“Are you Bannock?” Trooper Wyatt asked.
“Officer Charlie Bannock, Doyon Security Services, at your service, ma’am,” he said with a flourish of his hand, ushering her into the lighted building. “And you are?”
“Trooper Wyatt,” she replied in a flat cold voice.
When Lonnie first started her career in the Troopers, she had been told that her looks might be a difficulty for her. Her instructors warned that she would be constantly flirted with and harassed. Initially it had bothered her, even intimidated her, when suspects and officers alike would hit on her. They often assumed her too pretty to be strong. She eventually learned that her appearance could also be a powerful asset.
By any standard of beauty in almost any country or society, Lonnie Wyatt was stunning. She learned to use her appearance to her advantage when necessary to coerce a suspect or informant to give every bit of information they had to her. With a simple angle of her eyes and tilt of the head, she could soften her expression to the point where most men were hypnotized by her gaze. Some men were stronger, and others were just jerks who didn’t take her seriously until she had to use physical force. Physical force was something at which she was also quite adept. Lonnie was a 4th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and 3rd degree in Hap Ki Do.
Only two weeks earlier, a suspected meth dealer had tried to grab her gun during a warrant arrest. He quickly found his arm in a very unnatural position and could not explain to the medics how his face had been so badly bruised.
And, as with many Northeastern Asian women, she had the ability to make her face appear extremely cold, even cruel, just by going expressionless and staring into a person’s eyes. Lonnie had become quite adept at scaring the willies out of almost any person with a well-timed icy stare.
“I understand you met a couple of suspicious people earlier this evening at the TVEC substation?”
“Wow, you like to get right to business don’t you? My kinda girl.” He smiled.
“Look, Officer Bannock,” she started.
“You can call me Charlie.” A grin spread across his face that Lonnie thought seemed oddly uncomfortable to him.
She looked at him with cold, hard stare, accentuated by her stoic Korean features. “Fine, Charlie. I don’t have time to waste with flirting.” She put her hands on her hips and assumed an aggressive stance. Her voice was sharp. “You don’t have a chance with me. Let’s get to business so we can catch these guys.”
His face flushed red with a boyish look of embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I assume you’re talking about the two Albanian guys?”
“Yes, tell me everything you saw to the best of your recollection. I also have to let you know that this conversation is being recorded,” she said.
Bannock motioned to a rectangular folding table with a single metal chair on each side. He walked toward it, then sat down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, spreading his hands and tapping the fingers of one against the fingers of the other.
As he gathered his thoughts, Lonnie took a quick look around the room. It was about fifteen by twenty feet, with plain white Sheetrocked walls. Behind the chair farthest from her was a window through which she could see outside to the guardhouse at the entrance. The guard who had let her in was sitting inside the small booth, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback book.
Behind Bannock, along the long wall that stretched the whole length of the room, was a desk-height shelf covered in a series of computer printers, monitors, and CPUs. A short metal rack on the floor at one end contained a single device about the size of two pizza boxes stacked together. The IBM logo stood out on the front cover of the device, next to several two-inch-wide by four-inch-tall vertical rectangles that filled the rest of the front surface. It looked identical to a device in the computer network closet at the Public Safety building that was used to store video from the cruiser cameras at the end of each trooper’s shift. She remembered the IT guy calling it a NAS, which stood for something she couldn’t remember. Its real name was totally lost on the troopers in the office, who referred to it as the NASAL Server.
On several of the monitors, she could see color images being fed in from surveillance cameras around the compound. One of the cameras showed the entrance gate and part of the courtyard of the TVEC station.
“Right,” Bannock said. “Well, here is what I saw.” He explained everything in detail as he had with Eugene earlier in the evening.
“So, you were suspicious of them, based on a feeling you had?” she asked.
“Not just a feeling, ma’am. I spent twenty-two years in the Army, seventeen of those years in the Green Berets and the Delta Project. I hunted terrorists around the world or trained the armies of other countries how to hunt them down. After a while, you begin to have a sixth sense of sorts. It’s what keeps a guy alive in that crap.”
“As a cop, I can’t make an arrest on suspicions and feelings,” Lonnie replied. “I need facts, hard evidence of criminal behavior. Otherwise, we’re just wasting our time. It’s not a crime to speak Albanian.”
“Look, these guys were up to no good, whether they work for TVEC or not. I’m telling you, based on my experience, that they’re connected to terrorism. That’s it, plain and simple. Take it or leave it.”
“I understand your professional opinion, and you may be right. But it won’t hold up in court without hard evidence. And
