Chicken

It was after dark when we got back to my place, me in my dad's car and Amy in mine. My dad's car had a garage door opener, so I parked it inside the garage and Amy parked my car behind it outside.

The drive from Quantico gave me plenty of quiet time to think. I realized that I hadn't stopped to think since any of this had started on Thursday, I just kept bouncing forward from situation to situation and reacting on-the-fly. Everything seems much more important in the heat of the moment, and the last six days had been like one long, heated moment for me. Now, with nobody to chase and nothing to run from, it all seemed pointless. I collapsed asomeone's larynx, snuck into someone's office to snoop around their bank records, rented and bought a gun while underage, was assaulted with pepper spray and nearly shot by some guy who'd already killed a cop, the police wanted my hide, the FBI knew who I was, I've attempted to surreptitiously interceptsomeone's emails, and I'd possibly made illegal copies of military files.

And for what? All I had was more unanswered questions. I was grasping at straws, and driving myself crazy doing so. I had nothing more than what I started with. I was in the red.

At least it was interesting to Amy, I realized. She seemed to live a pretty hallow life, with a mother who's run off and a father who couldn't care less about anything Amy did. This must be a fantastic diversion for her.

I hadn't told Amy about the rigged USB memory stick or my plans to sneak files out of a Marine base. Maybe she wouldn't have to know. Maybe I could just put the USB drive in the microwave and fry it. They'd never be able to prove that I'd done anything, and if I didn't look at the files I'd have nothing to lie about. Nothing was going to bring my father back, and thrusting myself into dangerous situations was just going to make me end up dead too.

We went inside my house, I emptied my pockets on the kitchen table like always. USB memory stick, pocket knife, wallet; all piled on the table just a few feet from that gun. God, why did I own a gun? And why was it still sitting on the kitchen table? I grabbed the gun, its box, the ammo, and the spare magazines I'd bought and trucked them up to my room. I hadn't said a word out loud since I was in Quantico. The last thing I'd said to Amy was "honk".

Up in my bedroom's smallish walk-in closet, I safetied the gun and put it back in its Styrofoam package, and then put the package in an upper shelf between two sweaters. I set most of the the boxes of ammo on another shelf then sat down in my desk chair and begun slipping .45 cartridges into the metal gun magazines, one at a time, by the dim light spilling out of my closet. My hands weren't shaking this time.

I looked up to see Amy standing in my doorway. Her arms hung down and she toyed with the cuffs of her jacket with her fingers. It made her look even younger. She'd never been up to my room, I realized, but she wasn't looking around like most people do when they enter a new room. She was just looking at me. I looked back down at the bullets and magazines.

"What happened?" she asked.
I held my hands still, a single bullet pinched between my thumb and index finger. It was shiny and golden, smooth like a copper banister.
"There was an accident, at the lab where my dad worked. It was unfortunate, and Daniel Baker was a good man doing good things for the good of the good country," I said.
"You know that for certain now?" she said quietly.
I slid the bullet into the magazine, feeling the resistance of the spring.
"No I don't," I said, grabbing another bullet and spinning it in my fingers like all the others. "I don't know that. I don't know much of anything, really. I don't know where my old car is, I don't know why the FBI is toying around with me, I don't know why I spin every bullet around in my fingers before I slide it in... I don't even know why I'm loading these magazines. And I definitely don't know why you're still here, when you you should be as far away from me as possible or at least wearing body armor."

She stood still a while longer, then stepped in and sat down on my bed across the room. I set a filled magazine on my desk and grabbed an empty one, glancing at her as I reached.

"There's a lot of things I don't know either," she said, her voice wandering. She was looking at her hands cupped together in her lap, best I could tell. "We both grew up surrounded by secrets," she went on, "I never knew what my dad did either, I never asked. All I know is that now he's a drunk. My mom, I don't know for sure if she's even in the same state anymore. This is a fucked up town."

I don't think I'd heard her swear before. It didn't suit her; but she went on, "Everybody's parents do something in secret, and the kids have to deal with it. Never knowing. But you can't let those mysteries pull you down. A few years ago, I just had enough of all the lies and unanswered questions. I started streaking my hair red or green or orange or whatever sounded good, laid on the eyeliner real thick, put on as many bracelets as I could, and went out with any guy who asked me knowing full well why they did. I didn't care, they got what they wanted, and it made me feel good. For a while at least. It never amounted to anything, though. It just put me deeper in the hole."

She stopped talking again. I set another filled magazine down next to the first.

"So I'm not going to get sucked down a hole," I said, spinning my chair to look at her over the desk. "I'm done with this, all of it. No more mysteries, no more spying or FBI or pepper spray."
"That's not what I meant," she said, "I don't think think you can just drop this. If you don't do whatever those FBI guys want, they might let the cops come in and put you away for the thing in Lorton."
"The FBI is just having a good time with me, they must know that the fake cop guy was trying to shoot me. They wouldn't let hang for that, if the police even have any real evidence besides the fact that it was my car. I'm done, I'm out. I'm just a regular teenager now with a dead dad and too much bloody money."
The left side of Amy's mouth tightened to a frown. "So why are you loading your gun?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said.

I sighed, and spun around again to face my desktop computer. I turned the monitor on and looked at the viewing window for the remote camera in front of NathanComstock's house. The feed was still running, but it wasn't much good with the night darkness. I stopped recording, and opened the video of the last few hours I'd had it recording. I sped through the video, the tree branches danced around and a few cars zoomed through thecul-de-sac at lightning speed, then Comstock's car pulled into the garage, then the garage door closed, then nothing happened until it got too dark to see anything.

"There's nothing," I said, "no nuclear arsenal stored in the garage, nobody coming to the door to buy pirated DVDs. More dead ends."
"But he's home now?" Amy said, leaning over on the bed and crooking her neck to try and see the screen.
"Yeah, unless he snuck out the back wearing black."
"So maybe he did the email thing," she said, sounding a bit eager.

I really didn't want to get sucked into more spy capers, but having full access to someone's email did sound nice.

"My laptop's in my car," I said.
"No, it's downstairs. I brought it in," she said, getting up and disappearing out of my door.

She came up a few seconds later, dropping the bag on my bed and saying, "You can deal with that madness, and I'll go try to cook that chicken you bought. We can compare our progress in 20 minutes."

I went over to my bed and pulled the laptop and its cord out, found the wall outlet behind my bed, and turned the computer back on.

If I were still saying "bingo", I would have done so right then. As soon as I opened the status page Dale had set up, it said that thephishing email had been opened a few hours ago, and that Comstock's password (old and "new") had been submitted a few minutes later. I used the password to try to log into the email account online, and I was instantly in. This stuff works far too well.

I spent a few minutes looking through the archive of emails in the inbox. Nothing stood out very far, a few receipts from online stores for purchases he'd made a few weeks prior; kitchen appliances, mostly. I decided I'd take a closer look at these emails later, and I went to the settings to change the account's password to the new one Comstock had submitted so the ruse would be complete. That taken care of, I logged out and back in with the new password just to make sure it had worked.

When I logged back in, there was one new email. It was from Expedia, an online travel booking service. It was a trip summary for reservations he had just booked, probably only seconds ago. I opened the email, and to my surprise I found an itinerary for a flight to Vienna, Austria leaving the next morning (Wednesday) from Dulles Airport. He also booked a regular room at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Vienna through Friday, when his return flight was. The last-minute booking cost a small fortune, and hisKLM flight had a layover in Newark and Amsterdam for a total travel time of 13 hours.

It didn't make any sense. Why go to Austria? Why go last-minute? He'd be missing a few days of work, it seemed. What could he have to do in Vienna that was so important? I thought about the question for a few minutes before I realized that I finally had a concrete question; not something silly like "Why is Nathan Comstock acting suspicious?" or "Why can I shoot guns so well?"

I went downstairs and grabbed my wallet from the kitchen table. Amy was standing over a frying pan on the stove, I could hear sizzling and it smelled like pepper and olive oil. I smiled at her, then returned upstairs with my wallet. I pulled the two FBI business cards from one of the pockets and looked them over. Special Agent Bremer, Special Agent Rubino. Each had a different cell phone number listed. I decided that Rubino seemed more friendly, since he was younger, and dialed his number from my cell phone.

After three rings, "Rubino." Jumbled background voices made it sound like he was still in the office.
"Why is Nathan Comstock flying to Vienna tomorrow morning?" I asked without introducing myself.
There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then Rubino said, "Chris?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I gotta say, that's not exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, but it's a good question still. I'll look into it and call you back in half an hour," then he hung up.

I went downstairs to find Amy plating up the two pieces of chicken breast with some of the microwave rice. We ate at the counter, and she indeed had used olive oil and pepper. She asked if I had any luck with the emails, and I told her I found one lead but I was waiting to hear more about it. She asked what I meant right as my cell phone rang. The caller ID listed the same number I'd dialed before.

"Yeah?"
"So I looked into it, and it turns out that Comstock cleared out all of his bank accounts this afternoon," Rubino said.
That was odd, "You mean the two accounts at New England Federated?"
"How did you--"
"I have super powers," I said, cutting him off.
"Right, well he has more accounts than those two. A lot more actually. All of them pretty much emptied as of this afternoon, right before three when transaction posting is cut off."
"So he's taking all of his money to Austria? Or he's making a very large purchase and then fleeing to Austria?" Amy looked up at me from the sink, giving me a curious glare.
"The interesting thing is," Rubino continued, "he withdrew all of the money in a series of certified checks, each for $7,500. That's a lot of checks, the tellers must have been pretty annoyed."
"$7,500? Why would he do that? Some kind of payroll?"
"Well, it occurs to me... by today's rate, $7,500 is just under 6,000 Euros."
"So, what does that mean?" I asked.
Rubino sighed into his phone, and said, "In Austria, 6,000 Euros is the maximum deposit without reporting the transaction. Like how any deposit over $10,000 in the US gets reported to the IRS."
"So people deposit $5,000 twice," I said.
"Yeah, or $9,500 and $500. Or anything so long as the deposit is below the line."
"But why Austria?" I asked, "Isn't Switzerland the place to launder or hide your money?"
"It is in the movies," Rubino said, "but these days Europe's anti-laundering laws are so tight that anonymous bank accounts are impossible to open. Austria's banking system is actually older than the Swiss, and has a lot more loopholes for getting around the laws. The only reason Swiss Banking is so well-known is because it was all started with Nazi gold. Austria's was started with the gold that the Nazis later stole."
"Huh. Well, do you think Comstock already has accounts in Austria?" I asked.
"If he did, it would be specifically so we couldn't find out. So, I don't know."
"So what now?"
"What now? Well, I--what's that?--oh," he chuckled, "Bremer says to use your imagination." He hung up.

I flipped my phone closed and set it on the counter, zoning out for a minute. Amy was looking at me from the other side of the counter.

"So... what's going on?" she asked.

I pulled myself down to Earth and told her, "I'm going to Vienna tomorrow."
"Which one?" she asked. There was a Vienna in Virginia and one in Maryland, within an hour of each other.
"The one in Austria," I said, "it's the capital."

She looked at me flatly for half a minute, then said, "Oh, well see if you can bring me back some chocolates," before she walked out of the kitchen.
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This is the end of Part 1 (of 2) of Mind + Body.
The story will continue again on Monday, February 26th so the author can take a break and try to make some money off this thing.