Out and Beyond

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Nine weeks earlier…

Cameron A. Andrews, ex-police detective s***h ex-convict, walked out of the government office building and headed for the coffee shop on the next corner. It was a beautiful early summer day, but after the meeting she’d been to, it seemed cold and drab. Even knowing that Michael was waiting for her didn’t improve her mood.

At times like this, she rethought the whole plan again and again. Why had she ever let herself get into something like this? Alright, the first part had seemed logical, but she hadn’t even considered this part. Of course, if she hadn’t volunteered to continue, this part would never have happened.

She sighed. But she had volunteered…both times, so there was no one else to blame. She swept her hand quickly through her short dark hair; it was a habit she didn’t even realize she had.

She walked into the coffee shop and scanned the room. There was a table of four young adults, probably college students, and another of three businessmen in suits intent on a very serious discussion, their voices low. One of the men was being very expressive with his arm gestures. There were several booths with two or three occupants of varying sizes, ages, and colors, and in the very far corner, there was a beautiful blond with long flowing hair, reading a magazine, a large coffee cup on the table in front of her. As Cam watched, the blonde’s hand reached out and took the cup behind the magazine to take a sip. Cam strolled over to her, planted a quick kiss on her cheek, and slid into the bench across from her.

“Cherie!” the blond exclaimed, her French Canadian accent deep and thick. “How did it go?”

Cam had been to her first meeting with her parole supervisor.

Cam chuckled and tossed a set of papers stapled together onto the table.

“Rules! She spent the first ten minutes reminding me what I can and cannot do, who I could meet with, and who I cannot. Then she made me make a list of all the people I expected to come in contact with.” Cam leaned back in the chair and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but she’s probably going to do background checks on all of you. I was tempted to tell her who I really was.”

“You didn’t, did you?” Michael was concerned.

“Nah,” Cam sighed. “I couldn’t do that without Maggie’s or Dickey’s okay. I had to take drug tests, too, blood, urine, and hair. I’m glad I only have to report to her once a month for the next two years.”

Michael let out a concerned breath. “I could not be in your shoes. I admire your stamina and fortitude.”

“Well, this is what we decided to do and it’s what I’m being paid for.”

Michael shook her head. “It is more than that. I have always admired what you are doing. Maybe my ego is too large, but I could not ruin my reputation like you did. I am too vain and enjoy it when people admire my work.”

Cameron had volunteered to commit a crime and be sent to prison to solve a case the DEA hadn’t been able to crack, even after two years. Now, in order to keep the cover she’d worked so hard to build, she’d volunteered to remain undercover for a while at least. The drawback was that she was now on parole.

Cam put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. She bumped her chin with her fists. “I have to keep reminding myself that what I’m doing is more important than what other people think of me, but it’s hard to keep up your self-esteem when people who used to be friends look at you with disgust and you have to deal with people like that parole supervisor. She treated me like a f**k-up.”

“She probably has to. A lot of people in your position really are f**k-ups or they would not be in a situation like yours.” Michael looked across the table at Cam’s posture. Her shoulders drooped and there was a scowl on her face. “Let me get you something to drink. Latte? Cappuccino? Mocha?”

Cam looked up, her lips clenched in thought. “A macchiato. Something very strong. I think I deserve a good treat after that meeting. When we get back home I’m headed for the scotch bottle.”

“Are you allowed to drink on your parole rules?”

Cam scowled. “Outside, no, I’m not supposed to get drunk. But,” she stopped, a determined look on her face, “in the privacy of my own home, I’ll do whatever the hell I want. After all, this is all a charade anyway.”

Michael smiled as she stood up, patted Cam’s shoulder, and walked to the front counter to place their orders.

Cam sat back in her chair. She was always amazed when Michael stood up. You’d think she’d be used to it by now. Michael was just short of six feet tall. She drew herself up to the full extent of her height and the force in her posture was very imposing. She took advantage of her space unlike some women that tall who tried to minimize it.

Cam had thought serving time in prison would be the hard part of her life, but after meeting with Vicky Forrester, her parole supervisor, decided that being on parole would be harder. At least in prison everything was laid out for you. Meal-times, work schedules, free-time programs, and lonely night hours were all arranged. You could be nice and friendly or tough and surly, depending on your own mood. No one ever questioned that. If they felt they could approach you, they would; if not, they’d find a way around you.

The COs would hassle you from time to time, but for the most part, if you didn’t cause trouble, they’d let you be. In fact, if you were nice to them, they’d help you if you needed something, like that short, Hispanic CO that looked the other way so Cam could have a little tryst with her next-door neighbor.

Cam chuckled. COs: Corrections Officers. Thought they were too important to be called guards. When they weren’t around, some of the inmates called them something even more derogatory.

Being in prison hadn’t proved to be as bad as she’d been prepared for. You had to be where you were told to be when you were told to be there. It was black or white, no grey areas. She’d gotten into a few altercations but that was expected. She’d been stabbed and had to spend time in the hospital, but that proved to be a Godsend. She wasn’t in the prison when the Feds rushed in and busted the women who were doing the drug trafficking. She would have been right in the middle of that. She wondered where a few of the women that she’d known there were now. They’d been scattered around the country into more secure prisons. No one would say where.

She took a deep breath as she leaned back to stare at the ceiling. Her original sentence had been three years but she’d only been in there ten months…ten long months.

It had all seemed so easy, so right, when they had planned it. Cam had been a decorated Detective Sergeant in the narcotics division of the Baltimore Police Department, but her face was getting to be too well-known, which didn’t bode well for any undercover work she’d do. She’d gone to an old friend in the CIA to see if there might be a job for her there. He had given her his card a few months ago and offered to help her career if she ever needed it. The answer to that question changed her life completely. She became an agent for the DEA; a deep undercover agent, so deep that only a handful of people in the upper echelons of the CIA and DEA knew the real truth.

Her training was done at secret locations. She spent over a month meeting with Dr. Margaret Thomason, a psychiatrist who worked for the agencies. In fact, Dr. Maggie, as most of her friends knew her, became her control so that Cam would have contact with the right people. Maggie and Cam even let people think they were involved in a romantic relationship so it wouldn’t seem strange for Maggie to be visiting her in prison so often. Cam had listed Maggie as her next-of-kin on her records.

That was also how she’d met Michael. Michael, as Michelle Gauchet chose to be known, was hired to hone Cam’s martial arts skills. She was the head M.A. instructor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and was well on her way to expanding her training schools and techniques nationwide across Canada.

Cam’s first assignment was to find out how cocaine was being funneled through a women’s prison. They’d discussed plan after plan until Cam decided, or maybe they had manipulated her into deciding, that the safest way would be for her, as Cameron Andrews, to break the law and be sentenced to a prison term. That way it would be listed in police reports and court records that she was in prison because she was a felon and no one could suspect she was a plant. It would be extremely dangerous if anyone found out she was actually undercover: one agent had been killed, another would spend the rest of her short life staring into space in a mental facility.

Of course, everyone that she knew in Baltimore—friends and fellow police officers—believed she was a convicted felon. She’d even had to lie to her sister about it. Worse still, all of the people she’d worked with now thought it was an embarrassment to be talking to her. She’d have to steer clear of all her old friends.

It had taken a lot of courage and determination to get arrested. It had been in the back alley behind a bar she’d visited three times in two weeks. She’d met four young people and had treated them to free cocaine and sold them a few grams. She knew that she was being watched by Internal Affairs and that that night she’d be arrested. That night there were five young people there. The new kid looked like a rookie. Probably knew I’d recognize anybody else in the department.