And where had the time gone? Seemed like it was only yesterday he’d been twenty-two…
A knock came at the door.
He checked his watch. Time flew, and it just kept picking up speed.
Getting to his feet, Black smoothed back his hair, rotated his head and neck, and again loosened up his shoulders and back. Answered the door. An attractive, unsmiling woman in her forties, who looked as if she’d been around a block or two, awaited.
Black allowed her entry. He locked the door behind her. She removed her coat and placed it and her pocketbook on the couch and continued straight back into the bedroom. Black eyed her as she went before him. Eyed the professional swish of her hips, the long legs that ended in black, stiletto heels. For all his pain and nausea, he felt a powerful need to fuck. He had a lot of pent-up everything inside, and tonight he was going to take it all out on her. He was going to fuck her until she bled, and when he was done… do it again…
He was going to make her — and the rest of humanity — pay.
Chapter Ten
1
Lizzie again stood on those deserted, moonlit plains, holding a child in her arms. Again she watched as the dark silhouettes quietly descended from above, collapsed their parachutes, then silently charged off into the night… and, again, she followed.
In advance of the Bravo Force operators, she stood before the same house, as pleasantly lit as before, its three occupants as naïvely unaware of their situation as the last time. The child cooed and gurgled in Lizzie’s arms, a beautiful child.
She shivered at the kill team’s approach, wishing for it all to just be over, so she could wake up and again put the scene behind her. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen. For some reason she was meant to witness what was to take place — or had already taken place. She didn’t know. She was usually able to determine an image’s time frame, but this one didn’t yet feel set. Lizzie remembered the last vision/dream, where some force had interrupted the events that were about to unfold. It had come out of nowhere, abruptly terminating the dream. It was a force that now, she realized, felt oddly familiar…
Like specters flurrying across a ghostly landscape, the Bravo Force team positioned around the house. Lizzie knew that two were already inside. She knew that they were all experiencing growing anxiety. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Berettas. Felt the sweating and dry mouths of their owners. She knew little about the military, but figured these guys had probably seen plenty of “action,” they liked to call it, so why were they always so nervous and uncertain in this dream?
Still cradling the child, Lizzie calmly stepped aside as the team leader positioned himself before her. Invisible to them, she sensed their fear as if it was its own entity. She watched the team leader glance to his watch, his arm shaking. Stop it, the man mentally commanded, and the arm stopped shaking. What was the matter with him? the man continued to chide himself. He was a hardened, tested, professional — a goddamned government-trained killer, for Chrissakes. This was bullshit.
Lizzie watched the man focus his attention back to the house and their task. Clenching his hand into a tight fist, the man narrowed his focus back to his watch crystal. Time… watch the time. The dog… it would pick them up soon. 0210 hours.
Mentally counting, the Bravo Force operator closed his eyes and steeled himself. Buried his growing anxiety. He raised his Beretta in both hands and smacked himself in the forehead with it. Shaking his head, and quietly grunting, he coiled his superbly trained body and charged.
Lizzie calmly followed behind, lightly bouncing the child in her arms.
The man shot out across the darkness, taking note of the position of his team and their targets, but as he burst across the open space, another resurgence of oppressiveness took hold of him. His breathing, normally calm and relaxed, was now labored and short. The intense sense of dread built and filled every mental, emotional crevice. He felt as if he was again jumping out of that cargo plane into that moonlit night sky — but this time without a parachute…
Such will power, Lizzie thought. As mortally terrified as these guys now were, they continued to push on. Too bad their discipline wasn’t better utilized in more
(construction)
constructive efforts.
Lizzie could actually see the man’s shoulders bunch up as his anxiety level soared. It was here that Lizzie swelled with emotion.
Whether or not they were to ever complete their mission, it was their intent to kill that overwhelmed her. Their intent to break in on a family’s quiet, peaceful existence and eliminate them, coldly, calculatedly. Without prejudice.
Just following orders.
The man, she again noted, eyed his target, the father at the head of the table. Lizzie reached out to this man and found he had been a hard-working cattle rancher his entire life. A gentle and caring father. Firm.
Lizzie caught an image of the father punishing his son for lying about going out to visit his girlfriend down the road. The father had not been mad that his son had gone out to see the girl… only that he’d lied about it.
Then Lizzie’s attention was diverted by the picture of President Kennedy, the one the Bravo Force team leader had also spotted. Lizzie focused on it. There was something not right about it… something different from last time. Lizzie followed the Bravo Force leader into the home, sidestepping around him and to his left to get a better look at the picture. There was a smudge on JFK’s forehead, and the right backside of his head looked wrong. She stood before the photograph. Wiped at the spot on the picture. To her surprise, her actions wiped away sections of his head to expose a disgusting shot that clearly showed a section of Kennedy’s head blown away.
Lizzie blinked.
It was gone.
Her gaze then fell upon the book, The Prophesies of Nostradamus. Carefully shifting the child in her arms, she picked it up. It felt comfortable. She opened it. Its yellowed and weary pages were full of nursery rhymes. Her gaze fell to one in particular:
Ring around the rosie,
A pocketful of posies;
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.
She smiled, gently bouncing her child as she turned the crinkly pages. As she read other passages, she heard distant, childlike laughter. She continued to flip through the book — until the shots came.
She dropped the book and turned. She was no longer holding the child. Instead, before her, stood Joe. He had a smudge on his forehead she knew to be three holes-in-one, so dead center they were hardly noticeable as distinct wounds. Joe had a surprised look on his face, hands to his side, palms open toward her.
“Why, honey,” he pleaded, raising his hands up to her, “why didn’t you save me?”
Lizzie opened her mouth, when out from stage right swung a one-ton I-beam. She looked to Joe’s pleading bewildered look as the steel battering ram slammed into his head, popping it clean off. She burst into tears, lurching forward to help him, only to realize she was now cradling something that was no longer a child…
2
Lizzie’s head snapped up, and her entire body shuddered violently.
What had she been—
She had held something.
She sat before a table… holding a pencil, its point poised upon a piece of paper that looked… “official.”
A call log? Her call log?
She had been
(moonlight)
(running)
penciling in her
(1963)
time? She’d been — a family. That family. That Bravo Force team killing that family. A book — and picture.
President Kennedy?
The first one. And there had been something else… something else that had brought about a momentary emotional reminiscence…
Gone. She’d lost it. Something to do with that family and those Bravo Force operators. It would return. It always did.
Lizzie sighed, and completed penciling in her time into her call log. She’d had five calls already,
it wasn’t yet midnight, and she’d had that vision in the space of what, three seconds? Busy and she still had managed to doze off. She pulled off her headset and sat back. Lucy immediately leapt into her lap. Lizzie stared at the 1932 black-and-white Boris Karloff movie, The Mummy, now playing on her muted TV, and took a sip of iced tea. It was good. Maybe that strange man without a name was onto something.
“Okay, girl,” Lizzie said to Lucy, getting to her feet, “I’m hungry.”
Lucy jumped out of her lap and padded ahead of her into the kitchen. Lizzie opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold pan of leftover meatloaf, put it on the counter and undid its tinfoiled top. She sliced off a hunk and stuck it in the microwave, then leaned back against the counter, still watching Boris struttin’ his bad self back in the living room. The old black-and-white movies had atmosphere like nothing Hollywood put out today. Not always the best acting, but that didn’t matter, it was the nostalgia, the overall feel and atmosphere of the films — and their short credits.
Lizzie watched as Boris’s mummy-turned-museum-display-curator killed a museum guard off camera.
And no gratuitous anything. It was all about imagination… story.
The microwave dinged, and Lizzie removed her food. Fetching ketchup from the fridge, she took both with her into the living room. As she sat down, Lizzie had a fleeting image of a Civil War battle.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania?
An Irish brigade charging across a field? Not discounting it, but shrugging it off, she dug into her food.
Did she really want to work for Black and his FBI? Did she have a choice? Did she feel safe in doing so? Did she trust the man, and if not the man… his agency — supposedly the FBI? Black had said this guy, this Man With No Name, was a child molester, but her meeting with him indicated otherwise.
Why the hell couldn’t she figure this out?
Why the hell wasn’t she able to pick up on whatever it was she needed?
It’s okay, Mommy, the little girl beside her said. Everything’ll be all right. You’ll see.
The girl then skipped across the living room, toward the door with the “No Grownups Allowed” sign, and disappeared through it.
C’mon, Mommy, come play with me! It’ll make you feel better!
“I can’t honey,” Lizzie said, “I’m working now. I will later, though — okay?”
Lizzie kicked away a red plastic doughnut-ring from her feet and finished her dinner. She then returned to the kitchen and her headset, and barely had time to inhale before the phone rang.
Clearing her throat, and in her best Romani accent, Lizzie said, “This eez Madame Nostradameus. How may I help you?”
“Uh, hello. I don’t really know where to begin… I’m, uh, I’m a bit confused—”
“Eez okay, my dear, let’s begin with your name.”
“Mel — Mel Roberts.”
“Okay Mel, that eez a start. Now, what eez it you are so confused about? Madame Nostradameus eez here to help…”
3
Kennedy sat back on his deck, late-morning sun shining, sipping a glass of milk—
Milk?
He blinked, looking to the glass. Iced tea. It was iced tea.
Kennedy looked to the glass, to the condensation on the outside of it. Listened to the clinking of the cubes within it as he gently shook it. Smeared a section of condensation with a thumb. Took another sip.
Nope, iced tea, all right.
Kennedy looked out over Nantucket Sound. A beautiful piece of ocean. Sun shining, kestrels and gulls soaring the ocean breezes. The coastal scents. A striking day! He smiled.
Amazing how life turned out, wasn’t it? How it got away from you? He’d certainly regretted a couple actions over his lifetime, but never the gestalt outcome: how he and his family — right down to great-grandchildren, nieces, and nephews — had done some real good for the world. Even John, Jr. had finally decided to get into politics, as a New York State Senator (with global speculation of a future presidency). Talk about a family legacy. With all he and his family had done — and continued to do — it was extremely disappointing that his principal regret still walked the planet. The one blot upon the family name.
Victor Black.
How that had happened, he never quite understood. It wasn’t like he’d ever gone after him. Not that he remembered, anyway. But as you grew older, you changed. Memory didn’t always seem to work as well it used to. Or maybe it was just that you had so many memories it took a while to sift through them all…
He remembered actually selecting another man — a man he could no longer recall. Pathetic. However, he did remember he was going to let this individual take over a project in a position so powerful that it would (and did) end up changing the course of humanity — and he could no longer remember the guy’s name?
Then he appeared.
One day. Victor No-Middle-Initial Black.
He’d arrived subtly enough as one of the remote viewers in the mid-sixties—1966. Kennedy recalled how he had had a bad feeling about him from the get-go, though he’d looked great on paper and had interviewed well. Black had done well in the program, exceedingly well — scary well. Excelled beyond every one of his peers, and against Kennedy’s better judgment the council had begun to groom Black. In 1973 The Center’s directorship opened up when the current director abruptly retired. Kennedy remembered preparing for the final interview of that director’s replacement with that someone he no longer remembered… but who also — mysteriously — departed.
And in waltzed Black.
Kennedy’d always suspected Black of doing away with his original appointment though could never prove it, and this began over twenty years of Black constantly and relentlessly fucking-around-cat-and-mouse with his life and The Center’s mission.
Inexplicably appointed as The Center’s director.
His memory seemed quite clouded on this account, ever since.
What the hell had happened that day? How had Black usurped that appointment?
Black.
A man who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, Kennedy later discovered, much to his distress — what he felt the world needed, through some warped, misguided sense of morality only Black understood. How could a person like him even come to be? How could a Supreme Being ever allow so dark a soul to exist? But history was fraught with examples, from Attila the Hun to Hitler to… Victor NMI Black.
At the beginning, Black certainly appeared harmless enough, performing the Council’s directives, continuing the mission, building upon the firm groundwork that had been laid and shaped the ultra-secret government psi ops organization. He had established funding and gathered a core group of hand-picked, supremely talented individuals. But it had been over time that Kennedy had come to realize that there had been something dreadfully amiss with this man and his vision. He found that Black had had dreams that haunted him… someone chasing him down, for what, Kennedy never found out — and he doubted Black did either. But when Black discovered years later that Kennedy had been surveilling him… that had been where the two had overtly parted company. Kennedy directed background checks on him, but found nothing unusual, and very little, at that, except that he had had (and, of course, still did have) Addison’s Disease. Not even any perceived Communist ties. It was easier to hide back then. It was as if Victor Black had simply materialized out of thin air…
Black had, however, certainly beefed up Program One and put it on the intel map.
He’d performed Kennedy’s and the Council of Seven’s ultra-classified operations, but when relations grew strained, Black had begun to divert. He’d begun conducting his own operations… killing and ruining many lives along the way, and it was that which Kennedy regretted most… the senseless and useless ruination of all those lives. That was when he’d attempted to reign him in, creating his very own sub-tasking, one in which a single remote viewer reported directly to him and him alone — not even the Council. Kennedy began psychically spying on Victor Blac
k, and when Black found out about that, that viewer had also disappeared. Nothing could be proven, but the cards had been thrown down. It was near the end of Bobby’s second term, and to the public things were looking great. A rare Camelot, indeed. He couldn’t tell the Council what he’d done, for that would have exposed his subterfuge, burned many bridges, and wasn’t at all conducive to the overall good the Council and his administration were doing. All he could do was watch. Keep an eye on him. In retrospect, he should have brought the Council in on his decision. He just wasn’t sure who he could trust, and to have used the remote viewer to look in on who he could and couldn’t trust would have added too many variables to an already stressed and urgent timeline.
Oddly enough, Black hadn’t exploited that opportunity, either. That had always puzzled him. Black always continued to puzzle him in the most confounded ways.
Black had begun to use the remote viewers for his own ends, and he’d begun targeting Kennedy himself. It had become quite a rat’s nest for a while, with Kennedy’s life in constant peril — though, again, he could never prove it was Black, and curiously, Black had never made that an issue, either. Never leaked any information, lies or truths, that could have burned him. But he knew he knew. Never one to worry about bodyguards, Kennedy constantly rebuffed the need for personal security until the White House was forced to employ a permanent Secret Service detail on his behalf after several attempts had been overtly made on his life. Those attempts had ended up costing the lives of several agents. Kennedy had even been grazed by several rounds in one massive, several-shooter attempt in Texas. As a national resource, he no longer had any say in the matter and had since always been protected around the clock. And once Kennedy had left The Center and the political limelight and devoted his energies to altruistic causes… Black had backed off.
A constant puzzle, that man.
It was only a matter of time, Kennedy thought… and that man he’d met in the Rose Garden, a man who had looked professional enough, except that he had sported some outrageous black-and-white Dalmatian tie and rolled-up sleeves — the man from whom he’d never gotten a name — told him that Black, at the time, anyway, wasn’t a major concern. Black’s time was limited, the man had informed him. Other issues were far more pressing. And, he’d added, he’d make sure nothing else happened to him. Kennedy, the Man With No Name said, would live a long and fruitful life — not to worry.
Psychic Page 11