Hidden Agendas

After he'd bought the boomerang, Tyrone had spent a couple of hours at the park playing with it. It was a little trickier than it looked, but it had taken him only a few minutes to get the thing working well enough so he didn't have to run and chase it. Well, not too far anyhow. A couple of times, it had come back close enough so he had been able to catch it without taking more than a step or two.

He'd never been real big on physical stuff, but he could definitely get into this.

By the time his arm was tired and he was ready to go home, he had figured out a lot of stuff about how you stood relative to the wind, and how to figure out which way the wind was blowing. He'd watched other throwers pick up bits of dry grass or dirt and then drop them, watching to see which way they drifted. He also had a fair idea of how much wrist action a basic throw needed. This was really fun stuff.

His phone cheeped. Tyrone pulled it from his belt clip. 'Hello?'

'Hey, son. How are you doing?'

'Dad? I thought you were out in the middle of snowland or somewhere.'

'I am. Only guy around for fifty miles.'

'You okay? You don't usually call during these things.'

'Yeah, I'm fine.'

There was a pause, and Tyrone sensed his father wanted to say something else, so he stayed quiet.

'Actually, I had a little excitement today. You have to promise not to tell your mother, okay?'

Uh-oh. What did that mean? 'Sure, Dad. What's flowin'?'

'A tree fell on me.'

'A tree? Are you all right?'

'Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Thing snapped under the weight of a lot of snow. I was lucky, but it got me to thinking, maybe I should give you call. How are you doing?'

'Geez, Dad, a tree falls on you and you're worried about me?'

'It's what fathers do, Ty.'

'Well, I'm flowing fine. I just got a boomerang.'

'Really? War or sport?'

Tyrone felt his eyebrows rise. 'You know about boomerangs?'

'A little. They're hunting devices or weapons, depending on the kind. I wouldn't want to be clonked on the head with one, even one of the birding models.'

'Birding?'

'The sport models, that's what they were used for. If you hit something with it, it doesn't come back, but an expert can knock a bird out of the air forty or fifty yards away at a right angle to where he's standing. We played with them some in military camp when I was a kid. Been years since I've seen mine. I think it's in the attic at Grampa's.'

Amazing. His father seemed to know something about everything. And he had a boomerang. Amazing.

'Well, I got one, a sport model. There's this tournament not far from our house, I checked it out, and I got one.'

'Great. You can brush me up on how to use it when I get home. I'm out of practice.'

'Yeah, that would be DFF.'

'It's been good talking to you, son. I'm going to give your mother a call and say hi. And Ty? Let's keep the falling-tree thing between us.'

'Right. Take care, Dad. Thanks for calling.'

When he discommed, Tyrone smiled. His father had called him before he had called Mom. He'd shared a secret with him, something in confidence. And his father had played with a boomerang as a kid.

Man. Would wonders never cease?

Saturday, January 15th, 6:30 p.m. Quantico, Virginia

Michaels was in his office, worrying about twelve different things, when one of those things came in.

'Alex?'

'Toni. What's up?'

'FBI and the Georgia state boys ran down the address outside Marietta. An old house, belongs to a family named Platt. Father hasn't been around for thirty years, mother died, left the place to her son.'

She put a thin sheaf of hardcopy on his desk, including a photo. 'That's him, the son.'

Michaels looked at the image. The kid in the picture was big and muscular, in a white T-shirt and jeans, but he also looked about sixteen. 'Kind of young, isn't he?'

'Only image we could find. It's about fifteen or sixteen years old. This guy Platt would be in his early thirties now. We can age the image, and we're straining him through the Cray Colander now. Neighbors say he lives at the house, but he's gone a lot.'

'Seems to be something of a stretch, doesn't it?' he said.

'From Danish terrorists to a Georgia cracker?'

'Okay if I sit?'

'Jesus, you don't have to ask. Sit, sit!'

She did, and gave him a small smile.

He felt an erotic heat start to smolder low in his belly. Or thereabouts.

'I've been thinking about that,' she said. 'It seems kind of odd that nobody ever heard of this Frihedsakse before all this started.'

'What do you mean? Jay has dug up all kinds of references to the group predating the manifesto they sent, going back years.'

'Well, not exactly. I had Jay recheck. What we can absolutely confirm are bits here and there as old as six months. Before that, the etiology of the information is, as Jay puts it, ‘somewhat ambiguous.' '

Michaels leaned back in his chair and considered that for a few seconds. 'Why would that be, I wonder.'

'There's the jackpot question.'

'What do you think?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know for sure. But just for the sake of argument, let's say these Danish terrorists didn't exist until six months ago. Why would they bother to plant information that said they were a lot older? What would be the point? I mean, so they're only six months old, what difference would that make to anybody? Are they looking for prestige? Some kind of validation? They want to be the Elks or the Masons of terrorists?'

Michaels nodded. 'Good point. Why would they bother?'

'Maybe they didn't,' she said. 'Maybe it was somebody else.'

Came the dawn into his head, a few bright streaks painting the dark sky of his mind. 'Oh, man. Yeah, I can see that. Maybe there isn't any such group as Frihedsakse. Maybe it's somebody who wants us looking for a terrorist group that doesn't exist. They leave just enough clues for us to think we're finding something, to stay interested, when in fact we're spinning our wheels and not getting anywhere. Maybe it's not terrorists at all.'

'It's just a theory,' she said.

He shook his head, suddenly angry at himself. 'But we should have checked this out before. We didn't look for another target because we had this big fat turkey plopped right down in front of us. It was too easy.'

Toni said, 'The thing is, if it's not terrorists, who is it? And what do they want? Somehow, I have a lot of trouble believing some lowbrow high-school-dropout jock from a little town in Georgia has the wherewithal to pull all this off.'

Michaels said, 'Let's put Frihedsakse on the back burner. Check on what systems were hit, and who might benefit from them being damaged or down.'

She stood. 'I'll go talk to Jay and Joanna.'

'Good.'

She started to leave. He couldn't let her get to the door without saying something else. 'Toni?'

She turned. 'Yes?'

'About that… thing in the Miata…'