by Rob Horner
From the back, Agent Black asked, “What’s our plan, now?”
Agent Travers seemed almost content, relaxing back against his headrest. “What do you think, Lieutenant?”
“Well,” Barnes said, thinking fast, “sounds like he knows he won’t be able to get money later, so he’s taken it all out now. If he’s operating on cash, it means he’s not planning to use any credit cards, which will make tracking him a lot harder.”
“Sounds like he plans on hiding quite a while,” Black offered. “But hey, the girl’s still at her mother’s house, so I’m saying we go there next.”
Still reclining back, eyes closed, Travers said, “We’ll go there next, but the girl’s gone.”
“Her car’s still there,” Black argued.
“Lisa just said both their accounts were emptied,” Travers explained patiently, like a parent instructing a child. “That means the girl, Sherry, is with him.”
“Makes sense from what we know,” Kirkson opined. “He figured out how to remove the tracker on his car, so he assumes it’s the safer vehicle.”
“Why couldn’t he have just removed the one on the girl’s car?” Black interrupted.
“Because it’s tied into her GPS,” Lieutenant Barnes remembered. “He couldn’t have removed it.”
“Exactly,” Kirkson confirmed. “Besides, they don’t need two cars if they’re running together.” His voice was crisp, with a slight New England accent, most apparent in the way he said words like “car,” pronouncing it more like “cahr.”
Black sounded confused, “So if they’re running together, why are we going to go to mommy’s house?”
“Because they think she’s safe,” Agent Travers said with a smile. “Hell, they probably think they’re safe, too, maybe nothing more to worry about than being locked back up, their heads messed with a little more.”
That’s because they don’t know there’s a murderer after them, Lieutenant Barnes thought.
“That’s why we’re going to mommy’s house,” Travers finished, sitting up straight and putting the SUV into reverse, backing out of the parking spot. “I doubt they took her with them, and she may prove to be a valuable asset to us.”
First murder, now taking a civilian hostage. How much more could he take before he’d had enough, Barnes wondered.
Right on the heels of that thought came another: how long before Agent Travers decided a certain Navy Lieutenant?
4
Travis was glad he’d neglected to clean out the back of his car after his speaker modification. It meant his toolbox was still behind the back seat, with all the implements necessary for him to remove the interior paneling surrounding the small circles of light.
Well? Sherry asked, once the small black device, about the size of a half-dollar coin, was revealed.
Just what we thought it would be, Travis replied mentally, taking a few moments to inspect the self-powered microphone, wanting to be sure that removing it wouldn’t set off any alarms.
So what if it does? Sherry thought at him. You already disabled their tracking device. What more could it do?
Travis agreed. What did it matter now?
Surely the people watching them knew about his removed transmitter, and it wouldn’t be too long before they discovered the empty bank accounts. It was foolish to waste precious moments worrying about the removal of their listening device. Satisfying himself that only a small magnet held it in place, Travis yanked the transmitter away from his car’s frame.
What’re you going to do with it? Sherry asked, and Travis smiled, sharing his thoughts with her. Let me, she offered, and he handed the microphone to her.
Smiling grimly, Sherry set the small device on the ground, then squatted down next to it. Leaning as close to the device as she could, she bellowed “Hey assholes! Hope you like listening to this!” In one smooth motion, she rose, raised her right foot, and dropped it onto the device with enough force to make the sound of its plastic case shattering audible over the noise of traffic outside the bank.
“Better?” Travis asked out loud, replacing the plastic paneling.
“It’s strange,” Sherry replied, moving around to the passenger side of the Focus. “It’s like listening to music in a set of really good headphones, you know?”
Travis nodded, slipping into the drivers’ seat and starting the engine. “One minute the music’s really loud and really clear.”
“Right. And then, once you take the headphone’s off, nothing is as sharp and crisp.”
We could keep talking like this, Travis suggested.
Sherry laughed. “No, let’s concentrate on speaking. That way we can still keep some secrets.”
Travis blushed at the inference, still embarrassed over his earlier carelessness. Checking behind them for traffic, he eased out of his parking spot. “Any ideas what we should do now?”
“Some. But I’m sure you have some ideas.”
“I do,” Travis conceded. “But I’m open to suggestions too. We’re in this together.”
“Whatever this is,” Sherry murmured.
Travis had no response to that and instead concentrated on pulling out of the parking lot, heading back towards Independence Boulevard.
“So where are we going?” Sherry asked a moment later, as Travis pulled into the left-hand lane, preparing to turn back in the direction of Virginia Beach Boulevard.
“Well, I doubt that it’s safe for us to return to our homes—"
“But we’re going to need supplies,” Sherry finished for him.
“Exactly,” Travis said, surprised at Sherry’s ability to finish his sentences. It was like her mind worked along the same tracks as his, making them mentally compatible without joining their thoughts.
Thanks for the compliment, Sherry said, drawing another smile from Travis.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult keeping our…thoughts separate,” Travis said softly. He’d almost said ‘ourselves.’
If Sherry picked up the altered word—and Travis thought she had—she didn’t comment, for which he felt a combination of relief and anxiety. He berated himself for his nervousness—her inner thoughts were just as open as his, if he chose to listen—yet he couldn’t help himself. What they’d discovered seemed the perfect union, and her thoughts had already betrayed her interest in him. It was something underneath the obvious which terrified him.
What if this remarkable woman was taken away? Any time would be terrible, but what if it happened sooner rather than later, before they’d a chance to explore the possibilities of their relationship? Perhaps that fear accounted for his impatience to solidify their meaning to one another.
All in good time, Sherry whispered in his mind. He turned to look at her, once more arrested by her striking features, her ginger hair and sapphire eyes. She smiled to soften the effect of her eavesdropping, and Travis returned the gesture, finding he could agree with the sentiment. Things were being rushed too much already.
“Where were we?” he asked a moment later, after finally making the turn onto Independence Boulevard.
“Something about supplies,” Sherry offered, distracted. No one had compared her eyes to sapphires before.
“Yes. Those. We need to buy them.”
“What? Clothes? Toiletries?”
“Probably a little of everything,” Travis answered.
“How long do you think we’ll need to be on the run?” Sherry asked, and Travis felt the deep-seated fear and worry that accompanied her question.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “But I have some ideas I’d like to explore.”
“About what?”
“Well, about finding out what happened to us, and who’s responsible for it.”
“Any guesses yet?” Sherry asked.
“Not really,” Travis replied. “But I think I know how we might find out.”
“Spill it, then.”
“Not yet,” Travis said, driving through the intersections of Virginia Beac
h and Independence Boulevards, already easing the Focus into the right-hand lane. “It’s not that I don’t trust you or anything,” he started to explain.
“It’s okay,” Sherry said, placing a reassuring hand over his, shocking him with the sudden reappearance of the blue and green lines, current and radiation, which he now saw as clearly as she did. “You’re just waiting until you have the idea worked out in your head.”
“You get that from my thoughts?” he asked.
“Nope, from your character,” she replied, removing her hand as Travis down shifted to second gear, pulling into the Pembroke Mall parking lot. “You’re the kind of person who thinks about things before saying them. You don’t want to give false impressions or make promises you might not be able to keep.”
Travis thought about her words. He’d never taken the time to analyze how he interacted in day-to-day conversation. Surprisingly, he realized she’d just figured him out better than he knew himself. Of course, he thought ruefully, she could read his every thought.
Which gives a girl a certain advantage, Sherry thought to him, and Travis felt the humor, like a soft light, behind her words. Laughing, he pulled the Focus into a parking spot just outside the main entrance into the mall.
Killing the engine, he asked, “Ready to go shopping?”
Sherry replied quickly, “Me? Shopping? Oh, but you really are the man of my dreams!”
Locking the car behind them, Travis and Sherry walked toward the main doors, which opened automatically, leading into a short hallway between a Pet-Go-Round and the interior entrance to Sears. As they walked, their arms again reached to encircle one another. With their physical contact re-established, they shared another smile full of promise, which was more than enough to quell Travis’s earlier doubts.
5
Agent Buck Travers, lead task-force agent under Captain Ortega in the NAS Oceana branch of Project Heritage and, unknown even to Captain Ortega, one of the few agency personnel who understood the entirety of the project, its goals, its capabilities, its successes and its failures, felt like he was operating under a dark cloud, despite the bright sunshine. The death of Agent Bassett was something he’d been contemplating for some time, simply because she’d grown too close to the subject she was supposed to be monitoring.
No, that wasn’t fair. His mother always taught him to be honest with himself, even if he couldn’t be honest with others.
The truth was, from the moment she came onto the scene, just another tight ass in a short skirt to tease Travis Wilkins, he’d known he would have to shoot her someday. Some people just gave off that vibe, begging to be hurt, needing to be culled. So far, he’d managed to channel those feelings into his work.
Killing her hadn’t made him feel better, though it should have. Until today, a justified kill like that would have left him smiling for a week. No, something was wrong. Something was just enough off with this entire situation, hell, the entire Oceana operation. None of the others had done so much, so fast.
Though there was precedent, and he’d been briefed on the possibilities, no one had known what to expect from putting Sherry and Travis near each other. Their Pair-Bonding in the lab had been exceptionally strong and had resisted separation more than any other. It was the reason Sherry took so much longer to prepare for release. That they’d been separated almost four years didn’t seem to be affecting their Pairing in the least, which was another point he and the security leads had argued about at length with the pointy-headed scientists behind the project.
Of course, when taken out of the context of a controlled experiment, all of this was unprecedented, and therefore all points of conjecture were nothing more than educated guesses. What bothered him most was that the experiment had ever been allowed to progress beyond a laboratory environment. After the infamous two-one-four incident, it was a wonder Travis had been allowed to live. The only reason he still drew breath was because of how difficult it would have been to find someone to compliment Sherry’s genetic makeup. Six months they were Paired, monitored day and night, but nothing happened beyond the obvious affinity for each other. It was the scientists’ theory that if a laboratory environment restricted growth, perhaps more promising results would be shown if they were released into the world at large.
At least, that’s how it was presented. Travis seemed more stable from the outset with his Bonding. Sherry’s stability, strangely, seemed tied to his proximity, so much so that her rapid deterioration at the forced separation caused the doctors and scientists to place her in a medically-induced coma where she remained for three years while the scientists looked for a way to make her autonomous.
They hadn’t engineered a marriage for Travis simply because they hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to keep track of a young, attractive, and sexually active single man. What would a bunch of pencil-necked science geeks know about that? Travis went through three different girlfriends in his first year after leaving the lab, one of whom was an agency plant. He’d turned down or completely ignored a half-dozen other agency girls. He had a knack for weeding them out based on strong personal values and an expectation of similar values in the women he dated. Therefore, steps were taken to insure fewer problems in relation to his Pair-Bond.
All fine and dandy when put on paper, Travers thought, shaking his head. But best laid plans and blah blah blah. Here he was, with another one of those pencil-necked geeks riding shotgun, a monitoring technician who just called in cussing because Sherry screamed into one of their hidden microphones before destroying it, and two potentially dangerous subjects on the loose with nobody watching.
How could they have foreseen that just being near one another would engender a contact of an undefined sort? How could they have predicted proximity alone would be enough to reignite the mysterious Pair-Bond? How could they have known that Travis would turn out to be so damned efficient at locating and systematically removing their means of tracking him? Both subjects scored extremely high on their aptitude tests, which was one of the primary traits the scientists looked for; apparently intelligence was a promising predictor of a successful Bond. Then again, it didn’t take a genius to ace the ASVAB.
When Agent Travers was informed Travis’s Pair-Bond was being assigned to the same work center, he’d been satisfied. Having both of them in one place would make the task of tracking them that much simpler. Who could have known?
That question was rapidly wearing thin, he decided, glancing at the in-dash navigation system.
The computer representation of Witchduck Road flowed past their stationary dot, much as the oaks and dogwoods lining the street flowed in a great green blur past the speeding car, bringing them ever closer to the red spot which signified Sherry’s abandoned Nissan Sentra. It was obvious from its location that the car remained at her mother’s house, but Agent Travers figured the chances of finding his two subjects at that location at slim-to-none, with Slim in the outhouse taking a dump.
But the mother…now that was a possibility with the power to bring a smile to Agent Travers’ lips. If Lieutenant Barnes were to look over and see that smile, he might be more nervous than he already seemed to be. As it was, he sat ramrod straight, looking out the windshield, only moving to the motions of the car, like a life-sized bobble-head.
Sherry had been programmed to believe her mother was dead, and after finding her alive, was sure to remain in contact with her. The prospect of being there to answer the phone when she called, then using tried and true tracing techniques to locate her, served to lift the agent’s spirits again. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before both Sherry and Travis were back in the laboratory where they belonged. And then he could pass the case on to some other hapless agent.
He eased into the left lane, aiming to turn onto the street leading to Victoria Galer’s house.
Yes, soon enough everything would be back under his control. Agent Travers smiled again, focusing his attention on the navigation system as he wound through a couple of turns in the small
subdivision, wanting to reach his destination as quickly as possible.
6
Entering the mall was like walking into the world’s largest laser light show. No matter where Sherry turned, cobalt-blue lines of power and a torrent of green waves filled the air. Then came a new sensory bombardment--sound like a crashing tidal wave, filling her ears with a steady, demanding roar.
Gasping, she leaned against Travis, who had all he could handle in not succumbing to the sudden rush of sight and sound. Breathing heavily, unaware of the curious stares they drew, Travis pulled Sherry back into the sunlight outside of the mall.
“What…what was that?” Sherry asked as the sounds faded.
“I think we were hearing other thoughts,” Travis replied, surprised and fascinated by the new development. What else were they capable of together, he wondered. Though nothing about the noise had been clear, in hindsight it seemed as though he could pick out words, if he concentrated. “We have to figure out how to control this.”
“I’m open to any ideas you might have,” Sherry replied. “I mean, it seems to be most powerful when we’re touching, so we could just…you know…not hold hands.”
Travis looked around, noting the mall entrance, with its sign overhead, the parking lot with its load of cars, the street beyond with traffic moving steadily. The green cloud of flowing energy was ubiquitous, but concentrated around people and vehicles, most likely because they carried various electronics that transmitted, received, or both. Some blue lines were also visible, but they faded quickly at any distance. The passing cars on the boulevard showed nothing, for instance, while an idling vehicle in the parking lot would be barely discernible. Much closer was the lighted sign above the mall entrance, its lines of current flow easily distinguished.
“Let’s take a quick minute and see if we can get a handle on this,” Travis said. “I don’t like the idea of not being able to touch you without having my head explode.”
“Such a way with words…” Sherry sighed, smiling.