Above From Below Part 8

As Rick and Andrea sped away from the Observatory, keeping his lights off to stay hidden in the dark of night, Rick heard the information he briefly gleemed from the computer as the words rattled around in his head. He didn't understand what he'd seen fully, but knew that the classified stamp that had been entered on the files meant it was likely what got Nico killed. That they hadn't secured the files better meant they didn't know about him. The connection between him and Nico hadn't been found. How though, had Andrea found the tie?

It didn't take long for them to get back to town, and there was a farely deserted bar just a mile from his hotel. Nico pulled in, telling Andrea he needed a drink, and a quiet place to go over things. She looked back at him, puzzled. So, he pointed to the pole outside the bar.

"The town's got free high speed connections. We can look at the files and if needed..." he paused as her look changed.

"Got it," she said, getting out of the car.

The two went inside, and Andrea found a booth as far away from the bar as they could get. Rick went over to the bar and asked the bartender for two double whiskeys, and two beers. While he waited, he watched Andrea in the mirror behind the bar. She sat patiently waiting for him to join her, and hadn't even booted up the laptop. He wondered, as the bartender pourred the two shots, was she being cautious or was she legitimately being patient and waiting for him.

"Fourteen fifty," the bartender told Rick.

Rick laid a twenty on the bar and grabbed their drinks. As he walked away, he watched Andrea sit up and throw her shoulders back. Under any other circumstances, he'd have been interested in her. But, as it happened, she was a military investigator, and he barely knew her. As he sat the drinks down, Andrea smiled.

"I'm not really a whiskey girl," she told him.

"An army badass who doesn't drink whiskey. Now I've seen it all," he quipped, making small talk as he pulled the laptop toward him.

Rick put the flashdrive into the laptop and opened the file. He pointed at the screen, telling her these were the images and data readings that came up right before Nico made a short outgoing call.

"What is it?" she asked, looking at the readings.

As the two sat there, looking over the images, she paused before telling him that they were looking at data from the Lonestar satellite.

"The Lonestar satellite?"

"Yeah, it was built by a California based company after they relocated their operations south of the Dallas area. They're a huge telecommunications company and have numerous contracts with NASA, NOAA, and the D.O.D.," she explained.

"Do you know what it does?"

Andrea was perplexed. The Lonestar system was little more than an extension of the office of planetary defense. It was originally sold to the government because they claimed to have developed technology generations beyond the Hubble and the James Webb. It tracked that the observatory would be able to access and see what the Lonestar and other systems were seeing, but they were used for study and analysis of asteroids, meteors, comets, and anomalous events.

"This says that there were matching readings between the Lonestar and something called the BB One system."

Andrea shrugged her shoulders. BB One wasn't one of the military systems she was familiar with. If it was U.S. owned, it was beyond her paygrade. She admitted it might be another privately owned, or even a classified operation.

Fortunately, Rick knew just the person to get him the information. He knew and old buddy working with the newly formed Department of Intelligence and Security. But, that might take hours for him to return contact.

"I guess," sighed Rick. "I'll make a call. Then, we'll have some time on our hands."

In a mountain bunker, somewhere in the eastern part of the country, two men sat discussing the problems with the operations in Texas.

"Sir, even with special operations division hunting for them, they weren't anywhere we could track them to," admitted a worried young agent.

"But, you know the hotel the ghost is hold up in," asked the senior man in the room.

"Yes, sir."

"Good," the man sighed, looking at the junior agent. "Set up a drop, and then feed it to the locals. Make sure to contact the MPs and let them know that Andrea Kohl is involved. That should slow down our intrepid investigators."

TO BE CONTINUED....