Work-in-progress fiction, by Zeno Izen

I promised myself that I wouldn't write any more fiction... Then I broke that promise, and now I can no longer trust myself.

This one isn't finished. The whole thing is written out in my head, I just need to type it out.

--

(yet to be titled)
by Zeno Izen

Foldeurs watched Nichette pull away from the curb and drive off into the fullness of the suburban foilage. He shut the front door and returned to the back sitting room. His wife Maylin was there, on the couch reading some papers from work. She had taken her shoes off and tucked her bare feet under herself.

"Are you cold? Should I turn the heat up?" he asked her.

"No," she answered, looking up from her work just long enough to make brief eye contact.

"I have to make a phone call," he said. He left the sitting room and went upstairs to the bedroom, where he began to change into some more comfortable clothes. While he changed clothes, he brought a cellphone out from a hidden cabinet in the closet. He had already taken his pants off and loosened his tie when he flipped open the phone and dialed the first number that came up. The line rang twice and a recorded voice came on, requesting a message.

"Walking Tall. He's going to do it," Foldeurs said. Just as he was hanging up, his wife came into the room. Foldeurs quickly but casually shut the closet door.

"I need my other glasses," Maylin said. She passed Foldeurs without glancing at him. Her reading glasses were in her hand. Without any glasses on, she was effectively blind. Foldeurs strode casually toward the bed, holding his cellphone near his thigh. He picked his pants up off the bed and slid the cellphone into one of its pockets.

"Did you make your phone call?" she asked him from the bathroom.

"Not yet," he said. "I wanted to get out of these clothes."
--

Opelle picked up the message three hours later when his plane landed at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. He erased the message and immediately called his hotel to have them relay a coded message to his office in Helsinki.

The following Monday, Nichette waited until his lunch break to sneak into the basement three floors below his office at the Department of Public Awareness. It took him ten minutes to find the disks he needed. He took the old elevator up to the parking garage where he had jumped the fence to bypass an electroic key checkpoint. While Nichette's authorization was easily high enough to allow him access to the basement, the computer at the main elevator would record which floor he had exited at. Sneaking in through the garage allowed him to remain "off site" in the Department's databases.

And besides, he could drop the disks off at his car on the way back out.

--

In Helsinki, they decoded the message with the help of a large metal folder full of stiff cardboard pages. They fed the results into a computer which returned to them a list of seven names. They recoded these names and sent them to an agent, who would leave by airplane to prepare the location.

--
Late Monday afternoon in Vancouver, Traj stepped up to the teller window at the bank.

"Hi. My card's not working," he said.

The teller smiled politely and took his card from his hand. She slid it through the card reader on her desk and tapped a button at her keyboard. A moment later she slid the card again. After one last try, she typed the card number into her desk terminal. After waiting a moment she returned Traj's card to him and said "I'm sorry, there is no account with that number."

"No that's impossible. I've been using this card all day," he said.

The teller smiled again, this time a little bit uncomforatbly, and then glanced over Traj's shoulder. Traj turned around and saw two very big security guards walking toward him.

"Sir, can you come with me please," one of the guards said to him.

"No, I haven't finished my business here," Traj said. Then he felt something splash onto his face. He looked up and past the two security guards, into the grand marble interior of the banking lobby. As everything went black, Traj thought how remarkable it was that such a magnificent room should be so empty of people.

--

Opelle went straight to his hotel when he arrived in Cincinnati. He could have picked up the goods immediately, but he preferred to pick them up at the last possible minute. The items had been in storage this long, they would be as safe as anywhere else if they stayed in their lock boxes until just before he left town in the morning.

At exactly the moment Opelle was taking his sleeping pill, his agent from Helsinki was boarding her connecting flight to Dubrovnik. Once in Dubrovnik, she would be taken by car up the Dalmatian coast to Orebic, on the far end of the Peljesac Peninsula. She would be given a hotel room, but she would not sleep. Instead she would watch television for an hour until the sun came up, at which point she would drive up to the clandestine facility over the hills and begin her work.


--

It was at about eleven o'clock on Tuesday morning when Foldeurs began to get tired of hiding behind the oleander bush. He looked again through his binoculars at the front step of the little chapel. For a great while nothing changed in his circular field of vision. Even the leaves on the small tree in front of the building remained still, protected as they were from breezes by the monolithic library on one side of chapel, and the
imposing wall of the science building which wrapped tightly around the chapels other side. Foldeurs lowered his binoculars again and reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

Just as he was dialing, splitting his attention between his cell phone screen and the distant chapel, he saw a figure walk around from behind the building. Foldeurs brought his binoculars to his eyes again and watched the figure climb the front steps and open the front door. Within a moment there was a flash of light followed by a pop that came so softly that Foldeurs was sure he wouldn't have heard it if he hadn't been listening for it.

He emerged from behind the oleander bush and hurried down the stairs toward his car. One and a half minutes later, he pulled up behind the chapel, where his assistant was just stepping out of a paper jumpsuit. Foldeurs popped the trunk on his oldsmobile and jumped out of the car. His assistant had stuffed the jumpsuit and latex gloves into a garbage bag. He handed this to Foldeurs who tossed it into the compartment where the spare tire was meant to be. Then the assistant handed Foldeurs a medium sized suitcase. The suitcase was clearly too large for the spare tire compartment, so Foldeurs handed it back to his assistant and shut both the compartment and the trunk. Both men got into the car and departed the area as quickly as possible without attracting any attention to themselves.

--more--