The lights went out. Tiny, red LED’s were the only source of light in the corridor; they indicated that the cameras, mounted on the ceiling every twenty feet or so, were still recording. In the darkness, Jim was forced to rely on his other senses. He dropped into a crouch at the intersection of two corridors and waited for his eyes to adjust. The metal was cold under his bare feet, and the faintest hint of a vibration told Jim that something, somewhere was moving. The only noises were the sound of the water dripping from his skin and Jim’s own breathing as he recovered from the last ten minutes of running.

The place was a maze of intersections and hallways that doubled back on themselves and suddenly ended, forcing Jim to retrace his steps and waste valuable time. There was no readily apparent logic to the setup, but Jim had been here before--many times before—and he had developed a sixth sense for finding his way through the twisted, changing passageways.

As his breathing returned to normal and his eyes adjusted, Jim caught the scent of a distant cigar; one dark eyebrow arched in interest at the scent, and a bemused smile played at the corners of Jim’s mouth. He rose into a sprinter’s ready pose at one corner of the intersection where he had stopped. The cigar smoke was coming to him from the corridor to his left. He did some quick calculations, but the satisfaction he felt from the results would not even have been noticeable had there been enough light to see his face.

He waited.

The cool, shifting air raised gooseflesh on his arms and chest.

He didn’t move.

He barely breathed.

Come on, he thought, I’m wasting time here. Let’s move. The scaffolding leading up to the maze had taken him far too long to navigate.

A low rumble joined the sound of dripping water and Jim dove to the right, rolling, closing his eyes and turning his head away. The Flamer shot into the middle of the intersection, a foot from Jim’s resting spot, and the corridor was filled with blinding light as a twenty-foot jet of fire scorched the opposite hall. 5,6,7,8… Jim counted silently, then launched himself directly over the machine. As he passed over it, he flicked a switch conveniently set on its exterior, and the fires went out.

Jim’s hands hit the heated floor, then his feet; he did a forward tuck, a cartwheel, a forward roll and halted in another low crouch, ten feet past the stretch of floor that had been scorched by the Flamer.

Fortunately, the ceilings here were pretty high.

A light flashed on, blinding Jim, but the vibration of the blade was in the soles of his feet, so he knew to jump again as six feet of razor sharp steel swept through the corridor at ankle height. Another sound brought Jim flat on his stomach as a second blade swept the corridor at chest level. The third blade, the one that came up from the floor and sped down the corridor vertically, almost got him, but he was able to roll to one side fast enough that all he felt was the rush of movement at it whizzed past.

And he was on his feet and running. As he ran, he kept his breathing regular. He kept his heart rate slow. He was relaxed and ready for anything, every muscle in his lean body coiled and ready to spring into action. The corridor turned and turned again. It ended. A door slid out of the way as he approached it.

Jim threw himself against the wall to the right of the doorway.

A flash of green light would have cut him in half had he still been in the middle of the corridor. As the door started to slide closed, Jim was through it and his keen eyes picked out the rungs of a ladder stuck into the wall to his right. Far and away, the sound of metal gears grinding against one another told him that "up" was his only choice. As he started climbing, the sound of rushing water distracted him only long enough that he didn’t notice until it was too late that one rung of the ladder was thinner than the rest. When he pulled on it, it came cleanly away from the wall, and the force of the movement caused Jim to lose his balance. With a muttered curse, he fell backwards and landed on his swimming trunks.

Which is when his world shifted into slow motion.

From his seated position, Jim looked to his right and saw the wall of water hurtling itself down the corridor towards him. With one movement, and another muttered curse, he pulled his feet under him and jumped as high as his adrenaline soaked muscles would carry him. He grabbed the rung above the one that had given out and scrabbled up the ladder as quickly as he could, his eyes constantly on the rung just ahead and never wasting the time it would take to see how quickly the water was closing in. A second misstep and he was dead. You could recover from one mistake. Not from two.

He could only pray that nothing decided to hurl itself down the narrow shaft onto his head.

At the top, Jim could see, the shaft simply ended, but there was a side vent that obviously went somewhere. Hopefully, Jim thought, somewhere with more oxygen than water. With the top of the shaft in sight, Jim felt water splashing his feet. With five feet to go, the water was up to his waist and its force was lifting him. By the time he reached the top of the shaft, the column of water had engulfed him, and, as he threw himself into the side vent, the force of the water pushed him forward out of control.

He held his breath and forced himself to keep still. Thrashing around in a panic would only create turbulence, he knew, and he’d end up with a concussion or, even more likely, dead, so he let the force of the water carry him. Only when his lungs were close to bursting did he begin to wonder if there might have been a side vent he was supposed to notice somehow. But before he could start to worry about it, the shaftd up, and he felt himself falling throughspace.

Thank God, he thought as he fell, now I can breathe.

A cat, when dropped from almost any height, will reorient itself so it lands on its feet. Jim, as he fell from what he safely assumed was a height of at least one hundred feet, reoriented himself so he was face to the Earth, arms stretched and pointed below him. When he hit the surface of the pool, he immediately tucked into a summersault… just in case the pool wasn’t as deep as he would like it to be.
When he broke the surface at the edge of the pool, Jim was greeted by the twin sounds of laughter and applause…. which told him he hadn’t beaten Steele’s time. The sounds echoed eerily against the tile walls of the chamber, and the underwater lights flashed in erratic spiderwebs across the ceiling. Jim grabbed the edge of the pool with one hand and stopped to catch his breath. He was getting bored with the obstacle course.

Jim had started his day with the course almost every morning for over two years. The mazes, climbing walls, scaffolding and water hazards were meant to keep his mind fine-tuned as much as it strengthened and toned his already muscular body. Anyone who wasn’t already in tremendous condition could easily end up seriously injured or dead, but Jim knew it too well for there to be any real danger anymore, even though the course shifted and changed every time he ran it.

Steele stood above him, arms folded across the dragon tattooed on his chest; he had a smirk on his lips and a blue towel draped casually over one shoulder. He wore the black martial arts pants he usually wore around the gym. As usual, he was barefoot. When Jim hoisted himself out of the pool, Steele tossed him the towel. "You’re slipping, Jim," his friend and competitor told him. "You haven’t had a time that bad in months." The smirk grew into a full grin. "Hah! Slipping!" He slapped Jim’s shoulder with his prosthetic hand. The shiny metal was cold and hard, but Steele had long ago learned to modify the strength of his touch. He’d had the prosthetic as long as Jim had known him and could use it better than most people could use the hands with which they were born.

Back then, Jim had been the one with all the winning times. He toweled his hair—dark brown and crew cut--and smiled at the thought of the rivalry he and Steele had shared. They met at the Olympic tryouts when Jim was only seventeen. Steele had been twenty-two, and nearing the end of his career. The car accident that had taken his right hand had left his whole arm weakened. No one even expected him to make the team. He made it…. but Jim consistently beat his times. Jim won gold. Steele won silver. What started out as a bitter rivalry eventually grew into a strong friendship based on respect, competition and a good dose of humor.
More than fifteen years later, they were still friends and still rivals.

"You held up the Flamer," Jim protested, rubbing down his legs. "And what was the deal with the scaffolding?"

But Steele didn’t take the bait. He just folded his arms again and resumed smirking. He also nodded his head in the direction of the small office visible from the pool through a plate glass window. "As much as I’d love to stand here and listen to you weasel your way out of that pathetic performance, you have a call on line seven."

"Anyone important?" Jim asked, hoping the caller was someone relaying an assignment. Things had been way too quiet for Jim recently. He was a man who loved his work. He dropped the towel around his shoulders, rubbed Steele’s shiny, shaved head and padded off towards the office.

"One of your old "J" buddies," Steele told him. He was trying to sound off-hand, but a little bit of a different kind of rivalry slipped into his voice. Steele didn’t really get along with Jim’s other friends, the friends Jim had known even longer than he had known Steele, the friends who were not in the same line of "business" as Jim, Steele and their other associates. Jim wondered whether the "J" on the phone was Josh, Jack or Jeff. Probably Jack. Jack had been with them at the Olympics. He and Jim had become great friends the first time they met at the American Swim Team tryouts and had roomed together for almost a year as the team trained. Entered in different Olympic events, they had never been rivals. The story between Jack and Steele was very different and much less friendly. Fifteen years later, there was still some animosity between the two men.

"We need to do something about the course," Jim declared, sending his thoughts in a different direction as he stepped into the office.

"Yeah?" Steele asked, taking the dialogue as an invitation to follow.

Jim started typing commands into the computer on the cluttered desk, and three large video monitors, set into the wall opposite the desk, crackled to life and glowed blue. Steele settled himself onto one corner of the desk, his back to the monitors, facing Jim. "We know it too well," Jim muttered as he patched the computer into the phone line. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Steele’s upraised eyebrow and self-satisfied smirk, which Jim knew well enough to read as, With a time like that, you think you know the course too well? Jim smiled. "It’s fine for fun and games, but we’re supposed to be practicing for life-threatening…"

His words broke off as one of the wall monitors brought up the face of his friend Jack. "Hey, Buddy," Jack said brightly, and noticed Jim’s wet hair and the towel around his shoulders. "Good to see you’re hard at work!" he joked.

Jim laughed. "C’mon Jack, I’m already putting up with Doc Steele’s crap today. I need sarcasm from you, too?"

Jack shrugged, and his eyes were guarded. "Sorry, Jim. It’s been a weird day at the office this morning." Which is when Jim noticed that Jack was in uniform. He worked for the police over in Denver and only called Jim from the "office" if it was a professional matter. "Is this a secure line?" he asked.

And Jim was instantly all business. Steele noticed the shift. His shoulders pulled back a little and he squared his weight between his feet. He pulled the towel just an inch or two across his chest, as if he were mildly uncomfortable about taking a business call in his swim trunks. Steele smiled and let his gaze wander past his friend and through the plate glass window that looked out over the giant swimming pool. The lights played erratic games across the tile.

"Line’s fine," Jim told his friend.

"Are you alone?" Jack asked, and Jim began to worry. There was something very strange about the way he asked the question… almost as if he suspected that someone off-screen might be holding a gun on Jim.

"Doc’s here," Jim said flatly. He was reading every nuance in the expression on Jack’s dark face. If this were a purely professional call, Steele’s presence should be perfectly acceptable.

There was the tiniest of pauses, which Jim knew was only the result of the mistrust between Steele and Jack, who nodded, but was not thrilled with the other man’s presence. Jim wondered what was going on. "I have a video feed set up for you," Jack said, and his face turned away briefly as he entered commands into his computer. Jim’s fingers played over the keyboard of his own computer, and an image came up on a second monitor.

The camera was obviously behind a one-way mirror looking into some sort of holding or interrogation room... actually, Jim recognized it as one of the rooms the Denver police used to question witnesses. The door wasn’t as secure as the holding rooms for alleged criminals. On one side of a table sat a young, attractive woman, about thirty, Asian/Caucasian, long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, faded jeans and sandals, red flannel shirt.

"Chinese?" Jim asked quietly.

Steele nodded. "Half." His own mother was Hawaiian Chinese. "Granola," Steele added, referring to the woman’s typical Colorado environmentalist appearance.

The woman’s face was drawn and upset. A deputy Jim recognized stood facing her across the table. His name was Robby… or Rodney… something like that. He was facing her and asking her questions. She didn’t look up at him as she answered. Her eyes stayed glued to the table. Jim knew the deputy was still pretty green but was always extremely kind to the witnesses. The woman’s reticence wasn’t due to badgering by the deputy.

"You know this woman?" Jack asked after giving Jim a couple of minutes to examine the video.

"Don’t think so… is she famous?" He caught Steele’s chuckle. If the woman was in TV or movies, she could be the most famous woman on Earth and Jim wouldn’t have heard of her. He didn’t have a lot of time for pop culture. Jim noticed that Jack had not shared Steele’s amusement. He was shaking his head.

"She came in to report a missing person," Jack explained, and there was still that unreadable discomfort in his face. "Actually, it was a report I came across this morning when I came in. She was in Phoenix at the time. I had her flown in." Jim didn’t let his surprise register on his face, but he knew that Jack would see it anyway. "You’ll understand why the urgency in a minute," Jack said. "Tell me what you think of her, first." Jim nodded. His friend wanted Jim’s unbiased opinion before he knew anything about her. It meant Jack thought she was a fraud of some kind. Something about the situation had him questioning his own detachment and judgement.

Jim glanced at Steel, who had turned to look at the monitors over one shoulder. His eyes were locked on the woman’s face. Jim could tell that the good Doctor already had his own ideas. "She’s a pro," Steele said on cue.

"What’s that?" Jack said, startled by the off camera comment. "A pro?"

Steele hopped off the edge of the desk and stood behind Jim, looking over one of Jim’s shoulders so the camera could pick him up. He draped his other arm over Jim’s other shoulder. Jim let him have his say. He and Jack both knew that this sort of thing was Steele’s specialty. "Hey Jack," Steele said affably.

"Hey Doc," Jack returned. "What kind of pro?"

"Same as you and me and Jim," Steele explained, and it was obvious that Jack had not anticipated that suggestion. "Can you take it back to the moment she was brought into the room?"

"Just a second," Jack said, and looked away again as he worked the keyboard. As much as he didn’t like Steele, Jack had no reservations about the man’s ability to do his job.

"What gave it away?" Jim asked. He’d come to the same conclusion, but with Jim it was an instinct. Steele would have a logical explanation.

"She knows she’s being watched and it doesn’t bother her," he explained. He pointed at the image on the screen. "See? There’s no change in her expression when Junior there turns his back to her. Normal people relax when a cop isn’t looking at them."

Jim was impressed.

"Here we go," Jack said, and the video image flickered and the room they were watching was suddenly empty.

"You watching, too, Jack?" Steele asked.

"Yeah. You need audio?"

"Nah."

Jim was vaguely amused by Steele’s desire to impress.

The woman in the video entered the room and waited for the deputy to direct her to her chair. Her movements were slow and relaxed, but very conscious. She sat at the table with her hands folded in her lap and looked up at the deputy as he spoke to her and then left the room, leaving her alone. When the door closed, her eyes simply drifted to the table to wait.

"Hah!" Steele exclaimed, satisfied, and Jim nodded in agreement. "Freeze that!"

"What?" Jack asked, and his hand shot forward, freezing the image. "What did I miss? Isn’t the eyes downcast thing just a Chinese mannerism?"

Jim watched the still picture of the woman staring down at the table in front of her. There was something disturbingly familiar about her. "She never looked at the mirror," Jim explained quietly.

"What?"

"Nobody walks into a room with a mirror that large in it without checking their reflection," Jim said. "Especially when they’re left alone in it like that. She knows she’s being watched and doesn’t want your people behind the glass to realize it."

"Bingo," Steele confirmed. "My thoughts exactly." Steele chuckled. "You buy into a lot of stereotypes for a Black man," he added, making Jim wince.

Jack pointedly ignored the comment. "So she’s what, military, police, FBI...?"

"I’d guess FBI," Jim ventured.

"Unless….." Steele muttered, leaning closer, really getting into the puzzle, now. His eyes narrowed.

"Unless what?" Jim asked.

"Unless she wants us to know she’s in the business, in which case she’d have to be FBI or private. The military doesn’t train its people to act that well."

Jack considered everything they had said. "Okay… this just went from weird right into the Twilight Zone, Jim."

"Why? What do you have on her?"

Jack sighed and started working the keyboard again. "I’m sending you the photo I saw on the wire that got me interested in the first place," he said. While he worked, he continued. "Her name’s Sing Zebadee. She put out a missing person on her husband John yesterday. He went out to the desert to fast, she says…"

"Fast?" Jim interrupted, some gears beginning to fall into place in his head. "Out in the desert?"

"Yeah… fast. He left a week ago and was supposed to be back a couple of days ago."

"You buy her story?"

"No, especially now that you tell me she’s professional. It’s all too damn Biblical."

"Biblical?" Steele interjected, suddenly lost.

"John Zebadee? In the Bible there’s these two brothers, James and John Zebadee…" Jack explained.

"And fasting in the desert happens all over the Bible," Jim added.

"Exactly. It’s too convenient," Jack agreed. "You get that photo of her husband, yet?"

"It’s just coming in, now," Jim told him.

"Remember that this is the photo the woman gave us of her husband. It was taken just last month."

When the photo came up on the screen, Steele cursed under his breath. Jim didn’t understand why, and was about to tell Jack there’d been some mix up and that the wrong photo had been sent, when he suddenly realized that the photo of himself up on the monitor had been taken in front of the Magic Kingdom. Jim hadn’t been there in ten years, but there he was, smiling and waving, wearing a white tank top and blue jeans shorts he had never seen in his life. He muttered the same curse Steel had muttered a second earlier when he realized that John Zebadee, whose wife was some sort of operative and had filed a missing person on him, looked exactly like Jim, so much so that Jim himself had thought his friend had accidentally sent him an old vacation photo. This man, John Zebadee, if that was really his name, looked so much like Jim that he could be Jim.

"Wait a minute," Steele muttered, and Jim already knew what he was going to say. "You said these guys in the Bible were John and James Zebadee, didn’t you."

"That’s one of the reasons it freaks me out, Doc," Jack said. "What do you think, Jim? Is someone trying to get your attention?"

"If so, they have it," Jim muttered. "You can keep her there a few hours with paperwork or something?"

Jack nodded. "I’ll get her some lunch."

Jim nodded. "Can you get me complete files on both of these people?"

"It’s being done as we speak, Buddy," Jack assured him.

"You’re sure this guy even exists, Jack? It could be a hoax."

"We’ll know in about a hour. You flying over?"

"I’m on my way. See you in a few."

"Fly safe."

Jim cut the feed and turned to Steel who had reclaimed his spot on the edge of the desk. "You have anything pressing today?" he asked.

Steele smiled and shrugged. "Nothing I can’t put off… let’s hit the showers and get out of here. I’ll have Whip tell the other guys where we’re going."

Jim nodded and muttered, "Can you have him tell Torpedo I know he was smoking in the maze again?" He turned his gaze to the photo still on the monitor. The man was about the same age as Jim. Same build. Same bone structure. Jim’s practical mind was already rifling through possibilities. Did anyone have that kind of plastic surgery capability? Could it be make up? Could the photo have been doctored? Maybe the guy didn’t even look like this. Maybe he didn’t exist.

He felt Steele’s heavy hand on his shoulder, bringing him out of his trance. "Let’s get going, boss," he said. "You think and I’ll drive."