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Director Roosevelt held open the wooden slats of his window blinds, and he watched the two agents quietly amble down the dark streets of Washington, D.C. When it came down to the orders which he had given them, he knew that they would do as they pleased, but he was confident that one way or another, he would get the outcome he had wanted.
He closed the blinds, and with a remote control in his lap, he pointed it at the flat screen on the wall. With the touch of a button, the screen turned on and quickly came into focus at an odd angle in an empty room, the type of angle that a security camera would provide a watchful eye behind the closed doors of a security organization. The room which appeared in the confines of the screen was dark and gray, but Roosevelt could still perceive the outline of the body that hung on the door. He then clicked another button, apparently switching camera lenses from a color lens to a thermal detection lens inside of the room. The differences between the viewpoints of natural light to the lower frequency infrared were not very striking, and there was no longer any doubt as to the former agent’s condition within the confines of the DAM office. The body remained the color of all of the cold, inanimate objects in the room. Roosevelt felt a twinge of guilt at the loss, though he reckoned that the agent knew what he had signed up for when he agreed to a position in the Secret Service.
As if on queue, the lower frequency thermal photons that passed through the filtering detector of the special lens glowed red in the corner of the screen, and the red grew and grew in real time across the screen. The red moved with a soft caution toward the cold body of the agent. Curious, Roosevelt pressed the rotational buttons which controlled the rotary movement of the camera within the room. The red stopped. Whatever the red was, it had a detector of its own, and the red grew and enveloped the lens of the camera. There was no sound detection connected with the security camera; there was only the broad spectrum of wavelengths of light. Soon, the flat screen that hung on the director’s wall was swathed in the red glow, covered in the blood-colored light. In a flash, the screen was black for a few seconds with the loss of signal. Then the blue screen of death appeared along with the words: ‘No Signal’.
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Crush drove back to Baltimore and dropped Pound off at his home that night. They had been gone for several weeks now, and they needed a shower and at least one good night’s sleep in their own beds before they attempted anything else. In the morning, they would meet again at Crush’s place where they would begin the process of finding Dr. Tatum and Seth Hogan.
For now, a long catnap was in order.
Chapter 3
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Dr. Tatum and Seth