T h e h e r o

I walk into work, where Michael waits for me just inside the door. "Michael. You never wait for me here. I know it's only my seventh day here, but this is weird, right?"

Michael gestures for me to follow him into another room. "It's about Simon." His sentence makes me stop.

"W-what about him?"

He gestures for me to sit down in a chair across from him and continues talking. "His kidnap is linked to the bombing."

"The bombing?"

He snaps his coffee onto the table in front of him, making a metallic ringing noise dance throughout the room. "Geez Denise, don't you ever watch the news?"

"Not really. All I know is to come to work and check ID's." I fix my suit to make it look as though I'm more professional then I really am. I don't really know what I'm doing, I just know I need the money from this job and I didn't take security courses for nothing. I got bruised and spent money on bandaids for that course, and I need to get that money back.

Michael sighs. "There was a bombing in New York. Laser pointer 2.0. It's like a bazooka in a hand gun. That bombing happened around the same time as a short black out, where Simon was taken. We believe this all to be linked."

I raise my right eyebrow in a confused way and think about all the previous events and what Michael just said. "Don't you think this is all fitting together too perfectly? Bombing the same time as a blackout? Laser pointer 2.0? My dreams actually happening? I think this is a bit absurd."

"I thought you would say that, which is why we are calling in a special agent from the safe and secure team."

Now both my eyebrows are raised. "No! I've heard about them. They're just a whole lot of people that think they're smarter than everyone else. They don't even---"

Michael cuts me off by lifting his hand. "You might want to be quiet, he will be here any second."

There is a knock on the office door and Michael tells the man to enter. I don't want anyone from another team! I am capable of handling whatever comes my way. Very capable.

"Denise Briggs meet Chris Lucas. He came from Africa and is now the best agent from the safe and secure team."

I shake his hand and he starts to speak. "Nice to meet you. Now, you already know why I'm here, so I don't have to tell you anything about that, but we're going to be trying out a new weapon that can out skill theirs. Mind you it still is in... the rough draft. We need to be careful and we need to do this somewhere. Come on, we need to go to my car." He leaves the room and I quickly follow. As I see his car all my assumptions are confirmed. He drives a ferrari. This is going to be one hell of a long car ride.

-------------

"So, how long have you been working at the White House?"

I turn and face him. "You already know the answer, don't you?"

He sighs and quickly glances at me and then back at the road. "I've read your file, yes."

I look out at the road in front of us. It sure is cool being in a Ferrari, but I'm supposed to be mad, so I keep a tough exterior. "What did you find?"

"What do you expect? Age, weight, hair colour, eye colour, photo ID, family members, previous jobs, the whole works."

"And what would I find on yours?"

He starts to laugh, then realizes this is not a joke. "Oh, you're being serious. Well, I'm five years older than you; my family is two brothers and one sister, mom and dad deceased; previous jobs are a farmer, KFC, that's it. There's nothing special about my report."

"But there was about mine?" I watch him clench his jaw and then he gets saved by the bell. Security access in the middle of nowhere.

Chris talks the security man, "We're here to test the..." I can't hear the last words as his talking turns to muffled noises. He starts to move the car into the practise area, otherwise known as an empty field.

"So," he says, "what we're testing today is the Sonic Blast Rerouter. The laser pointer goes off and our Sonic Blast Rerouter uses special gamarays never before seen in this century in public that has only been used on secret missions and basically turns off the laser pointer by making it go into an opposite direction back towards the initial starting point."

I look at him like a Pepsi lover looking at someone who loves coke; wondering if they're being serious, question their life choices, and asking them to say it one more time to make sure I heard them right. "Umm... English?"

"You shoot it at the boom and the boom goes in another direction."

"Oh."

"Here," he takes it out of the car as we both step out. "Watch this."

With him is another gun, so that he's holding two weapons. "First let me fire the laser pointer," he fires it. "And now the Sonic Blast Rerouter." He fires the Rerouter and it works, making us both dive out of the way to not get hit with a flying bomb.

I get up off the ground and dust myself off, then realize that he doesn't really know everything. "If we have a version of the Laser Pointer 2.0, why don't we just make it so that it doesn't work and place it in the hands of the villain?"

He slowly takes off his shades while shaking his head. "Why would we do that? That's too much work. Do you know how long it took to get the laser pointer 2.0? We can't do that to our men. Rookie." He scoffs and goes back into his car.

"Geez," I mutter. "It was just a suggestion."