The plane touched down in Dallas, and George flicked the lighter one last time, kept his focus on it as the airliner bumped and shuddered along the runway.

“Sir?” The stewardess said, and George ignored her. Surely she was talking to some other Sir.

“Sir? The no smoking light is on.”

George smirked. Dames, he thought. He turned his head slightly. “Yeah, but the no burning sign is off,” he said, in his best Mike Hammer voice.

She failed to shed all her clothes and throw herself into his arms. She in fact frowned at him, and rolled her eyes before moving down the aisle. He watched her go, didn’t mind the view. But Mike Hammer wasn’t working out too well. Didn’t bring in the chicks.

So he went back to watching the fire.

Eventually another one tried her luck. “Sir? Sir, please, you’re making a few people nervous,” she said, quietly.

He gave her a James Dean pout, looked at her over the flame, tried to make his eyes smolder-y. The young brunette he saw met that with a brilliant, if somewhat snaggle-toothed smile, and said “I’m going to have to ask you to put that out, please.”

Her eyes told the story. She wasn’t buying it. But maybe he could salvage this by leaning on authority, she had the look of someone with not just Daddy issues but subscriptions, and a pile of magazines in the corners of her mind. George flicked the cover shut, tucked it into his shirt, and made a show of “accidentally” flashing the badge… but by then she’d turned away. “Bitch,” he muttered. Eh, she didn’t have as nice an ass as the last one, anyway. Probably got Herpes, too.

But George never stayed depressed. This, like many others, was only a momentary burst of ill-will, and George entertained himself by trying to spot potential troublemakers as the crew did their post-flight dance. George did his usual game of figuring out who he’d need to kill first in the event that they turned out to be commie agents trying to hijack the plane. Wait, no, scratch that, they’d landed. That was a little bit of a relief. George was sure that if he pulled out the butterfly knife he could tackle the big guy down the way who was definitely pretending to sleep, but that would open him up to the woman with the screaming baby that could definitely just be a clever ventriloquist’s dummy being used to conceal a gun. No, she’d need to be top priority, and he wasn’t sure he could get over to her with the garotte in time. So it was good they couldn’t spring their cunning plan. They’d waited too long! But oh, if they’d made a move, he would have been ready.

Amon Carter field was a modern terminal, with clean walls, dark wood furnishings, and a big golden bas-relief on the walls in the shape of Texas being eaten by corn or something. But George had no eyes for it, because he’d spotted his quarry.

Special Agent Rodney Burrows. All the time he’d spent obsessively reading over this man’s file had paid off. He knew him on sight.

Of course, the fact that Rodney was holding up a sign with George’s name on it helped a little. It gave George the precious seconds he needed to duck out of the way, snatch a paper from a rack, and pretend to read it. He took out his stiletto and poked holes in it for his eyes, then studied Rodney while he flipped through the same four or five pages. It didn’t look like anyone was watching the man, there were no snipers waiting, but he had to be sure…

“Sir?” came a voice from behind him, and George resisted the urge to reverse the blade and defend himself with a quick, lethal thrust. Evil intention would not have announced itself, he knew. George penalized himself ten pushups and added them to the count for letting himself be snuck up on, and turned to see the paperboy staring up at him, hand outstretched. “That’ll be a nickel for the dispatch.”

George flashed the badge. “Beat it kid, government business.”

The kid’s hand didn’t move. “Sir! You got to pay for that paper! You damaged it!” He was getting louder.

Kids. George hated kids. Other children had grown up soft. Coddled. Not like him. They had it easy. And it wasn’t fair.

George looked through the paper, found Rodney looking around for the fuss, found a few more heads turning his way.

Shit! This could blow the whole op! I need a distraction! George handed the kid the stiletto, handle first. “Here you go. Keep the change, buddy.”

The kid took it and dropped his jaw, staring at the wicked little blade.

George bit his lip, hard, spat blood onto the surprised kid, and backed up. “Look out, he’s got a knife!” George yelled, and slipped into the crowd.

There was a heck of a lot of fuss, and in the chaos, George slipped around, ended up behind Burrows, and put his hands on the man’s shoulders. “If I were a red you’d be dead by now!” he barked, as the smaller, pudgier man tensed up. “But lucky for you, I’m on your side. Now move! We have to get out of here, quick!”

Slowly, too slowly, Burrows turned around. “You’re the guy from Colorado? You’re agent Lidd—”

“Ah ah ah! Code names only! For this operation I’m Curious George! And you’re Yellow Hat!”

Agent Burrows blinked at him, then looked over to where a yelling kid was being tackled and disarmed of his knife by four security guards. “What’s going on there? Do we need to get involved? Oh shit, your mouth is bleeding.”

“Just a flesh wound. You should see the other guy,” George said, looping his arm around Burrows’ shoulders, and half-pushing, half leading the man out the exit. “I’ll treat it in the car. They assigned you a company car, right?”

“I mean, I used the spare one we’ve got for getting dinner when we’re working late,” Burrows blinked. He had that look in his eyes that George knew well, the look of men who’d never been truly tested. Men who had been trained to bow to authority, no matter where it came from. Perfect, George thought to himself. This is my ticket! I need to ride this train as far as it’ll go!

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Good!” George said. “Get us there as quick as possible. Don’t look back.” He tensed his arm as Rodney tried to look back. “I said don’t look back! They’re watching!”

“They?” George saw the whites of Rodney’s eyes widen. “Who’s they?”

“Who do you think they are? I don’t know their exact names, but they probably take their borscht over easy, if you get my drift! Now move, man!”

Three minutes later, the black Ford was speeding off into the night, with George at the wheel and Rodney crouched in the back seat, poking his head up every few moments to check for possible tails, just as George had instructed. After about the third check, Rodney asked “What about your luggage?”

“A necessary sacrifice. That’s fine, it was a decoy! Only a change of clothes and some spare ovaltine,” George said. “No, I sent the guns ahead via private post under a different name. They wouldn’t let me take them on the plane. More fool they!”

“Um. Okay…” Rodney said, in the voice of someone who was maybe starting to realize that they had made some very quick decisions under perhaps less than verifiable circumstances. “Well the Executive Assistant Director is going to want to hear all about that. He uh, he had some questions about the memo, and you being assigned to this case. So let’s go and tell him what happ—”

“No time for that!” George snapped. “We’ll catch him up later.” And that was perhaps the biggest lie George had told all night. But a very, very necessary one. Because George knew that if he ended up in front of the Executive Assistant Director of the Dallas branch of the FBI without hard evidence of reds on state soil, that he’d be caught out as a massive liar, and would probably spend the rest of his days inside a cell.

And it wasn’t fair.

George wanted to fight for his country. George had tried to go fight the commies. Had gone so far as to try to enlist to fight the commies for his country in Korea! But no one in Basic Training had truly understood him! And when he’d seen that the guns that they were training on were not properly secured, and taken them all to a secure hiding place that only he knew about to prevent agitators from stealing them, well, a few of them had assumed the worst.

George had had to call Dad to keep them from putting a Section Eight on his record. But they’d done so on the understanding that he stay the heck out of anything to do with the US Military.

So he’d joined the FBI instead.

They’d assigned him to Denver, Colorado, and to his great surprise, the place was pretty barren of any sort of action. Well, of the kind he was looking for, anyway. And his joy at being a card-carrying, gun-wielding secret agent faded a bit when he’d found out that they were mainly going to put him to use filing papers and hauling coffee for men twenty years his senior who were old and complacent and would be of absolutely no use against the dozens of enemy plots that were constantly unfolding all around them!

And that was the problem. George KNEW that there were commies out there, working ceaselessly to bring down this great nation, the one that he loved so much that he’d sacrifice anything to protect.

But his superiors wouldn’t understand him, wouldn’t see his true potential until he had PROOF.

And a week ago, he’d seen his chance.

A memo had come across his boss’s boss’s desk, and he’d purloined it during a coffee run. A possible communist incursion, a kidnapping to put pressure on a heroic inventor who’d done transport for signal operations during the war… yes, it was obvious!

So while his boss’s boss was out one night, he’d jimmied the lock, slipped in, and drafted and wired a memo appointing himself as a special investigator, and giving himself full authority on anything even remotely associated with the case! Then he’d given himself a line of near-unlimited credit, and bought himself a plane ticket down to Dallas. And lined up a few other things, to boot.

And now here he was, on the cusp of turning up an honest to god Russian conspiracy, and the last thing that he could afford was to go in front of any kind of authority who could tell him “Slow down, son.” Because that’d end any hope he had of doing his patriotic duty, for the country that he loved so damn much.

“The reds are deep in here, Yellow Hat!” George barked, speeding up. “It’s on us to solve this! Now where’s the Colfax farm from here, what’s the best route?”

“I-I mean, it’s close to Cooperston, not Cooperstown down south, but—”

“Directions! Speed’s vital!” George hit the highway and floored it, making the Ford scream as it went faster than it had ever done on any of the usual burger runs the agency had put it through. “Nothing must stop us!”

Special Agent Rodney Burrows stared at him. The man blinked, then furrowed his brow. “Wait a moment.”

George kept his poker face on. Shit, this guy’s got some steel in him after all. Well of course he does, he’s FBI.

Rodney was definitely having second thoughts. “This is all so far out of protocol that I’m going to need—”

George tried to head it off at the pass, gambling with a big lie. “This comes from the top. And if you ever tell anyone that Hoover was personally involved—”

“HOOVER?” Rodney shouted. “OH COME ON NOW, THERE’S NO WAY—”

For an instant, George thought he’d pushed too far.

For a second, George thought his luck had run out.

For a moment, George felt all his hopes and dreams crumbling, all his fears surfacing, all the dark thoughts in the back of his skull nibbling up again and telling him that he wasn’t a hero, he wasn’t anything, just a scared little punk pretending to be tough, just a meager little twit who’d realized that he couldn’t cut in a real war and let himself get caught stealing guns to get out of having to go and die in some place where they didn’t even speak English like people that mattered…

For a moment.

And if Rodney had kept on pressing then, if he’d been allowed to continue, then maybe George would have confessed. Maybe he would have crumbled and folded, like he always did, like he hated himself for doing but couldn’t change.

But then the radio in the passenger seat crackled to life. “Code fourteen-three! Cooperstown area! Confirm blackout, over..”

The two men fell silent. George almost clipped a passing Studebaker, ignored its angry horn as he slowed, and merged into regular traffic.

“Blackout confirmed. Protocols seven, switching to encoded channels,” someone else replied. “No further discussion on this clearance. Over and out.”

“Code fourteen-three. In Cooperstown.” George said. “My God, it’s already started.”

He didn’t know what a fourteen-three was. But fortunately, Rodney was bad at keeping secrets.

“They’ve taken out the power? Why?” Rodney babbled. “Unless… there’s something they want to cover up. Something they don’t want us to see.”

“Well then!” George said, putting pedal to the metal again. “Let’s go take a look!”

George felt a manic smile stretch his lips, as he drove them west.

Finally! His destiny awaited!