Shielding Instinct, page 16
The phone rang a minute later.
“Hey there,” Avery’s voice was bright and chatty, which didn’t jive with the survival state Petra had been swimming through for the last two days. “What did you do today? Lay out with a pineapple drink and soak in some sun?”
“Sun happened. Drinks did not. Have I got stories to tell you when I get home.” Petra worked hard to lighten her tone so she didn’t worry her friend.
“Stories plural?” Avery’s voice turned sing-songy. “Do any of them happen to include a certain handsome operator named Hawkeye?”
“In ways big and small, yes, he was along for the ride. Before I get too distracted, I’m calling you for an important reason. I brought up Holly Smokes' name in a conversation I had today.”
“Mmmkay.”
“There was this woman, Jenny Johnson, who reads Holly’s books. And it turns out Jenny also goes all over the world doing adventure races. I thought it’s such a small world at that level of racing that they might know each other."
“Were they in the same races? I’m having dinner with Holly this week. It would be fun to put them together.”
“I can look in a minute and text you. “
“Holly is really Beth McNight.”
“Yup. I remember. She said she doesn’t want her kids to know she writes SEAL-populated reverse harems with whips and butt plugs. But I think she races under Holly, so she can use the images for social media, right? I’ll look for both names.”
Petra started to think that a combination of her job and the events she’d just lived through might have clouded her thoughts.
Before she disparaged this woman’s name and warned Holly off, maybe she should do a little more investigating.
“Fun fact,” Avery said, “while men can, on average, run faster than women in shorter runs. Women are faster when they run ultra-long distances.”
“Which would be how far?” Petra asked.
“In my book? Anything over five miles seems excessive. I’m going to make this up. I think it’s at the fifty-mile mark or around there.”
“Just making facts up, tossing them out there for me to gobble up?”
“I know how you like to snack on a good factoid. But go back and check me. There’s a website with women’s adventure races and times. Just put it in a search engine.”
“Okay, Avery, let me do a little searching around. I’ll text you anything I find. Have a good evening.”
“Petra?”
“Mmm?”
“That was why you called?” Avery asked.
“There’s a lot going on. I think I called prematurely,” Petra said with a sigh. “I need to clear my head.”
“I get that. Call me when you figure it out.”
Petra glanced around the part of the emergency department she could see, and her nurse was nowhere around. Petra’s cuts were so minor compared to the injuries that were coming in. From the codes that were ringing out, near drownings, heart attacks, burns, and broken limbs were taking up everyone’s attention. And Petra wanted that. She wanted to slide into the triage in such a way that she was merely the minor inconvenience of a scrawled signature.
She leaned back and looked out the window.
The Cerberus men stood in a circle, hands on hips, dogs sleeping or resting in the center.
Then she looked down at her phone, feeling like she was about to open a kettle of worms.
Here I go.
Herb and Jenny Johnson.
When culling through names, Petra had found that she could get to the right person the fastest by using both names of a couple.
When she pressed ENTER, Petra was not prepared for what she found.
Yes, there were lists of Jenny’s races and pictures of her and her family.
But there were also news articles reporting on how the FBI had caught Herb and Jenny with so much evidence of their white-collar crimes that the couple had pled guilty in the hope of a lenient sentence. Even with a clean record and small children, a light sentence would be seventeen years for Herb and fourteen years for Petra.
They were felons.
Sentencing was in two weeks.
Looking through this new lens, Petra thought about the couple and their behavior.
Did today make any sense at all?
Criminals.
That was so unexpected that Petra didn’t know what to do with it other than to let Avery know to warn Holly away from any interaction.
Criminals.
Was that the explanation for the necklaces and the daughter’s anger? Why did she yank it off and throw it? Was she mad at her parents for going to prison?
Those thoughts took up so much space in Petra’s mind that when the nurse said, “Miss Armstrong?” Petra jumped and gripped her chest.
“Oh! Hahaha.” Petra grinned. “You surprised me. I was in Lala land.”
“The doctor says to take the medication until it’s finished. If you have any red striations or unusual symptoms, seek further medical help.” She held out a slip of paper with an old-fashioned prescription on it.
It had been a while since Petra had seen one of these, and she had to look at it for a moment.
“Are you okay?” the nurse asked.
“Fine. Tired. Going home to get cleaned up now. This can’t happen very often, there would be more supports in place.”
“Not necessarily. Supports in place is a funding issue,” the nurse said. “But I can tell you what I’ve heard on the news playing in the different treatment rooms. They’re saying that seismic activity just south of Puerto Rico caused rip currents and rogue waves throughout the Caribbean. Usually, when one island gets in trouble, the other islands rally. In this case, they’re stretched thin everywhere. Teams are spooling up to come from the Florida and some other of the East Coast National Guards. But can they get here in time to be of any real help?” She shrugged as she pulled her gloves off and put them in a biohazard bag. “At least it wasn’t a tsunami. Here on the island, there’s really nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I mean, what do you do? Go to the highest point and cling to a tree?”
“I hope the evening goes smoothly for you all. Thank you.” Petra waved the paper in the air.
And the nurse headed back into the fray.
Petra turned to the window and saw a doctor talking to the Cerberus huddle.
Pulling the necklace from her pocket, Petra held it up.
It just felt dangerous.
It just felt like something needed to be said.
Beside her, the bathroom door slapped open, and a kid came running out.
Petra caught the door and slid into the single-toilet room. She locked the door, turned on the water, and without sending a warning text, Petra pressed the button to dial Rowan.
This was a matter for the FBI.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Petra
Petra had a quasi-secretive job, one that the FBI tried to keep on the down low.
Recruited to the Bureau by Rowan Kennedy when they were fellow doctoral candidates in the field of brain security—or whatever it was that people were trying to call it now—their diplomas said Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology.
But that was only because the field of study was so new that there wasn’t yet a consensus on what else to call their research.
Rowan called himself a Doctor of Propaganda.
To Petra, that didn’t quite get the gist of her work.
Things were changing so fast—every single day, innovations brought sweeping changes to how humans navigate the world.
Was that a burden on the human brain?
How well did the brain adapt to such constant shifts?
Did the modern world present unprecedented dangers to human wiring?
There was no data until someone asked the questions and looked for answers.
It was true that back in the first days of steam engine trains, there was fear that if a woman were to travel faster than fifty miles an hour, the speed would fling a woman’s uterus from her body.
It was also true that fear of new technology was often just the fear of the unknown.
But this was absolutely a brave new world.
AI was changing a human’s ability to tell what was real and what artificial intelligence had created on command.
Reality was becoming ever more malleable.
Was that image an actual image?
Is that video something that genuinely happened?
Is the voice on the phone that sounds exactly like my child really my child?
Who the heck knew?
What the government knew was that the human brain faced a shape-shifting reality and that con artists would swing in and manipulate people in unprecedented ways.
The FBI sought to understand how the new manipulations could happen and how to get out in front of it.
There were, in fact, few laws that protected a human’s brain from a criminal attack.
Legislation took time.
Well-thought-out, effective legislation took even longer, requiring studies and a clear understanding of cause and effect.
Everything protective took time.
Everything calculated to con people changed at lightning speed.
Faster. Faster. Impossible to keep up.
The FBI hired Petra specifically to study doomsday cults and the fact that people—in historically unprecedented numbers—were succumbing to the draw and falling to their sway.
Why was this happening, and what were the ramifications?
Petra hated the term “cult” because it came with ideas about Kool-Aid drinking Branch Davidians.
Where Rowan’s expertise was in indoctrination and severing systems to gain power—much like what happened to Russia, then Türkiye and Hungary, and of course, earlier and most profoundly to women in Iran in 1979…
1979 wasn’t all that long ago; Petra’s mom was a freshman in high school. No, not that long ago at all.
Rowan studied how governments shifted people away from allegiances to family and friends, shifted morals and convictions, and shifted wealth from their citizens' pockets to someone else’s.
And that all fell under the term psyops—psychological operations.
Psyops happened in spheres of influence as large as a nation or as small as a doomsday cult.
These were the thoughts that danced through her brain as Rowan’s phone continued to ring.
Petra was exhausted, and she wanted to just drop the whole subject. But justice was a pressure that built in her until she came up with a way to find release.
And right or wrong, she wanted to hand this all over to Rowan.
Rowan, who had nothing to do with this kind of crime.
“Hey, sorry about that.” Rowan was in her ear. “I walked away from my phone.”
“I came across something. I’m sending you an article,” Petra dove right in. She pressed send on the newspaper article about the Johnsons’ crimes which summed things up more succinctly than the others. She waited, giving Rowan a chance to read it over.
“Jenny Johnson is the name you gave Avery a few minutes ago.”
“It is.”
“Guilty. Husband, guilty. Looks like you were hanging out with the riffraff.”
“They’re here on the island with their three small children.”
“You have a narrative running through your head. You sound damned stressed.”
“I’ve had a difficult couple of days. Listen, would it be okay if I rambled around a bit—sometimes processing out loud is the thing.”
“Be my guest. I was just taking a scotch over to sit in front of the fire.”
“Here are my thoughts in no particular order. Ask questions if you have them. The kids are young. I mean lovely young children, four, six, and eight are my guesses. If the parents go to prison—which is a given—even with a lighter sentence, they won’t be getting out until the youngest is in his late teens. The oldest will be an adult. They will have missed their children’s formative years. If I was a mother – and I am making this up from my imagination, obviously, but if I were their mother, I’d be freaking the hell out to be taken away from my babies. But she showed no signs of stress.”
“You’re also assessing that as a doctorate in psychology. There are norms in social patterns. But for this individual, you don’t have a baseline,” Rowan pointed out. “The woman could be a sociopath and not give a shit about her kids.”
“Possible, I guess. But I’m telling you there was something completely wrong with the packaging. Putting the interaction I had with this information about Jenny going to prison for a decade plus doesn’t add up.”
“You’re a hundred percent sure it’s her.”
“And her husband. The articles I read reiterated many of the details I’d learned over the day. The number of kids, the state where they live. It’s her picture, for goodness’ sake. I cross-referenced with articles and pictures of her in her races. The husband and kids are there at the finish line.”
“So, what was off?”
“The way she looked at her kids.”
“More.”
“If I were a mother on a last family vacation—not something in my experience, granted. But pattern recognition. This mom is two weeks away from not being able to tuck her kids in bed anymore, not give them a kiss when they wake up. I’ve seen other families have to deal with that kind of separation, so I do have a baseline. And this was not that. For example, let’s say that they came down here for this last vacation with their young children, and the next time this was available to them, the kids would be grown. I’d try to give them the best possible memories of a happy, loving, caring mother.”
“That seems reasonable. Is that not what happened?” Rowan asked.
“Mom and Dad were both laid back, kind of laissez-faire. It was just another day in the life rather than a time imbued with deep meaning. There should have been something buzzing under the surface, right? Like an undertone of bittersweetness. When the children were playing, and the mother was looking on, there should have been the sense that she was soaking it all in, imprinting her children and this event deep into her psyche to take out and remember on difficult days. There was none of that.”
“These are mother observations, not father?” Rowan asked.
“Dads don’t have ‘fetal microchimerism.’” Petra said. “Fair or not, I expect more from a biological mom.”
“And you’re going to explain all that to me so I can follow.”
“Fetal microchimerism is the phenomenon that happens when a baby is being born; part of their DNA passes through the placenta into the mother’s body. It’s stored in the mom’s organs, usually the brain, liver, and skin, and persists there. That’s the hard science supported by the scientific method and replications.”
“Now, the soft science and speculation?” Rowan asked.
“There’s the possibility that this connection is the source of mother’s intuition.”
“That research will never get funded,” Rowan said.
“True. But in this case, I would think that if microchimerism did connect mother and child, it would be blasting this woman, lighting her system up like a Christmas tree.”
“A chimerism tree?”
“You want me to laugh, but I’m too tired,” Petra said.
“Okay, Petra, as a former FBI profiler turned researcher of state-sponsored mind security, offer me your theory.”
“First, I have to talk to Avery when I get off from talking to you. I told Jenny about Holly Smokes. I need her to pass on a warning not to engage.”
“Yeah, that’s probably good. I’ll—hey, Avery, Petra needs to talk to you when we’re done.”
“Okay, I’m just running next door for a second to check on Mrs. Glasser before the ice storm. Should I wait?” Avery called. “I wanted to ask Petra what she knew about all the rescues today in St. Croix and see if everyone’s okay.”
“I think you have time,” Rowan called. He was back on the phone. “She has time?”
“I’m not in any kind of hurry,” Petra said. “This is vacation.”
Petra heard a door shut.
“What rescue today?” Rowan asked.
Petra briefly explained the situation on the island. “Avery saw that on the news? Must be a slow news day. And with a winter storm blowing in D.C.? Seems odd.” And since Rowan had an association with Iniquus, she added, “I am worried about Ash. All I know is that he was having respiratory issues after the boat fire. I’ll text you and let you know how he is.”
“Grateful for the information,” Rowan said. “The guy you pulled out of the blow hole is okay?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest. Broken limbs at a minimum.”
“Shit, that’s brutal. How old?” Rowan asked.
“Twenty-seven. The untouchable age.”
“Not anymore.” There was a clink of the ice cubes in Rowan’s drink. “That fallacy’s been blown. I’m going to help you focus. I’d like you to share the story you’re telling yourself about the Johnsons.”
“I imagine that the judge understood the stakes for this family. If they were to flee, they could try to get to a country without extradition.”
“Could,” Rowan conceded. “But surely they had their passports confiscated.”
“Mmm. I was wondering if maybe someone should check on that.”
“The judge?” Rowan asked.
“No. Could the Johnsons, knowing they might lose their passports, have reported them stolen at some point? Asked to have them reissued? That way, they’d have nothing to hand over to a judge.”
“How would that be useful?”
“Depends on where they’re going,” Petra said. “They didn’t need passports to get this far. If they were in a different country and needed to show them to someone, would it flag anything? I think that depends on the entity and the country.”
“If I were on the lam, would I try to use my real passport? That seems risky.” Rowan trailed the last word, then said, “Okay, take a step back. What would I do if I wanted to get gone? I’d sell everything to get as much cash together as I could. That would make sense if I were going to prison for the next ten years—house, cars, furnishings, cash out the 401(k). Liquify any stocks. I could say that this allowed me to give the money to the kids’ caregiver – one would assume family. But you wouldn’t hand over the money until you handed over the kids, right? But Avery, you can’t pack that much money in a suitcase.”
