Once again the girls were settled on the couch, on either side of Ian. Fortunately he'd only had a half day at school. This time both were hanging on his arms and he had his wrapped around them as best he could. Some movie was on, but nobody was watching it.

  Jane and I slipped away to her workshop. "Mama, just watch the footage, all the way through, then we'll talk."

  I settled myself in front of the monitor and started the playback.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary until a white car stopped in front of the school and a man in a business suit got out. He looked fairly ordinary, but he moved much too smoothly. Normal people are sort of jerky when getting out of cars. Either they have to step down or climb up a bit, depending on the height of the seat, so they have to adjust their posture accordingly. This guy just sort of flowed out of the car.

  "I'm having the license plate run Mama, but it will probably turn out to be a stolen car."

  I nodded and kept watching. Nothing interesting until he was inside the school. It wasn't just the kids who were a bit sleepy after lunch. The staff paid him no attention as he turned down the hall.

  "Holy SHIT!" He was looking at the room numbers as he went.

  Jane switched on two other monitors, both showing the inside of the girl's classroom. The main monitor showed him stopping at the girl's room. He looked at the number, nodded, then threw open the door and stepped inside.

  "Hold on a second Mama." Jane did something and the views on the side monitors were now side-by-side on the center screen.

  Talk about one's blood running cold. Mine was absolutely frozen by what I saw. He stepped inside and turned his head minutely. He was looking directly at Kumiko. He started to raise his right hand. Probably holding a 9mm, gods no, it was a .45! His head swiveled, way too smoothly, then he was looking at Kimiko. Now he was lifting his other hand, also holding a .45.

  Let me digress a bit. Any .45 has the kick of a mule if you fire it one handed. No matter what you see in movies, you aren't going to hit anything firing one handed unless you're firing at a stationary target and have braced yourself fairly well. The idea that you can fire two guns at once and hit anything is a total fiction. Thinking that you can hit two targets that are 80 degrees apart is insane. You can't even see two targets clearly with that separation.

  However, our perp didn't seem to realize that. Not only was he going to fire two guns at once, from the way he was moving it was obvious that this wasn't the first time he'd done something like this. Then the baseball hit him. I had Jane go through that frame by frame, both forward and backwards. Mr. Hafiz had turned toward the door the instant that it started opening. His arm was moving by the time the perp had spotted Kumiko, and he'd already released the ball by the time the perp had spotted Kimiko and had started to raise gun number two.

  I asked, tonelessly; "Elapsed time?"

  "1.4 seconds Mama. From the time the door opened till the time he released the ball. They weren't in view from the hall camera, but take a look at the girls."

  Jane switched the view over to a camera in the far back of the room. Both girl's heads snapped up like they were linked together, then they stood and threw their tablets like Frisbees. It was beautiful. Really, really scary, but beautiful.

  "Mama. The frames of those tablets are reinforced. I got the stronger cases because I figured that they could be bumped a lot at school. It takes about 60 kilograms of pressure to even start to deform them. And Kumiko said that the frames were, ah, 'crushed' was the word, wasn't it."

  I nodded.

  "Well, not counting the force involved, take a look at this."

  The view switched back again and went frame-by-frame. It showed the baseball bouncing off the right side of the perp's forehead with his head already pushed back about 40 degrees. Then Kumiko's tablet hit him on the point of the chin, and 3 frames later Kimiko's hit him in the left temple.

  The frames of the tablets were indeed 'crushed'. His head should have been more than crushed. There shouldn't be a jaw there any more. Not only that, the temporal bone is the weakest in the skull. There should have been brain mush all over the room after Kimiko's tablet hit him. I didn't see even a small dent.

  "That's why I called Mr. Forsythe so quickly. When I told him about it he started shouting. His exact words were: 'Holy effing SHIT. NOT AGAIN!' Then he hung up. Mama. We may be at 'Defcon Worse' again."

  She was in lecture mode, but I didn't care this time.

  "1) He was hunting the girls, nobody else.

  "2) He moved unlike any normal human. He took damage that should have literally pulverized his skull but nothing visible happened other than him being knocked out.

  "3) The girls called him a 'thing' and 'it'."

  I was nodding and wasn't liking what it was adding up to. I turned to go down to my room to think, but Jane stopped me.

  "There's more Mama. Point 4 if you will. Mr. Hafiz told me some other interesting things. He didn't just happen to come here on an exchange program, he was sent. Approximately 18 months ago he was pulled off his regular assignment and was told he was being reassigned to a teaching position in America. He wasn't happy about it.

  "It seems that our Mr. Hafiz was the NCO in charge of training new recruits for EKAM. That's the ultra-elite anti-terrorist unit in Greece. To even be a recruit for it requires completion of training equivalent in difficulty to our Army Rangers or Navy Seals. Then they go way beyond that in training for police work and anti-terrorism actions.

  "There are only about 150 of them in the entire nation. Yes Greece has a smaller population than we do, but they're much more likely to see terrorism.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  "So what was so important that the man who was essentially the head drill sergeant for one of the most elite military units in the world sent here? Good question Mama. Fortunately he answered it for me.

  "He didn't like being sent here. He was HAPPY where he was. He was accomplishing something very important for his people, and here he was sent to the good old USA, which isn't always the most popular country in that part of the world.

  "And why was he sent? To teach elementary school students. Fortunately he had a teaching certificate. He'd been a teacher before he volunteered for the army, so that part at least made sense. But it made no sense to send HIM. How could this -- 'enforced vacation' is what he called it -- be so important.

  "I'll let him speak for himself, here's the recording."

  Janie punched a few keys, nodded her head, then hit one more.

  "I must admit that I was more than a little upset Ms. Knight. Here I was for over a year in your country, doing not much of anything. Oh, yes, I enjoy teaching, but I was WASTED here doing this. And why was I here? Because I was told that there was something going on that was much, MUCH more important than what I was doing at home. So whether or not I wanted to come, here I was.

  "And, again, why? There was apparently a credible threat. There was an attack being planned against two children who would become my students some time in the next year or two or three! What absurdity! Why attack two children, and how could they be important?"

  His voice dropped to nearly a whisper, "I guess that what our foreseers saw, it was not so absurd after all."

  Then his voice resumed its normal timbre and volume and he chuckled. "Though it seems that your girls did not need much protecting. But it is better that I claim responsibility, no? I do not think that you want anyone else to know of their abilities, correct?

  "My question is this. How did anyone know to plan this attack? You told me that you just met them a few months ago and know nothing of their past. Well, whatever that past was must be fairly important.

  "I shall look into this further and then...who knows. We will surely speak again. Perhaps I will even be permitted to tell you what I find out. In the meantime, I have lesson plans to prepare and some more police who want to ask me the same questions...again.

  "BAH! Police are the same no matter where in the world you are. If you will excuse me please Miss Katt--oops, wrong assignment. Your pardon Ms. Knight. Until later."

  ------------------------------

  "Damn, damn, damn, DAMN!" I looked around but if I broke something in here I knew that Jane would break something in me, 7th dan or not.

  I settled for banging my head on the wall for a bit. Not too hard, just enough to make myself think.

  "Our Mr. Hafiz was ordered here BEFORE Kimiko was adopted. Heck it was before she'd even met her adoptive parents. What in holy hades is going on?!"

  "Well Mama, we know two more things. Whatever that assassin was, it wasn't human. Also Mr. Forsythe has either run into them or heard of them before.

  "There's another thing that comes to mind too. We're here in Salem mostly because a foreseer that works for the FBI pointed us in this direction. So it's no surprise that other countries have been recruiting them too. The question is, what would a foreseer in Greece see involving two girls who were, at the time of their forecast, living in Japan that scared their superiors enough that they pulled the most elite of their most elite soldiers away from his duties and sent him to the US?"

  "Scared you say Jane?" I thought I knew but I wanted her take on this too. "Why do you say that?"

  "It's obvious Mama. Let me ask you a question. What, other than an extreme threat to their national security, would make the Greek army send their best EKAM soldier here? He's needed desperately there. They MUST be shaking in their boots about something!"

  I let out a long sigh. "That's very much the same thing I thought. I'd just hoped that I'd thought wrong.

  "Gods above! What are we going to do about the girls? When this all filters up, they're going to be in the deepest hole in the deepest mine in America!"

  "Mmmmm, probably not Mama, and we can thank Mr. Hafiz for that. As best we can tell, nobody knows that they were involved. He said he'd stashed their tablets, and knowing what he is, it's damned likely that nobody will find anything he doesn't want them to.

  "Plus, we'll show them the security footage that shows that thing checking the classrooms. Not the part from inside the classroom though. We'll show them only what we want them to see.

  "And what they will see is this: Our perp checking the doors of all the rooms until he comes to the room that the big, bad, nasty, undercover EKAM agent is working in. That alone will pinpoint him as the perp's target. They're going to want to know how he blew his cover or how it was blown. Also, given whatever it is that tried to kill him, they're going to be in a bit of a panic.

  "I'm sure that our intelligence people will be asking his intelligence people to please play nice and tell them what he's doing here and why that thing wanted to kill him. I'm just as sure that the Greeks will tell our people to piss off. After all, nobody likes the CIA, not even us, which is a shame. They are trying to be useful.

  "Mr. Hafiz won't be deported or even outed. Our spooks are going to be watching everything he does now, to try to figure out what he's up to.

  "What the Greeks will do next is try to wring everything they possibly can out of their foreseers. Now that they know that the first prediction was correct, they're going to be even more scared of whatever it is that they're afraid of."

  "Wait a minute Jane. FIRST prediction? What makes you think that there are more?"

  "Just common sense Mama. While the Greek intelligence people might be a touch sad if a couple of orphans from Japan got killed in the US, they'd hardly send their best man here. At most they'd send a polite letter, probably through Interpol, saying that they had some soft information about possible trouble in Salem in the indefinite future. Even though they'd have to know that nothing would come of it on our end, at least they would have given a warning. That would salve their conscience."

  Shit. I hate it when she's right about stuff like this. Now I had even more things to keep me from being able to sleep at night.

  Jane was back in her favorite "chin resting in palm of hand" thinking posture. "So, like I said before, there MUST be something else to make them pee their pants like this. No matter how you come at it, sending Mr. Hafiz here appears to be overkill, unless there's a LOT more going on that's a threat to them as well as to us. And you can bet that there is."

  EPILOGUE

  OK. That's the whole story at least up till today. No, I didn't leave anything out, at least not anything important.

  Whose story is this anyway? I'm going to have bruises where you hit me too. You're a lot stronger than you think, especially compared to a human.

  Damn it, I'm soooo tired of you laughing at me the whole time during this report.

  What do you mean, "Well it was funny"?

  All right, so it was at times. Most of the time I was just plain scared.

  Yes, yes, I know. You're pretty transparent. Subtlety isn't your forte. You're trying to distract me by making me ticked at you so I won't worry so much.

  Yes. I love you too, but you know that already, don't you?

  At any rate, that wraps up my report. Not too bad for a first effort, don't you think?

  Oh? You think all the bickering between me and Jane was great fun to watch?

  OK Grgur, I give up. No more banter. I'm totally exhausted.

  I'll talk to you later. It's a shame that I won't remember. I know it's necessary, and I understand why. I just don't like being apart from all of you.

  Which is why I don't remember, I know. It would change my behavior and cause all kinds of problems.

  Right. Take care. Give my love to everyone. Signing off.

  Karla pushed an unobtrusive button on her desk, after which the pieces of her crystal paperweight that were spinning rapidly above her desk stopped glowing and slowly coalesced back into a paperweight again.

  Karla shook her head and tried to remember...something. Geez, not enough sleep again. Time for bed for sure.

  She padded back into her bedroom, crawled under the covers, and let the cats curl up around her while she drifted off into a well deserved, deep sleep.

  -----------------------------------------

  (And a comment. Any date referred to in these books, such as Janes graduation, is the actual date that the event occurred in our world as well as in her's. Funny how things in the multiverses can be such close parallels.)

  747 - Boeing 747 The first large-body, long-range airliner. They first flew in 1969. The design was still being used in 2015 though as of early 2016 it was being phased out and no new orders were taken.

  ambient backscatter - powering a very small device with the energy of radio waves in the environment. Very little power is available, but no (or only very tiny) batteries are needed.

  Asakusa - one of the districts in Tokyo. It contains a famous, and very large, temple dedicated to the goddess Kanon (known in Chinese as Kwan Yin).

  Back Door - computer speak for a way to access a secure computer system without using the official log-in. Usually put in place when the system is installed by the manufacturer or an employee. In rare cases, we hope, by a criminal who has infiltrated the installation team or manufacturer.

  copper - an old word meaning "policeman"

  Google Glasses - An early attempt to incorporate a computer interface into eyeware.

  Hmong - a tribal group originally from Laos and Viet Nam, many thousands of whom were evacuated to the USA after the Viet Nam War. This was done to protect them from genocide as they provided critical help to the USA during the war. Many now live in the Pacific Northwest.

  NCIS - Naval Criminal Investigation Service - The reference here is to a wildly popular TV series that began in 2003

  Oculus Rift - The first viable, immersive 3D headset.

  Japanese Words used here:

  Chuugaku ichinensei - First year of middle school. (7th grade)

  Daisuki - Like a lot

  Hai - yes

  Gohan - literally "rice" it is used to mean a meal.

  Asagohan - breakfast

  Hirugohan - lunch

  Ichigo - strawberry

  Jamu - jam

  Nihongo - Japanese language

  Okaa-san - Mother

  Okaa-chan - Mom

  Kaa-chan - An even more informal way of referring to your mother (not polite).

  Onee-san - Sister

  Onee-chan - Sis

  Onii-chan Bro

  .

  OMSI - Oregon Museum of Science and Industry - It sits on the east side of the Willamette River in Portland.

  The former is more correct, the latter is what is commonly used in the USA. I use both depending on who is speaking.

  Jane's method works best with arabica beans. The robusta variety tends toward bitterness no matter how you brew coffee with it.