I had been sitting behind one of the cubicles while I was working and listening to the conversation. I stood up just as the movement started towards the meeting room door.

“I would suggest not interrupting their meeting. Follow me back to the other meeting room,” I said.

When I stood up I could see the camera monitor; in front of the security office were two unmarked Dodge Chargers with blue and red hidden emergency lights flashing. I was angry all over again; this was not what Eric and Frank had agreed to yesterday.

“Who are you?” Otto asked.

“I am the boss,” I replied as I picked up my laptop. The smaller meeting room was one that was furnished and paid for by the agency. When this college was set up it was the third that we worked in partnership with the agency. There were complaints that there were not enough meeting rooms and the agency wanted one that was setup with a dedicated VCATS.

As soon as they were seated I called Eric’s office on the fancy meeting room speaker phone that was in the middle of the table, “Department of Homeland Security; Director Roberson’s office Mable speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hello, Mable how are you today? Is Eric in?” I asked.

“BJ – good to hear from you; he is in a meeting with Art Cummins from the NIA and Frank Love from the CIA. What am I thinking; you know Frank and have more projects going on with the CIA than I can count and that’s just the ones I know about that aren’t top secret,” she replied.

“Send him a text that I am in Minneapolis and I have four of his agents who I am going to shoot for being stupid.”

Suddenly there was a change in the expressions of my four visitors.

“Oh my! Hold on; for that I will interrupt the meeting.”

“BJ, please do not shoot my agents. There is too much paperwork getting them replaced. What’s wrong, what did they do?”

“What happened to the agreement we made yesterday that we were going to do this as an undercover OPS? I have four of your agents here who look like they just walked off of a Kojak TV set; they look so bad that a two year old ghetto kid could identify them as cops from two hundred yards away,” I said.

“There are two DHS cars sitting outside the office with the red and blue emergency lights on that I asked them to turn off and move the cars out of sight, only to get laughed at,” I said.

“That’s not the instructions that were given to their office and it certainly is not what we agreed on. I’m going to call their office; Frank and Art are going to talk to you about Randolph Reichmann.”

“BJ, this is Art, I am glad to see you are staying active after the Senate hearings. You do not know how much I appreciate you coming forward with information on this Russian spy.”

“Eric said that you were upgrading your bucket when the crumbs started falling out that led you to him: on top of that, you even arrested him and sent a crew to collect everything.”

“By the way, your clean-up crew did a bang up job. We sent a team to double check and we found nothing, so you can pass on a pat on the back for a good job.”

“Yes, I have a new and much bigger bucket than I had before. We have been running a lot of different things through it, including all personnel at various hot spot locations,” I said.

I guessed that since Art knew about Randolph Reichmann that meant that my chipper had not and would not be used.

“He did not want to talk in the interrogation room but when they got him to the pond and started the machine, he changed his tune and is still talking. We think he was high enough in the pecking order that he may be worth a future swap,” Frank said. “You know they never did tell me what the machine did.”

‘It would be best if you never know,’ I thought.

All four cell phones of my guests rang a text tone at one time and mine went off a few seconds later.

Thirty seconds later they were leaving, “We have been called back to the office. Someone will contact you later,” Otto said.

My text said,” They will be gone in a minute for a royal ass chewing and will not be back. Their supervisor will be there at one with four different agents who are used to undercover work,” Eric sent in the text.

I wondered how much damage had already been done to the plans; had today been one of the days that the terrorist had the college under surveillance?

Nothing could be done about it now. I called Robert and asked him to run the facial scan program on everyone that was in the view of the cameras so far today, to see if any stood out.

The one thing I could do myself was run the tag plate scanner to see if any non-student tags were repetitive, especially today. I keyed the program and let it do its thing.

When it finished, nothing looked out of the way, there were no tag numbers that raised any flags or names associated with them that did.

Andy finished his meeting then it was my turn. Andy, Ching Lee and I spent the next 2 hours in a walk around and then a ride around of the college grounds.

We had a good laugh at the expense of the local DHS office. We three needed something to break the tension and they were easy targets after this morning.

Lunch was delivered: sandwiches and pizza. It seems that security personnel always find the best fast food joints and this one was good.

I ordered a small cheese-steak sandwich and ended up adding a slice of the best meat lover’s pizza that I had eaten in a long time.

Ching Lee ordered a large sub and then ate 3 slices of pizza. How she ate like that and still gained no weight was beyond me. It had to be in the genes.

We had just finished lunch when three vehicles came in view of the cameras and parked in scattered parking places. A suit and tie guy got out of the Buick and four men got out of the other two – that were ten year old Chevy’s – and came into the office. I was sitting at the security desk with Larry.

“I’m Len Zimmerman, section chief for the local office of the DHS, and I am looking for Andy Reddick, Sherman Rommel and Ambassador Jones.”

“I’m Jones; Andy and Sherman are scheduling tasks for the night shift to complete. They should be finished in a few minutes. Let’s go back to the meeting room.”

I sent a text to Andy that I and the new group from DHS we would be in the second meeting, waiting. They must have been finished; they came right over.

After a round of introductions Ronald Smith, Howard Kraus, Kevin Ackerman and Sam Juster seemed normal compared to the first group.

Len began the apologies for the first group that lasted five minutes; his final statement was, “Eric directed that we work with you; tell us what you need and expect us to do. This is a joint operation and will be handled as such from my office. What did Eric mean by ‘we should avoid wood chippers’ when you are around Ambassador Jones?”

“Just an on-going joke between us,” I replied.

For the next two hours I exchanged everything we knew about the terrorists and the potential attack. Then we went over what our planned response was going to be.

When the two hours were up, Andy and Sherman had four more people at his disposal. The four undercover DHS were going to be split up. Two were to be working the day shift, one the evening shift and one the night shift. They were to be liaisons between the DHS and JBG college security.

“I was instructed by Eric that we were to limit inter agency cooperation with the agency and the FBI personnel assigned here temporarily. It seems they are all under a security review. We are to have no contact with the local police department for the time being,” Len said.

After some open discussions, Ching Lee, Penny, Alexandria and I flew back to Morton field. It was on this flight with the ability to have private time with Ching Lee that she surprised me.

Penny and Alexandria had spent the day auditing security records, logs and other things related to the office end of the business. After Randolph Reichmann, a lot of audits were going to be going on.

Tonight was the perfect night to begin the process for Lorrie’s pregnancy; we were using the same process as I had with Jenny. There were a couple days in the cycle that were prime days. We were going to make the semen deposit one day in advance, the two days of and one day after and hope for the best.

To make this week a special week for the Jones family, on Friday Jenny was donating eggs for Jake and Mindy to begin their family. Two of Jenny’s fertilized eggs would be placed in Mindy and if they both caught, there was the possibility of twins in the family again.

“You know Lorrie and I both went to the doctor. What you do not know was that I went through the checkup and I want to try to get pregnant. Marcy and I have talked about it for a while,” Ching Lee said. “We are on the same cycle.”

She was right about that; I had read that women who live together, their cycles would gradually move to come at the same time. I thought it was rubbish. But over the years we had been together proved it to be somewhat true.

All of us missed and often, because of the aggressive physical fitness regimen we followed. Even when it did come around, rarely did they last more than two or three days. But the girls that had them were all in the same week.

She was looking at me waiting for some signal of approval; a smile and a nod and then I motioned her to my lap to give her a hug and a kiss.

“I want what you and Marcy want and that is to be happy and for all of us to be one big family. If you feel you are ready, now is the time,” I said.

Edit by Alfmeister
Proof read by Bob W.