55.005 - The First Visit

[RonCo]

In the darkest of nights, the hooded woman stood still in the darkest of recesses of Section 412, scanning the silent ballpark before her. There was something wrong. She could sense it as an electric current in the air, which was stagnant and faintly fetid with the distant tastes of mud and swamp grass. An overcast cut even the stars from giving the place light. In the sky, only a single dull light of a commercial airliner marked a space.

She pulled the cowl of the hood back so her periphery was clear.

It had been a while since she’d worked in the field, and longer still since she had worked in the field out west. A lot had changed—including certain things about herself that went beyond the multiple simple cosmetics. She still had it, though, as her path through the interleaved security systems showed. She’d forgotten how much she liked the sensation of controlled tension that came on a site visit.

When the news came that Ron Collins had reappeared—the enigmatic ex-GM of the Yellow Springs baseball club—well, that was when she knew something had gone bad. And that was when she knew she had to do something. She owed him too much. If not for Collins, she may well still be working in a hide-bound office in Chicago.

The field below was expansive. It’s stillness seemed to belie the truth, though. The flat plane of centerfield seemed to radiate energy in the darkness of night.

There was one light, however.

Flickering.

A strobing thing that went dark for minutes at a time before flashing green in the slits out in the tallest spire that rose behind the fence out past that same center field. If she concentrated, the woman thought she could hear the soft crackle of electricity as it strobed.

Camacho.

She was, of course, aware of the stories behind the elusive new Assistant General Manager who had brought Collins back, but she was aware of even more arcane trivia about the man and the team than was publicly available for fanciful followers. One does not get to be in her position without knowing a few things that others do not, and in the years since Collins had stepped away, she’d done nothing but build on the foundation he’d helped her build.

She was aware of the curse. And she was aware of where it started.

Where it really started, not where it was said to have.

That was what worried her.

She was also aware of the catacombs that had been built deep into the core of the earth here—the trials that had been performed in what she knew to be something one might call laboratories down deep in the bowels of the club’s structure. It was those offices and their foundations, along with some quite intriguing technologies—dare she say magics—that kept the Basilica from falling into the swamp grounds here.

She grit her teeth and put the hood back up.

This first visit was a shakedown run only. A check on process and an opportunity to take in the lay of the ballpark.

She’d seen what she needed to see. Enough to know that yes, indeed, something was wrong here, and that this something could well be a true danger to Collins. So, there was work to do. She had to get back to the room she’d rented for the duration of the season. There were calculations to make. Assumptions to check out. She wanted to scan through bits and pieces of intelligence she’d mapped together regarding secret build plans and certain military grade UV, satellite, and radar scans.

It felt good, she thought, to be back in the field again.

To walk at the soft gait that kept her silent. To use a sequence of her new jammers that futzed with electronic surveillance, and to execute the perfect procedure to avoid optical and infrared detection. She was good at what she did.

She stepped backward again, into the shadows.

Time to go to work, she thought.

Collins wasn’t going to save himself, after all.