Elise opened a cupboard to check for broken wine glasses. “Yeah, it was nothing like when I was in Hayward in 89 when the Loma Prieta quake struck.”
Joe Junior came running into the winery. “Mom, Dad! The USGS web site shows it to be a magnitude 5.8 located on the east side of the Sierras.”
Elise smiled at her son’s excitement. “Thank you Little Joe.” Looking at Joe Senior she said, “We had better check on the tasting room.”
As Joe walked with Elise over to the tasting room he suddenly thought about his Great Grandfather’s wine tunnel. Recalling how blocks of weathered rock and soil were being held in place in the roof by dead roots in the original collapse area that he had been using as an entrance, he had a dire feeling about the tunnel.
Then it hit him! The wines of his Great Grandfather had let him sense the upcoming quake and also see that the quake was coming!
Alex sat in the debriefing room with Sandra, several other FBI agents, and Derek, representing CIA. “Yes, they tried to follow me after they released me, but I am certain that they were unable to follow me. It did take me a couple of hours on the transit system to drop my tail.”
An agent stood at a map of Oakland hanging on the wall. “Based on your observations, we place the location of the programming room to be in the area described by this doughnut ring. The rail yards on this side cut the area down by about a fourth.”
Eyeing the box of doughnuts on the table and the box of coffee, he poured himself some more coffee and grabbed a doughnut.
Alex looked at Derek, who sat at a table in front of a suitcase opened showing some complex electronic and laboratory equipment. “I felt like they must have drugged me, but they did not inject anything into me nor did I ingest anything.”
Derek looked up from the mini-lab. “Nothing has come up in the blood test yet. They probably did have something in the cloth sack that they pulled over your head.
The Russians are masters at drugs absorbed either through inhalation or through the skin. These psyops guys would have had access to the stuff available to the Soviets at the end of the Cold War.”
Sandra, still dressed impeccably in a suit, sat in a chair with a sheaf of papers on her lap. “We have even bigger problems coming with these guys. I just got the data from the special equipment installed inside Mr. Chatfield. We able to download the data from his car seat just about an hour ago. This is information that was downloaded from the bioelectronics in his body to the car seat after a meeting in Emeryville late yesterday afternoon. This confirms the stuff from our other informers and from the contact in Fresno. These guys are planning a gang war the likes of which has not happened since Chicago in the 1920’s.”
Another agent looked up from his paperwork. “So, a bunch of scum kills off other scum. What’s so bad about that?”
Sandra had trouble remaining patient after being up so long without sleep. “Remember the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre? Visualize what the Chicago gangs would have done with the kinds of weapons these guys have. Need I say rocket propelled grenades? Surface to air missiles? For crying out loud, these guys are bringing in an additional 30 paramilitary fighters to be equipped with M4s! And our intelligence indicates that the other side has even more.”
Continued ...