The Arena: The Awakening (1) (11 page)

After he greeted the visitor, she heard another voice. “Hi, I’m Special Agent Hank Richards with the FBI. I’d like to talk to you and anyone else at this address about something I’ve been looking into.”

Mia didn’t know it yet, but this was going to be the conversation that changed everything.

Forever!

Chapter 17

The New Beginning

Kyle wheeled Mia out onto the front porch of the house where Hank was sitting. He was leaning on the table in front of him, looking down at the grain of the wood, when Mia came into view. His thoughts were now clear. It was her! He had found her after all this time. He looked directly at her sitting there in her chair, not being able to move. He knew that this was not the time to say who he was, or mention the past they had together. He started talking about the case he was looking into and that their minivan was seen leaving the area where he lost the suspect he was chasing. He directed most of the conversation at Kyle, but couldn’t help look Mia in the eyes. Kyle continually played the whole thing down, explaining they had been in DC at a rehabilitation centre and that was all.

Mia was thinking to herself,
“I know this guy. He was at the bridge yesterday. That was his car I saw parked in front of that fire truck. He’s going to arrest me!”

After a moment or two, Kyle offered to make coffee for everyone and headed inside.

As soon as the door closed, Hank leant forward and whispered to Mia “Laura? Is that you in there? I’m Hank Richards. Do you remember me?”

She didn’t move. She just kept moving her eyes, scanning him up and down.

“You and I used to be married. That’s your car over there.”

“
What?”
thought Mia.
“Married? Us?”

The emotions building up inside her were difficult to explain as she didn’t remember him at all.

She again felt a certain familiarity towards his face but nothing else.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time. Your name is Laura Richards.”

That name struck a chord with Mia. That was the name on the cards she used to pay for hotels. Those people at the Arena had her using her real name at the hotels!

Within a few minutes, Kyle returned with a coffee for Hank and a tea for himself. He also had a smoothie-type drink for Mia which he fed to her while he spoke to Hank. Again he played the whole thing down, but Hank could see in Mia’s eyes that she was dying to say something to him. While Kyle fed her, Hank looked at her and looked at her body sitting there in the chair. Mia knew that there was emotion in his voice when he was talking to her. She wanted desperately to give him some kind of sign that she was still in there, but she couldn’t speak out loud or it would give the game away. Instead, as she saw him look her body over, she noticed him look at her arm. She gave it a slight twitch. Hank noticed it straight away but didn’t say anything. He looked at her in the eyes and raised half a smile on his face to show her that he noticed. He sat with them for a while longer and after Kyle fed her, Hank finished of his coffee and Kyle cleared the table of the cups and went back inside. Throughout the conversation with them both, Hank had worked out that Kyle was a bit of a nothing and that Mia was there in mind even if she couldn’t move her
body. He had a gut feeling that Mia wanted to talk to him but just couldn’t at the moment.

So, when Kyle went inside, he again leant forward and said “I need you to contact me when you’re ready. You can get a message to me in any FBI office. Just drop a note off when you can to let me know you’re alright and what’s happening.”

Mia again twitched her arm as a sign she knew what he was saying. Hank was content with the response. It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

When Kyle returned, Hank thanked them for their time and made his exit back towards
Laura
across the street. As he did, just as he got back into the car and started the engine, Kyle picked up his cup and said to Mia that he would be back in a minute and went back inside. Mia wasn’t stupid! She knew exactly what he was doing. He was going to call the Arena and blow everything. As Hank drove off down the street, Mia stood up from her chair and watched him disappear into the distance. As he vanished over the horizon, she turned and went into the house.

It didn’t take her long to find Kyle in the living room with the house telephone in his hand. It was as she suspected, he was calling it in. Mia flew across the room, jumping the coffee table between her and Kyle. She kicked him under the jaw and he flew over the back of the chair he was attempting to stand up from. He hit the wall behind with an enormous thud. Before he had time to regain his composure, Mia was there and struck him hard in the throat with a single blow. He sank to his knees, grasping at his throat and trying to take a breath. She had shattered his windpipe.

She stood back and looked at him, watching him struggling for breath. She knew he was finished and that she didn’t need to do anything else. In her mind, justice had been served for the years of torment that she was starting to understand. After a few moments, he fell backwards again against the wall and slumped into a heap. Lifeless. To most people, it would be a traumatic thing to see, never mind do to someone, but to Mia there was a sense of relief as she could now do whatever she wanted.

Mia started to put together a suitcase with her clothes in it. She was leaving for good and wouldn’t be coming back, so she took as much as she could. Once she had finished in her room, she had a look into Kyle’s to see if there was any money lying around as she had nothing. After searching all of the drawers, she moved onto the wardrobe. In the bottom, she found a shoebox that contained Kyle’s personal documents. His passport, driver's licence, as well as a few other bits and pieces. As she rifled through, she found a newly banded stack of one hundred dollar bills. It said $10,000 on it. That was what she needed to get her by. Since Kyle had failed to notify them of what was happening, she had time to do whatever she needed given that they only used her once a month.

Before leaving the house, Mia took the time to sit at the dining room table with a paper and pen and write a letter to Hank Richards. She needed to explain to him everything that had gone on. She didn’t name any locations in the letter as she was formulating a plan in her head to deal with the Arena and didn’t want anyone spoiling it. She wanted her memories back! She did, however, explain that if she was successful in getting her memories back, she would make contact with him again but not to wait for her.

As she slammed the door behind her, Mia felt a great sense of relief knowing that she wouldn’t be coming back to this house. It was actually a nice place but the things she now knew about tainted it. If she had her way, she would have burnt it to the ground but that would cause too much of a scene. She jumped into the minivan and headed towards DC. She had decided that it was too risky to take the minivan into the city, so she drove to Crystal City and ditched the car in a side street not too far from the Metro Station. After about thirty minutes, Mia was back in the heart of Washington DC. She headed towards Pennsylvania Avenue and walked past the J Edgar Hoover building. As she did, she posted the letter to Hank into the post box at the front of the building. She carried on walking as if nothing was wrong. She didn’t look out of place. She was just a normal person in DC. As she reached Freedom Plaza, she decided to check into a beautiful looking hotel on the corner. This would be her base from where she would get back what was wrongfully taken from her.

After checking in and being shown to her room, she opened the doors leading onto her patio and took a seat overlooking the city. It was here she would draw up the list of what she needed to get back into the Arena and get the serum from Dr Cooper’s safe, without him knowing. It was going to be particularly difficult as Mia didn’t have any weapons, or the cover of her being in a wheelchair. She knew she had to get herself back inside the Arena.

Chapter 18

The Plan

As she lay there on the bed of the hotel room, Mia closed her eyes and thought about what she was doing and how she would proceed with her next task. Her priority was Dr Cooper. She decided that it would be better to deal with him away from the Arena as she would have more time to extract the information she sought from him when there was less chance of them being interrupted. For her to do this, she knew that she needed her suitcase from the building and she needed it fast. There were other things in that case besides her rifle.

She got up and dressed and headed out the door. Mia needed a nurse’s outfit for the next stage of her plan. It couldn’t be a fake outfit from a costume store, it needed to be legitimate. She jumped onto the Metro and headed over to the Foggy Bottom district where she knew, from parking her car in storage in the area, that the George Washington University Hospital was located. She walked around the building first to see what the security was like and before long, she had established that access was easy and the security of the site was a joke. Almost non-existent! It took her less than ten minutes to enter through the service area unchallenged, access the laundry area and leave with a full nurse’s uniform. She did think to herself that the task was too easy but she shrugged it off as a bit of luck.

On route to her hotel room, she stopped off at a clothing store and picked up a new pair of pantyhose, a blonde 'bob' style toupee and a pair of black shoes to go with the uniform. She remembered that the nurses in the Arena all wore stockings and flat sensible shoes. She did turn her nose up a bit when buying the shoes as they were something she usually wouldn’t be caught dead in! She usually wore killer heels or a high quality set of cowboy-style boots but
when needs must!
She also went into the high end boutique next door and bought several items including a short black skirt, blouse and jacket, a large brimmed hat and a pair of those killer heels she would usually wear.

When she got back to her room, she started to figure out how she was going to get into the Arena building without causing alarm. She opened her bag that contained the stuff taken from Kyle’s stash in the house. There were a number of credit cards as well as the cash. As she rifled through them, she found a blank white card. It had no details on it but did have a magnetic strip on the rear. It looked really out of place but Mia figured that it must be an access card to the Arena as it appeared to serve no other purpose.

She formulated a plan. This was to enter through the side door as she would have if she was returning from a job. She would swipe in and then swipe out quickly. If someone was watching the comings and goings on a computer, it would look like a glitch of some type. Especially if it was in the middle of the night.

The time passed really quickly that afternoon and evening. Mia didn’t get much sleep. In her head she systematically went over and over her plan so that she knew exactly what she needed to do. Everything was worked out to the last letter. The clock on the wall of the room showed 2am; time to go.

It took Mia less than five minutes to get to the Arena building and before long she was standing in the entrance corridor that she knew so well. Her thinking that the card she found was Kyle’s access card was right. Swiping in and out quickly seemed to have worked as well as there were no alarm bells sounding and no security goons running towards her. She knew time was short so she headed straight towards the changing room where she would get ready for her missions.

There were several staircases to navigate but she remembered where she needed to go. On the way, she walked passed a nurse's desk. Mia carried herself very well and due to that, the nurse at the desk didn’t even raise an eyebrow as she passed. As she closed in on the room she needed, she could see that there were nurses working in the other rooms down the corridor but she still went unchallenged. When she finally got into her changing room, she walked to the wall panel at the far end and held her hand against the electronic display. It scanned her hand and a panel slid open revealing her suitcase. She retrieved it from the shelf and quickly checked that everything was still in there. She then went to the next display screen and did the same again. The panel that slid back this time revealed the spares for her field kit. She helped herself to a few handguns and as much ammunition as she could fit in the case, including nine new rounds for her rifle that were encased in a clear plastic box. Using it didn’t form part of her current plan but something made her think that she might need them in the not too distant future. This cabinet also contained spares from the kit she needed the most. It contained micro GPS transmitters and a LCD tracking unit. It also had a few more bits and pieces that she hadn’t used before but she took them anyway as they may come in handy at a later stage. She squirreled them away in the case, closed up both cabinets and made her way out of the building. As part of her plan, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to use the swipe card to get out of the building as the system would know that the owner, having swiped out, wouldn’t be in the building. She headed towards the elevator that Kyle would normally use to bring her in. Although she remembered the code that he typed in to get them down there, she found she thankfully didn’t need it to get out. The lift took her to the foyer of the building automatically and she walked out and into the main street. When she took her first breath of air outside, she stopped and looked around her. She could see the park opposite and the glow from the front of the White House in the distance. She thought to herself that either she was that good, or the security for the Arena was pathetic. After a millisecond of thought, she decided that it was that she was
that
good and headed off towards her hotel. Before long she was in her room, lying on the bed and trying to sleep. Her mini-mission had only taken a couple of hours so there was plenty of time for a power nap before starting the second phase of her plan.