Story for a GaiaOnline contest. Had to be fantasy. Had to include the quote, “We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict,” by Jim Morrison.

It nees quite a bit of work, but I don't have time to do that. I apologize.

I.

“This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.”

There was a gentle knock at my office door, and I looked up to see one of the gopher boys standing in the doorway. “Burke, Ulrich wants to see you. Says it’s about that piano case.”

“Okay.”

As he left, I closed the book I had been reading. The smile the boy had given me had implied that the news was good, but some part of me still worried: What if he had smiled for a different reason? What if he was simply doing it to cheer me up?

Whatever the case, I knew I would find out soon enough, and I set out toward my boss’ office. I passed his secretary and knocked on the door before entering the overly-extravagant room.

“Have a seat,” my boss – everyone called him Ully behind his back – said as he motioned to a leather chair on the opposite side of his desk. He slid a file across his desk calendar, turning it so I could read the red Confidential stamped across the front. “I assume you know about the piano case in New Hampshire?”

I looked up from the folder. “I do, yes.” Everyone in the department knew.

“Good.” Ully folded his hands and watched me. “I’ve heard you and your people talking about it – I will stray as far as saying that you would give anything to handle the case.” He held my eyes as I gave him a scrutinizing nod. “You know what it would mean to your career if you solved this case.”

A promotion – that’s what it meant. I nodded in response to the question.

“So I expect you not to mess this up for us, okay?”

My eyes flicked to his as I straightened my head. “What are you saying?”

Ully smiled. “I am assigning you and four other agents to go to New Hampshire and figure this thing out. You will be the field leader for the case, and I expect you to do a good job. Don’t embarrass us.”

“I won’t.” The Agency for the Safety of Civilians managed to embarrass itself all on its own. I doubted that I was the only one who called it the ASS rather than the ASC. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve earned it, Burke.” He reached across his wide desk and slapped me on the shoulder. “Go home and get packed. Your flight leaves in two hours.”

– – –

“All right, gentlemen.” I dropped my folder on the table in front of me and ran my eyes over the four men seated opposite me. “I hope you read up on this while we were on the airplane.” I started to pace, my hands clasped behind my back. “A piano was found in the woods three days ago,” I summarized; “perfectly tuned, recently played. Except no one knows by whom. Ferrer, why?”

The agent sat straighter in his chair, obviously bored by the brief I was required to give. He tapped the butt of his pencil on the table, then said, “The fingerprints found on the body of the piano could not be matched in the database.”

“Good.” I moved to the whiteboard just behind myself, picking up the marker in the tray. “Jefferson, can you please tell me what our job here is?”

Jefferson was a good agent, I knew. I had worked with him in the past, which is why I had chosen him when Ully had given me the choice. “We need to establish a time frame for the suspect to come play,” Jefferson said, and I started a list on the board. “We then need to set up a watch and wait for the suspect to return, at which point we will capture him. Then we take him in for questioning.”

“Very good.” I capped the marker and looked at the four men. “It’s not that hard, as you can see. If we do this, we will – “

“I don’t think there’s a we in this,” Ferrer muttered. He watched me, his eyes hard. “It’s all for your job.”

I looked down and sighed. “I’ll see what I can do for the rest of you, but it’s not my decision to make. Let’s just get this thing over with so we can go home.” I picked up my coat from where I had thrown it over a chair. “Come on – let’s head out.”

We left the relative warmth of the tent and wove our way through the woods to where the piano sat. It was a grand piano, easily weighing over five hundred pounds; the fact that someone had gotten it out there was astounding. We figured we were looking for at least six built men, maybe more.

“Sir.” One of the local cops approached me. “We found something you might want to see. This way.”

I waved my men to their stations and followed the cop. She led me to the piano, and I paused a moment to take in the size of it. I looked around, not seeing any room for the piano to even get to that spot; there were no trails nearby or any roads for miles.

“We were wondering if this symbol meant anything to you,” the cop said, motioning to the underside of the piano. “When we contacted Director Ulrich, he wouldn’t tell us what it meant.”

Kneeling, I put a gloved hand on the side of the piano to steady myself as I looked underneath it. The local law enforcement people had lain a tarp down so their investigators could look at the symbol on the underside of the piano.

I lay back on the tarp and froze. The symbol was one I recognized, one that everyone at ASS knew well. “Can you get me Jefferson?” I called to the cop, and in moments, Jefferson slid in beside me.

“Codename Black,” Jefferson said. With a rubber glove on his hand, he reached up to touch the symbol, the circle that contained a complicated Celtic knot. “It’s engraved into the wood.”

“Ully told me they might be involved,” I said. “That’s why this is such a big case.”

Jefferson made an affirming sound as he continued to examine the symbol. We both knew what it meant if Codename Black was involved. While the name was a gem Ully had made up, the threat from the group was real. My relationship with ASS was complicated – simply a placeholder for me while I sought Codename Black for myself – but as long as I had their inside information, I knew I couldn’t go anywhere else.

From what I had gathered in my years with ASS, I knew that Codename Black was their number one target, a group that we had very little intelligence on. We knew the things they did, and that was all. Even then, we only knew that because they left their symbol everywhere. We didn’t know their name or who worked for them.

No, that was wrong. We now knew someone who worked for them: The pianist.

“Burke.” Smith motioned for me to come out from under the piano, speaking to me as I did so: “I’ve got the latest files from the chief investigator here, the stuff Ully didn’t give us.”

I nodded as I brushed off my backside.

“They really don’t have anything new, other than the symbol, which I see you found.” He flipped through some pages in the notebook he held. “They don’t know what it is, but they’ve been working on a timeline. They say that the pianist, I guess we can call him, came around sunset. The hikers who found the piano were on their way back to their cabin when they found it, and said they were sure it wasn’t here when they came by the first time.”

“Okay.” I checked my watch. “That gives us an hour and a half to get all this stuff out of here. With any luck, we’ll have our pianist tonight.”

In an hour, all the crews, tarps, and markers were cleared away. The only people left in the woods were my team and I. We crouched in the bushes and waited, guns loaded in case we needed them.

I shivered, cursing the New England chill. We didn’t live far away, but it was still warmer there than it was in New Hampshire that night.

Suddenly, there was a crunching sound behind me. I froze and waited for the owner of the noise to pass, so close that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to.

We had had a rule that we would wait until the pianist got to the middle of our circle before we apprehended him. I leapt out of the woods when he headed for the bench, yelling, “Don’t move,” as I pointed my weapon at him. Jefferson, Ferrer, Smith, and Johnson moved in from their respective sides.

The pianist froze as I moved closer. He then bolted, but I caught him and wrestled him to the ground face-first. I handcuffed him, then pulled him to his feet as Jefferson called Ully on the phone – we would be going home right then, and the piano would be shipped to us soon after.