Captain Simon Banks had taken note of the latest comings and goings of his division’s members. Joel Taggart had dropped by, on a break from the academy, to touch base with everyone. Then Connor had shown up, checked her e-mails, then ran out again after informing Rhonda that she had to meet with a CI on the case she was still working with Narcotics. Brown was looking a bit lost, as his partner had requested some lost time to handle getting ready for a wedding, as he updated his reports on the department’s computer. Ellison and Sandburg had finally come back in from their follow up work on the Phelps case and were busy trying to put their notes into some semblance of order. All in all, a very nice, quiet day in Major Crimes. The phone on his desk rang even as the thought raced across his mind. ‘Never should’ve even thought that Q-word.’ He picked up the phone and answered tersely, "Banks."

After listening to the caller for a minute, he slammed the phone down and stepped out of his office. "People! Listen up!" The bullpen descended into silence. "We’ve got a major shooting in the 1200 block of Government Ave. Two down, several wounded, one subject in custody. We’re canvassing. Let’s move!" He had the satisfaction of watching his team move out with hurried, but not frantic, movements. Detectives, plain clothed officers and the uniforms. He caught up with Henri Brown, just as the detective reached the elevators, with Ellison and Sandburg on his heels.

"Brown, go to Cascade General, back up your partner."

"Rafe?" Henri was clearly confused, then a thought occurred to him. "Oh, hell. He’s not hurt is he?"

The elevator opened and the four men, Simon, Jim, Henri and Blair, entered as the Captain explained. "No, he was the arresting officer and one of the witnesses. He’s escorting his subject to the ER ? shooter took one in the arm."

Henri nodded, as Jim asked a question. "Captain, do you have any idea what went down?"

"Just what I told everyone else, Jim." Simon removed a cigar from his jacket pocket and began to chew on it. The elevator opened onto the garage level and they stepped out into barely contained chaos. Units, marked and unmarked, were pulling out of various parking slots, and pulling out of the garage. Nodding to Henri, Simon dismissed the detective to his assignment and walked over to his unit and managed to pull out of the garage just ahead of Ellison’s pickup.

Doctor Abrams examined the wound on the arm of the woman sitting on the exam table. She was wearing handcuffs and being guarded by no less than three officers. Two were uniformed officers; the other was a detective. The woman was disturbingly quiet as he cleaned out the wound, which looked like either a knife wound, or a graze from a bullet. Looking up to meet the lady’s eyes, he said, "Miss, this isn’t too bad. I can either stitch it or apply butterfly closures."

"Butterfly." The voice was low, tense, and that one word was all she had uttered since the exam had begun.

Nodding, he sent a nurse out to grab what he needed from supplies. When she came back, he finished dressing the wound, then with a nod of his head turned his patient back over to the custody of the police and left the room to attend to other patients, some of them from the same incident that the woman had reportedly been injured at. Abrams smiled as he realized how much information he could gather from those other patients.

Rafe reached out to assist the small woman down from the table, but had to step back as she hopped off the table and glared at him. Careful not to grab her by the injured arm, he escorted her out of the ER and into the waiting patrol unit, climbing into the back seat with her. Just before he shut the door, he spotted his partner approaching. Stepping back out he called out to Brown. "Hey, H."

Henri stepped on over to his partner’s side, looking the young man over to reassure himself that Rafe wasn’t hurt. Once that was completed, he bent down and took at look at the prisoner in the back of the marked unit. Whistling softly, he straightened back up. "That’s your shooter?"

Nodding, Rafe responded. "Yeah. Hasn’t said more than two words since I arrested her." Reaching into his pants pocket, he pulled out a set of keys. "Get you to do me a favor, H?"

"Left the car at the scene?"

"Had to. After Technical Support gets done over there, would you make sure it makes it back to the garage?"

Henri took the keys from his friend, "Sure. You need any help with her?"

"No. We’re going straight back to Central. Meet you there?" Rafe started to climb back into the unit.

"May be a while, but yeah." Henri closed the door, securing his partner and the prisoner, then tapped on the window to get the other man’s attention. "Talk to you later, Brian." Stepping back, he watched the unit pull out of the circular drive and into traffic.

Slowly, the investigators trickled back into Major Crimes. They had spent three hours interviewing witnesses, while Technical Support had gathered up evidence. Jim had been surprised to see that the ‘rounds’ that the first two shooters had used weren’t normal slugs, but rather shards of metal that looked like small torpedoes. He wanted a look at the weapon that had fired the things, but that had been confiscated first, along with the weapon that the other shooter had used. One of the techs had turned a bag over to Captain Banks that contained one of the ‘projectiles’ that had been recovered. He vowed to get a closer look once everything settled down a bit.

Entering the bullpen, he found Brian Rafe listening to a tape with a woman’s voice on it. Focusing his hearing, he clearly heard the words and came to halt, shocked.

"Jim?" Blair touched the sentinel on the arm, drawing him back from the edge of another zone out, the second one of the afternoon. He’d zoned out at the crime scene, but wouldn’t explain on what, and now this. "Jim? What is it?"

Jim shook off the hand on his arm and with a scowl, approached Rafe’s desk. "Rafe, you have a chance to interview your subject yet?"

Brian looked up, shutting off the tape. "No. She refused to speak without counsel present. She’s already called someone, but listen to this. She used a recorded line and spoke only 6 words." Rewinding the tape back, he pushed play and the voices on the tape came through the speakers.

Male voice: "Hello?"

Female voice: "Et Arcadia Ego. Cascade, Washington. PD."

There was a ‘click’ on the tape as the call was terminated. Rafe stopped the tape. "That’s it. Any idea what she was doing?" He sighed when Jim shook his head. "Damn. It sounded like a code phrase or something like that to me, I was hoping…"

"Sorry, if it is, it’s not one I recognize."

Blair had heard the voices, and stepped closer to his fellow detective’s desk. "Rafe? Could you play that again? I think I might have a translation for you, it sounds familiar to me." He was very aware of the hopeful look that was aimed at him by the perplexed detective. "No promises, but it does sound vaguely familiar."

Ignoring the sounds around him, Blair closed his eyes and concentrated on the words that were issuing from the tape player. "Et Arcadia ego?" He muttered under his breath, puzzling over the words in his mind.

Jim watched, and listened, as his partner and friend began to pace in a tight circle, obviously concentrating on the words and not the voice that spoke them. The tone was flat, almost dead, and familiar to his sensitive ears. Jim knew, from those six words uttered, who it was that Rafe had arrested. Sitting down in a chair next to the younger detective’s desk, he decided to leave Blair to his mutterings and see what he could get out of the witness/arresting officer. "So, Brian, what the hell happened?"

"It was unbelievable, Jim!" Catching the senior investigator’s ‘shushing’ hand signal, he dropped his voice so as not to disturb the pacing and thought process of the former grad student. "I don’t know who she is, but she’s damn good at whatever it is she does. I couldn’t react fast enough, I mean, I was there, saw the whole thing go down and couldn’t react as fast as that lady did. She must’ve seen the motorcycle approaching and realized what was about to go down, for she shoved a older man into a car, slamming the door shut behind him, used the vehicle for cover and came up firing as the car hauled ass out of the area. Two shots! She took the bikers down with two shots, surprised me so much that when I realized what she was doing I couldn’t stop her." Rafe had to stop in his narration to take a breath and Jim jumped in.

"Stop her?"

"Yeah, she ran up to the other shooters, and shot them both. Double tapped them both." He shook his head, "I didn’t even realize that she’d been hit until I was putting the cuffs on her and found the blood dripping off her left hand."

"She was hit?"

"Yeah, must have taken the shot while they were still firing. I’ve seen some pretty amazing shots, but she had to have been wounded when she took them down, cause the only shots I heard after they crashed were hers."

Jim could tell that Rafe was still running on an adrenaline high from the incident; he couldn’t blame him. Before he could ask anything else, Blair spoke up.

" ‘In Arcadia I’? What the hell?"

"Chief?"

Blair spun on his heel to face the two sitting at Rafe’s desk, " ‘Et Arcadia ego’, it’s Latin, or vulgar Latin. But why would someone use that phrase for a code?"

Jim and Rafe didn’t have a chance to answer as just then, Jim was hailed from the doorway to Major Crimes. Looking over his shoulder to see who had called his name, he spotted Josh Weissen approaching him, carrying a very odd looking weapon in a clear plastic evidence bag. "What the hell is that thing, Josh?" Jim got to his feet as the ballistics specialist walked over to him.

"I was hoping you could tell me. I showed it to Gardner and he couldn’t tell what it was, sent me over to you. Saying something about your time in the Army might give you an idea?" He handed the weapon over to the former covert-Ops operator.

Taking the weapon in hand, Jim looked it over. It had a pistol like grip, a Tommy gun like cylinder behind the grip, a shortened stock, and a fairly wide mouth barrel. And it appeared to be made entirely of some kind of hardened plastic. He estimated the total weight to be about 10 pounds, and he didn’t know what it was. Jim fought the urge to remove the thing from its protective wrappings, wanting to examine the weapon closer.

Simon came out of his office. Seeing a gathering of his people around Rafe’s desk, including Weissen from the labs, he walked over to see what had everyone so fascinated. Looking over the shoulder of Blair, he spotted the odd looking weapon in Jim’s hand. "What the hell?!?"

Jim looked up and spotted his captain standing behind his partner. He also thought he saw a flash of recognition cross the man’s face. "Captain?"

"Let me see that thing." Blair stepped out of his way, clearing a path to Jim’s side.

Simon gingerly lifted the weapon from Jim’s hands and took a closer look. "Well I’ll be damned! I didn’t think they were manufacturing these for sale yet."

"You know what that thing is, Captain?" Weissen couldn’t hide his excitement.

"Yeah, only seen them in books though."

Jim quirked an eyebrow as his brain suddenly supplied the information he’d been seeking. "A Pancor Jackhammer."

"Yes." Simon handed the weapon back to his detective. "Here. Hang on to that. I’ve got a meeting with Chief Warren. Watch this group for me, Jim." At the detective’s nodded acceptance of responsibility, he left the group.

"Okay, I give up. What exactly is a ‘Pancor Jackhammer’?" Rafe looked back to Jim for an explanation.

Jim handed the weapon back to Weissen, "Essentially? It’s a shotgun."

"Not like one I’ve ever seen." Josh cradled the shotgun in one arm as he dug into his pocket for something that he handed over to Ellison. "And I’ve never seen a round like that either."

Jim took the object from Josh’s hand and now that he knew what the weapon was, he now recalled the proper name for the ‘rounds’ that had been used in the shooting. "It’s a flechette. There are about twenty to forty of these babies packed into a normal shotgun shell, the Jackhammer holds ten rounds, which means that you have access to about two to four hundred flechettes that can damn near cut a man in half. Deadly as hell."

Josh paled, "Two hundred of these damn things? Support teams reported only finding about forty of these ‘flechette’ things at the scene." He lifted up the shotgun for emphasis, "And the chambers on this were empty."

Jim nodded. "Okay, that means we’ve probably got more victims than we thought." He turned to face the primary investigator. "Rafe? That car you saw pull off, to the best of your knowledge, was that the target of the people that used that?" He pointed to the shotgun.

"Yeah." He closed his eyes, replaying the scene in his head. "They must have gotten at least two rounds into the car. A black Mercedes. One of the larger ones. Should have body damage on the passenger side from the shooting." Glancing up at the chief detective, he grimaced. "Sorry, I can’t recall any other details about the car."

"You gave us enough." Jim clasped the detective on the shoulder. Bringing his eyes up to address the room full of people he put the investigation into a higher gear. "Okay, Blair? Get to work on that phrase that our ‘other’ shooter used. Find out exactly what it means and anything else you can dig up." His partner nodded and scooted over to his desk, firing up his computer and taking his reading glasses out. "Rafe? Call the hospitals and clinics, see if you can find any other victims that might match our case. The rest of you, if you can, follow up with some of the witnesses that weren’t injured. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will have gotten the tag number on the Mercedes." He watched as the bullpen started to jump. Turning back to the support tech, he handed back the flechette. "Keep that gun safe. I’m sure that Captain Banks will want another look at it."

"I’ll put it in the heavy lock up in my lab." Josh left the bullpen, intent on getting back to his lab and finishing the tests he had planned for the weapon and the rounds that Ellison had named ‘flechettes.’

Jim nodded, and deciding that he, and Blair, needed a cup of coffee, walked over towards the break room, carefully avoiding looking into the interrogation room that held the only surviving shooter from this afternoon’s incident. He knew who sat in there, but didn’t want to acknowledge her existence, let alone talk with her right now. From Rafe’s accounts of the events, she had killed two people, in cold blood, without a care that she’d been seen doing so. It added up to only one thing in his mind: Black Ops. Something he didn’t want to get involved in, that disgusted him, and that it was her, only made matters worse.