Mahoganys Dream | Page 2

a nine year-old girl named Mahogany Burrows had a dream
about a small boy standing outside of a redbrick house with the address
1331 in golden numerals. Of all the unusual dreams Mahogany
received, this was the most extraordinary.

This is the story of that dream.
PART ONE

CHAPTER 1
Kirtland Air Force Base Albuquerque, New Mexico 1995
Brian Hassett hated his job. As FBI station officer for the Air Force
Research Laboratory, he was little more than a glorified security guard.
In theory, he was there to prevent the lab's classified weapons research
from falling into the hands of America's enemies. In practice the job
was about as exciting as watching paint dry.
His main duty was making sure the scientists who worked at the Base
returned all the diskettes they checked out of the Data Room.
Even that was a stretch. A cardboard logbook handled the task just fine
without his intervention.
His "office" consisted of a cheap plywood desk and a metal folding
chair in the otherwise empty foyer outside the Data Room. He'd been
told that the AFRL was equipped with a $200 million particle
accelerator and a $72 million deuterium fluoride laser. But for his
workspace, apparently all they could spare was forty-nine bucks.
But he didn't care about that. He had only requested the post so he
could be near the Bernalillo Cancer Center over in Sandia, where his
wife was being treated for acute Lymphoma. At the time, the BCC was
the only medical facility in the country with an intensity modulated
radiotherapy machine. The IMRT was a byproduct of some earlier
military research at Sandia National Laboratory. It was their last hope.
He would've taken a job on the moon to ensure Alison had access to the
experimental treatment. Still, it wasn't exactly where he had expected to

find himself at 28, four years into his FBI career.
The funny thing is that he actually had a license to kill. All station
officers do. On the off chance that some idiotic foreign agents tried to
storm his office and steal his floppy disks, Brian could blow their
brains out with full immunity from prosecution. But where he worked,
that scenario was about as likely as a snowstorm.
It wasn't as if the lab didn't have anything worth stealing. That was the
furthest thing from the truth. The AFRL housed the Pentagon's
Directed Energy Directorate, one the most advanced scientific research
projects in the world. It was just that Brian's office was the least likely
place on the whole Base that such a theft might take place. The Data
Room he mindlessly guarded was also protected by a biometric security
system that scanned the iris and the palm. Any false reading would
cause the system to charge a huge bank of magnets, instantly erasing all
the disks. Anyone who knew of the existence of the Data Room also
knew about the magnets. No spy in his right mind would risk
destroying the data when he could just as easily steal the disks when
they were outside the Data Room.
Either that or recruit someone else to do it for them.
But the pickings were slim for that option. Besides Brian himself, only
three others had access to the Data Room: Dr. Stitz, the lab's research
director; José Arroyo, the technician who backed up the disks; and
Chen Tsang, a mild mannered forty-three year old engineer who was
the research team's designated diskette gopher. Dr. Stitz, who was
unquestionably his own biggest admirer, wouldn't be caught dead doing
something as petty as logging out a diskette when there were Nobel
Prizes to be won. José came by everyday to do his backups, which he
always took offsite for safekeeping. Sometimes he would bring adult
magazines for Brian to drool over while the backup tapes filled. Dr.
Tsang came to the Data Room everyday too, but unfortunately for
Brian, the small man was the least communicative of the three. Brian
figured that was probably due to Tsang's less than fluent English.
With so little interaction with other people, Brian spent most of his

workday reading or staring at the drop ceiling, wondering why the hell
the lab even needed a station officer.
He was doing the latter when a stranger who would change his life
tapped on the glass.
___________
Brian looked up to see a beefy, middle-aged man in a business suit
smiling at him through the glass door. The stranger had thick reddish
brown hair and wore a neatly trimmed beard, giving his face a curious
frame.
The stranger motioned for Brian to come towards the door.
The moment after that was the first time Brian realized that there was
no means to communicate with a person outside the foyer without
opening the door. No