REPORT: BULLETPROOF
FILE #: 215

IN HIS MOST CURRENT LAIR , Jarod is watching himself on a DSA from 11-21-71. At the end of the DSA, a young Jarod asks Sydney, “If I ever left here, would anybody want me?”

PINE RIDGE, TEXAS : Miss Parker, Broots, Sydney and Sam the Sweeper burst into a cabin, which was one of Jarod’s previous lairs. The place is filled with paramilitary paraphernalia: books and magazines on ” Urban Combat Basics ” and ” Hand-to-Hand Combat “; American flags; a huge cache of rifles and assault weapons… “What is this?” Miss Parker asks. “Testosterone headquarters?”

Throughout the main room of the cabin, pop-up targets appear suddenly. Miss Parker takes a shot at one of them and hits the target directly in the forehead. The target is an image of Broots. Targets resembling Miss Parker and Sydney also appear, but Miss Parker withholds her gunfire from them. Broots looks at the him-shaped target and complains, “You shot me! In the head !” Miss Parker quips, “You never looked better.”

On the Sydney-target is a white envelope with Sydney’s name on it. While Miss Parker, Broots and Sam continue to search the premises, Sydney opens the envelope and reads the contents of a single piece of paper found inside of it. The contents seem disturbing to Sydney, and Miss Parker asks him if he’s all right. Distracted, Sydney answers her with a monosyllabic, “yes.”

IN OHIO , we see two brutal-looking kidnappers in the living room of a small apartment. On the couch, bound and gagged, are a mother and her young daughter. One of the kidnappers tells the mother that her husband had better come up with the ransom money soon, or both she and her daughter are going to die.

Suddenly, S.W.A.T. [Special Weapons and Tactics] team members burst through the apartment windows and the front door. They’re all dressed in padded riot gear and carrying smoke bombs and weapons. They neutralize the kidnappers within seconds, and one of them walks over to the couch to remove the gag from the mouth of the daughter. This team member is Jarod. He tells the little girl not to be afraid; that everything will be all right.

The following afternoon, we see Jarod in a park having a Precinct Picnic with other civilian workers and officers of the Cincinnati Police Department and their families. Jarod is greeted by co-workers who a part of the same S.W.A.T. team he is: T-14, the “Turbo” Squad. Among his co-workers are Sergeant Stevens (a male), Officer Cook (a female), and Officer Mooney (a male). Steven compliments Jarod on his work with the team in the apartment complex, and Jarod tells him that he was doing his best so he would make for a good replacement for Daniel Lang, another S.W.A.T. team member who was killed in the line of duty two weeks earlier.

Stevens, Cook and Mooney have nothing but praise for Lang, and tell Jarod they won’t stop until they find the man who killed him — a white male, 6 feet tall, with a goatee, and wearing a baseball cap. A detective, also affiliated with the precinct, comes up and starts bad-mouthing Lang, saying he was hot-shot who got himself killed because he wasn’t a team-player. Stevens tries to attack the detective to make him shut up, but Jarod intervenes. Steven then points out that the detective had been maligning Lang in front of his two surviving children: Cody and Jordan. The detective turns to see the younger of the two boys run away from the picnic area in tears over what the detective was saying. The detective then waves off his insult saying he didn’t know the kids were there . Jarod looks over to where they boys have been stopped by a pretty blonde woman, Liz Brantley, who works as a dispatcher for the same precinct. Liz comforts the boys as best she can.

AT THE CENTRE , Sydney is in his office. He looks at the piece of paper from the envelope Jarod had left for him in the cabin in Texas, and also looks at a gold pocket watch which he withdraws from his suit. He opens the watch up, and on the back of the face-plate is the inscription: “Jet’aime [forever], Michelle”.

When Broots walks in carrying some files of records on routine surveillance scans, Sydney hides the slip of paper in a book and shoves it into a nearby bookcase. He then approaches Broots, and asks him if he can trust him. Broots tells Sydney, of course, Sydney can trust him; and Sydney asks him to conduct a search for a woman named Michelle Lucca. Sydney gives Broots a piece of notepaper containing all the information about Michelle that he can remember, and Broots promises him he will conduct the search immediately.

Outside Sydney’s office, in the corridor, Broots is intercepted by Miss Parker who had, unbeknownst to Sydney or Broots, been eaves-dropping on their conversation. She demands to see the piece of notepaper Sydney had given to Broots. Broots is reluctant to show it to her, but Miss Parker is insistent, so Broots hands the paper over to her. When she discovers the paper is in regards to a woman, Miss Parker says, “Dr. Pavlov has been drooling since he got that note from Jarod in the cabin.” She then tells Broots to go ahead with his search, and to tell her if any of it impacts on their search for Jarod.

IN OHIO , Jarod is spearheading a training simulation with the rest of Turbo Squad. When a male-shaped target appears suddenly out of the darkness, Mooney over-shoots the target and misses it. Jarod covers him by taking down the target himself, and Cook and Stevens take out the next two targets with single shots. As the simulation ends, Mooney seems upset and distracted and tells the others he needs to get some air.

A few minutes later, Jarod finds Mooney in the locker room and asks him if he’s all right. Mooney tells him he’s been “reliving” the incident during which Daniel Lang was killed, “I can’t get it out of my head.” Jarod tells him he may be suffering from “survivor’s guilt” or Post Traumatic Stress syndrome, and suggests that if they go to the place where Lang was killed, he might be able to help Mooney work his way through his feelings.

Mooney takes Jarod to a roller-skating rink and describes for him the situation during which Lang was killed. Turbo Squad had entered the roller rink looking for a shooter. Mooney and Lang took “point”, and Stevens and Cook were on the flank. The shooter was in the front of the rink area, behind the grandstand. A bullet had struck Mooney in the leg and he went down, he said. Then Lang stepped up to try to put his body between Mooney and the shooter, and Lang was struck several times directly in the chest. Although Lang had been wearing protective gear, the shooter had been using M-132 armor-piercing shells: “cop killer” bullets. Lang was dead within minutes.

AT THE CENTRE , Broots tells Miss Parker that he’d been unable to find anything on Michelle Lucca, but had been able to find someone with a similar name. The weird thing was: there was no record of this other Michelle even existing before 1974. He’d checked CIA records, FBI records and even Interpol, and could find nothing about this other Michelle prior to 1974. Then, he told Miss Parker, he started thinking: who else could have made someone disappear so effectively, and then re-appear somewhere else with a new identity? Miss Parker understands: “She worked for The Centre.” Broots nods, and hands Miss Parker the file on the “new” Michelle. Michelle Lucca had worked for The Centre as a clinical psychologist, and had been assigned to help Sydney with The Pretender Project until 1974 when she suddenly vanished without a trace. She was now living in Albany, New York, under a different name, and was married.

IN OHIO , Jarod is in his lair listening to the recordings of the conversations between Turbo Squad and the dispatcher, Liz Brantley, on the night Daniel Lang was killed. He can hear the members of the squad talking. There is sporadic gun-fire, and Mooney cries out that he’s been shot. Lang says that an officer is down and that Turbo Squad needs back-up. There’s more gun-fire, and then Lang goes down. Mooney is heard shouting that Lang’s been shot; he calls for an ambulance. Liz’s voice is heard talking to Daniel Lang. She calls him “Dan” , and tells him to hang in there; that help is on the way. Lang says he can’t feel his legs… that he’s getting very cold… Then he tells Liz to tell his sons that he loves them… Then Lang is silent. At the end of the recording all that can be heard is silence from Lang, and Liz’s soft voice muttering, “Oh, my god.”

AT THE POLICE STATION , Jarod seeks out the dispatcher, Liz Brantley. He tells her he had listened to the dispatch tapes of the night Daniel Lang was shot, and tries to comfort her by telling her that it must have made Dan feel a little better to know that someone who loved him was talking to him just before he died. Liz is shocked that Jarod seems to know that she and Lang were emotionally involved with one another, and Jarod tells her, “I could hear it in your voices.”

Jarod and Liz then go on a short walk, and Liz tells him about her relationship with Lang. Daniel Lang’s wife had died about a year ago, and Liz and Dan had only recently become an item. Although she’s mourning the loss of Daniel, she is most worried about Lang’s sons, she tells Jarod. The boy’s have no other family except for a pair of grandparents who live in Seattle, but the department hadn’t been able to get a hold of the grandparents yet because they were traveling abroad. The boys were currently being kept in the St. Norval Children’s Home. If the grandparents rejected custody, the boys would most likely have to remain at St. Norval’s… and since the boys were “older” children with “emotional scars”, they would, most likely, never be adopted and may have to live their lives in the institution.

Jarod asks Liz if she remembers anything “odd” happening before the night Daniel Lang died: any incident, any names that kept coming up, anything at all… Liz says she remembers the name Petrovka being bantered around a lot; and the fact that Daniel Lang had been readying to leave Turbo Squad about two weeks before he was shot. Lang had told her he was “burnt out” by the S.W.A.T. duties, but she says she didn’t really believe him.

Jarod and Liz go back to the police department office and while Liz runs a back-ground check on the name Petrovka, Jarod gets on the telephone and makes some calls. He’s talking to Interpol, speaking in fluent Russian, when Liz brings him a police file print-out on a man named Vladimir Petrovka. Jarod hangs up the phone, and looks at the print out. He tells Liz that Petrovka is a local Russian who had ties to the mafia in Moscow; he is wanted for smuggling contraband — including the “cop killer” bullets — in to and around the U.S. Petrovka had been caught and arrested once — by the members of Turbo Squad, before Daniel Lang was assigned to the unit — but had gotten off on a technicality. Since that time, Petrovka had been impossible to catch. He always seemed to know the police were coming before they showed up to arrest him.

AT ST. NORVAL’S , Jarod finds Daniel Lang’s sons playing basketball and stops to chat with them. The younger of the boys reveals to Jarod that Daniel Lang had, “yelled one night” , a few nights before the shooting. The older boy adds that they had been asleep in their room and were awakened by the sound of their father yelling at some other men. Their father had told the other men that he “didn’t want to be involved,” and that the other men “should leave.”

The memories seem to greatly upset the younger brother, so Jarod tries to comfort the boys by telling them that their father loved them very much, and that he had died a hero, putting his own body between a shooter and fellow officer.

BACK AT THE CENTRE , Miss Parker and Broots comb Sydney’s office looking for the piece of paper from the envelope Jarod had left in the cabin in Texas. Broots finds the paper folded inside the book in the book case and Miss Parker snatches it from him. She unfolds the paper and realizes that it is a birth certificate from 1974 for a male child named “Nicholas” . Michelle is listed as the boy’s mother, but no father’s name is listed. Miss Parker and Broots both deduce that Sydney might be Nicholas’s father…

AT HIS LAIR , Jarod goes over video tapes of Cook, Stevens and Mooney being debriefed after the Lang shooting. They all describe a male shooter with a goatee, and talk about a “fire fight” that lasted about 20 minutes. Jarod is not convinced that they’re telling the whole truth, however.

He later goes with Liz to the roller rink to look over the scene once more himself. The place has already been reopened to customers and is doing great business… even though repairs have not been completed since the night of the shooting. There are still a few bullet holes obvious in the grand stand area. Jarod asks Liz to tell him what sort of weapons Lang and the others were packing the night of the shooting, and Liz tells him that standard issue weapons were 9mm hand guns and M-16 assault rifles. Jarod tells her that the evidence at the scene simply doesn’t match the description of the incident given by Stevens, Cook and Moony. They’re stories were all the same, but… There weren’t enough bullet holes to account for the “20 minute fire fight” the three of them had described; and the bullet holes were all the wrong size for the weapons they were supposedly carrying that night. And if all of the S.W.A.T. team members were firing at a shooter in the grandstand area, why weren’t there more bullet holes apparent there?

Liz asks Jarod what he thinks really happened. He tells her that the evidence in the rink suggests there had been no shooter in the grandstand area… and that the “cop killer” bullets that struck Lang had come from weapons carried by the flanking S.W.A.T. team members themselves. Lang had most likely been set up and executed by his own team … But why?

THAT EVENING , Jarod breaks into Lang’s old locker in the police station and finds that it hasn’t been cleared out yet. Lang’s S.W.A.T. gear knapsack is still there, and contains night-vision goggles, a hand-held micro cassette recorder (with no tape in it), and a key to a fire-proof lock box. There is no lock box in the locker, so Jarod goes outside to the parking lot to find the last police-issue vehicle Lang had been driving. He jimmies the lock on the trunk and goes through the contents there: blankets, a fire extinguisher, a first aid kit… and a small fire-proof lock box. Jarod uses the key from Lang’s locker to open the box, and finds three micro cassettes hidden inside of it. “A voice from beyond the grave,” Jarod says, looking at the cassettes.

THE NEXT NIGHT , after listening to Lang’s voice on the audio cassettes, Jarod goes to 570 Franklin Avenue and parks there, and watches a nearby park area through the night-vision goggles. On the cassettes, Lang had described meetings between Vladimir Petrovka and the members of the Turbo Squad. Stevens, Cook and Mooney met with Petrovka on a regular basis and took pay-off money from him in exchange for their tipping him off about police activities that might impinge on his criminal activities. Lang was trying to gather enough evidence to have his partners arrested for collusion and obstruction of justice. When they found out what he knew, they had approached him and offered him the chance to join them. In the argument that had been overheard by his sons, Lang had told them he wasn’t interested and yelled at them to get out of his house. Two nights later, Lang was killed.

That evening, from his parked car, Jarod sees Stevens, Cook and Mooney arrive, on schedule, to take their next payment from Petrovka. He promises the dead Lang that he will finish what Lang had started.

IN ALBANY, NEW YORK , Sydney arrives at the front door of Michelle Lucca’s house. She opens the door expecting to find her son there, and is startled when she sees — and instantly recognizes — Sydney. The two of them take a short walk down the street, away from the house, and Sydney tells Michelle that he found Nicholas’s birth certificate. He wants to know if he is Nicholas’s father. Michelle tries to explain to him the circumstances of Nicholas’s birth and why she left The Centre.

At The Centre, she and Sydney had fallen in love: the pocket watch Sydney carried was a memento of their affair. When she discovered that she was pregnant with Sydney’s child, she rushed back from her doctor’s office to The Centre to tell him, but had been intercepted by a man she had never seen before. This man somehow knew about her pregnancy already, and told her she had to leave The Centre. The Centre would see to her re-location, would let her keep her son, and even set up a trust fund for him IF she agreed never to see Sydney again. Sydney, the man told her, had to be kept focused on The Pretender Project, and a son would only distract him from his work.

When Michelle, at first, was reluctant to leave, the man then threatened that if she didn’t go, he would see to it that Sydney had a “terrible accident” . Fearing for Sydney’s life, Michelle agreed to go. The next day, when Sydney came to work, Michelle’s office was cleared out, her projects had all been re-assigned, and her apartment had been emptied. [He had never found out what happened to her or why she left… until now.] After she left The Centre and Nicholas was born, Michelle tells Sydney, she eventually met another man who fell in love with her and agreed to raise Nicholas as his own child. They had never told Nicholas about Sydney. Nicholas was now twenty-four years old; and a “splendid” young man who had become a teacher.

Michelle tells Sydney that she will love him forever… but that she has a life with her husband and Nicholas now. She can’t leave them, she says, and she can’t tell Nicholas the truth about his parentage. She then quietly, gently asks Sydney to leave. He does so, but only after he catches a glimpse of Nicholas — a handsome young man with light brown hair and dark eyes — as Nicholas arrives and greets his mother in the driveway in front of their home.

BACK IN OHIO , Jarod is readying to set up Stevens, Cook and Mooney in a “sting” operation. He creates cardboard cut-out targets of himself and places them around the roller skating rink; he hot-wires one of the video game machines in the rink; and goes through Mooney’s, Cook’s, and Stevens’ vehicles, replacing the clips in their weapons with clips filled with blank cartridges. He then sets up a parked car outside the roller rink and splashes the driver’s seat with fake blood.

BACK AT THE CENTRE, Broots and Miss Parker walk into Sydney’s office to find him packing his things. He’s going to leave, he tells them. Miss Parker says they know about Michelle and the birth certificate, and ask Sydney to stay. He is adamant, however:

“They stole my life , Parker! Just like they stole Jarod’s…. and Angelo’s….”
“And mine …” Miss Parker says.

She then tells Sydney that if he leaves now, he’ll never find out who it was who scared Michelle away, and hid his son from him, and threatened his life. Sydney relaxes a little and decides to stay. He then asks Miss Parker why, if she knew about Michelle and the birth certificate, she didn’t confront him or turn him in. She tells him: “Everyone deserves a life… even you.”

IN OHIO , the Turbo Squad members including Jarod, still in their heavy protective gear, have just finished up some night time training simulations. They’re all leaving the training facility, and approach their vehicles, when a call comes from dispatch over their audio head-gear that a man matching the description of Office Lang’s killer was seen again at the roller skating rink. The team arrives at the rink to find a car parked out front… and blood all over the front seat. Jarod tells them that the shooter has come back, and then he rushes into the rink to get the man. The rest of the team is a few seconds behind Jarod, having to stop to get their weapons out of the trunks of their vehicles first. When they enter the rink, Jarod is nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, from different locations around the rink, pop-up targets start to appear. Stevens, Mooney and Cook fire at the targets but can’t seem to hit them. One of the video machines then comes to life: lights flash on top of it and police sirens blare from it. Then spotlights and a mirrored ball in the ceiling of the rink turn on, and the roller rink is splashed with moving light and colors. Disoriented, confused, and scared, Stevens, Cook and Mooney don’t know what to do. The decision is made for them, however, when, from the grandstand area, a man with a goatee and wearing a baseball cap starts to shoot them. The bullets from his weapon tear through wood, brick and metal: they’re ” cop killers ” .

Stevens, Cook and Mooney scramble toward some bleachers, away from the grandstand area, and return fire… but none of their shots seem to strike the shooter, who continues to threaten them with near-hits. Stevens figures out that their weapons are filled with blanks, and he screams for an explanation. “Who the hell are you — ?!”

The shooter steps down off the grand stand. “You know me. I’m the man you created. The shooter with the goatee and baseball cap…” It is Jarod . He removes his fake goatee, and confronts them with the truth about Daniel Lang’s murder, while he continues to fire cop-killer bullets in their directions. The bullets eat right through the bleachers and their metal supports.

Not intimidated by Jarod, Stevens steps up in front of him and tells him that he’d better make his next shot a good one, because if Jarod doesn’t take Stevens down, Stevens and the others will kills him just like they killed Lang. Jarod taps the ear-piece of the police issue head gear he’s still wearing and asks Liz Brantley if she heard that. Liz, sitting in a room filled with other policemen and detectives at the police station, says she heard every word.

This same information comes through on Stevens’ audio head-set and he realizes he’s been trapped by his own confession. He pulls a hand gun from out of his clothes and threatens Jarod with it. The hand-gun isn’t filled with blanks. “If I go,” Stevens warns, “you go.” Jarod refuses to step back, however, and raises his rifle at Stevens’ face. Just as Stevens is about to pull the trigger on his hand-gun, he can hear the sirens of approaching police cars. Cook and Mooney tell him it’s all over; they’re trapped. Stevens finally breaks down, and puts his gun on the floor.

AT ST. NORVAL’S the next day, Jarod and Liz watch as Cody and Jordan Lang are met by their grandparents. When they had heard what had happened to Daniel Lang, the grandparents came home immediately from their trip to pick up the boys. Liz tells Jarod that the boys will be going back to Seattle to live on their grandparents’ farm; and that she’ll miss them very much when they go. Jarod tells her she could always move to Seattle if she wanted to… and then shows her paperwork that will set her up with a job as a switchboard operator in the Seattle Police Department. She can start in two weeks if she wants the job. Liz hugs him and thanks him. And Jarod thanks her for being so willing to provide the boys with love and attention even though they’re not her “blood” relatives. Touched by the compliment, Liz runs off to catch up with the boy and their grandparents and tell them the news about her pending job-transfer.

IN ALBANY we see Nicholas walking through a school campus with a student. He’s telling the student how to improve her dissertation for class. When Nicholas and the student separate, Nicholas hears Sydney make a remark to him about his studies from a few feet away. Nicholas turns to Sydney, looks at him for a moment, and asks, “Do I know you?” Sydney smiles and tells him, “I’m afraid you don’t.” Nicholas gives Sydney another long look, then walks away across the campus.

AT ST. NORVAL’S Jarod calls Sydney on his cell phone and asks him if he was able to find his son. Sydney tells him, yes, he did. Jarod then reminds Sydney of the conversation they had once had when Jarod was a youngster, and had asked Sydney if his family would still want him if he ever found them. Sydney recalls the conversation, and Jarod tells him that at that time he thought it only “took blood to bond people. But I’ve learned that it takes something else… It takes love.” Sydney agrees.