Archeia's Atheneum (The First Shift)

Episode Three: Friday's Fear

They'd thought about killing him, a motion of termination had been sent out too. Douglass remembered grinning at the form. It came up on his screen as the hot paper inched its way out of the fax machine. "They want to kill Coburry?" he'd said aloud. To Friday, it was overkill; like shooting a squirrel with a shotgun. He could understand and condone the CMC's severe aversion to loose ends, but Douglas himself wasn't malicious so much as he was merciless; he'd do what he needed in order to protect his position--but surly Coburry didn't need to be killed. If the man's backbone wasn't non-existent, it was negligible. Threaten his family, that should suffice.

Douglas meant what he said, as phony as he heard himself say it. Kent was going somewhere. Now more than ever, it was apparent he was going far beyond the CMC. This had Douglas kicking himself for not approving the motion. It had him thinking how far the other cabalists had come on their own malice. Maybe he'd been keeping himself back all this time. The idea was sickening. Coburry made contact, he must have. Whatever breached the earth's atmosphere landed near him. That shit about Sanskrit something-or-other might have been true, but Kent was still acting guilty. He knew things he shouldn't--Douglas could feel it.

When he got back to his office, Friday's first reaction was to send some goons to Kent's house. They'd steal whatever he was hiding, and make sure he understood the value of silence. Then he thought of the missed opportunity. Douglas placed himself on the ergonomic office chair he'd received as a collective Christmas gift from his staff. He looked out his corner office window, down at his parking spot, at his Jaguar. He pondered his things. Measured their worth as symbols. Then Friday's phone rang.

"...What? I'm sorry, pardon?" Douglas didn't expect such words to ever be said. "I'm calm, that's just alarming...Because these people don't do late. No, you don't understand. If they're not there, they're choosing not to be...Nothing from here. Yeah, I'll go now." Douglas was headed toward the highway, and he'd be at the agreed location in a little less than half an hour. High Major Dietrich met Friday periodically at this location (an old DQ, at the northern half of the parking lot, near the woods) and he was nervous every time he did. It made him feel like a ninth-grade dropout who'd taken up selling weed as a fulltime job. Additionally, he'd long thought this would be an ideal place to be assassinated.

In climbing the intelligence division ladder, Douglas had let himself become his job almost completely. He'd been an intel runner, a handler, a spy, a monitor, and even a fetcher. Fetcher was a division colloquialism: it referred to one who'd lead an asset to an ideal place in which to meet an untimely end. Douglas would pick this place for himself. He could see it a little too vividly in his head: victim gets hit with a saser gun--the heart stops--and the next day they, he, is found to have had a heart attack in a DQ parking lot. Friday became the division head to avoid doing this kind of work, to avoid those scenarios entirely. He thought he'd be on top of the food chain, at least by human standards. Alas, it had been a rude awakening to see that if there was a top to the food chain, it was nowhere in sight. Division head turned out to be a big title for the same kind of work, with the same kind of risks.

Dietrich slammed the car door shut behind him and did his big-man strut over to Douglas, who'd left his vehicle almost before he put in park. His assistant, Pam, gingerly stepped out on the other side. Both the High major and his assistant wore casual dress attire, but were Pam fit her look to a tee, Dietrich looked like a red-neck playing aristocrat.

"Ok, how long has it been?" asked Friday, ignoring social protocol.

"Four hours, twenty-three minutes," Pam answered.

"What's happening Doug?" inquired Dietrich whilst searching for the cigar he'd started earlier that day.

"Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. What did Teller say during the last communication?"