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Realigning Destiny
By TT

Sometimes chance intervenes in our lives and causes destiny jumps the tracks. When this happens, fate steps in and realigns destiny’s course to bring us to where we need to be. But, as with the course of true love, the road of realignment doesn’t always run smooth.

Part 33 - Coming Home

Stephanie closed her eyes and began taking deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself and focus on what she needed to do.

After seeing the map, she could easily understand the chaos she had walked into as well as the missing weapons. Had she had the same training as Bob and Ranger, she too would have gone down and grabbed a few weapons. There was nothing that could justify this.

Standing up, she began pacing back and forth across the room as her initial shock burned away in the fire of her growing anger.

These people had to be stopped. There was no way that they should be allowed to survive.

Any thought of continuing to hide her current life from her past one had to be put aside.

They needed the Rangemen here.

They needed the whole freaking Army here and maybe the Marines too.

There weren’t words vile enough to describe the people who were plotting this… this…

Her rational mind poked through her anger as she realized she had no clue what “this” was.

Originally, she had thought it was just a terrorist act. Then, with the information about the Mint, she had thought that they were going to try to rob that, although, she had to admit, that seemed extremely unlikely.

With this new information about their targets, she was back to the original thought of terrorism, but it felt like they were missing something, like they were missing something important.

Walking to the door, she stepped onto the porch and scanned the horizon, wondering when the men would be coming home. She needed the information they had, the perspective. There was too much about this type of operation she didn’t know.

Once again praying that they wouldn’t do anything stupid, she closed her eyes and pushed away the fear and dark thoughts that taunted her with images of Bob and Ranger injured, lying in the open. She couldn’t afford to lose either one of them. Her heart just couldn’t take it.

Not seeing any sign of the men, she re-entered the house and moved to the kitchen, hoping that activity would replace worry and that she would be able to think of something to do.

Poking around, she tried to find some coffee. Not finding any, she took the now-cool kettle and filled it with water, placing it on the burner.

With water for her tea heating, she turned her attention to the refrigerator and explored the contents of that and the freezer until she located the items she would need to make dinner.

She knew it would have to be something that could sit for a while and still taste good, since she figured Ranger and Bob weren’t quite as prepared as normal when they left.

Twenty minutes later, her casserole was in the oven, the salad was in the refrigerator and she was back in the main room sipping her tea.

Never one to sit still for too long, she set her mug of tea aside and began sorting through the papers on the table in front of her. They had been scattered on the table and floor, but she knew there must be some sort of order to them.

As she skimmed over the words on the paper to try and figure out what page went where, she found it quite intriguing.

The papers were actually transcripts of conversations from the microphones that Ranger and Bob had planted. There was a mix of typed and hand-written pages.

Assuming the typed ones were older and the hand-written ones were from the tape currently in the machine, she split them out into two piles.

Deciding to sort the typed sheets first, she began reading them. Each paragraph had a number off to the left of it. She wondered what it was until she remembered that her old tape deck at home had had a counter on it. Checking the reel-to-reel machine, she noted that there was a counter on that machine too.

As she skimmed the pages, she felt discomfited by what she was reading. The conversations listed were incredibly normal. There were comments about the recent ballgames, what they wanted for lunch or dinner, discussions of the heat. If she didn’t know better, she would just think this was a group of normal people having a normal day.

A little further on there was a brief conversation as the guards switched shifts. That was a little out of the ordinary for the picture that had been previously painted.

The pages continued on in more or less the same vein until she ran out of typed pages to read.

Satisfied that that portion was all set, she started sorting through the hand-written pages. She easily identified Bob’s scrawl and started ordering the pages by the numbers in the left hand column.

These pages had a lot more detail in them. These were the conversations that confirmed in her mind that they had indeed found the terrorists. There were discussions of chemical mixes, lethal versus non-lethal options, discussions of explosive force and other such information.

The third page she looked at was only half full of writing.

The top portion revealed a discussion of targets. She saw that each target had been marked on the map she had found near the table.

She could feel her face flush with anger as she reached the last line, the one that listed the target that had set her off earlier. She also noticed that the final sentence was incomplete. Bob had stopped writing mid-sentence.

She stared at that half finished sentence and wondered what other horrors the people could have revealed.

She read the last sentence aloud, “In addition to the Federal Building, Convention Center, State Capital and Public Library, we need enough explosives to bring down the Children’s Museum of Denver and…”

Her eyes flicked to the tape recorder. Setting the paper down, she ignored the sick feeling in her stomach and tried to remember how to rewind the tape.

It took a few minutes, but eventually she figured it out. As the tape rewound, she closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, wondering what she would hear.

Continued In Part

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