Chapter Four
December 11
th
, 2020
Brunch had been about as tense as Andy had anticipated it would be, with many of his partners voicing concerns about bringing Melody Park into the family, but in the end, Piper laid them all quickly to rest by pointing out that if
she
could give the woman a second chance, then all the rest of them should be able to as well. That had pretty much settled the argument, although he could see that some of his partners were certainly going to be less trusting than others.
It certainly changed the energy around the house, which was already tempered with nervous anticipation, as towards the end of brunch a text message had come in to let them know that the plane had landed at Livermore Municipal Airport. The Air Force were there doing their initial screening, but relayed that Andy should be able to come by and both meet Mali and see his airplane by around 2.
After brunch, Andy headed up to the hidden room on the upper floor and stepped out onto the balcony to make a call. He held the phone to his ear as the General's voice leapt from the other end of the line. "So, Mister Rook, what's it going to be?"
"After talking with my entire Team, we'll accept Melody Park into our home, although we're going to have some conditions for her and we're certainly going to keep a close eye on her at first."
"We would expect no less from you, Mister Rook," she said curtly. "To be frank, I'm a little surprised you're willing to even entertain the notion, considering what you told me about her history with your fiancée, Miss Brown. Piper got a real bad beat before she ended up with you, and if she were to say she held a grudge a mile wide, well, I don't think just about anyone could blame her."
"I let Piper make the final call, but she's big on second chances and so am I. We're going to be cautious about this, naturally, but I guess somebody's gotta take some risks, and if my buddy Phil's taking Dr. DeMarco, I guess I'd never be able to live it down with him if I didn't do something equally as stupid."
"We can have Ms. Park here on base and ready for reassignment as early as this afternoon."
"We won't be ready until this evening," Andy said. "I've got to go down to Livermore and pick up my new money manager and get her imprinted to me. It's about half an hour each way, and I understand we can't go get her until your people have cleared my plane."
"It's not so much the plane, Mister Rook, as it is all the people your finance manager brought with her," the General sighed, as if the entire thing was one giant pain in her ass that she would've much rather foisted off onto someone else. "You're probably aware, but she's carrying with her one of the wildest collections of spies, soldiers, diplomats, scientists and politicians than have ever shared a single privately owned aircraft before. And she struck you quite a great deal on acquiring the plane for you permanently, if I'm meant to believe what she charged for transporting all these people to the United States."
It was true, although Andy hadn't expected the General to be fully aware of how they'd gone about it. Mali had bought him a Bombardier Global 5000, which could hold 16 passengers in addition to the pilot and co-pilot. And then, in order to aide in her immigration to the United States, a deal had been struck with the United States government. The plane had been temporarily enlisted as sort of international one-way taxi service. That meant the plane, which had been purchased used from the estate of a Saudi businessman, had made nearly a dozen stops before finally arriving in California. It had picked up, in addition to Mali, passengers from Egypt, Israel, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, India and Japan, with each person (or the nation representing them) paying a million dollars for the private relay service. All of that had basically paid for the plane itself.
The pilot for the flight was a military exchange from Saudi Arabia who was being paired up with a man in Valhalla Shores and the co-pilot was from the UK who was bound for Sacramento. Neither would likely ever set foot on Andy's plane again. Both Alexis and Niko were qualified to fly the jetliner, and several other girls in the house had been taking virtual flying classes. Team Rook had decided if it wasn't a skill they had in-house, they were going to get a handful of people within the Team to learn it, although Andy himself wasn't ever going to be allowed to fly the plane.
"Your people had a long list of folks they wanted brought to the US on the hush-hush, and with me having two internationally renowned actresses in my family, I knew I was going to need to be able to get around regularly and probably without having to constantly book flights. Seemed like getting my own plane was a win-win for everybody."
"You still charged them a pretty hefty ticket price, Mister Rook."
"I had to
buy
the fucking plane, General," Andy laughed. "That ain't cheap. Regardless of how much money you might
think
I have, let me assure you that a 16-person private jet is not what I could call 'pocket money.' It was a very sizable investment, so I appreciated Mali coming up with a plan to defray the costs."
"But your little United Nations of Spies flight still needs to be scrutinized by every security expert we have on site and a handful of others we brought in just for this occasion. That includes searching your plane practically down to the studs. You don't
know
any of these people that you've helped bring into this country, Mister Rook, and neither do we. Not as well as we'd like to, anyway. They'll have spent hours, maybe even days on that plane of yours as it travelled around, picking these merry pranksters up. So, we're going to take our time and make sure everyone on the plane is exactly who they say they are, and then and only then, we will turn it and Miss Merrick over to you."
"And once you do, and once she's imprinted onto me, then we'll bring her back to the house and then come onto the base and we can see about reimprinting Melody over to us."
The General paused for a second, as if an idea had just occurred to her. "Would you rather we bring Miss Merrick back to the base and you can save yourself a trip, imprint them both here?"
"We paid several million dollars for that plane, General. I'd kind of like to see it, you know?"
"I'm just saying, if you allow us to have a full day searching and examining it, it'll be better for all parties involved," the General replied. "And it'll let us give Miss Merrick a once over by people you know that you trust, like Dr. Marcos and Dr. Varma. I'm honestly trying to help you here, Mister Rook. Trying to help make both our lives a little bit easier."
"I might feel a little strange going straight from imprinting Mali to imprinting Melody."
He could hear the General laughing on the other side of the line. "I think Melody might have it coming, but you could also take a shower in between sessions here on the base. We have the facilities for it, and you're guaranteed to have medical staff if something goes wrong, which you'd have been half an hour away from if you did it at the airport."
"Why would something go wrong?" Andy asked.
"So far, you've been pretty lucky, Mister Rook. Nearly all of your imprintings have gone off without much in the way of hitches or complications."
"I think Piper and Sheridan would very much disagree with you, but okay."
"You seen a cocoon yet?"
Andy chuckled. "Yeah, Alexis had that when she showed up. Healed off all her scars, and she couldn't decide if she was angry, delighted or both."
"I can imagine. Some of us treasure our scars and don't want to see them gone. But I suspect she's missing them less and less every day," the General said. "If I'd gotten my gunshot scar through my shoulder healed up when I'd gotten imprinted, I'd probably miss it at first, but I'd be damn thankful eventually that I was back up to full strength."
"It's only been a month and change. We'll see how she feels about it this time next year. I suspect she may be nothing but thankful by then."
"Well, as fun as it is to chat with you, Mister Rook, I should probably get back to work. You want me to have Miss Merrick brought here to the base? I think it'll be much easier if you just give us a day or two to fully examine the plane. You're not in any immediate need, are you?"
"Not
immediate
need, no, but I suspect I'm going to need it before the end of the month. Not only do Emily and Sarah have some meetings they want to take down in Los Angeles, I think Maya needs to head there as well for some final sign off stuff to get her deal finalized. The plan was to have her working on a soundstage in Oakland, but it sounds like the location isn't quite ready yet, so their backup soundstage is going to be up in Sacramento. It'll be a bit of a drive every morning and evening, but she wants to get back to work, and I don't blame her. The studio is also pushing hard to get stuff into production, so the fact that Maya has a script everybody likes already means they don't want to waste
any
time they don't have to."
"Is Hollywood really in that much trouble, Mister Rook?"
Andy sighed, knowing the General couldn't see him shrugging. "It's not for me to say, but I know Emily seems to think they don't like to keep material waiting around too long, and we've been in a vacuum for basically a year now, where nobody could make new things. For theatrical films, that's not such a big issue, but for things like television? The networks are
freaking the fuck out
. So I suspect Em and Sarah will probably pick up a handful of television projects that'll start filming almost immediately before we get back to feature films again next year. Aren't you jonesing for new television?"
"I will admit that after my third rewatch, 'The Americans' has lost a little bit of the luster. I feel like a lot of us feel like we've finished Netflix."
"Well, you'll be delighted to know that Hollywood's spinning up again and so sooner or later, there will be loads of new things clogging our airwaves again. They're working very hard to get whatever they can finished as fast as possible. They're even looking to adapt a couple of my lesser works, just because I'm relatively easy to work with when it comes to the non-Druid Gunslinger stuff. Fine, we can come into the base and pick them both up there, and if you need a few more days to inspect the plane more thoroughly, I guess it won't hurt to let you have it for a few days."
"Great," the General said. "Come by in the early afternoon and we'll have both women prepped and ready and waiting for you. Say, around two or so?"
"Sure, I can do that. We'll be by around then."
"Thanks, Rook. See you then."
He headed back down the stairs and opened the secret book case, almost jumping out of his own skin as he found Alexis standing outside of it waiting for him. "So what's the plan for the day, Andy?" she asked him. "The General throw a spanner into the works like I expected her to?"
