracked down where the package had been diverted and pulled me in. They asked me how I knew what was in the package. I didn’t know what to answer, so I just told them the truth and, of course, they thought I was lying.
But, I guess that someone in the ATF had ties to Mr. Eckhart because these creepy guys came and transferred me from the jail to Genomex. There, I was given the option of spending the next 5 years rotting in a jail cell or spending the next 5 years doing “paid community service” for US Customs.
“Hmm, tough choice!” Emma laughed.
“Not really…” Elise smiled back. “Anyway, about a month after I started, Mr. Tong insisted that the GSA send someone down to remove the subdermal governor because he wanted it to be as normal of an employment arrangement as possible. I mean, true, it isn’t exactly ‘employment at will’, but I feel like I’ve gotten off pretty easy. I’m basically free, being paid a competitive wage and, I have to admit, I love my job!”
Emma’s smile and nod told Adam that her enthusiasm was genuine, but Jesse’s raised eyebrow indicated that he was yet to be convinced.
“You don’t understand,” Elise continued, “last week, I found a two billion dollar cocaine shipment, six refugees who would have died if they hadn’t been found that quickly and a shipment of tropical parrots. It’s the illegal animal trade that really raises my hackles. I mean, these guys take endangered birds and turtles and monkeys and stuff and box them up in a crate, usually within a crate of some legal item. Usually, more than half of the animals die, but they don’t care, to them its just part of the cost of doing business. And I just…I’m sorry,” she added with a guilty smile, “I’m a little passionate about the subject.”
Finally convinced, Jesse commented, “Imagine Eckhart actually doing something that was a benefit to everyone involved!”
“Accidents do happen!” Emma said with a smile as their food arrived. Now that Adam was convinced that Elise wasn’t being treated like a slave and Elise was confident that Adam wasn’t going to try to take her away from her job, they all settled into a more relaxed conversation, with Elise drilling Adam with a myriad of questions about her New Mutancy.
After lunch, Jesse noted that they had time to take a dip in the ocean and still get back to Sanctuary in time for dinner. Elise looked up, “there’s this really nice, secluded beach down the coast a bit. It’s usually only accessible by boat, but I bet that plane of yours could land there.” Adam agreed, so they swung by Elise’s apartment to pick up her swimsuit and some snorkeling equipment and went out to the beach.
When they got there, the guys changed in the lower section of the Helix while the girls used the upper section. Emma noticed that Elise wore a conservative one piece that was quite flattering. She shuddered with the memory of her heavyset aunt who insisted on wearing bikinis. Her own swimsuit was, technically, a one piece; there were just a large number of holes that made it look like Swiss cheese.
As they exited the craft, Adam handed Emma the bottle of SPF 30 sunscreen saying, “I would recommend a thick layer, you have fairly pale skin and a bright red sunburn would clash terribly with your, uh…current hair color.”
Emma stuck out her tongue as she took the bottle, “I hope us used some on those geek-white legs of yours!”
Adam looked down at his legs. They were sleek and strong from his regular exercise routine but, Emma was right, they were a ghostly pale. It was even more noticeable in contrast to his black swimming trunks.
Emma walked up to Jesse and handed him the bottle, “would you do the honors?”
“Do I have to fill in ALL of the holes?” he teased as he started rubbing in the lotion.
“If you don’t,” Emma warned, “I’ll have a very funny looking tan and I will NOT be pleased!” Jesse raised his hands in surrender and continued the process.
***
Later, as the three members of Mutant X approached Sanctuary, Jesse looked back to see that Emma was just waking up from an in-flight nap and Adam was sitting back with a relaxed smile on his face.
“So,” Emma said, “the story is that we found the New Mutant and took actions to make sure that she wasn’t being exploited and then came back, without any mention of the side trip to the beach.”
“That’s the story!” replied Jesse with a smile, as they both looked at Adam who simply rolled his eyes and laughed.
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