“This area is off limits to the public.”
The men from the National Security Agency flashed their badges at her while behind them army trucks were blocking the view from the road, moving one after the next to cordon off the area. Men in military uniforms were moving to tape the place off.
“Are you able to comment on rumors that this is a missile launched by our government in United States airspace?”
The man shook his head. “A satellite lost orbit and fell near here. As you know, it is illegal for United States citizens to collect space debris.”
“Would you give an interview to that effect?”
“No cameras,” the man said. Lowering his voice he said, “Off the record, this is a National Security matter. This was one of our satellites.”
Lois stared at the man, who didn’t flinch.
He was trying to say that this was a United States spy satellite, and that they were retrieving critical United States spy equipment before anyone else could get their hands on it.
This was the sort of story most reporters could sink their teeth into…as long as they waited for the cleanup to be over before they made their report. They’d get the credit for the story and the government would get their satellite. Everyone knew how the game was played.
Unfortunately, Lois didn’t believe a word he was saying.
Her bureau already had sources who were admitting to the launch, and there were a spate of 9-11 calls which the network already had someone else investigating. All Lois needed was a picture of the wreckage and she’d have proof that it wasn’t what they were saying it was.
However, in the era of the Patriot Act, there were limitations on what she could do. Tampering with evidence, trespassing, they all sounded reasonable in fiction, but in reality the consequences could be long term and severe.
Lois saw an agent she knew stepping into his vehicle. She turned to the man she was speaking to and said “Thanks for all the help.”
A moment later she was in her own vehicle following him. Agent White had been helpful to her in the past, and if she could get him alone, perhaps he would at least send her in the right direction. She had a feeling that it was going to be very difficult to get anyone who wanted to go on the record with all of this.
She was surprised as she crested a hill which blocked off her view of the flashing lights behind her to see that Agent White’s vehicle had sped up to well over the listed speed limit.
She sped up to follow him, hoping that any police in the area would already be tied up at the crash site.
He pulled into a parking lot five minutes later. The lot was rapidly emptying, with men on motorcycles fleeing the scene. Three government vehicles were already in the lot as Agent White drove up.
Lois pulled into the parking lot and cut her lights off as a man she recognized as working in the secret service stepped out to speak to Agent White in a low voice. They both stepped into the bar together.
Lois slipped out of her vehicle and grabbed a portable camera from her bag, which she covered with her coat.
Stepping into the shadows, she followed the two men into the bar.
Although it should have been the busiest time of night, the bar was half deserted. Lois imagined that it was the presence of the men in black that had made everyone nervous.
The remaining patrons were being questioned by six agents while two more and Agent White were speaking to the bartender and waitress by the bar.
“He just handed it to me. I thought it looked like funny money, so I took it over to the bar, and then I showed it to Joe. He slipped out before we could catch up to him.”
The waitress looked tired and irritated as though she’d been through all this before.
One of the agents murmured something to her and she said “I don’t know how tall he was. I didn’t see him come in. He was wearing a muscle shirt, black hair, nice muscles…not a body builder but nice…”
At something else the agent said she scowled. “Do I have to? I’ve been working a fourteen hour shift and I’m tired. What about in the morning?”
The agent shook his head.
By the time the morning rolled around, the details wouldn’t be fresh in her mind. The memory would fade. If they were asking for a sketch artist to do his work, they needed the freshest memory they could get.
Lois backed out of the bar as quietly as she could. Agent White wouldn’t appreciate the other agents knowing she’d followed him to the scene and she’d learned what she needed to know anyway.
The Secret Service handled counterfeiting. Homeland security didn’t. While Agent White might simply be working two cases which happened to be geographically close, Lois had a feeling that the two were connected.
A missile strike in U.S. soil and suddenly Homeland Security is interested in the identity of a man who had passed a counterfeit bill five miles away?
Was the man they were looking for the pilot of a crashed ship? How many resources did the enemy have if they were able to field a commercial jetliner and some sort of smaller manned craft to invade U.S. airspace?
This didn’t sound like the work of terrorists; the resources required to pull this sort of thing off required a massive infrastructure. This was the work of another country, maybe including a rogue nation.
As Lois was backing out, she stumbled a little. Glancing down she saw a dark shape lying in the grass.
Glancing around, Lois bent down to pick it up. The outside of it was charred and flaked away at her touch while the inside looked to be entirely unharmed.
Before she could look through it, she heard footsteps heading for the door. Slipping silently around the corner, Lois stood with her back to the wall, the peered around the corner when she heard a man’s voice.
It was one of the dark suited agents.
“It’s just like the bills the others had,” he was saying into a satellite phone. “As soon as we get a composite picture, we’ll start handing them out. For the moment the suspect is described as being a six foot one and hundred ninety five pounds, dark haired Caucasian male with a slight Asian appearance around his eyes. He is described as being muscular and wearing a white tank top and ripped gray dress pants.”
The agent listened to the cell phone for a moment before saying, “We’ll cordon off the area. We’ll find him.”
With that he snapped the cell phone shut and headed back inside the building.
Fingering the wallet in her hand, Lois realized that this story was much more involved than she had realized.
***********
Stepping into the brightly lit store, Clark kept his head turned away from the security cameras. The bars on the windows and the Plexiglas around the sales counter were just another sign of the general distrust this world had.
The bright fluorescent lights washed the color out of everything, painting everything in pale overtones. Clark could hear the persistent buzzing of the lights.
The old man behind the counter leaned forward and spoke into a microphone.
“What do you have for me?” he asked.
Reluctantly, Clark slipped the watch off his wrist and the ring off his finger. Lana would be furious; they had both been gifts from her, ways to ensure that he fit in better with her crowd. The suit had been a gift as well, hand tailored and handsome.
Now it was all gone.
“I’ll give you thirty dollars for the watch,” the man said. “Three hundred for the ring.”
Clark grimaced. They were each worth at least four times that in his time, and from what he knew of this time, things were more expensive, not less. The beer had cost four dollars, more than twice what he would have had to have paid back home.
“Ok,” he said.
It was the only choice he saw. His clothing made him conspicuous, but he didn’t see himself stealing clothes, and if he waited for a Salvation Army outlet to open in the morning he might be taking clothes from those who desperately needed them.
Without identification he couldn’t find a job, and even if he’d still had his wallet, the money inside would have been no good.
The old man slid a clipboard into the depression under the window then pushed the drawer out. “I’ll need a copy of your driver’s license and social security number.”
Clark froze.
“I lost my wallet,” he said.
“Federal law prohibits these sorts of trades without identification.”
“You can’t make an exception?”
“Is this property stolen?”
Clark shook his head numbly. “They are the last things of value I’ve got in the world.”
The old man said, “The Company can’t help you.” He hesitated then said, “Me now, I’ve been needing a watch for a while now. I’ve got no need for the ring, but I can give you fifteen dollars.”
Clark nodded reluctantly. A moment later he had his ring back and a ten and five ones. The old man was admiring the watch which was now on his wrist.
As he left the pawn shop, Clark stared at the ten dollar bill. They had Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill here? Then where was Grover Cleveland?
**********
Lois scowled as she flipped through the wallet. This had to be some sort of joke. Money that felt real but was obviously counterfeit, credit cards that looked real except for the Lexcorp insignia where it should have said MasterCard, Visa or American express.
She stared at the driver’s license. Handsome, dark haired, listed as being six foot one, one hundred ninety five pounds- he could have easily been the suspect the federal government was looking for.
The driver’s license was almost certainly a fake, but Lois couldn’t understand why anyone would do it. Even Iraqi schoolchildren knew about Clark Kent and Superman. No one would be foolish enough to use a name that was that obviously fake, and then repeat it on credit cards and video club memberships.
Even now as a semi-celebrity she had to go through repeated credit checks, people staring at her driver’s license and thinking she had a false id.
She hadn’t even bothered trying to smoke as a teenager, and she hadn’t bought alcohol herself until she was years older than twenty one.
Any competent terrorist would know better than draw attention to himself by adding unneeded complications to his story.
In the dark the money felt real. The pictures of unfamiliar presidents on the bills though made them almost impossible to pass, which defeated the purpose of making counterfeit bills.
There were pictures inside the wallet as well, pictures of the handsome man in the picture with a hard looking blonde. She was smiling, but in none of the pictures did it seem to reach her eyes. The man on the other hand looked lonely and a little lost in the pictures.
Lois could almost credit the idea that this might be another unfortunate soul like her, trapped by thoughtless parents with a name that would follow him throughout the rest of his life except for one unarguable fact.
The address on the driver’s license was in Metropolis, New Troy.
