Big Fish Little Fish

The first Chinese restaurant we found was a little place in a shopping plaza, tucked between a drug store and a Greek cafe. There was, of course, a big aquarium filled with tropical fish right by the door and across from the counter. A dozen booths filled the rest of the room. I picked a booth where my back wouldn't be exposed and I could see the front entrance, and we both sat down.

A paper place mat explained the Chinese zodiac; Tiger, Ox, Monkey, all that nonsense.

It was early March and the weather was beginning to warm, the rest of the restaurant patrons were wearing light jackets. Birds began to chirp outside. My birthday was in a month, I realized. I wondered if my life would be settled down by then, or if I'd still be choosing restaurant seats based on what my back is against and whether I can see the door. The thought made me feel tired and depressed.

A young Chinese woman with limited capacity for English came over and brought menus and took drink orders. I looked the menu over, trying to find the sweet and sour chicken, found it, and set the menu down. Amy's menu was still on the table.

"No point looking?" I asked.
"Everybody has beef and broccoli."
"They might have something new and innovative that would blow your mind."
"Then what are you getting?"
"Sweet and sour chicken," I smirked.
"Maybe they use a new kind of sour that'll blow your mind."

Drinks were brought, orders taken, menus removed.

"How was school?" I asked to fill the silence.
"Usual," she said, "How was truancy?"
"Usual," I nodded. "Bought a car today."
She feigned amazement, "Really? A gun, a knife, and a V-8. You're like a walking action movie now."
"I'm not carrying the gun with me, thank you very much."

I sipped hot tea from a tiny cup. It tasted like ginger; the tea, not the cup. The cup tasted like china; the porcelain, not the country.

"What. Is. Up, with your dad and those knives?" I asked, reflecting on the butterfly box full of sharp, pointy death.
"They're Emersons, man," she started, craning her head back, "they're all he ever talks about. Ernest Emerson. He was some Navy SEAL guy who needed one of those flippy-foldy-butterfly-whatever knives for a class, but he couldn't afford one so he made his own with his machining tools. Everybody says it's the best knife they've ever seen, so they start paying him for them. Flash forward a few years and he's designing the most sought-after knives for special forces people. Delta Force, SEALs, SAS, everybody goes nuts for them. They're supposed to stand up to a lot of abuse, whereas I suppose lesser knives fall apart after you slice a few throats open."
"So that's why you were looking at this one in the store," I said, looking down at the metal and epoxy clipped to my right pocket.
"Yeah, I was just seeing if I remembered any of the ones he let me look at."
"So these are the best in the business, I guess. I thought $180 seemed like a lot for a pocket knife."
"Oh, you can spend a lot more. Why was he showing you the collection anyway?" she meant her dad.
"I don't know, he saw that I had the knife in my pocket when I showed up and he asked about it, like 'why is this kid showing up for my daughter packing edged weapons?' I said the word Emerson and he turned into a museum curator."
She smiled, "Well, when you left he started grilling me for answers. Who was that boy. How do you know him. Where does he live. Not like he wanted to hunt you down, but like he was subscribing to your fan club. Most he's said to me in a while."

The food came; hot and steamy. I love the smell of fresh white rice when it's nice and sticky.

Before I started eating, I asked, "You said military guys use those knives. Do you think your dad used them when he was in the Corps or something?"
Amy looked up from her plate, "You mean like maybe one of those knives saved his life so he's had a boner for them ever since?"
I shrugged.
"It's possible," she said, "but there's no way I could know. I'm not entirely sure what he was doing in the Marines. When I was little he would take long trips all the time, when we lived on-base. He could have been some kind of black ops commando, or he could have taught recruits how to zip their pants up. He certainly doesn't talk about it, either way."

She started eating her food, so I did the same. The sweet and sour was more sour than sweet, which was surprisingly alright with me. I thought about Amy's parents; she said her mom left because of something her dad did. Maybe he was some black ops unit member and always had to rush out last-minute to go to some foreign country we're not supposed to be in to kill some guy we're not supposed to have killed. I'd never heard of the Marine Corps having special forces, though. Army had Green Berets and Delta, Navy had SEALs and Team Six, the Air Force had the mostly-useless SOC, but the Marines... everybody talks about the Marines like they're all special forces. Maybe Amy's mom was sick of him having to live some secret life, or found out what he did, and left. When they lived on-base. Wait a minute.

"Wait a minute," I said, sticking my fork in a tender chunk of chicken, "On-base. You lived in Quantico?"
She finished chewing and nodded. "Yeah, in on-base housing."
"In Quantico."
"Yeah..."
"Agh!"
"What?" she didn't realize what she was missing.
"Why didn't I know that?"
"Why... is that such a big deal?"
"My dad worked in Quantico my whole life and I've never been in there. It's supposed to be like a fortress town or something. Whenever I asked if I could visit, he said security was too tight."
"I remember it being like that," she said, trying to turn her eyes backwards and see into her memory. "We lived there until I was like eight or nine. I had to carry around a security pass and all kinds of papers for if I got lost or something. When we'd leave and come back, like for shopping or anything, we went through checkpoint gate thing and my mom had to show a card and ID. There was a special sticker we had to put on our car too."
"But you know the layout and everything, how to get in?"
"Layout? It's not like it's a warehouse or something, it's a whole town. The parts I saw were mostly just housing and offices and the PX. I never went inside the actual base, of course. We went through the east end a few times, by the river and all the academies."
"East end?"
She took another bite, then explained the general organization of the town. On the far west was base housing and administrative buildings. In the middle was the base itself, spanning miles and miles of wooded terrain with some airfields on the far east end. There was a whole fleet of helicopters there, and Marine One, the helicopter the President rides around in, is kept and maintained there. East of that, right on the Potomac, were the DEA and FBI Academies, the Marine Corps University where my dad worked, and a few more buildings she never found out about. Near the river were some small parks and fields where officers would go jogging or sprawl out and watch the river roar.

"If you wanted to go to where you dad worked, you'd use the southeast entrance, it's right by the University. There's a checkpoint there, too."
"I guess there's another thing for my agenda," I said.
"What's your fixation with the place? It's got nothing to do with any of this. The FBI aren't headquartered there or anything, just an academy for them."
"Oh, it's nothing like that," I said, "it's just that I feel like I've got to see the place at least once. My dad lived and died there, under a shroud of secrecy. I want to see where he worked, at least, maybe talk to some people he worked with and try to get some sort of explanation for why he died, or at least what he spent his life working on. Was he building nukes? Designing biological weapons? Calculating the optimum paint color for an oversea barracks? I know nothing; absolutely nothing about what he did and barely anything about who he was."
I felt my voice begin to shake, so I stopped talking. Amy's eyes were deep, and searching mine again. I slid a piece of pineapple around a pool of sauce with my fork, thought of Paul Bunyan and his giant flapjacks, for some reason.

"Alright," she said eventually, "I can get you in there if you want. I mean, I can show you how to get there and all that. I don't have the credentials to get us in there anymore."
"My dad's car should still be there," I said, "someone called the house about it a week or so ago. I can use that as an 'in'."
She nodded, "That might work, but I wouldn't call them about it first. They'll tell you they'll move it outside the gate for you to pick it up, or they'll have someone drop it off. Just show up at the gate and explain to the guy why you're there. If you have any of your dad's ID it might help. That way everyone will be in a scramble and you might get in. Bonus points if you look completely destroyed."

"There's still the other thing, though," Amy continued. "Comstock. The FBI wants you to ask them something about him, so you/I/we have to figure out what the story is with him."
"Yeah," I sighed, "the whole thing sucks. I want answers, but I can't exactly admit to the FBI or police about what I did Saturday night. And they know that, so it's like we're dancing on some stupid tight-rope with innuendo and code words. It seems like they want to help me, but first I have to help them."
"Maybe Comstock is selling drugs or something. Using students to filter the product down to the street level," Amy said, thoughtfully.
"DEA would be dealing with that."
"Selling government secrets?"
"CIA. No, NSA."
"Running stolen guns through Africa?"
"ATF."
"Playing professional basketball?"
"NBA."
"Then I'm out of ideas."
"And I'm out of acronyms," I said.
"So what exactly does the FBI deal with, then?"
"Everything else, I guess. They're like a federal version of a police force. Anything that the police would usually deal with, but it crosses state lines."
"So Comstock's just breaking some law, some big law, or he's working for people who are. Fine, he seems stupid enough that we could just tail him and wait for him to do something suspicious. He's not like a spy or anything where he'll be looking over his own shoulders."
"Yeah," I said, "We can keep an eye on him. When you're at school, try to hang around near him and watch what he does. Don't write anything down and don't be obvious. I'll try to find out where he lives so I can check around his house."

She nodded slowly, then shook her head. "Doesn't this seem, like, extremely stupid? We have no idea what's going on, and the FBI's giving you secret clues like Yoda or something. We're just kids, practically, what do we know about any of this stuff?"

I looked over at the fish tank. A large, stripped fish was chasing a smaller orange fish around the tank. The smaller one suddenly turned and charged toward the bigger fish, who stopped short and swam away to go play around the fake coral.

"Extremely stupid," I said.