Natalie Elisabeth Schultz's Story

"Um, yeah," Natalie said, her voice sounding almost funny, and not in the inflectionless way it normally did. She opened the car door and climbed inside, flipping her cell phone open and dialing a rather long number -- country code plus the rest of the number. It rang four times before a young, female voice finally answered. At least there, it wasn't much later than 8pm. "Sofia?" Natalie said into the phone, attempting to inject a sense of urgency into her voice. "I need you to go to Aunt Casie's house. It's important. Take enough clothes for a week, your iPod, your laptop, anything you think you need. Tell her I told you to, okay? Don't ask questions; just do it. I don't care what your friends will think. Go. Now."

There was a soft beep as the call disconnected, and Natalie's hand holding the phone dropped to her lap. She stared out through the windshield, the moonlight refracted strangely across the curved glass. Natalie found herself calculating the precise angle of the arc it created related to the value of the lumens of the moonlight itself. It was easier to perform these kinds of calculations than to consider the consequences of one's decisions.

Natalie's lips stretched into a thin line, tapping her fingers on the dashboard. She jerked her head to the side, in an attempt to gesture for Amelia to join her inside the car. "In America, yes. Here in France, only if the French police first take the case; then I would be permitted to act as a consultant. I am here for that purpose, although for a different case. The terrorist. I think the word 'terrorist' has two many r's in it. It derives from an Old French verb, terreur, which derives in turn from the Latin terrorem."

"I couldn't take the risk," Natalie explained as she shut her door and buckled her seat belt. "That photo proves that one of them knows where Sofia is going to summer school. SUMMER SCHOOL. For remedial trigonometry. Which wasn't planned or scheduled until a few weeks ago. Stalking maybe? This is concerning."

Natalie shook her head as she turned the key in the ignition. "It doesn't make any sense. Why would they waste their time with the amount of effort it would take to know where Sofia is going to summer school? It's such, well, useless information!" The double irony of her own statement seemed to be entirely lost on the agent. "I don't even know these people! This is utterly senseless."

"They better not be after me," Natalie said, attempting to sound pissed. "Hataf already tried to kill me last year, and I seriously hope that's the last time someone attempts that. I was not entertained; it was not an entertaining experience." She began to back out of the parking space, careful not to hit any of the remaining employees' cars still in the lot. "I don't recall ever having done anything directly involving any member of the Mailoc family. It's entirely nonsensical, the very idea. There's no motive."

Natalie pulled from the parking lot onto the almost empty Parisian street. Most people were either enjoying the nightlife at their chosen destinations or else tucked safely asleep in bed. Not much traffic, save for the occasional car of drunken hooligans. "Well, it'd be nice if they said why," Natalie said, without any inflection at all. The stars were hardly visible from here, with all the light pollution from the city.

"Like that photograph," said Natalie. "Wait." She nearly ran a light, but slammed on her brakes at the last possible minute. "It's time-stamped. It says it was taken nearly five months ago. Check the date." There was almost a hint of excitement, misplaced as it might have been, in the woman's voice as she spoke.

"The man seemed surprised that I was in France in the restaurant with his warning not to fornicate with his associates, not that I would, because I don't know any of them," said Natalie without expression or fluctuating her tone of voice, "but that date proves that they were watching Sofia, and potentially, myself as extension (or the opposite way about?) long before I was sent to France. Therefore, there must be a motive." She continued along the Parisian street until their hotel was visible in the distance. "We were taught that there is always a motive back in Quantico."

"People can do arbitrary things," Natalie observed, the hotel coming into view in the distance along the street. Lights flickered in high-rise buildings, offering an eerie glow to the Paris nightlife of clubs and amusements open until the wee hours of the morning. Few buildings were entirely dark. "But then again, I've never claimed to understand the motives and reasoning of others."

Over the next few days, in addition to lending her language skills to the FBI's legal attache in Paris, Natalie asked the French police for any copies of files they might have on the Mailoc family and spent some of her time reading the files while sitting on a park bench outside the hotel. Once finished, she returned the files to their owners, their images and text now stored exactly as they appeared on the pages inside her brain.

They were closer to tracking the Turkish-speaking terrorist who'd threatened the American embassy after fleeing from America to France, and Natalie was closer to closing one of the now twenty open case files waiting on her desk back in Washington. It was with this eventual respite in mind that she returned from the Police Nationale headquarters to the hotel around ten at night, her pen twirling in one hand as she walked with shoulders hunched, tilted slightly to the side, staring up at the strange, flickering glow of streetlamps.

She was less than ten meters away from the front entrance, able to see into the lobby where Amelia was waiting and the desk clerk was almost nodding off, when a gloved hand shot toward her face, clamping over her mouth to muffle any scream, as her legs were kicked from beneath her.

Within seconds, Natalie was forced against the side of the hotel, where her face was pressed into the stones, invisible to any security cameras or the receptionist outside. The cold edge of a blade pressed against her throat silenced any words she might otherwise have formed. "You were warned," rasped an unfamiliar male voice. "Keep out of the Mailoc's business. But that was too hard for you, was it? Maybe you'll remember better now, hm?"

Crack.

With a vicious right hook, Natalie winced, pain shooting across her skull, throbbing. The knife was back at her throat. "Who are you?" she tried to speak, when the unknown assailant kneed her in the small of her back. With a small groan, she tried to loosen herself from his grip, but he only forced her to her knees, her face grating against the wall all the way down before his other hand clamped firmly over her injured shoulder, eliciting a high-pitched whimper.

With a sudden cry of pain, the assailant dropped the knife, howling in pain. Natalie instantly tried to break away, but the stranger caught her with his other arm, sending Natalie to the asphalt, where he revealed a gun in his uninjured arm, aimed at Natalie's head. "The fuck," he muttered, looking towards the direction where the shot had come from. "Drop the weapon or I shoot the interfering American bitch."

Natalie's fingers were white clutching her pen. "I think I'm bleeding," she said, in a decidedly calm tone of voice, her voice somewhat muffled by the fact that her face was now being pushed into the asphalt.

"Good, now step away. Move!" he barked, not shifting the gun from its line of sight. In the darkness, the hooded man was hardly visible but by the glint of metal of his gun from the lights farther away in the parking lot. Natalie's grip tightened on the pen in her hand. The assailant narrowed his eyes, though they were hardly visible from the distance. "Who the hell is there? Hm, Schultz?" These demands were made of the agent at gunpoint, who did not respond. The man clicked back the hammer on his gun.

or at the very least no one is talking to me

Peter looks around. It sure was kind of those people to pick him up, but he already finds the memory of who brought him here fading, strangely.

"Huh."

He stares up at the archway, admiring it in it's grandiose size and structure.
He shakes his head. What am I thinking? I don't have time to marvel at architecture. I'm here to find somebody... If they were even real.

The memories of that vast plain of wheat or grass, he can't remember which, are already fading, and he struggles to remember.

A set of faces suddenly come into recognition, his mind remembering them, even as details have faded.

Moon... Moon something. Waves in Moonlight? Nah, wait... And the girl, Ha... Haze. Yeah.

He clutches his steel-plated temple, the leather gloves gripping firmly onto the metal surface.

Why... Why does it seem so distant? Was it even real? Or... A dream?

He suddenly finds it hard to breath, and scrabbles his hands at the seal of his helmet. As he removes it, he takes a deep gasp of breath. He's never felt uncomfortable in his armor before, but he feels very claustrophobic all of a sudden.

"F- Fuck, man. What's going on? Why-" He stutters to himself. He's never felt as out of place as he does now, with all the people around him.

The ground begins to spin around him as he turns in circles, staring at everyone around him. 30, maybe 40 people. Some of them, as he sees them dissolve into mist for a split second, then regain solidity, as if they weren't really there.

Peter shakes his head. He can't focus on this now, he has things to do. He puts back on his helmet, not bothering to seal it, and takes a deep breath of the filtered air. Lord, man. You gotta chill out. Take a step back, and let the business end take over.

He laces his fingers together and stretches out his arms, cracking his knuckles.

Alright. Time to get to work.