J.M.J.

Again, thank you all so much for reading and for your reviews! I've posted double chapters today, so be sure to read Chapter 20, too! There is a fuller note at the end of this chapter. Enjoy!

Chapter 21

Nancy was ushered into a comfortable room. It was a moderate-sized office in Vancouver which the Network had evidently rented temporarily while they tied up the loose ends of the case. Ned was with the girls back at the hotel where they were staying. Fortunately, the agent in charge of debriefing them didn't mind speaking to them one at a time, as Nancy and Ned didn't want to leave their girls with anyone else under the circumstances.

No one else was in the room when Nancy entered it. She didn't like the vulnerability of being seated when the agent who would be debriefing her entered the room, and so she remained standing, pretending to be interested in a picture hanging on the wall. She never had trusted the Network, and her recent encounter with Calvin Mace, otherwise known as Spencer Hale, had done nothing to relieve her distrust.

Nancy wasn't kept waiting long before someone else entered the room. Nancy quickly turned to look toward the door and saw that it was a woman of about thirty-five. She was wearing a business shirt and a pair of dress pants, her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back in a half ponytail. Like most Network agents Nancy had seen, she was completely ordinary looking, neither pretty nor plain enough to attract attention.

She smiled at Nancy and held out her hand to her. "My name is Katrina Bayley. You're Nancy Nickerson?"

"That's right." Nancy shook the woman's hand.

"I want to make this as comfortable as possible," Katrina explained. "Please sit down."

Still watching the other woman with a slight amount of wariness, Nancy took one of the chairs while Katrina sat in another.

"You can call me Katrina. How would you like me to address you?"

"Nancy is fine."

"All right, Nancy. I know you don't want to be here very badly, but it's important that we know everything that you learned during this investigation. You've told us enough already for us to know that it's very concerning."

"No kidding," Nancy replied dryly.

Katrina was unfazed. "You know how debriefings work. I'd like you to tell me the whole story again from the beginning and I'll ask questions about anything that needs additional clarification. After that, you can ask me anything you like. This is going to take some time, so shall we get started?"

"Okay."

Nancy told everything she knew about the case succinctly and clearly, hoping that Katrina wouldn't insist on hearing unnecessary details. Katrina, however, knew her business well and asked the necessary questions to draw every bit of information Nancy had to offer from her. She was recording everything that was said on a tablet that she had brought with her, but she was also carefully taking notes. This part of the interview lasted more than two hours, and Nancy was tired before it was over.

"We can take a break before you ask your questions," Katrina offered.

Nancy shook her head. "I need to know the answers to my questions. Not everything is quite adding up."

"Of course," Katrina said. "Go ahead."

"Why don't you go ahead and tell the whole story as far as you know it from the beginning?" Nancy replied. "It will save time that way."

"Okay, although I hardly know where to start." Katrina paused for a moment. "Ryan White really did make a bargain with that terrorist organization for them to make an ammo dump on his property. Our agents were already convinced of that much six months ago. Spencer Hale was in charge of the investigation. However, unknown to us, he was working on a side deal of his own. We don't have all the details and we won't until we locate Hale, but a review of Hale's cell phone and other data indicates that he's been working to cover up his own tracks for something. That he was selling information on the Network's investigations into the terrorists is the most likely answer. It's certainly more likely than that he was actually trying to help Ryan White. As I said, we've been onto White for six months and we have more than enough evidence to make our case against him. We've only been holding off in the hope that he could lead us to the terrorists themselves. Hale is certainly devious that he could have been—and probably was—taking White's money without any intention of benefiting him, but as you deduced, he was most likely using White as a useful pawn once things started getting more difficult. You see, it's happened several times now that we were about to make a move against the organization or we were about to get an agent in, and every time, the terrorists were able to change course and throw us off. We realized we had to have someone who was leaking information to them, and in light of everything that's happened, it appears that that person was Hale."

"But you don't know for certain?" Nancy asked.

"We're about as certain as we can be. There's virtually no other explanation for Hale's actions. We think his plan was to implicate another agent before disappearing. You see, Calvin Mace is a real agent. Or he was. He's disappeared, and I doubt very much that we're going to find him alive. Hale's plan, no doubt, was to disappear once he'd completed framing Mace, who would appear to have fled."

"But why would he have involved the Hardys then?" Nancy asked. "As I said, I thought that his plan was to make it look like Fenton had been the one to give out the information, but if he planned on using Mace for that role, what was the point?"

"As you're no doubt aware, Frank and Joe haven't worked with the Network—officially—for three years now, but the same isn't true of Fenton. He's continued working with the Network off and on to this day, although he's always insisted that he wants to only work for us in advisory capacities. With the possibility of an agent selling secrets, Fenton Hardy was consulted in the case. He had enough details that he might have made some progress in identifying the mole. Hale no doubt genuinely did want him out of the way, but he knew that if Fenton disappeared, Frank and Joe would not waste time in investigating. He needed all three of them out of the way, and since he didn't really care what happened to White, he tricked him into helping him. He needed a complicated trail so that it wouldn't lead back to him, which was the reason why they were kept alive and moved several times. You and Ned were meant to find them, and it was supposed to look like it was a disaster for the conspirators. Of course, it was for most of them. White and three of his men have been captured now that we've found the other two who tried to escape, and one of them—Rod—was killed. But it was all according to plan for Hale. In all the mess, he had a chance to escape, and you and Ned would be telling us that it was Mace, while White and the others would be telling us it was Hale. Mace would have disappeared already, and Hale would turn up from Saskatchewan, where he had laid the groundwork to make it look like he had been there the entire time. It would have all worked out perfectly if the Hardys hadn't managed to escape at the last minute and the attempts on Frank's life hadn't knew that between you and them, you would be able to put it together that it really was Hale you had both spoken to. That's probably why he decided to get out. He killed Rod and walked out. That was the shot you heard, and it was the only shot fired in the whole incident."

"Thank goodness for that," Nancy said. "There's one problem with all of that. It still doesn't plug up the one glaring hole in all of this from the very beginning."

"What hole is that?"

"Why did Frank and Joe cooperate with Hale? They didn't want anything to do with the Network, so how did he make them change their minds?"

"You don't know." It wasn't a question, but Nancy had the idea that Katrina had just learned the fact.

"Should I?"

"No. As far as we know, they've never talked to anyone about it. You don't know about that last case they worked for the Network."

"I can imagine. I've had my own run-in with the Network."

"Yes, the trafficking case," Katrina said. "I've seen the file on it. Believe it or not, the Network was very impressed with you."

"I can believe it, especially since you people had the nerve to try to recruit me after that."

"That would have been Arthur Gray's doing. You're exactly the sort who impressed him."

"Impressed? In the past tense?"

"I'm afraid so. Gray was killed in the line of duty a few years before Frank and Joe stopped working for us."

"I am sorry to hear that, but we were talking about why they did stop working for you."

"Yes. Gray was the one who recruited the Hardys, you know. He was also usually their contact when they worked for us, since they were never regular agents. After Gray's death, there was no dedicated agent who only worked with them. In the case in question, Hale was acting as their handler. They were trying to infiltrate a terrorist cell in New Orleans. They had practically succeeded, but there was a young woman whom one of the terrorists like to flirt with and Hale advised them that it would very helpful to see if she would be willing to work with them. It was dangerous to bring in someone untrained into an operation like this, and Frank and Joe knew that. Perhaps Hale pressured them. He might have even promised some safeguards that he didn't deliver on. However, they should have known that the most likely scenario was that the girl would fail as an undercover agent. That's what did happen. She was found out, and she compromised the Hardys' covers, too. We offered to help them pull out, but Frank and Joe turned us down. They thought they could still complete the mission, apparently. If they'd accepted the offer, that girl wouldn't have been killed. You see, the terrorists weren't completely convinced that Frank and Joe were really plants, and so they tried to test their loyalty by having one of them kill the girl. They didn't, of course, and that's when it all fell apart."

"Okay," Nancy said. "You were able to pull them out then, weren't you?"

"Naturally. And it didn't even turn out that the mission was a complete failure then. We weren't able to get our suspects on the terrorism charges, but we did get them for murder. It did cost us the Hardys, though. They weren't very happy that we couldn't get the girl out, even if they hadn't helped us at all there. What they were even more unhappy about, however, was that they were under the impression—mistaken, I assure you—that all of this was really the result that the Network wanted, that we had intentionally set the girl up to be killed so that we could have something to charge our suspects with. They even thought we might have blown her cover intentionally to make sure it happened."

Nancy had folded her arms early in this speech. "They wouldn't think that without good reason."

"Reason has very little to do with how they felt about the case," Katrina replied. "It's completely against how the Network operates to engage in a plan like that. I doubt even Spencer Hale would have tried to tell them otherwise. There would have been no point, and he would have been found out. But we've respected their wishes in this regard. We haven't asked them again to work with us. We have watched them, of course, and we've noticed that they've not wanted their part in that mission to be revealed. I suspect that Hale might have threatened to release the details if they didn't help him."

"You mean he blackmailed them."

"Yes."

Nancy shook her head. "I can't believe that. You don't know any of it for certain."

"No, but we're going to find out."

"So am I," Nancy said in determination.

Katrina smiled slightly. "I have no doubt you can, but are you sure you should?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"You've seen something of the sort of darkness we work in," Katrina said. "We work in that every day. It seeps into you, even if you're careful. You start to see the shadows more than the light, and it starts to tear you apart. It's a necessary job, but not everyone needs to do it. In fact, it's almost more necessary to have people who aren't doing this sort of thing. It wouldn't be worth doing this if everyone had to be caught up in this darkness. My advice to you is to go back to River Heights with your husband and your daughters. They've just been through a traumatic experience. They need you there and they need things to be normal. I know you think that if you join in the search for Hale, you'll be helping to keep the darkness away from them, but you won't. You'll be bringing it closer. You might catch Hale, but even if you hadn't, we would have, or he'd get himself killed. But there will be more like him. There always will be. You can't stop them all, not if you spend your whole life tracking them down. But you can keep this darkness away from your daughters. You can teach them that there is light in the midst of the darkness. Someone needs to, and no one else will. But there are dozens of people who can find Hale. You can make your choice."

Nancy paused thoughtfully. "I understand what you're saying, but I want to help."

"You would be. Those terrorists that Hale sold out to don't hate us so much. Oh, sure, we get in the way of their plans and cause them a lot of inconveniences, but they'd like nothing better than to see everyone either join us or join them. It's the people out there living ordinary lives, free and unafraid, that they hate most of all. That's why they throw bombs or carry out shootings in train stations and theaters and schools, because that's where those ordinary people are. If you don't want Hale to win, the best thing you could do is to forget about him entirely."

Nancy stared at the woman questioningly, but then she finally said, "I'll think about it."

NDNDNDNDND

It was late when Nancy finally returned to the hotel had two beds, and Katie and Audrey were asleep in one of them when Nancy arrived. Ned was still sitting up. He had been reading, but when he heard Nancy's keycard in the door, he had tensed and set the book aside. When he saw that it was his wife, he got up and went to meet her, putting his arms around her as she closed the door behind her.

"I was starting to get worried until you texted," he said quietly, trying not to disturb the girls.

"It went longer than I thought it would," Nancy said, "but I learned more than I expected, if I can trust the agent I was talking to. Oh, she said that since it's so late, she could debrief you tomorrow."

"Can't wait," Ned replied dryly.

Nancy chuckled. "Are the girls okay?" she asked, becoming more serious again.

"Yeah, they weren't worried. Not even Katie."

Nancy sighed in relief. "That's good. After everything that's happened, I wasn't sure how they were going to react."

"I think they'll be okay," Ned replied. "We'll do what we can to help them. I don't suppose they've found where that Spencer Hale or Calvin Mace or whatever his name is went?"

"Hale." Nancy shook her head. "They caught the rest of them, but not him."

"I wouldn't mind getting my hands on him myself," Ned commented grimly.

"I know. So would I. But it seems the Network doesn't want us to." Nancy paused as she glanced at her sleeping daughter. "Maybe she had a point."

"What do you mean?"

Nancy repeated the advice that Katrina had given her. "She is right that the girls need us."

"I don't like the idea of that Hale guy still being out there."

"Neither do I. But I like the idea of leaving the girls again even less. What if he tries to get at us through them again?"

"True." Ned smiled wryly. "I doubt we could get Dave and Bess to babysit for us again any time soon."

"That isn't very funny, you know."

"No, I didn't mean it to be. It's true, after all."

"Yeah." Nancy wrapped her arms around her husband again and leaned her head on his chest. "Ned, let's just go home."

And so that is the end of this story, but not the ending that I had planned. That ending kept getting longer and taking on its own storyline until I realized that it really wanted to be its own story, the sequel to this one. I hope you'll read it when I begin posting it, hopefully later this summer or early in the fall. I need some more time to work on it.

Of course, neither this story nor the sequel would exist if it weren't for all of you. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my stories. I know that your time is valuable, and so it is a great compliment when you choose to spend it reading my stories, and I want to thank all of you who have done so. I also want to thank still more those of you who left reviews throughout the story: Candylou, caseykam, Drumboy100, ErinJordan, MargaretA66, & an anonymous Guest or two. I know that it isn't always easy to write reviews and it certainly takes even more of your time, but as an author, I can assure you that it is the single most encouraging thing you can do for us authors. So once again, thank you so much!

Until we meet again, may God bless you!

~Elizabeth K. Joan