Washington, D.C. has some beautiful old office buildings, many with marble facades and impressive frescoes adorning their entrances. The office building housing one Jesse Houston, Col. (Lt.), USAF was not one of them. It was old, made of plain red brick and was set in a forest several miles from the expansive historic district known to millions of tourists each year. This is the way the government wanted it. After all, Jesse was up to such top-secret research that his budget, just like the C.I.A.’s budget, did not officially even exist. And now that he and his comrades-in-arms, and the spooks and the Pentagon officials with whom he worked, were just about ready to operationalize their biggest project to date, along comes a most unique bureaucratic roadblock.
Inside Jesse’s office there was a clutter of diagrams, blueprints, prosthetics of the human body – none of which was attached to any part that it should have been attached to – and, to top it off, several scale models of different fighter jets in varying states of disrepair. In one corner was a clear plastic jet canopy, stuffed full with a half-furled parachute.
Photos in the room showed Jesse with a number of government bigwigs and military friends. But the only one beautifully framed sat alone on his desk. It was a photo showing Jesse in his full-dress uniform with his arm around Dewitt, who was sitting smiling in his wheelchair. They were next to a beautiful baby grand piano and Dewitt was playfully tinkling the keyboard.
At the moment Jesse is holding up a large map while talking on the telephone.
“Carl. Carl! I’m telling you, we have to keep those rights to fly over their land... No, nobody knows what we’re really up to, just that we are doing something out there... Well, Carl, they’ve always let us... ”
Jesse’s face expresses his exasperation.
“... So it was before they could have casinos! So what! This ‘BS’ about their sacred burial ground is just some smokescreen to stick yet another very profitable tee-pee village, full of one-armed bandits, straight up the ass of the American touring public!... Okay. Get back to me.”
Jesse hangs up. Shaking his head he contemplates then twirls in his chair and looks out over the trees, above which he can see the very tip of the Washington Monument in the distance. Jesse uses his intercom.
“Susan, get me someone over at Interior. Department of Indian Affairs. It seems some of the natives are restless near our test site. I’m sure they’re about to invoke the name of that famous American, or in this case, Native American, Chief ‘Big Bucks.’ Oh, and Susan, get hold of ‘Traveler’ at Langley. He and I and Carl may be about to embark on a little road trip.”
Jesse pulls away from the intercom and leans back. He picks up a few pieces of paper and looks them over. He crumples them up and tosses them into the trash can.
“Eh,” he thinks out loud, “at least they’re probably not very well connected.”