John Ringo - Queen of wands

“How do we get her back?” Barb asked.

“That’s a tough one,” Sharice said. “Augustus, I’m going to need help.”

“Who?”

“Drakon and…Hjalmar,” Sharice said. “I’m going to have to go onto the Paths and battle. If we keep her here, I’m going to need physical security on her as well. She should be moved to a more secure location. We’ll need a nurse that can keep her mouth shut, support equipment and an on-call MD. Then Drakon to watch my astral back. Hjalmar, because if Freya doesn’t get involved pretty damned soon, we’re going to lose her.”

“What can I do?” Barb asked.

“Right now, what you’re doing,” Sharice said. “Send her power. It’s helping her, I can tell. We may need to bring in a coven to raise the support we’ll need. But you’ve got other things to do.”

“What?” Barb asked.

“Someone or something did this to her,” Sharice said, looking over at Augustus. “Am I right?”

“Presumably,” the senior agent said. “There has been an upgrade in the case. It is now officially Special Circumstances.”

“ See the Boss.”

Kurt snorted at the post-it on his computer monitor and then crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash. Special Agent Kurt Spornberger had been an FBI agent for barely two years, but he wasn’t exactly a newb.

He’d been a street officer with Chicago PD for three years before moving to investigations and had worked his way up to Homicide before being recruited by the Bureau. The Bureau was, at the time, going through one of its periodic reevaluations, and some bright consultant had noticed that many investigations that the Bureau had been credited with solving could better be credited to local LEOs. It just made sense in many ways. Bureau agents rarely spent enough time in any one area to really develop relations with the local informants. They didn’t spend their early careers working the streets of a city. They often didn’t really get the zeitgeist of the local culture. Local law enforcement officers-at least the good ones-did.

The suggestion of the overpaid consultant was taken to heart by at least one member of senior management in DC, and the order had come down from on high: Recruit some local guys. Kurt had good relations with the local office. After he turned up a critical lead in a local serial-murder case, an eyewitness to an abduction who just happened to be a street whore who would have never talked with a Fibbie, the local Supervisory Special Agent had recommended him. He had the requisite four-year degree, albeit in anthropology, not pre-law or criminal justice, and he had a good rep. He was a little less “STRAC” than the Bureau normally hired, another way of saying he didn’t look like he had a ten-foot spike jammed up his ass, but the idea was to look at different cultures and everyone agreed Kurt Spornberger was “different culture.”

But he had an interesting time at the FBI academy. Some of the classes were taught by agents who had “been there, done that.” You could tell by the look. These were guys who had spent decades looking at bare scraps of evidence, trying to find that one word buried in billions that would pop the perps, turn up the terrorists, break the bank-robbery team.

Those instructors looked him in the eye, looked at his record, listened to his answers and then nodded. He might be a greenie to the Bureau, but he wasn’t green. They’d brought him in on some techniques he hadn’t known and let him slide through the stuff that was rookie material without being assholes. He got along with the Old Guys.

Then there had been the classes taught by the Belts.

Suits were the upper echelon. Some of them were old agents who had been there and done that. Too many, though, were overgrown Belts. A Belt was like a Chairborne Commando in the Army. They were the agents who had somehow managed to never work outside the Beltway. Oh, they might have gone as far as Quantico, but that was about it. They had no field experience other than an initial tour.

But my God, did they know how to run an investigation. They were investigating supermen, one and all. They had every answer, just ask them. And ask the Suits, all of whom they knew by name. You clearly got the impression that the FBI Director did not shit without their fully prepared Action Report on Shitting Methodology. And make sure that form 493-628-QX is filled out fully.

Kurt had barely managed to survive the classes given by the Belts. He’d dealt with Belts before. Every department had them. You just had to learn to live with them because killing them forced you to fill out even more paperwork. And there were so many, you’d never get any real work done.

On the other hand, the shooting instructors were pretty good. They believed in the FBI Way of shooting. But when Kurt proved that the Kurt Spornberger Way of the Gun was going to get him through the qualifications, they’d left him alone. The hand-to-hand stuff, well…

It had taken him quite some time to convince them that he Did Not Want to move to Quantico to be a HTH instructor. Seriously. He had a house in Chicago, he liked Chicago, he did not like Virginia and he didn’t want to live in Virginia. He understood that the FBI meant he’d move at some point. But the idea had been to get local guys working local areas. Not get local guys to come teach HTH. I’m sorry about the arm.

He’d graduated from Quantico with fair marks, really high on shooting, investigation techniques and hand-to-hand-pretty high from the Been There Done That instructors, pretty marginal from the Belts. Any BTDT Supervisory Special Agent who looked at the results was going to be able to parse it. Good field agent, not a natural diplomat.

The last week of Academy, the postings came out. He was unsurprised to find that at least two of the natural Belts in the class were going to DC. Most of the rest weren’t untoward, either, except that they were actually posting the one Native American they had to a reservation. Of course, the guy was a Cherokee and they were sending him to a Hopi reservation in Arizona, but at least they were trying.

Then he got to “Spornberger, Kurt M.”

Chattanooga, TN.

The whole effing idea had been to recruit guys for their local knowledge, and where did they send the guy from Chicago?

Chattanooga. What, it started with a “Ch” so it had to be the same place? Belt thinking in a nutshell.

Fucking Chattanooga. Goodbye, Lake Michigan, hello…Tennessee River? He could hear the echo of banjoes just saying it. Goodbye kielbasa, hello…What the fuck did they eat in Tennessee, anyway? Grits…God almighty, he’d be forced to eat grits. And…chitlins…Oh…God…

Over the last couple of years he’d come to terms with living in the wilderness. Chattanooga wasn’t awful. Some of the local cops, with whom he’d quickly established a close relationship since his own BTDT came across fast, even insisted that they’d never live anywhere else. He’d tried to explain the inherent superiority of the only truly civilized city on Earth, but they just couldn’t comprehend it. It was probably something in the water.

But he survived. Someday, he was assured, he could get transferred back to the center of the universe, the city with broad shoulders. They just wanted him to get accustomed to working with other areas. “Think of it as broadening,” his Supervisor had explained.

“Morning, Kurt,” Supervisory Special Agent Garson said as the agent entered the office. “How’s case nine-forty-eight?”

“I don’t think these guys have got a record,” Kurt said, sitting down and spreading his legs out. “We picked up one pretty clear print, but it wasn’t on file. And the way they move, I’d say military background. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve put in a request for access to the military database of fingerprints, but you know how sticky they can be. They’re going to want to know which guy, and we don’t have that yet.”