A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “And you think I’ll be better able to do that from a cell in a mystery location than from the comfort of my own office?” I laughed at the expression on his face. Though it wasn’t all that funny, really. “And without the benefit of knowing what you spooks have already figured out about the bombing?”

  “Why did you call us spooks?”

  “You’d prefer me to say spies? Okay. You spies, then.”

  “How did you –"

  “You did begin this conversation by bitching about funding us,” I pointed out. “Do you really think we still haven’t figured out where our grant comes from?”

  “Your funds are passed anonymously through the Moore Foundation for Mathematics Research.”

  I shrugged. “That may have been the intention, but placing one of your own case officers in the middle of the Center kind of blew the anonymity bit, don’t you think? You know, you’re as bad a liar as I am. I do hope, for the sake of our country’s security, that your colleagues are a bit better at this spook business.”

  His face went through two or three contortions before he settled on a sternly commanding expression. “Certain of my colleagues require a demonstration of your capabilities before opening up a classified investigation to you people. You will demonstrate what you can do, then we will decide how we wish to use you.”

  I had a strong feeling that things should go the other way around. We should decide what use we would allow them to make of us, and then we should demonstrate only those paranormal abilities that would support such use. I had absolutely no inclination to write a blank check for this man with the crazy gray eyes.

  “There are a lot of things we can’t do alone,” I tried. Coming up with a unified strategy against these nuts, for instance. Too bad we’d never developed an application of topology that would enable telepathy. “It would work out better for everybody if you allowed us to get together and work as a group.” Better for us, mostly.

  “First,” he said, “we’re going to explore what you can do alone.”

  I shrugged. “Fine, but that doesn’t amount to much.”

  The back of his hand slammed against my cheek without warning. I nearly fell out of the chair. My eyes watered, my face hurt and I really wanted to introduce him to the concept of Riemann fire.

  “That was a lie. Do not lie to me again; you will regret it. We already have evidence that you, at least, can do quite impressive work on your own,” he said. He resumed pacing around my chair; I resumed consciously not turning to keep the bastard in sight. He might be making me nervous, but I didn’t have to let him see that. “Last fall you removed materials from a locked safe and then teleported yourself and Lensky from San Antonio to Austin.”

  Okay, that much would have been in Lensky’s report. But he wouldn’t know – not from official reports, anyway – the full extent of our teleportation range, or the fact that on occasion we had teleported through both space and time. The second wouldn’t do him much good anyway. It wasn’t like I could teleport myself to the time just before the bombing. Only the years before I was born were open to me, and of those years I’d already made a dent in 1957 and 1941.

  As for the range, I felt it was highly desirable that they continue to underestimate us.

  “That jump from San Antonio to Austin nearly killed me,” I said with feeling. “Didn’t Lensky put in his report that I passed out on the floor when we came through in Austin?”

  He looked smug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve already determined from other evidence that you can’t teleport as far as a hundred miles, and that you can only go to places you’ve already seen.”

  I wondered what other evidence that would be. The second part was true enough, but as for the range – apparently they didn’t know about our travels to Britfield, well over three hundred miles from Austin. Or about Colton’s impromptu visit to the family farm in the Panhandle.

  Good.

  “And for your information,” he said smugly, “this facility is nearly two hundred miles from Austin. Since you were brought here in a closed van, there’s no place you have seen that’s close enough for you to teleport yourselves to.”

  He thought that? Fine, let him think. I could go along with that theory as long as it was convenient for me.

  “If there’s no place we can teleport to, how are we supposed to demonstrate it?”

  “Come with me.”

  ***

  “Of course you haven’t seen any results yet,” Harrison answered the staff members he’d brought with him. “We already know that they cannot teleport any great distance, nor can they teleport to a place they haven’t seen. That’s why we brought them here in a closed van and knocked them out again before carrying them into the facility. The only place within two hundred miles that any of them has seen is the room where they’re being kept.” He flashed a grim smile. “Except for the Kostis girl. She has now been shown the alternative room. She’ll go there soon enough.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “It is significantly pleasanter than her current accommodations. By contrast, it’s practically a luxury hotel suite. How long do you think she’ll be content to sleep on the floor and piss in a bucket when there’s a bed, a private bathroom, a mini-fridge and a goodie bag of grooming supplies waiting for her just a short teleport away?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t put a chocolate mint on her pillow,” Dean sneered. “Seriously, now. That wouldn’t break any of our people.”

  “Our people are tough, and they have excellent training. This Thalia Kostis is a kid just a couple of years out of college, and she’s never been anywhere or done anything beyond reading math books in a comfortable office.”

  “If she takes the bait,” Torres said cautiously, “good, we’ll know she can teleport – at least a short distance. If she doesn’t, though, how will we know what that means? Could mean she’s tougher than you think. Or,” he paused significantly, “could mean she can’t teleport at all and the earlier reports were lies.”

  “If the carrot isn’t enough, we can use the stick,” Dean said.

  “Don’t be too eager.” Harrison said sharply. “We would prefer these people to cooperate willingly.”

  “That’s why you hit the girl?”

  “No, that was because she tried lying to me.”

  Torres started shaking his head. “You two really believe these kids can do magic? What universe are you living in?”

  “The reports—”

  “Sure, if you trust Lensky. Maybe he’s exaggerating their potential to keep himself in a nice comfortable Stateside posting without the usual pay cut.”

  Harrison shook his head. “I know Brad; we’ve worked together since his first posting, in Romania. He’d be more likely to pooh-pooh their achievements so he could be free to go overseas again. The man was born to be a field officer. It must be driving him crazy to be tied to a dinky little outfit in Texas, with nothing else to do but interview professors and oil company executives about their foreign travel.” He gave Torres a hard stare. “Maybe you’ve spent too long with the analysts. I’ve made a career out of interrogating and evaluating people who are highly motivated to lie to us. I’d stake my professional reputation that Lensky’s reports are, if anything, less than the full truth about these topologists.

  “There’s something there, and we need it. You know why I believe the terrorists used paranormal means in this attack.”

  “Ye-es,” Torres said reluctantly. “It’s – a classic locked room mystery, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly. Without paranormal abilities, they would have needed an extremely clever way to come and go. One that left no trace and that none of our analysts can figure out.”

  “The distraction of the bomb blast—”

  Harrison shook his head. “Evidence is that they pulled this off before the bomb exploded. The bomb threat was what they wanted. The bomb threat caused us to put everybody who might be at risk into the safe room. Ergo, they had a way into the
safe room and that’s where they wanted their… targets…” His speech slowed for a moment and he shook his head violently, as if to clear it. “Where they wanted them to be.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Torres argued. “Yes, in retrospect it seems they were herding the targets into the safe room. Yes, that implies they had a way in and out of the safe room. It doesn’t prove that their methods were paranormal.”

  “Except that none of our people have been able to come up with a coherent explanation for how they infiltrated and exfiltrated the very heart of our own facility while leaving no evidence of their passage. And the eyewitness account supports the notion of paranormal activity.”

  Torres shrugged. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And as for the witness… she’s under suspicion, and properly so. If she was involved, she probably had that story ready to trot out as a distraction.”

  “There’s precedent,” Harrison insisted. “During the Cold War, we tried everything from telepaths to storefront psychics, trying to figure out how the KGB selected their dead drops.”

  Torres said nothing more, but he shook his head again as he and Dean walked away from the meeting room. “Just because the Company wasted time on so-called telepaths and psychics during the Cold War – with no result – is no reason to waste even more time on the woo-woo stuff today. I think Harrison’s losing it. No shame in that, he’s holding up amazingly well under the circumstances. But he really shouldn’t be in charge of this operation, his personal involvement is screwing up his head. Paranormals, hah!”

  “Except that the analysts have come up blank on other leads to the bombers,” Dean said. “And we are going to get those bastards.”

  “With the help of a bunch of math majors?” Away from Harrison, Torres felt free to let his incredulity show in his voice.

  “With whatever it takes. Maybe we won’t get on to them soon enough – not for Harrison, anyway – but we will find them. And I’ll use whatever I can get to find out where they’ve gone to earth. If the math majors are good enough tools, yes, I’ll use them.”

  “Tools,” Torres muttered after he and Dean went their separate ways. “Tools, sure. Just like a teaspoon is, technically, a tool for excavating a canal. But who’d want to use it for that?”

  2. American citizens on American soil

  The light in my cell went off without warning. Would the others be in darkness too? I had hopes. These jerks seemed like the kind of people who would think it efficient to run all the cell lights on one master switch.

  The unbroken blackness was probably supposed to be upsetting and disorienting. What it was, was a gift from God. Any ordinary hidden cameras wouldn’t betray my disappearance. If they had infrared cameras as well, they might wonder why they didn’t see my heat signature, but with any luck whoever was on night duty would waste some time cursing and banging the equipment. Especially if we all left at the same time; a minor glitch in their camera system was much more probable than a mass disappearance from four cells at once. I hoped Lensky’s felonious colleagues were familiar with Occam’s Razor.

  I also hoped all the others’ lights were out; I hoped they would realize, as I had, that this was our best chance to meet without giving it away to our captors that we could do more than they thought we could. I hoped they had gotten my hints about operating in the dark. But I couldn’t be absolutely sure of any of that. Oh well, if they didn’t show up I’d just have to do everything myself. I stuck one hand in the pocket with my stars and pictured Mayfield Park in Austin.

  I couldn’t quite firm up the visualization of two curved surfaces intersecting at the single point that represented me; the drugs weren’t completely out of my system yet, and the throbbing of my cheekbone was a distraction. The others should be slightly better off, though. To help me focus, I used the keyword we’d practiced with. “Brouwer.”

  Swirls of light, points of brightness scattering as if startled, impossible angles and curves; I slid through the black space of the in-between and felt the gritty sand of the path around the lily pond under my feet. A sliver of moonlight let me make out shapes and – after a moment – movement. The air was heavy and warm and smelled of flowers and green plants and water; a big improvement on the stale mix in the CIA site. The two-hundred-mile jump had been long enough for me to taste the elation of traveling through the in-between, and that was a big improvement, too. Colton arrived beside me with a heavy crunch onto the sand; he tended to teleport to a couple of inches above where he actually wanted to be. Calibration problem. Happens to all of us from time to time, but almost always to Colton.

  A moment later, Ingrid joined us. I had just time to work up a good worry before Ben came down the path from the parking lot.

  “Why’d you jump to over there?”

  “Why not? You didn’t exactly specify a location. There’s a lot of Mayfield Park; you should be happy we all came through in sight of one another and at the same time.”

  “I’m happy, I’m happy. I’m ecstatic.”

  “Why the secret meeting in the park?” Colton wanted to know. “Yes, I figured out that’s what you wanted to do, but why couldn’t we all just go home?”

  “They probably know where we live.” In my case, of course, they definitely knew. “We can’t go to our homes, any more than we can go back to the office and carry on with our lives as if nothing had happened.”

  “Well, we can’t stay here all night!” Ingrid complained.

  “No, of course not. We have to go back.”

  “What?”

  “Eventually,” I pointed out, “they’ll turn the lights on again. Then – if we aren’t back — they’ll notice they’re four topologists short, and come looking for us.”

  “You sure about that?” Colton said, “They only had one short topologist.”

  Ingrid snickered. I glared, but it probably wasn’t very effective in moonlight. Tall people are the bane of my existence, and here I am stuck working with three of them. “Look, this is serious. Either we decide now to abandon our jobs and families and spend the rest of our lives in hiding from the CIA, or we go back and find some better way to get out of this mess. This jump was just an emergency measure for us to get help.”

  I did wish we’d worked out some version of telepathy. It seemed that in every crisis we realized anew how useful that would be; then, as soon as the crisis was over, we went out for beer and nachos and forgot about the telepathy question. The thing is, you can’t rely on a bunch of introverts like us to come up with a way of destroying what little privacy we retained inside our own heads. That was how I felt about telepathy when we weren’t in the middle of a crisis and too busy to experiment, and I was willing to bet the others felt exactly the same lack of enthusiasm for the concept.

  “What makes you think it’s the CIA?” Ingrid wanted to know now.

  “It doesn’t seem probable,” said Ben. “If they wanted our help, all they had to do was talk to Lensky.”

  “The big guy gave it away when he tried to interrogate me.”

  “Who?”

  I described the jerk. Apparently he hadn’t yet questioned any of the others. Typical government inefficiency.

  “As for why they didn’t ask politely, I have no idea. Except this bombing last week seems to have affected them like kicking an ant hill affects the ants. They yanked Lensky off to help with one aspect of the investigation, and I guess they thought that without him to manage us, they’d have to get their way through brute force and terror.” Or else they simply preferred the force and terror approach, and thought they could get away with it because Lensky was temporarily out of touch.

  “It’s a huge embarrassment for them,” Colton, always excruciatingly fair, observed. “A bombing in the heart of their own headquarters. I expect lives – careers, anyway – are on the line here.”

  He understands these big organizations somewhat better than the rest of us; apparently modern cotton farmers like his father have to work so closely with
the government that they sometimes feel like an unpaid branch of the Agriculture Department.

  “The thing is, all we need to do is get word to Brad that his agency snatched us. He will find us, and he will get us out of this.” In the aftermath of the terrorist bombing that shook Washington last week he’d been called back to the home office. Now he was at an undisclosed location, helping his colleagues to interrogate the bomber Sandru Balan in the hope of getting some leads on this latest attack. It hadn’t been that bad in terms of injuries; what had everybody shaken up was that it had happened right inside the CIA headquarters.

  “How do you propose to do that? We don’t even know where he is, and they took our phones.”

  “Classical methods.” I explained what I had in mind and couldn’t resist adding, “People did manage to communicate before cell phones, you know.” You’d think Ben would have more appreciation of that fact; it had been just barely over a year since Annelise had persuaded him to get one himself.

  We didn’t have time to chat longer; there were things to be done before we all returned to sit innocently in our cells.

  ***

  “So much for gentle persuasion,” said Torres after two hours of total darkness in the cells and no movement at all in the room that Harrison had set up as a lure for the Kostis girl. “Or maybe – just maybe – those reports were great works of fiction.” They’d turned the lights back on without warning but hadn’t surprised the topologists in any interesting activity.

  Dean shrugged. “Maybe he should have started with the other girl.”

  “The ice princess? No way. You can tell that one’s tough as nails.”

  “Well, I think we need to step up the pressure. Lean on all four of them at once, and not with anything so gentle as a mildly uncomfortable cell.”

  They studied the grainy images on the video feed. The equipment badly needed an upgrade; what had been good enough for a prison was barely adequate for serious intelligence work. The little dark girl was seated cross-legged on the floor of her cell, staring into her cupped palms as though she could see something very interesting there. The blonde was sitting bolt upright on her metal chair, betraying no discomfort. The larger of the two men actually appeared to be asleep. The tall skinny guy who needed a haircut was tracing invisible patterns on the wall with one finger.